#and oh no look at that the computer has restarted and I only have ten minutes left before I want to leave

[fractallogic]

I don’t want to go to work, I want to read the library book that just came in from my holds list

I want to go to the bookstore and find every book by T. Kingfisher and buy them all

Maybe I’ll go to the gym, shower, eat dinner, and then see how I feel about nosing around in B&N tonight. Or maybe I’ll just do the first three. Idk! Who knows.

[moonlight0934]

Broken Window

Tim sets out his carefully portioned food even though the last thing he feels like doing is eating. Bruce is staring at him since they’re taking a lunch break from training. His entire body aches, and he feels incredibly nauseous. Bruce has been harder on him recently, mainly obsessing about his weight, his diet, and his training schedule. Tim takes a tentative bite of his food, feeling even more sick as he swallows it.

Bruce leans back, his dark eyes following Tim. Tim starts to eat faster, at a normal pace for him so Bruce doesn’t notice how off he’s acting. Once he’s finished his food, Bruce stands up.

“Alright, take twenty minutes, and then we’re going to get back to sparring. I’m going to head upstairs to talk to Alfred in the meantime.”

Tim nods, blinking the dark spots out of his vision. Bruce heads up the stairs, and Tim drops back into his chair. He only sits there for a minute before standing up, and heading to the bathroom. He already feels like he’s going to throw up, and he’s not doing anything, so he decides that he can’t risk throwing up on Bruce once they start moving again.

He sticks two fingers to the soft spot in the back of his throat, immediately throwing up almost everything he ate. Tim rinses his mouth out, leaning heavily against the sink. He’s trembling, but quickly forces his hand to still.

“Ok, you can do this. This is for a really good cause. People’s lives are on the line including Bruce’s. You can’t let him fall back to where he was before just because you’re weak.”

He takes a few deep breaths before walking to the computer. He opens the latest cold case that Bruce assigned him. He hasn’t been allowed to work any actual cases, and he’s not allowed to go out into the field yet. So he doesn’t have much to work with, and this case has been particularly hard. So he spends the rest of his break working on it, quickly losing track of time.

His phone is buzzing in his bag, but he doesn’t hear it. Eventually Bruce comes back down, at least ten minutes later than he said he would.

“What are you doing?” Bruce demands, striding over to the computer.

“What? Oh, sorry, I was just working on this case.”

“You were supposed to restart your training ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize.”

Tim stands up, then pushes his chair back into place.

“You need to be on top of your own schedule. You won’t always have someone to tell you when to get back to working on something. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be worked on,” Bruce growls.

Tim nods.

“I’m sorry, I’ll keep a closer eye on the time in the future.”

“Good, now get over to the sparring deck. I’ll meet you over there in just a minute.”

Tim nods again, heading to the sparring deck. He pulls his hoodie off, tossing it over to his backpack. The cave is typically cold, but he can’t have anything hindering his movement. Bruce walks over a few minutes later, wrapping up his knuckles. Tim frowns, knowing that Bruce has been having more joint problems recently.

“Alright, do you remember the move that I taught you earlier to knock your opponent off their feet?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do that to me in this session.”

“Ok.”

They start sparring with Tim mostly just avoiding Bruce’s punches. Then he manages to slip behind Bruce, and take out his ankle, throwing Bruce completely off balance. Then Tim sends Bruce to the floor as something beeps behind them. Tim turns for a second to see Alfred coming down the stairs. He turns back, then offers Bruce his hand.

Bruce kicks Tim’s knee, then puts a hand on Tim’s chest to slam him into the floor. His shoulder hits the hardest, but the air is still knocked out of him.

“Never turn your back to your opponent. They won’t be as forgiving as I am,” Bruce says before pulling Tim to his feet.

Tim nods, his hand drifting to his shoulder. He can already feel the bruises start to form along his back and side. Alfred gives Bruce a hard stare, and Tim looks away. Tim walks over to his bag while Alfred and Bruce have a silent argument. He looks down at his phone.

“I have to go home.”

“You still have two more hours of training,” Bruce reminds him, then continues sipping his water.

“My parents came home from their trip early, and they’ve been texting me for thirty minutes. I really have to get home. They’re going to want to talk to me for a while before the gala tonight.”

“There’s a gala tonight?” Bruce asks, turning to Alfred.

“Yes.”

“Fine, go.”

Tim nods, then races to get a shower. He’s having to try really hard not to limp or make a face by the time he gets home. He walks in, smoothing out his shirt to make sure that there are no weird creases. His mother stands up as soon as he walks into the sitting room.

“Timothy,” she says, then wraps him in a gentle hug.

He hides his grimace behind a smile, hugging her back. They sit him down to talk about what he’s been up to since they left for their latest business trip. They have the next few days off of work, so Tim doesn’t end up seeing Bruce. They keep him occupied outside of school, which only makes it harder to hide the bruises from them. School is a good distraction though it’s the next Monday when he sees that Batman left someone in front of the police station that was beaten almost to death. He sighs as he clicks on the article.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Janet asks, turning to face him.

“Nothing, I’m just scrolling through the news. Some of what happens in this city is pretty disheartening.”

“I hear you. Would you possibly want to come with us on our next trip? We’re heading to Central City for a week before going to Star. You could come to Central, then go home. It’ll be a good break.”

For a second Tim is incredibly tempted, but the article is right in front of him.

“I’m good. Can I possibly take a day trip somewhere closer this weekend?”

“Yeah, but we’re not going to be here by then, so you’d have to go alone.” 

“That’s fine. Thanks, Mom.”

She hums, turning back to the front of the car. Tim sighs, leaning back against his seat. He ends up sneaking out of his window that night to go to the Batcave. Bruce is gone by the time he gets there, leaving Alfred sitting at the computer.

“Ah, Master Tim, it has been a few days. How are you?”

“I’m fine. I saw the news today.”

Alfred nods, his face dark.

“I came to talk to Bruce, but I don’t know how long my parents are going to take to notice that I’m not there. They’re leaving in a couple of days, but I didn’t think it should wait that long.”

“If you want to talk to him right now I can tell you where he is. He turned off his comm, otherwise I would suggest you speak that way, but it might be best if you talk to him in person.”

“You know Bruce doesn’t want me going out.”

“You’re right, he doesn’t. I won’t tell you to do either thing. You’re welcome to sit with me, or I can tell Bruce that you stopped by if you need to get home.”

Tim contemplates his options for a minute before replying. “Ok, I’m going to suit up, and I’ll meet Bruce on patrol. He might be mad, but we have to talk, and I don’t want to risk my mom knowing that I snuck out.”

Tim changes as quickly as he can with his still purple and black bruises, then heads back to the computer.

“Ok, I see where he is now, and I’ll just pull this up so I can follow it.”

Alfred nods.

“Make sure you take a comm with you.”

“I will, thanks, Alfred.”

It takes Tim twenty minutes to reach Bruce, who is actively bashing a mugger’s face in. Tim knocks Bruce’s wrist away before his fist can connect with the man’s head again. Bruce spins, and they stare at each other for a few minutes before Bruce grabs Tim’s collar. He drags Tim down the street before slamming him up against a car.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” he growls, his eyes angrier than Tim has ever seen them.

“I needed to talk to you. I saw what you did last night, and here you are trying to do it again.”

Bruce slams his fist through the window of the car mere inches from Tim’s face. Tim doesn’t flinch or back down.

“Who do you think you are? You’re trying to tell me what to do. You shouldn’t even be here. I never gave you permission to come on patrol with me, because you’re not ready. You don’t go out until I say you’re ready. Are we clear?”

“B, I’m literally here to make sure you don’t do something stupid. I’m not going to let you do something stupid if I can help it, because that’s the whole point of me being here, of my training.”

This time Bruce’s fist does connect with Tim’s face, knocking his head back into the car.

“You think you’re so high and mighty, well you’re not. You work for me, and you don’t get to tell me what to do. You’re done. Go home, and don’t come back. If you can’t listen, you don’t get to train with me.”

He tosses Tim onto the sidewalk before storming back towards the muggers. Tim staggers to his feet, spitting blood out. From his mouth to his right eye feels like it’s on fire as he leans against a wall. He makes his way back to the cave, sure that Bruce isn’t going to take any more anger out on the criminals since it he already took it out on Tim.

Alfred isn’t in the cave when he gets back so he’s able to get a shower in peace. However, Alfred is there when he comes out. A good half of his face is swollen at this point, and Alfred immediately rushes over.

“What happened?”

“Bruce threw a tantrum again though I’m not sure how I’m going to explain this one to my parents. I think I chipped a tooth. He fired me again, but I’m sure he’ll get over it. I’ll wait to come back until this weekend though, and I don’t think he’s going to do anything bad in the meantime, so we’re good. Anyway, I’ll see you later, Alfred. I’ll call if anything comes up, and you should call me if anything comes up.”

“Wait, come back. At least let me look at your face.”

“Nah, that’s ok. I’m going to have to tell my parents that I fell down the stairs or something, so I’m going to the hospital anyway. I know that you’re going to rip into him about this later, so I don’t have to worry about him getting away with it without consequence. I’ll text you if the doctor has anything important to say.”

