#THE SCRIBBLES!!! I NEED TO FEED MY PEOPLE THEY ARE STARVING!!! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

psalacanthea · 5 months ago

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Fanfic Friday- 7/12

A continuation of this bit of fic! More of Astarion and Zyn post-canon in the Underdark, if they'd met when he was alive.

Herein lies a bit of dealing with the complications of running a city of vampires, and the story of their original meeting, something Astarion has long since forgotten.

here's the first part!

...

Everything was easier with her blood running through his veins.

He could think more clearly, plan more thoroughly, avoid the endless, counterproductive fighting and bickering. Astarion understood now why Cazador had kept them down for so long eating nothing but rats. It was just another method of control. With Zynatheri’s blood flowing through him, he felt above the bickering, able to see past it, to anticipate and subvert it. He felt…cleverer than his siblings.

And that was dangerous.

The desire to be above, to stay in control– it was cruelly strong.

But, for now, it simply made it easier for him to do what needed doing. Insufferable moral problems could be shelved until later, when the sole available willing source of blood wasn’t Zynatheri. He certainly wasn’t going to let anyone else bite her, or even consider asking her to. Especially not remembering the sweet intimacy of it, the soft sound she’d made in her throat when he’d kissed her afterward…

The voice coming from the scrying orb was heavy with wry amusement. “Daydreaming, father?”

“Only a little,” he said, snapping back to the moment. Astarion glanced at the orb in the middle of the table, and then down at the hastily-scribbled sheaves of notes. Gods, so many notes. Pages upon pages of urgent needs. One would think keeping people nominally fed would be appreciated, especially with how long they had suffered, starving, but no~o.

Barely a pat on the back and then the next problem on the ever-growing list.

He might not have taken this responsibility if he’d known it came with so much sheer ingratitude!

“I realize that extending my personal protection doesn’t…sweeten the pot enough to convince people to work in a ruined Underdark city full of vampires. But on the other hand, there’s perfectly good money in it. Even just a few skilled masons would…” He sighed, spinning a hand in the air as he thought. Why was this so difficult? Ugh, why was he doing this the difficult way when they could just kidnap people? “We just had a refugee crisis, surely there’s people desperate for work. We’ll just start scooping up the poorest of the poor. They’ll be grateful! And, having been starving, they won’t ask for as much food, hopefully.”

“You could make it sound a little less predatory.”

“Darling, my dearest reflection,” Astarion sighed, trying not to snap at her for her obsession with wording, of all things. Shouldn’t she be grateful he was being honest? He could certainly offer all sorts of pretty lies if that’s what she preferred. “I am offering refuge to people in need! Not out of predatory charity, but in exchange for work. I’m not even asking them for blood– incidentally, I was talking to your mother about what future commodification of blood might look like.”

“I suppose with your condition it’s inevitable,” she agreed, but he could hear the note of vague unease. “And I’m not judging you for that. As long as you’re being fair and reasonable.”

“I’m not saying that selling your blood is preferable to selling your body, I’m simply saying that there may be those who find it a…welcome change in career.”

Lilithera gave a faint, dubious ‘mmh’, but her voice was only musing. “I’ll talk to my assistant Fredrika. But daily your recruitment list gets longer, father, and eventually money and privacy are going to start being a problem. Now that you’ve…somewhat solved the starvation issue, the next step has to be working on how to feed and protect mortals while you’re looking for immigrants. You don’t have any skilled laborers. You can’t have them starving or being eaten!”

“We can import,” he reminded her, smiling at her ‘hmm’ of agreement. “My people have already excavated half of my claimed district, and we’re turning up more and more tradable goods as we clear out the previous tenants. Precious metals, gems, magical items, cultural artifacts…”

“Don’t you dare sell Drow artifacts to the surface! You need contact with the local Drow. They know how to sustain a population down there, father! Learning to run a farm in the Underdark will do you so much more good than importing food. Convince mother to contact her family– bring whatever important pieces you can find to pave the way.”

“I– what?” he asked, pushing off the desk and turning back towards the scrying orb. Not that her idea wasn’t helpful, but…Zynatheri’s family? “I was under the impression they were all dead.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Well, she told–” No, she hadn’t. But she’d implied as much. “Wonderful. Slippery little pest.”

“I love mum, I do. But you have to understand trying to get her to do anything difficult is like trying to give a cat a bath. She’ll twist herself in any direction she can to avoid it. And unfortunately she’s spent three hundred years manipulating people. She’s breathtakingly talented at it.”

“You could sound less admiring, dearest.”

“I wish I’d inherited that talent, I’d get so much more done around here. But she did only learn it to avoid responsibility, I suppose…it wouldn’t work for me. Convince mother to parlay with House Tzahane. If for no other reason than you need someone to educate you on how to set up farms in the Underdark. Then you can move past starvation, and start hiring skilled workers to help you rebuild. You can’t afford to import food in the long run. You need to be self-sufficient.”

“She ah–” He might as well ask for help. “She told me to speak to you. Your mother has asked me to-" Gods, it sounded embarrassing, but he might as well just come out with it. "She wants me to court her.”

“No,” Lilithera laughed, voice bright and delighted. “What, actually court her? That’s so out of character. Not saying I know much about mother’s love life, but I’m fairly certain most times it starts in bed and ends the next morning. Every single time. ‘Romance is like fish, little Lily. It goes bad quickly, better to get rid of it before it turns’.”

While he was grateful that Zynatheri hadn’t said anything about his past in that respect, it did make this seem a bit more…well, serious. Which it wasn’t. Was it?

“Both of us are being cautious. Our lives are rather twisted together. All your fault, I think you’ll find.”

“I won’t apologize for being born. At the risk of sounding like mum, you’re the one who didn’t take your cassil.”

“Well, what does she like in these circumstances?” Ugh. “Flowers? Poetry? She wouldn’t say a damned thing, she just told me to ask you.”

“So you’re interested in courting?”

Why did she have to ask? He didn’t want to think about it. “I– I don’t know! I just prefer having her here, and she said that if I wanted her to stay, I had to make it worth her while. She was the one that called it courtship. I just would like her to stop flitting around like a pixie in a panic and keep my hair fixed for me, is that really too much to ask?”

Lily’s voice was uncharitably amused. “Hmmh. Well, I’ll tell you, she likes things she can look at.”

“What does that mean?”

“Flowers, jewelry, paintings, stained glass, curiosities– she has a fondness for pretty things she can just gaze at. And she’s a bit of a magpie, but she’s not picky about how expensive something is. For years her favorite piece of jewelry was a gilt and glass gem bracelet I found in a gutter and gave her to go with her performance costume. When the cheap clasp broke and she lost it, she was devastated.”

“You know, I have yet to get a present from you.”

“Oh hush, yes you have. Oh! She hates diamonds.”

“Hates diamonds? Really?”

“She says they’re gems without any of the joy. She prefers prettily colored things. Especially opals. Quite honestly, for mother I would look at what she buys for you. She’s showing you what she values and likes by bringing them to you in the hopes of making your life a little easier and happier.”

Hmh. That did make sense. “I suppose we’re both fond of the little luxuries.”

“Yes. Oh! She loves animals of any sort, even the creepy-crawly things. When we were in Neverwinter, there was a Lord who was desperate to be her patron. She had no interest, but he had the most beautiful aviary. For a while she strung him along just so she could bring me to the aviary and sit among all the brightly-colored birds. I have some fond memories of that.”

“She is such a little charlatan,” Astarion chuckled, feeling a surge of fondness.

“Honestly, mum is just a free spirit at heart, father. Give her a place to rest and things she loves and she’ll always come back to you, just like she always comes back to me.”

Ugh.

Come back.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? She was always on the verge of leaving, and it felt like there was nothing he could do about it. “It…that sort of trust goes against my nature, darling. I hate the way she always disappears.”

“She’s very fond of you.”

“Fonder than she has been of…other people in her life?”

“Papa,” Lilithera chuckled.

“She told me to ask you! The brat refuses to talk about herself– her favorite tactic is to blurt ‘ask your daughter’ and then flee the room as if her tail is on fire.”

“Mother’s never been in a relationship that I know of. When I was a child she poured everything into taking care of me. Eventually as I grew up I realized she did have lovers, but never for long. She’s always avoided attachment. Honestly, not to be rude, but if it weren’t for me you’d just be another forgotten bedmate, too.”

“No, I’ve gotten that impression myself. She hasn’t had anything nice to say about our love affair so long ago. But…she said I was special to her. I suppose that’s your doing.”

“Just believe her, father. It’s a risk, but what isn’t?”

Hmh. He hated that she might be right. That he might simply have to step forward on faith, without knowing if there was something ahead waiting to catch him. “That bracelet you gave her…what did it look like?”

“Oh, gods, it was so long ago…it was gold, because the gilding flaked. Blue gems? I can’t remember what cut, I’m sorry. But it was pieces of chain between the gems.”

“From a gutter? And she really treasured it so much?”

“Mhmm! I told her it was pretty and blue, like her, and she nearly cried. It was rather cute, thinking back on it. We were so close when I was small…”

It wasn’t regret, precisely, that he felt. Jealousy, maybe, but it was a jealousy that was thick with the rueful acknowledgement that– “I would have been an absolutely awful father. You would have despised me.”

“Perhaps. Not everyone’s meant to be, like grandmother. Horrible woman. Don’t ever ask mother about her unless you’re prepared to hear some very unpleasant things. But we get along now, you and I.”

“Well, yes, after she did all the work!”

Lilithera laughed, bright and delighted. “All the more reason to spoil her, father. You owe her.”

Gods.

"Don't you dare breathe a word of this to anyone. Before you go, darling, about Gale..."

"Oh dear, is it already so late? I'm sorry, Father! I have a meeting with the head archivist! I love you!"

"Don't you d-"

The orb went dull and silent.

Offended, Astarion stared at it, forehead furrowing. Why, the absolute wretch! How dare she flee from the conversation? Well, now he was going to have to tattle on her to her mother.

Zynatheri wouldn't stand for this, and neither would he.

Well, having been bitten wasn’t the worst experience in the world.

Yes, Zyn’s neck hurt, and yes she felt a bit worn and hazy, but other than that she didn’t feel too exhausted. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t lost blood before. Besides, Astarion hadn’t even complained about her stealing his bed for the night and she had books to read, so all in all she was quite fine. He’d make sure the twins were safe.

Even so, she’d Sent to them a couple times, just to check in. Apparently they were having the time of their lives down in the depths of the House, mapping things out for Astarion, hunting for treasure. She would rather not go herself, but she was happy for them that they had. Astarion said he was off inventorying things to be sold off surface-side, which sounded very dull to her. All in all, Zyn had the best lot out of anyone today.

And all for the low, low price of a little blood.

She’d had a bath and refilled the tub for when Astarion returned later, which was enough effort.

Zynatheri was deep into a book of famous Waterdhavian urban myths and murderers when Astarion returned, his footsteps echoing up the barren hall before the door creaked open. She didn’t mind his faintly condescending chuckle as he caught sight of her, lips twitching into a faint smile behind her book. Rugs softened his footsteps as he approached. She ignored him impishly. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of burgundy as he threw his coat over the back of the daybed.

“Have you even moved today? Please tell me you ate, at least, you have to get your strength back.”

“I ate,” she replied, eyes reflexively slitting as one of his cool hands rested on her head. Finally she peeked up over the top of her book. He looked…so much better than he had the night before. In fine spirits. “Shall I heat up your bath?”

His eyes were soft, but amused as he gazed down at her. “Soon. Thank you.”

Astarion sat down on the edge of the bed, and she watched as he kicked off his boots, letting out a long, slow sigh. They were a bit dusty and stained. It looked as if he’d had a hard day today. Not that she felt bad for being lazy or anything, of course.

“You must have been running all over the city.”

“I wanted to deal with some issues that have been plaguing me while I had…the energy,” he replied, leaning back on a hand to try and peek at her book. She turned it towards him, and he gave a faint ‘hmm’.

“You mean the blood,” she teased.

His lips twitched up into an amused smile at her words. “Well, there’s no need to be gauche. May I? What are we reading about?”

Pleased he was still willing to let her enjoy some cuddling despite him being annoyed with their discussion last night, she scooted closer to the edge of the bed. As he shifted behind her, laying on top of the blanket instead of under it with her, she leafed back to the beginning of the story. A hand hesitantly touched her hip as he settled, and then wrapped around her stomach at her faint ‘mhm’ of approval.

They adjusted a bit until they got settled, with her tucked up against him, blanket between them, his chin resting on her shoulder. Comfortable, simple. They read together, with him occasionally getting impatient when she took a little too long. Eventually those little annoyances added up, and he tried to forcibly turn the page, which got his hand smacked with the book. Grumbling, he pulled back and buried his face against the back of her neck.

“Read to me,” he demanded, muffled.

Zyn rolled her eyes.

But, well, they were only a few pages from the end and he’d likely had a long day…and she did like the sound of her own voice. Succumbing to the inevitable, she began reading to him in a slow, even voice, picking up from the top of the second page. Languid as a sleeping cat, he relaxed against her neck, letting out a heavy, cool breath.

His hand remained where it was, neither moving nor retreating, lightly cradling her stomach. Tucked comfortably against him, she finished the little tale of dismemberment and horror– terribly sensationalized, of course. Which was utterly unnecessary. Reality was strange enough without excessive embellishment.

At the end of the tale, it turned out to have been a servant of Bhaal after all.

What a predictable outcome.

“I would move on to the next one, but you’ll feel better for a bath,” she said, not just because he smelled a bit musty.

There was a wordless complaint, somewhere between a groan and a whine, his arm tightening around her, hand clutching more possessively. Amused, she let herself be dragged into the cradle of his body, his legs tucking up underneath hers, his other arm sliding under her head to grab her far shoulder. Pinning her in place. The blanket was still between them, though, a thin barrier.

“Or we could lay a bit longer,” she said, not bothering to hide her exasperated amusement.

Much to her surprise, she didn’t get something spiteful in response. Instead, he asked in a quiet, almost embarrassed voice, lips pressed to the back of her neck, “will you be here tomorrow night?”

“Yes,” she said instantly, not needing to think of it. They’d only been here four days, after all. The twins would never forgive her if they left so quickly. “I will be here tomorrow night.”

Only then did he release her, leaving the bed without another word to disappear behind the screen. She forgot her role until he reminded her, poking his head out. Leaning over the side of the bed, she sang her lazy little song to warm his bathwater, tucking herself back into the blankets afterwards.

Only for a few minutes, though.

Once he was relaxed in the water, she left the bed to keep herself from reading ahead without him. Wandering to the fireplace, she poked more cavewood into it– they seemed to have a lot of the stuff right now, cut down from the overgrown city. It wasn’t as if they generally needed it to cook. Or even, technically, to warm up a home.

“Have you thought about exporting cavewood?”

“I don’t know the first thing about how to set up forests,” Astarion replied, in that hazy, languid voice he always seemed to use in the bath.

She finished prodding the fire and stood up, gaze met by the pictures of the children on the mantle that she’d brought. No pictures of him. Zynatheri frowned. She needed Astarion to sit for some portraits. Hmm.

“Lack of knowledge seems to be our biggest hurdle here,” she agreed, adjusting the oval-framed painting of Lilithera’s second daughter. Of the youngest, she was the one who most looked like Zyn– and the one who was least like her. “How did our family make such a contrary child as Portia?”

“It’s unfathomable. I’ve never been contrary in my life,” Astarion lied.

“What color do you want to wear if I commission you a portrait? Violet, perhaps? A rich navy? That would make your eyes look brilliant. But no. We should place you against a dark wall– pale gold and blush with touches of sapphire? Oh.” She clasped her cheeks, imagining it in her mind. Yes. “Magnificent.”

“You know, when you constantly change the subject without warning, people can have difficulty keeping up.”

“Just looking at the portraits. There isn’t one of you, and you need at least a couple,” she mused, head tilting to the side.

“Why, exactly?”

“Well, they’re not family portraits unless you’re there,” she reasoned. “You can just get one done and make copies for the children.”

“There are no pictures of you.”

Well, yes, but… “It seemed a little presumptuous to put a portrait of myself up on your mantle.”

“You spent all day lounging in my bed,” he reminded her lazily. “Could you be a darling and pour me a drink?”

“You have the only proper bed in the city, of course I’m lounging in it,” she said testily, adjusting the portrait one last time before wandering over to his desk. Rothe blood wasn’t much, but it was something. At least he had the luxury of enjoying it in a civilized manner.

Picking up the bottle, she was about to pour into a goblet when she realized it was stained with dried blood. Annoyed, she shifted a glance to the bathing screen. A withering one. Hopefully the bastard felt it.

“Your cup is dirty.”

“And it would take you five seconds to fix that, but you’re using that time instead to complain to me.”

“Or I could pour the blood into the dirty cup.”

“Please don’t,” he said, pained.

“Are you going to clean it yourself after you’re done?”

“Don’t talk to me like one of the children,” he grumbled.

“Don’t act like one of them,” she replied with a laugh, and sang her small cleaning cantrip. With the cup pristine, she poured a healthy measure of blood from the enchanted ewer, not minding the way it steamed. So did mulled wine. Ooh. That sounded nice. “Do you have any wine? Spices?”

“What? Why– yes to the former, I think? Why would I have spices?”

“Mulled wine sounds nice, that’s all. Well, I can at least warm it up and add honey, I never leave home without honey for my wine. Shall I just reach blindly around the screen there, or…”

“It’s nothing you haven’t seen. Don’t–” There was a touch of frustration in his voice. “Don’t treat me as if I’m fragile. Please?”

“Silly viper, I’m trying to let you show me what you’re comfortable with,” she teased him, not minding a bit being invited to infringe on his space. “I know what it feels like to not be allowed to speak up for yourself. When I first started…regaining control of my life, my comfort would change by the hour. We’re complicated things, thinking creatures. You tell me what you’re comfortable with, and I’ll oblige.”

“Sometimes I’m profoundly grateful how careful you are, and sometimes it infuriates me.”

“Yes, I can be irritating.” She broached his space, knowing if she didn’t he might get more upset. “That was nice, having a cuddle together. Could we do it more often?”

All that was visible was his pale, sculpted upper chest and bared shoulders, but even that was distractingly attractive. Archery really did make for lovely muscles. There was something charmingly defiant about his curls when they were damp, disordered from their usual careful coiffure. His eyes had been narrowed, but when she spoke they relaxed, his wet fingers brushing hers, a droplet falling from his fingertips. The contact lingered as he took the goblet from her, their pinkies twining together. There was the slightest tug, a hesitantly hopeful beckon, and she followed it willingly.

Zynatheri sank to the new rug next to the tub, resting her temple against the cold stone basin.

The water splashed softly as he shifted, and then his hand settled on her head, long fingers idly massaging her scalp. Her eyes slitted closed like a contented cat. It felt heavenly.

“Will you read to me if I allow it?”

“Mhmm,” she agreed drowsily.

“Then yes. But I don’t know that it’s enough to make you stay.”

She sighed. It was a bit selfish of him to keep bringing it up like that, but selfishness wasn’t exactly a negative in her books. It might be crucial to his survival as well down here, and she did want that. More than she realized, and not just for the childrens’ sakes. They were both much less…sharp these days, and got along much better than before.

“It’s enough for a little while, at least,” she replied, lulled into a stupor by his languid caresses. “You have time to think of another reason.”

“Or I could just keep doing this.”

“Mmh,” she agreed drowsily. “That would work. But people would make some rather interesting assumptions about our relationship if you did it in public.”

“May I ask…” Much to her surprise he sounded a bit awkward when he trailed off. At her soft ‘hmm?’ he gave a small sigh. “I have to say this so rarely, but this actually isn’t meant as an insult. How can someone have lived for three hundred years and still be so…simple? Live so carelessly.”

She didn’t find it insulting, because he was right. “It takes more work than you might think. I did what I had to. I raised our daughter as best I could, and I’m done. That was enough responsibility.”

“It doesn’t bother you, watching your child– our childrens’ accomplishments outstrip your own?”

“They have them because of me,” she said, happily basking in that fact. All sorts of accolades, but her work had been finished! Quite honestly she loved Lily and her children, and her children’s children, but she despised babies. It was so nice there weren’t any in the family right now. “And now look at you! I gave you a whole city. Where’s the appreciation?”

“I appreciate you very much,” he said, annoyance and amusement clear. “But that doesn’t mean I understand you. There’s no ambition at all in this pretty head, is there?”

“No, ick. Not even a little. No thank you.”

“Strange little baggage.” His fingers wended through her hair, pulling strands from her braid, idly toying as he relaxed.

Contentedly she drowsed, in that half-meditative state she’d perfected over the years. Comfortable, soft, and hazy. Granted, she was leaning against stone and sitting on the floor; that could have been improved upon. But other than that, it was quite nice.

His long, graceful fingers felt nice running through her hair, with the occasional detour to stroke her cheek. Having decided to simply take this as it came, Zynatheri was perfectly happy to let him do whatever he liked; after all, if she’d had her way they would have been in bed ages ago. But that wasn’t what he needed.

She wasn’t sure he knew what he wanted, let alone needed, so she’d let him completely lead the way.

It was a shame that annoyed him, but she found that entertaining as well.

It was probably time, though, to be honest with him about what she wanted. That knowledge did annoy her, partially because it roused her from her very comfortable state, and she knew it would stop his stroking her hair. So she held back for now, mulling it over in her mind.

What was the best way to bring it up?

Probably to just be blunt; it would make things quicker.

When he asked her to reheat the water, that felt like a better time, and she prepared herself as she rose to sit on the edge of the basin. His hand left her head and settled on her thigh as she sang his water back to scalding. Too hot for her. But after his first hiss at the change in temperature, he slumped blissfully, eyes slitting closed.

He sprawled back attractively, fingers resting on the base of his cup, arm carelessly flung out of the bath.

It was amusing how his skin barely flushed from the heat, remaining pristine and alabaster as ever. Well, despite the scars. Content to lounge on the wide lip of the bath, one leg dangling down, she pulled her hair over her shoulder to re-braid, the plait loose and uneven from her long night of being lazy in bed.

As she braided, she hummed, and eventually he shifted to rest his cheek against the side of her thigh, tugging on her arm until she scooted close enough for him to get comfortable.

"Before this goes much further, I should be honest and admit to you that I'm not interested in loyalty," she said, keeping her voice calm and mild.

"Loyalty?" he asked simply.

Hmmh, that was a bit vague. Zynatheri tried again. "I generally don’t let myself get very attached to people. Yes, I have had many friends and lovers that were more than a night–”

“Lilithera didn’t seem to think that was the case,” Astarion interrupted her.

Zyn smirked, voice wry. “So that means I did my job properly. I am a...whimsical person, and I follow my whims. Does that bother you?"

"Stop prancing around the point, please," he said with a tinge of annoyance. He huffed, shifting his head against her thigh so he could glance up at her, ruby eyes narrowed. "Just come out and say it plainly."

"I bed a lot of people," she said, unable to help a small laugh cascading over her words. "And I don't plan on stopping. But it's only bedding and nothing more."

Astarion gave a faint 'hmm', eyes drifting back to the bath. "As long as you don't sow chaos down here, darling, I don't particularly care. Lily, on the other hand..."

"Our girl doesn’t need to know the sort of things you and I get up to, Astarion.”

“Excuse me? Why, I’m a very model of virtue,” he scoffed.

What an absolute liar.

Even when he was alive he was an awful person.

“Sounds like someone wants to hear the story of how we actually met,” she said with a quirk of her lips.

Affront tainted both his voice and expression as he reared back, straightening up in the water. “Did you lie to me?”

“No,” she laughed, leaning down. “I simply didn’t tell the whole truth. Not in front of Lily! She’d be shocked by what a degenerate you were.”

