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wh6res · 4 years

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“𝑰’𝑴 𝒀𝑶𝑼𝑹 𝑳𝑰𝑮𝑯𝑻, 𝒀𝑶𝑼𝑹 𝑶𝑵𝑳𝒀 𝑺𝑨𝑽𝑰𝑶𝑼𝑹.”

part of the 21 ways to kill your lover collab hosted by the lovely miss solange @du0tine

pairing. entity! xdj & f! reader | word count. 5.4k

synopsis. he wasn’t a god, he wasn’t a devil, and fuck, he’s surely not an angel, but he will be your saviour and your light ‘till kingdome come.

warnings. tread with caution. yandere/possesive themes, religious themes, violence, mentions of gore, swearing, mentions of ptsd, mentions of physical abuse, a lot of character deaths, manipulation, stalking, and implications of suicide

disclaimer. i do not condone whatever tf i wrote in this nor does it reflect my beliefs or values or morals and such. it is all pure fiction and i also dont think xiaojun from wayv would act like this in real life.

a soul’s vulnerability gives him strength. he has scourged far and wide and has yet to encounter a soul as interesting as yours. he never thought a heart filled with hatred and a fragile mentality can be such a sweet combination. xiaojun would be stupid not to latch his greedy talons onto you.

he hides in the darkest corners of your room at night, unseen and unheard, just watching over you like a predator to his poor unsuspecting gazelle before diving into the anticipated chase.

he moves in with you into the cheap apartment you got for yourself here in the big city—which he thinks is an awful move because of how lonely it’ll be. but hey, it wasn’t anyone’s fault that you got chased out of your own home by your stepdad, your very own biological mom too scared to say a peep of defense to your name.

your downfalls became xiaojun’s highlights.

he would’ve felt sorry for you after finding out about that abusive old man. ugh, he scowls. your stepdad makes the entity’s blood boil and he doesn’t even have blood to begin with. the same man who holds the bible in his left hand when he preaches sermons for the people, is the same hand he uses to hit you across the face.

the same hand he uses to pull at your hair. the same hand he uses to punch your gut. the same hand he uses to shove your mom down when she tries interfering.

xiaojun may hate men of god but above all, he absolutely detests the kind your old man is—a faker, who thinks he can get away with the shit mess he’s making. xiaojun would never take that preacher’s murky soul even if he offered it to the entity voluntarily. fake. fake. fake. fake. fake. xiaojun should’ve killed him. xiaojun should’ve slit his throat. xiaojun should’ve torn his eyes out—

ah, ah, ah.

he can’t afford to make you any less vulnerable than you already are, now, can he? after all, he can be anything you want but he’s no angel.

so he watched from the sidelines.

watched you cry. watched you bleed. watched your scars form. watched the hate and resentment you have for your own family fester in your heart until it grew to a size you can’t hide within yourself anymore.

and then you left home.

xiaojun has to admit, for a second, maybe leaving home will make your soul unworthy, will break the mold he’s already had of you and will completely spoil his well-thought out plans.

so really, he can only scoff when he watches you walk around the apartment wearing that pretty dress on a sunday morning, darting around with calculated steps to shove everything inside your bag to go to church. the dress hangs nicely against your skin but he’d rather you stay and wear nothing.

maybe you’d finally find contentment and happiness in this place, in this city, on your own. soaring high without a cage, without someone to hold you back—these things fill his thoughts like a plague until you come barging back into the door 30 minutes later.

he’s been watching you long enough to know church service wouldn’t end for another 30 minutes or so. xiaojun’s eyebrows quirk up. why would his fragile little gazelle come back oh so early? but his question is immediately answered when he detects your shaky breaths and the unshed tears in your glistening eyes

you’re suffering the post-traumatic effects your shit stepdad has caused. seeing another preacher must’ve been a trigger, he thinks, eyeing you with a look on his face. xiaojun felt a little stupid. of course, swimming to the surface will be tough with all that trauma anchoring you down.

it’ll be tough, indeed… so why not sink you even deeper?

it didn’t take much energy for him to start manipulating your dreams. every nap, every deep sleep, he’d replay all the horrible things your stepdad has done to you and he realizes how dreams depicted from his perspective took a larger toll on you versus the ones from your own point of view—witnessing for yourself how weak and helpless you had been seemed to chip away bigger parts of you, he notices. your terrified screams when waking up in cold sweat getting louder and louder with every passing nightmare.

he pushed, and pushed, and pushed until you were standing right at the edge of sanity. until you start questioning your own self-worth and judgment, the invisible chains of the trauma too strong to break. until your radiant skin looked deathly, with gaunt cheeks and white lips. until you developed a fear of sleeping because no, you don’t want to witness those horrors again. no. no. no. no, please don’t hit me—

xiaojun can’t help but admire his handiwork but no, he doesn’t have time for that!

the next time you fell asleep you had been desperately holding onto your 5th bottle of gatorade like it was a torch breaking through the darkness. you’ve intake so much of the energy drink that your body has grown used to it. you would’ve switched to caffeine, but from how much you drank it prior to the energy drinks, your blood is practically coffee at this point.

“you’re living in my house now, young lady! i’d like to see some respect from your or i’ll fucking beat it into you!”

“stop! please. hit me instead, hit me!”

“this is all your fault, bitch! how can you raise one daughter wrong? no wonder your husband left you!”

murky and black, you can’t even see the bottom at this point. it keeps pulling you down, and down, and down, until you couldn’t breathe. until your head feels light. until your heart beats erratically within your ribcage as you fought to the surface.

with all the negative emotions surging through you in thunderous waves, it’s a wonder how no other lonesome, starving entity has latched onto you like xiaojun. although realistically, he was here first, as if he’ll let any other being like him go near you.

it took a greater amount of energy to twist and manipulate the plotline of certain events in a dream. if xiaojun hadn’t grown strong from all your negativity, he’d never be able to do it.

he can never forget the day he first appeared to you in a dream. to have you cling onto him as you willingly took his hand—not that he was caught by surprise, anyway. every second of every hour of every day xiaojun spent plotting your demise has led to this fruitful day of “meeting” you for the first time.

“i’m right here,” he said, shaking fingers tracing over your cheeks. a soft caress you have never experienced.

the man in your dreams is someone you’ve never met before—you’re positive that you haven’t because you’d never forget a face as handsome as his. he appears like an angel casted over divine light, with a soft smile that can cure the plague as he offers his hands for you to take. it was beautiful, how your nightmares turned into dreams the moment the mysterious man arrived.

how’d you ever know, that the hand you grabbed is the wolf in sheep’s clothing?

it’s sad really, how you’ve only managed to escape one horror only to jump into the next but xiaojun can’t find it in himself to feel bad. well, maybe a little, it’s a fleeting thought. something that disappeared as quickly as it had passed by.

it was only after a few weeks of constantly appearing in your dreams did his plan start to backfire. the change in your behavior isn’t subtle, either, and it angered him all the more. he didn’t see this coming, not even from lightyears away.

simple to say you’ve grown a little more… how can xiaojun put this into words? well, a little more outgoing. adventurous. meeting new people and going to new places and experiencing new things. he can see everything as clear as day—you were healing from your past, leaving the dark chapters in your life to write newer and brighter ones that revolved on having actual healthy relationships for once.

his seething anger of his failed plans had made all the windows in your apartment burst into thousand little pieces. if you had fine china dishes displayed on your kitchen cabinets he would’ve broken those too. how can you go against him like this? look at you all happy and smiley even as the room turned ice cold because of xiaojun’s suffocating presence. you never even thought once about it—how naive.

tormenting you through dreams isn’t working anymore. xiaojun has to up his game if he wants to break you down and revert you back to that paranoid, sensitive, and frail self that couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t talk to any other human being without feeling the ghost of your abusive step-father’s hands against your skin.

who says he can only control you through mind games alone? after he’s done what needs to be done, grief and self-pity will go hand in hand. a combination so cruel and heavy on your shoulders that xiaojun can already savor the metallic tangy taste of victory.

“no! yeji—!”

xiaojun watches unblinking when he makes one of your new friends walk out the sidewalk and right into an overspeeding car.

tires skidding across the pavement, the breaks not working, glass shattering, bones cracking against the force of the hit—dead, right on the fucking spot.

he’s never heard you scream that loud and he shudders in pleasure as the vibrations of your shrill voice courses through his veins.

he missed this, your complete and utter misery.

but he wasn’t done yet.

“don’t you think it’s a ‘lil chilly in here?” ryujin asks, looking over to your side before drinking the hot chocolate she prepared for both of you.

grieving together with a friend can be good, hence why you’re now in her apartment a month later after yeji’s funeral.

you answer after taking a sip. “no, not really.”

xiaojun grins, giddy and a skip in his step while making his way towards you as he side-eyes your friend, who religiously drank her hot chocolate all the while bundling up next to you so you both can watch the movie together playing on the laptop.

this one, well, he particularly doesn’t like this one.

if your other friend was meant to be a casualty, a death borne from not one smidge of personal vendetta, this one, this ryujin is different. heck, he even remembers her fucking name.

no, no, no. xiaojun can feel his skin crawl as ryujin cuddles intimately closer as she stares at you from her peripheral, feeling out whether you’d react or not as she sneaks an arm around your waist. his anger turns a fever pitch, seeing you with someone else driving him up the wall. you were meant to be his sad and hopeless little gazelle and his alone.

xiaojun hoped the poison travels fast or so help him he’ll fucking rip her off of you—and he would’ve, when he saw you and ryujin slowly leaning into one another, head angled and obviously going in for a kiss. he would’ve, when one of ryujin’s hands come up to cup your face. he would’ve… until the poison reached its destination in her body, right when your lips were about to touch.

ryujin’s lungs seized, breathing becoming an agent to her demise as the oxygen from her lungs disappear into nothingness. the last thing she saw is your horrified face, tears streaming. she swore you were shouting something, probably her name, but it’s overpowered by the incessant ring in her ears.

when her mouth foamed and she laid limp on the couch right next to you, you knew ryujin would never wake again to give you that kiss.

xiaojun steps back to admire the havoc he wreaked. two of your friends dead, that should be enough to incapacitate you—whether it be permanent or not, he just wants to see you drown in misery.

and as he slowly dissipates into the void, there’s a little smile on his face as he stares you down, burning the image of your histeria in his head, the echoes of your woeful cries music to his ears.

you never dared step foot out of your apartment.

groceries were delivered to your door, trash is slowly but surely building up, and the place was a whole mess. the entity haunting you has never seen you this… shattered, even when you left home. it was like your brain has stopped working and your body turned into nothing more but a cusp of who you used to be.

it’s scary looking in the mirror and not recognizing the reflection—so, you painted all of them black. it was an in the heat of a moment kind of thing that took place the moment you came home from the police station, on the exact day she passed away before your eyes.

xiaojun just has to “misplace” a few pints of paint you had used from when you renovated the apartment in the past, putting the cans where you can easily see them and think that the idea belonged to you when in reality, it’s the entity that put the idea in your head.

there was a blanket over your shoulder when you came back from the station. it wasn’t yours, they gave it to you while you sat opposite to a stoic detective in a cold interrogation room, yet you made no move to shrug it off even after arriving at your apartment, fingers clutching the fabric like a lifeline and refusing to believe whatever that had transpired in ryujin’s apartment.

eyes unseeing, stumbling with your steps, back hunched with the curse of the universe weighing down on your back—xiaojun couldn’t’ve been more proud of what he had done.

you were spiraling out of control. a self-destructive cycle you cannot seem to fight your way out of as your nightmares came back to haunt you. the tall waves of anxiety and paranoia drowning and pushing you under the surface.

for once you don’t fight the current, you just let it pull you under.

every time you close your eyes, you can hear the deafening screech of rubber tires against concrete before the car hits yeji. can vividly see the foams of the poison coming out of ryujin’s mouth as if it was caught on tape and is now playing on loop.

your other friends have donned you as bad luck, cursed to have a fucked up life and will fuck up other people’s lives too if they get even as close as an arm length to you. too scared to lose any more people, you decided to completely push everyone away and had completely shut yourself out from the world beyond the four corners of your apartment.

it’s like your trauma from before has come crawling back to you, only now, he brings himself a little friend called guilt.

what are the odds that your two friends died after the other when the person they’ve each last spent time with was you? even the police found it too much a coincidence. if it wasn’t for the cctv cams in the corners of ryujin’s apartment, you’d be facing trial for a murder you didn’t commit.

you eye the usb stuck in one of your laptop’s ports. it’s black, with an srj poisoning case written in red ink on the small patch of masking tape pasted onto the back of the plastic.

after being stuck in an interrogation room for the last two hours, you had sneakily swiped it out of the detective's desk on your way out of the station. you remembered it was the usb with a copy of ryujin’s cctv cams, some underling busting into the interrogation room while in the middle of your questioning, holding the tiny usb between his fingers.

your stomach churned when the detective looked at you spitefully, as if he couldn’t fucking care less of the evidence presented to him in a silver platter and would thoroughly take pleasure in throwing you in jail himself, guilty or not. the last look he shot you still sends shivers down your spine, the sharpness in his gaze as he regarded you. “you killed them. i know you did.”

a week of self-induced isolation later and you start to believe in it yourself.

in the middle of screaming your lungs out and cursing the gods above for your sorry excuse of a life, you had thrown the usb somewhere in the apartment. not that you bothered to look for it right after, you were too busy wallowing in self pity before passing out on the living room floor. when you wake up, you’ve forgotten all about it.

so it was interesting, seeing the usb again after days and days of wallowing in grief. you had fallen off the couch while in the middle of a slumber and you spotted the small piece of tech lying underneath it with the other empty coke cans.

eyeing the laptop on the coffee table, you remember you haven’t taken a look at the evidence yourself—the detective had given you the stink eye when you tried shuffling closer to peep a look. carelessly, you shove all other objects off the table to pull the laptop closer. you plant yourself on the ground cross-legged, not batting an eyelash even when you feel the crumbs of chips against your skin.

you boot the laptop on, thankful you’ve yet to forget its password, and plugged the usb in again. it was simple to navigate, to say the least, the folder popping up in a matter of seconds. you thought it stored a whole collection of her cctv footages but alas, it didn’t, saving you the time and energy scourging through unwanted boring files.

hands shaking, you clicked on the video.

and it was as if you’re thrown back into that event in your life that has now become a distant memory. the hug ryujin gave you when she opened the door, her words of comfort when you opened up about your deteriorating mental health after your friend passed away, and finally, the warm feel of the mug against the palm of your hand.

wait a minute.

you perk up from your seat, groaning aloud when your knee hits the underside of the coffee table at your haste, fingers darting around to press the back 10 seconds button. the sweat starts forming in your forehead and palms, making your hand feel clammy and disgusting but it was the last of your worries.

did you see that correctly?

the quality is a bit low and the camera angle isn’t optimal. you can only see ryujin’s side profile but her glassy eyes are unmistakable and her actions look robotic at best.

