#(this was before-around the SOL event) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

devieuls · 2 months ago

Text

ˋ Haunted .✵

Qimir x Ex Jedi Fem Reader < SERIES >

Warning of the Serie: MDNI. Sith Lord Qimir x Fem ex Jedi Reader.

(during the series)

SMUT: Dirty Talk; Fangs; Bites; fingering; Blood; Spit; Jealousy and Possessiveness; Foreplay; violence; Swearing; Teasing; Unprotected Sex; betrayal; slut shaming; oral sex; dacryphilia; outdoorsex; jealousy BDSM. Dom Qimir ANGST: toxic relationship, self-harm, derealization, suffering, Requited / Unrequited love, prejudices, bullying and insults. There will be flashbacks in this series

Aged characters: Qimir 35 y.o / You 22 y.o.

Synopsis: In a twisted web of light and darkness, two opposites are facing each other, dancing on a thin thread called fate. What happens when light and darkness dance on a wire called destiny, two eternal opposites that inevitably attract each other and create something perfectly powerful and chaotic to unite the power of two in one? The answer emerges in a journey of tension and attraction, where yin and yang discover that their opposition is nothing but a reflection of a deep and unexpected connection. This is the story of how destruction is akin to peace, how the moon one day decided to save the sun, how darkness is not so dark and evil so bad. A journey towards change and desire, where opposing forces merge into a future that no one could have predicted.

(Following some events of the series)

Lenght: 4.9k

TW: THE SERIES WILL BE FULL OF DELICATE TOPICS!

⇠ Previous chapter ✵ Next Chapter ⇢

· · ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── · ·

Chapter I: The Abyss of Temptation

(The shuttle landed silently on the verdant surface of the planet Khofar, a wild jewel among the worlds of the Outer Rim Territories. As the hatch opened, a wave of humidity enveloped the Jedi, carrying with it the intense scent of damp earth and the exotic fragrance of the lush vegetation. The forest stretched out before them like an endless sea of green, where the trees rose like ancient towers, their massive trunks covered in layers of gleaming moss. The thick, intertwined canopies above them created a natural roof, allowing only faint rays of light to filter through, speckling the ground with golden patches. Khofar was a living, wild planet, and they were only temporary visitors, intruders in an ancient and balanced ecosystem. Every rustle among the leaves, every distant call, was a warning. A premonition or prelude to what the day would bring.)

If only you had known in advance that your teammates would die one by one before your eyes as you returned from the hut where Jedi Master Kelnacca lived, you would have thought twice before agreeing to the mission. You had fought against the Sith who killed your friends, battling with anger and bitterness, in a grief too fresh to fully comprehend. In the end, the pain of your body hitting the hard ground was nothing compared to the searing agony in your side from a nearly fatal wound. Your vision began to blur, and you could only see footsteps approaching before everything faded to black.

You awoke slowly, as if emerging from a hibernation that had lasted for years. Your eyes opened with difficulty, greeted by a nearly suffocating gloom. The dim light of a few torches was the only source of illumination within what seemed to be a cave. The rocky walls, uneven and cold, seemed to loom over you. You felt weak, every movement was a struggle, and a dull pain throbbed in your side. You tried to sit up, but your injured side forced you back down, a hiss of pain escaping your lips. You brought a trembling hand to the wound and felt the rough texture of the bandages wrapped around the torn flesh. Despite the agony, the wound had apparently been cleaned and treated with care. Someone had taken the time to tend to it, to ensure it would heal, though it was still far from being fully recovered. You looked around, trying to piece together fragments of memory that crowded your mind. You remembered your friends' deaths, Sol screaming, your lightsaber changing color, and a battle. You recalled the fierce confrontation with the Sith, your fall, and the darkness that enveloped you. But beyond that, nothing. You had no idea how you had ended up in that cave, nor who had brought you there.

Your heart raced, panic beginning to seep into your thoughts. Were you a prisoner? And if so, who had shown such mercy to tend to your wounds? The most unsettling question was the most obvious: why hadn't the Sith eliminated you when he had the chance? A shadowy thought slithered into your mind, and the face of the Sith echoed in the depths of your being. The idea that he might have been the one to save you, to care for you, was as chilling as it was improbable. Yet, you couldn’t shake the possibility from your mind, no matter how absurd it seemed.

You dragged yourself out with great effort, and through the blinding light, you saw the silhouette of a man, barely identifiable. You followed him stealthily, still holding your side and trying to endure the pain from the wound. For a moment, you lost sight of him, only to find him again shortly after, immersed in a pool of water in what seemed to be a coastal area with black sand you couldn’t identify. Your eyes fell on the figure facing away from you, submerged in the water, his muscles relaxed, his raven hair wet and slicked back. To your eyes, the man seemed completely unaware of your presence, though he appeared to have a vigilant awareness of the surrounding area. You moved silently among the rocks and vegetation, observing your target until your gaze fell upon a pile of clothes near the shore, where the deactivated lightsaber lay. With swift and somewhat precise movements, you approached the lightsaber. Tension mounted inside you as you crouched to pick it up, aware that any sound could betray your presence. You grasped the metallic object and assumed an attack position as the man began to speak, still with his back turned while he calmly washed himself.

"how does it feel?" he said, turning towards you. You recognized him immediately. The mere sight of his face sparked rage within you. "Pleasant, don't you think?" His tone was a piercing screech to your ears. You gritted your teeth, not responding, remaining in your attack stance. "Your stance is good despite the wound on your side, but your elbows are a real mess. I had my doubts when we fought last time, and now I see why it was so easy to defeat you. Your elbows are too low; you should keep one higher, you know?" he continued, observing you. "…To block more quickly and strike with more precision." He took a brief pause. "Since you don’t know how to use the Force, you should learn to block better," he concluded, stepping out of the water, now only a few steps away from you.

"Don’t move," your stance changed, now aiming the off lightsaber directly at him. Your gaze was sharp and cold. "If you don’t want to join me, at least let me put my clothes on" he said. You took a slight step back, allowing him to exit the water. You swallowed, trying not to let your gaze fall on the naked, wet defined body of the man, keeping in your mind that he was your enemy. You began to ponder whether it was appropriate to attack him now. But it was neither Jedi-like to strike a defenseless man nor to act in such a dishonorable manner. "Surely, you’re wondering if it’s honorable to kill me like this," he began, his tone different from the one used in battle. You swallowed. Your gaze fell for a second on his chest, and you cursed yourself for the terrible idea. "In battle it’s justified, but days later isn’t it revenge?" he asked with a sarcastic tone, as if he already knew the answer. "And now you wonder if I can read your mind… and the answer is… no. Anger betrays your thoughts" he continued, dressing himself as if you weren’t pointing a weapon at him. His gaze seemed oddly gentle, more delicate, almost innocent. So much so that he almost didn’t seem like the same man who had killed seven Jedi just a few nights before.

"Why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you kill me?" you asked, watching him sternly, uncertain of what to do next. "Am I your prisoner?" "Prisoner? You’re the one with a weapon" he said with an overly calm look and an obvious tone in his voice, as he walked back towards the cave, passing by you without fear. You followed him, teeth clenched. You wanted revenge on this man, but what a miserable person you would be to strike him from behind while he was unarmed. "If you keep me here, Sol will come for you. He’s found me before, and he’s powerful with the Force." Your voice sounded threatening, though not as forceful as you’d hoped due to the stabbing pain in your side. The man turned and looked at you with a puzzled expression. "Do you think he’s powerful with the Force? It’s you who’s powerful with the Force, y/n. Someone should teach you," he said. You were stunned for a few seconds, as he knew your name. To you, he was a stranger, but you didn’t seem to be as unknown to him. The stranger walked back into the cave, and you followed him, confused. "In what way am I powerful with the Force? You should know it’s something to be practiced. If you don’t train it, it fades" you said, your voice still sharp as you scrutinized the man who seemed so at ease in your presence. You had long abandoned being a Jedi, retreating shortly after becoming officially part of the Order. If it hadn’t been for your sister leaving a trail of blood wherever she went, you would have stayed far away from that world. You had lost every Force ability, not having practiced it for many years. You vaguely remembered how to use a lightsaber, thanks to Sol, who had helped you recall the skills during the time you spent together, training with his young Padawan Jecki.

The stranger was seated next to what appeared to be a small campfire, while you kept your distance. He tasted the food he was cooking. You didn’t trust him; something about him made you suspicious, aside from the fact that he had decimated your team. "You know… The Jedi teach that there’s only one way to access the Force, and if you don’t do it their way, it fades. But there’s another way," he said gently, turning his gaze toward you. "Beneath the surface of consciousness, there are powerful emotions." "Anger. Fear. Loss…" he slowly mentioned the emotions you had learned to suppress, as you had been taught in the Order during your time as a Jedi Padawan. "…desire." The last emotion was spoken almost in a whisper as he took on a more serious and penetrating expression. You swallowed, observing him with disdain, though you subconsciously held your breath as he listed the emotions. "That’s the path to the dark side," the words came out acridly from your mouth.

The man’s expression darkened for a moment, but he quickly masked it with a mocking smile. "semantics… You Jedi are so closed-minded," he replied, turning back to the fire, stirring the stew he was cooking. "The light side isn’t the only way to access the Force. The dark side… amplifies emotions. It’s just another way to access the Force. A way… to freedom." His convincing tone almost seemed reasonable, though it was contrary to your way of thinking. "You killed my friends," your gaze grew even sharper and more bitter, as your hand still gripped the hilt of the deactivated lightsaber, seeking comfort in the familiar cold metal. The Sith’s words were like poison seeping into your mind, exploiting the insecurities you had always tried to suppress. "Friends? That’s what you call people who come to seek you only in moments of need and then ignore your existence?" His voice was laced with a mix of disdain and feigned compassion. Every word from this man was a blade sinking into your soul, touching raw nerves you had tried to ignore. You had been trained to combat fear, anger, desire—all emotions that, if left unchecked, could lead you down the dark path. But at that moment, you felt the internal storm growing, fueled by suffering and loss, a mourning.

"War isn’t pretty, y/n, sometimes…" he began, his voice dropping to a near-whisper as he stood up, beginning to walk toward you with determined steps, never breaking eye contact. "Sacrifices must be made for a greater good." He stopped just inches from you, his penetrating gaze studying you with a mix of cynicism and desire, as if challenging you to contradict him. Every fiber of his being radiated an irresistible force, a magnetism that seemed to envelop him like a shadow. He leaned slightly toward you, his warm breath brushing against your skin as his lips dangerously neared your ear. "Your friends," he whispered with a cold, almost contemptuous tone, "were just collateral damage." His words were like sharp knives—cutting and relentless—but the seductive tone with which he spoke betrayed an unsettling intimacy, as if he were confiding a dark secret that only you could understand.

The stranger leaned back slightly, just enough to meet your gaze. His dark eyes, deep as an abyss, stared at you with an intensity that seemed to penetrate directly into your soul. His face was close, too close, and his expression was serious, almost sorrowful, but there was no trace of remorse—only a dark understanding. "Why do you love people who can only go so far?" His voice dropped further, becoming a near-confidential whisper. "Who can’t go as deep as you can?" His gaze was intense, his eyes locked onto yours with an expression that seemed to reveal far more than his words had. There was a hidden desire, a need struggling to surface, but the man skillfully masked it, maintaining a subtle balance between cynicism and seduction.

You held your breath, feeling the weight of his words and his proximity. You knew that behind those words lay a darkness trying to corrupt you, but his allure was dangerously real. Your mind was conflicted, torn between repulsion at the Sith’s cynicism and the irresistible magnetism surrounding him. The man gave you a slight smile, a smile that never quite reached his eyes, as he pulled back just a few centimeters, leaving you teetering between temptation and inner struggle. "Maybe, y/n," he added in a mellifluous voice, "you’re destined for something more… something greater… something that I can show you." "I’m not my sister. I’m not so easily corrupted," you said, looking him straight in the eyes, trying to maintain control over yourself. Every fiber of your being struggled to suppress the tumultuous emotions the stranger had tried to awaken in you. Your heart pounded loudly, betraying you, but your face remained impassive, covered by a studied veil of disgust. With a slow, deliberate motion, you took a step back, putting distance between you, your gaze charged with superiority and defiance.

Qimir observed you with an impassive expression, but behind his dark eyes was growing interest, a sort of admiration for your resilience. To him, you were not like the other Jedi he had encountered, too weak or easily swayed. In you, he saw a potential acolyte, someone with an inner strength that could be nurtured and guided toward an even greater power. A subtle smile appeared on his lips, a nearly imperceptible curve that betrayed his pleasure at seeing you so determined. "You’re not like your sister, that’s true," he admitted with a tone that seemed both a compliment and a challenge. He took a step toward you, closing the space between you once more, but this time with an even more calculated calm, like a hunter who knows its prey. "But don’t mistake your determination for invulnerability," he continued, his voice soft and sharp as a blade. "The force you suppress within you, the force you’ve learned to stifle, is what could make you great—much greater than the Jedi could ever imagine. I see in you a potential that goes beyond the limitations of their dogma, and that is what frightens them." He stopped just a few steps from you, his gaze locked on yours, trying to pierce through the mask you had erected. "I’m not here to corrupt you," he whispered, his voice almost persuasive. "I’m here to offer you a choice, a path that the Jedi have always denied you. A road to a freedom you don’t yet know." You felt a shiver run down your spine, but you refused to show any weakness to him.

"I don’t need your freedom," you replied coldly, your voice steady despite the internal turmoil. "Your whispers don’t touch me. I know who I am and what I represent." "So sure of yourself" he murmured, with a tone that seemed to appreciate your determination. "But what do you truly represent, y/n? A Jedi struggling against her own nature, stifling the potential that could make her truly powerful? Oh… perhaps I should say, ex-Jedi?" he asked with ironic amusement, towering over your figure. You clenched your teeth, pointing the hilt of the deactivated lightsaber at his stomach.

He tilted his head slightly, amused, his gaze growing more penetrating as he sought to reach that part of you he knew existed—the part that thirsted for knowledge, power, something more. “You feel the Force, you perceive it in ways that even the Jedi cannot understand. And you know there is a greater, deeper power calling you. It is not betrayal to explore that possibility. It is… evolution.” His words, spoken with such conviction, seemed to echo in the cave, breaking through the barriers you had erected to protect yourself. You raised your lightsaber to meet the man's neck. “Do it… light it” he ordered, his tone of challenge making your blood boil. The Sith, on the other hand, seemed delighted by your anger, his sharp and contemptuous smile only fueling the tension. Qimir merely tilted his head slightly to the side, offering his neck completely to you, his penetrating gaze fixed on the lightsaber you pointed at him, waiting for the moment you would decide to ignite it.

“A Jedi… does not attack the unarmed" you said through gritted teeth, your voice a murmur of frustration and determination. Your mind was a tumult of emotions, but your will to remain true to your principles was steadfast. “Do you still think you’re a Jedi?” he asked, his voice low and enveloping, almost hypnotic. “Don’t you remember how your lightsaber changed color the last time? Do you still believe you must adhere to a code you’re questioning within yourself?” Those words hit like a punch to the stomach, evoking images you would have preferred to forget. The blade of your lightsaber, once glowing a pure blue, had trembled, taking on red hues like those of the man before you. You took a step back, your heart racing, desperately trying to put space between you and that voice which seemed to read into you with ruthless precision. But the man gave you no respite. His hand moved with surprising speed, gripping your arm in a gentle yet firm hold. His fingers closed around your wrist, not enough to hurt, but enough to keep you from withdrawing the saber from his neck. The contrast between the contained strength of his touch and the relaxed calm of his face left you breathless.

His penetrating gaze was fixed on your eyes, a subtle yet relentless challenge. “You know yourself that after what’s happened you couldn’t return to the Jedi even if you wanted to,” he whispered, his tone charming and confident, as if he had already won this silent battle. “Sol has seen it, don’t believe that after succumbing to rage and revenge you can return to a position that no longer belongs to you.” You felt trapped, not so much by his hand holding you but by the words resonating inside you. His words seemed to challenge every certainty you had until that moment. Every fiber of your being wanted to reject him, but there was something in his tone, in the way he looked at you, that made you doubt, even if just for a moment. Qimir moved closer, his warm breath against your skin, each movement calculated with lethal precision. ��It’s not a matter of principles, y/n,” he continued, his tone now almost seductive. “That pain, that anger… this is what you are.” Your breath grew irregular, your heart pounding in your chest as you struggled to maintain control. “Let me go.” you threatened, your voice a low growl, but you knew there was a shadow of hesitation you couldn’t hide.

“Sol saw it… the Jedi saw it” he continued, his tone now softer but laden with cruel truth. “And for that, they will throw you away, again.” His piercing gaze cut into you, as your eyes took on an expression of anger and fear at his words. You felt his words like a sharp blade piercing through your defenses, and your gaze hardened, but you couldn’t hide the flicker of fear in your eyes. The fear that, deep down, he might be right. The fear that your Order, those you would give your life to protect, might indeed see you as a threat, something to be eliminated. The Sith sensed that shift within you, and his gaze became even more penetrating, probing every corner of your mind. It was as if he could see every weakness, every hidden thought, and he used them with a terrifying skill. “You can’t hide from what you are, y/n. The dark side isn’t a weakness… it’s your strength. And you know it.” You gritted your teeth, disgust and anger mixing into an explosive blend that pushed you closer to the edge. He seemed to know exactly which buttons to press; every word, every look was a sharp blade striking at your raw nerves. The tension inside you grew, turning into a knot that threatened to snap. Until you could no longer hold it back, and it was in that moment that you ignited the lightsaber, the glowing blade just a breath away from his neck. “It won’t be like that,” you hissed, your voice barely above a whisper, desperately trying to stay calm, though your eyes betrayed the mask of confidence you wore. “I will not succumb to the dark side.”

The man remained still, his mocking smile slowly widening as his eyes stayed fixed on yours, as if he were looking through you, reading every hidden thought. He swallowed slowly, a gesture that seemed almost like an invitation, a further provocation. The blade of your saber illuminated his face, but there was no trace of fear in his eyes, only a cold calm. “It’s not something you have to give in to… it’s inside you,” he said with that velvety voice of his, each word a whisper insinuating doubt into your certainties. His words struck you like a blow to the heart, breaking that fragile barrier you were desperately trying to maintain. “Your potential is immense,” he continued, lowering his voice to a warm, almost intimate whisper. Your gaze grew sharper as the subtle poison in his words sought to seep into your consciousness. The lightsaber blade barely touched his skin without making contact, his calm expression only annoying you. It was as if the threat had no effect on him, as if he knew you would never have the courage to go through with it. Every movement he made was slow, deliberate, calculated to keep you on edge, playing with your emotions like a master puppeteer. Anger bubbled within you, a fire growing ever stronger, fueled by his words, his confident smile, the way he seemed to control everything. You couldn’t deny it; there was a part of you that wanted to give in, that wanted to let go of the anger, the pain that burned so intensely. And he knew it; you could feel it in his voice, see it in his eyes.

“I understand…” His voice was a seductive whisper, just above a breath, as his hand rose with studied slowness, approaching yours without ever touching it. His eyes, which had been filled with impenetrable confidence until now, took on a new light, something deeper, almost vulnerable. “I’ve lost everything, y/n…” His gaze now seemed sincere, almost pleading for some strange reason. “But when you lose everything,” he continued, his hand now resting on yours, which still gripped the cold lightsaber handle. The contact was surprisingly gentle, a light pressure, but enough to make you feel the warmth of his skin against yours. His grip was soft but firm, and the contrast between his words and the apparent gentleness of the gesture made you waver. “That’s when you’re truly free,” he concluded, his voice a whisper carrying an inescapable weight, an invitation to surrender, to let go of everything that still bound you to the light. His gaze locked onto your eyes, deep, almost pleading, but not for pity: for understanding, for sharing. It was as if he wanted you to see the world through his eyes, to understand that the dark side wasn’t a condemnation but a liberation. His words struck you forcefully, penetrating your defenses once again with lethal precision. It wasn’t just a mental game; there was something genuine in the pain that lingered in his voice, a shadow of loneliness that echoed your own torment. And in that moment, the Sith you had seen as an implacable enemy became a figure that seemed to understand your suffering, your anger.

“The anger you feel, the pain that consumes you… you don’t have to fight it,” he continued, his tone calm and inviting. The tension between you was thick, almost suffocating. You felt the dark side’s pull toward him, the promise of freedom shining like an irresistible temptation. But there was something more in that man, something human, making it harder to you to ignore. The sincerity in his gaze, his voice dropping to an almost intimate whisper, made you doubt your certainties. His hand, warm against yours, made you feel dangerously close to an abyss you weren’t sure you wanted to avoid. You remained still, analyzing his words in your mind. The lightsaber still tightly gripped in your hand, your teeth clenched as you swallowed before sighing, thinking about what you should do. You deactivated the lightsaber and stepped away from him, pressing the hilt of the now-deactivated saber against his chest. You wouldn’t be deceived by his seductive words. You knew who you were and what you fought for. But, inside, a small part couldn’t help but wonder: what if he was right?

“You don’t know me to tell me these things. And as I’ve said, I’m not corruptible like my sister,” You hissed, your voice charged with a tension the man couldn’t help but appreciate. He let his smile spread slowly across his face, watching with almost amused interest as you deactivated the lightsaber and then pressed the hilt against his chest. The determination in your eyes, the resolve in your gesture, fascinated him. It wasn’t the reaction he had expected, but there was something in you, an inner strength, a resilience that intrigued him deeply. He could see the internal struggle you were facing, the conflict between the Jedi code and the emotions he had deliberately stirred.

The Sith, with a slow and measured gesture, placed the hilt of the deactivated lightsaber on a nearby rock. The smile on his face shifted into a smirk of satisfaction. “Perhaps I know you better than you think,” he admitted, his voice soft and filled with an intensity that echoed in the silence of the cave, where only the crackling of the fire could be heard. “I see who you are… who you could be. Your strength, your will…” His steps continued to close the distance between you, and you took a step back, trying to maintain the space between you. He gently took your wrist and pulled you slightly towards him, towering over your smaller figure. He looked at you with what might have seemed like admiration or… desire. You held your breath, swallowing, paralyzed by what could be the gentlest yet most dangerous of predators. The man brought his face closer to yours, the distance between you reduced to mere centimeters, his breath mingling with yours, warm and slow. His touch was once again firm but never painful. His eyes, dark as the abyss, glowed with an intensity that slowly captivated you. You found yourself hanging on his lips, almost asking for permission to breathe regularly. “It is rare…” he concluded. You took a deep breath, and the tension between you was growing increasingly palpable. His tone was like sweet poison, flowing slowly through your veins, making you doubt once more everything you had always believed. His hand slowly moved from your wrist to your side, stopping just below your ribs, where the wound, though treated, still throbbed painfully. The contact, though light, made you flinch, a mix of pain and something else you couldn’t quite identify. You felt the warmth of his body against yours, the tension between you becoming almost unbearable.

“You’re still loyal to someone who didn’t think twice about abandoning you to the enemy on Khofar some nights ago…” You swallowed at his words, feeling the knot in your throat that blocked every word and the weight in your stomach. “Deep down, you’re still searching for a master, someone to guide you… That life, you’ve never truly felt it as your own; they never understood you,” he continued, his gaze fixed on your eyes as if he could see inside you, reading every thought, every hidden emotion. “But I can.” For a moment, you felt yourself falter at those words. The tension between you was palpable, and you could not take your eyes off what must be your enemy, although your mind tried to keep lucidity. Your breathing was slow and irregular, each breath an attempt to hold back an invisible and unknown force that seemed to want to overwhelm you. The knot in your throat was getting tighter, blocking the words you wanted to say. Your eyes were mesmerized. There was an incredible intensity in those foxy eyes, a mixture of fear and fascination that left your heart inexplicably throbbing and mind confused. You failed to swallow trying to make words come out to counter his claims

“You are like me…” he whispered a short distance from your lips.

✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧

Notes :

Well, yes, the sexy hot af villain who will be the protagonist of the new series is Him. Qimir, from The Acolyte. If you don’t know him, go and watch that series because Manny Jacinto put all his effort to seduce us towards the dark side. This is just the beginning, still do not know how many chapters will have but I hope not many, I would like to write about more topics for him.

if you haven’t seen the series there will be some spoilers, so please watch the series first

-Mel

˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　　˚　　　　 . ★⋆. ࿐࿔　　　. 　　˚　　　　*　　　　✦　　　.　　.　　　✦　˚

139 notes · View notes

maika-aika · 2 days ago

Text

MY SAVIOR

Imma be real chat, idk how to write Sol so I'm just turning off my brain

☆: In which reader beats up bullies like an absolute baddie, making Sol fall in love with them even harder

★: Sol x gn!Reader

☆: Contains; Fluff, mentions of bullying, creepy men eugh, sexual harassment, reader beats them up dw !!, smitten Sol (per usual). I changed some of the main story plot for this fic so it won't be as boring to read lol

"Boo. This sucks"

You muttered below your breath, more than annoyed at the current events laid upon you. You thought that perhaps a small trip to the library would be fine, but as it turns out, your favorite seat by the window is taken by some random stranger.

Perhaps you should've went with Crowe after all.

Oh well, there's really no turning back now since you didn't quite ask where he and his group are heading off too, by the time you get out of the library they could be anywhere in the campus, making you waste even more time.

It would be nice to reclaim your seat, but talking to strangers was never your forte. I mean, sure, you can do it if it's necessary, but for small problems such as these didn't seem that important for you to step up, even though your main purpose was to stay and work in your favorite spot, such a small problem doesn't really require you to speak up and waste your breath.

A small sigh escaped your throat, opting to check out some books instead to pass the time, 30 minutes to be exact.

Dragging the tips of your fingers on every book's spine and reading their labels, taking them out of their shelves before dismissively putting them back again, looping around the library. Nothing seemed to catch your interest no matter what you do.

"Watch it, creep!"

A gruff sounding voice was heard behind the bookshelf you were facing, finally finding something that catches your attention, you took one of the books from the shelf to make a small peephole, making you able to check out what's going on.

