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littlereddream · 2 months ago

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ok so that zombie apocalypse au with jason was absolutely insanely amazing. i love how you wrote the rationale behind staying with him. would you ever consider writing more on the time jason kisses reader the first time (the one after they’d been attacked by a horde? if not, totally fine! have a cool day

Thank you!! So glad you asked because I’ve been wanting to write more about this au lol

This fully escaped me and ended up being longer than the original. Included is the missing scene from Jason kissing the reader for the first time and (I know you didn’t ask for this but I can’t help myself) their second kiss.

Enjoy!

(The original)

Under Heavy Rot

Missing scenes

Zombie apocalypse au typical gore (though more than Under Heavy Rot), gn reader

It was like digging for iron and finding gold instead. The corner store, such a short walk away from Jason’s house, was like a piece of trapped, untapped history. Every shelf was untouched, fully stocked as if the employees had made it their very last duty to fill up the space with supplies.

It’s not all perfect, of course. All of the dairy products are well past their expiration date, leaving you to grab powdered milk instead. The power’s out, and likely has been since the very beginning of it all, so most of the refrigerated or frozen products are out of the question.

Still, candy bars and canned food are nothing to scoff at.

After confirming that you’ve busied yourself with shoving non perishables into your backpack, Jason goes off to secure the store’s outside.

It doesn’t take long to fill up your backpack, and you zip it shut before slinging it over your shoulders. At that point, you almost leave. You’ve done what you and Jason came to do, so what’s left?

Just exploring the chance that the store might have a bag of those chips you used to love. Jason’s not around to lecture you for taking unnecessary risks, so you make your way over to the back. You’ll take your chances.

Every little movement has the old tile creaking under your feet, until one step prompts a quiet splash. Your gaze flicks down to your shoe, finding a puddle of sticky, nearly black blood. It sticks to the bottom of your boot when you raise it, thick and gooey.

Your hand flies to your knife, drawing it out of its sheath. Walker blood. It’s too coagulated to be anything else, too dark to be from anything other than the dead. The puddle smears forward, creating a trail through the aisle before turning past your view into the next.

Slowly, weapon raised, you move forward to follow the bloody path. You hardly make it two steps until a shrill snarl is your only warning before a hand grabs your shoulder.

You whirl around, knife angled to slash, but the blade can only uselessly cut across the walker’s chest. There’s no reaction from it, entirely undeterred from your attempt. You step back, distancing yourself as best you can while trying to form a plan. It’s just one. You’ve taken down countless walkers before, why’s this any different?

Another groan, this time from right behind you. You look back and, fuck, there’s two, blocking the other end of the aisle. Okay. Sacrifices, sacrifices.

Turning back to the one, you grip your knife tight and rush forward at it’s feet, diving between it’s legs to get behind before twisting around to slash the back of it’s knees. The action costs you your knife, getting stuck in the flesh mid movement, but it’s fine. It’s enough to buy you time, let you find out where you’d gotten yourself.

To the very back, with three walkers gaining on you and a singular clear path to the exit the next aisle over. You don’t make it. They’re faster than you’d predicted, recovering too quickly for your plan to fall into any sort of action. Too close, too close.

The two steps back you do take have your shoulders pressing into a shelf, securing your fate.

Or not. You could’ve sworn that the walkers in front of you didn’t have those holes in their head two seconds ago. They fall, one by one until they’re nothing but piles of previously reanimated flesh in front of you.

Behind them? Jason, slowly lowering his gun to rush over to you. His brows are knitted together, frown tight on his face, and you can only stare at him as his hands come up to cup both sides of your jaw. He tilts your face in his hands, checking you for injuries.

Jason repeats your name quietly, mumbled like he needs it to breathe. Like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

“Did you get bit? Scratched? What happened? I thought…” he trails off.

“I’m okay, Jay. They didn’t hurt me. You got them,” you reassure, hands coming up to rest over his.