this is after she made your hot cocoa and had delivered it to your shivering, sniffling form on the couch, all bundled up snug and cozy in the blanket she provided. you remember ryujin winking as she walked back towards her kitchen after you thanked her.

the way she poured poison in her own mug ruled her case as suicice. the evidence is right there in your face but the unease still sits heavy on your stomach and confusion clouds your brain like cannabis.

this doesn’t make any sense.

you knew her, ryujin. she’s never one to succumb to her negative emotions, always facing her problems with head held high. her overall mindset, in general, made her the last person you’d think would ever commit suicide. you’ve replayed the video a thousand times by now, still unable to wrap your head around the fact that she killed herself.

having the sudden urge for another bottle of gatorade, you pressed the pause button as you try hauling yourself up with your arms.

you pause. pushing your face closer to the laptop screen, rubbing at your eyes incredulously as you eye the corner of her kitchen.

ryujin’s apartment isn’t that luxurious, nor is it too rundown, but there can be little exceptions here and there.

like the cheap LED bulbs attached rather messily onto her ceiling, one of the six sources of light flickering on and off. you remember how many times you’ve told her to get it fixed yet she never really paid you any heed.

with shaking fingers, you replayed it one more time, hoping on everything you believe in that it wasn’t what it looks like. this can’t be it—how is that possible—

it’s him, the man who has appeared like an angel in your dream to sweep you away from evil. but standing in the corner, under the flickering lights of your friend’s kitchen, he looked anything but an angelic.

your mind is going haywire, your body shook in confusion, and sweat started dribbling down your neck. you would’ve thought you made a mistake because how is this even possible? the angelic man in your dreams isn’t real—he can’t be real, he can’t appear like this when you aren’t even sleeping because he’s not real!

he can’t… right?

he doesn’t look too harmless, what with his hands crossed and leisurely leaning against the wall. but one look at his eyes and you know you’re wrong. even through the shit quality of the cctv footage you can still feel the fury and the absolute hate his eyes held as he stared her down menacingly, unblinking.

stared her down as she made her own cocoa, as she hunches down to open the sink cabinets to get that pesky rat poison, as she poured it on her mug, as she swirls the spoon around to mix the deadly concoction all together in a hauntingly robotic way that looked too much like ryujin was being told what to do.

and as you let the video play the rest of its content and felt like the tragedy was unfolding right before your very eyes again—you couldn’t breathe, panic gripping onto you like a vice, the sharp talons of fear sinking deep under your skin.

you don’t register the coffee table toppling over in your haste to stand up. desperately putting a distance between you and the laptop as you turned and stumbled towards the hallway leading to your bedroom.

you stop, pathetically landing on your knees before the open archway. if you hadn’t been shaking in fear before, then you surely were now.

he’s here—can you even call it a he?

the man stands at the end of the hallway. in that similar, non-threatening stature with his arms crossed and body leaning against the wall.

but the mischief in his eyes is enough of a warning.

he’s come for you.

he’s come to finish the job.

“finally figured it out?”

you screamed, throwing the closest thing you can at him as you shuffle someplace else in your apartment. his laugh sounded pleasant in the ear when you were off in dreamland, but now? it sounded like nails grating against a chalkboard.

your legs eventually led you to the front door. appearances be damned. you weren’t even wearing a bra and you haven’t showered for days but fuck no you’re not going to stay here with that—that—that monster!

“baby, don’t leave! the fun hasn’t even started yet!”

you grab the doorknob and twist, practically throwing yourself out into the hallway, eyes frantic as you stumble and land face first against—

sticky. the floor’s sticky and there was a smell you can’t seem to pinpoint. it’s tangy, metallic, and you can almost taste the scent yourself in your tongue and when you look down—you want to throw up.

lying next to each other in pools of their own blood, lies yeji and ryujin side by side, faces towards each other. their eyes hauntingly empty and unseeing as they stared up at you.

you shrieked, voice scratching against your dry throat as you threw yourself back into your apartment, the door slamming shut in itself. you didn’t care if there’s now a huge mess of blood staining the carpets on the foyer. you curl in on yourself, hair sticking to your face as you covered your ears and shut your eyes.

“oh, my love…”

you felt his presence before you can hear him.

a flashback plays in your head—hot chocolate, soft blankets, and a friend who you loved with all your heart. “don’t you think it’s a little chilly in here?"

you answered. “no, not really?”

the tears start streaming like waterfalls, mixing with the blood and sweat already caked in your face. ryujin knew, she felt it back at her apartment yet you disregarded her completely.

“it’s not your fault,” the entity’s hands are ice cold when he gently pulls at your wrist. “everything is as it should be. now, open your eyes. there’s nothing to be afraid of. i’m not going to hurt you.”

stubbornly, you shook your head as you squeezed your lids even tighter, refusing to look at the monster dead in the eye.

“don’t be like that, my love. if i wanted to hurt you, i would’ve done it a long time ago.”

you don’t listen, hunching and curling your knees even more against your torso as you try to block out his voice. it’s unfair how gentle it sounded but your blood ran cold when you realize this is how he got ryujin to poison herself, this is how he got yeji to walk in front of a speeding car—

“hail mary, full—full of grace,” you pray under your breath, shaking like a leaf. “the lord… the lord is with thee. blessed art thou among women…”

“you’re praying?” there’s an underlying mocking to e in his voice. “this is fucking hilarious!”

your incessant mumbling partnered with how you rocked your body back and forth, made something snap within xiaojun. he already stated he won’t hurt you! did he break you so much that now you’re unable to hear stuff properly, too?

“holy mary, mo—mother of god, pray for us sinners, now and—and at the hour of our death, amen. hail mary, full of grace…”

“stop.” his body twitches, having the sudden urge to pull all his hair out and burn this fucking building to the ground.

yet you continue. “the lord is with thee, blessed art thou among—among women and blessed is the… the fruit of thy womb, jesus…”

“i said stop, [name]. don’t fucking test me.”

“holy mary, mother of god—pray—pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our—”

you screeched in pain as your forehead comes in contact with a mirror, the sound of it shattering is deafening to the ears. his icy fingers let go of your nape, letting you fall hard to the ground. your ears perk up at the sound of streaming water.

you weren’t in the foyer anymore, you feel cold tiles instead of the rough texture of the dirty carpet underneath you. eyes fluttering, you slowly pry them open, and the first thing you see is the faulty pipes found underneath your bathroom’s sink. patches of your clothes start getting wet.

“you think a prayer of all things can stop me? i’m insulted!” you hiss when he grabs your face, hands so cold that it feels like you’re skin is burning off. “i was going to play nice.”

he pulls you towards him, hand encased around your throat. he shoves the open hair dryer into the half-filled bath tub as you feel him vibrate against you. “you don’t know how long i waited, how much energy i needed to appear to you like this.”

it’s with dread you realize that he’s actually giggling.

you whine, eyes feeling like it’ll pop out of their sockets when he squeezed your neck tighter. with a sudden rush of adrenaline, you anchor your wrists against his arm but it proves to be useless when he’s too strong.

“please,” you wheezed. “i did… i did nothing wrong. let go—please.”

in the corner of your eyes, you stare at him from the mirror, stomach twisting in discomfort when you see him throwing his head back, eyes rolling up after taking a long whiff of your hair. “this—this fear you have, my love, only makes me stronger.”

“nothing… i did nothing wrong—please! please… let, let me go…” you’re starting to feel lightheaded, black spots floating around your vision.

“nothing? are you sure about that?”

you cringe when he licks up the tears in your face, toes curling at the sheer disgust you feel. but the words he spews next is far worse than the hand he’s wrapped around your throat.

“didn’t you left your mom alone with that abusive asshole? didn’t you make yeji walk into that incoming car? didn’t you make ryujin drink that poison?”

he whispers them so softly, so gently that you almost mistook them as proclamations of love.

“no…” your voice breaks.

“yes. yes, you did,” he knew you like the back of his hand, knew what to say and how to say them for you to break in his arms. “you killed them, my love. you’re a murderer. you don’t even deserve to be alive after all of the things you’ve done.”

it’s almost pathetic how you shake your head, eyes closed, refusing to acknowledge the truth.

“that’s… that’s not true…”

“you’re a curse to the people you love, the embodiment of they're suffering. don’t you see it?”

“stop lying!—”

“am i?” he retorts, maneuvering you around to face the mirror. you swore you covered the whole thing with black paint. “just look at yourself.”

oh, how badly he wants to shove your face against the mirror but he mustn't get ahead of himself.

“did any of your friends even visit you to see how you’re doing?” no, they never did. he smiles like he knows what you’re thinking. “the answer is all before you now, my love. you need to see through the haze and accept it for what it really is. no one loves you. even the god you’re praying to didn’t answer. there’s nothing, no one, left.”

and for the first time since he has you in his tight hold, you stopped fighting. sobs wracking through your body as your shoulders slump and accept defeat.

xiaojun automatically lets you go, cooing like a lover in your ear as he tucks you into his embrace. “you want this all to stop, don’t you? someone to save you?”

you nodded, unable to look at him as his hand came up to wipe away your tears. no one has ever done that for you in months ever since yeji and ryujin died.

“i’m here,” xiaojun says, running fingers through your hair comfortingly. “i’m your light, your only saviour. you want that, right, my love?” choice is a mere illusion but he likes keeping up with formalities.

you fail to notice the steps he took towards the now overflowing bathtub, too lost in the new highs and lows of emotions you feel.

“yes.”

it only took seconds to push you into the tub. its water buzzing with a live electric current brought by the hair dryer he dropped only minutes ago.

the effect is instantaneous. he watches your muscle spasm, your skin growing darker as the live water fries your body alive. quickly, xiaojun reaches down to lift your head out the water, not wanting to ruin your pretty face.

the last thing you feel is xiaojun’s cold lips pressing against your own, the gentle caress as he wiped your tears away… and the electricity finally passing through your heart.

when the entity pulls away from your dead body, he only whispers three things—“mine, at last.”

#nct imagines #nct scenarios #wayv imagines #wayv scenarios #xiaojun imagines #xiaojun scenarios #tw violence #tw religious themes #tw ptsd #tw swearing #tw mentions of suicide #tw murder #tw death #tw abuse #yandere xiaojun #yandere wayv

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ashintheairlikesnow · 5 years

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Ryan and Nate Share a Bonding Moment: Anon Asks, Answered

Anon asked: May I please request more Ryan reluctantly taking care of a sick Nate? maybe even finding some pity in his heart..?

Timeline: A few days after BTHB’s Worked To Exhaustion Prompt

Tagging @special-spicy-chicken, @spiffythespook, @bleeding-demon-teeth, @finder-of-rings, and @whumpywhumper

The first thing Ryan thinks when Vandrum comes staggering out of the bedroom is Jesus God, you look fucking rough.

With a couple of days of real sleep under his belt - Danny had recovered enough to insist Ryan get some rest, too, before he also got sick, and Ryan had been selfishly happy to hand the reins back to his older brother and sleep like a fucking log for twelve-hour stretches - he finally felt human enough to get back to normal.

Which meant he was enjoying, without guilt, a nice hot toddy. Hot Irish breakfast black tea, lemon juice, his dad’s favorite brand of imported whiskey, and honey. Ryan sipped it with a small smile on his face. He was on his second mug of the stuff and feeling warm and relaxed in a way he hadn’t felt in a very long time.

He wasn’t exactly trying to drink so much but on the other hand, you had to fight the flu - or whatever the fuck was wrong with them - germs, right? He was pretty sure whiskey was a disinfectant.

Plus, lemons helped you hold off scurvy, so, you know, he had that going for him, too.

Ryan had been alone out here the whole day. Danny was better, up and trying to do chores until Ryan all but begged him to stop, but he still slept most of the time and moved with an old-man shuffle that was hard to watch. Vandrum hadn’t appeared in more than a week except to go to the bathroom, take the occasional shower, or rummage through the fridge in the wee hours of the morning when Ryan was asleep for more Gatorade and Pedialyte.

Ryan just kept buying it because, fuck it, they weren’t keeping anything else down. Well, that and those little cracker sandwiches with peanut butter in them.

So when Nate Vandrum came out of the bedroom at 8:30 at night, while Ryan was sipping his hot toddy and checking on company emails that had come through (no such thing a true medical leave for a real executive, his father had warned him, and he’d thought he was kidding about that but there wasn’t any way to undermine Danny’s needs they wouldn’t find), Ryan was genuinely shocked to see him.

You look like someone ran you over with a truck.

Vandrum doesn’t even look up at him. He’s limping a little, favoring one leg, and Ryan thinks about how his testimony included that Denner motherfucker fucking up his leg. And of course the bad hand is always slightly open, where his other one is closed tight in a fist even as he walks into the kitchen, pulling out a new bottle of Gatorade and staring at its artificial neon-blue like he’s looking at the holy grail, or maybe a portal to hell.

“Do you need help, Vandrum?”

Nate flinches, hard, and jerks his eyes up to look at Ryan, white-ringed and frightened. “Wh-what?”

He was pretty fucking terrified of you putting your hands on his neck, this is what happens when you hurt people, Ryan.

Ryan hesitates, then leans forward to set his hot toddy down on the coffee table. This man has lived in his apartment - in Danny’s apartment, Ryan had just been saving it for him the only way he knew how - for months. Ryan has called him a coward and a rapist, accused him of wanting Danny to himself so much he’d kill - not to save him but to keep him - and through it all Vandrum has stared at him with a placid green stare that tells him nothing.

Except for when he put his hands around Vandrum’s neck and the broken bits of Nate Vandrum had taken over, and Ryan had seen the fire in Danny he’d thought Denner put out for good, rallied not for himself but to defend Nate Vandrum against his own goddamn brother.

Ryan hates to admit it, but he hasn’t really been fair to his brother’s maybe-sort-of-boyfriend. Maybe he should try.

“Let me help you, Vandrum,” Ryan says a little heavily, pushing himself to his feet. “You still feeling gross?”

Nate looks at him like he’s grown three heads, and his bad hand is splayed out on the countertop. Ryan moves towards him, slowly - Nate and Danny are both jumpy as hell when they’re sick, and Ryan tries not to think about how it’s a result of being sick being a cause for punishment up in that fucking horror-cabin. Danny talked about being thrown down in the cellar whenever he was sick for too many days in a row, like that psychopath thought locking him a damp basement was somehow going to make him get better faster.

Nate never talked about his punishments for being sick, only that there were some, and he didn’t want to think about it.

Nate watches him, his green eyes listless and fogged over but still scared, his face looking oddly younger with the expression. Like Danny looks, Ryan thinks - tense and worried, nervous that he’ll fuck it up, that he’ll be hurt. When Ryan makes it to the kitchen, Nate shrinks away from him a little, shifting back.

“Still feverish?” Ryan asks, and his voice gentles, a little.

