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aimfor-theheart · 4 years ago

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COIN TOSS– PART III

(18+ MINORS DNI)

PART I → PART II

PAIRINGS: Tomura Shigaraki x Reader, a little Shouta Aizawa x Reader

SUMMARY: As you fall asleep, you wonder faintly, almost sadly, if you’re the first thing he’s fully touched without losing in a long time.

You are Eraserhead’s troubled protege with a Quirk that cancels out others the moment they touch you. Tomura Shigaraki takes great interest in you.

(Enemies to lovers, a lot of angst, some hurt/comfort)

WARNINGS: Unhealthy/complicated relationships, age gap/power struggle, violence, gore, Tomura’s trauma specifically, (in later chapters) murder, smut, some blurred lines, rough sex, a smidge of a spit kink, a smidge of somnophilia (let me know if I’ve missed anything!)

If you are under the age of 18, you should not be reading or interacting with this!

↳ A playlist I made for this fic, if you're interested!

A/N: here is your final part to this series! again, thank you @randomrosewrites for beta-ing this!! and thank you guys so so much for your support and comments, they mean so so much to me!! i had a lot of trouble with this last part, there was a lot of scenes i cut out and alternative endings before i settled on what is there now and i'm not even fully happy with it still lol. i have a lot of Thoughts about this, so feel free to reach out if you want to know more or just chat!! i hope you guys enjoy this!!

Read on Ao3

***

Shouta apologizes to you soon after. You sheepishly get out your own apology, even though you’d planned on holding a grudge a little while longer.

Still, Shouta confides that he also had his doubts and worries as a young hero and that he shouldn’t have dismissed yours. He talks in a soft, low voice for you, sits beside you on the edge of the couch.

You hate it because it’s easier to be at odds with Shouta lately, easier for your conscience. He put distance between the two of you, but you forced it apart further– if only to keep him in the dark. Maybe if only to spare yourself all the lying, all the pretending you’d have to do.

He says, “You know, you can always come to me. Whenever you need me.”

You have to swallow hard around the lump in your throat.

“I’ll always be here for you, despite everything.” he promises gently, trying to catch your eyes. Your gaze ducks away, out of his line of site.

Still, you hug him, tuck your face into his shoulder so he can’t see the guilt written across your face. Your secrets will constrict around you if you’re not careful. You know Truth is tricky and likes to reveal itself with Time’s help.

Once more, you become acutely aware of the clock ticking away on your relationship with Tomura.

But this time, you also realize how much trouble you could get in. You realize that you’re endangering Shouta now, too. You swallow hard, try to keep all of that down inside of you, but you feel nauseous suddenly. Bloated with guilt.

You wonder if you would’ve confessed to him then, if you would’ve spilled your guts the way you’d wanted to, if it would’ve saved you the heartache of it all.

Instead, you’d just clung to him, little fingers twisting in the back of his shirt, praying that you’d never need to make good on his promise. Praying you’d never need to test how far he’d go for you.

(It’s far– you’ll realize, further than it ever should’ve been. And you’re all the worse for it.)

***

Tomura thinks one of the troubles with heroes is their willingness to sacrifice anything for their greater good. He doesn’t think there’s anything noble in it, there’s nothing glorious or good in leaving their friend behind because they think it will save more. Nothing honorable in facing down a threat you know you can’t win against alone. What good is their world if they’re willing to sacrifice all that’s good to them in the process?

Everytime he watches you patrol, go up against other villains, maybe yakuza members, throw yourself in harm’s way needlessly, he realizes the Hero Commission uses heroes’ bodies as collateral damage. You are nothing to them. Even to other heroes; your sacrifice is expected. He knows it isn’t wanted, per se, but it isn’t surprising.

It doesn’t help that you have a streak of recklessness in you. You are quick to danger, just as quick to flash teeth and stand your ground, to fight mercilessly.

You struggle against large, powerhouse types. He watches you nearly get crushed or strangled some nights. Your Quirk doesn’t do much for you when your opponent has strength and weight to defeat you with a singular blow.

Your mentor is often pulling you out of danger with his capture weapon, yanking you away from a massive swinging arm or a curled fist about to smash you into the ground. But if it came down to you or the greater good, he knows what your mentor and your heroes would pick.

He thinks it’s strangely unfair, for you to give them your loyalty over him. He’s more loyal to you, isn’t he? There is very, very little he wouldn’t destroy for you. They would sooner let you be destroyed for the sake of their world.

Destroying the hero society that is so careless with you now feels, in part, like his gift to you. Freedom from the world that only cared about you when they realized you could be useful–

There is a night you become not just useful to your heroes but imperative.

It starts with your sacrifice, just as you were trained to do. You shove a civilian out of the way of a villain’s Quirk– it’s something with tusks and teeth that jut out from his body, sharp and ready to gut you.

Your mentor is busy with this villain’s accomplice.

Tomura watches when he shouldn’t. He was supposed to meet with Kurogiri, but he knows you patrol in this area and when there’d been commotion, he couldn’t help but watch from the shadows.

He watches one of those tusks jut towards you, your hand reaching out in hopes of disengaging the Quirk. But it’s a physical Quirk, not something like Dabi’s fire or his disintegration. And he doesn’t know if this Quirk disengages with it’s user or if it’s just his body.

Tomura feels his heart drop, the trapdoor given way to all icy fear as he watches one of those tusks pierce into your stomach.

Tomura stops breathing.

You grab hold of it, a scream getting caught behind your clenched teeth. Your fingers are tight, near frantic as you press into them– hope with everything in you, in him, that his Quirk disengages with yours.

Your broken off scream is wretched from your struggling body when another tusk rushes to crash into your shoulder.

You’re the only thing between the civilians behind you and this villain.

Your other hand reaches for the tusk at your shoulder, digging fingers and nails into it desperately.

Your eyes are bright and feverish with the hot pink of your Quirk.

Tomura stutters towards you, before the villain let’s out a pained groan. Your teeth are bared, blood bubbling up in your mouth, but you’re still standing, vicious and undeterred.

The tusks begin to crack where you grip them, splintering apart–

A sudden fission of light through those crevices, same fire pink as your eyes, arcs throughout the villain. A flare of it that makes the villain almost see-through, the lines of his bones burned by light, an x-ray flash, as if you’d struck him with lightning for a moment.

Eraserhead shouts for you.

When the flare dies, there is a scream of pain and it’s not yours.

The tusks shatter, splinter apart into gleaming bone that flies through the air.

You’re left standing, blood oozing from your stomach, your shoulder, but still standing, your eyes crackling and too bright.

The villain, tuskless, crumples at your feet, smoking. A normal, Quirkless looking man.

Did you–?

“What happened?” he hears the distant voice of your mentor, laced with worry, whose already reaching to staunch blood, blood that seeps so dark out of you. Tomura’s stomach rolls, twists suddenly, but you’re still standing. You’re okay– you’re okay–

“I-I don’t know.” you manage, but you sway into your mentor’s arms and Tomura has to look away, jaw clenched tight, swallowing around the sudden lump in his throat.

He hears, “I need an ambulance– there’s a hero and villain down–”

But he’s already turning away, his mind churning, trying to keep the nauseousness from overcoming him. He feels suddenly furious, that it can’t be him at your side, that he has to watch, pushed to the outskirts. His fingers rush to scratch at his neck, his throat, desperate for relief from the pressure that has built in his chest.

He will try to call you– later, much later– the only time you’ll answer him. He is certain you will be okay with your healers and–

He thinks of the flare of light, the breaking of those tusks, the sudden heap of that man on the ground. If Tomura is correct about what you’d done, about what your Quirk actually is, the heroes won’t let you die now.

No, now you’re imperative. Now you’re trapped.

And the destruction of hero society will be his gift to you, an end to all the strings in place, the hands holding you both back.

***

“You destroyed his Quirk.”

“W-what?” you manage to get out, wobbly. You’re bandaged up, your torso and shoulder wrapped in fresh gauze after Recovery Girl healed the worst of your wounds. You’d been sleeping, hooked up to an IV to aid you in recovering. “That’s not possible, my Quirk only cancels–”

The doctor that has entered to give you this news shakes his head, “No, we’ve done scans, tests, the works on this guy. His Quirk is gone from his DNA. No trace of it.”

Shouta, who's sitting beside your hospital bed, speaks up, “Is it possible that it will eventually return?”

“I suppose, but we think it’s unlikely. It’s gone from him. There’s nothing left. She destroyed it cleanly. It’s like it was never there at all.” The doctor answers.

“I don’t understand–” you manage to get out, your head beginning to swim, giving a painful throb at your temples.

“It seems your Quirk isn’t so simple as cancelling out another’s. It’s likely that subduing other’s Quirks was just the surface of yours.”

“Is the man okay otherwise?” Shouta asks now, fidgeting in his seat when he senses your sudden distress. He leans towards your bed more and you have the sudden urge to latch onto him and not let go.

“Physically, yes. He’s fine.” the doctor answers, “However, mentally...he’s inconsolable at the moment. As you know, Quirks are incredibly– well, they’re a part of who we are, aren’t they?”

You swallow hard around the lump in your throat.

You think Shouta says something else, finishes speaking to the doctor for you. The moment the door clicks shut, the tears that you stubbornly had been holding back rush forward.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” you get out on just a hissed breath. “I-I didn’t know I could.”

Shouta shushes you gently, “It’s okay, this happens. Sometimes people don’t know the full extent of their Quirk.”

“I destroyed his Quirk, it’s not okay!” you respond, guilt thickening inside of you, dragging you down heavy, clogging your throat and chest. “I didn’t mean to do that– what if I do it again?”

“You were under distress,” he soothes, reaching out to brush a tear away from your cheek, “Really, you were fighting for your life.” And when he says it, something gets caught in his throat. Something hitches in yours, too.

His eyes rove over your face slowly, taking you in carefully, as if he hasn’t been by your side the entire time. As if it wasn’t him in the ambulance, or him kneeling beside your bed when Recovery Girl put you back together.

“I should’ve been there. It shouldn’t have happened.” Shouta admits, the confession filling the small space between you two.

You take him in now, too, tired and worried, his face finally displaying the fear and care he has for you. It softens out his features, turns his eyes gentle and dark.

You realize suddenly that you miss him. You miss quiet nights on his couch as he graded papers. You miss his clothes and his cats and the tenderness that blossomed in all your silent spaces to fill you both out.

You wonder if he misses you as bad as you’re realizing you miss him.

You think of him cooking for one again, eating alone, and it does something horrible to your heart– mangles it, twists it up horribly.

It’s made all the worse because you’re lying to him. And here he is, at your bedside.

“S’okay, Shouta,” you get out, reaching up to touch his cheek with a trembling hand. He leans into the touch, letting his eyes flutter shut for a moment. He savors your touch in a way that he hasn’t ever allowed himself to before.

But after a moment, he shakes his head fractionally, and he murmurs “I’m supposed to protect you.”

You don’t know why, but your bottom lip wobbles. Big, fat tears well up in your eyes, burn hot and put pressure on your already foggy head. You feel like you’re unraveling, your chest all swollen and tender, too, aching horribly.

You can’t decide if it’s because you’re lying and disobeying him so badly or because no one has ever bothered to say something like that to you, let alone mean it.

And you’re betraying him, your mind hisses.

When he notices, his face falls, his thumb moving to try and brush away your tears. “Don’t cry,” he hushes, “I’m sorry, don’t cry.”

You lean into his large and warm palm at your cheek, let him cradle and coddle you.

“I-I’m sorry–” you barely manage to choke out, for reasons far beyond him.

“No,” he coos, “No, sweetheart, don’t apologize.”

You choke on a sob and he grows more worried, leans over you more, brings his other hand up to stroke at your hairline, too.

He says your name softly, trying to soothe you, “Why are you crying, huh? What are you apologizing for?”

You shake your head, more tears loosening, your small fingers twisting themselves in the shoulders of his shirt. You think you’ll drown in all this guilt, it’ll fill your lungs with pressure, choke you out slowly as you struggle and thrash.

But for now, all you get out is a warbled, slurred, “Please don’t hate me–”

Shouta moves then, shifts to sit beside you on the bed. He’s painfully careful with you as he slides strong and sturdy arms beneath you, lifts you slightly into his lap, mindful of your IV, and cradles you to him.

You bury your face into his chest and try to hold back another sob as he murmurs, “Why would I hate you? I could never hate you.”

He strokes your hair, he hushes your cries, rocking you gently. Rocking you until you can stop crying, until you’re exhausted and aching and tender.

“I’ll help you with your Quirk,” he promises gently, holding you tight to him, “We’ll be okay, huh?” he murmurs, and it just forces another cry out of you, swallowed up by his chest that he cradles you to, “We’ll be okay, sweetheart.”

It’s the we’ll in that sentence that makes you squeeze him tighter. You wonder how willing he’d be to use it if he knew where you were every other night, who you filled your time with.

If he knew who called you late that night, when you’re alone in your room, aching and sore and alone. If he knew who you answered to, your voice hushed in the inky darkness;

“Tomura,” you exhale his name through the receiver.

“I saw what happened,” he answers instead, “I saw what happened today.”

You can feel the sudden jump of your heart, your nerves wringing themselves tight. “Oh,” you respond lamely.

To your surprise, Tomura rasps, “Are you okay?”

You don’t know why, but you cradle the phone to your cheek tighter, your eyes slipping shut for a moment.

“Yeah, I’m alright. Sore and tired, but I’m okay.”

“Good,” he responds, his voice softer than it usually is, just a breath when he asks, “What happened? What’d you do to him?”

You’re silent for a long moment. You can’t decide if you should tell him or not. You think of Shouta earlier and his voice like a hearth and the tender way he holds you, you think of his we’ll be okay.

But you can hear Tomura’s soft breath on the other line. You can see Ryuji in the patch of sun that splays out against the corner of the couch in the evenings. You think of him curled tight around you, like you’re the last good thing left on earth.

“I destroyed his Quirk,” you say, voice barely above a whisper, “With mine.”

“That’s new,” Tomura almost hums, but it nearly seems like he was expecting the answer.

“I didn’t mean to.”

A quiet snort from him, “What are you trying to prove to me?” he asks, “I’m not your heroes. I won’t look at you differently whether you intended to or not.”

The thought strikes like an arrow between the ribs, sharp, sudden. It stings, when you realize it’s truth. How hard have you tried to prove yourself to Shouta? How hard are you trying to prove your goodness to yourself?

“You could’ve killed him,” Tomura says, “And I wouldn’t think differently.”

You wince for some reason when he says that, “Don’t–”

“What would your heroes think then?”

“Tomura–” you snap, voice gaining some bite, a warning.

But for some reason he presses, “How badly does the Hero Commission want you now? With a Quirk like that?”

“What?” you ask, suddenly shocked.

“Don’t be naive,” Tomura says and there’s an edge to his voice. He sucks in a breath, “That’s a big Quirk. Destroying someone else’s? You don’t think they’ll be interested in that?”

You feel the pressure of tears work their way through your head, your throat. Your fingers clutch so hard at the phone that your knuckles are turning white and before you can think, you hiss out, “And how interested are you now?”

“As interested as I was before.” he returns, sharp and quick, and then with a vitriol he hasn’t directed at you in months, he says, “Don’t compare me to them.”

You bare your teeth, tears stinging sharp at your eyes, prepared to fight back when he hisses, “Mark my words, they won’t let you go now.”

“Stop it,” you spit, “You don’t know anything–”

And he laughs at that, caustic, harsh, a grating sound. Villainous. It slithers through the phone, down your spine. Your stomach twists. You hate this– your head is throbbing. You don’t want to fight. You want to stop crying, God, you wish you could just stop crying–

“I’ll be here when you realize it.” he says and there is too much heat behind his voice, simmering and venomous. You can feel the end of this conversation, the bitter goodbye in his words.

Your bottom lip trembles, and for some foolish, lovesick reason, you gasp, “Wait– don’t hang up–”

But you hear the click of the other line and he’s fallen away from you, leaving you with an empty, static silence that buzzes around in your head. In your heart.

You throw your phone across the room. You hear it clatter somewhere in the darkness. You turn to press your face into your pillow and let out a sudden, childish scream. It tears at your throat, before tapering off into this pathetic little sob.

It’s worse because he ends up being right.

And it’s ironic because it’s another string tethering you to him, the ability to destroy something with a touch.

It’s like some part of him knew all along, or maybe some part of you.

You scream into your pillow again, louder, kicking at your covers before it breaks off into a bitter cry.

***

The Hero Commission is very interested in the new discovery of your Quirk. They run tests and scans on you, over and over again, trying to find something interesting. They want you to practice with it, but there’s no way for you to practice without potentially destroying other people’s Quirks.

They offer up criminals to practice on.

It turns your stomach.

“I don’t want to do this,” you tell Shouta one night after another long series of poking and prodding at you by white coats from the Hero Commission.

Shouta is silent for a moment, “No one is making you.”

“But they want me to. It’s expected of me.” you tell him.

“They want to make sure you can control it,” Shouta answers, “And the only way to do that is practice, unfortunately.”

Or do they just want to be sure they can control me? The question bubbles up unbridled inside of you. It sounds suspiciously like Tomura’s voice.

You frown, “I can control it. I don’t go around destroying Quirks with every touch. I just mute Quirks still.”

“Under distress, too? Can you summon it completely calmly? Or stop it in an instant?” Shouta asks.

“I don’t know– no, I don’t think so.”

“Then you can’t fully control it.” he answers, which makes you ball your hands into fists.

“It doesn’t feel right taking people’s Quirks– practice or not. And it’s controlled enough.” you respond, gaining a sudden edge to your voice.

“Then don’t do it.” Shouta responds, almost impassively.

You try not to grow upset or so frustrated that you say something you might regret. You swallow tightly. “Will you be disappointed? If I don’t?”

Shouta tilts his head and in the quietness you fear he will be, but he eventually answers, “No. You’re right; you have it controlled enough that it doesn’t hinder your day-to-day life.”

You let go of a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding.

“Besides, if you’re under that amount of distress again, it probably flares for a good reason. It’ll probably save you if you ever need it again.” Shouta then says, “And if what they want you to do doesn’t feel right to you, then you shouldn’t do it.”

You stare up at him, a little surprised but–

Relief sweeps through you, sweet and cool.

“I trust your instincts,” Shouta says, the curl of his lips small but promising, as he reaches out to nudge your chin with his knuckle.

The guilt blindsides you later, so hard that it makes you lock yourself in your bathroom and keep a sob trapped behind the palm of your hands.

But for now, you smile up at him, the curve of your smirk playful, something he hasn’t seen from you in what feels like forever that you give to him again freely.

“Can I get that one in writing?” you ask and his answering laugh strikes you so suddenly it almost makes you dizzy and it’s like hearing the notes to one of your favorite songs that you hadn’t heard in a long time.

Like you couldn’t ever imagine forgetting it, now that you’ve heard it again.

***

Tomura wonders what it will take to make you leave your heroes.

Specifically, your precious mentor.

When he sees you again, you look like you did before nearly bleeding out in front of him and destroying the Quirk of another. It’s almost as if it never happened at all, almost like your argument never happened at all, either. In this little apartment where the rest of the world doesn’t exist, just you and him and sometimes Ryuji.

Except when he lifts your shirt there is a twisted, ugly scar from where they patched you up. Another at your shoulder. He doesn’t kiss it or run his fingers over it gently, he doesn’t make any sort of comment. He just thumbs at your waist and glares at it, wishes he could make it disappear like the villain who gave it to you.

(Not because he finds it ugly or unacceptable, only that it is now a permanent reminder of what he’d seen. Only that it reminds him that you are not guaranteed to him, not in life nor in loyalty).

You’re a little hesitant with him now. You feel more fragile to him now, too, like you’re holding something back, waiting for everything to finally fall.

The inevitable crash and break.

Tomura is gentler with you– he knows he needs to play his cards right now. It’s crucial. Something is building, even for the League of Villains. There’s more on the horizons.

And despite everything, he wants you there, when the sun is bloody and falling on a dismembered, new world.

He thinks he shouldn’t have pushed you now, when you’re so delicate, barely stitched together. But he had– he’d started another argument. He’d tried to convince you of the heroes’ lack of care for you, their greediness upon discovering the depth of your Quirk.

You throw it back in his face; isn’t that what All For One does to him? Isn’t that what he does for the League of Villains? Aren’t they all just pawns for him? Is that what he wants of you?

He seethes, digging into the skin of his neck desperately. You don’t stop him. He can feel the facade of this little apartment beginning to crumble, fall away into dust and he–

He knows he destroys everything he touches.

But you were supposed to be different.

(You are, his mind hisses, you are, you are, and that’s the worst part of it all).

You storm out that night. You leave him, no doubt to return to your precious mentor.

He thinks about destroying the entire apartment complex. He could now– he knows what’s coming. He won’t be staying here any longer. He has plans, so many plans.

You come back to him a week later, though. You’re bound to him in some way, returning again and again when you know you shouldn’t.

The make-up part is nice, with him buried so deep inside you that he’s trying to turn your stomach. Make you sick with him, the way he is with you. Your gasping moans, with the arch of your body far too pretty for hands like his.

And still, you lay on his chest afterwards, you let him run his fingers over the planes of your shoulders, the line of your pretty neck. He drags his knuckles against your soft skin, enamored with the feeling, with the way you soothe the haunting, sunken part of him. His Quirk submits to yours easily, dimmed inside of him. Maybe he should be frightened of your new potential.

But you’ve never been frightened of him, so he’s not of you, either.

You’re very bold, though, he thinks, for you to say, “Your parents were cruel.” After the argument you both had last time.

He tenses beneath you, grits his teeth. He’d thought you’d both learned your lesson, getting too personal in a place as sacred as here.

“You don’t know anything,” he says and it’s just a breath. Surprisingly toothless. He’d said it to you last time, in your argument. You’d said it to him before that. It feels almost ironic now.

You shake your head against his chest, your nose nudging into him, lips soft against his skin. You remain calm. “I know your name is Tomura. They were very cruel to give you that name.”

You say this as if it’s a fact, something as simple as the sky being blue. But it’s dark out now and the stars are dull, the moon just a scythe in the sky, caught in the window’s glare.

“What?” he demands quietly.

At least you have the guts to tilt your head up to find his eyes now. You look up at him through dark lashes.

“Your name–” you say again, gentle, “It means ‘to mourn.’ I don’t know why anyone would give their child such a sad name.”

He knows what his name means.

But this takes him by surprise, for some reason. Only because it’s not the name his parents gave him. You don’t know that, though. You don’t know anything about him, technically. He has the urge to tell you suddenly, that’s not my name.

He doesn’t, though. He stays silent. It’s his name now. And he likes the way you say it, the syllabus softened by whatever it is you feel for him.

(He won’t give it a name, he’s realizing now that names can be very powerful.)

Your fingers are gentle on him, rubbing strange patterns against a scar near his collar bone.

You have rendered him silent.

And eventually, as you begin to drift off to sleep, you murmur, “You were just a kid, you know?”

He doesn’t really know what you’re getting at, only that it does something strange to the tempo of his heart. He swallows hard, tries to keep his fingers gentle on you. Your breathing has slowed, the rise and fall of your back measured and even, but his has gotten tight.

He squeezes you against him, glaring at nothing, at darkness.

You were just a kid, you know?

It’s this part of you, the one that sees the human in him, that makes him think maybe you will be at his side until the bitter end of it all. Your compassion, the sympathy you have for the child he was, for the person he somehow became. Your unending ability to understand the worst of people.

He doesn’t dwell on the child he was, just has buried it in the cemetery of his chest– a part of him that only you have been able to reach through Quirk, through something too massive to name. You’ve soothed it, put it to rest like the dead, lit your incense in the spaces of his heart. Said your prayers along the notches of his ribs. Tried to appease that restless spirit that possesses him.

He doesn’t know why, but he starts to shake. He can hardly breathe.

And in the dark, when he thinks you’re asleep, and his secrets will be lost to your dreams, he admits for the first time in years what has always trembled inside him. He speaks the tragedy that has made a home of his body, the mourning that he was given name to;

“I wanted to be a hero– when I was a kid.”

***

Tomura thinks, for a moment, when you’re splattered in blood, that this will be your great turning point.

Your fall, the tearing and burning of your wings from your holy back. It will hurt, but he will be there on the ground with you, a hand extended to guide you. He will be there to cradle you into his chest, to hold you close when your world falls apart.

The way All For One was there for him.

The beginning of the end starts with you being a hero.

But you save the wrong person.

Toga’s been following him around as she does every so often, dogging in his shadow, skipping along beside him. You’ve become accustomed to her, too. She likes having you around. Something about not being the only girl. You’re kind to her in the same way he thinks you probably wanted kindness at her age.

The sky is mottled purple, bruised as the day sets into night. The sun looks like an open wound, violent and red.

When he thinks about it, he figures he should’ve been more careful, but then there’s a petty villain Tomura knows vaguely, someone they’ve clashed with before, who he’s pretty sure Dabi and Toga pissed off. He spots Toga first. Your back is turned to him.

“Uh oh,” Toga says, peering over your shoulder.

Tomura grabs your wrist, “Hide,” he hisses, and when you try to peer over your shoulder at what Toga is looking at, he forces you back around so the villain doesn’t see your face.

He doesn’t know why he saves you like that. Only that he doesn’t want you to get in trouble, doesn’t want you taken from him like that. He is not an idiot; if the villain recognizes you, if it somehow got around that you were seen with two of the most notorious villains, the Hero Commission would eat you alive.

And here’s the part that really gets him. You listen to him. You trust him.

You dart away, swift and fast like a fox, disappearing into the shadows the way you were trained to.

“Hey!” the villain shouts and he’s large, Tomura remembers now.

Stupid, too, he thinks, as he barrels towards them.

The glint of Toga’s knife in the sun makes him pause.

Better to not engage, Tomura thinks, not yet, not now. Too much on the horizon for something foolish to happen tonight. The apartment isn’t far from here. He hopes you’ll retreat there. He just needs to get Toga away safely now.

“Oh, I’ve missed fighting!” she sings.

“No,” Tomura rasps, “Don’t engage. We need to go, too.”

She whines a long and drawn out, “Why?” just as the hulking mass of a person swings at her. She ducks away easily, quickly.

However, then his Quirk bursts to life and it’s far worse than what Tomura had hoped for. He doubles in size, his arms in particular growing longer, and fill out with what seems to be rushing water.

“Dammit, Toga,” he hisses, shoving her out of the way as the villain blasts a large cannon of water at her.

Tomura takes the hit hard, black coloring his vision when he hits the ground.

In truth, he thinks he is out for at least a full minute, because when he’s come to, you’re shouting at the villain. You’re tugging desperately at his massive shoulder, clawing and screaming. You’ve canceled his Quirk, but he’s still too big, even without it.

Toga is pinned beneath that arm, choking and spluttering, drenched. It actually looks like she’s choking on water. She can’t even scream, too garbled, too water-logged. She looks like a doll, she looks horribly small. Her face is turning a deep shade of red as she struggles for breath. Her little hands claw at his wrist, too.

Tomura tries to stand, his vision swimming, swaying so bad that for a minute everything goes sideways.

Fuck, he curses, just as he watches you get tossed away by that villain’s other hand like you’re nothing. His Quirk suddenly ripples back to life and he blasts Toga with another bout of water, plastering her to the gravel, the onslaught of it unending.

You’re up in an instant, throwing yourself onto his neck, trying to wrench him off. His Quirk disengages again, and Toga heaves and gasps for breath, coughing up large amounts of water.

“You’re going to kill her!” Tomura finally can catch onto what you’re saying, what you’re desperately screaming. His ears ring.

You get thrown off again. More water. Toga is being blasted so hard that she can’t even choke or struggle.

Tomura thinks you’re trying to rationalize with them, you’re trying to explain you’re a hero. And to disengage. Stop, please stop, please stop–

He’s not listening, though, of course.

And he’s too big. You tried knocking him out, tried putting him to sleep with the grip of your elbow. You’re trying everything, even to crush his Quirk beneath yours. Tomura catches the flutters of pink, your inability to summon your destruction when you need it.

It wouldn’t matter anyways, not with how big he is. You struggle against powerhouses.

Tomura stumbles.

But you’ve always been gritty and sharp and determined, if nothing else. You have always fought so desperately for your life, never mind law or honor or glory.

He thinks he catches the glint of your knife, the desperate threat to let her go, leave her alone!

The villain grabs you with a massive hand around the throat, lifts you clear off the ground.

Toga has gone slack against the pavement in a puddle of water, face colored a strange shade of red and blue. A little like the way the sky blurs before his eyes.

You kick and thrash, a horrible growl wretched from your throat. You don’t think, just lash out.

And then there is blood. So much blood. It’s all over Toga now, seeping into the water– did she cut him? She managed to cut his throat? Because that’s where the blood is pouring out of–

Tomura sways.

You’re dropped.

You stumble away.

Your blade– the one you used to threaten him with, is bloody.

“Fuck!” you shout, raw and so sudden that it jars him a little. He forces himself over to the scene. So much blood. His stomach rolls.

He looks at you, your shell-shocked face. You’re looking at the knife, at the blood. At Toga, who's still not moving.

He goes to her first, tries to shake her a little, fingers held away from her shoulders carefully. For a moment, she doesn’t respond, limp and lifeless and something inside of him threatens to overwhelm him. No, no–

Her eyes flutter, though, and she wheezes for a breath, suddenly turning over to vomit up far too much water.

