#I think she would identify straight if identifications were something that mattered to her

[trekscribbles]

The Bushwhack Job: Chapter Four

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three

(Disclaimer: This is a relatively rough draft and subject to change when I post to AO3. I'm just overly excited and want to share what I have.)

Three bodies had been recovered from the destroyed LanCast building.

It took several hours to discover that much. Nate had insisted they leave the hotel as Eliot instructed, falling back on one of the contingency plans the two of them probably talked about when they were alone in the bar. Parker didn’t ask. She didn’t want to think about worst-case scenarios.

Once secured in a new hotel across town, Hardison had done whatever he usually did to get their information, and came up with a police report of the accident.

Three bodies. No identification. Awaiting coroner’s report.

They took the news in silence. They climbed into Lucille in silence, they drove to the morgue in silence, and they entered the cold building in silence. Hardison and Parker donned their FBI disguises, with Nate and Sophie wearing the appropriately stricken expressions of worried loved ones. It was late, but the badges got them in, and an assistant met them at the door and led them to the lab where the autopsies were being performed.

“Special Agent Thomas,” Hardison said, flashing his badge to the medical examiner. “This is Special Agent Hagen. We’re invistigating the incident at the LanCast building.”

The medical examiner, whose nametag identified her as “Dr. M. Morton”, glanced at Nate and Sophie. “We haven’t been able to identify the victims yet. Are you hoping to find someone? I can only speak with immediate family.”

“Our son,” Sophie said in an unsteady voice. “He may have been inside the building when it—when it…”

Nate put a hand on her arm, and Hardison cleared his throat to bring the doctor’s attention back to him. 

“What can you tell us about the victims?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.” She gestured at the three bodies, which her assistant had hastily covered in white cloths. “The remains were badly damaged by the fire. They were all male, all aged late-twenties to mid-thirties.”

“Anything else?” Parker asked, her stomach dropping. “Height? Clothes? Anything they may have had on them?”

“These two are around 6’2”, 6’3”. This one is shorter, maybe 5’7”.” Dr. Morton indicated the body in the middle and frowned when Sophie gave a little gasp of dismay. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Does that match the description of your son?”

Sophie nodded, pale-faced and trembling.

Dr. Morton gave her a sympathetic look and lifted an evidence bag from the tray at the body’s feet. “We found this on him,” she said, holding it out to Sophie. “Do you recognize it?”

They all leaned in, and Parker felt the heat leave her body in a rush.

Eliot’s necklace.

Sophie’s knees gave out. Nate caught her as she fell, but she sank to the ground with her face in her hands, shaking. “It’s him,” she sobbed, her voice muffled. “He’s ours. It’s Eliot.”

A strange, distant buzzing sound filled Parker’s ears, and for a moment, it was all she could hear. Hardison spoke beside her, and Sophie went on crying, but the words were lost to the static hum inside her head. The doctor asked them something, and Nate stared straight through her as if she didn’t exist. He wasn’t old enough to be Eliot’s dad, but suddenly he looked it.

They can’t handle it, said a cold, detached voice in her brain. They’re falling apart. Who’s going to hold them together?

Eliot. But Eliot was gone, and Eliot couldn’t be gone, and it didn’t matter whether he was gone or not, because he wasn’t here.

Parker was.

She blinked, and all the noise slammed back into her, and her brain caught up to what Dr. Morton was saying.

“—so sorry I have to ask, but it would help if we could get a DNA sample to verify his identity.”

“Yes,” Parker said. “A DNA sample. I’ll just—this is a shock for them. I’m going to take them out and give them a moment.”

Dr. Morton nodded. “Of course. Take all the time you need.”

Parker glanced at Hardison, who was blinking at the body under the sheet, his eyes wide and wet. She put her hand on his shoulder to turn him away. “Sir,” she said to Nate. “Ma’am. Let’s go. We can talk outside.”

Nate looked at her, but there was a strange emptiness in his eyes that made her feel tiny and hopeless. “Sir,” she repeated. “Please come with me.”

“Sophie,” he murmured, breaking eye contact with Parker to crouch at Sophie’s side. “Come on, honey. Stand up.”

“I don’t want to leave him,” Sophie said, her voice thick and broken. “Please, he can’t stay here, not with these men. Please, can’t we—?”

Parker took Sophie’s elbow and pulled her gently to her feet, guiding her toward the door. Nate and Hardison followed, but Parker didn’t look back. She had to get them out. 

Eliot would get them out.

She brought them to the van, and took the driver’s seat after getting them safely inside. Hardison was crying now, too, but Nate sat in absolute, unmoving silence. She drove to the hotel, parked, waited for someone to open the door.

No one did.

“We don’t know,” Hardison said after a few minutes. His face was dry, but his voice still sounded uneven. “He could have lost the necklace. It doesn’t prove anything.”

Sophie shook her head, but had to try twice before she could get her words out. “He would have called. He would have found us if he wasn’t…”

Dead. The word slammed itself against the inside of Parker’s skull, over and over again like a security alarm she hadn’t accounted for.

Dead, dead, dead.

Adapt to the situation, the voice in her head said. First things first. Take care of your team.

She opened her door. Hardison followed her, helping Sophie from the back, but Nate stayed where we was in the passenger seat. Parker moved around the van to open his door, but he didn’t look at her.

“Go inside,” she said, her voice low and steady. “We’re not done.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Lancaster knew about us,” she said. “He set a trap for Eliot and me. We have to finish this, or he’ll keep coming after us. After Hardison and Sophie.”

He looked up then, his eyes still hollow, his hands loose in his lap.

“This is what Eliot would do,” Parker said.

Nate lifted one hand and set it over his face. He took a breath, two, and exhaled so heavily that his shoulders shook.

“What would Eliot say if it was one of us?” he asked.

Parker shook her head. “It wouldn’t have been anyone else.”

“What does it say about me that I couldn’t stop this?” Nate asked, and Parker heard the unspoken again in the way his voice hitched at the end.

“I don’t know,” Parker whispered. “But we need you. Lancaster is going to try again, and we need you.”

Nate nodded, dropping his hand once more. He stood unsteadily and followed the others across the parking lot toward the door.

Parker watched them go, slipping her hand into her pocket to remove the evidence bag she’d taken when Dr. Morton's back was turned. She opened it, picked out the necklace, and clasped it around her neck, tucking the cold metal charm under her shirt so it laid flat against her skin.

Then she followed what was left of her team inside the hotel.

[daryl-dixon-daydreams]

Words: 5,340 Pairing: Daryl Dixon x Reader Reader pronouns: she/her Era: Hershel's Farm Warnings: Language, domestic violence, fear and anxiety A/N: Here with some Protective!Daryl for ya'll! Summary: When Daryl finds the reader outside in the rain in the middle of the night, he gives her a dry place to sleep, but the next day it causes problems with her asshole of a boyfriend.

Your name: submit What is this?

Daryl couldn’t sleep. He’d tossed and turned restlessly in his tent and finally decided to get up and do a perimeter check just for some goddamned thing to do to pass the time. A heavy rain was falling and it bothered him not being able to hear anything over the deluge.

He shouldered his crossbow and sheathed his knife, grabbing his flashlight from its place next to his cot. He slipped out of his tent and started through the maze of tents. That’s when he saw you. It looked like you were sincerely hoping he wouldn’t, like you were trying to blend into the tree trunk you were leaning against, sheltering as much as you could beneath the oak, obviously somewhat wet from the rain and shivering slightly.

Daryl’s brow drew down over his eyes and he headed straight for you. “What the hell are ya doin’ out here alone in the dark in the middle of a damn thunderstorm?”

You didn’t answer but you did raise your eyes to his, hugging your arms more tightly around yourself. He watched another shiver wrack through you. The archer frowned. “Why ain’t ya in with your guy?” he asked, jutting a thumb in the direction of the tent you shared with your boyfriend. Daryl didn’t like him at all... Frankly he thought the guy was a controlling piece of shit, and he had a hunch that he might be worse even than that.

You avoided his eyes again. “We, uhh—had a fight,” you murmured. Daryl could easily read the embarrassment and shame on your face.

“That don’t explain why you’re out here in the rain,” Daryl drawled.

You continued to avoid his eyes and didn’t answer. He could think of a couple reasons why you’d be out here instead of inside the dry tent, and neither of them were good. Either he’d kicked you out or you’d left because you were afraid of him, afraid of what would happen if you stayed. Either way, there was no way in hell Daryl was gonna let you spend the night outside in the cold autumn rain.

“Ya ain’t stayin’ out here in the rain. C’mon,” he said, nudging his head back in the direction of his own tent. He turned to lead the way and glanced back over his shoulder to see you hesitating to follow him. “If ya stay out here all night, all soakin’ wet like ya are, yer gonna catch yer death. C’mon.”

This time you followed him, still shivering.

Daryl held the tent flap open for you and you stepped inside, your arms still wrapped tightly around yourself. He followed and zipped the flap closed on the rain and night. When he turned you were standing awkwardly in the middle of the tent. Daryl set his crossbow down and clicked on the lantern next to his cot. He replaced the flashlight and pulled off his jacket. He held it out to you.

You gave him a questioning look.

“I can see ya shiverin’. Take it. Can’t have ya gettin’ pneumonia. We’ve already gone through too many of Hershel’s antibiotics.”

You accepted it from him. “Thanks,” you said.

He watched you pull it on, anxiously chewing his bottom lip as the fabric swallowed up your frame. He sat down on the floor across from you and pulled his knife out and his sharpening stone, just for something to do. He needed to busy his hands, because with you in that small space with him he was suddenly feeling nervous. “Make yourself at home,” he said, nodding toward his cot on the opposite wall.

You sat down on the edge a little gingerly and watched as he drew the blade of his knife across the stone.

He kept his eyes fixed on what he was doing but his deep voice broke through the pattering of the rain on the tent. “Ya wanna talk about it?”

You shrugged deeper into his jacket. It still held the warmth of his body and it smelled like him—musky leather, campfire smoke, and the outside air. “I don’t know,” you admitted.

The sharp noise of his blade punctuated the silence. “He kick ya out or… did ya need to get out?” This time his eyes flickered up to your face.

He watched you gulp, but you held his eyes. The warm lantern light threw the angles of your face into sharp relief. Your eyelashes cast long shadows on your cheeks.

Daryl’s light blue eyes moved back down to his hands. “S’alright. Ya ain’t gotta say.”

You bit at the inside of your cheek and couldn’t help another shiver that ran up your back. The archer looked up at you again immediately, concern furrowing his brow. He set his knife aside and climbed to his feet.

He unzipped the flap of the tent and stepped out. He met your questioning gaze with a nod. “I’ll be right back.”

This left you alone in his tent for a short time, just the hammering of the rain to keep you company. Your eyes wandered around the contents. It was a little unkempt, with clothes piled haphazardly in one corner and the edges of the canvas floor cluttered with tools and random items. There were half-finished crossbow bolts piled on a box that was serving as a side table, but something beneath them caught your eye. You gently brushed aside the wooden shafts and carefully lifted what had drawn your attention. It was delicate and brittle but you recognized it immediately as you carefully laid it out flat on your palm.

One day in the summer you had been collecting firewood for the group, eager to do something useful and needing some space for a while. You’d come upon a vine bursting with crimson flowers and as you’d stood and admired it, such a simple but beautiful thing, you’d watched hummingbirds flitting between the blossoms.

Wanting to know the name of the plant, you’d plucked a bloom and brought it back to the archer to identify. He’d taken hardly a glance at it before telling you its name. “Coral honeysuckle,” he drawled. “Ya can crush the berries and use ‘em on bee stings.”

“Coral honeysuckle,” you repeated. “There were tons of hummingbirds on it.”

He nodded. “Mhm. They like the nectar,” he said, holding the flower back out to you.

“Keep it,” you said with a smile, “as payment for your identification services.”

Daryl’s heart jumped at the smile on your face and he twirled the bloom between his fingers as he watched you retreat back toward the group.

This looked like the very same flower you had picked. He’d obviously pressed it underneath something to preserve it. The vibrant red petals were only slightly muted in color. He’d kept it all these months? You puzzled over this as you replaced it where you’d found it and arranged the crossbow bolts over it again. It was hard to ignore the warm feeling growing right between your lungs, threatening to spill outward.

A few minutes later, Daryl came into the tent again. There were raindrops on his shirt and caught in his hair. He had a small mug clutched in his hands and you could see spirals of steam rising from the surface. He extended it toward you and you accepted it, puzzled as you looked inside.

“Tea?” you asked, looking back up as Daryl settled onto the floor again.

He nudged his nose up at you in a nod. “Mhm. I dunno if it’s any good. I think it’s some ginger-lemon thing Maggie brought to help with Lori’s nausea. But it’s hot. And you’re still cold,” he said. He felt nervous under the bewildered gaze you were giving him.

This man had just gone out into a thunderstorm to heat water for you and bring you tea simply because he’d seen you shiver. Not to mention that you were wrapped in his coat and he was sheltering you from the storm when your own boyfriend had—his voice broke your train of thought.

“I told ya. Can’t have ya gettin’ sick.” Daryl picked up his knife again and went back to sharpening it.

It was silent for some time as you sipped at the tea and watched the archer work on his knives diligently. You didn’t know that he could feel your eyes on him and it was driving him crazy. His body seemed to respond to you like you were a drug and he was an addict. He did his best to keep it under control. After all, you were technically spoken for, even if the guy was a complete douchebag at best.

But finally you spoke, setting the empty mug aside and sitting farther back on his cot, pulling your boots off and folding your legs under you. “Can I ask you something?”

“Mhm,” he hummed, grabbing the next knife that needed sharpening from its sheath.

“What do you think of—of my boyfriend?” you asked. Your cheeks immediately flushed. You felt stupid even asking the question. You already knew the answer and you knew where this conversation would lead. You knew what you needed to do, but you were afraid to do it. Did you really think someone else saying what you thought out loud was going to somehow give you the courage to go through with what needed to happen?

Daryl’s hands froze and he looked up at you, his eyes narrowed and fixated on your face for a long moment. He averted them back down and resumed his work again just as suddenly as he had stopped. “Don’t matter what I think.”

“It matters to me,” you said quietly.

The silence between you was suddenly thick, like a stagnant room full of humidity, the air heavy. The raindrops on the tent seemed to surround you and insulate you from everything else, from the rest of the world. The atmosphere was almost intoxicating, disorienting.

Eventually, Daryl’s blue eyes lifted again and fell on your face. He sighed heavily. “Ya really want to know what I think?” You nodded. “I think ya deserve better.”

Your heart skipped a beat as your eyebrows lifted in surprise. You’d expected Daryl to call him an asshole. You hadn’t expected that stated so explicitly. And you really didn’t expect him to go on.

“Either he threw ya out of your own damn tent into a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, or ya had to get out because being outside in a thunderstorm in the dark was a better option than bein’ in there with him. What kinda man is that?” He scowled for a moment as he thought about how much he wanted to drag the guy out of your tent, give him a few good punches, and leave his ass in the rain. He turned back to his knives.

You were silent, consumed by your thoughts, but eventually you yawned and Daryl looked up immediately. He systematically put away his tools and then he grabbed some balled up clothes to use as a pillow. He also grabbed his poncho. His eyes lifted and met yours. “Ya take the cot. I’m good down here,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t have to—I’ll go—”

Daryl let out a scoff. “What are ya gonna do? Go sleep out under that tree?” He shook his head and settled down on the floor, leaning back onto the makeshift pillow and draping his arm over his eyes. “Wasn’t a question anyhow. Just get the lantern when you’re settled in.”

You couldn’t help smiling at him on the floor where he was stretched out under his poncho, a knife right beside him. You watched his ribs rise and fall with his breathing a few times and the butterflies in your stomach made you realize that you were most definitely in trouble… in more ways than one.

You clicked off the lantern and laid down on his cot, still wrapped in his coat. You slept peacefully until morning.

_ _ _ _ _ _

You woke early as the orange glow of the sun struck the tent walls and you shot up straight at the sound of Daryl stirring.

He nudged his nose up at you in a greeting and you gave him a small smile. His heart jumped at the sight of you in his jacket, on his cot, that sleepy smile and your tousled hair. He tried to ignore how many times he’d fantasized about this very scene, but with a slightly different context where that was right where you were always supposed to be.

“Hey,” you greeted him.

He stood and shouldered his bow. “I’m gonna go hunt. Ya ain’t gotta get up yet. Sun’s barely up.”

You bent and started pulling your boots on. “It’s alright. I’m already up.” You slipped his jacket off and laid it on his cot. “Thanks,” you murmured, tucking your hair behind your ear and trying to smooth the strands a little self-consciously. “For everything last night.”

He shrugged and chewed his bottom lip a little anxiously. “S’nothin’.” For some reason this made you smile and he thought your cheeks grew a little pink.

“You always downplay everything you do. You shouldn’t,” you said kindly, standing up. “It was way more than nothing.”

Daryl gulped and simply opened the tent flap and stepped out. You followed him and gave him another small smile as he nodded at you one more time and then headed for the woods.

You decided to do some of the morning chores since you were already up and set about gathering more and restacking the fire wood and doing some preparation for breakfast. You grabbed the water canisters and headed toward the well to fill them. You were filling the second container when you heard footsteps in the grass behind you. You turned to see your boyfriend striding straight toward you. Your stomach churned.

“Morning, Y/N,” he said, coming to lean against the side of the well. His affect was flat and you were immediately on edge.

You avoided his eyes and didn’t say anything, just continued your work.

He reached over suddenly and pressed the pump handle down hard to stop the flow of water and your eyes shot up to his face. His expression was dark.

“You know, it’s weird. I got up while it was still dark and went out to look for you. Even went up to the house, but,” he shrugged, “you were nowhere to be seen.”

You stared back at him, your heart starting to rush a little in your chest.

“And I just wondered to myself, ‘Where could my girl have gone?’” He moved toward you, drawing himself up to his full height.

You stared up at him, gulping at the nervous tightness in your throat. “Seeing as you threw me out, I figured you wouldn’t care or come looking,” you said, reaching over and lifting the well handle again to start the flow of water, a little surprised at your own boldness to talk back to him in the way you did.

He immediately slammed the handle back down. “Well, I did. And imagine my surprise this morning when I saw you coming out of Daryl’s tent.”

You gulped.

“As soon as you found an excuse you just went running straight to that dumb redneck, didn’t you? Huh? How long have you been sneaking around behind my back? Did you have a good fuck last night?” He was right in your face now and you recoiled.

“It wasn’t—It wasn’t like that. I didn’t! It was storming. All he did was get me out of the rain. He—he slept on the floor. I just slept on his cot! That’s it,” you said, urgently grabbing the water and trying to rush back toward the tents and the group, sensing sincere danger not far away.

But your progress was stopped when he grabbed your arm and spun you back around. You dropped one of the water containers which spilled its contents onto the ground. “You really think I’m gonna believe that? How stupid do you think I am?” There was rage burning in his eyes. “We have a fight and you think you can go fuck whoever the hell you want? Do I have to remind you who you belong to?!” He was yelling at you now and you tried to pry his hand from your arm. His fingers were digging in painfully.

“I’ve never cheated on you! I wouldn’t—please!”

He sneered. “Why the hell should I believe that?! Huh? You’re mine! I don’t want to see you talking to another man. Hell, if I even catch you looking at that redneck again, you’ll pay for it.”

His grip on your arm felt like it was tightening by the second. “I swear nothing happened! You’re hurting me! Let go!” you pleaded, feeling your eyes going wide with fear.

He growled at you through his teeth. “I can do whatever the hell I want. I’ll break your arm if I want to,” he said viciously, starting to twist your arm behind your back painfully. You couldn’t help crying out, but that was the wrong thing to do, and you knew it.

The next moment you felt a blow across your jaw and tasted blood in your mouth. You fell to the ground, splayed in the dust, narrowly missing cracking your head against the cobbled stone of the well. Your vision was black. You could only hear a high-pitched ringing in your ears.

The blackness dissolved slowly and you climbed desperately to your feet, but another blow landed across your cheek and you fell hard against the stone well this time, your back colliding painfully with the jagged edges of rock. You had an arm up to shield yourself as you tried to orient yourself again, waiting for your vision to clear.

You were waiting for the next blow to come, steeling yourself as best you could, but it never landed. The next thing you knew Daryl had barreled out of nowhere and he had your boyfriend on the ground beneath him, landing blow after blow into his face and body. “You piece of shit! Ya think hittin’ her makes you a fuckin’ man?! I’ll kill you if you ever lay a goddamn hand on her again!”

You watched in stunned horror. The rest of your group members were tearing across the field toward the commotion. They’d heard the yelling and your surprised scream and raced to get to you. Rick and Lori were in the lead and suddenly they were there. Lori grabbed you and helped you to your feet, her face white as a sheet as she looked at you, wrapping an arm around your shoulders and supporting you in your daze, leading you slightly back and away from the melee. When you glanced back over at Daryl you saw that he now had his crossbow aimed right at your boyfriend’s head. His chest and shoulders were heaving and every muscle in his arms were tensed. Rick was trying to talk him down.

“Daryl. Daryl, this isn’t the way. Let’s just calm down and we’ll decide together how to deal with him,” Rick was saying softly. “Just put your bow down and we’ll deal with him.”

The muscle in Daryl’s jaw twitched as he clenched his teeth. “This bastard deserves to die,” he growled.

“I know. I know… I see what he did. But we’ll talk about this and decide on it together. Alright? Let’s just calm down for a minute.”

It took everything he had, every bit of willpower not to pull that trigger and end the bastard right there. And if you hadn’t been watching, he might have done it. But he didn’t want you to be afraid of him too. Daryl lowered his bow and Rick pulled him off your boyfriend, who was cowering on the ground with blood pouring down his face from an obviously broken nose. His eyes were already swelling shut.

Rick grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. “You are comin’ with me,” Rick growled, dragging him away toward the barn.

Daryl ducked his head, his chest still heaving with exertion, and spared a glance in your direction. Your bottom lip was split and you had a hand pressed over the left side of your face, concealing the already blooming bruises from that asshole’s fist landing on your jaw and cheekbone. His heart ached, his stomach twisted, and he turned and stalked off after Rick.

You avoided the looks of pity and shock that the rest of the group was giving you and did your best to hold in your tears of pain and humiliation. You focused on Lori as best you could.

“Oh my God. Come here, honey. Let me look at you,” Lori said, moving in front of you and pulling your hand away from your face. Next, she noticed that your back was bleeding in a few places where you’d hit the stones and you winced as you tried to straighten up completely. Spots of crimson were staining your shirt. “Oh, Y/N. I’m so sorry. Come on. Let’s go clean you up. Come on.” She wrapped an arm around your shoulders again.

You felt like you were going into shock. You were disoriented. Lori led you up to the farmhouse and called out to Maggie and Hershel as you entered. They both rushed into the front room.

“Oh my God. What happened?” Maggie asked urgently, her eyes going round with horror.

Lori gave her a look and Maggie seemed to understand. There had been suspicions going around the group that perhaps your boyfriend was laying his hands on you occasionally, and they all seemed to now be confirmed.

Lori led you to sit down on a chair in the dining room. The vet-turned-doctor examined your face and determined that, luckily, no bones were out of place, but that you likely had a fractured cheekbone and a concussion, not the mention the injuries to your back and your split lip.

Lori guided you to the bathroom and started the bath tub filling with warm water. “Alright. Climb in there and I’ll be back in to help clean up your back, alright?” she said gently. She left and shut the door softly behind her.

You obediently stripped your clothes off, in a daze still, and stepped into the tub, wrapping your arms around your knees, holding them tightly to your chest. Lori knocked a moment later and you murmured a “come in.” She had a washcloth in one hand and sank down on the edge of the tub, immediately dipping it into the hot water and dabbing at the wounds on your back. The abrasions weren’t too deep, but it looked like most of your back would be badly bruised.

You were grateful she didn’t say anything. You’d seen the expression on her face and that was enough. She sighed heavily and climbed to her feet. “Come on out when you’re ready. Hershel says you can stay in the guest room tonight. We want to keep an eye on you because of that concussion, okay?”

You nodded and rested your chin on your knees. It was right then when the tears finally started pouring down your cheeks and you gasped in a shuddering breath. “Y/N. I’m so sorry this happened to you,” Lori said, rushing right back over and kneeling beside the tub, smoothing a hand over your hair.

“I don’t even recognize who I am anymore,” you said, rushing to wipe the tears that broke free from your eyes. “I think after everything fell apart, I just thought if I didn’t have something to cling onto from before that I—I don’t know—that I wouldn’t make it. But then he just… changed. And it didn’t happen all at once and I think that’s why I didn’t just—it was gradual. I almost didn’t notice it and then all of a sudden he just wasn’t himself anymore.” You hastily wiped at your tears again. “I feel so stupid and embarrassed and ashamed,” you admitted, unable to look at her.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. And you have nothin’ to feel ashamed about. And it’s all over now, alright? It’s over.”

You gasped in a shaky breath. “If Daryl hadn’t—”

“I know,” she shushed you. “I know. But he did. It’s all gonna be okay now, alright? Get cleaned up and I’ll be right outside in case you need anything.”

You gave her a grateful look and nodded. You sat in the hot water until it started to cool, your mind mostly blank. The adrenaline had worn off now and you were feeling every bit of pain. Your head felt like it was going to split open and you winced at the sight of your swollen and bruised face in the mirror. You pulled your clothes back on and ventured into the hallway. Lori was standing there with some clean clothes for you and she led you to the guest room and set them on the bed.

“Get changed into those clean clothes and then you need to rest. Hershel’s orders. He wants you in bed. We need to be careful because of that concussion.”

You thanked her again and nodded. You discarded your bloodstained shirt and dirty jeans on a chair in the corner and pulled on the new outfit before climbing under the covers. You couldn’t stop the tears from flowing out again and you squeezed your eyes shut against the pounding in your face and head.

Outside, the group was gathered to discuss what to do with your boyfriend. Daryl couldn’t stand still and was pacing angrily in front of the house. He looked up as Lori came out and the screen door slammed with a snap.

“How is she?” Rick asked, his face dark with concern.

“Alright, considering,” Lori said, slipping her hands in her back pockets. “Concussion. Bruised and swollen. Abrasions over half her back. Hershel thinks her cheekbone is fractured.” She caught Daryl’s eyes and gave him a knowing look.

“Oh my God,” Andrea said, exchanging a look with Carol, whose eyes turned down toward the grass.

Daryl swore under his breath and resumed his pacing.

“Well, what do we do?” T-dog asked. “We can’t just keep going on like everything is normal with him in camp. He’s got to go.”

“The question is how,” Dale said.

“That bastard ain’t even deserve to still be drawin’ breath,” Daryl drawled. He looked at Rick.

Rick sighed heavily. “Yeah…”

“I mean, I agree with Daryl, man. I don’t want that guy around any of us,” Shane said.

“What if we just take him out and leave him? Drive him way out and drop him off somewhere,” Rick mused.

Shane scoffed. “We might as well shoot him in the head right now. He’d never make it out there alone. That’s as good as killing him.”

Rick nodded. “I know, but it feels a little less like the blood is on our hands then... He has a chance.”

“He don’t even deserve a chance. I’m fine with his blood on our hands,” Daryl spat. “If I hadn’t been over there huntin’ he coulda killed her.”

