#and i realized why my chars are so vibrant

[thatlotuscookie]

ok ok, hear me out, hear me out I swear-

a Haikyuu character who's a teacher(you pick which one bc I am indecisive lol) who students don't like because they assign too much HW, x Art-Teacher y/n who's super eccentric and all the students have started calling "Auntie" bc they like her so much... and somehow the students realize they're dating

✧･ﾟ: a/n: hiii thank you for the req anon! i choseTsukishima Kei x art teacher!fem reader cause why not :) sorry for the wait, it got a little busy. please enjoy and thank you for requestinng <3

✧ Title: ✧ Paintbrushes and Equations ✧ ✧ Characters: Math!TeacherTsukishima Kei x Art Teacher!Reader, Fem!Reader ✧ Genre: Fluff, Romance, Slice of Life ✧ Rating: G ✧ Summary: Mr. Tsukishima Kei, the strict math teacher known for his tough assignments, and Ms. Y/N, the quirky art teacher adored by students, try to keep their budding relationship under wraps. But between secret coffee runs and after-school visits, it doesn’t take long for their students to catch on. ✧ Content/Tags: Secret Relationship, Soft Tsukishima, Teacher AU, Slow-burn Romance, Fluff and Humor ✧ WC: 1126 words // 6.8k chars

Mr. Tsukishima Kei was known as the strict, no-nonsense math teacher, infamous for assigning challenging homework and expecting punctuality from his students. Across the hall, however, was Ms. Y/N, the quirky art teacher who taught in a classroom full of painted murals, plants, and knick-knacks. Her students affectionately called her “Auntie,” loving her warm personality and encouraging nature.

Despite their differences, the two had quietly been dating for some time now, keeping things subtle so as not to spark gossip in the school hallways. But as careful as they tried to be, some moments were just too sweet to hide from their observant students.

Every morning, Tsukishima would stop by Y/N’s room before classes started. Though their relationship was mostly kept under wraps, there was one routine they couldn’t help but share—he’d bring her coffee, just the way she liked it, and stay for a few moments before his first class.

One particular morning, a student passing by happened to catch sight of them. Y/N was sitting at her desk, fiddling with paintbrushes while Tsukishima leaned against the edge of her desk, coffee cup in hand. She looked up at him with a bright smile as he handed her the coffee.

“Thank you, Kei! You know, I think your coffee runs are the best part of my day.”

“Maybe if you went to bed at a reasonable hour, you wouldn’t need this much caffeine,” he replied, rolling his eyes, though there was a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Bedtime? Reasonable? You’re talking to an artist, Kei!” She chuckled, raising her coffee cup in mock cheers.

The student who’d witnessed it ran back to their friends, spilling the details in hushed, excited whispers. “Guys, Auntie totally has Mr. Tsukishima wrapped around her finger. He’s bringing her coffee like it’s a daily thing!”

During lunch breaks, Tsukishima would sometimes slip away from the teachers’ lounge and make his way to Y/N’s art room, which was usually open to students who wanted to work on projects or just hang out with their favorite teacher. Though he’d never admit it out loud, Tsukishima was growing fond of this habit too.

One afternoon, Y/N was holding a brush in each hand, struggling to finish a mural one of her classes had started. Tsukishima approached, watching her for a moment as she fumbled with paint colors.

“Need a hand?” he asked, taking one of the brushes out of her grasp without waiting for an answer. He began painting in neat, deliberate strokes, adding to the vibrant, playful mural.

“Mr. Tsukishima,” Y/N grinned, “are you sure you can handle all this color?”

He just shrugged, pretending to be annoyed, but there was a glint in his eye. “It’s not my fault you’re terrible at ladders.”

The students present watched with wide eyes as their usually stern math teacher helped their beloved art teacher, even taking her playful teasing without so much as a sigh. “Is he… actually smiling?” one student whispered, amazed. “And helping her paint? They’re definitely dating.”

On Fridays, Y/N would stay late to finish up art projects, often leaving well after most of the other teachers had already gone home. But one evening, as she was cleaning up her brushes, she was startled by a familiar voice at the door.

“Didn’t I tell you not to stay this late alone?” Tsukishima’s tone was gentle, though there was a hint of concern.

“Oh, but I had just one more layer of glaze to apply! I didn’t want to leave it unfinished,” she replied, smiling sheepishly.

Tsukishima sighed and moved to take some of the supplies from her hands, setting them aside. “That can wait. You shouldn’t be here by yourself. Come on, I’ll walk you out.”

They left together, but not before another student, leaving basketball practice, caught sight of them walking side by side down the hallway, Tsukishima’s hand brushing hers in a quiet, comforting gesture.

“Did you see that?” the student whispered to a friend the next day. “Mr. Tsukishima totally waited for Auntie after school. He’s such a softie for her.”

When Field Day rolled around, Y/N was the designated supervisor for the art activities station. Her students flocked to her booth, excited to paint, tie-dye, and get a break from competitive games. Tsukishima, though not usually one for field activities, had somehow found himself “volunteered” to help out at her station by none other than Y/N herself.

At first, he’d tried to stay in the background, sorting supplies and ensuring everything was organized. But as more students lined up, Y/N pulled him over to assist with face painting. “Come on, Kei, it’s fun! Don’t be so serious,” she teased, handing him a paintbrush.

He gave her a long-suffering look but, after a few convincing nudges, gave in. Soon, students were giggling at the sight of Mr. Tsukishima painting bright flowers and animals on their cheeks.

“Mr. Tsukishima, can you paint a dragon?” one student asked, grinning. And to everyone’s surprise, Tsukishima nodded, actually putting in the effort to paint a rather impressive dragon.

Meanwhile, Y/N leaned in close, watching him with a proud smile. “See? I knew you had a colorful side.”

The students at the booth exchanged knowing looks, watching the way Tsukishima’s gaze softened every time he looked at Y/N. One bold student whispered, “They’re definitely together. I think Auntie’s the only person who could get him to paint a dragon.”

The biggest reveal came on Y/N’s birthday. Her classroom was decorated with student-made banners, handmade cards, and small, thoughtful gifts from her students. But the real surprise came when Tsukishima walked in with a bouquet of wildflowers, which he set on her desk, much to the shock of her students.

“Kei…” Y/N murmured, her eyes shining with surprise. “You didn’t have to—”

“Happy Birthday, Auntie,” he said simply, giving her a small, genuine smile before glancing pointedly at the students, who were watching, open-mouthed. He gave them his usual glare but, seeing the excitement in their eyes, eventually gave up on hiding it.

And with that, the students finally had their confirmation. They all whispered to each other excitedly, some even daring to give Tsukishima approving thumbs-up. From that day on, Tsukishima’s “monster math teacher” title softened in their eyes. He was still strict and demanding, but he was also the teacher who went out of his way to make their “Auntie” happy.

As the weeks went by, more little moments started to unfold between them—moments the students watched eagerly, as if they were witnessing a real-life romance. And while Tsukishima might not have been the most affectionate in public, he showed his care in small, steady ways, making sure Y/N was looked after and supported in the little things.

[pokemon-ninjago-world]

Cole Hence

As an attempt to reboot this blog I thought I’d do quick drawings of the main chars with updated appearances (like, how they would appear in my seasons when they’re older, comparing to the art you’ve seen of them as kids/teens on this blog so far) and some character info. I did Cole my boy first in case I’ll lose my inspiration and motivation and never continue these character things `8D  I got carried away with this one and spent more time than intended, so the next ones might not be as complicated as this one hmm.. Never mind me playing with watercolor brushes, I just tried to learn how to use them.

Character info under the cut for those who are interested!   Ninjago © LEGO;  Pokémon © Game Freak, Nintendo, Creatures Inc.;   Soileon © me

- Cole is very artistic, and enjoys visual arts the most. He does like dancing for fun too, as long as it happens when and how he wants and no-one tells him how to do it.     - Cole starts selling his art later when he moves out to live on his own after a few years living in the Yang’s temple, where the ninja have their ninja academy and where they live after the Day of Departed episode.

- Cole loves hiking and venturing in the wild. He’s a big fan of wildlife and all animals as well. He takes good care of daily exercising, though he takes it easier when he’s older and doesn’t whip himself as hard as he did in his teenage, and trains more his mind as well as his body. One of his favorite ways of exercising have always been jogging in the wilderness or at least closer to nature.

- With persistent practice, Cole becomes an okay cook, although he remains ever curious and experiments fearlessly new ways of cooking and altering recipes and the results won’t always be great. He’s best at baking. Cakes will always be his passion, but he does watch his diet more carefully the closer his thirties he gets.

- Cole’s mum was a loose, carefree and tough-willed young woman. I don’t have first name for her yet, I wait if they reveal something in Ninjago but if they won’t I’ll probs name her after some gemstone. Her maiden name is Brookstone. She’s not an elemental master herself but Cole inherited his powers from her side.     - Cole’s mum had broken with her family, run away and started working and living on the edge on Ninjago City, where she met Lou. She wasn’t much older than 18-years old and Lou was much older, but they both fell in love with each other, and after a while of dating, they decided to get married. Soon after Cole hatched, it became obvious that the woman wasn’t very keen on family life, and spend more time in her hobbies and in the downtown than with her own son or husband, so Cole was raised up mainly by his dad from the start.     - Lou and Cole’s mum started fighting a lot, and they divorced when Cole was 6-years old. Cole didn’t hear about her ever since, and he didn’t really care to hear about her.            - Thus, Cole doesn’t know she had married again (though she divorced again later) and Cole has two half-sisters he’s not aware of. He also never learned his mother had a little brother, so Cole has no idea he also has an uncle from his mothers side.

- Cole was badly bullied when he was a kid. This triggered a gene in him, that’s common among the people of Pokéninjago. It’s called “berserk gene” and it occurs differently on different people. On Cole, it made him liable to violence and brought up problematic characteristics. You can read more about this from his [character page] and [childhood story].     - As he grows older, he gets better at controlling his anger. He becomes very chill and easy-going as an adult, and he doesn’t even try to appear intentionally cool or tough like he did as a teen. If stress and misfortune keep piling up though, he has trouble keeping his head and can snap at people and experience similar tantrums as before and for example break something in his frustration.

- Because of his bad childhood experiences, Cole is very insecure and withdrawn with strangers, especially people same age and younger as him. He has trouble meeting new people and making friends, unless he’s been backed up by his good old friends. He is okay at dealing with elderly people, but youngsters make him nervous and alerted, even feeling inferior, which then makes him easily defensive and rude.     - He has this problem even as an adult, and when his friends are starting families, he gets kinda lonely because of his troubles with new people.

- Cole is bad at talking about emotional stuff, but he is very compassionate and caring when his berserk gene is not active. This makes him anxious when someone needs emotional support, because he wants to help so badly, but doesn’t know what to say or do. Sometimes all he can offer is his company and perhaps a pat on the back, or even hug when he’s more confident about himself and doesn’t try to pretend a cool, tough guy.

- Cole actually likes kids though, regardless of how children treated him when he was little. He helps his friends by babysitting sometimes when they can’t get Nelson to watch over the kids.

This is all I can remember rn. If you want to know something specific, feel free to send me an ask! I probably forgot to say something.

[whythinktoomuch]

i. apocalypse now & then

Kara touched down, her boots meeting the earth with a metallic clunk that was promptly swallowed up in the dust and utter grayness of her surroundings. The warnings came immediately—insistent beeps, bright red numbers and figures flashing before her eyes.

“How’s it looking?” asked the tinny voice in her helmet, and Kara sighed.

“Yeah, you were right. Place is infested,” she said, studying the mess of debris and desolation that seemed to feed directly into the faint horizon in every direction. “Kryptonite readings are off the charts. There’s either a tower nearby, or mines just planted all over. Maybe even both, if i’m Iucky.”

Alex let out a harsh breath. “Look, I know you’re not going to leave until you find those people, but you better watch your fucking back out there, okay?”

“Hm… don’t I always though?”

“You ask that every single time, and every single goddamn time, I have to re-mind you of all—”

“All right, all right…” Kara said, rolling her eyes. “Just stop worrying so loudly already, jeez. I’ll keep you posted the entire time.”

“Like that was ever an option.”

“Love you too,” Kara said breezily, and she began her search.

She explored the area in proportioned sections, slipping periodically into x-ray vision, keeping her feet drifting an inch off the ground at all times. You just never knew these days. By now, Kara had stepped on enough lead-wrapped kryptonite mines for one lifetime, which coincidentally had been the same number of times it took to gray almost the entirety of Alex’s head. Or so Alex claimed anyway.

Apparently, over two decades of this sort of living could do that to a person: make them older, but also, steal away every last bit of their sense of humor. 

--

Whenever Kara happened upon a particularly extensive blind spot—jagged slabs of lead piled on top of each other—she took her time. Carefully sifted her way through all that rubble, with a spare bit of rebar or her heat vision from a safe distance. Calling out to any potential survivors that could have been trapped underneath. But as she steadily neared hour two of her search, it was starting to look like a lost cause. That whoever had sent that distress signal must have since succumbed to the environment, like so many others already had done before them.

Then Kara heard it.

Whipping her head around, Kara strained her ears to their very limit, all the while silently cursing how muffled everything sounded in this godforsaken suit of hers. It took a minute or so to hone in on it, but she finally made out the distant voice.

Help us. Save us. We’re down here.

Kara snapped into action, already hurtling full-speed toward the source of the cry. “Alex, I found them.”

“About fuckin’ time,” Alex said, but the note of relief carried through the speakers loud and clear. It always did, of course, given the scarcity of such a feeling as of late. “All right, get them out of there, and hurry your ass up. You’ve already been out there for too long.”

The voice grew louder and more distinct as Kara approached it, and eventually, she could even distinguish other people in the mix—their whispers, the muted beats of their heart seemingly punctuating every word, and all the shallow breaths of air in between. She counted at least five separate individuals, five more lives that she could potentially save from this impossible landscape.

But by the time Kara reached the point where the voice was sounding from below rather than from the distance, her excitement had all but waned, receded back into the ever present anxiety hanging in the air.

“… Fuck,” she huffed out, staring at the large swathe of broken rock and dirt and twisted metal beneath her, the letter K spray-painted all over the surface in a faded green. “Alex. They’re in a mine-rigged shelter.”

“Forget it then. Just get out of there,” Alex said, all rather predictably. “We can send an extraction team with defusers in the morning.”

“But that’ll take too long,” Kara protested. “It would take days, just for a task force to cover all that distance, and these people need help now.”

“No. I want you to put down a marker and come right the fuck back home,” Alex said. “That’s your last kryptonite filtration suit! If anything happens, if you sustain even the slightest bit of damage out there, you could—”

Kara cut the feed and swiftly locked her comms from all available channels, employing one of the few tips Winn had passed onto her before he died. Because Alex didn’t understand. How could she, when she wasn’t the one who had to listen to these desperate cries for help from people just barely out of reach.

She floated outside the presumed blast radius, planted her feet firmly to the ground, and went to work. Uncovering the buried shelter bit by bit, one sizable mass of charred rubble dug up after the other. It wasn’t easy. The kryptonite in the area, though not exposed, was much too close for comfort even through her suit. And it made the sun hotter, everything heavier, and Kara’s progress as slow as it could possibly be.

But all that—the sweat gathering on her brow, the soreness burning up her lower back—was a very small price to pay when weighed against the lives of at least five people in need. So, Kara kept going. She kept burrowing deeper into the earth with her bare hands, until the sun was but a small twinkle above her head and her fingertips were brushing against a patch of warmed metal.

And she could hear them better now. They were so close.

Kara pressed her palm against what had to be the outer wall of their shelter. “Hey, can you hear me in there?”

“Please help us!” came the frantic response, only somewhat muffled now. “Please get us out! We can’t breathe in here!”

“Okay! Okay… I’m gonna get you out, okay?” Kara shouted back, heart thumping hard in her ears. “Just… hang on.”

A quick once-over was all it took to determine that the wall before her—like most other surfaces nowadays—was naught but a few inches of commercial steel, coated in a thin layer of lead. And as such, all it would to take, of course, to break into such a structure was—THUNK!—a single punch from the Girl of Steel herself.

Kara ripped a hole in the wall, using her heat vision to melt down the edges as she tugged the entire thing apart. Eventually satisfied with her efforts, she was just about to crawl through her rather crude but functional doorway when the speakers in her helmet abruptly flipped back on.

“—him back to life, and just… throttle him for showing you that trick!” Alex was practically hollering in her ear. “Why would you ever need to do that anyway? The whole frickin’ point of the—”

“Whoa, Alex, Alex, it’s fine! I’m fine! Just shh!” Kara hastily cut her off. “I’ve pretty much got my foot in the door already, okay? So, I’m helping these people whether you like it or not.”

“Yeah, you fucking better,” Alex said with a scoff. “I want to look these people in the eye while you explain to me what was so goddamn special about them that you had to…”  

And Kara barked out a laugh, shaking her head in wonder as Alex continued to chew her out in a way that only sisters could, apparently. “Hey, you can do whatever you want, okay? Just let me bring them home first.”

“Fine. Just don’t kill the comms this time.”

“Oh, I would never.”

“Kara, I fucking swear to—”

But the rest of all that swearing quickly faded into the backdrop, as Kara finally poked her head into what should have been just another underground refuge from everything their world now had to offer. Because ten feet below from where she had burrowed her way in, was not a handful of dehydrated people waiting to be rescued—only masses upon masses of thick coils and plates of smooth black metal shifting about.

That’s when Kara realized that it’d been quite some time since she’d heard a cry for help. And soon after that was when a muted click! sounded, then somewhere down there in the midst of all that darkness and mechanical movement, came another loop of voices calling out to her.

“Oh shit…” Kara whispered, and at least ten sets of glassy eyes flicked up to stare at her. The pre-recorded voices immediately cut out, and the entire room lit up in a vibrant green as the machines all powered up with a collective hum. “Shit, shit, shit, you were right!”

“Right about what?” Alex demanded, but Kara was too busy heeding her long overdue advice of getting the fuck out there to respond.

Kara burst from the ground in a flurry of dust and clattering scrap metal, already heading for the horizon at full-speed. She needed to put as much distance as possible between her and the decoy shelter. It was nothing short of an honest-to-Rao miracle that her sudden escape hadn’t tripped any of the mines on-site, but now, it was only a matter of time.

Still hurtling away, Kara threw a glance over her shoulder just in time to see the first three drones break through the surface, already mindlessly chasing after her. Then the third and the fourth crashed right on through after them, which abruptly led to a series of rapid beeping, which abruptly led to a violent disturbance in the air that stole away all the sound from the world and knocked Kara right out of the sky.

(next part here)

[amandaoftherosemire]

And Hell is Just a Sauna -- Part Four

Fandom: Marvel/MCU

Pairing: Bucky Barnes X Reader

Characters: Bucky Barnes

Author: @amandaoftherosemire

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 5,425

Format: Short Series (Complete)

Warnings: Violence, graphic and disturbing imagery, death, language, implied smut, fluff.

Summary: You meet Bucky Barnes upon your mysterious and deadly escape from a power obsessed cult leader and his followers. Though you carry a secret in addition to the wariness of trauma, you can’t help your attraction to Bucky and his irascible demeanor. As for Bucky, he is drawn to the light he sees in you while he fears the things you’re hiding. Can you trust him with your secrets, and your life? Will you have a choice?

A/N: When I told my husband about some of the things that happen in this chapter, he reacted with impressed horror and disgust. (He’s a great audience.) When I went to edit and proofread this chapter, however, that was in my mind and I realized that some of the things I describe in here are pretty weird and gross and I’m a little perturbed that I wrote them without realizing exactly how weird and gross they were. I wasn’t aware I also had a horror writer in here. Hmm. Anyway, fair warning: graphic horror movie style descriptions.

That said, these two were fun to write, and I might write more with them reuniting after the Blip. TFAWS was a gold mine for inspiration and I’m itching to write more Sam and Bucky interactions now that I have more of them in my head. Feel free to let me know if you want that. 😊

I would have had this up faster, but the God of Mischief has been busy of late and he was occupying my mind and my keyboard for the past several weeks. Every time I sat down to my computer, he took over and it has been too much fun to stop. Soon, I promise. 😉

 Part One // Part Two // Part Three // Part Four

 And Hell is Just a Sauna -- Part Four

 Bucky shook his head and snorted. "We're gonna have to have a talk about your timing, doll."

Bucky dragged his eyes from your retreating form to focus on the threat outside. He'd be damned if he'd let these assholes hurt you. Especially when he needed to hear you tell him you loved him again, when he still needed to tell you he loved you, too.

"JOSEPH!" You shouted as you threw the door open, your hair smoldering as you stepped over the body in the doorway. Your voice was a mockery of the strident tone he'd taken as you'd made him wait while you spoke to Bucky. You walked forward until you were standing at the          top of the stairs onto the front porch. "If you want me to be quick, do not send me meals. Or did you not send Brit as a sacrifice to the creature inside me?”

Joseph took a single step forward, losing his breath in a sigh of awe as your skin began to glow the red-orange of a fire's heart from the inside out, your eyes glowing molten gold as you spoke. "He's pleased that you'd send someone so valuable, but he also hopes you understand," your lips curved in a cruel, hungry smile as those brilliant eyes swept over the robed figures ranged behind him, "it's not going to be nearly enough.”

Bucky could see the shudder of fear run through the small crowd and figured at least half would panic and run should you attack. However, as he'd kept his eyes and the sight of his gun on Joseph, he could also see the desire on the other man's face as he eased closer when you didn't stop that first tentative step.

"That's not going to be a problem," the man said with pure lust in his voice.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky saw a twinkle of light just before a wall of flame erupted into being between Joseph and his followers, spreading from the left to the right. As he expected, half of them broke and ran immediately, joined by a few more besides. A few diehards ran towards the flames, but the heat screaming off of the fire easily kept them at bay. He figured Kiki was in control of them and focused in on the only threat left.

Joseph seemed mesmerized by the sight of you as you slowly descended the stairs toward him. "Are you a god?" You intoned the words in the same popping, roaring voice Bucky remembered from that first meeting and his eyes swept the scene for confirmation that Kiki was coming in from the left as her wall of fire indicated.

"I will be!" Joseph cried as he lunged towards you, only to stop abruptly at the blast of heated air that swept between you as the wall began to move in a swirl, whipped into a river of fire. The leading edge was bright gold with streamers of vibrant orange and red and hints of turquoise heat that hit the man directly in the chest and poured into him.