He pinched the end of her nose, smiling when she reared back in offense. “Mmh, now I must know.”

She reached out a hand for his cup, admiring the way he picked it up to hand it to her. The way the stem slid between his fingers that curved up to cradle the bowl actually reminded her of that night they’d met some two centuries before. That realization made the memory sharper, closer to the surface. It would be easier to tell.

“I’m going to get some wine. And maybe a pillow, the edge of the bath is too hard for my poor arse.” Zyn rose to her feet, slipping around the curtain to leave the bathing alcove.

His voice followed her retreat plaintively. “Refill?”

“Yes, that’s why I took your cup,” she chuckled, amused with him. “Does it feel better to sip throughout the day, or to just have one big bite?”

“You know, I’ve never thought about it,” he mused. “I hadn’t really ever had the chance to drink my fill before the nautiloid. There’s just something to be said for experience of having it in a civilized manner, even if it is better straight from the source. It makes the animal blood…more palatable.”

She set his glass down and went into the next room in search of the wine she’d been promised earlier. Dizzying, crowded, stacks of crates, barrels, and sacks were haphazardly left from floor to ceiling with absolutely no rhyme or reason at all. Zynatheri felt the twinge of a headache. How did he live like this?!

How did he find anything?

“Where the hells is the wine?”

“Ah…somewhere on the left wall, in a crate with a missing slat.”

She stared over her shoulder at the doorway, expression flattening. “That’s the best you can do.”

“It is! You’re so understanding, darling~!”

“Remember, if you murder him, Lilithera will be upset,” she told herself, loudly enough for him to hear.

He laughed, the sound both self-satisfied and innocently delighted, as if he were a child playing some impish prank.

It was frustrating how delightful the bastard was. Zynatheri forged into the crates with an annoyed, but determined air. It took her a few minutes to find what she was after, but eventually she located the wine. The crate was stamped with the Zhentarim sigil. Tsk.

What a thief.

Amused, she liberated a bottle from it, turning it over. Not her favorite, but decent enough. It’d do. With a shake of her head, she scanned the mess one last time and turned to leave the room. No door, of course; most of the doors were gone entirely. One day perhaps they’d replace it, but she really needed at least a curtain.

Now that she knew the mess was there, she’d keep thinking about it unless it was hidden.

“I now know the reason you want me to stay. So I keep cleaning up after you.”

“Mmh, that is a nice bonus…but only a bonus, my little fox.”

Zynatheri couldn’t even hold it against him, quite honestly, because after escaping from Menzoberranzan her own cleaning habits had been rather atrocious. Trauma had a way of doing that. Ugh, no, she couldn’t think about that too much or she’d be even more inclined to stay.

Something about Astarion made her want to coddle him.

In lieu of a second goblet, which did not exist, she just worked the cork out with her knife and resigned herself to drinking from the bottle. Not the first time, nor the last. Leaving the corked blade on his desk, she refilled his glass and brought both back to the bath.

Still impossibly, irritatingly alluring, he was slumped in the bath with his eyes closed, a loose, damp curl clinging charmingly to his forehead. Amused, she set the bottle down and perched on the edge of the tub reaching out to lightly brush it aside. One ruby eye cracked open to peek up at her, his mouth still soft and inviting in relaxation.

“Your wine,” she teased, offering him the glass of rothe blood.

With a faint smile he accepted it, their fingers lightly brushing. As he turned to set it aside, she began to rise, only to stall as he abruptly grabbed her by the waistband of her trousers. Curiously, she peeked over at him. He wasn’t even looking at her, but when she tugged at his wrist, he finally glanced her way.

“Where are you going?” he asked arrogantly, as if she didn’t have the right.

“I need a pillow, I told you.”

“Come in the bath.” He gave her another, more forcible tug, stalling when she slapped his arm.

Zyn glared at him, scooting further away despite his pulling on her. “I don’t have other clothes, you pain in my arse. What am I supposed to do when they get drenched?”

“You do have other clothes. Lily sent them for you,” he reminded her, and laughed at her instant scowl. He released her trousers with a flick of his hand, voice dismissive. “Go get your pillow. I want my story time.”

“People pay good money for what you get for free, you know,” she teased him, careful not to knock over her wine as she slid to her feet. “But you always did have a good eye.”

There was a hint of a purr to his voice, intrigue and coquettish interest. “Did I? I’d love to hear about it.”

Hmm. Why not make it a bit more entertaining? Show him why she was worth the bribery it would take to keep her around more often.

Magic, summoned by her voice and the story she began to weave, sufficed the room with illusion to echo her tale. A murmur of vague conversation, the clink of glass, laughter and music filled the air. The surroundings blurred, overlaid by a scene of gilded pillars and indistinct figures dancing and conversing. The flowers in the vases, draped over the windows…they’d been blue and yellow, she thought.

They blossomed in bright bursts of color, adding more detail to the illusory environs.

“It was a party, an event for the younger nobility. Which of course meant it was full of drunken revelry, licentious behavior, and other entertaining things. I myself…” She peeked around the curtain with a coy smirk, lowering her lashes to peek at him through them. “I was there to catch the eye of my target.”

Astarion smiled lazily, finger idly circling the rim of his glass as he watched her through the steam. “The target you were going to kill. But why were you going to kill him?”

“Oh, darling, it’s always better not to know when you’re doing it for money.”

It was very little surprise that he immediately rested his head on her thigh again with a possessive air.

“Which I did, of course, having been…informed of his preferences beforehand.” She took a sip of the wine, wetting her throat. “He wasn’t very interesting to me on a personal level, quite honestly. Boring. But a job is a job, after all. His friend, however, I found quite to my taste. Very handsome. Beautiful hands– actually the first thing I noticed.”

Astarion smirked, lifting a hand out of the bath to stare at it, water dripping from his fingertips, beaded droplets clinging to his skin like polished jewels. “They are nice, aren’t they?”

“Mmh,” she agreed, voice languid and slow. “I was aware that there was a small getaway planned to someone’s riverside estate. Which was, of course, the perfect opportunity to get the job done. I flirted my way into an invitation. To be entertainment, of course, not a guest.”

“I’m certain there were all kinds of entertainment you had planned,” he teased her.

Zyn laughed, unabashed. “I wanted to enjoy myself a little before having to run.”

“Quite understandable, really.”

“Your ‘friend’ was very, very flirty and handsy. You were not. You just watched me with a certain air that told me there were wicked things running through your mind. I have always enjoyed that in a man.”

“You were disguised as usual?”

She wove it out of light for him, a tall, slim figure with vaguely-defined features.

“Mmh. Elven. Long black hair, blue eyes– more regal than my natural state.” It’d been a long time, and she’d had to give up being Zyrenna when Cazador had nearly captured her so many years ago, but she summoned up what she thought was a good approximation.

“By regal you of course mean taller. Not that that’s difficult,” Astarion remarked, smirking smugly at her dark look. He reached up and tugged on her hair, head leaving her thigh. “I prefer you like this.”

“We made a very pretty baby, didn’t we?”

“We did! Let’s never do it again,” Astarion replied.

Zyn laughed, reaching over and playfully tweaking the tip of his ear. A rather rudely familiar gesture. “I agree. I’d never do it again– hadn’t exactly meant to the first time around.”

“Back to my story,” he ordered, resting his chin on her thigh.

Her fingers toyed with his hair, knowing touching his ears any more might get her snapped at. Hair was safe for now, he showed no signs any more of being uneasy with or disgusted by her touch. It might change. Boundaries would be drawn and moved with time; luckily she was very flexible and good at reading people. He could snap and grumble as he liked, it didn’t bother her.

Warnings, not attacks.

She would respect them as best she could.

Figures, little more than shaped shadow, gathered and parted in a dance of gossip and intrigue. The only two forms with any real substance were that elven disguise of hers, of course, and a slim figure in white and crimson.

She couldn't quite remember what he'd looked like back then, but that was all right.

“It was an…interesting crowd. Ambitious, young, pretty. The type of nobles that think throwing money and power around is a substitute for cunning and experience. Sharks snapping at the common schools of fish, unaware of how dangerous the ocean could be even for predators like them,” she smirked, amused by that memory. Lots of money to be made from people like that. Lots of enemies to be made, too. “It was no wonder a single assassin was so successful. It was no wonder I was so arrogant and sloppy.”

“Something went wrong,” he surmised.

Memories might fade, but grudges were forever. “The little bastard drugged my wine!”

Astarion laughed delightedly at her offended tone, the corners of his eyes crinkling in an impossibly charming manner. Grudgingly she laughed as well. It was quite funny in hindsight– she’d never had the temperament for being an assassin; it was just easy money and entertaining. But sooner or later, she would have ended up dead.

Maybe Lilithera had been even more important to her survival than she realized.

“So, instead of making it look like an accident after getting my fun in, I had no choice but to slit his throat and run; trying to find a place to pass out until the potion’s effects faded.” A bright splash of crimson drew eyes back to the illusion briefly, as the vague semblance of their forms playacted out the murder. The recollection irritated her. “What kind of man drugs women who were already planning to sleep with him? What an absolute cunt.”

Astarion laughed with relish, eyes on the pantomime as wel. “Well, from everything you’re telling me…”

“I should have seen it coming? Mmh, I agree,” she said, annoyed. Bloody entitled bastards. A door burst open, a staggering figure in black all but falling through it, struggling to stand. Not injured, but faltering all the same.

“I thought I’d found a safe place. I had not.” The figure in black collapsed, and another, paler one came to stand over it, staring curiously. “It was the bastard’s very pretty friend’s room, it turned out, and apparently highly amused that the entire place was in a panic hunting for me…he kept me safe.”

“You were passed out.”

“Mhmmm.”

“Which meant you were out of disguise.”

“Correct,” she agreed, lips quirking up into a little smile.

“I’d say that sounds ridiculous, but it was me, so…I suppose that makes sense,” Astarion allowed, shifting back to resting his cheek on her thigh, which she appreciated. The chin was just a bit too pointy. “Everyone running around in a panic looking for an assassin all snugly tucked into my bed does sound very entertaining.”

Zyn gave him a very strange look, which he didn’t see. “I didn’t get to that part of the story yet.”

“Metaphor, darling, but I can’t say I’m surprised it was literal as well.”

“Naturally, when I roused we bickered, threatened each other a bit. There was a knife involved. Then, we had sex. The knife was also involved in that.”

Astarion smirked, eyes fixed on the illusion, watching idly as their figures pantomimed the story of their tumultuous meeting. “What fun.”

“Afterwards, blood apparently running a bit too hot, you tried to convince me to murder other people so you could watch. While I was being hunted. Because you’d ‘never seen it before’.”

“Well, you were already there,” he reasoned, as if that was a sane thing to request.

“I declined, but we continued keeping company. Adorable, bloodthirsty, and excellent at taking orders in bed– is it any wonder we got along? I’m talking about both of us, incidentally. We weren’t lovers for long. Perhaps a month? You stood me up one day, so I shrugged and left town, not realizing you’d been kidnapped.” Zynatheri didn’t blame herself for that, of course. What could she have done against a Vampire Lord then? Hells, they’d only managed to kill Cazador two hundred years later because he’d gotten arrogant and desperate.

“And, let me guess. You found out you were pregnant.”

“Mmh. Two years later, I had Lilithera. Sometimes I think about what a forgotten thing you would have been to me without her,” she admitted, gazing at the illusion of her younger self cradling the baby Lily had been. Possibly. It was difficult to say if it was accurate any more; their daughter was two hundred years old, and she didn’t exactly retain her memories as clearly as a high elf might. “Hmmh. How funny the whims of Fate are. Men and gods may try to control it, but it always slips through the cracks in the most unexpected of ways.”

As that seemed a fitting end to the story, she let the spell drift free, edges, forms dissipating into colored light and then nothingness.

They both fell silent for a time, each in their own thoughts.

Eventually she began humming to him again, and Astarion gave a sigh she felt, but didn't hear. His eyes drifted closed, delicate lashes brushing his skin. It made the dark circles all the more apparent, giving his face an arresting fragility at rest.

Astarion could never know how close she was to giving him anything he asked for.

He'd absolutely use it against her.

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #astarion #tav: zynatheri rivati #astarion x tav #Fanfic Friday #I know it ends a little abruptly but the next part isn't finished <3

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soupy-mushroom-07 · 1 year ago

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Random writing scribble inspired by prompts I got from pinterest.

It was late at night. She had just gotten home from a very long night. This beautiful raven haired woman with the loveliest body, a great hourglass shape, came home late or well early, I suppose you could say, considering it was 2:30 in the morning.

"Ugh, I hated that mission so much." She though out loud.

The young assassin had come home at such an hour due to a very important, long and tedious mission. The said mission involved a very seedy man that instantly brought bile to her throat at the mere site of. Despite this foul man though, and his foul goons, she completed her mission successfully and so now all she had to think about was having a nice relaxing bath and then crashing in bed.

Or so she thought...

The light in the kitchen turned on out of nowhere, and instantly, the woman reached for her gun but forgot that she had already taken it out of its holster and sat it on the entryway table near the door, a bad habit she must admit, "shit" she muttered to herself.

Hesitantly, she crept around the corner to the kitchen, peering around preparing for a fight she came to find a menacing looking man made of muscle and tattoos, wearing a dark purple dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, standing in her kitchen. The man had a calm and collected look, a gun on the bench in front of him and he was drinking a glass of her vodka that the man seemed to have helped himself to.

Seeing all this didn't exactly seem to bother her though. Let alone scare her.

"Most people find me intimidating, you know." He spoke as he made direct eye contact with her.

"Most people also knock..." she muttered under breath and then responded to him with a truthful yet teasing reply.

"I can see what you mean, but whatever they may find intimidating, I just find endearing." She smirked.

"Well then I guess I kinda already knew that considering our backgrounds and shared history." He teased the woman back with sly grin.

"Yea, I bet you did." She chuckled well aware of their "history".

"Mind if I have some of my vodka before you drink it all." She asked, pointedly putting emphasis on the "my" as she sat on the barstool across from him.

The male didn't reply and simply poured her a glass, sliding it over to her gently. He then goes to take a sip of his drink but pauses and instead swirls it as he reveals to her his reasoning for stealing her alcohol.

"Vodka was easier to swallow than the fact that you weren't coming back." He said, looking at her with solem eyes.

"I never said I wasn't coming back. I just said I need time to work on a job." She said to him reassuringly while leaning over and pressing a hand to the side of his face, rubbing his cheek with her thumb.

"Still, you could have died, and I hadn't seen or heard from you, so I thought you were." The man explained, looking down as if he was remembering the days that he mourned her.

This took the assassin back, you see this man in front of her is in the profession of organised crime and runs the entirety of the brooklyn Mafia. She has seen him cut into a man's stomach and feed his intestines to his dogs as an example to his men. But she has never once seen him be vulnerable. Let alone about the death of someone or possible death in this case.

She looks at him speechless for a good minute and the she leaned over the bench more and held his face on either side gently in her hands and kissed him lovingly the lips, as she went to pull away he depend the kiss and kissed her with as much passion as a starved man. After he pulled away, they put their foreheads together and caught their breath. The young woman then leaned further up and whispered in his ear,

"I love you too."

After hearing this, he took a deep breath of her intoxicating scent and let out a primal growl. He grabbed her hips and pulled her up over the bench, wrapped her legs around his waist and kissed her passionately with just as much fervor as before and more as he leaned her back on the kitchen counter.

"You have no idea how much I've missed you my sweet bunny~" he whispered and also somehow growled in her at the same time, sending a delightful shiver through her body.

Her lover started kissing down her neck, and his hands roamed all over her clothed sides until ripped her tight cotton shirt of her body. He started kissing down her chest, kissing her scars as he went to remind her of his thoughts on them.

When they first got together the woman was self conscious of her scars and tried to hide away believing they were something to be ashamed of to help reassure her that they were not he said a simple quote his mother told him when got his first scar,

"Survivors have scar, my dear. Victims have graves. And there is nothing to be self-conscious about when you're a survivor. It just shows how resilient and tough you are."

After having this flashback, the man decided to stand up right and look at all of her beauty as a whole. However, as he did so, he found a nasty jagged scar that he hadn't seen on her before in a near fatal spot under her rib, which didn't look fully healed yet.

Seeing this the young girl tried to draw his attention away from it by grabbing his face gently and lifting it up to her face.

"Hey, don't worry about it ok I'm fine, see," she gestured to herself, attempting to quell his worries. His immediate response to this was, "Who do I need to kill, who hurt my princess."

"No one, ok. I can take care of myself. Besides, it's a scar I've had a while. You just hadn't noticed it before." Which was a mistake to say, especially since she knew him all too well.

"Darling," the man started as he held his hand gently on the side of her face, cupping her cheek. "I know every inch of your body, and I know for a fact that scar wasn't there before."

#writing #dark romance kinda but also not really i dont know

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unbridgeabledistances · 4 years ago

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hi 💜💜 i got a prompt about ian x body image a while ago (my inbox is a hot mess and i may have deleted the prompt lol, but i did paste it into my phone notes)- and i was feeling some feelings today & had some spare time amidst my travels & ended up writing this!!

prompt: can you write about ian and his relationship with his body image, esp post-canon when they move to the westside

(tw for body image/eating disorder/food mentions)

He didn’t really even think about it the first times that he did it— skipping a few meals that went unnoticed in the morning clamor of the Gallagher kitchen. He noticed his skin growing tauter and tighter around his abdomen with every passing day, a hollow absence sitting like a rock in the pit of his stomach.

He did it for a reason—he’d been getting more lingering looks under the flashing lights at the club, more unwelcome fingers pressed against the now-present ridges on his stomach, tracing his toned upper arms. The less there was of him, the more they wanted him.

The thing about Ian is that he was always disciplined; the middle child, the one who was overlooked and ignored and blended in until he decided that he had to make a name for himself. He and Lip and gotten into hair-tugging, jaw-smashing fights about this very reality; Ian was completely, totally, absolutely ordinary. Until he made himself extraordinary—until he burst through the storefront labeled “ARMY” at a strip mall with smudged windows and said with a tall chest: I want to enlist.

Everything had led up to this— every push-up on the creaking slanted floor of their childhood bedroom, every jog at the crack of dawn. He was going to make something of himself, he was going to be a hero.

He was going to get the fuck away from Mickey, and his wife, and whatever else kept pushing him down and holding him back.

When Ian came back from the army, when he was sleeping on exposed floorboards and working at the club all night—that was when it all actually started. When he decided that less of him meant more—when he decided that he should give people the best show he could, because everything else was fucked up anyways. This was all he was good for.

But then Mickey came through the door, pale skin flashing in the strobe lights, wearing that fucking dark button-up with sleeves folded to his forearms and smelling like nice cologne that he’d almost definitely stolen from one of his brothers’ bathroom shelves; and for a brief moment after the initial shock set in, Ian was proud— proud of how much negative space surrounded him, proud of how he could press his thighs into stretched golden spandex better than any of the other men thrumming to the beat beside him on the podium. Proud of how much other people wanted him, when Mickey didn't.

It was only later, after Mickey carried him home (easily, too easily) after he’d passed out in a snowbank, and Ian had woken and waited for Mickey to burst into his bedroom door at the Gallagher house while he leaned against the wall and scribbled on a notepad— later, when Mickey was about to curl on the floor and sleep using one of Liam’s balled-up t-shirts as a pillow— that Ian noticed Mickey’s eyes lingering on his uncovered torso, a second longer than the quick glances of admiration from the well-dressed men with greased-back hair and grubby fingers at the club. It hit Ian, then, when he saw Mickey’s gaze that was soft around the edges, the same fuzziness and confusion of Fiona’s stares when he would chatter on for too long in the mornings:

He’s worried about me.

But Mickey played along— Ian was back, and Mickey stayed beside him this time, and chuckled when he walked down the stairs to the sight of Ian cutting off the bottom half of his old ROTC pants, now multiple sizes too big and hanging baggy even at the hips. Mickey curled beside him on the twin bed, silently stroking hair back from his forehead and cradling his cheeks with a feather-light touch as Lip and Liam’s even, sleeping breaths swirled around them. And Ian kept doing pull-ups, and told Carl that he liked the way that Mickey smelled. Mickey came out for him. And for a while things were really, really fucking good, and Ian didn’t even think about the gnawing hollow feeling in his stomach at all any more.

Until a grey morning came, quick and silent, and kept him frozen under the sheets for days.

In the months afterwards, Ian trained harder, faster—he met up with Fiona as she pushed Liam in the stroller and jogged beside them, ran before and after shifts at the club, did push-ups on Mickey’s grimy floor while he was out handling Rub N’ Tug shit.

I’m not Monica. This wasn’t going to happen again. His body could do this. His body could fix his brain.

It couldn’t.

Most of what happened on the “road trip” with Yevgeny (that was the only phrasing that Ian could really mentally use to name the incident, the only semiotic filler for “kidnapping” that didn’t want to make him burrow even deeper under his tattered blankets) was a blur—Mickey feeding him fistfuls of pills and room-temperature Gatorade, luring Mickey to the dugouts where he tried to do a pull-up and felt a quivering in his limbs, a weakness rather than a familiar and fulfilling burn. Slamming Mickey in the face with a fist that was too flimsy, too weak—a fist that still left the blooming of a bruise on Mickey’s jawline, a splatter of blood caking into his eyebrow. But still weak, still not enough. Definitely not strong enough to fight off two MPs with loaded guns, tangling his hands behind his back and forcing him into the backseat of a car.

More blurry days— on the road with Monica. Breaking up with Mickey. Getting a job at Patsy’s. Withering away, purple bags sagging under his eyes. Becoming less, always less.

Then, a glimmer of light— he met Caleb. He studied to be an EMT. He got a call from Mandy, got to wrap her in his arms in less-than-ideal circumstances.

“I got tired of starving myself to fit in that golden thong.”

It was the first time he’d said it out loud.

He started to run again—and he started to not miss it, the hollow feeling gnawing at his insides, the twisting lack. He met Trevor, he went to brunches, he ordered mimosas and muffins and kept himself in shape, but didn’t push himself too far.

So it surprised him, really, when once again his body and mind weren’t in sync.

That was the biggest thing he’d think about, in the idle hours of he and Mickey’s prison cell, months later—that for once in his life, years after the nights at the club or the hazy early mornings at Patsy’s or in a baggy janitor uniform, he was actually doing really, really fucking good. He had a following. He was strong. Or at least he thought he was.

But something about being near Mickey pulled him out of his head and into his body, centered him— it always did. Mickey had always liked his body; Ian remembered how Mickey’s eyed at lingered that night at the dugouts, when they were two kids doing pull-ups and Mickey watched his muscles clench in the moonlight, two sets of shining eyes and bodies warm with beer leaning closer to each other in the muggy air. But Ian never felt a need to flaunt his body, or change his body, for Mickey— and in so many ways, those first days in prison were like his body was coming home. Sometimes it was hard, and fast, and filthy words whispered into each other’s skin—and sometimes it left them grasping for breath in an entirely different way, in fingertips lazily skimming over collarbones and fisted into roots of hair, of breathed “Fuck, you’re so fucking beautiful”s escaping Mickey’s parted mouth that Ian mentally stored but never brought up again, because he knew in the best case scenario Mickey would just roll his eyes and call him a “soft bitch,” and in the worst he would just flat-out deny it. But Ian felt balanced in a way he hadn't in months, with all the "Gay Jesus" bullshit pressing in. He took his meds, he did his nightly sit-ups, he counted down the days—until the hourglass was slipped out from under his fingertips and he was teleported back to the Gallagher house, back to the place where so much of this began and so much was about to end.

