#I have my eyes on the medical and insurance system | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

celestie0 · 3 months ago

Text

gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]

in holy matriphony ch4. in a mother’s eyes

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance plan in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, mentions of cigarettes, depression/anxiety; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ chapter. 4/x

ᰔ words. 10k (omg a whole number...very sexy)

a/n. hellooo my ihm friends! hope you're all doing well. ahh i'm glad to finally be posting this chapter lolol. it's a littleee off tangent from what happens in ch3, but still has some important plot developments. it does dive into feelings of depression & anxiety, so just wanted to give a warning on that! but yea other than that i hope you enjoy and see you at the bottom!! :) also so sorry if there are errors i only had time to skim through it once :((

nav. masterlist

“Just go ahead and sign right here for me.”

You take the pen from the hospice nurse’s hand. It’s cheap black plastic with a pink fuzzy pom pom attached to the end of it with peeling glue.

Your eyes briefly flit across the paragraphs detailed in printed ink until your gaze lands on the highlighted lines at the bottom of the page. Your signature. Spouse’s signature.

“We’ll need to have your husband come here to sign the paperwork as well, since he’ll have to add your mother on his list of dependents, but we can certainly get started on expediting this process for you since the insurance has already been pre-approved,” the nurse tells you as she accepts your signed paperwork and then neatly tucks it into one of the compartment holders.

The afternoon goes by smoothly, with your mother surprisingly patient as she sits in the waiting room while you wait for the nurses to formally show you to her new room.

You thought that you could put off putting her in hospice for a little longer, because in all honesty, you weren’t prepared to let her go just yet. You weren’t prepared to not have her in the house anymore. But lately, she’s been putting herself in lots of danger, like attempting to take her own medications when she does not know the correct dosing, and forgetting things on the stove when she attempts to cook.

But the last straw was when you came home from a very brief run to the grocery store at night a couple days ago to see a handful of your neighbors out on the front lawn with your mother at their side. She had apparently gotten out of the house and walked down the neighborhood, then fallen on the sidewalk but was unable to get up. When your neighbors had found her, a miracle as they were just coming home from dinner and caught sight of her in the illumination of their headlights, they tried to help her get up but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even tell the firefighters that came by to help her what her name was, or what year it was, or where she lived.

It was when you realized you couldn’t even keep her safe anymore that you had to let go.

“Is that a wedding ring?” your mother asks, pointing a trembling finger to it as she lays tucked inside her new hospice bed, “are you married?”

You glance down at the ring Gojo gave you in the courthouse, almost surprised to find that you were still wearing it in good faith. “Yes, mom. I am.”

“Why am I here?” she asks you, “I don’t want to be here.”

You stiffen a little. Although you were mentally preparing yourself to answer these questions, the preparation didn’t make it any easier. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just for a little short while, okay? The doctors want to run some tests on you.”

“Who are you married to?” she asks.

“To Satoru,” you tell her, “our neighbor.”

She lets out a small gasp. “The sweet boy who fixed our A/C?”

You roll your eyes. not sure why your mother has hyper fixated on that memory with Gojo when most days she’ll look at you like you’re a stranger. “Yes mom.”

“Oh, I like him,” she tells you with an affectionate nod. She hesitates slightly, wearisome of some other thought that flashes through her mind. “How long have you been married?”

You let out a small sigh. This is already a conversation you had with her a couple days ago, and it doesn’t feel good to lie to her. It was hard enough to do once, but to have to constantly lie to her over and over again over all the smallest things just so that she stays calm and safe and happy seems to drain you of all your energy and happiness you had left in your bones.

Little white lies, that’s what they are. Harmless ones. That’s what you tell yourself to absolve yourself of the guilt.

“I’ll come back soon, okay? I’ll tell you more about him some other day,” you say to her, speaking gently in the way an adult would speak to a child. The way she used to speak to you. You could never exactly pinpoint when those roles became reversed.

You finish discussing some more insurance matters with the front-desk nurse as she puts together a small folder of documents for you. While she works, you glance at the little counter shelf that includes a plethora of pamphlets on how to deal with the complicated feelings that arise from putting a loved one in hospice care, and dealing with the emotions of having a relative with advanced stage dementia. They are pretty brochures, lovingly creased at the folds as if looked through multiple times by people who walk in and out of this facility, but seemingly only few take them home. You slip one of each into your folder when the nurse hands it to you, manage the best smile possible, and then turn on your heel to head out the hospice doors.

The sun is setting outside as you take the walk back to your car, which was purposefully parked a half mile away to afford you the luxury of a melancholic stroll. Somehow, you feel like you’ve left a piece of yourself back at the hospice. A feeling you can’t quite shake from your bones.

Your feet stop walking somewhere along the sidewalk on their own, the street lights above you flickering brighter into life as the sky is now a dusty gray with only streaks of purple. There’s a liquor store you spot across a small parking lot to your right, and you’re guided towards it, but not without a sickening feeling in your chest.

When you open the door, the bell at the top jingles, and you glance to the right where you see a lanky young man playing some sort of shooter game on his phone by the cash register. You grab a bottle of vodka, a bottle of white wine, some packs of skittles, one of the mini pizza boxes at the hot food station, and then dump it all onto the counter.

The young man scans all your items without even so much as sparing you a glance, but does take a look at your ID, then says, “Total’s $68.65, cash or card?”

“Card.”

Just before you tap your card, something displayed behind the cashier counter catches your eye. Something familiar, something tempting, something you weigh in your head about twenty times within one millisecond all due to the cortisol coursing through your veins and you eventually say, “Uh, and could I get one of those, too?”

The cashier looks behind himself to what you’re pointing at before turning around. “Sure.”

The same jingle is heard on top of your head as you leave the store, now with a burning hot mini pizza box in your hand as well as a plastic bag that carries your candy and the two clinking bottles of alcohol.

“Oh!! omg, y/n,” you hear a feminine voice call out and you’re instantly wincing. The last thing you wanted was to be bothered right now. You just wanted to go home and get drunk and then pass out on the floor of your living room. But alas, the world is small.

You turn around to see Hana come running across the sidewalk lot towards you, and when she’s about a few feet away, she glances down at your hands and all the things you were carrying. You quickly shove your last-minute purchase into your jacket pocket with a shameful conscience, and try to hide the plastic bag of liquor behind your calves. There was no hiding the pizza box, but at least that was the least incriminating.

“Oh, Hana, wow! What a coincidence seeing you here,” you say to her, pressing your lips into a small smile.

“Yeah, I um,” she points over her shoulder towards the hospice that’s standing tall in the darkness of night, cells with windows illuminated with light. If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was a prison. “Remember I told you my friend’s mom is sick and she’s at this hospice?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“I was just visiting her mom with her,” she tells you.

“Aw,” you comment, “I see, I see.”

You adore Hana, you really do. She was there for you when the whole Yuna and Choso thing went down, picking your shifts up for a good week when you couldn’t stomach going into work when your ex-best friend’s stupid face was gloating in the halls over how she stole your boyfriend. Hana was there for you when you were a new hire and all the doctors were being bitchy about a “newbie in the ED”, but she stood up for you, even cussed the fuck out of one of attendings for the whole hall to hear when you were being disrespected by one of them. She’s someone you can beam about how hot the EMT and Firefighter men that stroll into the ED are, too. A priceless companion.

And even though you two have hung out after hours sometimes, it was still always a little awkward to see a coworker outside of work.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“I actually, um, was going to tell you at our shift tomorrow, but I just admitted my mom to the hospice too,” you say, “and…thanks a lot for telling me about it. I really appreciate it. It seems like a wonderful facility.”

Her eyes briefly widen with surprise before they soften once again. “Oh, that’s wonderful, love. I hope all goes well. And your little insurance scam worked! Good for you!”

“Shhh,” you hiss at her, looking around yourself with paranoia, “the feds are everywhere.”

She laughs, sweet in the air, before the sound settles and she looks at you with something reminiscent of well-intentioned concern. Her eyes flit to the plastic bag you were still holding behind your legs. “Hey…um, if…if you ever want some company when you come to visit your mom, just let me know. I hope you know you don’t have to do everything alone.”

You blink at her, sucking in a short breath to respond, but it only leaves you as a slight puff of air. There’s a silent gratitude that you give her, because it’s hard for you to express any feelings with words, but you’ve found that the people in your life who know you best can always read you without them.

“Thank you, Hana,” you manage to say with a slight croak to your voice because you were fighting back tears.

She smiles at you. “Take care, okay? And see ya tomorroooowwwwww,” she coos at you, coming up to you to give you a small hug, a squeeze of your upper arm, and then she heads back towards the direction of the hospice.

You watch her walk away until you can’t see her anymore. And then you head towards your car.

When you arrive at your neighborhood, you park in front of Gojo’s house. You have a feeling that you won’t be able to bear the vast emptiness of your home now that your mother is elsewhere, and so you drag your feet up the stone stairs of his house with a heavy heart instead.

The spare key that he gave you weakly pushes into the keyhole with about as much force as your fingers can manage, and you realize they almost feel atrophied.

The house is dark when you step inside, spare for the ambient street lights shining through cracked open blinds on the windows, and the curtains rustle gently from the draft of the AC, a chill that reaches you too by the time you make it to the staircase.

It doesn’t seem like Gojo’s home. A glance at the clock tells you it’s close to 8pm. You briefly consider texting him to ask where he’s at, why he’s out so late, when he’ll be home, and what’s for dinner, but you can’t even bring yourself to pull your phone out of your coat pocket.

Weak legs manage to take you upstairs and you’re about to pass through to your room when the slightly open door to the master bedroom taunts you, like a peephole into some other wordly dimension. Like the wardrobe in the chronicles of Narnia. A portal into your fake husband’s life.

With a palm pushing on the door, you slowly crack it open, and you know the anxious voices in your head are getting worse by the day when the creaking of the door hinges sounds like a lullaby to you.

Was this an invasion of privacy? And did you really care if it was?

The room is big, with a king sized bed off to the left, sheets neatly made and duvet primly tucked under, like the way hotel beds are set up. You feel a slight flush of embarrassment when you remember you haven’t been making your bed in the mornings for the past couple days you’ve been living here so far, and you wonder if Gojo would judge you for something like that. If he’d think you were a messy or undisciplined person. If he would think less of you.

Truthfully, in a lot of ways, you still felt like a child. You barely weathered a lot of your formative adolescent years when dealing with your parents’ divorce, and you’ve had to put so much of your life on pause to take care of your mom ever since she got diagnosed. So here you were, in the body of a 29-year-old woman, yet still feeling so painfully juvenile. One that forgets to make her bed in the mornings, and on most nights can’t seem to stomach anything other than cereal for dinner. It was like you were still at a party that everyone else had left, except all it ever was is hell. Your life was such a stark contrast to the lives of other adults you’ve come across. The ones that wake up at six to go on runs, the ones that have paid off mortgages with five figures in their retirement accounts, oh god, the ones that meal prep, and the ones that, all things considered, have their lives together. The ones that don’t spend at least an hour of every day, in fetal position on their bed, sobbing until tears soak through the sheets of the pillow down to the feathers like bone, because you’re so overwhelmed with stress and preparing yourself for the grief of losing your mother which you know that, no matter how hard you try to save her from, will inevitably one day come.

You used to cook dinner every night, make your bed every morning, and go to pilates on the weekends. Back when you were a little younger and healed and excited to live life. But now, you barely get by. Your priorities are with your mother. You can’t remember the last time you did anything nice for yourself, including something as simple as the luxury of getting to come home to a clean house because you hardly ever had time to clean it, not with all the doctor’s appointments you were driving your mother to, not with all the extra shifts you were picking up at the hospital to pay off your debt, not with all the times you felt too depressed to even get out of bed.

But your mother is in hospice now, so you’ve made time, right? You’ve made the decision that everyone in your life has been begging you to finally do. So why do you still feel so empty inside?

By a quick survey of the room, you notice Gojo doesn’t really have many framed photos hung up on the walls or perched up on surfaces. None, actually. Only a contemporary painting above his bed frame and then a faded vintage horror movie poster plastered up near his desk. Not terribly odd, since in your experience most men don’t really do the whole “cluttering the house with millions of photos of their family” thing until they at least have a couple of kids and some purebred dog. The thought of Gojo someday setting up a little portrait photo at his desk with his wife’s—his eventual real forever wife’s, pretty face in it, posing with their two beautiful kids, makes an oddly melancholic feeling waft through you. You wonder if he would keep a two-by-two in his wallet, too.

Your feet move one in front of the other as your finger traces the surface wood of a dresser cabinet, something that looks a little vintage and oaky, in stark contrast to the modern minimalist vibe Gojo has set up in the rest of the room. A family heirloom, maybe? There’s no dust that coats your finger, which surprises you. If you were to run your finger across your dresser at home you’d have collected enough dust to snort down your windpipes like a recreational drug. But Gojo’s a real estate agent, making a living off of dressing houses up in perfect cosplay so that monetarily stable middle class families feel inclined to buy them. So you’re not exactly surprised he’s invested in keeping his own house in pristine condition too.

There is a little bit of chaos, though. Like the shirt he has haphazardly hung over his chair at his office space over to the right. There’s a coffee mug sitting there too, porcelain and reflecting the moon light off, but upon peering inside you see that it’s half empty with stale coffee. He’s got pens sprawled across the desk, in a fashion that suggests he accidentally knocked them over in a rush, and slowly, like some grounding exercise, you place them one by one back into the paper mache pencil holder. It briefly occurs to you that he has a lot of paper mache containers of sorts around the house. You lift up the pencil cup, turning it in your hand until your eyes catch something written on it with glittery pink gel pen.

i luv u unkle toru! -yur BEST FREND 4EVUR juno!!! :D

A small smile makes it onto your face. The handwriting was messy, more like scratches than smooth lines, and nothing less than what you would expect of a child. You remember making paper mache and clay trinkets at preschool for your mom and dad when you were younger. And you’re sure if you were brave enough to open the box of memorabilia that sits in your attic some day, you’d see your own scratchy scribbled handwriting on them. An innocence that is long gone and buried, never again to be delicately placed on desks or counters for all the living.

