#also you have never been chased by a goose before and it shows

[void-of-unparalled-chaos]

Everytime I hear someone say Paleontologists can't possibly know anything I die a little inside.

Allow me to introduce to you Psittacosaurus, a very basal relative of Triceratops from Mongolia and China.

This is one of the most accurate models of any extinct animal ever made complete with accurate coloration, sizing, scales, and quills. We know this animal down to its cloaca. Literally. Paleontologists were able to reconstruct its cloaca from the above fossil, alongside the pigmentation and scales.

I don't have time to write everything out, but here is a video that covers it. It's an absolutely fascinating specimen!

Or if you would rather read the scientific papers yourself...

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

[peachdues]

BIRTHDAY SURPRISES — NSFW

Sanemi Shinazugawa x Reader

A/N: there is nothing redeemable about this. It’s just 7.9k words of pure filth in honor of my man’s birthday.

My husband got a boner reading this, so enjoy you whores.

CW: MDNI • Explicit sexual content • daddy!kink • elevator blowjobs • creampies • rough sex • kinky sex • brat-taming/mild dumbification • overstimulation • fluff at the end followed by more smut • not proof read lmao

Sanemi Shinazugawa has never liked the month of November.

For starters, the stupid month can’t decide what damn season it wants to be. It’s somehow too cold to really qualify as autumn and the leaves have usually fallen to the ground, brown and dead and useless, but it’s also still too warm to snow.

And November is such a tease — smack dab between two great holidays yet offering nothing but a restlessness that persists until the end of the year.

So no, Sanemi Shinazugawa isn’t fond of this time of year. But the universe has never shied away from giving him the middle finger, so Sanemi supposes he shouldn’t be surprised his birthday falls during such a bullshit month like November.

He’d been content to spend the day of his birth like he did every other year — hunkered down in his apartment with some cheap takeout, alone, without anyone to make a big fuss about it. That was the plan — his goddamn plan.

So how the fuck did he end up here?

The “here” in question is a suite at one of the city’s most exclusive hotels. The room is stuffed full of faces, some familiar but most not, packed together like sardines. The music is loud and pulsing and it threatens to give him a nasty headache.

It was Tengen who convinced him to allow this — though, Sanemi doesn’t suppose he was given much of a choice in the matter. But his friend group learned of his impending birthday a few weeks earlier, and before Sanemi could level a few, well-backed threats against any party planning, Tengen had booked the massive suite in which he now found himself, and promised Sanemi that he wouldn’t have to buy a single drink.

Sanemi agreed only on the condition that he be allowed to book a separate hotel room — several floors below where this godforsaken party now raged.

At least Tengen had meant it when he promised Sanemi wouldn’t have to spend a dime on alcohol. He took care to run up his friend’s tab by ordering several shots of Grey Goose, throwing them back as easily as water.

Hey, it was his birthday, after all.

The hotel suite is a blur of lights and colors and bodies pressed together in dark corners. Truthfully, Sanemi really can’t find any one thing to pay attention to; it’s ironic that this party is supposedly for him, and yet he feels like the most invisible person in the room.

But then he spots you — beautiful, witty, and charming you — seated in the lounge area, surrounded by both shared friends and strangers, and it’s like a spotlight has been pointed directly at you. All else seems to fall away, recessing into the shadows of the room, and his attention is locked solely on you; the star of the show that is his birthday party.

The feelings swirling in Sanemi’s chest are dangerous; lethal. He knows he should look away and accept the fact that you, with your endless pick of eligible women and men, would never deign to chase after someone like him, someone with as many scars on his heart as are seared into his skin. He knows that. He knows he’s only setting himself up to get more pissed off — to hate his birthday more than he already does.

But he can’t stop watching you.

And even if he could, he doesn’t want to. He’s only been in love with you since the moment Shinobu tugged you into a booth at a bar they all frequented. There hadnt really been any room for you to sit — not with seven of them already packed tightly onto the bench — but you’d taken one look at him and grinned, something that could only be described as mischief lighting your eyes.

“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?” You’d asked him sweetly as you plopped your ass right down on his lap. “You look like you’re the comfiest one here.”

Sanemi, who was known for having a quick temper and an even quicker mouth, had been stunned into silence by the presence of a beautiful woman, perched on his knee like it was the most natural thing to sit on a stranger’s lap. His friends had been hard-pressed to suppress their smirks at the way Sanemi gaped at the back of your head, and he was fairly certain it was because you’d been so ballsy that you’d secured a permanent spot in their weekly bar rotation.

That had been over a year ago, and Sanemi’s infatuation with you grew deeper by the day.

Not that he’d ever done anything about it — even though, at times, it felt like you were all but baiting him into acting on his feelings. He wanted to believe the way your eyes followed him wherever he went in a room meant something, that your lingering touches were an invitation for more, but he could never bring himself to find out.

That cowardice, he supposed bitterly, was exactly what led him here, sitting alone at the suite room bar, watching as countless others flirted with you and you, right back.

A few times your eyes had tracked him across the room; one time, you looked as though you were about to push through the throng of people shoved into Tengen’s suite to come talk to him, but a hand on your bicep caught you and diverted your attention.

It’s then that Sanemi snaps. The moment he watches as the asshole in question pulls you against him for a slow grind, that jealous, monstrous thing in his chest rears its ugly head, growling and gnawing to be let free.

He’d hoped, for one pathetic moment, that you would push the man away, shake your head, do something that indicated you weren’t the least bit interested in him, no matter how fascinating his multi-colored eyes were, or how charming his feral grin was, but you didn’t. And the moment he sees the douchebag pull your hips flush against his, Sanemi knows he needs to get some air.

So with less grace than he knows he probably should show, Sanemi shoves his way towards the door leading out the suite and into the hallway.

Fuck it, he decides. He would go back to his room, several floors below, take a shower and hit the fucking hay. His birthday was bullshit, anyways.

He storms towards the elevators, slightly tipsy and certainly angry. He stabs a finger against the down button, his leg bouncing as he waits for the elevator to come and save him from his own party.

“What’re you doing out here, birthday boy?”

His stomach sinks to his ass at the familiar cadence of the voice behind him. Reluctantly, he turns and sees you making your way down the hallway wall, a smirk on your pretty lips and looking downright sinful in that flimsy, silvery dress that barely reaches the middle of your thighs.

That damn elevator can’t come fast enough.

“Go back to the party,” he says tightly, though he still won’t look you directly in the eyes. “Don’t let me interrupt your good time.”

You draw up short. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sanemi only scoffs and jabs frustratingly at the elevator button, willing for the telltale ding that will allow him to step into the lift and get far the fuck away from this rager he didn’t want.

From you.

“What’s wrong with you? Did something happen?” You push, resuming your advance on him and shortening the space between your bodies. “Sanemi —“

“Save it,” Sanemi bites, and because he cannot help himself, he adds, “I just don’t particularly feel like watching you spread your legs for some lowlife asshole who can’t be bothered to remember your name.”

You blink, comprehension dawning on your face before melting to anger. “That’s what you’re so pissy about?”

Sanemi silently begs the elevator to hurry the fuck up, because now you’re only a few feet away from him and he doesn’t want you to see his fraying restraint.

You fold your arms across your chest, hip jutting out to the side. “You’re acting like a bitch because some jackass tried to grind on me? Why do you even care?”

Sanemi dodges your question with ease.

“You’re the one who fuckin’ followed me out here.”

The elevator dings and Sanemi is damn near falling to his knees in gratitude at its timing. The double sliding doors have barely finished opening before he’s already inside, jamming his finger into the button marked 26, praying it’ll move faster than it arrived.

The doors start to close but a pair of hands slam against both sides of the doorway, preventing them from joining in the middle.

You stand in the center of the threshold, eyes bright and nostrils flaring, the elevator doors half-closed around you.

“It wasn’t easy to throw this party together y’know,” you snap at him, and dully, Sanemi thinks the glare you give him is strong enough to wither plants. “Everyone went out of their way to try and make you feel special, but you’ve been nothing but an asshole about it.”

“I didn’t ask you all to do this — I begged you not to,” Sanemi retorts just as hotly, his arms folding across his chest. “I didn’t want a fuckin’ party.”

“Well, what do you want?”

the silence that stretches between you is more telling than any answer he could have given. By the way your lips part, you seem to realize it at the same moment he does, and that’s when Sanemi knows he’s fucked.

The two of you stare at one another for a moment, the weight of Sanemi’s unspoken admission hanging above your heads like the sword of Damocles.

But then, the blade drops, and it must impale you both, because suddenly your hands fall from the elevator doors and are tangling in his hair at the same moment Sanemi’s fingers latch onto your waist, and your mouths slam together in a fiery clash of lips and teeth.

The elevator doors slide shut behind you right as Sanemi presses you up against the paneled wall and slides his tongue into your mouth.

At the first stroke of his tongue against yours, you tense, and for one panicked moment, he fears he’s gone too far. But then you’re melting against him, and the way you tug on his hair and whimper his name against his lips makes Sanemi loses his goddamn mind.

Time stands still and there are no thoughts in Sanemi’s brain but the feel of your hands running down his arms, his chest, pushing under the open collar of his shirt to dance along his burning skin.

They can’t get to the 26th floor fast enough, no matter how fast the numbers tick past, bringing them closer and closer to privacy —

The elevator jolts to a stop, somewhere between the 29th and 28th floors, and does not move.

It’s just his fucking luck; the girl of his dreams is pressed flush against him, her lips at his ear as she begs for him, and the goddamn elevator has forgotten how to work. If his hands weren’t so busy pushing under the hem of that slip you call a dress to fondle the curve of your ass, he might’ve put a hole through the one of the doors.

He punches the button for the 26th floor again and again, his sanity fraying with each urgent jab of his fingers, yet the elevator still does not move.

If the idea that the pair of you are stranded in a metal box of death suspended over twenty stories high bothers you, Sanemi wouldn’t be able to tell — not when you’ve decided to turn your attention someplace else.

“What’re you —“ Sanemi’s voice is hardly more than a croak as your hands busy themselves with the buckle on his belt, fumbling and tugging until the leather fastened around his hips gives way.

“Shhh!” A press of your index finger to his lips silences him. “Birthday boys shouldn’t worry!”

Your fingers hook under the waistband of his pants and suddenly they’re following you down as you slide to your knees before him.

Sanemi’s eyes nearly bulge out of his head at the way your half-lidded gaze drifts from his face down his body, coming to rest on the tent of his briefs, jutting out from between his thighs.

Your voice is syrupy and warm as you whisper, “I guess I should let you have your first gift,”

Sanemi forgets how to breathe when you peer back up at him, your eyes suddenly round and wide; he nearly forgets how to stand when you lean forward and press your cheek against the side of his cock where it strains against his underwear.

Sanemi sucks in sharply through clenched teeth at the sudden rush of cold elevator air against the heated, sensitive skin of his bare cock, your fingers having tugged him free from the confines of his briefs.

“F-first?” He can’t stop the way the question stutters out, not when your lips, just barely gazing against him, drag from his base to his tip. The soft exhale of your warm breath up his length has his hands shooting behind him for something — anything — to grip.

You hum in confirmation, and Sanemi’s vision almost blacks out when your tongue peeks past your glossy, red-stained lips to trail over his leaking head.

“But you’ll have to wait ‘til we get to your room before you can unwrap the next one.”

Sanemi swears he’ll set the entire hotel building on fire if the elevator doesn’t start working in the next fucking minute. His vicious promise, however, fades to the back of his mind, along with every other coherent thought he’s ever had as your lips part around his head and you take him into your mouth.

“Holy fuck,” Sanemi hisses and his head falls back against the elevator wall with a dull thump.

You him pleasantly around his cock and Sanemi nearly cums right there, the vibrations from your mouth too sweet, adding gasoline to the already raging inferno of his desire.

At first, you keep your hands primly folded behind you, only allowing your mouth to work his shaft. Every time you slide up off him, you curl your tongue against the underside of his cock and every time, Sanemi has to draw upon every morsel of self-restraint he possesses to not buck further down your throat.

But soon, your hands pat their way to his, and you bring his hands against either side of your head. You hold them there for only a moment, just long enough for Sanemi’s stomach to flip as he realizes what you’re giving him permission to do.

You peer up at him with those big eyes, so wide and deceptively innocent, and he knows you’re trying to kill him.“Motherfucking — Y/N,” he moans, threading his fingers through your hair. “Fuck.”

With his grip in your hair secure, Sanemi begins to fuck your mouth. His cock slides in and out of your heat, every push shoving a little more of himself further into your mouth. You only relax your throat, your tongue still curling against the underside of his shaft in a way that makes Sanemi see white.

Sanemi’s hold on your hair tightens. “Fucking take it,” he pants, hips bucking against your face. “My little cock whore.” From his position over you, Sanemi can see the way his words make you squirm with need, your answering moan long, and deep.

Your hands flutter to the side of his thighs, and Sanemi almost winces at the prick of your nails against his skin. But despite the saliva steadily trailing down your chin and the guttural sounds choking in the back of your throat, you’re tugging him closer, your fingers inching around to grip his backside, pressing him closer and closer to you until your nose brushes his groin.

The elevator jolts with movement and resumes its descent, but neither of you notice. All Sanemi can focus on his the way his tip bumps against the back of your throat, and how your cheeks hollow against him as he ruts into your mouth.

Sanemi makes a strangled noise in the vague shape of your name. “I-I’m gonna —“

You only need to swallow around him once before Sanemi is filling your throat with his cum. With a deep groan, his head drops back, his hand splayed across the back of your skull, keeping your nose pressed against his base as he rocks his hips, his cock twitching violently in your mouth.

His eyes fly open when he feels the wetness from your tears against the sensitive skin of his groin, and he’s quick to pull out of your mouth. Your hands bracing against his thighs as you gulp down air in heavy, shuddering gasps.

“Fuck — I’m sorry,” his hands smooth worryingly over your hair. “That was too rough, I’m so fuckin’ sorry-“

Your head snaps up, and Sanemi feels a brief moment of panic at the sight of your mascara, streaked down your cheeks from an onslaught of tears. Bht then you’re smiling at him, a big, triumphant, radiant smile, and Sanemi feels almost as dumb in the head as he had when your mouth was around his cock.

The elevator slows and Sanemi hastily tucks himself back into his pants. The moment his belt is refastened, his hand is on your arm, gently guiding you up to stand right as a ding! sounds, and the doors slide open to reveal the 26th floor.

You step out first, turning back to him expectantly. “Well? What room?”

Sanemi’s heart falls to his ass as he beholds the assured confidence blazing in your eyes. “2602,” he manages to croak.

You tug him out of the elevator and for a few moments, he’s dumbstruck by his good fortune. It almost feels like a dream, that your here, leading him down the winding hallway of this oversized and overpriced hotel, eager to get back to his room and do whatever the hell it is that’s lit that fire in your eyes.

Sanemi’s awe is short-lived, replaced by a crashing wave of need and boiling desire, hot and furiously bubbling under his skin. His hand tightens around yours and he jerks you around, spinning you until you’re caged tightly between the hallway wall and his chest.

His mouth attacks your neck, biting and sucking his claim into your skin, no matter how temporary. Your leg hikes up to hook around his hips, your foot pressed against his calf, and it seems neither of you care that you’re very much still on an open hallway as opposed to the privacy of his hotel room.

“I’m not holding back with you,” he whispers against the hollow of your throat. His hands slide hotly down your sides, fingers toying under the absurdly short hem of your dress, kneading just beneath the curve of your ass. “You asked me what I wanted — I want this. You.”

Your sultry giggle in his ear chokes off as Sanemi’s finger dips under your ass from behind to run firmly over your clothed slit. A breathy fuck falls from his lips as he feels the wetness seeping through the fabric of your underwear.

“That’s your main gift,” you’re tugging on his hair again until you’ve pulled him away from your throat so that you can slant your mouth over his. “Me. However you want me.”

You take his bottom lip between your teeth and suck, and Sanemi swears he’s died and gone to heaven. “As many times as you want.”

“And in whatever positions you want.”

Sanemi has never been a particularly religious man, but he thinks he’s about one nanosecond from dropping to his knees in worship of you.

Sanemi wastes no time in hauling you over his shoulder, throwing any and all cares to the wind of being seen as he slaps your ass and books the remaining trek back to his hotel room. Youre lucky his room is only around the corner, given that you won’t stop groping his ass.

Somehow, Sanemi manages to fumble for his keycard and swipes it, and he has you inside his room and pushed up against the door before it even fully latches shut.

You’re moaning and panting just from his hands, and Sanemi can feel himself already growing hard once more. His lips are feverish as they roam from your lips, to your neck, and down to the hem of your dress concealing your soft breasts from sight. His hands are even greedier, bunching the tissue-paper-like fabric of you dress between his fingers as he explores the curves and dips of your body.

“God you feel so fucking good,” he mutters against your lips between kisses. “I can’t get enough of you.”

From the way your hands drag down his chest, fingers sliding between the undone buttons of his shirt to explore his chest, he knows you’re just as starved as he is.

With a slight whine, you push him back, breaking your kiss. Sanemi looks at you, but the question building on his tongue does as you kick your heels off, your fingers flying to the straps of your dress.

Sanemi feels locked in place by the heat of your gaze, and he swears he can feel his pulse tick in his neck. One by one, you push the straps of your dress from your shoulders, letting the satiny material fall down your waist and puddle around your feet.

If Sanemi thought he was losing his mind before, he knows for certain that he likely needs to be committed now.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Sanemi’s stare is unabashed and gaping. For beneath that flimsy scrap of shiny fabric pretending to be a dress was not your bare skin, but dark green lace and mesh and corset paneling.

A teddy.

You twist slightly so you’re looking over your shoulder, fully exposing your ass and the thong-like back of your one-piece to the slack-jawed birthday boy.

“I figured you would like this one.”

Your words knock Sanemi right off his axis, his head spinning so fast, it’s a miracle it’s still attached to his shoulders.

You’d worn fucking lingerie for his party.

For him.

You’d gone out of your way to wear something you thought he would like on the mere chance you’d end up as you were now, here in his room. You’d planned for it.

You didn’t leave him any other choice; he was going to fucking ruin you.

His hand flies behind his neck to grip his shirt, ripping it over his head and throwing it unceremoniously to the side.

Sanemi doesn’t fail to notice the way your tongue darts out to wet your lips, your pupils blowing wide at the sight of the sculpted planes of his chest and abdomen.

He kicks off his shoes and his hands shove his pants quickly down his legs, grateful that he hadn’t bothered to refasten his belt or button after the stunt you pulled in the elevator.

“C’mere,” he orders, roughly. Left in just his black briefs, he lunges forward to take you into his arms once more.

Your peal of laughter as Sanemi throws you onto his king-sized hotel bed is the prettiest thing he’s ever heard. He wastes no time pouncing on you, eager to reconnect your lips, to kiss you until you’re left as breathless and wanting as he is.

Between messy kisses, Sanemi’s hands make their way down your body, squeezing and marveling at the way your body seems made for his touch. And as if the feeling of your skin beneath his palms isn’t enough to drive him wild, you’re so responsive to his touch. Every stroke of his hands seems to bring you alive until you’re practically thrumming with want and begging him for more.

His fingers slide over your lace-covered cunt and he swears at the dampness he feels clean through the fabric of your teddy.

“Eager, are we?” He hums, his lips following down the path he traced with his hands. “Tell me what you need, sweetheart.”

Your hips buck impatiently against him as his face settles between your thighs. He grins at your desperation, trailing open-mouthed kisses across your inner thigh until he reaches your covered slit.

He lets his tongue peek out between his lips and drags it over until he reaches your other thigh, groaning at the faint taste of you dampening the lace.

Sanemi’s fingers push under the edge of the teddy, a breath blowing past his lips when he connects with your dripping cunt.

“Look how fucking soaked you are,” he says in awe, marveling the way your slick coats his fingers. “Is this all for me?”

You groan, pushing your hips down to grind harder against his hand.

“Just fuck me already,” you huff. “I’m ready now.”

Sanemi tsks softly at you. “You need to ask a lot nicer than that, sweet girl.”

Your impatient demands taper off into soft moans as Sanemi sinks a single finger into your entrance, his cock growing impossibly hard at the feeling of you clenching easily around him.

Sanemi practically trembles at the thought of sinking into your heat, of how you might feel clenching and pulsing around his length while he fucks you the way he’s been dreaming since he met you.

But while he might be pent up, Sanemi isn’t so much of an asshole that he wouldn’t make sure you were good and ready to take him.

So he simply tugs the crotch of your teddy aside and without any further teasing or torture, he latches his mouth to your cunt with a deep moan.

As his tongue darts between your folds, Sanemi realizes that all the cake in the world couldn’t compare to how fucking sweet your pussy tastes.

You cry out, his name stuttering out between a staccato of moans and cooes for more. Your hands twist in his hair, alternating between pulling his face closer to your core and pushing him away, the pleasure almost too much for you to bear.

Sanemi thinks he could get drunk on your taste. His eyes open to watch the way your face pinches, how your jaw goes slack to let his name drip from your tongue.

Your hands unwind from his hair to tug at the sinful draping of lace fitted against your body like a glove. “Off,” you whimper. “Off.”

It takes him a moment to realize what you want. But after another plea of “off,” Sanemi’s hands are already working to push the teddy down your lithe form.

“I’ve got you, baby, I’ve got you,” he soothes, dragging the lingerie off your legs. Sanemi swears softly at the sight of you, bare and spread out on his mattress, your body pliant and ready for him to use however he chooses.

“S-Sanemi,” he can’t suppress his grin at the apparent whine in your tone. “I feel so — so empty —“

He doesn’t try to hold in the groan resounding deep from his chest. Youre asking — practically begging — for his cock, and Sanemi doesn’t have the willpower to deny you.

“Fuck this,” he snarls, and suddenly your body is caged under his, his hips slotting perfectly into the cradle of your thighs. “I need to be in you.”

His lips dance feverishly up the side of your neck until they reconnect with yours.

For a moment, your kiss slows to something more sensual and passionate, as opposed to the heated and frantic kisses you’d exchanged earlier. The sigh you exhale against his mouth is the sexiest thing Sanemi has ever heard, and the feeling of your fingers latching in his hair is a sensation he never wants to forget.

Your tongue swipes along his lower lip in a silent request for entry that he’s only too happy to grant. You moan against the taste of yourself on his tongue.

Sanemi knows he’s been head over heels for you for a long time, but the way your tongue dances languidly with his has him utterly undone.

If you wanted to, he’d let you swallow him whole.

Your kiss melts into something more needy and frantic, and Sanemi feels your wetness grind down against his thigh, a pleading whimper building on your lips. With an eagerness that makes his head spin, your legs shift to lock around his waist, and one of the hands you’d had latched in his hair drifts down his abdomen until it finds his cock, heavy and hot in your palm.

“I’ve got a condom —“ Sanemi manages between desperate kisses. “In my wallet —“

But your legs tighten around his hips and your hand pumps harder at his stiffened length. “Don’t need it,” you murmur against his lips. “On the pill.”

Sanemi thinks he might pass out. “Fuck — are you sure?”

You nod, eyes bright and alert even in spite of your sleepy, fucked-out smile. “Wanna feel you, baby.”

Don’t have to fucking tell him twice. Especially not when you’re calling him baby, even if it’s a pet name you’ll only use on him for the night.

With deft hands, Sanemi flips you so that your front is pressed against the mattress. You scramble beneath him to plant your knees, raising your ass high in the air, your cunt held out in an offering he could never refuse.

He gives one of your pert ass cheeks an appreciative smack before he shuffles forward on his knees. He rests one foot on the outside of your leg, parallel with your hip, and slots his other knee between your parted thighs. One hand grips the base of his cock while the other kneads at your hip, holding you steady while also keeping your limbs relaxed as he lines his tip up with your dripping entrance.

“Unless you say otherwise, ‘M goin’ hard,” he warns, his voice rougher than gravel. “Been waiting too long to do this.”

Ever the devilish little minx, you wiggle your hips back against him, and his breath chokes in his throat when your wet heat catches him at his tip.

You look back over your shoulder and Sanemi’s gaze darkens at the challenge in your eyes. “Give me everything you’ve got.”

Sanemi decides to respond to your taunt not with his words, but with his body. In a single, fluid movement, he plunges his cock deep into your heated core, his fingers tightening around your hips with bruising force.

“Jesus fuck,” he pants once he’s fully embedded to the hilt inside your warmth.

It’s unreal; the feeling of your silken, pleasure-soaked walls moulding around his cock like you were made to take him sends a bolt lightning surging down his spine, making him shudder.

A cross between a cry and a scream tears from your throat, muffled only by the press of your mouth against the starchy blankets of his hotel bed. He’s about to ask if you’re okay, if you want him to go slow for a bit since he knows he’s a larger than average. but then you’re throwing your hips back against him, circling and grinding and mewling for more.

“Fuck me,” you moan. “Fuck me, Sanemi — please.”

“God fucking damn,” Sanemi hisses through clenched teeth. And he knows he can’t deny you, not when your whining so prettily for him; nor when your pussy feels this fucking good.

He draws back, his cock sliding out of you until only his tip remains. He lingers there, for just a hair’s breadth of a moment, teasing.

Your impatient whine doesn’t last long as Sanemi slams you back onto him, the sound choking off in your throat. He doesn’t give you time to recover; he digs his fingers into the flesh of your hips and drives his cock into you again and again, pounding a relentless rhythm into you that has you sobbing into the mattress.

“Yes, yes, yes!” You blubber, your fingers fisted into the blankets below for purchase as you push yourself back to meet his frenzied thrusts.

Sanemi can’t tear his eyes away from where his cock, shiny with your wetness, disappears in and out of you. “You’re taking me so fuckin’ well,” he says in awe. Your pussy is gripping him like a vice, practically sucking him back into your heat. “You like letting me use you, huh?”

