#again it really does help pass the time and I have a handy pad when I need to jot notes down

[wurmwizzard]

latest doodles from my tiny little booklet!! carrying around a tiny pad n' my trusty Marshmallow Scented Peeps™ Pen certainly helps pass the time

[tobesolonely]

Y/N and Harry are expecting a baby, and they’re both very impatient.

happy 5k to meee! when I made this account at the height of the pandemic in 2020 to pass the time i would’ve never thought i would’ve made the friends i have or gotten so much support with my writing!! thank you besties! i hope you enjoy! 

warnings: smut

please buy me a coffee to celebrate! :D

. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ – : ✧ : -˚̣⋅ .

“I just don't think we need three different kinds of bottle warmers, love.” 

Y/N looks at her husband looking down at the half-full cart that’s now one bottle warmer fuller. According to every baby blog and “new mom” website she scoured, bottle warmers were a must-have. However, there was no general consensus on the best one. Y/N didn't really see any other option but to try a ton. (Besides, it's not like he couldn’t afford it.)

“Then tell me which one’s the best.” 

Harry's eyebrows wrinkle in confusion. “How would I know which bottle warmer is the best?” 

“How would I know?” 

He opens his mouth to quip back but can't think of anything to say because once again she's right. How would she know?

“Ok, darling,” he resumes pushing the cart through the aisle with a defeated sigh. “You're right.”

A credit card swipe and a short 15-minute car ride later they’re home, depositing all their recent purchases in the half-complete nursery. It was nearly stuffed to the brim with clothes and instructions for toys Harry began assembling but never completed and baby wipes and strollers and now, three different types of bottle warmers that it was a little overwhelming. The good kind, though. 

By the time they finish that, they’re knackered, sprawled out on the couch with the tv playing lowly in the background.

“How does stir fry sound for dinner?” Harry absentmindedly traces over her plush thighs with the pads of his fingers while he seeks her approval. “I don’t think those bell peppers in the fridge have got much longer.”

“Mmm, sounds good,” she cranes her neck up to look at him, not wanting to leave her position on his chest. “Not too spicy, please. I can’t handle it right now.”

“I know, love.”

Y/N knows Harry knows, but she still reminds him anyway. He gently helps her up and guides her to the kitchen, lifting her up on the counter so she could cut up the vegetables while he stood at the stove and cooked the chicken. He’s about to sprinkle a generous amount of red pepper flakes atop the chicken when he remembers her polite request that he doesn't make it too spicy and he sets it down, deciding he’ll add it to his own portion separately.

“I think these are all chopped up.” 

Harry hums and walks over to where Y/N is positioned on the counter to inspect her handy work. Most everything she knows in the kitchen she learned from Harry, and he definitely still teases her about her skills with a knife. At least she tries! 

While the look on Harry’s face tells her he thinks her chopping skills look like that of a ten-year-old, all he says is, “Looks great, darling! You’re so helpful.” (The pregnancy has made Y/N more sensitive than usual and Harry knows she's liable to cry over the tiniest things so he’s been extra sweet to her)

With the chicken now simmering on low, Harry adds the vegetables to the dish and adds a bit of water to help soften it faster, making sure to add a generous amount of seasoning. Y/N appreciated this because she wasn't the biggest fan of vegetables (especially peas and broccoli, which Harry coincidentally loved) so whatever he did to make them even the tiniest bit tastier was helpful.

Twenty minutes later they're enjoying dinner, bowls filled with heaping piles of steaming rice and chicken-veggie stir-fry. Harry stands in between Y/N's legs while she’s sitting on the counter (occasionally giving her bites of his food even though they’re eating the exact same thing).

“Who taught you how to be such a good cook?” Y/N randomly questions in between a mouthful of food. She knows the answer is Anne, but she just likes stroking Harry’s ego sometimes.

“My mum,” he answers. “And lots of practice. I could teach you…”

“I’d rather not.” 

Harry chuckles at his wife’s hatred for cooking. “Luckily for you, it brings me great pleasure to cook for beautiful women,” Y/N narrows her eyes at him, “I mean you. My beautiful woman. Don't give me that look.”

“Are you gonna make baby food from scratch, too?”

Harry raises his eyebrows in consideration, pressing a quick kiss to the tip of Y/N’s nose. “There’s a thought… hadn’t even thought about that. I can do that.”

“I mean, you did say you love cooking for beautiful women.”

“I do,” Harry smiles at his wife for a few moments before the look on his face changes to one of accusation. “Are you trying to tell me something? Did you look?”

“Okay listen, I may have taken a tiny peek at the monitor when we were at the check-up on Tuesday…”

“Y/N!”

“I couldn’t help myself, Harry! I don’t know how you haven’t been going crazy over it,” she absentmindedly rests her hand on her stomach. “If I didn’t know I’d probably be so annoying right now.”

“That’s true. I’m sure you would be.”

Y/N playfully reprimands Harry by swatting his bicep. “You love how annoying I am. It’s why you married me. You said it in your vows, remember? There’s no going back now.”

Harry kisses the side of Y/N’s neck, then travels up to the sweet spot right below her ear before moving to the apples of her cheeks and then finally, her soft lips. “I wouldn’t dream of going back on it. Tell me more about this baby girl we’re having, since you like to ruin surprises.”

“I can’t help my wandering eyes!”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Harry responds sarcastically. “Are we telling people?”

“I think it’ll be fun if we kept it our little secret,” she reaches up to play with the curls at the nape of Harry’s neck. “Maybe we’ll tell your mum and mine. We’ll see.”

“You’re right,” his hand travels up the back of Y/N's shirt. She shivers at the feeling of his cool rings against her warm back, “Instagram post instead?”

“Harry!”

“I’m joking, love!”

“Help me down from here. My butt’s numb.”

“Have you been thinking of names while you’ve gone all this time knowing without me?” Harry easily lifts her off the counter, not removing his hands from her waist even once she’s steady on her feet.

“H, it’s only been two days.” 

“Two days longer than I’ve known,” he bends down just enough to ghost his lips over yours. “Come sit on my lap. Let’s brainstorm.”

Harry gently guides her toward the direction of the living room, plopping down first on the couch so he could pull her into his lap. There was no other place Harry preferred Y/N to be than in his lap whenever he was around her. 

“Are you upset that I peeked when we were supposed to wait?”

His eyes soften. “Of course ‘m not mad. I guess since we’re being honest I may as well admit that I took a peek, too.”

“Harry! Why were you gonna let me think I was the only impatient one?”

“You’re just easy to mess with,” he pulls her flush against his body. “I was gonna see how long I could keep it up, but I can’t do it anymore. I feel too bad.”

“When did you peek?”

“Right after you did.”

Y/N lets out a dramatic gasp, cheeks heating up in embarrassment. “You saw me? I thought I was being sneaky!”

“I’m sorry to say you’re not as sneaky as you think you are,” he fiddles with the strap of her tank top, pushing it down her arm slowly. “I admire the effort though - it’s very cute, love.”

“Thank you,” Y/N cocks her head to the side. “Are you happy? That we’re having a girl?”

“Y/N, I’m so happy that I don’t think I can properly put into words how I’m feeling,” his hands travel along her back. “I’m even happier I’m having a baby with you. I don’t care about anything but having a healthy baby with you.”

“H, you’re gonna make me cry,” Y/N says dramatically, a small pout on her chapped lips. “You’re very cheesy - I love you so much. How did I get so lucky?”

“Would you believe me if I said I asked myself that same question every day when I wake up beside you?” Harry taps her on her side. “C’mon, up you go.”

Y/N lets out a little groan. “Why? I just got comfortable. Your lap is the best seat in the house.”

“Wanna show you how much I love you and how happy I am that you’re giving me a baby girl,” Y/N’s eyes widen as she scrambles off her husbands lap and onto the empty space beside him, legs folding beneath her. “Can I have a taste?”

“I thought we were discussing baby names?” Y/N jokes.

“I think we should do this first,” Harry drops to his knees, “Turn around f’me, darling- on your knees- yeah, just like that,” and immediately attaches his mouth to her clit, giving a firm suck. He quickly moves to her slit and licks up it, collecting her wetness on his tongue. Y/N can tell by his quick pace and sloppy licks that he's feeling plain desperate, and she momentarily wonders to herself how long he's been in this type of mood. 

Almost as if he's read her mind, Harry pulls back and says, “Been wanting to get in between these pretty thighs since we were comparing all those bloody bottle warmers at the store…” before diving back in. She turns to watch as he pokes and prods at her holes with the tip of his tongue, working faster the heavier she begins to breathe. His palm rests on her ass cheek, which also aids in keeping her spread open for him. Harry places three pecks on her clit before removing his mouth from her core just long enough to turn her around so her bottom was on the couch instead.

Harry hooks his right arm under Y/N’s left leg and throws it over his shoulder, using two fingers to rub over her clit. He lowers his head back down and attaches his lips to her bud again, looking up through his lashes at her. Y/N uses her shoulders to support her body weight, using one hand to lift her tank top and tweak her nipples while the other tangles in Harry’s curls. His tongue flicks back and forth over her clit as he locks eyes with her before sticking his middle finger in his mouth and inserting it in her heat.

“Harry, I love you,” Y/N tells her husband breathlessly, voice filled with lust. “I love you so much. I’m so- oh!” 

She lets out a sharp gasp once Harry adds two more fingers in one swift push, easily accommodating to fit his digits. His fingers burn in the best way possible, and she can’t wait to feel his cock. The whole time Harry’s fingering Y/N he’s giving her sweet praises–telling her she always opens up so well for him, that she get so fucking wet, that she tastes sweeter and better than the finest desserts. It’s nearly too much.

“I can’t put into words how much I love you,” Harry whispers as he relentlessly curls his three fingers up over and over again to stimulate that spongy spot deep inside of her. “I want you to cum for me, my love. Cum for me so I can get inside you, hm? Can you do that for me?”

Y/N’s mouth falls open in a silent scream as she releases all over Harry’s fingers, clenching so tightly around him that he has to tell her to relax so he can comfortably pull them out. 

“S’fuckin’ tight…” he mutters moreso to himself, pulling his joggers and boxers down to his ankles in one swift go. “All mine?”

“All yours,” she responds so quickly she nearly sounds pathetic. “Please, H. Just give it to me please-”

Harry pushes Y/N up and back onto the couch so her back is against the armrest. “Comfortable?”

Y/N’s heart swells a tiny bit at her husbands concern for her comfort even when he was having her in such a filthy state. “Very. Please fuck me.”

Harry slips himself inside Y/N’s warm heat, letting out a quiet groan of relief at the feeling. Y/N whimpers and locks her legs around Harry and he takes that as his cue to move. He slides out nearly all the way before slamming his hips back inside her, grunting loudy in pleasure.

“That’s a good girl…just take it, darling,” he snaps his hips quickly into her, skin slapping against skin. “Lay there and take it like a good girl…My good girl…”

Tiny moans esacpe Y/N’s mouth and she doesn’t try to suppress them in the slightest, wanting her husband to hear how good he was making her feel. He always made her feel good, always put her pleasure first.

“My clit, p-please,” Y/N stutters out, reaching for Harry’s hand so she can place it at her core. Harry places his hand at her core and begins rubbing in hard, tight circles, knowing exactly how to stroke Y/N to bring her to her release.

“Tell me how good it feels.”

“So, so good. Gonna cum, H,” Y/N moans, bucking her hips up so they meet Harry’s. “Don’t stop H, please don’t stop!”

“Yeah? You’re there, angel?” his thrusts become impossibly faster. “Me too, baby. You first. Cum for me, Y/N.”

Y/N orgasms for the second time that night, waves of pleasure washing over her body that satisfy her in the best way possible. Harry’s not far behind her - his hips stutter to a stop before he lays his weight on top of her and cums, being mindful not to lay directly atop her bump.

The couple lay in silence for what feels like ages, basking in the afterglow of their sex and orgasms. Harry places a chaste kiss to the top of Y/N’s head before gently untangling himself from her, already thinking about which bath bomb he wanted to use when he went upstairs to run her a bath in a moment. 

“So, about those baby names…”

. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ⊹ ⭒ – : ✧ : -˚̣⋅ .

Please let me know what you think! and please buy me a coffee to celebrate! :D

[eremiie]

hbd cornelius springer <3

❥ nsfw | 3.2k words | connie x fem!reader

❥ content - blowjob

❥ the birthday boy deserves some birthday head!!!

happy birthday connie springer, and happy belated birthday @arlerted ily both a whole lot <3... i started this at like 4am so pls bare with this

"you enjoying your birthday?"

connie turns around at the sound of your voice, soda can in hand while he closes the fridge door.

the way his face lights up when he connects your voice to your face makes you beam. his eyes get wide, eyebrows rise up, and a crooked smile graces his features as you walk forth, your hand trailing against the kitchen counter.

it makes you smile, the ways he's immediately stoked to see you. it's endearing if anything and your heart flutters at the excitement that twinkles in his eyes at your appearance.

"duh... yeah of course i like it."

"duh... yeah of course i like it."

"duh... yeah of course i like it."

his stupid smile shifts into a small smirk and he picks up his drink to take another sip. "what're you lookin' at?"

seriously? were you that obvious?

he leans back against the corner of the kitchen counter, twirling the soda can in his hand to shake his drink up while steadying himself with his elbows. you can tell the question was one he was genuinely waiting on an answer for— it was to just rile you up and one for him to shrug off with a 'just messin'.

you roll your eyes. there was no reason to give him an ego. "your ugly party hat." your tone is snarky, and a breathy laugh leaves connie's throat as he shakes his head at you. he beckons with two slender fingers.

"come 'ere."

your stomach turns at the gesture— no at the sentence and you curse the slight stubbornness that keeps you standing where you stood with your arms crossed. "what?"

connie holds your gaze easily, and instead of giving you an answer his hand reaches out to pull you towards him by your forearm.

you stumble forward until you were situated between his feet, a strong hand encasing your wrists and his breath fanning across your face from the proximity of you and connie.

his eyes look more hazel up close, green and yellow dancing like a fiery bright fire. you can feel the denim of his jeans rub against the fat flesh of your thighs from where you stand, and connie makes no effort to move back.

it's a clear invasion of your space but neither you or him seem to mind— and you hope connie didn't take the way your heart jumps in your chest and your suddenly uneven breathing as a sign that you did mind. no, it was the exact opposite of that if anything.

"are you enjoying the party?" his voice comes out a little too smooth for your liking. where was the slight cracks in his voice as he spoke or the lilts in his tone as he tried his best to be a flirt?

the way he looks at you doesn't help. his eyes are low lying, having trouble staying focused on only just yours. you notice them flit a little lower every now and then before popping back up to match your gaze.

you hoped you came off as unbothered— stable and unfazed by his sudden demeanor. if it wasn't obvious by now your slight attraction to connie was something that you couldn't seem to let go of ever since you had first met him.

you hated how goofy he was and how the lame jokes he'd crack would always make you laugh regardless of how stupid. you hated how  somehow he'd always coerce you to do the handy work when it came to class projects because he was too lazy to get up off his own ass and help you. you hated how even through all these little silly quirks of his if he really wanted to with a few slip ups here and there he could make the hairs on your arms stand and have you stop breathing just from a slick look and slick sentence.

you hated all these things because they all made you feel gushy inside no matter how dumb it was. they made your body warm and gave you this comforting feeling that you couldn't get from anyone else.

so when connie repeats another "hm?" catching you off guard for the second time, that warm feeling returns because this time the pads of his fingers drum against your shoulder, a little to close to the junction near your neck.

"as long as ymir and sash keep me entertained, then yeah. this little 'party' isn't that bad." your quick with your response this time once he sets you back on track and you calm a bit.

"so ymir 'n sash are the life of the party for ya?" he pouts, and you scrunch your nose up when he leans in a little more, a mock pitiful expression on his face. "damn, 'n i'm supposed to be the birthday boy... that's crazy."

you can tell he's a little under the influence. despite it being his birthday he was actual one out of a few to keep their drinking at a light tonight. you couldn't say the same for armin who was currently passed out and curled up at the safety of mikasa's side on the large sofa, or for reiner who was last crying to ymir before she managed to 'shut the fuck up jockey' him as you walked pass.

you liked it like this though, liked to know that the interactions between you and connie weren't entirely the alcohol talking.

but it wasn't like it was ever really anything but him talking when he got more than comfortable with you.

light touches up the soft skin of your thighs, moving you around by placing his hands on your waist (where you must say they fit like a puzzle), or attacking you in tickles when he decided to crash at you and sasha's place and you wouldn't pass up the remote.

those were all connie, but it was nice to know that the person in front of you was mostly connie as well.

"you are... you just haven't been keeping me company as you should have." you lift up a hand right in front of his face and pretend to inspect your nails before dropping four fingers down to your palm and turning your nails to you once again.

connie let's out a low laugh at the gesture before using his own palm to cup the top of your hand. you expect him to push it down and let go but he only holds it in his grip with that same dumb smile plastered on his face as he doesn't fail to keep eye contact with you.

"ha-ha, so funny. you act like we didn't dance together," you recall the memory of connie hoisting you up from the couch and spinning you around until your backside was pressed against him, asking you to 'dance'. if anything that encounter is probably what encouraged the tingle between your legs and pushed you to follow connie into the kitchen. "sit together for like a good ass while, and play cards together— cheating together i might add."

you giggle, "did eren not realize that practically half the deck was under my ass and in your pockets?" connie reciprocates your giggle in his cheery tone and he raises the soda can to his lips again to empty it out inside his mouth.

"nah, but for real, what more company do you need?"

in the back of your head you had a solid idea of the kind of company you needed from connie, but you weren't even sure if your mind was quick enough to formulate it into a sentence that sounded appealing to the ears, enticing even.

a dramatic sigh leaves your lips and your hands come up to connie's head, one index plucking at the thin string below his chin and the other one holding the loud party hat until you were pulling it off and fiddling with it in your hand.

connie's hand automatically comes to rub at the short grey strands with a small frown at the absence of his hat. he stands up straight so he's peering down at you and his arm swings over your shoulder as he begins walking the two of you towards the exit to the kitchen abandoning his empty can of soda. "what?"

you slow down your pace so that he slows down and pull his arm from around you just as quickly as he placed it there massaging his knuckles in the process.

the eagerness to stay alone with him and not go back out where the chatters of all your friends would become tenfold is what makes you more bold, is what makes you back connie up towards the kitchen island until your practically leaning on him with doe eyes, fluttering your lashes and saying, "just wanna be alone with you for a minute..." you hesitate for a moment before beginning to speak again, "i gotta present for you, but we gotta go upstairs."

it's like your words alone manage to somewhat crack the demeanor he had going on. how his mouth slightly parts and how his body tenses up slightly tells you. you're thankful for the small adrenaline rush a measly walk to the archway gave you.

"shit, what's upstairs?" you relish in how he feeds into your words instead of stuttering under pressure and his hand moves to the small of your back pulling you even closer.

it's noticeable that he likes to feel your skin on his, and his hands are warm against the skin of your hip, practically singeing it with just his touch. it sends a hot feeling throughout your body and you indulge in him some more, fully enveloping your hand with his free one and giving a nice smile.

"if you come with me then it'll be me and you," and he lets you pull him along like a dog on a leash, sticking as close to its owner as possible as he's so close behind you that you can feel him up against your back as you begin to nonchalantly walk past your group of friends conversing in the living room.

for you it's easy to ignore their remarks and looks of 'finally'. after all, you knew they were coming. but connie couldn't, shooting silly faces to his audience as he lets you pull him along.

"they're finally fucking."

"go, birthday boy!"

"gettin' some birthday pussy!"

"_______, bite his dick off for me!"

the only phrase to elicit some sort of reaction from you is the mumbly one from sasha from whatever was in her mouth as she encouraged you to injure connie.

all the phrases seem to get one out of connie, from him pretending to fuck you from behind causing you to pinch the tan skin of his wrist to him making kissy faces at jean, eren, and even to ymir who further encouraged you to take a chomp out of his little friend.

you lead him through his bedroom door, immediately locking it because you know he'll forget and then turning to face him again.

when you turn back around connie's still looming over you, his hands lankily at his sides and it's as if he doesn't know what to do with them.

it makes you titter, and you take a step towards him pulling at his wrists place his hands back on your hips. "so what's my present?"

your hands come up to come his face and his skin is soft under your touch. he's warm and his breathing is unsteady as you lean forward to press your lips onto his.

he quickly returns the kiss, more fervently than you if anything. connie immediately groans as if the feeling of your lips on his was something he was craving.

connie pushes you against the door, a small thud eliciting from the way your back hits it and he lets go of your hips to cup your face and bring you deeper into the kiss.

the way he presses up so close against you makes you part your lips slightly giving him enough time to slip his tongue into your mouth until it's slotted alongside yours.

his knee parts your legs and bump against your crotch making you moan and let go of his face, holding onto his shoulders instead.

you pull back to breathe for a brief moment— and connie's eyes are overcast with lust. he doesn't have that twinkle from earlier and his grip on your hips is tighter than it was a few seconds ago.

he breathes heavily and rests his forehead against yours then dropping his knee. "that wasn't all i get for my birthday, right?"

with another roll of your eyes you shake your head. "it'd be a little rude of me to leave you like this, yeah?"

you slide down the wall until your knees hit the carpet and sit back on your shins. your delicate hands slide down connie's chest until the tips of your fingers are brushing over the buckle of his belt.

"yeah," connie's eyes flutter shut and he places a hand on the door to once again steady himself. "'d be real fuckin' rude of you."

your hands make work of his belt, unclasping the loop, unzipping the zipper and unbuttoning his pants to begin shrugging down the denim.

you had barely even started doing anything yet connie's mouth was slightly parted in anticipation. it was amusing how even the slightest touch from you could elicit a reaction out of him.

you pride yourself in this, and you take your time letting your fingertips massage the length of connie's clothed cock beneath his boxers. his body stutters overtop of you for a quick second and you move your hands to the hem of his boxers to begin pulling them down.

he's pretty; a slightly flushed tip that complimented the tan color of his skin. he's clearly already hard and you swear when your hand wraps around him his dick twitches in your touch. "god," he mumbles.

his dick is heavy in your hand, and he's thick to the touch. with a few test pumps you prop yourself up on your knees once more and place a hand over his thigh. "c'mon," his tone is encouraging yet hurrying, needy.

you click your tongue at him before using it to kitten lip his tip, like you were just trying to get a taste. connie hisses above you and drops his hand down to the top of your head.

"c'mon, we can't take too long with everyone still down there."

you know he's only saying so because he wants to feel your mouth around him. he's only being needy because it's something he'd been craving over the course of a few months. you are something he had been craving and now that you were under him he wanted all of you, starting with what you were willing to give which happened to be your pretty throat.

nevertheless, he's the birthday boy and you want to help pleasure him, making him feel a euphoric feeling that you know he's longed for.

you stick your tongue out and slap his tip against the flat of your tongue, and connie lets out another short groan, his fingers scrunching your hair.

connie shudders from above you and you almost feel bad for teasing him. you let the warmth of your mouth consume him completely— well, as far as you can while your hand works at the remainder.

"yeah, yeah..." he hums and he opens his eyes  again to look down at you.

your mouth around him felt heavenly, and the image of you sucking him off was even better; cheeks hollowed out and hand pumping his length.

you were so pretty.

connie brings the hand in your hand down to your cheek to feel himself through the skin, his tip pressed up against the inside of your cheek as he slightly rolls his hips forward to fuck in your mouth gently.

you pull off of him, pushing spit to the front of your mouth and letting your saliva drip onto his cock.

"fuck, you can't do that," he whines and rubs his tip against your lips until you open up again for him and his hand returns to your hair. "stick your tongue out."

you obey. using the leverage he has on your locks, he pushes deeper into your mouth, bobbing your head as he thrusts forward. small moans leave connie's lips. he's infatuated with the way your tongue slides against his underside as you try your best to relax your throat to let him in.

he loves it, loves how your mouth is so wet and sloppy around him, how it feels so good to be inside you— and he wants to feel every part of you, not stopping at your mouth.

saliva drips from the corner of your mouth and you try to suppress the gags that try to come up. you whimper from underneath connie, and he pulls out to give you a minute to breath.

it's funny how he's breathing harder then you his chest heaving. "that fuckin' mouth,"

you give a slight smile at the compliment, pleased to know you were pleasing him.

"i need it s'more."

what kind of person would you be if you didn't give the birthday boy what he wanted?

so you give him more, using connie's thighs to keep yourself steady, relaxing yourself and breathing through your nose as you let connie fuck your mouth.

he becomes erratic, the grip he has on your hair is slightly painful but you know he's too caught up in his lust, too caught up in the haven that was your throat.

he's so lost in the pleasure that he doesn't warn you when he's about to cum and you only know by the way his cum spills down your throat making you cough and pull off of him.

what you could only assume was a "sorry" comes from him as he calms down, pulling up his boxers and jeans but forgetting to buckle his belt. his hand reached out for you to grab it.

you take it and he pulls you up until you're almost at his height again, that same dumb smile on his face. "did you like your present?" you hum after you clear your throat.

"duh..." his thumb comes up to wipe at the saliva around your mouth before pushing the digit between your lips. you waste no time entertaining him, sucking your spit up and popping off of his thumb. "you thinkin' you could gimme something else though?"

you snort, "what happened to we couldn't take too long cause everyone's downstairs?"

"i'm still hard, it's my birthday, i really don't give a fuck who's downstairs." his words contradict his earlier statement but you brush it off, pulling him by the string of his jacket and pressing another peck to his lips.

"get in the bed birthday boy."

[mrskurono]

Hello. I don't really know if your request are open but I was wondering could you do something with Dr stone where you get your period and the see blood dripping down your clothes.in the stone age and you have to explain it to the gang or something like . Sorry if it's to much

a/n: Yesss a Dr. Stone request! I took it more of "How they react to your period" so I hope you don't mind ♡

type: headcanons tags: fem!reader, blood mention, menstrual cycle mention, cramps, etc. character(s): Senku, Kohaku, Chrome, Gen, Kinro, Ginro (dcst)

Senku Ishigami

He is anything but resourceful

In the most tactful way possible, chances are Senku has already marked your cycle down mentally

For both preparation sake annnnd to lowkey understand possible affects of petrification on the human body

He's Senku the verdicts still up on if he's creepy or considerate

"Keep this with you. You'll probably need it."

A kind of Senku themed way to pass on the handful of sea sponges he had Taiju collect prior as well as the best makeshift pad he could manage

He's not wrong though so it's hard to be angry with him

Senku isn't grossed out by any of it and talks quite frank with you if you need help but that's about as far as his ability to help goes

If aches keep you up at night though he will sit and rub your back

But will then raid the shed of science for any medicinal means the next morning because Senku doesn't like anyone having sleepless nights

Kohaku

Just like hers monthly, yours also surprises her right outta the blue

"You're bleeding!"

Tactless when she realizes what it is dripping down your thigh and then asks for forgiveness

Every single month she does this

Kohaku is very prompt at offering relief for anything you need

Including getting spring water to soak in as well as rubbing your back as much as you need

As for stopping the blood?