Two guys, red and blue unkept hair with piercings on their ears and lips are found harassing another guy with green streaks of hair. It was obvious they were just causing unnecessary conflict out of sheer boredom and degeneracy, but the green haired guy didn't seem to put up much of a fight.

"Playing silent isn't very smart of you, guess I better make you cough out some spunk—!" A heavy blow was dealt to the victim's abdomen as he tumbled on impact with a groan, his misfortune amusing the two bullies as they inch closer and beat him up.

Bullies like them are the usual in this school. You can't really avoid them, like wasps and hornets. Sure, you felt pity, but two bullies mean nothing when they just keep coming back in different forms. Nothing you do to help matters. They're everywhere, and that's that.

But as you were about to walk away, you saw something shiny glint on the fluorescent lights of the library.

"...Is that a knife?!"

How they even managed to slip a knife on school grounds was beyond you. "Not yet talking, ah? Maybe this will make you spit out something, " the red-haired bully chortled, inching the knife closer to the victim's neck. "Something...bloody."

That's it, that's borderline bullying, that's just attempted murder.

You made your way to their area. Your knuckles knocked against the wooden bookshelves catching their attention as their furrowed glares dart towards your figure like predators. "Bullying? Aren't you too old for Hollywood clichés?" You snide in mock boredom.

"Pretty little thing, no wonder this fuckface has the hots for you" the red haired bully remarked with a grin, tossing the knife to his partner and staggard towards you, circling you like a snake, breathing down your neck. "Pretty face with an ugly mouth, why don't you scram and leave our business out of your cute little ass, ah?"

"Leave them alone!"

Eyes snap back towards the green haired guy, he bared a fearful expression, desperate. "It's me you're after, right?! Just don't hurt them!"

"Is he taking the blame for me?" you mused to yourself. Glancing to meet his red-orange eyes, he flinched at your gaze, not really expecting you to look at him. Yet you didn't see how his pupils dilate at the sight of you.

"So now you're talking? Perhaps you could be of use after all, doll" suddenly, you let out a groan as you felt his hand grab the roots of your hair and snapped your face upwards, forcing you to look at the ceiling. "Before we fuck you up, you're gonna watch us destroy your cute little girlfriend"

You flinched, feeling a wet sensation on your neck, was that his tongue?!

The green haired guy tried to run towards you, but a knife was held up against his neck, forcing him to watch you. He was shaking, he was pissed. How dare they lay their filthy fucking hands on your pure, innocent body?!

"That's it, look how helpless you are, can't even lift a finger to help your poor— Argh!" He buckled on impact, your shoe stomped on his own. Taking your chance, you turned around and swiftly grabbed his hair and banged his head towards the concrete. Then, you kicked his body towards the blue haired bully with the knife.

"Gh—?! What the fuck was tha— Hrrk!" The red haired bully hacked up a cough, stumbling to get up. "You bitch!" The blue haired lacky dashed towards you with the knife, but you deflected it by pushing his arm away from your face and hit his knees making him loose his balance and fall onto the floor, dropping the knife.

In a flash, you picked up the knife and grabbed the other bullies hair, tossing him on top of the other red haired bully. A dangerous glint in your eye was seen as you took one of the books from the shelves and raised it high.

"When you see me again, I suggest you run."

The book made contact to their skulls, it was heavy enough to knock them unconscious, sprawled all over the ground, one could almost mistaken them for corpses. Oh how you wished.

After all that's done, you sighed to yourself to clear off the adrenaline during your little rendezvous. Picking up the book from the floor and placing it back on the shelf, and pocketing the knife to report it to the student council later.

Finally, you turned around to help out the guy, but what you didn't expect is his gaze on you, not of fear or disbelief, but admiration.

His heart was racing, his cheeks are flushed, his fingers are twitching, it's almost as if he just saw an angel come to save him. He knew you were amazing, but to see it for his own eyes, to be the one you're protecting, to feel and expericen it first hand instead of his imagination sends shivers down his spine.

"Hey...you still there?"

He blinked out of his trance, vision still a daze. You snapped your fingers near his face to wake him, as he blinked and refused to look at you, a hue dusting his cheeks. "S-sorry" he muttered.

You raised a brow at his random apology "Dont say sorry when you did nothing wrong" you squatted down to his level, he was sitting on the floor with a pretty bruised up face, not to mention, he also has a ton of piercings too. You wonder why those guys would pick on him when he looks just like them, but with a different heart.

"...Are you just gonna stare at me?" Now it was his turn to snap you out of your head, his gaze still at you, but unlike before, he seemed more at ease, softer. "Ah, guess we both have a problem of getting stuck in our heads, huh?" You made light of the situation, smiling at him to ease the once tense atmosphere.

"Come on, it sucks staying on the floor all day" you stood up first and lent out your palm for him to take, hesitance flickered in his demeanor, as if he's contemplating if he's even worthy enough to touch you. A second passes and he's taken your hand.

Once he stood, you've come to realize how tall he actually is up close. "Are you okay? Nothing broken in you?" He shook his head to the side "Not really, just this nasty bruise, I guess" he sighed in annoyance "What about you? They didn't...hurt you in anyways either, right?"

His once soft gaze turns dark and dangerous, an ominous aura surrounds him making you laugh nervously at his sudden change of demeanor "Don't worry! Yea I was kind of harassed, but it didn't go too far!" You replied, flexing one of your arms "And not to brag 'n all, but I did beat them up anyways soo"

You huffed with a proud smirk on your face, giving yourself a playful pat on the back. A chuckle was heard from the male, as once again, that dark expression washes away at the sight of you.

"So cute..."

"What was that?" You leaned in closer to hear his voice better, making him flinch and instinctively look away from you again "...Nothing, you're hearing things" he covered his mouth with his palm, still refusing to look at you.

You stared at him longer before shrugging your shoulders and leaned away, now focusing on the bodies laying on top of each other. "You know...if taken out if context, they look like their cuddling each other" You muttered, placing a hand under your chin to think of a way on how to deal with this mess.

"Pretty good blackmail material if you think about it." His quip lights up a light bulb on your head, snapping your fingers in he process which startled the guy a bit with your random snappy movements "You're a genius! I know just what to do know!"

You gave him a pat on the back and quickly started to shift the bullies into a position where it looks like they're cuddling and took out your phone to post it online, tagging everyone you know in the school, while also giggling like a child pranking their friends.

"Look at this! Those guys look pretty straight and the type to hate gay shit, so once people see this, it's gonna be nothing but public humiliation!" You exclaimed excitedly, jumping on your toes with your eyes shining and turning towards him "I have to pay you back for this amazing idea!"

He stared at you with wide eyes, still processing what happened before a smile graced his lips and a laugh reached his face. His cheeks are pink and his heart racing just by seeing your cute attitude over something so vile like blackmail and online revenge. "Jeez, never knew I'd meet someone so excited over online gossip" he teased.

"Oh hush, gossip is like a virus, it spread suuper~ quickly in a matter of seconds, kind of fitting for them don't you think?" You playfully nudge his chest which gives you an amused look on his face. You two were having so much fun you completely forgot about literal attempted murder.

"Nee, why don't I pay you back with some coffee? For giving me such good blackmail material" you smiled brightly at him, as if you did absolutely nothing wrong and totally didn't beat up two men into unconsciousness. That riled him up so bad.

Of course you're adorable, and by god was that so sexy of you to deal with bullies the randomly switching personalities like it's the most normal thing ever. He wanted to be with you longer. He needed to be with you longer.

"Sure, if that means I also have to pay you back with dessert for saving me" he quips, knowing your love for sweets, watching in adoration as your eyes lit up at free dessert and hastily agreeing to his deal.

"Oh! Let's get you fixed up first at the nurse's office, I can walk you there if you want!" You're too kind, too caring, too much for his heart to handle. He loves this, he loves you.

Oh how he wishes these moments of you would happen over and over again, but for now, he'll relish in your presence, admiring every single being of you. Worshiping his savior.

Eugh I feel like he's so OOC on this one HELP

#tkatb #tkatb sol #tkatb x reader #tkatb vn #sol x reader #how do u even spell his fullname damn

103 notes · View notes

tanoraqui · 8 months ago

Text

In Which Space Orcs are Men

[AO3] A "what if humans are space orcs" take on Dagor Dagorath. (Aka the prophecied apocalypse of Middle Earth. Scifi story accessible to non-LotR nerds!)

Elves weren't really supposed to leave Earth. That's what they told us—the Elves, that is, told people thousands of years ago, when Elves could still be found here and there. When I was born, elves were nearly as much a fairy tale as they’d been on Ancient Earth.

Elves weren't supposed to leave Earth, the Elves said in the fairy tales, and in a few old scraps of records scattered around known space. They literally weren't made for it. They could only do it if they brought Earth with them—Arda they called it, leaves or dirt, water or a rare bubble of air, perfectly preserved in a white crystal. There are tons of tales about Elves losing their lifeline jewels—their hearts, their silimirs—and roping people into epic quests to get them back before they—the Elf—faded to nothingness.

Even the jewels weren't enough, though. That's why there are also stories about Elves who fell in love with a person or a place and stayed there until they faded, or Elves who charmed someone into following them back to Fairyland on Earth...because whatever they said, Elves didn't really live on Earth. Humans have maintained their home planet as a monitored nature reserve since like the 40th century, open only to vetted research teams and serious Human religious pilgrimages. The most confirmed accounts of Elves that exist are of their ships appearing out of nowhere, with no trace of any tech that would enable it, at random, always-changing points within 100 miles or so of Earth.

Nobody ever came back from trying to follow Elves home. Mostly Elves tried to dissuade people from trying. But there are always crazy and curious people—and Elves usually attracted those, because any Elf who left the home they were "made" for was usually crazy and curious themselves.

Those were the stories I grew up with. There was a cave near the orphans' creche which was supposed to be haunted by a faded Elf. I didn't really believe it—like I said, the last confirmed Elf was last seen like 5,000 years ago, and not even on my planet. People have met two dozen new sentient races since then. We've discovered that reincarnation is probably real (just functionally untrackable), prompting the Pan-Religious Reform Wars. The last person to see a live Elf was still traveling via natural wormholes—they literally didn't know that you could loop pi.

When the Human natal sun started to turn really red, it wasn’t that big a deal at first. It’s a very important, very sad event for any species, but it happens to everyone eventually. It happened to the Hectort just after we invented interstellar flight. There were some unusual gravatic waves around Earth’s Sol, but nothing worth noting to anyone who didn’t already care for personal reasons.

Then the Elves sent us a message.

The local Parks Service picked it up, of course. I bet the Humans meant to hush it up at first—though the Centaurian government still won’t admit anything—but someone leaked it immediately on the intergalactic net. It should’ve only been famous as a joke of a hoax, but…

It was basically just a metal box with rudimentary fire-thrusters soldered on the sides. It contained two things. The first was a recording/replaying device so antiquated that the only way they got it working is that it was already playing on loop, and didn’t stop until someone disconnected it from its power source.

The message was in Ancient Bouban, which some folklorist soon announced is the latest language an Elf could know, since the last known Elf went back to “Arda.” The voice somehow sounded melodic to every species with a concept of music, from the screeching Vesarians to the deep-sea sub-sonic Thinkers, even when translated through cheap, staticky speakers. And to most species, the speaker was audibly distraught.

They said,

This is the final message from the Firstborn of Eru to the Secondborn, and everyone else. The Battle of Battles has come, and we…are losing. If there are any who remember the ancient love and loyalty which bound our peoples, if there are any heirs remaining of Thargalax the Magnificent, of Nine-Fingered Frodo, of the noble Houses of Haleth, Hador and Beor—

The speaker drew a sharp breath, there.

—by great oaths and greater friendship I bid you now to raise your swords and ride to our aid. Ride as swiftly as you can!

We will hold for another year. We will, they said determinedly. After that, it is unlikely that…

Another, shakier breath. A smile forced into a voice which would rather weep.

Fëanáro and Nienna believe there is a way to destroy the Straight Road. If we must, if it comes to it, we will do so, and trap the First Enemy here in this dying world with us. Though I don’t know about—

Hair-aristocrat! a more distant, slightly less perfectly melodious voice called, in a language so dead that they needed computers to decode it. The walls are falling, we need to go!

If you never hear from us again, and no sudden discord arises among you, you will know we succeeded, the first speaker said quickly. If otherwise…I am sorry. Either way, I bid you all only, remember us! Oh beautiful flames, remember us, as we have ever remembered y—

There was a sudden screech of tearing metal, a defiant, musical battle-cry, and a jarring silence. Then the message restarted.

And that wasn’t even the strangest thing in the box. The strangest thing was the recorder’s power source, which was powering the whole tiny rocket mechanism as well. It was an Elf-jewel right out of a fairy tale, a fist-sized, translucent not-quite-diamond—but instead of rock or water or a much-loved scrap of plant, the only thing it held was light.

...Kind of. It isn’t normal light. It arguably isn’t light at all, as we know it—scientists now think it’s technically some sort of plasmoid aether, except it only acts like a plasmoid aether about half the time.

It has no detectable source within the jewel. It fully illuminates whatever space it’s in, no matter how big. Its visible radiation is a frequency, the scientists say, that matches a hyper-accelerated version of what the universe must’ve sounded like in the split second after the Big Bang.

It makes people remember things, when they see it in person or sometimes even across a holo. Some remember a similar light in a strange traveler’s eyes. Others, dreamily enchanted valleys where spring never faded, or tall castles, bright swords, and stern and glorious lords and ladies. And some of us got hit with a whole lifetime of memories in one go: an identical gem on the brow of a sober forest king, friends who slipped through trees like shadows save for their merry laughter, an impossibly beautiful gold-haired maiden dancing in a glittering cavern...

(And all the pain and loss that came with them.)

And some people just remember the sight of a distant star—in another world, in another lifetime.

Reincarnation was provable but untraceable…until now.

The Thinker ambassador on Astrolax Station 5 was the first to kick up a fuss. Most Thinkers never leave their home planet, they're too huge and aquatic. But like I said, there's always crazy and curious people. The ambassador started bellowing the second che heard the message, without even seeing the light, because, "I know him! My Wisdom! We must send aid!" That made some news, and random other people shared their own, less dramatic revelations, and soon a compilation swept the net with timestamps showing that most of them were organically independent, not just jumping on the bandwagon….

Even that might've gotten written off intergalactically. The Thinkers are big in reincarnationist circles, on account of how they claim that deep in their planetary ocean they can hear echoes of their past lives. But being mostly planet-bound means they're not really influential on a big political level. Or it would've sparked another surge of the Reform Wars, and everybody would've remembered the rock, but not the recording. Or there would’ve been a fight over this potentially infinite energy source (though that is so last giga-annum)….

But first it was shown in person to the current Director of the Admiralty of the Astral Alliance, President of the X-ee Empire and Matron of the House of S,sh, Ch’ees/i’i S,sh. I was actually there—I was Captain of her ceremonial Alliance guards, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage my career after Zanzibus. Very ceremonial, considering the X-eee have laser-proof shells and pincers and I have, what, opposable thumbs? Vestigial tusks?

I wasn’t paying attention at first, too busy being suddenly assaulted by all my own memories. So I missed the President freezing mid-step and gasping (in X-eee), “Mother.” I also missed her rising alarm call of an attempt to speak Ancient Elvish without an Elvish tongue or lips.

I sure didn’t miss her snap back to X-eee for a sharp call to attention, and everything that followed: the call to arms! The rousing of the Alliance! A tour of the galaxy, to find anyone and everyone else in whom the Light could awaken ancient memories! And for the love of X'eeh, why had nobody figured out how to get back to Fairyland with this thing yet, and every warship in the quadrant?!

If I believed in the One Behind, or in any other creator god or gods—I'm not saying I do, but if I did, if there really is something out there all-powerful and all-kind—then it'd be because out of every soul in the entire universe, the probably one in the best position to act on the Elves' message turned out to have, from a past life, two parents and a much-loved twin still in Fairyland. Like, that's insane, right?

I stayed with the Director's ceremonial guards for the whole tour, actually more than ceremonial for once—it was the weirdest mission of my life, and I've been on a lot of weird missions. Or supposedly routine missions that got weird (and usually disastrous). My friends joke that I'm cursed. S,sh requisitioned an Inquiry-class ship, so the science boffins could study the Light and jewel along the way, and we started wormholing at weft speed, hitting a new planet every week. Sometimes every day. In each major spaceport and ground-city, S,sh stood with the jewel on the highest available point and gave a recruitment speech for going to save the Elves and fight the oldest enemy of all reality.

Honestly, it seemed a little redundant? The Astral Alliance was made for this sort of rescue mission (and for escorting trade convoys). But I was...if not happy, then sure as hell more self-certain with my ancient memories restored, and most people who joined up seemed to agree. It was mostly people who remembered, when exposed to the Light, who joined—so before long, we had a whole tag-along trail of mostly civilian ships, trying to get up to Alliance Fleet standard on the road in less than a year.

Three different religious sects tried to kill S,sh for "profaning the mysteries." Five others tried to steal the jewel because we were apparently appropriating a holy object. The boffins announced that, bar the can't-prove-a-negative possibility, the evidently sourceless Light should be counted as an infinite energy source, and at least seven different groups, ruthless financiers and sustainability idealists, immediately tried to steal it for that. And I still don't know what the rival thief-queens of Likkiliani were about, except that I got tied up upside-down from a palmdar tree for two hours trying to stop one, the other paid me 700 cron then threw me off a cliff, and in the end they recognized each other from past lives and just made out on worldwide live-holo before joining our growing fleet.

It turned out they were the Director's past life's great-grandparents, and a Canid pop princess was her niece. The Thinker ambassador was some sort of ancestor, too. Crazy extended family.

Most people who remember just remember the sight of a star in the sky. A buddy of mine from Fleet Academy remembered looking up at it as a Human sailor. The historians—and you’d better bet we picked up some Earther historians on this mission as well!—say this jewel or one like it was probably astrologically conflated with the planet Venus by early Humans.

(The more time I spent around the jewel, the Silmaril, the more I remembered, of my first life and more. Lifetime after lifetime with bad luck dogging my steps, killing loved ones in my arms, destroying cities I was supposed to save… One restless, haunted night, I met a Rigilic in the cafeteria who’d been awake with some of the same nightmares, who’d been my dead older sister once.)

The tour was cut short when word came from the Earth system that there was a black hole growing in the center of their reddening sun.

No, the sun wasn’t compressing into a black hole millennia ahead of schedule—one had just spontaneously manifested within it, like it’d teleported in. No, not literally—that was impossible. We were pretty sure. No, the sun wasn’t falling into it…somehow. Yet. The black hole was only 17 quectometers wide, but it was growing at an erratic but unceasing rate. If their best estimation of the pattern held, it would consume the sun 2 months before the Elves’ deadline, and the Earth 4 to 950 minutes later.

We pulled back to Earth—well, to the dwarf planet Eros, on the edges of Earth’s star system. That’s where the nearest shipyard of any note was, and we were gathering the whole Astral Alliance. This is exactly the sort of thing the Alliance is for.

I was released back to ship duty. Zanzibus was still a black mark on my record, as was Jorab, and really everything on the AAS Endeavor…and that thing in third year of Fleet Academy… But no matter how bad my curse, I was an experienced captain and one of the best pilots in the Alliance. For this, we needed all the best.

The boffins had pretty quickly mastered limited manipulation of the Light, using modified aetheric resonators, and every day they came up with something new for us to test. They focused the Light into a laser cannon like no one has seen before. They laced it through plasma shields until a fully shielded ship glowed like a distant star. They managed to nearly replicate the Silmaril’s crystalline structure, so they could make “copies” that shone like the original for first a few hours; then, with refinement, a full week…

The one thing they couldn’t pin down with any real confidence was how to get to Fairyland. The frequency of the Light resonated with large bodies of Earther saltwater in a particular way, and models suggested that if the Light source moved horizontally along the water within a certain range of distance and velocity, the resonance would create a wormhole-like ripple in space—but wormhole-like, was the key word, and models suggested. The closest anyone had seen to that spatial distortion was in a logbook of dubious veracity from the Delta Quadrant, four hundred years ago. Alteia, my Academy buddy who’d been a Human sailor, took the Silmaril in an M-wing on a series of highly monitored test flights above the Atlantic Ocean, and space did repeatedly start to hollow in front of bom—so bo had to stop every time, rather than risk vanishing with our single, maybe-one-way ticket.

Then Earth’s moon stopped shining in the sky. Its albedo just dropped nearly to zero, from one night to the next. There was nothing wrong that anyone could figure out—nothing with the orbit, nothing with the surface rock, nothing with the artificial atmosphere. Inhabitants reported feeling colder by several degrees, but no measuring equipment recorded anything.

The black hole slightly off-center in the middle of Sol was now 844.9 zeptometers, and growing more steadily.

We didn’t have time to keep testing. We needed to raise our swords and make our ride, even if we only got one shot at it.

I was given command, for seniority, skill, and because I was the one who managed to talk S,sh out of leading the fleet herself. (If my lives had taught me anything, it was the importance of having someone, anyone, ready to be emergency backup.) Ironically, I was back on the Endeavor, with most of my old crew—though we got permission to rename the ship, in honor of the mission. A lot of people did. Alteia was now commanding the AAS Elendil on my right flank, star-friend in Ancient Elvish. That Canid pop princess had taken over a hospital ship and renamed it Rivendell. An Earth Park Ranger, of all things, remembered being my dad—briefly—and he was leading the Rangers plus my Rigilic drinking buddy on the EPSS Elfsheen.

We weren’t sure if any ship but the one with the Silmaril would get through. The fleet numbered in the hundreds in battleships alone, not counting scouts and scuttlers. Twelve races had sent ships on top of their typical Alliance Fleet tithe, and S,sh had brought about half the full force of the X-ee Empire. We all just locked tractor beams and hoped.

I was piloting as well as captaining, with the Silmaril between my forehorns. It was held in place by about a dozen wires and other connectors to the ship, like an old-timey pilot’s headset. We took off in orbit around Earth, as close as possible to the surface—not very close, in warships of Class S and higher, but within range of the oceanic resonance. A Likkilianian thief-queen stood at my shoulder, ready to advise if anything “Musical” started to happen.

Think about what you’re trying to get to, and why, the boffins had advised, so I did—bright-eyed kings and dancing maidens; lost friends, families, cities, planets and all. The jewel got warmer against my skin and shone brighter with every pulse of the engine, brighter than we should’ve been able to see through.

The silver-gold Light twisted and diffused as space did around us. But there was no familiar rippling wormhole boundary—instead, spacetime thinned to a curtain like driving rain, like Vesarian silver-glass.

A ghost appeared next to me. She looked like the oldest, grumpiest writing teacher at the crèche, though I knew that was only in my head.

“There you are,” she said, impatient and relieved like I’d been hiding in the sandbox again, rather than coming to class on time. Her sewing scissors went snip snip snip as she darted them around my body—and a chain on my soul faded into guiding threads.

Before she’d even disappeared again, I punched the engine and blasted through the silver-glass curtain.

Fairy tales said there’d be a peerlessly beautiful land on the other side, green with eternal spring, full of endless light and laughter. They said there’d be sunlit shores and shimmering waves, with welcoming docks for sea-ships, sky-ships and space-ships all…

We flew into the worst battlefield I’d ever seen, in any lifetime. It was more desperately vicious than Jerusalem V at the height of the Reform Wars, more ruined than Glaurung’s wake, more desolate than Zanzibus after the nuclears fell.

Either a massive supercontinent or a small moon had been shattered, leaving nothing but a roiling debris field. The brand-new meteoroids ranged from pebbles to rocks the size of a small space station, and included space-frozen corpses, forests, and what might have once been city blocks.

I gave the helm back to my Pilot Officer—zer had, I can admit, slightly better reflexes for dodging debris—and focused on captaining.

Most of the life signs were clinging to the larger rocks. There shouldn’t have been atmosphere for them, but walls of thunderstorm wrapped around every shard with even a single life sign—wind and water desperately hand in hand to safeguard the last of the Elves. The only thing visible through the impossible storms was the Light of a second Silmaril, on a meteoroid shaped like half a broken eggshell.

A corpse lay at the epicenter of the explosion—what might’ve been a corpse, if it wasn’t also shattered. The broken pieces of a massive stone humanoid, taller than my ship if it’d stood beside her, still bleeding lava so hot that it burned even in frozen space. Another titan knelt at the shards of its head, a figure of towering bark and leaves, wailing with grief even worse than the end of the world.

A slimmer tree-woman stood with one hand on her shoulder, comforting, and the other wielding a skyscraper-sized club spiked with incandescent wildflowers. Guarding her sister’s heartbreak, she fended off a swarm of bat-sized monsters with wings of darkness and whips of flame.

Bat-sized relative to the gods of Elves and ancient Humans. About the size of an M-wing, in flight.

Countless more of the bat-things flung themselves at the storm-bubbles, like carnivores chasing the prey hidden inside. They were fended off by an equal army of creatures with wings of light and swords of lightning, led by a towering figure who seemed to dance from one bloody battle to the next.

The biggest battle by far was the farthest away, over where the sun had been. In this dimension of stories over science, Sol was another woman-shape, smaller than the others but burning just as brightly as her star. Also just as blood-red. The light was centered on a fist she kept clenched at her chest, and instead of containing the black hole, the unseeable thing that it was here surrounded her, striking at her with a thousand hungry jaws and grasping legs, and she had only a one-handed whip of a solar flare to fend it off—

But she didn’t fight alone. A warrior tore at the Darkness’s spidery limbs with his fists, image on the cameras flickering impossibly between every hero I’d ever heard of. A snarling figure bit at it with jagged teeth, gored it with horns, shredded it with claws and talons, and generally made every ancient prey-instinct in me scream. And a queen with a crown of stars, a shield like the night sky and a sword like a streaking comet, stood dauntlessly at the sun-holder’s side.

With all that, and with the speed of even her most exhausted strikes, I thought the sun-holder could probably have gotten away if she’d tried. But I knew how a person fought when they weren’t willing to leave a friend, and a smaller, silver figure lay at her feet, unmoving and drained of light.