Alfred tries to object, but Tim is already leaving. He ends up spending the rest of the night and morning in the hospital, and he throws himself into bed as soon as he gets home. He’s pretty high on the meds that they gave him, which doesn’t give him much time to think about his predicament. His parents end up waiting until Thursday to leave, but he still heads to Bludhaven on Saturday. His jaw, face, and back are all still pretty bruised since ones that large take a long time to heal.

Dick doesn’t get home until five thirty so Tim just waits outside. Dick jumps when he sees Tim.

“Jeez, kid, what are you doing outside of my apartment?”

“I was waiting on you,” Tim says, looking up from his phone.

“What happened to your face?” Dick asks, tipping Tim’s chin up. 

“Can we talk inside?”

“Yeah, sure.”

He unlocks the door, shooing Tim inside. He sits Tim down on the couch before heading into the kitchen.

“Do you want something to drink?”

“Water please.”

Dick comes in with two mugs and an ice pack.

“I got both of us chocolate milk. I know you’re probably on a diet, but it’s fine.”

He puts the mugs on the table in front of Tim before offering him the ice pack. Tim takes it, pressing it gently against his face.

“So what happened? Did Bruce finally let you go out?”

Tim bites his lip.

“Oh, I didn’t think it was going to go that badly. He’s probably never going to let you do that again,” Dick says with a small laugh.

“It’s not funny, and Bruce didn’t let me go out. I went out without his permission.”

Dick’s smile fades immediately.

“Oh, that’s so much worse. You got roughed up on a patrol that you weren’t supposed to be on. That still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

“I just thought that I should tell you that he fired me again. I don’t think he’s going to involve you, but he was pretty mad about it. That means he’s going to be throwing tantrums for at least the next week. I’m going to check on him and Alfred tomorrow, but I thought it would be courteous to let you know what’s going on.”

“And that couldn’t have been a phone call?”

“It could have, but I wanted to get out of the city anyway, so I planned to come down here. I went to a few places before I came here, so it’s been a nice break from Gotham, not that this place is that much better.”

“Thanks, and I do appreciate you letting me know. The last time that you guys fought he called me, and ranted for two hours. A heads up is nice. I won’t be answering any calls next week.”

Tim nods absentmindedly.

“Why don’t you stay here tonight, kid? Maybe I can give you a few tips for dealing with bruises so they heal faster, and don’t hurt as much.”

Tim smiles tiredly.

“No, I’m sure you’re busy, and I should get home anyway.”

“Are you sure?”

Tim hesitates, but nods.

“Yes, I’m sure. Thank you, and I’ll see you around.”

“Ok, I hope you’ll be back by the time I visit the cave again.”

“I definitely will, don’t worry about that. He’s just being dramatic.”

“I’m not so sure he is this time. Those are really nasty bruises. Did you break anything?”

“Only a tooth.”

Dick hums.

“Well, whether he’s overreacting or not, you’re free to stay here as long as you want.”

“I’ll stay until I finish my milk,” Tim says, grabbing the cup.

Dick smiles.

“I used to love that too, and B wasn’t as strict with my diet. I think you two would have gotten along before.”

Tim looks down, not sure what to say.

“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I shouldn’t have said all of that with how Bruce is now.”

“No, not at all. I appreciate you sharing with me. I know that we didn’t really get off on the right foot. I never should have asked you to come back to Gotham.”

Dick also looks down.

“Well, I was a little harsh with you. You know you’re always welcome here, right? You can even patrol with me if you’re ever in town. Unless you’re injured.”

“Bruce would blow a fuse.”

Dick laughs.

“Yeah, you’re right. Maybe we should wait until he clears you to go into the field, if he ever does that.”

“He will, I’ll wear him down eventually.”

They finish their chocolate milk in silence, then Tim gets up.

“Thanks, Dick. I’ll see you later.”

Dick nods, giving Tim a smile, though this one is strained. Tim heads home, getting there just before seven. It’s quiet, and he ends up crashing on the couch without the energy to get up the stairs. 

[jayreviews]

Apples are falling very far from the store

Hey it’s Yaj!

Quick update on the headphones: they’re amazing. I love them even more than I thought I did. The noise cancellation is a god send and I’m not even joking.

From previous posts I said how I lived with a big family, and said family has so many kids, and said kids make a lot of noise, and said noise is lowered when I turn on my headphones. Thank god I bought them cause my window was looking really tempting.

I did want to buy AirPods so I went to the store next to my house and asked for the cheapest not gonna lie. He said they were ten dollars and warned me that they weren’t the original and I was like ‘Well yeah they’re like ten dollars how would they be original?’ so I bought them but my tiny little shrimp brain didn’t think of asking about the sound or even seeing if I can try them at his store first.

So when I went back home to try them, in the nicest words I can think of: they were very much not what I wanted. The sound was very bad, the packaging was very good for ten dollars.

Anyway, I returned and got my money back.

I don’t need AirPods anyway.

Also I haven’t been playing as much as I did in summer cause obviously?? I have classes. And it’s exhausting. I went to my last class of the day today, spent money on the bus, sweat a lot cause summer sucks, walked to my class and finally sat down, only to get a text from my friend sending me the email our doctor sent saying ‘Oh there’s no class come in the weekend’ like?? Miss ma’am sir that should be illegal.

Anyway so I sat in the air conditioned room cause I wasn’t dumb?? And went home after an hour.

And new topic: What is up with apple?

I keep hearing about how the iPhone 15 overheats when you use a charger other than the one you buy, breaks when it bends but honestly why would you even buy a phone that expensive only to bend it?? rich people man. I want to be this rich in the future so I could but an iPhone just to bend it.

So I updated my iPhone 12 to the new iOS update because it hadn’t stopped bugging me about it, and what do you know, it’s been hell on earth.

My battery is more draining than before, my applications keep crashing, the new auto correction wON’T TURN OFF AND I AM FED UP BECAUSE WHY IS IT LIKE THAT??

And there’s another update to the one before, but it needs at least 6GB for it to update and like?? I have the 64GB you think I have enough space??

I’m crying.

Also my computer is lagging too much, the stupid thing won’t click unless I restart every time I open it. None of my applications will work unless I do that.

So I need a new phone, a new computer, and because I’m a hoarder and I like collecting things that are not normal and because it would look so cute, I want an iPad. With a keyboard. And an apple pen.

You think if I got just the iPad with the keyboard and the pen it’d replace my computer? Not like replace replace but it’d help for college right? Idk.

Yeah the window looks very tempting. It’s calling out to me.

Plus I’m responsible for this club in college and I have to do so many things and buy stuff and talk to so many people for this other thing and we don’t even have the budget so we’re all paying from out of pocket.

(We had the first meeting last week and so many people were starting at me. But then my best friend wad like ‘Well yeah it’s cause you’re the president’ and I blocked her. But there were two cute guys staring at me the whole time. Let me be delusional okay??)

Oh oh!! And there’s this cute guy in some of my classes but I’m terrified he’s a minor (like he’s 17 not 18 yet fresh out of high school) and like ew. So I’m remaining safe and keeping it close from a distance. Like, friends is okay. If he’s 18 then woohoo I can have a crush. But if he’s 17 then haha jail looking real fine right now.

So.

How are you guys doing?

Until next time.

Byebye!

[i-am-robie]

 Thanks to @coffeeshib​ for letting me steal the amnesia + wife prompt... I couldn’t help myself. This is not what I thought would come out (content warning for canon typical violence and injuries), mostly this is just Kara being a whole entire idiot and Alex facepalming and Lena just being glad Kara is there for her, as her fake wife while she recovers from another quarterly attempt on her life:

“Supergirl! You have to go!” Alex is yelling at her as they roll Lena into the emergency room at National City General, but Kara is rooted to the spot - she can’t look away. Lena is pale, too pale, and there’s blood all over her dress, cuts and scrapes and bruises already blooming on every piece of exposed skin. She isn’t moving, isn’t breathing on her own right now; the only air making its way into her body is through the ambu bag being operated by a nurse, as women and men in scrubs crowd around the moving gurney, shouting orders. And all of that is terrifying enough, but it isn’t the thing that’s paralyzing Kara.

The reason Kara can’t move, the reason that she is barely breathing, is that she can’t hear Lena’s heart.

“Kara.” Alex is closer now, she steps gently in front of her sister, dropping her voice so that no one else can hear her. “Kara, you have to go, they’re getting away.”

“Alex - “ Kara takes a step forward, as if to walk around her sister, to head towards the doors that Lena and the medical team are disappearing behind.

“I know, Kara, I know,” Alex says, gentle and quiet. The doors shut, and Kara’s eyes snap away from it to her sister's face. Alex looks as terrified as Kara feels; she’s wearing an expression Kara has only seen on her before when it’s Kara who’s hurt. “You can’t do anything for her right now. But you can get the guys who did this.” She reaches for Kara’s arm, squeezes - the pressure is grounding. “You need to go. You need to go right now.”

So Kara goes.

__________________

She returns seven hours later, after dropping the men who carried out the attack on Lena at the DEO and declining to help in the interrogation. She nearly killed them, doesn’t think she has the stomach to listen to them talk. She’d still been in the field when the hospital reached out to let her know that they’d been able to stabilize Lena, restarting her heart, but that she hasn’t woken up yet. Alex had relayed the message to her, but now Alex only shakes her head when Kara asks if there are any updates.