She's utterly useless

But she is very good at keeping people away from you and tending to your needs

Almost like a protective lioness

Until the following month and it surprises her all over again

Chrome

He tries, he really really does try. But alas he is sometimes a caveman

"Shit your bleeding! Wait wait wait- Oh crap you're on your period!"

Thank you sir points out the obvious a lot

Chrome is still a good balance of helpful science and tender bed side manner when it boils down to it

Aside from a perfect chance to test out different herbal routes he's gathered over the years, Chrome also has figured out good absorbent material that can at least make it look less like a blood bath

And any good science man isn't squeamish so clean up is just part of it with him

Chrome isn't as well versed in modern remedies but he understands tried and trusted ones

Heat, back rubs and good food

He'll probably get yelled at a few times for being too loud but Chrome's hearts in the right place every month no matter what weird contraction he ends up presenting you with

Gen Asagiri

Shit head

"Looks like you might as well opt for a red ensemble in the stone age my dear."

Though underhanded, Gen won't make a scene with you've unfortunately miscounted and end up sat in a puddle of blood

Perhaps the only time his slight of hand comes in handy in fact

When he's getting everyone to pay attention to him while you get a chance to leave without a scene

Gen can't offer primitive kotex or natures midol but he can offer surprisingly good company

Might be a lowkey reason to lay around all day eating disguised as companionship

He figures out when to shut up quicker than Chrome though and that's almost worth it's weight in gold in this group

Extremely good at keeping anything to triggering away and the loudness down to a minimum

The only time his showmanship seems to be handy is when you want a quiet day eating ramen

Ginro

It goes as poorly as imagined

Everyone knows you're on your period

If Ginro knows, everyone knows

Panic sets in probably worse for him seeing any form of blood painting your thighs and/or clothes than it does for you

Think of him as an annoying alarm clock letting you know your cycle started

As prompt as he is to freak that you're bleeding, he's equally prompted to be grossed out by it

By no fault of his own, Ginro thinks everything is gross but PMS doesn't reason with stupid well

Being forward with your needs and sharp tongued is probably you're best bet with him

And once Ginro figures out it isn't contagious and isn't deadly, he does make a fairly decent human shaped hot water bottle to lay on

After you threaten him with real blood spill that is

Kinro

This are stone men ok, please, they're trying

Kinro is onset panicky as his brother is but with less of the gross out factor

The blood worries him, you're dip in mood worries him, everything about it worries him

Followed with absolutely no idea how to provide solutions or what rules to follow to make it through this

Leaving Kinro to defer to you almost entirely (still with a slightly worried look on his face the entire time)

Doesn't find anything overtly icky like his brother does but Kinro is still very prompt in getting you washed off as soon as possible

Will sheepishly ask Chrome and Senku for advice

To which both of them could possibly be useless depending on the day

Kinro still tries though and if you need it he'll get it

Benefit of Kinro? Amazing hugs and very warm hands that he will happily set on your back or stomach if you ask

[legoshi-plz]

So I was wondering if I could get some period cramps comfort hcs with Legoshi and Louis please? (Also whatever animal u want is fine)

I had a couple of ideas for this but the indication of a period kinda means the reader would more than likely be coded as fem and I wanted everyone to feel included so I also did a version of them taking care of their significant other when they’re sick in general (like a cold or something).

Warning: NSFW-ish Elements

//////

Louis:

Period Discomfort:

- Growing up with only Oguma and himself, he’s never experienced seeing someone go through a period ever so he has no clue how to deal with it.

- If you want any empathy from him you’re going to have to explain it to him and how painful it is for you. He might think you’re exaggerating at first but once he actually sees you in pain, he’ll start to believe it.

- Thinks money solves everything and just buys whatever he thinks you’ll need and has it delivered to you. Thoughtful yes, however you end up with a lot of menstrual products you dont use and chocolate you won’t eat because Louis just went ahead and bought everything he saw instead of actually asking you what you about brands, sizes, etc.

- Not the type to comfort you physically. He actually really hates the smell of blood and his super sensitive nose always can pick up on it. He won’t go out of his way to avoid you because it’s you and you could never repulse him but he’s not the “let’s cuddle up on the couch and watch sappy movies” type either.

- Overall avoids the situation. Not the best in this subject but is doing the best he can in his comfort zone.

Sick S/O:

- Not very good at reading preemptive symptoms. Won’t realize that you’re sick until you’re nearly hacking up a lung or fainting from fatigue.

- But once he does realize you’re not well, he insists that you get some rest and don’t push yourself. Won’t take no for an answer.

- Again thinks the best way is to throw money at a situation so buys you the best medicine, heating pad, etc. Will also take you to the doctor and if you’re too weak or unwilling, will have his personal doctor make a house call.

- Stays with you while you’re sleeping. When you wake up and try to stop him, he insists your germs won’t affect him and he can’t get sick (they totally do and he totally does).

- Overall more equipped in this subject but can be pretty strict/ annoying in your recovery (he’s lost a lot of people okay? He refuses to lose you too, especially to something like this if he can prevent it)

Legoshi:

Period Discomfort:

- His Canine senses always let him know when you’re on your period (plus he can like.... smell the blood but he’s too polite to point that out + blood is the farthest thing from unpleasant to Carnivores).

- By far the best in these type of situations. Does a ton of research and also outright asks you what he can do for you. Really attentive to you and your needs.

- Wanna listen to sad music under LED lights and just vibe out? He’s right there with your fave playlist. Wanna cuddle up on the couch and watch sad movies? He’s already got it started along with a pint of your favorite ice cream.

- Just overall Boyfriend of the year when it comes to this.

Sick S/O:

- Yep, he’s also an expert on his significant other being sick too (Go figure, right?)

- Makes homemade Soup/ Broth to soothe your throat. Runs you a warm bath to try and break the fever. Makes you take some medicines but also uses a lot of home remedies and practices he’s learned from Gosha growing up.

- Also claims he won’t get sick but unlike Louis, he actually doesn’t because he has a pretty strong immune system as a Grey Wolf. Able to stay by your side the whole time and will unless you asks for some space, which he’ll give but he’ll worry about you the whole time he’s gone.

- Overall has a tendency to hover but means well and is very knowledgeable about your recovery. Will have you feeling better the fastest.

Juno:

Period Discomfort:

- Certified expert in this subject. Knows exactly what you’re going through and knows exactly how to deal with it. Will know what you want/ need before you even know yourself.

- Always has Pads and Tampons handy. Always knows the exact size and kind to get.

- Offers advice to ease the pain you’d never even thought of before such as stretching and doing Yoga (and of course you two do Yoga together/ she helps you stretch. The close contact can be pretty intimate which you’ll love if you crave touch during your period.)

- However, if you and Juno’s periods ever sync up, she’s not going to be the most pleasant to be around, it’s best the two of you just avoid each other.

Sick S/O:

- Loves to play nurse but not actually all that great in making you feel better. Definitely has a sexy nurse’s costume that she likes to put on while caring for you.

- A lot of head pats and hand holding with a few “We’re gonna get through this,” sprinkled on there so yeah basically not helpful at all.

- Will go get you medicine or anything else you need but you have to tell her EXACTLY what to get, she’s not great at following directions okay

- Like Legoshi, being a Grey Wolf means she’s hardly ever sick... like EVER. She has hardly any experience in this field.

Riz:

Period Discomfort:

- By far the most touchy-feely when you’re on your period. He loves the smell of blood and he thinks you smell delicious. Usually a very chill, easygoing guy but becomes uncharacteristically clingy during this time.

- Never gets tampons or pads because he’s too busy eating you out or shoving his fat cock inside you.

- Thinks his dick is the cure to all of your needs and in this case he’s kinda right because period sex actually does help relieve like 80% of your symptoms.

- Fucks softer than he normally would but he’s nearly insatiable, especially when he’s high off your blood so you’re nearly on the verge of passing out from exhaustion.

- Once you’re too tired to continue, he’s still right there by your side, his arms permanently latched around you. He seriously can’t get enough of you when you’re like this, your period hormones have him even more lovestruck than he already is.

- Will draw you a bath after sex, carry you to the tub, and personally wash every inch of you. Anything to touch you at this point. Doesn’t join though because he doesn’t wanna reveal how such a seemingly innocent act gets him so hard.

- Overall has a pretty unconventional approach to period care but it makes you feel better all the same and you know it’s coming from a true place of love (and a little lust).

Sick S/O:

- Much more tame when it comes to caring for a sick S/O because the hormones you secrete during your period aren’t fogging his judgement.

- Still very touchy-feely but in a non-sexual way. Likes to lay you on top of him and hold you to help get rid of your chills. Also gives the BEST massages to relieve the ache in your joints.

- Believes honey is an end all be all cure to any illness and puts it in/on literally everything. Though it does help soothe your throat, you still end up sending him to the store to pick up some more potent remedies.

- Next to honey, he thinks sleep/rest is the answer to near everything (because he’s a bear and hibernating is their go to for any ailment) so he also adds sleep inducers to your tea, food, etc. to get you to sleep off the cold. You don’t mind because it actually does help (also he always tells you ahead of time that it’s in there)

- Overall a good caretaker in this department even if some of his actions can seem a little antiquated or stereotypical for Bears.

Gouhin:

Period Discomfort:

- He’s surprisingly a lot like Riz in this department (which actually isn’t all that surprising since they’re both bears). He’s got a sensitive nose and your hormones really mess with his head and kick him into overdrive.

- This isn’t his first rodeo with his partners’ periods so he does have some experience in this field to help keep him under control.

- Will indulge in period sex but only if his partner asks for it/ brings it up first. He knows that’s a slippery slope, especially with his kind and with his self-control so he doesn’t seek it out first. (Can’t deny that he loves when you do ask for it though)

- Knows all the tricks of the trade in helping you feel better non-sexually and indulges you when he has time but since he’s pretty busy with clients and stuff, he hardly ever has time for the aspects that require him physically being there (such as cuddling, massages, etc.)

- Pretty average in this department because he’s older so he doesn’t have time to really baby you through this the way you might want him to.

Sick S/O:

- Deals with his S/O being sick very similar to how he deals with period discomfort.

- He’s a medical professional so he tends to just get you some medicine that actually works instead of incorporating home remedies that end up taking longer, in his opinion.

- Can be a little irritating when he walks around in the morning time with his shirt off looking like the embodiment of health and toned abs, sipping on his bamboo smoothie while you feel like you’re on your deathbed.

- Tells you to get plenty rest, drink plenty fluids, take the medicine he leaves for you but he’s not there to really enforce it because he leaves in the morning for work and doesn’t get back until super late at night. You usually fall asleep and forget to wake up to do anything he told you to. He’s not upset and not really the punishment type in the first place so there are no real repercussions, he just reminds you again the next day to do it if you want to feel better faster.

- Overall, has a pretty neutral/indifferent approach to this because he’s seeing the situation through the lens of professionalism, so some aspects you really crave such as physical contact or general affection, he falls short in.

Bill:

Period Discomfort:

- Don’t call him.

- Thinks periods are gross and does NOT want to be around you if you’re on yours.

- The only way he’d reach out to you during this time is if he was horny and wanted you to use your mouth to get him off.

- A terrible guy who you should block tbh :/

Sick S/O:

- Says things like “Hang in there champ,” and that’s pretty much it.

- If you sneeze around him or cough near him, he’ll think it’s gross and proceed to avoid you.

- Why do you even bother with him again?

[ahkaahshi]

how they handle the wedding planning process [scenarios]

pairings: hirugami sachirou; oikawa tooru; miya osamu x fem reader

genre: fluff, humor

warning(s): two swear words. that’s it, surprisingly enough.

Hirugami is well known for being cool as a cucumber under the most intense of conditions. It’s a skill he's refined over the years, and, boy, does it come in handy during the wedding planning process. If you’re stressed, he’s there to calm you down. If you’re doubting decisions you’ve made about your dress, venue, food, or literally anything else, he’s there to reassure you that right or wrong doesn’t matter, as long as the two of you are happy together and in agreement.

Not only is he a seasoned professional in the arts of remaining calm, but he’s also a skilled crafter. Yes, that’s right. This man will go HAM in the arts and crafts department. Think you need to hire someone to make cute invitations and a table decorations? Think again. Hirugami’s on it, and at only the cost of a few kisses an hour. If he’s workin’ overtime, he might request a lil shoulder rub every now and then, but talk about a good rate! Plus, he does a great job and you know what he makes is special because he put his heart into it.

“How’s it going, Sachirou?” you ask with a gentle sigh as you walk into the living room from the kitchen with a bag of chips in hand.

From where he’s sitting on the floor, focused on his work, he lifts his head and directs a gentle smile your way. “Good. I’m almost done with the invitations now,” he responds and returns to his duties once more.

With half a chip in your mouth, you pause for a moment to marvel at the sight before you. At the center of a sea of craft supplies sits your tall fiancé, looking calm and controlled as ever while his nimble fingers place appliqué decorations onto one of the many strips of paper in front of him. He’s wearing golden glitter on his cheeks like war paint and has his crafting weapons--paint, brushes, markers, and ribbon--neatly arranged within arm’s reach. The way he grabs what he needs without glancing away from his work for a second reveals just how much time he’s spent on this project.

Feeling your heart warm at his efforts, you continue walking through the room so you can carefully sit down beside him and spend some time with him. You don’t even have to utter a word for him to know you’re stressed.

“Just get off the phone with your mom?” he wonders. Your arrival warrants a break, so he backs away from his project for a moment and sticks his hand in the bag of chips you’re cradling.

You nod in response to his inquiry and mention, “She’s been driving me up the wall about all the little details. I know she means well, and all, but she’s just stressing me out.”

A hum echoes from behind his lips as his eyes move to yours. You think he’s going to say something reassuring or inspirational once he's finished munching, but, instead, he dips his fingertips into a container of glitter and spreads it across your cheeks in two, long swipes.

Eyebrows furrowed in confusion, you murmur, “What the heck are you doing, Sachirou? I need you to stay sane.”

“(L/n), (f/n)--soon to be Hirugami (f/n)--you are now a wedding warrior,” he announces, an amused grin forming across his lips. A moment of silence passes as you mentally question his state of mind. Maybe he hadn’t been the same since he’d left for the craft store earlier. “Which means,” he continues, pausing to press a kiss against your lips, “you’re strong and you can do this, okay? We’re in this together, so I’m right here with you, baby.”

His words and actions bring that reassurance that you’d been seeking in a goofier way than you’d anticipated, but one that you appreciated nonetheless. You utter a gentle promise of love to him that he returns and seals with another kiss placed on your forehead.

“Should I let you get back to work, then, wedding warrior?” you ask.

He nods and replies, “I’ll collect all my hourly kisses when I’m done.”

Oikawa is a methodical guy who always wants to be in control. Because of this, he’ll be just as hands-on in the wedding planning process as you are. In fact, there will be multiple times when you’ll have to tell him to step down, or you’ll argue because of your competing visions. However, his love for you will trump any desire of his to “win”--in terms of disagreements over certain aspects of your wedding--and he’ll always want to pick the option that will make you happy. Though, keep in mind, it may take him a bit of time to understand your point of view and come to terms with it.

While having a helicopter mom of a wedding planner for a fiancé might not be every woman’s dream, he is very helpful and you can always be assured that you’ll never have to shoulder the entire burden of the process yourself. It’s tiring! You don’t want to do it all by yourself, and that’s why you can be thankful that you have someone to share the workload with. If he’s busy at practice/training over the weekend, he knows that you’re working hard at home. Likewise, while you’re at work, you know you can trust him to get things done in your absence. He won’t let anything slip through the cracks, so you’ll never have to worry about the job getting done or any details being forgotten. You’ll just have to make sure you’re planning a wedding for the both of you, not for just one of you.

“No, I don’t like those floral arrangements for the tables.”

Oikawa’s lips settle into a frown upon hearing you express your discontentment with his idea. “Well, I don’t like the arrangement you like, either, (f/n)-chan, so what do you wanna do, then?” he grumbles.

As your gaze wanders around the shop filled to the brim with different varieties of flora and fauna, you take a deep breath of the air tinged with the potent scent of roses. You don’t like the way your fiancé’s looking at you right now or how he has his arms crossed in front of his toned chest as his foot taps against the floor with impatience.

“Tooru,” you groan quietly and shoot a withering glance towards his shoe, “Come on. These aren’t the only options we have.”

He retorts, “But we really don’t have the time to spend looking for another florist. And I think these arrangements are perfect. They match our color scheme and they look classy.”

You shake your head and take your bottom lip between your teeth. “I’m sorry; they’re just not what I envisioned. Besides, we don’t have to find another florist. Why don’t we just go around the shop with him and pick out some flowers we both like?”

There’s a long silence as he wrestles with the idea of compromise and his pride. Getting him to sacrifice the latter is harder than pulling a chew toy out of a pit bull’s mouth. But, for you, he’s willing to entertain the idea that he doesn’t always have to be right, since what he always wants is for you to be happy.

After a few moments pass, the expression on his face softens and his hand finds yours. He takes a long look at the engagement ring glittering on your finger before he presses a gentle kiss against the back of your hand and gives it a squeeze. “Okay,” he concedes, “let’s do that.”

A small smile graces your lips as you peck his cheek and give him a soft pat on the shoulder. “I know you just want everything to be perfect, baby, but let’s work together, okay?”

He murmurs in agreement and plants another kiss on your lips. “As long as I can have my milk bread on the menu, there’s no need to worry.”

“I’m glad your milk bread is worth the cost of including those embarrassing baby photos of you in the slideshow.”

“Don’t remind me, princess. Now, let’s go look at flowers.”

Osamu is more laid back by nature, and, while he’s willing to help, he probably won’t sweat the fact that you two have a huge event coming up. He won’t be getting into a tizzy about the ins and outs of wedding planning, so he often comes off as being apathetic about the whole thing. This can be extremely frustrating for someone who loves to plan and fusses over every, grueling detail of the event. However, it’s important to understand that his hands-off approach comes from his trust in you rather than from laziness.

Because he knows you have everything under control, he’ll be a part of the process by taking on a supportive role. Truth be told, he really does care about the fact that you’re getting married. He wants nothing more than to be with you for the rest of his life. So, if you want an opinion, you can go to him and he’ll help you. If you want him to make a decision, ask him and he will. If you need him to do anything, let him know and it’s done. Otherwise, he’ll just make sure you’re well taken-care of while you handle things.

Oh, and don’t even bother looking into catering options. That’s strictly his department and he’s an expert. Let him work his magic.

Your (e/c) eyes burn with strain as they flicker between the bright screen of your laptop and the notebook resting on your leg. For the umpteenth time that evening, you try turning down the brightness only to find that it was already at the lowest possible setting. This causes a small groan to echo in your throat as you scan the webpage tirelessly for any information you can find about each potential wedding venue you’d been considering.

The only thing that gives you pause is the sound of footsteps padding across the wooden floor behind you. Looking over your shoulder brings your attention to your fiancé, who’s dressed in his sweater and boxers, sporting a disheveled head of dark hair.

“(F/n)?” he utters, steel-colored eyes shifting over to your form, “What’re ya doin’ up? It’s fuckin’ two in the mornin’.”

Shaking your head and brushing strands of your own, messy hair away from your face, you explain, “I was too stressed to sleep. I can’t sleep until I find a good set of venues to look into tomorrow.”

Though he wears a clear look of disbelief on his features, he doesn’t try to stop you, since he knows that won’t get him anywhere. “Fine. But don’t be complainin’ when you’ve got a headache tomorrow, love.”

His words are dry and sharp, but you know the intentions behind them are warm and soft, so you don’t argue or huff in response. Instead, you turn back to your laptop and continue your research.

When you tear your gaze away from your work once more, it’s because Osamu’s at your side, offering you a mug filled with warm tea. “Come back to bed once you’ve finished this, alright?” he bargains as you hook your fingers around the handle and bring the drink to your mouth. You nod wordlessly, and he glances over at the notebook perched on your thigh. “Need any help?”

“I’ll need some tomorrow, but I'm okay for now. Thanks, ‘Samu.”

He places his hand on your shoulder and swoops down to press a kiss against the crown of your head. “I wantcha back in bed by three. If ya stay up later than that, ya start gettin’ all grumpy, ‘nd you know it.”

You chuckle and reassure him, “I know, baby. I promise I’ll be in bed before then.”

“Hey,” he speaks in a tone that’s more tender than that he’s been using, making you look up at him expectantly. “Whatever place ya pick, it’s gonna be great, alright?” You try not to giggle at the way his words are ever so slightly slurred by his fatigue as he continues, “As long as yer happy ‘nd the bank ain’t broken, we’re good.”

“I love you,” you coo against his lips in the moments before they meet with yours.

“I love ya too, babe,” he responds when the two of you pull away, “I’ll be awake, waitin’ for ya ta come back, so don’t be late.”

You scoff, “Oh, c’mon, ‘Samu, you were never awake to begin with.”

He clicks his tongue and places his finger on his chin in an act of contemplation before waving you off and trudging back to your bedroom. “Shit, ya got that right. But if yer up past three, I’ll know it. Trust me.”

[s1i9d]

AMPHIBIA SEASON 2 FINALE: INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND SHIPPING

SPOILERS FOR ALL OF AMPHIBIA PRE-"TRUE COLORS" & SEASON 2B TRAILER

It's time.... I can't believe this is the final week of Amphibia before the hiatus for Season 3. We can cry about that in May, but for now we have some business to get to with Relationship drama!

DISCLAIMER: This is a shipping/platonic interpersonal relationship discussion post for the relationship between all three of the girls. All healthy ships are good ships, but I’m talking from my perspective. This is my own speculation for the show, and what I interpret may not be the crew’s intent. So I’m doing this with the knowledge that there’s a possibility that this is all speculation and not canon.

If no ships at all, or the ship you wanted did not happen in the Season 2 finale, do not blame the artists and creators for such. Many fandoms have done this and it’s possible that it will happen again. Just don’t be those people who ignore the hard work and beautiful storytelling the Amphibia crew have done and just complain to them about not doing the ship you/we desperately wanted. Harassing the crew for telling their story is a horrible thing to do. So please be mindful of that.

I will also talk about both monogamous ships and a potential polyamorous ship (which is WILD that a Disney frog isekai has one of the most potential for LGBT Poly representation). So if you're polyphobic or monophobic, this post isn't for you. (while you're at it block me.)

But let’s get started:

The Polaroid

A recurring prop used to showcase the happy memories of Anne, Sasha and Marcy. We’ve only seen two of the same Polaroid: one with Anne, and the other with Sasha. It's used to showcase the three girls' tight friendship and bond initially on Earth, and I think if Marcy shows hers, it might showcase the angst of her working for Andrias. (More on that theory in my plot speculation post.)

There is no one else to morally ship them with.

Pad Thai shippers, calm down. In a show like this, there would be a dude who came to Amphibia with the three girls and Anne or someone would fall in love with him. But like The Owl House, there is no hetero ship presented with Anne, Sasha or Marcy that aren't Amphibians. The only people we can ship the three girls with are each other, and even then Sasha and Anne's ANGST is too much for a healthy relationship at the moment. Marcy would be the only real potential option for a happy ship with Anne. (Don't attack me Sashanne shippers, just stating the facts on screen.)

"Well, romance isn't the focus of this show!" You're right. Romance isn't the focus, but the show does do romance. We've seen several times with Sprig and Ivy, and Hop Pop and Sylvia. They may not be the centre focus (which is one of the reasons I love this show) but it exists. The show has done romance several times, and if they culminate a romance with [two or all three of the] girls, it would make sense. The potential is there, but will it happen?

Romance Thread

Hop Pop and Sylvia, Joe Sparrow and Bessie, Sprig and Ivy, "Quarreler's Pass" where Hop Pop asks Anne if she has a boyfriend to fill the awkward silence: these are all romance threads/points throughout the season and it makes so much more sense to have them culminate in this finale or at least showcase an idea of further explicit queer relationship, and do the romance in Season 3.

An overarching story with these three girls has been their interpersonal relationships with one another as Sasha is controlling of both of them, and Anne and Marcy try to find their own path and reach their own autonomy. By having Marcy and Anne find themselves devoid of Sasha, they are free to be themselves.

Sasha as a Complex Character

Sasha at the current moment is not ready for any relationship with Anne or Marcy, especially with what we learn about her in “The Third Temple” in using Marcy, Anne and the Plantars to storm Newtopia. She is a major component of angst in the show, and the main conflict to Anne and Marcy's arcs. Especially with the Season “wrapping” up their angst by "Battle of the Bands", but touching on it in several episodes of the season: it seems like it's going to be thrown over to the next season. The Season 2 finale will be somehow more angsty than “Reunion” (which... how are they going to do??) and the Season 3 finale will introduce a sort of distrust arc and denouement of them realising their relationship and dynamics were not healthy. The biggest disconnect in the last episode was Sasha thinking that after she uses them to get into Newtopia safely, she can somehow control this relationship she has between Marcy and Anne.

[You might be wondering: "okay, but if their angst is doubling down this season, why do a big post on potential shipping and relationships?" Because I can and I want to. I'm just very into these adorable teenagers being in a happy relationship as soon as possible (especially if it's not hetero).]

Sasha and Marcy - Hold your horses, this isn’t a Sasharcy segment. I’m talking about the relationship and interactions between these characters themselves.

We haven’t yet seen how Sasha and Marcy interact without Anne there: similar to Season 1 where we knew who Anne and Sasha were in terms of their own characters, but in “Reunion” we saw how their dynamic was and how that played a great influence on the Battle of Toad Tower. I think “True Colors” will delve a little into that with perhaps a flashback.

Another similarity and difference between the two is that Marcy is willing to give up her hyper fixated goal for the people she cares about. We see it in "The First Temple" where Marcy is willingly forfeiting the game to save Anne and the Plantars from the harm of the Temple. While with Sasha, we see in "Barrel's Warhammer" that she is persistent in going through with obtaining the Warhammer, even at the cost of the people around her. In this instance, Percy and Braddock. I definitely think that Marcy and Sasha are two foils while still being similar overall. If Andrias' plan means risking Anne and Sasha, I think Marcy would very quickly try to undo it and help Anne.

One theory I saw floating around was in "Reunion", Sasha forgot it was Anne's birthday, and so she sent Marcy to find her a gift while she distracted Anne with all the "fun birthday" stuff. I think perhaps we'll see some more of that, to showcase their relationships as a second chapter to "Reunion" where we see their dynamics. Or it could just be a Season 3 thing.

Anne and Marcy

Something I really like is a post made by @pyroclastic727. They talk about how Marcy and Anne were other-ing each other when I’m their relationship with Sasha. As much as Anne and Marcy cared for each other pre-meet-up, Anne in Season 1 focuses on Sasha. And of course who wouldn’t? Sasha is a force to be reckoned with, and last such an impression that we were terrified of who Marcy was going to be before we met her. I recommend checking their post here for full context.

One thing I am interested in that will probably be a Season 3 flip is how Marcy and Anne met. They seemed to be friends since they were babies, there isn’t really an understanding of where their relationship started. It could be they were best friends, but they started othering each other once Sasha joined them. But now, they’re high tier solid friends again.