He’s close, enough for you to see the sweaty glow of his skin, the scuffs of dirt on his cheeks. You don’t think there’s ever been anyone so beautiful.

“You’re okay,” Jason repeats, like he doesn’t quite believe it himself.

You nod, sweeping your thumbs in little circles over the back of his hands. Jason doesn’t waste another second. You aren’t ready for it, you don’t think he was either. Between one second and the next, he has his lips pressed to yours.

It’s soft, sweet in a way you wouldn’t have expected from the same man who almost killed you during your first meeting. Though maybe you shouldn’t be surprised. He’s also the same man who changed the bandages on your wound as if you’re broken glass, bound to shatter entirely if he pressed a little too hard.

He holds your face in his hands like the world around you doesn’t exist. There aren’t dead walkers sprawled around your feet. You aren’t standing in a crappy, abandoned corner store. This isn’t about to end the second he pulls away.

But it does, and the second his lips leave yours, the real world falls back into place. You don’t think you’ve ever hated it more.

Jason breaks it abruptly, but doesn’t fully pull away. His forehead remains touching yours, eyes squeezed tight like he’s preparing himself to force his next words out.

“I’m sorry. It…you know. Adrenaline. It won’t happen again, promise.”

Jason’s hands drop down to his sides, and now even the warmth from your kiss is gone. The real world is cold, and all you can do is shiver.

But if he wants to pretend it was a mistake, then you’ll let him. At this point, you doubt there’s much you wouldn’t do for him.

The realization hits you like a bucket of cold water. You really, really don’t want to leave him. Judging by everything that’s happened, he doesn’t want you to either.

There’s nothing for you to say, not that he gives you any time to speak. He’s already grabbing more canned food to shove into his own backpack.

“I think we have everything. We’re probably good to head back. Need anything else?” He asks.

You need him to kiss you again.

“No. Let’s go.”

With a curt nod from him, you leave the corner store, your favorite chips forgotten.

Two weeks later, you learn that Jason Todd is a liar. A no good, handsome, filthy little liar. And sure, maybe it’s you that gave him the perfect grounds to break his promise, but still. A liar.

It’s not like you’re not grateful. If Jason hadn’t gone back on his promise, then you wouldn’t be sandwiched between him and the kitchen counter.

You’d gotten tired of watching him look away anytime you caught him staring, of seeing how he’d never allow himself to touch you for more than a second when pulling you out of danger.

Your exhaustion, well paired with the event of him wearing his stupidly fitting leather jacket around you, was the perfect recipe for you to damn the consequences and just kiss him.

You’d started with so much confidence. You thought you understood what he kissed like, thought you’d be the one to overwhelm him when you grabbed him by the collars of his jacket.

“I really want to kiss you right now. Can I?” You’d whispered, like you’d disturb the air around you if you were just that little bit louder.

He’d nodded stupidly, eyes wide and lips parted in shock.

You’d overwhelm him, you’d thought.

You’ve never been so wrong.

Within seconds of your lips meeting his, Jason doesn’t waste another moment before backing you up into the counter. This Jason is different than the one from the corner store, who was so sweet and gentle. This Jason kisses like he’s trying to steal the air from inside your lungs, more starved than the dead outside.

Your brain feels blank, all confidence gone along with any memory of what to do while kissing somebody. He doesn’t even give you a second to think, broad hands squeezing your hips like you’d even try to move away. What the hell, what the hell.

Jason pulls away to give you a total of two seconds to breathe, then he’s back, bringing a hand up wrap around one of your wrists, still resting on his chest. What is he- oh. With his hand guiding one of your arms to wrap around his neck, you manage to have just enough brain capacity left to bring the other arm up too.

You aren’t sure how long you kiss. What you do know is that even after your lips part for the final time, the real world isn’t even close to coming back. Your brain’s too fuzzy, head resting against his chest while his arms wrap around your waist, slowly swaying the both of you to a melody that only he knows.

You know that if you look up now, you’ll see the wide smile that he hasn’t been able to force down since you’ve stopped kissing, despite his best efforts.