When he'd absorbed the last bit of fire, he looked up at you next to your front door where you'd retreated and smiled a cruel, anticipatory smile. His body continued to jerk and contort in wicked and unsettling ways that seemed to be preventing him from following you up the stairs to take his revenge.

You were deeply horrified by what was happening to him, though you didn't move any further away because you could hear Kiki muttering as she rummaged around inside Joseph. You didn't know what she was looking for, but you knew that he was dead as soon as she found it, either because of what she was doing or the man in the window waiting for his moment. You could see, however, that Joseph thought he was on the verge of victory, and you pitied him.

When you heard her crow in delighted discovery, you whispered, that pity ripe in your voice and on your face. "Good-bye, Joseph."

In the next instant, Kiki was clawing her way out of him, starting at his chest and climbing up his throat as he clutched his neck in nightmarish pain. Your eyes stayed dry, but you didn't enjoy suffering, even his. When the little flame body that Kiki had in this dimension came pushing out of Joseph's mouth in front of a hoarse scream, Bucky ended his torment with a single bullet to the heart.

The blackened body that fell to the ground was the last straw for the last few cultists who hadn't already fled. You saw them run for the forest in your peripheral vision but couldn't watch, your eyes glued to the happily chattering little fire trying to drag something out of Joseph's body.

As grateful as you were to never have to worry about Joseph ever again, you weren't made of stone and your stomach churned when Kiki managed to pry loose whatever it was she was so intent on retrieving. When the object fell heavily to the ground, she evidently lost her grip as she went tumbling several feet, but she was up and making cheerful scolding chuffs of sound in an instant.

The little flame creature scampered in merry leaps around something that looked like a dark quartz stone a little smaller than a tennis ball, with jagged spikes of black glass sticking out of the top. You frowned in confusion when Kiki continued to make huffing and scoffing noises that you couldn't understand as she got behind the rock and started pushing it forward.

"Y/N?" Behind you, Bucky murmured your name in a voice gentle with sympathy. Whatever else Joseph had been, he was pretty sure the man hadn't deserved to die like that. If he'd had his way, Bucky would have moved more quickly and made the end much less painful. On top of that, he hated that you'd had to see your little friend do something so gruesome.

"Yeah?" You sounded weird, like you were both puzzled and worried, but you didn't turn to look at him, your gaze on the wild flickering of Kiki on the ground next to the charred remains of what was once Joseph.

Bucky reached out, hoping he was doing the right thing, and slid his arm around your waist to pull you in and cradle you against his body. "Are you okay?"

"I guess?" If you weren't so focused on Kiki, you'd have melted at the tenderness in his tone, in his touch. As it was, you snuggled back into him even as you craned your neck to try and see what the little flame was up to. "I don't know what Kiki is doing. Kiki!"

Kiki's head popped up and she scampered forward a couple feet and shouted happily, It's Grumble! She scampered back and climbed on top of the stone, her front limbs wrapped around a couple of the spikes on top. I found Grumble in the human demon!

"What the hell is Grumble?" Your hand came up to grip Bucky's where it rested against your hip. As you stepped forward to get a closer look at whatever Kiki had found, you pulled him with you by the hand you kept wrapped around his, needing him with you. Stopping at the edge of the porch at the top of the stairs, you watched Kiki playfully rock back and forth on top of her discovery.

The little flame made the popping sound that served as her most delighted laugh, something you'd heard only a couple of times since you'd met her. No! Not Grumble. Grumble! You could hear very little difference between the two sounds, the second only more intense in its rumbling sound.

"That sounds like the same word, Keek."

Kiki laughed again and rocked the stone as her little head tilted down and she chuffed and rumbled at the object beneath her fiery feet. I love it! She shouted it in her popping, crackling language. She sounded so happy, so relieved, you relaxed by a fraction, enough to be tempted when she continued, Come meet Grumble, then, and waved you forward with one arm of flame.

You looked at Bucky, who was watching you communicate with Kiki with a raised brow and ready stance, not sure the danger was as over as he had believed. "She found someone named something that sounds like her word for 'grumble'."

Bucky tensed and his gaze dropped to the happy, chuffing fire where it was perched. He didn't know exactly what Kiki was, or what all she could do, but for now she resembled a small four-legged creature with a diamond shaped head and long almond shaped eyes made of blue flame. She scorched the ground wherever she ran, and he wondered if this was now why she seemed content to sit on her rock. "Where did she find this someone?"

Your mouth spread in a sickly expression, but it could still be described as an attempt at a winning smile. “Inside Joseph?" When Bucky understood that this was what Kiki had been doing between pouring her fire into him and the bullet through the heart that had ended it, the horror of it hit him like a brick. He looked back to you to find the same horror in your eyes. "I think?"

Bucky couldn't stop looking back and forth between you and the happy little flame continuing to scold the thing beneath her feet. "What is it?"

It's Grumble. She patted her hand against the obsidian spike she was holding and her eyes squinched up in delight. He's mine. He followed me through the hole but got confused and hid inside the demon man because I aimed at him. With that she dropped down and seemed to hug the stone, her flame wrapping close with what looked like affection.

You smiled a little at her apparent joy. "Okay." Still, you needed to know more about whatever had followed her from her world. She'd told you stories of some of the things that lived there. "But what is Grumble? Like, you're made of fire. What is he made of?" You were getting more and more curious, but you didn't move down the stairs yet, not sure that it was safe.

Oh! Kiki sounded surprised at the question, looking down at the stone she was perched upon with a head tilted in confusion. When she looked back up at you, that tilted head was a counterpoint to her perplexed tone. He's rock. You could almost hear the 'duh' that came after that sentence and you snorted softly in amusement. That's why he was so hard to move. Her voice took on a gentle, loving tone, and you realized that whatever or whoever Grumble was, he was evidently precious to Kiki. He's stubborn. And he's scared.

As you started down the stairs, you heard for the first time a rumbling at frequencies at the bottom of the audible range. You almost more felt the sound than heard it, so low were the vaguely annoyed growling noises that had Kiki answering in a spitting, roaring language that sounded like an approximation of them.

You got to the bottom of the stairs, doing everything in your power to keep your eyes on Kiki and her rock and not on what used to be Joseph. Once there, Kiki's face spread in what she used for a smile as she looked up at you and patted the stone beneath her again and said proudly, Grumble.

As he couldn't understand her, you explained to Bucky. "Grumble is this rock."

"I kind of figured that out for myself, thanks."

You shot Bucky a laughing grin, loving the irritated scowl on his face, delighted that he was back to regarding the world with a vague distrust. "He's also alive, and Kiki's friend. He followed her here when she got caught in Joseph's portal."

Bucky pulled you close and slung an arm around you to keep you there. "Pretty good friend." He smirked at you when his almost suggestive tone had your eyes flicking to his. You smirked back in acknowledgement before turning your gaze back to the flame creature that was now making a soothing chirring sound.

"Is it okay if I pick him up?" you asked her, needing to get away from Joseph as soon as possible. "So we can go inside?"

The little fire chirped a cheerful assent and nodded before immediately looking down to scold when the rock gave off what sounded like a hostile rumble. Bucky’s arm around your shoulders tightened slightly in response, a little concerned by it, and unwilling to watch you step again into peril so soon after the last time. "Let me, doll." You quirked a questioning eyebrow in his direction and he turned you in his arms to lean forward and brush your lips with his own, the gratitude he felt at having you safe bright in his eyes. He rested his forehead against yours, relief blowing through him, and smiled gently at you. "You've put yourself in danger enough tonight. I'm already gonna have nightmares."

You heard the dregs of fear in his voice, saw the relief of it in his face, and knew something of what it had cost him to watch you walk out the door to face Joseph. "Between Kiki," you answered, turning your cheek to tenderly rest it against his, "and you, I was never in any real danger."

Bucky's arms came around you in a move both fast and fierce. The next moment you were pressed firmly against him. His face was buried in your throat while he shuddered once, hard, before his hold gentled, and his lips brushed your skin as he spoke. "Sure didn't feel like it."

You simply held on, giving him the moment he needed to calm himself. He held you a moment longer than that, just for the joy of having you close. When he let you go, he flashed that million-watt grin of his that hit you like lightning every time and bent to pick up the little rumbly stone with his vibranium hand.

Kiki hopped out of the way and skittered up the hand you'd held out to nestle into her spot behind your ear where she could watch your world from your perspective. She had bonded herself to the roots of your hair, which is why your head started to smoke when she got angry. She was always more comfortable when she was closer to your scalp. From her perch she hissed in an encouraging tone towards the rock grumbling in Bucky's hand.

Bucky's eyes were on the stone, his brow furrowed in a mixture of confusion and concentration. He didn't look away when you took his hand and began moving up the stairs toward the house, too focused on the resentful grumbles of annoyance vibrating in his hand, up his arm and into his brain. He thought that if he just worked at it, he could come to understand what the different pulses and vibrations meant.

"We think he likes you." Your voice seemed to pop and growl in the same way Kiki had spoken to Grumble and drew Bucky's attention. While he'd been trying to understand the rumbles of the little stone in his hand, you'd led him to the front door and the unconscious body on the threshold. He bent and hauled the only cult member left up and over his shoulder with his free hand.

Bucky eased past you to carry Joseph's lieutenant to the kitchen, part of his attention still on the now curious purrs coming from Grumble. "Yeah. Cool." He was clearly distracted, and you wondered what about Kiki's friend had him so captivated. "Let's go call Steve so he can come clean this up."

"Actually," you said as you hopped up onto the kitchen counter to watch Bucky drop Brit to the floor, "I have a better idea."

By the time you made it back into bed, it was late morning, and you were unsteady on your feet, the weariness of the night having long since caught up with you. Still, your house was clean of Brit's presence and your yard of Joseph's body thanks to the phone call you'd made. You'd once done Maria Hill a favor and she was only too delighted to repay it. Even so odd a request hadn't fazed her when faced with the opportunity to no longer be in anyone's debt. Once Maria's crew had left, you and Bucky had been able to fall into bed in a tangled heap of relieved exhaustion.

If Maria'd had any questions about who had disabled and professionally restrained the tall and powerful person in your foyer, or about the bullet exactly through the heart of the incinerated corpse on your lawn, she kept them to herself. You imagined Nick Fury had already received a full and detailed report, but that was to be expected. You could only hope she was focused on you, considered it a small price to pay to distract them from Bucky's presence in your home.

Now that you'd found him, you would not give him up without a fight.

Bucky had stayed in the little library at the front of the second floor with Kiki and Grumble while you'd dealt with the people Maria had sent. Though he'd considered hiding in the forest during the clean-up, you'd been anxious at the thought. He couldn't stand to get that far away from you, not when he could so clearly see the worry in your eyes when he suggested it.

While he waited, he'd tried to communicate with Grumble. Something about the rumbling vibrations that came from the little stone resonated with his metal arm. If he focused on the sensory data he was getting from the vibranium, he could recognize tone and feeling. He would swear with practice he could truly communicate with the creature.

The clean-up took long enough that he got a little of that practice, was able to communicate enough reassurance to convince Grumble to open small, almond-shaped obsidian eyes. Those eyes had seemed to dart upward to the flame that popped and crackled on top of him. She whistled excitedly and, wrapping her arms of flame around his spikes, rocked him back and forth in what was clearly joy.

Bucky couldn't help but laugh at her antics, especially when he could feel Grumble's affection for her. He had placed one vibranium finger against one of the facets, could feel the relief, the gratitude underneath amused devotion, confirming Bucky's suspicions regarding their relationship. Whatever form it took, Grumble had followed Kiki because he loved her. 

Bucky could understand that feeling easily. He understood now he would follow you into the jaws of hell if he had to.

Thankfully, he didn't have to. Instead, he was laying on his side and nose to nose with you in the warmth of your bed and the only thing he cared about was hearing the words again. His arms were wrapped around you, his metal arm under your head, the other pressing you against him to feel your skin all over him.

Until he'd started sleeping in your bed, he hadn't realized how hungry he was for touch. Once he'd found the glory of your body warm and soft against his, he'd swiftly become obsessed. You were a feast to the famished, sweet and hot and delicious. His preference for having nothing between you whenever possible had been immediately apparent and something you indulged without comment. That silent acceptance inspired his everlasting gratitude as he hadn't known then how to tell you what it meant to him.

He knew now.

"Doll," his voice rumbled from his chest into yours and had you humming in pleasure and pressing closer, "I told you I wanted to talk about your timing." The feel of your body, warm and generous as you snuggled against his skin made both his body heat and his heart ache, and his hands smoothed over your skin in ways meant to make you shiver.

Your face melted into a bashful anxiety that made Bucky's heart pound like a drum. He couldn't believe that you could ever think that he'd be anything but endlessly thankful that you could feel a fraction of what he felt for you and he was terrified that you'd misunderstood. "Say it again, please," he whispered, his eyes burning like blue flames, "when there's time for me to say it back."

Your breath rushed out in relief, in joy, and your smile shone as your eyes blazed. You'd hoped the softness in his eyes had been reflecting his heart. "I love you, Bucky."

The sound of the words, the shape of them as they left your lips sent a feeling thrilling through his entire body, as though they had seeped beneath his skin and into the center of his being. His voice was hoarse with that desperate emotion when he answered. "I love you, too."

The next thing you knew, his lips were on yours and he was taking your breath away. You let him, not needing air when you were breathing his breath, breathing him. Your body already yearning to his, your skin set aflame everywhere he touched, you gave yourself up to his embrace with nothing held back.

Bucky was drowning in you, in the soft warmth you'd shown him from the first time, gladly going under. He loved to hear the words, but now that he knew the name of the emotion that left your mouth so soft against his, he had to keep tasting it on your tongue. Your hands were as fervid as your mouth in their race over his skin, as greedy as your lips as they fed from his. The feeling went to his head and soaked into his body to make him ache with a joyous kind of need. The sound of your pleasure in your throat seemed to resonate with his bones.

His lips left yours to press to the pulse in your throat, wanting both the taste of your skin and the thump of your heart, glorying in the temptation of your voice. "I think my luck changed, too,” you murmured.

Bucky's body seemed to clench in reaction to the ache in your tone and he rolled until he was stretched out on top of you, his hips between your thighs, his thumbs caressing your cheeks. He was smiling sweetly as he brushed his lips over yours, but that smile turned sly as he bent to kiss your neck again. "I met your ex. Your luck completely changed."

The feel of your laughter vibrating in your throat under his lips sent a rush through him, lust and love tangled together to keep his touch tender even as his hands began to wander to incite, to arouse.

Skin to skin and heart to heart, you were soon entwined and rocking toward ecstasy. Always a joyous experience, your joining was even sweeter, now that you had given each other the love you’d both been holding back. The words were as sweet on your lips as they were to his ear when you whispered them as you quaked in pleasure. His arms enveloped you and the choked cry of your name had your hands gliding over him to hold him through his own rapture.

A long time later, once he’d adored you to his own exacting standards, pleasuring you thoroughly and doing all he could to erase the memory of the night before from both your minds, you lay boneless and satisfied in each other’s arms.

“I kind of feel weird about what we just did.” His voice was low and raspy and made you shiver agreeably. His tone was so quiet and calm, it didn’t break the silence as much as it dismissed it. You marveled at the fact that your body was utterly exhausted and still yearned. Even now you could want him. “You know, with them here.”

You glanced at the nightstand where Kiki lay curled up on top of Grumble, both ostensibly asleep. You could still feel the gentle hum of her awareness in the back of your mind, however, and knew she was still half-awake. You smiled and turned back to Bucky to nuzzle his mouth with your own.

"Kiki lives at the roots of my hair; she's seen it." You'd used up what little energy you had and let your head fall back to the pillow. Bucky, on the other hand, lifted his head to stare at you as you continued. "They're not interested, I promise." His look of mildly horrified confusion made you snort, but you answered defensively. "She sets fires if she just wanders around freely. This is the first time she's been able to hang out somewhere else."

"She lives in your hair?" You laughed out loud at the tone of his voice, rich with baffled shock, and the worried eyes that raked the top of your head as he craned his neck to see your scalp. "Doesn't that hurt?"

You were still laughing as you lifted one heavy arm to draw his head down to yours for a long, tender kiss. You should have known that his one worry would be for your safety, your comfort. This was why you'd fallen in love with the man, the generous heart that beat so true beneath that delightfully gruff exterior.

Your voice was a little breathless from the kiss when it broke, but still soft with remorse. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about her, about Joseph, any of it." That remorse also softened your mouth as it brushed over his beautiful face. "At first it was because I promised to keep her secret, then it was because I was afraid."

Bucky appreciated the apology but considered it unnecessary as he could easily understand your reticence considering the circumstances. Even if he wanted to be angry, he was pretty sure that was impossible with you soft and warm in his arms, with your gentle mouth brushing love into his skin. He should probably be concerned that you had such a hold on him, but he couldn't find it in him to care.

Snuggling you closer, he smoothed his palm slowly up your spine as he closed his eyes to better appreciate the sensation of your skin against his. "Afraid of what?" He murmured the question, and you could feel in the way he pressed you closer that he was wondering if he had the energy to love you one more time. Alas, you were pretty sure you did not, but that didn't stop your heart from kicking like it was willing to find out.

You used the arm you'd slid around his waist to pull yourself tightly against him so that you could bury your face in his neck. His palm was just rough enough to send shivers through you as he skimmed it over your skin. "That it would be too much, too weird." You smiled against his throat when he scoffed. "I have custody of a fire elemental. She's kind of a lot."

Bucky scoffed harder and rolled his eyes as he pressed his lips to the top of your head. "I'm an international fugitive because I spent the last several decades a brainwashed assassin." His hand had reached the nape of your neck, only to turn and start the path back down, his touch both soothing and tender. "That's kind of a lot, too, but you don't seem to mind."

You sighed in pleasure, in contentment, and let your eyes drift closed. The warmth of his body, the smooth skim of his skin over yours, the rumble of his voice as he spoke all combined to leave you boneless and sleepy in his arms. "I knew what I was getting into," you murmured and the beginning of a slur to your tone alerted Bucky to your fading consciousness.

He smiled and felt the last of his own tension start to fade. If you were as happily content as your body seemed to communicate as you rested so trustingly against him, he saw no need to stay on guard. He let himself relax and enjoy the sensation of love and safety that had been so rare in his life until he met you. "You were on fire the first time I saw you," he reminded you gently, smiling at the memory now that he knew how truly safe from the fire he was. "I wasn't exactly in the dark."

You tilted your head back so that you could look into his face. His mouth was soft with affection, his blue eyes bright behind lowered lids. The way-past-five-o'clock-shadow darkening his features only added to the deliciously dangerous look of him. The sight of him made your heart race and your throat swell. A little breathless with it, with him, you kissed him gently. "I love you."

Bucky's grin flashed, dazzling white against the dark of his stubble. "I will never get tired of hearing that." His pretty lips brushed yours once, twice, before he gave in and sank into a long, tender kiss. When he raised his head again, your eyes fluttered open to meet icy blue hot with emotion. "I love you, too, doll."

Your face lit up with a bright and happy smile that made Bucky feel ten feet tall. When you snuggled into his arms and closed your eyes with a sigh of contentment, seemingly determined to fall asleep in his arms, he simply adjusted to maximize the comfort of you both and prepared to follow you into dreamland.

Just as his eyes were falling closed, Bucky's gaze landed on the little stone that had followed Kiki into this world. The vibrations that seemed to resonate with his arm and into his brain were still causing questions to chase each other in circles around his mind. There was only one person he would consider trusting with this secret, and she was also the only person who understood vibranium well enough to answer any of those questions.

"How do you feel about international travel?" His voice was loud enough to keep you from sliding into sleep, but still a low, sexy rumble. If only you could stay awake. "I know someone who would kill to meet Grumble."

You snorted, softly, and turned to rub your face against the skin of his collarbones, basking in him. "Let me know when you convince Grumble and I'm in." Your mouth twisted sardonically against his chest, even as you started to relax back into sleep. It was impossible to stay awake when your worst enemy was dead, your worst worries were over, and you were safe and comfortable in the arms of the sweetest man you'd ever known. "Then we can all try to convince Kiki."

Bucky couldn't resist the siren song of the softness of your body, bonelessly trusting, nor that of a deep and dreamless sleep that he knew would be his reward for getting you through the crisis safe and sound. "Will that be difficult?"

"She's paranoid and temperamental." Bucky could hear a small, half-hearted hiss coming from the direction of the nightstand. That hiss prompted a forceful and challenging change to your tone. "Yes. Unless Grumble has some ability to persuade that we don't, it will be very difficult."

Next came a sound like a small tumble of gravel, but the little clacks of rock against each other had such an amused tone to it, you couldn't help but hear it. Bucky laughed out loud, as he could hear the smug assurance underneath the laughter and knew Grumble was perfectly capable of persuading Kiki. Her hissing denial was clearly weak to everyone in the room, and it was clear she was as smitten with Grumble as he with her.

Though the little flame sounded irritated, you could hear the reluctant amusement mixed with attraction in the back of your mind and wondered what Kiki saw when she looked at the other creature. Whatever it was, she was as caught in her sexy, grumpy partner as you were in yours.

Bucky grinned at you, thoroughly familiar with the feeling of smug amusement he was getting from Grumble, since he got to experience it every time you lost your train of thought looking at him. You grinned back, reluctantly amused by the arrogance all over him, and thinking you and Kiki had a lot more in common than you'd thought.

The End

Taglist:

@hellzzzbelle​ @samwilsons-pillowpecs​ @cheekygeek05​ @lbouvet​ @diinofayce​ @bibliophile1773​ @thatawkwardlittlefangirl​ @miraclesoflove​ @nerdy-bookworm-1998​ @destiel-is--endgame​ @irritated-bisexual​ @peaceinourtime82​ @badassbaker​ @walkingtravesty97​ @fashionworld12​ @readermia​

[kryptsune]

Souly Damned Saturdays!~

🌼 It’s Saturday just let me live in my little denial world. Anywhoo. I am really excited about this one! When I started working on SD more and more I realized that I wanted to come up with something more unique and personal. So let’s get started! If you would like to know more about Souly Damned, its world, it’s stories, and its characters drop me an ask! You can also click that link at the end of this that says PREV. This will take you to the past posts! 

