#and if someone has never broken a bone or so much as hurt their foot before how would they figure out the cause of the pain

[hella1975]

for no actual reason how would someone distinguish between 'ow i have hurt my toe' to 'i have literally broken my toe' bc like what even is an indicator of that. again, no reason

[spaceyrosie]

I won't hurt you anymore

Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x daughter!reader

Summary: you got hurt that caused you to be hospitalised while your dad was out for a case and instead of comforting you, Hotch came home angry about your decision.

Warnings: heavy angst, sadness, reader got hurt, Haley’s death, (tw: abandonment issues), Hotch was in the wrong, only slight comfort in the end

Author’s note: I only write sad things :( but here's another angst father-daughter relationship (no, not that kind of relationship 😌)

Word count: 1.2k

Hotch was tired, no he was exhausted.

But he has never felt this scared. He fumbled with his keys, the metal cold against his clammy skin, his movements jerky with adrenaline. 

Bursting through the apartment door, he was met with the flickering blue light of the television illuminating the living room with the sound muted. There, on the sofa, a small silhouette huddled beneath a blanket, their form dwarfed by the oversized furniture.

“What in God’s name were you thinking?!” The words erupted from him, booming into the silent living room. Hotch wasn’t thinking straight. All he could feel was fear choking him, making his voice course.

You flinched at the harshness in his tone. Your gaze remained fixed on the late-night talk show playing silently on the screen, your mind not registering anything.

"I had to pull myself out of an active case," he continued his voice a low growl. It was a telltale sign, a chink in his usually stoic armour that betrayed the fear gnawing at him. "Only for Garcia to call me telling me that the hospital called and you had discharged yourself," He trailed off, frustration lacing his voice. "Dammit, y/n, I told Anderson to stay with you! Gosh, what were you thinking?!"

Silence stretched, thick and heavy, suffocating the room with unspoken words. Hotch tapped his foot impatiently, a reflection to the frantic hammering of his heart. He needed a response, anything to break the suffocating quiet.

You shifted, the movement sending a fresh jolt of pain through your injured arm. Taking a shaky breath, you tried to focus, to clear the fog of confusion and pain clouding your mind. 

But the only thing that came through was a suffocating tightness in your chest, a pressure that had nothing to do with the broken bone.

“Say something, y/n Hotchner!” His voice was clipped, laced with a tightly leashed anger.

The words tumbled out before you could stop them. "No, Dad, you didn’t leave the team," you whispered, your voice raw with barely contained tears. "You had to leave me." You spoke quietly, the words echoing in the silence of the apartment.

Hotch's breath hitched. He closed his eyes for a moment, the stark accusation in your voice a physical blow.

“You left me.,” you continued, your voice monotone but laced with a tremor that betrayed your calm facade. “I was hurt, scared and alone but you left me.”

“Did you know how scared I was when Garcia called saying you left against medical advice?” His voice rose trying to defend on his outburst.

The sound of your choked sob shattered the peace, “I was scared, dad!” You all but shouted, the raw pain in your voice made Hotch stunned as he looked at your teary face. “I was scared and alone and in so much pain.” Tears streamed down your face, blurring your vision.. 

“Do you know how scary it was?” You choked out, each word causing your chest to heave. “I needed someone-”

“Honey, I-” He started, his voice thick with remorse.

“I needed my dad,” you cut him off, your voice trembling. “But you weren’t there.” This time you dared into his eyes, hoping to find any closure from the overwhelming emotions brewing in your chest.

The accusation hung heavy in the air, hitting him like a physical blow. 

He knelt before you, his gaze drawn to the telltale signs of your ordeal – the bandage on your arm, the stitches marring your face, a face so similar to your mother, the loss of his life. His heart ached, a dull throbbing that mirrored the dull ache of regret in his gut. He tried to hold your shoulders, but you flinched before shrugging it off.

“I want Mom,” you cried out, somehow pleading for an inconceivable wish. “Why can’t you be here for me?” It was as if a dam had broken within you, unleashing a torrent of pent-up emotions.

“I- honey, I-”  He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Finally, he managed a choked, "I'm so sorry, honey."

Sorry doesn’t even begin to the sorrow he felt.

“Why didn’t you hold me? I needed you!”

You buried your face in your hands, the events of the day crashing down on you with renewed intensity. 

“How could you send Anderson?" you continued, the anger a desperate attempt to hold back the tide of tears. "We're in the same city, Dad!”

“You can’t even make time for me, even when I’m hurt.” And the words did not stop pouring, all the pain you felt when he left you for work. Since your Mom died a year ago, you noticed he had taken more work, staying up late at the Bureau and bringing work home. It hurts you, of course it did. 

"I hate you!" The words tore from your throat. You didn't mean it, not truly, but the pain and fear were a tangled mess in your chest, spilling out in the most primal way you knew how. Hotch took you into his arms as you struggle against his hold.

"I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!" Your fists pounded a weak rhythm against his back, more out of frustration than anger.

"Shh…shh… I’m sorry," he soothed as he held onto his ground. "I'm so sorry, honey. I'm so sorry." His voice was thick with remorse as he held you close.

A choked sob escaped your lips, the words "I hate you" dissolving into a whimper. Tears streamed down your face, hot and stinging, soaking the fabric of his suit. "I hate you," you whispered again, the accusation laced with a tremor of fear. "Why can't I hate you?"

Hotch rocks you gently, “I got you now, honey. I got you.”

He understood the illogical outburst, the desperate need to lash out at the one person who was supposed to be a constant. The sobs eventually subsided into hiccups, your body trembling with exhaustion. Hotch didn't let go, his embrace a silent promise of safety.

Pulling back slightly, his thumb brushed away a tear that fell from your eyes. His gaze, softened with a tenderness you hadn't seen in a while. "Look at me, y/n," he murmured.

"There's no excuse for leaving you when you were afraid and hurting," he said, each word heavy with sincerity. "And the regret of neglecting you will stay with me. I can't rewind time, but I promise, honey, I'll be there for you from now on."

A flicker of doubt, a remnant of your hurt, crossed your eyes. "Even when you're working a case?" 

Hotch met your gaze, "It's past time I make you a priority," he said. "I'm so sorry I didn't make that decision sooner." A heavy silence settled between you, thick with the weight of his words and the unspoken promises they carried.

He held you close, a silent promise echoing in his embrace. Your eyelids grew heavy, the emotional rollercoaster taking its toll. He continued to rock you gently, a steady rhythm against the silence of the apartment.

"Go to sleep, sweetheart," he murmured, his voice rough with emotion. 

"I'm here now." 

[bones4thecats]

Hi can I get a seperate scenario request where Cooler, Cell, and Whis have to help Fem reader with their sprained ankle, because they fell down the stairwell on accident. And F! reader just kinda looking around not knowing if she'd just broken a bone or not. (Note: Based on irl experiences, I just had something like this the 2nd time 😭)

Hope you have a good night by the way 💜

When Their Fem/GN! S/O Sprains Ankle

Characters: Cooler, Cell, and Whis Requester: @silkyshulks A/N: Holy crap, you sprained your ankle twice? That must be tough. I swear that I stub my toe or hit my head everyday, pretty sure I'm one more table-to-forehead thump away from brain damage, lmao. Anyways, hope you get healed up from your sprain and enjoy this! By the way, the Reader has no gender mentions in this! ⚠️ Spoilers/Trigger Warnings for: Spraining your ankle, maybe? ⚠️

Disclaimer: I have five requests left, let's hope I can get them done!

╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗

╚═════ Cooler ════════════════════════════════╝

🧊 You looked at Cooler and smiled. It wasn't a smile full of love, no this was one that you put up to make the other members of the Force feel freaked out

🧊 It was when you started going down the stars that you slipped and fell, causing you to hurt your ankle, but, as you were used to pain much worse than this, you looked around and up at Cooler, whom was panicking, wondering if you had broken anything

🧊 When he brought you to the ship's doctor, he was beyond angry that you had sprained the area between your foot and calf. He wasn't angry at you, he was angry at himself for allowing this to happen

🧊 The doctor handed you a medical note of everything you needed to do for the injury to heal; mainly just some rest, an ice-pack being placed on it from time-to-time, giving it a wrap of sorts to keep it from getting worse from moving, and getting it raised above your heart's level while resting

🧊 Cooler sighed as you shifted in your bed, not being used to having your ankle raised so highly. He grabbed a nearby ice-pack and placed it on your ankle, causing you to suck in a deep breath quickly before scoffing and looking away from your lover

"You don't have to be ashamed. Injuries happen to the best of us."

"Coming from the guy who didn't sprain their ankle in front of their lover and multiple members of the Frieza Force then having to keep it up despite having dealt with worse injuries than this."

"Are you done with your little tangent?"

🧊 He tries to stay around you as much as possible to make sure your injury would heal as quick and perfectly as possible. While he cannot always be there, due to some issues within the Force, he makes up for it all by sitting beside you with his head on your chest for you to slide your hands on while trying to cure your boredom

╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗

╚═════ Cell ═════════════════════════════════╝

🔬 This world that you both lived in was utter chaos. So getting injuries wasn't something to out of the ordinary for anyone, but for you? It was completely new

🔬 Cell always made sure that you stayed safe, keeping you from falling and injuring yourself multiple times. Hell, one time he was fighting someone and dashed to keep you safe from a boulder crushing you!

🔬 This time, he hadn't noticed you got injured because he wasn't there

🔬 Cell had gone out to deal with some humans and came back to find you wrapping your ankle and putting some ice on it, flinching and trying to keep yourself calm despite the obvious pain from the injury

🔬 You were shocked to see Cell kneel in front of you with a darkening expression, and you knew what he was going to ask you

"Who did this to you?"

"Nobody, Dear. I just fell down the stairs on accident and ended up spraining my ankle. It should be healed in about a week at most."

"Are you sure nobody harmed you?"

"Yes, Cell. I'm sure."

🔬 After that, he stayed by your side 24/7. You never suspected that the Bio-Android could be so clingy before this, but here you were, having him on his hands and knees for you

🔬 He always replaces your ice-pack, making sure there were always two. One being frozen while the other you could use so you didn't have to wait on some compression being added to your injury

🔬 Cell also may or may not have almost destroyed your stairs after the incident...

╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗

╚═════ Whis ═════════════════════════════════╝

😇 Whis values your health above all else. He knows that you're more susceptible to getting sick than him, so he always kept up-to-date with your symptoms, making sure you couldn't get to ill

😇 But this was an injury that he did not expect to happen

😇 Beerus and Whis had finally gotten to go to Earth after destroying a few planets about 7 galaxies away, and Whis was happy to get to finally see you again after nearly four weeks worth of destruction and traveling with Universe 7's God of Destruction

😇 He made his way to you door was confused why you didn't come right to the door when he gave the special knock you both made to let each other know it was you. So, after three tries, he opened the door was began looking around for you

"Y/N? Where are you?"

"I'm-uh, I'm over here, Whis."

"Oh my."

😇 You sat on the bottom stair of your home, your face had some light scuffing on it while your ankle's slight movements caused you to shiver and groan in pain under your breath

😇 Whis kneeled in front of you and laid his staff nearby your head, just within your grasp. He then picked up your leg lightly, draping the back of your knee over his thigh as he rolled up your pant leg to see your ankle

😇 He saw how your skin darkened at the marking around your ankle. It looked much like a bruise, but he had treated enough injuries dealt by Beerus and Goku to know that this was a sprain and not just a horribly-placed bruise

"Don't worry, love. I can get this fixed up in a mere second!"

😇 Motioning for his staff, you reached to your side and handed him it, to which he thanked you and laid your ankle back down on the ground, making sure your leg was laying straight and not bent from your knee

😇 He then allowed his staff to glow before he tapped it right above your injury, which caused it to slightly ache in pain before it went away. He had healed it in a mere couple seconds!

😇 Whis reached out for you, to which you grabbed his outstretched hand and pulled yourself back onto your feet. While your ankle did slightly pound from the pain, it wasn't as bad as before

"While it may look healed, you may want to put some ice on it and wrap it up if the pain gets worse, alright?"

"Yeah, thanks, Whis."

"No problem, after all, what kind of a boyfriend would I be if I let my S/O just writhe around in pain?"

[sunonyoreface]

He Knows - Simon "Ghost" Riley Pt. 23

Word count: 2686

Warnings: 18+, minors dni, death, use of weapons, use of a knife, graphic depictions of violence, blood, military setting.

They keep him locked away in complete and utter darkness. Not a single sound penetrates the two-foot-thick cement walls. Anything he hears is a fabrication of his mind. An audio hallucination caused by the psychological effects of the deprivation of his senses. I’m sure that’s not the only thing he imagines as his chilled bones rattle against each other and his joints stiffen from the cold. So when Ghost cracks open the vault-like door and flicks on the lights, I don’t doubt my father thinks he’s seeing things. Maybe that I’m not real or that I’m visiting him from the dead or that I’ve come for revenge. All of these could be true.

The frigid air penetrates through my long sleeves. It’s just warm enough in here to avoid hypothermia. It’s like 141 is refrigerating him, preserving him until it’s time to transport him back to their main base. That’s where the real fun will begin. In theory, at least.

Ghost keeps his word and leaves the room only after sharing the smallest nod with me. He trusts me. It’s not his choice to make. It’s mine.

I think I subconsciously knew what had to happen long before I could admit such an idea to myself.

All I’ve ever wanted since this began was for the hurting to stop. Not just the pain inflicted on me, but on every soul involved. I hated the idea of people suffering because of me. Even if they hurt me and even if they hurt others; I didn’t see the point in furthering the cycle.

But that’s just it. It’s a cycle that won’t stop until someone interrupts it. 141 thinks that’s what they’re doing, but they’re just as much a part of it as the Ultranationalists. I’d never tell Ghost that, but I don’t see any other way you can put it.

They won’t accomplish anything by locking him away and torturing him for days on end until he gives them some outdated information on my uncle that’ll just send them on another goose chase. The only thing they’ll accomplish is causing more pain.

141’s solution isn’t permanent enough.

“Y/n? Darling?” My father’s voice is weak. “Is that really you?”

For a moment I think he might cry. He looks broken. Genuinely broken. He looks like I’ve felt ever since I found out about who he is. All this makes me wonder how much his reaction is genuine.