Sanemi shifts so that his weight is on the knee resting beside your leg, allowing him to push harder and deeper into your cunt. You try to lift your head, but Sanemi’s hand leaves its place on your hip to press down on the back of your neck, squeezing lightly.

“Oh f-fuck,” you groaned, voice slightly muffled from where your face was half-pressed into the mattress. “Oh god — just like that — D-daddy, yes —“

Sanemi’s hips stutter. Daddy. No one has ever called him that in the bedroom before, but fuck if it doesn’t somehow make him harder than a fucking diamond.

Especially because it seems like it slipped out of you without much thought, your eyes too busy staring at the back of your skull as every punishing thrust of Sanemi’s cock into your pliant cunt makes your body bounce against the mattress.

He likes it. A lot.

“Should’ve known you’d have a daddy kink, filthy little thing,” he groans, his hand reaching under you to toy with your swollen clit.

You only moan in response, and Sanemi can’t help but to swirl his fingers around that nub, savoring the way it makes your thighs quiver beneath you.

The hand still pressing against the back of your neck slides up to grip your hair, and Sanemi pulls your head up from the bed. “Do you call everyone ‘daddy,’ sweetness, or just those who fuck you the way you like it?”

“Not everyone” you gasp, voice strained against the tight arch of your neck. “Just you — ah! Only you.”

With a growl, Sanemi’s arm locks around your middle and hauls you up until your back is flush against his chest. One hand wraps around your jaw, his fingers squeezing your cheeks to keep your head back as he continues pounding into you.

“Look at you,” his exhales hotly against your ear, his teeth grazing your lobe. “Daddy’s pretty little toy.”

Your thighs quake in their effort to keep you up. Your moans raise an octave, warbling out of your throat as you settle heavily against him, utterly helpless against the pleasure rolling through your body.

Sanemi’s hand drops from your jaw to drag teasingly down your torso. When he reaches your lower belly, he presses his palm flat, the pressure allowing the blunt head of his cock to rub against that sensitive spot that makes you sing his name.

“You feel that, baby?” And the whine that slips out of you is one he wishes he could bottle up. “That’s all me — that’s how deeply I’m fucking you.”

He’s practically holding you up, your limbs little more than jelly, but he doesn’t mind. He only increases the pressure of his hand, rubbing slightly over the softness of your stomach.

“And that’s where I’m gonna fill you up, ‘til you’re nice and full, hm?”

A stilted cry of his name is dragged from your lips, and Sanemi swears he’d marry you tomorrow, if you’d let him.

It’s not lost on him that this is likely a one-time thing; that you’ll likely leave his hotel room and the two of you won’t speak of it again, but he can’t find it within himself to give a shit.

It doesn’t matter if this is just a slightly drunken hook up — it doesn’t matter to him if it’s just sex. You’re letting him use your body for his pleasure, and that thought is enough to make his brain turn to liquid between his ears.

Sanemi falls back against the bed, bringing you with him, your back still pressed against his chest. He winds an arm around one of your thighs, holding it open to allow himself to continue fucking up into you with the speed of a racehorse.

“God you’re so fuckin’ tight — don’t want me to leave, do you, precious?”

He chuckles in your ear, catching your lobe between his teeth. His hand wedges between your thighs to play with your clit again, and the way your pussy flutters around him signals that you’re right on the precipice of your orgasm.

The first of the night, if he had anything to say about it.

“Maybe I should make you my own personal cocksleeve — would you like that, sweetheart?” You’re mewling, nodding frantically as you squirm and thrash atop him.

“Would you like to sit on Daddy’s cock all day, keep him nice and warm?”

“Yes!” You sob, and Sanemi’s fingers circle your clit even harder, determined to to make you cum. “Yes, ‘Nemi, please! I’ll be your good girl — I’ll be so good —“

Sanemi’s pace falters slightly at your words, a new idea — a wicked idea, forming fast in his mind. “You will, huh?”

He abruptly pulls out of you, though the anguished cry that rattles out of you at the loss of his warmth tugs at his heartstrings. After all, you’d been so close.

Sanemi wastes no time flipping you under him, hooking both your legs over his muscled shoulders until the underside of your thighs press flat against his chest.

“You’ll cum when I say so,” he shoves his painfully hard cock back into your pulsing warmth, his knuckles turning white under his grip against the rumpled blankets as he fights to keep his eyes from rolling back at the feeling of being sheathed back inside you once more.

“And you’re gonna fuckin’ look at me when i fill you up,” Sanemi snarls between ferocious snaps of his hips. “I wanna see that gorgeous face when I cum inside this pretty little pussy.”

“Yes! Yes s-sir.”

“Yeah? And who’s fucking you this good?”

“Y-you,”

He ducks his head down to nip sharply at your breast. “Try again.”

“You are — D-daddy,”

Sanemi’s pace only increases. “Still not what I’m looking for, princess,” he’s borderline cruel and he knows it, but he also knows what he wants. “Tell me whose pussy this is.”

You don’t answer; you can’t, given how slack your jaw has gone, your mouth frozen in a perfect “o” as Sanemi pushes the head of his cock right at that spot deep within you that makes you seize down on him hard enough that he sees stars.

He growls your name and when you still don’t respond, he snaps his hips particularly hard against yours.

“Say it.”

His hand shoves between your bodies, and Sanemi pinches your clit harshly between this thumb and index finger.

“Sanemi!” You wail, writhing under him. His fingers rub soothing circles against your clit, though the relentless thrust of his cock does not ease.

“That’s my girl,” he praises, and the pressure of his fingers against your throbbing nub increases. “Now cum on this fucking cock.”

That does it.

Your back arcs sharply up off the mattress, thighs tightening around his hips as your cunt clenching around him with earth-shattering force. Sanemi feels a smug wave of pride as a surge of fluid springs forth and coats his abdomen and groin.

You fall back against the bed, limp and spent, but Sanemi isn’t done with you yet; you won’t be, not until Sanemi has left his mark.

He shifts over you, his full weight pressing you down into the mattress; his hands pushing your knees up until they’re level with your chest. You sigh and hum, still wading through the haze of your orgasm, but given the way you let your thighs spread a little wider, you’re aware enough to know that Sanemi is readying you to take his release.

It’s not enough; Sanemi doesn’t want you lost in the aftermath of your euphoria — he wants you crying out for his.

His hand grips your face, your cheeks squishing together beneath his fingers as he forces your head to tilt toward him. Your eyes flutter open, bleary and unfocused before the clouds part and your attention is locked wholly on him.

“Beg for it,” he grits out, his hand smacking against your clit until you howled. “Beg for my cum.”

“Please!” Your cry is shrill and desperate, your hands tightening weakly around his shoulders. “Please f-fill me up — oh, Sanemi —“

He nearly loses it at the way you say his name, like it’s some damn prayer and he, your salvation, but he holds back. It’s not enough — he wants you as filthy and wanton as him.

“Use your words,” his words leave him in a single, inexorable command.

Your lower lip wobbles. “Your cum — please, please fill this pussy up. Fill me up, fuck it into me —“

Sanemi cuts off your babbling with a single, bruising kiss. He feels his balls tighten, and the prickle at the base of his spine grows hotter, signaling just how close he is to nirvana.

His hand finds one of yours where it clings to his shoulder, a fruitful attempt to anchor yourself, and he pulls it away. Sanemi presses your hand back against the mattress, interlacing his fingers with yours.

Your pussy flutters around him in time with your thumb stroking over his knuckle, and that’s all it takes.

“Oh fuck —“ Sanemi grunts before he feels himself explode. With a strangled yell, Sanemi’s hips slam into yours, pushing his cock as deep as it can possibly go, and his release crashes into him with mind-blowing force.

it’s the hardest and the most he’s ever come in his entire life. Nothing else has ever or will ever compare to this.

But even as his release spurts heavily inside your honeyed core, Sanemi doesn’t relent in his pace. His hips keep rolling steadily into you, prolonging his release to the point his toes curl, and he wonders whether his nose might start bleeding.

The corners of your mouth tilt up, a pleased groan vibrating loud and wanton in your throat as you feel him fuck his hot seed right into the Eden of your body.

Despite the mind-numbing pleasure of his orgasm, Sanemi won’t let himself look away. The face you make as he fills you up is the prettiest damn thing he’s ever seen.

Sanemi stays buried in your heat for several more moments as he comes down from his high, his head dropping into the crook of your shoulder. With a grunt, he pulls out, dropping down next to you in a flurry of messy blankets and pillows.

You push yourself to your side, a hand coming to push the sweat-dampened ends of his bangs from his eyes. “Good birthday?” You tease, your cheeks flushed bright red, your eyes bright.

“The best,” Sanemi agrees, his eyes scanning your face, committing every detail of you and your post-sex glow to memory.

The two of you lay next to one another for a little while, talking and quietly laughing. Neither one of you seems eager to leave the bed, and Sanemi in particular finds himself hoping today never ends.

Eventually, nature calls and he excuses himself �� reluctantly — to the bathroom. When he emerges, he’s greeted with the sight of your ass, bare and exposed as you nestle into the bed, one leg kicking lazily up into the air behind you.

Fuck, you’re too beautiful, and he is far too weak.

He approaches the side of the bed, stretching out one hand to drag teasingly down your spine, until he reaches your ass, knuckles kneading the soft flesh.

His eyes flit to the small clock perched on the hotel nightstand. Sanemi’s grin turns lupine as he reads time reflected by the green-tinted digits.

Sanemi’s fingers skirt down to your ankle, gripping it firmly in his hand. He tugs you over the side of the bed until your head dangles off the edge, your hair stretching towards the ground. “Looks like it’s still my birthday, darling. I ain’t finished enjoying my present yet,” he grips the base of his half-hard cock and taps it against your lips. “And I’ve been dying to cum all over this pretty face of yours.”

—-

True to his word, Sanemi takes him time ravishing his birthday gift. When the clock on the nightstand finally reads 12:01 AM, he flops down next to you, chest heaving as he works to catch his breath.

You lay beside him, panting in tandem with him from the exertion of the night’s activities. There isn’t an inch of you that isn’t sticky as a result of the heady mixture of your sweat and Sanemi’s cum.

You feel his eyes searing into you as you trail a finger through the milky white splattered across your chest — a favorite place of his to cum, as you’d learned, second only to spilling inside of you.

Sanemi hardly holds back a whimper at the way you bring it to your lips, letting your tongue lick your finger clean of his pleasure.

“You’re trying to drive me wild, woman,” he throws a tired arm over his face, shrouding his eyes. “You torture all your hookups like this?”

He’s surprised at how quickly you sit up in bed, your eyes flashing.

“Hookup?”

Sanemi props a fist under his cheek. “Well, yeah,” he winces slightly, searching for more careful words. “I don’t expect anything from you. I appreciate the birthday surprise, though.”

Your gaze is leveled, and your voice even. “I don’t buy lingerie for one-night stands, Sanemi. That shit is an investment.”

His eyes blow wide, and he feels the erratic thrum of his heart stuttering in his throat.

“I want you,” you say firmly. “And I had every intention when I followed you in here tonight for this —“ your hand waves back and forth between your chests. “— to continue.”

It’s a miracle Sanemi is able to speak at all. “I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give.”

You grin. “Well, now that you’ve fucked me, I guess you should take me on a date.” You pause, trailing one delicate finger down his chest. “But I won’t make you wait until we’ve been on three before I let you fuck me again.”

Your hand dips below the edge of the blanket and glides teasingly over his cock, already beginning to stir once more. “You’re far too delicious.”

Sanemi snatches your hand and rolls you under him before you can blink, your answering giggle the sweetest music ever to grace his ears.

“Y’know, in other parts of the world, it’s still the 29th,” he murmurs huskily, grazing his lips against yours. “So by that logic…”

You nod, eyebrows drawn together in seriousness. “We’re obligated to keep celebrating.”

Sanemi’s lips are already trailing down your body, savoring the taste of himself on your skin. He settles back between your legs, marveling at the way your thighs fall to the side so easily to accommodate his mass.

He presses a sweet kiss against your clit. “You’re just the gift that keeps on giving, aren’t you, darlin’?”

[bluesylveon2]

Chocolate Muffin Drama

A/N: So i'm on the olympic chocolate muffin tiktok and then this appeared lol. Everyone is aged up, sports/countries are not specified (except for Vil, Rook, and Rollo), and Yuu/Reader is a female

Everything starts when Ace wants to get breakfast at the Olympic dining hall and his eyes land on Yuu eating about 10 chocolate muffins

Yuu literally has crumbs on her face and the chocolate filling (or sauce? Idk) on her fingers. She looked like a hot mess that someone from the German team showed up to "clean the potato"

Ace is both surprised and confused

Later on, while sitting in the audience for a sport, he watches Yuu destroying the opposing team. Gold medal worthy, in his eyes

Ace rn: "is that the same girl who devoured those muffins in one sitting?"

Yes, yes, it is

Anyways, Ace is SMITTEN by Yuu and is determined to win her heart

How does he do it? He grabs a muffin at the dining hall and tries to give it to Yuu, but she is not there.

He comes back the next day to find out there are no more muffins! (gee I wonder why???)

Plan B: give it to Trey

Ace: I need you to tell me what ingredients are used to make this muffin

Trey: okay....

Eventually, Trey cracks the code to the muffins and even writes down the recipe for Ace

If only all's well, ends well

Meanwhile, a muffin thief was currently bringing the muffins back to the Village

Ruggie drops off his stash to Leona (while also taking one or two for himself. Leona pretends to not see it) so he can give it to Yuu later that day

See, Leona has been doing this for a few days now, but he waits until Yuu gets her servings before taking the rest to avoid suspicion

Yuu caught Leona's eyes at the same event Ace went to

He would have gone for more had a certain Frenchman not sat by him

Leona: there are other seats, ya know?

Rook: au contraire! These are the best seats to watch Madame Trickster perform!

So Leona repeats the process and basically plays hide and seek with Rook while Ruggie works.

He ends the day by being Yuu's prince charming (literally) and gifts her the muffins

He knows about the redhead who is trying to recreate the muffins.

It would be bad if the recipe got stolen...

Except, it wasn't Ruggie who took it. It was a bat

Lilia is grinning like he won the lottery. He saw how the muffins became viral on MagicTok and he just had to make some to share to all of his fellow athletes

(Little did anyone know that Lilia would accidentally end the Games if he succeeded)

Luckily, Silver is there to save everyone

He recognized the muffins from the dining hall and Malleus mentioned his new friend loved them

So he goes out to the nearby shops/places in Paris to buy the ingredients, unaware of a group of six guys currently on a goose chase to find a recipe

(tbh idk if the athletes can explore the city but let's pretend they can)

Silver has never met Yuu, but according to Malleus, she was a nice person.

Malleus suggests that Silver makes Yuu some muffins (it's a miracle he was able to at the Village). Silver gives some to her as a thank you for befriending his brother

What he doesn't know is that Malleus is trying to set the two up, so he talks about Silver when he's around Yuu and recruits Sebek to stop Lilia from adding his "secret ingredient" to the muffins

Bonus:

Malleus also drags Silver to Yuu's sporting events, sitting away from Ace and Leona

Except he has his own problem with someone from the French team

Rollo: why must you sit next to me? go somewhere else

Malleus: hush, Flamme, I am trying to get a sister-in-law here

Silver: trying to fight sleep

[queerism1969]

What is something about being LGBT that a straight person would never guess is a thing you have to deal with on a regular basis?

People asking how you have sex

Once you come out, you never truly stop coming out.

Being queer means that you are going to be really lonely a lot of the time.

The mini internal debate you have every time you tell a story about your SO. Do I say friend or girlfriend? Have I come out to this person yet?

People ask if I know X person because they're also gay.

When you're gay, there's a very real chance your Significant Other will not have a family to bring you into.

Any expression of my sexuality is "being in your face about it" and "it shouldn't be your whole personality".

Everyone had an opinion about my mere existence.

People legitimately question the validity of your relationship, and whether it's just a phase-especially if you're bisexual

Straight people always want to know what your type is. It always feels like a test to see if you find them attractive.

How to properly have sex. They REALLY don't teach you that in sex education.

You never know who is secretly homophobic whether at work or in public, so you always have to act "straight" in a lot of situations

You get sick of never being represented in media, but straight people don't really get it.

Getting polite service is difficult.

Office workers will sometimes purposely send you on goose chases because they don’t want to serve you.

Before y'all knew I was gay, you talked a lot of smack about "the gays." You don't remember, but I remember. I will always remember.

Losing nail clippers can really harm a relationship.

Being queer sometimes feels like being a 30-something-year-old teenager in a community full of 30-something teenagers and weirdly grown-up kids who’ve been living on their own since being kicked out by their bigoted parents at 16.

We have to constantly police our language.

The shame/internalized homophobia.

Your right to exist being a political debate

Wondering when the Supreme Court will revoke my rights.

You can’t really just have sex on a whim... You have to spend time (a lot more than you think) to clean.

While closeted, probably the weight of the secret or the fear of someone finding out.

A gay person will watch any TV show or movie, no matter how bad, if they hear there is even a slice of positive gay representation in it.

When a gay couple kisses in public, people stare. Not even out of disgust or anything, but just because it’s still kind of foreign to them.

You can't always go to the place you want for your honeymoon, because you might get killed

Being described as someone’s “gay best friend” and not just their best friend.

Every time we tell someone we have a partner, and it catches them off-guard, they proceed to tell me about a gay person they know.

The doctor is always super surprised as to how we can be both sexually active and be 100% sure that we are not pregnant

People force you to come out, and they act like they’re doing you a favor.

You have to be prepared to lose any friendship at the drop of a hat

Every couple of years or so, we get a random homophobic death threat on social from someone we've never interacted with.

[averagewriter-inthedark]

Back in Time P.1 ⏳| Agent K/MIB Imagine

An AU of MiB—takes place during MIB3

Part 2 | my masterlists

Characters & Pairings: Agent K x MiB agent!reader (romantic)

Content warnings: fluff, profanity, angst, mentions of death, violence, age gape (read the note below), cannon divergence, suggestive themes, shitty realities women & queer had to go through in the 60s, friends/strangers-to-lovers | female!reader (she/her) | wc 9.3k

Premise: The universe was full of secrets. Y/I learned that in 1997 when she signed her name on the dotted line, swearing her life to MiB with the promise to protect all life: humans and visitors alike. But her world flips upside down in 2012, when the secrets her longtime partner K come knocking at their door. Leading Agent Y/I to go on a wild goose chase to 1969 and employ a young K to stop a madman from killing him...but he doesn't know that just yet.

Note: disclaimer I do not own MiB or the characters mentioned, This is fanfic for fun and while most of the scenes are from the MiB movies I did change most of the dialogue for Y/I. ALSO here is the whole age-gap thing: K was born in 1940, reader born in 1964--24 yr age gap (I know I said I’d never do large age gaps more than 10+ years but this is one exception.) In 1997 K is 57, reader is 33. In 2002 K is 62, reader is 38. In 2012 K is 72, reader is 48. In 1969 K is 29, reader is 48, young reader is 5. Your Initial = Y/I, Y/h/c = your hair color, y/e/c = your eye color. In the movie Boris killed on July 15th, 1969, changed this to July 11th 1969.

Y/I = Your First Initial. Y/h/c = Your Hair Color

————————

2012

The last thing Y/I expected when she woke up that morning and headed into HQ was she’d be the only one to remember her grumpy, always serious, and sometimes melodramatic partner, Agent K. The man who showed her there was more than what meets the eyes in the stars of the night sky. A shooting star? More like the source of a new arrival. As humans were not the only ones to call Earth their home.

Aliens walked among them.

Y/I remembered it like it was yesterday. One minute she’s chasing a culprit in New York as Detective Y/n L/n of the NYPD, the next she’s being fitted in a black suit, identity wiped across all government systems, donning only her initial, Y/I. From there her life turned a complete 180.

Over the course of their 15-year partnership there was never a dull moment. Well 10 years actually when you count the fact the first five years of Y/I career was without K. They’d safely captured the galaxy and disposed of the bug in 1997, her first job after K recruited her. Then he goes saying he wants to retire and orders Y/I to nueralize him. The next five years Y/I went through partners like clockwork. Unable to connect to one like K and neuralzing them left and right.

It just wasn’t the right fit. Which confused the woman greatly because they had literally been partners for a week. Surely anyone else could fit the role. But for some reason Y/I butted heads with everyone Zed set her up with.

Then in 2002 all leads at finding the Light of Zartha points back to K, causing Y/I to recruit him back to MIB and remind him of the life he once had. Of course the task was better said than done. K was as stubborn and cynical even without his MIB persona, believing to have been in a coma for 35 years.

Y/I wanted to strangle him the second he got his memory back. Furious to discover the bastard had neuralized himself so he’d forget where he put the Light of Zartha. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Of course K had a plan. He always did. Which was annoying for the young agent since he hardly ran his ideas past her before going through with them. Honestly Y/I believed K was betting on luck half the time.

But who was she to complain when it always worked in their favor.

The most downright awkward moment between the two happened during their high speed chase trying to get Serleena off their trail. K, forgetting he’d been away from MIB for five years and that the cars were newly modeled, pressed the red button causing them to go into hypersonic mode. And Laura, who Y/I had been casually seeing over the course of the investigation and had grown rather affectionate of the beautiful woman, got to witness it all from the backseat.

“Okay here we go automatic pilot,” K fiddled with the controller resembling one that belonged to a playstation before pressing a button, prompting a decoy to pop out in front of K. Unfortunately, a decoy was all it was. Not taking control of the ship at all causing K to lean over with annoyance plastered on his face. “It is not automatic pilot.”

“He doesn’t operate at hyperspeed,” Y/n’s gave an ‘I told you so,’ face.

“I could really use a steering wheel!”

“Tough luck we don’t have a steering wheel! This is what we got,” her hand gestured to control, reaching over to press the button removing the decoy. K threw his hands up in defeat. Y/I huffed, “didn’t your mother ever get you a GameBoy?”

“What is a GameBoy?!”

Sweet Jesus she couldn’t believe it. What’s a GameBoy? Did this man live under a rock? She was going to have to change that. Bringing her finger up in a stern point, Y/I ordered the man, “You know what, move.” K’s jaw dropped in a ‘O’. “Move!”

And before either had the time to process, Y/I lifted herself off the seat, swung her leg over and straddled K. His eyes practically bulged out of his head, hands going to her hips. The action made her jolt forward, yelping as her thighs pressed against his and feeling something brush against her groin. They both froze, eyes locking as Y/I heard K gulp.

Oh. Fire ignited in the agent. Migrating all the way to her face she prayed didn’t show. K was packing.

Instantly she leaned against the door, pushing the man to get the hint and he quickly ushered himself over the middle console. Face red like a tomato. When they both got situated the car was completely silent. K adjusting his tie while Y/I took hold of the joystick and cleared her throat.

“Alright then.”

Luckily, for her sanity, everything worked out. Serleena indisposed, New York saved once again from a homicidal maniac, and Y/I got her partner back. Only downside was having to say goodbye to Laura, who’d been revealed to be the long lost princess and, quite literally, the Light of Zartha. K was kind enough to give Y/I and Laura a moment to say goodbye. And when a lone tear fell from Y/I’s eyes watching the spaceship ascend to the skies, K was there with a tissue and comforting hand.

They never talked about that moment in the car. And frankly Y/I wanted to erase the memory of her mounting K while at Hyperspeed from her mind. Even half tempted to neuralize herself. But as much as it mortified her, Y/I felt a bit giddy. A bit of her ego boosted at making K speechless���.and a bit more.

Her mind quickly shot that down. Remembering this man was her partner--who she went to extreme lengths for to get back--her superior once K got settled back at MIB, and the tiny fact he was a whole generation older than her. Literally. When she did the math it was almost 25 years between them.

Now Y/I had nothing against older men. She loved a silver fox as much as any other, and honestly preferred them to guys younger than her. At the bars she drew them in like wildfire. Never having to pay for her drinks. Then when she was 25 still a detective Y/I had a two year relationship with a man 12 years her senior.

But this was K. They’d really only known each other for maybe a week during that whole bug debacle before the shit with Serleena. It would be highly unprofessional.

Though she can’t lie. The man looked good in his 60s.

Ten years later the two were MIB’s best duo when it came to handling extraterrestrial business and keeping the world safe from unwanted visitors. Y/I with her charm and K with his quick wit, they were unstoppable.

“Don’t worry, K, you can sit this one out,” she’d tease, adjusting the cuffs of her suit with a confident smile. “I got this.”

He’d match her grin, “sure you do, slick.” Then he’d start walking and get right to work leaving her behind.

“Are you ever going to let me drive?”

“Maybe next year.”

“You said that last year, K.”

“I did?” his feigned confusion with a shrug, “Hmm don’t recall.” Like always, he was met with her groan, hearing her head fall back against the seat in defeat.

“I’ll have you know I’m an excellent driver, K.”

He chuckled under his breath, casting a brief glance, “Don’t doubt it, sweetheart, now call Zed and let him know we’re on the way back.”

What could go wrong? Apparently everything.

They’d been on a job the previous night. Investigating Wu’s following suspicious activity and K wasn’t acting like his usual self. On edge, behaving in ways Y/I kept wondering what had crawled up his ass.Then all hell broke loose causing them to lose each other at one point. When Y/I finally made it to the roof, out of breath and in desperate need of a drink, she discovered K wasn’t alone. Greeted with an alien named Boris the Animal.

And he was not the happy camper. In fact, he broke out of prison just to hunt K down.

Later on K vaguely explained the history between him and Boris. “I should’ve killed him,” were his exact words, surprising the agent. She’d always known K to be the man to see all life as precious. He’d take the risk in apprehending a suspect rather than putting them down. Boris, however, did not fall under that.

The night ended with K pulling a play out of left field by suspending Y/I for four weeks when she refused to let go of not pursuing Boris. Who’s arrival shook K to his core. Quite literally. And when he called her that night to say, “you know what the most destructive force in the universe is?”

“Sugar,” Y/I sarcastically replied, not really in the mood.

“Regret.”