Her sister pulls her aside when Kara says that she’s going to hospital to talk to the doctors, telling Kara quietly that she needs to go home and clean off her suit. When Kara looks down, she sees that Alex is right. She’s covered in blood - some of Lena’s, some of it the men she’s apprehended, none of it hers. It makes her want to sob.

But when she gets out of the bathroom after showering, pulling on soft joggers and a hoodie, Kara finds that she can’t settle. Every time she closes her eyes, every time she blinks, she sees Lena’s lifeless body in the rubble that had been her office, can feel Lena in her arms the moment her heart stopped, and the fact that Lena is supposedly stable doesn’t help at all because she hasn’t woken up.

What if she never wakes up?

Suddenly, Kara can’t breathe. Her chest is tight, the walls of her apartment seeming to flex and close in on her. Her heart rate speeds up and she’s taking choked half-breaths, clenching her fists and blinking away tears.

She can’t lose Lena like this, not after she worked so hard to get her back. Kara looks at the clock. It’s just after midnight. This is definitely not visiting-hours at the hospital, and Lena’s not awake anyway - but Kara needs to see her. Needs to know she’s alive.

Needs to hear her heartbeat again.

It’s all of this - the panic, the desperation, the single-minded focus on getting to Lena - that Kara will blame later when she’s trying to explain what happens next in the weeks to come.

The hospital is deserted except for the staff when Kara walks in through the main entrance and goes up to the ICU where she knows Lena will be. She heads straight for the desk at the front of the unit when she arrives, and introduces herself to a nurse before asking if she can see Lena.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Danvers,” the nurse says, and she does sound sorry in the face of Kara’s distress, “visiting hours aren’t until ten a.m.”

A man in a basketball sweatshirt and jeans walks past them, he scans a small badge that says ‘VISITOR’ in capital letters on a machine at the end of the desk, and nods at the nurse before he disappears down the hallway.

“He’s visiting,’ Kara tries, her voice bordering on frantic, “he’s visiting and I need to see her, you don’t understand, I’m not going to be okay if I don’t see her. Please, just let me...”

“I’m so sorry, honey, it’s immediate family only after hours.”

“I’m her wife,” Kara blurts out. “Please. I’m her wife.”

“You’re her…that’s not in the notes…” The nurse trails off, looking down at the computer in front of her.

“I’m her emergency contact, I’m her wife, please.”

““Oh, yes,” the nurse starts nodding, “I do see that marked here, they called you when she came in. Hmmm...Someone clicked the wrong box under ‘relationship to patient.’” She moves her mouse and clicks on something, then looks back up at Kara. “I’ve fixed that for you, Mrs. Danvers. Let me print you out a visitor badge so you can just scan it in next time.

Kara can feel her panic recede a little. She’s going to see Lena. The nurse takes a blank badge and feeds it into an electronic printer. She hands the finished product to Kara, then gets up and gestures for Kara to follow.

“Now,” the nurse starts as she walks Kara down the dark hallway, the lights on half since it’s night, “she looks a little rough, but I assure you, she’s receiving the very best care there is. Normally you would have been called for consent before we initiated the hypothermia protocol, but since she had an advanced directive on file already, the team went ahead and started it.”

Kara’s barely listening to her, has started to strain her ears for the only sound she’s wanted to hear all day. She nearly collapses in relief when she finds it, below the beeping and the whirring and the buzzing of the machines, unlike any other beat in the building. Lena’s heart is steady, slower than usual, slower than Kara’s ever heard it, but it’s there, rhythmically thumping away.

The nurse brings her to a halt in front of a patient room, Lena’s name on the board outside with a bunch of notations that mean nothing to Kara. She’ll ask Alex to translate.

“She’ll be cold to your touch, that’s alright,” the nurse continues. “The key right now is to try to stop or slow any of the damage she’s suffered as a result of going into cardiac arrest. She lost a lot of blood, and her left femur is broken, along with her right ulna, but there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful. We’ll know more in the forty-eight to seventy-two hours once the protocol is complete.”

Kara refuses to think about most of this. Lena is alive. She’s alive and she’s right on the other side of this door. She clears her throat. “How long...how long can I stay?”

“As long as you like, dear. We’ll round on her in the morning and if you’re still here you can talk to the attending. Also, we’ll be in to check on her, but most of the monitoring is electronic since she’s in a medically induced coma for at least the next two days. There’s a chair that reclines by the bedside, I can grab you a blanket?”

“Please,” Kara says. She stops with her hand on the door, turns back to the nurse. “Thank you.” It comes out wobbly.

“Of course.” The nurse smiles at her. “Go on in, I’ll be right back.”

_____________________

Kara’s woken up by the medical team the next morning during rounds, just as the night shift nurse had promised. She blinks awake and rubs at her eyes, stretching and going to stand up when the team enters.

“Hi Mrs. Danvers, we saw you’d arrived,” a tall woman in a white lab coat says, walking over to Kara on the far side of the room and sticking out her hand to shake. “I’m Dr. Sheldon. We’ll do our best to bring you up to speed now, I’m so glad you were able to make it last night.” She gives Kara a warm smile. “Believe it or not, it really does make a difference when patients are supported, even when they aren’t aware of it.”

The team walks her through their care plan for Lena, how long she’ll have to remain like this before they start the re-warming process, what they’re concerned about and what they’ll be looking for. Her arm and femur have been set and immobilized, but it’s likely that the femur will need to be rebroken and repaired surgically if and when Lena does wake up. Given the invasiveness of the procedure, the delicacy of her present condition, and the unknowns about her cognition, that decision will keep.

When they leave, Kara texts Alex. If the doctors think that it will make a difference for Lena’s recovery to have her here, then she’s going to stay. She’s owed time off anyway. This is the best use of it she can think of.

Two hours later, the door opens, and Kara looks up from the bed, relieved to see Alex standing there, holding a backpack with the food and change of clothing Kara asked her to bring.

“Oh gosh, am I glad to see you,” she says, letting go of Lena’s hand and standing up. She walks around the bed to where Alex has stopped.

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, and she’s frowning at Kara. “You have some fucking explaining to do.”

“What?” Kara stops abruptly.

“What?” Alex parrots. She narrows her eyes. “Are you being serious…?” At Kara’s confused expression, Alex rolls her eyes and reaches behind her to shut the door. She walks over to Kara, pulling some take out from the bag and handing it to her, before pulling up one of the swivel chairs a doctor had been using.

Kara takes the food and goes back to her seat.

“So?” Alex prompts.

Kara looks up from the styrofoam container, already having broken apart her chopsticks. “So what?”

“What do you mean...Kara!” Kara freezes, chopsticks frozen in midair clutching a piece of kung pao chicken. There is real frustration and confusion in Alex’s voice. “Imagine my surprise when I sign in at the front desk and the nurse says that my sister-in-law is stable right now. Wanna tell me why the fuck you’re playing house to visit your best friend in the hospital?”

Kara sets the chicken down. “Alex…”

“Kara, you have ten seconds to explain why the entire staff thinks you and Lena are married and the answer had better not actually involve marriage or I swear to god I’ll…”

“They wouldn’t let me in to see her!” Kara bursts out. “I got here last night and I needed to see her, Alex, I needed to. And apparently it’s immediate family only and I panicked, okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Alex says, pinching the bridge of her nose and closing her eyes. “I know Lena is important to you, but Kara, you could have waited ten hours and seen her.”

“I couldn’t.” Kara looks down at her food, not hungry anymore. “Alex, I couldn’t. I almost had a panic attack after you sent me home last night. I couldn’t wait.”

“Oh kiddo.” Kara looks up at that, all the frustration is gone from Alex’s tone. Her sister lets out a sigh. “Lena’s going to get through this and she’s going to get better. And when she does, you have got to tell her how you feel.”

“She’s my best friend.” Kara’s mouth twists. This is not a new conversation, but the stakes seem higher with Lena in the bed beside her, unconscious and battered.

“She is,” Alex agrees. “But she could be more.”

And oh, Kara wants more with every fiber of her being. But more than that, she wants Lena in her life, wants the easy love and affection they’ve finally gotten back to. And she’s been worried about rocking the boat.

“And by the way,” Alex says, pulling her back to the present, “lying to medical professionals is not a good look.” Kara grimaces and ducks her head.

“I know,” she says, glancing at Lena, the ventilator moving her chest up and down slowly. “But they said it’s good for Lena to have someone here, talking to her, holding her hand, even if she doesn’t know. And you know Lillian isn’t going to do that. And Lex is the one who put her here...just let me do this, okay?”

Alex hums. “You’re so lucky I didn’t blow your secret.”

Kara looks over at her sister. “Thank you.”

“Some of us are actually good at lying under pressure. I’m surprised you didn’t tell them she was married to Supergirl.”

“Well I wasn’t dressed as Supergirl.”

“Thank god for small mercies.”

______________________

Lena doesn’t wake up for the next three days.

In the interim, all of their friends visit, but Alex has already warned them about Kara’s new relationship status and other than Nia’s constant giggles, no one comments. Kara doesn’t leave the hospital. She keeps vigil in the chair, occasionally leaving for short periods of time to go down to the cafeteria, or to stretch her legs.

