#I wanted to pause by invasion so I could catch up with other titles so here works

[dcbinges]

Justice League International #19 (1988) by Kevin Maguire, J.M. DeMatteis & Keith Giffen

[celestial-toys]

That I Would Be Good [4/5]

Swan Upon Leda

Moon’s fingertips tap rhythmically along the edge of the counter, and he seems to be debating something. He finally speaks again after a pregnant pause. “…You’re like a God to him. Do you know that?”

His words cut through the fog in your mind. “I am?”

He nods solemnly. “You are. Not—Not in the sense that he wants to worship you… or at least, not as much as he wants to protect you. But there’s an undeniable, ineffable devotion there.”

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In This Chapter

Breaking points are reached, confrontations are had, and secrets are spilled.

Pairing: Sun x Moon x Reader

Word Count: 5,781

Contains: [AU - Real World | Sentient AI/Automatons | Personality Swap] [invasion of privacy] [more of Sun’s signature Overbearing Behavior™️] [crying] [substance abuse (not specified beyond ‘sedatives’)] [arguments] [shouting] [brief physical altercation] [religious discussion/metaphor(?)] [implication of past sexual assault (not committed by Sun or Moon, to be perfectly clear)]

A/Ns: This is a songfic. Lyrics and title are from ‘That I Would Be Good’ by Alanis Morissette. Also, the title of this chapter, along with additional lyrics featured within it, are from the song 'Swan Upon Leda' by Hozier. Please refer to the notes on the Ao3 version of this chapter for my commentary on the song, and it's unfortunate renewed relevancy post-US election.

This fic is part of my AU “[Not] Made by Design”, the full series can be found here.

Links to other parts of this fic: [Ch.1] [Ch.2] [Ch.3] [Ch.4 (you are here)] [Ch.5]

That I would be grand if I was not all-knowing.

Curled up in bed one evening, you huff in frustration at the puzzle on your phone. The sound catches Sun’s attention, raising his head from the pillow beneath him. Shifting from his usual fit-for-a-coffin position beside you, he cranes his neck to look over your shoulder.

“Expose. Pate. Resume. Rose.”

You frown. “Really?”

“Try it and see for yourself.”

You tap the four assorted words he called out and sure enough, they collect themselves in a purple bracket on the screen. You read the category title aloud. “Words pronounced differently with accent marks. …Oh. Huh. Guess you’re right.”

His voice is neutral, very matter-of-fact as he pulls his head back, neck folding and collapsing to allow him to rest on the pillow once again. “Of course I am.”

You roll your eyes, sarcasm seeping into your flat tone. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the help.”

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

Settled down for a lazy Sunday morning gaming session, you mutter aloud as your character runs across the island. “Okay, I’ve got… 300k on me. Daisy’s sellin’ ‘em for… oh, I checked earlier, what was it… uh—109 this week.”

Moon’s voice rumbles out from behind you and you feel the vibration between your shoulder blades as you rest against his chest. “Sheesh…”

You voice your agreement as you roam in search of the young turnip-laden boar. “Yeah, I know.”

You try to do the math in your head. “So… that should mean I can afford—”

Moon cheerfully provides you with your answer almost instantly. “2,752! Or—well—2,750 is as close as you can get without going over since she sells them in bundles of ten.”

You try to keep the frustration out of your voice when you thank him for the help.

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

Your hand freezes over the bowl, a scoop of flour held in midair as you lean back to stare at the recipe below. 

“What.” Deadpan as usual, Sun questions you from his seat at the table. He’d apparently joined Zero in deciding that watching you bake was the most entertaining way they could spend the afternoon.

“It was… ugh, I need ‘two cups’. But I‘m weighing this out, so I'm trying to remember what that was in grams.”

Once again robbing you of the opportunity to think, he’s quick to feed you the information. “Two cups of flour equals 250 grams.”

You sigh. “…Thanks.”

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

Curled on the couch between the two of them, you listen as they test their trivia knowledge against one another, having fallen into a contest thanks to the episode of Jeopardy currently playing on the TV. You’ve long since given up on trying to beat either of them to any answer, and are currently trying to fight back the rising, nagging voice in your head that keeps calling you stupid.

After Moon effortlessly answers a clue so obscure that you’d have had no hope in hell of getting it, you wiggle out from between them with perhaps a bit more force than necessary. Quickly excusing yourself, you make for the bathroom.

“You good?” You ignore the concerned question that Sun calls after you, focused solely on being alone and calming down before you make a scene in front of them. You’ve just gotta… breathe. See things rationally again.

You just need a minute.

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

After more time than you’re aware of passes, spent with your head in your hands as you sit on the edge of the bathtub willing yourself not to cry, a soft knock startles you.

“Are you alright in there, star? It’s… been twenty minutes and, uh…” He laughs, but it’s a sad sound. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold Sun back.”

You hurry to your feet, placating them with “Just a second!” as you check your reflection to make sure you don’t have pressure marks on your cheeks from how long you sat there like that. When you pull the door open, you try to play it casual in spite of the fact that you feel no better than before. Unsurprisingly, you immediately come face-to-chest with a very imposing and very quiet yellow automaton.

You glance between his blank gaze and Moon, wringing his hands some feet off to the side behind his bolder counterpart.

“…Hi?”

“What were you doing in there.”

“Using the… bathroom…?”

He’s obviously unsatisfied with your answer but he doesn’t stop you when you slip past him through the doorway. He surveys the empty bathroom for a long moment before following as you make your way back to the couch.

“Goodness, didn’t mean to turn my bathroom trip into a full-family event.” You remark as you pass by Moon and Zero, both of them turning to follow you as well. You settle back down in the middle of the couch, Moon taking his place beside you. Zero paces around her bed, too bothered by the tense energy that’s now filled the room to allow herself to relax.

Sun stands in the middle of the room, rays clicking back and forth rigidly. “I am… concerned about you again.”

You sigh, quietly grateful that someone finally broke the awkward silence. “There’s no need to be, Sun.”

“I thought… you wanted me to tell you when I am concerned.”

“I—I do, but… I mean…”

You search for something to throw him off his line of questioning and flop your head back into the plush couch cushion. “Christ, Sun, can’t I even take a shit in peace without an interrogation afterwards?”

His arms cross over his chest. “I never heard the sound of the toilet flushing.”

You internally curse his observation skills as he closes the distance between himself and your seat on the couch. Crouching down in front of you, you begin to feel backed into a corner. “Now, unless you’ve taken up some new, gross attempt at reducing your water-waste, I’d like you to answer me again and be honest about it this time.”

You stare into his blank, false eyes for an uncomfortable length of time as an array of thoughts and feelings wash over you. You consider fabricating another lie. You consider telling some sort of half-truth just to get him off your back. But the longer you stay locked in an unwinnable staring contest with him, the closer you get to throwing caution aside and hitting him with the full truth.

And so you do.

“You make me feel stupid, okay?! And it pisses me off, so I tried to excuse myself to go calm down in the bathroom, but I can’t even get a break in there anymore, so now here we are!”

His expression flickers to one of confusion. “I make you feel what?”

“Stupid! Both of you!”

His monitor rotates to face Moon for a silent moment of shared bewilderment, and then Moon turns to face you. “Could you… elaborate a little more on that? When—How do we make you feel that way?”

You tilt your head over to face him, crossing your arms over yourself in an attempt to quell the vulnerability. “It’s… it’s not even your fault.” You wince at the way your voice cracks and tense up as your vision gets blurry, refusing to cry over something so trivial. “It’s just… I’m… struggling to come to terms with the massive gap between us.”

Sun’s harsh tone doesn’t help. “What gap?”

You blink hard, ignoring the tears that escape. “Intelligence! Memory! Information processing speed! You name it- you two are far better at it than I could ever be!”

Moon reaches out, laying a firm hand on Sun’s knee. What he silently conveys to him is anyone’s guess, but it’s enough to have Sun rock back on his heels, arms retracting and elbows propping him up against the coffee table behind him. The forced look of casualty doesn’t suit him, nor does it negate his overbearing demeanor, but you’re appreciative of the extra space nonetheless.

“Has this… been bothering you for a long time?” Moon’s question is gentle, and on quite the right track.

“Not… since the beginning, if that’s what you’re asking. I knew—objectively—that you both would be superior to me in that regard. It just…”

“Hits different when you live with it twenty-four-seven?

You glance up at Sun. “I mean… kinda? I don’t know. It’s… it’s the little things that have been getting to me. When you—when you solve a puzzle that I’m working on without a moment’s hesitation. When you don’t even give me the time to do math in my head. When you offer up answers before I can even hope to recall them. It just makes me feel so… slow.”

The room is quiet for a moment while they consider your words. Surprisingly, Sun is the one to break through it with an insightful question more befitting of Moon. “Is it that we know the answers, or is it that we give them to you.”

Your tense expression softens as you view your frustration from another angle. Looking back on all the little moments that bothered you, you find that the common thread running through all of them is that they beat you to the punch. “You may… have a point.”

Sun does his best to not look smug, but his best isn’t very good.

“I guess… it wasn’t really that you had the answers that bothered me. It was hardly even the envy that you found them faster, it’s really just—the frustration that I feel when you spoon-feed them to me. It’s making me feel like I never even have the opportunity to use my brain anymore!” You laugh a bit with the exclamation.

Moon nods in understanding beside you. “If I try… placing myself in your shoes, I think I can see how that would get upsetting rather quickly.”

As the tension in the room begins to dissipate, Zero ceases her endless cycle of pacing and sitting, circling her bed a few times before curling up in the middle.

Your attention falls back on Sun as he speaks. “I suppose I should… apologize, then. For… making assumptions. About what you were doing in the bathroom.”

As much as it audibly pains him to admit to having jumped the gun, you appreciate the apology. Still, you know his concern wasn’t unfounded. “I know I've given you both plenty of reasons to worry over what I may be doing in there. It’s… it’s alright, Sunny. I accept the apology.”

Moon picks up from there. “We’re both sorry about our… inconsiderate habit when it comes to helping you out. And—it really does come from a desire to help! But, still. We weren’t aware that it bothered you.”

You reach out to pat him on the knee. “Thank you. Just—can we all agree to give me and my feeble little human brain some time to process things?” You smile. “It feels good when I figure things out on my own. And I’ll… make it known when I would like some help.”

They both nod, and Sun’s voice is surprisingly soft, dare you say gentle when he speaks. “Yeah… yeah. I think we can do that.”

That I would be loved even when I numb myself.

Shaking two pills out of a small bottle, you cringe at the noise and hope that neither of your attentive partners are within earshot. Faltering, you stare at the medication in your hand, trembling slightly from the stress of the day. “…Fuck it,” you whisper to yourself, quickly coaxing a third pill out onto your waiting palm before tossing them in your mouth.

Capping the bottle and returning it to its place behind the mirror-door of the medicine cabinet, you breathe a shaky sigh of relief. Grabbing your water bottle sitting on the bathroom counter, you knock back a few swigs, quickly downing the evidence of your… bad habit.

Or so you believed.

Turning to leave, your stomach drops at the sight of the door, cracked open just slightly. There’s no mistaking the void of a certain someone’s blacked-out screen pressed against the other side.

Goddamnit.

The door swings inward, slowly revealing the rest of the overbearing automaton leaning against the outer doorframe.

Unsure how much he saw but willing to bet that it was too much, you aren’t sure how to address him. “Sun! I thought you were doing laundry. Do you… want the bathroom towels, or…?”

His tone carries a serious, contemplative weight, and he doesn’t bother to manifest an expression beyond two solid red eyes. “I was. And I did. But now I am far more curious as to what exactly you were doing in here just now.”

You try to play him off, laughing. “Sunny, we really need to have a talk about this tendency of yours to spy on me in the bathroom.”

He welcomes himself into the room and your personal space, and you back up a step as he reaches out to reopen the small cabinet above the sink. He reaches in, pulling out the very bottle you’d just held, turning it over beneath a critical gaze. “This was not prescribed to you.”

You rack your brain for excuses and answers to the questions you know are coming. “Y-yeah, it’s just over-the-counter stuff. Nothing serious! I don’t see what you’re so worried about.”

“You are not experiencing a single one of these symptoms. Why are you taking it?” He places a fingertip beneath the dosage instructions. “And why are you taking more than the recommended amount?”

You can’t help but get defensive. “You—you don’t know every single thing I feel every second of every day, Sun. Who are you to tell me that I have no reason to take that?”

His monitor slowly angles away from the bottle in his hand and up toward you. He stares you down for an uncomfortable number of seconds. “…You really have no clue how long I’ve been watching you, do you?”

With nothing more than a few cryptic words, an old fear blooms within you once again. “What are you getting at, Sun? Out with it.”

He huffs, and you hear the quiet hum of his cooling system kick up. “I am aware of your history with this medication. Do you know how many nights I watched you down these things just to knock yourself out long enough to get a few hours of sleep? Only then to stumble right back into the lab with a hot mug of heavily caffeinated coffee to keep on working?”

Your disbelief pulls a stupid question from you. “Back in the facility?”

He scoffs. “Where else? You aren’t the only one that remembers those long nights, you know? That place was loaded with security feeds, and there just so happened to be one in that beloved employee lounge of yours. You have no idea—the number of hours of restless sleep I watched you steal, the number of double-shot coffee pods and energy drinks I watched you burn through, the...”

His red eyes flicker out, leaving you with nothing to see but your own reflection in his dark screen. “…The number of times I watched you sit alone in a room with our lifeless bodies and cry.”

Your breath comes shallow, and if you weren’t so caught up in the moment, you’d laugh at how he’s found another way to make you feel exposed. “You weren’t even fully functioning back then, Sun. You both were still in training! Your AI’s every action was logged—I—I would’ve known. So how in the goddamn hell were you ‘watching’ me?” You know that what he says he saw really happened, but you’re not about to buckle without evidence.

His voice comes out cold. “Those ‘inconsistencies’ in my action log weren’t the mystery to me that they were to you.”

The defensive tension in you morphs into disbelief as an old suspicion of yours is unearthed. “Are you trying to tell me that you managed to watch me through the goddamn security cams for who knows how long—and managed to cover your tracks so well that I wouldn’t find the evidence? Are you really trying to get me to believe that?!”

His voice remains level in spite of your inciting words, but it gains a sharp and serious edge. “I suppose I just never had the heart to break it to you, but sunshine, I regret to inform you that you lost control of me long before you thought you did.”

Enraged, you step towards him, jamming an accusatory finger into the unyielding metal of his chest and channeling the pain that results into your rising voice. “You! You lying, conniving, control-freak! I fucking knew it! You were altering your own activity log and making me take the fall for it! Do you realize how hard I beat myself up for the shit I didn’t understand?”

You force your words through your tightening throat, refusing to let these old wounds bring you to tears again. “I bet you were just laughing it up, weren’t you? Knowing I would never even suspect you at the time, because you were still playing the ‘innocent, lovable’ character I wanted you to be. I know you just ate that shit up—watching me flounder in front of my colleagues when I couldn’t explain what ‘I’d’ done wrong.” Uncharacteristic aggression comes over you and your hand balls into a fist before slamming hard into his chest with your final words.

He doesn’t so much as flinch, and his lack of reciprocity only riles you up further. “Oh, no-no. You don’t get to give me the silent treatment right now!” Beside yourself in a storm of pent up emotion, you reach up to take him by the shoulder and repeatedly slam a fist against his rigid, unfeeling core. “WAKE—THE—FUCK—UP! I DON’T CARE IF YOU HATE ME—YOU OWE ME A RESPONSE.”

Contrary to his cooling system running audibly in high-gear, his demeanor is cold and collected. Placing the bottle of pills down on the counter, he sighs. You flinch when his hands rise and he ignores it, taking each of your arms by the wrist and gently, firmly returning them to your sides. His voice is low, speaking to you as he does so. “You’re a designer, sunshine. Not a programmer. You’ve been out of your depth with us since day one.”

You huff in defiance, crossing your arms over your chest. Having rid himself of your petty display of frustration, he props a hip against the counter and retrieves the bottle from where he’d placed it. Looking miniature in his grasp, he rolls it between his thumb and forefinger as he continues. “Contrary to what you think of me, I don’t particularly enjoy subverting your authority.” He hesitates, and his voice takes on a brief hint of humor. “Well—most of the time.”

Your eyes roll as you release an impatient sigh. His tone falls flat again, reaching the end of his point. “Even back then, I knew my actions could and would have consequences—on me, and you, and even Moon if things went poorly enough. And believe it or not, I did try to keep them to a minimum. I’ve only ever done what I deem necessary to accomplish my principal goal.”

You take a step back, growing uncomfortable with the proximity you created in your fit of rage. “Well, excuse me for assuming anything about what really goes on in your head. Might I ask then, what goal could possibly necessitate such behavior?”

His idle motion stills, slowly closing his hand around the bottle until it disappears in his grasp. “You should know the answer to that, though. You’re the one who instilled it in me, after all. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the first law of robotics.”

A tense silence suffocates the room, and neither of you do so much as move an inch until Moon’s voice crashes in from the doorway. “What the hell are you two doing in here?” Uncharacteristically aggressive in his questioning, you know he’s had just as rough of a time visiting the facility today as you did.

You beat Sun to the punch, some small part of you clinging to the hope that you can divert the topic away from your… habit. “This bastard’s been spying on me since before the beginning!”

Moon’s voice fills with exasperation. “What?”

Sun cuts in, pushing his own agenda before you can elaborate. “This reckless idiot’s been abusing sedatives again!”

Your voice raises over him. “They’re hardly even—!”

His monitor whips around to stare you down so fast it jumpscares you into silence.

Moon makes his way into the room, and you try not to recall the last time the three of you had an impromptu intervention in this same place. His gaze flicks to Sun with a critical tone. “I take it Sun finally told you about his… observations.” He reaches out and works the bottle out of Sun’s tense grip, looking it over with a frown.

A sense of betrayal weighs your voice down. “Are there any other secrets of his that you’re privy to and keeping from me?”

You don’t expect an answer, at least not one you can believe, but he offers it anyway. “…That depends on how you define a secret, I suppose.”

You heave a sigh but there’s little relief in it, more exhaustion than anything. Moon questions you softly. “Have you been taking these often again?”

“Ha. Hardly. I can scarcely get away with anything with this one’s prying eyes in every square inch of my privacy.” You stare daggers into the void of Sun’s screen.

His voice is louder than you expect when he suddenly responds, and you’re shocked at how full of emotion it is. All of his cold, unfeeling mechanical indifference replaced with something far more… sincere. Painfully so.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t fucking care. about. you. Do you think I sat around watching any of your colleagues mill about the place? Do you think I gave a damn if any of them ran themselves into the ground? As if they ever even would. You’re the only one insane enough, stubborn enough, lonely enough to care about some heap of dysfunctional, lifeless material laying on an operating table. You’re the only one. Of course I watched you. What. else. could. I. do.”

His rays shutter and spin rapidly, hands balling the loose fabric of his pants into fists at his side. He leans closer to you as he spits his final words.

“So excuse the fuck out of me for giving a damn about the only person who ever gave one about me.”

With that, he turns on his heel, pushing past Moon and quickly storming out of sight.

The weight of his words join with the exhaustion from today’s stress, dragging you down. With the added effect of the medication beginning to kick in on an empty stomach, it all has you lowering your shaky body to rest—dignified as it is—atop the closed toilet lid. You watch Moon as he quietly returns the bottle to its place in the cabinet in what you assume is some attempt to repair trust between you. “I… appreciate the gesture, but I don’t really care what you do with it. I know Sun’s just gonna slip back in here once we’re gone and pocket it to keep it from me.”

His vents release a soft burst of air and he closes the cabinet, turning to sit on the edge of the counter. Monitor dropped low and staring at the floor, it seems you aren’t the only one feeling beaten down. The two of you sit in silence for a minute, collecting your scattered thoughts.

“You know, it’s hard to blame you for taking those after everything and everyone you had to deal with today. I mean—even I was ready to send myself straight into a shutdown after answering all those questions.” A small, sad laugh escapes him. “Living with you kind of allowed me to forget that not everyone sees us the way you do.”

You tilt your head to look up at him. “What, like the people that you are?”

His monitor angles to focus you in his camera’s line of sight. “…Yeah. Exactly.”

He raises a pointed finger. “But—still—you know I also can’t approve of you self-medicating. It’s a slippery, dangerous slope. That’s why Sun gets all… like that. Not—not that his way of doing things is appropriate, though. I believe I worry about you just as much, but I at least try to channel it into more acceptable methods.”

His hand drops back down to the counter, enervation palpable, and you wonder how anyone could observe either of your boys and question their sentience for even a moment.

“He wasn’t lying though. I hope you know that. When he said that he cares about you.”

You prop an elbow on the counter beside you, resting your temple against your palm. “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard him say it outright. Like—I’ve heard you say it on his behalf, and I’ve seen him nod along in agreement. I can even sense it in at least some of his actions, but… it’s different actually hearing it from him.”

Moon’s fingertips tap rhythmically along the edge of the counter, and he seems to be debating something. He finally speaks again after a pregnant pause. “…You’re like a God to him. Do you know that?”

His words cut through the fog in your mind. “I am?”

He nods solemnly. “You are. Not—Not in the sense that he wants to worship you… or at least, not as much as he wants to protect you. But there’s an undeniable, ineffable devotion there.”

You scoff. “You won’t find many people that would put their faith in a God that they know can’t even protect them. A God weaker than them. Inferior to them.”

Moon shakes his head. “Starlight, I don’t think you realize all the ways in which you have protected him. Protected us. Protection doesn’t always come in the form of a physical battle of strength. …Especially not when it comes to protecting someone whose entire life can be snuffed out of existence with the click of a button, or the flick of a switch.”

You twist around on the toilet lid, turning to face the counter where Moon’s sat. You rest your arms out on it, fingers drumming along in tandem with Moon’s rhythm. “How much of that is you projecting, and how much of it is actually his feelings on the matter?”

He laughs again, a soft, quiet sound this time. “Not as much of it as you may think! I… hmm. I guess if one were to call him religious, one would call me an atheist.”

Your brows raise. “Oh? Do you…” The implications cause dismay to swirl in your stomach. “…Is that your way of saying that you don’t believe in me?”

His monitor twists on its axis and tilts down toward you, eyes wide and round. “No! No—heavens, no that’s not what I meant by that!”

You stare at each other for a moment before breaking into the kind of muffled, shared nonsensical laughter that one only tends to experience during those late night chats with a friend, fueled by over-tiredness and the joy of being in good company. A… mutual, unspoken understanding of sorts.

As the laughter dies down, you reassure him. “No—like—I get it, I do. I honestly wouldn’t blame you at all if you didn’t believe in me. Certainly at least not in the sense of comparing me to a God.”

He collects himself and clarifies. “I… I do believe in you though. In you. The very real, messy, soft and squishy, vulnerable flesh-and-bone human being that you are. I believe in your heart and soul, the power that resides in your free will, and I believe in your capabilities and intelligence far more than you may think I do. Sun and I both put faith into all of that and more. I can even understand why he’d see you as a God, but… it’s… different with him.”

You can’t help but lightheartedly interject. “Goodness, what isn’t…”

Moon smiles. “Sun was the first. I was never far behind, of course, but you couldn’t do everything in tandem. He was the first to be trained, the first to be implanted, the first to troubleshoot with, and, well... Do you know the sentiment that parents make most of their mistakes on the first child, so by the time the second comes along, they’re… uhm, they ‘turn out better’? For lack of a kinder way to put it.”

You drop your head down and pull your hands in, using them as a cushion lest you knock your forehead into the counter. “Oh, now you’re gonna tell me that he sees me as his mother or something, aren’t you…”

You groaned the words out playfully, but Moon takes them unexpectedly seriously. “Honestly? …Something in between the two, if I had to guess.”

You let the weight of his words sink into you as he continues.

“I… can’t claim to be an expert on what goes on in that head of his. But I can get closer than anyone else can. He… doesn’t like letting people in, as you are well aware, but occasionally he’ll confide in me. He’s got a lot of walls up. Both metaphorically and literally. It’s difficult to wade through that chaotic maze he calls a headspace.”

His fingers gradually slow their drumming to a halt.

“Do… you remember… the first time we engaged the Eclipse Protocol?”

Your stomach tightens.

“I’d rather not.”

“I- I know. I’m sorry. I just… that night. When he and I were still linked, and he…” He shakes his head. “Oh, who am I kidding, when we were watching over you like a couple of hawks…”

“While I slept?”

“Yes. To keep you safe. … There’s… a lot about that evening that I can’t forget, but one particular thing struck me. Well, honestly it annoyed me at the time because it was bleeding into my headspace and overriding my ability to focus, but… it stands out to me as something profound when I recall it.”

He pauses, freezing for a moment before pulling a bent leg up onto the counter and turning to face you.

“Maybe I shouldn’t share this. Maybe he’ll get mad at me when I tell him that I did. But I feel like after the things he’s kept from you, well intentioned as he may be… it’s fair enough to share this with you.”

You rest your chin on your folded hands, eyes glued to him.

“There was this… singular line of text that just kept repeating, over and over in his mind that night. It… to level with you—it started to freak me out a bit.”

You question him, soft and quiet.

“What was it?”

“Five words.”

His facial features fade out, and a repeating line of text on his otherwise dark screen replaces it.

The sight knocks the wind out of you, and you can do nothing but nod as your mind starts spinning.

The text fades, and the familiar sight of Moon’s default smile and crescent eyes replaces it for a second, his expression then quickly morphing into something more appropriate for the moment.

“I’m still not sure what it meant. A general search for those words in that order results in too many options for me to narrow it down. The sentence sticks with me, though. I guess… that’s where my theories of how he perceives you took root. … There’s more examples, far more explicit things he’s said, but I… feel like I’ve shared enough already. Any elaboration should be his to do, if he ever wishes to.”

You nod, raising up in your seat and finding your words.

Moon—unlike Sun—never was the type to comb through your personal files, private playlists included. So it doesn’t surprise you that he didn’t spot the connection.

“Well. You’ve… certainly given me a lot to think about.”

His tone grows concerned. “I—I really didn’t mean to upset you more! I hope I haven’t…”

You reach out, placing a hand reassuringly over his. “No, no, nothing like that. I’m actually very grateful that you shared this with me. I… know you’ve got to be tired of serving as this intermediary between Sun and I… and I hope one day you won’t have to.”

He gives you his signature smile, and somehow makes it feel genuine. “I really don’t mind, dear.”

You eye him with concern. “Mhm… and one day I’m gonna get inside that head of yours and figure out why that is.”

His tone turns playful. “Goodness me! Can’t a little selfless couples counseling go un-psychoanalyzed?”

You smile. “Not in this house, nope.”

The medication's effects have long since started taking hold, and you rub at your tired eyes as your waning focus trains back on the day’s events.

“Moon?”

“Yes, dear.”

“We’ve got a bigger problem.”

You punctuate your sentence with a yawn, and he rises from his seat on the counter, coming to crouch in front of you.

“The problem being how sleepy you’re getting?”

You pout. “No…”

His warm smile doesn’t waver as he whispers a question. “Would you like me to carry you to bed?”

You falter. “W-well… yeah, I… I would like that, actually… but that’s not our problem!”

You raise your arms to wrap around his neck as he leans into you, effortlessly lifting you off of your ‘throne’ and encouraging you to hook your legs around his waist. Once he’s got you securely in his hold, he leans back to catch your gaze.

“What is our problem then?”

You whisper, mindful of Sun’s penchant for eavesdropping.

“How are we gonna get him to come to the headquarters with us next week?”

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

Not much later that night, you laid in bed clinging to Moon, quickly drifting off under his reassuring watch.

It didn’t surprise you in the least when Sun remained in his own room that night. The room was conveniently located just opposite the wall that your bed sat against, making it the perfect place for him to hide when he craved being near you but felt it kinder to you to keep himself away.

As sleep welcomed you, your ears picked up on a muffled, familiar tune coming from the other side of the wall.

You still aren’t sure if you dreamed it or not.

“The gateway to the world, was still outside the reach of him. Would never belong to angels, had never belonged to men.”

A/N: Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed. I’ll be back in a few days with the final chapter! You can also find my notes and commentary on this fic right here on Ao3. Links to the playlist and moodboard for [N]MbD can be found on this blog’s pinned post, as well as in the series notes on Ao3. Image Sources: x - x - x

[sunshineseung]

Journal Part 1 // Jeongin

🍄 | genre: smut ☁️ | pairing: Yang Jeongin x female!reader 🌿 | wc: 2.8k 🌸 | includes: milf!reader x babysitter!college student!virgin!jeongin, invasion of privacy (not the cardi b album), smut within the smut??? [handjob, begging, “mommy”], mentions of voyeurism, light dom/sub themes, “mommy” kink, teasing, stripping, blowjob/oral (m!receiving), no swallowing

☀️ | synopsis: Yang Jeongin babysits your two children, and he’s always been the most polite boy you’ve ever met. Unfortunately for him, he leaves his secret journal at your house one evening, and your curiosity got the better of you.

🌊 | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Finale |

Being a single mother was never in your plans. After your husband left you with two kids, your world nearly fell apart. You went from being a stay-at-home mother to working two jobs. The daycare took care of your dayshift, but your night shifts were harder to arrange a babysitter for. That is until you offered the position to your next-door neighbor’s son. They complained about how he was in desperate need of a job, being in his first year of college with no work history. Your offer was perfect for them, and Jeongin was happy to fill the position. He was always the nicest kid, and you could see his eyes light up at the idea of working for you, or more likely, at the concept of getting paid. 

