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imagining-in-the-margins · 2 years

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Inexperienced (S.R.)

Summary: Virgin!Reader has a secret no one expected, least of all Spencer.

Request: The reader is an overtly confident, social butterfly but has a secret… she’s still a virgin in every way, and it really bothers her. She’s also afraid to make the moves on her crush, Spencer, because of her inexperience. A/N: This is about Reader getting her first kiss. Check out the sequel linked at the end! Couple: Spencer Reid/Fem!Reader Category: Fluff (for Part 1) Content Warning: Embarrassment, truth or dare (game), playful teasing, confessions, first kiss, kissing Word Count: 3.5k

MASTERLIST

I’d always tried to tell the truth. Ever since I was a young girl, I found even the whitest of lies to be a little too guilt inducing to be worth it.

In fact, there had been times I’d even questioned whether my truth was, unbeknownst to me, a lie. Because of that, it had certainly been an odd experience to perform my lie detector test when I first applied for the FBI.

Over the recent years, however, I’d perfected my ability to lie — about most things, anyway.

There had been one exception. A very handsome exception who was sat beside me fiddling with the buttons on his cardigan.

Spencer Reid, my team partner of choice and the love of my life.

He just didn’t know about that second part yet.

But of course, my friends had been very aware of my feelings for the BAU’s boy genius, as well as the fact I was absolutely petrified of him finding out. So, as I sat in the comfort of Emily’s apartment, surrounded by my friends and playing a lighthearted game, I thought I would be safe.

“Truth,” I said with confidence.

I had been very, very wrong.

“Again?! Really?!” Penelope groaned.

Emily was quick to follow, with her fingers and eyebrows raised, “That is the fourth truths in a row. Seventh—if you include Spencer’s.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s a record,” JJ confirmed.

The conversation was bouncing so quickly, with each of them having perfected predicting each other’s next sentence. It was a well-oiled team, after all.

But Spencer broke pattern, butting in between quick quips to ask, “Why are we including mine?”

“I mean, by all means,” I shouted with a smile, “feel free to skip me!”

Penelope saw the easy out she’d given be and obstinately refused.

“No way. Nu-uh. If you’re going to be a party pooper, I’m going to make you pay!”

The rest of the team — including Luke this time but excluding Spencer — let out a harmony of “oooohs” in response to the threat.

“I’m ready,” I dared.

I should’ve known better than to dare.

“Do you think I’m bluffing?” she balked.

I really should’ve known better.

“You tell me, Pen-el-o-pe.”

“Okay, Miss Profiler, fine! Then my truth question to you is…”

I had been so cocky, so sure that Penelope wouldn’t dare take advantage of an innocent crush. But once she’d started, with an ever-escalating pitch until her breath ran out, I knew that I was sorely mistaken.

Penelope had a twinkle in her eye and a sickly-sweet smile on her face as she asked calmly, “Why won’t you tell boy wonder over here how you feel?”

The whole team devolved into chaos within a second. The peanut gallery was loud, but the heartbeat in my ears was even louder.

“Pfft, what?” I scoffed.

I hadn’t meant to look at him. Really, it was the last thing I’d wanted to do. But my brain couldn’t resist following her finger until she pointed directly at the boy to my right.

Spencer looked at me, also. We both stared at each other for a second with confusion and — more notably — embarrassment plastered all over our faces.

I wondered which part of it embarrassed him. I’d hoped it had been the attention, but the quiet voice in my head assured me that it was me that he found embarrassing.

“What? Spencer?” I asked.

As soon as I said his name, I watched one side of his lip twitch into a smile. It made my stomach fully flip, and I looked away as quickly as I could. Of course, that just put my attention back on the group currently laughing at how we were the perfect pair of obvious and oblivious.

“Uh-yeah,” Penelope snickered.

“What are you talking about? We’re friends. He knows that,” I stated so matter-of-factly that it almost sounded fake.

We were friends. I just wanted a little more than… friends.

I turned to the man in question again, but this time, his smile was different. It was lopsided and half-hearted, and it made me feel even worse for putting the spotlight on him.

“Right?” I asked him.

For a second, Spencer looked like he wanted to say something. But then he just cleared his throat.

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “We’re friends.”

Just friends.

JJ, the typical mother of the group, had tried her best not to laugh. However, after four glasses of wine and no intentions of driving home that night, JJ’s lips had gotten loose.

“Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?” she slurred in a feigned whisper to the woman beside her.

Emily was less inebriated than the others, it seemed. At least, that seemed to be the simplest answer for why she sighed and waved her hand in an attempt to quiet the group.

“You guys, we better stop or they’re never going to admit it.”

Her attempt failed, however, courtesy of Penelope’s number one fan.

“Yeah, right,” Luke laughed, “I give it a week. Maybe a month.”

Everything was going so fast that it felt like my brain was running in slow motion. I’d been there before. In that loud, suffocating moment where I wanted to say anything to stop the ridicule.

‘These are my friends,’ I reminded myself, ‘they’re just poking fun.’

They were good people. They just didn’t realize that in their banter, they’d stumbled into my greatest insecurity. It wasn’t entirely their fault. I’d never told them.

I’d never told them that the reason I didn’t want to confront my feelings was because it was the first time that I’d really felt like this. For most of my life, I’d convinced myself that the right time was never coming for me.

But then I met Spencer. I met him and it seemed like waiting hadn’t been a mistake, but cosmic design.

I thought Spencer had been like me. I thought it wouldn’t be humiliating to tell him that I’d never actually been kissed, much less…

I thought he was like me. It had only taken one poorly timed joke about his ex-girlfriends before I realized that I had been wrong. It only took one polaroid, one story about the time he sucked face with a serial killer for me to realize that Spencer Reid — bona fide nerd, multiple graduate, scrawny, clueless Spencer Reid — was so far out of my fucking league.

The thought of him learning all of this now, in front of all of our friends, was a little too much to handle. Like the monster in the Tell-Tale Heart, my paranoia grew until I was about ready to confess. The truth was going to come out. I couldn’t lie to him.

My breathing picked up and I felt the wine rising in my throat. No matter how hard I swallowed it, my eyes still started to feel with tears.

‘Not now,’ I begged, ‘Not like this.’

“Dare!” Spencer yelled.

Again, the group descended into chaos. This time, it was quieter. This time, the whispers and snickers were aimed towards the man who’d just done what was least expected of him.

“I-I pick dare,” Spencer repeated, “I’ll go.”

Any relief I’d felt was so, so short lived, though. Because not even a second after he’d finished his sentence, Luke spoke.

“Oh, now you’re brave? Alright, then, white knight, I dare you to kiss her.”

Spencer looked at me, and my eyes shut tightly enough to free a few of the droplets that had gathered on the edge.

I wanted to shout, to say anything at all. But ultimately, it wouldn’t take the pain away. No matter how quickly they began to pick up on the shifted tone, the damage was already done.

Before anyone could say a word to make it any worse – or worse, try to apologize – I’d stood from my seat and bolted out of the room. Just as I turned the corner into the guest bedroom, however, I’d heard a familiar voice calling my name as he followed.

Spencer hadn’t been able to stop me, though.

I shut the door and tried to catch my breath. I tried to shake off the anxiety and shame that had led me to the empty room in the first place.

I wouldn’t be alone for nearly long enough.

Spencer, knowing he was the very last person I’d wanted to see in that moment, only gave me a few seconds of silence before his voice could be heard on the other side of the door.

“Hey, are you alright?”

I stepped away from it like I would be able to hide. When I didn’t answer, though, he became bolder. The doorknob turned slowly, and before I could say no, the light from the hallway was peeking through into the room.

“I’m so sorry—" he started.

“Go away!” I shouted back while frantically wiping tears off my face.

I refused to turn around. I was too scared. Too scared of the pity on his face and my propensity for telling the truth. I was so scared that if I opened my mouth to say anything but a beg for him to leave, I would say something so much harder to forgive.

But his stubbornness was part of the reason why I’d loved him in the first place. I couldn’t fault him for only shutting the door after he’d stepped inside. I couldn’t hate him for reaching out and holding my wrist like it would shatter on impact.

If I could hate him for caring about me, this would be so much easier.

“I’m really sorry,” he whispered. He had nothing to apologize for. Still, I felt how much he’d meant it. I could feel the hesitation and trembling in his thumb as he strokes the underside of my wrist.

He never stopped long enough to count my pulse — not even for the card counting savant. There was nothing nefarious. Nothing stopping me from lying to him if I wanted to.

With my back still to him, he stepped closer. I could hear his regret in shaky breath when he said, “I should’ve told them to stop.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I answered immediately. My treacherous body turned to face him and more. My wrist twisted until it was so easy for him to lace our fingers together.

The words flowed from me so easily as long as I didn’t look him in the eyes.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I’m not mad at you or anything, I just… I don’t know.”

From my peripherals, I saw how Spencer tilted his head and shoulders down to meet my shrunken figure. Without saying anything, he managed to make me look up at him.

With tears in my eyes and my bottom lip firmly between my teeth, Spencer looked at me and managed to make me feel beautiful.

“If you’re worried about hurting my feelings, I just want you to know that it’s totally okay if you don’t… want to kiss me,” he said.

It almost sounded like a lie.

“I completely understand and I would never want you to do anything that makes you even remotely uncomfortable and—“

“Spencer, that’s not the problem.”

Of all the possible rejections he’d expected, that apparently hadn’t been one of them. The boy genius was caught so off guard that he didn’t even know how to reply. His body relaxed, but his jaw remained tense as he tried to run through what possibilities he had failed to account for.

Coming up short, he was forced to ask the question I’d been dreading.

“So… what is?”

“This is humiliating,” I mumbled mostly to myself.

“Why?” he asked.

I looked into eyes that always made me smile and I felt my heart stop. In fact, time itself seemed to stop. The clocks on the walls got louder and slower, like a countdown to the end of something.

Spencer looked terrified, like he was waiting for something horrible. If the voice in my head was to be believed, I guess he was, in a way.

Something would change if I told him the truth. I couldn’t know what or how, but I knew that nothing would be the same.

But… maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Maybe… it could be better.

“I didn’t want you to kiss me because I…”

I could have lied to him.

I just didn’t want to.

“I really want you to kiss me,” I said. “Just… not like this.”

Spencer’s hand went slack in mine. In a way, he’d let go without actually letting go. Just a gentle shift of his fingers from desperation to shock.

Spencer didn’t pull away. He mostly just… stood there, with his mouth hung open and his mind working slower than it ever had before. But my mind was racing, and my lips felt inclined to follow the train of thought that was now racing down the tracks.

“I want you to kiss me because you want to kiss me. Not because of a stupid dare.”

“Oh,” he said with a shaky exhale.

That was all he’d given me to work with. In a way, it was a blessing, because it didn’t sound enough like an outright rejection for me to stop my loose lips from continuing to spill the contents of my heart in front of him.

“I just wanted… if you kissed me, I wanted it to be more special than that. I wanted it to mean something.”

Like a light switch had flipped on in his brain, Spencer jolted back to his usual energy. That frantic, curious kid trapped in a man’s body was so quick to figure it out.

“Wait, have you never kissed anyone before?” he theorized.

And yeah, he was right, but he didn’t have to say it.

“Freaking profilers,” I grumbled, pulling my hand away from his to cross my arms firmly against my chest. I turned ever-so-slightly away from him before deciding, “You know what? Never mind, I don’t want you to kiss me anymore.”

A bold lie.

Spencer didn’t believe me nor let me get too far. With both hands on my shoulders, he quickly turned me back to him.

“Wait! Wait, is that why you were embarrassed?”

My lips puckered to stop my heart from letting anything else out. My eyes avoided his, no matter how insistent and inviting he was. I pursed my lips tightly enough together that Spencer could hear the answer in the body language.

And with the sweetest, shyest smile I’ve ever seen, he whispered back, “(Y/n) that’s… that’s really sweet.”

It was just so genuine. I was no good at telling when someone was lying, but I had been very experienced in telling the truth.

I knew he had meant it. I just didn’t know why. But in the spirit of truth telling, I decided to simply ask.

“How is that sweet?”

“You want me to be your first kiss,” he said. With incredulity in every part of his expression, he chuckled, “I’m flattered you think so highly of me.”

“I don’t know why, seeing as no one else was interested,” I grumbled.

Spencer did not appreciate the self-deprecating humor. In fact, he was very quick to disprove its contents.

“I promise you that there have been people that wanted to kiss you,” he assured me. Then, with a brief pause after he realized the web he’d gotten himself stuck in, Spencer gave me his own admission.

“You’re, uh… you’re looking at one of them.”

In that moment, between our lopsided smiles and white flags, I realized how silly this had all been. I wondered for a brief second how this could have gone so differently, how we had wasted so much time obstinately refusing to admit what we both felt out of fear of losing one another.

But we never would have. Still, as I reached out and embraced him without the heavy weight of that burden on my back, I didn’t regret waiting.

In fact, it almost seemed like that was how it had always been meant to be.

“Thanks, Spencer,” I said into his shirt. “Sorry I was weird.”

He just laughed, holding me even closer than I’d ever thought possible as he promised, “I wouldn’t change a single thing about you.”

And I knew that he’d meant it. There wasn’t a lie to be found.

Leaving the room after that had been so easy. The world had changed for us so quickly in a matter of minutes that I’d almost forgotten no one else knew what was going on. But I suppose the disruption had been enough of a punishment for their meddling.

I couldn’t hate them when Spencer’s hand was in mine. I couldn’t fault them at all for giving us that push — no matter how humiliating it had been — because in the end, I had everything I could ever ask for. I had everything I needed.

The rest of the night was like it always was. No one said a word about the way Spencer never let his hand leave me in some way, shape, or form. No one even mentioned the fact that our longing stares had changed to something else.

Everyone just had fun, knowing that they had been right about Mrs. Obvious and Mr. Oblivious.

As the night wound down, I found myself dreading leaving. Not only because Spencer had been the designated driver — and a terrible driver, at that — but because that meant he would have to leave.

When he parked the car in my driveway, I thought of what I could do to prolong the inevitable. I hadn’t been expecting him to be quite as much of the gentleman as he was, but I wasn’t going to complain when he hopped out of the driver’s side and ran over to open my door for me.

The walk to my door was silent and felt like forever. I almost wanted to invite him in, but I knew what his answer would be. It had been late, and a lot had happened. I was sure we both agreed that it was alright to take it slow.

I mean, look how long it had taken to get us there.

Once we arrived at my door, Spencer let go of my hand. He still stayed just as close, though. From mere inches away, he looked down at me with an affection so blatant it made my cheeks burn.

I was about to open my mouth to say goodnight when I decided that I had something better to ask, instead.

“Truth or dare?”

Spencer smiled. He swayed even closer, backing me against the entrance and whispering his answer inches from my lips.

“Dare.”

I knew he could feel the way my breath shook. He could see how my eyelids began fluttering shut before I’d given him his instruction.

That wouldn’t stop me, though.

“I dare you to kiss me.”

Spencer’s hands touched me first. He cradled my face before pressing his forehead against mine. I closed my eyes, unsure if I could handle the yearning in his eyes. I didn’t know what to expect, so I just stood patiently, counting the quick beats of my heart, and feeling the warmth of his breath fanning over my lips.

But then, just before I thought he would kiss me, he moved. Spencer tilted my head down and quickly pressed a gentle, chaste kiss against my forehead.

Even that innocent touch lit my body on fire. I opened my eyes, surprised to find that he wasn’t finished yet. I giggled as his kisses continued — one on each cheek before the quickest on the tip of my nose.

I laughed, a sound filled with excitement and my love for that silly boy. Spencer pulled away then, and I almost had the chance to be disappointed.

But then he kissed me. Without any hesitation, no moment of anticipation, he pulled my body forward while simultaneously pushing it back. He kissed me with soft lips and gentle hands.

Eventually, I had the sense to kiss him back. I knew it would be shier and less practiced, but he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he smiled against my lips once he felt it. He continued his attempts to kiss me until our smiles and laughter were too much to keep it up.

When he stepped back and away then, I felt no disappointment. I felt nothing resembling anything bad, and Spencer seemed equally satisfied.

He still felt the need to explain himself, though. Just in case.

“Not because of the dare,” he said with a shrug and a smile, “Just because I wanted to.”

Then, with the complete lack of grace that I’d loved him for, he stumbled back down the stairs with an awkward wave.

“Goodnight,” he said before I returned it with a promise.

“Until next time.”

I had a feeling we'd have even more fun with that one.

To be continued...

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#spencer reid #dr. spencer reid #spencer reid smut #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid fanfiction #criminal minds fanfic #criminal minds smut #criminal minds fandom #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid fandom #spencer reid self insert #no smut #not yet anyway #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid blurb

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jinlias · 1 year

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tally - rosé

— songwriter!, musician! rosé, paparazzi

i say fuck it when i feel it, cuz no one’s keeping tally i do what i want with who i like

rosé was exhausted, she hates this cycle. of sneaking around and hiding under dark clothes when you’re in public, of hiding her lockscreen and the polaroid on her phone case from appearing on photos or videos, she hated being unable to talk about you to everyone, she hated all of this, loathed it.

but she always kept you around, even if you had to ride with crew most of the time, for when she was away from you too long she would start to hear her own heartbeat more than she’d like. you were peace to her. rosé was exhausted, but mostly, she was furious.

and i ain’t gon conceal it, while you talking all that shit, i’ll be getting mine

it was a thing of time, that everyone started noticing the same feminine silhouette around her even when none of her crew was. fans kept up with her management team, everyone even knew her re-ocurring friend group, they just couldn’t pinpoint where u fell, yet, you were always there.

don’t apologize for my behavior, if you’re offended i don’t care.

she never fit in the usual korean mold, the delicate, educated and always quiet women she shared the industry with because they valued their dream career more than their own freedom. controversy is what made her stand out, it’s how she blew up, it’s expected no one was too surprised when she started a soft launch of your relationship. pictures of the two bowls of food, tangled hands, two shadows on a crosswalk, small, private, intimate photos like these easily gave away it was not just one of her friends.

sometimes i like to go play dirty, just like all of the fuckboys do, that’s my choice and there’s no one i’m hurting, when that’s not girly.

but rosé has always been open about her private life, she’s never hid behind dark clothes or hats, at least not until you. she was a weekly topic on social media, everyone took out the time to discuss her possible hook ups, like that was of important matter to anyone else.

that’s why everyone else was so observant now, because all of the sudden she stopped running out of models’ apartments at three am with tousled hair. instead, she was seen hiding behind her clothes and around a becoming familiar silhouette at restaurants, movie theaters, parks, at houses and parties of families who no one’s ever seen before, which was the ideal, but people would just not stop watching her. and you.

everybody tells me to play nice, everybody judge but looking twice, but my body don’t belong to none of them though, and i’m not going to change cuz you say so.

she was tired of playing nice, of laughing it off when men asked her about her love life, when the woman interviewer asked about any special boys in her life. she was tired of everyone assuming and deciding which one of her friends she was dating today. why couldn’t they see she loved you? why couldn’t they just move on? she wasn’t theirs to play around with, she just wanted to do what she loved, surrounded by people she loved. surrounded by you.

warned me to make the rules, or play the fool, it ain't that hard to choose

“rosie, this could make or break your career” you really wish it wasn’t this hard, you wish you could just love each other and live contently. without anyone else interfering.