“I-Is she-?” your voice, so small and lost, cuts through his thoughts.

He looks at you again, blood splattered and terror caught in your eyes. Pale and slack faced and half-mad. You look like a ghost, standing there in the aftermath, in your gruesomeness.

“She’s fine,” he says, just as she wretches up more water, “You saved her.”

Toga falls limp again. He checks frantically for a pulse at her wrist with two careful fingers. Still there. She needs a doctor, though. He stands to face you.

You make a noise, high pitched, trembling. You cover your mouth to keep it in, it’s something like a sob, an animalistic noise.

“I didn’t mean to– I didn’t, I didn’t– she was just–” you’re trying to get out, almost doubled over now.

Tomura doesn’t bother to check if you killed the villain. He knows the dead when he sees it. And he won’t lie to you now, he won’t soften this blow or shield you from it.

But he also knows what he needs to do.

You keel over, about to scream more and– no, that won’t do you any good.

He grabs for you, hauls you back up and you’re shaking so hard that he fears you’re going to split apart. You’re about to lose it.

“Listen to me,” Tomura hisses and you choke on a cry. He shakes you a little, tries to force you to look at him and not the body behind him. Your eyes, feverish pink, meet the wildfire of his, “Listen to me.”

“I– I don’t–”

“Sshh,” Tomura hisses, palm going to your cheek, a little too rough, forcing you to look at only him. “Sshh, listen.”

You try to swallow and he continues, “You’re going to call reinforcements. You’re going to tell them there’s a villain down.”

“W-what?! I’m going to– they’re going to–”

He shakes you again, harder, your teeth click together with the force of it. He needs you to understand this– needs you to hear this if he wants to keep you safe and out of jail.

“Tell them I decayed him. And before that, tell them Toga cut him, and it splattered onto you. Say you heard commotion and like the good hero you are, you ran to help.”

“Tomura–” you sob.

“Do you understand me?” he snaps instead, grabbing you harder, his fingers curling against your cheek to press desperately into you. “Answer me!”

“Yes–” you gasp, wide-eyed and terrified. “Yes!”

“Good,” he hushes, wiping blood from your cheek, “Good. You saved her,” he tells you, “You saved her, do you understand?”

You nod, jerky, and he continues, hand petting your cheek, messily pushing your hair from your face, “You did everything right.”

Your breathing is still labored, but you’re quieting with the praise. When he thinks you can handle it, he breathes, “Now, are you ready? I’m going to decay him and the knife, then I’m going to leave with Toga. You’re going to call for help.”

You glance at the villain, lying lifeless, in his own pool of blood and Tomura ducks his head to force you to look at him. “Okay?” he asks, “Answer me.”

“Okay,” you exhale slowly.

“Good,” he murmurs, “Good. Now give me the knife.”

You press it, trembling, into his hands. It’s slick with blood. He forces himself to stay calm for you.

He steps away, let’s go of you. The knife turns to dust.

“Look away,” he commands then, his voice a rasp.

And you– you listen to him. You trust him. You turn away. He sets his hands on the villain. And just like that, his body breaks down, gore at first, until it is nothing but dust. It blows away easily.

And then he goes to Toga and he lifts her carefully. She’s like a ragdoll in his arms, soaked and cold. He’s certain to keep his hands away from her, fingers lifted away, but she lolls into his chest.

When you turn around, Tomura says, “Thank you for saving her.” And he means it.

You swallow hard. You look to where the villain was. He’s gone now.

“Now call your heroes, just like I said.”

You nod, eyes filling up with tears. That’s fine. They’ll have more sympathy for you, for what you’ve witnessed. They’ll believe you more. Your mentor will protect you, with those tears in your eyes.

Tomura’s eyes burn crimson as you pull out your phone, “Do what I said and you’ll be okay.”

And you do, just like that. You lift the phone to your ear. That semblance of calm that he had coaxed you into shatters the moment someone picks up on the other end.

Your voice goes high, near hysterical, “T-There’s a villain down–”

He turns away from you as you stutter and cry into the phone about what happened. You give them the lie he told you to feed them. You make Tomura out to be the villain, you make yourself out to be innocent. He holds Toga close to him.

He tries not to smile, a dizzy slip of a thing, as you do exactly as he told you to– as you lie and lie and lie through your teeth.

Toga stirs in his arms. Police sirens are heard in the distance. An ambulance for a pile of dust. The sun sets, darkness blanketing the world, shielding it from the light.

And as he stalks away, with Toga alive and in his arms, he thinks maybe he’ll make a villain of you yet.

***

The police believe you. It’s hard not to, when there is so little evidence otherwise. Tomura destroyed it all for you. It’s hard not to believe you, when you’re crying and terrified, as you should be for witnessing the death of another person at the hands of Himiko Toga and Shigaraki Tomura.

Shouta, however, is not as easily convinced.

Not after so many strange occurrences with Tomura.

When he brings you back to his apartment, when the door is shut tight, and you still stand in bloodied clothes with your teeth chattering, Shouta eyes you warily.

You want to shower, burn yourself beneath the spray of water, like you could wash away what you’d done. You squeeze your eyes shut.

You saved her.

You swallow down the lump in your throat.

“What really happened?” Shouta asks, almost tentatively, standing in the middle of his living room.

You turn and you don’t– you don’t know how you should react. Should you be offended that he’d doubt you? React in outrage after all that’s happened? Should you act confused? Play dumb?

You can’t stomach any of it. Not when someone’s dead at your hands. But someone is alive because of them, too.

Your eyes well up with fresh tears.

“I-I told you.” you choke out.

Shouta’s jaw ticks. He draws in a slow breath, “Something isn’t adding up. You have had more contact with Shigaraki Tomura than anyone has been able to have.”

Your stomach drops. Your tears fall harder.

“What’s going on?” he asks and the distance between you two feels massive. It feels continental in the small space of his living room. He seems suspicious.

The lie comes out on a sob, “I–I think he’s been stalking me.”

“What?” Shouta asks and any uncertainty he has in you evaporates as he watches your face crumple.

You let your guilt overwhelm you into choking on another cry, cover your mouth as if you could catch it in the palm of your hand. Shouta doesn’t know the truth of it, so he believes it.

He crosses that distance like it’s nothing now. He stands tall in front of you, reaches to try and brush tears away from your cheek.

“I don’t know–” you gasp, filling out your lie, “I think he's interested in me because of my Quirk. Because he can’t– I can’t decay, when he touches me.”

Shouta tips your face up towards his but you can’t look him in the eyes, let your eyes squeeze shut when he asks, “Why wouldn’t you tell me that?”

“I don’t know–” you choke out, “I wasn’t sure.”

“Did something else happen?” Shouta prods gently and you grit your teeth to keep back another sob. More tears cut tracks down your face, right into Shouta’s waiting, gentle hands.

There is a long moment where you think of giving everything up. You think of telling Shouta everything, if only to lift the weight that has settled onto your chest. Surely, it will crush through your sternum, surely your heart will burst with it’s pressure.

“It’s my fault,” you whisper, “It’s my fault he’s dead.”

“No,” Shouta says then, gentle but firm, shaking his head, “I know it may feel like it–”

“He was going to kill her.”

This stops Shouta. He goes very, very still.

“What?” he rasps softly.

“He was drowning her– he wouldn’t stop. I tried to get him to stop and he started choking me–and she saved me by–” It’s a fabrication to save yourself. That’s not how it went! Your mind screeches, that’s not how it went– you saved her by killing–

Toga was turning blue, she didn’t help you. She didn’t save you. She was drowning. She didn’t kill him. You did.

“You saved Toga Himiko, a notorious villain, one of the most wanted–”

“He was killing her!” you hiss, “She was turning blue–”

“She’s a powerful villain, too, you should’ve tried–”

Something inside of you fractures, bursts apart the way glass does when thrown against a wall. You think there are a million, shining pieces of you now lying on the floor.

“She’s Shinsou’s age!” you snap, hoping one of your shards cuts him, suddenly half-furious through all your tears. “She’s Shinsou’s age, do you know that?!”

You break now, wrenching away from Shouta’s touch and rushing to double over the sink to dry heave again, body squeezing painfully. You threw up everything in your stomach already at the scene, when recounting the story to the police, to Shouta. You claw at your stomach, trying to stop it, to keep it all down inside of you. You curl your fingers into the divots of your ribs, try to force them to give you air, but they won’t– betrayers that they are, they squeeze and squeeze until there’s nothing of you left.

Your knees buckle, head spinning when you turn away from the sink and crumple into a heap on the floor,“She’s just a kid,” you wail desperately, “That’s all I saw when I tried– when I–”

Your head bows forward, body folded in on itself, forehead digging into the ground as you cry, “I didn’t mean for him to die, I didn’t mean it– I didn’t, I swear I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Shouta moves again finally, drops to his knees down beside you. He cradles your skull in his large hand, pushes your head into the crook of his neck to hold you, “It’s alright,” he breathes, curling his other arm tight around you, “It’s not your fault,” he hushes, “It’s not your fault.” You sob hard into his chest, fingernails digging into him, clawing at his biceps, “Sshh, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

And he holds you, buries you in the bulk of him, like he always has when you need him. Your constant, the love you never once deserved. Especially not now. Especially not here, with blood stained on your clothes, sunk to the floor with nothing but the anchor of your guilt.

He strokes your hairline, gentle, cooing softly to try and calm you.

He murmurs, his voice so deep and soft and earnest, “You’re a good hero.” When you make a strangled noise against him, he presses on, “You are. You’re compassionate. You see everyone’s humanity and that’s a good thing.”

He hushes more of your cries, fingers gentle in your hair, and you try not to throw up again when he tells you;

“You’re a good hero, I promise. I promise.”

The beginning of the end starts with you being a hero for a villain.

***

The next time you see Tomura, he questions you about what happened, if you pulled it off. You tell him you managed it, somehow. You don’t tell him anything else. You don’t tell him you haven’t been sleeping, that you can hardly keep food down. You don’t tell him that you take too many showers, trying to wash away the phantom blood.

You remember when it was Tomura’s blood on you, so long ago. A beginning that now seems so hazy. You hadn’t minded blood, then. You had never been particularly squeamish but now–

Now it could make you sick on your best days, downright hysterical on your worst.

Your guilt tears chunks out of you, bites down and shakes the meaty, soft parts of you until you’re all torn up.

It is easier to be with Tomura than Shouta now.

We have more in common, you think, and it makes you want to laugh, empty and wobbly.

You look in mirrors and hardly recognize yourself, wonder if this is really your body. If this is really your life, or if it’s someone else’s. Maybe you are possessed, maybe that explains how you got here.

You don’t tell him any of this. You stay silent.

And that’s okay because Tomura seems strangely quiet after that, pulling you to lay on his chest. He doesn’t let you put the TV on. You can tell he needs to think. You let your eyes drift close as he runs his fingers through your hair with a surprising amount of gentleness, compared to his usual petting.

But eventually he says, so soft that you fear you almost imagined it, “A yakuza head visited the League recently.”

Your eyes flutter open and in your surprise, you sit up a little, looking down at him. “Tomura–” you start, almost a warning.

He knows he isn’t supposed to talk like this here, in this little slice of another world.

But he continues anyways, his voice just a rough scratch, “He killed Magne.” And then, “And Compress no longer has an arm.”

Now you really pull away to look at him. You can feel your eyes widen out, your shock, then the stomach-turning sadness. His face is unreadable, but his jaw is tight. His eyes are simmering, so red, even in the low light like this.

“It was a set up.” he hisses, “I failed them.”

He doesn’t cry, but you can feel the slightest tremble in his body.

You hurt for him, you realize, your heart falling into the pit of your stomach. Those are two of his closest, some of his inner circle.

He looks shaken.

He looks young, with the weight of his world on his shoulders, with the crown of thorns placed on his head. Heir to a monstrous throne. All For One’s successor, boy prince to inherit an underground empire.

You just see him, though, just Tomura who's twenty, who likes sour candy and video games.

He swallows hard. He looks angry and hurt.

“Nobody mourns us,” he says eventually, looking away from you, somewhere in the darkness of the apartment.

Except you, you want to say, with a name like Tomura.

You lurch forward, throwing your arms around his neck, hugging him tight to you. “I’m sorry,” you tell him, soft, the way Shouta speaks to you, “I’m sorry.”

And then you think, I’d mourn you, and you squeeze him tighter, I’d mourn you, oh God, I’d mourn you–

He doesn’t hug you back, but you can feel the shaky breath he exhales, and the way his fingers tighten in the fabric of your shirt.

***

Tomura thinks it should be you, at his side, when he takes Overhaul’s arm. You are everything Overhaul wants. Your Quirk is what he has tried to bottle.

Tomura thinks you could’ve been useful, to switch off his Quirk, to destroy it in an incredible twist of irony. It would’ve been the ultimate power move, to have you at his side by the end of all of this.

But you’re not there, no, not with him.

You’re with your heroes, Toga had told him.

It shouldn’t, but it feels like a betrayal. It stings hard and sharp inside of him, like a livid bee that jabs at his heart.

He seethes about it. Hadn’t he done everything right with you? He’d played this game slow, knew that the rewards would be worth it.

You’re still walking away from him, though. You’re still not his.

And you’ve still got one of his ribs, left a gaping wound inside of him.

He wants it back. He wants it back.

***

Eri looks up at you with watery, red eyes when you first introduce yourself to her. You crouch to be on her level. She has silver hair. She’s timid, wobbly bottom lip and flushed cheeks.

You almost start crying, looking at her now. You wonder if this is what Tomura was like as a child– small and terrified of his Quirk, round red eyes pleading with the world. All you see in her is every other forgotten child.

“Hi, Eri,” you hush, half for her, half because you’re scared your voice might break.

“H-hello,” she trembles.

You try to keep your smile in place, but it’s a weak, sad thing.

Still, you say, “I’d like to be your friend, if you’ll have me.” And you extend your hand to her, palm up and offering. “I have a Quirk like Mr. Aizawa’s.” you tell her gently, “If you touch me while using your Quirk, it’ll stop.”

She brightens at this, not smiling but, surprised, “Really?” she asks, just a breath.

You nod, swallowing around the lump in your throat, “Really.”

She takes your hand then, eager, tightening with her small fingers, despite her Quirk still being off.

Then she looks up into your face and offers you a tentative smile. Small, just the corner of her lips lifting up.

“I’d like to be your friend, too.” she murmurs bashfully and you close your hand around hers. It’s small, almost fragile. She’s all bandaged up, arms wrapped in gauze.

You look at Eri and her red eyes and silver hair and see a coin toss, see it up in the air, spinning and spinning, catching in the light. A twist of fate like the flip of a coin.

But you think you could call it now, with her hand in yours, and the heroes that hover protectively around her.

***

There is a morning shared in blush light that isn’t the ending but feels like it could be one. In truth, you’d prefer to remember this as the ending, more of a whimper and less of a bang. The night before had been one of your better ones, too– you’d only woken once with a nightmare. Tomura had already been awake and he’d soothed you with a careful hand that drew patterns across the bare skin of your back.

That night, that morning, was gentle in the wake of all that violence, love taken root, finally bursting through your veins to make a mess of your insides.

Dawn is too mellow a place for the two of you.

(You have come to the conclusion that Tomura looks best in dusk, saturated, sharp and rich in color. Bold and vivid. You didn’t know it, but he thought the same of you.)

You never told him you loved him.

You think about that a lot, wonder if it would’ve made a difference in anything. You wonder who was the last person to tell him that, if anyone at all.

He’s still half hoping that you’ll follow him, but you think he knows he’s losing you. You are not content in fuming misery, cannot stomach to leave the mentor that has loved and cared for you with such perseverance and softness. You cannot stomach to turn away from the boy with violet hair, or now the girl that reminds you of him.

You wish you could keep him, too, despite it all, but all you see in the future with him is rubble.

In the least, you’ve always had a sense of preservations, survivor that you are, scavenger that you are. You know when to move on, can’t linger too much longer now or you won’t live through it.

You sleep better with Tomura, though, and that’s the cruel part. You wake with less nightmares. You sleep more soundly, wound up in him, so tight that you two might just grow together. Palm to palm, your Quirk quieting his, lulled and softened.

And that morning, you wake slowly, twisting around fitfully with the warmth that has blossomed gently inside of you.

Consciousness creeps to you, fighting against the pull of sleep, being coaxed awake by the fluttering of your heart, the slow roll in your core.

Your eyes lift, heavy with sleep, finally awake. You blink blearily before a sudden, sleep soft cry escapes past your lips.

You glance down the line of your body to find Tomura nestled between your legs, tongue tracing messy patterns into where you’re most sensitive. Your stomach swoops sweetly, flares into a spark of heat.

The light is soft on him. He cracks a ruby eye open to gaze at you, to open his mouth so you can watch the flash of glistening pink as his tongue laves against you slowly.

“About time you woke up,” he gets out, voice still morning-rough, a little grating. His fingers squeeze your thigh, pulling you apart further to be at his mercy, spread open all for him.

“Tomura–” you gasp, your hands finding their way into his hair, fingers gentle and weak with sleep.

He sets his mouth to you, sucks on the bundle of nerves in a way that makes you keen, almost arching away from him. He fixes his eyes on your face, watches as your expression twists up.

You can see the way his hips are twitching into the mattress. Sometimes you think he does this more for himself than you, takes pleasure in rendering you down to your most basic, most desperate.

Pleasure coils warm, simmers on the inside of you. Your fingers flex, tighten in his hair until he groans against you. When he pulls away for another moment to admire you, his lips are spit slick, a string of translucent spit and slick bridging between the two of you.

It makes you flush darkly, makes you throw your head back and whimper.

He takes you apart with the savagery and viciousness that he has always carried. Dawn spills over the bed sheets in rays of peach and honeysuckle, lovely for the impending destruction. You shatter like glass, pretty and ringing beneath his hands.

And then he’s flipping you onto your stomach, letting you claw at your pillow as he sinks deep inside of you. He hisses when he fucks into the crux of your sweet, supple thighs. Your hair is messy with sleep. He presses his chest to your back, presses you into the mattress.

You fist at your pillow, whining at the burn and stretch, and you can feel the sickle cut of his smile against the arch of your shoulder blades. He leaves sloppy kisses, scattering them, sucking at your skin until he has claimed and marked and branded you.

He nudges his nose against your cheek until you tilt your head back to his, to rub back affectionately, nudge into him like a cat. He hums in satisfaction, in pleasure, the sound of it rumbling against your back.

You feel like he’s trying to savor this. He doesn’t pull your hair, or speed up his hips. No, he waits until you arch your back for him, until you’re near begging.

He likes you weakened, maybe delirious, maybe like he’s giving you a dose of your own medicine. He’s trying to make you as addicted as he is, but there’s no need.

No need when he covers your hand with his, slots his fingers between yours. All five of them, squeezing at your hand.

“You were made for me,” he gets out, giving you a rougher thrust, his eyes flashing to your hands, “See?” he groans, fingers digging into your wrist, your knuckles, “Made for me.”

You moan, too, all wobbly and pitched, with all the pressure, with the squeeze of his hand. With the stretch of him inside where you’re vulnerable and soft and slick.

He drags everything out that morning, fucks you both into oversensitivity, until you’re both shuddering and gasping. He breaks you down, until there are tears streaming down your face, until he’s gripping you so tightly that he’ll leave a bruise in the shape of his hand.

He fits his hand against your throat at one point and your eyes roll into the back of your head. You end where you began, with the violet petal bruise of his fingertips into your skin.

You linger in bed with him that morning, letting him pet and stroke and touch you. You stay gentle, even when he gets rough.

You make cheap, bad coffee for the both of you.

You feel twenty something with a boy and his tiny apartment. A cat chirps at the window and you’re smiling when you let him in. The breeze is cool. You don’t put on clothes because you feel like an adult, with a lover.

You feel normal for a fraction of a moment after everything that’s happened.

You feel sated and tender and saddened. Your chest fills with aching as you watch Tomura drift in and out of sleep in the sunbeams.

You were made for me, he’d said and you reach out to brush a strand of hair from his face. You were made for me.

You swallow around the lump in your throat, the one that feels like needle pricks and the hard truth. You don’t have the heart to tell him that he may need you, but you don’t need him.

You want him, though, your fingers trailing down the lines of his face, you want him so badly that it hurts. Your fingers travel over the hitch of his scars, his body as familiar as a home.

You want him, but you don’t need him, you try to tell yourself in this moment. You want him, but you don’t need him. You will survive this.

Still, it’s going to hurt. You’re bracing for impact, can feel the free fall rush up to the ground, can feel your stomach swimming up where your heart is.

You’ll survive it, you think, breathing hard, trying to keep back your tears as you look at him. But it’s going to hurt, it might tear out something very precious inside of you.

You’d rather he just break your arm again. At the thought of it, you try not to choke on the bitter, furious laugh that splits from your aching ribs.

***

You get to know Eri, try to spend more time with her and Shouta and Shinsou like you’re trying to fix something you broke. The pieces aren’t quite matching up right, though. It can’t be fixed, not really, not fully.

You can’t close your eyes without seeing that villain in a pool of their own blood. Or Toga’s face made blue. Sometimes in these dreams, it’s Shinsou who is drowning. Sometimes the villain in blood is Shouta. Tomura is always the one who saves you.

You can’t look at yourself anymore. You can’t stomach to. Your lies explode out of you when you catch a glance of yourself, haggard and exhausted and beaten down.

Shouta takes you to a hospital after your fist collides with the mirror in your bathroom. Glass shatters into hundreds of reflections of your warped and terrible image. They’re not as pretty, when the sun isn’t setting in a warehouse with a boy that you think you love.

Your hand bleeds the way that man’s necks did–

Your world spins as you lean over the bowl of the toilet to throw up your lunch. You’d made it with Eri earlier, before Shouta had gotten home from class.

Shouta finds you on the floor, sitting in all that glass, with your hand clutched tightly to your chest. He must’ve heard the commotion next door.

“What happened?” he asks, voice flooding with concern. He doesn’t hesitate to step carefully over the glass to you.

The question feels too large for you.

I did something horrible, you think, that’s what happened.

“I’m sorry,” you mutter weakly, lifting your chin from its place on your chest. “I didn’t mean to.”

(That isn’t true and you know it.

(But you’re always trying to prove you’re good. Especially now. Especially to Shouta�� trying to prove you’re worthy of his love.

You suddenly crave Tomura. You didn’t have to prove anything to him.)

Shouta lifts you carefully, cradles you to his body to carry you out to his car to bring you to the hospital. He treats you like you’re fragile, made of glass yourself. “What’s going on with you?” Shouta murmurs gently, but there's almost a plea in it, concern that is so transparent it hurts, “You’re scaring me– I’m worried about you.” he confesses, almost desperate, “You know you can talk to me, don’t you?”

The laugh that sputters out of you is hollow, a grating noise that gets choked off. Shouta looks at you warily, uncertain and fearful.

The hospital keeps you for three days. Eri asks Shouta about you, apparently. She misses you. Shinsou helps her decorate a card for you.

Get well soon! Is written in her poor handwriting with far too many colors, and in Shinsou’s messy scrawl at the bottom;

Miss getting my ass kicked by you.

The doctors tell Shouta you’re struggling with a lot of survivor’s guilt and you have to fight back another absurd, off-kilter laugh.

Part of you thinks you’d be better off with Tomura at this point (your coin uncertain, hanging suspended in the air), if only to relieve you of this guilt, when Shouta tends to you and cares for you and loves you so steadfastly that it makes you feel rotten and horrible and monstrous. He has no idea who he’s loving. And you don’t deserve any of it–

But you think of Eri and the way she clings to your sleeves. And how you and Shinsou share granola bars during training.

And mostly, you are terrified to be without them.

None of it’s the same, though, and you think it’ll eat away at you until you’re nothing at all but the empty lies you kept feeding them.

You want to be better, you realize, when Eri draws you in pictures, holding her hand. You want to be better, you realize, for kids like you, like her–

(Like Tomura–)

So you decide one night, with your hand still bandaged, with Eri sleeping peacefully on the couch in the crux of your arms, and Shouta at the opposite end of the couch, that you will stay with them. The easy thing to do would be to leave, to not look back. But you have always been nothing if not determined, if not a fighter.

You will become who they want you to be, who they believe you to be, even if it tears you apart from the inside out.

Which means giving up Tomura, which feels like giving up a rib.

***

You had hoped you’d be able to slip away from Tomura and leave your secrets in a rundown apartment in a part of the city you grew up in. You had hoped that you could get away unscathed, without Shouta ever knowing more.

But Dabi mentions you to Hawks.

Offhand. Something about another traitor hero. Something about Shigaraki’s bitch.

Tomura also mentions Hawks to you.

And here is your trouble, what you were hoping to avoid by never allowing him to speak about his plans; you now know that the Number Two Pro-Hero is a traitor. However, the only reason you know that, is because of your secret relationship with the leader of the League of Villains that you have been slowly, painstakingly trying to sever yourself from.

(It doesn’t help that he’s latched on tighter–)

So, if you go to Shouta to warn him that the Number Two Pro-Hero is a traitor, you have to also conveniently come forward with your own truth. And what if he thinks you’re a traitor, too?

Surely, it looks that way.

Truthfully, you might as well be– you killed someone.

You killed someone.

Your stomach squeezes tight.

You think of Shouta and Shinsou and Eri and the loss of their love, when you’ve been trying to earn it back.

You don’t get much time to mull this over, though, because while walking back to your own apartment at U.A., a shadowy span of wings fall over your form.

Your heart falls into the pits of you, the drop of it sharp, horrible.

You think running will make it look all the worse.

Besides, he’s fast.

You can’t decide how this will go. Maybe he’ll only want to speak with you, traitor to traitor. But then you will be confronted with the undeniable truth that you now need to share with Shouta, with the Hero Commission, for the sake of people’s safety. You will have to come clean. Maybe it will be worse. Maybe he’s not after you at all, but just in your neck of the woods because–

All other thoughts are cut short when he lands in front of you.

You try to think of a proper reaction. Should you be expecting him? On guard? Should you act surprised?

His wings flare and you realize quickly how massive they are. They throw you into their towering shadow, make you feel like a mouse.

His eyes glint when he pushes up his visor, the gold of them sharp, his pupils a pinprick. The eyes of a predator.

You try not to cower. You stand your ground, lift your lips a little like you might bare teeth in warning, your hackles raising. Backed into the corner, you feel half wild, too.

But Hawks beats you to any form of a greeting, his smile a menacing twist of his lips, like he’s trying to be pleasant but he wants you to see all of those sharp, white teeth of his. You think he doesn’t look like much of a hero in this darkness, with the way his wings look thorny and maroon. His voice is barbed wire, the drawl of it stinging.

You know you’re in deep trouble now;

“You and I need to have a little talk.”

***

You are kept in a steel room that the Hero Commission tells you is not a holding cell, but you definitely think is a holding cell.

Your mind has not slowed since you got here.

You scramble for a story to tell– for lies to sew.

Hawks is not a traitor. Not to the heroes’ at least. He is a traitor to the villains and you know, logically, that this is for the greater good, but something about it bothers you. Villains aren’t people to the Hero Commission. You feel strangely protective of Tomura’s league of outcasts, even if you know you shouldn’t.

But they’re young, with feelings and thoughts and lives and pasts.

Nobody ever mourns us.

No, they don’t, you think, trying to keep away bitter tears from springing to your eyes. They don’t bother trying to see the big picture, they don’t bother to try and figure out why villains are on the rise.

They can’t stomach the idea that maybe their precious hero system has given birth to their villains.

Or maybe they can and they just don’t care.

They need heroes for their charts and money and power, don’t they? So they need villains. A never ending cycle, forever going around on this carousel. You’re dizzy with it, you’re sick of it, caught up in it’s riptide.

You don’t look at Tomura Shigaraki and see the most dangerous, wanted criminal in the country. You see a twenty-year-old pawn, a chip in a bigger game. You see someone as starving and desperate as you were.

You see a coin flip.

(You see the person you fell in love with–)

Shouta enters silently and the moment you see him, you have to try to keep from bursting into tears. Your lip wobbles.

He approaches slowly, cooly, but when he gets near you, his eyes are livid and searching your face, like maybe he could finally find the lies you’d kept buried so deep inside of you. They’ve finally blossomed, you think, all of them sprouting from your body, creeping through your lungs and up your throat to choke you out.

“Tell me the truth finally.” Shouta says, sharp and icy. He speaks like he’s speaking to a criminal, “Now.”

You suck in a shaky breath, try not to flinch when he leans across the metal table and snarls, “And if you are a traitor, at least have the decency to tell me now, before they come in here and interrogate both of us.”

Tears catch in your lashes.

Through the throbbing of your head, you realize you have jeopardized Shouta in the way you never wanted.

“I’m not a traitor.” you get out, voice quiet but firm, barely above a whisper.

“No?” Shouta clips and you can see it now, the hurt in his eyes. He feels betrayed, deeply so, and you can’t even blame him. “Hawks says differently. Says you’ve been working with Shigaraki.”

You rub furiously at your cheek to try and keep the tears from falling, shaking your head quickly, “No–”

“Then what happened?” he snaps and through the blur of your own tears, you catch the way his own eyes glisten.

“I didn’t tell you everything, when I said I thought Shigaraki was stalking me.” you say, having readied this lie the moment that Hawks brought you to the Hero Commission’s doors. You give them the story they want to hear of you, not the one where you fell in love, but the one where you jeopardize yourself for them. You are careful to peer up at him through damp lashes, “I–I got close to him, because he let me, because he was interested in me.”