“Don’t call me that anymore,” I respond and it’s enough to tell him that, yes, it really is me. And no, I’m not here to help. I take a step away from the locked entrance into the claustrophobic room.

I wouldn’t doubt these rooms are designed to be small for psychological reasons. The base isn’t lacking space by any means. Some psychologists at some point determined that people are easier to break when they’re caged up like animals.

“Don’t act like that darling,” his tone remains on the verge of cracking. “Can we talk? I want to know you’re okay.”

He’s lying. Something about the squint around his eyes isn’t right. Or maybe I want him to be guilty. Maybe I just want to feel justified. What would Ghost think about his body language?

It looks like it takes a significant amount of effort for him to rise his head. The once gentle, yet strong man I knew has since withered. I want to pity him. Some part of me even wants to get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness. To cut him loose and let him take me back in time.

The stronger part of me won’t let that happen.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” I tell him. My voice doesn’t let on how nervous I am. The stress of the situation doesn’t seem to sink in. That’ll happen later.

“Look,” he admits. “I need your help. They’re going to kill me. Then you. We have to do something.”

Suddenly it’s we. Not me. Not I. Not your mother and I. No, she’s in New York. All he cares about is himself. I imagine Ghost standing beside me and striking him for lying. We.

“How many deaths are you responsible for?” I don’t bother entertaining his nuances. I feel uncharacteristically calm right now as I slowly approach him. My hands don’t shake or sweat. My mouth isn’t dry. My heart beats steadily. I am in complete control.

The switch blade weighs like iron in my back pocket.

“What are you talking about?” his mask starts to slip away. I need him to tell me. I can’t do this if he doesn’t admit guilt.

“The shootings: refugee centers, churches, homeless shelters. I saw videos, you know.”

“If you saw videos, what does my answer matter?”

“I want to hear you say it,” my voice is even. I almost sound unbothered by what I’m asking him to admit like I don’t care all that much. “Take ownership of your actions.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he tries to change the subject. For a moment I think he’s trying to make me feel stupid. Then I register something else in his voice. Something fearful and hesitant. What is he scared of? “This isn’t a mistake you want to make.”

“You’re ignoring me. Admit it. Admit what you did to those people. Admit what you did to me. To Mom,” The tips of my boots are just inches away from his chained feet. The air between us is charged with resentment.

“Look at what they’ve done to you, y/n,” maybe it wasn’t fear I sensed earlier. Maybe the emotion sneaking out of his chest was something entirely different. Because if I’m not mistaken now, he almost sounds disgusted. “You’re almost unrecognizable,” The flare of his nostrils confirms it. “Your mother would be so disappointed if she could see you right now.”

I feel a dull twisting sensation in my chest. Like his cold hands have wrapped around my lungs and squeezed them. Breathing feels impossible as the thick muscle twists between his bloody fingers.

My heart pumps faster and molten blood races to my neck and cheeks. My calm composure is slipping and fast.

“You’re such a fucking hypocrite,” the words snag through bared teeth. How dare he try to guilt me. I haven’t done anything wrong. The only reason I’m here is because of him. It’s all because of him.

“Nothing about me’s changed, darling. Your mother’s always supported me. You would too if you knew where the world was heading.”

“I doubt that.”              

“You’re looking at it wrong, y/n. Not everything is about making the world better. But our job, our family, will make it more secure. Those people were a threat,” he says matter-of-factly. A threat to what, exactly? They were innocent. They were children.

“Don’t do that. Don’t act like you’re doing this for the greater good. There is no world where mass killings make things better,” I snarl.

“We work for what we want. We take things into our own hands. This little crew over here, 141,” he says with a measurable amount of distaste. “Is using you. Even now, y/n,” He says this like he knows. Like it’s the complete truth and to even think otherwise is utterly mad. “If you think you’re here on your own free will. You’re wrong.”

I blink. His absolute certainty is maddening. Never could I have imagined him to be so disconnected from reality. He truly is a stranger.

“I know why you’re really here, Little Bird, doing their dirty work like a good little whore,” he seethes. There’s a controlled sense of chaos to him that taunts me. I could pull the switchblade on him. I should. Just get it over with for god’s sake.

I close the minimal space between us. Only inches away yet the distance feels like miles.

“I’m not here on their business,” I say between my teeth. As I lean over him, it’s the first time in forever I feel like I am in control. “This all started because of you and I’ll be damn-“

Suddenly the tables turn swiftly and dangerously. He leaps from the chair and his hands are wrapped around my throat in a vice like grip before I can even process what’s just happened. My arms flail and it feels like slow motion as we fall through the air with him on top of me. How the hell did he get out of his restraints?

My head hits the cement hard and the sound of bone hitting rock echoes off the walls. Not just one, but two men are now strangling me and I struggle to make out which one is real.

“This is all your fault,” spit covers my face as he speaks. Redness runs up his throat to his cheeks as his eyes bulge from exertion. My hands desperately grasp at his arms to no avail. My ears ring as they search the floor for something, anything. Then I feel the tiny piece of metal, still in my back pocket.

Ghost’s training kicks in fast.

My brain barely regiseters the object in my hands as I thrust it toward him as quickly as possible while he’s still destracted. My vision is spotting as his grip seems to tighten even stronger. I repeat the desperate action several times more until the blade is lodged in his lower stomach and I finally manage to drag it across diagonally, completely bathing us in blood.

Only then, does he falter. The man’s hands reach for the wound as he crumples to the side and I take the chance to crawl towards the corner of the room furthest from him. I can’t feel anything but the hot, tacky substance that has fully saturated my clothes. My chest quickly rises and falls as my lungs fight to breathe, but for the life of me it doesn’t feel like any air is making it to them. Panic clouds my vision and my sight turns to static. Everything sounds distorted, like I’m underwater. For a moment I think that is exactly what happened and must be why I feel like I’m drowning.

Red emergency lights flash and an alarm blares in the background. In thirty seconds an armed team of 141’s soldiers will barge through the doors to address the security breach. When they see my father’s slumped body and the growing pool of blood around the bottom of his chair, they’ll look to Ghost for answers first, then they’ll look at me. There’s no hiding what I’ve done.

“Y/n, you’re hyperventilating,” his clear, calm voice breaks through the surface. My eyes flicker up to meet his and my whole attention focuses in on him. Simon. I don’t know where he came from or if he’s real, but right now he’s the only person that can save me. “Deep breaths sweetheart, we don’t have long before they’re here,” his gloved hands cup my bloodied cheeks. I almost don’t notice his skull mask. It’s not the scariest thing in the room anymore. I am.

I nod and Simon continues, “breathe with me y/n. Ready?” he searches my face before deeply breathing in, “and out,” he says through a deep exhale. “Keep breathing. You’re doing good, but I need you to listen very carefully about what is going to happen next,” I nod again and push through another wave of anxiety.

“A team of men is going to detain you and you’ll be brought to the med center. Once you’re cleared Price will have you locked in your room. You won’t get to see me again, but I’ll be watching, okay? You’ll stay there for a few days while the higher-ups have meetings, then eventually discharge you and put you under protective services,” Ghost’s thumb gently rubs back and forth, spreading blood across my cheek. I finally come to terms with what he’s saying. I won’t be able to see him again. They’ll have assumed he had something to do with this. Otherwise, how’d I get the knife? How’d I get through security? They’ll know it was him and they’ll punish him for it.

“But you-” My voice cracks.

“I’ll be alright y/n,” Simon is so calm that I can’t help but belive him.

I want to lean into his embrace, to feel his arms fully encompass my shaking frame and fully disappear into him. Does he mean it when he says I won’t get to see him again? My already clenched heart twists. How am I supposed to just accept that? There has to be something we can do.

I catch the silhouette of my father’s body from the corner of my eye and feel my breathing start to lose control again. I did that. I killed him. Even if it was technically self-defence, my intentions were already set upon deciding to visit him. He almost did me a favour by attacking me.

I’d be stupid to think Ghost and I could have a future after I’ve committed such a heinous crime.

In the distance I hear quickly approaching footsteps as a crew of men, armed and ready, sprint down the hall towards our direction.

“Simon, I-” my voice drifts off. There’s so much I need to tell him, but I’m at a loss. Under the mask, his eyes are calm. He knows. He always has.

“I know y/n,” his voice is low with remorse. The air is still. The alarm blares in the background and our faces are illuminated by the flashing red. My last ounce of hope is suspended by a delicate thread in the space between us. “Me too,” Simon’s brows furrow as he looks me over one sorrowful last time. His shoulders heave as he prepares himself for what he has to do next.

Ghost shifts back as he rises to his full height. The automatic riffle that is often clipped to his hip is taken into both hands and aimed directly at my heart.

“Simon?” my voice trembles. He isn’t there.

“Toss the weapon to the side and put your hands behind your back,” Ghost commands. He doesn’t have to yell or threaten me. I defeatedly do exactly as he says.

The sounds of the soldiers grow louder. Their feet loudly echo through the cement halls. The rattle of their equipment can be heard over the alarm as the leader of the crew yells something indiscernible.

Six more weapons are aimed at my chest as they storm the room. Five of the faceless, towering figures line the wall, completely surrounding me. The last one approaches my father, drops his weapon, removes his gloves, presses two fingers to my father’s carotid artery, and checks for a pulse. Thirty silent seconds pass, and nothing.

He is finally gone.

All their attention returns to me. Ghost remains in the background as one of the new soldiers approaches with a pair of cuffs dangling from his hands. He doesn’t say anything as he closes the gap. The metal is cold around my wrists as the cuffs tighten and click into place.

I fight every urge to look at Ghost. All I want is the comfort of his eyes, to know everything will be all right. I can’t risk it, my every action is being monitored. Even the wrong kind of eye contact can be incriminating. How badly will they punish him? My stomach twists at the thought.

The masked man yanks me to my feet. My knees almost buckle with the unexpected pressure. A wave of dizziness washes over me and I nearly fall. I barely have time to adjust before the familiar black cloth bag is tugged over my head.

Darkness.

I’m reminded of how I was brought to 141 in nearly the same state. It feels like so much has changed and yet nothing is different. My whole life was burned to the ground, yet for them, this is just another day. I am merely a small blip on their radar, almost small enough to disregard completely, but not quite.

I hope I never see them again.

[whumpshaped]

a rather specific prompt for you :)

whumpee is/ was trained and used a a guard dog. during their time with their master they sustained an injury that causes them to not be able to fulfill their job properly anymore. still wounded, they get thrown out, chained in some allay. whumpee expects to die alone and cold, when caretaker comes along and accidentally stumbles across the abandoned whumpee. they (caretaker) think whumpee is just a regular pet and don’t realize they have a still dangerous guard dog at their feet and decide to rescue them and help them recover. whumpee has never experienced anything like this kindness, especially after becoming so useless, so (after having lost their old master) they immediately bond to caretaker as their new master, and would do anything to protect and please them

tw pet whump, amputation, abandonment, past trauma, broken bones, medical setting, caretaker new master, murder, gore, dehumanisation

"Oh, dear..." Caretaker crouched down by the shivering figure, putting the back of their hand against their forehead. They looked... half-dead, honestly, so the feverish warmth eminating from them was almost a relief. "Who did this to you...?"

The poor thing whined, and they reminded Caretaker of a wounded dog; but maybe that was just from how they were chained up. This was all so horrible.

"Okay, don't be scared. I'm gonna get you out of the alley and to a vet, alright? We'll get you all fixed up."

Another whine, and Caretaker suddenly realised there were other issues apart from the visible sickness. The pet's ankle... it was twisted in a way they'd never seen before. It was swollen, a mix of deep red and purple, bent in a way no healthy foot was supposed to.

"Oh... Oh, this is way worse than I thought, isn't it?" They immediately regretted the comment when the thing looked up at them with those wide, fearful eyes, probably expecting them to just give up now and leave them. "That's okay!" they added hastily. "It's okay. Nothing that can't be fixed! I... I hope... I'll call someone for help."

-

So they'd been wrong. Some things were in fact beyond saving, and Whumpee's foot turned out to be one of them. Amputation, prosthetics... Whumpee was handling it badly.

"I know," Caretaker soothed. "I know, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But it'll be better later on, I promise, the doctors know what they're doing."

Whumpee let out a soft whimper, a scared one, and Caretaker thought their heart was going to shatter even further. The pet hadn't uttered a single word yet, — maybe they couldn't? — but their face was expressive enough to make Caretaker tear up.

"I'll be here," they said gently. "Every step of the way, yeah? I'll be here for you. I'll help. We'll figure it out."

How? Caretaker didn't know. They weren't planning on adopting a pet, but... they couldn't just leave Whumpee alone after all this. They had an obligation, a responsibility.

If anything, Whumpee's awe-filled eyes just made them more determined.

-

"One foot in front of the other. Slowly. There you go."

Physical therapy was a lot, but Whumpee seemed dead set on achieving every goal weeks earlier than planned. The staff had said it would take four to eight weeks for Whumpee to be able to walk again... and many more before they fully got used to their artificial foot. They were out and about within two weeks, much to the dismay of said staff.

"They'll hurt themself," they'd said. "They should be resting."

"They're very eager to come home, I guess," Caretaker had replied awkwardly, but Whumpee had nodded along, completely serious.

So now they were walking along the corridors, Caretaker supporting Whumpee's weight less and less as they learned the ways and limits of their new life.

-

"I know it's not super fancy..." Caretaker opened the door and stood aside, motioning Whumpee inside. "But I guess it's... homey."

The pet surveyed their surroundings curiously, then turned back towards Caretaker with a bright smile. If they'd had a tail, Caretaker wagered they would've been wagging it.

It made them smile, too. "You like it?"

Whumpee nodded enthusiastically, walking over to the new pet bed Caretaker had bought just a week prior. They carefully set their belongings down next to it, — a shirt, a pair of pants, a pair of socks, and a collar — then made themself comfortable. Testing it out.

"I think we'll get along nicely," Caretaker commented absently. "I mean, I like you a lot. And you seem to like me. I don't see how this could go wrong."

-

Caretaker couldn't believe their eyes.

This couldn't be real.

Was that blood? Was that blood on Whumpee's clothes, and hands, and... face?

When the pet spotted them they immediately fell to their knees, whimpering in terror. They tried to wipe their hands on their victim's shirt, to no avail.

"Whumpee, what– what's– what's going on...?"

