#a scar on my right arm from falling on a piece of wire

[canyoufoldbooksintowords]

I think there are few experiences more human than a group of people sharing different scars on their body. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Try going "so I have this one scar from-" and most people will join in and jump at the opportunity to show off their own "oh I have this one from when-" I don't know why it's so wholesome to me but every time it happens I go. Yeah. This is right

[nessieart]

TEETH pt. 13

|| The Price of Freedom ||

Eventual Tony x Reader

WC: 5.5k (again!?)

AN: Ok um, look. It’s a lot and oops? And listen here, CA:TWS is my favorite mcu movie ok? And we’re in it now. I wasn’t really sure i wanted to go this route, but now i am. Don’t worry, there’ll be more Tony soon! Promise! Thanks for following along with me and my writing journey! It means a lot to me! Enjoy.

Warnings: Canon level violence, cursing, depictions of violence, blood, guns, made up fantasy elements most likely. No y/n used. Nickname usage: Flowers, Poppy. Not proof read, it’s a hot mess!

Summary: This whole ordeal isn’t what you thought it was.

Masterlist

Previous || First || Next

Begi, lepestok.

Run, little Petal.

The Soldier, James - Bucky - whoever he was, looked over his shoulder briefly and then back down at you. He releases your hand, wiping the tears away from your face with his flesh hand.

"Don't let them see your tears," his voice is rough and slightly accented, and he lets his metal fingers fall from your chin. You vaguely remember him speaking another language the first time you -literally- ran into him.

He steps away from you, back in the middle of the room, next to the chair. It's unsettling the longer you look at it. You hear footsteps echoing down the hall that make you pause.

You go back to sit on the cold table a few feet away from the soldier and the daunting chair. It takes some effort but you manage to sit, still clutching at your stomach. Seems like the broken ribs have started healing at least.

In the next second, men in white lab coats enter the room, they pay you no mind as they guide the Soldier into the chair and take scissors to his shirt and cut it from him. You notice he's staring off blankly into nothingness as the men work around him. They connect the wires to something and they put it around his right arm, the monitors behind him come to life and you can see scans of his body and skull, his pulse and heart are also monitored; it’s steady and slow.

Then you notice the red angry scars along his left shoulder. The metal of his arm looks forcibly fused to his skin and it makes your stomach churn. And you have to remember this is Steve's Bucky, his best friend since they were kids. And you wonder what happened to him that they put that arm on him.

You wonder why he doesn't seem to remember anything. Steve, you, what he did to your brothers, and even himself. He didn't react in any way when you called him by his first name. Not physically anway.

One man pulls over a tray and brings the metal arm up and unhinges a piece of plating on the Soldier's arm and begins repairs. There's small sparks that fly around as he solders things together. The whirring of the metal arm is low as repairs are being made.

You shift a little on the table, and the Soldier notices your movement and he looks at you without moving his head, his expression is blank.

“Bucky?” You whisper, knowing he’ll hear you. His eyes go wide and the spike of his heartbeat is heard on a monitor behind him, his chest heaves and he looks around the room in a panic.

In the next second, some of the STRIKE team comes into the room, rifles in their hands as they move around the room, guarding you or the Soldier, you couldn’t be sure. One of them comes to stand next to you and he places a collar around your neck. He sneers at you when your eyes glow but he just clamps the collar on you anyway.

It’s silver, you notice, a jolt of pain goes through you the longer you try to keep your eyes alight. You go to reach up and touch it, but a few feet away from you you hear a loud zap and the whirring of a metal arm and the Soldier punches the man that was repairing his arm across the room. All the members of STRIKE draw their rifles up and point them at the Soldier.

His chest is heaving as he sits upright, hands clenched into fists, the metal arm whirs and groans as he flexes it. Everyone stands on baited breath, waiting for the Soldier to make a move, he relaxes his posture and slumps forward, resting his arms on his knees. That vacant look returns to his eyes and he stares off again.

A few moments later, you can hear a few footsteps coming closer to the vault you’re in, and in steps Pierce, with Rumlow and other members of STRIKE behind them. You haven’t seen Leon yet and you hope he’s ok. Hope he’s somewhere far away from all this.

Rumlow looks over to you, as Pierce comes to a stop in front of the Soldier, there’s concern on his face and he sees the collar around your neck. He comes to stand near you.

“How are you feeling?” He says quietly, and you scoff, looking away from him. “Your brother’s back at HQ, in case you were wondering.” He moves back to stand behind Pierce. You stare at his back, eyebrows pulled together, why would he say that? Why does he care?

Pierce then backhands the Soldier across the face hard after he doesn’t respond. The Soldier looks up through his hair that’s fallen into his face, his eyes still vacant and crystal.

“The man on the bridge…who was he?” The soldier’s voice strains and his eyes turn to you briefly before they go back to Pierce.

Pierce sighs, “You met him earlier this week on another assignment.” He goes to sit on a stool in front of the Soldier.

“I knew him,” he swallows thickly and you can see the flicker of something behind his eyes.

“Your work has been a gift to mankind,” Pierce goes on to say. And you snort behind him, it’s ignored. “You shaped the century, and I need you to do it one more time.” You look at Bucky now, his eyebrows crease and it looks like he’s struggling with something.

“But I knew him,” and you see it then, the crystal may clear from his eyes as they seem more blue now. And you realize that the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes are one. HYDRA just scooped and carved out what made Bucky himself. He looks at you - eyes wide - and it makes your heart hurt. And you can’t move or do anything to save him from these horrid men, because you’re helpless with the collar on. And you don’t think you could survive another bullet from one of those guns.

Pierce turns to look at the lab tech, “Prep him.”

The man stutters a moment, “He’s been out of cryo-freeze too long.”

Cryo? They were putting him on ice? No wonder he wasn’t aging all these years. What the fuck were they doing to him?

“Then wipe him and start over,” Pierce gets up and moves out of the way. He finally looks at you and a dark smirk takes over his face.

You look over at Bucky and his heart rate has spiked again, the fear in his eyes is all consuming as he stares back at you. Then he’s pushed back roughly and a mouth guard is placed in his mouth. A loud clank sounds out as the metal straps keep him in place, the machine whirs to life and the halo above the chair begins to descend.

You watch in horror as nodes of electricity spark and go to cover his face, and as they lock into place, Bucky lets out the most bone chilling screams you’ve ever heard. As he continues to scream, Pierce and the STRIKE team begin to leave. There’s tears flowing down your face and you don’t try to stop them.

“Stop,” you say weakly. No one seems to hear you over the deafening screams. “Stop it!” You say a little louder. You hobble off the table and go to push one of the lab techs away from the chair, “Enough! What are you doing to him!?”

There’s a jolt that runs through you, just enough that it knocks the wind out of you and you fall to your knees. Of course the collar has a shock system in it. You pant as you look up at Bucky, his voice is starting to go hoarse the longer he screams in agony.

-*-

It’s some time later, you don't even know the time. Was it night still, or was it morning? You’re still sitting on the floor where they left you, too tired and worn out to bother moving.

You tried to get Bucky's attention but after whatever they did to him in that chair, it's like he's a completely different person. No, not a person, a machine. The Winter Soldier has taken over and his eyes are vacant again.

The techs had given the Soldier a new tac-suit, much like the one he wore yesterday. Or earlier today? The straps pulled tight around his torso, all black gear, his arm a stark contrast against his outfit gleaming in the lights.

Someone had come in and said a phrase or words in Russian, you weren’t sure, and instantly the Soldier responded instantly, “Gotov vypolnit,” and it sent a shiver down your spine.

It’s so jarring, the man before you was nothing like the man a couple hours ago who was screaming so harsh and loud his voice had gone hoarse. The techs had left, only 2 members of STRIKE were left in the room, but they were conversing quietly in a corner. The soldier stood before you, and you leaned your head back to look at him, a sort of deja vu passed before your eyes and you hoped he experienced it too. His facial expression was blank as he crouched down before you, lifting a metal hand to the collar around your neck

“Hey! Don’t touch that!” One of the agents shouted. The soldier pays them no mind as his fingers dig into the space between your neck and the offending item and he squeezes. The whirring of his arm is subtle, the collar cracks and bends under the pressure of his hand and he yanks it off you with ease.

You instantly feel ten times better once the silver is off you, you sigh in relief and put your hand on the soldier’s silver one and look up at him, “thank you,” you say quietly.

There’s a commotion behind you as the STRIKE agents pull up their rifles and aim them at you, yelling commanding orders for the Soldier to stand down and for you to lay on the ground. There’s a guttural growl from the soldier as he places himself between you and the agents, his fists clench and you can tell he wants to reach for a weapon, but he refrains.

You stand and put your hands on the soldier’s arm, he looks at you over his shoulder, “Begi,” he tells you and you nod. You look out towards the exit of the vault you're in, you can see early morning rays shine through the windows, that had to be the way out. You squeeze the soldier’s arm once and back away, and shift, a few bones cracking into place, that silver bullet and collar definitely did a number on you.

The STRIKE agents certainly weren’t expecting the soldier to defend you, and they certainly weren’t expecting you to turn into a giant coyote and haul ass out of the vault in a blur.

-*-

You had run for a few miles before you were sure you weren’t being followed. You aren’t sure what possessed the Soldier to help you escape, but you won’t question it now.

As you make your way towards the Potomac, you can see the Triskelion in the distance. You hope Leon’s alright. If Rumlow was to be believed, then you’re sure he is. After all, you’d feel if something happened to him. Right?

The sun had barely come up as you reached the back entrance of SHIELD HQ. Everything seems to be fine on the outside, nothing out of the ordinary, agents going about their early morning routines.

You find the stairwell near the back exit you came through and quietly make your way up, the large floor numbers painted on the walls outside each door made it easier to keep track. As you round the next flight of stairs you come face to face with Steve, Sam, and a woman you haven't met before. But by the smell of her she's with them.

Steve’s in a uniform you swore you’ve seen before but can’t place, a helmet on his head covers his eyes as well, his shield hung up on his back. Sam’s in his Falcon outfit, the wings compact in its backpack, his goggles up on his head.

You all freeze and stare at each other for a beat, then Steve relaxes his stance and crouches down, bending one knee and placing the other on the floor.

"God, Flowers, you had us all worried," Steve says, he spreads his arms out and you rush to him, jumping up and licking his chin that's exposed. He chuckles and gives you a hug, one hand running down your back through your fur. "Don't ever do something like that again, Natasha's been pretty upset."

"Upset?" Sam asks incredulously, "How can you tell the difference between normal and upset?" He laughs and pats your head when you jump up to him next. "Glad you're okay, girly," he says softly.

"Uh, guys?" The woman that is with them gives them both a look, and then looks down at you, "what the hell is going on?"

Steve then goes to tell her, Maria he said her name was, that you were the friend they have been worried about since they split up from you yesterday near the bridge. Steve also tells you that Fury's alive, which you make a noise at and he goes on to tell you their plans.

"We have the launch codes to alter the helicarrier Insight targets. They all must be put in for them to work," Maria explains. "I'll be in the control room, while Sam and Steve put the chips into the systems on all three ships." You assume she still can't believe she's talking to an oversized coyote, who nods after her statement, but she doesn't let it show.

Maria brings her pack off her shoulders and places it on the ground as she kneels, "Natasha told me to bring extra clothes, just in case, and she didn't say for what. But now that I see you, I guess I know now." The pack opens and there's a pile of clothes in it, tac-gear that may be a little big, but you could make it work, a pair of boots and a holster with a gun.

Steve and Sam turn around after Maria shows you the clothes, and you shift. Maria makes a noise of surprise and swiftly turns around to let you get dressed.

As you put the new underwear and sports bra on, you notice a long jagged scar along your stomach. That must be where they pulled the bullet out of and stitched you up. You prod it and it stings, more than it should you think, and hiss in pain.

Steve glances over his shoulder warily and notices the pink scar on your back that matches the one on the front, "was that from the bullet?"

"Must be," you mumble. You twist your body to look at the scar on your back, “I don’t remember the bullet going through me though…” Steve gives you a worried look, but you shrug it off.

You pull the jumpsuit up over your legs, then your torso, and push your arms through. It’s similar to Maria’s, you notice, a deep blue one piece jumpsuit with a SHIELD logo on the left shoulder. It’s a little baggy on your frame, and you roll up the sleeves to your elbows and to your shins, then shove your feet into the boots. The gun holster goes around your waist, and you check the ammunition in the pistol before putting it away.

“Where do you need me?” You ask, following Steve once he sees you’re finished getting dressed. Your group ascends the stairs to the control room’s floor, you keep pace with Steve, Maria behind you and Sam bringing up the rear.

Steve looks down at you for a moment as he thinks, “Stay with Maria,” he says, and then raises a hand as you go to object, “please, I can’t be out there worried about you again,” he places his hand on your shoulder. So you relent and nod, the serious look on Steve’s face makes you think better of disagreeing with Captain America.

Your group comes to a halt outside the control room door, you can hear chatter on the inside. Maria brings out ear comms for you, Steve and Sam, then she pressed a button on what looks like a controller. You can hear a screeching noise and people yelling in surprise. Then Steve uses his shield to knock on the door, a loud clang sounds out against the metal door.

Sam and Maria step forward on either side of Steve with their guns drawn. You bare your claws, your hands and forearms sprouting fur as your claws come out.

The door opens revealing an agent rubbing at his ear and when he sees your group, he goes to grab his gun but Steve holds up a hand to stop him. A low growl leaves your throat as Sam and Maria take aim at him.

"Excuse us,” Steve says and walks through the door once the tech steps to the side. You follow Sam and Maria in, Maria makes a move with her gun and the rest of the techs in the room make a run for the exit.

Once the last person leaves, and it's just your group left, Maria goes to the console and types a few commands, then steps to the side and hands the mic for the intercom system over to Steve.

He leans down to hold the button, and in his Captain America voice (you like to call it) he takes a deep breath, “Attention, all SHIELD agents. This is Steve Rogers. You’ve heard a lot about me over the last few days, some of you were even ordered to hunt me down, but I think it’s time for you to know the truth,” he looks back at your group, and you give him an encouraging nod before he continues. “SHIELD is not what we thought it was, it’s been taken over by HYDRA. Alexander Pierce is their leader. They could be standing right next to you.

“They almost have what they want: absolute control. They shot Nick Fury, and it won’t end there. If you launch those Helicarriers today, HYDRA will be able to kill anyone that stands in their way, unless we stop them.

“I know I'm asking a lot, but the price of freedom is high, it always has been. And it's a price I’m willing to pay, and if I’m the only one, then so be it. But I’m willing to bet I’m not.”

You swear you have chills from Steve’s big speech, there’s a wide grin on your face as Steve stands back up to his full height.

“Did you write that down first, or was that off the top of your head?” Sam grins, and elbows you when you giggle at him.

Maria makes her way up to the control console, wheeling over a chair and placing a headset on her head. She hits a switch on the headset, “Channel 3, secure,” you can hear her in the ear piece she gave the group.

Steve gives a nod, he and Sam make their way to the exit to put their override chips in the Helicarriers. Before they reach the door, you grab their hands, one of their hands in one of yours. They both stop and look down at you.

“Be careful, both of you,” you say and give their hands a squeeze. They hug you from the side, Steve a little longer than Sam. “He’s in there, Steve,” you tell him softly, he inhales sharply and gives you another squeeze before he lets you go. “Promise me you’ll both come back in one piece, ok?”

With one final nod, both Steve and Sam are out the door.

-*-

You’re sitting next to Maria, trying not to seem anxious or bother her from her monitoring the camera feeds and the progress on the Helicarriers launch. Then you feel a sharp pain in your right leg, it feels like you’ve been stabbed, but no blood is oozing out when you pull your hand away.

“What is it?” Maria asks you, her brows pulled together as she looks you over. You shake your head, gritting your teeth through the pain. Then another searing pain shoots through you on your left shoulder, and you cry out and fall to the floor. “Talk to me, what’s going on? Cap?" Maria brings her hand to her ear to get Steve's attention.

“No. It-it's fine. I-I don’t know,” you grit out, “feels like I was stab— oh no, Leon,” you look up at Maria and she rolls back over to the console, typing away and changing surveillance cameras around SHIELD. You make your way over to her, peering over her shoulder as the footage scrolls by. Then you see him, in a stairwell on the other side of the building, and you point to one of the monitors, “There! That’s him. I’m going to get him,” you adjust the holster on your hip and jog to the far side of the room to the opposite exit you all entered from.

Maria calls your name and you turn back to her, “Be careful, the last thing I need is an earful from Cap,” and she winks. You smile and nod at her and continue out the door.

“Eight minutes, Cap,” you can hear Maria say over comms.

“Working on it,” Steve replies, he seems out of breath, only a little.

The pain in your shoulder and leg are persistent as you race down the corridor that leads you to the stairwell you’re sure your brother is in. When you burst through the metal door for the stairs you can smell the copper scent of blood, you run to the railing and look down.

“Leon!” You yell, and it echoes. You go to call again but you hear something above you, so you sprint up the stairs three at a time until you see a trail of blood at the base of a set of stairs. “Oh, Gods.”

Two flights up, Leon is on the floor, leaning against a door, one hand gripping his leg above a knife sticking out of it, and the other slung over himself to barely stop the bleeding from his shoulder. You rush to him then, almost slipping in the pool of blood that has gathered around him. Your hands are frantic as you can’t decide what to do with them, wondering if you should even touch him yet.

“Sunny, baby, can you hear me?” You reach out and graze your fingers along his cheek, his eyes flutter open and his head lolls to the side. He smells like anything but sunshine and roses now. His sweet scent is marred by copper and burnt leaves.

When he sees you, he lets out a weak laugh, a slow smile making it onto his handsome face, “Kn-knew you’d be ok, Fl-flowers,” he says slowly. You can see blood on his teeth, “Fel-felt the bullet rip right through me,” he lifts a bloodied hand up to your face and you grasp it, and lean into his touch.

"What can I do, Sunny? We have to stop the bleeding," you go to take hold of the knife still lodged in his leg but the small whimper that leaves his lips makes you pause. "Sunny-"

"It's…silver," he huffs out. Your eyes go wide and you pull your hand back. “Sorry about the pain,” he grimaces, and you let out a humorless chuckle.

“I don’t give a shit about the pain, Leon, I’m worried about you!” And without another word you lean forward and yank the knife from his leg, you both yell out in pain. You throw the knife over the railing behind you and rip a piece of Leon’s shirt off to wrap around his leg. “Let’s get you moving,” and you lift his uninjured arm over your shoulders and lift him up, his whines in protest but you could care less. Your first priority is getting Leon to safety, everything and everyone else could wait.

“Flowers, what about Insight, and —“

“Please, Sunny, you’re always my first priority,” you tell him as you make your way down the stairwell to the ground floor. So far you’ve tuned out what was happening outside with Steve and Sam, you can’t think about them right now.

“Falcon, Flowers?” Maria says over the comms. You come to a halt in the middle of the stairs. Leon barely notices when you do, all his weight is on you and you adjust him slightly.

“Yeah?” Sam replies.

“Here, what is it, Hill?”

“Rumlow’s headed for the Council,” she says. There’s a beat and Sam answers before you can and you sigh in relief.

“Take care of that brother of yours girly, we got this.”

“Thanks, Sammy, I owe you,” you tell him, and you guide Leon back down the stairs. You’re at floor 30 when Leon asks you to take a breather, you set him down and he leans his head against the wall. At least the bleeding stopped on his leg, you think. His shoulder is a little worse for wear, but most of the blood has stopped oozing now. You brush the hair out of Leon’s face, and he drags his eyes up to your face, it almost seems it takes all his strength to do so.

“How ya feeling, baby brother?” You ask him, and he gives you a lazy smile. His eyes shift to the side and he sits up straight, a forced growl rumbles his chest and the hair on the back of your neck stands on end. When you turn to see what Leon’s looking at, you see Rumlow on the landing below you. His gun is raised as he makes eye contact with you, his eyes squint and he frowns. You put yourself in front of your brother as Rumlow ascends the stairs, lowering yourself in a defensive stance. Your claws come out and fur ripples through from your fingers to your elbow and your eyes glow bright.

“Not another step, asshole,” you growled. Rumlow is a few steps away from you, he raises his hands, gun in his right and finger off the trigger. He steps to get around you and you growl again.

“Easy, easy,” he hedges, “easy there, girl. I’m not sure how you got out of the vault or away from the Asset, but it won't matter much soon,” he smirks. He gets around you and slowly backs up the stairs away from you and Leon. You let him go, you can’t put your brother in any more danger than he is.

After Rumlow is out of sight, you get Leon back to his feet and help him down the stairs again. You exit on floor 25 and decide the elevator would be the best to get the hell out of SHIELD HQ as fast as you could. You’re about half way down when you turn your ear comm back on.

“People are gona die, Buck. I can’t let that happen…Please, don’t make me do this.” Steve pleads. And it hurts to hear him sound so defeated, he really doesn’t want to fight the Soldier, you could tell.

“What’s happening up there?” Leon asks as he looks out the elevator. You join him and lean your head on his shoulder. The helicarriers are rapidly ascending in the sky, and you hope Steve can get the last chip in before it's too late.

“They’re fighting,” you tell him. You can hear the fighting in your ear, Steve struggling in his fight with his best friend-turned-mind-controlled-assassin. You turn to face Leon as the elevator nears the ground floor and you’re determined to tell him who the Soldier is.

“30 seconds, Cap!”

“Stand by. Charlie…-“ a gunshot goes off in your ear and you squeak in surprise, whipping around to look up at the Helicarrier you think Steve is on.

You put your finger to your ear, “Steve!? Steve, are you ok? Oh, Gods.” After a few moments you can hear his grunt as he begins to move. The elevator has reached the lobby but you make no effort to move. Your brother crowds in you on and wraps his uninjured arm around you.

“Ch-Charlie locked,” Steve says weakly into the comms, and you sigh in relief, leaning into Leon.

“Ok, Cap, get out of there,” Maria says, you can hear her frantic typing.

“Fire now,” Steve replies.

“But, Steve…”

“Do it! Do it now!”

“Steven Grant! You promised me!” You yell, tears forming in the corner of your eyes.

Steve says your name softly, and you sniffle back a sob, a tear escaping, “I can’t leave him,” he says, you hear shuffling and then the sound of Steve crushing his earpiece. A moment later the helicarriers begin opening fire on each other.

“No…” you place a hand on the glass, staring wide eyed up at the destruction.

“Flow, we gotta go,” Leon grips your shoulders to lead you out of the elevator and you relent. You wipe the tears from your eyes and help Leon jog as best he can away from HQ and the fire raining down from the sky just outside.

“You should Shift, it’ll be easier for you to run that way,” you tell him as you shoulder the back exit door open. Leon gives you a look and you roll your eyes. “I can keep up with you just fine like this. Do it.” Now he rolls his eyes at you, but he agrees. He Shifts, and you can hear his bones crack into place trying to heal his wounds.

You forgot how much bigger his form is than yours when he Shifts, you run to keep up with him, you both make your way across the bridge behind the Triskelion. You can hear explosions above you and try your best not to pay them any attention. You can’t let yourself think of Steve or Bucky still on one of those Helicarriers.

When you get across the bridge, you look back, and when you do a hellicarrier just crashes into the building. You go to reach for your earpiece, but it’s gone. It must have fallen out while you were running and you hadn’t noticed. There’s a tug on your sleeve and you look over to your brother, his eyes look worried as he looks at you. You place a hand on his head and nod towards the river.

“Let’s head up river, try and stay off the main road for now,” you tell him, you both make your way to the riverbank, putting as much distance between you and the burning remains of SHIELD as you can. “We can head back to your apartment, get some things together, and get the hell out of D.C..” Leon snorts at you as he trots beside you. “Oh yeah? You got a better idea, smart ass?” You nudge him with your hip.

-*-

You’re a few miles up river when you see a silver gleam out the corner of your eye, and when you turn your head you can see the Soldier walking towards you, his head turned down. He looks soaking wet and you wonder if he swam all the way from SHIELD to here. And then you see a lump of blue further up the riverbank.

“Steve!” You shout and run to him. You must have startled the Soldier because you hear his metal arm whir to life and his stance becomes defensive as you near him. Leon’s a few steps behind you and he growls. You come to a stop a few feet from the soldier and raise your hands up. “Do you remember me?” You ask, and he studies you for a moment, his nose flares, and he nods his head once, and he looks over at your brother who is still growling. You can see the soldier is favoring his left side, his right arm tucked tight into his side, he must have hurt it when he and Steve were fighting.

“Are you ok?” You ask him, the soldier’s brows crease and he stares wide eyed at you like you said something he’s never heard before. There’s a nudge to your hand and you place it on your brother's head. “This is Leon,” you tell the Soldier. “My brother.” The soldier just shifts on his feet, still wary of you both. “I’m going to go check on Steve now,” you say slowly, and take a step forward, Leon hasn’t stopped the low growl since you came upon the Soldier.

“Take care of yourself, James,” you say softly as you pass him by, he doesn’t acknowledge you and begins to make his way down stream and through a field before you lose sight of him. You rush to Steve’s side, he’s soaking wet and it looks like he's coughed up water. There’s cuts all over his face and bruises forming, you’re sure his right eye is swollen shut and his cheekbone is shattered. There’s blood stains around what looks like a bullet hole in his stomach, and you press your hand down on it.

“Steve, can you hear me?” You brush his hair back gently, his eyes flutter but they don’t open. You can hear a helicopter in the distance, and you look up to find it making its way in your direction. “Hold on, honey, help’s on the way.”

-*-

AN: Thank you for taking the time to read this hot mess of a story!! It means so much to me!

[jenconnellysshybellybutton]

Chapter 5: Plastic Heart

Characters: Melanie Cavill, Alexandra Cavill, Andre Layton, Bess Till, Ruth Wardell, Josie Wellstead, Bennett Knox

Warnings: Hurt/comfort, heavy angst, mentions of blood and gore, melanie being a tortured soul, domestic fluff, older woman crying, cuddling, alex being amazing

So much was happening all at once, the train sounded like it would fall apart from the wind and well now there was a half-conscious Melanie wrapped up in those tinfoil blankets you would find in a small first aid kit, it had been more than 48 hours since they got her from the cold lock, she had been asleep for that long,

Alex checked by the hour on the wounds on Melanie’s abdomen to see if they were bleeding through or not, when they were Alex would carefully dab them with rubbing alcohol, Melanie was so out of it she wouldn’t be able to feel it and thank god she didn’t Alex thought, she would also replace the gauze so it would be a new and clean and pray it did not get infected...both of them...there were two wounds, both appeared as something stabbed Melanie through her suit like a raw ripped off piece of shrapnel or metal and it flew into her at quite a speed, they were deep too, Alex pondered on the question of what and how.

Besides the many visible cuts and scars on Mel’s body Alex sat by her and watched her sleep for as long as she could until she eventually passed out holding her hand in between her turn of keeping an eye on her mother, nobody knows how long she was out, not even Ben, he didn’t want to disturb them by going into the bunk and waking them both up, it was also clear to everyone else at they did not want to be disturbed.

***

Melanie had on an oxygen mask to help her breathe again properly, all of a sudden she began to cough very violently, and that woke Alex up to the sound of her mother in pain, so she put her hand on her arm and tried to calm her and say sweet nothings the best she could. Melanie began to mumble words that were not understandable underneath the mask to form sentences.

“Mom?”

She grabbed the mask nozzle and pulled it off of her head still with her eyes closed “Go on, just take my plastic heart out! It’s not like I had a real one to you anyways...just take out my heart…..just rip it out…” Melanie’s sentences stopped along with her pulse, her breathing slowed down rapidly according to the small screen on the box attached to the wire.

