#-as soon as they turn 18 they end up instantly homeless

[angeltannis]

Thinking about how Frey’s rap sheet says

“Address: N/A”

🙁

[buckyalpine]

Ohhhh yay 🥰🥳

So my brain came up with this idea: Bucky is the leader of a werewolf pack (just like twilight haha I'm so sorry) and he gets fond of that one girl where he instantly feels a connection cause the wolves fall in love only once in a lifetime and he knows it's you. So when you get attacked by vamps one night he steps in saving you and bringing you to their camp to take care of you. Then you Kinda feel love at first sight as well and stay by his side ?

I love this but this is going to be a first for me, writing this type of AU so bear with me. Some A/B/O themes to do with the werewolf theme but not exactly an a/b/o fic. Just making up my own damn rules for this AU, so look the other way if something doesn’t make sense. 

18+ cause smut but also lots of fluff, knotting, marking, protective Bucky with platonic protective Steve, Sam and Peter

-

He didn’t mean to watch you so closely but he couldn’t help it. Perhaps it was a part of his instincts to notice the finest details that surrounded him. Every day he saw you, there was something new that captivated him. The way the wind would tousle your hair. The way your nails were painted to match the shades of the fall. Whenever you bought your morning coffee, you bought a second one along with a muffin, handing it to the homeless man that stayed near by the coffee shop. Sometimes you’d spent a good few minutes talking to him before continuing with your day. You’d hold the hand of the elderly woman who was slowly crossing the street, making sure she made it across safely before you went off to wherever you were going. 

You saw beauty in everything. Everyone.

You were beautiful.

Pure.

Bucky shook his head, turning back to the bar, wiping down a few glasses, though still sneaking glances at the window as you walked by. He’d first noticed you months ago, in the summer, blinking when he saw an unfamiliar but pretty face walking down the street, a bundle of sunflowers in your hand. His eyes lingered on you, smiling softly when you handed a little girl a flower before continuing down the street, disappearing around the corner. Bucky knew everyone around the area; after all it was his territory. The east belonged to his pack so he was curious about the sweet stranger he’d never seen before. 

You didn’t seem to pose a threat so he didn’t dive into investigating you. The more often he saw you, the more he’d find to admire. It was late in the afternoon, meaning Bucky would only see you again closer to the end of his shift which would be around midnight. He felt his cheeks heat up when he realized he knew what your routine was. 

Stop being creepy Bucky. 

Hours went by, less than sober customers walking in and out, Sam, Steve and Peter were talking Bucky’s ear off about something he stopped paying attention to 20 minutes ago. 

“...and that’s how I caught Clint in the vents, you should’ve seen his face” 

“Caught in 4k, no cap”

“Why would he be wearing a cap”

“I’m going to move you all to the graveyard shift” Bucky groaned, barely focused on their conversation, mostly because he lost track of whatever Peter was referencing, 15 references ago. He glanced at the clock, only a few more minutes left until he was off. It also meant you would be passing by his bar soon enough. Which is why he frowned when he didn’t see you. For the past few months, Bucky noticed you’d always walk home, something he wasn’t very fond of but it’s not like he could do anything about it. The area was generally safe but it wasn’t perfect, especially at night. 

Bucky shoved the uneasiness he felt to the back of his mind; you had a life outside of the moments he saw you. You could have taken a cab or gone home with a friend. Maybe you look a different route. Maybe you made plans. He thought of 101 reasons as to why he didn’t see you to try convince himself he was worrying over nothing. Bucky grabbed his jacket, heading out into the cool night, the moon softly lighting the empty streets. 

Something felt off. 

The worry he felt when he didn’t see you hadn’t ceased and for some reason the feeling was growing. 

She’s fine.

She’s made it home safe. 

You don’t even know her-

Bucky stopped dead in his tracks, turning back to a faint sound he heard near a pitch black alleyway. He took two steps towards it, only to hear silence filling the air.

Until he heard it again. 

He knew he heard something, a pained whimper so quiet, he almost thought he imagined it. The hairs on his neck stood up, something not feeling right, bounding towards the source of the sound. His pupils dilated to scan the dark area, eyes growing wide when he saw the sight before him. 

“Quiet!” John hissed, his teeth grazing your cheek. “Such a pretty lookin’ princess” he whispered, his fangs glistening under the moon light, his finger tracing along the column of your neck. “Hold her still” He grumbled while his friend kept their hand firmly over your mouth, their other arm wrapped around your arms and waist. 

“Been watchin’ ya sweet heart” Valentina purred, trailing a sharp nail down your cheek, a sinister smile on her face watching you struggle, “These young ones are hungry” She sat back on a crate, crossing her legs, while the blond grabbed a fist of your hair, craning it back to expose your neck. “Go on, make it quick before one of the mongrels find us” She spat, venom in her voice, feeling a sense of uneasiness roaming the streets they were forbidden to set foot in. 

“Ladies first” John smirked while Sharon hummed, smacking your cheek when as you struggled, trying to break free. “This will be a lot easier if you’d just fucking-

She stopped mid sentence, her eyes darting around her, the sudden scent of pinewoods and cedar evading her senses. A snarl tore through the air, your eyes falling on a white wolf along with three others growling and stalking towards your attackers, the largest white one bounding towards you, pinning John underneath him. Sharon tried to grab you, her nails digging into your skin, only to be torn off by another wolf, dragging her by the ankle. You fell to the floor, gasping when the smallest wolf came to your aid, standing guard in front of you, warning for the others to back off. You couldn’t place what it was but there was something distinct about each wolf, it was almost as if you could see their different personalities. 

“Fuck-”  John tried to throw the large animal off him, heaving at the weight that sunk into his chest.  

“You don’t belong here” The white wolf let out a deep growl, claws piercing into his chest, breaths heavy, fanning on his face, sharp teeth on full display. All you heard was a growl but John seemed to understand what it meant, frantically nodding his head. “Leave now, take the rest with you” He understood the low rumble to be a final warning for them to leave if they wanted to stay alive. 

“Lets go!” Valentina had already jumped to the top of the building, not waiting for the rest, the group running off into the night, leaving you half bleeding and scratched on the ground. John gasped for air, scrambling off the floor as he managed to climb up a fire escape, striding across the rooftops to follow the rest. 

Your heart stopped as the white wolf turned to face you, taking slow calculated steps, as if to show you he meant no harm. He was beautiful with piercing sapphire blue eyes and thick white fur. Your eyes grew wide, your breath catching in your throat as he began to shift, fur disappearing replaced with brunette hair, limbs now muscular arms and legs. There was no longer a wolf before you, a tall handsome stranger standing in its place. It was just you and him in the alleyway; the other three wolves who had protected you had trailed after your attackers to ensure they left the territory. 

“Are you okay?” 

“Who-who are you” You whispered, trembling in the corner as Bucky approached you, his teeth no longer sharp, eyes now a soft shade of blue. He carefully stepped towards you, kneeling on the ground to help you sit up, his touch gentle. “Please don’t hurt me-”

“I won’t hurt you” He smiled softly, resting his hand on top of yours, giving it a gentle squeeze. Your mind was still reeling over what you had just seen, your head feeling dizzy from the deep cuts that ran along your arm. The skirt of your dress had ripped, nicks covering your knees from where you fell. 

“But-you-” You stumbled over your words, your heart still rapidly beating out of your chest, “You were just-” 

“Fluffy and walking on four legs?” He gave you a playful smirk, his smile dropping when he noticed your eyelids grow heavy, your body exhausted. “You’re really hurt”

“M’okay” You rasped but you knew you were far from it. The area where you were scratched began to burn and you didn’t understand why. You let out a whimper of pain, clutching onto him as the pain worsened. Bucky’s heart broke, the need to protect you and take care of you overbearing all his other senses. He tucked you against his body, not thinking twice about his decision to bring you back with him. 

“Come with me doll, we’ll take care of you” His voice was soft, soothing, like a warm blanket covering you. You gave him a faint nod, melting into his hold as he lifted you into his arms with ease. Something about him brought you a sense of calm you had never felt before. 

It was the same feeling you felt when you stepped into your home after a long day. The feeling of slipping into a warm bath. The feeling of fresh sheets and a cool pillow. The first sip of hot chocolate on a cold day. Soul soothing. 

You slipped in and out of consciousness, as he carried you through towards the forest that surrounded the area, his scent of pine and something distinctly him bringing you comfort. The soft crunch of twigs crunched beneath his footsteps as he walked down the trail towards a clearing. 

Tall beautiful log cabins surrounded the camp, the area completely hidden from the outside world. Bucky managed to open the door to his cabin while still holding you close, setting you down carefully on the couch before frantically calling Wanda. By the time Wanda was knocking on his door, you were  completely unconscious, bruises starting to form on your skin, your breathing slowed. 

“She was attacked” Bucky stayed by your side while Wanda looked you over, running her hands carefully over your injures. 

“Vampires?” She asked Bucky, flecks of red flashing across her eyes when Bucky nodded. “What are they doing here”

“They’ve been watching her” Bucky swallowed thickly, the sense of dread returning when he thought about what could have happened if he hadn’t found you in time. “They were going to feed...”

“Leave it to them to prey on the most vulnerable” Wanda shook her head in disgust, scanning the shelves for all the medicines she’d made. She grabbed a small vial, squeezing a few droplets out onto your skin, wrapping the scratches with a soft cloth. “She’ll be okay, just needs to rest. They didn’t bite her so she won’t be affected in anyway. Just keep an eye on her throughout the night in case she’s in any pain” 

Bucky nodded, thanking Wanda as she left. You stirred, the oil on your arm starting to sting making you groan in pain. 

“Doll, are you alright? What hurts” Bucky was at your side in an instant, eyes clouded with worry. You clutched onto your arm, curling into a ball, biting your lip waiting for the pain to cease. 

“Just stings, that’s all” You tried to bear the sting, letting out a strained groaned as the pain radiated more. It seemed to come in waves, pulsing through your body. Bucky crouched beside you so he was at eye level with you, his hand gently skimming over your covered scratches. You relaxed for a moment at his touch, your eyes meeting his pretty blue ones. 

“It’s the healing oil. It stings more because...” Bucky bit his lip, pausing and choosing his words carefully, “Well, the medicines were made for-for our kind?” He gave you a lopsided smile, “It’s very potent”

“Your kind?” You cocked your head, urging him to continue though there was only so much left to explain after you’d literally seen him shift from wolf to human. 

“Werewolf” He grinned; you could hardly believe moments ago his perfect teeth were razor sharp. 

“Werewolf?” You repeated, still struggling to take in everything that had happened in the past few hours. You’d always felt an intense unexplainable energy in the air since you’d moved to the area but you were not expecting werewolves. Or vampires for that matter. Bucky chuckled at your wide eyes, helping you sit up. 

“Not Jacob from Twilight werewolf” He playfully rolled his eyes while you giggled, “A real werewolf sweetheart” 

“Ah, of course, so more Mason from Wizards of Waverly place” You giggled, half expecting yourself to wake up from whatever strange dream this was. “tell me more”

“Hmm” Bucky thought, not knowing where to start, a part of him worried you’d be scared off, though you didn’t seem to be uncomfortable around him. “We’ve lived here for generations, the territory is ours. We don’t typically reveal ourselves to the outside world. We don’t have to wait for a full moon to change, we can do it any time. We shift according to our places in the pack”

“And what's your place in the pack” 

“Leader” He smiled softly, proud of his pack, the family he loved more than himself. 

“Thank you by the way”, your fingers skimming over a few scratches that were on his hands, previously large paws when he had fought off Walker, “For saving me...” You realized you didn’t know his name.

“Call me Bucky, doll” 

Bucky insisted you sleep in his room though you refused, not wanting to impose. He laid out his softest and warmest blankets and coziest pillows, creating a safe space for you to sleep in. You gasped, looking at the way he’d set everything up, it almost resembled a nest of blankets and pillows. He wanted you to be as comfortable as possible, giving you some of his clean clothes to sleep in after you showered. You fell asleep instantly, his soft scent all over the bed lulling you into a peaceful slumber as soon as your head touched the pillow. 

Bucky made his way back outside to check on Steve, Sam and Peter, rolling his eyes when he saw they were perfectly fine, the three nursing beers while sitting on the stairs of his cabin. 

“What the hell are you-”

“So this is who you’ve been keeping an eye on” Sam smirked, nudging Bucky’s shoulder while Steve and Peter shared shit eating grins. 

“Shut up Sam”

“See? He didn’t deny it!”

“So what, you’ve been watching me?” Bucky cocked and eyebrow while Sam scoffed. 

“Please. You’re always looking out the window like a love sick puppy” 

Bucky was able to control many things with his body but he couldn’t for the life of him control the blush that spread across his cheeks. 

“I didn’t know alpha’s could blush” Steve cackled while the rest joined, each poking fun at the way his cheeks reddened more. 

“I’m going to sleep, or so help me God-” He shook his head, going back inside and laying on the couch. He couldn’t help the butterflies that fluttered around his tummy, the sweet sunshine he loved to see everyday was there. 

In his home.

In his bed.

In his clothes.

...

Calm down Bucky.

He made sure to periodically check on you like clock work, not getting a wink of rest through the night, not when you had been hurt. He loved the way you looked, curled up in his bed, sleeping soundly. A flash of anger pulsed through him when his eyes fell on your bandages. Those that hurt you. It’d be a problem for another day but he’d fine a permanent solution to that problem very soon. 

*****

You blinked awake, the delicious scent or fresh berries and pancakes wafting through the air. You felt warmth creep up your cheeks when you found another fresh set of clothes placed by the bed along with a brand new tooth brush and a towel. You mentally scolded yourself for the way your heart tried to skip at his acts of kindness, but you couldn’t help it.

There was something about him. 

You quickly got changed, padding down to the table where stacks of pancakes were piled high along with cut up berries. Bucky grinned when he saw you, his heart fluttering again at the way his Henley hung loosely on you. 

“Good morning doll, how you feeling”

“Better, again thanks to you” You felt giddy over his handsome smile and yet a sense of calm whenever you were near him. You couldn’t understand why you felt so comfortable around his presence. He was a stranger to you yet you felt like you’d found your place. You’d known him for less than 24 hours but there was a connection. Around him, you felt protected. Cared for. Perhaps it was the fact that he was the leader, so naturally he had a very protective nature. That had to be it, it’s not like you were special to him.  

You repeatedly had to remind yourself to stop gazing at him because there was another issue. It’s not like you were blind. Bucky was gorgeous. You loved his scruffy beard and dark hair, what you wouldn’t give to run your fingers through his soft-

What- 

You blinked, clearing the rogue thoughts that tried to probe your mind, distracting yourself with breakfast instead. 

“I didn’t know werewolves liked pancakes” You teased, ignoring the way your skin heated up, popping a berry into your mouth.

“I like to eat lots of things, doll” Bucky smirked at the way you moaned, licking off a droplet of the berry juice that stained your lips. Your pretty lips. Soft. Supple. Kissable. Would look even prettier wrapped around his co-

He shook his head, hoping to get his mind out of the gutter, why was he like this. A knock on the door made you jump while Bucky rolled his eyes, grabbing a few more plates before making his way to the door. 

“For fucks sake, even on a Saturday” Bucky mumbled to himself, knowing damn well the three idiots he called friends would have smelled him making breakfast from 3 cities away, let alone a few cabins down. You heard the voices of a few men, two large men about the size of Bucky entered the kitchen along with another who looked much younger. 

“Y/n, this is Steve, Sam and Peter”

You instantly recognized the three as the very same ones who had came with Bucky the day you were attacked. All three of them were as sweet to you as Bucky but you couldn't help but find Peter the most adorable, who managed to eat the most out of everyone. They happily raided the kitchen, passing each other glances you couldn't pinpoint, each look making Bucky more flustered.

“You protected me” You smiled at Peter, who blushed, stuffing another pancake into his mouth while Sam shook his head in disgust. 

“It was nothing, we’re just happy you’re safe” Peter preened at your praise, finishing the last of what was on the table. 

“Barnes, Peter ate everything again”

“For fucks sake-” 

Bucky didn’t let you lift a finger the entire morning, serving you everything you wanted and clearing the table away. In fact, he didn’t let you do anything that day. Or the next. Or the day after that. A week. Two weeks. He wanted to make sure you were completely okay before letting you leave. He was there to take care of anything you needed, cleaning and applying the oil to your cuts, redressing the bandages. Getting you fresh clothes. Fluffing out your bed so it’d be warm and cozy.  While you adored the warmth of his bed, you couldn’t help but wish he’d just stay with you instead. He’d introduced you to the rest of his pack, everyone happy to have you around when they saw the way his cheeks would tint pink when you sat beside him.

You’d both spent countless hours each night, talking by the fire place or walking in the moonlight. Each night, he’d make sure you were comfortably tucked in before crashing on the couch, occasionally morphing into his wolf form and curling up by the door just to be extra safe.

Bucky wasn’t sure why he was so drawn to you. What started as admiring you from afar was now making his heart beat faster. Skin warmer. He knew the feeling was far more intense than just friendship. He felt a bond. Something that pulled him to want you by his side forever.

For you to be his mate.

It was rare for werewolves to find a mate that wasn't a werewolf like himself but here was. In love with you. He never felt a pull like this towards someone else. Everything he felt was 10 times stronger than before, growing more and more with each day he spent with you. 

*****

“I know it’s been a few days but...maybe you should stay a little longer?” Bucky knew there was truthfully no reason for you to stay any longer; the wounds had completely healed and you were perfectly fine.

Still...

"Are you sure?" You bit your lip, wanting nothing more than to curl up in his arms for the night as he stood by the bedside, handing you one of his sweaters.

"Of course, I-I don't want anything to happen to you, so just to be safe" He smiled softly, itching to just crawl into bed with you and snuggle.

“Bucky, you-you don’t have to sleep on the couch” You sat up just as he was about to leave, your heart beating a little faster when he stopped and turned around. "You can sleep here"

“Are you sure?”

You nodded, moving over slightly and lifting the covers up so he could lay beside you. At the start of the night Bucky was as still as a statue, worried you'd find it odd if he got too close, making sure there was distance between you both before he closed his eyes.

Of course, even in his sleep he sought you. You sighed contently at the feeling of his arm wrapping around you waist, pulling you close to his chest, his face burying into your neck, a happy low rumble emitting from his chest at the way you felt in his arms. He nuzzled his face into your skin, keeping you flush against him the entire night, hoping the sun would ride just a little bit later.

Every night, your cuddles became a little more intimate. You'd start off at opposite ends of the bed, only to find yourself tangled in each other each morning. Hands would wander a little more each time with gentle touches and a few extra kisses.

****

"Just come cuddle" You giggled as he scooted over, giving up on trying to sleep at the other side of the bed. Bucky smiled, pulling you to lay on his chest, his hand slipping past your shirt, gently stroking your spine. He pressed a kiss to your forehead, loving the way your skin felt on his lips. He didn't want to stop, continuing to trail kisses down your face, holding you a little tighter, the need to have you completely growing stronger. His eyes locked with yours, nervously leaning down, smiling against your lips as you closed the gap between you both.

His hands carded through your hair, deepening the kiss, his tongue tracing your lips, slipping into your parted mouth. He couldn't help himself, rolling you both over so you were pinned under him, dominating the kiss till you both needed air. Your eyes grew wide feeling his length pressing against your tummy, hips rutting slightly, fighting himself from stuffing you full of him.

"Buckyy" You panted from under him, gripping onto his arms, spreading your legs further for him. The needy whine that fell from your lips made him growl, he could smell how aroused you were, his cock painfully hard in his sweats. "Need you"

“I-I don’t want to hurt you” He whispered, his mind conflicted over wanting you so badly but also worried his hurt you with his strength. He nearly whimpered feeling the warmth of your core pressed against him, your thighs squeezing the sides of his waist.

“You won’t hurt me Bucky” Your eyes were pleading with him, needing this just as much as he did, he only had so much self restraint.

“Let me taste you?” He crawled down, his fingers skimming around the waist band of the boxers he had given you to wear, pulling them down as you nodded. He threw his own shirt off before settling between your legs, spreading your pussy apart, his hunger for you growing at the way you glistened under the dimly lit room. "You smell so sweet, angel"

You felt shy under his intense gaze as he looked up at you while kissing the soft flesh of your thighs. Bucky nearly growled as soon as his tongue flicked across your clit, feeling the way it throbbed each time he licked you. His lips sealed around your sensitive nub, alternating between lapping up your arousal and toying with your clit, suckling and kissing you, moaning when he felt your hands tug at his hair.

"Grind on my face sweets" Bucky threw your legs over his shoulders, urging you to push his face down deeper, the greedy side of him wanting to suffocate between you legs. You squeaked when he guided your hand to pull at his roots, a feral look flashing in his eyes when you hesitantly pulled a little harder, his eyes rolling back.

"Just like that baby, I'll use my tongue all over this pretty pussy, just show me how" He groaned as you pushed his head down, your back bowing off the bed feeling his tongue slip inside you, drinking every drop you gave him.

"Bucky, need you-" Your body felt hot, pussy clenching and throbbing, aching for him to fill you. He kissed up your body, throwing the rest of your clothes off before lining himself up with your entrance, his breath fanning over your face.

"Sweetheart, I don't know if I'll be able to control myself" He stroked your forehead, his cock leaking against your pussy. "It's more than just- I can't explain it-

You smashed your lips against his, squeezing your legs around his waist tighter, cutting off his nervous rambling. "Please, I want you, want to feel you Bucky, all over you"

"M'right here angel, you have me" He let out a shuddered breath as he started to press into you, moaning against your neck once he was fully sheathed inside you. He moved slowly, rocking his hips while his nose tracing against the column of your neck, his hands moving to fist the sheets. He could feel them tear under his grip, your tight pussy and sweet scent awakening something primal.

“Doll...” He groaned in your ear, his cock swelling more with each thrust, “Baby, I-

He let out a desperate growl, his hands balled into fists, his corded back muscles tensed, holding back from pounding you into the mattress. You could feel his cock grow harder, stretching you more, the swollen tip rubbing against your sweet spot making you gush around him.

“What is it” You whispered, your thumb caressing his scruffy cheek, your soft touch only making it more difficult for him to hold back.

“Fuck baby” It almost hurt him, desperately wanting you to be all his, his tongue licking and nipping your neck, biting his lip to keep from sinking his teeth in. “Want you to be mine”

“I'm yours Bucky” You carded your fingers through his hair, grazing his scalp, making him growl, the soft color of his eyes now an intense sapphire blue and glowing. Bucky gently nipped your neck, holding back how badly he wanted to claim you, mark you, the smooth canines of his teeth growing sharper the more you moaned for him.

"Y-you don't understand sweets, I want-I want you forever"

"You have me Bucky" You clenching around him, your moans broken as the band in your belly tightned more. Bucky grinded his hips down, desperate to be as deep inside you as possibly, the coiled hair at the base of his cock rubbing your clit, warmth spreading through your body. "I'm-I'm gonna-

"Cum for me angel, I need it, need it baby, cum for me please" He moaned with you, his hand flying to the headboard, the wood splintering and cracking under his grip. He started to chase his own high, speeding his thrust's up, his balls slapping your ass grunts growing deeper.

"M'gonna cum baby" He could hard speak, too consumed and overwhelmed by the way he felt inside you, his cock swelling and throbbing, spurts of precum already soaking your pussy.

"Cum Bucky!"

"You're mine" He panted, his forehead resting on yours, "Say it sweets, say you'll always be mine?"

"M'yours" You nodded, kissing his nose, your hands cupping his face, "All yours Bucky, make me yours"

"Oh FUCKK" Bucky moaned against your neck, his teeth grazing your soft skin, biting just enough to to mark you without hurting you, gently licking the area after while he continued to moan and whine, his orgasm unending. "All mine"

You both laid tangled in the sheets, going for a few more rounds until the sun came up. You shivered at the feeling of his hands trace over your skin, your whole body sensitive from how many times he had you cum all over his cock. His hands. His face. There was a feeling of security surrounding you as you laid on his chest, the faint mark on your neck tingling.

“Will you be my mate?” Bucky whispered shyly, blushing more at your giggle while you sat up slightly, your nose bumping against his.

"Even if I'm not a werewolf? " You teased while Bucky playfully rolled his eyes, nipping you again.

“Of course, how else will I protect you bunny” He let out a growl, cocking his eyebrow while you squealed, finding yourself flipped under him again. "You'll stay with me sweetheart?"

"Even if I can't change into a giant a fluffy puppy like you under a full moon?"

"Yes"

"Even if I can't hear Sam sneaking into the house for breakfast from 3 houses down"

"We'll work on that"

"Do I always have to rub your belly and feed you my peanut butter treats when you turn into a pouty little werewolf, pretending to be a big scary leader to everyone else"

"Yes and now that you know that secret, you have to stay" Bucky grinned, his hopeful eyes shining brighter when you cupping his face, kissing him deeply.

"I already told you, I'm all yours"

****

Imagine the utter joy the rest of the pack get from how soft Bucky is for you. They're so used to seeing him unmoving and broody but now theres flowers around his cabin and the blush is just part of his face now. Steve and Sam help move some of your things over to Bucky's, more than happy to have you around because now there's even more food for them to eat.

Nothing turns you on more than when he goes into protective mode. His eyes glow. His muscles tense. The growl that rumbles from deep in his chest makes your thighs squeeze together. He keeps you by his side, always touching you, his hands lingering on your waist, toying with your hair or playing with your fingers.

It's not often he fully transforms but when he does, its because someone got too close to you.

You can't help but giggle when you see him transform into his werewolf form because he's beautiful and scary, teeth barred out, claws flexed out, but only you know how adorably cuddly he is when he's just alone with you. He nudges his head against your hand, whining for you to give him attention, he's three times your size but his tail swishes about like a playfully puppy.

Theres no doubt you're the best thing thats ever happened to him.

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[wiypt-writes]

Barking Up The Wrong Tree

 Ransom Drysdale One Shot

Summary: It’s the Annual Pre-Easter meal at the Thrombey’s and Ransom and you are in attendance. As usual, there’s fireworks, a lot of swearing and there’s only one way you know he can get rid of his frustrations…

 Warnings: Bad Language words. SMUT (NSFW) NO UNDER 18s!

Pairing: Ransom Drysdale x Reader

A/N:  So this was originally written last year for @jennmurawski13​ who requested a smutty one shot with an Evans character of my choice for her birthday. It was coined from a Brainstorming sesh me and @icanfeelastormbrewing​ had for our intended Ransom x OFC series (we might get round to it in 2022…so by then you’ll have forgotten if we use it again.) FYI Eighteen year old Ransom is totally Bryce from Fierce People, you can’t convince me otherwise… I also very much now see this being the same Reader as in mine, @ohthankevans13​ and @sweater-daddiesdumbdork​’s  Real Life Tasks With Ransom Drysdale series.

Your brown leather, knee high Saint Laurent boots (a gift from the man whose lap you were curled up on) were on the floor by your feet leaving you in your grey, woollen over-knee socks. One of your boyfriend’s large hands was resting on your left shin, the other just at the top of your right thigh, almost on your ass cheek. You were well aware your black sweater dress was riding up so went to shift and shimmy it down a little, conscious that you were, after all, sat in the large drawing room at his grandfather’s house whilst the rest of his family milled around as the pre-Easter dinner, which always took place the weekend before the actual holiday, was being prepared.

“You okay?” Ransom looked up at you, noticing you shift on his lap and you smiled.

“Yeah, just don’t want to flash everyone too much if you get my drift.”

Ransom cocked an eyebrow at you, then peeked around the room, before he gave a snort as his eyes fell on his cousin Jacob who was watching the pair of you.

“Yeah, we wouldn’t want Adolf junior getting a boner now would we?”

You gave a chuckle as you re-arranged your dress, making yourself more comfortable.

“He’s just a kid, Ran.” You soothed.

“He’s a deviant, Princess.” He replied, his voice quiet.

“So were you when I first met you.” You grinned, looking at him as you bent closer to whisper into his ear “Still are when the mood takes you.”

Ransom pulled back to look at you, his face inches from yours, his eyebrow raising slightly as that dirty smirk spread across his handsome face. “Stop it.” He warned, and you shrugged innocently, as he placed a soft kiss on your mouth.

“Come on son, put her down.” Richard’s voice rang across the room and instantly you felt Ransom’s entire demeanour change. Gone was the relaxed, jokey, happy Ran you knew and loved and in his place was Hugh Ransom Drysdale, asshole extraordinaire.

“Piss off, Father.” He shot back, his head moving back from yours, fixing his dad with a steely glare.

“Hey.” Richard glowered “Don’t speak to me like that…” he turned to Linda. “Did you hear that Linda?”

“Ransom…” Linda said lazily, not looking up from her phone. “Don’t speak to your father like that.”

Ransom rolled his eyes and you gently looked at him, shaking your head, silently telling him to stay calm. It was always the same with the Thrombey family gatherings. Ransom despised them for the simple fact that Harlan was the only one he had any time for, bar his mother on a good day, and you were inclined to feel the same way. It always ended in chaos, each individual nuclear sects within the extended family trying to get one up on the other, prove they were the best players in the game.

Frankly, they made the fucking Lannisters look normal.  

All your friends were constantly asking you how you managed to stay tangled in this web of dysfunction, but the answer was right in front of you, his crystal blue eyes now narrowed as he shot a sarcastic reply back to his mother.

The simple truth was, you loved him and couldn’t walk away if you tried.

It hadn’t always been that way, mind. When your High School had been asked to submit nominations for the coveted position of Harlan Thrombey’s Summer research assistant, you’d been short listed along with 15 other candidates from the New England area. Each of you were asked to produce a five-thousand word thesis on a literary subject of your choice to be submitted for reading by Harlan. You’d been ecstatic when you received the call from his Publishing Company to say you’d made the final three and were requested to attend an interview.

You’d been and bought a new suit. Nothing fancy but decent enough quality. You made sure your hair was tamed, your make up was as on point as you could get it, and had driven the thirty minutes or so out to his mansion from the home you shared with your Nanna in Brookline, following the directions on your GPS to the area near Pierce Park where the Thrombey Mansion was located. You were greeted by his housekeeper and shown into the large office where the man himself was waiting. Harlan was nothing like you had expected him to be. He was eccentric, sure, but also dmaned good fun. He’d asked you a few questions about why you wanted the position “I’m going to major in English at college and I hope to work in publishing when I graduate, this would be an invaluable experience.” He had then discussed your paper with you and after a few more general questions he had reduced you almost to tears of laughter by telling you a about an incident when he had been at college and was almost caught climbing down the trellis of his girlfriend’s parent’s house following a late night rendezvous of the very naughty kind “Don’t think too badly of me, we ended up married for forty-seven years…”

Then, just as he was showing you out of his study a tall, well-built young man, your age you had correctly guessed, with a strong jaw, dark hair flicked to the left side of his forehead, and a pair of the bluest eyes you had ever seen, waltzed down the hallway. He was dressed in a pair of riding breeches, a polo shirt and wore a long pair of tan leather riding boots.

"Ransom?” Harlan looked at the young man “I wasn’t expecting you till this afternoon.”

“Yeah well, the fucking horse I should have been riding is lame.” Ransom shrugged “Which means I can’t ride, and I probably can’t compete this weekend.”

“Dressage?” you had asked, your mouth speaking well before your brain had engaged, for some reason thinking it was a good idea to comment. Ransom had looked at you with disdain, scanned you up and down and cocked his head to one side, his eyes cold as they locked onto yours.

“Polo.” He had answered, a sneer on his face “Do I look like a dressage rider to you? Mind you, from the state of your cheap high-street dress the nearest you’ve probably ever been to a horse is those shitty little trail rides they run at kids parties.”

“Ransom!” Harlan had snapped sternly “Enough!”

You felt the heat rise in your neck and cheeks, and you drew yourself up to your full height, folding your arms as you looked at the ass hole stood in front of you. One thing your Nanna had told you was that, despite your humble origins, you were as worthy as the next person, no matter how much money, status or self-importance they may have.

“My apologies. I always thought polo was played by arrogant, snobby, stuck up pricks.” You retorted as you made a show of looking him up and down in the same way he had done to you. “Actually, on second thoughts, I should have guessed.”

As soon as the words were out of your mind you let out an internal groan. Way to go, flush your chance of landing this summer internship down the fucking toilet by insulting Harlan’s grandson. Nevertheless, you held the gaze of the man in front of you who stared back, his expression and face utterly stoic bar the blink of surprise his eyes made.

You heard Harlan chuckle behind you and the old man dropped a hand to your shoulder. “Fran, could you see Miss Y/L/N to the door.”