On day four, Alex convinces her to at least go to the DEO to shower and check in with J’onn about  the duties he and M’gann are covering for her.

She’s just getting ready to head back to the hospital when her phone rings.

“Mrs. Danvers?”

“Yes?”

“This is Dr. Sheldon. Your wife has woken up and she’s being evaluated now by neuro, but we wanted you to know first thing.”

Kara has to sit down in the middle of the DEO, the concrete hard and probably cold underneath her, but it’s better than the alternative, which was just going to be letting her knees give out. She closes her eyes tightly. “I’ll be right there.”

She flies back to the hospital, landing in a nearby alley and running into the building with just a touch of superspeed. She makes it onto the unit just in time to see Lena’s care team leaving her room and turning down the hall to the next patient, and as much as Kara wants to get an update from them, the urge to see Lena herself is too much. She walks through the open door and nearly runs into a nurse, who’s moving some of the equipment out, now that Lena is conscious. It’s a nurse Kara is familiar with, her name is Bernadette, she’s been on shift the last two days. Her eyes light up when she sees Kara.

“Your wife is here,” Bernadette says, over her shoulder before Kara can stop her. She smiles warmly as she turns back to Kara. “I’ll leave you two alone.” She slips past Kara and into the hallway.

“My…” Lena’s eyes go wide as she sees Kara standing helpless in front of the now closed door.  Her voice is still scratchy from the extubation. Her hair is greasy and all over the pillow, her right arm and left leg are completely immobilized, there are wires running through the top of her hospital gown, her whole body a tapestry of garish purples and greens and stitches. But she’s awake. Kara has never felt more relieved in her entire life, but it turns to ice in her veins as Lena struggles to speak, clearly confused. “My - my - oh god.” Her eyes start to fill with tears and Kara panics.

“No, Lena, no, it’s not - “ she starts saying, taking quick steps towards the bed.

“Oh god, oh god, Kara,” Lena chokes out, twisting a little in bed and flinching, “they said I only lost a week, they said my memory seemed okay, that there’s no - ”

“We’re not married!” Kara yells out trying to stop the clear spiral Lena is on. Lena’s eyes go wide, but she does stop looking like she’s about to start sobbing. “We’re not married,” Kara repeats, in a normal voice this time.

“Then why…”

Kara winces. “I might have told the hospital staff that we are. Married, that is.”

Lena looks wary, small and weak and confused in the bed, and she’s frowning a little at Kara now. It doesn’t even matter, though, because the feeling of seeing Lena awake is returning with every word she speaks, and Kara feels something in her chest open up. She has to resist walking over and climbing into bed with her and holding her, knows she needs to explain first.

In every single way Kara played out this moment all week in her head, not once is this how it went - she wants Lena to be smiling, to be okay, or at least as okay as one can be after coming out of a medically induced coma, with a number of near catastrophic injuries still to be dealt with. She certainly didn’t imagine she’d be contributing to the disorientation and isolation Lena’s projecting right now.

Lena’s eyes dart around Kara’s face. Kara takes a deep breath.

“The first night you were here, I had to see you.” She starts twisting her hands together, takes another step towards the bed. “And it was late, and even though I’m your emergency contact, they said no after hours visitors except for family and I panicked.”

“You panicked.” Lena sounds like she’s unsure how panic would lead someone to pretend to be married, and honestly, now that Kara is having to explain the decision, she’s not really sure either. The only thing she knows is that she doesn’t regret it. Would do it again, in fact.

“I knew if they thought I was your wife, they’d let me in to see you. And Lena, I had to see you. I had to. You were - “ Kara cuts herself off, can feel the tightness in her chest, closing around her heart like a vice. “Your heart stopped before I could get you to the hospital. The last time I saw you, I didn’t know if - “ A small sob works it’s way up her throat, and Kara’s eyes are burning. She feels a tear break free from her lashes. “I needed to hear your heartbeat.”

An unreadable expression crosses Lena’s face as Kara takes the seat by her bed that she’s occupied for the last week. To Kara’s great relief, Lena reaches out her left hand, lays it on the edge of the bed, palm up. Kara grabs for it with both of her own.

And Rao, the feeling of Lena’s hand, still cold, but undeniably warmer, squeezing back when Kara grips tightly - she doesn’t know how to describe this feeling. It starts a fresh wave of sobs in her, of relief this time, rather than terror.

“Hey,” Lena says, punctuating it with another flex of her fingers around the back of Kara’s hand. “Hey, I’m okay. I’m here. You saved me. I’m okay, see?”

And really, that just makes Kara cry harder.

“I’m supposed to be comforting you,” she chokes out.

“You are,” Lena says, disengaging their hands and bringing her fingers up to Kara’s face, wiping at the tears. “You are, god, I was just thrown. I thought...I thought, it doesn't matter what I thought.” She tries to laugh and ends up flinching.

“Oh no, are you okay, should I call the doctor?” Kara immediately reaches forward, lays a hand on Lena’s hip above the sheets and wipes furiously at her face with the other.

“It’s the broken ribs,” Lena grits out, jaw flexing as she drops her hand away from Kara’s face and back onto the bed. “Fuck that hurts.”

“I’m just so glad you’re awake,” Kara says, leaning forward again and brushing some of the hair out of Lena’s face, trying to tuck it behind her ear.

That’s how Bernadette finds them when she returns, Kara gently touching Lena’s forehead, and rubbing her hip, the two of them so close that Kara might as well climb in next to her.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she says, smiling at the two of them. “The attending would like to pop in with the head of ortho to talk about surgical options for your femur. Should I tell her to come back later?”

Kara moves to stand up, she doesn’t want to delay anything about Lena’s care, but Lena reaches for her hand again, and Kara’s powerless to do anything but lace their fingers together and sit back down.

Lena takes a shallow breath, “Can my wife stay?”

My wife. Hearing it come out of Lena’s mouth does something to Kara that feels a little dangerous, makes the room spin a bit. Her heart feels as if it’s expanding and being squeezed at the same time. My wife. My wife. My wife.

“Of course, she’s more than welcome to stay,” Bernadette says. “It’s probably a good idea, actually, now that there are care decisions to make.”

_____________________

“Let me get this straight,” Alex says, her head in her hands. Kelly reaches out to rub her back. “You’re still pretending to be married, and Lena is playing along with it?”

Kara nods. They’re sitting down in the cafeteria while Lena gets a sponge bath, something that Kara is trying very hard not to think about. It’s been nearly three weeks, one major operation, and thankfully no more complications.

And Kara has been here through it all. She’s started leaving for blocks of time during the day (it turns out she didn’t have a month worth of vacation saved up and Alex had nearly had an aneurysm when Kara asked if she was allowed to use family medical leave act time), but she’s spent nearly every night in the hospital with Lena since. The medical team loves them, has started talking to them about how devoted Kara is. Maybe Kara’s playing into it a little, bringing flowers, and Lena’s favorite foods, and always, always touching her in some way when she’s in the room.

“You know they’re going to build her discharge plan around you, right?” Alex squints at her. “Have you considered that?”

Kara flushes. “Actually,” she brings a hand up to rub at the back of her neck, adjusts her glasses for good measure, “we’ve agreed that I’ll just move in with Lena for a little while. She can hire someone during the day, but I’ll be around at night and I can help with the rehab. So, um, it’s fine.”

“You’re both fucking idiots.”

_________________

“I’ve been home for an hour and I’m already regretting every choice in my life that’s lead to this point. This is humiliating.”

“Oh my gosh,” Kara laughs, “no it isn’t.”

“Kara, you’re washing my hair in the kitchen sink because I can’t even wash myself right now with this fucking cast and brace on.”

Kara grins, squirting shampoo onto her hand and setting the bottle down on the marble countertop. Lena is sitting in the wheelchair, left leg propped up on the supports. She’s leaning back with her head over the edge of the sink, rolled up towels supporting her neck and her eyes are closed. She’s frowning, but it’s the frown she wears when she’s trying too hard not to smile. It makes Kara want to kiss it right off her face. She takes a deep breath, instead.

Kara is just so grateful that she gets to see Lena like this, hair stringy from the hospital, oversize sweatshirt with one sleeve bunched up over the top of the lime green cast on her right arm. The post-surgical femoral fracture brace looks uncomfortable, but Lena hasn’t complained about it at all. So, fine, maybe this nearly debilitating urge to kiss her best friend, to ask her if the last few weeks could be real, instead of fake (not the marriage part, not now, anyway, but the relationship part sure), is getting more and more intrusive. That doesn’t mean Kara can’t continue to ignore it until Lena’s better.

She finishes washing Lena’s hair and if she takes extra time massaging in the conditioner and making sure the water temperature is absolutely perfect, well, that’s just being a good caretaker. She sets Lena up in her bedroom, then goes back to the kitchen to clean up 

“Ok, Lena,” Kara says, walking back into the bedroom. “You officially have zero edible things in your apartment. I’m going to make a list and head to the grocery store for supplies, ok? Your next meds can’t be taken on an empty stomach.”