Shouta goes very, very still. All you can see is his chest rising and falling, quick, as he slowly begins to walk the path you’re leading him down.

“And I thought he might tell me his plans, I thought that I could help–”

“No,” Shouta says in disbelief as it all begins to connect, leaning away from you in shock, “Please tell me you didn’t–”

You lurch towards him slightly, naturally, your hands coming up to the table like you’re reaching for him. “I wanted to prove I could do this–” you choke out, voice breaking, “I wanted to prove I could do undercover work like you wanted– like they wanted!”

“What were you thinking?” he hisses in return.

“You never would’ve let me do this!” you snap, almost plead with him, and it must strike true because he looks away from you momentarily, “I-I saw an opening so I tried to take it– I was perfect for it. Shigaraki was interested in me. I used to be a thief. I would’ve fit in.”

The moment you say it, you realize how true it rings. It startles you, maybe, with how close you were. Almost, but didn’t, your coin doing an extra rotation in air. And why didn’t you? Why not be with Tomura now? Why not be where you fit in most? Where hero society wanted and expected you to be?

“I’m not a traitor,” you cry, tears tracking down your cheeks freely now– you think you’re trying to convince yourself as much as Shouta now, “I promise I’m not a traitor– I couldn’t do that to you. O-or Shinsou. Or Eri–”

And there is your reason. The truth to disguise your lies. You look at him, across from you, his face almost unreadable, with his furrowed brows and tense jaw. His eyes shine, though, gleam with unshed tears as he listens to you. The man who gave you everything, who has cared for you since the moment he found you– perhaps the sole reason your coin has flipped in their favor. All because he did more than what was asked of him, because maybe he just saw someone starving, too, like the way you did with Tomura.

Believe me, you plead, believe this.

There is a long stretch of silence after that, where all you can get in is hiccuping breaths.

Finally, Shouta asks, “Did you find anything out about him? Or the League of Villains?”

You exhale hard with relief, your shoulders finally falling. You collapse somewhat, exhausted, folding in on yourself.

You hang your head, then shake it slowly, “No,” you sniffle, wipe at your drippy nose, “He didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t trust me.”

Shouta eyes you warily.

“So that’s why you encountered him so much. That’s why you were there with Toga Himiko when–” Shouta cuts himself off when he sees your wince, the shuddering of your features at the mention of that incident. But he finally put all of the pieces together. All the pieces you’ve given him, at least.

You nod, stray tears falling quick, dripping off your chin, “I’m sorry for lying,” you get out, “I hated it— I hated lying to you.”

Truth.

Shouta throws you a hard look, “You shouldn’t have. It was dangerous and irresponsible. And now look at what you’ve done–”

Your stomach knots up tightly.

“I thought I could handle it.” You breathe and there is another truth, sprinkled throughout your lies.

But you were so horribly wrong–

Shouta is about to open his mouth again, but the door swings open and a man in a suit enters slowly. His gaze is cool as it falls on you and Shouta. You know this isn’t the end of your conversation with him, you know he wants to know more. But now, he focuses on the higher up that encourages him to sit, too.

He says, because Shouta has been such an upstanding hero and teacher, they are allowing him the courtesy of explaining everything now.

And then you watch as Shouta opens his mouth and lies and lies and lies for you.

He tells them that it was his idea to allow you to get close to Shigaraki. He knew, every step of the way. He tells them he bypassed speaking with a committee at the Hero Commission’s because it would’ve taken too much time. He says that they needed to act quickly and accordingly.

He takes the brunt of it, saves you from far more trouble. He’s a trusted hero. You’re an ex-thief in the eyes of the Hero Commission with a too-big Quirk. They won’t believe you and truthfully, if they did more digging, if they pried more, there is a chance that the truth might leak out of you, open like a wound.

Shouta protects you, the way he always has. You don’t deserve it and you can feel your heart tearing itself to shreds.

You know you can’t go back to Tomura, not after all this.

You watch Shouta lie for you, speak for you, get you out of the grave you have dug yourself. For the second time in your life, Shouta saves you. You try to hold back more tears, you try to hold back from throwing yourself onto him, clinging to him.

And finally, they ask, “Did you learn anything, then? About Shigaraki Tomura?”

He likes sour candy. He has trouble sleeping. He drinks too many energy drinks. There is a scar at the corner of his lip. He has a beauty mark on his chin. He is desperate and starved of love. He let’s a kitten sleep in the sunlight of his apartment. He tries to take care of the League to the best of his ability– he cares about them more than he will admit. He is not heartless. His hands are often cold but seeking, longing for what he can’t have.

Your eyes well up with tears but you take a slow, steadying breath. They don’t want those pieces of him, the human, messy ones. No, they want to know how evil he is, how diabolical his next plan is going to be. But you don’t know any of that, just that he holds you as if he never wants to let you go when you fall asleep at night.

So you’re not lying when you say;

“I don’t know anything about Shigaraki Tomura.”

Only that he wanted to be a hero– when he was a kid.

***

The days following are the worst between you and Shouta.

He doesn’t trust you anymore. You can’t fight him. You have nothing to say, which is perhaps worse than if you tried to fight with him.

There’s no defending you, especially if Shouta even knew half of the truth. He barely speaks with you some days.

He wedges the distance between you two wide, forces it apart further.

He does not comfort you, he does not hold you when you cry this time. He’s not there with soothing, hushed words or the gentle touch of his hand to your cheek.

A piece of his trust is broken, now so severely that it’s just a jagged edge, something you don’t think can ever be soothed.

(And you’re right, in some way– there’s a deep shift in your relationship with him, changed and scarred. It never returns to what you once had, when your life was very simple and all you knew was him.)

He doesn’t ever say, I forgive you. I will trust you again, in time.

But he eventually will make dinner for you again and you will sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder at his table with a respectable, lonesome distance between his heart and yours.

Nothing is ever the same again.

You think about running– from Shouta, from Tomura, from all of it. It would be the easiest option, where you never have to look either in the face again.

But the Hero Commission looks at Eri the same way they looked at you when they discovered you could destroy Quirks and you can’t stomach the idea of leaving her to them.

(Tomura was right in a lot of ways.

And when there’s a war on the horizon and the Hero Commission seeks to use you as a weapon, you will think of him again.

I’ll teach you, if that’s what you want, he’d said to you once. And he did.

You hate the system, the endless cycle, Prometheus chained to his rock, the need of villains to have heroes, the creation of heroes to make villains. The endless bodies, the using and discarding of real, human lives for a greater good. You wish you could destroy it.

But there is more than only destruction, too. What good is rubble and ruin and death?)

You stay so you can do what you can, so you can protect a child with red eyes, with silver hair, and a Quirk too big for their own body.

And you think maybe if you stay with her, it makes up for leaving Tomura.

***

You go to Tomura one last time, walk the distance to his apartment with your hands shoved into your pockets. It’s a familiar walk now. The pavement is wet from rain. It’s cold out. You don’t know what you’re going to tell him. You wonder how he’ll react– for a moment, you’re fearful. Will he lash out? For a moment you wonder if he’ll try to kill you.

But you know, deep down, he wouldn’t. Won’t.

And you won’t pretend you’re scared of him now. You won’t play the innocent hero, not in front of him.

The moment Tomura sees you, he knows something has changed. You are too expressive and now you look at him with a sense of foreboding. With a sadness that he feels uncomfortable gazing at.

You tell him, “I got in trouble with the Hero Commission.”

For a moment, he lets his hope grow and stretch inside of him. Maybe this is finally your turning point, your fall from grace that he will catch you on. But no, your lip wobbles and your eyes dart away.

“I can’t see you anymore,” you whisper.

At first, he wants to snap at you, hiss out something cruel between his bared teeth. Maybe if you had done this a few years ago, a few months ago, he would lash out, try to tear into his neck or you or the world. He thinks about hurting you, slamming you against a wall or–

The thought is unfortunately repulsive to him. He doesn’t want to hurt you, not like that.

His anger and resentment wells inside of him, swarms his chest viciously. He wants to argue, to point out every way your heroes have failed you. The world feels so absurdly unfair suddenly, to give him you– you who quiets his Quirk and touches him gently and winds your arms around him in the way he likes so much– only to then take you away, too. You who destroys with a touch, too. Who is perfect at his side.

But for all his work and care and strategy, he can’t get you to stay.

You will run back to your heroes.

You don’t need him, he realizes now. But you have his rib, tucked away inside of you. He wants to dig into you, pry it out, rip it from your body and take it back for himself.

But you’re crying.

And you’re pretty in the dark, like you’ve always been. This time, though, you’re not looking for a fight, there is no viciousness in you now. Maybe you’re too tired to fight.

So instead of erupting, instead of lashing out, Tomura steels himself. He’ll play the longer game, then. You don’t want to go, but you will. You’ll go back to your heroes and they will disappoint you. As they always do, at some point, eventually.

You will come back to him again, he tells himself.

And he will be forgiving, the way All For One has been with him. He sees it now; you, needing his hand, needing him to take you back. He will welcome you back into his arms, as if you hadn’t even left, and you will know then that you were right to leave.

He gazes at you, red eyes smoldering, “Then don’t.” he rasps and he’s trying to remain dispassionate, but his voice has a trembling note in it, the hidden fear underneath the harsh coolness.

Your eyes flicker back to him, your lips parting in surprise. You wipe at your eyes.

“So that’s it?”

And this makes him angry, the sharp tug of it like a dog at the end of it’s leash. He lurches forward threateningly, like he might hurt you.

(You don’t flinch. And he stops himself before he gets too close.)

“What?” he snaps, “Did you want me to beg for you to stay?”

He wants to, he realizes, he wants to howl and scream and tear apart everything in sight. He wants to say don’t go, don’t go, don’t slip from me, too.

He wants to bargain with you– what is it he can’t give you that they can?

Your heroes only love you because they don’t know you, they don’t know what you’ve done. Your heroes only love you as far as truth and justice go. A hero would sacrifice you for the greater good and you would agree with them, even if you were shaking and crying, even if you burned with all that liveliness.

But he’d sooner sacrifice the world for you.

You have his rib, he wants to scream, of course he wants to beg.

You shake your head, though, more tears falling free, “No,” you say, voice surprisingly strong, “No, I never made you beg.”

The truth of it burrows beneath his skin. He knows. The itch squirms beneath his skin. His hand reaches up, digs into the crook of his neck to scratch at it.

It’s Dabi’s voice in his head that says something about getting too distracted with this braindead hero. He has bigger plans than hiding in an abandoned apartment with you. More to do. You were nothing but a side quest.

His pause screen.

Besides, what’s there to be upset about? You’ll come back.

He won’t even punish you for leaving, he promises. He promises.

“Then that’s it.” Tomura tells you, a bitter curl to his lips.

There’s no goodbye, just the breeze between the two of you, the empty space that he always hated. The nothingness between that he always sought to destroy.

Eventually, he just turns away from you. He can’t stomach looking at you any longer. He can feel your eyes pressing into his retreating form– he imagines you rushing for him, crashing into his back to throw your arms around his middle. You can’t do it, you’ll cry, burying your face between his shoulder blades. And he’ll freeze, but eventually he’ll wrap his arms around yours and bow his head with the strength of your feelings for him.

Or he imagines later, when it’s the end of the world, and you emerge from the rubble to reach for him. It’ll be like his dreams, when the sky is falling, and you only want to hold his hand in yours.

He imagines you shouting to him, changing your mind, saying his name like it’s a song to sing, not mourning bells, not a curse or an affliction.

But none of it happens.

And when he turns around, you are gone.

You leave his life as viciously as you entered it, suddenly there, all furious and beautiful, and now gone, like a lightning strike, like a lifetime.

***

You tell yourself you’re going to be fine, but you spend random days weeping over a villain. You spend long nights awake, missing him, replaying it all in your mind. You cover all your mirrors. You try to be different. You wish you could say you regret ever getting involved with him, but it would be one more lie. You wish for the time before the worst of it, the strange honeymoon you never should’ve had.

You wish you’d remembered to slow down, to savor it all a little more. You try to remember what your first kiss was like and the shade of his eyes through the evening light of an abandoned warehouse.

You try to remember when you didn’t feel so heavy, so corrosive and lost.

It doesn’t help that you’re suspended from heroing; a choice made by both the Hero Commission and Shouta. There’s nothing for you to do some evenings.

Shouta lets you train with him and Shinsou still. Shinsou tries to cheer you up, though he doesn’t know what’s wrong with you. Still, it hurts because he’s trying. It hurts because he cares so much, even about you.

You don’t deserve it, after everything.

You take care of Eri more, too, now that she is nearly in Shouta’s care. You babysit her while he’s away. You grow close with her, fiercely protective of the young girl, careful to keep the Hero Commission at a distance from her. She settles in your lap on the couch in Shouta’s apartment most evenings, watching TV and movies, while he grades papers at the opposite end.

Sometimes she falls asleep tucked into your side. You stroke her silver hair and try to bite back tears.

She catches you, sometimes, perceptive as she is, and asks very gently, “Why are you sad?” even if a tear hasn’t slipped free yet.

And you always shake your head, trying to dispel the thought of Tomura and the parents that gave him such a tragic name as a child. You force a smile for her and you tell her something silly to distract her, “I’m not,” you promise, “I just think there’s an onion nearby.”

She wrinkles her nose at this, “No, there isn’t!” but she’s easily distracted with tickles or the promise of painting her nails or having a tea party with Shouta.

Miraculously, your relationship with Shouta begins to heal, despite your betrayal. You think he can tell something worse happened to you during your time with Tomura, you think he can tell that you’re hurting, so he ends up gentler with you. He doesn’t trust you, though, keeps you on a tight leash. He looks at you some days like he isn’t quite sure he knows you.

Nothing is the same. Part of you wants to regret it. The part of you that loves Tomura can’t stomach the idea of regretting it. Someone is dead because of you. Someone is alive because of you, too.

But Shouta doesn’t ask and you don’t tell, can’t seem to speak the words.

You can’t even say, I fell in love, can’t speak the truth because it is so horrible.

And you know what everyone would ask; who could love the likes of him?

Me, you think, vehement and grief-stricken, me, you think defiantly. Why couldn’t you? He was a child once–

Shouta lets you burrow into his chest, wraps his arms around you. He sways with you in the kitchen until you can keep back your tears, until your heart has slowed to the tempo of his. He kisses the top of your head.

And it’s Shouta who is with you, when you return from training, and open the door to your apartment to reveal a scruffy, mangy looking grey kitten that wasn’t there when you left.

Ryuji chirps happily at you, rushing to the open door.

For a moment, you’re so shocked that all you can do is stand, startled, as he rubs himself against your legs.

“Don’t tell me you found another stray–” Shouta starts, but all you get out is a small, choked noise.

And here is the impact from the fall, you think, looking at that little cat that is excitedly winding itself around your legs. You can feel the shattering of your heart, like he’d lobbed it against the wall. You wonder if it catches light the same way glass does, all stained with color and broken into shards.

You drop to the floor with the weight of it all, with the clean splitting of your heart.

The moment Ryuji climbs into your lap, a sob finally ruptures out of you.

Shouta is fast, coming down beside you, you think he’s asking what’s wrong, why you’re crying, but you’ve already gathered the kitten into your arms, cradling him to your chest as the tears come quick and furious down your cheeks.

You think maybe you should be more concerned as to how he got Ryuji here, in U.A. dorms, you should be worried about security and safety but all you’re thinking about is that little apartment that you hid from the world with him in.

No, all you’re thinking about is the way light fell through the lone window to turn him hazy and soft in your memory. You’re thinking about how he never denied you affection, so long as you gave it tenfold in turn. The drawl of his voice. The pressing of his fingers into your skin like you were a miracle.

To him, you were.

Another sob spills out of you, from somewhere deep inside you.

What a lonely life, to only be able to touch one person in certainty. You wonder who will be the next person that will lay their hands gently on a body that has known too much pain. You wonder if you will be the last person to do it.

The thought hurts, opens up a part of you that is tender and shaking and desperately furious.

When Shouta can’t figure out what’s wrong with you or why you’re crying, he gives up, and sits on the floor with you. He gathers you into his lap so your back is pressed to his chest, pushing your head beneath his chin, Ryuji still cradled in your arms.

You cry harder when Shouta tries to comfort you, when he hushes softly, so sweetly, only because you don’t think there’s anyone to comfort Tomura like this.

You think of Tomura alone, even without Ryuji and it just–

Crushes you.

You squeeze the kitten tighter to your chest as you cry and cry and cry. You let Shouta hold you against him, but there’s no comfort in the aching hollowness that is growing in the pit of your chest.

You want to scream at the world that tossed the coin.

But all that comes out is a garbled, misery struck, cry.

You never told him you loved him, never gave word to what consumed you. And you realize, sitting on the floor with a kitten in your arms, that you won’t ever be able to tell him now.

It will live and die inside of you, never spoken into existence.

And even though it’s too late and Tomura Shigaraki is readying for a battle with a giant without you at his side, you still whisper the words you never got to speak into the top of Ryuji’s head.

Your lips barely move with it, the quietest, most desperate, “I love you– I loved you.” that escapes you with a trembling breath.

Shouta doesn’t even hear the confession.

Ryuji nudges your cheek with his, though, purring softly, keeping your secret safe.

And in the least, you are able to twist into Shouta’s arms and bury your face in his chest to cry as hard as you need. There’s no distance between the two of you now, like you always wanted.

Always here when you need him, even now, when it’s not him you want.

The irony isn’t lost on you.

You mumble incoherent apologies into his shoulder, try to hide in him, like he might be able to shield you from all the hurt and ache of your first love. He doesn’t ask, but he tells you very gently, his voice like the hearth of your home, “If you ever want to talk, I’ll always be there for you.”

You keep Ryuji, clean him up, fit him with a new collar, a new life. Shouta helps you care for him.

Eri adores the kitten, hugging him to her smiling face every time she sees him. Thankfully Ryuji is even-tempered, eager for affection. Almost desperate for it.

Ryuji is like proof of another world, proof that it all happened.

Sometimes you rub between his ears and ask, “Do you miss it, too?” but all he does is peer at you inquisitively, eyes large and fixed on you.

You sleep with him, though, let the kitten curl up in your lonesome arms, hold tight to him the way you used to hold tight to Tomura.

***

In the middle of the night, your phone wakes you with its insistent chime and buzzing. You blink awake sleepily, slowly and blindly paw for your phone.

You turn the screen towards you and squint at the bright light, making out the word that flashes on it;

Unknown Caller.

You grimace, rubbing at your eyes. You debate putting your phone down, letting it ring and go to voicemail. Why should you answer for an unknown caller in the middle of the night?

And yet, something in you squirms, urges you to pick up. You have no idea who it might be— maybe someone needs your help. Is it possible it’s Shouta? Shinsou? What if it’s—

You answer finally, groggy voice slurring out, “Hello?”

You’re met with static.

“Hello?” you say again, voice hushed with sleep.

Still nothing.

Tomura sits on the other side, with the phone pressed desperately to his ear. He holds everything inside of him, barely allows himself to breathe on the other end.

He doesn’t know why he’s done this, only that he is on his way to proving himself with the League and he wishes you were still at his side.

He swallows, hears you call again, “Hello? Anyone there?”

He tightens his four-finger grip on the phone, squeezing his eyes shut at the sound of your voice, sleepy and soft in his ear, wrapping around the jagged parts of his heart.

He exhales and you must hear it because you say, “Is someone there?”

He bites back an answer, feels his lip tremble slightly.

He hears you huff, indignant little thing that you are and his lips pull into a shaky, painful smile. “I’m going to hang up now,” you say, all prickly, the way you’d get if he woke you too soon.

He used to soothe you with lips and teeth and tongue, run diligent fingers over you until you were sighing and arching into his touch. Until all your hard, vicious edges softened with the flattening of his palm on your body.

And for some reason you try, one last time into coaxing him to answer, “C’mon,” you say, almost like you know, “Nothing?”

Nothing, he wants to echo, but doesn’t.

His heart pounds an uneasy rhythm, a haunted tempo. He feels himself shaking again.

“Okay,” you exhale, slow, like you’re giving him a chance to stop you, “Goodbye.”

A beat passes, before he feels his heart lurch painfully in the hollow place of his chest at the thought of not hearing your voice again like this, so near. He doesn’t want you to go, wants to listen to you until it coaxes him to sleep.

“Wait– don’t hang up–“ Tomura hisses into the phone at the last moment, unable to decide if he wants you to hear him or not.

He gets his answer in the buzzing silence, long and drawn out, that fills his head. His heart.

And he sits there with his phone still in hand and his heart still on the line.

***

Tomura shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be watching you from afar, in the park that he thought you’d looked like a painting in. You’re beautiful.

But what does someone like him know about beauty, anyways?

The fireburst leaves are nearly gone, barely clinging to lone and stark branches. They claw up into the sky now, but the sun is shining. It’s mid-morning. You’re in the park with your mentor, with the violet haired boy he’d seen you with before, and the little girl with silver hair. The one that was in Overhaul’s care, with the devastating Quirk.

She tugs excitedly at your sleeve now and you give her your undivided attention, your face lighting up with whatever it is she tells you.

You scoop her into your arms and her echoing giggle is like wind chimes, melodic and childish and care-free.

You look happy, he thinks, with your mentor’s hand on the small of your back, looking down at you and the girl fondly. The violet-haired boy says something that makes the girl laugh, it makes you smile as you watch her.

You look back at your mentor with a look that Tomura has come to know; one that begs of attention and approval and affection. He can see the desperate glint to your eyes, hungry for his love.

He swallows around the sharp bitterness he feels. Jealousy floods him in a way he has never fully known. But it’s more than just jealousy for you and your attention, for the way you’re looking at your mentor.

No, it’s something greater, far worse.

He’s jealous of your mentor, with the easy way he gets to touch and look at you out in public. But he’s also jealous of you and your life.

He doesn’t realize it at first, but he’s begun to shake.

Because you were saved– isn’t that it? You were saved. And he wasn’t.

Maybe he’s jealous of the boy with you, too, with the possibility of his life so much brighter already. He has more of a chance than Tomura ever had.

Or maybe it’s the girl in your arms, with eyes like his, who he is most jealous of now. He has never allowed himself to ask;

Why couldn’t it be me?

But now he does and he can feel the pit in his chest grow with a livid sort of despair. Grief for a life never lived. Didn’t he deserve to be saved, too? Like the girl in your arms? Like you? Didn’t he deserve a life like this, too? What’s the difference? He wants to demand it, what’s the difference?

You were just a kid, you know?

His fingers dig into his neck. There is no one to stop him from breaking skin, for drawing blood on his own body. His chest festers, angry, like a blister. His stomach turns, his body trembling harder, like he’s a child, like he’s going to shake apart.

He looks at your smiling face, the curve of your lips, and wants you so bad it hurts. He wonders if you ever dreamt of him as a hero, the way he dreams of you as a villain. He wonders why it feels so unfair suddenly, the turning of your lives, the coming together and falling apart.

He shudders, feels the sudden lump in his throat. He tried not to mourn you, when you left him. He told himself that there was nothing to mourn; either you would be back or you weren’t worth it. He feels the pressure of tears now, though, much to his frustration. He feels his lungs burn for breath as he watches you hand the little girl off to your mentor, who props her onto his hip easily.

He watches you throw your head back and laugh, the sound of it distant, but he catches it, the outskirts of it. He used to feel that laugh against his throat, against his lips.

But now he watches you live a life he apparently never deserved.

His bottom lip trembles, a furious scowl marring his face.

He could scream or shout at a world that wouldn’t listen. The fact of it all, the helplessness of it all, burns beneath his skin like wildfire, like acid.

Tomura takes one last look at you; the expressive glimmer of your eyes, the flash of your teeth. He lingers on you, commits you to memory as if he could ever forget you. Maybe someday he will. Maybe he won’t have to, if you come back to him.

But he won’t wait on it, in an apartment that still has traces of you in it’s corners and crevices. No, he has more to do, bigger than him. Bigger than you.

Even if the horrible tempo of his heart begs differently, even if the shaking in his shoulders is an indication otherwise.

One last look of you– you’re talking, saying something with your hands. The little girl laughs again, her red eyes crinkling up happily.

Tomura turns away.

He walks a familiar path to the apartment, the wind tries to slice through his jacket, kicks up leaves and litter in shadowed alleyways.

He enters and there is no one trailing behind him, your hands twisted into the back of his hoodie, or his sleeves. It’s quiet. Empty. He surveys it once, the bed with unmade sheets. The window that let in beams of colored light, that Ryuji would sit at.

And then he sets his hands on the wall, all ten of his fingers down, the way he used to touch you.

The wall begins to decay, cracks and crumbles beneath his hands. It spreads, and spreads, and spreads like a disease filling out the body of the apartment. Dust begins to fall like early snow.

His heart squeezes painfully, his eyes suddenly flooding with pressure, with tears he tries to keep back. His head throbs, feels like it’s going to cleave apart. His ribs ache– hurt so bad it’s like he can feel the one you took from him, the gaping part of his chest.

His Quirk flares hard and hot and fast. It burns through him, floods his veins in a way that makes him cry out, suddenly shaking, suddenly pained.

He destroys the apartment, disintegrates the tiny world he created with you that existed outside of the real one. He unpauses the game. He takes apart what the world should’ve been, when he was here, with you. He sees now that a world like this cannot exist.

The peace, the ideal, the way you had understood him. Your unending compassion. It’s rare. Not enough to save the rest of them.

So he tears it all apart, pushes at his Quirk in a way he hasn’t been able to before, nudges at its strength to test it. It flares outward, eating away at the entire space, at the furniture, at the floor. Everywhere.

He seethes, blooming, finally allowing that livid and vicious thing inside of him to burst forward. It’s explosive, wrenching out of him in the form of terrible destruction.

He’ll grow into what he was supposed to–

I wanted to be a hero– when I was a kid.

The only option he ever really had, the hand extended to him a villain’s, gentle when he’d taken it.

He destroys the boy inside him, the one that was naive and hopeful and weak. He let’s that boy inside of him fall apart, split open and leaks gore before turning to dust, too. He kills the part of him that he had only ever shared with you, in the blue-dark of night, when you were lulled to sleep with just the sound of his heart.

He swallows down his anguish and his jealousy and his bitterness, keeps it safe inside him, like All For One always said to do. He’ll nourish it, let it grow, fester inside of him until the only thing it can do is explode out of him to tear the world apart, too.

When he’s standing in the rubble of the tiny world you’d made with him, the apartment complex demolished, the people inside gone, he knows what he has to do.

And he has so much work to do in order to achieve it.

He tries to forget you, to destroy your memory, too. He will not carry the weight of you around inside him.

(But in his dreams, you sit cross-legged in front of him, serene and beautiful, like a painting he knows nothing about.

In his dreams, you ask for his hands to have, and he gives you them to hold.)

#shigaraki x reader #tomura x reader #shigaraki tomura x reader #shigaraki x you #tomura x you #shigaraki tomura x you #shigaraki x y/n #tomura x y/n #shigaraki tomura x y/n #tomura shigaraki x reader #tomura shigaraki x you #tenko shimura x reader #bnha x reader #bnha x you #shigaraki fanfiction

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rotworld · 3 years ago

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3: Salamander

The apprentices of Magister Hezethril seem to be dying of horrific accidents with suspicious frequency.

->contains gore, murder, non-consensual touching, yandere, threats, and extreme power imbalance (basically teacher/student).

There’s a commotion in the hallway. A crowd of apprentices, swarming together in a sea of black cloaks, have gathered in the open doorway of the alchemy laboratory. But there’s no excitement among them, no jovial anticipation. They’re whispering and weeping, clinging to one another anxiously. Your heart skips a beat. It can’t be. Not again. You push your way through the crowd, refusing to believe it until you see it with your own eyes, ignoring the voices all around you.

“...looks like Bianca…”

“...the third this week…”

“...couldn’t have done this to herself…”

“Excuse me,” you mutter, shouldering past a pair of gawking boys. You’re hardly a step into the room when the stench hits you, sharp and unnatural, rust and ozone. Something pale green and foul-smelling is spilled across the stone floor, dripping from an upended cauldron, but what’s worse is the blood. You can follow a trail of pain and slow suffering; a bloody handprint on the glass case in the back of the room. A smear across the table. A spattered drag across the floor, all the way to the lifeless body of an apprentice, her hands frozen in rigor mortis claws in front of her face. Her mouth is still open in a silent scream.

“What in the seven hells is going on in here?”

The words crack like a whip through the tense air, cold and razor sharp. The crowd parts silently, allowing Magister Hezethril into the laboratory. You make way for him, scrambling out of his path. The Magister is imposing in his long red robes, towering above the apprentices and pushing them aside with webbed hands. His bronze skin turns ink black halfway down his extremities, his nails lacquered with gold. He sweeps forward wordlessly, tendrils of long black hair waving in his wake. His frightening eyes, spots of gold in black sclera, fall upon the dead apprentice. He scowls in distaste. “Who was in the room when this happened?” he asks.

A trembling apprentice steps forward, a young man with blood on his hands. “I was,” he says hoarsely. “I came in to use the lab. Bianca was already here, working on something. She dropped something into the cauldron, I didn’t see what. But all of the sudden, she was gasping and convulsing. She started,” he swallows hard, his hands trembling, “scratching. At her own throat. I tried to stop her, but she fought me. She just kept scratching. There was this awful, wet noise, and then she…” One of the other apprentices puts an arm around him as he begins to sob.