Two days later Harlan had personally called you to offer you the position, and it had turned out to be everything you ever wanted, and more. Three weeks into your internship, to your utter surprise, Harlan confessed that he had been looking to fund a worthy, local candidate through college and as the successful applicant it was yours for the taking. Some strings had been pulled, and in the last week of September thanks to his generosity you started your English Major at Harvard.

And so did Ransom.

He pursued you with a dogged determination, seemingly viewing your indifference towards him and his advances as some kind of challenge. You weren’t fooling yourself, however. He was devastatingly handsome and your traitorous vagina and that part of your brain that controlled your libido harboured a deep desire to fuck his brains out, a desire you finally gave into at the end of your first year when, following your final exam, you got drunk and woke up the morning after in his bed.

It wasn’t all puppies and roses though. You were on and off more than his boxer shorts, as simply put, Ransom was a player. And it didn’t bother you to start with. He was a hook up, a way to relieve tension when you needed to, and he was a very handy person to know with his seemingly endless network of connections. But by the time you graduated you knew you were head over heels for him, and needed to break this seeming cycle of being in and out of his bed.  So you turned down Harlan’s offer of a job at Blood Like Wine and were ready to move away from Boston after landing a job at a publishers in Manhattan…but then your nanna had been taken seriously ill and suffered a stroke meaning you had to stay.

As a result of her illness, your nanna was unable to live in your house in Brookline alone and so you were forced to sell it so she could afford to move into a supervised Retirement Village a five minute or so drive away. You were now jobless, drowning with the house-sale which would leave you homeless, and your emotions and been all over the place. You had no other family since your Grandfather had died at the start of your senior year so had no one to turn to.

Enter Hugh Ransom Drysdale.

You’d called him one evening, drunk and emotional and needing a release and he came over alright, but instead of fucking you into the mattress he made sure you drank water, ate something, and then got you into bed. The next morning, Harlan had shown up, telling you the job offer at his company was still open, and then to your utter surprise and initial horror he had offered to buy your nanna’s house, meaning you could remain there as a tenant. At first you had refused, insisting you weren’t a charity case but Harlan had simply waved your concerns away by insisting it was an investment. After a little discussion he agreed to allow you to pay rent which, all things considered, was a pittance in comparison to what other properties the same size in that area commanded but it was a rent nonetheless and made you feel better.

And you knew all of it had ben Ransom’s idea.

This was the side to Ransom he very rarely displayed to anyone. A softer side, a caring side, a gentle side. A side that held you as you cried at the thought that your nanna was growing old and may soon leave you behind, a side that made you a sandwich when you hadn’t eaten in days, a side that helped you pack up and move your Nana’s stuff to her new home, a side that turned up at 9pm with several tubs of ice cream and a bottle of wine after you’d messaged him earlier that afternoon to tell him what a shit day you were having when his Uncle Walt was being a dick at work.

The rest, they say is history. History which meant you were now curled up in his lap some eight or so years post that initial meeting in the hallway of this very house, listening to him bicker with his family, feeling his leg beginning to shake in that way it always did when he was agitated.

“Ran…” you said gently, squeezing his arm and you felt him take a deep breath and he looked at you, his mouth closing as you shook your head “Don’t.”

He turned away, looking to the other side of the room and his face glowered as he spotted Jacob once more had his eyes trained on your bare thigh. God the pubescent creep did his fucking head in, and if he stayed here he was going to end up putting the lanky streak of shit through the wall.

“Can we go?” Ransom looked at you, tucking your hair behind your ear.

“We’ve not even had dinner yet.”

“Please.”

That single word was enough to make you understand. It was a word he hadn’t learned until he’d met you, when he realised that his demands and arrogance got him nowhere with you. He still rarely used it mind, but when he did, you knew he was in desperate need of what he’d asked for.

“How about we take a walk?” You suggested “If you still wanna go after then we will”

He took a deep breath as he considered what you had said. Compromise was another word that hadn’t been in his vocabulary until you. His eyes locked onto yours and you looked at him, encouragingly and he took a deep breath, nodding.

“Okay.”

You uncurled yourself from his lap and stood up, him following so you could sit down and place you boots on.

“Are you leaving?” Linda asked, looking up for the first time.

“For a walk.” Ransom said simply, grabbing your hand and pretty much dragging you from the room. He didn’t say a word as he reached the coat stand and retrieved your lightweight Ted Baker belted mac, holding it out for you to slip your arms into, in a display of chivalry he reserved only for you. Once you’d done it up, he took your hand in his and you headed through the kitchen and outside into the reasonably mild April afternoon.

“Don’t let them get to you.” You said softly, leaning into him a little and he sighed, untangling his fingers from yours so he could drop his arm round your shoulders. He hated the fact his family could make him feel like this, like he wasn’t in control, like he was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. He could quite happily go without seeing any of them, well, bar maybe his grandfather, but you had told him he would regret it if he pushed them away completely because you had always wished you’d had a large family unit like that. So, despite the fact he knew deep down that was a load of bullshit, he played the game. He attended the damned gatherings more for your benefit than any as you adored Harlan and seemed to get on fairly well with Joni, Meg and his mother. He hung onto a glimmer of hope that maybe one day it would all change and he’d feel part of it.

But it never did. And he never did.

The two of you walked in comfortable silence across the Mansion grounds, round the lake where Ransom stopped by the small pier, looking out over the water.

“You know my most vivid childhood memories are of this spot.” He mused, his gaze focussed over the lake “Grammy used to bring me down here to feed the ducks.”

“It’s beautiful down here.” You agreed, snuggling further under his arm. “Peaceful.”

“Yeah unlike that fucking house.”

You gave a chuckle, as his hand curled over your shoulder, absentmindedly rubbing over the smooth material of your coat. He was agitated, you could tell, and there were very few ways in which he could calm down when he was like this. One was riding his beloved BB- a polo horse Harlan had bought him for his 21st, one was the pair of you curling up on the sofa with snacks and a good scotch or bourbon, getting drunk and watching Trashy Films, in particular horrors-you both loved to pick plot holes and insult the main characters, declaring the victim a dumb bitch for running up the stairs and not out of the door and the other, well…

You glanced around, checking you were alone before you pulled away from him, taking his hand and tugging on it slightly.

“What?” he asked looking down.

“Come on.” You gave his hand another pull.

“Y/N?” he questioned again, but followed nonetheless despite you not answering. You tugged him away from the lake, into the thin thicket of trees a little further round. You could still see the house here but you knew there was no way anyone from up there could see you.

“Seriously, Y/N what the fuck?” he groaned, as he stepped in the slightly squelchy mud “You’re gonna ruin my Gucci’s…” “Should have worn something a little more substantial then shouldn’t you?”

“I didn’t know you were planning on going fucking hiking in the fucking woods.”

“That’s not what we’re doing.” You said, stopping in front of a large oak tree, looking up at him.

“Then what are we doing? Reconnecting with Mother Nature? Or are we on the hunt for Oberon, Titania and Puck?”

“Ooh, good Shakespeare reference.” You grinned at him and he rolled his eyes as you slid your hand up over his navy blue lightweight Barbour jacket which was done up to his sternum, leaving his plain white, Armani t-shirt slightly visible at the neckline. “Does that make us Lysander and Hermia?”

“You got a hidden suitor called Demetrius I don’t know about?” he arched an eyebrow, his hands falling to your hips.

“Nope, I’m all yours Tiger.”

The sound of your ridiculous nickname for him drew a large smile across his face and he shook his head, giving a genuine chuckle. Here, with you there were no annoying voices to listen to, no family politics, nothing to care about but the gentle brush of the wind as it blew through the canopy of trees above your heads and the faint sounds of birds as they went about their business and Ransom felt a sense of comfort. Because you were his rock. The one person that saw through his bull shit, the woman in his life that knew all his horrible personality traits as well as his slightly less horrible ones and loved him all the same. The girl that had rounded off his harsher edges no matter how much he protested to the contrary.

You were his better half for sure.

“Well that’s good, because I don’t like sharing.” Ransom smirked, dipping his head to capture your lips in a soft kiss.

“Don’t I know it.” You mused against his mouth. His fingers flexed on your sides, pulling you closer to him as he slid his tongue across your bottom lip. You opened your mouth slightly, allowing him control over the kiss, knowing that’s what he craved when he was like this. His lips were soft on yours, tongue domineering as he kissed you deeply, slowly. Eventually he pulled back, his nose bumping yours slightly as he gave a little chuckle.

“I know you’re trying to distract me from those shit heads in the house.” He said, his tone playful and you loved playful Ransom. Another side to him only you really got to see.

“Is it working?” You played along.

“Yeah.” He nodded, his lips pressing to yours again.

“Good. Now why don’t you let your inner deviant come out to play?”

“You don’t need to ask me twice, Princess.” The words were barely out of his mouth before he had pressed you into the harsh, earthy bark of the tree behind you, kissing you hard again, groaning as you palmed his crotch through his designer denims. He grabbed your wrist, pinning it above your head before he did the same with the other one, easily holding both in place above you with one large hand, his other softly tracing up the outside of your thigh, fingers skating under your skirt.

“Is this why you wore this?” he smirked, toying with the material slightly. “So you could tempt me away for a fuck in the woods?”

It wasn’t, it was because it looked and felt good, but you decided to play along “Maybe. Was it a good choice?”

“Damned right it was…” he growled against your mouth, his long, soft fingers sliding your lace panties to the side. His index finger traced a path up your slit and you gasped at the feeling as he gently began to toy with you. Soft, teasing touches, his eyes never once leaving yours. That was one of his things, he liked to see your face, watch as your expressions changed as he undid you, fuelling his ego. Your hips gently started to move in time to his strokes as he played you, like an instrument from which he could always draw a tune. And in no time at all, he was listening to the music as you let out a soft keen, a purr almost as your head fell back against the tree, your mouth parting slightly.

“Like that?” he asked, and it was all you could do to nod, panting brokenly as the familiar feeing began to rise in the pit of your stomach, the fire growing hotter and hotter. “God you’re a fucking minx. Come on, cum on my fingers, you know you want to.” And you did, hard, your knees trembling, as you let out a loud cry of his name as the lights exploded in front of your eyes. Ransom pressed into you, his erection evident as it dug into your stomach, keeping you pinned between him and the tree as he coaxed you through your orgasm, before he moved his hands, allowing yours to drop to his shoulders as you held onto him tightly.

The clanging of a belt buckle, then the zipping of trousers and the rustling of fabric broke through the post-orgasm haze as Ransom undid his flies, reaching into pull out his painfully hard cock. He gently pushed forward, sliding the tip against your folds, gathering your slick as you gave a moan, the feeling of him sliding against your clit sent lances of red, hot desire through your veins.

His hands gripped the back of your thighs as he pulled you off the ground and you hooked them round his slim waist, ankles locking at the base of his spine. In a swift, fluid moment, no teasing, no gentle ease, he buried himself inside you with a deep thrust making you cry out as he filled you. His lips crashed onto yours as he drew back, then thrust back in hard, his cock dragging against your walls inside, hitting that spot that he knew would leave you seeing stars.

Yes, if there was one thing on this Earth Ransom knew he was good at, it was fucking you.

His lips traced a path from your mouth to your jawline, then to your neck, biting and sucking at any bit he could get to, his hips moving back and forth in a slow but deep pace which was torture, and you needed more.

“Ran, harder…” You groaned, digging your heels into his ass and he gave a dirty moan of his own as his hands held your hips.

“You’re such a needy little slut.” He smirked against your lips, not waiting for your reply as he picked up the pace, his hips snapping back and forth with a vigour that was merciless as he pistoned in and out of you again and again. Your hands gripped his shoulders tightly as you kissed him, teeth clashing together as your back repeatedly brushed against the harsh, rough surface behind you as you clawed desperately at the material of his jacket.

It wasn’t long before you felt another orgasm brewing and your head fell forward, teeth nipping at his ear drawing a growl from his throat. Your hands moved into his hair and you pulled sharply back causing him to hiss and look up you.

“Fuck, Y/N….” he groaned, the pupils of his eyes blown wide with a desire you would never tire of seeing. You pushed your hips down against him causing him to drive deeper and you let out an almost primal cry, the noise you made simply revving him up even more, his rapid movements growing even more urgent.

“Fuck Ran…” you moaned as your head rolled back against the tree, hands back on his shoulders, as once more that snake in your belly moved. Ransom felt the tell-tale flutter of your heat tightening round him and he continued his voracious pace, his eyes locked onto yours.

“You feel so fucking good…” he panted “So fuckin’ good Princess...”

His words made you moan again, and he pushed up once more, stilling slightly, grinding up against you as opposed to thrusting and a few rolls of his hips later you were done. The world faded around you as you came hard, with a loud scream before your head dropped to his shoulder, as you moaned his name, again and again whilst he pounded through your orgasm chasing his own.

“Shit, Y/N…I’m…fuck…” his words tumbled into your hair as his movements became desperate and he came a short while later with a loud yell. You felt him fill you up, as his hips stilled and he groaned, face buried into your neck, his chest heaving, sweat beaded both his brow and yours as he simply pressed into you, panting and shaking.

Neither of you had any idea how long you stayed like that, but eventually Ransom managed to gain enough control to pull his softening cock out of you and set you gently on your feet as he brushed the tendrils of your hair that had fallen over your face back with a tenderness he reserved only for you. He said nothing, simply looked at you, his lips gently greeting yours in a soft, loving kiss, a stark contrast to the violent ones you had shared moments before. You smiled at him, unadulterated love in your eyes as you moved your hands to brush his hair back before you leaned up and kissed him again, your nose sliding against his.

“I adore you Hugh Ransom Drysdale. Don’t ever forget that.”

“Don’t fucking call me Hugh.” He grumbled and you chuckled as he pulled you to him, nuzzling into your hair as he sighed. “But for the record, the feeling is mutual Y/F/N, Y/M/N, Y/L/N.”

You gave a laugh and were about to reply when you felt his head snap up, and his entire body tense and he let out an angry cry causing you to jump.

“Jesus Fucking Christ! The perverted little shit!”

“Ran?” You saw his face contorted in anger as he pushed back from you, striding away from the tree, rearranging his jeans as he went before he broke into a sprint. You watched him go and then, to your horror, saw the retreating back of a smaller male running away from the thicket of trees on the curve of the bank to your left and you felt yourself grow cold.

Jacob.

How long he had been there Ransom had no idea but he chased the little fucker all the way to the house, yelling insults and threats as he burst into the kitchen. Ransom finally caught up with him just as he ran into the hall and grabbed the kid by the collar, spinning him round and pinning him to the wall, arm crossed over his windpipe. “Enjoy the show did we?!” He yelled, the noise drawing the rest of the family out from the sitting room into the tiled hallway. Walt started to shout angry threats about what he was going to do to Ransom if he didn’t take his hands off his son, which then sparked Richard to bite back at Walt saying if he touched Ransom he’d give him a damned good hiding. If Ransom hadn’t been so focussed on the dirt little bastard he had pinned to the wall he would have laughed because the idea of his dad fighting anyone was hilarious, he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag.

“Give me your phone.” Ransom demanded.

“I didn’t…” “GIVE ME YOUR PHONE NOW YOU PERVERTED PRICK!” Ransom yelled, and reached into Jacob’s pocket, grabbing his hand where it was curled around the offending item, bending the boy’s fingers back. Jacob gave a yell, pulled his hand out of his trouser pocket and Ransom seized the phone, yanking it out, just as you walked into the hallway.

He looked at you, then to Jacob and saw you pale as the realisation washed over you that you’d not only been seen but recorded or snapped, by a twelve year old boy nonetheless.

“Unlock it.” Ransom demanded, thrusting it back at him.

“Now listen here…” Walt started until Harlan turned to him.

“Walt, shut up.” He barked, turning to Jacob “Unlock the phone, now Jake.”

Jacob sullenly took the phone from Ransom and did has he was told, Ransom snatching it back. He glanced down at the screen, flicking to the Gallery and let out an angry noise as he saw not only footage of you both in the woods but ten or so photos of your bare thigh and close ups where he had attempted to see up your skirt when you had been on his knee before. Thankfully from the snaps there wasn’t really anything visible, but still the fact he had even taken them in the first place made Ransom apoplectic with rage.

“You dirty little prick.” he mumbled, looking back up at him. Jacob visibly recoiled under Ransom’s glare.

“Ran?” You questioned as you gently touched his arm and he tilted the phone so you could see the screen and your eyes widened, your entire body growing warm as you saw the close up of your thigh on the screen.

“How the fuck dare you?” You exploded, glaring at Jacob.

“Can you explain what he has supposedly done?” Donna, Jacob’s mother spoke for the first time and you turned to face her, your pretty features contorted in rage.

“He’s…” You shook your head “Taken photos of me, before up my skirt.”

Noise erupted in the hallway, Joni and Meg screaming about you being violated, Richard and Linda yelling at Walt and Donna whilst Harlan shook his head, making a noise of disgust. Ransom ignored them all as he selected the photos and images, deleting them, and showing it to you.

“Gone, Princess.” He turned the screen off before he leaned over and kissed your temple.

“Look, he’s a teenage boy…” Donna was protesting “He’s a bit curious…”

“He’s a dirty bastard.” Richard snorted and the irony wasn’t lost on Ransom as he’d seen his father eyeing you up on more than one occasion. He looked at his dad, eyebrow raised as Jacob bit back at the dig.

“I’m a dirty bastard?” The pre-teen snapped, his eyes flicking from Richard to Ransom “I’m not the one that was having sex against a tree!”

Everyone paused and their heads turned to you and Ransom. You gave a groan, your hands sliding up to your face to hide your utter embarrassment, but besides you Ransom’s expression never changed because, well frankly, he couldn’t give two shits about everyone knowing what you had been up to.

“I’m a grown ass man.” He snarled “If I wanna fuck my girl outside on private property I will”

He held Jacob’s phone out to him, but as Jacob went to take it Ransom opened his hand, dropped it to the floor with a loud “oops” and stomped on it, the metal and glass crunching under the heel of his expensive, leather boots.

There was more yelling, and Ransom simply turned, taking your hand in his. “We’re leaving.”

This time you didn’t argue. The pair of you walked away, ignoring the screaming which grew fainter as you headed down towards the large front doors, only to hear Harlan calling after you. Ransom stopped, took a deep breath and tuned to face his grandfather.

“Y/N are you ok?”

“Of course she’s not.” Ransom snapped but you gently squeezed his hand, shaking his head.

“I’m okay Harlan, thank you. But I think its best we go before Ransom commits murder.”

“Well, I can assure you I’m not far off killing the little turd myself.” Harlan shook his head, sighing. He then took a deep breath, looked at Ransom, and there was a flash of something which you knew only too well to be amusement in his eyes. “Which tree?”

Ransom frowned “What?”

“I asked which tree you two were doing the naughty against.”

You groaned as Ransom blinked and then shrugged “Just in the thicket to the south side of the lake, near the little jetty. Why?”

“Well, instead of barking up the wrong tree so to speak, next time stick to the North side.” Harlan grinned cheekily “It’s in the dip and no chance you can be spotted by anyone unless they’re a foot or so away.”

Ransom’s mouth curled up into a smirk as he looked at his grandfather then to you.

Meanwhile you simply wanted the ground to open up and swallow you.

Harlan bid the two of you goodbye as you headed out to Ransom’s Beemer. He stopped just besides it, turning to you, his hands falling to your hips again. “Well, I don’t know about you, Sweetheart, but all that excitement has made me a bit hungry. Seeing as we’re not getting dinner here, how about I take you to Asta?”

Your face lit up at the mention of your favourite restaurant and you gave an eager nod before you frowned “Aren’t we a little underdressed? And it’s Saturday evening, we’ll never get in.”

“Baby girl, enough money can get us in anywhere, and you look fine.” He said, dropping a kiss to your lips before he grinned “You might wanna brush the twigs outta your hair though.”

[aetheternity]

I'll admit it's exciting (P2)

Synopsis: Being your professor's dirty little secret. His pet.. Sounded too good to refuse.

Warning: Smut in the later chapters! 18+ only

"He kissed me!"

"You know what they were wrong, 1,547th time is the charm." Eren picked up a new much rounder stone then the one he'd been holding previously. He quickly chucked the object getting about three and a half splashes before it went under.

"They who??" Sasha questioned

"They the people of society, Sasha." Mikasa replied

It was virtually impossible to remember any of the events of Friday. Ever since that kiss you'd basically lost a day of your life to your protruding thoughts. Now on a perfectly crisp Saturday like today you'd spent all day hanging out with Eren, Mikasa and Sasha as god intended. It was a ritual after all. The four of you coming down to the river together if you weren't all busy with homework and just discussing life events and skipping stones.

"It just came outta nowhere and it was so sudden!" You pout, resting your head on your knee.

"Just don't say it like that in court. You wouldn't want his little puppy to be homeless when he loses his job." Sasha patted your shoulder and you sent her a glare.

"I thought the puppy didn't live with him." Mikasa said, skipping a stone that went twice as far as Eren's to his own annoyance.

"Meanwhile that isn't the important part." Eren interjected "You have to take this to the higher ups you know."

"Please Eren, this is no time to think responsibly."

Mikasa giggled at the scrunched up look on Eren's face as she picked up a stone with both hands. One that was almost bigger than her torso.

"Mikasa, that one isn't going to skip." Eren said, trying to pry it from her grasp.

"Well, what do you want to do then?" Sasha questioned with an eyebrow raise.

"Huh?"

"I mean you clearly don't want to rat him out and you think he's hot so why not try to date him?"

"Cause she can't Sasha. It's against university policy." Eren replied turning away from Mikasa as she let the rock go. "And it's kinda gross."

When Mikasa chucked the rock in her arms the force was honestly intimidating. Surprisingly enough it managed to skip. Hitting the water once against the surface before sinking into the bright blue river.

"But I want to so baaaaadddd."

Eren rolled his eyes. "Well I mean if you go to the dean with that logic he'll probably allow it."

"Stupid sarcastic fuck.." You whispered with a huff.

"Mikasa, come on help me out here." Eren sighed turning to Mikasa who simply shrugged reaching for a new rock with one hand. "Thanks.." He mumbled

Sasha let out a loud sigh as she plopped down next to you. Scattering the rocks with her feet. "I'm hungry." She announced, resting her head on your shoulder.

Eren flipped the bag strapped to his back around digging in it for a couple seconds before tossing Sasha and you a sandwich and a bottle of lukewarm water.

"Yes!! You're amazing Eren!!" Sasha delighted

"Thanks.." You muttered, turning the baggie with the sandwich in it over in your hand.

Eren walked over plopping the bag between his legs and raising an arm to place over your shoulders.

"College is about new experiences." Mikasa said as she stood in front of you. "If you're not in a rush you'll find something to get excited over."

"Sleeping with a professor is a new experience that would excite anyone." Sasha said inbetween bites immediately getting flicked by Eren.

A mocking sob left your lips, interspersed with a couple snorts as you raised a hand up for Sasha that she instantly high fived.

~~~~

Somehow you'd managed to come to class on Tuesday and not hear a word of the lecture. Barely paying attention to your work as you read the same question over and over again and everytime he looked at you.... Dammit was he staring? Were you staring??

How could he sit there in that bright blue shirt? A shirt that matched his eyes so much so that they made their gorgeousness that much more enticing. You could feel your cheeks become pink as the memory of his lips drifting back like a curse. It made you grip your pen a little tighter, squeeze your thighs together a little-

"Hey.." You peeked up at the almost intimidating gaze he had set on you that had your heart racing. And wow your chest was definitely moving a lot faster. "The class ended." He muttered

Was he talking lower??

"Sorry.."

"Don't be."

He inched a little closer. The tip of his nose hovering just above the bridge of yours. His breath cold where it hit your skin. But then he was backing away.

"I promise you i'm not the kind of guy who preys on his students. I promise, seriously I.. normally don't but-"

"No-no.." You chuckled to break the tension. "No, I didn't think-don't think you would." It came off more as a question.

"I don't wanna make you uncomfortable." He sighed, leaning his head back where he stood. "I just had to do that at least once. It's not excusing it I know it's wrong and I won't ever do it again. I don't know what got into me."

Your eyes grew a little wider with every word that spilled off his lips. Fingers clutching the black pen in your grasp just a little harder.

"I said yes!" You announced a little too loud in the empty classroom. "I said yes.. when you asked."

"Y-yes, you did." His flushed cheeks made him effortlessly more adorable. Pink stretching over the bridge of his nose.

"I like you a lot already Mr. Arlert." You admitted staring deeply at each tile on the floor.

"Call me, Armin."

"Armin." You repeated

"It's still unprofessional."

"No one has to know."

He let out a loud exhale, pacing towards his desk before coming to stand in front of you. "I can't date you. I'll get in trouble."

"No one has to know."

He was standing directly in front of you. Arms on each side of you boxing your hips in. "It's still-"

You pecked his whispering lips in a moment of weakness. Arm falling over his back and trailing down the shirt you kinda wanted to rip off now.

"Wrong." He finished

"I won't tell." You giggled, pushing his gorgeous blonde locks away only for them to flop back over his once exposed forehead.

When he stepped back it caused your heartbeat to practically fly from your ribcage. The once quiet room being quickly bombarded with the next class and you hoped you didn't look as dazed and flushed as you felt. You leaned over the desk to grab your bag and just as soon Armin was standing beside you again.

"My office.." He whispered "It's on your syllabus, the room number and floor." And with those last words he was flooding out like a decapitated chicken.

Did he mean?? No he couldn't have?? Your brain wracked the second you'd left the crowding room.

He couldn't be suggesting?..

Without a second thought you ripped your bag open, wrenching your folder from the small compartment inside. With a quick flip it was open though a couple of your papers spilled out. You gripped the misplaced papers searching over the syllabus.

Downstairs.

For the first time since you'd seen it during your first college tour and started your first day you took the stairs. Bolting around and almost through passersby going in the opposite direction.

You didn't even know if he'd get there before you and at this speed he might not but you were trekking so quickly until you'd finally reached the door. Slowed to a walk as you turned the corner passing people carrying papers and flipping through thick binders as they walked.

You slowed even further, walking past a couple of desks some with people typingaway on computers and some completely empty. Your chest was pretty much ready to explode once you'd stopped at the last door at the end of the hall. Copy maker and small plant decorating the mostly empty space.

It only took two hesitant knocks for you to get pulled in. Gasping as your back hit the back of the door with a small yelp and the light thud of your skull.

His thumbs held your head in place as he dipped his face close to yours. Every bit of his breath tickling your lips. So warm where they teased you. You brought both hands up to curve over the back of his neck gripping his head almost tightly until he was pressing his lips onto yours with a roughness he hadn't exuded the first time.

"Mm.. what's that?" You giggled, pulling back.

His breath was so intoxicating and as much as you were begging for more your curiosity always won over other emotions. "What's what?" He replied

You pulled his hand back from your face immediately delighted in the smooth cold steel between your fingers as you held one of the rings cuddlinghis index finger.

"My rings." He replied, pressing back against your mouth with gentle hunger. "I don't like to wear them in class anymore cause the girls ask too many questions." He traced his lips past your cheek. And towards your outstreched chin giving it a little suck that made you whimper.

"Questions.." Your breathed in affirmation.

His teeth grazed the skin of your chin teasing exactly where he wanted to leave marks as he left more splayed kisses. "That and.. I don't like typing with them on."

His hands were back on your cheeks now. Grip a little looser against your face. His tongue drifted forward towards your lips. Breath catching a bit as he tasted you for the first time. A moan slipped from your open mouth, the sigh from his lips unbelievably pleasurable.

"Do you like them?" He whispered against your open lips.

"Mm?" You could barely muster.

His tongue crested over yours, pressing it further back into your mouth. You only had a second to press back before he'd retreated to pressing the tip of his tongue against the roof of your mouth. And then he was pushing his tongue back against yours pulling it forward and then pressing it back.

"My.. rings." He breathed between kisses. Right against your lips. Stealing your oxygen while barely reacting on his side. "You like them?.."

"Mmhm.."

He let out a little giggle, blonde hair a complicated mess against yours and his forehead. He pressed in as close as he could be with each sweet kiss. One. Two. Three.

"Let me take you out ok?"

When you didn't answer he pulled back ignoring your little whimper. Blue eyes blown and dark right in the middle as he stared into the depths of you.

"Wanna take you out." He almost slurred "Ok?"

"Mm ok.."

He rewarded your efforts to speak with a deep kiss. One that filled your chest while simultaneously causing your heat to combust. Your body smothered by his, grip tight where it grabbed onto the back of his shirt and neck. His own hand on your chin with just his thumb and index finger to guide you.

"Where do you wanna go?" His free hand moved to press against the door. "Where do you want me to take you?"

You pulled back, air lost on you and face seething with heat. "How do you expect me to answer when you just had your tongue down my throat?"

He shakes his head with a breathy chuckle that finally proves how the kiss has been effecting his own body. "Sorry. So?"

"I-I don't know.."

"Mm. My pick then, I promise I'll take you somewhere good."

~~~~

"Don't tell Eren.."

"Mm." Sasha replied

You'd gone straight to Sasha's room the second you'd left Armin's office and now you were laying on her floor while she scarfed down a pound cake next to you.

"I made out with him in his office.. and we planned a date.."

Sasha paused with a raised eyebrow. "What about Mikasa's whole find another reason to be invested in college thing?"

"Ok, I never said I'd do that."

She nodded, "Eren's gonna kill you.."

"No! Look the reason it's just me and you here and not Mikasa and Eren too is because I don't need his judgement!" You pouted, pulling your legs into your chest as Sasha took a new bite from her cake.

"How was he?"

"God his lips were so soft and breathtaking. I was suffocating in the best way."

"Tongue?"

"His tongue is the reason my thighs are shaking like this." You pulled back, resting the backs of your hands on the ground as your leg continued the uncontrollable shivering it'd been doing since you'd left Armin's office.

"Oh, well that explains one of my questions." Sasha said with a smile. "New question, how the hell do you plan on hiding this from Eren?"

"He's my friend not my dad I don't need to hide it or get his permission."

Sasha paused mid bite. "But.. you didn't invite him here to listen to your date plans??"

"Who's side are you on?"

"I believe the correct answer is yours!" She beams as you brush her hair back from her face with your fingers. She stuffs the last of the cake into her mouth as you continue, "I mean I'm not hiding it. I just wanna be happy in this and Eren will ruin it. People say you shouldn't tell your friends about things you know they'll ruin."

"Society?"

"Huh?" Sasha stared up at you from where she'd moved to relax her head in your lap. "Yeah sure Sasha society.."

Sasha hummed as you slowly combed her hair from its ponytail. "So where's the date anyway?"