She went silent for a moment, “You don’t have to wait. Just talk.”

“I promised you the secrets of the universe nothing more,” K reminded her, making the woman roll her eyes in frustration.

“So what, K? There’s secrets out there the universe doesn’t know about? How can we be partners if you can’t even trust me?” When he didn’t answer, Y/I had enough and hung up. Unaware the man on the other end was holding himself together. So desperately wishing he could tell her the truth. The whole truth.

Falling asleep not long later, Y/n woke the next morning like any other day. Completed her morning routine, whipped up some breakfast and nursed a cup of chocolate milk. Something she hadn’t had since grade school but got the sudden crave for. Slicked back her mix match hair into a tidy bun, gave one last look in the mirror to make sure her suit was nice and tidy before heading out the door.

The entire journey to headquarters felt weird. Unexplainable really. A dreaded feeling in Y/I’s chest on the verge of making her physically sick. But what was it?

When she arrived at HQ Y/I was greeted in the elevator by a man she didn’t recognize, but somehow knew her. Saying he was Agent AA and they’d been partners for a while sending Y/I into a frenzy, “I have no idea who you are, and we are certainly not partners. Where’s K?”

“Who’s K?”

“Who’s K?” she repeated, making him flinch by her sudden shout. “You know who I’m talking about. K! Agent K--the best MIB has ever seen. He’s my partner--My K!” Y/I pushed based AA to frantically search for K. Anxiety rose each time she asked a passing agent where he was and they said they had no clue who she was talking about. “K!” she kept calling for him, saying how it wasn’t funny to be playing a prank on her after their argument last night. But with each second Y/I was becoming scared. Circling in the middle of HQ until she finally broke with a pained scream that echoed through the building, “Kaaayy!!!”

It was then O dragged Y/I to her office, stating she was in charge of MIB….and that Agent K had been dead since 1969.

“Okay, you’ve got it all wrong,” Y/I chuckled to avoid having a mental breakdown right there. She was beginning to hyperventilate, struggling to process the buffoonery. There’s no way in hell K was dead. And that he had been for 40+ years. “K is not---what-whatever joke this is needs to stop--.”

“This isn’t a joke, Agent Y/I--.”

“K can’t be dead! That is impossible--I-I just did a job with him last night. We were on the phone before I went to bed. This is insane!! I am not crazy!!” Y/I leaned back in her chair, apologizing for the outburst when she saw how O was staring at her. “I’m sorry, O. That was out of line. But, O please,” she stood up, pleading with her eyes. “You have to understand that this--.” she gestured to the vicinity, “was not my reality yesterday. Something happened to K in the last twelve hours and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

There were a lot of things Y/I accepted in life. Her father left when she was five. Her family kicked her out at 18 when they caught her with a girl. Ex boyfriend cheating on her because her detective job had her working long night shifts. Blockbuster closing down. The Mets losing the World Series year after year. Pepsi replacing Coca-Cola in the MIB vending machines.

But a world without K? Y/I refused to accept it.

So that’s how she found herself at the top of a skyscraper about to make a time jump into 1969. Jeffrey, the store clerk she tracked down who gave Boris the means to travel back in time, followed behind her.

“Okay, you know the rules of time jumps, right?”

Y/I wobbled on her heels, doing her best to not look down. The wind blew in her face, “give me the short version.”

“Okay. You want to save your partner, word of advice: stay away from him.”

“Yeah got it,” Y/I nodded, making a motion with her hand. “Stay away from K just kill Boris.”

“Now,” Jeffrey handed her a pair of goggles. “Take these because it gets pretty windy on the way down.” Y/I spluttered a sound.

“The way down?!”

Jeffrey either doesn’t register the dumbfounded expression plastered on her or chooses to ignore it. “With your eyes tearing up it’s hard to read the time dial plus,” he offers a smile, “it helps you look like a real time traveler. Which is cool.” Her face never changed.

“There’s no way in hell I am jumping off of this building!”

“Time. Jump,” his face reads, ‘what did you think it meant?’ Y/I just gulps, peering out into the distance. Contemplating her life choices. Meanwhile Jeffrey pulls out the time dial, “Okay now I gotta set this thing to the 11th. Uhhh,” his fingers work over the device. Setting it to July 11th, 1969. “That seems right….ish.”

Y/I lifted her head to stare at him, “I’m gonna need that to be on the money, Jeffrey. Time is at stake here. Literally.”

“Now, all you gotta do…is jump,” passing the dial, he gives her a light push on the back, making her stumble and go, “hey-hey, stop. I don’t need to fall to my death before you finish telling me what I’m supposed to be doing.” Slowly itching herself to the edge, Jeffrey explained the final steps.

“Now as soon as you’re moving fast enough that circle is going to fill up with some sort of green time travel liquid or some such and it’s going to glow really bright--” Y/I cursed when she nearly slipped, catching her hand on the smooth surface. ‘God, I shouldn't have chosen today to wear my heels.’

“As soon as that happens you need to break that blue laser line with your thumb to complete the circuit,” Jeffrey scans their view. “At this height that should be uhhh…let’s see massive Earth and 30 something feet per minute uh--.”

The fear of jumping off a building combined with the stress of failing to save K, Y/I felt the pressure break. “It’s 32 feet per second per second.”

“That sounds right--ish,” Y/I mentally groaned at his lack of confidence. “So that would be, I guess uh, about two feet off the ground.”

“Then I break the laser line?”

“No, don't break it!”

“I mean when I’m fast enough,” Y/I reiterates and receives a thumbs up.

“Sounds good.” Well that didn't help her at all.

“So do I break the laser line or do I not break the laser line?”

“Do not lose that time device,” Jeffrey warns, making the woman sigh and accept she’s going to have to wing it and pray she lives to tell. “Or you will be stuck in 1969.” He didn’t have to say anything else for Y/I to understand. She was going to be a fish out of water.

Was it too late to change her clothes and dye her hair?

“How will I know if it works?” She asked, stomach dropping at the sight of spaceships entering the atmosphere. The Boglodite invasion had begun.

“You’ll either know…or you won’t.”

“Fucking A,” Y/I pulled the goggles over her head. They were tight against her skin, but she was able to at least breathe.

Before he left, Jeffrey had one last thing to say. And it really put into perspective how important K was to Y/I. “You must really love this guy to do this.”

“Yeah,” she muttered under her breath, tightness in her chest while heat flooded her veins. “I guess I do.” She brushed the intense feeling as platonic love for K. Their partnership had lasted 10 years. He was more than just a colleague, he was her best friend. Turning back to Jeffrey before he could leave, she yelled, “Wait! How come I remember K but nobody else does?”

“Woah!” Jeffrey exclaimed, looking as if she just unlocked the key to immortality. “Woah! That means you were there.”

“I was where?” She didn’t understand. Yeah she was alive in 1969, five years old in fact. But what the hell does he mean by she was there?

“If you survive you gotta come back and tell me everything, okay!”

“What are you talking about? Where was I?!” she was interrupted by a ship attacking a nearby building. Jeffrey ushering her off.

“You gotta go! Go! Go! Go!,” he fled to safety, leaving Y/I alone on the rooftop. More ships attacked, sending an alarm across the city for residents to seek shelter. Below Y/I made out their screams.

Time dial in hand, Y/I said a mental prayer, “I’m coming for ya, K,” and leaped to her destiny.

1969

Once Y/I settled her heart rate and mentally cheered in victory she didn’t die, her feet carried her off the rooftop and down the elevator. Had her mind not been preoccupied, she would’ve found humor in the man who looked rather scared out of his wits when she entered the elevator. Clutching the paper close to his chest while giving her an odd once over.

“What’s today?” Y/I picked up on his adversary, not meeting her eye at all.

“Tuesday,” he said shortly.

“The date,” she corrected with a sigh.

“The 11th.”

“Of?”

“July?”

“My man, what’s the year?”

“Nine-nineteen sixty-nine.”

“Thank you,” she threw a hand up, startling him more. “God, and I thought people sucked at answering simple questions where I’m from.” She left the elevator in a haste once it hit the lobby floor, rushing out the doors to a 60s New York.

After stealing a rich man’s car, neuralizing two cops and knicking a bottle of coca-cola from a vendor to quench her time travel thirst, Y/I finally made it to Coney Island. Approaching any and everyone to see if they’d seen Boris.

“He’s about six foot, gnarly beard and looks like he could use some screen,” the young couple hippy kept eyeing her up and down, expressions mixed with weariness and awe. It’s not everyday a woman in a dressy suit approaches to ask you questions. Y/I huffed, pinching the bridge of her nose, “I take that as a no?”

It was like this all morning and Y/I was starting to lose hope. But she had to stay. It said in the records Boris murders an alien on July 11th at Coney Island. Maybe if she could find him she’d save another life.

A scream filled her ears, Y/I running in the direction of the ferris wheel. Breaking through a curtain with her gun raised where she found a body laying on the ground. “Shit,” she muttered, head raising a second later to thumping.

There, leaping across the panels of the ferris wheel, was Boris. Y/I trained her blaster up, eyes following Boris’ until she could get a clear shot. She predicted he’d jump to the large billboard, so she focused her aim to await him.

But fate had other plans.

As soon as she lined up the shot Y/I felt cold pressure against her temple. Blood rushed as she mentally cursed herself. Then a familiar southern drawl filled her ears.

“We’ll take it from here.”

“K?” she gasped, eyes wide as saucers. Smiling as she turned to see him, young and alive, “K!”. ‘Damn K was a stud.’ However the happy reunion was cut short when the agent remembered this was a young K. His face visibly surprised at the mention of his name. Y/I once again cursed at herself.

He didn’t know who the fuck she was.

His defensive demeanor showed that. “I’m afraid I’m going to need you to lower your weapon and come with me, ma’am.” Had this been her K she would’ve teased the fact that even so young authority seeped off him. Carrying himself in a way Y/I was sure he had gals falling to his feet left and right.

But she couldn’t tease him. This wasn’t her K. And this K looked like he was about five seconds from losing his patience.

“Sorry, pretty boy,” she found her voice, his face shifting at the nickname. “Can’t let that happen.” Before K could blink, Y/I shot her arm up to push his blaster away, kneeing his stomach causing K to grunt and bend over, before kicking his legs. She made a mental note to apologize to future K once she returns home.

If she manages to pull this off.

Once K was down, Y/I took her chance to run. Unfortunately she didn’t get far. Heading in the direction Boris fled, Y/I got caught in a maze of tents, unable to find her way out. She stomped her foot, “Dammit.” It was there K found her, tackling the agent from behind, “Ooof--!” They rolled on the harsh ground, scuffling their suits and shoes before coming to a stop. K kicked Y/I’s blaster away, annoying her greatly, “Rude.”

They engaged in a small brawl. Which was pretty much Y/n doing all she could to escape and K attempting to get the upper hand but falling short. It was a new thing for K. Having an opponent on his level. He’d never had his work cut out for him until now. This woman was something else. She intrigued him.

After two whole minutes of fighting, they were becoming tired and frustrated. K took a blow to his rib, Y/I’s hair now loose from the hair tie snapping. It came to a climatic end when they fell back onto a curtain and tumbled onto a table full of orange crates. Moaning as they made impact with the ground. Y/I pushed herself up only to yelp in pain and fall back as electricity filled her veins.

The bastard tased her.

Breathing heavily, K wiped the sweat from his forehead. Leaning back on his knees as he observed the unconscious woman in front of him. Now that he got a better look, K assessed her to be in her mid to late 30s. Striking features with signs of aging, some wrinkles by her eyes and smile lines, but breathtakingly beautiful. Hair styled in an unusual fashion. Two toned in a way K couldn’t tell if it was natural on the sides framing her face or if they were purposely dyed a stunning white/gray. The top of her head was layered in y/h/c. Her makeup relatively simple with the exception of bold red painting her lips.

The most interesting detail of the gorgeous woman was she adored a black suit just like him. She stuck out like a sore thumb when all the women wore dresses and skirts. Yes, some wore pants, but a woman in a sleek black suit and tie? Unheard of. Not to mention her suit was made in a different fashion than his own. More tight on her figure, thinner tie, not as boxy on the shoulders.

K’s suspicion rose when he found fancy gadgets in the pockets of her blazer. He’d made sure to disarm her in the event she woke before they arrived at HQ. Besides her gun, he discovered a pen-like tool, and a circular device reading the current date. ‘What the hell?’ he thought to himself, examining the tools closely before pocketing them. Brows raised to his hairline when he found her badge, the MIB logo in bold printed above her identity.

Agent Y/I.

“Huh,” K hummed in wonder, “Well I’ll be damned.” He glanced down at the fallen agent, lingering on her features, “Now that’s something you don’t see everyday.” Badge in hand, K gently lifting the woman in his arms to take to his car. But not before neuralizing the crowd that had gathered around them.

Whoever she was, K was going to find out.

Y/I awoke with a groan. Feeling tension in her neck and back and throat dry as a desert. Bright lights filled her vision, causing her to blink rapidly until the blurriness became clear. Making her brows furrow at the sight of a very different MIB headquarters she was used to. For starters this one had color. Burnt orange furniture and bulky furniture to fit the times. It was buzzing with MIB agents and travelers from other worlds. Y/I heard one alien on the phone with his dad begging to bail him out.

Good luck with that buddy.

Still feeling the numbness from the voltage, Y/I massaged her jaw with her hand, groaning lightly as she turned her head to scan the rest of HQ. A sudden gasp leaving her as she found K staring at her, making her jolt in her seat.

“Christ, K,” a groan left her throat, eyes narrowed at the man--who again observed her with skepticism. “Would it kill a girl to ask you to turn the electricity down on that thing? I can barely feel my tongue.” He cut right to the chase.

“How do you know my name?”

‘Fuck,’ Y/I gritted her teeth. Pissed at herself for making a simple mistake. Now she had to improvise. Something K always clowned her for. “What? Cause I called you ‘K’?” She could tell he wanted to smirk at her nervous chuckle. “No, I call everybody K. It’s my thing really--What up, K?” the person passing the two gave a look, and the agent continued the ruse much to K’s displeasure. “Kaaaaayyyyy, pasa. Yeah, you know how it is.”

God this was embarrassing. But she was too deep now.

K turned in his chair around to grab something off the desk, “Now that I know what you look like when you’re lying.” Placing the items in front of Y/I, she mentally cursed. It was her neuralizer, gun, badge and time travel device. “Won’t you show me what you look like when you’re telling the truth?”

Oh boy. She hadn’t thought of him confiscating the stuff she had. Super important stuff. How was she going to get out of this? K was the smartest man alive. He’ll know she’s lying no matter how much she tries to deceive him. Time was running out and she needed to get away fast.

Putting on a convincing smile, Y/I leans her elbow on the corner of K’s desk. “I won those at Coney Island on the ring toss,” the lie was met with a gesture of her hand, like she actually was tossing a ring.

“I won a stuffed bear once, but never one of these,” he shakes his head, giving that damn smile where he knows she’s lying. Of course he fucking knew. “Must be good, slick.” God there was the nickname. The one that in the beginning Y/I hated but learned to love as it was only reserved for her. Hearing the younger K say it brought comfort to the agent, reminding her why she was in 1969 in the first place.

“All right, sir,” she pulled herself together, becoming serious which surprised him a bit. “I was minding my own business. I was out there waiting for my girl, who, by the way, is probably worried sick looking for me right now. So I-I just need my things and I need to get back to her.”

“What’s ya gal’s name?”

“Huh?”

“Your gal,” K repeated with a smirk, “what’s her name?” The question threw her off, but then Y/I she did, in fact, say she was waiting for a girl and not a guy. Forgetting she was in 1969 where lgbtq+ unfortunately dealt with prominent homophobia and persecution. ‘Fuck’ she thought again, hoping young K was just as accepting as his older self. Who, when Y/I told him she was bisexual his reply was, “I know, slick.”

By some God awful reason, Y/I’s brain melted at having to come up with a fake girlfriend name, “Schtaron” saying it aloud even made her cringe.

K even looked surprised, eyebrows raising as though he misheard her. “Schtaron?” Well she couldn’t take it back now. So Y/I did the only thing she could do: nod, accepting her fate. K’s mouth opened slightly, processing the information. “I bet Schtaron likes that suit of yours. Hm?”

Y/I peered down at her outfit where K was looking. Crisp black suit matching his only a tad different in style. She raised a brow in defiance, “What, it’s a crime to wear a black suit?”

K shrugged, finger brushing his bottom lip, “Not a crime, but it makes you stick out compared to the other pretty ladies wearing pencil dresses and skirts.”

“Yeah well,” Y/I scoffed with a roll of the eyes. “You men haven’t realized yet that women can rock a three-piece suit and tie better than y’all.” As though confirming her words, Y/I heats up when K gives another glance over her suit. From the tie around her neck to the red bottom heels on her feet.

Obviously he didn’t recognize the shoes since Louboutins didn’t release until the 90s, but K was still impressed nonetheless she’d be brave to wear such footwear in that line of work.

He leaned back in his chair, turning away when he was caught staring, red creeping up his neck and hand raising to adjust his tie. Y/I smirked, pleased with his reaction, while battling the warmth feeling in her chest. Part of her wanted to poke fun at him like she usually did, but there was a job to do.

“All right, listen, pretty boy,” she gets his attention back, visibly reacting to the nickname, “I haven’t done anything wrong except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I need to get out of here,” she slaps a hand down on the stack of files in front of her, “I cannot be here with you.” They’re suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a beautiful blonde.

“Terribly sorry,” she apologizes to Y/I before turning to K. “X is frightfully upset about the whole Coney Island incident.” K moves to grab his cup of coffee, meanwhile Y/I could not contain herself and was openly checking the blonde out. Which K caught and had to do a double take.

“Alright thanks for the heads up,” he takes a sip, wincing at the bitter taste, “Oh, man, this coffee tastes like dirt.” Y/I snapped her head to him in shock before turning back to the woman, ‘no fucking way,’ her suspicions were confirmed seconds later.

“What do you expect? It was--.”

“Just ground this morning,” Y/I finishes the saying, eyes wide and grin threatening to expand. “O?” ‘Damn O has always been fine.’

Both faced her, expressions of bewilderment. Especially O who had yet to know who Y/I was. It was further proof to younger K Y/I was hiding something big.

Realizing her mistake Y/I attempted to do damage control. “No, I call ladies ‘O’,” her hand waves. Feeling small under K’s hard stare. “To me, O is feminine, K is masculine.” What the actual hell was coming out of her mouth? She didn’t know and couldn’t stop, “You know, I see a couple, I’m like, “O-K.” Before anyone had the chance to react to the utter bullshit she spewed, X was rounding the corner. K dropping a large booklet on top of Y/I’s stuff.

“What a mess,” X exclaimed, standing beside O. “Any casualties?”

“Yes, Roman the Fabulist.”

O appeared devastated by this news. Almost like she could cry whereas X just rephrased the question to specify, “Any human casualties.” Y/I narrowed her brows slightly, offended by the audacity of X which didn’t go unnoticed by K. He matched her expression. To him, all life was precious. Humans and aliens alike.

“No, sir,” Y/I picked up on his strained tone. It was then X turned his attention to the woman seated in front of him with a piercing glare, “Who the hell is this?” He was put off not just by her scowl, but the fact she wore a suit and had mixed-match hair.

“Look, I was…” K interrupted before she could make a fool of herself.

“Stray human caught in the net.”

“Code 43 her and throw her back,” X ordered. O, sensing there was more to the story, diverted X away from the desk, “Sir, you’re gonna be late for a meeting with the Viagrans. They have a revolutionary new pill.” Y/I tilted her head at O’s words, ‘What the hell? Viagrans? New Pill? Oh my….’ She wanted to laugh at the irony, but K was back in front of her, serious as ever.

“Okay, slick,” he leaned on his elbows, waiting for the woman to come clean. Y/I kept her guard up, shaking her head furiously and sticking with the stupid story, “I was waiting for my girl.”

“Schtaron.”

“Yes,” Y/I wanted to crawl under the desk and hide, “she’s….Greek. It’s a family name--very unique.”

A moment of silence passes and K finally gives up. Accepting he was going to have to use unorthodox methods to get answers. “Okay. Just one last thing…..an eye exam.”

Oh no.

Any attempt Y/I made to escape was to no avail. They caught and strapped her to a stretcher like contraption, after she put down three men and managed to disarm K again, making his jaw drop. They wheeled her to a room, her eyes landing on a large machine resembling a device she was all too familiar with. “That’s not an eye exam, K,” she shouted appalled, “That’s a big ass neuralizer!”

“You sure have a lot of information for a gal who doesn’t know anything,” he approached the control machine.

“I see what you’re saying. Woah--!” They spun upside down. “You know what, K, we need to hold up a second. K!” Her y/h/c and white hair fell over her face, Y/I blowing air to get it out of the way. Necklaces smacking her cheek.

A man in a lab coat and white suit approached her. Leaning down with an object in his hand. “Let’s just get this bite guard in here.” Y/I clacked her teeth in an attempt to bite him.

“Hey. Back up,” she did it again, causing him to draw back. “Back the fuck up. I’m not afraid to bite you.” The stretcher jolted up, making it to where she was level with the machine. “K, listen,” she pleaded with a chuckle, “I think we got off on the wrong foot, all right? So let’s stop this show and talk for a second. Don’t put me in this thing, K!”

K thought about it for a moment before replying, “Too late, lass,” and pressed a button. Y/I groaned, stretcher moving to enter the vessel.

“K, no, you have to listen to me. I can help you with this case!” her pleas went ignored, K focusing on the dial. “K!” She makes a face, “I’m doing the truth face--you’re missing it!”

“Ah, I’ll just use my imagination.”

Buzzing filled the room. The neuralizer was closed and locked, beginning to spin in a circle as it lit up. Y/I started feeling nauseous, struggling against the holds. “K, I’m after the same killer you’re looking for. He’s a Boglodite named Boris.”

“Ship has sailed, amiga.”

The dizziness was becoming intense, Y/I blinked her eyes, “K, if we don’t get him now we’ll have to deal with two of them. Two!” K adjusts his headset.

“You had my undivided attention.”

“One will have one arm, and one will have two,” she informs, neuralizer speeding up. Now her heart was about to burst from her chest, desperation consuming her. “K! Listen to me, please!” the stretcher set in place as it locked in. “If you erase me you’ll be erasing the whole world!”

“Fifteen seconds to neuralyzation. Fourteen.”

“Fuck-fuck-fuck,” Y/I mumbled, the fear now setting in. The last time she felt terrified--besides that morning--was after getting poisoned by an alien stinger while on a job in 2003. Never had she seen K so scared. Cursing at everyone and breaking every traffic law to get back to HQ. So frighteningly angry he nearly threw hands with Zed while O had to step in to calm him down.

“Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.” her thoughts became fuzzy. Neurons pulling apart and pushing together. The area of the brain dedicated to memory being targeted causing her mind to spin. “Ten. Nine. Eight.” The least she could do before her brain was scrambled was warn K one last time. “When you see Boris tomorrow, K, kill him. Do not arrest him, you have to kill him!”

“Six. Five. Four.”

Y/I’s eyes closed, steadying her breathing to calm herself and not allow the fear to take over. Memories started to play like a film. From her childhood, to adolescence. High school and police academy. Her time as a detective to the moment she met K. Discovering the world beyond Earth. Every mission, every job. Every precious moment she took for granted.

Outside, K kept replaying her words. Warnings. Whoever she was, she knew too much. Between the technology, the suit, knowing his name as well as O’s, this woman had a past. A past with the same man he needed to find.

For God’s sake she had an MIB badge. She was one of them.

‘Fucking hell.’ “Three. Two. On--.” K stood abruptly and smacked his hand down on the button to shut it down before it could reach one.

Y/I let out a breath of relief, feeling the contraption slow down until it came to a stop. Lights shutting off. “Is this thing off, K? Hey, I don’t think it’s off all the way--can you check real quick?” Cranking her neck as best she could, Y/I desperately needed an Advil. “It’s still whirring and buzzing. I don’t know if I don’t know nothing.” Now she was being dramatic. But who could really blame her after nearly getting her memory erased.

The stretcher exited the machine, pulling Y/I upright causing her hair to become a wild mess. K approached, headset off, and watched her carefully. “I knew Roman. His wife cooked me dinner once and while it was not pleasant, he was my friend.” The men unlatched the metal straps holding Y/I in place, K stepping forward to extend a hand so she’d safely step off while saying, “Last chance, who are you and what do you know?” She took his hand, both flinching at the tiny shock that occurred and Y/I stumbled back once on her feet so they had a bit of distance, but still close. Inhaling, Y/I spilled all K needed to know in one breath.

“I’m an agent at Men in Black, but I’m from the future--we’re partners, ok? Twenty-five years from now you’re going to recruit me in New York, and fourteen years after that, the guy you didn’t let me kill today at Coney Island, he escapes from prison, and jumps back into the past and unleashes a full scale invasion of Earth,” Y/I checks her watch briefly, “we’ve got approximately four days and ten hours to catch him and kill him. So really, we need to go right now because he can be anywhere!” She let out a small groan, letting the air catch up. Nerves arose at K’s blank stare. Y/I unable to tell what he was thinking and that brought great annoyance.

They stayed like that for a moment. Staring at each other in silence. Y/I allowed her shoulders to drop, sighing in the process.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, K turned on his heel toward the door, “Alright.” Puzzled, Y/I blinked rapidly in question, but followed after the man.

“So that’s the story you believe.”

“That one was the truth,” K pointed out. “Wasn’t the whole truth, but I guess it’ll do for now.” Y/I looked at him offended.

“What the hell do you mean? Of course it’s the whole truth!” Liar. “I told you everything.” ‘No I didn’t, but what you don’t know won’t hurt ya.’ They entered the elevator, “The problem with a lie, K, is once you start lying you put yourself….” she trails off when he turns to her with a look of, ‘Don’t even try,’ Sighing again, Y/I licked her lips while placing her hands in her pockets, staring ahead rather than at K.