Rick sighed again, the weight of the decision obviously weighing on him, and he rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah… Let’s just take the day to think it over. We can decide tonight. And Y/N can have a say.”

The group nodded in agreement and dispersed. Lori went back in to check on you.

She knocked lightly on the door and you murmured for her to come in. “How are you feeling?” she asked you.

“I’m fine,” you said, lying about how much pain you were in.

She nodded. “We’re all going to figure out what to do about him,” she said. “You should think about what you want to happen. He can’t stay here, but as far as what that means—”

“Okay,” you interrupted her. You rolled over and looked at her in the doorway. “Is Daryl—?”

She smiled a little and nodded. “You want me to get him? He’s probably still pacing on the front porch.

You nodded. “If you could.”

“Of course.” Lori left and in a moment the archer appeared in the doorway.

You were in bed, your back to the door, but you turned and looked over your shoulder at the sound of his footsteps. Daryl’s stomach twisted at the swelling and red welts on your face. “Hey,” he said softly.

“Hey.” You pulled yourself up in a seated position and Daryl came around and sank down on the chair pulled up at the side of the bed. “I just wanted to say thank you,” you said, unable to meet his eyes and instead running the edge of the sheet through your fingers, staring at it like it was the most interesting thing you’d ever seen. “And I’m sorry that you got pulled into this mess…” you trailed off.

“I ain’t,” he said forcefully. “I’m glad I got to beat the shit out that guy. I just wish I’d done it sooner.”

You looked up at him and the glistening tears in your eyes made the colors in your irises stand out. His stomach flipped again at the sight of your injuries. “I feel so stupid. I never should have stayed with him.”

Daryl shook his head. “Ain’t that simple.”

You were grateful for his understanding. Daryl watched you struggling with some thought until you finally spoke it. “What if he gets out?” you asked, fear obvious in your eyes.

“He ain’t getting’ out. I tied his ass up myself,” Daryl reassured you. “But I’ll sit watch outside all night. Nothin’ is gonna happen to ya. It’s over.” The archer stood but your hand shot out and gently landed on his arm. He froze at the feeling of electricity that crackled from your fingers.

“Will you sit with me for a little while?” you asked. “Just—until I can fall asleep.”

He nudged his nose up in a nod and sank back down, feeling nervous and chewing on his bottom lip. Daryl watched as you settled back down in bed, pulling the covers up over yourself and shutting your eyes, your long eyelashes fanning out against your cheeks. The feelings welling up in him were getting more and more difficult to deny, and he knew now wasn’t the time—not yet. You needed to get through this first. But Daryl wanted to show you how you did deserve to be treated, even as he dared not hope that he’d have the chance, that you’d feel the same thing for him that he felt for you. He wanted to protect you, take care of you. He wanted to show you how strong you actually were, even as he thought of how much you reminded him of that flower you’d brought him; vibrant, sweet, soft, delicate, but always climbing toward the light. And he was determined to help you see it.

[cafeinthemoon]

The Home I Crave - Chapter 4

Title: The Home I Crave

Genre: Fanfiction

Pairing: Tobirama Senju x reader

Rating: teen and up

Word count: 2938

Chapter: 4/?

Symbols: ⭕ | ➕ | 💛 | ▶️▶️

Read the previous chapter here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3

Though your future husband had his own residence separated from the Hokage’s, you weren’t sent there after being informed that you would stay in the village for the next days. Instead, you would be a guest in Hashirama’s house, and Mito would provide you the orientation you’d need in your new role.

The Uzumaki princess, with her vivid presence and smartness, helped you to find ways to fill your days with meaningful activities, so you wouldn’t see time passing until the wedding and wouldn’t have many chances to feel like a burden staying in the house of strange people counting on their assistance. You couldn’t entirely avoid this sensation, which led you to decline from small favors and treats that were offered to you from time to time; on the other hand, you found some relief once you realized that the manners showed by the Hokage’s wife during the reception were not mere formality: Mito’s interest in your well being was genuine, and she was not going to give up on making you as comfortable as possible under the current circumstances.

It was better this way, you thought. So you just let her be the friend she was willing to be.

In fact, Mito Uzumaki was an excellent friend: she would always answer your questions and doubts with honesty and objectivity and never hide when she didn’t have the information you needed; the things she asked about you were never embarrassing or invasive, and you always saw yourself willing to talk when she made you questions. You spoke to her about your life with your sisters, your training at your clan’s compound, your use of Doton and how it is a characteristic of your family since the oldest generations; Mito explained that her clan was specialized in sealing techniques the same way your were proficient in Earth Style, and when you asked her about them, she described the history and the creation of the most important among them.

During your time together, most of your conversations consisted in you two exchanging your experiences as shinobi, your families and your relationships with your friends. You discovered opinions and preferences in common despite the obvious differences in your personalities: while you had a tendency to live in your head if you were left alone and not speak your mind unless you were invited too, Mito was straightforward when it came to expressing her thoughts, though she was never rude while doing it; many times she took the initiative to start the conversations, and the mission of taking out your thoughts would almost always fall on her shoulders, no matter how many times she assured you that you were free to speak whenever you needed to.

One day, when this situation happened, she looked into your eyes and gave you an advise for which you would thank her later, when you’d be a married woman facing the challenges typical of your new condition:

- I am always encouraging you to not keep everything to yourself when you have the chance to talk, but maybe I’ve failed in explaining why I insist so much in this, y/n-san.

You blinked in surprise and curiosity.

- In this case, let me ask you your reasons for doing this, Mito-san.

- This can be good for you in any circumstance of your life, of course, but the main reason is that this is the most efficient way to communicate with Tobirama.

You clenched your hands to avoid the trembling that was about to reach them after you heard his name. It’s been a while since it was mentioned between you: you’d usually hear it when Hashirama came home and mentioned something concerning his work or a message sent by his brother. However, you always felt it differently whenever it was said by Mito.

You asked little about him since that conversation you had when you first met the Uzumaki woman. You didn’t like to think you were avoiding the topic, though your attitude would say that this was exactly what you were doing; the case was that you didn’t have so much to ask about him after everything she told you that day, and knowing that he was the brain behind the measures of the new alliance between your clans already said too much about the person he was: any other minor information you’d get would sound superfluous compared to that. Mito noticed your reluctance in this, and despite never asking about your reasons for it, she chose to respect it.

To speak the truth, you would only talk about Tobirama when you got in touch with something – a place, a circumstance, an idea – that, according to Mito, reminded of him in some way. There was a time when you were taking a walk at the shores of a river around the village and she commented that you were walking at one of his favorite places to fish and spend time alone after stressful days.

- If he suddenly disappears, it is almost certain that you will find him here – she smiled – But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to come here unannounced when he’s trying to get some rest. He’s too attached to his privacy.

You looked around and couldn’t judge him for this feeling: that was a beautiful, calm place; you wouldn’t appreciate being interrupted if you were there seeking for relief from the burdens of the day.

Episodes like this happened with some frequency, and you took the opportunities to enrich the image you were creating of him. Everything you discovered was interesting in their own way, though you weren’t still able to decide if your final opinion was good or not. Maybe it was something between the two – shinobi were always in the gray zone of the human moral compass. And when you remembered that you, as a kunoichi, were included in this account, you refrained yourself from pointing your finger at him.

However, there was a parameter that remained unconsidered to you among all the others, perhaps because of your lack of attention or the great amount of urgent preoccupations you already had, and about which you’d only come to think when you were directly led to it – Tobirama’s physical appearance.

After your experience with Hokage, you were aware that sometimes informations could be deceiving depending on their source and the person who received them. With all you’ve heard about him and considering what you thought of the arrangements led by him, it was possible that your betrothed’s looks were just like his personality: not the most pleasing one, and even scary at some point. But when you added the fact that he had a brother like Hashirama, well, maybe he was nothing like this. At some moment, you started to imagine that he could resemble his brother in some traits, or he was just like the men you saw working in the office during the meeting: all of them had a certain level of resemblance, something that made it possible for a stranger to identify them as members of the same clan, even if they were not blood relatives.

Whatever the truth, all you had was a just a vague idea, a second hand thought that you weren’t willing to turn into a concrete concept or to confirm with Mito: it was more interesting just to hear her talk about his actions and attitudes.

You would only change your mind when, thanks to an unexpected incident, you ended up finding a portrait of him.

You were still getting used to the structure of the Hokage’s house: though your own residence at your clan’s compound was large, formed by many rooms, the corridors were few, not enough to form the same intricate labyrinth of the building you were now. Still, you wouldn’t avoid walking through them without company in order to train your sense of direction, and thanks to the orientations you received from Mito regarding the rooms you had permission to enter, you weren’t afraid of invading the wrong place. But you would still  get confused if you entered the wrong corridor.

This is what happened that time, so that instead of reaching the living room you got into a narrow hall with a collection of photographs on the walls of both sides.

You recognized some of the landscapes in them from the path you and your group took when you arrived at Konoha’s territory: hills, rivers and the forest’s entry; some of the residences and farms were there too.

You also identified some of the people: there was a rectangular portrait of Hashirama Senju in what you understood to be his official clothing as the village’s governor; Mito Uzumaki appeared in another picture right beside it, surrounded by a group of men and women with their hair as red as hers and dressed in the same style, leading you to the conclusion that they were part of her family or were close friends; there were also pictures with some of the people you saw in the office beside those two.

The majority of the photos were of people you didn’t know but were certainly close to the ones you knew. There was a photograph of a middle aged man wearing a reddish armor; wrapped on his forehead there was a white stripe with the crest of the Senju. The man had his skin as tanned as Hashirama’s, and his hair was straight and dark just like his, though it wasn’t that long. Looking closer, you noticed the two shared similar face traits despite the lack of gentleness and freshness of the older man if compared to the younger one. There was no identification in the picture, but you thought that this man could be Hashirama’s father. If this was the case, they must haven’t had nothing in common besides the appearance.

Near this photograph, there were other, larger, with a group of children surrounding a woman, all of them wearing the Senju traditional clothing. One of the children, a boy with a bowl haircut, shared some resemblance with the man of the previous image: you looked at him for a moment and recognized Hashirama. The other children, all boys, and the woman were too different from him and between themselves, but there was something in them that told you they were relatives, so that if that was the Hokage’s mother, those boys should be his brothers. With this, your natural reaction was to wonder which of them could be Tobirama.

The first kid, close to Hashirama, had a scar on his cheek and brown hair; he was the one with the widest smile. The second, sitting right after him with a sweet look and some shyness in his manners, had white skin and a hair parted in two contrasting shades: white on the right side and dark brown on the left. The third boy, standing up beside the woman and separated from the others, was the one who most resembled her; he was staring at the camera with a serious, firm look. He had the same light skin tone of the second child, and his shaggy hair was of a shade similar to the lighter side of that boy’s hair as well; but the thing that caught your attention in this one was that pair of red eyes, just like the woman’s, with which he looked into the lens, to the photographer or to something beyond them. It wasn’t the look one would expect from a child.

Considering what Mito told you during the tea and what you thought of the arrangements, you were thinking that this kid had the highest probability of being…

- Oh.

Your voice escaped when you took a step ahead to observe the next photograph and found in it a figure entirely different from the ones you’ve saw until that moment.

The portrait was the same size as the one of the Hokage and it showed a young man in a blue armor, with his arms crossed, looking at the lens with the same perspicacity you sensed in the boy’s look. His armor was different from the one of the middle aged Senju who you supposed to be his father: around his shoulders there was a huge, white fur attached to his forearm protectors, all of them together creating the impression that his torso was larger than it really was; under the armor, he was wearing a black shirt that covered his neck and arms until his fists; he wasn’t wearing gloves. On his face, he had a gray happuri with the Leaf crest carved on its forehead.

The man had white, voluminous hair that would rebel against the steadiness of his general aspect, as a minor inconvenience that remained out of his control and to which he was already used; looking closer, you realized it wasn’t of a pure white, but of a slight shade of gray. His skin, only visible through his uncovered hands and face, was light, even pale if you compared him to other people who spent as much time under the sunlight as him certainly did as a warrior; was it a peculiarity of him or just the environment where the photo was taken? You had no way to tell. On his face, too, the light tone served as a white canvas for what you thought to be facial painting or tattoos: three red marks spreading over his chin and under his eyes as slits opened by a kunai; around his eyes, black, thin lines that would contour their natural form, already sharp, giving them the sensitivity of a hunter’s eyes.

Those eyes, you realized with astonishment, were as red as the eyes of the boy from the other photograph.

You went back to the children’s picture to observe his face with more attention, and didn’t need much time to notice the similarities between them. The mannerisms, the traits, the seriousness – they were the same person.

It was when you started to look for portraits of the other children and was unable to find anything except the one of Hashirama in the Hokage’s clothing. You already knew that the Senju head had lost his siblings to war, but just a few days ago you found out there was only one brother left for him. You looked at the blue armored man again…

- Finally I found you.

You startled, almost letting a scream out. When you turned, you found Mito smiling at you.

- If I was an enemy, you would be in trouble.

A glimmer in her eyes insinuated that she has been observing you for a while, waiting for you to notice her presence. You never cursed your lack of sensory abilities as much as in that moment.

- I… I am sorry for this – you apologized, looking at the photographs – I took the wrong corridor and ended up here. I wasn’t expecting to find these pictures, so…

You glanced behind, as if sensing the man’s image right over your shoulder. This didn’t escape Mito’s attention: she walked closer to its spot on the wall, looking in the eyes of the warrior. This gesture eliminated any remaining doubts about the identity of the man.

- You already guessed, didn’t you? – with her unaltered voice, she questioned you without taking her eyes off the picture.

You turned to the portrait too, facing his gaze again.

- This photograph was taken four or five years ago, but he remains the same – Mito continued – Not even a line of expression appeared on his forehead or in the corner of his eyes since then – and with a smile – The same goes to Hashi. Just another talent of the Senju.

You observed the portrait in silence, not interrupted by the princess: having familiarity with arranged marriages as much as you, she was aware of the time one needed to become accustomed with the looks of their betrothed under these circumstances.

You only spoke when you felt prepared to, and when you did, it was to point out that he looked even younger than you expected after all the things you discovered about him.

Mito laughed.

- I don’t blame you. If I didn’t know him or his brother and saw them together for the first time, I would certainly think that Hashirama is the younger one.

You laughed too; when your smile faded, you turned back to your contemplative expression. Now, the white collar and the aspect of his eyes just gave you an idea.

- I hope you don’t find it strange what I’m going to say, Mito-san, but he reminds me of a wolf.

Mito crossed her arms, looking at the picture; now that you were becoming used to her manners, you no longer found it weird to see her doing gestures like that while dressing in noble clothing.

- Nobody never said that about him before, at least not to me – she commented – But it makes sense, now that I’m looking at him.

You stood in silence for some time. You spent it training your eyes to get used to Tobirama’s sight, to the weight of his gaze, for you sensed that once you were together, you wouldn’t have such time. The funny thing was that, while you stood there, you didn’t notice how much time passed, only waking up when you heard Mito’s giggle beside you.

You turned, only to find her still contemplating her brother-in-law’s image.

- In his own way, he’s a beautiful man, isn’t he?

You sensed heat coming up your cheeks, mas didn’t refuse to reply.

- Yes. I dare say yes.

[alternateafterthought]

Arcane - Part 4

ARCANE

Ø  Meaning: Secret, Mysterious, Understood only by few. MAGIC

Ø  Pairing: Panther Hybrid Min Yoongi x Reader

Ø  Summary: Some secrets are kept for the good of people. Some secrets are kept for abuse or power. Yoongi had been a victim of abuse and power, and he wasn’t going to let anyone else use secrets for that purpose. So, when Y/N comes into his life with secrets, he doesn’t want to fall into that rabbit hole again. He doesn’t want to give all his trust to someone who will abuse their power over him. But maybe Y/N’s secrets are a good thing.

Ø  Genre: Hybrid!au, fluff, angst, eventual smut

Ø  Warnings: None

Ø  Word Count: 1380

Ø  A/N: Hey guys… here is the next part of my Min Yoongi fic!! So this is more of a filler part!! I’m currently writing the next part and it should be posted in the next week or so!! So, I really hope you guys love and support this fic like you did with GOLDEN TIME!! If you want to be added to a tag list, message me or leave a comment or ask!! Thank you so much!!

PREV / NEXT

As the elevator doors opened on the 28th floor, neither Y/N nor Yoongi could breath easily just yet. Y/N’s mother walked in front of them, expecting them to continue following her as she walked with a purpose. Her shoulders were straight, her head held high, the complete opposite to Yoongi who slumped as he walked, finding comfort in Y/N.

Y/N could practically feel the tension on Yoongi, making sure she was barely a half step in front of him. She allowed him to almost press his chest against her back as they walked, this wasn’t the most ideal situation to have a hybrid with an unfortunate past in. Y/N was prouder of the fact that Yoongi sort some form of comfort from Y/N instead of turning and running.

“Mother.” Y/N stopped, Yoongi running into her back, she was quick to help steady him in front of one of the doors. “Yoongi and I have to wait in my room.”

Y/N looked behind her, sneaking a look at Yoongi as she looked down the fairly illuminated hall they just walked down. Being as high up as they were, there was less around them, massive windows letting in natural light, only 8 rooms on this floor. Y/N was smart enough to have gotten a room for herself, even with an extra room for Yoongi, having thought ahead if she did in fact leave with a hybrid. Everything pretty, open, too perfect even with no shade.

“We can talk in your father and I’s room.” Y/N’s mother folded her hands in front of her again as she stared Y/N down.

“Yoongi and I have to wait for hotel staff to come and fix Yoongi’s room. I would like to be there in decision making for my hybrid.” Y/N felt one of Yoongi’s hands pull on her cardigan. “He is, of course, now my responsibility.”

“Y/N, this is not up for discussion. We will be talking no matter how much you try to prevent it.” Her mother’s tone sharp, definitive. “And your new pet will not stop that.”

Y/N was quick, subtle, in the way she held onto Yoongi’s hand behind her back. She could physically feel the growl building in Yoongi’s chest as he moved closer to Y/N, almost wanting to lash out. From the sounds passing through Yoongi and the way her mother paid absolutely no attention to him, like he wasn’t a threat, Y/N could only pray that nothing happened until they got back home.

“You may not like it, you may not agree with it, and you may not understand it,” Y/N rolled her shoulders, standing tall against her mother, showing no weakness like she was taught to do. “But Yoongi is not nor will he ever be a pet. He may be a hybrid, but he is also human, and you will show him the respect he deserves as a human who associates with your daughter.” There was so much Y/N could push under the rug, but disrespecting another person was where she drew the line. “Now, if you don’t mind, Yoongi and I need to get to our room,” She pointed over her mother’s shoulder to where her room was. “We can talk at dinner or tomorrow before we go home.”

“Very well.”

Y/N watched as her mother barely acknowledged Yoongi with a look and nodded at her daughter before they walked past her. Y/N made sure to walk a little faster, opening her door and allowing Yoongi to walk in before her. Looking back with a nod to her mother who continued to watch, Y/N finally closed the door, letting out a much-needed breath as she leaned against the door, closing her eyes.

Raising her hand, Y/N sat it against her chest, feeling the flutter of her heart. Taking a few more deep breaths before opening her eyes to see Yoongi watching her, he looked almost concerned. Shaking it off a little, Y/N stood taller before moving around Yoongi into the middle of the suite.

“We’re only staying the night, then we flying out tomorrow around lunch.” Y/N could see Yoongi wanted to ask something. “You won’t need a passport or anything to identify you.” Y/N moved forward, silently asking if she could take Yoongi’s leash off, with a nod she continued to talk. “With your documents I signed you only need my permission. When we get home, I can get you any identification you need.”

“So…” Yoongi only spoke when Y/N’s back was turned, setting the collar and leash next to her back on the couch. “Your mother, she doesn’t like hybrids, does she?”

“Funnily enough, she loves hybrids.” Y/N turned back to look at the disbelief on Yoongi’s face. “She’s not very openly emotional, her own parents weren’t people you would go to for emotional advice.”

“That’s something I could believe.” Yoongi seemed to tighten his hold on his backpack he still hadn’t taken off.

“She just… well you saw her with me,” Y/N pointed towards the door before looking back at him. “Why don’t you put your bag in your room? We can rest a bit and maybe have something to eat and then I was thinking we could maybe do some shopping for you?”

“What do you mean shopping?” Yoongi looked confused.

“Well I kinda don’t own guys clothes, and you need things for your room and stuff, right?” Y/N asked, walking him to his room for the night. “I mean I did some research before looking into this whole thing, and you’re a lot more sensitive to touch and taste and all that right?”

Yoongi nodded, looking around the room, letting his finger lightly touch the bed; “Yeah, hybrids are pretty sensitive to things.”

Hearing a knock on the door Y/N smiled at Yoongi; “That should be hotel staff bringing the hybrid friendly sheets and blankets for you, we’ll order something to eat after and then we can go shopping.”

With a nod from Yoongi, Y/N moved to the door and allowed the hotel staff entry to the suite. They politely bowed to Y/N, even greeted Yoongi before changing his bed sheets and making it all hybrid friendly for him. Ordering food was simple enough, Yoongi happily eating whatever Y/N ordered for him, even though she tried to ask him what he wanted. He was too embarrassed to admit he had never had, never so much as heard more then half the things she had offered to get him. He had simply allowed her to order for him, trusting her judgement, trusting her so quickly to meeting her.

He quite liked it, feeling so comfortable and safe with Y/N so quickly. She may hide things from him, but what human or hybrid doesn’t hide something away from the other. Yet, none of that mattered. Not to Yoongi. Not when Y/N so willingly put herself in front of her own mother to make sure he was respected, to make sure he was comfortable and giving him something as simple as a hybrid friendly bed to sleep on.

That bed would be the best thing he ever lay his head on and he wished the others could have come with him. As he sat on the edge of his bed, he had pulled out the photo the boys had given him before he left, all 7 of them happily smiling at the camera. He wished they could have seen this, see him here, see just how amazing Y/N was, even after only knowing her for a few hours. He hopes that it doesn’t change, he couldn’t afford another heartbreak like that.

“Yoongi?” Y/N knocked on the door before poking her head in. “I’m ready if you are.”

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

Yoongi had long hoped that his life had stayed the same, living the rest of his life in that shelter. He had never thought that a beautiful, kind, caring girl would ever come into his life the way Y/N had. She was, as it were, someone he could actually get attached to, someone he could trust.

As he followed her out of their hotel room, a peaceful smile on her face, Yoongi was in trouble of really trusting her. He just hoped she could trust him, that she would never let him go.

Tag List

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[coreastories]

The Thirteenth Rule

Tae-eul was given an epiphany. Twice. 

That’s why she makes a decision-- destination be damned. 

Companion to Three Hours for Chicken and Seo-ryeong vs Lady Noh

Chapter 5 of Days and Nights of Forever

April 2020: Tae-eul was a detective. Her training had taught her three hundred sixty vision, spreading her logic and hypotheses far and wide in all directions to try to predict and identify the motivations and ripples of a crime and a suspect trying not to get caught, or trying to weasel away. 

In the normal, non-criminal side of life, it meant she stopped her dad from wasting money on excess groceries, and got Eun-sup out of trouble before he even landed himself in it. She collected evidence and knew how to gather intelligence with or without informants. 

So when she was stabbed in the stomach, her detective’s brain went on a three-sixty degree identification of all threats, conscious and subconscious. 

“Is there-- Is there any way you could tell if I’m pregnant even if it’s too early?”

The doctor and nurses clutched around her in the ER looked stricken. They all stopped what they were doing. Tae-eul tried not to sob or hurl-- she didn’t know which one was making her stomach churn and her throat tight. Luna had stabbed her and that was… it was too horrifying to think of if she was...  

“How early?” the doctor asked, squeezing Tae-eul’s arm as if she knew Tae-eul needed the touch to ground her in the present. “How many days has it been since your period should have come?”

“Um, I think-- I think ten days--two weeks--” 

“All right. We’ll check.” The doctor turned to someone. “Run to the lab. Add the test to her vial. Prioritize it so we know what to do.” She turned back to Tae-eul. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you in the meantime as if you’re pregnant.” 

Tae-eul tried to stay awake, tried to wait to find out, but her detective’s brain had done its job and shut down. 

She woke up in her private room. Everything rushed back-- there was no pause, no blinking into consciousness, only instant, real fear which she didn’t even understand. Her heart rate sped up. She looked at the tube curled and attached on the back of her wrist, followed the line to the bags on the stand. What was in those bags? Was she--

“Hi Lieutenant Jeong. It’s me. I’m Dr Bong.” Tae-eul turned at the voice and recognized the kind intern or resident who had treated her in the ER. “You’re all right. Thankfully, there was no major trauma, and you avoided a laceration on your liver by two centimeters.” 

The intern paused and smiled hesitantly. “You are not-- were not-- pregnant.” 

Just like that, Tae-eul could breathe again. The doctor seemed to understand. She reached out to pat Tae-eul’s hand. “You’ll be fine. You’re on antibiotics and opioids for the pain.”

Tae-eul wiped the tears she didn’t even realize had tracked down her cheeks. “Gomapseumnida.” 

The doctor nodded, smiling. “If you’re hungry, you can eat. We’ll bring you food in a little while.”

Tae-eul thanked the doctor again and turned her head to look out the window. She tentatively felt her side-- stiff with thick bandages. There was a sore, tender feeling deep beneath the skin, nothing like the pain she’d felt when she was stabbed, but still painful even if it was currently a dull pain. 

Not pregnant. Was not pregnant. Good. That was really good. She had plans for Luna, and Tae-eul was relieved she didn’t have to kill Luna, because she would have if Luna had-- 

It would be ridiculous to-- she sighed, swallowed, and tried to stop her lips from trembling. It was ridiculous to want, to love a-- 

She didn’t even know where Gon was. 

She didn’t know where Gon was. 

That was exactly the reason the possibility of being pregnant had both terrified and comforted her. 

If she never saw him again, she wouldn’t be alone, wouldn’t really be without him, if she had a-- 

She couldn’t even mention it in her head. 

She sighed. She swiped at her eyes and appreciated that the hospital people had placed her phone within easy reach. She dialed. 

“Hyeong-nim. Where are you? I need you to find the other me. Luna. I’m fine, I’m good. Okay. Good. I’ll come.” 

Tae-eul was glad for her detective’s brain anyway. It can compartmentalize. First, get out of bed. Then, get Luna. 

And if Gon came back to her, she wasn’t letting him go. 

--------------------------------------

June 2020: 

She very vividly remembered the weekend she had called their life a melodrama. 

It was one of those May days that made you sure of summer. It wasn’t wet, and it wasn’t cold. 

That was also the first time they were sent to present-day Corea-- since the reset anyway. 

That was also the time Gon told her about Kang Shin-jae, the real Kang Shin-jae in the Republic. She’d cried. She had missed him. The Shin-jae she’d known became Kang Hyeon-min of the kingdom and she remembered and missed him.  

That May night in 2020, Gon told her that he had met Kang Shin-jae, had actually changed Shin-jae’s life by delaying his walk to that deadly curve in the street. And then Gon had later seen him, a chaebol heir with all the trimmings, bowing underlings and chauffeured luxury vehicle. So that was what his life was meant to be. She had embraced Gon in tears and was truly glad the manpasikjeok also made that right. 