“i don’t give a fuck anymore. i need you to do the same” she’s cried, she’s given up. but she’s angry, she wants this over. she wants you two to be free. “will you walk the red carpet with me? please” she asks again, begs, her eyes are telling you all of the above. how she can’t take this anymore, if she has to pretend she doesn’t know you for one more night, she might just explode.

rosé can’t ever explain to you the amount of bliss she felt when you agreed, she had been given an ultimatum since the beginning, play the fool or break the rules. play the fool because it could save her career, break the rules because it could save her. she’s finally brave enough to choose for you. and she chooses to be immensely happy, publicly

i say fuck it when i feel it. cuz no one’s keeping tally i do what i want with who i like.

that night, hell broke loose. so did the internet, the photo of her kissing you at the red carpet had millions of fans publicly giving up on her, but so many more expressing their gratitude and pride for her. regardless she couldn’t care less about the numbers, the money, all she cared about was you, her, your future together, and how it was finally possible.

#AHHH I MISSED MY SONG FICS SM❤️‍🩹#and i love this song.#i haven’t ever gotten over this album and its been what six months?#also coachella has me in my bp feels #rosé imagines #rosé fluff #rosé angst #rosé x yn #rosé x reader #rosé imagine #rosé blurb #rose x reader #song fic #rsj

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geospiral · 2 months

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“I want to be someone’s stepping stone; I want the memory of me to haunt that person so that I may live through them and be beside them without having to stay. I know that's selfish and cruel, but if the path has already been laid out for me and I have no choice but to die, then I want to at least be able to choose who I die for. And to be honest, I will probably regret this decision when I’m lying there and spitting up my own blood, but at least it will be mine… and I think I can rest easy knowing that.”

Moran, a top student when it comes to all things excluding singing, can best be described as being Anakt Garden’s very own “Thinker.” Often found sitting on the very left edge of the garden’s box, she is willing to lend an ear to those in need.

Alien Stage OC Base made by @shakingparadigm

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Anakt Garden:

Moran is not a person who will intentionally seek other people out, but she does enjoy when others come to her, usually in the form of seeking guidance. This guidance can range from simply helping a fellow student with their class work to teaching others some of what she knows about the Segyein’s entertainment industry, a topic that she is familiar with due to her upbringing.

She likes talking about philosophy, giving general worldly advice, and being a mediator to her fellow classmates, trying her best to be an impartial judge.

Moran also likes “reading” other people’s fortunes as a kind of game. It’s not anything serious; you ask her a specific topic about the future, such as “Am I going to pass the test?” and then give her as much information as you can about your chosen topic in order for her to make an educated guess. If she guesses correctly, you have to give her something, and if she doesn't, then she’ll give something to you. The items are nothing big, just small treasures like a pretty stone from the stream or an Anakt Garden lollipop. Moran also keeps a small collection of things she finds or is given in case others would just like to do general bartering with her; however, she doesn’t hold any real attachment to the things she collects and will usually trade her items away in exchange for short-lived treats such as candy, drinks, or a bubble wand.

Moran gets along fine with the other students, and although she can be pretty blunt at times, to the point of unintentionally seeming rude, she does her best to stay on everyone’s good side. She was raised with many others under her Guardian, so she has always been used to living alongside her fellow humans; however, the experiences were not great, causing her to have trouble telling when others genuinely like her or wish to be her friend. It doesn’t help that it only seems that her classmates come to her when they need something.

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Background:

Moran’s Guardian, Rheya, is a well-known and respected theater director with a theatrical troupe composed of the many humans under her, raising them from a young age to be her personal actors. By having her plays consist of an entirely human cast, Rheya is able to push the limits of her plays' theatrics in ways that she simply could not when working with her fellow Segyeins. Her plays are touted for their stories and visual spectacles; however, they can tend to be extremely dangerous for the humans involved, with many sustaining real injuries throughout their performances.

Despite the humans of the troupe referring to Rheya as their "mother,” they do not view one another as family but rather as competition when it comes to gaining their Guardians' affection. Bullying amongst the group is commonplace; if one person is punished, everyone is, which leads to that one individual being viciously humiliated and outcast by their peers and being sent down levels in the troupe’s personal social hierarchy.

(Note: The troupe’s hierarchy is loosely inspired by that of the video game Rule of Rose; I haven’t played it, and it's basically impossible to do so without pirating, but I got the idea from the video analysis of the game by RagnarRox.)

Rheya did not want to stop her storytelling at just theater production; however, she wanted to extend her reach further and saw Alien Stage as a chance to do just that, devising a long-term plan to craft what will hopefully be one of her best stories. She wants the story to go like this: she will choose two of her humans, one to send to Anakt Garden and the other to stay with her, molding him into the next big celebrity pet. The one sent to the garden, Moran, would be used as fodder in order to boost the fame of the other human pet, Adam, under the guise that the reason she trained for and performed in Alien Stage was to gain the other’s attention, subsequently dying in the competition. Upon finding this out, Adam would then go on to perform in the next Alien Stage season after her to avenge the women who loved him, winning in the process.

Rheya doesn’t have any faith that Moran can survive her Alien Stage season, and neither does Moran herself, but while Moran is in the garden, she hopes to find someone who she can truly die for in the competition, someone she actually cares for, unlike Adam, whom she barely knows and has never loved. If Moran must die, she wants it to be meaningful to her and the one she adores. She wants to make it her own choice.

#alien stage #alnst #alnst ocs #oc: moran #my art #Does the backstory of why she was sent to Anakt make sense or am I going crazy #I've actually had this OC idea in my head for a few months but then a saw that the deadline for the competition thing is July 20th #I realized I actually needed to draw her and write her down lol

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solarmorrigan · 2 years

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Howdy! 40. things you interupted me to say, or 6. things you said under the stars and in the grass for Steddie? Your choice!!! (also ty for the ask! I'll get right on it! :D)

Hello! I'm sorry this has taken so long, but I have at last finished! Thank you for sending a prompt, and I hope your new year has been going well :D

Prompt from this list. I chose #40. things you interrupted me to say

If there’s one thing Eddie can say for the ostentatious double front doors of Steve’s house, it’s that they’re great for dramatically slamming open when you’re angry and your arms are full of bleeding boyfriend.

“I can’t fucking believe you,” Eddie grumbles, dragging Steve over the threshold.

“I can walk on my own, you know,” Steve grumbles right back, halfheartedly shaking the arm that Eddie has in a vice grip. “I didn’t get hit that hard.”

Eddie ignores him. “I swear to god, it’s like you put off a pheromone that makes people want to hit you in the face.”

“Is it working on you right now?” Steve asks as Eddie drags him into the kitchen and shoves him sort-of-gently into leaning against one of the countertops.

“A little bit, yeah!” Eddie snaps.

“Then maybe I should clean myself up,” Steve says; it looks like he’s trying to smirk, but the blood smeared on his chin from the split in his lip is kind of ruining the effect, and Eddie only rolls his eyes as he turns towards the sink.

He knows Steve is trying to make him laugh, trying to get him to lighten up, and usually it would be working, but not this time. This time, Eddie is legitimately pissed, and he’s going to hold onto that.

He’s still going to patch Steve up, obviously, but still. He’s mad.

He pulls the overstocked (actually, adequately stocked, for all the shit they end up going through) first aid kit out from under the sink and then sets to running a kitchen towel under the tap. Behind him, he can hear Steve sigh, but he doesn’t turn to look just yet.

Only when the towel is wet and wrung out does Eddie come back to Steve’s side, swiping the blood off Steve’s chin and then pressing the cloth to his split lip. Steve reaches up to take the towel, freeing up Eddie’s hands to go picking through the first aid kit.

Steve then almost immediately takes the towel away to start speaking, despite the harsh glare Eddie sends his way.

“I’m trying to understand, but I honestly don’t get why you’re so bent out of shape about this,” Steve says. “Like, I’m sorry there was a fight, I know you don’t like that, but it isn’t like I was trying to start anything.”

“Well you weren’t trying not to start anything, either,” Eddie says, pulling the bag of cotton balls from the depths of the kit; he’s not sure how it always ends up at the bottom.

“I was just trying to make that asshole go away. I thought if he just saw you weren’t alone, he’d fuck off. Normally they aren’t brave when they’re not in groups.”

Eddie pauses in wrestling with the cap of the disinfectant to give Steve a flat, sarcastic smile. “Yeah, that worked out real well, didn’t it?”

To Steve’s credit, the guy who’d approached Eddie on the street spitting poison at him about the murder accusations he’d been fully exonerated of had seemed pretty surprised to see Steve step out from around the side of the van. All the same, he hadn’t listened at all to Steve’s firm instructions to walk away, and when he’d tried to further approach Eddie, Steve had stepped between them and given the guy a shove back.

Eddie had known at that moment that they were probably going to have to perform a strategic retreat, but even he hadn’t been expecting the guy’s fist to come flying at Steve as fast as it had.

The ensuing fight had thankfully been short, startled into a stop after no more than a handful of vicious blows when a passerby had started shouting at them, and Eddie had managed to shove Steve into the van and make a quick getaway in the confusion.

“Well at least I’m the only one who got hit,” Steve scoffs. “Between the two of us, I’d rather–”

“Don’t do that,” Eddie cuts in sharply.

Brows furrowed, Steve blinks at Eddie. “Don’t do wh–”

“That’s exactly why I’m pissed off!” Eddie snaps. “You just– you fucking throw yourself between other people and danger like it doesn’t even matter!”

And Steve has the audacity to roll his eyes. “It doesn’t really matter, Eddie.”

“You seriously think that? You think it’s just fine?” Eddie hisses.

“Yes! I think it’s fine, because I’m fine!” Steve gives in to the irritation that’s been edging in since the start of the conversation, snapping back at Eddie. “Nothing that bad ever happens, and I’m standing right here, clearly fine!”

“Oh, you’re fine? This is fine? Standing in the middle of the kitchen bruised and bleeding is fine now?” Eddie demands. “And all those migraines I’ve had a front row seat for, those are fine? And the dizzy spells? And the fact that your vision is so fucked that you need glasses, and you’ve been trying to hide it from the kids by wearing contacts, because you’re clearly fucking fine?”

Eddie can see Steve’s jaw clench, the way he’s biting back an immediate and vicious retort, but Eddie’s not having it. He’s worked up enough that he’s decided they’re hashing this out right the fuck now.

“Answer me, Steve.”

“No. Just drop it, Eddie,” Steve practically growls. “That shit isn’t important, okay? It’s not.”

Somehow Eddie resists the urge to pull his hair out, but he should probably put the bottle of disinfectant down before he squeezes it beyond repair. “What’s more important than your fucking brain?”

“You!”

It’s the loudest Eddie’s ever heard Steve get outside of a life or death situation. It’s certainly the loudest Steve’s ever gotten with him, and it startles Eddie into silence for a short moment.

“You, the kids, Robin – your safety! There is nothing more important,” Steve says firmly, like he’s declaring some kind of universal law. “And I can’t… there isn’t much I can do but put myself between you guys and danger. Sometimes it’s all I can do. So I do it.”

It’s said with such steady conviction that Eddie feels cold; the idea that Steve is so committed – so determined to go down as the shield is terrifying.

And infuriating.

“And just what the fuck are we supposed to do when that strategy costs us you?” Eddie jabs a finger into the middle of Steve’s chest, demanding an answer. “What are we supposed to do without you?”

For the first time since the argument began, Steve looks away. He glances down at the ugly, tiled floor just to the right of Eddie’s sneakers, shaking his head. “C’mon, you guys would get along fine without me.”

“You really think that?” Eddie can’t help the shrill, incredulous laugh that works out of his throat. “You really think we’re that goddamn heartless that we’d just get on fine if you fucking died?”

“No!” Steve’s eyes snap back to Eddie, alarmed. “That’s not– I don’t mean you’d just immediately forget about me or whatever, of course you care, I just… like, you’d be alright. There’s nothing you need me for.”

Eddie steps forward, eliminating almost all the remaining space between them, and reaches up to put his hands on either side of Steve’s face, nearly cradling it. Even now, even bewildered and angry, Steve can’t help but lean into the touch, and Eddie keeps his grip gentle as he announces, “That is bullshit.”

Steve stares at Eddie, more confused than before, maybe a little hurt, but Eddie goes on.

“You think we’d be able to just get over you? That we don’t need you? I’m not sure Henderson would ever fucking recover. Buckley would have a meltdown big enough to take anyone inside a ten mile radius out with her. And I–” Eddie breaks off because he knows he’s tearing up now; he’s always wielded his strong emotions like some kind of superpower, channeling them into making himself a better musician, a better storyteller, a bigger-than-life target that’s harder to take down, but right now he can’t tell if they’re helping make his point or if they’re just making things worse. “I love you so fucking much. And if you just– if you just leave, what hell am I supposed to do with all of that? Where am I supposed to put it?”

“Eddie…”

“I need you here, Steve. Not between me and some asshole townie, but next to me. With me. I need you to make that your priority.” In spite of how tensely he’s holding himself, Eddie’s hands are still gentle on either side of Steve’s face, careful of the cut on his cheekbone that Steve himself never seems to have noticed at all. “Please.”

Slowly, Steve’s hands slide up under Eddie’s jacket and come to rest on his waist, warm through the fabric of Eddie’s t-shirt. “I don’t… know if I know how to do that. I don’t know how to step back,” Steve admits after a minute. “But I can– I can try.”

At some point during their argument, Steve’s lip had split back open, another few fat drops of blood rolling sluggishly down towards his chin, so Eddie tilts to the side a little as he leans in and presses a kiss to the corner of Steve’s mouth.

They stand that way for longer than Eddie really cares to count, nearly nose to nose, existing in each other’s space because they can, before Eddie kisses Steve again and pulls away.

“Alright, we’re gonna patch you up for real this time, and then we’re gonna make sure you’re not concussed.”

Steve rolls his eyes, though he’s barely more than exasperated. “I’m pretty sure I’d know if I had a concussion, man. I’m some kind of expert by now.”

“Yeah, well, humor me,” Eddie says, taking the bottle of disinfectant back up and hunting for another cotton ball.

“Okay, but I don’t have a concussion.”

“That’s just what a person with a concussion would say.”

“No, a person with a concussion would say ‘I think I might have a concussion,’ and then throw up on an EMT.”

A sharp laugh barks out of Eddie’s chest, real and startled, and he looks over at Steve. “You didn’t.”

“Post-Starcourt. Truly my finest moment,” Steve says, giving Eddie a look that lands leagues short of dignified, and Eddie laughs again.

They go through cleanup process in silence after that, no longer angry, not bitter, but tired and a little uncertain.

“What do you want to do after this?” Steve finally asks when they pack away the medical supplies.

Eddie shrugs. Before shit had gone down, they’d been planning to get dinner and then maybe swing by the video store to pester Robin and rent something for the night. Their evening is wide open, now. “Dunno. You have anything in mind?”

“Honestly? I’m tired. I kind of just want to lie down.” Steve says, and Eddie’s eyes cut back to him sharply; it takes a lot to get Steve to admit he’s anything less than ready to go at all times.

“Okay…” Eddie says. “D’you… want me to go, or–”

“I want you to lie down with me,” Steve says, reaching out to grab Eddie’s hand, as if Eddie’s about to run off. “I just… want to be with you a while.”

“Oh,” Eddie breathes. “Yeah. We can do that.”

Steve’s answering smile is small, a tired thing trying not to tug on the barely-formed scab in his bottom lip, but it’s there, and Eddie’s pretty sure he loves it just for that.

#homosexual-having-tea #steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #stranger things #eddiesteve #solar wrote

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mildkleptomaniac · 2 years

Text

oh baby part three— jj maybank x reader

𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭: “ reader finding out she’s pregnant (with jj) during season 1 events and he freaks out like in a bad way, kinda angsty with whatever ending you want! thanks in advance, love your work : ”

𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬: part one | part two | part three

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 1.7k

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: throwing up, guns, profanities, mentions of beer.

𝒂𝒖𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒓'𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒆: ....i didn’t know this many people missed this series. seriously. i still can’t believe this event still takes place during the first episode. i’m still trying to think about the logistics of how this will play out...given the events of the show lol.

“Look, I’m callin’ it off. All right?” John B walked out of the Chateau. The sound of Kie’s bongo playing came to a halt. Pope had been watching her intently. Y/N laid out on a lawn chair, watching her boyfriend toss rocks into the yard. She felt tired from last night, the adrenaline causing her to have sleepy eyes for the rest of the night that carried onto the new day. Her body ached.

“Peterkin said, if I stay out of the marsh, she’ll help me with DCS.” John B sounded desperate. Everyone didn’t want John B to get taken away. The glue. John B was the glue to the friend group it seemed. Despite him not being the most level headed, or smartest, everyone looked to him on what to do next.

“And you believe her?” JJ retorted, perched on a surf board.

“Yes, I believe her, JJ.” John B was quick to reply.

“An actual cop, John B. You believed a cop.” JJ snapped. The Maybank’s held an unhealthy relationship against the cops. Always on their backs. Y/N winced at the two boys arguing about John B’s situation.

“All I gotta do is stay out of the marsh for a couple days, then she’ll help me out. It doesn’t help that your ass was the one shooting a gun.”

Kie and Y/N shared a look, Pope looking down at his hands. Both the teenagers had valid points: JJ having a gun wasn’t the best choice of action, but no one wanted to let Topper drown their best friend.

“Kook versus Pogues, they always, always win!” JJ exclaimed before punching a buoy, pacing around the backyard.

“JJ, relax–”

“It’s okay,” Kie added on to Y/N’s comfort.