The hollowness, the hunger, didn’t really need to be there anymore once he was out— it was only a dull murmur. A ghost, a memory trapped in dreams of strobe lights and prying hands.

Mickey got out, and they got married—and in the moments before Ian called Mickey an “ugly motherfucker” as he let a smile crack onto his face—and he knew Mickey felt it, knew Mickey heard: I have never known anyone as beautiful as you.

And Ian’s fullness just kept blooming and compounding and radiating after the wedding; they fought, and then they didn’t, and it didn’t matter anyways because they were fucking married. Ian kept doing sit-ups before they went to bed, even though he felt like he didn’t really have to anymore. Something big had shifted; something had settled and given way, had filled in all the cracks.

So he’s surprised, when they move to the West Side, and that feeling starts to stir again; faint, fuzzy, like some sort of invasive and shapeless amoeba in the dark corners of his brain, whispering and hissing that there should be less of him. On their first morning in the new place he heads to the gym, wearing a camo t-shit that covered his torso and shoulders—and of course he ends up making a fool of himself next to some guy, some guy that he could have been, with sweaty toned abs and bronzed skin and rippling muscles. He doesn’t know why it gets to him, that small interaction—he’s so much happier now, so fucking happy he’s buzzing with it, but there’s also something churning in the faultlines of transition; that aching for hollow absence and stretched skin and interested eyes, that feeling that made him woozy and lightheaded as a kid but also sickeningly proud, like every moment of standing tall, of dancing, of staying alive was a statement, a challenge, a test of how much he could push his ability to be desired.

He immediately pushes the thought down. He doesn’t fucking need that anymore to keep his head above water; he’s stable, he’s loved, he’s fed. He’s growing organic tomatoes, and definitely developing a farmer’s tan from his days hunched over their way-too-tiny community garden plot tenderly watering and pruning the vines and brambles. He is desired. So it doesn’t make fucking sense that the hunger, the clawing in his stomach for the absence, doesn’t really stop.

“Okay Gallagher, spill.”

Ian felt his eyebrow raise instinctively at Mickey’s tone. “Huh?”

“You’ve been staring at this fancy fucking chicken thing you made for, like, twenty minutes. Stop staring at it and eat your goddamn dinner.”

He felt a twist in his gut. I don’t want to.

“M’actually not really that hungry.”

Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “The fuck’s up? You stressed about work shit?”

Ian huffed out a breath of relief. “Nah. It’s not that.” He fiddled with his fork on the plate, drawing lines into the sauce pooled under the tomato-basil chicken he’d made. It was healthy, it was good, he’d worked out today; he could stomach a couple bites of dinner if he fucking had to. He just had to work up to it. Even the smell was making his stomach twist— it had smelled good while he was cooking it, placing fresh-scented basil leaves into the simmering sauce, but now it just was too much.

Mickey’s boot nudged against his calf from under the kitchen island. “Ey. Is it a tired thing? Or a… sick thing?” His eyes darted to their kitchen cupboard, where Ian kept his meds on the bottom shelf by the water glasses. “Or, like, a food thing?”

Ian felt his fingers go slack around his fork. “A food thing?”

“Yeah, man, y’know. When you get all weird about food.”

A tightness in his chest. “What the fuck? I don’t get weird about food.”

Mickey’s eyes flickered to meet his—and Ian would have gotten more pissed off if he didn’t see the soft concern bleeding into Mickey’s gaze, how cautiously Mickey was trying to broach the topic. Ian blew out a breath. Of fucking course Mickey noticed this shit— he always did.

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know, man. You’re usually good, especially compared to when you were fucking starving yourself when we were kids. But, uh… I don’t know.” Now it was Mickey’s turn to play with his food, scraping his fork along the remnants of sauce on his plate that was nearly clean. “You got kind of weird about working out and shit in prison. And then at the house, with all the quarantine bullshit the first few weeks. Eating fuckin’ cereal all the time, then not eating at all. You’ve been normal since then, or whatever. Lookin’ healthy.” Ian felt Mickey’s gaze drag over him. “Just don’t want you getting stressed out and not eating again or whatever.”

Ian felt a muted warmth blooming in the hollow of his stomach, filling in the cracks of where the jagged feeling continued to claw. If it was anyone else laying out this fucking analysis of his habits Ian would’ve gotten defensive—or at the very least annoyed, that someone was pinning down yet another one of his behaviors, putting them under a fucking clinical microscope.

But of course, this was Mickey— and the difference with Mickey was that he cared, he cared so much that it made Ian’s body ache every time he realized it. Those words wouldn’t have come tumbling out of Mickey’s mouth if they hadn’t been building for a while, hadn’t been gnawing away at some corner of his mind over time.

Ian raised a hand over the table to clasp into Mickey’s warm palm—reaching over the empty plate, the plate of uneaten food.

“It’s, uh. A food thing.”

Mickey’s eyes met his—open, listening.

“You’re right about all the starving myself shit from forever ago. And the not eating. And the… quarantine stuff. I guess I just thought that now that things were good, it’d go away? And I feel so fucking good right now. But sometimes I just have weird days.”

Mickey huffed out a breath. “I fucking know you do, dumbass. M’just saying that I notice that shit. And we can figure it out.”

Ian felt the corner of his mouth tick upwards. “I really thought it was gonna go away. I’m a fucking adult.”

Mickey shrugged. “Sometimes shit doesn’t work like that, Gallagher.” He chugged a sip of water from his glass, apparently glad that this heavier part of the conversation was over now that he knew what was up. “It’s like what you tell me about my shit with Terry. Trauma doesn’t just magically fucking disappear.”

Trauma. He’d never really thought about it like that before—he had plenty of childhood shit to work through, between abandonment and raging mental illness; and he’d never really thought that his body image issues made the list.

But maybe they did— maybe this was another wound, one that he could learn to heal.

Mickey kicked his shin under the table. “There’s cereal and stuff in the cabinet, I got the Fruit Loops shit you like. Want me to wrap up the chicken and shove it in the fridge?”

All he could do was nod— and once again feel that warmth on his insides that Mickey was this good, that he knew how to make shit like this easier.

And he snuggled into the couch beside his husband, a bowl of soggy cereal in his hands.

#idrk what this is but i wrote it at LIGHTNING speed #can u tell that i reached the destination of my childhood home & am having lots of thoughts and feelings about body image LOL #i was like !!! i have a prompt about this #love u all xoxo #gallavich #shameless #shameless fic #gallavich fic #gallavich fanfiction #ian gallagher #mickey milkovich #ian x mickey #ixm #tw eating disorder #tw food mention #tw ed #tw body image

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imaginary-portal · 3 years ago

Text

Neighbors - Part One

Bucky x Fem Reader

Word Count: ~2k

Summary: Y/N works in the Avengers compound with her boyfriend Jonathan. Bucky Barnes lives in the room next door and finds himself falling for Y/N.

Part Two

Masterlist

Enjoy!

_________

"Y/N? Are you with us?" Y/N snapped her head up. She didn't realize she was staring off into space. The recent sleep deprivation has been costly. So costly that occasionally she sleeps with her eyes open. This meeting was important to plan the attack for the next mission. "Yeah. Sorry." She looked around the room, embarrassed. Bucky Barnes shifted in his seat. Y/N sparked his curiosity. He'd noticed her when he first entered the room, but he wasn't sure why she was there. Half of the room was filled with Avengers, the other half was experts and strategists. "Any suggestions?" Tony asked her, testing her attention span. "I'll have to think on it." Y/N said casually. "How about we take a lunch break. Clear our minds. Meet back here in 30 minutes?" Steve suggested. "Sorry, no one told me you're in charge of meetings now." Tony remarked. "Come on Tony. Look around. Everyone's tired. We'll figure it out after." Steve did have a point. Y/N wasn't the only one who looked drained.

During her lunch break, Y/N went back to her room, where she took a quick power nap. Bucky followed behind her, realizing his room was right next to hers. He wanted to know who she was, so he waited in his room until the lunch break was almost over. He left his room the same time as her. "Hey neighbor." Y/N said, looking refreshed. "Hi. I'm Bucky." Y/N shook his non-metal hand. "I know. I'm Y/N, I work in strategy." Bucky nodded, walking along Y/N's side in the hall. "Ah, that's why you were so tired. They overwork you." Y/N nodded. "Precisely. But I've never enjoyed a job as much as this one. I mean come on, I get free meals and lodging. Who'd pass that up?" The two of them laughed as they reentered the meeting room. "Y/N, welcome back. I'm ready to hear your ideas." Tony pressured her immediately.

_________

When the meeting finally ended, everyone left to grab dinner. Y/N sat with one of her colleagues, where they continued the discussion of the meeting. Her wandering glance noticed several times that Bucky was looking at her. He was sitting with the rest of the Avengers, who were talking about getting suit upgrades. Even though he couldn't hear her, he liked the way she talked with people. She seemed very enthusiastic and educated. "Oh, you like smart girl over there?" Natasha said quietly as motioned her head towards Y/N. Bucky shook his head, not realizing how long he'd been watching her. "No, I just didn't know who she was." Natasha smiled. "It's fine Bucky. You see him over there?" She pointed to a security guard in the corner of the room. He looked off into the distance to see the attractive man. Bucky looked back at Natasha, who wiggled her eyebrows. "We all have a normal person that we're interested in." Bucky looked back at Y/N and watched as a man approached her, interrupting her conversation. Y/N looked up at the man with a smile. The man bent down to give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Natasha hissed. "Oh, she's taken. Sorry bud." Bucky looked down at his food, no longer interested in anything beyond his plate.

_________

The next day, the team had a successful mission. It did include some hasty improvising that Tony planned to discuss with Y/N about. He was still wearing his iron suit and had scratches on his face but he wanted to be sure Y/N wrote down his critiques. Y/N walked outside, seeing the Avengers standing in a circle, Steve and Natasha sitting on the ground. A medic cleaned up their wounds as Y/N spoke with Tony. Bucky watched the conversation keenly. Y/N took notes and was very receptive to the critiques. For a moment she seemed to be more patient with Tony than Steve was. That was, until she disagreed with Tony on something. Tony claimed that a mistake was due to her strategy but she believed it had to do with his suit. "Let's test it right now. Stand up there, fly down and blast that trash can." Y/N was confident. Tony did as she said, proving her to be right. "I'll let you get away with that for now." Was all Tony said before walking inside. Y/N scribbled something down in her notebook, smiling to herself. When she looked up, she caught eyes with Bucky, maintaining her smile before walking inside.

_________

The team split up for the next mission. Each strategist was assigned an Avenger to tackle individual weaknesses. Since Y/N showed up pretty well to Tony, she got promoted to Chief Strategist. Therefore, she was given the hardest team member to work with: Bucky. Bucky was only hard to work with because he doesn't engage with people often. He likes to have a plan and the less that plan involves other people the better. What Y/N would find, however, is that Bucky is easy to work with, so she didn't exactly understand what people meant by that.

Y/N entered the meeting room with a computer and notepad. Bucky sat at the table, relieved to see Y/N as his strategist. Y/N sat across from him and logged onto her laptop. "So, what do you feel is your biggest weakness on missions?" She stood up to plug her laptop into the projector. Bucky watched her as he tried to think of his answer. "I guess it would be that I can't fly so I'm always stuck on the ground. I rarely have a height leverage." Y/N nodded, sitting back down. "What if I told you that doesn't really put you at a disadvantage?" Bucky furrowed his eyebrows, confused. "I mean, if flying was the main priority for a mission, only half of the team would be going. After looking at some of Tony's footage, it looks to me that your main weakness is your range." Y/N played a clip on the projector that showed Bucky falling because he couldn't reach behind him. "That metal arm isn't so flexible, yeah?" Bucky sat, astonished. "Yeah, you know what, you're right. I never realized that before." Y/N nodded, typing something on her computer. "So I scheduled you some training sessions this week. They're gonna teach you some new combat moves and flexibility, so it shouldn't be as much of a problem anymore." Bucky nodded, content with the plan.

"Wow. That was easy." Y/N said. "They told me you were the hardest to work with but if I was with Tony I'd be in a meeting for hours." They both laughed as Y/N shut her laptop. "So how's the compound life treating you?" Y/N switched topics. Bucky shrugged. "I mean I can't complain. I've spent a lot of time living in torture chambers." Y/N nodded, understanding the seriousness of the conversation. "I read that in your file. Are you getting any help for dealing with that stuff? You know, mental health is just as important as your physical health." Bucky shrugged again, not really answering her question. "Well there's a lot of resources here so use whatever you need. Not to sound corny, but I'm also available if you ever need someone to talk to. You know where my room is. My door is always open, unless my boyfriend is sleeping, in which case I advise you not to come to our door." Y/N laughed, realizing the ramble she went on. “Wanna grab lunch? I’m starving.” Bucky took up her offer, walking by her side in the halls. Along the way, he got a whiff of her perfume, which was a pleasant and enticing scent.

“Are you single? I can hook you up with my friend Clara. She’s the sweetest person you’ll ever meet.” Bucky shrugged, taking a bite of his sandwich. “Thank you but I’m not interested in a relationship right now.” Bucky lied. To tell the truth he was lonely. To tell another truth he was interested in Y/N. “Understandable.” Y/N said as Bucky swallowed his food. “So what’s your boyfriend like?” Y/N bit her lip as she thought of the perfect way to describe him. “Jonathan works over in aircraft. He’s very logical, focused. He has big plans here.” Bucky raised his eyebrows. “What about you? Do you have plans here?” Y/N nodded, poking around at her side salad. “I do, but they’re not as ambitious as his, you know? I’m already Chief of Strategy so I’m not sure how much further I can go.” Bucky shook his head. “Don’t limit yourself. I can tell you got potential.” Y/N smiled at his compliment. “Thanks Bucky, you’re a nice guy. What about you? Do plan to stay here, work government contracts?�� Bucky nodded. “For now. But I guess wherever Steve goes I’ll go.” Y/N awed. “That’s sweet. I love a good friendship.” They both sat in an awkward silence as they thought of something to say. “What do you do for fun?” Bucky scrunched his eyebrows. “I don’t do anything.” Y/N rolled her eyes. “Come on. You gotta do something. You like music? Movies?” Bucky shrugged. “40s music is nice.” Y/N's eyes beamed. "Oh you must know Frank Sinatra, yeah?" Bucky nodded. "Yeah he's all right." Y/N took a large bite of food. "Classic." she said with a mouthful.

"Well, well, well, if it ain't two troublemakers." A man approached the table from behind Y/N. "Jonathan!" Y/N said, excited. She pulled out the chair next to her and the man took a seat, plopping his food on the table. "As you may know, this is Bucky." Y/N tried introducing the two, and Bucky corrected her by saying "James" as he shook Jonathan's hand. Y/N's eyebrow wrinkled. "You do nice work out there, kicking ass." Jonathan complimented as he began eating. Bucky nodded and looked down at his food, no longer interested in conversation. "How's aircraft today?" Y/N asked Jonathan. "Stupid, as usual." Y/N playfully rolled her eyes, but Bucky took him seriously. "What's stupid about it?" Jonathan swallowed and wiped a crumb out of the corner of his mouth with a napkin. "Everyone is so caught up in team work when sometimes things could be faster if we just worked alone." Y/N chuckled to herself. "Easy for you to say when you know everything that goes on there. Not everyone is as advanced as you." Bucky held back an eye roll, growing a distaste for the way Y/N was feeding the man's ego. Jonathan caught onto this, sensing a feeling of disapproval from Bucky. "You'll see. Things will be better once I'm promoted to supervisor." No one replied, instead eating more food.

"So how did you two meet? Is Bucky not logical enough or something?" Jonathan tried cracking a joke. "No, we just split up into groups so everyone needed help." Y/N rebutted. Jonathan shook his head. "They just say that to make the weaker ones feel better. The airborne Avengers: Iron Man, Vision, Falcon, their combat is much more calculated, less error." Y/N smacked Jonathan's shoulder. Bucky expressed an eye roll this time. He didn't know why he was still sitting with this obnoxious couple. "Be nice. And that's not true. Remember when I told you I proved Tony wrong about his suit versus my strategy?" Jonathan shook his head, a confused look on his face. "Well anyways, that's how I got promoted. I'm at a higher rank than you now." She stuck her tongue out a Jonathan, who gave her a kiss on the lips, smirking at Bucky as he pulled away. Y/N regained composure, wiping a hand over her mouth. "I'm sorry Bucky. I promise he's nice when he opens up to you." She looked at her watch. "Shit. I have a meeting in five minutes. I'll see you guys later." Y/N quickly grabbed her bag, gave Jonathan a kiss on the cheek, and promptly left. The two men sat in an awkward silence. Jonathan swallowed the last bite of his food, glaring at Bucky.

"You don't go taking my girl, got it?" Asshole. Bucky nodded affirmatively, picking up his trash and leaving the table. ——————

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes imagine #marvel #marvel imagine #mcu #mcu imagine #sebastian stan imagine #sebastian stan #imagine #fanfic #crush imagine

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irish-urn · 2 years ago

Note

You don't know what you did? Babes. You're feeding a starving fandom (and also it drives me fuckin insane because I feel like a lot of people would really, REALLY like Dasey if they got over themselves bc it hits so many popular tropes but, yeah, whatever, it's not for everyone 🙄 but I digress)

MY POINT IS, people will literally pay artists THOUSANDS of dollars for Furry porn. And this, is my version of that 😂 (even if you never wrote another sentence of smut again, you will still be my favorite Dasey author. You write them THAT well)

I'm not joking, drop a venmo, PayPal, Amazon wishlist, PO box– ANYTHING and I will send you stuff because goddamn, you DESERVE IT. I read through all of the Dasey fics on AO3 in like a month and you're out here dropping Dasey fics that are 30k+ like 😭 you're so good to us.

...*blink blink*

Okay, so I think people don't know Dasey/Life With Derek because it's a fifteen year old show from the Family Channel; like... I'm shocked the fandom is doing as well as it's doing compared to, like, The Weekenders, Lizzie McGuire, The Proud Family, or Radio Free Roscoe, which was also playing at the same time. The few people I've talked to that even remember the show are like... "Wow. That's old." So, it's just not in-vogue right now; and I think it was right before the concept of fandom really exploded. I mean, imagine if Stranger Things came out ten years earlier; it would have a totally different reception!

(DOES ANYONE REMEMBER RFR? I used to hide in my basement to watch the episodes because they came on right before my bedtime and I had to sneak away to watch it.)

And, like, oh my gosh. I would never, ever ask to be paid for this for two reasons: one, I imagine we're all in the same boat just trying to keep afloat in this crazy world with terrible work-life balances and a totally lop-sided economic situation, and we're all probably kinda poor; and two, I like writing on my own time and without deadlines. I mean, I try to write at least every other day, but my life is kinda insane, and once I've made a promise to write something for someone, there's expectations and I hate disappointing people, and suddenly my stress-relief becomes stressful. That being said, that's incredibly kind of you and I'm honestly very honoured. <3

(I would like to write some more smut because I'm a perfectionist and I want to improve my skills. I wanna be able to write smut comfortably, dammit! But... For some reason, my brain is like, 'I need a bit of a break before you tackle the next story, Urn. Just keep writing metas and maybe I'll let you scribble down 500 words here and there.' *sighs*)

But in all seriousness, I am happy to feed you guys because you feed me back, and we're like a communal Dasey table or something (all day breakfast here at tumblr!!). <3

#asks #*flushes*#goodness you guys

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rosy-cheekx · 4 years ago

Text

Dragged from the Deep

I will update with an AO3 link, two chapters, but I really wanted to get this out!

This is from @voiceless-terror‘s prompt: “ Been a tough few days. How are you holding up?” with jmart in the safehouse...Not what they expected but I am VERY VERY proud of this!

Martin awoke to the sound of Jon mumbling in his sleep. “I took my hand, and I reached down into the darkness.” Jon’s voice is quiet, reverent. Its barely his own; his voice of the Archive.

Really should have heard from Basira by now, Martin thought, trying to tamp down the frustration rising in his chest.

“Down and down,” Jon continued. “Until my whole arm was inside, up to the shoulder. It was damp and cold, with the rough stone sides scraping my skin, but my hand was stretched as far as I could, and it still gripped nothing but empty air. Then the hole began to close, and all at once the spell was broken.”

“Jon, m’dear?” he half-whispered, stroking Jon’s cheek softly. Jon was a light sleeper, but these times were...tricky. “Hey, Jonathan,” he added, voice at a speaking-volume now. “Wake up, it’s not real.”

“I tried to pull my arm out, to get free, but it held me tight. Not quite crushing me but holding me in place. I screamed and cried for help, looking around for anyone who might be able to hear me, but the only people walking by seemed utterly oblivious to what was happening. Then I felt it, something brushing against my hand from below it in the hole. Teeth. Wet, blunt teeth, which quickly gave way to a rough, slender tongue-”[97]

Martin couldn’t bear to hear any more. He hated witnessing Jon like this, possessed by the statements, by his need to feed. Jon’s voice was like marble, smooth and cold and mesmerizing, but it was heavy and would consume Jon if he allowed it.

Martin would not allow it.

“Jon!” He gave him a shake, firm on his shoulders. “Wake up!”

A drowning man suddenly reunited with his lungs; Jonathan Sims gasped for air. His eyes flashed open (there it was, the cursed glint of green that seemed to glow from within) and he clutched a hand to his chest as he began to cough. Martin pulled him into a sitting position, kneeling next to him and resting a hand on Jon’s lower back as he felt the convulsions double his frame. When his hacking had settled, Martin felt safe enough to breathe again himself, lest he had stolen air from the man beside him.

“H-hi,” Jon murmured, voice shaky, drawing his knees to his chest beneath the comforter. “How-how bad was it this time?”

Martin knew about Jon’s hunger, knew that statements were his fuel more than anything organic. The arrangement with Basira had been working relatively well up until now. Every three to four weeks, Basira would call the mobile they kept stashed in the safehouse for that purpose, only her number programmed in and let them know when she was coming, typically within a day or two. She should have called almost ten days ago. Had she let them go, at last, to fend for themselves? Had something happened to her, to the Institute? Things were getting dire.

At first, a little less than a week ago, Martin thought it was the nightmares; that the mumbling had been Jon apologizing to those so unfortunate enough to have him as a feature player in their nightmares. His words were unintelligible, so Martin had hugged him tightly in the night, in the way they had held each other those first days weeks, whispering affirmations of safety and love.

When he asked the poorly-rested Jon about it the next morning, he had frowned. “Ah, no. I mean, I haven’t slept with anyone—ah, more to say, no one has been in the room while I’ve been asleep to confirm for sure besides you, but I don’t think I usually talk in my sleep.” Martin chalked it up as “Weird, But No Too Weird,” and they agreed to keep an eye on it. Every night since, Martin had repeated that ritual, the words too unintelligible to understand, Martin clutching Jon like a life vest, carrying him safe through the morning.

Jon’s flu-like symptoms had cropped up three days ago. He woke weak, hardly able to move, and couldn’t keep any food down. The tea and water Martin literally spooned him were staying down, at least, which helped combat the dehydration Jon was surely suffering from the 40-degree fever he was running. The fever reducers weren’t helping, and Martin had nearly dragged Jon to A&E before he’d been able to explain to him what was happening. He was breaking down, needed the statements or things would get worse. “And, no, Martin-” cut off by a coughing fit. “I don’t know how much worse. Bad.” Whatever role Martin usually played in Jon’s life: roommate, friend, boyfriend maybe?, it didn’t matter. Or, at least, it came to second to Martin’s new role as nurse. Nurse was a role Martin was good at it. Practically a professional home-care assistant. But caring for a starving eldritch demigod was marginally different than caring for his human mum. At least the vomit cleaned the same way.