“I think that’s the last time we went to the past,” Gon had said, smiling ruefully at her tears. 

“No, no, we went to 2016, too. I think that’s the last.” 

“Oh, you’re right. But that was a bust, wasn’t it? We didn’t do much. Well, we did a little.”

She’d giggled while swatting at his hand, which had burrowed under her pajama top to stroke her back earlier while she cried, and now started wandering. 

They’d arrived at the kingdom of 2016 and they had stayed in his study, with Gon distractedly signing off on the various petitions on his desk. She had protested at how careless he was being, but he showed her they were harmless, miscellaneous documents that really only needed the king’s signature, referrals and recommendations and certificates of merit. 

And then, back on that night in May 2020 while recalling their trip to 2016, Gon had stopped moving and stared at her. “I suddenly remember one of the papers I signed. Unless I’m mistaken, I think I signed Koo Seo-gyeong’s recommendation to the Interpol.” 

“Really?”  

Gon looked incredulous, amazed. “I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye now, but it didn’t register with me at the time. You were distracting. You laid down on that chaise by the fire and I wanted to get to you.” He grinned at her unimpressed expression. “Is that what we were meant to do that time? Because I usually don’t sign those documents. I just grabbed random stacks of papers from Secretary Mo’s office for something to pretend to do in the study.” 

“What do you mean you don’t sign them? So those people who need your signature usually go without?”

“We have stamps. Secretary Mo’s staff just use stamps. Those papers don’t even go to me. I’m not really needed..” 

“Ahh.” Tae-eul smiled. “Well, don’t be too full of yourself. I’m sure your signature didn’t matter much. Seo-gyeong is too cool not to get into Interpol.” 

Gon grinned. “You know what else? Kang Hyeon-min followed her there.” 

“Wow. They make a cute couple.” 

And Gon had made an unimpressed face that made her laugh and tickle him with her own hands under his pajamas.  

So that May weekend was memorable for her. It was full of revelations. 

It was also the last time she had her period. It was June now. She should have had her period over a week ago. The only time she was late, it was understandable because she’d been running on high levels of anxiety. 

Otherwise, her cycle had always run like clockwork. She’d been feeling some tenderness so she thought her period might come today. She had just come into Gon’s bathroom to check again. She looked down at her clean underwear. Nothing. 

Maybe tomorrow. 

She left the bathroom lost in thought. She didn’t register the childish chatter she could hear so she gasped when she rounded the corner and something collided with her knees. 

“Noona!” 

“Look who’s here,” Gon said belatedly. 

Tae-eul chuckled and went down on her knees so she could hug little Woo-jin at his level. He was at that age when he didn’t appreciate being scooped up any more-- except when he wanted airplane rides and piggy backs. 

“Are we kidnapping you again?” Tae-eul asked, pinching those cheeks. Woo-jin laughed. It was an inside joke between the three of them, kidnapping Secretary Mo’s son and escaping from the palace. 

“Yes, yes! Let’s go kidnapping! Let’s go bounce!” 

Tae-eul looked up at Gon, laughing. “Did he just use slang with me?” 

Gon knelt down beside her, grinning. “He means Vaunce. It’s a trampoline park. You want to go?” 

Tae-eul looked between them, and Gon imitated Woo-jin’s pouty-pleading face. She couldn’t help laughing. “Let’s go bounce then!” 

Gon changed into his incognito outfit. T-shirt, light denim jacket, jeans. He also washed his hair to remove the mousse and let his hair dry just lying naturally on his head. 

Then he changed Woo-jin into a similar outfit. Secretary Mo liked dressing her son like a little prep school boy, and in previous kidnappings, he and Tae-eul had to buy Woo-jin clothes he could play in. 

Tae-eul had changed too. Her detective outfit-- her usual shirt, vest, jacket and boxy jeans combo-- didn’t fit a trampoline park, so she picked skinny jeans and a pullover she wouldn’t have to keep hold of if she decided to go all out on a trampoline. 

“Right, Yeong says the getaway car’s on its way to pick us... up--” Gon trailed off, looking from Woo-jin to her, and smiled that boyish smile she loved. “You look nice.” 

She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe we should cut your hair.” 

Gon looked exasperated. He picked up Woo-jin. “There. See? Here’s my disguise.” 

Woo-jin giggled. 

They were off, and Tae-eul tried not to be nervous. Being out in the open in present-day Corea made her feel exposed. But thankfully Gon’s disguise worked. The first time it worked they were so stunned they laughed for three minutes straight, disbelieving that it was that easy. 

It was ridiculous but it was effective. Sans bodyguards and trademark hair and long coats, and with Woo-jin in his arms, Gon didn’t look like the king. No one expected it would be the king. They had gone about their day in Busan without anyone making a fuss. 

Or Coreans were simply not too nosy about other families. 

That made her stomach flutter. She knew how they looked. Gon knew how they looked. Woo-jin even called them Omma and Appa in these kidnappings, so they wouldn’t be “caught by the police.” It was part of their inside joke. 

Gon smiled at her in that happy, satisfied way, tucking her against his side with his other arm while holding Woo-jin in the other as they walked from the car-- an ordinary car he drove himself-- to the park. 

Then they were inside and Tae-eul laid a hand on Gon’s arm when he was buying the tickets. 

“What is it?” he asked.

The smell of rubber and disinfectant spray, the noise from the kids, and the colorful interior of the indoor park all churned inside her head, making her chest pound, because a single thought stood out starkly like a big monument amid the swirl of color and sound. 

“Omma--” 

Woo-jin’s voice-- and what he said-- brought Tae-eul back. Her heart was still racing. 

“What is it?” Gon asked again, looking concerned now. “Are you alright? Do you want Viewing Only?” 

Tae-eul shook her head, as much to clear it as to answer Gon. “Of course not. I’m fine. Sorry. Go ahead. Let’s bounce!” 

There was no way she wouldn’t be okay bouncing on a trampoline park. Even if-- even if she were-- it was too early, and she knew women did so much more and they were fine. 

God. 

-----------------------

Gon turned down the blankets for her and then immediately caged her with his arms and legs, maneuvering her to face him with her head pillowed on his upper arm.   

“What’s wrong? You’ve been distracted all day.” He stroked her hair and cupped her cheek, fingers gently stroking her ear.

Tae-eul stared into those eyes, looked at that face, sank further into his arms, and forgot why she was scared in the first place. 

“I need to take a pregnancy test.” 

She watched his face and loved what she saw there. The movement of his eyes and cheeks and lips made her heart speed up and she felt like she’d been jumping on trampolines again. He was surprised. He was stunned. He wasn’t unhappy. He opened his mouth but nothing came out at first. Tae-eul waited. 

“Are you-- do you-- how do you feel?” 

And Tae-eul fell more deeply in love with him than ever. In her head, she’d imagined him saying or asking so many other things, his scientific brain demanding facts, but no, the first thing he asked was how she felt about this. 

She wrapped her arms around his waist and snuggled her face against his chest, kissing him there through his pajama top. 

When she spoke, everything she’d been holding back all day spilled out. The one big thought that had haunted her all day, until now. “I didn’t want to go on the trampolines-- I just suddenly realized it when we were getting tickets. It suddenly terrified me if it might hurt the-- but lots of women do much more while they don’t know they’re-- and I’m still okay and--”

His arms tightened around her. She felt the shudder that ran through him. She stroked his back to soothe him and he mirrored the action, and kissed her hair. 

She knew he understood. That was how she felt about this. She didn’t even know yet if she was really-- but she was already terrified about hurting it. 

That was all that mattered, that was the important thing, that she hadn’t hurt it. 

Everything else-- the fact that they lived in different worlds-- it was all inconsequential. 

“We’ll go first thing tomorrow,” he said, his voice a little gravelly. 

She nodded against him, and they fell asleep like that, after what felt like hours of just quietly holding each other. 

--------------------------------

They went to a clinic in the republic. He helped her look for a specialty clinic with its own lab, so they wouldn’t have to wait days for the results. He was adamant that they didn’t go to an outright hospital with an OB-gyne department, because she would have been unnecessarily “exposed to something.” 

The OB was a cute woman with a bob. Tae-eul liked her immediately. She explained the options to Tae-eul, and Tae-eul chose the blood test without waiting for the doctor to finish explaining the vaginal sono. 

The doctor laughed but said she understood. No point having to go through that when Tae-eul hadn’t even taken a home PT. She wanted the blood test to give her a definite answer. So Tae-eul peed in a cup and her blood was taken and that was it.

They did have to wait two hours so they could have the results of the urine and blood test together. They went to a cafe and sat in a booth tucked away near the back. 

“Let’s not get our hopes up.” 

He grinned and took her hands, just wrapping his fingers over hers around her mug of hot chocolate. “So you hope for it, too, do you?”

She shook her head at him and tried to stay rational. “We’re careful. The chances are point zero zero three percent.”

“I’ll take those chances. We’ve always been exceptional.”

Tae-eul just looked at him sardonically. He laughed. 

They ordered food and ate, talking about everything else but what they were waiting for. 

They both knew they couldn’t discuss anything yet until they knew. 

And Tae-eul was glad about having him this time, anchoring her, being the giddy one so she could be the calm one, and she was able to eat just fine, all her nerves calm and steady because he was there with her and everything would be just fine. 

That she wasn’t pregnant was an anticlimax she didn’t know what to do with. 

They’d thanked the doctor and she had smiled at them. “Keep trying! It won’t take long. I hope to see you again and give you the good news.” 

They got in the car and just sat there for a few moments, with Gon looking at her and her looking at her hands in her lap. 

“Tae-eul?” 

She looked at him and smiled. “Let’s go back to the bamboo forest.” 

He seemed to understand--he always did-- and started the car without pressing her further. 

Tae-eul leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes, meditating on what she’d just discovered about herself, and what it meant for them. 

The rest of the drive to the bamboo grove, they stayed silent. At some point, Gon reached for her hand and brought their hands up to stroke her cheek for a moment. 

“Saranghae.” 

She enclosed his hand with both of hers, resting their hands on the center console and turning to him a little without opening her eyes. She smiled. “Nado.” 

When they sat on a bench in the bamboo grove, Tae-eul was resolved. 

Since she met him she’d had to take several leaps of faith and he had always proven worth it, everything about him was real, true, pure-- well, not pure, because she’d seen him kill and purity wasn’t important anyway-- and he was home to her. He was her home and they were both living and loving this strange and wonderful fate but she was ready if that fate meant so much more. 

She wanted so much more. 

She’d been through this twice now and both times had shown her what she wanted, what her heart absolutely ached for each time it happened. 

She looked at him and she didn’t have to tell him to look at her because he already was, peering at her face, looking worried. She smiled and smoothed her thumb on his forehead. 

“Don’t look like that. I’m fine.” 

“Are you sure?” 

She nodded. She took a deep breath. She placed both hands on his shoulders, then slid them up and cradled his cheeks, squishing them and making him grin before moving her hands to that jawline she loved so much. 

“Lee Gon. Here’s the thirteenth rule. If we ever get married, I’ll stop being on birth control and let’s just see where that takes us. Are you alright with that?”

He blinked at her and in a matter of two blinks his eyes sparkled with unshed tears. She smiled and felt tears run down her own cheeks. He wiped them and then just held her cheeks, too. They probably looked ridiculous to passersby but she didn’t care. 

“Well,” he said, then exhaled and took a deep breath. He slid his arms around her and held her tightly. “Well, I always follow your rules, don’t I?”  

[whatwouldmindykdo]

I wrote a little something about coming to terms with my sexuality and thought I’d share it here...

For as long as I can remember I’ve dreamt of my wedding day. As soon as I was able to comprehend the concept of wedding and marriage it became my only goal, my ultimate achievement: I wanted, I needed to get married. This would make me successful and prove my worthiness. I would be happy forever. And so, for years, I’d spend hours imagining the magical day: the dress, of course, and its designer, the venue, the guests, the music, the menu, the bridal party, the decor. And of course, the groom. Because it was always a groom. However, I would find it extremely difficult to imagine him. I could think of qualities I would look for in a partner, but that was it. Looking back now, I think that, more than any of these things, what I dreamt of was being loved and being in love. I was just hoping to find the kind of unconditional love I grew up surrounded by. Not a person but a feeling. An ideal. 

I grew up in what you would probably call a liberal family. My parents are very open-minded, left-wing voters and I grew up having political debates at the dinner table. But it was always about tolerance. Every love is love, they would say. Everyone deserves to be happy, they would say.

This, however, was not true for them growing up. Both my parents grew up in working class families and worked their way into the middle class. As liberal as my parents are, their own parents were rather conservative in thought. 

My father’s parents had grown up on farms. Their own parents, my great-grandparents, lived a life I cannot even begin to comprehend. After the Second World War, as life was changing everywhere, and especially in the countryside, my grandparents left for the city (well, a city, not THE city) to work in factories. They were deeply religious and my father was raised a Catholic. However, he also enjoyed great freedom. He was free to come and go, almost as he wished, to play with his brother and friends. He was free not to work in school, drop out after middle school and go on to work with his father. Which he did, for a while, until he realized he didn’t want to do that his entire life. In other words, he was free to fail, and try again. Would it had been the same thing had he been a girl? We will never know, as he was one of two boys. 

My mother, on the other hand, was not. Her grandparents had been mining workers, as almost everyone in the area. Her own parents had been saved from this life, and pushed to look for work in other industries. They had married young and my mother was the eldest of two. Her parents were heavily involved in political and union movements, pushing for workers’ rights. This gave her an awareness of the political situation and an ideal of what is achievable when you work for it. My mother, however, is also a woman. And as such, her parents expected her to behave a certain way. 

She was expected to be the perfect little girl. Calm, pretty, smiling. Not to take too much space. Do well in school. Be polite. And so my mother tried her best to be this ideal girl. She excelled in school, practiced many sports, and took it upon herself to keep the family together and happy. She eventually went on to work and had to move out to another city, but always close to family as she was sharing an apartment with her aunt. When she found another job closer to her parents, she moved back home. Eventually, she met my father. They dated for a couple of years, but moving in together was unfathomable. Not before marriage. And that’s how my parents ended up married without having ever lived together, something I honestly find quite hard to imagine. Her brother, on the other hand, lived a life closer to my dad’s. He could not roam the streets or drop out of school but he did leave high school without graduating, moving out to work away and never looked back. He introduced many girlfriends to his parents before eventually having a child and getting married, in that order. 

My parents would probably tell you that they raised me and my brother the same way. That not more was expected of me. That I could do the exact same thing he did. And to some extent that is true. We were both expected to excel in school. To be polite and respectful. We were both told we could dream of being whoever we wanted to be. But what had been instilled to my mother was also, somehow, perhaps more sneakily, taught to me. I also had to be the perfect little girl, no excuses. The one that doesn’t move. The one that doesn’t scream or make a scene. The one that helps at home. As Michelle Cliff says in Notes on Speechlessness, ‘I am reminded that a great compliment of my childhood was: ‘she’s such a quiet girl’’.

Instead of rebelling against this system I made it mine: it was my way of taking up space. My way of being remarkable. I was expected to excel at school: I was top of the class. I was expected to be calm and discreet: I would literally never speak. Even today it takes a lot for me to be able to do things I know my parents disapprove. Because I have built myself through others’ approval, and then who am I once they don’t approve? 

What does that have to do with being a lesbian, you may wonder. See, I knew about lesbians. I knew about gays. It was not entirely unknown to me. I saw them on the news, we talked about them at home. But no one in my family was gay, lesbian or part of the LGBTQI+ community, at least not openly. That was not what we did. As much as my family rebelled against capitalistic society, we were expected to conform in certain areas, and this was one. We, as a family, are heterosexuals. And so I unconsciously associated being a good girl to being heterosexual. 

I don’t remember the first time I heard of the LGBTQI+ community, nor do I remember the first time I had a crush on a girl. I am quite sure she was my primary school best friend. I very clearly remember wondering whether I was in love with her or whether that was just how you felt for your best friend (hint: I kinda knew the answer). And so, little me moved on with life. Eventually the feeling wore out, and there was a very intense and dramatic fall out. But that was it, no more questions about my sexuality. Not until I was well into my teenage years, at least. When I made it to university I had began what I would call my transformative journey, learning extensively about feminism, inclusivity and human rights. I was passionate about these subjects and wanted to learn more, and more. I surrounded myself with people who were open-minded, teaching me about these very topics, and, for some of them, part of the LGBTQI+ community. At about this time I began identifying as pansexual or bisexual. I have never been really sure about this. There was no major coming out though. I just stated here and there that I thought love was about a person and their soul, not their gender. Even though I was identifying as pansexual / bisexual, the doubt never really left. I felt ill-at-ease with the identification. Maybe I’m not into labels, I’d think. Maybe. 

Deep down, I knew. I think I’d always known. I would get major crushes on women in films and TV shows. Maybe that’s just identification. I could hardly imagine being in a relationship with a man. Maybe I just haven’t met THE one. I would feel uncomfortable whenever a man flirted with me. Maybe I’m just not into him. 

I just couldn’t imagine being a lesbian. And that’s not to say that I could fathom the very existence of lesbians. I knew they existed, I had a friend as they say. I truly believed that all love is love. What I couldn’t accept was that I was a lesbian. How could I not like men? Good girls like men. Good girls are straight. Good girls get married TO A MAN, and have children WITH A MAN. No way. I must be pansexual. Or bisexual. Not lesbian. 

Funnily enough, the pandemic was a big transitional time for me. I was able to truly connect with myself. Away from the world and the mundanities of everyday life, focusing on what really matters for the first time, I came to a realization. I do not like men. I do not find pleasure in imagining a relationship with a man. This realization was validated by experience. I signed up on a dating app (what??? I know, don’t judge). My immediate reaction was to set up my preferences to women  only (that should have been another hint right?!). However, almost immediately I changed those preferences to everyone (men and women). Why? Because, I thought, by excluding men I might miss out on the one (he’s always somewhere). What if I miss on the opportunity of happily ever after because I renounce to dating half of humanity? And oh boy did I regret that. I was instantly contacted by half the male population of my surroundings (the joys of being on a dating app) and it really felt like it was not for me. I was feeling miserable rather than happy, anxious rather than excited. I switched back to women only and I have felt safer and more myself ever since. 

I guess you could say that I have been feeling rather at peace with who I am. I have come out to a few (selected) friends, in the least dramatic way possible (well, they also are the least dramatic women I know). There remains the question, however, of coming out to family. Because although I have come to term with being a lesbian, I am still scared AF when it comes to coming out to my family and the main reason is: what if I am not lesbian after all (eye roll emoji)? The real reason, though, is that I know that as open-minded as my parents are, a coming out also means a period of adaptation, of understanding what it means exactly. And for someone like me who hates both confrontation and disappointing this feels like a big deal. Selfishly, I wish someone had been there before in my family. That I would not be the first. The trailblazer. The odd one out. The lesbian aunt. But then, I think of my little cousins. And how I could be that person for them. If I allow myself past the fear. 

Thing is, I also truly believe that I will not be able to be fully happy until I come out. I will not be truly happy until I can be who I am fully, knowing that the people who accept it are the ones who love me, for real. But what if that means losing my grandfather? What if it means that people will literally never stop talking about it? 

As much as I have talked about the hardships of coming out and coming to terms with my sexuality, I will also mention that coming to terms with this reality has been a huge relief. It has opened me to a world where love and inclusion are legion. A world where you are accepted for who you truly are. It has given me role models, values and a political awareness that I probably would not have had otherwise. In other words, being lesbian is a blessing because it is who I am, fully. And when I get to be this person, I can finally start to breathe. I can finally start to live. 

My problem lies with mainstream culture and the way it portrays lesbian relationships. I have grown up with the ability of seeing gay couples loving each other, hating each other, flirting, breaking up. Mainstream media and popular culture have very much romanticized gay relationships. What of lesbian relationships then? The reality is completely different. And how could it not be when Instagram still censored the ‘lesbians’ hashtag two weeks ago? When we only have The L Word as a reference? Where on TV and in films have lesbians been given the space and time to actually develop a relationship except in that show? And I’m not even talking about the perfect, happy relationship. Just any relationship. More than 3 minutes of screen time. You’ll have to agree that this is rather recent. 

How different would my life have been if I had seen lesbian couples on TV? How different would my life have been if people had not shied away from lesbian relationships? It is time for pop culture to be inclusive of our people. Little girls need this representation. They need to know that this kind of love exists, is normal, and brings fulfillment. I wish this had been my reality so that I wouldn’t have been mad when Casey from Atypical dumps her boyfriend to explore her relationship with Izzie. Because then perhaps I wouldn’t have been mad at her for doing that. I wouldn’t have been mad at Izzie for being honest. Because that is how deeply rooted my fear of being a lesbian was: I was mad at these two women for having the courage to explore their feelings and be true to themselves, when Casey could have had the perfect ending with Evan. And that is not ok. I need to let go of the idea that the perfect life means being in a heterosexual relationship. Because I know that this is not for me. This will not bring me fulfillment. 

[theskyexists]

She-Ra Worldbuilding nitpicks

I still think that they could have done better at revealing that the First Ones were imperial colonisers - the people who took magic away from the planet to create a weapon for their wars at the cost of its life force - not the ones who made the use of magic possible in the first place. This should have been a shocking moment of reveal - it should have been straight up articulated even - in full (not the part articulation like what Castaspella said about magic by the end). Instead it was like a long process of parsing out hints about Mara turning against something or someone and the Sword not defining she-ra and the Heart turning out to be a weapon and Prime calling First Ones tyrants and Melog’s planet suffering from magic extraction and at the very end some throwaway stuff about Mara being part of a rebel group against her First Ones superiors because that still didn’t give a whole picture. Normally I like a slow reveal but the problem is that it never became fully clear.

This ties in with the lack of clarity on the other princesses - if she-ra always had been a part of the magical ecosystem of the planet but was co-opted, then is the same true for the princesses? For that matter, they never make a clear distinction between princesses who are part of that ecosystem because they are bonded to their gemstone and ‘princesses’ who only carry that title. Worse, Glimmer and Scorpia imply that their magic powers come from the connections with their gemstones, but the only gemstones we know of are Frosta’s (fractal flake), Scorpia’s (black garnet), Perfuma’s (heart blossom), Mermista’s (pearl) and Glimmer’s (moonstone) as depicted below. However, Nettossa and Spinerella are also called princesses and seem to possess inherent and typified (and just as strong as the others’, it turned out in the last season) forms of magic. This follows the template of princess magic - but they’re not part of the ecosystem? and they don’t seem to have a gemstone. Meanwhile Entrapta is also called a princess, for no other reason than that....? She has a kingdom the size of her castle? and Huntara is called a princess of the waste because... she became the boss there. That last bit makes sense to me, as the title of ‘princess’ could simply have come to mean a ruler with some kind of power. But how do Nettossa and Spinerella fit in here? Do they have gemstones after all and were these simply not co-opted by the First Ones into the weaponisation system? That feels very messy and could easily have been clarified. What purpose did the Princesses and the gemstones serve before the First Ones co-opted them? (assuming they weren’t created by the First Ones?)

I make this point because I feel like a closer look at the princesses would have improved the reveal of the First Ones being imperial colonisers.

On top of that, Glimmer makes the point to Light Hope that the First Ones came to her people’s planet and used the magic. But all of the more regular people of Etheria have animalistic or vegetal aspects - while most of the main characters seem more purely ‘human’ (First One-like, going by Adora’s appearance). It looks like First Ones communities got absorbed into Etheria’s population when the planet was thrown into despondos, and they lost contact with their intergalactic empire. Glimmer sure seems like a First Ones descendent - via Micah. This would have been very interesting to explore in my opinion.... But it’s another example of them failing to make (what would have been really interesting) distinctions between Etheria before First Ones intervention and after. I would have loved it if Light-Hope had told Glimmer that actually, she also has First Ones genes, so what does she mean her people? For that matter, why are all the princesses so humanoid? Only Scorpia is particularly animalistic. Did the First Ones replace the original princesses with their own people? This is implied to have been done to She-Ra - that they had a way of steering the magical process (via the sword) so they could choose the person to be imbued with that power. It is also implied that this system could only work for the pure gene print of a First One...as Light-Hope had to teleport her to Etheria from across the dimensions.

The First Ones and their botched legacy became fused to Etheria and its peoples. And they show us this - they trick the audience with it. The show explicitly made it seem like the First Ones tech was the magic - the tech was presented as the same magic that she-ra and princesses used (most obviously in the Sword and Light-Hope’s crystal palace magical mentor schtick). We were taught to recognise it as such. Which was set up in contrast to the Horde as the corruptive and destructive ‘technological’ influence. Which was brilliant. But there wasn’t much foreshadowing to signal that the Whispering Woods were in fact only a sleeping remnant of what magic once had been - and that this transformation had long since occurred. There was never a moment in which it all comes together and the First Ones are shown in full for what they truly are: not the great magical ancestors of old but an empire of invaders who violated the planet thoroughly.This moment would have fit very well through the eyes of Adora  - BEING First One, and then having to deal with realising that the people she has been wanting to identify with the whole time - did something so awful to her home. I really felt that was missing - and only an implied off-screen development when she denied Prime‘s identification of her with the First Ones. If the show had gone into the mythologies of the princesses (instead of only she-ra���s) then this might have given us clues to what their original purposes were - and how their connections with their gemstones - and the magic of the land and sea and sky and elements had become degraded over time. First - this might imply the Horde as the industrial mechanised evil force that damages the world - but clues could have been hidden to imply a scale of time that pre-dated the Etherian Horde.

But the show refused to take a look at the princesses’ families or history because it would have to deal with its strange decision not to give a single princess but Glimmer parents or family. Even when Scorpia goes into her family tree murals, she does not explain what happened, why her mums (it seems) are gone. There is a tiny implication that a member of the family betrayed the Horde and possibly got them all killed? It is not elaborated on, even though it would have given Scorpia some more easy depth. Frosta is a tiny child, but she rules alone. Mermista and Perfuma cannot be older than 25. Did they all lose their parents to the Horde?? Is this ever stated?? I don’t think so. The princesses in their initial refusal to join the Rebellion, do not mention the loss of their parents to the previous rebellion as a reason. Which I think was a decision made to keep Glimmer’s story unique, and the first seasons more light-hearted, but I think was an gigantic missed opportunity and also a huge ?????? regarding the personal lives of these princesses and the social structures common in Etheria.

Other nitpicks:

You see the same lack of clarity on the stakes regarding the Heart of Etheria. First, the Heart of Etheria weapon would destroy Etheria because of its volatility. Then, Adora makes an assumption that it will destroy ‘all the stars’ that have newly appeared in the sky. Don’t know why. Maybe because it was still set to launch at ancient First Ones enemies that no longer exist? Then Glimmer makes the assumption that it will simply destroy the whole universe. And Prime is fine with that (??). Then they go back on that and Bow assumes that Prime can direct it and use it to control worlds. Then Prime says whatever, I guess I WILL destroy the universe with it. ??? It’s a bit strange...

Then one other thing: Hordak’s imp. Where did that lil failed clone dude go???

[ariainstars]

Sorry, But I Don’t Support Minorities (Any More)

For a start: I will not use inclusive language in this text. (I usually don’t, only in this case I want to make sure it’s known from the start.)