“Mom!”

Alex panicked and quickly snatched the defibrillators from the side of the machine and turned on the setting on the box for the heart starting mode, Alex rubbed the two defibrillators together so she could build up the tension between the two starters and forcefully pushed them onto Melanie’s chest, luckily she gasped for air and eyes shot wide open, she sat up and jumped out of the bed her arms reaching for anything to grab onto and her hands clutched the collar of Alex’s jumpsuit and pulled her close to her face.

“Who are you?! Who am I?- Where am I?! Where's my daughter?!... WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?!!!”

Melanie pushed her up against one of the cabinets still from the collar rather violently picking her up a few inches, she was desperate for answers and her vision was far from good but right now it was starting to clear up from being exposed to room temperatures.

Alex was scared, scared like she witnessed Wilford again from when she was little, she hadn't felt this afraid in a long time, a tear dropped from her eyes.

“WHERE IS SHE?!!!-” Melanie was cut off.

“Mom? Melanie, it’s me, your daughter Alexandra, your name is Melanie Cavill, you’re on the first ten cars of the train you built ‘Snowpiercer’ to save humanity, I’m not going to hurt you...I never would-”

A pound on the door came “Is everything okay in there?” most likely Layton.

“Everything is fine!”

“Allie?”

“Yes, mom it’s me” Alex smiled.

And just as Melanie’s eyes came back to normal and her memory was jogged back into place, she could see for the first time in what seemed like forever, she let go of Alex and as fast as she could she backed away slamming herself against the opposite wall, Alex let her tears fall a bit as she slowly walked over to her mother very slowly.

“Stay away, don’t come near me!”

“Hey hey it’s alright” Alex kneeled down to her and Melanie stood up, so Alex got up again, this time Melanie did not move, instead she just looked down towards her feet silently, crying, her lips were trembling trying to find words for her actions and what she just did. Alex slowly touched her mom’s cheek and tilted her face up, she noticed yet another cut on her lip, her mom did not look at her.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore, I will never hurt you” she used her other hand to hold her’s.

Melanie finally looked at her daughter and she leaned into the soft touch, her heart breaks “I-...I- I hurt you- I hurt you-” Mel collapsed into Alex’s arms pulling her in tight as much as she could never letting her go, sobbing she kissed her forehead, Allie let it out too, wrapping her arms around her waist, she feels something trail down Mel’s black tank top.

“Mom you’re bleeding”

Melanie did not move so Alex carefully moved her to the bed.

“Um alright” she whipped her eyes “here sit down” she did so guiding her and sitting her down, Allie got the kit again preparing the new gauze and rubbing alcohol, Mel just watched her do that silent, she came back over and grabbed a stool that was resting on the coffee maker “can you hold up your shirt a little bit?” Mel whimpered from the blood unsticking to the shirt “this is going to hurt like a bicth” Alex handed her another shirt to go in her mouth so she wouldn’t bite off her tongue “3, 2, 1-” Melanie let out a muffled blood-curdling scream of pain from the alcohol pad.

***

Hours passed after Alex patched up the one puncture wound Mel had, now they were both exhausted from the crying and pain so Allie decided to make some dinner for them, she made mac and cheese, a child-like meal that was innocent she thought of, while they were eating Melanie chimed in.

“I don’t deserve you, you’re too good for me”

Alex stopped eating not knowing how to respond to that she spoke something else and asked;

“Who were you talking to in your sleep? What’s a ‘plastic heart’?” she knew she shouldn’t have asked and instantly regretted it, Melanie responded with one word;

“Him”

And that’s all Alex needed to know at that moment “plastic heart means someone who doesn’t have emotions or feelings”

“Oh,” silence was followed “you do not have that you hear me, you have a warm and kind soul” “I’m not sure anymore, I-” Melanie’s eyes welled up again “I know everything I felt, that’s for sure...I don’t want to go back out that door...I don’t want to know what will be waiting for me behind it...I know we are going back to the others… I don’t know how they will react to me, I know all the horrible things I’ve done, but I do know I am going to kill him, All I want is to be at peace Allie, to be your mom again, to take care of you...to do what we missed out on because I want to do so many things with you and I missed you so much......” Melanie’s tearing frown turned into a soft happy one “Actually, there’s one we can do now?”

“Oh yeah? Alex smiled “What’s that?”

***

It was officially dark out now, they were both in bed holding each other, cuddling was on Mel’s list and Alex wants to do it every day they can, Melanie had her arms over Alex holding her close, rubbing circles on her back, breathing in the scent of her hair, pressing kisses to her head to tell her she loves her, she couldn't be any more content than she was now, Mel was truly happy, and so was Alex, this has been the most relaxed she has ever felt in her life, Alex once again pondered the question ‘what happened out there?’ she didn’t want to start another break down right now so she’ll ask tomorrow when she knows it’ll be okay to do so. She nuzzled her face into Mel’s shirt even more to comfort the both of them.

“Oh god I’m so sorry Allie, I never in a million years would want to hurt you, do you understand?” her voice cracked.

Alex’s heart was breaking again from just the thought of Mel being this hard on herself “There’s nothing to be sorry for, you didn’t know it was me, but yes I understand” Melanie had the waterworks turned on again.

“I love you mom, I love you so much, please never leave me again?” tears rolled down her cheek

“No, never again, I promise, you are my top and only priority now, I love you so much honey, you are my hope, the love of my life and I wished I did everything and more for you, I am going to do that now, I love you, Allie, nothing is going to hurt you” she rubbed her back more as Alex was sobbing into her shirt seeking comfort.

“Nothing’s going to hurt you baby”

[heartpascal]

time for the "i would let you in" song association version 🤭

I WOULD LET YOU IN

(reader)

• in my room - chance peña

"guess we weren't meant to last,

so i'll keep counting stars inside my room."

• right where you left me - taylor swift

"some perspective, but i sat and stared,

right where you left me,

you left me no, oh, you left me no,

you left me no choice but to stay here forever."

• i'm still standing - elton john

"don't you know i'm still standing better than i ever did,

looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid,

i'm still standing after all this time,

picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind."

• snap - rosa linn

"it's 4 am, i can't turn my head off,

wishing these memories would fade, they never do,

turns out people lie,

they said, "just snap your fingers"

as if it was really that easy for me to get over you,

i just need time."

(joel)

• glimpse of us - joji

"said, "i'm fine" and said, "i moved on,"

i'm only here passing time in her arms,

hoping i'll find a glimpse of us."

• the ones we once loved - ben&ben

"it's been a long time since your eyes lit up that way,

i felt the guilt build up as i looked back how things went wrong,

did i have to sweep in and scar you?"

"so, i apologize for coming into your life,

just to break your heart to pieces, and then leave you in the night."

• watching him fade away - mac demarco

"it still hurts watching him fade away, watching him fade away."

• nothing is lost (you give me strength) - the weeknd

"i thought i could protect you from paying for my sins,

and i been walking this earth long enough that death's a gift,

been living this life so patient until i see you again,

it's war we're facing,

i know that if i died my only choice is still defending."

• sparks - coldplay

"did i drive you away?

i know what you'll say."

"and i know, i was wrong,

but i won't let you down."

• back to december - taylor swift

"so this is me swallowing my pride standing in front of you,

saying i'm sorry for that night,

and i'd go back to december all the time."

(tommy)

• two - sleeping at last

"tell me, is something wrong?

you know i'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat,

it's okay if you can't find the words."

"tell me where it hurts,

i just want to build you up, build you up,

till you're good as new."

• fix you - coldplay

"lights will guide you home,

and ignite your bones,

and i will try to fix you."

• yes to heaven - christi buckley

"if you dance, i'll dance,

and if you don't, i'll dance anyway,

give peace a chance,

let the fear you have fall away,

i've got my eyes on you."

• carry you - ruelle, fleuri

"you are not alone,

i've been here the whole time singing you a song,

i will carry you."

(reader, joel, ellie)

• i love you so - the walters

"'cause you were cruel and i'm a fool,

so, please let me go,

but i love you so (please let me go)."

• two birds - regina spektor

"two birds of a feather,

say that they're always,

gonna stay together,

but one's never goin' to let go of that wire,

he says that he will,

but he's just a liar."

first of all. THE INCLUSION OF TOMMY!!! YES!!! “and i will try to fix you” 😭😭😭 DO YOU HEAR MY SOBBING MY HEART OUT???? and the reader ones ??? dude.

my heart hurts EVERY TIME WITJ THE JOEL ONES </3 “did i have to sweep in and scar you” do you hear me violently crying

[aenaxes-moved]

inertia

[crosshair x gn!reader] removing crosshair's inhibitor chip was never going to be an easy task, but you never expect it to demand an item of equal exchange. otherwise known as picking up the pieces with crosshair, together.

warnings: past paralytic injury, general angst, hurt-comfort

w/c: 2.2k

a/n: as much as i hate physics, you can't deny there's a poetry to the laws of the universe. inertia keeps heavy objects in place, and guilt's one of the heaviest burdens of all.

There are certain universal laws you learn while living on a ship, like the slightly upsetting fact that magnetism is relative and so is time. But there are constants: the behavior of gravity around a massive star, the physics of self-contained gas giants, and, on a less macrocosmic scale, that Crosshair’s armor has neat paint, all clean lines and sharp edges bordering plastoid and standard issue paint.

It only makes sense, a steady hand demanded by a life behind the trigger, you think quietly, watching Crosshair carefully scrape the excess red paint from his brush on the side of a flat scrap of metal. With only the low hum of the Marauder to fill the silence, you follow his brush as you stand in the armory threshold and simply observe the slow deliberation of an even, unwavering line drawn from a memory even the inhibitor chip could not blur.

Not that it’s a particularly difficult thing to paint, the sharp, stylized edge of a nine. But there is a silent weight to its image, a firm and resonant return in its bold crimson colour, reclaiming its rightful place on his shoulder in amends, if the restless bob of his toothpick says anything.

If you look long enough, it’s like he never left. Like you never lost your legs.

“You’re back early,” Crosshair says, dipping his brush back into the paint squeezed over his makeshift palette.

“The rest wanted to explore, but the humidity was getting to me. And I missed you,” you add, and your heart swells when you hear him laugh softly in return.

“I believe you,” he chuckles. It’s a rare thing to come by, laughter genuine and sweet, even with Crosshair’s return—perhaps, because of his return—but you take it gratefully either way.

Two cups of caf in hand, you push yourself off the doorway and move to join Crosshair at his place on the armory floor. But as you set a foot forward, a bolt of pain laces up your ankle. It’s the kind of pain that precipitates a fall, starting low in the arch of your foot, gaining a momentum that renders you immobile by the time it’s clawed up your thigh and fizzled around the cybernetic plate welded to the base of your spine.

It fells you without warning or remorse, cracking you open with the bone-deep sensation of memory. A single ultra-ionized shot through a modified rifle and silencer, calculated and surgically precise, a one of a kind and the only one you have known.

(It wasn’t his fault.)

You jerk forwards, caf sloshing dangerously close to the rim, and you distantly register the clatter of plastoid across the floor before you feel a shoulder push up from under your arm. Long fingers dig into your side, reminiscent of better days and tender touches shared in the quiet comfort of a bunk, and you pitch unsteadily, eyes squeezed tight enough to see white.

As much as you would like to confirm the certainty of a stable support before you can relax, the lingering dredges of atmospheric humidity and exhaustion of breaking into a high security imperial compound work cruelly against your strength. You can do little but give in.

Your knees buckle beneath you, and you sag against the only person on the ship able to brace your fall. Miraculously, the caf, handles squeezed tight under your white-knuckled grip, remains unspilled.

“I ruined your paint,” you laugh through your teeth, fuzzy black edges slowly receding from your field of vision as you blink your eyes open.

“And I shot you,” Crosshair hisses.

Crosshair lowers you to the floor, and you feel a full-bodied flinch shock through his form as your unmoving legs splay awkwardly over the cold metal. He is quick to take the cups out of your hand, setting them down with a hard clack before he returns his attention to you. You had always thought Echo would be the one on the receiving end of carefully placed touches to coax the pain of surgical scars and rough wiring away.

You never once dreamed it might be you, too.

One arm secured around your shoulders, he reaches down like it’s muscle memory to rub slowly over the scar tissue framing your implant. The scars are fresh, just barely a week old and forever seared over your skin, but guilt, you have found, tends to hasten the learning process, the scrambling compensation.

“It wasn’t your fault,” you sigh, leaning against Crosshair’s chest and dropping your head back against his shoulder.

“I aimed. I pulled the trigger, y/n.” He’s angry, a low, simmering rage held close and bubbling under the hard edge in his voice as his grip tightens around you. You feel it in the faint tremor in his arm, how he holds you tight to his side and silently wills you to stay.

He is angry, but it is not for you.

“You weren't you,” you mumble.

It’s second nature—it always has been, now, simply with pause—to turn your head when he’s nestled up against your back, to lean close, nuzzle into his neck, and ground yourself, ground him, in the silence of touch. Relief floods your chest, warm sunlight dawning over the thorn in your side, when you feel him chase your touch, settling both his arms around your waist and ducking down low to press his chin atop the crown of your head.

Nothing would ever be the same, but this was a start.

“If it wasn’t me,” Crosshair starts, his voice catching on a sputtering inhale, thick with the tangle of words unsaid. He clears his throat, and if you notice the curling edges of a tremor on his tongue, you say nothing. “If it wasn’t me, who else can you blame?”

“I don’t blame anyone,” you say into his skin, lips ghosting over his rapid pulse.

It’s a diplomatic answer. Of course you blame someone—Palpatine, Tarkin, the fact that Crosshair and his brothers, every last one of the clones, had been built around a single, biding initiative that he hadn’t the luck or the chance to resist. You had been sleeping with the enemy even before he knew that he could be the enemy.

But thinking about it makes your head spin. Blame is too hard, too tiring to place when you, yourself, had been sewn into its vast web. So while Crosshair had slept with a bacta patch plastered to his temple, you had rewired your spinal cord and decided to be away with the anger, the resentment, the mornings waking up in tears when you lifted your blanket and barely recognized that you had legs at all.

“Don’t fucking lie,” Crosshair spits, and you feel him shake around you. Anger, such an easy defense. Such a flimsy one.

“I’m not—”

“I hear you cry in the mornings when your cybernetics don’t click; I hear you scream when you try to move and your mind tells you one thing but your legs don’t fucking work because I made a killshot that paralyzed you—”

“And it paralyzed me because you had every chance to put a bolt through my head but you aimed for my back. You were fighting it, Cross,” you counter, voice quivering.

“But it was me. I took that shot, and you pretend like you don’t—like you don’t hate me because I still had my chip. But I remember it, and it was still me, and you have every right to—”

“Cross!” you shout, and he starts hard enough that you feel him jump. You feel blindly for his hand, gripped tight at his own wrist, and squeeze, hard. “I have my legs back. And sometimes they don’t work just right, but all I care about right now is that you’re back. It’s all I’ll ever care about.”

“I find that hard to believe,” he mumbles into your hair, the sudden burst of vitriol tamed and locked away for the moment.

You’re distinctly aware that he itches to push you away. You feel it in the uncertain pause rigid in his movements before he turns his palm to twine his fingers with yours. After all, it’s easier to cope when the object of your crushing guilt is at an arm’s length.

“This is the part where you’re supposed to comfort me, tell me that you missed me too and that I was right, and you say that everything’ll work out, Cross,” you laugh weakly. You gently knock your head against his collar, prodding, urging, anything to break the crushing silence you know haunts him every time he closes his eyes.

Instead, you feel a shuddering sigh against your ear, and Crosshair only dips his head low, hiding his face in your shoulder as his grip tightens around your waist. There is no sardonic quip or playful bite to offer you peace—only slow, mechanical breaths pressed into your skin in a desperate attempt to keep from falling apart altogether. You reach up, gingerly carding your fingers through his hair when you feel that telltale warmth seeping through the fabric of your shirt, salt sharp on your tongue.

“I shot you. I aimed to kill,” Crosshair mumbles, almost hysterical in level calm, the steady veil locking his tense jaw and drawn shoulders in place. “Why are you comforting me?”

“Would you rather I never speak to you again?” No malice in your tone, you shift your weight, bearing down against Crosshair and begging him to move closer. He does.

“It would be more believable if you did,” he mutters, and you catch the tail end of a soft sniff.

“Not really my thing, grudges,” you say. “Especially against the people I love.” Trailing your fingers lower, you slip below his hairline and begin stroking your palm over the back of his neck, bent forward at an unforgiving angle. You wonder how many times he’s curled into himself like this that he can simply sit, penance and grieving, and the ache that seizes your ribs hurts more than your cybernetic misfire.

“After all that,” he finally mumbles, something close to hushed awe in his voice. “You still love.”

Slowly, melting through the numb static crackle, you feel the sensation seeping back into your feet. You could always rebuild your mobility with some careful cerebrospinal implants, seasonal aches and occasional pains be damned, but you could never replace him.

“Of course I do,” you whisper back. Careful to keep the quiet, tremulous peace, you bring your hand down, sliding around the side of his neck to cup his jaw from behind, ignoring the wetness streaked over his skin. “Still loving,” you affirm, voice steady as you thumb over his cheek. “Still loving you.”

It takes a beat of silence, your words lingering in the still air of the armory, but instead of the tense, fraught grief of when your implant had fizzled out, there is warmth, present and forgiving. You know that nothing will ever be the same, but when Crosshair turns his head to press his lips into your palm, you know that you can still try. Like the waking groan of a crashed ship, you will pick up the pieces and power up one more time, again, again, again, as many times as it takes.

Crosshair nuzzles close, quietly basking in your presence as you sit curled together on the armory floor. And at last, his breaths still, slow and deep as the ship hums around you. He’s never been one for words, not even at his fever pitch of disorientation and distress. He doesn’t need to speak for you to know what he means when he clasps your hand again and holds tight, but his voice is a welcome sound all the same.

“Thank you.”

And for a while, that’s how you stay, breathing slowly and clinging to each other like moving apart would mean never coming back. And that’s how it genuinely does feel—the safety in stillness, carving out your own constant in the cosmic entropy of conquest and loss. For a moment, you can simply savor the quiet simplicity of being.

But the universe wills motion, stars colliding and collapsing and breathing new life all over again. So too, do you feel the strength return in lapsing waves to your legs and the coiled fear leach out of Crosshair’s posture.

“Promise me this,” you whisper, just loud enough to rise above the ambient noise of the ship as you curl your toes and feel again, lurching into motion like gears fallen into disrepair. Crosshair rouses behind you, and he sniffs deeply, once, before he presses his cheek to the side of your head—he is listening. “Promise me that we’ll move on.”

“I can’t promise that,” he says after a brief pause, words measured and low. “But I’ll try.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

As much as there are variables scattered through star systems and wreaking havoc wherever they go, so too are there constants pushing back against the chaos, aligning the universe. Like clockwork, when you wake, the stars turn, the gas giants dance, and when you squeeze Crosshair’s hand, he squeezes back.

[sweater-daddiesdumbdork]

Attack Of The Winter Wolf: Reality Takes Over

Summary- 8.6k Alpha Steve x Little One Reader. Visiting the reformed Pierce Pack, now under a new Alpha’s leadership, Caine. The young Alpha has a few questions for Steve. You and Steve seem to have finally found them at peace, but it still reaffirms that now your home is with your mate. Unfortunately it all comes crashing down in a matter of moments. Divider made by @firefly-graphics​

Warnings- Dominating Sex, violence, swears. This is an 18+ Blog

A/N- A friend sent me a GIF that inspired the sexual scene in this fic. If any should want to see the GIF, send me a DM as I wont be posting it on my page due to the content of it. Thank you so much for continuing reading The Packs journey in this next stage. Thoughts and Questions are always welcome. Happy Howling. 🐺💙

Chapter One / Masterlist

Steve had to admit that Caine had really changed it all around in the months he has taken over. His pack was more relaxed and open, no longer living with the fear of a crazy Alpha. Steve watched his Little One pausing every now and then to greet a former pack mate while he simply stayed nearby watching You interact with your old pack mates. Even though he knew You still carried connections with them, it wasn't the same because now you were his. You constantly danced back to him, your body seeing his reassuring touch, either taking his hand once more to weave your fingers with his or slipping under his shirt to press your palm to his back. It was all about the connection, You and the Little Wolf always establishing that bond. Steve felt a calmness wash over him at your desire to remain close. Every time a soft praising rumble would rise from him making you pleased. 

Soon Caine and Kat found the two of you “Welcome back, thinking about staying here Y/N?” The woman teased as she loped her arm through yours on the opposite of Steve. You scoffed with a shake of your head. 

“And give up all the work I did with him? Hell no.” You joked, patting Steve's chest and smirking up at him. He growled in a mock warning and nipped at your nose before letting You go with a nudge, which you split off with Kat, going to catch up. Steve and Caine watched the women for a moment till Caine broke the silence. 

“This is a side I have never seen of Y/N, it's good.” Caine observed in which Steve turned his attention from You leaving him and cleared his throat. 

“Well I'm sure she has the same observations as all of you. Not living in fear will work wonders. The whole pack looks pretty good. While we were walking around, everyone is so content here. Have nothing but to say how good an Alpha you are.”  

Caine gave almost a youthful excited look at the comment before clearing his throat to gain his composure in the other Alphas presence. 

<I like this kid.> The Wolf yipped in Steve’s mind and Steve had to agree, knowing just how dedicated Caine was to his pack, even when he was nothing more than a captive. 

I do too, and Y/N trusts him. 

“Well thank you Steve, that means a lot. We deserve to just be a pack, a real and proper one. That was actually kinda why I sent Y/N a text inviting you two over. You see Ross has been sending members here, trying to talk to me about the Accords.” 

Steve rumbled slightly at the mention of Ross. He hadn't seen the council member since you ran him off last fall. And that was just fine by Steve, he already made it known that he wanted nothing to do with the Accords nor would be signing them to give up part of his control of his pack to the council. 

“And what do you think about them Caine? I’m sure they left a copy for you to read over.” he questioned, and Caine gave a slight wrinkle of his forehead considering how to answer the question. 

“Well, part of me wants to, as all of this to take care of seems almost overwhelming at times. I want nothing but the best for my Pack, but giving up the rights to finalize choices, letting the Council be able to override my decisions? Seems dangerous to give it up. They claim it's to further protect our safety, especially if an Alpha loses his sanity. Ross claims that is what happened to Pierce, was corrupted by Hydra and that nothing could be properly done, as Pierce had every right to do what he wanted being the Alpha.”

“Yeah fucking bullshit. Pierce never should have been an Alpha. I don’t know how he managed it.” Steve growled out angrily at Caine’s words. “And that supposed Council had everything they needed to step in, they just didn’t. They were waiting to see where Pierce could lead them, at the innocent wolves expense.” Steve shook his head, the Wolf now pacing in agitation for his human counterpart. Caine nodded in agreement. 

“What I thought as well when the Senator was trying to feed me this. I told him I would think about it. But I don't think that this is the best thing for us. We are still trying to recover and it's just hard to trust anyone right now. Giving up as Alpha, it just seems to go against our very nature.” 

“Go with what you feel in your gut Caine.” Steve said. “You know what is the best thing to do for your wolves, they trust you for a reason.” The new Alpha looked relieved at Steve, that he was actually doing the right thing after a lifetime of his family being mistreated.

Soldat jumped out of the van Clint managed to hot wire, switching vehicles every couple hundred miles in case they were being followed. The Alpha they had collected groaned as Soldat yanked on the chain, Pietro pushing her forward from behind. Soldat never even bothered to learn her name. 

Her name didn't matter, she was just the mission. 

The White Wolf licked his muzzle hungrily, eyeing the Alpha, feeling the challenge her Wolf’s presence brought. But she was subdued, after killing her mate, all fight in her left. It broke her. She followed behind Soldat obediently as Brock unlocked the door to the warehouse, dragging her in. 

“A female this time.” Brock gripped her face, twisting it so she had to look at him, his sneer growing wider as it roamed up and down her, Alanna rolling her eyes from behind him. 

“Not much of a looker if you ask me. How did she get to be Alpha?” 

Brock ripped his fingers away from her face, jerking her head back. “Not all Alpha’s are built on strength. But they are weaker, easier to control. Isn't that right Sweetheart. Put her in the back... there's a free cage back there for her. Oh and Soldat, enjoy yourself with her… she's a fine piece of tail.” 

Soldat didn't say anything, just grabbed the chain he was using to lead her and tug her away with him, the rest of the team dispersed to unload the van of their equipment and dispense of it.

Alanna cocked her head as she watched Soldat leave with their latest Alpha. “Why do you do that? Offer him those Alphas like he will actually take you up on it. If you want him to get laid, why not just order it?” 

Brock watched before he turned to Alanna. “He’s programmed to only fuck his mate, if he ever chooses one, then we know. Another way to control him.” 

“You really believe in that crock of shit? Soulmates?” Alanna snorted out and Brock snapped his teeth at her. 

“I see Rogers was quick to drop you without a regret and he went halfway around the world leaving his pack behind to save his new mate.” He challenged her and Alanna snarled at him, her rage flaring at the mention of her former partner. 

“Fuck you Brock.” 

“Later Sweetheart, I got more important shit to do.” His hand whipped out and snatched her by the back of her neck, twisting till Alanna yelled in pain. “Don't you forget who owns your ass now Bitch, you got the pretty scar to prove it.” He dropped her to scramble at his feet while he stepped away, leaving her wiping her face dry from the tears of pain he caused, composing herself. 

Brock whistled a cheery tune as he followed along after Soldat to see if he was going to take him up on his offer or not.  

When Soldat shoved the Alpha in, Brock came up next to him, pulling out his phone to snap a picture of her to file away for later. 

“Good work, I have another one for you to go for. Coordinates are already pinged to your device. This one should be easy for you, he is fairly new and you’ve met him before.” Soldat dug out his own device and pulled up the file, a picture of a younger man paired along with a black wolf, both man and beast shown. “Collect him and bring him here, kill off as many of the pack as you can.” 

Soldat frowned a bit looking at it, studying it when he felt a haze of a memory rise up. Several people mingling in a hotel room, people he didn't recognize and a voice coming from nearby. 

“If Natasha and Bucky hadn’t come… Thank You, to all of you.” The Black Wolf he was looking at right now laying on a bed looking like he had just been through a fight, panting heavily.

“It was the least we could do, I’m sorry we didn’t know earlier.” The same voice he had heard calling to him days before when retrieving the Alpha. The White Wolf shook his head aggravated and Brock's voice sharpened suddenly. 

“Soldat! ANSWER ME.” 

“Yes Sir, we will head out right away.” 

It was much later when you returned with Kat. Caine and Steve were sharing beers with other wolves, talking about general stuff, Steve doing his best to answer questions, explaining how he made his pack an asset to the community, bringing in income to the sleepy town below there mountain. It all felt like back at home, that you quickly settled back in. You sidled up to Steve's side, which his hand rubbed at your side and he dropped a kiss to your temple. “Thought I was going to have to go look for you, Little One.” He chuckled and you grinned up at him, taking his beer from his hand and sipping from it. 

“Like you didn't know where I was the whole time.” You scoffed and Steve shrugged, it was true. With your bond, as long as you two were nearby, it wasn't hard for either of you to find the other. The wolves easily slipped back and forth along that shared bond, tangling together in greeting and breaking out in play as you lightly nipped at Steve’s chest when you turned into him, pressing against his chest as he tightened his arm around you. 