But even the battle for the sun wasn’t what grabbed my eye. No—all my attention, all my guiding threads of fate and the quick temper that always used to get me in trouble, before (and sometimes after) I learned to leash it in an Alliance uniform— All of that took me straight to the fight happening orthogonal to the stone giant’s corpse.

It was another one-versus-many. Morgoth, the First Enemy of Elves and Men— Master of Lies, Maker of Chains, Sonofabitch Curser of Bloodlines—towered over even his fellow gods. His shape changed constantly, sickeningly, but it was always black-armored with eyes like dying stars that hated you personally. His maul dripped with lava and every other kind of blood.

He fought against three great gray figures who moved as one. The tallest wielded a star-studded scythe with swift, efficient strokes, and wore the dark gray of corpse-shrouds. The shortest shimmered with more colors than even a Stamotapadon could dream of, and his weapon shifted likewise. The third was the clear, clean gray of skies after rain or tears run dry, and fought with only a shield—and hit harder with it than either of her brothers.

Around their heads darted the only Elves on the battlefield, in small fliers more like sea-ships than aircraft. But they moved fluidly, pestering the Dark Lord like flies, pricking his skin and threatening his burning eyes.

Until Morgoth swung his maul with a roar of fury that traveled even though soundless space. My ship and heart both shuddered. The gray gods all staggered back, and the Elves fell from the no-longer-sky—all but their leader, more fire than flesh, who wore the third Silmaril. Morgoth caught him in one massive black hand and with sharp claws plucked the jewel away, as easily as a ripe berry from a tree—

“All power to fore-cannon and fire,” I ordered—and the jewel on my brow shone bright again as several stored months’ worth of infinite Silmaril-Light slammed into Morgoth’s chest with all the force that the best scientists in the Astral Alliance could engineer.

He stumbled. He dropped both the jewel and the elf-king (who’d been trying to bite him). The Lady of Mercy tossed her shield to catch them, staying low and out of sight—though she needn’t have bothered. The so-called “Lord of All” had already found his next enemy.

“All ships, move forward and join shields,” I ordered, and met his burning stare though the viewscreen. “Then broadcast me on all external frequencies.”

The wires on my forehead shimmered as we shifted Light-flow to the shields—and to my right, so did the Elendil, and to my left, the Cosmian Blade, and all around us the Minas Tirith, the Elfsheen, the Muse, the Rivendell, the Heart of Zanzi, the Longbottom Leaf… They were still soaring out of the silvery distortion behind me, tractor- and Silmaril-towed: sleek Rigilic eels-of-prey and Centaurian cruisers full of Humans eager to fight for their homeworld, Betan mine-ships and Canid X-M-wings and my own Hectoan starlighters, a full third of the X-ee navy with their X-eee–shaped six-engine dreadnoughts, and hundreds more.

“This is Captain Pel Cinia, once Túrin Turambar, of the Astral Alliance ship Gurthang,” I said. My words were broadcast from every ship on every frequency in every language that the people of Arda might know, as the Fleet assembled from forty-plus different worlds flew into position. Our Light-infused shields blazed and locked together, until we formed a seamless wall right in the Enemy’s face, with the Elves and their other allies safely behind us.

I’ve never felt more proud to recite the most cliché line in the Fleet:

“We got your distress call. We’re here to help.”

#the silmarillion #science fiction #humans are space orcs #fanfiction #my fic #dagor dagorath #not tagging characters bc spoilers (they're listed at the end of the ao3 though)

352 notes · View notes

fickleminder · 6 months ago

Text

return to sender

Nightbringer AU. Wherein unsent letters are finally delivered to their intended recipients.

Before Lesson 40 dropped in NB, I often wondered where the letters MC wrote when they were about to be kicked out of the Devildom disappeared to. This fic was also inspired by the lesson where the brothers were talking about their pacts with MC and it sounded like they really regretted it :/

Hopefully you found me helpful from time to time?

Don't push yourself too hard, "big brother."

"SURPRISE!"

The blindfold is pulled away with a flourish, and the first thing that catches your attention is the large banner spanning the entire restaurant with the words "THANK YOU" splashed across in bright colors. Everyone is dressed to the nines, holding party poppers and showering you in confetti, but all you can think about is how tedious the cleanup will be afterwards.

As though reading your mind, Diavolo speaks on behalf of those present. "You are our guest of honor tonight, so please, put all thoughts of work aside and enjoy yourself to the fullest!"

So that's why Asmo has been pestering you about your measurements lately. To his credit, the outfit he personally tailored for you makes you look like you belong in the upper echelon of demon society. Not that there are others around to pass judgement; Ristorante Six is fully booked this evening for the future demon king and his entourage.

"Here, I hope you're hungry." Beel hands you an untouched plate of food, piled high with all the expensive items you can only dream of ordering and then some. Even though half of it is almost gone already, the buffet tables lining the walls feature a generous spread of your favorite dishes.

"A toast," Lucifer announces at one point, raising a glass of blood-red demonus, "to our dutiful attendant."

Everyone follows suit, and a part of you wishes there was actual alcohol in your drink. You're way too sober for an occasion such as this. Still, you smile and laugh along.

"Cheers!"

Thank you for always thinking of me.

I always had fun when we were together.

When you finally find the time to visit what's left of Cocytus Hall, all you see is a ring of rubble surrounding a massive sinkhole no one has bothered to clean up yet. Though, in light of recent events, you're not surprised rebuilding isn't on the list of Diavolo's priorities, if it even makes the list to begin with.

The brothers have spared no expense in replacing your personal belongings, furnishing the spare room in the House of Lamentation with all the material comforts to make your residence as cushy as possible. Their personal attendant deserves nothing less, after all. You have everything you could ever need, and yet...

Dirt cakes your skin and wedges under your nails as you start digging with your bare hands, determined to salvage what you can from the remains of your former home. You aren't looking for anything in particular, not that there's much that managed to survive the collapse intact. A crumpled book here, a chipped flowerpot there, scraps of clothing pinned under debris, a thick piece of fabric with 'Kiss The Cook' embroidered on it—

The dam finally bursts. You clutch Solomon's apron to your chest and fall to your knees.

"Come back!" You sob, coughing and choking on dust between desperate gulps of air. "Please, I can't do this without you! Come back! I need you, Sol—"

No one hears you wailing into the night. No one helps you up when your tears run dry at last, when your bones ache with exhaustion and you can't feel your legs anymore.

You have no one to turn to, nowhere else to go, and as you drag your feet back to the House of Lamentation, you pretend you can still feel your mentor’s warmth on the tattered apron wrapped tightly around your shoulders.

Make sure to take good care of Snake Henry, okay?

I know you'll make an amazing demon.

"Oi, watch it!"

In the blink of an eye, you find yourself swept off your feet and cradled protectively in Mammon's arms. A shower of rocks and bricks crashes to the ground where you were standing not one second ago.

"Are ya alright? Are ya hurt anywhere?"

"I'm okay! Thanks for the save, Mammon." You gently swat his hands away once you're sure your knees won't buckle. Mammon continues to hover over you, but at least he's stopped checking every inch of your body for injuries.

"This is all Levi's fault," the demon grumbles. "Him and his stupid Envy summoning Lotan—"

"Hey, come on. He wasn't in control and you know it."

"I hate to agree with Mammon, but it totally is when we all have to clean up his mess." Belphie wanders over with a frown, having noticed the commotion. "Why didn't you use your magic to shield yourself?"

"...That's what I have you guys for!" You take a step back to dust yourself off. "Seriously, I owe you one."

"Getting others to do the work for you? Nice." Belphie gives you a thumbs up. You laugh when Mammon tries and fails to ruffle his hair in retaliation.

Someday we should both go bookstore hopping!

You're fine just the way you are, Satan.

"Is it just me, or do they seem more tired than usual?"

"Not tired per se, more like defeated?"

"We don't exactly make it easy for them. Plus there's all the stuff happening with the Little D's lately..."

"Maybe they're still upset we didn't make pacts with them."

"Nah, I don't think so. I mean, it's our decision too, and they gotta respect it!"

"They have done a lot for us since becoming our attendant. How about we treat them to a nice dinner? Take them out for a night in town, all expenses paid for."

"A fine idea. I'll run it by Lord Diavolo and see if we can arrange something."

Looking forward to the next Asmo Night!

I love you! More than words can say!

There's a chilly breeze in the air tonight, but being bracketed by two demons helps to keep the cold at bay.

"Are you sure you don't want to share my scarf? It's long enough for the both of us~"

"I'm certain you can fit my jacket just fine too."

"Guys, I'm alright!" Their overprotectiveness warms your heart. "We're almost back at Cocytus Hall anyway."

"Already?" Asmo pouts, shifting the bag of groceries to his other arm so that his now-free hand can grab yours. "I told you we should have taken the scenic route! It's so hard to spend time with— Hm?"

The demon lifts your hand and squints at your bare fingers. "No ring today? I noticed you don't wear it anymore."

"Oh, that?" You tug free of his grasp with a small laugh. "I just put it away for safekeeping, that's all. A Celestial item in the Devildom does tend to draw attention..."

"Makes sense. Plus it's Lucifer's, so you shouldn't even be wearing it in the first place," Satan huffs.

Before long, the three of you arrive at the front door of Cocytus Hall. Asmo peers through the dark windows with a curious hum. "Is Solomon not home? Seems like he's never around nowadays..."

"He has some business to take care of in the human world. It's nothing he can't handle by himself, so I'm on my own for a while."

"Why didn't you say so earlier? We could have a sleepover, or you could come stay with us! I'm sure it gets pretty lonely at night—"

"Knowing you and your brothers, I'd never catch a wink of sleep," you deadpan.

"Speaking of, we do need you at the castle early tomorrow." Satan sounds almost apologetic. "Lord Diavolo wants to coordinate efforts for rebuilding after Lotan's flood."

"Understood, I'll be there."

"Get some beauty sleep tonight, okay? See you in the morning!"

Asmo blows you a kiss while Satan hugs you goodbye. Once they leave, you make sure the front door is locked tight behind you before allowing your shoulders to slump.

Put your name on any treats you put in the fridge.

Keep your brothers safe, okay?

You love the brothers, you really do, but some days you just want to kick their asses to the Celestial Realm. It never fails to astound you how these centuries-old beings can be so immature.

"—umpteenth time, no brawling in the house!" If it were possible, there would be steam coming out of your ears by now. "What if the fire had spread to the rest of the library?"

"But Mammon ate my—"

"I don't care!" You snarl over Beel's protests, already feeling a headache building at the back of your skull. "If you want to pick a fight with one another, fine! Just take it outside!"

"Ugh, you're not the boss of us!" Belphie snaps back, flicking his tail irritably. "Some of us weren't even involved in this, so leave us out of it!"

The word 'stay' is at the tip of your tongue, ready to put your rowdy demons in their place, and it takes everything in you to hold it in, knowing it won't do any good.

"What the blazes is going on here?!" Lucifer storms in before you can say anything else. "Are you lot not capable of staying out of trouble for one day? And you!"

You flinch as the first-born rounds on you. "I thought I could count on you to have things under control. I'm disappointed to see that I was wrong."

"H-hey, it's not their fault," Levi stammers, looking visibly guilty now that Lucifer has turned his ire towards you. Next to him, the rest of his brothers fidget uncomfortably. "We'll clean this up, okay? So why don't you take it easy on—"

"All of you return to your rooms this instant." Lucifer refuses to budge. "I will supervise to make sure our attendant actually does their job properly this time."

And there goes the rest of your day. You grit your teeth and nod obediently, ignoring the demons filing out of the library one by one, some murmuring apologies as they shuffle past you.

This is fine.

Someday I'll buy you the ultimate alarm clock.

I love that happy look you have while you sleep.

"You're the only one who can tell them what happened."

You curl Solomon's fingers over a small stack of letters, written what feels like years ago but never handed to their intended recipients.

If Solomon seemed upset before, he looks downright devastated when you place the Ring of Light on top of the pile, the final nail in the coffin. "We'll find another way," he pleads. "You and me, just— Don't make me do this, please."

"It's too late for me and you know it." You avert your gaze, unable to maintain eye contact with the one person who kept you sane throughout this entire nightmare. "My magic is as good as dead, but you still have enough for a one-way trip."

"I can ask Barbatos for help, I'll do anything he wants—"

"They'll take care of me here, I know it. They may not be the same, but they're still my boys."

Anger and jealousy flash briefly across the sorcerer's face. "If only they knew..."

"All the more they wouldn't let me go," you sigh, rubbing his white knuckles with your thumbs. "They're fresh from the war, strangers in a strange land, and Lucifer just pledged loyalty to Diavolo. Do you really think he'd allow what's left of his family to give their freedom away? To a human no less? I can't use them Sol, not like this."

"You wouldn't hurt them!"

"I know, but they don't. They don't know me here, and by the time they do, we'll both be doomed."

"But Nightbringer—"

"Whatever he’s planning won't work, not without those pacts." Your eyes harden at the thought, determined not to play whatever game this father of demons was trying to pull. "So really, this is for the best. Besides, there's another you running around during this time period. Maybe I'll bump into him someday. Can't have the two of you together, that's too much good food for me."

Despite the weak joke, Solomon cracks a sad smile. "I've never been able to say no to you, my dear apprentice. But before I go, may I?"

You meet Solomon halfway, pressing your lips against his, losing yourself in his arms one last time while trying to imprint the smell of old spell books and spices into your brain.

"Are you sure I can't change your mind?" He whispers, one last-ditch effort even though the answer is clear in your watery eyes.

"Please," you shake your head, "do this last thing for me."

I always enjoyed the time we spent together.

I hope you never forget me.

Take care of yourselves, okay?

At the call of your name, you turn around to see a familiar demon rushing through the hallways of RAD towards you, only stopping once you're within arm's reach.

"Hi Barbatos, did you need something?" You frown, noticing his somewhat unkempt state up close. A loose button in one corner, collar not done up all the way— It's as close to disheveled as you've ever seen him, not to mention the tips of his horns and tail are quivering slightly.

The butler doesn't answer. He continues to stare at you with a foreign look in his eyes, which have started to mist over.

"...Hey, are you alright?"

Barbatos breathes your name again, in a tone you haven't heard since Solomon left this timeline altogether, and something buried deep inside your heart sings.

#writing #obey me #obey me fanfic #obey me nightbringer #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me diavolo #obey me barbatos #obey me solomon

233 notes · View notes

baelarys · 4 months ago

Text

𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐮𝐧 Pt.2

Aemond targaryen x Reader velaryon(Rhaenyra Daughter)

Warning: Insest, bad language, death

Word count : 5038

A medida que pasaban las horas, la emoción de la noticia se instalaba en mi mente. El sol comenzaba a ocultarse tras unas densas nubes grises, presagiando una tormenta. El castillo de Desembarco del Rey estaba bañado por una luz tenue y melancólica, creando una atmósfera de expectación.

I stepped out into the entrance courtyard, accompanied by Lord Caswell and my guard, Ser Cedric Blackwood. His presence was comforting, his imposing figure and unquestionable loyalty reassuring. The wind lightly stirred his black cloak as we both waited patiently.

Finally, a caravan of riders and a carriage appeared in the distance. Without banners or fanfare, their arrival was discreet, fitting for the uncertain times we faced. My heart pounded, and I felt a mixture of nerves and joy as I prepared to receive my mother.

The caravan stopped, and the knights dismounted silently. Rhaenyra descended from the carriage, followed by Daemon, Jacaerys, Lucerys, Joffrey, Rhaena, Baela, Aegon III, and Viserys II. Rhaenyra, with her regal bearing and silver hair, shone despite the waning light of the evening, her pregnancy evident but not diminishing her imposing presence in the slightest. When our eyes met, a warm smile lit up her face.

Lord Caswell descended the steps and approached my mother, taking her hands.

—Welcome, princess —said Lord Caswell.

—My sweet child —Rhaenyra responded, coming forward to embrace me. The hug was strong and comforting, full of the familiarity that only a mother can offer. We separated just enough to see each other’s eyes, and she took my hands in hers.

—It is good to see you, my daughter. The journey has been long, but knowing you would be here made every mile worthwhile —she said, her voice laden with emotion.

—We were eagerly awaiting your arrival. Helaena told me about the rumors in Driftmark and about Ser Vaemond Velaryon —I asked, wanting to understand more about the events that had brought her here. Rhaenyra nodded, her expression turning serious.

—Yes, there are disputes about the succession in Driftmark. Vaemond has raised concerns that cannot be ignored. It is crucial that we remain united in these times —she explained, glancing around before focusing back on me. —But there will be time to talk about politics. Right now, I want to enjoy this moment with you.

—Of course, mother. It is an honor to have you with us again —I replied, smiling.

Daemon approached, greeting me with a smile and a nod.

—Y/N, it’s always a pleasure to see you —he said, his tone soft but firm.

—Daemon —I replied, returning his smile. Then I looked at my brothers and stepsiblings, feeling a mix of love and responsibility towards them.

—Brothers, sisters —I greeted them, hugging each one.

Lucerys, always affectionate, enveloped me in a strong hug.

—Y/N, I’ve missed you so much —he said with a warm smile, his affection evident.

—And I’ve missed you too, Lucerys. It’s good to have you close again —I replied, gently stroking his hair.

—And you, come here! —I exclaimed, pulling Jacaerys by the arm to hug him and plant a warm kiss on his cheek.

—I’ve missed you too —Jace said sweetly.

—Hello to you too —I said, leaving a kiss on Joffrey’s head and wrapping my arms around him.

I approached the nurses carrying the little Aegon and Viserys, who looked at me with curiosity. It was the first time I saw them in person, and their little faces filled me with tenderness.

—Hello, little ones! —I said, extending my hands toward them. Aegon, with his big curious eyes, came closer first, followed by his brother.

—They’ve grown so much since the last time you saw them —commented Rhaenyra with a smile.

Ser Cedric stepped forward, bowing his head in respect.

—Princess, it is an honor to welcome you to King’s Landing —said Ser Cedric formally.

—Thank you, Ser Cedric. I appreciate your loyalty and protection of my daughter —Rhaenyra responded with a nod.

With a gesture, I guided my family inside the castle.

—I’d like to say I’m happy to be back, but I hardly recognize it —my mother commented with a bitter tone, watching Daemon walk away with a small laugh.

—Many things have changed since you were last here, mother —I replied, watching Jace and Luke head towards the training yard. —You must be tired, mother. Let me take you to your quarters.

—And how is he? —my mother asked as we walked down the hallway with Ser Cedric and Daemon a few steps behind us.

—He’s fine, I think he’s training now —I replied sweetly.

—Do they treat you well here? —my mother added, sounding a bit worried.

—They have to, or I’ll take his other eye —Daemon quipped mischievously.

—They treat me well here —I said, taking my mother’s hand and caressing it to calm her. —I’m excited for you to meet Maegor —I added cheerfully.

---

I arrived at the training yard in search of my brothers and managed to see Aemond sparring with Ser Criston. He was truly a skilled swordsman, handling his sword with such ease. After finishing his duel with Ser Criston, I saw him approaching my brothers.

—Nephews, have you come to train? —Aemond asked, his tone mixing challenge and mockery.

I descended to approach and position myself next to Jace. I felt Lucerys move to hide behind me while Jacaerys took a step back.

Aemond’s gaze finally landed on me.

—Wife —Aemond spoke with a mischievous tone as he approached a bit closer.

The sudden march down the hallway startled me a bit. I rolled my eyes as Vaemond stared at me, his gaze filled with hatred and contempt towards me and my brothers. I turned to resume my conversation with Aemond. I smiled at him before turning to look at my brothers.

—You should go to mother and get ready —I said, looking at Jacaerys, who returned my gaze with concern. Aemond came even closer, his imposing presence increasing the tension in the air.

—Are you afraid, Lucerys? —Aemond asked with a twisted smile, his gaze fixed on the little boy trying to hide behind me.

—Leave him alone, Aemond —I intervened firmly, looking him in the eyes. Aemond raised an eyebrow, clearly enjoying the reaction he had provoked.

—I don’t intend to hurt him… yet —he said, his tone becoming more intimidating as he directed his gaze at Lucerys. —I was only offering a training opportunity. After all, we all need to improve our skills, don’t we?

I felt Lucerys cling a little tighter to my back.

—Luke, Jace, why don’t you go visit the gardens? I’ll stay here. I have some matters to discuss with my dear husband —I said, giving them an exit. Jace nodded, understanding my intention, and took Lucerys back to the castle. Aemond looked at me with interest, clearly amused by the situation.

—You’re very protective of them —Aemond commented, stepping even closer. —But that won’t always be enough.

—I know —I replied calmly, looking him directly in the eye. —But I’ll do what I can to keep them safe.

Aemond came even closer, his gaze intensely fixed on mine.

—That determination is one of the things that attracts me most to you —he said, his tone full of sarcasm.

I returned a smile.

—Only my determination? —I asked playfully, taking a step towards him. Aemond let out a soft laugh, his eyes never leaving mine.

—Also your stubbornness. And your ability to get into trouble —he said, raising a hand to gently caress my cheek.

I felt the warmth of his touch but maintained my composure.

—You have a way of saying things that always manages to disarm me, Aemond.

—That’s my intention, wife —he responded, leaning in a bit more. —To disarm you and keep you on your toes.

I took a deep breath, feeling my heart beat faster.

—You do it very well —I murmured, keeping my gaze fixed on his.

Aemond wrapped his arms around me, the tension between us palpable. When we finally separated, his eyes shone with a mix of desire and challenge.

—See you later —I said, heading back into the castle.

---

I walked as quickly as my feet allowed, trying not to trip over the cumbersome dress I had decided to wear that morning. Upon reaching the doors of the throne room, I took a long breath, trying to catch my breath, and gave a look to the guards, indicating they should open the doors.

—Princess Y/N of House Velaryon! —announced one of the guards as I walked through the doors. Everyone was already there: my mother with my brothers, my grandmother Rhaenys and my cousins alongside Vaemond Velaryon, and Queen Alicent with her children and the Hand of the King. I gave Luke a quick smile and took my place between Aemond and Aegon.

—You’re late —murmured Aegon with a mocking smile. —Was your dress teaching you a lesson in humility?

—I’d say it was more of a challenge to my patience —I replied, giving an ironic smile. —But don’t worry, Aegon, I still have enough to endure you.

Aemond, who was on my other side, watched the scene with a raised eyebrow.

Otto Hightower cleared his throat, walking towards the Iron Throne and positioning himself in front of it. There couldn't be a more disrespectful scene than that. I turned to look at my mother, who apparently shared the same feeling of rejection towards the Hand of the King.

—Ser Vaemond of House Velaryon —Otto Hightower announced. Vaemond stepped to the middle of the room, right between the two families, and looked at the Hand of the King.

Vaemond began to babble about how pure his house had been since the days of old Valyria, giving a boring account of his ancestors, as if talking about the dead gave him some kind of advantage and helped defend his position. I shared a look with Luke, who was holding tightly to my mother's arm. Luke looked nervous; his eyes darted in every direction until they met mine.

—You're going to be fine— I whispered through clenched teeth. Luke nodded and turned his attention back to whatever Vaemond was saying.

—I am their closest kin. Blood of their blood, the true and unblemished Velaryon blood runs through my veins— boasted Ser Vaemond. His words had a double meaning, said with only one intention.

Rhaenyra raised her voice to make a comment before her turn came:

—And through my children, descendants of Laenor Velaryon. If you cared so much about Velaryon blood, Ser Vaemond, you would not dare to usurp the heir, but it seems your ambition is greater— my mother expressed in a firm and serene tone.

—You will have your chance to defend your case, Princess Rhaenyra— interrupted Alicent, which made me roll my eyes and let out a bored sigh. —Have the decency to let Ser Vaemond explain.

There was nothing more to explain. It was obvious that there was something wrong with this claim. Ser Vaemond, no matter how much he wanted Driftmark, would never have it. If Lucerys did not take the place of Lord of Driftmark, Rhys Velaryon, Ser Vaemond’s eldest son, would. Surely Otto Hightower had promised to give him full support and advocate for him just to ensure that Lucerys did not obtain Driftmark. It was a conspiracy.

—Thank you, Ser Vaemond— I raised my gaze when the man's account finally ended. —Princess Rhaenyra, speak on behalf of your son, Lucerys Velaryon.

My mother took a step forward, clasping her hands with weariness and boredom, not looking at Otto.

—If I must legitimize this farce with a response, I must remind the court that nearly twenty years ago...

The sound of the doors opening caught everyone's attention. Seconds later, King Viserys appeared, escorted by his Kingsguard. Everyone watched the scene with attention. I couldn't feel anything but admiration for my grandfather, who had gathered all his strength to be here and defend his daughter and grandchildren from such vile accusations.

—King Viserys of House Targaryen! The first of his name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm!

My heart tightened as I watched my grandfather advance through the room. Where there was once a man, now there was a skeletal body that held only the old glory of what he once was. That old man would do anything for his most beloved daughter. He would be remembered—at least by the blacks—as an exceptional father and grandfather, even though the others were also in shock when they saw him enter.

Viserys advanced with difficulty, slowing his pace when his gaze fell on Rhaenyra. In his eyes, she was alone, with no one to defend her. The man's eyes wandered, fixing on the mysterious brown-haired woman next to one of her children. Y/N watched her grandfather observe her with attention, with curiosity even, as if he couldn't recognize her until the man advanced. For a few moments, Viserys confused her with his late wife Aemma until memories of his granddaughter filled him, recognizing her after a few seconds.

After that, the man advanced until he reached the stairs. Viserys stood still, catching his breath and being attended to by one of his guards, but he waved him away, climbing the stairs almost entirely until the crown on his head fell to the ground. I felt sorry for my grandfather; my feet were about to move toward him, but Daemon was quicker, going to assist his older brother. Viserys murmured something only Daemon heard, and when their eyes finally met, the man felt relief at seeing his brother. Daemon picked up the crown, helping Viserys up the remaining stairs.