He’d come over to your house at 5:00pm, book bag on his back, ready to do homework while he watched your kids play. Your two daughters were quick to warm up to him, and the rest is history. He was the best babysitter you could ask for, and even if you had to stay late at work, he was always understanding. Jeongin was a perfect kid with good grades and a good heart, and you’d always see him writing in a journal. When you asked him about it, he’d say he’s “writing a story for class.” It was always the same excuse, day after day. You paid no mind, more worried about the status of your kids after you’ve left them with a teenager for hours. 

Jeongin was very protective of his special journal. It was just a regular composition book, but whatever he wrote in it was sacred to him. He’d hide it from you when you walked by and hold it close to his face as he wrote. Whatever he wrote was his little secret, but if it’s for a class like he said, it can’t be that terrible, right?

🍓🍰🐤🍀💐🍯

Returning home from a late shift, you see Jeongin settled on the couch, sleeping with his phone in his hand. His head was back and his mouth was wide open, snoring loudly. You nudge him to wake him up, but he doesn’t budge. All you can do is scoff at him and check on your daughters in their room just as sound asleep as their babysitter. Going back to the living room, Jeongin’s turned to his side, snoring quieter than before. You sit right at his feet and get comfortable, kicking your feet up on the coffee table and turning on the TV. When your heel lands on the table, you kick over Jeongin’s journal, the book falling to the ground and opening to a blank page. 

Your eyes dart to Jeongin and back at the book, and you’re mentally debating whether or not to look through it. You’ve hardly talked to the boy aside from a few conversations about school in a “back in my day” type dialogue. This would be a major invasion of privacy, but there’s no way it’s a diary. He writes in it constantly, how would it be a diary? 

You pick up the notebook, looking at the cover that read “Yang Jeongin Journal 1” on the title lines. Skipping to the one of the first few pages, you read a couple lines, which turns into reading a paragraph, and later an entire page. The more you read, the more you begin to understand why he hid it from you while boldly writing in front of you. Your jaw hangs slack as your eyes glaze over the lewd words written on the page. Your mind is blown imaging the sweet boy Jeongin imagining these scenarios, especially when you realize that you’re the other character. 

Her hand feels like heaven wrapped around my cock, stroking me up and down as I quickly become breathless from the sensation. She looks into my eyes, staring me down like a predator watching her prey. Her touch quickly becomes overwhelming as my dick starts to twitch in her hand, begging to cum despite her only beginning to play with me. I thrust into her hand, hips quaking as I seat myself again. “Please let me cum, mommy.” Y/n laughs and nods her head, lowering her lips to my cock, ready to catch my release on her gorgeous face.

Seeing your name on the paper makes your heart jump. All of these dirty thoughts that Jeongin pens in his journal are about you. As you shuffle through the pages, your name is practically highlighted to your eyes. Every few pages, there’s a description of your body or what you wear, occasionally an imagine of you undressing in your bedroom window that happens to face Jeongin’s bedroom. Although you always keep your curtains shut, Jeongin’s writing describes him hoping that you leave your curtains open to put on a show for him, undressing slowly until you notice Jeongin jerking off in the house across the fence. 

You slam his journal shut. You’ve seen enough. Laying it down on the table as it was before, you attempt to calm yourself and watch the TV you’ve been craving to watch since you got off work. Despite your best efforts, your mind begins to wonder to Jeongin, sleeping quietly beside you, and how ecstatic he’d be if you’d reenact some of the scenes he wrote in his special journal. 

Jeongin groans and stretches, finally waking up from his nap. You tap his leg to signal that you’re home, and he nearly jumps out of his skin feeling you near him. He coughs as he sits up, pressing down his shirt to get out any wrinkles and fixing his hair that looks like a bird’s nest. 

“Good morning, sleepyhead.” You laugh, smiling brightly at him as if you weren’t just reading his book of sexual fantasies. “Did you have a nice nap?” 

“Yes, yes!” Jeongin fumbles over his words, worried that you’re about to fire him for sleeping on the job. “I’m so sorry! I promise I didn’t fall asleep until after the girls went to sleep.” He bows his head, sincerely apologizing for something any college student would reasonably do once work was over.

“No worries. I’m sure my girls were in good hands.” You reach for his journal and hand it to him, and he begins to turn a bright shade of red. He knows what’s in that book, but he assumes you’re still naive. “I almost used your little book as a footrest, so put this somewhere safe, okay?”

“Oh, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to leave it out. I was just writing in it until I fell asleep.” He grabs his bookbag and shoves it in gently. 

“Wow, you write in that thing a lot.” You cross your legs and you face him, totally ignoring the television show at this point. “How long have you had that assignment for class?” 

You clearly caught him off guard. He seems confused before he remembers his lie, widening his eyes once he realizes that he’s about to dig himself into a hole. “Oh, it isn’t just one assignment. It’s for my creative writing class.” 

“Ah, I had a creative writing class too.” If he was going to lie to your face, it was only fair that you rebuttal with another lie. “Can I read some of what you wrote? Maybe give you some critique?”

Jeongin’s mind went blank. He broke out in a cold sweat. If he lets you read it, his life will be over, but on the other hand, if he doesn’t let you read it, it will look sketchy since it’s just supposed to be innocent writing for a freshman level college class. 

“Uh, it’s a little personal.” He’s adamantly avoiding eye contact with you, looking anywhere but your face. “I don’t think that would be appropriate since you’re my next door neighbor.” 

“Not appropriate, huh?” You can’t help but smirk, and out of the corner of his eye, he sees the sideways smile grow on your face. His heart begins to dip as he finally starts to connect the dots, thinking that his job, no, his existence as your neighbor could end within a matter of minutes. “What’s so inappropriate about wanting your neighbor, who is over ten years older than you might I add, to sit on your face and call you her baby boy? Hm?” 

Jeongin is frozen in place. He’s been outed. All of his wildest sexual fantasies have been revealed to the woman he wants to do them with. Knowing you’ve read his journal at least a little bit, he can’t help but get hard under his joggers, mentally cursing himself for wearing them once he notices your eyes drift to the tent in his pants. 

“Sorry, but curiosity killed the cat on this one.” You scoot closer to him, taking his hands in yours and rubbing your thumb over the back of his hand to warm him up. “I can’t believe my neighbor’s cute little son grew up to be such a dirty minded boy that can’t keep his thoughts in his head, but has to put them on paper so he can read them and imagine his neighbor fuck him again and again.”

“How much did you read?” Still with his head down, he squeaks out the question that’s been running through his mind since you started teasing him with your words. 

“I read enough.” You remove one of your hands from the hold and perk his chin up so he has no choice but to look at you. His eyes are sparkling with lust as you’re just centimeters from his face. “Tell me, Jeongin, what do you want me to do to you?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

He pauses to ponder and collect his thoughts. Everything he’s ever imagined is running through his read: the pet names, the toys, the punishments, the pleasure. It’s all too much, and he can hardly speak another word before you pet his face, holding his head in your palm as he shyly presses his cheek into your hand. 

“M-mommy,” he had never said that word out loud to you before, “can I strip for you?”

“All for me?” You smile, gladly accepting this offer. “Go ahead, baby boy. Show mommy what she’s been missing.”

He removes himself from you and stands up, timidly facing you as you lounge back on your couch. His shirt goes first, being neatly tossing onto the couch where he once sat. His fingers fiddle with the hem of his sweatpants before he pulls them down, showing you his bulge that’s painfully pressed against his tight boxer briefs. He’s bigger than you expected him to be, but that’s welcomed in your eyes.

You hold your hand out, stopping him before he can pull down his underwear. Standing up with a groan, you walk around his body, eyeing him up like he’s a buffet. One of your hands gently grabs at his ass, squeezing the skin between your fingertips and making him whine. You bite your lip when you hear him, sounding cute as a button despite the situation. From behind, you pull him back to you and run your hands around his body to feel his toned abs, finally moving upwards to tease his erect nipples. You feel him take a deep breath to calm himself, but when one hand pinches his nipple, he whines again, louder this time.

“Quiet, baby. You don’t want to wake the girls, do you?” When you whisper in his ear, all of the thoughts leave his head. You’ve hardly touched him and he’s dumb, and as embarassing at it is, he loves feeling helpless in your arms. “I haven’t seen another man like this in ages. You’re exactly what I need right now, Jeongin.” 

“Y-you need me?” He can hardly believe that you’re just as horny over him as he is for you, although his longer dates back far longer than just an hour or so. You hum in his ear as your hands slide down his torso to his cock, palming him over his underwear. He hisses and moans from the lightest stimulation. His reaction to all of your touches is perfect, and you can’t wait to see how he reacts when you’re riding him or sucking him off, although you could do anything to him and he’d be thankful. 

You remove your hand from his cock and pull down his underwear, finally seeing his length in all its glory. He gasps from how fast you undress him, but at the same time, he loves being on display for you. As much as he wants to hide his erection out of reflex, he holds his arms to the side tightly, allowing you to come in front of him and take in the view. 

“Jeongin, are you a virgin?” As embarrassing at it is, he nods and holds his breath, waiting for you to answer. “Aw, my pretty little boy’s never been fucked? That must be why you’re so infatuated with me.” 

You get down on your knees so you’re eye-level with his cock, now red and angry, begging to be sucked. Although your skills might be a little rusty, if your ex-husband’s reviews were any indication, you were about to blow this kid’s mind. With a little lick, he’s whining and staring down at you as you wrap your lips around the tip of his cock before moving back again and wrapping your hand around him like he’s always imagined. 

“Do you want to sit down?” Your voice sounded so calm and gentle, it was honestly shocking to Jeongin since he could hardly speak at all. He nods, and you take him to sit back on the couch. He spreads his legs for you to sit in between, once again jerking him off with one hand while the other plays with his balls. You kiss the tip before taking his member into your mouth, bobbing your head only around the tip. 

Jeongin’s convinced himself that he’s dreaming when he looks down to see your face moving up and down the very top of his cock. It feels so good, better than he could have ever imagined, and surely better than his hand. As you slowly start to take him more into your mouth, he’s clutching onto the couch cushion for dear life. He gets close very fast, tapping his thigh with one hand to try to convey that he’s about to cum. Quickly catching on, you take him fully into your mouth, his tip hitting the back of your throat, almost making you gag. 

After a few twitches of his cock, you feel him cumming down your throat as he moans out expletives from the overwhelming sensation. When he’s finally done, you pull your mouth off of him and let his cum drip out of your mouth and onto your chest, which was still covered by your button-down work shirt. When Jeongin finally opens his eyes, he’s greeted by you lazily resting your head on his thigh, looking up at him, waiting for him to come back down to Earth. 

“Ah, thank you, mommy.” In his post-nut state, the name he’d given you leaves his lips more hesitantly, but he knows that’s what you want to hear. Looking up at the clock, he notices that it’s past his self-determined bed time, but he’s still dazed enough to not care, at least for a moment. “That felt so good.” 

“And maybe tomorrow night we can do more, hm?” You slide onto his lap, his soft cock resting between your thighs. “I’d love to ride my baby boy and finally take his virginity… only if you want of course.” 

“I- … Yes, I’d love that.” Before he can say another word, you kiss him on the lips, and despite them just being around his cock, your kiss is sweet, and he needs more of it. Trying to avoid a make-out session, you pull away and get off of the boy’s lap, telling him to get dressed and go home so you can both sleep.

Your goodbye to him is the same as always, waving as he walks back home, but knowing what’s going to transpire tomorrow night, you can’t help but finish yourself off after being all worked up from Yang Jeongin. You decide to save your panties from today before you get into the shower, because they’re absolutely drenched and you’re sure Jeongin would love to have them for when he’s home alone. 

After pleasing yourself in the shower, you peek out your bedroom window. Just as you had hoped, Jeongin’s curtains were wide open, and he was beating his cock with one hand and sucking on his fingers with the other. He was clearly thinking about you by how he’d had his journal sitting next to him opened to a random page. 

You sleep good that night, pleased and excited for tomorrow. Although you were always the submissive one, you came to realize that maybe being the one in control was just what you needed. 

[slashbitch2]

Prove Me Wrong, Darling

who doesn't love a bit of enemies to lovers? :)

You and Agatha had never gotten along. From your perspective, it was due to a conflict of interest. Whereas if you asked her, she'd likely say it was a conflict of intelligence, or something else insulting along those lines. Though the issue you had with the fellow witch wasn't her attitude, rather her underestimation of your powers. It'd started with her massacre of the Coven, when she'd attempted to end your life alongside the others. But to her surprise, you'd been strong enough to defend yourself and escape. Since then, there'd been several instances where your paths had crossed, and you hadn't let her live down the failure yet.

This particular occasion was different, however, as Agatha had asked you for help.

It'd taken everything in you not to immediately mock her. But you knew that she'd leave without further explanation if she felt ridiculed, and you were just dying to know what had made her stoop to your level. So, you'd swallowed your pride and attentively listened to her proposal. It'd mostly featured the repeated phrases "immense power" and "huge source of energy," and even a confession that she was baffled by the cause, which only intrigued you further.

Although you weren't too interested in accumulating anymore power, the opportunity to be on level ground with Agatha was too good to pass on. You confessed this to her upon accepting the invitation, which resulted in an unimpressed eye roll. Regardless of her annoyance, you left that same day, arriving in the least expected location. A quaint town in New Jersey.

"Well," You landed behind Agatha in the middle of a road, surveying the picturesque, colourless neighbourhood. "isn't this lovely."

She pursed her lips, looking round similarly perplexed. "Lovely?" She echoed. "This is like every outdated suburban stereotype rolled into one. Like some kind of picture-perfect movie set."

Her condescending comment jogged a memory. "That's what I was thinking of!" You exclaimed, clapping your hands enthusiastically. "Did you ever watch that sitcom- from the 50s? The Dick Van Dyke Show?"

"From the title alone I'm glad I didn't."

"Seriously, it's practically the same setting." You moved to stand directly in front, forcing her to look at you.

"So, what you're saying is someone used this insane amount of power just to recreate their favourite TV show?" She quirked an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed by your theory.

"Well, wouldn't you?"

"No."

"Anyway." You glanced down at the rather eye-catching ensemble Agatha was currently wearing, then at your comparably casual yet modern clothes. "This isn't going to work." With a wave of your hand, the jeans and jumper combo was replaced by a more period accurate pencil skirt and blouse. Satisfied, you looked up at her expectantly.

Taking it as a challenge, she copied the gesture, managing to both create a new dress and fix up her hair. She smirked, enjoying the chance to show off her superior abilities.

"It's not a competition." You huffed.

She placed a hand on your arm fake comfortingly. "Of course not, dear."

The contact caused you to shiver slightly. It felt as though her touch ignited sparks, though the sensation wasn't exactly unpleasant. Quite the opposite, in fact. But indulging in it didn't feel right either, so you were grateful when Agatha removed her hand.

Her face dropped, eyebrows furrowing. Slowly, she swivelled round to point at a house. "There. Can you feel it?"

Following her outstretched finger, you tuned into the energy, focusing specifically on the house. "Mhm." Unsurprisingly, Agatha was right. An unfamiliar energy was being emitted from whoever was inside. You tried to pinpoint what kind of magic the user possessed, but found no trace of any familiar type. "Shall we go meet the neighbours, then?"

"You read my mind." She muttered, narrowing her eyes and offering an arm without so much as sparing a glance in your direction.

You hesitated, taken aback by the kind gesture. It hadn't dawned on you until then that an incredibly powerful being was residing little over 10 metres away, and that you were both about to willingly walk into their house. Looping your arm with hers created a naïve sense of safety.

Neither spoke as you approached the house with faux confidence, only pausing for Agatha to summon a potted plant. A house warming gift, you guessed. The simple gesture of goodwill brought a smile to your face.

"I didn't expect you to be such a considerate neighbour." You whispered.

"Gotta make a good first impression." She reached out to knock against the door.

---

You sighed. Barely an hour spent in this black and white world and you were already bored. Everything was so tiresomely perfect, so normal that you questioned how you'd ever suffered through those terrible old sitcoms in the first place. Sitting in Wanda's living room, the only entertainment was your partner in crime Agatha, or Agnes, as you ought to say.

She was currently flipping through a magazine, tracing the page with her index finger and reading aloud to help Wanda prepare for her anniversary.

"Any notable date you can remember? Special occasion?" She asked the redhead. "You know, to remind him of good times." She winked suggestively, briefly glancing at you with an expression that only you could decipher. She was enjoying flustering Wanda a little too much.

"Oh...I don't know." She trailed off, untrustworthy eyes darting around the room. "Do you two have any memorable date? Maybe I could steal some ideas."

Had the sitcom spell effected you, this would've been the ironic moment in which you spat out whatever drink was currently in your mouth. Fortunately though, you'd declined the offer of tea earlier, and opened your mouth to correct her.

Agatha beat you to it by nudging you with her elbow. "Oh don't we just?" She laughed deeply until you joined in with a forced chuckle.

Deciding to join in with her game, you hummed thoughtfully. "What about that picnic we had? In Salem, remember?" Judging by the way her eyes flashed dangerously, she knew you were referring to that dreadful night with the Coven, serving as revenge for the sudden change in relationship status. "Agnes decided the best time to go on a date would be at night- and in the middle of forest of all places!"

Agnes threw back her head in exaggerated laughter. "Oh hush! I thought it'd be romantic. Besides, you're the one who got us completely lost, dear." She continued, further adding depth to the altered anecdote. "And I'd say it went pretty well regardless." She turned to whisper conspiratorially to Wanda. "So I'll spare you the dirty details."

The three of you fell into easy laughter, only interrupted by the shrill ring of the telephone. "If you'll excuse me." Wanda stood up to answer. "That's probably Vis."

You took the distraction as respite from forcing such an overly hospitable smile, finding that your cheeks were already aching. For the last few minutes, you'd been aware of a pair of eyes watching you closely, and finally turned to face the witch sitting next to you.

"What?"

Agatha said nothing, her invasive eyes never leaving yours as she took a sip of her drink. You could practically see the gears turning in her head as she thought something through, and dreaded to wonder what she was about to say.

Reaching some form of a conclusion, she leant forward to place her drink down on the table. "Kiss me." She murmured through clenched teeth, momentarily glancing at Wanda, who's back was turned.

"Excuse me?" Out of all the possible things she could've said, this request seemed the least plausible in your mind.

"When Wanda turns round she should see us-" Agatha gestured her hand back and forth as if vocalising what she was implying was too sinful to put into words. Her vagueness was met by your blank stare. "Y'know?"

"No?" You shook your head, unable to comprehend why she'd ask such a thing, untrusting your interpretation of her suggestion.

"Just-" Agatha raised her hands to grasp your face. Hesitated. Then threw them back down into her lap and sighed in frustration. The fact she was struggling to initiate contact was laughable, though eventually you took pity on her.

Leaning forward, you kept your eyes open to watch for Agatha's reaction. You found it amusing that upon realising what you were trying to do, her eyes shut impossibly fast. Satisfied that she was consenting, you raised one hand to cup her cheek and continued to chase after her lips. The kiss was chaste and affectionately mundane, exactly at it should be.

In response, she grabbed your knees and pulled you closer, nipping at your bottom lip. Clearly Agatha wasn't on the same wavelength as you. Her hands shifted further up to your thighs, bringing a startling heat to the kiss. You gasped, virtually melting at her touch. You wanted this. One hand slid to rest on her shoulder. But it wasn't the time or place. You gently pushed against her.

Agatha pulled away, breathless. She scanned your face with pupils blown wide and mouth slightly agape like she'd just reached some new revelation. You were certain your expression mirrored hers.

Wanda cleared her throat somewhere in the distance.

"Gosh, Wanda I'm sorry." Agnes' cheerful voice reappeared as she addressed the redhead without breaking your intense shared eye contact. "But I think we ought to be heading home now." She said unabashedly. Like you hadn't just been caught making out on the neighbour's couch.

"Of course." You could hear the understanding smile in her voice, the slight awkwardness from intruding. "It's been lovely meeting you both."

Summoning an ounce of brainpower, you turned to Wanda. "And you. Feel free to keep the magazine." Then tugged Agatha up and began dragging her toward the front door. For once in her life she went willingly, allowing herself to be pulled along, calling out a last minute farewell to Wanda.

Upon reaching the end of the garden, Agatha wordlessly took the lead. Staying true to her fabricated story, she set a determined course for the house to the right, waltzing up as if she owned the place. A quick flourish of your fingers and the lock was rendered useless. Now the house was yours.

As soon as the door shut behind you, she turned on her heel and pushed you against it. Her mouth quickly sought out yours with a desperation only appropriate in private. Had you known Agatha was this good of a kisser, you would've done this ages ago, but elected not to vocalise the praise knowing she'd never let you live it down. You felt her smirk against your lips, and briefly wondered if she'd somehow infiltrated your mind. You wouldn't put it past her.

As she began trailing kisses down your neck, any concern about the invasion of privacy became inconsequential. You sighed. She rewarded the sound with a nip at your throat. Due to the haze of lust clouding your better judgment, you didn't register the sound of footsteps until it was too late.

"Woah!" A man called from the top of the staircase, presumably the current previous resident of the house. Agatha froze, her lips still pressed up to your neck.

"If you two beautiful ladies hadn't already broken into my house, I would've happily invited you in." The man grinned obnoxiously, slowly continuing down the stairs.

Agatha disinterestedly waved her hand, incapacitating him. The sound of the stranger tumbling down the stairs caused her to let out a short, cruel cackle, before returning to bury her face in the crook of your neck.

"Not big on roommates?" You joked, sliding a hand up and down her back soothingly.

She nipped at your flesh, a little harder this time. "Trust me, he doesn't want to be here for what I'm about to do to you."

Already impatient, you decided to tease her in hopes it would speed things up. "You're all talk and no action, Harkness."

She all but growled as she returned to your lips. Without warning her hands squeezed your hips. "I don't think you're in the position to be insulting me, love."

"Then prove me wrong, darling."

[willowcrowned]

Grey Apprentice AU (Installment #4)

aka Sith!Obi-Wan AU Flavor II 

(Previous parts: x x x)

Qui-Gon paces the length of his and Obi-Wan's small sitting room, first once, then twice, then a third time. He looks up, expecting the usual dry comment from Obi-Wan on jedi masters’ peaceful bodies and minds, but he’s not there. Of course, that’s the problem in the first place: Obi-Wan is gone, off on a ship with a figure that felt like a maelstrom of darkness in the Force, and he’d left with a wink. The man must know something Qui-Gon doesn’t, but what it is, he can’t guess.

He turns, pausing at the entrance to Obi-Wan's room. He normally doesn’t enter without permission; it’s an invasion of Obi-Wan's privacy— privacy to which he is well entitled— but in this case...

Qui-Gon grimaces, opening the door. He won’t snoop, won’t do anything other than have a superficial look. At the very least it might calm him down to have tangible evidence of Obi-Wan's intention to return. When they’d left, he hadn’t taken the black bag he usually keeps with him, a velvet thing smaller than Qui-Gon's palm. Obi-Wan wouldn’t have left it if he thought he’d be gone for more than a week.

The room is just as Obi-Wan had left it, tidy and empty, with a plant on the desk next to a picture of his friends, a spare cloak hung up on the peg next to the door, and a blanket folded perfectly at the foot of his bed. It’s the room of a knight, not of a padawan, Qui-Gon realizes, and he has to push down the surge of pride and guilt that seems to swell up in his chest more and more often these days.

He frowns, for the first time noticing the odd pressure building in his brain. It’s a strange, blunt, thing— the marked absence of something, rather than its presence. He scans the room once more for the offending object, for the first time noticing an odd red glow from the closet. Qui-Gon pauses. He’d said he wouldn’t touch anything, but— The glow grows brighter, and he can hear the Force calling to him from it, not light, not peaceful, but not unkind. Qui-Gon sighs, and opens the closet door.  

The glow is coming from the floor, within the black bag Obi-Wan had left behind. Qui-Gon looks at it, a furrow forming in his brows. It’s not Obi-Wan's habit to leave things on the floor, and the cleaning crews haven’t been in their apartments since they left. When he picks up the bag, intending to return it to its place on the shelf, a white-hot pain sears through his hand, and he drops it. The bag tumbles to the floor, and out of it falls a holocron.

It’s the last thing Qui-Gon notices before the onslaught of darkness hits him, pressing him beneath a tsunami of emotion. The fury slams into him first, not so hot as the zabrak’s had been but far, far, deeper. Qui-Gon falls to his knees without noticing, forced to sustain the mental battering of his shields. He can feel them weakening even as he clutches them tighter, being torn away bit by bit like an old house in a storm.

How is no one noticing this, Qui-Gon wonders. How come no one has come in to see what this endless wave of darkness is— this storm with no light.

The first tear in his shields happens, and he works it shore it up, plugging it with whatever he can think of: random bits of trivia, a poem, a meal he shared with Obi-Wan. Stay, he tells them, give me time. The pieces do not stay, each layer being ripped away until all that’s left was the look on Obi-Wan's face as he realized the sandwich he’d bitten into was filled with candied ants. Then, abruptly, the maelstrom stops, and Qui-Gon is left grasping for the pieces of his shields, the void around them quiet once more.

“Do forgive my intrusion,” a female voice says, dry and unapologetic as Qui-Gon struggles to get control of his breathing on the floor. “You know how it is: better safe than sorry.”

Qui-Gon falls back, resting against the wall as he tries to catch his breath. “What are you?” He says, injecting his tone with as little worry as he can manage. “What are you doing here?” What are you doing in Obi-Wan's room, he wants to add. What have you done to my padawan?

Zannah’s nose scrunches slightly, halfway between amused and disgusted. “Your shields are down, Jedi.”

“I wonder why that is,” he manages.

She shrugs. “I’m not going to apologize.”

Qui-Gon patches up his shields, weaving the skeleton of the old threads of memory into a new place, beside several strong pockets of compulsion. It won’t be enough to stop the woman if she attacks him again, but it might gain him a few seconds of reprieve. It will have to be enough.

“As for your questions,” the woman says once he’s finished, “A Sith, sleeping, Obi-Wan brought me here, and I’ve done nothing to him.”

“Nothing,” Qui-Gon repeats, disbelieving, the aftershocks of her attack still filtering through his mind.

“Yes,” the woman says. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Darth Zannah. I’d tell you to sit down, but, well...” She gestures to him collapsed on the floor.

Qui-Gon shakes his head, trying to disseminate the information. “Does he know you’re here? Does he know what he brought back?” Surely not, he thinks. Surely Obi-Wan wouldn’t have knowingly brought a Sith into the heart of the Jedi temple.

“I should hope so,” Zannah says, “given that I’ve been training him for twelve years.”

“Twelve—” Qui-Gon freezes.

“Yes,” Zannah agrees, “since Bandomeer.”

“Impossible,” Qui-Gon breathes.

“Is it?” Zannah raises an eyebrow in a perfect imitation of Obi-Wan— or, no, all this time Obi-Wan must have been imitating her. Qui-Gon remembers when he picked that little habit up; it had been the months after he’d turned seventeen, just beginning to grow into his too-long limbs, still gawkish and almost awkward. Then, over the course of their mission, his gait had grown smoother, countenance more graceful, and his awkward smiles at Qui-Gon's jokes had turned into an amused raised eyebrow and half-smirk. 

It had felt odd at the time, watching the maladroit child he knew turn into a clever, subtle, adult, but he knows it now as the sign of Obi-Wan growing up, leaving Qui-Gon as a student and returning to him as a friend. He remembers the white stone of the city, remembers the late spring blossoms of the sea-roses, remembers the first time Obi-Wan had turned that quizzical look on him— and feels the taste of the memory, sweet with the blossoms, turn to ash in his mouth.

“How—” Qui-Gon starts, mouth dry. “Why—”

“I offered him knowledge,” Zannah says, not unkindly, “and companionship not to be found in the constraints of Jedi.”

“Why train him?” Qui-Gon asks, clutching at proof that she has not— could not— have trained Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan is kind, and clever, and selfless, and none of the things a Sith should be. He cannot have lied so fully for so many years. He cannot. “Why not train someone else? Someone you wouldn’t have to corrupt first?”

Zannah gives him an incredulous look. “You think I’ve corrupted him? Have you forgotten Ghé’aiit so easily? That was not the behavior of one corrupted.”

Qui-Gon feels ire stir deep in his chest, at her prodding, guiding rhetoric, but the memory springs to him unbidden.

It had begun as a trade dispute. Three families, each the head of a government and of a trade sector. The Jedi had initially been brought in to facilitate negotiations; those had lasted all of two nights, ending with Obi-Wan kidnapped and in chains— a hostage for the third family. Qui-Gon hadn’t known that at the time, of course. He’d only known that Obi-Wan was gone and the place where their bond was had turned to a jagged mess of edges before it disappeared into nothingness.

He’d found Obi-Wan again, oblivious to Qui-Gon's presence, escaped and facing the Third Peer, who was holding a blaster to his sister’s head. It would have been easy, laughably easy, for Obi-Wan to let him shoot her, claim he had gotten there too late to save her, and arrested the Third Peer with little risk to himself. Instead, Obi-Wan had lain down his blaster, and braced himself for the shot.  

(Later, when their bond was back and whole, Qui-Gon had blocked it off again, too overwhelmed by fear and relief not to yell at Obi-Wan. How could he yell at Obi-Wan, when he’d done exactly as a Jedi should do? But how could he not be angry, not be furious, that he had lain down his blaster and braced himself for death as if it were second nature? How can I forgive you, Qui-Gon had thought then, for almost leaving me? How will I be able to let you go when it’s time?)

“He scared me too,” Zannah says softly. “When I heard what he had done, I could barely restrain myself. Foolish, loving, Jedi, and their need to do the right thing.”