The major thing Sasha isn't accounting for is the fact that Anne has changed and grown over time. She's not the exact same girl from Earth, she has grown and changed. Become better and able to stand up for herself. Sasha and Anne's relationship seems to be more angst driven than it was in "Reunion". (HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE???)

THE ARC OF WOMEN LOVING WOMEN

Now that the general stuff is out of the way, let's dig a little deeper into the arcs of the three girls these two seasons so far.

101B - “Best Fronds” - We see Anne’s relationship with Sasha, and how she manipulates Anne and Marcy to do as she says. I’ll talk about this a bit more in the “Barrel’s Warhammer” section from Sasha’s POV, but this is big stuff.

110 - “Toad Tax” + “Prison Break” - These two episodes tie in Sasha and Anne’s angst for the season. It directly ties in two plot threads that are very prominent in ”Reunion”: “Toad Tax” with Anne’s progression as a character and her connection to the people of Wartwood, while “Prison Break” shows Sasha willing to do what it takes to get back home and find the other girls. This is the main plot of the season 1 finale, where Sasha helps Grimes to get what he wants in order for her and Anne to find Marcy and get home, even if it means killing off Hop Pop since he’s a frog and according to her, he doesn’t matter.

119B & 120 - “Anne of the Year” + “Reunion”

There's so much to unpack here. But this is a major moment in Anne standing up for herself, Sasha's "sacrifice", and the future of their relationship hanging in the balance. This is the main trigger for the Sashanne dynamic, the toxic and angst driven story. The end of Act 1 of this 3 act story.

201A - “Handy Anne”

This is an essential episode. The premiere immediately starts off with mentions of Sasha in the events of the Battle for Toad Tower. In addition to Marcy being mentioned only a few moments later. Clearly Anne isn't over the events of Toad Tower, but she's pushing forward and trying her best to move on positively; especially with trying to find Marcy, her third and final friend sent to Amphibia.

204 - “Quarreler's Pass” + “Toadcatcher”

As I said, the Hop Pop/Anne B Plot in "Quarreler's Pass" where Hop Pop tries to fill the awkward silence by asking Anne if she has a boyfriend is very telling of their relationship. But what I find interesting is as soon as the episode ends with Hop Pop saying, "Now we can talk about Anne's boyfriend again." And he gets shoved off the cliff. We immediately go to Sasha. We could have had any other episode with Sasha, but why the one immediately after discussing Anne's romantic life? We know the show likes to tie in plot threads through A and B episodes, so it's a possibility!

"Toadcatcher" is all about the Sashanne angst from Sasha's perspective. She tries to distract herself with training, but Grimes points to her that she's afraid their relationship will never be the same again. Sasha also reveals that she has been training to protect Grimes, the one person she can count on right now. After the fight with Yunan and making plans for storming Newtopia with a Toad Army, Sasha says, "It's not over between us. Not even close." Which just highlights their angst arc for the Season. We'll touch more on it in the B segments of 217 and 218.

206 - “Marcy at the Gates”

Here's the thing about this episode. We touch on Sasha and Marcy in the F-Wagon, and then we speak more on Marcy than Sasha. Something Anne says in the beginning with Sprig: "Look, Sasha and I might be going through a rough patch, but that doesn't mean I don't care about her." It shows Anne still cares about Sasha, and she wants to continue their relationship in a healthy way moving forward if possible. If not, then it's something she's willing to let go.

The rest of the episode is a Marcanne fancam people. So much love for Marcy, some suspicion of her from Sprig. But in the end, she's loved by all. If you don't love Marcy, you're a monster. A key reaction in this episode is wariness in the fandom: after Sasha, everyone was terrified and unsure who Marcy is and if she had a similar trait. But she’s amazing and a wonderful nerd.

Something I did find interesting in the Rebecca Rose interview that Matt Braly (and creator of The Owl House Dana Terrace) is that Braly said Marcy was the most important key to the whole show: if the audience don't love her in the first few minutes of her introduction, the entire show would collapse. What is so vital about Marcy that would cause the entire story to collapse? Is it the romance or the plot? Is it the overall arc or what?

207 - “Scavenger Hunt” + “The Plantars Check In”

Marcy and Anne episodes, with Anne feeling insecure about Marcy and Marcy feeling envious of Anne's social skills and befriending the people around her. It solidifies their dynamic and doubles down on Marcy being the cutest and greatest character of all time.

210A - “The Sleepover to End All Sleepovers”

This is a heavy episode for Sashannarcy. Although not seeing Sasha since "Toadcatcher" and we wouldn't be seeing her until "Barrel's Warhammer", this episode does good to remind the audience of Sasha's presences and lasting effect on the girls. Anne talks about Sasha as though she still wants them to be friends if possible to continue their relationship in a healthy way.

The episode does more so focus on Anne and Marcy in the sleepover, but Sasha's presence is still very strong, enough that you feel her presence looming over them. It's not healthy, but it's part of the healing process.

210B - “A Day at the Aquarium”

This is where alarms were set off about Andrias. His proposition for Marcy directly after she tells Anne to go with the Plantars back to Wartwood really does create a new dynamic. So far, it seemed as though Marcy really wanted to have her friend around her. She had no one from Earth until Anne came, and it seems as though she can't reveal informal secrets and insecurities to King Andrias or Lady Olivia. It is a real victory to have Anne go with the Plantars to Wartwood, but Marcy is left without her friend and Andrias takes advantage of that. It's still very unclear what his plans with her are, but that's just the other shoe waiting to drop.

214 - “The First Temple”

Marcy is wonderful. We see flashbacks through Anne's perspective as we see Marcy's issue of extreme hyper fixation not allowing her to pay attention to her surroundings. This was in "Marcy at the Gates", but it doubles down here. It even shows in the Temple where Marcy seems to be so into all the trials that she is unable to see the Plantars being squished, burned or smashed to pieces as a result.

I mentioned this as a comparison, but Marcy really does give up all her chances of recharging the Green gem just to save Anne and the Plantars. She gives up her hyper fixated goal just for them. Her extreme presence of empathy and care of Anne and the people who she may not have incredible emotional attachment to is what separates her from Sasha.

215A - “New Wartwood”

Directly after "The First Temple" with Marcanne development, absolutely no one saw this segment coming in hot as one of the gayest ones yet. It is an Anne and Marcy episode with a slight emphasis on Mayor Toadstool. I think I would have seen this episode as solidifying Anne and Marcy's friendship if not for that blush in the beginning of the episode. Marcy geeks out about the swamp Wartwood is built on top of, and Anne blushes at her asking for more info she learned in the town. If Anne and Marcy were "just friends" I don't think Anne would have blushed at Marcy geeking out about frog stuff. The only other times we've seen her blush is when she's embarrassed, and it doesn't seem like that's her emotional state at that moment. You could just brush it off and say its an error, but there's no way that's an error. It went through production and post-production and was locked in! There's no way that's an error!!

216 - “Toad to Redemption” + “Maddie & Marcy”

Not a lot to say here, but this is important. These two episodes are directly after "Return to Wartwood" and a while after "The First Temple". Each segment features Anne and Marcy having their own adventures, and their stories can be separate from one another. In "Toad to Redemption", Anne is helping Mayor Toadstool remain the Mayor of Wartwood and not become the head of the Southern Toad Tower. In "Maddie and Marcy", Marcy is helping Maddie with reviving a pet to life. Both Anne and Marcy are key players this season, but they each play a supporting role to people they didn't really talk to or meet previously in these segments. This shows their independence from one another, and that my friends is the sign of a healthy relationship!

217 - “The Second Temple” + “Barrel’s Warhammer”

Buckle up folks, the Sashannarcy segment we've been waiting for.

"The Second Temple" has a focus of Marcy and Anne, but more specifically Anne since this Temple was her trial. Still not sure of the exact location of the temple, but it's fine. The trials show Anne and how she cares about the people around her, how she is the "heart" of the group, and her growth from Season 1 up until that point. The deep love she has, especially at the end where she gives up charging the gem midway to save her friends who are screaming.

"Barrel's Warhammer"... yikes. This segment is perhaps the biggest insight into Sasha's psyche we've seen. In comparison to Marcy who gives up what she hyper fixates upon for the people around her, Sasha is persistent and attaches her worth to her goal. She does not like failure or losing, and I think that shows in this segment. This shows her absolute fear of abandonment and desire for complete control (which we'll talk more about in "Battle of the Bands") over the situations around her, which causes for unsympathetic actions and negative repercussions of the people around her. This episode (very late into the season) just highlights Sasha's journey further and what she needs to work on. It's not Anne and Marcy for leaving her: it's her. Her tunnel vision is shoving them away.

218B - “The Third Temple” - This episode made me feel so down on shipping. Like it’s a great episode over all, but what it means for the Season 2 finale is... angsty. Sasha fake apologises to Anne in order for her and Grimes to enter Newtopia safely for the invasion. Just as much as she understands she is doing it, her slight look of conflicted feelings at the end of this segment really does showcase how even she is unsure if she should go on with this. Sasha really does not deserve Anne and Marcy, and I think she knows it too.

219 - “The Dinner” + “Battle of the Bands”

The biggest disconnect Sasha provides is that she believes after they get the Toads to invade Newtopia, she can get her friendship with Anne and Marcy back "under control". Which I believe is the friendship they had back when they were on Earth. Sasha didn't realise how much Marcy and, more specifically, Anne had changed in their time in Amphibia. Sasha is really the only person who hasn't changed nor made solid emotional attachments to anyone other than Grimes. Anne and Marcy grew, while Sasha didn't. "The Dinner" just proves that where she is unable to have her feelings of being other-ed in their relationship. I think Sasha's fear of missing out, and not being the centre of their relationship just plays into her "Barrel's Warhammer" insecurities and problems.

While "Battle of the Bands" shows her need to be in control of everything and everyone around her, even with her realising it's very tiring. She doesn't like mindless people (like Toadie) who obey her every command, she likes the challenge of controlling people into submission. Which is very bad, but I think by the end when she plays the song she realises it's okay to let loose with help from Toadie. Even at the end when the three of them lose to Grimes, she realises that it was more fun to play with Anne and Marcy with a silly, heartfelt song instead of making it perfect and winning with a controlled performance. By the end, Sasha is controlling them because she does have the plan to invade Newtopia with Grimes. But this is just the calm before the storm.

TL;DR - I don’t think a relationship can healthily start in the finale, especially with the Sasha betrays Anne and Marcy betrays Anne plots both coming to a head. There’s no way that Sasha is going to be an immediate better person and get into a relationship with Anne and/or Marcy. There is a logic to them starting the relationship, but I don’t think it’s gonna be this season. Instead, I could see perhaps a declaration of love or some kind of coming out scene happening where someone confesses their love to the other. I don’t come to this show for shipping, but there is a logical through line as a connection to the overall story which could culminate in romance.

Either way, lemme know your thoughts and ideas! No shipping wars in the comments please, but do tell what you think? Is it happening? Is it not? Are we going to be explicit in canonising (by that I mean a confession of love or something) or saving it for Season 3? As always, let me know your thoughts!

[morethanalittleconfused]

I accidentally wrote a 5k fanfic about incidents caused aboard the ghost by differences between species

I've been reading a lot of those old tumblr posts that are like “what if humans are actually just really, really hardy and alien species would be just completely blown away with the shit we put up with without a second thought” and it's got me thinking about the crew of the Ghost trying to get used to each other at first with three humans that are all just absolutely fucking insane, even more so than even your average human.

Rebels spoilers ahead, as well as a trigger warning for blood, vomit and general injuries

It starts with Hera and Kanan. It’s just the two of them, aboard the Ghost, and it takes some getting used to.

At first Hera is shocked by the way Kanan's body seemingly has no limits. He has never once complained about the temperature of the ghost, even when they were running low on power and Hera could feel her limbs start to get sluggish from the cold. Two weeks later he somehow managed to find his way back to the ghost after being in -2 degree Celsius weather for a half an hour with no coat on. When he walked back through the hatch with snow blowing in his loose hair and a red nose and said “it's cold as shit out there” after Hera had been panicking about losing him for the literal entire time, she had to practically scrape her jaw off of the floor. She would have been dead after a few minutes, and yet here he was, now steaming from a shower and shirtless, bitching about how the caf maker was broken.

As time went on, she learned his body did have some limits to the heat. At about 35 degrees he got irritable and short, but that was about when she started getting uncomfortably warm, too. But he would tolerate it. And more. He kept impressing her with the things he somehow managed to pull off, in conditions she would have thought would kill him. He could get knocked around far more than she thought he should be able to, and would haul himself back to the ship with a grin every time.

The way his body worked constantly surprised her. She noticed it first in how quickly he healed, and in how much he ate.

He could eat literally anything. Things she thought were poisonous for most species. He loved chocolate, and would easily eat ten times the amount that would send her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. He could withstand a ridiculous amount of alcohol, and could drink unprocessed coffee with no problem by the cup. Caf didn't seem to really affect him because his body processed it so fast. And he ate so. Much. it was ridiculous. The good thing was it didn't really seem to matter what.

Hera didn't need much food, but it had to be good. It had to count. Too much filler and she would lose strength. Her body couldn't process a lot, and if what she got wasn't exactly what she needed, her health went downhill, quick.

Kanan was not the same. He could, and would, eat anything. He didn't have any noticeable preference for plants or meat, or the quality of the food. If he could get his hands on it, he would eat it. He would eat food out of the refrigerator she would have considered to be dangerous. He put appalling amounts of random, unrelated food in a pan, cooked it, and acted like that was an acceptable thing to do. Omelets? She hated the very idea but he seemed to think they were wonderful.

And yet, for all that, they had once been stranded for over a week with only enough rations for one, and Kanan had insisted that she take the vast majority of the ration bars. She pushed back, and he then presented her with the absolutely shocking fact that humans can survive for over a month with no food. She was absolutely flabbergasted, and he took advantage of her stunned silence to press another ration into her hand, smirk at her and say, “I can take it. Trust me.”

Another thing she noticed very quickly was how fast he healed.

He could be bleeding openly one minute, and the wound seemed to close itself the next. She knew human blood had clotting factors far beyond that of nearly any other being, but it was ridiculous how fast he sealed himself up. Further into their relationship she got to see this close up when she accidentally touched some of his congealed blood on the floor of the refresher after cleaning him up. She had had to turn away and take a few deep breaths at the slimy, gelatinous texture. He had gently huffed out a laugh.

“Kinda gross huh?”

“Yeah... it's… unique.”

“I've always been kind of fascinated by the way it congeals so quickly. Handy I guess.”

Out of sheer curiosity she had run the end of a pen through the small puddle and been horrified to see that it mostly stuck together.

“It just… does that? Inside you? And that doesn't cause problems?”

“It can. If it clots when it's not supposed to. But mostly it keeps me alive.”

And it did. And though she wouldn't say it to his face, his ability to pull through seemingly anything took just one more worry off her plate. His wounds would be almost completely closed in often under a week, where she would have been dealing with bandages and salves for a month. He almost never got infections, and could keep going with seemingly incapacitating injuries.

They had once narrowly escaped a fight with a gang of imps and made it back to the ghost with almost no problems. She had a sprained ankle, so he had supported her most of the way there, and they had patched up each other's scrapes. He had needed a bit of training so he didn't just slap a bandaid on what could have been a potentially life threatening injury for her, but he did alright. It was only later, when they were sitting in the cockpit, well into hyperspace, and he had coughed suddenly, when things went sideways. She turned to see blood seeping out of the corner of his mouth, and more on his hand when he pulled it away. They both looked at it for a moment, then Hera almost blacked out as a sudden wave of adrenaline washed over her.

“Kanan you're- are you- let me make the calc- are you dying?”

“What? Oh- no I had thought I just cracked a few of my ribs but it would appear I must have broken at least one of them.”

“BROKEN? Your bone? Like in half?”

“I- yeah?”

“Chopper we need to get to the nearest med center right now. Tell them were coming. I dont care if its a fucking imperial light cruiser”

“Wait no lets not be hasty-”

“HASTY? YOU BROKE YOUR BONES KANAN”

“Okay i know it looks bad but really i'm not going to keel over and die right now. Make sure it's a safe med center and cheap too. I can wait.”

“Kanan your bones are literally broken.”

“Yeah. It's happened before and it will happen again. I've broken my arm twice. I've broken one of the bones in my lower leg. A couple toes. At least one finger. And don't even get me started on my nose. It didn't always look like this.” At that he had huffed out a small laugh, but then winced and brought a hand to his lower chest. Almost as an afterthought, he reached down and pulled up the hem of his shirt. She had started to avert her eyes at the sliver of hip he showed, but as he pulled the shirt up higher and revealed more, she felt the breath taken out of her. His skin was mottled a whole host of awful colors, angry and puffy. He coughed that wet cough again and said, “Maybe I do need a med center after all”

She was incredibly relieved when they dropped out of hyperspace and into the welcoming arms of medicine. She was less happy when Kanan was returned to her, that night no less, with only bandages around his chest and a note to “take it easy for a while” she was appalled to say the least.

His ridiculously resilient body sometimes created just as many problems as it solved, though. He got into bar fights after downing enough alcohol to kill a bantha, and got the piss kicked out of him. He ran headfirst into danger with little consideration for life or limb. He was reckless, and incredibly hotheaded, and overall behaved like a clown. She had no idea how the Jedi accepted humans into their ranks, if Jedi he was. Restraint, my ass.

His recklessness applied to food as well. He didn't really seem to mind what he ate, content with the knowledge that if it didn’t work out, he could always regurgitate it back up. Twi’leks could not vomit, like many other species. It was yet another bizarre human trait. The ability to purge substances from your body without them having to pass through your entire digestive tract and cause more issues had always seemed like a neat trick to Hera. That is, of course, until she saw it in action.

She was roused one night by a strange noise coming from the refresher, and she had padded to the door, only to find it open. Blinking in the harsh light, she saw Kanan curled on the floor, wearing no shirt. His hair was loose and hanging around his face, and he was panting heavily. She only had time to say “Kanan, what-” before he coughed and vomited into the bowl.

Her immediate reaction ricocheted from “Oh my god he's dying” to “I’m actually going to die just having to witness this” to “Oh stars he is actually dying” so fast she could barely process it. She was immediately horrified but had no idea how to help him.

“Kanan are you- do you need a medic? How- chop- CHOPPER! How do I help you? Are you hurt?”

He had turned and peered up at her with puffy eyes and a runny nose. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He tried to talk but his voice came out too rough and he had to try again. Even then it was strangely thick.

“Hera? Are you okay?”

“Am I okay? Am I okay Kanan? You're in here dying for stars sake and I have no idea how to help you and where the hell is chopper-”

“Hey. hey.” He turned away for a moment and took a long breath in through his nose. “Calm down for a sec. I feel like shit so you're going to have to talk slower. Are you hurt or something?”

“Hurt? No I'm not hurt i’m just- you- you're in here- I don’t even know-”

He closed his eyes and took another long breath in through his nose.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah i’m just… trying really hard not to throw up again.”

“Oh.”

He opened his eyes again and looked up at her again.

She shifted against the door frame. “But you're… okay? This isn't life threatening?”

He huffed out a soft laugh, then seemed to immediately regret it as he dropped his head between his knees for a moment. Then he cleared his throat and tipped his head back up.

“No. I'm good, I just ate something bad at that pub. And I also probably drank a bit too much as well. But I think it was definitely the squids fault.”

“Oh. So this is… normal?”

“More so than I would like. Yes.”

“Okay so…” she took a deep breath to calm her nerves now that it was apparent he wasn't in any imminent danger. “Do you need anything? How can I help you?”

“Some tea maybe. Some crackers. Anything ginger you have. It'll work itself out with time.”

She stood in the door, unsure of what to do, wanting to help him, and watched as he drew a quick breath in and closed his eyes again.

“Hera. Tea. Now”

“Right.”

As she dashed to the kitchen she heard the sounds of retching from behind her.

  There were some strange things about humans that became interesting as their relationship developed beyond mere captain and crew. His hair, for example. At first she had thought it was appalling, the sheer volume of it. It was everywhere. But all it took was threading her hands through it a few times, and hearing the wonderful noises he made, before she quickly changed her opinion.

Related to his hair was the fact that humans seemed to enjoy a certain level of pain, which she could not understand. He would moan audibly when she tugged at his hair, which startled her the first time, in the best way. Once, when she was feeling particularly adventurous, she had dragged her sharp canines across the delicate skin of his throat, and had been surprised to find the taste of metal filling her mouth, sharp and bright. She was even more surprised at the way he had shuddered and come apart beneath her, just like that.  

Then, later, when Zeb and Sabine joined the crew, there was yet another learning curve as Hera adjusted to another human as well as a Lasat, and Zeb adjusted to Kanan and Sabine at the same time.

Sabine was just as reckless. She was a fighter too, but she didn't have the force to help her out. Hera had more than a few small heart attacks in the early days of Sabine's presence before she fully appreciated that she could take almost as much of a beating as Kanan. Sabine had once walked over a half a mile back to the ship with a broken leg, and when Hera pressed her on just how she managed to do that, Sabine had gotten quickly tired of the argument, ending it with a, “I don't know what to tell you, Hera! I didn't have any other options! I had to do it, so I did.”

Hera was used to most of Kanan's strange human quirks, but Sabine presented a new and entirely alarming one, which Hera first came in contact with on a supply run. Sabine needed a monthly supply of medical supplies. Hera knew very little about menstruation, as that was a trait entirely unique to human females. Why their biology decided that it was necessary was completely beyond Hera, it seemed incredibly inefficient. Sabine made as little fuss about it as possible, but Hera had embarrassed everyone about three months in when Sabine asked hera to go get her data pad from her room. Hera had burst back into the common room, and only then was able to identify the smell Sabine was carrying with her that had been tugging at the edges of Hera’s mind all day. Blood. She turned on Sabine with a very distressed, “Sabine are you injured? Are you sick?”

To which Sabine had responded, with a distinct note of confusion, “No? Why?”

And Hera, without thinking, had said, “There's blood all over your bed? Did you hurt yourself?”

Sabine had gaped at her for a moment, then blushed ever so slightly. “I uh- I forgot to wash my sheets after... Sorry. I forgot about that before I told you to go into my room.”

Hera still had not connected the dots and was opening her mouth to further interrogate Sabine as to why her bedsheets were covered in blood when Kanan had jumped up and said, “Hera! Let's go for a walk, yes?” and pulled her gently out of the room, but not before she heard Zeb turn to Sabine and say, “So, why were you bleeding?”

Zeb apparently hadn't had much contact with the more alarming of the humans' quirks, as he had his own room, until Ezra showed up. Then Zeb had to learn for himself just how absolutely wild human biology was for himself. He arguably had a rougher go of it, because while he had the rest of the crew to help him out, he was literally sharing a room with a teenage human.

The first time Ezra got food poisoning was just about as rough for Zeb as it was for Kanan and Hera, except it happened in Zebs room.  Ezra was mostly self-sufficient, but Zeb had come hollering down the hall. He had broken the “do not open my door without knocking” rule Hera kept firmly in place, but she couldn't even be mad at him. Hera was just glad Kanan had been in his own bed that night. She had woken to see Zeb standing in her door, his fur standing up like a spine down his back, one ear folded inside out, panting hard.

“Hera the kid- he’s- I don’t know what the fuck happened but he- I think he’s hurt- or- or something but I don’t know how to help him- it’s Ezra-”

At which point Kanan, who had been woken by Zebs racket, slid open his door wearing only his sleep pants. He took one moment to assess the situation, looked down the hall and said, “Oh, Ezra’s throwing up. Do you want me to take care of him, Hera?”

Hera sighed and got up from her bed.

“No, you get Zeb some tea or something. I've learned well enough how to hold hair back at this point.”

Zeb, still looking entirely horrified by the situation, allowed himself to be led into the galley by Kanan. Sabine poked her head out of her door, decided this crisis did not involve her, and went back to sleep.

The same situation had happened the first time Ezra had gotten a bloody nose in the middle of the night. It was the kind Hera had witnessed with Kanan, and knew firsthand how horrifying it was if one didn't know humans noses just Did That sometimes. It was a middle of the night kind of bloody nose, where Ezra had presumably woken up with blood all over his face and in his mouth and in his hair and on his sheets, and had tried to catch the blood in his hands, which was all well and good until he somehow had to get down from the top bunk and open two doors to get to the refresher. That left Zeb to wake up to a room smelling of blood, with blood on the floor, on the door panel, and a trail leading to the refresher where he found Ezra leaning over the sink which was also, conveniently, covered in blood. All it had taken was for Ezra to turn his face toward the creature standing in the door and say “Zeb?” before Zeb was hurtling down the hall in a panic, calling for Kanan to come help him because the kid was dying.

Sabine, who had been up working on a project, was the first to respond to this particular “The human is dying!” call. She took one look at Ezra, standing in his pajamas with blood on his hands and said, “That sucks,” and turned back to her room.

Hera, who was making her way down the hall to check on if Ezra really was dying this time, had the pleasure of seeing Sabine turn back and say, “If you want a tampon to stop up the bleeding, they're in the bottom left drawer.” This worked surprisingly well at stopping Ezras bloody nose, because he was blushing so hard there was no blood left for his nose. Hera turned back to comfort Zeb, telling him she had reacted the exact same way the first time Kanan had woken up with a bloody nose. She saw him come out of his panic in time to realize she had effectively confessed to sleeping with Kanan, but wisely decided not to say anything. Nothing he didn't already know.

The humans were absolutely bizarre to spend time around. They ended up installing a wall in the galley that had live plants in it, not because they needed fresh plants to eat, but because their brain chemicals got thrown off if they weren't around plants for too long.

They had empathy for everything. Hera had once witnessed Ezra cry in a market when they passed a fruit stand with a deformed Meiloorun. When Hera asked why he was crying, he had looked up at her with these huge eyes, sniffed, and said, “I just feel so bad for it! No one will buy it!” They had, of course, bought it. Kanan tried not to get attached to anything, but he apologized for bumping into inanimate objects, and Sabine got visibly sad when they had to throw out a good piece of gear because it was broken or old.

They all three loved swimming. They were awful at it, just barely flopping around on the surface, but any time they were near even relatively safe water, they were in it, having the time of their lives. Kanan had once explained to Hera that humans have an extra fun little bit of evolution called the mammalian dive reflex, which slows their heart rate and lowers their blood pressure when they are in water, making it calming and enjoyable. Hera was skeptical until she watched Ezra calmly floating down a river on his back and wished she had that, instead of feeling nothing but panic anytime she had to float in water.  

They were mimics. They could replicate a stunning array of sounds, from animals to tech. Ezra's favorite way of annoying her was to make the noises her ship made when something went wrong, just to see how much she would panic before she realized it was him. They would sing along to anything, even if it was just instruments, and Hera would never admit it, but she loved Kanan's voice.

They could sleep anywhere. One of her favorite memories was walking around Chopper Base after a particularly exhausting mission and finding the three of them, Kanan in the middle, with one kid leaning on either shoulder, asleep, leaning against a crate. They had looked so peaceful, and yet she was again surprised at them. It was far too cold for her to even consider sleeping, there were fighters landing only a few hundred meters away, people running all over, and they were snoozing with smiles on their faces, just glad to be home.