“I see,” Magister Hezethril says. He turns on his heel and walks away. “Clean this up,” he orders, leaving shaken apprentices in his wake. Some scatter, eager to be far away from the gruesome mess, but you stay with a handful of others. The young man who saw Bianca die sits, unresponsive, against the wall. He’s going to need all the help he can get. Several apprentices cover Bianca with a white sheet and take the body away. You and a few of your peers begin scrubbing blood from the floor. You wince at the fleshy chunks of tissue among the mess.

Luca finds something in the bottom of the cauldron that makes him wrinkle his nose. “She was poisoned,” he mutters. “This brew was extremely toxic. No one in their right mind would have brewed it, but there’s some kind of residue in the bottom. I think she was sabotaged.” He pinches a fine, ashy dust between his fingers. You can’t recognize it anymore, singed as it is, but you believe him. The smell in the room leaves a distinct burning sensation in your throat.

Beside you, Sheila squeaks, “Sabotage?” She’s had to leave the room twice to vomit, and she looks like she might need to again.

“It’s not unheard of,” Phoebe says, shrugging. She wipes Bianca’s bloodied handprints from the cabinets. “Lots of mage apprentices die under suspicious circumstances. It’s new apprentices, usually. Young, impulsive, trying to compete. They just want to get ahead.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” Sheila insists. “What’s there to compete over, anyway? The Magister hates all of us.”

That gets a bitter chuckle from everyone in the room. Working together, you get the laboratory cleaned up in no time, every trace of blood and poison mopped up and disposed of. It leaves an empty feeling within you. It feels like you do this more and more often lately, erasing all traces of your fellow apprentices. Memorial services, if there are any, happen in the distant hamlets and villages where the apprentices came from. Life in the Magister’s tower goes on uninterrupted and you’re expected to behave as though the sudden holes opened up at certain desks and in certain dormitories simply do not exist.

The others are thinking about it now. You can feel that heaviness in the air even with the body gone and all traces of death washed away. Accidents happen anywhere you gather inexperienced mages, but not nearly this many, not so close together. There’s a field south of the tower full of fresh graves and wooden crosses. “Why isn’t the Magister doing anything?” Sheila whimpers. “Is this what he wants? Are we all supposed to kill each other until only one of us is left?”

“Of course not,” you insist. You give her the water pail you were going to use to rinse your hands, letting her take it first. She sniffles as she scrubs Bianca from beneath her nails. “The Magister must know something’s happening. Maybe he’s just being careful. He doesn’t want to say anything until he’s certain he knows who’s responsible.”

“Are you kidding? Magisters get off on things like this,” Phoebe says, rolling her eyes. “It’s a power trip for them. You saw how he looked at Bianca, right? Like she was an insect. He only cares about his favorites. Bet you get extra credit for offing somebody.”

“That’s awful,” you tell her.

She shrugs. “That’s life.”

“I assume you’re done in here if you have time to gossip.”

The Magister’s voice is like ice down your back. Sheila practically sprints from the room. Phoebe sheepishly greets him and keeps her head down as she leaves. Luca eyes the Magister suspiciously but passes without a word. “Magister,” you address him, bowing your head. He holds out his arm when you try to step past him.

“Just a moment, apprentice,” he says. You’ve heard him speak to your peers, reducing them to tears with nothing but his hard gaze alone. But when he looks at you, his strange gaze softens with affection. He says “apprentice” as though it’s a term of endearment. You shift uneasily, peering into the hallway behind him in search of your friends, but they’re long gone. A sinking feeling overtakes you when he bumps the laboratory door with his elbow, shutting it behind him. “I won’t keep you long,” he assures you. “Solstice preparations will begin soon. Could I persuade you to assist me?”

Could I persuade you, he says. A phrase unheard of, coming from the mouth of an elder mage. They don’t ask favors. They don’t plead or beg. They give orders, and apprentices jump to follow them. Magister Hezethril is no different, but for you, he will dress up the truth in pretty language, will say it sweetly so it scares you less. But you know better. You hear the threat unspoken. His hand hooks beneath your chin, demanding eye contact. The webbing between his fingers is soft and damp, slick against your skin. “Yes, Magister,” you say quietly. “I would be happy to assist you.”

The Magister’s smiles are uncomfortable, too wide and hungry, too inhuman. “Excellent,” he says. “See to it that your schedule is open, I’ll need you the next few evenings for preliminary research.”

“Of course,” you say. “But, ah, I will need tomorrow evening to myself.”

“Oh?” the Magister says, sounding so unconcerned and casual that you almost slip up, forget who you’re talking to. “And why is that?” You try, subtly, to slip out of his grasp. A mistake, you realize too late, Magister Hezethril’s pupils narrow into slits and he corners you against the back cabinets, slamming his hand against the wooden panels beside your head. You hear the cabinet door splinter, feel it shaking and collapsing inward. You hold your breath. The Magister bends slightly from his great height, his gaze piercing and heated. “Where are you going, apprentice?” he hisses. “Why the rush? Are you hiding something from me?”

“I’m not, I swear I’m not,” you insist, too weak and hesitant to convince him. You can never lie to him. He always drags the truth out, one way or another. “I just...I promised one of the others that I’d tutor them in incantation.”

The Magister makes a frightening, inhuman sound, somewhere between a hiss and a growl, flashing fangs and a black, forked tongue. “This again?” he mutters. “How many times must I tell you that you are above them? They do not deserve your attention. How could you possibly learn everything I have to teach you when you are too busy with these wastrels you call your peers?” He doesn’t give you time to answer, nor the space to breathe. His sharp nails trace your jaw, titling your face towards him when you try to turn away. He looms so close you can smell the fire in his lungs, magic that could reduce you to ash if he so desired.

“It would be such a shame, wouldn’t it, if another apprentice were to die,” he murmurs, looming inches from you, his breath warming your lips. “Such a terrible waste. So many accidents these last few months. So many dead.”

“Please,” you whisper, clutching his shoulders. His robes bunch up beneath your grip but it’s worthless. He’s so much older and stronger than you. “Please don’t hurt anyone else.”

Magister Hezethril tilts his head, drinking in your fear and submission. He traces your lips with the sharp tip of one nail. “Are you available tomorrow, apprentice?” he asks.

“Yes,” you say shakily. “Yes, I swear, I’m all yours.”

It’s just what he wants to hear. Smiling, he pulls you into his chest. Gently, he smooths down your hair where it ruffled against the cupboards, pushing the creases from your cloak. But he pauses as he does this, catching sight of the thick turtleneck fabric you’re wearing beneath. He toys with it, peeling it down to expose tender flesh. You shiver under the attention, the careful stroke of his fingers along your pulse. “You aren’t just yet,” he says. “But that’s alright. I can be very, very patient.”

You wince when he slices into you, just enough to break the skin. He rolls your turtleneck back up. The wound throbs hot underneath. “See you tomorrow, apprentice,” he purrs. You nod numbly. The laboratory opens and slams the shut, the sound echoing off the stone walls.

#rotpeach writes #teratotober #i know salamander seems like a weird one lol #but they were traditionally given mystical properties in various cultures #so this one is a mage lol

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turtleflurple · 4 years ago

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My headcanon of Donnie and Leo’s relationship when growing up together

Okay, so when thinking about the boys being a little younger, I can’t help but imagine Leo taking on a bit of a more antagonistic role in the family when growing up. Not that they’re not close as brothers, but I do find myself thinking that Leo could have been a bit more of a bully when younger.

Leo can be a bit of a jerk towards his brothers in the series, and especially looking at his behavior in Lair Games and Air Turtle, he kind of has the bad habit of lording his own superiority over his brothers and milking his winning for all it’s worth. We also know that Leo being a poor winner is a very old and known behavior. Leo is also very focused on being better than other people (going with how small social circle was before the show, this probably mostly meant his brothers when growing up), and while he’s very sure of himself he also has bouts of severe insecurity where he’s very desperate for reaffirmation.

Where as with Donnie, I find his behavior currently fits very well with a very sensitive child being picked on a lot when younger and over time hardening more into this “emotionally unavailable bad boy”. To me Donatello is always a very emotional individual, only he has trouble connecting and explaining himself to other people especially because he’s so intellectually gifted. I can see Donnie in Rise being a bit of a crybaby and pushover when he was younger, something that I see keen eyed Leonardo focusing in on and exploiting. This would create a relationship were Leo would rile Donnie up a lot since Donnie would be such an easy target and always guarantee a reaction.

Kids just kinda tend to be mean to one another sometimes, especially they get bored and/or want attention. Just look at the dynamic between Mikey and Raph in the 2003 series. Mikey picks on Raph constantly, because it’s easy and it gets a reaction. If Raph wouldn’t react to Mikey constantly goading him on, Mikey would probably find something else to entertain himself with and leave Raph alone for the most part. But Raph can’t really keep a lid on it since he has a very explosive temper and gets swept up easily in his emotions. But yeah, I can see how in Rise this dynamic growing up could have shifted more to have been between Leo and Donnie. But instead of growing angry like Raph, Donnie instead would mostly just get very emotional in general.

I think that as a sensitive kid, regularly being picked on would turn that up to eleven, thus making Donnie hypersensitive. You know the kind I’m talking about, the kinda kid that’s so easily triggered by any perceived hostile behavior that they tear up over the smallest of things and constantly run over to their caretaker for comfort, a type of behavior that tends to grow a bit tiring after a while. Since it’s obvious that the person Donnie would run to most of the time would be Splinter, I think Splinter would in turn grow to be a bit desensitized by Donnie’s tears and claims of teasing, maybe even get exasperated from time to time. Here you have four very rowdy children that you have to run after constantly to make sure they don’t end up killing themselves and/or each other, and one of them keeps crying out that the others are being mean to him. I would understand if you would just get a bit done with it all after a while.

So in this situation Splinter would mostly apprehend Leo for picking on his brothers in the beginning, and especially for picking on Donnie, but after a while would also more turn to Donnie and tell him to deal with the issue himself instead of always running to Splinter to hide behind. Not in a mean way, but more in an “I can’t be the one to keep solving all your problems, Purple” kinda way. But I think this would send the wrong message to Donnie and he will instead interpret Splinter’s words more as a command not to bother him anymore with his issues. As a result he will act more emotionally distant towards his father after I think, and tough it out more when he’s overwhelmed and/or feeling vulnerable, maybe even isolate himself more.

With Leo and Donnie I think it first grew a lot worse before it got better again. I think focusing in on Donnie and picking on him a lot grew into a bit of a habit for Leo, as it was funny to him since it always garnered a reaction. Donnie would grow increasingly upset, much to Leo’s delight, until the day that Donnie wouldn’t take it anymore and snap. He’d attack, cuss out or accuse Leo of being a bully, and Leo would be so taken off guard by the accusation that he wouldn’t know what to say or do. Leo wouldn’t see himself as a bully, even tho I think he would have kinda been one over that span of time, and this conflicting image of himself would shock him so much that he would be forced to reflect on his behavior and his relationship with his brothers, with the focus laying mostly on Donnie. I think that after this altercation Leo would have gone to Donnie and apologize but deny being a bit of a bully while still validating his feelings to a certain extend and promising to stop teasing him so much. Donnie would accept the apology, but the damage would already be done. Donnie would be a lot more emotionally closed off, since until that day it kind of taught him that those many emotions of his can and will be used against him. He would have become more aggressive and guarded, but over time mellow out more into the more familiar teenage Donnie we all know and love with his dry humor, sarcastic snark and anti-social tendencies.

I think that this would have played out when Leo and Donnie were between the ages of 7 to 10, and when they both grow older they will actually realize what had happened and heal. Leo will apologize for real, and Donnie would have already forgiven him. I think Leo would never have meant any harm, he had just been bored and Donnie was just sure to be entertainment. Donnie didn’t know how to handle himself back then and I’m sure that in between Leo picking on him he was nasty back as well (since I do believe Donnie can be a bit vindictive if he wants to). They were both younger, and when you’re a kid it’s difficult to think of others and the consequences of your actions.

But yeah! That’s what I think Donnie and Leo’s relationship tended to be like when they were a bit younger! And it’s not the case that in between the ribbing they didn’t also play around with each other, would tussle and take comfort in one another. But you know what I mean when you have siblings. It’s very easy to simultaneously dislike and love them, forgive and forget when you’re having fun, and honestly, there never were any mal-intentions. Just kids figuring out how to better take care of each other.

#rottmnt #donatello #leonardo #turtle tots #splinter #tmnt #headcanon time #my art #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #rise of the tmnt #tmnt 2018 #tmnt 2k18 #teenage mutant ninja turtles

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lyrabythelake · 3 years ago

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Stick Together

Legend is lost, and so very alone.

Read on AO3

CW: gore, mentions of death, just a shed-load of Legend angst

No birds sing in these woods.

It’s the thing that stands out most to Legend as he stumbles his way over fallen branches and rotting logs he cannot see, for the fog swallows his legs and the foreparts of his arms he stretches blindly out in front of him. There are no twittered conversations or scuffling of small creatures, no trickling nearby streams or even rustling leaves.

Just complete, all-consuming silence.

It’s the kind of silence that sits heavy in his chest and threatens to choke him, the kind that reminds him every second that he could not be more alone.

It’s not how it’s meant to be, he thinks desperately. Woods are places where life and nature thrives, but the trees that emerge from this ghastly fog are withered and decaying, twisting shells of what they once were. Or perhaps they have always been like this. There is no life in this place; it is a graveyard for the lost, one that threatens to bury him alongside all those who were unfortunate enough to die here, so very alone.

“Time!?” he calls, but it is half-hearted at best, his voice long hoarse from hours spent shouting the same eight names in futile hope that one of them will hear. The sound falls pitifully short, consumed by the banks of white swirling mist that cave in on all sides. He sounds small and frightened, incredibly pathetic, but he would give anything for someone, anyone to hear him.

How long has it been? he wonders. Time loses all meaning when the world around him provides no landmarks but the homogenous, gnarled faces of those mangled, warped trees that stare down at him every few steps. Time doesn’t flow in the same way when one is staring into that infinite abyss of swirling white.

His feet ache fiercely, but he cannot stop. He entered this place, so there must be an exit, there must. His mouth is so, incredibly dry and his stomach aches with hunger, his legs are weak and his ankles are splintering with pain from turning over on the uneven floor, but still he blunders forward. He has no way of knowing in which direction he is heading, every turn of his head is disorientating, every trip of his feet he is left wondering if he has just been going in circles all this time.

He has never been good at following orders, he’ll admit. Perhaps it is not so surprising that eventually it was the thing that brought his downfall.

“Stick together,” Wild had said, “and whatever you do, don’t stray from the path. This place is called the Lost Woods for a reason.”

Simple really, but the Captain had been on top form that day (is it the same day or have weeks passed without him knowing?) and after a jab that hit particularly close to home, he had stormed off in a fit of prideful rage.

None of that anger remains now, all that is left is clawing desperation and uncontrollable terror. There have been many times in his life where he thought he might die, when he had accepted that he may be nearing his last few moments in this world, but never has he felt so completely helpless about it.

This isn’t like dying in a sudden, electric explosion of a lightning strike. This isn’t like falling mid-battle, fighting for his life, sword held out in front of him until the very last second. This is slow and quiet and suffocating, it is drawn out and long-suffering, like Hylia is playing with him, torturing him before she finally ends it all.

It’s not like he deserves any better, he supposes.

A scream echoes in the distance, guttural and full of fear, like the sound of an animal crying out as they are torn limb from limb by a larger predator. Except there is no mistaking that this one is human.

“Hello?!” His breathing picks up as he clambers forward more quickly, half twisting his ankle on a tree root.

“Is anyone there?!”

Had it been a figment of his imagination? Is his worn-out mind configuring hallucinations from the ringing in his ears just so he can focus on something other than this endless white murk?

The scream sounds again, closer this time, but coming from all around him, the direction impossible to determine. But this time he hears the familiarity in it; he knows that voice, though he’s never heard it in this capacity, never heard such blatant terror held within it.

“Hyrule…” he all but whispers, his voice choked, the sound not coming out how he intended. “HYRULE!” he screams louder, his vocal cords feeling like they’re tearing under the strain. He spins around, desperately scrambling for the direction he needs to go in order to save him. But there is none. The sound had come from everywhere.

Had he gone searching for him after he had disappeared? Has he been wondering lost and alone all this time because of Legend’s stupidity? Has he met a grisly end in these woods, ripped to shreds by some wild animal, or is he lying somewhere in the mud, staring up into this boundless white mist, bleeding to death on the woodland floor in bleak agony?

“HYRULE!”

He can’t let that happen. Hyrule is too sweet, too determined, too kind, and he has already spent most of his life alone, he doesn’t deserve to die like that, he can’t die like that.

Another scream echoes out, lost to the white darkness and again, its tone is horrifyingly familiar.

“WIND!” Legend cries. There are tears streaming down his face, though he can’t remember when they started. Perhaps they have always been flowing.

Wind is so young, so hopeful and holds such promise. He told Legend only the other day how he dreams to explore every inch of the ocean, discover everything it has to offer. When he said it, he held such excitement in his big, blue eyes that Legend couldn’t even pretend not to be enthusiastic on his behalf.

“WIND! HYRULE! Where are you,” he utters miserably, those last words quieter but as much to himself as any of his pleas. His heart is banging in his chest, beating away the last stems of energy he has left within him. He dares not set out in one direction, for he might only extend the distance between him and his friends and when he finally loses his last morsel of energy, he won’t have the strength to rectify the mistake.

Another scream. Warriors. The man is like a brother to him, even if they have their disagreements. He has fought too hard in his life, he deserves a noble death, not this.

Then there is another scream, then another. Twilight, Four, Wild, Sky, their voices warped from terror and pain, so different from what he is used to them sounding like, none of them indicating any further as to where they may be located.

Legend is not holding back his sobs anymore, there is no point, no one can hear him. The mist takes his tears and draws strength from them, seeming to get ever thicker, that cruel, hypnotic swirling ever more disorientating.

Time’s voice sounds next, low and strained as if he’s trying to keep himself from screaming but fails as the pain gets the best of him.

“Time! Warriors!? PLEASE!” That last word comes out more of a scream, raw and painful, every fragment of helplessness he feels carried in its din, and he sinks to his knees. He has nothing left to give; dirt and twigs dig into his knees and shins and then his hands as he brings them too to the ground. The screams are a cacophony around him, coming from every direction, a symphony perhaps in the way they seem orchestrated to break him down until he is nothing. They are so frequent he can no longer tell them apart; it is just noise and agony and his own pathetic crying.

He wants to bring his hands to his ears, but he can’t bring himself to, for what awful kind of coward would block out their friends as they suffered. He cannot go to them, he cannot help, so he listens, and his tears fall and wet the muddied ground as he cries for his companions and all the others he could not save.

It is ridiculous now to think of all those who called him a hero when it’s clear all paths led to this moment, to him cowering on the slowly softening ground, snot dripping from his nose like a child while his friends die their endless, painful deaths.

But then the screams stop. Suddenly and all at once they cut off, and if it weren’t for the ringing in his ears and the heaviness of his face, he might have thought they never sounded at all.

They weren’t real, he thinks, they couldn’t have been. But his heart is still beating like a rabbit caught in a trap and adrenaline makes him tremble violently. The sheer disparity between the screams and the silence makes it seem like all the air has been sucked out of his lungs. He is waiting for something, waiting for them to start up again, perhaps worse than before.

And start up again they do, eventually, except this time, there is only one, and it is different. A jolt rips through him as if from a lightning strike, sudden and totally unpredictable at the scream that is higher in pitch than the rest and so, unbearably familiar.

Marin.

“Please, no,” he sobs, and though he knows it isn’t real now, that almost makes it worse.

He has not heard her voice in oh, so long. There have been nights where he’s lain awake trying to remember it, replaying those distant memories over and over in his mind, helpless as the picture of her gradually fades. He once would have given anything to hear her voice again, and it seems his desires have been thrown back in his face, distorted and satirical.

His heart aches as if it is tearing in two, and he truly believes it would be impossible to feel any more pain than he does in this moment.

He does move then, finally. He curls up into a ball, his back leaning against the rough, gnarled trunk of one of those dead, shadows of trees, his eyes pressed to his knees, listening to the sounds of his lost love, her sweet voice warped in excruciating pain.

There is a time during the potential hours he sits there that those screams turn to something melodic. He doesn’t know when it happened, perhaps it was too gradual to put a finger on the exact moment it changed, but the sound that reaches his ears is now a beautiful, eerie, and terribly familiar song.

It doesn’t sound like he remembers it. It’s not her voice, not really, there is an ethereal quality to it beyond the echo the woods provide and there is something strange and creepy about it. It’s a mockery of the girl he loved, and it is worse than any of the screams that came before it.

His tears stop. There are no more within him left to cry. The singing drones on and, he supposes, if he is to die here, at least he is thinking of her.

And he is. He thinks of lighthouses and gull’s cries, of falling asleep to the waves gently crashing on the shore. He thinks of the feeling of sand between his toes which he thought unpleasant at first but grew to love. He thinks of thick, red hair and the smell of strawberries and a time that brought true happiness in a way he hasn’t felt since.

There is an aching peace in those memories, so he hides in them. He lets himself be cowardly, because you know what? He’s given all that he has to play the hero, and perhaps he does deserve to die alone in the end, but in the face of it all, he’ll take back what he can.

So he gives up, lets the fog consume him.

_______________

“Legend!?”

He is aware, vaguely, that the singing has stopped. Aware of the ache in his head from crying and in his stomach from hunger. It is distant, but it is there, and logically, that means he’s not dead.

“Legend!?”

The voices… sirens… whatever they are haven’t given up then. Perhaps they’ll keep torturing him until the life finally leaves him completely. How cruel the world can be.

“Legend, where are you?!”

He perks up, finally bringing his face from his knees, for all the good it does. The fog is the milky white of a blinded man’s eyes.

Footsteps in the distance. The snap of twigs, desperate chatter. Maybe…

“Hello?!” Goddesses, his voice is wrecked. He’s never sounded so pitiful in his life.

“Legend! Is that you?!”

“Over here!” he cries, the small beginnings of hope blooming in his chest, despite him trying his best to smother it. Hoping never did end well for him.

“It is him!”

“Which direction did that come from?”

“This way, I’m pretty sure.”

“It’s a wonder we found anything in all this goddessdamned mist.”

“Over here, I think I see him!��

All of a sudden, a familiar face is staring into his own, worry etched into every feature, his curly brown hair wilder than usual, one cheek streaked with grime. But Hyrule is looking miraculously alive as he kneels in front of him, and this time Legend sobs in relief. He reaches out a trembling hand, the frailty of it almost sickening, and grabs a fistful of green tunic.

“You’re real?” he whispers hoarsely. It’s more a plea than a question and Hyrule’s eyes widen in something similar to shock.

“I’m real,” he tells him, watching helplessly as Legend reaches out his other hand to grab a handful of material in that one too.

“I wasn’t sure.” But he is now. Hyrule’s tunic is soft in his hands and the details of his face, the faint freckles on his skin, the green of his eyes, they’re too real to be anything else. Reality has been warped so many times for him that it’s become difficult over the years to tell what’s real and what’s not, but Hyrule is here now, and that’s as much confirmation as he’s going to get.

The others arrive, falling silent as they see Legend on the ground. He knows what a state he must look, he must have been crying for hours, but he can’t bring himself to care. The colours of their clothes are the most vibrant he’s seen for an eternity, and he turns his gaze from the Prussian blue of Warriors’ scarf to the glinting gold of Time’s chest plate like he is starving for it.

“What happened?” Time asks immediately, his voice soft but sombre.

“I thought you were dead. All of you.” Legend’s voice has almost given out completely, every syllable feels like he is ripping up the inside of his throat. There is another silence, and it seems no one knows what to say. Legend supposes the sight of him in such a vulnerable state must be a little shocking. He may not be the most stoic member of the group, but like them all, he keeps his emotions close to his chest.

“They say travellers who get lost in these woods hear the sounds of their loved ones in pain in the last moments of their life,” Wild murmurs quietly when no one says anything. His voice is muffled by the fog, but they all hear him crystal clear.

“I’m sorry we didn’t find you sooner,” Twilight says sombrely, as if it wasn’t his fault for running off in the first place. He doesn’t want apologies; he just wants to get out of this goddessforsaken woods and pretend all this never happened.

He knows that’s impossible though. The screams of those who stand in front of him unite in his mind with the strange, beautiful melody sung by the girl in his dreams. The way it echoes in his ears makes him fear it will never fade.

“Can you stand?” asks Sky, clearly sharing his desire to leave this place as soon as possible. To tell the truth, he doesn’t think he can, but he lets Hyrule haul him up, and though he wobbles palpably, he remains on his feet.

“We’ll rest as soon as we’re out of this fog,” Time tells them as they follow Wild closely. He somehow seems to know where he’s going, though Legend isn’t paying much attention to him, lost in his own relief and remnant horror.

“Let’s not come here again.” Wind’s voice is smaller than usual, containing none of its usual optimism. Legend could not agree with him more.

The atmosphere around them feels slightly strange to him. His ears still carry those Goddessawful screams and nothing feels quite normal. It is only the feeling of Hyrule by his side helping him along that assures him he’s truly been saved. But he trusts his friends, believes them to be real. And that belief is all he has.

#lyra writes #linked universe #linked universe fanfic #lu legend #Legend's turn to be tortured today

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someonestolemyshoes · 3 years ago

Note

So... during the time skip, Hange is on a business trip to Marley. Levi stays home to deal with some installation or important project for Hange, gets injured in some stupid way, falls off scaffolding or something. And he doesnt think too much of it because it's such a stupid way to get injured. And he hides it even when it gets worse and Hange is the only one who notices because she knows him so well. BUT when she gets back, it gets worse. And Levi hates hospitals so Hange forces him to go <3

Hello! Thank you so much for the prompt :) I’m not super thrilled with the way this one turned out, but I had a lot of fun anyway, and I hope you enjoy it! Angst ahead, if that’s not your thing.

(Drinking game: take a shot every time Levi says he’s fine)

Levi was no stranger to pain. While he had been luckier than most, Levi had sustained his fair share of injuries. Bruises and breaks were commonplace. Pain became easier to handle, wounds less debilitating to endure.

It didn’t make them hurt any less.

It wasn't a particularly bad accident, but it was a particularly stupid one.

Hange had been tied up in meetings for days, stuck inside Sina with other military personnel, with carnivorous media, with business moguls eager to ensure their pockets would be well lined by any negotiation plans with Marley and their neighbouring countries.

She had taken Armin and Jean alongside her; Armin had a mind with similar mechanics to her own, and as such he was best suited to help her formulate a compelling case with their higher ups, while Jean had attended at Levi’s insistence. Hange had already made it clear that, with Armin gone, they needed somebody to oversee continued construction on the railway line, and Levi, uneasy with the idea of Hange being without an attack dog, had demanded Kirstein attend in his place. The brat was becoming something of a budget Moblit, always trailing after Hange whenever she was around—Levi thought he looked a little pitiful, following her around like an eager puppy, but he supposed he was grateful for it now, if it meant he had no objections taking a trip into the interior with her.

Levi had been left with the rest of the brood. Eren and Mikasa worked diligently, though Eren—distant and despondent as he had been since the Queen’s address after Shiganshina—remained sullen, while Mikasa alternated between shooting Eren looks of concern, and staring scathingly at Levi whenever he came into view. She tolerated him far better, these days, but Levi was unsure she’d ever fully forgive him for his public display at Eren’s trial.

No matter. She did as she was told, reluctantly as may be. Connie and Sasha, on the other hand, were proving problematic.

They lacked focus. The four of them were working on construction of a rail house near the coast, somewhere to store equipment for maintenance, with a few flat beds for workers to rest in between commutes. The walls were coming along, but the space was still lacking a proper roof, covered only by tarp to keep the metal beams and frames inside from rusting before they could be treated and on the tracks. Eren and Mikasa were working quietly on one side, while Connie and Sasha were goofing off on the other.

Levi clicked his tongue. The work was, in theory, far less hazardous than slaying titans had ever been, but they were still a couple of stories in the air on flimsily constructed scaffolding, without any gear to catch them if they fell. The drop wasn’t deadly in itself, but the inside of the half-built hut was full of great mounds of metal, beams and poles and wires covered only by papery thin sheets. A fall onto that, from this height, would result in breaks and bruises at best.

"Oi,” Levi called, making his way around the rickety structure. Connie and Sasha either did not hear him, or chose to ignore him. That had been happening upsettingly often, of late; whatever intimidation tactic Levi had employed when they were still bratty kids had lost its effect. Connie teetered around Sasha as she tried to smear mortar on his cheek, edging along the scaffolding on only his toes until he made his way around her. Levi picked up his pace and called again, more of a snarl this time, a warning, but Sasha let out a shriek of delighted laughter as she managed to slap a trowel full of mortar on the top of Connie’s head. Neither of them heard him.

“You fall and break your necks and Hange will kill me,” Levi said. Sasha twisted to look at him but offered only a smile. Levi was within feet of them, when Connie moved quickly behind Sasha—he was doing nothing suspicious that Levi could see, but Sasha, awaiting retaliation, tried to scurry hurriedly away. Her foot missed the edge of the scaffolding, and there was a fraction of a second in which her eyes widened, body tilting, before Levi moved.

