#ANOTHER FIX IT FIC

[killuaisaprincess]

🍏

“I was so scared I would lose you, Killua.”

He doesn’t know… what’s going on… it feels like he’s still falling into a bottomless abyss, even as he scrunches his fingers up into the hospital sheet.

This wasn’t… The plan…

Yet… he’s staring at his best friend beside his bedside while squid-octopus talks outside with the owner…?

He isn’t sure… his head…

Fuzzy…

But there’s a spark of anger at Gon’s words. He shouldn’t relish in the fact that Gon was scared he was going to die… it’s wrong… but… but… time and time… Gon says he’s allowed to die, but Killua isn’t… and he does reckless things… and Killua is always scared…

He’s drowning in it.

“You jerk!“

He balls his hand up, hitting Gon in the chest, ignoring the pain that shoots through it, choking on a sob.

“You were scared? You selfish! Jerk! You only think of yourself!”

The hot rage in his veins is nothing compared to the tidal wave of despair and fear.

“I-I’ve been nothing but scared! I don’t know what to do… I can’t do anything to help you!”

Not even with this…

“I’m so scared… you selfish…”

His head hurts. His heart is splitting in two, and his lungs ache, trying to get even a gasp of air between heaves.

“I don’t wanna lose you! I-I don’t… want you to hate me… but I’m helpless! Useless!”

Pain. Every crashing sob makes his head throb more, pulsating hot pressure.

He leans down, pressing his forehead to the white sheet, gasping.

“Even Palm is more useful than me!”

So if he shatters the delicate balance, Gon will hate him.

But if he doesn’t…

“I know I’m not your most important person! I’m not Kite.. I’m not your stupid-ugh! Dad!”

But…

“So what does it matter what I want…?”

When has it ever mattered?

“B-But! Please don’t go!” Don’t die! “For K-Kite…”

“Killua.”

His blood runs cold, his breath leaving his lips in a whimper.

He doesn’t want to… he doesn’t wanna look! Maybe he wants to be selfish!

He can’t… see Gon’s eyes so cold…

“I knew something was wrong.”

Huh…?

He slowly uncurls his fingers from the sheet, lifting his head carefully, his slight frame racking with tremors.

Killua sits up slowly; he can’t swallow it down… the lump in his throat.

Gon’s hand is balled up in a fist, and Killua flinches.

He closes his eyes, looking away, waiting for the impact.

Gon’s knuckles gently tap his head, and Killua opens his eyes cautiously, tears slipping past.

Gon pulls his hand away, and Killua reaches up, touching his forehead where Gon “hit”.

It tingles, and he stares dumbfounded at Gon, sniffing.

“Killua.”

Gon slings his backpack off his shoulder, placing it at the foot of the bed.

“I win! This is sorta like an I told you so thing, right? I knew something was wrong.”

Gon sits down, gently pulling Killua closer, and Killua collapses into Gon’s arms, his head hitting Gon’s sternum.

“Killua…”

Gon wraps an arm around his shoulder, grabbing his bag with his free hand.

He rummages inside, revealing familiar and comforting colors. Killua stares at the cute box of chocorobots, confusion flitting across his face.

“C-choco…?”

He trails off, and Gon smiles at him.

“Oh, and this.”

Gon reaches in, fumbling around, sticking his tongue out in concentration.

He places it gently in Killua’s hand, and Killua stares. The special edition robot…

“I told you I didn’t…”

He gently pokes it, tears pricking his eyes, putting it on the pillow.

“Killua.”

He doesn’t even notice Gon has been messing with some ply wire; his bag thrown carelessly to the side, until he can feel Gon grab his free hand.

“You are my most important person.”

W-what?

He can’t register the cold of the metal slipping over his ring finger, not just because of the bandages…

What… no…

The chocorobt falls from his other hand, the clatter not even registering in his ears.

Gon can’t…

“I-I’m sorry, Gon, I-I can’t…”

Killua so tenderly takes the ring off his finger, tears welling up in his eyes as he plays with it. It’s not a real ring, but it’s the meaning behind it.

He can see Gon’s heart shatter as he says those words, and it only makes a sob leave Killua’s lips.

“I-I promised… I already promised Bisky I would leave… long before this… I don’t belong with you. I don’t deserve you…”

Killua holds out the ring for Gon to take back, sniffling and keeping his head tilted down, only catching a reflection of the hurt and confusion in Gon’s eyes.

“Everyone is right. I’ve been told my whole life over and over I don’t deserve friends. She thinks I’ll leave you to die.”

It doesn’t matter how many times he pierces his head or tries to get rid of the feeling; he’s still terrified. What if it’s true…?

“I-I’m sorry…”

“What?”

Gon’s voice sounds so cold. Like it has recently that it makes Killua freeze, shaking.

“Killua.”

His voice goes soft in an instant, and Gon takes his hand and curls his fingers up, so he is holding the ring.

“It’s good that they’re wrong, then. You’re not my friend. You’re my fiancé.”

The air leaves his lungs, and he looks up slowly, lower lip trembling and hot tears falling onto his cheeks, eyes wide. Gon’s are watering too, and he uncurls Killua’s fingers gently, taking the ring and placing it on his finger again.

“And they’re wrong.”

Gon grabs his arms, trying not to press too harshly and hurt him, pulling him close and burying his nose in Killua’s hair, hugging him closer.

“You’re my light, Killua. You’re kind and beautiful, and selfless. None of them know you. Not like me. I was so scared- you…”

Killua curls his fingers up in Gon’s jacket, sobbing softly into his chest.

“Killua. Marry me right now. It’s-It’s what Kite would want. H-he wouldn’t want me to-to do this… he’d w-want…”

Killua gently tucks his arms under Gon’s armpits, resting his dainty fingers on his shoulders and hugging him back.

“O-okay, you idiot…”

Gon pulls away slowly, reaching down and cupping Killua’s cheeks with his hands, wiping his tears away with the pad of his thumbs.

“You can wear the dress Abe wore… and we can celebrate in the forest so Kon can come…”

He pulls Killua into his lap, cradling him close.

Killua smiles softly, nuzzling his head against Gon’s chest.

“Kite will be there too, Gon… in spirit… and we can tie your stupid old man up, so he can’t escape.”

“Mmm…”

Gon slowly reaches around Killua, grabbing an edge of the hospital sheet, pulling it up, and resting it on the crown of Killua’s head, smiling.

“What are you doing, idiot?“

Killua huffs, but it’s only filled with endearment.

“It’s your veil.”

Gon grins, leaning down and softly kissing Killua on the lips.

“Are you cold? Killua, you’re shaking.”

Gon gently takes one of his wrists, and Killua stares at his own hand, noticing the slight tremble to his fingers.

Killua snuggles against Gon’s chest, shaking his head and listening to the rhythmic sound of Gon’s breathing, the comfort in the rising and falling of his chest, smiling softly.

No… he’s… happy.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to be scared, Killua. Or cold. I’m here.”

“I’m here.”

Words that lull him into a warm sleep.

[rcmclachlan]

8x06 fix-it fic: Amnion

Buck doesn't bounce back from Tommy the way he did with all his other breakups for reasons he can't articulate or even look at. He thinks of how long it took him to recover from Abby, but even that felt different, because he'd had hope carrying him through most of it. He doesn't have that now.

The worst part is it's bringing everyone else down. It's starting to affect the job, and he can't take any more of Bobby's pity dinner invites or the kid gloves Eddie handles him with. Then one day, Chimney (in an attempt to lighten the mood) asks Buck if he's pregnant, and it awakens some primordial rage in Buck that he never knew he possessed and damn near rips off Chimney's head about it.

But once the blood levels in his adrenaline start rising and he calms down, he starts thinking about it. Before he knows it he's thinking about it day and night, and now that's starting to affect the job more than his heartbreak had been.

Then one night Maddie invites him over to watch trash TV and eat junk food until they can't feel feelings anymore, but instead of the patented Maddie Hug he's expecting, she hands him a First Response test stick the second he walks in the door.

Five minutes later, he comes out of the bathroom pale-faced and dripping tears because there are two lines in the test result window, and Maddie leads him over to the couch where they curl up and cry together. Just like the old days.

Maddie asks if he's going to tell Tommy, but there's no judgment in her voice, like she's behind him no matter what he decides, and Buck tries to make her laugh when he says, "How do you know it's his? I could've been living it up for the last month. New person almost every night. Exploring myself."

She just gives him a Look. Also patented.

Under the weight of her scrutiny, Buck thinks about Tommy's face before he left the loft that night and how ''Buck'' looked and sounded so wrong coming from him. Like the shape of it was so painful he could barely move his mouth around it.

Finally, he shakes his head. His eyes well up with more tears, which feels impossible, because the human body can't possibly produce this much liquid. He's going to drown them both. "I thought... I thought we had a future, Maddie. I really did. I guess I still get one... but only with part of him."

A couple of months pass and Buck's entire world shifts. The 118 have rallied around him in a way that almost feels like they're closing ranks to every other firehouse. Eddie becomes especially protective and devises a 5000-point care plan that makes him twitch if Buck so much as thinks about deviating from it, but he also keeps telling Buck that he needs to tell Tommy about the pregnancy.

"If only to get his family history," Eddie says reasonably, but there's something pleading in his voice every time, like there's so much more under the surface that he's trying to keep under wraps. Like there's more about this that he thinks Tommy should know.

Chimney's in the middle of explaining why he's stealing the cool uncle crown from Buck and sitting pretty on the throne when Buck asks him about it.

"Is there something about Tommy that no one's telling me?"

It trips Chimney up. Literally. He just barely catches himself from going headfirst into the kitchen counter.

Buck's heart starts pounding. "Chim, does he know?"

"No," Chimney says, firm and almost a little offended. "We promised you we wouldn't say anything. But Buck... you should tell him. You should talk to him."

Part of him wants to whip his phone out right then and there and dial Tommy's number. He could do what he did the first time: ask to meet somewhere and laugh about bad coffee and plead his case for a second chance. He could reach across the table for his hand, but this time, he'd stand up and walk over to Tommy and place it on his belly. "I don't care about firsts or lasts," he'd say. "I care about only's. And you're the only one I want."

But the other part of him, still licking its wounds, hormones in flux and forcing organs to shift and bend as it makes room for the thing he and Tommy made together, bares its teeth and snaps, "He made it very clear that he had no interest in hearing what I had to say."