Secondly, if you identify as trans or non-binary and / or are a huge Harry Potter fan, I am warning you: don’t read this.

If you do want to hear me out, be respectful in your comments or hold them back altogether. I won’t tolerate bullying merely because I am expressing my own opinion. Though the topic touches a sore spot in me, too, I will be as objective as I can.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am not and never was a fan of J.K. Rowling and her works. I found the Harry Potter hype strongly exaggerated, the books mildly unoriginal and biased, the films ok until they became so overloaded with derivation from other sources (dragons, elves, magic wands, brooms, unicorns, centaurs, phoenixes, basilisks, flying horses - stories like Star Trek or Star Wars at least have their own world-building) and later so dark that they were no fun anymore. In my opinion an average writer was lucky because she tapped into a trend and was at the right place and right time with her stories. I daresay years from now many fans will wonder why they liked these stories so much and realize that they just jumped on a train, having been too young and naïve to question it.

I don’t own any of Rowling’s books or DVDs or merchandise and I never have been part of the fandom. So, I come from a different corner when I say that I have my own attitude about the current shitstorm regarding J.K. Rowling now being coded as “transphobic”. This is due to personal reasons of my own.

  1. The Discussion Can Add Confusion

Rowling stated that in her youth she had problems with her own identity due to her father having wanted her to be a boy. I can understand that because I went through a long period in my late teens and early twens where I had difficulties identifying with the sex I was born with. At times I also felt physically attracted to females. In my case, it turned out to merely be a phase: I am an average cis woman. I can understand that for some people, such doubts may turn out to be more than a phase. But I know what Rowling refers to because I have been there. And I am grateful that there was no gender discussion when I was young because it would have confused me even more than I actually was, and I already had more than enough other problems. I was and I am a “common” woman, but there was a time in my life when I did not like it very much. That time was bad enough, combined as it was with other aspects in my life I had to come to terms with, which at times almost drove me to despair to the point where I contemplated suicide. So, I am glad that in my time being gay / straight / trans / cis / non-binary or other was not such an issue, at least not where I grew up. With my confusion and disorientation, well-meaning people might have taken the opportunity to encourage me to “embrace my lesbianism / trans identity”, when in truth I am neither. I was discouraged, from many sides, to liking myself, and that self-loathing took many forms. 

I am extremely cautious when it comes to gender identification because I know that finding one’s way in life under difficult circumstances can take years and years and end in a very different place from where it started, well beyond adolescence. In my case, for a long time I thought I was “not really female” because I love my independence and never wished for children: this is not due to some masculine trait inside of me but to my growing up with a disturbed mother who strongly invaded my life and mind and did everything that was in her power to trap me. I suspected that something was wrong with her since my early teens, but I found out the truth only about twenty years later. I had to accept her the way she is and put distance between us. 

Then there were my peers: where and when I grew up it was trendy to be (or appear) as tomboyish and easy-going as possible because this was seen as a sign of a “strong, modern, emancipated female”: fie on you if you wore your hair a little longer, liked clothes or only had to much as a flower-pattern on your notebook. Again: I simply had to get away. For many years I had been led to believe that my too “female” or “masculine” traits were a problem, when the actual problem was not mine. And if this happened to me, I daresay there may be many others in similar situations; which is something that who supports and encourages trans people usually does not consider. People who are confused about their sexuality without actually being trans need understanding as well.

  2. What About Us?

As a native Italian, I cringe when I only think e.g. of Lady and the Tramp’s silly “Bella notte” scene or films like Good Fellas or of The Godfather trilogy, cultural phenomena that did a lot to cement the general audience’s idea of how Italians are like. Not to our advantage. - No, “bella notte” is not correct Italian. No, we don’t play the mandolin, it’s an outmoded instrument that you are more likely to find in a museum. And no, spaghetti with meatballs are not Italian food!

Following the 2009 economic crises many countries in the European Community applied for financial “umbrellas”; Italy didn’t, it paid into those funds. Italy was the first Western country who went into lockdown as the Covid-19 crisis struck. The country functioned, though under huge restrictions and security measures. In both cases, other countries’ reactions in and outside Europe were like: “Typical - Italians are too lazy to work!” When it came to negotiating an economic pact to help Europe start again, the countries who had said this the loudest held their purse-strings tight - after having locked down too late and hidden the truth about the casualties in their own countries. Convenient.

Italians are generally often seen as silly and not trustworthy. And nobody talks about how demeaning and disrespectful, and on the long run damaging, it is to portray us in such a stereotyped way which at best is good for a laugh. The prejudices stick, and they have destroyed or turned into a living hell many existences.

There are huge now discussions about banning films like e.g. Gone With the Wind due to its “clichéd portrayal of Blacks”. Nobody talks about abolishing The Godfather or other films of that kind although they contribute to the stigma that Italians are either all in league with the mafia, or easy-going, silly folks who sing and drink wine all day and have no idea of what hard work means. Most Italians have too much personal pride to victimize themselves and bo-hoo “the rest of the world just won’t understand us”. They love their country but that does not make them not blind to its shortcomings. I hope they stay that way. In any case, I intend to.

  3. The Actual Problem: Bullying

I can sympathize with anyone who comes out as trans because I know what it’s like to be bullied. I was bullied myself for many years due to my Italian origin as well as my upbringing while I had to live among persons who were on a lower social level than I. I was e.g. accused of being stuck-up and “inhibited”. I know now that the female bullies were envious of my self-esteem and insinuating that I was missing “fun”; while the males were counting on another girl being at any guy’s disposal for free and were angry when I didn’t let them have their way with me. 

The actual problem with any kind of intolerance and discrimination is bullying. Whatever form it takes, bullying is or ought to be unacceptable. Bullies will be bullies, they do not care who they harass and why: if they e.g. can be convinced to leave trans people alone, they will vent their frustrations and build up their self-image by bullying people who are fat or black or whatever. Except trans people won’t be there to witness that (unless by coincidence they are both trans and fat / black etc.) 

We live in a world that gives a great deal of importance on competitiveness; as a result, even in families, schools and other institutions that ought to educate children and youngsters to be respectful towards themselves and others, bullying is often not seen as such, or simply downplayed as “assertiveness”. Bullies do not want to hear reasonable argumentation and learn to be sympathetic: they want to show off their power, provoke an emotional reaction from their victims to see how far they can go, and gloat when they can hurt them. They will not change their minds and they will never be trustworthy, no matter how many discussions about your particular situation you have with them. 

To bullies, the world is a jungle where only the strongest have the right to survive; any attempt to make them rethink their attitude will only make them laugh at their victims’ alleged stupidity (because that’s what a humane, respectful attitude is to them) even more. The only language they understand is violence. If you are bullied, protect and, if you can, defend yourself; never try to discuss. Minorities were silent and subdued for such a long time with good reason: because they knew that the more they held their heads up and did not hide what made them different, the more targets they offered for bullies. No one ought to go in hiding because he is queer or black or Jewish etc., but sometimes it’s unavoidable simply for self-protection. I am almost fifty years old and I have never witnessed a nasty person changing for the better. If anything, they became worse, because every time they got away, they felt more superior than before.

Particularly sly bullies will make their victims believe that they have changed, maybe even pulling off the role “I’m a victim myself”. Please, please, whether you belong to a group of minorities or not: don’t listen to them. Ever. Maybe they once were victims, but it turned them into arseholes, and now they are sunk too far in their own filth to care. Compassion is a good thing, but it should never go as far as to delude yourself, endure abuse and sympathize until you become an object for compassion yourself.

For instance, I like wearing dresses, cooking and sewing and looking after my household. Fifty years ago, that would have made me a pattern housewife; nowadays, feminists would either want to strangle me or at least have a good laugh at my expense. This just goes to show how short-sighted any kind of prejudice and bullying is. Any human being ought to follow its own nature with a healthy self-esteem, and esteem others as well. But with our today’s view of the world we are supposed to be not altruistic and respectful but “strong” so that “we will make our way in life” (i.e. feed capitalism in any way we can); and nothing can make you feel “strong” more easily than finding someone who is allegedly weaker and pick on him. We are expected to be “winners”, and the first thing winners need are “losers” to serve them as a foil. The pool from which to choose is large.

  4. Who Is Subject to Intolerance Can’t Be Intolerant… Really?

For many years of my life, I always found myself a supporter of someone who was ostracized for one reason or another.

A woman who had left her husband. (It was the early Eighties.) A gay man. A girl who had been harassed by being called ugly. A woman who had been abused sexually by a family member. A woman from East Germany (I live in the West and there are lots of prejudices.)

For the record: these persons were of different age, origin, upbringing, social status, intellectual level and character, and they did not know one another.

I knew and supported them for years, listening, loyal, supportive, interested in their problems and personal development. I never attacked or criticized them. And each and every one of them sooner or later accused me of “not understanding them” and “being prejudiced towards them”. In the case of the abused woman this was particularly unfair because I have been abused myself in my family, though psychically and not sexually. The divorced woman, my own mother, viciously accused me of lying and being in league with her ex-husband after I had been loyal only to her for entire decades.

It appears these people only were my “friends” as long as I told them what they wanted to hear. When I suffered, I was put off with “pull yourself together”. Like I had no problems, because the only people in the world having problems were them. Thank you very much. So, I was supposed to accept their growing insolence due to their being such poor victims, while from their point of view I deserved neither understanding nor respect.

Only recently, in the aftermath of the riots caused by the killing of George Floyd, I posted a comment on a video on youtube… guess what. I was immediately attacked by a black woman saying that my “stupid remark” just went to prove how a white person would never understand “things like these”. She had not even read my post carefully enough to understand what I actually wanted to say, she simply felt entitled to offend me.

I do not say that I dislike trans people or that they are bad, I’m sure there are as many good or bad people among them as anywhere. If someone says e.g. that though born with male organs they identify as female that is their very own affair. I must not like it or understand it. Tolerance means leaving other people alone to do as they please. Any person is “bad” only the moment they behave badly towards others; being different from the mainstream does not count.

But when I have to watch and read people nowadays defending trans or gays or blacks or some other minority, believing to be being open-minded or particularly noble and heroic by supporting them, all I can say is that I have been there and it did me no good. I won’t get caught up in another wave of “minority tolerance”: in my experience, it’s a waste of time. Many of those who now proudly burn their Harry Potter books and proclaim that they will no longer support the author, respectively that they “love Harry Potter but love trans people more” will make the experiences I made. Except they most probably won’t talk about that, because these experiences are so humiliating.

Minorities of any kind do not want to be supported, understood and defended by people who are not in their shoes: it hurts their personal pride. Which I can understand, although it’s a lame excuse for being mean to the very persons whom they expect help and support from. They will tend to envy the ones who do not have their problems due to being white / straight / cis etc., and consequently turn a blind eye to the fact that these can have huge problems of their own. Many of them expect their supporters not only to understand them but to support them enthusiastically at every turn, and if these don’t, (or if there is the slightest reason for them to assume that they don’t) these “victims” will feel entitled to be offended and become vicious aggressors, with a whole fan club behind them protecting their backs and convinced of promoting a honorable cause.

I am fed up with being tolerant. It seems you can hardly do anything anymore without offending someone: watching Disney movies or old classics, wearing a pink dress, calling a woman a woman instead of woman / trans / cis / non-binary etc. There is always someone who will point to these things saying why they’re not right.

I’m sorry but clichés, prejudices and stereotypes can’t be totally avoided: the human brain is not wired to know all facts about everything and everyone. What you can do is teach children and adolescents to be respectful towards everybody, even if they don’t like a particular person or group. Nobody has the right to force you to like everybody and to agree with every life style. But it seems the world has become full of people who seem to have nothing better to do but feel personally offended at the drop of a hat and make a fuss about how hurt their feelings are. Helping someone out who is in a difficult situation is not the same as catering to the keyed-up hysterics of some entitled brat. Seeing the difference between these two can be quite difficult because the latter often show their true face only after years and years, when they realize that for some reason or other, they can no longer squeeze you out for their personal benefit giving nothing back.

Who follows my account is aware that I did not like The Rise of Skywalker. Heaven knows I wrote enough about it. But I did not and will not harass the studios twittering, mailing, making youtube videos etc. ranting and raving about what rubbish it supposedly is for years, like the haters of The Last Jedi. Listening to them, one would think their whole reason for living had been destroyed on purpose. We most probably largely have to thank them for the Episode IX disaster, the flattest and most uninteresting Star Wars film ever made; not to mention the harassment the actress Kelly Marie Tran was subject to. Anyone has the right to dislike the development the authors chose for the saga, but for heaven’s sake: after all, it’s just a movie. If such a relatively insignificant thing can be hyped up like this, I don’t want to know what’s in store coming from people who feel offended for much more personal reasons, like race or gender.

Tolerance cannot be one-sided; it cannot mean that whatever one side wants does not have to be reasonable or useful, but they are entitled to scream and yell until the other side gives in. (If for no other reason than to satisfy them so they will finally shut it.)

  Conclusions (I did warn you…)

I. Hogwarts is not my world

Hogwarts is supposed to sound like a dream come true, but I never liked the idea of a “school” where pupils, who are still children and adolescents, are taught spells and engaged in games and tournaments where they have to risk life and limb. These facts are commonly overlooked, I guess, because “the heroes” usually don’t get hurt. The heroes overcome their traumata but do not get wiser from them, on the contrary: their suffering is supposed to make them seem nobler so that we will root for them more. Harry loses his parents before he could get to know them; his adoptive family mistreats him, but he doesn’t care about them; Cedric dies in his stead, but they were not close friends; Dumbledore dies when Harry was getting too old for a father figure; Snape dies, but Harry never liked him either. The list could go on. Harry always remains an innocent; he never gets to look into a metaphorical mirror where he has to see all of the bad that is inside of him, his darker sides are always projected and personified by someone else. (When he does look into a metaphorical mirror in the first book and movie, he finds out that the Philosopher’s stone is, magically, in his pocket. How convenient.)

I can’t invest emotionally in a fictional character who stands out before having earned or deserved it. Harry is like a Chosen One who skips the hero’s journey: from an abusive household, he is catapulted into a whole new world made of mystery and wonder, where he immediately is singled out, admired before he lifts a finger, unexplainably lucky, awed due to his heritage, envied by who is not as special as he. Harry remains untainted by own sins because other people do the dirty work for him; which seems ok because they are, for one reason or another, uncool - Dumbledore = old, Ron = weak / foolish, Hermione / Snape = unpleasant, his parents = dead, and so on. Yes, Harry sometimes makes mischief, but people usually cut him slack because of his past as an abused child, his parent’s tragic death, and his undefinable power that makes him resist the Evil One. The Dursleys, Snape and Draco don’t tolerate him, which is why they are coded as villains or at least very disagreeable characters. How do you recognize a villain in these stories? Simple, he’s being mean to Harry. Everybody else gives him special treatment because you don’t want to upset the person whom you expect to defeat the ultimate villain. I always found his character bland and uninteresting. We e.g. learned why Snape was so lonely and bitter, but not why Harry was so “good” although he had grown up unloved, in an abusive household, until he was eleven. 

For decades now Harry Potter fandoms and clubs gather all over the world proudly proclaiming that they are something really special and not like “them Muggles”. No wonder these stories are so popular with who feels misunderstood and downtrodden. Wouldn’t it be nice to be born with capacities ordinary people can’t even dream of? When maybe you’re just a common person, shocking thought. Nowadays, if you want to be someone outstanding, make it up in your mind and it automatically becomes true. And if you identify with the protagonist, you get to be a hero before you did anything special into the bargain. Harry is a victim of other person’s sins and / or blunders and his story is about unfolding the details of his victimhood and correcting them so he gets his happy ending. We are supposed to sympathize with this: well, I can’t. Victimhood and alleged inborn virtue are insufficient to make a protagonist “overcome his trials” and emerge triumphantly over his sidekicks or enemies, without any real loss on his side, while they get killed or, at best, ridiculed. And I will not pick up the part of that sidekick any more.

 II. Feminism Is Not My World

While I am an advocate for women’s independence, I do not identify as a feminist. I have an independent nature: that does not mean I am or should be ashamed of being a lady. This where we live is the era of the tomboys, of the feisty, cool, tough females. And often they don’t just go their own way but feel entitled to scorn women who do have their own job and live with a man who respects them, but also like the color pink, pretty clothes, flowers, romantic stories and everything else the new wave feminism likes to dismiss as “brainwashing”. Today you can hardly let your daughter watch a Disney movie without being accused of undermining her identity with false ideas about womanhood because, oh wonder, it seems a “real woman” must think and act like a badass guy.

Louder for the feminists in the back: you can actually look and behave in a way that is coded as “female” and be intelligent, independent and self-respecting. Women who went their own way have existed in every age and culture, often making great achievements and changing the world around them; they were intelligent, compassionate and took matters into their own hands. They did not proclaim that they unfairly were victims of men: they knew how to make men respect them. Being a woman is not a stereotype thrust upon you, it’s natural. If someone rejects qualities that are identified as “female”, it’s their very own affair. If I wanted to return the offense, I might as easily say that “feminists” and “empowered females” are just too smug to do the dishes.

 III. Trans, cis, binary etc. is not my world

For millennia, people had to accept the sex they were born with. Now you can have surgery and take hormones to get rid of a problem which you can’t solve on your own. Sorry, but I can’t get my head around it: to me the gender diversity discussion is unnatural. Good and right things are always the same, they cannot change with time and “scientifical / medical progress”. Tomboyish females and same-sex lovers are as old as the world, but it’s only a few decades since you can surgically have your sex changed if you feel uncomfortable with it, and even less time since you can claim the right to be both male and female or not to choose any sex at all. Excuse me, what’s behind it? Fear of missing out? I know, nowadays we are supposed to “change the stars”, but excuse me, it’s not possible. Rowling did not change the stars: as I wrote above, she got lucky.

I can say from own experience that for healthy growth a person needs limits. It is not “tolerant”, in my opinion, to say that one can be male or female or binary or none of that, all by choice. If I raise a child calling it a boy because he was born with male organs, or by Catholic standards because I am a Catholic myself, I believe no one has the right to say that I am intruding into its personality. I would be intolerant if said child would later come out to me e.g. as trans or atheist and I would dismiss its identification and opinion as a matter of principle, or disown it altogether. Rejecting rules and values is like pretending that it is wrong to be e.g. female, or straight, or that Catholic values are rubbish. None of that is true. It is true that a trans or gay or atheist or Buddhist etc. is not automatically an immoral or inferior person.

I can accept other people’s choices about their gender identification; that doesn’t mean I must like or support their mindset. It doesn’t automatically make me “transphobic”. If it is intrusive or intolerant to say that someone is male because he was born with male organs, what will come next? Will “normal” females no longer be entitled to protect their most intimate privacy because any guy can share our private space, like a public toilet or dress room, claiming he’s a woman (and he might well not be trans, but a lying voyeur?) Will we no longer give our children male or female names? Not teach them any values? No longer send them to kindergarten, to school, maybe not even feed or clothe them or furnish their nurseries according to our own judgement, because the poor babies can’t choose by themselves yet?

We all did not choose to be born in the first place.

If you want to protect your children from suffering, don’t have them: suffering is a part of life. Trans is not my world. I don’t want to destroy it or to behave rudely towards it; I simply do not want to have part in it. I want people to care for me, and to do so because I am me, not because I come out with this or another sexual orientation or make myself an advocate for people who belong to this or another minority.

All of the above is why I will not jump on the current “I defend minorities” respectively “I defend downtrodden victims” train. The good part is that I don’t have any Harry Potter book or merchandise I could burn anyway. 😊

Anyone who is uncomfortable with my point of view can unfollow me. Bullies will be blocked and reported without further ado. Greetings from a notorious Muggle.

[niksfiks]

Gotta Get It Right: Chapter 11

PAIRING: Loki/OFC

RATING: Mature

NOTES/WARNINGS: Trigger warning: mentions of dubcon, violence, PTSD, sexual assault, and physical abuse in later chapters. 

Also on Ao3 

Feedback is always appreciated (just being an attention whore screaming for comments/reblogs). Taglist is open

Tagging @fandom-and-feminism @fadingcoast @igotloki  @mrshiddleston-uk @mischievousbellerina  @amwolowicz 

Chapter 11: The Dungeons Below

The mind...is a fragile thing. Takes only the slightest tap to tip it in the wrong direction. Charles Xavier, Dark Phoenix (2019)

Loki suppressed a shudder upon entering the prison block. He was all too familiar with the cells, having spent far more time in them than he ever wanted to admit. Those who now occupied this prison were criminals, tried, and convicted for their crimes. He never should have been held, much less beneath the palace. He had tried to save Asgard from the Jotunheim, and from his brother’s idiotic lust for war. That business on Midgard with the Chitari had not been his responsibility. Even if it had, Odin had no right...

He stopped himself mid-thought, refusing to allow the memory to progress. Things had been set right with Odin gone, Thor off-world, perhaps never to return, and Loki firmly ensconced on the throne of Asgard. Regardless of anything else the woman had done, she had cemented his right to rule. And that alone was reason enough for keeping her alive. The other reasons he kept to himself, forgetting them when he finally reached her cell.

The woman sat on the floor with legs folded, her back against the wall. Her hands lay relaxed on her knees, palms turned upward as if to receive something. Loki watched her for some time, focusing on the slightest changes in her expression. He wasn’t sure if she was lost in a vision or simply dreaming, but her brow remained furrowed while her lips moved in silent speech. Just as he decided to leave, her eyes blinked open and bore straight through him.

“What?”

“Hardly a complimentary greeting, Midgardian.”

“If it’s a compliment you’re after, maybe you should visit your harem.”

Loki smirked. “We do not practice such archaic beliefs here.”

“Sounds like a personal problem.”

“I would think,” he said, approaching her cell, “that you would be more appreciative of the one who saved your life.”

“You’d think,” she responded absently, standing in a swift motion. “But technically, you’re not the one who saved me, are you?”

Loki stood silent.

“Figured as much. So the question remains: what?”

“Are you attempting to ask what it is that I desire by visiting you here? Or, perhaps, do you mean to inquire of the time?”

Aleksa rolled her eyes.

“There are so many possible variants of questions beginning with ‘what’, I couldn’t possibly list them all.” He leaned toward her. “You wouldn’t live that long.”

“Except for the part where you told your people to inject me with whatever happy juice it is that makes you immortal-ish. So I appear to have plenty of time. By all means, ramble away.”

Loki’s brow quirked as he wondered just how long she’d been feigning unconsciousness.

“What is your name?”

“Haven’t figured that out already? You’re losing your touch.” she scoffed.

“You proceed from the assumption that I haven’t.”

Aleksa shrugged, her arms folded.

“Regardless, I thought Midgardian soldiers were trained to recite their name and identifying number over and over when questioned. No matter. The data found on your identification tags has proven quite useful.”

Her hand instinctively went to her neck, searching for a chain that wasn’t there.

“Petterson is quite the surname. Perhaps I should just call you ‘pet’.”  

“Only if you have a death wish,” she snarled as she stepped closer to the force field.

“Pet, it is, then.” Her jaw clenched as he grinned. “There will come a time that your little excursions will wear my patience thin.”

“Stop chasing me and it won’t be a problem anymore. Besides, seems to me that your guards need more exercise now and again.”

“Now and again?” he scoffed. “Are you aware that you’ve attempted seventeen escapes in  three months?”

“And made it outside the walls of... whatever-this-is... fourteen of those seventeen times.” Her voice grew distant. “I still need to step up my game.”

“Your game? Quite the shame to waste such extraordinary talents on a... game.”

“But you’d have me play yours.”

“This is no game, pet.”

“Then what is it, Jotunn?” Aleksa growled.

Loki ignored the insult and grinned, satisfied that he was wearing her down. “Opportunity.”

“For what?”

“Well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it? You are obviously a warrior of considerable expertise, and I admit to being quite intrigued by your,” he paused, “handling of the Tesseract. Certainly, there are other talents that remain hidden.”

“All in service of Asgard, no doubt.” Her voice soft, she added, “Or did you have something more personal in mind?”

Loki was suddenly aware of the difference in height between them as he looked down at her, trying to ignore the sightline straight to her cleavage. “I’m sure we could come to some sort of an arrangement.”

“Fuck off.” An admonition that sounded both sultry and threatening.

“An insult, the typical human response.” he balked. “Why unleash your hatred on me? Was it not your beloved SHIELD that sent you here to fetch those poor, lost academics? And was it not your decision alone to challenge me to duel in exchange for their lives?”

“Just like it’s your decision to keep coming after me every time I escape.” She returned to the back wall, sliding down to the floor. “Maybe you should find a hobby.”

“Oh, I’ve already found one. And it’s proving most entertaining.”

“I repeat,” she said with a sigh, “fuck off. Especially if you’re offended by typical human insults.” Aleksa glared at the sarcastic smile creeping across his face, then decided to disengage. He wanted her attention and she was going to withhold it.

“You can’t ignore me forever, pet.” Loki stared at her, noting the timing of the rise and fall of her chest. His mind wandered to the flesh beneath the tunic, what it might feel like against his own skin.

“It pains me,” he said with a shake of his head to return himself to the moment, “to see a creature of your considerable abilities left down here to rot, but, if that is what you wish...”

With no response, Loki sighed, turned, and made his way to the corridor.

“Oh,” he paused, speaking over his shoulder, “thank you for not instigating another riot during your last escape. It made finding you so much easier.”

He heard the slightest change in the hum of the force fields surrounding the cell before something hard hit him in the back of the head. He spun to find her still seated. The cup that had been in the cell with her now lay on the floor next to his feet. He picked it up, then looked back at her.  She was watching him, her facial features relaxed, almost inviting him to react. He only grinned and resumed his journey out of the prison.

Aleksa sat motionless for some time after Loki’s departure. Her mind raced with new plans for escape mixed with memories that felt more like dreams. She tried to think of simple things like the places or people she knew to settle her mind, but even that failed. Her childhood home in Charleston morphed into an even smaller hut near a cliff. Stifling hot summers spent in band camp became much cooler days walking shorelines with her mother.

Except it wasn’t her mother. Her mother died in an accident. Or was it a raid?

Blue skin.

Red eyes.

So much ice. And fire.

Fire.

“C’mon, Colonel. All you have to do is light the fire. Then you and your friends can go home.”

Aleksa’s eye squeezed shut, trying to block out the vision. They were nightmares, illusions. None of it was real.

Was it?

The desert heat was real. The smell of spice and gunpowder and whatever chemicals she’d been exposed to were real.

“Just light it. You can do that, can’t you?”

She began a breathing exercise, a deep inhale followed by a slow, steady exhale while summoning a white candle in her mind. All she had to do was light it and keep the flame steady.

“The flame will cease to flicker when your mind is calm.” A soft voice, neither male nor female.

“Light the pyre. ” Another voice, definitely male and definitely malicious.

Breathe in.

“You can control matter, control the energy that binds it together.”

Breathe out.

“Just a spark. That’s all. I’d hate for you to have the deaths of anyone else on your hands.”

Breathe.

“What d’ya say?”

“No,” she growled. “Better a few soldiers than thousands of innocents.”

“Never let your gifts be abused.”

How many are dead because of me?

“Poor Rose. Her death will excruciatingly slow without anyone to ensure she receives the proper treatments.”