“Agent K,” a voice called from below as the elevator rose. They turned to find X and O. “What’s she still doing here?”

“Oh I might have cooked her for too long. Thought I’d better walk her out.” Catching on, Y/I said the first thing that came to her mind.

“I put my pants on.” K rolled his eyes, lifting his hand as if to say, ‘See what I mean?’ Once X looked satisfied and took his leave, K gently placed a hand on her shoulder to turn her back around. His touch sent another wave of heat. She straightened her posture, looking ahead.

Y/I jaw hurt from how hard she was holding her laugh. Squeezing her eyes shut, but she still felt K’s gaze, damn well knowing she’d break if she made eye contact. “Please stop looking at me before I lose it.”

“How’d you know--.”

The elevator jolted a stop, Y/I exiting first before K took the lead. She quickened her pace so they were next to each other. Outside K led her to his car, Y/I’s unable to contain her reaction at the sight of his car. A 1964 Ford Galaxy 500. She whistled as got into the car, missing how K was biting back a smirk.

The driver’s door slammed shut behind him, “Okay future-gal, where to?” Y/I’s brow raised, hands making a motion. She didn't have a damn clue at what to do next. Now that her original plan blew to shit.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” K parroted, just as confused and she made a face.

“I don’t know. Uh…go wherever you went last time.”

Did she forget she traveled back in time? “I haven’t been here last time. I didn’t tell you where I went?” She had to choose her next words carefully to not let anything slip. Nonetheless she let out a light chuckle.

“No, we don’t really talk.”

K huffed, adjusting himself in the seat, “What kind of partners sit in a car all day every day for 14 years and don’t talk?”

“Exactly,” her smile is tight, proving her point. She points a finger between the both of them, “and this is the type of problem it causes. It’s dysfunctional and annoying if I’m being quite honest. And technically we’ve been partners for ten years but that’s a long story and one for another day.” She didn’t miss the curious look that came over him, but it was quickly replaced with frustration.

“Alright, sweetheart,” he put one hand on the wheel while his arm laid across the headrest of the seats, face serious. “You better get useful real quick, or you’re going back to room 43.”

Y/I muttered something he couldn’t hear, turning away to gaze out the windshield. Brows furrowed deep in thought as she picked through her brain for any information.

“Okay, uh,” she bit her lip, “the file--the file I read about Boris before coming here said something about a factory,” she looked back at K, “something happened at a factory on the 13th.” She heard him sigh, and Y/I held back her own. “Look, pretty boy, I’m giving you all I got. You can stare at me with your jedi knight--,” she forgot Star Wars had yet to be released for another seven years. “Looking eyes, but that’s all--we’ve got two days to find out where he’s going.”

To her surprise, K started the car. She tilted her head, “oh, did that spark something for you, cowboy?”

“Roman had this on his person when he was murdered,” In his hand was a matchbook, Y/I reached to take it. On both sides read ‘Cosmo Lanes,’ the letters encased in bowling pins.

“It’s a matchbox.”

“No, it’s a clue,” K corrected, making her look at him puzzled. Then he answered her unspoken question, “He didn’t smoke.” They were off with the roar of the engine trailing behind. Off to Cosmo Lanes with their lead.

The entire drive Y/I kept stealing glances at K. Not hiding her intrigue at all or how she admired his features. Jet black hair, shiny and sleek. Smile lines--which she always found adorable. Brown eyes that twinkled whenever he smirked or gave a genuine smile.

She must’ve been staring because K snapped her out of it as he said, “You lose something over here, darlin’?”

Instead of becoming embarrassed and flinging herself out of the car, Y/I held her chin high, feeding off the confidence she usually carried herself with. Lip curling, as she tipped a brow up, “Say, K, I’m curious. How old are you?”

It took a moment for him to answer, “twenty-nine.”

“Wow,” Y/I hummed, making K give her a, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Her grin widened, tone taking a teasing nature, “Just that you got some city miles on ya.”

Now it was K’s turn to smirk, “You know I’m starting to understand why we don’t talk.” Y/I chuckled, facing forward in the seat. K turned down the music lightly, “Exactly what year in the future are you from?”

“Twenty-Twelve,” she heard him make a sound, like he was calculating his age in 2012. “Don’t worry, you're still a stud even in your old age. Silver hair suits you.”

“Glad to hear,” Y/I heard his smile, matching her own. “What you said earlier, about us being partners for ten years, what’d you mean by that?” She hadn’t expected that question, tightening her lips as she debated on opening that can of worms.

“Like I said, it's a long and complicated story.”

K’s eyes flickered to her, “we got time.”

She snorted, “Should I really be telling you? I’m not an expert in time travel, but what if telling you about what happens in the future inevitably dooms it?” All she received was a shrug, making her head fall back against the seat.

“Well,” she breathed through her nose, clicking her teeth. “As I mentioned--after you nearly fried my brain--you recruited me in ‘97, but after the first job you decided to retire and had me neuarlize you,” She briefly glanced to find K raising his brows, visibly surprised. “Then five years later in ‘02, you held the key to stopping a homicidal maniac so I had to drag you back to MiB. Once that was over, you just stayed,” leaning her head to look at K, Y/I smirked, “And we’ve been going now ten years strong. My longest relationship really--you should be honored.” She couldn’t help but tease, watching the man flush red.

Even as a young stallion K was easy to fluster.

“I love that,” she giggled lightly, looking away when he turned his head.

“What?”

“Oh nothing,” she jutted, but then came clean, unable to contain her laugh. “Just that you’re still easy to tickle.” Y/I didn’t see it, but K’s gaze lingered on her. Fondness peaking through as a million questions racked his brain but he refused to ask--the leading being just who was she to him? Yeah they were work partners, but call it intuition, K felt there was something more to Y/I and what she meant to him.

Whatever it was now was not the time to drown himself in theories. Gathering his priorities, K kept only two things in mind: 1) they had a job to do and 2) this woman was from his future. They needed to find Boris, stop him from changing the future, and get her back home.

They pulled up to the bowling alley, K shutting off the engine after putting the car in park. Y/I leaned forward to get a better look. “How well do you know this place?”

“I know its reputation.”

“I don’t like it,” she shook her head, finding it sketchy. “I hate going in blind. I’m gonna need my gun back.”

“Sure thing, slick,” a handcuff clasped on Y/I wrist, a gasp leaving her as he cuffed her to the steering wheel while she gaped at him like he lost his damn mind.

“K! What the hell?!” she fought against his grip, “I need to go in there with you!”

“You just sit tight. I’ll be fine.” K was out the door and entering the establishment. Leaving Y/I shouting after him, “Stop--K! You can’t go in by yourself. When I get back to the future I’m going to have serious words for you!” She puffed out a breath as his suit clad figure disappeared. Her hands searched around the car, ‘I wonder…’ reaching for the ashtray, Y/I made a ‘ah-ha!’ sound as she found the spare key underneath.

“Same old K,” the smirk stayed on her lips, freeing herself from the cuffs and racing out the car. Going quiet as she accessed the center to take in the scene. K had his gun on a man, who in turn had four guns pointed at him. Grabbing the first thing, a bowling pin, Y/I inched her way until she was bringing down the pin on the alien’s head. Promptly knocking him out.

“See you still keep the key under the ashtray,” she saw the flicker of what looked like astonishment.

“Lucky guess,” he played it off, facing the man who was not passed out on the floor. “Now, where were we?”

After landing a spare on the lanes, finding the owner’s dead body, and a call to O for information, the two tracked down where Boris was heading next. From what K said, it was the factory.

Now they had two days to spare until then. And frankly, Y/I was beat like a tennis ball after Wimbledon. She needed a hot shower, food, and at least ten hours of sleep. It was pushing close to 6pm and Y/I was about two seconds away from making a bed out of K's backseat.

“Where are we?” a yawn escaped her when the car came to a halt. Squinting at the unknown building they were in front of.

“My place,” K casually replied, exiting the car as if it were nothing while Y/I choked on her saliva.

“Your what?” The wind hit her as she climbed out, gawking at the man. People passing by gave them looks which they ignored. “Why are we at your place, K?”

His brow tipped up, “You’re exhausted. So we’ll pick things back up tomorrow.”

“Okay….” she agreed, but her tone was still confused. “That still doesn’t explain why we’re at your place.” Then it hit Y/I, heat filling her veins and she began to splutter. “K, If you’re insinuating what I think you are, I can go get a hotel.”

“Oh really and how are you gonna do that?” K countered, hands going in his pockets. “You don’t have any money on ya, sweetheart.” Y/I tilted her head in surprise.

“And just how do you know that?” She could’ve sworn she had her credit cards on her. Learning not to carry cash on her at times now that most places were switching to cards only or never had change in the registers.

Fuck K didn’t think about how that would sound. Face redding as he adjusted his jacked, “Um,” his throat cleared, “I confiscated everything on ya at HQ and there was no wallet. Just assumed you weren’t carrying any.”

Instantly Y/I fished for her MiB badge, where she hid her Capital One credit card. Flashing it to him, “I have this.”

“What is it?” He snatched it to get a better look. Reading the print of a name he assumed was her alias, several numbers in a line and expiration date. Not recognizing the company labeled at the top.

“My credit card,” she said as if it were obvious, forgetting where she was. K’s face was questioning, making Y/I go, “What?”

“This won’t work at a hotel, slick,” he passed the card back, but not before reading it one more time. Before she could ask why K gave the answer. “For starters Capital One doesn’t exist yet. And the expiration date will have everyone turning heads,” his face turned serious, “but the main thing, if you attempt to pay with that, the authorities are going to have a field day wondering how you managed to forge a credit account.”

Y/I’s jaw dropped, absolutely floored. Forge an account? Yeah the name on the card wasn’t her real name but it was the MiB issued credit card and worked perfectly fine. And she was certain she hadn’t maxed it out yet. It’d just been used on her daily bodega order that morning.

“This isn’t fake! I get it’s not my real name, but thanks to MiB it hasn’t let me down yet. How will it--,” she cut herself on as it crossed her mind. What he was trying to tell her without really saying it. Y/I brought a hand to her nose, scrunching it. Feeling stupid she hadn’t realized it sooner as a sigh left her, “I’m not supposed to have a credit card.”

In fact, no woman was supposed to have one. They wouldn’t get the right to open their own credit accounts until 1974. Where they’d be free without having a husband, father, or brother cosign on one.

Gotta love the 60s…..

“What’s it gonna be, slick?” K voice brought her back to reality. Lifting her eyes from the pavement to meet his. Air caught in her throat suddenly, ‘Wow K has beautiful eyes.’

“I’m taking the bed,” Y/I gave in, lighting a cigarette she stole from a pack in K’s car before heading into the building with one thing on her mind: sleep. “I deserve it after jumping off a damn building and almost having my brain cooked.”

[randomfoggytiger]

Mulder's Alien Baby Baby Trauma In-Depth (Part IX): An Episode of Mad About You

It's hard to know how soon after Three Words this episode takes place, much less speculate what happened in-between.

The X-Files' timeline has always moved at an incredibly rapid, incredibly unreasonable pace; so we can assume less than a week (if not a day or two) has transpired since Mulder and TLG's break into the DOD. He and Scully must have had a conversation of some sort sometime afterwards (though that conversation might have taken different routes depending on the viewer's discernment, discussed at length here) based purely on their body language during the opening scenes and ensuing events.

Speculation aside, Empedocles is the first time Mulder draws direct lines between himself and the baby (despite the fact he already knew Scully's baby was his, post here.)

Let's go~!

THE MULDER MATING RITUAL

Knock knock, someone’s at the door. 

Scully appears from the right side of her kitchen, walking as fast as she can to the peephole. Not fast enough, apparently, because her visitor knocks, loudly, three more times. (Impatience, thy name is Mulder. At least that hasn’t changed, in spite of your absence and personal crisis.)

 Scully peeks through-- always cautious-- and is surprised to see who's there: her skeptical face reappears quite naturally at this latest, unexpected antic (or in expectation of a new, unexpected antic.) 

She opens the door to a casually relaxed Mulder, who quickly leans against the door frame right as Scully comes into view.

Mulder is here with aplomb, with a theatrical little plan that he intends to act out: the Mulder Mating Ritual, wherein he brings a trinket to the nest then dances around both of their feelings in an attempt to communicate without communicating.

It’s a sign that nature is healing-- more accurately, that Mulder is; and that he wants to reclaim his old life with Scully.

“Mulder…” Scully whines, adorably plaintive as she winds up an excuse not to go off on his latest goose chase. She also isn’t outright saying she can’t go, a sure Scully sign that she can be persuaded. 

Mulder senses that Scully is game-- or willing to be wheedled into one-- and commits fully to the Mulder Mating Ritual (as it shall now be called.) Whipping his head from its side-pivot (where he had indirectly assessed her mood and possible rejection), his eyes snap to hers, comedically wide and oozing with faux innocence. 

“What?” he asks, reeling her in. 

The interaction shows that something has been ironed out between them, whether in full or half-detail, between the conclusion of Three Words and opening of Empedocles. While we’ll never know exactly what was said, something had to have been based on the ease with which they speak to each other (closer to their Season 7 interactions, for example, than any season before it) and their body language throughout this scene.  

Scully-- who is not a fool and knows Mulder code down to a miniscule blink-- looks at him with an equal mix of resignation (for her peaceful pizza and shower moment) and blooming hope (for his return to buoyant Mulder Play.) Still, she tries to mitigate some of the impending disruption to her anticipated ritual, hiding a full smile while tumbling out a perfectly legitimate excuse to not go wandering (read: waddling) off somewhere. 

“I was just about to jump in the shower but I was waiting for the pizza man.” 

Immediately, Mulder sees an opportunity to tease and seizes upon it. 

“You got something going on with the pizza man that I should know about?” he responds, squinting in mock jealousy: a picture of the scorned husband who returned from his travels, bearing gifts and love, only to find his female consorting (and creating babies) with another. A copy of the bantery one he gave in Three Words.

This is incredibly important: Mulder is playing the role of jealous husband because he is secure in Scully’s loyalty, but even more importantly because he is secure in the baby’s paternity. As much as his partner knows him, he knows his partner: that Scully hasn’t betrayed or replaced him (discussed at length in-depth in this, this, this, this, this, and this post.) 

Scully is highly amused-- and charmed-- at this display of put-upon machismo. 

She digests his comeback a second before asking, “The pizza man?”, dipping her head incredulously at the stretches Mulder has always been able to reach. 

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Mulder continues, full steam ahead, “but you just said you were waiting for the pizza man to jump in the shower.”

He hides the sparkle in his eye with an slightly angry, slightly aghast expression, maintaining it while Scully jumps in with a “No--” 

“--what I mean was, the pizza man is usually late, and so…”

Scully trails off, intuiting that the angle her partner is playing is one of dense relentlessness: no matter how she tries to talk herself out of word traps, Mulder will find another angle and “aha!” his way to the top. Her intuition is confirmed as she examines his face, his second (mock-indignant) squint, and the sparkle in his eyes while he waits for her to verbally trip up. 

All excellent signs: he isn't treating her-- and their relationship-- like glass, instead reverting back to his annoying, endearing ways. 

Giving up, she cuts to the chase-- “Do you want to come in?”-- preferring that to outthinking Mulder’s next mental twister. Some games, she figures, are best fought on a full stomach.

Mulder, true to form, keeps up the mock squint and "Thank you" until he's certain he won that round. Like she suspected.  

As they both turn in, Mulder does a side-shimmy to hide his present while Scully huffs off, indulgently, to the bathroom (it looks like) to turn off the water-- a sure sign she knows her partner will stay a while. 

“I feel like I’m stuck in an episode of Mad About You,” she remarks, poking at this weird style of miscommunication more in-line with an everyday couples' squabbles and misunderstandings than their own particular partnership. In essence, calling Mulder out. 

Not to be outdone-- even while juggling a present and mentally running through places to hide it--  he stalls, “Well, uh, yeah--,” closes the door “--but small technicality--” spots the couch, locks the door, and stuffs the gift behind a pillow “--Mad About You is about a married couple, and we just work together.”

In any other set of circumstances, this would have been an accusation; but here, perversely, it’s a healthy sign of their relationship: Mulder wins an argument because neither of them are married, despite her pregnancy; and Scully grumbles over her defeat instead of his remark, knowing there was no ulterior motive behind his words. A mutual back-and-forth.

“Yeah, well, you know what I’m talking about,” she brushes aside, not wanting to dwell on Mulder's victory. And also bringing up, obliquely, a more domestic-focused conversation-- one that features a certain mad-for-each-other couple now on much better terms.)   

“I do, I do. What I’m, what I’m trying to say is, that, uh,” Mulder says, shifting his weight before putting his hands in his pockets and carefully reordering his thoughts.

His actions reveal Mulder isn’t here just to play around and leave-- he’s put careful thought and planning into this visit, finding a present for the baby (his baby) at his mother's and teasing his way into Scully’s apartment to open (in some manner of form) a more serious (perhaps permanent) conversation between them. 

Mulder’s silent for a few seconds, weighing how he wants to continue their interaction; but ultimately slips back to the comfortable familiarity of banter (although he will segue into more personal gestures: pointing at Scully’s belly, directing her to the gift with his eyes, misconstruing her “package” remarks because of his internal focus, leading them both to a touching exchange over his beautifully wrapped offering, etc.)

“We have no good reliable information on this man--”

Scully re-enters, eating out of his hand until Mulder's tired old trust no one schtick kills her enthralled curiosity. She majestically raises her head in judgment, the very picture of one bored and above-it-all, then tilts it and dons her work eyebrow (the one that tells Mulder she’s trying to figure out if he’s serious or not.)   

Sensing this shift (not a dangerous one, just one further away from his intended goal), Mulder swiftly re-centers the conversation away from conspiracy and back to jealousy. 

Comically raising his eyebrows and jovially pointing at the baby, he continues “--that the pizza man--” then abruptly stops, expression turning gentle as he watches the bump approach.  

“--is not above suspicion,” Mulder softly finishes, eyes still glued to his baby. 

Scully stares down at her bump in turn, unsure what Mulder means.

It would seem by her body language this is the first direct, personal reference he has made to the baby; and she carefully puzzles over his layered meaning before taking it in the spirit he meant it: personal. 

She sighs-- a little embarrassed, a lot relieved. Shyly keeping her head down, she whispers, “I see”; and, again, in any other circumstance, that could have been a dejected or lost or nervous response to a husband’s paternity concerns. Here, however, it’s another sign of health: that she understands Mulder is no longer avoiding the baby-- including it in his Mad About You scenario-- and that she is readjusting herself in this sudden onslaught of information. 

When she’s ready-- two or three seconds later-- Scully looks up with a knowing smile: she caught his meaning, got it, and is letting Mulder know she understood.   

And Mulder, delighted, turns the conversation to her prize, motioning his eyes back and forth from Scully to the couch. (He’s always loved giving gift-loving Scully surprises, after all.) 

She doesn’t understand at first, moving her head in janky segments until she catches sight of the wrapping paper. 

“Is that for me?” 

“Yeah,” Mulder replies, nodding and smirking over her suppressed, though obvious, delight. 

“Nice package,” Scully comments; and misses her partner’s flustered but touched “Thank you” as she bends to retrieve her bounty. “What’s the occasion?”

“Oh!” Mulder responds, catching the actual drift of her conversation. 

As a side note: her comment doesn’t seem to have been deliberately made to mess with Mulder: usually, Scully will fully face her partner when teasing him, wanting to see his face register and react to her comment. Here, however, she doesn’t. Further, she is so zeroed-in on the gift that she talks right over his thank you. So, the moment’s comedy seems to stem from karma getting Mulder for his morning games rather than Scully intentionally tripping him up. 

Voice quieting as he transitions to a more serious topic, Mulder explains, “I was going through some stuff, after my mother died, and, um….” 

He stops to bite his lip, and Scully looks down, respectfully giving him the space he needs; but, recovering quickly, he continues, and Scully reestablishes eye contact. 

“...it’s just an old family keepsake; and I wanted you to have it.” Mulder keeps his eyes down-- another sign that he’s serious about this-- and swallows before gazing at Scully again: nervous, obliquely giving away his own intentions. 

Scully catches, gets, and lets him know, again, that she’s caught, got, and understood his motives: “Well, I’m touched.” 

There’s a knock at the door, and Mulder lunges for a lifeline away from his vulnerability: “Little Caesar, I presume?” with another jealous deadpan, yet again. 

Her amusement is tempered: Mulder may want to escape his declaration, but it stays with her, giving her peace. He’s doing his best, given the circumstances; and, though Mulder hasn’t outright laid claims to the baby, they both know he’d considered it his. Moreover, Scully’s happy that not only does he consider it his, but he’s also taking steps to become more involved. He just needs time; and she’s had more than enough to process his abduction, his death, and his resurrection. Giving him some in exchange seems small-- and, really, when has it ever been too large a thing between them? 

Scully waits for him to turn away before smiling to herself: radiant, hopeful, content. 

Mulder, never one to to curb his actions or reactions in front of others, isn’t going to stop now, involving the pizza man in his shenanigans. 

And any sense of shame or embarrassment Scully might have felt being part of these shenanigans is long gone. However, he will not tie her to the mast of his behavior and take her down with him. “Hi. Just, uh, give it to the man with the funny look on his face,” she instructs, sitting down with her gift on her lap. 

An important side note: Scully, it seems, expects Mulder to bring the pizza to her while she opens her gift (which is proven correct by the end of Empedocles)-- a set-up-and-follow-through.  

Pizza boy is unfazed by their interactions. “Yeah, that’s $29.08.”

Cheapskate Mulder is snapped out of his playacting by the stunning reality of pizza over $10. “‘$29.08’? What’d she get on it, a tank of gas?” 

CONCLUSION

And that’s the last bit of fun they have before the next crisis. 

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

[xf-cases-solved]

i've been doing my xfiles rewatch, but i've also been watching twin peaks for the first time with my partner (v weird that i haven't seen it before bc it's very much My Type of show, but w/e), and silence of the lambs was already my favorite movie. so since my personal aesthetic is apparently very specifically honed in on creepy and weird early 90s entertainment centered around fbi agents, here's a collection of random crossover thoughts i've had while watching these things, in no particular order:

-twin peaks, xfiles, silence of the lambs, except all the characters are shifted one plot to the left, so you have mulder and scully trying to figure out the death of laura palmer, clarice assigned to the xfiles division, and dale cooper having to make a rapport with dr. hannibal lecter

-separate thought: if mulder and scully met dale cooper, mulder would be absolutely delighted, and scully would want to put his head on a slab. this would just make mulder more delighted

cooper would be very pleasant to them both, but would find mulder's lack of self-care unsettling. mulder would be trying to talk about the case when cooper would interrupt him to tell him to try the mulberry pie and take a moment to savor it

he would also be able to follow scully's reasonings and would know all the references to scientific studies she makes, and would be like, "very clever! you're very intelligent!" not in a facetious way, he'd mean it genuinely, but then he'd still insist that his dream will lead them to the killer and she'd want to rip her hair out

-cooper to m&s, apropos of nothing: so how long have the two of you been in love?

-scully would not enjoy twin peaks. too rustic, too weird, too many affairs to keep track of

-mulder would love it for all the reasons she hates it

-if clarice and scully met they would get to know each other carnally, obviously. msr can still exist, but mulder has to be ok with being cuckolded by special agent clarice starling

he can watch sometimes, if wants ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

-agent crawford would have one (1) conversation with mulder and would immediately write him off as insane and never talk to him again

-crawford and scully would get along fine

-clarice and cooper would be buds, bc even tho cooper is fucking weird, he would be very enthusiastic about how clever she is, and would talk her up constantly, and clarice would appreciate the validation and kindness (besides, she's pseudo friends with hannibal lecter, cooper's idiosyncrasies are nothing in comparison)

-hannibal lecter wouldn't be able to manipulate mulder, but he wouldn't be that impressed by him either. it would be a mutual disdain. they could potentially have a hannibal/will graham-esque relationship but eh

-as badly as a "quid pro quo" scene between scully and hannibal would slap, i can't imagine scully giving hannibal anything to work with. she wouldn't stick around to play games; she doesn't have time for it and would never be able to regard him as anything besides a monster

mulder would agree to take on the puzzles, and hannibal might give them to him, but he'd taunt him and send him on wild goose chases more than he does with clarice, bc mulder doesn't have anything he particularly wants, but he is vaguely curious to see if he can figure it out. (mulder WOULD figure it out, but only with the addition of scully's analysis and theories, not hannibal's direction alone)

-hannibal would not talk to cooper lol. cooper would figure out who buffalo bill is anyway, tho

-nobody at the fbi in the xfiles universe would know how to handle dale cooper. skinner especially would be very -squints- about it, bc he'd get results, but would just be so fucking Weird™️ about it, but in such a different way than mulder is weird

-the lone gunmen would be very sweet and protective over clarice. they would be very confused and vaguely unsettled by cooper

-clarice would be skinner's dream agent bc she would listen to him and value his input and rarely punch him in the face or hold him at gunpoint

-while i can picture clarice getting the hang of the xfiles, i have trouble picturing her in twin peaks (tho, do note that i haven't seen all of it so mb that would change)

-this isn't a headcanon so much as a v obvious observation, but they are all so fucking hot, what the fuck??

-final thought: dale cooper, clarice starling, dana scully, and fox mulder = dream blunt rotation

anyway those are some of the things i think about in my spare time

the end

[callsign-dexter]

Always With You

Request: Hi

i was wondering if i could plz request a mav x daughter reader

maybe mav finds out his daughter has separation anxiety or just really doesn't like it when she can't put eyes on him. like Iceman and mav are talking about her "symptoms" and Ice points out the possibility. So mav has to find a way to reassure his kid that he isn't going anywhere and that he won't leave her.