His hand closed around her wrist. With a sharp tug, he jerked her back onto the safety of the scaffolding, but in his rush to grab her he hadn’t the time to brace himself—with his weight unbalanced, the force of his pull sent his body careening forward, tipping over the edge of the plank.

He barely managed to release his grip on Sasha before he lurched over the edge.

It didn’t make them hurt any less.

Levi hit the beams with a resounding clatter. Metal clanged and wood splintered, dust gathering in great plumes as Levi hit the tarp. The beams, built with enough strength to hold steam engines, had no give to them—Levi struck one solidly with his side and his body bowed around it. Something—his ribs, his spine—crunched on impact. The sudden stop made his neck whip down, temple cracking hard against the stone floor.

Every last drop of air punched out of his lungs and a white, dizzying pain exploded in his head. He slumped the rest of the way to the ground, gasping fruitlessly, but his chest, all empty, crushing pressure, would not expand, would not allow for a single wheezing breath.

He lay in a heap on the cold stone. Dimly, he could hear voices, the clatter of feet on wooden planks and the echo of sturdy shoes on the scaffold poles as the kids clambered their way down to him, but everything sounded muffled and distant, warbled by the pound of his pulse and the rush of blood in his ears. He blinked rapidly, squeezed his eyes closed to push the fuzziness from the edges of his vision, then gathered himself slowly, shifting to lay on his back. His every muscle felt tight, seizing from the shock of the impact and sharp, stabbing pain, but despite the tension, something in his side felt loose. He sucked in a few small breaths, pausing at every spike of pain before trying again, and then he pushed himself up to sit. His head felt thick and full, stuffy, too heavy for his neck to hold up. It throbbed with the change of position, a crack of pain so sudden he thought his skull might split in two. He resisted the urge to grab at it as the kids’ footsteps sounded close by, several sets of feet scuffing and clicking against the stone.

Levi pre-empted their concern with a wheezy, “I’m fine,” as Mikasa, followed swiftly by the others, rounded the corner and stopped short of him. “Get back to work.”

None of them moved. Levi focused his swimming gaze on them as well as he could, attempting a glare, but the corner of his eye and the side of his face felt fat, skin tight over the rapidly swollen flesh, and his breathing was tight, uneven, chest jerking with each attempt to fill his empty lungs. Nobody looked intimidated by the sight of him—in fact, all four of the little brats looked almost frightened.

“Captain…” Eren said. Levi scowled, fought not to wince.

“I’m fine.” Gritting his teeth to muffle each pained grunt, Levi grabbed a nearby beam and used it to drag himself up to his feet. His head spun, the ache intensifying to something almost unbearable, and that, coupled with the sickening grinding sensation in his side as he straightened up, was enough to make him sway on the spot. Mikasa was the first to step forward, hovering awkwardly. Levi suppressed the manic urge to laugh—there was some irony somewhere in Mikasa, grudge so steadfastly held, being the one ready to catch him if he fell. Levi shooed her away. His chest ached something terrible, a persistent, resounding swell behind his rib cage. It should be impossible to feel so full, so bloated, yet so empty at the same time.

“You should rest a little more,” Eren said, at the same time Sasha erupted with a wailed apology. Connie looked pale and guilty behind her.

“Hange wants this—shitty thing—finished, by the time—she gets back.” Levi hitched stilted breaths as he spoke. He took a careful step forward. His side screamed, and his head pounded, but he remained upright, which was good enough. He passed by Connie and Sasha, who both looked ashen-faced, and clicked his tongue against his teeth. They’re too tall now, so tall he almost lost his precarious balance when he stretched up to pat them both roughly on the head. Then he brushed past them with as much ease as he could manage.

“Hurry up. The damn walls won’t build themselves.”

Levi had expected to be better by the time Hange returned.

The pain had not subsided at all in the three days that passed between the injury and Hange’s arrival—if anything, it had intensified, and Levi’s bouts of dizziness and breathlessness were near constant. He hid it as well as he could from the others, compensating with vicious scowls and quick, barked instructions, but he couldn’t escape their concerned glances.

The building, at least, was almost complete. They had laid the rafters for the roof the day before, and were hammering on the felt when Hange, Armin, and Jean appeared in the distance.

The weather was blisteringly hot. Eren and Connie had removed their shirts long ago, while Sasha and Mikasa had tried fruitlessly to keep their hair off the base of their necks and out of their faces. Despite his lack of manual labour Levi was just as sweaty as the rest of them, though his skin was pale in comparison. He had argued, albeit rather feebly, to do his part in aiding the construction, but the damn brats had put their foot down on that, at least—as such, Levi had spent the last three days sitting beneath the shade, glumly watching their progress.

He stood when he saw the horses approaching. The others climbed down from the scaffolding, wiping sweat from their hands and faces. They cast Levi a sidelong look, and he glared in return.

“Not a word,” he reminded them coldly. Levi had already demanded that they keep the details of his incident quiet. The swelling on his face had gone down some with the aid of a bag filled with cold sea water, but the bruises were persistent, mottled from his eye to his ear. He could play it off as a far smaller incident than it was, so long as he could keep the ugly welt on his torso well hidden. The bruising there was dark, a deep, violent shade of purple, wrapping around his side and bubbling out over his back.

Eren looked uncertain. Mikasa gave him a stoic, level look, while Sasha and Connie still looked sheepish, avoiding his gaze. They had apologised profusely, and on multiple occasions, for causing such a mess. Levi had, at their insistence, scolded them for messing around, but in truth he had little energy left to care.

Hange waved as soon as they were close enough. She kicked her horse on, Jean and Armin following dutifully behind her. The three of them pulled to a stop and dismounted, leading their horses to shade and water, looking tired, but satisfied. Levi kept his angled down, twisted to one side. He was prolonging the inevitable, he knew, but if he could get Hange talking about the meetings, or with some luck the upcoming expedition, or maybe even the mostly completed rail house, Levi could at least wait until they were alone before Hange battered him with questions.

All three of them had dark circles under their eyes. Armin yawned widely, he and Jean bumping into one another as they walked. Hange, as tired as she looked, strode forward with a delighted confidence—Levi, in spite of himself, quirked his lip in a small smile. It has been too long since Hange looked excited about anything. The prospect of an expedition had breathed some life into her.

“We’ve still got to work out some kinks,” Hange said, “but things are looking good. We’ll set up another meeting with Kiyomi. It might take a little while, but we’ll get out there ourselves. See the world with our own eyes, and—more importantly—let them see us.”

Connie and Sasha exchanged excited glances. Mikasa and Eren shared a more subdued look. Levi understood both perspectives—the prospect of venturing out into the world opened them up to a lot of risks. Each of them carried targets on their backs. One wrong move, and they would be in trouble. But, if all goes according to Hange’s plan, there would be plenty of reward. Freedom was worth any price they could pay, if only they can secure it.

Levi listened as the group reacquainted. Eren and Mikasa seemed pleased to have Armin back in their company, while Sasha hounded Jean endlessly until he relented, and surreptitiously pulled a small pack of cured meat from the inside pocket of his jacket. He had the decency to look embarrassed when he caught Levi’s eye on him, but his abashed expression quickly turned to one of confusion when he caught a good look at Levi’s face.

“The hell happened, Captain?”

Hange, who had been quietly engaged with Armin and the other two, looked around. Levi tutted and curled his lip, letting his fringe fall to cover part of his bruised brow.

“None of your business,” he said. His chest spasmed and he clenched his teeth, fighting the sudden urge to cough. “If you’ve still got the energy to stand around talking, you can get up there and help them finish the damn roof.”

Jean, who either hadn’t quite developed the same immunity to Levi’s brash tone as the rest, or was nervous about Levi scolding him for stealing food from the interior, nodded once and shrugged out of his jacket. Sasha’s eyes followed longingly as he hooked it over the nearby cart sitting on the tracks, but then her gaze shot back to Levi, and she scurried after Jean towards the rail house.

The others followed. Hange’s eye was still on him, and she waited until the group had scrambled up onto the scaffolding and picked up their tools before she crossed over to him. She bent a little, tilting her head to get a good look at his face. Hange let out a low whistle.

“Quite the bruise,” she said. Levi gave her a somewhat guarded look, and carefully shrugged one of his shoulders.

“Brats were messing around,” Levi said simply. “Caught me with a stray elbow.”

He didn’t dare look Hange in the eye long enough to determine whether she believed him. He nodded towards the rail house and said, “They’ll be done in a few hours.”

Hange beamed, bracing her hands on her hips. “They’ve made good progress! I wasn’t sure they’d get it finished by the time we made it back.”

“You wanted it finished,” Levi scowled, “those were your orders.”

“Calling it an order is a little harsh, Levi.”

“You’re our commander, Hange,” Levi said. “You tell us to do something, we do it. By definition, it is an order.”

Hange grimaced. It had been years since Shiganshina, years for Hange to come to grips with the position that had befallen her, and to her credit she had taken to it admirably enough, on the outside. It was only in small, private moments like this that she allowed herself to show doubt. The lack of cooperation from Hizuru had been a blow Hange had expected, but hoped to avoid—she had worked hard on her proposals and her negotiations had been sound, but the rejection stung nonetheless. With each new trial and each new error, Hange felt herself all the more lacking. Her distaste for her own position, for Erwin’s faith, grew stronger, and showed face more often.

Levi took in her sullen expression and winced internally. After a moment of heavy silence, he said, “They give you a hard time?”

“Who?”

“Zackley. The reporters. The kids.”

Hange let out a low chuckle. “Zackley’s as rigorous as ever. Picked apart every last thing we had to say, highlighted every possible flaw in the plan. Made us work hard, as usual. The reporters...asked a lot of questions we didn’t have answers to. They’ll smear our names in the papers tomorrow, no doubt, but it can’t be helped. We did our best. Armin was a huge help, though. He’s still a little nervous, but—so clever! So full of interesting ideas, and he negotiates well. He’ll make a good commander one day.”

“And Kirstein?”

“He’s an excellent paperweight,” Hange said, shooting Levi a sideways grin. “I appreciated the company, but I think we would have been fine without him.”

“Never know,” Levi said gruffly. He couldn’t be sure whether it was the heat of the sun or simply standing too long, but Levi was beginning to feel woozy. Breathing was still a chore, a concentrated effort to suck air into his aching chest and let it out again without choking, coughing, and more often than not he felt lightheaded. He nodded towards the boxes he’d been using as a seat over the last couple of days. “Sit. You look like shit.”

“For once, I don’t think you get to judge me for that.”

Levi had already begun walking stiffly to the boxes, and made no comment. He had no valid argument to give—he did look like shit, far worse than Hange, and he felt even shittier. He dropped a little heavily onto the box and bit back a grunt of pain.

Hange sat next to him. The box shuddered. Levi tensed as pain lanced through his side. He took in a quick, sharp breath, holding it high in his chest when the pain intensified. He could feel Hange’s eye on him and clenched his teeth, fighting to keep his face somewhat neutral.

“You sure you’re okay?” Hange said to him. Levi grunted. He busied himself taking slow, shallow breaths, staring resolutely ahead, avoiding Hange’s keen stare. “You look a little clammy.”

Levi made another quiet noise. Levi wasn’t very talkative at the best of times—this, he knew Hange was aware of, and most of the time Hange was content to fill the silence herself, but today she was quiet, and watching him too closely. Scrutinizing. Levi had often praised Hange for her powers of observation—she had an incredible eye for detail and a knack for spotting patterns and anomalies, a talent which had served the Survey Corps very well, but right now, Levi was cursing it. He didn’t need Hange surveying him.

He was hurting. He’d had a near constant headache since the incident, and his chest felt tight, riddled with pain both dull and sharp, stabbing whenever he breathed too deeply or gave in to the pressing urge to hack out a cough, but more than that, he felt unwell. Groggy, sickly, light-headed. His heart beat frantically, and his skin did feel clammy, cold sweat sitting on his brow. He stared ahead, blinking the fuzziness from his head and resolutely ignoring Hange’s steady stare.

Hange’s palm pressed to his forehead. The sudden touch made him jump—his muscles tensed, his ribs screamed in protest, and Levi let out a strangled groan, biting his tongue a second too late to trap the sound.

He was barely aware of Hange’s fussing as he fought to draw breath. Air grated in his battered lungs as Hange’s hand pressed flat to the back of his neck, her voice warped and muffled in his ear as she felt his sweat-damp skin. His vision tunnelled. He blinked rapidly to clear the black spots and wheezed in the humid air. His chest felt like it might split open, pressure billowing out from behind his ribcage, pressing agonisingly against his damaged bones.

He breathed short and shallow until the haze of pain lessened. Hange’s voice was loud beside him, the sharp, deep bark she used when she felt it necessary to assert her authority. Through the fog in his head he could barely make out her words, but he knew exactly what it was she was demanding. Sasha’s voice was meek in comparison, but it still carried over the distance enough for Levi to hear her.

“It was an accident,” she was saying. “It was our fault—my fault—”

Levi hissed through his teeth. Hange’s hands—one still at the back of his neck, the other curled around his arm—tightened their grip on him.

“Drop it,” Levi said. “Stop grilling them. It doesn’t matter what happened, I’m fine.”

Hange had the audacity to laugh, but there was no humour in it. “Fine? Levi, you can’t even move. You can barely breathe! What the hell did you do?”

“Fell,” he said shortly. His voice sounded weak, but he didn’t have the breath to put more force behind it.

“From where? When? Hell, Levi, when did this happen?”

“Hange, leave it.”

Hange turned her question to the rail house, and Connie answered immediately. Traitors, Levi thought scathingly. Mikasa explained without prompt that they didn’t know the extent of his injuries, that Levi had refused a proper medical examination despite the head wound that had left him unable to stand straight. She explained that they had managed with very little effort to get him to observe the construction from the ground, which, it seemed, was enough to concern Hange—Levi wasn’t the type to sit around doing nothing. He despised being idle and she knew it.

“You should see a doctor, Levi.”

“I’m fine—”

“No, you’re not. What else did you hurt? Just your head?”

Levi felt ill. Hange’s persistent questions were making his head spin and his entire body felt sore and spent. He mustered enough strength to glare at her, but nothing more. Hange was watching him carefully, brow furrowed in concern, but at his silence her expression hardened, and she stood abruptly. Levi bit back another groan as the box moved beneath him.

“You can ride, then?”

Levi squinted up at her. “Hah?”

“If you’re fine, you can ride back into town with me.”

No. “Sure.”

Hange stared at him a little longer, waiting, no doubt, for him to backtrack, admit defeat. Levi clenched his jaw and maintained steely eye contact. Hange narrowed her eye at him, then turned towards the rail house.

“Oi!” Hange called up, cupping a hand around her mouth. Six heads turned their way, popping up over the roof. “We’re heading back early. Leave the scaffolding when you’re done, we’ll send for it tomorrow. Good work!”

She turned on her heel and headed towards the horses, still tacked and tethered beneath the shade of a small copse of trees.

“We’ll go get your head checked.”

“Hange, I said I’m fine.” It was a weak argument, made even moreso when he stood too abruptly and swayed on the spot. Hange darted back towards him and steadied him with a hand on his shoulder, and a little of her angry resolve cracked, worry creasing her brow. She led him, more slowly now, towards the horses with her hand hovering over his back. He braced himself for the agony of her touch, if she pressed her palm against him, but Hange—perhaps in fear of not knowing what other injuries he had sustained—didn’t touch him.

“Humour me,” she said. “If you’re really fine, and it’s really nothing, no harm done. I’ll feel better knowing, and you—” she drew them to a stop by the horses and turned to face him fully, grinning, but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, “—you get to say I told you so.”

Levi said nothing. The thought of riding for hours on end made him feel nauseous.

“This is pointless,” he said. “I’ll rest here, if you’re so worried.”

Hange shook her head at him. She untied her own horse and Jean’s, holding the reins out for Levi to take.

“We’re going back now, Captain. That’s an order.”

An hour into the journey, Levi began to struggle in earnest.

No part of the ride had been pleasant—the heat was oppressive, and the motion of the horse required a fluidity in his hips and back that sent sharp jolts through his side with every step. Hange was uncharacteristically quiet, occupied instead by watching Levi from the corner of her eye. His head pounded with increasing intensity the longer they travelled, and between the pain, and the scorching sun, and his pitifully shallow breathing, Levi was feeling more faint by the second.

It was an unsettling sensation. Injuries were always difficult, but Levi had never felt so completely wiped out by physical damage in the past. Three days was enough time for his body to at least begin healing, but Levi had seen no improvement since the moment he struck the beam during his fall—if anything, he’d felt worse by the day.

Now, he was fighting to keep himself upright in the saddle.

They were approaching another clump of trees, great leaves wilting in the heat, when Levi, jaw tight and teeth bared, grunted out a request that they stop.

Hange looked torn. She wanted to hurry back into town, and was already impatient enough that Levi had requested they walk—”It’s too hot, for the horses”—but something on his face must have reflected the severity of his discomfort. Hange directed them to the treeline, dismounting and taking Levi’s reins while he did the same. His feet hit the ground and his knees buckled.

Hange caught him about the elbow but only after he had sunk to the grass. He felt shaky, weak, but more than that he felt vulnerable. Realistically, Levi knew that there was no shame in being hurt, in needing help, but he was a stranger to it. He had been self-sufficient since he was in Kenny’s care, and had grown up with the express understanding that showing weakness was a death sentence. And then again, in the Survey Corps—an injured soldier was titan bait.

There were no titans now, but Levi felt distinctly exposed, sitting in the long grass with his vision swimming and his lungs burning, barely functional.

Hange knelt next to him in the grass. She brought a hand up to his face, fingers curling against his jaw. Her gaze darted over his face, all of her righteous anger forgotten as she took in his state. Levi wanted to shake her off, to shake off the spinning in his head, to stand up and get back on the horse and continue their journey, but he couldn’t find the strength to gather his legs beneath him. Hange’s hands—one on his arm and one still on his face—kept him sitting upright.

“Levi…” Hange said slowly. Words sat on his tongue, reassurance that he was fucking fine, that he just needed a minute, but try as he might, he couldn’t get enough air in to voice them. His chest bubbled and rattled as he drew in a thin breath.

“Levi,” Hange said, sharper this time. Levi blinked blearily and searched for her. Neither of them were moving, but Hange’s image wavered and blurred in front of him. He swallowed. Wheezed. His heart hammered in his ears. Hange’s fingertips found the pulsepoint in his neck, pressing, counting. “Levi—what else hurts?”

Levi swallowed thickly, a nauseous tremor under his tongue. After a moment, he choked out, “cracked a few ribs, probably.”

Hange sucked in a sharp breath. “Let me see.”

He didn’t have the strength to fight her as Hange began unbuttoning his shit. He swayed where he sat, struggling to balance without her hands keeping him upright, until he heard Hange’s hiss as she uncovered the bruises wrapping his chest and back.

Levi looked down and grimaced. The bruising was worse than he remembered, stretching further up his chest, dark and mottled, the flesh tight and swollen.

“Levi, this is bad,” Hange said. “We need to get help.”

“Just need rest,” Levi said. His voice sounded slow and slurred in his own ears. Hange’s hand cupped the side of his neck, her thumb tipping his jaw up to look at his face. His eyelids felt heavy.

“I know it hurts,” she said, “and I know you don’t want to move, but—Levi, please. C’mon, I need you to get up.”

It had been a long, long time since Levi had heard that frantic tone from her. She sounded urgent, panicked. Desperate. Levi dragged his eyes open, but found he couldn’t focus on her face anymore. His lungs protested violently as he tried to speak, only coughing instead, dry and hacking. His chest burned.

Hange dragged him to his feet. Levi’s limbs felt heavy and clumsy, detached and completely out of his control. He leaned heavily into Hange’s side as she moved him across the grass.

“C’mon, Levi—work with me.”

Hange hefted him up onto one of the horses. Her horse, he realised, as she clambered up with him. She settled behind him, her arms gripping the reins either side of him. Levi tried to sit up right, but as she kicked the horse on, he slumped back with a low groan. Hange’s voice rumbled through her chest when she spoke.

“You good?” Hange asked quietly, and then, “stupid question, of course you’re not.” Levi found the strength to scoff, but it was a pitiful sound, and followed swiftly with another pained grunt and a fit of coughing. “Bear it a little longer, okay?”

Consciousness drifted, as they rode on. Levi was dimly aware of the sun on his feverish skin, and of Hange’s warm, solid body at his back. Her jaw brushed his head when she moved. Her voice was constant now, a rumble up his spine and in indistinct mumble in his ear. At times he could pick out her words, but his comprehension was hazy, mind unable to string sentences together, to find meaning in her chatter.

In this state, there was no focal point for the pain. It was consuming, indistinct but ever present, impossible to isolate in any one location. His whole body ached. His breathing was quick and laboured. There was no real respite even in this state.

Hange’s hand repeatedly found his throat, fingers feeling for his frantic pulse.

Time passed strangely. The ride seemed to last a lifetime, with Levi waking a thousand times to agony, consciousness barely breaking before he succumbed again to his feverish dozing.

At times, he awoke to new sounds and new sensations. The echo of multiple voices around him, all talking frantically over one. The scratch of crisp sheets beneath his bare back, the click of shoes on tiled floor. New, stinging, fiery pain, sudden and excruciating enough to make his body jolt in discomfort, followed swiftly by strong hands on his arms and legs to keep him still. Cool air blowing gently over his heated skin. His hand caught in a loose, tangled grip.

The aches in his battered body settled, localised. Levi felt it acutely in his chest, though the pressure no longer felt as intense. Breathing still hurt, but the air came easier now. He felt his lungs fill with it, little by little, for the first time in days. He opened his eyes, blinking rapidly in the light, then rolled his head slowly to look around.

The small window had been cracked open, the fresh, cool air lifting Levi’s fringe, tickling at his brow. Thin morning light poured in, illuminating the small, sparsely furnished room. Besides the bed he lay on, there was only one small table and a stiff, uncomfortable wooden chair.

Hange was slumped low in the chair. Her legs were sprawled out in front of her, her chin dropped to her chest while she slept. She had discarded her military jacket, eye patch, and glasses in a heap on the floor, and her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, the top buttons of her shirt undone and splayed open. Her hair hung limp and ratty around her face. She looked pale and exhausted.

Levi’s tongue was dry, tacking to his teeth and the roof of his mouth. It took him three attempts to say her name, and when he did it came out raspy and ragged. He tried to move, to reach over and nudge her awake, to ask what the hell had happened since he’d last been lucid—but as he leaned over a sudden, white hot agony ripped through him, tearing into his side.

He gave a strangled groan and pressed himself back into the mattress, squeezing his eyes closed as he rode out the spasms. Wood scraped by the bed; Hange must have startled awake at his outburst. Levi squinted an eye open to see her blinking rapidly, rubbing her knuckles into her eyes before scooping up her glasses and taking in the sight of him.

The pain subsided little by little, though Levi didn’t dare move again. Hange sat on the edge of her chair and reached for him, her hand stopping short of his and falling to grip the bed sheets instead.

“How you feeling?”

Levi cleared his throat. “Like shit.”

Hange managed a weak smile. The bags under her eyes were considerably darker than they had been before, her skin paler, papery. Levi frowned at her. “You still look like shit.”

Hange waved him off with a small laugh, sitting back and scrubbing her hands over her face. She hung her head over the back of her chair, fingers pressing into her eyes beneath her glasses. She sat for a long while, observing the backs of her eyelids. Levi watched her through pinched eyes as the burn in his side settled to a more familiar ache.

“Don’t do that,” Hange said, voice strained by the stretch of her throat. “Don’t do that again.”

“Which part?” Levi said.

“All of it. Don’t get in stupid accidents. Don’t pretend you’re fine when you’re not. Don’t—”

She stopped short, then, with a sudden hitch of her breath. Levi watched her dig her fingers harder into her eyes, watched the bob of her throat as she swallowed reflexively. For a moment she was quiet, then she sat up straight and turned watery, bloodshot eyes on him.

Hange was strong. She was a far more emotionally available person than he could ever be, but she had an incredible capacity to compartmentalise. To switch off. To accept the necessity, the inevitability of loss, to evaluate and recalculate and move forward. Hange mourned—Levi had witnessed the aftermath of it plenty of times before, repaired broken tables and reorganised upended bookshelves in the wake of her disaster—but she mourned later. Alone. Felt all her fears and frustrations in isolation, away from prying eyes.

Hange wasn’t the type to cry at peoples besides and beg them to live.

And yet.

“Don’t leave me on my own.”

“It wasn’t that—”

“You dare tell me it wasn’t that bad and I’ll kill you myself.”

Levi clamped his mouth shut. Hange was glaring at him like she might really mean it. Instead of arguing, he said, “what’s the damage?”

Hange slumped forward, elbows on her knees and head hung low. “Broken ribs. Ripped up a few muscles in your back. Collapsed lung. The air pressure in your chest was restricting blood flow to your heart.” She put her head in her hands and dug her fingers into her messy hair. “You got so fucking lucky, Levi. If we hadn’t left when we did—”

He watched silently as Hange groaned into her palms. She breathed deeply, back and shoulders raising as she did.

“You could have died.”

“I didn’t.”

Hange’s head shot up. “By the skin of your teeth, Levi. You—” she took a long, steadying breath, but her voice still shook as she continued, “—you were barely breathing. You couldn’t talk to me, you would hardly even respond to me.”

“Sorry.”

Levi wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to say. Hange looked distraught, her composure tenuous. Levi’s fingers twitched on the sheets, itching to reach out and touch her, offer some kind of reassurance that he was here, he was fine—but he wasn’t fine, and moving so far was out of the question. He gripped hard at the sheets instead. “Sorry.”

“Not you as well,” Hange said quietly. Levi’s chest tightened painfully at her tone—she sounded so small in that moment. Scared. Levi wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her sound so frail before. “What am I supposed to do if you—” she cut herself off again, shaking her head.

“Same thing you always do.” Hange curled tightly in on herself. Levi turned to stare at the ceiling instead. “You keep going, Commander.”

“Don’t. Don’t do that.”

“One day or another, everyone you care about eventually dies. You said that.” He listened as Hange’s breath hitched, but refused to look at her. “It sucks. It hurts. But we keep moving forward.”

The mattress dipped by his hand. Levi rolled his eyes down, and found Hange hunched out of her chair, her face pressed into the blankets. Levi sunk his fingers quietly into her hair.

They lapsed into a painful silence. Hange hiccupped and sniffled now and then, while Levi scratched lightly at her scalp. After a long while, Hange spoke again.

“I know those were my words,” she said thickly. “But I can’t accept that. Not now. Not after everything.”

“Stubborn,” Levi said quietly. He pulled lightly at her hair until she raised her head, wiping her cheeks and nose messily on her arm. “Disgusting.”

Hange managed a bare, wobbly smile. Levi’s hand fell from her hair as she straightened up, and Hange scooped it up in both of her own. She played absently with his fingers, curling and flexing them, rubbing her thumb over the lines on his palm. She seemed to be gathering herself, brow a little furrowed in thought.

“I know we can’t guarantee anything. I know how uncertain our world is. But just—” Hange paused, closing Levi’s fingers around her own, then looked up at him with a fierce determination. “Promise me anyway.”

Levi blinked sluggishly at her. “Promise you what?”

“That you’ll survive.”

Levi tensed. “Hange…”

“Indulge me. Just this once, please.”

A promise of that kind was unrealistic, Levi knew this. Hange had said so herself: there were no guarantees. Except, that wasn’t quite true—death, at least, was a constant. The only inevitability they had. The island may be free of titans now, but the threat of attack loomed over them like a persistent storm cloud, black and heavy, ready to give at any moment. And accidents, as he had painfully learned, could happen in the blink of an eye.

Levi was resilient, but he wasn’t invincible.

But Hange was looking at him steadily, her resolve unwavering. She wanted his word here and now. Needed it, maybe, but Levi knew her. Hange valued honesty over everything else. There was no way she could feel at ease with such an empty promise.

Levi sighed.

“You’re a brat, you know that? Looking at me like that.”

Hange’s gaze held firm. Levi felt her grip on his hand tighten.

“I can’t promise shit like that, Hange,” he said. She squeezed his hand tighter still, and her body tensed, shoulders drawing up to her ears. “You know I can’t. Nobody can.”

For one horrible, gut wrenching moment, Levi thought she might cry again. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes but when she opened them again, her good eye looked terribly blank.

“You’re right. Sorry, sorry!” She let go of his hand and sat back in her chair, hands resting on her legs instead. Her voice sounded lighter, more like Hange, but there was something off about it. Something forced. Strained. She adjusted her glasses but didn’t meet his gaze again.

This was the Hange he knew. The Hange who could bury her feelings in the moment, squash them down and push them aside to focus on the rational, the plausible. Seeing her like that didn’t relieve him the way it should have. It left a sour taste in his mouth and a discomfort in his gut, knowing that he was the cause of the grief she felt she had to hide.

It was stupid, the whole situation—how a moment of carelessness lead to this; Levi bedridden, and Hange struggling to hold herself together.

The space between them grew stagnant. Hange seemed a little lost in thought, gaze caught blankly on Levi’s blankets, while Levi watched her, waiting for her to say something else, to change the subject, to be Hange again. But Levi was never one for giving inspiring speeches, and in truth, he didn’t know that anything he could say now would make anything better. Hange would do what Hange always did—wait until she was alone, and vent in whatever way she could.

And Levi, as soon as he was able, would do what he always did, too—pick up the broken pieces and mend as much as he could.