And humans would pack bond with literally anything. She had thought Kanan was bad until she met Ezra. It was ridiculous. Her father had said that she was improper for developing a fondness for a droid, but the kid formed a relationship with everything that moved. It got them out of a few tight spots, sure, but she would never get used to having to sit still as some enormous predator loomed in their faces. The sight of Ezra staring down a cat the size of the ghost on some jungle planet, the cat's fangs mere inches from his face as it huffed at him, was something she would never forget.

They were wild and hard headed and strong and made her life so much more interesting.

Early on, Kanan’s strange human ability to adapt to seemingly anything had been a momentary point of contention between the two of them, and was still something she struggled with. It took time for her to be okay with the fact that humans and Twi’leks were just built differently. But it frustrated Hera how weak she felt compared to him. It infuriated her the way he could just walk off something that would have killed her. She had always striven to be adaptable and up for anything. She was strong, and she knew it. But she felt her inadequacies sharply next to Kanan. Early in their partnership they had been in the galley repairing themselves from yet another fight, when Hera had turned to see Kanan casually sewing his own skin up with a needle. The way he could just puncture his own skin like that, with nothing more than a wince and a hiss of breath, had made her see red for a moment and she had to excuse herself to the cockpit to take a breath. They had talked about it, and he had helped her to realize that she was, of course, strong. Humans were adapted differently, so it was entirely unfair for her to be comparing them. But they could compare emotionally, and she was one of the strongest people he had ever had the pleasure of knowing. The two of them were forged in war, and had been through incredible things. She had fought prejudice and overcome so many obstacles to get to where she was, the best pilot in the resistance, without question. As he had said the last part, she heard him smirk a bit, and looked over at him, bathed in the blue light of hyperspace, to find him with a little crooked grin on his face and his hair falling down around his ears. She had felt her guarded heart open a little bit more at that, and had to turn and gaze back out at the stars before her heart opened completely to this rogue of a man.

Later, pressed against his chest in a supply closet, hiding from some stormtroopers, she would marvel at just how fast humans' hearts beat. She knew they were supposed to beat about two times faster than a twi’lek, but his seemed like it was fit to fly out of his ribcage. She found herself thinking, “Is it supposed to be doing that? Is this why he's such a hot headed idiot?” Later she would discover it did not always beat that incredibly fast, usually just a bit faster than hers. It made him ridiculously warm, and also may have contributed to why he was so quick to anything. Not rushed. Not hasty. Just quick. Quick to anger. Quick to smile. Quick to fight. Quick to laugh. Quick to love.

Maybe that was why it was such a shock when he finally reached his limit. She had gotten used to him pulling through impossible situations. She had forgotten that they had limits, just like her.

And then, years later, a glimmer of hope. Ahsoka and Sabine, travelling the galaxy over, searching for Ezra. While Kanan was gone forever, she still had a chance to get one of her boys back.

And of course, there was always Jacen. Her beautiful little boy, who was soft and sweet and yet surprisingly strong, just like his father. And Hera was comforted to know that wherever this wild galaxy would take him, he had Kanan Jarrus’ blood coursing through his veins to keep him safe.

[darter-blue]

bec, darling, would you do body worship from your prompt list for lil ol' me? 🥺😂😈

Hey there dearest. Well, Ali. I must apologise because this turned from Kinktober to whumptober. And to start its a bit more body horror? But it will work it’s way to Body worship I promise.

So here is part one of your Fic - Resurrection

Warning for Bucky Barnes recovering type anxiety and hurt/comfort

Bucky wakes to the sound of water running. The smell of wet earth and dead leaves permeate his senses as they slowly open to his surroundings. 

He aches. From head to toe, his body aches. He needs to get his eyes open to properly assess the damage. But it sure feels like he's been hit by a tank.

Or he'd fallen from some ridiculous height… had he fallen?

Bucky's last memory is of the cold… of… fear. 

Of Steve.

Steve

His memories are fleeting but he has something, an image, caught in his hand, and he curls his fingers around it to hold on. 

Steve was in the train, they both were. Zola's train. And Hydra… and that fucking Canon of a gun, some Hydra tech, blasting a hole in the side of the train… and Bucky…

He fell… didn't he?

His eyes snap open.

He looks down to find himself lying on a damp, soft surface, definitely not the snow he's expecting. 

He blinks into the mid-morning brightness, shaded by the structure above him, a jetty. The sound he's hearing is a river, a rocky shore line at his feet, dead leaves beneath him, trees behind him.

And he's… he's definitely not in Austria. Glancing around him it's all lush vegetation and rocky shorelines but there's something oddly familiar about it all and yet so, so wrong.

And as he looks down to check the ground he's woken up on (is there a bed roll, did he collapse here?) he catches sight of his outfit and then, by extension, his left arm, his left hand, and his brain freezes.

He doesn’t understand what he’s looking at but what he sees is… well it’s not good. It’s… his hand is... he wants it to be encased in some kind of metal glove. He wants this to be some elaborate costume. Steve gets to have an elaborate costume, maybe Bucky has one too. Maybe this is just the boys’ idea of a joke. 

It doesn’t feel like a joke. Bucky tries to wiggle his fingers but something is wrong. They wiggle, but it’s not… it's like there’s a lag or… they’re broken, or he’s had some nerve damage maybe. And they’re not… they're stiff and twisted and they won’t do what he wants them to do and it feels stilted. It doesn’t feel right.

And he knows. Bucky knows. This is not a costume. This is his arm. Or…

This is what has been attached to him. In place of his arm. It’s not his… it's a machine. 

And he’s waking up with it. In pain. In a strange place. With no idea how or why he’s here.

He needs to find Steve.

First things first, he needs to get up off the ground, but fuck. It hurts. His whole body feels like it’s been crushed by something. His chest aches, his head aches, his legs feel like garbage. His shoulder, his fucking shoulder is on fire. But focussing on any of this is not going to help him right now. He needs to get up. So he does.

He puts that pain in a box in the back of his mind. He uses a pillar of the jetty for support and he lifts himself up. And it's too much, for a second, it’s too much, and he vomits.

God, okay, he tells himself to just breathe. He breathes. And when he gets it together he walks. Carefully, gingerly, he walks to the trees and makes his way through them, using trunks to lean on as he passes. Letting the smell of the earth and the bark overpower the blood and the bile and whatever else it is on him he can smell.

He doesn’t know where his army uniform is. He doesn't know why he’s dressed in these strange pants with what look like black catchers pads on his knees. Covered in knives. No gun. There’s a belt and straps that don't attach to anything and no food. No rations. Nothing useful in any of the thousand pockets. 

He tries not to speculate as he walks. It won’t do him any good to panic. He needs to figure out where he is. He needs to keep as quiet as possible (though he’s not doing a great job, with the limp and the dizziness) in case he comes upon Hydra or Nazis out here. Though… it all feels so wrong.

And he realises why as he gets closer to civilisation. It looks like farm land, but it’s not european farmland. The first building he sees is a business of some kind, the sign is in English and what looks like Native American, though the name doesn’t sound familiar (he notes with some positivity that both his vision and hearing seem to be as good as ever). It looks like some kind of national park. And no one is around. He doesn’t see or hear anyone. And necessity being what it is, Bucky moves closer.

Piscataway Park, the Accokeek foundation, appears to be a national park owned and operated by the US Department of the Interior. The US. The US of A. He’s in fucking America? He sits down for that information to sink in. And then gets back up to get closer to the visitor’s centre. 

Which is empty. And pretty easy to break into with one of his handy knives, inside is food and water and so much… everything looks wrong. Bucky has seen some crazy shit fighting Hydra but this is all just… different and yet somehow the same as the America that he left behind for the war. Everything is so bright and clean and expensive. The prices on the food, on the signs over the freezer, it’s way too much. And the food itself, the packaging is so colourful. There’s so much writing… it’s all just… too much…

There’s a phone but it’s… there’s buttons where the dial should be. The handset is not even connected by a wire… and Bucky can’t use the damn thing anyway - he has no idea who to call… There’s no switch operator, just a dial tone. 

He does find some less conspicuous clothes to wear. A t-shirt and some kind of hooded sweater to cover up his monstrosity.

He finds bathrooms, full of fancy looking equipment nailed into the walls, but there’s a sink, and paper towels, and a mirror, and fucking hell. 

What happened to him?

His reflection is… jarring. His hair is long and rancid. He has a bruise under his eye and one on his temple. He has stubble. He didn’t have this much stubble when Steve pulled him out of Azzano. And he looks… bigger. His shoulders and his arms. Arm. His one arm. 

But mostly he looks…haunted.

Well. he has just woken up in the wrong country, in what seems like the wrong year. With no idea what has happened to get him here. So that really makes sense.

He takes a good minute to remove the leather contraption he’s wearing as a jacket and stares at his chest in the mirror. It takes him a minute of staring to catch his breath because what he’s looking at, the reflection of his own body, it’s… horrific. It’s… a nightmare. 

The skin around where the metal of the arm is fused to him is red and raw and painful. Covered in scar tissue. And it feels so heavy. It’s pulling at him, from the inside. Like someone has a hand inside him and is just twisting and yanking at chords of muscle, cutting into his bones. 

His chest is bruised, but nothing seems damaged. It feels like broken ribs that have been healing for weeks. Though he knows he heals fast now. Faster than before the war for sure. Gabe was always questioning him about it. Never happy to just let it go. 

And wow, okay, the muscle there is so much bigger that he remembers. Sort of like Steve’s, what he’d seen of it (tried not to look too hard, too much) the few times they’d been thrown into the same tent, or woken up from having rolled into each other camping out with the boys and washing what they could reach with freezing cold water from their canteens. 

Bucky never mentioned it, because it made Steve uncomfortable, when people talked about him the way they did. About the size of him, the look of him, the strength of him. So Bucky let the changes fly over his head and he paid attention to the important stuff instead. Was Steve eating enough for his twice as big body now? Was he sleeping enough? He seemed plenty warm, Bucky could never quite get over all that nice new warmth (Bucky’s Steve, brooklyn Steve, had always been so cold, Bucky had had to force blood into that kid’s toes with his own hands too many times to count), but was he breathing good, did his back hurt, was he getting everything he needed?

Turned out Bucky didn’t need to worry about that stuff too much after Azzano (didn’t stop him, he just learned to hide it better). 

Turns out Bucky has bigger things to worry about now. 

He throws up most of what he eats. He keeps some of the water down, refills the bottle from the tap. He washes himself as best he can with what he has and dresses in the shirt and sweater from the visitors store, drags himself back out of the bathroom, and passes a stand of pamphlets on the way to the door.

And one of them catches his eye. It has dates on it. Tour dates, it says, for March. March of 2014. 

2014.

Bucky has woken up in the future. Seventy years in the future. 

He gets behind the store counter and finds more papers with the date on them. Everything he can find is dated up to december 2013. So maybe that’s when it is. Although it seems like the place has been closed for a while - so maybe it’s later than that. 

Bucky sinks down to the floor and rests his head against the counter. He closes his eyes. Maybe if he sleeps again he can wake up back in 1945. And this is something that he and Stevie can laugh about. Maybe he can tell Stark about it.

Maybe he’ll find a flying car. 

He can’t sleep anyhow. Everything hurts. He feels so sick. And hot. And cold.

After a while he gets up again and finds a map of where he is. Maryland. He’s not far from Washington actually, he could probably walk the distance in a few hours (maybe more than that - in his current state) and in the city he’d have access to more information. He could find out… anything. Anything that might help him figure out how he got here. Why he might be here, How he can get back.

So he has a plan. And that’s what his brain needs to push that pain away again. He can do this. He can stay on task. He can get information.

And that’s what he does. He sticks close to the road, but far enough away to avoid suspicion, or cars. (The cars! They don’t fly, but fuck are they fast, and big! And colourful!)

It takes him much longer than it should. But he gets there. He avoids the smaller towns because he won’t be able to blend in there, he avoids the smell of the food from the roadside restaurants which has him bringing up more bile. Sipping more water. He follows the not great map and makes the best decisions he can make in the moment to get himself across the bridge. And then another bridge. And then finally he’s in Washington.

It’s more than his senses can take. It’s huge. The buildings are huge. The roads are crazy. The people are everywhere.

It’s not that different from what he remembers, but just more somehow. He has the hood of his sweater up to cover his mess of hair, as much of his face as he can. And it's a very good thing. Because the first image that accosts him, from screens that cover a back wall of the first busy bar he walks into, screens with colour pictures, brilliant pictures, is his own haunted face.

It’s Bucky, this new terrifying version. And he’s reeking havoc. Shooting up a crowded street. He’s watching the pictures and it has him ready to vomit again, though there’s truly nothing left in his stomach, and he’s on his way to find a bathroom or a dumpster to do just that, when the image on the screen changes and it's Steve.

It’s Steve.

He looks dead.

He’s being lifted onto a stretcher, he’s being placed into an ambulance. Bucky uses his hearing, hones in on the newscasters voice to hear her say he’s being taken to a hospital. She doesn’t say which one.

So that leaves Bucky to figure out how many hospitals there are and just go to them all until he finds him. 

And then the footage changes again and it’s Bucky again… and he’s… he’s shooting at Steve in the street. 

Oh god, no. That’s not right. That’s not him. He wouldn’t do that. Maybe Hydra cloned him. Maybe the pictures aren’t real…

But he can feel in his gut that something is so very wrong

Oh god.

Oh god.

He needs to find Steve, he needs to get out of here, he needs to breathe. To breathe. People are starting to stare and he has to get out. He bursts onto the street and runs. To anywhere, he doesn’t know. His legs give out soon enough and he ducks behind a building to collapse. 

He breathes. He keeps breathing until he starts to calm down. The nausea passes somewhat. The image of Steve lifted into an ambulance, being shot at in the street, is enough to shut the panic down. There is important work to be done, he has no time to fall apart. He needs to find Steve.

It takes him a few small thefts here and there, the minor break in of an unoccupied newsstand, to find a page of hospital listings and directions to follow.

It takes him even longer to find the right hospital.

But when he comes upon Medstar Georgetown University Hospital, the extra hustle and bustle, the armed men at the main entrance, he figures this has to be the place. Bucky pulls his hood low, (he’s had his metal hand kept securely slotted into one of his many pockets all night) and finds the easiest and least noticeable way to get inside through a huge concreted underground parking garage where the staff entrance is sitting completely empty of armed men. 

Once inside he sticks to the crowded areas, watches the movements of the people looking the most military, they’re milling mostly around the third floor. At least they're looking after Steve better here than at the entrance. But Bucky will have to be more careful because of it. A hooded sweater and an indifferent attitude probably won't get him to Steve unnoticed. 

He takes note of the people looking the most harried, the most like hospital staff. It's hard to tell the doctors from the nurses from the orderlies, they all seem to be wearing different versions of the same uniform. Almost like pyjamas. And this could work in Bucky’s favour. He takes his time to wander back down to the floor below and finds a tall silver trolley full of folded linens and clothing, he requisitions some of the pyjama like pants and a matching shirt and then from an unoccupied utility closet, finds a hair net to hide his mess of hair up into and blue gloves to pull over his hands. He squeezes his way to getting changed inside the closet, leaving the long sleeve t-shirt under the uniform to cover his metal arm and straightens it all out as best he can. He grabs a folder from a nearby desk, just like the ones he sees other hospital staff walking around with, no one is paying him any mind, and then makes his way back upstairs. 

And from there it's a snipers game. At least an hour of watching and waiting, breathing through pain and nausea, until he finds his opportunity to get into Steve’s room. A man he recognises from the footage at the bar, footage of Bucky shooting at Steve, a man who had been wearing wings and flying, actually flying through the sky, exits the room and speaks to the guards before leaving for parts unknown. 

And Bucky, who has passed the guards now a few times looking busy, passes by them now into Steve's room with a nod and one of his most casually trustworthy smiles (Bucky knows just how to use his face to get out of trouble - even as sallow and pale as he is looking right now). And he stops short at what he finds inside. 

Bucky is all too aware of how much damage Steve can take in his new body. But this is…

This is terrifying.

His face is black and blue, bloody, swollen. Bucky might say unrecognisable, but it would be a lie. Bucky doesn't need to see Steve's face to recognise him. Bucky could recognise Steve by the sound of his breathing, by the smell of him. By the essence of his presence alone. Bucky would know Steve anywhere.

Did he do this? 

Did Bucky do this to Steve?

His moment of indecision doesn't last. He's propelled forward by the movement of Steve's chest rising. By the flutter of his ridiculous lashes. He presses close to Steve, leaning over from his bedside, touching him gently with his flesh and blood hand, his own hand, to feel the warmth of him through the bedclothes, through the gloves. 

A sigh of relief runs through Bucky at that familiar warmth under his fingertips. 

And it's as Bucky stands by Steve's side, hand flat against his chest, face just inches from Steve’s, that those bright summer blue eyes Bucky knows so well blink slowly open. His head turns just a little to look up at Bucky and his cracked, bruised, bleeding lips spread into a smile.

'Steve?' Bucky whispers, 'Oh thank god, Stevie.'

But something in his tone hits wrong. Some kind of desperation maybe, because Steve’s smile is waning. A hardness is flooding his expression. The more conscious he becomes, the angrier he looks. 

He pulls back from Bucky, just a fraction. An inch at most. But it's a chasm to Bucky, that distance. And Bucky pulls back too, instinctively, removing hishand from Steve’s chest. 

Steve looks at him, at as much of Bucky as he can see from the position he's in, and then to the room around them. 'What is this?'

‘Steve?’

‘Who are you?’ His eyes are flicking around the room like he’s looking for clues. He’s panicking.

'It's me, Stevie, it's Bucky.' Bucky uses the calm voice he always needed to bring Steve back from an episode. ‘It’s me.’

'No.'

And that hurts. That cuts into Bucky like a blade. This is his Steve, he knows it. But maybe… maybe in the future Steve doesn't know him? Doesn't remember him? 

He steps back a little and takes the net from his hair. 'I look different, I know,' he says, working to keep his breathing even, to keep the stress out of his voice,  'Something… something happened to me.'

And Steve is looking at him. Watching him. Bucky lifts his chin, tries to let Steve see him. Looks him in the eye and hopes, prays, that Steve can see him in there. 'Bucky?' Steve finally whispers, reaching towards Bucky with an aborted movement, 'Buck?' He says louder, slipping as he tries to sit himself up in bed.

‘It’s me, it is me,’ Bucky says, placing his hand on Steve’s shoulder, trying to discourage him from moving and dislodging the cacophony of tubes that seem to be connected to him and a million pieces of flashing, beeping equipment.

Steve looks down at the hand on his shoulder, the metal hand, not really Bucky’s, and Bucky reaches down to slip his real hand, his right hand, over Steve’s where it rests on the bed. ‘It’s really you?’

And Bucky wants to cry at the relief in  Steve's tone. But it scares him too. 'Oh god, Stevie' - his breath hitches on Steve’s name - 'oh god, what happened to us?'

'Its okay, Bucky, it's okay,' Steve is shushing him, has reached his other hand over to cover Bucky’s where it covers Steve’s, 'It's not your fault, it wasn't your fault.'

'Wasn't my fault?' Bucky asks, not understanding.

'Hydra, any of it. What they did to you. What you did. It wasn't you.'

(Hydra. It's always Hydra, isn't it? Whenever he closes his eyes he can feel them waiting there in his nightmares. Of course they would be torturing him still. All the way into the future).

‘What they did?’ Bucky asks again, and then hears Steve’s words, remembers the film stock from the screens at the bar, ‘What I did?’

‘You don’t remember?’

'I don’t really remember much,’ he says, shaking his head like he can jog something loose, find something hidden, ‘How did we get to the future, Steve?'

And Steve is looking at him. His eyes wide. He's working himself up the bed, up to a sitting position - despite how painful it must be. 'What do you remember, Bucky?'

‘I…’ Bucky looks at Steve, at the raised eyebrows, at the clenched jaw, the tight fisted grip he has on the sheets under Bucky’s hand, ‘I remember the train,’ he says, swallowing, trying to fit his horror into a small, sealable box, ‘I remember falling,’ he looks aways from Steve for the first time since he entered the room, ‘I remember your face, getting further and further away.’

Steve’s breathing has ticked up. He’s doing that thing he does to hide his short sharp breaths from Bucky, but this is not an asthma attack, this is anxiety. This is worry. For Bucky. ‘Buck, it’s okay.’

‘I woke up on the side of a river, in a national park, not in Austria, in America, Steve, and it’s twenty goddam fourteen,’ he’s whispering and it’s painful, he’s got no control over the words, they just come right out of his mouth, like more bile, ‘I woke up in the future Steve, the future! What happened, why was I shooting at you? Why was I shooting at everybody? What did they do to me?’

Steve is reaching up one of his giant hands to cup it around the back of Bucky’s neck, squeezes it, kneads his thumb into the pressure point below Bucky’s ear. Bucky just leans into it, leans into Steve’s fingers, their weight around his neck. Leans into that comfort. ‘Bucky look at me, listen to me,’ Steve turns his laser focus to Bucky’s eyes and holds him firm, ‘You weren’t you, when you were shooting at me, you were compromised-’

Bucky dreads to think what compromised means, especially the way it sticks to Steve’s tongue, like he can barely get the word out.

‘-But, Buck, we need to get you out of here,’ Steve looks around at the rest of the room, at the door, at where he’s probably sure the guards will be standing, ‘Sam and Nat will be around somewhere, hopefully, and I can probably get them to help us, but nobody else can see you, okay?’

Bucky is nodding, he figured as much anyway, but he doesn't want to interrupt Steve, not when he’s so spooked. And Bucky can hear the flying guy on his way back, can hear him talking to the guards outside, and quickly adjusts the net back over his hair, tucking it away. Steve must be able to hear him too, because he’s moving his hand down from Bucky’s neck and back to the bed.

Bucky feels the absence of it like a blow. 

And when the door opens Steve holds out a hand to the man who freezes at the sight of Bucky. Looks to Steve and puts his hands up. Lets the door close behind him and doesn’t take his eyes of Steve and Bucky.

‘Steve?’ the man asks, doesn’t elaborate.

‘It’s okay, he’s friendly, he won't hurt us,’ Steve is saying, calm and even, like he’s talking to a skittish animal, ‘Sam, don’t do anything, just hear me out.’

Bucky wants to shrink into himself. Wants to disappear for putting that look on the man, Sam’s, face. ‘Okay,’ Sam says, his voice low and rich, his arms loose and by his sides, ‘You have ten seconds.’

Bucky is pretty sure that won’t be enough.

[wheelersdealer]

The Schmucks

Request: Will do you a Steve imagine? About when him and Robin were captured by the Russians but instead of them beating up Steve they beat up the reader - Anonymous. Pairing: Steve Harrington x Reader Warnings: STRANGER THINGS SEASON 3 SPOILERS! Profanity, descriptions of blood, gore, and beatings. A/n: Requests are open for S3! Hope you enjoy!

They beat you bloody.

Nose pouring and teeth stained, your knees drag against the metal flooring before they chuck you down right against it. And it hurts in the moments you’re conscious for it — only flickering in and out — but you are gone in seconds, unable to feel the immeasurable pain in your face and stomach, not even able to feel the slighter feeling of blood soaking your shoes and socks.

You do feel another weight right before you pass out completely. 

It’s Steve being thrown onto the floor by his guards. He isn’t in the best state emotionally, but compared to you his psychical attributes are completely clean. You hear him grunting and shouting at the guards, you hear him yelp right before he comes down to the floor with you.

But you don’t feel him force himself on his elbows and knees to nudge you, saying quickly “Hey, hey! Y/n? Y/n? Come on — Y/n?!”

A buzzer sounds and in comes what Steve can only assume is the lieutenant, leader? Hell, maybe even the head guard. 

“What did you do?!” He shouts while on his knees. And following a low growl he wills himself to his feet and dashes straight toward the guy, his head out and ready. The best he can do is butt him in the stomach with it, using his side, shoulder, elbow and everything to add to the pain. But considering the weak and pathetic huff of air the lieutenant gives out, Steve doesn’t have the energy for this. 

And when he stumbles back he makes the mistake of looking down at you. 

That’s when the lieutenant’s friend steps in, grabs a fistful of Steve’s hair, and juts his knee up and cracks his jaw. Steve falls back and tries to catch his breath through gritted teeth, but in this position he’s just that much closer to you. 

So up he scrambles, crawling again and whimpering (never mind his lack of breath) as he shakes your shoulder with his cuffed-together hands. “Wake up! Y/n wake up!”

One of them snaps their fingers then the guards come around him. One for you, two for him. That one holds you around the stomach and hauls you to your unconscious feet. He drops you into a chair sat against the one Steve’s thrown in.

“H-Hey — HEY!” He growls and tries looking over his shoulder. He can see them touching you, holding your body up in the chair and in place while they wrap the belt around you two. “Don’t touch HER!” He started flailing, trying to escape as best as he can but all that he achieves is a slap to the face and a hand locked tight in your hair. He coughs up, blood in his nose finally starting to come out his nostrils and dribble down the back of his throat, but the lieutenant just clicks his tongue satisfied at all of the blood and bruises on you.

“Y/n? Y?n?! C-Can you hear me?” Try all he may, even pushing his feet against the ground does nothing to slide your chairs even the tiniest bit this or that way.

The lieutenant drops your head. Steve hears autonomous gurgling as your body tried to rid your throat of the blood that’s built up in it.

“I think your friend needs a doctor,” he says in his accent. He rubs his hands (sticky and stained with your blood) on a white washcloth. He shakes it out as he comes to face Steve. And with a smile he bends his knees. “Good thing….” He tilts his head, “We have the very best.” 

Steve can feel the heat in his nostrils like a bull about to go rogue. 

He doesn’t give a shit about the blood and how it was getting into his mouth now — he throws his head back then rams it forward, his skull making a harsh connection to the lieutenants pointy nose. 

And he screams…

It’s a loud, guttural groan as he stumbles back and pinches his nose. It’s not broken — no no, it’s not broken. But it’s red and purple, bruised and on its way to becoming bloody, even if just a little bit. 

He doesn’t need to say it. The look he gives Steve perfectly encaptures the idea that he would regret it.

And he does. Only a little bit.

None of the others come to their lead’s aid, only holding Steve’s shoulders in place and one taking grip of his head while the guy pads at his nose with the cloth before bawling it up and stuffing it in Steve’s mouth. He uses his fingers to push it deeper, not caring when he feels them hurt upon making a connection to the roof of Steve’s mouth, a connection only softened by the cloth. He spits down at Steve’s feet and Steve screams into it, screams at the guys as they leave the scene.

Once while at work you watched him obnoxiously lick clean a sample spoon he used every day at closing to give himself a quick treat. He’d manage a big scoop too, despite how little and weak the blue plastic was. He was so, so obnoxious, but he knew he was, and he only continued because you knew it too and you laughed about it together — him, Robin, and you. 

“Your tongue is gigantic,” you told him with no intention on guiding the conversation in a less savory direction. You were merely stating fact. 

But he wiggled his brows and giggled “Is that so?” While taking another obnoxious lick to really clean it. 