“I th-think so,” Nate says, his own deep voice a little breathy, the words slightly slurred. “The r-r-room moves, when I’m n-not looking.”

Ryan holds up a hand and Nate doesn’t flinch, but his eyes lock onto the hand and follow its movements with perfect concentration. “I’m just going to feel for a fever,” Ryan says trying to pitch his voice soothing, the way he talks to Danny when he does shit like this. “Can I do that?”

Ryan’s blood runs cold when Nate says softly, “Wh-whatever you w-w-want. I can d-do whatever y-y-you want.”

“Jesus,” He whispers, and feels Nate’s forehead. “He taught you that, too?”

Nate closes his eyes against the touch. His skin burns Ryan’s hand, like there’s a flame taking Nate over from the inside out, leaving charcoal behind where his organs and bones and soul should be. “The rules are th-th-the s-same,” Nate whispers, and he doesn’t pull away from Ryan’s touch, only closes his eyes and holds still. “J-Just hurt less.”

“I’m not so sure of that.” Ryan thinks of the barking laughter in the courtroom, of Abraham’s absolute fucking glee recounting all the shit he’d done to Danny, the way Nate had kept his eyes on the table in front of him whenever Abraham was talking, had worked so hard to never look at him.

He sighs. “You’re a fucking mess, Vandrum.”

Nate laughs - it’s more of a raspy, hoarse chuckle than anything else. “I kn-know,” He answers, and his knees buckle a little but he catches himself on the counter, pushing himself back up. “I know I am. D-D-Don’t you th-think I did okay, though, M-Michaelson?”

Ryan steps away from him, pulling the bottle of whiskey back from the cabinet, setting water on to boil. Nate watches him with glazed eyes, without questioning anything he’s doing, and Ryan wonders what he’s even seeing at this point. “Okay? Are you really asking me that question?”

“I did the b-b-best I c-could,” Nate says, and then it’s quiet for a while. Just the scrape of a ceramic mug on the counter as Ryan pulls one out, the paper rustling of a teabag being picked up out of the specially-carved wooden box his dad had given Danny a long time ago to keep the good teas in.

Ryan pulls out an Irish breakfast for Nate, too, humming to himself a little as he works. Adds a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a tablespoon of honey, two shots of whiskey. When the water boils, he pours the hot water over the mixture and stirs, mixing it all together. “There. Give that a few minutes to steep, and you sure as fuck won’t get scurvy, at least.”

“I’ve al-always worried about sc-sc-scurvy,” Nate says, and his total deadpan voice makes Ryan glance over at him to see if he was really serious, only to find a faint smile on the older man’s face.

Ryan shakes his head, curls falling over his forehead and his eyes, but he feels something inside himself not entirely unlike affection for how goddamn weird Danny’s boyfriend is. “Go sit on the couch, Nate, I’ll bring your tea to you, yeah?”

Nate hesitates, and then nods, moving into the living room with slow steps, still favoring one leg. He settles onto the couch and Ryan follows him, setting Nate’s mug down in front of him on the coffee table before dropping into the armchair and picking his own back up.

There’s a silence while the two men sip, and Ryan finally asks, “What do you mean, about did you do okay?”

“I d-d-don’t know.” Nate sighs. “I d-d-did my best…”

“You said that already.”

“It’s all I h-h-have, M-Michaelson,” Nate says wearily, and closes his eyes at the mix of flavors - sweet honey and the twist of the lemon juice, the welcome burn of whiskey, the strong black tea. “That I t-t-tried. And it w-wasn’t enough, b-b-but… but it was all I c-could do. Keep him ah, alive until I c-could break it, and… and h-h-hope enough was left.”

“He’s getting better every day,” Ryan says, and he’s not sure if he’s reassuring Nate or himself.

“N-Not him. I mean, y-y-yes, I had to hope enough was l-l-left of him, but…” Nate licks his lips and gnaws on some chapped skin, a weird nervous habit Danny has picked up too. “I don’t kn-know. But what I m-meant is…”

Nate trails off, and there’s more silence, uneasy and uncomfortable.

“What?” Ryan grips his warm tea mug, watching Nate sip from his steaming one.

“I g-guess I just meant… I had to h-hope enough of me was, was l-left, too. And I... I w-w-wasn’t s-sure, not until... not until he c-came back.”

“Well, you tried to burn Denner to death,” Ryan says, and earns himself a slight smile in return from the older man. “So that’s evidence that you were still in there, right?”

“I d-d-don’t know. It could also b-be… being like h-him. I’m so sc-scared, I just…”

“Of what?”

“That I am. Like th-them, already. That I c-c-c… c… that it won’t st-stop. That I’ll h-h-hurt him, and… and en, enjoy it.”

Ryan considers, sitting back in his armchair. He’s accused him of almost exactly that, but in this moment, Nate Vandrum looks tired and sick and sad and scared. He doesn’t look like a monster, he won’t bark like a hyena, he won’t laugh when Danny screams.

“I don’t think so, Nate.”

“Y-you don’t? But before, you’ve…”

“Fuck what I said before, I’m a fucking asshole, Vandrum, you and I both know that. Especially with… with everything with Danny. I’m a spoiled rotten poor little rich boy and I’ve always been that, and what happened to Danny maybe made me grow up a little bit more, but… but fuck all of that mess, you’re not like him at all.”

“How… how d-d-do you know?”

Ryan’s eyes glint in the dim light from the streetlight outside the apartment, seem momentarily to glow, but this time Nate was looking down in his mug and didn’t see a thing.

I can look at your face and know you - I’ve always been that way. I’m good at reading people.

“If I’m honest... I always knew you weren’t. I’ve just been a shit to you because I can’t be a shit to him. And besides…” At the bottom of Ryan’s mug it’s all honey and lemon, hardly any whiskey or tea taste at all. “If you were like them, you wouldn’t be worried about it, would you?”

Nate looks up at him, surprised, and then back down at his own drink. “I… I g-g-guess.”

“So there you go. Now how can I convince you to go back to bed to fucking snuggle my disease-riddled brother so I can have my living room back to myself?”

#ryan michaelson is a good brother #ryan and nate #sickfic #hurt/comfort #but basically just comfort #sick fic #sick whump #recovery whump #trauma recovery whump #anons wants bonding #I give bonding #Daniel Michaelson's story

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honeybee-babe · 5 years

Text

Sharing is Caring (Except When You’re Sick) Part 3

Part three of my collab Sick Luther and Sick Klaus fic with @hargreevesstyles. Can also be read on her blog!

Meanwhile, at the CVS check-out counter, Klaus held the sleeve of the hoodie Diego had forced him to wear up to his face.

“Hih… xngt-ishuu! Ht’TDZshieww!” He scrunched up his nose afterwards and the itchiness that had barely been affected by the sneezes, and rubbed his hoodie-sleeve covered knuckles underneath his nostrils to prevent another outburst. Diego tried not to watch. He would definitely be washing that before he wore it again. In fact, maybe he’d just give it to Klaus.

“Bless you, dear!” The middle-aged cashier flashed him a warm smile as she put the cough suppressants and expectorants (“Might as well get both, knowing you!”) into a brown paper bag.

“Thanks! I’ll take that!” Klaus said with a grin as he took the bag from her, punctuating the sentence with a watery sniffle. Diego rolled his eyes, not looking up from the card reader as he punched in his pin. The total was a bit higher than he’d hoped for, but he tried not to let his frustration show. At this insistence of Vanya’s frantically scribbled list, they’d stocked up on tissues, cough drops, Gatorade, the whole nine yards, even buying extra of the stuff they already had at home. Plus Emergen-C for Klaus. And ice cream, he’d insisted on ice cream (“It’s for Luther! It’ll help with his throat.”). Yeah, right. But Diego had agreed, not wanting to waste time arguing with a pouty Klaus. He just wanted to get home and give everyone their pills ASAP.

“Always best to plan ahead, I guess, hmm?” The cashier smiled at Diego, holding up the last remaining item -- Echinacea -- and putting it in the bag turned to Diego. “You make sure your boyfriend takes this right away before that cold gets worse!” Diego blushed deep red. Klaus chuckled out loud, stopping himself when he felt a bit of a tickle forming in his throat at the tail end of it. He cleared his throat subtly, which subdued it, but it still lingered a bit.

“Will do. But he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my brother.”

“Oh my god.” The cashier brought her hand to her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

“It’s okay. We’re not exactly twins -- and I’m not sick,” Klaus said with a proud smile. “It’s for my brother.”

“You’re sick?” The cashier looked at Diego with a raised brow.

“No,” he sighed, “he means our other brother.”

Speaking of brothers and twins, Five was surprised to find Allison and Vanya speaking in hushed tones in the living room. He licked the peanut butter off his fingers as he stood in the entryway and watched them deep in conversation

“I don’t know, Van. But I’ve never seen him so sick, he’s always had a pretty decent immune system”.

“But then how did he get so sick?” Vanya asked, voice soft and scared. “I don’t get it.”

“Of course you don’t,” Five cut in, crossing his arms smugly over his chest as he stepped into. Allison whipped her head up at him and shot him daggers.

“You don’t even know what we’re talking about, Five.”

“Let me guess, you’re talking about Luther, who is sick, and you’re trying to figure out how it happened.”

“Is this some sort of weird twin thing?”

“No, Allison. It’s a having-a-brain thing.”

Five explained how it really hadn’t been that difficult to figure it out, even without his ability to literally jump through his brother’s locked bedroom door -- which he’d only done once, when he heard him whimpering, thank you very much. The fact that Luther had been holed up in his room for two days was enough for him to draw that conclusion -- and let’s just say the largest Hargreeves sibling wasn’t exactly the best at stifling his sneezes. Plus, Five had passed by the pot of chicken soup boiling on the stove. It had to be for someone.

“And to answer your previous question,” Five turned to Vanya, “have you ever tried living in complete isolation for four years? Because I doubt you would feel very healthy when -- “

“We come bearing gifts!” Klaus stood in the doorway to the house, holding up one of the paper bags from the drugstore up above his head with a huge grin on his face. Even despite his chipper energy, his red-tinged nose and slightly-more-pronounced than usual pallor was unmistakable. As was the slight hoarseness of his voice.

Diego trailed behind with two more bags, filled to the brim. You couldn’t even see his face behind them. Vanya rushed to grab one of the bags off of Diego. As they started unpacking everything, Klaus started laughing.

He joked, “What, are we opening up our very own hospital?”

“Come here, ghost boy. We’ve gotta get some of this stuff in you,” Diego ordered.

Klaus groaned and sat down next to his stabby brother. Diego opened the Emergen-C and a water bottle and poured the drink mix in. He shook it up and handed it to Klaus who just set it down beside him.

“Drink it, headass,” Five said.

Again, Klaus groaned. He opened the bottle and drank about a quarter of it. As soon as he put the bottle down, Diego was forcing pills into his hands. Mucinex and Sudafed along with a couple of cough drops.

“I’m not sick!” Klaus said.

Vanya jumped in, “You’re going to catch it. The thermometer I brought downstairs that Diego took your temperature with...I had just used it on Luther and I don’t think we cleaned it in between uses, and...yeah.”

“Hh’-gkSCHh-nGXTchiew! Hh’tsxchyuu!” Klaus caught the sneezes in his palms like normal, but what he forgot was that Diego’s sweatshirt was about four times his size and the sleeves draped over his hands. “Sorry.” He sniffled lightly.

“Bless you,” Allison said pointedly.

The attention of the whole room was on Klaus, something he’d usually bask in but this time he felt vulnerable and uncomfortable in the spotlight.

He grumbled, “I’m not sick! I sneeze all the time!”

Five shrugged, “He’s not wrong.” Still he picked up the thermometer off of the coffee table and blinked over to Klaus’ side. “Open up.”

“Really? This? Agai-ow, what the hell, Five?” Klaus scolded, as his tiniest sibling tried to shove the thermometer in his mouth as he was speaking. Klaus ripped the device out of his brother’s hand and put it in his mouth. After it beeped, he looked at it. “Look, 98.7. It’s pretty much the same as last time.”

“You went up a tenth of a degree,” Diego noted.

Klaus rolled his eyes. “What-fucking-ever, Diego!”

“Take the pills already!”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that from you,” Klaus chuckled.

It was Diego’s turn to roll his eyes. “Yeah and it’s the fucking last time too so don’t get used to it.”

Klaus ignored him and swallowed the pills dry. With another threatening look from Five, he took another swig of the Emergen-C.

“I’m gonna go check on Luther,” Allison said.

Five added, “I’ll come with. I’ve yet to see him in all his sick glory.”

The two disappeared, Five actually walking with Allison instead of blinking away.

“Hehht’TSCHHhyeu-nkTT!” Klaus moaned lightly after.

“Bless you. Where’s Ben?”

Klaus rubbed his nose vigorously. “Uhh, he’s right here. Yeah. No, no I’m not. Shut the hell up! Whatever.” He turned to face his visible siblings. “I will not be manifesting Ben for the time being, as he is being a complete bitch!”

“What’s he doing?” Vanya asked.

“Pestering me! He’s all like ‘Oooohhh Klaus! This is exactly how Luther was at the start! Blah blah blah!’ like, I don’t care!” Klaus ranted. “I feel fine! I know that you’re all used to me being useless but I actually think I’m okay for once and no one will hip off my fucking dick!”

It was silent. Klaus sighed. He felt guilty. Sure, Ben was annoying him but Klaus was the only way his siblings could see Ben. He couldn’t keep him from them like he was his master. He didn’t want to be like that.

“Whatever,” Klaus muttered. Slowly, Ben became visible.

Klaus tuned out the conversation as he slumped back down on the couch.

Up in Luther’s room, Allison and Five were trying to give Luther everything they could without absolutely filling his stomach cavity with different types of medicine. They used some spray Klaus found that was supposed to numb your sore throat. Luther said it didn’t work.

They waited a few minutes after applying everything. Allison was impatient to see improvement. She hated seeing any of her siblings feel like this, especially Luther. He was supposed to be their leader, and when he couldn’t lead them who was supposed to?

For the next hour, Allison checked Luther’s temperature every fifteen minutes. It finally dropped back down to 100. Still a fever, not not nearly as bad as his 103.4 degree fever from before.

“Allison?” Luther asked weakly. His voice had become so much more raw and broken as his coughing had increased. “Can I have another cough drop? My throat hurts so badly.”

Allison nods and goes to give him another one. She hands him two this time, just in case. She then announces that she’s going to go get some tea for him because the cough drops aren’t working as well as she’d like.

All Allison can think about is how sick Luther was. She had had to change his shirt because of how sweat-soaked he was. Luther was obviously embarrassed but he let Allison do it without complaining. That was a big clue to Allison that he was really miserable. He had started having more productive coughs, ones that were wet so everyone in the room could feel his sickness.

Five had left shortly after Allison had taken Luther’s temperature the second time. She didn’t know where he went, but she knew that Five didn’t like seeing his brother in such discomfort. Luther wasn’t one to really show how he was feeling. He was almost always still as a stone. It was odd for them to see him break his walls down for once.