Whumpee was crying now, getting more and more desperate about ridding themself of the blood, as though that was the only evidence as to what they'd done. As though they could erase it all, if only they managed to erase the stains.

Caretaker walked closer, eyes wide with shock and horror. So much blood. So much gore.

Their sweet pet had done this?

"Why...?"

Whumpee scrambled to pick up some sort of equipment, struggling to hold it between bloody fingers. A lockpick, Caretaker noted distantly. They put it down on the floor in front of their feet, then quickly grabbed something else: a knife, this time. They put it next to the lockpick. Then they crawled back, flattening themself against the floor like a dog who knew it'd done something bad, whining as they waited for the verdict.

The stranger had been a burglar. Was it... self-defence? No, this had been a brutal murder.

"You're– you're a guard dog," Caretaker said softly, because they didn't think their voice could handle anything more. They got but a whimper in response. "This... Oh, dear. This is not... This is not good."

~

general drabbles taglist: @ashh-ed @whumpsday @whump-queen @the-scrapegoat @hidden-dreamland @rosewriteswhump @dismemberment-on-a-tuesday-night @whumpkinpie @delicateprincepaper @whumppmuhw @whump-em @cyborg0109 @morning-star-whump @justanotherlokifan @2in1whump @lthrboy @justletmereadmywhump @florissimps @anonymous-tiangou @whump-kitty

[twisted-wonderland-shenanigans]

I remember you mentioned humans are weird stuff, and the red eyes things that hans have when lights flashes to them

What about tails? Humans don't have tails and we balance quite well without one most of the time and our natural buoyancy in water, how would the monster au be when they learning from that

And to add something funny when they see our soft padded feet and our habit to grab stuff

Ooooh, lots of good fun stuff to explore here! >:3 It’s so much fun imagining non-humans reacting to human based things, let alone trying to figure out how and why we’re so biologically weird to them (join the club, boys, even we consider ourselves to be really weird when most of us don’t even know what half the organs in our bodies do)! 😆

The red eye effect I can imagine Cater discovering by pure accident (and subsequently accidentally throwing his phone in panic). 🤣

//Heartslabyul Lounge Room//

Cater: “Hey, Yuu! Let’s take a selfie together~!”

Yuu: “Uh…sure, but isn’t it a little dark in here?”

Cater: “Yeah, but that’s what camera flashes are for. Ace, Trey, get in here for a group selfie~!”

Ace: “Sure, I’m down!”

Trey: “I’d rather not, thank you.”

Cater: “Suit yourself. Say cheese~!”

Yuu and Ace: “Cheese!”

Click!

Cater: “Okay, let’s take a look and post i-GYAH!!!” *launches into the air with his wings and clings to the rafters, dropping his phone in the process*

Trey: “Cater?! What’s wrong??”

Cater: “What’s going on with your eyes in the pic, Yuu?!”

Yuu: *confused as they pick up his phone and stare at the picture* “Ah darn it, I hate the red eye effect.”

Ace: “The red eye what??” *peers over shoulder and shudders* “Dude. That…that’s creepy as hell!”

Yuu: “It happens when the camera flashes in low light. Don’t you guys experience red-eye in photos?”

Cater: “No! Or…well, maybe? We call it ‘silver eye’ or ‘white eye’ when the flash reflects off our pupils, but I’ve never seen it be red before! I don’t even know if the filter to remove the effect would even work on that…”

Trey: “I guess we managed to find yet another difference between monsters and humans.”

///

Once word got back to the researchers of this effect, they were able to realize that not only did humans lack the same reflective surface as monsters, but that the camera flash reflected the rich blood supply in the back of the eye. Depending on the eye color of the human in question, it would become more prominent in paler eye colors—a fact that soon tied into the rare phenomenon of certain canine and feline monsters with blue and green eyes having similar effects to their own eyes.

When it comes to tails, it comes as a surprise to the researchers that humans did in fact have a tail bone, yet evolutionally speaking, it didn’t serve any obvious purpose…on the surface. In reality, the tail bone served as a support to help Yuu sit. When compared to the other monsters, it seemed Yuu had better balance sitting on virtually any surface—including uneven ones. “Not that it’s always comfortable to do so,” as one researcher noted after seeing Yuu somehow find a decent spot on the bumpy rock with an uncomfortable expression on their face.

Now, as for the natural buoyancy in water (unless you’re someone who has a lot of muscle mass and struggles to stay afloat or someone who just doesn’t know how to swim at all), the monsters might find it quite a surprise to see Yuu just floating on their back in the pool. They might even think that one of the aquatic monsters was holding them up…only to discover that no, they were just…floating there. For no reason other than it was comfortable.

RIP the monsters’ nerves if Yuu were to do the “dead man’s float” in the pool. 😂

For the feet grab thing, I’d imagine this takes place shortly after the “hoof-shoe discovery” post here. >v>

///

Ace: “This is so weird.” *pokes the fleshy part of Yuu’s foot* “How do you guys even walk with these things? Doesn’t it hurt?”

Yuu: “Not unless we step on broken glass or shell shards and sharp rocks.” *squeaks when he pokes again and pulls foot back* “Hey, that tickles!”

Deuce: “It…tickles?”

Random Student: “Hey, hurry up! Coach says we need to clean up the field or he’ll make us run more laps.”

Ace: “Okay, okay, yeesh! You good, Yuu?”

Yuu: “Yeah, I’m good! I’ll just leave my shoes off for a bit. The grass feels really nice!”

Ace: “Seriously, how are you humans so weird?”

*The monster students gather the larger, heavier items while Yuu starts gathering the lighter and smaller pieces left behind until their arms are full and a cloth falls out of the pile*

Deuce: “Here, let me get that for you.”

Yuu: “No thanks, I got it.”

Ace: “You literally have your hands fu-”

Yuu: *uses one foot to grab the cloth, twisting their leg around until they can grab the cloth with their opposite hand and continues walking* “See? I got it!”

Ace: *stares with everyone else in shock and disbelief* “…seriously, why the fuck are humans so weird??”

///

And thus began a new Magicam challenge for monsters to try (that don’t have hooves of course…Cater assures everyone that an alternate challenge is currently in the works so he can participate as well): try and pick up random objects with your talons and put it in a box like a human! If you use your hands to grab them off the floor or you don’t get it within the time limit, you fail the challenge. It became an instant hit on Magicam, with many struggling to recreate the same prehensile motions that—so far—only avian monsters have been able to mimic.

I can just imagine the muscle cramps some might’ve gone through trying to do this challenge. 🤣

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Febuwhump Day 7 - Suffering in Silence

LU in Healthcare! Feat. Warriors and Legend, PTSD and difficulties with empathy and difficult patients

XXX

Warriors rolled his eyes as he heard the patient yelling.

Legend shot him a bemused, somewhat disconcerted look. "Look, I get people can be dramatic, but he is hurting."

"He bruised his hip," Warriors snapped. "I've seen the films. Literally nothing is broken. He has no medical history to denote that this is aggravating something that already exists. And he's screaming for the entire ER to hear. He needs to suck it up. I gave him an ice pack to hold him over until the pain meds get verified by the pharmacist, I'm not denying him anything, but this is excessive."

"Yes," Legend agreed as the man screamed again, making people pause and turn their heads. "It is excessive. But maybe he's never had a bruised bone before. They hurt. He's in pain. People express pain differently."

"Obviously," Warriors grumbled, rubbing his forehead as a headache developed with another yell from the room.

Legend watched him, his eyes becoming more discerning. "Link... just because you've been through some serious shit doesn't mean everyone else should understand that. I... I get that the military makes you build a tolerance, but not everyone goes through that."

Warriors paused, closing his eyes and trying to regulate his breathing as the patient hit the call bell.

"I... look, I can tell you're angry, and I can't really... understand why, but--"

"Because people here get to just make demands and expect us to wait on them hand and foot when others are dealing with so much worse and never ask for such things," Warriors snapped before he could stop himself.

Yes. This patient was in pain. Yes. He would treat said pain. It was cruel not to do so. But that wasn't the issue, it was the entitlement, the demands that came with it. I'm in pain, I can't reach something that's within reach. I'm in pain, give me food. Why can't I get fucking food? My mouth is so fucking dry and you're denying me that?! Warriors had heard it again and again, had explained multiple times to multiple people that if someone is going to get surgery they can't ingest anything or they might vomit and aspirate during surgery, he'd seen a grandmother with a broken hip politely deny pain medication and apologize for even needing to be there while others like this one made sure to let the entire world know he had a bruise.

Fuck. Warriors chewed on his lip. Civilian life was certainly different.

Legend huffed mildly. Although the army nurse expected some snippy remark, his friend instead bounced his eyebrows briefly and looked away. "Yeah, I get that." But then the travel nurse looked back at him, holding eye contact. "But you can't take it out on him."

He's still a person. He still deserves respect. He's in a rough spot and you know it.

Warriors sighed and nodded, walking away. He needed space to calm down, somewhere he couldn't hear the screaming.

The screaming. The agonizing screaming of his brothers-in-arms as they lost legs, as they bled to death with nothing he could do about it. The patient's yells pitched higher, morphing into a woman's yells instead, and Warriors felt his heart stop. His world shifted, he wasn't in an ER anymore, not in Castle Town, not in--

"Hey, looks like pharmacy verified the med," Legend said from the nurses' station. "I'll give him the medicine, okay?"

Warriors swallowed, leaning against the wall, counting to ten over and over and over. "Yeah. Okay."

[heartfullofleeches]

Tbh, a lot of my fascination of Erin has to do with his relationship with his Dad. Like how much does Theodore know of what's going on?

Does he notice the packages at the door and skirts and dresses in the laundry and just wonder if Erin is trying out a new style? Does he notice one of his button downs missing and Erin coming home wearing it and upset, and think he forgot about something going on at Erin's school?

Has he ever taken Erin to the hospital after he broke his ribs and then went to the school trying to find out who did it when Erin didn't tell him? Does he ever question Erin when he comes home with dried blood staining his clothes?

And if he does know about the nature of Erin and Reader's relationship, does he ever tell Erin to stop pursuing him because he doesn't like to see Erin hurt when he comes home?

(I would just love some more insight on how these two interact. The "Theodore sees Erin's burn scar" fic was *chef's kiss,* and I can't get enough of it.)

Theodore accepts everything his children do as long as it's consensual and (mostly) sane. He sees a lot of himself in Erin as both repressed their masochistic sides - Theodore, because he thought he was a freak for those desires and being with Caroline was pain enough and not in the way he'd like. Erin, because he's built up this tough guy persona and doesn't want to come off weak. Theodore is not totally oblivious to things going on, he just respects Erin's boundaries to a point. If he and Erin cross paths late at night when the latter is sneaking back in wearing his new skirt Theodore simply goes back to his room like nothing happened.

Theodore is conflicted when it comes to Erin's darling. Obliviously, not all fics have the same one so it's different. Theodore can tell his boy has found true love in you and that is enough to bring him to tears because thats all he wants for his kids. While Ben and Spencer showed interest in others as teens, Erin never really did and to see him bolt from the table when someone mentions your name makes Theodore grin like an idiot. He's hesitant to accept student council reader because of how harsh they are and will put his foot down if Erin comes home with broken bones. Creep reader is unsettling, but he was considered a freak before he got with Caroline and tries to get them to open up. Any shy/gentler darling and he's imagining what he'll wear to you and Erin's future wedding

All in all, Theodore eventually sits Erin down and tries to ease him into a talk about safety and the things he likes. He won't push anything, but if Erin has questions he wants him to come him first. He'll gladly buy Erin a shirt that fits him better and give him as much help as he can. Theodore doesn't know a lot about the dating scene since he's been mostly focused on his kids, but he'll do his research if it means it can make up for the time he wasn't there for his kid and make him happy

[steddiebang]

The World Ends With You

Author: @lihhelsing l Artist: @keikei_firefly l Artist: @verdiris Posting on Thursday, November 30

After the world ended and the undead creatures were everywhere, Steve Harrington survived by isolating himself. Completely alone in a house, he barely knows what to do when someone breaks in. Injured and alone, Eddie Munson slowly wins Steve’s trust as they navigate surviving together in the middle of the Apocalypse and their relationship grows into something Steve can’t quite understand. But just as he has his share of secrets, Eddie has some of his own and this might be enough to get in the way of whatever they were building together.

Keep reading for a sneak preview!

It took a bit of time for Eddie Munson to be on his feet. 

Or maybe foot was more accurate. Steve was honestly shocked Eddie had been able to stand like that, let alone walk for who knew how long. 

He would definitely need to take a closer look and he already knew he was completely out of his depth. He had seen broken bones and crushed limbs on his mother’s medical books but he never saw it in real life. That was still the best shot Eddie had so it would have to do. 

Steve also knew what he was about to say was a douche thing, but one could never be too careful. 

“I need you to strip down,” he said and there it was again, the weird sound Eddie made when he laughed. It ringed in Steve’s ears and tingled his brain. 

“Woah, Harrington. Guy’s usually pay at least for a coffee first, but I can’t say I’m opposed to the idea,” Eddie answered easily, a grin splayed across his face. Steve stared and stared and he was afraid he was blushing but the dark should still conceal his face. “Oh, you’re serious.” 

“Deadly,” Steve added and let the word hang between them. 

Death had taken a new meaning for Steve after everything. You didn’t just throw the word around like a joke anymore like ‘Oh I’m dying to eat chocolate muffins’. It felt especially disrespectful now that death walked the earth. 

Eddie bit his lower lip like he was thinking about it. 

“If you’re not going to strip I can show you the exit,” 

“Harsh, man. It’s been a while since I’ve made a show of undressing in front of a guy. Gimme a minute, will you?” 

x

When they were done Eddie did his bit cleaning everything up and they went into the living room. Eddie lay on the couch and pulled from under his pillow a hardcover book Steve had never seen before. He looked up at Steve and there was a glint in his eyes. 

“I was just going to start this one and I thought I could… Nevermind, that’s stupid.” Eddie shrugged his shoulders and held the book close to his chest. He was, once again, shirtless. Steve had stayed awake too many nights watching the way Eddie’s pale skin glowed with the moonlight. He was shameless. 

Steve leaned on the chair, his back already twisting in an unpleasant way. 

“You could what?” He asked and Eddie pressed his lips together. 

“I could read it for us. Out loud, I mean.”