"He hasn't told me yet but he said it'll be special."

~~~~

You hadn't properly talked to Armin since you'd both kissed in his office but he had your phone number. Not that he texted you much (to your own annoyance.) But on Friday he did. Told you to come outside at almost 12am with a quick apology text underneath with praying hands hoping he hadn't woken you.

You got dressed pretty casually. V neck t-shirt and jeans with your best looking pair of sneakers before heading down stairs where Armin stood in his own casual white tee (that accented his biceps.) And some standard looking black jeans.

"I thought about it for a little too long huh?" He smiled holding out a thin piece of cloth. "Just until we get there." He assured

You couldn't stop snickering with each step you took. Sparks racing up and down your spine as Armin held your waist.

"What's so funny?"

"Hmm.. I don't know I just figured I'd have to wait till at least the third date to be blindfolded."

He paused and you held your breath. "N-no it's not like that.. I normally don't do this but it has to be a surprise."

You laughed away his tension. "No no I figured." You would honestly give anything to see his face right now.

You could tell the terrain had changed as soon as you felt grass tickling the backs of your ankles and you reached out to him as the feeling of falling started to take you.

"It's ok. We're almost there."

You managed to grab his wrist and the breathy laugh on your neck made your skin practically spark.

"Don't worry I won't let you fall." He pressed a kiss to the shell of your ear and you were both gradually slowing until he'd stopped you.

He carefully untucked the blindfold making sure he didn't tangle your hair as he pulled it off your face. It slowly unraveled and tickled your skin revealing the cutest picnic set up. A small green blanket draped over the ground with tiny lanterns sprinkled around the spread and a basket right in the middle.

A container leaned against one side of the basket while another blanket rested on the other side. A folded white one with green stripes spreading over it.

"Come sit."

"This is so beautiful." You remarked, careful not to jostle the set up as you sat. "You should've told me I would've dressed nicer."

He shook his head, "The point of this was so you'd be your most normal self. So just be you ok." He held out a glass which you instantly took as he poured the liquid from the jug in his lap into your cup. "Sorry I didn't ask you what your favorite foods were.. I wanted it to be a surprise so I spent most of this week preparing."

"Armin.." You exhaled softly reaching out for his hand. He flinched away for just a second and then he was back, flipping his hand around for you to hold it.

"Let's lie down ok?"

"Mm."

"Unless you're really hungry." He offered looking at you as his head plopped back on the grass.

"No no I'm ok I promise. I ate not too long ago." You replied leaning your head back until it made contact with slightly dewy grass.

He hummed in affirmation, rubbing his thumbs over each of your knuckles individually. "Then all this food might have been too much." He chuckled

"I mean we can eat it sometime." You whispered rolling you head over to face him. He slowly did the same and it had quickly turned into a staring contest.

"I don't really feel like I should ask you about college." He started "I mean you must talk about it enough seeing as that's all people ever seem to ask about once you're there."

"Mmhm." You snickered

"Tell me something random."

You stared up in mock contemplation before a soft smile played at your lips. "Well, I'm really into my college professor.."

He laughed, "Not college related!"

"So I started dating this guy.."

"Ugggghhh!"

At this point you were both stuck in a small fit of giggles. Once he'd relaxed a little he threaded his fingers through yours squeezing both your hands impossibly tightly and then bringing the back of your hand up to his lips for a quick peck.

"You're wearing the rings." You said, turning your adjoined hands over and sliding your thumb over the one on his index finger.

"I couldn't help but remember, this girl likes them a lot."

"Where'd you originally get them anyway?"

He blinked not taking his eyes off your face slowly turning more serious. "Well.. I had this friend and she told me I had perfect fingers for rings so she got me these for my birthday."

"By friend you mean ex?"

He slowly nodded, "Hope that doesn't make them less pretty. I just couldn't get rid of them. Not because I still have feelings! Don't think that I just I really like them!"

You huffed hoping it came off playfully and not the way you felt you looked right now. "I've thought of something awesome to talk about."

"Mm?"

"What'd you wanna be when you grew up?" You smiled as he wrinkled his nose trying to prevent the very clear smile forming on his face.

"It's not that interesting.."

"Please don't say teacher. Please don't say teacher. Please don't say teacher." You beamed crossing your fingers on your free hand.

He playfully shoved you, "No! Close a surfer dude!"

You blinked in confusion bringing your cup up to your lips and taking a sip before repositioning yourself to be up on one elbow. "Huh??"

"You asked." He replied mimicking your actions.

"I did.. why did I do that again?"

He scoffed, "Gonna listen to my reason?"

"I'm here right?"

"When I was younger my mom used to love the beach. She had little ships in a bottle on her dresser, multi colored towels in the bathroom and a surfboard necklace with her initials engraved on it. When I was five she took me surf boarding for the first time." Armin reached into the basket holding out a loaf of bread which you cautiously bit off of.

"I was terrified, I cried so much and I fell over and scraped my knee. I fell over so much that day I'm still surprised she didn't give up on me. I didn't get it down that day or at all till I was eight and I rode my first wave and then crashed and had to be rescued by her. But by then I was able to laugh even while I was coughing up water."

He slowly pressed the bread to your lips once more as he let out a slow breath. "Once I hit ten her and my father had passed away in a plane crash and I vowed to be a surfer partially because of her. But I couldn't pick it up again after, no matter how easy I thought it would be."

You chewed through the new bite you'd taken. "Oh Armin, I'm sorry."

He shook his head, "It happened so long ago. And from then on I was raised by my grandparents so the story has a happy ending."

"In a way.." You muttered laying back on the grass.

"Sorry.." He sighed, placing the bread on a napkin by you and laying back down. "I shouldn't have told that story, it always makes people sad for me."

"No no, I'm not sad for you I'm glad your mom's life is a happy memory for you. Enough so that you can laugh while saying you wanted to be a surfer dude." You giggled

"Yeah yeah I know."

"It's not a bad thing."

"No I know."

"It's just-" You continued to laugh, holding your stomach. "I'm sorry it's just.. it's not surfer.. it's surfer dude." You cackled

"Well technically my dad suggested I say lifeguard so that was my true calling." You exhaled with a sigh, laughter slowly dissolving into the night air. "Cold?" He offered you the blanket and you quickly draped it over his shoulders too squeezing him in closer despite the objects between you both.

A comfortable silence slowly drifted in and you could swear in the distance you heard a soft hoot. Definitely ridiculous assumptions but you looked over at him.

"I just wanna stay here." You squeezed his hand under the blanket.

"Me too."

You looked back up at the night sky. "What if we slept here."

"We can't."

"Yeah.. I know."

A new silence fell over the two of you for a couple seconds and you could hear the sound of Armin's breathing slowing. "The stars are gorgeous tonight.." You mutter looking over at him. His eyelids shut for just a minute before he turned his head, cheeks immediately flushing pink as his droopy gaze fell over your face.

"Yeah.. yeah they are."

[nitewrighter]

Hiya mun! Can you write like little character bio blurbs for your fankids? Im not sure if you've wrote some already before but if not could you please? :D

I’ve written a short masterpost of who’s who’s kid here but as far as like... bios go...

I’m limiting this to the main continuity because we are practicing Self Care.

Watchpoint Kids

Rei is Mercy and Genji’s daughter, and the first kid on the Watchpoint. Despite her parents’ desire to try and raise her as protected and peacefully as possible, Rei grasped from an early age how much Overwatch’s conflict was affecting her life. She idolized Hanzo from a young age and wanted very much to be a ninja like her father and uncle. Genji and Hanzo obviously had a lot of misgivings about continuing the Shimada skills and traditions, and with them their violence, but in the end they relented and started training Rei as a means to keep her occupied, teach her to defend herself, and to try and direct Shimada ninja arts into a force for good. Rei grew up on the watchpoint alongside Marti, Rajeev, and Samir. Under Genji and Hanzo’s tutelage, Rei became a very competent ninja, even incorporating her Mercy’s Valkyrie wings into her movement and combat. Eventually Rei became frustrated with how slow her training was going and broke into Shimada castle one night looking for answers, but Genji and Hanzo were able to intercept her and convince her to come home before the Shimada clan became really aware of her existence. Years passed and eventually Rei joined Marti’s strike team, going on several minor missions before, at age 18, she was kidnapped by Talon, an incident that ended up catalyzing Aedan’s defection from Talon, but Rei lost her dragon after being killed by Moira and subsequently revived by Aedan. Rei then spent two years away from the Watchpoint as a stuntwoman for the Sentai series “Midori Rider” in Hollywood, all the while struggling with the pain of losing her dragon, and trying to get it back. She eventually did get it back during a confrontation with the Reaper76 Clone Andrea in Shirakami-Sanchi.

Marti is Widow and Sombra’s kid--she actually refers to Widow and Sombra as her “aunties” rather than her parents because she still remembers her biological mother. Marti’s story actually begins well before she’s born, during Sombra’s days in Los Muertos. Sombra’s best friend in Los Muertos was a woman named Soledad, who was romantically involved with Jacinto, a ruthless enforcer for the gang. When Soledad found out she was pregnant, she became disillusioned with Los Muertos and enlisted Sombra’s help in disappearing from the gang to assure a safer life for her unborn child. Sombra was able to secure a new place to live and identity for her, and Soledad named Sombra as Martina’s godmother when she was born. Six years later, however, Talon began opening communications with Los Muertos, and Jacinto, now a leader within Los Muertos, was more than happy to hear them out. Talon was desperate to kill Sombra after her defection, and managed to track Soledad down and alert Jacinto and Los Muertos to her location. Talon initially planned to just use Soledad and Marti to draw Sombra out of hiding, but now that Sombra was involved with Overwatch, the situation rapidly escalated and ended with both Soledad and Jacinto dead. Sombra and Widow adopted Marti, and Marti came to live with them at the Watchpoint. The other kids instantly latched onto her, and while Marti was wary at first and a bit lonely being the oldest, warmed up to them... and got kind of good at bossing them around. Like Genji and Mercy, Sombra and Widow had no intention of letting Marti be affected by the fight between Talon and Overwatch ever again after her loss and traumatizing experience, but Marti’s grief fueled her desire to take Talon down. Always a tinkerer, Marti was playing around with various electrical gadgets from a young age, but eventually used what minor hacking skills she had picked up from Sombra to access Overwatch’s old records. She learned as much as she could about the old Overwatch, and even cribbed information from Sombra’s own work on her eye conspiracy to try and find out as much about the fight between the two organizations as possible. Not wanting Widow and Sombra to worry about her, she kept tinkering with robotics, but now she started bothering Jack Morrison to tell her about the old days. At first Jack was rightfully stubborn and insisting that “This wasn’t her fight” and “he didn’t have time for this” but through sheer force of Sombra-level persistence, Marti managed to cow him into taking her under his wing... and, okay, yeah, he was kind of fond of her at that point. She almost reminded him of Reyes, sometimes. Marti engineered her own full-body grappling harness system based on Widowmaker’s rappel hook, ended up picking up hand-to-hand combat skills from self defense lessons from Widowmaker and sparring with Rei, and all the while used Sombra’s intel and Jack’s experience to gain an uncanny perspective on the scale of the fight. Eventually she told Widowmaker and Sombra that she wanted to fight as well, and while they weren’t happy about it, they understood how invested Marti was in the fight (oh they chewed Jack the hell out for it, though). Marti went on collaborative missions with adults in mentor-like roles as well as a few solo missions before being selected as the leader of the “junior strike team.” The fight would be pretty simple and straightforward if she didn’t have a weird romantic rivalry with Seye Ogundimu.

Rajeev and Samir are twins born to Pharah and Symmetra via IVF. Pharah carried them, and their sperm donor is a Pakistani Olympic Rower, engineer, and philanthropist named Kader Hiraj (Sombra may have hacked the sperm bank to give Pharah and Symmetra an edge, haha). They were born in the orca at 45,000 feet. To their credit, Pharah and Symmetra were able to raise their twins to be a bit more ‘protected’ than Rei and Marti, however, Rajeev impressed on Grandpa Reinhardt and Auntie Brigitte from a young age and loved the idea of glorious battle. Samir, the more quiet of the two, took after Grandma Ana and also became very interested in the applications of Hard-light, which Symmetra was more than happy to share because she saw it as a chance for Hard-light to be about creation rather than control as it had been with Vishkar. Ana and Pharah had a lot of mixed feelings on teaching the boys combat--they made a point of teaching them self defense, and Ana even taught Samir marksmanship (More as a target practice hobby than a combat application). Still, as with the other kids, when you grow up on a Watchpoint, it’s hard not to see the fight affecting virtually every adult around you. Eventually, with help from Marti, they learned more about where Symmetra’s past with Vishkar, and, learned that a lot of Symmetra’s architectural work was actually still in Vishkar’s clutches. At age 16, largely on Samir’s goading, they broke in to a Vishkar office in Oasis to get their mother’s blueprints back, leading to a confrontation with Sanjay Korpal and a Vishkar agent named Akasha. They managed to escape with the blueprints, but Rajeev lost his eye in the fight. Samir blamed himself, and Marti ended up taking Samir under her wing. Marti soon found that Samir’s perspective was invaluable, and he ended up as her unofficial “Right hand Man.” Rajeev eventually got a cool gold-irised prosthetic eye, and both got Wadjet tattoos as a gesture of “Yeah. We’re in this fight, too.” 

Jaime was born to Turkish-Basque parents in Pamplona, but was orphaned in a Null Sector attack at the age of 7. With so many state resources going to trying to just remain stable in the face of Talon and Null Sector attacks, the Spanish government resorted depending on the private sector for many child welfare services and Jaime was given to the custody of a Vishkar Corporation-owned orphanage. Throughout his time in the orphanage, his Vishkar guardians criticized him as “Resourceful but resistant,” “Contrarian to the point of self-destructive,” and “A little shit who needs to learn his place.” Jaime actually had numerous escape attempts over the course of his 5 years in the orphanage. His first attempt he tried to bring five other kids with him, but one of them snitched. The second attempt he whittled down his fellow escapees to two others, except one of them twisted their ankle as they were running out, and the three of them got caught trying to carry him out with them (a part of Jaime still wonders if they would have made it out if they left him). Then there was just one other... but it turned out Vishkar had treated them with extensive conditioning with the express purpose of making them betray Jaime and teaching Jaime “You are completely alone” in the hopes that that would discourage further escape attempts and traumatize him into submission. It did not. It just pissed him off and isolated him. With all of his escape attempts, he was getting better at free-running, at climbing, at breaking in, at picking locks, at pickpocketing keycards, at disabling security cameras---every time Vishkar caught him he got a little better. Two years and 9 escape attempts later, Jaime finally made it out, homeless, angry, and alone, but free. He hopped several freighters, and used the agility and cunning he had learned in his escape attempts to scavenge, steal, and stow-away his way all over the Atlantic and the mediterranean for the next two years. He had only been in Gibraltar for about two weeks when he stole a schoolgirl’s backpack and she and her friend chased him down like a fucking madwoman. It had been the first time in 2 years someone had managed to keep up with him. McCree and Hanzo were able to intercept them, basically looked at him and were like “Oh shit, you’re 14 and starving.” It started out with the offer of food, a shower, and a place to sleep back at the watchpoint, and McCree’s word that Jaime could leave the second he wanted to...and it ended up with McCree and Hanzo pretty much adopting him. When Jaime found out that Overwatch was fighting Vishkar, he wanted to join the fight as well, but quickly ended up butting heads with McCree over the issue. McCree just didn’t want to end up as “someone else’s Reyes” and wanted Jaime to stay out of the fight. In the end, Jaime ended up spending 6 months in the southwest with McCree’s godmother Willow “Billie” Quintero. Incidentally during this time, Jaime met Ashe and ended up learning a lot from her, so basically McCree’s plan for Jaime to “not end up like me” kind of went out the window. But Jaime returned to the watchpoint, significantly cleaned up, now way more cowboy-ish, and still just as stubbornly willing to fight as ever. The other kids were happy to have him on the team.

Talon Kids

Seye Ogundimu was the product of an amicable but complicated marriage of Doomfist to successful Ogundimu Prosthetics shareholder Tujuka Tejuosho. Raised largely by his mother for the first few years of his life, he was only a few months old when Doomfist broke out of prison with Talon’s help. Seye himself grew up in luxury and privilege, attending the finest schools, proving himself both a brilliant student and incomparable athlete, and being groomed to take over Ogundimu Prosthetics once he came of age. Still at the back of his mind, the fear of irrelevance loomed. Every time he turned on the news, the name of his father was on everyone’s lips. To his credit, Doomfist did try to be a good father to him, and while he didn’t exactly pressure Seye to be like him, it was one of those situations where context was everything. Doomfist didn’t need to pressure Seye to be like him... the effect Doomfist had on people, the power he had, was something Seye wanted, too. The only other option, as the son of Doomfist, was humiliation and oblivion. But Seye knew he couldn’t just try to be a carbon copy of his father, and his father was also a product of their company’s own cybernetics. Seye thus decided to throw himself into engineering, and eventually developed his own pair of high-tech graviton gauntlets (nicknamed “The Twofists” by Aedan). Once he finished with his schooling, he kind of just... strolled into the main Talon board room like “Ready to take my seat at the table!” and Doomfist was just like “Oh, you think you have a seat at the table?” And Seye was just like “...uh...” and Doomfist basically made Seye start from Talon’s bottom ranks and pretty much claw his way up. It turned out for the best though, with his ambition, Seye gained the experience needed to lead strike teams, formed alliances and gained loyalty of grunts, enforcers, assassins, snipers, and heavies, and got plenty of combat experience. Still, doubt sometimes itches at the back of his mind.

Faustine was the daughter of two major money launderers for Talon, who died under suspicious circumstances. She was adopted by Maximilien. Afflicted by a rare bacterial infection at a young age, Faustine had nerve damage all over her body and was bound to a wheelchair for the first 13 years of her life. Still, her brain was unaffected, and she proved herself a mathematical, financial, and strategic prodigy. In Talon’s “Private” sector, she served first as an intern, then as a secretary to Maximilien, helping oversee much of Talon’s finances. Frustrated with the limits of her body, Faustine enlisted the help of Ogundimu prosthetics to undergo an experimental procedure outfitting her entire body with “neuroprosthetics.” Not only could she now walk, run, and, to a limited extent fight, but she could interface with virtually any technology. By her own ambition she soon proved herself an invaluable asset in the field of corporate espionage. Almost as if to make up for her previous lack of mobility, she also gained a passion for cars, and got into amateur, then professional racing. Both her neuroprosthetics and the logos slapped all over her racing suit are a veritable billboard for Talon’s many shell companies, and Faustine herself displays a particular ruthlessness both on the racetrack and in the boardroom that, despite her more diminutive phsyicality, makes her no less a threat than any other of her Talon compatriots.

Aedan was engineered by Moira in an amnio-tank. Part of his reason for existence was not only Moira securing her own genetic legacy in the world, but also proving that you could make a stable embryo with nanite-based biology. In essence, while Reaper was falling apart, Moira wanted to know if being nanite-based was actually biologically sustainable on a growing organism... if it could exist, in a sense, “naturally.” There were five attempts before him, and all self-destructed in their first few weeks of gestation, thus making him “Subject Six.” Artificially aged to 10 years old and flushed out of the amniotank, Aedan had been implanted with false memories and brainwashing tech giving him an entire childhood and a staggering intelligence. He and Moira actually had a wonderful rapport together, they were really on each others’ wavelength. He didn’t figure out he was a clone until 4 years in and it did severely affect his trust in her. He understood, to an extent, that Moira did it so she wouldn’t just drop him headlong into an existential crisis, and in its own way, the brainwashing did give him enough of a sense of self to really develop. Still, to cope, he threw himself more into science, interning at Oasis’s labs. At age 17 he met a girl named Rei, not even knowing at the time that she was the daughter of Angela Ziegler and a target of Talon. As soon as he realized who she was, she bolted. He wouldn’t see her again until Talon kidnapped her. Repulsed at the concept of Rei becoming either brainwashed or a constantly-dissected lab experiment, Aedan helped her escape, though in the process he was forced to defect from Talon. Both were harrowed by the experience, but eventually Aedan found his place on Overwatch’s team. 

Andrea, like Aedan, was made in an amnio-tank. She was not only meant to be a more ‘martial’ application of nanites, but Talon wanted to replicate the SEP serum as well, and the only still-living source for that was Jack Morrison. So, Andrea was formed from an X chromosome from Reyes and an X chromosome from Jack Morrison so that they could have a subject with both nanites and SEP serum... there were many failed attempts, and Andrea’s project was titled “Subject 19.” Andrea wasn’t given a childhood while she was being artificially aged, rather, they crammed as much martial knowledge into her as possible. As a result, her personality is very... uh, “Terminator.” While Reyes was warned that her ultimate loyalty was to Talon, and while he was furious that his and Jack’s DNA had been used to create an entire fucking person without either of their consent, he did feel a protectiveness towards her. One of Andrea’s first missions with Talon was assassinating Aedan after his defection, but the mission failed, and even worse, Rei somehow ended up getting her dragon back in the process. So now Andrea’s pissed, and she has no intention of failing again.

 Like Jaime, Akasha was one of thousands of orphans taken under Vishkar’s wing, but she took to Vishkar’s vision like a duck to water. While not able to make the massive constructs most hard-light architechs are known for, she demonstrated an uncanny ability to make smaller constructs really really fast. This paired with a high athletic potential from a young age, slotted her in an experimental program for more martial applications of hard-light. She was equipped with a ‘Projector sword’ capable of making a hard-light blade and functioning as a translocator, but she disappeared after a fight with the Amari twins went awry and her translocator sword was destroyed. It’s not sure if she’s alive or dead, (Schrodinger’s Akasha...) but last time someone got caught in a teleporter incident like this, it was Tracer in the Slipstream. So if she ever comes back, she’s going to need a chronal accelerator, and she is going to be pissed.

[sondepoch]

IX: Neutral Route (Y/N)

Where Futures Begin

Life used to be simple for you. Peaceful. But the Savior had other plans for you, and in moments, she ruined what you thought was your one shot at happiness. Blinded by anger, you escaped the Mint Eye, but that triggered a series of events that would bring you further into the world of brothers Saeran and Saeyoung. And further into the twisted world of your love for them.

Neutral Route: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | ✔

Saeyoung’s Route: 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | ✔

Saeran’s Route: 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | ✔

MASTERLIST

The only person who knew the whole truth was V.

Saeran, the dense boy too blind to see that he was the cause of your pain, doubtlessly had no idea why you'd chosen to leave the Mint Eye.

The Savior, for once in your whole life, had no way of knowing how you had escaped and why you'd helped Luciel and Vanderwood (though, you assumed she knew precisely why you'd escaped).

Even MC, who probably knew more of your situation than most, seemed confused as to why you were readily helping what V had called the 'RFA.'

Luciel had respected you too much during your questions game to ask anything that you might not have wanted to answer.

And Vanderwood had left as soon as you began telling V your story, utterly uninterested your past.

It was nice to tell everything to someone, to have a secondary input. V consoled you as you told him about your parents, the orphanage, being homeless. And he had sighed helplessly as you expressed the utter bliss you felt during the first years of yours and Saeran's friendship in the Mint Eye. He tried to pat your head awkwardly when you told him about your primary commitment, but even he withdrew as you explained how your secondary commitment had further scarred you.

He was perhaps the only person in the entire world to know just how heartbroken you had felt when Saeran began ignoring you for MC.

The words hurt, as they left your lips, but saying them aloud was like a reminder to yourself, that this was the life you had lived and the fate you'd resigned yourself to.

"I'm sorry, (Y/N)," V murmured, pinching the bridge of his nose. "The Mint Eye has truly scarred you. I can't believe Rika would go this far..."

"You mean the Savior?" You asked, intrigued. "You knew her?"

V nodded his head, leaning back into the chair he was sitting on, "Rika...yes. I loved her. The same way you must have loved Ray."

Oh.

Well, that was one thing V didn't know.

His real name.

You refused to call him Saeran, the name too charged with emotion and pain for you to bring it past your lips anymore; and so you called him what everyone else at the Mint Eye did.

Ray.

The blue-haired man in front of you, though, seemed to raise his eyebrows every time you called your former best friend by that name.

It was almost as if he knew the truth.

Almost.

Before you could ponder the issue further, Vanderwood walked in, his mug of coffee refilled.

You raised your eyebrows. How much coffee does this guy drink?

"Is backstory time over?" He looked from you to V, self-concluding that it was. "Good. I have Luciel working in his room. He's trying to hack into the Mint Eye and access their camera feeds. Can you help him with that, (Y/N)?"

You nodded your head. "If I have a computer."

"Use one of Luciel's laptops. He always carries extra. And," Vanderwood grabbed your wrist before you were quite able to exit the room. "Be careful. I mean it."

You stared at Vanderwood, not quite sure what he meant, but the man was ushering you out of the room before you could ask any further questions.

You sighed, heading into what you hoped was Luciel's room, knocking softly at the door. "Can I come in?"

You heard a lock click, and the door opened, Luciel's confused form appearing instantly. "What are you doing here?"

"Vanderwood told me to see if I could help you. He said that you were trying to hack into the Mint Eye?" You glanced around the room, noting three different laptops open. "I worked with their software every day. My user might still be active."

Luciel laughed. "You really think they wouldn't have disabled your privileges?"

"There's only one other person who worked with me in that room and..." You let your voice trail off. "He might not have."

Luciel shot you a questioning look, curious to know more details but not pressing. "Ray," You murmured breathlessly, the single syllable answering all his questions.

You got to work quickly, managing to engross yourself in the world of code despite the uncomfortableness of your surroundings, the overly soft bed providing no support whatsoever for your back.

You glanced up at Luciel, momentarily shook as you saw not his features, but Saeran's. They really do look similar, you thought, disturbed by the uncanny resemblance. Objectively speaking, they were quite different. Luciel's hair was red whilst Saeran's was white; Luciel's eyes flecked with gold, whereas Saeran projected a mint green glare.

But, you mused, you had only met Saeran after his secondary commitment, when his hair had been bleached white and his eye color altered. Who knows how similar he and Luciel may have looked before Saeran was changed? You remembered, with surprise, that a long time ago, the edges of Saeran's hair were reddish, a physical memory of what he had told you was a happier time for him.

Maybe that was his natural hair color?

You shook your head, pushing the thoughts from your mind and got back to work. No good would come from forming conspiracy theories in your mind.

Alright, Saeran hasn't deleted my user yet, You thought to yourself, smiling. Had the boy consciously left this end open for you? No...he made it clear that he doesn't care about me anymore. So why....?

You hesitated, before inputting your password. This is too easy.

Your finger hovered over the 'Enter' key before you powered through and pressed it.

Loading...

Loading...

Loading...

You bit your lip, noting how the system was taking longer than usual to process your ID. "Luciel, I think I'm in," You whispered to the redhead, who immediately ceased his typing and came over to you, observing the 'Loading' screen with calculating eyes.

Those seconds where you didn't know what would follow were blissful ignorance, you realized later.

Gradually, you felt the laptop you were using become hot in your lap. Before long, the internal fans were whirring at what you could only assume was their maximum speed, the laptop making ungodly sounds.

You glanced at Luciel and then back at the laptop. It looked new enough; what kind of program was running in the background to cause this kind of response?

Saeran!

You realized with a start that, of course, it was his doing.

"Shit, shit, shit!" You mumbled, frantically trying to close the program, stop Saeran from hacking into your laptop. Your former friend must have been on standby, waiting for what he knew would be your first attempt in.

You slammed your finger on the power button, but the keyboard controls were locked—no matter how hard you pressed, it was rendered useless. The screen blanked, temporarily, then glitched into an audio file. No...this isn't a prerecorded audio clip. It's a live connection!

"Ah~" A voice cooed from inside your laptop, the sound distorted with a voice changer placed over it. Even with the filter, though, you'd recognize that inflection anywhere. "There you are, my sweet princess."

You winced at the nickname.

Saeran had only ever used it lovingly, as he'd gaze down at you with a soft smile on his lips while preparing to kiss your cheek.

The mocking tone in his voice made you cringe, a piece of your already broken heart further shattering.

"Sae-" You began, trying to reason with the person you once knew so well.

"Don't call me that!" The voice shrieked, stopping you. "I've...I've come to give you a warning, (Y/N). I know you're working with that...that liar."

"Who?" You asked, fingers no longer flying across the keyboard as you halted all motion to talk to Saeran for the first time in weeks.

"Don't interrupt me!" Saeran shrieked, evidently unstable. "I know how you stole MC from me, how that liar is sitting with you right now."

Only then did you notice the red blinking light beside the camera on the laptop, but Luciel responded before you did, his arm darting around your body to cover the laptop camera with his thumb. "Who are you?" He demanded, voice hard.

"You should know that, shouldn't you?"

You bit your lip. Saeran wasn't acting normal. Hell, he hadn't been normal for almost a month, but this was too much. He was acting psychotic. Crazy, even.

He wasn't him anymore.

"Anyway," Saeran began again, "I've come to give you a warning, (Y/N). If you ever set foot in the Mint Eye again, we will ruin you. Did you think taking the Elixirs was bad? That what happened to your eyes could even begin to compare to true pain? Don't return, (Y/N)." Saeran threatened, "But if you keep working with that traitor, we'll have no choice but to hunt you down and bring the Mint Eye to you."

For a moment, the room was quiet, the only audible sound being your shaky breath.

"May we never see each other again, princess," Saeran cooed, before the laptop let out a burst of electricity and shut down. You shrieked at the pulsation of heat, pushing the device from your lap and onto the bed where you cradled your stinging things.

"Who...was that?" Luciel whispered, his arm no longer around you as he turned to meet your eyes.

"Ray," You whispered, trying not to cry.

But the tears had already begun flowing.

MASTERLIST

Neutral Route: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | ✔

Saeyoung’s Route: 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | ✔

Saeran’s Route: 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | ✔

Word count: 1.7k

Notes: This story takes a couple turns over the next few chapters (I'm excited to see what you guys think of the developments in chapter 10! :D) and I'll be honest - things may get dark here and there. I want to know what you guys think of that, since I, personally, love the deranged interpretations of Saeyoung and Saeran. I feel like both characters are so multi-dimensional, and that Cheritz really only showed us the insane side of Saeran, rather than Saeyoung - but what if the circumstances were even more fucked up? I'm currently drafting out another Saeran x reader x Saeyoung and it's 10x darker than what's in here...but the plot moves faster, and reader-chan will be with both brothers, at the same time, from the very beginning. (But it will be have mature/explicit themes) Are you interested in reading something like that? Drop me a message and tell me what you think :)

Comment & Like

Next Update: 1/30/20

I do not own the rights to Mystic Messenger or any of the characters within it.

[halloweenvalentine1997]

A short story I made out of short stories I’ve written under other names.

When she died, I felt a series of perforations, hollows and bruises

about my skull. I saw her die behind static.

By the stone wall adjacent to the office supplies store, I

bewailed her, screaming,

burning myself later with the tip of a lit cigarette.

I put ash and poison on my wrist for the ones who died.

I wanted to pick a strawberry off the plant in my parents’ backyard

and once more taste its succulence. I wanted to impale my head with the

iron tip of a weathervane. Slice open my vibrant red aorta.

Seeing them all in a hole

through the light emitting

through the asylum blinds.

I myself am a corpse in a bed

in the forensics ward,

green moths on my blanket,

rotting silently in a pastel grave,

killed by medicine,

wasted by time.

If you come close enough to hear my thoughts

(like a chemically-enhanced ghost)

distort and clamor

amongst the traffic, the television,

the noise a death in a family brings,

I will let loose my hatred

like a ribbon from hair,

unraveling red Medusa strands.

I will draw more ribbons on your flesh

if you touch me,

bleed you into the wood,

hammer a nail into your heartline,

devour your fear like a shot of amphetamine

to my malevolent blood.

2013

Stacey

1.

Some of us are the river’s current, floating through life swiftly or slowly, as if in a trance of somnambulism. Some of us are a human shell at its edge, refusing to follow its pattern and be a part of it. Why follow them when you can live on the fringes of society, away from its stigmas and scrutinizing scorn?

2.

When Ellie married Samuel Barnes, the world was a rose-gold utopia. Three years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Ellie no longer felt that the chemistry they had once remained. On a windy September afternoon, when she returned to the red-brick bungalow she shared with Samuel on Hillsam Avenue, Ellie heard moans and sounds of sexual ecstasy emitting from their bedroom. Another woman was there. Ellie’s eyes instantly began to burn like hot coals in a campground grill. She examined her wedding portrait on the wall of the hallway as she moved in slow motion through it. They had been photographed in front of the church’s stained glass windows, a spectrum of color radiating behind the couple adorned in black and white.

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, blinking through the lake of sorrow in her dark eyes, and suppressing a sob, pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Another dark-haired woman Ellie didn’t recognize was riding Samuel, and when she registered the door slamming open, she turned around wide-eyed with a cry of alarm, her brown nipples in full view.

“I knew it,” Ellie told Samuel bitterly. “I knew for at least a year that there was someone else!”

Samuel looked at his wife blankly and didn’t reply, his face almost smug.

“Who are you?” Ellie shrieked at the strange woman.