As Allison poured the tea into the kettle, a quiet voice asked, “Can I have some? Only if there’s enough water. Diego said I should keep drinking it just in case.”

“Of course. Sit down,” Allison said.

It was Klaus who had entered the room and he sat down quickly and quietly. Allison would have noticed that he was acting off if she wasn’t so worried about Luther.

“I’m gonna take this up to Luther and then I’ll come back down to hang out with you,” she promised.

Klaus shook his head, “No no no, you don’t have to. You can stay with Luther, I know you want to. You don’t have to feel obligated to stick around. I’ve got Ben here.”

“Klaus, I want to hang out with you,” Allison’s voice faltered. “I thought it would be nice.” She couldn’t help but be upset that Klaus thought she was only offering to hang out with him out of pity. That’s what Klaus was used to: people pitying him.

“Oh, okay then.” He grabbed a napkin off of the center of the table and held it up over his face. “Hh’eiishieww-ishhew! H’nxght!”

“Bless you. You sure you’re feeling alright?”

Klaus nodded, “Must be pollen or something. Diego took my temperature and I feel pretty okay otherwise. I’ve been sneezing all day, but that’s something I’m pretty used to.”

He was right. Klaus was a pretty sneezy guy. Due to his several-year-long relationship with snorting cocaine, Klaus was set off by almost every strong smell there was. He had grown up being allergic to pollen and he had found out in his late teens that he was quite allergic to cats. Klaus wondered if there was anything Luther even could be allergic to on the moon. Moon dust? Recycled air? He didn’t know.

“As long as you’re not feeling too badly,” Allison said.

“Hihh...hh...fuck I...hh’ishhyu! Ugh. My god!”

Allison giggled.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Allison continued laughing.

Klaus feigned anger. “What’s so funny?”

“You just had that dramatic ass buildup for that tiny sneeze!” She confessed.

Klaus cracked a smile but then quickly went back to faking his furiousness. “My sneezes aren’t tiny! They’re quite average, thank you very much! They come out so damn fast sometimes, it’s like they’re all on top of one another. They all fuck me in the ass one after another. It’s like a damn orgy but without any orgasming.”

“One time I read that if you sneeze enough it can make you orgasm,” Allison doted. “Not sure if that’s true though.”

“I’ll have to try it out someday,” Klaus said. “Not today though.”

Allison joked, “You better be quiet about it because Diego would not be happy to hear about you triggering your allergies or your asthma on purpose.”

“You’re doing what?” Diego’s voice came in.

“Nothing! Just fun and games, that’s all,” Klaus said.

“Allison mentioned your asthma is it acting up? Are you feeling alright? Christ, Klaus you have to tell us these things Allison where’s the thermometer-“

Klaus laughed, “Calm the hell down, Diego. It’s not acting up, I promise. I’ll tell you if it is, you know that!”

It was times like this where Klaus really saw how much Diego cared for him. He could become so worried in .2 seconds and it always threw Klaus off of his game. Part of Klaus’ whole routine was people not caring about him and it kind of threw a wrench in things when people started to care.

Diego looked at Allison with the same urgency, only calming down a bit when she nodded her head in agreement with Klaus, who was sniffling and rubbing at his nose.

“You mentioned his asthma --”

“In jest, Diego. Jeez, lighten up!” Klaus play-chastised his brother, shoving him lightly with his free hand, which of course left his brother completely unfazed. Diego was similarly unfazed by Allison’s explanation of their previous discussion. While Allison and Klaus chuckled again, Diego’s jaw remaining locked and he rolled his eyes.

“Hilarious. Klaus is getting sick, Luther’s upstairs hacking his lungs out and you think it’s the perfect time for a stand-up routine.”

There was a silence after that. The spoon Allison was using to stir a cup of tea hovered in mid-air. Even Klaus’ sniffling and nose rubbing stopped as he stared at Allison in excitement, waiting for her response. Finally, she started stirring the cup of tea again.

“Yes, Diego. My brothers are sick,” she said, voice calm. A small smile on her lips. “And I’m making them feel better by being a nice, pleasant presence. You should try it, god forbid you might like it.”

“For real, D, don’t be a dick. Sissy is a mom, she’s the best at this kind of thing -- see?” Klaus took the cup of tea from her hand as she offered it. “Thanks, Ally!” He blew on it as Diego shot him a look. “Hey, you’re good at this stuff, too, man!” he quickly added on. Klaus was truly grateful for all of the times Diego had helped him out in the past when he was sick, before he was sober. But now his brother went into panic mode the second he heard him sniffle. It really killed his vibe.

“You’re just a little… intense,” Klaus said with a small grin, quickly covering it up as he raised the mug to his lips. He sipped way too quickly. Not only did he burn his tongue, but steam rising from the mug made his nose itch. He rubbed at it again to delay the inevitable reaction.

“Well, if you’d been in my shoes all these years maybe you’d understand why I don’t think it’s funny to see you make a joke out of it when you’re sick.”

“But I’m not even sick!” Klaus bit back, in that same whiny tone Diego had become familiar with over the years. His nose chose the perfect time to finalize its reaction in that moment. He hastily set the tea down on the counter as he again buried his face in his hoodie sleeve. “nxXGsht-ixgtshu! Hih! H’dtZshiuhh--fuck!”

“Not sick my ass-”

“Bless you!” The three siblings whipped their heads to the entrance to the kitchen, but Vanya was standing at the stove seconds later, having rushed in in a panic. She was just as bad as Diego. She fussed over the large pot of soup boiling on the stove, lifting a small spoonful up to her mouth to taste-test and blowing on it. “Diego, I told you to watch it while I was gone!”

“Sorry, Van, I was too busy watching over our idiot brother.”

“Rude!” Klaus gasped, moving his hand to cover his mouth in pretend shock.

“Klaus, what’s wrong? Are you feeling sick yet?” Vanya asked, as if it was an inevitability. She turned to look at him for concern, the spoon still raised to her lips, her anxiety over his well being overpowering her anxiety over dinner. Diego swapped anxieties with her, diving in with another spoon and tasting the soup without blowing on it before she could bring the spoon to her lips. He burned his tongue in his haste, but he nodded through the little wince of pain.

“It’s done.” Vanya shifted her focus back to her own soup-filled spoon and finally tasted it, nodding in agreement.

“Klaus, come get your soup.” Vanya started ladling the soup into the six bowls she had laid out.

“Wait, it’s for me?” her curly-haired brother asked in mild shock (again, people caring about him was not the reality he’d known most of his life). Though what came across was annoyance as he crossed his arms over his chest. He’d sat at the counter watching them prepare the soup for the last hour, sniffling discreetly and rubbing his nose as Diego rapidly chopped vegetables and flung them into the pot with perfect accuracy, Vanya quietly stirring and adding the seasonings. “Give it to Luther, he’s the one who needs it. I’m not--”

“Klaus, eat the damn soup!” Ben had apparently appeared behind him, and he could hear the eye-roll in his voice. Klaus’ living siblings had blinked at him when he’d apparently cut himself off mid-sentence, assuming he was going to sneeze, since he’d cut himself off in the middle of the sentence. When it didn’t happen, Allison sprung into action, picking up a bowl and putting it into Klaus’ hands. She chuckled as she brought a perfectly manicured hand up to his cheek and patted it gently.

“Klaus, do you really think we made this whole pot of soup just for you? And you guys say I’m a narcissist.” Klaus watched as Diego shook his head and walked over to the table with a bowl of soup, Allison and Vanya following shortly after.

“Oh.” Klaus looked down at the soup in his hands and tried to hide the little smile that had formed on his face. He knew for a fact that they had made the soup because of Luther and him, and even if he was convinced he wasn’t sick, the fact that they cared so much and they were going to make a family dinner out of it made him feel just a little bit warm and fuzzy.

“Where’s Luther?” Klaus asked as he set his soup down on a placemat. “Shouldn’t he be the one we’re worried about feeding?”

“He’ll eat in his room. He needs to be quarantined,” Diego said, blowing on a spoonful of his own soup.

“I’ll bring him some!” Klaus rose from his seat.

“Absolutely not.” Diego shot him daggers. Klaus slumped down into his seat with a pout and scooped up a spoonful of soup. “Allison, why don’t you bring it--”

“Oh, no, let him be. He’s asleep.”

“Again?” Allison gaped. “Well I guess that’s what his body needs more right now.”

“Mmmhmm,” Vanya responded a little too quickly, putting her water glass to her lips almost immediately afterwards and taking a big, audible gulp. All these years and she was still a terrible liar. Thankfully, everyone was so preoccupied with eating -- and, in Klaus’ case, trying not to sneeze -- that they’d let it slide.

Around twenty minutes prior, Vanya had left her precious soup entrusted to Diego’s care and walked upstairs to Luther’s room to check on him and ask if he was ready for dinner. Afraid that he might actually be asleep, she opened the door slowly and carefully, not making a sound. The sight that greeted her had been pretty surprising, and even more so touching.

Luther was lying on his bed in the fetal position, barely fitting on the twin XL mattress. His blankets had been pulled back up to his chin, hopefully due to the fever breaking. He was wheezing in that careful way that meant one miscalculated breath would send him into the harsh, liquidy coughs he’d been producing for the past hour or so, thanks to the hefty dose of Mucinex.

And at his side sat Five, probably the only one of the siblings who could fit next to Luther’s massive frame on the bed. He looked down at his brother with intense concentration, brows furrowed as he traced constellations on his broad back with his index finger.

“Gemini,” he announced softly. Despite his expression, his voice carried an air of tenderness Vanya hadn’t heard from him in years. Not since they were kids, and even then it was rare. And he never used it on her. Only Luther, and only when he really needed it.

“The twins,” Luther wheezed out, a small smile playing on his lips, which quickly dissipated as his jaw went slack with a shaky breath. Five quickly retracted his hand, just as Luther buried his face in his blankets. “Heh-nGXTchiew! Hahh-nXXT!” He was stifling again, and judging by the slight curl in Five’s lip, Vanya knew the reason why. Five had never done well with germs, and she caught his slight flinch when Luther’s blanketed form contracted a third time. “S-heh!-sorryfive-

‘nGXTSCH! Hhh’nXGTschiehh. Hhh… heh!”

Luther tensed in anticipation, and so did Five; Vanya could tell he was about to bounce. So she decided to be a good sister and do something about it.

Concentrating on the sound of Luther’s breathing, she focused her energy on his nose, sending little waves of energy flowing outwards against the walls of his nostrils from within, and thus applying pressure from the inside out; something she’d been doing to herself lately, whenever she had to sneeze in a crowded place, or just didn’t want to attract any attention to herself. She released her hold when Luther’s breathing evened out.

As if on cue, Luther let out a deep, wheezy sigh. Five relaxed again, chuckling a bit as he put his finger back gently on his brother’s back.

“That was a first. Gesundheit!” His voice still held the soft tone Vanya had feared it might lose. “How about Libra next?”

With a small smile on her face, Vanya had slipped out of the room even more quietly than she’d came in.

She walked back to the kitchen, satisfied with her ability to stop Luther from sneezing, and she wondered if she could possibly do the opposite. She would get to test this theory out at dinner.

#sick luther #sick klaus #luther whump #klaus whump #luther hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #tua fanfic #tua #umbrella academy #the umbrella academy #luther snz #klaus snz #tua snz

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spine-buster · 7 years

Text

Out of the Ordinary - Will Ospreay

I was driving to work one day and heard that Selena Gomez song “It Ain’t Me” on the radio and…well…this scene formed in my head. Every time I hear that song this scene plays over and over. I haven’t even watched a Will Ospreay match; I think I’ve seen one clip of an interview he did with Rob Naylor. I think I have a problem. My brain works in mysterious ways.

2500+ words. Serious angst with a dash of fluff at the end.

@wrestlewriting @wrasslin-x @wrestlerecs @chasingeverybreakingwave @thegenericluchadora @running-ropes @sammiielli @fan-fiction-galore @ratherkissawookie @anerdysouthernbelle @spot-of-bother @amaranthine-reign @baleesi @flnnbalor @smuppies @sarahmatthews7 @daintymissdevitt @newjapan @thyestean-feast @corey-renee

- - -

When anybody was asked to describe you, the first word they said was pragmatic. You always thought logically and sensibly, and on more than one occasion you were told you were mature well beyond your years, which you took as a compliment but some saw as a detriment. Your fellow wrestlers had a strong love/hate relationship with you because of your personality. Two wrestlers that loved your personality, or at least appreciated it, were your friends Zack Sabre Jr. and Marty Scurll. Zack, who was a lot like you, took a liking to you early on; Marty took a while to warm up to you, but now that he had, you couldn’t get rid of him. He routinely expressed to you that you were one of his favourite people. You didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing, but you leaned towards good. Zack, in particular, stuck with you throughout the only time in your life where you didn’t think logically and sensibly, and he was right beside you (now with Marty) when you got out of it. Three years ago, you began dating Will Ospreay against your better judgement. You were a newbie, and he was cute, and he kissed you one night at a bar and said the sweetest things to you. But you were both young, and traveling the word for wrestling, and though you got booked on a lot of the same shows and were together often, it just couldn’t work. It didn’t work.