Steve blinked, watching him as if Eddie had grown another head. He had never been one to read much, one of the many ways he disappointed his father. Steve found it was hard to concentrate on a book for too long but he always liked when his mother read to him. 

“Forget it,” Eddie said at the same time Steve said “Ok.”

“Yeah? You really want to? You’re not saying that just so you don’t hurt my feelings?”

Steve chuckled. “No. Maybe. A story seems nice, actually. What’s the book?”

Eddie turned it in Steve’s direction and he could barely see the name printed. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

“It’s one of my favorites of all time. There are so many things he says in this book that stuck with me. There’s so much truth and hurt inside of it.”

“Sounds nice,” Steve said, because it really did. “Can I… Do you mind if I lie next to you? That way I can hear you and you don’t have to shout.”

“Be my guest, Stevie. It will be just like a slumber party,” Eddie wiggled his eyebrows and Steve rolled his eyes pretending to be annoyed. The truth was Steve’s hearing wasn’t the best, courtesy of years playing sports in high school and getting head injuries. He hadn’t admitted that to Eddie because he had never admitted it to anyone but Eddie seemed so excited about the book Steve didn’t really want to miss anything. 

He put his pillow and some blankets on the floor and he lied, close enough he could touch Eddie if he just reached out his hand. 

“Can I tell you one of my favorite quotes from this book?” Eddie asked and Steve just nodded. The moment felt charged as if Eddie was about to show his soul to Steve. “'Some things are more precious because they don’t last long'.” 

Steve blinked. He looked up at Eddie and he wasn’t sure if that was just a nice citation or maybe a foreshadowing of them. He felt like they were living in a bubble that could burst at any moment and Steve wasn’t really ready for it. It seemed Eddie wasn’t ready either. 

He had to fight the urge to argue about it. To say that some things lasted a long time and were precious and good. Instead, Steve put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He could feel Eddie was looking at him and he knew that was happening more and more, and every day they seemed to be less worried about not being caught. 

Steve opened his eyes and there it was, those two brown eyes watching him curiously, as if Steve was a puzzle Eddie wanted to decipher. They held each other’s gaze for a minute before Eddie adjusted himself back on the couch and opened the book on the first line. 

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfum of the pink-flowering thorn.”

Eddie’s voice was velvety and smooth as he dove into the book and soon Steve was deep down in the story, feeling how every word tickled his brain in a way reading a book had never managed to do to him. He fought sleep for as long as he could and when he finally lost the battle he dreamed of flower scented gardens, precious things and deep brown eyes. 

Read more on November 30!

[bazaarwords]

Warrior nun prompt where Ava and Beatrice spar and Ava accidentally goes too hard and hurts Beatrice?

this one is actually a combination of this ask and another one: "the halo reacting to beatrice" — thank you both, anons!

-

Ava never wants to take her life for granted. Never wants to forget the feeling—well, maybe that’s it. The feeling of everything. Physically, of course, but even though she’d lain with her thoughts and her emotions and they’d once been her whole world, there’s something new about the way things feel now.

The problem with gratefulness is that there’s so much going on now that she never really has the time to sit with her new normal.

Now—as she dodges a punch that could probably break anywhere between one and ten of her bones—doesn’t seem like the best time to be contemplating.

“Woah!” She laughs, trying to keep her defenses intact. “I like all of my bones in my body!”

Beatrice just shakes her head, but Ava knows she’s won—maybe not the war, but the battle—there’s a smile there that’s almost impossible to notice. Ava notices.

“You’ll heal,” Beatrice says, and Ava’s just glad she’s entertaining her. “Focus, Ava.”

She is focusing. Mostly. Kind of.

They’ve been at this for the better half of the morning, but there’s a beautiful view to contend with (two, if Ava is as honest with herself as she should be,) and the clear water is tempting her. She’s so fucking sweaty. If she could just get a little break, maybe she could convince Bea to hop in too. The idea winds itself around her limbs, tries to drag her in.

Come into the water, the thought wafts around her head like she’s in a cartoon. “Can we go swimming after this? Just for a tiny little bit?”

Beatrice doesn’t answer the question, just tells Ava to focus again.

Ava doesn’t have the option to be distracted for a moment longer, because Bea is suddenly in her space, hooking a leg around her knee with a speed that wouldn’t make sense if it was anyone else. As she does this, it’s as if time slows down. Bea’s face is maybe an inch away. She’s got Ava’s leg in a position that would compromise her footing, but—Ava’s more concerned with their proximity, how she can feel the flex and release of the muscles in Bea’s thigh—

They’ve been at this for hours. Why now? Why is her body choosing to react right now—

It is an embarrassing combination of emotions that does it. The closeness, the way Beatrice moves, the thought of dragging her into the water—all of it gathers at the point between her shoulder blades, and the Halo does the rest.

The pulse is strong enough to send Bea reeling, and Ava can neither measure nor mitigate the damage. They go flying in opposite directions, Ava directly into the water she’s been dreaming of. Not—obviously—like this.

Ava sputters, coughing up pond water in the shallows. “Bea?” When she sees her, in a pile at the bottom of a tree, Ava’s never moved faster. “Beatrice?”

There’s a long, gnarly gash along Bea’s arm, and she’s knocked out and fuck fuck what the fuck, Ava?

“Bea!” She’s got her hands on Bea now, gently shaking her. Nothing—“Fuck. Beatrice. Come on, come on.”

This is the work of someone too stupid to be allowed in the presence of others. This is the kind of shit Bea’s been trying to train out of her, and here she is, trying to shake awake the badass who’s only job is to help her and she can’t get her shit together for five minutes—

“Ow.”

“Bea!” Again, stupid, Ava gathers Beatrice up like a sack of injured flour and squeezes her until she thinks better. “Shit. Sorry, sorry. God, Bea, I’m so sorry I—your arm.”

She’s on the verge of tears now, willing to perform any kind of penitence for quite possibly the first time in her life. Hail Mary’s, flagellation—anything.

“I’ve certainly had worse,” Beatrice says through a wince, trying to sit up against the tree. She sucks in a sharp breath as she leans against the trunk. “Although–I may have broken something.”

“Oh my God. I am so, so sorry, I—“ she doesn’t even know what to say.

While she’s at a loss, however, going through the motions as Beatrice remains intelligent and competent and asks for her help staving off the bleeding on her arm, the Halo seems to know exactly what to do. Its glow is so powerful that it bathes them both in light that eclipses even the noonday sun. This one, however, keeps them right where they are.

When she blinks away the brightness, Beatrice’s arm is… totally fine.

“Strange,” Bea says, a little wistful, turning her arm back and forth. She gets up, nowhere near as careful as she’d just been. She moves around, unhindered. “You healed me.”

“Yeah, but. I also smashed you against a tree.”

Beatrice looks between Ava and her arm with the kind of sharp focus that would make Ava a little weak in the knees if she wasn’t already sitting. She offers a hand and helps Ava up, which, if she hadn’t just accidentally managed to heal all of Beatrice’s wounds, would make her feel completely useless. She’d wounded her in the first place, so. Six and one-half dozen. She still doesn’t feel great.

“We should look into this. If we can hone it—Ava, this could turn the tide in our favor.” Ava agrees, completely, wholeheartedly. But right now? She feels like she’s just run an emotional marathon. Beatrice, to her everlasting credit, seems to pick up on this. “Before that, how about a break?”

“A break—I don’t think the Halo healed your concussion. You want to take a—“

“Swimming?” Beatrice suggests, making off for the shore.

Maybe she’s been run over by an imaginary steamroller, but even now, even as she’s watching Beatrice toe her sneakers off and hop into the lake in her workout clothes, she’s feeling. The earth under her feet, the uncomfortable press of her wet shirt on her back, the relief at Bea’s state, and something else, something soft and gentle.

So she slogs right in after Bea, and she feels every moment of it.

[hirazuki]

For Now [Chapter 12 snippet]

Sasori/Haruno Sakura, Sasori & Haruno Sakura | T | Blank Period | canon divergent | angst, hurt/comfort, enemies to friends | ongoing [AO3]

•────────────────────⋅☾ ☽⋅────────────────────•

“Hand,” Sasori demands, holding out his own towards her, palm up.

It’s a day off for Sakura, and they are lounging on the couch after another healing session. The progress is slow, as expected, but more whole than she had dared to hope, and evident in the steadily growing precision and strength of his chakra threads when he periodically tests them – usually on her. 

She’s absentmindedly flicking through TV channels and he’s sitting only a foot or so away, close enough to practically lie across if she extends her legs to the side from where she has them curled up in front of her, reading the latest inter-village pharmaceutical bulletin that came in for her at the hospital yesterday, which he pilfered from the stack of paperwork that she left on the living room table. Like most things she brings home, it’s confidential, as he well knows, but that’s never stopped him from helping himself; it’s never stopped her from not stopping him, either – though, she thinks distantly, she probably should, professionally-speaking.

Instead, she’s been silently encouraging this behavior with her unspoken permission, happy to see him increasingly curious about the post-war world around him, and discreetly admiring how healthy he looks compared to even a week ago, nevermind when he first arrived. 

His complexion has become bright and even – and the fact that, after everything he’s put his body through, his skin is still so much better than hers is both medically fascinating and extremely unfair – his previously lifeless hair is back to being the vivid splash of color that used to stain her dreams, and his nails are neatly shaped, no longer broken and brittle. The hollows between his bones are filling out and, though he’s still all hard angles, it is now primarily due to his build. His eyes, too, have been different, dull blades slowly being resharpened and glinting with that dangerous intelligence that she’s finally had to admit to herself she enjoys, as he engages with more and more things, allowing them to catch his interest. 

The subsequent fuzzy warmth that blooms inside of her and worms its way through her body is something that she determinedly attributes to satisfaction with his healing – a job well done on her part, especially for how experimental it’s been; after all, who else can say that they’ve rebuilt someone’s entire chakra network? – and not to pleasure at witnessing how boneless with content he seems, after more than a lifetime of being strung-out. Hypervigilance is something all shinobi struggle with, of course, but she’s found that Suna-nin are a particularly bad case; Gaara-kun, for instance, despite the years, still has trouble sleeping.

Sakura looks at the other redhead currently in her life, and on her couch, and raises a brow.

Sasori sighs, somewhat dramatically, but humors her. “Hold out your hand,” he amends.

[ghastlybin]

Hewo my dear, may i request a jiu fluff, maybe has crutches but didnt tell jiu to no worry her, but then when jiu pay visits after work welp- just fluff and cuddles perhaps? I do understand if this is too boring to write tho

Heyoooo, thank you for requesting 💜💜 I really appreciate you and your support :))) it’s not boring also, and as weird as it sounds, I gave myself butterflies writing this 💀💀 thanks for fueling my ego (joking joking) much love though :)

Pairing: Jiu x Reader

Word count: 855

Genre/contents: fluffy fluffy I’m not always evil but there’s minimal angst? If you consider it angst lol

Note: I’M SO SORRY I’M LATE LETS GOOOOOOO- also I’ve never broken a bone before so I’m sorry if I sound like a netflix tv show writer that’s trying to relate to teens here, but rest assured, I know how to break a bone.

I wanna D word for her.

It was only an accident.

Just a moment of clumsiness on your part but still, you had to make a trip to the hospital.

The sidewalk shouldn’t have been in the way, you thought.

You rolled your eyes, seeing the cast wrapped around your ankle.

Yeah, it’s the sidewalk’s fault for not having an even path.

It’s the sidewalk’s fault you fell and fracture your ankle so bad that you needed a cast.

You never told Minji. Just that you tripped and only went to the hospital because you wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to get worse.

Half of a truth but also half of a lie.

“Hey, it’s good you weren’t hurt but you really need to be careful!” Minji spoke through the phone. You could tell how worried she was just by her tone.

She only found out because of a video someone took of you falling.

You were glad the video did not show you in pain. Worrying Minji was the last thing you wanted.

In fact, it wasn’t even on the list of things you wanted to do.

“I’m okay! It really wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.” You tried to reassure her.

“That is not the point! You are wearing bubble wrap next time you go out!” By Minji’s tone, she was still pretty concerned about you.

“Oh, sorry I have to go, I love you!” Minji then hung up the call, leaving you in silence as you sat on the couch, your leg propped up to the side.

You stared at her contact after she hung up. It wasn’t like you could avoid her for about six weeks and you knew you would eventually have to tell her what really happened.

Even if it meant wearing bubble wrap out in public.

You cheered up at the thought of having to walk around covered in bubble wrap because of your worried girlfriend.

You knew she wouldn’t be home until the next day due to her busy schedule, so you tried to make the most of it by watching the television and dozing off after so long from the growing boredom of just sitting around.

You have napped for about two hours before you were awoken by a knock on the front door. You sat up and gathered your crutches under your armpits as you stood to your feet- Or more accurately: One good foot and one broken foot.

Minji usually ordered food for you when she’d be away from home, despite the kitchen already being stocked. She stated that she liked being able to take care of you without being by your side every second of the day.

That’s what you assumed to be waiting behind the door. Dinner.

Instead, you were greeted by an excited Minji- whose grin slowly drooped into a worried frown when she saw you had crutches and a cast on your ankle.

“Surprise…” You spoke on instinct, though there was nothing to surprise her with.

In fact, she was the one surprising you by being home early. She even brought the food you originally thought about.

You agonized over what you said, squeezing your eyes shut.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Minji asked, carefully entering the house and helping you back to the couch regardless of if you already had gotten the hang of using your crutches or not.

You let out a sigh, knowing you’d have to be completely honest now.

“I didn’t want to worry you,” You answered truthfully, your eyes lingering elsewhere as you felt more and more nervous. “I thought if you knew while you were working, you would’ve had a hard time.”

“Oh, honey! You should’ve told me! I could’ve been there with you!” Minji placed her palm against your cheek, her thumb rubbing against it in side to side movements.

“I didn’t want you to get in trouble with your company.” You placed your hand over hers. Minji tilted her head as her eyes were fully focused on you.

“I’m here now. Anything I can get you? Or do for you?” She asked. She still had a worried expression on her face but she began to ease up, lovingly staring at you, listening to you, everything about you made her feel at ease after her long day at work. Even though were hurt, there was no where else she would rather be.

“Well, I do love your cuddles.” You boldly stated with a smirk playing on your lips. Minji let out a string of giggles, nodding.