“You’re underestimating my iron constitution.” Lena frowns unhappily in bed. “We can just order some, you don’t have to go.”

“I’ll be back in a jiffy, okay?” Kara smiles at Lena.

Sure, they could order groceries, but she wants to go get them, to pick them out herself, and bring them back. It makes her feel so good to be able to do things like this: wash her hair, go get groceries, make her something to eat. The best part of this whole terrible ordeal is that she’s gotten to take care of Lena, to show her, not just tell her, how important she is to Kara. It warms her up from the inside out.

“You sure I’m allowed to be by myself?” Lena teases, breaking Kara out of her thoughts. “I haven’t been left to my own devices in weeks now. Just imagine all the trouble I could get into.” She raises an eyebrow.

Kara laughs and shakes her head, drawn closer to Lena like a magnet. Lena’s tucked into bed, leg propped up on pillows to keep the brace comfortable, two books on the nightstand beside her, a glass of water within easy reach, and the next round of medications in a small porcelain bowl that Kara repurposed from the kitchen. Her hair is still wet from being washed, and although there are dark circles around her eyes, and her cheekbones are too sharp from the weight she lost in the hospital, Kara doesn’t think she’s ever seen anything more beautiful than Lena right at this exact moment.

She walks over to the bed and sits down next to Lena, reaching over to move the glass of water back from the edge of the nightstand and onto a coaster. “You’re going to be fine. I’ll bet you a whole order of potstickers that you’re asleep when I get back.” She reaches across Lena, adjusts the towel covering up her pillow to keep it from getting wet.

When she pulls back slightly, she’s startled by how close Lena’s face is to hers. Lena is looking at her with such unadulterated fondness, that Kara can’t help reaching up and tucking a wet tendril of hair back behind Lena’s ear. “I’ll be back so soon you won’t even know I was gone.”

“I always know when you’re gone,” Lena says, the corners of her mouth lifting up, her eyes crinkling lightly. Kara’s hand has drifted from Lena’s ear to the back of her head, her thumb brushing gently at the soft skin just below Lena’s jaw.

When she retells the story of what happens next later, Alex will roll her eyes and mutter under hear breath, but Kara will swear this is the truth: without even thinking about it, she leans forward and kisses Lena on the lips, quick and soft, then stands and turns to go, pulling her phone out of her pocket so she can start making a grocery list.

“You can drop the act now,” Lena says, a little stiffly.

“Huh?” Kara whips around, more at Lena’s tone than at her words, and looks at her in confusion. Lena’s face is bright red.

“Kara, we’re - I’m home, there’s no hospital staff to convince anymore.” She sounds a little upset and Kara, feels her forehead crinkle as she replays the last several seconds in her head: she moved Lena’s water, adjusted the towel behind her head, smoothed Lena’s hair, and…

“Oh Rao, oh gosh.” She takes a step forward, then back abruptly, as she realizes that she’s just kissed Lena on the mouth. She puts one hand on her forehead and the other on her hip, spins in a small circle. “Lena, I’m so sorry. I didn’t - ”

“It’s fine,” Lena says, her voice sounding calm and even now that Kara is having a meltdown, but her heart is doing some sort of high speed gallop in her chest and it’s giving Kara the impression that this is not actually fine.

Oh no, oh gosh… “Lena, I’m sorry, - ”

“I get it.” Lena cuts her off, holding up a hand to stop her. “The whole act, it’s a hard habit to break.” She drops her hand to the bed and laughs lightly, picking at the blanket. “Honestly I’m surprised we made it this long without accidentally doing that.”

“Accidently. Yes.” Kara’s nodding so hard, she feels like her head might come off. “It was an accident.” That might be a convenient way of putting it, but it doesn’t change the fact that Kara’s been wanting to kiss Lena, wants it to be as un-accidental as possible. And aren’t accidents things like tripping on the carpet, or spilling a drink at dinner? She may not have been thinking when she did it, but Kara knows there’s nothing accidental about that kiss.

But Lena’s giving her an out, and Kara can’t bring herself not to take it.

“I’m just going to - ” Kara gestures over her shoulder and then she flees.

“Alex, I kissed her.” Kara’s made it outside the apartment, but her heart hasn’t slowed down. She didn’t even bother making a list after walking out of Lena’s bedroom, just went straight to the elevator, dialing Alex before she’d even hit the lobby. Her stomach is squirmy, she feels like she might throw up.

“Finally,” Alex says, letting out what might be a relieved sigh.

“What do you mean finally?” Kara feels hysterical.

“I mean finally, idiot. Watching the two of you for the past three weeks has been the most painful experience of my life, I’m glad you finally did it.”

“She thinks it was because of the act!” Kara nearly yells. A man walking by looks at her, narrowing his eyes and giving her a wide berth. “She thinks it’s because of the act, Alex!”

There’s silence on the other end of the line for a moment.

“Kara Danvers, are you fucking kidding me right now?”

“No,” Kara wails. “I didn’t even mean to do it! Or, well. I meant to do it, but I didn’t know I was doing it. I was making sure she had everything she needed and then I was leaving to go to the grocery story and somewhere in the middle I kissed her! And she got kinda upset even though she said she wasn’t and she says it’s fine because it was an accident. And it was an accident, at least in the sense that I wasn’t thinking when I did it and god I didn’t even ask if she wanted to kiss me, but I meant it, Alex, I meant it.”

Kara can picture Alex right now: that tight, unhappy expression on her face, fingers pinching her nose between her eyes.

“Okay, I swore to Kelly I wasn’t going to do this, but that was before you lost your damn mind and kissed her.” Kara can hear Alex take a deep breath. “You need to go back upstairs right now and confess, Kara.”

“What?” Kara practically screeches. She spins in a circle. “No, this isn’t the right time. I’m supposed to be helping her, I’m supposed to be taking care of her, I can’t put this on her right now. What if she doesn’t feel the same, what if this ruins everything, what if - “

Thankfully Alex cuts her off. “That argument worked before you kissed her and decided to let her believe you didn’t mean to do it. And before you argue with me, you might not have known you were doing it, but you absolutely meant to do it, Kara.”

Kara is now facing Lena’s apartment and gently knocking her forehead against it.

“Kara, I heard that crack, stop headbutting the building.” Kara stops, keeps her forehead pressed to the cool limestone. Alex pauses, and her voice is gentle when she continues. “You gotta tell her, kiddo. You’ve been down the whole lying path with her before and while I don’t think this is the kind of lie that would cause her to try removing our free-will again, I do think that you guys decided on honesty as your way forward. You either own that, or you don’t.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right.” Kara squeezes her eyes shut. “If we can get through that, we can get through this.”

“That’s the spirit. And hey, if for some reason things don’t go well and you feel like you can’t stay with her? Kelly or I would be happy to swap out for you tonight. Just in case you need some space.”

“Thanks, Alex.”

“But Kara, I think you’re gonna be just fine.”

Kara doesn’t feel much better when she hangs up with Alex, but she knows her sister is right. She’s got to tell Lena.

And to be honest, Kara can’t imagine a world in which Lena would be upset with her for having feelings, regardless of whether they’re reciprocated. They’ll be able to work through this, even if it hurts for a while. She’s had friends fall in love with her before, and she’s always been able to keep them as friends afterwards. God, maybe Winn has some advice for me, she thinks.

So Kara takes a deep breath and goes back inside. Groceries can wait.

She’s trembling when she lets herself back into Lena’s apartment. It’s nerves, anticipation more than anything. She’s about to confess something that she can’t, won’t take back and it will change things between them, even if only for a while.

Lena looks up from her book when Kara makes her way back into the bedroom. She sets it down beside her hip on the bed and cocks her head.

“Well that was fast. Did Supergirl get my groceries?” She gives Kara a smile.

“I’m in love with you.” Well that’s one way to start this conversation. “And I didn’t kiss you accidentally.”

Lena’s smile drops, her eyes widening in surprise. Everything about her seems to freeze.

“Before you say anything, I need to get this out. I’m not telling you because I’m expecting anything. I don’t want anything to change, I mean, I do, clearly, but I don’t if that’s not what you want.” Kara squeezes her eyes shut and looks at the ceiling. She really should have thought this through. “I’ve known for a while, actually, I was just worried about what it might mean, if you didn’t feel the same way.” She drops her gaze back to Lena. “But then you almost died. And I pretended to be your wife. And I was planning on telling you once you’re totally recovered. Except then I kissed you without even thinking about it and I can’t lie about this, Lena. It isn’t good for either of us. So. Yeah. Just. Tell me what you need.”

Lena’s looking at her with an expression Kara can’t read, but she doesn’t look unhappy, or afraid, or upset...

“Kara, do you remember when that nurse told me my wife had shown up?”

“Yes,” Kara says, frowning, because she doesn't understand where Lena is going with this. “Of course I do, you were panicked that you’d experienced severe brain damage.”

Lena shakes her head, pats the space on the bed next to her.

Kara feels a weight lift from her shoulders: no matter how this goes, if Lena is asking her to come closer, then they’re going to be okay. She walks across the carpet.

“You’re right,” Lena says as Kara comes closer, “I was worried, but that wasn’t the only thing that made me panic.”