Chimney never brings it up again.

Meanwhile, Hen goes a little overboard with forcing him to undergo random physicals—she pops out of the shadows twice a day to ambush him with the blood pressure machine, and he keeps threatening to avoid rooms that have doors—but he loves it. His body is a complete stranger to him for the first time in a long time, but the changes he's experiencing are interesting and he's having a blast cataloging every new one. He and Hen have a spreadsheet with like fifty tabs, and she helps him navigate every test his actual OBGYN sets him up for.

He's over her house at least once a week, although pregnancy talk at the dinner table is verboten.

"If one of you says the word 'amniocentesis' one more time, I will start a food fight," Karen had said, finally putting her foot down. Across the table, Denny perked up.

As much as he hesitates to even think the Q-word, it's a pretty quiet pregnancy. The cravings are kind of wild, though, and he goes most of his first trimester feeling like he's going to die if he can't eat rice krispie treats with cottage cheese. Every time Bobby sees him cracking open another container of Hood, it looks like he's seriously reconsidering sobriety.

But as incredible as they are about the pregnancy, they're all tiptoeing around the other elephant in the room: when Buck is going to stop working scenes. He and Bobby have a series of discussions that satisfies neither of them and resolves nothing, and it builds to a big blow-out that ends when Bobby tearfully begs Buck to stop risking his own life and the life of Bobby's grandkid.

After that, it's like some stone thing in him dissolves into sand and he finally eases back a bit in his fifth month. He doesn't put up a fight when Bobby orders him to only handle the winch or stick with hose duty, and if he stays a little closer to the engine because he gets winded so easily these days, no one comments on it.

In his sixth month, the inevitable happens: there's a call out at Palos Verdes and it's all hands on deck, which means the 217 is there too. At first he thinks he might make it through without running into Tommy at all, but he turns a corner and—there he is. Smudged with mud and looking like a drowned rat because of the downpours, but in his turnouts he's big and capable and, for a second, he's walking into First Presbyterian and apologizing for missing the ceremony.

But the memory is easily wrestled back into the past the second Tommy's gaze fixes on Buck's belly.

Buck wants to stage a retreat that would make the Allies at Dunkirk stand up and applaud. He wants to throw his arms open so Tommy can get a better look at it, say something cool and mean, like, "Did you know that INNOTEX makes turnouts for carriers these days? Pretty progressive of them, if you ask me."

He wants to be weak and ask if Tommy will spare him a hug. Just one. Nothing greedy. Just—a moment to soak in his warmth, to inhale the smell of his skin. Enough to carry him through the rest of it.

But he does none of that. He inhales through his nose, lifts his chin, and says, "Firefighter Kinard."

At that, Tommy smiles, and it's completely awful. There's no joy in it. Not even amusement. He looks like he wants to be sick, and Buck feels like a monster.

But Tommy swallows and says, earnest as anything, "Congratulations. I-I knew you'd find it. I never doubted for a second that you'd find the person who'd be your last."

Even as he says it, Tommy's face does something indescribable, but it rips through Buck's chest and shatters his ribs, tearing through pericardial layers until it scores the vulnerable muscle of his heart. It's so shocking that it almost knocks the truth right out of Buck's mouth.

Someone comes over the radio and requests all available first responders with flight experience to report to the B-zone, and Tommy straightens up and locks whatever it was away.

With an unsteady hand, he tips an invisible hat to Buck and says wryly, "Firefighter Buckley," before jogging away.

And Buck stands there like an idiot watching him go. It's that night all over again. It's Buck instead of Evan.

"See you around," he whispers, and then runs back to his post in the A-zone.

+

Tommy gets the call when he's halfway through a burrito foisted upon him by Dana, who had taken one look at him and said, "You look like a flood victim. Eat something before I get HR involved."

He'd taken a mutinous bite and couldn't argue with her. Months later and it still felt like he'd watched everything he loved wash away with a tide he couldn't fight. Except he'd sent the tide himself. He had no business feeling like this.

But they send him to the site of a car accident where a pregnant driver had been T-boned by some asshole who ran the red light, and the RA unit called to the scene didn't have the right equipment to assess the fetus. But the victim's belly was hard enough to warrant a med evac.

By the time Dana gets the victim loaded on the backboard and inside, Tommy's already on with both First Presbyterian and LA General to see whose neonatal surgery team is available.

The door on Tommy's side slides open and Tommy turns in his seat to ask what the hell Dana's doing over there, but it's Hen who's pulling herself inside.

His stomach clenches with dread. "Hen?"

"I'm riding with you," she shouts, taking the headset that Dana gives her.

He looks just beyond her and wishes he'd had the presence of mind to listen to the manifest when Dana had read it aloud to him, because Evan Buckley is strapped to the gurney and looks like he's on a completely different planet.

"Hen." Tommy can't hear him say her name, but he sees Evan's mouth shape the word. Evan reaches clumsily out for her with one hand while pressing the other to his belly.

Hen murmurs something to him that the comms can't pick up, and Tommy wonders if they've notified Maddie, if they've notified the father, whoever they are. If they're already at the hospital waiting for them. If Tommy will have to see them, talk to them face to face.

Tommy bites the inside of his cheek until he feels the hot wash of blood over his tongue, then forces everything down to join the burrito from earlier that really wants to make a reappearance. It isn't his right to know any of it. That went out with the tide, too.

He locks it down tight enough that he gets them into the air so easily they might be a feather on the wind, then he heads in the direction of First Presbyterian. The real start of it all.

They're maybe halfway across the city when Evan shouts, desperation and fear carrying his voice over the rotors, the words sliding together, "Hen, check Nora! Y-Y'need to ch—"

"Nora's fine, Buck," Hen says, her voice clear as a bell in Tommy's ear.

Staring at a skyline he can't see, Tommy says, "'Nora'? Was someone else in the car with him?"

When Hen comes over the comm, her voice is as inescapable as a flood. "Nora's what he decided on for the baby. It's her name."

Tommy's hand tightens on the cyclic so the way it starts shaking won't be so obvious. "Nora was my grandmother's name."

He'd told Buck about the woman who was basically the only family he could stand, who was responsible for not letting him become his piece of shit father, who accepted him when no one else would. She'd meant the world to him. She'd been the world to him. And for Evan to give his kid her name—

Realization hits like a levy breaking, and he turns to look wide-eyed over his shoulder at Hen, because it can't—he couldn't be—

"Patient, male, 33, prenatal course complicated at 8 months gestation," Dispatch had said.

The timeline is right.

Hen stares right back, as good of a confirmation that he could get outside of a DNA test.

Without breaking her gaze, Tommy tells Dana to take over. She gives him an unreadable look but says nothing except, "Copy that," and smoothly resumes their journey while he squeezes into the back. There's hardly any room next to the gurney and his knees are compressing his lungs, but he takes Evan's' hand and stares blankly at the shiner forming around his right eye until Hen breaks the silence.

Why didn't you tell me, he wants to demand, but he knows that if he so much as opens his mouth, he's going to start screaming until someone sedates him.

"For the record," she says, "I hate what you did. I hate what you took from him. But I understand why you did it."

Tommy rolls his lips inward and wants to suffocate himself to death. She understands? Does she? Does she know a life can be obliterated in the span of a minute? Does she know what it is to live a half life, to walk through the world like a five-year old drew a scribble on a blank sheet of paper that was supposed to be a person?

Does she know what Evan looks like when his joy is sucked away? Because Tommy does. She hates what he did? No one hates what he did more than him. No one hates him more than him.

Shakily, he lifts his other hand and touches the tips of his fingers to Evan's birthmark, which used to know the touch of his lips so well that Evan would joke that it was actually in the shape of Tommy's mouth print. Like a brand.

He forces himself to inhale. It seems impossible that Evan's here, carrying their child, their Nora. Evan used to say the lightning strike gave him super powers, made him invincible, and Tommy's ashamed to admit that he almost believed him. It seemed like nothing could ever bring Evan Buckley down, but here he is in Tommy's sky, halfway to Heaven already.

He glances at the LifePAK—where Evan's life has been concentrated into a series of lines and numbers, the reading strong despite everything—and then looks back at Evan, who is still the most beautiful man Tommy has ever seen even now.

"Evan," he chokes out.

There's no answer. At least not from Evan.

Across from him, Hen breathes through her nose and then quietly says, "I'm only going to say this once, Tommy, so I hope you're listening. If you can't trust him to know what his own heart wants, then this flight will never have happened. When he wakes up, you will not have been here. I'll change the manifest myself."

Tommy closes his eyes. Something hot spills down his cheeks.

"I know things haven't been all sunshine and roses for you. Lucy's said you've basically shut down since it ended. I know you're hurting just as much as Buck is... which is why I'm telling you: be sure. He's going to have enough on his plate without worrying about whether or not you're going to swan out of his life again. You need to be sure, Tommy."

Tommy doesn't say anything, but he opens his eyes and holds her gaze without flinching, and he tightens his hold on Evan's hand.

The rest of the flight passes in the kind of silence that feels like a cyst was lanced. Or maybe a boil, as it were.

+

Buck wakes up in stages to find he's in a hospital bed, and when he puts a hand on his belly it's smaller and almost deflated beneath his palm. He is just starting to hyperventilate when suddenly Tommy's there, murmuring to him, "You're okay. Everything's okay, I promise, she's fine. She's fine. Look."

And Buck, heart racing, forces himself to breathe slowly while he follows Tommy's gaze down to the bundle in Tommy's arms. Then he stops breathing altogether.

"She's fine," Tommy says. "A little early, according to the doctor, but absolutely fine."

Buck collapses back to the bed and weeps in relief, because she's fine. She's here and she's fine and she's perfect. Tommy gently places her in Buck's arms before retreating to the chair next to the bed which has a dent in the vinyl in the shape of his ass.

But Buck is enraptured with Nora, who smacks her lips in her sleep, and he marvels aloud, "She has my mouth."

"Thank God for that," Tommy says with a laugh. "It'll help take the focus off my nose. Poor kid."

It hits Buck like lightning that Tommy is here. He's in this room and talking about Nora like—like he knows. And there are things Buck should probably be saying, like apologizing for not telling Tommy about her as soon as he found out, or asking why he's there at all, but the words are crowding in his mouth and he can't figure out which ones should go first.