“I can do that.” She helped you get into a cuddling position that would be easy on your ankle, her arms holding you tightly on the couch as your head was laid against her shoulder with your arms around her as well.

You two laid there for a while, forgetting about the dull pain on your ankle as she stroked your hair in a comfortable silence.

“By the way,” Minji spoke in a soothing tone that had always made you feel safe when you two would cuddle. You hummed, allowing her to continue.

“You’re still wearing bubble wrap next time.”

[farfromstrange]

Foreigner's God: Chapter 55

Main Masterlist | Series Masterlist

Pairing: Matt Murdock x OFC

Chapter Summary: She moves back in with Tony, Pepper and Happy at Avengers Compound. Her decision to prioritize her recovery over the man she loves weighs heavy on her shoulders, and now she has to push through. The question is just, will it help or will it further break her (and possibly Matt, too)?

Warnings: ANGST, mentions of addiction, mental illness, therapy, lots of crying, Eliza's POV

Word Count: 5.8k

A/n: And I am back! I am so sorry for the long ass hiatus and irregular updates, but I have really struggled with this series. It took me longer than usual to write this chapter, so the next ones will also be coming very irregularly until I've figured out how to make my vision come to life. I just wanted to set the scene for this new storyline with this chapter. There's going to be more plot in the future. I just had to start somewhere.

Read Chapter 55: Why am I like this? here on AO3!

The Avengers Compound had become a foreign place to her. She never thought she would move back to where it all began. The most defining years of her life held their roots in those four walls. 

When Eliza first stepped through the door, she contemplated whether or not she had made the right choice. Leaving Matt had left a gaping hole in her chest.

Things weren’t moving forward and she was losing herself. She couldn’t risk hurting him again the same way she had before. Her last relapse had to remain the last. Her heart was heavy, but sometimes, she remembered Natasha telling her, it is necessary to choose yourself. 

“Ah,” Tony greeted her with open arms when she arrived, “The prodigal daughter returns!”

Eliza rolled her eyes, but a soft, exhausted smile still found its way to her lips regardless. “Hey,” she greeted him back. 

Pepper stood next to him. She looked almost relieved to see her again, and unlike Tony, she didn’t care much about her personal space. Her arms wrapped around her, engulfing her in a bone-crushing hug.

“Welcome back,” her breath tickled her ear, her voice remaining barely above a whisper. “We missed you around here,” she said. 

She expected to hear that. Nothing was the same without you. That sentence alone felt too much like standard practice for her to take it seriously, but Eliza forced a smile nonetheless. Pepper never did anything wrong. She couldn’t help who she was, and she didn’t want her to change either. It offered a welcome distraction. 

It was only a temporary fix, she kept telling herself. A temporary solution to resolve a bigger problem. She had a disease and her own fair share of trauma, but it could be managed. She had to be open. She had to allow others to help her. And she had to put herself first for once in her life. 

Setting foot into her old room for the first time proved to be… strange, to say the least. She walked right into a wall of nostalgia. It twisted in her chest, wrapping its greedy claws around her heart and pulling—hard. 

The bed had been neatly made by someone who cared about her and her comfort, most probably Pepper. The clothes she had left before she moved out lay on the mattress. Neatly folded with a few of her favorite chocolates on top. She let out a breath she didn’t realize she had been holding. 

She remembered all the tears she shed in that very bed. The times she had laughed with Natasha by her side, painting her nails and hoping, praying, that it would last. It didn’t. It was never meant to last. The family she’d once had broke apart and she found herself standing in the ashes of what once had been with bare feet and broken glass. 

Eliza's fingertips grazed the surface of the dresser, tracing over the faint marks she'd left behind—signs of a past that was simultaneously too distant and painfully recent. Tattoos of a life she had long left behind. 

She carried the reminders of her past on her skin every day, but skin isn’t the only organ capable of holding scars. A home can suffer and inflict scars the same way the human body does, it’s just never as obvious. 

Her eyes lingered on the framed photo of her friends—her family—their faces frozen in a moment when they believed they could conquer anything. They won once; back then, they believed if they could save New York City from an army of aliens, they could do anything. They could survive anything. Tony formed and shaped an amazing team of misfits who had never considered working together before. One day, one unfortunate event, and they became a family. 

Eliza hesitated before unfolding the pile of clothes. She ran her fingers over the familiar texture of the fabric. She didn’t remember the last time she consciously thought about what she was going to wear or what impression she would make on the people around her. It had been a while since she cared about anything other than surviving—a while since family had still somewhat mattered. 

It had all turned into a scrambled mess where priorities no longer remained straight.

The door creaked open. “Hey,” Happy poked his head in, “Need anything?” he asked. 

She wasn’t sure how to answer that. “Just… time,” she said, offering a small, appreciative smile. Happy nodded, but he didn’t move from his spot in the doorframe.

He took a deep breath. A beat of silence followed, and then, “In case I haven’t told you before, I’m really glad you’re here, kid.”

“Thank you.”

He had told her that before, but it didn’t hurt to hear it again.

“I know it wasn’t an easy choice to make, but I think… I think you made the right one. You deserve a break. And this place is your home. You’re always welcome here. We love you,” he said.

His words sounded distant. She could hear him, but she struggled to believe him. If she’d truly made the right choice, why was it hurting so much? It was her choice. She knew what she was getting herself into. Or maybe, just maybe, she didn’t.

This time, when she didn’t answer, Happy pushed himself off the door frame. He left her without another word. He told her everything he could, and she was well aware that there was nothing Happy wouldn’t do for her. Right now though, she needed peace. Nothing more. 

Once the door shut behind him, she inhaled a deep breath. 

Eliza had packed her bags with what little belonged to her. It wasn’t much. She left more of her heart behind than her belongings, and perhaps her scent that still lingered in the walls of Matt’s apartment.

While packing, she had made sure to sneak one of Matt’s shirts into her luggage. It smelled like him, and she needed something to remind her that he was still real. That he was still there, even if he wasn’t directly by her side. 

Being wise, making the right choice—being a human being with feelings proved to be so much harder than she expected. 

The need to make her guilt so much worse rose from the ashes of her tendency to self-destruct. That tendency was a phoenix, and it would never truly die, no matter how many times she set it on fire to get rid of it. There was no way out of the spiral except for her to play along with it. 

As she stared out of the windows of her room in the now-empty Avengers Compound, the tears relentlessly began to burn their way out of her eyes. 

She clung to the necklace around her neck, Matt’s initial on the puzzle piece that represented their love. She never took it off, not even to shower. She promised him as much when he gifted it to her. He was a part of her, and the necklace was proof of that. 

Her fingers traced the delicate Braille on the pendant. Thanks to him, she knew what it meant. She knew a few things now. She remembered the alphabet, but reading it was different. He had tried to teach her once, but she got distracted by his fingers stroking over the paper, and then they never continued. 

Thanks to Matt, the world started looking differently. She started viewing it differently. She no longer only relied on her sight but on the other four senses as well, sometimes even more than that. He taught her what it was like to laugh again, to smile, and to actually mean it. He made everything a little lighter. He made her forget. 

But, and she had to remind herself of that, forgetting isn’t dealing with the problem at hand, and she could no longer just forget. She had to work through her issues. Matt made life and the suffering linked to it a little easier, but she had taken the bliss that came with it for granted. The bliss of ignorance, so to speak. She ignored the warning signs, and she might have caused permanent damage to herself. 

There was no time, she kept telling herself. There was no time to focus on herself with everything going on around her. After meeting Matt, she found a piece of herself that had long gotten lost. She found the thrill in the chase again. In the process, she found herself and who she truly was. She found her past. She pushed through it. Perhaps she pushed a little too much.

Recovery is a process that the affected person needs to be okay with, something they need to want, but Eliza pushed it all aside in the hopes that Matt’s love would magically turn her okay, that it would turn her normal; she had been foolish to think that love could heal all her emotional wounds, and that just a little therapy that she way too often neglected could fix her, and now her foolishness was coming to bite her in the ass.

Leaving Matt behind though was one of the hardest things she ever had to do. 

It all happened so fast yet passed by in slow-motion. Only a few hours ago, she had still been in his arms. Now, she was alone. And the moment she stepped through the door of his apartment and left remained ingrained in her mind, probably forever. She wasn’t sure if she would ever not feel guilty about it. She shattered his heart. It had been so obvious even though he tried to hide it, and she blamed herself for doing it. The pain was eating her alive. 

Her eyes closed and the last minutes at Matt’s apartment replayed over and over again like a bad movie. 

Eliza woke up with him by her side, but that very feeling of relief washed over into emptiness. She was exhausted, tired beyond compare, while Matt’s chest had never felt more alive with the pain that seemed to burn through every muscle and every fiber of his being. He had to listen to her heavy breaths as she packed everything she kept in his apartment, and the sound alone made him want to scratch his eyes out. 

It tainted his heart and his mind. Hell seemed so close yet so far away. This had to be a cruel cycle concocted by God himself to make him suffer for all that he did because it wasn’t fair. The world wasn’t fair. 

Eliza dropped her bags on the dining table. The nagging feeling she harbored inside was a mixture of guilt and shame. She only hesitantly looked up to meet his eyes. She wished to be able to take back what she said or what they did the night before, but she couldn’t. 

They both knew that giving in for the sake of not being apart was no way to approach this. In the end, they were both masochists. 

He cleared his throat into the thick silence that hung over their heads, ready to bring the knife down on them. “Uh, did you pack your hairbrush?” Matt swallowed the lump in his throat. “It’s just that… well, you always forget your hairbrush,” he said. 

She nodded. “First thing I packed.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah,” she said. 

He reached for the orange capsule on the fridge. “Don’t forget your pills.”

Their fingers brushed when Matt handed the medication to her. Electricity coursed through her veins. She took the capsule only to set it down and take his hand in hers. “I’m sorry,” was all Eliza could whisper back to him. 

“Stop apologizing,” he said. 

“I feel like I have to.”

“No, you have nothing to apologize for.”

Matt tugged her closer, brushing a strand of hair out of her face. She squeezed his hand. He could feel her pulse drumming against his sensitive skin. 

“I love you,” he leaned down, his lips ghosting over her forehead, “and that won’t ever change.”

She leaned into the kiss. “I love you too.” 

He held her steady with his hand on the back of her head. The world didn’t have anything on her. She couldn’t deny that she was safest in his arms and that anything beyond that seemed impossible to master without him, but that was precisely the problem. 

She was dependent on him and by doing so, she forced him into a state of co-dependency because he felt responsible for her. He cared, sometimes too much. She couldn’t blame him. She had often enough posed a danger to herself in the past. Their relationship was anything but healthy. They kept continuously hurting each other. Eliza couldn’t do that to him anymore. Matt deserved a chance to heal just as much as she did, possibly even more. She wasn’t doing this to be selfish; she was doing it for him.

The ringing of the doorbell broke them apart, followed by a soft knock. With a heavy heart, Eliza grabbed her bags. Happy greeted them at the door. He looked happy, relieved almost. She was coming home, something he had never thought possible ever since she first moved out of the compound into her apartment. 

The second her name had popped up on Tony’s phone, they knew something was wrong. She had told them that she needed a place to stay, a support system, a chance to work through all that happened, rekindle old relationships, and simply get the therapy she needed in a secluded space that was far away from the mess she came out of. She couldn’t control everything at once, no matter how hard she tried. The chaos she used to control became a distraction. 

Tony saw it as an opportunity to fix their relationship in person, and Happy was simply happy that she chose to ask for help instead of running herself to the ground again. He couldn’t bear losing her. 

When he saw Matt’s pained expression though, he felt bad. He had become somewhat of a friend to him, someone he talked to from time to time, someone who loved Eliza even more dearly than anyone else in her life, it seemed, and Happy was endlessly grateful to him. 

But Eliza made her decision and she usually got what she wanted, even though this time her decision was a plausible one and the people around her had never been more willing to get her what she wanted. 

Happy took the bags from her. He took a few steps back, leaving the couple room to say goodbye. It was the least he could do. 

Standing in the doorway, Eliza took Matt’s hand again. His grip grew impossibly tight. He snaked his arm around her waist and pulled her flush against his chest. There was a hickey on her throat that pulsated from the night before. He had marked her up well enough to last for a few days, but it was only a small victory that felt less like something positive now than something he dreaded. 

The blood rushed under her skin. Her heart thudded relentlessly against her ribs. The hesitation in her eyes was evident even to him, and he wanted nothing more than to pull her back into the apartment and lock the door. 

“I’ll come back,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She tried to convince them both, it seemed. “I promise, I’ll come back.”

He sniffled, pressing his forehead against hers. He breathed her in. She showered with his body wash again, and even washed her hair with his shampoo. The clothes were undoubtedly hers, but the scents that mixed on her skin with the memory of the intimacy of the night before overwhelmed him. 

“You have to let me go, Matt.”

“I know,” he choked out, “I just don’t want to.”

She caught one of his tears with her finger. “I’m gonna miss you.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”

“I wish things weren’t as fucked up as they are so I could stay, but I can’t…”

“I know,” he shushed her. “I know, sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m not blaming you.”

Eliza swallowed the sob that lay on her tongue. She stood on her tiptoes and captured his lips in a bruising kiss. 

She pulled away after a moment. As she caught her breath, she looked into his teary eyes with tears of her own. “You have to let me go, Matt,” Eliza repeated. 

His head dropped into the crook of her neck. Matt made a sound of disapproval. 

The sniffle didn’t go unnoticed, and he smelled the salt in the air. “Please, baby,” she said again. “Don’t make it harder than it already is.”

Her words fell on deaf ears. Ears that were overwhelmed along with his other senses. Matt was tied to the stake and being burned alive. At least that was how it felt to him. Letting her go, his mind told him, was a death sentence to everything he had grown to hold so dear. He was afraid of losing her.

The sob rolling off of Matt’s lips got muffled through the fabric of her shirt. 

“Let me go,” she stroked a hand through his hair, trying to pull him back, “Please.”

His grip tightened around her waist. “I can’t,” he said. 

“You have to,” she repeated. “You have to let me go, Matthew.” Her voice grew more stern, even though the softness remained. She tried her hardest not to let the tears win.

Matt continued hiding his face in her neck. He wasn’t sure what he expected his pathetic attempt to stop her from leaving would bring him, but there was something about her warmth that made him feel like he couldn’t live without it, so he could not, for the life of him, let her go. It was impossible. 