“What else was it?” Kara sits down and looks at her lap, bringing her hands together to fidget. She can feel Lena’s body heat next to her, but she doesn’t want to reach out unless Lena does it first. “Was it the idea of being married to me?” She laughs. She can laugh about this.

“No, darling,” Lena says. She reaches for Kara’s hands, smoothing her fingers across them to still them. Darling, that’s a good sign, right? “Kara, as terrified as I was that there was more damage, my first thought was that somehow I’d lost memories of us: of you falling in love with me, of dating and first kisses and someone proposing and a wedding.” Lena pauses and Kara stares at their joined hands. She hears more than sees Lena take a deep breath and let it out. “I’ve been in love with you for so long it broke my heart to think that those things had happened and I couldn’t remember them.”

Kara whips her head around to look at Lena. Her best friend is smiling, and her eyes are a little wet like maybe she’s overwhelmed and might cry and oh gosh, does Kara understand that feeling right now.

“You love me,” she says, feeling her own eyes start to fill with tears.

Lena nods.

“You’re in love with me,” Kara can’t help clarifying. This is something out of a dream.

Lena nods again.

“Can I…” Kara reaches for Lena’s face, trails her knuckles down Lena’s cheek and watches in awe as Lena leans into the touch.  “Can I kiss you now?”

“Yes,” Lena breaths out, smiling, and it’s blinding. “But only if it’s not an accident.”

[revenant-dumpster-fire]

Canine (Revenant x Reader)

Part 2 of 2 of the chapter “Styptic & Canine”. [AO3 Link to full chapter]

Theme: Revenant introduces the reader to his makeshift family as he turns up the spice level, but an unfortunate run in with a creep ruins most of the day.

Warnings: Graphic content, physical male dominance, threats of violence, blood, descriptions of violence, sexual references, sexual harassment, sharp objects, pain, bipolar, depression, mentions of mania, general romantic fluff.

Reader's Notes: Revenant (Apex Legends) x Reader, reader is female.

Writing Notes: This post was too big. 18K words. This is part 2 of a larger chapter that is “Styptic & Canine”. I’m posting it in halves so Tumblr doesn’t die. Also, yes, this chapter is where I start raising the heat. My intent was to boil the frog, but Tumblr made me split right where I first turn on the gas stove.

Navigation: First Chapter | Previous Part (Styptic & Canine) | Next Chapter

You regain consciousness to a mild shake, his hands around each of your cheeks and his frame vaulted over your body in a sitting position.

"Oh dear, little skinsuit, what was that about?" His voice drips with some kind of sadistic humor.

"What was what about?" The morning light was shining through the skylight. He obviously let you sleep in a bit, for which you were grateful. You couldn't remember any dreams though, it was all blank.

"Don't play stupid, you must know." He's way too into this. "I want to know if it was me."

"I really don't remember. Why, what did I do?"

He lurches back in some kind of cruel delight, pulling his hands away to cup around his own face, accentuating his joy.

"Then maybe you'll know the answer to this: who is 'daddy'?"

Your face gets hot instantly, now you know why he's so interested. He has prime material to hold over your head for days. You have one potential way out and he isn't likely to buy it.

"I never met my father, so I'm not sure..." You try.

"Oh, I guessed as much. But this wasn't that kind of daddy." He places each of his hands on the sides of your waist, making you blush harder. "Your hips were absolutely reeling. I could hear how much you were loving it. You still smell like lust. So, I must know... who is the lucky one to have the title of 'daddy'?" Your face is burning. Your attempt to get out of this has definitely and utterly failed.

"I don't know! I've never even--" You cut yourself off, realizing that saying more is only playing into his game.

"Oh please, you must tell me." He leans over to whisper in your ear, curling over you in a seductive manner. "I'll keep it a secret, I promise. I just want to know who makes you writhe like that. Clearly I could learn something." This asshole. Your face actually hurts it's so hot. You can't get out of this, and you don't even have an answer for him. You've never even called anyone that before.

"Please, can I get up?" You beg, hoping it can just be over.

"Oh no, dear," You feel yourself screaming internally as he nuzzles his mask against the side of your face, "I can't let you do that. No, no... Not until you humor me." He presses his body into you, and you audibly whimper. "Call me daddy."

You're dead. You have to be dead. This can't be real. You can't humor him, but you have to humor him. Why is he like this? If you say it really fast, maybe it'll be okay. Maybe he'll accept it.

"Can I get up...?" You choke. "...daddy..." You didn't say it fast, but you said it with zero confidence, which hopefully dampens his power trip.

He throws himself off of you, laughing something fierce. His guffaw is loud, cruel, and pure delight. He's completely overtaken by it, laying back beside you, almost twitching in hilarity. He can't control himself as he lifts his hand as if to wipe away a tear.

He shuts down again, turning limp.

You jump out of bed, giving yourself distance from his metal sarcophagus, knowing whatever comes next might not be pleasant. You make your way to the computer desk, sitting on the office chair, waiting to see what he does this time.

His chassis begins to whirr and cracks into movement, his arms grabbing at air beside him as he tests every limb in violent bends and swings. The static begins in his voice, before suddenly slipping into something audible.

"You-you moved away." His empty optics seem to stare at you from a distance as he sits up. "I wanted to hold-hold you again..." His tone was soft, but his vocals were still skipping. "Shame, daddy will get you next-next time."

His eyes come back to life, and he's aware again.

"Well, just say how you really feel then, huh?" You jab back, waiting to see how he reacts. He chuckles a little, a mere echo of the laugh that forced him to restart.

"Well, I'll make it up to you. How do you feel about making a trip to meet my little family?"

"Family? I thought--"

"Oh, not like that, of course. Just the closest thing I have." He smiles smugly at you, seeing an opportunity. "You don't need to worry, no one competes with you."

Damn blush, you're going to turn red permanently if he doesn't stop.

He vaults out of bed, making his way over to you.

"I let you sleep in, thankfully what you're wearing is ideal for the job already." He offers his hand. When you take it, he hoists you to your feet. "It should help with any sad feelings too, how are those going by the way?"

"With how things have been going, I haven't had the chance to be depressed..." You're almost embarrassed that his plan to keep throwing you off your depression is working so well.

"Good, keep showering me with all your attention then." He squeezes your hand a bit before letting go. At this rate he could make you manic again if he keeps pushing it. You're just not sure if you should let him. "I've arranged a ride for us, since I don't think you can run this far."

"Oh, alright, sure. Do I need to do anything? I feel kinda like I should take a shower..." It's very strange that you're going someplace wearing dirty clothes with no shower.

"Trust me, you'd be better off doing that after."

• • • •

Revenant can't drive, apparently. To the point in which he's actually enough of a liability that he's not allowed to drive anywhere outside of the Apex Games. He wasn't very happy with the idea of having a chauffeur, but the legal team was able to convince him to accept being driven in exchange for a vehicle that separated him from the driver. That vehicle was a limo. A giant, stretch limo. A very luxurious limo. Versus you, who is a mess: dressed in a stained shirt you slept in and you haven't washed your hair. This is embarrassing.

"This dumb thing is almost ten yards long, and you have to be right up against me, don't you?" Revenant is sitting far in the back corner, and you've wedged yourself right between him and the corner, trying your best to hide yourself from any phantom that might see you.

"I'm in a limo and I look like I belong in a garbage truck." You duck away from the windows, shoving your face up against the black leather of his waist, careful to avoid the support pistons.

"Literally no one can see you except me." He scoffs, crossing his arms. "The windows are blacked out, the driver's privacy window is closed, and nobody is here but us." His eyes glare down at you, but he seems to be moderately entertained by your distress.

"I look homeless." You pause. "Again."

Revenant laughs at that, uncurling his arms to mess up your hair in some kind of adoring but condescending gesture.

"You're fine, trust me. Nobody is going to see you." He pauses from messing with your hair. "I have a stop coming up, just stay in here and I'll be back with some supplies."

"Be fast, I need to hide behind someone and you're the only one here." You're being intentionally dramatic, but if it makes him laugh it's worth it. He sighs equally as dramatically, clearly playing along.

The vehicle hovers to a stop, and Revenant wisps out the door, closing it behind him before you even get a sense for where you are. The windows really are blacked out, you can't see anything through them.

Now alone, you shrink into the back corner of the seats going around the vehicle. There's a television and what appears to be a loaded bar, multicolored LED lights lining the whole thing, and starlights in the ceiling. The seats are all made with beautiful leather and have a triangular pattern stitched in the surface. The floor has carpeted mats that feel a bit more plush than the average car. You consider rummaging through the bar, but you're not sure if anyone is going to charge you an arm and a leg for alcohol you can get cheaper anywhere else. You sigh and lean back, shrinking further in the seat.

The door on the opposite corner as you clicks open, and Revenant crawls in, dragging a massive green bag behind him, barely managing to get it in the car.

"Is that a body bag?!" You curl up in the fetal position on your seat, recoiling away from the door.

"Yes." He gruffly huffs as he drags the apparent bagged corpse into the limo, weighing the whole vehicle down. He gets it in the middle of the floor, then drops it with a thud and throws himself down beside you. With his weight, you feel like you nearly missed being crushed. His arm rests on your opposite shoulder and you shudder, giving him a concerned stare. "Oh shush, I paid for it."