Tommy's lips twitch in a smile that is awful to look at, like he completely understand Buck's struggle, but his voice is soft and even when he says, "I need you to know that it wasn't about you. Not you personally. It never was."

Buck stops trying to speak and just stares at him, because that is bullshit, and oh, he knows which words should come first, and he opens his mouth to release them into the wild but Tommy holds up a hand.

"I know," he says. "I was a coward and an asshole, and I'm more sorry than I can possibly say. I won't ever be able to make up for what I did. But I need you to know why I did it."

And, in fits and starts before he finally finds the thread, Tommy tells him about Jeremy.

After Tommy ended things with Abby and then finally came out, he dated around for a long time before he met Jeremy, who was brilliant and fun and new. Tommy was the first man Jeremy had ever been with, and Jeremy was the first person Tommy saw a future with. He'd been so sure about Jeremy. He'd believed that Jeremy was it.

Until, almost two years in, Jeremy ended it. He'd sat Tommy down and said kindly, cruelly, "You're amazing, Tom, but you're just the first. You can't be my last." And then he'd left Tommy completely shattered in the rearview.

"That night, when you asked me to move in... it was like I was watching him put on his coat all over again," Tommy says shakily. "But what I felt for you was lightyears beyond anything I felt for him. I'd fallen so hard for you that I knew if I had to watch you walk away I'd never get up again."

Buck stares at Tommy, eyes rimmed red, and says, "So instead you made me watch you walk away."

It must land like a fist because Tommy exhales sharply and hangs his head, bowing around the pain. He sits like that for a moment, absorbing it, before he lifts his head and nods. "Yeah. That's exactly what I did."

There are deep, dark circles under Tommy's eyes that speak of a hundred sleepless nights, and his body is sharper, leaner, trimmed entirely of anything soft. He's made entirely of angles. He's so unfairly hot. He's miserable to look at.

Buck swallows and murmurs, "You look like there's no love in your life, Tommy."

Sucking in a trembling breath, Tommy smiles weakly and sketches a shrug. It looks like the fatigued steel of his edges are starting to crack.

"I left all my love with you that night." His gaze darts down. "Among other things."

Buck looks down at Nora, who's sleeping the sleep of someone already exhausted by existence, or maybe just by her fathers' drama, and thinks that maybe he really has been carrying all his love plus Tommy's around. Because otherwise he has no idea how he's so full of it.

"She's absolutely perfect," Buck says, smiling dopily.

"She's... more than anything I could've ever dreamed of."

He looks up in time to see Tommy drop his gaze to the floor at the same time his shoulders lift and lock like they're bracing for a blow. And in a voice so thin it's barely a sound, Tommy says, "I know I don't have... any right to ask, but is there any... any chance I could be part of her life?"

The tears that have been languishing at the edges of Buck's eyes finally see an opportunity. He doesn't think he could've held them back any longer if he tried.

Mouth trembling, he whispers, "Just hers?"

At that, Tommy looks up, eyes wide, disbelief and hope chasing each other across his face like dogs. He jerks a little in his chair but he doesn't move. He doesn't move.

Buck stares at him, a tsunami pulling everything back from his shoreline, and bites out, "Thomas James Kinard, if you don't get over here and kiss me, I swear to Christ—"

But Tommy's out of the chair and at his bedside, cupping Buck's face and tenderly smearing a kiss over his open mouth, licking the relieved gasp right off Buck's tongue.

Between them, Nora makes a tiny noise, and Tommy startles away just enough that he can press the side of his head to Buck's and gaze down at her with a tremulous smile.

"She really is something, huh? Sorry about the nose, kiddo," he says softly.

Buck knocks their heads together and says, "I happen to love that nose, thanks. And like you said, my lips will help balance it out."

Huffing a laugh, Tommy kisses Buck's lips. And the side of his nose and the bolt of his jaw. Then he leans down and presses a kiss to Nora's little pink and blue hat.

"I'm sure if you are," Tommy murmurs, tilting his chin up so he can flash a brave smile up at Buck, who smiles back.

"I was always sure."

[unrepentant-heliocentrism]

how i hold random babies at the supermarket

[gulliblelemon]

Like That

“What happened last Friday…” Simon feels Wille tense beside him. “It was— I just—“

“Maybe we could do that again.” 

Wille has gone pink with his outburst. Simon watches the blush disappear into his collar. Swallowing, Simon nods, trying to bite down his smile.

— 

Later, they lie tangled in Wille’s bed; content, giddy and a little bashful.

“I wondered if you would shut me down,” Simon says, vulnerable in his happiness. “Say you weren’t like that.”

“Oh, I’m definitely like that.”

Simon giggles. “I can see.” He takes a breath. “But maybe we should try again. Just to be sure.”

Thanks, @youngroyals-events!

[desceros]

tries to sleep, fails, gets melancholy, copes by writing purple turtle fic donatello/reader, gn!reader, rated t, 1.6k. insomnia, friends to.... friends, (were you ever just friends? are you something more? what is love if not friendship shifted an inch to the left?), yearning, yearning, yearning, yearning—

Donatello is sleeping.

Hefting a fatigued sigh, you hover in the doorway to his bedroom for a moment. Staring at his face, taking it in. He’s gotten unfairly handsome as the years have gone by. Beautiful, even. Pretty angles, sharp defined lines, dark seductive eyes. Like this, unmasked, slack in sleep, it’s free for you to look as much as you want. More than you can during the day. A little secret thing just for your own heart’s keeping.

…Best friends shouldn’t want to stare at each other like this, you think with an ache.

It’s late. You can’t sleep. Lying down has provided nothing but racing thoughts you can’t quiet. Things to do tomorrow. Things to say when you see someone. Things to write down if you can hold them until the morning. Things, things, things. So many things in your head, ten thousand little voices like little snowflakes in your skull. Each small, powerless; but together, a force too mighty to outrun.

And Donnie is sleeping. Normally he’s awake. Fiddling, poking, prodding, studying, twisting, cracking, bending. Available to draw you into sleep. Always soothing, petting your hair, cooing at you until you drift off at last to the dulcet sounds of his low rumbles.

But not tonight. Tonight he sleeps, pretty in his sheets even as he’s all sprawled out and drooling. Cute. He’s cute. He’s cute and close enough to touch but so, so far away that you know you never will. Not like that. Not like that. 

It’s late. You can’t sleep. 

Slowly, not wanting to wake him, infuriated with yourself just at the thought that you’d risked it by lingering as long as you have, you peel away from his door frame and sneak into the living room. The couch greets you again. Inviting, soft. It smells like turtle ass. Popcorn. Movie night. It smells like family, like home. Scratchy beneath your cheek. You’ve been meaning to get them some new pillows. The way Mikey had laughed so hard he’d snorted his drink. Leo’s squawk when it got all over him. The weight of Donnie’s arm on your shoulder when he’d leaned on you while laughing until he got the hiccups. His cologne, new, smells nice. You should tell him tomorrow.

(You can’t tell him. There’s no way for a best friend to look at the other with pupils shaped like hearts and be the same. You can’t tell him.)

Heavily, you sigh. It’s late. You can’t sleep.

You sit up. Get up off the couch. Stretch a little before exhaling and walking around a bit to try and work off some of this excess energy. The darkness of the living room isn’t so much, anymore, what with how your eyes have adjusted. You can see the pieces of the evening strewn about. A pizza box that Splinter’s going to find in the morning and yell at the lot of you for not throwing out. Raph’s teddy bear, leaning against the other couch where he’d been pretending he hadn’t been using it to hide his face in the scary parts. Mikey’s cup, half-full, forgotten in Leo’s panic to find paper towels. And—

—Donnie, standing in the doorway, bleary-eyed, arms folded. 

“Why are you awake?” he asks, voice tumbling over your ears like rocks on a riverbed. Guilt strikes you like a blow. He’s exhausted. You’ve woken him up.

“I’m sorry,” you say as an answer, tangling your fingers in the shirt you’d borrowed out of his closet. The shirt you always borrow. The shirt that’s half yours, now. 

Donnie’s quiet. You sink your teeth into your lower lip and hope he’ll shrug and go back to bed. Maybe, if he’s lucky, he’s got enough sleep juice in him that he’ll drift right back off and forget this happened. 

He doesn’t. “…Can’t sleep?”

The guilt burns your skin like sand in the wind. You smile and pretend. “I’ll be okay. Go back to bed, Don. You need it more than I do.”

He doesn’t. 

“…Please?” you try again. 

You’re met, instead, with a sigh. He rubs the back of his head where his mask would tie if he were wearing it. Lets his arm fall to his side—ah, except no. He’s holding out his hand, palm outstretched, inviting you to come close. When you don’t, his beak wrinkles. “Come here.” 

You take a few steps closer, but don’t take his hand just yet. “What are you doing?”

“Just come here,” he says again, curling his fingers a few times in an imperious grabby command. You come closer. He opens his tired eyes in a squint, mouth dipped into a frown, and his gesture gets more demanding. “Come here.” 

Stepping closer, closer, closer, finally you get within range. You realize he wants your hand the moment he loses patience with you, watching as he rolls his eyes and reaches out to encircle your wrist with strong fingers. They eclipse the bones there easily, tugging as he turns, pulling you out of the living room. 

“Don—” you start to protest, but he stops you with a breath.

“Stubborn,” he accuses, though there’s no heat to the word. The scoff is thick on the back of your tongue—Donnie of all people calling you stubborn—but you don’t let it out, knowing it’ll be too-loud in the pitch night. 

He pulls you into his room, the very room that had been such a sweet siren song to you earlier. He pulls you towards his bed. He pulls you in behind him when he settles in. He pulls you beneath his blanket. He pulls, pulls, pulls, until your chest is flush to his plastron and his arm is around your waist and his breath is in your face and your heart is in your throat.

It’s late. You’re not going to be able to sleep.

“…Go to sleep,” he says after a few seconds, doubtless able to feel the way your pulse is like a hummingbird against his skin. 

“Sorry,” you say in lieu of—anything else. You don’t dare try to say another word, unsure of what exactly would tumble out instead. Perhaps a sweet poem about the texture of his skin against yours. Maybe a lament that he feels the need to tuck his thigh between yours so so so close to where you wake in a pool of sweat dreaming of his touch. Or possibly a whispered confession that tastes like lightning and blood and sugar all at the same time; that you want this but not this, you want this but more. 