“No, it’s not okay! That means there’s something valuable down there, and you know it.” Perhaps JJ felt more in need to discover something to help his own life. Something to get away from his father, comfortable clothing, food in the fridge, money for Y/N and the future–whatever that may be, with or without a baby, Y/N’s a part of it. “I know you do. And I understand why you don’t wanna go.” JJ began reasoning with the Pogues.

He faced his direction to Pope, “You’re the golden boy. You got way too much to risk.”

He faced Kiara, “And you–I mean, you’re already rich as fuck anyway. Why would you bother?”

And then he faced Y/N, “You know what it’s like, we need to see what’s down there,” The words wanted to slip off his tongue, for the baby. For the future. The decision still unclear, with no purpose, direction or guidance.

“Y/N, you and me, we got nothin’ to lose!” JJ continued his spiel. JJ did have something to lose in fact, same with Y/N.

Each other.

“I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to talk about it.” John B shook his head, completely unenthused about their conversation. Well, until JJ spelled out the plan for him.

Rich kids don’t go into Foster Care.

Y/N thought John B would be smarter to not listen to JJ’s plans. Logically, stealing from your rich boss seemed most definitely wrong. All the steps JJ meticulously thought out were all stupid. John B would get caught, inevitably–whether it be in the marsh, by Ward, and risking his one chance from Foster Care.

Y/N deemed the risk wasn’t worth the reward. At least to say, Y/N failed to make the wisest choices as well.

She found herself sitting on the HMS Pogue, setting up the SCUBA gear for him. Kie and Y/N shook her head as they read the tanks, practically empty.

“Does anyone know how to dive?” Kie looked at her friends, exasperated. All eyes flickered to Y/N, who shook her head. Being on the swim team differed from SCUBA.

“It’s a Kook sport, ain’t it?” JJ looked at Kiara, leaning against a metal pole.

“I’ve read about it before…” Pope trailed off. Kie rolled her eyes and tossed her hands in the air.

After much calculations and arguments, John B volunteered himself. Y/N watched as Kie stressed herself out over John B’s decision. Stealing a quick glance at her boyfriend, he raised his eyebrows and shrugged. Neither of the two knew what was going on between Kie and John B. The kiss on the cheek caused everyone else to share a look. That’s never happened before.

At least it gave Y/N something to think about, other than the baby growing inside of her.

After a month, buds for arms and legs developed, along with the umbilical cord. The heart had been formed, along with webbed fingers and twos. The life inside of Y/N soon formed ears, eyes, liver, and other facial features.

Y/N studied more about babies than she ever did in biology class, thanks to the books from the store she stole.

Y/N’s face turned pale at the sight of the police boat coming in their direction. “Oh my god,” She whispered. Heart palpitations increased. She felt sick.

“Just act normal everyone,” Kie stated, going back into a conversation with Y/N–as if they were already deep in conversation. She could hear her pulse in her ears, especially as the officer came abroad and began spewing questions left and right.

“I’m going to be sick,” Y/N whispered to JJ. He looked at her, questionably. Most of the time, Y/N was able to conceal their motives from the legal authorities. One of the many things JJ loved about Y/N. She could act and she acted well. A façade that she didn’t just steal beers from a gas station while flirting with the attendant, or letting her friends sneak into the junkyard to find some parts to fix the van.

“Everything okay over there?” The officer asked, before peering over the front of the boat into the water.

“Just–just peachy,” Y/N smiled weakly. Her acting quickly failing, she felt her stomach grumble and tightening. She gracefully found herself over the edge of the HMS Pogue, throwing up into the water. Everyone grimaced at the sight, JJ trying his best to hold her hair up.

Poor John B, Y/N thought. Hopefully he wasn’t on that side of the boat. At least it prevented the officer from investigating the water.

“I just have bad sea sickness,” She announced to the officer, after wiping her face. The two officers shared a look, followed by disgust.

“All right then, just let us know if you see anything out there.” He stated, walking over onto his boat. The engine started.

“Will do,” Echoed from Pope and JJ. The waited as the officers cruised away before glancing over the side of the boat. John B must’ve ran out of air by that time.

“How did it go down there?” JJ asked.

“Well,” The Pogues assisted John B back onto the boat, unloading the gear off of him as he tossed a case onto the boat.

“Y/N scared the cops off with some gnarly acting, being seasick.” Pope grimaced, yet sounding proud of her ‘skills’. Relief washed over Y/N, at least it was in character for her. Kie didn’t believe the acting though.

In the distance, Y/N noticed another boat in the ‘closed off’ marsh. “Guys? Bogey, two o’clock.”

Turning heads, a boat sped their way. None of the Pogues were able to recognize that boat. It wasn’t any of the Kooks–they’d have something fancier–for sure. JJ began pulling on the bowline and kept an eye on the boat speeding ahead.

“I think we should start going, guys!” Y/N exclaimed.

“Don’t wait on me!” JJ continued to pull on the line and the engine kicks on.

“Just act natural, again!” Kie spoke, before holding onto the metal bar. Y/N glanced backwards at the strangers.

“They’re speeding up to us, guys.”

“What?”

��How else do you want me to word it, John B? They’re revving the engine to get closer to us?” Y/N spoke of sarcasm. JJ chewed on his cheek, holding back a smile.

“I’m going!” He argued back.

“They’re following us!” Kie panicked.

“Gun the fucking boat, JB!” Her nerves crept on her, shouting at John B. She watched the strange men follow from several feet behind, creating quite the wake in the Marsh. As the curve the corner, Y/N eyes widened.

“Holy shit, they have a gun!” The words sputtered out of her mouth, not fast enough before the first bullet shot into the air. Y/N slipped down off the seat, covering her head from the action to protect herself.

What the fuck.

All the Pogues got down, while John B continued to speed off. JJ made sure to cover Y/N with his body to protect her. To protect them. Just in case.

This shouldn’t be happening.

“We’re going to die!” Pope shared his feelings before Kie got an idea. She grabbed a fishing net before tossing it in the water, avoiding shots in the process. The net caught onto the follower’s engine, stuttering and whirring.

“That was insane!” Kie laughed, in disbelief.

“Booooyeah!” JJ shouted, enjoying the rush of adrenaline pumping through him. Pope looked relieved and looked at Y/N, who sat there–complexion of a ghost. He watched his friend for several moments, taking note how she didn’t celebrated and how she cradled her abdomen. No blood. No injuries. Yet, she reeked of consternation.

Out of character–Y/N would be cheering as well, throwing her arms in the air before letting JJ plant a big kiss on her. Or maybe she’d suggest celebrating with a pack of beer and music around the fire. Poking at Kie to get free food at the Wreck. Instead, she remained silent for the rest of the ride back to the dock. Last to leave the boat as they emptied the secret treasure, only to reveal a canister with a compass in it. Disappoint filled the atmosphere, killing everyone’s anticipation.

Except John B’s.

“It’s my father’s,”

#jj maybank #jj maybank imagine #( jj maybank )#jj maybank x reader #outer banks imagine #obx imagines #oh baby

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ueidesign · 2 months

Note

I’m curious as to your reasoning behind making Leona Wind/Euridition.

Does it have something to do with this?:

And the fact that he canonically loves chess, is very strategic, and is extremely intelligent?

I would have thought, with Savanaclaw’s dorm motto, the Hunt path would work better… but if you chose to go with the above clip and a sand storm as his main attacking point, then Eurdition does work better since they do better against groups, right?

Forgive me if I’m way off I have never played hsr in my life this is the product of a quick amount of research to figure out elements and paths etc. so I knew the barest of bare bones so I could learn more and understand more about what you’re doing here with these because I love them 💀😅

Well, hello there ! ^^

Before i start yapping, i just want to say that i love how u ended researching about the paths and elements BECAUSE THAT IS TRUE DEDICATION OVER HERE

Also you are not far from my own reasoning :0 !

Soooooooooo

Let's start by the Path

If we want to choose based on the canon, it would be Tank (Book 6), similar to Vil's

However, i wasn't pleased with it .. it felt bland ?

even Idia himself forfeited the idea immediately cause it DOESN'T MATCH LEONA'S CHARACTERISTICS

And i absolutely agree that the path needs to reflect a character behaviour and their skills !

A small detail i liked is that Leona is not only physically strong, but even his magic power is in great shape !

LEONA IS STRONG AND WELL SUITED TO BE A DPS

He might be lazy... yes, but wasn't what started it was his hatred toward the way he got treated whenever he tried his best ?

In reality He is strong and well suited in the front lines

He even has the title of a "Sunset Warrior" back in his hometown, which is a title given to the strongest fighter !

This leaves us with two options Destruction, The Hunt and Erudition

It is true that Leona's SP (Signature Spell) is a destructive one(turns everything he touches into sand), but unlike Malleus, his behaviour AREN'T that hazard !

This leaves us with The Hunt and Erudition

Comparing the two to each other, i believe that the Erudition is the perfect choice

One

is because Leona is a character that was raised as a TRUE prince he did turn into a troublesome person and very difficult to handle, but those actions of his reflect how strategic he can be

Not to forget how he managed to avoid lots of trouble thanks to this talent

Another thing i love about Leona is that he might be ruthless, but his words are based on experience and silent observation. A LOGICAL ONES INDEED

He even went to a great length with cheating and abusing his power in order to achieve what he wanted (Book 2 accidents)

Point two is more related to his SP, which can injure those around him on a specific range

I think this is a great choice for him to be a multi targeted character or, more accurately, an aoe character

Element choice

As u saw, i ended up giving Leona the Wind element and not physical

Why ?

Because relating him as physical just because he is strong and well built didn't feel right

LEONA ALWAYS DID WHAT HE WAS TOLD he learnt to fight because he is the prince

he polished his skills because he is the prince

I'm not saying he doesn't like that. But why does it feel wrong? It is as if we are labelling it as his duty as the SECOND prince

Wait, let me give an example

Remember Jack Eidolons?

I gave Jack a physical element, compared to Leona. You can see how well deticated Jack is for working out and balancing a healthy lifestyle, but Leona ? He might have cared once but completely gave up on it later on

Not to forget that Leona is a beastman. his species played a huge role in this too.

Last but not least his SP gives a veryy strong feeling for wind

Since sand storms occur when there is a strong WIND to the point it starts lifting the sand grain off the ground and blows them in the air :> (thank u google)

Hope this helps clear everything

Btw !!!

i didn't consider the gif i inserted as a part of my reasoning because u absolutely shocked me with that detail, and I LOVE IT hellooo!!!???

Little note (and a reminder)

ALL OTHER CHOICES ARE VALID. THIS IS NOTHING BUT MY OWN OPINION ON HOW I VIEW THE CHARACTERS <3

Feel free to drop me ur thoughts ! Or reply on this matter

#ueidesign #ueimessages #twst x hsr #leonakingsholar #leona twisted wonderland #leona kingscholar #twistedwonderland

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the-ace-with-spades · 5 months

Text

just hold my hand

(based on this and this post) (hangster kids, mpreg, sad grandpa Mav, protective Hangman and the angsty hours followed by fluff hours)

---

Part 2/3? | read on ao3

Mav really doesn’t know what to do. None of the lieutenants seem to be taking the training seriously — if anything, they treat it like a competition, like an opportunity to outrun the other person and prove they’re better.

He knows it’s ironic to say given his history, but he wishes they’d actually focus more on team-building than proving who has less skill issue.

The worst part of it is, if he needed to decide today on the pairs, both Rooster and Hangman would be chosen. He regrets letting them train at all because everyone has seen how well they work together — Cyclone included, who can just override his judgment and choose them both for the mission anyway — they fly a bit too aggressively to his taste and still didn’t manage to make a swing at him, but they were close, really close. Rooster seems to be taming Hangman down, enough that he thinks about who is there with him in the air — his husband, Bradley is Hangman’s husband and he’s in the air with him — and Hangman seems to bring out of Bradley the worst; the overconfidence, the rushness, the unquestioned trust in his wingman.

Mav really feels the irony.

He’s still against them both being sent off. Right after the two of them, Coyote seems to be following the lead, and he and Hangman work the best as a pair, Bradley excluded. Bradley works better with any of the foxtrot teams than Hangman and it’d make sense to group them by compatibility with foxtrot teams rather than the individual pilots' compatibility.

If he could, he’d choose no one.

Mav knows that if he chooses Bradley and he dies, he'll feel guilty forever — another Bradshaw gone from the world too soon due to Mav’s choices, another dad he’d take away from a Bradshaw kid — their Baby Goose, the kid Mav has known since the day he was born.

But he also knows that if he chooses Hangman and he dies during the mission, Bradley will never forgive him. Mav’s been lucky enough to have been given that kind of forgiveness once already, from Carole, who had always claimed she hadn’t blamed him at all, not even for a second, and he’s not lucky enough to earn it twice.

This training is a last, and slightly haphazard, attempt to make all of the aviators work better in a team, no matter who is in that team.

At least that’s what he tells himself as he watches them all do warm-up stretches on the beach, Hondo running them ragged with the whistle.

They’re catching a break, each of them with a cooled water bottle, and still scattered in the same small groups they seem to favor in the air.

Bradley and Hangman are standing close, sharing a water bottle between themselves. Hangman dries off his face with the hem of his t-shirt and opts to take it off completely, throwing it onto the floor.

Bradley rolls his eyes and handing him the water, leans forward to pick it up. Mav sees him hiss, staying hunched over for longer than expected. When he straightens up, he rubs his spine a little, blinking.

Hangman reaches his hand to Bradley’s waist. “Is your back still—”

“I’m fine,” Bradley replies, so sharply and so loudly that it turns heads. If it was anyone else, Mav’d have joked about trouble in paradise, but it’s Bradley and Mav’s been watching his husband hover around him, clutching onto him, to an annoying degree.

Mav watches again, ready to interfere, as Hangman tenses, his jaw clenching.

Bradley softens, just a bit, palm wrapping around Hangman’s hand, squeezing and letting go as he says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. I’m fine, Jake, I promise.”

His voice sounds so gentle, so intimate that Mav has to look away from them. Phoenix meets his gaze, shaking her head a little.

“It’s really weird, isn’t it?” she tells him, quietly, and she doesn’t know the half of it. “You’d think they hate each other but they actually work together better than most.”

He’s not sure what to tell her — he can see how it could look like that, on the outside, that they’re good for each other, the way they complement each other, but Mav has more than just reservations. He’d have never taken Hangman for the type Bradley would choose and Hangman seems not only arrogant on the work level but also seems like he is too assured he knows what Bradley wants or needs, a bit too possessive.

The behaviors Mav knows people would call cute seem a bit too controlling, for Mav’s liking. Even just now, in the corner of his eyes, he can see Hangman rubbing sunscreen into Bradley’s face and neck — he’s always had such sensitive skin, turning lobster red within an hour out in the sun — and Bradley stands there idly, letting Hangman do as he pleases, and he looks so passive to everything that’s happening.

He’s not seen this relationship develop, Hangman is not someone he’d have wished for Bradley, and just from their files, he knows they had the twins first and only then got married. It looks the way it looks — like they only got married because they had kids together.

He’s—He’s a little bit scared, that Bradley got trapped, and he hasn’t been there to prevent it. He hasn’t been there for so much.

When he lets himself look again, most of the training group has piled closer to the water, just Bradley and Hangman staying behind and Halo and Harvard idling around the cooler.

He takes a deep breath at the sight, telling himself to not explode, to be professional, for once, even if Hangman isn’t giving him the same courtesy, pushing his hands under Bradley’s t-shirt shamelessly.

Bradley isn’t exactly better, swatting him away but not really putting much effort into it.

“No one is going to say anything,” he hears Hangman say, his voice a bit too—too sultry for Mav’s liking, one hand now on the small of Bradley’s back, too low. Really too low. “They’re not going to even notice.”

“I’m going to notice,” Bradley replies, squirming a little.

“Sweetheart,” Hangman—it almost sounds like he’s pleading.

“Don’t you sweetheart me,” he protests but even to Mav’s ears, it sounds half-hearted, more amused than anything. “I’m not taking it off, end of it.”

Mav stands there a bit horrified — he should do, say something, but he can’t stop looking. It’s like watching a train wreck or even worse than that.

“But you look good,” Hangman, hands still fisting the hem of Bradley’s t-shirt, both at the front and behind, but pulling him in closer by bending his elbows, says. Mav can barely hear it. “So, so good.”

He can see an arm slipping down even lower, Hangman is getting a bit too—handsy, for Mav’s liking, so he clears his throat, loudly enough that it makes them part.

Bradley crosses his arms over his chest again, but he’s red in the face and he knows it’s not a sunburn. He awkwardly avoids Mav’s gaze, swatting Hangman’s hands away, and walks off to the group that’s already jogging back and forth along the waves.

Hangman has the nerve to glare at him, like Mav was in the wrong for interrupting this wildly inappropriate display of affection.

“Is, uhm—Is Rooster okay?”

“With all due respect, sir, but you don’t have the right to ask that,” he replies and by the tone he uses, Mav can guess all due meant zero.

“This is still mandatory training, lead by me,” he points out. If nothing is working, at least his rank should — maybe Hangman needs to be reminded.

“And Rooster is fit for training, the same way he’s fit for flying,” he says, tone short.

Mav still doesn’t get it. “What was that about then? Why does he not want to take his shirt off?”

Hangman puts his sunglasses on, the corners of his mouth quirking, but not making him seem amused at all. “He’d been pregnant three times — take a wild guess, Captain.”

***

Warlock said Lieutenant Bradshaw was still at the base and Mav let himself hope for a moment alone, finally. He was sure Hangman would stay behind with Coyote at the hospital, they seemed closer than the rest of the lieutenants had been with Hangman.

The last hop was a nightmare. He’s almost lost three people in one flight session, everything going horribly wrong and then getting worse the longer they stayed in the air. Mav has stayed with them throughout the medical transport, escorting the medevac to the hospital and then driving there on his bike with the rest of the aviators who wanted to check on them, Bradley and Hangman included.

The surprise he’s met with as he steps into the rec room is a bitter reminder — there are two Lieutenant Bradshaws and the one who is at the base is not the one Mav wants to see.

Hangman is kneeling beside one of the desks — Bradley’s — three packed bags already at his feet, and he doesn’t even attempt to stand up as he notices Mav enter the room.

“Captain,” is all he says to acknowledge his presence.

“Hangman,” he says, biting down his tongue not to add something too snarky. “Not at the hospital anymore?”