Rose?

Her mind wandered to a baby, small with bright blue eyes. A child become woman become old, the blue never fading in her eyes, regardless of how distant they became.

Sweet little Rose.

She saw Erik’s face, smiling as he cradled the babe. The smile turned evil as his face morphed into Malick’s.

“Leave her out of this.”

Just kill me instead.

“Then bring me what I want.”

Aleksa’s eyes flew open and she stood, pulling energy from the floor into her body. The lights in her cell flickered, followed by the lights in surrounding cells. The block fell dark for a split second then returned to normal lighting.

None of the other prisoners noticed that the cell at the end of the row was suddenly unoccupied.

D’Varst, on the other hand, thought on all he’d witnessed for a moment before making his way out of the dungeons.

[spideyrights]

Partners (Series) - Detective Loki x Reader

VIII. ANCHOR

series masterlist

“Mrs Dover not here?” you question with a softness in your voice, seating yourself besides Keller who’s eyes remained fixed on the ground and rigid in posture. He avoided eye contact and responded only with the shake of a head. 

“If you can’t make a positive ID on the photographs I’ll need her to come in and take a look at them,” you inform. “I hope she’s doing okay-” “She’s not.”

“Well if there’s anything you can do-”

“You can find my daughter,” he snaps, his voice growing in contempt and you think it best to say nothing further but you see the guilt wash over his features immediately. “I’m-I’m sorry, you have been helpful, Detective. More than your partner has been.”

You exhale, feeling like you should have seen that much coming. Keller clearly had a disliking and simultaneous level of respect for Loki whereas with you he had a bit more of a kind of tenderness. You didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. “Detective Loki and I just have...different approaches to the work we do but he is a good detective. He hasn’t thought about anything else since this case started.”

Keller nods. You notice how he grips his knuckles tightly and it makes you try and get a better glimpse of them. The visible hand was frighteningly red though that could be easily accredited to the cold, it was the other hand - the one you could see traces of purple and blue bruising on - that you were interested. Your attention was snapped away from that when the Birches came rushing out of the room, completely distraught. You exhaled sadly, pressing your eyes shut. They'd positively ID’d some clothes. You glance over at Keller who’s clearly fazed but aims to conceal it.

Loki comes out shortly after, a better concealed expression of pain on his face but you know him well enough now to see it. “Mr Dover,” he says, indicating he’s ready for him to come into the conference room. You and Keller stand together simultaneously and you’re ready to say your goodbye’s and let Loki continue the identification process but Keller stops you short.

“Can Detective (Y/L/N) come...please?” Keller asks timidly and Loki’s mouth parts slightly, both confused and pleasantly surprised. “Um, yeah, sure.” And so you follow the two of them into the conference room. Keller sits at the head of the table and you sit in the next available seat next to him, across from Loki. You notice the sheer size of the pile of photographs that are stacked in front of Loki and it makes you shuffle in your chair out of discomfort.

“So he confessed? He said he killed them?”

“We were hoping he was lying but...” Loki shrugs slightly, raising his hands to express his lack of knowledge.

“We haven't even found any bodies Mr Dover, but...” There’s a pregnant pause as Loki tries to figure out the best way to say it. “The Birches positively identified two pieces of clothing. So I am going to need you to tell me if you recognise anything.”

You’re on the edge of your seat, watching as Keller pauses on each image, straining to look at them with eyes of discomfort. He hesitates on some before shaking his head and Loki sets them aside. Loki’s eyes quickly flitted to you for just a moment, maybe a half second, just to check you were okay. You’d never done this kind of thing before which is why you weren’t going to be involved but he knew you’d go to the ends of the Earth for a poor grieving father so there was no point trying to stop you. Noticing the well-hidden distress on your face, however, he wished he had briefed you on what this would be like.

“I am not sure. I don’t know.” Loki sets the image to a new pile. He goes through another which Keller denies but the next image evokes a new reaction from him, one that makes you sit up with raised brows. He takes the image in his hand, his bottom lip quivering. It’s a sock. A beautiful baby pink sock with a cutely embroidered bunny rabbit on the top. You know he’s recognised it. Your heart breaks.

“That's h-her,” You press your eyes shut harshly, trying to compose yourself. Loki blinks harshly. “That’s her sock.” The silence in the room is eerie as you note tears fall from Keller’s eyes. You look away, thinking he might not want to be seen in such a state and your eyes land on the image, fixed on its juxtaposition of pain and innocence.

“You...You wasted time,” Keller says lowly, directing his insults directly at Loki. “You wasted time following me.” You hate hearing Keller speak this way about Loki, not just because you consider him a friend but because you consider him a good detective and you know he didn’t want to waste time, he just wanted to do what he thought was right.

“You let this happen.” he finishes firmly, pointing at the photo accusatively before rising from his seat.

“Find yourself a new partner, Detective, this one’s no good,” he says to you, clapping his hand firmly on your shoulder as he passes before storming out of the room. You and Loki sit there in the uncomfortable reality of what had just happen. You look at Loki for the first time since you’d entered the room. Loki’s head is hanging low, a hand raised to his forehead, rubbing at it to relieve the tension.

“Loki...” He raises a hand to stop you, dismissing your soft whisper of his name. He stands, leaving the room so quickly you can’t even read the expression on his face as he passes. You stand gathering the bunny rabbit sock into the file of pictures you assumed were the items the Birches had positively ID’d also, taking it with you as you leave and noting you’d look at them later.

It was a solemn day for the most part following that. You looked through some of the pictures taken from who you now knew as Bob Taylor’s house. Your eyes lingered on the peculiar pattern pictured all over the walls. Loki had theorised that it must have been a map of some kind that led to the bodies but you weren't so sure. It looked almost like...

“a maze.” You could hear Alex Jones’ words in your head when he spoke to you that first interrogation. There had to be some kind of connection between Bob’s drawings and whatever Alex was talking about surely? You stood quickly from your desk, making those around you jump, and searched for some paper. You threw your hands up in frustration when you struggled to find someone and instead walked out of your cubicle, past the printer, hurriedly ripping it open and taking out a wad of paper before storming into the interrogation room. Upon entering you noticed Loki trying to question an unresponsive Taylor and you went in from the viewing side, startling both men. Throwing the paper down and handing Taylor a pencil he immediately took it in his cuffed hands eager to draw.

“You wanna draw, Bob?” He nodded firmly and you gestured for him to go ahead making Loki look at you with wild eyes, standing and dragging you out of the room by your elbow.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I need to know what that pattern looks like by itself. I think it connects him to Alex Jones...somehow. I just- I don't know how yet.”

“Yeah but-”

“You said you trust me, right? Trust me now, please.” Loki shakes his head, scoffing and you’re not exactly pleased with that reaction but he makes a vague hand gesture you can only assume is a ‘go ahead’. You didn’t expect Loki to be in a good mood obviously, neither were you by your standards for that matter, but he had been cold and abrasive since Keller’s visit.

You thought for a moment whether you should say something, try and get him to discuss his feelings with you even but you eventually decided against it, knowing Loki wasn’t in the mood and weirdly enough neither were you. You instead seated yourself beside him, both of you settling into the odd silence of watching Bob draw.

“You don’t think what Keller said was right, do you?” Your eyes lit up at the almost childish tone of Loki’s question. You’d never heard him sound so...vulnerable. You were almost shaken by the thought of Loki’s unperturbed facade slowly breaking down let alone in front of you.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Then why does it feel like it is.”

You’re interrupted by O’Malley storming in, his coat and briefcase in hand. You hadn’t even realised how late it is but staying overtime seemed to be a habit of Loki’s that you’d picked up. “How long has this Bob Taylor been working on his map?”

“Three and a half hours.” Loki’s tone is sharp and his words short, clearly not in the mood for conversation with anyone let alone O’Malley whom his contempt for was growing.

“You think this is going to lead to the bodies. I sure as shit don’t.” You rolled your eyes knowing just how terrible that choice of comment was.

“Do me a favour, Captain. Go fuck yourself.”  “David.” you said, a warning tone running through your words. O’Malley was a terrible guy and an even worse captain but there was never a good reason to disrespect those superior to you.  “Did she just call you ‘David’?” O’Malley said, stumbling over his words out of shock. You and Loki both chose to ignore the comment. 

“We weren’t getting anywhere questioning him.”

“That looks more like a maze than a map-” “He's got a thing for mazes.” Loki’s tone was growing increasingly impatient and increasingly agitated which caused you to direct a look towards O’Malley that made clear that you didn’t think he was being very helpful right now and, more importantly that you thought he should leave. He took the signal well. “I am going home. Call me if something happens.”

Once he was gone you both exhaled a sigh of gratitude to the fact that he was finally gone. Loki’s eyes hadn’t departed from Bob Taylor for at least an hour now. He was watching him straight through the one-sided viewing glass as opposed to the screen you were looking at and his body was rigid in its seated stance on the table. 

"(Y/L/N), you mind getting me a cup of coffee? Please?” Loki speaks slowly and gently, his eyes moving hesitantly from Bob Taylor to you. You sit up in your chair, surprised at his request. Normally you make coffee for him of your own volition and he’s pleasantly surprised and exceptionally grateful every time. Sometimes he even reprimands you lightly for spending your time taking care of others instead of yourself. So it was a slight shock when he actually asked this time around but a somewhat nice shock nonetheless. 

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” you say, rising immediately and heading straight out to the shared kitchen to make yourself, John the security guard and Loki all some well deserved warm beverages. You were only there for a minute tops, hovering by the coffee machine when you noticed John hurriedly pop his head out of the viewing room with alert eyes and a frantic expression. “Detective, get in here!” You rush in and you’re immediately drawn to the sight in the interrogation room, you and John rushing in together.

“Yes, you can! Yes you can!” Loki exclaims, his hands on Bob’s collar, shaking him violently. You see the man’s newly bloodied nose and the specs of blood on the table and you can only assume what Loki has done. You pull Loki back from one side whilst John pulls him back by the other, not realising that Bob Taylor has grabbed his gun until the man raises the gun in his hands.

“Oh, shit! Gun!” Loki exclaims, making you whip around, pulling out your own weapon by instinct as Loki does the same. Loki blocks you with his arm, pushing you ever-so-slightly behind him and you do the same for John’s who’s unarmed, moving your body to block his but you realise your approach is misled when Bob raises the gun to his chin.

“Bob, don’t! Put the gun down!” you say softly but Loki’s own desperate shouts block your voice out. You glance sideways at him. He’s out of control with wide eyes and desperate shouting and he seems to be scaring Bob even more.

“Bob, put the gun down!” Bob raises the gun, shoving the barrel of it into his mouth “Bob, no! No, no, no, no!”  Loki’s desperate pleading is drowned out by the sound of a gunshot. Your gun moves with the movement of Bob Taylor’s unconscious body, trailing him all the way as he drops to the floor, finally dropping your gun completely in disbelief. Your mouth is agape at the sight of the interrogation room glass and wall spattered with blood.

“Fuck. Go call a fucking R.A!” Loki’s voice is muffled to you, almost like the kind of sensation that overtakes you before you faint. You manage to make out the waver in Loki’s voice however which causes you to draw your eyes from what you were certain was the dead body of Bob Taylor to Loki who ran a hand over his face, concealing the whimper that you only caught a moment of. 

You felt frozen in place. Loki rushed out once the R.A was brought in but you remained there, unmoving, until they left, until it was you, bloody walls and some hand drawn mazes left alone in the room. John jolted you out of your trance-like state by resting a hand on your shoulder, guiding you out of the room whilst telling you O’Malley was on his way and you should probably get Loki and wait with him outside the Captain’s office. You shifted yourself back to reality immediately, trying to remain calm and composed as you searched the entire floor for Loki with no success. You could only think of one other place he might be.

When you entered the changing room you found Loki seated in the exact place you had been around a week ago when he cleaned up your wound for you. His head was in his hands, eyes closed and body shaking. You approached him gingerly, unsure if he would appreciate you seeing him like this. 

“David...” His head shot up quickly hearing your faint whisper in the otherwise entirely silent changing room. He looked to you briefly, you noted the puffy eyes and trembling lips, before instantly turning away upon noticing it was you. 

“Can you gimme a minute?” His voice was shaky, you could practically hear the strain in it from trying to speak over the lump in his throat. Ignoring his request, you moved away from the lockers you leant on, stepping closer to him until you were right in front of him. You crouched down, brushing your hands gently over his forearms, trying to tug them away from his guarded face though he resists. 

“Hey...” you whisper softly, rubbing your hands up and down his arms, leaning further towards his body. You try and duck your head to see his which faces the ground and, clearly noting your persistence, he finally meets your eyes. Your face forms an expression of sympathy as you see the tears streaming down his face and his wavering lips. 

“I thought you’d be mad at me. I even made you fucking leave because I knew you’d stop me. I wish you were there to stop me,” he mumbles, almost in a kind of endearing childish shyness. “I’m not mad. I’m just confused,” you say laughing semi-drily, your hands coming to rest on his legs, tracing patterns on his knees in an attempt to comfort him. “I thought you said you trusted my plan, that you trusted me.” Your words seem to upset Loki more, his ducks his head again briefly, scratching at the back of his head unsurely. You raise one hand to wipe the tears streaming freely down his face. You let the hand linger there on his cheek and he brings his own hands to rest on top of it, grasping it, as his other hand follows suit, intertwining his fingers in yours. 

“I-I do. I really do but...” He hesitates. “I didn’t know what else to do. It-It’s my fault.” You felt your own eyes begin to water seeing him in this state. You lifted your hand from his cheek, his moving with yours as you pushed back strands of his hair that had come loose. He nuzzled into your touch, his eyes shutting briefly at the warmth of the contact he had craved for a while now. You come up  from the ground, seating yourself beside him, hands not releasing from each others for a moment. 

“It’s not your fault like Keller said it was.” Your words are firm as your gaze flits between his blue eyes, beautifully illuminated by the small amount of light in the room. “You work harder than anyone I’ve ever known. A little too hard,” you tease, eliciting a laugh from him that you couldn’t be more thankful to hear. “It’s not your fault that those girls aren’t here. People do terrible things and we can’t spend our whole lives upset that they do. That’s why we do this job, so we actually do something about it. What we do is go up to O’Malley’s office and face the consequences so we can try and get those girls back somehow. Okay? Together?”

Loki nods hesitantly, now more composed and admittedly more comforted now that you’re here in his grasp. You pull your hands apart making a minute frown appear on his face which instantly disappears when you wrap your arms around his slumped figure. He freezes immediately, just like last time, unsure of how one should react to a hug before he relaxes and settles into your arms, desperate for the affection. His body is so weak from exhaustion that he’s practically laying in your arms and you bring your chin to rest on the top of his head, pressing a chaste kiss to his hair. From where his head rests he can hear your heartbeat. It’s pounding.

“Are you okay?” he says, rising from the hug with a questioning glance. You look down at your hands, both of which are now resting on Loki’s forearm. You fiddle with his jumper, picking at the wool of it. His hands grasp yours quickly, making you stop. 

“I’ve never seen anyone be shot before. Let alone anyone shoot themselves,” you admit, your tone slightly fearful, worried about Loki looking down on you for your lack of experience. He’d probably been in this kind of situation a hundred times and it worried you to think that he’d think less of you by being shaken by something that was the reality of your job. 

He bumped his knee against yours, trying to make you look at him, which you did to be met by the exchange of short, small smiles. “Must’ve been scary for you.”

“Not scary, just...”

“You can be honest with me,” he says softly, a whisper almost. You turn your head in his direction, meeting his intense gaze. Your nose bumps against his, your lips inches apart. You feel the warmth of his breath skim your skin making your heart race. His hand comes up, interweaving his fingers into your hair. His lips ghost over yours, brushing them gently as his gaze remains fixed on your mouth. 

“Not like this,” you whisper, the movement of your mouth brushing against his lips as you speak the words. He nods gently, his head dropping with a heavy exhale, the moment gone. A knock on the door startles you both and you jump apart quickly, looking to see the person hadn’t entered but rather called for you both to come out and speak to O’Malley. 

“Let’s go.”

tags: @mother-dearest-loves-me  @mariamermaid @vigilanteavengerqueen   @superheroforrent  @peterbxrnes   @igotanaddixon  @blablasomethingblabla  @cafeaufeels   @montypythonsholysnail  @carolines24   @chimera4plums   @oswald-1998  @iv-nyc  @twowaymirrorx  @skarlettmikaelson

[icosmohunters]

chapter two : captain

chapter two of cosmo hunters!

word count : 5.5k words

synopsis : hope had her ship invaded by a group of stranded space pirates, which hasn’t happened before and she hadn’t scheduled social interactions until a couple of days. needless to say, they have a lot of explaining to do. but that doesn’t stop them from striking a bargain with our bounty hunter. one which she is tempted to accept. 

“ alright, talk. ”

in the span of a couple of hours, hope didn’t think it would be capable for her world to be flipped around. here she stood in the dining room of her ship, nebula, watching a group of pirates gather around the table. pirates who were not welcome. pirates who somehow managed to hold out in the ice-cold moon europa orbiting jupiter.

quite frankly, she didn’t know much about piracy to make assumptions on their survival tactics. they had no ship, but then again, a.j hadn’t scanned the moon’s surface for anything so a ship could very much be sat miles away from her, perhaps in ruins due to the drastic weather conditions they were in.

like most moons, europa didn’t have an atmosphere like the typical planet earth, and the gas it produced, oxygen, was primarily made from the water vapor released from the craters of ice this cracked moon was known for. the cool temperatures could be enough to reduce a human to mere particles of ice. temperatures could reach below minus a hundred degrees celcius, so it had the bounty hunter wondering, how were these pirates surviving?

looking at them now, they looked particularly healthy. the guy who’d tried to shoot her with her own taser gun, packed with muscles and decorated with a chiseled jaw and brown hair, seemed to be surviving. she’d asked for names, and the declared captain of the crew stated he was enzo.

the two girls who’d accompanied the crew were dawn and vivienne, two very attractive ladies with contrasting energy but hope, looking at them, sensed a feeling of warmth from the two of them. it wasn’t because maybe they were both females, but maybe the fact that she felt like they would require less work. unlike others.

and the two young men left were called quinn and dom, both particularly quiet but judging from the way they sat differently and even glanced around, she got a sense that she would be better off not throwing too much trust on the table when it came to them. 

in fact, she wasn’t ready to throw her trust anywhere until she had a plain idea on why these fools had managed to get stranded on an ice rock millions of kilometers away from the dense giant that was jupiter.

now, even upon asking them to finally explain just what they were doing on her ship and how they got inside, or even just a brief explanation on why they chose her ship of all ships, she found that they seemed to waver uneasily. dawn seemed to fidget with her sleeves and vivienne semed to avoid eye-contact, it was only enzo who was staring straight ahead.

“ i don’t think you heard me. ”

jaw clenched, hope let out a sigh and crossed her bare arms over her chest. her hands, aching from the cuts of the wires she’d been working on, were twitching because she was close to having a nervous tick. her fingers mildly shook at times, something which she tried to hide.

because as nervous and as lost as she was, she wasn’t going to allow these guys the freedom of seeing her lose it. her ship had been invaded, her serenity had been tarnished and her mission would be ruined with every tick of the clock the longer they took in replying to her.

“ oh, we heard you, alright ”, enzo finally spoke up, meeting the gaze of the uneasy bounty hunter with a flicker of confidence in his eyes that had hope’s fingers craving to encase themselves around his neck. “ it’s just a matter of trust. ”

“ trust? ”, hope echoed, craning her head forward in an attempt to hear him correctly, brows knitted into a frown. “ you’re gonna sit there after having invaded my ship and taken most of my resources and preach to me about trust? ”.

dom spoke for the first time, hope took note of the sultry tone he harnessed and rose a brow at his sudden change of body language, leaning back into the chair and tucking his arms behind his head in such a casual way that she began to wonder whether he’d been taught the concept of self-awareness before.

“ he’s talking about your badge, rumple. ”

hope glanced down to the badge they were referring to. voyage inc saw that every member wore a badge as a form of identification, and as someone who wasn’t completely free from them despite working a job with no association to them, she carried the badge to access restricted areas around the galaxy. like underground cities and ship docks importing some sweet loot.

the badge was made of acrylic of some sort, a chip planted inside holding the identification intel. it was cut into a symmetrical v shape painted in navy blue with borders edged in an ebony color, accompanied by the word voyage written across the shape in small but identifiable letters. gold lettering.

anyone would feel a rise of pride whilst wearing a badge like this but hope had considered it more like a burden ever since she chose to resign from her position in the said corporation. being a navigator drained far too much of her energy and as great as she was at it, she needed action. hence her choice in following the path as a bounty hunter.

but that’s a story for another time.

“ ah ”, the girl grunted, nodding slowly before moving from her position at one end of the dinner table and slowly, began to circle it, walking behind each individual seat like a vulture circling its prey, waiting until it was at its weakest moment before attacking. but she wasn’t attacking. not yet. not until they gave her a reason to. “ and you’re convinced that due to my badge, i’ll turn you in. ”

“ that’s what voyage does. it’s known for never resting until every scum of the earth is behind bars or serving up some service to make up for the damage they made. and by scum, of course, i mean anyone who disagrees with their moral code ”, dom continued, lifting an index finger whilst speaking up in a matter-of-fact tone similar to a.j’s. hope didn’t like it one bit.

“ well, believe me, i am no fan of voyage’s way of work but you can’t expect them not to do something when there are brats like the bunch of you running around fucking everything up ”, hope spoke, looking directly at dom and his eyes were like magnets, they didn’t leave her until she circled enough to stand behind his seat. “ like the way you just invaded my ship. ”

“ w-wait, do you even work for voyage? ”, vivienne questioned, leaning forward slightly on her seat and hope shook her head.

“ i officially left the company years ago. i only work as a bounty hunter for their police unit so they still keep tabs on me. other than that, i ride solo ”, hope wasn’t planning on giving all of her details to these guys until she had some in return. “ but believe me, i’m not the type to send people to jail. normally i kill criminals. and looking at you, you seem to all have a bounty for your head. ”

quinn, who had not spoken a single word up until now, finally rose his voice after hope’s statement. something in his tone harnessed a youth, telling hope that perhaps he was still quite young, or at least the same age as her.

he started off timidly as if struggling to gather the right words. “ so, you’re a bounty hunter but you’re not going to kill us because you’d rather turn us in? ”, he voiced.

“ that all depends on what your captain tells me now. didn’t we agree, cap, that we’d discuss why you and your crew are stranded on europa with no ship? what happened, hmm? space accident? rival pirates? did voyage track you down and give you a nice beating? ”, hope asked. she could tell that the bruise near his cheek hadn’t been caused by her dart gun. in fact, she even pointed to it on her own face. “ nice bruise. matches your whole bad guy aesthetic. but since you got a bruise, maybe you aren’t as bad as you make yourself out to be. maybe it’s just plain stupidity. ”

a tense silence swept in, hope’s gaze remained nailed to the captain who didn’t show much of an effort in responding until a couple of seconds staring the bounty hunter down, he let out a sigh and sat forward. “ as you . . . rightfully pointed out, voyage doesn’t like us very much. we were escaping the m-colony after finding out that there was a bounty on our asses. we dipped, but then our ship engine malfunctioned and they found us and nearly ripped us to pieces ”, enzo’s gaze had dropped to the table now. and then he nodded in dawn’s direction. “ dawn was the only one well enough to patch us up. ”

hope rose a brow at the girl, “ you’re a medic? ”.

“ i’d hope so ”, dawn replied, her posture was hunched and shy as if she was scared of something and hope could understand why in this instance. it made her wonder if this girl was always like this and what she was like when the atmosphere wasn’t tense. “ i, uh, managed to heal everyone, but we were left drifting around and found europa to be the only safe place. so we used our last bit of jet power and energy and landed. we ran out of food and heating and . . . now we’re here. ”

hope stared at the girl. over the course of her career in chasing criminals, she had become an expert in spotting liars and this girl wasn’t cut out for it. if anything, she wasn’t cut out for causing any harm. she wouldn’t lie, hope thought.

turning her gaze back to enzo, hope continued. “ how’d you find my ship and how’d you get in? ”, she was quick to ask. no matter how much they tried to justify themselves, they still invaded her ship without permission and for that alone, they could have been thrown out. but she was being nice for the time being. ‘nice.’

“ the hatch opened at some point. we spotted it because it’s not that hard to miss, plus you’re on elevated ground and it can be spotted from a mile away even in a place like this ”, enzo explained with a slight tilt of the head. “ we didn’t think it’d be a voyage ship, of course. we assumed it might have been another pirate ship but . . . ”. his gaze wandered to hope, starting from her head down to her toes. 

the study of hope’s eyes hardened as she suddenly became somewhat skeptical. “ i assume you had to leave your darling ship behind. and being pirates, you were about to use your tactics to take over another one and pillage it to your heart’s content and then run off with it ”, she pretty much had this entire story covered through her assumptions. “ a.j, did you run the check? ”.

“ yes ”, his luscious voice broke through, hope noticed the way dom nearly jumped in his seat. a.j’s spontaneous voice is known for startling most. she, as his owner, was quite used to it. “ there is a ship located some miles away but it’s in inoperant condition, i cannot access its database bec— ”.

“ because the whole ship is shut off, right ”, hope interrupted and nodded, tilting her head to the side slightly. “ okay. well, you mentioned your aims in reaching pluto for reason unbeknownst to me. care to elaborate? ”.

vivienne took hold, rightfully so because enzo didn’t look like he as ready to take on any more questions. it was like a police interrogation. “ p-colony is the furthest away from here and probably the safest. voyage tends to venture between saturn and venus only, and besides, from pluto, we can easily access other gate-ways to different galaxies and get away from here. it’s an escape plan but, of course, we never got to really initiate it ”, vivienne’s explanation had hope nodding in understanding, but not in sympathy.

because all of this was foreign to her. she wasn’t accustomed to pirates wandering in like they owned her ship, she wasn’t used to hearing about bounty missions aside from her own since she never tuned into ich anyway. the girl found it hard to sympathize with a group of criminals but she didn’t feel like she was in the position to dictate to them. whatever reasons they had for being pirates, she didn’t want to hear it.

the damage they’d caused, the people they’d robbed, the places they’d pillaged, it was unknown to her for the time being and thinking about it deeply, she could continue to be clueless to it if she just turned them in. but something about this had her curiosity peaking, which was unlike her at all. she wanted to know more despite not wanting to at the same time.

so, she had two options. they’d proposed the deal of being taken to pluto and then never bothering her again instead of being handed over to authorities. and quite frankly, all the signs were pointing for hope to hand them over quickly.

she could. she could totally ask a.j to phone another distress signal and maybe then they’ll send someone to fix her engine and take the pirates away. 

killing two birds with one stone, she could say.

but hope took a pause. and looked at all of them individually. she wasn’t used to seeing many faces sat around a dinner table, she often goes nights sitting and eating alone, talking to an a.i unable to form opinions that weren’t logical, spending hours doing things alone. and then she imagined what life was like for them.

in a ship with people, with familiar faces which you don’t have to particularly like. sharing meals together, exploring together, sharing stories and experiences and forming true, life-long bonds that might last for years until death comes knocking on the front door. 

hope couldn’t help but feel envious of that.