Gently, a forehead bonks against yours. Dark eyes open and meet yours, centimeters away. He studies you, and you watch the gears turn. More slowly than usual, lethargic even, because of his slumber. 

“You’re thinking too much,” he murmurs. Dumbly, you nod. “Need to talk about it?”

“…Yeah,” you admit, then, “…but I won’t.”

He doesn’t like that. A frown mars his beautiful, beautiful face. 

“Why?”

You swallow the incredulous laugh, the kaleidoscope of responses. They’re all irrelevant, impossible to share, save for one. “You should sleep.”

Donnie’s hand tightens, fingers curling in his—your—shirt in the small of your back. “So should you.”

“Yeah.”

“…”

“…”

“…I don’t understand.” The confession, rare, makes you sigh. 

“…I don’t either,” you tell him. And you don’t. Why did you have to feel this way for him? Why couldn’t it be someone easier that stole your heart? Why does it have to be the one person you can’t stand to lose? Why does he have to be so comfortable touching you like this and making it hurt even worse? Why can’t you stop feeling this way?

Why can’t you sleep? Why can’t you sleep? 

His fingers unfurl from your shirt. His hand dips beneath the hem, finding the skin of your back. Slow shivers spread like little earthquakes as he strokes along your spine, tectonic caresses that ripple and destroy. It's familiar enough a touch that you don't stop him; unfamiliar enough that it rends you inside out.

Donnie leans in. Ghosts his lips along your jaw. It’s not a kiss; you’re just friends, after all. But it’s a sweet caress that feels good, all the way to where he lingers at your ear, whispering there, quivering at the touch that's too close to something else to be fair. “Close your eyes.”

You have one rule: listen to Donatello. So you do; you close your eyes, let his nails drag down your back, let his mouth press warm into your pulse, let his chest rumble with churrs that fill the night air with something akin to a lullaby. His legs curl around yours, mixing, confusing, making the separation of you disappear. 

It’s… maddening. You hate this. You love him. You love him so much. You hate that he can do this so easily. 

“Shhh,” comes the gentle coo against your skin, like he can tell you’re pulling away from his intent. You obey that, too. Donnie says to be quiet, so you quiet. Thoughts, movements, words; all of them fall away at his beckoning. “Just like that. Good.”

Good, you think, feeling a little fuzzy. It feels good to be good for him. God. You’d be so good for him—but no. None of that, now. Not when you can pretend that these little presses of his lips are kisses. That the thickness of his thigh pressed to your shorts means something. That his hand scratching lines in your skin is something meant to claim as much as it is to calm.

“Making me work for it tonight,” you hear him mumble, half-conscious of the words, not sure if they’re real or part of a dream he’s built for you. “Good job, sweetheart. Just like that.” 

More brushes of his mouth. A slow glide of tongue. A lovely dream, you think, finally letting your muscles go slack. A dream of a Donatello who would hold you like this, talk to you like this. A Donatello who is more than just your best friend.

It’s late. Finally, warm and held and pulled into a sweet dream, finally, you sleep.

[youhavethesun]

jess and rory s6 in her bedroom at her grandparents house,, I don’t know why I do this to myself but I just watched a clip of that scene and I have tears in my eyes. i’m not even saying this for exaggeration i’m genuinely tearing up.. I feel so nauseous like what we could have had !! they were both so happy to see each other. jess’ “you graduate already doogie?!” like he is so completely ready to be overjoyed for her and rory’s little speech about finding the subsect in bookstores and writing her own recommendation notes is just… I am beside myself at how happy they are around each other here :((((

[phoenixcatch7]

Loz fandom stop being angsty and give the daydreaming kids on big fun adventures with a cool glowing sword some actual whimsy and joy challenge

[wbne]

despite opinions on Restoration, I think that the fanfictions that are gonna come out of s19 are going to be insanely good

[chiropteracupola]

in the mood for a modern au. banishing them to Community Theatre.

[randomwriteronline]

"Ah! You're one of those," a voice came to his ears.

Nuparu turned to find a tall Gaquri standing at the entrance, looking at him curiously.

"I am a Toa," he corrected.

The other nodded: "Yes, I do know that. Forgot the name is all. You're a, uh... Ko?"

"Onu."

"Hm! My mistake. Which element is that, again?"

"Earth. Do you need something?" the inventor cut their small talk short, lightly tapping a tool similar to a wrench against the skeletal frame of what appeared to be a heavily modded chariot: "I'm working on a project."

"You know where Berix is?" the Gaquri asked. He raised an arm: an interesting weapon, with a jagged light blue blade at one end and some kind of projectile mechanism attached to the handle, dangled from it casually. "Wanted to drop this off to him. The thornax launcher's been jamming up more often and I know that boy can make it work like a charm again."

"He's getting parts," Nuparu answered. His eyes rested once more on the blade and he added, tilting his head intrigued: "You can leave it here if you want."

"So you can study some original Bara Magna manufacturing?" the other joked.

"It's not really my field, but it looks remarkable."

He watched the organic being laugh heartily as he approached - with a fairly heavy limp, he noticed: "Remarkable! Now that's a bit of an exaggeration, kid. I made these from some bones, whatever viable scraps I could find from wrecks of the Core War, and a few patches across the years when I could afford it. It's held together by spit and whatever Ackar's friend did to make it spurt water."

"From what I understand, spit doesn't seem like a good adhesive."

"That's what we say here to mean something's parts are real shoddily connected together."

"Hm! Like dried mud. Or aluminum sheet."

"That's the idea. Ah, where should I put this, anyhow?"

"There is fine. What's with your leg?"

The Gaquri gave a grimace: "Nothing much - just my knee acting up," he replied, patting the guilty joint. "Something must have gotten rusted. It happens."

Even through the lack of expression of his mask Nuparu treated him to a baffled look.

"What?"

"Organic parts don't rust," the Toa sputtered. "At least, ours don't."

The other eyed the tendons and muscles peeking through black armor, and his lips perked up in a little smile.

Without a word he placed his weapon on the least cluttered corner of Berix's work desk before redirecting his now free hands to the side of the faulty knee, messing with what appeared to be the graceless stitching of a large wound: his fingers sank deftly into it and pried through the gaps enough to loosen the whole thing, and before the less organic being's flabbergasted eyes pulled down the fake skin and meat to reveal a fully mechanical joint, complete with pistons and springs and even what seemed like wires.

"Don't worry," he chuckled with a wave, "Ours don't either. But most crusty old Glatorian like me haven't been completely flesh and bone in a long time."

If the inventor's attention had been piqued before, he was completely captivated now. He was leaning on his seat towards him, vehicle project all but forgotten, intently studying as many details of the prosthesis as he could see from that distance.

His eager interest made the other laugh again: "Why all that surprise! Don't you see something like this on you every day?"

"Yes, but I'm not you!"

"And what's that mean?"

"You're all flesh! And meat! And skin! How does that work?"

The Gaquri considered something for a moment. "If you can get me a seat and figure out what's wrong with it, I'll be glad to let you have a closer look," he offered at last.

Nuparu pulled the stool from right under himself so fast that he fell on his ass.

He then placed it down with extreme care and patted it insistently.

The other barely held back a snort.

His implant hadn't caused this much of a scene since the first day it had been up and functional.

"The name's Tarix, anyhow," he introduced himself as he sat down a little heavily. "Since you'll be rummaging knuckle-deep through the insides of my leg for the next thirty minutes."

"Hm," Nuparu replied as he kneeled until his mask was all but grazing the joint.

Tarix waited a dozen seconds, and added: "You got one too, Toa?"

"One what?"

"Name."

"Nuparu."

"I see. Ah - nope, nope, don't-" his fingers quickly pinched the mechanical being's and lifted them away from the scarified tissue binding the meat to the metal: "That's real flesh, don't peel that - the nerves still work, you'd put me through the pains of Plude."

"What's that?"

"You folks have a place in your lore built just to torture you forever?"

"Yes, Karzhani. I've been there."

"Huh. Well, I've been to Plude too back when it still existed, and I'll just say that the only good thing the Lord of Sand might've done was collapsing it on itself. So, you get what I mean about the pain."

"Hm. Yes, I can imagine. But how do I - see, to check the individual parts, I'd need to pull them off..."

"Oh - hold it, let me just..."

Angling his leg in an uncomfortable position and hunching down with a hiss, the Glatorian set to work carefully pulling screws loose with the help of an empty pipe he'd fetched from his pocket. The small parts dangled from their sockets without falling, just distant enough from the point the metal touched to allow the top and bottom pieces to be pulled apart without needing to pull the much more easy to lose components out of the whole.

"Hold the calf a moment, will you?" he muttered with the pipe now stuck between his teeth. Nuparu complied, holding the lower half of the leg still as Tarix worked his magic on the inner wires. At last, satisfied, he unfurled his back up once more and puffed satisfied: "There, pull."

When the Toa did so, the prosthesis came apart as easily as a house of cards. Suddenly, in the mechanical palm was a whole calf, still warm with life and undoubtedly organic.

Tarix watched genuinely amused as Nuparu tested the ankle in his hands and on the ground, miming an attempt at a walk as though playing with a very concerning doll with nothing short of pure unadultered fascination.

He posed it as if stuck in a sprint: "Can you feel this?"

"Not a single thing," the Glatorian replied. He patted the metallic femur's exposed head: "And neither can I here. The connections are all in the wires, they go right into the nerves, see? So long as they're apart I can't feel crap anywhere from over here," and he pointed to the flesh that stopped around the middle of his thigh "To the rest of the leg underneath. Not that I should be able to, frankly, if we wanted to abide by nature's whims, but luckily for me us Spherus Magna natives never cared much for that."

Nuparu hummed: "How'd you get it like this, anyways?"

"Oh," the Glatorian shrugged as though it were the most normal thing in the world, "Blew up."

"It just exploded?"

"Not by itself, of course, someone shot the whole thing out of me."

The Toa treated him to an appalled look.