“Lila Stern,” the woman replied. “And clearly, Sam doesn’t love you anymore. He loves me. He has for the entire year you suspected something was going on. We would both like you to leave.”

“Don’t dictate what I will do in my own house, you fucking homewrecker!” Ellie shouted. Lila, remembering her nudity, covered herself with the indigo comforter.

“I agree with Lila,” Samuel said. “Just pack your things and go, Ellie. You’ve been a nagging, paranoid pain in my ass for too long. You’re in need of a psychiatrist, but you won’t pay heed to my advice. All you are lately is a cold fish who’s no fun. A fucking schoolmarm. Find an apartment somewhere. Leave.”

“Now,” Lila said.

Ellie slammed the door shut and bolted down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife she could find. Tested its point with the tip of her index finger. A small blood-drop formed in the small pad of flesh. Although Ellie’s tears rained down like heated glass, she felt no physical pain.

I won’t pack my things, she thought. I have a better idea.

She glanced at the neon green digital clock above the oven. It read 1:11 p.m. It was September 24th. As she placed the knife into the pocket of her navy blue peacoat, grabbed her smartphone, scrawled a quick note and left the house, Ellie knew what to do. No more morning to afternoon shifts as a psychiatric nurse at St. Mary Medical Center’s psych unit. No more wondering when Samuel would be home from his nightly excursions. As she walked towards the river, passing the other houses, the Texaco, the railroad tracks, the boarded-up, shutdown factories, memories flashed before her. She remembered her lonely childhood, her even more tumultuous adolescence where she slept with a crowbar in her pillowcase and read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird at the edge of the schoolyard grass away from everyone.

“I wish you’d never been born,” Ellie’s mother told her, swilling red wine from a tall, dark bottle.

“I second that,” her father said, puffing on a fat cigar. Once she made it to the river, Ellie collapsed like a house of cards to the white sand, and howled the loss of her love into the godless sky. She glanced from side to side to make sure no one was watching. She couldn’t be sure if someone was for all the foliage and bushes. But she didn’t care. She sat there for the longest time, her breathing a series of hyperventilation. Samuel’s face was all she could see, then Lila’s, the two of them like a rotating holographic image. She wanted her cremated ashes bequeathed to the river. She wanted no tomb in the town cemetery. No funeral. The note she wrote with these directions was in her left pocket of her coat. Such a heavy coat for the nice weather, but Ellie was always cold. Her body, feather-boned and catatonic, slumped over a large rock and she let the tears wet it like a water nymph mourning the loss of a handsome sailor on a receding boat.

Ellie turned on her cell phone and listened to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” one last time. It sounded faint above the river’s churning. Just like the woman in the song, she too had an non-devoted, careless husband. She wept hardest at the chorus:

Where is my John Wayne?


Where is my prairie song?


Where is my happy ending?


Where have all the cowboys gone?

“To greener pastures,” Ellie said to herself. “To rose-gold utopias I’ll never see.“

3.

The clock on the wall of Mrs. Sykes’s math class ticked in time to my heartbeat. The hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I crave marijuana was there, screaming like a lacuna asking to be filled. The time for more recalcitrance (in this case, truancy and drug use by the river) was near. While Mrs. Sykes droned on like a monotonous honeybee about the Pythagorean theorem, I got up from my desk and slung my backpack over my shoulders. Her gunmetal grey eyes followed me to the door with the poster of the Power Rangers on it, all teamed up together. Always use the buddy system, the poster said.

“Where are you going, Stacey?” Mrs. Sykes asked.

“Skipping class,” I told her. “And dropping out when I turn eighteen in February. This is non-negotiable. You can’t stop me.”

Before my teacher could retaliate, I flounced out of the room, leaving the scoffing and titters of my peers behind me. I left my textbooks in my locker to lessen the load in my backpack. I unzipped a small pocket and grinned at the verdant green pot in its glass pipe.

Jimmy Stirling is the one who introduced me to pot when I was a junior a year before. He was a senior, and one of Lewis and Clark High School’s few homeless students. His dad was a cantankerous drunk and gambler who threw him out. Jimmy spent time singing songs on the sidewalk for spare change, or sleeping at the homeless shelter for adolescents. For someone who was homeless, Jimmy frequently had a remarkably full tin can of bills and change. His singing voice was a rich alto tearing pleasantly through the downtown breeze. On October of last year, he found me crying under the highway after school let out. I recognized him from my creative writing class.

"What’s wrong, Stacey?” he asked.

“My brother’s locked in the loony bin. He’s possessed. He killed Alvin, my guinea pig. Everything is falling apart, and to top it all off, Liam broke up with me this morning.”

"Man, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You every try marijuana? It might make you forget all that stuff.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said, knowing that anyone with marijuana downtown expected payment in return for it.

“That’s alright. I have some I’ll share for free. Let’s sit in my favorite place to do it.”

I followed him, listening to him sing as we walked the few blocks to an alleyway with a set of cement stairs against a condemned apartment, leading to a bolted door. He sang Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself To Live.” We sat on the bottom step . He loaded the pot into a glass bowl and taught me how to light it, how to inhale the hit of smoke without exhaling it too soon. I caught the gist of it. Suddenly, within a few minutes, everything was funny. My mind was suddenly devoid of all negativity. I was giggly, light as a tumbleweed blown by a gale of fierce wind. I felt energetic, talkative, and happier that I’d been a long time. Shortly after my day with Jimmy, I learned he went to jail for getting caught with Ecstasy tablets in his lockers. He was also rumored to be selling cocaine and heroin downtown. He wasn’t allowed back at school. I never saw him again. The flashbacks vanished when I approached the river and saw her. She was a woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a peacoat, jeans and pair of black loafers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what she was doing. The woman older than me by at least a decade, was holding a kitchen knife to the veins in her right wrist. She made no sound when she punctured them, her hand dangling over the water. I watched her bloodletting turn part of the emerald river red. It was spouting out like the slashed throat of a sacrificed farm animal. She turned and saw me when i stepped on a twig by accident and snapped it in two.

“Go away,” the woman told. “Believe me, you should be letting this happen.”

She took in my red ringlets, my sharp green eyes, my pink hoodie, my Converse sneakers. Then she went for her throat with her knife and slit it open with perfect finesse. There was a vibe coming off of this woman that insinuated I should just let her die. I could sense that her life had been miserable and mean. I sat on a rock out of sight of the dying woman and got high, thinking of her spirit rising, transcendental and free, into the sun and clouds. I thought of how the first settlers of the city I live in came here 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Before there were cemeteries, they buried their dead in unmarked graves. I thought of all the skeletons that must be under the grass of the lawns and parks, the sidewalks, the urban streets. I thought of the days of religious fanaticism, and how had I been born then, I would have been buried in unconsecrated ground for my heathen ways. I didn’t believe in god, but I did believe in Satan.

2019

Stacey

I am not sure exactly when my family died. Before they died, I was a genuinely innocent soul whose conscience burned to a crisp. I couldn’t blame myself for it, but I didn’t know who to blame because the ones responsible for my family’s death never came out of their disguises, synthetic human skin and features made to look exactly like my family members would look if they were really there amongst you. I still hear them call to me over highway noise and wind, while I’m taking hits off a meth pipe or smoking a cigarette on an overpass with dead eyes and no ache. I’ve already ached so much. Without them I am a branch breaking off of a tree. It’s hard to explain what I mean by disguises; they look so much like my family but aren’t. They could look like anyone and they’re wearing synthetic skin designed to look like my mom and dad.

I am Stacey Galloway. I was born to a family that never loved me but that I tried to love fiercely. I may have turned into a drug-addled street kid but I still wanted them to love me, anyway. I remember when I first suspected them to be dead. I was sitting in my old apartment in the living room with a scream in my ears that sounded like my mother’s emanating from my laptop and whirling through the dusty air like a trap I would remained enveloped in. I heard a chainsaw start up and then the sound stopped. It was like an audio recording that just stayed there screaming and sawing in my computer speakers. The voices told me my parents were dead and replaced by “skin masks.”

I asked, “What is a skin mask?” “Synthetic skin made to look like your parents. Exactly like your parents. And your younger brother,” a man replied out of thin air. “Someone else is wearing skin that looks like them now. Every feature of your family has been replicated, special contact lenses have been made, someone with the same height as them is wearing skin masks.”

I couldn’t see him but maybe he could see me. I hoped not. What he was saying was too horrible to want to comprehend. It’s humanly possible to do this, with the aid of a lot of fake skin and ways of knowing how the victim worked, how they spoke, where they lived, whom they spoke to. I will never know that world and don’t want to. It’s insidious enough just to live in the city I live in, gone and waking up with ice in my chest in a house that is now unfamiliar and rearranged. All I want to do is get high to forget about it, and it’s worked after awhile.

I know the police will do nothing because I don’t know how to explain it without dying or not making sense. I never wanted this.

I never wanted to lose the only lifeline I had.

So after the voices came from my laptop and told me these things, I left my apartment, locked it and went to the stone wall by the office supplies store about a mile away. I sat there in the gravel and lit a cigarette, the parking lot blurring through my wet eyes. I didn’t know why I believed what I was hearing, but I was anorexic and schizophrenic, and didn’t know how to not believe something that seemed so real. Before all this, I heard voices talk to me in my room that really were there. No one was physically present around me, but their voices reverberated throughout my walls, my silent television, my closed laptop.

“We’re going to kill your family,” said the voices.

I didn’t believe them. I didn’t reply. I thought they were full of shit.

Now I know they’re not, because although the identity thieves of my family are never in prison, the handwriting of my parents has changed, and so have the cadence of their voices. They speak in European accents now when they think they’re alone and that I’m out of earshot. But I can hear them. It’s hard to understand what they’re saying. It’s plain English, but indecipherable at the same time.  My brother’s identity was never actually stolen. He is eighteen and currently going to college. I am twenty-three and never doing anything with my life again. I’m in the loony bin.

I stare through the green and blue in the slit in the blinds and think about the house I grew up in, a green bungalow in the middle of a golden field of grass, a porch swing, wind chimes and an attic window that never lit up. My father always told me our attic was full of asbestos and that it could cause mesothelioma to inhale it after years of exposure to it.

“But,” he said, “there is no asbestos in the rest of the house. You’re safe.”

In the backyard, my mother grew strawberries and tomatoes. There was a one-car garage and a deck, a wooden fence and a glass picnic table with chairs surrounding it. I remember days, years of smoking marijuana in my room and listening to music. Grey smoke filling the room with the scent of weed, filling my lungs with blackness and my heart with euphoria. I will do that later on, in another place, when this institution is tired of me and forces me out the door like I want.

When I went home after my tantrum by the stone wall, I noticed that my parents were still there, or they just appeared to be. I saw no blemishes, no redness, nothing but them with a synthetic look to their skin, it appeared to be fake. But there was my mother’s hair, my father’s hair, my father’s eyes, their faces. Over the next several years that I lived in the house with them, I noticed that while they copied the handwriting of my parents well, it was slightly altered. They could do their signatures perfectly, but their notes to me and their grocery lists were different looking than a note would be were it from my parents. I was distressed by the way my father’s eyes were either a dark blue or a light blue. They looked like two different sets of eyes. He tried to hit me three times, but never went any further than that. I could tell he was an angry man all of a sudden, and though he looked like my father, I knew he wasn’t. He was wearing a synthetic skin mask. It looked like my father, but it wasn’t. Its skin is fake. It wasn’t real. Same with my mother. Whoever these people were, I know I need to chop them up and leave their remains to dissolve in a landfill somewhere. I want to leave my brother, Steffan, out of it. I know there’s a way to make them expose themselves. Purchase a gun, aim through the summer air at the targets, themselves and tell them, “Take off your skin masks! You’re not my parents! You killed them.”

They wouldn’t be able to reply, and if they were somehow compelled to reply and tell me what they did with my parents, I would happily kill whoever is underneath that fake human surface and tell the cops that they were serial killers who spied on my parents for years and stole their identities. Something I never wanted to happen to them or to myself. I hardly ever talk to “my parents” anymore and Steffan stays the hell away as well. I know I have to have them buried but for now, I think I’ll drown myself in writing. I haven’t explained what is going on to the psych ward, which is going to let me out anyway soon. I know how to handle it myself after hearing one of the directors of the facility tell me, “Your family is skin masks.” The sick fuck laughed to himself and I knew I had to flee and get those people who thought they could ever replace my parents, who were unkind to me but were all I had. I hated everyone else or lost the ones who mattered. I’m going back into their house and I’m going to dig up my gun and aim it, loaded with silver bullets, at their brains. I know they’ll unmask. I’m not born yesterday. I know I should do this. I would never duplicate a mask made to look like real skin and identity of someone else, and wear it over myself as though I could become that person. I’d rather swallow a bottle of pills and go to sleep forever. Fall asleep in a meadow of bluebells and Vicodin.

Before here, I hung out under a train bridge where I always wanted to follow the mysterious Mathilde, a girl whose surname I didn’t know to this day, anywhere and everywhere. She came there to buy meth and was always hanging out with older men, smoking a meth pipe and blowing the smoke up into the lights under the train bridge on the cement walls, watching it float, a white demon mask, in the illumination. I joined her once. She asked me, “Why are you doing meth, Stacey?”

“Because I’m miserable without it. It makes me feel like I could walk for miles and it feels like it’s only seconds until you’re at your destination. I feel like I can die alone on the autumn breeze and die happy.”

“Don’t die, Stacey. You’re the last one of them that should be killed.”

“Some of these bitches really should die. Last night, someone threatened me with a lead pipe after I threatened his friend with a lit cigarette after that cunt tried to beat me up. The both of them should burn up in a chamber underground.”

Mathilde smiled. “How did you know I love that sort of thing?”

“Because I can see through you. I’ve seen you in fights under here, too. Try to keep a low radar. I know you haven’t initiated any of those fights, but try to see there are real dangers here in town and don’t let anyone know where you live. I heard you lost your ID recently and had to get it replaced. It was stolen. I’m only saying this because I care about you, Mathilde. I don’t think they’ve done anything with your ID except disposed of it, by now. I think we should stick together.”

“I don’t have any friends except you,” said Mathilde.

And a few days later, I was shoved away into the psych ward, the loony bin, the human menagerie. I felt like a psychiatric science experiment, doped up with meds and lost in the dull, utilitarian rec room, playing ping pong, watching an episode of Intervention in drug  therapy, browsing the bookshelves, learning different coping skills, watching the bus park and then leave through the glass cage of windows, learning about different behavioral therapies, making collages with magazine pictures, standing in line for more meds, staring at the ceiling light reflecting from their TV, craving drugs and wanting to cast off all purity. I couldn’t stand it here any longer. I still can’t. I’m crazier and know I won’t pay for what I’m about to do, considering how horrible what these people did to my parents is. I can’t let them live any longer and everyone is buying into their disguises except and another lady whose name I don’t know. Their old friends won’t speak to them. A lady who lives me nearby told me my mom isn’t herself anymore.

“She’s not Autumn,” the lady told me. Autumn is my mother’s name.

She said nothing about my dad, but all the voices ever reiterated to me was that my dad, Roger, was killed and that I would never know where or what had been done with him. I’ll forever remember that scream and chainsaw sound on my laptop, playing through the speakers out of dead silence. What was I supposed to do with that information. Say I heard it out of thin air? I’d sound psychotic to law enforcement, mental health services and anyone listening. I can’t just ramble about this to random drug addicts, either. I can’t tell them why I’m purchasing the gun, what its purpose is, or where I’m going to kill those thieves. I am haunted by days of sleeping and screaming and all I can do is bleed Ativan and never want to wake up. But still want to avenge my parents’ murder as well. I’m getting out soon. I will sleep under the stars for a night out on the deck, and wait until the daylight breaks to kill them when they emerge from behind their locked door and into the interior of the basement.

You’ll see. They have masks that are so fake-looking they betray themselves, they give themselves away. I can find a way to move on and I know I shouldn’t blame myself, because this destruction of the family foundation was never my doing. It was theirs, whomever is living in those disguises. I’ve told no one. I can’t allow myself to be labelled as psychotic or severely mentally ill, but I have been. I can hear the voices to this day, and four psychiatrists told me that schizophrenia is incurable. The voices can only be tapered down with medications. There is no cure alive for hearing voices, for visual and auditory hallucinations. I’ve seen things too. I’ve seen people that look ghostly and transparent appear by the river, or sitting on curbs, and they vanish into thin air just as quickly as they appeared. A cop by the river, a man in a grey hoodie on the street curb. I see black shadows above me, or white or golden flashbulbs emanating in the ceiling like there’s a camera taking my picture. The voices still talk through speakers, walls and televisions. Car radios. Computers. A speaker will transmit a voice faster than anything. All they’re telling me is that my family was bad and that they deserved it. I know most people wouldn’t agree with this or think this is okay. Nothing is okay. I will never feel like I’m wholly human again.

2016

Mathilde

1.

In the woods there whispered a secret I felt compelled to follow, just to discern its meaning. It could’ve been a blessing or a curse, and still I was brave enough to leave my repressive household for those screams that normally would frighten someone, but I’ve been reduced to a frozen-hearted Banshee on the floor of a seclusion room more than once. I remember the fog of those moments and feeling more broken than even the most dismantled women could get. Screaming because it was expected of me.  

I left home when I was eighteen, dropped straight out of high school, a nightmare I never hope to relive. Age eighteen was the last time I saw a psychiatric facility. My family and me lived in a Tudor mansion in the city’s most affluent neighborhood. It was my parents and my sister Sinead, who was always the opposite of me, the black sheep.

“Mathilde, no one is screaming in the woods,” she’d tell me when I first heard the shrill, ear-scorching girl’s shriek echo from the trees bordering the park.

I ignored her and ran knocking a stone statue over, and sought out the source of feminine distress.

“Hello? Are you alright?”

“No matter where you go, I’ll find you,” was the whisper that fervently replied from somewhere in the foliage. As though the angel or apparition (whatever she was) could read my mind. I was thirteen.

Pale and whey-skinned compared to my sister, who perpetually blushed and took better care with her pretty countenance. She snagged Dale Tierney before I could get to know him; naturally someone like him would gravitate towards an extroverted floozy like my sister Sinead. He greeted me politely but tersely upon visiting our house, as I was not the subject of his interest. My sister was seventeen, and a senior in high school, while I was in ninth grade, a razor-freak and antisocial, maladjusted misfit. Sinead pretended not to notice. My cuts bled on tiles to industrial rock music. No one could stop me.

*

“Mathilde-”

“Don’t speak, or I’ll excavate your heart from your chest and incinerate it while I smoke a coffin nail,” I replied. He was chasing Dale with a bat, and I remembered a brief feeling just like getting fucked with a knife. Some bat-wielding perverts had jumped me several years ago and shoved the handle in.

“Mathilde!”

“I’ll eat your heart before I burn it over the pyre,” I snapped.

In the abandoned grain elevator building made of cement, a place I pretended was a mental institution, I executed him. Lobotomized, Never anesthetized, because I wanted him to feel like hell. I always knew there was no inferno underground where bad people like myself and this man who is dying beneath a series of rope knots. I have bound him in a length of chain as well. Years ago, long after the screaming in the foliage to the cacophonous magpies had ceased, I heard a woman or young girl wail in agony above the ceiling. The attic I never went up in because it was asbestos-ridden, and I wondered how schizophrenic I had become.

I told my father (a man who once told me “try harder” while I pretended to asphyxiate myself with a shoelace adorning the knob of my bedroom door) that I heard a scream erupt from the attic.

“Well, your intake with mental health is tomorrow,” my dad replied. “We’ll get you on the right meds.”

I hoped and prayed there was no reality behind the scream.

The house was over 100 years old; it could’ve been a benevolent or malevolent apparition.

He’s dead.

I’ll splash him with acid and dissolve him into the floor.

I see Dale watching me from the doorway all of a sudden.

“I am Hell itself,” I tell him. He seems to know the guy I offed was scum.

We laugh.

*

I wake up from my zoning out on the couch at 3 a.m., content, knowing I had no part in it. None of it was my fault. Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back album has played on repeat all night. I could’ve retained my innocence if the city’s pathetic excuse for a population cut me a little slack, but now all I have time for is complete, indisputable indifference. And euphoria over everything, hedonistic amusement showing at all times. So happy I could die in outer space. I wouldn’t even care. I used to put methamphetamine mixed with angel dust, or PCP into my bloodstream and it was then that I discovered a drug that could take away the fear of death itself. A man said, “Get the fuck out of here or face my gun.” I saw no gun to speak of and felt numb with nothing but mania in my head under the freight train bridge. I moved myself as far away from him as I could go. I was full of amphetamines under the bridge. A place downtown full of drama and drugs. I saw a man hold a knife to the throat of a man in his late teens or early twenties. I told the older man with the knife, “Don’t cut him. Just don’t. I don’t want police under here. I’m not calling them. Just…don’t,” I told him lifelessly. This was before the gun threat with the possibly non-existent gun in one of his pockets. The man withdrew his silver blade and backed off the guy, who was the only one allowing me to use a meth pipe. I felt no affection for him considering I don’t know him to this day, but I wonder how I’m not afraid to waltz out into the insidious Spokane night. A hellhole in the central eastern part of Washington state. I never liked this city, famous for its underground whoredom and criminal activity since the early nineteenth century. I intend to haunt it just like the screaming ghosts.

But I won’t scream. I’ll just make them their own worst enemies. I don’t feel I will ever really die, even when my body does.

“I hate you and I love myself, you pathetic fucking city,” I whispered to the mirror. I would place them in an underground chamber. Baths of acid dissolving useless DNA. When people like me are crossed, the night can scream and sleep will reveal what Hell can be. I’ve dreamt of being in a kennel on a plane. Jail cells on a bus with cages lining the aisle that remind me of a jail on wheels. It deserts me by the side of a road aligning a river. Sometimes I dream of treading deep water and drifting along in its waves like a damned soul. I dream of people glaring at me in dark alleys, houses where there’s nothing to watch but a woman in a peach-colored dress entertaining some businessman, drinking something out of a wineglass while she does it. An abandoned asylum being haunted by myself and others. It’s like I’m haunting somewhere that is judging me as I judge it.

I made a carbon copy of him. A clone. I drifted away on dissociative hallucinogens to the sound of his voice in my ear. I don’t care that he’s not really here.

Whenever anyone badmouths him, I feel like they should meet the Windex I pretend to pour in their coffee.

I’ll do what I please for the rest of my life.

2.

Colored balloons and iridescent papier-mâché dotted the walls on the summer evening of my sister, Sinead’s, suicide. I staggered home to Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” blaring from her room above the stairwell on repeat, a bottle of Robitussin lingering in my bloodstream. I felt high as a kite. I stared into the rainbow vortex, the littered warps of tinsel on the floor, and remembered hours earlier an argument ricocheting off the walls between Dale Tierney and Sinead. I couldn’t understand them through their slurred drunkenness. I remember a wineglass breaking against his car as it was tossed aside by Sinead.

I had never known her to fall apart.

I would have never done this to him, but I chose to keep out of his way and never tell him how I felt. I was like winter without him, cold as silver and bracing as the winds of the east. I could sustain the fantasy of him more than the reality.

He was somewhere in the house, probably, drunk in the kitchen and avoiding the drama of prior hours.

When the song played one more time, I ascended the stairs and traipsed down the corridor to Sinead’s room.

Do not turn away, my friend

Like a willow I can bend

No man calls my name

No man came

So I walked on down away from you

Maybe your attention was more

Than you could do

One man did not call

He asked me for my love

And that was all

The lines from the song tore through the air and were like bells of 80s euphoria in my ears. I saw Sinead dead with a jagged red line across her throat, torn open from a self-inflicted wound. Blood spattered the mirror of her vanity table. I never thought she had the guts to even prick her finger. I watched her white face for a moment, its waxen marble idiocy, its vacant, grey-eyed death. In extremis, she looked more at peace than I’d ever been in life.

Dale was nowhere to be found on the property. A white sheet covered my sister’s face and they wheeled her to the morgue. I would soon adorn her grave with clematises and dahlias. I would miss her soliloquies on the balcony before he entered our lives. She was so melancholic sometimes, but nowhere near as much as I.

The day after her funeral procession, a blur of black hearses and silver cemeteries, mounds of dirt cascading over her coffin, I smoked angel dust and watched the rain fall outside as I blared heavy metal from the stereo. Tears only burned once and I allowed them to fall for two minutes. Nothing could bring her back, and when Dale rang the doorbell I only told him, “She’s gone,” and closed the door in his face. His double stood behind the closed door ready to embrace me and disappear with me into the bed.

“No one should be allowed to even reach me, touch me or talk to me,” I said. I told the silent thin air. I didn’t want a reply, and I awoke the following day to a touch on my shoulder. When I turned, I saw nothing. Not a person. Not even a trail of vapor. I’d deny anyone from knowing the monster that is me.

Something in me still laughs, despite the grief.

I can see her in dreams. I can see Dale in dreams.

I’d rather daydream on drugs and live in the ruins of my old house than deal with the heinous society around me.

Broken doorknobs and glass I can’t shatter. I swallow pills and wrap myself in blankets, dreaming of a boundless, lazy sea that carries me in its midst. When I reach land, it is steep and treacherous.

I awaken in my mirage’s arms. I am an endless realm of sadism when someone poses as a threat. I once pointed a silver crescent of a knife to the skin of one of his would-be attackers. I won’t ever let go of the image Dale embellished in my mind.

I am as dead as the man in the cement left in a puddle. I am as dead as Sinead, wallowing away in a hallucinogenic reality.

I find nothing damaging although my health is rotting like the grass in the heat waves. Rotting like the relics in every yard, made of metal and plastic. I hate everyone in the world and all I wanted was to end the city.

All I wanted was to end time.

To corrupt and corrode.

To slide right out of life older than anyone had ever been.

3.

I’m only twenty-five years old, and it took me that long to finally kill someone. It was in defense of Dale while we wandered for a couple minutes when I ran into him, discovering he also had an affinity for the abandoned grain elevator where I killed whatever his obtuse name was. I knew somehow he would grace my presence that day. The would-be attacker was quite the opposite of a graceful presence; he was a storm. A storm boiled in my blood, too, and instantaneously, I made the baseball bat fly out of his brandishing arm and struck him several times. Dale Tierney grinned as he watched me debase the humanity right out of the man’s veins. I left him there to rot by some old filing cabinets.

Months after all of that happened, I no longer cry tears or cling to a crucifix on my pillow in the shade. There is nothing more to make of myself; no one will expect anything of me for a long time. Maybe never. Isolative by both night and day, I crave no presence to sustain me through the day. My parents flit about the house and are mostly not in it.

Yesterday I met a girl in a white dress with glittery, crimson-bleeding eyes in the foyer. She bid me follow her to the mirror beneath a chandelier and told me my beauty would wane.  Then she vanished into the air like an exploding star. I didn’t care and I told her to hush and leave me be. I gazed into the mirror, not as dissatisfied as I used to be. Sinead was always prettier, but I no longer envied her for it. If anything, I missed her. I never knew, in my cough syrup-induced state, what Dale had told Sinead that pushed her over the edge enough to slit her throat. She took her own life right off the planet. I will forever imagine her ricocheting into the stars, an astral angel leaving her own body and becoming a new being in the form of a spirit. The girl with blood rivers in her eyes was nowhere near as beautiful as my sister.

Whenever I think of the glow of emergency vehicles outside the limits of the mansion, I pacify myself and push away the thought as fast as it came. I know there were no witnesses besides Dale and me. There was no one to see us all meet there, not knowing one another would gather there to explore the grain elevator. Barbed wire, rusted beer cans and rejected heroin needles littered the ground at the base of the cement building. It had been shut down since the 1970s, and not a soul usually stirred in or around it premises by the railroad tracks. There was nothing to do at the place besides fuck or get stoned. In this case, I killed someone and left him for dead in the place’s basement. The bat was disposed of. Everything wiped clean. No information regarding me can be salvaged because I am a lightning bolt full of speed running as fast as I can away from everyone.

4.

I am sitting by the 7-Eleven high on acid. Halos and wings bleed out of the sky and litter the parking lot in a debris of feathers and gilded circles. I cannot scream in my house, so I went downtown to swallow an LSD-laced sugar cube and careen in the opposite direction from rational thinking. There was nothing to do but melt away along with everything else around me. I wanted the patterns of the strip mall across the street to keep melting, the neon of the bar on Dante Avenue to keep illuminating the girl beneath its sign with the darkest eyeliner I’d ever seen. She kept moving from side to side erratically, as if she were high on speed. I just can’t sustain my lifeform without drugs. I become other selves. I talk to ghosts of humans, both living and dead. She is talking to the empty air that always has answers. Her cigarette smoke forms a crown. I get bored and walk down the street, the church on its corner alit with hallucinatory flames. I think I see Sinead staring at me beneath the wainscoting in someone’s house through their window. I hate everyone except her and Dale, but whatever he said to her caused her to slice her own throat open. I can’t trust him to not make me capsize. I can’t let my iron guard down when it comes to my walls.

Do not touch me, I command every living human.

There is a star I stare at to the south that shines its light upon my shoulder blades ripping open, my veins bluer than before in my wrists. I caress them. The most important love is self-love, I tell myself. That is how I will flourish.

2019

Mathilde

1.

They found the remains of the body that I left behind in a fit of post-traumatic rage. It was a puddle of lye and hydrochloric acid, and gone was the baseball bat-wielding storm of a man after he tried to assault my sister Sinead’s lover, Dale Tierney. A few years ago, my sister committed suicide over an incident with him in which the circumstances are still unknown to me. Since then, I’ve been laying on my bed with voices compressing my head, telling me they’ll sell me and kill me. I am too strong, too fortified with indifference to care. My parents are rarely at home and I’ll never tell them. My dad would just advocate for changing the medication combination I’m currently not taking.

My twenty-eighth birthday is just around the corner. A brand new gun I purchased from one of my meth dealers shines in my hand in the starlight, full of a fresh supply of bullets. My red-lipsticked smile could enchant the devil. On top of the hill where I stand are two high school enemies, Jamie Frances and Stormy Hale. The last place I saw them was under the freight train bridge. They were sharing a pot pipe. They called me an ugly dog. That time, I let it slide off like snow from a gabled roof. Now, I’ve got the two of them right where I want them and I’m still not bothered by their comment. Underneath of them the grass blades look like ebony knife blades and my hand is on my cheap but efficient gun. It’s a silencer so there won’t be much sound when I snuff their lives out. I know how reckless this is considering anyone could have seen me out their window at 2 a.m., but I’m willing to risk it anyway. Jamie and Stormy don’t see me watching from the top of the metal stairs.

2.

I approach with quiet steps across the hilltop. Their backs are turned. My hand grips the gun more firmly than a snake’s coiling hold on a victim. Closer. They turn around. Closer still. Jamie yelps like a mouse before the gun’s bullet catches her in the head, embedded in the wisps of her brown hair. She collapses like a darted, tranquilized animal to the grass. Next, I point the gun at blond, self-righteous Stormy. I see nothing. The fear in her face screams a novel’s length of words. I fire at her forehead and she, too, is done for. It’s my lucky night that they chose this hilltop to smoke weed. I was coming here to smoke meth. I embellish each bitch with another bullet hole and calmly leave them there, the swishing sound of the gunfire replaying in my mind.

The hill. The black grass blades. An abbatoir for two girls who crossed a thin line.

3.

I go home, hide the gun and decide I’m already too high to take another hit. I open an antiquated copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel and nearly read the whole thing, satisfied that the voices in the wall have been silenced. I’ll read the end tomorrow. Before I close my red-tinted eyes at 8 a.m., I think I see Sinead standing at the edge of my bed.

“Good job, Mathilde,” she tells me. “You snuffed those cunts out just like a hurricane takes out a wooden house in southern floods.”

I love her.

I miss her.

I almost cry, but my emotions are in a graveyard somewhere. My eyes are only ice instead of liquid tears. My heart isn’t broken. I know she’ll always be with me. I know that the mirage I made of Dale will always love and caress me, even when I’m no longer young and dangerous. He’s not really here but it’s like I can see him anyway.

4.

I imagine the bones of Stormy and Jamie decomposing under the cold earth. And if they are cremated, their ash is undisturbed in urns for centuries. I think of crimson bullet holes on the hilltop of a feminine warzone. It’s the last thing I see before I fall into a pleasant slumber.

2019

Stacey