I know this can be a touchy topic and if you state somewhere that you don't write for it than i apologize i don't want to make you uncomfortable so please only do what you are comfortable with

<3 much love and i hope you have a wonderful day

Pairings: Maverick x Daughter!Reader

Warnings: angst, fluff, separation anxiety

Masterlist

Y/N wasn't a clingy person, to say the least. She had always been a very independent person. She didn't start being clingy until her, dad, Maverick, and Goose were in an accident, 10 years after the first one, and she came to the hospital with Carole to be with them. From there on she would not let Maverick out of her sight. When the first accident happened she didn't think anything of it since she was too young to know. It came full force when the second accident happened and she was 12 years old. She would be fine at school since she had distractions but once she saw her dad or in his presence she was not leaving the room.

Maverick never really caught on to this since he was still young himself and not very observant of emotions. He was enjoying having her practically clinging to him but couldn't see it was a problem that is until Ice brought it up but he just brushed it off. Ice picked up on the behavior almost immediately because he was observant of emotions and he absorbed loved that little girl, even if she was a Mitchell. Ice first noticed it when he was left in the room with her and Maverick had walked out to take a phone call and see freaked out. He tried to tell her that he was coming back in just a few minutes but she was not having it. She wouldn't settle until she had set her eyes on her father.

It was during work and when everyone was at lunch when Ice decided to bring his concerns up to the father of the little girl. He thought it was safe do so since it was just him, Slider, Maverick, and Goose. He didn't know how to bring it up the father but figured he would just cut to the chase. After Maverick and Goose brought Ice and Slider home they all became friends but still liked to pick one another. So, he made sure nobody was around.

"Is everything going ok with Y/N?" Ice asked out of blue. It stunned both the pilot and the RIO. Ice waited patiently.

"Yea, everything is going great with her. She's doing well in school and during well in her sports. She's happy as can be." Maverick told his wingman before he took a bite of his lunch. He swallowed "Why do you ask?" Maverick asked him.

"I've noticed some things going on with her especially when you're not around. I think she has separation anxiety. She's showing symptoms of it." Ice said and took a sip of his drink before he could speak up again Goose spoke up.

"Now that Ice said something. I've noticed it to." He said and this caused a confused look to come across the young pilot's face. Slider nodded in agreement.

"What do you mean?" Maverick asked honestly since he doesn't see what they're seeing. She has always been happy around him and hasn't show any distress.

"Whenever you're not around she almost goes into panic mode. She begins to frequently look around and starts to get fidgety. She basically shuts down. She also asks where you were." Ice said completely abandoning his lunch along with Slider, Maverick, and Goose.

"How come I've never noticed it?" Maverick asked to nobody in particular but Slider answered it.

"It's probably because she doesn't want you to see it and she drops it and relaxes when she is in your presence again." Slider said and everyone was quiet.

"What should I do about it?" Maverick asked now concerned for his little girl. He had completely lost his appetite. He looked at his friends with pleading eyes.

"I would first talk to her about it and reassure her that you won't be going anywhere and that you're safe with us. If she needs to, she can come to any of us at anytime. She has everyone's numbers. I would also maybe talk about getting her in therapy." Slider spoke up and everyone nodded in agreement.

"Ok, I guess that would be a start." Maverick said

"It's a good start." Goose said slapped his friend's back. Another conversation was started and lunches were resumed except Maverick. He wasn't listening to anything and he didn't want to eat. The day went through like normal, thankfully they were done flying for the day. The day ended and everyone went home.

Maverick headed to Y/N school since it didn't let you for another 10 minutes. He needed to see this for himself so he parked in the parking lot with the other parents. When the doors opened he got out and walked up to the front stairs. He got many stares from the parents and some even flirted with him, how could they not? He was in his khaki uniform and he had that charming smile. He wasn't really paying attention and any flirting her politely turned down. He was just waiting for his little girl and when he found her with Bradley, they usually walked home but he decided to pick them up and he also let Goose and Carole know, he also wanted to watch her movements. The movements were jerky and she was looking around she seemed tense. She also wasn't smiling and if she did it didn't go to her eyes.

When she noticed her father standing at the steps all of those movements, tense shoulders, and nervous looking around stopped and she smiled and it reached her eyes. Maverick knew what Ice, Slider, and Goose were talking about. She and Bradley reached Maverick and smiled. "Hey, Dad what are you doing here?" Y/N asked and he smiled and hugged her and let go.

"Hey Maverick." Bradley said and gave him hug and then let him go.

"Hey guys. To answer your question, I figured I would pick you up today since we got done with teaching and flying. Goose and Carole already know I'm driving you home." Maverick said and not telling them the truth. He wanted to talk to his daughter privately. They turned and they walked to Maverick's 1998 Ford Explorer. They all got in and Maverick started the ignition and started towards their homes. Maverick dropped Bradley off and noticed that The Bronco was in the drive so he knew Goose was home.

Once Maverick and Y/N arrived home he put the car into park and shut the engine off and they got out. Maverick noticed that she was sticking to his side and would not move from him, even when they got into the house. She dropped her back at the front door and they each took off their shoes. It was silent and Maverick decided to break that silence. "How was your day, sweetheart?" He asked and she smiled at him when she stood up from her bent over position.

"It was good! Nothing really exciting as usual." She said with a chuckle, which Maverick loved hearing.

"That's good! I'm surprised they don't have you practicing today." He said to her.

"They said it was way too hot and they would postpone it for Saturday morning when it's cooler out." She replied and nodded in understanding and was glad the school was looking after the kids.

"I'm gonna go and change and then get supper started. Sound good?" Maverick asked his daughter and he saw her smile drop but then quickly put it back up.

"Um yea. Sure. Sounds good." She said nervously. He nodded and walked away towards his room and once he got there his smile dropped, why didn't his little girl speak to him about it? He had just put on sweatpants and was taking his shirt off when she walked into the room and sat on his bed. He turned around to face her.

"Everything alright?" He asked her and she nodded. She had changed into something more comfortable. He put on a T-shirt and a hoodie and went and sat down on the bed next to her and she turned towards him.

"Yea of course!" She exclaimed to her father and he knew it was time to talk to her about it.

"Sweetheart you know you can come to me about anything right?" He asked her and she nodded "Uncle Ice brought something up to me when we were at lunch and it was about you. He thinks that you have separation anxiety." Her smile dropped. He took that as a sign to continue "He told me that you're not around me and that you almost go into panic mode. He said that you begin to frequently look around and start to get fidgety. He also told me that you shut down and that you ask where I'm at. Goose and Slider have also noticed it as well." He said what Ice told him and what he say and she was silently looking down. "I also noticed when I was waiting for you at school. Talk to me, Sweetheart." He said and lifted her chin seeing tear tracks.

"He right. I'm sorry for not talking to you about it. You had a lot on your plate with teaching and just your job in general." Y/N started "It started after your accident that Goose and you had. Carole brought Bradley and I to the hospital to see you guys. Seeing you like that made me realize that I could lose you. I figured that if I'm with you at all times you wouldn't go anywhere. That I wouldn't lose you. I don't want to lose you, Dad." She sobbed out and he hugged her.

"Oh, sweetheart. Everything is ok and I'm ok. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. If you feel like this anytime I'm not around you can call me and if I don't answer then you have Ice's, Slider's, and Goose's numbers and you can call them anytime because I'm usually with them. If you want I can get you an appointment with the on-base therapist and you can talk to them any time. They know how to deal with these situations and teach you some tricks." Maverick told her as he pulled away from her.

Y/N nodded. "I think that's a good idea." She said. Maverick hugged his daughter again.

"I love you, you know that right?" He asked her into her hair and he felt her nod.

"Yes I do and I love you too." She said and pulling away and smiling at her father while sniffling. Her smiling made him smile.

"I'm not going anywhere. Now let's go get dinner cooking." Maverick said and she nodded I'm agreement as both of their stomachs growled and that made them laugh.

They got off the bed and headed downstairs towards the kitchen. Where they started making dinner together and joking around. Y/N just had to be reassured that her father wasn't going anywhere and now that she knew that she could rest easier. She was definitely going to take up the offer of seeing the base therapist. Everything was going to be alright.

Tag list:

@kmc1989

@els-marvelvsp

@atarmychick007

@nyx2021

[muffinsandstardust]

Roier and Foolish: Father and son, one in the same.

so! roier and foolish, family that have a lot in common. let's start with what everyone can see on the surface: they're both silly, comedy reilf characters who act goofy without seeming to take things seriously. this is an act they both put on, a mask. the mask does a lot:

1. it keeps others happy. foolish and roier both are notable for valuing other's happiness above their own. by acting silly, they relieve the mood and lift other's spirits which is very needed on an island where so much trauma is happening continuously.

2. it distracts from their own feelings of loss and dispair. roier and foolish are arguably the people who have lost the most on the island over the longest period of time. they both lost Vegetta and Leo, Roier also lost Spreen, Quackity, Bobby, and Tilín. That pain weighs on them constantly but pain is scary, vulnerability is scary. Especially when that pain and vulnerability has been used against you. (Mike targeting leo, the federation dangling the possibility of bobby being alive) no one enjoys hurting, and feeling numb isn't much better, so it's easier to run from the pain (literally in foolish's case). saying a joke or being the joke offers a distraction, keeps their minds away from the pain. cheering someone up allows their joy to become your joy, temporarily. also it's not just pain they're masking, it's anger. burning anger at the justice of it. because how is it fair they're left waiting with no end in sight. how is it fair they're to go on goose chases with no reward. they're hurting and they want others to hurt but right now they have no outlet to lash out at so better to feel nothing than to burn themselves on their anger.

3. the third reason they wear the mask is to hide their skills. if they (seemingly) take nothing seriously, no one will take them seriously. if they act happy all the time, people will think they ARE happy all the time and won't bring up their more risky emotions. no one can take advantage of vulnerability if they don't see any, don't think to look. if no one look closer, no one will see how capable and how dangerous they are. for instance, they're both very good at PvP but they hide it. no one knew they were skilled fighters. etoiles and cellbit were the only ones who knew about roier, and until yesterday no one knew about foolish. he's not up to etoiles level, but he is still a skilled pvper. they both know how to kill people but they are very careful about showing it. they also use this mask to hide their intelligence. by acting foolish, people underestimate how smart they are. for foolish, it's typical intelligence. foolish is an incredibly smart character/person, he is constantly thinking through the possibilities of everything to the point he's overthinking. he is able to spot and create codes to the point everything he says is a carefully crafted code. "I never lie, but I try not to tell full truths." if you've ever heard the foolhalo fish code conversation, you know how much he thinks about his moves ahead. he thinks so far ahead his fans call him psychic because of how many of his predictions come true. something about foolish I'll expand on later is foolish doesn't like how much he thinks so will go out of his way to not think or use his inteligence. roier uses his mask to hide his emotional intelligence. people forget roier was the therapist of the server before niki arrived. he is incredibly good at reading people and understanding them. and he's used that against people. i won't talk on the spreen situation, I know very little about that, but I will talk on the quackity situation. quackity told his therapist that he had a plan to kill the eggs but changed his mind. roier used that information to manipulate not only quackity, but the rest of the server to turn against quackity for revenge.

now i want to point out the father son dynamic and how much it comes across as not only roier and foolish being similar, but roier taking after foolish. foolish considers roier his son and roier calls foolish his dad, and they care about each other a lot. Foolish is roier with the mask refined, roier is foolish with less restraint. Roier is foolish without restraint. not to say roier has no restraint, but foolish restrains himself to an absurd degree. foolish is almost too paitent in how he acts and holds off on retaliating. roier in contrast, didn't hold back from ruining the lives of the people who hurt him. he spent literal months plotting how to torture someone he previously considered a friend. i fully believe hfoolish is capable of the same acts if not worse, and we saw a glimpse of that with mike's prank.

"Not just you. everyone. hell will rain down."

but foolish won't act on it yet. foolish needs a reason to act, roier needs a reason to hold back. the reason I say foolish has refined the mask, is because while roier is good, people have been able to catch on. etoiles being the main one. foolish has perfected his mask so well, it's a detriment to him. he will try to allow people behind the mask and is ignored or rejected.

"that's 3 out of 3 people who think you're not smart enough to pull this off." "he doesn't care about his kid! he's having too much fun arresting people!" "I think if you like the people you work for and agree with them then you're not influtrating you're just apart of them." "I don't think you know what you're doing." in trying to convince himself and ignore his feelings, he's convinced those around him to the point very few people actually understand him or try to see behind the mask. so even when he tries to trust, and rely on others, he is very limited on who will believe him if he turns to them.

so because of foolish's paitence, it comes across that foolish's mask is older (and more worn) than roier's. with the father son dynamic ontop, it comes across that roier's mask is less experienced and like he's learning/mimicking foolish. i don't think that's what's happened as roier was like this before he was adopted, but it's interesting how much the masks mimic each other.

except the masks have been cracking. the eggs have been gone for over 50 days and people are starting to notice. people are noticing the mask isn't holding up. people are noticing roier becoming more and more tired, he's sleeping more and his eyes bags are worse. people are noticing when foolish's voice cracks, when he goes quiet or suddenly gets angry.

the thing about foolish and roier is that they can read people very well, and they're family. i think it'd be wrong to assume they don't notice the way the other is deteriorating. so we come to the three reasons why they were fighting before purgatory. 1. foolish words, lashing out when the wound was still raw and he was still in shock was the catalyst and that shouldn't be brushed aside. that's a truth he should have kept to himself. (and what hurts is it is the truth, one they both agree with but hurts all the same.) the second reason is they're different methods of coping. because roier has lost everything and had his hope dashed so many times, he believes the eggs are dead. because foolish has lost so much, but seen so many twists and surprises, he believes the eggs are alive until a dead body is before him. for roier, to have hope would crush him. for foolish, to lose hope would crush him. the 3rd reason I would like to circle back to how easy they can read and understand people. now imagine your family, who you know is hurting so badly (and so are you.) daring to smile and act like they're happy. they want the other person to break and admit they're unhappy (maybe so they have permission to break). it's infuriating to see someone (you) acting like it's fine when you know it's not, that they (you) are not.

but all this was before purgatory. the egg wars event has forced them to show how capable they are. how deadly they are. people know now how good at fighting they are. they may try deny it (they both did and are) but people know now. the mask has slipped and there's no putting it back. it excites me thinking what that could mean for both of them. what does it mean when people take them just a bit more seriously?

[artaxlivs]

Somewhere Under the Rainbow

Rated T - no TW - I don't know how I became a Sterek fan having never watched the show but here I am...

Stiles is so busy bitching and complaining about this wild goose chase that Derek sent them on - in the rain, mind you - that at first he doesn’t even notice the actual goose is right in front of him. Doesn’t see it until he’s tripping over it and face planting in the soggy dirt, a tangle of his stupidly long arms and legs. The fucking goose climbs onto his back and settles in like Stiles is her nest - or maybe her gosling. God, that would be awful. A gosling? He’d never be able to live that down. He hopes no one sees this.

Pulling out his phone, Scott calls someone. Probably Derek. And then, because he’s Stiles’ best friend and best friends are fucking dickheads, he takes a picture. Stiles would be mad but he’d have done the same.

“Are you gonna get this thing off of me?” Stiles asks softly, trying not to spook the goose. Geese have teeth and since this one might be supernatural, it probably has something worse than teeth. Better to not make any sudden movements.

“Sorry dude, Derek said to wait for him.” Scott grimaces, shrugging. “He’ll be here in just a minute.”

“Welllllll, I best be gettin’ on with it then.” A gravelly, smug sounding voice says before there’s a popping sound and what can only be a fucking leprechaun appears at the edge of the clearing.  

“Oh no, I’m gonna have to switch breakfast cereals.” Stiles groans, still not shifting under the weight of the damn goose on his back. The forest floor is cold and uncomfortable, damp from the sprinkling that’s still falling all around them. Also there’s a rock poking into his hip bone that’s definitely gonna bruise.

Growling, Scott circles closer to Stiles, he’s not shifted but his teeth are bared and he looks ready to pounce.

“Sett’le down, pup.” The leprechaun waves at him, obviously not impressed or threatened. He’s got fucking buckles on his little heeled shoes and a little green jacket - waistcoat? Whatever. “No ‘ere for ya.”

“You here for the magic goose? Because you can have it. With my compliments.” Stiles says like they talk to leprechauns every day and this isn’t weird at all. He’s starting to fidget because meds or not, he’s incapable of lying prone for this long. The goose squawks and flaps its wings, Stiles shields his face with his shoulder but it doesn’t attack him, just settles in and starts to clean one of its wings.

The leprechaun cackles, slaps his knee and everything. “Magic goose? Thas’ no’ a magic goose!” He laughs for another few seconds and then takes a step toward Stiles, clapping his hands. Scott starts to move closer but then freezes when the leprechaun’s smile drops away and he turns to Scott with a menacing growl, “You’ll stay where ya’ are, young’in.”

The goose has apparently had enough at this point because it jumps down off of Stiles and waddles slowly away down the path. 

“Alright then?” The little man asks, looking down at Stiles again. “Ready?”

“Um…for what?” Stiles asks, attempting to drag out the inevitable. Derek and the others should be here by now. It’s weird that they’re not here yet. Whatever Stiles should be ready for, he’s hoping the pack gets here sooner rather than after he’s been kidnapped…or gotten dead.

“We’re goin’.” The leprechaun replies, sounding exasperated.

“Yeah, no. No, thank you.” Stiles stammers not looking at Scott who’s inching closer to Stiles as sneakily as he can. “I’d rather not.”

“Yeah, thas’ not ‘ow this goes,’ bairn.” The leprechaun says in his thick brogue, tsking as he shakes his head. “Iffin you give chase to a wild goose, and it catches ya,” He grins and his eyes seem to twinkle in the moonlight, “I get ta keep ya.”

“Whoa - no, Creepy McCreepster. That wasn’t in the rules and I decline.” Stiles says, pushing himself up to stand and attempting to brush the dirt and leaves from his favorite red hoodie but it’s wet from the rain and the dirt sticks in streaks and splatters. “Respectfully of course.”

“There’s no way we’re going with you.” Scott says, clenching his fists like he’s about to start a fight.

“I wasna’ talkin’ to ya.” The leprechaun barely glances at Scott, disdain on his face. “I donna collec’ sidekicks.” He spits out of the corner of his mouth like the word sidekick left a bad taste in there. Where the spit hits the ground, it sizzles. Which is…concerning.

Scott sputters, “Wha-what? I’m not a - a sidekick!” He sneers it and then waves a hand at Stiles who sure, is not the main character here but damn, they’ve been bros since the sandbox, how dare Scott call him a sidekick. “I mean - sorry man, I didn’t…shit.”

“Listen, Mr. Leprechaun, sir, this is more of an ensemble cast, “ Stiles says, waving his hands around, “Like…the Justice League. Or the Avengers.”

“No.” The leprechaun says with finality. “Th’ goose chose ya. And it didna choose ‘im.” He points at Scott and there’s a crackle then Scott crumples to the ground.

“What the fuck!” Stiles shouts, rushing over to Scott. He’s not dead, just sleeping. With a weird little smile on his face. “What did you do?” He demands, looking over at the leprechaun who’s proudly tucking his thumbs into the pockets on his vest - waistcoat? What’s the difference? Doesn’t matter. Whatever. It's a hideous yellow plaid whatever it’s called.

“‘e’ll be fine. Come along, I needta get ya to the rainbow before’n it’s too late.” With that, he does a little jig. It’s jaunty. Stiles has never had a reason to use that word before but that’s exactly what’s happening. A jaunty jig. 

The dancing little man grins again, snapping the fingers on one hand and Stiles finds himself suddenly standing in the middle of a field. The wildflowers are all grown up to his knees; their petals damp with rain as the mist falls all around him. The leprechaun is nowhere to be seen but when Stiles takes a step he comes up against an invisible wall.

Putting one hand against the wall, he follows it around in a circle. It’s less than five feet wide and he can’t find the top but it can’t be a dome because the rain is hitting his cheeks and soaking his sleeves. Looking down at his hands and sleeves though, the mist is glowing gold but only where it touches Stiles. Not on the flowers or the grass at his feet. And when he shakes off the droplets, they don’t glow where they hit the ground.

Looking up, he sees the end of the rainbow. Like a light show in the fog but it’s just mist droplets. Red and yellow and blue and there they mix, orange and green. Unzipping his hoodie, he lets it fall to the ground. The rainbow droplets tingle where they touch his bare arms but they don’t hurt. They feel good, they feel like tiny little bursts of happiness. 

Pulling his Batman shirt over his head, he drops it on top of his sweatshirt. The skin on his arms and chest and back feel awake, alive . Stiles turns in a circle, eyes flicking from staring up at the rainbow to down to the patterns of glowing spots along his bare skin.

There’s movement at the edge of the clearing and he looks up to see the pack all coming to a stop from a run. Of course something like this happened when they were all home for spring break. Stiles wonders who’d have been the victim of the week if he hadn’t been home from college. 

“Ya were ow’d a favor, Alpha Hale.” The leprechaun says as it pops into existence between Stiles and the pack. “Consida’ ya wish grant’d.” He does his jaunty little jig again and lets out that creepy little cackle, “But I coudna jus’ let ya’ have ‘em. Collect yer prize ‘afore it’s too late or I will.” His voice is steel at the end of his little speech and there’s the sound of some kind of wind instrument then he’s gone with a flourish.

Stiles puts his hands against the invisible wall. Scott looks pissed off. Most of the pack just looks curious. Derek looks nervous and a little scared. Stiles doesn’t know what the fuck they have to do to get him out of here but there better fucking do it because he does not want to become a plaything for a leprechaun. He’s eaten so many bowls of Lucky Charms over the years - there’s bound to be a price for that.

“Well?” Scott demands, looking from Derek to Stiles and when Derek doesn’t move, Scott closes the distance and reaches out for Stiles. Only to come up against the invisible wall. He slams his hands against it, rakes his claws along it but nothing happens. “Derek!” Scott turns to him, “Do something!”

Derek seems to shake himself free of something before he jogs over. But then he just stands there, not reaching out. Not doing anything but staring.

The mist along Stiles’ skin stops feeling like happiness and starts to hollow him out. Like sorrow. Like emptiness. Looking down, Stiles watches himself flicker like a lightbulb. He looks up and the rain has stopped. The rainbow still ends at him but it’s fading. They’re fading. 

“Derek?” Stiles can’t help that his voice trembles. Because it’s fading in and out, too.

Reaching out, Derek easily pushes past the invisible barrier, taking Stiles wrist and yanking him out of the path of the rainbow and into his arms. Stiles, as per usual, trips over his own feet and lands hard against Derek’s wall of muscle. His wrist, still held in Derek’s hand, fades away and comes back, fades away and comes back. Like a pulse. 

When Stiles turns and looks the rainbow is almost gone. The golden glow of his damp skin is waning. Gold. At the end of the rainbow.

“What did you wish for, Derek?” He says as he and the rainbow start to dissolve.

“You.” Derek whispers and pulls Stiles in for a kiss.

To say it’s a magical kiss is an understatement because holy four leaf clover, it really is magical. A magical kiss that brings Stiles back to full life and he's even still a little glowy from being the actual pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. He feels it in his toes and fingertips and everywhere in between. Sidekick his ass - he’s the happy ending to this story.

Go to Ao3 and tell me your thoughts!

[applepiesupreme]

American Apple Pie

Pairing: Low/Mid Honor Arthur Morgan and female OC.

Rating: Explicit

Summary: Savigne Ricci is a temporary guest at the Van der Linde camp. Her path crosses with the enforcer of the gang, Arthur Morgan, and despite their differences, a relationship develops between them. Whole lot of smut and fluff, slow burn-ish.

Chapter 40

AOC link:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/54945853/chapters/154132942

Standing here and looking out at the vastness of blue, it felt like there was nothing but water in the world; the memories of land dwarfed by its sheer size and volume. His previous struggles and aspirations, his fears and hopes dismal, small, insignificant. Life was a fleeting dream and at the end of it, all that you were allowed to stuff into your pockets, all that remained with you was moments of pleasure. Warm sunlight dancing on your belly through a tent flap. The taste of peaches. A glorious dawn, unfurling in a blaze. The heat of the campfire between your fingers when snow was building around you. A child’s eager eyes as they watched you hook up a worm. The hurried muscles of your horse in full gallop between your legs. The feeling of her wet cheek on his shoulder when she was slumped in his lap in warm water. The rest of it…pointless, used up, empty - just miles and miles of dusty road that led you to these little treasures.

It was impossible to stand at this banister day after day and not think of the sea monsters in Savigne’s book. And that thought inevitably led him to the morning at Clemens Point when she had served pancakes and Hosea and Jack had foolishly tried to outeat him. Afterwards she had sat reading to Jack and he remembered sitting behind them at the table, cleaning his gun. He remembered the sharp scent of the cleaning fluid. The quietness of the Sunday morning, interspersed with the cry of gulls. The slant of her eyes when she looked at him over her shoulder. That reddish tint in her hair when the sun hit it. If only he could go back to right then. And do everything differently. Before Ecco. Before that stupid fight they had about Abigail. Before the disastrous bank job. And before Hosea’s loss.

But…wasn’t that moment in time also before the better things that followed? Before the pact in the Bayou that had made his heart sing? Possibly before the child? Two things that were precious to him and two things he would never want undone no matter what the reward. In light of these, he thought Hosea would understand and maybe even approve of his reluctance to revert time.

The captain and the crew were amicable but distant. His gang mates, sullen and angry. Once or twice the issue of Fussar and the offered money brewed up but Arthur faced it with the same stoicism he had that day at the beach. When pressed, he told them Fussar couldn’t be trusted, he was a seasoned liar. Maybe there was money, maybe there wasn’t; maybe he would have shared it or maybe he would have tricked them and led them on a wild goose chase. All of it, hogwash. Truth was, he had wanted to keep his word. Why? Why does a man do anything? Because. Maybe because he had felt he had to honor Hosea, do something right by him as a show of gratitude. Maybe because he had sworn to himself that he would try to be a better man for Savigne. Maybe he had felt indebted to Hercule because of Micah. Maybe it was the secret, inexplicable shame he had felt when he thought how a kid that wasn't even born yet would think of him. It didn't matter, he had chosen as he had and he had no regrets. They weren’t satisfied with his answer but there was nothing to be done about it now, so they swallowed their anger and kept their arguments. 