The draft from the AC reaches you once again, brushing over your skin and causing a chill to shiver down your spine. It kicks at the curtains as well, causing them to ruffle up towards you, baring the dark outside world into the streets. And you notice in that momentary glance that there’s a roof just outside the window that overlooks the backyard. A roof? Spotted by a depressed woman going through a quarter life crisis? There was nothing more tempting than that.

The window was easy to open, which only caused unease over the revelation of how easy it would be for someone to rob this house. You make a mental note to tell Gojo to get a ring camera or security system of some sort since he doesn’t seem to have one, but you can already picture him telling you something about how statistically low the crime rates are in this neighborhood compared to all the other neighborhoods, and then you’d tell him that it’s just for your peace of mind. But whether he’d compromise or not after that, you’re really not sure.

You take a seat on the roof, a little scared as you sit because of the slight slope, but it’s comfortable once you’re settled. You sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, staring out into the neighborhood of perfectly lined up suburban houses. You’ve got a better view into some neighbors' backyards, noticing that a couple of them had pools while some of them have big gardens. There's a cat resting up on a fence in the distance. A car drives by with headlights illuminating everything in its proximity briefly before zooming off. You glance up at the sky, and notice the full moon, but it’s too cloudy to see any stars. Or perhaps it was just the light pollution from the lamps making it difficult to see.

On instinct, your hand reaches inside your coat pocket for your phone, but your knuckles hit something else instead. A moment of brief confusion flickers through your head, but then you immediately recall the last-minute purchase you made at the gas station.

Your hand pulls out the object, and then you stare down at it. Squinting your eyes a little, because it’s a sight that feels familiar but also one you haven’t seen in so long: a pack of twenty Marlboro red cigarettes.

You’ve tried a lot of things to manage your stress over the years. Excessively working out, eating a lot of sugar, going on six hour hikes to touch grass, flirting with random men at bars, fucking Choso until he was rendered speechless, multiple types of antidepressants, you almost tried smoking weed once with your roommate in college but you wimped out last second. But the habit that had gotten you through the years of 21 to 24 is held loosely in your hand right now. It’s been five years since you quit, but resolve was often a fickle thing. As the saying goes, once an addict, always an addict.

There’s a brief moment of hesitation as you slowly peel the plastic off of the back, but then it all comes back to you like a reflex you’ll never forget up to where you slide a cigar up out and then pinch it between your two fingers. Forgetting to buy a lighter with the cigarettes is definitely something you would do, but because you remembered it was something that you would do, you remembered not to do it. The flick of the flame coming to life is ASMR you didn’t know you were painfully nostalgic for, and you balance the cigarette between your lips in that sort of movie-star way people used to obsess over back in the day. But just as you bring the lighter up to the end of the cigarette, and just before you can light it—

A hand shoots out in your periphery, grabbing your wrist and entirely stalling the movement.

You gasp, lips parting enough for the cigarette to fall from them and into your lap. The hand wrapped around your wrist is large and masculine, and you briefly consider screaming, but when you snap your neck to look at the perpetrator, you see Gojo crouched down next to you on this roof. You notice he’s wearing a black suit, a tie that was loosely secure hanging from his neck into the space between his spread thighs as he’s crouched, and whatever gel he had in his hair from earlier only barely remains as strands fall over his forehead haphazardly. He looks like he’s on the other end of a long work day.

You blink at him, expression plastered with surprise, but his is only earnest. With breathtaking blue eyes that you realize he could easily use to surrender a person just by looking at them, like the way he’s looking at you right now. His lips are pressed together into a firm line, as if to suppress some emotion, but the slight crease to his brow makes you feel like you’re in trouble somehow. Like he was silently scolding you for something.

“I—” you stutter.

He lets go of your wrist and discreetly pulls the lighter out of your hand. And then his hand reaches for the pack of cigarettes you were balancing on your knee, but on some reflex that you don’t even think about, you try to snatch them away from him, and now you’re both tugging at the same pack of cigarettes.

“y/n,” he says, “let go.”

“No,” you say stubbornly.

He sighs and tugs a little harder. “Give them to me.”

“But—” you stammer, voice becoming softer to see if that’d work on him, “I’m…” Your grip on them tightens. “I’m stressed.”

He raises an eyebrow at you, then finally loses his patience and snatches them right out of your hand. He stands up from his crouched down position to toss the pack off to the side onto the roof somewhere. You’re surprised when he lets out a sigh and sits down next to you on the roof, as if he felt the obligation to. His legs stretch out in front of him, but still bent slightly at the knees, and he leans backwards with his body weight braced on his palms laid flat on wood paneling behind him. “There are better ways to relieve stress,” he tells you candidly.

“Like what?” you ask, and just when he opens his mouth to speak, you clarify, “and don’t say sex.”

He shuts his mouth and his eyes flit up to the sky for a brief second. “Damn. I didn’t have a back-up answer.”

You roll your eyes, releasing a deep breath, then draw your knees to your chest before resting your chin on top of them.

“I didn’t know you smoke,” he says after a century-long minute.

You wince a little, because you were half hoping he was going to just drop the subject all together.

You bite your lip nervously and hug your knees to your chest tighter as if to hide yourself from him. “I don’t. Well, I haven’t. Um, not for a while.”

“Huh. I see,” he says.

Another silence passes, and as he shuffles next to you, the fabric of his suit brushes against the fabric of your coat, and you’ve become entirely too aware of the feeling.

“So,” he says, breaking the awkward silence, “your mom’s in hospice now?”

You nod, enthusiastic enough to where you won’t look like you’re entirely depressed about it.

“That’s good,” he says, “no issues with the insurance?”

You shake your head. “They need you to sign some papers by the end of the week though,” you tell him. “We’ll have to go in person.”

He nods slowly to affirm he’ll make time for it. “I really hope things get better for your mom,” he says, voice soft as he stares off into neighbors homes like you had been doing ten minutes ago. You see the cat that was resting on the fence get up, do a big stretch, and start walking along the length of the fence. Your eyes briefly glance at Gojo, and you notice his gaze is tracing the cat’s path.

“My—” you start, hesitant all of a sudden by the vulnerability you already feel swelling within you, most definitely due to sitting with someone on a rooftop late at night, but you decide that you’ll be nice to him for once, “…my mom seems to remember you a lot. More than she remembers me.” You let out a small humoring laugh, as if that fact doesn’t completely destroy you. “She was blabbering to me again for the seventh time about how you apparently fixed our AC.” You try to bite your tongue, but can’t help it when you say, “although I’m pretty sure you just pressed a bunch of buttons until it started working again.”

“Yup. That’s exactly what I did.”

You roll your eyes and sigh.

Another awkward silence.

“Can I ask you a question?” you say.

“Sure.” His voice sounds deeper, like he’s sleepy.

“Why did you agree to marry me? That’s not something people just do out of nowhere.”

He glances over at you, and you flicker your eyes to him. “Why? Having regrets?” he teases, with a slight nudge of his elbow to your side.

“Just answer me.”

He lifts his palms up from behind him and leans forward, placing his hands on his knees instead. “I don’t know. If something I could do would help someone out that much, I wasn’t going to say no.”

You hum quietly, still confused by his intentions. But you’re too jaded to question them.

“It costs nothing to be nice,” he adds.

You run soothing circles over your thigh through the fabric of your jeans. For some reason, your mind wanders to Choso. Thinking of all the years you wasted staying with him even though you knew his affections were long gone, just because you didn’t want to break his heart. Only to realize that you never had that privilege in the first place.

“I think,” you say, your voice barely above a whisper as you draw your knees closer to your chest, “that sometimes it does.”

A gust of autumn wind breezes by, ruffling the trees that the two of you are at eye-level with at the moment. You're pretty sure you’ve completely lost Gojo’s interest at this point, where he’s finally too tired to deal with your oddly cryptic attitudes and overall generally displeasing vibe, assuming this based solely on his prolonged silence beside you. You’re ready for him to get up and abandon you here on this roof, left to ponder every single thing you’ve done wrong in your life. It was any second now.

“Sometimes,” he instead speaks up, and it’s so surprising to you that you jolt a little bit, “you can do everything right, and people will still find a way to fuck you over. But I don’t think that’s any reason to stop being nice to others.”

You glance over at him, your eyes widening slightly, but he just continues to peer off straight into the night. His blinks are slow, lingering on being closed for a moment before he opens them again, and you’re mesmerized by the sight. The skin under his eyes is slightly dark from exhaustion, heavy with character that makes you aware that he’s just a person too. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, you realize that he’s—…handsome. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, your heart flutters in your chest.

He scoffs suddenly and dusts his hands off. “I sound like a fucking youth pastor.” He lets out an exhale before suddenly standing up onto his feet before you can think more on it. He looks off into the night again and lets out another exhale that sounds more like a sigh this time. “God, it’s getting a lot colder these days. Might have to start running the heater.”

You blink up at him with no commentary to add.

He looks down at you. His face is relaxed, but you can tell those eyes are distracted. A shimmering blue ocean in its own world while he attempts to stay present in this one.

He holds his hand out to you, and you stare at it blankly like you’ve got no clue what he intends for you to do with it. But you finally take the hint and curl your hand around his palm so that he can pull you up onto your feet too.

You stumble a little, falling forward from the sudden blood flow to your brain, but he holds you steady by the strong grip of his hands on your elbows. He’s close to you, close enough to where you can smell the faint lingering scent of his cologne. Something different than that expensive one he wore to the courthouse, but it’s comforting somehow. A fragrance that’s more him. And you feel nervous as you look up at him underneath pale moonlight.

He lets go of your elbows. You feel cold from the loss of his touch. But his right hand moves to gently hold your left hand in his palm, holding it curled as his thumb barely grazes the stone you wear on your ring finger; the one he gave you.

The way his thumb prods at the silver band is like he’s inspecting its quality, as if it has to pass some test to be worthy of sitting on your finger. Or maybe just any finger, if you were to quell the delusion. You’re not sure if he’s satisfied with his inspection.

“Where did you get it—” you blurt out.

His gaze flickers up to your face briefly before he’s back to examining the ring. “It was my mom’s.”

Your mouth gapes slightly in shock, heart dropping a little in your chest, and all of a sudden you feel guilty. Guilty that he put his mother’s ring on your finger for something that was fake, something that was essentially a business deal, something exchanged to you out of fraud when it was a precious family heirloom that should be exchanged with love. And maybe he didn’t care about it much, some people don’t care about the sentiments of objects. But your mind thinks of the oaky vintage dresser in his room, so out of place in the aesthetic of its surroundings, a decision you can only imagine him of all people, mr. “everything in this house has to look like an IKEA catalog”, would do if the dresser held some importance to him that was more than meets the eye. And so you’re compelled to think that maybe this ring did, too.

“Why would you give me this?! You could’ve just gotten a cheap fake diamond ring from a pawn shop and called it a day,” you ask him, suddenly feeling burdened by it.

“Well I wasn’t exactly given much time to think of other options.”

“But—” you start, only to realize you have no counter arguments for that.

He lets out a huh noise, like the sound someone makes when they’re pleasantly surprised by something, as he looks down at your hand that he still held in his. “It’s kinda crazy that it fits you perfectly. I wasn’t sure.”

Your mind wanders to when he slipped the ring onto your finger in the courtroom, followed by the kiss. Soft, sweet, the lingering warm sensation of his palm on your cheek as he cupped your face, the same way those heartthrob actors do in all those romance movies and kdramas that you watch on Friday nights while snuggled up in a blanket, wondering when anyone will ever kiss you like that. You remember the ghost sensation of his hand hovering over the small of your back, fingers lightly grazing the nape of your neck, his frame blocking out everything around you as he kissed you, just to pull away and for the two of you to then pretend like it never happened, as if it wasn’t one of the sweetest kisses you’ve ever known.

You slowly pull your hand out of his, the moment feeling too tender for your liking, and you clear your throat before flitting your eyes up to his.

“Rule #1,” you remind him with a soft whisper, “no touching.”

You purse your lips, watching his round eyes blink once, then twice, before he shoves his hands in his suit pockets. He rocks back and forth on his heels for a few seconds, nodding slowly in submission, and then he turns on them to head back to the house. You’re standing a little stunned from the abrupt ending to this trance of a moment on the roof, and you’re also a little surprised with how your chest is heaving a little bit with fast breaths, but you eventually snap out of it to follow him inside too.

You two make it back inside the house, with little words exchanged. You pretend to not notice the way Gojo tilts his head at his desk, like he’s confused about why it looks tidier than when he left it. You’re prepared to feign innocence or ignorance, but he doesn’t press you about it.

“Y’know,” he says from behind you, his chest briefly brushing against the back of your head as he pushes the bedroom door in front of you open so that you can head out into the loft, “those oversized 1800s-esque nightgowns you’ve been wearing around the house kinda make you look like a less-hot version of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•

“Sign right here for me, sir.”

You watch as the nurse slides the papers across the high-raised counter of the hospice nursing desk towards Gojo, his eyebrows narrowing as his eyes skim the words on the paper and land at the highlighted lines where he’s been intended to sign. You feel nervous for some reason, as if he’d suddenly find something disagreeable and refuse to sign, then take you to the courthouse first thing to finalize a divorce and send you off to prison while claiming he was blackmailed into the whole marriage in the first place.

Instead, he pulls a pen from the chest pocket of his suit jacket, clicking the end of it and scribbling his signature onto the paper with some jet black ink that looks like it takes a second to dry. How pretentious of him. The pink pom-pom pen was right there.

The nurse behind the counter continues to chat with him about something, blah blah dependents, blah blah tax claims, blah blah you’ll receive an itemized bill in the mail. You’re trying your best to eavesdrop in on the conversation, but most of your senses are being occupied by examining all your surroundings. When you dropped your mother off at the hospice, your feelings were at the forefront of conscience, but now that you’ve had a couple days to come down from that overwhelming emotional high, you’re here to scope out the quality of this place you’ve just dumped your mom at.

The facility is clean and sleek, with a color theme of red and an ocean blue across the signs, the furniture, even with the paperwork they hand out. All the workers had color-coded scrubs based on their occupation or specialty, and none of them had stains on the fabric. You take a glance down at the modest leather pumps you were wearing past the creases of the long skirt, and notice that the floor was shimmering off their reflection in a perfect polish. It wasn’t bad, this place.