He was paralyzed, his fingers stiff as they dug into her hips through the shirt she was wearing. Her heart heaved with sobs and he wanted nothing more than to make her feel better. He could fix her, he just needed her to stay. The thought kept rolling like a defective movie tape, and it drove him further into the river of insanity. Or, it felt like insanity, anyway. 

He couldn’t fix her. There was nothing to fix, only to heal, and he wasn’t strong enough for the both of them. He was broken too, and that was no place for her to get better. He would drive her into doing things she wasn’t stable enough for over and over again, and then he would lose her. Permanently.

She pressed her lips against his ear. “I’m gonna be okay, I promise. We’re gonna be okay, but I have to go. You know I have to go. So please, let me go. Just let me go.”

The pleading tone of her voice gave him the last push and he fell off the cliff to his certain death. He pulled away, his hands still resting on her waist, but he wasn’t holding onto her anymore. 

Eliza reached out to wipe his tears. “I love you, Matthew,” she breathed. 

“Yeah,” he sniffled, “I love you too.”

She chose not to say much more. Their hands remained entwined until she was too far away for their arms to keep up, and then their connection faded away. 

Her heartbeat disappeared into the distance. She took his heart with her, leaving him with a gaping hole in his chest, but the pain was nothing compared to the weight of the world on his shoulders. She left and as the door closed, his colorful world soon turned to gray. 

Eliza threw one last look over her shoulder, then got into the car. Happy asked her if she was okay, but she waved him off. “Just drive,” she said. 

And he drove away. 

Eliza sniffled. The memory was like a fresh wound that kept reopening every time she as much as thought about him. The tears cascaded down her cheeks with no intention of stopping. 

She slid the pendant back into the cleavage of her shirt, making sure it would stay hidden from curious eyes. “No,” she whispered to herself. It hurt too much to think even more about it. 

She needed hope. Hope kept her going. Even if it was slowly dying, it gave her a purpose. It gave her something to look forward to—something worth fighting for. Matt was worth fighting for. She left him when he needed her the most, so now she had to get better to take that role back as soon as she could. The way she had been before, she was of no use to him or Daredevil. 

Daredevil needed his Angel, after all, but she was in no shape to be her alter ego right now. Loss of control, in her case, could prove fatal. She wasn’t going to risk that either.

The agreement she made with Tony for her recovery was clear. She would move back into the compound, she would work for him, and let him keep her occupied, and she had to go to therapy two times a week for two full hours at the compound with Mrs. Darcy. 

Eliza wasn’t allowed to leave the premises without an escort. It brought her back to her first relapse all those years ago after she had gotten clean. This time, she only came terrifyingly close, but that was enough to require drastic measures. She was unstable, that much was true. She brought this isolation upon herself by agreeing to forego inpatient treatment for someplace that felt a little more like home. 

She was starting to regret that decision now. 

No contact with Matt, no vigilante duties, and besides the occasional training sessions, she wasn’t allowed to use her powers in any capacity to protect both herself and the people around her until she was more in control of her mind again. 

Her fingers itched, but Eliza knew she was in no place to do anything with it without seriously putting the people around her at risk. While her mental health deteriorated, her powers grew stronger, which made them unpredictable. She used what little common sense she had left to justify the decisions and make it easier—to no avail. 

She thought back to when Stephen Strange tried to lock her away in his castle to control what she was born with. He hadn’t come back since, but she didn’t trust the peace. He let her go. For someone so afraid of what she could do, he was awfully quiet now. At least at the compound, she was safe. No one other than Matt and Foggy needed to know about the encounter. 

Her mind felt scrambled with all the different thoughts and memories that started to come back up in the quiet of her old room. The nostalgia threatened to suffocate her. She agreed to a treatment plan that was almost the same as if she had taken herself to the psych ward; somehow the familiar space turned into a noose in the few hours she had already been there, and Eliza slowly began to worry about whether or not she had made the right decision by upending her life and coming here. 

How was she supposed to stay away from the man she loved? How was she supposed to go without a phone call or a text now that her electronic devices had been sophisticated? And how was she supposed to learn how to live a normal life if she found herself secluded from that life? She knew that she needed control to stay sober, but it didn’t seem fair that everyone agreed to keep her away from civilization on her own until two weeks had passed, at least. 

But she was in a bad place, she could admit that. And people in a bad place don’t always know what is best for them. 

Looking down at her shaking fingers, she balled them into a fist. Her lips pursed. The cravings didn’t stop with a change of scenery. They didn’t even fully go away with sex. They were relentless little bastards.

She went to Josie’s that night, and she didn’t take the drink she ordered because she remembered what she promised when she first went clean weeks ago, but she was so close—too close. And the cravings remained. They were there and they were painfully prominent.

She could still feel Viktor’s blood on her skin. She could hear the shots in the back of her head. She could feel the air leaving her lungs, the panic attack, and the sirens of the ambulance as she was taken away. She almost got justice for what had been done to her and so many other little girls and the Punisher took that opportunity away from her. 

Viktor had deserved to suffer. In the end, he died, and death was too kind for a man like him. 

Part of Eliza wondered if her powers could turn back time. Stephen Strange had the time stone. She felt connected to it, most likely because of her blood, but maybe she could manipulate reality in a way that would bring Viktor back and finally allow her to do what she had wanted to do all along. 

She couldn’t go there. She couldn’t allow herself to lose control after admitting that she needed help to regain the very control she had lost before. She was losing herself, and it was starting to catch up with her. It made her bitter. It made her dangerous. 

Eliza found herself at a crossroads with no sense of direction. Not anymore. 

“You’re shaking,” Mrs. Darcy observed. 

Almost a full day had passed since she arrived back home, and she had already lost all track of time. This appointment with Mrs. Darcy felt like torture of the highest order.

She felt so alone, so isolated, so misunderstood—all because the one person who knew her better than anyone in this world wasn’t around. 

“I know you’ve been through a lot. And this decision surely wasn’t easy. Leaving the man you love, coming back here, deciding to focus on you,” she said. “I mean, for someone who’s been through hell and back without ever actively asking for help yourself, this was a brave first step toward full recovery. But I also know why you did it.”

Eliza’s nostrils flared as she took a deep breath in. Her lungs felt so heavy. Every muscle in her body was straining against nothing at all. She didn’t want to see it because withdrawal happens after a relapse and she hadn’t relapsed, but this was as close to withdrawal as it could get. She felt humiliated by her own body, which, in turn, made her mind turn on herself. 

Mrs. Darcy sighed, scuffling her notes around. She was just about to say something when Eliza opened her dry lips to speak. 

“I was ready to throw it all away for that one shot of tequila,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Because… because I felt so stuck. I feel… I am stuck. Nothing was going the way I wanted it to. I couldn’t find answers. I couldn’t… I couldn’t find the person that took my chance at getting justice and now… I made it impossible for myself ‘cause I’m stuck here. I… I’m just so stuck.”

Her arms wrapped around her legs and she hugged them tight to her chest. 

Mrs. Darcy nodded, putting her notebook aside for a moment. “Are you having cravings right now?” she asked. “For drugs? For a drink?”

In response, she only shrugged, but her shaky hands were already a big indication of the truth. “I wanted to feel nothing, even if just for a moment,” Eliza admitted. “I guess I still do. A bit.”

“I take that as a yes.”

“So what if I am?” That came out snappier than she intended. She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, I just…”

She was having a hard time adjusting to a life she had been so used to before. A life that wasn’t a life but a mere existence. All of her life, she had been on the run, and now that she was stuck, it somehow still felt like it, with the only difference being that she was running in one place now with nowhere else to go. And that was significantly worse than being on the run from her past. 

Facing it meant pain, and she hated what it did to her. She hated this godforsaken mess that she had become. Would it ever end in anything other than a disaster?

Mrs. Darcy silently reached into her bag. She was always so understanding. She didn’t judge, she simply took her word for it and tried to help while still being honest. 

Eliza watched as her therapist pulled out a small package she knew all too well, and she placed it before her on the conference table. Sunlight fell on it. She met her eyes. 

“What’s this?” she asked.

“A little something to help with the cravings,” said Mrs. Darcy. 

“Revia?”

She nodded. “Revia.”

Naltrexone.

Eliza's eyes lingered on the small package. “Revia,” she repeated. She knew it was a tool, a means to an end. The internal conflict raged on, and at that moment, the wariness in her eyes spoke volumes.

Mrs. Darcy slid the package closer. “Now, it’s not a cure. You know that as well as I do. It's an addition to your support system. And it will take some of the strain off your body that your mind is putting on you.”

She traced the outline of the medication with trembling fingers. “I know that,” she whispered. 

“I know we’ve been down this road before, but since you want to get better now…” Mrs. Darcy gave her a supportive smile. “I think we’re on a good path here, and a little help can’t hurt. I need you present if you want to do this. I need you alive.”

She had a choice: to confront the demons within or succumb to the numbing embrace of substances. The weight of that decision weighed heavily on her shoulders.

“I’m not weak,” Eliza whispered again, more to herself than to the woman before her. 

She wasn’t weak. The words repeated like a mantra in the screen of her brain. 

“No one said you were,” Mrs. Darcy answered. “Strength lies in acknowledging your vulnerabilities. I told you that before.”

After a moment of silence, Eliza took a deep breath. She hesitantly reached for the package. It was a silent agreement. She didn’t have the words to say it out loud. 

A bitter chuckle passed her lips. “I feel like I'm running in circles,” she said.

“You’re breaking unhealthy patterns that became your survival instinct. No one said that doing this over and over again would be easy, but eventually, you will heal. Trauma is cruel, addiction is cruel, and your circumstances pose a whole ‘nother obstacle we’ve found ourselves faced with time and time again. No one is pressuring you into doing this other than yourself; that is what it takes.” Mrs. Darcy finished by filling her a glass of water. “Now, take your pills,” she told her. “We will go from there.”

Eliza sighed. “You’re very bossy, you know that, right?”

“It’s my job.”

“Is that why you never gave up on me? Or is it the money?”

“Believe it or not, I like you, Eliza,” Mrs. Darcy said. “It’s that easy. You deserve to have someone take a chance on you. Or two. Or how many more you might need.”

The words felt like a thousand needles drilling through her skin into her most sensitive nerves. Her head ached a little at the prospect of this woman wanting to help her simply because she believed in her. Tony paid her good money. It was easier to blame it on that than think, just for a moment, that she was worth it. Worth taking a chance on. Worth more than what she told herself she was. 

Matt loved her and he cared, but his feelings made him feel obligated to be there for her. Mrs. Darcy had no personal connection to her and yet, she stuck around for years. It was a lot to wrap her head around. 

A tear slid down her cheek. Eliza furiously wiped it away, angry at herself for letting this get to her. “I…” Her mind was in shambles. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Just accept it,” the woman said. 

She made it sound so simple, but accepting love and care and not turning it into unwanted pity was hard for her. She never trusted peace, she never trusted love because, in the past, it had always been bound to conditions. Who was to say that it wasn’t the case with the people in her life now?

She was overthinking. Her body burned brighter than the sun. This feeling of vulnerability kept eating her alive. Almost as if in a rush, Eliza reached for the package. She tried to take it slow, but her hands shook in the process of getting the pills out. She took one, not more, and popped it into her mouth. She downed it with the glass of water Mrs. Darcy offered her. 

Part of her imagined that it was Oxy she was taking and that the shaking would go away as soon as this flesh-eating pain in her soul went away, but she knew better. Revia tricks the body, not the mind. 

Mrs. Darcy’s smile turned triumphant. She picked her notebook back up, clicking the pen a few times. “Are you ready to talk now?” she asked. “Really talk?”

Eliza opened her mouth to object, but she quickly changed the course of her thinking. She let out a heavy sigh. “What do you wanna know?” she retorted. 

“How about everything?”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

She wasn’t sure if she liked what that insinuated, considering she had shared her life story with her before, but Eliza had no choice. 

If Mrs. Darcy wanted to know everything, she had to tell her everything. There was no more use in lying now, anyway. Her soul lay open, bleeding out. That was her only way to survive. And she promised Matt to fight, so she would fight. For him. 

For herself.

But mostly for him. 

Tag List: @acharliecoxedfan @gpenguin666 @linamarr @mattkinsella @norestfortheshelbywicked @schneeflocky @yarrystyleeza @merlinbtch

[cdyssey]

Safe

Summary: On the night before Natalie's funeral, Tai finds herself on Shauna's doorstep.

Tags: Death/Drug Mentions

AO3 Link

On the evening before Natalie’s funeral, Taissa knocks on Shauna’s door, shivering from seven sleepless nights that feel like seven thousand, from fear, from aching grief, from the rain and November cold. She’s not here about forgiveness exactly—giving it, receiving it, talking about if either of them have ever once deserved it.

It’s just about being in her presence. 

About finding comfort in one of the few people who has ever made her feel safe.

It’s to her visceral relief that Shauna’s the one who opens the door. She’s fairly sure she would have clawed Jeff’s pretty boy eyes out on sight. (Fucking asshole. Their goddamn blackmailer apparently.) And, well, she still feels ashamed that the first time she laid eyes on Callie, it was on the verge of being mere footfalls and moments away from successfully hunting her mother down.

She hadn’t wanted it to happen like that.

Had maybe wanted their two kids to meet someday, and she and her best friend could look each other in the eye and revel in the fact that they’d produced one damn good thing in this world. 

They hadn’t fucked something up.

But she supposes that plan went like a brick through a window when she recently scared the living shit out of her own child and almost killed his other mother.

Simone’s going to take her to court for full custody whenever she gets out of the hospital, and Taissa is going to fight it, of course—(she never knows when to quit)—but somewhere, beneath the thousands of crusted layers of outrage, denial, inflexible pride, and reflexive fear, it’s entirely possible that she understands that it’ll be justice if her soon-to-be-ex-wife wins. She’s spent an entire lifetime inadvertently hurting the people she has loved. Simone’s probably helping out by making it that much harder for her to do it to their beautiful son.

Indeed, another of her would-have-been-victims stands in the threshold of the doorway with a flannel pajama set on, her hair hanging in limp waves around her face, dark shadows engulfing those big, brown eyes like sickly bruises. 