“Sure I did, doesn't mean I didn't want to go find you and drag you away all for myself.” His voice husked in your ear, a flattening of his palm against your lower back pressed your hips into his and you could feel exactly why. 

Your hand smoothed against his pecs as you turned around, leaning back against his chest and taking another sip of the beer before giving it back to him. Steve's arm slung around your waist loosely while he nipped gently against your mark, making you tilt your head for him with a satisfied sigh before focusing once more on the small group milling around. 

“Would you consider coming back Y/N?” someone asked, a woman named Tess that you knew vaguely from the short amount of time she was for sale. Steve growled lowly at the question and you chuckled while pushing your hair back to flash your neck. 

“Most certainly not. You all will always be family, but I’m bonded with Steve now. My home is with him and where we decide to go together. Right now as Alpha, we’re staying in the mountains.” You stated and you felt Steve shuffle behind you, speaking up as well. 

“As long as your Alpha is fine with us visiting, Y/N will come back whenever she wants to. I know you all are her family and wouldn't ever ask her to push that away.” You could feel your Little Wolf howling to her mate, the satisfied warmth of her happiness flooding through you and you couldn't feel more content then you were right now. 

Caine was nearby, nuzzling up to Kat in a sneaky way. The two of them teasing at the edge of the group when suddenly Caine seemed to realize that the attention was on them from the others in the group. 

“Of course, Y/N, this is your home whenever you want to come. As well as any of your pack.” He cleared his throat. Kat hid her face a bit, trying not to give them away. 

“Thanks Caine.” You are quick to answer, deciding then that it was time to pull you and Steve away for the night, which made you twist to face him. “What do you say Alpha, ready to call it a night? I got something I want to show you.” 

Steve arched a brow at you, seeing how you were biting your lip and giving him a playful look. He gave a wave of his hand as you ran your fingers along his stomach through his shirt, pulling away from him, making him choke back a growl at the loss of your touch. “Nice meeting you all, see you tomorrow.” he said before walking stiff legged away. The rest of the wolves chuckled among one another at him trying to not be obvious. 

You sprinted ahead while Steve was saying goodbye, well away from the group now and sliding into the darkness of twilight quickly taking over and making the shade under the trees almost dark as night now. You could hear Steve quickly catching up to you, which made you put on a burst of speed. You weren't going back to the little cabin you two were calling home for the night. You wanted to play, wide awake and ready for your Alpha. Darting into the woods, you picked up speed to put more distance between you two and cupped your hands together around your mouth to give a soft howl, enticing him to come find you, hunt you down. The Little Wolf filled your mind, your eyes glimmering yellowed in the low light as you darted away from where you could hear Steve. 

<You keep crashing like this, he will find us in no time.> 

Well that is the point. 

The Little Wolf’s laughter filled your senses as you darted around a tree trunk, your hands pressing against the rough bark as you peered around, looking for any sign of movement. All your senses flared as you listened carefully for anything. Then to your left a snap made you jump, and the Little Wolf pounded her front paws, yipping. <Run! Run!> Turning the opposite way you raced off, panting as you picked up speed. 

When Steve first followed, he thought you would make straight for the cabin. But you had veered off, following your honeysuckle scent that he picked up and took the first step into the darkening woods. Inhaling deeply, it was filled with new scents. The sharpness of the pines, the fresh crushed needles where you passed through. The wolves who lived here mingled scent, and it was somewhat reminiscent of you when he first met you. But now… He drew it in deeper when he found yours, it was different, it was his. Warming in his lungs as he plucked it loose from everything else clashing his senses. It was the one that had that honeysuckle undertones, but now it was more intimate. It was a scent he was surrounded with when you pressed in against him, especially when you were just about to go into heat. A welcoming desired scent that left him aching hard and a smirk spread with a slight possessive growl rumbling through him now that he smelled it. Knowing that the sweetness would be dripping from you, his own honey pot. 

“Little One, you better run, because you certainly can’t hide.” he whispered as his footfalls were heavy at first. He could hear a giggle that you tried to muffle as you darted around trees and swiftly turned into trails that you found. The ferns growing under the forest swayed with your movements, some leafy fronds getting crushed in the process. Your howl echoed and bounced around, but Steve was hot on your trail, not being deterred. 

He saw you ahead, when you went around a particularly large trunk and Steve went to the right, quiet in his footfalls till he happened to finally managed to get around where you were trying to hide. You peered the opposite side, stretching a bit to look. Completely unaware of where Steve was. His fingers itched now to grab a hold of your waist, pull your ass back to grind against his hips, hear you shriek in surprise and fall back into his chest to look up at him with a grin. He knew how you would play this, trying to escape him with sweet kisses and wriggles to bolt again. As Steve attempted to sneak in closer, the pad of his foot happened to press against a twig and snapped it, making you twirl around on your toes wide eyed in surprise and Steve lunged forward to catch you, your back against the tree that was shielding you earlier and his arms caging on either side of your head. 

A surprise growl rolled through you when Steve pressed himself against you, catching you efficiently between him and the tree. Your hands fisted in his shirt and your eyes flashed yellow up at him. Flops of his hair fell forward on his forehead as his head dipped to yours, teasing lust filled kisses nipping on your lips, tugging at each other hungrily with groans. “Gotcha Little One.” Steve whispered, trailing his nose against yours, and his eyes closed while he inhaled against you. 

You dragged your teeth against your bottom lip while running your hands up his chest and fingers pressed through his beard to follow the sharp angle of his jaw. “You did Alpha, now what are you going to do about it?” 

Steve let your warm honeyed scent arouse him further, a sticky sweet honeypot of a mess his Little One was and he wanted to get his mouth on you, wrap himself around you till the whole world fell away. A cheeky grin crinkled the corners of his eyes, his grin turning wolfish in nature as he growled at you. “The Big Bad Wolf will eat you up.” 

Your head fell back as laughter burst out sharply, disrupting the quiet of the night. “Smooth Alpha.” 

He nipped on your mark, turning that laughter into a distressed needy moan as Steve's hands smoothed the back of your thighs to lift you up and wrap your legs around him. Pressing his erection against your core. “I ain’t nothing if I ain't smooth ‘Mega.” He stated before claiming your lips and pressing the length of his chest into yours, stealing your air from your lungs, and making you fist a hand at the back of his head, getting lost in him. 

Soldat scanned the small pack. Some of it felt familiar, but not enough for the Hydra Soldier to consider what it meant. This was just another hit on the list Brock had for his team to overtake. These wolves were lazy in the night time warmth. Lulled to think they were safe in their packs boundaries. The White Wolf flexed in Soldats mind, licking over his jaw in anticipation of hunting them down. Soldat tilted his head in the air, searching out what the scents could provide to him. 

The only thing out of place was the scent of two Alphas here. One was young, still new in leading the pack, the one he was after. His control would be iffy at best over the wolves unless their loyalty was already cemented to him. 

But the other stirred the White Wolf in Soldat. Making him flex anxiously a moment at the sensation. Another time, another place he knew this one. It lingered in his senses and he didn't like that. Making him clench his jaw as the White Wolf shook his fur in agitation, unsure of how he knew it. Brock's voice came over the comm in his ear, snapping out. “Is the team set Soldat?” 

Soldat moved from his crouch, retreating back to where the others waited. “You all know what to do. There are two Alphas this time, go for the younger one, get the other if you can.” he told his team. Silently as always they dispersed. None of them questioned the fact that there were two Alphas. They had their orders, nothing else needed to be considered. Clint going one way through the trees, and the twins another. Wanda started to simmer red where her powers took an unnatural form, solidifying to cause harm instead of heal. Soldat shoved knives in various places in his kevlar and fitted a mask to his face for protection. That other Alpha, it still left Soldat and his Wolf unsettled for reasons he couldn't place while he prepared himself. 

“Set and dispersed, starting extraction.” Soldat said into the comm, and not even thirty seconds later Pietro's snarls and howls started on the other side of the packs compound, Soldat came out of the trees, sniper rifle lifted aiming right for the sleeping group by the nearby bonfire.

Steve ground himself into you, his chest rumbling as his hands rubbed at your sides and cupped your breasts to squeeze and tease. Your head was tilted back against the tree, drawing in air best you could as your mate sucked on your neck, tracing his mark on you with his tongue, his dirty talk making you ache, and rolling your hips to create that friction. “Gonna fill you Little One. Stretch you open and leave you dripping my cum till you're pregnant with my pups.” 

God that made your heart race, knowing that he was going to knot you against that tree. His hands kept tugging and making you arch your back, wanting him to get rid of your clothes now and really lay claim to your body. It was a whirlwind of sensations prickling your skin in a heated way. 

But then you heard it, at first it barely registered when Steve sunk teeth into your collarbone. You almost ignored it, but the Little Wolf couldn't. She stirred through your hazed mind, making you focus again outside of your Alpha. Another howl, distressed. “Steve… wait.” You tugged at his hair to lift his head away, and he growled in warning at you that he didn't want to wait, but you pulled again. 

He lifted away from where he was tasting your skin, stilling his body and frowning slightly while panting. “What's wrong Little One?” 

“Listen Steve… something isn't right.” You loosened your hold now that you knew Steve was focusing on you and he tilted his head to listen. Inhaling deeply for any change in the air. He stepped back, letting you loosen your legs around his waist and slip to a stand. Cold chills laced up your spine, looking around as the night seemed to turn silent and dangerous. 

<We gotta go back to Caine and the others.> The Little One pressed against the Alpha, who was rigid next to her, searching himself for what she sensed. 

But did we actually hear anything? You looked around you, but Steve's hand shot out and caught your wrist in his hand to keep you from moving away from him. His eyes wide as he found what he was looking for. 

“Bucky… he’s here.” The Alpha rumbled out and that's when the yells rang out, the sharp rings of gunfire. 

“The others… we have to get back to the others Steve.” You tugged your wrist loose to sprint away and Steve lunged to catch you, but you were too quick, already streaking through the woods. 

“Y/N! Come back!” Steve yelled as he took off after you. Shedding clothes as you raced, the urge to listen to your Alpha made you falter, but not enough to make you stop. Soon you were falling to all fours, faster to make it back as the Little Wolf and you put on a burst of speed that had everything a blur around you. Soon at your side was a streak of silver as the Alpha attempted to keep up with you on unfamiliar ground. Your twists made him skid heavily into the trees and brush, but he was never far behind as he tried to over take you and before you could burst into the chaos just out of sight of the tree line, he snatched your ruff and jerked you off your feet. 

The Alpha twisted you underneath him, his jaws pinning you to the ground while you struggled, but he wouldn't loosen his hold until you stilled and your eyes rolled up to look at him, willing him to release you. He couldn't let you charge into the attack like this, and he loosened, nudging you to creep forward to see what laid beyond out of sight. Both of you stayed low to the ground slinking till breaking out from the forest to the underbrush to see what was going on. 

Bodies, your old pack littered the ground and your whine echoed so loudly in distress that the Alpha flattened his ears and pressed against you before slinking along the edge, trying to find the attackers. 

A heaviness filled Steve's chest because he knew exactly what he would find. His muscles coiled when he finally caught sight of Bucky, who was taking aim at Kat. She was unaware of him while trying to help the injured to their feet. 

You crouched next to him, quivering in shock and anticipation at seeing the missing members of the Pack. The Alpha growled out an order, demanding you help the others. As well as stay away from Bucky, the danger to great to risk letting you go near him. Bucky obviously wasn't in control right now. Once the Alpha was sure you understood, he nuzzled you quickly and split away, leaving you to wait till he had the soldier distracted. 

Soldat just happened to see the other Alpha coming at him before he could take his shot. Barely. He spun to block the large wolf from hitting him. Teeth sank into his meatal protected arm, the shield plates clinking together to hold up against the pressure of the bite and he heaved back, sending the wolf sprawling back. A smaller one bolted from their hiding spot, to reach the people he was just about to end. It didn't matter, one of the others would take care of them. Soldat turned his attention to the Alpha he had scented earlier, the one who didnt belong here. 

The Silver Wolf pushed back to his feet, his chest rising and falling with each inhale. Soldat knew he was scenting him, assuming it was for the animal to figure out what he was. Swinging the rifle over his shoulder to move it out of the way, he grasped for his belt to pull out a collar. The Wolf's ears flicked forward to what was in his hand and turned wary, stalking out of Soldat's reach. A low growl rippled through him, and the White Wolf ached to submit for just a moment, but it was easy to brush it away. 

<Attack him. He is not going to expect you to rush him.> 

Why did you stall? 

The White Wolf shook himself off, snarling out. <We have our orders.> Soldat heard the waver in him but started towards the Alpha. The Alpha matched his movements, picking up speed in his gait to collide back with him. <This ones got some balls.> Soldat heard the White Wolf remark.

All the more reason to get him collared and under control.

And just before they reached one another, the Alpha darted around him, making Soldat spin just to have the Alpha tackle him once more, teeth sinking into the kevlar of his suit. There was enough force to feel the bite, but nothing that could do damage. Fistfuls of fur was grabbed trying to wrestle him away and attempt to maneuver the collar around his neck. The Alpha managed to twist out of his hold in time and Soldat yanked a knife from a hidden spot, swinging it in an aim at the animal, trying to sink it into a vulnerable spot. Instead it grazed him, a spurt of red following the blades descent through its fur. A furious snarl demanding him to submit filled the air before man and wolf collided again. 

You were busy helping Kat try to get the others away, stalling for a moment when you saw Clint emerging from out of nowhere, his aim sighted on you and the others. He was just about to let loose when you saw Caine get dragged towards him, collared now. Seeing that they had that packs Alpha, he dropped his bow and followed along with Pietro and Wanda. Unsure of what to do, Steve had demanded you only be to help and stay out of the actual fighting before breaking from cover earlier. The Omega in you wanting to obey her Alpha, keep pushing others to go into hiding like Steve wanted. 

But these were your missing pack mates, and they were causing all the destruction. Everything in your senses screamed at you to go for them, as well as go back into hiding with Kat and the other survivors. Then the hot scent of blood hit you, your Alphas blood. All other thoughts left you as your nose lifted to find him. 

It was being hit in the worst way possible, stinging your senses with fear as you broke from Steve's earlier command. Long leaps ate up the ground as you sought him out. You found him trying to bite at Bucky's neck before being thrown to the ground in a way that vibrated the ground, a knee dropping to his ribs while Bucky collapsed full force on him, a flash of silver in his hand let you know. Steve was just about to be collared.  

The whole world just zeroes in on that moment, if you can't get there fast enough, you might lose Steve. He might be able to break free from Bucky's hold before the collar is attached. But you can't take that chance, and you make a grab for Bucky's wrist, closing fangs around the metal plates and wrenching back. Catching both of them by surprise, your back paws dig in for traction as you whip your head back and forth in a move meant to snap an animal's neck. It's enough to surprise Bucky and make him fall off the Alpha, the both of you tumbling away. It did earn you a well placed kick to your skull, which caused you to yelp while stunning you. 

The Alpha pushed himself up once Bucky rolled off him, unsure of what caused him to let go, but the Alpha wasn’t going to let him get the chance again. The yelp made the hair raise on his back, now seeing the reason Bucky released him. 

You disobeyed him, which resulted in your head getting kicked at and you crumpling to the ground in shock. The Alphas rage at your expense caused him to roar in fury, a whirlwind of fury attacking his best friend. 

The Alpha managed to back Soldat up, covering your smaller form with his body. The Alpha bristled, his muzzle rolling up to show fangs and ears pinned back flat against his skull, warning him back. Soldat stalled again with the sensation he was supposed to listen to this Alpha, shaking his head to clear the impulsion. 

“You got one of the Alpha’s, leave him.” Brock's voice screamed in Soldats ear, clearing it from the impulse. Soldat took off at a run, leaving the two of them behind. 

You push yourself back to a shaky stand, having the wind knocked out of you and the kick disoriented you when the steel toe boots connected to your skull. The Alpha watched Bucky race away with perked ears, the shiver rolling through him controlling his urge to follow him, but he turned away from his best friend back to you. Padding over, the Alpha was quick to check you over, his muzzle pressing against your side to make sure nothing was broken till he nudged at your shoulder, getting you to move. When you started towards the injured, he growled sharply, making you falter and lower a bit in submission, unsure of what he wanted. 

Coolly he pressed you the opposite way, towards the cabin you two were staying at for the time being. The Alpha didn't let up, keeping you heading away from the others and back to the safety of the cabin. 

Steve had never had to quell such scared anger in his life, far more than when you had gone off the road that winter. It was raging hot that he could have lost you to Bucky, so easily. After he told you to stay away from Bucky, in that state the White Wolf would have easily snapped your neck if he got a hold of you. Because that wasn't Bucky, their packmate, his brother. Something happened to him. 

You darted into the cabin and Steve was right behind you, the both of you racing up the stairs to the bedroom where you both shifted back almost on cue with one another. You grabbed at clothing, starting to tug them on. “We have to go back out there Steve, find them and the others.” 

Steve was doing the same, but he was quick to turn towards you, his eyes still glinting hints of burning yellow while he ground out. 

“You are staying here.” 

You straightened and lifted your chin a bit when you heard Steve's command. The Little Wolf lowered to the ground hearing her Alpha’s command, but you simply weren’t going to accept that without finding out why you couldn't go help your former packmates. “I’m sure as hell not staying here Steve.” You hiss a bit while heading for the door. Steve was quicker though, his hand circling around your upper arm and tightening enough to pull you to a stop and back into the room. “Let me go Steven!” You try pulling out of his hold, but his hold tightened until he backed you onto the bed. 

“I told you once Little One. Stay the fuck here.” His teeth snapped at his words and there was just anger in his features hiding his fear.. Fear that he could have lost you was clouding his mind with jagged memories of Pierce sticking you with that needle and he was that close to losing control and attacking Bucky then. Steve knew that if Bucky hurt you this time in any way, he wouldn't be able to control himself. No one would be safe. 

You protested though, going to push against him while your voice raised in your own anger at trying to be controlled, unable to help the others. “Steve you can't-” 

This time he roared out, the tendons in his neck rigid and his tone going deep and snarling at you in a way you had never seen before and you shrunk back suddenly from him. “As your Alpha I am, if you know what's good for you Y/N, stay in this cabin. That's an order.” 

You hissed at him in anger from between clenched teeth. “You are going to have to make me submit Steve.” 

If he had to, he would. Steve almost lost you once, so close… and that was all before you two even bonded. He was ready to lose himself back then and let the Alpha take over. It was an overwhelming sense of loss that sunk in his chest. Needing to push it away, he closed the gap between you two, pressing you back onto the bed in surprise while his lips claimed your own, searing them heatedly, and the shock made you growl against him, grasping his hair to hold on. 

Steve kept the pressure, ready to make you submit to him completely. Hands grasped at your thighs, still clothed but he didn't care at this second. Wrapping them around his waist as he kissed you senseless, he easily maneuvered you up the bed, growling harshly when you tightened your hold, pulling his hair at the roots when you grabbed onto his head.

It all happened so suddenly that you could only hang while he maneuvered you to where he wanted you, blinking up at him in shock for a second when he pulled away to pant above you. Locked gazes, you arched up to meet him again, pulling at his shirt to rip at it, his hands doing the exact same to you. Shreds of clothing got tossed away as you both withered against one another. You bit into Steve's shoulder when he rutted himself against you. “You will listen Y/N, You have no choice in this.” he snarled out against your neck. 

It was a heated spiral in your limbs, burning in your gut. Echoing in your mind was the Little Wolf snapping and yipping at the Alpha. You pushed against Steve to rub yourself into him, snarling against his ear. “Then do it!” It was animalistic the way he bit at your mark, making you gasp between pleasure and pain while dragging you closer till you felt him everywhere except where you needed him. Slick coated your thighs while his cock dragged against your thigh. “You want to make me listen so badly, here I am.” Another roll of your body and he pulled away to run his hands up your withering body, palms covering your breasts and marking the swells. 

Before you knew it, you were flipped to your belly, Steve snapping your hips up in the air, the curve in your back sharp as you clutched at the bedding to scream your frustrations into the mattress, you were furious at Steve for commanding you to stay, and the way your body betrayed you. You could break it, but you didn't want to defy him. You had spent a lifetime going against your instincts protecting yourself, now it was time to trust for once. Steve was different, it was because he loved you to keep you safe, not use you. 

He growled above you and you pressed back against him, feeling his hands wrap tightly around your hips and rock you back into position. “I couldn't live with myself if anything happened to you.” 

You clenched at his words, lifting your head enough to speak without being muffled in the bedding. “Fine Steve, I'm not going anywhere.” You felt yourself finally give into him, not because you couldn't break that bond, but you didn't want to. It ached too much to defy him when it meant so much to him even though it infuriated you to do so. 

His hand circled to dip between your thighs, teasing between your folds as he bit your shoulder, holding you still with his other hand while thrusting his cock into your weeping entrance and spreading you open in a sharp sting that made you cry out sharply. His thrusts were quick  and dominating, leaving you withering in his hold while fingers strummed your clit and his chest crushed against your back. Grunting growls and slapping skin filled the room, words becoming meaningless between you two. 

It was such a primal moment, one complete with trust as neither of you could do anything but seek connection and pleasure from one another. You felt the rush of your orgasm wash over you, crying Steves name with tears in your eyes. 

Steve wasn't ready to slow down, feeling you break apart under him just made him go faster, his hand covered in your arousal flushed up your body to fondle your breast, pulling at your nipple and squeezing while he pulled you both up to your knees. It just solidified for him that he needed you, just like this all for him. You arched before him, one hand reaching behind you to grasp the back of his neck, and the other covering his hand clasped over your chest. He still rutted into you, biting your shoulder enough to keep you still while he pounded himself into you. 

For You, you had never felt him so entangled in you, holding you to him so that not only did you feel him physically, but mentally. Everything he felt, feared, and needed was just an overflow of information in your bond, and it took such complete control that rational thought was impossible. All you could respond to was the way he dragged out your moans and cries, his grunts into your skin as he slapped against your backside, and punched the air from your lungs when your next orgasm turned the edges of your vision black. 

“Steve, I can't…” You begged and he groaned against your mark, his tongue sweeping over the sting of the bite he left, sure you were scented with him. 

“You can Little One, I have you.” He assured you as his hard thrusts turned into heavy drags through your sensitive walls that were clenching and trying to hang onto him while he so easily pushed through you to bury to the hilt. 

You pushed back into him when he ground into you, the two of you falling back so you were sprawled against his chest, his arm latching over your chest to keep you in place while his feet planted against the bed. Able to leverage himself into filling you so complete, your nails dug into his forearm stretched across you and tears streamed down your face. Your body felt wrung out, not able to give him that last one he wanted. 

There was no denying in this moment no matter what way Steve took you, he was in control of you, and you were just able to hold on. 

You felt his knot swell, stretching inside of you while he filled you with himself, warm against your aching channel, your body milked him, claiming every burst Steve gave with a growl of your own till it all stopped. Underneath you he calmed, his arm still heavy across your chest, but he was still except for heavy dragging breaths against your neck and your own pants as your head tipped back into his shoulder, staring upwards. 

“I promise, I won't leave.” 

“Good Girl.” He muttered, still hints of dominating presence in his tone, but it wasn't fear now, but acceptance. Steve managed to roll you onto the bed and his hands rubbed at your side to lull you into closing your eyes to relax in the aftermath. When he pulled out, you whimpered into the pillows, clenching your fingers into the fabric. 

“Just rest… I will be back soon.” He nipped at your neck, with that he moved off the bed to grab at his clothing and get dressed while you curled up on the mattress. Your body was tired and is fogging your mind trying to pull you into sleep. The last thing you felt was the scrape of his beard against your cheek as he kissed your temple and left you, his boots heavy thuds down the stairs and the slam of the front door left you alone in the bedroom, slipping finally into a fitful sleep. 

The Little Wolf whined loudly after a while, leaving it echoing through your body, distressed that the Alpha was going out on his own, leaving you locked here and had been angry at your defiance. It also effectively woke you back up after a quick nap. 

He will be okay. You assured her as you stretched back to a stand and went down the stairs to look out the window, watching for Steve to come back. He must be following Bucky’s trail. What happened to them? 

<Hydra… Didn’t you see the collar around Bucky's neck? He's being controlled. If he's being controlled Steve isn't safe going after him alone.> The Little Wolf paced back and forth, anxious with wanting to obey her Alphas command and going to help her Mate in his hunt. 

Your fingers curled around the front doors handle a moment, the internal battle making your throat close and eyes well up as you turn away from the door. You would respect your Mates order, as much as it left you scared to do so. 

Steve jogged in the forest following Bucky’s scent, quickly picking up the other members of his team as they all met back up at some point. There were also many other scents where other Wolves had passed through, probably in their bid to get away from his missing packmates. Steve pulled out his phone, dialing Natasha as he came stumbling out to a dirt road, and that's where the trail ended. Fresh tire wheels showing where a heavy vehicle sped off. 

The ringing of the phone was soon cut with Natasha's voice. “Steve? What’s wrong, why are you calling so late?” 

“Nat are you near Y/N’s old pack?” He questioned as he leaned down to look at the tire marks, looking for anything distinct to go on, but he was quick to straighten back up. They were long gone, with Caine he suspected. Just like the other attacks Steve had heard about. For some reason they were taking the packs Alphas. 

“Not too far off, why? Where are You and Y/N?” Natasha asked then and Steve confirmed where they were. “I will be right there.” 

“Just come right in, Bucky and everyone just hit this area, took off with Caine.” 

“Are you guys okay?” Her first concern being for you and Steve. 

“Were fine, Y/N is back at the cabin we were staying at and I followed Bucky’s trail to where it ended. They must be holed up somewhere nearby.” 

After hanging up, Steve took one last look around the area, and then headed back towards the compound. It would be a bit until Natasha showed up, and he knew he would have to talk to you now that his temper had calmed somewhat. 

<It was the best choice Steve, we don’t know what Bucky would have done to her if he got a hold of her.> 

That wasn't Bucky… or Clint, Wanda, Pietro… Steve thought, and the Alpha growled softly in agreement. They did something to them, controlling them. 

<The collars, they are stronger than the one Pierce used on Bucky before. You know what this is like… you have seen it before.>

Steve’s chest tightened, knowing exactly what the Alpha was talking about. Back in his days working with Howling Commandos they ran into a similar instance before. A group of renegade wolves making their way across Europe destroying not just other shifters, but humans as well in the most vicious way. They managed to disband most of them. 

The one that got away, he was the only one to break the control Hydra had on him. Steve recalled. 

<And you know where he returned to… maybe it's time we follow up on that lead and see if he is still alive.> 

It was something to consider Steve thought to himself as he made his way back to the cabin, easing the door open to the quiet of the cabin. The Alpha quieted in his mind as Steve let his senses open, feeling for you. He was quick to hear you shifting in the bed upstairs, rolling to your side and not actually getting any rest. An outward exhale of relief you were still safe escaped Steve as he started up the stairs. 

You heard Steve come into the house and pushed to sit up when he appeared in the doorway, his eyes roving you up and down, making you feel a bit small after the earlier altercation. Your legs curled up under you at the edge of the mattress, your hands folding into your lap as your head tipped, a typical submissive pose for either your mate of Alpha. “Oh Little One…” Steve started as he came into the bedroom, moving to kneel before you on the floor, his hands sliding along your folded knees and easing up along your bare thighs. “I only did it because I had to.” 

Your eyes lifted and a frown fluttered across your face. 

“Had to? Steve I’m your mate and partner, you can't just keep me safe all the time.” 