The statements had become more distinct the first night of the fevers. Words that had typically barely passed his lips were now being told to the night air with an intensity Martin had sorely wished he would never hear again. If Martin strained his ears, he could typically hear the tired hiss of a tape recorder. He tried to smash it that first night, out of anger and exhausted desperation, but Jon had screamed when he had bashed it with a vase, weeping as if it had been his head smashed and not the spinning dials of that cursed thing. Jon’s migraine had lasted through the night and into the afternoon, with Martin unable to do anything but apologize and stroke his hair, reading to him a novel that just wouldn’t be enough.

“Not too bad,” Martin answered, plastering a soft smile over his tired face. “Just scared me was all, I don’t know if it’s better to wake you or not, but it felt weird not to.” Jon was scratching at old worm scars, skin shiny and taut, and Martin took his hands gently, pressing a kiss to his pulse points in turn. God, he felt so hot against his lips.

“M-I’m sorry,” Jon sighs, eyes already fluttering closed again. His face was pale and his muscles slack; Martin hated how hollow his eyes and cheeks seemed, skeletal in the light of the moon.

“Shh, nothing to apologize for,” Martin assured him, reaching across Jon’s side of the bed to click on the lamp, wincing at the sudden light and the clock. 4:15. Too early, even for a morning person like Martin. “Do-do you want me to read to you some more? I can make some tea, chamomile? Milk and honey? Or we can listen to some music, or a podcast?” He knew it was fruitless. It would all be for naught until he got the damn statements from Basira.

Jon had the comforter drawn to his neck, shivering slightly, eyes closed. He nodded vaguely. “The book,” he managed, voice a broken whisper, so unlike the strong and powerful intonation Martin had just heard. Martin nodded, kissing his forehead, clammy and plastered with baby hairs, and stood, passing the book into Jon’s lap, page marked with a flat-barreled pen, something that had been tucked into a journal in the bedside table. (Jon and Martin had agreed that some things are better left unread.) Martin could see Jon’s hands shaking slightly under the blanket.

The walk to the kitchen was cold and dark, and Martin took a moment to himself, while the electric kettle hummed to life, to press his forehead against the cool plastic of the refrigerator, fingers interlaced behind his neck. God, he was so tired. He loved Jon more than anything, that was true, but he was at such a loss. It hurt to know there was nothing he could do to help, short of kidnapping a random neighbor from the town and begging them to tell Jon their story. He would call Basira this afternoon. He had tried the day the fever started and hasn’t received an answer. She was probably chasing down a lead about Daisy; she was known to go off the grid when hunting after her.

The click of the kettle, and Martin is on task again, portioning out tea and honey, chamomile for Jon, English breakfast for himself; he needs the caffeine. Two travel mugs later, Martin was heading back into the dark hallway, up the stairs, and to the dimly let bedroom.

The task had taken no more than five minutes, eight max. This was apparently, long enough for Jon to rifle in the nightstand drawer, retrieve that little notebook they had found, and to begin scribbling in it furiously. Martin could already see a good quarter of the notebook had been filled already, though what measure of that had been used prior to their arrival was unclear.

“Jon? Writing anything interesting?” Jon’s eyes jerked open and he let his gaze fall on the notebook.

“Oh-ah, no. Just doodling,” the words still weak, but the half-smile on his face lifts Martin’s spirits. See? He told himself. He’s still Jon. Jon closed the notebook and tucked it into his lap, reaching for the spill-proof mug with the hand not holding the pen that had been marking the page number. Martin noticed Jon twiddling the pen between his fingers and elected not to say anything. Whatever helped. And it had seemed to help; Jon seemed a little less gaunt than he had, but maybe that was the consequence of sitting up, letting himself focus on other things than his gnawing hunger. “Page 74,” Jon sighed as Martin resumed his position next to him in bed, tucking his head on Martin’s shoulder. “Second paragraph.”

“Creep,” Martin muttered good-naturedly, before settling into the pages and resuming the book, some sort of cop thriller-mystery (because of course that had been Daisy’s preferred reading material).

Martin had been reading for nearly an hour when, while pausing to sip his tea, the scratching of pen on paper had distracted him from the story. They had been at a rather thrilling part of the chase; the detective had just discovered that his wife, who he thought to be dead, was not actually dead and maybe even a part of the mystery. Martin had felt rather invested in giving Jon a good show, throwing himself into the narration maybe a little more than was necessary for the audience of one (1) ill partner (Boyfriend? Love? Patient? Whatever). Jon had remained quiet, save for a periodic coughing fit, but didn’t seem to be asleep from the way Martin could feel The Eye in the room with him, an inescapable feeling now, consequences of his proximity to The Archivist. With the sound of the pen, however, Martin closed the book, flipping it upside down and open. (Usually, Jon would chastise him for such a horrendous act to a book. Martin wished he would.)

Jon’s eyes were cast on the book, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. He was scribbling furiously, writing continuously in the notebook that had once belonged to Daisy. Jon’s handwriting, difficult in the best of circumstances, was positively chicken scratch as Martin tried to parse out the strings of words on the paper, some he could swear weren’t even English.

“Jon?” Martin asked, placing a hand on the journal gently. “Is everything alright?”

“I-ah, yeah,” Jon capitulated, sighing softly, even as it resulted in a series of weak hacks. “I was trying to remember the dream, the statement I was reading in my sleep. I thought maybe writing it down would help.”

“And? Did it help?”

“I…I don’t know.” Jon frowned and scrubbed his hands over his eyes, blinking wearily. “I need to keep trying.”

Martin frowned internally but tried to keep his face neutral. “D’you think it’s…good? To try?”

“I don’t know, Martin.” Martin is suddenly reminded of a paranoid, frantic Jonathan Sims, angry and scared and not knowing who to trust. “But I have to try something! I can’t just sit here, waiting to wither away and die.”

“O-okay then,” Martin took a deep breath. “It was just a question.”

“A stupid one.” He’s sick, Martin reminds himself. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.

“Well,” Martin closed the book properly this time, surreptitiously dog-earing a page. What Jon doesn’t know won’t hurt him. “I’m out of tea. Need any more?”

Jon shook his head, quiet now as he continued to write, eyes glued to his page. “A-alright then,” Martin slid off the bed and frowned, catching a whiff of himself. Yikes. He had lost track of the last time he bathed, so worried had he been about missing a call from Basira. “Would you be okay if I have a shower?”

More silence, the scratching of the cheap pen the only sound in the room. At least there wasn’t a tape running. “Shout if you need me.”

It felt good to breathe in the steam and smell of lather, to luxuriate in the hot water rolling over him. Martin has always been a bit generous with his showers, especially as a teen. They had been his designated times to be off the hook from his mother, chores, his jobs, anything that was causing him stress. Martin felt a bit guilty remembering these things. His shower wasn’t long because he wants to avoid Jon, not at all. It’s just. Jon is clearly in a bit of a mood, so it would be good to give him some space without making it seem like he’s upset. Which, he’s not upset! Just. a break is good. Yeah. A break is healthy.

Martin turned off the water when he started to feel a bit dizzy from the heat, wrapped himself in a towel and splashed cold water on his face. There. He was feeling better already.

“Jon!” He called, cracking the door and letting steam roll out around him. “I know it’s a bit early, but I thought maybe I could start on breakfast. Maybe you can stomach down some crackers today?”

After a few beats of silence, Martin called out again. The loo, while not an en suite, was pretty close to the master. “Jon?”

Must be asleep. Martin smiled softly to himself and shook his head, ruffling his curls, more white than auburn anymore, and pulled on a fresh pair of sweatpants. Not like they were going anywhere today.

Tinged pink from the hot shower, Martin rounded the corner into the master bedroom and stopped, momentarily confused. “Oh, did you not hear me?”

Jon was awake. He was still writing, bent over the notebook and scribbling furiously, murmuring to himself, too quiet to hear. He didn’t look up. Martin frowned, shivering as a wave of static rolled over his body like a cool wind. “Jon. Jon, a-are you in there? Are you okay?”

The muttering continued, unceasing. Martin edged forward carefully, hands in front of him like he was buffeting back a storm or trying not to scare a wounded animal. Honestly, Martin wasn’t sure which sentiment was more accurate. He crept his way to Jon’s side of the bed, still apparently unnoticed by the Archivist. There was a bloody tape recorder on the bedside table. Martin knew better than to touch it.

He bent down, kneeling on the floor and craning his neck to look up into Jon’s face. His shoulders slumped as he gazed up into an emerald glow as Jon’s own eyes, usually a deep brown, lit the page in front of him like a torch, bathing it in harsh light. Jon’s own form was crackling slightly, seemingly more solid than a usual body should, silhouette a little too crisp against the wall behind him.

Martin could hear him now, too, and his voice was the same low, consistent monologue that Martin had first loved, but had grown to hate in his years working in the Archives.

“As I said, it was one of the last boxes I opened on the second day. It was late, and I had already made my way through most of a bottle of wine. The more I think about it, the more I think that opening that box felt no different to any of the others. No hard feelings, no smells, nothing. It was just a box empty of everything except a single typewritten note and an old hand mirror.

It lay inside, utterly innocuous. If it was a trap, there was no way to tell.” [60]

That one sounded familiar. An old statement, it must be. Something about a mirror and seeing things in a reflection? Punching a camera? he wondered. Martin felt another shiver roll through his body; he turned his attention towards the notebook, towards what he knew would be there. Now that he knew what to look for, he could read the handwriting with little trouble. As the Archivist spoke, he wrote the words in Jon’s handwriting, transcribing the statement.

“Jon,” Martin’s voice was soft. “If you can hear me, I’m going to take away your pen now. I think…I think that will let you rest. I’m going to count to three, okay? One. Two. Three.”

As soon as Martin reached for the pen, he felt himself being thrown backwards, as if by a tidal wave. He felt his body hit the wall, heard his skull hit the wall with a sickening thud.

------Chapter 2------

When Martin woke, he was confused. Last he knew, he had gone to sleep in bed, right? Not on the couch watching telly or drunk in a bathtub. So why was he so stiff—ow. He rolled his neck. And sore. He was on the floor, for one thing, head against the wall and legs splayed in front of him. God his head hurt. Was he hungover? No, he hadn’t drunk anything. Just eaten dinner in bed with Jon, done dishes, read, and fallen asleep.

Oh shit. Jon. It rushed back to Martin in a dizzying spiral; Helen would be proud. The mumbling, the writing, the pen, the eyes. Had Jon pushed him? Not physically, maybe. But hadn’t he heard through the grapevine something about Jon and the delivery man—Breekon? Or maybe Hope? Whichever one hadn’t died in the Unknowing. Something about him shoving him backwards with sheer force of a word? Jon had thought they were exaggerating. But maybe…maybe not.

Martin’s eyes were still closed, he realized. He was afraid to, he realized. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see: maybe a big, unblinking Eye where the body of Jon had been? A torrent of books and pages spinning around Jonathan Sims in a dramatic flourish as he commands them? Hundreds, if not thousands, of tape recorders piling around their bed, drowning them both in magnetic tape and words? Slowly, painfully, Martin opened his eyes.

None of those were there of course. There was just Jon. Sitting in bed, gaunt and frail. Writing and reciting as if nothing happened. That was almost worse, in a way, that he had flung Martin against a wall and continued as if it hadn’t hurt him to do so. The Archivist’s movements were stiff and mechanical as he turned the page and continued to write, voice now in a language Martin couldn’t understand but was probably Chinese.

Stopping the writing was no longer an option, he supposed. But what else could he do? Maybe it could recharge Jon a little, like sucking the marrow from a bone. Only Martin wasn’t sure if the statements or Jon was the bone in that scenario. God, he wished he could Eldritch Google “Eye statement starvation: stages of bad?” Unfortunately, his Eldritch Google was out of service and there was no one else he could ask who wasn’t also trying to actively kill him.

What were his options then? Wait and hope Jon doesn’t die. Call Basira again. Kidnap a stranger and have them read a statement. Well, he wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

Martin sighed, running a hand through his hair and feeling a lump throbbing gently on the back of his head. He checked the rest of his body for injuries and was grateful to find nothing too bad. Probably just a concussion.

Hauling himself to his feet (using the floor and doorknob to a closet as his supports), Martin teetered his way to the kitchen. He threw open the cupboard beneath the sink and grabbed the small black phone with Basira’s number saved.

Dialing, he slid himself into a chair at the kitchen table, resting his forehead against his free palm and closed his eyes again.

“Hello?” The faint voice Basira Hussain rang out into the air.

“Basira? It’s Martin. Any word on the statements? It’s getting a little dire here.” He could hear the exhaustion in his own voice.

“Dire? How do you mean?” Basira was always a little too direct for Martin’s taste; couldn’t she hear how drained he was?

“He won’t stop repeating and writing old statements. I tried to stop him and he—well. It wasn’t on purpose…But he threw me into a wall.”

“Shit.” Basira was quiet for a moment. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he bit back. “I would be better if we had the statements.” There wasn’t time for him to feel guilty about his delivery.

“I know, and I’m sorry. I caught wind of Daisy being in Italy, so I’m there now. If I take the first flight out of Rome, I can be at my flat tomorrow and yours the next. Two days, max. Less if I can. Can he make it that long?”

“Better bloody hope so.” The fight drained from him. “Please, Basira,” he added, sighing. “I don’t know what to do. He was sick and feverish and I could handle that but now he’s just…empty.”

“Maybe it’s like a diet.” He could practically hear her mind spinning through the phone. “You know, how when you starve yourself for too long? You start losing weight and all’s dandy. But the longer you wait, your body starts taking nutrients from your own organs?” Martin hummed an affirmation. “Maybe he’s sucking out every bit he can from himself to survive.”

“So…how do I fix that?”

“I mean, when I get you the statements, we can force-feed him. But until then? I dunno. I’m at a loss too. Keep him safe, I think? But don’t let yourself get hurt either.”

Martin nodded, momentarily forgetting he was on the phone. “Oh, yeah. Um, thank you Basira. I’ll do my best. Call me when you’re at the flat?”

“Of course. Call me if you get lo-bored.”

“Please hurry.”

Martin hung up and dropped his head to the table unceremoniously, wincing as the impact rattled the back of his skull. Now what? He didn’t want to sit in the room while the Archivist worked, but he was afraid to leave him alone. He hated how it felt to be in the room, the low wave static and the feeling of being known permeating every pore. He was afraid what staying in there would do, if Jon would Know him too well after he came back. Looking around, Martin grabbed the egg timer Jon used when he cooked and spun it to an hour. If he checked in every hour, that would be fine, right? He could let the Archivist have the bedroom; he’d stay downstairs, and check in every hour.

The first few hours crept by, but each ding of the egg timer was much too soon for Martin’s liking. He iced his head, wincing again when he realized it was the late morning and he had been unconscious for quite a while. He made himself an unassuming brunch, cheese toasty and curry left over from dinner a few days ago. Made some more tea, obviously, and took some acetaminophen to reduce the swollen goose-egg on his head. Read, watched an old DVD of some American TV show Daisy must have liked. Tried to keep his mind off whatever had taken over his boyfriend in the upstairs bedroom.

Each time the timer went off, Martin would repeat the same process. He would ascend the stairs, knock on the doorframe of the bedroom, tell Jon he was coming over to check on him, and would watch and listen to him for almost a minute. Some of the statements he recognized, some he didn’t. His eyes were always that throbbing, blinding green, staring into nothing, his face hollow and gaunt. Around two in the afternoon, Martin went in to see that Jon had moved from the bed. The notebook lay abandoned, filled to the last page. The Archivist was standing, in baggy sleep boxers, facing the wall, still intoning the fears and terrors of those who had contributed their stories to the Institute. Their stories were stark when written against the robin blue pant. Martin left the room before he could Know he was crying.

Afternoon turned to evening, and Martin continued his ministrations. The egg timer ran his day and he got little done, managing maybe half of a book from the meager shelf downstairs. He wasn’t even sure what it was about; he had to keep rereading the same pages over and over. The writing had grown to cover half the wall in Jon’s slanted script. Martin wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what would happen if he tried to smudge it. Between checking up on The Archivist, he half-heartedly ate scrambled eggs and chugged some wine; he figured he’d earned it. It was weird to feel strangely like an Archival Assistant again; knowing things were bad for the man he desperately wanted to be there but not knowing how to help.

KRRRRRRRRRRG!

Time to check on him again. Martin trudged up the stairs for what felt like the hundredth time that day. The Archivist was in a different position this time. He was kneeling, head bowed. Martin could have sworn he was praying; the monotony of words slipping from his lips as easily as the nuns Martin had seen growing up. Martin paused. It was…almost beautiful, in a way. The slight form of a man paying his service to a god to whom he was so completely indebted. The green light reflecting off the wall, covered in his scripture, casting a glow on his skin and through his curls, mussed from fever.

Would’ve been, anyways, if Martin hadn’t seen the drop of blood snaking its way down Jon’s thigh, creasing where his leg was folded along the calf. All at once, the beauty he had been caught up in was gone and all he saw was a helpless, broken man, compelled to write the words of the desperate, the lost, the broken. Martin shook a pillowcase from the bed, letting the pillow fall unceremoniously, and cautiously moved to the Archivist. As worried as he was, he needed to know what was going on before he could help.

The sight made him slightly sick. Jon was bent over his thigh, holding the pen as if it were a dagger, and was using the ballpoint tip to carve words into the meat of his leg. He hadn’t gotten far, apparently the effort took more out than the body of a weakened Jon could take.

“a fac-” [54]

Confused, Martin looked up to the wall where he had been writing and figured out the problem. The pen had run out of ink. The words got paler and less distinct until they were barely readable. Judging from the smears, the Archivist had tried to use Jon’s blood to write, using the pen as a quill. It clearly hadn’t worked, judging by the thin, weak curves of red and brown. Jon was still mumbling the statement, eyes blank and voice even, but the lines of his face seemed frustrated and dark.

The letters on his skin were weeping dark red now and Martin could see his hands weren’t the only ones shaking. He was afraid to touch him, afraid that trying to press a cloth to his wounds could quite literally be both of their deaths.

The more he stared, trapped in indecision, he watched as the decision was made for him. Jon had been ill, dehydrated and fever-laden, and the assault to his body was more than he could handle. His face, an ashen brown-grey-green from the glow of his eyes, went slack and as the emerald lights went out, Jon slumped, falling into Martin’s lap and shoulder as his body gave up. As soon as their skin touched, Martin’s mind snapped into focus. Fix this. You have to fix this.

Martin was immediately comforted by the fact that Jon was breathing. He hadn’t run out of fuel, not yet. Martin pressed a kiss to his hair (still hot) as he gently laid Jon flat, tearing open the sealed end of the pillowcase clutched in his fist so he could slip it up Jon’s leg and press it down, trying to stem the blood flow. You need something better, he thought, mind racing. It was oozing, not squirting, so Jon hadn’t hit an artery. That was good. Thank god Mum’s hospital soaps were worth something in the end. He needed a thicker fabric; the sheet wasn’t doing any good. Martin scoured the room, looking for any sort of thick fabric.

His towel from his shower. Thank fuck for his laziness. In less than ten steps, he had retrieved the towel from where it was haphazardly abandoned by the dresser and brought it back, folding and pressing it to his thigh, exchanging it for the thin white pillowcase. Sorry, Daisy.

Kneeled beside Jon, Martin lent most of his upper body weight to pressing down on the towel, keeping a cautious eye on Jon’s face and his chest, each shallow breath another blessing. He’s not sure how long he sits there in, that position, whispering platitudes to the pallid-faced man laid in front of him. Maybe an hour? Maybe three? Maybe twenty minutes? Time is blurry, intangible to him.

It’s dark when Martin felt okay to cautiously lift the towel and examine the letters carved in his leg. They’re starting to clot, he nodded to himself, feeling safe enough to leave Jon there on the floor to get the first aid kit from the lav. Carefully, lovingly, Martin pulled the ace bandage tight around the cotton pads on his leg, freshly doused and swabbed with cleansing alcohol. Daisy was nothing if not prepared for injuries.

Satisfied with his care, he gently pulls Jon into his arms and takes him downstairs. He didn’t want Jon to wake up and see the room like this—bloody and covered in the writings of the Archivist. Between the carpet and walls, it would take a while to clean anyways. The couch was certainly big enough to hold the man he held in his arms (and god he was way too light).

One Jon was laid on the couch, Martin made a fresh cup of tea, black tea with as much caffeine as he could stomach and pulled a cold compress from the freezer. Lifting his shoulders carefully, Martin situated himself to act as a headrest for the unconscious Jon, a cold compress acting as a barrier between them to hopefully aid the fever. One hand in Jon’s curls, the other holding a book open (still, no idea what it was about), Martin settled into the evening, saying a prayer to anything that was out there that Basira would hurry the hell up.

Martin read aloud to Jon all night, trying in vain to keep himself awake. Apparently, the book was a romance novel, some trashy erotica about a woman and a werewolf. Martin was just graceful it wasn’t sci-fi and horror. He annotated it as he read, giving Jon his stream of consciousness thoughts. “You know, I haven’t done that,” he chuckled to himself, brushing Jon’s hair from his face. “Especially not with a woman, but I don’t really think it’s anatomically possible.”

His eyes were starting to droop around three or four in the morning, the adrenaline draining out of him. Resting a hand on Jon’s neck, he felt for his pulse point and, after finding it, light and shallow as it was after the coma, let his eyes close, comforted in feeling the life fluttering beneath his fingers.

Martin woke up to a pounding on the door and he snapped awake like the knock had been a gunshot. The care he took to lay Jon’s head back down was deeply contrasted by the way he bolted to the door, unlocking it with haste and resisting the urge to throw his arms around Basira, wincing at the bright daylight that streamed inside.

“Woah—Martin,” Basira took a step back involuntarily. “Is there a reason your hands are covered in blood?”

“What? Oh-yeah, I’ll tell you about it. Things were bad. It’s fine now. It’s-It’s not my blood.” Martin swung the door open, letting Basira in. “What time is it? How did you get here so fast?”

“It’s quarter-three; I may or may not have found a plane that wasn’t on the official flight plans. And there’s more than one way to get in the Institute besides a key.” Martin shook his head and decided it wasn’t worth asking about. He beckoned her to the couch, where Jon lay, limbs limp.

Basira handed him the first statement on the pile and opened one for herself. “Ready?”

“Statements begin.”

Jon’s first thought was how wet his neck felt. His second was why he heard so many words. His brain floated between living dolls and a message in a bottle, washed up on the beaches of Greece. His teeth were chattering and he felt so cold. He grasped his hands out, reaching desperately for the comforter. Martin must have stolen it, he smiled to himself. Oh, that’s Martin. Martin’s voice.

“Hmm…Mm’tin,” he murmured, shifting towards the sound of his voice. Martin’s voice continued, telling him a story about a doll with painted lips and angry eyes. A hand reached out and cupped his face. Jon leant into the touch hungrily, grateful for the heat on his skin. He let Martin’s words carry him away again.

When Jon woke again, he felt more alive than he had in days. If his illness recently had been him submerged, he finally felt like he was breaking through the surface. The Choke released him, and he felt oxygen return to his lungs. But he was not in the Buried, he was on the couch. He was not drowning, he was breathing sweet air and felt it wafting over him in the drafty house that felt like a home when he was with Martin. Martin. God, he could hear his voice and he didn’t think he had heard anything so sweet than Martin speaking and reading to him. He was reading, yes, and Jon knew immediately what it was: the statement of Herbert Conklin, an Irishman who watched his son turn to plastic before his eyes, piece by piece. Jon’s eyes flew open and he craned his neck to find Martin’s face. His eyes were cast down on the statement in his lap, but his hand was folded in Jon’s, running his fingertips over the smaller man’s knuckles gently.