Leaving. Right. As if. As far as you were concerned, the only way either of you would ever leave is with the other following right behind.

And it’s perfect.

#jason todd #jason todd x reader #jason todd x y/n #jason todd x you #x reader #zombie apocolypse au #there was no way to stop the length of this one yall #I did try

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vivanightcity · 11 months ago

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Name: Yash 'V' Vala

Age: 23

Gender + Pronouns: Man, he/him

Occupation: Courier and runner, both legally and less so. Largely operating in the southern parts of NC, but officially covers the whole city. If something small and physical needs to be somewhere safe and fast and undetected? He's a pretty good option.

Cyberware: Sandevistan, gills, grip feet, reinforced tendons, smuggling compartments in his legs. (Gills provide up to 4 hours of time underwater without resurfacing, given where he got them, they include a filter to help - but not eliminate - the trouble from unclean or dangerous waters. Grip feet basically makes feet prehensile and adds an extra grip surface to the bottom. The storage space used for smuggling is just small compartments, 2 x 6 inches, one in each thigh.)

Long form backstory under the cut: It's long yall, I went a bit ott with it.

His mom was from the Raven and Rats nomadic group when her family arrived in London. Settling their narrowboats in what would’ve been around Limehouse - since the flooding caused by the Thames Barrier bombing, there were a lot of new routes and waterways for the nomads.

After the fall of the thames barrier, Equinox more or less left that area of east london to rot. Seeing it as too much effort for what they’d get back. So for decades there was rampant crime in an almost entirely ungoverned and abandoned city. Officially, no one there existed. No one lived there. Despite the crowded streets of floating walkways, and salvaged tops of flooded old brick buildings turned into rare dry outcroppings, and houseboats, narrowboats, floating shacks made of salvage, littered the entire place. It was alive. Always was. Just. Not according to the government.

In the mid 2050s, there was another push to reclaim and control the area. As it grew, moving into the flooded thames, encroaching more into the highly militarized City and Westminster, there were more clashes between BCF - British Combined Forces - and citizens, as well as criminal groups that used the growing slums and waterways to their benefit.

Multiple corporations, especially those with headquarters in the city, were pushing for the government to take action and start up a new Urban Development Committee after the past ones failed, or abandoned, the area, to at least get the border pushed back.

ETB - English Tourist Board - wanted to clean up the city to make it more appealing again, especially with R&R and other trouble making groups being able to hide more easily in the sprawling river. IMA - Imperial Metropolitan Agriculture - wanted to use the large flooded space to build artificial floating island farms, to make the most out of the potential, as more and more of the Good British Soil (TM) was being worked to death and lost to city expansion. If they wanted to keep telling people to BUY BRITISH (TM) they’d need more space.

It was easy to hide the initial clashes and push back, these weren’t residents, there was no proof they were even UK citizens, so it was easy to sell it as the typical xenophobic fearmongering that kept so many in check. Only the east end wasn’t going down easy, and the BCF found themselves against a strangely, and worryingly, united force of nomadic groups who needed the river, criminal groups that thrived in the ungoverned corners, and even militia groups from a bit further east, as the thames basins flooding was felt all the way along, with many areas of South Essex not caring a shit about what was happening in Colchester and the north, but connecting - as they always did - with east london. A shared river, a shared blood, a shared history. So it was easy to redirect from action in East Anglia to a new front.

Yash’s family were not involved. Like many civilians, they were just caught in between. He wasn’t even born yet when his father was killed. Shot by BCF working as private security on behalf of EBT to scout and find historic areas that could be salvaged of worth or even turned into tourist destinations - the top of greenwich hill, the observatory itself, being a great place to start trying to reclaim for tourism, from the destruction it has seen after decades of apparent ‘misuse’ as a crowded indoor market, with the rare areas of dry actual earth and land around it turned into lush community garden. All fiercely protected by a tight community, quickly labelled as a ‘gang’ by the government. His father worked there, as a mechanic, helping people repair their boats and homewares. When the EBT scouts tried to clear people out, they were harassing people who worked there, civilians of all kinds, including the elderly and children. They moved too slow, they didn’t listen or respond as wanted, to screamed orders and threats.