Just over a year into the relationship, you used that same judgement to end things. It was hard, but it needed to be done, especially before he could really hurt you. It hurt you in ways you never revealed to anyone – not Zack, not Marty, nobody. Barely four weeks later, he was with another girl – a fellow wrestler on the circuit named Maddie. You convinced everybody it didn’t bother you, and you even worked a few matches against her, always remaining professional. You wondered if she knew the extent of yours and Will’s relationship. Touring Europe now, you found yourself in a locker room with Zack and Marty, giving them your thoughts on spots they wanted to do for their match. Many wrestlers were around – half of which you knew – and Will and Maddie were booked for the show too. They hadn’t arrived yet, but you were expecting them at any hour. “You wanna do those rolling Romero specials?” Marty asked Zack. Hearing the move made alarm bells go off in your brain. “Don’t,” you interjected quickly. “I’m doing them in my match. You can’t do the same spot too.” “Fine,” Marty nodded his head. “What other way can I bend your body like a pretzel, Zack?” “You working against Maddie tonight?” Zack asked you, completely ignoring Marty’s question. You shook your head. “I’m working Sadie,” you revealed. “That’s why we’ve already got the match called. God forbid Will and Maddie show up on time so we can plan a match beforehand.” Zack snorted at your comment, knowing Will’s penchant for being late. Marty huffed out a laugh. “Are they in a mixed tag tonight?” he asked. You nodded you head. “Well then, maybe you could go out there and teach her a few pointers,” Marty commented. Zack laughed out loud but you could only smirk. “Be nice, Marty.” “I am being nice. A month ago she almost dropped Sadie on her head.” “She’s still learning,” you said. “We’re all still learning. Will’s getting her to practice more aerial stuff like him, so she might be neglecting a bit of the fundamentals.” “He’s training her and responsible for making her forget the fundamentals? I should punch him in the face.” “Marty!” you chastised him. By this point, Zack was just looking back and forth between the two of you. “Whatever, he deserves a punch in the face after what he’s been saying,” Marty mumbled. You saw Zack’s eyes bulge out of their sockets quickly at Marty. Marty, seeing his reaction, shrugged his shoulders quickly and looked away. “Why? What’s he been saying?” you asked. The boys looked at each other silently, not answering your question. That was the only clue you needed. The atmosphere of the room completely changed at this point. “What has he been saying?” you asked again, slowly. Still nothing. “One of you better speak or I’m going to assume the worst.” “It’s nothing, love,” Zack prefaced. “It’s bullshit is what it is,” Marty mumbled again. “What’s going on?” you demanded of your friends. “You know how Will is…he runs his mouth a lot…and well, he said…he’s been saying, in a couple of locker rooms, really, that you still aren’t over him, which is why you’re still alone, but that you’re also desperate to get married, which is quote unquote pathetic,” Zack revealed. The hairs on the back of your neck stood up. You felt like your body was on fire. “He said what?” “I told you love, it’s bullshit,” Zack said. “Nobody believes him, especially the ones that know you.” “But he still says it,” you said as more of a statement than a question. “Well…yes. But I cannot stress this enough…nobody believes him,” Zack repeated. You looked toward Marty, who was biting his tongue in anger; God knows what kind of expletives he wanted to throw around. He and Will were friends – they all were – but Marty was quick to call people on their bullshit. You wondered if he had already said anything to Will. “What a fucking asshole,” you said, shaking your head. “He can fuck right off.” “Don’t do anything stupid,” Zack warned. You looked at him like he was crazy. “Me? Do something stupid? Do you forget who you’re talking to?” you asked sarcastically. You were the pragmatic one, remember? “If nobody believes him, he’s making a bigger ass out of himself than I could,” you said, shrugging it all off. Zack smiled at your response, knowing he didn’t have to worry about you. “Good thinking.” The thing was…when it came to Will, you were stupid. - - - When Sadie told you Will and Maddie had arrived, you knew it was go time. Your blood had been boiling since Zack and Marty told you about the things Will was saying. You had managed to keep it cool, but now that you knew that he was here, in the building, you felt like you were about to blow. You left the women’s locker room, under no suspicion from Sadie, and walked down the hall to the men’s, where you saw the door was slightly ajar. A bunch of voices could be heard, but that didn’t cloud your train of thought at all – you knew exactly what you were going to do, and exactly what you were going to say. You opened the door slowly, just enough to see one of your fellow wrestlers lacing up his boots beside the door. “Hey,” he greeted you. “Who you looking for?” You ignored him, opening the door fully until you spotted him, directly across from you, his arm up on the coat hooks, leaning against them as he talked to Maddie. Of course she was still in the men’s locker room, only stooping to join the female’s room until the last minute. God forbid she wasn’t attached at Will’s hip every moment of the day. You darted towards him, ignoring the stares of everyone around you. Will turned his head towards you at the last possible second, taking his arm off the coat hooks. The last thing you noticed was the confused look on his face. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” you screamed, shoving Will with such force that he actually stumbled back onto the bench seating. “What the fuck is your problem?!” “What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked, standing back up. By this point the room had gone silent, all eyes on you and Will. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Marty hold back another wrestler from intervening. Maddie looked at you like you had just ripped the head off her favourite doll. “What’s your problem with my boyf --” “Maddie, unless you want me to spill my ammo on you too, I suggest you stay the fuck out of this ‘cause it has nothing to do with you,” you warned with such venom in your voice you almost scared yourself. She was just as shocked, her mouth closing as she stayed silent. You brought your attention back to Will. His brows were furrowed by now, and you could tell he was angry at the way you were speaking to his girlfriend, but it seemed like he was too scared to say anything. “How dare you talk behind my back to our colleagues. How fucking dare you.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he denied it, like you knew he would. “Oh, so now you’re going to deny talking shit about me? Really?” you demanded. “Telling everybody I’m not over you? That I’m sad and alone and desperate to get married?” you listed the things he’d said. “How am I the desperate one when you were the one to propose after only six months and I said no?!” And there it was. Everyone’s jaws hit the floor in complete shock at what you had just said – everyone except for Will, of course, who was seething. Nobody, nobody knew he had proposed; not Zack, not Marty, not even his or your parents. You hadn’t let anyone on about it; it was a secret between the two of you, and it was supposed to stay that way. And now, it was out in the open. “Who was the one waiting up for you when you’d go out and party with your bros, huh?” you kept demanding of him. “Who would go out and get you Gatorade and Advil for your hangovers? Who was the one who actually let you go out instead of keeping you on a leash?” you made a slight jab at Maddie. You couldn’t hold anything back at this point. “And just last week, who was the first person you fucking called that came to pick you up when you were drunk out of your mind wandering the streets of Hamburg since you couldn’t find the hotel?” He didn’t bother answering you. He knew, you knew, everyone in the room knew the answer to those questions. His eyebrows were still furrowed as you huffed and puffed, the anger in you not subsiding any time soon. There was so much you could say to him – so much you thought about saying to him for two years. You didn’t know how or when you were going to stop. “And another thing – it’s one thing to talk to other girls while we’re still together, hanging by a thread,” you began, pointing to Maddie, “but it’s another thing to get with them less than a month after a break-up. You think I didn’t know? I fucking knew. You were a scumbag then and you’re a scumbag now.” You looked over to Maddie, surprisingly not feeling an inch of remorse. “Congratulations, sweetie, but a word of warning – the way you get ‘em is the same way you lose ‘em.” Will clenched his jaw. Only now had the eerie silence of the room, despite it being full of men, get to you. You didn’t even know how long you had been standing there, giving your verbal beat down, but you figured now was as good as ever to end it. “You can fuck off, William Ospreay. If I ever find out you’ve even looked in my general direction or muttered my name to anyone else I’ll chop off your balls and feed them to you for breakfast.” With that, you turned on your heels and walked out of the room, every pair of eyes on you. - - - The show went on. Your match went well, and the crowd was very into it. You went over Sadie, but that only meant she’d go over you in the next show. You were good friends so you didn’t mind. She’d heard about your outburst in the men’s locker room and high-fived you for it, telling you that you should have done it sooner. Will and Maddie finished their match and left early, apparently not wanting to run into you again. They were staying at a different hotel than you, lucky for them. You didn’t want to see them either, so you were glad they took the initiative to get the fuck out of dodge. After changing out of your ring gear and into a pair of black leggings and an oversized sweater, you heard a knock on the dressing room door. You looked behind you to see who it was. Without bothering to wait for a response, whoever was on the other side pushed the door open slowly. Marty revealed himself soon enough. “Hey.” “Hi Marty.” “You almost ready?” “Yeah, just packing in my shoes,” you said, turning back to finish. He took the initiative to step inside of the room, closing the door about half way. He watched you for a few moments, stuffing your shoes into your luggage and zipping it back up before crossing his arms against his chest. “You okay?” “I’m fine. Gonna need a bigger suitcase soon,” you commented. He watched you for a few more seconds. “Listen…what happened earlier…” You spun around to look him in the eye. “I’m going to hear it from Zack when we get back to the hotel. I don’t need to hear it from you too.” “You’re not going to hear it from me,” he said. “I just…I thought it was very… honourable of you. I thought it was the right thing to do, to be perfectly honest, and that he had it coming.” Well, those were words you didn’t expect to hear from him. “Is this some sort of reverse psychology thing?” Marty chuckled slightly. “No, I actually think that, darling,” he said. “Well, thanks,” you said, turning back quickly to lift your luggage off the bench and extend the handle. You knew you could always count on him. “Listen,” you heard his voice again as you faced away from him. “I was thinking… once we get back to the hotel I could, you know, buy you a drink…you know, since uh, you probably obviously need it,” he stumbled through the sentence. Still facing away from him, your eyebrows rose. Did he just say what you think he just said? Was that subtext really there? Oh, Marty. Marty Marty Marty. You spun around to see him looking at you, desperate for an answer. You would never reveal to him how anxious he truly looked. “Come here,” you said. “What?” “Marty, just come here,” you repeated. He followed your command, approaching you and standing inches apart from you. “You’re going to go through an entire night of buying me drink after drink, and maybe even food, just for an opportunity to maybe kiss me at the end of the night?” Marty huffed out a laugh, bringing his arm up to scratch the back of his neck. “Well when you put it like that…yes.” “Can I save you the time and the money and just kiss you now?” You were pragmatic, after all.

#will ospreay #will ospreay fic #will ospreay fan fic #will ospreay fanfic #will ospreay fan fiction #will ospreay imagine #will ospreay drabble #marty scurll #marty scurll fic #marty scurll imagine #wrestling #wrestling fic #wrestling fanfic #wrestling fan fic #wrestling fanfiction #wrestling fan fiction #wrestling imagine #wrestling drabble

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artificialqueens · 7 years

Text

Catalyst (Trixya) - Boleyn

AN: This is off the prompt where Trixie gets upset about the video of Katya grinding on Violet. Turned into a mess of angst but with a fluffy ending! This is my first time writing this pair so apologies if the characterizations are a bit rocky! I use their drag names but male pronouns. Also, BNYC should be updated soon. I’m sorry it’s taking so long. I am in the midst of finals and this chapter is fighting me, but I promise it’ll be ready soon! Much love, xx

Trixie rolled his eyes as he tossed his phone down beside him on his mattress. He was still in full drag. His head weighed down by the twenty pounds of platinum blonde that he had carefully stacked and coiffed to frame his face perfectly. His ribcage still felt like it was being pulled through itself from the corset that still pushed every organ of his into the others. His face still felt like an over frosted cake, the skin desperate to feel fresh air. But none of that hurt right now. Not the way that that stupid fucking video of Katya grinding on Violet and the entire crowd fucking cheering it on did. Like the masochistic idiot he is, he snatches his phone back up to scroll through the likes and comments, hoping against hope that Kat hadn’t liked or commented on it. Of course, he was wrong. Not only had he liked it, among the droves of “Omg Vatya #OTP” comments left by sexually repressed high school girls, was Kat’s icon. Next to it “Sit on my face mother and spank me.” He smiled a little, hearing Kat saying it in his stupid Barbara voice, his eyes bugging out. But then he remembered that the comment was for Violet. Fucking Violet. And not him.

Then came the second slap. A stream of notifications lit up his phone. All of them for the fucking video. All of them asking him what he thought of them. All of them asking whether he wanted Katya to grind on him like that.

Then, the third slap. As he was watching the floodgate of Trixya shippers commenting on the video, one from Violet popped up. A simple “I ship us.”

Trixie felt tears start to prick at the edge of his eyes and angrily stifled them. He was not about to cry over this bullshit while sitting on his unmade bed in full drag. He had some dignity. He was going to cry in the shower where it wouldn’t matter if his gallons of foundation and mascara and lipstick got everywhere. But not here. Not where he can stain his Amazon prime $27 cover up and have a reminder of just how pathetic he is. Just how dumb he is to have fallen in love with his best friend.

He turns his phone on Do Not Disturb and throws it in his nightstand drawer. He wants it as far away from him as possible. He doesn’t want even the slightest chance of seeing a notification pop onto the screen. He doesn’t want to keep seeing the stupid video replaying in his mind.

But how can he not see it? How can he not keep thinking about it as he yanks out the multitude of bobby pins pinning his obnoxious mess of wigs to his head, welcoming the sharp pains that dance along his scalp as he does it. At least it doesn’t hurt half as bad as seeing the person you’re hopelessly in love with constantly flirt and fawn over someone else. A someone else with a waist thinner than his forearm. A someone else with a perfect ass. A someone else who’s confident. A someone else who does casual sex and doesn’t want the forever after that Trixie’s desperate for. Someone who’s not him. At all.

He quickly scrubs most of the makeup off of his face and turns on his shower, cranking the heat up far beyond comfortable. He doesn’t want to feel comfortable right now. Nothing feels comfortable right now.

He steps under the boiling spray and lets it envelope him, willing his heartache to cascade off of him with it, to disappear down the drain. He was the one who turned Kat down every time. He was the one who had decided that it would be better for them to remain friends. Their careers were intertwined with the show. What if they broke up? What if Trixie was more than Katya could handle? What if all the things Trixie wanted could never reconcile with everything that Katya wanted? What if Trixie wasn’t good for Katya? How could Trixie expect Kat to give up his lifestyle that was working for him and ask him to change that all? What kind of person would ask Kat to change anything about himself when he was so perfect and wonderful and good?

Trixie slid down to sit on the floor of his shower, finally letting himself cry. Violet would be better for him anyway. They could fuck without all the feelings getting in the way. They want the same things. The things Trixie doesn’t know how to want.

He wants so desperately to want whatever Kat does but it hurts. It hurts to picture someone else making Katya flail in laughter from a stupid pun. It’s beyond painful to imagine someone else being the one who gets to be annoyed by Katya’s miniscule attention span. It eats him alive to think about anyone beside him getting Katya’s 3 a.m. calls because he saw a cat that looked exactly like Jodie Foster and now he has proof that parallel universes are colliding and they are experiencing a secondary universe wherein everyone is a cat and that elite race of felines has engineered a device to breach their universe and now we can all meet our cat counterparts. It sucks to realize that it could be someone else who gets to make a lame cat pun about kitty counterpawts and conspurricy theories to him once he’s inevitably run out of breath and has to take a pause in his explanation.

It just hurts more than anything Trixie’s ever experienced.

After realizing that he’s probably been in the shower far too long and he probably more closely resembles a prune than a human, he warily turns off the water, surprised that his tears stop with it. He takes a deep breath, wincing as he feels a twinge in his back and a lack of sensation down his legs. He probably shouldn’t have sat so awkwardly on the hard tile for so long. But he doesn’t care. Everything hurts, so why not?

He slides back down and settles onto his now numb butt. Stepping outside of the warm cocoon of his shower feels impossibly difficult right now. He just wants to not try. To not feel. To not think.

God, he’s pathetic.

He hears a knock on his front door and thinks for a second that he’s really losing it when he hears Katya’s voice faintly calling out “Trix? Trix open the door?” Trixie sends a prayer up that Kat will just leave, idly wondering why the hell he was here anyway.

“Trix! C’mon? I know you’re here mawma, I checked your location!”

Trixie started crying again. God, why couldn’t he just pull himself together? Why was Katya here? Why now?

“I’m worried about you and I’m coming in!” He called. Trixie felt all the blood rush out of him. Fuck. Kat’s got an extra key. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

He bolted upright and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around his waist loosely before exiting the shower and looking in the mirror. Great. His eyes were bloodshot. There was no way for him to hide the fact that he had been crying. Not from Kat. Kat knew him far too well.