A soft growl rose up as he pressed his mouth to your knee, his eyes lifting with a tint of yellow in them, the Alpha so close to the surface while discussing your safety. “Can’t I? As your mate and Alpha, it's taking everything in me now not to bring you back home.” Your hands reached to cup his face, scraping slightly through his beard and spreading against his cheeks. A swipe of your thumb under his tired looking eyes. 

“You know I wouldn’t go Steve.” You wrinkled your nose at him slightly and he shifted to nip the top of your thighs, you moved to unfold your legs and let them drape off the edge of the bed, your foot rubbing against Steve's ribs gently. “I can’t just leave them.” 

“Still doesn’t change how I have the drive to keep you safe.” Another inhale against your thigh, light bite as Steve tasted you with a press of his tongue. “All I could think of is how I almost lost you with Pierce. Bucky is not Pierce, he's strong, more efficient, and dangerous because he’s being controlled.” 

Your knees pressed against his sides and your hold tightened on his jawline to lift him from your lap so he would look at you. “And what about you Alpha? What do you think it does to me when you rush off into danger and I can't be there with you?” You felt Steve's fingers dig slightly into your hips while your words sunk in, the yellow tinge backing away as his Alpha retreated and the crystal blue sharpened. You knew it would pain Steve to think that he had caused you any distress. The Little Wolf whined, her ears flattening while seeing all this being processed. 

Steve could feel the Alpha try to keep calm, respect the bond by waiting to be invited before going to his mate. Steve could imagine what you would feel being told to stay while he went into a dangerous situation. 

He knew what it did to him, the bile of fear raising up in his throat once more, it wasn't something he was familiar with. Fear didn't live in Steve’s body, not till he had you, then suddenly he really did have something to fear, losing you for good. That all was sunk down deep into him from the first time, maybe he had a problem he never knew he had. That worried him to be so irrational, he couldn't let it control him, because it would just end up pushing you away. 

Taking a dragging breath, he pushed up from where he was kneeling on the floor and sat next to you on the bed, you twisted to face him and crawl onto his lap till you were straddled, your arms around his neck, knowing that you had just ripped off a bandaid of sorts. “I’m sorry Little One, I put your safety first in my mind and nothing else. It will end up happening again.” 

Your forehead tipped to lean against his, sighing softly as your fingers trailed down the back of his neck and back up. 

“Steve, I'm not just your mate, I'm your partner. Where you go, I go to. You can't always keep me out of the way of what you deem dangerous.”

The silence stretched between you two, unable to give each other what the other wanted entirely here.

[trashmenofmarvel]

Branded - Chapter 57 (Final)

Pairing: Demon!Bucky Barnes x Reader

Summary: You find your relic.

(This is a fan AU of Falling’s Just Another Way to Fly by araniaart​ . Please check out this incredible series for all of your demon Bucky needs.)

AO3

You’d only been to the ancient Sanctum a few times, with strict access to the library for your studies and nowhere else, and normally you would be excited to visit the unofficial headquarters of the Mystic Arts.

But now, as you followed Wong to the room of portals that would lead to the Nepal sanctum, your stomach twisted and your heart raced. You couldn’t even enjoy the fact this was where Strange had gone on his near-disastrous pilgrimage. The idea of the Ancient One kicking him out on his ass was an entertaining one, though you were still glad she eventually trained him. As irritated as you were about a lot of things regarding the former surgeon, he and Wong both had taught you nearly everything you knew.

Plus, you’d seen the scars on his hands. As arrogant and egotistical as he appeared, Strange had suffered to get where he was. Not unlike yourself. Not unlike Bucky.

The Orb of Agamotto hung within the circular room where other sorcerers consulted with it, verifying that the magical Earthly shields were still intact. Past them were three doors leading to the other sanctums, including the one in Kathmandu.

You and Bucky followed Wong through, the familiar feeling of displacement shifting your stomach and throwing you off balance for a moment. Neither Wong nor Bucky were as unsteady as you were. It had been something you were embarrassed about, but according to Strange during one of your lessons, it simply meant you were more sensitive to spatial displacement.

As Wong led you both through the ancient stone hallways, past the commons where other sorcerers were in training, doubt crept along your nerves. Someday, possibly sooner than you were prepared, all of these people were going to follow you. Look to you for guidance, for teaching. For protection.

How were you supposed to become the next Ancient One if you couldn’t even walk through a portal without getting dizzy?

This wasn’t going to work. The idea was crazy enough to begin with. The Ancient One had to be wrong. You were going to step into her office and nothing would happen. You would make a fool of yourself; you weren’t any more talented or skilled than any other sorcerer. Just half a year ago, you’d had no idea demons and magic were even real.

And now, you were expected to carry on the mantle as one of the most powerful sorcerers on Earth? How was that even possible? How could you ever be worthy enough to—

Wong opened a door using a complicated series of hand gestures, and as soon as you stepped through, your panicked mind fell silent. Energy thrummed along your skin, setting the hairs upright.

“Here it is.”

Wong’s announcement was unnecessary; you would know this place in your dreams, even though you had never been.

It was a simple room with a single large, circular window pointed towards the mountains over the city. Potted plants perched on most available surfaces that weren’t covered with books, scrolls, and odd knickknacks.

There was only a single writing desk pushed to the side, humble and unobtrusive. The rest of the room was empty space with a single well-worn green rug in the middle. But the plants made everything seem alive and verdant. It felt very much like a place the Ancient One would spend her time. It was a reflection of her, in a way. Quiet, but hidden with secret truths.

“Take a look around,” Wong said, but you were already moving. Slowly and with intense focus, you circled the room, reaching out and feeling, not with your hands but with your mind.

Odd and powerful energy pervaded the room, muted by spells but still apparent to you. They were coming from the artifacts that were laid out, seemingly casually, on the shelves and desks.

Most of them seemed as plain and unimportant as the room itself. A cracked vase with the lip stained red. A golden helmet that was varnished and faded, but two glittering horns jutted from the temples. A knobby staff with a smooth, grey stone fixed at one end, as modest as any walking stick except for the melodic hum that emanated from the stone. You had a feeling neither Wong nor Bucky could hear it.

But despite all the weird, wonderful oddities in your reach, you were drawn elsewhere. You approached one corner of the room where lay a pile of old scrolls and their cloth wrappings, and moved them aside with care to reveal what was hidden underneath.

It was a sword hilt. Just the hilt. There was no blade, not even a piece of broken metal. The metal was dulled with time and flaked with rust, the pommel grey and dirty.

You reached out and hesitated. Fingertips inches away, something stopped you. The knowledge that once you took hold of the relic, everything would change.

You glanced over your shoulder at Bucky.

He was watching you with close attention, as was Wong, but when he caught your eye he gave a small smile of encouragement. He supported you, even though he had to know what this meant, or at least had a good idea of it.

Not every sorcerer found their relic within the Ancient One’s study.

Comfort and warmth, so strong it could only be described as love, flooded across the bond and washed away your fears. You returned his smile, even if it was shaky, and you held on to that feeling as you turned back to the hilt.

You closed the distance, wrapped your fingers around the relic, and lifted it.

It was surprisingly heavy; that was your only observation before it began. The hilt thrummed in your palm, vibrating so fast you nearly dropped it.

The rust flaked away from the metal, leaving it polished and silver. The grey pommel was shaken of its dirt, and you realized it was white bone, the metal wrapping around it to form the grip and crossguard.

The thrumming didn’t stop, but you couldn’t let go even if you wanted to. Your fingers seized around the metal, energy teeming up your hand and arm. When it reached your right shoulder, all the way up to your pentagram, the sigil burned in a way it hadn’t done since the ritual.

Bucky must have sensed your panic because he rushed forward, but you backed away from him fast, instinct screaming at you to put a safe distance between you now.

It was a good thing you had; the energy from your sigil exploded down your arm, through your hand, and into the hilt. A burst of red light shot outward, forcing you to turn away from the blinding beam.

When the light dimmed and you could see again, blinking away the after images, you stared at the sword. That’s what it was now. A glowing red blade, seemingly made entirely of light. The energy that came from it was purely of the demon realm, scorching and sulfuric.

“What…” You choked the words past your dry throat. “What is this?”

There were only a handful of times you’d ever seen Wong shocked. So, that was three powerful sorcerers you’d rendered speechless in the span of a day.

“The blade of Hell, or so it is spoken. None in the history of the order had been able to unlock its powers, rendering it anything more than a broken hilt.” He leveled you with a somber stare. “It is called Daemonio Vexatur. Which means—“

“—to become a demon.”

Wong raised a brow.

“Rough translation, but yes.”

“So, it’s a demon sword?” asked Bucky, eyeing the glowing blade. He was understandably wary, and honestly, was accepting what was happening better than you were. You were still stuck on the fact that you were holding a glowing-freaking-sword in your hand.

“Yes. And no,” Wong said in traditional teaching-fashion. “A demon cannot wield it, but it takes demonic energy to power.”

“Oh. So that’s why my sigil and my entire arm feel like they’re on fire.”

Bucky’s mouth opened and he took a step forward, protectiveness sizzling along the bond, and you gave him a hurried smile.

“Kidding. Sort of.” You smiled wider through your clenched teeth. “It is really uncomfortable.”

Bucky’s dark look told you he didn’t believe you, and with what you imagined was coming from your end of the bond, you didn’t blame him. Holding the sword was like holding on to a live wire that was also burning. There was a molten jolt connecting the hilt to your sigil, and you were just hoping to not get incinerated in the process.

And just like that, the connection was gone, and the relief of your arm no longer being on fire was dimmed by the disappointment as the sword was extinguished, leaving nothing more than a gleaming hilt.

“What happened?” You frowned, eyeing the relic as if searching for an on switch.

“It will take time and training to effectively control your relic.”

“How long?” You looked up when Wong didn’t answer immediately, catching the serious dent in his brow.

“It’s hard to say. No one in living memory has wielded the blade, and it was believed no one ever would.”

Wong gave a heavy sigh.

“So of course, you would be the one to wield it.”

You returned your gaze to the relic and turned over the hilt in your hand, admiring the metal and bone. You wondered if the bone was from a demon, a safe bet considering.

“So.” You carefully put down the hilt and turned to give Bucky your best serious face. “How does it feel to have a wizard girlfriend with a lightsaber?”

Wong rolled his eyes. He knew you well enough by now to know what you were doing, but he didn’t comment on your attempts to over your fear with humor. He muttered something about reporting to Strange as he left the office.

But Bucky…

Worry and fondness conflicted across the bond, struggling to coexist. He stepped forward, the green cloth tunic he’d found in one of the drawers of your room stretched unfairly tight across his chest. It was the largest he could find in a hurry, and it was nearly enough to distract you from your own anxieties.

“I think…” Bucky wrapped his arm around you, drawing you into an embrace that you melted into easily. “That I’m scared for you. I’m confused as hell what this means, and I’m guessing this isn’t going to make your life any easier or less complicated. But… I’m also proud of you.”

You could sense the pride easily, but Bucky was trying to bury the fear that was close to terror. He truly was scared of what this meant. You were too, and the Ancient One’s words weighed heavily on your shoulders.

There was a questioning feeling tugging at your thoughts, and you remembered too late that Bucky could sense the same anxiety, even if he didn’t have all the details. So you smoothed out your tumultuous thoughts and covered them the best way you knew how.

“You say that to all the wizard girlfriends.”

“You’re deflecting.”

“That is what swords do.”

Bucky pulled back far enough to stare at you with narrowed eyes, but when he touched his horns to yours it was with such gentleness that you nearly forgot to breathe. But breathe you did, drinking in his familiar, soothing scent and allowed the tension to drain from your muscle.

“We should head back.” Bucky said after a moment of intimate, comfortable silence in which you finally relaxed. “Got a bastard to catch.”

You reluctantly let go first, knowing he was right and you couldn’t stay here forever. Turning toward the sword hilt, you reached for it and paused. You took a small detour and picked up an old, ratty cloth nearby and carefully wrapped the relic within. Until you had a better grasp of how to wield the sword, it was probably a wiser idea to not handle it directly. You had no idea if it was sentient like Strange’s cloak, and it would be better not to accidentally set it off. Slicing off your own leg was a poor way to convince anyone that you were the next Ancient One.

On your journey back down the halls toward the portal door, Bucky said, “So… what are you going to name it?”

He smiled at your sideways glance.

“All cool swords get a name. It’s kind of a universal rule.”

Maybe you didn’t know Bucky as well as you thought you did, because you had no idea he was such a damn nerd.

“Yeah? You’ll have to bestow all your sword knowledge on me.”

“Is that a sexual innuendo?”

“It is now.”

Bucky’s smile died on his lips when you were no longer at his side. He paused and looked back where you had stopped at the threshold to the portal room.

“What if I can’t do this?” The doorway before you was no longer just a doorway. It was an insurmountable hurdle, and your feet wouldn’t budge from the floor. “What if I fail?”

Bucky approached slow and steady, his expression gentle and fond.

“You won’t. You’re too stubborn to fail.” A warm hand softly cupped your cheek, his human one, and you leaned into it. He laughed silently at your predictable need to be touched, but his expression faded into something more serious. “But on the very slim chance you do, then you get back up and you start again. Just as you always have.”

Your stomach fell. Bucky couldn’t understand what failure meant in your case. You didn’t even know what it meant, but you could guess. If you failed to be the Ancient One everyone needed… then there might not be any second chances.

Bucky wrapped you in his arms one more time, undoubtedly sensing his words of encouragement hadn’t hit as effectively as he’d wanted.

“Whatever this means, you finding that relic… Whatever happens when we find Zemo...” Bucky’s voice was deep in his chest, a rumbling sound that never failed to comfort you. “I’ll be here.”

You returned his embrace, gripping him tightly as you pressed your cheek against his chest.

“I know.”

And you did, too. Bucky would be there for you. Not because he was compelled to be, and not out of a sense of duty or guilt to protect you. He would be by your side by choice.

And that fact made Zemo’s escape, the Ancient One’s words, and your own self-doubt a little easier to bear. Because you and Bucky would weather it.

Together.

“When wounds are healed by love, the scars are beautiful.” –David Bowles

[details-later]

Divine

  Highschool AU: Vincent Sinclair X Reader

Vincent had always seen you around school, with your friends laughing about the stories you tell about other kids in the school. He always had this pull towards you, however with the issues he faced due to his scars he chose to observe you from afar. Taking in your beauty and committing it to memory so he could try and recreate it on paper. 

So when he saw you standing in your families garage piecing together a mosaic conglomeration of old beer and wine bottles held together with thick wire to create a stained glass effect out of waste, He knew he needed to talk to you. Vincent stood for a minute or two staring, waiting, debating what to say or to just walk. Finally you made that decision for him, quickly walking to him with that beautiful smile that he loves so much. He almost couldn't pay attention to the words coming out of your mouth out of shock. “ Hey, Vincent right? you're Bo and Lester's brother?” you spoke fast as if the words were running a marathon to leave your mouth. Vincent's voice, having rarely been used, croaked out a small whimper of a “yes.” his gaze quickly casted down to stare at his boot clad feet. 

Craning your head to fall into his line of vision your smile grew. “Of course I knew it, All of you Sinclair brothers are handsome.” you spoke with such a genuine tone. His face flushed so bright that it trickled down on his neck for you to see even with his mask on. “T-thank you.” He quickly stuttered out trying to not seem rude. “Well what are you doing here Vinny.” Your bright voice sung. When he heard the sweet nickname fall from your lips like honey he wished he could just kiss you to express the adoration and love he felt for you. He knew, however it would be crazy to blurt out his confession of love and kiss you. Especially with this being your first conversation. Instead he looked at you lifting his head to stare into your eyes. “I was walking around town and was on my way back home.” He said without thinking. Quickly regretting saying it once he saw your face fall. 

“Oh well you should be getting home then.” Your voice quiet and reserve as you said it. He could tell by your arms coming up to wrap around your body you were embarrassed, he could only hope it was because you wished to continue talking. “I actually uh did want to ask you something.” Vincent said his head tilting down slightly again. You're face lit up when you heard him. “Yes, what is it?” you were quick to ask. “Uhm i see that you're making a sculpture and i wanted to know if you maybe want to hang out and sculpt... together.” He spoke so shyly you almost didn't understand what he said. “I would love to. I'm currently working on a piece for the church its going to be a Mosaic of Mary.” His eyes snapped to yours and while you couldn't actually see his face you knew he was smiling. “Ok cool want to meet up on Thursday. I can show you some of my art.” He said with more confidence then you've ever seen him have. “Yeah totally its a date.” when you said those words Vincent could hear his heart pounding. “Yeah definitely a date.” You both continued to look at each other with such adoration and happiness. It seemed as if it was only you two in the world.

You both got shaken out of your trance by a loud call out to Vincent from down the road. “Hey candlehead if you don't come now I'm not helping you later with moving your weird sculptures.” Bo called out in annoyance. Vincent turned his broad body towards his twin “One minute Bo.” Vincent quickly called back. Turning back to you he smiled. “Uh sorry about that but I've got to go before he comes over here.” having met the infamous Bo in passing before you quickly understood. “Ok well ill see you Thursday.” You said with a smile. “Yeah ill see you Thursday.” He said to you quieter almost in sadness having to leave you. “ Well By-.” Vincent tried to say before you pulled his face to your level and kissed the waxy lips of his mask. “Bye Vincent ill see you Thursday.” You said with a blush quickly over taking your features as you turned to walk away. Believing you had misread the situation. Recovering fast Vincent grabbed your wrist and pulled you back. He pulled his mask to just barely show his lips and kissed you. “I’ll see you Thursday.” he said once you parted. He turned away from you after adjusting his mask and walked over to his twin that was shocked with what he had witnessed. 

[passable-talent]

VADER X GN!READER

cryst am I writing a fic? what is that. who does that anymore akfkvjsb

dedicated to @sunsetkenobi bc she deserves it and I probably wouldn’t be writing this otherwise

okay so if you’ve seen how to train your dragon 2, this is that one scene. ya you know the one. I decided I wanted to break my own heart and here I am to do that so. ergo I do not own the song nor the original concept nor httyd akckcja

also I find writing vader exceedingly difficult thank u send tweet

my apologies for reappearing just to drop a mediocre fic

The stormtroopers took your saber when they captured you.

You had tears in your eyes as they ripped the blade from your grip, but you couldn’t do much about it, with force blockers around your wrists. You just had to watch as they carried away the last remaining piece of your husband.

You hadn’t seen Anakin since he left for Mustafar, intent on ending the Clone Wars. The last time you’d seen Obi-Wan, he told you that Anakin had been killed there, when a sith named Darth Vader struck him down.

Ever since, you’ve been hiding out. Hoping to escape the Jedi hunter who killed your husband. He was ruthless, and powerful, but you did your best to stay among the crowds, unseen, unnoticed.

Unnoticed was a word for it- you weren’t in Jedi robes, and you no longer had your saber. Being dragged through the bowels of an empire ship, stormtroopers flanking you on all sides, you looked like any other prisoner.

You got a cell far, far in the corners of the ship, like they were trying to bury you away. You took the steps down and into the cell and stood amongst it as the troopers left.

Your saber... who knows what they’d do with it. You’d made it with a piece of metal that Anakin had given you, a piece of scrap he’d found on one of his Padawan journeys with Obi-Wan. Nothing else... you had nothing else. You had nothing else of him. And now, your saber was gone, too.

So, your final few hours. You were caught as a Jedi, labeled a traitor to the empire. You were in the ship of Darth Vader, Jedi hunter. You were facing execution now, you knew it. You’d been caught.

So there was no need to hide anymore.

The cell was cold, but it wasn’t too bad. Your fingers would get chilly after a while, but for now, it was a good enough place to meditate. You hadn’t been able to take that risk in so long.

You sat down in the center of the cell, opening yourself to the force for the first time in years.

It was painful, at first. You felt great grief, all around you, surrounding you. It was familiar, too familiar, it brought you right back to the moment that Obi-Wan told you Anakin was dead.

But this was different.

It was a universal grief, one much bigger than one man. It was like a mourning of the force itself, mourning her lost Jedi, mourning each of the thousands of them.

You closed your eyes, feeling like you were leaving the cold cell, becoming bigger than it. You reached out to the ship, to the troopers who wouldn’t know the difference, the millions of miles of wiring working through the cruiser. You felt the metal, the heat, the drone-like worksmanship from the pilots and the sanitation crew.

And then you felt the anger. Rage, the likes of which you hadn’t felt in quite a while. It startled you, tossing you out of your meditation. You opened your eyes and fell backwards, catching yourself with your palms on the floor. And then the door opened.

You jumped to your feet, staring up at the imposing figure in the doorway. A black cape, a saber at his waist, and a menacing helmet.

He took a step into the room, and you took a step back. The door closed behind him.

“(Y/N) (L/N), Jedi scum,” Vader said, his voice deep and scratchy, even through the vocoder of his helmet.

“Lord Vader,” you answered, pressing your back against the wall. There was something to the area around him, the force felt so... unsettled. It was like he both channeled and reflected it, pulling it toward him and pushing it away. Like he was fighting it.

And yet... there was something familiar about him. Your gaze slipped back to his saber, which seemed so oddly familiar. His presence, as well. It made something in your mind ring, as though your own body felt him familiar, too.

How could that be?

“Keep your eyes from my saber,” Vader growled after a few moments of silence, “you won’t be taking it. You cannot escape.”

“I’m not thinking of taking it,” you assured him, hoping not to anger him. “It just... it reminds me of my husband’s saber.”

“Husband?” Vader echoed, his body unmoving. You wished he could at least take off the helmet so you could see his facial expression. “Jedi aren’t meant to marry.”

“I know,” you breathed out, trying to keep eye contact with the disturbingly familiar man, even through his helmet. “But I did.”

There was a moment in which the only thing you could hear was the humming of the ship. And then he turned, his cape spinning behind him, and made his way to the door.

Your husband- you would marry him again, if you could. He was the love of your life, and that was never going to change.

Your wedding, the most beautiful day of your life. Padme’s villa on Naboo, a gorgeous lakeside view, a beautiful ceremony, even if the both of you were still tainted with your padawan hairstyles. But then, later that night, sitting around a fire with a song you would go on to sing together every night you had to yourselves amidst the war. A song you’d develop a dance to, a song you could still hear in his voice, if you listened hard enough.

As Vader approached the door and began punching in a code, you turned your head to the side, closing your eyes.

“I’ll swim and sail on savage seas,” you began, whispering it under your voice, barely even melodic. You hadn’t intended for Vader to even hear you.

“With ne’er a fear of drowning, and gladly ride the waves of life, if you would marry me.” You glanced back up, seeing Vader frozen at the door. When you didn’t continue, he turned his head back toward you with the slowest movement.

“No scorching sun, nor freezing cold, will stop me on my journey...” Your nerves got the best of you and you trailed away, no longer having the bravery to continue, the strength. You couldn’t cry in front of Darth Vader.

“...if you will promise me your heart...” came that rasping voice, and you snapped your head up. A shuddering breath escaped the vocoder of his helmet as he lifted his hands to its sides, lifting it from his head.

He turned his gaze to you, and your heart pounded harder with every feature you recognized. His face was scarred over from burns, his neck crossed on each side of his throat with thin surgery scars. His eyes were yellow and red, but that much was expected from Darth Vader. His hairline was mottled with scars where the scalp hadn’t healed enough to grow hair, and the rest was unkept, but still it was a familiar gold.

“And love me for eternity...”

Your eyes widened and your hands lifted up, reaching forward to his face, tears already welling in your eyes. Anakin, Anakin was alive, he’s right here. Your husband is alive. You cupped his face, rubbing your thumbs over his cheekbones. His voice was different, rougher, deeper, but still you heard him. His eyes closed slowly, his face lowering into your palms.

“My dearest one, my darling dear, your mighty words astound me...” You took a deep breath to steady your voice, overwhelmed with relief, emotion, surprise. “But I've no need for mighty deeds when I feel your arms around me.”

Anakin’s eyes opened, and they were blue, that blue you hadn’t seen in so long, that blue you adored. A low smile pulled at his lips, one you never thought you’d see again, and he took his arms around your waist. There was a laugh to his voice as he sang.

“But I would bring you rings of gold, I'd even sing you poetry-“ You took slow steps, the cell smaller than your usual dance space, but you made do. His hands spread along your lower back, yours on his shoulders.

“And I would keep you from all harm, if you would stay beside me!”

You pulled away, taking his hand, stepping into the familiar pattern. He didn’t step as nimbly as he did when you’d last seen him, but still he tried.

“I have no use for rings of gold,” you sang, falling into the familiar patterns, his smile, the way he looked at you, “I care not for your poetry, I only want your hand to hold-“ Finally his smile brightened to what you remembered, and you took his leather-covered hand between both of yours as you sang your last line, your voice no longer timid, now loud and happy.

“I only want you near me.”

You joined his voice, finally twirling in the circles you never thought you’d have again, holding the man you thought you’d lost.

“To love and kiss, to sweetly hold, for the dancing and the dreaming-“ His leather glove, after all this time, hadn’t changed. Did he wear the same one?

“Through all life's sorrows and delights, I'll keep your laugh inside me.” His voice wasn’t exactly the way it’d been when you’d seen him last, but still, it blended perfectly with yours. Six years... it had been six years.

“I'll swim and sail on savage seas, with ne’er a fear of drowning,” You took a spin, like walking on air. He stepped around you, never letting go of your hand.

“I'd gladly ride the waves of life, if you will marry me!” With the last word, he lifted you up by the waist, pulling you against his body, your knees only just on either side of his hips. Mostly, he held you up on his own, your forehead pressed to his. You’d missed that smile so much.

Your husband is alive. Anakin Skywalker is alive. You couldn’t help your breathy laugh as you settled your weight against his chest, cupping his cheeks.

“Oh, Anakin...” you breathed, closing your eyes, and for one blissful moment, all was perfect.

He dropped you.

You looked up, startled, into yellow eyes. His expression was blank, his glaze flitting over you. He turned with a whip of the cape that forced you to step back, and before you could say a word, he clipped the helmet back over his head.

He only gave you one more look before he disappeared out the door, shutting it behind him.

And now the cell felt so much colder.

-🦌 Roe

[only-lurkin-dont-mind-me]

The Path of Loyalty is Paved in Blood

While I enjoy reading Mostly fluff pieces, it seems as though whenever I write it always ends up... a little angsty (mostly with a happy end though, I’m not heartless)

@chiliiscereal

TW: Blood. Injury. Character death(s)

The night had been cold when you first met them, you remembered it well. You were still so young, so were they. You had been wandering the empty park in the later hours of the night, wandering aimlessly until you heard other children's laughter. Short stubby legs racing to find where the noises were coming from, the chattering grew louder as you made your way to a single basketball court. 

As you looked past the shrubbery dotting the edges of the court, you saw them, four brothers smiling and laughing in delight as they passed the ball around in what seemed to be a game of catch. You were too young to even think of how they looked different from you. Instead, you stood in place, wondering if you could join in their game. 

When the smallest of the group lost his aim and ended up throwing the ball into the same bushes that hid you, you took it as your cue.

"Mikey!" one of them laughed gleefully, "I'm over here; you gotta throw it to me!" 

"I'm doing my best Leo, catch better!" the other replied in turn as you grabbed the ball. Slowly you walked to the edge of the chalk outlined court, ball in hand, looking around nervously. You could hear them walking towards you. You only looked up when the biggest of the group spoke to you with a cheerful tone as you bounced the ball towards him.