Dutch barely talked to him. In twenty-two years, Arthur had made plenty of decisions that Dutch had disagreed with. But when push came to shove, he had always stood by Arthur, had defended him to others. Not anymore. What made this one apparently unforgivable was that it had been done with an audience. It was one thing to act within Dutch’s benediction and quite another to rebel against his person and call his leadership into question. The cardinal sin. There was no denying that both of them were men of a jealous and possessive nature. But their distinctions were stark: Arthur knew his possessiveness and jealousy was because of the scarcity of things that had belonged to him and him alone. Dutch’s jealousy, on the contrary, was because he was used to owning things and he couldn’t fathom ever going without them.

So now their once seamless bond was pockmarked with mistrust and hurt. That surprised him none. In hindsight, the course of their relationship had been leading to this point for a long time. The things that happened at Blackwater. Micah's rise in the gang despite Arthur's objections and inhibitions. Dutch's unwillingness to accept that the country had changed, his downright rejection of reality. Then the killing blow of Savigne's addition to an already strained relationship. A blind fortune teller could have told you that this bond had been limping and looking for an alley to die in for the better part of a year now. So no, no surprise there.

What did surprise him, however, was how little he cared. Here he was, at odds with a man who had practically been a father to him, and yet he was taking it as nothing more than the inevitability of growing pains. Once, not even that long ago, life without the gang and without Dutch would have been unthinkable. Now it felt natural and right because it was simply his turn to be a father, his turn to launch his own pack.

In his shirt pocket, a small folded piece of paper rattling with dark pellets of seeds.

“You already got everything a man needs,” Hercule squeezed it into his hand. “And this is all I have. Take it.” “What is it?” “Night blooming Jasmine. From my mother’s garden.” He grunted his thanks. He wasn’t a sentimental man but he liked flowers. Still kept his mother's flower to this day by his bed. Besides, when a man gave you something precious to him, you took it with the respect it deserved. “For luck?” “Good days, for luck. And to remember home.” The black man shrugged with a grin. “Bad days, so it can bud wherever I fall. Something pretty to leave the world.” Arthur chuckled at the concept. “It's no regular jasmine, patron!" was the proud addition. "Family heirloom, gonna smell for miles! You plant it your garden. Good days, it's gonna make your woman happy. Be the envy of town.” “Bad days?” was his amused question. Hercule smiled. “Bad days - and may there be few - hope it makes you think of me. Guarma. And what you did for us here.”

He had left America with bars of gold and was returning with flower seeds. If that wasn't life telling you your outlaw days were over, he didn't know what was. 

First the coastline appeared like a solidifying dream as the day turned from purple to blue. Arthur felt a flutter in his heart. For all the complaining and cursing he did, he had missed his homeland. The grass, turns out, was not greener elsewhere. Then the distant haze of Saint Denis crept up, that city he had hated profusely and now couldn’t wait to see again. The captain’s quoted date meant they had been gone for five weeks. An absurd amount of time. Unthinkable things could happen in five weeks. For all he knew there was no more gang and everything was in the wind. And what if Savigne had moved states to have the child in private and hadn’t shared her plans with anyone? If she hadn’t told Luther or Sadie, the odds of tracking her were terrifyingly small.

Dutch decided that they would split up and he would check for mail at a post office while Arthur would ride out to Shady Belle. He was fine with this as he had always been a man of action and felt the urge to move, to look and to find. The morning he arrived back was chilly and silent. He was rowed to land where he came upon an unattended horse and took it as a good sign. He led her quietly away before he climbed up and turned her south. The horse was a small thoroughbred but eager to run and he let her run to her heart’s desire as they arced around Saint Denis to head to Shady Belle. His heart thundered in tandem with the hooves in expectation what he would find.

He tied the horse to a tree not far from the mansion and crept closer on foot, cautious. But as soon as he had sneaked close enough, he knew it was deserted - he could feel it. Not only deserted, but deserted a while ago. He walked into the mansion, head whipping left and right, both cautious of traps and wary of missing any clues. The gang had left in a hurry, that was obvious, probably soon after the robbery had gone sideways. The letter on the table was clean and sharp and stood out among the other dilapidated items. He quickly read through it and stuffed it into his pockets. Maybe the Pinkertons had found it and had made their own deductions, or maybe it had been placed here after things had calmed down and Pinkertons hadn't come back this way again. Either way, he wasn’t going to leave it behind to be discovered. So Sadie had moved them to Lakay. Clever woman. More and more he thought that the only good call in this colossal ball of failure had been to leave the lead to her.

He left the mansion and marched back towards his horse, but then stopped midway and his head swiveled towards where his old tent used to be. After a moment's hesitation, he surrendered to the temptation and headed over.

The tent was gone, of course. By the looks of it, undone in a hurry. The wagon and the fabric were removed, but the pillars still stood there, tilted and crooked, reaching for the sky. He walked around, touching the emptied crates, running his hands around the pillars and inspecting the imprints of the furniture, faded now, but still there. A little further, the second clay oven and the ice box. 

A surge of missing came over him. In the quiet solitude of the morning hours, without another soul for miles, the depths of his foolishness felt enormous. He walked around between those crooked columns and felt irredeemably stupid. All a man could ever want had been right here. Handed to him on a silver platter. And he had walked away from it. For fucking money. He had pettily slept on a bedroll and then had walked out to leave it behind. As if good fortune grew on trees and he could pluck another whenever he felt like it. Why? His god damn pride, that’s why. Bent out of shape because she had kept secrets from him when he should have focused on why she kept them and marveled at her love for him. Stupid, just hopelessly stupid.

Dropped the ball. Again, he thought as despair took hold in his heart. Fucking clumsy fool. Yer hands shaky and yer heart weak, yer always gonna drop that damn ball, ain't ya? Deep in his gut, that old habit to just wander off and wallow in self pity reared its head, whispering the usual things.

Pick it the damn back up then, Hosea growled in his head. His eyes shifted to the spot they had sat and talked, what felt like years ago now. A long while later he rolled his shoulders and nodded imperceptibly. Alright, old man, he thought. Here I go.

He rode around the swamp for hours and the dull winter sun was over its high point by the time he took an untested fork in the road and Charles quietly slipped out from his hidden spot. Arthur reared his horse in surprise, then grinned like a fool and jumped down to walk up to the other man.

“Knew you would return,” Charles said as he stepped closer. His eyes were dancing with laughter when he extended his hand. Arthur coughed a huff of joy as he mirrored the clasp on his forearm. The five weeks suddenly felt like five years.

“I didn’t,” was his stammer of a half chuckle.

"Welcome back, big guy," was the soft response, accompanied by the grip of a shoulder. Charles gave him a head to toe. "We missed you."

"Glad you made it outta them docks," Arthur breathed, overcome with emotion at seeing a familiar face again. "Given what happened after, ya made the smart choice, tell ya that."

Charles smiled. "That's why I made it." Arthur huffed in amusement and followed Charles' head jab. "Little further down this path. Go on."

Frost danced in his spot when he arrived and he walked over to pet him and coo to him, his heart thrumming with elation. People started trickling out of the hut and running over. The women embraced him and the men did, too. He had long history with some of these folks, but rarely had the reaction been this intimate and rarely had he allowed it. 

Sadie strolled over last, the grin on her face impossibly wide. She embraced him too, smacked him on the shoulder, then embraced him again. 

“You fool! Fuckin’ dumb fool,” she hissed in his ear. 

He nodded into her neck. “Fair.”

She slung off his satchel and pushed it at him, “Glad ‘m rid of this shit.”

It surprised him that she still had it instead of Savigne, but he accepted it. Questions erupted about what happened and where the others were, but he hardly heard them as his eyes scanned the camp. 

“Where is she?”

“She workin’. She be back soon.” Sadie answered.

He sighed with relief. So she had remained with the gang. A third electrifying shock of relief ran through his nerves. His luck held.

“She okay?”

Sadie gripped his arm and led him towards the cabin. “Oh sure. She okay enough to bite your head off, if that's what yer askin'. Come sugar, have some food and water. You look like you need it.”

His steps faltered. The urge to find her, to see her was overwhelming. "I gotta..."

“You don’ wanna ambush her at work. Plenty of knives in a kitchen.”

He scoffed, wiping his palms over his sunburned face. “That bad, huh?”

“Mister Morgan,” Sadie sighed, dragging him on, “Was me, I would carve your heart out.”

They shooed him into the cabin like a flock of hen and pushed a chair under him and put a glass of cool water into his hand. Questions bubbled up again and he tried to answer to the best of his ability, dazed and distracted with relief and happiness. At some point a bowl of stew was placed in his lap and he gulped it down, marveling at how good it tasted. While he ate they told him their story. How they had rushed out of Shady Belle. Weathered the news of the men’s demise. Broke out John.

At long last he said he needed a moment, took his coffee and cigarettes and stepped out to walk to his wagon. He was dismayed to see the state of it and his optimism faltered a bit as he inspected its condition. The only pieces of furniture were the two chairs and the table. They sat a bit crooked in the mud. On the table, an old newspaper that reported the sinking of the ship. His mouth went dry. He sensed that she hadn’t been well and the child was just a small part of it.

He climbed up the wagon - the crates stood haphazardly lidded, rummaged through and just left there. It disturbed him that she had been living here for over five weeks like this. The Savigne he knew couldn’t sleep if a corner of a picture wasn’t aligned with the rest. She used to twitch when the crates sat out of order. He jumped down and came around to the bed. The tent flap was bunched up, swaying limply and the sheets looked dirty and worn.

“Why she been livin’ like this?” he asked when Sadie approached.

“What d’ya mean why? She been upset.”

“I know that, but she be less upset if the tent was clean.”

“She didn’ care to clean it,” was the shrug.

He palmed his mouth, fingers rubbing his beard. He came to stand by the table again and looked down at the article in the newspaper. It bothered him that this was the only item on the table, aged from being re-read. 

“She was sick, wasn’ she?” he asked, eyes meeting hers. “Like before.”

Sadie nodded.

Arthur straightened and looked about. “Should have tol’ me,” he said at last.

“‘Bout?”

“The child.” Sadie’s eyebrows went up and she gave him a long head to toe, as if she wondered how he put it together.

“Did. Best I could.”

“Nah,” he shook his head, fixing her with his gaze. “Should have said it as is.”

Sadie snorted. “Right before a job? No sir!”

“Wouldn’ been a job if ya said somethin’. Not for me.”

She shrugged and strolled closer. “You was yappin’ it's yer last job. Everyone talkin’ how much gang needs it. Wasn’ gonna pull the pin on it.” He inhaled and sank into the chair. “Said you should switch with me. Said you shouldn’ go. Once you said you gonna, wasn’ gonna put that in yer head.”

She pulled the other chair and flipped it to sit backwards, arms resting on the back of it. “That bein’ said, if I knew what was gonna happen, you bet yer ass would have said that and more.”

He wasn’t happy with her answer, but it was honest and it would have to do. Wasn’t Sadie’s problem that he was deaf and blind, wasn’t Sadie’s fault the job went sideways. Hard pill to swallow, but most truths were.

“She know?”

“She know now,” Sadie grimaced. “Wasn’ easy but she made peace with it. You finally put it together, huh?”

There was a short silence. The swamp around them thrummed and sang through it.

“Had to travel a thousand miles to see it,” he huffed with bitter amusement. “Almost lost it all.”

“Was a rough few weeks,” Sadie sighed. “But coulda been worse. She okay. Baby okay. She workin’ again, think that helps. John helpin’ her fix a place. All you gotta do is swoop in and do right. She’ll come around.”

“What kinda place?”

“Hear it’s a cabin. Close to Saint Denis.”

“Cabin?!”

“There an echo here? Yeah, cabin.”

“Woman…” he growled, trying to suppress the shiver of the past that brushed against him, “…you was gonna let her live in a cabin? With my god damn child?!”

Sadie ignored his rising hackles and the timbre of his voice. “She a grown woman and I ain’t in the business of ropin’ people down. But she wasn’ gonna be alone. John and Abigail offered to stay with.”

This surprised him. He rolled his shoulders and leaned back, giving her a furtive look. “Who talked the idiot into that?”

“He offered on his own. We was as surprised as you when he came back, tellin’ us that’s what’s gonna happen, all cocked up and defensive.” She chuckled to herself. “Fool thought we was gonna put up a fight. Tell you what, never seen Abigail so proud. Thought she was havin’ a stroke.”

He clicked his tongue and grinned despite himself, unable to hide his pleasure at the news. He mused on this development and offered a grunt of approval a minute later.

“Guess he one of them folks who step up when it counts,” she smiled.

“Made him promise,” Arthur crossed his arms, unwilling to heap too much praise. “Course he stepped up.”

Sadie hummed in amusement. “Anyhow,” she changed tracks, “Heard you talkin’ in there ‘bout what happened. Money sank. Now what?”

Arthur ran his tongue over his teeth. “Told you ‘m done after. That don’ gone changed.” His eyes flicked up to her. “Ain’t gonna risk a hair here on out, I got family to think on.”

“Settle down, ‘m on your side,” her palms rose, amused at how territorial he sounded. “But…it’s a bit sad,” she shrugged, looking around. “The mighty Van der Linde gang ends in a swamp? Broke?”

“More than we deserve,” he grimaced. “But we ain’t exactly broke. Dutch sittin’ on all them savings. We share that and walk.”

“That ain’t much.”

He took a while to answer, but placed his elbows on the table and gave her a look. “There’s also Blackwater money. Hundred and fifty grand.”

Sadie whistled softly. “Too bad nobody can retrieve it.”

His eyes lingered on her a while. “I can’t retrieve it. Dutch can’t. Nobody who was there that day can. But…” he leaned forward and dropped his voice, “…you can. Charles can. He was with the gang but wasn' at the job.”

Sadie must have given this some thought because the suggestion didn’t surprise her. “Dutch ain’t gonna tell where it is,” she said at last.

Arthur shrugged. “We convince everyone we walkin’, he gonna have to hand it over. Ain’t his money, belongs to all of us. But if he still won’ do the right thing…I might have a clue where it is.”

“Really?”

“We was fishin’ while back in Clemens Point - me, Dutch and Hosea. Dutch said his mom was buried in Blackwater.” She hummed at this, intrigued, watching him. “Thought that was…interestin'. Was me, would go pay my respects to Missus Van der Linde one nice evenin’.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything for a while. Then: “What happened over there? You good with Dutch and the other two?”

“No,” was Arthur’s flat answer. “Things broke between us. I ain’t celebratin’ but was gonna happen anyway. Moment I promised Savigne we gonna leave, was gonna happen. Dutch says we can leave anytime, our choice, but he don’ mean it. For you maybe, not for me.” He groaned bitterly. “Truth is, a year ago, I felt the same. Never forgave John for leavin’. Walked around urgin’ folks to stay, to hang in. Was such a fool,” he finished with a tinge of disgust.

“Don’ beat yerself up too hard,” she sighed. “This all you knew. You big and burly, but you wasn’ fully grown.”

“Gave up Mary for the gang,” he mused. “Gave up Eliza and my kid. Thought I was bein’ loyal. Steadfast. Stand up guy. Ya know Sadie,” he squinted across the marsh. “I robbed plenty of folks in my life. But think I robbed m’self the most. Aint that somethin’?”

She watched him a long while as he ruminated in silence.

“Way I see it,” she said at last, “all that had to happen so now you can choose differently.”

He smiled a broken smile at her and nodded.

“I asked cause I made sure nobody but me, John and Abigail know where that cabin is. I was you, I do the same.”

This surprised him. “Why?”

Sadie shrugged. “Nobody’s business, that’s one. Pinkertons think you all dead, so they ain’t lookin’ now. But…” she gave him a long, hard stare. “…don’ hurt to be smart.”

“How so?”

“You gotta take yer blinders off. You sure that if they get caught few months down, Bill or Javier wouldn’ sell you out for a deal with the law?”

He mulled this over, surprised by his own blind spot. He had ridden with these people for years, but he had also lost a lot of goodwill with them in Guarma. And even without all that, there was no reason to presume blind allegiance from them.

“Moreover,” Sadie pressed on, “the human heart is dark, boss man. These people love you like a big brother. But love and jealousy go hand in hand. They might be happy for you but they might also resent you for leavin’. Might think you ditchin’ them at their lowest.” He nodded, thoughtful. “So,” Sadie concluded. “Folks here know she with child. They know she movin’ out somewhere. But unlike you, they haven’t grown, haven’t changed, cause most think, hope, this gonna be like Eliza.”

This startled him. How can they think that, he wanted to ask, when they know how much I regretted what happened? When I carried this wound for years now, a gaping hole that drank and drank - drank the whiskey but also drank my misery, my guilt, my anger and still wouldn’t fill?

“They don’ want nothin’ to happen to her, ‘m sure,” Sadie soothed, watching him. “But Savigne called them lazy and entitled and I can’t argue. Thing is…” she sighed, squinting off, “…people all good and generous and nice. Until they served the bill. Might not say it, but in their hearts, they ain’t gonna like this choice you make, so be smart ‘bout what you blab to whom.”

He balked at this. Dutch was one thing, but the gang? Tilly and Grimshaw and Mary Beth?

“Gave these folks my best years. Ya really think they want more?” was his incredulous question.

She gazed at him a long while. Sadie was younger than him in years, but wisdom, turns out, aged differently.

“Course, you fool,” she said gently. “People always want more.”

“I really like that stall you built,” she huddled into her coat and grinned up at him. “Cricket is going to love the roof over his head!”

John shrugged with his signature boyish shyness. A week ago someone got robbed and killed in the Bayou, not that far from camp and ever since, she couldn’t get rid of him. Every day he found an excuse to come pick her up at the edge of the city, claiming he was on his way back from somewhere - hunting or foraging or returning with construction material for the cabin, elaborating some nonsense story as he led Cricket to be tied to the cart next to Old Boy. She knew it was all bullshit but Arthur had given her plenty of practice in how to deal with men who were too proud to - god forbid - care about someone, so she pretended she believed it. And he pretended he believed her believing. So now they did this ridiculous dance and song because the man simply couldn’t say “I worry about you traveling in the Bayou after dark”.

She didn’t mind though, because John didn’t have Arthur’s brusqueness. It was never “Woman, get on the damn cart!”, but “‘M thinkin’ if we take the cart, gonna save us some time. You agree?” She, of course, agreed. He handled her with a caution and clumsy care she didn’t know he was capable of and times like this, she understood what Abigail saw in him. That grim, childish determination to keep his promise was quite cute. She was an only child but wondered if this was how one felt about siblings. 

“Just nailed some boards together…” he rolled his shoulders.

“Well I’m a stickler for doing things the proper way and the boards looked really even,” she praised.

“Wasn’ hard,” his eyes flicked at her, the corner of his lips turning up as the swung the cart into the trail leading to the camp. 

“How?”

“Cut a stick and used it to measure so they the same,” he shifted in his seat.

“That’s genius!” she exclaimed and grinned wider as his shoulders straightened. “See, most people wouldn’t care.”

“Savages!” was his sarcastic huff.

She chuckled and turned to camp and her grin froze on her face as she spotted Arthur Morgan rise from the chair by their wagon. She blinked rapidly with incomprehension and felt her jaw go slack. John pulled the reins and Cricket and Old Boy came to a jostling halt. She turned to him, eyes like saucers. He glanced at her and nodded as if he understood her silent question. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “He there, y’aint dreamin’.”

She turned back and indeed, he was still there, solid. No ghost, no apparition. He had obviously pulled some clothes from the crates in their wagon and had made an effort to clean up and trim his beard. But underneath this he looked distinctly leaner and haggard, the roundness of his shoulders more bony, the carve of his abdomen more obvious. His skin was a color she had never seen on him before, a lot darker. It made the blue of his eyes even more prominent than before. A flash of teeth. The familiarity of that cocky expression knocked the breath out of her.

He flung the cigarette to the ground as a grin crept up his face and settled into his eyes, dancing with blue mirth. His gaze never wavered from her as he stepped around the table and started to walk towards them, his steps loping, confident and swift. She watched, hypnotized by his approach, her mind frozen, unable to process what was happening. Distantly she felt John climb down and walk away, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from Arthur as she flustered between allowing herself to hope or remaining steadfast that it was impossible. Maybe she was hallucinating not just this but the entire day? Maybe that damn roof had indeed collapsed on her head and she was lying under it, unconscious and in the clutch of a lucid dream while the real John was scrambling to dig her out. Time dilated and stretched, then snapped together like a rubber band. She blinked and he was by her side of the cart, reaching up, fingers beckoning. 

“Gonna come down, little bird?” Hearing that gravely voice, that accent again turned her knees into mush. She just sat there and gawked in shock, unable to move a finger and wheeze a word as a jolt went through her stopped heart and it restarted with a vengeance, thudding in her chest and hammering in her ears. 

His grin widened, eyes dancing with joy as if he was proud of himself to have surprised her into speechlessness, as if the prank he had pulled had landed to his satisfaction. A moment later his large hands encircled her waist and she managed to utter a grunt of surprise as she was lifted like a child and pulled down.

She was smacked against his chest, arms coiling around her shoulders to press her in. For all his air of light-hearted ease, the kneading of her flesh, the urgency of his fingers in her hair, that huff of panting in her ear betrayed the intensity of his own emotions. She stood rigid as a board, her head grappling with disbelief while her heart was rushing as if she was falling from a great height.

“Almost didn’ recognize you,” he grinned into her ear. “Ya look damn fine.” The squeeze of her buttocks made her jump and woke her from her daze. She gasped a sob and then another, and then the rest followed as she threw her arms around his back and buried her face into his chest. She hadn’t had laudanum in weeks and yet she distantly wondered if the scent of his skin and the warmth of his body was a trick of her mind. 

“The hell ya been?” he teased, “been waiting for hours.” Smug as if he was proud to trivialize his own disappearance.

“Oh my god!” she cried and wheezed for breath. Her fingers clawed at his back as they danced around each other to avoid getting their feet tangled.

His hands were everywhere, in her hair, pulling on her arms and pressing against her hips, cupping her face and squeezing her shoulders, fingers curling around her flesh and her locks as if he couldn’t contain his excitement.

He smelled of dust and cigarettes and sweat and the ocean and was warm like a stone that had baked under the sun for weeks. She realized that until this moment, she hadn’t believed he had survived. Not really. That unlike the others, she had buried him in her head and in her heart, buried him prematurely under layers of her own problems, well hidden so she wouldn’t have to think of him. Her bewildered mind remembered the article of the shipwreck she had read countless times and she croaked “How?”

“Ship sank,” he sighed. “Got washed up on an island. Then…sailed back.”

“Like Robinson Crusoe?” she blinked up, stupefied.

He barked a cough of laughter, his joy raw and also tinged with disbelief at his own fortune. “No. Had to shoot my way through.”

How can you miss the blue in someone’s eyes? she wondered when she gazed up at him. The next moment he was kissing her. And not a chaste kiss you would expect from him in the middle of camp either, but a full on, unabashed and hungry, hand-cupping-the-back-of-her-head-to-tilt-her-head-to-his-liking kind of kiss. She stumbled back with the force of it but his other hand shot out to pull her back by the hip. Her arms flew around his neck to steady herself and she rose on her toes to kiss him back, hiccuping and sobbing into his mouth.

When he broke it she was breathless and dizzy. His thumb brushed her wet cheek as his eyes danced.

“I thought you were dead,” her lips wobbled as she fisted his lapels. “Five weeks, Arthur! I thought you were fucking dead!”

He cupped the back of her head and pressed her face into his shoulder. “I know, little bird,” he sighed. “‘M sorry.” A long minute passed as she clutched at him with disbelief and he ran his other hand over her back, allowing her to recover from her shock. An overwhelming sense of safety washed over her. A feeling she hadn’t even known she had lost. Something to be found nowhere else but in his arms. She hugged him with all the force she could muster, like he would fly away if she loosened her hold even a little. The Bayou, indifferent to their human drama, just sang on around them and she hugged him tighter still and cried into his shirt. That heartbeat under her cheek was like music to her ears. The choppy waters of her mind churned and slopped, then finally calmed a little  as he caressed her back. A dim memory of someone else doing this to her when she was little crested in her and the feeling of safety inflated her heart bigger and bigger and bigger still - to the point where she felt like she was all heart.

“Ya gonna do yer thing?” he drawled at last when her panting ceased.

“What thing?” she sniffed.

“Yer ‘missed you’ thing?”

She looked up at him with astonishment.

“Cause when you say ‘missed you’,” he drawled, “this time I get to say ‘yeah, been long’.” He chuckled at her expression like a little boy who had discovered the cleverest joke. “Get it? ‘been long’ instead of ‘hasn’t been’…”

She pushed off him and ran her palms over her face, trying to gather her wits. Despite the relatively mild climate of the Bayou, she was trembling like a leaf. He stepped closer and ran his fingers through her hair as if he had forgotten the curve of her locks.

Arthur Morgan, alive. Someone pushed a picture album of the past five weeks under her nose and opened that hefty folder with a creak. Here she was, ugly crying. Here, drinking laudanum. More crying. Here, getting yelled at by the sous chef and trudging away from the pinnacle of her career. Oh look, more crying. Weeks of dirt and muck and croaking frogs. Weeks of pushing a fake ring on her finger and ignoring Susan’s smugness now that she had tumbled back down from the heights she had climbed, right into the same droll job. Weeks of slapping mashed potatoes on a plate and trying to forget the fact that she would never do flambé again. And here, a picture of her buying two dozen handkerchiefs because there was a mountain of crying to be done.

“Unbelievable!” she hissed, removing her hands from her face to glare at him.

“Said ‘m sorry,” he said defensively but the smirk didn’t leave his face.