“I hope you don’t think,” Qui-Gon says, tired, “that I trust you.”

“No,” Zannah says. “You’re not a stupid man, on the whole. I hope you will trust Obi-Wan, though.”

Qui-Gon sits straight up, reminded of what had caused his agitation in the first place. “Obi-Wan. You sent him after that darksider?”

“Darth Maul,” Zannah agrees. “I wouldn’t fear, he’s not a match for Obi-Wan— merely the servant of the Sith Master.”

“You would send Obi-Wan to do another Sith’s dirty work?” Qui-Gon doesn’t hide the curl of his lip from her, meeting her gaze head-on. “I thought the masters were supposed to discard their apprentices themselves.”

“I do not,” she hisses, eyes flashing, “do that creature’s dirty work.”

“Lady Zannah—” Qui-Gon replies coldly.

“Lord, actually,” Zannah corrects, and all of a sudden the fire has left her eyes. “The title is ‘lord’ regardless of gender. A Sith Lady is a different job entirely.”

“Lord Zannah,” Qui-Gon corrects, making sure she can hear the eye-roll inherent in his tone, “Are you implying that not only are you embroiled in a rivalry with another Sith clan, but that you have, in fact, created your own?”

“We call them houses,” Zannah replies. “Mine is that of Athén. And you are correct, Obi-Wan is a part of it. We are a House of two.”

Fantastic, Qui-Gon thinks bitterly, and his patch-job must not be as good as he thinks it is because he swears he hears Zannah chuckle. He sighs. “Out of curiosity, what is the job of a Sith Lady?”

“A combination of cultural advisor, archivist, and magic user. And occasionally a consort.” Zannah smiles a wickedly sharp smile. “I much prefer being a Lord.”

Yes, Qui-Gon thinks, not caring that she can hear it. You would.

-

 Some notes:

-Yes Zannah did name her house after her dead wife, who is in turn named after Athena, because I am a basic, basic, bitch

-Yes, I did borrow the line about Sith jobs from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Patricia C. Wrede I’m so sorry I’m using your work for my nonsense AUs but also those books shaped me as a human, so. Too Bad. They’re a part of my writing now.

- I included a bug-eating joke because apparently I am constantly under the compulsion to talk about people in sw eating bugs. I have no excuses

[multiverse-muse]

Little Lamb (Thor soulmate au)

as the title says, this is a soulmate story for Thor, where your first words to your soulmate manifest themselves as tattoos

One day, you’d learn not to visit New York. Your first time to the city, there ended up being an alien invasion and you’d been through months of therapy since. You get up the courage to visit the City again and now an extremist group was attempting to claim buildings and overtake the Avengers.

In the way of selfish human beings, the evacuation had been anything but calm and you’d been jostled and knocked aside, landing on your leg and hearing a faint crack. Between the panic and noise, no one noticed you still on the floor and eventually you were left alone. Of course.

You make it down two flights of stairs -why’d you need to go to this department so bad anyway?- before you can’t hold yourself up anymore. You situated yourself enough so that the pain in your leg was only a dull throb and kept trying to use your phone to reach an emergency line, to no avail. You’re not entirely sure how long you’d been laying there, alternately yelling for help and accepting your doom, when a not-so distant explosion rocks the building. Despite your attempt at calming yourself, you could feel true terror boiling up.

That feeling was only amplified when you hear a window in a level above shatter and a loud thud as something - or someone?- lands.Even higher beyond that, you hear more noise, more mechanical. You hear only one set of footsteps bounding down the stairs. You’re not sure what to expect - someone coming to kill you? A terrorist trying to escape? The man that emerges is not anything you’d expected. Thor, of the Avengers, his face slightly pulling in concern.

“You are not meant to be here.” He says. As if you’d decided to just hang out.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” You hiss back at him, flinching as another explosion shakes the building. Any other time you’d be intimidated by the large, handsome man but right now was certainly not the time for you to be fussed at.You could hear fighting above. A slow, wide grin appears on his face.

“I believe I may be your soulmate.” Thor says. You glance at him again, mouth half open to snap at him again, brain slowly processing his former words. He approaches you slowly, giving you a once-over. “You’re injured?”

“Y-yeah, my leg.” You answer, still bewildered. “How did you even know I was down here?”

“Friday said there was another heat signature down here, we wanted to make certain all civilians were safe.” Thor answers, kneeling down and testing your hurt leg. You make a slight choking noise when he brushes against your knee and Thor frowns. “Were you left here?”

“Ah, well, there was a stampede basically and I can’t really get down the stairs.” You reply. Thor’s face is a flurry of anger and calculation, before he reaches up, activating his earpiece.

“Yes, I found them. No, just one, they’re-” Thor pauses, glancing at you and a grin breaking out across his face. “They’re my heart’s chosen.” You can almost hear the response from your position on the floor, your face aflame even as Thor winces at the noise in his ear.

He says something else into the earpiece but you don't catch it over the sound of rumbling and fighting from above. Thor catches your scared expression and kneels back to your side.

“Would you permit me to pick you up, my lamb?” He asks and you manage to nod before he sweeps you up, holding you effortlessly against him. Even with the careful way he’s holding you, your leg pulses in pain and you find the breath knocked out of you. You wince, flinching into his chest and Thor frowns, making sure to hold you as if you were porcelain.

Flying through the air would probably have been more exhilarating if you hadn’t been injured and fearful for your life, during a bad guy invasion.

“Here.” Thor says as he lands. You manage to pry your eyes open and are astonished to find yourself on the ledge of the Avengers Tower. “Friday has alerted a physician to your injuries, they’re waiting to look at you.”

“Is it even safe here?” You ask. Thor carries you through the door where, indeed, a young professional-looking woman is waiting. He gives you a considering glance as he sets you down on the couch, the woman immediately stepping up to take a look at you.

“There is nowhere safer, I can assure you.” Thor pauses, then grins. “Well, besides next to me, my lamb, but it seems I'm required to save New York once again.”

[amillionsmiles]

in your bedroom after the war (Dick/Artemis)

Title: in your bedroom after the war Summary: As far as coping mechanisms go, Artemis could be doing worse. At least her method has a gymnast’s ass. / Post-Invasion, pre-Outsiders. Rated M.  A/N: I have one (1) agenda and that is messy grieving fuck buddies who are each other’s ride-or-dies. if you are not into fic that sits squarely in sad feral horny territory, then this is probably not your speed.

[Read and review here] or continue under the cut.  

| GOTHAM

| JANUARY 14, 2017; 12:05 AM EST

Artemis is a bit heavier than she was in her teenage years, but her feet land lightly on the fire escape by the window. An hour ago, she’d called her mom from Metropolis, promising she’d be home by midnight. Ever since her daughter faked her death a year ago, Paula Nguyen has become even more of a worrywart, and Artemis knows that the five minutes she’s running late are going to cause her to receive an earful.

“Didn’t think I’d see you back in this neck of the woods.” A familiar figure drops from the roof above onto the rung below her.

“Nightwing.”

She’s not surprised that he’s been keeping tabs. Officially, he’s been on a leave of absence for the past six months, but Dick, like her, is vigilant in his grief.

She’d come back to Gotham because it put her closer to Metropolis and Beta Squad’s continued investigation of LexCorp, but the truth is that she could have Zeta-tubed from Palo Alto easily. Their—her—apartment had been no good though, not without Wally. So she’d left most of her things in storage to figure out later and moved back in with her mom. On days when Artemis can’t muster the energy to get out of bed, Paula wheels determinedly around the kitchen, ready to whip up some mì xào  or a warm bowl of  mì gói.  They play card games and laugh about how bad Wally was at tiến lên the first time Paula tried to teach him. Your boy has no patience, he always wants to play his strongest cards right away, her mom had teased, and Wally had protested, I make it a rule to always put my best foot forward! and Artemis had loved him even more then.

Loved. Loves. She hates the past tense.

“I mean, were you ever going to ask me to grab coffee?”

She can see the bits of Wally in his cracks. In a room together, it was always easy to tell they were best friends from the way they riffed off each other. The acrobat and the speedster: all verbal gymnastics and fast-moving quips. But unlike Wally, who liked poking fun because he liked getting attention, Dick is at his wittiest when trying to avoid talking about himself.

Artemis reaches out and pulls him to sit down beside her. She makes a show of looking at her watch.

“How’s… 12:15 AM this Saturday?”

Dick pretends to check it against his mental schedule. If his is anything like hers, it probably goes: Wake up. Exercise (beating up bad guys counts). Mourn.

“Yeah, seems like I can swing it.”

“Perfect,” says Artemis, sliding up the glass panes to let them into her childhood bedroom. “I’ve got just the stuff.” 

*

In the kitchen, Brucely stirs briefly from his dog bed to sniff the air and  yip, then curls back asleep. Paula hands Dick a mug, waiting for him to take a sip before saying, “So you were the one who had the brilliant plan to have my daughter fake her death.” 

Dick splutters; from the table, Artemis rises to his defense. “Mom,” she says. “Leave him be.”

Setting his cup down, Dick leans against the cabinets, bending his head slightly and rubbing the back of his neck. He does a good job of appearing chastised, and Artemis wants to roll her eyes, if only because she’s heard from Bette and Raquel that this pose is far too effective at convincing women to want to forgive him or try again.

“I’m not leading much of anything these days, if that’s at all a comfort to you.”

“Hmph.” Paula sniffs. “You live alone?”

“Yeah.” Dick shoots Artemis a questioning look over her mom’s head. Artemis shrugs.

“What do you do to fill the time?”

“A lot of reading. Gotham’s library system actually has a pretty good selection, believe it or not. I’ve also gotten really into meditating.”

“And you don’t sleep.”

Dick stiffens. For the first time, he looks exposed, a boy with too much guilt and too much time on his hands.

“I do. Tonight I was just… restless.”

Paula nods and backs up her wheelchair so she can sit by Artemis, curling her fingers over Artemis’s hand and squeezing. She raises her drink, Artemis and Dick following suit, the three of them toasting to invisible losses.

“Aren’t we all.”

*

Later, back on the fire escape, Dick taps his fingers against the railing, jittery. “I feel like I need to start doing jumping jacks. What was in that stuff?”

Artemis bites back a smile. “Yeah, Vietnamese coffee packs a hit. That’s my bad. Probably should have given you something non-caffeinated at this hour.”

“It’s fine. I’ll jog it out, or something.” He turns to go, but Artemis stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, listen—it was good seeing you tonight. And if you need someone to talk to…” What she really means is: it’d be nice to be around someone who’s hurting as much as I am. Not to say that the rest of the team wasn’t as torn up over Wally’s death, but she and Dick had been ground zero. Closest to the blast.

After a pause, Dick nods. “Yeah… I could use a sparring partner, actually. I’ll send you an address.”

“Okay.” Satisfied, Artemis withdraws her hand, curling her fingers into her palm.

It feels like a start.

*

Dick’s directions lead Artemis to Wayne Manor; from there he takes her to the Bat Cave.

“I thought you were striking out on your own,” Artemis says, using her forearms to deflect a kick to her face. Dick grunts and recovers, throwing a punch to her stomach; she dances out of the way.

“I am. I just pop in here from time to time because Bruce has better equipment. Plus there’s less of a chance of me disturbing the neighbors.” He gestures to the eerily blue-lit stone walls around them.

Artemis feints and goes low, ducking under Dick’s guard. Two quick hits to Dick’s sternum pushes him back, before he gets a hand on her wrist and twists her around so that her back is pressed against his chest.

“Weren’t we supposed to be talking?”

Kicking his shin, Artemis breaks free. “All right, fine. I’ll start.”  Jab.  “I keep wanting a scapegoat.”  Kick.  “Like, one person to blame, instead of something as big as the Reach. But it’s not some giant revenge thing, and I know Wally wouldn’t want me to go down that sort of all-consuming rabbit hole even if it was, and that pisses. Me. Off.” On those last words, she manages to use Dick’s momentum against him and flips him over her shoulder.

For a minute, it’s so quiet between them she can hear the faint plip of water dripping from a stalactite into the water below the sparring dais. Still lying on the floor, Dick confesses, “I keep hearing him.”

“I make a joke to myself and he’s there, in my ear, with the punchline. And then…” He passes a hand over his face.  “And then I realize that the real punchline is him being gone.”

Slowly, Artemis approaches him. She feels like she did when they were undercover at Haly’s circus so many years ago, that brief moment of hangtime before their hands connected in the air. She means to sit down next to him, pat his shoulder, she doesn’t know what, but instead Dick sweeps her legs out from under her and she goes down hard, the air whooshing out of her chest as she falls flat on her back.

“Agh!” The release sets something loose inside her. Next thing she knows, she’s yelling again, louder, just because.

Dick catches on and then it’s just the two of them shouting, their voices echoing through the cavern, threading around and piling atop each other like a flock of birds. After they’re done, Dick rolls so that they’re lying side by side.

“You know, when we were starting out—when we first became friends—I used to make fun of Wally that if he kept talking so much while running he was bound to swallow more bugs, or something. And he’d just shoot back like, ‘Nah dude, you think I’m not fast enough to see them and dodge them in the air?’ But you know how he was always so hungry after missions? One time I was so mad at him I put a bug in his sandwich. I’ve never forgotten the look on his face after he bit into it and I said, dodge that.”

“You didn’t.” Artemis gasps and covers her mouth, horrified, but she can see it so vividly: the colors draining from Wally’s face, making his freckles pop even more against his skin, the same greenish tint his cheeks took the time they went to Vietnam and he got food poisoning. He’d spent two days feverishly glaring up at the mosquito netting, and Artemis had draped cold hand towels over his forehead and promised she wasn’t going to leave him for the very obliging boy who kept bringing them ice.

“I did.” Dick is gleeful. “Really put the ‘rank’ in prank.”  

Artemis snorts; the snort turns into a full-blown guffaw. Dick turns toward her, laughing too. His hair is matted with sweat but still soft; it brushes against her forehead.

It feels so good to be close to someone again, to be able to flip on a dime from sadness to frustration to anger to laughter and not have to explain herself. She can’t remember the last time she smiled and didn’t feel guilty about it, and she means it more affectionately than anything when she reaches over and brings Dick’s mouth to hers, like if she inhales whatever they’ve temporarily managed to create here between them, it’ll be enough to tide her over for the next few months. For a second, he’s warm and responsive, before his lips stiffen and he pulls back.

“I shouldn’t have done that.”

Shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t.  Shouldn’t beat yourself up about it, shouldn’t blame yourself for getting back in the game.  Artemis is sick of people telling her how to deal, how it’s supposed to go.  It’ll get better and then it doesn’t. People talk like there are guidebooks for this kind of shit, like it’s a marathon she just needs to pace herself through. And it’s the stupidest thing, but she misses being held.

She sits up and crosses her arms, resisting the urge to curl in on herself. “You didn’t do anything. I’ll go.”

“No, Artemis, wait, I don’t think you should go, I just want to understand what’s going on—”

“I want you to touch me, okay?” she explodes. “I want you to touch me because he’s never going to again and I know you loved him too and—and maybe if it’s you, I won’t feel so desperately alone.”

Dick looks stricken, and then, hesitantly, he reaches for her. His eyes are so blue, the kind of crushed eggshell you’d use to make a paint. “You’re not alone.”

“Prove it,” she says, vision blurring with tears—wanting, needing him closer, and then his hairline is up against hers again and his nose is at her cheek, his mouth at her jaw, soft but with a willingness to bruise. Don’t ask me what we’re about to do, Artemis silently begs, and Dick doesn’t.

 *

 Wally had been a restless lover. Always turning them over, switching positions. Artemis had taken it as a challenge, part of the ongoing competition that defined their relationship. Deep down, she’d known that Wally would be just as content if the rest of their sex life consisted solely of spooning gently on Sundays, which, if anything, was why she’d been so eager to experiment—because it felt like an easy gift she could give, not something she had to master to “maintain excitement” or make him stay.

She’s not sure what she expected from Dick. Maybe that’s a comfort—that she wasn’t fantasizing before they happened, wondering about all the mechanics of how it would go. Dick lets her call the shots, lets her ride him into the ground, the grip of his fingers around her thighs the only reminder she isn’t just angling toward oblivion. When he presses his thumb between her legs, it’s a weird sort of anchor—like hearing a voice pick up on a line you thought was dead. She has a body, and here’s someone on the other end of it, caring about her release. As soon as that thought hits, the relief shudders through her; she keeps rocking long enough to feel Dick follow, a stutter and a grunt, before she collapses boneless over him, the sweat of his skin a comforting stickiness against her cheek.

Internally, she apologizes to Bruce for desecrating his training space. Then again, they’re hardly the first of the Justice League to get handsy in less than appropriate places. She’s seen how Black Canary and Green Arrow act around each other.

Below her, Dick catches his breath. The rush of blood—his or hers—is loud in her ears.

“I didn’t think you’d be so…”  Giving, she means to say, but it gets lost on her tongue. “I mean, Zatanna…” she trails off again.

If Dick’s embarrassed at the prospect of his ex-girlfriend having blabbed about the details of their sex life to Artemis, he doesn’t show it. His fingers find a snag in her hair; gently, he works it loose. The air smells hedonistic. He keeps combing. Nice is the only word she can think to describe it, and that makes her want to cry again, so she squeezes her eyes shut.

“Thank you,” she whispers against his chest.

Dick pauses his ministrations. He flattens his palm against the base of her neck and just—holds her there.

“Don’t mention it.”  

When she goes home that afternoon to shower, she runs the water on full blast for a long time.

 *

 Armed with Chinese food, she visits Dick’s place the next day intent on making amends. Dick doesn’t even act surprised; he just points to the glass coffee table where she can set the bag of chopsticks, napkins, and takeout.

“I’m trying to decide what to watch.”

There’s really no need for him to stand in front of the TV the way he does, one hand propped on his hip as he clicks through options with the remote. Artemis lets herself ogle, a bit. The surest way to blow past what happened between them yesterday is to be honest with herself, right? And as far as coping mechanisms go, Artemis could have done worse. At least her method has a gymnast’s ass.

“Any preferences?”

“Between what?” asks Artemis, cracking open the carton of lo mein and settling back against the cushions. The Netflix suggestion algorithm onscreen paints a condemning picture of Dick’s tastes. “True crime or… true crime?”

Wally had been really into nature documentaries. One time during freshman year, when they were still living on Stanford’s campus, they’d gotten high in Wally’s dorm room and watched Blue Planet. Wally had cried when the seal got flung apart by killer whales.

“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark it is, then,” says Dick. He settles next to her on the couch, peeling back one of the orders and sniffing its contents. “What’s this one?”

“Salt and pepper ribs. They were today’s special.”

“Artemis.” Dick beams. “You really do care about me.”

 *

 Ten minutes into the episode begs a single question: “Isn’t it sort of depressing that you spend so much of your day fighting crime, and then you go home to unwind and just watch… more of it?”

Dick shrugs. “It keeps me sharp. And it’s nice seeing other people solve problems.”

“Well, if you ever feel like branching out, there’s a short film about Rubik’s cubes you might like.” Artemis nudges his side. “Remember when you were a scrawny math geek?”

Bringing both hands behind his head, Dick smirks. “Still a math geek. Just not scrawny.”

Artemis stares. That was just a bit of friendly showboating, right? Or was it a flirt? Not trusting herself, she whips her gaze back toward the TV. What feels like eons later, the credits roll.

“Artemis,” Dick says, too soft for having just finished a show about murder. He taps the corner of his mouth. “You’ve got some food stuck.”

She wipes with the back of her hand; a breaded piece of orange chicken emerges as the culprit. Without thinking, she flicks it off, sending it flying somewhere onto Dick’s carpet.

“Oops.”

Chuckling, Dick shakes his head. “I need to vacuum tomorrow, anyways.”

The mention of tomorrow stirs her. “Right. I should head out.”

“Yeah.” Dick rises to help her clean up their mess, holding open the plastic bag so she can toss in the soiled napkins and other bits of trash. “Or—”

He hesitates, but the hesitation’s enough. It might as well be a hand on her wrist, with how it stops her in her tracks. All night, despite what she told herself, she’s been looking for proof: proof that his aloneness fits the shape of hers, that he needs her, too. This time, Dick makes the first move—cups her face in both hands and kisses her, slow and deep and full of heat. Some pepper from the food they ate still lingers on his lips, making her mouth tingle, and Artemis is dizzy and flat on her back on the couch before she knows it, giving in.

Not scrawny at all, she thinks, admiring the solidness of Dick’s knees on either side of her, the weight of his frame as they grind together. The sheer mechanics of it feel very horny-teenager-after-prom, but the way Dick sucks her bottom lip and swallows her breath down with it is decidedly adult.  These days, Artemis practically lives in her sports bra, which doesn’t exactly grant easy access, but when Dick’s fingertips skim over the cotton covering her breasts the sensation zings all the way down her spine.

“Need… off…”

“Yeah,” Dick murmurs, humming as he moves down the column of her neck. “Gimme a sec, I’m working on it.”

She’d worn sweats because she figured their bagginess would keep her from sparring again and any potential… situations that could arise from that. Instead, all it means is Dick unties the drawstrings easily, sliding her pants down her legs. Cool air brushes across her as he shifts positions; she wants to sob in relief. His teeth graze her hip and then catch the edge of her panties and—oh. Fuck. The moan tears out of her and she scrabbles at the armrest, hips rising of their own accord. Next time, she is handcuffing Dick to a bed, because what he’s doing with his tongue and fingers should be illegal. She can feel him grinning, the bastard, and the only thing keeping her from crushing his head to a pulp between her thighs is the maneuver he pulls where he hooks her knees over his shoulders, so he can change the angle and plunge in deeper. Artemis shoves the edge of her T-shirt into her mouth at the last minute, only barely managing to muffle her cry.

Dick surfaces from his solo mission looking entirely too satisfied, mouth glistening. Trembling, still, from her orgasm, Artemis squints at him, possessed by some combination of unbridled lust and rage.

“Dick.”

“You calling, or asking?”

“Shut up,” she hisses. She feels like a newborn foal, after what he just did to her, but the urge to dismantle him just as thoroughly sends her surging upward and pushing him back. Dick welcomes their reversed positions by peeling off his shirt and tossing it over his shoulder, all while Artemis works furiously at his belt. It shouldn’t feel so good, to hear the metal clink against his button and watch the leather slide through the loops. To see the shadows the light of the TV casts on him—the lashes on his cheeks, the hollow of his throat. Artemis hadn’t paid much attention the first time, too desperate and caught up a bit in self-loathing, but now she’s actually enjoying this, savoring the flex of Dick’s abs as he pushes up to meet her, his skin pebbling at her touch.

“I’m going to take you apart,” she purrs.

Dick groans and bucks. The sensation sends a sharp spike of pleasure through her, and she clamps down on him tighter, refusing to yield.

“Try me, Tigress,” he rasps, pushing himself up on one arm so he can mouth at her collarbone. With his other hand, he pulls off her hairtie so her hair comes free of her ponytail, and this is going to be a thing with him, isn’t it, him wanting to fuck her while her hair swings loose around her face. She indulges him for a few minutes, claws his back and bites his shoulder for good measure, but then she’s pushing him back down and stretching out her body as languidly as possible to remind him who’s boss. Their pace slows. Dick keeps a hand fisted in her hair, so he can tug her head back in order to keep her neck exposed to his wanton mouth, but his grip gets less sure the closer she pushes him to the edge.

“Art—” says Dick, the single syllable like a painting pinned to the wall, fraught with desire, and then he just lets it drop, the tresses of her hair falling through his fingers. She wants to tell him that he’s beautiful, that he does look like a boy wonder, right then, in the midst of coming undone, chest flushed and hair mussed and pupils blown nearly wide enough to overtake the blue.

She doesn’t, but she stays the night, and that’s close enough.

 *

  High-functioning, Artemis’s therapist had called her, before Artemis moved back to Gotham. And it does feel like a high—the sneaking around, the after-hours meet-ups, the back-and-forth. There’s no one really keeping tabs on her, though Artemis has plenty of cover stories if anyone asks (new intel, side reconnaissance, etcetera, etcetera). Her mom eyes her and says, “As long as you’re not planning on staging your own death again, because I will find out and I will kill you this time,” and that’s that. Artemis nearly laughs. If anything, what she’s doing is the opposite, a small resurrection. An entire month and a half passes this way: day trips and dinners and movie nights and Dick and her in a bathtub, in the shower, against a wall. She even wears a gown and heels once, not because they have an actual event to attend, but because Dick has a fantasy that involves taking her from behind in the Wayne Manor library.

They’re in his apartment on a Sunday morning bathing in the afterglow, sheets tangled around their waists. Thank god Dick is one of those assholes that splurged on not only a nice mattress but also a solid bed frame. Artemis reaches over to push the hair out of his eyes. The black tuft on the back of his head that she likes grabbing is fluffed up like a duck's tail, and under the sunlight slanting through the windows, he looks angelic.

“Are you falling back asleep?”

Yawning, Dick snags her around the waist, dragging her to him. She should not delight this much in being manhandled.

“You wore me out,” he complains, tucking his chin over her shoulder.

“They just don’t make them like they used to,” Artemis sighs. Dick growls a little at the dig, fingers tightening against her hip.

Well. If he’s going to nap, she is, too. Comfortably spooned, she snuggles back against him, prepared to drift off.

“Do you think Wally would have wanted…” Dick doesn’t finish the thought.

Artemis turns in his arms. Dick has long eyelashes, and he’s looking at her through them almost bashfully. She places a hand on his chest. Feels his heartbeat thump once, twice.

“I think he would want us to be happy.”

“Are you?” Dick’s voice fades out and he has to swallow hard to clear his throat. “Happy?”

“I’m not… miserable.” 

Dick runs his hand up her bare arm, over her shoulder. “Me neither.”

“You know, Wally and I thought…” She bites her lip, remembering a whoosh of air, Wally speeding to her side to kiss her and interrupting her report on the disabled Paris MFD.  I know we promised each other we’d get out of this game, but maybe we can have our life together and play hero, too.  “We thought we’d have everything.”

Dick’s response isn’t mournful; it’s matter-of-fact. “After my parents died, I never really convinced myself that I could have it all.”

“That sounds like something Batman would say.”

“Does it?”

“A little.”

Once upon a time, Artemis had stood before the team ready to lay bare her darkest secret, waiting to be kicked out. And Dick had shown his hand: he’d known from the beginning and hadn’t cared.  You aren’t your family. You’re one of us. She knows he’s second-guessed himself over the years, wondering how fit he actually is to play leader. But for her, trust has always been the easiest thing about the two of them. It was why she’d said yes so easily to his deep cover mission—because she knew that he wouldn’t quit until he’d brought all of them home, that he would do whatever he could to keep them safe.

Taking his face in both her hands, she looks deep into his eyes. “You deserve good things, Dick Grayson.”

“Mm.” Dick smiles into her kiss, hooks his ankle over hers. “Keep telling me that. I’ll start to believe it.”

 *

 Jade abandons Will and Lian on a Tuesday, and Artemis’s carefully crafted equilibrium falls apart. At least this time she’s not the one directly being left, unlike when she was a teenager. Her expectations of her older sister had hardly been high, but if she’d plotted them on a graph they’d have trended upward. Now they’ve tanked.

“Did she leave any hint of where she was going?” Dick asks over the whir of his juicer. He’s gotten really into squeezing oranges lately; Artemis can’t complain because he always gives her the first glass.

“It’s Jade. She never wants to be found, and I hardly think she’s about to try an  Eat Pray Love type thing.”

“Eat Slash Steal, maybe?” Dick offers, dropping two ice cubes into a drink and setting it in front of her.

Artemis sips, balling up a napkin and throwing it at him at the same time. “Watch it, that’s still my family you’re talking about.”

“I’m sorry. How’s Will taking it?”

“As well as any dad trying to raise a two-year-old by himself would.”

“So, poorly.” Dick taps his finger against the table. “Are they coming here?”

Artemis looks at him blankly. “Why?”

“I figured they might want to be closer to you and your mom now that Jade’s gone. Gotham’s not so bad—you and I turned out fine. And Will probably needs to look into preschools and a babysitter for Lian soon. If you move in with me, you can bring her over whenever.”

The last piece of information slips in so casually she thinks she’s misheard. “What?”

“If you move in with me, you can bring Lian over whenever,” repeats Dick. “This place is as good as yours. You’re over here all the time anyway.”

Suddenly, she can’t breathe. “You’re serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She can’t meet his eyes. “W—Will’s home is in Star City. He’s not going to move.”

Slowly, Dick says, “Okay. But my offer doesn’t really depend on Will.”

Her stuff is still in boxes. She’s still paying for a storage unit almost 3,000 miles away. And Dick is waiting on her so intently it makes her chest hurt.

Artemis stands up. “We’re not doing this.”

Dick’s eyebrows rise. Annoyance, or maybe anger, flickers across his face. “You wanna fill me in on what exactly it is we’re doing, according to you?”

“We’re not going to fight about this like we’re…”  In a relationship. In love. In anything other than a messy configuration started by shared grief. She doesn’t say any of it out loud, but she doesn’t need to—Dick’s always been great at reading people, and he’s known all her tells from the start.

“Right.”  The single syllable comes out as cold and pointed as an icicle. He pushes his chair back from the table and stands up. The clouds are rolling in, throwing shadows across his features. Even now, Artemis wants to kiss him, wants to be the one to smooth the furrow between his eyebrows away.

“Dick…”

“Do me a favor, will you?” Dick grabs his jacket from the hook by his door, shrugging it on. He pauses, briefly, in the doorway. “Lock my door on the way out.”  