I felt a swarm of emotions in my chest, watching Daemon crown Viserys in an emotional scene that only brotherhood could provide. I had never seen so much sadness and respect in the eyes of his former master. After that, the rogue prince returned to his place, sharing a look with the brown-haired woman. Princess Rhaenys shared her opinion with the king and announced the engagement of her granddaughter to Princess Rhaenyra's sons.

—Well, the matter is resolved, again. Therefore, I reaffirm Prince Lucerys of House Velaryon as the heir to Driftmark, the Driftwood Throne, and future Lord of the Tides,— Viserys spoke wearily. Ser Vaemond cast a confused look at his sister-in-law and addressed the king.

—You have violated the law and a centuries-old tradition to name your daughter as heir,— accused the white-haired, dark-skinned man. —And you dare to tell me who deserves to bear the Velaryon name? No, I will not allow it.

—"Allow it"? You have forgotten your place,— Viserys said, disdain dripping from his voice at the way Ser Vaemond addressed him.

—That!— Vaemond shouted, pointing a finger contemptuously at Lucerys. — is not a true Velaryon, and even less so my nephew,— the hatred and rejection spilling from Ser Vaemond's mouth like venom.

—Watch what you say, Ser Vaemond, if you don't want to lose your tongue!— I spat at Vaemond. I would not allow anyone to speak to my brother that way, especially in my presence.

—Leave. I have spoken enough. Lucerys is my legitimate grandson, and you are simply the second son of Driftmark.—

—You do as you please with your house, but you will not decide the future of mine. My house survived the Doom and a thousand more tribulations, and damn me, but I will not let it extinguish because of this...

Daemon smiled slightly, the moment he longed for since Vaemond began to open his mouth to disrespect his family had arrived.

—Say it,— Daemon murmured at his side with a hunger for bloodshed. I could see how Daemon's hand gripped the hilt of Dark Sister.

—Her sons are bastards!— Vaemond shouted, more exasperated than necessary. I shared a knowing look with Daemon, seeing the hilt of Dark Sister in his hands. —And she is a whore.

The entire Hall was left in shared shock and it was Daemon's moment to act. That was the last toll on the man-eater's patience. Daemon slipped like a shadow, living up to his title, passing behind his family to reach the other end, no one had noticed his intentions and that was good.

—I will cut out your tongue for that— Viserys threatened from the top of the throne, pulling out a knife from his clothing.

Daemon before anyone else could stop him raised Dark Sister with incredible ease cutting Vaemond Velaryon's head in half, the Valyrian steel making a clean cut. Everyone remained silent, some screams of terror in the court were what made Daemon smile but more the reaction of the green Targaryens. Aemond watched the scene with pleasure.

—Let him keep his tongue— Daemon said when he saw the body of Ser Vaemond at his feet.

—Disarm him!— Otto Hightower shouted, making a dozen men surround the prince.

—no need— the platinum ruled, leaning his weight on Dark Sister, looking at the blood dripping on the floor and walking back to his old place as if nothing had happened

Viserys began to get upset with shock, interrupting the moment. I watched my grandfather collapse on the throne.

—Call the maesters!—Alicent helped by climbing up the stairs to the throne.

—Father...— Rhaenyra murmured, staying under the throne watching the maesters urgently take Viserys away.

–––––––

—What a scene— Aemond spoke when we got to our rooms, resting in one of the armchairs near the now unlit fireplace while I adjusted some threads of the leather suit I used to ride the cannibal.

I approached the dead fire, removing a couple of remaining ashes with my fingertips. Aemond leaned forward, his eyes shining with a mixture of satisfaction and mockery.

—It's not every day that you witness a beheading at court— Aemond murmured, raising a glass of wine to me. —Daemon certainly knows how to liven up a boring meeting.—

—Cheer up is one way to put it— I said, finishing adjusting the strings of my suit. Although I must admit that it was a little satisfying to see Dark Sister go through his head so easily.

Aemond gave a soft laugh, his eye twinkling with amusement.

—I'm glad to know that you appreciate the art of the sword, my dear.— Although I'm not sure if what happened today will be remembered as art or as atrocity.

I sat next to him, crossing my legs and taking the drink he offered me.

—With our family, those two words are usually interchangeable.—I answered with a smile on my lips, getting up and walking towards the door—see you at dinner.—

–––––––––

The Dragonpit, an imposing and significant structure designed to house dragons that have been companions in our family for generations.

—Ābra (princess)— greets one of the dragonkeepers with a bow, while the smell of smoke wafts from the caverns where some dragons rest. I return the greeting with a slight nod.

—Gaomagon naejot vāedis Cannibal syt ao, mazverdagon māzigon dārys ēza pryjatan jevi ēdruta. (we are preparing cannibal for you, he has been quite restless and aggressive these last few days your grace)—he informs me as he approaches.

Cannibal had never had a rider before nor had he been to King's Landing. It was an honor to have become your rider. Cannibal was a towering dragon, almost the same size as Vaghar, with a coat of coal-black scales and green eyes that glowed like emeralds. He was somewhat aggressive and refused any contact with humans, except me.

"—essa iderēbagon ūndegon īlva mēre (Maybe we should let him marry his own food)—I respond, approaching Cannibal as he shifts restlessly, trying to remove his saddle.

—Bantis zōbrie (good boy)—I murmur to Cannibal, trying to reassure him.

––––––––––––

After the events in the throne room, it was decided to celebrate with a small banquet to have the entire family together at the king's request.

The banquet hall is illuminated by hundreds of candles, reflecting their flickering flames on the stone walls. We met in the Great Hall, at a long dark oak table, adorned with gold festoons and glasses overflowing with wine. The conversations are a constant murmur, mixing with the clinking of dishes and forced laughter.

I take a seat next to Aemond, feeling the tension in the air. He appears rigid, with an expression that denotes his discontent. Seeking to comfort him, I take his hand in mine, leaving soft caresses on the back of his hand. —Are you okay?— I ask him affectionately, hoping to calm his spirits.

—It fills me with joy to see you together tonight.—Viserys smiled softly, taking soft breaths trying to catch his breath.

—A prayer?— Queen Alicent offers next to her husband, Viserys responded with a nod.

—May the mother bless this meeting with her love, may the blacksmith reforge the ties that were broken and may Vaemond Velaryon rest in peace—the latter making me raise the corner of my lips in a small smile that quickly disappeared.

King Viserys rises, his imposing figure towering over us as he taps his cup, drawing everyone's attention. The room falls into an expectant silence.

—It seems that on this day there are many things to celebrate, my grandchildren Jace and Luke will marry their cousins Baela and Rhaena, strengthening the bond between our houses—Viserys spoke with a voice full of emotion, he talks about unity and family love. —a toast to the princes and their fiancées

Everyone raised their glasses, took a light sip enjoying the taste of the sweet wine brought from Dorn, I see Aegon talking to Jace who seemed fed up with his uncle's words.

—Let's also toast to Prince Lucerys, future lord of the tides,— I said, raising my glass and looking at Luke, smiling lovingly at my sweet little brother.

—It makes me happy, and at the same time it fills me with sadness to see your faces at this table, the faces most dear to me and that have become so distant over the years,— Viserys stood up, the king expressed with sadness and regret, my grandfather brought his weak fingers to the gold mask that covered what was once the face of a completely healthy man, my eyes went to my lap my chest being eaten by the feeling of sadness and somehow of pity, aemond He squeezed my hand trying to express some kind of Consolation.—My face is not that pleasant either if anyone ever was but tonight I want everyone to see me as I am, not as a king but as a father, as a brother, as a grandfather and like a husband.—

—Because I know I won't be among you much longer. I beg you not to harbor any more resentment in your hearts. The crown will weaken if the house of the dragon remains divided,— Viserys continues, looking away at everyone else. —Forget your differences if you don't, They do it for the crown, at least do it for this old man who loves them all deeply.—his words echoing in every corner of the room.

—I want to raise my glass to her highness the queen—my mother rises from her place with her glass raised.—I love my father but I recognize that no one has accompanied him as faithfully as his wife, she has remained by his side with unwavering devotion love and honor. And for that I offer my gratitude and my apologies.

After a few words from Queen Alicent to my mother, the atmosphere seemed calmer and less uncomfortable. Aemond, still with my hand in his, relaxes slightly, although his gaze remains severe.

—I want to toast Jace and Baela, they're getting married soon and it's not that bad, most of the time he almost always ignores you. Except when he's drunk—Helaena was heard speaking as she gets up from her place. The brunette shared glances with the platinum girl, smiling at her and raising her glass when she saw that no one else was doing so.

—Excuse me,— said Jace, passing by Baela until he reached Helaena, offering her his hand to dance to which Helaena responded very happily. Aegon looked at the scene with confusion, sharing a look with Aemond, who immediately fixed his gaze on his nephew and his sister.

Some servants entered the room bringing a large smoked Pig, leaving it in the center of the table, without paying much attention to it since I had hardly touched my food until they heard Luke giggle and divert his gaze to Rhaena to hide until he felt the aemond's attention on him. The brown prince also brought his to Aemond, laughing in his face without any impudence.

—Just ignore him, don't make him...— I spoke but before I could finish, Aemond hit the table with his fist, drawing everyone's attention, raising his glass in the air to speak.

—One last tribute and we leave,— Aemond spoke, making Aegon raise his glass as well. —To the health of my nephews, Jace, Luke and Joferry, all handsome, wise and strong like a strong .—

I felt a twist in my stomach before he mentioned Sir Harwin Strong, our real father, he could never see it in such a way. Luke and Jace shared glances across the room, taking them with concern to their older sister.

—Aemond,— Queen Alicent warned, still sitting in her place.

—let's raise our glasses to these four strong ones...

—Repeat it if you dare,— Jace threatened, walking towards him.

—It's just a compliment, aren't they strong?— says Aemond, placing his hand on my shoulder, leaving a strong squeeze.

The tension in the room feels like a rope about to snap. I can see the redness on Jacaerys and Lucerys's faces, and I feel the anger in the air. Suddenly, words turn into action. Jacaerys launches himself at Aemond, punching him in the face, causing the guards to fall on him, Rhaena and Luke get up from their places, running towards where the fight was, the twin trying to stop her sister and Luke to defend Jace, the table is turns into a battlefield. Screams echo, glasses are overturned, and wine spills like blood on the tablecloth. I try to get away from the chaos, but I'm trapped in the middle of the fight, I watch as Aegon takes Luke's head in his hand and smashes his face on the table.

—Stop it, you bastard— Aegon murmurs, pressing Luke's head down on the table.

I get up from my place when I see Aegon putting more pressure on Luke's head on the table, I push Aegon in an attempt to get him away from Luke, giving him a hard slap on the cheek—whom you call a bastard—I spit angrily seeing him. As Aegon steps back with a hand on his cheek. —You bastard,— Aegon repeated again, this time reaching the voice and approaching angrily towards us.

I take one of the knives that were on the table when I see the blonde approaching with a determined step—disarm her!—Alicent shouted at the guards when she saw how I approached with Aegon with the knife in my hands.

The guards took the brunette in their arms while they forced them to where they were holding their brothers—say it again if you dare!—she screamed again.

When the guards released us, my brothers and I advanced in a threatening manner until Daemon stood up from his place, walking in front of us, making a sound with his mouth to stop us, the blonde looking at the brunette behind them, boiling with fury, Daemon turns his attention to the one-eyed prince. .

—How can you say something like that in public!?— Alicent asked, annoyed, she kept her gaze on Aemond in front of her.

—I'm just expressing how proud I am of my family, mother,— Aemond responded, smiling falsely, turning his attention to his wife and nephews. —Even though my nephews aren't as close to yours.—

Again Luke and Jace advanced furiously but Daemon raised one of his hands, managing to calm them down. The rogue prince's gaze fell on that of the one-eyed prince who only looked at him carefully.

Aemond left the room but not before fixing his gaze on me, letting out a chuckle that only irritated me, before disappearing through the corridors.

I could see my mother scolding my brothers while they kept their heads down. I approached them.

—And you? Try to attack your uncle with a weapon? —my mother exclaimed, annoyed—How can you think?

—But he called Luke a bastard— I said, indignant.

—It does not matter! “What you did is not worthy of a lady,— my mother responded before I could finish what she was going to say. —We will return to Dragonstone Tonight . Say goodbye to your brothers and everyone return to their rooms before they cause more trouble— my mother proclaimed in a stern tone, walking away to approach Queen Alicent.

My brothers and I looked at each other in silence, knowing that any protests would be futile. I couldn't help but feel a mixture of frustration and shame. It pained me that our actions had shamed our mother, but I couldn't stop thinking about the injustice of my Aemond's words.

—I'm very sorry about what happened— I said quietly. —Aemond had no right to say those things about us.—

My brothers nodded, accepting my words with sad faces before heading to their rooms.

With a sigh, I headed to my room. Unlike my brothers, I would not return to Dragonstone. My place was here in kingslanding away from my family.

#aegon targaryen #aemond targaryen x reader #aemond targaryen x you #house of the dragon season 2 #aemond fanfiction #rhaenyra targaryen #aemond targaryen #hotd season 2 #aemond one eye #prince aemond #aemond x reader #hotd aemond #angst #house of the dragon #fanfic #game of thrones

144 notes · View notes

bonefall · 10 months ago

Note

again looking over the reworked history what the hell happened with Ripwater, I wanna know. What *was* that? How did Riverclan kill it?

Oooooh, quite a request! Ripwater, Queen of the Lake, one of the episodes of BB!Po3!

Ripwater is a Wels Catfish, the largest freshwater fish in Europe. The biggest specimen EVER caught was just landed last year, in 2023, 9.4 feet long. It wasn't weighed, but smaller fish than this one have broken 300 pounds.

And it's not a good thing that we're catching so many big ones.

Wels catfish are extremely invasive across most of Europe, introduced for anglers who want to land record-setting catches. They're massive, intelligent carnivores, sometimes called the "freshwater orca" because they will lunge out of the water to catch land prey. They DESTROY the population of anything big enough to fit in its terrible mouth, including fish, amphibians, and even turtles.

They get that big from a mix of constant food and hot temperature. It's a sign that they're devastating their surroundings, and that nothing has been able to kill them for the decades it takes to get so large.

So of course, some dunderhead put them in British rivers, where they've been spreading upwards ever since. Thankfully they thrive better where it's warmer, so they're not too massive of a threat to BB's modeled regions in Northwestern England, but they're fucking coming.

Ripwater's name isn't an exaggeration. That's how they hunt. They gape their jaw and beat their fins like dragons, creating eddies and currents that suck their hapless prey in. When RiverClan names her, it's because they see her ripping the water in half. I was thinking about her recently, and came up with some new stuff. I'll take a brief break from my drafts to serve up some fragments for you.

[A gray cat with blue eyes, Lakepaw, later BB!Lakeheart, swims in bluegreen water surrounded by lilypads. Below her is the massive shadow of Ripwater, a gigantic Wels Catfish. Its eyes flash in the depths.]

SMALL RECAP OF BB!PO3: (to set the stage)

It is now a breather arc, just dedicated to some worldbuilding!

I feel pretty strongly that Po3's strength is how AWESOME of a slice-of-life arc it could have been. To this end, I removed the Kin of your Kin prophecy from it, until it's revealed only at the very end just before Cruel Season.

That's so I can focus on The Three and their adventures around the lake, without this big prophecy looming over them and making the lower-stakes conflicts look small.

Instead, the various episodes of Po3 are related to problems that their new home presents, with just a teeny bit of Sol's magical influence to spice things up.

While Lionpaw learns about the "meaning of strength" and ultimately learns a terrible lesson he will extend to his kits, and Jaypaw finds his limits and learns to prevent others from defining them for him, Hollypaw is grappling with Fire Alone and how to reconcile her grandfather's legacy with her strict dedication to the Warrior Code.

And SO we find ourselves in one of the earliest episodes of BB!Po3; Ripwater the River Demon. This is like... episode 3 or 4, it's a REALLY early one.

I'm just shuffling it around with ANOTHER RiverClan-centric episode; the Shinewater Plague. The oilspill from TNP is now going to be bumped up to Po3 so it's more about establishing Mothwing and her apprentice Willowpaw, to contrast Leafpool and her apprentice Hollypaw, before Holly swaps to being a warrior. Jaypaw completes warrior training before becoming a Cleric apprentice.

So I don't want them to be TOO close together. Maybe put Ripwater in Book 2 and have RiverClan comment that they don't really want to ask for help because of the last big event, Mistystar hates feeling indebted to ThunderClan.

After all, it could basically replace the "flood" episode from Canon Po3, which is often forgotten about anyway. I'm already having ShadowClan construct dams instead of RiverClan anyway...

ANYWAY RIPWATER

I want to start this episode off with Sol/Harry, who is unnamed, messing around near water. He has a bit of a fish motif going on that I want to establish, and I need to get him to start messing with the Clans good and early.

(Specifically his motif is going back and forth between the koi, also an invasive and notably domesticated species, and the atlantic salmon which is famous for its changing life cycle.)

The Wels Catfish is an invasive species to England, slowly making its way up the island from the South. The fish who will become Ripwater, at this point, is already HUGE but not cat-swallowing huge. She's an 80-pounder.

Sol hits her with some godly magic, which allows her to grow at a rapid rate.

The sort of thing where it wouldn't be COMPLETELY implausible. He just... helped it along.

When we get to her first true on-screen appearance interacting with RiverClan, she is nearly 300 pounds of monstrosity with a length of about 8 feet

I'm unsure how, exactly, ThunderClan comes to know of this. But I DO know that I want Hollypaw to be snooping, and heavily encouraged by her mentor Brackenfur to do so. So, somehow, SOMETHING starts going wrong across the lake and ThunderClan catches wind of it.

Thinking about it, this should probably be her first big action after swapping out of Cleric apprenticeship.

One of the few things she's missing about Clerichood is the way she could be close to Willowpaw without needing to sneak around so much. It's easier to just pass it off as "friendship" and "Clerics need to be close." Leafpool and Mothwing are a similar way.

Possibly work in that Hollypaw's also already seeing Heatherpaw in the tunnels, contrast the two things...

At this point, Hollypaw has a crush on Willowpaw, which is requited, but... it's kinda fading.

She still loves her like a friend, but she's liking Heatherpaw a lot more. It doesn't mean she doesn't CARE for Willowpaw, of course, but

Willowpaw is still IN love, and it's slowly becoming unrequited, when it didn't used to be.

And from RiverClan's POV...

The first disappearance is so sudden they have no idea what's happened. I'm planning for it to be Robinpaw.

(I go back and forth on if it's Robinpaw or Dapplepaw, but I'm leaning towards Robinpaw again, because I like Dapplenose too much to have her get killed off here.)

She went out clamming in the lake with her sisters, Lakepaw and Otterpaw, there was a swirl in the water, and that was it. She was gone.

Just like that.

She never came back up. RiverClan searched for her, following the currents, checking the shoreline, everything. It was like she vanished.

Mistystar is suspicious and doing everything in her power to figure out what happened, but... let's face it. It's the word of two apprentices, who were swimming alone, who swear Robinpaw just went under.

Misty JUST got done with the Shinewater Plague and isn't trying to make RiverClan look like it can't keep track of its own young. The most likely situation is that Robinpaw was sucked down by an undertow that the three of them were too inexperienced to recognize.

So... she's pretty adamant about not sharing this information until Robinpaw's body is found. Jaws Style. "We cannot let the other Clans be alarmed by this, else they might meddle in our affairs..."

(and she's still maybe a little paranoid that some snoop in another Clan is going to find out that Leopardstar wasn't killed by a rogue, y'know.)

I don't want it to be TOO much of a bloodbath, so I'm capping Ripwater's body count at three and just aiming for two deaths total.

I'm also going for a coincidence RiverClan is going to interpret as a pattern; this happens a lot, specifically, when they're hunting Freshwater Pearl Mussels.

Ripwater doesn't like the river as much as she likes the lake, but it has nothing to do with their clamming. They're just going to interpret it as such.

Anyway.

The next one she goes after was lucky. By some stroke, she opens her jaw, and the victim is able to grab onto something before they're sucked in. (Maybe toss in something here were it was Holly who was able to help save them.)

Since the WHOLE Po3 Apprentice Generation is going to be getting more focus, there needs to be more input from the RiverClan apprentices. Lakepaw and Otterpaw obviously need time here, but I also NEED to involve Ripplepaw, to establish how he's going to be seen as one of the strongest in RiverClan by OotS.

EDIT FROM THE FUTURE AS I FIGURED STUFF OUT:

It was Ripplepaw, Otterpaw, and their two mentors on a raft who were attacked next. They were fishing for mussels in a shallower part of the lake.

Otterpaw was tethered to the raft with a flax lead, so it wouldn't float off. Or just tugging it in her mouth. Either way she had a line.

When Ripwater attacks her, she is swallowed on the line like a worm on a hook

And it starts pulling the WHOLE RAFT down, just a crummy bundle of sticks

One of the mentors started shouting to cut the line, else it would drag all of them under, but Ripplepaw dives right down to beat its ass without telling them he's not gonna cut it

Hollypaw just rushed right in, didn't think about it, forgetting she was supposed to be trying to sneak around

Taking control as the natural leader she is, she ordered them to shut up and start pulling the opposite way

Underwater, Ripplepaw braced himself against the fish's lips, grabs Otter's tether, and YANKS

Abovewater, the adult warriors are pulling together, Holly grabs the raft and pulls too

Once their paws touch the bottom of the shallows it's over, one last HEAVE-HO and POP!

Otterpaw is FREE

And when it's finally known that the apprentices weren't mistaken, there's a monster in the water, THAT'S when the debate really starts up. Mistystar does NOT want ThunderClan meddling, and she'll already be pissed off that Hollypaw (and any OTHERS who tagged along with her, I wouldn't put it past Honeypaw to wriggle her little yellow butt into a later draft, or Lionpaw for his massive strength) witnessed something that's not her business.

There's a moment from canon I desperately want to keep; where Squirrelflight comes to fetch her daughter.

(more reason to just say this is replacing The Flood Episode from canon lmao)

It's such an interesting moment, and so forgotten. In a nutshell, Squilf is both furious and concerned that her kit went missing and meddled in another Clan's affairs, but... understands the impulse.

Because it's something she would have done.

So when she scolds Hollypaw, there's this aching feeling that she's scolding a younger version of herself. Calling her arrogant and disloyal, that an apprentice's opinions mean less, and that she needs to listen to "older and wiser" warriors within her own Clan.

In BB, I want to do something big with this. Firestar is the figurehead of Fire Alone, who encouraged Hollypaw's behavior through his deputy, Brackenfur, who he set as her mentor for a reason.

But Squirrelflight is being abused. By Brambleclaw.

This is one of the lowest points in Squirrelflight's life, and she is walking a line between self-worth, the warrior code, and her personal beliefs, just like her daughter is.

SO, since I'm already using Brambleclaw's enabling of Ashfur's physical abuse as one of the contributing factors to Hollyleaf's descent, I ALSO want to show how he acts on other characters.

Brambleclaw, Clan Culture, the pressures of their strength-obsessed social system. So it's gotta be Squirrelflight that reminds her, or even plants the seed in her head;

"What you did isn't consistent with the Warrior Code."

Maybe even have Mistystar herself state this earlier, to be echoed by Squirrelflight, offering an alternate perspective to Hollypaw. Make her realize that ThunderClan's political leanings are not universal or even popular.

But when Hollypaw comes back to ThunderClan, whoever set her to be a snoop wants her to spill the beans. This is also a big WIP part, as Hollypaw struggles with if she's going to obey or not, and I still need to set all the political "players" in this moment.

I know for sure, though, that Firestar's IMMEDIATE desire is to meddle like it's an episode of Scooby-Doo. Though he's savvy enough to be smart about how he phrases it and what actions he takes, his ultimate goal is to put his little cheeto-dust paws all over this. And Hollypaw is starting to question how appropriate that actually is.

This is where it starts to really be a rip in Holly's mind. Clans aren't JUST big, blanket groups with united opinions, they're collections of individuals. Mistystar doesn't want meddling, but Willowpaw is in danger. Otterpaw and Lakepaw went all that time without being believed, after they watched their sister die, because they're lowly apprentices like her. Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw are angry and disappointed, while Firestar and Brackenfur are secretly lathering her in praise.

Now imagine me standing in front of a big board where I'm writing ??? because there's a missing chunk here.

I need to connect THIS part to what comes next, which is where ThunderClan DOES come in and help out. Here's the thought process going on in RiverClan;

Willowpaw comes in to do something important. She adores Hollypaw, knows her value as a Cleric, and knows that StarClan can sway Mistystar.

I want her to have a couple of pieces of a vision... BUT. She decides to interpret it in a way that's convenient, and add a few details.

It's not a tooootal lie lmao. It's just 75% true.

This is the true power of Clerics, when they realize it. No one can actually challenge them without just ignoring them or stripping them of power. They are accountable to StarClan alone.

A mentor simply doesn't say this out loud to their apprentice. It's a quiet secret. And Willowpaw just realized it.

and thinking about it... this should be the thing that finally breaks the budding romance Holly and Willow had. Holly is sickened by this, when Willow confesses how she convinced RiverClan to work with ThunderClan.

But, without even being a full Warrior, the apprentice leverages her power as Cleric of RiverClan, and 200 skill points of Improv Acting, to tell them these things;

"StarClan is so angry with us that they've sent a hog to the water! It's why they've sent a ThunderClan apprentice, we must work with them to eliminate the beast that lurks in our waters. With spears and plans, we must hunt it honorably!"

(Mistystar is defensive, but it's not known why) "We haven't disobeyed StarClan in any way. We'd already accepted their help once before, when sickness drove us to weakness, and it's only let them think they can disrespect our borders as they please. This can't be the holy will of our ancestors."

"It's-- We've been disrespecting this bountiful new land that they've so generously given us. That's what the pile of shells in my dream was. Think about it! The last attack was on the shore where we collect mussels. The second attack was on a cat latched to a raft, and it was only the tether that saved them. And the first..."