“Which part?” she growled and smacked his chest which only made him grin wider. “The stupid robbery?” Smack “The part where you fucking disappeared?” Smack “Or the part where you broke up with me?”

His smile faltered at that. “Listen here, I never broke up.”

“You left me,” her eyes welled as he snaked his arms behind her back again. “You left me and you didn’t even care!”

“Nonsense. Yer spinnin’ in yer head again.”

She pushed off his chest. “This is the worst thing anyone has ever done to me!”

“That so?” was the infuriating question.

“Yes! Absolutely!”

He grimaced. “Them O’Driscolls come to mind…”

Savigne made a choking sound in her throat.

“‘M just sayin’!”

The problem with Arthur Morgan was that he was too fast. He avoided her slap like he saw it coming a week ago and immediately closed the distance, fingers brushing against her arms, cupping her shoulders. His eyes dropped to her lips.

“Don’ pout. Ya pout, ‘m gonna kiss ya.”

She wrestled his hands off her. “You horrible man! You think you’re going to show up and I’ll take you back like a fool, don’t you?” She poked a finger in his chest. “You and me - we’re over!” He scoffed like she was being silly and her eyes narrowed. “I’m not interested in your excuses! It’s done. The end. I moved on.”

He clicked his tongue and strolled closer again. “Listen here, I get yer mad. But I didn’ get on that ship knowin’ it was gonna sink…”

“Don’t…fucking…care!” she backed away as he advanced. 

“Survived five weeks of hell. For you. Sailed across the damn ocean. For you.”

Any other time she would marvel how these words were falling so easily from the lips of the man she had to read through grunts and eye flicks. Not today.

“Wouldn’t have to do all that if you had never left!” she seethed.

He stepped up again. His hand shot out quick as a snake to pull her closer by the neck and lean his forehead on hers. “Woman...” she tried to wiggle away but he pressed himself against her. There was a long moment where he looked like he was working himself up to saying something serious and Savigne stilled, wondering if he was done downplaying the situation. If he had more introspection than a ten year old. Then suddenly his hand splayed across her belly, first more tentative, then increasingly confident as he mapped out the bump and loosely cupped it. “…calm down. Ain’t good for the grub.”

She felt the color surge up to her face like a splash of hot water. It must have been quite dramatic from his point of view too, because he blinked at her reaction with alarm and pulled back a little.

“You okay?”

Fuck!…she thought and swayed a little as her legs went weak.

“Savigne?”

“I’m okay,” she lied and moved his hand off her stomach, busying herself with brushing her skirts so she wouldn’t look at him. The heat on her face throbbed like a pulse. Her eyes flicked up to him, then quickly away as she chewed on her lower lip.

On the one hand, someone had done her a huge kindness. Because the worst moments her imagination had conjured up as she lied in her bed late nights, fantasizing a world where he had survived, had to do with the reveal. That was the point his face would fall and his features would twist into anger. Or regret. Or worst of them all - resignation. 

On the other hand, she kind of wished that she could have seen his initial reaction because it would have been more honest and true and now that he had time to process it, she could never be sure. 

He tried to catch her eyes, his mood of jubilation finally dissolving into doubt. “Ya wanna…sit down?”

“I’m fine,” she ran a hand through her hair, trying to be as nonchalant as possible. It was damn hard when you were as red as a beet. “Just tired.”

For all his blundering foolishness, Arthur was thankfully intuitive and sensed that she wasn’t ready for a cavalier conversation in that particular matter. “Course y’are,” he sobered and gently grabbed her arm to lead her to the chairs.

She fell into a chair and he pulled the other one right next to hers and ran his hand over her back again. The camp was suspiciously quiet and empty and she eyed the cabin, wondering if they were all perched by the windows.

“So where were you?” she growled.

“Guarma.”

As if that should mean something.

“Where the hell is that?”

“Island off of-”

“You know what? I don’t care!” She rolled her shoulder to get rid of his hand and he ignored her. “Hope it was worth it! Hope you ate a lot of coconuts and drank whatever the fuck they drink over there and sang songs by the campfire and had a fantastic vacation!”

“Woman, I almost died.”

She shot up, grabbed her chair, moved it a step away, slammed it into the mud and sat back down.

“I also hope everything that crawled on that damn island bit you.”

He cleared his throat and moved his chair next to hers again.

“Now listen here…”

“You called me a scorpion! And fat!”

“The hell? Said yer ass was plush.” He hesitated when her eyes blazed at him. “Was a compliment.”

“You think, you really fucking think you can go rob a bank, a god damn bank, Arthur Morgan, and I will sit here in the mud and take you back?! Like, ‘Good job, welcome back’? Reward you so you can run off and do it again?”

“Ain’t never doin’ that again,” was his quick defense.

Just then the door of the cabin banged open and Uncle strutted out. He made it as far as the steps before hands and arms grabbed him and pulled him back in. The door was banged shut and muffled his protestations.

Her face that had been normalizing colored all over again as she realized they were having a full on fight in the middle of camp. No “young lady” was hollered and nobody came out to remind them that they were not alone. She turned to look at him with narrowed eyes. Arthur seemed to have changed in some surprising and profound ways. The man who used to stiffen at a hug or a kiss on the cheek had openly embraced her, kissed her and didn’t seem to give a damn that they were having a private argument in everyone’s earshot. Either he was too happy to care or his stint offshore had made him more confident, looser, bolder. Probably both.

“I’m going to bed,” she rose.

“Good idea,” he mirrored her.

She stepped away, then whipped back and hissed a quieter “Also, I fucking hate you!” before she marched around the wagon. The short distance didn’t allow her a dramatic exit but she made the best of it. She untied the tent flap and sat on the bed to yank off her boots.

To her amazement, he came to sit next to her and followed suit. Which completely ruined her dramatic exit.

“What are you doing?”

“Going to bed?”

“Here?!”

“This our bed, no?” He ignored her incredulous look.

“The bedroll is in the wagon. There’s room enough back there, you’re welcome to it.”

“I ain’t doin’ that,” he scoffed. “Would be disrespectful.”

“Who the hell said that?”

“You did,” was the response with a cocked eyebrow.

“That was when we were still together!” she hissed and crawled on the bed.

He pulled the flap down and lied behind her.

“And we're not together anymore,” she added, annoyed how her heart thudded not with anger, but foolish contentment.

“The hell gave you that idea?” he shifted closer. 

“I think it dawned on me when I slept on this bed alone for like a week before you left. We broke up and then you left me. I’m single now.”

She felt him inch closer still and an amused “That so?” followed.

He lightly laid a hand on her hip and when no explosion of fury ensued, crept closer still.

“What exactly do you think happens when you abandon someone? They become single. I’m single.”

Despite her annoyance, the exceedingly slow and careful way he arranged himself to lie flush against her put a smile on her face. Her resolve to do something about it quickly drained out of her. God, how she had missed this man! Her heart welled up. It wasn’t easy to push Savigne’s ire down and yet she didn’t even have to try. That warm body lying against her, that hand on her hip and the breath on her neck did it all so effortlessly. You’re pathetic, her inner voice chanted but even that voice sounded merry instead of its usual spiteful timbre.

“In that case, ma’am,” he sighed into her hair, “Wanna go on a date? I’ll take ya to the zoo.”

It took a firm palm on her mouth to keep in the chortle. Unfortunately he picked up on her amusement and her softening temper as his hand grew bolder and traveled around her hip to sit inconspicuously close to her belly. “Ya tryin’ to say yes?” he asked with a grin in his voice.

“Absolutely not.” she managed once she had gulped the laughter down.

“Fine, I’ll throw in a dinner.”

“Wow, a whole dinner!” she pushed away his hand and he placed it on her breast instead.

“I’ll open the door for ya…”

“Jesus, hold the presses!” she rolled a shoulder and the hand glided back down to her bump.

“…pull out yer chair…”

“I’m so fucking mad at you,” she grumbled. He was pressed against her like a second layer of skin and she wished she had bothered to change into her nightgown so she could feel him better, to be closer still. She brushed off his hand again and he caught hers and folded it in a firm but gentle grasp.

“Savigne,” he sighed, inhaling her sent. “‘M gonna fix it.”

She lied there, wrecked with a happiness so enormous, it hurt her chest. Everything that seemed dull and tarnished and hopeless all these last weeks brightened with blinding light. Like someone had thrown the shades aside in her room and all her nightmares, all the demons that tortured her in the dark evaporated. No monsters under her bed or in her closet, that scary figure sitting on the chair watching her all night was just a pile of clothes, the claws tapping against her window was just the tree outside, that whisper she had listened to was just the water in the pipes. The world was warm and safe again and all her fears were smoke.

How could a man simply show up and dispel it all so easily, so effortlessly? Was it magic? Witchcraft? Voodoo?

She made a last attempt to fan the flames of her temper: “This is not the kitchen sink, Arthur!”

“Good. Cause I ain’t got a clue how to fix that.”

It was impossible to fight him when he was in a good mood and despite looking like he had waded through hell, he was in a fabulous mood. Her fire sputtered and dimmed down to embers in his hold.

“Tell ya what," thumb brushing the back of her hand, "you wanna fight, we fight tomorrow.”

They both knew this meant they wouldn’t, because Arthur simply didn’t like fighting and Savigne’s temper was too short lived. That’s why he handled most conflicts between them either with a firm resolution, or complete lack of acknowledgement, confident that they would disintegrate once her ire had passed. Which, embarrassing enough, proved to be true more often than not.

“Fine,” she whispered. His grip on her hand tightened just a smidge. Her eyes misted with a profound sense of gratitude and relief and she curled her fingers to bolster the hold. “We fight tomorrow.”

[waytooinvested]

Forgotten, Not Forgiven - Chapter 5

Still reeling from finding out the truth herself, Lena suddenly finds herself in the midst of an odd role reversal in which she knows that Kara is Supergirl, but Kara no longer has any idea she has ever been more than an ordinary human. And what’s more, Lena has no choice but to keep the truth from her for her own protection…

Rift era reconciliation/fix-it fic, starts out kind of on the angsty side but there will be more fluff down the line.

This and previous chapters are also on AO3

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Al’s.

It wasn’t where Lena had imagined this conversation taking place, and she honestly would have preferred to meet at the DEO headquarters, or her own office. Somewhere that set a clear boundary that this was a work collaboration, not a personal one. But Alex hadn’t exactly left room for negotiation before she’d ended the call, and, well, the glass of wine it gave her an excuse to drink was not unwelcome, though she did plan on taking it slow. Easing the tension was one thing, but becoming sloppy right now would be unacceptable.

She was a couple of sips in when Alex dropped down in the seat across from her, a pint in one hand and a basket of onion rings in the other.

Lena raised an eyebrow, and Alex grimaced back.

‘I didn’t have time for lunch today, okay?’

‘I didn’t say anything’.

‘Your face did’.

‘I’m not interested in your eating habits Alex, I want to know about Kara. Did anything show up in the tests?’

Alex nodded through a mouthful of onion and batter.

‘Yeah, I have them here’.

She pulled an unmarked cardboard file from her bag and slid it across the table, then hesitated, her hand still pressed down firmly to keep Lena from taking it.

‘If I share this with you, you can’t pull the same shit you did when we were trying to find her. You tell me everything you find the moment you find it. I want theories, vague hunches, wild goose chases, hell, if you so much have a dream about this, I want to know every single detail’.

‘Fine, but that goes both ways. I tell you everything I have, and you do the same’ -Lena paused, leaning forward over the table and tapping a finger on the closed folder for emphasis – ‘everything, Alex. No more hypocritical demands for openness while you keep your own cards close to your chest’.

‘That wasn’t my-’

Lena pursed her lips, challenging her to finish that sentence. This was a battle line drawn in the power balance of their working relationship, and Alex clearly knew it. She hesitated, glancing down at their outstretched hands where they both rested on the cover of the file, then back up at Lena, a faint frown on her face.

‘Look, it’s not that I don’t want to. But the DEO works with a lot of highly classified intel, and I just can’t promise you that’.

Not good enough.

The tip of Lena’s finger went white where it was pressing against the folder, her nail leaving a small indentation in the cardboard, but she kept her voice level and calm, as if she was arguing contract wording in a business arrangement. Polite but firm. Not aggressive, but not giving an inch either.

‘I’m not asking to see the Alien Registry or schematics for your latest weapons designs. Keep whatever else you want to yourself, but if we’re working together on this, then we share all pertinent information both ways. If you want my help, those are my terms’.

Their eyes locked in a brief struggle, but Lena neither blinked nor looked away, the jut of her chin conveying (or so she hoped) that she was perfectly willing to walk away right now if this condition was not met. She might have agreed to help, but she would never again allow herself to be forced into being a convenient little lacky that the DEO could call on whenever they felt like it and drop the minute they didn’t need her anymore. She was done with being lied to and kept in the dark.

At last the set of Alex’s shoulders dropped from defensive to acceptance, and her free hand reached up absently to run through her hair, pushing imaginary strands out her face like she needed to brush the feeling of Lena’s glare off her skin.

‘Alright, it’s a deal. But I’m gonna have to get you to sign an NDA, we’re under enough scrutiny right now as it is’.

‘Fine. You too. Some of my research is still at the highly confidential experimental stage, and the fact that I might use it to help with this does not mean I want it to be public knowledge’.

Lets keep things fair this time, shall we?

‘Seriously? I’m not going to leak your research Lena’.

‘And I’m not going to leak yours, but here we are’.

There was a moment when Lena thought they might be about to tip into another fight, but in the end Alex just rolled her eyes and nodded.

‘Yeah, fair enough. Write something up and I’ll sign it’.

‘Good’. Now that the first battle was won, Lena allowed herself to relax by a few degrees, sitting back in her chair and taking another small sip of her drink. ‘Speaking of which-’

She pulled the gadget she’d brought out of her purse and placed it in the centre of the table, activating it with a quick twist. It lit up with a faint blue glow which expanded rapidly outwards to encompass the table and the two of them, then faded to nothing, leaving the device apparently inert once more.

‘Okaaay... what the hell is that?’

‘It’s a prototype for an auditory scrambler I’ve been working on. It has no effect on what we can hear coming in, but will keep anyone outside of our immediate vicinity from being able to make out what we’re saying, without anything as obvious as a bubble of artificial silence. Given where we were meeting I thought I’d better bring it along’.

Alex stared at the unassuming black box, assessing and, perhaps, a little bit impressed.

‘Well that’s why I got us this table way off in the back corner. But yeah this is better. If that thing works it would be really useful to have a few at the DEO’.

‘That is another conversation, and not what we’re here for right now’.

Dream on, Alex.

‘Right, yeah, sorry’.

At last Alex seemed to realise that she was still holding onto the file between them, and withdrew her hand to allow Lena to pick it up.

Finally.

She flipped through the thick wodge of notes and test results it contained, skimming briefly through a page of negative read outs for various types of foreign chemicals in Kara’s saliva and urine samples, then turning to the brain scans.

The MRI was first and looked normal enough, though with a few minor variations compared to human images Lena had seen.

‘I assume the differences I’m seeing here are due to Kara’s Kryptonian anatomy rather than anything Lex did?’

‘Yep, totally as expected. We’ve scanned Kara before so we can be sure of that’.

Lena nodded and turned to the CT scan, then the EEG. Again, a slightly different set up to a human brain but nothing alarming.

And then-

‘Did something go wrong with this one? A hair on the lens or something?’

Alex had clearly been waiting for her to get to this page, and didn’t even need to glance at the image to know what Lena was looking at.

‘No, I checked and redid the scan twice. I even scanned my own brain just to be sure there wasn’t something weird in the machinery that I wasn’t picking up. It’s legit’.

‘Well… wow’.

‘I know, it’s crazy, right?’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole area is completely dark, and the margins-’

‘Like someone went in there and drew it on with a marker’.

Lena traced the winding path of the shape that cut through Kara’s brain, curving back and forth so that it passed through almost every key area to form a wide, dark S.

‘We might really have something here, something we can use. What sort of a scan is this? I don’t think I’ve seen a readout quite like this before’.

‘It’s something new we’ve been working on with Q-waves’.

‘How does it work?’

‘The details are classified Lena, I can’t tell you more than that’.

The paper creased at the edges as Lena’s grip tightened on the printout. Who did Alex think was doing who a favour here exactly?

‘What were we just saying about sharing everything?’

‘And I will. But this is about DEO tech, it’s not directly related to Kara’s case’.

‘It could be. Nothing at all showed up on the other scans, but there’s something different about this one. If I know how it works, maybe I can use it as a starting point to design a device that could not only detect the barrier, but start breaking it down without triggering the fail safe’.

They stared each other down for a long moment, and then Alex broke eye contact to take a sip of her beer, and shrugged.

‘Fine, I’ll send you the schematic. After you’ve signed your NDA. I might be Director but I can’t just do whatever I like you know’.

Lena tutted, but did her best to smooth the rumpled edges of the Q-wave scan before slipping it back into the folder and turning to the next page.

‘Whatever, go ahead and jump through your hoops, just get it to me quickly. What else have you found?’

‘Not much honestly. Blood work all normal. Her powers seem to be blocked off along with her memories of Supergirl, so no accidental heat vision or super hearing, and she can get hurt, so we’ll need to watch out for that. Cognitive tests were all normal too, apart from the obvious. She feels fine as Kara, but it’s like Supergirl is just a work acquaintance she vaguely knows but hasn’t seen in a while’.

‘I suppose that makes sense. Her mind would need to come up with some explanation for all those exclusive interviews she turned in at Catco – they’re out there now, so it’s not like she can just forget they ever happened’.

‘That’s what I thought. The one other thing we were really hopeful for was when Brainy went back into her Mind Space before she woke up to see if he could help her-’

‘Wait, back up a minute. Her Mind Space?’

‘Oh, right, you weren’t in the loop yet then. It happened when she was in a coma after Reign attacked her, Brainy was able to go in after her to try and wake her up. Mind Space is- I guess kind of like a dream, or a metaphor or something? It’s 31st century alien technology, don’t ask me how it works. Anyway, last time he said it was like Kara’s apartment, only the front door was locked and she couldn’t get out. That was the coma. It was different this time – the front door was open, but there was a new door at the back – like the door to a serious maximum security prison – a foot of steal with cross bars and a million padlocks, totally locked up tight’.

Lena leaned forwards, interested enough to forget that she was annoyed with Alex.

‘Okay, not great, but it’s a start. If there’s a door there must be a way to get through it’.

‘Yeah that’s what he hoped too, but it was like Kara couldn’t even see it. Every time he tried to get her to look where it was the door would move so it was behind her again, and the place it had been would just be a blank wall. He couldn’t even get her to go to that part of the room, and she didn’t seem to notice at all’.

‘Just like Lex said, her mind is fighting to keep the two parts separate. Still, it could be something to explore further. What about-’

‘Hey Alex! I was in the diner across the street and saw you come in here, so I thought I’d drop in to see if you wanted to meet up later’.

Lena turned instinctively towards the voice, and locked eyes with none other than Kara Danvers herself.

Her glass of wine very nearly spilled as she jerked in her seat, unsure if she was trying to turn away from Kara or get up and flee the room altogether, so that in the end she did neither, and the two of them remained frozen in a moment balanced on a knife edge.

A single slip in any direction, and one of them would bleed.

She swallowed against the sudden dryness in her throat, trying to remember how to breath. Somehow it had been almost easier when Kara was unconscious – at least then she had known how to feel about it. But there was no time to figure that out, because now Kara’s eyes were flitting back and forth between Lena and Alex, and her expression had become one big question mark as she tried to work out exactly what she had just walked in on.

Lena pushed aside her own inner turmoil as best she could and took the opportunity of Kara’s distraction to flip the file of test results closed and slide it casually off the table into her lap, before reaching over to disable the auditory scrambler.

Whatever else happened, Kara could not be allowed to realise that they were here because of her.

‘I didn’t know you two were… ahh… hanging out?’

‘We’re not’.

They said it simultaneously, and too fast. If anything Kara looked even more puzzled than before.

‘Oh?’

‘Lena’s helping the DEO out with a project that could use her science expertise, that’s all. We were in a planning meeting and had some things to finish hashing out, and it was getting late. You know I can’t concentrate when I’m hangry, so we came here to get something to eat’.

Alex gestured to the half empty basket of onion rings, as if that proved the story rather than raising more questions.

‘Oh, that’s… that’s great. What’s the project? Can I help?’

This time Alex looked stumped, and Lena jumped in before the pause got too obvious.

‘You know how I work Kara. It’s still all top secret at the moment, but I promise, as soon as there’s anything ready to take public I’ll give you the exclusive’.

It was the kind of thing she had said all the time before, and yet for some reason Kara was staring at her, apparently stunned by the offer.

‘Wait, really?’

‘Of course, why wouldn’t I?’

‘Well, I just thought… after our fight, and then you sold Catco… I didn’t think you’d want to work with me again’.

Kara knew about their fight?

Lena had assumed, given what they had fought about, that Kara wouldn’t remember it at all, but clearly her mind had filled in the blank of the subject matter while retaining their falling out. She should really have anticipated that, but with everything else going on she hadn’t given the matter enough thought, and now she didn’t know what to say.

What did Kara think they had fought about, if not Supergirl?

She cleared her throat awkwardly, trying to regain some semblance of composure.

‘Yes, well… you going missing forced me to look at things in a new light. I may have… overreacted before. If you’d be willing, I’d like to try and start putting it behind us’.

Kara’s entire face lit up, and the sight of it made Lena feel raw and numb at the same time, the radiant warmth of her smile searing the very skin from her bones to leave only the bleeding essence of her, vulnerable and exposed despite all the armour she had tried to forge for herself these past few months.

‘Yes! Definitely yes, I would love that. Maybe… we could meet for lunch some time?’

She wasn’t sure she could do this.

But she had to. She had to. She had to. The stakes were too high not to at least try.

‘Sure Kara, I’ll give you a call’.

‘Amazing. Fantastic. I’ll see you soon then. Oh- and Alex, text me later if you want to hang out? I was thinking pizza and a movie?’

‘Yeah, sure. I might be a while though, we still have some stuff to finish here’.

‘That’s fine, I don’t think I’ll be sleeping til late tonight anyway’.

‘Alright, I’ll text you when we’re done’.

‘Bye Kara’.

They waited, watching in silence until the door had closed behind Kara and she had been gone long enough to be fairly confident that she wasn’t going to pop back in, then Lena rounded on Alex.

‘You let her follow you?’

‘I didn’t let her. She was supposed to be at home! I can’t tie her to the radiator to keep her inside Lena-’

‘That’s weak and you know it. How the hell have you made it this long as a secret agent if you can’t even keep your little sister from following you? Kara’s a reporter Alex, we can’t let her catch even a hint of this or she’ll start digging and she won’t stop, and that could literally kill her’.

‘Hey, you think I don’t know that? It was a mistake, it won’t happen again. And it’s fine, she doesn’t suspect anything’.

‘Yet. She doesn’t suspect anything yet. We are clearly going to have to put some ground rules in place to stop this kind of thing happening again. Code names, file encryptions, plausible reasons for meeting up, not to mention plausible places for meeting up – and it will have to be on a strictly need to know basis. Anyone who knows who Supergirl is will have to be in on part of it of course, but full details should only be shared with people who are actively working on her case. The fewer people know, the safer this will be’.

Alex stared back at her, eyebrows raised and seeming entirely unchastened by the scolding. If anything, there was a hint of smugness in the curl of her lip, and Lena scowled back at her as she replayed the last part of what she’d said in her mind. She huffed.

‘Oh shut up, this is different’.

‘I didn’t even say anything!’

‘You were thinking it very loudly’.

‘So I’m not even allowed to think n-’

Lena held up a hand to stop the budding argument before it could go any further. They were here for a single purpose, and it was not to bicker like children, no matter how tempting it was to keep venting all the confused feelings seeing Kara had stirred up in her. This was business, and emotions had no place in business.

‘First things first. Change my name in your phone’.

‘What? Why? Kara knows we’re working together now’.

‘Yes, but that excuse is only going to take us so far. This will be safer- actually, no don’t. Kara knows my number, if she saw that under someone else’s name it would look even worse. Use this one instead, and give it a different name’.

Lena scribbled down the number, careful to make her handwriting look as unlike her own as she could to avoid it leading back to her if Kara came across the paper in Alex’s things.

‘I will use that number to contact you for anything relating to our work, and continue to use my regular cell for anything to do with the cover story. You do the same’.

‘Okay, but I don’t have a second phone number’.

‘That doesn’t matter. I am a well known public figure and I like my privacy – my phone is pretty much unhackable, and besides I have software set up that will allow me to assign you an alias name and number. It’s not a problem’.

Alex nodded, tapping the number Lena had given her into her phone.

‘What do you want your alias to be?’

‘I really don’t care. Whatever you like as long as it’s not obviously traceable to me’.

‘Okay then, you’re… Lulu’.

‘Lulu? Seriously?’

‘Hey, you said anything! Luthor. Lu. Lulu. It was all I could think of! Besides, it’s kind of perfect because there is no way in hell Kara would ever believe you’d let me call you Lulu’.

‘With good reason. But fine, okay, Lulu it is’.

Alex chuckled as she saved the name and popped the last of her onion rings into her mouth. She chewed in silence for a while, tracing patterns in a puddle of spilled beer before broaching the question she had clearly been weighing up in her mind.

‘So… Kara knows you had a fight. What does she think it’s about, if not Supergirl?’

‘I have no idea. I could hardly ask, could I? I just had to go with it and hope for the best’.

‘And… did you mean what you told her? About wanting to put it behind you and move forwards?’

Lena opened her mouth to tell Alex to mind her own damn business, but then hesitated. If they were going to work together and keep Kara from getting suspicious, she supposed they needed to be on the same page about this. Still, she took a large swallow of wine before replying, trying to work out what she wanted to say, and how much she was willing to admit.