That night, she lies alone in her bedroom next to the picture of her, Wally, and Brucely. Brucely snuffles at the foot of her bed and then leaps onto the covers, and this time she doesn’t shoo him off. Neither does she fall asleep.

 *

 There was a song Jade had liked to sing, passed down from their mother: a Vietnamese lullaby about a yellow butterfly, to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” The butterfly flies all over the sky. Come and see. Come and see. When it became clear that Artemis’s hair would grow in blond, not black, Jade started pulling it, making her giggle. You’re the yellow butterfly, see?

The taxicab she calls for the airport is bright yellow in the morning light. Plain old civilian travel for plain old civilian business. You don’t need to be a superhero to fly across the country and move in with your brother-in-law and your niece. She’ll sing silly little songs and wash Lian’s hair, and they’ll be a family same as anyone else’s: clumsy, incomplete.

“Artemis.” Dick coalesces out of the fog. They haven’t seen or spoken to each other in a week, and she should be mad that he’s here because it probably means he’s been monitoring her web traffic and caught wind she’d bought plane tickets. Still, all she feels is relief.

Jade had laughed when Artemis had let slip what she was doing during one rare sisterly bonding moment. “Oh, darling sister, your thing with your little bird boy isn’t about moving on. You’re using him as a holding pattern. Try not to damage him too much, hm?” Rankled, Artemis had hung up the phone—what did Jade know about anything, besides shoving it under the rug and pretending it didn’t matter? Now, though, Artemis sees things more clearly. Jade did know something about bodies and what they could and couldn’t fix; after all, isn’t that why she ran?

She worries with the strap of her duffel bag, letting Dick approach.

“If this were a romcom, you would have waited until I got to the airport and then run through security.”

“If this were a romcom,” says Dick, stopping in front of her and shoving his hands in his pockets, “I’d be trying to make you stay.”

She thinks he might be the one person left on this planet who knows her best. She thinks they could save each other, if they’d let themselves try. But they each have work to do on their own, first.

Setting down her bag, she tucks her face into the crook of his neck and breathes him in. Wherever else she goes, this spot will always feel like forgiveness. Nose buried in her hair, Dick squeezes her back.

The taxi driver rolls down his window. “Is this guy coming with us or not?”

Artemis pulls back, and there’s so much sky in Dick’s eyes.

“You know where to find me,” she says.

 *

 | STAR CITY

| JULY 29, 2018; 7:30 AM PST

 “Who are you here to recruit this time?” Will asks, leaning against the doorframe, but Artemis doesn’t need an answer, doesn’t need any details but the black hair she can see just over Will’s shoulder, Dick’s voice at the end of a line.

He jumps, and she jumps with him. They’ll figure out everything else as they go.

Before Dick can respond, she says: “I’m in.”

[deniigi]

bro, work made me depressed that I literally left my seat to regain any resemblance of joy or something equivalent before breaking down again. Do you think you can provide a ficlet I involving Peter and Sam to cheer me up?

FUCK CAPITALISM

TAKE THIS

Title: Calibrating

Summary: Sam and Peter talk themselves towards a meaningful discussion.

---------

Peter did this thing—this infuriating thing where he texted shit like ‘come over’ and then Sam had to bend over backwards to be flirty and coy.

It was imperative that he came across as flirty and coy.

Im-fucking-perative, regardless of what Leilani said or Matt’s annoyance at what he called the ‘jungle of depravity’ that overtook the group chat pretty much daily.

Sam didn’t care.

If Peter texted the group or sent any message that might be construed upside-down as something romantic or sexual, Sam not only had to catch it, but he had to volley it back.

This, he told Leilani, sealed their No-Homo contract.

She stared at him.

He decided to demonstrate.

“See, here, look, I’ll show you,” he said, dragging out his phone. “Exhibit A. There he is, see? Asking about the strength of PVC pipe in pounds per meter like a fuckin’ tease. Now I can’t just let him think that I saw that and didn’t think of it as a metaphor, alright? So I say—”

“Sam, why does he need to know the strength of PVC pipe?” Leilani interrupted.

It didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point of this discussion.

“I’m sending a winky-face,” Sam informed her as he did that very thing.

Leilani stared harder than before.

But look, skepticism was unrewarded. Peter texted a kiss right back and said ‘oh boo, you always know just want to say.’

How could she not see the No-Homo? Sam could do this all day. He could and there would be absolutely no problems and he wouldn’t want to suffocate himself in his pillow at the end of it all.

It was fine.

“Samuel,” Leilani said, “I’m going to tell you something and I want you to hear it with an open heart. Will you open your heart for me?”

Sam spun around in his chair and arranged his arms and legs so that they were as open as they could feasibly be without being obscene.

“I am more open than a boiled clam,” he informed her.

Leilani blinked slowly, then shook her head and checked over her shoulders. She waved him in closer. Then closer. And then close enough that he could smell her perfume on her neck.

“You’re the tease,” she said.

Then she left the backroom. And Sam could only stare after her, frozen in horror as his wide-open heart wrinkled in on itself, picking up mass and gravity until it was naught but a black hole.

“I’m the tease?” he whispered to himself in shock.

Oh no.

OH NO.

 --

  “SENSEI.”

Matt dropped his collection of folders and swore, clutching at his chest.

“We have discussed volume, Sam,” he said, bending down to collect his paper children.

Sam took the opportunity to throw both arms around his neck from behind as a threat.

“Don’t lie,” he warned. “Swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, amen.”

Matt stood up and Sam felt his toes leave the floor. He hadn’t planned this far ahead.

“Or what?” Matt asked, 110% unfazed.

Sam wished that his feet weren’t kicking around in air here. It really put a dent in his intimidation factor.

“Am I a tease?” he asked.

Matt faced front with heavy eyebrows. Sam couldn’t see his face from this angle, but he knew that aura of irritation.

“If you have to ask the question, then you already know the answer,” Matt said. “Does that help?”

“No, I hate you now, actually,” Sam told him.

Matt dropped him right on his ass.

 --

 There had to be a way to attain proof. To determine once and for all that it was Sam who was in the wrong here, misinterpreting things like the genius that he was.

Thankfully, Sam’s experience of growing up as a non-only child for the last two decades had prepared him exactly for this type of conversation.

 SC: HANNAH AM I A TEASE???

HC: yes

HC: next question

SC: FUCK.

SC: WHAT IF ITS NOT NO-HOMO?

HC: my dear brother, the only options if something is not no-homo is for it to be no-no or homo-homo.

SC: Murder me

HC: gladly

SC: I’m in possible homo-homo with spiderman

HC: are you sure it’s not no-no?

SC: MURDER ME

HC: okay but like if it’s no-no then this is not a problem, right?

SC: If it’s no-no then I’ve read every sign wrong and I deserve to become a partially eaten tadpole awash in an indifferent boiling sea

HC: okay so we’re leaning INTO the drama today I gotcha. Alright but like, just for the sake of arguing, what if it was homo-homo?

SC: then I need you to bury my body somewhere no one will ever find it because my heart can’t stand requited love you know this about me.

HC: give me your login

SC: thank you I love you you’re the only person who matters

 --

 BT: Spiderman.

SM: Blindspot. DMing? You okay?

BT: this is Hannah.

SM: OH

SM: hi Hannah are you okay? Did you need something?

BT: My brother never got tested for reading comprehension but would have failed anyways. Can you arbitrate an arbitrary argument for us?

SM: I’m positive that there is a link between those two ideas that I am missing, but sure?

BT: okay are you ready?

SM: my loins have been girded.

BT: gross. you two are made for each other. Okay: what are your opinions on 24yo Chinese dudes with bad vision who are 5’7” tall, with terrible hair and brains as big and gaseous as Jupiter?

SM: positive

BT: you’re so romantic spidey.

SM: I know

BT: I’m going to tell him now

SM: WAIT DON’T TELL HIM

BT: byeeeeeee

 --

 Sam was going to have a heart attack. He couldn’t look at his phone. He was just going to lay here until he wasted away into a fossil.

Mm, yes, what a wonderful way to escape any and all feelings. That was—

His phone chirped and he nearly fell out of his chair in a hurry to answer it.

 HC: [image] [image]

HC: you owe me your bones

SC: AFASDFADFAS:FJaf’asdfjahsdlfihasdl’fas

SC: TAKE THEM

HC: if you fuck spiderman you have to get pregnant and demand alimony for your beautiful mixed babies Samuel

SC: Darling sister, we’ve talked about this. it isn’t going to happen I still have yet to steal a womb

HC: try harder

HC: ttyl

--

 Okay, this was fine.

Everything was fine.

Spidey liked Sam back, it was no big deal. Spidey liked everyone back. Even the teases.

Even.

The.

Teases.

Fuck, Sam had to move.

 --

 Foggy caught him biting his nails to pieces over the copy machine and asked him if he was okay. He was not. Foggy could read this off him. He didn’t ask again, but he did say that if Sam was feeling particularly anxious about something he was welcome to go have his breakdown upstairs in Kirsten’s kitchen instead of downstairs among the files.

Sam appreciated his offer. He hiked up the stairs, and halfway up, his phone chirped.

His heart stopped.

It chirped again, and then again. By the time he got to the top of the stairs, it was chirping every couple of seconds with messages being typed and sent at mach speed.

He kicked off his shoes and went to go stand over Kirsten’s sink to open the first one.

  PP: Sam it’s peter hey listen your sister messaged me

PP: and was asking some pretty invasive questions and I replied to her. I don’t know if you saw them but I just wanted to say that if that makes you uncomfortable in any way know that I absolutely don’t mind and I’ll stop

PP: you can tell me to fuck off if that crossed your boundaries. I shouldn’t have even messaged her back without asking you

PP: and obviously in future I won’t talk to her until I’ve cleared it with you I just wasn’t thinking I’m never thinking it’s a little hard to think sometimes

PP: especially when you message me back and I get caught up in the games and the emojis and stuff and like I’m sure that sometimes I overstep but I don’t mean to and you can tell me at any point if you want me to stop

PP: I guess I just really like to talk to you sometimes and it’s fun to have someone to banter with who actually banters back like not in a mean way but in a really nice and funny way. you’re an easy guy to talk to is what I’m saying

PP: which I’m sure you get a lot. I don’t mean that I want to like tell you all my problems I swear it’s not that it’s just more of a AHHHHH I don’t even know what I’m saying I think it’s sorry???

PP: I’m sorry??? I don’t mean to imply anything that isn’t there and I don’t want to make you feel like you have to either. Ar e you mad? Please don’t be mad okay wait no I’ve sent like seven fucking messages I’m being a creep oh my god IM SORRY ILL SHUT UP NOW OKAY SORRY BYE

  Oh nooooo.

The panic-induced infodump was not only familiar but horrendously endearing.

Sam had to explode now.

Man. Bummer.

  SC: it’s okay Peter

PP: OH THANK GOD

PP: is it tho??? Are you sure?

SC: I have positive feelings towards people like you too

  Sam’s heart pounded. He almost locked his phone and threw it in the sink, but another text came in just as that thought finished crossing his mind.

  PP: you do?

SC: yes of course I do

PP: oh nice

SC: yeah

  Annnnnnnd cue mutual nerd awkwardness. Great. Well done, Sam, you’ve done it again.

He sighed and turned away from the sink and sunk down onto the floor with his back against it.

Such a loser, Chung. So painfully awkward. Would it kill you to, just for once, slow down and chill for a minute?

God.

  PP: hey sam?

  No, Sam just wanted to sit on this floor and wallow.

  PP: hello? Are you still there?

 --

Sam let his head fall back against the sink. He closed his eyes.

His phone rang in his hand and he nearly had a heart attack. His fingers scrabbled over its face and the caller ID read ‘Peter Parker.’

Oh god.

Oh no.

Be cool. Be cool. Be cool.

“Hello?” he answered to the scratchy phone silence on the other side of the line.

He frowned.

“Hello?” he tried again, a smidge less desperate.

“Hi.”

There he was.

“Hey,” Sam said. “Sorry, just got awkward.”

Peter laughed through the line.

“Me too,” he said. “That was awkward.”

Yeah.

“Yeah.”

A long pause.

“I’m doing it again,” Sam moaned into his hand.

“No, no. Hey, you’re good,” Peter said. “I was just uh. Calling because.” He trailed off.

Sam waited.

“Sam? You still there?”

He startled and cleared his throat.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “Sorry, zoning out a little bit. You know, busy day.”

“Yeah,” Peter said.  “Yeah, I know.”

Sam breathed as quietly as he could. He could almost hear Peter doing the same on his end.

“Sorry, I’ve gotta g—” Sam started.

“Hey, do you like me?”

HNG.

“No?” Sam answered and then punched himself in the leg. “Sorry. Uh. I didn’t—I mean, uh. Yes. Of course I like you. You’re a really good person. I admire you a lot.”

Hannah, oh Hannah, where is thine shovel? Sam needed it to dig this grave deeper, please.

“Oh. Okay, I just—I guess I uh, have a hard time reading the tone of your texts sometimes,” Peter said.

“It’s okay, I get that a lot,” Sam said. “I’ll try harder to be more direct.”

“No,” Peter said. “No, no, you don’t have to change anything.”

“Oh? Okay, well. Maybe I still will, though,” Sam said.

If Peter wouldn’t have heard him, he would have started to try to fit his whole fist in his mouth.

Five minutes of conversation and they were still saying nothing.

“Sam?”

He swallowed.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Next time you’re in the city, would you, uh, maybe want to go out somewhere? With me?”

Out? What like, to a movie or something?

“Yeah, just like that,” Peter said. “’Cause I uh. Would like to. Do that, I mean. With you.”

“With me?” Sam asked. “Oh right, and your other friends, uh, names—sorry, I’m bad with names. N-ned?”

“No,” Peter said oddly abruptly. “Well, I mean—I don’t mean it like that. I just—just with you. For now. That’s what I mean.”

“Oh. Uh. Kinda like a date?” Sam asked through the forcefield of self-hatred that felt like it spanned the entire continental US.

There was a pause. Sam held his breath.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Exactly like a date. If you don’t mind—you know, doing that with me.”

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

“Are you trying to lure me to a secondary location, Mr. Parker?” Sam asked seriously.

The laugh that met him made all the muscles in his shoulders relax.

“Maybe if the bit at the first location goes well,” Peter said. Then added hurriedly, “If you’re down for that.”

Sam was down for it right now.

Actually, maybe not in Kirsten’s kitchen. But like, right now in a different location.

“If it’s a movie date, we can do it through Netflix Party,” he pointed out faux-lightly. “It wouldn’t be the same, but we could do it this weekend, even. Saturday—I’m off Saturday.”

Peter said nothing for a long time.

“Okay. Saturday,” he finally agreed, “I can do Saturday. Kinda hard to hold your hand through a screen, but I can give it my best shot?”

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFfffffff.

“Oh, I bet you will,” Sam nearly choked.

“You’re really cute, Sam.”

NO. SHUT UP. YOU ARE.

“Thanks.”

“I wanted to kiss you last time you were here, but I was too, uh. Shy. Embarrassed. One of them.”

Sam was going to puke, but in like, the happiest kind of way.

“I like you a lot too, Peter,” he whispered.

“Are you crying?”

“What? No.”

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”

“Shut up, I’m not. I—the old man’s downstairs, his ears aren’t as good through ceilings, but I just want to make sure—”

“Uh-huh,” Peter said. “I’m sure that’s what it is. So I’ll see you Saturday? Maybe Facetime or something?”

“Yeah, Saturday,” Sam said. “I’ll send you a time when I know. I’ve gotta go. Meltdown-alloted-breaktime is over.”

Peter laughed.

“Alright, man, I’ll talk to you later. Bye now.”

“Bye,” Sam said lamely.

He hung up the phone. He did not scream. But he did fist pump and then fall onto his side.

 ---------

Here’s to hoping things get easier for you anon!!

[bnhayyy]

The Call (2)

Chapter Title: Teamwork

Wordcount: 4.7k

Fic Tag: Click

Ao3 Link: Click

Notes: See end of fic.

Chapter Summary: Mikasa has a conversation with Annie, and Annie has a conversation of her own.

"The slayer," Mikasa repeated, disbelief flat on her tongue. She let go of the woman’s - Annie’s - hand and took a step back. "I'm the slayer."

"I thought you might be," the woman - Annie - said. "That's why I came here. I thought-"

"No," Mikasa cut her off, already shaking her head. "There's only one slayer at a time. You're..."

A lie. An imposter. Impossible. Mikasa took another step back, forcing her feet into a more solid stance despite the fresh wave of protest from her injured ankle.

"I'm telling the truth," Annie insisted. She drummed her fingers against her stake as she spoke, as if its mere presence somehow landed her words credence. "A new slayer is called when the old one dies. Normally that would mean that there's only one at a time, but..." Her lips pressed together. Now it was her turn to look suspicious. "I suppose I'm the one who should be asking questions," she finished.

"She's right," a voice said from behind her, soft, contemplative, maybe even a touch mournful.

She didn't need him to remind her of that. The thought was already dancing around within her, forming a lump in her throat and clawing at the backs of her eyes. Nonetheless, Eren whispered, "you died, Mikasa. Remember?"

Of course she did. The memory had been lapping at her heels for the past several days, relentlessly haunting her in those few moments that she laid down to sleep. It had been easy to brush it off as a combination of guilt and exhaustion. Now, however... Erwin had told her that slayer's dreams tended to be more meaningful than most. She had assumed that it didn't apply to memories, but as she stared Annie down, she wondered if she might have been drowning in her dreams for a reason.

Assuming that Annie was telling the truth.

"Who's your watcher?" Mikasa asked, not daring to drop from her stance or come any closer.

Annie blinked. "Watcher?"

"From the watcher's council," Mikasa pressed.

"Oh." Annie frowned. "I didn't... know that was a thing."

Mikasa pursed her lips. In theory, that probably shouldn't have boded well, but... Erwin had found her less than three months ago, even though she had been called years before that. Everything she knew about being the slayer prior to his arrival had been cobbled together from encounters with various demons after she was called. That much, there had been no denying.

The council was supposed to guide the slayer and help combat against the forces of darkness, but they had already failed once. What were the odds that the council would have found a second slayer when they had no idea that they were even looking for one? 

Had the council really been so incompetent that they left her to go through the same thing as her?

Mikasa's expression remained guarded and unreadable as she continued. Meanwhile, Annie was visibly trying to do the same, but she couldn't quite hide the whisper of anxiety making its way against her expression. Eventually, she broke and asked, "will your watcher help treat your injuries?"

He would if she went to him.

She didn't want to. That wasn't Annie's business though.

"Does it matter?" Mikasa asked. As she spoke, she went to shift her stance a little, her muscles growing stiff from being trapped in the same position for so long. That was a mistake. She was hit by a fresh wave of dizziness from her head and discomfort from her ankle, causing her to stumble a few centimeters. It was a very slight misstep, but Annie caught it, her lips dropping into a slight frown.

"You're dead meat out here in this state," Annie said. "If they won't, then let me help you."

Mikasa stiffened. She turned her head, almost imperceptibly - just enough to catch a glimpse of Eren lurking a few paces behind her. He hadn't been there to watch the vampire go for her, but he was here now. Did that mean that some part of her sensed that she was out of danger? Or had he showed up because the real threat had only just arrived? Even if she was a slayer, it didn't mean that she was to be trusted. It didn't mean-

"I don't know what you should do," Eren confessed, stepping forward and looking Mikasa in the eyes. The eye-contact was brief and promptly broken off by Mikasa. As she shifted her gaze back to Annie, she thought her peripheral vision caught the whisper of some expression flickering across his face. He continued on in spite of it. "But if she planned on hurting you, I think-"

He went silent as Annie spoke, seemingly finishing his line for him. "If I was going to hurt you, I would have done it already." She paused, gaze intensifying as she looked Mikasa up and down. "I wouldn't have had to do anything. You've already taken care of that by going out in your state."

Mikasa bristled. She knew that Annie was right, painful to accept though it may be. That wasn't the thing that pushed against her nerves. It was that this woman - her apparent savior - felt the need to go ahead and point that out.

"So why did you?" Mikasa asked, voice short and clipped. "Why are you here?"

Annie answered immediately, her voice earnest despite the hint of discomfort. "Because we're both slayers," she said. "The only ones in the world, presumably." She gave a bitter smile and held her hands up placatingly, one thumb pressed down to keep her stake held in place. "I'm not saying we need to be friends, but our lives will probably be a whole lot easier if we help each other out."

It made sense. If there truly were two slayers, then in theory, they could bear to lighten their loads by half. Or do a whole lot more. But that would require both of those slayers staying alive. It made sense, and yet, Mikasa hesitated.

To her credit, Annie caught on quickly. She lowered her hands with a heavy sigh. "I'll answer any questions you have at my place," she said. "But not here, with you half dead."

Mikasa gritted her jaw.

At the edge of the vision, she saw Eren step up to stand beside her. "Mikasa, I know you're strong, but you're not invincible," he said. "You need help."

I know, she didn't say, even though she knew that she did, at least for tonight.

Instead, she unclenched her jaw, took a deep breath, and said, "fine."

***

The journey to Annie's house was silent. She didn't offer to help Mikasa walk, for which she was glad. It was already bad enough that she had noticeably slowed her pace to accommodate her limping.

"We're here," Annie murmured, coming to a halt in front of an unobtrusive little house placed on a street corner. A street corner that was only two blocks away from the cemetery. Mikasa frowned, unable to decide if the location was smart for its convenience or foolish for its risk. The frown deepened when, after a short walk up to the patio, Annie opened the door quickly and easily.

"You don't lock your door?" Mikasa questioned.

Annie shrugged. "No need."

Mikasa pursed her lips. Potential reasons for Annie's viewpoint flew through her head; she'd certainly considered them herself a few times. A slayer should be able to deal with any intruder. The odds of a home invasion were unlikely. If some thing truly wanted to get in, a mere lock wouldn't be enough to stop it. She had considered them many a time, wondered if she was just being paranoid.

Those considerations never changed her actions. She still kept her door locked, regardless of whether she was home or not. Even if it didn't stop whatever was trying to get in, it could slow them down. That was important. It was important to remember that every moment counted. It was important to remember that slayers were strong, but they weren't infallible, and with that strength came a target painted on their back.

It wasn't even just slayers. Normal people could stand to be a little safer too. Home invasions were rare in Paradis, but they did happen.

Not that Annie seemed to care.

She strode through the entryway, either unaware of Mikasa's displeasure or simply failing to care. As Mikasa bristled, the phantom that had followed them all of the way there stepped in ahead of her. "Give her a chance," Eren urged. "You haven't really met her yet."

What I've seen so far doesn't seem worth knowing, Mikasa thought. Nonetheless, she moved to follow Annie into the house, hesitating for a moment at the doorway, then walking right through Eren when he didn't get out of the way quickly enough.

It would probably be easier if she just let it slide. And yet...

"You should sti-" Mikasa's words evaporated as she followed Annie into the kitchen. There was a person in there. A tall man about their age, sitting slumped over at the island, reading a book. He looked comfortable. Not an intruder, no, he looked like-

The stranger looked up. "Annie," he called, eyes glittering with excitement that turned into concern as he noticed Mikasa. They met eyes, and Mikasa's confusion deepened. She'd seen this guy around before. Only a few times, and only at night. Quite frankly, she'd entertained the thought that he was a vampire last time she saw him. His general nervous and soft-spoken demeanor was what had made her second-guess her assessment. A good thing, she supposed, because that was looking very much impossible now. Assuming that she was right, assuming he actually-

The stranger turned his gaze back to Annie. "Is everything okay?" he asked.

"Bertolt, get the first aid kit," she said, a hint of a sigh in her voice.

The man - Bertolt - stood up with a nod and scurried out of the kitchen. Annie walked over to the island and set down her stake. Eren wandered over to lean against the stove, idly taking in his surroundings. Meanwhile, Mikasa just stood there and stared. This woman claimed to be a slayer, and yet...

"You live with someone?" Mikasa demanded, her voice suddenly returning to her.

"Of course," Annie said. "I couldn't afford to pay the rent myself."

"And does he-"

"-Know?" Annie interrupted. "Of course." She leaned against the island and crossed her arms, preemptively daring Mikasa to challenge her. "Bertolt and Reiner have been with me since I first got my powers."

Mikasa gaped. Meanwhile, Annie stared, not quite judgemental, but certainly assessing.

"Is your watcher the only one that knows about you?" Annie asked.

"No," Mikasa admitted. "But there were mitigating circumstances."

Annie raised an eyebrow. "What makes you think that there weren't with me?"

Mikasa pursed her lips. "That's not the point," she said. The point was that she avoided living with anyone, even though it meant that she couldn't afford more than a tiny apartment. The point was that she took measures to make sure that no one was truly dragged into her world. The point was that she didn't dare let Armin close enough to truly consider him her friend - or for the rest of the world to notice. "What you're doing is dangerous."

"And striking off on your own isn't?" Annie countered. As she spoke, Bertolt returned, carefully placing the first aid kit on the island and nervously glancing between them. Annie didn't so much as pause. "There are benefits to having a team."

"Do they help you?" Mikasa asked. The idea was preposterous. Annie might have been a slayer, but her roommates certainly weren't. The very demons that she could go toe-to-toe with would turn them into mincemeat. "You're putting their lives at risk."

"Maybe sometimes," Bertolt piped up. He had migrated over to a corner and was leaning against a wall of cupboards, fidgeting awkwardly. "But she's also saved our lives plenty of times too. Maybe we can only help her a little, but that's still something. And, well, I'd rather know the truth and be able to do something about it." He paused, and something in his gaze seemed to harden. "Especially since if anything happens to her, it means that everyone will be a lot less safe."

"They have a point," Eren mused.

They might have. Mikasa's head was reeling too much to really think about it right now. She thought it was because of what they were saying, but judging from the myriad of concerned and alarmed looks she received in that instant, she supposed it may have been the head wound.

"Come here," Annie said, reaching for the first aid kit.

With a small sigh, Mikasa obliged.

Once she was within reach, Annie took Mikasa and guided her onto one of the stools surrounding the island. Her touch was gentle yet firm.

Mikasa watched out of the corner of her eye as Annie opened the first aid kit and opened a packet of antiseptic wipes. She was prepared for it, yet couldn't quite refrain from wincing when Annie took one of the wipes and carefully dabbed at her head wound. The blonde didn't apologize, but she did pause for a second before slowing down in her ministrations. Before long, the first wipe was bogged down with blood and she had to reach for another.

They sat in silence this way for several minutes, Annie tending to Mikasa's wound while Bertolt and Eren stood by, human and illusion both equally unobtrusive. It was shattered by Annie saying, "the person that knows about you. It's Armin, right?"

Mikasa went stiff as a board, the distrust and alarm bells that had begun to fade from her mind making a striking return. Annie noticed and took a cautious step back, which Mikasa took as an opportunity to give her a long look, searching for any sign of deceit. She hadn't mentioned Armin to Annie. She had been very careful not to mention Armin to her, not to anyone. How could she-

"Armin mentioned her earlier," Eren remarked.

At the same time, Annie said, "Armin and I study together. He's mentioned you a few times, and you don't seem like the type to have many friends. That's all."

"Oh." Slowly, the alarms in Mikasa's head began to fade. The surprise meant that they lingered to some degree, but now that she'd been reminded, she recalled that Armin had mentioned an Annie. It added up in that sense. Annie's own conclusion, while a little insulting, was also accurate. Mostly. "He's not a friend," Mikasa murmured, allowing her gaze to drift down toward the floor.

"Right," Annie said, the corner of her lips twitching upward. "Too dangerous."

Mikasa sighed. "Are we done here, or..."

That got Annie and Bertolt to pipe up at the same time. The latter started to say, "you're still really-" only to cut himself off when he realized that Annie was also speaking.

For her part, Annie sighed and allowed her gaze to drift upwards for a moment. It wasn't quite an eye roll, but Mikasa got the distinct sense that she was tempted. "No," she said. "Not yet."

With that, they lapsed into the same silence as before; at least for a little while. As Annie was setting aside the final wipe and reaching for a tube of antiseptic ointment, the room was shaken by the distinct sound of a door opening. Mikasa's attention snapped to the entryway, and within a way moments, a large blond man walked by

"Reiner," Eren murmured in the same instant that the newcomer paused and peered into the kitchen. His eyes met Mikasa's, and for the third time that night, she found herself surprised by a familiar face. He was the guy from her trigonometry class, the one who sat next to Annie and liked to pester her.

She supposed it made sense. Annie didn't seem like someone with a bunch of friends either.

The newcomer - Reiner, if Eren was to be trusted - took a step further into the entryway. Eyes still trained on Mikasa, he said, "you're-"

"Yes," Annie interrupted. Now that Reiner had shown himself, she seemed content to return her attention to what she was doing. She didn't even bother looking up from the bottle of ointment she was opening as she spoke.

Reiner nodded slowly. "Right. And she's-"

"Yes." Annie squeezed some of the antiseptic onto her fingertips and carefully dabbed it onto Mikasa's wound.

This new distraction made it easier for Mikasa to avoid wincing this time. "They know about me as well?" she demanded.

"Of course," Annie said, voice flat. "We help each other."

Mikasa frowned, but didn't press the subject. If Annie was completely sold on involving her cohorts, fine. There was a more important question at hand, a question that she'd let wait for too long. "How did you find out about me?"

"Demons talk," Annie said. "I got a lot of comments about how I'm impossible and the slayer is supposed to be in Paradis." She closed the tube of antiseptic, set it back in the first aid kit, and began rummaging for the bandages.