"Nice find, I thought we lost it that time." Despite being the largest out of his brothers, he was smaller than you with a big grin. You couldn't help but smile back; yeah, they seemed like fun. 

Taking another step forward, you finally found your voice, "Can I play too?" You asked with a bright smile, one that was matched by the kid that had two red stripes by his eyes. 

He was quick to move to your side and grab your arm, pulling you along while exclaiming loudly, "New friend's on my team!"

"What?!"

"No fair!"

"NO TAKE-BACKS!" 

The darkened smoke-filled skies hid the sun from sight. You watched your heavy breaths rise into a cold mist, glowering at the looming threat that towered over you. You thought of that moment, of each and every moment you had cherished with this found family of yours.

The common tradition that came with sleeping over in the lair, you and Mikey would go straight to the kitchen, baking tools in your grasp as you both set about designing something that would be amazing. The music had been loud as you both danced around each other, tossing stencils back and forth, drawing out ideas for cake designs. Taking turns kicking the others out each time one of the brothers tried to infiltrate and sneak off with the tasty decorative pieces. "You know-" Mikey had spoken in an easy tone as you both worked on the final touches of the nights' creation. "-it really is fun getting to do this stuff with you, you're my favorite crafting buddy!" He would say while throwing an arm around your shoulders, beaming smile and all.

As the cold air of the storm seeped around you, fighting off the burning heat from the creature, you snarled at the beast above you, fist clenched, widening your stance, placing yourself directly between it and your family that lay in a bloodied and far too silent heap just behind you.

Another late night with Donnie, hiding out in the lab trying to be as quiet as possible while watching old horror movies. You could never be scared of them whenever watching them with the purple-clad turtle. "See? See?! right there, it's a big ass wire holding the doll up can you believe it!" You had jumped on him, covering his mouth to stop the roaring laughter from waking up everyone else in the lair. In the same fashion, he had covered your mouth to help you bite back the same laughter. shoving your hands away to keep his commentary up, "The blood looks like it's just water mixed with ketchup!" He had wheezed out. Throwing popcorn and chips at each other to try and silence each other in the strangest attempted stealthy food fight as the ridiculous horror movie played on. 

You could feel the ache in your bones as the rain and ash pelted your skin, your muscles wanting nothing more than to give out. You knew that the only thing keeping you going was adrenalin and a deep-rooted instinct to guard and stand by your family. As the blood dripped from your wounds down your person into a puddle on the ground, you planted yourself in place. Standing firm and unyielding.

Evenings with Raph, sitting with him on the floor of his room, holding his trembling hands together as he held a paper flower in his palms. 'The Beauty of Origami' laid open on the ground next to you both, Raph had asked you to go over the instructions and make the simple lotus flower first so he could see the steps in person. As he stared at it now it seemed so small and fragile in his larger hands. "You can do this, Raph. Paper is easy, it takes a light touch and that's it. Even if you mess up it's alright. It won't hurt anything if you tear a piece or two, we'll just try again." He finally looked to you, absolute trust in his eyes as he nodded. Gingerly placing your flower down in front of him, Raph took the piece of colorful paper from you, and he began to craft. 

You felt every emotion at once rising from within you, faithful love for your family, Warmth from all of the small moments you held close to your heart with them. You could physically feel your spirit rise in a violent force to defend them, this wasn't just a group of brothers. This was yours, your family. 

"Hurry up, if you don't get in here already the dynamic duo is going to be a dynamic uno. I will leave you behind if Raph finds you in the kitchen this late!" Leo whisper yelled as he stood halfway through the portal that leads to who knows where. You could only throw the bag of chips at him as you rushed his way, food, and drinks in tote. As a heavy set of footsteps slowly sounded through the hallway you saw Leo's eyes widen, He lunged forward, wrapping an arm around your torso, and pulled you through the portal with a laugh. As the world brightened once again to reveal a quiet cliffside, you could hear the water below. "Come on bestie, help me set everything up." So it would go, snacks, drinks, a blanket to lay on, and an endless sky of start to watch, fake constellations to make up and give stories too.

The beast let out a crashing roar as it stomped the ash-covered ground in front of you. You could feel the force of what felt like many in your words as you bellowed a wordless, hateful cry. You could feel tears rushing down your face now. Still, you remained in place. "This is my family! You will not touch them!" Thunder booming as your voice sounded. The storm only growing as though it was lashing out in your own emotional state.

Your ferocity faltered as you felt a hand reach out to rest against your ankle. You risked a glance behind you, looking down to see that it was Leo, you could see his bloodied mouth trying to move, unable to form the words, and tears falling down his bruised face. his hand shook from the effort of trying to grab hold of you. His eyes were desperate, tired, near lifeless. He wasn't going to tell you to fight, or to run. He was just... Scared. Of existing at this moment alone. 

You looked to the beast with a burning, hateful, wrath. You growled towards the creature as you turned your back to it. Instead of fighting fruitlessly with your last breath, you allowed your body to fall to the ground. Hitting your knees as everything you had was finally given out. 

You leaned against Raph’s side unable to feel for his normally pounding heartbeat. resting an arm on top of him to hold onto Mikey's limp hand, squeezing lightly, waiting for a responding squeeze that you knew would never come. Stretching your other arm over Leo's back to reach for Donnie, resting a hand on his chest, feeling for his slow heartbeat, only to be met with a cold lack of the familiar rhythm. Finally, you let yourself slump forward onto Leo's upper shell. You pressed the side of your head against his, no longer holding back the anguished broken cries. You felt his arm wrapping around your shoulders desperately as he tried to catch any breath he could. You could hear his crackling breathing slow as his body began to relax.

This was your family, you had found them when you were young. You had grown up with them. Celebrated with them at their best and mourned with them at their worst. You would find a permanent rest with them. You would stay until your final breath gave out and beyond. 

You called out their names softly in turn, waiting for any response. 

Nothing. 

You closed your eyes, knowing that this was where you belonged. Besides your family, till the end. As you allowed your body to finally rest, you held tight where you could. Allowing what final strength you possessed to be poured into a final declaration. "... I love you."

You could hear the fading noise of the beast finally getting closer, you had a feeling though that none of you would feel the burning as its molten fire gathered in its gut, its maw unhinged, the fading light of its flames shines and-

...

"HEY!" Your eyes shot open as you sat upright, greeted by the sight of four smiling brothers, no equipment, no blood or bruising, not a single scar from their lifetimes marred their scales. They seemed, healthy, glowing even in a way you had never seen before. 

Leo kneeled next to you, Raph was standing tall with Mikey perched on his shoulders. Donnie standing a few steps behind them, looking outward along the treeline of what seemed to be a meadow, staring towards something that had caught his attention. 

"C'mon, Donnie says the river down there has got to lead to a lake or something." Raph gestured to where Donnie was looking. 

"Yeah, baby! We're gonna go for a swim, see what we can find out here." Mikey chimed in, hopping from Raph’s shoulders to the ground, snatching up Donnie and pulling him along in his excitement.

"Yes, do try to hurry though, Michel here just might leave us all behind if we take too long!" Donnie shouted back to you as he was dragged along.

Raph could only laugh as he raced to catch up with his younger brothers. 

Leo grabbed your arm, pulling you up easily with a relaxed grin. As soon as you were up he began walking in the direction his brothers left in. Once he realized you weren't walking with him, however. He stopped, turning to you with a knowing look. "Hey-" Leo reached out a hand to you. "You coming?" 

You stared at him, settling into yourself with a wave of newfound peace, you couldn't feel a single ache or pain, just a light airy happiness surrounding you and your family. You slowly reached out and took Leo's hand, smiling back at him with a shine in your eyes you could only remember having when you had first met a lifetime ago. "Of course I'm coming with you guys, I'm always right with you aren't I?"

Leo nodded with an amused snort. "Course you are, you're always with us, oh and by the way-" Leo pulled you along, walking at a leisurely pace, seeming to settle into this new place just as much as you had. "-We love you too."

[amiedala]

SOMETHING DEEPER

CHAPTER 2: We Have a Problem

RATING: Explicit (18+ ONLY!!!)

WARNINGS: sexual content

SUMMARY: Nova swallows. “Din—”

“This,” he starts, resting one gloved hand against her cheek, “is what Mandalorians are made for. We’ve got this.” When Nova tries to interrupt, he gives her a swift shake of his head. “Go. Be a Jedi.”

If you're a newcomer, my fic "Something More" is the first installment of this story! <3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: hello my loves and happy Something Deeper Saturday!! i hope you love this chapter (and that you'll forgive that it's only about 9,000 words, i've had a hectic week)! this chapter was such a joy to write, and i hope you enjoy reading it just as much. more notes, as always, at the end!

*

When Nova wakes up, the bed is empty.

She rubs sleep from the edges of her eyes, digging her thumb lightly on the ridge between her eyebrows, trying to chase the groggy feeling away. Din’s not here, and his armor is gone, and Grogu’s crib is missing, too. Slowly, she makes her way into the fresher, pulling on the silver knob until water starts running down from the shower, filling the room with steam.

It’s so much more lavish than the one back on the Crest, and certainly years better than the old, stubborn one on Kicker, but the amount of space in here feels like almost too much. “Soap,” Nova mutters to herself, not even aware that she’s speaking until the word slips out of her mouth. At least the kind the two of them use, the bar that smells like crisp air and starlight, is sitting on the dish right to her left. She takes her time lathering up her hands, dragging suds in circles down her aching body, trying not to notice how roomy and empty it is in here without Din.

This whole placeis so empty without Din. The palace is huge, a Mandalorian fortress, and even though it’s outfitted with the absolute best technology and beskar that exists in the galaxy, there’s something eerie about it. Like most of it is standing empty, ornate and gilded for a reason no one can speak aloud. Nova knows the palace has more functionality than it seems, that the tunnels that run into the training stadium and the holding cells have purpose, but the fortress is over-fortified for a planet that barely has anyone left. She felt the same way when she went back to the base on Yavin, she reasons with herself as she wrestles the stubborn nozzle back into place, stepping into the fluffy towel hanging just outside, but at least the emptiness of the building made sense. The Alliance had accomplished almost everything they needed to, and a giant, communal space wasn’t practical after the fall of the Empire. It stood both as a testament to what the Rebels had accomplished and as a reassurance that anyone could come back and fight the good fight. Castles and temples and bases across the galaxy had all fallen into a state of disuse, Nova bargains, looking at her reflection in the foggy mirror. This wasn’t abnormal.

Except it was. Mandalore was a ghost town. Din was the ruler of a world that had long since fallen, and she was royalty in a place that barely had anyone left. And the way that this place operated was just as eerie and strange—she always had fresh towels, clothes were laid out in her closet, they both had feasts made to feed dozens more people than the two of them—but Nova had no idea where they all came from. She’s only seen Bo-Katan at intervals—usually in the late night, when her voice carries all the way up the stairs after she and Din have argued in the war room—and the two other Mandalorians that seemed to be attached at her hip are even scarcer than Bo-Katan is. There’s not many Mandalorians left, Nova knows this, but the way this entire place could fit thousands more people than just a handful makes everything seem heavier, somehow, or sadder.

Nova looks at herself in the mirror. Most of the reflection is still fogged up, and she drags a hand through it to reveal her face. She studies herself, focusing primarily on her pink, chewed-on bottom lip. There’s something wild in her eyes, something deeper than her everyday fears and worries. She knows that every day that slips by the closer the First Order—whoever the hell they are—gets to wounding Mandalore and the surviving Alliance. But with her heart in one place and her body in another, everything in Nova’s body feels like wire snapped taut, like if she moves the wrong way she’ll fracture off into pieces. Slowly, she blinks away the intensity of her gaze, brushing her long fingers over the spot where she knows her scar is reflected. The skin always looks raised after she showers, an angry rash of a still-festering wound. It’s easy to forget when Nova’s thinking about anything else, but any time her mind drifts away from whatever she’s focusing on, she feels the impact of it. It wasn’t just a flesh wound, after all, the lightsaber that Jacterr dragged through her stomach was meant to kill. And it’s still somewhat of a miracle that she survived it.

The very tips of her fingers ghost over the old wound, and Nova tries her best not to wince at the touch, the burning way it still sears when she touches it wrong or she’s wearing something that brushes uncomfortably against it. If Din were standing behind her in the mirror, he wouldn’t even have to touch it—or her—to take Nova’s pain away. But Din’s not here, he’s downstairs in the war room trying to lead a planet he never even wanted, and Nova scrunches her face up sourly in the mirror, attempting to chase away the inner, selfish longing for being back out alone together in the crush of space.

But even if it were just the three of them—Novalise, Din, and Grogu—there were always threats just a half-step behind them. Space was cold, foreboding, and no matter how warm the light and company was on the Razor Crest or on Kicker, the very real threat of being behind enemy lines they couldn’t ever seem to find was constant. It was eternal. But there’s something nostalgic about missing the consistent chase of it all, something that kicked Nova’s fight-or-flight response into high gear, something that neither of them feel here on Mandalore. No matter how rich and long the history is here, it’s also suspiciously empty, and Nova knows that everyone here, regardless of how skilled they are as warriors, is a conspicuous target.

The bedsheets are still all tangled as Nova exists the fresher, piling her wet hair on the top of her head as she wrestles the towel around herself, shivering a little in the vastness of their suite. In the wardrobe are hundreds of outfits—gorgeous dresses, ornate jewels, top-of-the-line everyday wear—but all of them have a distance to them. Nothing in these drawers feel like hers. Nova rustles through the shirts and trousers, all in varying neutrals or that strange shade of pale Mandalorian blue, looking for something functional, comfortable, and most importantly, inconspicuous. It was going to be a harrowing trek back to Ahch-To to return her baby and borrowed lightsaber to Luke Skywalker, and Nova didn’t want her reputation of Novalise Djarin, wife to the reigning Mand’alor, to be announced and heralded across the journey from the Outer Rim to the Unknown Regions. She just wanted to be Nova—human, mother, and Jedi.

Maybe. Maybea Jedi.

That part was still a lingering question mark, one that hung over her head more than it excited her. For years, growing up, Nova excused her Force sensitivity away as just something more that she was tapped into, something deeper, something divine. It was hers and hers alone, because the Jedi were mostly legends and myths, with only the current story of the famous Luke Skywalker told in whispers from people in the Alliance. Now, though, she knows it’s real, her ability to use the Force. She knows since she met Luke Skywalker, went head-to-head with the incredible Ahsoka Tano, and became a mother to Grogu. It’s beyond just what’s in her blood—beyond lineage and beyond chemistry—it’s something ancient and pulsing. Something that’s hers.

Nova sighs, picking the most functional clothes in her wardrobe—deep tan trousers with a pocket deep enough to hold the lightsaber, a long-sleeved black shirt that hugged her curves but didn’t irritate her scar, and a shawl in that shimmering Mandalorian blue. She pressed a thumb to her necklace, the one that Din offered to her alongside his heart, biting down on her lip. It was long past sunrise, because the hazy blue atmosphere was full of color, and as she opened up one of the gigantic windows, a gentle breeze wafted into the suite from the outside. Mandalore smelled like dust and loneliness, she decided, which wasn’t entirely fair, but it holds her at arm’s length. Nova looks back at the rumpled bedsheets, eyes glazing over the clothes hanging in her open wardrobe, trying to find a sign that she belongs here, that she’s more than just a figurehead, that this role that she married into has significance deeper than looking pretty on an unyielding throne.

It doesn’t come. She exhales, tears starting to well up at the edges of her eyes, and she sits on the edge of the bed. It smells like Din—cleanness, metal, woodsmoke, cinnamon—and even though it’s far more comfortable than any of the makeshift ones they crafted on the starships they used to call home, it feels empty in the same way that this room does, that this planet does.

“You’re being selfish,” Nova chastises herself quietly, her whisper coming out much louder than intended, filling up the hollow air of their gigantic bedroom. This was what she wanted. This was what she wheedled both of them into, this small little slice of a life beyond killing and running. But so much of this planet felt empty, like everything holy here had long since left. There were only dozens of people that still inhabited Mandalore, and it was a ghost of itself in a cruel, unfair way.

Ironically, Nova muses, walking back over to the open window, letting the breeze tousle and dry the long, thick waves of her hair, Mandalore, the home to a legion of warriors, was the least confrontational place that she’d been in years. And the kicker is, after over a decade of running, all she’s itching to do is get back out there in the stars. She looks upward, wistfully, trying to catch any of them through the hazy, foggy, blue sky, but she can’t. So she turns back towards the mirror, grabbing fistfuls of thick hair, pinning just the top layer away from her face. She adjusts the shawl in the mirror, marveling at the shimmering strands that catch delicately in the light, and right before she’s ready to walk out the door, the lightsaber starts burning a hole in the door.

She gasps, wrenching it off its hook. The blade isn’t even ignited, and when she grabs it, it pulses in her hands, once, twice, and then the air is pierced with a vibrant green light. Nova stares at it, inspecting it from every angle. It was just a vision—a realistic one, at that—but now that she’s holding the weapon in her hand, the fear that raced through her just a second ago has evaporated. The fact that she’s holding a lightsaber is sacred enough, but the knowledge that it’s Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber feels like it’s beyond something holy. It holds her there until Nova lets the blade slide back into the sheath, dropping it into her pocket. It still feels like it burns, even though that’s not possible, and she ignores it as she makes her way out of the ornate door and down the marble steps to the war room to her husband and their baby.

It's still jarring to see Din without his helmet on in a public space. Like Nova’s walking into a trap of some kind, or that she’s breaking a divine rule. It was different when she was the only person allowed to see his face, to map across his features as a vow, but now that the rules have changed, she doesn’t quite know how to act when she looks at him. He’s alone in the war room when she pushes open the door, a heat rising in her cheeks when she catches light of the beskar throne, vivid memories at how indescribably soiled it was from their desecrating tryst the night before. The holotable is lit up, glittering out in that deep, vivid blue, maps of the galaxy intercut with Alliance bases and safe houses, Din staring up at it like he’s looking for a sign of the Maker. His gaze is intense, electric.

“Hi,” Nova chances, softly, and she hears the baby babbling from the corner as she strides across the luminous room, sidling up to Din as he continues staring, his armored body cold to the touch. Quickly, he kisses her temple, and Nova’s tummy flips over as he holds her there, even though he’s done this a thousand times, even though this is far from new.

“Hi,” Din echoes, leaning forward against the rim of the holotable, squinting intently at something that Nova can’t quite sort out. “How did you sleep?”

She bites her lip, trying to decide if it’s worth lying, but before she can come up with a suitable one, the kind that can cover up all of the crushing loneliness she feels in a bedroom that doesn’t seem to belong to them, Din’s gaze is on her face, thumb hooking her chin upwards so that Nova doesn’t have a choice but to meet his eyes.

“Don’t lie to me,” he says, and even though his voice is gentle, she knows the intent of his command.

“Not great,” Nova whispers, the sound getting caught on the way out of the hollow of her mouth. “I missed you. I—I hate waking up without you.”

Din cocks his head to the side, eyebrows knitted together, as if he’s trying to pick out the exact right thing to say. Nova watches the expression of frustration reflect across his face, and has to hide an endearing smile as she revels in getting to see Din’s mind working in real time. “Novalise,” he says, finally, and heart does a little flip. It sounds like he’s chastising her, but that’s not Din’s typical modus operandi, and she blinks up at him, waiting for the rest of what he has to say. “Why did we come here?” he asks, finally, and his voice is so quiet, so filled with a plea she hasn’t heard in weeks, that it makes her wince.

“What?” she manages, reaching out one hand to Din’s reflective hip, trying to anchor his armored body against her own. “What do you mean?”

Din sighs, long and heavy. He’s pondering. It isn’t a noise of annoyance, or a noise of frustration, just his typical exhale when he’s trying to puzzle something out in his head. “Why did you want me to rule Mandalore?”

Nova presses her lips together, trying to come up with an answer adequate enough to placate the both of them. “Because,” she whispers, finally, “you’re the type of leader that makes people want to follow you everywhere. Because we were tired of running, and we wanted to fight back. And also,” she tacks on, trying to get Din to echo her smile, “because Bo-Katan wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Din’s expression is complicated, worried. Nova watches as his gaze drifts back up to what’s being reflected on the holotable, and she can track the places where attacks from the Order have cropped up in the time that’s lapsed since they’ve lived here. The galaxy is still largely intact, most planets benefitting from the defeat of the Empire, but Nova can see the clusters of danger, the places where the First Order found a weak point and applied enough pressure to fracture them entirely. Coupled with the jailbreak in one of the Mid Rim sectors, out of Cara’s jurisdiction, there’s at least ten attacks in the last three weeks. Nova is a staunch believer that everything happens for a reason, that there’s no such thing as coincidences, but a handful of malicious acts could be classified as one. More than three signified something else. Over seven is a definite indication of a pattern.

“You want to be back out there,” Nova breathes, searching for a confirmation on Din’s face. “You want to fight. Hand-to-hand, not from behind a holotable in this room.”

Din looks over at her, his expression clouded, and when he catches sight of the reflected fire in Nova’s eyes, he grabs at the curve of her cheek again, locking his eyes on hers. “You want to be back out there.”

Nova presses her lips together in a thin line, trying her absolute hardest not to give it away.

“You’re a horrible liar, Novalise Djarin,” Din says, shaking his head. “Awful. Worse than I am. Worse than the kid is, and that’s saying a lot.”

Nova sighs, leaning into his touch. “I know. You’re right. It’s driving me up the wall to be here, trying to rule a planet that barely has anything left, when I know that war is coming.”

“Why do you think I’m always in here?” Din asks, pointing up at the virtual starry sky splayed across the room from the holotable. “I don’t sit in the throne. I don’t try to rule. I stand in front of this table for hours, plotting for the inevitable battle that’s going to come, fighting back every single urge to just get back in the stars, chase the enemy down, and start blasting.”

Nova smiles slyly up at him, and when Din’s gaze drifts back over to hers, he does a double take.

“What?”

“I’ve made a Rebel out of you, Din Djarin,” she grins, gently flapping her palm against his cheek. He rolls his eyes, huffing out of his nose, and she just smiles, knowing that his proverbial feathers aren’t really ruffled, but basking in the idea of it anyway.

“Nova,” he continues, voice low and urgent, “so why aren’t we out there?”

The smile fades off her face. There’s something desperate in his eyes, something deeper than the level way he asks the question. She stares, trying to come up with an answer that will keep both of them here, committed and driven, but as she searches Din’s expression, she knows that she’s going to fall short.

Before Nova can come up with anything, though, there’s a sharp rapping at the door, and both of them break apart, Din swiftly pulling his helmet back over his head. He’s already shown his face to Mandalore, and the Creed that he followed for nearly his entire life has fallen to pieces, but Nova knows the security it provides, and she smiles gently at him, watching his gorgeous features disappear underneath the beskar.

“We have a problem,” Bo-Katan announces, her voice cutting straight through the luminosity of the holotable.

“Don’t we always,” Nova murmurs, but the expression on Bo-Katan’s face wipes every inch of humor off of her own. “What’s wrong?”

Bo-Katan sighs, running a hand uncharacteristically through her short red hair. “We are under attack,” she deadpans, looking upward through the clear dome, pointing as ships come out of the fog.

Alarms starting blaring from somewhere, and Nova darts over to Grogu, clinging him tight against her chest. “Who—”

“Nova,” Din says, evenly, tossing her shawl through the open air, “you need to take the kid and get back to Luke.”

She stares at him in disbelief as Bo-Katan pulls her helmet back over her head. “No,” Nova starts, “we need to stay and fight, you might need our help—”

“We don’t,” Bo-Katan interrupts, but there’s no fire in her voice. She’s busted open the small armory in the corner, hurling weapons at Din without giving him a second glance. “It’s not the Order. Or Empire leftovers. There’s no TIE fighters. Whoever they are, they’re not after you or the kid.” She turns around, finally, striding over to Nova. “Besides,” she says, rather sourly, “I already called for backup.”

Nova lifts one eyebrow. Before she can say anything, though, she’s interrupted by the infamous shape of Slave I entering the atmosphere, and she winks at Bo-Katan, who’s still hidden behind her mask, but Nova would bet every credit she’d ever owned that Bo-Katan is emphatically rolling her eyes.

Din presses his forehead against the baby’s, and Nova only gets a flash of his expression before his helmet’s back on. He’s tense, trying his hardest to let Grogu disappear from his watchful eye for the second time. “Go out through the amphitheater,” he whispers to Nova, his voice gruff. Under the beskar, he’s electric, like he was praying for a conflict to let the lightning out. “Don’t take off until we get out there and preoccupy them so that no one follows you back to Ahch-To.”

Nova swallows. “Din—”

“This,” he starts, resting one gloved hand against her cheek, “is what Mandalorians are made for. We’ve got this.” When Nova tries to interrupt, he gives her a swift shake of his head. “Go. Be a Jedi.”

She links her hand in his, squeezing once, and then she’s holding the crib open for Grogu, knitting the shawl around her head, a makeshift hood obscuring her telltale dark hair. She nods, just once, and when Din’s hand leaves her grip, she runs with the baby, heart pounding in her chest, heading back into the stars.

Space is cold and quiet. It always is when Novalise is out here alone, but this time, it seems like the silence and the chill penetrates even the warm hull of Kicker. The baby is sleeping in the copilot’s chair, and Nova coasts through the stars, popping in and out of warp periodically to check that they’re not being followed.

Her hand goes to her necklace, fingertips tracing over the outline of the Rebel symbol and the perfect star notched in the back of the beskar. She doesn’t even realize that she’s doing it until she pulls her thumb away and it’s embossed with the image of it. Kicker is being uncharacteristically obedient, coasting through the Outer Rim with determination, and Nova almost misses the distraction that the constant wailing and failing that Kicker used to give her, because with Grogu asleep and Din back on Mandalore, she’s bored out of her mind.

Nova sighs, stretching her legs out as far as they’ll go, the toes of her boots scraping quietly against the dashboard. They’re old and worn, with so many scuffs that she’s long forgotten what they were supposed to look like, and the sole of one is threatening to pop off any day now, but she’s had these boots since she was in the Alliance as a teenager. Before her parents died. Before she was subject to Jacterr’s awful hand. Before Din walked into her life and made her believe in something more, something deeper.

As quietly as she can, she eases out of the pilot’s seat, leaning over the navigational system to ensure that she’s following the right coordinates. Wedge had given her the location of the general area that Luke was located in the Unknown Regions, but Luke had given her explicit—albeit confusing—directions when he promised he’d see her again soon. Nova settles against the floor of Kicker, where the one window outside of the cockpit that’s directed towards the sky is located, and lays down in the nest of blankets and pillows she used to call her bed.

Being out here feels colder, somehow. More distant. Nova watches as the sky moves through warp, billions of tiny stars shooting and reaching across the galaxy as she and the baby make their way to Luke Skywalker. She pulls the lightsaber off her belt, squinting at it in the low light. She doesn’t try to ignite it, doesn’t call forth the green blade, she just studies it. Across the handle are grooves for grip, and the alloy of the metal is so different than the beskar she’s surrounded her life with. Nova tries to hold onto it like Luke does, effortlessly and easily, and even though it feels like she’s been made for this her whole life, there’s something in the way. A distance between the pulsing and beckoning, maybe.

Before she can ruminate any longer on the disconnect, though, her comm blinks, and Nova shoots upward, pressing her wrist to her mouth. “Hello?” she calls out, wincing as her voice echoes around Kicker, but the baby doesn’t even interrupt in his snoring.

“It’s me,” Din breathes, and all the coldness and distance between Nova and the stars evaporate. “We’re safe. The second Fett showed up, the ships retreated.”