The Soul: 

Mortal souls are especially important to the world of Souly Damned. All souls are unique on their own and I am sure you are wondering... Kit...being in the UT community you are not using hearts or traits are you? The answer is no. If you notice in some of my fics you have already seen what the SD souls are. They are floral based and unlike UT the colors do not have a significance. It is the symbolism and physical traits of our little flower souls that makes it important. I will note that if the mortals soul is let’s say a blue then their eyes will reflect this (eyes are the windows into the soul). 

The soul is tied strongly to the physical body branching off into roots that resemble that of a circulatory system. If the soul has magic within it they are more vibrant in color. When it comes to physical appearance this is entirely dependent on the person themselves. Generally the flower type is based on symbolism or personal traits. If someone is an introvert for example then the bud of the flower may not be fully in bloom. What is cool about this concept is that the possibilities are endless. 

Life’s hardships and joys also reflect on the soul. The soul flower can be damaged in various ways such as torn, wilted, decay as some examples. I should also mention that this is just scratching the surface of this. If you have specific questions about how to translate a character’s soul just ask. 

Every single soul works this way on a basic level but there are differences between the types of souls.

Infernal Beasts: They do not have souls at all which is why they were locked away. 

The Fallens: This specific soul type is reserved for Fallen Celestials aka the Princes. Due to their fall the edges of the petals of their soul flower is burnt and smoldering. As with Celestial souls they are encased in crystal which presumably amplifies or hides the power it contains. 

Changelings: Since Changelings used to be mortal souls tormented and twisted by their time in the Infernal Realm their souls appear like burnt remains with a faint hint of color on the outside edge. All the roots connected to the flower are also burnt, possibly twisted. This particular type is why Changelings have a ravenous hunger to consume souls as theirs are barely existent. They almost have this primal drive to fill the holes where there souls once resided. 

Imps: Imps are the denizens of the Infernal Realm created by the beasts. There are many different types but unlike their origin they do in fact have souls or what resembles them. Very similar to The Fallens but opposite. The flowers are mostly charred with hints of color within because they are creatures that hail from the Infernal Realm they are magically touched and therefore the internal portion will glow through the burnt sections. This color will expand to a degree if more power, aka souls, are obtained by the imp in question. 

Celestial: Celestial souls are within a flower shape but they are completely white and encased in a mineral housing. Depending upon the rank of the Celestial some of this could be gemstones, crystal, or the petals are dipped in precious metals. Their souls look like they are blazing in vibrant fire (color is based on the individual). The flowers may burn but they are never charred or burnt. 

Contracted Souls: Contracts vary depending on the power that a mortal is connected to. 

Fallen: Each Prince has a specific contract symbol on their physical form. This symbol appears on the mortal soul flowers petals, branded with that mark.  High Infernal: This is reserved for dukes and others in the Infernal hierarchy. The interior of the soul flower will have an inked symbol of their kingdom and the flower itself will burn with the same colored flame as the duke/higher in question.  Regular: Souls that are contracted legally have a singular symbol as lower level demons are not permitted to claim certain souls for themselves. It looks like the flowers drip with molten wax in a red color. Upon close inspection in the middle of the bloom will be the standard contract symbol, impressed in the wax. Illegal: Very much like a regular contract, illegal contracts look far more smothered as the demon possess and takes over a soul completely. As the mortal soul is smothered a black waxy like sludge covers the entire flower. If it is fully consumed then what remains will be the soul of the Imp instead after being burned into nothing. 

How to Break or Nullify a Contract:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each contract formed is by a person to person basis but there are some things that can break or nullify the contract. 

The demon no longer desires the soul- Rare but possible. If the demon contracted no longer wants the soul they can break the contract if they so wish but that means that the humans magic will still be maintained and able to be passed to their children. 

The human is killed before the stipulations of the contract are fulfilled. 

The demon violates the contract set forth. 

The human soul is no longer classified as human.

*note a Prince’s power is so extensive that a vessel is crafted in order to hold this power and so that it’s easily accessible for the contractee. These vessels can range from jewelry to physical marks. Each one is unique to both the Prince in question and the contractee.*

<< PREV  | FIRST | NEXT >>

[aclosetfan]

This is a really incomplete idea BUT it’s about Brick’s hat(s). And hopefully someone else finds this and enjoys it! More under the cut, it’s a long post :)

I think it’d be funny if boomer and butch get him a shitty novelty hat for birthday/holidays/etc because 1) they don’t know what to get him 2) they’re like 12 with four buck to their names. so they just go from charity shop to charity shop looking for ideas. Brick probably doesn’t ask for much (I don’t think any of them do. poor kid syndrome amiright? I personally never think they’d be well off in childhood).

So anyway butch and boomer are bumming through the charity shops and boomers like:

“Holy shit, Butch!”

“Wut?” Butch looked over pulling the charred and ruined Halloween mask that someone had donated for god knows what reason off his head.

“Dude it’s perfect!” Boomer came running from three aisle over, waving a garment around in the air.

“It’s a hat.” Butch pointed out bluntly, unimpressed, and pointed to the mask atop his head, “I think we should get this.”

“But it’s red!”

“He’s got one of those. Wears it frequently.”

“But not like this!” Boomer boosted, “See.”

Boomer turned the hat around, so Butch could see the bill of it. It was one of those novelty snapbacks, inscribed on the front was the playboy bunny logo.

“Dude.” Butch smiled, giggling with Boomer, albeit a little nervously.

He was familiar with the playboy bunnies work, it wasn’t like he was a virgin or anything (except he secretly was), but he had never actually seen a genuine centerfold spread like some of the older boys at the detention hall had talked about. When he thought of playboy, he thought of the Victoria Secret models he saw plastered to the side of the store at the mall. They made him feel weird and his hands would get all sweaty, so he tried his best not to look too closely.

“Dude we should get him this!” Boomer continued to smile, “It’d be, like, so funny.”

“Yeah.” Butch nodded, as his smile grew. He didn’t 100% get why it was so funny, but the idea of having something with the playboy bunny logo on it seemed cool to him. It made him feel kind of like one of the older boys.

Him and Boomer snickered all the way to the cash register, and when it was their turn to pay, Boomer nudged him ahead, ducking behind him with a giggle. He glared at his brother over his shoulder, but allowed Boomer to twist a nervous hand into the fabric of his oversized sweater (the one his brothers had bought him last year. They bought it 3 sizes too big cause he kept growing out of everything too fast. It was 1 size too big now). Boomer liked latching onto their sleeves when he got nervous.

He didn’t get what the big baby was so nervous about though. They were just buying a stupid hat. The lady cashier watched them with thinly veiled boredom and Butch threw the hat down on the counter.

Raising a penciled on eyebrow, the older women examined the hat, “Playboy, huh? You even know what Playboy is kid?”

The question made the back of his neck burn. He had never heard a lady say playboy before, it was weird. From behind him, Boomer pressed his face into the back of his sweater to muffle another giggle.

“Uh, duh.” He sniffed, “We know, lady.”

“Have you actually seen a playboy before?” The cashier snorted, ringing them up, “Not just the logo?”

“Yes!” Butch huffed, defending himself, “The Internet!”

(It was a semi-lie—they had tried looking it up on the internet, but Fuzzy didn’t have a computer at his cabin, HIM wouldn’t let them use any of his flashy spy monitors, Mojo was lame, and the library had parent controls)

“Surreee.” The lady drawled out and rang them up, “Dollar fifty.”

He didn’t make eye contact with her as he handed over a crumpled dollar bill and took two quarters from the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny. When she gave them back the hat, they ran out of the store like they had committed a bank robbery.

When Brick opened the present two days later, he threw the plastic bag it had come in to the side and frowned.

“A new hat?”

“Yeah,” Boomer nodded, putting down the cheap Polaroid camera Butch and Brick had shoplifted from a secondhand shop downtown (still too expensive to actually buy), and reached for the hat, turning it around in Brick’s hand, “but look!”

Brick’s smile grew, as the logo registered in his head. “Oh, shit,” their brother laughed, “is this playboy?”

“Betcha you won’t wear it.” He goaded his brother on as he tossed the new (used—looked like it was taken from Pokay High’s sports department) rugby ball from hand to hand.

“Betcha I will.” Brick shot back, carefully removing the ratty cap he had had since forever and replacing it with the new one.

“Sorta big.” Their brother murmured, adjusting the strap.

“Your fat head will grow into it!” Butch joked and Brick punched his arm.

“Shut up, dipshit.”

“Do you like it?” Boomer beamed, ignoring the bickering.

Brick looked at their brother with a smile, precious anger dissipating, “Yeah, dude, it’s funny.”

———————————————————

Then it becomes a thing//like Brick really loves his hat collection:

“Truckin’ ain’t easy.” Brick read out loud with a snort, and replaced the hat he was wearing with the new one.

He thought for a moment then shook his head no, “nah. Not today.”

He had so many hats to chose from, it was almost overwhelming. They were all basically offensive on every level and he tried to wear them all as often as possible. The highlight reel included:

Kitty gang

Swag.

Yolo.

Lmao.

Weed jokes. Lotta weed jokes.

Thrasher.

Fish love me. Woman fear me.

Met god. She’s hot.

Blow me for luck.

Beer drinkers get more head.

The carpets do match the drapes

FuCk

Birthday Bitch

Deadass fuck thots on god

Hello I am Mr. Cunt

Master Baiter

Drive fast. Eat ass.

At 17, he had a vibrant hat collection. Anytime his brother’s saw a red hat with a shitty gag, they snagged it for him. Recent political events had bestowed upon his brothers a plethora of new material:

Make racists afraid again.

My other hat’s tin foil

Made you look

The list went on. His fuck cops wasn’t popular with local authorities. And how could he forget his most favorite powderpuff girl cap. That pissed them off to no end.

“Brick!” Butch yelled down the corridor. They were at Mojo’s this week, “Hurry up!”

“Uuhhhhh,” he mumbled to himself, as he stared at his wall, ignoring his brother. He hung them all up to make it easier to chose. His collection covered the wall.

His hand floated left to the one that said FuCk, but the one that said bad hair day caught his eye and his hand twitched to the right, “uuuuuhh, hmmmm.”

He floated toward the ceiling to look at the top of the wall, “welllllll...”

They’d be fighting with the girls today and because he liked making Blossom mad, he figured he needed to chose something more crude.

“Oh my god!” Butch cried outside his bedroom door, “Just fucking pick one!”

“Mmmmm.”

“Brick!” Butch pounded on his door, “I swear to god, I’ll burn them all if you just don’t pick one!”

“HMMmmmmmm!”

“Brick, it’s been thirty minutes!” Boomer whined, joining Butch, “The girls are waiting, we can’t cancel on them again! We’re bad guys, but we aren’t bad guys.”

“Ahhhhh—“ he sucked on his teeth in thought, “five more minutes!”

His brothers groaned in unison from the other side of the door.

“This is your fault, Boomer.” Butch whined.

“How?!” Boomer protested.

“Cause I wanted to get him that mask.”

————————————————————

His hat—his first hat—is lovingly preserved. He can’t risk losing it or damaging it any further. Before they started buying him new hats, most of the boys misadventures (the chaos they did NOT plan) were dedicated to saving Brick’s hat from the clutches of (insert one-shot villain here). It’s his security blanket. He breaks it out on the lazy days in.

He does though often lose his novelty hats. A violent gust of wind will rip one from his hat or a fight will cause it to disintegrate. But because Brick considers being the hat guy a personality trait, I think he’d have a spare one on hand at all times:

“My hat!” He cried, as the tornado-like monster blew through Townsville, ripping his hat from his head, and then disappeared into thin air, “the fucker took my hat!”

“Brick!” Blossom cried over the wind, “calm down! It’s a hat!”

“Yeah my hat!” He argued back. He wasn’t fond of the idea that him and his brothers and the girls now had to cooperate with each other, but desperate times called for desperate measures. “Butch! Boomer! I want my hat!” He hissed and his brothers nodded, understanding immediately what he meant.

“Right!” Butch dropped Buttercup, forgetting whatever fight the two had found themselves in.

“Got it!” Boomer jumped up from where he had been sitting on Bubbles, squashing her to the ground.

“What was that thing!” Brick barked at Blossom and she wiped the blood from her nose.

“I only know as much as you do, considering it literally just happened. Maybe it has to do with air—“

She cut off and looked at him, as he adjusted his emergency back up hat onto his head.

“What!” He hissed when he realized all three of the girls were giving him odd looks.

“Dude,” Buttercup asked from the ground, “do...do you just carry extra hats around?”

“Of course I do!” He spat, disgusted that they’d think so low of him not to, “Extra hat,” he pointed to his head, “emergency beanie,” he pulled one out of his pocket, “and extra hair ties,” him and his brother lifted up theirs wrists. “We live by the aesthetic, we die by the aesthetic, anymore questions?”

“Yeah!” Boomer huffed in his defense, “what’s it fucking matter to you anyway!”

“Don’t you three have bigger issues to worry about then our business?” Butch hissed, kicking at Buttercup.

Buttercup rolled away from the kick, dodging it with a laugh.

“What’s so funny!” Butch demanded and Buttercup shook her head, ignoring Butch and pointing up at her sister.

“Holy crap! He really is your counterpart, huh? You guys are perfect for each other!” She laughed wheezing. 

“Hey!!” Him and Blossom bristled together, “Shut up!”

————————————————————

When he learns that over excessive hat use can lead to hair breakage and premature balding his heart breaks, so he starts buckling them to his belt loops instead when he remembers to give his hair a break.

[ozsyn]

Dabi x Vigilante!Reader (1 of ?)

———————————

(Y/N) stared out into the shadows of the darkened alley, watching. Waiting.

Peering out through the slit in the mask, she takes notice of her surroundings.

It had been a few short months since she arrived in this wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Crime ran rampant throughout Japan, but the increased villainous activity only brought with it a spike in so-called heroics.

Hero society was corrupt.

Change was needed, but she wasn’t that change.

She was...an intervening force. She’d do her job and help those that needed it.

People preyed on the weak and she was far from that.

You couldn’t afford to be weak around here.

Her thoughts were interrupted, however, as a figure steps into view.

The barest hint of light reflects off the staples holding his charred skin together, a result of his powerful and destructive quirk.

He leans against the wall just a few steps down from her, legs crossed nonchalantly as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

There is no fear on him.

Finally, he speaks, voice a deep rumble.

“Out for another night of saving lives, hero?”

Her eyes narrow, “I’m not a hero.”

“But you’re not a villain.”

“I don’t need to see the world in black and white.”

“Well that’s how it is. Hero society is corrupt. It needs to be taken down.”

“And you think your band of misfits is going to do that?”

“This ‘band of misfits’ is getting more done than you could ever hope to saving your little girls on the street.”

She advances on him then, drawing one of the twin daggers she keeps on either side of her waist.

People often rely on their quirks here and for good reason, but hers was not a weapon.

It provided her the stealth needed to slip through the night undetected, a striking contrast to that of the man before her.

A vibrant flash of blue flame erupts just as her knife meets the scorched skin of his neck.

“You could never do it,” he grins confidently as deep turquoise eyes meet her own.

“You don’t know what I’m capable of,” she grits out.

“These pretty little knives of yours give me an idea,” he replies, delicately fingering the sharpened edge.

She retracts the blade, then, securely replacing it in its hidden sheath.

“They’re for protection.”

“Protection from what? Big bad boys who got a little handsy? Taking advantage of a girl who had a bit too much to drink?”

“Or....” he continues, grin widening like a Cheshire cat’s.

“Is it something else you’re scared of in this cold, dark alley? Something like-“

“A villain!”

He suddenly surges forward, shoving (Y/N) against the wall, arms encircling either side of her.

“You’re pushing it, hero.”

“And you’re not?” she counters, noticing his proximity. “Shigaraki wouldn’t be too thrilled if he heard you were out here with me.”

“Cute little vigilantes aren’t on our radar.”

“That’s your mistake, then. You don’t know what I am, what I’ve done, or what I can do.”

“I’m not a hero. I’m not a villain,” she continues.

“I don’t pick sides in this war of yours.”

“Maybe it’s about time you did.”

She studies him.

“What makes you so confident I’d choose yours?”

“You can play at hero all you want, little mouse. But deep down, you’re one of us. You pretend to have a code. You’re protecting the weak. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor. You act like this is a game.”

“I’m doing what is right.”

“And nothing is more ‘right’ than saving lives, isn’t it, hero?”

“Better than ending them.”

He smiles.

“What makes you think they’d even accept you? After all you’ve done....” he says, trailing off.

Her eyes widen as she comes to the realization of his words.

“It’s really not hard to keep an eye on you, hero. I’ve done my research. Hell, you may have more under your belt than I did starting out. I’m almost proud-“

“Enough!” she finally snaps.

“I know what I’ve done and I’m not proud, but I needed to survive. We are not the same and we never will be.”

“It’s cute-“

“No. I told you I was done. I didn’t join up with the League because I’m not here to eliminate hero society or whatever you think you’re doing by taking innocent lives. People need my help here and I will give it however I can and if that means I have to parade around in this ridiculous costume, I will.”

There’s a pause between the two as her words settle in, but it’s soon interrupted as he begins a drawn-out applause.

“Inspirational,” he finally declares, wiping a false tear from his eye.

“You know what the difference between you and me is, Dabi?” she says with a sneer, enunciating the villain’s name.

“What’s that?”

“I will do what is right and help anyone who needs it. And to do that, I will put down anything that gets in my way.”

He leans into her, then, hot breath ghosting over her lips.

“And am I in your way, hero?”

She steels her gaze and tilts her head up ever-so-slightly to look directly into his eyes, her answer a low growl in her throat.

“Why don’t you find out?”

Chapter 2

[flourchildwrites]

It’s an ordinary Tuesday for most of the hospital occupants as well as the passersby scurrying on the street below. As Rei ends her call with a reputable cab company, she gazes out the window to watch their comings and goings one last time. From the comfort of her windowsill, she likes to imagine the colorful lives they lead in contrast to the hospital's endless reserve of rooms drenched in muted earth tones. The exception is, as always, a vibrant arrangement of Japanese gentians that sits in her windowsill, sticking out like a sore thumb.

But this Tuesday is different. Her doctors say that this day marks a milestone in her recovery. For what it’s worth, Rei is inclined to agree. She’s packing her bags to leave the hospital. Unlikely though it once seemed, Mrs. Todoroki is going home.

Fandom: Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia

Relationships & Characters: Todoroki Rei/Todoroki Enji, Himura Family, Todoroki Family, Todoroki Shouto

Genre: Flashbacks, Parent-Child Dynamics, Healing, Hopeful Ending

Trigger Warnings: Implied/Referenced Canonical Child and Spousal Abuse

Rating: PG-13

Word Count: 2,993 words (Complete)

A/N: I'm so excited to share the fic I wrote for @todofamzine! I would like to thank the Winter Dawn mod team for being the best damn moderators I have ever worked with and @robinoxel for collabing with me and creating art of Rei to go along with the fic which you can find here. This fic was written before the recent chapters featuring the Todoroki family were published. I did my best to imagine what might have happened during Rei and Enji's past, and any canonical divergence you see is just that: canonical divergence coming from a simpler time. Flashbacks are in italics. I hope you enjoy this fic!

Home is a curious concept for Rei Todoroki. For the better part of a decade, she’s passed her time in a series of well-furnished hospital rooms with bland walls and bleached sheets. Her accommodations are not so cold as to be unwelcoming: extra blankets and plush pillows are a perk of her long penance, not to be taken for granted in spaces like these. But the walls are nearly bare, every wire is tethered taut, and someone somewhere is always—always—watching.

Oddly enough, she’s going to miss that.

It’s an ordinary Tuesday for most of the hospital occupants as well as the passersby scurrying on the street below. As Rei ends her call with a reputable cab company, she gazes out the window to watch their comings and goings one last time. From the comfort of her windowsill, she likes to imagine the colorful lives they lead in contrast to the hospital's endless reserve of rooms drenched in muted earth tones. The exception is, as always, a vibrant arrangement of Japanese gentians that sits in her windowsill, sticking out like a sore thumb.

But this Tuesday is different. Her doctors say that this day marks a milestone in her recovery. For what it’s worth, Rei is inclined to agree. She’s packing her bags to leave the hospital. Unlikely though it once seemed, Mrs. Todoroki is going home.

What she will find waiting on the other side of the recovery divide is still a mystery.

Rei folds her life into two suitcases. One shirt and a pair of pants lay neatly on top of the open case, but beneath the surface, she allows some disorder. The hairbrush she used this morning is stuffed in the middle. Prescription bottles with rattling pills hide between layers of cloth, and there are deep wrinkles in the fabric below, not unlike the tired lines etched under her middle-aged eyes. She’s almost finished, almost ready to relegate the sterile smell of the hospital to nothing more than a memory, but there’s one last thing to pack.

Some of her photographs are framed; others are faded. A few photos are torn, and still, there’s the odd bit of charring on the edges of one or two pictures, courtesy of young Touya’s wild ways. Rei can’t help but smile at her collection of fond memories.

Her eyes flit to an old, framed newspaper clipping, and echoes of Rei’s glory days wrap around her like a favorite cardigan. In the picture, her stance is commanding; her arms are outstretched. A sheet of ice streams from her fingertips as her pale hair fans out from the force of the chilly blast. The sidekick Frostbyte is strong and vivacious, a match for any villain she might encounter in the small locality she protects. The headline beneath her picture speaks volumes: New Sidekick Frostbyte Freezes Crime Rates!

It’s a warm memory, something Rei wants to tuck in her chest and carry with her wherever she roams. She picks up the frame and places it safely in the top compartment of her baggage. Another image, a picture already tucked in her suitcase, draws her attention.

Rei doesn’t know why she keeps the picture. She isn’t sure why Fuyumi pulled the image from the family albums for her in the first place. Perhaps both Todoroki women are sentimental for what was and what might have been. Looking at the staged photograph now, Rei sees hope in the lineless eyes of her younger self, a blushing, traditional bride in a pure white shiromuku. And there’s Enji by her side, a tall, prideful hero made uncomfortable by the humble formality of the Shinto shrine.

The smile fades from Rei’s face; it is replaced by well-earned worry lines as she glances sideways at the blue flowers on her windowsill. She’ll never know how Frostbyte appeared on Enji’s bride-to-be radar. Neither will she ever be certain if her family, eager to capitalize on her early success as a sidekick and drowning in debt, put her profile into the matchmaker’s hands. Either way, the request was made and answered before the young woman could give her blessing.