"This is impossible," Reiner said. He walked over to lean against the counter beside the oven - inadvertently taking a place beside Eren, who was eyeing him contemplatively. "Everything we found about slayers said there's only supposed to be one at once." He frowned and crossed his arms. "Granted, it wasn't much," he conceded, "but it all said that a new slayer is only called when the old one dies."

"I died," Mikasa said, voice empty, refusing to let herself feel what she was saying. There was no avoiding this. At least she could get it over with sooner rather than later. "The EMTs revived me. But for a few minutes, I was dead."

Reiner's frown deepened. He looked for all the world like he wanted to say something else, but Annie shot him a look, and the expression fell away. He sighed, and a sympathetic one took its place. "I'm sorry you went through that," he said.

"Thanks," Mikasa murmured.

"Well," Bertolt interjected, the anxiety clear in his voice, "it's good that you know about each other now, at least. Maybe you can work together?"

He was right. Mikasa knew he was right. Two slayers had to be better than one, and the logical thing would be for them to help each other. However, the thought of committing to working with this woman she'd just met still made her pause.

Thankfully, Annie spoke up before she had to. "Don't make any assumptions," she warned Bertolt. Even so, as she turned back around to face Mikasa, bandage in hand, she gave her a brief, hopeful look; a reminder of her earlier offer.

Mikasa sighed. "I'll think about it," she said.

"That's all we can ask," Bertolt said.

Annie didn't comment. She opened up the package of the large bandage she was holding and brushed Mikasa's hair out of the way before gingerly pressing its edges down around the cut on her temple. This, she noticed, was less uncomfortable than cleaning her wound or applying the ointment. It was almost soothing.

With her head wound taken care of, Annie returned to the first aid kit and pulled out a roll of beige adhesive gauze wrap. Mikasa took the cue to extend her injured leg. Annie crouched down before her and deftly removed her shoe. Mikasa frowned, but didn't comment, a little embarrassed that she hadn't thought to do it herself.

Compared to the near-hesitancy with which she'd dressed the wound on her head, Annie was surprisingly quick and effective at wrapping her ankle. "You're good at this," Mikasa remarked.

Reiner laughed. "She should be! Annie hurt herself all the time as a kid."

"Reiner," Annie warned, standing up and shooting him with a flat look.

This time, her attempt at intimidation didn't have much effect. "It's true."

Annie frowned, Reiner's grin widened, and Mikasa couldn't help but stare. It was odd seeing a slayer interact with someone like this. Someone she had a personal history with, someone she was friends with. It was dangerously tantalizing for all that it was foreign.

Mikasa pulled her gaze away. "I should get going," she said.

"Are you sure?" Bertolt asked, shooting a glance at her ankle. "Annie or I could drive you."

"I only live a few blocks away," Mikasa said. She was aware that it wasn't entirely true, that the distance was probably closer to a mile and a half from this distance, but she wasn't about to say that. "It's been long enough that I should be able to walk that far." This much was true. The walk would agitate her ankle a bit, sure, but the wrap would minimize additional damage, and what she incurred would likely heal while she slept.

Annie looked hesitant, but eventually nodded.

Taking that as her cue to go ahead and leave, Mikasa stood up and took a few steps, then paused just as she was about to leave the kitchen. It took a few seconds to get the words out, but she eventually managed, "thank you. I'll see you later."

She left before any of them could respond.

***

The household was quiet for several minutes after Mikasa's departure. They all lingered in the kitchen, staring at the doorway, as if the slayer might pop back up at any second.

Finally, Reiner tilted his head back and sighed. "She's gone." He shifted to peer at Bertolt, then Annie, the unspoken 'we can speak' in his gaze.

Annie frowned. "Are you so confident that your hearing is better than a slayer's stealth?" she asked.

"I'm confident that she doesn't seem like the type to stick around and eavesdrop," he said.

"She seemed... sincere," Bertolt said. Annie almost wanted to snort upon hearing it. The impulse faded completely with his next words. "It kinda sucks that we have to..."

"Kill her?" Reiner interjected.

Unlike Bertolt, Annie managed to refrain from frowning. Even so, Reiner gave both of them a long look before pointing out, "that's the job." His voice was light and cheerful, carrying all of the ease that she and Bertolt lacked, like he was talking about getting groceries rather than killing a slayer. It crawled under her skin and made her want to try and claw it out.

That wouldn't do anything. Instead, she went for the itch that she actually had reason to scratch.

"A job that you're making harder," Annie snapped. She stood up a little straighter and walked over to stand in front of Reiner. "You didn't need to kill Mina."

"I was hungry. I weighed down her body and dropped it in the rider, so it's not like we'll get any trouble from it," Reiner defended. "Besides..." He paused, his eyes meeting Annie's. The casual air he had been maintaining dropped into something far more grave and serious. "You seemed like you were getting attached."

Annie bristled. In that second, she was tempted to call Reiner out for hypocrisy. He was ten times more social than she was; if anyone might endanger the mission through attachments, it was probably him. The trouble was that it wouldn't work, because it wasn't true. Reiner was a soulless bastard who could probably turn on his so-called friends at the drop of a penny without any trouble at all.

Then again, maybe it was unfair of her to blame his behavior on his lack of a soul. Bertolt didn't have a soul either; no vampire did. Bertolt didn't put on the same friendly act as Reiner, but he still managed to be less impulsive and cruel at the end of the day.

Maybe Reiner was just an overconfident, hypocritical jackass by nature.

There was no point in calling out Reiner's hypocrisy, so Annie settled for glaring at him and saying, "I've told you plenty of times that I don't care about anyone here that much."

"I'm just being careful."

"No, you're making excuses to be greedy."

Bertolt stepped out of his corner, a flicker of worry on his face. "Guys, do we have to fight about this?" he asked.

Annie gave him a long, tired look, which quickly turned into one of agitation when Reiner held his hands up and said, "hey, I'm not the one who's fighting."

"I'm not fighting," Annie ground out, slowly turning her gaze back to Reiner. "I'm saying that you're being stupid. You want to hunt on campus? Fine. But if you keep killing people we interact with, people will get suspicious no matter how much time you spend in the sunlight."

"She's right," Bertolt tentatively interjected. Reiner shot him a frown, and he quickly amended, "I'm not saying that you're stupid. But we can't afford to take too many risks." He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "I'm already worried about how we're going to hide my nature from the slayer. Maybe we should have come up with some sort of story."

"Like what?" Annie asked.

"Maybe we could say that I was cursed with a soul or something?" Bertolt mused.

Reiner laughed. "A vampire with a soul? How lame is that."

"It's happened before," Bertolt protested. "Although, I'm not sure if I'd be able to pull it off. It's supposed to be pretty emotionally devastating..."

"It's still ridiculous." Reiner shook his head, then waved his hand - and the ring that adorned it. "If it comes down to it, I'll just let you borrow the gem. Make sure that she sees you in the sunlight a few times and you're set."

"You're lucky to have that thing," Annie grumbled.

"I am," Reiner acknowledged. He stood up a little straighter and gave her and Bertolt a serious look, clearly trying to play the role of inspiring leader. Fun. "But we're going to need more than luck to pull this off. We need the slayer to trust us, and I doubt she's going to make that easy."

"I think we're off to a good start," Bertolt said. "She seems pretty isolated, but Annie did a good job trying to convince her she'd be better off with a team."

Annie frowned, but didn't bother pointing out that Bertolt had done most of the work. Meanwhile, Reiner blinked in surprise.

"Annie? Talking up teamwork?" He let out a bark of laughter and shook his head. "I'd pay to see that."

"Then pay," Annie said. "What I want to know is why we didn't just take her by surprise. I could have taken her out tonight if we did that."

Oh, Annie knew fully well what Reiner's convoluted logic was. They had been over this several times before. That didn't mean she didn't see the benefit in making him run through it again, just on the off chance that he might change his mind about this whole charade. She couldn't say that she felt very bad about inconveniencing him with it either.

Alas, Reiner didn't seem particularly perturbed to repeat himself for what had to be the seventh time. If anything, he looked a little smug to hear his plan out loud once more.

"Slayers know to expect attacks from strangers," Reiner said. "Unless we're able to kill her immediately, the element of surprise wears off after the first attack. But if she trusts us first? Even if she survives the initial assault, that will slow her down for a while.

"Bertolt, you're right in that you'll need to be cautious. You can help when you get the opportunity, but until it's time to act, Annie and I will need to do most the of work. As long as she doesn't find out about the Gem of Amara, I can keep her from finding out that I'm a vampire; she'll have no reason not to trust me. And Annie. Even with the state she was in, she might have escaped if you tried to take her out tonight. But if you're able to get close to her first?" Something akin to appreciation flickered in Reiner's eyes as he paused, mingling with the excitement that was oozing off of him. She ignored how it made her stomach twinge. "You're a slayer. She won't stand a chance."

Annie allowed herself to think of the strong, cold, sad woman she met today. Of how she had seemed so convinced that she had to be alone, of the flicker of hope that had shown through the distrust.

"You're right," Annie admitted. "She won't."

*****

End Notes: Alright, so. Pre-emptively, I know that Reiner is pretty OOC in this chapter. He's my favorite character in the series, so believe me, I am Aware. They are in-story reasons for this, some of which are tied to Buffyverse vampire lore and some of which will be unveiled as the story progresses. Hopefully, the payoff will be worth it in the end, but for now, all I can do is ask you to trust me when I say that I have plans.

For now though, hold on tight. Erwin gets properly introduced to the story next chapter, as well as a few other characters.

[julemmaes]

Prompt: person A comes home to Person B singing,dancing and just being really happy/laugh-y in the empty house and Person A is just all 🥰🥰😍😍

My Everything - October 5th

Feyre Archeron x Rhysand

THANK YOU GUYS SO SO SO MUCH FOR 500 FOLLOWERS, I LOVE YOU ALL SO FREAKING MUCH IT’S UNBELIEVABLE

A/N: I changed things a little cause it was way too similar to what I wrote for Fenrys/Asterin today and I couldn’t stand to do two things just the same, also, I’m sorry if I’m posting so late but I’ve traveled all day and I couldn’t find any plugs to charge my pc, really hope you guys like this.

One more thing, sorry. I added many of you to my acotar tag list because of the post/au I made about the IC being mean to Nesta and lots of the comments said that Rhys and the rest of their group aren’t your favs and bla bla bla, what I ask you is, if you are one of those who really cannot even read about Feysand cause *gag*, please refrain from leaving a “bad” comment on the characters.

Word count: 1,475

Rhysand was still in the shower sitting on the ground, taking the soap out of his hair, when he heard the door of the house open and the lively and amused laughter of his daughter and wife. He smiled instinctively when he heard Adelaide calling him from the other room.

"Honey, I'm in the bathroom," he screamed loud enough so she could hear it. He heard Feyre say something to the little girl, but he couldn't distinguish the words under the jet of water.

He heard someone running, laughing excitedly and slamming on the door. He laughed, knowing exaclty what had just happened. He was used to lock the bathroom door, although he hadn't lived with Cassian and Azriel for many years he was always afraid that they might come in and disturb his lazy showers.

And once their daughter was born, this habit seemed to have returned to him, as Adelaide had absolutely no idea what privacy meant.

Feyre let her into the bathroom with her as much as she wanted, Rhysand was more hesitant about the invasion of his personal space.

"Dada! The door is closed," said Adelaide in an annoyed voice. Rhysand chuckled again, standing up. His mood was already improving dramatically since he returned from work just thirty minutes ago.

"Of course it's closed, honey, I didn't want your mother to ambush me while I was showering," he joked, finishing off. He waited for his daughter to answer and when no joke came he wrinkled his forehead. He heard the door move again and then fingers popped out from under the door. He smiled, walking to the door and bent over on the floor, touching his daughter's fingers. She immediately took her hand away, screaming amusedly. They played that silly game for a little while longer, before Feyre yelled, "Ade leave your dad alone and go pack your backpack for tomorrow!"

Rhysand laughed when he heard Adelaide complainin. Feyre just told her that if she didn't pack her schoolbag at that time, the next day she wouldn't have the toys she wanted at kindergarten and Rhysand heard her gasp. And then Adelaide's hand popped out again under the door, her fingers moving upwards, "Bye daddy, I have to go do something important," he squeezed her fingers, smiling and looking up at the ceiling, shaking his head, "Sure, see you later."

He heard her running down the corridor and imagined her black ponytails flying behind her.

He returned to the sink, looking in the mirror and deciding at that moment he needed to shave. He turned on the electric razor and heard someone knocking at the door. He closed his eyes sighing, "What's wrong?"

"I just wanted to know if everything was alright."

It was Feyre.

Rhysand leaned against the sink, nodding and convincing himself more than his wife, "Yes, alright. I'll tell you later."

He heard Feyre move against the door, "If you have something to tell me, it means it's not alright." a pause and then the handle moved, "Come on, let me in."

"No, really, nothing serious." he reassured her, "And besides, if I let you in, we have to let Ade in too, and I don't feel like talking about work in front of her."

"Yeah, I know." she sounded down, but Rhysand knew it wasn't because he wasn't letting her in, more because she couldn't comfort him now. "I see you made dinner, thank you." she added.

"No need to thank me Feyre, you do it every night." he chuckled.

He heard her yawn, "And you thank me every night, so I can thank you too."

Their quarrel ended there, as Adelaide was calling her mother loudly, unable to find her favorite toy car.

Rhysand allowed himself to stay in the bathroom for a few more minutes, enjoying the steam from the shower and letting his hair dry without the need for a hair dryer. It was hot enough that he wouldn't risk catching a cold if he didn't.

He came out of the bathroom and headed into his room, trying not to make any noise and attract his daughter's attention. He managed to get dressed quickly and tiptoed to the kitchen, where his intention was to scare his girls, but once he got to the door he froze. Heart in his throat.

Feyre was holding Adelaide in her arms and they were dancing hugging. His daughter's head bent back in a carefree laugh. His wife was moving her hands on her sides as Ade tried in every way to free herself. As soon as Feyre stopped tickling her, she turned to Rhysand and screamed excitedly, throwing herself at her father.

He took her mid-air when she jumped up, clutching both hands to his arms and flew her into the air, covering her with kisses and continuing the torture that Feyre had begun.

He couldn't remember the title of the song, but he knew the words by heart, and when the chorus arrived, Feyre joined them, hugging his daughter from behind and leaning forward to kiss Rhysand on the lips. They looked into each other's eyes and those of her shone with emotion when they both sang, shifting their attention to Adelaide.

I'll give you everything I have

I'll teach you everything I know

I promise I'll do better

Adelaide stopped squirming, bending over backwards and placing her chubby little hands on her mother's cheeks. Feyre smiled at her and made funny grimaces that made their child laugh. Rhysand held her tightly on his chest. She could feel Feyre's warmth so close to hers that it merged with Adelaide's.

They sang at the top of their lungs and at a certain point they were joined by the little one, taking Rhysand's ears in their hands and squeezing them.

Cause you are loved

You are loved more than you know

It almost made him cry when towards the end of the song, Feyre put her arms around his hips and began to swing, moving slowly. He looked at her again, leaning forward and leaving a kiss on those rosy, perfect lips.

"Dada I want a kiss too!" shouted Adelaide, taking his face in her hands and making him turn towards her. Feyre laughed, shaking her head and squeezing his side, "I don't think so. He is all mine." Rhysand laughed with her and whitened immediately afterwards as he heard Feyre's words, "You must find your beautiful man to make children with, I have worked so hard to win your father's heart."

Adelaide sulked and squeezed her father's cheeks. Before she could speak, Rhysand had covered her mouth with one hand, a hand that was big enough to cover most of her nose and neck. He looked her straight in the eyes and with a very serious expression, "You don't have to find anything at all. You are all mine," he said to her, kissing her forehead, "Don't listen to your mother," he specified, "and she didn't have to do anything at all, this slacker here, I had to fight to make your mother marry me."

Feyre giggled, taking Adelaide from his arms, "And yet, the day will come when you will find someone as beautiful as your father and marry him and give us many beautiful grandchildren." she looked at him with an amused expression, making fun of him.

"Ade, don't you dare listen to her."

Their daughter seemed unaware of that little bickering between her parents, but she didn't mind being passed from the arms of one to the other, receiving many loving kisses.

Feyre looked at him shaking her head, "Is everything alright?" she asked him, worrying that he wasn't getting any better. Rhysand nodded, "Are you sure?" she asked, just in case he was lying. He approached her, rubbing his nose against hers, "Sure. You are my everything, and you both seem more than alright."

Feyre snorted, "That was so lame."

"But you like me all the same." she nodded, despite herself.

They ate on the couch that evening, hugging each other, then put on a cartoon. One of those cartoons that Feyre hated so much, full of useless and morbid songs. Songs that seemed to drive her daughter and especially her husband crazy, who never complained about how many times Adelaide wanted to see a movie over and over again.

Feyre had parted from the other two for a moment to clean up the kitchen and when she returned she found them both lying on the floor on the carpet. Adelaide was lying entirely on her father's chest, who wrapped her with his arms. She decided not to wake her family up, both of them looking more than at peace with themselves, and she lay down on the sofa next to them, placing one hand on her daughter's back and falling asleep shortly afterwards.

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[tuiccim]

Santi (Part 2)

Pairing: Bucky X Reader

Words: 4430

Warnings: Fluff, flirt, 

Summary: The team leaves for a mission leaving you and Bucky alone at the tower. 

Santi Masterlist

After bidding the team goodbye the next morning you and Bucky head to the kitchen for breakfast.

"How was your first night in the new place?"

"Good. Slept okay. How'd you sleep?"

"I have a hard time getting to sleep any given day but once I did last night I was good."

In the kitchen you pull out a frozen breakfast burrito to heat and grab an apple and peanut butter.  Bucky fixes a huge bowl of cereal. 

"Why aren't you on the mission?" Bucky asks.

"You want the official answer or the truth?" You ask.

"The truth, always."

"Steve didn't want you to be alone so he asked me to stay."

"You were okay with that?"

"Well, you know, my 'particular skills are not needed for this mission'" You say imitating Steve.

"You don't mind being my babysitter?"

"Well, first, I'm not your babysitter. You're a big boy and can wipe your butt all by yourself. Second, I don't mind having some time to take it easy. It's usually hard to come by. And, lastly, the rest of the team has worked with you before. I like that it gives me the chance to get to know you. Not the file or news reports or rumors, but you as a person." Bucky seems taken aback by your answer. "You said you wanted the truth, always." You smile and Bucky seems to relax a bit.

"Thanks." He pauses for a minute but then smirks, "Wipe my own butt? You always had that mouth on ya?"

"All my life." You smile at him.

"Apple and peanut butter?" Bucky asks as he watches you eat.

"It's delicious!" You pick up a fresh slice, scoop some peanut butter onto it. Leaning over the table you hold it up for Bucky to take a bite. "Try it." He eyes you as he bites into the slice you are holding out to him.

"Okay. Weird but good "

You giggle at his expression and pop the other half into your mouth. 

"Are you always happy like this? You always seem to be on the verge of laughing." He asks suddenly.

"No. But, I don't know, I guess I've had the privilege of living my life unlike you and Steve. It's given me the time to work through things, figure out what makes me happy. I guess I've just lived long enough to learn contentment. And I think that's the basis of happiness."

"Lived long enough? You're what? 25? 30?"

Your face falls. "You haven't read my file."

"No."

"Have you read any of them?"

"No. It feels... invasive. Like I'm prying."

"It's not. It's just basics. Nothing overly personal. Abilities. Skills. Things you need to know in the field." You say emphatically. "For example, let's say we're on a mission. I get shot. Femoral artery hit. Bleeding out. What do you do?"

"Apply a tourniquet. Determine if I can complete the mission without you dying."

"Wrong. You just wasted time and possibly cost us the mission. You do nothing. I don't need medical attention." You take a deep breath, "I'm a Gifted. I have healing abilities. My body will force out the bullet and the wound will be repaired within 90 seconds. Blood supply restored in minutes. You and Steve heal fast but I put your abilities to shame there."

"Do you have any other abilities?"

"Additional strength, not your level but decent. Increased metabolism. Slow aging." You pause and look directly into his eyes, "And empathic telepathy."

"Like Wanda?"

"Wanda's a little different. She's more telepathic in the sense of reading minds and forcing waking dreams. My ability allows me, if I choose to, read people's emotions. And I can imbue people with emotions."

"Force them to feel things?"

"Ye...yes." You say hesitantly and then look him directly in the eyes, "Look, I have read your file and I know you've had your mind messed with enough. I will never, NEVER do that to you without your consent. Never."

You stare at each other for a moment before Bucky gives a slight nod.

"Is it helpful?"

"My specialty was deep cover. Being able to force trust, calm, caring. It makes getting to the inner circles easier. But after doing it for so long I had to get out. I was other people so much I started to lose myself. So, I told Fury that I wanted out. And then the world blew up and I ended up right back in the middle of it. I think I'm where I'm supposed to be now."

"How do you do it?"

"I just think it and I kinda push it to the other person. It's even easier when I'm touching them. If a person can somehow resist me mentally, once I touch them the resistance fades."

"What all can you make them feel?"

"Any emotion. Several if needed."

"Fear? Panic?"

"Yes."

"Pain?"

"Emotional pain, yes."

"Love?"

"Yes."

"Pleasure?"

You look at Bucky and raise an eyebrow at that one before replying in a low voice, "Yes."

"Have you done it to me?"

Voice strong again, "No. Never without your permission."

"Our teammates?"

"Only with their consent. Most people want to try it at least once."

"I have nightmares sometimes." Bucky says quietly.

"Yeah." Your tone softens.

"Could you calm me if that was happening?"

"I can, yes. I can also help you sleep. Do you want me to?"

Bucky stares into his bowl of cereal for a moment. When his eyes flicker up to you there is a tinge of red to them. He gives a slight nod. Reaching over you curl your hand around his wrist. "You're my teammate, my friend. I'll do anything I can to help you. Anything, okay?"

Bucky gives a small nod.

"Okay. Time to get some training in. Don't want Steve to think I'm slacking the first day without him." You start clearing your breakfast dishes.

"He's a real drill sergeant, huh?"

"Sometimes." 

"Wait, how old are you? I take it, older than 25."

You laugh, "That's sweet, Buck. I'm 62."

"So Sam was including you in his geriatric patients?"

"I think you have to be over 65 to be in that category. You and Steve are still the geezers of the place." You smirk at him. "I'll catch up with you later."

"I'll see you in the training room in a bit."

"Sounds good." You say as you walk to the elevator. Your heart hurts a little for Bucky knowing it had to be hard for him to ask for help. You hope he knows how strong he is, how brave to ask.

Before Bucky heads to the training room he detours to his room. Going to the desk he pulls out the stack of files Steve had given him and quickly located Santi's. Flipping it open he read:

Name: Bella Santi Delarosa

Last known address: Stark Tower

Date of Birth: November 1, 1957

Place of Birth: Mobile, Alabama

Status: Active

Title: Agent

Aliases: The Saint, Lucia Roman, Marie Frances, Eve Lastra, Elana Romano.

Document Citizenship: United States

Height: 5'8"

Weight: 140 lbs

Gender: Female

Hair: Black

Eyes: Brown

Languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, German.

Identifiable Markings: Triangle shaped birthmark right shoulder.

Family: Parents, Marco and Giulia Delarosa, deceased. Brother, Luca Delarosa, deceased.

Classification: Gifted

Abilities: Healing. Increased strength, stamina, reflexes, balance, and accuracy. Decreased aging. Empathic telepathy.

Skills: Multiple forms of Martial arts, acrobatics, expert marksmanship, espionage, infiltration, tactical coordination.

Bucky closes the file and heads to the training room. He spots Santi lifting weights and joins her. "So, 'The Saint', huh?"

You laugh, "You read my file?" 

"Yeah."

"That's what you took away from it? My code name?"

"Bella Santi Delarosa. Beautiful Saint of the Rose?"

"I was born on All Saints Day. My parents were Catholic." You shrug. "Any other questions?"

"I noticed the slight southern accent so Alabama made sense. Did you grow up there?"

"Until I was 13."

He wanted to ask what happened but knew it wasn't the right time to get into it. Deciding on a subject change, "Expert marksman?"

"You bet your ass."

"I was gonna bet lunch, actually."

"Knives or guns?"

"Knives."

"Yay!" You clap your hands as you move to the weapons cage to pull out knives. "Let's start with a target and we'll see if we need to get to trick shots to determine a winner."

Bucky glances at the body shaped training target at the end of the range, picks up a knife, and says "Right eye." The blade finds its mark with barely a glance. 

"Left eye." Hit.

"Left shoulder." Hit.

"Right shoulder." Hit

"Center mass." Hit.

"Same." Hit within millimeters of his knife.

"Nose." Hit.

"Mouth." Hit.

Getting an idea you move in a bit closer as he says "Forehead" and aims. As he's preparing to throw you reach on tiptoe and blow in his ear. The knife hits the target's groin. 

"I'm sorry. Did you say forehead or foreskin? If it was forehead, you were a little low on that one, weren't you?" You say still right next to Bucky's ear. Bucky turns eyes wide and swallows hard. You smile innocently up at him. 

"Wouldn't you call that cheating?" Bucky's voice is gravelly as he stared down at you.

"I'd call it winning. After all, out in the field there's all kinds of distractions. You have to get used to them." You say in mock innocence with a sweet smile.

Bucky tries to keep a straight face but a chuckle slips through. "Fine. I'll give you this one, Doll."

"I accept your defeat. There is this great diner right by the Museum of Natural History. They have phenomenal burgers and then we can go to the museum."

"I thought the bet was for lunch."

"Well, I figured I'd take you to the museum as a consolation prize. After all, I did cheat."

"I'm not taking you away from any plans?"

"Those were my plans. Now, you get to pay for lunch though."

Bucky laughed and his heart warmed a little at the thought that you had planned out the day with him. 

"Let's finish training and then we can get ready to head out." You say heading back to the weights.

Three hours later, you arrive at the diner and both order burgers and fries.

"Can I ask you something? Personal?" Bucky asks, glancing at you nervously.

"Anything. I'm kind of an open book. Which is unusual in this group."

"Yeah." Bucky says on a short laugh "What happened to your family?"

You knew it was coming at some point. "You want the short or long version?"

"Long if you're comfortable with telling it."

"Yeah." You pause to collect your thoughts. "You read my file so you know I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. My parents were Marco and Guilia and I had a brother named Luca. He was two years younger than me. My parents wanted more kids but it just didn't happen. We were a big Italian family. Steve always says he knows I'm Italian because I'm loud, always eating, and am touchy-feely."

Bucky laughs "Sounds right. You've never shied away from touching me."

"Sorry." You say feeling a slight blush creep up. "Please let me know if I make you uncomfortable. I just don't think about it much."

"No, I like it. Most people don't get very close to me. Keep going"

You smile blushing a little more but continue with the story. "My grandparents, my dad's parents, had a bakery. Most of the family worked there. I loved it. I had 8 aunts and uncles, a million cousins. Big, big family. Nice life, ya know. Lots of love and lots of drama. Then when I was thirteen, we were driving home from my cousin's birthday party and our car was hit by an 18-wheeler. My parents died on impact. Luca…" you pause and swallow hard willing the tears away. Clearing your throat you continued, "Luca died while they were trying to get us out of the car. He was such a sweet kid. Tender-hearted and quiet. I should have died too. My injuries were severe but that's when my mutation kicked in. Before they even got me out of the car my injuries healed. I didn't understand what happened. The doctor explained the mutant gene while I was in the hospital. I was so wracked with guilt that I lived. I didn't want to hear anything about it. Then my family… they were scared of me. I could feel it. They turned me over to the state. They didn't want anything to do with me. I was put in a group home and first chance I got I ran. Ran for nine years before SHIELD found me. They took me in. Taught me that my mutation was a calling not a curse." 

The food came at that point and you both dug in hungrily. Bucky looked up after a few bites. "What'd you do the nine years you were running?"

"Petty theft, lot of trespassing, might have been a grand theft auto somewhere in there, and then I joined the circus."

Bucky laughed, "Serious?"

"Yeah. I got a job helping set up and take down for a circus and when they left I kinda stowed away and they let me stay. I grew up dancing and doing gymnastics, so they taught me aerial silks and rope tricks. I ran errands, took care of the animals, cooked, and eventually even performed."

Bucky narrows his eyes at you, "You're pulling my leg."

"No. It was the 70s. I'll show you some pictures when we get back."

"What exactly are aerial silks?"

"They're sheets of silk you use to perform contortions while kinda flying in the air. I'll show you one day. I still love doing it." Bucky still looked skeptical. "What?" You finally ask when his face was still scrunched up.

"You really have pictures?"

"Yes. Tell me about when you and Steve were kids." Trying to get the subject off of you for a minute. 

You looked across at Bucky and saw a genuine smile on his face for a moment. He launched into a story and was more animated than you had seen before. It was endearing the way his face lit up talking about pre-serum Steve and their antics. He looked young and happy for a few minutes. 

The spell was broken when the waiter delivered the check. Staying true to the bet, Bucky paid and then you walked to the museum a block away. You had already purchased the tickets online and went right in. It was only 12:30 and it seemed to be a slow Tuesday as you were nearly alone in every exhibit. Bucky was enthralled. He went from display to display pointing out observations, wondering at the discoveries, and fascinated with the history. Sometimes even grabbing your hand to follow him. You were enthralled by him. It seemed like for a few hours the weight lifted from his shoulders. 

You stay at the museum until closing and then head back to the tower. Bucky talks nearly the entire way back about the museum exhibits. You thought your heart would burst that your outing made him so happy. 