“You know there’s a muscle in that thing? The whole thing — its just one muscle?” Robin chimed in. You hummed, impressed, and she too wiggled her brows at you. Then she lifted herself up onto the counter and let her legs sway as she watched you count the day’s earnings and watched Steve lean over the ice cream containers and lick up the spoon’s handle which he also managed to get covered in ice cream. “Who knows. With all the sucking face you do I’d say you’ve got yourself a pretty strong tongue.”

It was a gross idea but you muttered “True.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Great pick up line — ‘hey ladies, they say I’ve got a strong tongue, wanna test it out?”

“Yess!” Robin hissed, clapping her hands.

You clapped your hands once before howling basically, shouting “WOOO! That’s what I’m TALKING about Harrington! You just gotta get your head in the game.”

He craned his neck to watch you head into the back. “Please enlighten me on a situation where I’d be able to whip out my strong tongue.” After looking around the room (some families still finishing up) he stood and raised his brows in warning. “And keep it family friendly.”

“Eh, who knows. Your freakishly large tongue might come in handy some day. In a not 18 and up way.” 

Steve winces realizing that yes, it did. He pushes the wadded cloth out of his mouth and can’t help but spit up on his own uniform, the taste of your blood too strong for him. He keeps trying to jump again, get your chairs moving. 

“Hey, hey, Y/n?” He throws his head over his shoulder to try and bump against yours. 

“Y/n are you okay?”

“Pl-please talk to me Y/n…” he makes your seats jump again. “Y/n!?”

He drops his head and looks at his lap. He sees the blood;  it’s your blood from when he crawled over to you. He shakes his head and the sorrow in his voice turns into something casual, with a little bit of contempt. 

He scoffs. “Come on…after everything this is what gets to your head?” And rolls his eyes (though it pains him), “I mean, literally…I guess.” And you still weren’t talking. What was he trying to do? Wake you up through the power of making fun of you? Well, yeah…

“Y/n y/n y/nnnn!” His feet tapped rhythmically with his voice. Still didn’t wake up.

He tries to make himself chuckle, but only a sob comes out. He shakes his head at himself in shame and takes a moment to breath deep. 

“Come on…come on Y/n…Ugh…..At this rate I’ll be single at 25, you can’t die on me now.” Still nothing. So he chuckled weakly. “Remember that? When we uh…a-after Nancy uhm…After Nancy left? And you were lonely and I was lonely and we…we said we’d get together? Right? We said we’d like-we’d date. Or-or get married, or something, just do something if we were both single and miserable and alone at 25?” He huffs when still, there’s nothing. “Yeah…weird day. But I thought it was fun…and then you said how we could probably just totally pig out on our honeymoon. Just….“ 

He closes his eyes tight shut. “And you called me a trust fund baby and I got really offended even though I technically am? But anyways, you went on this whole speech about how we’d dress up all fancy and I’d introduce you to my parents as my girlfriend of six years or something and you’d be super super sophisticated and we’d take them on a train ride and we’d be dressed all fancy like we were snobby rich pricks in a murder mystery, and how they’d basically buy us the ring cause they’d love us together so much, and then we would take the ring and all the wedding money, elope in Vegas, and I dunno, go spend the rest of our days living in the woods like Hopper and shit, just pretending we’re a different couple every time we go out in public and make a mythical name for ourselves among all those snobby restaurants in Los Angeles?”

That was certainly a day…A long one where Robin did most of the work but you paid her with a twenty and the promise that you’d spill all the secrets about a group of friends you strangely hung out with in high school that she was just dying to get the dirt on. 

Steve thinks about it. Really thinks about it.

He thinks it would have been fun. 

He whimpers at the thought. And he sobs a little…at first it’s a laugh but the tears build up in his throat and then he’s cackling but he can’t see behind the fog in his eyes. 

“Can you imagine you in your little beret? In fucking France?” He’s sure that’s what you called it that once. “And-and a freaking turtleneck? And you — Y/n Y/l/n smoking while I pretend to actually like wine tasting? Gosh…” he sniffles and shakes his head at the ground, still smiling. “Can’t believe there’s guys that do that for a living…”

“Don’t die on me Y/n.” He gulps. “I can’t. I seriously can’t go back to that guy I was before. I mean,” he laughs, “meaningless sex is nice but man I really wonder what it’d be like to act like I’m Mr—“ he sputters, “Robert Vanderbilt or some snobby shit on a freaking boat! Who am I gonna do that with, huh? Yeah…maybe, maybe Robin. But I just…I don’t know…Y/n I don’t know…I really don’t…”

Steve scrapes his shoes against the floor. 

“Stop being so sappy dude…” You cough out.

Steve jumps and you feel your chair moving when he does.

“Y/n? Y/n holy shit! You’re awake?” He keeps wiggling, trying to free himself. But you’re quiet again, nodding in and out. “Y-you okay?”

You press your tongue to your cheek. You can feel where it’s swelling. “Well, everything’s throbbing, my ears are ringing, can’t really breathe, eye feels like it’s ‘bout to pop outta my skull but besides that I’m uh…” you taste your cheek again, “I’m pretty good.” 

“Oh shit — holy shit you had me really worried there.”

You scoff. “Is Robert Vanderbilt the best fake name you can come up with?”

Steve cackles and tries leaning back again. It doesn’t bother you feeling his head on your shoulder, especially since you can’t muster the strength to lift your own back up there. “You heard that? How…how much did you hear?”

“Mmmm…” You close your eyes for a second and Steve jerks your chairs, forcing you awake. “I uhm…good enough. I heard a good enough bit.” 

“Okay…okay…”

“Hey Steve?”

“…Yeah Y/n?”

You smack your lips. “When we get outta here can we go to ‘rance?”

Steve chuckles. “France? You wanna go to France?”

“Mmmmhmm.” 

He shrugs. “Eh, well I was actually thinking we might shoot our shot and visit Russia. How about that?”

You finally lift your head. His head rests on your shoulder, your head rests on his. He does most of the work trying to crane his neck to get a good enough look of your face. And lucky for you the eye that’s swollen is on your other side. You can actually see him without fuzz and without a splitting feeling in your brain every time you try to focus.

“That idea….I like that one…but first, we have to get out of here.” 

“Agreed. Okay, uhm,” Steve looks around and the first thing he spots is, “Scissors….Y/n, do you see those scissors?” You look to your left. “No, your right.” So you look to your right. There’s a little metal table. There’s a pair of stainless steel scissors and some other whacky utensils. “So, how about on uh, on three? On three we’re gonna try and jump in that direction, okay?”

“‘Nd cut our binds?”

“Yeah yeah, you’re getting it! Okay, ready? One, two…three!” 

You jump as best as you can and with Steve’s help you get a little closer to the table. You choke on your own laughter, blood still caught in your throat, but you get it up and out through your mouth and onto your clothes fast enough. 

“You-you still doing okay over there?” Steve asks.

“Never better.” You squeeze your swollen eye shut and force a smile. “Gonna do this again?”

“Yup! One, two, three!” And you jump, landing well enough. There’s a bit of a wobble that has your breath hitch immediately and you need a moment considering how busted your lungs are. “Shit! Holy shit okay—great job, great job Y/n! This is gonna work, I feel it! Okay, uh j-just a few more times. Ready?”

You decide to count. “One, two, three!” Steve can hear the determination in your voice when you get to the last count. It makes him feel even worse than an ache in his head can when you both tumble, the legs of your chairs slipping and scraping against the floor before dropping you both on your sides.

You crane your neck up and cough violently, trying to get blood and mucus out of your throat before you reserve to pressing your cheek as tight to the floor as you can cool you. It’s the least this environment can do for you. It’s cold. It’s nice.

And once you get comfortable, embracing the cool tiles, you begin to chuckle. It’s very faint, and wispy.

Steve whimpers thinking you’re doing the same. 

He pushes against your back, pleading “Y/n, don’t-please don’t cry. We’re gonna get out of here, I swear we’re gonna get out of here, okay? And-and we’re uh, we’re going to France! Or y’know, or Russia if you really want to just please don’t cry….” 

And then a much more dignified cackle breaks through your ‘whimpering.’ 

You cough in the middle of it, especially as your laugh becomes hardier.

“Are…are you laughing? Jesus…” 

You stop to groan in pain and Steve’s just as concerned as he was before. But you push it to the side and despite your sore throat you mutter, “I’m just-this is all just—“ you cough again, and Steve can’t help but coo. “I mean…this is ridiculous! Who needs to go to Paris, France, Russia, Rome, wherever and pretend to—“ you cough “—pretend to be a mysterious newlywed couple when we, you and me and Dustin, Mike, Max, now Erica and Robin we-we’re supposed to just go back out there once this is all over and act like we’re not being kidnapped by Russians right now!” You laugh so hard Steve has to shush you in fear of attracting them back to the room. “It’s insane, Steve! And—Heh, that’s even if we get out! Or maybe we’ll die in this secret Russian base and the world will do the honor of playing pretend for us by—PSH, saying we died in a fire or something!” 

Steve sighs. “We’re not gonna die. We’re gonna get out of here, okay? You just—you gotta let me think for a second, alright Y/n?”

You sniffle. “Remember when we uhm…when we were kids?”

Steve winces at the thought.

“And remember,” you roll your eyes, “The three Musketeers? Me…you…and Tommy H….? Third grade? And how we would, uhm…we would play pretend? And we would write stupid little stories and get in trouble all the time but you and Tommy would always take a blame? And we’d go on the playground and we’d make up our own stupid little games. We’d like, roleplay essentially and wonder why our parents got all frazzled and giggly when we told them that’s what we were doing?”

“….Yeah….yeah I remember…” 

You close your eyes and shake your head. “That was so fun man…I never once imagined — psh, especially not after the majority of high school — that we’d be where we are right now. I swear dude, this is some shit we would have thought up back then. And I don’t know to be happy, mad, scared, or sad! Because I wanted this. Man Steve I really wanted this. After uhm…after everything—“ 

Ah yes, the earlier high school years when Steve and Tommy went one way and you went the other. 

“—I just really wanted something just batshit crazy to happen that would bring us together again. And it did when Will went missing and then it did again when heh, we fought round two…But man Steve, now I kind of feel like I deserve this for wanting something ‘batshit crazy’ so bad when I was just this pathetic, lonely little teenage shit.”

“Hey….you weren’t a ‘shit,’ okay? If anyone was, it was me…well, and Tommy.”

“Hey, you were an asshole but at least you admit that.”

“Yeah…I know…” 

“It didn’t matter. So bad I just wanted something no matter how painful or harmful or bizarre…I wanted something to happen so we could be closer again. Without me having to actually do the work and risk being utterly humiliated in front of the whole school by Carol, but whatever. You were a fucking nerd Steve. You were basically a drama kid in disguise — a James Dean wannabe but damn you played the part so well. I just didn’t want to be apart of the ensemble, you know? I wanted to be like, your co-star. I wanted us to do stupid shit on our own and for nothing bad to ever happen, but I wanted us to just drive out into the middle of the night because we wanted to and who knows, just pretend to be stupid rebellious teenagers at some far off gas station just because we were bored….I still can’t help but think how that would have been so fun. In all mediums you’ve just been so…fascinating to me.” 

Steve sighs. “I wanted those things too Y/n.” He takes a breath. “After a while I started despising Tommy cause it was clear to me that he was an asshole even way back then, ruining the fun cause he wanted to be king of some stupid 30 minute game. I went through a lot of scenarios too. In my noggin’, or something.” 

You chuckle. “I’m glad.”

“It just baffles me knowing I could have had everything I wanted back then instead of now. And I-don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I have it now…heh. I just kind of wish  you didn’t have to be tortured by Russians for things to be this way, y’know?”

“I know Steve…I know…” 

He lifts his head and tries looking at you. “How you doing? You feeling okay?”

“Uhm, a bit better,” you lie.” 

Steve lays back down. “Okay, okay…At one point there were so many bad things I never imagined could happen. I thought I would be immune to everything if I got prom king my senior year or something.” He chuckles. “But look at us now. It’s all bullshit…sometimes I wonder if I would have been more prepared if we indulged a bit, had some fun.” 

“Me too Steve, me too.” You sniffle. “But on the bright side…we can practically play pretend all the time now.”

“How?”

You giggle, almost hysterically. “When we get out of here we can pretend to have a normal life now!” 

He chuckles. “Yup, yup. God I both love and hate how that’s true. And when we get out of here we can pull the finish line forward from 25 and make it 19 while we’re at it.”

“Ugh. You’re such a sappy schmuck.”

“Your sappy schmuck?”

You hum, all warm at the thought. “My sappy schmuck…hey you know what?”

“What?”

“Say goodbye to Mr. Robert Vanderbilt and hello to Stephen Schmuck!” Everything hurts with how hard you’re laughing, but it’s such a blissful feeling when compared to everything you don’t even try to slow it down. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Schmuck, huh?” Steve clicks his tongue and smiles. “I think I like the sound of that.”

“I like it too, Steve. I like it a lot.” 

[moonlightandlilacs]

A Very Strange Tea Party

This story is inspired by the amazing work of katydoodles, specifically this adorable drawing.

This would take post-Battle of the Miraculous.  Luka knows that Marinette is under extreme stress (and knows why, although he’s keeping that to himself), so he decides to give her a relaxing, fun afternoon.

Luka asks Juleka to gather the girls together, though he doesn’t tell her why, just that it involves Marinette.  He’s surprised at how quickly they all arrive at the houseboat, not realizing that they all think he’s trying to make a plan to ask Marinette on a date.

Rose is already squealing quietly into Juleka’s shoulder as they all settle into their seats and stare at him expectantly.

“It’s just so romantic,” Rose mumbles.

Juleka chuckles softly into the other girl’s blonde locks and whispers, “You think everything is romantic.”

Luka looks around at the assembled young women and gives them a smile.  “Thank you all for getting here so fast.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Marinette has been really stressed lately, and I think she deserves some help.  She’s always here for us, so let’s be there for her.”

A little embarrassed at making a speech, especially without his guitar in hand, he looks down at his shoes for a moment.  The memory of Marinette crying into his shirt surfaces, though, and that gives him the strength to look back up.

“Not that I’m not supportive, but how is asking her out going to make her less stressed?” Alix asks bluntly.

“Because then she’ll have someone to lean on, and someone to love her and hold her and-”

“Whoa!”  Luka bursts Rose’s romance bubble, turning redder and redder.  “Who said anything about- that’s not- I didn’t gather you all here to talk about me asking Marinette out.”  He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, ignoring the sighs of disappointment from around the room.

“Alix is right; that would just put something else on her plate, and she’s conflicted enough right now.  At the moment, she needs her friends,” the teal-haired musician says firmly.  He then turns his gaze to Alya.  “What’s a book or movie that Marinette really likes?  Maybe something she dressed up as for a party?”

Alya looked thoughtful for a moment.  “I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but she loves those Lewis Carrol books, especially the first one.  Alice in Wonderland, I think it’s called?”

Luka grins.  “Perfect.  Does she have a dress she’s made that would fit that?”

“I don’t know...” Alya dithers.  Suddenly, Myléne perks up.

“What about that Little Bo Peep dress she made?  That’s like Alice, only in pink!”

“Yeah, that should work,” the redhead agrees.

“So what’s the plan?” Alix asks.  “Clearly you have one.  Care to share with the rest of us?  We’re Marinette’s friends, too.”

Luka smiles again.  “We’re going to throw her an Alice in Wonderland-themed party.”

The girls meet this announcement with grins and the whipping out of phones.  Even Alix, who would normally hate this sort of thing, is nodding.  “Let’s give Marinette a party to remember!”

OooOooOooOooO

Several hours later, they have a basic plan in place and characters assigned.  The location, one of the many park/gardens of Paris, has been chosen, and tasks have been allocated.

Rose has been put in charge of decorations, with Myléne to help rein her in.  Obviously, none of them are as handy at designing and making clothes as Marinette, so they’ve decided to keep the costumes simple; Juleka, as the resident model, is given that task.  Alix is to get Marinette to the party with the help of Myléne, while Alya is in charge of research.  She, as the “best friend” also has the unenviable job of somehow convincing Marinette to wear her pink Bo Peep dress the day of the party without making her suspicious.  Luka is, rather obviously, in charge of music, and he’s convinced Marinette’s parents to supply food and drink; that phone call had gone surprisingly well.  He’s also in charge of transporting said food and drink.

As the meeting breaks up that evening and the visitors head to their various homes, everyone is excited and hopeful, ready to start on their tasks.

OooOooOooOooO

The day of the party dawns sunny and warm, and all of the final preparations are quickly finished.  Luka ferries pastries, finger-foods, and tea from the Dupain-Cheng household to the garden while Alya video chats with Marinette to keep her safely out of the way.  Rose sets up a lavish tea set and table for the goodies, along with plenty of decorations (not all in pink, thanks to Myléne).  Juleka hands out costumes to everyone, and then it’s time to fetch the guest of honor, whom Alya has finally talked into showing off her adorable dress.

Alix skates to the bakery, her white rabbit ears flying behind her, and exchanges her prized skates for a pair of white sneakers before strolling inside.  Tom and Sabine give her matching grins and call to Marinette that she has a visitor.

When Marinette appears at the bottom of the stairs and spots Alix in her waistcoat and bunny ears, she gives the girl a confused look.  Alix just smiles and pulls out her prized pocket watch.

“You’re late for a very important date,” the skater informs Marinette.  “No time to say hello, goodbye; you’re late, you’re late, you’re late.”  She grabs Marinette by the hand and pulls her out of the bakery.

“Have fun, kids!” Tom calls as the door swings closed.

For a few minutes, Marinette allows herself to be dragged along in silence, too confused to protest.  In fact, when she sees the fluffy white tail protruding from Alix’s white pants, she nearly trips over her own feet.  Eventually, she gathers herself.

“Alix, what’s going on?”  This barely affords her a glance.

“Don’t worry.  You’ll see.”  As Alix turns back around and starts tugging Marinette along again, Myléne comes around the corner ahead of them.

“But I have work I should be doing, and I’m sure my parents need help in the bakery, and there’s so little time, and I’m wearing this silly dress, and-”

“Now, now, don’t cry,” Myléne chastises gently as she joins them.  “Wouldn’t want to create a sea of tears, now would we?”

Marinette’s head snaps around, and she takes in the shorter girl’s grey sweater, mouse ears, and drawn-on whiskers.

“The... doormouse?” Marinette mumbles quietly.  “And... the white rabbit?”

“Very good, Alice.  But don’t get too far ahead of us,” Myléne adds with a grin.  Marinette looks down at herself and reassesses her dress, putting a few more pieces together in her mind.  She nods decisively and speeds up to walk between her friends instead of being pulled behind.

As the group turns another corner, they are met with the entrance to a garden.  The gate is open, but placed into the gap is a small door.  Marinette grins and kneels down to open it.  She crawls through and gasps as she looks up on the other side.

Rose has truly outdone herself with the decorations, turning the garden into a magical forest fit to be called Wonderland.  There are flowers everywhere, shimmering cloths draped through the trees, ceramic mushrooms dotting the ground, and a large table set up in the center.  As Marinette spins around, taking it all in, Rose pops up next to her with a huge, well, Cheshire grin.

“Welcome to Wonderland, Marinette!” Rose squeals.  The stripes on her face are beginning to warp with the size of her smile, and she bats at one of her cat ears with a gloved hand, showing off the paw pads felted to the underside.

“Glad to see I convinced you to wear that dress,” Alya comments as she swishes over, her red and black skirts flowing around her and her crown shining in the sunlight.  Her heart-painted lips pucker in a smirk.  “Fancy a game of croquet?”

She swings a plastic lawn flamingo down from her shoulder and offers it to Marinette.  “I guess since you’re my best friend, I can pass on the beheading part.”

“Heads are made for wearing hats, not for rolling,” comes a shy voice.  Juleka steps out of the shadows and sweeps her overlarge top hat off of her head as she bows.

Marinette’s eyes begin to fill with tears.  “I can’t believe you guys did all this for me!  This is... amazing!  Thank you all so much!”  She gathers her friends into a group hug.

As they pull apart, Myléne smiles.  “Well, it wasn’t all us...” she points out.  When Marinette shoots her a confused look, she steps back and gestures toward the tea table.  Blue meets blue as Marinette turns to face Luka, who is stepping towards her with a soft grin.

“Why, hello, Alice.  Or Marinette, if I may.”  His large rabbit ears flop forward slightly as he takes her hand and leans down to give it a kiss.  “The March Hare, at your service.  Would you care for a spot of tea?”

Marinette, still blushing, giggles and nods.  Luka leads her to the table and pulls out a chair for her.  Seeing the spread of desserts, finger sandwiches, and a beautiful tea pot with steam drifting from the spout, she tears up again.

“You guys really didn’t have to do all this.”

“We know, but we did, so sit down and enjoy,” Alix responds firmly.

“Besides, your parents helped,” Alya points out.  The others all chorus agreements and encouragements, and Marinette somehow finds herself settled into a chair with a cup of tea in front of her.  The others all settle around her and begin passing around the food with smiles and laughter.  Luka’s fingers brush Marinette’s as he hands her a cucumber sandwich, and she nearly drops it at the tingle that runs the whole way up her arm.  That tingle spreads and becomes butterflies in her stomach when Rose mentions that this party was all Luka’s idea.

OooOooOooOooO

Several “clean cup, move down”s, a lot of tasty snacks, and a very strange game of croquet later, Luka rises.  He pulls out his phone and presses a few buttons, causing music to begin playing from hidden speakers.

“Would you like to dance, Marinette?” He asks softly.  A muffled squeak is the first response he receives, but she puts her hand in his nonetheless.  As he leads her to a grassy area and begins to sway with her, he looks down into her eyes.

“You look beautiful, you know.  And your heart sounds so much lighter.”

“Thank you, Luka.  For all of this.  I still can’t believe you guys did all this for me.”

“You’ve been so stressed, Marinette.  We’re your friends, and we wanted to be here for you.  You needed a break and some fun.”  At this, Luka twirls Marinette out, showcasing the loveliness of her dress and making her giggle again.  He pulls her back into a dip and swings her upright smoothly.  As they lock gazes, the song comes to an end, to be replaced by “I Love Unicorns” by Kitty Section.

This jolts a laugh from Marinette, who had been lost in Luka’s eyes until then.  He lets her go, and she is immediately swept up by her friends into a silly jumping dance.  Luka smiles at her joy for a moment before joining in with dramatic air guitar.

They all dance and laugh and play the afternoon away together, Jagged Stone melding with songs from the various movies and shows based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderful, along with songs from Kitty Section.  Soon, everyone’s sides hurt from dancing and laughing so much, and Marinette feels happier and more at peace than she has in a long time.  If that feeling amplifies every time she looks at Luka, well, that’s her own business.

The last song on the playlist is a recording of Luka playing Marinette’s song, and as soon as it begins, she shyly asks him to dance.

“Of course, Alice.  This Hare is always at your service.”  He bows over her hand.  Marinette tugs one of his ears in response, startling a chuckle out of him.  As Luka and Marinette wrap their arms around each other, Juleka attempts to stifle the squee emerging from Rose.  Alya takes numerous photos of the pair as they sway together, and none of the girls can deny how sweet this moment is.

As the end of the song approaches, Marinette lifts her head from Luka’s chest to look him in the eye.  “Thank you, Luka.  I really needed this.  I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun, and everything has been so hard lately.  Just... thank you.”

“Anytime, Marinette.  I’m always here for you.”

“I know, Luka.  You’re sweet that way.”  After another moment, she nods to herself decisively and tugs on the back of Luka’s neck to bring him closer.  He bends obligingly, and she whispers in his ear.  “I want to thank you properly.”

“Marinette, you don’t have t-”

The rest of his words are lost as she kisses him.  Her nerves are evident, as is his surprise, but they both soon melt into the chaste kiss.

“Thank you, Luka,” she whispers when they pull apart.

“Do we all get one of those?” Alix calls.  The pair blushes, but eventually, everyone laughs, and Marinette’s heart soars.  For the moment, all stress is forgotten, thanks to her friends.

[dwaynepride]

Truth Or Dare

Summary: The team’s been drinking. Chris is dared to kiss reader. You know the trope.

Words: 2,943

Warnings: None

Tags: @stanathanxoox @pageofultron @n3shama @starryrevelations @thebeckyjolene @diaryofafan17 @specialagentlokitty

Notes: started out as an imagine but i get carried away and also am bad at planning so enjoy.

New Orleans was a great city. It really was. The music and the people and history...it was uniquely beautiful. You could see why Pride held such affection for it.

But right now, you couldn’t understand it. Because as amazing as the city was, it had its downsides. Namely, the damp, crowded, muddy swamps that you and Sebastian have been wading through all day. Granted, the amount of evidence you were able to collect would come in handy. It might be the key to solving the case.

But as the rest of the team rolled up, hopped out of the cars without mud stains on their clothes or sweat streaking their faces, you’ve never been more envious about staying at the office.

“Y’all need a shower!”

Chris’ jab was a joke, you knew that. He’s wearing a wide grin as he says it, prompting the rest of the team to smile. And even when you manage to sport one yourself, you can’t help but lower your eyes while padding up to the truck. The others might be content to laugh a little at yours and Sebastian’s expense, but at least they brought along some towels and a change of clothes.

Though, as you drag the towel down your face to clean the mud off, you reckon it’s just because they don’t want the work cars full of mud....

“You have fun today?”

Your head whips around at the sound of Chris’ question. There’s still a smile on his face, but it’s more like the one he usually wears. Carefree but friendly. It prompts a bit of heat to rush up into your face while shaking your head. “I’m covered in mud and had to listen to Sebastian complain all day. What do you think?” You reply sarcastically.

He gives a light shrug, leaning against the car while you work to wipe the mud from your arms and hands. “I dunno. Thought maybe bein’ out here would’ve put you in a good mood,” Chris comments, his eyes flickering about the edges of the swamp before looking back.

“Why would I be in a good mood?”

“Because all the evidence you and ‘Bastian got outta be enough to put our guy away.” Chris shrugs and motions over to Pride, who’s going over said-evidence with Sebastian and Gregorio. “That’s what King says, anyway. Y’all did a good job.”

Despite the irritation of wading through the bayou all day, with the heat and the bugs and Sebastian asking about gators, it all seemed worth it. Sure, the thought that all the work will go towards finally closing this case was nice. But somehow, Chris and his praise felt just a little better.

Your eyes are still down, focusing on the mud-stained towel, before he speaks up again. “Am I seein’ you at the bar tonight?”

This time, his tone is just a little different. Not an ounce of the light teasing it’s been sporting, and the sound of it forces your heart into jumping-jacks. You look up, forcing your face to stay neutral. Is he asking you join him for drinks....? “The bar?”

“Yeah. Once we get all this wrapped up, we gotta celebrate. And you definitely gotta be there.”

Right. Celebrating with the team. Like you always do after solving a case. A bit of embarrassment creeps up at the idea that it would be anything different, even in nobody else was aware of that secret hope. It still made you feel foolish.

But hey, spending time with Chris with the team was better than not spending time with him at all, right?

So you put on a smile and nod your head. “Yeah, I’ll be there. After a shower.”

-

“Gregorio, truth or dare!”