“Thanks, you too,” you hear Gojo say to the nurse behind the counter. He has a professional smile on his face, but still kind and genuine, which makes the woman at the computer something bashful and unable to make eye contact. He folds something that looks like a receipt into his chest pocket before tucking his pen back in there too and then turns to face you. You make a mental note to pay him back for whatever he just paid for, at least once you move some money around.��

Your eyebrows lift, feeling a little dazed as you blink at him blankly.

“Alright,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets, the sound of his shoes on the polished hospital floors satisfactorily tapping in your ears as he took a couple steps towards you, “where’s your mom’s room?”

“Huh?”

“What’s her room number?” he asks you.

“Y-You wanna go see her??”

“Of course I want to,” he says, “she’s my mother-in-law.”

You roll your eyes and pet the fabric of your skirt to smooth the wrinkles out. “You’re getting a little too invested in this role of fake husband.”

“I get to annoy you all day and ride the adrenaline rush of committing a federal crime,” he says, “of fucking course I’d get invested.”

You sigh, tossing some of your hair to behind your shoulder before glancing up at the signs, squinting slightly to locate the ward where your mother’s room is, before you hear an extremely high-pitched and somewhat catty feminine voice call out from behind you. You glance at Gojo’s face as he peers off to whoever’s behind you, and you see him visibly stiffen a little.

“Is that Dayton county’s sexiest realtooorrr???” the voice purrs, and you turn on your heel to see a blonde bombshell of a woman clacking her kitten heels down the glistening floors of the hospice, with another brunette bombshell just a few paces behind her. Bombshell #2 sighs something like “it issss” before they walk right up to your fake husband and take turns at giving him a playful squeeze of his bicep. You have to physically stop your jaw from dropping at the sight.

“Wow! Ladies, so–...so great to see you two,” he says out of polite obligation, and you immediately clock the fact that he doesn’t address them by name.

Bombshell #1 turns to look at you, all of her hair moving as one solid entity with the motion from all the hair spray that’s probably holding it up, and she points at you with a long slender finger that narrows into a french-tip. “Oh who’s this?? Another one of your clients??”

“Oh, no, she’s my–”

“I’m his wife,” you interrupt him, irritated for some reason.

Both the women chirp something out like oh! before their faces twist with confusion.

“I didn’t know you were married,” Bombshell #2 says in a thick New Jersey accent.

Gojo lifts his left hand up, the silver band on his hand glimmering under fluorescent hospice lighting. “Very happily,” he says, as if someone was holding a gun to his head.

Bombshell #1 crosses her arms, and you try not to stare at how nice her boobs look in the low scoop-neck jaguar print top she was wearing. You were no better than a man. And now you’re pissed off at the idea of Gojo glancing down too, but a flick of your gaze up to his face tells you he’s safe. For now.

“You weren’t married when I asked you if you were a month ago,” Bombshell #1 sneers at him. It’s true, the math wouldn’t make sense, but in his defense, this marriage was a fraud.

“Or when you took me out for dinner last week after I bought my house,” Bombshell #2 snarls with an undertone of hurt.

Gojo clears his throat beside you before pointing at Bombshell #2. “How is that, by the way?” he asks in an attempt to change the subject, “the half acre down on Maple Ave, right? You, uh, enjoying the pool?”

The woman let out an offended scoff and–were her eyes sheening with tears?? She puts her hands on her hips. “No. Mine is the three bedroom house with the cedar gazebo on 14th street.”

Her friend next to her rolls her eyes and smacks her gum between her cheek. “I’m the one that bought the half acre down on Maple Ave, jerk. Ugh!” She grabs her friend’s arm with a high-pitched hmph noise leaving her throat, and you can hear the other one sniffling subtly as she wobbles on her heels with her friend’s pull of her arm.

Right before leaving the two of you alone, Bombshell #1 turns to you and says, “I hope you find someone who treats you better,” and then they storm off together down the hallway, their perfectly blow-dried hair bouncing in sync with each stomp.

You blink at the sight, a little flabbergasted from the interaction, and then flit your faze up to Gojo. You see him awkwardly scratching at the back of his head with a grimace on his stupidly handsome face.

“That’s what you get for being a manwhore,” you tell him.

“I’m not a manwhor–”

“You went on a date with another woman while you were maaaaarrrieeeddd?!” you coo as you let out a fake gasp and slap your cheeks with your hands, “despicable, really.”

He lets out some disgruntled noise, the source coming from deep within his throat. “No. We weren’t fake-married yet,” he vindicates himself, “and it wasn’t a date. I just bought her dinner as a congrats for buying a house. Not a big deal. I do it for all my clients.”

“Satoru. You do realize you’re leading these women on, right? I mean, I’ve seen the way you talk to them. Even if you think you’re just being friendly, please know that your definition of friendly is most people’s definition of flirting.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s true.”

He raises an eyebrow as he glances down at you. “Alright, how come this flirting in disguise of friendliness hasn’t worked on you then?”

You scoff in disbelief before crossing your arms. Maybe you did deserve a better fake husband. “You’re never friendly with me. You’re always rude to me.”

“What? I’m not always rude to you.”

“Well, you’re certainly much more rude to me than you are to other women,” you say, tapping the tip of your shoe with irritation.

“Can we not do this right now? We’re in the middle of a hospice.”

“God, you’re such a cop-out,” you mumble as you forcefully push past him towards the hallway that’ll lead you to your mother. You can hear that Gojo’s on your tail, following you down one of the more dimly lit hallways, and you can tell he needs to stall the strides of his Daddy Longlegs to not overtake your pace.

“What the fuck is a cop-out?” he asks you from behind.

“Look it up on urban dictionary, Grandpa. Unless you don’t know what the Internet is, either,” you spat.

You waltz right up to your mother’s room just in time to see a nurse making her way out with a clipboard in her hands. She glances over to you when she sees you approaching in her periphery.

“Hi! How can I help you?” she asks.

“Is it alright if we visit my mother?” you ask her.

“Oh! Sure, let me just clean her bed pan really quick.”

Your brow furrows. “B-Bedpan?? Why is she using a bedpan??”

The nurse stops in her movements. “Well, yesterday and today, that’s just what she has decided to use.”

You immediately become hostile. “That’s not right. She never needed to use one at home. Why is she suddenly using one here? Is that not a clear sign of deterioration? The restrooms must not be kept well enough here if she doesn’t want to use them.”

The nurse becomes something meek, her eyes widening as her mouth gapes slightly. “Ma’am,” she squeaks out, “we see this commonly with patients as they begin to adjust to hospice life. We’ll urge her to use the restroom, but as of right now, we need to prioritize what she finds most comfortable.”

Your expression softens, your shoulders relaxing from their tense position, and you duck your head a little with guilt. “Right…I’m sorry.”

The nurse presses her lips together with a well-meaning smile before shuffling into the room and closing the door behind her. You sigh and lean your back against the wall next to the number plate, cheeks flushing slightly from the confrontation. You have no idea how loud your voice was or who heard you. But you try to convince yourself that you’re just stressed and trying to look out for your mother, although the guilt still sits.

You glance up to see Gojo staring at you with slightly wide eyes, his hands shoved into his pockets, and he tilts his head to study your expression.

“What?” you snap at him.

“Are you doing okay?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Satoru,” you cut his questioning off by raising a palm into the air, “just—…just stop.”

His brow furrows together slightly, but before he can show any further concern, the nurse exits the room and holds the door open for the two of you.

“All set!” she chirps, and Gojo moves to hold the door open in her stead, and then the nurse bolts down to disappear somewhere down the hallway.

You hear Gojo let out a small huff of a scoff as he stares down in the direction the nurse ran off in. “Glad to know I’m not the only one that’s scared of you.”

You roll your eyes and walk into the room through the open door.

Your mother lays in her bed, looking out the window with her hands resting on top of layers of white linen sheets, her skin looking slightly paler than usual. You approach her bedside slowly and she finally turns her head to look at you.

“Hi mom,” you gently greet her, sitting down on the stool beside her bed, “how are you doing?”

Her eyes dart across the features of your face, and you briefly glance towards the wall to the right where you see Gojo standing from a slight distance.

“Oh, hi dear,” she says with a smile, and relief washes over you.

You match her smile with your own. “Mom, I brought someone here to see you.” You glance over at Gojo, who starts to close distance now as he approaches the foot of the bed, “this is Satoru, my husband.”

Your mother’s eyes widen, “Oh! I know him,” she scoldingly swats a hand at you, like you’ve embarrassed her somehow by assuming that she doesn’t know who he is, “he’s my neighbor!”

You sigh, “yes mom, the one that fixed the A/C?” You attempt to finish her sentence for her.

She looks confused for a moment, but slightly nods as if to avoid any further confusion for herself. “But—…but, why…” she trails off and then looks at you, “I’m sorry, are you my nurse?”

Your shoulders drop slightly. “No, mom, it’s me. Your daughter. Do you remember?”

Her face scrunches before it entirely relaxes to keep some image of composure despite the haze you know she feels in her head. “Oh…yes, yes…my little girl. I remember you, of course!”

Your eyes become layered with a slight sheen of tears, “I’m glad.”

“Where’s your father?” she asks, “he said he’d bring me some…oh dear, what—…he said he’d bring me tea. I’ve been waiting.”

“Mom, dad is—” you pause for a moment to think on your feet. You could either tell the truth, or a little white lie. You never know what to do. And either one comes with either guilt or sorrow. “Well, he’ll be here soon, I just wanted to come see you.”

“Oh okay…” she trails off, her eyes squinting at you once more with that same look of confusion on it, but then they drift towards Gojo. “Oh you’re a very handsome young man! You look just like my neighbor.”

Your eyes flicker up to Gojo, and he walks up to your side by your mom’s bed. “Yes, Mrs. l/n, I am your neighbor.”

“With the lemon tree!”

“The avocado tree,” you correct her with a small sigh. “And he’s my husband mom. And also our neighbor.”

“Oh I see I see…” she says, looking up at him, and in a moment that shocks you, she holds her hand up for him to take.

There’s a slight moment of surprise on his face too, but he accepts her frail hand in his, and you glance over to your mom to see her look at him with some look of peace on her face.

“Oh, sit down here, won’t you?” she tells him, and you both blink at her in a moment of hesitation.

He pulls a stool up to the side of the bed right next to you and takes a seat down onto it. Your mother holds his hand with both of hers now, soothing her palm over the back of it before she taps on it lightly.

“Oh, my little girl is very sweet. She would bring me flowers from the garden when she was,” she glances at you, confused once more, “well I remember her when she was so little but she looks…a little older now. Ah, but she would bring me such pretty flowers.”

Your heart aches in your chest. You never knew what version of you your mother would remember. Some days, you’re still supposed to be an angsty teenager that shuts doors in her face, some days you were just as you are right now, and other days, you were just her little girl. And it confused her, the image of not seeing you in the way that she remembers. In the only way she knew how.

“You’ll take good care of my sweet girl, won’t you?” she asks him.

And it knocks the wind out of you.

It drops your heart to the center of the earth.

The thought that, after so many moments where she doesn’t remember you, she still knows that you’re someone she wants to keep safe.

Your mouth gapes slightly, tears welling in your eyes and you try your best to blink them away, but you see Gojo’s hand slip out from being held by your mother’s hands, to instead use both of his to hold hers. Your eyes snap to his face, and you see that same earnest expression you’ve been growing used to seeing these days.

“Yes,” he responds, eye contact level with hers, “I will.”

A small puff of air leaves your lips, a single tear streaming down your cheek and you quickly swipe your trembling fingers to remove any evidence of it before you huff out a shaky, “excuse me.” And then you’re standing up off the stool, and in a few hurried steps across the room as more tears continue to stream down your face, you make it to the door to push out into the suffocating air of the hallway.

It’s hard to breathe, huffs and puffs barely leaving your lips as you struggle to pull air into your lungs while you storm down the hallway at a fast pace, your heels clicking underneath you in a way that only sets you off further. Suddenly, all the sounds around you make you sick to your stomach, a wave of nausea washing over you, and your nose burns with the intensity of the tears that continue to stream down your face. A few hospice staff look at you with concerned expressions, and you eventually reach a heavy-duty door that leads you out into a secluded staircase hallway where the dim lighting serves to relax at least some of your senses, but you still feel like you’re about to pass out.

Even in the haze of your emotions, there’s this glimmer of a memory that comes to mind. One from when you were younger and you were pushed on the playground at school. You cried and cried and cried in your mother’s arms, but even then, you didn’t want her to baby you. You would say to her, I’m a big girl now! in that same way a child knows nothing of what it truly means to brave the world.

That little girl had no idea that one day, there would be moments where she wouldn’t be remembered as her mother’s little girl anymore.

No matter how old you grow, you will always be my little girl, your mother’s voice echoes to you, the feeling of her squeezing you in her arms as she holds your sobbing little form in hers casting a ghost sensation across your skin.

In a mother’s eyes, you’ll always be her baby.

And that’s why it hurts.

Because it’s all fake.

It’s phony.

It’s not real.

This arrangement you have with Gojo.

And if your mother were to die tomorrow, there would be no one to take care of her little girl anymore.

Not in the way she believes there will be.

Of all the white lies, this one pierces you straight through your heart in a way that leaves you gasping for air.

Amidst your whirlwind of thoughts, you hear the door push open harshly, and when you glance over, you see Gojo standing in this dimly lit hallway as he turns his head quickly to the left and sees you standing there.

“Hey,” he says, catching his breath as he lightly jogs up to you, “hey, hey, hey,” he repeats with more concern now when he sees the state you’re in, and he seamlessly pulls you into a hug, your cheek pressing against his chest that feels warm even through the fabric of his suit jacket and shirt, and that familiar scent of him completely engulfs you.

You sob quietly, wiping your snot on his tie and your tears on the felt fabric beside it, your hands balled into tiny fists at your chest, squeezed between the two of you. You feel him tuck your head under his chin and his arms wrap around you tighter. You don’t even realize it at first, but suddenly, it has become easier to breathe.

Then, you wail, and you cry, and you sob, because you don’t have the words to even explain how you feel, about not just this, but with everything, a buildup of everything that has been suffocating you in your life that just comes crashing down on you all at once.