They released me from the psych ward. I have a gun in my hand. I’m veering towards the bungalow with meth reeling in my veins, my hands on a fifteen dollar loaded gun. I purchased it from a man in a trench coat in an alleyway. I open the door.

“Where were you?” asks my non-mother. She looks and sounds like my mother, but she isn’t my mother.

“It’s late.”

“Take off your skin mask,” I tell her, withdrawing the gun and pointing it at her head. “Stand up and unmask! You’re not my mother! Take that damn thing off!”

She starts to hyperventilate, and stands up. She fumbles with the layers of skin parts that originated in some clandestine building. They come off and underneath is another pale woman. I don’t study her face but I don’t recognize it. The moment I realize I’m right and that this is a malevolent identity thief, I blow her brains to pieces. I shoot her full of three holes. I only wish this were a smoking gun. I steal away into dad’s TV room and he does the same thing. He’s just an ordinary guy underneath. These two strangers are people that have lived the lives of someone stepping into a stranger’s skin. Stealing their house, their job, their lives. I’ll never sleep again. Once they’re both dead, I call 9-1-1.

“I just killed my parents’ identity thieves. Come and pick up their remains,” I tell the operator once asked what my emergency is. I tell them my address and they wheel them away. They’re covered in white sheets.  A bunch of cops tell me, “You’re not going to pay for this. They were dangerous. They were unpredictable. They could have killed you, too. You haven’t assaulted us, and we thank you for that and understand how hard this is to talk about for you. So we’re going to just let you stay in the house for awhile. Keep the gun with you.”

They leave.

I’m considered a murderer in self-defense. I’m not even going back to the psych ward because I haven’t told them my history of hospitalization.

I scribble a murderous vignette in a composition notebook that night called “Cornfield Rot.”

It reads:

1.

“Some of us are wraiths gliding through your world, blissfully unaware of your cryptic eyes staring past us, of your mouths that eject inanities. All we’ve heard is noise for years.

We’re used to it.”

2.

This is the paragraph I hear spoken aloud to me in a phantom whisper at 3 a.m., my alarm clock bathing my stoned self in a neon green glow. It’s a feminine voice, half-familiar and as faint as the illumination from the clock. My pillow is like a wreath of thorns. I eat pills, caffeine, switchblades and shards of broken teacups. There is a prevalence of apathy that spreads me in me, but what I lack is fear. What they say I lack is self-respect. I suck down another joint, draining the grass until it glows like the motel fire I will see in a few days. Lighting up the firmament with incandescent flames, fiery orange mingled with slate grey. I always wanted to rip open the sky like paper and end the world. When the Days Inn burned down from one of my lit cigarettes, I fled the scene as the firetrucks skyrocketed past me. Black flames filled the town with poison. The colors blurred through the water in my eyes. I hated everything around me since I could think, since I could speak.

Something explodes behinds me as I propel myself further away from the scene of my infantile crime. No more late-night TV, no more waking up to the same sailboat prints on the walls. No more panhandling at the hamburger restaurant next door to the Days Inn.   I’m as thin and intangible as a wisp of smoke floating through the adrenaline-suffused air. I’ll disappear into the fields and search for rotting bodies under the pines.

I imagine swallowing a handful of pills next to the concrete platform by the abandoned bowling alley, the one with the crimson anarchy sign spray-painted on it. I see a haze of red Victorian wallpaper and a knife aimed at many skulls. A flash of fire will light up in other places someday. I won’t kill myself while they recline in the brambled ruin and laugh.

3.

Sometimes I can hear the dead in the dirt beneath me say,  “I am under here.” I’ve heard them come from underneath the bus stops I wait at, the sidewalks, the swimming pool, the abandoned drive-in theater at the edge of town.

I can’t see them, but I can hear them with ears that hear nothing but bells, voices, or chaos. I can feel my pain get carried off with the breeze at such times. They give me the hope that death is an opening to a portal of the soul’s immortality.

4.

My makeup is burning off. I’m a limp, ragged doll in the corn maze getting eaten by ants. I got lost looking for the exit. I am rot given back to the earth.

2015

Janine

Amanda Warwick, age twenty-two, lay submerged in a halfway-house, painted yellow walls, dirt yard, a place to be jettisoned to. She had overdosed on methamphetamine in the heated, sunlit parking lot of multiple storage garages, her head in a hole in the cement next to an empty Halloween candy basket shaped like a Jack O Lantern. After the sharp inhalation of crystallized smoke found her brain, she was set off balance with the cathedral’s clamoring bells, the beauty of the wind’s white noise. She drenched herself in the calm black water of the lake, washing asunder the sins of Janine Crellin. Janine, with her green eyes and reddish-blond hair, a contrast to Amanda’s coarse black curls and hazel orbs, was in an infamous fixture in Amanda’s past. She had bled Amanda in the alleyway, bedazzled by the trails of blood flow, scarlet stars, mesmerizing to Janine. They were both sixteen and lived next door to each other. A red brick house with a picket fence (Janine’s) set beside a white house with green shutters (Amanda’s).

Janine was belligerent. Amanda was polite. They weren’t friends and Janine’s problem with her originated from a source unknown to her. In wild, vociferous rage, Janine left cigarette burns, several of them, that felt like surface tumors after they swelled with ash and pain.

What could I have done to you? Amanda thought.

Amanda was never wholly perceptive of what she was doing to Janine. If the evidence of Amanda’s taunts and provocations had been recorded, her remarks would have been proven to have been said aloud. On that day in the alleyway, Janine couldn’t refrain from assaulting Amanda because of Amanda stealing a plastic bag of marijuana. All they both wanted to do was get high. Janine withdrew a knife, the steel blade glinting, sawing gashes formed like lightning bolts. Gashes made while Janine sat on Amanda’s neck to choke and carve across her stomach, the spaces between her ribs where Janine slightly poked Amanda’s ligament, tearing it. When Amanda passed out from lack of oxygen, Janine began to carve some more. The thighs. The calves. A turning over of the deprecated body. More blood pools against the jutting bones of the shoulderblades.

What a passage to destitution, what a decline of descent into the laconic state of shades pulled down, the swallowing of Vicodin. Amanda was in for it. After the cutting and the burning done unto her flesh was concluded, Janine took off into the night where she was always most comfortable.

Amanda never would have been revived if not for a lone transient who discovered her with a faint pulse and numerous raw wounds, blood cold, veins a transparent blue beneath the skin on her crooked arm. He called an ambulance at a pay phone and Amanda was swept to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion, loss of blood, five broken ribs and amnesia. It took Amanda one week to recall Janine’s attack and even longer to recover her memory; her head had been hit so hard on concrete. She chose to press charges and Janine was confined to jail for eight months and later on to psychiatric care on and off for three more years. She was very troubled. Her anger seemed baseless. Amanda wondered, withdrawing from meth in her bed, if she had died that evening in rigor mortis in the snowfall, if some silver angel of death, one of grace and storms, would have absolved her of fear and taken her to another side. One separate from life where we all may go, anointed. Amanda wasn’t sacred anymore. She had survived but now she wanted to expire.  Amanda thought of Janine in a devious city, weapons hidden away, only to come out again for the dismemberment of corpses, dragged in burlap thorough a secluded forest, placed in a ditch by the railroad tracks under a pine tree, branches hanging low with needles. Amanda’s thoughts were decay, wasp stings, rotten fruit, sour wines, aspiring homicide. The residents of the group home generally ignored Amanda, but as of recently, they wanted her dismissed as a resident because of her conflict with them over trivial matters of ones full of more depth than would have been suspected.

Meanwhile, Janine was exactly where Amanda supposed, in the position of a merciless killer. She let the bodies sink into remote lakes with heavy stones tied to them, not a trace of her DNA left on their remains because she wore hair nets and was careful. She often got high and was free of institutionalization. No more secluded cages or millstones of grim prophecy. Amanda was only an attempted murder. When Janine left town at eighteen, she acquired a car to transport the bodies. In her new town, a population of nearly 30,000, she knew the civilians to target. She knew who they were.

Fanatics.

Chaos itself.

Dysfunctional child-abusers.

Every house with a shrine dedicated to only the pristine. Their gilded monuments.

So far, Janine had killed seven people.

Her victims:

1. Jay Motley, 36, convicted child rapist and wino

2. Alyssa Sparrow, 14, student, frequent bully

3. Martha Wilde, 45, child killer and teacher

4. Karen Wilder, 21, employee of Burger King

5. Kevin Fielding, 7, was terminally ill

6. Tess Moriarty, 22, bartender

7. Matthew White, 29, pawnshop owner

*

When Janine Crellin was four, she saw in her parents’ living room, a black halogen lamp with white flames flickering at the top. Either it had been left on too long, or her mother had set the fire herself, Janine decided.

“Look what you did,” said Mrs. Crellin, blaming the fire on her. She would grow up to relish those flames, pyromania impending. First, Janine burned her journals, then people.

In remote plains tied to wooden stakes with twine, gazed at by onlookers, the only ones who could hear the screams.

Amanda Warwick, in her reverie of Janine, planned to kill her. A new resident told her where she was living. Not far away.

“Here’s her address. I’ve smoked weed at Janine’s house. After what she did to you, Amanda, I would undo her.”

Seven people were dead so far and Janine still slept, tranquil at night. Never would she allow grief or guilt to disturb her. She had made to list of victims, having met them all, knowing their crimes. They had moved to the town for its quaintness and scenery as well as to carry on their traditions of immorality. Only one victim was innocent. Kevin Fielding, who was only seven years old with severe cancer. Just a needle in his vein put him to sleep and sent him, Janine supposed, to celestial firmaments.

How far could she get by being a killer? In the distance, Amanda tried to peer into the room of Janine and sacrifice her dead.

 

                               Amanda

I was born in the middle of nowhere in a Gothic castle with saints and gargoyles guarding the doorway. My father had painted blood coming from their eyes as they knelt in prayer, keeping watch over our mercenary riches. He was blond with brilliant green eyes. When I lived on the grounds of his castle, I had to be his farm slave doing yard work and keeping the flowers by the moat neat and alluring. He made me kill the animals I admired more than the humans. I will forever remember what he did to my eyes. A complicated surgery that lifted up my skin and transformed my eyes from squinty and listless to bulbous and beautiful. I was staring into an antiquated mirror surrounded by four girls prettier than  myself preparing me for eye surgery. My father grabbed me aggressively by the wrists, placed me on a cot and put me to sleep momentarily to perform plastic surgery. An eyelift, he called it. The girls giggled in their pinafores, playing dress up at girls from the nineteenth century. I will kill Janine. They looked just like her. I will kill her. We are sisters. We have the same father and I killed him when he came to my adopted parents’ house to kill me. Shot him point blank in the head. His ghost will never be able to speak to me from the dead. 

I am ready to kill this girl Janine who fucked me up when we were teenagers. People tell me to stop being so high school and grow up, but I’m not in high school or hanging out with high school kids. Just people that keep the mentality around too much and I’m bored of them. Where will I find her and how will I get past her gang of people that I know is protecting her, driving her around in cars to burn people and sink them into rivers. Nobody can find her but I know she’s the type to kill and I heard a woman discuss her and use the term “murder” and “rope.” I don’t know how to take a person down and a part of me tells me to stay away from her. But a part of her wants Janine to kill me again and send me on my way to a better place. The government wants to control my health and not allow me to smoke meth. It houses me in group homes that are unkind to me and compare my surgery to drivel compared to what their daughters with a lot of money paid to get. They got way better facelifts. I have weird eyes. Currently, I’m on the road looking for a way to find out what Janine’s doing, spy on her a little. She lives in a plain wooden house and I can see her in the window, staring out at me knowing it’s me; I am easily recognized by my eyes, even at a far distance. I’ve changed my mind. I want Janine to kill me. I can take a lot of pain. I know I won’t survive her and I can’t help but throw myself at the mercilessness of this sadistic girl.


 

*

Nobody saw Janine drag Amanda’s lifeless corpse up the three cement stairs and into her house to dispose of her with acid. She shot Amanda with a silencer the moment she saw her face loom large and moon-like at the window, open and paneless. The neighborhood Janine lived in was full of gang bangers and drug addicts that shot up and shot people driving by them at night in the street. I must be in the right place, Janine reassured herself. She planned to dispose of Amanda in a nearby landfill, to never be figured out.

2019

Mathilde

My old friend, Janine from summer camp, was just arrested. She told the news she assisted in the suicide of Amanda Warwick, a girl who Janine claimed wanted to kill her. A girl I once met under the train bridge, Stacey Galloway, is not being prosecuted for the murders of Brian Harlow and Jane Seymour, her parents’ identity thieves. It’s really sick shit. Brian and Jane wore skin masks that were completely like real human skin and the features of Stacey’s parents had been duplicated. She didn’t really know what to do about it for many years until she just went crazy. She told me about the recording from her laptop, and I didn’t know how to explain it. I had heard the voices, too. If you don’t want to hear voices, I recommend that you don’t do drugs. You will become a schizophrenic satellite. You’ll hear the world speak to you, and the people in public will say what you’ve heard your voices say when you think you’re alone at home. They can hear you breathe, they can hear you sing, talk, even think. I don’t know how to put Stacey at ease. I’m never really on edge anymore, but I can tell she is. I always wanted to make her my partner in crime. Even Janine would have done well, but I’m against her opinion that Kevin Fielding needed to die. He was just a kid, and I’m against killing kids. Apparently something leaked out and someone turned her in. She is now in prison forever.

I know the same thing won’t happen to me because I plan to stop after three killings. I wish I could free her and I wish I could ease Stacey’s pain. What’ s happened to her is horrible.

Like my old friends, June and Marcelle. Their group home has been shut down and I don’t know where they are, now. Both girls were beautiful and crazy. They had been raped by strange men who met them at the house of their legal guardians and they killed their guardians in self-defense. Marcelle didn’t pay for her crimes, but June had killed the neighbors as well as her guardian and got locked up in the criminal forensics ward for seven years. Just as I’m thinking of them, I decide to write. It’s about a girl who’s always being watched.

It runs on like this:

It was my sophomore year of college. I had just completed the first day and everything depressed me, especially the shadows of the maple leaves dancing on the wall in my dorm room.

“I’m going out for awhile,” said my roommate, Naomi Carver. I assumed she would be gone for a long while. My homely reflection stared back at me from the rectangular razorblade I held in my hand. I took in the zit on my chin, my black curls, my lackadaisical brown eyes. I turned the blade away from me and reflected the white, utilitarian walls covered in posters of new wave bands, the fake plastic red flowers in a vase on the nightstand, the Russian dolls next to it. The bottom of the blade was still covered in cocaine powder from a night Naomi spent partying at a friend’s apartment. My eyes stung. I moved in slow motion to the bathroom and ran water on my wrist in the sink. The key is not to think, I silently told myself. The key is to gash the vein and not fear what’s beyond. With the past, present and future forgotten, I made a vertical red line on my wrists, tearing into the blue creek of vein beneath my porcelain flesh. It brought forth a mild sting, like a bee’s. Blood spurted like a fountain into the sink, onto the mirror.

When I began to feel weak, I allowed myself to fall to the linoleum and wait for a bright light, a celestial set of golden gates. Before I faded out entirely, I felt a pair of arms pull me up and heard Naomi’s distorted shouting.

“Mildred!”

I blacked out, thinking it was only a hallucination when I saw a girl who looked like me staring at the scene from the entrance to the dorm room. I would see her later, in new circumstances. It turned out that Naomi forgot her phone, which is how she found me attempting to end my dismal life.

They sent me to a local hospital, where they staunched the bloodfloow and where I eventually came to. The first thing I remembered was how I used to be such a sweet little girl. I think the most soulless day I had was when I was in junior high and I burned Elena Miller with a lit cigarette, all the world curdling behind my eyes with anger.

“Where do you want it?” I asked Elena, wielding the cigarette like a knife against her arm. “Your skin, or your clothes?” I pointed the tip at the polyester of her blue blouse. At the finality of my outburst, I chose her pale wrist as the target. Elena gasped instead of screaming. I spent two weeks in juvenile detention, was expelled and transferred to another school. As I was recalling this savory memory, a psychiatrist came to evaluate me and she concluded I needed inpatient treatment in the psych ward on the upper level of the hospital. Once I was up there, I frequently threw thermonuclear fits in the blinding flourscence of the ceiling lights. The leather restraints they placed on my bed burned like fire. They were too tight. A whole week later, they sent me to a place of higher security, a building as old as the 1950s called Astria State Hospital. Located in Astria, Washington, a small country town full of orchards and horses.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I covered my bedroom window with collages and childish colored pencil drawings, once of which was a depiction of me rising above three pastel-colored buildings and into the sky. I wore a black dress and had no legs. Often, I stared up at the sky during cigarette breaks and felt like falling to one of the hollow black holes in outer space, but I was bound by the limitations of earth. My heart felt like hellfire.

“Mildred Swain should burn with fire,” said a patient with wild hair, pointing at me and taking a puff of his cigarette. I could only wonder how he knew my last name, let alone was he was saying this. I had been as friendly as possible since I was admitted into the hospital. As I lay in bed one night, a litany of insults came from both patients and staff passing by the door. They called me ugly, weak and deserving of death. I pulled the blanket over my head and refused to fight back. When I felt they were gone, I emerged from under the blanket, and saw her come in. The girl who looked exactly like me loomed, pale and spectral over my bed. She moved as though she were walking on water.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“An extension of you,” she said. “You are doomed to be hated until you die. Humans are forever to be your plight. When you go home, they’ll talk about you on the sidewalk, in the park, in the classroom. All you can do is be strong and persevere.”

She went on talking until I fell asleep. When morning came, I felt groggy. The sunshine evaporated me. I felt like a puddle of snow melting beneath my blanket. Slowly, in the midst of the empty room, I willed myself to rise to the ceiling and become united with the camera I felt to be hidden in the light above. I watched myself from the top and there was my strange twin in the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, snapping my picture with a polaroid, the black eye of the lens like the eye of an observant spider.

2019

Stacey

In the dream, I am small enough to fit into a crawlspace. I cannot hide from my mother’s red wine in our barren living room that is as black as a power outage, as black as my rotten innocence. My mother picks me up and takes me to the car, says it’s time to go, I need help. She parks outside a stone clinic and leaves me inside. I cry out and am told to be silent by a stern receptionist. Two white coats hold me down and drag me to a white room with a thirty-something redhead in it. She has painted the word “borderline” on the wall next to an immaculate, gold-framed mirror. When we face it to see our reflections (mine child-like, hers much older), we are propelled from its shattering glass by a defiance of gravity. We coil up and writhe, possessed by demons. Satan lets us die together, which is a blessing compared to living in the hospital. I close my eyes one last time without seeing my mother. I only see the broken glass, the blood on the wall (bright as an ambulance light), the linoleum beneath my cheekbone. I am a dead husk of a human determined to haunt the city I was born in. Life grows black again. I don’t scream.

Marcelle

2012

Marcelle Trahern was raised by two cunts with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term derived from the original Munchausen syndrome itself. If one has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, it means a caregiver (in this case, the godmother of Marcelle), chooses to refrain from giving their charges the right health, supplements and nutrients to keep them alive. In fact, they make them worsen with sickness and degradation. Subtly, so the good doctor won’t notice they’re causing the illness for their charges. The first bitch had decided to poison her subtly instead. Marcelle’s godmother favored ipecac. In their small village, church was a mandatory service where all girls had to see the Lord Jesus Christ be praised or crucified on film. A montage of filmy sunlight and a golden cross shone from an array of manipulative Christian imagery, perceived on an overhead projector.

Marcelle went every Wednesday and Sunday in a grey stone building with elaborate brick arcs painted black outlining the stained glass windows. The broadcast room was like an insidious revelation opening up a nightmare to the eyes of sensitive Marcelle, without the abrasive steel to pry a pair of eyes open. Especially when the topic was eternal damnation or the crucifixion of Jesus. It was like a metaphorical film lobotomy. They just stayed peeled open, unable to shut or fall asleep for any reason. Nanny Cravat insisted she stay awake. She favored those antiquated neckbands.

The girls sat around her in stiff, ungraceful lines, backs upright or slouching depending on the girls’ preference to posture. Ms. Winifred Scarlet, who had been killing off children in her home for three years, took Marcelle in at eleven years old the year her mother died and Marcelle was never able to know the woman by heart in a way her memory could rely upon. Winifred was a registered foster mother and she was ailing. Marcelle killed her foster mother (and made the police and medical examiner rule the death as a suicide). She sang “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in her choir voice while spoon-feeding Winifred “sugar in a spoon bowl, so the medicine goes down.” She gagged on the Drano and no longer said the words Marcelle needed to hear: “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “You should be grateful,” “Why didn’t you try harder?” Winifred was involved in a canned television broadcast again for that last comment, a boring, banal comedy Winifred needed to have Marcelle watch with her before bed in 2011.

On March 24, a clear, shiny spring morning, Marcelle knew that she had no one to rely upon any better by the time the next foster mother came around to raise her. She was a distant harridan of a woman with a thin, pert mouth shut tight at church and open like a wrathful shrew to chastise Marcelle at home.

“See that window?” said Nanny Cravat, her second godmother: a malevolent, Puritan woman with brown hair in a frizz and vacant eyes.

“You’ll be lucky if God saves you when you fall out of it. It’s all shit. God’s for nothing. But I fear hell just as much as you do. All we can do is try to believe and see if God listens.“

In her dress made for church, the stiff lace a cascade of black and white. A knee-length skirt and pilgrim collar. Church uniform. The telepathy Marcelle heard: “devout truths”, “deep breaths,” “if you need to console yourself, use these coping skills.”

All the things Marcelle picked up on by reading minds that she could never express piled up in her head and she was crazy.

“Marcelle may be crazy,” said a soft-voiced man about to make an assumption based on what he saw in elaborate artwork in a journal: a drawing in Bic pen, of a realistic-looking Nanny Cravat swallowing a spoonful of something, reminding him of milk poisoning and a scary story his mom sometimes read to him at night in his portentous childhood. Marcelle’s self-portrait was accurate. She overheard the bell ringing in the distance beyond her thoughts of his voice by the cathedral  bells that rang with worship, clanging vehemently. When Marcelle got home after spring choir ended, she planned the Drano death. It was under the kitchen sink, meant to mingle with Nanny Cravat’s cup of milk.

“Nanny, I  hope you enjoy your milk,”

“Come, have a sit-down,” said Nanny to Marcelle. She set the glass of milk  in front of Nanny Cravat, who was wearing her red velvet blouse and white cravat.

“Put that milk on the table carefully. Don’t spill it.”

Time to die, Marcelle wished. Down the throat went that blue liquid permeating Nanny Cravat’s esophagus as she choked. The only number Marcelle knew to call wasn’t an option, and she had to make her own way in the world feeling like humans weren’t worth anything and we’re all just partially alien. Meretricious, cheap people.

Marcelle wanted to die in outer space. She left the raw death and agony of Nanny Cravat  slumped over on the table after she choked. Marcelle became the third eye, the third shrew, the ultimate survivor of destiny and doom.

June

2014

My lucidity died in the house I grew up in. I was raised in an arcane Hitchcock mansion with a cupola. There were no servants due to my guardian, Scarlett Freeland’s, illicit exploitation, and her fear of it being discovered. Therefore, she let everything collect dust. Her mansion was tall and monumental. It reminded me of a Halloween sticker decoration one puts on a windowpane. On our street, Cupola Avenue, named for the cupolas on each house, I suffered many seasons of violent turmoil at the hands of Scarlett. She owned a video camera that she balanced on top of a tripod and told me it was my “surveillance.”

On several occasions, at the age of thirteen, I was raped by a multitude of strange men that Scarlett invited inside. She would put 80’s hair metal on the stereo while they raped me and she sat in a red armchair, smoking numerous cigarettes. Sometimes, I wouldn’t get raped and instead it would be my deed, according to every person in the room, to kill a person in front of me. I’ve killed 37 people in Scarlett’s house, each one dissolved with acid in the cupola on film, and killed on film as well, before being doused with acid. Each time this event happened, it was recorded and burned onto a disc to be viewed on Scarlett’s TV.

There were only two other houses on Cupola Avenue: the Tarringtons’ house and the Miltons’ house. Clyde Tarrington lived in a two-story house painted white with black shutters. He lived there with his daughter, Blithe. On their front door was a poster of a symbol that held a cryptic enchantment for me: a cross with an hourglass in the center of it. It always reminded me of their time running out. I had wanted to kill Blithe for so many years. I felt her to be prettier than me with her lustrous black hair and piercing green eyes. She always loved to remind me of how I would have been killed by my twin sister, Adele, had she lived. In the womb, she was the alpha and I was the omega. On a rainy day when lightning split the sky into slices, Adele and me were playing dress-up with red velvet gowns and silver high heels. We were twelve. I convinced her into a “baptism,” holding her head underwater. Despite my carrying the title of the omega twin, my newfound strength prevailed and she soon ceased to breathe.

When Scarlett found out, she didn’t seem to care. Neither did the rest of the neighborhood; they were always killing people. We melted her body into the floor of the cupola with acid.

My name used to be Lillian Freeland, but once my twin was dead, I uncontrollably became someone named June. She came to me, like a doppelganger, looking exactly like me, but bearing no evil intentions.

“I am here, and I am not leaving you,” June told me. I regret killing Adele despite her greater knowledge of schoolwork. We were both homeschooled and Scarlett never told us what she did for a living. I learned later on that she worked for the federal government.

My liberation from Scarlett’s persistent and unyielding abuse came on the day of my eighteenth birthday, April 17. After she made me read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot” to two men, who raped me when I was done, and when they had left, I waited for Scarlett to go upstairs and watch one of her movies. I sauntered to the garage and snatched an axe, the same one Scarlett used in satanic rituals when she was young. I made the predatory ascent up the stairs and into her bedroom. Then, as though she were a chopping block and as though her sanguine bloodflow was sacred, I swung the axe down upon her skull. Hard. She was watching The Caretakers, a black and white movie about women in group therapy. She fell to the side, writhing in pain. I went to the front of the chair and brought the axe down upon her back until her spinal cord was severed and her tenebrous heart gave out. I left her there and ran back downstairs, screaming the whole way.

Next, I opened Scarlett’s freezer and grabbed a carton of Marlboro 100’s, lit one, and burned the subtle swastikas hidden in the patterns of an Oriental rug. I gazed around me, took in the contents of the living room: the Kit-Kat clock shaped like a black cat with bulging eyes, the white topaz chandelier, the gutted hearth, the period furniture. I decided it was time to leave my home behind forever. I grabbed a pink backpack and shoved the carton of cigarettes inside, along with a drawer full of working Bic lighters. I threw in three shirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, a journal, a pen, and a gun. I topped off the luggage with some rubber vampire teeth I endeavored to save for a malevolent purpose: murdering Blithe Tarrington.

I put my hand on the gun as I walked outside, holding it securely within the large pocket of my forest green trench coat. To my knowledge, the Miltons across the street were always killing people (Scarlett always said so.), but I didn’t know how they felt about Blithe. I didn’t care. I rang the doorbell, staring down the cross and hourglass on the door’s poster. Luckily, Blithe answered the door. I pulled out the gun, and her face became as stricken as one being lashed with a switch.

“Get inside,” I gnashed, pushing her onto the floor  and slamming the door behind me. “And don’t get up. Don’t even talk.”

She talked anyway. “Lillian, please don’t kill me. You don’t have to - “

“But I want to, and I can, and I will kill you and nothing will ever be able to resurrect you!”

“What’s going on with that Freeland bitch? Why is she in my house?” screamed Clyde, who had just descended the stairs. I shot him in the head, and he slumped over, instantaneously dead.

“You’ve been killing people in this house for years, and it’s time to go!” I vociferated over her harrowed wailing. “Now, put these in.” I unzipped my backpack and handed her the rubber vampire teeth.

She stared at me, wide-eyed with feral fear. She did nothing. She said nothing.

“Your mouth, dummy. Put them in your mouth.”

I handed her the teeth, and she took them from me and placed them over her own toothpaste commercial-white teeth.

“You look the very caricature of Halloween,” I said, laughing as I blew out her brains. The remains flew against the wall and painted an inkblot test of blood smears everywhere. I walked into Blithe’s bedroom after I was sure she was dead, and saw a purple canopied bed, a bookshelf filled with many classic and contemporary novels, among them: the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Dreiser, Jane Austen, Anais Nin, D.H. Lawrence. I grabbed Nin’s House of Incest, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and left the house.

I didn’t make it very far. I was down the road not very far when I was arrested.  I always feared them coming for me. I fell onto the asphalt, scabbing my knees and not feeling it. I denied what was happening. I muttered to myself incoherently.

“We know you killed some people, Lillian.”

“My name is June,” was all that I said before my mind shut off and I suddenly woke up vegetative in a jail cell.

*

Eventually, I was labelled not guilty by reason of insanity. The police found Scarlett’s recordings and the recordings that the Miltons and the Tarringtons made of their own killings when I told them about the neighborhood, and what Scarlett had done to me. One day, I will get out of the forensics services ward, where the criminally insane are housed. I have spent many nights here, remembering the death and ravagings, my hair coiling like Medusa’s on the pillow of the restraint bed, the leather straps leaving black bruises on my wrists. Every night, I pray to God and Jesus and all the saints that ever were that I’ll be forgiven for my killings, and be accepted into a realm I can call heaven.

My lucidity will live again, resurged.

2017

June and Marcelle

Cathleen Carter

She led me to the house with the cupola

Where she stabbed me in the backyard

Blood flowed glowing red from my pale skin

Staining my white blouse

And my throat ached

I haunt the halls

And my voice resides within the walls

I’m a phantom floating through the inmates

Living in my killer’s group home

Eyes stare from the cupola

I don’t know who saw me die

I’m buried under a thorny bush

Bones hidden by woods and tiny baby teeth

She scattered

Covering my grave with evidence from her recent infanticides

She stabbed my baby

And cut me for giving birth

In her bed

My lover carved our initials in a tree

And we’ll always be in touch

I eat strawberries off a plate in his room

We hung a dreamcatcher to capture his nightmares

Of me being tortured by her ringed hands

Bag placed over my head

Cathleen Carter, the snuff film queen

(I have killed many)

Choking on film reel

Always having to be polite

In the morning light drinking tea

Deirdre, the killer, laced it with GHB

Putting me to sleep

Separated from my lover

Pillow soaked in warm tears

His tears and mine

We drink them in vials and kiss under stars

Soon he too will be a ghost

Swallowing pills on a blanket in the cemetery

Deirdre will find us and take our picture

Maybe she’ll capture my phantom on camera

*

With curiosity, Marcelle Trahern saw from the window Deirdre Carter and her niece, Cathleen, arguing. The infant was dead, that much Marcelle knew. Cathleen Carter had given birth to a baby girl now with stab wounds, lying in red and white rigor mortis in her crib with blood on the teddy bear, in the dolls’ hair and on the lampshade on the side table. Most of the inmates, as they were known due to the group home’s strict rules, were gone for the day at an event and June Freeland was downstairs Deirdre Carter quickly took over June’s life after leaving her post as nurse at the asylum where June was housed. June was incompetent to stand trial, declared insane and sent away for seven years. She had returned to Scarlett Freeland, her former guardian’s, mansion to live. It had been converted into a group home for women with trauma issues.

All thoughts of June vanished from Deirdre’s mind when the knife blade shone in the sun, an ominous metal glint that suddenly penetrated the naked pearl throat of Cathleen. She collapsed to the grass in the fenced-in backyard and as the earth was fresh from the rain, Deirdre found a shovel leaning against the toolshed and dug a fresh grave. Marcelle had never liked Cathleen much because she was always harping on the girls to follow the rules: don’t smoke dope, don’t invite boys over without permission, etc. She had gotten herself knocked up by Miles Sutherland, and Deirdre highly disapproved of him with his leather jacket and cigarettes. Marcelle only saw him once when he drove to pick up Cathleen for a date, his handsome face a silhouette in the dark window. Marcelle decided to keep quiet about the death. She watched Cathleen be tossed into the grave liked a broken doll. Deirdre had tied a plastic bag over her face and stabbed her in the chest. For ten minutes, Marcelle watched Deirdre extract Cathleen’s heart from her chest cavity, holding the dead, lifeless muscle in her palm, her calm blue eyes narrowed and focused on it like a witch in a black magic ritual. June suddenly appeared beside Marcelle.

“The bitch is finally dead,” Marcelle said, breaking her vow not to tell anyone. “What is she going to do with the heart?”

“I don’t know,” said June.

The girls, both in their twenties and too old for Cathleen’s trashy immaturity, watched with morbid fascination as Deirdre snapped a polaroid   (after turning off the video camera)

of Cathleen’s corpse before throwing dirt back over her and packing it in. She laid stones over it and from her pocket, she took something white and scattered it over the grave. When she went back inside the house, Marcelle and June left the cupola to inspect what Deirdre had spilled. Six tiny teeth in the front yard, taken from a toddler’s mouth. A previous killing. When the cops led Deirdre away after June called them, June put on a nun habit and took over the house.

They heard Cathleen’s whispers of love for Miles and reassurances that Deirdre was gone. They buried her baby in an infant cemetery labeled merely “Infant Cemetery” in iron above a fancy gate bearing an entrance to the graveyard. June called the cops by her own policy, knowing hiding a murder is wrong.