The bar was so loud - so full of music and people - that Chris barely heard Patton’s words. When his attention moves away from watching Pride on stage toward his friends, the two agents are staring at each other with a challenging look in their eyes. Sebastian watches, as does Sonja with a mischievous smile.

“Uhhh, truth,” Gregorio answers.

“What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done to impress somebody you liked!”

The team worked hard today. They deserved to kick back and throw back more than a few drinks. Get just a little drunk. That’s probably what led them to start playing a little Truth-or-Dare; a pleasant buzz that had Chris agreeing to play the stupid little game.

As Gregorio goes into telling the story, Chris is looking up towards the bar. His head leans side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of you through the mob of people. And then he sees you, still leaning against the counter, waiting for the bartender to fill the order of beers. How long have you been standing there? Five minutes? It felt longer.

There’s a nudge on his shoulder, and when Chris looks over, Sonja is glaring up at him. “Who are you staring at?” She asks bluntly.

“I’m not starin’,” Chris answers, and he hope he doesn’t sound too defensive. But he still motions up to where you’re standing, watching the band play even though you’re starting to look a little bored. “Just thinkin’ that....Y/N’s missing out on all the fun.”

Sonja’s focus follows his, and Chris doesn’t notice the sudden way her spine straightens. Doesn’t notice the look she gives Patton and the rest of the team before she’s nudging Chris again. And when he looks back, she leans in just a little. “Well, it’s your turn, Country Mouse. Truth or dare?” Percy asks, her tone almost deadly serious.

He gives an amused snort. “Dare,” Chris replies; he’s never been one to pass up an opportunity to do something daring. Plus, it’s a whole hell of a lot better than having to spill his guts.

But Sonja seemed extremely pleased at his choice. “Alright. I dare you...”

“Yeah...?”

“To go up to the bar. To Y/N...”

“Percy.”

“And give ‘em kiss.”

Immediately, the entire table erupts with a combination of laughter and shocked hooting noises. Everybody’s grinning at him, leaning forward in their chairs, waiting for Chris to take on the dare.

He’s blushing. He’s embarrassed, but he’s never turned down a dare before. And he’s not going to start tonight. Especially since it was Sonja who laid the dare out in front of him. The teasing will never die if he refuses.

Chris waits a moment, his eyes rising to look at the bar before raising his beer bottle and downing the last of it in a single swig. When he stands, his fellow agents watch his every step. Probably muttering to each other but the music and the bar patrons drown it out.

Not that he’d hear them anyway. Not with the blood rushing through his ears, matching the rhythm of his racing heart.

It takes some maneuvering through the crowd, but Chris eventually makes it to the bar. Shoulders his way to stand beside you, pressing against your arm. You look up at the sudden contact, probably expecting some strange man looking to get a little friendly before recognizing the face of your friend.

Your face instantly breaks into a smile, and it doesn’t help slow his heart rate down. “Sorry about the beers! It’s so busy - it’s impossible to get the bartender’s attention.”

Chris waves off your apology, mimicking your smile with one of his own. Your eyes break contact with his in favour of staring at your hands. “Don’t worry ‘bout it. I didn’t come up here for the beers,” Chris replies, voice elevated so you can hear.

But you still couldn’t catch his words. When you frown and tilt your head, Chris huffs a laugh before leaning in. His breath is wafting over your ear as he repeats himself, “I came up so we can have a chance to talk.”

You don’t reply for a moment. If Chris weren’t so close, he’d notice how your eyes went a little wide. How your face turns a subtle shade of pink that has nothing to do with the heat and energy of the bar. You turn your head a little to the side so he could hear your response. “Really?”

“Yeah. Ya looked lonely!”

Again, there’s a short bout of silence from you. The music’s thumping against the walls, but it feels as if Chris’ ears are straining, trying to pick up your next words. If they ever come. Eventually, he leans his head back to look at your face. And you’re barely meeting his eyes. Still smiling and, for all intents and purposes, looking really damn cute.

Maybe that’s just the beer talking.

He’s leaning closer into your space; probably a little closer than what’s considered normal between two friends in a crowded bar. But if you’re uncomfortable with the proximity, you don’t show it. In fact, for the first time since Chris has been up here, you’re finally making eye contact. Strong, firm eye contact.

He gives a sly little smirk; the very same one he usually uses whenever he’s trying to charm someone. “I gotta question for you. Feel free to say no,” Chris says, and he’s glad he’s close enough for you to hear him. He’d hate to break this eye contact.

You nod for him to ask, and Chris ignores the big knot in his stomach to focus on his objective. He knows the team is watching - waiting for the dare to be completed. “Can I kiss you?”

He would’ve said more. Probably a lame joke to get you loosened up, or even a comment to fluster you. But he knows you better than that, so the question is left as simple and blunt as possible.

Your eyes widen, clearly expecting anything but a request for a kiss. And then there’s a little quirk of your brow, as if wondering if you possibly heard him right. But Chris keeps his smile on, even leans his head in a little more, and you’re sure that you heard correctly.

Whatever force drove you to give a nod of your head was clearly not listening to the more rational part of your brain screaming ‘no, you shouldn’t kiss him.’ But your heart was beating way too hard and Chris smelled way too good when he leaned in for the kiss.

And, alright, you may have fantasized about a kiss from Chris LaSalle since basically the moment you met him. He was cute, in a goofy kind of way. Liked to make people smile, but you’ve never met anybody more loyal or brave. It truly wasn’t fair that he was able to gallivant around the streets of New Orleans.

It wasn’t fair that he was such a good kisser. That his lips were this soft or his skin was this warm. The sensation of him, all of him, completely knocked the air from your lungs. It was difficult to remember why a small part of you argued against the kiss, because right now, it’s all you can focus on. Chris’ lips are lightly tugging into a smile, but he keeps moving them against yours. Soft and passionate at the same time, and it’s turning your brain into a puddle of mush.

Just as you think he’s about to deepen the kiss, Chris pulls away. It takes a moment for your senses to return and open your eyes. And when you do, he’s grinning widely. You’re about to return the expression, but then his head whirls around to the table the team is sitting at.

You follow his eyes, noticing that your friends are all sharing mixed looks of shock and amusement.

There’s no time to wonder why Chris immediately looked back at them after the kiss before he’s talking. “I got dared to give you a kiss,” he calls out. When you turn to meet his mirthful eyes, Chris doesn’t even look shy or ashamed. “When it’s your turn to dare me, you can make me do whatever ya want. Embarrass the hell outta me.”

You don’t reply, or even attempt to mimic his amused expression. That warm, fluffy feeling that sprouted in your chest when he kissed you was gone. A feeling you never knew he could give you until just now, and it vanished as soon as it appeared. Replaced with a yawning, aching hole.

Instead of trying to play along, like you usually do when Chris flustered you so much, you just turned away from him and the bar. Head low, trying to navigate through the crowd as quickly as you can. Not looking at the team. Not seeking Pride out on the stage so he can come to you. Just making a bee line to the door.

And Chris is standing by the bar as you leave, his grin a thing of the past. Furrowed eyebrows mar the playfulness of his face, and when he glances back to Sonja and the others, they share his expression.

But they aren’t the ones who just fucked up. He was.

Chris instantly takes off after you, reaching the door much quicker but not without bumping into a few people and throwing out apologizes over his shoulder. He couldn’t care about them, right now. Because when Chris finally makes it out of the bar, he can’t find you. He leans to look down one side of the sidewalk, and there’s no sign of you.

He does the same with the other side of the bar, and thankfully, he spots your figure in the dark. Trying to speedwalk away from the Tru Tone towards...somewhere. So Chris breaks into a jog, calling out your name, telling you to stop, but you don’t.

It’s not until he reaches your side and tugs on your arm do you finally stop walking. “Hey, I was callin’ you,” Chris says earnestly, but you don’t look at him. That somehow makes it worse.

“I heard you.”

“And you didn’t stop?”

You let out an exhale, finally raising your gaze to meet his. Chris expects anger, which is probably warranted, but all he finds is small tears. Glittering against the streetlights, but unmistakable. “No. You kissed me on a dare, Chris. What made you think that was a good idea?”

The question gives him pause. Alright, sure, maybe it was kinda dumb. Maybe the dare was completely immature for a pair of federal agents, but it was all in good fun, wasn’t it? “It was justa kiss,” Chris responds, his voice more flat than you think you’ve ever heard it.

But it doesn’t soften the blow of his words. Just a kiss.

Again, your eyes fall away from his. But only because looking up at those baby blues is making this situation a hell of a lot worse. “Not for me,” you mumble out.

“What?”

“I said, not for me. I know you only think of me as a friend, but when you kissed me, I don’t know....” You trail off when your throat starts to sting. Don’t cry. Don’t cry... “I guess I thought you finally felt the same.”

There’s silence. The streets of New Orleans might be banging as loud as before, but the bubble that exists around you and Chris is dead silent. You’re staring at his boots, half-hoping you’d see them turn and walk back to the bar. But they don’t. In fact, they take a step closer.

You keep your eyes down.

“I’m so sorry, Y/N. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t’ve done that if-”

“Yeah, I know,” you cut him off. Putting on a strained smile that you’re not sure he even sees. “You’re still a good person, Chris. Can we please just forget about this? Go back to being friends?”

“Hey, we’re always friends, alright?” His hand is suddenly gripping your shoulder tight. The contact forces your eyes up, meeting his. And they suddenly look determined. That same look that appears when he has a dumb idea. “I want’chu to hit me.”

Despite the hurt, and the sting of embarrassment, his words bring out an amused snort. “What?”

“Hit me. I deserve it. Then we’ll be even.”

That’s when you start laughing. It’s not a belly laugh, or doubles you over. But it’s enough to ease the tight tension in the bubble. “Chris, I’m not going to hit you. Even if you were stupid enough to kiss on a dare.”

His weight shifts, and he doesn’t look very happy at your decision. “Yeah, but-”

“I don’t want to be even. I just want to forget it happened.”

Chris is hesitant to accept it. You know him well; know that he’s probably still brainstorming ways to truly put things right between you two. His attempt at getting you to hit him doesn’t work, so he finally just offers a smile. “Ya know, if you come back with me, it’ll be your turn for Truth-or-Dare.”

You frown in confusion, even when Chris comes closer and drapes his arm across your shoulders. Tugs you close while wearing that mischievous smile of his. “Yeah, and?”

“Well, Sonja’s the one who dared me. I reckon you can come up with somethin’ to get back at her with.”

Instantly, you’re reflecting his smile. And having him this close to you, his arm over your shoulders and feeling his warmth, should’ve clammed you up. It always has before. And for some reason, it doesn’t now. Maybe it’s because, as the two of you walk back to the bar, Chris is rubbing his thumb over your shoulder. It feels natural to fall into step with him.

You enter the bar still friends, but who knows what’ll happen after Chris answers a couple truths.

[zukofenty]

FWU

➜ Summary: The one where Katara (is sure) she's in love with the campus drug dealer. 

“Sokka, I swear! He’s not a drug dealer...he’s just an unlicensed pharmacist!” 

➜ Genre: Modern!AU, humor, DrugDealer!Zuko

➜ Words: 2.5k 

➜ Warnings: I will fight Katara for DrugDealer!Zuko 😩

AO3 

“We got the goods!” Katara squeals, throwing down flour, sugar, chocolate chips, and a sack of marijuana. 

Suki picks it up, sniffing the plastic bag. “This shit is loud and clear.” Her smile is dangerously devious. “Thanks, Zuko! This is going to be the best 4/20 ever!” Suki immediately begins to grab the proffered ingredients, shuffling them to the kitchen. She’s already taking some of the buds and putting them on a tray to prep in the oven. “Who knew fingering a drug dealer’s asshole would come in handy?” 

  Zuko immediately turns beet red. “Why do you keep telling people that happened?” Katara slaps Suki upside the head. 

  “Because I like seeing the two of you squirm, sue me!” Suki admits, shrugging her shoulders and dodging Toph’s slap to her ass. 

  Katara collapses on her futon, positively spent after spending the day helping Zuko drop off sacks for his clients, while buying all the ingredients they needed for baking edibles to celebrate the holiday.

  // 

  “Zuko, what the fuck are you doing!” Katara screams, almost losing grip of the wheel. 

  “How about you make sure your fucking Prius doesn’t eat shit?” Zuko screeches, coming back to his seat after sticking his entire body out the hybrid car. 

  Katara smacks her forehead. The pain where she hit is almost as bad as the frustration she feels. “This is the exact fucking reason I never get Chipotle with you!” She sees the car that was formerly beside her pulled over at the side of the freeway, the driver clearly angry with how hard he was pounding the pavement with his fist. His entire body is covered in Zuko’s half chicken half barbacoa burrito bowl. 

  “I’m not going to lie, that was impressive. The NFL’s vag must be positively pulsating,” Katara deadpans, rubbing at her temples to relieve the pressure from forming. Sokka always said her road rage was the worst he’s ever seen, but alas her shouting and occasionally flipping people off could never compare to Zuko’s hotheadedness. Her gut feeling about grabbing an extra bowl paid off, much to her dismay. This was not a rare occurrence. “How did you manage to throw your entire bowl through the crack of his window?” 

  “Well, the NFL can go eat a dick!” Zuko says, wiping his hands on a Chipotle napkin before taking a sip from his water cup filled to the brim with their lemonade. “And the shit dick had it coming.” He did, Zuko swears. It’s completely his fault for not only playing Michael Buble as loud as his Honda Accord was capable of, but also refusing to use his turn signal, and then screaming “fuck you, pussy hoe!” when Katara honked at him. That bitch. 

  “Right. Anyways, I’m recalling a conversation we had I think...yes! Two days ago. You’re still thinking about going to therapy, right? You’re moving on from your designated therapy toad?” 

  Zuko fully turns to face Katara. He accidentally bumps his head on the roof, and proceeds to smack it. “First of all, what makes you say that? Second of all, you know Frank has a name!” 

  “Not your anger issues, of course.” She doesn’t miss his eye roll. “Also, when you gave me your phone so I could text your uncle that you were going to pick him up, I went through your Youtube search history. Because I care. You deserve better than boxed hair dye tutorials, Zuko. I know you can do better.” At the red light, she grabs Zuko’s shoulder in an almost caring manner. He slaps her tiny hand away. 

  //

  Zuko was certain he was spending this 4/20 positively baked , so while he waited for everyone to wash their hands so they could whip up his favorite Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies edibles (with a gooey marshmallow middle), he took out his grinder from his hoodie’s pocket. 

  He grabs at the Sailor Moon bong he bought Katara for the one month anniversary of the time she saved him from being beaten to death by a group of frat brothers. She didn’t nearly like using marijuana as much her friends did, insisting on her maintaining her brain and lung health. She’d never admit to enjoying the cannabliss that came with huffing and puffing out some Mary Jane, but Zuko knows her sleepy smile after taking a hit lets her sleep just the slightest bit better. 

  Especially now that she’s working nonstop to pay off her tuition this semester. While Sokka was efficiently loaded, his record label was going through a rough patch after a scandal with one of their artists. Apparently, having viral toe sucking videos reflected badly on you as a person, and a number of investors pulled out after the news broke. Sokka was dipping into emergency savings, about to sell the Bugatti, but Katara insisted on taking on a few part time jobs. It breaks Zuko’s heart when he’s the first one to come home to her apartment, even after doing his runs for the night. She’s always blearly, insisting on taking a “quick nap” before she takes off her makeup. He likes feeling useful, when she instantly falls asleep and he’s the one using Micellar Water and a cotton pad to rub off her stubborn mascara of the day. 

  “I will literally curb stomp the Dean for you,” Zuko tells her, the fire behind his words that makes Katara doubt it was a passing joke. 

  “Zuko. No.” 

  He remembers being woken up in the middle of the night, Katara whispering into her phone. He invested in the Sailor Moon pipe after he found out she could only sleep a few hours, before being woken up abruptly from the stress weighing on her mind (her dark circles betrayed her).  “I started seeing someone,” Katara mutters, checking over her shoulder to see if Zuko was still sound asleep. She started wincing at the palpable silence that followed. 

  “As in dating or hallucinations?” Sokka questions, much too loud for her taste. 

  She sighs. “Don’t get like this! He’s a good guy, I promise. His name’s Zuko.” She hears shuffling on the other side of the line, after the prominent thunk of the phone dropping. “Why does that name sound so familiar? And so colonizer-like…” His voice is filled with suspicion, and she could almost see the cogs in his brain whirring to life. Before she could utter another word, her brother abruptly yelps. “Isn’t he the drug dealer who got beat up on campus?” 

  Katara sucks in a breath. “How do you know about that?” 

  “I read the Campus Crime Alert emails the school sends out, idiot! For such an expensive school, you would think they would have better security and less laptop snatchings. By the way, we need to buy you a laptop lock. You still have that self defense knife I sent you?” Sokka angrily whispers in the phone, mocking Katara’s quiet tone. 

  “Yes, dad !” She hears his irate protests as she flips her body to face Zuko. He looks a few years younger when he sleeps, breathing even and face forgetting the patented scowl. His bare chest and sweatpants hanging low on his hips were enticing. His hair was almost perfectly positioned, the strands messy and unruly but just screamed Zuko . The dangly cross earring doing too much to her heart. Down girl, down! Katara tells her pussy. “Sokka, I swear! He’s not a drug dealer...he’s just an unlicensed pharmacist!” 

  “I have the email right here! Right here! And tell me what about ‘student being violently attacked due to drug related incidents ’ doesn’t scream drug dealer getting beat up for drug dealing !” Katara bites down on her tongue, whether to hold back a laugh or scream she wasn’t completely sure. 

  Suki takes a hit from her Hello Kitty dab pen, a white, bedazzled one that Zuko had gotten her. Toph and Katara also had matching Hello Kitty dab pens, in green and blue respectively. She thinks Zuko has one in red, too. She added a second layer of soy lecithin to the weed infused mixture, before popping it in the oven again for another 30 mins. 

  In the meantime, Katara was preparing the ingredients for the cookies. Zuko’s laying on the ground, narrowly missing the futon, eyes glazed over. He hasn’t moved in the past twenty minutes. “Katara, that isn’t the hand mixer, that’s your vibrator .” Suko gently chastises, moving the device from her lax hands. Katara always complained her hands were numb when she was high, and once dropped a mug from their balcony after they packed a bowl together for the first time. Suki is still bitter. It was her favorite Gudetama mug. 

  After freezing the mixture for two hours, Suki, Toph, and Zuko were hard at work, mixing ingredients, and preparing to get fucked up. A few people have stopped by the apartment to exchange plastic bags for cash. 

  “Are you turning Katara’s apartment into a dispensary? ” Toph is absolutely incredulous. 

  “That’s a loaded question with an answer very much open to interpretation…” Zuko ducks the house slipper Toph propels to his face.  

  Katara has a dumb smile on her face, wide and threatening to split her head open. She’s an avid texter when she’s baked.  

 **

Katara: What are you doing right now? Come over! Zuko’s got apology weed for you <3

  Jet: I’m at McDonald’s!! Kinda of high lol 

  Katara: Ooo you got the munchies? 

  Jet: Nah 

  Katara: how come? 

  Jet: I smoke meth lmaoooo

**

  “Who are you texting?” Zuko asks, plopping next to her spot on the floor. She’s sprawled out, hair every which way and tangling into already unruly knots he’s going to have to detangle in the morning for her. Because Katara’s a lightweight, and suffers from weed hangovers regularly. Zuko’s already recovered from his many hits at the Moon Stick pipe. 

  “Did you know Jet smokes meth?” 

  Zuko rolls his eyes, curling up and trapping Katara with his outstretched embrace. “I really thought he would like my I’m sorry weed.” 

  “Me too.” He kisses the pout off of her.  

  Katara steadily crawls up (Zuko doesn’t miss her sleep shorts riding up) and tries her best to help Toph mix the marshmallow and Cinnamon Toast crunch mixture being heated up in their big pot they stole from Katara’s neighbor. 

  When Katara grabs the hand mixer to try assisting the cookie batter, Zuko knew he had to intervene lest something explodes. She smiles when he surrounds her with his body, the warm weight of his chest against her back and his hand wrapping around hers on the mixing device. 

  He loves her, he’s sure. Even while they roll the cookies together she tries to be funny (when she clearly knows she isn’t) and throws the dough at him, and it lands in his hair. He’s sure she peed herself with how hard she was laughing and scrambling to find the bathroom when her eyes could barely open. 

  Zuko shuts down his phone when the sweet scent of the pastries flood his nostrils. Even if 4/20 is like his version of Christmas, he’s determined to spend it with his girl. “I think my pussy just gave out. That shit looks dank ,” Katara squeals, shaking Toph by the shoulders to emphasize her point. 

  “Thanks for the visual,” Toph says, looking devious and wholly prepared to get stoned. 

  //

  “I could beat his ass if I needed to,” Katara loudly whispers in Suki’s ear. At this point, they were all laying down on the floor, the familiar tingle of an impending high at the forefront of their minds. 

  “Katara, you’re staring at a poster of 11 year old Frankie Muniz.” Suki shakes the girl off her. “Why do you always say that about any guy you see, sober or not?” 

  Zuko’s the most sober of them all, but based on the fact he killed a few joints on his own, he thinks he’s about to die. Toph’s on the balcony, weary of the smoke detector. She comes back in after repeatedly coughing, pounding at her chest to lessen the pain. She promptly lays on the floor with the rest of them, stupidly smiling. 

  Zuko sits, leaning on the futon for support. He pulls Katara into his lap, and she’s pliant, immediately melting in his hold. Hands coming out to wrap around his neck. “Check your school portal,” he says into her ear. She laughs at the sensation. 

  “Why?” She’s breathless, when he rubs comforting circles into her back. Zuko finds her phone, thrown carelessly on the futon, before gingerly handing it to her. After she types in the login information, she gasps, the sound reverberating through the room. Zuko blushes, and rubs the back of his neck gingerly. 

  “Happy 4/20, baby,” he presses a sweet kiss to her hair, wiping away the pricks of tears appearing at her eyes. 

  “ You’re lying !” She couldn’t believe her eyes, and thinks she’s a little dizzy from how many times she zooms in and out of the tuition financial statement. “You’re fucking lying!” The bill, formerly with a nauseating number of zeros was now only $0.00. “How?” she splutters, even spitting in her haste. 

  “Toph knew your portal login, so I just kind of...paid it off?” He’s doing the thing where he’s rubbing at his neck and looking shy, and so so positively adorable . The sheepish look he gives her makes it known that she was screwed . So absolutely in love. “I want you to not worry about it. Save the money from your job for something else.” The kiss she slams against his lips nearly knocks his breath away. 

  //

  “So what’s your plan, after paying all this off?” Zuko remembered Toph asking, after she entered Katara's password. 

  “After this, she’s catching all this ball juice. Going to suck her eggs out her ovaries like it’s boba. I’ll even use the straw and everything,” Zuko says, entering the pin of his debit card. 

  “You know what. She should have let you die that night.” 

  //

  “Who knew there would be perks to dating a drug dealer?” Toph teases.  “Girls be so single and then boom ! Baby shower pictures with some drug dealer in a Burberry shirt and Nike Air Maxes.”

  Suki groans. “Toph, I swear. You are a hindrance to society.” 

  “Well, you’re a cunt!” 

  She shoves the smaller girl. She gets up to face Katara, still staring at her phone in shock. Her hair is a bird’s nest after growing two sizes two large and painfully matted.  “You know, we thought we were bad friends for letting you date a drug dealer with mommy and daddy issues. We just sat there and prayed that our ‘we’re so happy for you guys!’ was convincing. But, I kind of like him.” 

  “Thanks for the support,” Zuko grumbles. 

  “Anytime!” The two say, perfectly synchronized.

  “Like MJ doctor, they killing me,” Zuko sighs, dropping his head in the crook of her neck, defeated. Katara’s heart nearly bursts because he’s so cute . A big bad drug dealer, but she still was squeezing at his cheeks like they were mochi, and he was dumbly smiling back. 

  “Why do you always quote Nicki Minaj lyrics when you’re high?” She thinks she can’t feel her face, the excessive smiling numbing her features. 

  He’s bombed, stomach growling from getting the munchies and devouring an entire box of Suki’s Wheat Thins cereal and he thinks he feels his heart about to explode. Whether it’s Katara’s sweet, sweet smile, or her body pressing to his, he’s not sure. She’s soft and perfect and everything he could have asked for. He’s sure he’s in love, the type of love that was dangerous and stupid and promised to consume him whole. Yet, he’s all but offered his heart on a silver platter to Katara. Her presence in his life was a constant he was willing to fight to keep. 

  “I love you,” he mumbles against her lips.

  “I know.” She stares into his eyes, before grabbing his hand. “I love you more.” 

  “Impossible.” 

  She pokes his chest in protest. 

  “Say it again, please?” Zuko begs, voice whiny. Her kiss was an adequate confirmation of the sentiment.  

[somekindofseizure]

When the Ink Dries Part IX

This is not the end of the story, still working on the last few chapters but I felt these were ready to see the world and you all have been so patient. Thank you all for that and thank you @icedteainthebag​ for editing brilliance.

This is, as the previous 22 chapters were, adult-rated material.

* * *

Chapter 23

The vinyl upholstery crackled as Mulder shifted his weight and looked out the diner window onto the expanse of knotted beltway.  FM radio scattered particles of music around him like dust that moved with the swoosh and capture of twin glass doors.  It was a busy morning in the restaurant, but for Mulder, there was only unleased space and silence, the room Scully’s voice and body would soon take up across from him, where her new reality would be borne, where time would reset itself for them as it had so many times already. 

The waitress dropped menus and clicked her gum, winked as though she knew what he was about to do.  New realities, a zero on the stopwatch - these were things of science fiction, sexy from afar, terrifying up close.  He turned down the coffee, he was jumpy enough.

He had run his finger up and down the coiled spine of the menu for the fortieth time when she finally slid into the booth, brushed back a front-leaning strand of hair from root to end, an impractical gesture that had never really seemed to serve any purpose except to distract him.  Saturday brunch sunlight pierced the window like a bullet and Scully chose her spot carefully, taking redheaded cover in a shadow.  He fidgeted in parallel, wanting to be directly opposite her when he said what he had to say.  She laughed, as though he was making fun of her, and reached across for a quick squeeze of his hand.  He fumbled the gesture, his grip still favoring the safety of carefully-named omelets over human women.  She didn’t seem to notice his worriedness.  Maybe in her mind worriedness had become his natural state.

“How was London?” he asked because he didn’t want to say you look so good, I missed you, please come sit next to me, and these exclusions limited small talk.  And yes, because he wondered if she would tell him what happened with Stella.

“Nice,” she evaded, scanning the menu.  They both knew she would get two eggs scrambled with an avocado instead of bacon, tell them to hold the home fries but on-purpose-forget to tell them to hold the buttered toast.  Looking at the menu was mere formality. “How are you, Mulder?” 