“I know,” he says, his palm resting on the back of your head as he holds your face to his chest, his voice soothing in your ears while you sob until there’s nothing left to cry. “I know.”

You two stay like this for another minute or so as you come down from the cries, your remnant sniffling echoing in the hallway while you wipe more of your snot on his jacket. You make the first move to pull your face away from his chest, but he still keeps his arms wrapped around you when you look up at him.

With your gaze darting across his face, you take in the blue in his eyes. Eyes that are looking at you so softly it’s suddenly hard to breathe once more. And when those eyes flit to your lips, your mouth parts slightly as you two breathe in unison.

It’s possible that you could have dreamed the moment you saw him lean down slightly towards you, his eyes still set on your lips, but it didn’t matter because you’re pushing him away with strong fists before you can even register the thought in your head.

He lets go of you entirely, his eyes wide once more, and you glance down at your feet.

A tender moment, just like on the roof, broken just because you can’t handle that—…that way, that intense way that he looks at you. New rule, no looking at me longingly like you want to kiss me. I won’t allow it.

“I want to go home,” you whisper, still examining your shoes. And you suddenly feel embarrassed that he had to see you this way. He’s supposed to be scared and intimidated by you, not holding you in his arms while you cry.

He’s silent for a moment, but you can tell he’s searching for things to say. “You don’t want to say bye to your mom before we go?”

You swipe your palm against the wetness on your cheek. “No. I just want to go home.”

“y/n,” he tried to convince you.

You finally look up at him. “Please.”

He breathes in a few breaths as he studies the features of your face in a way that makes you feel so seen that it’s frightening. But he slowly nods, then says,

“Okay.”

[end of chapter 4]

a/n. hi friendsss i hope you enjoyed :'') yea like i said at the a/n in the beginning, this chapter is a slight off-tangent from last chapter, but ch5 will continue with a lot of the stuffs that were brought up in ch3. but yea i wanted to explore the whole process of emotions reader would go through putting her mom in hospice, since it kinda felt like a big thing, hence why it got its own chapter. aaa i hope to see you in the next one!! much love from me :''0

➸ take me to chapter five!

note: please do not ask me for updates or when i will next update (read rules)

🏷️ @tremendousbouquetflower @semra4 @noctuaism @gojonegs @reinam00n

@bloopsstuff @bbyxxm @yungbloode @elloredef @spriteshawtyy

@joemama-2 @luniunia @4y3sh4 @ironhottubstranger @lushafterglow

@hermizery @manyno @idiot-juice-enthusiast @fairyflorasworld @teramisuyhin

@mmeerraa @bnha-free-writing @xenop0p @spaghettinewt @pngjpn

@anniegojo @rirk-ke @chiyokoemilia @higurumapet @pickuptruck01

@electrckchild @vi-ola666 @arishaxml @lavender-hvze @starmapz

@sxnkuna @billiondollarworth @fallintothechasm @mavvsmm @satorubluu

@ricaliscious @satxoru @oyaoya-bungeegum @satowooo @samistars

@ifartmangos @andeverden @13-09-01 @lindyloomoo @tvdumarvelhpsimp

note: i’m starting to transition towards tagging interacts to make sure i’m tagging active readers! but as always let me know if/when your taglist preferences change :)

taglist is closed

1K notes · View notes

ldysmfrst · 8 months ago

Text

American Mate (6) - A Proposition for You

Paring: Hybrid!BTS Ot7 x Plus-sized Human FemReader

Status: Ongoing series

Chapter number: 6 of unknown

Word count for Chapter: 5,431

Work count for Story: 25,248

Genre: Hybrid Playmate Au inspired by works created by @yoongiofmine

A little about the author: I am a mother of two beautiful children. One of which is special needs, and on 3/28, they lost 75% of their vision. I started a Patreon if you feel the heart to donate towards helping with the medical costs of appointments, medication, and modifications to the house, which insurance doesn't cover.

Warnings: (I am not good at this, but I will try. Let me know if I missed anything!!) NOT BETA READ!! This story will have a bit of angst, fluff, smut, f/m, m/m, and m/f/m. This chapter does have Injury, Anxiety, arguments, comfort, Alpha Space, close proximity, and scenting.

BTS HYBRID ANIMAL TYPES: Seokjin - Roan Ferret, Yoongi - Black Jaguar, Hoseok - Marten, Namjoon - Alaskan Timber Wolf, Jimin - Red Panda, Taehyung - White Southwest African Tiger, Jungkook - Flemish Giant Rabbit

AMERICAN MATE MASTER LIST / LDYSMFRST MASTER LIST

“Excuse me, Sirs. We have arrived at the Airbnb,” the driver announces through the van's intercom system. The voice pulls Jimin, Taehyung, and Jungkook's attention away from the end of a scenting cuddle session.

“Thank you, Mr. Malcolm,” Jungkook calls out loud enough to be heard past the petition between the driver’s and passenger's seats. Looking down, he trails his fingers through Jimin’s hair as the tiny Alpha is now sprawled across his and Taehyung’s lap with his eyes closed.

“Minnie, we need to get out, my little love,” looking at Taehyung, “Tae Tae? Are you good now?”

“Hmm. Yeah, Kook, I am doing better,” Taehyung opens his eyes, returning to their clear brown, longer darkened with lust. Lifting Jimin’s legs off his lap, Taehyung moves from his seat and opens the van door.

Taehyung as he watches the panda curl up into a small ball, trying to become one with Jungkook. Raising a brow, he firmly says, “Minnie, you cuddle bug. Time to go. I know you are nowhere near a scent high, so please get up so we can get Y/n to see the doctor.”

Jumping up from lying on Jungkook’s lap, Jimin stumbles out the door and over to the first van, “I will get their door!”

Jungkook and Taehyung chuckle as they watch the dancer trip over one of the van’s swivel chairs, but he manages not to fall onto the curb before beelining it to the other van.

“Hey, hyung. Are you going to be okay around Y/n?” asks Jungkook.

“I think so. It might be better for me to keep my distance until she isn’t in as much pain. I think that is what is causing the most issues for my Alpha. Well, that and keeping away from that pathetic excuse of a Director,” answers Taehyung, growling out the last part.

“I think it would be best if we all keep away from him, though I think Manager Sejin and Namjoon will have to at least deal with him a few more times,” comments the youngest.

“Better him than us. Why don’t you go with the others? I will help with the luggage so that everything is where it should be,” suggests Taehyung before hugging Jungkook around the shoulders and kissing his cheek softly.

You didn’t realize how stuffy the van had gotten, but the intensity of the scents within the van does not go unnoticed by Jimin as he watches you bolt from the van right past him towards the packhouse.

Yoongi followed close behind with a smirk on his lips.

“What did we miss being in the reject van?” Jimin asks no, the three remaining Alphas.

“Oh, you guys missed quite a bit, but we will talk about it later. Maybe once Miss Y/n goes in with the doctor,” Namjoon says as the rest leave the van.

Jungkook walks up to the group and watches you with a confused look. Manager Sejin also joins them.

“You all realize she has no idea what she is to you. She isn’t going to understand why it is nice that she is so instinctually responsive,” Manager Sejin comments using air quotes.

“Yes, Manager-nim. She just was… ah it is hard to explain,” Hoseok bashfully responds as he looks at the floor.

“Well, she isn’t my mate, and I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to break it to her, but you are going to have to be careful. I know that much,” contemplates Manager Sejin, looking at you, a softness of worry crosses his face. “Do you guys know that she wouldn’t even ask for a bottle of water when she got to the van because she didn’t want to take something from the pack?”

“I have a feeling that she has had to be the one to take care of others and put herself last. She won’t ask for help, and accepting help will be hard for her. Especially since you guys are so well-known and established as a mate-bonded pack,” adds Manager Sejin, looking at his watch, down the street and then back to the gathered group.

Taking deep breaths, you hope to clear your mind, slow your heart to an average pace, and regain professionalism from wherever it is hiding. Muttering to yourself, you are unaware that Yoongi has followed you, but he keeps a distance while listening to your utterances. His smirk grows to the point where his eyes are almost closed.

Now that you have calmed down, you turn around and almost run into him, yelling, “Ahh! Don’t sneak up on me like that. I need to get you and Evie both a bell. It must be a feline thing.”

Glancing past Yoongi, you notice Taehyung coming up the steps with some of the staff carrying luggage. You also mumble, “I should get one for him, too.”

Chuckling, Yoongi shakes his head, “No bell. No house cat. Jaguar.” Taking a step closer, he sniffs, “Better? No conflict?”

You can’t help but smile softly at his concern: “No, I am fine now. I just haven’t had much skinship, as one might say… outside of my family pack, as you call them.”

“I know it is a big cultural thing amongst hybrids and even more so depending on the kind of relationship involved. I guess I was taken back by all the … all that,” you say, gesturing towards the van as if it were explaining whatever was happening inside.

Yoongi nods in understanding and takes the last step to be by your side, facing the rest of the pack. His tail again wraps around your waist, and you giggle in amusement, regaining his attention with a raised eyebrow.

“Are you keeping me on a fur leash?” You ask, pointing at his tail on your waist.

Yoongi looks down at where you are pointing and looks at his tail like he doesn’t realize that he ever put it there, to begin with. With a glare like he is scolding a child, his tail starts to let go, which pulls at your heart a bit.

“It’s okay, Alpha,” you say as you stroke along the soft black fur, laying it back in its place, “you are keeping me close and safe as a good Alpha should. Thank you for protecting me.”

Yoongi preens at the compliment while holding back a shudder at the feeling of you petting his tail. His Alpha is happy you recognize his needs and allow him to continue. It’s like the instincts of a mate are just below the surface, waiting for a way to get out. Yoongi cannot wait to be there when you know who you are to them and watch the bonds solidify.

“Mr. Min,” you start to speak only to get cut off with an indignant huff.

“Yoongi Alpha. Not, Mr. Min. Yoon,” the jaguar says, pointing at himself with his ears flat.

“Ah, umm. Okay. Yoongi,” you say with a blush as you avoid looking him in the face. “I want to thank you for helping me not land hard on the floor back at the office. I am sure I would have been in worse shape if you hadn't tried to catch me.”

“Hopefully, you know that I do not blame you for my wrist. It was just awful timing,” you say, hoping his Alpha understands what you are saying and the Yoongi part of him also hears you.

“Still hurt. Keep safe for healing,” Yoongi says, leaning down to catch your eyesight and hoping you see the truth in his words.

“Time to go ahead inside. Jin-hyung, can you make some snacks for everyone, including the staff? If you need help, take Hobi with you. The rest will finish helping Tae-ah with the rest of the luggage, and I will go with Yoongi and Miss Y/n to one of the guest rooms on the first floor,” Namjoon instructs the pack.

With different forms of agreement, the boys take off to do their assigned tasks.

Seokjin and Hoseok smile sheepishly as they pass you, heading to the kitchen. Jimin and Jungkook wait for Taehyung to return before the three head to the packing van. Have a group of seven Alphas with their clothes, specialized bedding, personal items, and clothes needed a small troop of men to unpack.

Namjoon walks up the stairs to the porch, his ears flicking to the street as he hears a car approaching. This could only signal the doctor’s arrival, but he leaves the greeting to the manager.

“Miss Y/n. Yoongi. If you please follow me, I will take you to one of the guestrooms you can use to meet the doctor,” says Namjoon as he opens the front door. “We have some snacks being prepared and will bring those soon as well.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to impose, Prime Alpha Sir. Save those for the pack and your staff, please. Plus, my stomach isn’t feeling so well with all the pain,” you explain to Namjoon. Shaking your head, you silently add, ‘The emotional whiplash isn’t helping either.’

Leading you both into the house, Namjoon nods his head, “I see. I am sorry it took so long for us to get you seen. We normally heal rather quickly as hybrids. I think we forgot that humans cannot do that. Sorry.”

“No worries, Prime Alpha, Sir. I have a high pain tolerance, according to my mom and Derek, but I guess there is just so much that has happened in a short time that my body is just kind of everywhere. I am sorry if my scent is causing any problems as well. I know it must be all over the place,” you reply.

At that last comment, you feel a tug at your waist from the tail, causing you to stumble back into Yoongi. Who buries his nose in your neck, similar to how you were being held by Hoseok in the van, causing you to blush as you regain your footing.

“Smells good. Not bad. Y/n in pain but happy,” he says as he releases you. This time, he grabs your good hand and pulls you into the room that Namjoon has opened.

The room is significantly larger than your bedroom, that is for sure. The walls are off-white, with a dark purple accent wall containing a sitting window. The bed is a four-post queen with deep purple curtains tied back with black lace, complementing the purple and black bedding. All the furniture is made of dark, almost burnt-looking wood with iron accents.

You look around the room with your mouth agape. “It’s so beautiful here, and look!” you exclaim as you walk to the adjoining bathroom. “It comes with a private bathroom!”

Namjoon and Yoongi smile at each other as they smell your sweet pea coming out in waves with a hint of more jasmine, which the boys now understand indicates your happiness.

“There is also a walk-in closet, but my favorite part is the sitting window. Perfect to read in,” Namjoon adds.

There is a knock at the door, though it is standing wide open. The three of you look over to see the manager, Jungkook, and a woman with an old-fashioned medical bag standing just outside the door.

“Pardon the interruption, but Dr. Blackwell is here,” Manager Sejin states, motioning to the woman beside him, who bows.

“Dr. Blackwell! It is good to see you again. Please come in. I am sure you were informed that Yoongi is in Alpha Space and will probably like to stay, but I will step out if needed,” Namjoon greets Dr. Blackwell with a firm handshake.

Dr. Blackwell is a younger-looking woman, but you can tell that she is still older than you. Her hair is in a French braid, and she is wearing a pantsuit. Setting her bag on the chest at the end of the bed, she looks at Yoongi with kind eyes.

“Yes, Mr. Kim. I was informed, and you are correct. Since the patient is not a member of your pack, you will have to leave. Technically, Mr. Min should leave as well, but I will leave that up to the patient,” she states, turning to you.

“Oh, umm…” Looking between the doctor and Yoongi, they both seem to await your decision. “Mr. M,” you are cut off by a huff and a tug around your waist, “Sorry, Yoongi can stay for now. I will ask him to step out if anything gets too private.”