‘If I’m going to be able to help Kara I need to be close enough to her that she’ll let me do it, and the more comfortable she feels opening up to me the easier that will be. I did mean it when I said that all this has made me see things from a different perspective. But- look, the fact that Kara doesn’t remember what she did doesn’t mean she didn’t do it. Amnesia is not a free pass’.

‘I know that, but surely now you’re on the other side of it you can see why it might be important to keep this kind of secret?’

‘As I said, I’ve gained some new perspective, but it’s still a false equivalence to compare the two situations. Besides, me being upset with Kara isn’t just about her keeping her identity a secret. It’s the fact that she would fight with me as Supergirl, then come over as Kara and spend time with me as if nothing happened. Alex, she went behind my back and got my boyfriend to break into my lab instead of trusting what I told her, or even asking me to show her myself. As Supergirl she acted as though I had betrayed her for keeping the smallest thing about my work to myself regardless of the intention behind it, and yet all that time she knew she was keeping this huge secret from me despite how often I had practically begged her not to lie to me. She did a lot of objectively pretty awful things, and I don’t know if I will ever be able to forgive her for them, or feel like we can be real friends again. But I’m not a monster. I still care what happens to her, and I am committed to helping her get the rest of her memories back. That’s the best I can do’.

Alex nodded slowly, frowning down into the dregs of her beer.

‘Yeah, I guess I see that. For what it’s worth though, I think you should try to forgive her. Kara made some mistakes, but she cares about you a lot, and she really misses having you as a friend’.

‘Respectfully Alex, I don’t want to hear that from you. It’s none of your business. I told you what I did so that you’ll know where we stand and that I’m in earnest about working with you on this, but beyond that, you don’t get to have an opinion on my friendship or lack thereof with your sister. I will work with you on this project because it’s the right thing to do, but that is the extent of our relationship’.

‘Fine. From here on out we will only talk about Operation Get Our Girl Back’.

‘We are NOT calling it that’.

[underthetree845]

ADA Members as High School Students- Headcannons

All the characters are of high school age, except for Fukuzawa who is a teacher.

I might do the older ADA members as teachers eventually, but I wanted to focus on them all as students for now.

Includes: Dazai Osamu, Kunikida Doppo, Ranpo Edogawa, Atsushi Nakajima, Kyoka Izumi, Miyazawa Kenji, Yosano Akiko, Fukuzawa Yukichi

Cws: mentions of suicide (because it's dazai), mentions of school fights, school life, mentions of bullying, school counseling

Dazai Osamu:

Would mess with the underclassmen by sending them on a wild goose chase for the nonexistent school elevator or something like that. 

Takes advantage of his friends and always gets them to do his assignments for him (that habit obviously carried into adulthood). 

Proudly holds the record for the most unexcused tardies in one school year. 

The teacher keeps trying to call on him to answer a question when he seems like he’s slacking off but Dazai always answers correctly, that devilish little unapologetic grin on his face. 

Literally never studies. 

The teachers can’t tell if he cheats or is just really intelligent, but if he were cheating, they wouldn’t be able to catch him. 

(He doesn’t cheat by the way, but he never explicitly denies it). 

Has been confessed to at least three times, (he scared them away when he asked if they’d be willing to commit double suicide with him). 

The guidance counselors keep trying to schedule a meeting with him to talk about his “suicidal tendencies,” but then he just shows up on mushrooms or something and they’re like “Nevermind.” 

Drama queen. 

Used to be part of this questionable after school club (Mori was the faculty advisor) that got disbanded. 

Pulls pranks on the faculty and other students (mostly Chuuya), particularly ones he has some reason to hold spite against.

Never gets caught. 

Smooth liar. 

Completely up with the gossip too. 

Those career path quizzes never know what to do with him, he gets a jumble of results. 

The underclassmen have no idea who Oda is, but they know you should never bring him up around Dazai.

Lots of rumors circulating as to why he wears his bandages. 

Probably hides Kunikida’s glasses so he can’t see the board. 

Surprisingly good at writing, language arts is his best subject.

Kunikida Doppo: 

Constantly threatening to snitch on Dazai but never does. 

This audio. 

The kid that asks for clarification on assignments and ends up reminding the teacher that they meant to give homework. Doesn’t see the problem with it. 

Does. not. condone. bullying. He’ll push up his glasses and emotionally destroy the perpetrators before filing a fancy report to the faculty advisor. 

Keeps a planner notebook. Very meticulous and organized, he’s proud of it. 

Probably class rep. 

Takes way too many things way too seriously. 

Has never missed a deadline. Ever. 

Every single one of his pencils is somehow always sharpened and perfect. 

Strongly believes that wooden pencils are superior to mechanical ones. 

Good at math, but also art. He sees the canvas as a kind of graph, does particularly well with landscapes. 

Very serious about getting proper nutrients from what he eats and drinks throughout the day, he plans his lunches for the week ahead of time.

Does very well in debate class too.

Always perfectly in uniform, scolds Dazai when he has his tie loose or didn’t button up his blazer or something like that. 

Ranpo Edogawa: 

Does favors for people when it gets close to Valentine’s Day to make sure he’ll get some chocolates. 

Do I even need to say it- ALWAYS snacking in class. 

Coerces as much free food out of other students as possible. 

Eventually they pick up on his game and stop feeding him. 

Snitches on people flawlessly in the middle of class, the culprit fuming, the teacher dumbfounded. Maybe he can get away with snacks once in a while. 

When people ask him to help them study he usually just redirects them to Atsushi. 

That kid that’s always leaning his chair back way too far but never falls.

The faculty has basically given up on punishing him. After school detention?- more sleeping time. Extra homework?- doesn’t even break a sweat.

Knows exactly who is cheating on the test, gets offered bribes from both the students cheating so he doesn’t tell on them and the teachers who want to know who it is.

That one kid that just shoves looseleaf crumpled paper into their backpack, seems like they’ve never used a binder in their life. Somehow turns everything in just fine. 

Says he doesn’t have gum on him when he’s literally chewing a piece. 

Always goes and visits/annoys Fukuzawa when he can. Fukuzawa actually doesn’t mind and Ranpo enjoys getting to talk to his favorite teacher. 

Doesn’t even check the board when tests results come out, he already knows what he got, and can easily guess the others’ scores too. 

Most people couldn’t actually tell you what his eye color is. 

Fukuzawa is the only teacher Ranpo will actually take a lecture from seriously, the other administrators have to call him over when they need to scold the boy.

Atsushi Nakajima: 

The only one who did their part in the group project. 

Always offering to help the teachers, tutors other students, etc. etc.

An angel, really. Akutagawa is the only one able to make him upset. 

Extremely apologetic, would probably help the janitor clean up if he ever accidentally made a mess. 

Probably tried out for a part in a school production at least once. 

Turning heads from around the room when he reveals that he plays piano. 

So shy about it though, he probably didn’t even mean to say it. 

Dazai gave him a pep talk before his first performance. 

After that, he starts to come out of his shell in music class, does well in music theory too. 

Would literally die if he ever received a love letter or anything of the sort. 

Doesn’t like to share who his favorite teachers are out of fear of hurting their feelings. 

Definitely has a bond with at least one facilitator, is probably friends with the janitor and cafeteria cooks. 

Wouldn’t hesitate to give his umbrella to someone if it were raining after school.

Found a blue-eyed kitten on his walk home once. It’s his now, he kept it, and Dazai absolutely adores it. 

Always has index cards or post-it notes on him to quickly write something down or give someone a piece of information. 

Makes specific playlists for studying different subjects. 

Kyoka Izumi: 

When she entered school, there was a lot of talk about her past; it ranged from what happened to her parents to saying she’d kill you if you even looked at her. Became a social outcast. :(

As soon as Atsushi caught wind of the rumors, he immediately shut them down, jumping to her defense whenever he could.

Now she’ll death glare at anyone being mean to him. 

Doesn’t understand the concept of a school dance, she only went because the others seemed excited about it. 

Actually ended up having a great time, replaying the fond memories in her head the next day. 

A sucker for bunny keychains. She has the one on her phone, yes, but also a few on her backpack and maybe pencil pouch.

Atsushi gave one of them to her for her birthday, she doesn’t even know how he found out when her birthday is.

She refuses to allow her phone to be confiscated (for obvious reasons).

Doesn’t use it in class or when she’s not supposed to or anything like that, but if a teacher is having a particularly bad day and decides to try to take it from her, her grip is unassailable.

Fukuzawa knows what happened to her, so he usually steps in to diffuse the situation and get the teacher to let it go.

She finds watercolor time in art class pleasantly therapeutic. 

The only one who helps Atsushi with the group assignment. 

Fukuzawa’s favorite student. They get each other. 

Kenji Miyazawa: 

Literally every teacher wishes they had him in their class. 

His only issue is that he keeps forgetting you have to wear close-toed shoes to school, he can never remember to change them.

So many athletic teams want him to join them, but he remains loyal to the garden club. 

Has impressed the school nurse with his home remedies. 

Has (unknowingly) talked down a few fights. 

Smiles so brightly in his school photo every year. 

Does well in the environmental/botanical portion of science class. 

Incapable of holding a grudge. 

Really dislikes doing dissections. 

The meals he brings from home are the BEST- everyone always wants to try a bite. Kunikida has to shoo the others away so Kenji doesn’t give away his entire meal. 

One time at a school soccer match, Kenji was watching from the sidelines with some friends and one of the players kicked the ball his way. He got hit smack in the face and fell over, everyone thought he was out cold and was ready to call an ambulance, but he just stood up and brushed it off like it was nothing. His nose bled a little, but he assured everyone that he felt fine.

They had him checked out by the school nurse that day just to be sure. Yosano had a look at him too. 

Returns every single pen and pencil he borrows. 

Had never seen mechanical pencils before coming to Yokohama, was absolutely fascinated. 

Yosano Akiko: 

No one actually knows what the inside of her bag or locker looks like.

“When you first meet her and wonder why she’s single and now you’re three months into the relationship and you know why.” (No Yosano hate, I just feel like this has happened to people who thought she looked approachable at first glance). 

Keeps a hairbrush and bobby pins in her bag.

Checks every box, the prime example of that friend everyone needs. She’ll stick up for you, provide you with things you need, is really nice to talk to, gives AMAZING advice.

Some people are afraid of her, which is kind of fair. 

Hands-on learning experiments in science class are her favorite. 

Actually enjoys dissections. 

The butterfly clip is OFF LIMITS. Absolutely no one is allowed to touch it. 

Hardly ever has to use a calculator, she excels at quick mental math and long division problems. 

Completely prepared to perform CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, etc. at all times. 

I feel like she would keep houseplants on a shelf somewhere. Simple ones, dark leaves and pretty blossoms. 

Professor Mori, the psychology and human behavior teacher, is the only person in the entire school who can give her the chills. 

Has known she wants to be a doctor since the beginning of her school life. 

The teachers have tried to encourage her to at least consider creating a plan B, but she refuses. 

Probably critiques the school nurse and their methods so hard. “No, the gauze needs to be tighter than that if you actually want to stop the bleeding.” “Apply heat if you want the muscles to relax, not cold!” “Do you even know how to use an epi-pen?!”

I feel like Yosano can sing, she would probably do well in choir.

Could be persuaded to sing onstage for a school production if provided a good enough reason. I’m just saying it’s not completely off the table for her. 

Fukuzawa Yukichi:

The only student that knows his complete backstory is Ranpo, and he won’t tell anyone else because Fukuzawa pays him off with snacks in exchange. 

I could only really see him as a literary teacher.

One time he accidentally mentioned that he has a cat in class. Every student erupted into a series of exclamations and demanded pictures.

Now they get him cat-themed gifts on holidays and for his birthday, the man could not be happier. 

Naomi likes to come talk to him about random thoughts she has, things her brother does, she treats him like another one of her friends. 

Has the scariest serious voice, it’ll make any student shut their mouth. 

Likes to eat his lunches outside. 

Kyoka is his favorite student. Ranpo too, of course, but Fukuzawa and Kyoka hold a special kinship.

A handful of students can sense the mutual war between Fukuzawa and Mori, the psychology professor across the hall. (I considered anatomy or something like that for Mori, I just feel like psyche would be more fitting for him to actually teach). 

Fukuzawa and Mori are the faculty members that have been at the school the longest.

One time Atsushi brought Fukuzawa a warm turvis of his favorite tea because he “just looked a little tired yesterday” and that’s when he knew that he would be keeping his job for a long time. 

Always cooks his own meals and brings them for lunch, would rather die than have to survive off of instant ramen or something like that. 

His class is the only one ever completely behaved during the fire drills. 

[molamola-p]

TADC

Alcoholic Pomni AU - Idea Drabble

901 Words

// AN: I thought it would be funny if Pomni lost it and decided to turn to alcohol. Idk- my brain is wack. I wanted to write for the longest time but I couldn’t bring myself to come up with any fun ideas. Then TADC came out and I decided to write a quick thing about that. This was the first thing I thought of. I’m sorry Pomni lovers _:(´ཀ`」 ∠):

Pomni wasn’t keen on the idea of being trapped in the digital circus with now way out.

What’s really the kicker is that everyone has seemingly given up on finding an exit. Not Pomni though. No. She’s determined to find one!

Unfortunately, dead end after dead end, it starts to dawn on Pomni that maybe she’s on a wild goose chase. Maybe the others were right. Maybe there was no exit.

Pomni sighed. Annoyed at the idea that Jax might be on the winning side of the argument, she busied herself with simply walking along as many walls as possible. Maybe, just maybe, she missed something.

Pomni stoped at a small table. A glass bottle of wine sat atop it, sitting just in the center. Pomni looked around to see if Cain was pulling something again. Or if maybe it was a trigger for another “adventure” of sorts. Didn’t Cain say this show, or world, or whatever was supposed to be “PG?”

Have some

Pomni heard the little voice in her head say. Wait… voice? Maybe she really was losing it. She stood for a moment and thought about it. Maybe a bit of booze would help take the edge off.

Pomni tentatively took the bottle from the table, half expecting some sort of alarm to go off. When it didn’t, she breathed a sigh of relief. A siren is just the type of thing Cain would pull.

…

Pomni had been missing for a while, and Ragitha was starting to worry.

“Guys shouldn’t we find Pomni?” She suggested to the group.

“She’s probably looking for that exit again” Zooble scoffed.

“Or she obstructed” Everyone took a second to glare at Jax, who in return simply shrugged with a bored look on his face.

“OHHHHH GUYYYSHHHHH~”

A slurred voice that sounded like Pomni traveled through the room.

The group turned to look in that direction. Pomni wobbled into the main room with a big grin on her face and what looked to be an almost empty bottle of wine in her hand.

“You won’t berive dis, hehe…. The wine here? AMAZING! I didn’t evren have ta’ drink the whole fing to get drunk!” Pomni smiled in a drunk daze.

Now Ragitha was even more concerned. Where did Pomni find alcohol? There had never been any before!

“Well she’s wasted… I’m out” before Jax could walk away Kinger who had been uncharacteristically quiet and Gangle who had been shut out of the conversation start freaking out and talking really fast.

“HOWCOULDTHISHAPPENNOTTOSWEETPOMNIOHHOWFARWEVEFALLEN-“

And

“IFPOMNIFOUNDALCOHOLDOESTHATMEANWEREALLDOOMEDTOFALLVICTIMTOSOMEKINDOFDRUGJUSTTOCONTINUELIVINGINTHISWASTELANDOFA-WAHHHHH“

“Would ya shut up! She’ll sober up eventually, jeez” Jax felt a headache coming on.

Little did they know Pomni would rarely ever be sober again.

Sure it started innocent enough. Just a little temptation to ease the boredom. Unfortunately for everyone, Pomni didn’t stop at just on temptation. Also unfortunately neither did the digital circus.

Somehow, someway, Pomni would always find alcohol. It got to the point where Ragitha implemented the “Pomni Buddy System” where a someone had to be with Pomni at all times. Still miraculously, Pomni always managed to slip away. Or maybe the group was just not very good at their job.

Cain hadn’t been seen in days, either which made this mess even worse. On top of that drunk Pomni had a knack for getting on both Zooble’s and Ajax’s nerves pretty quick. While Jax played it cool it was obvious he was sick of it. Zooble on the other hand made it clear she was very unhappy.

The breaking point came when during one of drunk Pomni’s episodes,

“******* GUYS! THIS NEEDS TO END” A disheveled looking Jax yelled at everyone. He has been on Pomni duty, his least favorite thing, and he had reached his limit.

“I can’t keep doing this- She’s SO ANNOYING!” Jax cupped his head in his hands.

Pomni, when drunk, had the tendency to ramble about nothings and make random noises that just drove Jax (and Zooble) insane. Kinger and Gangle resigned to make the noises with her to keep their sanity, which only made it worse for everyone else. While Ragitha tried to stay strong and help Pomni through her addiction, even she had to admit this was not going well.

As the group sat in dread, Pomni’s incessant noises in the background, Cain, oh Cain, came in to a very strange scene.

“Uhm… What?” He looked around confused.

To everyone’s surprise it was Ragitha who jumped up and grabbed Cain by the tongue and said with death in her eyes,

“MAKE. IT. STOP”

Cain looked around nervously and confused. Then it clicked. He easily slipped out of Ragitha grip and adjusted his tie.

“Ohhhhh! That’s what that did! I was working on some new code and I came across a dormant command and thought I’d see what it did!”

Everyone stared in disbelief. All of this, ALL OF THIS, was because Cain got a little curious and decided to push a button!

“U n b e l i v e a b l e” Jax looked like he was on the verge of tears.

“Well lemme fix this real quick” Cain snapped a few times and Pomni poofed back to normal.

“WHERES THE- huh? Oh… I’m not craving it anymore…” Pomni looked around and everyone, and sensing she wasn’t in the best of standing said “sorry?”

“Well that settles that! Now for an adventure!!!”

“ARGHHHHHHH!” -Everyone

[safety-writes-noms]

ur art n characters are so good!!! ,,,i am greedy, i want even more about callisto and oliver, can we get a lore/story dump for them i need to know more

Aw tysmm!! I’m glad u like them :D. AND OFC I CAN DO A LORE DUMP THISE ARE MY FAVORITE THIGNS TO DO!! I love it when people let me talk at abt my little people! I tried to shrink the text since it was kinda long but if it’s hard to read, just tell me and I’ll try to fix it :D

also DNI nsfw/kink accounts!! It’s fine if you like that vore in a sexual manner but I am a minor and definitely do NOT like it like that!!

Okay so basically Oliver and Cal are really close bc they practically grew up together. Oliver’s parents always used to have Cal over at their house since they’re aware that Cal isn’t entirely normal but love him like a son anyways.

 Plus little Cal showed up on their doorstep one sunny day asking for food and having no home so the obvious next step was to officially adopt him into the household.

Callisto originally showed up with wispy pale hair and an almost colorless complexion that slowly shifted to thick blond hair and tanned skin to mimic Oliver’s parents’ images.

 He has a tendency to copy or adopt the features of the people he loves. Also Oliver’s parents are named Ethel and Kane! Sorry for throwing a bunch of random names at you guys, i know its probably kinda convoluted but bear with me plss. 

Anyways, when Oliver was born Cal’s eyes immediately changed to the same color. Thankfully his original shade was close enough that it didn’t raise questions. Oh, were Cal’s eyes a lighter shade before? Probably not, just the sunlight or something. He’s 18 almost 19, still in the beginning of his senior year in highschool but started school later than normal kids. He’s usually pretty laid back.

Callisto actually doesn’t really care much for finding his real family or finding out his origin. In his eyes he has a perfectly fine family now who loved him unconditionally no matter what. 

He did want to find the family who abandoned him when he was younger but after a long goose chase that ended up fruitless, he became resentful that they left him in the first place. He’s mellowed out by now but that doesn’t mean the angsty “You’re not even my real family!” Line wasn’t dropped somewhere along the way. 

He’s never really told his little brother about his inhumaness since he himself doesn’t know much about what he is specifically. He never really changed his appearance on purpose. It was always something he did unconsciously and he genuinely doesn’t know his limits or what he can do since it’s really hard for him to shift on purpose. Unless he’s under insane stress/panic but he’s never really been under that level of pressure so 😋. Oliver knows that his brother isn’t entirely normal just like Ethel and Kane but he doesn’t know the specifics.

Oliver is 14 and is in his freshman year of highschool, straight out of middle school. I live in cali so the school systems might be a bit dif in other places so if anyone wants some clarification on that just tell me! 

They go to a highschool that’s near a huge thick forest that’s usually barred off from the rest of the school. I’m talking about thick wire fences and a bunch of warning signs and caution tape. The whole spooky shebang. There are a lot of rumors surrounding it but none of the students ever usually even go near there so there’s never been a situation. But there are whispers of grotesque inhuman creatures and monsters, hungry for human flesh :)

Unfortunately Oliver gets mixed up with the wrong people, a bunch of juniors who “take him under their wing” when really theyre just using him. And he’s just getting dragged along since he desperately wants to still be friends with them since he’s afraid of being left behind. 

One thing leads to another and he’s dared to go into the forest by his ‘friends’ alone and even though he really doesn’t want to, he’s afraid that they’ll abandon him if he doesn’t comply. (Which they will, they’d do that if he did or didn’t finish the dare)

They tell him they’ll go in with him but ultimately leave him behind, lost and terrified out of his wits because it’s getting dark, his phone is dying and he can’t call anyone for help. He manages to send one text to Callisto before his service disappears entirely and he’s left stranded. So what does cal do?

Drive straight to the school, probably over the speed limit. He’s received one panicked kinda short text from his little brother begging for his help and a location and immediately hopped into his car. 

He’s equipped with pepper spray, a box knife and some car keys as he tracks down Oliver. He doesn’t know how, doesn’t know why, but he’s almost mindlessly following the exact same path Oliver took trying to get out of the forest. (More cool abilities he doesn’t know exists :D) And when he does find his baby brother, Oliver is in mortal danger, all bruised and banged up, surrounded by these horrifying creatures that look like they’ve been pulled straight out of a horror movie and blacks out.

Next thing he knows he’s waking up seven hours later, knuckles covered in black goop and a disturbing wiggling feeling in the base of his gut. Oh, and he’s also the size of a giant tree. Fun. 

What's not fun is hearing his little brother scream for help — inside of him. Inside. And then that freaks him out so badly that once he has Oliver out of his system (that never would’ve hurt his baby brother in the first place but he doesn’t know that) he spends about a few days talking with olly before fucking off, convinced that he’s a monster and disgusting creature bc what kind of brother resorts to sleep cannibalism in a time of mortal danger?? Meanwhile Oliver is just really confused, kinda scared and most of all just really wants his older brother back, human or not. 

And it’s not like he was hurt or anything inside Callisto despite knowing his brother has a terrifyingly fast metabolism so… everyone draws their own conclusions. Plus even though he just watched his brother grow to inhuman levels in the span of seconds, he’s also seen horrifying monsters and his brother was the one who protected him in the end. Oliver mainly wants explanations and hugs. 

That’s all I’ve got for now :)

[creaturefeaster]

could you talk more about what your geese are like and what its like to own them? ive been so obsessed with them lately and theyre so silly to me :3

Oh hell yeah I'll talk about my geese any day

Geese are really, really silly. A lot of people find them scary, but they can be very sweet and extremely loyal.

My geese will follow me everywhere. If I walk from one side of the land to the other, at a slow pace, they will typically follow in a slow line behind me. During late summer and early fall when green grass is more scarce, I like to take them to parts of the lot that they haven't been to in a while so they can keep up on their greens :3.

If I'm not the one leading, Sebastian, the gander of the group, takes on that role. I took these pictures today, and he was feeling particularly protective of the hens while I was taking these pictures (I was doing really close up pics, something I don't normally do so I don't blame him.) When a goose, especially a gander, is being protective of something, they always position themselves between you and what they're protecting.

Something else people don't realise about geese is that they pay really close attention to body language. A lot of attacks from geese are because people start acting weird around them. They take this like, "this human is not acting like how humans usually act, so I feel uncomfortable." Especially in early spring when they have babies.

...But also, they like to check people. They check every living thing around them more often than not, because they get bored easily and have fun asserting themselves. When alone they do this to each other, but if you're new around, they will try and fuck with you. And if you react how they want, which is usually in backing away, flinching, or even sometimes they're looking for a fight so approaching them the wrong way as well, they will keep going until you're chased off.

Sometimes I use my geese to keep my chickens safe, because getting occasionally pestered by a goose for straying into their grazing grounds keeps them closer together and near their coop, and out of sight of eagles and hawks.

But what's really funny, is if you just... ignore them, as long as you aren't walking towards something they're protective of and you aren't showing signs of stress, they just stop. They fail to check you and that's that, and unless you've really pissed them off beforehand, they'll forget about it. I have a tiny, clueless chicken named Sloppy Joe who doesn't read body language well at all. So whenever a goose checks her they never succeed, because she's too busy not paying attention to notice she's being challenged.

The center focus goose in this picture is Gertrude, or who I like to call Gerdy (I think of Binding of Isaac's boss Gerdy), and she's been especially funny lately.

My geese aren't ever thrilled about being picked up so I don't tend to upset them with holding them if I don't have a reason to. But lately, Gerdy doesn't leave the pen when they're let out. She gets vocal and upset that everybody left without her, and she paces by the gate. There's no reason for this. So I've been picking her up and helping her out, and when she's put back down she happily runs to go meet up with the others, it never fails.

I think she's just been wanting attention. When I first got her she was always a lot more tolerant to being touched and handled. She also likes to stand very close to me and stare at me and shake her head. (Head shaking can be fear, a threat, or excitement. It's hard to tell which it is, but I know her. She's giddy.)

I've been taking their pleasant mood in as much as I can lately, because when December rolls around, they start getting into their pre-mating season funk. Sebastian is a short fuse and the hens are hissy even before they start laying eggs 🙄

I usually have to avoid sitting on the hill like this during mating season, because Sebastian is so unpredictable during those months. But it was nice today and everybody was in a good mood :).