IVE GOT AN IDEA, Robin, Lake, and Otter WEREN'T clamming when they were attacked. She gestures over to Lake, knowing that if she doesn't back her up, the theory crumbles.

(Otter is in the Cleric's den, unconscious.)

Lake hesitates, not wanting to lie. Willow jumps back in,

"It's why Otterpaw was attacked," does those little jazz-hands to be like 'come in bitch work with me,' "And it's why Lakepaw has to be involved in killing it, to end what she started, and appease StarClan."

Lakepaw more like I LIKE-what-you-just-saidpaw, "It's true, we were so ashamed to admit it, Mistystar, this is all MY fault, I wanted my siblings to dig up mussels, PLEASE let me atone by stabbing the fish to death"

AND AFTER THAT IT'S NOODLIN' TIME

Mistystar, begrudgingly, accepts Firestar's help, or perhaps reaches out to him. Ripwater is a "Hog in the Lake," a beast too big for them to kill honorably on their own.

ThunderClan is the ONLY Clan that uses spears, and only for boar hunts. To protect themselves and to give their quarry a quicker death.

No other Clan touches weapons for dishonor reasons, as they're heavily associated with the demon Shredtail.

I should have Willowpaw explain her half-truth to Hollypaw here, and it's where Hollypaw just... so very suddenly can't look at Willowpaw the same way.

Jaypaw would definitely face an ableist moment from someone, but it's going to have to be one of those times where he accepts that there IS a very real limit to his ability here. Spears are range-weapons and his whiskers don't reach that far. He can't tell where he's stabbing, and the water is going to make it too hard to smell where Ripwater's dangerous mouth is. He can't be chosen for this hunt.

Meanwhile Lionpaw learns from Willowpelt how to make a spear and it is one of the most satisfying things he's ever done in his life, he's like "this is so awesome oh my god i love weapons"

just gently setting up that he's going to eventually become ThunderClan's head of hunting, and also that he's a lil violent

I feel like him and Lakepaw should hit it off a little because they both think the idea of stabbing a fish in the face is super cool, only for someone to growl at them that they shouldn't be enjoying themselves so much

Maybe Blackclaw, fuck that guy

(absolute tangent but BB!Lionblaze is kind of evolving into a little dork and I love that for him. Local himbo only capable of making friends or enemies, all Clanwide opinions on him are polarized, more at 11)

THE PLAN

So how DO they kill that thing? First of all, it's all about strategy.

Immediately they started making a couple of specialized spears. Most spears they make are exclusively for boar-hunting, so they have a distinctive "lug" that prevents a boar from impaling itself down the shaft to get you.

Someone in RiverClan explains that you don't want a fish having the chance to get off a claw. If Ripwater escapes, they might not find her again until she kills someone else

The solution is that these need to be custom-made, with special claw-shaped prongs, so they're chevron ^ shapes instead of tear-drop points. They stab in, and don't pull out.

So they need to make spears from scratch, which is an intensive process, and they don't have time to waste. RiverClan doesn't want to hunt by water that has a chance of having a freshwater orca spawn and drag you in; they'll starve

And there's only so many artisans in TC that can MAKE spears. Glue, twine, shafts, blades... these are all things that take hours of labor to create.

And MORE IMPORTANTLY, they realized from the Raft Rescue that a tether, attached to a floating object, can be very useful. Each weapon has rope tied through it and is tethered to a raft-- which is even MORE intensive, RiverClan had to repurpose several nets to create so many lines, and they only own three rafts, so the rest have driftwood.

So they only have time to create 3 special water-spears, and bring in 2 modified boar-spears.

Lionpaw is like visibly disappointed he can't have one lmao

The only apprentice given a spear is... Lakepaw. And it's a boar-spear

Because she's gonna be bait. They believe the litter is cursed for their "sin" and she'll be the next target.

But still, they chum up the water near the last sighting with blood and crowfood, like hog slop, and wait.

(Heavy WIP stuff here as we get to a play-by-play I haven't fully figured out yet)

Their plan is to get it on the shore as quickly as possible.

Four cats could pull Otterpaw from its mouth, so 5 spearcats and a dozen strong warriors could pull it onto the shore. Surely.

shorely.

It comes as expected, lunging at Lakepaw. She leaps back and tries to use her spear on it, but she is NOT properly trained with it, she stabs its face, but can't break the skull

RiverClan manages to toss a net at the beast, but it's NOT heavy enough

And they managed to get LAKEPAW with it, pressing her to the beast, her spear is dropped into the water

Someone shouts that it swims like an eel, able to just reverse course unlike a REAL fish which must turn

In the panic, warriors start mobbing it.

she thrashes, and splashes and the net is barely holding her back at all

She smashes a warrior with her tail, buffs another with her powerful head

She's stabbed in her side by a ThunderClan warrior (probably Sandstorm), and she turns on the raft they're standing on, breeching and SMASHING it to bits. Lionpaw and the rest of the cats on this raft get dunked

In the water, ThunderClan cats are useless, and RiverClan cats can't properly handle spears.

Someone from RiverClan, probably Blackclaw, tries to free Lakepaw but is scooped up in Ripwater's mouth.

He's screeching and yowling and trying to hold onto its upper jaw, regularly cut off as she dives under

When Willowpelt gets her spear in, she holds onto that damn stick with her LIFE, getting swung around and dunked in the water and then going back up into the air

Thornclaw, holding the other boar-spear, aims for its tail

But it's not enough; Even with several warriors of RiverClan, five spears, a net, and the weight of the two remaining rafts, Ripwater's managing to pull them towards the depths

She's too big to bite, too large to claw, and too strong to hold down

LIONPAW TIME

He grabs the spear that Lakepaw dropped

Ripplepaw seems to zoom right passed him, running away from the fish. He thinks he must be some kind of coward, the fight's NOT OVER YET!! WE NEED TO HELP LAKEPAW

(In a later draft I might have Lionpaw be on the smashed raft, and Ripplepaw brings the spear to him before turning and bolting back to shore. Either way he doesn't explain himself)

He paddles near one of the rafts, and is pulled up onto it

Firestar calls him a WONDERFUL BOY for bringing the spear

Lionpaw mumbles something enthusiastic around the stick in his mouth, wriggles his butt, and jumps back into the water

Grabbing the net sticking to Ripwater and using it like tree bark, he pulls himself on

Bites the spear by the lug like a handle

And stabs it in like a knife

But it's already starting to pull out, too shallow

Filled with anger and resolve, he bites the shaft, and PUSHES

Harder and harder and harder until there's a crackle, the twine breaks loose, and the lug snaps

The rest of the spear slips in as if Ripwater's made of butter

Figuring that's probably deep enough, he lets go of the net, breaching the surface, sputtering and hacking

He's about to dive again to go get Lakepaw, but to his surprise, she breaks the water next to him

and then he feels the fish bump his paws

His name is called from the shore, and there's Hollypaw and Ripplepaw waving. Ripplepaw TOOK HIS SPEAR'S ROPE. Like a GUY WHO THINKS.

Now there was a team of cats on the shore, all the spent warriors who got thrown off, pulling Ripwater to the shore.

And from the feeling of slimy fish under his paws, it seemed like her fight had been all but spent.

And more cats were swimming to shore now, with the ropes attached to the other spears.

Once on the shore, they're able to discover that, tragically, Blackclaw has died. Mistystar in particular looks deeply torn by this, as their relationship was notoriously toxic. But still, he had been the father of her children, and drowned trying to save a Clanmate. She jumps up onto the massive fish, giving a speech about sacrifice, how Blackclaw and Robinpaw would be honored, and that RiverClan has learned its valuable lesson.

Ripwater was symbolic; it's the greed they had unleashed upon the lake by over-exploiting one resource. From now on, they would be respectful of StarClan's bounty. She thanks ThunderClan for helping to fulfill a prophecy, and offers that their debt be repaid by splitting the meat of the hunt.

Hollypaw, internally: "Oh she's doing that on purpose. She knows ThunderClan hates fish and it would be rude to refuse."

Firestar: "well. how could we refuse."

Sandstorm, quietly, in the distance: "easily actually ew"

CLOSING STUFF

I kinda want some kind of "epilogue festival" where the two Clans legitimately celebrate with a somewhat somber meal sharing. Some of these episodes in Po3 will result in lasting traditions and holidays that are celebrated annually.

At that little "fish festival," it works for Holly to officially break it off with poor Willow, to leave this episode off on a bit of a sad note.

This was one of the first times Lionpaw's power becomes obvious, and it's the sort of thing that wasn't really noticed. I figure it would be good for Lakepaw to ask how that lug snapped, she could barely even get the spearhead in. Lionpaw just brags and says it must be because he's SUPER STRONG.

For some reason he's just making a ton of friends whenever I write these out, I think I'm going to lean into it. Lionpaw's got friends when he's a kid lmao, starts losing them over time as he gets more violent.

It's probably because I really need a comic relief in The Three's dynamic. Hollypaw is very dramatic, Jaypaw is dealing with legitimately stressful social issues, and Lionpaw is violent. Someone has to lighten the mood up a little and it's probably because he's The California Girl himself lmao

At this fish festival he also discovers fish isn't actually that bad. Everyone's being weird about this. It's not really that slimy. It's got a strong taste but that's kinda nice, actually?

Could use some berries but like... "damn why don't we do this more often. this would go great with blackberries."

Ripplepaw: "You think so? I can taste sweetness, can I try to make it at home and tell you how it works out at the next Gathering?"

Lionpaw: "It's not hard, you just mash the berries and stew them in a little water before pouring it over your meat. I learned it from Willowpelt, she's got a mad sweet tooth."

Lakepaw: "No offense Lionpaw, but I always thought you were a total lunkhead. I never thought you'd like, cook?"

Lionpaw: "I mean not really, I'm an awful cook, I can just make simple stuff. Willowpelt's just nice enough to be patient with me, my mentor Ashfur says if I can learn something anyone can, haha."

Just a nice little moment for him.

Blackclaw is being mourned in the mortal plane, but secretly, getting a SCATHING trial up in StarClan. His death was heroic, but his ENTIRE LIFE was treacherous.

From teaching Hawkfrost to follow in his father's pawsteps, to joining him in WindClan's Civil War, and his constant arguing and undermining of Mistyfoot back when she was just a deputy trying to do the right thing.

He goes on trial for a bunch of things he did in TigerClan, too, facing his victims who took his misdeeds to their graves. He's not the only cat in RiverClan who is getting a review like this.

Leopardstar is already in the Dark Forest, and soon, Blackclaw's sent there too.

I decided to kill off Blackclaw here so he could have a VERY cool Land Mar;

(context: all Dark Forest demons now get a cool little evil playset area just for them, where they spawn into after they're thrown out of StarClan. These are called Land Mars)

It's still unnamed, but it's basically an even BIGGER Ripwater. It goes above and below the river and lakes of the Dark Forest, popping up in any body of water big enough to hold her.

#better bones au #Land Mar #Ripwater #BB!Po3 #Better Bones AU #BB!Lakeheart #BB!Willowshine #BB!Hollyleaf #Fallenleaf #Wels Catfish #I NEED to make an art tag for my partner #Gamer-the-kittypet art #THEIR SUGGESTION NOT MINE

271 notes · View notes

thelastofhyde · 1 month ago

Text

the likeability complex.

chapter 3. the butterfly theory.

pairing. joel miller x fem!reader

synopsis. two seasons pass before joel’s very eyes and, without the presence of his sol, neither the spring nor the summer seem to heat his aching bones. what’s meant to be a simple drop off at bill and frank’s becomes a whirlwind of events that send you barrelling right back into joel’s arms, and all it takes is one horrified shriek: otis is missing!

warnings. no use of y/n ( reader has the nickname of sol ), grumpy x sunshine dynamic, unspecified age-gap ( but i personally picture the reader to be mid-20s at this point in the story ), pining, love as obsession, mention of previous s.a. & miscarriage, death, reader is implied to have had a good relationship with her mom, smut ( handjobs, male masturbation, dry humping, joel is desperate and begging, fantasies of piv, oral sex, and anal sex, mentions of virginity loss/younger joel having been a milf lover )

word count. 14.3k

hyde’s input. instead of addressing the reasons it took so long for this part to come out, let me address this instead: joel miller is a man who loves himself some prone bone! nothing gets that old man off quite like fucking his lover down into the mattress, the carpet, the dirt-floor, full body weight pressed against them, head buried in the crook of their necks as he literally smothers them with his love. in this essay i will...

read on ao3. series masterlist. previous chapter. following chapter

Time, as a matter of fact, does not fly.

At some point, Joel may have claimed it ticked, from one minute to another, until the hours passed by and another day’s work was done. He can no longer agree with this sentiment, for a multitude of reasons. For starters — and perhaps the most obvious — a broken clock may be right twice a day, but it is eternally silent. The dials on his wrist stopped ticking long ago and, with it, so did time.

So maybe time crawls. Slow as a newborn finds its feet, over carpeted floors and through cramped spaces. It seems to do so in spring, the tease of the impending heat of a summer’s sun on his back while the fading chill of winter in the breeze messes his overgrown hair. Joel can almost feel himself bending to match it’s slow crawl, his knees aching, a few of his fingers breaking — the consequence of a sloppy punch, thumb trapped beneath his four curled fingers, thrown without a second thought at the sight of one of Robert’s lowlifes placing a filthy hand on Tess. At the very least, the asshole’s nose burst with a bloody red, a reminder of the roses in Frank’s garden.

The trading is kept to the boundaries of their gates this season and, no matter how hard he twists his neck, nor how far lets his eyes run off ahead of him, there is no glimpse of a skirt billowing in the wind, nor the sound of smile-woven words. Just Bill, face as scrunched up as a constipated hole, gruffing out the bare-minimum of words to let Tess know one of his generators is starting to fail, before handing over a list of things they’ll need to bring with their next visit.

Joel cranes his neck one last time before departing and, still, there’s no sight of you.

Summer brings a whole new meaning to things and, thus, time begins to flow, like a river swimming towards the sanction of the ocean. The days wash away, sleepless nights slip into hellish mornings. The couch is being used so much that Joel’s indent has become stained into its very fabric.

This time, they are let in. Bill needs the help, in over his head with how easily he’d be able to fix the failing generator, and so they wind up being pulled through the gates and presented with the dying power source. Bill still wears a frown, even as he thanks Joel for fixing the damned thing. The four sit and break bread at a table, that seat which sits directly across from his empty in a way that he can’t avoid or ignore. The nerves to ask why you aren’t around never quite work themselves up.

What, or better said who, he does see is Otis. And what a relief it is to be sent near stumbling to his feet, the fully grown beast’s size a laughable contrast to its excited whines and wagging tail. He lets himself be tricked into taking the dog for a walk, in which every kick of Otis’ legs reminds Joel that his sol is still here, hiding in plain sight, not a single hope in hell that you’d leave your fur-friend behind.

In Autumn, the leaves begin to fall.

Joel’s dwindling hope seems to follow.

Time has become a threat. A jagged rock clasped in the hands of a volatile assailant. It is the impending feeling of bracing for impact, only for it to never hit. Because a threat can no longer be a threat once it is enacted, and time is no longer quite time once it passes by.

In between the pause of the present and the future, that is where time sits.

And, on either side of it, Joel and Bill occupy a seat.

“‘S quiet,” Joel’s not talking about the tense silence that has blanketed the past ten or so minutes, however long it’s been since the two were left in no company but one another’s.

Bill, aware of his implications or not, shrugs. “Is that a problem?”

Joel shakes his head, and swallows down that lump he gets in his throat every time he lies. He’s been doing that more often than he’d like recently, lying.

To Tess, whenever she’d ask him where he disappears to, slipping out of their shared bed in the middle of the night. She’d not enjoy the truth of him pacing the living room and lamenting upon the cracked leather of their couch.

To FEDRA, when a group of so-called soldiers ambushed him in demands to know why he’d been spotted attempting to smuggle a dress. They’d not believed the tale he spun of it belonging to Tess.

And, to himself, when he’s searching for answers of what’s been keeping him awake at night. Between the cries of whom he lost, and the moans of who he desires, he’s a sleepless wreck.

Laughter comes from another room. The distant duo of Tess and Frank bring more life to this deadly atmosphere than either of the two tense men. Theirs is a complicated relationship. No smiles exchanged, no warmth shared. Respect seems to be the glue that holds them together, a mutual understanding between natural protectors. Just as Joel snaps his bones without hesitation on behalf of Tess, Bill double-locks the doors and secures the perimeter each night as Frank and you lay sound asleep.

With this in mind, Joel treads with care as he descends further into the topic at hand. He decides to treat his own self the same way he’d once taught a stubborn curly haired girl to swim: throwing himself into the deep end.

“Ain’t seen much of your...” He pauses, considers what word best suits Bill’s affections for you. He finds himself at a loss. “The girl. She doin’ alright?”

That’s it, he’ll keep it casual.

Passive, hardly-caring.

Totally not headache-inducing each time a new tally is added to how many days it’s been since he’d last seen you — two hundred and four, but who’s keeping count?

“She’s fine,” the answer is curt. A coughed out sort of thing, heaved out of Bill like it aches to even speak. He’s not entertaining Joel’s longing.

“That’s... good, yeah,” he’s not sure he believes his answer. Good has never sounded so distasteful. “I’ll let Tess know, give ‘er some peace of mind. She’s been wonderin’-”

“Cut the shit,” Bill barks over at him. “You aren’t asking for Tess.”

He could try lie, again. Play the innocent, shrug his shoulders or furrow his brows, an image to mock what could be confusion. But the other man would see right through him, each and every time. Joel has no choice but to surrender. “Where’s she been? Can’t remember the last time I saw her.”

“Didn’t realise you were keeping count.” Is it that obvious? Perhaps he needs to adopt a new method of going about the ways in which he approaches the subject of you. Does Bill know he’d gone back to your room that night, instead of the toilet? The man has a fondness for cameras, perhaps he set one up in your room, or all over the house. Joel’s heart-rate spikes as he wonders if there’s one in the kitchen. “She’s out.”

Out.

A simple enough word, yet it crashes down on Joel like a ten-ton bag of dynamite, imploding his thoughts and reality. Because out to Bill means something far different than merely being out of this house. Out means beyond the electrified gates. Out means danger, someplace Joel can’t stomach the thought of you being, much less if it’s without him.

“You sure that’s the right thing to do?”

“I don’t need your opinion on how I raise-” Bill cuts himself off with a deep breath. He clears his throat. “I don’t need your opinion on how I take care of my people. She’s a smart girl, and it’s not her first time. She’s been going on solo runs since the end of winter.”

An act you’d never have been able to achieve, had he not taught you how to hold your own behind the wheel. That fact alone is enough to send bile burning to the back of his throat. He’s scorned you with the ability to put yourself in harm’s way.

A question of why seems to slip past his lips as his own thoughts abuse his heart, the word sounding far too pathetic and pleading for a man of Joel’s stature, reputation and morals.

“We’re old, she isn’t. There’s gonna come a day where she’s alone and needs to choose if she wants to stay here or move on.” The other man’s risen from his seat, paying no mind to the way the legs of it screech against the hardwood floor. He speaks passively, as though he’s merely reciting the weather as opposed to speaking of the approaching closing of the curtains on his life, and where that would leave the most valuable possession Joel could only ever dream to smuggle: alone, defenceless, in need of a new home. He too could use a new home these days. “And if she doesn’t get a choice and has to run, she needs to be able to adapt. She needs to know how to survive out in that shit-hole of a world.”

Ask me, the words crack like thunder in his head and shake his very core. Ask it of me, and I’ll make sure she’s never alone.

Bill never asks.

The floorboards creak behind Bill as he makes his way to retrieve his partner, leaving Joel to his solitude without the sparing of another word.

Scanning the room, Joel lets himself indulge in the freedom to be curious, to let his eyes wander for more than a few threatened seconds in which he runs the risk of a frowning Bill ringing his neck for snooping.

The place is homey, that has never been in doubt.

The first time he ventured inside nearly left him retching on their bathroom floor, skin chilled and eyes burning as that uncanny-valley feeling overtook his guts. Playin’ house, that’s what he’d proclaimed to Tess on that first journey back to the QZ. Rest ‘f us are out here fightin’ for the right to exist, and these two assholes are playin’ house.

The misplaced anger was truly Joel’s green eyed envy.

And his own self-hatred.

Maybe if he’d been prepared like Bill, he’d have less blood on his hands. Maybe if he’d foreseen the day that shit would hit the fan, he’d never have felt how thick her blood ran, through his fingers and down his arms. Maybe if he thought smarter, worked harder, all his losses would have been nothing but a whisper in passing winds, brushing past him and taking the impending storm they promised over to the next unfortunate bastard.

A polaroid picture captures his attention, pulling him away from the edge of his mountain of self-loathing thoughts.

It lures him out from the safety of the dining table and over towards a cabinet. Meaningless memorabilia and porcelain trinkets decorate the ageing furniture, a blob of motionless browns, tans and beiges that seem to match the colourless feeling in his chest. Among it, a burst of red. Joel has it in his grasp in a matter of seconds, calloused hands likely tainting the image with his fingerprints, and blinks in an attempt to focus his ageing eyes.

When the haze settles, you greet him.

You look young, younger than you are now. Your hair seems just that tad lighter with the sun’s rays shining a spotlight somewhere off-camera to the right. There’s a cheek-splitting grin across your lips, while bags puff out from beneath your closed eyes, lines to match his own crow’s feet forming under the pressure of your radiant joy. The image cuts off just below your shoulders and captures how your two hands sit parallel at either side of your chin, the source of the red gripped in each of them: strawberries. One for each hand. The left has a chunk bitten out of it, a perfect match to the shape of your mouth and the red tint at the corner of your lips. But it’s the right hand that holds his attention, it’s grip on him as powerful as your hand on the strawberry. He imagines you were excited, buzzing with too much energy and with no place to put it, your nimble fingers resorting to burying it in the layers of the fruit, the tips of your nails stabbing into the surface of the berry.

As his gaze traces the grainy image of berry-blood pouring down your fingers and over the back of your hand, he pictures his heart in the place of the red fruit. He’d want you to squeeze tighter, dig your nails in until you’re knuckles deep and his blood paints you, dripping off your elbow.

The thought of whether you washed your hand after the image was taken, or merely shrugged and licked the juice off yourself sparks his curiosity.

He snuffs the flame out before it can make itself too comfortable.

Getting the polaroid back into place feels an impossible task, with Joel’s shaky hands and prone-to-overthinking brain not willing to work together to get it back to where it originally sat, to where Bill won’t immediately notice it’s been tampered with the next time he so much as walks past it.

His eyes catch onto the faded black marker at the bottom of the picture. Baby’s first harvest, ‘13.

It sparks a memory in him, one of hearing your overexcited whispers over the radio-com at an hour far too late to justify being awake, Tess’ figure scooted down to the bottom of the mattress in an attempt to not waken him. Strawberries, Tess, you’d gushed in excitement, voice so pure he could feel it cleansing away all the sins stained within his fingerprints. We grew strawberries! You need to come visit soon! Do you think Joel likes strawberry jam?

He does like strawberry jam.

And he’d been afraid you’d never give him another batch after his dismissive acceptance of it the first time. The growing collection of empty jars he keeps are evidence of the truth, the yearly harvest of the berries bringing him the promise of something to feed his sweet-tooth.

With a baritone growl from his stomach, Joel’s attention carries him off into the kitchen, eyes struggling to look past the spot of the counter he’d had you pressed up against. Only now, standing within the room, does he realise he’d not been in it since that night.

His mouth runs dry at the memory.

This time, it is not through messy scoops of water that he chooses to quench this thirst. Instead, he zeroes in on the large bowl of ripened strawberries that sit atop the counter and digs, till his fingers wrap around the largest, reddest, juiciest looking one of the bunch.

Heaven makes a home on his taste buds with just one bite.

Tangy, fruity, fresh. Wet on his tongue, delicious in his mouth. It paints him memories of you, hand grasping the hem of your own skirt, hips tilting ever-so-slightly back and thighs shaking under the stress of his teasing tongue.

A second bite, a whole new wave of sensations.

His body, with a mind of its own, awakens the pumping of blood down to his crotch. Replaying the sound of your knife falling from your grasp, his cock hardens within the confines of worn-out jeans.

If he were to disappear off into the bathroom to rub one out, would the others even notice?

Perhaps he could take a detour, get lost on his way to that familiar toilet. The third door. It would creak upon opening, but maybe he could cover it with a cough, or simply pray the other three remain too far away to notice. From what he can remember, he’d be able to reach your bed with four steps. Sit on your sheets, bask in their warmth, their softness, their smell of you. Wind his hand down beneath his belt, grip his aching cock as he bathes in your unpresent presence. Stain your sheets in the thick, creamy white poison that shoots out his tip. How long would it take you to notice it painted on the back of your pillowcase? Would it happen instantly, or would it be late into the night, nothing but a lamp to light up the room, as you sleepily flip it over in search of the cold side, only to lay your face back down and be met with the sticky substance against your cheek? Would you lick it clean, drag the tip of your nail through it before caressing that very same finger over your pretty clit and-

“Ok, so I didn’t manage to get, like, anything you guys asked for! But, guess what I did find?”

Joel nearly chokes on the stem of the strawberry.

That voice.

Too kind to be Bill, too lively to be Tess, too feminine to be Frank.

It’s all you, rambling over excited breaths and stumbling around your words. He can’t see you yet, and it nearly kills him to not run off in search of the sound. He needs to sit and wait, and pray the tent being pitched in his trousers deflates by the time you reach him.

You’re getting closer by the second and life grants him no relief. If anything, the pulsating ache that sits between his thighs grows stronger as your footsteps get louder. This is it, he’s really about to see you. Finally, after so long.

What will you say? Will you say anything? Will you smile at the sight of him? Have you noted the lack of him in your days, just as he’d lamented it through his nights? Have you missed him?

Mind a frenzy of questions, it steals away the joy of watching you step into the room.

Instead, you seem to almost manifest before his eyes, two steps through the door and two hands behind your back. Scanning you from head to toe — and confirming a lack of bumps, cuts or bruises — his shoulders fall slack as he reaches your face at last.