Yoongi’s actions cause the doctor and Namjoon to pause before looking at each other. Dr. Blackwell speaks first: “Mr. Kim, I was informed that Mr. Min believes to be responsible for the injury. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that is right, and as a mate ~cough cough~ bondedpack, we are all here to support them,” informs Namjoon while staring down the doctor.

“Oh, I see, and that would explain the familiarity. Thank you, Mr. Kim. That is all I believe I need from you now. Unless you want me to check out your cough?” Dr. Blackwell teasingly asks the Prime Alpha, who turns slightly pink.

“Nope, I got it. You got it. Yeah,” sputters Namjoon. “We will head out with the rest of the pack and be waiting in the dining room near the main kitchen if you need anything or need to kick Yoongi out.”

Pleasant conversations are happening here and there between everyone present. Everyone seems to avoid you as a topic since no one has said what is happening. However, since the doctor was here, most staff have concluded that something happened between you and Yoongi. The only ones that do know are the pack and their manager.

Namjoon watches from the entryway with Jungkook draped on his back. He has always felt proud of his pack and how they treat the staff like a pseudo-family pack. They have seen other idol groups treat their staff like stepping stones, which never felt right to any Bangtan pack.

“Hey, everyone,” Namjoon says loud enough to gain the room's attention. “The pack has to have a pack meeting while the doctor is here. I invite the staff to take some prepared snacks to the guest house across the lawn and settle in. We won’t be needing any services tonight aside from Manager Sejin.”

“Namjoon-ssi, I will also head over to the other house to settle in, but I will keep my phone on me. Please text me when you need me, and I will come right over,” the manager responds while holding a tray of rolled-up meats and cheeses.

“Sounds good. Bangtan Pack, we need to meet in the dining room. Grab what’s left and come sit down,” orders Namjoon, patting Jungkook on the hand and motioning for him to help carry stuff.

With that, the kitchen is filled with goodbyes, see you later, and other pleasantries as everyone departs. Namjoon, knowing that he doesn’t do well in the kitchen, turns and heads to the dining room they will use for the meeting.

The rest of the boys grab what they can and follow their Prime Alpha. The energy in the dining room is heavy. They know they have to discuss this; there is no getting around it, but the situation is odd. Once everyone is seated, Namjoon looks around the table to see each of his mates looking back expectantly.

“We can all agree that she is our mate, right?” The Prime Alpha asks, wanting to ensure they are at least starting on the same page. A chorus of agreement floods the room, lifting a weight off their shoulders.

“Hyung?” Jimin tentatively speaks up.

“Yeah, Jimin-ah, everything okay?” inquires Namjoon.

“Seeing how everyone has reacted to her, I agree that she is a mate, but I want to be honest with you all… I haven’t had time for my Alpha to respond to her.” Taking a deep breath, Jimin continues, “That isn’t right actually, to be transparent; my Alpha backs away whenever she is close. I don’t know why.”

Jimin looks down and picks at the tablecloth until a Hobi takes hold of his hand. “Jimin, you were close with our last playmate and were the first of us to connect with her on a deeper level of friendship. She broke that trust with you,” Hobi begins.

“I am sure I was not the only one who was shocked that you wanted a new playmate out here. I didn’t say anything because I figured you were trying to rebound. However, rebounding by finding a new friend differs from stumbling on a new mate,” explains Hoseok. “It will be difficult for you and some of our other mates because very few of us have had any experience outside our bonded mates.”

“Minnie,” Jungkook chimes in. “I know you are nervous, and you keep trying to find a way to be around her but not at the same time, which is okay. But you need to make sure to listen to yourself and your Alpha. It is okay if you are not jumping into it headfirst like some of us are.”

“Hobi-ah and Kook-ah are right, Jimin-ah,” Namjoon finally speaks up. “This goes for everyone. We will all take this at a comfortable pace for us and, more importantly, for her. Manager-nim reminded me that she probably cannot understand what is happening right now. Not just because we haven’t said anything yet but because she is human. She is likely fighting her instincts because we are already a bonded pack.”

“Remember how long it took us to convince Jungkook-ah he wasn’t a toy? Or how Taehyung-ah didn’t open up fully until after Jimin-h finally took it into his own hands?” inquires Namjoon.

“She is gonna be like that,” Seokjin states, gaining everyone’s attention. “We need to watch ourselves. Some of us are more instinctually driven, which could drive her away. She may have instincts because she is our mate, but she wasn’t raised using those.”

“With that being said… does anyone have any suggestions?” questions Namjoon.

“Yoongi will end up being her safe space, I think,” Taehyung comments more to himself than to anyone.

Hobi shifts in his seat, remembering how self-conscious you were in the van before he speaks up, “She reminds me of myself. She doesn’t have a good self-image. We should spend time with her. Show her who we are off-stage, as a pack, as mates with each other, and encourage her to join in.”

“While I think that is a good idea, she won’t join in,” Jungkook interjects. “She wouldn’t ask for a bottle of water for the worry of taking from the pack. How will she accept cuddle time or scenting?”

Yoongi’s ears are flat at your yelling or the feeling of failure. During the examination, his tail curled around his waist as your pain levels tinted your scent with mold. The feeling of failure and something akin to heartbreak filled his being.

The ever-calm Dr. Blackwell continues, “It would be best if you sought help during that time,” looking at Yoongi, “and since you have a respectable pack claiming responsibility for the injury, there should be nothing to worry about. Isn’t that right, Mr. Min?”

Yoongi nods with an almost blank face as he tries to hide his disappointment in himself. He internally scolds himself for breaking his mate during their first meeting.

“Mr. Min, I think it would be best to get your Prime Alpha to discuss anything further,” Dr. Blackwell instructs.

Looking briefly at you while you are looking at the floor, cradling your wrist, Yoongi leaves the guest room, quickly seeking out his pack. It isn’t often that Yoongi feels like he is in over his head and needs his hyung or Prime Alpha, but right now, he cannot breathe.

“Miss Y/n, have you dealt with hybrids?” inquires Dr. Blackwell.

“Yes, my family pack, as Bangtan puts it, consists of a beta fox and omega munchkin, but what does that have to do with anything?” you scoff back, the irritation at the situation spilling into your words.

Nodding with a calculating face, Dr. Blackwell says, “I see. That makes sense. You were the Alpha in your pack, which explains why you don’t understand what is happening around you.”

Snapping your head to look at the doctor, you demandingly ask, “What do you mean by that?”

Taking a tentative step forward, Dr. Blackwell places a hand on your shoulder, “It isn’t my place to say anything more than I already have. Just take a moment to think back to what you have learned about hybrids, and be open to the pack around you in the next coming weeks.”

Jin, being the closest to him, reaches out and pulls him to sit on his lap. Being Yoongi’s only hyung, he goes willingly and tucks his nose into Jin’s neck, “Hyung, I broke mate.”

“Yoon, it’s okay. You didn’t do it on purpose. It was strictly an accident,” Jin whispers while rubbing soothing circles on his back. The pack pushes calming scents into the room to help Yoongi avoid going into total Alpha drop.

“Yoongi-hyung, can you tell us what the doctor said?” asks Jungkook.

A muffled reply of “Broke wrist. Weeks healing. Need Pack Alpha” is heard because Yoongi won’t remove his nose from Seokjin’s neck as he seeks comfort.

“Joon-ah, go talk with Miss Y/n and the doctor. Get things figured out. We will take care of Yoon-ah,” Jin instructs, subtly pulling the elder card again.

“Well, come on in and make yourself comfortable,” you say. You smile down at him as you scratch softly on his hair, but Namjoon notes that your smile doesn’t reach your eyes.

“Are you still in pain?” he asks as his eyes close at the soothing feeling of your fingers.

“No, Dr. Blackwell gave me something for that, and it kicked in a few minutes ago. Though it’s going to be painful for a while,” you inform. Looking up, Namjoon stands next to the doctor with a sweet smile.

“Dr. Blackwell, can you explain the situation, please?” you ask, nodding to the wolf hybrid.

Nodding, she turns to the Prime Alpha, “Mr. Kim, Miss Y/n has what I suspect is a hairline fracture. To be certain, I would need to take her to the local hospital, but given your situation, that would not be a very easy task.”

“I can say with certainty that be it a hairline fracture or a severe sprain, she will have to wear a brace and not use her wrist for six to eight weeks,” she continues.

When you are reminded of the weeks of difficulty that will come, your scent turns watery, and worry creeps into your mind.

“As you all know, I am both a hybrid and a human doctor, which brings me to the next issue. While Miss Y/n is kind of heart and forgives Mr. Min of any wrongdoings, Mr. Min, according to the hybrid culture, is responsible for her recovery, and I must confirm this is happening,” states the doctor, her eyes set firmly on the Alpha.

“Wait, my recovery? I thought it was just to get me to see you?” Your eyes bounce between the three others in the room.

“That is correct, and as Prime Alpha of his bonded pack, we will provide for her over the next eight weeks minimum. We have the space, the means, and the power to do so, Dr. Blackwell,” Namjoon says, holding eye contact with you. His voice gave no room for argument.

“Prime Alpha Sir, you… the pack… my work… how?” you sputter while your mind runs into walls and failed solutions.

“Not to interrupt, but I will excuse myself as this is now a pack matter. Keep the brace on as much as possible to aid healing and prevent surgical intervention. I will leave my report with notes for your employer explaining your health situation and a vial of your pain medications on the dining room table,” Dr. Blackwell says as she gathers her things and bows, leaving the room.

“Miss Y/n, Dr. Blackwell is right,” agrees Namjoon. “This is a pack matter now, and I think speaking with everyone together would be the best idea. Would you join us to discuss what to do next?”

While trying to comprehend the wild situation you got thrown in, you mumble, “Umm, yeah. We can do that. I can do that.”

Moving to stand, Jungkook moves out of the way and holds your good hand, leading you toward the living room where the pack is now gathered.

Seokjin and Yoongi are on the medium loveseat-like couch, Taehyung, Jimin, and Hoseok are on the long couch, and the only open seat is an armchair.

You move to sit alone in the armchair only to have Jungkook pull you to the couch where Seokjin and Yoongi are. “Jin-Hyung, can we sit there with Yoongi?”

Noticing that Yoongi gets stiff at the question, you say, “No, no, that is okay. I think Yoongi has had enough of me. I can sit somewhere else.” However, not only does Jungkook not let go of your hand, but a black tail finds its way around your thigh.

“Sure thing, I will sit with Namjoon,” Seokjin smiles and moves to sit with his Prime Alpha on the arm of the chair.

Next thing you know, you are sandwiched between the bunny and jaguar hybrids. Yoongi is on your right, his tail still wrapped around your thigh, with the tip sliding up and down almost absentmindedly. Jungkook is on your left, still holding your hand and resting his head on your shoulder.

Your body relaxes as you lean back on the couch, looking around the room. Your mind is joking about having a fur leash again despite Yoongi not looking at you since you entered the room and how you seem to have become a bunny pillow. After some thought, you realize that you don’t mind either action.

Someone clearing their throat pulls you from your thoughts. Looking towards the armchair, you see Namjoon sit up straighter and take on a look that clearly shows that it is the Prime Alpha talking and not the cute, funny Namjoon you have seen clips of on Instagram.

“Bangtan pack, Miss Y/n has a hairline fracture of her right wrist,” starts the Prime Alpha. At this information, a collective hiss of sympathetic pain comes from the other members.

“She will be required to wear that brace and limit the use of her hand for the next six to eight weeks. This brings up some causes of concern for Miss Y/n,” he continues.

Namjoon looks at you to continue, which prompts you to say, “Umm… well, I am right-hand dominant, so doing pretty much anything will be complicated. I only have about four days of sick pay saved up right now. So, returning to work will be a hurdle all on its own, not to mention doing any chores or cooking.”

Your eyes wander across the group as you speak. They all look at you like you speak something other than English or Korean. When your eyes come to a stop on Yoongi, he is finally looking at you, his eyes now a deep brown.

“Y/n, stay with us,” Yoongi states, not asking. “I am a respectable Alpha Jaguar, and it is my honor to care for you and bring you back to health. My Alpha has already told you outside that he would keep you safe until you are healed. I am here for the long haul.”

Your eyes widen at his declaration, and your mind blanks on what to say or how to respond.

From your other side, Jungkook cuddles into your side, his nose nudging your neck softly, “We all will be here for the long haul.”

“They are right, you know. We are a bonded pack of mates, and we would love to have you stay here with us so that we can take care of you,” Hoseok adds.

Breaking eye contact with Yoongi, you took to Hoseok as he and the others on that couch smiled genuinely. While you are sure any typical female with eyes would jump at the chance, you question, “What about my job? I cannot leave my work. I have rent to pay for my flat and food and stuff.”

“Y/n,” your head snaps to the Prime Alpha, “is it okay if we call you Y/n?”

Nodding, you turn your body to face him directly. Your left hand, still holding Jungkook’s, is gripping tightly, trying to ground yourself.

At your agreement, the Prime Alpha smiles, showing off dimples as he continues, “I figured that you would worry about a few things like that.”

“The room you met with the doctor in is yours while you stay here with us… at the pack house. When we say that we will take care of you, we mean it. We will cover all your expenses; it’s not like we lack the funds to care for anyone. Lastly, in order to keep a job to cover your everyday expenses, such as your flat, cell phone, etc., going, I have a proposition for you.”

Holding your breath, your eyes wide at everything he has said so far, you gulp, “What is your proposition, Prime Alpha, Sir?”

“Become our playmate.”

Previous / Next

Taglist - CLOSED

@braveangel777 @bethanysnow @smileykiddie08 @kayways @danielle143 @nenefix-on @im-gemmy @fluffy-canada-pancakes @staytinyville @juju-227592 @levislifeline @carolinexkpop @m00njinnie @drenix004 @singukieee @avadakadabra93 @dazzlingjade @sehun096rainbow @sunshinecallie @seoullove96 @reallysparklychaos @tired7o7 @channiespup @cryingpages @kittycatkrissa @hijabae2019 @captain-joongz @roseidol

410 notes · View notes

nothingbuttrashhere · 3 months ago

Text

Have any leftists considered running for small local govt. positions? I know that goes against the leftist creed of talk, complain, insult, protest, be outraged, but don’t get your hands dirty. However, we could use some idealists who refuse to compromise their morals in government right now.