Looking back, it feels like their first meeting happened lifetimes ago, as if the entire event is witnessed through a pane of frosted glass. But Rei remembers every detail, down to the tea stains on her mother’s best table cloth and the nervous buzz in the pit of her stomach. The scene plays out as though she is on the outside looking in, forever separated from the optimistic young woman she used to be.

...

The Todoroki family seems pleased.

In between courses, Rei’s mother hisses this sentiment in her daughter’s ear. Her father sits politely through dinner, speaking when spoken to and wearing his deference on his sleeve. Enji appears to be nice, though fixated on his work and the pro hero rankings. His mother and father are cordial, especially considering their lofty status; however, their impeccable etiquette is not important. The Todoroki family fortune is the reason her mother and father agreed to this meeting.

The older couples beam at their children when, somehow, dinner devolves into dessert. Their eager matchmaker announces that Rei and Enji should spend a few moments alone to speak candidly about dating with marriage (and children) in mind. Rei, for one, isn’t sure how to feel. She cannot know how a conversation of this nature is supposed to go.

Nevertheless, she stays the course and flashes Enji an accommodating smile as they take a seat on the bench in her family’s small garden. The summer heat does not agree with Rei, but her favorite flowers, bell-shaped blossoms the color of sapphires, are in bloom. They bring her comfort, and Rei doesn’t hesitate to tell Enji that these are her favorite to jumpstart the obligatory small talk.

He doesn’t respond in kind.

“I saw your rescue in Hasetsu,” the young man observes, changing the topic. “The way you fortified the building with your ice quirk was impressive, and I understand there were no casualties.”

Rei does not reply. She merely nods in assent, wondering if he really wants to talk about the ins and outs of their careers when marriage is on the table. For the first time, she glances upward and looks at Enji Todoroki. Impressive height, flaming hair, and cerulean eyes speak for themselves, but there’s also a hint of something sweet and smoldering in the night air that’s coming from him. There’s no denying that the rising pro hero is, as the tabloid papers are fond of saying, a hot commodity.

But the blush that dusts Rei’s cheeks isn’t only from physical attraction, nerves, or the thick material of her best dress. There are worries and concerns, curiosities that Rei thinks should be sated. Her thoughts spill from her lips before she can catch them.

“Why me?” she asks, bolder because of the plum wine passed around the dinner table. “You’re Endeavor. Surely, you have people lining up to-”

“Did no one speak to you about this before our meeting?” Enji interrupts.

The grin wilts from Rei’s face. “What do you mean?”

Enji sighs. He stands and steps forward; his figure illuminates, outshining the moon. His glow erupts into a burst of hellfire, and Enji’s arms are engulfed. The sleeves of his fine suit are ruined, but he doesn’t appear to care. Rei is startled, yet she only feels a gentle heat radiating from the star before her. Enji’s command of his quirk is incredible.

“Power like this comes with a cost,” he remarks bluntly.

He turns to face Rei, and the blaze surrounding his arms contracts, burning brighter. When Enji grimaces, her eyes widen with the realization that he is overheating.

Rei can relate.

“With a quirk like this, my body can only withstand the heat for so long. I assume that it is the same for you and your ice.”

The puzzle pieces connect as reality settles on her shoulders. Their pairing isn’t about temperament so much as temperature; their powers are polar opposites that cancel and complement. Enji reaches out to take Rei’s hand, and instinctively, she drops her body temperature to combat his blaze. Frost meets hellfire, steam rises, and the garden is flooded with fury. When the cloud clears, Rei and Enji remain hand-in-hand. No burns. No ice.

But it is neither luck nor good fortune. It is calculated equilibrium, a quirk marriage through and through.

...

She remembers that there were three dates, three opportunities to be seen and photographed at hotspots near his agency and hers. Matching stories were crafted for the hows and whens of their contrived romance. While they dated, the Todoroki family lawyers drafted an airtight prenuptial agreement.

The contract arrived on a Friday evening, Rei recalls, along with a small package that contained an engagement ring worth more than six months of her salary. The advice from her mother was particularly memorable.

...

“Answer him,” her mother’s voice pleads. “The sooner, the better. Remember your family is counting on y-”

Rei stops the answering machine. She doesn’t need to hear the rest. The older woman’s lecturing tone grates on Rei’s nerves. The pressure from her father is more subtle, but it’s still there. She isn’t sure where the family debt came from; however, she doubts that the schools she attended were inexpensive. Plus, her mother never hesitates to tell her that she should give them more of her paycheck, though the salary of a sidekick is barely enough.

She rolls her weary eyes and tosses the package on the low table of her small living space. Paperwork spills across the surface; the ring box nearly falls to the floor. Rei wants nothing more than to sink into her futon until her next shift rolls around. But Endeavor is not a patient person.

Rei runs through her internal debate once more.

True enough, Enji will be hard-pressed to find a better match than Rei, not for the ends he has in mind—a child with a combination of their quirks. Likewise, Rei knows that she will never rise as high as him on the hero billboard chart. It’s not that she doesn’t want to make a difference, but her countenance is naturally understated. Rei would like to live a quiet life, helping others and supporting her family.

And someday, she’d like to have children too.

Yet, the possibility of a loveless marriage is a difficult pill to swallow, especially since the concept of romance is nebulous in Rei’s mind. Her parents swear that love can take root and grow with time, and Enji is nothing if not dedicated to his goals. Moreover, Rei is not so naive as to pretend that a comfortable life with a steady income isn’t attractive in and of itself.

One last glance at his profile cements her answer. She doesn’t revel in bargaining for a better future as she slips on the engagement ring and signs her name on the dotted line of the prenuptial agreement. Rei calls her parents to share the news and phones Enji to tell him she’s accepted.

As she lies down on her futon to rest, Rei swears that she will plant a garden at their first home, filled with flowers to admire and founded on promises worth keeping. She imagines pretty blooms decorating a harmonious house alongside the pitter-patter of little feet which grow into the large shoes Enji wants filled. Rei consoles herself: if she does a good job of bringing up the next generation of Todorokis, her children will have the luxury of choosing love instead of a contract.

...

Rei admits that hanging up her hero costume was an easy thing to do after the marriage. It was even easier to watch her hardened muscles soften into feminine curves as life took root in her belly. Her parents were proud; Enji was satisfied. Any lingering doubts were pushed aside by the demands of motherhood.

And when Touya’s quirk proved disappointing, Rei tried harder to fulfill her side of the bargain. She can scarcely remember a time in her twenties when she was not waiting for her child’s quirk to manifest or swallowing prenatal vitamins over an anxious lump in her throat.

Fuyumi was born on a crisp December morning eleven months after Enji declared Touya unsuitable for further training. Like clockwork, Natsuo was on the way after their sweet daughter failed to manifest a fire quirk before she turned four. Then, Rei cannot forget how Enji became impatient. Natsuo had not reached his second birthday when her husband decided that he was also a failure. As Rei thinks back on the arrival of her last child, hindsight’s perfect vision highlights chilling insight.

...

“It’s a boy!”

Strong cries rebound off the walls of the delivery room. Rei breathes a sigh of relief as her body shudders from the efforts of her labor. At the end of her bed, the hospital staff congratulate her on another healthy baby as they pass the newborn to his mother. The comforting feeling of an infant pressed against Rei’s chest will never grow old, and she savors this moment with Shouto, mumbling words of love as she holds him. Deep down, Rei realizes that her fourth pregnancy was hard, and secretly, she dreads what her husband will think if this child also has a head full of snow-white hair.

Enji often tells her that he knew the other children were failures the moment he laid eyes on them. On this subject, husband and wife will never agree, but Rei is content that he leaves their upbringing to her. She’s done her best to temper Touya’s attitude, bolster Fuyumi’s confidence, and keep Natsuo laughing.

Rei glances down at the fresh face of her newborn son and is perplexed by the contradiction she sees between his halves. Trembling fingers weave through his hair. Fine white and crimson strands part down the middle. Yet, Shouto’s hair is not his most striking feature. A pair of mismatched eyes blink up at Rei. One is bright turquoise, and the other is a somber gray.

The contrast is uncanny.

“Heterochromia iridum,” the doctor pronounces as if on cue. “That explains his eyes. Usually, it’s a benign condition, nothing to worry about. Considering his hair, I’d say it’s all genetic, possibly related to his quirk.”

Through a blissful haze of oxytocin, Rei registers Enji’s hand on her shoulder. He laughs in an abrasive chuckle that overtakes Shouto’s cries.

“Finally,” he exclaims, “a masterpiece.”

If the doctor and nurses think Enji’s behavior is untoward, they keep the observation to themselves. Rei is too exhausted to fight the relief she feels. She allows her husband to take the newborn baby from her arms instead of insisting that she nurse Shouto straight away as she did with her other children.

“You did well this time,” he mutters.

Rei smiles wearily at the compliment, but it does not sit as well as she believed it would.

...

In retrospect, Rei understands that there was no singular moment that caused the trouble which followed. Rather, it was a collection of compromises that seemed, at the time, to be for the best. Rei gathers the rest of her photographs. Carefully, she thumbs through the small stack and is reminded of all the seeds she and Enji planted in their garden.

Undoubtedly, her children are her greatest love, and she tucks the loose photos in her purse for safekeeping, holding their cheerful likenesses close and the good memories closer. Looking around, Rei realizes that she’s finished packing—all except the vase of Japanese gentians sitting on the windowsill.

Rei prepared for this. She spoke at length with her therapist about the baggage she intends to take into the next phase of her life. Some of it is essential. Never again will she let herself slip so far as to harm someone she cherishes. No more will she suffer the company of people more concerned with ends than means. But when it comes to Enji, Rei is of two minds, torn between the past and the present. Scarred and repentant, he is not the person he once was.

Neither is she.

A brisk knock on the door stirs Rei from her reverie. She turns to address the nurse and is happy to find a familiar face.

“Your discharge papers are ready, and your cab is here, Mrs. Todoroki,” he says cheerfully, already taking her bags. “Are you sure you don’t want your family to escort you home?”

Rei shakes her head.

“They offered, but I want to do this by myself.”

“Fair enough.” The nurse shrugs.

He takes a step toward the windowsill and reaches to collect the flowers when Rei makes her decision. With a gentle expression but a firm palm tilted upward, she halts his kind gesture.

“The flowers stay,” Rei says confidently. “I don’t have room for them anymore.”

It’s a short walk from her old room to the hospital’s front door, but the journey took Rei over a decade to complete. She slips into the back of the cab and passes the driver a slip of paper with the name and address of her new accommodations—a small, refurbished apartment with a low table, comfortable futon, and no answering machine. It's a perfect place for someone starting over.

Rei knows that if she turns around for a last look, she will see Japanese gentians standing guard on the windowsill, but she lets this opportunity pass. As the cab speeds away, Rei commits herself to the good habit of not looking back.

“That’s a nice address, Miss. Where are you headed to?” the driver asks.

It’s been a long time since Rei was called anything other than Mrs. Todoroki. Caught in the small thrill, she doesn’t correct him. She’s grateful for the crowded city’s veil of anonymity and, within it, her second chance.

“Home,” she answers honestly, feeling freer than she has in decades.

[katsukikitten]

2!

Lol here have this I have no idea what I'm doing with this. Hope yall can't tell.

You clenched your teeth, watching as the Avatar waltz through to the sitting room on his own accord. No servant attendant as he stared Zuko down.  

The Avatar looked...different from what you remembered or what had been described to you.  He had filled out some, broad muscles swept in golden colors with a heavily beaded wooden necklace with the air symbol carved into it. As if the world needed a reminder that he was the last air bender. You fight to roll your eyes as the roam over his bald head, blue tattoo vibrant in the cast of the afternoon son while his beard was as dark as rich upturned Earth. 

"So what do I owe the pleasure of having the honored Avatar as my guest?" Zuko's voice comes out gruff, golden eyes narrowed onto the bald man. 

The Avatar returns the glare, his brown eyes reminding you of frozen Earth in the darkest winter. 

The tension between the two is tangiable enough that you can taste it.  The fresh breeze being summoned and the wood starting to char beneath Zuko's feet. The Firelord begins to shift his weight for an offensive attack putting you on edge. 

The Avatar mirrors the action and both set off a powerful blast of Fire and Air. Just as you're about to move to counter attack the two men burst into a fit of laughter. 

"It's been too long, Zuko!" They step into a tight hug separating in time for tea.

"Way too long Aang." Zuko sits on one of the many cushions that lie around the room, broad hand gesturing for the Avatar to follow suit. The young servant sets the tea on the low table between them, Zuko observes the set up with a harsh glare. 

"Why are there only three cups?" A tone above a bite causing your stomach to twist. Your teeth sink into your tongue to keep your temper in check, agitated that the man never seems satisfied.

"Uh, your Highness forgive me. I am still new and I assumed you'd serve yourself and your two guests." Her voice trembles as she presses her forehead to the ground, hard enough you were sure the wooden grains would dimple her forehead. On the verge of snapping you step towards the tea more than ready to douse his arrogant flames. Nostrils flaring as you watch him berate her but then your heart catches in your chest when you hear him speak. 

"Daiyu..." His voice is soft as he touches her forearm, "You must always remember your own cup, tea was made to be enjoyed in company." 

The girl looks up, bewildered. 

"Y...your fierceness I…" She clutches at the green silk ribbon that adorns her wrist. Crackling and smoothing the fabric as she tries to refute without really refusing. It's obvious she's a fresh servant from the Earth kingdom. You had noticed that majority of Zuko's helping hands were a modge podge of former refugees from all across the lands. 

"It is fine. You may have my cup." He pours her tea first, earning a blush as he presents it to her. 

And with a smile no less. 

Your heart summersolts in your chest, thumping with questions and anger, all unnoticed to the small party. 

It is true you had observed the Firelord over the last six months, most of it arguments and fights between the two of you.  You thought you had him pegged as a bitter Prince with daddy issues and an absentee mother. 

But you were starting to question if you had observed closely enough. When she does not take the tea his molten eyes flash an emotion you've never see before. 

"You may take it with you back to the kitchen if you think it is against etiquette." He leaves the nature of their relationship unspoken and finally she bows deeply before reaching for the tea. 

"Thank you Firelord Zuko." She bows again with tea in hand before exiting the room, softly shutting the sliding door behind her. 

Aang chuckles as deft hands pour the other two cups. The Avatar holds onto his tea with a smile, looking after where the young woman stood.  

"They still aren't used to a kind Firelord are they?" He takes a small sip as Zuko offers you your tea. You glare at the light green liquid, staring down your own reflection before he half growls in frustration. 

"At least sit." He gestures to a pillow beside him to which you plop down on ungracefully after a moment or two. Brown eyes watch you with undying curiosity while golden ones bore holes into your skin. 

"I want them to feel more like employees than servants." He address Aang's previous question, "How is Katara?" 

A dip in his tone that has your brows furrowed as Aang's voice carries throughout the room. 

"Happy and busy as ever especially with two kids." He smiles hard enough he is forced to close his eyes, "And you and Mai?" 

A small silence before Zuko chooses to speak the truth. 

"We...have chosen separate paths." 

"Ah I'm…." A heated hand stops the avatar from speaking. It is clear that Zuko does not want his old friend's pity but it is left unspoken. Instead he shifts their focus back on Aang. 

"What of Sokka and Suki? And my best friend Toph?" The scowl is quickly replaced with a gentle smile that spreads across his lips, leaving you bewildered. You had figured he was all angst and rigid but you figured even coins had two sides. 

"They are well. We should camp. For old times sake."

"Maybe I'll chase you around for an hour or two." They share another hearty laugh before a flip is switched and Zuko returns to all of adjectives you're familiar with. 

Stern.

Serious.

Calculating. 

Not...not smiles

And surely not kindness. 

A grin washes over your features as you realize his softness can last only so long, you bring the green tea to your lips. Refreshing satisfaction washes over your tongue.

"What really brings you here Aang?" His stature no longer vulnerable, his spine straight and those broad shoulders snapped back. Aang sighs, having wanted more of his friend than his ally today. 

"It is your sister. Azula." The tea cup in your hand threatens to snap from that name alone. Rage seeps into every fiber of your being, into your bones as you grit your teeth to keep from speaking. 

You needed to hear what was next. 

"She's finally been spotted." Steam escapes Zuko's nose for a long moment. When he opens his eyes again it is as if the brewing storm calmed. Head level and clear as he speaks. 

"It's time she came home." 

But you see the fresh steam billowing from the spout of the tea pot. A defiant smile forms on your lips as you watch the hairline crack in the ceramic form before your eyes. 

It's time you tested how well he could keep his temper under control with a guest. 

"Bring her home?" You ask, golden eyes snap to you. Your infernal voice one of the few things left on his Earth that got under his skin. 

"Surly you don't mean here." You set your tea down, heat radiates from his toned body all the way through his thick robes dancing along your exposed skin.  A shiver runs down your spine from the hint of a fight. 

"I think you mean a rehabilitation center. If you missed being called Zuzu so much. I would be more than happy to oblige." A purr leaves your plump lips as his eyebrow tics in tandem with his sharp jawline. 

Aang is left to watch the scene unfold with inquisitive eyes, not yet having the pleasure of meeting your acquaintance. 

"Uh Zuko who is this exactly?" You glare at the Avatar as the Firelord's heat slowly dies down.  

"My name is too difficult for your tongue. I hail from a much different land." You roll your eyes as you sink into the silky pillow. Another glare sent your way as his eyes seem to scream murder. 

"My uncle called her Lost Dragon. She answers to that or Jasmine. He tried to name her after his favorite tea." Amber pools soften at the the thought until he remembers who it's about, "Mostly I say you." 

"In that irritated tone too?" Aang chuckles and Zuko nods. 

"Well I must confess. This is very much…..you." He looks you over before holding eye contact with Zuko, "You may have found your FireLady." 

You snap up from your lying position ready to throw daggers his way but the tea pot explodes instead. Aang guides the boiling tea into his empty cup laughing as he's clearly struck a nerve. 

"I would never." His voice dips so low and so dark it almost stops Aang from relishing in his now rare moment of igniting Zuko's ire. 

The tone does not sit well with you causing you to send an icy glare his way.

"Whatever you say hotman." Fire erupts from Zuko's shoulders. 

"Don't call me that!" An infectious laugh rings out before Aang retorts. 

"Whatever you say hotman." He covers his mouth before he takes another sip of tea, "In all seriousness those sightings of your sister are rumors for now. But I wanted to tell you in person first." 

Aang sets down his cup and stands, looking Zuko in his eyes. He offers a smile that the firelord returns.

"Another day?" Aang asks. 

"Hopefully sooner rather than later. And for pleasure instead for business." 

They bow to one another fist in hand before the Avatar slips out of the door. 

Zuko turns to you stepping almost too quickly as he breathes life into a powerful blast that you dismiss with your own fire. 

You both stare one another down for countless minutes before Daiyu slides open the door  The hairs on the nape of her neck stand straight up as she feels the exuding power seeping from the two bodies in the room. She is not quick enough to slide it back shut like she wishes. Neither breaks eye contact even as she struggles to get her message out. 

"F..Firelord Zuko, your bath is ready." Another moment passes before he sighs heavily. Steam filling the room until neither can see the other. 

"Thank you Daiyu. I shall retire for now." A threat lingers in his voice as you hear him exit the room. 

You grit your teeth as your body carries you back out to the large tree in the garden where you've been sleeping. Refusing to sleep in the house of your enemy. You slam your knife into the bark of the tree above your head before you adjust your weight in the branch. Wondering why in the hell the man you respected so much, the man who understood the pain you went through, who apologized for his actions, sent you to watch over some arrogant over grown brat. 

 

"Destiny is a funny thing."  His voice echos in your head as you drift to sleep dreaming of the deep golden color of oolong tea.

[moonsofmars-writes]

From the darkness below (life can still rise)

Fandom: 七つの大罪 - 鈴木央 | Nanatsu no Taizai | The Seven Deadly Sins - Suzuki Nakaba (Anime & Manga) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Diane/Fairy King Harlequin Characters: Fairy King Harlequin, Diane (Nanatsu no Taizai) Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff, One Shot, king feels guilty about lots of stuff, diane doesn't like that, king and diane dancing!, Dancing, Romantic Fluff, Zine, written for the SPECTRUM zine

Summary: King visits the ruins of the old Fairy King's Forest for the first time in years. The last time he went there he was a criminal and racked with guilt, and he couldn't do anything to save the forest. But this time, Diane is with him. And this changes everything.

Notes: here’s my piece for the Spectrum zine @spectrumnntzine​ ! I got the prompt “black” and wrote some Kiane. King suffer a little here but luckily, Diane is with him. 

Enjoy! 

When he lands, a cloud of ashes and dirt rises from the ground. King clenches his mouth as dust covers his shoes and pants with a thin dark layer, then starts to fall, slowly, to the earth. Around him, the ground is covered with black mud and rubble, all that’s left of what were branches and leaves. King shivers and forces himself to look around, letting his eyes wander over the desolation surrounding him. The burned forest hasn’t changed since last time he was here. Somehow, the trees still stand, raising their slender branches to the sky. The wood is dark and dry, and King feels like it would crumble into ashes under his fingers if he touched it. Below, the twisted roots sink into the arid ground. Dirt and cinder cover the earth, almost obscuring the spider-web of cracks stretched across it. In his mind, the resemblance is disturbingly fitting. After all, this wasteland is a place of death and misery - death of the vegetation that once ruled it, death of the wildlife that made its home here, death of the Fairies he failed to protect. The place is the rotting cadaver of his beloved forest. Nothing but a monument to his own failure.

“Harlequin?” Diane’s voice is as soft as the gentle touch of her hand on his cheek. He breathes in and looks down to meet her eyes, loosening his grip on her. He was holding her tighter than he realized.

“Sorry,” he mutters as he buries his face in her hair. It feels nice and smells like flowers and hills, and it gives him an excuse to look away from the grim landscape around them.

Her head shakes slightly as she answers, “I’m fine - are you alright?”