You are smiling.

At him.

“Howdy, stranger!” Normally, he’d find your attempt to mimic some poor stereotype of his accent irritating at best, infuriating at worst. Right now, however, still riddled in withdrawals of you, Joel allows a corner of his mouth to quirk up. “Long time no see!”

There’s a million things Joel thinks to say to you.

Like how your absence has been painfully noted. Or tips on the proper ways to throw a punch, lest you wind up like him, bruised fingers and all. Or like the way he’s missed tasting your cooking, and the way you standing there, lit up in the doorway, radiant smile and electric eyes, seems to be healing a little piece of his fragmented heart, yet shaking his nerve-stricken hands. None of these thoughts manage to reach the surface.

Instead, Joel inhales.

And chokes on the stem of the strawberry.

“Oh my god, Joel!” You’re quick to react, shrugging off the bag from your shoulder and rushing over to him. You clap your hand over his back several times, and perhaps it’s the heat of feeling you touch some part of him at last, that final piece of confirmation that you’re real, and breathing, and standing so close to him in this kitchen, but he continues to feign choking even moments after he rids himself of the blockage. “You okay there, big guy? Don’t go dying in this kitchen or else Bill’s gonna lose his shit!”

Big guy. That’s new. Joel’s indecisive as to how he feels about such a name.

He means to say he’s fine, but then your hand is soothing over his back in comforting rubs. And when he works up the nerve to tell you he’s okay, you’re holding a glass up to his lips and feeding him water down his burning throat.

It’s nice to be comforted.

It’s even nicer to be comforted by you.

Catching himself moments away from leaning into your touch, Joel stumbles a single step back, colliding with the very same counter edge he’d tasted you against, and looks past you. Because he can’t look at you, not when the unfocused version of you that takes up space in his peripheral seems so tangible, bright, touchable. If Joel wanted to, he’s mere inches away from being able to sink his teeth in and eat you alive.

It’s dangerous, how much he wants to.

He spies your backpack, discarded on the ground, contents from it spilling out across the tiled flooring. Most of its junk — some nuts and bolts he’s sure Bill will find a place for, scraps of papers and faded movie posters that reminisce on what the world once was, a miscellaneous cloth stained in the red ink of death that has Joel questioning just who exactly had been bleeding — but there’s something else capturing his attention.

It’s not fully out of the bag, merely a corner of it peeking out the pulled-back zipper and gifting him the view of a worn-down box he’s sure was once a colour more akin to yellow than its current rotting brown.

“‘S that ya got?” He slips past you, hands reaching out and heading straight for the obscure item. The cardboard welts under the pressure of his grip, the top of the box popping open with an uncomfortable ease.

“Oh, that’s what I wanted to show Frank-” The moment Joel’s eyes read over the faded slogan, he has no time to wait on a real answer, flipping the lid to a trash can open and dangling the box over the top. “Hey, what are you doing?!”

“Throwin’ this shit out-” You’re near him. No, next to him, body heat mingling with his own as you shoot forward and try your luck at prying your treasure out of his grip. But Joel is stronger, larger, quicker, arm stretching up above his head and holding the box out of your reach.

He doesn’t comment on the fact the little jump you give as you try to reach only invites him to ogle the bounce of your tits under your shirt.

“Why? It’s harmless,” you plead against him, with your tone of voice and your eyes of sorrow, pitiful in the way they twist up his insides and leave him craving your blinding smile. Still, he’s an immovable force, grip tightened on the box as his other hand clamps down around your wrists, prying your hands away from him. “It’s literally just cake mix!”

You fight back, wriggling and squirming, trying your best to slip through his fingers. Joel squeezes tighter, ignoring the bile that burns the back of his throat as he pictures you come sunrise, bruises of his fingerprints burnt into your flesh. A new wave of nausea follows as the familiar heat returns to his loins, a feral part of him preening at the fact you’ll own some part of him, even as he’s miles away and crawling back through the gutters of the QZ.

“Ain’t no way in hell I'm lettin’ you eat that.” He says it for your own good, your own safety.

All the same, the eerie calm that comes over you makes him feel dirty and immoral for letting such words slip out.

“Letting me?” You parrot his words. With frozen features, you seize all fighting, all resistance, hands going slack in his hold. An unsettling smile overcomes you, something malevolent lurking beneath the surface of your typical kindness. “Joel, you’re no one to let me do anything. You have no say, no control, whatsoever. Understand?”

It’s a kick in the guts.

And not because he wants to control you. Or, maybe, if he’s honest with himself, a part of him does want to. Wants to keep you wrapped under his arm where no threat can approach you, longs to spend his working days awaiting the return to safety in the shape of a bed warmed by you, him and all the delicate sins you could share. But, more-so, because it makes him feel powerless, unable to put distance between you and harm’s way.

He’d felt true powerlessness years back, blood on his hands and a lifeless daughter in his arms. A shot missed and a whole lot of sobbing later, he’d vowed to never put himself in a position to feel that again. He kept Tommy close, to an obsessive degree. And when Tess came along and he eventually let himself give into the feeling of accepting another pair of lungs into his family, he kept her closer, living a life of keeping a watchful eye and a ready hand for any moment of violence. He’d do the same with you, if you’d just let him pull you into his circle, a space freed up ever since Tommy left him with nothing but a string of curses and an I don’t ever wanna see your face again to remember him by.

Of course, Joel doesn’t tell you that.

Instead, he gives in to the irrational anger your fighting back awakens in him.

“The flour, you stupid girl, ‘s what started all this shit.” He spits the words out, mind barely registering the way you flinch back when his face inches closer to yours. “But if you wanna turn yourself into some mushroomed freak, then go ‘head and be my guest.”

It’s like a fog clears and, suddenly, your calmness feels less threatening and that tinge of whatever it was — violence, disobedience, assertiveness? — in your eyes slips away and makes space for amusement. Only, the amusement will not sit still, seeping out of you in bright eyes and poorly held-back giggles.

He’s so caught up in it, caught up in you, that he fails to register you stepping closer. It’s only when he feels the brush of your breath against his cheek, and the bump of his nose against your own as he leans down into you, that the lack of space between you sinks in.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Joel.” The biggest lie of the century. He’s well aware of your prone-to-accident self, losing count of the amount of times he’s spotted bruises all over you and listened to Frank recount tale after tale of how you’d walked into a door, and stumbled down some stairs, and tripped over your laces. If anything, you’re the only thing Joel has to worry about. Especially with how much closer you’re getting, your own breath starting where his ends, chest pulling in to inhale and make space for his exhale. Perfect sync, a flowing motion, just begging to be ruined by locked lips and urgent kisses, feaverish passion that’ll leave him at a loss of both words and breath. “Besides, this batch is harmless...”

God, you’re so close. All he can smell is you — sweat, and wilted flowers, and vanilla, and a trickle of gunpowder. He can feel you, breasts pressing against his chest, hand pressing down on his aching shoulders, mouth taunting him a hair’s breadth away from his own. What he sees of you is far more torturous, bathing him in the impurity of coy looks, and teasing smiles, and soft skin yet to be marked by time and the torture of living. If Joel could just taste you, for just a second, then all those two hundred and four brutal days and sleepless nights would suddenly feel worth it.

Your eyes level with his own as the hand on his shoulder pushes him further down. It’s going to happen, he knows this, he’s accepted this. You’re going to kiss him, and he’s going to let you, and then he’s going to spend the rest of however long it takes for you to kiss him again thinking of how your lips feel.

Just a little closer...

That’s it. Kiss him.

Kiss him.

God, please. Kiss me.

“Check the production date for yourself!” Like whiplash, you pull back and send him reeling, muscles stiffening in a rapid attempt to keep him from keening over at the loss of your supportive hold. The disappointment that follows robs him of the horror of realising he’s now empty-handed, the withered box of artificial flavours and powdery evils secured tightly in your own grip.

You’re holding it out to him, finger pointing at a faded black ink. He squints his eyes and, sure enough, there it is: Mfg. 2001.

“Still don’t mean you should eat it,” Joel’s stubborn, despite all, and can’t seem to tamper down the burning in his loins that warns him against you eating such a thing. “‘S gonna be long past its sell-by.”

“Please,” you scoff, a snark-filled smile upon your face. You seem to be enjoying this act of defiance, or perhaps it’s the helplessness upon Joel’s face you find amusement in, torturing the older man with his inability to take care of you. “Sell-bys are just recommendations for the weak-stomached.”

A disturbance comes in the sound of thundering steps. The door behind you slams open, handle leaving its indent in the wall with a brutal force.

There stands Tess, a shine of sweat on her forehead and nervous twitching in her fingers.

Something is wrong.

Joel feels sick.

Merely a moment passes before the two owners of the home join the scene, Frank’s hand nervously tugging back on Bill’s arm the moment the man notices you, Joel and the nonexistent space that lives between you both.

“Tess!” Bless, you seem unaware of the heavy atmosphere settling within the kitchen, throwing your arms out and darting forward to wrap them around the older woman. She halts you, holds you just that bit out of reach, and Joel nearly scolds her for leaving you looking like a lost puppy, deflated as your hands come to rest at your sides once more, cake-mix forgotten in your newfound disillusion and hitting the floor with a muted thud as it slips out your sweaty palms. “What’s wrong? Why are you breathing so heavily?”

“Me and Frank... we were walking...” She keeps pausing to heave in breaths. The grip she’s got on you loosens and her hands slowly come to rest on her knees as she haunches over. Joel steps a little closer to you, hackles rising at the thought of danger. “A hole... Under the fence...”

Red alert. Loud, angry, threatening thoughts invade his mind, blaring at him like a siren refusing to go ignored. He’s got his fingers wrapped around the holster that houses his revolver in a matter of seconds. The safety’s on, he’ll need to remember that before he dares use it.

“How many?” He mumbles out, in true Joel fashion, and watches Tess meet his face at last. Confusion flashes through her features. “Raiders, infected, or whatever. How many of ‘em got in?”

He can’t help the anger that rises in him, teeth grinding down to hold back the curses aimed towards Bill. He warned him, that first time they’d met, to upgrade those damn fences.

“No,” Tess struggles in another breath. Frank seems worried, but that’s not what makes Joel sick to his stomach. It’s Bill, who’s pale as a ghost and uncomfortably quiet, eyes locked on the ground, that scares him half to death. “Nothing’s got in. It’s out, something got-”

“I swear I turned my back for one second, kid,” as if everything else wasn’t enough, Bill makes himself gentle and cautious, approaching you like you’re a wounded fawn and Joel’s some menacing stag behind you, ready to stab his horns into the heart of any who mean you harm.

“What-” you start.

“The hell are you lot talkin’ about?” Joel finishes.

They exchange looks among the three of them, each one more pressing in the way they plead the other to speak up, explain the situation.

Frank takes the fall.

“It’s Otis,” he’s exasperated, exclaiming it like it’s the heaviest of burdens. Joel can’t quite see your face but he imagines whatever expression you’re wearing must be heart-wrenching, so much so that Bill can not bring himself to meet your eyes. “Otis is missing!”

There’s a sharp silence that takes over the room, scratching at everyone’s eyes and burrowing itself down your throats, making a nest that gets in the way of what’s spoken aloud.

Joel watches your head sluggishly nod. You stumble a few steps back, catching his boots beneath the heel of your own. His hands make haste with supporting you, physically and emotionally.

“He was with me this morning,” Bill picks up again, tension thick in the air as his words slice through it. He’s explaining himself, voice layered with guilt and other emotions Joel’s never imagined the man capable of. “Out in the chicken coop. Started barking at something past the fence and... none of us have seen him since.”

The revelation has Joel retracing his own steps and, indeed, no four-legged creature had launched itself at him earlier, as he and Tess entered the gates. Nor had any paw-prints followed his footsteps through the mud, and no ball had been dropped before him, followed by a demanding bark that was guaranteed to get him to give in and throw the damned thing, if only to shut the dog up. Otis has not crossed his path once, a realisation he never imagined would bring him desperation.

A deep gasp cuts through the tension.

A few deep breaths. Four, to be exact. As you attempt a fifth, you waver and your exhale grows shaky. You pull air in deeper and it doesn’t seem to be enough, forcing your mouth open. The descent into hyperventilating is quick, a path Joel’s all-too familiar with, and the panic swells through your heart before anyone can try to stop it.

Joel acts fast, instinct leading his actions. He turns you to face him, grip firm on your shoulders as he holds your attention on him, big hands on your soft cheeks and tilting your head back to find your eyes. Glassy, wide, panicked. It's the hopelessness behind them that gets the best of him though.

“He’s fine, alright? Probably just saw some rabbit he wanted to chase.'' It's hard for a man like him to sound optimistic. Were you anyone else, he’d be telling you how dumb you were to keep a pet in the first place, nothing more than another mouth to feed and another life to watch out for in an age where safety is a luxury. But you aren’t anyone else, and Joel Miller will always be partial to his Sol. “Hey, hey, listen t’me. He’s gonna be okay. Bet he’s out there right now tryna find his way back, we just gotta meet him halfway.”

You nod along to his words, as though you’re listening, but your thousand-yard-stare says otherwise, eyes gazing past his wide shoulders. Unblinking, unmoving, you seem lost in a daze of emotions Joel's never prepared himself to see on your features. It twists at his guts to watch your figure attempt to follow him in the first steps he takes away from you, halted only by his own hands clasping down on your frame, coaxing you backwards until you find grip upon the kitchen counter.

After a cautious step back, eyeing you like you’re a wounded bunny two seconds from bolting, he turns to Bill. “Give me a few hours. I’ll track the dog and bring him home, alright?”

A half hour, a packed bag, and a rifle slung over his shoulder later, Joel finds himself at the scene of the crime, chicken shit on his shoes and his usual scowl on his face. Not having even stepped a foot out of the gated paradise and he’s already encountered his first obstacle: Otis has not clawed his way out of the fence but, instead, dug his way under it.

Fresh mud lays ahead, faint yet visible paw-prints lead off into the array of woods. He grabs a hold of the fence’s newly exposed bottom and justifies the way he further destroys it, bending the metal to his will and proning his way under it, with his faith in Bill's ability to fix the hole up in the time it takes him to find the creature.

Moving to a crouch, and ignoring the crunch of his bent knees, he eyes up the prints in the mud. The sight of only one set of tracks gives him a fleeting moment of comfort, until the thought of Otis having chased after something already so far in the distance pops into his head.

Your voice calls out his name from behind.

Sweat slicked skin, your fingers grab at the wiry fence, ripping the thing up with far less care Joel had given it. Bill will still find a way to blame him for the extended damage.

“I'm coming with you,” you speak with such determination behind your voice, Joel nearly forgets to actually pay attention to what you’re saying.

His reaction is instinctual, shooting back to hold the fence down, struggling to keep you within its confines, gritting out a firm no. “You sure as hell ain’t.”

“Yes, I am.” You tug uselessly at the fence. The wires stretch a third time, until a few snap.

“No.”

He holds his ground.

“Yes.”

You wriggle a hand under the fence, an action that forces him to loosen his grip. He can’t risk harming you, not even for your own good.

“No, you are-”

“Joel, please,” there’s exhaustion in your plea. A hint of desperation, too. He catches how you glimpse over your shoulder and observes the only item you carry — a distressed looking stuffed bunny with an ear missing. You glance over your shoulder again and it hits Joel. You’re nervous, in a rush. You’re here without anyone’s knowledge, that same look of panic in your eye as a teenager sneaking out of their window. “Just- I don’t want to sit around doing nothing. I want to find Otis.”

Talking is limited.

Instead, what fills its place is the sound of crunching leaves beneath heavy boots, and birds cawing and cooing in the trees above, and your incessant need to hum along to some melody playing in your head, distracting Joel to a dangerous degree.

This distraction leads to a close encounter, one where it’s only your swallowed scream as you stumble closer to him in fear, body seeking out some form of protection — he can’t tell if you view him as a mere shield or a sworn knight prepared to draw his weapons and, frankly, he winds up too caught up in your hands grabbing at his sides and your shaken figure melting against his own to care — that clears the haze in his eyes and sets his sights straight, gun drawn and aimed directly at the infected creature running towards you both.

He misses his first shot — shaky hands, one he partially blames on your proximity and the adrenaline it brings — but makes up for it in his second one, shooting point blank range and sending the creature crumbling to the ground, a bullet-hole in its forehead.

You both wait a few minutes, listening out for anymore rustling, before Joel deems things safe enough to continue and motions you with his head to follow.

From then on, you stick closer, alternating between walking a step or two ahead or behind him. He keeps a grip on the gun, unwilling to reholster it, and wordlessly hands you a shiv he has, ignoring the way you seem to perfectly curl your fingers around the weapon and practise a swinging motion, stabbing at the air with a deadly confidence Joel's never imagined to associate you with.

It forces him to rethink everything he’s come to believe about you over the years, and requestion just how exactly you’d wound up under Bill’s roof.

You interrupt his thoughts, the first to speak as always.

“If you don’t mind me asking-”

“I do.”

Undeterred, you smile and push through with your probing. “Who taught you to shoot?”

“My old man,” it takes him a few minutes to gruff it out. Or maybe it’s a bit longer than a few minutes, the sun’s shine seeming a lot less dim from when you’d asked. You say nothing, however, don’t even gasp in surprise at his eventual answering. “Dragged me out back to where he’d tied up our dog, poor thing had been sick for a while. Told me we weren’t goin’ back in till I shot it. Must’a stood there for hours.”

And that was that.

As much as Joel had felt you wanting to say more, you’d dropped the subject — maybe you’d noticed the dullness in his voice or the way his grip on his gun had tightened — and he’d never been more grateful for your ability to read him, without him even needing to open his pages for you.

You make camp by nightfall.

A clearing amongst the wooden areas, small enough to keep you hidden yet big enough to stretch out your legs. you ask for a campfire, and Joel denies you of it. ‘S too risky, he’d explained the instant he caught you deflating his objection. Don’t need no smoke signals bringing us any unwanted visitors.

He’d given you the coat off his back instead, a token to heat yourself up with as the pair of you quietly ate away at the tin-can meal Joel had been saving for the journey back to the QZ.

Chef Boyardee has never tasted better, however, after watching you place the can up to your lips and tilt your head back, swallowing down the artificial flavouring.

You don’t seem to agree, grimacing at the taste. “I don’t know how you can eat that.”

“If you think that’s bad, you don’t wanna know what they’re feedin’ us in the QZ.” It’s a privilege you’ll never understand, this sheltered life you lead among Bill’s traps and fences. You eat fresh eggs, and cook red meat, and nurture food out of the ground, while Joel fights tooth and nail to scrape up some measly ration cards. Oddly enough, he's not angry at your lack of understanding. He’s glad, happy you have a quality of life far better than his own.

“I'm surprised they feed you at all,” for all your grimacing, you’ve yet to stop taking mouthful after mouthful of the canned food. You must not have eaten much out on your run, Joel concludes. “Considering you eat Bill out of his whole stock each time you visit.”

He wants to defend himself, tell you it’s not true. Tell you it’s only the food prepared by your gentle hands and caring soul that he devours, in chase of satisfying another hunger he should not dare place upon you. That it is nothing more than Joel settling for a piece of your love, hoping that if he takes enough bites and chews enough times, it’ll seep into his skin, his bones, his bloodstream. It’s the only way he figures he can hold a piece of your heart next to his, until it stops beating.

But that is a burden a man like him does not place on a woman like you, so he bites his tongue and swallows down the rest of his dinner.

“The hell are we, middle-schoolers?”

A squawk of birds fly from their perch in the trees above, spooked by the unexpected boom of Joel’s voice. It’s an accident, flying out of him before he can really stop it and consider the dangers of loudly proclaiming your whereabouts to anything — living or dead — within a ten mile radius to hear. But you’re being ridiculous.

Your suggestion is ridiculous.

And you’re shushing him, a giggle behind the index finger you press to your lips, eyes shooting up to where the birds have fled, catching the reflection of the stars in your pupils and knocking the wind out of his chest, momentarily, with how bright they seem to shine.

“No, we’re two adults about to engage in a serious game of 21 Questions,” you speak like you live: much softer than Joel. No creature seems to hurry away at the sound of it and, in the fading memories he possesses, he can almost picture your voice drawing in all the critters of the forest, like that Disney princess she’d loved so much. “And that counts as one of your questions, by the way."

He has no plans on entertaining your childish play. He’ll sit there, he’ll watch out for any suspicious shadow lurking about in the dark, he’ll listen to whatever ridiculous questions you throw at him, and he’ll let you talk yourself silly, going in circles as he remains mute, and observant, and completely unwilling to answer to any of your-

“Which means,” you drag out the word, a sing-songy melody to your voice. “It’s my turn to ask you something, mister.” Mister. A warmth blooms in the pits of his stomach, one that threatens to creep lower, beneath the waistband of his blood-stained jeans. “What’s your favourite colour?”

If looks could kill, you’d likely still be alive.

Perhaps a little bruised, but it’s the worst stare Joel can will himself to pin you with. No doubt, it feels more threatening to you that it truly is, splashed across his stoic face.

“What?” You question, and somehow have the nerve to laugh. “It’s like… The most common question people ask in this game. That, or who took your virginity, and I really don’t think you want to tell me-”

“I’d just gotten my first job as a pool-boy. Pay was shit, but it covered my gas and left me enough to buy a six pack and a tub of wings,” the words fly out of him with an ease they never have before. Somehow, this feels easier, less intimate than matters like his favourite colour. When he thinks that answer is enough, he finds your face, expectations written across it. You’re waiting to know more. “I ended up with a few shifts working for one of our neighbours. She was a friend of my mom’s, recently divorced, and with a whole new body she’d bought with the divorce settlements.”

A spark of amusement flares in your eyes, that pretty smile stretching over your lips. He purses his own, trying not to think of pressing them against your mouth. You’d still taste of the canned food you — reluctantly — devoured and, somehow, the thought messes his head up even more, the potential taste of the food, of the care he had been the one to provide you with.

“That sounds like the beginning to a really bad porno,” you muse. Joel watches how you sit up a little straighter, legs tucking themselves up against your chest, chin resting atop your knees, arms engulfing yourself in their warmth, nose turning to take a quick inhale of his coat. He hopes he’ll smell you on it, too, next time he does the same.

“Surprised you even know what that word means,” he regrets it the moment he says it, that sickening reminder of your youth against his own ageing disgrace. He doesn’t know the exact years, but he know the difference would surely be enough to disgust a younger version of himself, the young father who once scowled at the sight of grey-haired men trailing their eyes down the bodies of wide-eyed girls, giggling by the bar as they flashed their fake-ids and sipped their first taste of — horrifically overpriced — alcohol.

“Porno?” You cut through his train of thoughts, unknowingly saving him from the downward spiral into memories best left behind, before the world went to shit. “You’d be surprised what a little bit of courage and a whole load of ration cards gets you past FEDRA.”

That word, that name, that organisation, it sets off an alarm in Joel’s brain, red-alert and siren sounding. And it pulls forth a question, echoing in the woods before he even realises he’s speaking his thoughts aloud.

“You were in a QZ? You weren’t always with Bill?”

“Pittsburg QZ, if you want to get technical. And then Hartford. No, I wasn’t always with Bill.” He tries to picture it: you, confined to the horrors of city living, bargaining things for survival, facing the harshness of the power-tripping FEDRA officers. The thought proves too disconcerting, so out of line with the you who exists only within the confines of safety and comfort in his mind, that Joel has to stop himself from imagining more, imagining worse. You and pain do not, should not ever exist in the same space, not if Joel can do anything about it. “And those count as two separate questions, so now I get to do the same.”

He hadn’t even meant to play into it, entertain your silly game. He’d just needed reassurance, answers, to know no scars litter your skin and no wound has fractured your psyche. But you’ve given him none of that. No comfort for his ailing soul, more questions for his troubled mind.

“Was it a one time thing,” unaware, or simply desensitised to his ways, you continue on with your questions, despite the frown he feels wrinkling at his forehead. “With your neighbour?” He’s glad to see you bring the conversation back to his own debauchery.

“No.”

“Ooh, scandalous! Joel Miller, local pool-boy turned toy-boy.” If he wasn’t so busy fighting off images of you, young and scared, standing before armed FEDRA soldiers, Joel might have found it in him to crack a half smile at the amusement the sexual endeavours of his youth seem to gift you. “Did you fuck any other of your clientele, or were you and Miss Recent-Divorcee exclusive?”

“No,” he says once more, then quickly clarifies. “I didn’t sleep with other clients. But also no, we weren’t exclusive.”

��Did your mom-”

“‘S my turn, darlin’,” Joel surprises even himself, cutting in before you can sneak a third question his way. It’s like it finally hits him, the way this game has handed him the opportunity of a lifetime to learn the answer to any question he’s ever pondered over you. But all other questions, topics, seem to slip out his conscience’s grasp, like sand slipping through fingers, as he feels himself dragged further into the fear you’ve awoke within him, a fresh layer of worry he now holds for a version of you he’d never known, a version of you he can barely stomach the idea of. “How did you meet Bill? Were you with Frank before?”

“God, you’re bad at this game! Two questions, again!” And, yet, you say it with more humour than chastisement. You turn your face, again, nose bumping against the collar of his jacket. “But no, I wasn’t with Frank. I met them both at the same time, after I spotted them through their fences. I passed out, dehydrated, and I probably wouldn’t have been brought in if it weren’t for Frank insisting they couldn’t just leave me out there to die.”

“You were alo-”

“Ah, my turn!” Your hand shoots out, index finger pointing across the space between you both. “Did your mum ever find out about you and her friend?”

“No, it ended before that could happen. She got herself a man her own age, and I…” Got someone pregnant. The words stick to his throat, refusing to come out.

Reading his closed off pages, like you always do, your voice cuts through the air before he can let himself slip too deep into the sorrow.

“I was alone, when I met Bill and Frank. But I wasn’t always.” Those four words are enough to make him ache. But I wasn’t always. Who had you lost? How long did they survive? Did you feel their blood on your skin? The questions fly by so quickly, he’s struggling to pin-point which one he wants to ask first, which ones he’s allowed to ask. “Have you ever been in love?”