Nova exhales slowly, fluttering her eyelashes closed. “Who was it?”

“Pirates,” Din says, immediately, and she furrows her eyebrows.

“Pirates,” Nova repeats skeptically. “On Mandalore?”

“We ran into some…unsavory groups of people back on Morak. Before the refinery explosion. Apparently, they tracked us down and wanted to ransack Mandalore for what it has left. They didn’t get very far,” Din continues, sighing. “Boba and Fennec fought them off, and Bo-Katan has been itching to fight someone since I won the Darksaber out from under her nose. We’re fine. Mandalore is fine.”

Nova looks up at the stars again, watching how they shoot by out the front of Kicker, trying to put her finger on the off feeling of Din’s face. “They weren’t part of the First Order?” she asks, her voice low. “Or working for them?”

Din exhales, long and slow. “No,” he answers, finally. “They’ve been quiet, Nova. Almost—”

“Too quiet,” she interrupts softly, eyes landing on the baby. Grogu is already the cutest thing in the galaxy, but when he’s asleep, and tiny little snores come out of his mouth, he makes anything else evaporate. Now, though, with the silent looming threat of the Order that was so eager to kill every Rebel and capture Nova and her power for their own, she’s just trying to memorize his features, one at a time, permanently etching them into the back of her mind. There’s a weight in her chest that Nova has been ignoring for a week, ever since Grogu was allowed to accompany them to Mandalore—her time with him is limited. Even if Luke allows visits—which she thinks he will—it will be far too dangerous to keep following the same path from the Outer Rim to the Unknown Regions, especially considering Nova’s telltale Alliance ship, regardless of the new paint job and the beskar additions, and with the attack today, Mandalore is far from safe.

“Where are you?”

Nova sighs, leaning over the nav system. It’s blinking with the bright assurance that Kicker has crossed, quite unceremoniously, over into the Unknown Regions. She relays that to Din, eyes roaming the seemingly empty sky.

“That was fast.”

“Yeah,” Nova agrees, chewing on her bottom lip. “The new thrusters Bo-Katan put into Kicker are no joke.”

Din offers up a noise somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “What are you wearing?” he asks, finally, and his voice is back somewhere low and dangerous like it was the night before.

“You saw me leave,” Nova answers, giggling, sinking down the wall until she’s hugging her knees against her chest on the floor. “Are you meaning to tell me you didn’t take stock in what I was wearing when you were staring at me? I’m offended.”

“Watch it,” Din volleys back, but this time, she can hear the smile in his voice. “I was just wondering if the ship has gotten you out of any of those clothes.”

“Ah,” Nova allows, her own tone dipping conspiratorially, “I see. However, it is quite difficult to get out of my clothes without you itching to take them off.”

“You’re good at getting out of things.”

“True.”

“I’m good at getting into them,” Din whispers, and Nova laughs, leaning her bead back against the hull.

“I am certainly not arguing with that,” Nova allows. “You know—”

But then, in Kicker’s typical fashion, the ship starts screaming. Nova’s sigh is low and frustrated, a small echo of the ones that Din’s let forth in the past.

“Go,” Din says, amusedly. “Take care of the kid.”

“You know I will,” Nova promises, and the light on the comm blinks off. She sighs, hauling herself to her feet, her head already aching from the indomitable screeching sound that pours out of Kicker the second something goes haywire. It’s startled the baby, and she strokes a single finger over the top of his fuzzy, wrinkled head before she sits down in the pilot’s seat, flipping switches and moving toggles back and forth. “What is it, Kick?” she murmurs, long waves of hair falling in the way as she leans down, squinting at the motherboard hidden underneath the metal sheath.

It turns out, that Kicker was actually screaming for a veryb good reason, this time around—after a very shoddy, embarrassing crash landing on Ahch-To, Nova discovers a fuel leak on hidden underneath the ship.

“Dank ferrik,” she seethes, and Grogu babbles. She turns on him, pointing a finger. “Not a word to your daddy about all the swearing. You promise?”

Grogu just tilts his head to the side and smiles gleefully. Nova squints at him, matching his quirked expression, pointing a long brown finger through the air like a threat.

“You are,” she continues, softening as Grogu toddles across the green, mossy earth of Ahch-To towards her, “a little war criminal. I hope you know that. Just because you typically use your powers for good doesn’t mean that I don’t notice that you don’t fight fair.”

Grogu babbles. Nova laughs. When she hoists him off the ground and notches him safely against her hip, she turns again to inspect the fuel gauge underneath Kicker’s patchwork underbelly, she nearly crashes into Luke Skywalker.

“Maker above,” she gasps, hand immediately slapping over her mouth. “You scared me. I’m used to stealthy, but you didn’t even make a sound.”

Luke Skywalker smiles serenely at her, like it’s nothing. “Hello, Nova.”

“Hi,” she echoes, faintly, and Grogu reaches out for Luke. Belatedly, Nova hands her baby over to him, hands shooting to the lightsaber hanging from her belt. “I have your lightsaber,” she adds, rather dazed, handing the thing out to him. He looks down at it, and there’s something complicated that flashes behind his expression.

“Have you used it?” he asks, and Nova slowly shakes her head. Luke starts moving, up the impossibly tall stone steps that look like they’re as ancient as this mountain is, like they were built into the bluffs of the sea. He’s much more agile than she is, and easily more used to this walk, but Nova tries to keep herself in pace without heaving air into her lungs. “I would have thought you might have used it on one of your missions from the Alliance.”

Nova stops for a half-step to catch her breath, and Luke stops without even looking back at her. “Well,” she starts, running her tongue over her teeth, “I haven’t really…had any missions.”

There’s a strange smile on Luke’s face when her gaze finds his eyes again. “Rebel activities and royalty still don’t exactly go hand in hand, I assume.”

She squints, nodding. “I don’t like being a diplomat,” she allows, even though she’s well aware that to Luke Skywalker, she probably sounds like a whiny brat, but he laughs. He opens his mouth and laughs out loud, in this gorgeous sea air, sounding as gleeful as Wedge always talked about him.

“You sound like my sister.”

Nova’s heart does a tiny backflip, and she sits up straighter. “Your sister?”

“General Leia Organa,” Luke grins, before turning back into the steps and moving nimbly up them. “She was a princess, too, for a while. She preferred action to negotiating. Still does. That’s why she’s holding rank up in the Alliance, even now. Well,” Luke stops, moving his sandy hair back and forth like he’s trying to measure something, “she’s taken to calling it the Rebellion.”

Nova smiles, trying her best to keep up with Luke’s pace. “The Rebellion. I like that—”

“Don’t,” Luke says, jabbing a long finger in her face so quickly that Nova nearly misses the next step and takes a tumble all the way back down the mountain. “Don’t let her title win, Wedge and I will never hear the end of it. Besides, I like the sound of ‘The Rebel Alliance’. It makes it feel like we’re all in this together.”

Nova laughs. He does, too. For a second, just a second, they’re giggling like the kids they never really got to be, like the galaxy isn’t facing impending danger, like they aren’t two of the known four surviving members of the Jedi left. It’s cold on Ahch-To, foggy and biting, but the landscape here is so lavish and so green, that she can pretend, just for a moment, that they’re back on Yavin. The Alliance hasn’t gone anywhere, there’s no First Order, and her parents are still alive, just around the corner. “I like being in it together,” she manages, finally, hoping that Luke won’t notice the tears under her voice. His expression is kind, gentle, and when he returns to the winding hike to the top of the hill, Nova follows him. Eventually, the ground levels out a bit more, and she stands on the top of the flattest rock, looking around at the entirety of the island. There’s something magical about this place, something that holds as much holiness as the throne room on Mandalore does.

“What made you come here?” she asks, and her voice is so quiet that the howling wind could have easily whisked it away. Luke seems to genuinely parse over Nova’s question, and he gently hands Grogu back to be swaddled up in her arms. The shawl that she draped over her head for the getaway off Mandalore is barely still knotted around her neck, and Nova wraps it closer to herself, pulling Grogu and his gentle warmth as close to her chest as she can. “Why leave the Outer Rim after the war was won?”

Luke has a strange expression on his face, and Nova’s gaze drops, suddenly worried she’d said something to offend him. “We did win the war,” he answers, finally, his voice far away. “But I also lost my father to it. I lost my old mentor. I lost my aunt and uncle. Leia—and Han, really—were the only family that I had left, but being around them was difficult because they had each other, and soon after, they had Ben. My nephew.”

Nova nods, chewing on her tongue. “It was hard to stay?” she asks, genuinely wondering. She knew that feeling. It’s what left her without the Alliance for the first time after her parents died, moorless and heartbroken.

“Exactly,” Luke offers, beckoning her closer to get out of the whipping wind. They’re half shrouded by the giant outcropping of boulders that rest atop the mountain, and she leans against the support of it for strength, trying to catch her breath. “It was hard to stay. Not because I didn’t love them, not because I didn’t love the Alliance, but because it felt like…everyone found peace except for me. It was a lot of loss, and it was incredibly…complicated. I knew someone who looks a lot like your son,” he continues, the ghost of a sad smile on his lips, “and he was the only other Jedi I ever knew up close. I had Ben—Obi-Wan—but until the last few days of his life, he wasn’t a Jedi. He was just a sad man who lived out in the desert, trying to make life better for me than his ever was.” Luke pauses, staring at the lightsaber in his hands. “I came here, to the Unknown Regions, to Ahch-To, to try to put the history of the Jedi together, and to recruit every new one that I’ve found.”

“That’s a great goal,” Nova answers, stroking her finger against Grogu’s fuzzy green head as he babbles in agreement.

“Would you like to see what I’ve gathered so far?” Luke asks.

Without even a second of hesitation, Nova nods. “Yes,” she echoes, and he points toward the biggest stone at the top of the mountain, where a tall, dark room has been hollowed out.

“Novalise,” Luke says conspiratorially, “welcome to my life’s work. Oh, yeah, and my humble abode.”

It’s not what she’s expecting. Any of it. There’s years’ worth of research here, old texts, folders, things that aren’t in languages she even recognizes. She’s speechless, turning around, eyes jumping, trying to take it all in.

“Wow,” Nova manages, finally, after she’s sure she’s turned all the way around a few times. “This is…”

“I know,” Luke adds, softly, and he looks down at the lightsaber in his hands. “There aren’t many Jedi left, Nova. You should come here and train. Your skills are…of the old world. You’re strong. You have a good heart. I would be honored to teach you.”

Nova looks back at Luke, holding on tighter to Grogu, who looks up at her and smiles. She knows, instantly, what he’s thinking—he wants his mom here, learning how to be Jedi side by side—and she has to keep her own feelings guarded because she doesn’t want to reveal to him how badly she wants the same thing. Again, she chews on her lower lip, thumbnail hovering beneath teeth and tongue. She promised herself she’d stop chewing on her nails what feels like a million miles ago, but right now, all she wants is to stay here, to learn. Din could be happy here, too, she thinks wistfully. He might be bored, but it’s only a small island on this whole planet. She and Grogu could train together, become Jedi together. It was perfect, she muses, blinking back the tears threatening at the corners of her eyes.

Except it wasn’t. Ahch-To is a safe haven, but Nova’s job is to keep it that way. She’s seen how ruthless and intense the First Order are, and there’s not a single doubt in her mind that they would follow her here and desecrate this place, leave such a holy site in ruins. She swallows again, trying to conjure up the strength to say no, but from the look on Luke Skywalker’s face, he already knows.

“I’ll be here,” he offers, quietly, and Grogu touches his tiny palm to the small crescent of Nova’s exposed skin underneath the warmth of her blue shawl. “If you decide the galaxy would be better protected if you had training.”

“I want to,” she interjects, her voice low and pleading, like she’s the one begging for it. “Maker, you have no idea how badly I want to. I could be happy here. I—I want you to teach me how to become a Jedi, but—”

Luke’s gaze shifts to the ring on her left hand. The stone sparkles in the low light, the tiny crystal sunk into the beskar. It’s so tiny, but it’s there, and there’s something both sad and fond behind his smile. “You have bigger things to handle first.”

Nova swallows, nodding gently. “But—if I were to become a Jedi—”

Luke holds out his hands, one gloved, one bare. Grogu hops eagerly into his arms. “Like I said, I’ll be here. Grogu will be safe with me. My nephew will be joining us soon. And my sister,” he adds on, his voice suddenly a bit more electric, “my sister is Force sensitive, too. I have a feeling that you might run into her at some point, considering—”

“The Alliance,” Nova grins, nodding. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell her we aren’t changing the name.”

Luke chuckles. The sound is so jarring, so much closer to the boy Wedge always talks about knowing, and Nova’s heart aches. He’s only a handful of years older than she is, and for a moment, she lets herself imagine what it would have been like growing up alongside Luke and Leia on the base at Yavin. If she’d be in Jedi training. If anything about her life would be there same. “If anyone could,” he agrees. “I have something for you. You can have him back for a second.”

Instead of picking Grogu back up, Nova sinks down onto the cold earth inside Luke’s makeshift home, trying to fold her body tiny enough so that she’s face-to-face with her kid. His eyes are huge, reflected and starry and sad, but she can see the hint of joy of being here, of training alongside someone who cares, someone who will protect him until Grogu is old enough to fully protect himself.

“Hi bug,” she whispers, sticking out her palm for his tiny fist to hold onto. “This isn’t goodbye, you know. I’ll be back for you. Your dad and I will come visit any chance we get. You go and be good for Master Luke, okay? No eating his frogs. No hide and seek. I’ll be checking.”

Grogu babbles, the mischievous light in his eyes sparking up just for a second, and then he moves closer, falling into Nova’s warm hug.

“I love you,” she whispers, and he presses his fuzzy forehead into hers. They stay like that for a second, swaying, an unspoken promise. She can hear his little voice in her head—no words, nothing concrete—but a reminder through the power of the Force that he loves her, too.

Luke steps back into the narrow slice of light Novalise and Grogu are standing in, holding something out in his bare hand. “This is for you.”

Nova stands, squinting at the thing Luke’s holding out. It takes a second for her to recognize it in the darkness, but when she does, she inhales a sucking gasp. “I can’t take this,” she protests halfheartedly as he presses it into her open palm. “I’m not a Jedi yet, I—”

“Ben Kenobi gave this to me before I was a Jedi,” Luke interrupts, his voice gentle but urgent. “You will be a powerful Jedi too one day, Novalise Djarin. I know it. He knows it.” Luke’s gaze shifts over to Grogu. “And you know it,” he continues, tapping a long finger against her heart. “Just take care of this, okay?”

“Luke—”

“Take it,” he enunciates. “Go home to your husband and the people that need you. I know Wedge loves having you around.”

Nova tilts her head at him, quietly hooking the gifted lightsaber onto her belt loop. “I know why you’re out here,” she says, carefully, “but there are people who need you, too. And people who love having you around.”

Luke doesn’t say anything, but there’s a ghost of something that looks an awful lot like hope behind his conflicted eyes. “I’ll see you soon.”

With that, Nova presses a quick kiss to the most prominent wrinkle in Grogu’s forehead, pressing her thumb into both her old Rebel necklace and the signet that matches Din’s. She reaches her hand out to shake Luke’s, but he grins at her and pulls her into a quick, strong embrace. He smells like the ocean, and still, somehow, of Tatooine. Luke and Grogu watch as Nova slowly descends the stone steps jutting out of the cliffside, so much easier to get down than heave up. When she’s back at Kicker, she checks the makeshift patch on the underbelly of the ship, which seems to be holding up okay enough to get back to Mandalore relatively unscathed.

“May the Force be with you,” she calls up to Luke and Grogu, waving her hand frantically.

“May the Force be with you,” Luke echoes. For a second, there’s nothing but the sound of the ocean hurling itself onto the gorgeous, green mainland, and as she climbs the gangplank, she hears Luke call out again. “Novalise.”

She sticks her head back out, shawl flapping in the wind. “Yes?”

Even from all the way down here, she can see the smile on Luke’s face. “That’s the Skywalker family lightsaber. Don’t lose it.”

She nods, feeling the weight of it on her hip as Kicker groans to life. She’s crying by the time she lifts off the surface of Ahch-To, her heart both heavy and light, sunken and buoyed. Space is dark, and she hops immediately into warp, heading back to Mandalore, back to the place she’s slowly learning to call home.

Mandalore, as usual, is quiet. It’s dusk, the foggy azure of the sky descending and swallowing up most of the planet, and when she lands in the designated parking bay, she checks the patch holding steadfast on Kicker’s underbelly, knowing that her beloved trash heap of a ship will need to go back into the more capable hands of the local mechanic. When she looks straight up, even through the dark, she can still see the faintest smattering of stars.

“Nova.”

She whirls around, hand on her belt. Din’s standing there, fully armored, just out of reach. “You scared me,” she chastises, closing the distance between the two of them. His beskar is cold, but his hands immediately encircle around her waist. “Has the threat passed?”

Din sighs, long and heavy. Her heart pounds as she listens to the timbre of it through the modulator, remembering all the time that she spent trying to dissect his breathing before he took the helmet for her and let Nova make him moan instead.

“There’s always another one,” he says, darkly, and she nods, tilting her head to the side. “I missed you, cyar’ika. Mandalore is cold and quiet without you.”

She wants to come up with a snappy retort, but the honesty and exhaustion in his voice pulls Nova down to his same level. She steps in closer, just letting Din hold her there, satisfied in the small comfort that she’s still his anchor. “Space is cold and quiet without you,” she offers, cheek pressed up against the beskar.

Din looks up. She can tell it even without looking at him, the way that his muscles shift underneath the beskar she’s still pressed up against. “I’d give anything to be back out there,” he whispers, finally, his voice low and complicated.

Nova’s heart flutters once, twice, and then she has an idea. “Din,”

“No,” he answers, immediate, helmet tipping down again to focus on her face. “We can’t, it’s too dangerous—”

“We can,” she enunciates, squinting her eyes at him, trying to put on the best Sabacc face she has, which isn’t much, because as Din is always reminding her, Nova is a terrible liar. “Twenty minutes. Nothing is happening. The palace is quiet. Boba Fett sent the pirates packing, remember? We won’t even leave Mandalore’s gravitational pull. We’ll only be just outside the atmosphere. We—”

“Stop it,” Din says, but there’s no fire in his voice.

“Come on,” Nova wheedles, well aware that she’s being reckless, a terrible influence. “Come on, come out with me into the stars. I’ll make it worth your while, you know,” she teases, raising one dark eyebrow playfully. When she hears Din sigh again under the mask, she knows she’s convinced him.

“Bo-Katan will not be happy that we left,” Din protests, but now he’s dragging Nova up the gangplank. She hides her smile in the shoulder of her shawl.

“Well,” Nova counters, spinning out and around while still holding Din’s gloved hand, spiraling down into the familiar comfort of the pilot’s seat, “it’s a good thing you’re Mand’alor, not her.”

Getting back into the stars with Din feels completely different than it did when Nova traversed the Outer Rim alone earlier. The silence isn’t crushing. It’s comfortable and easy, and when they’re finally safely out of Mandalore’s atmosphere, Nova pulls Kicker into a slow coast, heart still galloping in her chest. No matter how many times they’ve fucked, the little anticipatory period that comes before anything still feels like the first time. Quietly, Nova spins around in the pilot’s chair, expecting Din to still be seated behind her so she can climb over and straddle his lap.

But he’s not. Somehow, he’s the second person whose stealth has completely surprised her today, and Din’s no longer in the copilot’s chair. He’s standing over her, in full beskar regalis, visor of the helmet tilted downwards. All she can see reflected in the surface is the slow dance of the stars out of Kicker’s front window, and she swallows. Din steps forward, close enough to shift Nova’s legs apart, hands gently reaching forward to grab either side of her face. For a second, he doesn’t move. Nova’s breath hitches in her throat, desire sparking up a low flame in her pelvis. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since Din fucked her on the throne, promising that Mandalore was theirs to desecrate, but it feels like a lifetime ago. Everything in her body is on fire, electric.

“I missed the stars,” Din murmurs, his gloved finger ghosting over her plump bottom lip, lingering enough to reveal her teeth. Nova shivers.

“Me too,” she whispers, not daring to take her eyes off of the helmet. She can see the bulge growing in his pants peripherally, but she’s determined to stay here, frozen in this position, until Din begs for her mouth, her touch, her warmth.

“More than anything,” he continues, voice rumbling low and deep, his hand traveling down the marks he left on her neck—the pulse points, the light imprints of hickeys in between—and Nova swallows, the air going starry and unhabitable, “I missed making you scream my name out here with no one to hear you.”

“Oh,” Nova gasps as Din slowly kneels down, parting her legs like an ocean. Faintly, somewhere in the distance of her logical mind, something is telling her to make sure Din doesn’t tear these trousers off her body, because they’re light and comfortable and didn’t keep the dampness of Ahch-To trapped against her skin, but as he hooks his fingers around the waistband, any protest fly out the window into the starry darkness. “What—fuck, what happened to fucking me in front of an audience?”

“I don’t want that tonight,” Din whispers, immediately. He lifts the helmet just enough to reveal his mouth, and as his hands are pulling Nova’s pants down to her ankles, his tongue writes a symphony on the soft, smooth skin of her inner thighs. “I want to be the only one to worship you.”

Nova gasps again, heart fluttering in her throat, barely even registering that Din’s pulling down her panties until the heat from his hands travels up, notching perfectly between her thighs. She slumps in the chair, everything in her electric and alive. It feels like years since Din’s spent longer than a few seconds down here, the warmth and wetness of his mouth lapping up her every orgasm. She pulls the helmet clean off by accident, but she doesn’t burn in embarrassment when it makes a loud, clattering noise against the metal hull of Kicker’s floor. She just tangles her hands in Din’s hair, knotting her long fingers in his curls, pulling him in closer and closer, teetering on the edge from just his touch.

“Are you going to cum for me, Queen of Mandalore?” Din rumbles against her flesh, tongue immediately sliding back in between her folds after the last word comes out of his mouth.

“No,” Nova manages, yanking gently at Din’s hair. Immediately, his mouth comes off of her, even though she didn’t say a word. She stares into his brown eyes, gorgeous and full of lust and darkness. “I’m not the Queen of Mandalore out here.”

“Then what are you?” Din asks, pressing his wet lips against her inner thigh. He adjusts his grip on her thigh, and she exhales, a staccato beat, complicated with how badly she wants his touch.

“Your wife,” she manages, “so devour me like I belong to you, Din Djarin.”

There’s something deeper in his eyes, a flash of something guttural and animalistic. His mouth is back on her pussy so fast that it knocks the wind straight out of Nova’s mouth, and she gasps, her moans loud and unencumbered. When he adds the pumping of two fingers, entering her like it’s nothing, like he owns every single inch of his body, Nova’s on the edge again. And then, without warning, he’s pushing her over it, again and again and again. Everything in her is both electrified and exhausted. The stars outside the window are spinning, she’s panting like she’s in Tatooine’s heat, and blood is rushing so powerfully in her ears that she can’t hear anything else. Nothing in the galaxy exists except for her and Din.

It takes a moment for her to realize, dazed and satisfied, that Din’s mouth has left her. “Hey,” she manages, her voice sounding disconnected and warbled, nothing like it’s coming out of her whole mouth, “where’d you go, it’s your turn—”

“Nova,” Din interrupts, his hands coming out of nowhere and bracing against both of her cheeks, instantly anchoring her in the moment, “your comm is blinking.”

“My—comm,” she repeats, head still feeling underwater with the aftershocks of her orgasm, and she blinks the stars out of her eyes long enough to look at the thing on her wrist, her vision slowly returning back into focus. Her eyebrows furrow down the middle, and Din tilts her head, still standing on his knees like she’s about to knight him. She swallows, pressing the button. “Hello?”

“Your shields aren’t up,” an annoyed voice relays through the comm, slightly muffled. “You’re Order bait out there.”

Nova rolls her eyes. “Bo-Katan, we just went for—”

“Alone time,” Bo-Katan interrupts iciliy, but the current in her voice immediately makes Nova realize she’s not annoyed with them for sneaking away, she’s panicked for something else. “We have a problem.”

“You’re repeating yourself, Bo-Katan,” Din interjects, gathering the panties tangled at Nova’s waist and gesturing her to lift her hips up so he can slide them back over her thighs. “What pirates entered Mandalore now?”

“Not pirates,” she snaps. “Not Mandalore, either.”

Nova rolls her eyes at Din, exhausted. As she sits up, pulling her trousers back over her thick thighs, the mountains of her hipbones, she cracks her neck to the left. The wetness of Ahch-To’s atmosphere sunk into her bones, and now that the warmth of Din’s mouth has evaporated, she’s suddenly freezing again. She nimbly picks up her discarded azure shawl, wrapping it around her shoulders, her neck, dipping the pooled fabric up over her head. Her hair is wild, hanging in her face, running out of the shawl like water. “Bo-Katan,” Nova chances, trying her best to not sound sour because of the very unwelcome interruption, “can you please tell us what exactly is wrong?”

“Rebel girl,” a voice filters through, and Nova sits straight up, startled. The shock of Wedge’s voice is one thing, but hearing it through the same frequency—and, most likely, location—as Bo-Katan’s makes her heart start hammering for a very different reason. Din and Nova exchange glances—his skeptical, hers frightened—and Nova waits with bated breath for Wedge to continue speaking. His voice is low, full of foreboding, when it crackles across the comm again. “We have,” Wedge says, sighing heavily, punctuating the silence with his voice, full and intentional, “a problem.”

*

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as always, reply here or send me a message to be added to the taglist!!! (and if you’ve already asked me and you’re not on it, please message me again!!!)

if you would like to be taken off the taglist or put on it, send me a message/ask/comment!! <3

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!! we're about to dive headfirst back into where SM left off with the Order, ruling Mandalore, and the Rebels, and biiiiiiiig things are coming ;) hope this one tides you over until next week!

as always, i'll be here, on tumblr (amiedala), and on tiktok (padmeamydala) for even more Dinova/SD content, so come hang out! <3

CHAPTER 3 WILL BE UP SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH AT 7:30 PM EST!!!

xoxo, amelie

[ardellian]

WIP WEDNESDAY

Tagged by @antigonick and @impossible-rat-babies, thank you! <3 Here's another bit I managed to drag up from that unfinished folder... Not technically a WIP, rather something I abandoned, but reading it now I don't hate it so here it goes.

tw: blood, surgery

It’s more than an hour later when he finally finds himself with space to think. Staring at his palm in an ambulance, slowly opening and closing the hand. The whole arm tingles, from the shoulder to his nails. It’s probably bad. Someone’s going to be mad at him for it. It’s going to be expensive to fix; it’s always expensive to fix.

He doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a shit; Sidestep is safe and what's a few more items on his tab, really?

“What happened?”

Ricardo jerks his head up, somehow surprised to hear the voice even though Chen's the reason he’s in the ambulance, not the arm which he didn’t even have time to tell anyone about. Not that Chen is actually hurt; just the armor. But it was damaged enough that he can’t get out of it in the field, so they’re going back to base like this.

Sidestep’s the one who was bleeding, but he never lets anyone look at his injuries. Ricardo should have dragged him to an ambulance, not—

Chen’s face darkens, and Ricardo realizes his mind is starting to drift again. “Sorry,” he says with a quick grin. “Lot on my mind. What did you say?”

“What happened?” Chen grumbled. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Nothing,” Ricardo says. “Maybe I overcharged the circuits a little.” He shrugs.

“During the fight? What did you do?”

“The hole you blew was enough to expose the wiring. I got him from behind. Sidestep distracted him.”