“You should rest.”

Hange blinked tiredly over at him. It had been an age since Hange looked well-rested, years since Shiganshina and the exhaustion of that particular battle had never left her. The burden she carried—everything Erwin had left behind and all that they had discovered since—was so impossibly heavy, the expectations put upon her too much for any one person to handle. Hange had enough to deal with, she didn’t need to be worried about him, too.

“Eat something, bathe. Sleep. I’ll still be here when you come back.” After a pause, he added, “I’ll promise you that much.”

Hange gave him a weak, wry smile as she fished up her eye patch, strapping it into place and righting her glasses over it. “I guess I’ll take that. And then tomorrow, you can promise me the same again.”

Levi rolled his eyes. “Fine, whatever. Go.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll nap for a couple hours and come back. You should sleep some more too, you know. It’ll help you heal faster.”

Levi grumbled in response, and grumbled louder still when Hange stepped up to the bedside, but he fell quiet when she leaned over, brushing his fringe back from his forehead and pressing a small kiss to his hairline. It was such a simple gesture, and nothing out of the ordinary—Hange had been a physically affectionate person as long as he had known her, always grabbing and hugging and kissing whenever she got the chance—but there was something so tender in it, this time. Levi’s eyes fluttered closed.

Hange lingered longer than was strictly necessary, and yet it still didn’t feel like enough. Levi could easily have let her stay close, feel the warmth of her breath and the softness of her lips on his skin until he drifted into sleep, but she straightened up after a moment and Levi was left instead with the cold breeze from the open window. Levi blinked sluggishly up at her. His own exhaustion barrelled in, making his eyes sting, lids heavy. Hange folded her jacket over her arm and pushed the chair into the corner, out of the way.

“I’ll see you soon, okay?” She said.

“Mm.”

“You’re gonna feel like you got crushed by a titan when the pain meds wear off, so make the most of it.”

“Got it.”

“And you should let the doctor know if anything changes. Straight away, don’t wait around.”

“I will.”

"And there are nurses around, if you get hungry or thirsty. The bathroom is just down the hall too, but they've got bedpans if you need to—"

“Hange.”

“I’m going, I’m going.” Hange had already crossed the room as she spoke, but she paused in the doorway, fingers curled around the frame. She deliberated with herself for a moment longer, then said, “hey, Levi?”

“Hm?”

Hange chewed on her lip, contemplating something, a faint blush building on her cheeks. And then she shook her head, gave him a small smile, and said, "Ah, doesn't matter. Sleep well."

She left quickly after that, closing the door quietly behind her. Levi stared at the space she'd vacated, brow a little furrowed; her hesitancy confused him.

But he was tired. His body hurt. His head felt thick and fuzzy, and without Hange's presence to keep him occupied, he consciousness began to drift.

Tomorrow, he thought hazily. He would ask her tomorrow. For now though, he would follow his own advice; for now, he would rest.

#snk #levihan #my writing #man I had a hard time with this in the end hjhgjj I can't say I'm that satisfied with it #but!! I am sticking to my philosophy after the Drabble week #someone somewhere will like it #levihans relationship ended up more ambiguous but hey ho #also ended up being a lot of angsty hange

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literaila · 4 years ago

Text

beg, scream, laugh

spencer reid x reader

summary: maeve dies. spencer needs someone. needs more.

warnings: messy, disorganized, typos, angst, fluff?, pining, break downs, yelling

a/n: hahahahahahahahaha so i wrote this in two hours and i know i said i wasnt going to but.. i lied, so uhhhh yeah enjoy it? sorry if you dont like it..

Something inside of her was telling her no.

She could hear it, shouting, screaming at her to stop, to leave, to walk away before she could do anything she knew was wrong.

It was yelling at her so loud and clear, so loud, but. He was standing in front of her.

It had been two weeks without seeing him, two weeks of wondering where he was, where he had gone. She’d been worried about him for two weeks and now he was standing in front of her, his eyes were swollen, he looked like he hadn't eaten in days, and she could tell, she could just tell with one glance of him, that he was broken. Splintered into pieces.

He didn't look like her best friend. He looked like a shadow of the man he had been two weeks ago.

A poor shadow.

And something was yelling at her to stop, begging her to leave, get in her car and drive away, check on him again tomorrow, let him, let her process this without doing anything first.

She’d heard screams before. She heard them pleading, begging to stay safe, begging fellow people, fellow human beings to make the right choice, begging for their lives. She’d heard screams before.

She was no stranger to screams.

And for a moment, the screaming in her head seemed familiar. Too familiar.

But, he was there. Standing in front of her.

And she missed the way he’d been smiling only three weeks ago, she’d missed the passion, the desperation that she’d seen in him. She’d missed his voice, and his face, and his ridiculous memory.

She missed the Spencer that wasn't collapsing into pieces.

And, ignoring the voice, she thought, maybe. Just maybe. She could get him back. Maybe this would be good. Be so good for the two of them, maybe it would be good for him, maybe she could save him as he’d always saved her. Maybe, just maybe, she could make things better. For once, maybe she could be his whole. Bring him back to life.

Maybe, she thought.

And there was screaming, of course, it was in the background, like she was watching a movie like it wasn't really her own mind screaming at her. Of course, it didn't just go away. No matter how many things she reassured herself of, she could hear the voice, yelling, screaming, pounding on her body, begging her to stop.

Screaming. It sounded so distant.

Maybe. Just maybe.

And so, when Spencer had asked when he had mumbled the soft words against her head, so close to her, so much closer than they’d ever been before. When he mumbled and sounded nothing like himself, nothing like the friend she had known three weeks again, when he mumbled to her, whimpered out only one more word.

When he’d told her, please.

She kissed him back.

Weeks before, she looked at him as Spencer. Nothing else but Spencer.

She’d looked at him and she had appreciated the smile that seemed to be plastered on his face. She’d liked the way he seemed happier lately like there was nothing wrong with the world. She’d been glad that he was so happy.

He seemed okay. And she was just happy about that.

She’d looked at him like he was Spencer weeks ago, and she hadn't seen anything. Nothing else.

She’d worked side by side with him, teasing him, telling him that he was ridiculous, laughing with him like they always did, walking around an office and talking to him, discussing with him like they always did.

She’d worked with him side by side and he was glowing. Lit up like the sun.

And she’d appreciated it.

She’d looked at her friend.

At Spencer.

And she hadn't seen anything else.

He was just...

There hadn't been anything else. Nothing else.

There used to be nothing else.

A week ago, Spencer, a shadow, had pulled her into his apartment. Had grabbed her face like it was the only thing keeping him from falling off the face of the earth. He’d squeezed her waist, tugged on her hair, bit her lips. He’d held onto her and they’d stood in his apartment.

It had felt like an eternity.

He’d kissed her, tried to put himself back together.

A week ago, she and Spencer had made out in his apartment, only two weeks after his girlfriend had died. And then once she left they hadn't spoken a word. Not a single glance since then.

Spencer had gone back to work that week, reassured the rest of their friends that he was fine, that he needed to get out, that staying at home all day reminiscing over the time was not helping him. That he wasn't going to cope like that.

And they’d all accepted. Hotch had been there before. They understood.

None of them had mentioned anything that had happened, they hadn't checked to make sure if Spencer was okay when they knew he wasn't. They didn't call on him at night when he was alone at home to make sure he was sleeping. Didn't text him nice words during the day, didn't see if he was doing alright when they were away on cases.

Not one person had said anything.

Because they all knew Spencer, they knew that he wanted to stay quiet about it. That he was going to be silent until he was ready. Hell, none of them had ever known he’d had a girlfriend until he needed their help. It was just who he was.

But the silence, it was terrifying.

Ever since the night that he had kissed her, Y/N and Spencer hadn't said anything to each other. They hadn't mentioned a single word.

And that silence between the two of them was terrifying.

She knew that he needed someone, knew that someone needed to be checking on him, even if it wasn't obvious, he needed someone. And she was supposed to be that someone. The rest of the team assumed she was.

But, she was frozen.

After what had happened, what she had done, what he had asked. She couldn't say a thing, didn't feel any words ready to come out of her mouth when he was around. She couldn't mumble a single word to him.

She was terrified, scared that he was mad, that he hated her now, that he was heartbroken and miserable and she had only made that worse.

She was terrified that she couldn't do anything to help him after kissing him just once.

She was terrified of herself.

It was miserable.

Because she watched him all the time. She checked to see if she could tell if he was okay if he was eating enough if he was drinking too much coffee if his mind seemed to be in check. She checked to make sure he still wasn't that splintering shadow she had seen a week ago, checked to make sure he was holding himself together.

But she couldn't tell. Not from so far away. Not when they weren't talking to each other.

It was miserable.

And now it was Friday, almost exactly a week after their first kiss. And they were the last ones in the building.

Y/N wasn't exactly sure why she was there, didn't really know what she had left to do, but she did know that Spencer was still there and that she wanted to make sure he was going to go home.

She cared for him too much.

So she sat at her desk, yawning while flicking the hula girl Derek had gotten her for her birthday. She was bored, she didn't have anything to do, and she was trying to be discreet about her staring.

Spencer was filling out paperwork, scanning over the same papers again and again, and she wondered why it was taking so long but she couldn't say anything.

And then finally, when the clock hit past eleven, she decided it was time to go. She decided that if she was really worried, she should call someone else to help him, because she couldn't talk to him, could barely breathe in the same room as him, and there was nothing she could do for him. So she would call Derek, and she would get him to check on Spencer and she would go home and crawl in bed and try not to sob while she slept.

She packed up her bag and intended to do just that.

She was tired, and it was dark and cold, and she was miserable.

And she didn't hear Spencer calling after her when she got in the elevator. Didn't see him as the doors closed.

She stood alone, waiting for it to reach the first floor. Ready to go home. Thinking of what she would say to Derek.

And then she was walking out to her car, trying not to freeze, trying not to start crying so soon, but someone was walking behind her.

“Y/N!”

She turned around and saw Spencer, looked him right in the eyes for the first time in a week.

“Didn't you hear me yelling? Are you okay?” he breathed out, looking more like a ghost than himself, his eyes wide.

“What?” Y/N said shocked, forgetting everything that had happened, scared of the person she saw in front of her, and how much he had changed.

“You were watching me all night, all week, and then you left. I wanted to make sure you’re okay?”

Y/N’s eyes widened, looking similar to Spencer's.

“Spence-” She looked away behind him, tried not to laugh, turned away a little bit. “You’re-” she almost broke down right there, turning away from him completely toward her car, breathing out a laugh while she thought over his words.

Spencer was standing behind her, confused.

“You’re asking me if I’m okay?” she laughed, turning back to him, running her hands through her hair, forgetting about the cold.

Her body was shaking, her mind was rattling against her skull, surprised that Spencer was even talking to her after last week, surprised Spencer had even noticed anything.

And Spencer was still confused.

“Spencer.” She said, trying to get his attention again. “Have you seen yourself?” she laughed once, reminded herself that it wasn't funny.

Spencer laughed a little bit too, looking uncomfortable. He rubbed a hand against his neck.

“I don't know what to do,” he whispered, so low that she could barely hear him through the wind, so empty that Y/N felt like bursting into tears.

And for the first time since she’d looked at him, she saw the thinning of his face, the dark circles under his eyes, his disarrayed hair, his red cheeks. She could see him, but it was so much different than it ever had been.

His girlfriend had died. Right in front of him. And then, he was alone.

He didn't know what to do.

“I know Spence,” Y/N whispered, wanting to hug him but feeling frozen to the ground, similar to how she’d felt all week, just looking at him.

“Will you tell me what to do Y/N? Because I don't know how I don't know how to move on, I don't know how to breathe without her.”

His voice broke.

She took a deep breath in.

“She's gone. And I couldn't save her. I couldn't do anything to help her. That's my job!” he yelled, turning away from her, his body suddenly wild with bitterness, the two of them suddenly surrounded by anger. “I was supposed to save her, to keep her safe and I couldn't! And she's dead.”

And then he shrunk.

And Y/N swore, she swore she watched him crumble in front of her. He was standing tall, standing the same as he had been a second ago. But he was falling to the floor, she could feel him breaking, could see the hands tearing his body in half. He was crumbling to the floor and she didn't move.

“I can't breathe. She’s dead. And I’m worried about how I can't breathe.”

His eyes were wild as he turned back to look at her, he looked so different, so hurt in front of her and Y/N felt herself breaking with him, she could feel his pain in her bones in her blood and she didn't know what to do, she didn't know what she could do, and she forgot that he was Spencer, she forgot because she couldn't see her best friend in front of her.

This was someone else.

“God,” he laughed, running hands through his hair. “She's never going to breathe again and I’m worried about me.”

His eyes were wild, they were so different. So unlike him. And Y/N could almost see what was going to happen before it did.

She could see him moving forward, she could feel the wind against her face, the heavy breathing between the two of them. She could feel him against her skin, holding her close. She could feel his breath on her lips, intoxicating her, holding her hostage. She could taste him and she could feel herself under a trance, one she didn't know was there.

And she could see all of this as he moved forward. She could see it.

And she could hear the yelling in her head. She could hear the begging, the pleading, the yelling. It was so loud.

And then he was pushing her against her car and he was breathing her in, swallowing her whole as the world collapsed between the two of them. And she was breaking, just like Spencer. But they were different. Spencer has splintered into pieces, falling apart bit by bit.

But Y/N wasn't like that.

No.

She was a piece of glass. Shattering under his hands, falling to the floor, crashing against it. She was glass and she was breaking apart, all at once, and she was so fragile, and she didn't know what to do, and she didn't know anything, she didn't see anything, and she was glass falling against the floor, shattering under his hands.

The world was collapsing under them. Spencer was whispering in her ear.

I don't know what to do.

I need you.

Please

She was falling to pieces, breaking against him, and breathing him in. And this was only the second kiss they had shared and it was already too much, she could tell it was too much.

And the yelling in her head was so loud.

Come home with me

Y/N was in the center of the universe, pieces of her turning to sand.

And she whispered a yes against his lips.

The yelling in her head, unbearable.

She couldn't help but regret it.

Couldn't help but feel sick every time Spencer smiled at her, every time he tried to talk to her at work.

She couldn't help but feel like she had done something wrong.

The voice in her head was taunting her, laughing.

I told you so.

She’d spent that night at Spencer's, stayed with him, woke up next to him in the morning, feeling like she had done something wrong, like everything was wrong.

But Spencer was sleeping beside her, and he looked a little bit better.

So, she stayed in bed until he woke up.

A week later, when Spencer asked her to come home with him again.

She thought about how terrible she felt, how terrible she felt to be kissing Spencer, to be standing next to him in the elevator, talking to him when she knew that she was doing something wrong.

She thought.

And then she’d noticed how his shadow disappeared a bit, how he was standing like he used to.

She couldn't regret saying yes.

A month later she didn't know what was happening.

She knew that it was a normal thing for her to come over to Spencer's house on weekends.

She knew that he smiled a little bit more now.

She knew that he hadn't mentioned Maeve in a while.

She knew that sometimes he seemed almost normal.

And she knew that she wasn't supposed to be spending nights with him. Kissing him when they were alone.

She didn't know what was happening.

She didn't know if he was using her if she was using him if there was something they needed to talk about. She didn't know if it would all be okay if they were going to be fine when this was all over.

If this was ever going to be over.

She didn't know what was happening.

But on Friday nights, when they were alone in the elevator, and Spencer asked her if she wanted to go watch a movie at his apartment, rubbing her hip with his thumb.

She knew that she ignored the yelling in her head.

And then three months later.

Maybe she knew what was happening.

Maybe she knew that what she was doing was wrong, that what they were doing was wrong.

But she woke up on Saturday morning, she stared at him, made sure that he was still breathing. And when he woke up they made breakfast together, they laughed and Spencer seemed okay, and Y/N was looking into his eyes, checking to see if he was there.

And she was looking at him.

They were doing okay.

It had been three months. Three months since their first kiss.

And everything was normal now. Neither of them had mentioned what was happening, and they preferred it like that.

Slowly, it seemed like Spencer was turning back into the person he used to be like he was keeping himself whole easier like he was doing better.

And Y/N was glad. She couldn't stand to see him fall apart.

And maybe she knew what was happening.

Maybe she didn't.

Either way, selfishness doesn't leave much room for thought.

And neither do the voices in your head.

It was a month later when Spencer asked if they could talk.

And the world was spinning, normally. And when Spencer muttered the words, Y/N felt it stop. Felt everything stop for a moment, the world standing still.

She pretended she didn't.

Smiled at him.

Told him sure that she was just going to finish making lunch. He could talk then.

She tried not to let her hands shake, tried to keep herself from breathing too fast.

And then he began to talk.

“I think I’m finally ready. To talk about it,” Spencer said.

And she nodded, thinking about how last weekend he had taken her to the library, read her a couple of chapters of his favorite book, asked her if she thought that people were good if they could repair mistakes, if sorry was enough. She remembered how they’d laughed together last week, thought about how she loved that.

She nodded at his words, not looking up.

“I’ve finally admitted it to myself.”

“Hmm?” she hummed, her hands shaking, her mind whirling. Breathe.

Something in her head was screaming.

It was strange.

That hadn't happened in a while.

“I know what you’ve been doing for me,” Spencer said.

And she finally looked up, her heart beating, her hands sweating.

She remembered the night by her car, how he had screamed, how desperate he’d looked. She wondered how he could have known.

“Doing what?” she whispered, the answer already in her head, hoping he didn't know.

“Being with me. Taking care of me. Being there for whatever I needed.”

I need you.

The yelling had turned into whispers.

It was strange.

That hadn't happened in a while.

The world started spinning again. She wondered why.

“I-” she started.

“And I’m so grateful. Honestly, I don't think I could have survived the past couple of months without you.”

She thought about how Spencer had asked her to tell him what to do. What do you do?

“Grateful?” she whispered, her eyes focused on him, on him, on them. What was she doing? What was there yelling?

“I know it couldn't have been easy, and I’m sure that there were moments where you wanted to leave, to go somewhere, be with someone who wasn't mourning. But, I also know that you stayed. That you care about me.”

Mourning.

It was silly to think that she could have forgotten, that she could have forgotten her purpose, that she would've ever thought-

“You’ve cared about me more than anyone else, and it was what I needed. And you’re so amazing. I’m so thankful for you. That I have you as a friend.”

Please.

Stop yelling.

“But, I feel like I can hold myself together now. I feel like I’m not going to fall apart when I’m alone. And I don't want to do this to you anymore.”

Anymore anymore anymore.

Who is yelling?

“You don't deserve this. You deserve someone who doesn't need you to hold themselves together, and I want you to start taking care of yourself again. And not me.”

She nodded.

“You’re an amazing friend. My best friend. And I’ll admit that I haven't been the greatest friend to you recently, that I’ve been using you even when I know it's not what you need. I know. I’m sorry.”

She remembered how she used to hear this yelling in her ear. Every time he was about to kiss her. She could hear something begging her to stop.

How could she have forgotten?

And she almost didn't recognize herself. SHe didn't know what was going on.

“I hope you’ll still be my friend. I know I don't deserve your forgiveness, but I needed to tell you this, I needed you to know how sorry I am, how terrible I feel for everything I’ve done.”

She was looking in his eyes.

They were so bright.

She remembered the ghost that used to stand in front of her.

“Y/N?” Spencer said, shaking her out of her world, out of everything.

“What?” she asked, her voice quiet, monotone.

“Are you okay? Are we okay?” he asked, and she could see him again, he looked like her best friend. Not nothing.

Yelling.

“Of course,” she said, her words coming out even though she felt like she couldn't think.

“Of course,” she said again. Her words, nothing.

Of course, they were okay. Of course, they were friends. Of course, it was okay. Of course of course of course.

He didn't kiss her. He wasn't falling apart anymore.

He was fine.

She was fine.

Of course, they were fine.

She almost couldn't feel her feet as she walked out the door.

Almost didn't notice her heart, which she had left on the floor, in front of Spencer.

I told you so.

“Please Y/N. I don't know what to do.

I need-

Please.

Please.”

Glass can be glued back together. The pieces coming together again.

Of course, it can be fixed.

But, when he held her in between his hands, squeezed so tight, threw her down on the floor.

She forgot that glue wasn't strong enough.

She wasn't strong enough.

To stand a broken heart.

And the voice in her head.

It laughed.

my masterlist here.

#spencer reid smut #spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid x y/n #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds #criminal minds rp #criminal minds headcanons #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fic #spencer reid fan #spencer reid fanfic #mgg x reader #mgg #mgg blurb #mgg fanfiction

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oh-nxts-and-bxlts · 3 years ago

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@lcveblind

With a crunch of trampled twigs and disturbed bushes, Dravite extracted herself with a snort from a dense patch of undergrowth, grunting and snorting in protest. Her tough dense scales might have been impervious to thorns and sharp splinters, but the tied bundle of burlap around her neck would snag and catch on the smallest obstacles, forcing her to trudge onwards full force to break through.

Part of her wished she’d dumped the lumpy bag long before she’d become inconvenienced by it - but the more reasonable side to her, not yet irritated into irrationality, knew better than to risk hunting in unknown terrain. The bundle of bread, dried meat and cheese, duly stolen- ahem, borrowed, from a peasant’s pantry, would have to remain on her back no matter how inconvenient it got.

Shaking herself free from the leaves collecting over her scaly back and load with a huff of breath, the diminutive drake looked through a break in the treeline at the distant horizon. The jagged outline of the crystalcrown peaks felt no closer to her than when she’d wandered off from her usual route, the sight making her sigh through sharp teeth. But, she trusted her sense of directions enough to remain certain she was not moving away from the shining mountains, and was still on the path of the long way around.

A few choice curse words were hissed under Dravite’s breath at the heavier patrols scurrying across the mountainside roads she was used to taking like so many fire ants. She wasn’t sure why the activity of armed men had increased so sharply, and she frankly did not care for human affairs, but she wasn’t one to pick needless fights. Especially when said fights could be as painful and embarrassing as planting one’s tail square on a hill of said fire ants.

...Not that the long way around had turned out particularly safer.

Dravite lifted her snout to the air, whiffing in a deep breath and grimacing, the distant caustic scent feeling as though it was stripping her sinuses raw. A mixture of cold alchemical burn, and decidedly dragon musk - it wasn’t everywhere, but it was there enough for her to tell the empty stretch of land was occupied. The small drake grumbled, proceeding under the cover of trees at a hurried, plodding pace.

Some dragons had no qualms with making a light snack of unwary hatchlings trespassing, or worse. And she wasn’t about to stop and wait to see what kind of dragon was occupying the landscape.

She definitely wasn’t expecting the sight of a vine-choked cathedral bathed in sunlight at the edge of the woodland. Dravite blinked owlishly at the sight of the decrepit building, staring up at the pale grey stones pockmarked with moss. Older dragons didn’t much care for human buildings, either as homes or as landmarks - but given this one was abandonned, so perhaps the master of the countryside had chosen not to care for it.

...Either way. The vast stretch of uncovered terrain was enough for Dravite to feel nervous, even after looking out at the blue skies, straining her eyes yet failing to spot the shadow of wings overhead. Travelling uncovered by day did not appeal to her in the slightest. As such, the small drake darted for the building, practically diving in its shade and scuttling along the wall to a small door ensconced in shade.

Taking care to not make too much noise, Dravite gently nudged the door open with her snout, nostrils flared in search for any distinctly dangerous scents, sniffling her heart out and progressing ever-so-slowly inside...

#fantasy au #lcveblind

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downwiththemutantnjnjaturtles · 4 years ago

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We Met Within This Screen (chapt. 2)

[Donnie x fem reader]

Sfw, part 1 here

Intellectually, Donnie was the best matchup for their leader as today was sparring day. He'd gone against his oldest brother many times, sometimes even coming out the victor himself, but today was just not his day.

He held his staff with that iron grip of his and waited for Leo to come at him. Donnie was more on the defensive than any of his brothers; he had to be. Out of all he was weakest physically but superior in calculations, but he was missing range in this matchup. Leo had a hard time disarming him as his katana could sometimes get lodged in the solid wood staff, giving Donnie leverage to perform the finisher in the short time it took him to dislodge his sword. He thought this time would be how that would happen.

"You're slow today, Donnie," Leo said as he lunged at his brother with a swing of his katana, forcing Donnie to step back. He was too focused on blocking Leo's rapid succession of attacks to respond.

Leo reeled back to swing his blade again but Donnie parried and struck his arm with his staff, shoving it aside. For a split second, Leo actually thought he was fixing to go down by this move if Donnie could hit him again quick enough. But his brother hesitated in thought, and without any reluctance himself, he used his other katana to put him in a compromising position. The match was over and Donnie was forced to stand down.

"Why did you hesitate?" Leo questioned him, lowering his blade. Raph watched from the sidelines with Mikey as they prepared to go up next. Since Leo was the winner, it was Raph's turn next to spar in his younger brother's place.

Donnie huffed and dropped his stance, putting his staff away. "It's just an off day," he replied. Splinter wasn't there to dictate today's training session and tournament, so Donnie was already on his way out to go to his lab by the time Raph stepped up to spar. But Leo sheathed his sword and put a hand on Donnie's shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.

"You've been pretty eager to run back to your lab lately," Leo said matter-of-factly. He was wondering what was going on, why Donnie seemed weirdly distant the last couple of weeks. He had gone through a very withdrawn phase in earlier times upon entering his teenage years, but now, he was legitimately making everyone guess. He didn't snap at his brothers, and he wasn't any more impatient than usual. But something was different. He'd been spending a lot more time holed up in his lab, which everyone began to notice. Leo wanted to know what was wrong.

Donnie shifted and shrugged, "Like I said, I've been busy with some projects. Also, it's not like I have much to do out here beside training and patrol."

Leo opened his mouth to speak, but Mikey jumped on between them. "You missed game night last week! You never miss it," he butted in. Both Donnie and Leo gave him a look as if to say really? and he added in, "Well, uh...not usually."

Gently moving Mikey aside, Leo wanted to continue, but he saw Donnie staring at him expecting a follow-up when he didn't really have one. Whatever this was, Leo knew that coming at Donnie with questions was not the way to go about it. So he stepped back and gave his brother some space.

"We all have off days," Leo said finally after an awkward moment of silence. "Just work on your speed, Don."

"Got it."

With that, Donnie turned to leave, and Raph entered the ring to go against Leo in the last match of the night.

Once Donnie was gone, Leo got ready to spar with Raph. As they got into position, he contemplated bringing this recent development up with the other two, but decided against it in the end. He didn't want to incriminate Donnie, especially with Raph's assertive approach to handling things. Donnie could be somewhat flighty at times when it came to resolving matters of emotion, at times a little too introspective, but Leo couldn't fault him—he had his own struggles with that very thing, too.

Done, finally, Donnie thought as he skirted into his lab and started up the game. He was late to the party quite literally; training lasted longer than he'd thought, and he was disappointed to see that his newest friend was online, but not responding to his invite. Did everyone get together and play without him? After a few minutes, he almost decided on giving up. The instance made him contemplate whether he even wanted to continue this. Perhaps he'd been too eager.

He sighed. And then the menu pinged, and he was there reading the message in an instant.

Hey, sorry I partied up without you, I just didn't know if you were gonna be on or not :/

Without even thinking, he licked his lips typed back, repeatedly deleting and retyping his message to make sure it was casual but not too casual, apologetic but not desperate—

It's okay, don't worry about it

Likewise sorry it took me so long to get here.

That would do. He'd be lying to say he wasn't feeling that flutter in his stomach; the excitement of something new got to him in a way that only a discovery in his research did, or how he felt when he mastered a new technique in his training.

Let's get started then :)

They started the game, and this time he kept the mic on, as she did. They talked back and forth as they fought creatures and enemies and looted things, eventually coming to learn that she herself was in New York City. He was surprised; suddenly, the world felt a lot smaller, and he couldn't concentrate on just playing after that. The time they spent became more of an opportunity to converse than to play a mundane game for hours on end.

At some point, she switched the topic to his whereabouts. Donnie's breath hitched.

"I'm...not anywhere near. So it doesn't really matter," he told her, cringing. If the guys found out—if Splinter found out—he would be in such trouble.

"Oh," she paused for a moment, trying to find something to say. "That's alright, I don't want you to feel like you have to tell me, you know?"

He'd muted his mic to release a deep breath. He got lost in thought thinking about how in that moment, he wanted to be human. If he weren't a giant mutant turtle, he could actually form a connection with someone. It was a very "Mikey" thing to think, he reckoned, but at times he wanted friends just like his brother did.

"Yeah, sorry, I just…"

"It's really no problem, dude."

He felt as though he could hear the smile in her voice. What did she look like, he wondered. He wanted to see her, but he couldn't ask for that when he could never do the same. If he could get her name, he'd be in the clear to do some preliminary lookups on this person, but so far, she'd been dodgy about sharing info about herself as well. He couldn't blame her. They were two strangers online, one with a huge secret and the other completely in the dark about who he truly was. For all she knew, he could have been a creep, looking to stalk her online and perhaps do even worse. The thought made him feel almost nauseous, how she could be considering that about him as a possibility as they spoke. But she seemed comfortable enough. Unlike him, who was still slightly skeptical of the entire thing, because after spending his whole life in practical isolation, he was at a loss as to what to say or do after a certain point. The conversation died off and both of them thought simultaneously about how weird the sudden silence between them felt.