Jon felt paralyzed, unable to move as he let the statement wash over him, hating how good it made him feel to hear the statement, lavishing in the words. He felt a sharp pain in his leg throb to dull ache as the healing words flowed through him. As Martin uttered those forsaken words: “Statement Ends,” he brought his eyes to meet Jon’s, a pale smile ghosting his face before it solidified into something more real, more Martin.

“Hi love. Been a tough few days. How are you holding up?”

Jon was lost for words for a moment, gaping like a fish before he brought Martin’s clasped hand to his lips. Kissing it, he pressed the words into his skin, begging them to impress themselves there forever.

“Better that you’re here.” His memory was a blank, sure, but he knew it must be true and didn’t need to ask the Eye to confirm. Martin was here. All would be well.

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fanfic #jmart #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #cw self harm #spooky #not mental health related tho #cw blood #cw canon typical violence #hurt/comfort #whos the one hurting tho #jk its both #ill post AO3 link in the morning

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fantastic-rambles · 4 years ago

Text

The Greatest Gift

Fandom: Sk8 the Infinity

Characters: Sakurayashiki Kaoru (Cherry Blossom), Nanjo Kojiro (Joe)

Warnings: None?

Word Count: 1.1k

Summary: When Kaoru is too busy to even remember his own birthday, Kojiro is more than happy to intervene and drag him away from his work. [MatchaBlossom Week 2021 | Day 1: Birthday]

"You have an incoming call from Nanjo Kojiro."

"Hang up."

"Understood."

But not even a minute had passed before Carla spoke up again.

"You have another incoming call from Nanjo Kojiro."

"Block him."

"Yes, Master."

Kaoru stared at the paper in front of him, running a hand through his hair in frustration. He'd agreed to prepare a few pieces for an exhibition, and he'd finished most of them, but this last one, the one that would serve as the centerpiece, was stumping him. He wanted something simple but relatable, something that could stand on its own without explanation. And yet, he'd been sitting at his desk for hours, scribbling down ideas and immediately scratching them out.

"Award-winning calligrapher, my ass," he muttered as he lay down his pen and leaned back in his chair. Did it even really count when he'd practically invented the field of AI calligraphy and was basically the only person who practiced it? It wasn't as though he couldn't do regular calligraphy, but he didn't feel that there wasn't anything particularly special about his work. It seemed like people just liked the novelty of what he did, rather than the product itself, so now he had to be all refined and intellectual even when he had no idea what he was really doing.

Sighing, he stood up and stretched, then walked over to the side of the room where the rest of the scrolls were already ready, hoping that looking at them would give him some inspiration, or at least a theme that could tie them all together. He was just in the process of reviewing the last one when he heard the door slide open on the ground floor, and he frowned. Had his assistant forgotten to lock the door when she left? It was far too late for a client to be coming to see him, and it wasn't as though he had anything particularly valuable here.

"Carla, stand by to call the police," he ordered as heavy footsteps began to climb up the stairs. He didn't hear her acknowledge his command as he cast his eyes around for something that could be used as a weapon. They settled on one of the awards that he'd won: it was unwieldy, but still better than nothing, so he drifted over to it, resting a hand casually on the shelf as he fixed his eyes on the doorway.

A large shadow materialized out of the darkness on the landing, and Kaoru tensed… until it stepped into the light.

"Kojiro? What are you doing here?" Kaoru snapped.

"If you'd answer your phone, then I wouldn't need to make a house call," Kojiro retorted, hefting the paper bag in his arms.

"Did it never occur to you that maybe I wasn't answering because I was busy?" Kaoru glared at his friend, crossing his arms over his chest. Sometimes, he wondered why he even put up with the muscle-bound idiot when it seemed like Kojiro's only goal in life was to bother him. Right now, he didn't have the time or energy to put up with whatever he had planned this time.

"Actually, that's exactly what I assumed," his friend replied, walking over to Kaoru's desk and shoving his papers aside. Indignant, Kaoru stormed over as Kojiro began to pull plastic containers out of his bag and lay them out on the desk. "You probably haven't had dinner yet, right? You're too skinny as it is--you can't afford to miss meals. I brought you some roasted vegetables, mushroom risotto, and chicken parmesan. Eat!"

"Just because I'm not a musclebrain like you doesn't mean that I'm starving," Kaoru complained, but he sat down anyways as Kojiro pulled out a bottle and two wine glasses. It was true that he hadn't eaten, and Kojiro's food was always a treat, though he'd never admit as much out loud. When Kojiro popped the cork and poured the drinks, though, Kaoru raised an eyebrow.

"Champagne? Are we celebrating something?"

"Something like that," Kojiro replied evasively, offering him a glass. Rolling his eyes, Kaoru accepted it, clinking his glass against Kojiro's and taking a sip before he started to dig through the containers with a plastic fork. Kojiro probably had some sort of trivial announcement that he wanted to brag about and nobody else to talk to, so he'd made an excuse to come bother him.

However, Kojiro didn't say a thing as Kaoru ate, just sitting in the chair across from him with an amused expression and occasionally topping off their glasses. There was clearly some sort of joke that Kaoru was missing, and it irritated him, though he tried not to let it show that it was getting to him, since that would probably just make Kojiro more insufferable.

By the time that he finished eating, though, he was feeling better: satiated by the food and relaxed from the alcohol. With a sigh, he leaned back in his chair, tilting his head backwards to stare up at the ceiling. Reluctantly, he muttered, "Thank you, Kojiro," only to be startled when his friend burst into laughter.

"You've really forgotten, haven't you? Really, Kaoru. Never change, okay?" Kojiro continued to laugh, causing Kaoru to scowl as he straightened up in his chair.

"Well, then, please bestow your brilliance upon me," Kaoru spat, irked. "What momentous event has slipped my mind? It's not the anniversary of your restaurant opening, or the day that you mastered the Crail Slider or some other trick. What else is so important to you?"

But Kojiro just shook his head, struggling to regain his composure. When he could finally speak without being interrupted by laughter, he pointed out, "It's March 27th."

"Yes, and...?"

Still shaking his head, Kojiro reached down into the paper bag again, pulling out one more plastic container and setting it in front of Kaoru. Kaoru sighed in exasperation, but he humored his friend, pulling off the top and looking inside. And then he froze.

A slice of what looked like a green tiramisu was tucked into the container, and pink icing on top spelled out "Happy birthday, Kaoru."

"It's a new recipe. Instead of coffee, I tried using matcha," Kojiro commented blithely. Picking up the discarded fork, he sliced off a corner of the cake and then extended his arm to offer it to his friend. "Let me know what you think?"

Still blinking in surprise, Kaoru leaned forward to let Kojiro feed him, swallowing the dessert almost without tasting it.

"It's good," he told Kojiro, who smirked and cut off a piece for himself. Kojiro nodded with satisfaction as he chewed it thoughtfully before offering Kaoru another bite.

After Kojiro had left, taking the remnants of the meal with him, Kaoru continued to sit quietly for several long minutes. Then, after picking up his brush and placing a sheet of rice paper in front of himself, he began to write.

(Translation: "The greatest gift of life is friendship." Allegedly. xD) (It sucks because I can’t find a good brush pen to make it look like actual calligraphy and cover up my terrible handwriting by looking fancy. I also don’t know how to write hiragana. Deal with it. >.>)

@matchablossomweek

#sk8 #sk8 the infinity #skate the infinity #fanfic #fan fic #sk8 cherry blossom #sakurayashiki kaoru #sakurashiki kaoru #sk8 joe #nanjo kojiro #kojiro nanjo #matchablossomweek2021 #mine

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the-hilda-librarians-wife · 4 years ago

Text

Silver Lining

Summary: My sketchbook twist on what happened in the episode The Storm while Johanna was alone in her car. You know, technically, it could have happened...

Inspired by something I said in this rewatch post

Notes: Okay so originally this was going to be something very different with lots of obliviousness and mutual pining, but then it hit me that outside of the angsty hell that is The Mistakes We Made, I have no established relationship fics??? Time to fix that. Also I wanted to jump into the “librarian and Johanna were secretly dating during season 1” bandwagon before season 2 comes along and crushes our dreams.

Read it on ao3

The art supply store had been deserted, presumably because of the storm raging outside, which seemed to only get worse by the minute. Uneasy over the weather, Johanna’s shopping was quick, and she only bought what was absolutely essential, even though she promised herself to come back some other time.

She couldn’t fathom what was happening that day. Even in the height of winter, it never snowed like that in Trolberg, not as far as she remembered. It could be one of those freaky effects of global warming, she supposed, but it still was weird that it had happened so suddenly.

Returning home was not an option. The roads were completely blocked by heaps of pristine snow, and she’d certainly catch her death if she attempted the walk back, thus why she’d called Hilda. She’d wanted to tell her why she wouldn’t be returning home so soon, but knowing her daughter as she did, she also found it wise to warn her not to leave the house. Just in case she had any grand ideas.

After putting down the phone, she looked around only to realize that the stores were all closing, turning off their lights and closing their curtains. Johanna could see where they were coming from, seeing as no customer would face this storm for things like art supplies or doughnuts, but she had hoped at least one of them would be available for her to stay inside and make use of the heating. Seeing no other option, though, she returned to her car.

Her cellphone had no signal, and she was sure that that, too, was due to the weather. The supplies she’d bought weren’t enough for her to get ahead on her work, or even to doodle, so she was stuck with people-watching to pass her time. Everyone she saw looked like they were hurrying somewhere, and Johanna silently wished good luck to each of them, even though she knew that they would only be able to go so far before being forced to find somewhere to stay immediately.

None of the anxious faces she saw evoked more than a brief memory from her, either people who frequented her favorite cafe at the same time as her, or perhaps people she’d helped during her time working at the hardware store. Until one did.

Johanna recognized her colours before her face, because even though she was looking down at the ground, stepping carefully on the snowy street, her black clothes and purple hair always gave her away. She was curled in on herself, apparently clutching something to her belly to protect it from the snow.

Her house wasn’t nearby, Johanna knew this. The only reason she was outside at all was because of the weekly coven meeting that the witches of Trolberg did every Sunday morning. She must have been caught abruptly by the storm when she was already on her way.

Feeling icy wind on her face as she opened the car’s door, Johanna waved her hand in the air and tried to shout to get her attention.

“Maven!” Though she knew the woman to get lost in thought while she walked, Maven heard her right away, and a look of recognition overtook her face when she glanced at the yellow car. “Come here, you’ll freeze to death!”

There was barely a second of deliberation before the librarian crossed the street and headed for the passenger seat. When she opened the door, Johanna was already sitting down again, and she helped herself inside the car.

“Thank you, Anna.” She said, incredibly relieved that Johanna had been there in the exact moment she’d needed her. “You just saved me.”

The smile Johanna gave her stole her breath, making her feel warmer in spite of the freezing cold she’d just come out of. She always had that power of making the room feel like it was filled with a light so strong that it seeped all the way into Maven’s heart, and it was one of those things Maven knew she’d never tire of.

“Well, I’m glad to be of help. How was the meeting?”

Maven shrugged, opening her coat’s zipper to get rid of the icy garment.

“It was alright. Harvesting season is coming closer and we are planning on blessing the crops nearby.” She said, throwing the coat on the backseats. “Heavens know they’ll need it with this storm. The elders also warned me that they’ll be coming to the library this week with a group of children who showed gifts to the occult arts. You know, to teach them about the path. So I guess that will be interesting.”

The most intriguing topic on the reunion had been, by far, the concern over a group of kids who had caused a commotion in the cemetery. One member of their coven had recently made contact with a ghost, only to find it unwilling to help her ‘because of the human children of their town that had been disrespecting their eternal slumber’. Maven had to admit that she’d had to make an effort not to laugh when their spirit worker told this story, but unless she had a death wish, she should not let Johanna in on this. It wasn’t lying, she told herself. It was simply not snitching on Hilda. Besides, since Johanna wasn’t a witch, Maven shouldn’t even be telling her any of that to begin with.

“What about you?” She asked, trying to shake the ghosts away from her mind. “What are you doing out here in this storm?”

“Oh, I came for art supplies.” Johanna pointed at the shopping bag on the backseat. “Wasn’t quite this bad when I left home. I wonder what on earth brought on this crazy weather.”

“Oh, weather spirits undoubtedly.” Maven said as she took off her gloves, rubbing her hands together for warmth.

“Weather spirits?”

“Yes, I can sense they’re the ones behind this. Besides, the coven has been observing some very unusual weather spirit activity in town. We could be here for a while.”

Looking worriedly at the sky, Johanna only noticed that Maven was offering her something when she all but shoved it under her nose. She blinked, picking a cupcake up on her hands. It was still warm and exhaled a sweet apple scent, with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top of it.

Maven’s left hand was inside a paper bag, which Johanna assumed was what she’d been trying to protect from the snow when she’d been outside. After taking another cupcake, she folded the bag closed.

“One of the witches made too many cupcakes and brought them to give us. Very convenient to have them right now.”

“Oh, that smells lovely.” Johanna said. “Are you sure you don’t want to take it home for yourself? I’m not going to starve if I have to wait a few more hours to eat.”

Maven smiled right before taking a bite of her own cupcake, shaking her head fondly in exasperation.

“I’m your girlfriend, Johanna.” She said when she finished chewing. “If I don’t feed you, who will?”

Johanna rolled her eyes playfully as she brought the cake to her lips, humming in satisfaction at the sweet taste. Along with seeing Hilda happy and with new friends, her newfound relationship with Maven was what made her be thankful every day that they’d moved back to Trolberg.

“So, these weather spirits.” Johanna began while each of them focused on their sweet. “Any idea of why they went haywire?”

“Hard to tell, really. They’ll pick fights with each other over anything, but for a storm this strong it has got to be an enormous gathering of them. I honestly don’t know what could have caused this, but one of the elders specifies in weather magic. Maybe he knows, I’ll ask him about it when he goes to the library with the initiates.”

Frowning, Johanna felt herself getting more worried.

“So there’s no way to know when this will stop.”

“I’m afraid not.” Noticing her girlfriend’s unease, Maven tried to catch her gaze, but Johanna seemed to look everywhere but at her. “Anna? Are you okay?”

“I’m just a little worried about Hilda.” She answered. “She’s alone at home with Alfur. I told her to stay put, but even so… she’s just a kid, and if anything happens, she has no way to talk to me.”

“Hey.” Maven put a hand on Johanna’s shoulder, trying to ground her to the moment and not leave her to imagine every bad scenario she could. “I know I don’t know her like you do, but from what you’ve told me she’s a smart and brave little girl. She’ll be fine. If you want to worry about anything, I’d suggest worrying about us at the moment. We’re due to become icicles any minute now.”

Johanna chuckled, grateful for Maven being with her in that moment. She always seemed to know what to say to make her feel better.

“Yeah, you’re right.” She sighed, relaxing the weight of her body against the seat and taking one more bite. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw that Maven had taken a pen out of her pocket and was now scribbling something on the paper bag the cupcakes had been on.

“I’m not kidding, if this storm gets any worse I don’t know if the car’s heating will keep up.” She said when Johanna shot her a questioning look. “I don’t have many sigils memorized, but luckily Ruth packed a heat one with the cupcakes. I’ll just activate a few and we should be fine.”

Indeed, on top of her tight there was a small paper square with a doodle in it, which Maven had already copied three times on the bag, and was now doing a fourth one. If Johanna saw that symbol and no one told her of its meaning, she’d wave it off as some sort of stylized drawing of a spider, or perhaps of a flame from a certain point of view, so she was glad to be with someone who knew better.

After finishing the drawings, she put the pen aside and began to carefully rip the sigils from each other. When she had the four pieces of paper, she pressed the first one against her window and recited some words that Johanna couldn’t recognize. Listening to witch language always felt singular to Johanna, like even though she’d never learned it, something deep inside her felt awake when she heard it, like it was in her blood. She’d asked Maven about it once, receiving the answer that this wasn’t an unusual feeling. The language of witches is the language of the Earth, which we’re all part of, she’d said. Johanna couldn’t say in all honesty that she’d understood, but it had seemed to make sense to her girlfriend so she hadn’t pressed any further.

When she removed her hand from the glass, the paper had disappeared, and only the symbol remained on the window, shining with orange light as if it was on fire. Then, it vanished leaving no trace on the window.

Johanna continued to stare at where the sigil had been while Maven maneuvered herself to the back of the car to repeat the process with the back windows. Magic never failed to leave her astonished.

It registered on the back of her mind that the car was indeed getting warmer, especially when the librarian activated the third sigil on the window behind Johanna’s seat. After Maven had done that too, Johanna felt her put her elbow on her seat, near her neck, leaning the other against the passenger seat. She was kneeling on the car’s floor, practically by Johanna’s side in the gap between the two front seats. The look she was wearing immediately gave away to Johanna that she wanted to talk about something.

“Anna, I wanted to ask you…” She began, proving her right. “When do you think it will be okay to tell her about us?”

“Her?” Johanna frowned.

“Hilda, I mean. Obviously I’ll understand if you want to keep our relationship just between ourselves for some time. But what do you think she’ll think of me?”

Johanna opened a smile and leaned towards Maven, kissing her cheek. When she retreated, she had to bite back a giggle at how flustered her girlfriend looked.

“Hilda will love you.” Johanna answered honestly. She’d admittedly thought about how Hilda and Maven’s relationship would be, and she was afraid, just not the way one would expect. Her fear was that they’d get along a little too much and Johanna would have to run after them every other day, trying to stop them from getting killed at the hands of a magical creature they’d attempted to befriend or a spirit they’d summoned. Though it was possible that there would be some unease between them at the beginning, the thought that they wouldn’t see eye to eye didn’t even sound possible to Johanna.

“The only reason I haven’t told her yet is because she seems to have a lot on her mind right now. Some trouble with her friends, I think, but she won’t tell me yet. But it’s a conversation I want to have with her as soon as she’s alright again.”

Maven looked away from Johanna, now feeling silly for having asked. It wasn’t like her to be insecure like that, but this truly mattered to her. Whether Hilda approved of her or not would be decisive for how far she and Johanna would be able to take their relationship. Besides, if Johanna told her daughter about them, then that would mean that she took their relationship seriously, so she couldn’t help but care about it.

At least Johanna hadn’t taken it the wrong way, her pursed smile as she put a stray lock of Maven’s hair behind her ear telling her that her girlfriend was probably very amused. She could practically hear Johanna calling her ‘adorable’, stopping herself from doing so only because she knew how Maven didn’t like being called cute.

“I’m… very happy to hear you think so. And I hope whatever is troubling Hilda gets solved soon.”

“I do too. Are you done with your sigils already?”

Between her fingers, she was still holding one last piece of paper, and she flickered her wrist so that it was in front of Johanna’s eyes.

“There’s one more, but I’ll need your help this time.”

“How so- oh.” Before Johanna had time to wonder in what way she could possibly help Maven with magic, her girlfriend had already deposited herself in her lap.

Johanna wasn’t one to blush often, but she was certain the heat on her cheeks was not because of the sigils.

“Just keep this up. I only need to activate this one near your corner of the car.”

Maven then pressed her palm with the sigil to the window, repeating the incantation. This time Johanna was distracted by more than just the magic, in a way that she barely noticed it when the casting was finished and the car was filled by cozy warmth.

“That’s good.” Maven said, approving her own work. “I can go to my seat now, if you want me to.”

Realizing that she’d abstractedly put her arms around Maven’s waist, interlacing her fingers near her side, Johanna shrugged and then caught Maven by surprise by learning in to kiss her lips sweetly. It would have been a very romantic cenario, snug with her love while snow piled outside, if only they weren’t there because they were trapped inside a car due to a mysterious storm. Still, she was with Maven and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I don’t want you to go anywhere, dearest.”

_#_#_#_

Maven did go back to her seat eventually, but it was only because Johanna remembered a deck of cards that she kept in the glove compartment and after some time they decided to play something. It didn’t take long at all for the librarian to realize that she was pretty bad at that, but seeing Johanna’s childlike joy every time she won a match, she couldn’t even be annoyed.

Safe and sound inside the car, the storm hadn’t really been on the forefront of their minds. The magic kept them comfortable and the flow of people running from the weather outside was all but nonexistent at that point. But they did realize when the few rays of sunshine that made it through the thick layers of clouds became stronger.

Both of them put their cards down, the change so noticeable that they wanted to get a good look at what had happened. While Maven only lowered her window and stuck her head out, Johanna stepped out of the car to look at the sky.

“At last!” Johanna sighed with relief as the clouds became smaller, making a gap just above them.

From her side of the car, Maven was more interested in another thing she’d noticed than in the changing weather. Either her eyes deceived her, or a thunderbird was flying away at that very moment. What it had been doing in the middle of that tempest was anyone’s guess.

However, they were soon startled by the booming sound of thunder, and watched in stunned silence as one of the remaining clouds seemed to swell unnaturally, darkening at each moment that passed. Johanna closed the door by her side just in time to not get hit by the first drops of water.

They were static while they watched the rain pour down, not believing in the situation even though it was happening right in front of their eyes. Stunned by the abrupt turns, a laugh escaped Johanna’s lips, and soon the absurd picture that she made, laughing like a madwoman while monstrous rain surrounded them made Maven break into giggles as well.

“Well dearest, I think we’re going to be here for even longer.” She said after she had gathered herself enough to form a coherent sentence.

Picking up her girlfriend’s cards as well as her own, she began shuffling them together.

“In that case, I would like a revenge match.”

“Alright, but I warn you that you’ll regret it.”

Huffing in feigned outrage, Maven began distributing their cards, and the ones that were left she put to the side.

“In the end I’m glad, you know.” Johanna said after they began their match, making the librarian frown at her. “For the storm. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t even see you today, let alone spend some time with you.”

“Me too, Anna.” Maven smiled. “Me too.”

#fic: silver lining #my fic #sketchbook ship #sketchbook ship hilda #sketchbook ship fanfic #the hilda librarian fanfic #hilda johanna fanfic

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sp00kworm · 5 years ago

Note

Can you maybe write a little something with Niles being a little shit and poking fun/tease female Corrin? If not that's fine too~

A/N: I can indeed write something about Niles and being a little shit. Though my two brain cells demand he be a filthy hoe about it.

Requests are open! (Awakening, Fates and Three Houses)

–

A Matter of Urgency (Niles x Female Corrin/My Unit)

Corring truly was trying to stay awake. It was just the turn of the afternoon when Xander asked for her to attend a meeting. It was in the strategy room, a map of the two kingdoms laid over the long table. The new king of Nohr was stressed, even now, when he wasn't in his massive amounts of armour, pulling at his hair as he explained the scouts reports from close to the border. There was fear of rioting in the outer villages of Hoshido. Nohr was taking their food, it was only right that they would be outraged. The invaders were taking some of their livelihoods, and even if it was to feed the starving people of Nohr, it was loathe to go down well.

“I’m thinking that we set up some form of defensive position along here.” Xander’s finger ran along the roads, “We need something for both the journey in and out.” He commented, sighing as he looked at the fields around the outlying villages, “I fear any more food being taken will result in riots, even if it is to feed our people.” Xander followed the roads with his finger before sitting back in his chair, eyeing the map with cold eyes.

“Hmm.” Corrin held her chin, looking over the map with red eyes before pointing at the roads, “Perhaps you are over thinking this? I think that a simple military presence within the villages would be enough to deter riots.” She offered before looking at Xander’s frown.

“I don’t believe that would be the best course of action.” Xander pointed out before thinking, “We would need to send only the most trustworthy individuals to avoid accidental bloodshed but I agree that it would be a much easier solution than blockades and stockpiling resources within the towers, here and here.” His finger tapped the map before he nodded and drew a line over the original plan, noting the idea among his scribblings, “I will try and organise this…It would save a lot of scare mongering too.” Xander smiled at Corrin.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Corrin.” The word sister felt all too foreign too him and Corrin smiled at his stiffness before giggling.