“And then ran off?” Chen grumbles.

Ricardo sighs. “Come on, Wei. He got himself hurt to take that monster out, so don’t even start.”

“Then why is he not in this ambulance?”

“You know why.”

“Because Sidestep doesn’t like hospitals. Because Sidestep won’t tell anyone his name, or show his face even in private. Because Sidestep could be anyone, and you shouldn’t trust him so much.”

Ricardo sees Sidestep’s slightly parted lips in his mind. Wouldn't he recognize that, if they brushed past each other on the street? He'd like to argue so, that he knows those lips and that jaw line so well that he'd recognize them anywhere.

“What?” Chen says. Gruff. Displeased. “You do know his name?”

“No comment.”

Chen’s eyes narrow. “He showed you his face, too?”

“I trust him, Chen,” he says, putting on the Marshal voice, even though he doesn’t know how effective it is right now. “You don’t have to, but at least trust me. I’m not an idiot. I’m not about to give out any classified information, but Sidestep’s one of the good ones. I don’t know why you can’t see that.”

Chen stares back for a second and then sighs. “If you say so,” he says, leans his head back and glares at the ceiling instead.

Ricardo goes back to staring at his arm. After a while he pulls out his phone. Starts to write a message to the contact which is right now labeled ‘Stephanie’—Sidestep has made him change the name every month or so.

The last received message stares back from the screen.

S: asshole

He smiles; starts typing:

O: how’s the leg?

O: if it hurts maybe let me try kiss it better? ;)

S: ha ha i need stitches you dumbass

O: if you let me know which hospital you’re at i can hold your hand while they do it

O: i’ll even let you cry on my shoulder

S: you’d be the one crying and you know it

S: you’re soft

This isn’t that bad. Not a big deal. He kissed Sidestep, but it doesn't have to change anything. Just adrenaline and relief and a stupid impulse.

He bites his lip, sucks in a breath and—

O: i can think of ways you could change that ;;;)

Ricardo grins at the phone when Sidestep doesn’t reply. Score one for him.

Sidestep doesn’t give a shit that Ricardo has enough power running down his spine to blackout a small city or kill a man with a touch, doesn’t give a shit that he’s the Marshal, that he’s famous, and if not rich at least doesn’t lack for money. His phone buzzes in his hands.

S: still not convinced you think at all

Ricardo laughs out loud, and ignores Chen’s huff from the bed. He resists the impulse to touch his lips.

This is nice.

---

This is a disaster.

You drag yourself up the last steps to your apartment, almost collapse onto the door. Manage to get your keys out.

Unlock the door. Get in. Lock it up.

Drop the bag—deal with the suit later; bleeding now. Dizzy; lost too much blood.

Fucking traffic—the bus ride shouldn’t have been that long. Should have stolen a car. Did you bleed all over the bus? Your pants are wet, but at least they’re black.

Just get in the bathroom. The phone is buzzing; fucking Charge—he kissed you—why did you let him do that? Are you absolutely insane? Just let it buzz; don't think about it. First aid kit; bathtub. Painkillers, the strong ones, and anesthetics, but the pants need to go first, and shit. You didn't take the suit off.

Fucking hell. You have to twist and turn and when you’re finally out of it the bleeding has started again and what even did that—a piece of a window?

It’s going to scar.

Never mind. Anesthetic. Sterile compress. Apply pressure. Okay, better. Just dizzy now. Not so much pain—great; time for the stitching part.

It’s a mess.

Your hands are shaking. You feel cold. Bathing with an open wound is stupid, but you can keep the injury up out of it? Yeah. You turn the shower on, let the water run around the bottom of the bathtub—it turns pink; almost pretty.

This is going to feel like shit for awhile.

Can’t fall asleep—very bad when you’re in this shape, and alone.

You reach for your phone and of course Charge has replied. Of course it’s a dirty comment. Of course.

A disaster.

Don’t smile; this is bad. Charge shouldn’t ever have been allowed to see your mouth, not to mention kiss it. You shouldn’t shouldn’t have gotten this close; he shouldn't even have your number. Why can’t you stop smiling?

This is a disaster.

You write a stupid reply, ignoring the innuendo.

Smile wider. Touch your lips. Maybe it’s the painkillers, maybe it's the blood, but it feels like they’re burning. You can still feel The Marshal’s hand at the back of your neck; around your waist.

Fuck, you almost got crushed and bled out and all you can think about is the feeling of his lips against yours. An absolute disaster.

[bokunoheroanalysisforthefuture]

The second and third obstacles! And Mei’s first big showing, because of course. 

[No. 25 - In Their Own Quirky Ways]

Ochako, Tsuyu, and Mina are all standing still, staring at the next obstacle as Present Mic announces it. He calls the first barrier ‘a piece of cake,’ the notes that for the second, you fall and you’re out, so you have to crawl across if you want to make it. The obstacle, oh, nothing big, just the fucking Grand Canyon with the bottom encased in the goddamn void:

Despite all reasonable reservations about crossing, Tsuyu takes the leap (metaphorically) and starts creeping along one of the ropes, calling it a giant tightrope. She giggles to herself, saying this is her chance to make a splash. (God, a girl after my heart, I love her sense of humor between this and the USJ.)

Next we are introduced to our resident spark - I mean support course student, Hatsume Mei (abet we don’t get her name yet here, but she’s emphasized enough that it’s obvious she’s gonna be important soon.) He’s cackling a bit maniacally, talking about how it’s time for her support items to get the spotlight, calling out to the national support companies to look at her wire arrow and hover soles - the items she just so happens to be wearing, along with a few other gadgets.

Ochako realizes Mei is in the support course, while Mina is shocked that she’s allowed to have her gear. Mei points out to them that the hero course students get practical battle training, right? So in the interest of fairness, as long as they developed the gear themselves, using equipment’s just fine! In fact, for the support course students, it’s the greatest opportunity to show off their inventiveness and craftmanship to the industry! 

Mei cackles some more as she shoots off her hookshot - I mean wire arrow, the end impacting and catching on one of the pillars with a klang. Mei leaps off of the side of the canyon, again calling out to all the corporations to check out her ‘adorable babies’ while clicking on a button on her devise that starts reeling her in, as well as activates the hover function of her boots. Ochako and Mina are fired up, Ochako rushing to chase after while Mina continues to complain about it being unfair. 

Shinsou, meanwhile, is being a little bit creepy, just watching on with a slight leer as he just says ‘cool.’ Wonder what he’s doing here… hmm…

Up in the announcers’ booth, Mic states how they have all types trying to make it big in the sports festival. Aizawa, meanwhile, is just annoyed ay why ‘those idiots’ (re: the students probably) stopped moving. We then shift over to Shouto just reaching the other end of the canyon, with Mic announcing as such to the crowds.

Of course, it’s not so easy as that. Even as SHouto starts building up more ice to start pushing ahead, Katsuki is blasting in from above. Katsuki calls out, refusing to stay behind any longer, while Shouto just thinks that with how fired up Katsuki is now, he must be a slow starter. Which, man, I don’t even know if that’s just an observation about the quirk or if that was intended as a savage shot, but either way, I’m cackling.

We see Tenya somewhere behind Katsuki, watching the explosions as he pushes on. He says it’s very likely his brother is also watching, so he musn’t show an unsightly performance… 

he says as he does a T-pose to skid across the ropes with his quirk. Mic calls it unsightly, which like, dude, rude. Also, how did he know what Tenya even said there? I guess it’s just a little thing for the sake of humor, like the ‘drawn differently’ jokes for All Might. 

The crowds watching on are impressed with the performance of Shouto, talkin about how he just can’t be stopped. How quirk is awesome, but it’s not just that - he’s also incredibly athletic and perceptive. Someone else agrees, then points out how he’s the son of the flame hero, Endeavor. The first person(?) says that makes sense, the kid’s got the blood of the number two hero out there, after All Might. The pros are gonna be scrambling to get him as their sidekick.

Can I just say this is a very interesting panel here. Like there’s no reason we immediately know about to have it divided in two like this, but any amount of retrospect with what we learn later this arc makes it obvious: this is representing the internal divide Shouto places on his two sides, separating his fire from his ice. I also like how the mention of Endeavor here also happens to be on the fire side, further drawing attention to it and, subsequently, the scar there.

The scar that, incidentally, can be considered Endeavor’s fault.

I’m sure there’s a whole lot more Shouto and Todoroki family meta that can be shoved in here when analysing this panel, but we have things to do, events to see, arcs to get through! 

Present Mic announces how the leads keep breaking ahead, while the rest of the pack is bunched up. Since the racers don’t know how many will get to move on, all they can do is aim for first place! And the leader has just reached the final barrier - that is to say… the minefield.

...wait a second, ‘a deadly Afghan carpet’? Uhm, is that a translation thing, or… what a strange reference to make here. While it’s hard to make out the locations of mines from this page (at least to me), Present Mic confirms in his announcements that a quick glance should be enough to reveal it to the students, so they need to keep both eyes open and watch their steps. By the way, the mines don’t pack a deadly punch, but they’re loud and flashy enough that the kids might need a change of underwear when it’s over. Aizawa adds on that it depends on the individual, of course.

Meanwhile, back on the ropes, we see Izuku crawling along almost like a chameleon, the armor plating strapped to his back with some of the loose wire. In the background we see Shouji gliding from one of the pillars with his arms out wide, and another student  Naruto running across the wire like a champ.

You go, Naruto runner guy. 

Back with the landmines, we see Shouto realize that the positioning of the landmines puts whoever is in the lead at a disadvantage, since none of the mines have gone off yet, ergo meaning the highest chance of setting one off and losing time to the distraction. It’s all a big show, which I mean, you’re only just realizing this? Meanwhile, in the background, we see another student get blown into the air from one of the mines, and yet another (I think Ojiro???) struggling to follow. 

Katsuki, of course, decides to show up then, finally blowing past Shouto while stating how ‘this crap’ can’t slow him down. Which I mean, makes sense when his whole thing is explosions, these landmines really can’t be all that impressive to him. Katsuki declares that Shouto’s declaration of war was to the wrong person.

Present Mic gleefully announces the new leader, telling the mass media to get excited, since they love this kind of turn-around. (Definitely not a subtle dig at them, no sir.) He then announces how the rest are catching up while Katsuki seems determined to fight Shouto right where they are - Tenya has blasted himself forward with one of the mines, looking very silly, while Ibara is using her vines to test the ground around her (I think?) to allow safe passage. 

Gotta go fast (do do do do do do do…)

While Present Mic wonders if the two grappling for first can hold onto their lead, we see Izuku standing at the start of the field, watching the other students rush ahead. Tokoyami is again launching himself into the air with his quirk, Kirishima is just carefully picking his way through, and I can’t tell enough about the other students to see if they’re 1a or not, so… 

Izuku worries about how wide the field is, while we get to see just how many people are ahead of him on the field. However, Izuku seems to have a plan, looking around him. As the others rush onwards, and as Shouto and Katsuki fight with each other, we see Izuku hard at work doing something he says is taking a page from Kacchan’s book. He thinks about how he can still catch up as he throws himself forward onto a bunch of unearthed landmines, the plate under him and between him and the inevitable explosion. 

Nice. 

Izuku is sent flying over everyone’s heads from the force of it, much to everyone’s shock. Shouto and Katsuki both look back to see what caused it, while Mic wonders what could have caused such a blast, and whether it was accidental or intentional. As Toshinori throws his arms up in the air (panic or excitement?), we get one last look at Izuku, wearing a very determined expression as Present Mic announces his riding the wave in hot pursuit.

And with that, chapter 25 is done! What a point to leave off at. Next time, we finish the race, get to see placements, and (I think) we get the announcement for the second event. See y’all then!

[whosnickydude]

A soft dusk

okay so a while ago a posted this Kandreil drabble on ao3 but never really kept writing a 2nd part? but now that’s summer i have more time on my hands and i started writing again, so i guess i’m posting the 1st part here as well?? idk enjoy

CW: panic attack, Kevin has some really sad and harmful thoughts. please take care of yourselves lovies!

Kevin was spiraling. He felt as if his chest was about to explode from the pressure of not getting air through, and he couldn’t get a hold of his feelings.

Six months had passed since Riko’s death. Since the press lurking around every corner, demanding answers, fighting for a statement. None of them were sensible about it. Kevin practically couldn’t go anywhere alone the first month, or he would probably end up being stalked. One time it actually got close to physical assault.

All the while, he was mourning Riko. And he was the only one, it seemed. He felt immensely guilty, for an overbearing amount of reasons. He felt guilty for letting his brother become the sadistic monster he turned into. He felt guilty for not being able to change him. He felt guilty for leaving him. But most of all, he felt guilty for mourning him. It wasn’t fair, not with all that he did to Kevin. The sleepless nights, the feeling of always being a prey, always the second, always with a leash around his neck. He broke his hand because he was having a fucking tantrum, for God’s sake. It was not fair that Kevin still had to feel like shit because of him dying.

He started drinking, after that. More than he did before. It was the only way he knew to numb the pain. The other foxes let him. None of them understood why he felt so sad about his abuser’s death, so none of them knew how to —or wanted to— comfort him. They would throw him a pitying glance and try to do so, but after some times he shoved them off, they started to leave him to himself. So they let him drink. It wasn’t as if they ignored him completely. When everyone went to Eden’s Matt, or Dan, or Allison asked him to go dancing with them. Sometimes he got so drunk that he actually did. Most of the time, though, he stayed on the table while everyone gradually went to the dance floor. They never left him completely alone. Almost every time, Neil and Andrew stayed on the other side of the table, speaking in languages he didn’t know. Probably flirting shamelessly right on his face. However, the only one who stopped him from getting alcohol down his throat was Andrew, and only when he saw that another one would end up with Kevin passing out.

Five months had passed since Thea left him by now. And through text, at that. Apparently, he was making a fool of himself in public every day and it was bad for both of their careers. She didn’t want anything to do with him nor with Edgar Allen. The hypocrite. Kevin was the only one that was always mindful of his surroundings. The only one that acted perfect, that pushed every feeling inside so as to not attract too much undesired attention from the public. But she had it as she wanted it, and Kevin put no resistance against it. They didn’t even see each other and barely even texted or spoke on the phone.

The drinking got worse. The mighty Queen of Exy had fallen, but the only ones who saw it happening were the Foxes. And people who knew nothing about Exy in the darkness of a nightclub in full swing.

Four months had passed since on a Wednesday at 6 A.M., in the middle of his morning run, Neil had found Kevin, alone, near to unconsciousness in the middle of the road to Fox Tower. He had his body on the street and his head on the sidewalk. His face was pressed to the pavement as he sobbed, a half-empty bottle of vodka in his right hand.

Four months had passed since the last time he drank alcohol: he was four months sober now.

It had taken fights, screams, and comforting talks with Abby, but Kevin finally accepted to go to A.A. Neither Wymack nor Andrew would let him alone enough time for him to get near any type of alcoholic beverage. It took a while, but he got to the point that he spent a whole day not thinking about it.

Right now, he would kill for a drink. His mind seemed to have caught up on everything that had happened in the past few months. It was the beginning of term, so everyone wasn’t as free anymore to look out for him. Andrew and Neil had gone out a while ago, probably to the roof, since it was almost dawn. Kevin was left alone for more time than he could manage. The prospect of having to deal with still mourning the death of his worst nightmare, his own mental health, his addiction, and the school year, was simply too much. It was looming over him. He felt as if he was dying.

Maybe it was because he found himself with so few distractions that he started overthinking. Maybe he just opened the wrong Pandora’s box from the rotten depths of his mind. Either way, he was panicking. The rush of adrenaline and utter fear he felt —he remembered— from his time in the Nest was a live wire around his throat. How could he let all those things happen to him? Riko’s abuse, Tetsuji’s beating, the terror, the exposure. Being so vulnerable and ignored while also being right in the spotlight. “Always a commodity, never a human being...”

And then, what? He went running to his father, who didn’t even know he was his father. And he didn’t say anything about it until he was forced to do so. He was a coward. He was a coward, a fucking coward.

He couldn’t breathe. His head felt heavy, his shoulders felt heavy, his whole body felt heavy. Living felt heavy. Maybe he could just lay down where he was sitting on the couch and let himself go. But he couldn’t bring himself to move. His vision started blurring and everything around him was out of focus. Suddenly, there was a warm pressure on the back of his neck, and then another on his right cheek. The world started solidifying back, spinning around him, and he was gasping for air. He was letting out ragged, desperate gasps, his neglected lungs screaming for oxygen.

A face started coming to focus in front of him, but as soon as it materialized it blurred again. Tears were running down his face and he curled his arms around him. The pressure on the back of his neck —a hand, he realized— tightened, and the one on his cheek went up to pull at his hair.

“Kevin, look at me,” he heard someone say. The voice sounded familiar. “Kevin, I need you to breathe.”

The hand behind him stretched up and tangled between his hair as well, pushing his head slightly down.

“Come down, Kevin. You’re safe.”

The voices felt oddly comforting, and his hands flew up to grasp the other two. He was still crying and gasping, but it wasn’t as desperate. Maybe he wouldn’t die today.

At some point during the episode he had shut his eyes tightly, and now he tried to blink slowly, with narrowed eyes. The first thing that he saw was red hair, scarred skin, and blue eyes. Neil was in front of him, looking worried in his own way. His brow was furrowed, and he was chewing on his lip, but his expression didn’t seem quite compassionate.

“Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, Kevin,” he said. He showed the motion, exaggerating his breaths for Kevin to copy. And Kevin could only look him in the eyes and comply. Some time passed —maybe minutes, maybe hours— and the panic ebbed. The tears wouldn’t stop falling and his breath was shaky, but he wasn’t hyperventilating anymore.

He was still holding both hands, and he felt the one at the back of his head slip away from his grasp. He looked back and saw Andrew staring at him, sitting on the arm of the couch. Neil was sitting on the coffee table in front of it.

“I’m... I’m sorry, I just...” he started, but couldn’t finish.

Andrew didn’t look away from him. His face didn’t demonstrate any emotion, but he still wasn’t looking away. “What happened, Kevin?”

“I...” He sighed. “I started overthinking, and I really wanted a drink, and I... I guess it just went down from there.”

His voice was small and he hated it. He felt stupid, he couldn’t be left alone with his thoughts for two fucking seconds because he started falling to pieces.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Well, don’t be,” Neil said. “It’s only natural for these things to happen.”

Kevin wasn’t really sure what he meant by that, but he didn’t have much time to think about it because then Neil was standing up and going to the kitchen. Kevin looked back towards Andrew and saw him lighting up a cigarette and walking to the desk next to the window.

“Go change your clothes, Kevin,” he said, looking out towards the campus. “You’ll be itchy until you do, and you probably drenched all that in sweat anyway.”

He was probably right, Kevin thought, but still glared in his direction. Only because it was in his nature and he felt better already; Andrew wasn’t looking at him. Though he probably knew Kevin would glare at him. Giving no response to the blonde, he stood up and went to the bedroom to change into his pajamas. Andrew was right: the sweatpants felt like heaven on his skin. He closed his eyes and brought his hands up to rub them. He was feeling sleepy all of a sudden. The panic attack had drained all the energy from him, and his muscles hurt everywhere.

He went back out to the living room, yawning, and found Neil sprawled on one end of the couch with his laptop on his lap and a cup of coffee on hand. Andrew had one too where he was still sitting on the desk, and there was another one on the coffee table.

“Is that for me?” Kevin asked, sitting down on the other end of the couch. Neil looked up at him from his laptop and raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

“No, Day, I felt like having two cups of coffee,” he said. They fixed their eyes on each other until Kevin decided to take the cup. Neil seemed satisfied with that and looked back to where he was browsing something. A few seconds later he clicked on something with a flourish and put his laptop on the coffee table. It was a Trojan’s game they had already seen many times.

Kevin stared at Neil, but the boy just kept watching the beginning of the game. He saw Andrew moving to stub his finished cigarette on the window sill and light up another one. The last rays of sunshine and the street lights drew shadows all over his face. He breathed out the smoke and Kevin saw it disappearing in the wind. He looked back to the game playing on the laptop and brought his knees to his chest. He sipped on his coffee, and it was sugary sweet. But he could allow himself that, at least for today.

[wkemeup]

By Any Other Name (12)

series summary: When Special Agent Bucky Barnes is tasked with infiltrating the notorious gang Hydra and gathering evidence against its leader, Brock Rumlow, Bucky finds himself drawn to the woman who doesn’t seem to belong in this world of violence, the wife of the head of Hydra… you. pairing: bucky x reader chapter word count: 6.7k warnings: the moment of truth 🌹series masterlist 🌹

It was pitch black outside; the only light surrounding you from the stream of your headlights and the cast of stars gently illuminating your path huddled by acres of trees. The countryside was untouched by the pollution of the city and it was almost unbearably quiet amongst the woods, with only low hum of your engine and the faint chirping of crickets outside the crack of your car window to fill the emptiness around you.

The ink hastily written on the scrap of crumpled paper curled up in your hand was smudged. You couldn’t quite make out if it was a six or an eight in the address, but your GPS had long abandoned you several dirt roads ago, so you supposed it didn’t matter much anyway. There was nothing else around for miles. 

When you finally pulled up to what looked like an abandoned warehouse, there was no relief. It looked like something out of a horror film. The paint was chipped on the walls, the name of the metalworks company faded under years of weathering and neglect, tiles of the roof were gathering in piles on dusted, dirt roads. There wasn’t a single light in sight.

You swallowed as you turned off your engine. The headlights stayed on, reflecting on the single silver door. It was rusted along the hinges and looked completely untouched.

You had half a mind to call James to help ease the steadily increasing rate of your heartbeat, but he had been very clear when he asked you to turn off your phone and leave it behind at home. He couldn’t risk anyone tracking your location, so he said. He was acting so strangely lately, but you could sense the heaviness weighing on him.

You didn’t have much in the range of weapons in your car, not that it would have done you much good, but you stuck your keys between your fingers as you pushed open the side door. The air was brisk, sending a chill up your spine as clouds of dried dirt puffed up in clouds with every step you took. You crossed in front of your headlights until you paused in front of the warehouse.

With a heavy inhale, one you weren’t sure you’d let go of anytime soon, you turned the rusted knob and locked your car. The lights flashed off, leaving you surrounded in darkness.

You quickly hurried inside, more afraid of the darkness of the countryside than the unknown of what laid beyond the door. The slam of the door to its hinges behind you was louder than you prepared for and you winced as it echoed through the rafters.

You glanced up to find a group of people stood at the center of the room, all huddled over a long metal table filled high with piles of papers. Their heads turned abruptly in your direction.

One of them separated from the crowd, relief evident on his face as he quickly jogged in your direction; hair bouncing around his shoulders with every step, a half smile on his face though it struggled to reach up by his eyes. Ocean blue, and swarming in something darker, something pulling him under.

James.

But it wasn’t him you were looking at.

The inside of the warehouse was like something out of one of those spy movies Peter used to marathon on Saturday nights. The walls were lined with monitors, some filled with maps of the city, others with profiles and mugshots of men you recognized as friends of your husband, but the one displaying live security footage outside of your home caught your eye. 

You could see the driveway, the row of plain, well-kept bushes lining the pavement, the lights on above the garage. One of the security men you snuck past was on a lap around the perimeter and stopped to take a drag of his cigarette before he tossed the butt unto the grass.

An unpleasant shiver swept up your spine; cold and detached, and it nestled deep into your stomach.

“What the hell...” you exhaled, hardly able to take it all in.

You felt a hand graze your arm and you flinched, shocked by the sudden touch before you realized who was behind it. You turned to find bright blue eyes watching you cautiously as James chewed on the healed scar at the center of his bottom lip. He glanced sadly down at your hand, noticing the keys nestled between your knuckles and you quickly released them, slipping them into your pocket.

“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” he said quietly and there was a slight tremor in his voice, a nervousness, as he looked back to the group of people watching him from the metal table ahead of them.

“James, what’s going on?” you asked and he forced a smile to his face, one that was meant to reassure you, though he could hardly muster it.

“Come with me. I promise, I’ll explain everything.” He extended his hand to you, open and waiting, patient, and you studied the lines in his palms, lines you’d come to be familiar with, and suddenly you weren’t sure if you knew much of anything at all.

Still, you took his hand blindly as he guided you further into the room. He pulled out a chair for you at the table, just ahead of a particularly high stack of papers. You didn’t say anything as you glanced around at his friends and took a seat.

The tall, blonde man with broad shoulders and the clear line of muscles visible through the thin fabric of his t-shirt wore a slight frown on his face, though the way his eyes drifted to James protectively suggested he was concerned more than he was angry.

Beside him, slumped down into a chair of his own, was a dark-skinned man with a large, toothy grin, and dimples in cheeks. He smiled at you, like he knew something you didn’t, and you suspected that was more than the case because he was almost giddy with excitement, shifting in his seat and stealing looks at James.

“We don’t have much time before Rumlow finishes up in Harlem,” a red-haired woman to your right said.

You narrowed your eyes, recognizing her short, rounded nose, pointed stare, and perfect curve of a cupid’s bow on her lips outlined in dark red. She was familiar -- they all were -- like you’d seen them in passing but couldn’t place exactly where.

She pointed to a monitor behind you and you turned to find grainy footage of your husband sitting in at a table surrounded by men in suits you recognized from one of the dozens of parties he’d dragged you to over the years. It was from a Chinese restaurant in Harlem you got takeout from once with Peter. You gritted your teeth as you watched him clap a hand on the man beside him, throwing a wad of cash onto the table.

James nodded to his red-haired friend, pulling up a chair in front of you and turning it to face you properly before he took a seat.

“Where am I? Why am I here?” you asked tensely, unable to tear your eyes away from the monitors. You watched as one flickered from your living room to the hallway outside your library, to the staircase leading up to your room. Empty, haunted, in your absence.

A ruffle of papers to your left stole your attention and you found yourself staring at the blonde man with a file rifling through his fingers. A picture of your husband slipped out from the center and fell to the table. Even in his mug shot, his eyes held a kind of possessiveness, an arrogance, that transcended the page.

“Why do you have security footage of my house and—and Brock’s old RAP sheet?” your gaze flickered to the man sitting in the chair, watching you with a familiar kind of look in his eye, and then to the woman who was busying herself behind her laptop. You turned to James. “Who are these people?”

You could feel your breaths increasing in pace, the panic that was starting to take hold, but you stifled it down, buried behind closed doors and cement until it suffocated under the surface and all that remained was a vagrant stare and a jaw wired to stone.

James brushed his lips over with his hand, a heavy breath before he spoke again.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t really know how to say this.”

“Try,” you muttered out, voice like sandpaper.  

You didn’t realize your hands were clenched onto the bottom of the metal chair until your fingers started to ache. James’ eyes wavered down to your grip and he nodded quickly. Your heart was pounding so painfully, you wondered if he could see the thump of it through your chest.

He dug his hand into his pocket, let out a breath that looked near painful, and slowly set a shiny, golden badge onto the table. The shine of it reflected in the dim lighting of the warehouse. You dug your hands into the metal edges of the chair until you felt a sharp burn. 

“My name isn’t James Karpov,” he exhaled. Blue eyes flickered up to yours, gaging for a reaction on your face he wouldn’t find. He glanced back nervously at the blonde man pacing behind him before he continued. “I’m a special agent with the FBI and I’ve been undercover in Hydra for over a year now.”

Your features hardened over like stone, a protective layer to shield the surge of a storm thundering inside of you; the answer to a question you’d been suspecting for a while without realizing it.