“Marcelle, she’s a psycho, bats-in-the-head bitch and she could have come after us, too. It’s better that she’s gone.”

“I guess so,” said Marcelle. her  mind on Nanny Cravat choking on her milk laced with Drano. Marcelle had fled the world of Christian broadcast rooms and the sex trade. Nanny Cravat had invited several men over to force themselves on her, and she was glad she couldn’t remember it in great detail. Dissociating was so divine. Girls wore meretricious makeup to school and church and their naked limbs stuck out from cheap, mall-bought

miniskirts. Marcelle would have given them all Drano in a cup, too, if she knew how not to get caught.

But she was far from their bratty voices now, with June Freeland, Anika White and Marilyn Sanders to keep her company. In the meantime, the house became less of a group home and June began paying the monthly bills with Deirdre’s leftover income found stashed in a safe in her room. Marijuana smoke soon filled the rooms and the girls giggled at the enhanced cartoons on the television, making funny faces at the ceiling. Then, Cathleen appeared in the mirror behind them in her prom finery, staring sternly with her stab wound, The blood withdrawing and disappearing into the gash. Anika screamed. When the others asked what was wrong, Anika revealed what she saw.

“You’re too high,” Marilyn said, running a hand through her rainbow hair. But Cathleen stood behind them, strawberry juice the color of blood on her mouth, back from Miles who contacted her spirit and she came when summoned and manifested herself in the flesh.

Cathleen

My baby is gone

In an infant coffin underground

I wear black to mourn her

And place flowers on her grave

Miles embraces me in the cemetery

Where we have sandwiches and milk

He marvels as the food disappears from the plate

And the milk drains from the thermos

He can see me fresh as daylight

A rose haloed in gold

I am fragile dust and fairy winds and gilded blond hair

They find him dead the next day

By the gravesite of his daughter

His lips blue from the pills

His hair plastered to his head

In the spring rain

His indolent heart gave out and from her prison, Dierdre laughed at the television giving news of Mile’s suicide and the note he’d left:

I’ve gone to be with Cathleen, who drew me into hear heart forever, and our daughter Melanie’s, too. Dierdre couldn’t kill my love, though she tried very hard.

I saw Deirdre from the corner where I stood, staring at ladies dressed in orange watch the television and play cards. Now that I’m dead, I can go anywhere I want to in the world. I’ve explored the moors of England and I’ve been to Alaska, the northern lights illuminating the night sky and I didn’t feel the cold nor the heat of Death Valley, California. I flew and touched the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Anything can be done in death, it’s like magic is yours after you die,” I told Miles.

Down he went with me and they buried us side by side. We go into earth, then Summerland, then back again. When I haunt the group home, I conjour nightmares for the girls who tormented me, especially June Freeland who told me I looked dressed as gaudily as she had for one of the snuff films her guardian she murdered made her do. I know many murderers: the worst of them being June and Marcelle. I read the evidence of Marcelle’s Drano murders in her journal and her revelations of sex with strange men who came when called by Nanny Cravat, Marcelle’s godmother. But something told me not to be a hypocrite and tell on her. I never had a mother like these girls. She abandoned me on the doorstop of St. Xavier’s Orphanage and Dierdre, the nun (she was a devout Catholic before she moved on to work for the hospital) who knew her sister’s face and knowing I was her niece, took me in and after years of her impossible violence and nagging, I am finally set free and better off, even if by her hand.

The Ouija Board

“Miles committed suicide,” said Marilyn to Marcelle. “It’s on the news.”

“Oh,” said Marcelle. “I bet Cathleen’s ghost dragged him down with her. Anika keeps seeing her everywhere and is freaking out.”

Anika was fast asleep in her room, having taken a dose of Haldol to help the hallucinations.

“But you aren’t hallucinating,” Cathleen had insisted when she came to Anika late at night. Sometimes she wore a nun habit like June, who had taken to smearing on red lipstick and blaring Courtney Love from the stereo. Sometimes, she sang opera with a crucifix dangling around her neck, and quite good. The girls loved listening to her sing her songs of lovers who lost their loved ones like Miles and Greek tragedies where Persephone became trapped for six months in Hades with the Lord of the Underworld and six months on earth. Gods and monsters fighting their battles to the death. The Ouija board they used to summon Cathleen worked. Anika revealed the messages to them of their conversation she heard in her head. Anika directed the board marker’s movement in their hands.

“Cathleen, where are you?” Anika asked, finally facing her fear of the unknown.

“In Summerland, with Miles,” was the reply.

Anika spelled it on the board and all were shocked.

“I knew it was real, like heaven but better than clouds and angels playing harps, waiting at the gates to judge you,” Anika said. “In Summerland there is no judgment, or pain or violence. Just love, laughter and magic. I learned all about the theory of the afterlife in Summerland from a Wiccan book I found in the used bookstore downtown.”

“Are you sure it isn’t fake, Anika?” Asked June, who doubted the paranormal.

“I heard her voice, just the way it was when she was alive!” Anika stormed out of the room, offended by June’s remark. The Ouija board remained still. Out of all of the girls, Cathleen found Anika most vulnerable to her presence. Cathleen enjoyed scaring them a little. But she never spoke to June, who ascended the staircase with a boy from the nearby prep school, holding a candlelabra and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. Marilyn played 20 Questions with Anika in their room and listened to her account of what she read in Marcelle’s journal.

“I saw too,” said Cathleen. “She sent people to their death same as insane June. I wonder what sort of terrorism Dierdre endured at a young age.”

“Probably witnessed something violent, or had no parents like you. I didn’t,” said Marcelle, who stood behind them listening and hearing Cathleen’s voice just like Anika.

Deirdre

High on a precious hill stands my home for abandoned, unstable girls

I can’t return to it

I’m in prison garb in the women’s prison surrounded by barbed wire and a river runs past, saturated in pollutants spilled by the nearby plants and factories.

I used to be a nun, then a nurse, mercy-killing the elderly, smothering infants and pretending they died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), immune to the wails of inconsolable parents informed by the doctor in the corridor.

I spent my early childhood in a ramshackle farmhouse in Louisiana, smothered by my mother and her hot back coffee thrown in my face. How her knives danced before my eyes. When my baby brother died when I was fourteen, they thought it was SIDS. I hated babies. My mother told me to kill it, it was a sickly, weak little boy and wouldn’t last the year. I fed him to a hungry feral cat and watched the skin ribbon over her bones from the cat’s carnivorous snacking. My mother, a widow always in grey with shadows under her eyes the color of her sweater, watched the baby’s decomposition.

I felt an affinity for June the most out of all the girls in my home. We had killed and had bad mothers who abused our bodies and sucked our souls out through crazy straws, leaving us bereft and insane. I couldn’t plead insanity the way June could, though.

I wish I were out of this stale air and away from these women, with their murderous stairs and rancid shouting, their fights that lead them to solitary. I won’t put a hand on these women. I won’t go to solitary.

June

I murdered this whole neighborhood besides Clinton and Mary Milton and their twin son and daughter. The parents went to prison for murder, and the kids live somewhere else now. The house is vacant.  I never enjoyed what Scarlett made me do. They housed me in an asylum, where I spent the majority of my time in restraints staring at the ceiling with vacant eyes and Medusa coils in my hair that snarled on the pillow.

I dreamt of black widows biting me and in my dreams, Deirdre, who worked there at the time as a psychiatric nurse, didn’t tend to my bites that reddened on my hand. When I wasn’t dreaming, Deirdre liked me. Now she’s in prison where she belongs. I no longer handle nitric acid or kill people or endure stiff baseball bats tearing open my cunt.

Scarlett watched my defiling from behind the camera, recording the rapes in the dark room. I was smothered in her cellar and remembered it, screaming, spitting out the pills, refusing to take them. Deirdre heard my whole story, decided to move into the old Freeland estate and take over as group home director. I moved out of my trailer to stay there. Weird I should live here after killing someone here. I used to hallucinate Blithe, who I shot and killed, but I don’t see her lately. I dismiss Anika despite my own experience. Sometimes, the ghost of Cathleen gets old as a topic and I think all should  remember the living and forget the dead that can’t reach us, gone to nether realms.

But what if she was there? What if she can reach us?

I’ll never know. One day I’ll be a ghost myself. I have faith that there is something prettier to see than this insidious earth after our bodies run out of time and our souls transcend.

There must be something better than what I had, what Marcelle had, what Cathleen had, what all of us had.

I think I just heard a voice. Is it the still, small voice of God, or is it a spirit coming from some divine region, holy or unholy?

I am a combined angel and demon. I want to drink absinthe and sleep with that voice.

Mathilde

2019

I stood in the calm, obsidian woods and gained my frail balance against a ramshackle cabin. Wolves dashed out of the shadows, ignoring me and veering towards a carcass in a wildflower-bordered clearing. I was pretty certain it was human. Then I saw a ski-masked perpetrator, blood channeling from his disguise. He offered me a bouquet of purple irises in his scathed left hand. In the shunning woods, feeling like the ghost of someone gone, I tore my lavender dress on a nail in the cabin’s wood. I declined the masked monster’s offer. Suddenly, I was pulled inside by someone behind the front door. I cried out, closed my eyes and could hear the door shut and bolt. Once the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered on, I saw my rescuer’s face like a sanctified revelation. The kindest pair of dark eyes I had ever seen. My speech failed me but his did not.

He told me, “Nothing will kill your equilibrium while I’m here. You no longer have to claw at wooden walls are cry into a pillowcase. Notice that soon the sun will come up and figuratively, I’ll give you a pair of rose-colored glasses to view the world through. A better world than this.”

“I-“ I began.

“I love you,” he said.

Of course, he was handsome and I coveted him highly.  He pressed his perfect mouth on mine and carried me to bed. After the sex and the sun-glow, he told me he’d be my dreamcatcher, and if not the destroyer of my enemies, the bane of them. The unidentified mask never showed up again. We soon left the cabin to live in a castle. He taught me to love instead of maim, to be tender instead of destructive. I learned to give myself away to a man created by the sparks of imagination itself.

*

I ease myself out of bed after this dream and take another hit of glass. Something to make the world glitter with white ice and a way to make the hell inside freeze over. I see him blur on every bridge, every riverbed, every highway. There is no hallucination more powerful than him. Nothing will perforate me and make me stop haunting this city. Nothing will make me bleed out onto the sidewalk because I am too fast for the blade, the bullet. The smoke flows through the open room and hits the sun. I wake to sirens piercing the quiet. I’m the cause of them but I know their glow won’t alight on me and swallow me up.

[trash-bag-of-stuff]

Potential - Chapter 1

Previous chapter // Next chapter

Word count: 2431

___

After the death of my parents, I was forced to live by myself on the streets. I could have stayed at the ruined house and waited for the police, but they would have just put me into foster care or an orphanage, and who knows what that would’ve brought. It was easier to go it alone, relying on stealing from the bins outside restaurants and the local soup kitchen. It wasn’t a comfortable life, but at least it was a life.

On that particular night, I was almost ready to pass out from exhaustion. My temporary hideout was an abandoned warehouse on the edges of the city, but the owner had finally decided to do something useful with it and rent it out. When I heard the trucks arrive outside, I grabbed what few possessions I had and ran until I was far enough away to be sure they wouldn’t find me or realise that I’d been living there for the past two months. Being the anxious boy that I was, I was always prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. After walking for about an hour, I was completely and utterly lost.

Tired, hungry, and scared, I started to check my belongings in an effort to calm down. Water bottle, extra socks for warmth, a sheet of cardboard I was using as a bed, and… nothing more. That was my breaking point. I was really and truly homeless. The tears that I’d been holding back since the fire that took everything started to flow. Choking sobs wracked my body as I staggered into an alley to hide from the world, only it wasn’t as empty as I’d hoped. A child, looking to be about my age was standing there, digging through a pile of scrap metal and disposed electronics. And they were staring right at me.

“Who are you?” they asked. I didn’t answer. “I don’t bite you know,” they said, with a hint of a smile.

“How do I know that?” I replied with as much dignity possible with tears streaming down your face. That earned me a shadow of a giggle .

“The name’s Robin. Nice to meet you.” They extended their hand. I stared at it as though it had teeth, but reluctantly reached out to shake it, but didn’t give my name. “No answer? That’s not fair.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you my name!” The loud outburst made me flinch. “A name for a name.”

“No.”

“Well if you won’t tell me your name, then at least tell me what happened.” Robin said as he gestured to North's missing arm.

“Why should I tell you?” I wasn’t too excited to share his life story with a complete stranger.

“Here’s an idea,” they paused to make sure I was listening, “we can discuss it over dinner. My brother's home, he can cook really well.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Do you always ask so many questions? Just help me take some of this stuff back to the apartment.”

It seemed too good to be true. Dinner and the possibility of a friend? And for the cost of carrying a few scraps? I smiled back.

“My name’s North.”

  “How do you afford this place?” Robin’s apartment, well technically it was their brother’s, was huge.

“Family privilege,” Alex said matter-of-factly. Before I could ask any more questions, a plate of steaming cottage pie was placed in front of me. It took all of my self-control not to just dig in with my hands. It had been so long since I’d had a warm meal, seated at a table in a proper house.

“Go ahead. Dig in.” I didn’t have to be told twice. After barely getting enough food to survive and going to bed hungry almost every night, I was starving. I had seconds but was too scared to ask for thirds even though I could have finished another helping easily. I was glad that I hadn’t eaten more though when Alex brought out three small servings of creme brulé. We ate in silence, only the clinks of our spoons against the glass could be heard.

“Thank you. That was incredible.” I wasn’t sure just how casual I could be around these two who had welcomed me into their home so readily, so I stuck with being polite.

“It’s his Talent,” said Robin, almost bouncing in their chair. “He’s a chef at The Gardens.”

His Talent? That meant that he was rich enough to have it unlocked. And working at The Gardens, one of the most expensive hotels in the entire city? That means his Potential was probably really high and his Talent was strong, so it probably ran in the family. I was dealing with a rich and powerful family. What would they say when they heard my story? Probably kick me straight back into the streets. After all, who would ever want to be associated with a reject?

“I held up my end of the agreement. Now it’s your turn. What’s your story?”

Fear started to fill my head like a thick fog, but I would never go back on a promise. My mouth had dried up and my tongue felt too heavy to speak so all I did was turn around and lift up my shirt to show the dreaded scar.

“Wow.” The response was so quiet, I wasn’t sure I had even heard it. The silence that followed was deafening, pounding on my ears until I couldn’t take it. Mumbling a quick “Thank you again. I’m sorry,” I started for the door.

“North! Wait!” A hand grabbed at my wrist. “Where are you going?” It was Robin. They looked so confused. Why? Surely, they didn’t want to be in my company any longer.

“You know who – what – I am now. So, I’m leaving.”

“What? Why are you leaving just because we know? If anything, that makes me want you to stay. I’ve never met anyone with-”

“That’s why! Every time someone finds out it's pity that keeps them there until they get sick of me!” At this, I started to cry again, which only fuelled my desperation to leave.

“It isn’t that. You just seemed… scared. And we used to be scared too,” said Robin, gesturing to their brother and themself. “After our parents disappeared, we didn’t know what to do. But we got some help and now look at this place! It was falling apart the first few months. But with that little bit of help, look what we managed to do.”

“I think he’s trying to invite you to stay with us,” said Alex. He’d been silent until then. I looked at Robin, then Alex, then Robin, then Alex then settled on Robin.

“You’d really do that?”

“Of course. I don’t want anyone else to go through that. But you look like you’ve already gone through that and more. We have a spare bedroom, come let me show you.”

  Living with Robin and Alex was probably the best thing to ever happen to me. Online schooling, good meals every night, a comfortable bed, and a best friend. Having all of this for free was great, it really was, but it caused some serious guilt on my part. What did I do to deserve all of this? So as soon as I turned 18, he moved out, into a much cheaper, much smaller, much worse-smelling apartment. Being the people that they were, Robin and Alex gave me a very generous amount of money, enough to go to college and finally pursue the one thing I was good at: mechanical engineering. Remember those pieces of scrap metal and discarded electronics that I helped Robin take back to the apartment? Well I found them intriguing and fiddled with them for a while. I was pretty good for someone without a Talent and that was enough to pique my interest. Life wasn’t as easy as it was with Robin and Alex, but it was good. I took mechanical engineering at university, hoping that it would be enough to get me a good job.

In my first year I met Jacy. We bumped into each other at a party that we’d both been invited to. On that particular night, I would have much rather stayed home, but I didn’t want to decline the invitation and possibly lose a new friend. Not knowing anyone at the party and not being the type of person to go around and make friends, I was standing on the edge of the noisy crowd, fiddling with a gadget I had been working on. It was supposed to enhance the wearers hearing. The longer the party went on, the more people arrived. The crowd was quickly becoming overwhelming and my hand started to shake so badly that I dropped my gadget. Scrambling to rescue it before it was crushed by the storm of feet, I had the bad luck of crashing into someone and knocking them over.

“I’m so sorry, this was my fault, I'll just-” The girl I had knocked over didn’t actually look all that startled. In fact, she was smiling. No, laughing. And she instantly put me at ease. Her hair was in little braids that were sticking up all over the place. Each of them had four beads in them, one black, one white, one grey, and one purple.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m pretty clumsy myself. What were you doing on the floor anyway?”

“I just dropped something I was working on…”

“What does it look like? I’ll help you find it. The name's Jacy.”

With a smile, I replied: “North.”

After finding the boosted hearing-aid, Jacy and I left to go walk outside, away from the pounding music and flashing lights. We talked for a good few hours. I found out that she was studying neuroscience and that her Talent was calming. It really helped for making new friends since anyone she met was instantly put at ease. This also allowed me to open up to her about my past pretty easily. As soon as she realised that I really was good with mechanics and electronics, she brought up an idea that she’d had. By combining our knowledge of neuroscience and mechanics, we might be able to build me a new arm.

A year of working and research lead to something that I hadn’t had since I was three years old: a fully functional left arm. I would meet up with Jacy every week for check-ups. After we were sure that everything was going smoothly, it turned into monthly check-ups and then no check-ups at all. We still stayed friends but now it was just that, no longer doctor and patient.

  I was doing well in my classes, I had made some new friends, I had a new arm and I had my own apartment. Life was good. Until the money ran out. Three years into university, I was forced to drop out since I was no longer able to afford it. Robin and Alex offered to lend me more money but time after time I declined. In order to keep my apartment, I needed a job. A barista at the coffee store around the corner from my apartment wasn’t exactly my dream job but it payed the bills. Almost. I needed a bit more money which lead to a new idea: I could make gadgets and sell them. The first week I only sold two things, both of them small mechanical animals, so I focused my efforts on what sold. Using some of my pay from my job I bought scrap metal and wires. Sales were getting better every week. It went from two sales a week to twenty.

All of this tinkering was taking up a huge part of my life, so much so that it was affecting my job at the coffee shop. I knew that I got three warnings until I was fired and so far, there had been two. Staying up late to finish an order caused me to sleep through my alarm the next day so I was late for work. Strike one. Then I was trying to finish up an  order behind the counter. Unfortunately, it started smoking and an alarm went off, so everyone had to evacuate. Strike two. You’d think I'd learnt my lesson about trying to work on projects during my shift, wouldn’t you, but this one was special. It was a complicated order and it was due in the next few days. A crane (the bird, not the machine) that would move just like the real thing. It would be solar powered of course, and when there was no longer any sun to power it, it curled up and “slept”. It wasn’t quite pocket sized, but it was only a little bit bigger. The buyer had offered a handsome sum of money for it but had one condition: I had to deliver it myself. Something about “the media invading his privacy”?

“North! What are you doing!” I had gone around back to work out the few last details so that I could deliver it straight after M shift ended. And my boss had found me.

“C'mon Jackie, this order is due today and my shift is almost over anyway!” I knew she wouldn’t let it slide but it was worth a shot.

“You know the rules. Three strikes and you’re out. You’re out.”

“One more chance please I’ll-”

“No exceptions.”

  “It isn’t fair. Just because I haven’t had my Potential unlocked, doesn’t mean it should be this difficult to get a job.” It’s been a week since I was fired. I called Robin to talk to them about the situation.

“I know it might seem difficult but look at me!” they say. “I struggled to find a job for two months and then I found this one. Which is way better than my previous one anyway.”

“Nuh uh, you don’t get to talk. You have a Talent. You have connections. And even with all of that it still took two months. Without any of that, I’ll be lucky to find a decent job in six months!” The awkward silence after my mini outburst gives me a moment to think. Then it dawned on me.

“Hey, I’ll call you back later,” I say, obviously distracted.

“Wait but-“

I end the call before they can finish their sentence. People don’t like change. If you don’t speak up, they ignore you. They walk all over you. But there was a simple was to get their attention. Wreak absolute fucking havoc.

Tag list:

@nice-jewish-lesbian

@just-a-marvel-fan

@your-villainous-neighbour

@floor-based

@the-spiritual-bisexual

[bxxpbxxprichie]

Lost (Reddie) (1/8)

Summary : Richie Tozier is struggling with something. Something he’d never thought he’d have to struggle with. Sure, his parents can be pretty shitty, but he never thought it would come to this. It’s now been about a month since Richie has been kicked out of his house. He has made do with sleeping in his truck, and passing out on nights that all the losers are together, but things are becoming more dire. With what was left of his money stash gone, Richie is forced to make a living by prostitution. There’s also something going on with Eddie. Eddie Kaspbrak, mommy’s boy and pill expert has been put on a new pill. This time, it was of his own doing, and not his mothers. What it’s for, no one knows.

Pairings : Eventual Reddie with hints of Stenbrough and mentions of Bikeverly (Ben/Mike/Bev)

Warnings : Slight noncon, prostitution, homelessness, bad language, and over all Richie’s trash mouth.

AN : Ayyyeee! This is the first time I’m posting a fanfic on Tumblr, but it’s also the first IT anything I’m posting. Keep in mind that all of the characters are 18/19 at this time, and in their senior year of high school. There will be eventual smut, but how in depth I haven’t decided. The characters in no way have any relation to the child actors that have portrayed them. IT does not belong to me, however if it had I would’ve changed a lot of things in the book.

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Chapter 1

Word Count : 2010

“That’s good… So good…”

Richie kept his eyes closed, his mouth being assaulted roughly. His throat hurt, tears welled in the corner of his eyes.

“What a good boy you are.”

He couldn’t believe he was in this situation. Just past eighteen and on his knees in a seedy gas station bathroom for money.

“You’re too good at this-”

The strangled moan from the man flushed down Richie’s own throat, hot liquid being forced into his wet cavern, making him sputter around the pulsing body part.

It’s not like Richie opposed to having dicks down his throat. It was rather that this wasn’t the dick he wanted down his throat.

Of course, he knew the man. Derry was a small town. Mr. Pickles used to be the gym teacher at the elementary school, that thought alone made him queasy.

The older male handed over the money, before shuffling out of the bathroom and leaving Richie to his thoughts as he stuffed the twenty into his pocket and stood from the floor.

He felt dirty. But it wasn’t like it was the first time he’d done this.

Richie crossed to the sink, and turned on the faucet, saliva building up in his mouth as he refused to swallow what wasn’t forced down his throat. He spit a few times, before leaning his head in and capturing mouthfuls of water, trying to flush the taste from his system.

After righting himself enough, Richie headed into the gas station to pay for a few dollars in gas, and headed to school.

There were barely any cars in the parking lot once he got there, something that was good. Richie climbed into the back of his truck, and lifted the seats. Concealed beneath the seats were two plastic tubs. One filled with clothes, and the other sparingly filled with food items, a blanket and pillow, and bathroom things.

Richie gathered what he needed to shower and change, shoved it into his backpack, and headed towards the gym. It was easy access into the building, as they still hadn’t fixed the lock on one of the doors. He strode through the basketball court, and into the boy’s locker room. He dropped his bag on a bench, and began ridding himself of clothes and glasses.

He turned on one of the shower heads, and moved back to his bag to pull out his soap. It was cheap, but at least he was clean. He took a deep breath before stepping under the icy spray, teeth chattering almost instantly. His curls matted together, flattening against his head. He grabbed for what he hoped was his shampoo and started lathering his hair, just as the door to the locker room opened.

“In here again, R-rich?”

Richie hated more than anything to lie to his friends, but they didn’t need to know he didn’t have a place to stay. It wasn’t their problem, it was his.

“Yeah, Big Bill. Got into a fight with my dad this morning and left before getting a chance to shower.” It was the excuse he used pretty much every time Bill found him in here, but the other didn’t question him much. It wasn’t like he had the best track record with his parents.

“S-Sorry about that. What happened t-this time?” Bill had gotten better about his stutter over the years. It definitely wasn’t as bad as it had been when they were kids, but it got pretty iffy when the other got frustrated.

Richie delayed answering by stepping back under the spray and rinsing the soap from his hair. His hands ran over his face, feeling the scruff that had been working itself up since he’d been kicked out for good. He just didn’t have money to buy razors. Sometimes Eddie or Stan forced him to clean it up, shoving their own supplies his way. He had to pretend he wanted this scratchy thing on his face, otherwise it’d look suspicious.

He stepped back out of the spray, his eyes meeting Bill’s where the boy had situated himself on the bench next to his bag. “It was stupid. Something about money and cereal, I don’t really know. Don’t worry about it, he’ll go right back to ignoring me once I get home today.” He gave a soft grin.

“If you s-say so.” Bill shrugged.

“I know so. So, Billy Boy, what brings you to school early today?” Richie asked, trying to lighten the mood as he washed his body with his shampoo.

“S-stan wanted to meet early t-to study for the h-history test. I got h-here before him.” Bill told him.

Richie nodded, rinsing himself off under the spray. “Throw me a towel, would you?” He asked Bill as he turned off the water. Bill tossed him a towel from the clean rack before sitting back down. “So, how are you and Stanley doing, hm?” Richie asked, shit-eating grin on his face as he toweled himself off.

“I d-don’t k-know what you’re t-talking ab-bout.” Bill said all too quickly.

“You don’t fool me for a second, Big Bill. Say, just how big are-”

“B-beep beep, Richie.”

Richie huffed, “I swear, you guys are getting so stiff in your old age…at least something is.” He got his last jab in with a cocky grin as he tucked the towel around his waist and moved to his bag. He dug around, before pulling out his toothbrush and toothpaste, and moved to one of the sinks.

He ignored the looks Bill was giving him as he scrubbed his teeth and tongue, finally ridding the last remnants of the salty taste out of his mouth. The only thing he needed now was a cigarette, and he’d be good for the rest of the day.

His stomach rumbled a bit, reminding him he probably needed to eat something… he’d just wait until lunch.

After rinsing out his mouth and shoving his toothbrush and toothpaste back into his bag, he pulled his clean clothes out. Without so much as a glance at Bill, he let his towel drop.

“F-fuck. Seriously, R-rich?” Bill grumbled, shielding his eyes as if the sun was shining right into them.

“I know it’s big, but don’t act like you’ve never seen a dick Billy Boy.” Richie passed a wink at his friend, before tugging clothes on piece by piece. By the end of it he was in his favorite pair of ripped jeans, a comfy black t-shirt, and his usual converse. He shoved everything back into his bag and headed out of the locker room, knowing the other was following behind.

“So when’s Stan getting here?” Richie asked, as he lead the way out of the gym and back to the parking lot.

“H-he should be here s-soon.” Bill spoke, taking slightly longer strides to catch up with Richie. Richie, Mike, and Bill were the tallest of the group. Bill definitely had Richie and Mike by a few inches, but Stan by about a head. Ben was next when it came to height, and at the end were Beverly and Eddie, standing at the same height of 5′4.

“Speak of the Devil,” Richie commented, nodding towards Stan’s car, in which the lanky boy was unfolding himself out of. “Stan the Man! How ya doin’ this morning?” He called to the other.

Stan rolled his eyes, seemingly already tired of Richie’s antics for the day. He didn’t even bother responding as he picked his backpack up and shut his car door. “Hey Bill.”

Richie scoffed, and held a hand to his chest, “I know you guys are like dating now or something, but you don’t have to act like I’m not here, Stanley!”

Stan raised a single eyebrow, “Where’s Eddie?” He asked, not commenting on the others words.

“Y-yeah, shouldn’t you b-be there by now?” Bill looked to Richie.

“That’s where I’m headed. I’ll be back with everyone’s favorite doctor-in-training in promptly five minutes!” Richie hopped away from the other two and back to his truck. He unpacked his backpack, leaving only school supplies, and shut his back seat. He got in the front and started up the engine, hand reaching instinctively for the cigarettes that wouldn’t be there in the center console. He puffed out a breath and pulled out of the parking lot to start his journey to Eddie’s house.

“Why’s your hair wet?”

“Hello to you too, Eds.”

The two boys held each other’s eyes for a moment, before Eddie got into Richie’s truck, tossing his bag onto the floor board.

“No cigarettes this morning?” Eddie asked snidely, as Richie drove away from his house.

“Not yet. I was going to snag one from Bev when we get to school, I’m out.” Richie adjusted his glasses, pushing them further up his nose.

Eddie didn’t comment in it, and instead turned to stare out the window.

“You alright, Eds?” Richie asked in the silence.

“Yeah, it’s just this new pill I’m on. It’s making me tired.” The smaller boy explained, reiterating the fact with laying his head against the window.

Richie raised his eyebrows at that. “What’s it for?”

As if not expecting such a question, Eddie sat up straight and looked at Richie. “It’s uh…not important. J-just something my mom is making me take, you know. Gazebos and all that bullshit.”

Richie pressed his tongue to his cheek. He didn’t believe Eddie for one second, but he wasn’t going to push him. Especially since it was obviously doing something to him.

They were back in the parking lot within minutes and both were out of the truck. They headed to the usual meet up spot, where Stan and Bill were sitting and talking in low voices. It immediately stopped when Richie and Eddie walked up.

“Oh, don’t stop whispering sweet nothing’s to each other on our behalf. We’ll just go over there and do the same.” Richie grinned, tossing an arm over Eddie’s shoulders. He must’ve been really tired, because he didn’t bother shrugging it off.

“W-we were just talking about the b-battle of-”

“The battle of tongues? I knew you guys were into each other!” Richie cheered.

“Beep Beep, Richie.” This came from Eddie, voice tired, as he finally shoved the other’s arm off of his shoulders and flopped down into a sitting position next to the other two losers, uncaring his khaki shorts were on green grass.

“We were actually talking about you. Bill’s worried.” Stan said, shuffling some papers in his lap, before placing them back into the folder they belonged in.

“Bill’s worried? Why?” Richie looked to the other male, “I’m perfectly fine! Although a little upset that Stan isn’t worried too.”

“What’s Bill worried about?” A nice soprano twinkled in Richie’s ears, and he turned to greet his best friend by wrapping an arm around her waist.

“Bill’s worried about me. Can I bum a-” Before Richie could even finish the sentence, a cancer stick was shoved between his lips by small fingers. He grinned around the filter and took it from his lips to press a kiss to Beverly’s cheek.

“My goddess, my love, thank you.” He accepted her lighter as well and was quick to light up the cigarette, arm still hanging around her waist.

“So why is Bill worried about Rich?” Beverly asked, looking towards the three boys on the ground.

“H-he just seems different. H-he’s been fighting with his parents a l-lot more than usual.” Bill started.

“He is right here.” Richie reminded, flicking away bits of ash from the end of his sanctuary.

“You’ve been fighting more?” Bev looked to Richie with this question,  and before the lanky boy could even respond, he was being pushed away from the red haired beauty.

“Hands off the goods.” Mike bellowed, putting his own arm around the girl’s waist.

“Good morning to you too, Mike. And where is number three?” Richie righted himself quickly, and looked around for Ben.

“C’mon, Richie. Lighten up on them.” Eddie spoke. The boy was now leaning heavily against Stan, who at this point was just letting it happen.

“You walk in on Beverly taking two dicks and a-”

“Beep Beep, Richie!” Beverly called, punching the boy in the arm.

Richie winced and rubbed the sore spot, “I wasn’t making a joke! I was telling the truth!”

@edsrich

[stereksecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, @jeangvrey!

I hope you enjoy this Jeangvrey!!!

Read on AO3

*****

Batman Has Bunny Teeth

Chapter 1:  Firescapes & Batman Capes

“I am the night!” Comes the booming voice behind him and Stiles turns, flailing a bit as he stares up at the towering shadow of a man, bathed in darkness, cape billowing despite the lack of wind.  All Stiles can do is cover his mouth to hide his laughter once his mind, as usual, zeroes in on the exact wrong thing to focus on.

Batman gives him a quizzical stare, still looming over him like a storm cloud of glowering anger.  “Usually the only laughing criminal I have to deal with is the Joker,” Batman quips, and that only makes Stiles erupt in more titters.

“I’m sorry it’s just… it’s just I never noticed Batman had bunny teeth,” Stiles chokes out, fully preparing for Batman to deck him.  But he can’t, all that darkness and rage and Stiles instantly settled in on the most adorable part of the man, one of the only parts he could really see of his face.

“I’d say you should worry about your own teeth, the dentists at Blackgate aren’t very good at their job.”  Batman continues to stare at him, like he’s looking through him to the rather poor graffiti littering the brick wall behind him in the dank alleyway.