“My husband stayed,” he replies and Mav is sure he’s taunting him with it. My husband. Like he hasn’t been Mav’s kid first. “I’m only grabbing everyone’s things.”

Bradley must have stayed with Phoenix, then, or Coyote decided to not get admitted and come back for a check-up in the morning after all.

It’s getting late. The sun is already turning the sky orange and even with the summer being almost done, San Diego always has quite late sunsets. It’s been a long day.

“Shouldn’t you be home then,” he notes and it comes out flat and bitter, to the point his voice wavers, “if he’s not, that is, because the—the kids—”

Hangman stands up and even a few feet away, Mav feels the way he towers over him badly. He finally meets Mav’s gaze, his eyes working like spikes on Mav. “I don’t need advice on our parenting, especially from you, sir.”

“I know Bradley is still mad at me—”

“You don't know anything.”

“Hangman,” he warns.

“Hurting. He was hurting and he still is and you're the cause. There’s a difference.” He makes a humorless sound, shaking his head at Mav and Mav wants to wipe that stupid smirk off his face. “You don’t get it, do you?”

Mav closes his eyes, trying to keep it all inside — the anger, at Hangman, who is the one who doesn’t know shit, the guilt that’s been culminating in him for over thirty years, and all the regret and bitterness he’s brought onto himself and that still feels unfair.

“It took me years to fix what you’ve done to him,” Hangman says and it sounds to Mav’s ears too much like he’s calling Bradley a problem. “Years of trying to make him believe he deserves to have a family, that he can trust the people he loves, that he’s worth his place, worth the care, that he’s worth being loved.”

Mav has many faults, has made many mistakes, but this one thing he is sure — this is absurd. “We loved him. We still love him.”

“Funny way you showed it,” he snarls. “I’m not losing my husband to your mistakes again and I don’t care what you think you’re doing. Stay away from our family.”

“Bradley deserves to make his own choices,” he tries, feeling again like Hangman is letting himself interfere with Bradley’s life too much, like he’s already decided for Bradley what Mav is and isn’t going to be to him.

Hangman snorts, an unamused laugh souring his voice. “Says you. Ironic, ain’t it.”

He’s grabbing all the bags and Mav takes a step, something inside him boiling—

The door opens and Warlock stays in the entrance until he turns toward him.

“Maverick,” he says slowly, eyes painfully blank. “The admiral has been hospitalized.”

***

Mav’s been staring at the obnoxiously gray walls of the waiting room for what felt like hours — it’s only been forty-five minutes — sat in the plastic chairs.

By the time he had arrived in the hospital, again, Ice was already being prepared in the OR. Mav had only passed a few words with the nurse in charge of the theaters, who explained what was happening and why, and the anesthesiologist, who asked Mav the standard questions again, and then he was left alone behind the glass door.

It isn’t the first time he’s waiting there, but he has never waited there so suddenly — all of Ice’s operations and procedures so far have been carefully planned and scheduled in advance, never an emergency.

Ice’s oncologist warned them it might be a possibility, he’s just never let himself think about it. Denial kept him calm and that kept Ice calm.

Someone had come by and left a jug of water on the plastic table next to him, asked if Mav wanted anything else to drink, but that was it.

He is alone. He is alone and he can only wait.

The door on the other end opens and Mav stands up instantly, expecting someone to come and update him — he’s met with Bradley, still in his flight suit, just like Mav, tired but with a blank expression on his face. He quietly closes the door behind himself and rubs his hands over his thighs, not looking fully at Mav.

“Bradley? How did you—”

“Jake called me,” he says only, not explaining anything else.

Why did Hangman tell him? What? Why is he here? Who let him in, who told him where to come?

Mav’s brain feels like a pulp. It’s too late for this, he’s too tired, he’s—He knows Ice thought it was time, to face it all, but he can’t.

“You’ve got better places to be, Bradley, kids waiting at home for you,” he says, trying to sound genuine. Bradley doesn’t have to sit here, worrying, he’s got his own family to take care of. “I can let you know if—if anything happens.”

“I’m not here for you,” he says pointedly, voice cracking a bit. “Besides, Jake’s got them.”

He sits down on the chair on the opposite wall, the farthest away he can from Mav — he fidgets a bit in the seat, face cringing, and does a couple of small stretches with his back. His legs are too long, too, folding over the same he’d sit on the couch when he was a teen.

Mav wants to say something about crappy hospital chairs, even just to fill the silence, but he doesn’t want to start an argument, not now, and he isn’t sure Bradley would hold back.

He sits back down and shuts up, his eyes itchy. He really wants to cry right now, he does, but he doesn’t want Bradley to take it the wrong way, doesn’t want him to think he’s playing on his empathy.

Bradley takes out his phone, leaning on his knees, and Mav can only guess he’s texting someone. He flips the phone in his hand and Mav tries not to look at his face too closely, not to search for anything — his expression is cold and emotionless and it’s so weird to see it, to see a mix of Goose’s face and Carole’s round eyes showing nothing.

Mav stares at the ceiling, the off-white shade of it daunting but better than staring at the OR door.

He doesn’t know how much time passes — his eyes close from time to time, it’s late, he’s drained and he feels so stiff. The door from the outside corridor opens again but he doesn’t get up.

Slider, still in his airline uniform, steps in, looking between the two sides of the room. He takes his hat off and the door slams behind him, echoing between the walls.

“Slider,” he says, suddenly so much more awake.

“Mav,” he says back. “Baby Goose? What are you doing here?”

“I’m on training detachment in San Diego,” he replies.

Slider blinks, mouthing at Mav, and Mav can only shrug. He isn’t going to be able to explain more.

Slider opens his mouth again but the vibration sound pops in the silence, turning all their attention to Bradley, who takes his phone out of his pocket.

He leans away from them as he picks up, but they can all hear it clearly anyway. “Jake? Yeah, I have a minute, just—give me a second.” He covers the phone with his hand and addressing them, says, “I’m going to say goodnight to the kids and will be back.”

“You should go home,” Mav attempts again. “Ice—Ice wouldn’t like you to get stuck here and neither do I.”

“Good thing I don’t need to listen to either of you anymore,” he replies only, and with that, he passes Slider and steps out of the waiting room, the doors swinging behind him.

Slider’s eyes follow him until he’s gone and stay on the door for a minute. Finally, when he turns to Mav, he questions, voice a bit breathless, “Kids?”

“Hasn’t Ice told you?”

The way he falls numbly into the chair next to Mav tells him the answer before he can vocalize it.

“No,” he says. Then, still sounding so confused, he asks again, “He has kids? Plural?”

“Four,” he supplies. “Twin girls, another girl, and a boy.”

Mav doesn’t even know their names, he’s not sure if Ice did either. Maybe the full files had access to his insurance policy, they’d have been named there.

“That’s—Well.” He can tell Slider is trying to stay—some sort of positive and Mav, he appreciates it. “Good enough reason for Ice to turn back around, isn’t it? Gotta meet them.”

He doesn’t want to think about it, especially not right now, but he’s not sure Bradley would ever let them meet them. Even if this, if Ice being—if this would bring him a change of heart he’s sure Hangman wouldn’t let them meet them.

Despite that, Mav just says, “Yeah.”

Slider nudges him with his elbow. “It’s going to be alright, Mitchell.”

“It’s Mitchell-Kazansky.”

“Not like you use it.”

Maybe he should start.

***

Mav still can’t believe they’re mostly in one piece. They’re mostly in one piece and Bradley is talking, joking, smiling with Mav, around Mav.

He looks so much younger like that, even with the dried blood around his neck, the tiredness in his eyes, like the bright boy Mav remembers.

And then his face changes shades and his smile falls, and Mav can swear he has a bit of a green edge to his complexion.

He slides off the cot he’s sitting on, steps rushed, and asks, “Bradley?”

Bradley blinks and slouches, the telltale sign he’s going to throw up in the upcoming minutes, just like when he was twelve, arm reaching for Mav’s shoulder, and says, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

The medical officer who has been checking them so far barely manages to grab a bowl and pop it under Bradley’s chin. They haven’t eaten anything in hours so he’s mostly just heaving dryly, griping Mav’s flight suit.

When it finally stops, the officer hands Mav a towel and sets the bowl on the nearby table with paper towels inside. Mav lets Bradley breathe for a few seconds, long, deep breaths that seem to never stop, and when Bradley finally opens his eyes again, he cleans his face with the towel. He could probably do with a drink of water or something to brush his teeth, but it has to wait.

“Why didn’t you say you might have a concussion the whole time?” Mav asks, brushing hair off his sweaty forehead.

“I don’t think it’s a concussion,” Bradley says, a bit wide-eyed, as he takes the offered plastic glass from the officer.

He gulps the whole thing down and Mav blinks, feeling like he’s missing something, like the face Bradley is making means something.

“What? What do you mean?”

“I just realized I’ve been nauseous the past couple of weeks,” Bradley explains and Mav still doesn’t get it, but he hears the medical officer take a deep, sharp breath. “I thought it was just stress, but—”

But what? It could’ve been stress. Bradley’s always been a stress puker, every school play, every new first day at new school, every bigger exam — he’d puke before and after, up until he mostly grew out of it at the end of high school.

“I think I might be pregnant again,” Bradley says, quietly but it echoes in Mav’s ears.

“That’s—” He doesn’t know what to say — that’s one of the scenarios he’s never imagined before, Bradley staying in his head seventeen and not really ready for more than hand-holding and cheek kisses. He turns to the medical officer, but the young lady doesn’t look any less caught off guard. “They’d have tested for it, wouldn’t they? Before they send him. He couldn’t have—”

“Not necessarily, only women are—”

The lieutenant bites down on her lip and Mav can tell she’s deeply unprepared for even the possibility. Pregnant people should not be present on the aircraft carriers, or any battleships.

“Let’s just have a look,” she decides, nodding to herself. “I’m going to grab a portable ultrasound, sir.”

She leaves, disappearing somewhere behind another curtain, and Mav doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Bradley unzips his flight suit, getting his arms out of his sleeves, and pushes it down so it rests below his waist, staying only in his black cotton top. Mav grabs him another cup of water and then refills it, handing him the bowl, and watches as Bradley rinses his mouth, still looking a bit pale.

“You’re weirdly…calm,” he notes.

“Someone has to be,” Bradley says and it sounds like something he’s said many times even though Mav’s only heard it just now. “I’ve been through this three times, Mav, now that I had a minute to think about it, I’m pretty sure this is happening.”

“Just like that?”

“Aside from being nauseous, my back’s been killing me, which is not that unusual since pregnancy number three, so I just ignored it, the tiredness I put up to the house move and the whole ordeal just being one big nightmare,” he explains and Mav blinks, the amount of new information from Bradley’s life feeling almost sacred. “I’ve also been peeing like crazy, which is not that unusual since the twins, but also kinda been going away lately, so I just thought, you know, coming back after all.”

He and Goose were deployed for a large portion of Carole’s pregnancy, months three through six spent on the ship, but he remembers how much she’d slept at any given moment at the beginning, and how her back and stomach always felt overstretched, no matter if the bump was or wasn’t getting bigger.

Bradley says it all so nonchalantly — he looks thoughtful, eyes absently going over the missed memories.

“The moodiness should have been a clue, even with stress,” he realizes. “I’ve been really snappy.”

He’s pretty sure he doesn’t mean with Mav — he’s pretty sure he mostly means his—his husband, Mav still can’t get over it, husband, kids, now pregnant, again — but he almost feels a bit better about how hot and cold Bradley’s been with him the past couple of weeks.

“You’ve been flying under so much stress the past few weeks,” he notes, horrified. They’ve been flying at a G force that isn't recommended for people at their fittest and healthiest, burning through tons of jet fuel, and they’ve both destroyed their planes less than a day ago. “This mission alone, you ejected—”

“I’m worried, a bit,” Bradley says and he doesn’t sound it a bit and — oh — he lays his hand over his stomach. “But, well, it is what it is. We’ll—we’ll manage. Always have, always will.”

We.

Mav probably should offer to go and grab—grab Bradley’s husband from the debriefing. He doesn’t want to — he wants to be the one who is there for Bradley, this one time.

Before he can ask, the lieutenant returns, an old-looking, clunky machine trailing behind her. She pulls the curtains around them

“Do you want me to explain what I’ll do, Lieutenant?”

“No, I know the drill.”

Mav doesn’t know the drill. He had gone to one OB appointment when Carole was pregnant, but the times were different back then — ultrasounds weren’t that popular and expensive and most of the time, there was one or two done through the whole pregnancy.

He stands there like a sore thumb as Bradley lifts his t-shirt, bunching it up on his chest lets the lieutenant squirt some gel on his abdomen.

“Do you have an estimate?” she asks.

“Not really, we’re—it’s spread out all over,” Bradley says, cheeks pink as he gives him a glance. “Usually, I don’t have any symptoms until around the middle or end of the second month so probably at least that.”

Usually. It still doesn’t register in Mav’s head, that it’s been three times already. When he looks down, he tries not to stare — Bradley’s stomach looked flat in a t-shirt, but he can see the white lines on his sides and his skin is a bit floppy, the way Carole’s belly stayed stretched out the first year after Bradley came into the world.

It seems—unreal. Bradley, he knows, has a husband and kids, but somehow, all Mav can see is the seventeen-year-old boy who couldn’t keep a goldfish alive.

He blinks when the probe starts smearing the gel all over the skin, Bradley hissing a little bit. He resists the urge to hold his hand — Bradley’s both hands are holding the fabric up, clenched up, and it feels like overstepping to unroll his fists and take them over.

“I haven’t done any ob-gyn work since my intern days, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to—”

The lieutenant stops, frowning, and clicks something on the machine.

“What? What’s happening?” Mav asks. He steps to the left, stretching his neck, and he’s met with a mostly black screen with a white blob in the center. “Is that—”

“I’m going to grab someone who has, uhm—a bit more experience in this area, sir,” she says, taking the probe away.

She doesn’t turn the picture off so it just stays there frozen.

Mav makes himself blink and when he turns to Bradley, he looks almost amused.

“Do you want a towel?” he manages to ask because Bradley is still lying there holding up the t-shirt, the area around the zipper of his flight suit a bit wet from the gel.

“No, I’ll just wait, at least it’ll warm up this way.” Bradley tilts his head at him, contemplating something. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” he says instantly.

“Hold off Jake from coming here for a minute,” he says. Carefully, he adds, “He’s going to be—a lot. I don’t need him to explode right now.”

“Is he going to be…angry?”

It’s—well, if Bradley is pregnant — he’s still holding out hope that he is and he hasn’t been pulling ten Gs and ejecting from planes while pregnant — it can’t have been a planned pregnancy. They already have four kids and he can imagine not being unconditionally enthusiastic about this.

If Hangman is angry, that will be a whole other thing. There’s a difference between worrying about how you’ll manage with another kid and being angry another kid is on its way.

“Oh, he’s going to be pissed,” Bradley snorts. Something on Mav’s face must still be showing because he softens, explaining, “Not with me. Just, everyone else on this ship. Or the whole Navy.”

“This includes me,” he guesses.

“Look, Mav, I was messed up after you—” Bradley takes a deep breath and starts again, “I was a fixer-upper when we met, Jake was a whole construction crew, and he doesn’t like being—Jake loves me, more than I could’ve ever imagined, which means he’s always on my side, even if I don’t want him there.”

Mav doesn’t know what to say to this — he still has mixed feelings about the way he words it. Quite frankly, he doesn’t like the way he’s talking about himself, the way he’s putting himself down and into Hangman’s arms.

They haven’t really talked, about what Mav did all those years ago and what followed, and he can’t imagine it being easy for Bradley. He had been there, too, alone in the world, trying to navigate adulthood, college and a job, and he had never wished for Bradley to go through.

Saying sorry doesn’t feel enough now.

The lieutenant returns, bringing another medical officer with her — a commander this time. He takes one look at Bradley, then one look at the frozen screen on the machine, and blinks.

“Well,” he says. “That’s definitely a fetus.”

Mav can’t breathe for a few seconds, feeling—something. Bradley, their baby boy, the kid he had used to sing to sleep, who used to fit in his arm, who would shy away from people into his side or hide away behind his legs, is pregnant.

He knows Bradley already has kids — but it only just solidifies in his mind. This Bradley is an adult, a husband, a parent, and Mav hasn’t seen him become any of it.

He turns his gaze to Mav and he even sounds a little smug as he says, “Told you.”

“I’m going to conduct a full exam, we need to decide if you have to be transported to a maternity hospital, Lieutenant,” the commander says. “If you could wait outside, Captain Mitchell.”

Mav looks to Bradley, unsure if he should leave him alone right now. He doesn’t want to, but Bradley nods at him and promises, “I’ll be okay.”

Mav steps out from the curtain, pulling it back together as soon as he can, and hears snippets of questions the commander has.

He’s contemplating what to do now — Hangman surely will show up after the debriefing, he just doesn’t know how soon. The best action would be to wait in the little waiting area outside the med bay, but he isn’t sure how that would actually help.

Distracting Hangman with something is another option, but he’s pretty sure if he gives Hangman some order, he’s just going to ignore it and come straight back here.

In the end, he doesn’t need to decide on anything, because Hangman enters the med bay before he can leave it. He’s looking like a man on a mission and he supposes his mission is finding Bradley and making sure he’s in one piece after the heart attack their little stunts from early that day gave everyone.

“Hangman,” he speaks up, catching his attention, even if reluctant.

“Captain,” he says curtly. “Where’s my husband?”

“Not even a glad to see you in one piece, sir?” he tries. He’s met with an unimpressed silence. “Look, he needs a minute, they’re still checking him up, just wait outside.”

“Like hell I will,” he spits out. He tries to take a step past Mav’s right, but Mav pivots, catching him with his shoulder before he can go through. If Bradley doesn’t want him there, Mav will try to keep him away. “If you think this mission solves everything, you’re wrong, I’m not going to let you—”

Suddenly, he stops completely. His eyes widen, focused on the curtain behind Mav's shoulders.

“Lieutenant?”

“I know this sound,” he says and Mav registers the rhythmic, rustling sound, mostly overshadowed by the Commander's voice talking quietly.

He doesn't understand.

Mav barely has a second and he's barging through him, completely avoiding Mav's barricade of a body.

“Hangman—” he calls out, catching him by the arm, but he gets an elbow to his stomach and Hangman slips through. “Hangman—”

He grabs his flight suit, pulling him by it, by the waist, to no avail. Before Mav knows it, they’re at the hidden bed, Hangman pushing the curtain away, just a little, and stops moving.