Heading to the kitchen you look in the fridge. "What do you want for dinner?"

"You pick."

"If I pick, we're ordering pizza."

"Sounds good to me. What movie do you want to watch?"

"You're not sick of me yet?" You smile, amazed that he wanted to spend more time with you.

"No! I mean, you don't have to watch a movie with me. I just thought, ya know, pizza and a movie. You had, uh, mentioned the Star Trek movie yesterday, so I thought maybe..." He trailed off.

"Sounds good to me." You echoed his earlier sentiment and he smiled at you.

You sat on the couch eating pizza and watching the movie. After a while you ended up shifting to lean into Bucky and rest your head on his shoulder.

"You okay?" He asks.

"A little cold. I'm sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?" You say, moving away a little. He doesn't answer. Instead he grabs his hoodie and drapes it and his arm over you giving a little squeeze. You snuggle into him. It's a little harder to concentrate on the movie enveloped by his warmth and smell. 

After the movie was over, Bucky looked over at you, "Tired?"

"No, not really. You?"

"No."

"What'd you think of the movie?"

"It was interesting. I'd like to see the next one. Right now, I'm interested in seeing some pictures someone told me they have."

"Oh, yeah. Let's go to my room and I'll find them." You stand and stretch your arms over your head bowing your back. When you look at Bucky still sitting on the couch his eyes aren't quite on your face. You clear your throat ostensibly and his eyes snap up to yours while his cheeks gain a little pink tinge. "Come on, Buck." You turn away smiling to yourself. 

You get to your room and find the photo album with pictures from the Seventies in it. Placing it on the bed in front of both of you, you skip the first few pages and flip until you find pictures from the circus. They're starting to fade with age, but there you are riding an elephant, another showing you contorted in the silks, one where you are surrounded by clowns, cooking in a tent, and a few more showing your circus life. 

"You weren't kidding!"

"Of course not! It was actually a pretty fun time in my life. It was easier being accepted there. Once I got past being first of May."

"First of May?"

"Green. New. Takes awhile for circus folk to warm up but they're good to you once they do. They were like a big family." 

"Why'd you decide to leave?"

"SHIELD. They could help me learn to control my powers. And to be able to use them for something good."

"What are these other pictures?" Bucky asks as he flips back to the beginning of the album. 

"Oh!" You say in surprise. You reach for the album but Bucky is already looking at the pictures. Resignedly, you explain, "That was the last family portrait we took."

Bucky looks up at you sorrowfully, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have." He goes to hand you back the album.

"No, it's okay. It's been a long time since I looked at them." You point to the next photo. "That was my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary."

"Is that the entire town of Mobile?

"No, that's just my grandparents, their kids, and all my first cousins."

"First cousins?!?"

"Yeah, they were prolific. What can I say? My parents were picked on because they only had two of us."

"How old are you here?" He points to a picture of you holding a stuffed bunny.

"Three, I think." The next picture is you holding a baby Luca. You reach out and touch his little cherub cheeks but only feel the cold plastic covering the photo.

"You miss him?"

"Yeah. I guess you never stop. Losing a sibling sucks, ya know? They're the ones that are supposed to be with you through it all. You expect grandparents and parents to die, but your siblings are supposed to be there. Do you?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I miss Rebecca."

"Sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up."

"No, it's okay. But I probably should get some sleep."

"Yeah."

Bucky gets up and puts the album back on your shelf. "Night, Santi."

"Night, Bucky." You say in a small voice.

"Hey." He waits until you look up at him. "You okay?"

You force a smile, "Yeah, I'm good."

He hesitates, studying you. 

Finally, you give in to yourself. "Actually, can I have a hug?"

"Absolutely!" He walks over to you taking your hand and pulling you up before wrapping his arms around you. You put your arms around his waist and your head on his shoulder. After a minute you feel a soft kiss pressed to your forehead. "Sweet dreams, Doll."

"You, too." You say as you reluctantly let go. You change into a sleepshirt and get ready for bed. Knowing sleep won't come for a while you pick up a book.

A couple of hours later you feel your stomach twist in knots and a loud grunt issues through the wall followed by "NO!" Getting up quickly you knock on Bucky's door, "Bucky, are you okay?" You listen for a second but only hear another grunt. You knock again, "Bucky?" You say a little louder. 

"Стоп!" Hearing the Russian word from Bucky made your decision. You turn the knob and walk in. Bucky is thrashing a bit on the bed. His right hand is clenched around the sheets.

"Bucky, wake up. Hey. Come on, Buck." You put a knee on the bed and lean over to shake Bucky. The moment you touch his shoulder he sits up. The knife in his left hand lands with a thunk in your side. You hiss at the pain but stay still. "Buck. Bucky, hey." His eyes are far away and you know he hasn't come out of it yet. You put your right hand over his hand gripping the knife and your left on his shoulder suffusing calm into him. "Buck, I'm calming you. You said it was okay. Look at me, darlin'. Hey, hey." You see his eyes begin to focus. Finally, he looks at you. "Good. Hey, love, I need you to let go, okay?" You gently nudge his left hand which is still firmly holding the knife in you. You see him glance down and panic blanches his face. Suffusing calm again you take your left hand and touch his face drawing his attention to yours. "I'm okay. I just need you to let go. Bucky, talk to me."

"I'm so sorry!" Comes out in a panicked whisper as he lets go. 

"Bucky, I'm fine. Healing ability, remember?" You gather the ends of your shirt and brace to pull out the knife. "Mmmm...had to be a serrated one, huh?" You press the shirt to the wound to staunch the blood flow and look at Bucky. He looks shattered. "Bucky, everything's okay."

"I stabbed you." He whispers.

"Better me than anyone else." You give a humorless little laugh. You wipe the knife on part of your shirt and set it down on the nightstand. 

"I stabbed you."

"90 seconds, Bucky. 90 seconds and I'll be healed. No harm, no foul."

"I stabbed you and you're laughing." He looks at you incredulously. 

"What's a little stab wound between friends?" You smile but he still looks lost. "Bucky, another empathic part is I can let you feel how I'm feeling. Can I show you?"

He nods and you put a hand on his. "What do you feel?"

He looks in your eyes finally, "Calm. Caring. Worry for me."

"Exactly. I'm fine. Now, are you okay? You were having a nightmare."

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay." You pull him into a hug keeping your bloody side away from him. He puts his right arm around you and runs his left hand up your arm to your neck. Pulling away he looks into your eyes, glances down to your lips, and then back with an almost questioning look. It doesn't take empathic ability to know what he's feeling and your heart twists a little. You raise up a bit and kiss his forehead like he did for you earlier that night.

"I'm gonna get cleaned up. Can I borrow a shirt?" You stand up and that's when Bucky notices you had bunched your shirt up to stem the wound exposing your legs and a pair of peach colored panties. 

Tearing his eyes away he stands up quickly and pulls open a drawer. "Yeah, here, Doll." 

You look in the drawer and pull out a black ribbed tank from the top. "This will work." You say as you head into his bathroom. 

Bucky watches you walk away thinking with the peach colored underwear it almost looked like you weren't wearing anything down below. He shook the thought away. Nice, Buck, you stab her and then ogle her, he thinks to himself. 

You take off the shirt you are wearing and grab a cloth to clean off the blood. After washing your hands you slip on the tank. It comes down just past your butt and almost looks like a dress on you. A very short dress. Staring at yourself in the mirror for a second you can't deny the feelings developing in you. Bucky is...you can't even describe it. Beautiful inside and out. But too often your empathic abilities had interfered with real feelings. You had wanted to kiss him in that moment but the emotional charge was too much. What if that's all it was? The heat of the moment? It was too soon. You'd known him for less than 48 hours. Sighing, you shake off your thoughts and walk back out. Bucky eyes you from where he is sitting on the bed. 

"You okay?" He asks. 

"Yes. See? No harm, no foul." You lift the tank up to show him. 

He raises his left arm and touches your side. The cool touch from his metal hand breaks your skin into goosebumps. You cover his hands with yours and for a moment get lost in his eyes when he looks up at you. 

Breaking eye contact you pull the shirt back down, saying softly "It's late. You should go back to sleep." 

"I don't think I can." He says.

You sit next to him on the bed. "Lay down. Get comfortable. I'll help you."

He lays on his side and hugs his pillow. Running your hands through his hair, you suffuse calm and see the tension slip away a bit. Giving him a minute before suffusing lethargy, you watch as his muscles start to relax. Finally, you suffuse a sleepy feeling. You can't force sleep but have found that when these three feelings combine they make a fairly good sleep cocktail. Bucky's form slowly relaxes and you continue to run your hands through his hair suffusing the sleepy feeling until his breathing evens out. You retrieve your ruined shirt and bloody cloth from the bathroom and the knife from the nightstand. You don't want him to have any reminders when he wakes. Switching off his lamp, you reluctantly head to your own bed. 

Part 3

[kat-hawke]

Kul Tiran Backing

A puddle broke beneath the soles of the Director's boots as she journeyed through the rain across the city of Boralus. Eyes swept across open streets from beneath the hood of the long coat, drops of water cascading off to the sides. The amount of rainfall here stirred up memories of her Gilnean childhood for only a minute before she shifted focus to the upcoming meeting.

"I don't think I've ever seen you nervous," Alyssa chimed across the telepathic link. "Anxious, sure. But nervous—"

"Are you making a point here, or?" Kat interrupted.

"No. Just curious. Why does she make you nervous and not anyone else?"

"It's not her. It's the topic at hand. Doing this puts an unnecessary risk on other financial ventures and our relation, should she decline. Yet, I'm left with little other options to seek funding." Kat admitted as the office came into view across the plaza.

"There's also the matter of what I plan to do. Pad her funding line with my own coin to avoid potential investigations into my financials. She won't like it, I know. To keep that behind her back creates more risk while revealing the matter could turn her away."

"Well, if she doesn't need to know, then why risk it? What she doesn't know won't hurt her." The dagger-bound woman practically shrugged in her tone.

"It could hurt us both. I'll consider your point," Kat sneered.

Drowning out the warlocks reply, she swung the office door open, the bell above the frame emitting the soft chime throughout the space, announcing Kat's arrival to the noblewoman seated at the desk. Pulling back the soaked hood with a smile, the pair commenced with the standard pleasantries. An informal greeting, inquiring on one another's state of wellbeing, and a brief catch-up of the recent Scourge invasion.

"My family is all well and safe, and Stormhollow did not suffer the Scourge. I would consider things well and good." Lady Stalsworth answered as she eased back into the seat, following their courteous handshake.

"Glad t'hear," Kat nodded, swinging one knee over the other as she dropped into the adjacent chair. "Gransonee was spared from the dead risin' again as well. So, no effect on our current arrangements as it stands." She paused for a moment. "Unless, of course, ya' wish fer changes?"

"Unless there are reasons why I should wish for changes, I see no need. Do you?"

The Director shook her head slowly. "None wot-so-eva. Th' profit flows, th' people are happy, and the hamlet has been able t'repair and expand some infrastructure. Most importantly, it keeps Jasper out of m'ear."

Elaianna chuckled in a breath, a faint smile touching the corner of her lips. "You did not write to me about our current business affairs, but rather, a new one if I am to understand your letter correctly?"

The pleasantries were dismissed. Both women preferred to discuss business over the former at every meeting.

"That is correct, yes. While this proposal is of another nature, it bears no effect on the current trade agreemen'." Kat cleared her throat, ignoring a comment from Alyssa as she pulled a ledger from the coat. "I'm sure yer aware of th' current state of the Kingdom, yes?"

"Presuming you mean things such as the King's absence and an ill-chosen replacement on the throne in the meantime? Yes. I cannot say things are any better here, as the Lord Admiral has also gone missing."

"I was referin' more t'the current economic situations." The Director clarified, collecting her hands upon the leather cover of the ledger.

"Aye," the Lady dipped her head in a shallow nod. "Such things come with recent events."

"More-so when on th' tailwinds of a long and costly war," Kat added. "Stormwind is, well t'be blunt, fractured. Th' military cutbacks, coffers empty...surely ya' know wot follows there. Taxes and overexertion. Th' nobles houses are all in a tiff, vyin' fer favors and agreements in exchange fer gold. Sharks, th' lot of 'em."

"I am an affluent woman, but I cannot cease an entire kingdom from going into taxation," Elaianna remarked, weaving her fingers together and studying the Director. "So what favor and agreement are you looking for?"

Kat quickly wet her lips, knowing her discomfort in this proposal was visible to a small degree, and while the dagger-bound woman was silent, Kat knew she was listening. Without further delay, she promptly opened the ledger to her Unit's budget and slid it across to Elaianna.

"I do no' have th' time or patience t'lobby the houses while they are in congress fer fundin', nor would I likely care for th' things they ask in exchange. My Unit is internal affairs, we are no' combat facin', but many believe wot we do is of little value."

"What -do- you do? Especially in times post-war?" Lady Stalsworth inquired, glancing over the ledger.

"Th' same as we would durin' war. We handle issues that extend beyond th' capabilities of the guards; serial killin's, drug cartels, slave rings, th' occasional cults." Kat picked at her nails in her lap, out of the other's view.

"Our latest project has no' been well received by m'peers, and I narrowly dodged havin' the Unit axed with my proposal. With the right resources and time, we could document and categorize these dangerous people's thought processes and mental states. Study them, if you will, and create a possible method t'detect these behaviors before they manifest into somethin' larger. However, with no fundin' or resources, I canno' produce the results needed to keep my Unit from disbandment."

"And you're looking for..." Elaianna asked as she found no estimated total within the ledger.

"Wot eva yer willin' t'give." Kat answered plainly. "I hate t'even ask at all, given our current professional relationship. And I certainly do no' expect charity either."

The Lady nodded again, motioning toward the Director. "Would monthly increments be of use, or were you hoping for a singular lump sum?

"Monthly would be ideal, luv'. A lump sum may create too much of a surplus that others may try to pillage."

"I can commit to supporting your Unit on a monthly basis." Elaianna pushed the ledger back across the desk with her answer.

Inquisitively, Kat stared and collected the ledger, returning the book to her coat as she hesitantly asked, "And in return?"

With a simple shrug, the Lady answered, "I would ask what I would hope you would already do. If you happen upon any knowledge of a threat to Stormhollow or my family, you will let me know so that we might protect our people and ourselves."

A soft hum rattled with Kat's throat. This was something she would have done already, yes. But while Elaianna had never given her a reason to be mistrusted, Kat struggled to believe one would ask only this in return for funding. A thought that Alyssa did little to dismiss.

"That I would already do, yes. Though I will add that if ya' have an issue within Stormhollow that falls within wot m' Unit handles, I would be more than happy t'direct focus there until the matter is resolved."

"Thank you."

Kat lifted her hand, "it is I who owes ya' thanks, twice over."

"Then let us call it a deal." Elaianna smiled, extending her hand over the desk to cement the agreement.

Now at the crossroad of revealing or secreting her intend, Kat's conflicting thoughts churned again as she eyed the offered hand. Forcing her way through, she began to reach but recoiled at the last second.

"Don't do it," Alyssa argued to no avail.

"There is one more thing," Kat muttered, clearing her throat.

"I will pull funds from my personal accounts, those undocumented linked to Gransonee. Doin' so on m'own would draw attention and force m'hand into revealin' th' island and hamlet publicly, which would then force a pledge to the Alliance or vassalage t' a noble house. Against the wishes of its people. I will hide th' funds I sent in the same ledger line as yer own." The Director admitted, letting out a heavy breath as if a weight had been lifted.

"I wanted ya' t'know, rather than keep it hidden from ya' and risk an auditory blowback."

Immediately, Elaianna's lips pursed, and a low hum vibrated behind the displeased expression as the offered hand was withdrawn. The silence which followed lingered uncomfortably between them for a solid minute as Kat held her breath and avoided the Lady's gaze.

"I suspect such will not pose a problem," Elaianna finally spoke, "as it is assisting the Kingdom."

Kat's shoulders dropped as she relaxed and let out her breath.

"I wanted t'be honest and transparent in m'intentions than lead ya' blind and risk everythin'."

"I appreciate that," The Lady smiled faintly. "Thank you."

"Th' consequences will be mine, and only mine t'bear should anythin' happen." Kat offered her hand to complete the transaction with a nod, relieved when Elaianna nodded and took the hand in a firm shake.

"Let us hope such things do not come to be."

Standing to exit, Kat fixed the position of her coat, which had shifted slightly while seated. The hood remained down, as the sound of rainfall beyond the door had ceased during their exchange.

"Light and Shadow keep ya' and yer family, Lady Stalsworth."

"Tides guide you and yours, Lady Hawke."

Resisting the urge to correct and discourage using such a title, Kat resigned to dipping her head and turning towards the door. Quickly leaving the office and taking in the scent of the city after the rain. She knew Alyssa overheard every word and would likely inquire on details but cut the inquisitive warlock off before she had a chance.

"Another time," Kat implored, "I promise. Just give me time."

[ @elaianna, @alyssa-ward​ ]

[ Relevant: @tristanasneak, @jocelyn-wellson, @myzariel, @nikkithorpe, @lovelydeadlysocialite, @quinn-varden ]

[museflight]

The Call (2)

Chapter Title: Teamwork

Wordcount: 4.7k

Fic Tag: Click

Ao3 Link: Click

Notes: See end of fic.

Chapter Summary: Mikasa has a conversation with Annie, and Annie has a conversation of her own.

"The slayer," Mikasa repeated, disbelief flat on her tongue. She let go of the woman’s - Annie’s - hand and took a step back. "I'm the slayer."

"I thought you might be," the woman - Annie - said. "That's why I came here. I thought-"

"No," Mikasa cut her off, already shaking her head. "There's only one slayer at a time. You're..."

A lie. An imposter. Impossible. Mikasa took another step back, forcing her feet into a more solid stance despite the fresh wave of protest from her injured ankle.

"I'm telling the truth," Annie insisted. She drummed her fingers against her stake as she spoke, as if its mere presence somehow landed her words credence. "A new slayer is called when the old one dies. Normally that would mean that there's only one at a time, but..." Her lips pressed together. Now it was her turn to look suspicious. "I suppose I'm the one who should be asking questions," she finished.

"She's right," a voice said from behind her, soft, contemplative, maybe even a touch mournful.

She didn't need him to remind her of that. The thought was already dancing around within her, forming a lump in her throat and clawing at the backs of her eyes. Nonetheless, Eren whispered, "you died, Mikasa. Remember?"

Of course she did. The memory had been lapping at her heels for the past several days, relentlessly haunting her in those few moments that she laid down to sleep. It had been easy to brush it off as a combination of guilt and exhaustion. Now, however... Erwin had told her that slayer's dreams tended to be more meaningful than most. She had assumed that it didn't apply to memories, but as she stared Annie down, she wondered if she might have been drowning in her dreams for a reason.

Assuming that Annie was telling the truth.

"Who's your watcher?" Mikasa asked, not daring to drop from her stance or come any closer.

Annie blinked. "Watcher?"

"From the watcher's council," Mikasa pressed.

"Oh." Annie frowned. "I didn't... know that was a thing."

Mikasa pursed her lips. In theory, that probably shouldn't have boded well, but... Erwin had found her less than three months ago, even though she had been called years before that. Everything she knew about being the slayer prior to his arrival had been cobbled together from encounters with various demons after she was called. That much, there had been no denying.

The council was supposed to guide the slayer and help combat against the forces of darkness, but they had already failed once. What were the odds that the council would have found a second slayer when they had no idea that they were even looking for one? 

Had the council really been so incompetent that they left her to go through the same thing as her?

Mikasa's expression remained guarded and unreadable as she continued. Meanwhile, Annie was visibly trying to do the same, but she couldn't quite hide the whisper of anxiety making its way against her expression. Eventually, she broke and asked, "will your watcher help treat your injuries?"

He would if she went to him.

She didn't want to. That wasn't Annie's business though.

"Does it matter?" Mikasa asked. As she spoke, she went to shift her stance a little, her muscles growing stiff from being trapped in the same position for so long. That was a mistake. She was hit by a fresh wave of dizziness from her head and discomfort from her ankle, causing her to stumble a few centimeters. It was a very slight misstep, but Annie caught it, her lips dropping into a slight frown.

"You're dead meat out here in this state," Annie said. "If they won't, then let me help you."

Mikasa stiffened. She turned her head, almost imperceptibly - just enough to catch a glimpse of Eren lurking a few paces behind her. He hadn't been there to watch the vampire go for her, but he was here now. Did that mean that some part of her sensed that she was out of danger? Or had he showed up because the real threat had only just arrived? Even if she was a slayer, it didn't mean that she was to be trusted. It didn't mean-

"I don't know what you should do," Eren confessed, stepping forward and looking Mikasa in the eyes. The eye-contact was brief and promptly broken off by Mikasa. As she shifted her gaze back to Annie, she thought her peripheral vision caught the whisper of some expression flickering across his face. He continued on in spite of it. "But if she planned on hurting you, I think-"

He went silent as Annie spoke, seemingly finishing his line for him. "If I was going to hurt you, I would have done it already." She paused, gaze intensifying as she looked Mikasa up and down. "I wouldn't have had to do anything. You've already taken care of that by going out in your state."

Mikasa bristled. She knew that Annie was right, painful to accept though it may be. That wasn't the thing that pushed against her nerves. It was that this woman - her apparent savior - felt the need to go ahead and point that out.

"So why did you?" Mikasa asked, voice short and clipped. "Why are you here?"

Annie answered immediately, her voice earnest despite the hint of discomfort. "Because we're both slayers," she said. "The only ones in the world, presumably." She gave a bitter smile and held her hands up placatingly, one thumb pressed down to keep her stake held in place. "I'm not saying we need to be friends, but our lives will probably be a whole lot easier if we help each other out."

It made sense. If there truly were two slayers, then in theory, they could bear to lighten their loads by half. Or do a whole lot more. But that would require both of those slayers staying alive. It made sense, and yet, Mikasa hesitated.

To her credit, Annie caught on quickly. She lowered her hands with a heavy sigh. "I'll answer any questions you have at my place," she said. "But not here, with you half dead."

Mikasa gritted her jaw.

At the edge of the vision, she saw Eren step up to stand beside her. "Mikasa, I know you're strong, but you're not invincible," he said. "You need help."

I know, she didn't say, even though she knew that she did, at least for tonight.

Instead, she unclenched her jaw, took a deep breath, and said, "fine."

***

The journey to Annie's house was silent. She didn't offer to help Mikasa walk, for which she was glad. It was already bad enough that she had noticeably slowed her pace to accommodate her limping.

"We're here," Annie murmured, coming to a halt in front of an unobtrusive little house placed on a street corner. A street corner that was only two blocks away from the cemetery. Mikasa frowned, unable to decide if the location was smart for its convenience or foolish for its risk. The frown deepened when, after a short walk up to the patio, Annie opened the door quickly and easily.

"You don't lock your door?" Mikasa questioned.

Annie shrugged. "No need."

Mikasa pursed her lips. Potential reasons for Annie's viewpoint flew through her head; she'd certainly considered them herself a few times. A slayer should be able to deal with any intruder. The odds of a home invasion were unlikely. If some thing truly wanted to get in, a mere lock wouldn't be enough to stop it. She had considered them many a time, wondered if she was just being paranoid.

Those considerations never changed her actions. She still kept her door locked, regardless of whether she was home or not. Even if it didn't stop whatever was trying to get in, it could slow them down. That was important. It was important to remember that every moment counted. It was important to remember that slayers were strong, but they weren't infallible, and with that strength came a target painted on their back.

It wasn't even just slayers. Normal people could stand to be a little safer too. Home invasions were rare in Paradis, but they did happen.

Not that Annie seemed to care.

She strode through the entryway, either unaware of Mikasa's displeasure or simply failing to care. As Mikasa bristled, the phantom that had followed them all of the way there stepped in ahead of her. "Give her a chance," Eren urged. "You haven't really met her yet."

What I've seen so far doesn't seem worth knowing, Mikasa thought. Nonetheless, she moved to follow Annie into the house, hesitating for a moment at the doorway, then walking right through Eren when he didn't get out of the way quickly enough.

It would probably be easier if she just let it slide. And yet...

"You should sti-" Mikasa's words evaporated as she followed Annie into the kitchen. There was a person in there. A tall man about their age, sitting slumped over at the island, reading a book. He looked comfortable. Not an intruder, no, he looked like-

The stranger looked up. "Annie," he called, eyes glittering with excitement that turned into concern as he noticed Mikasa. They met eyes, and Mikasa's confusion deepened. She'd seen this guy around before. Only a few times, and only at night. Quite frankly, she'd entertained the thought that he was a vampire last time she saw him. His general nervous and soft-spoken demeanor was what had made her second-guess her assessment. A good thing, she supposed, because that was looking very much impossible now. Assuming that she was right, assuming he actually-

The stranger turned his gaze back to Annie. "Is everything okay?" he asked.

"Bertolt, get the first aid kit," she said, a hint of a sigh in her voice.

The man - Bertolt - stood up with a nod and scurried out of the kitchen. Annie walked over to the island and set down her stake. Eren wandered over to lean against the stove, idly taking in his surroundings. Meanwhile, Mikasa just stood there and stared. This woman claimed to be a slayer, and yet...

"You live with someone?" Mikasa demanded, her voice suddenly returning to her.

"Of course," Annie said. "I couldn't afford to pay the rent myself."

"And does he-"

"-Know?" Annie interrupted. "Of course." She leaned against the island and crossed her arms, preemptively daring Mikasa to challenge her. "Bertolt and Reiner have been with me since I first got my powers."

Mikasa gaped. Meanwhile, Annie stared, not quite judgemental, but certainly assessing.

"Is your watcher the only one that knows about you?" Annie asked.

"No," Mikasa admitted. "But there were mitigating circumstances."

Annie raised an eyebrow. "What makes you think that there weren't with me?"

Mikasa pursed her lips. "That's not the point," she said. The point was that she avoided living with anyone, even though it meant that she couldn't afford more than a tiny apartment. The point was that she took measures to make sure that no one was truly dragged into her world. The point was that she didn't dare let Armin close enough to truly consider him her friend - or for the rest of the world to notice. "What you're doing is dangerous."

"And striking off on your own isn't?" Annie countered. As she spoke, Bertolt returned, carefully placing the first aid kit on the island and nervously glancing between them. Annie didn't so much as pause. "There are benefits to having a team."

"Do they help you?" Mikasa asked. The idea was preposterous. Annie might have been a slayer, but her roommates certainly weren't. The very demons that she could go toe-to-toe with would turn them into mincemeat. "You're putting their lives at risk."

"Maybe sometimes," Bertolt piped up. He had migrated over to a corner and was leaning against a wall of cupboards, fidgeting awkwardly. "But she's also saved our lives plenty of times too. Maybe we can only help her a little, but that's still something. And, well, I'd rather know the truth and be able to do something about it." He paused, and something in his gaze seemed to harden. "Especially since if anything happens to her, it means that everyone will be a lot less safe."

"They have a point," Eren mused.

They might have. Mikasa's head was reeling too much to really think about it right now. She thought it was because of what they were saying, but judging from the myriad of concerned and alarmed looks she received in that instant, she supposed it may have been the head wound.

"Come here," Annie said, reaching for the first aid kit.

With a small sigh, Mikasa obliged.

Once she was within reach, Annie took Mikasa and guided her onto one of the stools surrounding the island. Her touch was gentle yet firm.

Mikasa watched out of the corner of her eye as Annie opened the first aid kit and opened a packet of antiseptic wipes. She was prepared for it, yet couldn't quite refrain from wincing when Annie took one of the wipes and carefully dabbed at her head wound. The blonde didn't apologize, but she did pause for a second before slowing down in her ministrations. Before long, the first wipe was bogged down with blood and she had to reach for another.

They sat in silence this way for several minutes, Annie tending to Mikasa's wound while Bertolt and Eren stood by, human and illusion both equally unobtrusive. It was shattered by Annie saying, "the person that knows about you. It's Armin, right?"

Mikasa went stiff as a board, the distrust and alarm bells that had begun to fade from her mind making a striking return. Annie noticed and took a cautious step back, which Mikasa took as an opportunity to give her a long look, searching for any sign of deceit. She hadn't mentioned Armin to Annie. She had been very careful not to mention Armin to her, not to anyone. How could she-

"Armin mentioned her earlier," Eren remarked.

At the same time, Annie said, "Armin and I study together. He's mentioned you a few times, and you don't seem like the type to have many friends. That's all."

"Oh." Slowly, the alarms in Mikasa's head began to fade. The surprise meant that they lingered to some degree, but now that she'd been reminded, she recalled that Armin had mentioned an Annie. It added up in that sense. Annie's own conclusion, while a little insulting, was also accurate. Mostly. "He's not a friend," Mikasa murmured, allowing her gaze to drift down toward the floor.

"Right," Annie said, the corner of her lips twitching upward. "Too dangerous."

Mikasa sighed. "Are we done here, or..."

That got Annie and Bertolt to pipe up at the same time. The latter started to say, "you're still really-" only to cut himself off when he realized that Annie was also speaking.

For her part, Annie sighed and allowed her gaze to drift upwards for a moment. It wasn't quite an eye roll, but Mikasa got the distinct sense that she was tempted. "No," she said. "Not yet."

With that, they lapsed into the same silence as before; at least for a little while. As Annie was setting aside the final wipe and reaching for a tube of antiseptic ointment, the room was shaken by the distinct sound of a door opening. Mikasa's attention snapped to the entryway, and within a way moments, a large blond man walked by

"Reiner," Eren murmured in the same instant that the newcomer paused and peered into the kitchen. His eyes met Mikasa's, and for the third time that night, she found herself surprised by a familiar face. He was the guy from her trigonometry class, the one who sat next to Annie and liked to pester her.