She hummed, as if searching for something to bring up. When she spoke, he was taken aback—"Hey, I'm gonna be honest, I really like talking to you but this game is getting boring. Do you wanna chat somewhere else?"

"Uh…" he trailed off, mind shooting blanks. Oh, was it just a horrible idea. He couldn't keep the jig up forever; the truth was bound to get revealed somewhere down the line. He was fixing to reject the proposition, tell her that he didn't want to take it that far. She could be anyone. The likelihood of it being a clever ruse on account of the Foot Clan was slim, but the paranoia still worked ambiently in the background noise of his mind. But his other doubt stopped him—when would he ever have a chance at this again? He wanted to have the strength to say no and leave it at that. The loneliness that crept up on him from time to time had something else to say.

"Yeah," he answered after a terribly long pause of mumbling, fighting with himself all the way as she told him where to add her. He could have kicked himself had it not been for the fact that he knew how to encrypt data, and that as long as he didn't leak a word about his inner circle or life, it would be okay. It didn't feel okay, though.

"Nice! I'll text you, see you later, Bo. I had a lot of fun tonight," she chirped.

Before he could respond, she was gone from the party, and the mic went silent. It happened so fast. He was barely caught up with the fact that he was now receiving messages and prompts to talk, but he couldn't bring himself to answer right away. He had to refocus his logic; how could this be used by the enemy as a way to get to them? Could they have somehow anticipated he'd download this game and find this random on there? The more the thought about it, the more glaringly obvious it was that it was not the case. It was just too improbable.

"The probability of the Foot being able to simulate such a specific scenario in order to get intel on us is so slim, it is practically non-existent," he told himself as he finally pulled up the messages. He read through them. "Approximately a zero-point-zero-zero-zero..."

My name is (Y/N), by the way :)

Well, that was easier than expected. He figured that somehow, the name suited you—a fitting name for such a personality. But it also gave him a glimmer of hope. It made him want to ask why you appeared to trust him, as he could be anyone on the Earth over the screen, not his benevolent self. Which she had no way of proving, technically. But he soon came to realize the screen painted him in a whole new light that it casted on him. It hit then that he could be anyone. He didn't have to be himself; not necessarily. She'd never have to know, as he could wear a human mask and she'd be none the wiser. Problem was, the lying made him feel guilty, and slowly would develop to be the thorn in his side.

Donnie thoughtfully stared at the screen. Now that he was here, some of his anxiety began to fade. He found himself actually able to talk, someone to listen to his tangents and even build upon them. They spent hours texting back and forth about anything and everything until it was almost time for him to put the phone down to leave for patrol. He felt giddy, like a kid, all over again.

________________________________________

Had you ever been able to talk to someone this easily?

You asked yourself that question as you exchanged with the faceless and nameless stranger over your screen, chatting from afternoon to night. Time flew by in an instant, with him, and you loved every minute. He was someone intellectual, but funny and so easy to talk to that it was as though the conversation carried itself. After some time he came out about his age after you revealed yours. Oftentimes, he'd just present to you a random question when the subject tapered off and run with it, like now:

What do you think of reptiles?

Puzzled, you took a second to reply. Odd question.

Why do you ask? Do you have one?

I was just curious

What do you think of them?

The chat indicator flip-flopped between "typing" and "idle" a few times before a message finally popped up, and you smiled. You'd learned over this short time that he was a dork in a cute way.

Well...I think they're pretty cool.

They've got natural armor and you would be surprised to know just how fast a turtle can be

You laughed a little to yourself. It was such a random thing to bring up, yet you were endeared. Deciding you'd go along with it, you asked him what else he knew about turtles.

Well...

__________________________________________________

Donnie was wondering what he was talking about just as much as she probably was. Stupid, he thought, facepalming. His first time really speaking with a human as an equal and he starts talking about turtles. Of course he knew a lot about them, he was one himself—but for some reason he found himself wanting to dispel myths and misunderstandings about turtles as if they reflected on him, when as far as she knew, he was just a human guy like herself.

He groaned lightly and typed, thinking up a fact that wasn't too conspicuous.

Red eared sliders are semi-aquatic.

As he typed the next part, he caught himself writing "we" instead of "they", to his dismay. He quickly fixed the error and continued, feeling weirdly exposed as it was almost as though in sharing this information, he was putting himself under a microscope for her to inspect.

They can hold their breath for up to thirty minutes, usually

Holding his breath was something he'd tested numerous times before. He and his brothers had actually made a game out of it on a few occasions, with Leo leading at thirty-three minutes, Donnie in second at thirty-one. Raph broke at twenty-nine minutes and Mikey followed behind in last at just twenty-seven. The ability could be trained, nonetheless.

That's interesting, I wonder what it's like to be able to go underwater so long?

It's kind of cool, you should try sometime

For THIRTY MINUTES?

Shit. He promptly replied:

No—not like I can hold my breath that long, I just mean you should try to see sometime I guess

I tested it just for the fun of it.

Looking up how long humans could hold their breath on average (between thirty seconds and two minutes), he bumped the number up a little bit and added:

Personally, I'm at two minutes and forty-five seconds

He was embarrassed, partially covering his face as he waited for a response. Such a foolish slip-up; he couldn't afford to say anything cryptic. But he still was fairly sure that he had recovered that alright. He couldn't help but think about how awkward or weird he seemed to her. Who talked about this?

I don't think I could hold my breath for more than a minute, kudos to you haha

Anyway, sorry to switch gears all of a sudden but if you don't mind me asking, what's up with your family? You have any siblings?

He told her no. He would not bring his brothers into this, lest it be the slim chance of a ploy, after all. He said his family situation was unconventional and left it at that.

With that, he said to her goodnight and put his phone away, getting up to go get geared for patrol. It was only then he noticed the figure leaning against the doorway.

Chapter 3

#tmnt #donatello #tmnt donnie x reader #donatello x reader #teenage mutant ninja turtles #tmnt 2014 #tmnt 2016 #tmnt bayverse #tmnt fanfiction #sfw #fanfiction #romance #writing

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kookicat · 4 years ago

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Consequences That He Renders

He's shaking hard enough for her to feel, fine tremors running through his hands, his arms and it's freaking her out because as a rule, Eliot Spencer isn't a man who shakes. The last time she'd seen it was after a job went majorly, horribly bad, when he'd been so battered and bruised and bloody they'd actually managed to get him to visit a hospital. It's too dark in the car to get a proper look at his face, but the streetlights offer glimpses and she'd swear on a stack of hundred dollar bills that he's pale, eyes shadowed, gaze fixed at some point miles past the glass.

The car hits a pothole, hard, and he grunts, lip curling, one hand creeping up to cup his left shoulder. It's the one he favours first, some nagging remains of an old injury, and it makes the tension in her stomach curl a bit tighter, like a snake burrowing into the sand for the night. She's a thief; she's trained to notice the smallest detail because it can be a matter of life and death if she misses something. Another piece of the mental jigsaw she's building clicks into place when he shifts, jaw tightening as some sore spot somewhere presses against the seat.

"Eliot," she starts, resisting the urge to poke him, to see how badly he's hurt this time in favour of leaning over a little.

"Parker," he says, voice hoarse with exhaustion, and turns towards her. He can't quite meet her eyes. Another piece. Something bad happened. She's not great with emotions but she's learning. It's not shame on his face, but sorrow.

"Are you okay?" She gives into the urge and presses her hand against his arm, half expecting him to move away.

He doesn't, just blinks tiredly at her and dredges up a weak smile. "I'm fine," he says and she lets the lie slide because she knows he's not fine at all.

"What happened, at the warehouse?" She keeps her eyes on his face, seeing a flicker of something before he shoves it down deep.

"I did my job. Got Nate and his Italian friend out of there." As he says the words, voice flat, the smell of cordite floods his nose, thick and bitter and choking. He can feel the weight of the guns in his hands, feel the shock of the recoil burning up his wrists as he takes the next target out. As he kills the next man, the voice in the back of his head mocks.

It had felt clear and clean in the moment, the kind of clarity only found at the right end of a gun but he's reeling, because he stepped into the kill box and didn't expect to walk back out. His life for his team's, a fair and more than even trade. He'd do it again in a heartbeat, but after the fact, he's not quite sure how he managed to survive.

"Oh," she says, voice so small, it makes him really look at her. There's a pensive frown between her eyebrows that he longs to wipe away but his hands aren't clean and he doesn't want to stain her. She needs a distraction, and he inadvertently gives her one when the car hits another bump, forcing another soft grunt out of him.

He's wrenched his back and bad shoulder all to hell and he's pretty sure that both knees are skinned raw from his slide. There's a low grade throb in both hands that he knows will evolve into a full on ache before too much longer. He knows guns, but he rarely uses them and he's paying the price.

"I thought you said you were okay!" She reaches for him, and he wards her off with one arm, biting the inside of his lip when she grabs his arm right over a growing bruise.

"I've had worse," he says, and it's true. He's pretty sure nothing is broken. He's just sore all over, abused muscles aching but it's not life threatening, just enough to make him miserable.

Something in her eyes shifts and she blinks, hard, hand tightening a little on his arm. He expects her to speak, but she just presses her lips together and leans against him gently, staying there until the car stops.

Hardison looks up from his laptop, taking in the scene with a sweep of his eyes, and gets out, coming round to open the door. Parker slides out of the other side and Eliot realises with a jolt they're all waiting for him, even Sophie and Nate.

It's going to take him a moment to get out and he'd really rather not have an audience for the performance.

"I'll catch up," he says and holds his hand out for the keys.

Parker snatches them from Nate. "We'll catch up," she says, giving Hardison a meaningful glance.

Sophie catches on and takes Nate's arm, tugging him towards the hotel entrance, casting a worried glance back at the car as she goes.

Eliot gets a good look at his friends’ faces and chokes back a sigh. They're going nowhere at least not without an argument, and he just doesn't have the energy for it right now. He swings his legs out of the car, pausing for a moment when his back spasms, then forces himself to stand. Being upright hurts, the long muscles in his abs tight and sore, back aching. The shootout ran him through the wringer and the aftereffects are starting to kick in.

"Come on, man," Hardison says and leans past Eliot to slam the car door. One hand lifts like he wants to offer assistance, but the older man shoots him down with a quick look.

They flank him, Parker on one side, Hardison on the other as he limps towards the entrance, feeling the denim peel away from his knees in a way that makes him want to hurl. His shirt is sticking to his back in a similar way and he rolls his shoulders in annoyance. It sends a bolt of pain down his spine and he stops, eyes closing until it eases.

"You're freaking me out, man," Hardison says, running his gaze over the other man, checking for blood. There's a few spots - his left shoulder is sporting a nasty blood stain, as are both of his knees, but nothing major jumps out. They've seen him hurt worse and walk it off but this time is different and Hardison just can't put his finger on why.

Eliot starts walking again, eyes fixed on the doors, but he's distant, pensive and Hardison realises with a jolt that's the problem. There's a level of quiet they only see from the older man when he's really hurt but that doesn't tally with the visible injuries and it's ringing alarm bells in Hardison's mind.

He glances at Parker, getting a nod in return. Something dreadful went down in that warehouse, bad enough that Eliot doesn't want to talk about it, bad enough that he's pulled back into his shell. The thought of what it could be sends a chill down Hardison's spine. Part of him wants to push, to needle a confession from the other man but a bigger part of him doesn't want to know. Their hitter had done his job and got everyone back safe and beyond that the details don't really matter. They won't judge him no matter what he did.

There's an elevator waiting in the lobby and they shuffle into it. The mirrored walls show Eliot just how bad he looks, and he suddenly understands why his friends are so concerned. He's pasty, dirt streaked and vaguely clammy in the air conditioning. He wants a shower, a change of clothes and a time machine, so he can go way back before this whole mess started and stop Nate from throwing them at Moreau. He knows which of those he's likely to get and leans against the wall with a sigh.

He's lucked out on this stay, managed to get a room to himself and he fishes in his pocket for the key, vaguely surprised it's still there.

Parker and Hardison are looking at him and he licks his lips, tries to dredge up some sort of response and settles for a quick, tired smile that he knows doesn't come close to reaching his eyes. "Thanks," he says and unlocks the door, "I'm going to go clean up. See you in a few."

He ducks inside, closing the door on them, knowing it's a shitty thing to do. He's pretty sure they'll forgive him, pretty sure they'd already figured out this wasn't a normal job and he's not in the mood for twenty questions. He pauses, slides the chain into place like it'll stall Parker for more than a couple of seconds if she decides she wants in.

Pain runs through his fingers as he grabs a change of clothes and carries them to the bathroom, starting the shower. His clothes stink, a bitter mix of smoke and cordite and sweat and he struggles out of them, throwing them in the corner for now. The water engulfs him, washing away the physical traces of what he did and it suddenly hits him, hard enough to unlock his knees so he ends up sitting with his back to the shower wall.

The tears are a surprise, because he thought he'd forgotten how to cry, used them all up. He pulls his knees up and rests his forehead on them, gulping in breaths when black spots swirl through his eyes. He's not weeping for the men he killed - their own choices put them in that warehouse, and none of them was an innocent - but for the man he was becoming, someone closer to the kid he searches for everyday in the mirror. They leave him aching and empty and hollow and it's going to take a while to soothe the new raw spots inside his soul.

He's chilled from sitting in the cold tile and the water is starting to run cold so he forces himself to his feet, reaching for soap and a washcloth, scrubbing any last trace of the battle from his body. It stings in places, highlighting minor cuts and knicks he didn't know he had until the lather found them, painting a map of damage to his body. He can't quite lift his left arm high enough to wash his hair and settles for doing his best one handed. He rinses, shivering, under the now cold water and steps out, wrapping a towel around his hips, leaning towards the mirror to find out why his shoulder hurts so much.

There's a splinter longer than his hand in the back of his shoulder. He can see it in the mirror but he just can't get the angle to dig it out. It hurts, a nasty throbbing ache that makes him want to tear his arm off and he tries again, flinching when his fingers just brush the wood. He's going to need help and stoops to find his phone in the pile of filthy clothes, sending a quick message.

He drys himself, slipping into soft sweatpants, draping a towel carefully around his neck to catch the water trickling from his hair. Somehow he's not surprised to find Parker and Sophie are already in the bedroom when he opens the bathroom door and steps out. There's the big medical bag between them on the couch and he pauses, steeling himself because the damn thing has to come out but it's not going to be a fun process.

"Hi," Parker says, voice just a tiny bit unsure, like she's not sure how he's going to react.

"Hey, Parker," he says, voice so rough that he winces, tries to swallow. "Sophie."

He's not sure which one of them is more surprised when she stands, wrapping her arms around him carefully.

"Thank you for bringing him home," she whispers in his ear and he nods, having to swallow hard before he can answer.

"I'd do the same thing for any of you," he says simply and lets himself lean into the hug for a second.

The towel slips and she gasps when she sees the sliver of wood lodged in his flesh. "Jesus Christ, Eliot!" she says, ducking out of his arms for a closer look. "This is not a little problem!"

He flinches, a little at her raised voice, knows they both notice. "Still needs to come out."

The room has a small table and he turns one of the chairs, sitting down slowly and resting his good arm on the back. His left shoulder doesn't want to bend and he gives in, tucking his arm in in front of him.

"Eliot, are you sure about this?" Sophie asks. "I'm sure we can find an actual trained medical professional to remove this from you."

He scoffs at that. "It's a splinter. If it was somewhere I could reach, I'd be digging it out myself right now."

"It's going to hurt," she says and if his head wasn't already throbbing, he'd roll his eyes at that. It already hurts, and getting it out before an infection sets in is his main concern.

"Just do it," he says, and put his chin down on his good arm, watching Parker as she lays out various medical supplies on the table in front of him. There's tweezers, squares of gauze, dressings, tape and wound ointment. He bites the inside of his lip, lifting his head to speak. "Grab the scalpel and stitch kit too," he says simply and she nods, one sharp bob of her head and reaches back into the bag.

Sophie presses an ice pack over the wound and he shivers under the chill, but it helps, takes some of the throbbing away and he's damn grateful for that.

Parker slips a pair of gloves on and moves behind him, reaching over him to grab some gauze and the tweezers. The closeness makes him feel twitchy and his hand tightens on the chair.

He grits his teeth as she lifts the ice pack off and probes the sliver with the tweezers, the plastic catching on the wood. It makes him flinch, muscles twitching and he feels her freeze behind him.

"I'm okay. It's okay," he says quietly. "Keep going."

"Tell me, if you need me to stop," she says, one hand brushing his bare back before she gets to work with the tweezers again.

It's a nasty sliver, maybe four inches long, jammed in the muscle just under his shoulder blade. The end is ragged and friable and every time she thinks she's got a good grip, the wood breaks off. The muscles in his back are tense under her hands, breathing deliberately steady and she knows all the poking must be agony.

"Parker," Eliot says, voice slightly hoarse, and she stops instantly. "Just cut it," he adds and blows out a ragged breath.

"Cut you, you mean?" She glances at the scalpel and shudders.

"Yeah," he says, and turns as much as he can to look at her. "That's where the damn thing is, after all." He's pale again, eyes shadowed, and there's a fine sheen of sweat on his face.

She licks her lips and nods. "Tell me what to do."

He does, in more detail than she ever wanted and her hand only shakes a little when she picks the scalpel up, trying not to think as she follows his instructions, swabbing his back with antiseptic first. Shaky doesn't seem an acceptable trait for performing minor surgery and she presses the ice pack against his shoulder until she has the shake under control. She places the blade against his skin and makes one swift cut. It frees some of the splinter and she reaches for the tweezers again but the wood still stubbornly refuses to come free.

It rips a pained grunt out of him and he swallows so hard she can hear it.

"Eliot…" Parker says, free hand on his good shoulder, thumb rubbing absent circles on his skin. She looks up, meeting Sophie's horrified gaze. It's not the first time they've had to do stuff like this and given their jobs, if probably won't be last but that doesn't make it any easier.

"Just get it done," he rasps, tacking on please as an afterthought to soften his tone.

"Okay," Parker says and makes the cut bigger, swiping away blood and letting the gauze drop to the floor.

His back is still under her hands, but she can hear the strain of it in his breathing when she goes in with the tweezers again. His good hand is gripping the chair hard enough to turn his knuckles white, head tipped forward so his hair falls past his face, hiding his expression.

Blood wells again as she gets a good grip on the wood and tugs. It moves this time, sliding out maybe half and inch and Eliot makes a noise halfway between a hiss and a grunt.

His whole world has distilled down to the throb in his shoulder, the sharp but cleaner pain from the incision, the ache down his back as he fights his instincts to stay still so he doesn't scare Parker half to death.

"Nearly done," Parker says, and he can hear the wobble in her voice that means she's crying and trying to hide it.

Must be the day for it, he thinks. "You're doing great," he tells her, because she is. It's a damn brave thing she's doing, and he's not sure how to make her understand how grateful he is for the help.

She changes her grip on the tweezers and takes another hold on the sliver, pulling slowly, easing it out from under his skin. The entire thing slides free suddenly and she feels like cheering. "It's out," she says and drops it on the table in front of him.

He swipes his hair back from his face, blinking at the damn thing in surprise. It had felt huge in his back, like a stone in a shoe, but it's actually bigger than he'd expected.

"Well, fuck," he says simply, and takes a deep breath that doesn't pull obscenely at his shoulder.

Sophie hands over a dish of antiseptic and more gauze. "It says it doesn't sting," she says and takes a minor risk, resting her hand on his arm. His muscles tense under her touch at first before he blows out a long breath and lets himself relax.

She's right, it doesn't sting at all as Parker cleans the wounds, adding wound ointment for good measure before taping a dressing securely over the top. He's glad she's being so thorough because pallet wood tends to be coated in all kinds of dirty stuff and the last thing he wants is an infection.

He's exhausted and all he wants to do is give into the pull of the bed and sack out for a couple of hours, give his brain and body chance to rest a bit but he's painfully aware of Parker standing next to him, face pale.

"Thank you," he says. "Feels better already," he adds, and it's not quite a lie.

She nods, sharply and he forces himself to his feet, accepting a t-shirt from Sophie who tips her head towards the door and slips out quietly.

"You were shaking in the car," Parker says and he sinks back into the seat. "Why were you shaking in the car, Eliot?" she asks, like it's something she can't quite square in her mind.

He licks his lips, knowing he's too exhausted and mentally fried to have this conversation right now. He also knows that he owes her. "It was a rough fight," he says simply, after a long pause, thankful there's enough cuts and bruises on his skin to sell the story.

"Did you kill someone?" She can't look at him and he feels a stab of self hatred rip through him, more painful and cutting by far than the wound on his back.

He hesitates, again, because he doesn't want her to think badly of him, but she's been brave enough to ask the question and he needs to be brave enough to answer. "Yes," he says and doesn't try to explain or excuse it. He did his job and he'll take the consequences, no matter how much they hurt.

"Okay," she says and looks at him. "You should rest," she says and a rush of gratitude races through him for the way her brain works. She's got the answers that she wanted and she's not going to press him for more.

He stands, body aching, and brushes past her, dropping a featherlight kiss on her temple on the way to the bed. "Stay?" he asks, in the same tone she'd once used on him, and she nods, curling up one one side of the big bed, one socked foot resting against his calf.

It takes him a while to get comfortable and he watches as the tension slowly drains from her face before he lets his own eyes close.

Thank you, he thinks. Thank you for not hating me. Thank you for giving me another chance when I don't deserve it.

He's not sure how or why or which God is setting up a long joke at his expense, but he's found a family and he's going to do everything he can to keep them whole.

Even if it costs him more of his already tattered soul.

That's a consequence he can live with.

Losing them isn't.

#leverage #eliot spencer #whump #hurt/comfort #parker #team as family #emotional whump #big bang job tag #minor surgery

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love-and-monsters · 4 years ago

Text

Cavern and Foe

M elf X GN reader, 8,276 words.

After coming across a sworn enemy and shooting him, you both fall into an underground cavern. The only way out is to work together. If, of course, you can manage it.

You unfurled yourself from your hunting crouch and headed a few steps further into the forest. It was unnaturally quiet in the dusk, and you could feel your stomach grinding hungrily against your ribs- it had been hours since your last meal at dawn, but you still hadn’t managed to catch anything. The only animal you had managed to hit with your arrow had been a deer, and that had only been in the flank. Generally, your ritehood was not going well.

It would be another week and a half before you were allowed back in your village. Hunting wasn’t strictly necessary for the ritehood; there were plenty of people before you who had survived on a diet of plants alone, whether by choice or necessity. But an unwillingness or inability to bring down prey did preclude you from your chosen profession.

You wanted to be a warrior. And that meant proving that you were strong and skilled enough to become one.

Something rustled the undergrowth behind you. You shifted your weight, turning your body toward the noise without making any of your own. With only the smallest, most delicate motions, you removed an arrow from your quiver and threaded it. There were precious few of them left- you were going to need to make this shot count.

The rustling moved closer to you. You squinted through the woods, trying to make out the shape moving between the trees. It was tall. Perhaps a bear? Taking down one of those would surely confirm your path as a warrior. But it would have to be fairly young to be so quiet- bears were usually much heavier.

You caught a glimpse of tanned skin through the trees and loosed your arrow. It plunged straight and true into the flesh of your target.

The scream that went up made your hair stand on end. It was full of raw agony, a nearly human scream, but with a razor-sharp edge that made it sound a little like a wildcat’s. Your heart leapt. A cougar, perhaps? That would earn you a warrior position, surely. Barely breathing, you plunged through the woods toward your target.

What you saw made you stumble to a graceless stop.

It looked almost like a person, wearing off-white robes with an embroidered neckline. From its head, poking through its black hair, rose a crown of short, bone white horns. Its ears were long and pointed, extending almost past the back of its head.

An elf. You whipped out your bow and pointed an arrow at its throat. An elf. With its head, you would be the most respected member of your town. You could be a warrior, if you wanted; you would probably be given a high-ranking position right off the bat. Who would deny you, after you had killed one of your people’s greatest enemies?

The victory was already singing sweet inside your head, so you were too distracted to notice the elf’s tail whipping across the ground. It hooked your ankle with a surprisingly strong grip for its thin size and yanked.

Your feet went from underneath you. Only barely did you manage to catch yourself on your elbows, and by the point, the elf was on his feet, sprinting back into the forest.

Rage flashed through you. In seconds, you were on your feet, plunging after him. You could see him darting between trees and scrambling through the undergrowth. Bright spots of blood stood out against the deep green of the forest, guiding you after him.

He was slowing down, stumbling more and more. The splotches of blood were growing bigger- running seemed to be making the injury worse. You were right behind him, gaining on him with every step. Without breaking your stride, you pulled your bow off your back and nocked an arrow. You trained your sight on him. All you needed to do was get one good hit- just one.

And, before you could blink, he dropped out of sight.

Confused, you staggered, trying to kill your momentum. Where had he-

And then you pitched into the same pit he’d fallen down.

You felt yourself hit the ground in slow motion. One of your arms twisted underneath you. There was a split second of stomach-turning horror where you heard and felt your bone crunch as you landed on it. Then there was one second of nothing.

And then the pain hit you.

Agony. You couldn’t move your arm. You couldn’t fathom moving it. There was nothing to move. Your arm was nothing more than a white-hot blaze of pain. It made your stomach churn with the awfulness of it and you rolled onto your belly so you could vomit. Sobs and dry heaves mingled together, leaving your body convulsing and trembling.

Time lost all meaning for a while, but eventually, you got used to the pain. It was still there, but you were able to take one small part of your brain away from screaming in agony and figure out what was happening.

You were in some kind of small cave. The hole you had fallen through was distant above you, far enough away that you could blot it out with the palm of your hand. The room curved upward, like an inverted bowl. It was only the size of a small room, perhaps ten feet across. Sitting across the room, glaring at you, was the elf you had just been chasing.

There was a long, awkward silence. He was clutching at his shoulder, blood pumping slowly down his front. You moved instinctively for your bow, but froze when you touched it- it had been smashed upon landing, no more than splinters and string. Not that it mattered- you weren’t shooting one handed. With your good hand, you fumbled for your knife, but you weren’t excited about your chances- the broken arm was your strong arm, and you were pretty sure that even injured, he would be able to wrestle the knife away from you.

“It would seem we are at a stalemate,” the elf said. His voice was slightly accented and rather soft. “You cannot kill me, I have no desire to kill you, and we are not getting out of here any time soon.”

You glared at him from across the room, as much as you could manage. It was hard to stop your expression from twisting into a grimace of pain. “Maybe you’re giving up. I’m going to climb out.”

The elf somehow managed to make an eyebrow raise look sarcastic, but he said nothing else. Cradling your broken arm, you examined the wall. Unfortunately, the hole you had fallen through appeared to be roughly at the apex of a dome. Attempting to scale it would mean pretty big sections where you hung nearly upside down, a feat that would be difficult with two functional arms. With only one still working, it was nearly impossible.

That didn’t mean you weren’t going to give it a try. There were a few rocks that jutted out from the wall, creating solid footholds. You braced your good arm against the wall and started to climb.

Your fingers slipped from the stone when you were only couple of feet above the ground. You struck the ground hard, knocking the wind out of your lungs. For a moment, you just lay there, gasping and choking as pain radiated up your broken arm.

It took a few minutes for you to be able to sit up and you risked a glance at your broken arm. You had been avoiding looking at it, mostly out of fear.

Your stomach twisted as you looked at it. The bone had shifted against your skin. It hadn’t broken through, but you could see the unsettling jut of it, twisting the shape of your arm. It took several deep breaths and staring determinedly at the ground before you could settle your stomach.

“You’ll need to set that.” The elf sound smug. “It’ll be useless until then, and worse than useless if it heals like this.”

You looked down at your arm again. Experimentally, you probed it with your fingertips. The pain was bad enough that your vision hazed over for a moment, leaving you trembling and gasping on the ground.

When you came back to yourself, the elf was tearing strips of his toga apart. He wound the strips around the gash in his shoulder, tying it off. The movement of the arm seemed limited, but it was leagues better than yours. He paced slowly along his side of the room, resting his fingers against the wall. You followed the motion of his tail. His expression was smooth and unperturbed, but his tail whipped and coiled behind him, twining close to his legs.

Time slipped by with agonizing slowness. You could only tell it was passing because the light filtering into the cave was gradually growing dimmer. Your stomach growled, adding its own complaint to the aches and pains you were already feeling. You had been trying not to move, since that only seemed to aggravate your broken arm, but finally, driven by your groaning stomach, you shifted to look for your pack.

The elf watched you as you grabbed for your bag. It was small, but it contained a few days’ worth of rations. Looking at them made your nerves flare. There wasn’t enough to last you until your arm healed, and even if it had, you weren’t sure it was going to help. Your arm was not healing properly without being set, and every tiny touch made a nauseating wave of pain roll through you. You weren’t setting it on your own, and if your arm wasn’t set, you weren’t climbing out. Starvation was inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

Your stomach growled and you reached fumblingly for the food with your non-dominant hand. Fuck it. Might as well eat. Nothing would be solved by going hungry. You ripped into one of the strips of dried meat. Ugh. If it was going to be your last meal, you really wished it could have been something that tasted better.