"You what?" You whimper, completely at a loss of what you're experiencing.

"It'll be fine, I can't rightly show up without any offering." He shrugs his shoulders, pulling you closer. He seems to be very pleased with himself, smugly teasing you.

"Offering?! Is this a cult?!" You whisper aloud, not necessarily expecting an answer. He laughs again, enjoying your mental wheels spinning. The limo gets moving again, handling the extra weight very easily.

"Oh, no, that's for next time." He's obviously teasing now. "I'll make sure you're in a lovely white dress to soak in the blood of our sacrifices for that occasion." He shoves you up against his chassis, growling to rattle his torso against you. "Then, when we're all done, I'll make official my new nickname."

"Oh, fuck you." You let slip under your breath, causing him to guffaw openly again. He catches his synthetic breath, rubbing his mask in the same motion a human would.

"You've gotten so comfortable with me so quickly, what happened?" His question must be rhetorical, because he doesn't leave much of a pause for an answer. He jumps right back into teasing. "I'll have to tame you by any means necessary if you're going to keep being so temptingly coy." His hands cup around your waist and you crack a sigh, turning away from him, trying to focus on anything other than how red in the face you must be.

"Do you regularly flirt in front of fresh corpses?"

"Awww..." He grabs your chin and pulls your face back to meet his, bringing his visage down close enough to feel his breath. "Are you kink-shaming me? Or are you just being a prude little tease?" He pauses before snickering to himself, losing his flirtatious composure. "You're so red, you practically match me." His loss of composure is cute enough to get to you. You giggle a little.

The car comes to a gentle stop, and Revenant immediately gets to pulling the corpse out. The body bag is way larger than makes sense, it almost looks as if it could fit someone Revenant's size. Yet the body inside still seems way too big. You're not sure what it is, but you're a bit too afraid to ask at the same time. Revenant eventually gets the bag to the edge of the vehicle before throwing it over one of his shoulders, forcing his shoulder spikes to flip downward out of the way. He nearly topples over at the shifting weight, meaning whatever is in the bag is excessively heavy.

As you crawl out of the car after him, you smell the fresh air of being nowhere near civilization. You see lots of flat lands broken up by woods with a giant abandoned warehouse in front of you. The warehouse has holes rusted throughout its sides and the door is ajar, the hinges rusted so it no longer swings. The air is fresh, and you look around, unable to find signs of other humans close by. Revenant waves away the limo. It turns around, kicking up dust off the unpaved path before zooming off into the horizon. He waits until the limo is far enough before pulling you close.

"You have to listen to everything I say, understand?" He's dead serious. You nod, suddenly concerned over his change in tone. "Don't try to protect me, I'll be okay. Scream if and only if you feel pain." You search for any joking tone in his voice, but there is none. "But above all else, listen to me. Don't play stupid, just obey." He looks to you, demanding acknowledgement. You nod, determined and concerned at this new development.

He walks over to the door, making his way inside carefully as you follow. He throws the body bag on the concrete floor of the entryway, causing a morbid slapping sound as it hits the ground. Revenant kneels down and begins ripping the bag open. You take a moment to look around.

This whole warehouse is dark beyond belief. There seems to be different rooms, but the rusted-through holes in the wall allow you to get negligible peeks into nearby rooms. The roof has not decayed at all yet, but it means no light is entering the building, making the deeper rooms be cast in an oppressive darkness. From the outside this warehouse looked massive, this room must be only one of dozens. The silence is scary, there isn't a single sound of life apart from you and Revenant, but you know better. Silence means something doesn't want to be found, and is inevitably a sign of life. Silence only happens when a hunter has scared everything else into silence. You might have learned that from Bloodhound, but you can't be sure. Either way, it's anxiety-inducing.

Revenant stands tall, pulling the scraps of the bag away from a giant bisection of a carcass. It appears to be beef, in the same state butchers will sell to grocers or restaurants. It doesn't smell bad, but it definitely smells like raw meat. Revenant grabs you around the shoulder, pulling you into a very controlling embrace. He whistles, or something like it.

"C'mere puppies!" As soon as he says it, you hear the sound of many nails skittering around the concrete flooring, making their way to the room you're in. Revenant squeezes you close as the pack comes into sight.

"Revenant! Those are not dogs!" You can't help but whisper in shock as the pack stops in your line of sight, trying to get a read on whether you're a threat or not.

Prowlers are utterly terrifying predators. They can be described as something between a wild dog and a tiger with the hide of a dinosaur. Their quadrupedal forms stand tall enough to meet you eye-to-eye at the largest, but the females and younger prowlers come up to your waist or knees instead. This subspecies has a beautiful, peacock-like furl behind their ears that stand on end when they see you, making them look as kaleidoscopic as they are scary. Their fangs could make a saber tooth tiger swoon, and their colors remind you of the legendary Birds of Paradise. Their long tails flick back and forth in concern, trying to understand who you are or if they should fight you. The largest male growls so deeply that Revenant sounds like a kitten in comparison, and it approaches both of you ahead of the rest of the pack.

"Rev..." You start to step behind him. This creature could very easily kill you in a single bite to the neck, and he was already tall enough to reach it.

"Shush, listen to me." He whispers to you, using his grip around your back to shuffle you back in place and to his side, pulling you against him in an uncomfortable grip. "Hey Six, this is mine." He addresses the massive male prowler approaching you, almost presenting you to him.

You hold your breath as Six sniffs your face, neck, and chest, trying to figure out what you are and why you're here. The other prowlers begin to enter the room, not even paying attention to the food in preference of figuring out the newcomer. Six's tail begins to rise up, flicking the tip back and forth as he finds you acceptable as a guest. You receive a lick right on the face as a final assurance, and the other prowlers swarm you to meet you.

You grab onto Revenant like your life depends on it. All of these prowlers could kill you, probably even the young ones too. It doesn't matter if they're all flicking their tails happily, or panting with smiles and tongues out, or excitedly greeting you. They can kill you and you're painfully aware of it.

"Calm down, seriously. You were fine meeting me for the first time, but a bunch of little puppies scare you?" Revenant releases his hold on you, but you don't return the favor.

"These are not puppies!" You try to whisper at him, but he might not be able to hear you over the crowd you've attracted. He pushes down on your shoulders, causing you to lose your grip on him and fall into a sitting position. Now all the prowlers can meet you eye-to-eye or tower over you. You're inundated with licks, and no amount of guarding your face with your arms will save you.

"You'll be fine. They're my pack, and they'll respect what's mine." You can barely hear him over the assault of affection.

As the excitement begins to settle, some of the larger prowlers peter off to check out the meat, leaving the younger ones to look after you. A tiny pair of kits you didn't see before bound up to your lap and hop in, cuddling against your stomach. For such scary adults, the babies are unbearably cute. You're not sure if you can touch them or not, so you simply let them roll around in your lap, slapping at each other like the siblings they are. Six comes back to you, his maw covered in blood from the beef.

"I figured he'd notice." You hear Revenant mutter as Six inspects your arm and calf, licking at the puncture wounds a little. "I guess my hypocrisy was going to catch up eventually." Six carefully sniffs the skin before shooting a glare and deep growl at Revenant. "Don't move a muscle, no matter what." He instructs you.

Six lunges at Revenant's leg, catching the metal below the knee joint in his bite. Revenant buckles and hits the ground. You jump a little and whine to yourself, but you stay as reserved as you can otherwise. The kits notice and begin pawing at you, trying to understand your reaction. Six drags Revenant a few feet from you as Revenant makes stifled sounds reminiscent of excruciating pain. You want to step in, but you obey orders. You hear the moaning of the metal in his leg beginning to bend for a few moments, before Six releases him. Revenant sits up, grappling his leg before Six chomps the opposite arm near the shoulder, causing Revenant to try to reel away in shock and pain. Again, Six growls as the metal bends beneath his bite, Revenant taking the pain as best as he can. Six releases, gives a growling bark to Revenant, and returns to you to lick your wounds more.

"Oh, now aren't you just poetic." Revenant finally makes out between what sounds like heavy breaths. "You got me in the same places." He's cradling his calf and arm, in the exact same places and sides as you were hurt. "I knew I was going to pay for that, but you didn't have to be that literary about it."

Six turns to him and makes whining sounds that mimic human speech. You've heard of Siberian Huskies making these noises, but never prowlers. Either way, it sounds sassy, and Revenant seems to relax knowing he's back in good graces.

"Yes, I know I taught you the same lesson a long time ago, but still..." He talks to them like anyone would talk to their dog. "You didn't have to be that extra about it." Six flicks his head at him before returning to your wounds, the kits now back to play-fighting each other.

"So, yeah, these are my puppies." He finally addresses you again. Most of the other prowlers are now taking turns at the carcass, seemingly following a hierarchy. You want to correct him, but you don't. He's clearly going to keep insisting that they're puppies. "This is Six, he's the sixth alpha of a pack I've helped raise over the past few decades. Zero was the first prowler that accepted me, and One was his puppy--the first alpha."

Six retires from your wounds, taking the two kits from you to go eat with their mother.