Tarix waved a hand harshly, chewing on his unlit pipe: "The Core War was absolutely barbaric, kid! I've witnessed stuff I wouldn't wish on a Skrall. When I saw that half you've got there in your hand fly over my head as gracefully as the ugliest bird known to any being with eyes, I thought I was going to die of shock like a Mountain Striker with a broken wing. I still have no clue how I managed to keep awake through the bloodloss and pain long enough for the fixers to figure out I was still alive enough to be taken down to the medic."

Nuparu regarded the half of a limb in his grasp with newfound horror and fascination. A whole portion of leg, shot right out... He wasn't sure if even the Vortixx could have had something capable of doing that. Oh, sure, they had plenty of possibly worse things, but even the most blunt tended to have slightly more complex effects than just 'blows a chunk off of you'.

And the fact that they had managed to rebuild the broken joint and connected it to the rest of the nervous system was nothing short of miraculous, compared to the same thing done on a mechanical being - whose organic components regenerate, too.

"And all Glatorian have something like this?"

"Us older ones, yes," the other nodded. He watched with a sort of lazy interest as the Toa turned his attention to the mechanism of his prosthesis, checking for damage as he had promised. "The rookies tend to have the usual stuff, thank goodness - scars, plaques, maybe a limb, some fingers..."

"Fingers?"

"Yes, some of them. They tend to nip 'em a lot during training, you know, when they start to get the hang of it and stop holding their weapons like they're gonna grow a mouth and bite them - they cut tendons often those first few times. Or just the whole thing."

"Really?"

He chuckled, playfully waving his fingers: "Gresh keeps losing them. If you look closely you can tell which phalanxes are still his."

"I thought he was good at fighting."

"He is. He's just young. And a little too brash at times."

Nuparu hummed, moving onto the piece of implant attached to his thigh: "You mentioned limbs, too," he noted absentmindedly: "Is that also common, during training?"

"Losing them? Oh no, that happens out in the desert. Or, used to happen... Well, the desert's still out there, just smaller, so I guess - point is, you'll sooner get one cut off by a Bone Hunter or chewed up by a Vorox than find a fellow Glatorian who'll do that to you, on purpose or not. We made sure to try and avoid that sort of thing when we made the rules for the job."

"And plaques?"

"Oh, these," and he tapped some strange metallic protrusions on the top of his legs, on the side of his arms, and on his shoulders. "Nothing special, they keep armor in place. Easier than having to strap it on. We install them when we come of age."

Their shape was somewhat familiar: "Berix has them too, I think."

"I think everybody gets them - Agori, Glatorian, Skrall..."

"They are pretty useful," the Toa nodded.

He couldn't really imagine how they could have managed to stick armor to themselves otherwise. Maybe through some cloth? But then it might chafe their joints, and they'd have to find a way to insert it in the metal anyways...

He hummed thoughtfully, wracking his brain as he tried at once to figure out both the logistics of putting armor on fully organic beings and whatever was wrong with the implant.

So concentrated he was that he actually jumped a little when the pipe gently smacked his shoulder.

Tarix had a strange look on his face as he pointed down at a spot on his prosthesis: "Don't - it's nothing to be worried about yet, just, watch it," he warned, "That coil there you've got near your index, she's real frisky. Won't be a problem now that it's taken apart, but when you stick it back together you'd better avoid even just so much as grazing it - it'll pull my calf back at top speeds to kick my ass. Been like that since the start."

"Oh! Sounds painful."

"It is!"

With a hand already rummaging through a box of springs, Nuparu offered: "Since I'm here already, I could replace that..."

"Ah, there's no need really," the Glatorian quickly stopped him.

"But it's a liability."

"If it's out in the open like this, yeah, but - well, when it's covered it's a lot more manageable, and the wires-"

"It's still a malfunction. I can fix that without any trouble."

"I get it, but it's - I - hm! Let me explain. See, when - if I cover it up, see, with my-"

"The fake flesh?"

"Yes, that - it still jerks back if touched, but not as hard, you get me?"

"But it still does."

"Yes, and here's the - the thing is, I also have my nerves connected, right? Right, and when the coil gets touched and makes my leg jerk, it... Er... See - have you ever - hm! Hmm-hm. Hold on. Do you... Is there something that you know is not good for your body, but when you do it it just feels nice?"

"No."

"Alright, this complicates things."

"Oh! Oh, no, wait - when I cut metal with a saw, I like to keep myself as close to the sparks as possible so they can hit me because they tingle. It's fun. Do you mean like that?"

"Eeeh, close enough! That's what's going on with that coil."

"It tingles?"

"It... Uh... Sure, let's. Call it that."

The change in tone was weird, and he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed about having brought the subject up.

Now, in regards to asking personal questions, Nuparu tended to be as uninterested in other beings' private matter as much as a Kofo-Jaga is in lightstones.

However, this was directly related to the machinations of an impressive, if a little primitive, handmade mechanical joint.

So yes, he would have loved to pry.

The mental manifestation of Turaga Whenua repeatedly smacking him over the head with his drilling staff was currently the only thing keeping him from inquiring on any activities Tarix might have enjoyed dabbling in outside of his work hours, but luckily for the Glatorian that singular imaginary scenario was also an extremely effective deterrent for any Matoran or Toa that had ever at some point of their lives resided in Onu-Koro.

As such, the Toa just shrugged and diverted his attention onto the object the Gaquri was now nervously twisting in his hand: "What's that, by the way?"

The total swerve in subject matter destabilized the Glatorian briefly. He looked down at his fingers, then back at the Toa.

"A pipe?" he replied.

Nuparu squinted at it a little better: "That does not look like a pipe." he decreted.

Tarix lifted an eyebrow, curiously: "It's just an Agori pipe."

"That's not a pipe," the inventor insisted.

"And how should a proper Toa pipe look like, then?"

"Matoran pipe, maybe-" the Toa scoffed, rolling his eyes and making the other chuckle a bit while the mechanical hands went right back to checking on his implant in the midst of his correction: "First of all, it's far too small to be of any proper use; second, that seems to be made of wood, which is the worst material for this kind of thing - even if you could fit that tiny piece in a proper hydraulic system, long time usage will lend it to rot and come apart much faster, which is why we used to trade iron with Le-Koro to avoid the whole village from caving in on--"

"Oh!" Tarix interrupted him all of a sudden, smacking the object on his palm with a hollow sound: "Oh, you meant - no no no, it's not that type of pipe! It's a, uh -- pipa! Nagele! Sghitt!"

"Don't curse at me, please."

"I'm not cursing at you, it's just different names for this! You really don't have a word for-?" then he cut himself off as he seemed to remind himself of something evidently obvious: "Ah - well, I mean, you don't have a mouth, of course you can't smoke..."

"Yes we do."

"You do?"

"Yes? How else would we hold our masks?"

Tarix blinked, briefly wondered if he should have asked, and decided it didn't matter: "But you don't smoke? At all?"

"No? Unless we get catastrophically overheated or are set on fire," Nuparu replied as he attached the disjointed calf into the thigh again. "Both of which in all fairness have happened before. Not very often, but they have happened."

"No, I meant... Ah, hold it, hold it..."

He stuck the unlit pipe back in his mouth, puffing out nothing a few times with a thoughtful expression on his face.

"See - it's a bit like the coil and the sparks again, the matter with smoking," he decided to start explaining: "There's certain plants, if you dry them and burn them well, that make really pleasant smoke."

"How is smoke pleasant?" the Toa muttered.

"The smell can be," the Gaquri shrugged, "And the taste too. Wait-" and he gently knocked the foot of the pipe on the top of the Volitak before the inventor could interrupt him again "-Wait a second, I can't very well clear this up if you keep cutting in. Alright, so the bigger part here, the bowl we call it - you need to press the dried plants in here and light them up, only a little before the whole thing burns up; once they're charred nicely, you inhale through the shank, and then you puff it back out. That's how the smoke gets in your mouth and you can taste it."

"And how does it taste, then?"

"Ah, depends on what you smoke," was the whistful answer. "Same goes for the smell. The Lebori have a certain bark that gets real flexible when wet - they make whole pipes with it, they burn up real well, but it's a bit too sour for me. Before the Shattering there used to be a type of kelp I liked, and Kiina said they had River Eyes up near the Dormus that made some terribly sweet smoke."

"River Eyes?"

"It's a flower! Small, round, blue, and it grows on river banks. Never got to try them, though, and it's better I don't go around asking for some with the lungs I've got. Like I said, smoking's the same as the coil and the sparks: feels good to do, but it's bad for the body."

Nuparu hummed deeply, rummaging inside the knee as he handled the hanging wires carefully.

"I think I figured out the problem," he announced.

At that Tarix perked up: "Rust?"

"One piston has developed a limestone growth that makes it much harder to move properly, and as a result one of the springs is bent out of shape and chafes right against the nerve."

"Ah! Well, damn. You can get limestone in there?"

"If it's humid enough, it can build up over time."

"Hm... Alright, I guess all those years sweating in arenas and whatnot were bound to do the trick eventually."

"Also there was rust."

"Hm. Where?"

"Three screws. I changed them already."

"Wait, really? When?"

"While you were talking about the Core War."

"Huh! You're quick. And quiet."

The Toa shrugged: "I like working."

He pulled the prosthesis apart for a second time, laying the calf down on the floor. He then leaned back to search through a tool box brimming with bits and pieces - bolts, nuts, coils, springs, and all sorts of other things - with what his mask's stillness still managed to convey as a focused furrowed brow, evidently still thinking about what course of action to take now that he had pinpointed the anomaly to fix.

Changing his mind, he stood up and made his way to one of the various piles of junk and assorted more or less useful knicknacks to start looking for something in there instead.

"Speaking of the Core War," he said, implying he wanted to start a conversation but without really adding to that sentence.

Tarix waited a few minutes, puffing out in silence while watching him shift towels or bottles until he found what he was looking for (a clean enough rag and flask containing a murky liquid), before figuring that he was waiting for some kind of permission to continue on the admittedly not particularly pleasant topic: "Yes?"

"You said other older Glatorians also got implants like this from it."

"I implied it, but yes, that's the case."

The Toa hummed as he settled back before him: "And they're all knees, like yours?"

"You want to ask what their own prosthesis are?"

At that, he got no response.

"You can, by the way," Tarix reassured him, "It's been a damn long time by now, it doesn't hurt as much as say, eighty hundred years ago. We've been living like this long enough to joke about the whole thing and whatnot."