And now she flicked her eyes up to note the quality and integrity of his answer, a doctor assessing a patient, if the doctor and patient had spent many years being in love.  And so he could assess back, could see now as she studied him was that though she was happy to see him, there was sadness too.  No doubt this sadness had something to do with Stella’s phone call from the bathroom floor. The realization was bittersweet - a poignant comfort on Stella’s behalf that the heartbreak she’d nursed was shared by the silent party, the dizzying disappointment that that other party was the person he himself was still heartbroken over.

“I’m good, Scully.  You were right about the therapist.”

“Well--”

Normally, she was happy as anybody to accept an I-told-you-so, but she demurred here, waving him off.  He persisted.

“I should’ve gotten help much sooner.  You were right.”

“Okay.  Good.  You look well.”

She turned the menu over, pretended to consider a milkshake.  He’d only seen her actually order one once.  It was as memorable a diner moment as they came - glow-cheeked and kohl-smeared, she’d asked for it with a sigh of relief, as though the night they’d just spent together had earned her some sort of bonus.  Relief.

It had been like making love to her all over again, watching her gaze into the frothy glass, the Redi-Whip level and locking like a canal as she sucked her cheeks in making pinwheels of her cheek and jaw bones.  He had reached over to take it, slurp the remains from the bottom of the straw and she’d slapped his hand away.  When she finally chose something, she possessed it, devoted herself to it. What happened when there were two competing items on the table?

“Any good cases lately?” she asked.  

Strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, her finger physically skimming the plastic cover over these joyful words.

“No… well, some,” he said.  “Hospital good?”

“They’re still a little sore over my long leave, but they’ll get over it.  I’m starting to think about retirement.  I think I could do more good that way, volunteering on my own terms… It’s not like I’d do nothing, but...”

Myriad were the hypothetical topics Mulder loved and Scully hated, but this was one of a few that went the other way around.  She could pass hours daydreaming aloud about what she’d do with free time.  It incited a sense of panic in Mulder, made some voice inside him start chanting, I will work until I die.  He muffled a sigh by coughing into his elbow, trying not to sound annoyed, and waited for her to take a short pause before interrupting her.

“I actually brought you here to tell you something,” he blurted.

She looked up, eyebrows at a two percent incline that indicated she was in no way prepared for this moment.  He picked up the file folder on the seat beside him, but the waitress came by with her pad.  Scully made Mulder go first, buying time she didn’t need, and then ordered her usual.

“And a black and white with whipped cream,” Mulder tacked on at the end.

“No, I’m on a cleanse.  London was all red meat and chocolate and alcohol.”

London, not Stella. As though she’d been in a hotel somewhere alone.

“I’ll have it, then,” he said.  

The waitress nodded as she jotted and Mulder wondered how many people used places to set a scene.  Should he have done it in private, where she could cry or scream or do something else (he didn’t know what)?  It was true, he’d been counting on the fake-leather booth and egg-pan breeze to undercut the drama, but now that he was here with her it seemed more likely to exacerbate the situation.

“Sounds like big news,” she said but lightly, a benign reduction - you, the boy who cried aliens.  She folded her elbows on the table and leaned forward.  “Come on, you’re killing me.”

No sooner did the sarcasm settle than she spotted the mustard yellow folder under his hand and her technicolor complexion went grey.  This news was not we’re going to a basketball game, I’m getting a dog, or I found your favorite sweater, here ya go.  This news required a folder with a standard bureau label on it.

He placed it in front of her on the table, laid his hand flat on top of it so that she’d have to look at him before she opened it.  She knew the moment their eyes met.

“How?” she demanded immediately.  She regarded the folder itself like a bomb, waiting for him to tell her which wire was which.  His heart raced and he tried to remember his patience, tried to quell the urge to rush her into feeling any one specific thing. 

“I wasn’t sure we’d be able to find him at all.  That’s not how we set it up,” he said to stall, and to explain why he hadn’t told her he was looking into it in the first place.  He hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up.  

“And… how?”  she repeated, now sounding light headed, shallow-breathed.

“Working for the FBI for a hundred years has to come in handy at some point, right?”

“Is he…?”  

He reached for her hands, bending forward like a branch, an unexpected gale of guilt curling his back.  Generally file folders appeared when a body turned up.  Of course he should have led with this:

“He’s fine, honey.  Just fine.  Sorry.  I should have...”

She nodded quickly, let out a breath.  

The waitress arrived with the milkshake in a deep old-fashioned glass, a spoon, two straws and the stem of a cherry sticking up out the top. For the first time, he understood Scully’s gravitas around ordering these things.  There was a time and place.  Celebration could turn to sorrowfulness, expectation to terror quickly.  Sometimes you’d be sorry or embarrassed you had a milkshake in front of you. Neither of them touched it.

“There’s a picture,” he said.  “Pictures.”

In slow motion, she registered this development, licked her lips, straightened up as gradually as a puppet, pulled her hand from under his and placed it on her stomach.  Air shifted visibly within her ribcage, rippling her fingers as she tried to support her diaphragm externally.  Condensation began to encircle the base of the glass.

“I know, it’s a shock.  I’d half been hoping Stella told you, even though I asked her not to.”

Her face twitched in confusion.  

“Stella knew?”

He shook his head quickly.  

“Just for a couple days before you came back.  It came up.”

Color reappeared in her cheeks and her fingers went to her temples.  The kind of face she normally made when she found herself in the middle of a desert in a suit in hundred-degree heat, chasing down one of Mulder’s hunches, her how the fuck did we get here again face.

“Sorry -I -?  When did it come up?  How?” she stammered.

“She probably didn’t think it was her place.”

“Why do you talk to each other behind my back?”

“We weren’t talking behind your back, we were talking and it came out, Scully.”  

This was a coping mechanism of hers, to bicker through a loss of control, but sometimes mechanisms malfunctioned, caused damage.  He knew that ‘cause he went to therapy now.  Sometime - definitely not now - he would tell her she should go too.  

“I hate feeling like I’m the last one to know things,” she said.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“I hate that there’s someone who can make you come faster than I can.”

She startled, almost laughed, but couldn’t - that folder was still here, in the room, staring her down, just like the milkshake.  

Her eyes moved over the edge of the piece of cardboard, as though it required planning - how does one open a file folder that contains the son you gave away? He tore it open for her, a Bandaid off a scab.

Mulder wasn’t there the first time Scully laid eyes on their son.  He’d had to guess at the way she must have marvelled, the beauty, the awesomeness of it.  No telling how he might have held up then, how that experience might have toughened his tolerance so that now thirteen years later he might not fall apart watching this second first-time.

His chest tightened, tears freezing somewhere between his eyebrows to avoid falling.  Across from him, Scully shed them with sensible abandon, weeping as science intended, peeling the surfaces of her eyes away like dead skin, leaving behind something new and unprotected, something healthier but easier to wound.

There was a school photo of William, a close-up, and then a few surveillance photos that had been taken at a distance.  Mulder had insisted they take no chances disturbing the boy, so these were a little blurry, taken at odd angles, slightly refractory images.  You had to use your imagination in order to piece him together.  But Scully stared, tracing a finger over his profile like he might pop up from the paper and sit with them.  What would he order if he could join them, Mulder wondered?  

He was tall for his age and pouty-lipped, possessed of the pronounced Mulder brow.  But he had Scully’s eyes and his skin was so fair he looked like he’d get a burn just turning the lights on.  And there was one odd thing -

“He’s blonde,” she said finally, mystified.  

“Yeah. Tell Stella I want a paternity test.”

She smiled and laughed, held a napkin to her upper lip to blot the snot.  

“There’s some information, too,” he said.  “It’s mostly, well, you’ll see.”

She flipped nimbly through, taking it all in like one of the old casefiles she’d had to cram before she got out of the car.  As in those cases, there was little to go on.  A tonsillectomy.  One school change to enter a gifted children’s program, a broken arm when he was ten from falling off the edge of a staircase, climbing up the wrong side of the rail, an activity which had almost gotten him kicked out of the fancy school.

She looked up, topmost edges of the papers trembling over her knuckles.  Her fingers were ripply at the knuckle, but her hands were still lovely, expensive looking - little blown-glass figurines that would outlast every piece of furniture in the house.

“He’s fine?” 

“Yeah.  He’s fine.”

William’s life was average in the extreme.  It was regular.  It was everything they could have hoped for.

She put the photos down in a neat pile, straightened her shirt, her lipstick, her hair, pushed the file folder closer to the center of the table beside a ceramic bed of sugar packets.  In a moment, food would arrive and they’d have to pack everything up, put it on a seat to her left or to his right, but for now it sat evenly between them.  Just as much his as it was hers.  

She scratched her lips thoughtfully, tapped the other set of fingernails on the table.  

“He’s fine,” she said, this time quietly, talking to herself, or to the folder, or maybe to God.

And then her gaze settled on Mulder.  It lingered there as the waitress balanced their food on her shoulder, placed down little dishes of overly cold butter and plasticky jam.  A few feet away, a newly minted middle-aged couple joined hands for the first time ever beside their forks.  Behind Scully, an aide helped an old woman into the booth.  Two college girls cooed at the counter, full up with things to tell each other.  Time moving forward and backwards, borrowed and stolen and still and running in circles at every table.

“Fine,” Scully repeated and tugged the cuff of his sleeve.  She mouthed the words thank you, bottom lip grazing her teeth.  She did it again, this time forehead collapsing into the center of her face to make that vertical wrinkle she’d had above her nose since she was twenty seven.  

He nodded, reached his foot under the table so that it rested against hers, his rubbery arch warming the sharp edge of her shoe and he pushed the milkshake across the table.  

She laughed and then took a sip.  Relief.

Chapter 24

As a biology major, Scully had sometimes been warned she was signing up for a life of disappointment.  Satisfaction would be fleeting.  Few of them, if any, would make grand discoveries in their careers.  The earth was already round.  The miracle of penicillin had already been witnessed, sprouted hundreds of other little miracles that bore an ever-less-impressive resemblance. A scientist, Scully was told, must learn to love the question, not live for an answer.

William had been a hypothesis for most of these past thirteen years, and though that was sometimes painful, it was familiar.  It was a circumstance Scully had come to accept.  She’d given him up because she’d firmly believed it was better for him.  Conclusions: none.  Control: none.  It was how she’d assumed things would always be.  But now there was an answer. William existed once again. He looked a certain way and sounded a certain way and lived a very certain life and she would always miss him.  This was harder than she’d ever expected or allowed herself to imagine.  The earth is round - think what that had taken for people to get used to it.  

She rationalized things like the thing she was doing by going over this, comparing the unfamiliar emotions associated with her son to the familiar territory of science.  But Stella was no scientist, and she was no poet like Mulder. She was an answers person. And now she was here, involved in Scully’s experiments, and was not particularly happy about it.

They were seated on a cool-slatted autumn park bench, Stella draped in cashmere and reluctance, the chilly peach East Coast air settling on her cheekbones like stains of faint embarrassment.  It had been eight months since their parting ways - eight months of silence. Stella had granted Scully’s request for a visit without knowing specifically what it would entail.  Now she clasped her brown butter leather gloves over a tightly crossed thigh, pulled the cuffs of her sweater down closer to the edge of her gloves to warm her wrists.

Had this once come easier?  The restraint it took to refrain from touch and mentioning the effect of light on the color of her eyes?  An evening they’d spent in a hotel as just-friends came to mind.

“Did you color?” Scully asks, her surgeon-steady hand poised over Stella’s, light pink bottle of Chanel nail polish in place of a scalpel.

“Color… my nails?” Stella asks and blows a stream of air across her other hand.

“No, you know, like, crayons.”

“Oh.  No, not that I remember.”

Scully glances up quickly to make sure of two things – first, that Stella’s not touching her hair, her spaghetti straps, her Scotch, anything that would smudge the half-finished work, and secondly, that she hasn’t overstepped Stella’s bounds by asking questions.

Stella smiles, quick, casual, disappearing.  It’s hard to tell if it ends quickly because there is no reason to force it longer or because some shadow of the past has swallowed it.

“Isn’t that the sweater you let me keep?” Scully asked, eyeing the grey marled drawstrings on the hood.

“Bought myself another one.”

“And here I thought you’d made an ultimate sacrifice.”

“That would be unnecessary when I could just re-purchase it.”

“You could have just asked for it back, it was expensive,” Scully says, feeling the sting.

“And now it has dog hair on it,” Stella continued.

A stranger’s Golden Retriever had brushed up against Scully’s leg and she’d kept him there for a matter of seconds

“It’s barely noticeable.  You and the dog have the same color hair,” Scully said.

“I don’t shed.”

“We all shed.”

“I don’t like dogs.”

“You just pretend not to like them.”

Perhaps this had been a terrible idea.  Perhaps she should have waited for Stella to call first.

“Are you certain he’s coming today?” 

“No, not certain.  I haven’t really established a pattern.”

“That’s good to hear.  Aren’t you freezing in that denim jacket?  What have you got under it?”

“A t-shirt.  I’m fine.”  

“I’m not pretending, I truly dislike dogs.  They’re jumpy and they stink.”

Suddenly, Scully thought of some version of her life not lived, pictured Stella in their home, going stone cold as she brought in this or that mutt home from the pound.

“You’re a cat person, is that what you’re telling me?” she asked.

“I’m not an animal person, I’m a people-person.”

Scully double licked her lips as she waited for a punchline that never came.

“What?” Stella pushed back.  “I’m good with people.”

“You’re good at making people do what you want, that’s not the same thing.”

“You should know.”

Scully looked away, scanned a group of children without guardians - not the right group of children.

“I should have told you this was where we were going, but I thought you’d say no.”

Stella looked at her hard - her hardest countenances were reserved for her kindness.

“I think you know me better than that,” she chided softly.

“Did you swim?”  Scully asks with eager intrigue, that new friendship glee still fresh even after a few years of knowing one another.

“No.  I learned when I was older,” Stella says.

Scully nodded, dug the heels of her hands into the bench as she shuffled her feet - uncrossed and then recrossed.  She tossed her hair to the other shoulder so the wind wouldn’t pin it to her lip balm.  Maybe it would be better if he didn’t show up.

“How many times have you done this?” Stella asked.

“Five or six times.  Seven.”  Eight, nine, if she counted the times he hadn’t showed.

“Long drive coming from your place, isn’t it,” Stella murmured.  

Scully said nothing.  She had never even noticed how long.  She had spent exactly none of those hours considering the moral quandaries involved.  It was only talking to other people about it that even made her aware of them.  Alone, driving here, she wondered about his favorite color, his favorite food, if he could play any instruments.  

“Mulder go with you?”

“Just once.”  

He’d thought it was weird, said it felt wrong.  She’d pretended to agree. 

“What did you do then?” Scully presses.

“Horses.  Everything was my horse.  Riding, being with him, sitting there staring at him leaning on a fence, anything.”

Scully laughs and mumbles something about how very English this is and still Stella’s cuticles stay clean, not a stray stripe. Steady fingers, doctor’s fingers.

“Look at that,” Stella says in a soft, appreciative voice, eyes hot and hard where their hands are occupationally joined. “Even better with your hands than I remember.”

The flirtation is a change of subject, a subtle warning, and Scully licks her lips, doubles back for a second coat of the other hand, prepared to drop the topic of the horse.   But Stella keeps talking.

“My father would take me.”

The father, yes. Somehow always comes back to him, somehow always seems like the best and worst of what Stella remembers.  Scully paints, carefully considering her next question.  The color on Stella’s nails thickens so that it goes from a translucent skin color to a ballet pink that matches Stella’s satin slip camisole top.

Stella had turned slightly to watch a crowd of nearby teenagers approaching the skate park.  She slipped off a glove to scratch her lip with her nail.  This was the kind of thing Stella remembered to do that Scully wouldn’t have - all her leather gloves were marked with pink, red, mauve colored wax.

“How did you and I wind up friends?” Scully asked, eyes on her son, voice going wistful against her better judgment  Sometimes she wondered why they’d had to break up (was that what it was?).  Other times, she wondered how they’d started in the first place.   She caught Stella’s profile for a moment at such a perfect angle that she had to look the opposite direction to catch her breath.  Perhaps eight months had not been enough.  “Two not-people-people from separate parts of the world sitting on a bench together.”

“We almost didn’t.”

“And?”

“And I have irrepressible impulses to fuck beautiful people I know for certain I’ll never see again,” Stella said, pronouncing the F so hard it produced pulp in the air.  The playground moms turned to look.

“Blonde, you said? How’s he blonde?”

“Mulder said to ask you.”

“Idiot,” Stella murmured absently, busy separating the boy out from a crowd, putting him at the crosshairs of her attention. Scully found him at once. She knew his walk by now.  His carriage.  She could spot him a mile away.  She didn’t worry when he didn’t come.  She didn’t think about talking to him or touching him.  It was just this, watching, at a distance, periodically.  Still there.  Still there, watching him like he was an infant sleeping in a cradle rather than an almost adult riding a skateboard.

“There, yes?” Stella said, a voice like a long hooked finger, the drawl so sustained the word could have reached across the Atlantic Ocean.  “That’s him, isn’t it?”  

“Yes,” she hissed to herself without Scully saying anything at all.

He was wearing a hat today, a striped beanie and a pair of Ray-Bans, trying to look cool, Scully thought, but the rest of him was still sloppy and silly, lecturing at his friends about something.  Like his father, she thought, and still she felt no angst, no sadness, only peace.  It was like bird-watching, only it was her son out there in the wild.  And this lanky creature here is known as a young human.

“Not what I expected,” Stella murmured, as though a voice any louder might make him flit away, all the way across the park.  Stella said.  “All you.”

“Why is that unexpected?”

“They say the first child always resembles the father, to keep him from wanting to kill it, eat it or abandon it.”

Scully looked at her knees. 

“That’s not what I meant,” Stella said quickly.

“I know.”

Ten, it had been ten times.

“Were you pretty?  You must have been very pretty.”  Scully is flirting and she knows it but it seems harmless enough.  

“I don’t know.”

Scully gives one of Stella’s fingers a little tug, bats her eyelashes to let Stella know she’s teasing, overdoing it.  She doesn’t know how to pay compliments without turning them into jokes.

“Did people tell you you were pretty, fawn over your golden hair while you relentlessly questioned them?”

It’s Stella’s turn to laugh.

The kids were moving closer, William looking at his phone as he smoldered leaves underfoot, swiveling on the balls of his feet with each step to make the crunch and sizzle.  Who was he texting with?  His mom?  Maybe a girl.  Or boy.  She lost herself in the last of the questions she could dredge up - imagining his turns of phrase, his favorite emoji and soon he was closer than he had ever been, just a few feet away, kicking a ball as he walked.  Scully felt her breath quicken as one of the boys got William’s attention, asked him something.  She had heard his voice only a couple of times, from much further away.

Stella nudged her in the side, drew her attention to the map on her phone.

“Here look,” Stella said.  “Says they’ve a good Caesar salad.  I’m in the mood for that.”

Scully nodded, her ankles brittle as weak stemmed flowers succumbing to first frost. Stella tugged her up from the bench.  She suddenly was very cold and shivered as she wrapped her denim jacket tighter.  She knew Stella’s instincts were right, that it was too strange, too risky for them to just sit there, so close to him.  Don’t turn back, she told herself.  And:

“Don’t turn back,” Stella echoed aloud.

Stella’s hands were in her pockets as they walked, eyes sympathetic but stern. Scully imagined it was how she looked when she brought someone in to identify a body, tell someone their sister had been strangled.

“Mulder’s right about this, you know that.”

Stella’s mention of his name, even in this context of William, or maybe because of it, angered her.  Stella pulled the scarf from her neck and forced it around Scully’s neck.  Loving Stella was no more or less painful than loving someone else, but it was more embarrassing, like loving a ghost or a phantom limb.

“How did you know I asked lots of questions?” 

“Most children do.  And you’re a detective.”

“So are you.”

“Not like you, not a born one.”

“Well you do have a second profession to fall back on.”

“A doctor?”

“A manicurist.”

Scully fake-raps Stella on the wrist and a bit of paint splatters on the crests of her knuckles.

She was grateful that she was not alone, that Stella’s footsteps were falling right beside her own, Stella’s musk-heavy floral scent bedded in the fabric beneath her own chin.  

“I’m glad I got to see him this once,” Stella said. That’s it, William was in the past again, at least for today.

Would she have disliked him as she disliked other children (and dogs?)  She would have been good to him, spoiled him, refused to stop cursing in front of him, probably?

“You and Mulder doing all right?”

“I don’t really want to talk about that.”

“You’ll have to get used to it again at some point.”

“So you’re not going to fight for me,” Scully said, meaning it as a joke, but her voice cracked.

“Fight for you,” Stella repeated dubiously, deciding whether to enter a game or a boxing ring.

Scully was glad they weren’t facing each other now.  She had things she wanted to say.  A fireplace burned somewhere in the neighborhood, the smell of a family gathering around it.

“You sent me back home because of William, didn’t you?  Mulder told you.  That’s why you made me leave you and now I’m home and you don’t think I should see William but you’re not going to try to get me back either. It doesn’t quite track for me.”

She stopped only because her breath ran out.  Stella was silent a moment. Walk, keep walking.  

“I don’t fight for people.”

If not people, then what, Scully wanted to say.  But she bit her lip instead, trying to keep it from trembling as she faced the chill, keeping time as though accidentally, side by side like strangers just off the same bus.  

“You can’t keep doing it.  This was the last time.  All right?”

Scully pursed her lips, shook her head, looked at the sky.  Stella was not going to use her son to change the subject.  

Or were they the same subject?

“You could do worse than Mulder,” Stella said, sharpening the edge on her voice, her weapon of choice, that vicious casualness.  “You love him.  He loves you.  You’re best friends.  He’s very well-endowed, from what I remember.  He can reach things.  Kill bugs.  He found your son for you despite absolute impropriety and deep ethical and legal breaches.”

“Stop,” Scully said, looking away over her other shoulder just to keep from crying.  A cadre of barren trees was ready to march off into winter, leave their dead, once-treasured leaves at their feet.  “Please stop.”

“Fine.”

This was how Stella faced her fears, she knew.  Laughed in the face of murderers, memorized her nightmares, re-read them like fairytales, salivated at the sight of blood, sneered at a plane nose-diving with a slug of Scotch.  

“You aren’t supposed to tell little girls they’re pretty too often,” Stella says with slow, deliberate breaths placed mid-phrase, as though she regrets having to tell anyone this, having to spoil an innocent, unruined worldview where a compliment to a child is merely a compliment, where little girls can be pretty and not suffer for it.

��Why not?”

“Because it makes them think they’re nothing else.”

“Mm,” Scully says and caps the polish.  Stella sits still as stone, hands out in front of her on the magazine, watching the polish dry with more patience than Scully has ever seen her muster.

“Sometimes you just have to let a person go,” Stella said as a boy - not her boy - on a skateboard sailed by.

“Which of you are you talking about now?”

Yes, the same subject.

Stella stopped abruptly, took Scully’s chin in one hand.  Rough enough that Scully might have objected except that it was stopping the incessant spinning she’d felt since they got up from the bench.

“I can’t do what Mulder can do, Dana.  And Mulder can’t do what I’m doing right now, and I don’t live here, so you need to let me say this right fucking now and tell me you hear me.”

Scully tightened her jaw stubbornly.  She felt small but safe here in Stella’s one hand.

“This is the last time you see him until he’s eighteen and you can ask.  Or you’ll regret it.”

Scully nodded, gulped away the tears in her throat, but they were tears of embarrassment, not sadness.  Stella’s grip loosened but did not release her.

“Tell me you hear me.”

Stella finally dropped her hand and held Scully’s.  The skin was bare.  Where was her glove?

“I wish I could have known you then,” Scully says, replacing the fancy second square cap over the little ridged round one.

“Take this,” Stella said and handed her one glove.

“Why?”

Scully heard the footsteps before she saw him and she saw the slightly sad, slightly satisfied smile in Stella’s eyes.  It could be any of them, Scully told herself, any of those kids.

“Excuse me!  Lady!”  

But it was him.  Stella nodded for her to turn.

“This yours?” he asked.

He held the abandoned glove out at arm’s length and Scully choked the sob in her throat.  Despite Stella’s impression, he looked just like Mulder the first day she met him.  First day of school science lab boy, nerdy and needy, sanguine and sweet and unaware of his charms, willing to cut open anything you didn’t want to touch even if he had to hold his breath to do it himself.

“Yes, yeah that’s mine,” she forced herself to say finally, knowing that once she did it would be over.  Her pause made him laugh for some reason.  When she stuck her hand out to take the glove, she must have still looked dazed, lame, because he frowned at her as though she’d made a silly mistake, then stuck his tongue between his molars and held her wrist with one hand, pretending to struggle to put it on her like a toddler.  She laughed, counting the seconds until she could collapse.  She’d have to make it out of the park, clear the area, she knew.

“Thanks,” she said and he nodded, licked his lips, and yes that was all her, turning them chapped to the wind and jogging off to meet his friends, a thirteen year old interrupting his afternoon to return a single glove to two middle aged women he’d never seen before.

Stella immediately took her arm, keeping the pace steady but consistent.  Scully kept up but would not stop looking until Stella looked back.

“What if he didn’t return it?” Scully managed to whisper.

“Why?” Stella asks.

As in why would anyone want to have known a four- and six- and eight-year-old girl like her, freckle faced and quiet eyed, brushing a horse’s back as she stands on a stool, proud and kind and a little strange, inconceivably wise beyond her years.

“Because,” Scully says and picks up Stella’s hands, squeezes her palms between thumb and middle fingers. “Then I could have told you you were everything.”

“I was willing to lose a glove today.”

Chapter 25

He realized he’d left the door unlocked by the way the early November candy corn breeze whistled through the first grade teeth of the patched screen door, winter dragging autumn out by its ankles.  The kitchen was as clean as it had been when Scully lived there, back when she’d tidy it every night before bed, caring for it like she cared for her teeth or her skin.  

It had taken him some time to figure out how to do this.  Time plus a therapist, two bottles of pills on the bathroom counter, and experiments with various citrusy smelling liquids in spray bottles.  Toxic, non-toxic, lemon-mint, gingerberry, when to hit the hard stuff - bleach, served neat.  Certain things like mental health and spotless surfaces had always been Scully’s area of expertise, but in her absence, he’d learned about both.

He’d done this often over the years, sat with William’s baby picture, forearms resting on the kitchen table, staring at it the way most people had learned during those years to stare at their tablets and phones.  He only ever did it alone - waited for Scully to leave and go home, which she always did.  When she lived here, he’d had to wait for her to go to sleep.  He had never told her it wasn’t all research and computer screens wrestling him from their bed.  

The photo paper was pliant from age and attention and it took only ten minutes or so for it to warm between his fingertips so thoroughly that he worried the colors would come off on his fingers, that baby William would disappear from prosperity into the temporariness of his skin.  He used to think of old world boy-things - model rockets and baseball caps, the stuff of fifties sitcoms and Norman Rockwell.  He used to think you belong here.

He used to wonder if William would look at him the same way Scully did when she was thinking aloud, the little line forming between her eyebrows, the squint, the lips tightening in distaste and restraint, or if William was more like him, a dreamer and a rambler.  He knew himself.  He knew Scully.  That William possible, knowable. But now he was a third thing - himself.