Continue on AO3

He swallows before glancing around again. The scrawny trees look back at him like a jury of the dead. There used to be colours in their bark - light and dark brown, red, grey - sometimes almost invisible under the green mass of moss. There used to be colour in the earth where their roots sink - the light green of the grass, the hundreds of shades of the flowers; and in the air too, where butterflies flaunted their vibrant wings and birds flew from branch to branch with a beat of their vivid feathers. Nothing is left. King imagines them melting together as the fire consumed the forest, leaving behind only this nauseating, burned black.

“Yes,” he answers slowly, looking away, “I’m fine, don’t worry.”

Diane raises an eyebrow but says nothing as he lets her go. She eyes her surroundings, a hint of uneasiness in her violet gaze. Not for the first time, King wonders why she insisted on coming with him. He told her it wasn't necessary, that the sight was hardly worth the trip, but he knows better than pushing her when she makes up her mind. She can be very stubborn, he thinks, a faint smile curving his lips.

Truth be told, he doesn’t know why he wanted to come here. The new Fairy King's Forest is home now. He knew nothing waited for him here. Yet the desire to return had been growing in the back of his mind since the war ended until it was impossible to ignore. Maybe, he admits to himself as some he takes hesitant steps between the trees, he hoped something had changed. When he last came, he was still a traitor, wanted by the kingdom for a crime he didn't commit. Even to him, it feels like ages ago. It was easy to convince himself that it was worth visiting if just to check whether some semblance of life had returned. But on the ground he sees no sprout, and on the trees, no leaves. The entire place looks frozen in time, framed in the aftermath of its destruction. King clenches his jaw as he approaches a tree. After a moment, he finds the courage to touch its trunk. It doesn’t crumble under his fingers as he feared, but he can feel no life within its burned shell. It’s only a matter of time before it rots, leaving no trace of its existence but ashes scattered on the ground.

“We should leave." His voice sounds stiff and low, but he is grateful it's not trembling.

“Oh? But we just got here!” He hears Diane’s approach behind him, her soles crushing tiny pieces of burned wood. “Didn’t you want to take a look around?”

He shakes his head. “It’s useless. I … I was hoping that I would have been able to fix this, now that my wings have grown,” he admits, finally turning towards her. "But this place is ... well, look at it. It’s dead. If anything survived, if only a single bud sprouted, I could help it grow, but I can't bring what is dead back to life.” If he could, he thinks bitterly, he wouldn’t have lost so much, would he?

With his foot, he traces a line in the dirt. It stains his shoe with sludge, black like the charred wood and the burned bones he knows he will find if he looks well enough between the roots. Some are so tiny and thin and can’t come but from small animals. Others are bigger and King doesn’t even want to think who they belonged to.

"It was foolish of me to come here - and to bring you with me,” he mutters. “I should know by now that I can't erase my mistakes."

Diane gasps and King closes his mouth, pressing his lips together, though he knows he can’t take his words back. She hates it when he speaks like that about himself. He glances at her and tries to find something to say as he waits for her to berate him. But she doesn’t speak. She stands silently instead, her head tilted and teeth sinking in her bottom lip; she stares at him with thoughtful eyes, then, suddenly, she moves. King's brow furrows as he watches her walk around, eyes fixed on the ground. Near a tree, she stops and taps her foot on the soil, once, twice, making the dust lift and float. King hesitates, unsure how to ask what she is doing, and his eyebrows rise suddenly when she crouches and reaches for the earth with her hand.

"Diane! You shouldn't touch -"

"Of course you can't erase your mistakes," she says without looking up, "that's not how it works."

King sucks in air and closes his mouth, baffled. That’s … not how she usually answers him, when the argument comes up. The change doesn’t quite upset him, though he feels his stomach clench. She loves him, but if she starts to see how much a failure he was -

"But you can't deny," she continues, pressing her palm against the dark soil, "that you’re trying. You are doing what you can to be a good king, and you are Harlequin. I, our friends, your people, everyone thinks so. Yes, you made mistakes in the past, but you’re trying to make sure nothing like this will happen again. This is the only thing you can do, now.” When she turns towards him, a little smile has formed on her lips. “And anyway, you’re wrong. You can help this forest.”

King frowns. “No, I can’t."

Maybe she can't feel the sense of death that filters through the cracks on the trees' bark, but she is not blind. Her bond with the earth must be telling her there is no hope for this place.

"You know I can't revive these plants," he says through his teeth. "There is no life left inside them, I ... checked, the first time I came here." Those moments are etched in stone in his mind - fear and disbelief taking his breath away, his mind refusing to process what he saw, to acknowledge it was real. He looked for his sister first, then for the other Fairies, and when he couldn't find anyone he had examined the plants, stumbling from one to the other, desperately looking for something alive. "Nothing survived the purgatory fire," he finishes, bitterly.

Diane hums softly before beckoning him with her hand. "Come here,” she orders.

King frowns as he walks towards her, curious to see what caught her attention; as soon as he is close enough, she grabs his hand and pulls him to crouch at her side.

“You have to stop blaming yourself for everything that happened here,” she whispers. “It’s distracting you.”

“How can I?” His eyes drop to the dirt that now stains their shoes and calves. "I was the king of this forest and I left it unprotected." He smiles bitterly, shaking his head, "I can't even bring myself to regret it. I couldn't abandon Helbram and - and leaving led me to you," he adds softly. "No, I could never regret my decision. But when I remembered, when I realized that I abandoned my people for centuries, I chose to stay away. I thought it was for the best to surrender myself to the humans and take the blame for what Helbram did. The truth is that it was an easy option.” He swallows, feeling like there is dust in his throat. “One that didn't require me to face my people after I failed to protect them, after I left them, after what I let happen to Helbram -"

“Harlequin.” Diane’s grip on his hands becomes tighter. “Look at me.” Reluctantly, he meets her gaze. Her eyes burn like violet flames. “You know you had to stay. You told me.”

"If I came back -"

"You would have had to fight a war against humans. Many people would have died - more than the ones who lost their lives in the fire. You would have brought death here,” she gestures at the forest around them, “to your people, and to the humans who would have fought you. You saved lives when you decided not to come back.”

“But I should have been here to fight that Demon!”

“You couldn’t know about the Demon.” She squeezes his hands tighter, so abruptly that he has to hold back a groan. “You did what you had to stop what was threatening your home. You acted like a king.”

He wants to object, to insist he should have done better, he should have found a way to keep everyone safe and give the humans the justice they demanded. It takes just a moment to realise that he can’t. Diane is right. It’s not the first time he’s thought about this and reached the same conclusions, but this time they feel more … real. Not like simple excuses he is trying to make up to absolve his crimes.

“I … know”, he whispers, “but my sister died because of my decision. If Ban hadn't revived her ...”

“But he did. You can’t keep tormenting yourself over what was in the past, Harlequin. Elaine is alive and happy, and so are the Fairies and the Fairy King’s Forest - and that’s what you should focus on. What it is, not what it isn’t anymore.” She smiles at him. “You have to accept that you can’t change the past. But you can protect the present.”

King stares at her, the grip on his chest finally loosened a little. The guilt is still there, heavy and bitter. He knows it will never go truly away. Maybe it's alright. Maybe with time, it won’t feel like a burden to drag him down, but a push to do better. So that there won’t be more burned forests and lost lives.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, releasing a long breath as he lifts their joined hands to kiss her knuckles.

Diane beams before reaching for him; the touch of her lips on his own is quick as a beating of wings. She is gone before King can even think to kiss her back, then, still holding his hand, she murmurs, "Will you look into the earth, now?"

"The ... earth?" He blinks, tilting his head, cheeks still flushing for the kiss. "The - the roots have burned as well. I can't feel them, Diane. They’re dead too."

She shakes her head. "No, I mean - under here," she says, pressing his hand against the ground with her own. "You have to look deeper. Please, just," she adds when he looks at her with uncertainty, "just try."

Under the dust, the ground is hard and coarse and feels nothing like the soft meadow that once covered it all. King hesitates, but when he glances at Diane she nods encouragingly, a spark of excitement in her eyes. So, he closes his eyes and lets his magic flow. When he uses Disaster, he can feel them clearly - the plants, their connection with each other and the ground, whether they are going to survive or if they need to be taken down to allow other plants to grow. When he does it in the Fairy King’s Forest, the wood awakens with whispers and lights everywhere around him, the entire forest pulsing with life.

But here, King feels nothing. The world around him is silent and dark as a starless sky. Nothing seems to answer his call. Clenching his jaw, he keeps looking; Diane wouldn't be making him do it without a reason. She felt something, and now he just has to look long enough to -

It's there. His eyes snap open, but his mind stays focused on the tiny spark of life hidden in the depths of the earth. It’s a seed, King realises, and it’s not the only one. There are others around it, here under him, but also in the surroundings, under every scrawny tree. He looks up, eyes wide, and Diane grins at him.

"You saw them! I think the earth preserved them from the fire. There is still life in this forest.”

“But it's too deep," King breathes, "they are still alive, but they won't reach the surface and grow if we leave them there."

“Then we won’t. We are going to get them out.” Suddenly, Diane is holding both of his hands, looking at him with determination. "Dance with me."

It takes only a moment to understand what exactly she means. He can make the seeds into buds and trees, but with feet and feet of ground separating them from the soil, it will be easier if the earth opens for them.

"Of course," he says as they stand up together. Sliding one of her hands from his, she starts.

This is not by any means the first time they’ve danced together, nor the first time they have combined their powers like this. Yet King feels clumsy and stumbles on his feet as he follows Diane's smooth movements. She doesn't say anything and continues to dance, adapting her movements to his and giving him time to pick up the pace. His throat feels dry, his chest tight - he is nervous, more than any other time, maybe because he needs to make this right, to give this place another chance to live after he failed his duty to protect it.

He breathes in, out, trying to calm the pulse of his heart, and stops thinking about his next step, his focus shifting to the seeds. They are there, tiny and weak, and he keeps looking for them, finding more and more. His magic gently envelops them and then pours inside them, growing them slowly. Around them, the earth opens, like lungs too long contracted and finally given the chance to breathe. King is only partly aware of the way the ground trembles under his feet, but he can feel Diane's magic radiating from it as she delicately pulls the seeds outwards using her control over the earth. They are still dancing, their bodies finally moving in harmony, and when Diane pirouettes in his arms their hands touch oh so slightly - and under them, the seeds keep growing and rising until they are emerging from the ground like tiny green stars on the dark soil. King doesn't stop though, not yet, nourishing them with his magic, pushing them further - just a little more, till they will be strong enough.

And then they stop. King gasps for air, his eyes snapping open; Diane's face is inches from his, her body in his arms with their hands still connected. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes feverish, but she is grinning widely as she whispers, "We did it."

She is right. All around them, among the dead trees, saplings raise their thin branches to the sky and tiny bushes cover their roots. They are not many, yet, but it's a start. A laugh escapes his lips and he takes Diane's face into his hands before kissing her, again and again; he can feel her laugh too against his lips.

Before they leave, Diane carefully shapes the earth so that the wood will have enough water to grow while King finally lets the old trees decompose. They turn into dust under his power almost gratefully, as they were waiting for it. Part of him can’t help but mourn them, as he mourns the times he used to fly between their branches with his sister - and Helbram and Oslo and all the friends he lost. He will hold the memories dear in his heart, but finally, he thinks as the last tree crumbles into ashes, he can let this place go.

He turns back only once as he flies away with Diane in his arms. The wood looks so young, so different from the forest where he grew up, but that’s fine. It will grow into something new - something that will survive, he promises to himself. Even the earth looks healthier and softly embraces and supports the new trees, though its pitch-black colour remains. But ... maybe it’s the green of the new leaves, maybe it’s the fact that his heart is much lighter than when they arrived, but as he looks at it, King feels for the first time like the darkness of the dirt doesn’t mean death. It means life.

[violetmuses]

Rupture || Chapter 4

Tag Team: @ocfairygodmother @bekscameron @stylesthesunflower @lilith-blackrose @punemy-spotted @ajokeformur-ray @a7estrellas @clints-lucky-arrow

2023

Marilyn Brooks

“Who do I have the pleasure of meeting?” Zemo spoke up and allowed the rasp of his Sokovian accent to rattle these walls without bringing on anger this evening. Nearby goons watched silently, turning their seats and showing obedience.

“My name is Marilyn Brooks and this is my colleague Charlotte Mills.” I introduced us both as if Zemo actually were someone else. Criminals of his stature always understood that fear would have immediately triggered madness in this space.

“Hello, ladies.” He then repeated the first greeting to us as his Sokovian accent rasped once more.

For a moment, Charlotte set one hand onto my shoulder and silently confirmed her chance to take charge of this situation.

“We’re not afraid of you.” Charlotte lowered her voice. Seconds later, my best friend stepped forward to click her stilettos. She then circled around this monster like any shark who had just found their desired prey.

“How could anyone living on this Earth fear such beauty, Ms. Mills?” At least had been respectful enough to address Charlotte with her last name, but I would’ve cringed about his compliment otherwise.

“Flattery will never excuse your behavior or actions, Zemo. Why did you escape prison?” Charlotte probed him further, still keeping her voice leveled. All around us, goons kept silent and watched this moment play out between them.

“Freedom.” His answer to Charlotte sent chills down my spine, but I wouldn’t falter of course.

“If every single criminal in the world left prison the way you have, chaos and danger would last forever.” Charlotte affirmed horrors of what freedom Zemo just granted himself.

“Why are you here?” Zemo sized Charlotte up as patience grew thin across his own face. I nearly stepped up to interfere, but Charlotte handled this point before I could say anything else.

“Justice. I know that law enforcement officials can't arrest you here, but once we leave Madripoor, everyone will know that you’re still a monster. Consider tonight your last warning.” Seconds later, Charlotte vowed to bring hell upon this man once word spread back to the media.

“Publish those atrocities all you want Miss Mills, but as long as I stay here, nothing else can stop me.” Zemo croaked his Sokovian accent once more, asserting his own power right back to Charlotte.

“Hold on, Zemo. I thought that you couldn’t stand gods.” Charlotte offered this fair statement. I hissed, realizing how ironic Zemo acted right now. Even some of the goons around us mumbled in slight agreement, but were still quiet.

“Supremacy and freedom are completely different topics.” Zemo lifted both of his gloved hands while still addressing Charlotte.

“No semantic bullshit, I’m not stupid.” Charlotte gritted her teeth, reasonably fed up. Some of those goons grumbled with shock in the background again.

“I never said that you weren't intelligent, Ms. Mills.” Zemo’s gaze towards Charlotte seemed apologetic for once, but that look could’ve been manipulative anyway.

“The implication towards me was still offensive.” Charlotte said back.

“Apologises.” Zemo whispered, almost sounding inaudible near us.

“Enjoy your second round of so-called freedom because I won’t stop working until you’re standing behind bars again.” Charlotte made one final point before glancing towards me and leading us both towards the nearest exit.

_________

“Are you serious, Charlotte? Taking Zemo on like that was dangerous. What if I wasn’t around?” James grilled Charlotte once all of our car doors slammed shut.

“I’m not a child, Bucky. Stop it.” Charlotte depanned her voice without making eye contact with James.

“I’m not treating you like a child, Charlotte. It’s called protection.” James shook his head, but I could still hear the way he argued with my best friend.

“He’s got a point, Char. What if something did go wrong tonight?” I faced Charlotte too, but she wouldn't make eye contact with me either.

As glimpses of vibrant neon lights and dark tints from street lamps zoomed beyond these car windows, her face looked terrifyingly numb.

_______

Later that night, James had pulled even more strings for us. Now, Charlotte and I shared this gorgeous hotel suite with two bedrooms in Hightown. Considering what happened if we stayed around Zemo any longer, my skin would’ve crawled.

“Will you talk to me?” I questioned Charlotte while sitting barefoot on the living room couch.

“There’s nothing to talk about. We’re leaving in the morning anyway.” Charlotte answered and still wouldn’t look at me.

“Char…” My heart dropped, but I wouldn’t cry of course.

“I just want to get this story over with, Mary. You should be grateful that we confronted Zemo without dying, all right? That’s how dangerous he is.” Charlotte shook her head and finally glanced towards me here.

“I know you’re frightened now, but I was so proud of you back there.” I offered the truth and hoped to encourage her.

“If we showed fear, Zemo would’ve killed us and you know it. What if he found Bucky tonight too?” Charlotte spoke up, but still wouldn’t allow herself to cry, either.

Damn. I thought.

Charlotte was right. All three of us had survived this evening by the skin of our teeth.

[half-bakedboy]

Worth It (read on ao3)

Pairing: Clary Fray/Isabelle Lightwood Rated: Gen Summary: Izzy had seen the girl at Pandemonium; saw the way Jace’s seraph blade lit up when she grabbed onto it, noticed the fire inside of her that seemed to burn as bright as her hair, witnessed the fear of the unknown in her eyes while Izzy and her siblings fought around her. Izzy immediately understood why Jace had wanted to follow her and, if she wasn’t so fearful of straining her already tense relationship with Alec, she would have been right beside him.

She had heard the girl’s friends chasing after her without seeing Izzy do the same and her name echoed in Izzy’s mind. Clary. Even in the distressed state she was in, Izzy thought the name fit the gorgeous girl in front of her.

For 5 Years of Shadowhunters presented by the @malecdiscordserver​! 

“Who is that?!” Alec yelled as Jace entered the Institute, the unconscious redhead limp across his arms. Jace pointedly ignored him and veered toward the infirmary, hauling her up the steps before gently laying her on the bed. Izzy followed them, immediately intrigued by the way Jace held her so protectively. When he pulled down the collar of her shirt, she saw a deep wound with almost charred skin around it and hissed as she knelt beside Jace. 

When he pulled out his stele, Izzy rested her hand over his in surprise and cried, “Jace, you can’t!” There was a small amount of fear in her voice that she didn’t have time to be confused about. She could feel both her sibling’s frustration resonating around the room, tension heavy in the air as Jace tore his hand away. 

“She’s going to die, Izzy, I-- I have to try,” Jace whispered as he pushed her head to the side exposing her neck. Izzy had remembered that ravener venom spread quickly and knew that the rune would have to be drawn as close to the injury as possible to be more effective. Izzy wouldn’t have chosen that placement for her first rune, but she realized there was a chance the beautiful girl wouldn’t even survive long enough to care. 

“She’s a mundane!” Alec argued as if reading Izzy’s mind and stomped forward angrily. Izzy shot up as quickly as she could and rested her hands against Alec’s chest to stop him from making the - possibly more logical - decision. They didn’t have time for logic when the mundane was gasping for air, sweat pouring off of her skin as she struggled to survive. She glanced back at Jace with a look she hoped contained the trust she had in him. 

“She either dies from the venom or dies from the rune, Alec,” Jace countered as he hovered his stele over her pale skin. Izzy thought he had a point; the girl was either dead or a shadowhunter they had never met before and Izzy wasn’t sure which option scared her the most. “We have to try,” Jace whispered as he peered up at Izzy with pleading eyes. Izzy sent a similar glance to Alec who threw his hands above his head in resigned exasperation and stormed out of the room mumbling something about his idiotic siblings. 

Izzy wasn’t sure he was far off, but Izzy had seen the girl at Pandemonium; saw the way Jace’s seraph blade lit up when she grabbed onto it, noticed the fire inside of her that seemed to burn as bright as her hair, witnessed the fear of the unknown in her eyes while Izzy and her siblings fought around her. Izzy immediately understood why Jace had wanted to follow her and, if she wasn’t so fearful of straining her already tense relationship with Alec, she would have been right beside him. 

She had heard the girl’s friends chasing after her without seeing Izzy do the same and her name echoed in Izzy’s mind. Clary. Even in the distressed state she was in, Izzy thought the name fit the gorgeous girl in front of her. 

She wished she could have been there to help Jace save her, but she pushed it all aside as Jace held his stele over her neck again with hesitation. The best she could do then was to stroke Clary’s hair from her face, rest her palm comfortingly on her forehead, and give Jace a brief nod before he burned the rune onto her unblemished skin. Clary shook with what Izzy figured was pain - she remembered how it felt the first time a rune was etched into her skin and shuddered at the memory - and her breaths came out in breathless gasps and animal-like hisses. 

“Hurry!” Izzy said as she held Clary down as best as she could without hurting her when Clary’s body started convulsing. She leaned over Clary for a better grip and rested her head onto the bed next to Clary’s ear and whispered, “I’ve got you, it’s okay, you’re going to get through this,” and hoped that the girl could hear her. When Clary fell silent and still, Izzy let out a deep breath and glanced up at Jace. 

“What do we do?” Izzy asked nervously. 

Jace shook his head and stood before saying, “Now, we wait.” 

---------------------

Izzy stayed by Clary’s side while Jace changed out of his clothes and a few minutes later when she heard Alec and Jace’s raised voices a few yards away, she slid the glass door shut so Clary could sleep soundly. Izzy wiped at Clary’s forehead with a warm cloth to rid her of the sweat that had dampened it in her struggle and brushed her hair rain-soaked hair out the best she could with her fingers. With the help of one of the medics, Izzy changed Clary into dry and untattered clothing, laying her back down so she could try to regain her strength. 

Clary hadn’t moved in almost a day but the wound on her shoulder was healing slowly, the darkened skin around it returning to its natural pasty color. The pale color contrasted sharply with the vibrant hue of the hair Izzy stroked softly. Izzy stayed at her side as much as she could, only leaving when nature called and tasking Jace to protect her in the meantime. She couldn’t imagine what Clary would think or feel when she awoke and she had decided she wanted Clary to see her first. 

Just as fear was starting to get the better of her, Clary shot out of her sleeping position and her head slammed against Izzy’s painfully. For a moment she saw stars and then her mind was enamored by the beautiful green eyes staring back at her. 

“Ow,” Izzy said because every other thought floating around her mind was entirely too forward and she wasn’t about to risk scaring Clary off with her flirtatious nature. 

Clary looked panicked for a moment, pushing herself backward as she said, “Wait, I don’t know who you--” Izzy rested a hand on Clary’s knee and smiled softly at her, her bright red lips curling over her teeth in what she hoped was a comforting view to the mundane. 

“I’m Isabelle,” she said simply. When that didn’t seem to ease Clary’s fear, she racked her brain for what a mundane might want to hear and came up almost empty. Clary froze as she glanced in Jace’s direction, a bit of recognition flooding her eyes. “I’ve never seen Jace so curious about a mundane… or distracted,” she said with a wiggle of her eyebrows. She wasn’t about to let Clary see that Jace wasn’t the only shadowhunter distracted by her mere presence. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Who’s Jace?” Clary asked as her eyes darted toward the hand Izzy had on her knee before meeting her eyes again. Izzy thought she could stare into Clary’s eyes forever and it would feel as though no time had passed. 