Nuparu mumbled something indistict as he soaked up the rag and began scraping the limestone off of the metal with it.

"Don't act all shy now, kid! As I said, it's no trouble." the Glatorian repeated. A sly smile curled the corners of his lip: "You can't get embarrassed like this every time you have to ask about new possible clients, you know," he jokingly reprimanded him, "Otherwise you'll have a hard time getting any."

"I don't want to be paid!" the Toa replied. "I'm just curious, is all! This is... Well, I didn't expect it to be something you'd have."

"Oh, don't worry, not everybody's missing a whole chunk of leg like me," Tarix chuckled. "We Glatorian like to keep ourselves distinct from one another."

"In implant too?"

"Of course! Let me think, now..."

He inhaled a long breath through his pipe, leaning back a little as the kid continued on with his work, and exhaled with a whistle.

"So, let's see - Vastus, he's got a good chunk of his lower spine replaced and, oh, 'bout three quarters of his intestines," he began: "Kiina had her hip crushed and put back together, and that should be... Ah, nope, nope, half of her left hand and the whole ulna too. Telluris I haven't see in a long while now, but unless he's figured out how to place his brain in a tin can I'd bet his head's all that's left. Certavus, bless his memory, I don't think he had a single original organ left by the end, and Gelu's got bionic feet - one foot, one leg, right, a whole leg, so then Strakk was the one who got his eye shot out and his nose crushed. And the jaw, of course. I don't remember if it was him or Malum who cracked his head but I do think it was him, because Malum had the femur that got split in half and it worsened with that problem with his ribcage where the metal was corroding and messing with his blood... Which is why he had to get his marrow replaced in his leg later on. Oh, and Ackar also had to... Ah, wait, which one was it? Right, right. Ackar, poor guy, his back itself is worse than a Plude street but his real problem's his right shoulder blade, which got essentially pulverized - I was there, ghastly sight - so they had to replace the whole thing, and that was bad enough; but then, and this is the fucked thing, the implant actively degraded the rest of the arm, so he had to keep replacing bits and pieces of it until it was just completely gone."

Nuparu lifted his head, eyes wide and flabbergasted: "The fixing made it worse?"

"It did! He kept having trouble moving it."

"How?"

Tarix raised his shoulders: "Beats me," he replied just as baffled. "It's a common thing for Tapyri, honestly. It's hard to tell if the material's bad quality or has trouble with the heat. Perditus too - after he got half his leg replaced, the damn thing somehow managed to melt halfways and left him limping almost worse than he would if he just didn't have it."

"And he can't replace it?"

"It's grafted onto the bone and the muscle has grown over it. They'd have to carve the whole thing out with it, it's just not worth it."

The Toa stared at him positively appalled.

"That is horrid," he spat, punctuating the adjective with a harsh yank of his hand over the faulty piston, thus launching a loosened piece of limestone to skid across the floor.

"You're tellin' me, kid."

"That's - it's inadmissible. It's insane."

"And I haven't told you about the Agori."

"What about the Agori? Were they fighting too? Do they-?"

"No, not fighting, usually - it's something we got in common with your lot: we're basically the same species, but we are much bigger and they're much nimbler. So you had us larger folk tearing one another to bits properly, while they tended to work as scouts if they weren't busy trying to put us back in one piece."

The Gaquri interrupted himself to stretch his arms up, pulling one towards his head.

The movement produced a loud 'crock!' roughly around the height of his shoulder, followed by much softer pops crackling all the way up towards his wrist as it twisted.

Satisfied with the sound (which instead made the inventor a little uneasy considering their conversation), he moved to massage the sides of his spine with his knuckles, rolling his neck: it seemed to make a curious ticking noise in place of a meatier sound, filling in the quick pauses of Nuparu's rag scrubbing the limestone away.

At last he puffed into his unlit pipe: "If you look at the older ones - the Agori, I mean - you'll see they've got less lower half than upper."

"That makes no sense."

"It does if you don't count implants. We've got them a bit everywhere, I told you, but an Agori with an arm prosthesis is a real rarity. They've got them mostly between their soles and the top of their hipbones."

"And why's that?"

"It's 'cause the lucky ones stepped on mines."

The Toa hummed thoughtfully.

He did not raise his eyes from the almost clean piston: "And the unlucky ones?"

"Well, we were trained to aim for either the neck or the head."

Ah.

Those certainly had been unlucky.

For every thing Toa and Glatorians seemed to have in common, a complete opposite came around. To imagine a Toa willingly kill was already hard, though not impossible - the Mahri themselves had been met with the chance to do so once or twice, and it had been tantalizing to say the least; but to envision a group of his brothers and sisters being not only instructed but even trained to kill, and especially to kill Matoran...

Well, he was glad he did not live in that kind of world.

"That's just how life is," Tarix sighed in the end. "Nobody wins. They've got their metal hips, and I've got my leg held together by wires and pistons. And an artificial diaphragm."

That snapped Nuparu out of his unpleasant musings: "A what?"

"That one wasn't the war's fault, though - well, it was, but it came in later. See, I had some sharpnel that got stuck in there but nobody noticed, and then one day I got a shove in the wrong spot during a match and just stopped breathing. So I had to get a mechanical one, and when I have to put myself under any sort of strain I need to hook myself up to an oxygen supplier to make sure it doesn't collapse under the effort - you know, that tube thing you might have seen on me, sort of like yours."

"Your gills?"

"I..." the Gaquri briefly did a double take. "You call those gills?"

"Yes?"

They blinked at each other briefly.

"Yeah," Tarix conceded, "Yeah, I guess those would be gills for you folks, huh. Makes sense."

"What was it that you had to replace?"

"My diaphragm."

"What is that?"

"... The muscle?"

"Which muscle?"

"The... The one that makes the... Lungs? Work? I understood you did have lungs?"

"Lungs work on their own."

"No they do not?"

"Yes they do. They are muscles."

"No they are not??"

Before Nuparu could further argue his point by lifting his chest plate and forcing Tarix to behold the disquieting spectacle offered by his very much clearly autonomously moving lungs, the unmistakeable noise of a small variety of hollow brass objects gracelessly crashing on the floor and being hurriedly chased after by stomping feet attracted their attention elsewhere.

Berix did not notice them as immediately as they noticed him, since he was busy making his entrance on all fours as he scrambled to pick up a bunch of scrap metal that had spilled from his arms.

The other two beings made no sound as they watched him curse to himself after stepping on a rogue bolt. They decided to simply observe him in silence much like an equipe of entomologists observes a particularly frenetic spider panicking for some kind of fault in its web, making no motion to lend the young Agori any help as he crawled along the ground to collect the scattered pieces of his scavenged treasure of junk.

It was particularly fascinating when he accidentally shoved several bolts in his mouth to the point of almost stuffing his cheeks with them, realized his mistake, and spat them in what looked like an exhaust pipe.

He almost cried when they fell out of it and rolled away again.

Then he lifted his eyes briefly to the other two silent beings in the room and failed to recognize them.

Meaning he then proceded to jump almost three whole bio straight in the air once he figured there were people looking at him - landing on a screw.

"FUCK!" he whimpered.

Tarix waved: "Hello to you."

"Do you need help?" Nuparu asked with a notable delay.

The Agori kneeled to the ground and skidded across it: "No no no, I'm good! I'm good, I'm - hey, hi, Tarix, hi, when did-? What are you-? Uh," he said nervously as he tried to catch as many nuts and springs as possible, "What is going on there? Is it, did I interrupt or, should- should I leave? Again? Should I leave again?"

"Nuparu's fixing my leg."

At that Berix snapped his head with a deafening gasp to look directly at him, the most betrayed expression to ever grace his face plaster across it.

"But I wanted to do that!" he cried out in anguish like a desert fox cub experiencing the horrors of its mother's tongue bath for the first time: "I told you I could do it, I- I replaced Gresh's ribs and, and I fixed his lungs when the Skrall got him and he hasn't had problems with them since, I told you I could do it, I'm good at fixing-!"

"I know that, and Gresh told me you did real well," the older Gaquri stopped him, "But - don't take it personally, kid, you're good and all, but when it comes to my leg I only trust you as far as I can throw you and believe me, it ain't far."

"But then why does he get to do it!" Berix wailed, pointing at Nuparu still scrubbing off the limestone.

"He's got a whole body like this, I'd imagine he knows what to do."

"But I know what to do too!"

"I told you, I'd rather have a specialist on it."

The Toa briefly wondered if being a descendant of the Water Tribe had something to do with how outstandingly wet Berix could will his eyes to look, or if it was just a specifically Berix thing.

Mabe it was an Agori defense mechanism. After all, it would have been pretty hard to want to hurt something that appeared to be the personification of the verbs 'to whimper', 'to whine', 'to sob', and last but not least 'to wail'.

Whatever the origin of such an expression of anguish, Tarix was not immune to its effects: "Oh, don't be like that," he finally pleaded with a tired but guilty tone, and pointed off to the cluttered desk not too far away: "There, I've got something for you too, alright? I came in 'cause my Thornax launcher's busted and you're the best with 'em. Could you fix that for me? Pretty please?"

That was enough to light the younger being's face up again.

With the sort of excited thin howling laugh that a mischievous ghost might have, he scuttled away to the mess of a table that was the headquarters for most of his projects: onto it he dumped the rest of his scraps, not caring even in the slightest that it only helped to worsen the general situation he already had going on as he was already completely absorbed by the thought of the inner mechanics of the weapon at hand.

The perfectly good chair right beside him thoroughly ignored in favor of sitting on the ground in a curled position that would have made a shrimp suggest booking an osteopathic appointment, he immediately started tinkering around to figure what the problem was with the drive and precision of a blood hound.

That had been perhaps one of the best things their unplanned collaboration had brought Nuparu - aside from all the knick-knacks and thingamajigs and vehicles and tools he'd been able to make or just plan out with the Agori, of course. Watching Berix work on something was such a fun and fascinating experience: his intensity gave his body language a sort of visceral desperation that contrasted his careful fumbling motions, pulling pieces apart with his scarred skeletal fingers and letting them fall all around him as though discarded carelessly - yet he somehow always knew where to search when he needed them again, and if in the middle of his fixer's frenzy you asked him for a specific nut or a gear he could pick it up without even looking, always on the first try. The thunderous act of creation and its rhythmic symphony played on rough instruments whisked the both of them away from the world at large, but when the Toa managed to pull himself back to reality (whether done or stumped or just in need of a break) it was enjoyable if not just all-together mesmerizing to observe the other hard at work on his own project.