The screen door hinge cracked and smacked behind him.  He’d recently tightened the screws and she wasn’t used to its newfound snap.  Stella must have gone back to London.  He had not asked for dates and times - had never done that, not even when they were together.  He’d always had plenty to keep himself busy while Stella was in town.  He more often had trouble stopping that busyness when Stella had gone.  He always made Scully re-announce her presence. “Just me, Mulder.” “I know.”  I can tell by the way the gravel crunches under your tires, can tell by the tone of the wooden moan in the porch floorboards, by the way you breathe on the other side of a weight-bearing wall.  You belong here. “So clean,” she marvelled quietly, as she often did when she stopped by these days to say hello or drop off some pizza or check on him, he knew that’s what it was.  He wondered if someday it would sound like superiority.  He wondered if he’d ever learn to take her for granted again, just a little bit, just enough to relax.

“How’s Stella?” he asked, and considered shuffling the photo out of view as he normally would, but for some reason, this time, he did not.

“She’s good, I think.  You know, Stella doesn’t say much.”  

She dropped William’s folder on the table. She’d had possession of it since the diner. Now she leaned on the back of the chair over him, her fingers snuggling between the wood and his back as she saw the baby picture.  She petted his hair from behind, rested her chin on his head so that her voice came out funny.  He wondered how long she’d been watching from the door.

“I didn’t know you still had that,” she said and her voice sounded strangled by the lump in her throat.

Someday something like that might feel like a vote of underconfidence, a dig… he wished for that someday to come.

“I don’t know what’s harder, having information about him, or when we had nothing,” she said.

“I was just thinking that.”

“Were you?”  

For years, they’d resisted this.  Done everything else together while they mourned the loss of their family in private.  Like they’d had separate roles in that crime.  Like they weren’t serving the same sentence.  Just minutes ago, he’d been making plans to keep doing it forever.  Why?

“I spoke to him,” she said.  “Heard his voice.”

He tried not to look alarmed.

“No, not like that, not about anything.  Just accidentally left something behind and he… he was… good, he’s good.”

“Of course he is, Scully.  He’s yours.”

She came around the chair and leaned her behind against the edge of the table, half-smiled.

“Maybe it’ll be better if we put them away,” she said.  “For us.  And for him.”

Someday this might sound like she was couching her own self-correction in a criticism but tonight it sounded like thank Christ, Stella had talked sense into her.

“I think you’re right.”

“Regular people with normal jobs wouldn’t have even gotten this much.”

“No.”

“But I’m glad you did, Mulder,” she said and this would always mean what it meant tonight.

She picked up the photos - the baby one and the new ones, stared at them as she shuffled to the drawer next to the fridge and laid them in there with their love notes, blank birthday cards, Scotch tape.  Sometimes junk drawers weren’t for junk, they were just for the things you didn’t know what to do with.

She hesitated, then pushed it shut, and then, leaning back against it, hands still behind her on the pull, she looked at him, really looked at him.  Sweet and sexy and yes, a little sad.  Her lips shined, caught the glow of the single source of light in the room over his head.  He held his breath.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me,” she demanded softly.  “That you were sad about it?”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

He waved her over and she came, held his hands like the holster of a carousel horse.  In her eyes, shades of blue spun as she tried not to cry.

“Hard to say goodbye to him all over again.”

He nodded, swallowed, and put one arm around her hips.

“But this time I’m here.”

Her belly shook at his ear, though he heard nothing.  He kissed the hem of her sweater, leaned his chin into the dip of her navel.  She wiped her cheeks dry and then took his face in one wet salted palm, bent to kiss him on the mouth.

Her hands crept around his throat, thumbs at his Adam’s apple.  The room stopped smelling “clean” and smelled instead like her, like the perfume she’d been wearing since the day she first walked into his office, something he had never heard the name of, never heard her mention having to replace.   She was only good at keeping the silliest secrets. He put his hands around the trunk of her right thigh and tugged her towards him.  More need than want is what it was up until then. 

But now her body swayed toward him and she climbed into his lap in her sweatpants.  It had been years and her lips dripped with salt.  She tasted like love and sadness and the future.  He was hard for her, hell, hard for all of it.

“I’m here this time,” he said, pulling his mouth just far enough from hers to speak, letting her tongue catch the chap of his lips.  “I’ll always be here.”

She stopped then and something passed behind her eyes, a shift of color behind blue-tinted glass, a sheet in the wind, a wave of blonde hair, a silk shirt.  Would she think of Stella whenever they kissed, when he made love to her on this table?  Would he ever not wonder?  

“Always is a long time,” she said without hiding the hint of mournfulness, of missing something, and he nodded.

“I didn’t say she’d be gone.  I just said I’ll be here.”

She frowned, breath quickening even as her mind slowed.

“Mulder?”

“We’re too old to give up things we love,” he said and meant it. Who cared what she thought of when he kissed her?

She unzipped her sweatshirt, pushed it back off her shoulders.

He placed a kiss on her neck, stripped her naked from the waist up.  She moved his lips back to her own and dropped her weight deeper into the cusp of his pelvis.  With their noses pushed together and her shoulder blades clipped toward one another over the table, she breathed into his mouth.

“God, I missed you,” he said.

“Fuck me, Mulder.”  

Her hair frizzed in his fist as she pulled her hamstrings tight atop his quadriceps.  The grace of youth was gone but it was replaced with something better.  This is what age looked like.  This is what fixed mistakes looked like.

One hand on her lower back, hooked into the back of her pants, the tag silky between his thumb and her skin, he pulled her closer and tighter, sucking her into his mouth, savoring her like a sublingual pill, like he was waiting for her to melt under his tongue and be absorbed into his blood.  

She arched and stretched, placing herself over him with such anatomical precision that he might as well be inside her rather than on either side of four layers of clothes.  Her body was hot and impatient against his belly as his fingers slipped into her pants and under her thigh, past the cotton seam of her underwear.  She hummed in his ear, fit her body more closely over his hand.  

He lifted her at the waist, laid her back on the table, pulled her bottoms off in a swift but clumsy motion.  He leaned over to kiss her cheeks, her neck, her chest. She bent a knee and brought the top of her foot to brush his cock through his pants, rubbed the sharp crest of her instep against him until it hurt.

“Fuck me, Mulder,” she said again, the solid edges of her voice absorbed by the wood at her back.  She squeezed his arms. “Easy, baby,” he said and as he entered her, her eyes watered and a tear rolled out onto the table, crystal clear.  She’d come over for dinner and television, sweatpants and chopsticks, but he had trapped her with his clean surfaces and exposed wounds.   Her body shuddered, shoulders convulsing, shrugging off the past, making herself new for him.  “So tight.  How are you still so tight for me?”

She grinned wickedly.

“She only has so many fingers.”

And he laughed, bit her neck as he fucked her slowly.

They’d made their baby just like this, in a bed rather than on a table, but just like this, with this much love and intent.  He’d known right away that it had worked, known just looking at her collapsed on his torso. “Oh my God,” she whispered as the edge of the table met the back of her knees.  She pinched his t-shirt to her in both fists, then slammed one hand down hard next to her hip.  He moved his hands from table to body, alternatingly bracing his weight and cupping her breasts, aligning her hips and brushing her lips, fucking her until she white knuckled the slab he used to eat his depressed dinners on.

She pulled herself up against him, gripped his neck and pushed her feet against the seat of the chair behind him for leverage.  Sometimes it upset him how little he had to do to make her come.  Sometimes but not now.

“Look at me like you used to,” she said and he spun around to sit on the table, let her put her knees down on either side of him.   “Look at me so I can make you come.”

They did it together, like they did most things, their work and their driving and their arguing and their meals and now their goodbyes to their son.  Soft staccatoed moans and her pelvic muscles squeezed and tugged him and he peeled the cheeks of her ass so that she’d take him deeper and then the rhythm of their bodies broke like a fever, madness taking over, breath tangling, toxic and medicinal at once, words all nonsense and undictionaried.   If she was thinking of Stella too, that didn’t matter, that was not a bad thing, because nothing associated with this could be bad.

He held her until he went soft inside her, and she smiled - her favorite magic trick, his dick going from hard to soft and back again, biology and anatomy in motion at her whim. When they got up, she picked up her clothes, tucked them under one arm, and led him up the staircase naked, her rear silhouette incarnadine with freckles and friction.  He followed her three steps behind, watching each calf raise each heel carefully on the edge of each plank, soles searching the wood grains for the stamps that showed where her footsteps belonged.

[ham-politics-bloopdebloop]

Because we have each other

Pairing:Anthony Ramos x reader (because there aren’t enough)

Requested: not requested (just from my broken mind). REQUESTS ARE OPEN!! PLEASE TELL ME WHAT TO WRITE!! I HAVE NO IMAGINATION!!

Word Count: 1,600

T/W: uhhh angst? Hopeful ending though!!

A/N: Y/N is a artist suffering from insomnia and also married to the one and only Anthony Ramos. Y/N hasn’t told Anthony about said insomnia b/c he’ll worry and ehhh it’s a dumb idea, just roll with it.

I thought that once I got married, my insomnia would go away. What a foolish idea. As if marriage could get rid of a medical condition. But it did get better, at first. The first month, I slept every night, the second, it was harder to get to sleep, but it still came. And now I’m two weeks into my third month of marriage, and I can’t sleep.

I wish I had told Anthony, I wish I could tell him, but I know that he would be worried, and would stay up with me. I love him, but I know how grumpy he gets when he doesn’t get enough sleep.

The bedroom is dark, the only light coming from the crack between the curtain and the window sill. Anthony is sleeping soundly on his stomach, unmoving except for the peaceful rise and fall of his bare back. I run my hand against it, feeling his warmth radiate into my cold hands. Heaving a sigh, I slip my legs over the bed and I pad out of the room; I know that sleep is a hopeless case tonight.

The blinding light in the kitchen causes me to flinch and blink quickly before my eyes adjust. Glancing back down the dark hallway once again to check that Anthony hasn’t woken up, I pad across the cold floor and fill up the kettle. Maybe sleep will come easier after a cup of hot tea. I pick a sleepytime tea bag, vanilla flavored and silently ease the cupboard closed once again. Anthony is working with Lin again, on another musical, and he needs all the sleep he can get. Hamilton was an amazing time in his life, but broadway musicals are always stressful enough without an insomniac spouse. I know that I can’t tell him, so I lie to myself, saying that it’ll get better on it’s own.

--

I hadn’t slept in a week. I was weak. I was awake. My husband’s usually frustrating lack of observation has come in handy, he hasn’t even blinked twice at the dark circles around my eyes and my weight loss. It’s equal parts reassuring and infuriating. For goodness sake, I’m his wife! Can’t he notice that I’m stumbling around the world in a daze? That I lie awake, staring at the ceiling for hours upon hours at night? But he’s been so happy recently. I can’t take that from him.

Determined to hide my condition until it improves, I head to the theater, set on seeing my husband and Lin of course.

“Y/N!” Lin is all over me the moment I walk through the door. I helped him with Hamilton, offering artistic advice for costume color palettes and the set design. That’s where I first met Anthony, though we didn’t start dating until more than a year later. The memories from the Hamilton team are some of my favorites.

“Lin! It’s been so long!” Though I’m trying my best, there is an obvious lack of excitement in my tone.

“Hey, what’s up?” His features have gone from excited to worried as he holds me at an arm’s length, carefully examining my face, “You look really sick, y/n, are you sure that you should be out?”

“Oh, I feel fine, Lin.” I force out a shaky laugh, “I’m just recovering from a little cold.” I can tell that he doesn’t really believe me, because his eyes narrow and he doesn’t smile. I have to change the subject, and fast. “Where’s Ant?”

“He’s up in his dressing room, but I really think-”

“Thanks, Lin!” I cut him off mid sentence, moving towards the stairs, trying to keep some energy in my step even though I feel like a reincarnated corpse. Lin is far more perceptive than Anthony, and he knows about my history with insomnia better than anyone else. As my friend for years, he saw me struggle to sleep through college and then Hamilton. I’ve always assured him that I’m fine, that I’m feeling better, but he’s always taken my assurances with a grain of salt.

“Babe!” Anthony runs up to me from all the way down the hall, crashing into me and spinning me around, “You’re here!” I shake off my sudden dizziness and hug him, a smile breaking over my face. I love this idiot, with all of his stupidly blind mannerisms. He’s looking fabulous, happy and glowing, with bright eyes and a radiant smile.

“I wanted to see you before I went to go up to Albany for the auction.” I had made plans to drive up to upstate to sell some of my art and though I don’t want to leave Anthony, I think this may be healthy. A change of scene for a few days. Maybe a different bed will offer me some relief.

“I’m going to miss you, y/n.” He mutters into my hair, his arms wrapping around my waist. I breathe out a careful sigh, not wanting to show my exhaustion, but also relaxing into his grasp.

“I’ll miss you too, Ant.” He bends down and presses a soft kiss to my lips before a throat clearing  breaks us apart. Lin stands there, smirking widely.

“Rehearsal starts in a minute, Ramos. I suggest you hurry this up.” My husband groans, pressing quick kisses to my nose and forehead before pulling away. As he does, I feel my legs shudder a bit, weak without his support. I want nothing more than to stand in his embrace all day.

“I’ll see you after you get back.” He strokes my cheek lovingly, “I love you.” I return the warm smile.

“I love you too.” I watch as my husband walks away, Lin shooting another concerned glance over his shoulder. I try to hide my exhaustion for his sake, offering a warm smile and a wave. I don’t want to worry the poor man. Heaven knows he is stressed enough with this new musical idea.

--

I am dead tired by the time I reach home, but I know that sleep won’t come. It’s barely come for the past week, just in bits and pieces that leave me feeling more tired and unsatisfied than before.

“Come on, y/n.” I mutter to myself, “pull it together. You have to make it through this auction.”  I hurry to pack my suitcase and take it to my car, loading it in the trunk. Remembering my wallet lying on the counter, I jog up the stairs of my apartment building. I am halfway up when a wave of nausea and dizziness hits me like a brick wall. I stagger on the staircase, my foot slipping on the lip of a step. Before I can cry out or even register what’s happening, my world cascades to black.

--

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“I should have known something like this was going to happen!” Lin’s voice, fraught with anxiety and tension causes me to stir from my sleep. My head pounds, but I am aware that I am lying in a bed, bright lights shining through my eyelids and beeps and other noises filter into my ears.

“What do you mean she’s had insomnia for years?” Anthony’s voice is more distraught than Lin’s, a mix of concern, anger, and terror. I blink sleepily, trying to gain some knowledge of my surroundings.

“She’s waking up!” I blink twice, my vision adjusting to the bright lights. I’m in a hospital room, surrounded by friends from the Hamilton cast and others around the theater.

“What’s going on?” My voice is shaky and cracking, but my words are surprisingly clear. Anthony sits down on my bed, tenderly rubbing my hand in his own. I look up at him, seeing tears of relief in his eyes.

“You passed out, y/n. You hit your head really hard. You’re lucky that I was worried and sent Anthony home early to see how you were.” Lin speaks nervously, “I knew that you weren’t feeling well the minute you stepped in the theater. What were you thinking?” I try not to cry, but I can feel tears bubbling up in my eyes.

“Hey, can we have some privacy?” Anthony’s request is carried out within seconds, my concerned friends filing out, Lin carrying the tail end. Once the door clicks behind them, Ant turns to me.

“God, I’m so sorry.” There are tears running down my cheeks and I’m sure that I look like an absolute mess.

“No. Don’t be sorry!” He takes me into his arms, tucking my head into his chest. I cry, allowing all the exhaustion and pain that I’ve been feeling lately to rush out of me. He murmurs sweet nothings into my hair, rubbing circles on my back.

“I should have told you.” When I find my voice, I barely have the strength to whisper the words, “I can’t believe I didn’t tell you.”

“Hey, look at me.” I lift my gaze, blinking through my tears to see his earnest, determined eyes and set jaw. I love that face, the hundreds of freckles and the easy, compassionate smile, “We’ll fight this, okay? Together. You’re going to get through this and I’m going to be there for you every step of the way.” I bury my face into his shoulder once more, but I no longer feel so lost. I’m going to fight this. I’m going to get better. And he won’t leave me. We’ll survive, because we have each other.

[born-in-the-wrong-multiverse]

Literal Baby Blues

Title: Literal Baby Blues

Square: De-aging for @clintbartonbingo

Warning: Language

Pairing: None

Summary: When Clint ‘volunteers’ for an experimental procedure to make himself sixteen again for the sake of a mission, no one could have predicted how horribly wrong it could all go.

"You absolutely promise this won't be permanent?"  "I swear it. Forty eight hours, max. It'll wear off gradually over the last couple of hours but until then, you'll be sixteen again."  "Greattttt. Because that's every grown man's greatest fantasy, to be pimply with a squeaky voice right before he's even had his growth spurt all over again." Clint was understandably a little unhappy about the whole situation. He'd drawn the short straw, though, and now he had no choice but to follow through, no matter how hard he might try to talk his way out of it. "How do you even know this will work in the first place? I'm guessing you didn't exactly use yourself as a guinea pig, Banner." Looking up briefly from the monitor he was observing as he calculated the dosage based on Clint's weight and height and current age, Bruce nudged his glasses up a little higher on his nose, delaying the need to answer. "Well...I mean...the mice responded well." Clint damn near shrieked at him. "Mice?! You mean you've only tested it on rodents?!" "Well," Bruce muttered, "Every scientific theory has to start somewhere." "And now you're back to calling it a theory!" Clint's eyes bugged out of his skull, backing away from the workbench hastily. "You're joking, right? About this whole stupid idea?" When Bruce shook his head, eyes full of sympathy, Clint slumped dejectedly, reluctantly resigning himself to his fate. Whatever it might be. "Fine," he grumbled, "Just make it quick so I can get this mission over with and go back to being a full grown man with all his short and curlies again." Scrunching his face up as he pinched the bridge of his nose, Bruce just nodded, doing his best to bleach that image from his brain as he instructed Clint to sit down and lay back in the chair. "You'll likely experience a little disorientation, your balance will be a little compromised to begin with until you adjust, but your mind will be your own. You'll have all your memories, all your personality and...quirks...will be intact." "Oh, I suppose you and Pym just asked your little mice subjects to clarify all that for you in a handy little questionnaire, huh?" Ignoring Clint's little outburst, Bruce drew back on the syringe as it filled with the serum that would revert him back to his teenage body. "Okay? Ready?" "Do I look ready?" Clint muttered, his eyes wide with trepidation and displeasure. Bruce shrugged. "Not really."

Over the course of the forty seven minutes following the injection which flooded Clint's veins with the highly experimental solution, the Avenger's body shrank, in both height and muscle mass. The battle-weary creases at the corners of his eyes smoothed until they were no longer a visible reminder of the seven layers of hell he'd survived. The scruff on his jaw and chin retreated, leaving only the faintest hint of fluff on his top lip, while his voice lost its tenor. Almost disconcertingly, however, his nose still heralded the crooked memories of every time it had been broken in a fight, and the reminders of innumerable gunshots, stab wounds and other miscellaneous injuries still scarred his skin. "Aw futz," Clint croaked as he tested out his resurrected, under-developed vocal cords. Looking at himself in the mirror, he cringed, resisting the urge to reach up to squeeze the zit that itched next to his left nostril. "Forty eight hours, right?" For a moment, Bruce didn't respond. He was gawking awestruck, foremost at the serum's success, but also at the sight of sixteen year old Clint in all his gangly glory; he hadn't grown into his limbs, yet, and the years of hard work put into his physique hadn't yet passed. He hadn't expected the scars to remain, either; he had, foolishly he now realised, assumed that the formula would have somewhat regenerative properties. "Banner! Don't stand there staring at me like I'm your Frankenstein's monster success story; answer me! Forty eight hours and I can go back to normal, right?" "Right!" Bruce snapped out of his reverie, nodding emphatically at the teenaged Hawkeye. "So, better make them count. Unless you want to have to go through this whole thing again." Eyes wide, Clint squawked a curse. "Not a futzin' chance." 

It started slowly at first, so gradually it was imperceptible to the naked eye. The crackling pop of his maturing voice started to shift up an octave instead of dropping one. The shoes that had fit perfectly that morning started to slip off his feet with every step. The fuzz on his lip receded one hair at a time without him so much as lifting a razor. It wasn't until his gums painfully swallowed his wisdom teeth forty two hours in that Clint realised something was horribly wrong.  "Fix this!" Clint shrilled at Bruce as he stormed into the lab with all the fury his now twelve year old self could exude. "I'm supposed to be getting older, not younger!" Bruce's eyes expanded in perfect synchronicity with his jaw dropping. "I...none of the test subjects experienced anything like this. I'm not even sure what...I mean...I can't fix what I don't understand, Clint." "Then understand it! Figure out what's happening and fix it!" the younger version of Clint Barton snapped, his voice no longer squeaking with the effort of pushing words past vocal cords that were still figuring out their role in this world. “An hour ago my balls were still right where I’d left them and now they’re back up somewhere between my bladder and my spleen along with the pitch of my voice! Fix it so they drop back down where they belong or so help me God, Banner...” Squashing down the absurd instinct to deliver an unnecessary anatomy lesson, Bruce exhaled slowly. Bracing himself for another outburst, he held his hands up, palms out so as to placate the already irate archer. “Give me time. I just...I need some time to run tests and figure this out, but I promise, I can fix this." He paused. "I think." "It's the 'I think' part that worries me," Clint groaned. He was almost certain that in the five minutes since he'd walked into the lab, he'd shrunk another inch, and the pre-pubescent blemishes had faded from his now perfectly smooth skin. "I swear I'm losing two years every couple of minutes now. If you don't fix this before I'm back in diapers, I will sink my milk teeth into you!" "Six hours," Bruce pleaded, "And that's if I take a lot of shortcuts. But I'm going to need at least six hours to run tests. I'll need blood, hair and a cheek swab. To begin with, at least." Gritting his teeth, Clint scrunched his now nine year old face up in contempt. "I'd even jerk off into a cup if it would help but I'm not sure I'm even capable of that any more." Pinching the bridge of his nose, Bruce rubbed his eyes with the pads of his thumb and forefinger, his glasses resting on his knuckles as he sighed. Admitting he needed at least six hours to even run the tests was one thing, but trying to tell Clint that he would need adult supervision for the duration of those six hours was going to be another thing entirely. 

"Gimme the goddamn drink! I'm teething and have nappy rash that itches worse than a case of the clap because someone -" the piercing pair of literal baby blues shot daggers in Bucky's direction, "- forgot to powder my ass!" At two years old, it was disconcerting hearing that sort of language spouting from Clint's tiny, but not yet completely toothless mouth. The team that wasn't hunting for answers in the lab was officially stuck on babysitting duties. While Clint retained his memories and his ability to speak, his fine motor skills were on the decline, resulting in the need for a little more help getting around. Pym had suggested it was possibly only a matter of time until even his vocal cords reverted back to being unable to form sophisticated sounds, too. Clint hadn't liked that, and was in the middle of a particularly foul mouthed tantrum as though to make the most of what time he had left to do so. "Well next time tell one of us you need to crap yourself and we'll take you to the bathroom so you can do it in the big boy's potty instead," Bucky smirked, clearly still not over the trauma of changing his teammate's dirty diaper, and still cursing Tony for suggesting that they draw straws for it, too; especially when he was positive Tony had somehow cheated. Just because he looked like a toddler didn't mean it was any less Clint. "Besides, you can't metabolize alcohol any more. So, suck it up. Have a binky instead." The look of pure rage blazing in Clint's eyes when Bucky tossed a pacifier in his direction was enough to force Steve's hand, as he stepped in and lifted Clint into his arms. "Okay, that's enough out of you. I think you need a nap." "No I do not need a nap!" Clint protested, but even as he did so, he yawned, snuggling into the crook of Steve's neck and shoulder. "I am a grown ass man. Grown men don't use binkies or take naps or...or..." "Shit in diapers?" Bucky teased, eliciting a tempestuous shriek of indignant wrath from the two foot tall, blond haired boy with eyes bluer and colder than icicles as he tried to fling himself from Steve's arms in an effort to sink his sharp little fingernails into Bucky's face. “Okay,” Steve laughed, drawing the word out slowly as he wrangled Clint in his arms, “Enough. Just because you look like a baby doesn’t mean you need to act like one.” Watching with an eyebrow raised in bemusement, Nat piped with an affectionate taunt in her voice, “This is Clint we’re talking about. Acting like a baby is sort of what he does best.” Clint shot a furious look in her direction, but with his plump infantile features, the scrunched up button nose and pouty lips only served to remind Nat of a Cabbage Patch doll, making her own face contort with the effort of holding back her laughter. Sucking in a breath to try and calm herself, Nat looked at Clint sympathetically, walking over to take him from Steve’s arms and cradled him close to her chest to try and comfort him. “Just hang in there a little longer. Banner, Pym and Stark are all working on a way to reverse this, but you gotta be patient. They can either do it fast, or they can do it right. Which would you prefer?” “Both,” Clint muttered. “Can’t we just get Strange to do his magic wizard thing and take me back to before I agreed to this nonsense? So I can use my brain for once and refuse to do it at all?” Glances were exchanged between the group; the idea had been floated briefly, but was quickly rejected. The mission itself had been a triumph, and a diplomat’s sixteen year old son had been saved from a politically fuelled abduction attempt. Any effort to distort the prose of history could undo all that hard work, and none of them were willing to take that risk. “You know why we can’t do that,” Steve sighed softly, “Just...be patient, like Nat said.” Tears welled in Clint’s eyes, and for a moment, it was easy to forget that there was a man in his mid-thirties trapped inside that baby’s body. His bottom lip trembled, and his eyes screwed shut, sniffing loudly as he tried to force the sob of despair back down his throat before it could escape. Fat, lazy tears of pure frustration slipped down his cheeks as he looked around the room at each of his teammates, silently pleading with them to help him. He knew they were doing all they could, but he was losing hope. When he opened his mouth to speak again, all that came out was a few babbled, incoherent syllables. “Oh no...” Nat’s hand flew to her mouth as it dropped open in horror. None of them knew what would happen if Clint continued to shed months of his life in mere minutes, and it was clear now that he didn’t have many months left to lose. “We’re going to get you back to normal, Clint. Until we do, we’re going to look after you. You’re going to be okay.” 

Moments after the now four month old baby Barton fell asleep in Natasha’s arms, Bruce summoned Steve to the lab. The sombre look on his face wasn’t promising. “He’s stopped growing younger,” Banner frowned, cleaning his glasses on the hem of his shirt, “But...we still can’t figure out how to reverse it. Barton’s antibodies should have kicked in and essentially started eating at the serum as it attached itself to his cells, but, the serum was too strong. We could try giving his immune system a boost, but if his white blood cell count raises too high, then...that in itself won’t be good, either.” Looking Steve in the eye, Tony folded his arms across his chest, and shrugged. “The alternatives are to either let him grow up all over again,” he quirked an eyebrow at the look of disbelief on Captain Roger’s face and held his hands up, demanding patience before he continued, “Or we keep looking. The solution is here,” he tapped his temple and shrugged again, “We just need to dig around in the grey matter to find it. Until then, I guess we all just signed up for Parenting 101.”