She seems exasperated by Taissa’s presence, one hand cocked on her hip, mouth pressed into a thin, pink line.

Fair enough.

Warranted even.

But she also looks so goddamn broken.

“You look like shit,” Taissa blurts out and just as immediately regrets it—not because she didn’t mean it exactly—but because Nat had said the same thing to Shauna mere weeks ago, and she knows, just from clocking her friend’s black expression, that the connection isn’t lost on her.

“Oh, fuck off,” she snarls and tries to slam the door in her face, but Taissa gets her foot in before it completely closes. The ensuing force might have been enough to break something had she not been wearing boots.

“Wait, Shauna! Fuck—“ She hisses through the pain ricocheting all the way up her leg.  “I don’t know why I said that. I mean, just look at me. I look like shit too. Haven’t slept much since—“

But she stops short, can’t quite bring herself to finish the awful sentence. It’s unbearable. 

She can’t fucking bear it.

It’s only been a little over a week since paramedics carted Natalie’s body away in a belted black bag. She had always been tiny, but she was utterly insubstantial in death, just an arrangement of hollow bones on the dirty ass ground. It had been a familiar sight to them all. 

Watching someone they love die.

Being the sole cause of her death.

Natalie, their savior and leader in those cold and lonely woods.

Natalie, their teammate.

Natalie, their hunter.

Natalie, their friend.

Taissa had tried so fucking hard to save her, had paid for rehab stint after failed rehab stint, had both forced her scrawny ass to sober up in jail on a few frustrated nights and dutifully bailed her out at least a dozen times more. She’d coddled her. Yelled at her. Given her a thousand-and-one stern talking-tos, perhaps thinking—(praying)—that at least one of these extraordinary measures would be enough to keep her alive. But in the end, even if it was Misty who shot her up with phenobarbital, it was Taissa who had called off the crisis team.

Which is to say that it was Taissa who made it permissible for their former equipment manager to wield a cocked and loaded gun.

Shauna’s face doesn’t exactly soften, but at the very least, she stops actively trying to amputate Taissa’s foot, and she takes desperate solace in that, in the fact that her friend still gets it—gets her—without a single syllable having to be said.

“Me neither,” the other woman finally admits in a quiet voice, leaning her cheek against the edge of the door. It doesn’t look comfortable, but then again, nothing about Shauna ever really does. “When I shut my eyes, all I can see is her.”

And then she does it.

She briefly closes her eyes, exhaling deeply, and Taissa knows that Nat is filling all of that empty space: her presence, her absence, her sunken-cheeked ghost. She was waxy in death, like a damaged doll. A marionette even. Limbs akimbo. All cut and broken strings. 

“Yeah,” Taissa nods once, the column of her throat suddenly constricted. She blinks rapidly and swipes at the underside of her own heavy eyes with the heel of her hand. 

“Rain,” she lies and doesn’t know why she does that either. Most of her actions are incomprehensible to her these days, even when she does feel present in her own body.

(Which is not as often as she’d care to admit.)

“Can I…” She hesitates, squirms, worries her chapped lower lip, and suddenly feels like a kid again, too little to be occupying such big shoes. “Uh… can I …come in?”

“No.” 

Shauna straightens up and shakes her dark head. The lone syllable slashes through Taissa like a knife. She’d been counting on Shauna’s acquiescence—much more than she had even realized until this very moment. 

She hadn’t anticipated a no.

Shauna has never fucking said no when she’s needed her.

But then, surprising her and simultaneously unknotting her where she stands, her friend reaches out and places a steadying hand on her arm.

“Stay here,” she says, fingertips gently curving over Taissa’s wrist. It’s still slightly banded with rope burn scars, all the nights her Other self had fought against containment, and all the nights that Van had valiantly fought back. She usually wears a watch over the spot, some expensive number, the kind lawyers like to wear when they’ve made it.

“I’ll grab us some blankets and something warm to drink,” Shauna continues in a voice that could almost be construed as kind. “We’ll, um, sit in your car, okay?”

“Okay,” Taissa croaks, devastated with relief, simply choking on it. 

She doesn’t have to leave.

Shauna doesn’t exactly smile, but the corner of her lip slightly bends.

Just a little. 

Taissa clings to this infinitesimal gesture like it’s a lifeline.

—

Ten minutes later, they’re both in Taissa’s idling car, sipping on boozy coffee, plaid throws draped around their shoulders like pelts. It’s still drizzling a little outside, the rain politely drumming its fingers against the steel roof of the car. Fleetwood Mac plays on the radio.

“Landslide.”

It’s depressing as hell, but neither of them make any move to change it. They both loved this song when they were kids. (Shauna dropped Tai off at her house after practice once when her own car was in the shop, and they listened to it on cassette, incorrectly half-remembering the lyrics to the song. They talked about MTV and stupid history pop quizzes. They pleasantly agreed that their calculus and English teachers were probably fucking behind the gym. They fantasized about what it would be like if they finally made it to Nationals. Shauna thought it was a long shot. Taissa bet her five whole dollars and a six-pack of beer that it was a guarantee.)

“I would have invited you in,” Shauna explains, lips nearly touching the rim of her thermos, “but I don’t think Callie would take too kindly to your presence right now. You made an… um… not-so-nice first impression.”

It’s a generous way of saying that she almost killed Shauna in an act of ritual violence.

“We don’t have to sugarcoat it,” Taissa mutters, even though she has to look away, staring out at the endless row of nice, suburban houses in this nice, respectable neighborhood that her friend who used to be their unflinching butcher lives in. It doesn’t feel real to her.

But then again, most things don’t.

“We don’t have to litigate it either,” comes a blunt reply—a warning tone even—punctuated by the precise thud of Shauna setting her coffee down.

Danger ahead.

Don’t cross this line.

Don’t burn this tentative bridge, Taissa.

This is all you’ve fucking got.

“I’m a lawyer,” she retorts all the same, perpetually one to greet a challenge with a handshake and a vicious smile. “That’s what I do for a living."

A beat—she inhales sharply through her nose.

"Well, did," she mumbles. "Did for a living anyway."

The slip-up briefly disorients her. She hasn’t spent an awful lot of time thinking about the fact that she’s a state senator now, not since her barely remembered excursion to a dusty video store in Ohio. Naturally, all of her aides were on the verge of a nervous breakdown after her week-long disappearance, freaking out about missed calls and panicked constituents, and in one assistant’s case, her lost car. She didn’t have much of an explanation for them then, nor can she barely bring herself to care about the less-than-stellar optics now. The election feels like it belongs to another lifetime.

Before Natalie.

And this is the After.

She will have to live in the After and with it for the rest of her godless days.

“What do you want then?” Shauna laughs bitterly. “To talk about how you called off the crisis team? To fondly reminisce about the fact that you picked up a knife? That’s not a conversation that’s going to end well for either of us, Tai.”

She briefly wonders if the other woman is being accusatory if it’s all true.

“I don’t fucking know, Shauna,” she grunts, defensive—always—and in this particular matter, far from deservedly so. “I just don’t want to… you know… do what we always do.”

“Fuck each other over?” The other woman snorts, crossing her arms over her chest. It’s petulant, a child’s gesture. 

They’re both forty-two year old women who never stopped being seventeen.

“That,” Taissa agrees emphatically, “and sweep it all under the rug like it’s no big deal. We’ve both fucked each other over lately. Like, you and the whole Adam deal. What was that? What the hell were you even thinking?”

Maybe it’s a low blow, bringing up the fact that Shauna has been a piece of shit too while they’re sitting in her driveway, drinking her coffee that’s probably three-fourths booze, but Taissa isn’t above a little playing in the mud. Besides, she doesn’t want to be alone in the pit, ashamed by just how far she’s fallen. Hell is too awful of a place to be without a bosom friend.

Shauna immediately flushes.

“Don’t change the subject,” she snaps, every lineament in her body rigid with tension as she turns to fully face Taissa. “I mean, you and the other four dipshits were actually going to kill me. Like, you were literally gonna do it just because I drew that stupid card.”

“I thought you didn’t want to litigate it,” Taissa mocks her, and it’s clever. It’s scathing. It’s cruel. It’s how they sometimes talked to each other in the woods, and so maybe it’s a fucked up declaration of love too.

“Yeah, well…” Shauna starts heatedly, pink blotches feathering her cheeks, but then just as quickly fizzles out, visibly deflating. She’s got nothing, Taissa knows, because she doesn’t either. 

What they’ve done is indefensible—the violence that they’ve inflicted upon others, the suffering, the horror, and the pain. They’re going to destroy their families and all the people that they’ve ever loved if they keep it up. They already decimated themselves in the wilderness a long time ago.

And they could blame evil forest spirits then; they could attribute their brutality, their monstrosity, and their madness to every creaking branch and volatile stirring of the breeze. Devoted worshippers, they could call their own depravity God and offer sacrifices to keep it alive in their chests.

But maybe Shauna was the one who screamed it best the other night.

You know there’s no It, right? It was just us.

And maybe Lottie, as unbalanced as she was, as fundamentally unwell, had a salient point too.

Is there a difference?

The end results are still the same. They’re abominations, each and every one of them; the blood on their hands keeps the score.

“You killed a man, and we almost killed you,” Taissa says matter-of-factly, and she almost remembers what it’s like to be a lawyer again, actually caring about justice in this world. “And, fuck, Shauna, that’s not even half of what we’ve done. We’re all messed up, and somehow, we’re not sharing a wall with Lottie in the psych ward.”

“Because we’re not like…” Shauna tries to protest, shaking her head, looking like a hunted animal and just as hurt. “We can’t be—“

“We can’t be? Or don’t want to be?” She cuts across her mercilessly, rubbing one of her brows with two fingers. “Because I’ve been thinking about that a lot, and I don’t know that it’s great that I can’t remember chasing you through the woods. I think the fact that I woke up holding a knife is fuckin’ terrifying.”

And maybe that’s one of the things—right next to Natalie’s death—that haunts and implicates Taissa most of all. The hypothetical reality where she could have slaughtered her best friend and not even realized it until after she’d done it. She looks over at Shauna, at the steady rise and fall of her chest, at the delicate flush coloring her bloodless face, and feels a rush of primal relief in her aliveness, in her hereness and her health.

Of course, being alive is not the same as being well—the survivors from the woods know that far more intimately than most—but it goddamn beats being dead. They’d sell their own souls just to keep their hearts pumping. 

(They‘ve done it before.)

(Once, they watched a twelve-year old boy fucking drown.)

“Why are you even here, Tai?” Shauna groans, every syllable affected, injured and anguished on her tongue. “Why aren’t you talking about all this with… God, I don’t know… Van? I mean, where is she? I don’t even know what you want me to say.“

At the mention of her—well, she doesn’t exactly know what to call Van anymore because ex-girlfriend sounds juvenile, reductive, and now frankly untrue—Taissa shifts in her seat, a knot in her belly, a writhing worm.

She loves Van with every last molecule in her and Van loves her back, right down to the ghastly marrow of her bones. And when they kiss, when they talk, when they share space with each other, when they fuck, the entire world narrows down to just the two of them alone. 

And that’s intoxicating, how consumed that they are by each other—fire and oxygen, burning and burning endlessly in the dark of the night.

But, Jesus, it’s breathtakingly dangerous too. It’s not lost on Taissa that Lottie hadn’t been the only one who had wanted to draw cards on the night that Natalie died. After all, it was Van who had convinced her to call off the crisis team; it was Van who had also wanted to play their most sacred and dangerous game.

For what reason?

Taissa’s got one hell of a good idea, and there’s an entirely selfish part of her that sympathizes—and more than that even—actually fucking understands.

(Survival is the one thing that any of them have ever really been good at besides soccer; in those godforsaken woods, there was never a cost they weren't eventually willing to pay.)

“She’s driving back from Ohio tonight for the funeral,” Taissa finally says, neglecting to mention that she’d had to go back for an appointment with her oncologist. Shauna doesn’t need to know. Shauna would immediately connect all the twisted puzzle pieces together and arrive at the big picture. Shauna would bristle. Shauna would judge. Shauna would blame the pair of them for Natalie’s death all over again. (Shauna would be right.) Shauna doesn’t need to know.

“And I don’t wanna talk to her about this,” she continues stubbornly, also setting her thermos in the empty cupholder with a decisive clunk. “I want to talk to you. Van and I… you know… it’s like we don’t know how to be straight with each other sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” Shauna mutters under her breath, and Taissa laughs for the first time in what feels like days; it’s a coarse sound, unpleasant even, as though it’s been raked from the muck in her chest. 

“Asshole. You know what I mean.”

“Not really,” comes a scoffing reply. “It’s not like we’ve been entirely straight with each other either lately…”

It’s true. They’ve both lied to one another’s faces and thought nothing about getting away with it. Taissa didn’t have a single qualm about sending a fixer after any of her fellow survivors, and Shauna, meanwhile, remorselessly made them all accomplices to manslaughter for Jeff Fucking Sadecki. The weight of those mutual violations currently electrifies the air between them—takes up oxygen, resources, energy, and precious space. It turns all of their words into live wires, each subtle shift of their bodies into the probable beginnings of a spark, an all-engulfing flame.

And both of them intimately know what it’s like to watch the world around them burn. 

“No,” Taissa agrees tiredly, shrugging a hand across the back of her neck. “I guess we haven’t.”

Another long beat, a tortured silence, slumping between them like a body, a carcass, a bloody slab of meat. This is assuredly the part of the conversation where normal people say sorry and hug each other’s neck.

The problem is, they haven’t been normal people in a very long time.

“Lot’s locked up,” she finally breaks the silence, digging her nails into the fabric of her jeans. She clipped them short just last night. Couldn’t stand all the dirt that had gotten beneath her cuticles. “Van’s away, and Nat’s…” 

She stumbles on the words, still can’t say it, still finds it impossible to articulate a reality where Natalie Scatorccio isn’t just down the road, probably snorting blow at some shitty motel.

But at least she was alive.

At least she was somewhere Taissa could always reach.

“... in a casket somewhere on the other side of town,” Shauna finishes for her, and the effort seems like it cost her. She shivers and suddenly looks ancient. Neither of them are even close to fifty-years old.

“Yeah,” Taissa just barely gets out, roughly scrubbing the side of her nose. “And I can’t stop thinking about how she hated small spaces.”

“Ha,” Shauna tuts, “don’t we all?”