“You really don’t know much, do you?” Izzy responded slowly. She had thought at first that maybe she was lying to Jace in order to stop the interest he obviously had in her, but the way she searched around the room as if she’d never seen anything like it before had Izzy second-guessing herself. Clary seemed to have that effect on her. “Like you saw earlier, distractions are dangerous in our line of work.”

“What are you talking about? What work?!” Clary asked, a begging tone to her voice that had Izzy squeezing her knee to try and calm her down. It seemed to work as Clary took a deep breath and closed her eyes tightly as she shook her head. Izzy figured she was trying to shake all of her fear and anxiety away and was instantly filled with equal parts respect and sympathy for the girl. 

“All I know is some psychos took my mother and now you people have taken me,” Clary said as she opened her eyes. The panic that had filled them before was replaced with that fire Izzy had immediately been captivated by. Clary was full of strength and surprises and Izzy had never wanted to get to know someone more. 

“And by ‘taken’ I assume you mean ‘saved your life’?” Izzy retorted before she could stop herself. Clary glared at her heatedly before standing presumably too quickly as she stumbled over her bare feet. Izzy was at her side in an instant with a hand around her waist to steady her. Clary’s big green eyes widened and she gasped as Izzy instinctively pulled her closer, unable to stop herself from protecting Clary. 

“Where am I? What is this place?” Clary whispered without making a move to separate herself from Izzy. Before Izzy could answer, she heard Alec’s complaints and Jace’s scoff outside the room and sighed. 

“We’ll try to explain everything soon,” Izzy whispered as she noticed Clary’s eyes struggling to stay open. She was still exhausted and even standing was too much for her recovering body to handle. Izzy guided her back to the bed and Clary followed easily, laying back as she tried to stay awake. “Get some more rest, okay? I promise I won’t let anything happen to you,” Izzy whispered, stroking a hand over Clary’s hair one more time. 

There wasn’t any reason Clary should believe her, but she nodded anyway and let her eyes fall shut. She was asleep in seconds, her hand gripping Izzy’s even as her breathing evened out and the rest of her body relaxed. When Alec and Jace entered bickering loudly, Izzy shot them a deathly glare that had them turning around and exiting without another word. 

She wasn’t sure what it was about Clary, but as Izzy’s eyes roamed her still and vulnerable form, her heart beat a little faster and butterflies erupted in her stomach. Izzy promised herself she would protect Clary at whatever cost and something told her Clary would be worth it. 

[luna-redamancy]

The Mate (Thorin x Reader)

Summary: When Smaug’s destruction left the pack of Erebor homeless, Thorin has to call in a debt owed to his father to get a new home for his pack members. When Thorin reaches the Blue Mountains and discovers his mate is amongst the humans living in the mountain village, will Thorin give up his hope for one day reclaiming his territory?

Warnings: None

Part Two, Part Three

The minute Thorin walked into the Blue Mountains, he knew he found his home. After the destruction of Smaug, Thorin and his pack had to move west, taking all of their leftover belongings with them. It was the smell that first caught his attention. Vanilla mixed with the smell of berries and bread, it was intoxicating to him.

The smell left his mind puzzled as Thorin shook his head and continued walked into the town, now focused on getting his pack settled in before anything else.

“Alpha Thorin,” Alpha Broadbeam called out, confusion clear in his voice, it was rare for another alpha to leave their territory, especially in mid-summer. Typically they’d leave south during the colder months if necessary but not always.

“Alpha Broadbeam,” Thorin’s voice was thick in relief, grateful to see a longtime friend after so much was lost.

“What’s wrong, Thorin?” Broadbeam dropped the formality as soon as he saw Thorin’s pack behind him, the wolves shifting back into their human form, checking on their mates and family that was walking behind them. “Smaug, he destroyed everything… So many are dead,” Thorin nearly whimpered in grief, seeing so many get charred to bits from the flames.

“Your father did much for me when he was Alpha of Erebor, I owe him a debt…” Broadbeam began, feeling his heart grow saddened as he saw the children whine about being hungry to their mothers who were trying to hold back tears.

“You all may stay here for as long as you need,” Broadbeam finished, nodding to himself. “There are several empty houses from when the Firebeards moved south, lots of jobs that need to be picked back up,” Broadbeam smiled, there was another pack that shared this land before, what would be a problem with bringing that tradition back?

“Thank you, I now owe a debt then,” Thorin said as Broadbeam chuckled, “Nah, let’s just call it even, a debt I owed to your father now paid and a clean slate is before us.”

The two set out to organize where each member of the pack would live, and Thorin himself only took the home that was leftover. It was a small cottage, a single bedding chamber, and had just enough room for a sitting area in the kitchen and an armchair near the fireplace. “Are you sure you want this for yourself, Thorin?” Dwalin, Thorin’s beta asked with confusion. Alpha’s were like kings, and this house was surely not suited for a king. “My people come first, living accommodations do not concern me, for I am only concerned that I have a slightly soft place to rest my head. I will sleep in the forest if I needed to,” Thorin nearly growled, his love for his people was strong.

“Aye…” Dwalin could only nod, not wanting to set off Thorin’s temper any more than he already had. “Come first light, Alpha Broadbeam will show us the jobs that are needed to be taken up,” Dwalin reminded, “Aye, I will see you then,” Thorin nodded to Dwalin, allowing him to leave for the evening and spend time with his brother Balin.

Sighing, Thorin slumped onto the small dining chair, groaning as it squeaked beneath his weight. Thorin couldn’t wait to not have to rely on another alpha for home and shelter. Growling, Thorin shook his head. It will be soon. It must be soon.

When first light peaked through the windows, Thorin was already ready to leave, eager to get going. He wanted to get himself and his pack back to their former glory, wanting to do anything he can to get there.  Being in a new place, Thorin didn’t get much sleep, his mind alert and ready to get going, waiting for another attack from Smaug.

Leaving the small cottage, Thorin took a deep breath, the morning dew soothing his worries as the calm air of the mountains filled his lungs.

“Alpha Thorin,” Dwalin called out to him in greeting, bowing his head out of respect as Thorin nodded in return, “Did Broadbeam tell you where to meet him?” Thorin questioned immediately, confused as to why Broadbeam wouldn’t be here first light. “He said he’d be here,” Dwalin shrugged, not knowing what else to say.

‘Hmm’-ing deep in his chest, Thorin leaned against the fence. He fought the urge to shift right here and go for a run in the woodland, ‘He will arrive soon,’ Thorin soothed himself, knowing that later that evening he would get to go on a run as long as he wanted.

“My apologies for being late,” Broadbeam emerged from the woods, fresh from a shift by the way his clothes were disheveled, obviously put on in a rush. “It’s alright, shall we get going?” Thorin questioned, a polite smile on his face as Broadbeam nodded, walking alongside Thorin.

As they walked to town, Broadbeam began to explain the history of Ered Luin, “These hills are home to humans and wolves alike, so be careful who you shift around,” Broadbeam explained causing Dwalin to cross his arms, a scowl on his face. “The humans don’t know?” He questioned gruffly but with respect laced in his town, after all, Broadbeam was an alpha.

“They know,” Broadbeam began, sighing slightly, “However they know not to ask who is and who isn’t a wolf,” Thorin nodded, “In case hunters come around?” Thorin guessed, knowing it was easier to not give up information if you didn’t have any to begin with. “Yes, you are free to tell whoever you’d like, but they won’t ask and they won’t tell once they know,” Broadbeam finished, nodding to a passerby.

“The town has a single bakery, ran by the (L/N)’s, an alchemist hut ran by the NightThorn family, a healer’s cavern, a tavern ran by the Ironfoots, an inn--”

“What was that?” Thorin nodded to an empty building, curiosity brimming in him. It was in the middle of the town, a large stone building made for something more than dust and decay. “Ah… That is the old blacksmith shop, it was shut down when the smithy died last spring, old age, poor man,” Broadbeam shook his head sighing, “Brought in a lot of business too,” Broadbeam sighed and continued ranting about the shops and services and who they were run by.

“Dwalin and I worked in the forges, we have smithing experience,” Thorin butted into Broadbeam’s rant, causing it to cease. “You’d want to set up the smithy shop again?” Broadbeam said with a slight grin, knowing Thorin couldn’t stay away from the old shop. “Of course,” Thorin agreed, knowing that it was something he loved to do and could make money very quickly.

“Well, then I’ll get the paperwork ready,” Broadbeam grinned as Thorin’s brain became fuzzy, the smell he smelt when he first arrived now filling his lungs like oxygen that he couldn’t live without. He wanted to smell it all the time. “Do you smell that?” Thorin questioned, taking a big sniff of the air, his eyes wanting to slip shut in bliss.

The two men looked at Thorin in confusion, sniffing at the air before shrugging, “Smell what?” Dwalin finally asked causing Thorin to shake his head as it was gone again, “Nothing, I must be imagining things,” Thorin sighed as Broadbeam began to lead them away to the town hall for the rewriting of the lease of the smithy shop.

Confusion swept over him in waves as he felt his inner wolf whining, begging to be let out like it would die if he wouldn’t let him take over right then and there.

“What is it?” He internally asked, but only got more whining in return, “We’ll go for a run later, calm down,” Thorin sighed, not liking the anxious, butterfly feeling in his stomach that his wolf created inside of him.

Several hours later, the blacksmith shop was cleansed and now ready to be opened first thing in the morning. Sighing, Thorin rolled his neck, groaning in delight when he heard the pops of his aching bones.

Looking at the horizon, Thorin grinned as his eyes flickered gold for a moment. The sun was setting. He could finally go for a run.

Nearly running to his cottage, Thorin discarded his clothes as he felt his joints and bones pop out of place, kneeling on the ground and shifting into his wolf form. His wolf was truly a sight to behold, his once vibrant blue eyes were now shining gold, his fur a deep black with silver undertones, shimmering in the moonlight.

Nudging open the door, Thorin left the cottage and bolted through the woodlands. The dirt mushing beneath his large paws as he jumped over rocks and fallen trees, the wind carding through his fur soothingly.

But then he smelt it.

The smell of vanilla mixed with berries and bread filled his nostrils again as he paused in his run. Following the smell, Thorin realized he was getting closer to town. Stopping at the edge of the treeline, Thorin watched, his eyes narrowing in on your form as you closed down the bakery for the day, a basket of leftover loaves of bread and pastries in your arm.

Humming to yourself you walked down the stone path towards your house, unaware of the fierce gaze that was on you at all times.

Following you behind the trees, Thorin nearly swooned as the smell followed you. Thorin’s eyes widened as he realized one thing…

‘Mate,’

Tags:

Forever tag-

@lady-of-lies @all-things-fandomstuck  @fizzyxcustard @izzydaelleth @aquaangel18@raindancer2004 @love-colorfulglittercollection @queenunderthemountainx

Thorin tag-

@greennightspider @ashleygrrrl @skylarkvip

[mdelpin]

The Red Dragon - Chapter 28

AO3 | FF.Net | Tumblr: Ch1 | Ch27

Gray walked around the remains of his village, a place he had never revisited outside of his worst nightmares. He wasn’t sure what he’d hoped to accomplish by coming back here; he just knew it felt like the right place for them to talk.

Maybe he’d just wanted Natsu to see where he’d been coming from all this time. Not that he’d ever thought the dragon slayer — no, he corrected himself, Natsu had never been a dragon slayer, he was a dragon — had ever doubted him.

Mounds of scorched rubble lay amidst the few structures that had managed to remain standing, a stark contrast to the vibrant village of his childhood. When he’d escaped during its destruction, he’d been too traumatized to look back, not wanting to see the charred remains of his parent’s bodies intermingled with the rest. He’d still been able to hear the roar of the flames as the fire continued to devour everything in its path, the black smoke reaching up towards the morning sky, darkening it as if in mourning for what it had witnessed.

The air had been oppressive as he’d run deeper into the woods, full of smoke and the horrid smell of the villagers’ burnt flesh. Gray had run fast and true, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself, the last cries of his parents, and the roaring laughter of that evil dragon that had tried to kill him.

Now that he was older, all Gray could feel was a sort of detached surprise at the fact that the woods had somehow remained unharmed. There had been some cleanup over the years, and even though he was grateful that someone had apparently taken care of the bodies, he wished they’d placed some sort of marker somewhere, anything to let him know where his parents had been laid to rest so that he could pay his respects. He stumbled around, trying to find the location where his house had once stood.

He heard a noise behind him and turned to observe Natsu, also wandering over to the remains of the village, his features exhibiting a fury Gray had never witnessed before.

“Natsu?” Gray ceased his search and ran over to the dragon, startled to see Natsu showing so much emotion considering he’d probably seen much worse over the last few years.

“This is not what red dragons are about!” Natsu seethed, “They stayed away from humans, and once my father decided to side with them, they protected them. This should never have happened.”

“I know that now,” Gray assured him, “I think it took talking to your father for me to finally accept all the things you’d been trying to tell me over the years. I hadn’t wanted to believe that dragons could be intelligent or have complex emotions. If I continued to think of them as mindless beasts, then I wouldn’t have to face my own guilt. It was much easier to blame everything on Deliora and anyone like him.”

“Your own guilt?” Natsu looked puzzled, “What are you talking about, what could you possibly have to feel guilty about?”

“I -- I killed my parents,” Gray admitted out loud for the first time, “Or rather, I may as well have,” He cut Natsu off before he could try to convince him any differently.

“Deliora destroyed our village, yes, but if it hadn’t been for me, my parents would have survived.” Gray oriented himself, he began walking towards the spot where it had all happened, and Natsu followed, his previous fury doused by his concern at Gray’s words.

“We were all woken up by the roars of the dragon, although we had no idea what it was at first,” Gray began, his eyes becoming cloudy as he surrendered himself to the memory. “We were luckier than most. We’d been planning on going camping that night, so we had bags packed. My father went outside to see if he could help, but he returned quickly, whispering something to my mother,” Gray closed his eyes for a moment holding on to his parents faces.

“They told me I needed to be very quiet, that everything would be fine once we reached the woods, but even then I knew it was a lie. How could anything possibly be alright when I could hear the screams of the other villagers and the roar of the fire as it destroyed everything I knew?”

He stole a look at Natsu, wondering if, in his tense state, he would see him as his love or as the villain, and was pleased to know that he still clearly saw him as Natsu. Gray was glad his mate wasn’t a hellfire dragon like his uncle, he wasn’t sure if he would have been able to accept that as easily. Not that any of it had been easy, of course.

Gray recognized the sympathy in Natsu’s eyes and offered him a tight smile. He was relieved that Natsu wasn’t trying to interrupt him with platitudes, seemingly content to just listen to him.

“They told me to focus on them as I ran in between them. We were almost at the woods when I tripped. My mother caught me before I could fall, and she tried to keep me from looking, but it was too late. I had tripped over what was left of the body of one of my friends, and I started to scream, drawing Deliora’s attention to us.”

“If I had just kept my mouth shut,” Gray’s voice broke, no longer able to continue. He felt a light embrace and was surprised to find Natsu wrapping one of his wings around him in a manner he recognized. He’d seen Happy doing the same thing for Natsu years earlier. It was surprisingly comforting.

“You were a child,” Natsu spoke even as he made soft purring noises that helped to soothe Gray, “It was their choice to save you, and one that any loving parent would willingly make for their child. Even now, I have no doubt Igneel would do anything he could to protect me,” Natsu chuckled, “Atlas might let me die, though.”

Natsu had meant that as a joke, knowing full well Atlas would never let anything happen to him despite how he pretended to act. Hell, if it ever came down to it, Natsu had a gnawing suspicion Atlas would even extend that protection to Gray, but judging from the way Gray tensed up at the mention of his uncle, a hellfire dragon like Deliora, it might not have been a good idea to bring him up.

“There is enough guilt to go around,” Natsu sighed, knowing his father wouldn’t want him to hide his role in the events that led Deliora to this village, “And none of it changes a damn thing.”

“I have something to tell you, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive him because, for some crazy reason, my father really likes you.”

Gray stared at Natsu with dread, not knowing what to expect from that statement. He tugged at Natsu’s wing, trying to show him he wanted to be held tighter. Natsu capitulated, holding him closer while continuing to make those soothing noises. Pressed close to him as he was, Gray felt Natsu take a deep breath before speaking.

“I’m not sure if you know this, but my father is the King of the Red Dragons.”

Gray looked up at Natsu in surprise and horror as he remembered the way he’d acted when they had met, “K-king?” He gulped.

“Yep. Anyway, once my father declared his decision that the red dragons would side with the humans, not all of the red dragons were in agreement. Deliora, in particular, was furious, and he challenged him. The way Atlas tells it, they fought for days until my dad finally won. He should have killed Deliora then, but he chose to exile him instead. He thought that was the end of it, but, well, you know what happened after.”

Natsu hung his head, ashamed for having kept it to himself for so long.

Gray blinked as he processed Natsu’s words, not missing the stiff manner in which the dragon held himself. He decided to lighten the moment while he tried to figure out how he felt about this new information. “Are you trying to tell me I’m a fucking princess?!”

Natsu stared at him in open-eyed wonder for a full minute before letting out a deep rumbling laugh. “I never thought of it that way, but I guess. Although technically, you’d be more like a Queen.”

Gray was so happy to hear Natsu laugh again after such a long time that he disregarded his words, thinking them a continuation of the joke.

His enjoyment was brief as Natsu soon became serious again.

“You should know, you don’t have to worry about Deliora ever again.”

“Why’s that?” Gray couldn’t deny the relief he felt at those words, but there was something in Natsu’s voice that terrified him. It had sounded cold, which is not something he’d ever associated with him. Even when he’d been attempting to maintain distance between them, there had always been warmth. It was something that was just a part of him.

“He’s dead, I killed him,” Natsu stated simply, letting go of Gray and once again turning towards the remains of the village, but not before Gray felt a wetness on his shoulder. Natsu was crying? What the hell had happened?

“You killed him?” Gray chased after him, full of a need to know what had upset Natsu so much. “What aren’t you telling me? We both know the only way this is going to work is if we’re honest with each other. No more secrets.”

“Can we not?” Natsu pleaded, and that should have been his clue to leave it alone, but he was too used to pushing and fighting Natsu to realize when to let something go.

“No more secrets,” Gray repeated firmly.

Natsu tried to stare him down, but when he realized Gray was not backing down in the slightest, he kicked the nearest object in anger, watching with satisfaction as it flew in the air for quite a distance before landing on a large pile of rubble.

Natsu’s voice was tense when he began to speak, and Gray resolved not to interrupt, hoping it would make it easier for him to get through the telling.

“Deliora made an alliance with Acnologia. Once Igneel and Atlas learned of it, all dragons were tasked with killing him on sight, but he managed to hide for months. Until the day Rogue and I came upon two enemy dragons during a routine patrol, one hellfire, and one acid.

“I recognized Deliora right away. He was the only other hellfire dragon in the area, and we had met once before. Rogue knew how badly I wanted to go after him to avenge you and my father, and like an idiot, I let him convince me to stay and fight rather than going for help, even though I knew better.

“I — I let my desire for vengeance cloud my judgment, and I left my friend behind to fight against a dragon whose element was extremely hazardous.

“We split up,” Natsu continued, his remorse weaved into every word, “Rogue asked me to let him down so he could fight his dragon. He was doing well, and I was only gone for a few minutes. That’s how long it took me to kill that bastard. I rushed back to help Rogue with his fight, but, uhm, I was too late.

“I found him writhing on the field, the acid from his injuries eating away at his flesh,” Natsu was filled with anguish as he recalled finding his friend in that state. Still, he did his best to finish, “I tried to head it off as best I could, but I wasn’t able to stop the damage soon enough, and he-- uh -- he lost both his legs up to his knees. Sting blamed me for what happened, and he was right. I should never have left Rogue to fight on his own.”

“So, when you asked me if you were a monster?” Gray prodded, recalling the night he had found Natsu sitting outside their hotel room in the middle of the night. Natsu nodded, no longer able to hold back his tears.

“Oh Natsu,” Gray was heartbroken for everyone involved, he tried to hug as much of the enormous body as he could, knowing it wasn’t enough, would never be enough to ease a trauma that large.

“Was Wendy able to help?”

Natsu shook his head, “She can’t regrow bones, she could only finish healing what I couldn’t,” Natsu answered, keeping his head down.

Gray stared at Natsu, his hand covering his mouth as he attempted to digest what Natsu had just told him. “Is - is he okay?

“Yeah, he’s fine. He can still move around if he uses his magic. From what I’ve heard, Gajeel and Metalicana have been working on something that might help him walk again.”

“From what you’ve heard?’ Gray repeated, puzzled by how aloof Natsu sounded. It was surprising considering they were discussing one of his closest friends. Until he remembered Igneel’s words.

“I haven’t talked to them in about two years,” Natsu shrugged, clearly done with the topic.

“Two years?! Don’t you think it’s time for you to talk to Sting about it again? I’m sure by now, he must realize it wasn’t your fault.”

Gray stopped to examine the dragon in front of him, trying to read his gestures. Had Natsu been in his human form, this would be a lot easier, he could read human Natsu like a book, but dragon Natsu was still a mystery he was slowly deciphering. Although he was confident with time, he would manage it.

“It doesn’t matter anymore, any friendship that existed between Sting and I is over,” Natsu seethed, “Can we please talk about something else?”

He sneaked a quick glance at Gray only to find his eyes had never wavered from him.

“No. This is important. Sting is your best friend, I’m sure whatever happened between you, you guys can work it out.”

Natsu began to laugh, but this time it was dark and mirthless, the sound making Gray take a step back. “There are some things that can’t be worked out Gray. What he did, while I understand it, I can never forgive him.”

“What did he do?” Gray whispered, a feeling of dread settling over him, knowing it would have to be quite terrible for Natsu to not be willing to forgive his closest friend.

Natsu studied him for a long time before finally responding, “He’s the one who sent Acnologia to Talos.”

It took Gray several minutes to piece together what those words meant. Sting had set the events in motion that had put an end to the life they had built together. He could feel the rage rise within him at the injustice, even though a part of him still had trouble believing it, “But why? Why would he do that?”