And it would bring the godforsaken country one inch closer to a more socialist future.

So a lot of political scandals just dropped in the last 24 hours

-NC Governor Candidate Mark Robinson's online posts were found, including some VERY graphic descriptions (like seriously, do not read if you're not 18) of him cheating on his wife, calling himself a black Nazi, and expressing support for reinstituting slavery. His email address was also found on Ashley Madison

-Robert F Kennedy Jr was revealed to be cheating on his wife with a reporter (and that isn't even the weirdest thing since federal law enforcement opened an investigation into him allegedly cutting off the head of a whale and taking it home with him less than 24 hours ago)

-GOP Senate candidate who is the CEO of a bank has been found accepting millions of dollars from what seem to allegedly be Mexican drug cartels.

-Finally, probably the biggest bombshell, according to multiple eyewitness testimonies within sealed sworn affadavits, Congressman Matt Gaetz allegedly invited a 17-year-old girl to a drug-fueld sex party

And we haven't even hit October, folks. Again, these are all still breaking news stories, so things are subject to change, but oh man oh man.

#I have full plans for getting into politics and doing lobbying #I have my eyes on the medical and insurance system #also I need to scrape together the money for gun ownership #I do need an effective cabal for destroying the NRA from within…#my irl leftist friends backed out

28K notes · View notes

jennamoran · 2 months ago

Text

Tonight's Hitherby: "No Innards, No Problem"

Jane is sick.

“Darn it,” Jane says, when she hears the doctor’s report. “Tuberculosis!”

There’s a little picture of tuberculosis on the wall. It shows the various systems that the TB bacteria infests. It says, in bold, “There’s no magic answer to tuberculosis!”

“You shouldn’t be playing in infested pits of tuberculosis bacteria,” explains the doctor. “That’s not good hygiene!”

Jane makes a woeful face. Her lip trembles.

“But it’s the only good place to play in,” she says.

“There’s a half-finished slide at the park!” the doctor says. “You could use that!”

“I could have,” says Jane. Her eyes widen. “But now I’ll be quarantined!”

The doctor shakes her head.

Jane slowly relaxes.

The doctor says, “In nihilistic 19th century Russia we would have idolized you. In barbaric 20th century America we would have quarantined you. But today—”

The doctor taps the “treatment” section of the tuberculosis picture.

“—today, we can treat this malaise with advanced medical techniques. Do you have good health insurance?”

“I have moderate health insurance,” Jane stresses. “It’s okay for ordinary treatment, but don’t try any of your funny medical tricks!”

The doctor nods. She prints out a series of instructions. Jane watches nervously as the doctor measures out doses of several different medications into the plastic mold of a wand. The doctor then hands the wand to Jane.

“Wave the wand and recite,” says the doctor.

“Okay!” says Jane, giving a thumbs-up. Then she coughs, racking consumptive coughs. Then she blinks it off and beams at the doctor.

“Star sparkle power,” says the doctor. “Production!”

Jane waves the wand, reciting, “Star sparkle power—production!”

Jane leaps into the air. She can’t help it. It’s the magic of the words. She spins around. Her clothes attenuate into great sky-pythons of fabric that swirl in the air around her.

“Ack!” says Jane. “My dignity!”

Jane’s skin turns translucent. She doesn’t have organs! Instead, inside her, she has the sparkling grandeur of a starlit sky.

“You can tie the sky-pythons together in back,” says the doctor, “so that they’re more concealing.”

“Oh!” says Jane.

But the transformation sequence does not last long enough for Jane to apply this advice. She lands on the ground in a heap, now wearing the marvelous rainbow outfit of a Star Sparkle Girl.

“Huh,” says Jane, dizzily. Her skin is still shimmering, and little stars whirl around her head.

“Say ‘ah’,” says the doctor.

The doctor puts a tongue depressor in Jane’s mouth.

“Ah!” says Jane.

“Good,” says the doctor. “I don’t see any tuberculosis bacteria in your throat.”

Jane’s stomach twitches a bit. It’s from the minor gag reflex triggered by having the tongue depressor on her tongue.

Then, even though the doctor takes the tongue depressor out, Jane’s stomach heaves! She hiccups stardust all over the doctor’s floor. Now it’s very sparkly.

Jane gulps a little bit.

“Um,” says Jane.

“It’ll happen for a bit,” says the doctor. “I mean, the stars-in-the-stomach.”

“But all the kids will tease me!” says Jane. Her eyes are wide. “I can’t be ‘throws up stars girl!'”

The doctor looks in Jane’s left eye, then her right eye. Then the doctor takes down a few notes, shrugs, and tucks her medical clipboard under her arm.

“There’s no magic answer to tuberculosis,” the doctor points out. “It says so on the sign.”

Jane hiccups. There’s the bitter taste of a white dwarf in the back of her throat, its cold electrons mashed one against another to fill up all the available energy levels.

“But everyone will tease me,” Jane says, miserably.

Playing in the tuberculosis pits doesn’t seem that good an idea now.

#hitherby dragons

68 notes · View notes

itmeansiris · 1 month ago

Text

The Solar System Legacy Challenge: End of the Line Gen 1 pt.87

3 hours later

Kason sat behind his desk with his head down. The fire had been put out and the workers had all been sent home for the day. The servo was destroyed and worst Rufus had been taken to the hospital. Kason called Mercury when they lifted Rufus into the ambulance and pulled off without him, claiming that he couldn't ride along because he wasn't family. Kiersten and M arrived at the hospital shortly after. Kason hoped to be there soon, he felt obligated to be with Kiersten, waiting for Rufus to wake up, but for now, he was needed at the office to square things away with the fire marshals and police.

When he'd spoken to M last the doctors had assessed Rufus's injuries. They ranged from 2nd-degree and minor 3rd-degree burns and a bump on the head. What they were most concerned about was the smoke in his lungs and the fact that he was still unconscious. The doctors put him into a medically induced coma in case he awoke and had injuries they were unaware of. Still, their top priority was to make sure his head injury was simply superficial and not something more severe.

Kason pushed the image of his friend's helpless body on the cold metal floor of Servo Hold 2. He had one more task to take care of and wouldn't leave without completing it. He took a deep breath as someone knocked twice followed by the door opening.

Kason: Come in.

Paris strutted in and stood in the center of the room. Following the incident, she'd refused medical attention, so when Kason dismissed the rest of the office for the day he'd asked her to stay behind for a while claiming he needed to get her statement for insurance purposes.

Paris: I've already told the police everything I know.

Kason: Have a seat Ms.Amyot.

Paris smiled as she sat down in one of the plush white chairs across from him.

Paris: Mmm, I like the way that sounds.

His insides twisted with disgust at her flirty tone. When he looked at her all he saw was her standing at the back of the crowd smiling as Rufus fought for his life. He forged forward fueled by his suspicion.

Kason: We need to talk about your performance up until this point.

Paris: Sure.

She shrugged, her tone suggesting she was bored as if the conversation didn't pertain to her. It was as If she'd forgotten she'd attacked Aria just hours earlier. She was aggrogant but he was about to cut her down to size.

Kason: Ms.Amyot, your work with the servos and other machines is okay at best. You miss about 40% of your deadlines and your attendance needs improvement.

Paris: Okay. Is that it? Is that really what you called me in here for or did you miss me while you were away, Kay?

He continued, ignoring her lastest failed attempts at seducing him.

Kason: You're rude to the clients and don't work well with the rest of the team. Computer Engineers and Mechanics alike.

The corners of her mouth dropped and she narrowed her eyes.

Paris: Excuse me. It's not my fault that your mechanics are babies and your computer techs are like teenage nerds.

Kason: You belittle and berate your co-workers. You make inappropriate advances and comments to your higher-ups and clients. Paris, I think it's safe to say you are the problem here.

She jumped up from her seat, he could see her mask of control slipping, but Paris was determined to regain the upper hand even if she had to play dirty.

Paris: So what! What are you going to do about it? Hmm. Keep me as an intern? Ha! Greg would never, my father will be sure of that. As for you, you're a nobody. Insignificant just like Madison, just like Rufus, just like your wife.

He clenched his fist at the mention of Rufus. Her hate for M was old news. But she'd never given Rufus a second glance previous to the company dinner party.

Kason: If I find out you had anything to do with what happened to Rufus. I promise you will regret the day you met me.

The threat seemed to get her attention and all traces of humor left her voice.

Paris: No one, makes me regret anything, Kay. No one.

Her lack of denial furthered his suspicion and deepened his hatred. He smiled knowing he would get the satisfaction of ruining her day as she had ruined so many others.

Kason: Well maybe this will make you regret coming to Brindelton Bay. Paris, Your fired.

Checkmate.

Her reaction was priceless.

Previous Next

Beginning

Poses: Josie Throwing in Anger

@ratboysims sitting and talking

#sims 4 #sims 4 gameplay #sims 4 screenshots #sims 4 legacy #sims 4 story #solar system legacy challenge #itmeansiris #gen 1 #Paris Amyot #Kason Gratz

40 notes · View notes

woman-respecter · 20 days ago

Note

https://www.tumblr.com/woman-respecter/769231651188408320/sorry-not-sorry-but-everyone-simping-for-that-guy

Honestly, I can understand the people who were specifically royally fucked over by this guy feeling some sense of catharsis over this bastard dying. I'm not exactly gonna lose sleep over it.

What makes me roll my eyes however is the sheer number of self-righteous chucklefucks who use this as either the foundation/expectation of some kind of "righteous revolution" against evil CEOs, while frankly I don't expect anything of significance to happen beyond typical copycat killers that may or may not (more than likely) end up only targeting people that they deem "rich and elite" but actually aren't anything more than convenient scapegoats for mob mentality.

Because let's face it, people are absolute shit at determining who "the enemy" actually is, and more often than not just butcher innocent people or easy targets because they're too cowardly to go after actually difficult but meaningful targets. It'd be another thing entirely if they'd gotten rid of the one certain major rich asshole whose currently behind so much of the propaganda of a certain site, because at least THAT have a chance of making a major difference in crippling a certain administration, but that'd require a level of guts and courage that I don't expect to happen anytime soon.

Also to be honest, the above is also just really endemic of the highly fucked up priorities of a lot of people, especially online: how much they romanticize acts of vigilante violence that, while outwardly cathartic, aren't exactly that effective in the long term because as much as we don't want to admit it, this CEO is just a cog in a fucked up system. He's replaceable and ultimately the company he led isn't gonna change their policies just because he's kicked the bucket.

In addition, a number of people don't really have any interest in doing anything of the sort because the image of being a "tough revolutionary against the evil establishment" is more important to them than actually doing anything meaningful. And this ESPECIALLY applies to the people who are cheering on this guy, but whom decided to not vote for the one woman who could have given us all a better future in a far more overall beneficial way out of their own twisted vanity and egotism.

Besides, we don't know diddly squat about this guy; I don't think it's particularly good to be projecting your own selfish hero fantasies onto someone who, for all we know, might not exactly be on the up and up. And if he does turn out to be a genuinely vile person, I expect a fair bit of backtracking from people, and for less scrupulous groups to take advantage of it and frame the people who support this as immoral hypocrites for more propaganda.

TL;DR: I'm not losing sleep over the bastard being dead and anyone who suffered because of him has a right to feel relieved that one of their tormentors is gone, but I feel like way too many people are just using this as an excuse to romanticize ineffective vigilante justice to overcompensate for their own impotence as "revolutionaries" while ignoring how the dead guy is just a cog in the big fucked up machine of medical insurance who can be replaced. Or more pessimistically, to try to cover up how much things could have been overall better if they'd prioritized doing the one thing that could have helped all of us a month earlier.

And that it's frustrating and disturbing how much people are valorizing a person that they know nothing about, despite the very real possibility that if he's revealed as a total scumbag, that their loud support right now could be used against them by our enemies. Which I need to note is pretty much part of the reason we're in this mess in the first place.

yep, the tl;dr sums up my feelings on the topic p well. idc that the greedy bastard died, i just hate the glorification of “revolutionary” violence.

#ask

25 notes · View notes

deariemay · 1 month ago

Text

Regarding Isis Morales —

By the time women are 40, 83% of them will be mothers. If you do not care about the systemic oppression of mothers, you do not support the rights of most women.

Isis first became pregnant at 17. She was a baby herself, not yet finished with highschool. She described the men who were the fathers to her first two boys as “from the hood”. She stated this was an unstable and unsafe place for her children, and left.

Isis did at one point have a job which paid 90k (before tax) annually, however working a 40+ hr a week full time job is an incredibly difficult task when you are the mother of two children who aren’t old enough to be enrolled in government-funded school and need to be cared for 24/7. Childrearing and homemaking are labor, so in reality she had two full time jobs. No, on 84k a year (after tax) you cannot hire a full-time nanny, which cost an average of 60k a year in California.

America is one of the few developed countries that have no government-mandated maternity leave. Women with children are left to fend for themselves for three to six months, and often lose their jobs upon returning. We have no subsidized childcare for working women past a certain income threshold, nor child health insurance. Putting your children through college costs tens of thousands of dollars each.

Isis was homeless and had two unsheltered children with nowhere to go after her lease ended with her ex. At this point, it’s likely her and her children had no health insurance either. Her husband said he would only give her a place to stay if she married him. This is coercion. Essentially, he bought her. This is exactly what men want. They want women to exist in a society where they are vulnerable and have no place to go, where women are expected to both work themselves to death and do all domestic chores, or legally sell their body to men.

Marriage is an arrangement where women legally sell their bodies in exchange for safety. We live in a country where women are encouraged to financially rely upon men and yet we blame women for financially relying upon men. Every facet of government encourages marriage— tax breaks, shared ownership of assets, shared retirement fund, widow’s pension, shared medical insurance, and more. Whereas single mothers don’t get shit.

And yet, everyone is more upset with Isis than her husband, who raped his own biological children, aged 2 and 4. We are upset because Isis married a rich man, in an attempt to secure her children’s future. We are upset that Isis didn’t ‘make sure he was good’ as if men who seem sweet and kind don’t murder their families again and again. We’re not talking about the man who raped his own toddlers.