“ h-have you deduced your next move, uh . . . whatever your name is? ”, vivienne asked, breaking the silence hope was only made aware of now. the bounty hunter rose her head and paid the blonde a glance. “ s-sorry but you didn’t tell us what your name is, and i wouldn’t like to refer to you as rumple. ”

hearing a small snort from dawn, hope’s eyes ever so slightly softened and she allowed herself to nod. “ it’s hope ”, the bounty hunter introduced herself. “ no last name, i don’t like carrying one. ”

vivienne nodded, “ o-okay, well, hope. listen, we know breaching into a ship as it is can be considered as bad in the eyes of the moral public such as yourself. but we’re starving. and cold, and we want to get to safety. you don’t have to ever associate yourself with us. you can just take us to where we have to be, and you won’t ever have to hear from us again. ”

hope stared for a long time. she was uncertain of what to do. mingling with pirates already can be considered as mutiny if voyage were to ever find out. she would be in deep shit. deeper shit. and for some reason, knowing this, her body didn’t immediately react as a form of panic, she didn’t immediately pull the lever to dump them back onto the moon or perhaps rush to bring them to the nearest voyage policing station. her body remained incredibly still.

say if she did say yes. say if she agreed to deliberately put herself into a risky situation that could tarnish her career and forever change her way of living. the consequences would be drastic, she could count them in her head now. she had more reasons against this choice than for this choice. her intuition was telling her to back up. 

danger, danger. don’t mingle with pirates, they always mean trouble.

“ we don’t have all day, rumple. ” 

hope’s thoughts snapped back to the fact that the dom had the audacity to continue using the insult even though it was obvious who held the real power here. vivienne even leaned forward on her seat and hissed, “ dominic.” 

“ seriously, we’ve got places to be and so does she. it isn’t that hard of a choice to make. we’ll just sit and wait for another ship to come if she’s unwilling to help ”, dom argued and hope finally noticed that he’d even risen from his chair. “ what, just because some chick with a voyage badge has a better ship and better stuff, we’re supposed to rely on her to make a good decision that’ll decide our well-being? ”.

“ there won’t be any well-being unless if we get food and warmth, dom. so either we accept it from someone who you may not particularly like or we don’t have any at all ”, vivienne spat back. hope stood there, impressed by how firmly she was able to catch hold of the situation. she radiated the energy of being assertive, hope only realized that now. 

dom rolled his eyes, “ not you as well, vivi. we’re pirates. we shouldn’t be dependent on one person. if we give quinn enough time, he can easily fix the engine of our ship and we can get our asses to pluto faster than it’ll take for this girl to make a decision. ” the way he pointed at hope had her blood boiling.

because she disliked many things, but what she hated the most was being spoken to like she wasn’t present. being insulted whilst she was in the room, being indirected whilst already listening in to the conversation, treated like she was invisible when she very much knew everything. 

she wasn’t dear nor blind nor stupid, and this dude was going to have to get it into his thick brain at one point or another. 

“ the girl you’re referring to can easily be spoken to since she’s a fully grown adult ”, hope’s tone suddenly rose, cutting through the air like ice as she found herself glaring daggers at this guy. handsome as he was, he didn’t seem like the type she was going to get along with at all. “ and the girl you’re referring to might as well take your whole crew to pluto and just dump your ass into space somewhere if you’re gonna be an ass for the rest of the trip. ”

enzo suddenly seemed to have gathered his spirits again, as his posture straightened and his eyes that lacked life lit up in a series of sparks that left hope stunned for a moment. “ w-wait, so you’re taking us?! ”, he asked excitedly.

hope regained her composure, “ yeah, might as well. anything to get you guys off my back. and since i believe in karma, i think handing you to voyage will come to bite me in the ass at some point ”. the girl shrugged, her eyes shifting over to the table, anywhere but in the eyes of the pirates.

“ wow . . . ”, dawn let out a sigh equivalent to that of relief. hope hadn’t planned on saying yes either, so she understood the girl in some way or another. “ f-for a while, i thought we were doomed. uh, t-thank you, hope! ”. the smile the girl flashed her wasn’t expected, but it was pleasant, to say the least.

she couldn’t believe she had the courage to agree. she’d struck a bargain with a pirate and everything in her intellect was telling her to back out before she fell into a trap of some sort, that this would backfire and they were using it as an excuse to take over her ship and dump her into outer space.

she’s read enough bounty hunter journals to know that pirates aren’t the type of people you’d want to trust. but she didn’t trust them. she didn’t even think about trusting them. but a bargain was a bargain and hope was a woman of her word, and this one was one she was reluctantly willing to keep. to avoid karma.

enzo’s mouth, previously fallen open, closed as he suddenly shone a smile towards hope that she could only describe as the cocky greaser grin. the ones she would see in those old movies. he had that sort of energy, releasing confidence and self-assurance and perhaps that of an ego so full it was at the point of over-flowing but that’s beside the point for now.

“ well . . . i suppose it’s nice doing business with you ”, he spoke, but he didn’t reach over for a handshake and she was somewhat glad he didn’t. “ when do we set off? can we actually have dinner now? oh yeah, and where does the captain sit? i kinda need to know that for future referen— ”. 

“ you’re not the captain here. ”

and that was something hope had no hesitation in declaring. she stood there with her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes piercing deeply into that of the pirate captain. as much of a captain as he may be for his set of fools, he was no captain on her ship. the nebula’s captain was hope, and it’s been like that for years and will remain so until hope’s passing. nobody was allowed to fly the nebula who wasn’t hope, nobody was allowed to claim the nebula who wasn’t hope. 

“ pardon? ”.

“ you have ears, didn’t you hear me the first time? ”.

hope stared back at the increasingly widening eyes belonging to the pirate. “ the nebula has only ever seen one owner. and that’s me. she’s only ever seen one pilot, one navigator, one captain. and that’s me. to impose your place as a captain here is irrelevant. you’re not in your ship, cap, so until you get your ship back, nobody is touching that navigation cabin except for me ”, she explained firmly. 

and the good thing was, no one dared to question her.

time skip  ﹏

oh, she wasn’t used to this at all.

it’s been months since hope has been near people. traveling between planets, accessing strange locations, hunting criminal after criminal, sometimes two at the same time. she had planned on seeing people eventually, and it felt like the universe was starting to purposefully irritate her. perhaps it knew just how much hope hated being among crowds.

and now there were pirates on her ship. regardless of the fact that they looked more like average people than the tyrants she’d often seen in her adventures, they were still pirates. good-looking ones but pirates regardless. and they would be on her ship for a while.

and by a while, she meant as she soon as she finished her mission with crimson.

hope had shown them the extra cabins, in particular a room with around eight bunk beds, two on each side of the room, hidden into the wall as to make the room appear empty, most of the rooms in her ship were programmed to change appearances and appear plain and empty. it was a good tactic when she was hiding something she didn’t want others to see.

and after making sure they had all gotten clothes which were kept somewhere in the storage space and fed, hope realized she still needed to fix her engine. it was in the basement, the process waiting to be completed and she forced herself onto her feet despite really needing some proper sleep.

taking the elevator down once again, hope took a glance at the time. she had wasted at least six hours fixing the engine along with dealing with the intrusion from the pirates. so now she had perhaps six hours left to get this thing fixed if she required twenty-four hours to prepare herself for the hunt.

upon hearing rattling, it was brought to her attention that she wasn’t alone. what’s when she spotted quinn, of all people, fiddling away with the engine as if he had taken the impulse to fix it.

“ uh, you’re not supposed to be here ”, hope voiced, but the kid merely looked over his shoulder and acknowledged her, and then turned back. hope didn’t like being ignored. “ quinn. ”

“ relax, i’m just fixing the engine for you. i want to go soon as well, you know ”, he argued. so hope sighed and approached him in his crouching position and looked into the hatchet to see just what he was doing. from what she’d heard, this guy was a mechanic. “ the cable you picked was good but it was also broken. so i fixed it and now i’m just installing it back into the circuit. shouldn’t take too long. ”

hope stood there quietly, arms crossed over her chest. her eyes traveled to the side of the boy’s face, his eyes were fixated on the job, and he acted all with a sense of purpose. they say, after all, that human beings get satisfaction from starting something and completing it. and based on his knowledge, he knew what he was doing. so she didn’t worry entirely too much.

“ how long have you been doing this? ”.

“ hm? ”. quinn looked up and saw her nod towards the engine. “ oh. i’ve been doing it nearly all my life. dad’s a pirate, but he was always more of the adventurer kind so there was never really anyone to fix his ship. so i started to learn from some of his friends and picked it up mainly as a hobby. but then i found it to be a reason to help my old man in some way. e-even if it’s just fixing things. ”

hope nodded, that was a valid reason. people go out of their ways to help others in any way they can, it was something about humans, from what she knew, that hadn’t really changed. but from what many have said in history books, the people of today were a little bit more . . . selfish. because they had everything. so what was the reason of helping someone who already has everything? no reason. well, that’s what they think.

“ where’s your old man now? ”.

“ don’t know, haven’t been able to trace him down for ages. i’ve been told all sorts of different things, that he’s in another galaxy or in a goldilock planet not far from us. some have told me that he’s in jail ”, quinn explained it so plainly. it sounded like the kid had gone through a lot if none of these were causing any alarm to him. “ but he’s alive, i can tell that for a fact. ”

you can never be too sure, hope wanted to say, but she kept her lips drawn in a thin line, it wasn’t her place to comment on personal matters, let alone that of a person she barely knew. but she continued to linger beside him as he went about his work. around ten minutes or so, Quinn suddenly pulled back and sighed.

“ all done? ”.

“ yeah, all done. i suggest telling your a.i to reboot the system now that it’s fixed. we’ll be running soon, i’ll imagine ”, quinn voiced and stood up, taking the cloth hope kept in her toolbox and wiped his hands with it. 

hope was rather glad someone had fixed it. honestly, knowing how carried away she can be, she would have never realized that the cable was faulty and she would have probably been here for longer than she intended if it hadn’t been for this boy. so she thought it was appropriate to thank him. 

“ u-uh, cheers for that ”, hope voiced, quinn looked up and met her gaze. “ for fixing it. i wouldn’t have realized it was a shitty cable, and i would have probably been stranded out here. so thank you, for . . . doing it without even having to be asked. ”

quinn stared at her for a moment, and she thought that perhaps there was something on her face for a moment until he spoke with a shrug, averting his eyes away. “ it’s alright. the ship wasn’t making the noise it was supposed to be so i assumed it was the engine. besides, dom said that he saw you struggling down here with something ”.

hope’s jaw clenched. so it was dominic who was walking around scaring the absolute shit out of her. “ he doesn’t know when it’s his business or not, huh? ”, she asked mostly rhetorically, cursing under her breath.

“ hah, yeah. but that’s just dom, he’s like that. i’m sorry if he bothers you but the longer we wait, the more time you’ll have to spend around us ”, quinn stated. “ we are . . . leaving straight away, right? ”.

hope shook her head, “ no. i have a hunt to go on and i can’t miss this fool. hence why i need you guys to stay on the ship and to avoid stepping outside once i’ve landed at the docks. if anyone sees you in my ship, i’ll be in deep shit. ”

“ you could say you’ve arrested us ”, he suggested.

“ yeah, and set you guys free to roam around? unlikely. besides, if they get too suspicious, they’ll take you from me. i’m not a voyage police officer, i’m merely a bounty hunter who kills criminals rather than arrest them. and i can’t say i was planning to kill you because that doesn’t make any sense. so just, stay on the ship. it’s safer here ”, hope requested. “ a.j, reboot the system! ”.

the lights around them seemed to dim and i was probably like that for the rest of the ship. hope closed the hatchet of the engine and allowed a couple of seconds of silence until the lights came on at full brightness. hope blinked her aching, burning eyes and found herself exhausted all of a sudden. but she couldn’t sleep. not now.

quinn looked at her curiously, “ how long has it been since you’ve slept? ”.

“ don’t know, you lose track of time in outer space. whichever planet you’re closest to, you sync into its day-night cycle and i was on earth a couple of days back. don’t know how many days but i got accustomed to its twenty-four-hour cycle ”, hope held a hand to her forehead and she rubbed her eyes slightly. “ but i’ll be okay. i just need to get energy drinks. ”

“ you like energy drinks? ”.

hope released something equivalent to a chuckle, “ who doesn’t? it’s my lifeline at this point. ” she shook her head and motioned to the elevator. “ uh, anyway, thanks for fixing the engine. you can go and rest up if you want, i’ll probably be in my room or in the navigation cabin. we’ll be setting off in a couple of hours. ”

quinn nodded and took the impulse to step forward, appearing reluctant but then he proceeded into the elevator and hope watched the doors close and the transparent container rise up the metal tube and quinn was gone.

hope let out a tired sigh and blinked, she was on the verge of fainting due to the tiredness and this whole situation had been an emotional rollercoaster, especially for her. and she needed to relax. but she remained tense even after the engine had returned to normal and after she had taken the elevator up to her cabin.

now there alone, hope sat on her chair and looked out towards the empty space beyond her. europa was a dead and vast moon similar to that of what the arctic had once looked like on planet earth. mountains of ice so hard it had turned to granite. hence why the temperatures were so low. but now the ship was warming up and hope found herself dozing off at times, a.j didn’t intervene.

and the last thoughts she had were debates on whether any of this was a good idea.

it was bad to trust a pirate, let alone a group of them.

but it would all be over soon. after she crossed off crimson off her bounty list, she could take them to pluto where she would be rid of another headache. voyage would leave her alone and perhaps then she would be able to travel and hunt in peace.

yes, all of this will be over soon enough.

[adhdtozier]

read it on ao3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18363323

pairing: eddie kaspbrak/richie tozier

warnings: none except language!

taglist: @girasol-eddie @annoyingtozier @constantreaderfool @tozierbinch @notafightr @anellope @bittcrtragcdy @trashmouthandspaghetti @richieshawaiianshirts @mileven-bughead @marsisaplanetyall @cigarette-tozier @richietoziersadhd @mirandonsky 

message me if ya wanna be added, or to my permatag list!! :)

Sometimes Eddie wondered if things would be different, if they didn’t have the flowers. If, in some other world, there was a version of everyone he knew who had to live with uncertainty. He couldn’t really imagine it; never truly knowing if the person you loved was the person you were meant to be with forever. It was just one of the constants of the world, like his mother being worried, or the Losers Club, or Richie pulling up to the Kaspbrak house in his horrible, loud old truck every morning to give Eddie a ride to school.

People were born with their flower tattoos, beginning as small buds but then growing as the wearer did. Tendrils of vines, or long stalks, or small bunches of leaves, stretching across everyone’s bodies, in beautiful shades for every color of the natural world. Most people raced to a plant identification guide, or else the library, as soon as their mark seemed something identifiable. Eddie certainly had, eager to put a name to the long, pale gray branch that stretched along under his clavicles, with gentle pointed green leaves arranged along.

“Wisteria floribunda,” Eddie had wheezed out as soon as he was in earshot of the other Losers. He quickly propped up his bike on the kickstand, pulling down the collar of his worn cotton t-shirt as he approached his slightly confused friends. They were arranged among the rocks of the Barrens, lounging and shooting the breeze when Eddie came crashing through the brush.

“Guys, that’s what it is! My mark! Japanese wisteria! Look, it’s coming in really clearly now!” Eddie tugged at his collar more aggressively, as if trying to draw their attention. Bev seemed to be the first to understand, a slow smile growing on her summer-freckled face as she stood up and came closer.

“Eddie! That’s amazing! Let me see!” She peered at the spindling branch, and the rather unremarkable gray buds that had begun to appear along it. “This is gonna be gorgeous when it blooms, Ed, you’re a lucky duck.”

Eddie’s face turned almost imperceptibly more red at the compliment, cheeks already flushed from his bike-sprint to tell his friends the news. “I finally was able to identify it, it was so hard to tell for the longest time because it was just a branch, ya know? But, now? There it is! Right there! And that’s what it is, Wisteria floribunda, Japanese wisteria, it’s gonna be all purple and long and, and, yeah,” he finished breathlessly, beaming at his friends.

“Well, well, Eds,” drawled Richie from where he was reclining against a rock. “Japanese wisteria? Someone’s a little exotic now, aren’t they?” Eddie rolled his eyes, coming over to sit between Bill and Mike. “I’m not surprised though, honestly,” Richie continued, peering through his glasses to get a better look. “Of course my Eddiebear would have the cutest, prettiest, most pastel flower known to man.”

Eddie’s grin abruptly turned to a scowl, as he pinched his lips together. “Don’t call me that, Rich.”

“What?” Asked Richie innocently, a shit-eating grin creeping across his face as he scooted closer to Eddie. “Cute? Eds? Eddiebear?” He batted his eyelashes dramatically, flopping onto his stomach to rest his chin in his hands. “Preeeeeettty?”

“All of the above!” He released his shirt collar huffily, reluctantly pulling it back down at Ben’s sounds of protest. “And I am not pastel, Richard.” He leaned back comfortably on Bill’s shoulder, catching his breath in the gentle rays of the evening sun. Richie snorted. Mike glared at him, almost imperceptibly.

It was no secret, the bullying that Eddie had endured throughout his school career. He was short, coddled by his mother, asthmatic, and didn’t deny the gay rumors: practically a bully magnet. The one thing he prided himself on, however, was his strength. Eddie Kaspbrak was small and gay, yes, but he was strong, and fast, and quick to stand up for himself and his friends.

Mike smiled kindly at Eddie, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Rich doesn’t mean it in a bad way, Ed. I think he’s just saying- well, you’re a really caring person, Eddie. And you’re gentle with the people you’re close with, and you’re-”

“CUTE!” Richie exploded, beaming and slightly red from the obvious exertion of having stayed quiet for Mike’s words. “Cute, cute, cute, Eddie!”

Mike rolled his eyes, as did the rest of their friends. “Seriously though, Eddie. It’s gonna be beautiful, I can tell. I’m so excited for you to meet him.”

Eddie flushed slightly. “Me too, Mikey. Thanks.”

Mike Hanlon had dozens of tiny vines of honeysuckle stretching all over and around his arms, winding across his dark skin all the way from his calloused hands to his biceps. The Hanlon farm was one of Eddie’s favorite places to go: an escape from his mother, where he could lay in an empty pasture with his kindest, best-at-listening friend and vent about his mother, or the new issue of Fantastic Four, or (more often than not) whatever ridiculous scheme Richie had dragged him into most recently. Sometimes, though, the two of them would just lay quietly in the tall grass, trying to count the tightly furled buds, or murmuring as they speculated when they would finally blossom.

It was laying in the pasture one day as the sun set, watching the yellow light shining through the oak trees and listening to the crickets hum, that Mike had been the first of the Losers to be told Eddie’s deepest, quietest secret.

“Hey. Hey Mike?”

The homeschooled boy hummed in response from his place directly beside Eddie, hands folded behind his head.

“I’m queer.” He blurted out the words quickly, clenching his fists at his sides, terrified to look over and see Mike’s reaction.

He hadn’t planned on telling Mike today, necessarily, but he was the warmest and least intimidating of all of Eddie’s friends (and maybe there was some tiny, quiet part of him that hoped that even if Eddie disgusted Mike; if he was shocked and didn’t understand at all; then perhaps he would recognize the similarities in the hatred that African-Americans and non-straight people were treated with in Derry, and he might have some tiny bit of sympathy).

Mike was perfectly still for a moment. Then, he spoke, in the same soft voice he always used with his friends. “Really?”

Eddie nodded, pressing his lips together tightly and squeezing his eyes shut.

“Wow. Thank you for telling me, Ed.”

Eddie felt some tiny, warm, pop in his chest, which quickly spread through his entire body, like air rushing out of a popped balloon as an overwhelming sense of relief washed over him.

Mike turned then, and smiled, and Eddie smiled back, and they went back to laying there, gazing up as the sun-drenched sky gave way to dusk.

That had been months ago. In the weeks since, he had slowly told each of his friends individually, unable to look at their faces when he breathed out the secret he had kept inside for so long.

Each and every time, he felt shock at their loving acceptance of him, and then shame, that he would think that they wouldn’t. His friends weren’t like the rest of Derry, or the rest of the world, for that matter! But still, he had doubted them, some deeply buried voice that sounded a lot like his Ma’s, whispering that he was dirty, a freak, sick, and that he would never find anyone like him.

He had held off on telling Richie for last. They had been sitting out by the empty soccer fields, ripping up tufts of grass as they waited for Bill to get out of baseball practice. Richie, true to form, had been trying to make a blade of grass into one of those dumb whistles (unsuccessfully) for about 20 minutes. Eddie figured there was about a 50-50 chance that Rich was actually listening to his stressed monologuing about the calc test, or if he was completely zoning out and thinking about, like, boobs or weed or Pokemon or whatever Richie Tozier’s mind was usually populated with.

It was when he watched Richie lift the blade of grass up to his face, scrunching up his crooked nose in that annoying cute and innocent way, as he peered through his (still ridiculously thick) glasses, that Eddie knew. He knew that he had to tell Richie. He had known when they were at the Barrens, and Richie had held both his hands, hard, and helped him jump over a giant puddle so he wouldn’t get his new socks wet. He had known when they were sitting on the Toziers trampoline late one summer night, just the two of them, and Richie had starting sniffling, then sobbing, as he told Eddie how terrified he was that everyone around him actually found him too annoying to be around. Heck, Eddie had known when they were eight, and Richie had leapt dramatically in front of him during dodgeball and gotten out instead.

“I dunno why, Eds,” Richie had shrugged, unconcerned, to a nearly hysterical Eddie, pinching a wound-up bunch of 1-ply from the boys’ bathroom over his bleeding nose. “That’s just what best friends do.”

And it was true. Richie Tozier was the best friend Eddie Kaspbrak had ever known, and probably would ever had. He wasn’t quite sure if he believed in God, or fate, or whatever, but he did know for sure that something special had led to the two of them being born in the same town, in the same time. Richie was kind, and funny (even if the Losers were loathe to admit it), and goofy, and genuine, and so overwhelming in his Richie-ness that it was almost staggering sometimes. And somehow, Eddie had gotten to be this idiot’s best friend. Yet he still hadn’t told him his biggest secret.

Suddenly, Richie looked up from the grass he was ripping up, alarm in his magnified, owl-like eyes. “Eds? What’s going on? Why are you crying?”

Eddie sniffed, startled by the sudden tears. “Uh, I’m not sure.”

Richie frowned, his eyebrows furrowing into his ‘I don’t believe you’ face. “Eddie. C’mon.”

Eddie sniffed again, pulling out a small pack of Kleenex from his backpack. “Rich, I- I gotta tell you something.”

Richie, in an act that was wholly un-Richie, went completely still. “Okay.”

Eddie, finishing wiping his nose, crumpled the tissue in his fist. He kept his eyes fixed on his hands, watching how his skin got whiter and his hand began to shake the tighter he squeezed. “Richie. I’m gay.”

Silence.

After what felt like an eternity, Eddie Kaspbrak looked up. Richie was looking straight at him, eyes still wide. But now - shining with what looked like tears?

“Oh my god, Richie, I’m so sorry. Don’t cry, okay?” Eddie began frantically twisting the dampened tissue in his hands, wholly unsure of what to do with himself. Of all the millions of possible outcomes he had imagined, laying wide awake in his twin bed, this was probably the one he was least prepared for. “I, I swear it won’t change anything, ‘kay? I just. I can’t help it, and it felt so wrong not telling you, but-”

“Eds.” Richie croaked suddenly, a calloused hand suddenly over Eddie’s own, which he hadn’t even realized were in the process of systematically tearing the tissue into tinier and tinier pieces. “Stop.”

Eddie did. He gulped, suddenly very still.

“Eddie,” Richie began again, looking down at the destroyed Kleenex, then back up at Eddie’s face (which he was pretty sure was completely white and ashy at this point). “Eddie. It’s… it’s okay.”

In an instant, Eddie’s heart was bursting out of his chest and his stomach had dropped to the grass below. He felt like he was floating, and falling, all at once. “Wait… Really?”

Richie smiled back at him. It was a soft smile, not full of teeth or smirking or with a huge laugh bubbling out from behind it, as Richie’s smiles were apt to be. But it was almost… fond? “Yeah, doofus. Really.”

Eddie’s heart pounded in his chest. “You’re sure.”

Richie grabbed both of Eddie’s (much smaller, how did he never notice how much smaller?) hands, and squeezed tightly. “Yes, you idiot. So you like dudes! That’s fine, Eds. Really. Thank you for telling me.”

All at once, Eddie felt warmth and light rushing into every fiber of his being. He was buoyed, finally, by the weight of the people he loved most in the world, all six of them. “Rich. Rich…” He threw his arms around the taller boy, who stiffened, almost imperceptibly, for just a second, before wrapping his long and bony limbs around in return. “Thank you,” he whispered.

Richie squeezed tighter. “Nothing to thank me for, Spaghetti Man. Besides,” he let go, fixing his eyes back on his lap. “Uh, I. I think I like guys too, Eds. So. It’d be pretty hypocritical of me. I think, at least.”

Now it was Eddie’s turn for his eyes to be as wide as saucers. “Wait. What?”

Richie smiled back, sheepishly this time. “Yeah. Uh, I think I still like girls? I dunno. If you can like both, I mean. But. Yeah. Kissing guys, fuck yeah, right?”

Eddie snorted. “Sure, Rich. Fuck yeah, kissing guys.”

-----

Things had been almost imperceptibly different between the two after that. Some weird, quiet, only somewhat unwelcome part of Eddie’s brain whispered that maybe, this is what he had wished for all along. That, somehow, Richie Tozier liking guys was some kind of miracle sent down specifically to make Eddie Kaspbrak’s little gay heart sing.

But, as Eddie reminded himself every day, Richie liking guys just meant that he liked guys. Not that he liked Eddie specifically. At least, not necessarily. But it still wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility. Right???

When Richie’s flower appeared, a single prickly bud on a long green stem, just above his heart, something deep within Eddie twisted itself into knots.

“It’s helianthus annus! Or at least, I’m pretty sure. It’s a sunflower, guys!”

The beaming smile on Richie’s face was almost as bright as the bloom that’d one day appear on his pectoral.

The Losers all congratulated him, but Richie didn’t bring it up again until one day at lunch, a couple months later. He was tossing an apple into the air and catching it, over and over again, while they all leaned against the track shack. His blue eyes were fixed on something far in the distance, and he had been uncharacteristically quiet for most of the lunch period, til Eddie finally elbowed him.

“Dude. What’s up? You’re being quiet.”

Richie pursed his lips, then held the apple for a second, looking at it thoughtfully. “Ya know, my mom says it’s rare to have a single flower, like mine. Did you know that?”

Eddie blinked. He wasn’t expecting soulmate talk, but sure, why not. “No, Rich. I didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, furrowing his eyebrows at a slight bruise on the apple before resuming his one-man game of catch. “I guess it like, means something. Or at least that’s what my grandma told her. Like, flower meanings or whatever.”

Eddie raised his eyebrows, eyes fixed on where the top of Richie’s prickly bud tattoo peeked out from his collar. “Oh? What’s yours mean, then?”

The corner of Richie’s mouth quirked up in a smile. He flicked his eyes to meet Eddie’s for split second, then looked back up at the sky. “Adoration. Also, like, loyalty, and happiness, and other stuff. But mostly adoration.”