That quiets his mind. For a moment, it’s a welcomed incident. Then his heartbeat fills his ears, and it’s pounding, skipping over beats of its own rhythm, threatening to spread too much of that fear, too quickly to every vessel under his skin, that Joel has no choice, he has to give you an answer he doesn’t want to, just to save himself from the impending tightness in his chest.

“Green,” the words are a struggle to get out but he manages it, watching the confusions bleed into your soft eyes. “I never answered. Before. When you asked my favourite colour. It’s green.” If you find his answer to be too late, or you’re disappointed at his clear avoidance towards your latest question, you don’t give it away. You just nod, smile softly, and wait for him to take his turn. “Why were you alone?”

“Everyone changed, got bit, or died. I didn’t want to be next.” Perhaps he’s a fool. Perhaps he underestimated the resilience you keep under warm sweaters and easy-going smiles. Because you sit there, not a tear welling in sight, and talk about the things you’ve lost like they don’t haunt you. Like you haven’t spent every waking moment since trying to find them, evidence that they were real, and that they’d mattered, and that they’d loved you. Like you haven’t drowned in grief, the way he has. You’ve swam, instead, against the current, crawled to the safety of shore. “Who’s your butterfly?”

The question catches him so off guard, so out of left field, so completely and utterly nonsensical, that he just can’t help himself. “My what now?”

"You know, the whole ‘if a butterfly flaps its wings’,” you trail off, hands curling tighter around yourself after performing air quotes. “Who's one person that changed the trajectory of your life?"

He cannot run.

He cannot repeat his earlier trick, deflecting with the answer to a previously spoken — and visibly ignored — question. Because, no matter which of your two questions he chooses to focus on, the answer remains the same. That little girl, with a smile like sunshine, sitting at the breakfast table, egg yolk on her cheek, ketchup all over her tiny, chubby, little fingers, an incoherent babble of excited squeals as he, once again, drives the choo-choo train — in truth, a fork-ful of food — towards her lips.

You’ve got him backed into a corner, no out, no escape. His mind, a cruel torturer that takes advantage of his own panic, thrusts yet another memory into the VHS of his mind, broadcasting it against the back of his eyelids, forcing him to see the granny pictures every time he blinks. Her first step. Her first day at school. Her first time trying a sip of his beer and absolutely hating it. Her. Her.

Suddenly, he’s angry. The only response he ever seems to conjure at the memory of her.

“‘S this what this whole things all about, huh?” It’s snarky, it’s cruel, and it's punctuated by a scoff. The fact you don’t even react, face unchanging beneath the shine of the moon, only seems to make him angrier, outrage for the fact you’re letting him speak to you like this, fury for allowing himself. “You want me to tell you somethin’ traumatic, somethin’ for you to pity me over? And then what, you gonna give me your own little sob story so we can have ourselves a lil’ pity party? Newshflash, princess, you ain’t special just cause your mama died and your daddy never wanted you.”

“Are you done?” You speak only after a silence has permeated the space between you for a few minutes, nothing but Joel’s laboured breaths filling the night air.

He’s not even sure when he started breathing so heavily. His heart is still working itself into a frenzy, his mind still off the rails. The eire calm that remains over your face seems to bring him momentary respite from the pain, if only to feel himself bracing for a new wave, a worse wave. One born from you. From your pain. And one that Joel’s entirely unprepared, and undeserving, to have wash over him.

"I didn't really notice it at first, you know?” You speak so softly, he almost doesn’t hear you. But he does, and it hurts. “Hell, it wasn't even really me that realised. Bill did. I’d only been staying with them three nights, just until I got back on my feet. Back then, he used to barricade my door at night, and he wouldn’t let me eat at the same table as them both, not even when Frank insisted. But, suddenly, Bill flipped the switch on me. He became apologetic, careful, asking me if I was feeling okay and actually sounding… interested in the answer.”

Much like the thought of you in a quarantine zone, the thought of Bill being anything but utterly protective and completely trusting of you does not seem plausible in Joel’s mind, no matter how much he believes you. The image, simply, will not conjure in his mind, too out of shape with the current reality he’s witnessed.

You continue talking after a pause for composure, those eyes that trap him so easily now frozen to the ground, staring at some smudge of mud on your boots.

“Frank was the first one to actually say it out loud, to ask me if I... Anyway, it was hard to tell but we all agreed, eventually, that I had to be around three or four months along. It made sense, timewise. There were some raiders, they found my camp a few weeks before I collapsed outside Bill’s gate. I… I don't even really know which one of them sealed the deal. All I know is all of them were on me, and none of them cared about how hard I could kick.”

He almost calls you by your name, then by the name he’s given you. Sol. But it’s too pretty a word, too undeserving of being tainted by the anger he feels coursing through his veins, a bloodlust like no other making home for itself in his loins.

“I didn't really care that much about it, as horrible as that makes me sound.” It doesn’t make you sound horrible, at all. Joel could show you horrible, if you just gave him a few faces and the permission to do with them, punish them as he pleased. “It was just a means to an end. A deal to keep myself safe. They'd let me live under their roof, and I'd give them the baby. We never… discussed what would happen to me, once I held up my end of the bargain. Never got the chance to, really.”

And suddenly, Joel Miller is the greatest asshole to ever walk the planet.

Not only the greatest asshole, but a hypocrite, too. You ain’t special. Well, neither is he, moping around life with a chip on his shoulder and baggage the weight of a dead daughter. He isn’t the first parent to outlive a child, to lose a child, and he won’t be the last. He’ll just be another name on the list, another poor soul.

The hoot of an owl. It’s somehow a reminder that you’re both out, huddled in the privacy of a few trees, waiting for night to pass and the search to continue.

Those tears in your eyes still haven’t fallen. My brave girl. But it feels condescending, and wrong. Not because you’re not brave. Because you’re not his girl. You’re the sun, and he’s just another planet that’s been sucked into your orbit. Dense, unfeeling, and miles away, forever circling you.

“One minute, it's just a burden weighing down on my whole body,” your voice is so soft, it’s almost a whisper. Perhaps he’ll be the one who cries. It sure feels like it, if he has to continue watching you fidget with your fingers and look anywhere but him. “And the next minute, it's screaming torture and the heartbreak of holding her barely-there body in my arms. That guilt... of not even knowing how much I wanted her until I got the chance ripped away, that’s something that never really goes away. It lingers, it changes you, forever."

God, does it linger.

He’s tried to lose track. He’s tried to make himself forget the years that have gone by, all in the hopes of getting through that September day, completely unaware of it. But he can’t.

Just like how he can’t think of what to say right now.

He knows he should comfort you.

He thinks he should tell you his own story, his own loss. Let you know that the grief you feel is not a lonesome one. But then he’d be worse than a hypocrite. He would be a liar, and that’s one thing he’s getting tired of being, especially when it comes to you.

“What,” he pulls in a deep breath, eyes flickering off you for a moment to watch figures that move in the distance. Tree branches, swaying in the wind. The temperatures are dropping even more, and he’s got no other layers to keep you warm with. “What were you gonna name her?”

You’re gracious enough to utter a name, softly, and finally your eyes flicker up from the ground and meet his own. The tiniest of smiles tugging at the corners of your mouth, the moon casting shadows down your face. You pull in a breath and stutter on its exhale, clearing your throat as if that’s enough to regain your composure.

“That’s her name. We buried her out back, under one of Frank’s flowerbeds,” there’s a sickening kind of envy that coils itself around his chest. Even if it visibly hurts, you’re talking about her, you’re honouring her enough to share something about her existence. Joel can’t do the same for his girl, a pain too harrowing, and, once more, he reminds himself that he’s the greatest asshole alive. “It’s silly but… I like to think it’s her whenever the snowdrops bloom.”

“'S a nice name," he’s a pathetic excuse of a man, no courage to pull you close and tell you it’s okay. Tell you he’s sorry, for your loss and for his earlier harsh words. Tell you about his own daughter. Would you think he’s trying to outshine you in the pity party, if he told you he doesn’t get to see what life blooms from atop his daughter’s grave?

"It was my mom's,” you snort over an unexpected laugh, as if you can’t believe you’re admitting this to him. Or maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s a sense of relief, a lightness coming over a heart previously weighed down by grief. If he could do that for you, even if just slightly, he’d feel as though the tears shining in your eyes are worth it. “She'd have hated to see me use it, she was never a fan of it, but I couldn't think of a better name for someone I love so much."

Something awful hits him, square in the jaw and deep in the gut.

He can’t remember why he called her Sarah.

You’re sleeping next to him.

He’s spent the better half of what feels like an hour trying to ignore this fact. Stared at the sky, just to count each freckled star that shines through in the dark. Closed his eyes and tried counting sheep. Rolled over, back facing you, and tried to just fall asleep, once and for all.

But it’s sisyphus. Each time he feels himself about to slip into the discomfort of sleep, you twitch a leg or mumble something incoherent, and he’s back to being far too aware of you, squeezed in beside him in what must be the world’s least spacious sleeping bag. The worst thing is, it had all been his idea.

You’d been yawning, eyes slipping shut just to be opened in defiance by your own stubborn self, unwilling to give into the sleep you so visibly needed. He’d told you to go to sleep, the words coming out soft for once yet, somehow, still a demand. When you nodded in agreement instead of standing your ground, Joel knew you must have been exhausted.

You told him that you hadn’t imagined the search would last overnight, that you hadn’t grabbed a single thing to sleep with. Not even a blanket. Which was fine, really, because Joel had no intention of closing his eyes. He’d rolled out his sleeping bag and told you to take it, he didn’t mind. It would be one more thing of his that smells like you.

But you wouldn’t stop tossing and turning. Restless, cold, and completely distracting to Joel as he tried to will himself to focus on what was important, any approaching threat, and not the shape of you wrapped in his belongings. A fruitless endeavour, that earns him nothing but a string of words rolling off his tongue: “Move over.”

And now he’s here, regretting ever thinking he could possibly lay next to you, exchange body heat, and somehow just will himself to fall asleep.

You squirm, hand fisting at the well-used material of his sleep roll. Laying on his back, he glances over at you. The itch to snake his arm beneath your head, offer a makeshift pillow to spare you from the hard floor, grows harder to ignore the more he looks at you.

It’s not the only thing that grows harder, however.

Maybe it’s because he can smell you, all over and around him, staining your memory into the fabric of the sleeping bag so he can lament how empty it feels the next time he sleeps it in. Maybe it's because he can feel you, scattered points where the heel of your foot rests against the slope of his ankle, and the swell of your ass presses into his upper thigh, and your back brushes against his arm with every slow breath you take. Maybe it's all more simple than that, like the mere knowledge that you’re actually here, in his presence, after so many months, and Joel Miller is just a man, susceptible to the pleasures of flesh and starved of you.

Whatever the reason is ultimately doesn’t matter. Lamenting over it won’t change the stiffness of his cock as it fights beneath denim confines, an uncomfortable throb that demands his attention. And he’s trying so hard to resist, trying so hard to pretend he’s not aware of his own body and the erection it’s bestowed upon him.

But you won’t stop moving, you won’t lay still. Deep in sleep, you taunt him, unawares to the way each soft sigh sends his mind barreling down into the depths of sinful thoughts, and each wriggle, squirm, repositioning of your hips serves no purpose other than to push you closer to him, deeper against the straining fabric.

He flirts with the idea of unbuckling his belt. It would be easy, his hand already resting stiff by his side, itching to shove down layers and feel the weight of his own cock. It barely even makes a sound, a soft clink muffled beneath the blanket, followed by the pop of a button, and the zing of a zipper sliding down. He glances at you, heart rate picking up, and confirms you’re just the same as moments ago: fast asleep.

As much as he wants to peel off his layers completely, he settles for the safer option of pulling down his jeans and briefs enough to free himself, full fist wrapping itself around his base. A swift tug, a tight-jawed hiss. The thrill of it runs right up his spine, a torture that he wants another taste of.

He wants to snake his hand up to his mouth and wet the palm with his spit, but he can’t, won’t, the risk of too much movement waking you. So he settles into his fate, a series of uncomfortably dry and unfluid strokes of his cock, nothing but the drops of his own precum to lubricate his movements.

Slow, steady, he runs his palm over his length in sync with your breathing. Your lungs expands, his fingers brush the tip, they deflate and he’s down at the base, trying hard not to brush against his heavy balls. Images of you, the same ones he plays on repeat when he’s working himself to an orgasm in the safety of his and Tess’ apartment, or balls-deep in some faceless stranger, hidden in the darkness of some back alley. Breathless in the kitchen, gripping a knife like your mind grips at its sanity as he bruises his knees from drinking between your thighs. Perched atop his lap, the metal of the truck’s hood creaking with each bounce you give, fuckin yourself further down his length, forcing him deeper and deeper.

His eyes slip shut as he lets the memories take over, replaying for his own viewing pleasure. He tries to match the tightness of his hand to the tightness of your cunt, but his own touch is cold, unfeeling, dry, nothing like the sweetness of you. The version of you that lives in his mind throws her head back lips parted in a cry of pleasure. Joel, she — you — moans, gripping him tighter, pert nipples straining through the thin fabric of a shirt. His shirt. God, you looked so good, so safe in his coat, he should’ve stripped you down to nothing but it, and taken you there against the dirty woodland floor, on all fours, ass in the air, face in the dirt, Joel all over you.

Joel, he can hear it, the way you’d sink down fully to the floor, forcing him to follow you, smother you in his whole weight, hips tilted up enough for him to keep drilling himself deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

“Joel,” he hears you. Real you, turning towards him in the tight squeeze of the sleeping bag. Sleepy eyes meet his own and he sees it, the recognition. You know what he’s doing beneath the surface of the sleeping bag. Before he can fully register this, the touch of another hand — far more delicate — envelopes his own, tightening his grip before he can dare to retreat. “You should be asleep.”

“Can’t,” he grits out, powerless to the sudden movement of your hand, the slow drag in which you guide him to jerk at his cock.

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“I do,” you admit with a soft shrug, eyes glued to his own. “Still, I wanna hear you say it.”

One glance down and he sees the way you touch him beneath the blanket, wishing he could rip it all away and watch your fingers, intertwining with his own, smother over his leaking tip, staining your skin in his pleasure.

It’s embarrassing how much of a mess he’s becoming, all at the mercy of little old you, and your sparkly eyes, and your sleepy smile, and your guiding hands. It’s embarrassing how softly the confession parts from his lips.

“Because of you.”

“Me?” You question immediately, feigned innocence striked across those tired, doe-like eyes he likes so much. “All I’ve done is try to sleep. You’re the one who can’t keep his hands from wandering. Are you really that weak Joel?”

“Yes.”

“Do I make you weak?”

“Yes, fuck!” He feels like he’s gone back in time and you’re playing with him, twenty-something questions or whatever the fuck you’d called it. Feeling his balls tighten, an urgency to touch you, feel you, make you feel good takes hold of him. “I’m gonna- Ahh, baby, let me- Let me feel you.”

But you won’t let him. Tightening your hand around his cock, continuing those up and down motions, inching him closer and closer to the orgasm he’s trying so hard to stave off.

“No, I’m too tired,” even your little whine is enough to drive him mad, a sigh out your nose as he watches you snuggle into the width of his chest, a throbbing pain taking over his heart. How can you seem so sweet with your fingers sitting tight around his cock? “Let's just lay like this, feel me like this. Let me make you feel good.”

“Tell me you’re wet,” it becomes a need, a desperation, born in his heart and spreading all throughout the rest of him, to know you’re enjoying this torture as much as he is. To know you’re not simply touching him as a means to get him off, over and done with, mind silenced to sleep by the haziness of spilling his cum.

“I am,” you soothe his minor fear, and he feels the gentle roll of your hips into his thigh, leg tangled between both of his as you grind your clothed cunt against him. “So wet. Love touching you, Joel.”

“Yeah?” He croons back, voice teetering off into literal begging, his free hand perched on the tip of your chin and tilting your eyes up to meet his. “Then let me fuck you, please.”

“No, just…” You say, shaking your head, rolling your hips, teasing at the slit in his tip with the tip of your finger. He can’t help but hiss, a grunt catching in his throat. “Just wanna focus on you. Wanna see you cum for me, Joel.”

Never have seven words been enough to make his resolve snap.

With a pathetic cry of your name, Joel feels the first rope of cum spray against his knuckles. Sticky, hot, thick, it dribbles down the cracks of his fingers onto your own, making a mess out of both of you. You’re there, closed palm, sweet lips, soothing him with words of kindness as you carry him through the motions of his orgasm, no doubt working your wrist into a dull ache as you squeeze every last drop of cum out of his weeping tip. He doesn’t want to think of the mess that awaits him beneath the sleeping bag, sticky cum staining soft skin, and rough jeans, and nylon material.

What he wants is for you to keep going, stroke him until his cock regains its full stiffness, standing to attention and ready to feel you in the ways he’d pleaded moments earlier, like he felt you months earlier.

Maybe this time he’d try your other hole. He’s wondered, on lonely nights where nothing but his hand has kept him company, how much convincing it would take until you’d bend over and present him with the pretty little creases of your puckered hole. You’d protest, he knows. call him disgusting, degenerate, dirty. Shame him for even wishing to touch you in such a vile manner. Joel could handle it. He’d always had a preference for the chase, the thrill of wearing a pretty thing down off its high horse of holier-than-thou syndrome and onto their knees before him.

He’d not be kind. No, not when the time comes. He’d ease himself in, sure, but the true battle would begin once he’s sheathed inside and the tightness of your hole hugs his cock in the warmest of embraces. He’d push, and pull, and break you down into whatever surface he takes you against. His hands would join in, bringing an electrified pleasure to your neglected cunt while his hips piston into the plumpness of your cheeks. They’d move in sync, working to ensure no second passes where you’re not full of some part of him - be it his cock in your ass or his fingers in your cunt.

Exhausted and defiled, your poor body would have nowhere else to run than to the comfort of his embrace and the sweet serenity of peaceful sleep, once he’s through with you. And, should you wake to cry of a newfound pain in your rear, Joel would waste no time in snaking his way down between your legs to mouth at your cum-stained hole, laving his tongue over you and painting your thighs in apologetic kisses until you can no longer speak of pain, his name the only word you’ll ever need to know.

But, alas, time is catching up on him and the blood refuses to return to his cock.

Exhaustion wraps you both in its blanketing warmth, melting your head down against his chest with ease, hands still missing somewhere between his thighs. Every soft breath that leaves you hits the skin of his neck, a physical, timely reminder that you’re there, in his arms, closer than you’ve ever been.

The thought is frightening, enough to get his heart racing in his chest. He can only assume you hear it, feel it beating against your ear.

“I’m sorry, Joel,” you whisper, just when he feels himself teetering towards the edge of sleep.

“Hmm?” He hums back in lieu of a verbal response, eyes he’d not even notice close peering open to look down at you.

“I didn’t mean- I wasn’t trying to make you angrier with the questions.” Angrier. That word leaves a sour taste in Joel’s mouth. “It’s just… You’re a good man. You care about others. About Tess, and Bill, Frank too. About me. But you have this chip on your shoulder… I just wanted to try to understand you better, I wanted to make you feel better.”

With your soft voice echoing in his head, he feels himself sinking into a dreamless sleep, a reply caught on the tip of his tongue.

Something wet wakes Joel.

It’s a slow return from the land of sleep, the longest that it’s taken him in years to go from peacefully resting to wide-eyed and alert to every surrounding. The first thing he registers is how warm everything feels, how cosy. How much he enjoys the weight of something in his arms, breathing softly into his chest.

Then, that something wet itches at his skin, drags across his cheek. He tries to open his eyes, only to hiss and squeeze them shut, the bright burn of the morning sun nearly blinding him. A few birds sing from the trees above, exchanging their good-mornings with the rest of nature’s critters.

A groan comes from his left, muffled against the flannel of his wrinkled shirt. He readjusts himself, pulling the weight even closer, and finds out he was right: your smell already lingers in his sleeping-bag. A third lick of wet, this one from chin to eyebrow, a cringe overcomes his tired face.

Lick.

His eyes snap open, fight against the burning of the light, and there he sees him. Otis, to the right, mouth panting, tongue dangling out his mouth, tail wagging somewhere in the background. Joel tries to move as slowly as possible, fearful of spooking the dog, and even more fearful of spooking you, eyes still shut and hand nestled atop his groin, fingers tangled in coarse hair and poking beneath the layers of his top.

“Sunshine,” he whispers, shaking gently at your shoulder, and nearly apologising as you crack an eye open and pin him with a deadly stare. You’re not much of a morning person, a fact Joel fools himself into thinking he’ll need to remember for the future. He gives your shoulder another shake, a gentle squeeze too, for extra measure. “C’mon now, gotta open those eyes properly for me. Got someone here who’s mighty excited to see you.”

That seems to entice you, eyes peering fully open and giving him a once-over before mumbling a soft, “what’re you talking abo- My baby-boy!”

No sooner than you’ve shot up straight, arms wide and reaching for the furry creature, Otis has bounded over, trampling over the mess of limbs you and Joel make up beneath the nylon. Pathetic whines fill the air, a tail that moves a hundred miles an hour, as the canine smothers his snout into you, his luscious mane shining beneath the sun’s rays.

You’re pressing kisses against the dog, tears brimming your eyes as you wrap your arms around his neck and tell him, over and over, “don’t ever do that again! I was so scared!” The happiness is contagious, spreading with a small smile upon Joel’s lips as he peels himself off the floor, chest pressing into your back and hand stretching out over your shoulder, fingers tangling in the threads of Otis’ soft fur.

“Must’a caught scent of you, followed it all the way till it brought him to us,” Joel musses, feeling you laugh as the dog licks a kiss over your cheek. “He’s a good boy. Aren’t’cha, boy?”

Neither of you mention the sticky dilemma between Joel’s thighs as you pack up. You roll up the sleeping bag while he wipes himself clean with a dirty shirt, quietly passing it your way as he slips off his belt and loops it around Otis’ collar, becoming a makeshift lead to guide the dog home with.

Though, as the four-legged creature sniffs on ahead, with the occasional pull that tests Joel’s grip on the belt, he almost seems to need no guide, leading you all in the direction of home. Your home, not Joel’s. But, what a wonderful thought that would be, if he were just a man, and you were just a woman, and you were both taking an early morning walk around the woods with your dog, catching the first rays of sun, together.

As if hearing his thoughts, Otis turns his head, looking at Joel over his shoulder, tail wagging as he lets out an excited bark. Up ahead, closer than he’d like it to be, stands the borders to Bill’s sanctuary. Up ahead, sooner than he’d like it to be, the place where you’ll part ways.

He finds himself slowing his pace. You do the same, no question, happy to simply have your fur-friend safe, by your side, the occasional brush of his snout against your upper thigh, searching for the affectionate stroke of your hand.

He needs to speak soon, act now, before it’s too late and the chance slips through his fingers. Joel clears his throat.

“My, uh,” a lump catches the words as they try to leave him. He swallows it down in a gulp, and tries again. “My daughter.”

Your face turns so quickly from the trail ahead to Joel, that he swears he hears a snap of something in your neck. Silence settles in like fog, mist on the horizon, a pause pregnant with so many questions he can see running through your pupils. You don’t speak them, however, and it strangely eases his nerves, taking away the feeling of demand to reveal his pain, leaving him to peel off the band-aid at his own pace.

“She was my… Whatever you called it, last night.” He sees you nod along, in the corner of his eye. You’ve both slowed to a mere shuffle, unaware of the three figures manifesting ahead, crowding on the other side of the fences. “The one that changed my life. She was so… bright, I used to worry one day she’d blind someone with her smile.”

In his memories, she’s always a beacon of light. Shining, even in darkness. Joel’s almost convinced glitter, or starlight must have been weaved into her skin, her eyes, her smile.

“She was everything good about me,” he says, and finds he can’t help the small laugh that claws its way up his throat, scratching as it goes. “None of the bad.”

“Can’t imagine there’s much on that list.”

“I know, ‘s hard to believe there’s even one good thing about m-”

“No, Joel,” he swears he feels his heart still at how you say his name, firm, and with conviction, like you’re trying to drill the sound into his head, remind him that he has a name, has a heart. “The bad, it must be a short list.”

Three of you — man, woman, dog — find another similar trio waiting by an open gate. Frank, Tess, Bill, each more relieved than the last to see Otis nearly pulling Joel’s feet from under him as the animal surges forward, pulling against the belt-lead with all his might. You release both man and dog from the tug of war, unbuckling the belt from the German Shepherd’s collar and freeing him to pounce on Bill who, despite the frown embedded in his forehead at the dog’s incessant licking, claps a hand over its back.

Joel feels a hand clap down on his own back, snaking its way up to squeeze at his shoulder.

"C'mon, Texas,” Tess proclaims loud enough for all eyes to fall on them. Yours included, kind and questioning, making him wish he could stay. “We're gonna be in shit if we're not back by sundown."

Bag already on his shoulder, Joel can’t feign a reason to linger a little longer.

“Wait!” You call out, parting from Frank’s side, fingers scratching at Otis’ head as you pass. Without warning, you throw yourself at Joel, arms wrapping around him and holding him close in the gentlest of embraces. “Thank you, Joel.” It’s just a whisper. He’s not even sure exactly what you’re thanking him for. Still, he lays a hand against your back and pulls you a little tighter, one last rush of your shampoo hitting his nose before you’re stepping back and parting ways. You, heading back into the safety of Bill’s gates, and Joel, walking off towards the desecrated city, back to the cold of his apartment.

When he wakes the next morning, beneath a roof and upon an uncomfortable couch, he feels time reset itself.

One day since he last seen you, who knows how many more days to go.

#joel miller smut #pedro pascal smut #joel miller x reader #pedro pascal x reader #joel miller series #joel miller fanfiction #pedro pascal fanfiction #joel miller fic #pedro pascal fic

104 notes · View notes

jrwi-eldritchstrings-event · 13 days ago

Text

Eldritchstrings Event Sign-Ups Open!!