Isis and her trophy-wife guides are simply a reflection of what society demands of women: shave your arms, do whatever men want, pretend to be whatever they want, dress nice, don’t gain weight, be submissive, do housework. She was teaching women what men want, and she was right. Men don’t want an individual, they want a blow up doll. She did not create these standards. Men did.

Isis states, “I built this whole channel around being this man's wife.” Then, “I didn't realize that the person I married was actually going to be my biggest nightmare."

Isis herself was the product of rape and had been sexually assaulted in her childhood, and always kept a close eye on her children to keep it from happening to them (they were not allowed to be on family members laps, or kissed, or hugged if they did not want it.) Learning her husband who she devoted her life to was abusing their toddlers absolutely destroyed her.

Instead of screaming “men should stop raping their babies” feminists are screaming “she’s so stupid for not knowing better”

Some statements from feminists about Isis:

Some women would rather advocate for forced abortion, eugenics and sustaining the deeply abusive foster care and adoption system than let mothers have human rights.

Tell men in the government to give single mothers adequate financial security. Tell men to stop raping toddlers.

Focusing all your energy on yelling “stop making tradwife tiktoks” and “scope out men first to make sure they’re nice” are going to get us no where. This is why feminism is so unproductive. ‘Nice men’ is a misnomer when women are more likely to be murdered by their husbands than anyone else. Marriage needs to be abolished and women should receive government-funded full childcare support. We don’t blame men because it’s just too easy to blame women.

#radical feminism #terfsafe #radfemblr #isis morales

23 notes · View notes

appalachiananarchist · 1 year ago

Text

The 15 minute clinic visit model should be considered a crime. Do you really think you can adequately address a patient's A1C of 11.5 (while they refuse to adhere to a diabetic diet or take their meds, so you have to explain why these things are important and that no, Metformin did not cause Uncle John to develop Rheumatoid Arthritis), blood pressure of 187/98, ongoing chest pains, chronic back pain, inability to sleep, explain to them what it means to have chronic kidney disease and what meds they need to avoid + go through their current meds to renally dose them, update their foot and eye exam, and talk about changing the medications for their bipolar disorder... in 15 minutes?

Keep in mind the patient keeps interrupting to tell you about their sister Shirley's birthday party and ask irrelevant questions like, "Hey doc, is it true going outside in the cold gets you sick? Is it true babies don't have bones?"

Oh, and the patient reminds you as you think you're wrapping up that they need you to check their shoulder because they fell on it yesterday and also they think they have a sinus infection...and then you remember you haven't reviewed their health maintenance gaps yet, either.

The above is not a hyperbole. This is the average patient I see in my clinic as a rural family medicine doctor. I have people fitting this profile scheduled every 15 minutes because it is our health system's standard policy. It makes me furious because these patients deserve to have all of their issues addressed, but it is not possible. They taken time off work, some of them driving over an hour, to see me. These are serious problems and serious misunderstandings that deserve my full attention for as long as is required, not to have me rush, half addressing their concerns or not addressing them at all.

We can't be doctors in this system. We are just little reimbursement machines.

And the icing on the cake: after you talk to the patient and finally compromise on medications the patient agrees to take, the insurance company denies them all.

#medblr #family medicine #my ramblings

157 notes · View notes

evanbuckleysarms · 1 year ago

Text

Was able to see a doctor today and it’s a clogged gland inside my eyelid 🤢

Thank god my husbands insurance is amazing. The doctor quoted me the medicated ointment at $70 but it was only $0.90.

Not me waking up to an inflamed eyelid/potential tear duct infection and my optometrist being closed until tomorrow 😫

#but literally the US healthcare system is so fucked. like why am I paying less money because my husband works for a…#very difficult to get hired at company with good benefits #like this should be 90 cent medication for everyone??#if this was even five years ago I wouldn’t have been able to afford the $70 that it likely would have been on my companies insurance #I’d be stuck with a swollen shut eye for months on end #how fucked is that???#anyway #I digress #I should be healed within a week

2 notes · View notes

redfoxv · 3 months ago

Text

If you are able to help. . .

As some of you may know I have been in chronic pain for the last 4 months due to a back injury. This has negatively impacted all aspects of my life and had been incredibly taxing both mentally and physically. I have been unable to work in recent weeks as the pain has gotten progressively worse.

We are finally scheduled for treatment however the tratment will cost $1965.40 with insurance (our health care system is broken) this is on top of the near $800 in prior medical costs we still need to pay off.

If you are able to help in any way my appreciation will be beyond measure. Maybe you like my content, maybe you just think im cool or, you are just a wonderful person who wants to help out a fellow in need. Regardless I greatly appreciate anything anyone can do to help, this includes rebloging to help get more eyes on my desperate plea.

My cash app link if you are able to help financially Cashapp

Thank you all so much words cannot express just how much I appreciate you all <3

#please support #please help #medical debt #fuck our medical system #please share #anything helps #support sex workers #support trans people #support trans artists #medical support #thank you for the support #fox talks #desperate plea

27 notes · View notes

theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

Text

The Chinese healthcare system has a long way to go before it can adequately satisfy the needs of the country's huge population. However, I take great pride in the high quality of China's healthcare at such low costs for the average Chinese person.

Yesterday, a little winged insect flew into my right eye, leaving a red spot on my eyeball. I opened my medical app at 12 a.m., scheduled an appointment at 2 p.m., waited for half an hour, and had a medical examination. Most of the bill was paid for by my national health insurance.

I also tried making an appointment with a neurosurgeon through the Peking University People's Hospital mobile app. When I checked the app at 21:44, I saw that the earliest available appointment with a chief physician (professor) would be 16 hours later and would cost 300 RMB ($41, most of which would be reimbursed by my medical care). [Picture 1]

The earliest appointment I can get with an attending physician is a day later, and it will cost me 50 RMB ($6.8). With my healthcare, I only pay 10 RMB ($1.4). [Picture 2]

For people in immediate need, the system is incredibly affordable and effective (I don't want to have a red eye for days).

Here are some statistics on China's healthcare system.

🏥 When the PRC was founded in 1949, the average life expectancy in China was 35 years; in 2022, it was 77.93 years, mostly due to the country's improving medical care system.

🏥 Its basic medical insurance covers approximately 1.3 billion people.

🏥 China has a three-tier system to grade hospitals, with tertiary hospitals -- which have the largest number of beds and provide comprehensive medical services -- at the top of the system.

🏥 Basic public health services provided at the primary level have been bolstered. In the first half of 2023, nearly 90 million people aged 65 and above enjoyed health management through such services, increasing by 40 percent compared with the same period last year.

🏥 Health authorities and medical institutions have made proactive efforts to ensure the accessibility and equitability of health services. Currently, 82.7 percent of all medical institutions at or above the secondary level in the country have established a system that enables patients to schedule appointments for diagnosis and treatment.

🏥 Internet-powered health services are playing an increasingly important role in China's health system. By 2020, over 1,600 internet hospitals were opened in China, and almost 49 million people had used the service to receive a diagnosis and treatment.

🏥 By the end of 2021, the number of doctors in China had reached 4.2 million, and the number of doctors per 1,000 people had reached 3.04, close to the level of developed countries.

🏥 The Chinese government announced in 2022 a strategy to increase the number of health professionals as part of the country's 14th Five-Year Plan. It aims to increase the number of physicians to 3.2 per 1,000 people by 2025.

🏥 From January to September, medical institutions in China saw a total of 5.11 billion medical visits.

#china #healthcare

36 notes · View notes

celestie0 · 27 days ago

Text

in holy matriphony | series masterlist.

gojo satoru x reader [18+] | angst, fluff, smut

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - next door neighbor!gojo x reader

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency department, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ warnings/tags. 18+, fem!reader, fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, some choso x reader, some suguru x reader, some crippling debt x reader; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ status. ongoing

ᰔ word count. 53.4k

ᰔ taglist. closed

☾·̩͙꙳ ao3 link :: header art by @/3aem

chapter index.

ch1. he said yes! congrats!

ch2. you may now kiss the bride

ch3. domestic encounters

ch4. in a mother's eyes

ch5. child's play

ch6. pending…

drabbles.

no1. new neighbor

no2. pending...

headcanons.

official headcanons pt1. fluff & crack | link

pt2. pending...

a note from the author. hello! my name is ellie, and this is my second long fic series called 'in holy matriphony' which i began posting earlier this year in april! this started off as such a small lil concept idea trashing on the american healthcare system, and now it's a fullblown fic. i have sooo much planned for this series, so admittedly it will be a long one, but i am so grateful to anyone that tags along for the ride :””) please let me know if i missed any tags or warnings! and for those who may want to know before reading, this series will have a happy ending <3

series tags. #in holy matriphony

541 notes · View notes

dezyj1205 · 4 months ago

Text

A Rant— Sorry

I haven’t been writing because I’ve been dealing with finance issues. A while ago I had a sever kidney infection that ended with me getting a 1400$ medical bill from the radiology department in the hospital. On top of that I also received a 1000$ medical bill from the hospital itself. That’s 2400$ for a bad kidney that I CANT afford. I’m trying to find a second job because of these bills and the stress is taking away from me wanting to add to No Cut Strings. That doesn’t mean it won’t be updated but it does mean I’m asking for patience when it comes to updates.

I’m fucking pissed that I owe so much money because of a kidney infection. If I hadn’t gone to the doctor I would have ended up in kidney failure and it would have been worse but it’s still incomprehensible that survival has a cost. That HEALTH has a cost. My lowest insurance premium is 280$ and I would still be paying 70% of the cost. It wouldn’t cover emergency visits, eye, or dental. I’d still fully pay for prescriptions. I’m tired of bills. Im tired of being broke. I’m pissed that there isn’t affordable health care despite the fact it’s advertised. I’m just done with our health system in general.

Americans are some of the most unhealthy people in the world and there are reasons but rn I think a big reason is no one can afford to be healthy. Healthy food is twice the cost of junk food. Gym equipment costs more than a new bed. Gym memberships cost more than tv platforms. Dying is less expensive than going to a fucking hospital.

It’s bullshit. I’m pissed and have no creativity right now because I’m stressed to hell. I’m 👌 close to moving somewhere with free healthcare but can’t because I DONT HAVE THE MONEY.

#healthcare #medical bills #medical billing in usa #hospitals suck #I’m ranting #sorry

8 notes · View notes

foxglove-garden · 28 days ago

Text

Apparently I have to say again that I don't consent to interacting with people, especially unhinged people, who claim to have a self diagnosed dissociative disorder like DID or self diagnosed systems.

I don't have any issue with people who have actual mental illnesses with a diagnosis, obviously. But if you're an adult, you have the ability to get diagnosed. It's not that hard to find a psychiatrist who offers good faith estimates for the uninsured (my psychiatrist appointments were $4 each when I lost my insurance, you can afford $4-10 a month) and it's not that hard to apply for medical assistance or insurance through what used to be Obamacare (also $5-20 a month for low income people, and that covers your prescriptions too)

My main reason for this is because I was that "annoying self diagnosed DID system" kid in highschool and when I actually got help I realized that I actually was going through manic psychosis due to bipolar and CPTSD with dissociation. I was an unstable monster during that period of my life and I don't want to deal with people like that now that I'm stable and recovered.

Plus, I'm kinda tired of watching people mock mental illnesses that actually cause people real problems just for the chance of tiktok fame or because it's trendy. I'm tired of people running obvious roleplay accounts attacking me for saying "that's factually not how mental illnesses work" when they say their alters make them change eye color or their alters have physical disabilities that the actual physical person doesn't.

"my alter makes my eyes purple" they're still brown babe

"my alter gives me demonic abilities" that's a classic delusion babe

"I have an alter that's always happy and excited and one that's always depressed" that just sounds like a mood disorder babe

Like I'm sorry but I actually put the years of work in to get rid of my own mental health symptoms including psychosis and delusions, and as someone who's been living in the real world, stable and medicated, for almost a decade, I want nothing to do with people who are too focused on using their mental health issues as a marketing tactic to get help. Y'all drag me down and I don't have time to indulge you.

And anyone who wants to argue is gonna be blocked. I don't have the time to argue with people who are delusional and anti recovery.

#dni #discourse #anti self dx #anti self diagnosis #it's one thing to be like “I think I might have this” versus making it your entire life and personality #that's unhealthy. y'all are unhealthy. i don't want that near me.#pro recovery #pro mental health recovery #mental health discourse #mental health recovery

6 notes · View notes

practically-an-x-man · 10 months ago

Text

Pit of Vipers (Nikoletta x Abner)

Summary: While in Belle Reve, Nikoletta realizes that a fight broke out the night before - and Abner didn't even try to fight back

Tags: pre-relationship, angst, violence, depictions of injuries, brief references to suicide

Word Count: 3.1k

____

“Adrian.”

She appeared out of the shadows and slid onto the bench beside him, and Adrian just about jumped out of his skin.

“Jesus Christ- don’t do that!” he blurted, glaring at her from behind his glasses, “Do you know how close I get to punching you in the face when you do that? It’s a reflex.”

“But you never have.” Nikoletta pointed out, giving him a slanted grin.

“Yeah, ‘cause I stop myself every time. Those aren’t exactly the knuckle tattoos I’d want,” Adrian said, wringing his hands together as he imagined it. Nikoletta scoffed. He talked a lot of big game, she thought, but she’d only ever seen him fight when it was premeditated. He didn’t strike a single blow without considering it first. It was part of why she chose him as a confidant. He wasn’t reckless like the others were.

“So… what sends you popping up over my shoulder like my sleep paralysis demon this time?” he asked, seemingly recovered from his bout of shock, and shot her a broad grin. Someone else probably would have found it charming. Nikoletta just pressed her lips together.

“Someone’s missing.” she said, dark eyes scanning the cafeteria around her, “One of the newbies.”

“Hm. Yeah. The skinny one, right? With the-” Adrian guessed, gesturing vaguely at his own neck, “The one who always looks like he’s sad he can’t hang himself from the bars of his cell like the guy in Goonies?”

“He doesn’t-” Nikoletta started, but cut herself off with a huff, “The guy from Goonies didn't actually hang himself. But… right. Him.”