He hears, from behind Hangman’s body, exclaims gently, “Jake—”

Hangman’s body flops, back relaxing under Mav’s hands. He sounds both awed and horrified, as he says, “You’re—”

“Just hold my hand,” Bradley says, softly, like it can stop a hurricane from coming. “Please.”

Mav doesn’t try to grab him again — Hangman steps in through the small hole in the curtains, and with a tunnel vision, moves to Bradley’s bedside.

As Mav closes the curtain back up, he sees him reach for Bradley, one arm going towards Bradley’s hands, still clenched on his chest, the other to Bradley’s shoulder.

#hangster #tw mpreg

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twistedminutia · 2 months

Text

A Million and One Minutia: American Football

Read the first two chapters here: Ch. 1 Ch. 2

Gray teaches the Savanaclaw students about American football.

My enrollment situation at NRC is slightly tricky, primarily because I am technically enrolled as one half of a full student (Grim being the other half). This means that there was some initial confusion on how to administer and grade work- were Grim and I supposed to work on it and turn in assignments together, like a group project? Or should we be graded entirely separately from each other? Or both complete the assignment and then average our grades together?

In the end, it was decided that we would be graded separately, which was a relief. Grim wasn’t exactly a star student, and I wasn’t interested in his poor study skills pulling down my grade. Not that it was all that high to begin with.

Unfortunately, that still left us with another problem: Electives and clubs. Did Grim and I have to agree on which ones to take, since we only counted as a full student together?

The short answer was, basically, yes. Crowley insisted that, because I couldn’t use magic and Grim was an ‘atypical student,’ it would be better for us to attend classes together. Clubs were given a similar explanation- plenty of clubs had magic requirements, so I couldn’t attend those without Grim if I wanted to, and Crowley tended to insist that my presence was required with Grim when attending school events. I suspected Crowley just made the restriction up so I would be free to babysit Grim in class and at club events, but every time I tried to call him on his shit, he would make comments about how generous he was for even letting us stay here at all. So, I decided not to push it.

In the end, Grim managed to whine Crowley into allowing two clubs for the pair of us- I was more or less saddled with Newspaper Club duties, whereas Grim was allowed to pick his own club of choice. We had to attend each others’ meetings, but as long as all the duties got done, it didn’t matter much who did what. And Grim, being an annoying little shit, decided to go for one of the more irritating clubs on campus.

In summation, that fun little chain of events was why I was sitting on the sidelines of a Spelldrive practice match. Because I certainly wouldn’t have gone of my own free will.

Well, that’s a bit harsh. It’s not that I think Spelldrive is bad. I just have the same problem with it as I have with other sports. Namely: There’s only so many times you can watch a ball (or puck, or disk) go up and down the same field before you want to bash your brains in.

Grim, however, was delighted with the entire sport and had announced his desire to be in the Spelldrive club as soon as it became a possibility. Which meant that I had to choose between spending at least an hour every week watching a sport or I could spend the rest of my NRC experience listening to Grim whine and complain about how I was ruining his chance to be the best, most famous mage EVER.

I picked the former. Obviously. And the practice wasn’t all bad. Watching people play around with magic is cool, and Jack stops by when he gets back from his track and field club. I can’t tell if he likes me or if he’s just being nice because he thinks he owes me one for helping to save his housewarden from an inky fate, but he’s pleasant to be around, so I’ll take the win.

My official position in the Spelldrive club seems to more or less be ‘benchwarmer.’ Which makes sense, since it’s not like I can actually play the game. Not that that stops Leona from making me run through the drills at the beginning of practice. I’m just lucky he doesn’t make me run laps while everyone else is playing.

I swing my legs, leaning back on the bench to stretch my back. The air is warm and almost muggy, though that doesn’t bother me much. I’ve always preferred it warm to cold. Even with my eyes off the practice game, I can still pretty much tell what’s going on- Leona’s constantly scolding poor players or yelling instructions from the sidelines. I’d consider his lack of actual participation to be laziness, except that on the rare times he does participate, he dominates pretty much everyone on the field.

The sound of footsteps makes me look up. Jack, dressed in his PE gear and mopping sweat off with a towel, approaches my bench.

“How’s it going?” he asks, stopping once he’s close enough to speak comfortably.

“I dunno. I think Leona’s getting annoyed at some first years.” I pass him a water bottle from my stash and Jack chugs half the thing in one go.

“He’s always annoyed at first years,” Jack says. His eyes scan the field and his ears prick at attention. “They’re not coordinating at all. They’ll never play like a pack if they don’t start paying attention to each other.”

“Sure,” I agree amiably enough. He probably knows what he’s talking about. “Grim’s probably not helping. I like that little fuzzball, but he’s got an ego on him.”

“Yes,” Jack agrees. He folds his arms over his chest and stares out critically toward the field. I do the same, until my head starts to prickle. I follow the feeling and find Jack staring at me.

“What?”

Jack snorts, ears and tail twitching. “You’re good at controlling Grim and those other two. Maybe you could help bring the team together.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Okay, one, I wrangle Grim. I don’t control him, and I certainly don’t control Ace or Deuce. Sometimes I can get them all on the same path, but it’s not like I’m managing a whole group of them. Second, no magic, so no Spelldrive. And third, even if I had magic, I wouldn’t be playing. I hate sports.”

Jack frowns. “All sports?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” I shrug. “Never liked any of them. I did running for, like. Six months once, and that really sucked. I was awful at it.”

Jack gives me a once-over. “You need to build your strength up. You’re not…” His expression screws up and he stops.

“Glad you’re wise enough not to end that sentence,” I say, mostly joking. Like I could ever actually get the jump on Jack.

His tail whips back and forth. “I meant you’re not very physically active. If you started doing morning jogs with me, you would get better.”

“I appreciate the offer,” I say, mostly to be nice, “but I’m already spending most of my time studying to try and catch up on all the information I don’t know about here. I need all the sleep I can get.” It’s not totally a lie, but I am omitting the fact that I consider forcing someone to get up at sunrise to work out to be a form of torture. Jack accepts the answer, though.

We watch the spelldrive match in silence for a few moments. Grim manages to get ahold of the disc, only to promptly fire it halfway down the field toward the opposing goal. Grim’s aim is apparently off, because the disc careens in an arc before plowing straight into the ground. Even across the field, I can hear Leona’s aggravated sigh.

“So, is that a foul?” I ask Jack.

“Yeah. Grounding the disc is a foul, hitting a goalpost hard enough to do damage is a foul, and serious injury is a foul.” He counts them off on his fingers. “And using non-regulation-approved spells, too, but freshmen haven’t learned anything like that yet.”

“And getting the disc through the hoops is a score,” I say. “Like basketball.”

“But the number of points varies on the hoop you get it through instead of how far you are from the basket,” Jack says. “That’s why players usually focus on the topmost hoop, since it’s worth the most points.”

The disc goes whizzing down the field again. This time, it’s snagged by another player who makes for the opposing team’s goal. They’re cut off by Ruggie, dangling off his broom, who fires off three spells in quick succession. The player dodges them, but his attacks have served their purpose- they drive him straight into a purple-haired player, who’s wearing the same team colors as Ruggie. The purple-haired student grabs the disc in his magic and starts in the opposite direction down the field.

He’s made it most of the way to the opposing goal, expertly weaving past spells on his broom, when Grim blasts a fireball toward him. The student tries to pull up on his broom, but another student swings by to take the disc back and the purple-haired student course-corrects to protect his hold on it. He succeeds in dodging the other student, but does not succeed in steading his broom, and goes spiraling into the ground.

I wince at the dull thud and play grinds to a halt. Fortunately, the purple-haired student is already clambering to his feet, apparently unharmed, if also rather pissed. “Do people get hurt a lot playing this game?” I ask.

“Sometimes,” Jack says. “Usually things are enchanted to prevent the worst accidents- no one has died from playing spelldrive in a long time.”

“Huh,” I mutter. “I guess that means they’re doing better than football.”

One of Jack’s ears twitches toward me. “People don’t die playing football?”

I blink. “I mean, they do sometimes- from the brain injuries when they tackle people.”

Jack stares at me. “People don’t tackle each other in football.”

“Yeah, they do. That’s part of the whole-” I pause. “Wait. Are you talking about the game where people kick a black-and-white ball down a field and into a net to score goals?”

He nods. “Yeah. That’s football. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about American football. That’s, uh. Football everywhere else, I guess.”

Jack’s ears twitch. “American football? Is America… something from your world?”

“Yeah. It’s where I’m from.” Jack looks mildly interested, so I continue. “It’s the big sport in my country. It involves two teams and they’re trying to shoot the ball to other ends of the field to make a touchdown. Maybe they have something similar here?”

“I’ve never heard of anything like it,” Jack says.

I consider that. Football is only played in America, pretty much, right? Maybe it’s similarly restricted here, only in one country and other people haven’t heard of it. Or maybe it’s not known here at all. “It’s a popular sport in the country I��m from, but I guess it’s not particularly widespread at home either.” I snag a stick from the ground and start scratching lines in the dirt. “Uh, so you have two big goals at either side of the field, and you have this egg-shaped ball-”

Jack listens attentively as I struggle to map out the basic game. Unfortunately, I’m realizing exactly how much I understand the rules of football. Which is very little.

“Uh. So. You’re kind of trying to move the ball down the field by throwing it and then running, and the other team tries to stop you,” I say, sketching out lines. Jack crouches next to my drawing, ears pricked at attention.

“They tackle you to stop you,” he clarifies. I nod.

“Yeah, and- Oh crap.” Jack turns to look at what I’ve already seen- a flailing Grim held at arm’s length by the scruff of his neck by Ruggie. “What happened?”

Ruggie opens his hand and Grim drops to the ground, then scrambles over to me and burrows into my side sulkily. “He’s benched,” Ruggie says by way of explanation.

Grim puffs up like a sea urchin. “I didn’t do nothin’ wrong! The goal was open so I took a shot-”

“You’re on defense. You’re not supposed to be taking shots.” Ruggie’s annoyed demeanor cracks a little, his sly smile appearing on his face. “Sheeheehee, though it was funny to see the look on Leona’s face when the disc nearly hit him.”

“You almost hit Leona?” I say, frowning at Grim. He stomps one of his paws.

“He was close to the goal! If he’d been standin’ even another couple of feet to the left-”

“How many times are we going to have to go over this?” I groan. “You gotta watch out for people and things with your magic.” Grim huffs, tail waving in irritation. “Sorry about that, Ruggie. And tell Leona I’m sorry too.”

“He doesn’t care,” Ruggie shrugs. He catches sight of my rudimentary drawing and frowns. “What’s that?”

“Gray’s trying to explain American football to me,” Jack says. “Have you ever heard of it?” It strikes me as a bit silly that he’s asking it, since it wouldn’t be called ‘American’ football here, but then again, I’ve been surprised by weird similarities before.

Ruggie shrugs. “Nah. But I never followed sports much, so I maybe wouldn’t have heard of it.” He bends over to get a closer look. “What’s with all the Xs and Os?”

“So, the X team is defending right now and the O team is advancing,” I explain. In all honesty, I’m not sure what they represent. I just saw football diagrams with Xs and Os in them.

“Football’s a kind of war game, then?” Ruggie says. “That’s interesting. What kind of spells are allowed?”

“No, there’s no magic allowed. You have to get the ball to the end of the field, and you do that by throwing it to other teammates-” I launch into the explanation a second time, trying to keep straight everything I already told Jack. I fumble over the rules a few times, which Jack immediately jumps on, and then I have to wrack my brain to remember the exact rules.

Practice ends as we’re talking, or I assume it does because people stop flying or running around and start leaving. After a few more minutes, I’m aware of someone sidling closer and closer. Then I’m aware that it’s Leona. It reminds me of a cat, the way he casually strides closer, occasionally pausing and glancing around like he’s just happening to come our way, and is perfectly content to go elsewhere if a better opportunity presents itself.

“If the ball hits the ground then the teams swap from defending to attacking?” Ruggie asks. I sigh.

“Um, not exactly- there are things called downs? First down, second down, third down, and fourth down. It references the amount of yards you travel, I think, and if you get a certain distance, you can start there when the ball stops moving.” I’m not totally sure what I’m saying is right, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Grim perches on my head, peering down at the drawing.

“And you score through getting the ball through the big goals at either side?” he says. “Doesn’t seem that hard. They’re way bigger than the hoops.”

“You actually just have to run it across the end zone, which is the zone the goals are in,” I say, drawing it out. “But you can also kick the ball to get a field goal, but that’s hard because the field’s so big. And when you score, you get an opportunity to kick the ball, which can go through the goal and that earns you an extra point-”

There’s a huff and I glance up. Leona is closer, leaning down over the drawing. He snorts again. “Are all the games where you’re from so complicated?”

“Not all of them,” I say. “And I admittedly don’t understand this one that much.”

Leona snorts, leaning forward so his elbow is resting on Ruggie’s head. “That’s not surprising, herbivore.” I roll my eyes. Leona’s prickly by both nature and habit, and he snipes far more easily than anyone else I’ve met on campus. I don’t like it, but it’s at least reassuring to know exactly how he feels about me. Too many people here are conniving enough to be cruel with a smile- Leona’s at least got the decency to do it with a frown.

“Have you ever heard of American football, Leona?” Jacks asks. He’s the picture of respect toward his upperclassman, though I’ve told him several times that there’s nothing to respect.

“Nah. Never.” Leona shrugs. His gaze sweeps critically over the diagram. “If it’s called football, how come people are always throwing the ball?”

I make my voice as deliberately mysterious as I can. “No one knows.”

Leona rolls his eyes. “Whatever. Here.” He shoves something at me and I fumble under its weight- it takes me a moment to realize it’s the spelldrive gear bag.

“What do I need this for?” I ask, startled. Leona gives me a condescending look.

“You’re supposed to be part of this club. If you’re not going to play, you’re going to at least help haul the gear back where it belongs.” I resist the urge to groan. If this school is so jazzed on magic, how come we have to put things away by hand? If I had magic, cleaning spells would be the first thing I’d master.

Grim snickers on my shoulder, only to fall silent when Leona glares at him. “Don’t think you’re getting off so easy, weasel. You’re helping to clean up the field. Ruggie’s in charge.” An evil grin immediately spreads over Ruggie’s face. I can’t help but think I’ve just gotten the better end of the deal.

“I’ll show you where the sports equipment goes,” Jack offers. I nod at him in thanks and hand a protesting Grim over to Ruggie. His complaints echo down the field as Jack and I start hauling the equipment away. I glance back at the diagram to see Leona studying it, tail swaying lazily behind him, before he huffs and lounges out on the bench, hands behind his head. Despite his obvious lack of care for the drawing, he doesn’t bother to brush it away. It’s still there when I return for the next spelldrive practice.

(Though, I don’t know if it’s there for any longer than that- after two weeks straight of cleaning the field under Ruggie’s supervision, Grim quits the Spelldrive club in a shower of sparks and heads off to start his own club. I can’t say I’m not relieved.)

Read the next chapter here.

#twisted wonderland #twst #a million and one minutia #twisted wonderland fanfic #fanfic #leona kingscholar #jack howl #Ruggie bucchi #yuusona #twst OC #Grim

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rlyc00l · 3 months

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BL2 AU: Rhys travels to Pandora for a simple job: take a train to Lynchwood, pick up an artifact, return to Helios. Only, he finds himself unwittingly caught in a trap that wasn't meant for him. Now stranded on Pandora alongside six Vault hunters, he has the choice between fighting Hyperion alongside them or dying horribly. Lucky for him, Handsome Jack is always looking for opportunities. All Rhys needs to do is a little bit of spying, maybe a teensy bit of sabotage, and then he's home free with a huge promotion and maybe like ten turbo-mansions. The Crimson Raider cause is doomed anyway, and Rhys is a pro at ignoring his conscience. Not that there's much conscience to ignore when you're betraying a group of murdering Vault hunters. At least, he's confident he won't have any internal conflict about screwing over that selfish jackass of an assassin.

Hey guys I went ahead and uploaded the first chapter of a fic I've also been writing alongside P0is0ned. This is one where I try to be CONFIDENT and not be a perfectionist. So I might update it a little more frequently? I mentioned this idea before but I think it would be interesting to have these two meet when they are both at their worst. Zer0 before discovering the magic of friendship and a Rhys who totally buys into Hyperion bullshit. (Also, I like writing the BL2 Vault hunters in general and IDK I just wanted to write about BL2 I have a lot of thoughts and headcanons.)

EDIT: As ff.net is perpetually broken, the chapter's also under the break!

———— The train was mostly empty when Rhys boarded, aside from the Hyperion soldiers that boarded at the same time as him. Rhys had offered them a cheery greeting, and been mostly ignored as the soldiers filed back into another car, somewhere behind them. One had stopped, asked him “You sure you’re in the right place?”

“This is the train headed to Lynchwood, right? Jack sent me on a job down there.”

“Yeah, well, keep your head down. Stay out of the other cars,” the soldier said, before following the others.

Technically, Jack hadn’t sent him, Vasquez had. But it was always better to invoke Jack’s name, and Jack had given Vasquez the job. Vasquez had simply passed it down to Rhys, and no one outside of Security Propaganda knew who the hell Vasquez was. If you said a job came from Jack, no one questioned it. No one except Vaughn and Yvette.

“Are you sure Vasquez isn’t just sending you down to die on Pandora?” Yvette had asked as the three took their lunch break the day before.

“It’s a peace offering! He knows I’m a threat, so he gives me the prestigious-yet-inconvenient job so I feel like I owe him. If he wanted me dead, he’d throw me out an airlock.”

“I dunno, Rhys,” Vaughn said, mouth still half-full of hamburger. He swallowed. “He’s thrown a LOT of people out of airlocks, they say at a certain level you reach your allotted murder-limit. Now, send a guy down to the death-planet…”

“Yeah, seriously, Rhys, you know there’s a war going on down there? And the entire planet is populated by bandits? And man-eating monsters?” Yvette gestured with her fork as she spoke. “Is he even giving you a gun or something?”

“No, Yvette, because I won’t need a gun. I looked up the route, it’s extremely safe. I’ll mostly be on a Hyperion train, there will be soldiers guarding it, it’s fine.”