You’d seen the way he flinched at his own name, how he got that kind of solemn look in the blue of his eyes when you talked about your husband, about wanting to escape it all, how he’d promised for things to be different when this was over, if he had more time. Pieces started to fall together and somehow you were still more lost than you’d been in years.

He paused, watching you, waiting for a flicker of the woman he knew to break through the blank stare currently consuming your features, but when nothing came, he let himself exhale. You focused on the soft footsteps of his friend pacing along the wall behind him. It was comforting to use his steps as a metronome, something to ground yourself because you could feel your world pulling apart at the seams.

It was a single string at the very edge of everything you knew. It only took a moment for it to unravel, within an admission of a name that was not his own, and soon the floor at your feet was covered in the broken pieces of what you believed to be true. Tattered and tangled threads.

“It started after Jack Rollins was murdered in lockup. I was assigned to this case to gather evidence against Rumlow and his men, so that we could dismantle Hydra completely; prevent it from ever coming back again,” he continued, his voice even, almost matter-of-fact, and it didn’t sound much like your James at all. It was too clinical, too rehearsed, and you could feel the sharp twist of a knife embedding itself deeper into your chest with every word he spoke.  

You listened quietly as he told you of when he first learned your name on a single page in the back of your husband’s file, how he’d known who you were before you even stepped foot into Brock’s office that first evening. He told you how he’d been assigned a cover, a new name and a history, to replace the role of Jack Rollins within Hydra as their enforcer. He’d been Brock’s right hand man for over a year and he was playing your husband like a fiddle.

“Director Fury thought it would be beneficial to the case to, um,” he released a heavy breath, as if the action in itself hurt him, “…to get close to you. He thought you might know more about Hydra’s dealings than you realized and he’d hoped you’d open up to someone who, um, you trusted. Seems he was right.”

You didn’t allow him see the way your heart caved in; jaw clenched, impossibly still, even breaths, and yet the floor had dropped from under you and you were free falling a hundred feet below. Lost to an abyss from which you were certain you’d never return; darkness barreling in and taking you home. It was where you belonged, wasn’t? It was where you had lived for years. Back to the fractured sense of safety, to the shadows lurking in the corner, to the eggshells under your bare feet made of broken glass. To lies and manipulation and deceit and ruin.

You wondered when it happened, when he’d been officially assigned to claw his way into your heart as if you were nothing but a pawn in the scheme of his mission. You wondered if it was before or after he’d gifted you A Farewell to Arms and if it was even his at all; if the scribbles in the margins belonged to his youth or if it was the carefully constructed design of an analyst with the sole purpose of hooking straight through your heart and sinking you to the ocean floor.

That moment was the beginning of it all; when you showed him your library, your most sacred place to a stranger, but it had felt so right at the time.  

Was the first moment you’d felt safe with him a complete lie?

There was always a comfort in being with him. A place for you to let down your guard and the walls you held up like stone around your heart. Beyond everything else, the one thing you knew about James Karpov was that he was safe. His presence was the only thing that allowed you to let go of the fear of the shadows of you home and the monsters lurking in the corners. He was a shining light in the darkness that had consumed your life.

You were young and naïve when you met Brock. You were eager for love and fell easily into his carefully constructed trap, overlooking obvious warning signs and the flaws of a man obstructed by the character he played.

For only a moment, you wondered if it had happened again, if you had become so foolish to allow yet another man to manipulate you and spin himself into the version of a man you’d desire until he could rip the floor out from under you just to see you squirm.  

A pang burned in your stomach, something stubborn and instinctive, one that urged you to just look at the man in front of you, to notice the way blue eyes nervously sought out your own, to see how his hands were trembling and his voice was strained, to notice that he was scared with every word he spoke. But your world had fallen apart and you could only do so much to stifle the scream bubbling its way through your chest.

So, you held your tongue as he told you about the orchestrated meetings in Brooklyn, how his friends -- his team -- had helped plan what you thought were coincidences but turned out to be carefully constructed operations. Moments when you’d light up upon seeing him, a wash of warmth to your chest on even the coldest winter mornings, and it was a lie.

You realized then why you recognized his friends; it was from the outskirts of coffeeshops, sitting under sunglasses and baseball caps, hiding behind newspapers in the distance. The quiet observers in your life pulling away at the last shreds of dignity you had.

“I was assigned a job,” James said tensely, clenching at his hands, wringing them painfully in his lap as he stared down at the cement under your shoes, “no different than jobs I’ve had before. Take on a new name. Be a new person. I’ve done… terrible things to preserve my cover, things I am not proud of. I’ve hurt people because Rumlow ordered me to. It was part of the job. I kept telling myself that, anyway. Didn’t seem to matter that I never killed anyone he put a hit on, that the Bureau stepped in to relocate my targets and hand me a look-alike that was mutilated just enough so Rumlow could have his proof and I could keep my cover. The blood on my hands is still real.”

There was a lump in your throat, one that burned and ached and was on the verge of choking you completely. You wanted to scream, or cry, or run until your legs gave out completely, but instead, you were paralyzed. Frozen in place. Stone of a statue. A single touch would crumble you.

“But you have to know it was never an act with you, Y/n,” he urged, desperation in his voice. You could hear the grief in his words, the slight tremor in the dissonance, the fear that you might reject him in favor of a man who does not exist.

You could hardly meet his eye.

He paused, watching you for a moment, waiting, longing, for you to tear your stare away from the wall beyond his left shoulder, hoping you’d find your way back to him as you always did, but you gave no inch. You held yourself still, unreadable, and he exhaled a breath that must have weighed immensely on his chest.

“After a while, I started meeting you in Brooklyn when the team wasn’t around, when there was no one to listen in and no agendas to fulfill,” he started, a little softer now as he slumped back into his chair. “I started staying at the mansion long past when I should have, just reading with you in your library because it was the only place I felt like myself anymore. I started forgetting that on Sundays in Brooklyn, I wasn’t who I said I was. You don’t know how easy it was for me to spend time with you and just let myself believe for a while that I really was James Karpov…”

Jaw wired shut, clenched, and you did not respond.

He sighed, a careful look back at his team and he continued.

He told you about the red-haired woman, Natasha, who turned out to be the sales associate from the boutique downtown where you’d bought the lavender dress. She smiled at you in acknowledgement when the heat of embarrassment stung in your cheeks.

You realized that the two men were the same Steve and Sam he’d tell you stories about on your Sundays together; old friends, brothers. A single grain of truth in a web of lies. 

“I knew, even before the gala, that my feelings for you had started to cloud my judgement,” he said slowly, laced with guilt, and your gaze flickered up to him, surprised, though he didn’t notice. You watched the shame seep into his features, his hands clenching at his pant legs. Steve and Sam turned away awkwardly as he continued, “I nearly told you everything that night. When we danced on the balcony and we almost--”

Kissed.

You remembered it well. You had committed the night to memory; to the way his hands felt pressed so delicately to your hips, the gently sway of your bodies, the subtle scent of his shampoo and how warm his breath was as it touched your skin. It was a dream, a fairytale, and you wondered if it was just that; a moment meant for the stories in your library, far away from the cruel realities you’d come to know.

James sighed, a hand brushing over his forehead, pushing away the hair from his eyes and exposing the blush in his cheeks. He was staring down at the floor, chewing painfully on his lip. He didn’t notice the way your features had started to soften, your lips slightly parted as you watched him, heart racing.

“I didn’t know how to make it stop… the way I felt about you,” he confessed, a pained kind of humor in his voice. “I’d never compromised myself like that before. I’d always been able to separate myself completely from the case, where a mask and a new identity like a costume and manipulate my targets without remorse, draw on their strings and tug at their levers. It was my job.”

You flinched; subtle, but as you unclenched your jaw you noticed a pair of green eyes watching you from behind a sweep of auburn hair. She smiled encouragingly before you turned back to James.

“But I never did that with you, Y/n, I swear it on my life,” James pressed, raking his fingers through his hair though it fell back into his eyes. “You… you found a way to push yourself through the cracks in these walls I built up and brought out pieces of myself I hadn’t seen in years. You made me smile again, and gave me something worth fighting for outside of my own damn ambitions, made me believe in a world where things could be different – kinder, maybe. You made me want to be myself again instead of these characters I so often lose myself in. You made me want to relearn who I was and stop hiding in the identities of my enemies.”

He rubbed at his eyes, pinched at the bridge of his nose, and exhaled a breath that provided no relief. “Steve almost threw me off the case entirely when he found out I’d started crossing lines between my cover and the man I wanted you to know me as.”

Your heart skipped at that, eyes flickering up to blue and you watched as he struggled to find his words. He was breathing heavy, hands constantly raking through his hair and there was a slight shakiness as he clenching them back into fists at his side. You’d never see him like this before. Scared.

“Please understand, I couldn’t tell you any of this,” he sighed, scratching his nails along the thighs of his jeans. You noticed rather quickly that he stopped trying to meet your eye. “You have no idea how much I wanted to, how much it was fucking killing me that I couldn’t, especially after--”

He clenched his teeth, stopping himself before he could say it, but you knew what he meant; the night he’d put himself on the line for Peter, how he’d kissed you through broken lips and everything changed. It was evident in the way his friends turned away, giving him space, red tips on the end of Steve’s ears.

“The director thinks I’m a damn fool for bringing you in on this,” he continued, “but, I trust you, Y/n, even if I just destroyed any trust you had in me. I know you and I know you want to see Rumlow brought to justice. I know you want to be free of him and for Peter to be out of Hydra’s control. I still know you and... despite all this, I promise, you still know me, too.”

He seemed to have finished as he allowed a deep, unsettling silence take over. You could vaguely hear the soft ticking of the clocks hanging high on the wall and the exhales of breath coming from across the room. He glanced back at his friends nervously, who offered him nothing but clenched jaws in return, before coming back to you.

“Say something... please,” he asked timidly, desperately.

There was something unpleasant churning in your stomach and you weren’t sure what it was; dread, humiliation, betrayal. Maybe it was something more like the edge of relief, so close you could just barely touch it but it wasn’t yours quite yet. Just beyond your fingertips but still there, still visible, waiting.

You swallowed, letting your hands unclench from the chair and you looked up to find his friends busying themselves with the paperwork on the table; various files on your husband and the company he kept.

You glanced over to the door, the weight of your keys heavy in your pocket. There was a pull urging you to the door, whispering in your ear like a siren’s call to leave, to run and never look back, and fall straight into the darkness you knew. It was familiar at least; a demon you knew by name.

But as you turned your attention back to the man in front of you, watched the way he hung his head in shame, accepting the worst of his fears that in your silence you’d rejected everything you now knew him to be, that call urging you to run seemed a little further away. Drowned out by the overwhelming urge to draw him into your arms, you could no longer hear the voice beckoning you away from the man you’d come to adore, perhaps even love, even if he was a man you weren’t sure you truly knew at all.

“I can’t, um, back off the case,” he started, clearing his throat as his words seemed to give out before he could continue, “but I can give you space. You won’t have to see me unless I’m around your husband. I’ll do what I can to keep my distance but—”

“Stop.”

He froze, head lifting abruptly at the sound of your voice. It was then you realized his eyes had glossed over, reflective with unshed tears, his lower lip nearly chewed raw.

You held his gaze for a moment, searching for the man you knew him to be within the shades of blue you’d come to know so well. The darkest part of yourself wondered if there were pieces that reminded you of your husband in there, if he held the same qualities that allowed Brock to manipulate you and lure you into a false sense of security and love and affection before he ripped it away.

But you’d seen the way James smiled at you from across the room. You’d seen the way the lines around his eyes wrinkled when he laughed. You’d seen the kindness nestled into every touch upon your skin, a warmth in his embrace you hadn’t known in years.

You’d seen grief consume him; pain and the guilt sweeping over his features as he told you the truth of who he was. Facets of a complicated man who was more than just one thing; subtle moments one could not easily fabricate.  

James was not just the man who lied to you. He was not only a man with a name you did not know and a history wiped clean. He was also the man who reminded you what it was like to laugh again, who reminded you that you were stronger than what Brock led you to believe and that you carried more worth than what your husband assigned to you. He was a man who took a beating that could have killed him to spare your sixteen-year-old cousin and gave over every Sunday he had just to listen to you talk and run errands around Brooklyn. 

He was messy and complicated, flawed but human. In the years you’d fallen under Brock’s spell, nothing your husband ever faked even compared to how James treated you. Brock had made himself to be perfectly designed, an impenetrable lie.  

James had been the one to break through his cover of his own volition. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose in doing so; the case, his team, his career... You wouldn’t dare allow yourself to wonder if you were within that list.  

You took a deep breath, steadying your gaze. “I have questions.”

His eyes widened, surprised, but he nodded quickly, brushing his palms on his thighs. “Anything. Anything you want to know. Just ask.”

“So… you’re not Hydra." It wasn’t a question, but you were still seeking confirmation.

“No,” he confirmed quickly. “I’m not.”

“You’re not a hitman. You don’t kill people because Brock tells you to.”

“I’ve killed,” James replied sincerely, “but never for him. I was an army ranger before I was recruited by the FBI. I don’t take a life unless I have to.”

You nodded, trying to find your ground again now. Those were the easy questions, ones with answers you already suspected to be true. It was the next ones you were about to ask that held answers you were truly afraid of. You pushed out a deep breath through your lips, though it trembled on its way out and you felt the shake of it deep in your lungs.

“The copy of A Farewell to Arms… was it yours?”

The question startled him, eyes narrowing for a moment before a soft smile curved at his lips. “Yes. Sam made fun of me relentlessly for digging through my ma’s house for it. I can’t say it had nothing to do with the assignment, because you did open up more after that but... I didn’t do it just because I thought it would help our case. I just thought you'd like it.”

You nodded, taking in his answer. It didn’t relieve the ache in your stomach, but it was something. A piece of the beginning was still intact.

“How much of it was real?” you asked, surprising yourself. The words stumbled out before you could stop them and it wiped the smile from his face almost instantly. It was like a punch straight to his gut, the wind knocked out from under him.

You swallowed, gripping painfully tight into your sweater and trying to avoid ocean blue eyes and the curious stares of his friends. You needed him to say it, needed to hear it out loud, or you might collapse within yourself entirely.

“The times you’d call late at night and we’d watch dateline over the phone or when we bought the lavender dress downtown or dancing on the balcony at the gala. All you did for Peter, every Sunday we spent together... Tell me it wasn’t just for the cover... to get closer to me so I’d tell you secrets about Hydra I didn’t know I had. Tell me it was real... that it was really you and not some character you played. Tell me you’re real. Please.”

You didn’t realize you were crying until James – not-James – threw himself down to his knees in front of you. His hands reached up to your thighs before he froze, hovering, because he didn’t know if it was okay to touch you anymore.

“Sweetheart, please, look at me,” he begged. He finally sat his hands against your thighs, just in an effort to ground you and when you didn’t flinch away, seeming to relax as your heart rate softened, he began to trace delicate patterns with his thumbs.

“Everything -- and I mean this -- everything was real between us,” he implored. There was a redness in the whites of his eyes, a subtle tremor of his lower lip as he tugged it between his teeth. “There were some circumstances that allowed me to run into you when maybe I otherwise wouldn’t have, that let me spend more time with you, but I swear on my life, nothing I ever said to you was scripted, nothing I ever felt for you was forced. Every second I spent with you was the happiest I’ve been in years. I won’t lie to you again. Not ever. Please believe me when I say that what I feel for you is real. It's always been real.”

Sniffling back tears, you let him brush a hand up over your cheek to wipe the wetness away. His lower lip tugged between his teeth in concentration, purposeful to keep the rough edges of calloused palms from touching your skin. He was so gentle, so tender with you, and it was entirely your James, even if he wasn’t.

“It was real, honey. The important parts, those were all real,” he whispered, his voice so achingly sweet it made your heart clench. There was a desperation in his voice, like the very foundation of his soul was etched into every word, his heart sitting within the dissonance. “I am still the man I was yesterday. I’m still him, sweetheart. You haven’t lost me.”

He smiled sweetly at you, though it didn’t quite make it up to his eyes. No, his eyes were filled with a remorse that consumed him whole. The guilt always sitting on the surface, the hesitation in his hands but the longing in his stare, the pain in the pleasure; it made sense now.

When you set your hands on his forearms, it startled him, his eyes darting down to where your touch met. Without a word, you let your hands wonder along his arms, sliding up his shoulders, his neck, to finally cup the sides of his face. Rigid muscles relaxed as you passed them by, his body caving into your touch with ease as his eyes fluttered closed, like he was sinking into the palms of your hands.

You just needed to feel him, remind yourself that he was real, that he was solid and tangible, and right under your fingers. The slight bristles of his beard scratched under your palms, the wrinkles of a shirt creased in his drawers, the divots in his skin from old wounds.

You let out a heavy breath, grazing your thumbs along his jawline, over the healing scar on his right cheek and the discoloration that had long faded to a soft, light pink. Marks of a man who was everything you always believed him to be.

“I don’t know what to call you,” you confessed, a whisper of a smile touching at the edges of your lips and you felt it in your palms as he choked back a sob of relief, jaw trembling under your touch.

He nodded, his hands coming up to rest on your own as he turned his head just slightly enough to press a kiss to the heal of your palm. His eyes were red and glossy, but there was a smile on his lips; it was aching and tired, but it was swollen in relief, like yours.

“For now, just call me James.”

You shook your head. “It’s not your name.”

“It is, actually,” he countered, with a nervous chuckle. He gently pulled your hands from his face and set them into your lap, though he didn’t let go. “It’s technically on my birth certificate and it’s just a coincidence this identity and I shared it in common, but it’s not what my friends call me. It’s not what I want you to know me as when this is finally over.” He paused, a deep breath in a beat later, “I would... I would give anything to hear you say my real name.”

You took in a deep breath, trying not to focus on the gravity of what he said, but it hit like an anvil to your chest. You wondered what his name was, how he might act around you without Brock hanging over your shoulder, how it would feel to be with him in the light of day; no restrictions, no hiding in the shadows, nothing holding you back from one another.

“You… you still want this— us— when the case is over?”

James paused, a sad kind of heartbreak in his eyes that you would even ask such a question. He nodded slowly before he lifted your intertwined hands to his lips and kissed sweetly at your knuckles. “I told you, honey, everything between us was real. I’d give you my whole life if you asked.”

A tear slipped past your eye as a breathy laugh escaped you, a strange mixture of awe and surprise and relief washing through you. You stayed there with him, reveling in the feel of his hands encasing yourself, the touch of his lips to your fingertips, watching as he started to come back into himself, as the guilt faded from his eyes and he was smiling at you with that flicker of light in in the blue of his eyes.

James pulled up a chair beside you, freeing his knees on the hard, cement floors, and you tugged yourself closer to him; thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder. He was still yours.

“So, what happens now?” you asked, glancing to the papers on the table curiously.

“Now,” a voice called from behind him, deep and commanding, and Steve stepped forward, setting a file on the table ahead of you, “you help us bring down your husband.”

You narrowed your eyes, intrigued, and pulled the file into your lap. You thumbed through the pages, eyeing the transcripts, glanced over names of men and women, over the date in the top left corner and the address of the pier scribbled in James’ handwriting.

You set the file back on the table. “You’re planning a raid for the shipment at the end of the month.”

It wasn’t a question and Steve seemed surprised by how quickly you’d gathered that from the information he presented you with. There was no doubt in your mind, you’d do anything they asked if it meant putting Brock behind bars where he belonged.

“What do you need from me?” you asked, hand seeking out James’ and he squeezed it back lightly.

“That we’ll decide when the opportunity presents itself,” Steve responded. “In exchange for your help in this and frankly, all the evidence we’ve gathered based on your unknowing intel… uh, James,” Steve cleared his voice, clearly having to remind himself to use the cover’s name, “has arranged for your immunity.”

Wide eyes met his and he offered you a shy, reassuring smile. The thought hadn’t even crossed your mind. You always assumed that the price it took to bring your husband down meant sinking the ship with you inside. You knew he held a number of charges over your head; it was why you stayed complicit for so long. But now...

“You just have to sign the papers,” James said, sliding a pile of folders across the table to you. There were two stacks and you looked at the second suspiciously before James answered your unspoken question. “I got the judge to sign off on immunity for Peter, too. It was part of my condition before I handed over the shipment log for the raid next month. Wasn’t that hard of a sell, honestly. Peter’s a good kid.”

Lost for words, heart pounding tight in your chest. “You-- what?”

James nodded casually, a slight purse of his lips like he hadn’t just doused you in a relief you hadn't known in years. “Yeah, well, no jury was ever going to convict him anyway, but I figured it was best to cover our bases. I told you I’d watch out for him, didn’t I? Wasn’t going to let you down on that promise. Plus, a kid as good as Peter didn’t deserve to be caught up in all of this. The judge could see that pretty easily.”

He was smiling softly at you but you could hardly breathe. You knew he cared for Peter. It was obvious the night he took a brutal beating for your cousin, but this was something else entirely. This was something far beyond his cover, the identity he wore like a mask, this was him at his core; a man who was true to his word, a man who was decent and kind and good.

He was your James, regardless of his name or the badge he wore.

Without the proper words to thank him, you surged forward, despite his friends standing at the table surrounding you, and kissed him. Hands pressed to his cheeks, lips communicating what words could not, and you only pulled away when you felt him searching for a breath.

His cheeks were burning pink, eyes a little wide as he nervously glanced up at Steve, who had conveniently turned his back. Natasha was smirking in the corner as she attended to the files in her hands, and Sam was sprawled out in the chair across the table, sparing no expense and grinning wildly as he winked at James.

“So, we bring down Hydra,” you said with a proud smirk upon your lips and James’ whole face seemed to light up. “We put Brock behind bars. We end this.”

Steve stepped out from behind the shadows, a hand extended in your direction. Stone cold expression melting into a soft smile, the blue of his eyes kinder than the façade he put forth.

“It’s good to have you on board, Y/n.”

[imjustheretoseetheprivateblogs]

Rayllum Valentines Week Day One: Valentine’s Day (February 14th)

Solemnly, Rayla waited. Waited for the sun to rise. Soon, the day would begin and the most infamous day of the year would begin.

The holiday which little Moonshadow elves still told stories about to scare each other during the darkest of nights during new moons.

The day on which humans celebrated their own dismemberment, presenting the bloody evidence to one another in a macabre show of their passions.

The day as infamous to the elves as the death of Avizandum.

The Day of Valentine.

But today, Rayla was ready. More than ready.

The doors and windows to her and Callum’s adjoining rooms had been barricaded. She’d stockpiled enough provisions to last three people a week and a half, her bed made for an excellent rampart when turned on its side, and she’d set enough improvised traps in the room to make any would be assailant stop long enough for her to disarm them.

Moonshadow elves could do a lot with empty bottles and a few choice dead plants.

But homemade smoke bombs aside, she would have to find Callum and Ezran soon. Callum was just next door, so getting him to safety would be easy, but Ezran was all the way down the hall. Not only would getting to him be dangerous, but getting both the prince and herself back to her fortified room would be too.

But she couldn’t think about that right now. She would never allow Callum or Ezran to be disemboweled by some raving lunatic. They meant too much to her to leave them to some backwards custom humans hadn’t yet out grown.

Suddenly, there was a knock on her door. Rayla steadied her breathing and tightened her grip on her weapon. This was it.

“Rayla? Are you up?”

Callum!

Rayla jumped over her bed and over her trip wires, making a dash for the door. Removing the chair she’d jammed under the doorknob, Rayla opened the door enough to see outside.

“Callum?”

Callum stood in front of her door, a sheepish smile on his face and his hands behind her back.

“Hi Rayla,” he said, wiggling his fingers before returning the hand to behind his back.

“Are you alone?” Rayla asked.

Callum frowned.

“Yes…?” he said, confusion on his face.

“Well, get in here!”

Grabbing him by the collar, Rayla dragged him through the door, slamming it shut behind him. She was briefly aware of something hitting the floor behind him, but paid in no mind. Their survival was her top priority.

“Rayla, is everything al—what happened to your room!?”

Ignoring his question, Rayla unceremoniously picked Callum up bridal style and bounded across the room until they were safe behind her bed.

“There,” Rayla said, dropping him, “we should be safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“Shush.”

Rayla placed a finger over his lips.

“I need your help. You’re safe, but Ezran’s still in his room.”

“He’s not in his room.”

Rayla felt her stomach drop.

“He’s what?”

“He’s outside the castle. You know for Valentine’s Day.”

This was not good. Ezran was outside the castle. Away from Rayla or any of the guards, he could be torn apart by a frenzied mob.

“Stay here,” she said, rising, “I’ll go get him.”

“Rayla, wait.”

Callum made a grab for her arm.

“Don’t try to stop me Callum,” Rayla said.

Callum frowned.

“Stop you? From what?”

Not as agile as she was, Callum opted to take the route around her rampart to talk to her face to face. Which unfortunately meant he would be headed straight for one of her tripwires.

“Callum…!”

All too late, Callum became aware of the line at his feet and the sound of dozens of glass bottles falling from where Rayla had secured them on the ceiling with a web of fishing lines. The air filled with black pepper and dust, sending Callum and Rayla fleeing from the room coughing and rubbing their eyes.

“What the hell was that?” Callum spluttered, “Are we preparing for war?”

“Not,” Rayla said, thumping her chest with a fist, “Valentine’s Day.”

Callum looked like he was about to explain something, only to suddenly slap his hand to his forehead and then sprint down the hall.

Great, Rayla thought, now I have to princes who forgot about self-preservation.

The consternation was short lived, however, as Callum returned, carefully carrying a box in his hands.

“Callum, what’s that?”

Callum blushed and held out the box to her.

“I…I’ve got something for you.”

“Oh, Callum, you didn’t…”

“It’s fine. I wanted to.”

Wanted to? Callum wanted to vivisect his fellow humans?

“I had Barius and Ezran’s help. I… I had to call in some favors but…”

Callum’s eyes shifted around the room, as if there would be words to say written on the walls before finally looking at her again.

“Here,” he said, handing her the parcel, “I was going to give it to you first thing this morning, but I was so nervous, I guess…”

Rayla didn’t hear the rest. She could only stare down at the plain off-white package now in her hands.

The love of her life, a deranged maniac who gave her a box of severed body parts on this most grim of holidays.

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

Rayla looked up, where she found Callum watching her with expectant eyes. Expectant puppy dog eyes no-one could say no to.

Rayla sighed.

Might as well get the mental scarring over with.

Gingerly, she lifted the lid, bracing herself for the stink she knew accompanied pieces of the dead.

Except there were no dead body parts in the box.

Instead, nestled inside the box was a moonberry tart (she could tell from the smell; the non-threatening, non-stinky, delicious smell) and artfully written on top of it, in pieces of dough, was the message ‘For Me, My Elf, and I’.

“Callum,” Rayla said, looking up at him, “I don’t understand.”

Callum’s previously proud expression changed to one of confusion.

“I thought you said you liked the moonberry tart recipe Barius had.”

“No, I do, it’s just…”

Her confusion probably mirrored his own by now.

“Why?”

Callum shrugged.

“It’s Valentine’s Day. This is my Valentine to you.”

“This?”

Rayla looked down at the tart.

“And it’s not made of body parts?”

“Body parts?” Callum asked.

“Because on Valentine’s Day, humans rip hearts and organs out of other humans chest to give to other people they want to sleep with, right?”

For what must have been five minutes, Callum stared at her. Then, as if she’d just told a joke, laughter burst out of him. Rayla scowled.

“Did I miss something?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Callum said, wiping his eyes, “but I think we might need to have a talk about Valentine’s Day.”