“Don’t worry about it, Xan.” She laughed when his smile turned into a withering look. It was her nickname for him from being a small child. Xander shook his head, curls of golden hair bobbing around his head before he continued.

Her older brother’s words were droned out by a very familiar smirk in the shadows.

Niles.

Just when had he sneaked into the strategy room? His smile was lethal as he raised a finger to his lips, shushing her to silence as he watched her brother babble on about a new supply route from the northern ice villages.

“Corrin? Are you alright?” Xander looked at her wide eyes and almost turned around before Corrin smiled, easy going as she pointed to the map and engaged him.

Niles watched her, lips parted as she distracted her eldest brother from the troublemaker poised behind him in the shadows. She couldn’t have him knowing about Niles and her…not yet. He already despised the criminal’s face enough as it was. She dreaded to think what he would do if Niles was to mention one of his lewd jokes only aimed at her.

She’d seen Xander lop off heads. Corrin swallowed and tried to ignore Niles who was now leaning against the wall, bright eyes glinting before he attracted her attention again with a slip of his hand down his thigh. Now he was just being cruel. Niles smirked before raising two fingers to his mouth, devilish tongue sliding out from between his lips slowly, the appendage curling between them before he crossed his arms again and watched.

Corrin was red in the face. Xander whipped around this time and caught sight of the archer before he could make a move. Niles was the picture of calmness, despite Xander towering over him, imposing aura and eyes icy.

“Is there any reason for you to be in here, retainer?” Xander crossed his arms over his chest, imposing and glacial.

Niles gave the King a bow, dipping low, platinum blond hair sweeping over his shoulders, “I apologise, your majesty, I’ve simply come to collect the princess for her meeting with Leo. He requires her…” She scowled when his blue eyes stared at her embarrassed face, “Input with a matter of beast stone transformations.” He drawled out before standing back up and placing his hands on Corrin’s shoulders.

“Ah…Well.” Xander rolled his maps back into place before scowling, “Do behave yourself Niles…” He took a step towards the door before looking over his shoulder, “It would be a shame for Leo to lose a retainer due to improper conduct.” Niles fingers rippled in a pattern over Corrin’s shoulders as he watched the blond king leave.

“You didn’t tell me you would be in here with the King…How scandalous, my love.” Niles purred, fingers dipping over Corrin’s shoulders, mouth hot against her pointed ear, “Maybe I should follow through and have you against the table? My tongue inside of you, thighs tight around my head.” Niles let her smack him away, chuckling low as Corrin glared at him.

“You embarrassed me in front of my brother, Niles!” She grumbled before touching his cheek, already softening, faced with his smile, “Don’t do it again.”

“Hmm. Of course not, my little princess. I’ll be the very picture of manners.”

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ye2owm2cm · 6 years ago

Text

“‘Don’t eat,’ was two words embedded in my brain; two words in a frame above the entrance.

Etch A Sketch it inside the dome of the darkness that claimed to be my mind; this couldn’t ever be a home, for myself, or for anyone else.

‘Don’t eat,’ painted in red that was bold in the family room, blood dripping from the letters. People’s whispers, ‘Look how much weight she’s lost, she must be a pill head,” was lock and key inside of me.

The goal is to be petite, I grab my plate and that’s when Ana will greet me, yanking at the skin that’s resting upon my hipbones and ribcages. I starve myself, shattering the glass plate; and my mother’s hopes and dreams of her daughter getting healthier. I lay in bed with a pen wanting to carve the fat from my thighs and baptize the demons in my mind.

‘Don’t eat,’ Mia whispered, grabbing me by the throat. Gags and gasps escaping my mouth, i knew this was a bad idea the first time that girl taught me the trick behind purging. My fingers trail down my throat, the pretty girl at the store lingers in my mind.

No cheat days, 300 calories minimum. The health risks; the hair loss, and bone mass loss, I am starving myself to the point of baldness and crackling bones. Cardiac complications, and fertility challenges, heart attacks and miscarriages. Pill head popping laxatives, and a deprivation of potassium, chloride, sodium and every single nutrient I may ever need.

‘Don’t eat,’ was written all over notebooks; scribbled and in bold, neat and in cursive. Every calorie every consumed in six years— two thousand, one hundred and ninety days. Every meal I had consumed and thrown up was left unwritten, hidden, because being the daughter of a nurse everything I had done was forebidden.

My grandmother stares in disbelief, salty tears dripping from her eyes as she sees how her once healthy granddaughter was frail; so easy to be broken and destroyed, every last calorie that i had refused now sat proudly on my prominent collarbones, dancing on each rib that attached to my ribcage. Pale, the haunting actions were bagged up in the color black and blue underneath my green eyes. The pain was colored pink in my cheeks. Purple, green, and yellow bruises lining my body from head to toe.

‘Don’t eat,’ was inside my brain when my best friend and i had decided to do it together. We both fueled each other’s ache to burn the fat. Fake smiles rested on our faces as we played with the dinner we would share around our parents after four days of a bellyache. We would wake and avoids any dinners that they would bake, popping a stick of gum in my mouth on a work break to take the hunger away.

The void inside of me, there was multiple, plural, voids. They are the fault of my temple being destroyed. A void for beauty and thinness, I want forgiveness, forgiveness for unwiseness. I have a void of hunger, a massive demon who eats at my intestines, doubling me over in pain. Benevolence was dripping in my passive actions as I fed them water and drugs.

‘Don’t eat,’ was spilling off my tongue when my friend had spoken up about my habits, ‘You’re going to die, it will kill you, and at the rate you’re going it is only a matter of time till it happens.’ Maybe it’s my fate because all the times my mother pushes me to get help and get healthy i had refused, whispering, ‘i don’t think i am ready to be okay,’ I was stealthy, my pains from the disorders was hidden and they had only made assumptions by my bones.

I had seen the deepest and darkest areas of the eating disorder, demons popping out from corners. A coroners report, listing that it wasn’t natural causes that had killed the girl with burgundy dyed hair, and bright green eyes. She was short the amount of nutrients to feed her intestines, she had some sort of problem to assort the importance of vitamins and nutrients. First her energy levels had dropped, the fatigue had hired and the fatal consequences would be the start of the heart attack.

‘Don’t eat,’ was creeping and crawling in every crawl space and crevice in my mind, as i cried, looking at myself and writing this.”

— Ye2owm2cm // Don��t Eat // 1:53 am

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thedarklordmegatron · 6 years ago

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Nosferatu

I can finally share my piece for the Promptio Zine @justyouandmezine ! The zine is free and you can find the link to download it on their profile!

Title: Nosferatu Rating: Teen Warnings: Vampire AU, implied physical and psychological torture.

AO3 link here

He remembers a warm laugh and large arms around his body. He remembers feeling safe, feeling loved, and wanting it to last forever. He remembers a body curled around his own, whispering sweet nothings to him as fingers run through his hair. He remembers that face, the sharp jaw and the singular scar across one eye; the golden eyes that make him feel as though he could take on the world, so long as those eyes were waiting for him at home. He remembers it all, remembers the way the man walked, the way he dressed; he remembers everything, except for a name.

It’s there on the very tip of his tongue, so close that he can taste it but always so far out of reach. Some mornings, when the sun rises and burns his skin through the tiny hole in the roof, he opens his mouth to call a name and nothing comes save a wordless cry. As the wind tears at the meagre shelter, threatening to bury him beneath tonnes of concrete and sheet metal, he reaches a hand through the bars and tries to write a name in the dirt yet. He never manages anything more than a few illegible scribbles. It is there. He knows it is. He knows that out there, somewhere, this man is waiting for him to come home, but how can he get home when the bars burn his skin? When the unbreakable chains around his neck and wrists restrict his movement? When he’s so thirsty that some nights he can do nothing except scream himself hoarse, throwing himself against the strange metal caging that keeps him trapped? He can smell the food. It’s out there, and it’s so close, yet so far, but he wants it. If he’s lucky and the man in the white coat is in a good mood, a small bottle with red liquid is occasionally thrown in his general direction.

Once the man had thrown it too far to the left, close enough that he could touch it with a finger, yet it was too far away for him to grab it. That day he’d spent hours curled up on the floor, screaming and crying, his food close enough to see but he still couldn’t get it. The memory alone is enough to send a shiver down his spine.

How is it that he can remember so much yet he cannot remember a single name?

He’s not sure what lies beyond the door on the other side of his prison, when the man enters or leaves, he takes great care to prevent him from seeing the outside world. There are days when he comes with a bucket and those are the days Prompto loves the most. On those days, the door is opened just wide enough that he can see the grass and bushes beyond it. If he’s incredibly lucky, the man will go out, sometimes forgetting to shut the door, and return with a second bucketm granting him a few more seconds of joy. Yes, the water is cold, and yes, his clothes stick to his skin, but he saw the grass! A few stars as well, if he laid himself down on his stomach! Those are the days he loves the most.

He remembers once that the man came with a second man. This one had strange purple hair and looked at him as though he was dangerous, which was silly. He can’t be dangerous, chained as he is, and he’s not about to touch the bars that always hurt him so much. The second man had stayed with him all day and until the next sunrise! They hadn’t spoken. Prompto had long since learnt that talking only ended in more pain, but the company was pleasant though. The purple man had even broken off another piece of the roof; this one far enough away that the sun’s rays wouldn’t hurt him, but close enough that he could see the stars at night and the clouds during the day. If he wasn’t so sure that he was meant to be quiet, he would have thanked him. Now, when he was left alone, he could lay on his back and watch the sky. He dreams of flying among the clouds, of being one of the birds that flies past occasionally, of being so free that he could go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He dreams of dancing with the stars. Of exploring other worlds and wonders if anyone lives out there, if anyone can see him. He likes to think that they can, that one day those strange people from space will come and see him, maybe even take off the chains. That would be nice. What he wouldn’t give to just be able to take them off for half an hour.

If he focuses hard enough, he can just about forget the hunger. At least until his fangs come in. He always forgets about them and always ends up cutting his lips. The man doesn’t like that.

“I can’t have broken merchandise, you stupid creature!” He hisses, but Prompto always thinks it’s a good thing because no matter what, the man comes back with a bottle and he always gets those ones.

He’s laying on his back, absently poking at his fangs, and watching the stars through the hole, when he smells it. Food! He can’t let himself get too excited--the man won’t let him eat if he’s happy--but there’s so much of it! Lots!! There must be a lot of bottles out there! And then he hears them. There’s a lot of heartbeats out there. The man must have brought friends this time. Maybe the purple man is with them? If he stays this time, Prompto promises himself that he’ll try to thank him, or at least smile. The man doesn’t have any cameras so he shouldn’t know, unless the purple man tells on him, but he doesn’t think he will. He’s too nice for that.

The heartbeats are coming closer and as much as he wants to press himself against the bars, Prompto forces himself to lay on his stomach and hide his head under his arms. Better to look like he’s sleeping; they might not hurt him if he does that. He can’t help the small squeak that comes out as the door is kicked in. Angry people! He doesn’t like angry people! The man always hurts him and doesn’t feed him when he’s angry! There are voices. Really loud, angry voices, and lots of running. Why do they have to be so loud? His stomach growls and his fangs sting. He’s hungry but he can’t move. If he moves and the man is with them, he won’t get his food tonight.it’s already been three days and his last bottle was only half-full; he needs that food tonight.

“Prompto?” A soft voice asks from nearby. He hasn’t heard a voice like that in ages. Wait…that’s his name! The man doesn’t say his name, though…is it a test? Should he answer? “Prompto?” The voice questions again, only this time a hand touches his arm and he moves. He knows he shouldn’t, knows that moving isn’t smart, but the person touched him! They can’t touch him!! So instead of letting them touch him, he throws himself into the bars on the other side of the cage, choking himself with the chain in the process. His skin sizzles as it comes into contact with the bars and he screams. Oh gods! The man is going to hurt him, going to starve him, and now he hurts from the bars! Terrified, hungry, and confused, he allows himself to sob, curling up into the smallest ball possible in an attempt to hide. Why are they doing this to him? He was good! He hadn’t done anything wrong!

The voices are shouting, there are noises outside, loud noises that he doesn’t like. More people are rushing inside, however the person who touched him has stayed still. He can hear them talking quietly to another, yet he can’t find the energy to try and listen in on the conversation. All he wants is for them to leave him alone. Why can’t they just go away? There are more footsteps, only these ones are heavy and far too close for comfort. That’s never a good thing.

“Prompto?” He knows that voice. “Prom?” Slowly he forces himself to lift his head. Oh. That’s the face. That’s the face from his dreams. The warm eyes. He doesn’t like the tears in those eyes, though. The face has always been happy and smiling; there shouldn’t be tears in his eyes. Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s reaching between the bars to touch the tears. This man is a nice man. A very nice man. Unlike the man with the white coat, this man stays still and lets him touch his face. This man smiles through his tears but makes no move to touch him. That’s nice. People touching him is never fun. “Hi babe,” the man says, only this time his voice breaks and Prompto doesn’t like that. This man shouldn’t be sad. He should be happy like he is in his dreams.

His fangs tingle again but he ignores that. The man smells like food but he’s not going to eat him. That’s stupid. If he’s lucky, they might have a bottle for him.

“Cor,” The man starts, never once taking his eyes off Prompto, though he clearly isn’t talking to him. There’s shuffling from behind him. Another man appears--perhaps he’s the one that touched him? He’s the only other one close enough to have done so. “His eyes?”

“I can see them.”

Prompto startles, accidentally knocking his arm into the bar again. Ow! He’ll never understand why the bars, hurt but he wishes they’d stop.

“Silver,” The second man grumbles, tapping the bar closest to him.

“Daemons don’t react to silver,” Prompto’s man mutters and he feels as though he should recognise that word. Something about it seems familiar.

“No, they don’t.”

He quickly tunes out their conversation.t’s nothing interesting and, besides, he’d much rather focus on his man. The eyes are so much better in person than in his dreams. And his hands! They’re huge! While the men talk, Prompto reaches out to take a hand, failing to notice the pair had gone silent. There’s a leather bracelet wrapped around the man’s wrist, and his curiosity gets the better of him. He no longer cares that the man might hurt him when he gets back. Even if everyone here hurt him, he’s the happiest he’s been in ages. His dream man is here and he’s finally touching someone that doesn’t want to hurt him, although the delicious smell of food coming from him is really, really hard to ignore.

“It’s yours,” his man says softly. Prompto looks up at him in confusion. His? He doesn’t own something that nice! He doesn’t own anything really. Except the little piece of wood in his pocket that reminded him of a bird thing.

“I don’t think he recognises you, Gladio.”

Gladio!! That’s the name! That’s the name he knows but didn’t know!

“Gladio!” He crows happily, pointedly ignoring how much his voice hurt after being quiet for so long. He doesn’t care. This is Gladio! This is him! He remembers the name!

His man laughs, though more tears are gathering in his eyes again, and he nods. “Yeah, Prom. It’s me,. He chokes on his tears and Prompto presses his face against the bars, desperately reaching out with chained hands in an attempt to comfort him. Gladio smiles and leans down to press a kiss to the back of each of his hands before gently pushing his face away from the bars.

“I’m here,” he soothes, running one finger along Prompto’s cheek, obviously minding the new burn. It’s the first touch in as long as he can remember that doesn’t hurt. Turning his face into the warmth, Prompto smiles. The smell of food is really strong on his hands, so he supposes Gladio must have had something to eat recently. “You’re okay,” Gladio continues. “Gods, you’re really alive.”

“Gladio,” Prompto purrs, wrapping his arms around Gladio’s hand and holding it close. He doesn’t care that Gladio is probably going to be gone by the morning, just as the purple man was. He doesn’t care that he’s not going to eat for a few days and that he’s probably going to be hurt. He doesn’t care because he remembers the name. He remembers Gladio and Gladio is here. It’s the best day of his life.

#prompto argentum #gladiolus amiticia #promptio #prompto x gladio #final fantasy xv #final fantasy 15 #ffxv #vex writes #promptio zine #zine piece #vampire au

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moonstruckbucky · 6 years ago

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Prowl [2] | b. hargrove

SUMMARY: Billy doesn’t believe in werewolves.

PAIRING: Werewolf!Billy Hargrove x fem!Reader

WARNINGS: Language, graphic depictions of violence, blood, pain, smut, you’ve been warned

RATING: 18+

NOTES: Wow guys, thanks so much for all the feedback on the last chapter! I’m glad y'all are enjoying this! This chapter is 3.2k words long so grab a cup of tea, cuddle up and enjoy! Honestly this could have gone longer, but I figured you guys would appreciate a part four over a longer chapter ;) As always, feedback is appreciated! Reblogs and comments and replies mostly!

CHAPTER 1 / CHAPTER 2 / CHAPTER 3

chapter two.

The next morning, you woke with a crick in your neck from sleeping in the arm chair. Billy wasn’t on the couch, but you could hear someone digging around in the fridge in the kitchen. Rubbing your eyes, you stood up uneasily, knees wobbling from being cramped on the chair all night.

“Billy?” you asked around a yawn. Your boyfriend was bent at the waist, his entire top half buried in the fridge. “What the hell?”

“Do you have any hamburger?” he asked, shoving aside juice, eggs, and yogurt. He yanked open the vegetable crispers, the sandwich meat drawer, before slamming all of them closed. “I need to go get hamburger.”

“Billy, what the actual fuck? It’s 9 in the morning! Why do you need hamburger?” You were pretty sure your brain was spinning in effort to keep up with him. He barely looked at you as he closed the fridge and headed to the door. You grabbed his arm to stop him. “Wait, wait, wait. Let’s slow down here, okay? I need to get dressed, and I need to check that wound before we do anything, okay? Then we can go get a real breakfast that isn’t hamburger.”

“Fine,” he grumbled and then he proceeded to pace around the kitchen.

“Can I trust you to stay put?” you asked with an arched eyebrow. The look he gave you was withering, but you were used to his foul moods. His body warmed with the effort of glaring, something he’d never noticed before but didn’t put much thought into now.

You backed away from him, keeping your eyes on him to make sure he didn’t bolt for the door. When he appeased you by dropping heavily into a kitchen chair, you turned and headed down the hall to your bedroom, changing quickly and swiping a brush through your hair.

Billy sat quietly but in annoyance, his knee bouncing as his ravenous hunger put him in an even worse mood. He couldn’t remember being so hungry. And everything was louder—the clock on the wall ticked a loud beat that echoed inside his head, bouncing off his skull like a pinball machine; the faucet was drip drip dripping and he thought he might go crazy; the fridge was humming, a low sound that, to anyone else, would have been barely noticeable, but to Billy, it was as loud as the music he played in his car.

His fingers curled into his jeans, leg jittering more rapidly as his aggravation mounted. He could hear you humming to yourself in your bedroom down the hall, and it stalled his souring mood for a second as he smiled fondly. But then he heard your cat in the living room scratching at his post and he growled deeply in his throat. In the back of his mind, there was a flicker of confusion over his suddenly-acquired sharp hearing, but the annoyance over the offending noises outweighed it.

Billy’s head fell into his hands, fingers tangling in his curly mullet as he willed the sounds to just go away. Then his ears pick up the sounds of your footsteps, your socks soft on the carpet, and there you were again. Eyebrows furrowed, you stepped over to him, kneeling before him.

Any other time, Billy would’ve had an innuendo to go along with the action, but his head felt like it would explode, both from the overload of sounds and from his anger climbing higher.

“Billy?” you asked worriedly, pulling one of his hands out of his hair. “Billy, what is it?”

“Everything,” he hissed between clenched teeth. “I can hear everything. I’m about to rip that fucking faucet out of the sink.”

Confusion muddled your mind as you laid a hand on his collar, bloodied from his wound. The gauze was stained red, but the blood was dry. You peeled off the tape, lifted the gauze off the wound, and felt the color drain from your face.

Billy picked up on the change immediately. You smelled different. Your face was stark white as your eyes, wide and fearful and tremendously confused, stared at his shoulder.

“What? What is it?” he asked, tilting his face to see, but it was futile.

“It’s…. It’s gone,” you mumbled. Billy stood up from the chair, nearly knocking you back on your ass as he did so, and hurried to the bathroom to look in the mirror.

Sure enough, the wound was gone, the skin healed over as if it had never been there to begin with. But his skin and his clothes were still stained deep red, the only evidence that it had, in fact, existed.

“What the fuck?” he whispered, terror eking into his voice despite his better judgement.

“Billy, what the hell is going on? Unless you have some badass immune system, that- you—” You huffed a breath, trying to rein in the panic that was quickly flooding your system.

“I know,” he said, turning to you and grasping your face between his hands. His blue eyes met yours, and in them you could see his panic as well. You took a steadying breath, hands rising to hold onto his as they held your face. “What the hell is happening?”

“I’m not sure, Billy, but we’re going to find out.” Your voice was soft, comforting, because the panic in his eyes was growing. You’d have to be the reasonable one in this situation. “Come on. Let’s go get something to eat and then we’re going to the library.”

Normally Billy would fight you tooth and nail against going to the library, so when he just nodded compliantly and followed you, you knew he was desperate. You drove to the little breakfast diner in town, knuckles white on the steering wheel. You and Billy chose a booth away from the door and away from the few other patrons.

“Okay,” you sighed, reaching into your purse for a pen and sliding a napkin across the table, “let’s make a list of what’s going on, okay? So, first one: rapid healing.”

You wrote it down as the waitress appeared with two mugs, pouring bitter, burnt coffee into both. You fixed yours with hefty amounts of cream and sugar, ignoring Billy’s wince before he prattled off a massive breakfast order to the waitress.

Slightly wide-eyed, she scribbled everything down, repeating the order of sausage, two pancakes, hash browns, toast, three scrambled eggs, and extra bacon, extra crispy. Once she was gone, you wrote down ravenous hunger on the napkin and then, more as an afterthought, improved hearing, as you thought back to his comment in your kitchen.

When the food arrived, Billy drained his coffee in one swallow and tore into his breakfast like a man starved. Your food sat mostly untouched as Billy inhaled his bacon, alternating between chewing and gulping heavily from a tall glass of orange juice. A few of the patrons at the bar sent him and you dirty glances; you hoped your returning expression was apologetic.

“You gonna eat that?” Billy asked around a mouthful of bacon. He then reached over and stabbed your sausage patty and tore off a huge chunk.

“Slow down, Billy,” you hissed, eyes bouncing to the people at the bar. “You’re drawing attention.”

“I can’t help it. I’m so hungry,” he whined, swallowing the bite and draining his orange juice. His plate was completely cleared of food, and he was staring at yours with a pleading expression. With a roll of your eyes, you pushed your half-eaten plate across the table to him, and it was empty in minutes.

“My, we were hungry,” the waitress commented as she appeared to collect your plates. She shot a wary glance over at Billy, whose hands were fidgeting on top of the table. No doubt he was tempted to ask for more food, but you spoke before he could open his mouth.

“Everything was delicious. Can we get the check please?” You smiled sweetly at her, apologizing with your eyes for Billy’s behavior.

She dropped the receipt on the table and you snatched it, glanced at the total, handed her some bills and told her to keep the change. Then you all but dragged Billy out of the diner, glaring half-heartedly at him. His eyes were sweeping up and down the street and then he suddenly winced as a car alarm blared. Your glare softened to a look of sympathy, and you laced your arm through his to lead him to the library.

“I’ll buy you a burger later, okay? Let’s just figure out what the hell is going on with you.”