Hi! Are you looking for some Apothy fun in these trying times of no new Apothesosis episodes? Wanna get together with other toxic yuri fans to make something swag? This post is to let you know that sign-ups are now open for the Eldritchstrings Event - an event centered on Exandroth and Rumi!!

This event is solely being run by @burning-sol (me) and @exandr0th-0f-viscera (my headmate). It probably won't be that large-scale, and we'll be kind of loose with management as we get an idea of what the members involved want from the event in terms of development and a final product. Our biggest rules are to HAVE FUN and TRY YOUR BEST!! If you don't feel like you're having fun, then this event is officially so joever.

If you're interested, please read through everything after the cut, the Sign-Up Form's link is at the end!! Sign-ups close November 16th.

Who can join?

If I've blocked you that's probably a bad sign... Obviously. But other than that, no limitations we can think of! Just know that Xander and I are pro-endo and pro-mspec lesbians; so if that gives you the impression you wouldn't gel well with the group, it's best to steer clear. All we ask of our participants is that they'll...!

Communicate clearly, and consciously try to take others in good faith.

At the least tolerate their cohorts if they can't outright get along with them.

AND, most importantly, they'll reach out to us if there are any issues!! It is no bother and it's actively better for the collective if you're open about anything that may have come up :3

What's the estimated time frame?

Sign-Ups close November 16th! ..however, the time frame for development and publishing will be up to participants to decide - with that process of consultation concluding before 2025.

At the LATEST the deadline for the works themselves will be July 31st, which will leave time for the editors to finesse the final product and publish it August 27th... (the anniversary of the first Eldritchstrings post!) So if you think you could make something by July 31st, even if you're initially busy, join the sign-ups!

If you miss it you will NOT be let into the event late, unfortunately. But no worries, because if the event goes well then there's a high probability another will be held in the future! :D

What contributions are we looking for?

Firstly, anyone who can help with visual design, editing, accessibility and publishing otherwise would be appreciated! There's also room for people who have general experience overseeing events and/or those who would like to help with promotion.

There will also (potentially) be groups, so if all you wanna do is hang around in case a pinch-hitter is needed, you can do that!

In terms of those submitting work to the event, ANY form of art goes! You may want to submit something like...

Fan-fiction, poetry, essays..

Illustrations, comics…

Banners, blinkies, icons…

Moodboards, stimboards, webweaves..

Textiles, cosplay, photography…

Edits, animations, PMVs, AMVs…

Original music, playlists…

Coding, games, 3D works…

Or whatever other weird and unique things you can think of…!

Romantic, platonic, situationship... Angst, comedy, abstract works, complete bullshit… Canon, non-canon, post-canon, somewhere in between… All is welcome so long at it centers on Exandroth and Rumi!!

Our ONLY limitations are that we will NOT be allowing any erotica, and no portrayal of genitalia in terms of artistic nudity! If you are otherwise unsure your work would be allowed, feel free to ask about it!

Also! Works that are exclusive to the event would be super cool, but you can submit older art or continue to work on something from your already existing WIPs if you'd like! The only catch is that you wouldn't be able to resubmit those to any future events... So if you're okay with that, go on ahead!

..and that's about it!

Make sure you've read over this and any relevant posts on this blog thoroughly. Participants will gather in a Discord server, the invites of which will be distributed via Tumblr PMs from this blog. If you're chill with everything stated above, here's the sign-up form!!

-> SIGN UP HERE <-

Note: We will not be personally promoting this event to other social medias, but you have our permission to share this sign-up with Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, etc!!

#jrwi eldritchstrings event #just roll with it #jrwi #jrwishow #jrwi apotheosis #jrwi eldritchstrings #jrwi exandroth #jrwi rumi #exandroth x rumi #rumi x exandroth #if ive made any errors i apologise i was too anxious to ask my friends to check for mistakes LOL #if ur like 'sol u made this very quick' y...yeah.... well...i just rlly like eldritchstrings okay...............#anyways hope to see u there!!#obv rb to spread the news if u want

58 notes · View notes

ninesolsyapper · 20 days ago

Text

So... Goumang and her Apemen Boys? Her weirdass kids, pets, whatever bizzare exact relationship they've got.

I frequently see their situation being described as Goumang turning them into Jiangshi out of her own will to control them while keeping them around. This idea of her control freak tendencies showing in how twisted her affection towards her Apemen is. This seems widespread enough that both the real and the fake Nine Sols Wikis frame it as such on their Goumang pages.

Though as I see the information we're given in the game, this does not seem right to me. The story here is a bit different methinks.

Goumang did not just turn her Apemen into Jiangshi soldiers because of her control freak tendencies, she did because her Apemen Boys died. They died and Goumang used her research into Jiangshi soldiers as a try to ressurect them, or at least to maintain as much of what's left of them. What we see in the game are these reanimated corpses.

I don't think I can call this part even a theory, because IMO this is pretty much what the game tells us about the situation. It doesn't directly spell it out but it appears clear.

Case 1 - Goumang's direct response to Yi's question of "You've gone so far as to modify the Apemen?" is "What's wrong with putting everything to good use? The opportunity to serve me beyond death is a special privilege I bestow.". So already here, this response would be just straight up incoherent if "serve me beyond death" was not directly relevant to the Apemen present. Though here admittedly it could be argued she meanslt that by making them Jiangshi she made them "beyond death", as good as immortals by her side. This by itself is not ironclad case for my argument.

For that I need to reach for...

Case 2 - The Apemen Jiangshi were stored in literal coffins.

So once you get back to the spot where you first meet Team Rocke... I mean Goumang and her Apemen, the coffin on the opposite side of the hole left after the elevator has a database lore entry attached to it. It gives you some context on what Jiangshi are but the most important part is the inscription, said to be written personally by Goumang, on the coffin itself.

“A life cut short too soon. The Abused - dead at 19”

So what we know from this?

1. The Apemen were dead at 19

2. Their life was "cut short", which definitely doesn't mean they were just forced into the Jiangshi-fication tubes or whatever. This more conclusively proves for me that they died for some other reason before Goumang made them into Jiangshi.

3. The most crucial part, this is Goumang herself stating these deaths were a tragedy, that they shouldn't have died at 19. This is an orbituary, this is why I said these are literally coffins. Goumang made them into coffins herself. Her directly saying they were "too soon" seems to also dismiss the idea she was already anxious that due to going into her Dreamscape she could end up seeing them only a few times more before they die of old age.

In this context, the "This way, you'll always be by my side." in Goumang's dreamscape reads less as a simple statement of the reson for which she's doing this but as this sorrowful "this is the only way I can keep you" way. Frankly it also carries this more sorrow tone in her voice.

So the above is my go at analysing what we are shown in the game. I would like to follow up with a couple theories going off of that.

1. Her control freak "mindful method" ideology actually crystalized because of the events that killed the Apeman duo. The extent of Goumang's desire to control and manage everything appeared to me to be like an actually new development that Yi wasn't quite aware of. He has no idea what "mindful method" is and the conversation in Goumang's throne room doesn't seem to hint they had this sort of argument before.

As for Apemen themselves, they really could have only either died to an accident or by pissing off some Dusk Guardians or another Sol. In either of these cases Goumang could go onto thinking this was her fault for not controlling them well enough, either by letting them work in an unsafe area or by letting them be around dangerous people without her supervision. She of course already showed similar tendencies before but being affected by their deaths could have make her double down on the micromanaging aspect of it.

2. The two Apemen actually started a bit chipping away at Goumang's ruthless technocrat worldview, a bit like Shuanshuan did with Yi. Possibly she started questioning her actions just a little bit just as two Apemen got cut down very conveniently.

What I'm nudging at is that Eigong was the one who orchestrated their deaths because after Yi she got paranoid over her second student also potentially getting weird ideas. First "lying bad" and then "mass murder and slavery possibly maybe bad", a true slippery slope if you ask me! So she got rid of the source of these weird ideas and possibly actively pushed Goumang towards going in the opposite direction of doubling down on the desire to control.

Also possibly the Apemen themselves started questioning the morality of what was happening to the rest of their species and got themselves in trouble as a result. At that point mayhaps Eigong could have had them even openly executed to teach Goumang a lesson.

There is so so much opportunity and potential for some fucked up shit that could have happened here. I hope my drive for fic writing finally pops back in for this.

3. Goumang actually got a worrying tendency to try to keep around people and things she became attached to after death. Next to the Jiangshi she got her old transmutated scorpion research subject taxidermed and lying around somewhere.

#nine sols #nine sols lore #nine sols theory #nine sols goumang #nine sols Jiangshi Apemen #nine sols eigong #long-ish post?#seems like it would be a couple pages on paper IG?

57 notes · View notes

hadesrise · 1 year ago

Text

𝐈 𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔.

𝖘𝖚𝖒𝖒𝖆𝖗𝖞. you and miguel were in love... until you weren’t anymore.

𝖕𝖆𝖎𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖌𝖘. miguel o’hara x scarlet witch!male reader

𝖜𝖆𝖗𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖌𝖘. angst, hurt/no comfort, lovers to enemies, violence, foul language, mentions of trauma, minor character death (harry osborn), stupid canon event, hero turned villain trope, joker!scarlet witch!reader, REALLY STUPID CANON EVENT, tiniest fluff

𝖆𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗'𝖘 𝖓𝖔𝖙𝖊. we need this after all that sinful miguel fics i wrote 😭 i had that one scene of wanda when pietro died in mind, and couldn’t help but write this.

“I despise you,” You laughed while shaking your head at your husband as he smoothly danced along to the music with no struggle, his gentle hands guiding you. “Such a show off. Aren’t you, mi sol?”

Miguel smirks, “I like impressing you, mi luna.” His heart flutter at the sound of your giggle and he pulls you closer, swaying your bodies, face inches away from yours. He stared into your eyes that twinkled under the dim light, calm and warm, bringing him comfort. You never failed to brighten up no matter what happened, keeping your head up and forcing yourself to move forward when things get tough. Eyes holding kindness, arms always giving love. You’re a bright soul despite how many times the universe wronged you, Miguel never thought of you any less.

You twirl him around, getting the hang of it, and hug him from behind as you rest your chin on his shoulder. It makes Miguel smile, something that he struggled to do ever since you both lost Gabriella.

“I love you, Miguel. Very much.” You pressed a kiss on his shoulder.

Miguel swoons, resting his head against you and putting his hands over yours. “I thought you despise me?” He teasingly asked, looking at you over his shoulder.

A chuckle erupts before you kissed his cheek and Miguel tilts his head, leaning in to capture your lips. “I do, I despise you.” You breathlessly mutter with a loving tone contradicting your words, a smile stretched across your lips. Miguel turns around in your arms and wraps his around your neck as the two of you continued to sway to the music.

Simple days like this made Miguel’s stress melt away. All the burden and responsibilities disappearing into the void by your gentle touches that are more than willing to serve him and make him feel better. You were always good to him. Even after he was distant, harsh, and cold after Gabriella’s death, you never stopped loving him. Never got tired of being there, guiding him, helping him heal while you healed as well. You were grieving greatly too, but put him first before yourself and never gave up on him. He used to think how could you act so fine after losing your daughter? until he caught you break down when Peter told you to hold Mayday to make you feel better. It nearly made him beat the shit out of Peter, but when you whispered, “she’s so warm, peter” he couldn’t do anything. He started making it up to you after that, realizing he wasn’t alone going through the pain.

Despite how much he hurt you and how much of an asshole he was, you still forgave him. Still loved him, muttering “i despise you” with a tone filled in overwhelming love for him like you always did.

“Mi amor, can you show me your magic?” He gently asked, watching your bright eyes travel around before looking down, hesitant.

You were always fearful of your powers. Thinking of them as your flaw and what makes you less than human, but Miguel only thought of them as something that contributed to your perfection. He always tried his best to help you heal from the trauma of those awful experiments. “It’s okay, you won’t hurt me.” Miguel reassured, holding your face.

Doubt lingering in your bright eyes, you nodded and lifted your hand, waving your fingers. Light scarlet mist surrounds them and you softly waved them around to create a small ball of energy. Miguel’s lips parted in awe, staring at your magic with a mesmerized look. It made you feel bubbly with pride, confidence and happiness, the silent encouragement slowly eating away your fear of your own powers.

“Es hermoso, mi luna. Eres hermoso.” He mumbled, intertwining his hand with yours and kissing the back of your hand. You sighed in content, letting your magic disappear as you leaned your forehead against his, relishing his presence.

That was just few days ago, but Miguel feels as if it was already few years as cold sweat dripped down his temples and all blood drained from his face. Eyes wide with horror at the knowledge of what must come sooner or later, what you must go through.

The universe isn’t fair. It never was, even before Gabriella was taken. But why, why did it have to be so fucking cruel?

You already have your powers, why did it have to burden you with radioactive spider?

Getting bit by the radioactive spider from your universe surprisingly worked well despite the complications you went through within the first few days caused by your powers and the spider venom fighting each other in your veins. That was the problem; it shouldn’t have worked well. Your powers should’ve killed the venom in an instant, but it didn’t, and instead it molded together.

Fuckfuckfuck, why did it have to work?

Why didn’t your magic reject it? You’ve already got so many plate on you, and destiny decides to just throw this at you?

Peter worriedly stared at him as Miguel paced back and fourth in HQ, muttering inaudible words under his breath. “Aren’t you going to tell him about the canon event?” The male quietly asked, holding Mayday.

Miguel sighs. If he did, you would try to save that person. The canon event cannot be disrupted or your universe will collapse; he doesn’t want you to go through the same thing he did, but it was necessary so all Spider-person could become the hero they are. He had no other choice, and it made him uneasy.

When Miguel doesn’t answer, Peter steps closer to him with a worried look. “Do you... at least have an idea who it’s gonna be?”

Miguel glances at his friend for a second before nodding dejectedly. “In his universe, there’s no Peter Parker, but there’s Harry Osborn. He’s bestfriends with him.” He informs quietly and rests his hands on his hips, heart heavy.

Horror flashes in Peter’s eyes as it widened, “Oh no.” He gasped, realizing Miguel’s assumption would be correct.

Harry Osborn has died in nearly every universe due to being Peter Parker’s dearest friend, he is the canon event in usual case, which makes the probability that he will be your canon event more high. Eyebrows furrowed in sadness, Peter didn’t know what to say. Neither did Miguel, who stood in the platform with sad eyes watching the footage of you fooling around with Harry that Miguel took.

He knew how much Harry mattered to you. You two were childhood friends who did everything together and helped each other tirelessly. You told Miguel of what Harry did to himself when Hydra kidnapped you — he injected himself with a green serum that caused him to become Green Goblin just so he could find you. The bond shared between you and Harry could never be expressed with words, it was like a platonic soulmate that found each other. You told Miguel how you needed Harry just as much as you needed your husband, because Harry was there for both you and Miguel when Gabriella died, and he also helped you bring your husband back when Miguel lost it.

It’s awful, how Harry’s positively your canon event. Miguel could feel guilt exploding in his chest with tears welling up his eyes; he didn’t want Harry gone, that guy is his bestfriend as much as he is to you. But the risk of a universe collapsing made it difficult to choose him.

The heavy responsibility weigh on Miguel’s shoulders as a tear escaped his eye.

You cannot know.

The loud siren and explosions cause your ears to ring as you gritted your teeth to keep your magic steady and out, hands pushing against the large concrete that almost fell on top of a pregnant woman. It flies across the road when you frustratedly thrusted your hands forward and your magic strengthen due to your frustration. Guiding the pregnant woman to safety while letting her chants of gratitude fall on deaf ears, you quickly escorted her to where the survivors are and ran back to fight.

A giant lizard looking creature causing chaos in your city, you huffed in frustration and leapt up using your magic before shooting your web at the post that fell down to grab it. You concentrated energy on one hand, making a large energy ball before blasting it at the lizard, sending it flying back. You quickly shot your web at the creature and pulled it back as you swing the post, hitting it straight across the face.

“Holy shit, ouch!” You hear Harry hiss jokingly as he floats down using his glider.

Rolling your eyes, you threw the post away and patted the dirt off your hands. “Took you long enough. It was hard rescuing the people all on my own, you know.” You grumbled, and Harry noticed the irritation in your tone.

His brows furrowed while looking around, not seeing the obnoxious blue and red figure who was usually by your side to fight enemies. “No husband today?”

“That’s exactly why I’m irritated,” You grunted out. “I got no time for chitchat, Green Goblin. Would you be a man and help me out here, brother?” You asked with a smirk, already knowing the answer as the lizard regained consciousness and roared. Harry grinned, lowering his goggles and facing the creature. No words needed, you two will fight with each other until the end of the day.

The fight ensues with the lizard being definitely angry at what you did earlier, becoming more aggressive and powerful each time you shared fists. Your spider sense going haywire when the lizard nearly decapitated you with its tail, Harry fortunately being there to pull you back. It was getting difficult to defend yourself with each passing time, the exhaustion weakening your magic as you dodged the lizard’s attack here and there. Harry was struggling as well, flying around in his gliders and throwing razor bats, which only sliced the creature with no further damage.

What felt like hours of battle, a sudden fear consumed you when the lizard managed to take an upperhand by slashing your chest with its claws and slamming you hard on the ground. A pained groan leaves your lips, feeling the fractures of your ribs, but adrenaline gushes through your veins when the lizard’s wide creepy eyes stared at you like a predator. You cursed silently and pushed yourself to leap backwards with your magic. Only a feet became your distance from the creature, the strength in your body dying down as you nearly fell over due to the sudden disappearance of your magic’s support.

A familiar body prevented your fall, catching you with strong arms and helping you straighten up. You looked through heavy eyelids at Miguel, who had a look of concern and... sadness, regret, in his eyes.

“Where have you been...?” You weakly croaked, groaning at the pain in your whole body. Many emotions swirled within you. Happiness, relief, anger, irritation.

Miguel doesn’t answer right away as he stared at you with an odd, apologetic, guilty look. “I’m sorry...” He quietly muttered.

You frowned in confusion, but quickly turned to the sound of grunts and saw Harry back on his feet fighting the lizard with all his might again. Pushing yourself away from Miguel, you moved only to be tugged behind by your husband. You looked at him with weariness and panic, “What are you doing!? We have to help him, Miguel, let me go—”

“We can’t,” He shakes his head, gripping your arm.

“What?” Disbelief coated your tone, “We fucking have to!” You tried fighting it off, but his grip seems to tighten more until you had to completely struggle against him. “What the fuck— MIGUEL! LET ME FUCKING GO! HARRY, STOP!” You yelled, heart jackhammering. Your strength seem to suddenly come out again as Miguel struggles to hold you back, wrapping his arms around your torso.

You desperately fight him off when you saw Harry getting knocked to the ground with the lizard towering over him, screams and yells spilling past your lips.

Your breath hitched when the lizard’s claws pierce right into Harry’s chest. Tears spill from your wide eyes, chest exploding in fear and devastation as you can’t do anything but watch the cruel creature lift Harry up, snarling at him. Your world crumbles down beneath your feet. Blood splatters from Harry’s lips as he weakly looks at you with tears in his eyes.

I love you. He mouthed, a faintest smile on his lips, before going limp.

You only saw red.

A sudden surge of power explodes from your body as a heart-wrenching scream escapes your throat, sending Miguel away and destroying everything around you. You fell to your knees, cry of anguish leaving your throat. A mix of anger, grief, sadness filled your chest, rollercoaster of emotions, before an overwhelming rage takes over your body. Eyes glowing deep red, you clenched your jaw and focused your rage on your hands, scrambling up as you harshly shot it at the creature, who flied back at the sheer power of your magic.

You quickly wrapped Harry’s body in deep scarlet mist to set him down on the ground gently. The creature emerged again with a piercing roar, eyes set on you as it ran towards you on all fours. With enraged growl erupting from your throat, you swiftly grabbed Harry’s glider just as the lizard jumped on you, jamming the glider’s blades on its chest. Its shriek leaves your ears hurting, but you slammed it down on the ground, digging the blades into its body. You pull the blades out, not wanting it to die yet as you wrapped a tight rope of magic around its neck with one hand, strangling it.

You made sure to look into the lizard’s eyes, a deep scarlet mist surrounds your other hand. The blood red of your own eyes striking fear within him, before you twisted your hand and snapped its neck in one swift motion. Miguel watched from the distance with wide eyes, the murderous look on your face causing goosebumps to appear on his skin and uneasiness surround his chest.

Breathing heavily, the blood red from your eyes disappear as you remember Harry, rushing over to him and lifting his upper body. Your lips quiver, holding him in your arms. You feel like your heart had been ripped out from your chest, the void of emptiness sucking off your emotions and the pain too much that you feel numb. A part of you seems to die as Harry laid there lifeless and unmoving, somehow peacefully despite the circumstances of how death welcomed him.

Red and blue feet enters your vision, the quiet voice of your husband calling your name reaching your ears. You used to love that sound. It used to make your heart skip a beat and get wrapped in loving warmth. But a mere voice could no longer bring it back alive, especially when it belongs to someone who cruelly held you down while Harry stared death in the eye.

“......Did you know?” Miguel flinched at the flat tone of your voice, dread filling him as you refused to look up. When he didn’t answer, you finally looked up, sending chills up Miguel’s spine at the lack of brightness in your eyes. Void of any emotion, lifelessness replaced the light that used to inhabit them. “Did, you, know? O’Hara? That it was going to happen?” You asked again with a low, almost threatening voice.

He felt unsettled by your wide emotionless eyes, lump forming in his throat. Hands trembling by his sides as he licked his lips, Miguel was unable to meet your quiet rageful eyes. “.....Yes,” Miguel defeatedly answered.

As soon as you heard his answer, your face dropped. The atmosphere immediately changes, Miguel suddenly feeling cold and blood draining from his face as fear bubbled within him. Something in you had snapped, he could feel it. It made him panic as he steps forward, holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m— I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, mi luna. It was supposed to happen. I can’t— I didn’t want it to happen, but it had to. If— If you had stopped it, your—”

“What the fuck do you mean it was supposed to happen?”You snarled, cutting off his pathetically frantic apologies. He was taken aback by the look of pure hatred in your face. “Harry’s our fucking best friend, Miguel. He was my brother, my soul. He dies and a part of me will die, you knew that, you piece of fucking shit.”

The way you spat those words out dig a hole into Miguel’s heart as tears blurred his vision, frantically shaking his head with series of no’s spilling from his lips. “N-no, nonono, you don’t understand,” His voice shakes. “It—It had to happen, please. Please, hear me out. Let me—let me explain, please, mi amor.” Miguel attempted to reach out to you, but his heart shatters when you jerk away from him in disgust.

“Explain?” You scoffed, “You forced me to watch my best friend die and you want to fucking explain? Get the fuck away from me!” You were already seething in rage yet the strange calmness in your demeanor scared Miguel even more as you scrambled up while carrying Harry’s body, away from him.

“No! No, no, please, I’m sorry—” He chokes between sobs, tears running down his face. “P-por favor, mi luna, lo siento— I—I had to, I had to do it, please. Perdóname, lo siento, lo siento....” His legs grow weak beneath him and he falls to his knees, begging you desperately and shaking his head.

You swallowed hard, tears brimming in your eyes, but not from sadness or grief. It was from anger, rage, your eyes seeing red again as your blood boiled. Just who the fuck is this man standing — kneeling before you? Rageful thunderstorms rumbled, rainfall washing away the love and peace in your heart, vengeance filling your veins bits by bits. The man you fell in love with was not as cruel and monstrous as this man before you. The man you fell in love with understood how Harry’s life literally kept you together, the only thing that kept you away from insanity. The man you fell in love with would never hurt you like this.

And then, the rageful thunderstorms suddenly quiet down as your mind came up with one single thought; this was not your Miguel O’Hara.

This is no longer the man you married — this is the man who killed your best friend, who made you watch as the lizard pierced its claws through Harry’s chest, who took everything from you.

Miguel sees you look down, your shoulders shaking. Just when another apology was about to leave him, a low chuckle erupts from your chest, coming off as a rumble due to your closed mouth, but it slowly got louder and turned into a full blown laughter until your mouth was wide open in a grin. Sweat drips down Miguel’s temple, his heart beating incredibly fast. Your laugh was gleeful, which shot eeriness within Miguel due to how out of place it was, but it was also sinister — like the screws in your head twisted loose.

Insanity filled every bit of your laughter before it slowly died down, but the big unsettling grin stays on your face. “Ohhh, what a funny joke you repeat! I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” You mocked before bursting into laughter again, all throat.

Miguel didn’t realize he was holding his breath. Unable to move or shed another tear from shock, his face pale at the pure display of insanity on his husband. His whole body was trembling now.

You adjusted Harry’s body in your arms with a big grin, few chuckles leaving your lips. “It’s okay, I could still dance around with Harry.” Miguel’s blood ran cold at your words. Then, your grin suddenly drops as you make eye contact with him. “But it still doesn’t change the fact you took everything from me and ripped my heart out.”

Miguel shakes his head, weakly trying to bring you back to him. “No, no, please. Mi amor, mi luna... I love you, please, don’t do this...”

“Oh, you poor thing,” You mockingly clicked your tongue a few times. Carrying Harry’s body over your shoulder, you stepped closer to Miguel and caressed his cheek with the back of your hand. You were cold. Impossibly cold. He can’t feel your warmth anymore as you looked at him in pity, the brightness that he adored no longer existing in your eyes that now flickers with insanity.

“You may love me, but I despise you, Miguel.” His heart drops at the cruel sincerity in your words, your lips curled up into a twisted grin. “And just like you made me watch my best friend die, I’ll make you watch as I burn the multiverse to the ground.” Your eyes flashes a dark red, the words you lowly spat strangling Miguel like a curse as well as promise.

Without uttering another word, you flicked your wrist and created a portal before disappearing with your curse spreading through Miguel, leaving your insane sinister laugh echoing in the air.

Tears spilled from Miguel’s eyes as devastation settled within his guts.

You totally lost it, and it’s all because of him.

749 notes · View notes