Now, watching Pandora pass out the train window, he was feeling pretty confident that his reasoning had been accurate. He’d boarded at a Hyperion military post in the Highlands, its lush green landscapes a far call from the wastelands heaped with trash featured in propaganda videos. By now that green had given way to barren desert, but still not a single bandit in sight. At one point the train passed a pack of oversized skags, and later he was pretty sure he saw a body, but maybe it had been a weird rock. Ocassionally there were remnants of Atlas and Dahl’s failed attempts to colonize the planet. Broken-down buildings, being retaken by the elements. Obviously those two hadn’t thrown enough resources at the place. Jack was going all the way. Yvette would probably note that he’d be safer if he shuttered the window, but hey, it wasn’t often he got to see an undeveloped alien planet, and the glass was probably bulletproof. Rhys was starting to get the sense that Handsome Jack had ensured that Hyperion’s propaganda greatly exaggerated Pandora’s general awfulness–not that he blamed him. How else was he supposed to convince the investors? Not to mention it was a fantastic motivator for the workforce. Still, Rhys was almost disappointed. He’d wanted to see something impressive, have some good stories for when he got back to Helios. This place was just a lot of empty desert, ripe for development. At some point, the monotony lulled him to sleep, head propped against the window. The glass was cold when he woke suddenly. Outside, the desert was gone, replaced by ice and snow. It took Rhys a moment to realize that the sound he was hearing wasn’t the train, but nearby gunshots. Gunshots that didn’t fade out at the train moved. Well, shit.

He shuttered the window, hunkering down between the seats. It had to be a bandit attack, bandits were no match for Hyperion soldiers. Just had to wait it out.

Yvette had given him a stun rod before he’d gotten on the shuttle. “It’s better than nothing,” she’d said. He clutched it now, wishing she’d hooked him up with something more powerful.

Minutes passed, and the shooting went on, accompanied by indistinct yelling. Still, no one boarded his car. He wondered what bandits would do to him if they found him. They didn’t have a reputation for letting people live, except to torture them. Maybe, if Rhys stayed here, waited to unleash the stun rod until the last second, he could catch them by surprise. Then it was a matter of getting a gun from one of them, diving back behind the seats (Were those bulletproof, too?), and taking down the rest of them. They’d be lined up, it had to be easy, right? He hadn’t ever touched a gun, but they didn’t seem that complicated. Right?

His planning was interrupted by a deafening boom, and the next he knew he was flying through the air. He hit the ceiling, hard, and he knew nothing more.

It was dark when he woke, cold, hurting all over, and tasting blood. Part of him was afraid to flick on his palm flashlight, so he first tried to take stock mentally. He could only hear his own breathing, now. The gunshots had stopped. He wasn’t sure what that meant for him, but he was starting to realize that the train had crashed, or been derailed, or something. Which, maybe meant he didn’t have to worry about bandits anymore? Or, they’d be in at least as bad a shape as he was. Hopefully.

That led to the question of how bad a shape he was actually in. Okay, first, the blood taste. He ran his tongue around his mouth, finding the place he’d bitten the fleshy side, hard. Well, at least that wasn’t gonna kill him. His face stung, but in the carpet burn way, not the “there’s shrapnel imbedded in your cheeks” way. He had an agonizing headache, but maybe this was one of those times where you’d worry more if it didn’t hurt. His ECHOeye seemed alright, at least.

Fingers checked out, both flesh and cybernetic, though when he tried to make a fist on the flesh side he found himself letting out a string of profanity. Fine, okay, he hurt his wrist. No big deal. His cybernetic arm was fine aside from an ache at the connection point, he wouldn’t be helpless. His legs were good, at least. And his torso…Well, it sort of hurt to breathe, which wasn’t ideal.

Better get it over with, then. He turned on the flashlight and sat up with a groan to get a better look at himself. Sure enough, his wrist was swelling, and bruises were starting to form all over, but there wasn’t even close to as much blood as he’d expected. So, yeah, he probably wasn’t in immediate mortal peril.

He turned his attention to his surroundings. In front of him were the rows of seating, the entire car had fallen sideways and he was sitting on what had been the wall. Snow drifted in from some broken windows above him. He realized how cold he was, now. He hadn’t packed much of anything, it was supposed to be one night, he’d counted on there being a Quick-Change machine.

Okay, fine, Rhys had seen all those border planet survival shows, you had to be proactive in these kinds of situations. First, figure out where he was, maybe find one of those soldiers, if they’d survived. He rose, broken glass crunching under his feet as he walked unsteadily across the car until he found the roof hatch. It only opened part way when he turned the handle, getting caught on the snow bank the car was half-buried in. It was a little brighter outside the car, a combination of Elpis’s light and a number of small fires revealed silhouettes of the train wreckage.

He had to wriggle and clamber his way out, managing to get snow up his sleeves and down his shirt before tumbling down the bank into a foot of snow.

As he pushed himself up, he found himself facing a…glowing blue line? His eyes followed it up to the hand that held it, and the strangely featureless owner of that hand. He blinked, taking a moment to put it together.

Oh. A sword. A bandit holding him at swordpoint.

He barely managed a “D-don’t.”, knowing he should probably beg for his life. He was finding he didn’t have the energy for begging, though. Snow was already melting through his pants.

The bandit leaned in closer, not taking the sword from his neck. The light of the blade reflected on the dark surface that should have been their face. A helmet with a dark visor, Rhys realized—or maybe they were a robot, but they seemed to be shivering too, just a little.

“You are no soldier.” Their voice was deep, nearly monotone. “But you are Hyperion. / You have ten seconds.” “Ten…? F-for what?” He started to rise without thinking, only to be prodded by the point of the sword.

“To explain yourself. / Jack had someone set this up. / You’re the last one here.” “Look, I…I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s freezing, my head’s killing me, can we just…Not do this?”

They prodded him again.

“I-I mean, I was here for a business deal. I didn’t…”

The figure lowered their sword. A red, glowing “:\” appeared in front of where their face should have been, and Rhys found himself wondering if he was hallucinating this entire thing. “You got on the train / Meant as a place of slaughter, / Just by accident?”

Slowly, things were coming together. God, if he survived this, he was gonna never live it down. “I swear, I-I had nothing to do with this, I was told to get on this train, take it to Lynchwood. I was supposed to buy an artifact.”

The emoticon was replaced by a question mark, but they lowered the sword. Rhys didn’t move, lest he provoke them. “Get up, or you’ll freeze,” they said, turning away. They limped as they walked.

By the time he was on his feet, they were gone, only leaving footprints and an occasional spot of blood. He hesitated. Helios hung indifferently above him, framed with curtains of green auroras. He could just find one of these little fires and sit down next to it for however long it lasted, and hope for rescue. Except, a middle manager didn’t warrant a rescue, once the fire was out he’d just freeze to death. That, or Pandoran wildlife would get to him first.

Following that stranger might mean being stabbed, but maybe they knew where to find shelter. He got up, and followed their prints with his palm flashlight, hoping the snow wouldn’t bury the trail before he caught up.

He passed smoking wreckage and the corpses of soldiers. Wind bit at him as he walked, and he held his vest close, for whatever difference it made. Snow clumped up on his socks and the bottom of his pants, even as he tried to step in their prints. He tripped and stumbled a few times, there was trash everywhere, much of it hidden beneath the snow.

Just when he was starting to resign himself to a cold death in a frozen trash heap, he saw distant lights. As he neared the word “Welcome” lit up one letter at a time, over and over. Again he wondered if he was hallucinating. Was that a symptom of hypothermia? But the footprints continued in that direction, joined by more tracks. Other survivors.

As he got closer, he found that the sign was outside a structure built of snow and defunct Claptrap units. He opened the door. There was a short hallway, built of ice and more dead claptraps, and ending in a warm glow. Fire.

He came out into a low-ceilinged room with six people and a broken–but still functioning–Claptrap. Before he could process exactly what he was looking at, five of them were pointing guns at him.

He held his hands up, trying to inch towards the blazing furnace. “Please—Please don’t kill me. I-I-I–just, I’m trying not to free-freeze to death.”

His eyes found the one who’d threatened him earlier, they were the only one who wasn’t pointing a gun at him now. But they didn’t come to his defense, either. They only watched him, arms crossed. Or, he assumed they were watching him, they could have just as easily been intently ignoring him.

When nothing happened for a moment, he took the last few steps to put himself near the fire. It was hard to care about getting shot when you were so goddamn cold. There were at least six dead bodies already beside the fire, but he couldn’t make himself care about that either.

“That’s a Hyperion uniform.” The speaker was a Dahl soldier–marked by metal implants in his brow. He cocked his gun.

“I uh, I’ve got nothing against Dahl,” Rhys tried.

That earned him a snort.

Right, yeah, they’d all arrived at the same conclusion as the first one. “I had nothing to do with that, with the train, I-I was being set up to die back there, just like you.”

“What’s happening?” The eyeless claptrap demanded. “I can’t see–!” A high-pitched bleep censored out the last word.

“The mortar meat is too stringy! Where’s your pain stick?!” The masked man who looked straight out of Jack’s anti-bandit propaganda waved his gun as he spoke, then lowered it suddenly and gave a shrug.

“Big guy’s right, he’s obviously not a soldier,” the blue-haired woman said, following his lead. Her tattoos matched her hair, and his first thought was “siren”, which almost seemed too absurd, out of six in the universe, why would one be here, in this weird corpse-shack?

“Neither is Jack, and I mean, look at him,” said the pigtailed redhead, making a wide gesture at Rhys with her robotic arm– a much more primitive model than his. She looked too young to be here, he was pretty sure that was a high school uniform.

“I uh, I don’t have the kind of power Jack does, even if I wanted to kill you? Could-could you at least put down the guns, for a second?” His head hurt too much to be dealing with this, he just wanted to sit down and relax for a minute or two. “That Claptrap is a Hyperion robot, right? Arguably more Hyperion than I am. And considerably more annoying.”

“FORMER Hyperion robot!” the Claptrap addressed the wall. “Jack discontinued and destroyed my product line! I am a free robot now!”

“I saw we kill ‘im already. The guy, not the robot.” The short, weirdly muscular man spoke up. “Then get this bullymong.”

“You’re actually going to kill an unarmed man just for a label on his shirt?” the maybe-siren asked.

“Yeah, really? I-I have… several broken bones, too, I think. If that makes any difference. And, if I uh, if I had anything to do with this, I definitely would have avoided hurting myself this bad.” He looked to the one with the helmet, pleading. They’d seen him in the snow, they’d judged him innocent.

“Hurry and decide,” they said, not even turning their head to look at him. “I am eager to move out. / And kill Handsome Jack.” There was something strange about how they talked, Rhys was realizing. Measured, concise, short…

“What, you wanna freeze to death out there?” the soldier asked. “I’m not heading out until morning.”

They crossed their arms, a red “:\” passing over their visor. “Fine.”

“Oh come on, you already decided not to kill me, earlier! Could you at least back me up?”

This time they did look at him. “I have no stake, here. / And you are clearly dead weight. / You’re doomed regardless.”

“Your bones are made of toothpicks and my molars are SPOTLESS!”

“Yeah, alright, good point, I think?” the soldier said. We can always shoot him later, right? Once he’s earned it.”

The short man shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”

“Fine,” the redhead said with a yawn. “If he kills any of you in our sleep, that’s not on me.”

At that, the group dispersed throughout the shack, finding comfortable spots, as if Rhys were suddenly of no more importance than one of the corpses by the fire. The maybe-siren hung back for a moment.

“Here,” she said, handing him an insta-health. “If you try to screw us over, I will liquidate your brain with my powers.” Okay, definitely-siren, then. “But for now, I’m not big on killing unarmed men.”

“Thanks.” He took the syringe, feeling strange about using a random needle on Pandora, insta-health or not. Still, he was in enough pain to jam it into his arm, gritting his teeth as bones realigned. “So, uh, hi. I’m Rhys.” He offered his freshly healed hand and his most charming smile–he’d better ingratiate himself with these people, fast. “I guess we kind of got off on the wrong foot, thanks for uh, sticking up for me.”

She looked at him, then at the hand, but didn’t take it. “Maya,” she said. “And I can’t say the others were entirely out of line, considering who you work for.” “Worked for. I think trying to blow me up was Jack’s way of firing me.” Always better to invoke Jack’s name. “Might have been a little too vocal in criticizing his policies on Pandora.” He’d heard of people who criticized Jack’s policies, Jack dealt with those hands-on, but bandits didn’t know that.

She raised her eyebrows. “Well, good to hear. Perhaps you can do something worthwhile, now.”

“Worthwhile, like?”

“Tomorrow, we hunt down the bullymong that tore Claptrap’s eye out. Supposedly, he can get us into Sanctuary. We’re going to kill Handsome Jack.”

#zerhys #borderlands 2 #tales from the borderlands #fanfiction #still looking for alternative fic sites? Should I like. just start posting straight to tumblr?#decepti0n

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dyns33 · 1 year

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Fucking fate - ending 1

Vaas x soulmate Y/N

I had two ending in mind, so this is Y/N’s ending

Everything had happened very quickly.

One day Vaas was the king of Rook Island, or at least the part that Hoyt let him control. The next day Carlos was leading Y/N quickly away from camp because Snow White was attacking and it was too dangerous to stay here.

Vaas' order.

Vaas, whose death was announced a few hours later throughout the island.

This news came as a shock to Y/N. She had imagined that people felt something when their soulmate died. A vibe. The breaking heart. Anything. But no, a pirate had given the news, which had echoed in the cave where the small group was hiding, and panic had gripped everyone.

Always calm and loyal, Carlos stayed close to her, awkwardly patting her on the back. Then, when the others had been too busy wondering what they were going to do, not paying attention to them, he had led her to the square, asking Benny to follow him.

Of all the pirates, Carlos and Benny respected their boss the most. Even dead, they weren't going to stop.

They went to a small port that the Rakyats had not taken yet, where a boat was waiting for them.

"Well, you go in with her and take her to the embassy of her nearest country. Then, you do what you want." Carlos announced with a straight face.

"But... And you ?!"

"Relax, princessa. I'm staying here, trying to kill Snow White and regain control of the camps. You're leaving. You're going to live your life somewhere else, safe. That's what the boss would have wanted. Benny, you don't leave her until you're sure she's safe."

"Of course not. I remember the time she met a tiger. The boss broke my nose and three ribs. I'll follow her like her shadow."

"Good. Go, now !"

This was the last time Y/N saw Carlos, and Rook Island.

As promised, Benny stayed with her until she found herself in front of an office surrounded by soldiers, bureaucrats and doctors, who asked her many questions, checked on her and called her relatives to tell them that she was alive.

That was the last time she saw Benny. Before letting her into the embassy, he had wished her good luck, telling her that he was going back to Rook. He couldn't leave his hermanos like a coward.

Her family and friends were all very happy to find her. They took her in their arms, kissed her and repeated to her that they had missed her very much, crying.

Y/N cried too, realizing that she hadn't thought of them at all during the time she had spent on Rook, focused on Vaas, her soulmate, who was dead. She hadn't had time to mourn him before, in shock.

She didn't tell anyone about him. For ten years, everyone around her thought that she had been captured by pirates who had treated her well, that she had managed to escape, and that she could now resume a normal life, with the hope of meet her soulmate one day.

It was torture.

Every night she dreamed of the times they had spent together. Of the last time she had seen him.

"Fucking Jason is coming, nena. He's crazy, worse than me. I don't want... As soon as the alarm goes off, you go with Carlos, okay ? You go with Carlos and you stay with him until let me come to get you."

"Why don't you come with me ?" she asked, as if at that moment she knew very well that he wouldn't come back.

"I have to face him. It's crazy, I must be as crazy as him, I've killed him four times and he's still here. We won't be safe until he's completely dead. I have no choice, mi corazon. But don't be afraid, I won't let anyone hurt you."

He had kissed her forehead and he had hurt her forever by losing his stupid fight. He could have just come with her, they would have left this cursed island and they would have been happy.

Unable to lead a normal life after what she had been through, Y/N traveled extensively. She didn't go back to Rook, there was nothing for her there, and besides she avoided most of the islands, but she couldn't stay in one place for too long.

That was how she found herself near the border of Yara.

It was out of the question to go to Yara of course, too dangerous. It was totally a coincidence that Y/N happened to be in this bar near the beach.

A coincidence, if it was a place frequented by the smugglers. A coincidence, if that day, two of them were right next to her at the counter, speaking Spanish.

Coincidence, or fate.

The voice of one of the men sounded familiar. Turning her head, she saw his back, but she could see his Mohawk, his scars, and the tennis ball with a face sticking out of his pocket.

His colleague noticed her watching them, waving at the man, who turned his green eyes in her direction. They stared at each other for an eternity.

He had aged. Normal, after ten years. He looked tired, even more tired than when she had met him. Maybe darker too, less crazy, even if the tennis ball showed he wasn't in his right mind.

"... Vaas ?" she managed to say, not trusting her voice, nor her eyes.

As on the island, everything happened very quickly. One moment her soulmate was dead, the other Vaas lifted her off the ground, spinning her around the bar, not listening to her cries of panic, before kissing her again and again.

"Nena ! Y/N, mi Y/N ! You're alive ? Are you really here ?! Pedro, she's really here ?!"

"I don't know who's this girl, but yes, she's here." sighed his colleague. "We shouldn't attract attention, remember ?"

"Shit, shut the fuck up, that's my mate and I thought she was dead. Fucking Carlos, he wasn't in the cave anymore when I managed to drag myself in. No trace of you left ! Then I found his body. That asshole got killed by the Rakyats. I was sure... Oh, mi amor ! You're alive ! The world was so bland without you ! I feel like to be reborn !"

"You really can't do this anywhere else ?" the other smuggler begged, as everyone in the bar looked at them.

They walked to the beach, Vaas refusing to let go of her hand, as if she would disappear if he didn't touch her. He had often had visions of her, he wasn't sure it wasn't a dream.

"Carlos and Benny sent me away from the island when they found out... Everyone thought you were dead." Y/N whispered, letting him rub his head against her neck like a big cat.

"I thought I was dead too, but Brody's not good with a knife. I almost died, but it wasn't the first time I got stabbed. Did they really make you leave ? Shit, I should have buried Carlos instead of spitting on him. I was pissed. He could have left a note to tell me !"

"You were dead."

"Still !" Vaas said indignantly, finally calming down a bit, resting his head on her shoulder. "It was hard, nena. I lost everything that day. My island, my men, and you. I wanted to kill Jason, but my sister was faster. It was over. I thought about jumping off a cliff, but it wasn't a nice ending. I thought you wouldn't be happy. So I left. I wanted to visit your hometown, but I couldn't. Hurt too much. Shit, hermosa, you're here ! You're really here ! Hey... No, don't cry, querida, don't cry."