“Trix?” Katya called out softly, peeking his head into the open bedroom doorway, turning around to find Trixie in the short hall leading to the en suite. Trixie smiled in confusion at Katya who, still in full geish, sighed in relief upon seeing him. “Trix you scared the fucking hell out of me! I called you like a hundred times!”

“What?”

“When you didn’t show up to my funeral I got worried! I checked your location and saw that you were at home so I thought that even though you cut the number of wigs you wore in half this year that it had still been too much and you got a migraine so I ran to the store and got you Excedrin. I forgot if you took the regular or extra strength ones so I got both just in case. And Gatorade and crackers. You always get sick when your head hurts and the last thing I need is you running out of electrolytes mawma. I also got you a Barbie coloring book that comes with five different colors of pink crayons,” he continues, digging through the plastic bag he had looped around one wrist. “Oh! And I found this headband!” He screams, holding his jaw open in excitement as he attempts to put the headband on with one hand. It’s absolutely everything that’s wrong but everything that’s absolutely Katya. It’s a plain headband with two tufts of purple fuzz that have big eyeballs on springs sticking out of them. The eyeballs each have another tuft of fuzz, these ones black, atop them. Katya, ironically, looks at him seriously for the first time that night just as he looks the craziest. It’s one of the things Trixie loves about him. It’s one of the things that hurts the most about not having him.

Trixie feels heat prick at the base of his eyes. “Kat, I’m so sorry. I forgot about your birthday. I’m such a terrible friend. I’m so sorry,” Trixie begins to stammer out as his breathing becomes erratic again. Kat had left his own birthday party early because he thought Trixie was sick and wanted to bring him medicine and check in on him. It was too much. Too selfless. Too perfectly Katya.

“Trix, stop. It’s okay. Breathe! I told Violet to spread their asshole to keep the crowd entertained. But that’s probably something every horny top in all of WeHo has already seen. So I’m guessing Jinkx will do stand-up, so everyone will leave.” Katya smiled so genuinely at him, and he had just skipped out on his best friend’s birthday celebration because he was a lovesick, jealous, selfish person. He started crying again.

Kat gently grabbed his elbow, steering him toward the bed where he pulled him down to sit beside him. He pulled Trixie into him, cradling him snugly against his chest. “What’s going on, Bri?” He asked so sincerely that it cut deeper and pulled a fresh wave of tears from somewhere so deep down inside Trixie it felt like he was heaving out his entire soul into Katya’s hideously beautiful silver stiff chiffon tea length gown. Katya sat there silently holding Trixie, letting him cry until there was nothing left, waiting for him to be ready to speak.

It must’ve been maybe five minutes but it felt like hours to Trixie as he saw images of him and Katya together and then Violet replacing him and a new onslaught of pain, seemingly more acute each time, slicing through him. God, why did this hurt so much? Why did Katya have to be who he is? Why did he have to be just out of reach even while holding him tightly to his bony frame?

“Kat,” Trixie managed to breathe out once his body had poured the entirety of its water content out of his eyes. “You need to go back! It’s YOUR party! You should be there having fun!” Trixie hiccupped, struggling to find oxygen in the mouthfuls of air he forced into his lungs.

Katya pulled back from Trixie, forcing him to meet his eyes. “Brian, you’re not okay. How can I be?“

Trixie swallowed the lump that crawled up his throat at those words. God, he didn’t deserve Kat. No one deserved Kat. God, Violet better appreciate what he has because Trixie sure as hell would make sure that Katya would always have someone there to love and appreciate him, even if it was never reciprocated to the same degree.

He pulled himself away from Katya, needing distance. He grabbed a stray blanket, wrapping it around him chest, suddenly desperate for a physical barrier between him and the perfect, wonderful human he was so hopelessly and terribly in love with.

“Kat, go. Go to your birthday. I’ll be fine.”

“Trix, I’m not buying a single counterfeit, bank heist, blood diamond exchange, murder for hire, blood splattered, back alley, corrupt, capitalist ruble of that,” Katya said far too seriously for the ridiculous stream of verbiage that had just left his mouth. It was just one more thing that Trixie loved about him.

Trixie had the same jokes. The funny material he had, he reused, several times. But Katya was just insane and said something unexpected every time he opened his mouth. It was infuriating and intriguing and maddening and mystifying and Trixie couldn’t imagine a day without it.

“I will be. Kat, it’s your fucking birthday party. Everyone’s there for you! You really should go. Please go.” Trixie forced the words past him lips, though the only thing he knew he didn’t want was for Katya to leave right now. He stepped up away from the bed, leaving the blanket behind in favor of moving toward his closet where he would be able to find a real barrier from his emotions and Katya’s very real, very comforting, very warm, very tangible body. And, even worse, his very real care for him.

“Brian?” Katya asked quietly, almost hurt. Trixie didn’t want to hurt him. But he was hurting and he didn’t know how to save Katya from that.

“Kat. I’m fine. Go,” Trixie managed to all but shout from behind the safe curtain of wall separating his closet from his bedroom. He waited a few minutes, successfully gaining control over his breathing pattern, pulled on a pair of boxers, grabbed a shirt, and walked out fully expecting Katya to be gone. But he wasn’t. He was stoically perched upon his bed just the way he had left him. His expression confused but open.

“Brian. I’m not leaving. I can’t. Not when you’re hurting. I want to help, I just don’t know how?”

Trixie forced a breath down, knowing that this next moment was going to alter everything about them, either for the best or for the worst. He was scared and nervous and embarrassed and hopeful and …. and God he just wanted Katya to feel the same. God please let him feel the same.

“I saw the video of you and Vi.” He looked at Katya’s nose in an effort to avoid his eyes. It was straight, feminine, even when he wasn’t painted to high hell. Kat was beautiful. Everything about him was. His body, his mind, his soul. The fact that someone so wonderful could exist in this world at this time was beautiful.

Katya wheezed out a laugh. “Oh my god! It was so stupid! Vi and I were talking and someone just screamed out ‘RIDE THEM KATYA!’ and Vi was like “YES’ because their asshole is literally an open vacuum to any dick that approaches it and I just went with it. It was so funny …?” Katya started out the last sentence strong but quickly faded it into a question as he saw Trixie wince.

Trixie nodded, shifting his gaze down to his feet.

“Brian?” Katya gently asked, getting up off the bed and walking over to him, stopping just shy of touching him. “Brian, did the video upset you?” Katya calmly stared at him, waiting for Trixie’s response.

Trixie wanted to disappear. He wanted a hole to form beneath his feet and swallow him away from this world. “Umm,” he managed to mumble out, horribly unsure of how to approach the subject.

Katya once again pulled him back toward the bed. “It’s okay if it did. You can be honest with me.”

Trixie felt one traitorous tear threaten to crest over his bottom eyelid and blinked to rein it in. “It did,” he whispered after taking in a breath he hoped was laced with courage. It was not. He was still absolutely terrified.

Katya felt a pang of distress slice through him. He never wanted to hurt Trixie. He never wanted Trixie to hurt. “I’m sorry, Trix. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. What about it hurt you?”

Trixie felt nerves tingle through his limbs as he prepared himself to say something that he’d never be able to take back.

“Because there’ll never be another country pink to my garbage red. It’s not like Vi could ever take your place. You’re my other half, Tracy,” Katya murmured softly into Trixie as he pulled him into an embrace.

Trixie swallowed thickly, his throat far too dry. “Umm. I didn’t like it because, umm, because I like you, Kat.”

“And Hades is unfairly represented as an unforgiving tyrant in modern mythology when he was really a pretty understanding guy,” Katya quipped, an enormous grin overtaking his face.

Trixie stopped in his tracks. All of his emotions abandoned him as he pulled away from Katya to look into his face. “What?” he almost laughed, Katya’s comment catching him so off guard that he didn’t know how to react.

“I thought we were listing facts everyone knows but no one ever actually says?” Kat asked looking at him with the most innocently excited expression. Trixie’s heart swelled as he laughed. Of course Kat would make a crazy remark just to give Trixie a minute to breathe and gather himself without all of the tension and nerves that had been restricting his ability to form sentences.

“You’re an idiot, you know that right?” Trixie breathed affectionately.

Katya laughed, his eyes wide and his smile overtaking his face. God, he was beautiful. God, why had it taken so long for Trixie to give in to this? To them? It had always made sense. Why had he fought it to the point where it might not be anything anymore?

“Kat. I like you. A lot. I want … I want to try us. I got upset about the video because seeing you with someone else hurts. So much. And I know you’ve spent so long trying to get me to see this and I know I’ve fought it and I understand if you’ve moved on, because, hell, I’ve told you to move on so many times, but I’m tired of it all and I just want you, so much, and –,” Trixie was cut off by Katya’s slender hand spreading across his cheek. The warmth was so inviting and so comforting and Trixie leaned into his touch, savoring it, fearing that this was the closest he would ever get to truly holding Katya.

“Trix. Shut up,” Katya breathed out in a slight laugh, his eyes meeting Trixie’s. They shone with relief and excitement and so much adoration it hurt Trixie to see. So pure. So wonderful. Too good for him.

Katya leaned in, gently capturing Trixie’s bare lips with his painted ones. Everything within them burst alight. Warmth spread throughout Trixie as he felt Katya meld perfectly to him. He drew his arms around Katya’s slender waist, pulling him closer, a fresh wave of electricity shooting through him with every new part of Katya that aligned itself with Trixie. He sighed into the kiss, parting his mouth and welcoming Katya closer to him. Katya eagerly responded, deepening the kiss. Trixie idly thought about the amount of red lipstick that was being smeared across his lower face, but he couldn’t give a single damn. He had Katya and Katya wanted him too.

But maybe not in the way Trixie wanted him.

Trixie savored a moment longer of being surrounded by everything Katya. But he knew that kissing Kat didn’t solve everything that had stopped him from pursuing this in the first place.

He gently pulled away, making sure to keep his arms wrapped around Kat, holding him loosely to him body. “Kat… Is this something you want too? Like, not just a one time thing but like a relationship?”

“Brian,” Katya said with all the seriousness Trixie had ever known him to have. “I wouldn’t expect that from you. I know you. I know what you want from this and I think I want that too. It’s not something I’ve really done before, but I know that I can’t imagine waking up next to anyone else when I’m old and senile.”

“So, in like five years?” Trixie laughed self-consciously. Was it even right for him to expect this of Katya? Knowing that Katya was comfortable with his current lifestyle? Knowing that his current lifestyle worked so well for him?

Katya wheezed out a laugh and Trixie’s gaze was drawn back to his lips. They were beautiful. Even with clown red lipstick spread all over the place. God. He was beautiful.

“Trix,” Katya coaxed his gaze back to his eyes, peering into them earnestly. “I’d really like to take you on a date. I want to go to some cliché Italian restaurant, order something purposely because it doesn’t have a lot of onion or garlic in it, then walk down the boardwalk with you at sunset, and kiss you and hold you until it gets cold. And then I want to walk you home and kiss you goodnight and head back to my place but regret not having kissed you longer. And then I want to text you that so that you can tell me that you also wanted to kiss me longer. I want that. All of that cheesey crap that I’ve never wanted before. I want it. For you. With you. Because of you.”

Trixie felt a few more tears fall before he lunged forward to reclaim Katya’s lips, pouring his gratitude, and excitement, hope, admiration, everything he felt but couldn’t put into words into the kiss. He didn’t deserve Katya. How did the world align in such a perfect way that he and Kat would be in the right place at the right time (Season 7) to meet and become friends and then best friends, and, now, maybe more?

Katya initially reciprocated the heat of Trixie’s kiss but began to slow it, working instead to deepen and lengthen it, meeting Trixie’s desperation with affection.

“Would you go on a date with me Trix?” Katya whispered once they came up for air. “Please?”

“Yes, of course I would,” Trixie breathed back, looking into Katya’s crystal eyes.

They both smiled as they caught their breaths, holding one another close. Katya leaned in to press one last peck to Trixie’s lips before extricating himself from Trixie.

“Well, if I’m going to do this right like a good Midwestern country Christian woman, then I should go.” Katya’s voice was steady with conviction but his face screamed his disappointment at having to go.

“You don’t have to,” Trixie whispered. “You can shower here and borrow some clothes to sleep in. I don’t want to have sex,” he quickly clarified, biting his bottom lip before admitting, “but I don’t want to be without you right now.”

Katya smiled easily at that. “Are you inviting me to spend the night mawma?” He drawled, raising one spindly leg onto Trxie’s bed and leaning his weight onto it in what Trixie could only assume was supposed to be a seductive pose.

“Well, I’m reconsidering now,” Trixie laughed, though his eyes held nothing but adoration for the idiot man before him that he couldn’t help but love with everything he had.

Katya laughed and began to work his way towards Trixie’s en suite, turning around to meet Trixie’s eyes, a mischievous smile plastered across his face. “But if you, for whatever reason, decide to bring all of that body into the shower while I’m there, mawma, I’m not going to complain.” Katya complimented Trixie, his eyes lingering on Trixie’s fledgling six-pack, his tongue poking out quickly to moisten his bottom lip before sinking his teeth into it gently.

Trixie blushed, finding the shirt that was still hanging limply from one hand and bringing it up to hide himself from Katya’s roaming gaze. He laughed nervously. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” he teased back, surprising himself at the realization that he wasn’t totally opposed to joining Katya in his dedragging process.

“Too bad. That body deserves to be seen, always,” Katya trilled, prancing the rest of the way into the restroom, closing the door behind him.

Trixie heard the water start up and fluffed a pillow on the other side of his bed, eager to have something to occupy his hands and keep him from providing Katya with some company. He wanted to do this right. Katya wanted to do this right. And though he knew Katya wouldn’t have any objections to getting handsy in the shower, Trixie didn’t want to jeopardize Katya doing what he had set out to do. And Katya wanted to romance him. And God did that knowledge exhilarate Trixie. Katya wanted him to be the one to share a relationship with and Trixie wanted that too. So much.

He smiled as he ran into his closet to change into slightly nicer nightwear, trading his faded, worn out basic t-shirt for one of Katya’s merch shirts. Being hugged in a shirt with his face on it was almost like being surrounded by Katya himself. And Trixie wanted anything he could get.

He heard the water switch off and sat down on his bed, waiting for his maybe lover to slip into bed with him and hold him as they both drifted off to sleep. He didn’t know if he had ever been happier or more excited for something so mundane, but when the person you’ve spent years of your life loving from afar is steps away from loving you right here, right now, every little thing feels earth-shatteringly large.

Katya prodded out of the bathroom, flicking the light off as he moved into Trixie’s closet, reaching for a pair of boxers and a shirt, intuitively knowing that he was welcome to anything in there. He chose one of Trixie’s merch shirts. It was one of his favorites. Obscenely pink with a highly caricaturized portrait of Trixie in the middle appearing almost cat like. He smiled as he pulled it on, thinking about how close he was to what he had wanted for so long. He knew that he had to do this right. Trixie was more than a regular hook up. He wanted to be to Trixie everything Trixie dreamed up at night. For the first time in his life, he wanted to be that couple that everyone gagged at. The one that overshared on social media and held hands at every opportunity. He really wanted that. And it scared him but excited him so much. He wanted Trixie. And he wanted him for real. Forever and all that bullshit.