And all she can do is nod in mute agreement. Before they’d been flown back to Wiskayok—nearly three months of recovery in a Canadian hospital later—doctors had been forced to sedate them all. Not a single one of them could bear the thought of being lucid on a goddamn plane. And to this day, Taissa can’t stand to be entrapped in a space any smaller than a bedroom. Elevators freak her out. Her closet door stays open when she’s scavenging for clothes. Simone always rode with Sammy on the Ferris wheel whenever they took him to the local fair. Those steel cages made a mockery and fool of her, but somehow, she had hated it even more when her wife looked at her with such tender concern in her eyes, with pity for this tragedy that she could never understand.

“But I know what you mean,” Shauna eventually adds in a less skeptical tone. “The thought of that makes me wanna shrivel up and, like… die.”

Maybe most other people would have flinched at such a brutal assertion.

But, of course, most other people haven't starved in the wilderness for nineteen goddamn months.

Taissa doesn't even blink.

“So many of our people are either dead, going, or gone, Shauna,” she half-whispers, staring out through the rain-lashed windows. The endless rows of amber street lights flicker like a hundred tiny fires in the night. “And I know we have our shit between us, but we have to get through it. No grudges or anything like that. I can’t… I don’t want to… 

She struggles yet again; it’s hard to be honest about what she wants from Shauna.

Her attention. Her affection. The physical presence of her body right next to hers. The weight of her unconditional love. It’s not really romantic, but it sometimes absolutely is. It’s almost sisterly if it’s sisterly to want to lay another woman’s warm arms and feel safe there forever. Of course, at the same time, it’s an unrealistic expectation—not particularly because they’re both taken women per say—but because safety is the most temporary delusion in the world. So Shauna is safety. And Shauna is a delusion. And Shauna is temporary.

But fucking hell, they all are in the end.

“I’m terrified of being alone,” she eventually chokes out, sickened by every syllable, so goddamn ashamed. She resists the urge to close her eyes at the sudden rush of nausea and bile. “It’s stupid, I know—“

“No,” Shauna tries to interject, shaking her head. “Tai, it’s not—“

“—and, fuck, it’s needy,” she plows on anyway, afraid to stop, afraid to listen, unable to face even the barest possibility of rejection—not from anyone, really, but especially not from Shauna. She buries her face in her shivering hands, fingertips mashing down hard on her eyelids.

“Just don’t shut me out, Shauna. Please. I’m begging,” she finishes, and just as she does, a horrible thought—Jesus, one that she doesn’t even believe—suddenly erupts in her head.

Don’t make me another Jackie Taylor.

All-alone when she died, frozen, half-buried in the freshly fallen snow. They used to have a term for that when they played soccer.

Iced out.

She would know; she once broke a girl’s leg putting the phrase into good and practical use.

“Taissa.” Her own name lands upon her sharply, like the lash of an incisive blade, but then, directly on the very heels of it, there is a much softer sensation, right next to the crook of her elbow. A warm, scar-calloused hand. The hand of their butcher. The hand of her best friend. “Hey, look at me, okay?”

It takes her a few seconds, but in the end, she reluctantly drops her hands and finds that Shauna’s face is mere inches away from her own now, pale even in the growing darkness. She can discern every tired line and errant freckle, the faint etching of a scar running across the bridge of her nose that she earned in the woods long ago. She can see the resilient, seventeen-year old girl who almost fucking died in gruesome labor. And she can also see the forty-two year old wreck that Shauna has become now precisely because she didn't.

“Stop being a dumbass,” she says when she’s sure that she has Taissa’s attention. “I’m not going to shut you out or whatever. Alright? You tried to kill me. Fine. Both of us have done far worse.”

And she smiles at the end of this batshit insane—this unquestionably true—declaration. It’s a small, crooked little thing, but it’s more than that, really. It's an olive branch and a tiny kindness. It's an unspoken sign to let her know that everything is going to be okay.

Relief storms through Taissa Turner. It plunges through her like rain.

“Sooooo inappropriate,” she croaks, embarrassed when a tear slips from the corner of her eye. She jerks instinctively to mop herself up, but Shauna gets there first, reaching up to thumb it away with her free hand without saying a word. She almost wants to gasp at the touch, wants to shudder, wants to weep, wants to shatter into a million pieces on her Nissan’s well-kept floor. 

She keeps it together anyway.

Shauna's tenderness is sweet anathema to her, an unholy cure.

“You say that like there’s anything appropriate about us,” the other woman says before letting her hand fall away. Taissa misses the warmth of her touch immediately. “Like we’ve got this normal thing down.”

“Wishful thinking, I guess,” she replies lamely.

Refuting her on that particular point is pretty useless.

“We all have stories that we tell ourselves in the dark,” Shauna shrugs right back, and with that, reaches down to grab her thermos from the cupholder. To Taissa’s surprise, she also grabs the one next to it.

“What are you doing?” She asks quickly, dreading that her friend has already decided to take her word back.

“What does it look like, dummy?" Shauna rolls her eyes in such a way that it's clear that she thinks she's doing something obvious. (Asshole.) "We’re going inside. There’s vegetable soup in the crockpot, and you can wear one of my t-shirts to bed. Well, um, put Jeff on the couch.” She snorts to herself at this last thought. “He kinda deserves it after all the shit he pulled."

Taissa’s body reacts to what her friend is suggesting before her mind catches up. She laughs aloud, a pleasant warmth percolating in her gut, a happiness that she's forgotten how to entirely feel. She only eventually remembers—

“Shit, wait, what about Callie? I thought you said she wouldn’t want to see me.”

“I’ll deal with my teenager. You’re coming in."

“But—”

"No buts," comes a fierce reply, a desperate one. Taissa flinches at the sudden change in tone, while her friend looks down, her dark hair eclipsing most of her face from view.

"It's mean, it's just... we need each other tonight, Tai. Tomorrow—" But it's Shauna’s turn to be repulsed by her own words, to anticipate the foregone conclusion to her sentence and call foul. Red card. Timeout. This isn’t right. It’s far from fucking fair.

But, of course, this has always been their shared reality.

Life isn't fucking fair.

“—we bury Nat,” Taissa finishes, remembering what it was like to be a closer in the game. One kick. A ball buried in the net. It had to be done.

As a teenager, she once lifted her arms in victory as her teammates crowded around her, shouting her name, embracing her, nearly knocking her to the ground. As an adult, she reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind Shauna's ear, knuckles skimming her smooth cheek, and knows that this, too, is love.

“Fuck,” Shauna exhales, closing her eyes. 

“Fuck,” Taissa dully agrees just as it stops drizzling outside, as it begins to pour and endlessly pour.

[twisted-wonderland-shenanigans]

Hi! I just have to say, I love your blog so much!!! And the monster au idea is genius! I started reading what you posted out and loved it! I saw people doing questions on it so here's my own, what would happen if Yuu broke a bone in some kind of accident? Wether it was indirectly their friends fault because they were fooling around or something else entirely and they just "weren't there to prevent it" (I can imagine the researchers would be quite In a frantic panic if they see the only human in their world getting hurt) how would the others react?

Oh goodness, that would cause quite the stir at NRC for sure! I’ve never broken a bone before, but there was one time I got punched in the face by a tree branch that got caught on the bag of the tall person I was hiking behind a few years ago. My nose was okay, but I still experience phantom pain whenever I think about that day! 😂

As a human in a world full of monsters, it’s not hard to imagine that the physical differences are more than cosmetic. Some monsters are more fragile than others, while some are so sturdy that they’re like a moose getting hit by a car—meaning that it’ll take a lot to hurt them. It’s also possible for them to heal quickly if they do get injured, though I like to imagine that they do get assistance when they need it!

Prosthetic arms, legs, tails, or wings? Yes!

Wheelchairs even for those with more than two legs? Yes! (Was I thinking of those videos of paralyzed puppies and kittens in makeshift wheelchairs scootering around? Yes. Yes I was)

Crutches and those scooter things you see where the person has their leg propped up and they’re moving around like they’re on a kid’s scooter (I think they’re called “knee scooters”?)? Absolutely!

All this is to say that—while not as fragile as a human—monsters know how to set and heal broken bones!

Dealing with the fact that their human friend has a broken bone, however, is a whole different kettle of fish depending on the type of fracture.

WARNING: Mention of bodily injury and blood. No major details, but proceed with caution! Under a read more just in case, but please let me know if I need to add any other tags so I can also tag things properly in the future!

Hairline fracture on their foot caused by hooves stepping on them? It’s manageable, though it may take a day or two for Yuu to notice they have an injury unless it’s run day at PE. Once it’s wrapped up in a cast to heal on its own, Yuu notices how any student with hooves (especially Deuce) will be more cautious about how close they stand to them or where their legs are when around the small human.

Dislocated arm from a friendly wrestling match and/or someone fell on top of their arm? Horrified screams all around upon seeing Yuu’s arm hanging limp by their side and their face contorted in pain. Once it’s popped back into place by the medical staff and put into a sling to speed up the recovery, it’s somewhat amusing seeing how their friends look like kicked puppies as they try and help Yuu with things around the dorm or in class. “It’s our fault you got hurt in the first place” is what they’d say if Yuu asked them why they were fussing. It’s sweet, but it’s up to Yuu to tell them to ease up and that they will ask for help when they need it.

Broken arm or leg? I can see this going one of two ways for both cases. If the arm or leg has a closed fracture where they can see part of the bone under the skin but the skin itself hasn’t broken? You can bet that there’s going to be a lot of concern about it. Depending on what the x-rays show, the boys and staff will be even more concerned if the incident resulted in Yuu needing surgery to repair the damage. A compound fracture though? Well…

Let’s just say that the moment the monsters smell the blood, they’ll immediately realize that something was wrong before they even see the bone jutting out from the large wound. This is a worst-case-scenario that—despite their best efforts—the medical teams may not feel they’ve prepared enough for as they search for blood that can safely be used to replenish what Yuu lost during the accident and in the surgery to try and repair the damage…or amputate to save their life.

It’s a highly stressful time for all, to the point many of Yuu’s friends can’t even focus on their work—not that the staff can blame them. They’re just as worried that Yuu might lose their life or limb...

When Yuu does manage to pull through sporting a new cast (if a little worse for wear), Yuu had better be prepared to have quite a few clingy monsters sticking to them like velcro! And gifts. Lots and lots of gifts!

I’d like to take a moment to point out that humans can be hurt by the most ridiculous things and yet in life-or-death situations. They’re able to crawl through snow with a broken leg for several miles, yet the moment they stub their toe on a coffee table leg? Down for the count.

Table: 1, Human: 0. U.U

So can you imagine just how horrified the guys would be to hear that Yuu/one of their relatives/a friend of theirs once broke their leg and crawled to safety in a major weather storm, yet just two minutes later they stub their toe and now they’re on the ground whimpering in pain. X’DDD

Also, to further prove that animals (and therefore the monsters) can have compassion for those who are disabled, just remember that there is a crow couple that���s been together for 12+ years and even though she has a broken beak, he and the rest of their flock protect her. ;;v;;

[ogdoadfates]

Hiiii

I just read about your bloody paws au and l loved it! Especially the Keyleth part with her powers and how she got them (l also came up with the idea that Raishan was involved somehow but idk...)

Could you write something about the experiments where she gained them, or struggling to control her abilities with her team during training?

Sorry if it's too vague, but with this au you could write something completely unrelated and l would thank you anyways. Thanks for writing the au and the rest of them too!

Man it’s been a long time since I wrote anything for this AU!!! And aawwww I’m so glad you like it!!! :D And oh yeah Raishan def has a role to play in Keyleth’s story!! (Warning: Body horror, experimentation, violence, gore.) PS: I'm sorry this took so long.

Everything hurt, it always hurts. Her bones ach from growing more and more, her muscles burn from stretching to cover all the new limbs her bodys been made to create, her very skin iches from the sprouting of fur and feathers that force there way through. 

She’s been forced to change yet again and just like last time she’s broken free from the confines of the cell they’d been keeping her.

They had introduced a new chemical this time, some vile green liquid that once it was in her blood reacted violently. The sheer agony was only comparable to having every bone in your body crushed then force to reform by nailing them back together, leaving jagged edges that dig and tear into the flesh with every twitch of the body. Her vision swam till all she saw was red and then the all familiar sensation of her body tearing itself into multiple directions took over.

The next thing she knew was the taste of iron heavy on her tongue. The ground covered in sinew and the cruel scientists intestines. With no one left in the room, she runs. Bursting down the gore stained door like it was made of thin paper, alarms blaring loudly as the walls blur in flashes of red and white, the thumping of her heart almost drowning out the thundering booms her feet and arms make as she hurls herself down the facilities halls.

Keyleth feels odder then usual, there is something else then just the pain this time. A weird new sensation is battering at the back of her brain, like a worm despiritly trying to find somewhere to burrow the battering moves looking for something. Looking for what, she doesn’t know beut it’s leaving her feeling hollower then she was already. So many desperate needs and no way to obtain them as she runs through this maze of walls and screams. Are they hers or someone elses? She doesn’t know, she just knows she must run.

But as fate likes to remind her, nothing in this life is fair. She turns down a corner and before she can even process the feeling of her foot sinking into the floor just a little more than it should, ropes of strong barbed metal entrap her and a cage erupts from the floor. She’s trapped yet again but the fight doesn’t leave her. It never does, it’s all she has left at this point and she holds onto it like a hawk clings to it’s food while it tries to weather the ever present storm that fights against it. 

As much as this is a repeat of all her other attempts one thing is different, where usually once she falls into a trap the alarms stop, they haven’t. The blaring still blasts, the lights still flash, yet she’s stuck. Did some other poor soul get captured and like her is trying to escape? 

She remains there struggling till a shadow moves in front of her cage, she almost snarls at whomever found her but as her eyes meet that of a bird like mask she stops. Her struggle stops as she stares at this new figure, one she’s never seen before. A figure encased in wisps of smoke, the light reflects off the glass parts of his mask that cover the figures eyes. The two of them stare at each other for what feels like hours but most likely was only seconds. Free me. She doesn’t beg, she doesn’t shout for mercy, she doesn’t demand, her eyes just convey a statement. Free me. There is shouting and rushing of footsteps coming their way but the two just stare at each other in a standstill till the figure moves and in a blink of an eye, the ropes go slack and the cage door opens.