A loud bang was not enough to deter him from the launcher either.

The equally loud voice that followed with an exasperated bark did, however: "BERIX! THE DOOR!"

"RIGHT! RIGHT- RIGHT, HOLD ON!" he squeaked hurriedly, abandoning (with a little more care) the weapon to scuttle away as fast as he could to the entrance of their laboratory.

The figure that emerged from the held open door replied to his rambling apologies by grunting every few steps - not without reason, seeing as they were carrying the carcass of an older model of chariot intertwined with some other mean of transport that had clearly gotten lodged sideways in its back, trying to balance the hellish thing on their shoulders in a way not too dissimilar to how a shepherd might carry a too small Mahi tired from a day of running wildly.

The mess of a car accident was dropped rather gracelessly onto the first largest spot of floor available; freed from their herculean weight, the being sighed and pulled back their arms, making the rather dull metal vertebrae poking from their skin creak in a somewhat unsettling fashion.

Nuparu briefly wondered if they were encrusted in limestone too.

They sort of looked like it.

Hm.

Now he had to wonder if it was a common yet not very well-known problem for organic beings with mechanical implants. Maybe it had to do with an excessive production of sweat?

While he was busy pondering that, Tarix grinned at the sight: "Hello, my beautiful wife who sucks at killing me," he crooned lovingly.

Vastus turned to him with a smirk, thin feathers raised and brows slightly furrowed in a manner that was much more fond than annoyed: "Hello, my beautiful husband who can't aim for shit," he replied; upon noticing the Toa kneeled before him, he cheekily added: "Committing adultery, I see?"

His partner wheezed a loud gurgling laugh: "Twelve thousand years we've been married! Twelve thousand years and now you mistake me for Gelu!"

"For who?"

"What, you haven't heard about--?"

"NOT IN FRONT OF MY PROJECTS!" Berix shrieked.

The Lebori chuckled - it was a strange sound, some kind of hiccuping hiss - and reached out to rub his hand all over the younger Gaquri's head; the kid swiveled away from him with a soft rattling noise as his annoyed trembling arms shook his scales against one another, face contorting into a piqued grimace, and returned to the launcher to tinker the other two away from his conscious perception.

"And where'd you get that?" the Glatorian inquired, pointing at it with his chin as it was common to do in his tribe and getting no answer.

"It's mine," his husband reassured him, "He's fixing it."

"Jammed again?"

"Seems like it."

"Bet you just didn't clean it properly."

"You don't know that."

"But I'm right," Vastus teased him as he approached to steal the pipe from his mouth. "And over here, what's going on?"

"He's fixin' up my leg. Nuparu, by the way, that's his name - he's a, ah, Ko- nope, Onu-Toa, he said - thought it was rust but I had limestone in it."

"We can get limestone?"

"Might be the sweating," Nuparu interrupted them suddenly. He fixed his unmoving mask onto the Lebori: "Can you turn around, please?"

Tarix snorted at the other's brief baffled blink: "Hey now, kid, I get you've put your hands in me and all, but you shouldn't go around just checking my wife out like that!"

"NOT! IN FRONT! OF THE PROJECTS!"

The Toa looked between the three of them with no clue what any of them was going on about: "I thought there might have been crusts on the vertebrae," he explained. "Since I have the solvent at hand already, I could handle that already if it's the case..."

"That's what they all say," the Gaquri snickered.

His confusion was palpable.

Vastus flicked a playful finger at his husband's head, warning him: "Berix is gonna kick you out at this rate... But I'm sure it's just some dust, kid, nothing to worry about."

"It still would not hurt to do a simple visual check."

"He's right," Tarix interjected while trying to snatch his pipe back and failing: "Maybe you've been building up a limestone deposit this whole time without knowing it."

"I don't have limestone."

"You don't know that."

Vastus smirked at him as he turned around for Nuparu to check: "But I'm right."

"You can't keep answering that and get away with it."

"I can if I'm always right."

The inventor gave a high pitched hum: "False alarm. That's just dust," he confirmed.

A triumphant grin briefly met the Gaquri's eyes as he rolled them.

Nuparu reached into a box to pull out a short variety of springs in order to compare their size with that of the one that had been bent by the affected piston, now cleaned and hopefully ready to work smoothly; careful not to dislodge anything else, he carefully pried the ill piece out and hooked up its replacement.

Satisfied with how the procedure had done, he pulled himself back a little and announced: "I have another question."

"Shoot," Tarix answered instantly.

"What do 'wife' and 'husband' mean, exactly?"

A hot second of silence passed in which the Glatorian regretted opening his mouth.

He glanced at Vastus.

His wife glanced back.

The quiet persisted.

"We're married," he answered lamely at last.

The question he dreaded slapped him in the face with outstanding punctuality: "And what does that mean?"

Having had his fun of seeing his husband's best full-body impression of a yam turning exponentially smaller when fried to a crisp piece of coal, the Lebori finally intervened: "You folks have contracts?"

"We do."

"Marriage is a contract between people where you become part of one other's family. And tribe, if you're from different ones like us."

A vacuous gaze met his explanation.

"Alright, what's confusing you?"

"The 'becoming part of' thing."

Vastus shrugged, his feathers puffing out for a moment before returning flat in a way similar to how certain avian Rahi did before starting a very long song: "It means we become relatives," he tried again. "Here, look - Tarix is a Gaquri and I'm a Lebori, so my family and hers come from different tribes. By marrying me she became a sort of honorary member of the Jungle tribe, and everybody treats her almost as though she was my brother, or my cousin; in the same manner, I became an honorary member of the Water tribe and I'm treated like her sister or cousin."

"So... It's sort of like assembling a team?" Nuparu tilted his head, puzzled: "There's no need for a contract for that. All Toa consider each other siblings already."

The other clicked his tongue as though he'd bitten it by accident: "I shouldn't have used that metaphor," he muttered.

"Why not?"

"First of all marrying your actual blood-siblings is frowned upon."

"Why? What's a blood-sibling?"

"I'll tell you when you're older. Secondly, I can assure you marriage is nothing like siblinghood."

At that, the Toa frowned: "It sounds the same to me."

"Your knee and Tarix's look the same to me, too," Vastus argued: "They're both made of metal, so they're the same thing."

"They really aren't." then he blinked, bright eyes flashing briefly, looked to the ceiling to recollect his thought, gave a loud hum, and met his gaze again: "I see your point."

The Glatorian smiled: "Good kid."

"Back to the point - how do 'wife' and 'husband' fit with all that?"

"That's just how you call someone who's married."

"So they're synonyms?"

"Yes, pretty much."

The answer seemed to satisfy the inventor greatly.

"I'm learning so much about your species today," he commented in a giddy tone. He returned to the discarded robot calf on the floor, dusting off its mechanical parts to make sure not even small amounts of debris would interefere with its functions; just as he plucked it back into the bulk of the implant, he looked again at the two Glatorian and told them with complete and total earnestness: "You know, if you were significantly smaller, quadrupedal, perhaps vaguely insectoid and incapable of speech, Turaga Whenua would have the best day of his life writing down and trying to decypher your absolutely incomprehensible habits."

That was the highest compliment an Onu-Matoran from the island of Mata Nui could bestow upon someone.

It was not categorizable as such by perhaps any other being in the entire universe, considering the source of such an idiom had been cut off from all other known civilizations and it was generally not considered particularly flattering to be told that you would make for a great petri dish for one's paternal figure to microscope if you were any less sentient, but luckily his tone did manage to properly convey the positive nature of his otherwise insane sentence.

So instead of knocking his head off with roundhouse kick, Tarix and Vastus smiled awkwardly in an attempt at not laughing in his face and just replied: "Thanks."

His Volitak did not have a mouth, but Nuparu's grin was blinding.

Berix chose that moment to shriek triumphantly.

"Fixed!" he declared, Thornax launcher hoisted into the air like it was the second making of the Element Lords.

The older Gaquri turned to him with eyes wide: "What, already?"

"It was encrusted with Thornax juice!"

Not even the time to feel bashful about such a silly and easy to fix thing hindering his battling performance so much that his wife was already leaning down into his line of sight with a smirk so wide that he could have just bitten his whole head off with it.

"What did I say?" he teased.

Tarix sighed, a weary smile on his face: "You cannot keep getting away with this."

"Yes I can," Vastus gloated, "If I'm always right."

[treasureplcnet]

also quite obsessed with karl being as detached from the story as he is. there's nothing that makes him have to be the detective that has to be involved, but he unknowingly dooms himself by agreeing to work with the KYAL cult. every other detective basically deals with elias head on except weissman, who only meets him right before he kills him. like he's right when he says "by my choices" because everything that leads him to being mixed up with the mannix cult is himself. it's the gambling debts and the choice to do the dirty work for an organisation he knows nothing about. he's the only one that doesn't encounter that body doing police work and it's specifically because he's told to cover it up. he gets himself into the mess and eventually fixes it but the fact that esther always dies in the doomed timelines and he's always too late even if he starts wanting to change things ("till this child. esther.") it just makes me very ill

[billdenbrough]

@naturecalls111 prompted me kevaaron + procrastination and was like ‘post grad’, meaning they’re not undergrads if it’s canonverse, & something abt the phrasing latched into my brain so we ended up with this vaguely professor au w/ the flimsiest excuse for a TA-adjacent situation ever instead. idk. as ever this was just for her texts & i’m coming off a 30hr migraine so pls forgive me LMAO <3

“I can see right through you,” Kevin murmurs.

“Oh, yeah?” Aaron challenges. God, he’s close.

“Mm,” Kevin says. “You just don’t want to mark the test.”

It's an accusation, but there’s no censure in his voice. He's amused, mostly; fond too, despite himself. It’s not exactly behaviour he should be encouraging, but—

Aaron huffs. “I never want to mark a test,” he points out. “Undergrads are fucking stupid. Or these ones are, anyway.”

“You were an undergrad once,” Kevin says. He very determinedly keeps his hands steady on the bench. Maybe he’s gripping the edge so he stays in place; so what? That's between him and whatever God Renee believes in enough for the both of them.