The library was nearly dead, fortunately. The librarian, a middle-aged recently divorced woman, peered over her glasses at you and Billy, her lips tilting downward. No doubt she knew who he was and did not approve of his being in her library. You smiled tightly at her before leading Billy to the back, sitting him down in a chair while you scoured the shelves. Your first stop was the medical section. Billy frowned at the pile of books in your arms as you hobbled back to the table. He stood and took half the pile from you, and the two of you settled in.

It was two hours later when you slammed your book closed, groaning in frustration. None of the medical textbooks yielded anything of import. None of the symptoms Billy was experiencing matched up with any of the illnesses in the books, and you were close to giving up. Billy was faring no better. His frustration and rage was mounting rapidly, his teeth and fists clenched tightly, even though there wasn’t really a specific reason for his rage.

Until he realized that his mood was feeding off of yours.

He looked across the table at you to see your head in your hands, fingers tugging at the roots of your hair. Forcing himself to calm down, he reached across the table and pulled your hands away from your hair, thumbs stroking gently over your skin. Immediately he felt a change, a slight calmness, as your shoulders slumped in defeat.

“I’m at a dead end,” you muttered, voice thick with frustrated tears. Yours eyes met his for just a quick moment before darting away, and Billy frowned. “Are you sure we can’t go to the hospital?”

Billy sighed and gave you a look that had your shoulders dropping further. “Fine. Let me go back to the books then.”

You pulled out the napkin, reading and rereading Billy’s symptoms as you walked up and down the aisles. Somehow in your wanderings, too far deeply into your thoughts, you’d ended up in the Horror fiction section. Your eyes skimmed the titles, not really seeing them, until the cover of one caught your eye and you froze. Spinning on your heel, you went back to Billy, who was leaning his head backwards, staring at the ceiling.

“What did you say it was that bit you?” you asked hurriedly. Billy’s head flopped forward and he shrugged.

“Not sure. It was big, and it looked and sounded like a dog. Why?” He sat up straighter as you whirled on your heel and went back to the Horror section. “Y/N!”

Picking up the novel that had sparked a possibly stupid idea, you cradled it gently as you moved onto the Mythology section, focusing primarily on cryptids. Eyes flitting over the spines, dancing across titles, until your eyes found one that might contain the answer to the question bouncing around in your head. You yanked it off the shelf, along with a few others you found further down the shelf.

Billy jumped when you dropped them onto the desk and slid the first book off the pile. His eyebrows pinched together as he read the title.

“The Book of Werewolves?” he read. “Are you serious?”

“God, I hope not….” you muttered, tucking into the first book.

“You really believe in werewolves.” It wasn’t a question but a statement, with an inflection of disbelief. Your eyes snapped to his.

“You believe in secret government agencies messing around with other dimensions?” you shot back, sufficiently shutting him up.

It was no longer a town secret, what happened at Hawkins Lab in 1984. After the death of Bob Newby, the lab was forced to come clean about both his death and about a girl named Barbara Holland’s. You’d gone to school with Barbara, though you’d belonged to different friend groups, but you and Barbara talked here and there in the classes you shared.

Somehow the notion of werewolves seemed more believable than other worldly dimensions and monsters with petaled visages.

Billy’s knee jittered under the table as the two of you skimmed the pages. Finally, after the fourth hour of sitting in the library with fuck all to go off of, you yelped in happiness.

“Found it! Look at this.” You turned the book around and pointed to a paragraph. “Subjects stated they experienced sudden rage or mood swings, insatiable hunger, improved hearing, and brute strength. Later they claimed they also experienced excruciating headaches and aching pains similar to those of arthritis. Rapid healing was also observed from subjects who had injured themselves or received injury. Billy, this is everything you’ve been experiencing!”

“Yeah,” he began skeptically, “except for the small fact that werewolves don’t exist!”

“They could!” you responded indignantly. “I mean, what else could have bitten you in the woods?”

“A coyote?” He held his hands out in a helpless gesture, and you could only cock an eyebrow.

“A seven-foot coyote?”

Billy groaned and dropped his head backwards. “I know it sounds stupid but….fuck, how can I just all of a sudden believe I was bitten by a werewolf?!”

“Keep your voice down,” you hissed, glancing around the nearly empty library. Billy rolled his eyes as you looked at him again. “Werewolves might not make sense to you, but I for one am not ready to say they don’t exist. Now, I’m going to check these out because if it turns out that werewolves do exist, that means that you are eventually going to turn into one.”

Billy watched the color drain out of your face as he felt himself go faint, as if that realization suddenly came to both of you all at once. Not once did you think that those bitten by werewolves would become them until you said the words aloud, and now that they were out there, you felt a sudden, all-consuming fear for Billy. He was going to become a werewolf.

Billy’s eyes flitted over your face as you calmed yourself down. No sense worrying until there was something to worry over. This could all just be a coincidence right? A horrible, freaky coincidence.

You invited Billy over after the library, holding true to your promise of a burger in exchange for his patience. Billy ended up ordering the biggest burger Benny’s offered, piled high with cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and onion rings. With a side of fries. You got it to go, but Billy tore into the french fries in the car, chewing noisily and grunting every so often. You looked fleetingly at him worriedly, wondering if that insatiable hunger for anything would graduate to a hunger for meat.

You sat at the kitchen table as Billy dumped your food out onto the tablecloth, not even bothering with dinnerware before tearing into his gargantuan burger. Grease dribbled down his chin as he chewed, taking breaks only to sip from the soda he’d gotten. You, on the other hand, handled your burger much less animalistically, one of the werewolf books open beside you. Careful not to get grease on the pages, you dipped a fry in ketchup and chewed slowly, taking in every word about werewolves.

Halfway through your burger, you sat up straight, pushing the burger away and pulling the book closer to your body.

“Billy! Look at this!” He grunted around a mouthful of food and you grimaced at the grease trails on his chin. “Okay, you’re not a total animal yet so please, clean yourself up.”

The look he gave you was highly unimpressed but he swiped a napkin across his face anyways. Tossing the soiled paper down, he scooted his chair closer to you and found the passage you pointed to.

“A werewolf will cease to change when the werewolf that bit him is killed either by silver bullet or by wolfsbane poisoning.”

“Okay….so there’s a cure, but how do we even figure out who bit me? Can’t werewolves go out in sunlight?” Billy asked.

At some point between the library and your kitchen table, Billy had decided to say fuck it and go along with the werewolf theory. It was the only plausible thing to explain the constant pains his stomach was putting him through. Not to mention your faucet was still dripping and he was pretty sure there was a mouse in the cabinet.

“They can…. Wait, did you ever see Silver Bullet? It came out last year,” you said. Billy shook his head, causing you to sigh and drop your shoulders. “Uncultured swine. Anyway, in the movie, Marty meets the werewolf face to face and he sets off a firework that takes out the thing’s eye. Then the next day, his sister goes around to houses under the guise of collecting cans for a drive and she basically rules out anyone who doesn’t have an eye patch. Long story short, they end up discovering its their priest who’s the werewolf and they kill him.”

“Okay, so we should lure this thing out, injure it in some way that’ll be obvious, and they once we know who it is, either shoot him or poison him…. Yeah, yeah that’ll be a piece of cake,” Billy muttered, burrowing his head into his hands. He groaned loudly. “Can you fix the goddamn faucet? It’s driving me insane!”

You tried to ignore the snapping tone of his voice, knowing and understanding that it was a symptom of the bite, but it didn’t stop the slight pang in your heart. You scraped the chair back and walked to the sink, twisting both knobs until they were tight and the dripping stopped. You took a deep breath, dropped your head between your shoulders, and let the gravity of the situation pull you in.

After the events of 1984, you thought the supernatural mumbo jumbo was over and done with. You hadn’t been directly involved, but you knew the ones who were—Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers…. Not to mention Nancy’s and Jonathan’s younger siblings and their friends. Senior year was rough for them, and they were excused often from class to go see the guidance counselor. More than once you caught Nancy or Steve staring with glazed-over eyes out the window, while Jonathan suffered from panic attacks.

Now you were directly involved with the fact that Billy may or may not be a werewolf. You didn’t look up as Billy’s chair scraped backwards on the linoleum floor, but you relaxed into him as he stepped up behind you and wrapped an arm around your chest, the other hand settling on your hip.

“I’m sorry I snapped,” he muttered, kissing your temple with a sigh. “I can’t really control my mood anymore.”

“It’s okay,” you responded quietly. You leaned your forehead into his cheek, your fingers dancing across the skin of his forearm. “We’re going to figure this out okay? We’re going to fix you.”

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facethroughthemirror · 6 years ago

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No Ready Cure

Chapter One

Characters: General Doyle, Locus, Dr. Grey Relationships: One-Sided Doyle/Locus

Lovesickness in two drastically different senses of the word. One of them is hopelessly in love, and that love is slowly killing them. The other, unfortunately, can only stand by and watch the object of their own affections choke to death on flower petals not meant for them. Or can they?

Please read tags for warnings!

For day four of @rvbrarepairweek, and crossposted on ao3!

[ I know I missed Day Three I’m working on a bonus that will be up in the next two to three hours ]

"Hey, uh, has your general always had that cough?"

Agent Washington is very perceptive, she’s noticed. And of course he would have noticed the general’s persistent cough. General Doyle tries to cover it, or at least stifle it, but it’s quite obvious that he’s trying not to cough. And he always has an excuse at the ready: a dry mouth or throat, dust, simply running out of air from talking. But some of his excuses make such little sense, it truly baffles her that anyone could possibly believe them.

It occurs to her that Agent Washington is still talking, so she continues to listen. "--nds really bad, there could be mold or something causing it. If it’s mold, we have to find the source--"

"Oh, it’s not mold! Or dust! Or any other outside irritant!" she chirps, pushing some of his hair out of the way to check how the site of his most recent procedure is healing. She nods, noting the progress, and releases his hair to scribble on her note-taking datapad. “And the altitude of the outpost isn’t high enough to cause trouble for someone wearing armor with built-in life support systems -- though even if it was , he’d be acclimated by now!”

"... okay, well, is it like… is he sick?"

"It isn’t allergies, asthma, bronchitis, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, drug overdose, emphysema, influenza , kidney disease, pertussis, pneumonia, pneumo thorax , pulmonary edema , neurogenic or otherwise, sepsis, or tuberculosis!" Emily’s grip tightens on her notepad, and she forces the corners of her mouth up into a wider grin behind her helmet. More than a few years ago, her face would have started hurting by now. Not anymore, though, actually, her face hurts more when she’s not smiling anymore. " But ! As his condition is not immediately life-threatening, and will never be contagious, and he is my superior officer, I can’t exactly compel him to allow me to treat it! I think he's a little intimidated by the recovery period, but it’s not like my medical wing is very bus y up here!"

"... oh. Hey uh... do you like... maybe want me to talk to him? Maybe try to convince him to let you help with… whatever it is?"

"You can if you’d like , but there’s simply no convincing him, I’m afraid! I’ve tried." She swears she can feel her notepad about to crack in her hands. "Now, is there anything else, Agent Washington?"

"... uh, no, I guess that’s it."

"Then you’re free to leave now!"

He hops up from the chair and snatches up his helmet from her desk, putting it back onto his head as he rushes out. Once the door closes behind him, she drops her notepad a little too carelessly onto the desktop, and sits down a little too hard in her chair.

It seems like only yesterday that the general had stumbled into her office, finally, to see her about his coughing, though it had been a couple of years now. She’d asked her standard questions, of course, going through her standard mental checklist as she gathered supplies to start taking vitals and doing a thorough check of the symptoms. A cough is the body’s response to an irritant in the throat, airways, or lungs, she’d told him. It’s the body forcing out the irritant by pushing air out of the lungs. It can happen without an actual irritant, it happens with dry throats sometimes too. Her first instinct had been to conclusively rule out pleural effusion first, in order to make sure General Doyle’s lungs weren’t just filling with fluid. However, the cause of his coughing had become apparent as soon as he’d taken off his helmet.

She’d only seen the illness during medical school, when during the time they’d spent on it and several other pulmonary illnesses, but there was no question as to what it was as she watched a collection of spit-shiny flower petals fluttered and tumbled to the ground, shaken out of his helmet.

There’s a number of names for it, but the most accepted name for it is "hanahaki disease," or, medically, "hanahaki-type pneumafytotrophy." As opposed to mycelium-type pneumafytotrophy, which she’s always found to be a misnomer, "pneuma mykitatrophy" would be more correct, considering how words work, the fact that fungi aren’t plants, and the fact that mycelium is a specific part of the fungus rather than a category of fungus. She’s been dying to lobby for a name-change on that front, considering mycelium and fungus proper aren’t the same and technically the name should be accurate. There could be "fungal-type pneuma mykitatrophy" and "mycelium-type pneuma mykitatrophy," but the civil war has sort of prevented her from pursuing anything official in terms of experimentation or publishing.

First referenced on Earth, hanahaki disease is attributed to a region called "Japan," she believes, similar to takotsubo cardiomyopathy, which had been identified in that region over five hundred and sixty years ago, in 1990. It’s been seen in other cultures, though, particularly close to the region of origin. No one is, apparently, entirely sure when the concept originated, and it was, allegedly, thought to be a fictional illness at first, but it had been discovered to be all too real. No one is entirely certain what causes it, but the most commonly-accepted theory is that it's a rare genetic mutation, possibly hereditary, that is usually entirely harmless. However, the going theory is that prolonged exposure to the hormones and other neurotransmitters produced by the anxiety of unexpressed emotion, in this case unrequited love, trigger the mutation to activate, and produce plant-like growths inside of the lungs. Incredibly plant-like, as a matter of fact, as they include functioning roots, and petals! Those roots usually grow into, and eventually, through, the lung tissue, and the growths cause so many complications!

"Well, the good news is that this condition is very treatable!"

"‘Treatable?’ Not curable?"

"Well, the possibility of regrowth exists, of course, but it’s not common! Unfortunately, if the affections aren’t returned, or if the growths aren’t removed, the disease will eventually become fatal!"

"And there’s no adverse side effects to the surgery?"

"Well, unfortunately, there is one noteworthy side effect. Your brain will no longer register that person in the same way: you will lose all ability to feel romantically attracted to them."

She’d explained his condition to him, in no uncertain terms, had even taken a few chest scans in order to verify the diagnosis. The growths can become starved and die if the body stops producing the substances that feed them, usually through the return of the feelings that originally caused them, removing some of the neurotransmitters from the cocktail. But the sadly more common treatment is surgery to remove the growths. It was actually a very easy fix. Honestly, treating fluid in the lungs would be far more difficult. But he had declined the easier of the two fixes.

That was fine, she supposed, he was well within his rights. That wasn’t what bothered her the most about the situation. What hurt, and made her angry all at the same time, that of all people, he was risking his life for…

"Doctor."

She looks up from where she’s been holding her head in her hands, eyes locking on the hulking, black-armored form of the Federal Army’s resident mercenary. She springs her false smile back into place, even though he can’t see it, and straightens up, though she owes him no such courtesy and they both know that.

"What can I do for you , Locus?"

"I’ve received word from the general. He has made it to Armonia safely."

"Oh, excellent! You know, I’m sure he would have called me himself, though! You really didn’t need to come all the way down here!"

"I thought you would like to know.”

“Mm. Well, I appreciate it all the same! Thank you very much.”

“I will be leaving soon to join him."

"Have a safe trip, then, Locus! … you can go now!"

Locus just turns on his heel and stalks out, as silently as ever. Like a particularly irritable housecat, as the general would say… sort of. He’d never call Locus irritable, but they’re all thinking it. She knows they are.

As soon as the door shuts behind the mercenary, Emily’s poor, abused notepad whips across the room, finally cracking and shattering against the door, dropping to the ground in a hopeless pile of pieces. She merely stares in the direction of the door with her hand still partially raised from the throw, some acidic emotion that she can’t immediately identify burning at the back of her throat.

It isn’t fair . General Doyle is the only person in the world who’s ever been so nice to her. He makes her feel warm inside, like glitter is exploding inside of her. No other person has ever made her feel that way before. He’s so nice to her, he cares about her, and she cares about him! He’s so very important to her, and she doesn’t want to see him get hurt, especially not like this.

They’ve been friends for years . She’d met him back when the brigadier had first called her into his office after Doyle had gotten a splinter and fainted upon trying to pull it out. She’d pulled the splinter out for him, gotten him back upright in his chair, and even made him a cup of peppermint tea to get him back to himself and settle his stomach. She’d come back to check on him later in the day, they’d gotten dinner, chatted. He started calling her directly whenever he felt sick from then on, started asking her to get meals whenever he thought she might not have eaten for awhile. They were looking out for each other.

Years . It’s been literal years. Years of kind words and medical priority, even before his promotion to general. Years of late night quarters- and office-calls, of anxiety attacks and stress rashes and stress-induced vomiting. Of insomnia and tea at three o’clock in the morning when he wandered down to her office for anything, anything at all, to help him sleep. Monitoring blood pressure and racing heartbeats and reassuring him that he isn’t dying and he’ll be just fine in just a few moments and would he please try to take some deep breaths before he starves himself of oxygen again and passes out?

Why does it have to be Locus ? Locus has no feelings! He doesn’t talk to anyone! He clearly doesn’t care about General Doyle! He’s not worth choking to death over! She can’t let her friend do that to himself! Her friend is suffering for someone who doesn’t even notice, and that makes her so indescribably furious. The person she cares about more than anyone else is poisoning himself on such toxic emotion and it breaks her heart to see him do so without even understanding that he’s hurting himself so badly. He can’t see it, but she can.

Some days, she just wants to--

Her arm finally drops, wrist smacking against the edge of her desk on the way down with a crack that would be terrifying if it hadn’t just been the sound her armor’s impact against the well-worked surface. No. She’s a doctor. She can’t do that. And if she did, what would General Doyle think of her then? He’d hate her. He would hate her, and she can’t take that chance. And she’s sure that he would know her handiwork, or she’d be so unable to keep a secret from him that she’d blurt out what she’d done. What’s more, he’d be so upset that Locus was gone. Locus, the menace, makes him feel safe and she can’t take that away from him without being immediately able to step in and take his place.

… it’s alright. It’s alright, she’ll… just keep treating him. She’ll just keep doing her best to keep him comfortable. Maybe he’ll come to his senses and see that Locus isn’t right for him, doesn’t love him, and he’ll let her remove those filthy parasites once and for all! Then his feelings for Locus would be gone! The problem would be solved!

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dazzlingfantasiesblogs · 6 years ago

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Hurricane P8

Happy x Reader

Warning/Triggers: Desertion, Smut. 18+ Only please. If under, kindly un-follow me!

Notes: Sooo.. about only being 8 chapters.. Not going to happen. I think I might have a few more thoughts. Let me know how you liked the chapter. Love you all.

NSFW Under the cutt!

XOXO Dazz

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You had three meetings and you really did not want to talk with Happy about everything. Avoiding subjects seemed to be your go too over the few weeks. Walking into the living room after your shower and makeup routine you seen Happy watching TV. You thought for sure he would come talk to you after the shower. “I will be back later.” He looked over to see you in red flowy pants, black blouse and a gold belt. “I didn’t even hear you get up.” Happy stood up looking over the outfit and your tattoo littered arms. He was starting to love these business outfits.

He would love them more if they where for him to undress then yourself. Wrapping his arms around your shoulders he pulled you in for a real hug. “Wish you would stay with me all day.” Happy pulled back, gripping your chin, kissing your lips lightly. “I know you have business shit to do. Kozik will maybe come over.” “Good. Have some guy time.” You smiled back to him. “I talked to Brittany this morning” man did you wish you would have just walked out. “I know.. I listened into the convo.” He laughed a bit. “Should have known with that hearing of yours.” “I have never wanted anything so bad in my life.. I want you… so damn bad. I know I bitched in the past and complained about you not listening to me, but… you make me be a better person. Hell I didn’t even want the kuttee as bad as I want you.” Happy grabbed your hands holding them tightly. “We can discuss it over dinner ok? How about I pick things up to make those pork tacos you like?” Smiling he nodded. He felt a little bit like a child whining, but he really did want you.

Sitting at the table outside of the café you swung your glasses around staring at your laptop. “Put on your glasses, your going to get a headache.. That is why we went to go get them.” Looking up you seen Kozik and Happy. “Hey you two. Shut up Kozik. I am just trying to not get fucking irritated.” Kozik came to your side, kneeling down to see the laptop. “I can’t figure out how to make this paragraph more professional.” Happy watched as Kozik read over the paragraph on your laptop using his pointer finger to follow the lines.” “Instead of putting ‘It will be clear.. Put you will see results” Looking at Kozik surprised he gave you his sweet smile. “I got your back sis.” He kissed your cheek standing up. “You hungry? We where about to get some food.” “Sure. Just a salad.” Scrunching his face, Happy looked at you with disgust.

“Let me guess, your one of those salad girls..” Happy spoke looking over the menu. “Hah..no. We did not have to go to this fancy place Happy. We are not really one of those kinda people. At least I am not. I would have been fine going to The Tavern on Main.” Happys face fell. “Not that I do not like it, you just seem so uncomfortable.” “I thought you deserved something nice.” This was one of your first dates with Happy. He was new to the relationship thing and so where you. Kozik telling him to take you some where nice. Even if he had to chip in a bit. “All I want in life is a lover, a home and money to be comfortable. Well and Kozik. Fancy stuff does not mean much to me.”

“So a pasta salad?” you waved your head no to Happy. “ I don’t wanna gain more weight.” Kozik sighed a bit. “Sis enough! Your fine..” Ignoring Kozik you took out some cash from your bra. “It was against your boob..” Kozik said with a off look. “I have touched them.” Happy grabbed the cash. “You have done more then that.” Happy smirked at what you mumbled. “Be right back.” Kozik sat down as you packed up some of your stuff. “HE didn’t ride his bike right?” “No, we took my truck.” Nodding you took a drink of your lemon water. “Gemma asked me to come in on my day off because they are swamped. I told her I was helping Hap. We got forty-three new customers in a fricken week sis.” Kozik always praised you, always being your rock. Happy came back outside, sitting at the table next to you. “Well it is nice to sit and have lunch with you two.”

“Man it is nice to get the fuck away from familiar areas.” Kozik and Happy agreed sitting at a bar patio in Vancouver. You where sitting in Happys lap, drinking your beer. “I am going to get a refill. Same thing?” you nodded to Kozik. “Get some French fries..” Chuckling he nodded. “And a pizza.” Happy chimed in. When Kozik went inside, there was just you two out on the patio. “mmm.. let me take you right here… those leggings are doing something to me..” Happy swatted your ass. “Can you finish in a minute?” Happy was unsure how to answer that question. “ I really don’t care if anyone sees.” Rolling your eyes you finished your beer. “I’d prefer not to go to jail for public indecency, or my brother to see us.” “Fine… then we need our own hotel room tonight.” “Yes you do..” Kozik held up a piece of paper. “I just got a number. You losers can get a room far from mine.” Laughing you high-fived him Happy doing the same. “Here you go cutie..” You seen the girl set the pizza and fries down. She looked at me slightly wondering whom I was to Kozik. Probably looking like an odd three-way. “Hey, thanks for the food. My BROTHER was starving!” Kozik nodded grabbing a fry, winking at the girl. Popping the fry in his mouth.