“Because if he hadn’t, Acnologia would have killed all of them, so he did what was necessary to protect Rogue. I don’t fault him for that, I probably would have done the same thing if you were in danger,” Natsu tried to sound convincing, but Gray could still hear the hurt in his voice. Sting had been his best friend since he was eight years old, he knew the betrayal had to have been a blow, especially on top of his own rejection.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Gray interrupted, wanting to move the conversation away from what had happened. “Before you left, you’d said renegades were just dragon slayers that had turned against the dragons, but Acnologia was a dragon.”

Natsu sighed, “Something went wrong with Atlas’ spell, or maybe the dragons who cast it messed it up. We don’t know exactly what caused it, but for some of the dragon slayers using a lot of dragon magic, combined with the blood of the dragons they slew changed them, and they somehow gained the ability to turn into dragons.”

“So they turned into something like you?”

“No, the renegades are something entirely new. I was born from a dragon and a human, so my body could take both forms, at least it used to be able to,” Natsu amended, his forehead creasing briefly before he continued his explanation.

“The renegades, however, were human, and the process ended up destroying their minds. While they can change between either form at will, they aren’t really human anymore. But they aren’t truly dragons either. Acnologia is the strongest of them, and he has declared himself their leader.”

“And Deliora joined up with him?” Gray thought this seemed rather short-sighted, “But wouldn’t Acnologia have just killed him later?”

“Probably, I doubt he really cared. I think his hatred blinded him to anything else, or maybe he thought he could handle Acnologia on his own,” Natsu shrugged disinterestedly, “Who knows?”

“I can tell you this, Acnologia is like no other renegade. He reaps the souls of his opponents, keeping them inside him and fusing them to his magic to give him immunity to ours. It makes him almost invincible.”

Gray found himself thinking of the malevolence he’d felt from the renegade and shuddered to realize it was something he’d never felt from any of the other dragons he’d encountered except for Deliora.

“Y-you told me Acnologia almost killed you, did — did he do the same to you?” Gray didn’t really understand what soul reaping meant, but it sounded terrible, and he instinctively didn’t like it.

“He uhm, he tried,” Natsu’s face was grim, “And there would have been nothing I could have done to stop him if Belserion, he’s my father’s advisor, hadn’t sacrificed himself for me. Acnologia ended up with his soul instead.”

“I managed to take one of his arms in that battle, but he destroyed most of my side,” he pointed at the X shaped scar near his hip bone, deciding to leave out the part about how the renegade had eaten his tail. He didn’t think Gray would handle that well.

“I was fading fast, but then you came to me and asked me to come back to you, and I — I couldn’t leave you.”

“That — that really happened?” Gray blanched, remembering the pain he’d felt at that moment, and his face contorted in terror. His arms immediately wrapped themselves around as much of Natsu as they could, finally understanding how close they had come to losing each other.

“You saw something?” Natsu peered down at his mate with interest.

“No, I didn’t see anything, but I heard your voice, and then I was hit by this incredible wave of pain, and I tried to call out to you. I did tell you to come back to me, but then I blacked out,” Gray recounted, still shaken at the realization that for that brief moment, they had been connected.

As much as he’d been determined to learn everything, he realized Natsu had been right all along. He wasn’t ready to hear anymore. He needed time to process even the little he’d just heard.

“I wish I could go back and do so many things over. My parents, you, Lyon,” Gray cried out in frustration, “I screwed up so much, and look where it led us.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself, love,” Natsu protested, and Gray felt himself perk up at the familiar nickname, “None of what happened was ever your fault. I could have trusted you more.”

“No, you had it right the first time, what were you supposed to do when I hated everything you were? That is the truest thing you ever said to me. I understand that now. I just wish..., there were so many times I could’ve made better choices.”

Natsu sighed, “We both screwed up a lot. We were stupid and scared to lose what we had, but I never doubted your love for me, even after what happened in the field,” He tried to phrase the rejection as tactfully as he could, knowing it was a touchy subject.

“If there were any way I could change what I am, I’d do it in a second, I’d do anything to be with you,” And he absolutely would, but he also knew there was nothing to be done in this case and he needed Gray to understand that. Before he wasted his life trying to find a miracle cure that just didn’t exist.

“But the truth is, I was already having trouble changing back during the war. The longer I remained a dragon the worse it became. And after Acnologia almost killed me, they had to use massive amounts of dragon magic to reconstruct parts of my body. When I changed back into my human form, all those areas were covered in red scales.”

Natsu saw the disbelief on Gray’s face and hurried to drive the last point home. “That tattoo I had? It was an illusion spell Atlas created for me so I could hide them from you. The battle within my body is over, and the dragon won. I’m sorry, but this is how I will always be. Not even magic can change that. So if that isn’t something you can accept or —”

“If you even attempt to finish that sentence, Natsu Dragneel, I will end you,” Gray threatened, “I’ve already told you, I don’t care what you are. I care about who you are, and I am never leaving you again.”

Natsu didn’t reply. Just watched him with a sorrowful expression Gray didn’t understand. Shouldn’t he have been happy with his declaration?

Gray’s head was swimming, and he looked for a distraction, something to take his mind off things for a little bit. He was back in his village for the first time in twelve years. Deliora was finally dead. It was time to put all this behind him. But first, there was something he needed to do. Something he should have done years ago.

He looked around for materials, settling on some rocks and small branches. He collected a large number of them as well as some vines and moved them over to where his house had once stood, letting himself think about the good memories he’d once had, back when his family had been whole.

If he concentrated really hard, he could almost see his parents. Images of them flitted through his mind, chasing after him as they played with faces full of carefree laughter, or tucking him into bed at night and reading him stories even though he complained he was too old for such things. It had been a good life.

Gray remembered how his mother’s wish for his happiness had been simple: a wife, a family. While his father had merely wanted him to be kind and strong. What would they have thought of his husband, the dragon?

He could feel the tears stream down his face, and he didn’t fight them. He had never allowed himself to properly grieve their loss, too caught up in his anger. But he knew it was time. If he ever wanted to move forward, he needed to start here.

Gray felt a tentative pull through his distress, and he waved Natsu away, needing to experience this fully.

“My dad, he was uhm, really fun. He liked to tell jokes and play pranks on my mom, “Gray wiped his eyes as he talked to Natsu, “You would have liked him, I think.”

He could hear Natsu moving behind him and wasn’t surprised to find himself once again enveloped by a large wing. “My mom,” he began but got no further as he dissolved into sobs.

“Shh,” Natsu soothed, “I’m sure she was amazing too.” Once Gray had calmed down a little, he asked, “Would you like some help?”

Gray nodded, not trusting his voice yet. Natsu nuzzled him as best he could before getting to work, placing the rocks Gray had collected in a large circle in what used to be their backyard.

“I wish I knew where they were buried.” Gray sniffled.

“Isn’t it better to honor the place where they lived?” Natsu suggested, and Gray decided his mate had a point. This was where they had been a family, this is what he would choose to remember from now on. And with that thought came an idea. He molded a knife and used it to scratch his parents names, Mika and Silver Fullbuster, on the branches he had chosen, tying them together with the vines and pounding them into the ground with an ice hammer.

Gray sat in the circle and closed his eyes, trying to remember as many details about his parents as he could. He shaped his ice, carefully making adjustments as he went, until a near-perfect sculpture of the three of them playing and laughing together stood before him.

Once he was satisfied with the results, he infused it with as much of his magic as he could manage, wanting it to last as long as possible under the summer heat. He made his way over to Natsu, who had moved away once he’d realized what Gray was attempting.

Natsu admired his work, sighing contentedly, “I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but I’ve always thought your magic was beautiful.”

Gray smiled at the compliment before turning into a mess when Natsu added, “Just like you.”

He nudged the dragon playfully, only to hear Natsu laugh at him. They remained silent until the sun began to set, content to sit together and enjoy the memorial they had crafted together.

“Let’s get out of here,” Gray suggested, standing up and dusting off his clothes as he felt Natsu rise beside him.

“I know just the spot,” Natsu murmured, and Gray climbed on the dragon’s back, sparing one last look at the place where his life had begun before finding himself in the air once again.

0-0

They hadn’t been flying for very long when Natsu touched down. Gray looked around, feeling there was something familiar about it.

He could feel Natsu’s nervous excitement, but it was dark, and the woods all looked the same to him at night.

“Where are we?”

Gray could tell that Natsu was a little disappointed at his lack of recognition, but he soon perked up. “Go look at that tree,” Fire lit up one of Natsu’s talons, and he neared it to the tree trunk, carefully revealing a clumsy heart with the names Natu and Gay carved inside it in barely legible letters.

“Natu and Gay?” Gray collapsed into giggles. He was incredibly touched by the gesture, and he didn’t want to hurt Natsu’s feelings, but it was hilarious. “Oh, my poor stomach!” Gray complained, still unable to stop laughing. “How old were you when you did this?”

“Eight,” Natsu pouted, “Forget it.”

“No, no, no, I’m sorry,” Gray apologized through his giggles. “Is this the tree I rescued you from?”

“Yeah,” Natsu grumbled, looking away.

“Oh come on, don’t be like that, I wanna hear about it,” Gray urged, “Please?”

“Fine,” A little bit of mischief was reflected in his eyes as he revealed.” My dad forbade me from searching you out, but he never said anything about not returning here.”

Gray snorted in response, not surprised in the least at the defiance. He could only imagine Igneel must have had his hands full with child Natsu.

“I had to,” Natsu defended, “I didn’t want to forget we had met, and I was scared I’d lose your scent, so I snuck away again as soon as I could. I tried to carve our names, but I’d only just started learning my letters,” Natsu frowned, “I’ll fix it.”

“Don’t you dare touch it,” Gray objected, “It’s perfect just the way it is.” And he meant it, too. There was something about learning that Natsu had come back here on his own and done this that freed him from his previous guilt at having attacked him more than any of Natsu’s earlier assurances that he’d never hated him for it ever had.

Natsu lit a fire near the tree, and once he was satisfied it was safe, he gestured for Gray to sit down. “I’m going to go hunt us some food,” Natsu announced before disappearing.

“Natu and Gay,” Gray muttered to himself, once again giggling, but this time he felt his body overflow with warmth. Stupid romantic dragon. He wished that just once, he would be the one to surprise his mate with a grand gesture. One that would show him once and for all how he felt, especially after all the pain he had inadvertently caused.

Natsu soon returned, and while Gray cooked the rabbits he’d caught, he made a nest for them to sleep in. When Gray offered him some food, Natsu only replied he’d already eaten.

“Where do we go from here?” Natsu asked after watching Gray eat quietly for a while. The apprehension in his voice was hard to miss.

Gray studied him thoughtfully for a few minutes, mulling it over. The truth was he had no idea either. They had hurt each other deeply over the years, and while he wanted nothing more than to pretend none of it had ever happened, he knew that was the wrong approach to take. Especially given the considerable hurdles they would have to face in their future.

“There’s really only one thing we can do,” Gray wrapped his arms around himself, suddenly feeling vulnerable, “We keep talking, we make things better, and more importantly, we stay together. I — I’d like us to go back to living together. “

Natsu’s jaw dropped, “You’re an ice mage, you can’t possibly want to move into a cave with four fire dragons.”

“Well, you don’t exactly fit in my apartment anymore, do you?” Gray quipped, drumming his fingers on the ground, his nerves keeping him from being able to stay still.

This was one of the things he’d decided during those days he’d sat on the mountain, waiting for Natsu to talk to him. They were married, and he wanted to go back to acting that way, even if it seemed ridiculous given their circumstances. They had pledged their lives to each other through good times and bad, and he wanted them to fulfill that promise.

“No, I guess I don’t at that,” Natsu cocked his head and stared into his eyes, reading them as he always had. “This means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Gray confessed, “I know this isn’t how we wanted it to be, but if we’re married, it’s important to me that we act like it.”

“Alright then,” Natsu agreed, “we’ll try to make it work. I’ll have Atlas make you a bed. You can always go back to your apartment when I’m gone.”

Gray glared at him menacingly now that he had gotten his way, “And on that note, no more suicide missions. I might only be a human, but I promise you, I will find a way to make your life miserable if you ever do something that stupid ever again.”

He could see Natsu wanted to protest, but instead, he nodded his acceptance. “I promise I won’t go after Acnologia by myself again, but that doesn’t change the fact that I will have to go after him at some point.”

“Why, why does it have to be you?” Gray complained, terrified by the mere idea of Natsu going after that monster. “Haven’t you done enough already?”

“There’s still a lot we need to discuss, but there is one thing you should really know. The times I told you I was off helping the Dragon King, that was a bit of a lie.” Natsu announced, somehow managing to appear sheepish.

Gray stared in disbelief for a moment, trying to understand what Natsu was implying and groaning when he remembered him saying he would be a Queen, not a Princess, “Let me guess, you’re the Dragon King now?”

Natsu chuckled nervously, “Surprise?”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?!” Gray sputtered, “How even?”

“Belserion mostly. Igneel and Atlas kept me far removed from other dragons, even red ones, for most of my life. I mean, I knew other dragons existed, but Metalicana and the others were the first ones I ever met outside of my family. I knew next to nothing about our politics. Even the fact that my father was the King of the Fire Dragons was more an interesting bit of trivia than anything that held any importance.” Gray tried not to feel disheartened by the fact that Natsu had included himself with the dragons, it only made sense now, but it brought home the crux of their situation. Natsu was a dragon, and he was not.

“When I got there, that changed. Suddenly there were dragons everywhere, all kinds, even ice ones. They’re really pretty,” Natsu recounted. Gray could hear the excitement in his voice, and he had to smile.

“Anyhow, it turned out that every race of dragon had their own royal families, and Acnologia and Deliora had systematically gone about destroying them all. My father, uncle, and I are all that’s left. So my father was made King of the Dragons. It’s complicated, but mistakes were made, and Atlas magic had caused too much havoc, so that left only me. Belserion recognized that early on, and without me realizing it, he began to build me up. After I was able to wound Acnologia and survive, it cinched it.

“I couldn’t really get out of it, so I made a deal instead. I agreed to take my place as King, but only on the condition that Belserion would act as my regent until your death.”

“Is that why you were so anxious to leave?” Gray wondered, remembering how determined Natsu had been to put as much distance between them and Talos as possible.

“Yeah, I was afraid something would come up, or someone would change their mind, so I grabbed you and ran. I didn’t want to spend any more time apart,” Natsu admitted shyly, “And I don’t regret it, that time we spent together, it was the happiest I’ve ever been.”

“Me too,” Gray agreed, those months had been everything he had ever dreamed, even if they had been too short. He would do anything to get that closeness back. He finally got the nerve to ask what had been worrying him since Igneel had checked their bond. “Our bond, is it — is it going to be okay?”

Natsu looked down, and Gray could feel his guilt at having tried to destroy their bond, although it was more muted than before. “I think so, but it’s going to take time.”

Gray was surprised to see a sudden change in Natsu’s features until he looked down and saw that the pendant was glowing slightly.

“It looks like it’s already begun to heal,” Natsu’s eyes shone with emotion, and once again, Gray felt it inside. He focused on their bond, wanting to reassure himself that their connection felt a bit stronger.

They stared at each other in amazement, neither really knowing what to say.

“I love you,” Gray finally burst out.

“I love you too,” Natsu nuzzled his cheek gently, “I’m sorry I made such a mess of things.”

“We made a mess of things, this wasn’t just your doing,” Gray reminded him, “I was too stubborn to see anything other than what I wanted to see, and I didn’t leave you very many choices.”

Gray could tell that Natsu wanted to say something more. He’d caught him staring at him and shaking his head several times already, and it was making him anxious. “Just spit it out already.”

Natsu dragged in a long breath before speaking, alerting Gray that he wasn’t going to like whatever it was. “I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but there’s another reason why I need to go after Acnologia, and it’s important.”

“Belserion?” Gray guessed, remembering Natsu had said the dragon had sacrificed his soul for him. “Vengeance is not a good enough reason to get yourself killed, Natsu.”

“It’s nothing like that, and it’s not just him. It’s also my father and all our dragon slayers’ parents too. He has pieces of their souls inside him, Gray. If they died before he did, they’d never be able to rejoin their soulmates. Their cycle would be destroyed forever. I can’t let that happen to my parents or any of the others.”

Gray stared at him in dismay, remembering how Igneel had looked when talking about Natsu’s mother, and as much as he hated the idea, he knew Natsu was right. They couldn’t allow that to happen.

Gray relented with a sigh, “I don’t like it, but I understand. Just remember your promise.”

“I will,” Natsu assured him, “I give you my word. I won’t go after him on my own.”

“Good, we should go to bed, it’s been a long day.”

Natsu grunted in agreement as he lay down in the nest he’d made earlier, beckoning Gray to join him. “Yeah, I’m beat.”

“I still can’t believe I get to be with you like this and not have to pretend to be someone else.” Natsu’s smile was dazzling, even as a dragon.

Gray crawled in and lay next to him with a chuckle, “I feel pretty stupid for not realizing it sooner. I mean, looking back now, outside of that awkward formal speech you used when you weren’t freaking out on me, it should have been pretty obvious.”

Natsu laughed, “I wasn’t expecting you to show up, I kind of panicked. That’s how Belserion talks.”

They snuggled together in the nest, Natsu wrapping his wing around Gray in a combination hug and blanket while they stared up at the stars quietly.

“Hey, Natsu?” Gray prodded the dragon, whose eyes were struggling to stay open.

“Hmm?”

“How long do dragons live?”

“I don’t really know, the oldest I’ve heard of is over a thousand years old,” Natsu replied dreamily, his eyes beginning to close once again, “Atlas and my father are close to four hundred, I think. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering how long I’d have to wait to meet you again in another life.”

“Every day away from you will feel like an eternity.”

Gray giggled, and Natsu frowned at him, “What?”

“Nothing, you’re just incredibly romantic, I need to step up my game.”

“Nah, I love you just the way you are,” Natsu mumbled.

“Go to sleep, you idiot,” Gray scolded, not bothering to hide his smile at those words.

“Did I ever tell you that when we first met, I wanted to take you home with me?” Natsu’s voice had turned dreamy, “I wanted us to go on great adventures together. I had it all worked out, too. We’d fly until I could feel myself changing back, then we’d explore wherever we ended up and camp out until I could fly again, and then we’d start all over again.”

The last part had been almost unintelligible, accentuated as it had been by snores, but still, Gray’s heart felt like it would burst at any minute.

He was beginning to understand what Natsu had tried to warn him against. So many times that day, Gray had wanted to kiss his lover like he was used to. To play with Natsu’s hair or do any of the myriads of gestures he’d been used to giving and receiving.

Only to be confronted with their reality. The holds and wing hugs were pleasant, but they were nowhere near the same, and it grieved Gray to realize that it would be almost a year before they could once again do all the things they had once taken for granted. He told himself it didn’t matter, Natsu had gotten through it, he could too.

A/N: Natu and Gay, that is all. Heh, the things that come from typos! This was a rough chapter, but it needed to happen and I tried to lighten it up a bit. While they obviously didn't get through everything I tried to get the most important ones out of the way. But, yay, the boys are back together again!

I’m excited for the last two chapters and I hope you are too. Thank you once again to @oryu404​ for their help betaing, this one was a beast! See you in two weeks!

@ao3feed-gratsu​

[gold-eyes-vengeful-heart]

Apologies

((Runya goes to deliver an apology.

Contains 5.2 spoilers! Also some vaguely gross imagery and also parental mental abuse of an adult child in the second half courtesy of @semper-miles Merceus being an asshole, mind that warning))

===

When Runya approached on the back of his Shinryu-egi, he would admit he didn’t expect to find Blue carving big furrows into the shores of the crater-lake with his body.

He dismounted and dismissed the aetherial construct without looking, his eyes registering his amusement at the Weapon. He kept skidding along, tilted to one side, in a vain effort to—Runya imagined—scrape off the crystalline substance coating the former injury he had from the Ruby Weapon. Even spotting Runya wasn’t enough to get Blue to totally stop, either; sure, he got to his feet and came thumping over, but when he paused in front of Runya, it barely took a moment before he hiked up one leg and started scratching at the crystal with his knee joint. It left him balancing on one foot, but he seemed steady enough, even as he craned his neck to look down at the much smaller Miqo’te.

{Runya-friend Runya-friend}

The little eager calls bounced onto his mind like raindrops. He couldn’t help but smile lazily up at the thing, even. “Ah, so you haven’t forgotten my face after all this time?”

The sarcasm earned him a flurry of mild huffiness, but as Blue kept scratching, Runya kept eyeing that leg and the shavings of crystals he was scraping off in the process. “...I can presume you itch.”

And he probably, in turn, should have expected Blue to project that feeling into his head so strongly that his body immediately echoed it, with a penetrating tickle that he almost doubled over onto before he started to rub furiously at the spot. “Excuse you, that was uncalled for!”

{Yes it was.}

“No it wasn’t.”

{Yes.} The thought sat there glacially, refusing to be moved even by him. “...You just did that to amuse yourself, didn’t you?”

The glacier-facade cracked and trickled merriment, and the Weapon physically chuffed like a laugh. And in response, Runya just raised a hand to his forehead with feigned drama, sighing heavily. “Oh, heavens save me, he actually has a sense of humor.” A strange thing, that. He had to say, after seeing what he had done to an entire lab full of Garleans, he hadn’t expected Blue to be...well, quite this human.

And yet all the same he knew full well from that panic that he had had a couple times over that the Weapon was indeed still a weapon. And there was something...off in the depths of Blue’s mind, too, he came to realize the more he hung around the creature. It lurked not quite at the heart of Blue but frighteningly close, a tattered void-like slash in his mindscape like a gouge across a throat. Every time it occupied his thoughts, it drew him silently closer, beckoning him towards a tempting and all too familiar madness that both begged for help and bit furiously at any being that dared listen—it both threatened to consume him and yet also didn’t quite dare consume Blue himself, held in check by rocky scarred tissue mountainous around its edges but not quite enough to keep him away it would be too simple to peek in and see what memory lurked under the surface but all the same he could catch a familiar glimpse of dead eyes and mountains of bodies twisted and gored and cracked open like eggs but they weren’t human and some were tall and robed under the layers of char and gore—

He jerked back from the contact as the black yet vividly blaring, projecting scar threatened to consume his vision entirely. Even then, it dotted across his vision, bug-like, making him blink rapidly as he looked up at Blue.