For some reason, Eddie felt his cheeks suddenly blush a hot pink. “Oh.”

Richie chuckled awkwardly, adjusting his glasses. “Yeah. But, uh, the big thing is that there’s only one flower. Do ya know what my grandma says that means?”

Eddie frowned, tilting his head. “No, what?”

Richie coughed lightly. “Uh, I guess it means that, I only have one potential partner. Like, the first person I end up dating is probably like. It for me.”

Bev, who had been apparently overhearing their conversation, suddenly leaned over, beaming. “Rich! That’s so romantic! You must meet them pretty soon, then!”

“Or you’ve already met them,” Stan cut in, a weirdly knowing look on his face. Richie coughed strangely again, glaring at Stan, and Eddie instinctively reached for his hand sanitizer. The last thing he needed was getting sick in the middle of the school week.

That was the last time the Losers talked about soulmates for a long while. Occasionally, the topic would come up in casual conversation, but Eddie always tried to steer the subject away pretty quickly when it did. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but whenever he thought about the single sunflower waiting on Richie’s pale, freckled chest, he got a weird tight feeling deep in his chest. Thinking about some gorgeous person waiting out in the unknown to swoop Richie off his feet and probably take him away forever made Eddie’s heart thump wildly, and his palms start to sweat, so he tried not to. Think about it, that is.

It was only a couple months after Eddie revealed his twirling Wisteria to the other Losers that Stan made an announcement to the rest of the group before school, an uncharacteristically wistful look on his face. They were all standing at the bike racks and idly discussing plans to go see a move that weekend when Bev suddenly got a knowing gleam in her blue eye.

“STANLEY MICHAEL URIS!” Stan jumped almost imperceptibly at Bev’s shout. He walked up to join the group, a rosy blush creeping across his olive cheeks as he adjusted his backpack straps.  

“What, Bev?”

“Don’t you what me! Where is it?” she demanded, grabbing him by the shoulders excitedly. “I can see it in your eyes, you sly dog. So show us the tattoo!”

Richie gasped dramatically, joining Bev with one stride to clasp Stan’s shoulder. “Stan! My man! Becoming a man! Bless my stars, I can scarcely believe it! They grow up so fast.” He sniffled and wiped an imaginary tear from his cheek.

Stanley rolled his eyes and shoved Richie half-heartedly, but didn’t attempt to hold back the pure, delighted smile spreading across his face. “Step back, dumbasses, and maybe I’ll show you.”

The other Losers exploded in exclamations and congratulations as they crowded around the youngest member of the group, chattering excitedly. “Alright! Alright, I’ll show you. But we can’t do it here.” Mike and Ben shared a confused glance, but no one questioned Stan as he led them behind a bush near the baseball field.

Methodically, and in typical Stanley Uris fashion, he carefully set down his backpack and lunch and began to unbutton his shirt. Richie audibly inhaled at this, but Beverly promptly smacked a hand over his mouth before he could comment.

Finally, Stanley stood before them in only his white undershirt. Both long arms were exposed, and there was a collective gasp as the group saw the beautiful rosebuds adorning both of his deltoids. Long, thorny stems wound down each upper arm, and right where the smooth skin of his shoulder met his arm, a tightly furled bud.

Ben’s mouth was slightly open in awe, as he reached out and gently touched the new additions. “But, Stan. There’s…”

“Two, I know.” Stan’s cheeks were still a hot pink, and he glanced over his shoulder as he quickly pulled on his shirt and buttoned it up again. “I think that means I have… well. Two soulmates.”

“Stannyyyyyyy,” Richie crowed delightedly. “I always knew you were too much man for one person to handle.” At this, Stan blushed a shade of crimson previously unseen on any human face.

Mike chuckled, but there seemed to be a hint of warmth in his cheeks too, after seeing Stan’s marks. “Lay off, Rich. But… seriously. Congrats, man. Whoever they are will be lucky to have you.”

Eddie, who had been watching quietly, had a sneaking suspicion that Mike was wishing he were one of those someones.

-----------------------

By the time the summer after sophomore year rolled around, Ben and Bev were practically joined at the hip, adorably and almost sickeningly infatuated with each other since the crepe-y magenta azaleas on Ben’s ankle and the daffodil on Bev’s spine had finally blossomed.

Mike and Bill and Stan had been circling each other for ages now, all batting eyelashes and blushing and secretive conversations when they thought no one was looking. The rest of the Losers had an unspoken understanding that it was almost a matter of time until they finally got their acts together and finally became official.

Meanwhile, Eddie tried not to think about his mark too much. Or Richie’s, for that matter.

Richie had started dating girls the second he finally shot up and gained some semblance of muscle, no doubt thanks entirely to the weights that Wentworth Tozier kept in their garage. He was still a dweebus, full of (slightly less) crude jokes and loud, bracing laughter, but somehow that was attractive to at least 6 (7? 8? Eddie had lost count) of the girls at Derry High.

But, even with the new, objectively pretty girls that Rich would occasionally have around, the Losers somehow remained a unit. Bill and Eddie joined track, Bev and Richie became the drama department’s darlings, new friendships were formed and broken. But somehow, they all still remained locked in an orbit together.

There was an unspoken bond, one forged in the fire of being outsiders, that cemented the seven as something deeper than friends and more treasured than family. Strengthened and maintained by casual intimacy, indelible trust, and the sacred Friday movie nights, each person knew that they had something special in their core group of friends.

Eddie was a little bit in awe of them sometimes: their wit and success and athleticism and energy and compassion. He could scarcely believe that he was one of this wonderful group of ridiculous, talented people filled with so much potential. And, as the other losers began to slowly find romance and connections and soulmates, a deep sense of un-belonging seeped into his bones. An overwhelming feeling of other-ness, and sadness, and loneliness, even when surrounded by the people closest to him in this world.

Especially when he was around Richie. Although, that feeling wasn’t quite in his bones. It was in his stomach, and his heart, and it burned. He knew why. Every time a grinning Richie walked up, hand in hand with his latest girlfriend, or casually exposed the sunflower on his chest when changing his shirt, Eddie felt it. First, the pang of jealousy. Then, the warmth of deep affection, and then, the hotter burn of want.

Sometimes, laying in his bed, looking up at the pale blue ceiling his mother refused to let him paint, Eddie thought about what Richie’s grandma had said, years ago. About his mark. “Adoration.”

He’d turn that word over and over in his head for hours, like one of the hard butterscotch candies his aunts gave him when he was little, that’d last for hours but was still as sweet at the end as at the beginning. He adored Richie. He knew that much for sure. With every dumb joke, and every suddenly introspective and quiet revelation, and every time Eddie caught his bright, blue-eyed gaze through his glasses from across the quad. He adored him!

But did Richie adore him back? Eddie wasn’t sure. It depended on the kind of day he’d had at school, or what his mom said when he got home, or the random comment someone had made at track practice, or just how much Eddie despised Richie’s latest girlfriend.

A thousand hair ruffles, and lagging behind the group when they walked somewhere so they could talk, just the two of them. Holding each other’s ice cream cones, and shared hysterics at the dumb comics they leaned over in each other’s bedrooms. The cheesy homemade cards they always exchanged on each other’s birthdays, and the truly horrific homemade cake Richie had tried to make for Eddie’s 16th. The quiet nights when Richie (“you idiot!”) would scale the tree outside Eddie’s window and clamber in to sit, or lay, or dream.

Did those add up to adoration? Eddie really wasn’t sure.

–––––––––––––––

One such night, when Richie was conked out on the rug in Eddie’s room, mouth slightly open and gangly limbs splayed, Eddie felt a particularly strong surge of his own adoration bloom somewhere deep inside.

And on his collarbone, a single bloom of Wisteria floribunda shifted.

hope y’all enjoyed!!!! please shoot me a message if you did, or if you wanna be added to the tag list. this is my first major work in this fandom, so i super want any feedback!!!!!!

[1000roughdrafts]

Little Tree (part 1)

Summary: Being a sheriff in a small town, you were surprised when a body was found, making it the first murder in over 50 years. The alarm bells really went off when the FBI showed up as quick as they did. Despite your initial thoughts, you were lucky that they had.

A/N: this was written for @spnclassicbingo and I’m on mobile so i had to break this up into parts. I also hope the keep reading insert works, if it doesn’t please tell me so I can take this down and post later when I have my laptop as i don’t want to clog anyone’s dash. Thank you :) Anyway, I hope that you like it!

Warnings: somewhat graphic description of a dead body (no worse than the show), some cussing,

Word Count: 2k

Square Filled: werewolf

It was a typical morning for Sheriff Y/L/N on that cold day in Little Tree, Louisiana. Her house sat perched on a small hill roughly a mile from the station, leaving her with plenty of time to enjoy breakfast and a hot cup of coffee before heading into her shift. The usual damage the town endured was caused by rowdy teens or a robbery here and there.

Y/N and all that lived in Little Tree had felt safe enough in their small community to leave doors unlocked overnight and during the work days. Unfortunately, that would all change this winter day when word broke out of a possible murder on the outskirts of town, just ten miles away from Y/N’s cabin home.

To say that the lives of many where changed would be an understatement. It started with a phone call from one of Y/N’s good friends at the station.

“Mornin’, Deputy Scholts,” Y/N mumbled, crunching down on her breakfast pastry as she leisurely collected her badge in preparation to leave for the day.

Her eyes went wide in shock as the deputy’s voice quivers on the other line, “I know you’re not due in for another hour or so, ma’am, but uh-“ he pauses, and as he did so she could see him shaking his head in her mind's eye. The thought that something terrible could happen in her town made her both terrified and angry. “We have a situation.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, throwing the pastry into the trash before running out of her house.

She made it to the station in record timing, almost frowning at her perverted thought that there would be no one to catch her speeding, but on a day with such a case, time was of the essence.

Her nose crinkled in disgust when she made her way into the morgue, conveniently located behind the station. In a town as small as Little Tree, it made sense to keep the two close together.

The doctor peeled away the sheet to reveal a young woman, aged somewhere in her thirties. Her face was so mangled it would be impossible to identify her without collecting DNA.

Y/N’s stomach twisted in disgust and heartbreak as, even though she didn’t know who the woman was quite yet, she knew that in time she would be trying to solve the murder of someone she knew or at least saw around town.

Tears pecked at her eyes as the deputy and doctor kept theirs on hers. She stood with her arms crossed, gazing over the woman’s gashes and cuts, too disoriented to step closer.

“I could cover her up and read the report to you, if you’d like, ma’am,” the doctor said.

For whatever reason, that was enough to pull her from her trance. She shook her head to rid the tears from her eyes and uncrossed her arms. Taking a step closer she reached for the gloves and slipped them onto her hands.

“It’s okay, Marion,” she said softly, yet retaining assurance. “I’ll be fine.”

The doctor nodded, leaving the room to her and the Deputy. Her ability to be a kind-hearted and loving woman all while keeping professionalism is something the community more than admired about her. It was one of the reasons they had nominated her to be the sheriff in the first place.

A few moments into examining the body in front of her, the doctor made his way back into the room.

“Uh, Ms. Y/L/N?” he said cautiously. Turning her head in his direction she saw two tall men standing beside the doctor.

Dr. Marion was a tall man himself, taller than most people who worked at the station, so seeing him look as small as he did in comparison to the two men had her stifling a giggle. “These two claim to be federal agents,” he went on, eyeing them suspiciously.

She only nodded, using two fingers to suggest they enter the room. The men smiled at Dr. Marion as they made their way towards Y/N.

She slid the gloves off of her hands and dropped them into the garbage by the door. With her award winning smile, she held her hand out to the taller of the two men.

He smiled sympathetically as he shook her hand before gesturing to himself, “I’m Agent Burg,” he said with an even voice. “This is my partner, Agent Hatch,” he said, gesturing to the other.

Agent Hatch held his hand out for her to shake with a cramped smile on his face.

“Do y’all have some form of identification I could take a look at?” she said firmly, but keeping her smile.

“Uh, yeah, certainly,” Agent Burg mumbled as the two pulled out their badges.

She examined them thoroughly before eyeing the two men and reaching behind her for the box of gloves. After pulling three pairs free, she held them in her hands a moment.

“Look boys, this doesn’t normally happen in this town. We haven’t had a murder case in,” she stopped, blowing out air and letting it rattle against her lips. “Well, over fifty years by now. I need you to understand that it is my job to protect this town and you will not do anything her without my say so. You understand?”

The men nodded, both muttering a “yes, ma’am.”

She smiled to herself before handing over the gloves, “no need to call me ma’am, gentlemen. My team calls me that, and while I’ll never correct them quite frankly it makes me feel out of place. Call me Y/N,” she said, eyeing the two as if the three sat in the interrogation room. “Y’all got first names?” She asked, skipping the gloves over her hands and hesitantly walking over to the body.

Agent Burg speaks out first, “yeah, I’m Sam and this is Dean.”

“All right,” she said, handing the chart over to Dean. “How’d you find out about this anyway? Far as I knew this just happened overnight?”

“We… have our sources,” Sam says with a soft laugh.

Lifting her eyebrow in suspicion, she decided to press the matter later, when she’s not standing over the body of someone she very well may know.

“Sounds like we got ourselves a town crier,” she said with a soft chuckle in an attempt to light the dark atmosphere of the room. “I’ll have to see about that later on.”

Pulling the lamp towards the table, Y/N circled the table to stand on the opposite side of the men. She sighed as her eyes trailed up and down the broken body of a woman she recognized, but tried her best to stay unreadable to the men.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she muttered under her breath, shaking her head in slight disbelief. “This is torture. Plain and simple,” she said, anger seeping into her words. It went undetected until her eyebrows furrowed and she shook her head once more, “son of a bitch is gonna pay for this, I’ll tell you that.”

“We’ll help make sure of that,” Sam added reassuringly. “Let’s uh- let’s talk about the cause of death. It looks like her heart is missing?” He said, pointing to the hole in her chest.

Y/N nodded, “yep, looks like it. This isn’t a clean cut, either. Looks like it was ripped straight out. Don’t know what could do something like that. Some of the boys think this is a bear attack. The cuts on her arms and face are good indication of that, however no animal would remove just the heart.”

Sam and Dean exchange a glance. Dean opens his mouth to speak, but keeps quiet for the moment.

Y/N pulls the woman’s hand up, “looks to me like she fought back,” she said with a smile like a proud mother, holding one finger at a time to inspect under the woman’s long nails, “she’s got crusted blood and a bit of dirt under here,” she said, shaking her head.

“She’s also got some scratch marks on her hands. And I’m willing to bet she was restrained by the looks of her wrists,” she sighed. She stayed silent for a moment, massaging the woman’s hand but dropping it before the tears could come. “Dr. Marion,” she called out.

As he entered the room, she lowered her voice and put on a smile, “have you collected the DNA under her fingernails? I think that would be a good place to start looking for whoever did this to her.”

“Uh, yes ma’am. I’m having it sent in today, Deputy March said we’ll have results no later than two weeks out.”

“Two weeks?” She shrieked before taking in a deep breath to calm herself. “Okay,” she sighed, “very well, I know how this game is played.” After another long pause, she removed her gloves and squared her shoulders to the men, “you gentlemen got all you need? I’m packing her up and heading out for now,” she said, hands resting on her waist.

Sam cleared his throat and followed suit in removing his gloves. After looking over at Dean, he shrugged, “yeah, I think so.”

The three were silent as the men followed her out of the morgue. She kept her lips pressed tightly together as she turned around to lock the door behind them. She took long, slow steps over to her desk, grabbing a business card and a pen to scribble her number down.

“This here is my personal cell,” she said, handing it to Sam. “You guys got any questions, leads, anything, you come straight to me,” she demanded.

The two looked at each other, a slight but noticeable frown on Dean’s face.

“Please,” Y/N added with the tilt of her head, which seemed to relax Dean.

The men nodded and said their goodbyes, leaving their own card on Y/N’s desk. She slumped into her chair as they walked out of the door.

—

A rough breeze blew by, sliding between the buildings to sound like a whistle as Sam and Dean walked towards the Impala. Dean had his head shaking by the time he got into the front seat.

“We already know what it is,” he started.

“Yeah, werewolf,” Sam said, almost snorting.

“How’re we gonna deal with this without tipping her off and keeping it to ourselves,” Dean grunted. “You know as well as I do that she’s got ‘go-getter’ written all over her face,” he said, putting the car in gear. “She’s not gonna stop until she has someone to blame for this.”

“Well then we just gotta tell her the truth,” Sam suggested.

Dean laughed condescendingly, “she’s not gonna buy it, dude.”

Sam shrugged, “you never know.”

“Yes, I do. She’s gonna deny it, call us crazy and throw us away in the loony bin,” Dean snorted.

“Well,” Sam said, letting all the air out of his lungs in one breath. “Guess we just gotta get this done and split town before she finds out.”

—-

Reluctant to shed any tears just yet, Y/N peeled herself from the desk and rubbed her face with her hands. Forcing her body to stand, she walked over to Deputy March’s desk and plopped in the chair across from her.

“Deputy March,” she said, a tired lull in her words.

“Yes, ma’am?” the Deputy said, sitting up straight and turning away from her computer to give all of her attention to Y/N.

“I need to know how the FBI was tipped off about this case,” she said through her teeth, attempting to not let on that she was concerned about their sudden arrival. “I need you to figure out who got the word out and why. Comb through articles, both printed and online. Figure out who shared details about this case before it was printed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. I’m leaving for the day. Do not, under any circumstances, let anyone in that autopsy room except for Dr. Marion, got it?” She tried to keep her voice calm and steady, but the words came out strict and shaky.

“Yes ma’am,” the Deputy repeated, standing up from her chair to alert the doctor.

Y/N made her way back to her desk to grab the files of this case and drove home at a much slower pace than she had in the morning.

Forevers <3

@waywardblueshun @fangirl490

[pyropsychiccollector]

            Ten identification markers. They were ultimately what stood between Fairy Tail and victory. The other forces of Alvarez, while overwhelming in number, could be beaten back with enough tenacity and perseverance. The ten marked enemies on the map, however… the remaining Spriggan Shields… They still posed the most imminent threat. Natsu might have taken down two of the Spriggan Shields and Zeref in one fell swoop, but some of the most powerful commanders of the enemy army were still advancing towards Fiore and Magnolia.

            As Makarov stared at the map hologram with grim determination, Mavis floated over to his side.

            “The biggest threats right now are the forces to the East and South… Each of those armies has three Spriggan Shields assigned to them.” Mavis re-evaluated their current standing. “The Shields we know as Dimaria and Wahl are stationed in the south… Wahl was the one that nearly nailed our guild from Hargeon’s port.”

            Makarov frowned as his brow furrowed in slight concern.

            “We stationed Laxus in that group… I have every confidence he can win against Wahl, no matter how formidable that man has proven to be.” The weary Guildmaster stroked his beard. “And though we know next to nothing about Dimaria’s abilities, I hope that Erza and Kagura will be enough to defeat her.”

            Mavis continued to stare at the map with a neutral face.

            “That leaves the third Shield, who has yet to leave the ship he’s stationed on… We don’t know anything about him, so let’s move onto the Eastern front…”

            Makarov shook his head tiredly.

            “Some of the most intense fighting will be happening there… God Serena is there, as well as August, the King of Magic. We dispatched our Gods of Ishgar – we can only hope they can prevail.”

            “Apparently, the third Shield has been identified as Jacob Lessio. Some sort of assassination specialist. He might be the weakest of the three Shields on that front, as far as we know, but we shouldn’t take him lightly.” Mavis advised cautiously. Makarov could only nod his agreement.

            “That leaves Invel, leading the remains of a million soldiers to our West… Natsu chipped away at them, but they are still hundreds of thousands men strong. And then there is the remaining Shield to the North…” Makarov’s frown deepened. “We don’t know who that is, or what he or she is capable of. But as it is a Spriggan Shield, we must be ever vigilant.”

            “That leaves Ajeel, who Erza defeated.” Mavis finished off the analysis. “He remains at large, but we captured the other one that stepped into Magnolia… Brandish.”

            “Nine of Alvarez’s elite is still a tall order to meet… Yet there is no choice but to win. For my children, who are fighting with all their hearts. For our allied guilds, who have no stake in this fight except to defend Ishgar. For Natsu, who foolishly threw his life away to give us this chance…” At this point, tears were streaming down Makarov’s face, anew. No matter how long he took to try and process that loss, it filled him with sorrow to no end. “We must win. So long as the enemy keeps advancing, we will fight back.”

            At this heartfelt declaration, Mavis could only stare down at the floor with a blank expression. True, the loss of the Dragon Slayer saddened her as well... But not as much as she would have liked. Mavis knew this was the result of being afflicted with Ankhseram’s Curse… And she could do nothing about it.

            Suddenly, Warren ran up to the two Guildmasters with an alarmed expression.

            “Laxus initiated the fight with Wahl of the Spriggan Shields!”

            Makarov clenched his fists in frustration as he stared listlessly at the map.

            “Just don’t fly off the handle, Laxus… I couldn’t bear to lose you, too…” Makarov sighed with exhaustion, feeling every bit the brittle and old man that he truly was.

            ~*~

            Laxus grunted as he was smashed through another wall. Now that he’d had some time fighting this guy, he could definitely say this machine trumped the doll that he’d sent to try and bring down the barrier around Magnolia… Wahl had barely been showing the extent of his abilities, back then. The bastard had even taken on a new form no one from Ishgar had seen yet, reverting to a more appropriate stiff robotic personality.

            The Dragon Slayer got up in time to dodge the robot from stomping down on his previous position, leaving a sizeable crater in its wake. The machine then proceeded to raise its arm and fire off a volley of shots that Laxus managed to dodge by taking to lightning bolt form. But just as he got in range to punch Wahl, he got punched instead, hurtling back with the force of a meteor.

            The result was many more ravaged buildings… But it was a minimum price to pay, for going up against Alvarez’s elite.

            ‘Damnit… How the hell am I going to beat this guy?! He runs on electricity, and he can’t affect me with lightning attacks! A stalemate!’ The blond breathed raggedly as he moved around in the rubble, keeping an eye out for where Wahl would be coming from next. He wasn’t too surprised Wahl had stayed pretty much where he was, and opted to attack from a distance. A tall, intimidating gun had manifested on his back, and he was firing Magical blasts with his arms as well.

            “Now pierce ‘em…!” Wahl bellowed, firing off the devastating railgun on his back in tandem with the smaller barrage of attacks fired from his arms.

            Laxus avoided them easily enough by taking lightning bolt form again and steadily making his way over to the robot before savagely kicking him hard enough to make the robot sprawl out on his back and smash the railgun to bits.

            “Grr… Target has exceeded estimated time for elimination…” Wahl muttered to himself. He glared at the Dragon Slayer, who was stalking toward him with a murderous expression. But then abruptly, Laxus wavered in his stride, and collapsed to the ground painfully and coughing violently. To that, Wahl could only exude an aura of arrogance. “Hah… It seems the Magical Barrier Particles in your system have reached their peak stage. Soon you won’t be able to move, and breathing will become painful.”

            Laxus gritted his teeth as his body continued to fail him. His arms collapsed under him, and he was now flat on the ground, at Wahl’s mercy. The robot’s analysis was completely on the mark. He was a sitting duck, and he needed to get up and move… but… nothing was working. His whole body shook in agony as he attempted to move, but that was the most he could accomplish – he couldn’t even lift his face from the dirt.

            And as Wahl rambled on about putting him out of his misery, Laxus could only inwardly reflect on everything. He wondered if this would be the end for him…

            ‘The only reason I came back here… was to protect the guild…!’ Laxus gnashed his teeth as his face remained planted in the dirt. ‘It’s been around for 100 years already… and I can’t even beat a friggin’ machine? Natsu, wherever you are now, you’re probably laughin’ your ass off… You took down the leader of Alvarez, the boogeyman of the world of Magic, and I can’t even demolish one little psychotic toy soldier… I’m pathetic for groveling like this…!’

            A wellspring of new determination surged up through the Lightning Dragon Slayer. He recalled a talk he had with Mavis about his ancestor, Yuri. At the time, he denied being anything like that man at all. Mavis painted him to be a hero, who would do anything for his friends… go to Hell and back for them. And all Laxus could do was think about his past sins, trying to takeover the guild. He was nothing like Yuri.

            … But… Only now, in this moment, he finally realized that’s what he’s wanted to do for so long. And now it’s what he needed to do!

            ‘Like hell I’m gonna let you upstage me, damn Pyro…’ He lifted his arm with great frustration, and with his pointer finger carved out a line while channeling Magic power through it. ‘You got your dumb ass killed, wiping out our greatest enemy… I’ll never forgive you for leaving us in that way. But I’ll be damned if I let the guild go unprotected because you’re no longer here!!!’

            Wahl tensed up as an Enchantment suddenly encircled the two of them. He temporarily stalled firing his Etherion Cannon.

            “An enchantment?! Since when did something like this appear…!”

            Laxus slowly got up on one knee.

            “Got it straight from Freed… and in this Enchantment…” Before Laxus could finish, however, Wahl cut him off.

            “You fool…! Did you forget already?! Enchantments don’t work on me! Is that the best you can do?” Wahl sneered at his efforts. But Laxus wasn’t deterred this time, even as Wahl cancelled out the Magical Barrier particles.

            “Thanks a lot, Freed… There’s no Wizard alive that could break your Spells… And even if there was…” Laxus grinned cockily at Wahl, standing up to his full height. “He or she would have to neutralize the Magical Barrier Particles completely… meaning he or she would be my ‘cure’…”

            It was now dawning on the robot what it had just done.

            “Sh… Shit!!!” Wahl cursed as he convulsed suddenly. “DAMN YOOOUUU!!! Personality settings error! Personality settings error!”

            Laxus’s feral grin widened as he then surged towards Wahl, lightning crackling all over his body.

            “It’s rude to bite the hand that feeds you… But you took out one of my friends!!”

            Wahl regained some composure as he cackled madly.

            “Thunder doesn’t work!! You’re helpless!! There’s nothing you can do now!!” Wahl resumed charging up his Etherion Cannon, and Laxus kept steady on his course towards the machine.

            “Yeah, well, I’m not giving you my life so easily, either!!!” Laxus slammed into Wahl with a super-charged fist into its chest, which earned a sneer from the robot.

            “Like that would work…” The robot quickly changed its tune, as Laxus’s lightning took on a dark red tinge. “What…!! What’s that reddish dark thunder?! I can’t seem to analyze it!”

            “Raiko…! RED LIGHTNING!!!” Laxus bellowed, managing to pierce Wahl violently enough to tear off large chunks of the robot’s body – to the point that Wahl was decapitated, and there was no room for doubt that the robot was dead. Laxus breathed heavily as he surveyed his destructive work; Wahl was nothing but scraps now, his face forever froze in a tortured, soundless scream.

            ‘I did it, Gramps… Natsu… That’s a win for Fairy Tail!’ Laxus slumped on the ground in exhaustion. He’d get back into the fray after he recuperated a little… Being poisoned by Magical Barrier Particles for so long, and then having them essentially removed, it really took a toll on a man.

            No one would begrudge him a quick power nap.