Y/N didn't listen to him, hugging him while sobbing. It was hard to know if it was joy, stress, or a bit of both.

Like when they were on the island, the first few nights when she cried a lot, Vaas massaged her back, kissing her neck and repeating reassuring words, singing a lullaby in Spanish, until she calmed down.

"Are you... Are you staying with me this time ?" she asked shyly.

"Of course. You're coming to Yara ? I have a small house near a lake. I built it myself. It's quiet, not far from the village and the sea. Little Vaas and I go there often."

"Little Vaas ?"

"Yes, I'll introduce him to you. I've told him a lot about you, he'll be happy to meet you. And I'm Vaas the nice smuggler, I help people. Well, I still sell drugs and drugs. weapons, and I transport humans, but because they ask me to, I don't sell them ! No more piracy, I'm clean. Almost."

"... And if I don't want to go to Yara ?"

They had this discussion about Rook Island. Vaas refused to leave, he loved his kingdom too much. Now they were very far away, they had changed. He looked at her intensely, before nodding, cupping her face in his hands with a very serious expression.

“We'll go where you want, mi reina."

"Well... I want to see your house. And meet little Vaas."

"Nena, if this is a dream, please don't let me wake up."

He then pressed his forehead against hers, before kissing her and pressing his head against his chest again, to listen to her heart, with the sound of the waves in the background, and Y/N also hoped that she was not not dreaming.

She imagined them in Vaas' cabin, which was probably not very well built, with little Vaas, who must have been a dog or a tiger. Heaven.

"Well, that's cute, but we're going to be late !" shouted the other smuggler who was standing near the bar, to give them some privacy.

"Pedro is boring." said a small voice. "He's not as cool as Carlos."

"That's right, little Vaas." replied Vaas, resuming his normal voice. "Too bad he died, he was nice and he protected my nena. It's not fair."

"... The tennis ball in your pocket is little Vaas, right ? You don't have a tiger." "You want a tiger, nena ?"

"No. I want to go home." she whispered, even though she had already been there since he had jumped on her in front of everyone.

#far cry 3 #vaas #vaas montenegro #vaas montenegro x reader #vaas montenegro imagine #vaas montenegro fanfiction

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atinylittlepain · 1 year

Text

Your Creed, My Quest - Prologue

Din Djarin x jedi!reader/jedi!oc

series masterlist

She's been tasked by her master to watch over the child, but things become complicated when she picks up a rogue Mandalorian along the way.

series warnings | 18+ canon-typical violence, angst, eventual smut, like a moderately-paced burn lol

chapter warnings | 18+ canon-typical violence, angst

a/n | ahhh! i am so excited to share the first entry of the series with you. let me know if you'd like to be added to the taglist for this series and I will start it up with the first chapter. thank you for reading! alsoooo, props to the darling @toxic-seduction for sending me the idea for this scene which really started it all, love youuuuu

................................

She doesn’t like this one bit. When Mando had told her about the job, she had initially refused it outright. It sounded like a suicide mission to her, banking on a prison ship to free a man with a group of people they didn’t know, but he had assured her that Ran had good contacts, people they could trust, at least as long as it took to get the job done.

But now, as they’re stalking the halls of the prison ship, her mind is a swirl of anxiety all over again. All she can really think about is the kid they left on board with that damn droid, the kid who is her one mission. She had found the child nearly at the same time Mando had, and had aided him in freeing him on Nevarro, saving Mando’s life in the process as well.

While there aren’t words for what she is, not really, not anymore, she is a wielder of the force, and when her training is complete, she would call herself a Jedi, if such a title wasn’t so dangerous to hold these days. She had trained from a young age with a master, and she had given this task to her, to reunite the child with his own kind, and to keep him safe from those who wished him harm. And somehow, she managed to pick up a Mandalorian on the way.

They’ve already had a run-in with a prison guard, Xi’an quick to kill him, something that sent a prickle up her spine. It was the first thing her master taught her, to respect all life, and to choose peace over violence, always. These people certainly do not live by the same tenets. But she supposes things are a bit different now in this New Republic.

“Should be down this hall, let’s go.” She pulls up the rear of the group, Mando further ahead with Mayfield leading them all. It’s not her weapon of choice, a blaster rifle held in her hands, but she knows it’d be foolish to bring out her sabers, keeping them stowed behind a loose panel in her bunk on the Crest.

Suddenly, Xi’an is letting out a high-pitched squeal, rushing over to one of the cells and pressing up against it. Mayfield quickly deactivates the lock, the door swinging open with a loud hiss, letting a twi’lek man step out as he hugs Xi’an in a tight embrace, murmuring that it’s so good to see his sister. She’s surprised when it appears that he recognizes Mando, a not altogether friendly grin spreading across his face.

“Mando, can’t say I’m happy to see you again.” It happens in a flash, the twi’lek man kicking Mando in the stomach, shoving him back into the cell and moving to slam the door closed. She moves before she can even think about it, stretching out her palm, willing the door to stop on its hinges. It halts, but she already knows she’s made a grave mistake revealing her powers. Not even Mando knew she could wield the Force.

A harsh pain burns in her thigh, and she glances up to see Xi’an holding a dart gun aimed at her, a wicked grin across her face. Sure enough, a dart with a now empty vial is sticking out of her thigh, the room already starting to darken and tilt around her. The last thing she hears before collapsing to the floor are Mayfield’s words.

“Do you think Jedi heads are worth more if they’re pretty?”

…

He can’t quite believe what just happened. Getting double-crossed by Qin, he could have expected. But seeing her use the Force, something he had only heard of in myths, something he thinks he may have seen the kid do, has sent him reeling. He steadies himself as best he can, ears pricking to the sound of a prison droid coming down the hall.

Getting out of the cell isn’t a problem, making quick work of the droid and using its key to free himself, but he knows he’s in a race against time to find them before they get to the Crest and strand him on this damn ship.

He hurries back to the control room, finding the group of raiders making their way through the halls on the surveillance footage. She’s still slung, unconscious, over Burg’s back. He has no idea what he’s doing, but he figures it’s all he’s got as he starts flipping switches on the control panel, sending the halls into darkness as doorways start to shut throughout the prison. The staticky surveillance screens show the group getting separated by one of the closing doors, Xi’an and Burg getting shut off from Qin and Mayfield. It’s a start, and now all he has to do is pick them off, one by one.

…

When she was little, she was given a sedative H4b injection before a tooth extraction to keep her asleep during the procedure. She woke up in the middle of the operation and had bit down so hard on the medic’s fingers that he needed stitches. It was one of the first signs of her sensitivity to the Force, her nervous system working just a bit differently than everyone else’s. So, it’s no surprise now that she’s waking up a whole lot sooner than would be anticipated with the kind of dart she was hit with.

The world starts to come back to her in hazy patches of sound and light. She can hear what sounds like two men fighting, loud crashes and grunts a little ways away from where she’s slumped on the ground. Her vision comes back last, blurry blobs of movement that start to focus in until she realizes it’s Mando grappling with that Devaronian, Burg. Something foreign stirs in her chest at the sight of Mando getting thrown to the ground.

It’s as if someone, or something, is whispering in her ear, directing her focus to the way the Devaronian is standing right in the doorframe, hulking over the struggling Mandalorian, and once again, she moves before she can even think about it, power running through her that is new in its speed and might as she whips the door closed on Burg with a twist of her palm, crushing him where he stands.

She doesn’t have much time to think about how different this power feels, not when a knife is whirring past her head where she’s still sitting on the ground. She jerks around to see Xi’an slinking down the hallway toward her, teeth bared in a hard cackle.

“Well, look who’s awake. Looks like your boyfriend is a bit indisposed at the moment. What say we have a little girl time?” She scurries up onto her feet as another knife comes hurling her way, grabbing her blaster as Xi’an runs toward her.

It’s a quick blur of jolting hand-to-hand combat. Twi’leks are notoriously squirrelly, but she has been trained for this, letting her instincts take over as they twist around each other, a tangle of blocked jabs and hard hits. Her mind becomes singular with the task to such an extent she doesn’t notice the door to the control room reopening, but Xi’an is quick to lob a knife Mando’s way, lodging deep in the sliver of unarmored skin over his shoulder. The twi’lek’s distraction costs her, though, as she grabs her, pressing her lips to her ear and whispering words that put her to sleep, slumping down onto the ground.

She finally looks up at Mando who is stilled in his place, his helmet tilting subtly as he looks between Xi’an’s unconscious form and her.

“You– you’re–” She cuts him off before he can finish that sentence, already turning and heading back to where they came in from.

“There’s no time for that right now. C’mon.”

…

“If you and the kid are gonna keep traveling with me, I need to know what’s going on. All of it.” She sighs, eyes tracing the streaking patterns of lightspeed darting by outside the Crest’s windows.

They had made it out, barely, taking Qin back to Ran’s station to complete the job while the others were left behind in a cell. Mando had thought fast, bringing along that alarm device, and as she watched Ran’s station get blown up by two New Republic fliers, exhaustion finally washed over her, the reality of just how much power she had used settling in and rendering her unconscious in the cockpit of the Crest. She was surprised when she woke up in her own bunk, the kid curled into her side and watching her with his impossibly large eyes. Mando must have carried her down to the hull while she slept. She still feels woozy, sapped, as she joins him again in the cockpit, and has to immediately sit down as he starts asking questions. She can feel his stare, even through his helmet.

“Are you– is the kid–” She huffs, picking the kid up from where he was grabbing at her pants and settling him on her lap, a contented coo sounding from him.

“Technically, I suppose we’d be called Padawans during a different time in this galaxy. But yes, we have both been trained up in the Force, though under different masters.” Having this conversation with someone behind a mask is unnerving, all he gives her is a small nod.

“Is this a part of your training then? Looking after him?” She shakes her head, glancing down at the kid who has slumped into sleep on her lap.

“No. My training is as complete as it can be. This is my mission, a trial of sorts. If I succeed, my master will give me the title of Jedi. It is not how things once went for our kind, but it is the path I must walk in this new world. I vowed to bring this child to my master so he may continue his training with her, and to keep him safe so long as he is in my care.” Mando nods, resting his elbows over his knees as he leans closer to her.

“I will travel with you then. The child is as much my ward as he is yours. I will do what I can to keep you both safe.” She frowns at his solemn words, wrapping a comforting arm around the child who is fussing in his sleep.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you wish to part ways with us. It’s not safe to be our kind in this galaxy. And it’s certainly not safe to aid our kind either.” Mando straightens in his seat at that.

“You have saved my life, multiple times now. I am indebted to you and I am tied to this child by my creed. So long as you need my help, I will answer your call.” She can’t help the shiver that runs down her spine at his words, swallowing thickly and nodding, but her attention quickly shifts to the darkening fabric over the front of his one shoulder.

“You’re bleeding.” He jerks his head down to assess the damage, shrugging lightly.

“It’s nothing. I can cauterize it myself.” She feels that whisper again, a jolt running down through her fingers. She quietly picks up the child and tucks him into his bassinet, making sure he’s still sleeping before turning back to Mando.

“Come with me, I can fix that for you.”

…

“I’ll give you a moment of privacy– please remove your armor and unbutton your flight suit.” He seems hesitant to heed her command, but he eventually nods as she turns around to face the wall of the hull. She can feel energy skittering up and down her spine, the anticipation of power being used only being heightened by the muffled sounds of Mando removing his armor. He finally clears his throat, and she turns around to find him bare chested, the top part of his flight suit shrugged off his broad arms and hanging loosely around his hips. But of course, his helmet is still on.

She moves quietly back toward him, eyes focused on the wound over his left shoulder, a deep gash smeared with blood. She brings her one palm to hold steady over his chest, her other hand coming to hover directly over the wound. His helmet is tilted down just slightly, she figures so he can study her as she closes her eyes and centers her energy toward the task.

Everything falls away as she feels the power flowing through her, like magnets pushing and pulling her toward him. It’s over in a flash, and her knees start to buckle in the aftermath, Mando wrapping his arms around her to hold her flush to his chest so she doesn’t collapse. Her eyes squint open, darting to the now smooth expanse of skin over his shoulder where the wound once was.

“Dank farrik. Are you alright?” His words are a bit breathless, clear wonder lacing his tone at what he just witnessed. She lets out a ragged sigh, still not quite able to hold herself up in his arms.

“I am– I just– need to sit down, I think.” He helps her over to his open bunk, sitting her down on the edge of his sleeping mat while he pulls over an old fuel tank to sit down on across from her.

“You didn’t have to do that– not when it obviously drains you so much.” She props her elbows on her knees, holding her chin up in her palms as she offers him a tired smile.

“It’s better than a cauterizer, though, isn’t it?” For the first time, she hears the Mandalorian laugh, a breathy chuckle as his helmet tilts at her.

“I suppose it is, thank you.”

“My pleasure, Mando.” She can hear a sigh crackle through his helmet.

“If we’re going to do this, I’d like you to know my real name.” She perks up out of her exhaustion at that. She hadn’t been sure if names were another sacred part of Mandalorian culture, something that didn’t get shared just as they covered their faces. She understands that this means something, for him to tell this to her. He holds out his hand to her, for once uncovered from his usual gloves. She takes it in a firm shake, trying to ignore the energy that she feels once again rolling through her.

“I am Din Djarin, and I will travel with you and the child so long as you need me. I will not break my vow to you. This is the way.”

#din djarin angst #din djarin x oc #din djarin x female reader #din djarin #din djarin series #din djarin au #the mandalorian fanfiction #the mandalorian angst #the mandalorian fluff #the mandalorian #the mandalorian fic #din djarin fanfiction

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goodnightmemes · 1 year

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ANNIHILATION (2018) SENTENCE STARTERS

some triggering content may be present! (such as mentions of suicide) feel free to change pronouns / terms / tense as needed!

❛ How long did you think you were inside? ❜

❛ All work and no play, it sounds…not healthy. ❜

❛ I thought you were gone. ❜

❛ I don’t know where it was, or…what it was. ❜

❛ You must be able to tell me something. ❜

❛ I deserve a better explanation than no explanation. ❜

❛ I saw you. I recognized you. Your face. ❜

❛ I don’t feel very well. ❜

❛ Stay with me, baby. I’m right here with you. ❜

❛ You must be feeling dreadful. It’s a hangover from the sedative you were given. ❜

❛ I want to know what the fuck I’m doing here. ❜

❛ Did he ever mention where he was going, what he was doing? ❜

❛ It’s not easy to move on. ❜

❛ We have many theories, few facts. ❜

❛ We need to come to an agreement about what to do with you. ❜

❛ You’re not going to let me go home? ❜

❛ Is that what you want? To go home? ❜

❛ I was just looking at the moon. It’s always so weird seeing it like that, in the daylight. ❜

❛ I get really turned on when you patronize me. It’s really hot. ❜

❛ You didn’t tell me where you’re heading this time. ❜

❛ I know there’s something strange about this mission. ❜

❛ If you step outside and you look up, we’ll be looking at the same stars. ❜

❛ Don’t you think we should make friends? ❜

❛ You know, I always see you here alone. ❜

❛ The people here put themselves to sleep in the fetal position making cooing noises. It’s freaky, you know. ❜

❛ Do you have to hit on everyone, like all the time? ❜

❛ Under the circumstances, I think I’m allowed to roll the dice a few more times. ❜

❛ What do you think happened to them? ❜

❛ Well, there are two theories of what went wrong. One, something kills them. Two, they go crazy and kill each other. ❜

❛ I am so sorry. And I know what I have to do. ❜

❛ You want to come with us. ❜

❛ You can fight. You can learn. You can save him. ❜

❛ That was a brave choice. ❜

❛ You gotta give me a second. I’m a little disoriented. ❜

❛ We did a food inventory. From the depletion, we’ve been out here for at least three or four days. ❜

❛ So we’ve got no compass, no comms, no coordinates, and no landmarks. ❜

❛ Let’s pack up and get moving. We’ve already lost a lot of the day. ❜

❛ Anything interesting in there? ❜

❛ Okay, just breathe. It’s okay. You’re just fine. ❜

❛ Is it possible these were hallucinations? ❜

❛ It was dreamlike. ❜

❛ Sometimes it was beautiful. ❜

❛ All other lives feel like a lifetime ago. ❜

❛ Volunteering for… this. It’s not exactly something you do if your life is in perfect harmony. ❜

❛ We’re all damaged goods here. ❜

❛ More mutations. They’re everywhere. ❜

❛ There’s beds and bags. You think people are here? ❜

❛ Let’s not jump to conclusions. ❜

❛ "For those that follow.“ I believe that means us. ❜

❛ Okay, so we know what happened to the last group. They went insane. ❜

❛ That was a trick of the light. ❜

❛ I don’t want to stay here tonight. ❜

❛ It’s too late in the day for us to move on. ❜

❛ I gotta leave a day early. ❜

❛ The mystery unraveling? ❜

❛ I’m at least as freaked as [name]. I’m just hiding it better. ❜

❛ What’re you doing up? Not supposed to relieve me until 3:00. ❜

❛ I’m done sleeping for the night. ❜

❛ I’d say you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. ❜

❛ Almost none of us commit suicide… and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. ❜

❛ Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell? ❜

❛ Wake up. Something’s happening. ❜

❛ [name] was next to me. Something took her. ❜

❛ We have to go back. ❜

❛ I’m fine going on my own. You just need to decide whether you’re coming with me or not. ❜

❛ And thanks for the fucking backup. ❜

❛ You’re saying we get out by going deeper? ❜

❛ You lied to them. ❜

❛ I didn’t know what going back meant. Why it would be safer than going forward. ❜

❛ Just… leave me the fuck alone. ❜

❛ That doesn’t make any sense. ❜

❛ It’s literally not possible. ❜

❛ This was a mistake. ❜

❛ What’s really going on here? You think that something may have happened to him? ❜

❛ You think somehow he’s found out about our affair. Has he found out? ❜

❛ I’m not interested in talking, or in anything you have to say. Just get dressed and get out. ❜

❛ You know, it’s not me you hate, it’s yourself. ❜

❛ You lying bitch! ❜

❛ Why didn’t you tell us? ❜

❛ So nothing’s confirmed. Everything’s on their word.

❛ You’re a liar.