For his part, the Weapon had paused with his hind leg half up in the air, and his head was very slowly cocking to one side until he nearly turned it sideways in confusion. Strangely, he didn’t seem to have even felt Runya’s intrusion into that mindscape incarnation of ancient mental trauma, and even Runya’s secondhand echo of it just concerned him more than alarmed him.

{??????} A cold fish-slimy slap of worry flew right into his face. 

“It’s quite fine, thank you.” He waved off the now-crouching Weapon, despite how his body twitched and burned with secondhand panic not his own. His hand shook as he ran it through his hair. “I...aah, I shouldn’t have gone poking into your mind so offhand. That was rude of me.”

{...Very rude.} The concern soured into a sulk and heated into an accusation. {I don’t look into YOU like that. Even if your whole mind is like that.}

The two words didn’t need to be explained, at least; Blue knew immediately what he had been looking at, and perhaps he wasn’t entirely wrong that Runya’s entire mindscape was little else but a vast wound in and of itself, with only the faintest hints of something more around the edges—and even then he couldn’t stop picking at it long enough for those little hints to take hold.

“Perhaps.” He still waved off the notion with one hand. “But I do swear that I won’t be nosy without good reason. Does that sound alright?” And the second he got a grudging agreement, he continued, leaning on his elbows on the tip of Blue’s jaw. “And I actually came here to ask you a question. You do know that Macbalor isn’t an enemy, don’t you?”

The Weapon’s discordant jangle of negativity clashed against his thoughts so ferociously it put him in mind of jars of marbles being thrown down the stairs. Loud. Disorienting.

“Ah, come now...” Runya waggled a finger in his ear as if it would stop it ringing after that...that. “It’s an honest question, Blue, if you don’t mind.”

But no matter how genuinely honest the question, Blue didn’t want to cooperate; he could feel that much. The Weapon snorted and the gust of ocean-smell wind ruffled his robes.

{Pilotnotpilotpilotnotpilot—} The confusion, Runya could nearly taste; Blue had wanted to run but he couldn’t with her exerting that pressure on his mind, no matter how subconsciously she did it—he remembered the small Garleannotgarlean being brought to him as a last resort and he refused until she broke through his will like butter but even then he fought the whole way down the corridor as she made him move—

Runya actually snapped his fingers at Blue as the right half of his vision and the left half of his vision disagreed so wildly so that his stomach churned with nausea—one eye stuck in Blue’s past and the other stuck in Runya’s present. “Ah ah ah, you’re going to make me ruin your lovely paint job if you keep doing that.” And his head felt liable to explode, but that was obvious, he hoped. “Focus, Blue. I would prefer not to get shoved out of my own head again.”

Luckily for the both of them, he listened and did exactly as asked. The Weapon took in a deep breath and audibly blinked, and the wild torrent of uncontrolled memory receded to just a trickle of faint impressions. {...Sorry.}

“Even if I didn’t have a literal safety mechanism for my brain, I still do not enjoy migraines and feeling as if I’m going to lose lunches I ate years ago.”

{Said sorry.}

“Just a reminder that it’s unpleasant, is all.” He gave Blue’s nose a pat, the claws on his gloves clicking lightly against the metal. “You have a very loud voice. Mine pales in comparison.”

{Like it though.}

Runya cocked his head and flicked his ears forward. “Well, there’s a good thing.” He wasn’t going to question why, particularly not when even the most tentative of pushes on that front met an unyielding wall. “I should be honored, I suppose.” {Work with. Not over.} But whatever that enigmatic remark meant, Blue wasn’t keen on explaining. Instead, the top hatch hissed open, and he wordlessly peppered Runya’s mind with the urge to go run, fly, run. To move. Boredom, perhaps, but the reasons were irrelevant to Runya.

(It was so easy to get addicted to that feeling of power—and that was even without the Resonance active. He could, for a while, be not in a carved-apart-sewn-together nightmare of a body, but in something fluid and powerful and vibrant in a way that even a normal, healthy body would never be able to give him.)

“Oh, as you wish, dear.”

— — —

Shifting patterns of light roiled over Legatus Silentius’ face, as he replayed the footage over and over. Footage not just of the VIIth Legion’s vaunted Ruby Weapon, but also of his Weapon, dueling fighting clawing flying biting, until it flew into a rage at the sight of the monstrous Van Darnus and tore her apart. He scrolled the recording back automatically, without conscious thought, his attention so focused on what was before his eyes that he almost missed the soft thuds of footsteps behind him. Almost.

“Sir?”

Ariadne’s voice. But it held hesitation, weakness, and when he craned his neck around to look sidelong at her, she stiffened.

“Have you come to bring me your sister?”

“No sir.”

“Hmm. The Weapon, then; have you captured it and dragged it back here?” Ariadne swallowed. “Sir, I came to tell you that Angerona is on the move. She disappeared again—“

“I did tell you,” Merceus interrupted lightly, “only to interrupt your father with news of your successes...not your failures.”

The reprimand set Ariadne’s shoulders even stiffer than before, but really, he had told her that her only purpose now was to drag her wayward sister back here. He had not, for a moment, insinuated that he would tolerate one of his blood failing him. “Were you expecting help, Ariadne?” He smiled. “This isn’t the first time she has very suddenly eluded even your sight. And Celia’s. I don’t care why; I just want her found again. That is the task I set both of you to: finding her, and also finding the Weapon that is key to irreversibly ensuring our dominance over the weak. I did not send both of my loyal daughters on such a simple task only for them to come crawling back demanding assistance with something they should have no issue with.”

His chiding done and met with silence, he languidly returned his stare to the screen, the projected light flickering across his eyes. To no one in particular, he spoke aloud. “The Seventh was always short-sighted. They just wanted to repeat their same old mistakes, expecting that they just had to work this time.” He chuckled. “We were on to something, with this Weapon. Even in the hands of the unworthy, it carved through one of Baelsar’s glorious projects. One of the others even steals our Sapphire Weapon’s name...”

The smile disappeared. “And yet, none of us could get it to fight even half as well. It disobeyed us, routinely made us override its mind just to make it move...It refused to show us this potential, and yet here it does just that in the hands of some useless savage.” Or at least, he was quite certain that had been an Eorzean; no one else would dare stand up to the Empire. “If you do drag that pilot back here alive, Ariadne, I will be very sure to squeeze whatever foul spell he’s cast on that thing out of him before I finally let Celia have a little fun with him. But if you have to kill him, very well. I will not have both one of my daughters defying me and our Weapon being used so casually by a savage.”

Ariadne frowned, as she came to stand by him, but not too closely. (Experience, perhaps, informed her how terrible an idea that could be. “He loses control of it...there, though. When that Darnus monster appears. That’s more like when it went berserk at Celia—“

“It would still be a grand help, Ariadne,” he interrupted testily, “if you were able to drag him back here so we can dissect him properly instead of guessing.” He would not be reminded of failures—

“It has to be fond of him, somehow, to let him do this...” But Ariadne visibly winced as Merceus walked over and painfully clapped her shoulder with an even wider smile.

“This family does not make friends with things, Silentius. Nothing ever could, with that beast, even if they tried. And if it wouldn’t willingly cooperate with the very people that gave it such power, there is no chance that it is willingly cooperating with an Eorzean, either.”

“Of course, sir.” She only relaxed once he let go of her, and she turned to salute to him. (A sharp, precise motion, born of practice unyielding until he had been satisfied with it.) “I’ll take a magitek ship and continue the search, Legatus. By your leave.”

He had half a mind to deny her, after she came crawling back empty-handed and begging like some pathetic worm. But...for the moment, his mercurial mood took a turn for the marginally more lenient, and he just dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Do not fail me again. Bring her back, bring the Weapon back, even bring the savages’ pilot back...or don’t come back at all.” And even then, he wouldn’t suffer such failure of his bloodline to live...but he didn’t need to say it out loud. Ariadne swallowing audibly was proof enough she didn’t need to hear it, either.

“Yes sir.”

He would find those three, even if he had to go out and find them himself. Even if he had to sacrifice all of what remained of his family and his men to do it. Even if he had to kill them with his bare hands. He would not tolerate such an insult to his pride as a Legatus to continue existing unhindered.

The Weapon was his. Angerona was his. And the savages all belonged to him, even if they refused to believe it. They would see, when he had the full extent of his power aligned...they would all see.

[hoseokmylovesworld]

Picture of Love | 06

Pairing: Photographer!Hoseok x OC x Producer!Yoongi

Genre/Warnings: Hoseok AU/Yoongi AU/Includes strong language.

Words: 3,047

Summary: Charlotte Galloway is the leader of the up and coming girl band, “She-Bang”, with a side hustle as a photographer for anyone who will hire her.  She meets a fellow professional photographer named Jung Hoseok who helps “She-Bang” realize their dreams and Charlotte to make a love connection along the way.

Entering the hotel, the girls  continue to prod and poke me with questions that I have yet to answer. The boys say goodnight and go to their room as the girls make themselves comfortable on my bed before I can even enter the room. "Goodness me." I say as I sit on Leyah's bed across from them awaiting judgement. 

"So...?! Where did this guy come form and why is he kissing you on the cheek?!" Carrie kicks off the questioning once more, nearly hanging off the edge of the bed. I laugh lightly to myself before answering. "Um, technically we met at Evan's club after that gig last Sunday." I stop and wait for them to take in this information. "We swapped info the next day at the local park... and...yeah." I awkwardly trail off, awaiting their response. It was silent for a few moments, I assume because they were thinking of their next approach. "Do you like him?" Vicky speaks, causing me to freeze. 

I was expecting this question of course, but I never anticipated how the girls would react to my answer. How was I to answer anyway? Surely they would be disappointed if I told them the truth, if I told them I was merely attracted to him and planned to only sleep with him I'd be lying and I just couldn't do that. "Um...it's complicated. I guess. Because...uh..." Fuck.

"It's okay if you do you know?" I drag my gaze from the floor to where the voice was heard, which was a person I never thought I would hear say these words. Leyah.

"What?" Was all I could utter. 

"It's alright if you like him. It's not the end of the world." She answers with a lopsided, half smirk. I'm speechless. "But I-I said all those things. I told you-forced you to be like me...miserable." As the words leave my mouth, I realize this is the first time I'm admitting this aloud and I feel like shit for it. I forced them live in fear of affection and love for two years just because I was and after admitting to myself that I feel something for J-Hope, I see how utterly wrong I was for that. "I'm sorry." I say, too scared too look at them so I look to floor once more. I feel arms wrap around my shoulders and my face is shoved into Vicky's neck, that's when I notice the tears that started to fall from my eyes as they cascaded down her shoulder. 

"Don't apologize. You found someone you're fond of." She said, I could tell she was smiling just by listening to her, but her choice of words put me off. "And that's what scares me." I say into her shoulder. She loosens her grip on me enough to look me in the eye and I see the girls over shoulder, still on the bed, both holding comforting gazes. "We know...but I think you should just...let it happen." I whimper at the thought. "I know, I know, it's easier said than done, but Char, it's been two years since He Who Shall Not Be Named fucked everything up...I say it's a sign. Just give it a try? I mean for crying out loud, he called you, excuse my language, Charlotte and you didn't gouge his eyes out!"

I think back and laugh realizing she was right. I didn't let the girls, or the boys call me by my whole name, I only let my ex call me that once in a blue moon and I didn't even notice J-Hope hasn't called me anything, but that. I laugh some more, wiping away the tears. "You're right." 

"Damn right she's right! The whole table was shook when he did that!" Carrie exclaimed. Leyah just nods with a smile. I go to sit on the bed with the girls.

"Are you all sure about th-"

"Yes!" They all practically shout in my ear. I smile in response.  "Okay." More silence befalls the group before Carrie speaks up.

"Does this mean I can date now?" She asks sheepishly. I turn to her. "Yes Carrie. I'm so sorry I did that to you all." 

"No more apologies, we know why you did it. And we followed you for a reason. Trust me if we didn't believe in your rule we would have overruled you years ago." Leyah explains with a laugh. "I love you guys." I say absent-mindedly. "We love you too." They say collectively. 

"So when are you going to see him again?" Vicky asks, causing everyone to laugh. But it was obvious the girls were all wondering the same thing. 

"Uh, tomorrow actually." I say with a hint of a smile on my face the mention of our date. 

"Wait, seriously? And you weren't going to tell us?" Leyah asks offensively. "I was still in the middle of figuring out how to tell you about him. I'm sorry."

 Leyah settles down a little. "It's okay...so what are you going to where?" I roll my eyes at her. "I have no idea." 

"Then I guess it's time to get to work ladies." Vicky says already heading to my closet. Lord help me.

The girls and I initially go with an edgy, sexy all black outfit, but after I told them where J-Hope was taking me, they decided it was best to save that outfit for another day and to go with something more classy.

It's not something I would normally wear on a date, but then again I've never been on a date to Gary Danko and honestly this is the most excited I've been for a date in a long time. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It was finally Saturday and even though I didn't have to be anywhere until eight o'clock I couldn't stay in bed any longer. I eat cereal, I read, I surf the web, I fucking color. Anything to get my mind off of texting J-Hope. I'd forgotten what it felt like to be this giddy about someone. Soon the girls join me in my antics around the hotel room whilst asking me questions about J-Hope, which I was happy to answer. 

"Have you had sex yet?" Leyah asks, shocking us all.

"Leyah!" Vicky gasps.

"What? It's not like Char here is an angel." Leyah sends me playful eyes and a set of jumping eyebrows. I just laugh. She's not wrong. 

"Haha, uh, no...we have not." I reply timidly. 

"Wow. And you've known him for over a week. Must be special." Leyah smirks smugly. 

"Shut. Up." I say lowly. 

Soon enough it was 7:46, I was getting dressed, my hair and makeup were done. The girls stand around watching me, making me nervous for god knows why. I decide to ignore them, afraid that if I open my mouth Leyah will spew some nonsense about how special J-Hope is me. 

As I put on my jewelry I get a text from J-Hope.

I'm outside the entrance. Your move ;). 7:58. Smooth motherfucker.

I look myself over in the mirror and grab my purse. The girls send me off with words of encouragement. "Have fun and don't fuck it up." Leyah yells at me on my way out. And some not so encouraging words I guess. 

Exiting the hotel, I am met with the sight of J-Hope leaning on his Range Rover out front with his hands in the pockets of his obviously tailored black suit.

"You look amazing." He says genuinely upon me approaching him. Just take the compliment Char my brain screams at me as I try to reject it.

"Thanks. You don't look too bad yourself." I reply.

"Thank you. I told you I would be here on time." He said smugly, holding his iPhone up to display the time. 7:59. 

"You just live to please don't you?" I approach him with a pleased smile. 

"If that's what you want me to do." He says with a little too much confidence. It makes me cringe and melts my heart all at the same time. "Ugh, you're so sleazy." I laugh.

"What?!" J-Hope gasps in mock offense. "You heard me." I say with a pleasant smile. He returns it while shaking his head and then opens the door for me. "Thank you." I say as I get in. "No problem." He replies, closing the door and making his way to the other side. J-Hope and I make small talk on our way to the restaurant and it feels natural as always. I can't remember the last time I was this free and comfortable with a new person in my life. He opens the door for me again when we arrive and leads me in, resting a hand on my lower back with no complaints from me.

Walking into the restaurant I begin to wonder what J-Hope sees in me again. This was the fanciest place I'd been to in a long time. The walls were rich brown and red wood with mirrors scattered throughout. There was dazzling, abstract artwork and beautiful sculptures in every corner, accompanied by exotic and vibrant flower arrangements. 

There were intricate, black chandeliers that dimly lit the room with help from the tan candles on each table. The chairs and tables were nothing to get excited over, but altogether the aura of this place screamed money. It kind of made me feel like I didn't belong. But feeling J-Hope's proud hand still resting on my back and seeing his occasional gaze at my stunned face from the corner of my eye, I knew better. 

"Reservation for Jung. Two." J-Hope tells the hostess once we approach the podium. The blonde haired girl wearing a black colored shirt and dark eye make-up checked her list and smiled at us. "Right this way." She replied grabbing two menus. She leads us to the back of one of their many dining rooms where she sat us in a little nook in the wall disguised as a booth. "Thank you." we each tell the hostess as she tells us a waiter is on their way to serve us and then she leaves us. 

"You know I woulda pulled out your chair, but we're in a booth." J-Hope starts. I laugh immediately. "Oh, I bet you would have." 

"Just as long as you know." He says playing along, but not playing at all. I open up the menu and am not surprised to see that the first price is $99.00. I'm tempted to rub my eyes and try that one again, but then I remember where I am. A five star restaurant where the rich and even celebrities drop in on vacation. It makes me wonder about J-Hope's job as a photographer. 

"So what are you getting?" He asks abruptly. "Uhhh..." I focus on the menu and realize there are so many options. Damn me for being an indecisive Libra. "I actually have no idea." I laugh. J-Hope proceeds to ask me what I like and what I'm in the mood for and to tell me his favorite dishes so I go off of that. We each ended up enjoying a four course meal filled with seafood, meat, cheese, sweets, wine and delightful conversation.  We reach the topic of J-Hope's family and I can only hope he won't ask about mine in turn. Still not ready to have that conversation with him. 

"So...you made your parents...stroke you as a child?" I ask attempting to leave out the judgement that came with the question, but failing. "They did it! I didn't make them!" He defended. "Plus it helped me fall asleep." He added.

"I see." I lean back in my seat and pretend to analyze what I just heard with a thumb and a finger to my chin. "You take that judgement right out of your voice." He playfully points a finger in my direction. "I would never!" I offer energetically. "Also this stays between us." He declared more seriously causing me to giggle. "Of course." I assure him. "...Pinky swear?" he offers pinky to me across the table. I look at it silently for a moment before realizing. "Oh, you're serious?" 

"Dead." Is all he responds with making me giggle once more before reaching out to lock my pinky with his. "Pinky swear." I repeat. When he doesn't let go, I send him a questioning look. He looks at our hands and then at me and says "Oh, I was just trying to find an excuse to hold your hand." I laugh out loud this time, probably inflating J-Hope's ego ten-fold. 

"Smooth, but...you don't need an excuse." I say as I unlink our pinkies and link the rest of our fingers and set our hands on the table. "Smooth indeed." was J-Hopes reply. I can hear my conscience telling me to stop, that I don't know what I'm getting myself into. But in this moment that seems damn near perfect, I decide to take the girls' advice and just go with it.

The ride back to the hotel was comfortable, like the moments spent reminiscing after waking up from a pleasant dream. J-Hope pulls up to the back entrance of the hotel as I requested because it's easier for me to get to my room that way. J-Hope makes no move to get out of the car so neither do I. "So did you have a good time?" He asks with a smirk. 

"You know that I did, if my non-stop babbling about how amazing everything was, was anything to go by." I mocked. J-Hope laughs lightly and turns to me. "I'm glad...but if you remember our conversation from earlier this week, I do believe I was promised, how you say, 'a strong possibility' of a kiss." He raises his right brow and grins at me. Shit can I get pregnant from that?

"Um, I do remember that, yes." I stutter. "So?" He says still grinning, just waiting for my say so. It's now or never, we gotta set the record straight.

"About that, uh..."

"You don't want to." He turns his body back to the front, but keeps his eyes on me, disappointed. I panic.

"No! Nononononono. Of course I do-" 

"I feel a 'but' coming on." J-Hope mutters, his hard yet saddened eyes looking straight ahead. 

"Can I speak for myself now?" I snap. He turns to me.

"You're right. I'm sorry." Concern in his eyes.

"It's okay." I look down. "It's just that...I haven't been in a relationship that required effort or that wasn't just sex without commitment in two years and my last actual relationship didn't end too well." J-Hope's eyes soften in interest. "I guess what I'm trying to say is...can we maybe take things slow?" No matter how much I wanna fuck you, I should probably pace myself.

"I get it Charlotte, we can take things as slow as you'd like...But just to make sure, you do wanna see me again right?" his eyebrows furrowed and I chuckled at him. What did I do to deserve this man? "Of course, I do." I assure him. "Okay good, haha." He laughs nervously and gets out to let me out of the car. 

Half-way to the door I hear "How about just one kiss?" 

"J-Hope!" I chide, playfully.

"Just one! I swear, you can choose what kind, you can pull away whenever you want." He implores. Wow, he is kind of begging for it. I give him a playful side eye, studying his raised eyebrows and eager expression. "One kiss!" I emphasize holding my index finger up. He mimics me and repeats "Just one." 

"Okay then." Upon hearing this, J-Hope relaxes and reaches  for my face with his right hand. I feel my ear slot between his index and middle finger as he cups my cheek with his palm and never looks away from my eyes. He leans in all the way and there is no turning back now. I close my eyes and lean in as well. 

Soon I feel his lips mold themselves to mine. My body immediately floods with heat and desire and...the color red? Whatever that means. I start to move my lips and J-Hope follows me. I find myself raising my right hand to rest against his chest and it slowly makes it's way to wrap around his neck. I had no idea a kiss without tongue could be this sensual.

Although neither of us are exerting much energy, J-Hope and I find ourselves out of breath and I have to pull away. J-Hope and I make meaningful eye contact, still wrapped in each other. "That was one kiss right?" I ask quickly still catching my breath. "Totally." J-Hope replied instantly making us both burst out laughing. We each compose ourselves, separate from each other and J-Hope walks me the rest of the way to the door.

"Goodnight Charlotte." He finally says. "Goodnight J-Hope." I watch him walk back to his car. "I'll call you!" He shouts. "You better!" I shout back making him chuckle. I walk into the hotel through the lobby, heading for the elevator when I hear Darren's voice. 

"Was that him?" I turn to see him resting a chair with a drink in his hand, probably from the bar down the hall, his gaze focused on the window where J-Hope's car could be seen pulling off. I panic for a second realizing he saw that whole exchange. Get it together Char, Darren missed his chance, we don't have to prove anything to him. I clear my throat. "If you mean J-Hope then yes...That was him." I say as confidently as possible. He nods slowly as if lost in thought. I roll my eyes and begin to walk away. 

"Char!" I hear Darren call, I turn to him. "Yes?" He looks at me. opens his mouth and then closes it. "Nothing." he finally says. I nod once and head straight to my room.

That’s what I thought.