“These ones,” Aaron repeats, scoffing. “Anyway, I'd never have taken a history paper. Get real.”

Kevin can’t help the frown there. “History is fascinating,” he argues. Aaron scoffs at him again, but the way he watches Kevin runs counter to that. Like he’s listening to whatever Kevin says, regardless. “It is,” Kevin insists again, clearing his throat.

Aaron's gaze tracks the movement, eyes following the motion of his throat, and Kevin kind of wants to clench the counter edge hard enough to crack the formica. Jesus Christ.

“You like research,” Kevin says. He keeps his eyes on Aaron, watches as he steps in closer again. “History is an endless study of every mistake we’ve ever made—”

“—So we don’t repeat our forefathers’ mistakes?” Aaron asks wryly. “Hate to break it to you, but that’s a non-starter.”

“No,” Kevin says, shaking his head. “We’re bad at learning. Mostly, we don’t even see the patterns for decades, if not centuries.”

Aaron cocks his head. “Doesn’t that frustrate you?” he asks. “I've seen you watch sports. You get mad if people make the same fuck-up within, like, three minutes.”

An image floats in Kevin’s head, unbidden: the two of them at the sports bar, late one night after they finally convinced Jeremy to go the fuck home because the college wasn’t paying him enough to sleep at his desk to reply to nineteen year olds’ panicked emails at 11:17pm before a midnight deadline. Kevin had been unbelievably put-out by the Astros’ scoreline; Aaron hadn’t cared so much, but had seemed to find great entertainment in prodding at Kevin to express his opinion to a bar full of patrons who strongly disagreed with him.

Do you even care about baseball? Kevin had asked in the end, exasperated. He’d unknotted his tie and slipped off his jacket, heated by his opinions and the game and the alcohol and the way Aaron had sat there, head tilted, that clever mouth of his quirked up to the side like a smirk, like a secret.

Not really, Aaron had said, shrugging. He swished his beer a little. I played hockey at school myself. Before Kevin could get too excited about that—a sport! An actual goddamn sport! that wasn’t only worth watching European leagues for, cough cough Jeremy and Jean and fucking football—Aaron added, I like seeing how much you care about it, though, and knocked Kevin right on his ass, metaphorically-speaking.

That night had ended in a blur: Kevin’s flushed cheeks as he lectured the bar at large about heliocentrism after finishing his grumbling about the baseball, Aaron’s quiet snort and eyes that laughed more than his mouth did, alcohol-sticky wood beneath his feet as he made his way to the bathroom, the taste of Aaron’s beer on his lips, Aaron’s cool fingers a balm against his cheek, his mouth a searing heat burning all the way through Kevin.

Then when Kevin’s TA dropped out because of ‘unmanageable stress’ (which was not Kevin’s fault, no matter what Dan says, she and Matt can fuck off) and he had to scramble to figure out what to do, Abby had offered one of her tutors—but only for marking, Kevin, he has no base in history. He’s just smart enough to use a rubric and willing to help. Between this and Jean’s long-suffering offer to lead the tutorial that didn’t clash with his meetings with his advisor, and even Neil’s unlikely assistance in the form of helping restructure the syllabus, it all seemed pretty manageable. (The history department had quietly come to the conclusion that this was not, strictly speaking, acceptable by university standards, but elected to ignore this information until the conclusion of the semester. As far as Kevin’s been able to tell in his years in academia, this is how things tend to work.)

When Abby showed up at his office with Aaron, though, Kevin's cheeks had gone hot enough that she’d asked him if he was sure he wasn’t coming down with a stress fever. Aaron's face had stayed blank, but his eyes were – amused.

It was one thing when Aaron had been the regular third person in the staff room late at night alongside Jeremy and Kevin, rubbing his eyes as he scowled at whatever it was he was looking at. (Anatomy exams, Kevin found out later.) He’d been mostly quiet, but sharply funny when he’d ended up interacting with them, mostly starting with indelicate snorts at whatever madcap thing Jeremy was saying, then incredulous stares at Kevin’s rebuttal, and finally muttered jabs as he worked the coffee machine and Jeremy laughed delightedly and Kevin stared at him with disbelief and a slow-building warmth in the base of his stomach.

It was yet another thing when Aaron had been the guy he bundled up Jeremy with, the guy he got drunk with for hours in a sports bar, the guy who laughed at him and offered him buffalo wings so spicy that they made Aaron’s cheeks red and Kevin’s lips feel like they were on fire, until Aaron kissed him, tipsy outside the bar, the warmth spreading through Kevin overtaking both the chilly night air and the spice-stained echoes on Kevin’s mouth.

But it was another thing entirely for Aaron to be Aaron, meaning Abby's favourite postgrad and the guy who diligently read Kevin’s syllabus on top of his own work just to better understand the marking rubric and hater of psych majors everywhere. Aaron, with his tired eyes and quiet laugh and complete inability to answer a phone call from his brother in a normal way. (At one point, Kevin had been half-concerned he was ordering a hit—less about the morality or legality of the situation, more in a if you get arrested, I’m screwed again type way—until Neil had shown up half an hour later with lunch for Aaron and Aaron had gone, ugh and Neil had rolled his eyes, spotted Kevin, and turned to Aaron to say, you’re one to talk. Aaron had flushed a little, then scowled and flipped Neil off, and said fuck off, to which Neil said, gladly, then see you at dinner? And Aaron had waved his hand. If you eat your fucking vegetables, to which Neil had laughed, and flipped him off, and walked out. Kevin had stared at Aaron, nonplussed, but Aaron had ignored him, focusing instead on the test he was marking while he ate the sandwich Neil had brought.) Aaron, with his unbelievably rude opinions about Kevin’s lack of video game knowledge, and the genuinely unreasonable amount of sour gummies he can put away in an hour, and the unbearably soft look he gets on his face when he’s sleepy and huffy and Kevin has gently dragged away whichever test he’s marking or article he’s reading that’s made him so grumpy late at night.

Aaron, who Kevin actually knows now. And likes even more for it, which is inconvenient and inopportune and probably inevitable.

Kevin clears his throat. “People are meant to try and win in sports,” he says. “History is about things that have already happened. It’s a different ballpark.” There’s a moment, and then, “They’ve already lost the battle. I'm not rooting for anything else there.”

Something flares up in Aaron's eyes at that, and he snakes his hand forward, tugging on Kevin's tie. Kevin, hands still holding onto the bench, allows it.

“But sports are about victory?” Aaron asks. 

He’s not even subtle about procrastinating, Kevin thinks. He wants to laugh. He swallows a sigh instead, and says, a little warningly, “Aaron…”

But he doesn’t move. Doesn’t stop Aaron, doesn’t do anything to stop him. Maybe leans in a little, even.

“Yeah,” Kevin says after a long moment. “History, you live or you die. Sports, you’re the best or you’re not.”

“That's a reductive way of looking at the world,” Aaron says, but it’s that tone he gets sometimes, the one where Kevin doesn’t know if he believes it or if he just wants to poke at Kevin a little. Kevin hates that he likes it as much as he does; that he lets it stoke him up, bites at the bit every time.

“You are not subtle,” Kevin murmurs. The tests are sitting on the table behind Aaron, staring up at the ceiling. Aaron's coffee is abandoned, probably cold.

You are not subtle, Kevin says, and means it, but Aaron’s cocked his eyebrow at him, and there’s something a little taunting in his eyes, and he’s still holding onto Kevin’s tie, and something in Kevin loosens. He sighs, and lets go of the bench, tucking his fingers into Aaron's belt loops instead and pulling him forward.

“Is this a sport?” Aaron asks, because he’s a dick and facetious and he knows just how to make Kevin want to shut him up.

“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Kevin scolds, and then leans forward to kiss the rebuttal out of Aaron's mouth.

[fookinstevienicks]

so this doesn't feel as devastating as what Torchwood did to Ianto but the taste of betrayal is extremely similar

[profoundbondfanfic]

Buffer Time

Buffer Time by SundayZenith || @sunshine-zenith Rating: Teen and Up Word Count: 42k

When Dean wakes up in his town's jailcell with a disoriented Cas, he happily roles with it. Sure, he knows he'll be the laughing stock of the town for a few days -- what deputy locks himself in his own jailhouse? -- but as long as Cas is there, things are fine. Until he realizes his memory is unusually fuzzy. Until Cas starts acting strange and morose. Until he starts having brief flashes of Cas being taken from him by an inky black entity. Until Cas starts talking about plot holes and tropes. Until he wakes up by a fire in the woods, on a quests to fight a dragon --no wait, in an ambulance, late for his shift as a surgeon-- no wait- Dean's just trying to figure out why he and Cas keep waking up in different genres and why Cas seems so distant, while Sam works with Eileen, Gabriel, and a few others to do the same on the other side of a laptop. (WandaVision inspired finale fix-it)

A clever take on the finale fix-it genre, this fic is delightfully twisty. Dean and Cas keep waking up in different worlds. Is this a western? Is it a fantasy fic? It's a little bit of everything and you will spend the entire time wondering what is going on.

I don't want to give too much away because part of the fun of this fic is the journey. That being said, it's really fun to follow Dean and Cas through these different worlds, and the background cast of characters is also a lot of fun.

And, well, it's a fix it, so you know you'll get a soft landing and a good resolution.

[kandicon]

On the assumption that any lost body parts of the mechs still exist after removal and don't, like, disintegrate or something:

Note: since the fictions talk about all brains being rounded up and put to work no matter how small or unusable, this poll does not require that the mechs had to have their brains harvested as a whole for a brain to be counted (aka brains collected by a death from head explosion, for example, still count).

The Toy Soldier and Drumbot Brian are not included for obvious reasons, but the idea of ferrymen looking really hard to try and find their brains after they "die" and being confused is very funny to me.

[therealjammy]

Adding this idea to the already massive pile of WIPs: Rhaenyra going on a power trip, believing she is blessed with divine purpose and now has the gods on her side, and flying to take King’s Landing for herself vs Alicent who has shed her power and her religion who tries to pull Rhaenyra from the brink, to make her see reason and pull the wool from her eyes

Idk I’m obsessed with this darker turn Rhaenyra seems to be taking and I’d love to explore that some more, and Alicent’s liberation and the sort of person she becomes when she is free of power and religion