Stiles rolls his eyes, hitting the window he was currently jimmying open softly.  “Hey, listen Mr. Bats; this is my apartment I’m breaking into.  Do I really look like the kind of idiot that would break into an apartment on the shittiest block in the city, during a thunderstorm?” Stiles asks blithely.  “Seriously, I’d track rain and mud in everywhere, the police would have no trouble identifying me through shoeprints.  And sure the crack of thunder might be all well and good to hide the shatter of glass, and yes the average person on this street is more likely to call their friend to gossip about what’s happening than call the police, but it’s still a terrible target for burglary or petty larceny.”

When the boy finishes rambling Batman isn’t sure what to say, it’s very rare for him to make a mistake when it comes to criminal activity, and while low level crooks aren’t always his M.O. he’d noticed this from the rooftop above and decided to investigate.

“So… are you going to arrest me for breaking into my own apartment or can I get in before I’m actually entirely drenched to the bone?  I think my underwear might still be dry if I can get inside soon…” Stiles says, and there’s a smirk on his lips.

“Why exactly should I believe this is really your apartment?  And don’t give me the intelligence excuse, because I’ve met some very idiotic criminals in this city,” Batman replies, voice less imposing now, but still skeptical.

Stiles stood for a minute to contemplate what he can say to placate the vigilante on his fire escape.  “Ok… how about you let me get inside, then I can prove it’s my apartment?  If I can’t then you can take me to the cops, I won’t resist.  My dad used to be a sheriff so I have respect for the police.  Well, not so much the Gotham PD, but you’re sorta police.  I guess,” he laughs.

Batman stills, deciding before giving one short decisive nod.

“Cool, cool, just gimme a sec to work this out,” Stiles answers, holding up a finger as he tried to get the window open.  After a few minutes of fumbling Batman pushed him aside and does it himself, almost effortlessly.  Stiles turns with a frown, “I almost had it.”

“Sure you did,” Batman deadpans, then motions towards the window.  “Now prove it’s your house.”

“Alright, alright.  I’m going, don’t sick your pet bats at me man,” Stiles jokes as he ambles through the window, tripping and faceplanting on the rug he’d just bought last week.  “You saw nothing!” He calls back behind him as he straightens up and grabs a picture frame on the nightstand.

“See?  That’s me, and my dad and my best friend Scott.”

Batman takes the photo and holds it up next to Stiles’ face.  “You look different.”

“Well duh!  I was like, 18 in that photo.  I’m an adult now, my hair grew out, I put on a bit of muscle, or at least I like to think so.  I mean it’s nothing compared to all this bondage muscle god stuff you have going on here,” he gestured to Batman’s suit.  “Unless are these fake?  Did you have abs made into your suit?” He asks, reaching to touch and having his hand slapped away.  Hard.

“Fine, I believe you.  Why exactly did you break into your own apartment though?” Batman asks almost as an afterthought.

“Oh?  Well you see I ordered a pizza because I just got back from night class and I was swamped with work and I just wanted to stuff something into my mouth greasy and cheesy and well, anyway, so I hear the delivery guy pull up so I race downstairs to get it and, well, I forgot my keys.  So I end up eating the pizza on the stoop and giving the leftovers to a homeless guy on the corner, and then set about finding something to pry my window open.  And then you show up and nearly give me a heart attack.  And that’s what you missed on, Glee!” He jokes, cutting off his rambling explanation and staring back.  It’s only now he begins to process the fact Batman is in his house, that he’s been talking to the caped crusader for the better part of ten minutes.

Batman huffs, not a laugh, but something akin to mild amusement.  “Have a good night and try not to have to break into your apartment again,” he says in that gruff tone.

“Oh this is a weekly occurrence.  Why do you think I’m so good at it?” Stiles laughs, pointing finger guns at Batman before thinking better of it.

“Then next time don’t let me catch you,” Batman says, turning and for a moment Stiles thinks he catches the barest hint of a smile before the man grapplehooks away from his fire escape.  “Why am I suddenly turned on?” Stiles asks the night, shaking his head and laughing, one hand dragging down his face as he strips and heads for a well-deserved hot shower.`

Chapter 2: Nananananananana Batcave!

“Ah, Mister Hale, you’re home early,” Deaton says blithely, eyes tilting up to meet the gust of wind kicked up by the Batmobile’s entrance.

“Slow night.  I think all the villains are either locked up, licking their wounds or out of town,” Derek scoffs, almost sounding offended at the lack of crime.

“Or maybe,” Deaton surmises, standing and crossing towards Derek, “one of your young wards has taken care of things so you can have the night off?”

Derek pulls the cowl off and glowers at Deaton.  “Justice doesn’t take the night off.  Besides, you know I don’t like them out on their own.” His voice is tinged with a hint of worry, a tone most unusual for Derek aside from speaking of the kids.

“Well you’ll be glad to know Isaac is still here, Vernon took Erica out on a training mission however.” Deaton announced it with the same dispassionate tone you’d use for reading a grocery list.

Derek sighs, rubbing at his eyes and staring back at Deaton.  “At least Boyd will likely stay safe,” he says, albeit begrudgingly.  “So Isaac is?”

“Asleep I believe.  As should you be.  Unless you plan on going out and playing the part for tonight?”

Something deep within Derek stings at that, how Deaton so casually lays bare that his public persona, Derek Hale philanthropist and billionaire playboy heir, is all an act.  Most nights he thinks Batman is who he truly is and the putting on the mask isn’t hiding his identity, but completing it.

Shaking off the thought he heads towards the gear room, reassembling the costume on its mannequin before taking the proffered robe from Deaton.

“I better turn in actually.  Tomorrow is that ribbon cutting ceremony for the new research facility, and the trip to the orphanage, barring no more interruptions.” Both were points of pride for Derek, working on both his persona’s goals at once to improve the city.

“And don’t forget the gala fundraiser tomorrow evening…” Deaton reminds.

“Again, provided there aren’t any nefarious plots afoot.” That makes Derek crack a smile, something Deaton is happy to see.

“Yes, we must be ever vigilant for those dastardly villains,” Deaton deadpans.

“Goodnight Deaton.”

“Goodnight Derek.” Deaton waves him off, going back to his studies.

Derek stops by Isaac’s room and a soft smile spreads on his face.  The kid’s wiry, but he has heart.  He’s going to need that if he plans on following in the family business of crime fighting.

Sometimes Derek wonders if bringing them into this life was for the best, if he’s not putting them all in more danger than they were before they’d met him, but when he sees how they’ve all grown, Boyd finally having friends, Erica coming out of her shell, and even Isaac no longer skittish and drawn in.  That’s how he knows he’s doing something right.

Chapter 3: Disbelief & Deliberation

“You did not meet Batman!” Scott argues from his place on the couch.

“Uh, yeah, I totally did.  He nearly arrested me for breaking into my apartment.” Stiles feels personally offended his best friend doesn’t believe him.

Scott gives him that same look of disbelief.  “And why would you be breaking into your own apartment?  Wait…  Never mind, you forgot your keys again right?”

“Yes and since someone…” He looks at Scott, “who shall remain nameless wasn’t home.  I had to Jimmy the lock and nearly get carted away by the Gotham knight.”

Scott rolls his eyes again and turns on the T.V.  “Say I believe you.  Does this mean you might have a new obsession and will stop drooling over Derek Hale?  Including this scheme you’ve dragged Lydia into?”

“Please, I dragged her into nothing.” Scott raises an eyebrow.  “There was no dragging!  Maybe some slight hand tugging and a bit of pleading and volunteering to work at the greenhouse all next summer when I have time but there was definitely no dragging.”

Scott doesn't have time to reply to that because the news comes on and none other than Derek Hale shows up.  “Oh no…” Scott sighs; putting his head in his hands before Stiles jumps over the couch and nearly knocks him out of the way

“God he’s so handsome!  And generous!  He’s such a great guy.” Stiles gushes about Derek as Scott pretends to vomit.

“I hope this ends once you meet him.  I don’t want you actually going full stalker mode.  I might have to, you know, be concerned for your mental health.” Stiles gives him a look of derision for that.

“Stopping trying to headshrink me Doctor McCall.  I have a perfectly normal attraction to and interest in Derek Hale.” Scott snorts at that.  “I do!  And after this party where I hopefully meet him we’ll fall in love and get married and I’ll live in Hale manor while we have ridiculously hot sex and eat caviar off each other’s chiseled bodies in a bath of champagne.”

“I’m too sober for this… alright, well I have to go home and you know, actually sleep since I have work tomorrow.”

“Have fun at the asylum!” Stiles jokes.

“I told you not to call Arkham that.  We’ve rebranded,” Scott rebuts, indignant.

“Look you know my distrust of places like that.  Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean I like it anymore.”

Scott doesn't argue, just heads out on his own leaving Stiles to his thoughts.  Thankfully that means Stiles has time to plan his infiltration of the benefit gala.  Of course, even he doesn’t suspect that he’ll actually get seated with Derek Hale and have to try not to make a mockery of himself.

Chapter 4: Revelling & Revelations

The night is going great; for once Derek is actually enjoying this benefit, if only because of the charming man seated next to him.  It takes him until halfway through the second course for him to realize where he knows him from, the man he’d caught breaking into his own apartment last week.

He’d known the others manners weren’t befitting the Gotham elite, but ignored it since nouveau riche often immigrated to Gotham to show off to their friends back home.  But now he was wondering how the seemingly uncoordinated man he’d stumbled upon had conned his way into one of the most elite functions of high society.

A wry smile split his lips as he watched Stiles regale anyone that would listen with a plethora of facts about history, culture, art, almost any topic he could manage to drag kicking and screaming into the discussion.  It seemed the more obscure the better, with Derek even doubting a few of the stories before Stiles offered to Bring up proof on his phone.

“That’s quite alright; I think we all believe you Mr.…?”  Derek said, putting a hand over Stiles to stop him getting his surely older phone that might have given him away.

“Stilinski.  Mr. Stilinski, but you can call me Stiles,” he said, and the faintest blush seeped into his cheeks at the direct contact between him and Derek.  He had to hold it together, because he’d been doing so well distracting himself with rambling.

“Well Stiles I think we’d all love to hear more of your anecdotes, but I hear the band starting up and, well,” Derek stood and offered his hand, “I thought you might care to join me?”

Stiles’ brain may have short circuited for a moment, and his heart not so much tripped as face planted right against his ribs, but he nodded, licking his lips as he took the offered hand and stood.  He was smiling, not bidding a second glance back at the table they’d left before following Derek out to the dance floor.  “You’ll have to lead, I’m not the best dancer, of course I’m sure that’ll be no problem for you and…” He quieted as Derek put a finger to his lips.

“I’ll lead, don’t worry,” Derek said, smiling what at first seemed to be the same vapid, guileless smile he always wore plastered on his face at these events, but slowly began to morph into something real.

They danced for a few songs, Stiles only stepping on Derek’s toes once after the first song.  They’d both focused on the movement of their bodies, of keeping time and flowing with the other dancers that there was little room to talk until a slower number came on after the third song.  “I know you’re not supposed to be here,” Derek said, a smirk crossing his lips as Stiles nearly stumbled, Derek quickly turning it into a dip to save face.

“Oh, really?” Stiles asked, laughing nervously.  “And where should I be then?”

Derek thought of the dingy apartment, the rain soaked fire escape and smiled.  “Well now I think you should be right…  Here,” he said, leaning in as if to kiss him, whispering the words before yanking Stiles back up and into position.  “But really, how did you get in here?  One year my companies stock fell and I didn’t even get an invite.” Derek was smooth, waltzing them around the floor as he spoke, not even winded.  Stiles struggled to keep up, but at least dropping the pretense he belonged would help.  He hoped.

“Honest answer?  My best friend Lydia, well one of my best friends.  Her ex is Jackson Whittemore?  She pretty much bribed him to let me in.”

That made Derek pause.  “What could she possibly have that Whittemore wanted?”

Stiles grinned, flicking his eyes back and forth.  “An introduction to her boyfriend’s twin brother.”

Derek’s eyebrows rose at that, he wasn’t the type for gossip since he rarely spoke to anyone outside of these events, but his family had dealt with the Whittemores in the past.  “But isn’t he with that app designer?  Mahealani?”

“Oh he is.  I should have clarified; he AND Danny wanted an introduction to the twin.”

Derek smiles, not out of any real happiness, but because he should here, and they continue to dance.  By the end of the night Derek is, despite a halfhearted attempt at the contrary, thoroughly charmed by Stiles.

The gala finished, Derek walks through the lobby with Stiles, shoulder to shoulder.  “So this was… fun,” Derek confesses, not sure when the last time he said that and actually meant it was.  Certainly with the kids he thinks, but even then that’s more fun for them than it is him most days.

“I had a great time.  Totally worth the bribery,” Stiles replies, laughing not so politely.  His eyes trail towards Derek’s lips almost imperceptibly.

“Let’s go out the other way,” Derek interjects, holding up his hand to shield his eyes from the flashing lights of the paparazzi outside.  It’s at precisely that moment Stiles looks over and he’s hit by a wave of deja vu.

That jawline, those bunny teeth, the light flickering.  It’s so eerily similar that he has to stop for a moment and remind himself it’s preposterous to even consider.  It’s just a passing resemblance, that’s all.  He’s silent on their way to the back, Derek asking him if he needs a ride home twice before he notices.  “Oh, uh, no.  No, thank you though,” Stiles says, and it’s only after it’s been vocalized he realizes that he just passed up one of his actual bucket list goals.

It surprises Derek that he’s a bit disappointed by Stiles declining, the offer but he reminds himself that it’s for the best.  He’s already gotten entirely too friendly.  And sure, keeping up the act as Derek Hale, playboy was a necessity.  The problem was by the end of the night Derek wasn’t sure if he had been acting.

“This was…  This was honestly one of the best nights of my life,” Stiles finally speaks, running the back of his neck, eye doing something between a twitch and a wink that Derek can’t help but find amusing.  “But I’m sure you have plenty of rich people things to do like order a new yacht and build schools in Uganda or something so…  I better get going.  Thanks for the dancing, and for not ratting me out.”

Derek rolls his eyes at that, huffing a short laugh.  “Of all the crime and corruption in this city, I think sneaking into a charity gala is far from the worst thing.  Besides I saw you write a check to the charity.  I doubt it even covers the price of the entree you had, but it’s the thought that counts.”

Stiles turns red at that, a mixture of embarrassment and something he can’t quite explain.  He looks up from beneath his lashes at Derek one last time, smiling.  “Well, we can’t all be as righteous as the caped crusader,” he says, and there’s something about the way Derek doesn’t react, almost as if he’s schooling himself not to that sets off alerts in Stiles overactive brain.

“Anyway…  I better be going.  I’ll see you later.  Well, I’ll see you on like, television or a newspaper, you probably won’t see me,” he laughs, chewing on his bottom lip, trying to decide if going for a hug is too much. In the end he settles for an awkward wave before heading down the street and away from Derek.

Derek watches Stiles go, mentally mapping the freckles on his neck, the moles on his cheek, the color of his eyes and the timbre of his voice.  He says it’s so he won’t be surprised again if he sees him like he was tonight, but even he isn’t that deluded.

“Goodnight Stiles,” he says, words taken by the brisk night air.  He gets in his car and goes home, his last stop before taking his nightly duties.

Across town Stiles sits at his computer with a photo of Derek Hale and a sharpie, practicing drawing Batman’s cowl over it and analyzing how it looks.  Beside it there’s written just one thing.  “The bunny teeth match.”

Chapter 5: Investigations & Invitations

Stiles convinces himself it’s just a coincidence, that any two people could have similar looking teeth.

Or at least he honestly tries too.

When he can’t get it out of his head he decides he needs more research, and not just looking up photos online.  No.  He needs to see Derek again up close.  And maybe Batman too.  But definitely Derek.

And so what if, like Scott says, he’s using this as an excuse to indulge his crush even more.  It’s not like Derek didn’t seem at least somewhat interested in him.

Besides, there were some gossip bloggers talking about the mystery man Derek danced with at the gala.  He was pseudo famous already; he might as well keep it up.

Lydia wasn’t up for asking Jackson for anymore favors, especially considering him and Danny had absconded with Ethan to a private island somewhere.  That meant it was all up to him this time.

When Derek noticed him a real smile split his lips and he moved towards him, abandoning the conversation he’d been feigning interest in without a second thought.

“We meet again,” Derek says, voice low and deep.  Not the gravel of Batman, but a seductive timbre reserved for, well, seemingly just Stiles right now.

Stiles had spotted Derek from a ways off, had seen him wading through the crowd and didn’t even try to pretend he wasn’t ecstatic.

“So we do Mr. Hale,” Stiles replies, trying to be as seductive in return but not quite managing it.

“So, who did you bribe to get in this time?” Derek asks, trying and failing to suppress a grin.

Stiles’ eyes look back and forth, shifty before leaning in. “I posed as a waiter to get in…”

The deviousness in Stiles should be a red flag, but he in fact finds it charming.  Derek deals with so many criminals intent on harming innocents that someone simply sneaking into formal events seems almost wholesome in comparison.

“Why exactly are you sneaking into all these events?” Derek asks, bemused.

“To see you, duh,” Stiles answers immediately and for all Derek is used to telling lies, he genuinely can’t tell if it’s a joke or Stiles being flippantly honest.

After that they talk, they dance, they spend the night in each other’s pocket practically.  Derek knows this is more than he’d intended when Stiles tells him he has to leave and he actually grabs his wrist, asking him to stay.

“Sorry, I gotta go.  Glass slipper, carriage that’s a pumpkin and, well you know the drill,” Stiles laughs, smiling at Derek.

“I want to see you again…” Derek says before he thinks better of it.  And that’s all Stiles needs to hear.

“You will,” he says, quickly pecking Derek on the cheek before slinking off towards one of the exits.

What followed was a series of ever more elaborate and ridiculous ways for Stiles to sneak into charity events to see Derek.  He actually started to admire the criminals of Gotham as he noticed how much time and effort it took just to plan something like this, much less a bank robbery or similar crime.

Maybe not their evil deeds, but at least the time and energy it took to plan them out.  As he felt more and more certain that Derek really was Batman it only seemed to make those ideas grow.

Derek for his part felt himself drawn more and more to Stiles.  In a way he reminded him of some of his villains, not so much in demeanor, but in his intelligence, flamboyance and, increasingly, his ridiculous schemes to get into these parties.

That’s why one day he decides enough was enough, the kids had been badgering him, even Deaton had left cut outs of gossip pages mentioning Derek and his mystery suitor, and he did something he should have done a long time before.

The envelope arrived at his doorstep, or more importantly slipped beneath it late at night.  Stiles almost slipped on it as he carried in some blueprints and other equipment he’d gathered for his next gala crash.

When he saw it his heart did a weird flip and he bent with shaky hands to pick it up.

Opening it he took out the glossy embossed card and read it aloud.

“You are cordially invited to attend the Gotham High Society Excellence in Charity awards fundraiser as the guest of Derek S. Hale!”

Stiles nearly passed out reading that, jumping up and down on his couch and whooping with joy.  Especially since he was basically being asked out by Derek Hale.  By Batman.

They’d spent a lot of time together, even if it was just at these dinners, but he'd gotten to know Derek.  Gone were the days he marveled at his beauty, at his accomplishments and wealth, even just his philanthropy.

No, now Stiles couldn’t get the look of determination Derek had when talking about turning Gotham around, the way his lips quirked in a smile like they weren’t used to it but wanted to be, the scent of his cologne or the way his body felt pressed close during a dance out of his head.

He realized that he was falling for Derek and maybe, just maybe, Derek was, as impossible as that seemed, falling for him too.

Chapter 6: The Dark Night

The date is everything Stiles wished for and more.  Derek arrived with a perfectly tailored suit for him to wear that complemented what the other man was wearing.

The paparazzi were a surprise, even if Stiles should have expected it, what with him arriving on the arm of the wealthiest man in town.  Still it was hard to fathom anyone might want his photo.  But then Derek would look back at him, smiling that gorgeous smile, those ever present bunny teeth on display, and he’d forget about anything else.

They danced, they talked, they ate expensive food and drank expensive wine.  It was the perfect date.  A night to remember for sure.  He felt their bond growing, every ridiculous thing he did seemed to only charm Derek more.

Derek knew he was falling hard, knew that Stiles was more than just a date, than just a fling.  Tonight wasn’t meant as a test, but Stiles was passing anyway.  Yes, this wasn’t his life, not his real life, but with Stiles by his side sometimes, for a few moments, he felt like it was.  Like it could be.

For those brief seconds Derek would forget the other part of himself, just a moment, and be this part of him.  Live this life, with Stiles, and it was terrifying and wondrous all the same.

It would never be who he was, not fully, but maybe if he had Stiles; it would anchor him to this life.  Keep it from slipping away until all he was, was the cowl and the cape.  And the thing that scared him most was that he wanted it.  For the first time since he’d adopted the kids, he saw a chance at normalcy, at love, at things he had denied himself so long, and his hands itched to grab it and hold on for dear life.

The night wound down, and Derek led Stiles to a secluded spot.  “Thank you for being my date,” he said, all charm and class, holding Stiles hand the same way he’d done all night.  Except now it felt different, charged.

“Thank you for inviting me.  It was a nice change not having to concoct some elaborate plan to sneak in.  But I would have, to see you,” he laughed, knuckles grazing Derek’s cheek, staring into his eyes.

Derek stared at him and he couldn’t hold back any longer.  He kissed him, hands cupping his cheek and the side of Stiles neck, lips pressed against his.  It was chaste at first, soft but passionate, but then Stiles pressed further, deepening it, letting their tongues dance.  And Derek had to admit, Stiles tongue was a much better dancer than his feet.

“Let me take you home…” Derek breathed, eyes locked with Stiles as he held him close.

And this time when Derek offered him a ride he didn’t decline.  They sped off in his luxury car, but they weren’t headed towards Stiles’ place.  They pulled up at a high rise penthouse and Stiles had to crane his neck to look to the topmost floors.

“This is yours, isn’t it?” He breathes, staring up before glancing back at Derek.

“It is.  You want to come up?  The view of the city is…  Amazing.” Derek smiles, and he knows Stiles is going to say yes, knows that this night is leading somewhere he never anticipated, but can’t stop.

“I’d like nothing more,” Stiles said, and he took Derek’s hand and ran off towards the building.

They wasted no time once they were in the elevator, bodies wound around each other, lips clashing.  Derek’s suitcoat hit the floor first, followed closely by Stiles jacket and then his tie.

When they reached the top floor Stiles already had one leg wrapped around Derek’s back, shirt unbuttoned giving Derek easy access to lick and bite at the cluster of freckles at the juncture of shoulder and neck.

Derek hiked the other leg around him, effortlessly carrying Stiles through the penthouse and towards the bedroom, never breaking contact.

They fell over the side of the bed, kicking their shoes off as they made out, hips grinding together.  There was no need to ask, the desire was clear in their gaze, in the heated touch.

Stiles hands went underneath Derek shirt, rucking it up to feel the warm muscle, the chiseled abs.  When Derek pulled it all the way off he licked his lips as he stared at the shock of chest hair, his mouth darting up to lick and nibble at a nipple.

Derek groaned, the noise rough and uncontrollable as his hand carded Stiles’ hair.  He rocked his hips, desire clearly evident before pulling back.

Standing up he quickly undid his belt as Stiles the same.  His pants fell to the floor, leaving Derek in just his tight black briefs, a designer label of his own brand that left very little to the imagination.  Even one as wild as Stiles’.

For his own part Stiles had flannel patterned trunks on beneath his suit, kicking his pants onto the floor for Derek to brush aside.

Derek toed off his socks before climbing into bed over Stiles.  They kissed for what felt like hours, trading positions as Stiles rolled on top, slotting their hips perfectly to rut against each other’s thigh.

When Derek finally rolled Stiles onto his back again and began to kiss down his jaw, his neck, towards his chest and abs Stiles’ body shuddered in anticipation.  Derek stilled, kissing a line along Stiles waistband before the other man nodded.  A grin split Derek’s lips and he hooked his fingers in the fabric, slowly tugging it down, kissing his way all down Stiles thighs and legs before tossing the underwear away.

He planted kisses back up Stiles firm legs, across both his thighs before coming to rest between them.  Derek smirked as best he could as he heard Stiles whimper and moan at his ministrations, looking up to catch the way the flush spread from his cheeks down to his pale chest, only covered by a smattering of hair there.

Stiles fingers curl into Derek’s hair at the same time his other hand clutches the sheets.  “Fuck!” He groans, feeling on edge already.  He’s almost relieved when Derek pulls away to slip that last piece of cloth off.

Now Stiles has never thought little of himself in the bedroom, but seeing Derek in all his glory he realizes it’s not just Derek’s endowment for the arts that is sizable.  He bids Derek to straddle his chest, and once he does so reaches up to take him in his mouth.  Stiles allows Derek to set the pace, his hands on the man’s well defined cheeks, keeping it steady.

“I wish…  I wish we could…” Derek moans, trying desperately to embed the image of Stiles like this in his mind, even as his eyes try to clench shut in pleasure.

Pulling off, Stiles uses his hand for a moment as he looks up at Derek.  “We can.”

“But… are you…?  Because I’m not…” Derek trails off, tips of his ears pink.

“Yeah,” Stiles answers, “I mean I wasn’t expecting but… a man can dream right?”

Derek laughs at that, bending down to kiss Stiles, playful and overjoyed.  He reaches to the nightstand, grabbing what they need as the lovers continue to kiss and caress, bodies pressed together in sensuous bliss.

He opens Stiles easy, pace languid and relaxed.  When he’s ready, Derek kisses him, makes sure he’s comfortable before taking his place between his thighs.  Stiles pulls Derek into a fiery kiss, gasping into his mouth as his body accepts Derek inside.  They make love slowly, gently at first, like nothing either has ever experienced with another.

Derek caresses him, soft and gentle in a way neither of them expected.  As he moved within Stiles, the younger man quiets for the first time in the night.  Of course, Derek should have known it wouldn’t last for long.

“Shit, I can’t believe I’m in bed with Derek Hale,” Stiles sighs out on a moan, fingernails dragging down Derek’s back, miniscule red lines tracking behind them.

Derek just huffs out a laugh as he thrusts harder, his lips finding a spot in the hollow of Stiles neck, just above a cluster of freckles and sucking hard enough the bruise.

“Can’t… can’t believe I’m getting dicked down by Batman,” Stiles gasps.  “You’re so fucking good, damn!”

It takes a moment to sink in, but once it does Derek stills entirely, bodies still locked together intimately.  He stares down at Stiles in shock; face a mask of confusion in the dark of the night, only illuminated by pale moonlight streaming in through a crack in the curtains.

“I’m not Batman,” he says seriously, too seriously he realizes after a beat.  “That’s ridiculous!” He laughs, but the sound is hollow, forced.  It doesn’t do anything to sway Stiles, not that it would have even if it were believable.

“Yeah, you are…” Stiles finally replies, lying on his elbows to get a better look at Derek.  “It’s pretty obvious up close, and makes a lot of sense.”

“I’m not Batman…” Derek repeats; he’d pull away, but Stiles legs are still locked tight around his waist, his hips kissing the man’s supple ass.

Stiles rolls his eyes, chuckling to himself.  His hand runs up Derek’s chest, catching on a nipple for a moment before sliding to cup his cheek.  “It’s ok; I’m not going to tell anyone.  Don’t worry; your secret is safe with me Bats.”

Derek grits his teeth; he’s getting angry now because this is the closest anyone has gotten in a long time.  He’s not sure if it’s the closeness to him or to finding out his identity that he takes most concern with.  “I’m NOT Batman!” He says once again, more forceful now.

“See, right there.  It’s when you get intense; your voice drops all emotion.  Your eyes are analyzing me, like you see through me.  I’d know these lips anywhere, your little bunny teeth.  You remember?  That was the first time I met you, the first thing I noticed up close.  And then I met your other half, Derek Hale, and it was the first thing I noticed then too.  Some five o’clock shadow, a fake smile and a tailored suit doesn’t change what I can see.”

Stiles’ smile is soft, knowing as he looks at Derek.  “Besides whoever is Batman has all these gadgets and cars and shit.  They’d have to have a lot of money.  They’d need to be in insanely good shape.  They’d have to be free to do whatever they want without people watching their movements.  It all adds up, I was surprised it took me so long to put it together and actually believe it...  And then when I did, well, I wanted you to know you could trust me Derek.  That I wouldn’t rat you out.  I care about you, what you’re doing for this city is something great.  It’s a burden you didn’t need to put on yourself, not with all that you already do outside of the cape.  But you do it anyway.”

Derek should leave.  He should deny it again, get up and never look back, but all he can see is earnest concern and affection in Stiles’ eyes.  All he can feel is the same pull that drew him here tonight growing stronger.  For all that could go wrong, the little part of him that is Derek Hale the man and not Batman yearns for something normal.  Something that’s all his, and not his counterpart’s, and maybe, just maybe, that’s Stiles.

Without saying another word Derek dives in for a kiss, passionate and deep.  His tongue twists around Stiles, battling for dominance before Stiles gives as good as he gets and they find a sensuous balance.  His hips pull back before snapping forward, the moan that rolls off Stiles’ tongue and down Derek’s throat a small victory.

He pushes Stiles to his limits, tests his own endurance and keeps him occupied as much out of genuine desire as to stymie the other man’s incessant chatter.  For all his playboy status Derek doesn’t indulge in these carnal delights often, but even he can’t deny this is the best he’s ever had.

Stiles is the best he’s ever had.

When it’s over, when their bodies are stuck together from more than just sweat, he doesn’t leave like he usually would.  Derek stays; he looks at Stiles and for once really sees him, for all his parts and not just as a potential threat, as another mark, as a citizen he has to protect, but as something else.  Something hard to define for someone like him, but so important he can’t ignore it.

When he finally rolls off, Stiles is still riding the tail end of his high, sated and fucked out, a bit exhausted but in the best way possible.  He turns to speak and Derek puts a finger to his lips.  “Tomorrow, please… let me just sleep next to you.  I don’t want to ruin this.”

Derek’s voice is softer than Stiles has ever heard it, cautious, optimistic he thinks.  It makes him smile and nod, licking the man’s finger playfully before cuddling closer.

Stiles rests his head on Derek’s chest, fingers scratching at the hair there.  His lips kiss one firm pectoral, soft and delicate.  A smile crosses his lips as he looks up at Derek once more before settling down.  It doesn’t take long for Stiles to drift off to sleep, one leg thrown over Derek casually.  What’s most surprising is how fast Derek falls asleep with Stiles in his arms.  How easy it is to let the rest of the world fall away, to quiet that nagging voice in his mind and for Derek to just relax into the bed, close his eyes, and sleep restfully for the first time in a long time.

Chapter 7: A Bright New Day

Stiles wakes up slowly, fingers clenching around empty air and bed sheets.  A disgruntled noise bubbles up from his throat and his eyes flutter open, blinking against the first rays of light.  When he finally can see he notices Derek is missing and his heart drops, only to turn his head to the window and notice Derek is still there.

He stands in all his glory in front of the full length window, gloriously toned ass on display as he looks out across the city.

Derek doesn’t move to turn around, but he says “good morning” all the same.

Stiles sits up in bed, still luxuriating in the downy blankets, relieved Derek isn’t gone after last night.

“Morning Derek,” he says, a soft smile spreading on his cheeks.  He slips out of bed and walks up behind Derek, letting his arms encircle the slightly broader man, resting his head between those sculpted shoulder blades.

One hand comes to rest over Stiles’, holding it firm to his middle.  Derek smiles, starting slow and cautious before relaxing into something deeper, something open and honest.  He turns in Stiles arms, cupping his cheeks and kissing him.

It’s delicate, not like the steamy, impassioned kisses of last night, and not like the cautious and reserved kisses before sleep.  No, this is something entirely different.

“I think I’m falling in love with you…” Derek whispers against Stiles lips, feels the other man smile as they kiss.

“I think I’ve been in love with you,” Stiles answers, his hand sliding up Derek’s toned back, feeling the expanse of smooth muscle as he pulls back just enough to look into his eyes.  “I’m in love with all of you Derek.  You don’t need to hide anything from me.”

It still catches Derek off guard how simply Stiles puts it, like him being Batman is just another night job.  The absurdity of that make him laugh, a low chuckle that has him shaking his head.

“I know you are.  And I…  I don’t want to hide anymore, at least not from you.  But there is so much about my life you don’t know, so much to learn, to deal with.  There is danger, for me and my family, for those in love if who I really am ever got out.  You will… you will worry about me when I’m gone, and I don’t know if you’re ready to deal with this Stiles.”

Stiles makes an offended noise at that, smacking Derek’s chest lightly.  “Derek, my dad was a cop.  You think I don’t know what it’s like to worry that someone you love might not make it home each night?  Yes, I’ll be worried, and I’m sure there is a lot I don’t know.  But one thing you should know is that when you love someone, you’re always afraid for them.  That doesn’t mean you stop loving them, it means you love them more, love them harder, keep them close and enjoy every minute because you never know when it could be your last.  And as for learning, well, I’m a quick study.”

Derek shakes his head, casting his eyes away before he’s pulled right back to those whiskey eyes.  “How?  How can you make me feel this way after all this time?  Like maybe, like maybe Batman doesn’t have to be the only side of my life.  Like maybe there can be more…”

“Because I’ve totally fallen for you Derek Hale.  Batman.  Whichever moniker you want to use, I’m here.  I know what it’s like to lose family, to feel powerless.  I know what it’s like to see the law fail, to wish for someone or something to bring justice where it’s deserved.  I may not be able to understand everything about you, not yet anyway, but I know what’s inside here,” he rests a hand over Derek’s heart, “and I want to know more.  I want to know everything.  I will never try to change you or make you stop your mission.  All I ask is to be allowed to come along for the ride Derek.”

And that’s all it takes.  He thought it would be harder, impossible even for someone to break down his walls, to make him feel this way.  But Stiles is a master of the impossible, and even if he knows it will take time, that there will be bumps along the way, he can’t imagine anyone else trying so hard for him.  Can’t imagine feeling this way about another person.

“Come home with me.  Meet my family, see the Hale mansion,” he says on a whim, surprising himself.

Stiles eyes light up and he's nodding before he can even speak.  “I’d love to!”  He says, kissing Derek excitedly. “Waiiiiiiiit, does this mean I get to see the Batcave?!”

Derek should have expected that.  He just laughs and kissed Stiles, heading him towards the shower.

“No, seriously, I want to see the Batcave.  I’ve heard stories…”

“Play things cool and I might even let you inside the Batcave,” Derek laughs.

“Well you’ve already been in my Batcave, I think it’s only fair I’m returned the favor,” Stiles teases, wiggling his eyebrows.

Derek raises his own in response, giving him a skeptical look before breaking into a grin.  “I’d like for you to come in my Batcave.  Both of them.”  He smirks and winks at Stiles and it’s probably the dorkiest and hottest thing he’s ever heard.