“Oh, yeah, he’s in medical,” Adrian pressed on, his voice just as light and conversational as it had been in the moments before, “Couple’a guys jumped him late last night. Didn’t see who, but they got some good hits in before the guards got there. Looked pretty bad.”

“Bastards.” Nikoletta growled, “They know the rules. He wasn’t marked.”

“Maybe they thought nobody would care.” he guessed, casually picking through his French fries without a care in the world. Sometimes he scared her. “I mean, the guy doesn’t even talk, why’s he even worth protecting?”

“It’s not about being worth protecting,” she said, “Why do you pay your insurance premium if you never get sick?”

“Ah, I never had insurance. Even the cheap ones denied me. I get in too many fights.”

“But you know how insurance works, don’t you?”

“Sort of.” Adrian said with a one-sided shrug. Nikoletta rolled her eyes.

“Good enough.” she decided, “What I’m saying is… whether he’s ‘worth it’ or not, everyone gets my protection, whether they need it or not, unless they decide to stir up trouble. And he hasn’t stirred up any trouble. They shouldn’t have gone after him.”

This was far from the first time something like this had happened. Even with her system in place, there was no way to control every stroke of violence in Belle Reve. People got… pent-up after a while. Marking the unruly prisoners kept things peaceful in more ways than one - removing some violence from the pool entirely, and giving the others a chance to release their frustrations - but it wasn’t a perfect solution. She doubted there was any perfect solution to be found.

And it was always the quiet ones who seemed to slip through the cracks.

“I need to find out who did this,” Nikoletta said, standing up from her seat in one decisive motion. Adrian twisted around to look at her, giving her a strange look.

“Y’know, if it were up to me, I’d just mark him now. Just to get it over with. His blood’s already in the water. I’d be willing to bet someone’s gonna rip him apart eventually. Might be better just to let it happen, save yourself a bigger fight. I mean… you’ve seen him, Nikki, the guy’s a walking target.”

This was the side of him that Nikoletta had to keep on a very short leash. Underneath his lighthearted and even charming exterior was the same thirst for violence as anyone else in Belle Reve, and she knew that. And as much as she liked having Adrian as her right hand man, she had to be careful about that ruthless streak of his. She had the sense that if it was a matter of his safety, even his escape from Belle Reve, he’d would break anybody’s neck without hesitation. Even hers. He was only loyal to her because she set her terms clearly and followed them.

In a way, that was more comforting. Loyalty based on emotion always felt… shaky. At least here, she didn't have to worry about some social faux pas meaning the difference between ally or enemy. She didn't need an emotional bond with Adrian. Really, she wasn't sure he formed emotional bonds with anyone. But as long as she kept her rules transparent, consistent, she could trust that he had her back.

Even when his ruthless side showed its face.

“No.” she replied with a shake of her head, “He hasn't done anything to deserve being marked.”

“C’mon, Nikki. I know you like him, but-”

“It’s not a matter of liking him. It's a matter of principle.” she huffed, “If I mark him without warning, people are going to start to wonder if they’re next. That’s just the fast track to me losing what little control I’ve managed to scrape together in here- and if I go down, you’re coming with me. And it’s a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. The ones who attacked him are just going to find another target if he’s gone. It doesn’t solve anything.”

She took a step back, comforted by the brush of shadows against her skin. There she paused, just for a moment, and met Adrian’s eyes.

“And I don’t like him. He’s just another prisoner.”

“I dunno, you didn’t get this mad about the last guy who got beat up.”

“You were the last guy who got beat up.”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

Nikoletta rolled her eyes and fell into the shadows.

She reemerged from a pool of darkness in the corner of the medbay, suddenly enough that a nurse in the hall flinched at the sight of her. Most of the staff had grown used to Nikoletta’s habit of slipping between rooms, but that didn’t make it any less startling to see her suddenly appear in a once-empty room like some kind of apparition.

It didn’t take long for her to find Abner. He was in the bay closest to the wall, far away from anyone or anything else. Ever since he’d arrived, she’d gotten the sense that the staff was a little afraid of him. She didn’t understand it - aside from the power dampener, he was about the most unassuming guy she could have imagined in a place like this. She doubted he even tried to shoo away the rats that sometimes scurried through the halls.

But the staff were afraid of her too. She didn’t usually give it a lot of stock.

Abner’s eyes were closed, but the faintly pained expression on his face told her he wasn’t asleep. She didn’t blame him. Half his face was swollen in a brutal black eye, and the rest of his skin was equally littered with bruises and dried blood. Nikoletta wondered, briefly, if he’d even fought back. From the nature of the wounds, harsh and dark and from every direction, she guessed that he hadn’t. The power dampener had been removed from his neck, showcasing a dark band of bruising around his throat - like he’d been shoved to the ground and landed hard on the dampener. Nikoletta couldn’t help but wince at the sight. Some of the bruises were almost dark enough to look like her shadows, save for the faintest purple-red tint.

“Who attacked you?”

She must have been moving more quietly than she realized. Abner’s eyes snapped open with a sharp gasp, and he jolted upwards in the bed. A faint light glowed from somewhere near his wrists, but he tamped it down with a grimace just a moment later.

“Nikoletta?”

“Who else?” she replied, planting her hands on her hips and frowning again at the bruises painting his skin. She waved a hand vaguely in his direction, every movement sharp. “Who did this? Who attacked you?”

He opened his mouth to respond, then frowned and shut it again. He shook his head.

“You won’t tell me.” Nikoletta guessed, clenching her jaw in anger, “Goddammit, Abner, I’m trying to help you! I’m trying to make sure this doesn’t happen again!”

“It won’t fix anything.”

“This isn’t like grade school bullies,” she insisted, “If you tell me who did it, the problem will go away. Permanently. I need to know who did this.”

“So you can kill them?”

“I haven’t killed anyone.” Nikoletta snapped. The words came out too harsh, and she wanted to wince. Abner flinched, but there was something deeper in his eyes. He raised his eyebrows. Nikoletta resisted the urge to scoff. “Listen. All I do is mark the ones who have it coming to them. I don’t sponsor any violence of my own, I just… rescind my protection. Anyone who’s marked has to fend for themself. That’s how it works.”

“But they all die anyway, don’t they?” he asked. His voice had gone soft. It sent a maelstrom of emotion through Nikoletta’s chest. She wanted to be angry - with him for poking holes in all the rules that should have kept him safe, and with his attackers for sparking all this to begin with - but strangely couldn’t find the emotion within herself. Abner’s eyes were tired and sad, the effect only magnified by the fact that one was nearly swollen shut.

“Yes.” Nikoletta finally hissed, “They die. That’s the nature of Belle Reve. If I didn’t have my system in place, they’d have killed you too.”

“Maybe that’s not so bad…”

If it were up to me, I’d just mark him now. Just to get it over with.

Nikoletta grimaced as the words echoed in her mind. Adrian wanted her to mark him. Whoever had attacked Abner wanted her to mark him. Hell- it seemed like Abner himself wanted her to mark him, just to rip the Band-Aid off.

For the slimmest moment, she was tempted.

But only for that one moment.

“Stop that. You’re in pain. Death won’t bring you the relief you want.” Nikoletta muttered, “Trust me, I’ve been there myself. The only way to make things better is to fix them yourself. Now tell me who attacked you.”

“STAR Labs?” he asked instead, apparently ignoring her demands, “Is that what brought you there? Is that why you… you hurt like that?”

“Of course it was fucking STAR Labs.” she said, reaching for the sleeve of her jumpsuit and tugging it up to expose the silvery track marks at her elbows, “You think I had these before STAR Labs? You think I was in prison before STAR Labs? You think I had to cover every fucking inch of my skin before STAR Labs?”

“Why are you angry?”

“Why aren’t you?” she fired back, “Look at yourself. Look at the bruises. It’s going to happen again if you don’t tell me who gave them to you.”

Abner was quiet for a long time. He stared down at his hands with a distant look in his eyes. Nikoletta shifted on her feet. It shouldn’t have been this difficult of a decision to make. It was a choice between safety or pain, and he didn’t have to do anything but give her a name. There wouldn’t even be any guilt in it, she thought. They’d struck the first blow. The Queen of Belle Reve had very particular rules, and those rules had been broken. It was all fair play.

Finally he looked up and met her eyes. Nikoletta lifted her eyebrows, awaiting his response.

“Will you do me a favor?”

“Hm?”

“Will you get me a glass of water? Please?” Abner asked, his voice falling back to that near-whisper of his, “The nurses don’t like coming over here. Not when I don’t have the…”

He trailed off but gestured vaguely at his neck. Nikoletta nodded. She still wasn’t sure what power it was that had the nurses so afraid of him - something to do with that odd light when she startled him, she was sure - but it must have been something big. Most things that came from STAR Labs were.

Nikoletta took a step back and melted into the shadows. She was back a moment later, a half-filled plastic cup clutched in one gloved hand. She held it out, and Abner took the cup with a faint but grateful smile. He sat up and took a sip, grimacing like every motion hurt. Looking at him, she believed it. She hoped the nurses had at least given him some sort of painkiller before they vanished.

“I don’t like killing people.” Abner mumbled after a few long moments of silence. His fingers worried at the edges of the cup. He refused to meet her eyes.

“So you’d rather let yourself get beat to shit like this than tell me who did it? None of the blood is on your hands here, Abner. They attacked someone under my protection, so they deserve to have their own protections stripped away. It’s all just turnabout. Fairness. Really… if you tell me now, they’ll probably be gone before you get out of that bed. Why the fuck are you protecting them?”

“Because it’s still…”

Abner trailed off, shaking his head with a low sigh.

“I’m sorry, Nik. I can’t.”

Nikoletta scoffed and took a step back from him. She couldn’t believe this - beaten so badly he’d landed in the medbay, covered in blood and bruises, so severe they’d even removed his power dampener, and he still refused to give her a name. Did he really have so much guilt for something he hadn’t even done? How had he managed to take down STAR Labs, with a hyperactive conscience like that?

The sadness in Abner’s eyes only deepened as Nikoletta took another step back. It was hard to look at. She sighed.

“Do you need anything else? Before I go?”

“Um… no. I don’t think so.” he said, “But if you… if you wanted to come back sometime? Just to talk for a while? This place, it reminds me of the lab. It’s hard to be here.”

She could understand that. Normally she avoided the medbay like the plague for that same reason. She didn’t like her cell much either, but this was… worse. Nikoletta pursed her lips but gave him a singular nod.

“I’ll be back in a few hours. Try to think of some things you want to talk about before I get back.”

She took a final step back, returning to the familiar not-quite-comfort of her shadows, and had already begin to slip into that other realm when she heard Abner’s soft voice one more time.

“Nikoletta. Thank you.”

She was back in the cafeteria before she could even think to respond, but the words rattled around in her mind much longer than they should have. That whole interaction had been… odd. He was an odd man. In a lot of ways. She didn’t quite mind it, but it was certainly different from the interactions she was used to.

“Any luck?” Adrian’s voice, deceptively chipper, pulled her from her thoughts. Nikoletta shot him a lukewarm look, irritation bubbling just underneath the surface.

“No. He won’t give them up. For whatever God-forsaken reason.” she said, shaking her head, “Lands himself in a hospital bed but won’t even tell me who put him there.”

“I’m telling you, Nik, you could save yourself a lot of trouble if you just-”

“I’m not marking him. Especially not now. That sets a precedent I don’t want to set.”

“Suit yourself.” he muttered, though he clearly didn’t agree with her decision in the slightest. After a moment he shrugged, tossing it aside like water off a duck’s back. He waved a hand towards the opposite side of the cafeteria. “Well, in that case… I’ve been doing a little recon-”

“I’m assuming that means you walked straight up to their table and dared them to give you the gossip?”

“It was recon. I was very subtle.” Adrian repeated with a huff, “And it sounds like one of the guys that jumped him was that calendar guy, with all the tattoos? Heard one of the cameras got footage of it, just a couple frames. Y’know, it’s probably not a great idea to attack a guy in the middle of the night if you’re one of the four prisoners in here who can be recognized from the back si-”

“Thanks.” she said, cutting him off before he could get into one of his diatribes, “I’ll take care of it.”

____

“Julian.”

This time, she meant to be startling. The tattooed criminal sat bolt upright in his cot, frantically scanning the shadows for where her voice had come from. Nikoletta took a step forward, allowing herself to be lit by the dull yellow bulbs that shone in from the hallway. The sight of her didn’t ease the fear on his face.

“I heard you broke my rules.” Nikoletta continued, drawing each word out, “You attacked a prisoner who wasn’t marked. You know what the punishment for that is.”

All lingering dredges of sleep had vanished from his posture, and he looked at her with wary eyes. His fingers were curled tightly into his bedsheet, as if he were debating trying to smother her with it. Surely he had to know he was outmatched here. Surely he had to know that was why she confronted him in the dead of night, blanketed on all sides by her shadows.

“So what? Not like I did anything big, just knocked him around a little. Fuckin’ creep deserved it, too.” he replied, the words so loud and barbed that she could hear cots creaking in the neighboring cells. Tension drew into Nikoletta’s posture, both from the words and the growing audience to them. She took a step closer, aiming to administer her punishment swiftly and potently. With a mark, and with all the gossip that had been swirling over the ordeal, he’d be gone by breakfast.

But they all die anyway, don’t they?

I don’t like killing people.

Nikoletta froze on the spot, jaw clenched so tightly it hurt. It was a matter of principle. Julian broke her rules, she administered punishment, it resolved the conflict that landed Abner in the medical wing and secured Nikoletta’s reputation as a strict but objective ruler. Half a second’s action to repair a host of issues. All it took was one little death.

But she found herself stepping back. Confusion crested across Julian’s face, in equal share with the same sharp wariness.

“No more second chances.” Nikoletta warned, darkness dripping off every word, “Do better. This will be the only mercy you’ll get from me.”

And with that, she vanished into the dark.

#did i just post a nikoletta fic yesterday? yes. did I write this one over the course of one day and decided to post it anyway? also yes #my writing #my ocs #nikoletta bordeaux #oneshot #angst #tw swearing #tw violence #tw depression mention #the suicide squad #abner krill #polka dot man #adrian chase #vigilante #calendar man

15 notes · View notes