He stepped out of the closet to find Trixie curled in bed, smiling in his direction. Katya smiled back at him, walking to the other side of the bed and climbing in beside him.

They laid there for a few moments, silently looking at one another, internalizing the idea that they were finally here. After so long and so many terrible attempts on Katya’s part to initiate something, they were here. Both of them on terms that they were comfortable with. Both incredibly excited at the possibilities before them.

Trixie grazed him teeth across him lower lip before leaning in to press a kiss to Katya. “I’m glad you came for me.”

Katya smiled, breathing in his contentment. “I’m glad you asked me to stay.” He dropped a kiss to his nose before drawing the blankets around them more resolutely. “But you’ve had a long day and you owe me a birthday breakfast brunch in the morning. So bed time.”

Trixie felt a fresh wave of affection flush through him at how seriously Katya announced his decision. “Bed time. Goodnight, baby,” he sighed, kissing Katya once more before turning on his side.

Katya slid toward him, molding himself around Trixie perfectly despite his smaller frame. “Goodnight, gorgeous,” he whispered in his stupid Barbara voice before pecking a kiss to the tip of Trixie’s ear and settling down into the pillows. Trixie smiled so wide he thought his face might crack in half. How was he this lucky? How did he get to sleep in the arms of the most wonderful person to have ever lived? He sidled backward in an attempt to get even closer to Katya before allowing his eyelids to fall closed and sleep to overwhelm him as Katya began to softly snore behind him.

#trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #trixya #boleyn #angst #fluff #rpdr fanfiction #submission #canon compliant

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hprarepairnet · 8 years

Text

silverskin

pairing: cormac mclaggen x pansy parkinson

setting: modern, non-magical, the cutting edge au; also, a spiritual continuation of the ice, ice, baby series

word count: 3,749

alternate link: ao3

get to know our members challenge: favorite rare-pairs | (3/5) - andrea

Goalies have a short shelf life, is the thing.

Everyone’s always surprised when they find out that Cormac went to college.

Six semesters at Minnesota, two trips to the Frozen Four, and a solid enough GPA that he hadn’t even been that embarrassed when he was the only dude in his poetry seminar to nut up and declare for English Lit. But then he’d been drafted into the actual motherfucking NHL on a steady diet of Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary, and he’d barely had to make a choice. School was school, and he was okay at it, of course he was, he knew how to focus and he knew how to get shit done and he knew how to parse out the overarching narrative themes of a good gothic romance.

But hockey—hockey was everything.

And he fucking hates calling himself a drop-out, because that makes it sound like he’d quit, or something, and it wasn’t…he isn’t a quitter. He’s not. He commits to shit. That’s his trademark. He’d picked up a hockey stick when he was four years old, and he’d basically never put it down again. His loud roar of triumph after stopping the final puck in a championship shootout had resulted in a sick as hell nickname and an even sicker tattoo permanently inked across most of his upper body. He’d fallen in love with the smartest girl in the world when he was nineteen and too dumb to see all the ways she wasn’t going to love him back, and he’d been carrying around the admittedly pitiful remnants of that particular torch ever fucking since. He’s stubborn. He’s determined. He doesn’t fucking quit.

Which is why hockey—

Hockey was everything.

Hockey was forever.

Forever, it turns out, is approximately three and a half years.

Malfoy solemnly squints as he snaps his fingers next to Cormac’s ear.

“My peripheral vision’s gone, not my hearing,” Cormac says darkly, draining his pint of weak-ass Canadian beer. “You unbelievable fucking dick.”

Across the table, Potter winces, and then waves at the bartender for another round of drinks. “Nothing they can do about it?” he asks, because Potter’s a pretty solid dude, even if his taste in boyfriends is fucking horrifying. “There’s no, like, surgery, or anything?”

“Nah,” Cormac replies, directing a sleazy, mostly automatic grin at the waitress who delivers their tray of Jäger bombs. “Puck hit me at—uh, at a bad angle. One in a million, the doctor said. I’m done, man.”

Malfoy hiccups. “Okay, but, like, can you still skate? Or are you. Y’know. Broken. Permanently.”

Cormac drops his shot glass, watches the Jäger splash out and the Red Bull gently fizz, and he doesn’t really know how to respond. A fuck-ton of guys have it way worse than him, have ruptured Achilles and splintered orbital sockets and totally debilitating concussion symptoms that’ll never quite go away. But he’s only twenty-four. He’d wanted to keep hockey. He’d wanted to hold hockey’s hand and buy it a dozen red roses and take it home to meet his fucking mom during the off-season. Hockey just hadn’t wanted to stick around. Hockey hadn’t wanted him back.

“Yeah, I can still skate,” he says, wiping his hand over his mouth. “Why?”

Blaise Zabini is a retired ex-figure skater with two gold medals and the blankest, most dead-eyed serial killer shark stare that Cormac’s ever seen.

He sizes Cormac up like he’s a particularly questionable side of beef—and somehow, it makes sense to think of Zabini as a butcher with, like, unlimited access to a lot of sharp knives and bloody meat hooks and industrial cleaning supplies—but it only takes Zabini three or four minutes to finally crack a microscopic smile and turn his attention back to his Arnold Palmer.

“Good shoulders,” Zabini says, apropos of fucking nothing. “You’ll do.”

Cormac doesn’t go after girls like Hermione Granger anymore.

Girls with edges.

He picks up girls who are stacked and blonde and uncomplicated. Girls who laugh at his jokes and who smile at the appletinis he buys them and who don’t mind being fucked from behind because stacked and blonde and uncomplicated is actually really, really, really not his type, but the alternative isn’t an option, seriously, he’s not cut out for that level of self-flagellating masochistic bullshit.

And then he’s stepping inside the enormous private rink Zabini brings him to, gaping at the gorgeously polished cedar beams crisscrossing the ceiling, and he sees—he sees—

Pansy Parkinson is her name.

She swishes across the ice with the kind of grace that can only be taught—can only be bought—swift and serpentine and so, so sure, and Cormac’s hockey gear abruptly feels cumbersome and oddly heavy as he watches her move. Watches her glide.

He notices the rest of her in fragments.

Slight, small build. Slender arms, long legs, narrow waist. Glossy black hair, blunt-cut bangs and a sparkly purple headband. High cheekbones and ivory skin and scarlet lips. Emerald green leotard with a keyhole cutout between the wings of her collarbones, shimmery beige tights and boring white skates.

She comes to a halt next to where he’s standing with Zabini, icing them both pretty thoroughly, and, god, she barely even looks at Cormac, just props her hands on her hips and frowns at Zabini and jerks her chin towards Cormac before asking, in a tone that’s flat with derision—

“Who the fuck is he?”

She’s not even pleasant, Cormac thinks, helplessly dismayed by how much he already knows he doesn’t give a shit.

His palms are sweaty.

His mouth is dry.

His stomach is sinking.

He’s been here before.

Pansy Parkinson is not the smartest girl in the world.

She’s arrogant and she’s whiny and she’s entitled and she’s focused. She’s militant about being up before the sun rises, and she’s scathingly critical of everything from the calluses on his fingers to the lingering traces of middle-class Boston in his accent, and she’s unfailingly strict in her interpretation of her nutrition plan. She eats steel-cut oats steeped in flavorless raw almond milk for breakfast, piles leafy greens and grilled chicken and soft-boiled eggs onto her plate for lunch, and carefully weighs out her portion of whole-wheat pasta every night after they’ve studied the film Zabini seems to arbitrarily fucking choose for them.

She’s determined.

She’s competitive.

She’s carefully composed and hilariously self-absorbed and intensely, frustratingly enigmatic.

She listens to shitty pop music during their morning runs, and she flips through dog-eared back-issues of Vogue when they take their water breaks, and she carries herself like she’s simultaneously afraid of her own shadow and confident in her ability to take both him and Zabini in a fucking fist fight. She’s fascinating, and she’s clever, and she’s honestly kind of mean. She spends their first week together speaking very, very slowly, almost exclusively in monosyllables, and asking him if he’s absolutely certain he doesn’t need to keep wearing his hockey helmet.

“You’re lucky I’m not that sensitive,” Cormac tells her, twisting the cap off a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade. He’s lying. He’s really fucking sensitive. He still cries every time he reads Emma. “Could give a guy a complex.”

“I doubt you need any help with that,” Pansy retorts sweetly.

She’s not wrong.

Skating to music is harder than Cormac thought it would be.

He’s been doing yoga and ballet and, like, jazzercise with Pansy every day, training his muscles to twitch and flex and stretch in ways they never really have before—but finding rhythm on the ice, in sleek black skates with unreliable laces and rickety little blades; it’s fucking rough.

“Jesus Christ,” Pansy hisses, shoving him backwards after he’s messed up some needlessly complicated footwork sequence for the fifth time in one day. “Count out loud if you have to, but get your shit together before you break your fucking ankle.”

“I’m a hockey player,” Cormac argues, annoyed by the defensive slant of his own posture. “There’s a learning curve, princess, we didn’t all grow up doing—whatever the fuck this—tap dancing Charlie Chaplin on ice bullshit is.”

“Yeah, well, there isn’t a learning curve at the Olympics,” she replies, coolly. “Which is where we’re going. Maybe. If you stop skating like a drunk toddler with an eye patch on.”

Cormac grits his teeth, unable to come up with a response that isn’t dumb and petulant and embarrassing, and the smirk that Pansy levels him with is as unimpressed as it is a challenge.

It’s then, though, that he registers a low-simmering onslaught of something—excitement and adrenaline and energy, cratering in his veins and punching at his sternum and reminding him, with vivid, vicious clarity, of suiting up before a game and reading the angle of a puck just right and winning. Being tackled into the boards by his team, by his brothers, after he’s managed another shutout. He’s fucking missed it. Missed this. And he doesn’t have a team anymore, but he does have Pansy. A partner. His partner.

“Again,” Cormac eventually says, holding Pansy’s gaze for a second too long. “Let’s do it again.”

A month into training, Cormac’s dick gets involved.

Zabini’s there, ostensibly to teach Cormac how to propel Pansy into some kind of spinning twirling death-defying lift that, yeah, okay, looks hella fucking rad on grainy Soviet-era film, but—gravity? Gravity’s a thing. Cormac went to college. He knows his shit.

“How,” Cormac starts, scratching at the back of neck.

Zabini gestures absently to Pansy’s thighs, not even bothering to look up from his phone. “Just pick her up.”

Cormac tilts his head to the side. “Uh. Just—where, exactly, am I touching her?” He clears his throat. Adds, again, deliberately plaintive, “Exactly?”

Pansy huffs, and then sighs, and then reaches for Cormac’s wrists, dragging his hands to the space between her thighs. And he just—

He freezes, thumbs and forefingers framing the cradle of her…pelvis? He doesn’t think it’s her pelvis. He’s, like, eighty percent sure, actually, that it isn’t.

But his brain’s not quite firing on all cylinders, and his chest is rippling tight and tense and hot like he’s been crosschecked into a fucking bonfire, and his hands look so fucking big like this, fingers long and thick, palms broad and callused, and she’s tiny, of course she’s tiny, he’s been aware of that—painfully, viscerally aware—since that very first day, that very first moment, except the way his gut is clenching and his skin is tingling and his pulse is racing—it’s new, and it’s familiar, and he aches with how badly he wants to move his hands. A little farther up. A little farther in. He wants to trace the center seam of her leggings with his fingernail, wants to tease her, get her wet, make her gasp, wants to flick his tongue out and swipe his fingers down and press an open-mouthed kiss to the mound of her cunt, grip her hips and hold her—

“—hold her up, man,” Zabini is drawling, sounding bored. “Gotta get used to her sense of balance.”

Cormac blinks.

He’s half-hard in his Under Armour, and it’s as jarring as it is mortifying to realize that touching Pansy like this—learning her body, memorizing the shape of it and the bend of it and the strength of it—this is his fucking job now. He’s here to win. To skate. To take ballet lessons and pack on a lot of unnecessary muscle and grope Pansy fucking Parkinson in exchange for an Olympic gold medal. Nothing else.

Still.

He glances up.

He meets Pansy’s eyes.

He doesn’t think he’s imagining the faint hint of pink that’s blossoming across her cheeks.

It gets worse, after that.

They suck at Worlds.

They suck hard.

Cormac trips over the fucking snaggletooth murder traps on the fronts of his skates, skids into the boards while the crescendo of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony echoes around the rafters of the rink, and he hasn’t eaten ice like that since he was twelve, training with Zabini notwithstanding, and he’s taken aback, almost, by how fucking infuriating it is.

To work and sweat and bleed and still not be good enough.

Somewhere, Hermione Granger is writing her fucking dissertation on emotional manipulation and fucking laughing at him.

Again.

But Pansy’s a professional, of course, and so she skates on, footwork beautiful and timing impeccable, but there’s a rigidity to her movements, a stiffness in her spine and a wariness clouding her jumps, that doesn’t translate well. And Cormac heaves himself up, hurries to join her, tries to get the counts right in his head, but he’s not used to this, still doesn’t hear the nuances of the music quite like he should, and he’s a visible half-beat behind her for the rest of their long program.

Pansy doesn’t look at him afterwards.

She lifts her chin, clutches his hand, pastes a smile on her face, graciously accepts the scattered flowers and the slightly subdued applause; but her lower lip is trembling, and her eyes are suspiciously glassy underneath the false lashes and the metric fuck-ton of glitter, and Cormac feels guilt, gross and thick and vaguely acidic, begin to eat at his insides. It’s shitty. He’s shitty.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out when they get back to their dressing room.

Pansy yanks at the laces of her skates. “For what?”

Cormac hesitates. “For, uh, fucking that up? Like, the whole thing?”

She shrugs. Fiddles with the zipper on her Team USA jacket. Still doesn’t look at him. “It happens,” she says, shortly.

“Well, yeah,” he replies, tugging at the over-starched cuffs of his shirt. It’s an ugly fucking shirt, interlocking shades of grey superimposed by a ragged slash of purposely illegible graffiti. “But, like. I’m still—I’m sorry, I guess, that you’ll have to. You know. Find someone else to skate with.”

Pansy goes dangerously still, a travel pack of cucumber-scented exfoliating wipes crinkling between her fingertips. “Excuse me?”

“Uh,” he hedges, licking his lips, “I’m sorry? I just—this shit was a lot easier during practice, you know, and I’m really…there’s still a few months left before San Jose, you could probably find another dude to—”

“What the fuck?” she interrupts. “What are you talking about?”