❛ Did you kill [name]? Did you lose your shit? ❜

❛ Do you think I’ve lost my shit and we’re gonna fuck each other up? ❜

❛ Oh, God. When I look at my hands, and my fingerprints…I can see them moving. ❜

❛ I’m not the one tied to a chair. You are. ❜

❛ We are disintegrating. Our bodies as fast as our minds. Can’t you feel it? ❜

❛ The person that started this journey won’t be the person that ends it. I want to be the one that ends it. ❜

❛ It’s… in me. ❜

❛ It will be in all of us. ❜

❛ Imagine dying frightened and in pain, and having that as the only part of you which survives. I wouldn’t like that at all. ❜

❛ [name] wants to face it. You want to fight it. But I don’t think I want either of those things. ❜

❛ One by one, all gone, except you. How do you explain that? ❜

❛ I had to come back. ❜

❛ What was I? Was I you? Were you me? ❜

❛ My flesh moves like liquid. My mind is just cut loose. I can’t bear it. ❜

❛ You ever seen a phosphorus grenade go off? They’re kind of bright. Shield your eyes. ❜

❛ If you ever get out of here, you find [name] ❜

❛ We spoke. What was it we said? ❜

❛ It’s not like us. It’s unlike us. ❜

❛ I don’t know what it wants. Or if it wants. ❜

❛ So it was alien. Can you describe its form? ❜

❛ It came here for a reason. ❜

❛ If what you encountered was once alive, it seems it’s now dead. ❜

❛ You aren’t [name]…are you? ❜

#rp meme #sentence starters #sentence meme #rp sentence meme #roleplay meme #roleplay prompts #rp prompt #rp memes #inbox meme #sentence starter meme #*Movie

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gmwsuperfan5467890 · 1 year

Text

Never Have I Ever Season 4: My Extensive Opinions on all the plots

I will go through various plots and characters (in no particular order) and give my opinion

Margot

I don’t like Margot. Her introduction this season was her being furious at Devi because she was mad that Ben ghosted her but Devi literally has a right to mad. Margot’s reaction was very unwarranted and a lot for the situation at hand, especially because she wasn’t giving Ben any of that energy she was giving Devi. She isn’t wondering why Ben ghosted Devi out of the blue? She isn’t thinking that this could be a potential red flag? She is still protecting him and doting on him?

This isn’t even the only time this happens. Every time Margot is on screen, they have to get her mad at Devi for some reason, which is usually a misunderstanding. Sometimes she is justified, for example when she finds Devi’s notebook and when Devi almost gets her suspended.But why was she mad at Devi when Ben brought the flowers to her house? Why did she not give the same energy to Ben? He was the one that brought the flowers.Then she admits that she is embarrassed of Ben after she spent 6 episodes fighting over him? Girl, what was the fighting even for??

It just makes me mad that her character got so much screen time and the conflict that she has with Devi is so repetitive. I just think about how her screentime could be given to other characters (cough, cough Aneesa) and that makes me even more mad.

Episode 1

Should be called “Never Have I Ever Risked it all for a man” This is not a criticism to the writing of the episode, this is more of a message to characters that don’t exist. Devi, Margot, stand up, please. No man is worth fighting for, no man is worth ruining your reputation for and no man is worth ruining your chances of getting into your dream university for and I’m saying that as someone who loves Ben as a character (for the most part).

Ben x Margot

Was very unnecessary. Ben stop dating girls to get over Devi challenge I beg of you.

Ethan

Also unnecessary but at least he got Devi to take her mind off of Ben.

Fabneesa

They had so much chemistry in their interactions together and they were trying to tell us last season that they don’t have any romantic chemistry?? Nah, sorry I don’t believe it. During the scene where Fabiola confided in Addison about her fight with Devi and Addison told her that she would make new friends in college, I was thinking about how Aneesa would get it since she is in the same friend group (tho props to Addison for listening to Fab and getting it in the end.)

Aneesa

I adore Aneesa so I was disappointed that she was barely in the season. I wish we could’ve gotten more information about where got recruited to.

Nalini

I adore her and I love how much she has grown. In seasons 1 and 2, she would have called Devi ‘stupid’ or used other harsh words without a second thought. Now she corrects her mistakes and is more gentle and comforting to Devi. I also really like Nalini’s relationship with Margot’s dad, they had chemistry.

Nirmala

Funny as always.

Kamala

I am glad that she took that job in Baltimore and I am so glad that she didn’t get married. I feel like a big part of her character is that she isn’t ready to get married and needs to figure out the timing of things in her own terms. I am also very happy that she is still with Mr Kulkarni.

Paxton

I was worried when he dropped out of university but the writers handled the plotline so well. The first thing they did was drill it into our heads that Paxton made the wrong choice and that he was running away from change. I adored his friendship with Devi and I really liked his relationship with Miss Thompson. I really like Miss Thompson’s personality and I like how she isn’t phased by his charm and holds him accountable for his actions. They are also bi4bi, I don’t make the rules.

Fabiola

Fabiola was right in applying to Princeton because she can apply anywhere she wants but wrong in not telling Devi at all. I definitely felt bad for her because you can tell that she adores Devi and would never want to hurt her. Luckily, it all worked out in the end.

Ben

He really needed someone to slap him in the first few episodes because what the hell was he thinking?? First, ghosting Devi after they slept together, dating Margot, refusing to speak to her and lying about it being Margot’s decision. I was ready to fight him. Luckily, he redeemed himself in the last few episodes.

Devi

I am a Devi stan first, person second, have always been from season 1. I am so proud of how much she’s grown and of how far she’s come. Most of all, I am so glad that she got her dream college, her dream boyfriend and started embracing her culture.

Benvi

The moments in the last few episodes were perfection. Ben defending Devi from the creep? Amazing. Them interacting with each other and everyone knowing that they’re in love? Spectacular. Them gazing at each other with heart eyes at graduation when you know season 1 Ben would have been so mad that Devi won valedictorian over him. The scene where he flies all the way from New York to confess his love for her and they run away holding hands and the scenes after that? The most romantic scenes on the show. Benvi is definitely one of the best slowburns in recent television.

#nhie #nhie spoilers #devi vishwakumar #ben gross #benvi #bevi #paxton hall yoshida #aneesa qureshi #fabneesa #fabiola torres #nalini vishwakumar #nirmala vishwakumar #kamala nandiwadal

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delimeful · 1 year

Text

in sickness and in health (6)

warnings: remus-typical gore/nsfw mentions, injury mention, captivity, panic, logan mad scientist moments: mini edition, cliffhanger

The situation had spiraled out of control faster than Virgil’s self esteem mid-mental breakdown.

His mind kept replaying the last few moments, trying to find the choice that would have saved him. There were a hundred obvious answers, and ones that had been obvious even before he’d landed himself in his own worst case scenario.

He should have realized something was wrong with the stranger’s act before they’d gotten to the point of trying to stab each other. He should have been less harsh with the tackle, going by the wince-worthy crack of skull against marble. Most of all, he should have just cut his losses and ran the moment he’d realized the other borrower wasn’t even listening, but—

“You don’t get to take anything else from me,” he’d said, squinting against the light, each movement more stumble than step.

The guy was trying to protect Patton and his friends. He’d clearly had a run in with the Monoxide group before, had lost people to them before, and he’d still decided to confront Virgil.

Murder attempt or not, he couldn’t just leave the stranger there to get caught.

Now that he was squarely in the palm of a hand big enough to crush him in one motion, he was admittedly having some regrets.

“Woah there, Goth Thumbelina, no need to panic,” said Remus, hurriedly moving his other hand close to form a wall as Virgil attempted to duck away from the fingers curling over him. “A guy as small as you does not want to fall from this height, trust me. We’d turn the kitchen into a total splatter zone.”

And here Virgil had thought his heart couldn’t beat any faster. Life was always surprising him in the worst ways possible.

“Hello? Can you hear me, little guy?” Remus asked, lifting his hands to face level in a motion quick enough to shake what little balance Virgil had left. “You’re not dying of shock, are you? If I accidentally murder a fairy in Patty’s house, I’m pretty sure I’ll legally have to commit some kind of elaborate ritual suicide to atone.”

Well. His parents would probably be happy to know that he’d taken one last human down with him, at least.

Virgil drew all his limbs in until he felt more pillbug than person, his mind too full of mindless panicked shrieking for anything resembling a plan to form.

He couldn’t get away. He couldn’t fight the human off. He couldn’t even say anything, not unless he wanted to make this even worse for every other borrower in the world.

In the end, for all their malice and arrogance, a borrower from the Monoxide group was the same as any other borrower. There still wasn’t a single technique that would save them when they were in the clutches of a human.

All he could do was wait and see what the human decided to do with him.

… At the moment, Remus mostly seemed to be intent on poking him, over and over.

“Hey, c’mon, don’t kill us both in the world’s bizarrest murder-suicide! I haven’t even gotten to third base with a ghost yet!” The finger prodded lightly at the curve of his back again. “If we both die here, we’ll have to haunt this house together. Is that what you want? Because I will inevitably make it weird.”

Do not bite the human, Virgil reminded himself. Do not bite the human. That is a one-way ticket to getting thrown against a wall. Do not bite the human—

“Wow, you are way more polite than most of the small creatures I’ve held,” Remus noted enthusiastically. “On a completely unrelated note, are you venomous?”

Maybe one bite would be fine.

“Remus, if you’re cavorting with rodents in Pat’s kitchen, I swear—,” an annoyed grumble came from the entryway.

“Au contraire, less fair brother of mine,” Remus replied as he spun around to face his twin, “Any true rodent would have given me rabies twice over by now.”

Roman, who had a blanket cape draped over his shoulders and a cranky expression draped over his face, didn’t even glance down at Remus’s cupped hands. “Well, unless you’ve found a mouse-sized poltergeist, my beauty sleep—,”

“Huh.” Remus tilted his head, as though considering Virgil from a new angle. “Actually… maybe this is Patty’s mystery polterguest! Come look!”

He beckoned his twin over with a jerk of the head, and Roman’s suspicion deepened immediately. “Remus. If you are about to throw a cockroach at me, the repercussions will be severe and without mercy.”

“Heh,” Remus looked as if he was indulging in a fond memory. “Nah, I don’t want to ruin my intact-window streak by making you scream like an opera singer in a saw trap.”

Roman edged closer, eyes narrowed. “I still don’t see what kind of ghost would be that small—,”

“Tsk, tsk! Don’t judge a home invader by their size, RoBro!”

Virgil barely bit back a yelp as the human promptly stuck his cupped hands out, nearly knocking his kneeling form right back over. He ducked his head slightly, as though he could somehow prevent them from seeing what he was when he was literally being displayed at that very moment.

Roman’s eyes went wide as quarters as he peered down at him. “Holy Heracles. Is that a fairy?! Patton really is a Disney Princess!”

“That’s what I thought, too, but check it,” Remus nudged Virgil onto his side, revealing his back more clearly. “No wings, or even wing stumps. Plus, they live in the walls.”

Great, he’d noticed that. Still halfway to a panic attack, Virgil spared a pitying thought for all of borrowerkind.

“I feel like there was a Barbie movie that addressed the validity of wingless fairies,” Roman mused, before pausing to frown. “What do you mean, the walls? Tell me you didn’t try eating drywall again. This is not our house.”

“Nobody ever wants to try my fun sleepover activities,” Remus pouted, before rolling his eyes at Roman’s glare. “Don’t get your crown-patterned boxers in a twist, I caught them pre-wall entry.”

“‘Caught them’?” Roman echoed, glancing back down at Virgil, whose body had decided to start trembling hard enough to hopefully vibrate him right out of existence. “Oh my god, you traumatized the fairy. We are so gonna get cursed.”

“Awesome!” cheered Remus. “I hope it’s something with boils.”

“I am not re-enacting the Princess and the Frog as the more amphibious role!” Roman snapped, and lunged forward as though planning to snatch Virgil right out of Remus’s grasp.

Virgil had managed to keep his screaming internal thus far, but the strangled noise of terror that escaped him at the motion was entirely involuntary. Luckily, it was also probably high-pitched enough to bypass human hearing entirely.

“Woah!” Remus recoiled sharply, his hands cupping together to completely surround Virgil, like a child holding a firefly. “Do you even know how breakable itty-bitty creatures are? If I wanted to play tug of war with someone’s guts, I’d kidnap a politician!”

“If I shouldn’t be trusted with delicate creatures, you definitely shouldn’t be,” Roman shot back, though going by the distance of his muffled voice, he’d aborted his grabbing attempts. “Just put them down, they can’t even fly!”

The two of them exchanged some petulant, mostly-indistinct muttering, and then Remus shuffled to the side before placing his clasped hands down on something solid and slowly shifting them out from underneath Virgil.

Rather than fight the motion, Virgil pulled himself upright and let tension coil in every muscle, prepared to take off the instant he felt stable countertop under his feet again.

Sure, running hadn’t worked out for him the first time, but the first time, he’d been dragging the majority of a concussed stranger’s weight along with him. Seeing as Remus had barely caught him even with that handicap, he was more than willing to give fleeing for his life another shot.

His weight dropped onto a surface that was distinctly smoother and slicker than a kitchen counter, and his heart dropped along with it.

Sure enough, when Remus’s hands pulled back, he found himself standing at the bottom of a glass lemonade pitcher, no closer to escape than he’d been when a human hand had been the only thing between him and a fatal fall.

The twins were looming close enough to make his heart stutter, but they were also currently too preoccupied bickering with each other to pay their captive too much attention. Virgil backed up until his shoulders met glass, and slowly slid down into a sitting position, tucking his knees up against his chest.

He was never getting out of this.

–

“Janus,” Logan started, from where he was peering out the wallpaper doorway. “Haven’t we always agreed that we wouldn’t wish our humans on our worst enemy?”

“I don’t recall agreeing to that,” Janus countered halfheartedly, squinting past his near-blinding headache to follow Logan’s gaze. “Really, if you think about it, our worst enemies deserve to be faced with our least merciful weapons.”

In the kitchen, Remus cheerfully put his brother in a vicious headlock.

Also in the kitchen, the borrower Janus had totally and utterly screwed over flinched and flattened themself further against their glass prison.

Logan hummed in a way that did not make Janus feel like he was winning the argument. “And is this solitary borrower our worst enemy?”

“They could be,” Janus replied, indulging in as much of a sulk as his dignity would allow. “They have the mark, they knew what I was talking about. This could all be part of a long con.”

“A long con,” Logan echoed, “to get captured by humans.”

Humans that could have easily caught Janus instead, he pointedly didn’t say.

Janus felt the phantom pressure of a pair of hands shoving him to safety at the last moment, and nausea bubbled up in his throat. He felt fairly certain that it was only partially because of the alleged concussion Logan insisted he absolutely did have. “Anything’s possible.”

Logan turned from the nightmare scene in the kitchen to give Janus the look that comment deserved. “There were no passages to window box gardens or stores of harvested poisons in their home. All of the equipment I found was intended for borrowing, not assassination. There’s only signs of a single borrower residing here, when Monoxide members favor traveling in pairs or trios.”

Janus hissed under his breath. “We can’t just dismiss the possibility that they’re an outlier. A really strange, ineffective, idiotic outlier.”

“Perhaps, but looking at the current evidence offers us a far more plausible conclusion,” Logan said, and then paused, taking in Janus’s grim, hunched-over posture. “... Of course, we can’t truly confirm any theories without investigating our suspect further.”

“Our humans seem entirely too willing to interrogate them for us,” Janus replied bitterly.

Logan turned away from the doorway, dragging his oversized pack in front of him and rummaging through one of the side pockets. “In my experience, our humans have also been very susceptible to distraction.”

Janus perked up, recognizing something familiar in Logan’s tone. That was the tone that preceded a scheme risky enough to make typical borrowers faint just thinking about it.

“Of course,” Logan continued, pulling what looked like miniature explosive prototypes out of his bag, “a distraction loud and flashy enough to divert the twins would only worsen your concussion. I, however, am not concussed.” He paused to give one of the prototypes a dubious glance. “Yet.”

Janus leaned forward to try and inspect one of the devices, and received an armful of coiled thread and a meaningful look from Logan instead.

“Oh, sure,” he complained. “Leave the guy with the head injury with the job of convincing the stranger he tried to stab to participate in the rescue attempt, that makes perfect sense.”

“I have utmost faith in your persuasive abilities,” Logan said in that deadpan way that always made Janus doubt his claim to not understand sarcasm. “Be ready to move as soon as the twins are lured away; I haven't tested the new formula and I’m not sure how long they’ll burn.”

With that extremely concerning statement, the borrower tucked a pair of matches under his armpit, turned, and vanished around the nearest corner.

Janus pulled the thick loop of thread over one shoulder, crouched by the kitchen entrance, and waited.

To Logan’s credit, he worked fast. A series of crackling pops went off, distant but distinct, and their humans only exchanged the briefest of glances before haring off in an unspoken competition to get to the mysterious noises first. Truly, they were predictable in the most amusing ways.

Running had proven to be highly disorienting, so Janus speed walked across the counter to where the borrower’s prison sat. Undignified, but effective.

It hardly mattered; the stranger had crossed the width of the pitcher to peer after the twins and thus was facing the entirely wrong direction to notice Janus’s approach.

They did notice the weighted end of the thread clunk onto the glass behind them, going by how high they jumped and their vehement, half-wheezed swear. They glanced between him and the rope several times in bewilderment.

Janus waggled his fingers in an obnoxious little wave, just because he could. “Any day now. Unless you prefer your current accommodations, I suppose.”

“You’re… helping me?” they asked, with far more dubiousness than Janus felt was warranted. He hadn’t even managed to actually stab them.

“Do you really have the luxury of suspicion right now?” he asked back, shaking the rope for emphasis.

That seemed to snap them out of it. In the next moment, they were wrapping the end of the rope around their wrist and planting their feet on the glass wall, hauling themself up with impressive speed.

Janus leaned back, planting himself as a firmer counterbalance, and then paused.

He could still hear the muted bangs of borrower-sized chemical warfare going on in the other room, but that was it. For a space inhabited by both twins at the same time, there was a suspicious lack of shouting.

Unless…

A chill ran up his spine, and he resisted the urge to yank pointlessly on his end of the rope. “Hurry.”

“I’m trying,” the stranger bit back, grunting as they got a grip on the edge of the pitcher and pulled themself up. They lifted their head and froze in place, all the blood draining from their face.

Janus knew what he'd see before he even turned his head.

“I knew it,” Roman crowed from where he stood in the kitchen doorway, “you do talk!”

#sanders sides fic #sanders sides g/t #ts virgil #ts remus #ts roman #ts janus #ts logan #in sickness and in health #isaih #my writing #writing

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