“Hey Y/N, thanks for that Manuel. I just got such positive feed back for that platform you showed me!” Craig walked out not paying attention that Kozik and Happy where at the table. You stood up “That is awesome. Craig this is Kozik my bestfriend/brother and Happy..” you were unsure what the hell to call him. Friend? Lover? Orgasm giver? Ass lover? SOA Tacoma Killer?, “Boyfriend.” Happy stuck out his hand to Craig. “Hey I know you! You get a black coffee everyday! Thanks for coming here and supporting us!” Happy was so confused. He was thinking that Craig would be pissed you had him. Or even might ruin your proposal after he thought about it. “My girlfriend always talks to Juice about those drinks he likes.” Happys face smiled a bit nodding. You looked at him surprised he was smiling. “Well have a good lunch Y/N” Craig waved backing into the café. “Boyfriend?” “Yup.” That was all Happy could manage. “Doctor called, my stiches should be out tomorrow.” Smiling you hugged him “Good!” Happy nodded. “Here is the food all!” You looked up to see it was Brittany. “Hey Y/N, Hey Happy, Hey..” she looked at Kozik and blushed brightly. “This is Kozik, my brother.” Kozik stood up, helping her set down the food. “Wonderful to meet you, I hurd a lot about you.” Brittany’s face dropped nervously. “Good things!” Kozik reiterated. “Brittany, you should come to the club Friday night. There is a party.” You could tell she was fighting herself in her head. “Not sure I’d fit in..” “Nonsense! I will be there, and you know Happy and now Kozik. You will be fine!” She smiled at you. “Ok!” you scribbled your number on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Call me or text me so I can pick you up!” She shook her head gladly before waiving and exiting back to the café. “Why did you do that? Please tell me that you are not trying to set us up together..” Happy grumbled takng a bite of his sandwich. “No. She seems sweet, I think Juice might like her. Or Kozik.” Kozik looked up from his sandwich “If she can make this.. I will fucking marry her!” “Kozik.. it is a sandwich” Kozik finished a half already “It is made with love.” Rolling your eyes you took a few bites of the pasta salad.

Later that night.

“LUCYYYY I’M HOME!!!” you yelled as you walked into the house exhausted. Happy came in seeing you carrying ten bags in. “Let me help you!” he came over taking a couple of them, putting them on the table. “Glad to see you home.” He kissed your cheek. “I hope you stay, I can’t see you leaving again.” “Correction, I never left.” Sighing Happy agreed it was poor wording. “Let me change and start some of those tacos!” “First..” Happy grabbed you, kissing your lips. He slightly lifted you so you sat on the table. He kept kissing you, his fingers tangled in your hair. “Hap..” You moaned out. “Just wanted to kiss you..” He leaned over kissing your exposed collar bone. Hopping off you walked to the bed room to change.

Throwing your purse on the table, you yawned walking into the house. Happy came into the doorway seeing you. “Whao, didn’t think you where home yet.” Without saying anything, Happy picked you up pushing you against the door. He pressed his lips to yours, his tongue begging for entrance. Opening your mouth to moan, he slid it in. Wrapping your arms around his neck he slid your pants and panties down and unbuckled his pants. “Need you now..” this was not uncommon. If both you had a terrible day you would fuck the night away. The sheer feeling of being entangled together made everything better.

“I feel I should ware a towel every time I cook this meal!” talking as you came out to the dining room. Happy relaxing in a chair. “I would love to see that.. hell make it easy and cook naked… put on a apron for good measure, just so I can take it off..” “No, no hannky panky till you stiches heal.. even then..” “Hanky Panky?” Chuckling Happy stood up pushing you forward against the counter as you tried to fill a pot of water. He slipped his fingers passed your shorts and panties, he felt how soaked you were. “Even then?” He smirked whispering in your ear. “Your dripping for me, just after kissing.” Taking a deep breath, his fingers felt so good. He pulled away putting his fingers to his lips. Sucking off your wetness. “Fuck… please.. let me lick you..” He begged slightly. It was evident how badly he wanted too by the sound of his voice. “I gotta start cooking..” He nodded sitting back on the chair. Fuck did he want to disobey your request. So sweet.. so tangy. He grumbled watching you cook.

After plating everything Happy smiled seeing it was like the first time you ever cooked this meal. “Dig in!” you clapped your hands together, starting to pile on a toppings for you taco. Ding!. You got up grabbing the hard shells out of the oven, setting them on a plate next to Happy. “I know, they are hot.” He smirked taking his first bite. Both of you groaning at the foods delicious taste. “Let me get you some Tea.” Happy looked at you confused. “Just try it!” you handed him some iced tea. He took a sip and smirked. “Damn.. this is good” you nodded taking a sip of your own. “One of the Nevada old ladies taught me how to make it.” He smiled finishing his second taco.

“I want to stay..” you looked up from your food. Happys head shot up from making another taco. “Really?” was all he could manage to get out. “Not only because of you… Kozik is coming down here. As much as I love my Tacoma family.. Kozik is home.. You are home..” Happy set his taco down, reaching out to you. He grabbed your free hand. “I want you here. There is a reason we seen each other again.. I usually am not fucking mushy, but when I seen you again.. I could barly breath.. Never in my life have I experienced such joy and happiness at the sight of someone.. hell of anything..” you nodded back to him. Tears fell from your eyes on to the table. “Baby what is wrong?” Happy grabbed the side of your chair, dragging you over to him, scratching the hardwood floors. “Nothing.. it hurt so bad when you left.. part of me wanted to get you back for it.. but I can’t hurt you like that.. all I wanna do is be next to you..protect you..” you looked up at him. He smiled grabbing your face in his hands. He pressed a soft kiss to your lips. “We will take it day by day till the rest of our lives to get it right.” Nodding to him you kissed him again.

The next day.

“There you are Mr. Lowman, stiches are healed and the xray looks fabulous!” you noticed the doctor batting her eyelashes a little to hard at him. Walking over you slid an arm around his shoulders. “That is fabulous! Thanks Doc!” You looked in her eyes kissing the side of Happy’s face. He looked at you with a smile. “You are clear to go. Just still do not lift too much. Your ribs might be sore from too much activity. You can head back to work on Monday.” Nodding he looked over his papers, signing his name.

As you exited the hospital you hurd motorcycles. you seen the brothers pass by, waving to Happy. “Everything ok?” you asked slightly confused. “Yeah, they hurd I was getting my stiches out.” Nodding you laughed a bit. “Fuck… let me taste you now..” Happy whispered in your ear. “Outside, infront of the whole world?” he smirked at the thought of out against the brick wall, legs over his shoulders. “Shut up.” You playfully hit him. Walking back to your Jeep, he walked around opening your door for you. “Well thanks Mr. Lowman.” You batted your eye lashes, mocking the doctor. “She was so not my type.” Happy shut your door, getting in on the passengers side. “Hmm.. who is your type? Blonde porn stars?” “Low Blow Y/L/N” smirking you started the Jeep. “Him and I by G-Eazy played.” Both of you started laughing, singing as you drove home.

As you shut the truck off, you noticed Happy was already out of the Jeep. He opened your door grabbing your hand. “Need you..” he dragged you to the door, opening it. “Hey!” You seen Jax there with a balloon for Happy. Happys face dropped. “Hey Pres..” He gripped your arm, sliding his hand to your ass, keeping it there. “Hey, Just wanted to drop off this present. Gemma wanted to leave it but I missed the girl!” Jax came over giving you a hug. “Hey prince.” “Hey Y/N” He waved kissing the top of your head. “I’ll see you two at the party tomorrow.” You nodded waving goodbye as he walked out. Happy hugged him and shut the door, locking it.

“Wow, nice cake!” you looked at it. Swirled with hearts and a motorcycle. “Nothing tastes as good as you..” He picked you up bringing you to the couch. “Fuck me like you love me..” you whispered. He knew what you meant by that. He picked you back up. Groaning at his erection brushing against his jeans. He laid you on he bed, slowly kissing all over you face. Finally pushing his lips to yours. The little things where starting to build up quickly, all the emotions he poured in to the kiss had you losing air. “I love you.. please let me have you.. if I got further I do not think I’d have the will to stop..” “I am yours..” was all you said. He slid down your black leggings and panties down. He lifted your shirt and bra. He took a step back looking at you. “You are my queen..” He leaned down whispering, biting your neck hard. Squeaking, you arched you back to him. “More..” he smiled and started to bite your neck all over, hard. The slight and pain shooting straight to your core. This was how you two made love, pain and pleasure. He wanted the club to know damn well who you belonged too. Kissing down you shoulders, he kissed to your fingertips and back up. Slowly he licked down your collarbones to your breasts. “Please… feel a little exposed here.” You whimpered looking down. He smirked twirling his tongue around one of your pierced nipples.

“Why do you want to pierce them.” You gazed at the different barrels for the piecing. “Because, I think I would like the look of them.” Happy sighed a bit. “I do not want another man touching your breasts..” Happy stood in front of you looking down. “Good, because a woman is. Her name is Jazz.” “Y/N” you smirked seeing Jazz come through the curtains. Happy followed close behind you. You laid on the chair laying back. Jazz eyed Happy slightly confused. “This is my boyfriend.” “Ah, bet your happy to get them pierced.” Happy made a sour face. “Naw, he wants me to keep them unpierced.” Jazz laughed a bit sterilizing the needle. “Alright, take off the shirt and bra.” You slid your shirt and bra off of your body, handing them to Happy. The sheer sight of you topless made Happy fight his instincts to jump you. “Alright, take a deep breath.” You did and felt the needle slid through one of your nipples. She grabbed the diamond barbell you chose. “Damn you took that well.” Happy looked at you shocked. He remembered when one of his brother got dared to do it and cried. “Deep breath.” You did, following the same steps. “Alright, so make sure you clean them twice a day. Wear baggy shirts for about a week.” You nodded handing her the cash. “They look great on you!” She winked towards Happy. Happy looked at you, while you stood up. “Fuck… she isn’t lying..” he licked his lips. Something about the slight pain had you just as turned on as Happy. “We are one fucked up couple..” you laughed a bit. Happy looked at your shirt and relzied it was slightly tigther. “Here.” Slipping off his kutte he gave you his SOA shirt. “Great.. Now I get to feel your chest on the way home.” Smirking Happy nodded.

He continued to roll your nipples in his mouth, biting every so often. How he worshiped your body. He always felt that he never deserved it. After leaving a trail of bright purple marks and suction marks he kissed each one of your hips. “Finally…” He whispered against your pussy. He licked a long swipe, groaning at the taste. “Fuck baby girl.. so yummy..” he looked up to see your eyes almost black with lust. He grabbed your hand holding it tightly. He twirled his tongue around your clit. He slightly bit and sucked it. Bucking your hips against him, squeezing his hand. “Fuck…. Happy..” He licked down to your entrance. He pushed his tongue in you, licking up all of your slick. “Ah..” arching your back towards him, he seen your eyes closed, your head thrashing back and forth. “That is it baby..” Happy moaned against your pussy. He trailed his tongue against your clit one more time before you lost it. Your whole body ignited in pleasure. You swore you blacked out momentarily as you shook uncontrollably. Happy went back to your entrance, licking all of your cum up. He slid off his shirt and the rest of his clothes. “Do you want me to use a condom?” He whispered in your ear. “Up to you…” your body still shaking. “Never with you..” He lined himself up. “Please.. be gentle..” He nodded taking your lips with his. “I know..” it had been over two years since you slept with not only him or anyone. He pushed in slowly. You yelled out in slight pain. He wrapped his arms under your head, kissing you continuously. He pulled away slightly. “Fuck.. your so tight… so… so wet… you are fucking heaven…” he bit your neck pushing completely in. You felt your walls spasm against him. Unsure if it was because you had not had someone in so long, or if because your heart was filled with so much emotion for the man on top of you. “Please.. let me move..” He whispered against your lips, looking deep in your eyes. He seen a tear escape your eyes “Baby.. am I hurting you..” Happy looked at you shocked. “No… just am happy..” He laughed at the pun and kissed the tear. He slowly pulled out and pushed back in. “Fuck babygirl… can’t hold long..” you nodded to him holding onto his biceps. You looked at the man before you, he was yours. You looked at him slowly enter you and lost your control. “Your clenching me so roughly..” Happy moaned against your ear. His thrusts kept moving at a fast pace. You where reaching the cliff that was so high. He knew what you needed, but he wanted to wait for you to come together. “I love you..” he whispered, sinking his teeth into your neck, biting hard.

You came. Happy felt you grip him tightly, cumming right after you. His chest heaved at how good you felt. “I love you too Happy… I am yours..” He stood up walking to the bathroom and came back with a warm towel. He pressed it between you thighs and seen you squint in pain. “I am sorry baby..” He kissed your knees cleaning you up. “I will be ok..” “IYou grabbing me and holding me would make this night even better” You smiled to him.

Happy looked at you nervous. “Are you ok..?” he leaned down looking at you. “Yeah… just never.. felt that intense before.” Happy sat next to you smiling. “I was thinking the same thing.” You slowly sat up sorely. “So…” it was weird having strong feelings for someone so soon. He gripped your chin “I love you..” he whispered against your lips. “I love you too..” He picked you up gently carrying you to his bathroom starting a bath.

Laying with you, sleep took over very quickly. Exhaustion fell on Happy as well. You both slept till late in the afternoon the next day. “Babe..” Happy pushed your shoulders gently. “I have to head to the club. We have our weekly church.” You nodded sleepy. “Do you have any work today?” “Mm.. took the day off..” Happy smiled leaning down, kissing your lips. “It really is a dream you’re here..” you reached out pinching his arm. “Ow!” “See not a dream.” He laughed a bit and kissed your forehead. “What time does Gemma need me to help with the party?” “4. Party starts at 8.” “Mmm.. ok”

After picking up Happys house a bit and playing with Kozy it was almost four. You threw on a tank top and shorts. You forgot to look in the mirror. Happy had adorned your neck and chest with hickies and bites. Putting a lose shall over your arms, you and Kozy jumped into the Jeep, heading towards TM. Walking into TM you seen Gemma and smiled. “Damn.. he is making it known you’re his!” you looked around confused. Gemma grabbed a mirror from her purse and showed you yourself. “Ah fuck..” laughing a bit your fixed your hair and put it down. She followed you into the club house. Both of you stocking the bar with liquor talking as you did. “So are you staying in Charming?” you looked over to her, putting the last bottle of tequila away. “Yeah, I think.. except when I got business. Kozy seems to like Happy’s place. I might still get my own place. I want to take shit slowly.” Gemma nodded agreeing with your thought process.

“This world.. I tell yuh.. Not all old ladies could handle it like us.” Gemma stood up taking a cig out of her pack thinking about the passed. She leaned over handing you one. “Thanks Gem. I am here if you need to talk.” Standing up, you hopped on the bar smoking. “Sis!” you looked over to see Kozik walking in with Chibs and Happy in their uniform. Swinging your legs around you ran into your brothers arms. He lifted you around swinging you. “Wee!” he laughed kissing your head. “How is work?” You looked to them. “Busy because of you..” Happy mumbled. “Hey blame Gemma.” “You ain’t blaming shit. Yall got a fuckin raise because of it.” Happy laughed. “If it wasn’t for Gem I would have never got you back.” Happy winked to you. “Alright.. no ones gotta he..” Kozik stopped mid sentence, opening your shall seeing all the marks. “What the fuck Hap, you went a bit over bored!”

#happy lowman #kozik #jax #gemma #soa #soa imagine #sons of anarchy #sons of anarchy imagine #juice #tig #chibs

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periperimommy79-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Don't give up

This is my first scribble - knowing me it'll be a novel sized scribble, apologies -, and it will be about my breastfeeding journey in the UK.

Nothing I write should be considered medical or professional advice, it is only my personal experience and loads - no, really, LOADS - of researching the internet (even translating Spanish, Italian, French and German articles - thanks Google). And of course my final conclusion on the matter. Which is: do not panic or stress, relax and it will fall into place. Emotions are more important than I believed before. Mind over matter? Sure. But heart and soul over mind. Always. So do not despair as it will hold you back.

My journey began in May 2013 when I've truly understood love, holding my baby girl for the first time❤. I was set on breastfeeding and never gave it a second thought. I believed it was the natural way, so formula feeding was a choice for those who did not WANT to breastfeed.

5 days after her arrival we were back in hospital as my little angel lost over 16% of her birthweight. When we talking of a 6.8 lb baby that is a lot.

She wasn't getting fed enough, probably was getting some as she managed to stay hydrated... just above the ouchy line, but not enough to sustain her weight.

So we were told to supplement after offering the breast. She needed to get stronger to be able to suck properly, as feeding on the breast takes a lot of energy, especially if the reward is near nothing.

I was devastated. It felt like I've failed my baby. I kept beating myself up for starving my child. Up till today when I look at her early pictures my heart goes out to that baby with so much pain and sadness in her tiny eyes. I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive myself for not pressing harder when my instinct told me something was wrong after 2 days. As a new mum I was not given credit by the seasoned professionals visiting us every day for 5 days when I said she sleeps too much, she doesn't eat only goes on for a few sucks then falls asleep. Her latch was checked and seemed good, so I was labelled a worrier. Until the day 5 weight check when our world collapsed.

Not for a moment did I want her to starve any longer but I also wanted her to get breast milk. So I've followed professional advice. Increased and increased then increaed the formula again and kept offering the breast before each feed. Also followed the set time for feeding, every 3 then 4 hours, and so on as she grew.

Tried expressing after feeds as well, but it was a disaster and disheartened me even further. The lack of milk when expressing made me accept that I am one of those women who just can't produce milk. It happens. It's not my fault. It's just how it is. I gave exclusive breast feeding my best shot and by offering the breast until she was 6 months old I did give her the "best of both worlds".

5 years down the line I can see where I went wrong. In November 2018 my little man arrived. He was a surprise: we were trying for nearly 5 years with no luck, then decided it isn't happening for us, sold all baby and toddler stuff. Was about to sell the nursery furniture when we found out about him 😊 everything else had to be bought again 🙈

What did I do different?

1. With my girl we had help, honest help, but untrained and unexperienced help from lovely people. If you want to breastfeed and it's not working, having professional help is important. Finding the right one is key. With our son we had picked up on the "not enough milk" on day 3. Again, started formula topups. We were upping it to 30ml each feed and he wa gaining well so we stopped the topups. Then weighed him 3 days after. He lost weight again. Back to formula. Gaining again, decrease formula. Baby lost weight again. Hospital as his weight is up and down. We know why but go in anyway. So luckily we went. And met 3 amazing and experienced feeding specialists.

Turns out if you look at an already latched baby feeding you will not be able to establish if the latch is good or not. You'll need a feed observed from start to finish to tell. He wasn't latching properly. So with help and instructions he was latching fine after 5 hours of trying. He fed with big gulps for 10 minutes on each breast then followed with lots of sucks and fewer swallows on each. We were in there for 2 days, BF, express, topup. I felt more sure of myself when we left and very greatful for "my 3 angels" and their knowledge.

2. Have support. With my girl I had the understanding and backing of our family - I was shaken of what happened and feeling an utter failure. But I was not pressing breastfeeding, scared of her losing weight again I accepted formula as the only way.

With my boy I decided I will not give up as I did with my girl. Unfortunately my partner and our family did not believe I can breastfeed and my partner was very agressivly against it - being told I'm selfish for trying to breastfeed, that I rather starve him than accept that I will never have milk and the best one: he'll call social services if I don't give up the idea of not giving him formula - not the support I needed.

His whole family gave me the cold stare for carrying on and even my own mother said just give him the bottle and spend the time gained with my daughter. Emotional pressure...hmmm, mother knows best. Good thing I'm now a mother too, so took the tiny gold out of this comment and spoke to my girly, explaining what and why is mommy doing what she's doing. I swear that little girl is more supportive than some of the adults close to me.

So I ignored all negativity, got courage from 3 of my friends and told my other half if he can't be supportive then at least keep his mouth shut and stay away from me as stress has serious negative effects on my supply. He stayed away and kept his mouth shut and I've carried on. It was hard times. To carry on and not give in. Even harder that the people I expected to back me had turned their back.

So surround yourself with people who raise your spirits, who will assure you and make you believe that you can do it. Ignore the nay sayers. It is your baby and body, as long as you're both safe you call the shots and do what feels right.

3. Research. Knowledge is power. Gather as much info, as many tips and methods as possible. Watch videos, read, go on forums and ask questions. Find groups. Shape all info so it fits the two of you.

With my daughter I just accepted what I was told by the professionals in the hospital and after we left it. I did not know of other moms who struggled but succeeded. I did not know there are ways to try to increase milk supply. I did not know I was breaking the demand and supply ring by increasing formula and not boobie time.

With my boy I was constantly reading, watching, getting in touch.

What worked for us? These:

1. Did not follow rules of timed feeding.

Yes, I've kept to the 3 hrs with him, but only that I didn't let him go longer than 3 hrs between feeds. Not even at night. Not until he was gaining weight well. If he wanted to eat 30 minutes after he came off the breast then I've put him back on.

Ever heard of supply and demand? SOOOO TRUE! When your baby is sucking for 3-5 hours non stop (cluster feeding)? Or eating for 1 hr then 40 minutes break and another hour session aaaand repeat? They just ordering their meals ahead. Telling your body they need more. Let them.

When we were topping up with over 30ml formula, I did it in smaller portions during his cluster feeding periods which were always evening meals - 60ml topup: 2x30ml or 3x20ml and put him back on the boob in between. It is time consuming, but works. Sometimes he refused the last portion cuz he was too tired/full. If it was only one meal, I let him skip that formula amount.

2. I started expressing only after his last feed before his big sleep each night. It saves time during the day and I can sleep more during the night. It is app. the same time each day, so my body is expecting it.

Now I can get 3x as much out as what I've staryed with. He drinks this still as a topup after his last meal of the day the next evening. Past few days he doesn't even drink it all and it makes me happy! They're hungrier in the evenings - getting filled up for longer time to sleep - and if he refuses his favourite meal with the easy access (he prefers breast milk over formula, but prefers the bottle to the breast as it is easier) must mean he had enough already 😀.

3. I had looked at pictures of how my breast is built up, where he needs to press to get the milk going.

I finally understood that I did have milk, even with my daughter - she kept sucking for 6 months and never took more than 90ml of formula, looking back I was such a fool not to realise that she wouldn't have gained weight as well as she did on 360ml of formula a day - they just could not get to it efficiently.

Once I worked out where his mouth needs to be on my aerola I looked for ways to put it in. It sounds funny, but my aerola is rather large and his cute mouth is so little, so he needed help to "stuff it in". Now he doesn't need it as he learnt to do it himself as well as his mouth is a bit bigger.

4. Made myself realise, understand and trust that I have enough milk for my baby and stop worrying over it.

I looked for proof and reminded myself every time I started to doubt myself again (maybe because a look from other half, or baba wanting to eat and eat - not because I did not have enough now but because he will need more soon so he is ordering) that I have milk. So when he was gaining on 420ml formula a day until he was 7 weeks old I convinced myself and reduced the amount to 360ml. Then 300ml. Always checked his gain. Now we're 180ml a day and reducing. And he is gaining.

It was hard not to increase formula as suggested by some people, but I knew he is safely gaining and worse case senario he will not gain enough, but he will not lose weight again, even if my supply decreases or can't keep up with his demand.

5. Stopped timing our feeds. I take note of the bottles still - will do until they're out of the picture -, but not of how long he is on each breasts. It is not important. I'll put him on when he asks. And because he is gaining he will ask when he is hungry because he has the energy to let me know. He will now not sleep if he's hungry no matter what I do. Dare to go shopping too long and the roof comes down!

This way feeding feels natural, not a must do thing which commands my day and full attention. I even enjoy it now, that I relax. No clocking in and out 😊 honestly? This is one of the best feelings other than seeing the numbers go up on the scale and down in the bottle.

Do not get me wrong. I have nothing against formula, we're lucky that is available. I do not judge anyone who chose to formula feed their LO. Mixed feeding has it's advantages as well. Not the way I am doing it now, but when you replace meals with a bottle to gain some time off boob duty.

But to me exclusive breastfeeding is the end game, so at mo formula is an unwanted must.

I will stop here for now, my eyelids are getting glued at each blink.

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