As they get in the shower, hands exploring each other’s bodies as their mouths do the same, the water cascades over them.

“I love you Derek,” Stiles whispers.

“I love you too Stiles,” Derek answers, and he knows it’s true.  And for the first time in a long time Derek feels something new, not just love, but hope.  For the city, for the future, and most importantly, for himself.

[captain-unlikelynutbouquet-blog]

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I tried with some of the agents, but it is not working out for me. Can anyone help me, If you have taken any health insurance plan.""

Car insurance? Do they check your credit rating?

I have just phoned to change my insurance over to another car, and was told twice that it was declined - firstly, he said due to the group of insurance, and secondly, I was told that the operator had a system problem. I am a bit concerned as I know my credit rating is bad at the moment, but I am trying to better it, and I don't know if this is why my insurance was declined? I thought that they had to tell you if they carry out a credit search, but nothing was mentioned and I don't particularly want it going against me if it was searched twice. I have paid my insurance for the year, and was going to pay any extra instantly, so there would be no need for a credit search as far as I can see. Does anyone have any more information on whether they credit search you or not for this?

Insurance on a 2008 Suzuki Hayabusa......?

Wow dont ask me how, but I lucked up and found some RIDICULOUSLY cheap insurance. I have been looking for about a day and a half. Every last MAJOR insurance company you can think of. For some reason everyone on here kept saying check out Progessive. They were one of the MOST expensive. If you have a SUPER sport bike. Meaning either the Kawaski 12 or 14 or the Suzuki 1300 Busa, everyone is quoting you between $6,000 to $8,000 for a year. Thats like $400-$500 a month. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my life. But then my salesman told me to call State Farm. He said trust him, that he used to race sportsbikes and always insured through state farm. So I call them and get a quote for $767 for the year. The same Bike that EVERYONE else quoted at $1000. Honestly I could not belive the lady. I do not understand how the price is that different. My salesman said that it is because State Farm is the only comapny that doesnt run the vin number of the bike and put it in the""

What factors affect how much i will pay for car insurance?

what are the factors that affect the amount i pay for insurance on a car? im looking to purchase my first vehicle and want to know what i can't afford.

What do you think of the '08 Ford Fusion?

Insurance is cheap enough on em

How much is insurance for a crotch rocket (600cc)?

I'm a teenager looking to purchase a crotch rocket (by definition) in the next 6 months, and after googling it and coming up with incredibly high prices, I thought there had to be cheaper insurance. Can anybody provide me with information on how much liability insurance would be for a teenager for a crotch rocket 600cc (not a new one; probably anywhere from '95 - '05). I have no tickets, or wrecks, etc, etc. I would be willing to take a drivers school, etc, etc, whatever I had to do, to lower the insurance. Thanks.""

What are cheap car insurance companies in nj? Or anywhere?

New driver and looking for an affordable price for auto insurance

Where can i find affordable health insurance for my wife so that she may quit work and start her own business?

She is a teachers aide now, has retired but still works b/c she won't have insurance is she quits.""

How much will a medical condition load the car insurance?

if someone told the DVLA that the had a problem with drink, what would the insurance load be when they got their licence back?""

Getting free insurance when buying a van new?

I'm Ste & I'm 21. I've just passed my license a month a go and I'm struggling to get a decent quote from any insurance company. That's made me think about buying one new as I know some car showrooms do free insurance policies for young drivers (Mainly over 21) which is lucky as i've recently celebrated my 21st. So, are there any van company's with free insurance? I've got no no claims and I've had my license a month. Any help would be brill! Cheers, Ste.""

Car insurance?

I just got my liscence and my friend told me that car insurance is more expensive for 16 year olds than 17 year olds because they have increased chances of getting into an accident. What are the average rates of insurance for sixteen year olds and is it worth waiting until I am 17 until the prices drop?

Question about motorcycle insurance?

Ok... I know that insurance is different from person to person but in general who is the best company to be with for motorcycle insurance. What is the average lowest price, who actually will do their job when its time for a claim. Who has the best or most coverages for a cycle. All these different things. So who is the best...""

What bike would be cheapest on insurance?

scooter?street+trail?chopper?crotchrocket? or anything?which bike out of all bikes street legal and able to achieve 50mph is the cheapest insurance wise

150cc Scooter Insurance in California...?

I bought a 150cc scooter for $950 brand new in California. Do I need to get it insured. I am only going to use it for 6 months till I got to school. I live abroad. I am not worried about the scooter getting damaged, I need only 3rd party insurance in case I knock someone and they decide to sue me or whatever... What are your suggestion, and the cost to register one and the cost for insurance. Im 20 years old btw. Thanks alot if you can help me out!! Thanks...""

""Cheap, but safe cars with low insurance [group 5 or less]?""

Are there cars [excluding super mini cars] that are big [i.e. saloon cars etc], but are generally cheap to insure for young drivers. As it seems the only ones that have cheap insurance are the super mini cars, and I don't really want one.""

Does anybody know how much it cost for insurance for a 16 year old in Arkansas?

Does anybody know how much it cost for insurance for a 16 year old in Arkansas?

What will insurance pay?

If my car is totaled, which amount on the Kelly Blue Book will the insurance base payment on.""

USAA Auto insurance extra monthly bill?

Hi we've been with USAA for over 10 yrs now for our Auto/Recreation insurance company. This month on our bill i noticed our rates went up by 35+ dollars per month. I called and they said nothing has changed in our policy. They told us because the dates our policy renewed we have an extra bill in this cycle. So they had to charge us more so we wouldn't have to pay 2 bills in 1 month. I am so confused it seems like were making an extra payment for nothing. We Pay every month on time , so I'm not sure why we have to pay an extra payment to avoid a double billing. Only thing they could tell me is that it happens to alot of policyholders once or twice in the lifetime of the policy. Seems strange to me. Thanks for your responses!""

Why does my car insurance provider ask for other people in household?

Does it matter who I live with if they aren't going to be driving my car? How will it affect my rates? When I first got my insurance I lived with roommates - they had good driving records but still they never drove my car (they had their own!), now I live with my fiance who has a DUI - will my rates go up because of it? He has his own truck and SUV so we rarely ride my car and when we do I ALWAYS drive... so why do I need to tell my insurance company (Mercury) who else resides in my home?!""

Help on AT&T insurance?

Okay so when I got my upgrade I got the htc one x with insurance . A month later my friend traded me a galaxy nite for my htc one x . And now my galaxy note doesn't want to work will the insurance cover the note?

I have no insurance and need an abortion?

Please dont judge im young and recently found out im pregnant. But im not ready for a baby... I would love to keep my child but if my parents ever found out they'd literally disown me. I have no insurance and I dont know how much an abortion would cost. I was thinking about getting the abortion pill still not sure. How much would that cost?I checked online but it didnt say anything about abortion.

What are Insurance groups all about?

And... 1. Is a 1.4 engine car okay for a 17 year old? Or does it HAVE to be 1.2 2. Honda Civic or Volkswagen Polo? 3. A rough idea on the insurance cost per year for third party fire and theft?

Which Insurance company is best for Whole Life Insurance ?

I have search only 2 big compnay Metlife and New York Life. I am 24 years old and want that whole life insurance for my life. So i want to know which compnay i need to choose for whole life insurance.... Metlife or New York Life ? I have quote from metlife Insurance...Agent told me my premium payment gonna be $3510.00 per anuual for $500,000.00 ( insurance amount). and i am 24 yeras old it has cash value too.. So i need some information from ur side...should i take it or ?""

Is it illegal to not have insurance on a car you don't drive?

It's tagged and everything, just don't see the point in paying for car insurance if it isn't getting driven.""

""Will my insurance go up, if my parked car was hit and not occupied?""

My Car was hit While parked and was not occupied (nobody was in the car) The car that hit my car, pulled out of the parking spot and was trying to hide. i went and filed a collission report against the driver. what will happen now, will my insurance rate go up? or will i be at 100% no fault. I know some insurance companies try to rip us off. plz help

Aussie car insurance?

who are the cheapest car insurance company for aussie p platers also.. are there any companies that offer reduced term cover.. id like 6 months insurance so i can take up a years insurance once thats finished to break up insurance and rego

Canceling car insurance?

i got some car insurance for a car i was purchasing today as i did not want to drive it home over 100 miles with out none , i only took it out yesterday but when i went to pick up the car it had obtained some problems that it did not have before so i have not brought it. i was told when i got the insurance that i would have 14 days to cancel it but when i rung them up today to cancel it they have said i can not and i will have to pay all of the premium in full, i explained to them why i was needing to cancel it and was told it is not their fault and i still have to pay all outstanding monies , is this right . this is with swinton if it matters.""

Car insurance? Do they check your credit rating?

I have just phoned to change my insurance over to another car, and was told twice that it was declined - firstly, he said due to the group of insurance, and secondly, I was told that the operator had a system problem. I am a bit concerned as I know my credit rating is bad at the moment, but I am trying to better it, and I don't know if this is why my insurance was declined? I thought that they had to tell you if they carry out a credit search, but nothing was mentioned and I don't particularly want it going against me if it was searched twice. I have paid my insurance for the year, and was going to pay any extra instantly, so there would be no need for a credit search as far as I can see. Does anyone have any more information on whether they credit search you or not for this?

I am 16 almost 17 and am looking for a car and am wondering what the insurance rats would be on a porsche 944

this would be my second car and its a really nice 1985 Porsche 944 (non-turbo) it has only 67K miles on it and is in excellent shape I am just wondering if my insurance would go up i pay about 130 $ a month on a Pontiac grand am ... would it go up? if so do you know how much?

How much do you pay for car insurance?

How much do you pay for car insurance?

""Why is my car insurance for my 1st car, 2500 and my friends insurance is only 1500 for his 1st car??""

Why is my car insurance for my 1st car, 2500 and my friends insurance is only 1500 for his 1st car?? This is confusing me, both our annual milage is estimated to be 5000 miles, they are both in group one insurance groupes, they are both a 1.1L etc, everything is the same apart from the make of the vehicles. I have treid other vehicle qoutes, but yet my insurance qoute is still 2500, and my friend qoutes is only 1500.""

Health insurance?????????????????????...

should government help on health insurance? y or y not?

What is the renewal process for car insurance?

Do they call in around expiration of the policy. Or is it a form you fill out. What questions do they ask? In particular, say you failed your G test before the expiry of the insurance policy and you redo everything and get a G or G2, will your insurance rate remain the same?""

I need a cheap auto Insurance company.?

Can anyone recommend a specific company in California that they use and was either told or knows that they are a low cost agency? Thanks for your help.

Life insurance with gerber life?

hey everybody...im thinking of taking life insurance with gerber life..im getting a lot of pish posh from the company, they seem to be circumventing my questions....im curious has anybody ever filed a claim with them regarding the passing of a loved one, or tried to make a claim with them? my dad...god rest his soul tried to get a life insurance policy claimed when his sister passed on, he was beneficary,,and i remember they gave him a hard time about the policy...if you can suggest a life insurance co you have id be intrested....serious answears only please""

Car Insurance for Young Driver (UK)?

Hi, I'll get straight to the point, I'm 17 almost 18 and am looking 2 buy my 1st car. I live a upper class life, and when it comes down to cars i do get to travel in in style. e.g. my dad drives a Jaguar S-Type, my mother a brand new 2008 Land Rover Freeland, and i do know people with Bentley's and this one guy i know will take me out for a drive in his Aston Martin Vanquish. I do like to stick out from a crowd and this is a amazing opportunity to do so at college. My 1st car is definitely goin on my dads policy, and by then i will have my full license. I have seen Jaguar XJ's for sale which i can afford, but my greatest question is how much would the insurance be. If someone who is a young driver who drives a Jaguar or something similer could give me a rough guess to how much insurance wud be?, i wud be greatfull or someone who has insured a young driver on there Jaguar?.""

Do I need to get tested for smoking to get health insurance?

Im not a smoker but I can have the occasional cigarette with friends

""I have experience working in the health insurance industry, now im wondering what job I could apply for?

I worked as a medical case manager at an insurance company. We were a 3rd party company. I did phone interviews with people applying for individual insurance for several ...show more

Are you supposed to have car insurance at 15?

i just thought of this just now and i remember having to pay for auto insurance at 15 just for a school permit for school and back and i hear some people dont have insurance was i right to pay for it or was i tricked because he says you have to be 16 and said he'll accidentally put that i am and say it was a mistake to the company, i think this is a trick but idk and again others dont pay for insurance but were they just too cheap to do it and risk the consinquence? or did i get tricked back then by my insurer""

What the hell is wrong with my insurance quote?? Help please?

Hi, I've just been to confused.com and obtained a quote for the car I want - FORD MONDEO VERONA 16V 1997-2000 1796cc 5 DOOR HATCHBACK Manual Petrol - this 2nd hand car has done around 12,0000 mileage My cheapest premium was 4329?? Why on earth is it so expensive?? Is it the fact that I'm a 20 year old male? Or that I've just had my licence for a month? Or I've only lived in the UK for 3 years? Engine size?? State of car??? Please let me know than you""

Should i use life insurance or annuity or retirement?

my wife has a non qualified annuity @ 3% fixed rate. my question is on her renewel medicaid application should i use annuity-retirement or life insurance policy. thanks for any help & may GOD bless.

Can I have car insurance from California in Maryland?

I spoke to a representative of the car insurance from California and she said that it was fine. And that she had many clients from all over the nation. Does anyone know more about this? Thanks!

Will Insurance goes up when I change my car motor?

i am trying to buy a car. but some cars are cheap when they changed out their motors. how much will the insurance go up if the motor is changed. and how much will the insurance go up if the car is modified?

Why do wives have to be on husbands car insurance?

I have been under my parents car insurance for my whole driving life and now I am married. My husband is a new driver in the USA, and because we just bought a new car, we have to be ...show more""

""Car insurance, Help!?""

I crashed my car into another car, both card sustained minimal damage, I just payed for my car to be fixed without consulting my insurance, is this illegal? And furthermore could I settle a money agreement with the guy I crashed into? is this all legal? Also if the guy decided to go through insurance would someone come inspect my car or inspect his... Basically what would the whole procedure be? I haven't contacted him yet""

""Okay, so how much does neutering/spaying a dog cost? Will insurance companies cover it?""

1 - How much does it on average cost to get a female dog neutered/spayed? 2 - I will be buying insurance from the day we get her (8 weeks old) so would my insurance cover the cost? (I know it varies on actual insurance plans, but Im wondering if its a complete 'they never pay for that' sort of thing?) 3 - How long is the recovery time? How long after the op can I take her home? How long will she have the cone of shame? I have googled this but I get a bunch of long winded answers that dont really answer the questions""

Can I get a loan for a car but put the car in someone else's name?

So I need a new car mine is totally done for and I wanted to get a loan for a car but my insurance will be crazy high, my boyfriend has Usaa and said he'd put it on his insurance cause it'd be way cheaper but can we put the car in his name if I'm the one getting the loan?""

What should I do if my attorney is not paying me my insurance money(california)?

ok.. I've filed a claim against my home insurance company through a lawyer. It was a house related claim. I was told my claim was settled and signed the settlement paper from attorney's office about 5 months ago and still have not received the money yet. So I called the actual insurance company and found out that the money was paid out 4 months ago. When I called my attorney's office, 4 different agents told me different stories and I noticed they might be trying to keep the money. is there any way to file a claim against lawyers? Please help""

Cancelling Car Insurance questions any help please?

Okay, first and foremost thanks for reading. The situation with me right now is I'm thinking about cancelling my car insurance after this month. This is my first time having insurance but I can't afford the payments because I have been unsuccessful in getting a job. Not only that but the car cannot be driven again until it is fixed so it will stay in the yard. I didn't get into an accident or anything but it needs a few parts cause they've worn out. So I was just going to get it cancelled/lapsed whatever since there is no point for me to have it if I cannot drive my vehicle. I don't have the money right now to repair it either. I'm thinking about cancelling it, waiting until I get my car fixed and then getting some new insurance. But my mom told me that once your insurance runs out in NC you have to bring the tags back... Does that mean I have to pay the full registration fee again once I get another insurance policy as well? Or can I somehow just keep my tags until I get some new insurance within the next two or three months? By the way the vehicle will stay parked until I have enough money to fix it and insure it.""

Why is my car insurance so high at 18? How can I get it down?

I've just passed my test and learnt in a 1.4 diesel and I have a peugeot 206 1.4 hdi, I had insurance quote for 1800 a month ago and now they are saying its 3700 I don't understand what's changed in a month what's the best way to get it down, I'm going on my Nans policy as a named driver and registering the car in her name and its still 3700! Any ideas? Thanks in advance""

How much (on average) would private health insurance be per month for a family of three?

male 40 y.o., female 36 y.o., and child.""

What happens if to my insurance if i get married?

My parents pay for my insurance and ill have it till I'm 19 if I get married would I no longer have insurance?

How much would car insurance for a 16 girl cost?

Im 16 and thinking of getting a 2000 ford explorer and a 2000 jeep cherokee. how much would my insurence cost? and what car is better to get?

Car insurance? Do they check your credit rating?

I have just phoned to change my insurance over to another car, and was told twice that it was declined - firstly, he said due to the group of insurance, and secondly, I was told that the operator had a system problem. I am a bit concerned as I know my credit rating is bad at the moment, but I am trying to better it, and I don't know if this is why my insurance was declined? I thought that they had to tell you if they carry out a credit search, but nothing was mentioned and I don't particularly want it going against me if it was searched twice. I have paid my insurance for the year, and was going to pay any extra instantly, so there would be no need for a credit search as far as I can see. Does anyone have any more information on whether they credit search you or not for this?

Part-time and need affordable health benefits. Any suggestions?

My COBRA is running out in 4 months. Any suggestions for affordable benefits for part-time workers? Thanks!

Do I need car insurance the moment I get my provisional license (CA)?

I'll be going out for my provisional drivers license tomorrow, and I was wondering whether I need car insurance if I do get my provisional license. My parents are planning to allow me to get my provisional license, but won't add me to their policy until a year down the road. Am I allowed to drive alone with my provisional license as long as the car I'm driving is insured by my parents? (California)""

I need info about maternity Insurance?

I currently have insurance through assurant health and I am looking to add maternity insurance. I was contacted by an agent asking me what deductable I wanted a 10 thousand or 5 thousand deductable. The thing is I heard that I may be eligible for medicaide. My husband only makes about 30,000 a year and I am a full time sudent. I am unsure what to do as I am completley in the dark about the situation. Please someone give me some insight thank you""

How can I get a car insurance quote if I'm under 18?

I don't have my license yet but a large part of what decides what car I can get depends on what the car insurance would cost. Since I am under 18 not of the car insurance websites will give me a quote and if i lie about my age it will change the cost. Any ideas?

Two part question--Germany Auto insurance and the IPhone?

1.) What automobile insurance companies do most people use in Germany (German companies not American) to get the best rate? 2.) Will a T- Mobile IPhone from German (T-Mobile) work in the US under a new contract or will i need to get a new phone when i return to the US?

How much is insurance for young men drivers?

I want to get a new car and im 18 years old. My dad says he wont put me on his insurance if i buy a new car but insurance on a new car will be like $400 a month!!!! I have no accidents or tickets my record is clean. Is this normal? I dont live in a bad area and it is a convertible pontiac g6. ThanX

Where can I get affordable dental insurance?

Where can I get affordable dental insurance?

What's the best health insurance coverage and best insurance company?

I'd like suggestions on the best top-notch health insurance coverage/ company in the U.S or just in general. I'd also like to know if there are other companies abroad who provide health insurance coverage for U.S citizens. Finally as a young kid just out of college , with first career job, with no health issues what should i be looking at as far as coverage plans and expenses, looking to save money. I had a student health coverage while in schoolm, but it's since expired. Thanks""

""If i'm under my dad's car insurance plan, does he need to be there when i buy a car?""

Do i have to give the car dealer any of his info? What do i need to show them to prove i have insurance? I live in california, so insurance in required to drive.""

Is it mean to cancel the kids' health insurance?

I pay for all of the health insurance through my job, including his. I told hime that he has 15 days to some for himself and 30 days to get some for the children. He thinks that is a horrible mother because it would all cost me $300 a month but it will cost him $1200 per month. He make 260K per year. I make $70K He he moved out and got involved with someone else. Why should it be free to destroy your family? I really should have done this four months ago when he moved out.""

Insurance of a replica sports car ?

Would I have to pay high insurance on a replica of a sports car, when really the car is actually that the body kit will be going onto is only worth 600 ?""

Insurance for Mustang v6 2014 for 18 year old?

Hi , I'm planning to get a Mustang v6 premium 2014, I'm an international student with 3.7 GPA in High-school I have a clean record even in my country ( no accidents or tickets ) I know it's not possible to get a real accurate estimate but what I want to know if it would exceed 200$ a month ?""

Where can I find inexpensive health Insurance for an individual?

Where can I find inexpensive health Insurance for an individual?

How much would this cost to insure?

Hi, I'm looking to buy my first car. Two I have my eyes on are an automatic 2002 Chevy Camaro and a manual 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder. Both cost just over 5k. I'm 17, a male, I have good grades, I don't smoke or do drugs, I'm in honors classes and I've taken drivers ed. Approximately how much would they cost to insure? Please don't say They're too challenging to drive , or They have too much power. I've driven cars with power before (both manual and auto) and I don't find it challenging at all. I have pretty good hand eye coordination. Also, my apologies if this somehow gets asked in the UK answers, I'm asking this fairly late at night.""

How much will it cost me to send an used laptop from US to India? including insurance. Is insuring a must?

How much will it cost me to send an used laptop from US to India? including insurance. Is insuring a must?

Thinking of switching to Progressive Insurance?

Would like to know if anyone has Progressive Insurance for auto insurance. Would like to switch to them from Farmers because I can double my coverage for the same price as Farmers. Has anyone had problems with Progressive such as filing a claim? or rate increases for no reason. I have not had an accident in over 14 years, knock on wood. Just afraid if I switch my rates will go up for no reason. I know there is good and bad about Progressive. Any input would help. I live in California""

Car and car insurance for a 16 year old?

What is the best company for a 16 year old to get car insurance from? (needs to be fairly cheap but also, very reliable) Also, what would be the best car to get? (also needs to be fairly cheap and very reliable) Thank you for your time and give as much advice as you can!""

Do I Need Car Insurance to drive my parents car?

I live in ct and i was wondering can i drive my parenst car as long as they have car insurance on a registered car or do i have to be on a policy too?

Learning to drive questions?

From england. Ok so a few quetrions. On average, how many lessons does it usually take before you can take the test? Is there a set minimum of lessons or do you take the test when you feel ready? How much on average does each lesson cost? Is it true i wont be able to get insurance on a 1.8 or 1.6? How much did you spend on your first car? Answers to do with England please !""

Can i get a better insurance for my car?

I just bought a car last week. My fiance and I are in the registration. The lender of the car (GM Financial) is asking to have my fiance in the insurance but he does not have a license since he had a DUI back in 2010 and other little felonies. He have a bad driving record and my insurance (Allied Insurance) wants to charge me 289.00 a month. Can i find a cheaper insurance for the both of us?

Which company provides the cheapest car insurance in the UK?

I recently passed my driving test, so for a first time driver its going to be high but what if i am an additional driver""

Why is it hard to find medical Insurances?

i have a heart condition, why is it hard to find medical insurances?""

How long should I get a term life insurance policy for?

I'm researching term policies to cover the shortfall for life insurance from my work. How long is reasonable to get a term policy for? Term to 60, 75 or 100 years?""

Teenagers and car insurance again?

so i just posted a question asking if insurance costs more for a 18 year old. i loved all the answers they were really helpful. so the story is my friend thinks she's gonna insure a car and pay only 60 a month in arkansas but my moms insurance company says me being 18 i would pay over 100 dollars because im so young. ive had everyone tell me that thats right so it sounds pretty impossible for a new driver 18 years old to pay such a cheap price right? please give me some insight!!!

Getting into a car accident with a 16-year-old uninsured driver?

I live in San Diego, California. I recently got into a car accident with a 16-year-old uninsured driver, who was using his mother's car at the time and had two underaged passengers. I was in a business area (25 MPH) and I was switching lanes into the right lane. I had my right hand blinker on and was in the process of switching lanes. The 16-year-old driver was speeding and quickly hit my front right end. I had a witness - who reported two things - with the police, he reported that the 16-year-old tried to avoid me by getting into the bike lane, but then reported with my insurance company that the 16-year-old ran straight into my car at 50 MPH. They are currently finding me 80% at fault because of the police report. The police report was obviously misrepresented. What steps can I take to fix this?""

Car insurance? Do they check your credit rating?

I have just phoned to change my insurance over to another car, and was told twice that it was declined - firstly, he said due to the group of insurance, and secondly, I was told that the operator had a system problem. I am a bit concerned as I know my credit rating is bad at the moment, but I am trying to better it, and I don't know if this is why my insurance was declined? I thought that they had to tell you if they carry out a credit search, but nothing was mentioned and I don't particularly want it going against me if it was searched twice. I have paid my insurance for the year, and was going to pay any extra instantly, so there would be no need for a credit search as far as I can see. Does anyone have any more information on whether they credit search you or not for this?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/car-insurance-17-help-needed-zerneisen-sasha"

[my-boston-strong-blog]

Character Suggestions;

Need some help with deciding what to do with your character? Our members, have given us some suggestions for any potential new members! Take a look at our list and tell us if there was one you grabbed! (This list includes character suggestions for biography’s and secrets.)

Biography Ideas: 

Name is from another country, and he comes to the states and Boston, looking for his sister who ran away when they were kids. What he didn't expect was the life he was given once he arrived. Spotted by a talent agent, name became a model, suddenly famous all over the world. But will he ever get closer to finding out where or what happened to his sister?

What do you do when you find out that your moms boss is your father and your entire life your parents have been lying to you? What do you do when you find out said boss is running for president? Forced to keep the secret of their paternity for four more years, name's life is now in shambles. 

Secret Ideas: 

Person had a gambling problem, always believed they would hit it big with bets. Unfortunately, they couldn't pay their loan shark back and bones were broken. Still not enough to force Person to pay back, their house was taken by the loan shark and is being used as a hideout for the betters. Person is technically homeless, and does what they need to survive on the streets of Boston.   

Growing up name, did one to many shitty things, but what he did was always under the influence, and also is why he lives a sober life today. When name is high, he's the most unstable person there is. He's cruel, and he doesn’t care. When he was high and angry there was no stopping him from whatever he'd do. He put terror in his hometown. He becomes sadistic, and injuring women when high was a pleasure that nothing could come close to. He's scared today to lose it like that again as he gets mad now especially towards women, the urge to make them suffer keeps peaking through.

She's not proud of this, but her young mother has fresh young guys in her surroundings. After her mother got married to her step dad when she was 18 years old she felt an odd attraction to him. She never had a father figure like that in her life before, but the more she hung out with him on her own, the more attracted to him she got. Eventually leading to their year-long affair started.  She had a relationship with her 15-year-older stepfather, behind her mothers back.

Name spent some time in London, where they joined a group of friends for a night on the town and they introduce yours to the glamours underworld of high-end prostitution. Leading to name meeting their one and only client, a prince.  Falling pregnant with the prince's child name's kid is born blue-blooded, and the prince, pays them off to leave London and keep his identity a secret. 

Name is a doctor who has lost their license and ability to practice. Stuck in a complicated situation, they take up a job in organized crime doing surgeries for gang/mafia members who get shot/stabbed.

When name was a child, a neighborhood toddler went missing. Weeks later that child was found, dead. Cause of death, strangulation. Who did it? Well, name did, when they were 8 years old. No one ever found out about it. Why did they do it? Just to see if they could.

Name is a grandchild of a survivor of the Jones Town mass suicide/massacre. If you haven't heard of it, well maybe this term will jog your memory: "Guess they drank the koolaid!"

When name was a teenager they got pregnant. Being that they were from a wealthy family where news traveled fast, they hid their pregnancy. No one knew. Not even the staff. With parents who were hardly home, due to work the secret was easily kept. Once name had the baby, she dropped it off at the nearest fire station. Problem solved. No one knew about it. It wasn't until many years later that name started to regret that decision and have since then spent mounds of cash in search of their child. Fun fact, name doesn't even know if it was a boy or a girl. Guess that's what happens when you wrap that evidence up and toss them in a basket.

On a cold a stormy night, name ran over an old lady. Why? Because they didn't see her, until she was in their rear view, falling off the back of their car. Oops! Did they stop? Well, only for a second, to check the damage to their car. Barely even a dent. No blood. No hair. Quick glance back to the non-moving body of the old lady. Then down at the watch. They were late to the biggest house party of the year. Their last high school senior party. Boy, were they late. So, they did what most irresponsible party teens did, they quickly glanced around for other cars, or cameras, then hopped into their car and left. Crisis averted. Now, as for whatever happened to that old lady, well, they never thought to find out. Hello, remember, important party for any and all relevant seniors.

As a teen name often snuck out of the house to go to the bad side of town, for what was supposed to be an awesome time. Only their dad was a cop. He found out name snuck out, after getting their sibling to dish on them. When he showed up at the party to break it up, things quickly turned south. A gun went off, and he was down for the count. As in, dead-dead, 'cause most ambulances took ten times longer to drive into those neighborhoods due to all the gun activity. So, now this kid's gonna hold that guilt over their heads till they die. That they're partially responsible for their dad's death.

Name likes to tell everyone that they are an only child but in reality, they have a twin sibling. Their relationship is not a good one, and there is a mutual sense of hatred. Name needed extra money so they started opening up credit cards and loans in their twins name, causing the other twin to be heavily in debt. Now, needing money, they do illegal jobs [drugs, prostitution, ect] under their twin's name.

Name grew up in a very strict house where they couldn't go anywhere. One night they snuck out and ended up getting drunk with a few friends. Name's friends told her/him to drive the car. One their way home, they ended up hitting a man and his/her friends told Name not to say a word about if they did they would make it look like it was just him/her that did it. Name never told a soul about hitting the man.

Character Name lost his/her family at a young age. So they don't remember them much. He/She grew up with other street kids. She learned to survive on the streets and when he/she became a teen they killed their first person. Soon they became a hired killer for anyone and everyone who could afford them. Soon Character Name was no longer living on the streets. Now in their 20's they still make their living as a hired killer.

Character Name owns one of the most successful clubs in Boston. Character Name uses this club as a front for some of their more illegal money makers. Everything from: Prostitution, hit men, drugs, etc.

Character Name loves living their life in the fast lane. While out one night racing in the streets of Boston Character name was driving down the winding two lane roads coming out of the country going back into the city when a car came around a curve. Rather than slowing down to get back into the correct lane Character name kept going and the car ran off the road into a massive ravine. The driver of the other car was killed instantly. Character Name has never shared this information with anyone because they know what that would mean for them.

Character Name is a teacher and all of the kids love this teacher. However, every year this teacher ends up sleeping with one of their seniors.

Character Name is a prominent member of society but they do not like to fit the mold that they have been given. While most people know of Character Name what they do not know about them is that they are secretly a burlesque dancer.