His dad stepped in to argue with them, unarmed, untrained, but angry, they can’t treat people like that, and he got shot for his trouble. He was considered a hero to many of them, and his death was a spark for that mislabelled gang to maybe take the label more seriously. If they were going to treat them like criminals, they’ll defend themselves like criminals. When EBT returned to take the royal observatory by force, they were fought back. It was bloody and violent, and the locals lost a lot more people, but they won. There is a mural of those lost still in the observatory, touched up, and sometimes added to, over the decades since. His dad is front and center.

Both his older brothers knew their father very well, being 13 and 9 at the time he was killed. They both deified him, and the fight he set off, and went whole-hog anti-government and anti-corp. They’re, essentially, Rockerboys. (I just can’t remember if Rockerboy is only for that specific genre, or can be applied to any and all anti-authoritarian musicians in the cyberpunk verse? If it’s only the genre, then it doesn’t fit.). They were founding members of the Foundlings. A community gang made up of kids around their age who saw what was done to try and erase the east end, and are going to guerilla warfare street tactics the shit out of things to protect their home. The name coming from the pure numbers who were orphaned and alone after what became seen as a war with the corporations and BCF along the river.

Yash always tried to keep up with his brothers, but they wouldn’t let him, he was too young, he didn’t understand fully why they did what they did. He was raised with a hatred and distrust of corps and government, and a fierce personal anger for them taking a father he never got to know from him, but he didn’t see the level of violence that the war was. He wasn’t involved. There were still clashes, but it wasn’t the same. The metal wars were in the news, sure, but they weren’t theirs to care about. They had enough trouble on their front door step.

He got his job as a courier initially through the Mudlarks - A more recent, largely non-violent, smuggling group that operates along the river - not knowing that his brothers put some pressure in to stop him being allowed into the more criminal aspects, even with that, he eventually started pushing to get involved in running dead drops and collections along the river during low tide.

It was the mudlarks that landed him in NC. A london based gin maker - an illegal business without licensing - needed to get some out to NC because an NC based celebrity was throwing a party, and was requesting it. Deep pockets and an affinity since they’d done a world tour and tried some in London.

It was his job to see it got there safely. They’d have someone meeting the cargo at the other end, but he had to accompany it on the orbital transit. When he gets into NCX, he is indeed met, but by NCPD and orbital corp customs. He managed to duck them, but it wasn’t like he could walk back into NCX and try to leave, although NCPD seemed to drop the grudge quickly, he knew Orbital Corp still had him on the no-fly list. On the plus side, he did get a pretty decent pay day when he delivered the order to Empathy, no middle man cut for people in NC. He still transferred what was owed to the mudlarks back to them, but kept the rest.

They told him to lie low, and even gave him some contacts, largely within Pacifica, Heywood, and the City Center. Pacifica felt the most like home, so he set up shop, got in good with the right fixers, spent some time learning the fastest ways around, and built a good reputation from there.

'V' was actually the symbol his brothers used as a tag, the name they released music under, and they'd always talk a big game about how it was for the east ends victory over the BCF, and the peace they're fighting for etc. etc. but Yash knows damn well that last bit is just a line they thought up later. Typical younger brother, the second he got the chance, he took it. Decided V was his thing now. They couldn't stop him all this way from home after all.

He meets Jackie in the canonical Streetkid way, just without the Heywood local vibes.

#cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk oc #cyberpunk 2077 oc #cyberpunk photomode #cyberpunk vp #i hope the backstory - to those who actually see that massive wall of text and give it a read - feels like it fits in the world #i did try #i cannot take a picture I like to save my damn life today #vibes of yash #my vp #too punk to fuck (cyberpunk)

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