“I—I’m just—isn’t that how this goes?” Cormac asks, cracking his knuckles. His forehead is itchy where his sweat’s dried, caking the thin layer of bronze powder the makeup artist had dusted all over his face. “You got rid of…your other partners, the ones before me, and I don’t really expect—I mean—I’m not even a figure skater, you know? You don’t have to. Keep me around, or whatever. It’s okay.”

“Right,” she exhales, and that’s—that’s anger, he can hear it now. Anger and consternation and just the tiniest bit of fear. She’s finally looking at him. “I’m only going to say this once.”

“Uh.”

“You are not expendable,” Pansy snaps, enunciating each word so, so clearly, so crisply, like she’s convinced that if she doesn’t—convinced that if she slurs, or if she stumbles, or if she stutters—he might not get it. It makes her sound frantic. It makes her sound fierce. And he wonders at that, at her, just for a second; has to, absolutely, because she’s the most rigidly self-contained person he’s ever met, and this is unprecedented. This is. This is. “One subpar performance isn’t—it happens, you know that, but you—you’re not going anywhere, you’re not—you’re not temporary. Okay?”

Cormac swallows. He feels a little wrung out, like his skin’s stretched too thin and his bones are too spongey. Like—he’s exposed. Nerves raw, tonsils scratchy. It isn’t bad. Not really. He thinks he could get used to it, actually, if she needed him to. Asked him to.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay.”

On New Year’s Eve, they’re sitting cross-legged on his living room floor, three iPods and Zabini’s laptop and a wine-stained yellow legal pad spread out between them. Cormac’s never really had strong opinions about classical music before, but they’ve been arguing about this shit for three and a half hours, and he has a fucking headache. He deserves a drink. He deserves a Stanley Cup.

“I’ve got it,” he says, popping the cork on a bottle of Bollinger. “Def Leppard.”

Pansy chews on the inside of her mouth. “I know you think you’re joking, but that’s actually—that might not be a bad idea.”

Cormac skips the crystal stemware and grabs two custom black beer steins emblazoned with his old jersey number. “What, asking the Olympic Committee to install a stripper pole on the ice?”

“No, I meant—going rogue, with the music and the costumes and the—the routine, maybe, your technique is garbage, but—wait, what are you doing? What is that?”

“Champagne,” he says, holding out a mug for her.

She doesn’t take it. “I don’t drink.”

He rears back. “What? How do you live?”

“With excellent liver function and a spotless criminal record,” she simpers.

He pauses. “You read my Wikipedia page,” he says, kind of accusingly.

“You punched a math major.”

Cormac makes sure to gulp down most of his champagne before he deigns to answer.

Midnight comes and goes.

They give up on making a decision about the music for their short program, and Cormac turns on a holiday marathon of Love It or List It. Pansy scrunches her toes into the carpet, toys with the hem of her tank top, gradually shifts closer and closer and closer; and the minutes seem to grind to a slick, syrupy halt as the weight of this—the expectation—suddenly becomes realer. More tangible.

It’s not a surprise when their lips finally brush.

It is a surprise, though, that Pansy’s so tentative about it.

So uncertain.

She has her eyes squeezed shut, and her hands bunched into fists around the fabric of his henley, and the movement of her mouth against his is mechanical, slow and soft and wet, yeah, but almost like those are things that she’s mentally checking off a list. Commonly Accepted Attributes of a First Kiss. Lean in. Arch up. Meld. Melt. Tease. Her tongue flicks out, just once, and she tastes cold and tart, like lemon water and peppermint, and Cormac groans, threading his fingers through the ends of her hair, cupping the nape of her neck and tilting her head a little farther back and—she relaxes, slightly.

“Yeah?” he breathes.

Her nails scrape against his skin. “Yeah.”

Twenty minutes later, they’re upstairs.

Pansy’s naked, sitting on the end of his bed with her knees pressed together and her face flushed a seriously satisfying shade of pink. And Cormac’s trying to get his own clothes off, really, he is, but she’s leaning back on her elbows, right, and her tits are small, obviously, she’s small, but they’re round and firm and perfect and the movement sort of thrusts them forward, drawing his attention to the tight peachy-beige buds of her nipples, and they’re—she’s—distracting. He’s distracted.

“Jesus Christ, are you going to fuck me or not?” she demands.

Cormac yanks his boxers off so fast that his cock slaps against his lower abdomen. “Don’t worry,” he assures her when her eyebrows fly up, “it’ll fit.”

Pansy’s jaw goes slack, and then she’s snorting out a laugh that’s deep and throaty and remarkably genuine, actually, nothing at all like the audibly artificial giggling she’d done at their last presser. And Cormac—he doesn’t care, he decides, that this laugh had come at his expense. He doesn’t. He’d say awful, humiliating, utterly moronic shit for the rest of his life, probably, if it would get her to laugh like that again. Which is a problem. Definitely. That he’ll totally address. At some point. Definitely. In the far, far, far off future.

“Who have you been sleeping with?” she asks, sounding mystified.

“No one, lately,” he replies, maybe a little too honestly, before pushing her backwards, dragging his hands from her shoulders to her waist to her hips.

Her lashes flutter as she clamps her bottom lip between her teeth. “Oh,” she says, but then she’s flashing him a smile, small and subtle and pleased, and her knees are falling open, and she’s repeating, much more quietly, much more intimately—

“Oh.”

They’re waiting to board their charter to South Korea when she grabs his wrist.

“Cormac.”

“Hmm?” he answers, scowling at an email from Malfoy that contains an inexplicably snide lol and absolutely nothing else. “What?”

Pansy glances over at him, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She’s wearing leggings and an oversized cashmere sweater and fluffy brown Uggs with the tops folded down. She looks fucking ridiculous.

“So…are you…are we…?” she asks, sounding—not indifferent, exactly, but maybe like she’s trying incredibly hard to pretend that she is. “All in?”

And Cormac—

Cormac forgets, sometimes, that other people have feelings, too. Feelings like he does. He shies away from words like “inadequate” and “unremarkable”, hasn’t ever let himself go there, even in his own head, because that’s a slippery fucking slope and he’s a big believer in faking shit until he doesn’t have to anymore. Until he’s tricked himself into thinking that it’s real.

He’s never had to do that with Pansy.

Not once.

And he doesn’t want her to have to do that, either. Second-guess herself, or him, or his place in her life. She’d told him he wasn’t temporary, wasn’t expendable, and she’d meant it, she’d made sure that he knew she meant it, and all he’d done in return was give her orgasms. He could do better. He would do better. He’d get her a gold medal and he’d curate her fucking library and he’d teach her how to play hockey. He’d love her, eventually. He would.

For now, though, he just twists his wrist around, slides his hand up, presses the flat of his palm to the flat of Pansy’s, and he—he marvels for a second. At how tiny she is compared to him. How fragile, and how not fragile, and how much of a fundamental fucking contradiction she’s been all along.

He then laces their fingers together, and he feels her brief tremor of surprise. Feels how she stills, and how she steadies, and how she settles.

“All in,” he promises.

#pansy x cormac #cormac x pansy #cormac mclaggen #pansy parkinson #hprarepairnet #gtk #andrea #drabble #slytherdornet

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thecoroutfitters · 7 years

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Written by Guest Contributor on The Prepper Journal.

Editor’s Note: This post is another entry in the Prepper Writing Contest from Kena K. If you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and possibly win a $300 Amazon Gift Card to purchase your own prepping supplies, enter today.

Everyone has different reasons for prepping. For us it was the combination of hearing about the increasing devastation of more natural disasters in the U.S. and abroad, and seeing how many people lost their jobs and homes during the economic recession. Initially, our thought was just to have some extra food in the cupboards in case I lost my job. We started by emptying out the closet in our extra bedroom, which allowed us to get rid of some of the extra “stuff ”we all seem to accumulate. Next, we purchased a few shelving units on sale, and secured them to the wall inside the closet. From there, we researched food items with longer storage lives like beans, instant rice, oatmeal, pasta, instant potatoes, honey and sugar and then started buying a little extra food each time we went to the store, focusing on sales to keep things cheaper. Once home with the the food, I wrote the “use by” date on the labels of the food before storing them in the closet so the items that expire soonest would be used first and those with the later expiration dates would be placed behind those to be used later.

As time went on our food storage grew and became more diverse. We began to compare our closet to a savings vault and the more food we put in it, the richer we felt. Coincidentally, the more we collected, the more interested we got in the whole prepping concept. I organized the food according to categories like beans, rice, oatmeal, canned fruit, canned vegetables, canned fish and meats, boxed meals, spices, baking items, drink mixes (coffee, tea, hot cocoa, hot cider, instant milk, Gatorade, Tang, Kool-Aid, etc.) and so on. We not only thought of ourselves, we also planned for the possibility that other members of our family might have to leave their homes, so we downsized more of our “junk” to create more space, and collected more food.

The biggest challenge for me was storing water. I didn’t want anything to be so heavy it would fall on our heads, collapse the shelves, or worse to leak and ruin our food, so I boiled water and stored it in glass quart jars that I had saved from empty juice containers, and then dated the jars and placed them upright, underneath the shelving units where lucky for me, they fit perfectly. I also purchased and stored some plastic drinking water bottles. Since the minimum recommendation is to save one gallon of water per day, per person and pets, and since water is life, I found it difficult to determine how many days we should save for and where to find enough space to store it all. Eventually, I got creative and found other places throughout the house to store more water and we kept empty 5 gallon water containers with our camping gear so we could use them to gather more water, as needed.

Prepping isn’t a new idea – What is new is the idea that you don’t need to prepare.

At some point, we began to expand our storage items from just food into thoughts of our pets needs, first aid, extra indoor and outdoor clothes and shoes, towels and blankets, soap, shampoo, lotion, toothbrushes, toothpaste and the like, again purchasing items on sale. We started going to garage sales to look for things like oil lamps and camping items. We made Bug Out Bags for ourselves should we need to evacuate at a moments notice and I even stored a few emergency items in my purse and in our vehicles. We have a camp trailer so we also got it ready with extra sleeping bags, food, hygiene items, books, puzzles, cards, and toys for the grandkids. It became a game to us, always thinking of things we might need and how to purchase them without spending tons of money. We bought things like tools, personal protection items, backpacks, cooking and camping gear for each other for our birthday and Christmas presents. During the winter when the weather was too bad to go outside, I used my time to copy our important papers, put family pictures in a small photo album, and wrote down their addresses, phone numbers and birthdays and anything else of importance I could think of (scars, blood types, etc). We stored some state and Forest Service maps in the glove box and our backpacks in case we had to travel or use the back roads. I also started collecting recipes for ways to use the freeze-dried foods we’d purchased.

In the spring we expanded our garden area and mostly planted food that we could freeze, dry or can. We felt really good growing our own food because we kept it organic and knew it would taste so much better in the winter than grocery canned foods. We read articles on sprouting and bought seeds so we could try it. Since we owned an acre of land outside the city limits we figured we should utilize our property to help us survive, so instead of a yard full of grass and ornamental trees, we opted for edible landscaping by planting a few fruit trees, berry plants, rhubarb and herbs. We even raised our own chickens for eggs and meat, and had rabbits and turkeys for awhile.

Keep in mind that none of this happened over night by any means. It was something that we started that grew over time. It grew because we saw the importance of it, turned it into a game and then had fun doing it.

What could possibly go wrong?

As our adult children came to visit they began to notice all the food we were collecting and they laughed saying if the Cascadia Fault line acted up, they would just bring their friends and come to our house since we were already so stocked up. I had read an article about someone who opened his property to a few friends who ended up bringing other friend after the Katrina hurricane in 2005 but no one brought anything to contribute towards the cause and soon the years worth of food that he had saved for himself was gone because he had to share it with everyone else. Remembering this, I told the kids that they were more than welcome to come and to think about what they could bring to contribute (food, bedding, towels, etc), and that we had indeed planned for them to stay with us if need be, but then I had to let them know that we did not have enough for their friends, so they would have to prepare for themselves or plan on going someplace else. I felt like I was being a bit mean, but when the SHTF, we all have to decide who can enter our domain and who can’t…and what we are willing to do in order to back that up.

Major cities affected by a disturbance in this subduction zone include Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia; Seattle, Washington; and Portland, Oregon.

That year for Christmas, I gave the kids a mini survival bag for the glove box of their cars that included things like a metal cup with a bit of food, a pocket knife, flashlight, fire starter, and hand warmers and a tiny address book that I wrote our address and phone number in, thinking that in an emergency they may not have cell service so it would be helpful to have important numbers written down with the hope they might be able to use a land line. I told them it was just a starter kit, and encouraged them to add to it.

After some time, I noticed it seems the kids have been paying attention. They have started to collect extra food in case the power goes out or they get sick and can’t go to work or get to the store. My 80 year old mother recently had to rely on the water and food she had stored for just such an occasion when she was unable to leave home due to a heavy snow storm. Fortunately she didn’t lose power, but if she had, she would have been OK because she had candles, a flashlight and an indoor propane heater on hand that we had given her. She had extra blankets and winter clothes too, all things we had given her or that she had gotten for herself. It was a big relief to know she was prepared as we do not live in the same town and are in fact divided by a mountain pass that may have been impossible for us to go over during the storm. Fortunately, she also has a kind neighbor who helped keep her walkway shoveled and some folks from her church who stopped by to check on her. I would prefer that we lived closer so we could help her more, but for now at least, that is not the case.

Whatever your reason, I hope this article inspires you to begin your prepping adventure. Keep it simple, make a game of it, and don’t spend a ton of money upfront if you don’t have it. Second-hand stores, Dollar stores, garage and estate sales, all have great deals. Online stores and military supply stores are great places to look for backpacks, camping supplies, military clothing and a whole host of other items without paying an arm and a leg for it like you might at a specialty-type store. There are numerous prepping articles full of great advice and helpful lists of whatever you might be interested in, like what to put in your first aid kit or your bug-out bag for example. There are also plenty of prepper-type stores online to buy freeze-dried and dehydrated food if you choose to go that way, and they tend to have different items on sale every month, which is how I am building up our freeze-dried and dehydrated items. You can even find a limited supply at some stores like Walmart. So, there are lots of options, and the more you get into it, the more you will want to do. Perhaps you can get others to join you – encourage your family, friends and neighbors to have extra supplies on hand “just-in-case” explaining you never know when you might get sick or when the power will go out. Let them know they don’t want to be the one stuck without gas, food or water. They wouldn’t want the power to go out and be sitting in the dark without some sort of light, heat, or a way to cook and clean. Invite your friends to go to a garage sale with you as a fun way to get started.

There is still so much I want learn like emergency first aid, tying knots, identifying edible mushrooms and wild foods. Reading books and watching survival-type shows is a fun way to be introduced to different ways to build shelter, make fires, use weapons and just live off the land, but of course nothing prepares you for this type of survival like taking a class and practicing your skills and I look forward to it all. I hope you do, too.

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from The Prepper Journal Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

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