            ~*~

            Meanwhile, on the Northern battlefront, a much more lenient battle was being waged, in terms of difficulty. Between Blue Pegasus, Sabertooth, and Fairy Tail’s representatives, they were easily taking down the forces that were now without leaders. The remaining Spriggan Shield wasn’t even anywhere to be seen.

            Gajeel sneered and let himself have a good chuckle.

            “Things are goin’ almost too good… I’ll bet we’ll have the Northern front cleared up before they get through defendin’ the South!”

            Beside the Iron Dragon Slayer, Levy punched his arm sourly.

            “Don’t get cocky! Once the Spriggan Shield shows up, we’re depending on you to take them down!” The bluenette huffed. She placed her hands on her hips as she glared up at him. “And anyway, how can you still be laughing?! From what Warren said…!”

            It was now Gajeel’s turn to huff.

            “Listen, shrimp. I heard the same thing like everyone else. But if we sit stewin’ over what we lost, we’re gonna get massacred! We gotta get these clowns out of our backyard before we can even think about yellin’ at Flamebrain for getting himself killed!”

            Fresh tears spilled from Levy’s eyes as her glare grew harsher.

            “Is that what you’re really going to do?! Yell at him?! You’re never going to cry over him, are you?”

            To his credit, Gajeel didn’t even take one step back from the heated accusation Levy was throwing at him. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

            “Why would I cry over that moron? He was probably too stupid to live.” He grimaced as Levy threw her hands up in the air and stormed off, obviously upset with how cold he was being. The eater of iron ran a hand through his hair in slight exasperation. “Sorry, shrimp…”

            He was being prickly… and probably more than a little frosty. But someone had to stand up and be a wall of unbending iron. Too many would be crying their heart out. And he wasn’t exactly Salamander’s buddy to begin with…

            Gajeel dipped his head as he clenched his fists in pent-up frustration.

            How dare that numbskull get himself killed before they could settle the score? The whole reason he was in Fairy Tail was because that Pyro kicked his ass…

            Gajeel’s ears pricked up as he heard a faint sob nearby. Grimacing, he steeled his features for what he thought would be a confrontation with Levy… Only as he passed by a few trees, his eyes fell on the form of Fairy Tail’s resident Demon, leaning against a tree and cradling one of her arms, face downcast as she stared listlessly at the snow-covered grass.

            “If it’s not one thing, it’s another…” Gajeel sighed and got a crick out of his neck before ambling over. “You, too, huh?”

            Mira didn’t say anything at first. But when she did, a small, sad smile graced her lips.

            “I heard you and Levy… You’re trying to be strong for her, too.”

            At the sad, kind smile shown his way, Gajeel could only growl in denial.

            “Dunno what you’re talkin’ about… I ain’t gonna miss that moron. It’ll be a lot better without him around!”

            Mira’s expression never wavered, much to Gajeel’s displeasure.

            ‘Stinkin’ know-it-all…’ The iron eater griped in his head.

            “I know because I’m doing the same…” Mira murmured softly, eyes panning back down to the snow. “Lisanna’s beside herself. Elfman’s pulling the tough guy act, like you are, but he’s not as good at hiding his emotions as you are right now… If I don’t hold myself together, we might lose more than Natsu. And my heart… can’t take that. Natsu’s too much as it is.”

            Gajeel scratched the back of his head awkwardly.

"Uh, yeah... Could tell you had a soft spot for..."

"I loved him."

Gajeel proceeded to look like he'd scarfed a lump of coal instead of iron.

"Really?! You're really going there!"

Mira just smiled at Gajeel's flustered state, too caught up in her own emotions. She stared up at the sky fondly.

"But he always had Lisanna and Erza around, so I had no right to usurp their bonds." Mira continued, disregarding Gajeel's attempts to gain her attention. "Heck, Lisanna came back from the dead! No way I could top that."

Gajeel fell silent as he knew he had no choice but to allow Demon Mirajane to let it all out... Or he'd probably get his ass kicked...

"Unfortunately, I don't think Natsu's gonna pull the same thing off... He's gone, and there's nothing I can do about it. He saved us. So many times. And I can't repay him for everything now... It's not fair, but I have to remain strong for them. Because I'm the oldest, and it's my responsibility to look out for them."

"..." Gajeel couldn't say anything, in the face of such raw emotion.

"I have to watch out for everyone else, too, of course. Everyone in the guild. They're going to feel lost, once we get through this and return home." Mira lightly pushed herself away from the tree she was leaning on and walked in the opposite direction Gajeel was facing, only pausing as she stood beside him. "If you ever need to vent, I'll listen. Don't try to shoulder everything yourself."

With a ghost of a smile tugging at her lips, Mira began to walk off. But Gajeel's voice stopped her a second time.

"Oi! That goes double for you, alright? I'm not the best at advice, but I can listen!"

Gajeel heard the small giggle she let out in response to his declaration.

"You're such a gentleman, Gajeel~..."

... But he missed the lone tear trailing down her cheek.

~*~

Author's Note: Been a year and a half since I dabbled with the idea of Natsu's attack connecting with Zeref, and the world that endured after his death... Figured I'd write some more of it. Kinda fun to muse about.

[lazydoodlesandfanfic]

Hello, I’m Pansexual (Avengers X Fem!Reader)

Characters: Avengers X Fem!Reader

Universe: Marvel, Avengers

Warnings: Mention of homophobia, anxiety.

Request:can you do one where the reader’s part of the avengers and has powers, but is pan and struggling w how to come out to the team bc she’s scared they’ll kick her off?

You were an Avenger. A member of the world’s mightiest heroes. You had your own powers that made you unique and proved why you were on that team. You seemed to fit in almost perfectly among the super soldier, god, assassins, and genius’s and fellow mutants.

However, the one difference to you and them was that (as far as you were aware) they were all straight. You, however, weren’t. You were pansexual, though your team were totally unaware of this. No one knew- not even Fury. However, that didn’t mean you didn’t want to tell them. You’d been wanting to tell them for ages- ever since you joined the team. However, it either wasn’t a good time, or something came up before you could tell someone, and your fear of not being accepted made you hesitate.

You were terrified that your second family that had seen everything and had nothing that phased them anymore, would not be able to swallow the news that you were pansexual. It sounded insane when you actually thought about it, but it was an understandable fear for you. Not many people understood your sexuality in its full extent, in denial that you were ‘just bisexual’ or ‘selfish’ in some way. But you’d known the second you identified with the sexuality that it was the right identification.

Every year that went by you felt guiltier for keeping it a secret from the Avengers, and decided that this was going to be the year. Now it was just finding the right time to tell them. What’s a better time than in LGBT History Month?

You had to work still, so instead you decorated yourself. You came into work in a pink, yellow and blue hat, several new badges on your jacket in the same colours with other indications as well in them, like one being in a heart shape, one saying “Hello I’m Pansexual’ and even one as an actual pan. Hell, you even changed your phone’s case to be the right colours. It was pretty obvious what it was all referring to.

It wasn’t long till you ran into some of your co-workers. “Nice hat Y/N.” Clint called when he saw you passing. While a wave of panic passed through you, you sent a small smile in response, only noticing then he wasn’t alone- and was in fact in company of the rest of the Avengers, all seeming to be waiting for something to kick off.

“T-Thanks, it’s for Pride, you know?” You tried to explain, taking a few cautious steps towards them. You got quite a few confused looks.

“I didn’t know you were gay.” Natasha commented.

“I don’t think any of us knew…” Bruce also added. You gulped, nodding and starting to fiddle with your hands. You were starting to regret going with it this way, but there was no going back.

“I’m guessing the colours mean a certain flag… uuuhhhhhh…” Tony snapped his fingers, trying to remember.

“P-Pansexual. I’m pansexual.” You quickly blurted out the answer, making him point at you, telling you that was the answer he was looking for. While the others nodded, there was still Thor and Steve in the back looking a little lost.

“I think the god and 95 year old are a little lost.” Wanda joked a little. There wasn’t any hostility and no bad looks… yet, so you took the opportunity to come a little closer.

“Um… Pansexual means I’m attracted to anyone, no matter their sex or gender identity. So I could like a girl, a boy, or someone who identifies as both, or neither or something else.” I tried to explain to them. It seemed to click finally for Steve who made an ‘oh’ expression with his face before smiling. Thor, was grinning.

“That makes perfect sense!” The sentence seemed a little… odd, coming from him, but then you remembered he was a god/alien so… you decided not to question it further.

“I’m sorry I never told you guys before, I was… scared, you know? Not everyone is as… nice as you guys.” You told them. Wanda and Bruce were quick to give sympathetic smiles, quickly followed by the others, even getting an arm over your shoulder from Tony.

“Hey, don’t be scared to tell us anything, you’re part of this team, we go through thick and thin together.” He assured. It was a sigh of relief, knowing that the team had your back through anything. “Have you ever wanted to bone the Hu-“

“Don’t even finish that sentence Stark.”

Hope you like it! If you have any questions, please send them in!

*Not my gif

TAGS: @imbuckypositive @abbybills22 @waywardemo @httpmcrvel @mutantjediavenger @theoraekensnotsosecretlover   @courtneychicken  @graysonmalfoy @bellero @captain-peanut-at-your-service @likiyoshi-lijie  @sebstanchrisevanchickforever19 @marveloussupernatural @aesthetjic @originalpottervengerlock @supernatural-pan @esoltis280 @lena-stan-xavier @lady-of-lies 

[khhunniewriting]

Ride Or Die (1)

[ Mafia AU ]

This is for you @leyarren, biggest Jwalker I know.

Jay stood over the corpse of his latest victim. He was a young, ambitious man who thought he could get away with selling Jay’s merchandise at double the price and pocket the extra profits...but he thought wrong. “Elo, Loco dispose of him.”

The two men put on their black rubber gloves and immediately got to work, searching the victim's pockets. They needed to get rid of any and all evidence that could identify who he was if his body was found. Loco pulled out what he thought was the man’s wallet. “Shit,” he exhaled loudly as he showed Elo what he found.

“Boss we have a problem.” Elo pointed at the thing in Loco’s hands. “This guy was an undercover Fed.”

“The fuck?” Jay snatched the badge from Loco. There was the guy’s face on a federal agent’s identification card along with the badge to prove it. This man had been selling for Jay a few years now. He wondered how no one could have suspected him. “Who was he reporting to?”

“Wegun,” Jay’s second in command answered the question. Simon’s fingers tapped away on his phone as he sent notice to Wegun. “He’ll be at HQ first thing in the morning.”

Jay shook his head, “No, tell him to go to my house as soon as possible. We have to finish this quickly or it could hurt us.”

Simon opened his mouth to protest the idea but knew it had to be done. He sent the message to Wegun and didn’t even wait for a reply. “He’ll be there in ten.” Since it was an order from Jay he knew Wegun would be there quickly.

Jay nodded, satisfied with Simon’s efficiency. “Tell Gray to keep watch here. You two proceed to dispose of him just like everyone else.”

“Yes boss,” the confirmed their orders. Once Jay and Simon had stepped out Loco turned to Elo with a look of relief. “At least we don’t have to go to Jay’s house at two in the morning.”

Elo nodded in agreement. “I’d rather deal with a dead body than interrupting with Y/N’s mood swings. She’s always given us a hard time but now...” Elo widened his eyes to show how much harder it was to deal with you.

“I know man, I love Y/N but pregnant Y/N is a monster.”

“Agreed.”

After only two minutes of having found a comfortable sleeping position, you heard loud noises coming from downstairs. You tried to avoid it knowing Hoody was in the house with you. But when you heard banging noises and multiple voices you kicked the covers off. If it was an enemy Hoody could kill him, if it was Hoody then you would kill her for interrupting your sleep. If you could even call it that.

When you stepped out of your room you saw Hoody coming up the stairs. “Y/N! You’re awake...” Hoody looked worried.

The noises were still there so you knew it wasn’t her. “What’s going on?”

Hoody pointed downstairs. “Jay is back. He’s talking with some of the guys. Apparently, there might be an issue with the Feds.”

The problem sounded serious. If you were in your right of mind you would have gone down there and offered your help but you were so sleep deprived that all you could think of was silencing them at any cost.

Holding onto the stair rail you made your way downstairs and interrupted their meeting. “What is going on here?!”

The guys were surprised to see how quickly you moved even with your belly. It was like it hadn’t stopped you at all. They looked to Jay knowing it was best for him to answer you.

“We ran into a problem and need to fix it as soon as possible so I asked the guys to come here.” 

“At two in the morning Jay?”

“Yes, Y/N.”

Your eyes narrowed as you stared into his, your faces only inches apart. With little effort, you quickly pulled his own gun out from behind Jay and pointed pressed the barrel under his chin. “My feet are swollen, my stomach has stretch marks, every morning I throw up the little food I can keep down, I can’t sleep, and have to keep buying bigger bras because my by boobs keep growing.”

Simon and Gray stood wide-eyed, surprised at how easily you had unarmed Jay. 

“That last one doesn’t sound so bad,” Jay smirked.

You tilted your head to the side not taking his humor well. “I have a lot more pain coming my way thanks to you and I swear to God Jay. If I don’t get to sleep at least eight hours, I will shoot you.”

Jay simply leaned forward and kissed your lips with a smile. “Goodnight Babe.”

You sighed, your anger had suddenly been taken away by Jay’s gesture. He was the only one who could deal with your crazy. You flipped the gun offering it back to him. “Goodnight,” you only took a few steps before turning back to give him a peck on the cheek.

After you left Jay put his gun back in its place and turned to the speechless men. “What?”

“I will never understand you two.” Gray went over to Jay and tried to do the same thing you did. He tried taking Jay’s gun but Jay grabbed his arm half-way.

“You have to be faster than that.”

The next day you wanted to know what was going on. Jay hadn’t gone to bed which worried you. Looking around your home you saw no traces of him or anyone for that matter. Not even Hoody was there. “Hoody~” you called out to her but got no response. The house was in dead silence. 

Hoody had been assigned as your bodyguard after Jay found out you were pregnant. He didn’t want you hurting yourself or the baby and pulled you out of your usual operations. 

Before you got pregnant you were just a regular soldier at the bottom of the AOMG hierarchy. You pointed your gun at whoever Jay and Simon instructed you to and collected money from various associates of AOMG. Of course to Jay, you were more than just a soldier. That’s why you were currently in this position, hidden away in a big house where no one could get to you. All of this because you were carrying Jay’s baby, the future heir of AOMG.

Deciding enough was enough, you got into a car and drove to HQ. The AOMG headquarters was the complete opposite of your home. Everyone was there, even some soldiers you hadn’t seen before. You made your way past everyone and went straight to Jay’s office. 

Before you could get there you were stopped by Simon and Hoody. “Y/N what are you doing here? Jay is going to be so pissed off.” Hoody still remembered the threats Jay had made about killing her if something ever happened to you while in her care. She looked back over her shoulder at Jay’s door. Even if you weren’t in her hands at the moment she was still worried what he would do. 

Simon put his hand on your back as he tried to guide you back into the elevator. “Come on Y/N, I’ll take you home.”

“No,” you pushed his arm away. “I want to know what is going on with the Feds. It's obviously something very serious if Jay didn’t go to bed last night.”  

Hoody and Simon looked at each other asking themselves if they should let you know all the details. 

“Fine” Simon sighed. “I’ll tell you but let’s go somewhere else. Jay will kill us if he knows you are here asking about this.”

Hoody and Simon took you down a floor to where Simon’s office was. There you took a seat in front of Simon’s desk and listened to what he had to say while Hoody stood by guarding the door.

“Last night we found out there was an undercover Fed among us. He was here long enough to get some decent information. We just don’t know if he was able to get it out to his superiors. Jay killed him before we knew all this. Loco and Elo disposed of the body and all the evidence of his existence in AOMG.”

“Are the odds 50/50 or are they against Jay?” You gripped the armrests of the chair as you felt burdened by the information. Normally you would have run out onto the streets and started looking for all of the undercover agent’s connections. Tracing the trail until there is no one or nothing left but in your current position, you were banned from all activity. “Don’t lie to me.”

Simon knew it would be best to keep you worry and stress-free for the baby’s sake. If you knew Jay, the father of your unborn child, was in danger of being secretly killed off you would put your child in harm’s way. There was no doubt in Simon’s mind that you loved Jay just as much as your baby but in the end, your soldier mentality would make Jay your first priority. He was the boss. “We think the information was already given and the HQ might be a target. That’s why I need you to leave now.”

Simon stood up ready to take you home. “I’ll take her, you go check in with Gray,’ he instructed Hoody.

You went along with him until you were in front of the elevator. When the doors opened you went in first and got to the buttons. Once Simon was in you made up your mind, you pushed the button for the first floor and slipped out the door in the last moment. “Sorry Simon.” You left him in the elevator and ran up the stairs to Jay’s office. 

“Sorry baby, sorry baby.” You ran with one hand on the rail and the other on your stomach. All those movies and dramas with scenes of pregnant women falling down the stairs and losing their babies kept flashing in your mind. Once you made it safely to Jay’s floor you burst into his office and locked the door.

“Y/N what are you doing here?!” Jay was angry. There was no time for hugs, kisses, or pet names. He was furious with you for breaking orders. “HQ is off limits to you until our son is born safe and sound. Did I not make that clear?”

“Crystal, but I can’t just stay away knowing something could happen to you.” You wrapped your arms around Jay, your head rested on his shoulder. “I want to help you.”

“But nothing,” Jay sighed. “Orders are orders” he was breathing heavily, worried by the threat of attack. He pulled you away and held your face in his hands. His eyes took in your beauty before closing them and giving you a passionate kiss. “I can’t let you get hurt carrying such precious cargo.” He chuckled at his own words as his hand smoothed over the roundness of your belly. 

The sweet moment was interrupted by Simon’s loud banging on the door. 

You unlocked the door to reveal an angry Simon. “You...” he trailed off as he pointed to you.

“Yeah, yeah just take me home now.” You walked out of Jay’s office leaving Simon to angrily ask Jay, “How do you deal with her?”

Weeks had passed and nothing happened at AOMG’s HQ. Jay had relaxed as he felt the possibilities of information being leaked were down. He was now able to resume his normal activities and focus on you more.

When Jay got home you were right there waiting for him like usual. You had a blanket wrapped around you for warmth. Lately, you kept getting chills and just needed the extra warmth. “Do you know how boring it is to be home all day and why is our house so cold? I could really use some coffee right now.”

Jay laughed, “Do you remember keeping me locked up here after I got shot in the chest? Trust me Babe I know how you feel but it’s for your own good.”

“Don’t use my words against me. You almost died that time.”

“You can’t have coffee but I can solve your other problem.” He opened his arms for you and immediately you accepted his offer. Jay wrapped his arms around you to give you some extra body heat. 

A smile tugged at your lips as you snuggled up to him. “Thanks, Boss.”

“Boss?” One of Jay’s brows rose taking an interest in the word. “I can’t remember the last time you called me that.”

“It was when no one knew what was going on between us. Remember you would call me to give me my orders and I would respond seductively: Yes Boss, Whatever you say Boss.”

Jay smirked, remembering how you teased him. “Those were some fun times. How about I give you some orders right now?”

“Whatever you say, Boss.” 

When night time came you found it hard to sleep, like usual. There were only two positions you could sleep in and none of them were working for you. Turning to face Jay you began scowling at his peaceful face. “How do you get to sleep while I’m in pain, that’s not fair,” you whispered. You felt a kick come from the baby and groaned, “Fine, I’ll be nice.” As if your son demanded it you gave Jay a quick peck on the cheek. 

Once again you tried closing your eyes when you suddenly heard a noise. Hoody wasn’t there today since Jay was home and if he was home then there was no reason for anyone to be downstairs. 

When you heard the familiar sound of glass being broken you didn’t wake Jay. You went into soldier mode and quickly grabbed the gun you kept under your bed. All around the house you kept guns hidden for moments like these. 

With absolute silence, you opened your bedroom door and snuck out into the hall. Going down the stairs slowly you looked back every so often. In the kitchen, you saw someone headed straight your way. You hid behind the door and waited. Once he came out you pointed your gun at his head. He only glanced at you before you pulled the trigger. 

The gunshot woke Jay up. “Y/N!” He looked over at your empty side of the bed and quickly ran out forgetting to grab his own gun. 

“Not so fast.” 

Jay stopped as a man dressed in all black clothing pointed a gun at him. “I never thought killing the leader of AOMG would be so easy. No guards and your security system was easily hacked by my partner who now has killed your girl and unborn son.”

Jay glared at him as his anger rose. It lowered just as quickly when he heard a second gunshot.

The man stumbled to the side after being shot by your AK. “Who killed who?” You managed to knock him down long enough for Jay to take his gun. 

He didn’t even question the man. With no second thoughts, he finished him with a second bullet to the head. 

“Jay!” you shouted, “I know I’ve been gone for a while but the rules are that you question the last man standing. How are we supposed to know who sent them?”

He didn’t respond and instead held you tightly. He inhaled and exhaled deeply as relief washed over him. He thought the worst had happened to you. When he pulled away he scanned you for injuries, “Are you okay? Is this your blood?”

“I’m fine,” you assured him. “This is that other guy’s blood.” Looking down at yourself you could see why he would be worried. The white shirt you borrowed from Jay was splattered with blood. “Jay who is targeting you?”

“If they were able to hack the security system, my money is on the Feds.”

Jay knew it wasn’t safe for you at home so he took you with him to HQ. Everyone else was already there waiting for him.

Hoody gasped when she saw you. You hadn’t had any time to wash your face and still had a few splatters of blood on your cheek. “The one day I’m not there this happens.”

“Seriously Jay I’m so sorry. How could they be able to hack the system?!” Gray asked. He was the one who programmed it. It was supposed to be hack proof which made him feel like it was all his fault. 

“They’re Feds, they imprison hackers and put the best ones on their payroll.” He gave his keys to Elo “You and Loco take my car and go back to my house. There’s a body downstairs and another upstairs.”

“Yes, Boss.”

“Simon, start waking everyone up. I need you to get as many soldiers as you can here.”

Simon pulled his phone out, “Already started.”

“Gray, today’s the day. You’re going to hack into their system and extract all incriminating evidence they have on us.”

“That’s easier said than done but- Yes Boss.” Gray ran off to his office to begin his task. 

“Hoody, start working up a security plan for the building. Once those soldiers are here I want them efficiently protecting the area.”

“Yes, Boss” Hoody gave you a final hug before leaving.

You looked at Jae expectantly, “What about me?”

“Come with me.” Jay took you up to his office. “You will stay in here with me.”

You sighed as you sat down on the corner couch, “I knew this would happen.” It was pretty obvious that Jay had gotten freaked out by the sight of you in a blood-soaked shirt. 

“Why didn’t you wake me up? Why did you go off on your own?”

“I don’t know, instincts? I thought someone was trying to kill you so I acted like a soldier and protected my Boss.”

“Babe, I’m more than just your boss now and you are more than just a soldier.” He sat down beside you and held your hand. “You are a mom, please think like one first and protect our baby. I love you and if anything happens to you I don’t know what I’ll do.” 

You rested your head on his shoulder as a giggle escaped you. “Okay but don’t make me sound like a monster. I do think about protecting our son.” 

“I know,” he kissed the top of your head. “But now you have to promise no more guns.”

“I promise,” you pouted. 

Hours passed, you fell asleep on the small couch and surprisingly rested better than when you were at home on your expensive bed. When you woke up Jay was showered and dressed. He was looking fresh while you were a total mess.

“Morning Babe” Jay was smiling brightly indicating nothing bad had happened while you slept. 

“Good morning” you yawned. “I know you said I had to stay here but can I at least go shower?”

Jay nodded, “I’ll get Hoody to take you unless you want me to come with you.” He wiggled his eyebrows in a suggestive manner.

“No, I’m still slightly mad at you. I don’t know why but I feel like I should neglect you for a while.” 

“Come on Babe you don’t mean that.”

“We’ll see.” You waited for Hoody to come and get you. She lead you to the bathrooms and let you go in on your own. “I’ll be out here if you need me.”

After your shower, you got dressed and started blow drying your hair. That’s when Hoody ran in panting. “We have to go!” She held your hand and lead you out to the elevator but before you could get to it you heard gunshots.

You and Hoody dropped to the floor and began crawling. Hoody stopped when she got to the armory’s reception desk. Following behind her wasn’t easy. You could barely crawl with your stomach in the way. “Well, it’s good to know pregnant women can’t crawl.”

“I have to get a gun but the armory will only open with the proper fingerprint.” Hoody looked around for someone but the immediate area was empty. 

“OH! I might still have access if Jay didn’t take me off the system.”

“Let’s try it.” Hoody poked her head out before running to the armory door. You followed close behind her and pressed your right thumb on the pad. It lit up green and opened the door.

“Yes!” Hoody shouted. That’s when the attackers came and began shooting at you two. You ran inside and closed the door. They started shooting at the door but it was bulletproof steel. 

Hoody started equipping herself with a gun and ammunition. “We can’t stay here forever. I have to help the others.” You agreed and began doing the same. “Wait, Jay said no guns for you.”

“Jay said to protect our baby and that’s what I’m doing. Those assholes shot at me in broad daylight.” After cocking your gun you pressed the button that opened the door and began shooting at the unknown men. “BITCH I AM PREGNANT!”

With Hoody’s help, they were all easily killed. “Who shoots at a pregnant woman?”  You sighed, “Damn it.” After only a few hours you had broken your promise to Jay about guns but at least you kept you unborn son safe. 

“We need to find the Boss before he goes crazy looking for you. Please don’t get shot,” Hoody begged you.

“Don’t worry I don’t plan to.”

As soon as Jay saw bullets coming through the door he dodged behind his desk and used it as a shield as he grabbed your AK that you brought from home. The door now crumbled to the ground allowing the enemy to come inside. He stood up and began to shoot them mercilessly. 

After finishing them off he knew he had to find you. He ran out of his office and saw Simon stepping out of the elevator with you and Hoody. All three of you looked like you had fought a war. “What the hell happened?”

“Jay~” you dropped your gun and went to him. You held onto him feeling relieved that nothing had happened to him. He wrapped his free hand around you and ran it up and down your back to calm you down. 

“It was a raid,” Simon informed him. “Gray hacked into their system and wiped out their records so they tried to get rid of you by illegal means. With no evidence left they thought the only thing they could do was kill you.”

“Have Elo and Loco checked in?”

“Yes, they said there hasn’t been any activity at your home. We suspect this is their last effort and will start planting another undercover agent to get their information back.”

Jay nodded, “Then we better be careful of who we hire from now on.” He handed your AK to Hoody. “Get a body count and start clean up.”

“Yes, Boss.”

When you two were alone Jay dropped to the ground panting. He had been putting up a front for everyone’s sake but he couldn’t take it anymore. “We have to get that baby out of you soon. I can’t keep worrying like this.” 

You smiled, touched by how much he cared for your son. You got down on your knees to hold his face in your hands. “We’re halfway there Jay.”

“What?” His brows rose in shock. He swore he thought you were due to have the baby soon. “Babe I’m sorry but we can only have one baby. I don’t think I can go through this again.”

You laughed evilly, “You think you have it bad now just wait until I’m in the delivery room. You will know what pain is.” You would be sure to break his fingers that day.

-end-

A/N: This was inspired by one of my favorite shows, Archer. More specifically it was inspired by the fifth season premiere where Lana is pregnant and the FBI raids the agency.