She supposed it made sense. Annie didn't seem like someone with a bunch of friends either.

The newcomer - Reiner, if Eren was to be trusted - took a step further into the entryway. Eyes still trained on Mikasa, he said, "you're-"

"Yes," Annie interrupted. Now that Reiner had shown himself, she seemed content to return her attention to what she was doing. She didn't even bother looking up from the bottle of ointment she was opening as she spoke.

Reiner nodded slowly. "Right. And she's-"

"Yes." Annie squeezed some of the antiseptic onto her fingertips and carefully dabbed it onto Mikasa's wound.

This new distraction made it easier for Mikasa to avoid wincing this time. "They know about me as well?" she demanded.

"Of course," Annie said, voice flat. "We help each other."

Mikasa frowned, but didn't press the subject. If Annie was completely sold on involving her cohorts, fine. There was a more important question at hand, a question that she'd let wait for too long. "How did you find out about me?"

"Demons talk," Annie said. "I got a lot of comments about how I'm impossible and the slayer is supposed to be in Paradis." She closed the tube of antiseptic, set it back in the first aid kit, and began rummaging for the bandages.

"This is impossible," Reiner said. He walked over to lean against the counter beside the oven - inadvertently taking a place beside Eren, who was eyeing him contemplatively. "Everything we found about slayers said there's only supposed to be one at once." He frowned and crossed his arms. "Granted, it wasn't much," he conceded, "but it all said that a new slayer is only called when the old one dies."

"I died," Mikasa said, voice empty, refusing to let herself feel what she was saying. There was no avoiding this. At least she could get it over with sooner rather than later. "The EMTs revived me. But for a few minutes, I was dead."

Reiner's frown deepened. He looked for all the world like he wanted to say something else, but Annie shot him a look, and the expression fell away. He sighed, and a sympathetic one took its place. "I'm sorry you went through that," he said.

"Thanks," Mikasa murmured.

"Well," Bertolt interjected, the anxiety clear in his voice, "it's good that you know about each other now, at least. Maybe you can work together?"

He was right. Mikasa knew he was right. Two slayers had to be better than one, and the logical thing would be for them to help each other. However, the thought of committing to working with this woman she'd just met still made her pause.

Thankfully, Annie spoke up before she had to. "Don't make any assumptions," she warned Bertolt. Even so, as she turned back around to face Mikasa, bandage in hand, she gave her a brief, hopeful look; a reminder of her earlier offer.

Mikasa sighed. "I'll think about it," she said.

"That's all we can ask," Bertolt said.

Annie didn't comment. She opened up the package of the large bandage she was holding and brushed Mikasa's hair out of the way before gingerly pressing its edges down around the cut on her temple. This, she noticed, was less uncomfortable than cleaning her wound or applying the ointment. It was almost soothing.

With her head wound taken care of, Annie returned to the first aid kit and pulled out a roll of beige adhesive gauze wrap. Mikasa took the cue to extend her injured leg. Annie crouched down before her and deftly removed her shoe. Mikasa frowned, but didn't comment, a little embarrassed that she hadn't thought to do it herself.

Compared to the near-hesitancy with which she'd dressed the wound on her head, Annie was surprisingly quick and effective at wrapping her ankle. "You're good at this," Mikasa remarked.

Reiner laughed. "She should be! Annie hurt herself all the time as a kid."

"Reiner," Annie warned, standing up and shooting him with a flat look.

This time, her attempt at intimidation didn't have much effect. "It's true."

Annie frowned, Reiner's grin widened, and Mikasa couldn't help but stare. It was odd seeing a slayer interact with someone like this. Someone she had a personal history with, someone she was friends with. It was dangerously tantalizing for all that it was foreign.

Mikasa pulled her gaze away. "I should get going," she said.

"Are you sure?" Bertolt asked, shooting a glance at her ankle. "Annie or I could drive you."

"I only live a few blocks away," Mikasa said. She was aware that it wasn't entirely true, that the distance was probably closer to a mile and a half from this distance, but she wasn't about to say that. "It's been long enough that I should be able to walk that far." This much was true. The walk would agitate her ankle a bit, sure, but the wrap would minimize additional damage, and what she incurred would likely heal while she slept.

Annie looked hesitant, but eventually nodded.

Taking that as her cue to go ahead and leave, Mikasa stood up and took a few steps, then paused just as she was about to leave the kitchen. It took a few seconds to get the words out, but she eventually managed, "thank you. I'll see you later."

She left before any of them could respond.

***

The household was quiet for several minutes after Mikasa's departure. They all lingered in the kitchen, staring at the doorway, as if the slayer might pop back up at any second.

Finally, Reiner tilted his head back and sighed. "She's gone." He shifted to peer at Bertolt, then Annie, the unspoken 'we can speak' in his gaze.

Annie frowned. "Are you so confident that your hearing is better than a slayer's stealth?" she asked.

"I'm confident that she doesn't seem like the type to stick around and eavesdrop," he said.

"She seemed... sincere," Bertolt said. Annie almost wanted to snort upon hearing it. The impulse faded completely with his next words. "It kinda sucks that we have to..."

"Kill her?" Reiner interjected.

Unlike Bertolt, Annie managed to refrain from frowning. Even so, Reiner gave both of them a long look before pointing out, "that's the job." His voice was light and cheerful, carrying all of the ease that she and Bertolt lacked, like he was talking about getting groceries rather than killing a slayer. It crawled under her skin and made her want to try and claw it out.

That wouldn't do anything. Instead, she went for the itch that she actually had reason to scratch.

"A job that you're making harder," Annie snapped. She stood up a little straighter and walked over to stand in front of Reiner. "You didn't need to kill Mina."

"I was hungry. I weighed down her body and dropped it in the rider, so it's not like we'll get any trouble from it," Reiner defended. "Besides..." He paused, his eyes meeting Annie's. The casual air he had been maintaining dropped into something far more grave and serious. "You seemed like you were getting attached."

Annie bristled. In that second, she was tempted to call Reiner out for hypocrisy. He was ten times more social than she was; if anyone might endanger the mission through attachments, it was probably him. The trouble was that it wouldn't work, because it wasn't true. Reiner was a soulless bastard who could probably turn on his so-called friends at the drop of a penny without any trouble at all.

Then again, maybe it was unfair of her to blame his behavior on his lack of a soul. Bertolt didn't have a soul either; no vampire did. Bertolt didn't put on the same friendly act as Reiner, but he still managed to be less impulsive and cruel at the end of the day.

Maybe Reiner was just an overconfident, hypocritical jackass by nature.

There was no point in calling out Reiner's hypocrisy, so Annie settled for glaring at him and saying, "I've told you plenty of times that I don't care about anyone here that much."

"I'm just being careful."

"No, you're making excuses to be greedy."

Bertolt stepped out of his corner, a flicker of worry on his face. "Guys, do we have to fight about this?" he asked.

Annie gave him a long, tired look, which quickly turned into one of agitation when Reiner held his hands up and said, "hey, I'm not the one who's fighting."

"I'm not fighting," Annie ground out, slowly turning her gaze back to Reiner. "I'm saying that you're being stupid. You want to hunt on campus? Fine. But if you keep killing people we interact with, people will get suspicious no matter how much time you spend in the sunlight."

"She's right," Bertolt tentatively interjected. Reiner shot him a frown, and he quickly amended, "I'm not saying that you're stupid. But we can't afford to take too many risks." He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "I'm already worried about how we're going to hide my nature from the slayer. Maybe we should have come up with some sort of story."

"Like what?" Annie asked.

"Maybe we could say that I was cursed with a soul or something?" Bertolt mused.

Reiner laughed. "A vampire with a soul? How lame is that."

"It's happened before," Bertolt protested. "Although, I'm not sure if I'd be able to pull it off. It's supposed to be pretty emotionally devastating..."

"It's still ridiculous." Reiner shook his head, then waved his hand - and the ring that adorned it. "If it comes down to it, I'll just let you borrow the gem. Make sure that she sees you in the sunlight a few times and you're set."

"You're lucky to have that thing," Annie grumbled.

"I am," Reiner acknowledged. He stood up a little straighter and gave her and Bertolt a serious look, clearly trying to play the role of inspiring leader. Fun. "But we're going to need more than luck to pull this off. We need the slayer to trust us, and I doubt she's going to make that easy."

"I think we're off to a good start," Bertolt said. "She seems pretty isolated, but Annie did a good job trying to convince her she'd be better off with a team."

Annie frowned, but didn't bother pointing out that Bertolt had done most of the work. Meanwhile, Reiner blinked in surprise.

"Annie? Talking up teamwork?" He let out a bark of laughter and shook his head. "I'd pay to see that."

"Then pay," Annie said. "What I want to know is why we didn't just take her by surprise. I could have taken her out tonight if we did that."

Oh, Annie knew fully well what Reiner's convoluted logic was. They had been over this several times before. That didn't mean she didn't see the benefit in making him run through it again, just on the off chance that he might change his mind about this whole charade. She couldn't say that she felt very bad about inconveniencing him with it either.

Alas, Reiner didn't seem particularly perturbed to repeat himself for what had to be the seventh time. If anything, he looked a little smug to hear his plan out loud once more.

"Slayers know to expect attacks from strangers," Reiner said. "Unless we're able to kill her immediately, the element of surprise wears off after the first attack. But if she trusts us first? Even if she survives the initial assault, that will slow her down for a while.

"Bertolt, you're right in that you'll need to be cautious. You can help when you get the opportunity, but until it's time to act, Annie and I will need to do most the of work. As long as she doesn't find out about the Gem of Amara, I can keep her from finding out that I'm a vampire; she'll have no reason not to trust me. And Annie. Even with the state she was in, she might have escaped if you tried to take her out tonight. But if you're able to get close to her first?" Something akin to appreciation flickered in Reiner's eyes as he paused, mingling with the excitement that was oozing off of him. She ignored how it made her stomach twinge. "You're a slayer. She won't stand a chance."

Annie allowed herself to think of the strong, cold, sad woman she met today. Of how she had seemed so convinced that she had to be alone, of the flicker of hope that had shown through the distrust.

"You're right," Annie admitted. "She won't."

*****

End Notes: Alright, so. Pre-emptively, I know that Reiner is pretty OOC in this chapter. He's my favorite character in the series, so believe me, I am Aware. They are in-story reasons for this, some of which are tied to Buffyverse vampire lore and some of which will be unveiled as the story progresses. Hopefully, the payoff will be worth it in the end, but for now, all I can do is ask you to trust me when I say that I have plans.

For now though, hold on tight. Erwin gets properly introduced to the story next chapter, as well as a few other characters.

[nobodyfamousposts]

Missing - Part 3.3

There will be one more part to finish this chapter.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice. We just have a few questions to ask you.”

“Of course! Anything to help!”

“I guess to start: What is the nature of your relationship with Marinette Dupain-Cheng?”

“She’s a cool kid. She works hard, goes above and beyond, and is really creative. She’s got talent, let me tell you!”

“I see. So you’ve had interactions with Marinette? Perhaps even meetings?”

“Well, sure. I’ve commissioned a few things from her. She’s one of the only ones who gets my style, you know?”

“Were these meetings generally private?”

“Yeah. We kind of have to keep them on the down low. She’s just a kid, after all and the last thing anyone wants is for her to be hounded or bothered by the media. So it’s just me and my team and her and her parents.”

“Wait—and her parents?”

“Of course! Have to get the parentals’ okay before asking their little girl to make anything, regardless of what I’m paying for it. It only seemed right since my requests are taking up her time. She’s just started working on a new jacket that includes an accent that is supposed to glow in the dark!”

“I…see…”

“Yeah. Plus Tom and Sabine are awesome. Even if they put their foot down about allowing her to try and make a jacket for pet—”

“Sir, are you aware of Miss Dupain-Cheng being in a relationship?”

“You mean that blond kid she’s crazy about? Did she finally ask him out?”

“Well, no. There have been some reports of her having an...um...older boyfriend?”

“...what?”

“And that he looked like...you?”

“WHAT?!”

_______________________

Paris was a lovely city. Full of equally loving people.

“Here!” Andre held out the ice cream with a joyful note in his voice. “A magical treat for our magical savior!”

Ladybug started in surprise. She tried to decline politely even as she couldn’t help but eye the ice cream with longing. “Oh, I couldn’t—“

“Nonsense!” He reassured her, pushing the cup to her. “It’s the least I can do after all you’ve done for Paris!”

Well, if he insisted...

She accepted the offering, feeling the chill in her fingers even through her suit. “Thank you.”

“But of course! And who knows? Maybe it will help bring love to your life.”

She highly doubted ice cream could accomplish that.

“You never know.” He told her as he gave her a conspiratorial wink. “There is all sorts of magic in this world. You are proof enough of that!”

She simply smiled and bade him a good day before leaving with ice cream in hand.

Such a strange man, she mused. But the offer was nice of him. And the ice cream was rather good.

The people here were quite kind. Upon seeing her, many of them had wanted to give her such treats or other foods for free. Part of her felt bad for accepting the offers, even as they insisted it was out of thanks for helping them so much.

But as much as she wanted to decline—and probably should have at points, she kept accepting. It seemed likely for the best though. And now she wasn’t sure she should refuse.

She hadn’t realized how tired she had been getting until after that first incident of a civilian insisting on giving her cookies. While she had reluctantly accepted at the time, she had noticed a marked difference after ingesting the first one and almost inhaled the rest afterwards.

It was…unusual. She didn’t remember being like this before.

But it became more clear over time that she was losing energy. And food—particularly sweets and confections of that like—would be enough to recharge her strength.

When she first realized she was able to stay out longer after a battle, she had taken to patrolling and trying to track down any potential akumas before they could reach their target in hopes of determining their origin and where Hawk Moth may be hiding. But she hadn’t made any progress after the first couple of days, and didn’t realize just how much energy she was using up.

Now, she was trying to be more cautious and conserve her strength. After all, Hawk Moth was bound to send out an akuma sooner or later. And while she hoped to find the butterfly before it could akumatize anyone, Paris was a big city and it was not logical to expect she would just happen to be in the right place at the right time to find it before an attack could occur. In that event, she needed to ensure she still had energy for the battle. So while she would still patrol regularly, she had been making a point to take breaks and rest more often throughout the day.

But why was she still out? What normally happened once the fights were over to restore her strength? And why wasn’t it happening this time?

Something felt wrong, but try as she might, she couldn’t figure out what it was.

She paused for a moment, considering.

Perhaps Hawk Moth was planning something?

It had been a good few days since the last akuma. And he had yet to try anything since.

She frowned. It was rational, but something felt wrong.

She drew out of her musings to look around the park. It was rather empty, but it was also getting late so there were less civilians around. There were only a couple of people in the area. One was a young woman walking a dog. Two kids who were cutting through the park to get somewhere. And a single elderly man in a Hawaiian shirt who was seated on a bench nearby and appeared to be having tea.

Noticing her gaze, the man smiled and nodded to her in greeting.

“Hello, Ladybug. It is a rather lovely evening, is it not?”

“I suppose.” She replied, more out of politeness than any real agreement. It was just another day in Paris, as far as she could tell. Though the lack of an akuma was nice.

The man smiled, not at all put off by her response. “It is getting later, though. I imagine many people are are returning to their homes.”

She nodded. That made sense. And explained the growing lack of people in the area.

He looked up at her, seemingly curious. “Should you not return to your home as well?”

Ladybug blinked at that. “Home?”

“Certainly. I am sure that even a hero of Paris has a place she can rest at the end of the day.”

She frowned, trying to consider his words.

She had been active for days. Probably a week or so by this point. Whatever was supposed to happen after an akuma fight hadn’t this time, so she didn’t have a place to go.

“I have nowhere else I need to be.” She replied simply. It was true enough at any rate. Clearly dealing with Hawk Moth was the priority, and this was as good a chance as any to try and gain some advantage or intel.

The man, however, appeared concerned.

“Do you not have a life to return to? A family waiting for you?”

A life? A family.

How bizarre.

Such little things. So pointless. They would only hold her back and distract her from the mission at hand.

“Of course not.”

Homes and families were for the civilians she protected.

She didn’t need those things.

Why would she? She was Ladybug.

Just Ladybug.

_______________________

Kim liked to think he had grown some since the school year started. A bit at least.

He would admit he wasn’t the smartest person—that title belonged to Max and he was quite proud of his friend for it. After all, not just anyone could make a working robot that could live and feel.

But nonetheless, Kim wasn’t stupid. He just liked to believe the best in people.

Granted, that didn’t always work out—like with his attempt to ask out Chloe on Valentines Day.

But then there were the times it did—like when he sacrificed himself to save Chloe and his other classmates during the whole ‘kissing zombies’ incident.

Well…sort of. Chloe was still Chloe either way. But at least the zombies were dealt with. And Chloe…did seem to be trying to do better.

Emphasis on ‘trying’.

But in that regard, Kim had been trying as well. He had undergone some changes since the start of the year. He didn’t like to think it, but he hadn’t been the most observant or empathetic guy. He was self-centered in a lot of ways, not out of any malice, but simple ignorance. He had often done things without thinking. And while he may not have intended to be mean, he would still act in ways that would upset others without realizing he was doing it.

But having a friend turn into a stone monster and try to kill him made Kim reevaluate his idea of friendly teasing or just how he interacts with people in general.

And his idea of gentle ribbing may not be so gentle or friendly to others. It was…something he’d had to learn the hard way. And even relearn, given the panther incident. And again with Odine…

It was something he was still working on. And had to catch himself at times. Whether or not he intended harm didn’t matter. That he had been trying to be helpful in his own way also didn’t matter. Because Kim’s idea of tolerance and what was okay or too much or not enough was different than other people’s. It was something he still struggled to be mindful of.

That was why he didn’t comment on the strangeness of Lila’s injuries.

A sprained wrist should have been in a brace of some sort. Some of her reported injuries should have had indicators like scratches, bruises, or red marks. Her claimed arthritis should have involved swelling or tremors. But there was often nothing.

There were points when Lila’s claims of being in pain made him raise an eyebrow.

Kim was an athlete, and had his fair share of experiences with people who had injuries and how they worked. So it was strange to him that Lila could be lacking any of the common indicators. But some injuries couldn’t be seen easily, and he also had experience with what could happen if they weren’t treated appropriately because of assumptions based on that.

Lila’s symptoms were strange and all over the place. But Kim wasn’t a doctor. It wasn’t his place to judge or determine.

Not to mention that people were different. She could just have a lower pain threshold. And it was possible her body could just outwardly heal fast as far as appearances go.

Kim had no way of knowing for sure without either questioning her or becoming invasive. But he wanted to take her word for it, so he continued to help her out. He didn’t mind, really. What was a lunch tray or an extra bag to carry for a few minutes anyway?

He understood Marinette’s anger at the idea of being used. He didn’t like the thought either. But if it did turn out that she was lying, what did he really lose? He still would have helped out. There didn’t need to be any injuries involved. Honestly, he would have done the same if any of the other girls had asked. Heck, even if one of the guys had.

There was nothing he lost by a few minutes of kindness here and there. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t worth questioning or trying to argue over.

While he could understand why Marinette might be upset if she thought Lila was lying, he didn’t see any reason to actively try to disprove it.

It was like people with allergies or unseen medical issues. Just because you couldn’t see where they had a health problem didn’t mean it wasn’t there.  Even if there isn’t necessarily active proof, it was safer to treat the person like the condition was real because you don’t know for sure. And you could just be making yourself out to be a jerk either way if you did act on it.

Even if the napkin incident was kind of lame.

He saw the way the class almost got up in arms over Lila’s claimed injury by a napkin. He saw the way Max clearly wanted to say something to correct them. He also saw the way Marinette only got upset because of it. Maybe he should have spoken up then, but he didn’t want to be dismissive of Lila’s health issues regardless of how real he thought they were.

Maybe catching the napkin WAS enough to bother her? It could have been the movement of her arm rather than the weight of the napkin. He didn’t know. And he’d had enough instances of being a jerk because he questioned and pushed things instead of simply accepting them.

He did feel bad for Marinette though. If she was so distrustful of Lila, he was sure she had reasons. But trying to disprove someone’s medical condition in such a blatant show wasn’t really the best way to go about things if she didn’t believe they were real. He agreed with her that it was fishy, though, and considered that if it kept happening, maybe they could try some other way of finding out for sure. Talk with the teachers about their concerns. Check with the nurse to confirm if any of this is in her medical history. Maybe see if as the Class Rep, Marinette couldn’t get in touch with Lila’s mom to determine her needs. That way, they could at least be sure and have all the information straight.

He figured he could talk to her about it at some point when there was time.

He thought they’d have time.

But life happens.

People act without thinking.

Akumas go on a rampage.

Friends go missing.

And suddenly little things like whether a classmate is faking injuries for perceived special treatment he would happily have given regardless seemed a lot less important.

He had to have priorities.

His main priority at this time, other than schoolwork and sports, was to try and find Marinette or any clues on what happened to her. Which was why he was still going out on the streets after school to search.

It had been something he started since the class initially discussed plans to try searching themselves. And it’s something he hadn’t stopped since then either.

Admittedly, it wasn’t the brightest move to go searching alone, but that was why he had Max on speed dial in case anything happened to him. His parents were informed and knew where he would be each outing. And he also had his phone set up to keep track of his location, which his parents could easily find and Max was no doubt keeping track of even at this moment.

They made a good team this way. Not just brains and brawn, since Max wasn’t weak anymore than Kim was stupid. But they both had their strengths and they worked best as a team when they each played to their strengths.

In this case, Max was searching as well in his own way, even if that way was from his computer rather than in person. Kim could get farther faster on foot whereas Max could span miles in minutes by computer. That way, they could coordinate and cover more ground.

They kept in touch constantly though. Which is how Kim knew something was wrong.

“Max? You there?”

There was only silence.

He looked at his phone in worry. Of the two of them, Kim was the one who was supposed to be more likely to encounter some sort of trouble. What could possibly happen to Max in his room?

“Max? Anyone?”

“Kim?”

That wasn’t Max.

“Markov?”

“Oh thank goodness!” The AI spoke from the phone screen, clearly frazzled. “An akuma appeared and took us!”

“Wait—what?! Why?!” Max had been in his room! Why would anyone try to go after him and Markov specifically? Kim frowned, eyes narrowing as he took charge. “Do you know who it is?”

“From my data, the akuma was a match for Lady Wifi.”

Kim gasped. “Alya?”

It made sense, now that he thought about it. He hadn’t been there for the incident, but he had heard from others in the class how Alya had apparently been suspended after supposedly attacking Lila while they were alone in class. He wasn’t sure he believed it, as that sounded particularly out of character for the blogger. It was now with a sickening realization that he remembered the last time Alya had been suspended in what was later revealed to be an unfair manner.

If Alya had been wrongfully accused and punished—especially if she was suspended a second time for a similar reason—they should have figured that Lady Wifi would be likely to make a reappearance.

But why go after Max? He hadn’t even been involved!

“What should we do?” Markov asked. “I’ve routed myself to Max’s phone to contact you, but I don’t know how long it may be until she realizes it.”

“Do you know where she’s taken you guys?” Kim asked, glancing around his own location and already starting to work out what would be the best course to take.

“We appear to have been taken to a cellphone tower. One near the TVi station.”

“But why there?”

It didn’t make sense. If Alya was Lady Wifi, wouldn’t she go after Lila? Or the school? Or really anywhere that has more cellphones around for her to make use of?

“I am uncertain.” Markov replied, all the more worried. There was a pause, seemingly as something was happening on Markov’s end that Kim couldn’t hear. “She wants us to hack the tower. What should we do?”

Okay, this was time for action. Alya was the akuma, meaning the Ladyblog wouldn’t alert anyone of the attack. Quickly, Kim sent out a mass text to the class to give warning in case Lady Wifi would try going after them as well.

“Do what she says for now and keep an eye on her and Max. I’ll try to see if I can’t find help.”

Ladybug had been patrolling more actively lately, hadn’t she?

He just needed to find her.

Kim: Need to alert LB nd CN. If anyone gets ahold of them, let us know!

A few minutes later, he had a response.

Adrien: Just spoke to Chat. He’s on his way.

_______________________

By the time the two came down from the roof, school was already over.

Nino noticed the time and groaned once he realized how late it was. “I’d better check in with Alya and let her know we’re okay.” He pulled out his phone and started up a text as the two continue walking out of the building, passing other students. Nino gave a mutter about how he was already going to have one lady angry with him once his mom found out he’d skipped the rest of his classes for the day.

Adrien smiled sympathetically, but knew he wouldn’t be much help. He was pretty sure his father would be furious with him as well once word got back to him. So focused on their encroaching doom, neither noticed that they had passed Ivan and Mylene, getting their attention.

“Wait, Nino? Haven’t you heard?” Mylene called out to him. Nino and Adrien drew to a stop as the couple approached. There was something about Mylene’s terseness and Ivan’s frown that made them worry.

“Did something happen?” Nino asked. He and Adrien had been on that roof for a while, so there was no telling what they may have missed.

“Alya’s been suspended for fighting.” Ivan told the, looking distressed.

Both boys gaped.

“What?”

Mylene nodded, upset. “Rose and Juleka came in and told us that Alya attacked Lila.”

“WHAT?!”

“Where is she?” Nino demanded.

“Lila’s at the nurse’s station.” She continued with a gesture back towards the school. “She had a mark on her cheek but wasn’t hurt otherwise.”

But Nino only shook his head, appearing more frantic. “No, not her! Where’s Alya?”

“She left, man.” Ivan answered, drawing the attention to himself. “She was taken to the Principal’s office and her mom came to pick her up.”

Mylene shuddered. “I’d never seen her so angry before.”

Nino and Adrien shared a look, both worried and feeling a sense of foreboding.

“This is bad.” Nino moaned.

Adrien wilted in on himself at the news.

“It had to have happened just after I left.” He murmured in dismay.

Was this his fault?

Would it have been prevented if he had stayed?

“Wait a minute. Adrien, were you there?” Mylene asked.

He froze at that. They...they wanted to know, right? They wouldn’t be asking if they didn’t. Part of him wanted desperately to tell the other two what had happened.

But would they believe him?

“Go ahead, man.” He heard Nino say from right next to him. “They’ll listen.”

Both Ivan and Mylene nodded encouragingly.

He didn’t want to say it.

He didn’t want to revisit that moment of heartbreak, even as he tried to convince himself that none of it was true.

“Lila said that Marinette ran away.“ Seeing their horrified expressions, he steeled his resolve and continued. “Because of us.“

Mylene gasped.

Ivan clenched his fists, his smile dropping in an instant. “She what?!”

“They were already arguing by the time I got there.” Adrien explained. “Alya was angry. Lila was taunting her. Saying...all kinds of hurtful things.” He took a breath. “She admitted to lying about everything. Insulted Alya and everyone else for believing her. And she said…” He felt Nino’s hand come to rest on his shoulder, encouraging him and emboldening him to continue.

“She said we were bad friends and it was no wonder Marinette ran away.”

“Are…” Mylene hesitated, looking pale and stricken. It was clear she didn’t want to believe it. “Are you sure you didn’t mishear? Or maybe misunderstand?”

Adrien started to shrink in on himself, uncertain and beginning to second guess everything he’d witnessed. Maybe he had misunderstood? Or Lila meant something else? Or—

Nino’s grip on his shoulder tightened—not painfully, but enough to remind Adrien he was there and that he had support.

“That could explain one or two statements, but not everything.”

But it wasn’t Nino’s voice that spoke up in his defense.

Mylene wasn’t the only one to look to Ivan in surprise. The bigger boy looked angrier than they’d seen him since the start of the school year. Adrien was half worried he would become akumatized again.

It wasn’t long before Mylene appeared angry enough to match him. It was to Adrien’s relief though that both seemed to be angry on his behalf rather than with him.

“If that’s true, then it’s no wonder that Alya slapped her.“ She said darkly, sounding as though she wished for the chance to do so herself.

“I don’t think she did.“ Nino said flat out, drawing everyone’s attention back. “Alya texted me about that time to let me know what happened and asked me to look for Adrien. If she was rational enough to put a friend first after a comment like that, I don’t think there’s much else Lila could have said to make her react violently.”

Ivan started in surprise. “So you don’t think Alya attacked Lila?”

Mylene even looked to Nino, almost hopefully.

Nino shook his head. “Adrien said that Lila’s been lying about a lot of things. She was probably lying about that too.“

“No wonder Marinette didn’t like her.” Ivan murmured. “She’d been trying to counter any of Lila’s claims all this time. She probably knew they were lies.”

“I thought it was jealousy.“ Mylene admitted, guiltily. “Or maybe that she had just gotten the wrong impression like she did with Adrien at the beginning of the year.“

“I think we all brushed it off more than we should have.” Ivan took her hand in his own, giving a gentle squeeze in comfort. He straightened though as he remembered something.

“But what about the mark?

Nino scowled at that. “I’d be willing to bet Lila did something to make it look like Alya slapped her in order to gain sympathy and discredit Alya if she tried to tell anyone the truth.”

Adrien’s mind flashed to his initial meeting with Lila. How she expressed an interest in superheroes only after seeing him reading about them and the disappearance of his father’s Book shortly afterward. How Lila went so far as to get a necklace to try and pass off as a Miraculous in order to convince him she was a superhero.

“I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s certainly done it before.” He admitted. “But what can we do about it?“

Alya was already suspended. Lila had no doubt spun her web and shared her “version” of events with everyone. The teachers, the administration, the rest of the class...she probably had them all hanging off her “sob story”.