“You have food?” The elf had gone still on the other side of the cave. One of his arms was pressed to his middle, like he was trying to massage away hunger pains. He was staring fixedly at you. In the dim light of the cave, his cheeks looked sallow and his eyes, sunken. Was he starving? You pulled the food bag tighter against your chest. Would you be able to hold him off if he decided to charge? He seemed to be thinking the same thing, eyes flicking over you. You might be able to get a few good kicks in, and if you got a lucky shot on his injury, you could probably incapacitate him. But he could easily incapacitate you, too. It was all up to luck. And neither of you were willing to take that chance.

The tension went out of him after a moment and he slumped against the wall, still staring at your bag. Your eyes drifted to the tight bandage at his shoulder. “Do you know how to set a broken bone?” you asked.

He looked at you cautiously. “I am aware of how to do it. I’ve never actually done it, though.”

“I’ll cut you a deal,” you said. “Set my arm and I’ll give you something to eat.”

His eyes drifted from your bag to you, then back to the bag. “And how are you going to stop me from twisting your arm and stealing the bag?” he asked.

“I’ve still got my knife on me,” you said, indicating the blade at your hip. “If you reach for the bag, I’ll have just enough time to gut you before you grab it.”

He eyed the knife. “And how do I know you’re not going to try to stab me the second I get within range?”

“Because then I’m not getting out of here either. I need my arm set. And you need to eat. We both need this. I’m not going to be stupid about this if you’re not.” The elf looked at you for a moment, weighing his options, then nodded.

He approached you slowly, eyes scanning your every move. You held as still as possible, keeping your hands low and nonthreatening. When he reached you, he crouched at your side, turning his body away from you. It was clear he was trying to keep any vulnerable points away from you.

His hands brushed your arm and you gave a strangled groan. “Usually, you’d set it with some sort of stick or piece of wood to keep the bone straight as it heals,” the elf said. “But I don’t have any of that.”

You glanced around. Your bow had chunks of wood that were as long as your forearm, but they were all curved. “Arrows,” you said. “I have a couple. Will those work?”

The elf lifted your quiver and slid one of the arrows free. He examined it for a moment, then deftly snapped off the tip and dropped it on the ground. You grimaced. The elf ripped at the hem of his clothes, tearing off another long strip of fabric. When he had a long enough chunk, he lay the fabric and arrow together and took your arm in his hands. Despite everything, his touch was soft and gentle, barely brushing your skin.

“The bone is out of place. I’ll have to shift it back in,” he said. “I can’t guarantee it’ll heal perfectly.”

“I’m good with good enough,” you said. You turned your head away. Looking at your arm was starting to make you feel sick. “Just go for it.”

“Hold on.” He reached down and seized another arrow. After snapping off the tip again, he pressed the body of the arrow to your lips. “Bite on it. It’ll hurt.”

You seized the arrow in your teeth. He nodded and looked back down at your arm. “All right. Three… t-” He hadn’t even finished saying two before he was pressing on your broken arm.

Your vision went white. Agony blazed through your brain. You couldn’t think. Distantly, you thought you could hear someone screaming. There was the vague sense that you were thrashing around. But you couldn’t be sure. The pain commanded all of your attention.

Slowly, the pain diminished. It didn’t go away, but you started being able to have coherent thoughts around it. You were lying down, sweat soaking into the dirt. Fine tremors ran over your body. The elf was sitting over you, looking ruffled.

“You kicked me,” he said. His voice was winded and, as your senses returned, you realized he was clutching his side.

“Sorry,” you said. Your voice was raspy and your throat protested even the simple aspect of talking. You’d said it reflexively, but to your surprise, you realized you were actually sorry. Genuinely, you hadn’t meant to hurt him. “You could, uh, kick me back.” It was a stupid thing to say, but you had said it so often to your siblings that it was nearly automatic. To your surprise, the elf laughed.

“I won’t.” He let out a slow breath. “Don’t move your arm. It’s bound, but it’s not stable. Arrows aren’t the best for splinting.”

Your arm was still throbbing bad enough to make your stomach turn, but you had enough wherewithal to turn and grab your bag. “Here,” you said, thrusting it at him. “Take some.”

He looked at you cautiously, then reached into the bag and started rummaging through your food. It would have been easy for him to drag the entire bag away from you. There was no way you were in enough of a shape to stop him. Instead, he pulled out a tied-off bag of dried fruit and laid the bag back at your feet. Transaction concluded, he retreated to his side of the cave.

It was rapidly getting darker in the cave. The sun was setting, and any light that you once had was fading. You shivered. The cave was chilly. Usually, you managed nights in the woods with a fire, but there was no wood and you weren’t quite desperate enough to sacrifice your clothes. Instead, you lay back on the dirt ground and did your best to cover your body with a coat. Shivering sucked. It made your arm ache even worse. Gradually, the cave dimmed into pitch blackness.

Despite your exhaustion, sleep refused to come. The sickening pain of your broken arm notwithstanding, every noise from across the cave made your eyes snap open again. Could he see you? There were rumors about elves having dark vision. If you fell asleep, it would be simple for him to steal your knife and slit your throat.

Your paranoia kept you from engaging in any but the lightest of sleep. The slightest sound brought you back to full wakefulness, and you never really lost consciousness. You only drifted in the dim, dreamy area between wakefulness and sleep.

Morning came to find you stiff, exhausted, and in a worse mood than you had been in the night. The pain in your arm was more insistent, a constant throbbing that shoved its way to the forefront of your mind. The elf appeared to be in only moderately better shape. He was holding his arm in a strange way, suggesting that his own wound had stiffened overnight, though he looked better rested.

Slowly and uncomfortably, you pushed yourself into a sitting position. The elf watched you, caution in every line of his body. You ignored him, instead scrounging in your bag for breakfast. Rationing was probably a good idea, so despite your weakness, you only ate a few strips of dried meat and a piece of hard biscuit. It barely filled the aching void of your stomach. Trying to distract yourself, you started fussing with the bandages on your arm.

“What do you think you’re doing, idiot?” the elf hissed at you. You paused, looking up at him. He had shifted closer to glare at you. “I went to all that trouble to bind your arm and you’re just screwing it up!”

Irritation flared in your chest. “I am not screwing it up! I’m making it tighter!”

He snorted. “Sure. Just don’t expect me to rebind it again when it comes apart. I’m not looking to get injured by you again.”

The anger grew brighter and hotter. Frustration at being trapped, injured, and afraid spilled over. “If you hadn’t been trespassing in the first place, I wouldn’t have shot at you! What were you doing on our land?” It felt good to vent your spleen on someone.

“Your land?” the elf snarled back. “You can’t own land! Just like a human, to think you can come in here and take whatever you want-”

“We take whatever we want?” Your voice echoed in the small space of the cave. “You stole our crops! But sure, act all high and mighty because we like to make sure our own people get fed-”

“You can’t steal a living creature! What lives belongs to the land and the land is for all! Only a human would want to possess everything!” The elf stormed toward you, jabbing a finger toward your chest.

“Only an elf would claim the moral high ground while stealing food from the mouths of our children!” You rose to meet him, faces inches apart. His features were as delicate as any elf’s beautiful even when twisted in rage. The constant ache of your arm only spurred your anger further.

“We did no such thing! If you have not sustained the land so that it will sustain you, then you only have yourselves to blame,” the elf sniffed. Red haze clouded your vision.

“How dare you! All you elves claim to be so pure and noble, but you’re all just a bunch of smug bastards, lording your superiority over everyone else! I bet if your people had to fight starvation off by tooth and nail every year, you wouldn’t be so damn high and mighty!”

“At least we’re not the ones shooting any human on sight! We’re not a bunch of savage murderers!”

“We can’t trust you not to take our stuff! It’s either that or you rob us blind and we’ll die as surely as if you slit our throats!” You had pushed each other to the middle of the cave, right under the single shaft of sunlight. Your voices echoed off the walls, filling the space with overlapping noise.

“And of course, your first instinct as a human is violence! You couldn’t negotiate to save your stupid hide!” The elf leaned over you, his face barely apart from yours. “All you know is how to shoot and ki-”

Something underneath you groaned. The ground shifted, buckling under the elf’s feet. He wobbled. Directly beneath him, the floor of the cave shuddered. You backed away, skittering toward the wall. The cave floor was unstable. Perhaps it hadn’t been able to take the weight of the two of you standing together. Perhaps your voices had been loud enough to shake something loose. Or perhaps it was just the last straw on the camel’s back.

You saw a look of undisguised terror on the elf’s face as the floor on his side of the cave crumbled away.

It was pure instinct on your part. Perhaps it would have said more to your character if it hadn’t been, if you had made the conscious decision to save an enemy. But it wasn’t. You just saw his look of fear as he went down and lunged to catch him.

Your good hand caught one of his. For a horrifying moment, he kept going, fingers sliding through yours. Just in time, his other hand snapped up and caught your wrist. His fingers were slick with sweat, but he managed to hold on.

You groaned. You weren’t quite lying on top of it, but the position you were in was putting your weight onto your bad arm. It took all your strength to just hold onto him. There was no way you were going to be able to pull him back up and if this went on, he was going to pull you over the edge too. But you couldn’t let go. You couldn’t let him fall.

His legs scrambled at the crumbling ledge beneath him. “I can’t pull you up,” you said. “Can you try to climb out?”

“I’m trying!” He pulled on your arm, trying to climb you like a rope. You kicked your legs furiously, trying to find something to anchor yourself with.

One of your feet caught on a chunk of stone. You wrapped your legs around it, hooking your foot around your ankle. Slowly, sick with the agonizing pain in your arm, you pulled yourself away from the ledge.

He scrambled up onto solid ground as soon as he could grip the ledge. Both of you scurried away from the edge of the pit, huddling together against the wall. Now that your adrenaline was fading, the pain in your arm was crawling to new levels. You must have done something to it when you lunged for him. Cautiously, you probed the bone through the bandage. A coil of pain kicked you straight in the stomach. You rolled over and vomited bile over the ground.

When you were done, you sat back up, back pressed to the wall. Your skin was clammy and fine tremors wracked your frame.

Slowly, you turned your head to look at the elf. He was pressed against the wall, smudged with dirt and a few smears of blood. His eyes were focused on you, wide as saucers. “You saved my life.”

You spat a bit of stomach acid onto the dirt. “Yeah. So, I guess it’s all evened out now, huh? Maybe you can stop yelling at me for almost killing you.”

He blinked at you. “No, I mean- why did you save me? If you wanted me dead, there was no better chance than that one.”

“I don’t know,” you said. “I don’t know why I saved you. I wasn’t thinking. I just saw that you were scared and- I don’t know. It’s one thing to attack a trespasser. It’s another to just… let someone die.”

The elf stared at you for a moment, the whites of his eyes bright against the dirty background of the cave. “Your arm,” he finally said, “is it… okay?”

You didn’t want to look at it. “I don’t know.”

“Sit back against the cave wall,” the elf said, waving his hand toward you. He crawled over to you, settling next to your injured arm. You turned your head away. “I’m going to unbind it. Please try not to kick me again.”

“No promises,” you said, trying to smile through your gritted teeth. You thought you caught a quiet huff of laughter as he bent over you.

Cold fingers delicately unwrapped the cloth bandages and removed the splint. The elf sucked in a sharp breath. Your stomach dropped. “That bad?”

“Um,” the elf said. “You sort of lay on top of it when you grabbed for me, right? I think you, um. I think you pushed the bone a little further out of alignment.” He inhaled and exhaled slowly. There was a measure of unsteadiness to it. “It’s hard to see down here, so maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“How bad does it look?” you asked.

The elf grimaced. “It’s… swelling. And the bruises are bad. And the bone’s out of place again.”

“Fix it,” you said. “You shoved the bone back in place before, do it again.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I can stabilize it, but you’ve jostled it more out of place than it was before. I don’t want to risk damaging anything else.”

You leaned your head back against the wall. “Just do what you can.”

He at least attempted for gentleness this time, but you still had to grit your teeth against the sheer awfulness of the pain. His fingers were nimble, and the warmth of his body against yours was almost comforting. When he leaned away from you, you found yourself missing the contact.

The elf was apparently reluctant to part as well, because even after he finished with your arm, he stayed next to you, close enough that your shoulders brushed. “We need to get out of here,” he said.

“Yes. We established that already. The problem is how,” you said. “I can’t climb out of here even without a broken arm, and unless you’re hiding some impressive wall-scaling abilities, you can’t either.”

Something tapped against your side. You looked down to see the elf’s tail twisting and coiling on the ground. Occasionally, the fluffy tip would hit you, though it seemed to be more incidental than intentional. “No, I can’t. Especially not with an arrow wound.” He moved a hand over it absently. “But there has to be a way out.” He got up and started pacing along the wall, touching it with his palm. His tail waved behind him, swinging from side to side.

“Maybe,” you said, unconvinced. “Or maybe not.”

He fumbled along the wall for a few minutes, before lashing out with a kick. “Dammit! The floor crumbled so damn easy, why won’t these walls?”

He kicked the wall again and again, sending tiny stones skittering across the floor. You watched, wide eyed. The elf slammed a particularly hard kick into the wall and yelped, then started hopping around, clutching his foot. He slumped to the ground, mumbling and cursing.

“You all right?” you asked.

“Just bruised,” he groused. “Sorry. I get grouchy when I’m hungry.”

“We’ve got some more supplies,” you said, nudging the bag closer to him. He snorted, pushing the bag back over to you.

“Not that kind of hungry. There’s no light down here, except that tiny little patch.” He pointed up to the distant hole in the ceiling. The direct sunlight filtered down into the gaping hole in the ground. “I’ve been trying to meditate, but it’s just not effective without the sun. It’s making my skin crawl.” He gave an affected shudder before glancing at you. “How are you managing it? You’ve barely been affected by night-sickness at all.”

You stared at him. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about?”

The elf looked back at you with a similarly confused expression. “Night-sickness. Do humans call it something different? You know, when you haven’t done your light meditation for too long?” You shook your head. “Do you have totally different words for all of it? Look, how do you process the light from the sun into energy?”

“How do we- what?” You were staring to get frustrated. “You’re not making any sense. We don’t convert light into energy or whatever.”

“Then how do you get energy?” the elf said. He sounded well and truly bewildered, like the very idea was completely unheard of.

“We eat food? You know what eating food it. I’ve seen you eat.” Several expressions flitted across the elf’s face, from confusion to surprise to something like guilt.

“You only eat food?” he asked. You nodded. “Ah. That, er. Explains some things.”

“What does it explain?” you asked. “And what do you mean we only eat food? What else would we eat? Rocks?”

The elf chuckled weakly. “Then you would be a lot better position down here. No. Elves need sunlight. Without it, we get sick, and we can die. Food is still necessary, but we don’t need much. We have maybe one meal a day and we meditate to gain our energy other times.” His tail hooked around his chest, curling and twitching. “We can eat more food, but it’s… wasteful, I suppose. Or maybe overly indulgent.”

Several ideas were dawning upon you in the same moment. “That’s why elves don’t have farms. You don’t need them. You don’t eat much, so you can afford to just forage every now and then and gather what you want. Human farms must look greedy to you.”

“It did come across as a little…” He made a vague hand gesture. “A little gluttonous, perhaps. To have so much food and to be so possessive over it felt like an overreaction.”

“But we need it,” you said. “We got dangerously close to famine last winter.”

The elf shrank back. “We didn’t know! We don’t grow our own food! I mean, it’s not fun to go without food, but we can live. The idea of planting and growing living things that only you can harvest is just weird! You plant things because you like seeing things grow and get healthier, not because you have to.”

You kneaded at your forehead. “Are you telling me the war between our species for years has been because we didn’t know you guys eat sunlight?”

“We don’t eat sunlight,” the elf said. “It’s more of an energy transfer process. And you could have asked.”

“You could have asked before stealing our food!”

“We didn’t know it was stealing!” The elf had drawn closer to you as you were talking, and you were suddenly overly aware of how close you were. You could feel the heat of his body against yours. A wave of buzzing heat spread over your body from the pit of your stomach. Your eyes were unsettlingly drawn to his lips. His upper lip was fuller than his bottom one. Your mind wandered, almost casually, over to how it would feel to kiss the upper lips, to explore it with your teeth-

“Okay, get off me!” You struggled away from him. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but you thought there was a red flush staining his cheekbones. “It doesn’t matter how this whole thing started. Maybe, if we can tell people that this whole thing started with a misunderstanding, we can get them to end it. Or at least stop being so belligerently violent toward each other.”

The elf glanced at his injured shoulder. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try. But, uh. We’re still kind of trapped. We’re not going to be stopping a war if the only thing people find are our skeletons.”

“Which means we need to find a way out of here,” you said. You stood up, your legs wobbling. You hadn’t realized exactly how tired you were. Apparently falling into a pit, breaking your arm, and then rescuing the guy you had previously tried to kill was an exhausting process.

The elf stepped closer to you, eyeing you like he was worried you were going to fall over. “I looked around. I didn’t see anything.��

“Might as well give it another pass,” you said. “Not like we’ve got that much else to do.” You started to pace along the wall, trying to feel for any weak points that might lead to a tunnel. The elf stayed by your side, tail flicking around your ankles.

No matter how closely you examined the walls, they never became anything other than solid stone. “There isn’t a way out,” the elf said. He was starting to look despondent, slumping against the wall. “I’m going to die down here.”

“No one’s going to die down here any time soon,” you said. “We just need to figure out a way out of here! There must be one.”

“Or the only way out is the same way we fell in, which we can’t get to.” He watched as you kicked at the wall some more. “Don’t bother. It’s not going to work. If I couldn’t get out, you’re not going to do it.”

“Don’t be an asshole. Do people let you get away with this all the time at your home just because you’ve got a pretty face?” you snapped, then realized what you’d said. The elf, apparently unable to believe his ears, stared back at you.

“Er- what?”

“Never mind! I wasn’t thinking. It’s the pain. It’s making me loopy.” You gave another kick toward the wall. It remained as solid as ever. “Fuck!”

The elf stood back up. “Kicking solid rock isn’t going to help. You’re so stubborn. Are all humans like that?”

“Well, we don’t all give up like elves do, apparently,” you snorted.

“You waste your energy with fruitless endeavors instead,” the elf replied. He walked over to you, examining the wall. He still managed to have the refined air of an elf, even after spending a while at the bottom of a cave. “It’s not going to collapse.”

You staggered back from the wall. Your leg ached and the wall had suffered absolutely no damage. “Well, we can’t just stand here and do nothing.” You paced away from the wall and toward the pit. You couldn’t see the bottom, though it was already so dark it could have only been a few feet down. A breeze rustled your hair.

The elf sat down next to you. “You’re not thinking of throwing yourself off, are you?”

“No. You could push me, though. If you’re annoyed I’m still here.” It was a very weak attempt at a joke. The elf didn’t smile.

“I’m glad you’re here, actually,” he said. “Even if you’re the one who got me into this. I don’t want to be alone down here.”

“Yeah,” you said. “I, uh. Don’t mind having you down here either. I mean. I’m not happy you’re going to die too. If I could get you out, I would.”

“Me too. I just wish someone knew what we did. Maybe it could help people,” the elf said. His shoulder pressed against yours as he leaned closer to you. You leaned back into him. The contact was nice. He smelled oddly good, despite everything. Another breeze drifted up from the cavern beneath you, stirring your hair.

The elf went stiff next to you. “Did you feel that?”

“The breeze? Yeah. What’s the big deal?”

“It smells like the forest! Like fresh air! There must be a way out down there!” The elf scrambled to his feet. “If we can just climb down, we can get out.”

You looked uncertainly into the pit. The sides were jagged, with plenty of hand and footholds, but you weren’t sure how far you would be able to make it. “You’ll have to go on ahead,” you said. “I can’t scale the wall, not with my arm like this.”

The elf’s face fell. “I can’t just leave you here.”

“If you can get out, you can get help. I’ll be fine.”

The elf’s tail coiled around his legs and his ears twitched frantically. “No. I’m not going to leave you.”

“You’re going to have to! I can’t climb like this, and you’re even more of an idiot than I thought if you’re going to stay here just because I can’t get out. Go!” You waved your hands at him, ushering him toward the edge of the pit.

“No.” The elf planted his feet, fingers curling into fists. “I can get you out of here. You saved my life. I’m not going to abandon you.”

“Technically, I save your life after trying to kill you. So, I would say that sort of evens the whole thing out,” you said. The elf rolled his eyes, glancing around the small cave. “Look, the longer we stand around here chatting, the less time you have to get out of here-”

“No. I have an idea,” the elf said. He fumbled with the hem of his clothes, tearing it into strips. Most of his stomach was exposed, showing off toned muscle. You deliberately did not look at him. It was not difficult because he was definitely not appealing to look at. “Come here.” You took a cautious step closer to him. “No, come here.” He seized your arm and tugged you next to him. “Stand still.” He took the cloth strips, which he’d tied into a long band, and wrapped them around both of your waists, tying you together.

“What’s this going to do?” you asked. One of the elf’s arms fell loosely around your waist, trying to steady himself against you. An odd jolt jumped through your core. You froze.

“It’s a tether between us. I should be strong enough to support at least some of your weight. You can use your good arm to climb and I can support your other side.” You tried to twist your head to look at him, but that put your faces dangerously close together. You looked away. “But we’ll have to work together.”

“I can do that,” you said. The elf’s hand pressed to your back. His tail twined around your leg for a moment.

“Okay. Just watch your step.” It took some careful negotiating of your positions to start scaling down the cliff, but you managed. Your arm screamed with pain, but the elf’s body pressed against yours, bracing you. Climbing down the rock wall was a slow, uncomfortably process. Once or twice you slipped and the elf had to pause and brace himself to support you, and he even slipped once and you had to bear his weight. It was difficult, but you managed to coordinate your movements. Without speaking, you and the elf moved as one. His tail looped around your waist. It couldn’t support your weight, but it was comforting to feel the elf’s presence.

The wall went on and on. Your arm ached from the jostling alone, and you kept bumping it against outcropping stones. The elf’s breathing had taken on a ragged edge- clearly he was struggling to hold up both of you.

“Can you tell how much further?” you asked. The elf squirmed, trying to get a look at the ground.

“No. It’s really dark. Could be a couple feet. Could be further. I don’t know.” The elf leaned closer to you. “This may have been a bad idea. I… I can’t hold on much longer.”

“I know.” Your own arm was trembling. Going up was no longer an option. There was no way you’d make it back to the top. The only hope was that the ground wasn’t much further away.

The elf moved down a couple more feet. You could tell his moves were laborious. Maybe if he hadn’t been helping you, he would be doing fine, but supporting another person was taking its toll. “I’m sorry,” you said. “This is all my fault.”

“Yeah,” the elf said, “it kind of is, isn’t it?” He sighed. “At least we know the reason our species had a feud, though. Even if no one else ever does, we’ll know the truth.”

“Yeah,” you agreed. “I’m sorry I shot you and I’m sorry we ended up down here. But I’m gad we met.”

The elf’s tail curled tighter around your waist. There was almost no light, so you couldn’t see him, but you could feel him next to you. Just the two of you, huddled together in the dark. Even that small comfort felt precious. “I’m glad, too.”

As he moved to take another step down, the foothold he was using crumbled. You heard him yelp and felt him scramble to regain his grip, but his movements were clumsy and fumbling. The belt at your waist tugged and you tried to brace yourself, but it didn’t matter. You were tired and your weak grip was no longer enough. The elf’s weight pulled your grip free and you tumbled into the dark.

You barely had opened your mouth to scream when you slammed into the elf, landing squarely on top of him. He huffed out a breath and wheezed awkwardly as you tried to figure out what had just happened.

“What was that?” you groaned, struggling to push yourself up. There was just enough light to see by, which meant that you got a good look at the elf’s face, which was directly under yours, as he stared back at you. Your noses were almost close enough to touch. You could feel his heart pounding against your chest where you were lying on top of him.

“Um,” you squeaked. The elf didn’t seem to be processing the situation any better. He stared at you, eyes wide.

You recovered first. “We lived!” You scrambled up, wobbling a little. Your legs didn’t seem to be fully aware of the fact that you were alive. The elf made his way to his feet, equally unsteady.

“And you feel that, right?” The elf’s ears were twitching and his tail was waving in a constant, smooth motion. He tilted his head back, focused on the airflow of the cave. “The breeze is stronger. This way.” He took off at a light jog. You jogged after him, arm cradled against your chest.

There was a tiny glow of light in the cave that grew brighter and brighter the further you traveled. The tunnel sloped upward, your calves burning as you continued up the increased grade. The elf kept glancing back at you, making sure you were following him.

You turned a small bend and the light pouring into the cave became blinding. Instinctively, you squeezed your eyes shut. One of your hands fumbled and caught on the elf’s arm. He grabbed you back, and, clinging to each other, you plunged into the undergrowth of the forest.

Your eyes were slow to adjust to the brilliance, but apparently the elf’s were not, because he made a choked noise of horror. You squinted, eyes watering. There were dark shapes around you, humanoid shapes. Relief flooded through you. “It’s okay,” you said. “It’s oka-”

The pointy end of a spear hovered right in front of your chest. You froze. The elf, despite being about an inch taller than you, was trying to retreat behind you. You shifted to stand more directly in front of him, good arm out.

Now that your eyes were more properly adjusted to the light, you could see who was gathered in front of you. It was a hunting party, all four of them holding enormous spears and very ready to plunge those spears into the chest of an interloping elf and anyone who defended him.

“Hey,” you said, keeping your voice was slow and soothing as you could manage. “Guys. It’s me.”

The spear wavered. The man in front, Elias, frowned. “Step away from the elf,” he said. “We can take you back to town, get you some treatment.”

The elf was gripping your clothes tightly. His eyes were wide and he glanced at you uncertainly. You could read the terror in his eyes, the utter fear that you were going to hand him over to the humans.

You braced yourself. “No. Look. There was an accident. He helped me, even after I tried to kill him. He comes with me.”

Bewildered looks were exchanged between the hunting party. “He’s trespassing,” Elias said, but there was no longer as much conviction in his voice. You drew yourself up, trying to look as authoritative and confident as possible.

“He saved my life. And he had important news for us. He stays with me.” You ushered the elf fully behind you, daring the hunters to get around you. They looked at Elias uncertainly, waiting for his say so. He looked back at them. Already, they were lowering their spears, and Elias seemed to sense that they were no longer going to attack confidently.

“All right,” he said. “But the elf stays under guard.”

“I stay with him,” you said. The hunting party fell in around you. The elf squeezed your hand. You could feel a world of gratitude through that small motion.

You refused to leave the elf, even as they questioned him and treated your arm. Explaining about what you had discovered took some time, and there was certainly no small amount of skepticism. But after hours of waiting and repeating yourself, a delegation of elves entered the town.

“Guess you’ll be heading back home soon,” you said. The elf nodded.

“I’m glad of that,” he said. “Though I think… I think I’ll miss you. Isn’t that strange? Missing the person who tried to kill you?”

“Just as strange as missing the person you tried to kill,” you said. “I’m glad I met you, Viatas,” You had learned his name soon after the other elves had arrived.

“I’m glad I met you, too.” He leaned in and gave you a gentle hug, careful not to disturb your arm. He was warm and he smelled surprisingly nice and your heartbeat pounded in your ears as he squeezed you.

“We’ll see each other again,” you promised. “Now that we’re actually talking, I think things are going to get better.”

“I hope so,” said Viatas. He waved to you once more before following the elvish delegation into the forest. You watched him until he had completely vanished between the trees.

Three weeks later, you paced around the entrance to the cave. The sun was low in the sky, washing the area around you in an amber glow.

The foliage rustled. You froze, eyes locking onto the spot where it shifted. There was a moment of silence, then Viatas emerged, hands raised.

“Not going to shoot me again, are you?” he asked. You shook your head.

“Still can’t hold the bow, actually. My arm’s not fully healed yet.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Viatas sat down next to you on a fallen log. “I didn’t make it worse, did I?”

“No. They said I probably never would have been able to use it properly if you hadn’t set it. It’s just a bad break. You saved my life and my arm.” You nudged his leg playfully and he laughed. “I’m glad you got my message.”

“I was glad to hear from you. I’ve been worried. I mean, things are going well in my home, but I wasn’t sure how your people were taking anything. You’ve been all right, haven’t you?” He gave you a concerned look and you nodded reassuringly.

“I’m fine. Actually, I asked you here to talk about something. I just got assigned as an ambassador to the elves.”

Viatas’ eyes widened. “Really?”

“Yeah. Apparently an elf will come to my town and I’ll go to yours and that’s supposed to help with interspecies relations. So, uh. I’ll need some help when I go. And I figured that you’d be a good person to ask. I mean, you’re the only elf I really know.”

Viatas frowned. “You try to kill me, kick me when I try to help you, and my reward for getting you out of the cave you were going to die in is more work?”

You sputtered. “You don’t have to! I was just thinking I’d offer-”

Viatas rested a reassuring hand on your arm. “I’m kidding.” He drew closer. In the dim light, shadows played appealingly over his features. You found it a little hard to breathe all of a sudden. “I would love to work with you.” He drew closer still. “In fact, I’ve rather missed you-”

You closed the distance, pressing your mouth to his. He moved in the same moment, lips molding to yours.

An amount of time passed. You weren’t really paying attention to how long. But you broke apart eventually. “You’re better at that than I thought you’d be,” Viatas said in a quiet, awestruck voice.

“Yeah?” you said. “I think you need some more practice.”

“Oh?” Viatas lifted his brows. “Well, perhaps I should get some.”

“Yeah,” you said, leaning close to him. “I think you should.”

#exophilia #elf boyfriend #elf lover #monster boyfriend #enemies to lovers #monster lover

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