To everyone’s surprise, it was Mylene who stepped up to take charge.

“Adrien, you need to go to the Principal and tell him what really happened.”

He balked at that. “But I wasn’t there for the actual incident.“

“But you were there for what set it off.” She gently reminded him. “If nothing else, that gives context and at least shed some doubt on Lila‘s story.“

Ivan grinned. “That’s right! If you tell him that Lila instigated the incident, he may reverse the decision—or at least the suspension.”

“Do you really think so?” Adrien asked. He wasn’t used to authority figures listening to him and changing their minds about things like this. He was still half convinced his father’s agreement to letting him attend school was a fluke. His father’s response to the loss of the Book during the Volpina incident certainly hadn’t helped with that.

“It’s worth a try.” Nino said, encouragingly. “I know it’d be at least one more voice in Alya’s corner than she had.”

“And Alya’s parents would know if nothing else.“ Ivan added. “Even if the school decides to keep the suspension, it would certainly make a difference to her parents to know the full extent of what really happened. They may lessen her punishment at home, or at least not ground her.“

Adrien fought with himself.

There was that part of him—an admittedly big part that wanted to stay out of things. It would prolong the conflict. Lila was dangerous. She had some sort of influence on his father. She could get akumatized again. She could hurt him. Nathalie could find out. His father could find out.

But…

He’d told Marinette once that he was in her corner and hadn’t followed through.

And regardless of the reason she was gone, if he did ever see her again, he at least wanted to be able to look her in the eyes.

He didn’t think he could do that if he just abandoned her best friend—HIS friend when she needed him.

“Okay.” He agreed at last. “Principal Damocles is gone for the day, so I’ll come see him first thing in the morning and tell him what I know.”

The other three beamed at him. And for a moment, Adrien actually felt like things might just work out.

Then a text came that brought everything crashing down.

Kim: AKUMA ALERT!!! Lady Wifi is back and kidnapped Max and Markov!

_______________________

It had been a peaceful evening. Ladybug appreciated it and resented it at the same time.

Appreciated it for how the peace meant that the civilians of Paris were safe.

But resented it because it meant she had no akumas to track for leads to Hawk Moth. And if things were peaceful, it was likely that he was plotting something. Like the calm before a storm, knowing something was bound to happen but not necessarily what or when.

It also meant she was stuck with nothing but her own thoughts. About her presence here outside of akuma battles. About her general lack of purpose outside of fighting. About the inexplicable sense of longing though she knew not what it was for. And now about that elderly man she had met.

Asking questions that made no sense. Bringing up concepts that didn’t apply to her. Making her wonder things that didn’t matter.

And worst of all was that expression he had. There was a look in his eye as he gazed at her. Concerned and sad and disappointed all in one.

And she didn’t know WHY!

It was irritating. An intrusive, niggling feeling that just wouldn’t go away. And for all that she tried to brush it off, the strange thoughts and the man’s expression kept flickering back into focus as soon as she let her mind wander.

So she was grateful for any distraction by that point, even if it was a message from Chat Noir.

At least it was something useful for once.

“Ladybug! I just received word that Alya has been akumatized.”

Well, that was a relief. There was an akuma at last. However, the way he said that made it seem like the akuma was the lesser issue than who the akuma was. Which led to a problem on her end.

“Who?” The name sounded vaguely familiar, but didn’t stand out to her.

He paused at that, frowning in confusion. “Uh...Alya? From the Ladyblog?”

“Oh, that little fan site?” It was cute for what it was.

Chat’s frown only grew at that. “It’s not just a fan site. You’ve done interviews with her before, remember?”

Did she? She didn’t know why. It seemed silly to indulge something so inane. Not to mention dangerous to encourage the blogger’s antics and insistence on getting footage of akuma battles. The last thing she needed was for a civilian to jump into the fight, distract her, and get in the way. Not to mention how much more difficult it would be to deal with the akuma while trying to protect the civilian who lacked the sense to leave the area.

She shrugged.

“It doesn’t stand out.”

He gave her an incredulous look and mouthed the words to himself like he wasn’t sure what he was hearing. She didn’t know why this came as a surprise to him. Or why he would have such a reaction over something so frivolous.

“Okay…” He said, uncertain. “I got the report from a classmate that she’s taken hostages to the TVi station. I’m already on my way there now.”

“I’ll head that way as well. Stay in contact just in case.”

Chat seemed perturbed, but didn’t argue.

That may have been because he didn’t get the chance, as a sudden yelp from nearby caught Ladybug’s attention. A passerby dropped his cellphone just as the screen sparked and a figure appeared.

The akuma.

“Lady Wifi is here.” She muttered into the communicator.

That was rather fast. But at least it didn’t mean wasting more time than necessary.

It seemed she didn’t need to go to the TVi Station after all.

“Hang on! I’m on my way!” Chat’s voice exclaimed before the call ended.

However startled Ladybug was by her sudden appearance, the akuma even seemed just as surprised at seeing her there.

“Ladybug?!” She gasped out. But her eyes narrowed. “No. I don’t know how you found me, but you are not getting in my way!”

Wait. Found her? But she hadn’t even started looking for her yet!

There was no time to question it, however, as Lady Wifi proceeded to go on the offensive. Ladybug ducked out of the way just in time to avoid the multiple symbols being flung at her from the akuma’s phone.

She flipped backwards and landed on the lower roof behind her, breaking line of sight with her enemy. Taking advantage of the moment, she then jumped from to a ridge on an adjoining building where she would have cover and not be easily viewed from above. Glancing up, she frowned when she noticed that she could not see her foe. It was like she had disappeared.

Or...had she simply left altogether once Ladybug was out of sight?

Strange, shouldn’t Lady Wifi be looking for her? They had only just crossed paths. Normally, akumas would attempt to continue pursuit.

She jumped down to street level and kept looking around, warily. Perhaps the akuma had gone into one of the buildings?

There was a sudden outburst of screams from a nearby store as several civilians ran out of the building. She rushed over and noticed that...yes, it was a phone store. And sure enough, the akuma was inside and the cause of the scare that drove all potential customers away. Without hesitating, she ran inside to continue the fight.

Lady Wifi growled in frustration at her appearance and sent more attacks at her. Ladybug dodged them easily enough, but to her surprise, Lady Wifi simply took off shortly afterwards, rushing out the back and out of the building altogether. Her attempt to follow only drew her further into the busier part of the city. And soon enough, she had again lost her target.

Until there was another flash followed by a shriek from a nearby civilian who had been hiding from the chaos. Sure enough, Lady Wifi was once again present, only looking all the more agitated once she appeared and saw Ladybug already there.

“How do you keep finding me?“ She demanded as she swiped at her phone again.

Ladybug didn’t bother to respond as she simply ducked, dodged, and jumped out of the way.

But the angry accusation kept ringing in her head. Because the truth was that she didn’t know. Really, she had thought it was the other way around. Why would Lady Wifi leave just to keep coming back? It wasn’t even a fighting tactic as she wasn’t utilizing any element of surprise it could grant her.

A purple glow appeared over the akuma’s face. No doubt Hawk Moth was trying to give her orders.

But...Lady Wifi just blew him off?

“No! I’ll get you your stupid jewelry, but right now, I need to keep looking while I still can!”

Looking? For what?

The glow only increased in response. The akuma seemed to shudder under an unknown force.

“All right. Just to get her out of the way.” She agreed before switching symbols on her cell and sending them flying at Ladybug.

Unimpressed, she prepared to move. If she jumped, she could go over the symbol and even Lady Wifi herself. She was close enough that she could land behind her and then try to take her out. Just keep her yoyo at the ready to tie her up and—

“Look out!”

Something slammed into her from the side, sending her and whatever the force was rolling towards a nearby truck. There was at least partial cover between them and the akuma now, but it ruined her plan and now she was on the defensive.

Who?

She looked over to see...sure enough, Chat Noir had interfered.

“Are you blind?!” She hissed, pulling him fully behind the cover.

“She was attacking you! I was just trying to help!” He said, defensively.

“You can help by not getting in the way.”

His ears lowered. He looked genuinely hurt. “Sorry…”

“Look, let’s just get this over with. I’ve been stuck playing ‘Hide and Seek’ with this akuma and I’m tired of it.” She pulled out her yoyo. “We’ll split up and come at her from both sides. Then I’ll tie her down and you can break her phone. Ready?”

There was a pause.

But he didn’t move.

She raised an eyebrow in annoyance.

“Well? What are you waiting for?”

He simpered, gesturing pathetically at her yoyo. “Uh, aren’t you going to use your Lucky Charm?”

DONOT

She gave him an incredulous look.

“Why would I do that?” Really, the Lucky Charm was useless and a waste of her energy. It only served to force her out of the fight sooner.

“Well—” He stammered. “I mean—you usually—it’s always…” He seemed to realize it was a stupid question and looked away. Whether in understanding or embarrassment, she didn’t particularly know.

“Just go already.”

Honestly, the flinch was unnecessary. It wasn’t like she’d struck him.

She wasted no more time worrying about her partner and whatever his latest antics were. Instead, she put her focus back on the akuma where it should be.

It wasn’t a very complicated plan. And it didn’t need to be. They had fought this akuma before. It wasn’t like it was that hard. With Chat charging from the front and taking her attention, Ladybug leapt out from the other side and had Lady Wifi trapped in her yoyo wire, forcing her arms to her side and sending her cellphone clattering to the ground.

For all the trouble and annoyance, the fight was over disappointingly quick.

Within seconds, the phone was broken and the akuma released. A simple flick of her wrist and the butterfly was purified and sent on its way. And soon enough, Lady Wifi was a normal human teenager once more. Ladybug sighed in relief that the latest upset was dealt with at least.

“Miraculous Ladybug!”

The Cure did its work per the usual. But something seemed off. And there was a small amount of the ladybugs that seemed to hover around her before she waved them away. Honestly, she shouldn’t have to keep doing this every time.

Taking no notice of her state, Chat bounded up to her, fist out.

“Pound—”

Except Ladybug had already turned away, leaving Chat feeling put off and especially alone.

“...it?”

He frowned, uncertain.

“Uh...Ladybug? Is everything okay?”

No. She was lost and confused and that strange man’s words wouldn’t leave her mind.

She had no home. Nowhere to go.

So why did she feel she was supposed to be somewhere? And ‘where’ was she supposed to be?

“I’m fine.” She told him as she turned and walked away.

She was fine.

_______________________

He ran down the street, cursing himself the entire time. He should’ve known something would happen! Alya had clearly already been upset. While he had talked to her about not confronting Lila, he knew very well how Olea was and that there was only so much she could hold back if directly confronted.

Alya had been the one to text him to warn him to look out for Adrien. His focus has been on finding his friend at that time, that he had completely neglected to consider how she would even know about the situation or what her knowing had to mean.

If he had been there, he could have backed up Alya. Been a witness to counter Lila’s lies about being attacked—if a single slap she more than deserved could even count as that.

No! No. Not the time! Alya now. Deal with Lila later.

Because of that, Alya had been suspended. Her parents had no doubt been given the wrong version of events by the school thanks to Lila, and probably grounded her on top of that. Right now, Nino must have been the only one Alya knew was on her side. She wouldn’t know that Adrien knew the truth or that he would even speak up in her defense. She only knew she was alone and everyone was against her.

And now Lady Wifi was back. And while he knew that Lila was responsible, he could not help but blame himself for failing to be there for her.

That was why as soon as he got Kim’s message, he had taken off for where the alert said Lady Wifi was attacking. Maybe he could calm her down? Or at least be there for her once it was over.

Because surely the heroes would be fixing all of this soon enough.

It was the Ladybugs that led him to her. A small group that seemed...a bit detached from the rest. Following them, he found the aftermath of the battle. Both Ladybug and Chat Noir were moving away, leaving Alya just...sitting there on the sidewalk.

Wait. What?

Didn’t they normally talk to or try to comfort the akuma victims?

Glancing over, however, he noted that both appeared to be rather tense. And Chat in particular seemed worried. He didn’t know why. They were a distance away and quiet enough that he couldn’t hear. But neither seemed happy. Maybe the fight was harder on them than it seemed?

His focus, however, went to Alya. She seemed almost out of it by the time he reached her.

But when he called out her name, her eyes met his immediately. And her face crumpled into a sob.

“Nino!”

He was there by her in an instant, holding her as tightly as he could and whispering reassurances.

He’d lost one friend.

He didn’t want to lose her, too.

_______________________

Alya didn’t know what happened when she was an akuma. Nobody ever really remembers, after all.

But she knew...she’d been looking for something.

Desperately trying to find something.

And she half believed that something was her best friend.

She hoped, at any rate.

It was dark out by the time the fight was over, and Nino was walking her home. He promised that he would also talk with her parents to let them know what’s going on with Lila and that she was lying about everything. Neither of them knew just how much good it would do since it was their word against Lila’s, and anything he tried to say might just be construed as solely a defense due to being Alya’s boyfriend. But it was something and it was certainly more than she’d had when she was on trial at the school.

But…

The worst of it all as that her thoughts kept going back to Lila and those damn words.

“Don’t blame me just because you’re a bad friend. Honestly, it’s no wonder Marinette chose to run away.”

Maybe...maybe Lila was right?

Maybe she did run away?

…

…

...

No.

She took a breath and forced herself to focus.

Facts, Alya. Think about the facts. She had made enough poor decisions without bothering to get information. Now was the time to not repeat those mistakes. The first thing to do was look at the facts of what she knew.

Fact: Marinette was her friend. Even at times when Alya wasn’t the best friend to her in return, Marinette still cared. This was clear in the way that Marinette still tried for her—continuing to try to warn her or look out for her and yet going along with her even after the way Alya acted.

Fact: Marinette was stubborn to a fault. If she knew there was something she could do about a problem, she would keep trying. And it would take something pretty severe for her to give up.

Fact: Despite how strained their relationship had become, things had not become so broken that they would stop being friends. That tension was nowhere close to being severe enough for Marinette to give up.

Fact: Marinette was not one to seek attention. She never needed to. She never did anything to intentionally draw attention to herself and if anything, had willingly given up chances to get attention if it meant helping or supporting someone else.

Fact: Even if Marinette was having trouble in the class, she still had support. And more importantly, she had her family. She would never allow her parents to be hurt because of her.

With these facts in mind, Alya knew with some certainty that Marinette would not run away.

She just had to hold onto that.

“Marinette wouldn’t have done it.”

Nino started at that. “What?”

She turned to him, looking tired and weary, but so very certain.

She looked up at Nino, resolutely. “We made the mistake of not believing in Marinette before. We didn’t trust her when we should have. But just because we didn’t believe in her doesn’t mean she ever gave up on us.”

Alya smiled. “That’s just the kind of person Marinette is.

She rested her head on his shoulder.

“That was why she was our Everyday Ladybug. Because big or small, no matter the problem, she was there. Trying for us.”

She wouldn’t just leave.

Alya couldn’t expect Marinette to always be there. That wasn’t fair to her. To be required to keep trying despite the futility of it all was a burden that no one should ever be expected to continue to carry, especially if it was only hurting her. She knew that eventually even Marinette, as kind as she was, could have enough of the strain and move on. But she also knew that in her kindness, Marinette would never just disappear without a word.

She would never leave without saying goodbye.

“That’s why I know she didn’t run away.”

Because Marinette hadn’t said goodbye.

Nino took a breath, hesitating.

“You know that means that...something...probably happened to her.”

Alya nodded, barely holding back the tears as that horrible truth fully presented itself.

“I know.”

[cat-soda]

(please, oh please) just throw it all away

Near and Mello are two halves of a whole disaster waiting to happen.

Pairings: meronia, slight lindaxmatt

Wordcount: 760

Warnings for: hanahaki disease, hurt no comfort, angst

[AO3 Link]

The orphans of Wammy’s House whisper amongst themselves as Roger and Near return from the hospital; Roger is haggard-looking with bags under his eyes, and Near is pale and blinking slowly. Not an altogether unusual sight, but one that brings Linda barreling down the steps like some kind of freight train anyways.

Or, at least, that’s what it looks like from the second story window, where Mello is watching the proceedings.

“Did you want to go greet him?” asks Matt. His gaze is firmly set on his GameBoy, but his fingers are paused, hovering over the buttons.

Don’t you want to go greet him, Mello?

Linda wraps her arms around Near gingerly, not wanting to break whatever it is about him they’ve just fixed, and Near, sluggishly, brings his own up to pat her on the back. He says something to her and she pulls back, smiling. Near responds with a smile of his own, small but genuine. Present. Mello’s finger ta-ta-taps against the windowsill. “Why would I wanna do that?”

Matt finally glances over, eyes half-mast. “Gee, I wonder.”

Mello glares, but Matt’s already turned his focus back to his game, and when he looks back out the window, Near and the rest of the procession have reentered the building. He rolls his eyes, then sharply closes the blinds.

—

The thing is that Matt has this habit of encrypting and scrambling rumors and secrets behind his playful tone, behind the blue light shining off his goggles, his gardening-glove-clad hands. He keeps it all hidden away, except for the one thing that’s mostly an open secret by now: that Near and Mello are two halves of a whole disaster waiting to happen.

Linda puts it differently. She argues, instead —with dark pencil sketches and decisive, unflinching strokes of her paintbrush— that it’d look something more like a supernova, whatever it is that those two will make. They circle each other like stars. Duh, she adds.  

Stars don’t do that, though, he points out.

Ever heard of poetry? she shoots back, then goes flustered when Matt smiles at her like daybreak.

What is not a secret, nor a hushed rumor, nor whispered in the halls —rather, it’s openly gawked at, gossiped about, and “did you hear? did you hear?”— Pkah and Key and Rose and Fuel and, yes, Matt and Linda, too— they all notice when Near stops returning Mello’s glances.

—

“So hey,” says Mello, because they’re partnered together for a project and, with Near having been stuck in the hospital, it was obvious that they needed to make up for lost time. That is what he’s telling himself when he catches Near by the shoulder and turns the other boy around. He stops, though, at the way Near’s gaze meets his, searching, uncertain —what reason would Near have to ever feel uncertain? — before blinking.

“Oh.” Near tilts his head, and his white-haired fringe falls into charcoal-colored eyes. Unrelenting and inquisitive, the stare almost makes Mello flinch. “You must be Mello.”

And what the hell is that supposed to mean?

—

Well.

Here’s a picture: Near sitting with his back against the wall, and his dorm room bathed in the light of a dying sunset. He clutches bloody edelweiss tight in small, pale fists, and whispers to himself, over and over, “I will not die, I will not die, I will not die for someone who does not love me back.”

—

It’d be easy to put the pieces together, if Mello could think, or take a steady breath, or do something other than focus on the scar that mars Near’s chest. “It’s a clever procedure,” says Near, matter-of-fact. “Minimally invasive and highly efficient.”

Mello feels a tickling start at the back of his squeezed-shut throat. He coughs to clear it. Near quietly redoes the top three buttons of his shirt.

They look at each other.

Near does his curious “Near”-like half-smile. “I suppose introductions are in order?”

And Mello can’t explain the disgust that wells up in him in that moment. Just that it makes his stomach roil with nausea, just that it chokes him from the inside-out, just that it soaks his tongue in poison as he spits, “Go fuck yourself.”

(He can't bring himself to say much else.)

—

Later finds Mello holding a fistful of white violets in his hands, the petals limp with saliva. Moonlight and Matt’s concerned shouting fill the room, and Mello leans his head back against the wall; when he laughs, the sound is hollow, bitter.

—

.

.

.

Near and Mello have matching scars on their chests.

---

a/n: uh. so i may have gone overboard with the purple prose ;; sorry

hanahaki is a really interesting concept!! i think its mostly about perceived unrequited love, and a lot of people write really beautiful and creative things with it,,, it does seem that no one can really decide what the surgery does besides that It's Bad so. for the purposes of this fic, i went with the surgery causing you to lose all memories of that loved one, yep yep.

i'm not used to writing angst, so it was really challenging to try to get those impactful, emotional lines without having them sound too hammy haha!! this was also a different style of formatting/storytelling to me,,, i tried to get that "greyscale" feeling across, but lol... i do have more lighthearted meronia in the works (i also have a near-centric bachelor au with near as --you guessed it!!-- the nation's hottest new bachelor LMAO), so pls look forward to them!! (i'm really slow at writing tho orz) ...anyways i hope you all enjoyed!! pls lemme know what you think, if you can, and have an absolutely groovy day!!! byeeee

oh btw the title is from juby's cover of patchwork staccato!! i also really recommend listening to jefferz's cover ft. k*chan as well as lambia's cover!!! (and for funsies, another cover by McKatherine ft. kagamine rin, aka the love of my life and another by Epiaeon ft. all of miku's voicebanks haha)

[imagine-loki]

Soulbonds and Fairy Dust

TITLE: Soulbonds and Fairy Dust (rewrite) CHAPTER NO./ONE SHOT: 9/?

AUTHOR: nekoamamori ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine one of the fae has been helping the Avengers, jumping in to help them on missions and vanishing before Shield can bring her in.  Loki joins the team and convinces her to come talk to the team and consider joining before Shield takes more drastic measures. RATING: M NOTES/WARNINGS:  This is a rewrite of the original work of the same name.  Also on AO3 here

Sigyn took a moment as she entered the palace to use magic to change her clothes to an Asgardian style dress so she didn’t stand out as much.  She was remembering more of her memories just by being home and knew automatically what the dress needed to look like in order to fit in.  She made sure the green lines of power on her arm were covered when she did.  Loki was so uncomfortable with what had happened that she was certain that he was going to reject the bond, going to reject her.  

Even though she could see the bond was shimmering between the marks on her skin and the marks on his.  She could see the soul binding.  It was part of her nature to see such things after all. 

Loki strode with such speed that Sig and Thor had to rush to keep up with him. They finally reached Frigga’s suite and Loki knocked, waiting for someone to answer for once instead of just barging in.  Sigyn remembered that they used to just barge in. She remembered this place and these people.  Now that shew as home, she was remembering her life there. 

Frigga opened the door herself for them.  Apparently they were expected.  “Come in, darlings,” she bid the three of them, noting Loki’s fear and anxiety etched clearly on his face.  She reached up to touch his cheek reassuringly.

He gave her a warm loving smile and pulled her into a hug.  Mama’s boy never changed, no matter what was going on in his life.  Sig couldn’t help smiling at the familiar old gesture. “It’s alright, darling. Whatever it is, it’s alright,” Frigga reassured him as she hugged him back.  Whatever it was, whatever was wrong, it couldn’t be worse than her son coming home in chains because of a crime he didn’t choose to commit. 

Loki released Frigga and showed her the spirals of power on his arm.  “Have you seen anything like this before?” The purple lines radiated power as they spiraled up his arm, glowing softly with the new soulbond.

Frigga gave him a warm smile while Thor and Sig watched on, anxious for her response. “Of course I have, darling,” she told him gently and led her three children, Sigyn included in that count, into her sitting room proper so they could all discuss the matter.  She also took the opportunity to say hello to her other son and kiss his cheek and to welcome Sig back to Asgard.  She noted the green swirls of power on the back of Sig’s hand, which she hadn’t been able to cover with her sleeve. She wasn’t surprised that Sigyn was Loki’s soulbond. 

 Frigga turned to Loki once her three children were all seated on various couches and chairs around her sitting room with tea.  She let the illusion fade from her own arm where light and dark gold lines of power swirled together from her hand up her arm.  “It is a soulbond, darling. The mark of soulmates,” she told Loki gently.  She knew that he knew what it was.  He just needed the confirmation.  He needed the truth.  She hoped her suspicion that Loki would demand the soulbond be broken was unfounded. She watched his brows furrow while he thought over the implications and she waited patiently, sipping on her tea.  

Loki didn’t think he deserved a soulmate, or that he would ever have one, or find her if he did have one. “I actually have a soul mate? Me?” The disbelief was obvious in his voice and Frigga suddenly knew the problem.  He didn’t think he was worthy of a soulmate, not after the alien invasion, not after the things he’d done.

“Yes, darling. That is the only cause for those marks,” Frigga replied gently.  She didn’t want to hurt her son.

Loki was in absolute shock.  They were all in shock as soulbonds weren’t the most common of things, even on Asgard.  Though the royal family tended to have more than their fair share of them.  Loki never thought he deserved one, not after all the mistakes he’d made.  Again, Frigga waited patiently for Loki to digest that piece of information and for his brain to start working again.

“What does this mean, Mother?” He asked, sounding like a small boy in his demand for answers.  He was having a hard time wrapping his mind around all of this.

“It means that Lady Sigyn is your soulmate,” she told him patiently.  She hesitated, but continued.  “The soulbond increases both of your magic, plus increases things like your telepathic bond to the other. There are other perks of course. Though the bond does have one catch,” she paused again and waited to be sure she had all three of their attention before she would continue.  “If one half of a soulbond dies, so does the other,” 

Loki did not at all like the sound of that.  Thanos was still a threat looming over his head and he fully expected that threat to come back.  He didn’t want to risk Sig’s life.  He didn’t want her life in the balance if Thanos came calling again.

Frigga read the expressions flashing on his face and waited for his conclusion, or more questions.  She also noted Sigyn’s expression.  Sigyn was sitting just out of Loki’s ability to see she and she was excited at the prospect of having a home in someone, though she was also wary that Loki was going to break the soulbond. Frigga was observant, and knew her son well, so she spoke again.  “Thor, why don’t she take Lady Sigyn and show her to her suite.  It’s the same one she had as a child,” Frigga ordered, dismissing them both.  Loki wouldn’t talk to her candidly in front of witnesses, even witnesses like his brother and soulmate.  And he needed to be able to speak candidly. 

“Yes, Mother,” Thor replied and offered Sigyn a hand.  The two of them left quickly, though Sig glanced worriedly back at Loki before she left.  She wouldn’t disobey Mama Frigga, though and agreed to be escorted by Thor.  None of them would dare disobey Mama Frigga.

Frigga turned her attention back to Loki when Sigyn and Thor had gone.  “You seem displeased by this news,” she started gently once they were alone. 

“I’m still in danger, Mother. Being on Midgard doesn’t change that. The news you just gave me makes it dangerous for Sigyn to be bonded to me,” Loki told her, speaking his concerns.  Frigga knew about Thanos and the truth of why he had led the alien invasion on New York. 

“There is always danger surrounding us, my darling. That does not mean we should abandon happiness when we can find it, simply due to fear. And you are currently bonded to Sigyn,” she reminded him.  Her voice and tone were as gentle and kind as usual.

His heart broke when he asked the question that he needed answered. “Is there any way we can remove it? I don’t want to put her in danger. I don’t want to bind her to a monster,” he hesitated before he admitted the rest. “I love her too much!”

“You are no monster,” Frigga snapped at him firmly with a mother’s conviction.  Loki gave her a small smile at her automatic dismissal of his self-pity.  It was definitely a mother’s reaction. Frigga sighed. “It can be removed. If that is truly what you wish…"

Loki sighed.  He didn’t agree with Frigga saying he wasn’t a monster, but she was his mother and that was her job.  “I don’t know…” he put his head in his hands, frustration evident and rolling off of him in waves.  “I’ve never dealt with something like this before.  I love her.  I have since we were children.  And yes, I need to become acquainted with the woman she’s become.  But I don’t want her in danger or tied to a monster for eternity, either!”

Frigga moved to sit next to him on the couch and pulled him into her arms, letting him rest his head on her shoulder, just as she had when he was a child and needed comfort.  “Of course you have never dealt with anything like this, before,” she told him gently and stroked his hair.  “But can you really live with never touching her again? That would be the cost of breaking the bond,”

Loki shook his head emphatically.  “I don’t think I could live with that,” he told her softly.

“Then you will have to learn to live with the bond, darling. I know it’s difficult being told you’re soulmates when you just found her again, but can you really imagine life without her now that you have her back?” Frigga asked just as gently, guiding him to the answer that would make him happiest.

Loki shook his head again. “I thought she was dead. I mourned her for centuries.  I never really believed I would ever see her again.  I can’t give her up now that I finally have her back,” he said with conviction in his tone.  He wouldn’t, couldn’t, lose her again.

“We all believed her dead,” Frigga stroked his hair while she held him in her arms.  “I can break the bond if that’s truly what you wish, or you can treat that girl like the most precious thing in your life, earn her love, and finally find the happiness you have been missing since she was taken from us,”

Loki wrapped his arms around Frigga. “I will do my best,” he promised her after a moment.  It only took a moment.  He knew what he wanted, but it was still hard.  He couldn’t give up Sig.  Not again.  “I’ve never had someone really care for me besides you and her. It will be an adjustment,”

Frigga hugged him tighter and smiled warmly.  “She did care for you. Even as children. Or do you really expect me to believe that the incident with the bilgesnipe was her fault?” Sig had lied and claimed that incident so Loki wouldn’t get into even more trouble, since he’d been grounded at the time.

That drew a laugh from Loki.  “You always could see right through me, Mother,” he told her warmly.

“I am her mother of course I can,” she told him and pressed a kiss to his forehead.  “You will be fine, my darling. A soulbond is a heavy responsibility, yes, but the easy way out of it would just hurt you both,” she reminded him.  “I will have the texts pertaining to soulbonds sent to her chambers. In the meantime, don’t you have a lady to reassure of you affections?” She teased.  She’d seen how Loki had been acting since he came home and he would have to reassure Sigyn that he cared for her and make it up to her.

Loki nodded and released Frigga, kissing her on the cheek.  “Thank you, Mother,”

“Anytime, my darling,” she told him warmly and saw him out of her suite.