"There's no way you can be depressed around these guys. If there's any creature more aware of the emotional state of other beings, I dare them to come forward. My pack is perfect." He genuinely sounds overjoyed that you're getting to meet them all, he seems very proud. "I even raised them to respect females... Even if that did bite me back today." He huffs a bit.

"So, wait, you've been raising prowlers out here for decades?" You finally make a sound, Six and a few others look over at you for a moment, surprised by your more relaxed voice.

"Yeah, although they're fairly independent. I'm more like an elder to them, rather than directly in their hierarchy. I bring them food, not that they need me to, and they come along with me when I need company or extra help." He scoots himself close to you, letting his damaged leg drag. You get a closer look and see that the metal is both punctured and buckled on both his arm and leg. "They've been a passion project of mine ever since I first met Zero. They make me feel a bit of humanity." That last sentence is spoken with a level of reverence. You let the silence fall for a moment.

"You know, this is probably a scientific breakthrough in some field that nobody has ever managed before. You have a wild pack of prowlers that accept you and the people you bring in." He seems surprised by your lavish praise. "This could change our understanding of prowlers forever."

"Well, it helps that I'm nigh unkillable," he knocks on his metal chest, making a banging sound, "and honestly you're allowed in because as far as they're concerned, you're my mate." He wraps his arm around you possessively as the kits crawl back into your lap, now well-fed and cuddly. "That's why they don't mind you around the little ones." He sees you eyeing them as they roll around, trying to get comfortable. He picks one up, holding it in his hands like it's a precious jewel. It yips at him for attention, so he scratches behind it's tiny furls with his spare hand. "I think this one will be Seven, unless the next litter has an even bigger boy."

His adoration for these predators is absolutely identical to how so many people feel about their pets. The choice to love prowlers is a bit unconventional, but he is very much a man stuck in a metal body--humanity intact--in these moments. You are growing increasingly fond of him, seeing something beautiful beyond the cruel simulacrum assassin you once knew. He catches you staring.

"Go ahead, pick her up." He gestures to the other kit in your lap, actually looking a little jealous of her brother. At first, you tremor at the thought of picking her up wrong, but a sudden wave of confidence comes from nowhere. You scoop her up in your arms, bringing her up to your chest and cradling her. She immediately begins to squirm with delight and lick at your hand as you rub her head and chin.

"Was that all instinct?" He pauses, and you tilt your head at him, confused by the question. "You were shaking, then suddenly you weren't. Is that what maternal instinct looks like?" You're a bit shocked he saw that much.

"I'm not sure. I'm not usually around babies of any kind." You confess, but now you suspect the same thing he does. The baby female prowler reaches for your face, barely managing to touch your chin before you lower your face to meet her. She reacts with tiny licks on your nose while you tickle her belly. Revenant is the one staring now.

Revenant places the baby male in your arms next to the female, allowing them to both vie for your coveted attention. Some of the females come over and snuggle up next to you, laying on and around you, while the males and Six lie next to Revenant. Revenant leans back, eventually resting his head on the flank of one of the larger males, while another rests its head on his shoulder.

"You should lie down, let the puppies run around." He instructs you, briefly pointing to the kits in your arms. "Your body isn't heavy enough to bother anyone, just lay on whoever seems the most comfortable."

You look around, seeing a lot of intimidating warm bodies around you, so you cheat and carefully lay under Revenant's arm. You hear him audibly sigh, bothered that you're still worried but unable to chide you. The kits use you to crawl up on Revenant and slide down his metal torso to the other side, Six audibly purring when they land in his vicinity. Maybe a prowler would make a better pillow than a newly busted up metal arm and the concrete floor. You shiver a bit at the sheer power of these creatures, running your fingers over the metal holes in Revenant's arm, causing him to wince away from your touch.

"Does it hurt?" You whisper, hoping not to draw any prowler's attention.

"Yeah, it hurts a lot. My body can feel pain just like you skinsuits." He inhales in distress as you pull your fingers away from the damage. "It honestly feels like the flesh and muscle is torn off, like the bone is crushed and splintered, and like I'm bleeding out on the ground. But I know it's not real. It's never real."

"I'm sorry, I didn't know this would happen." You pull yourself into more of a ball, shuddering at the thought of that level of pain.

"It's not your fault, I instilled this level of protectiveness into them." Revenant pulls his arm away as one of the female prowlers crawls over you and lays on top of you, purring as if to comfort you. "Anyone who hurts one of the girls gets it back sevenfold." You roll onto your back, the prowler readjusting to lay on your belly, purring and licking your neck. "So you can stop being sad about it. They can sense it in you. If you don't want the attention, you can't let yourself be distressed." He sits up, looking down at you smugly while a second prowler writhes across the ground to get close enough to lick your cheek. Are these creatures really this intuitive?

Six notices Revenant sitting up to watch you and meanders over to see the small commotion. Six shoves himself between you and Revenant, apparently sensing some kind of disagreement. Six positions his paws on your neck, allowing you to feel the enormous size of his claws. One flex and you're dead. These things must be three inches of blade, all with a hypodermic tip. Six turns his head to Revenant and makes a sound somewhere between a huff and a growl before shoving his snout against your ear to purr. He bares his fangs while doing so, allowing you to feel how long and menacing they are. You wince away from him, pushing your face into the other prowler's licks, but Six just shoves his snout further to reconnect with you.

"He seems to think I should be more comforting, you're way too nervous for his liking. Good luck being depressed now." He sounds like he's enjoying this, shrugging to himself before he places his hand on your free arm. "Just calm down, they're not going to hurt you."

"I could die from a single flick of the wrist." You carefully say, feeling your vocal chords vibrate against Six's massive nails.

"That doesn't stop you from getting close to me." His hand glides up and down your arm. You don't have a response for him, so you stay quiet. "Like I said, just scream at any discomfort and someone is getting a swift dose of justice." He lies back on the same prowler as before, changing his position to avoid disrupting Six.

"I can't scream if my throat is slit."

"Give it time, you'll understand."

• • • •

Three prowlers is apparently the amount it takes to bring back a stick. It can be more if the stick is longer, but this giant branch is the maximum size you can throw. They hop together, all their jaws in a line across the branch, their fangs clutched around the wood. They carefully drop it at your feet, waiting expectantly for you to try throwing it again. You do your best to throw it, but between your injured arm and the weight of it, you struggle to get it as far as you'd like. The area behind the warehouse is a small yard with enough room for fetch, surrounded by thick forests over a few small hills.

"You throw like a child." You hear Revenant mock you, and you turn around to shoot him a glare. Six is resting in his lap and he has the mother prowler at his side, accepting the belly rubs he offers while the kits sleep. "I can throw farther than you from here, without even standing." You roll your eyes, knowing he's probably right.

Two new prowlers got in on the stick this throw, bounding back to you for another throw. You have eight prowlers all fighting to be one of the three on the stick, but they all seem to be having fun. Four of the young adults are off in the woods playing tug of war by themselves, making a total of sixteen prowlers you've now met. This pack is unusually huge from what little you know. You wonder if Revenant's meddling has something to do with it.

You pick up the branch and drag it over to Revenant, curious to see if he'll back up his claim.

"Alright, go for it." You hand him the end of the branch, and he chucks it far enough to lob over the entire yard and land somewhere in the woods. He snickers as the pack disappears in the darkness after it. You watch, hearing the branch collide with the trees, making rustling and snapping sounds as it catches in them. "So, what if you just got it stuck in a tree?"

"Oh, I thought you wanted me to show off for you." Revenant coos sarcastically. "Give them a few minutes, they can climb." You sigh and shrug, waiting for any sign of them coming back. "Do you want to go home?"

"No, not yet."

"Oh, oh!? You aren't scared of my puppies anymore?" He says between chuckles.

"Shut it." You growl at him, finally getting to use his catch-phrase against him.

"Are you sure? It's getting late." It was beginning to be late in the afternoon, coming up on when you'd normally be wanting dinner. In truth you hadn't eaten in over a day, but depression made it so you never wanted to eat anyway. You'd been playing with his prowlers for hours now, fully accepted by them. You now felt pretty confident in your safety around them, but their stature was still a bit menacing.

"At least let me see if they can bring back that stick." You hear some rustling in the woods, before the eight prowlers burst out of the brush with the original branch and a second, equally massive one. Now only two are left out of being able to hold a part of a stick. They drop both at your feet.

You try to throw the first but it only makes it a short ways, all the prowlers fighting for it. You hand the second to Revenant, and he throws it back into the woods completely out of sight. They all abandon the first stick in preference for the farthest one.

"Maybe you should be doing this." You hunch over, a bit defeated and tired.

"You're doing fine. Anyways, we should wrap up soon. You probably need that shower and I have something I need to do before tomorrow." Revenant starts to get up, prompting Six to get off of him while huffing and shaking himself awake. "Also, you need food."

You sigh, wanting to argue but knowing you can't.

"I'm calling back your ride. We need to get all these guys hidden in the warehouse as to not cause any alarm." He pulls some kind of cellular device out of his pocket on his belt and presses a few buttons. He then proceeds to shuffle you back towards the warehouse, prompting Six, the mother, and the two kits to follow. As you get to the side entrance, Revenant turns around and emits another whistling sound, inundated with his usual modulated twinge. He steps inside with you and the other twelve prowlers come flooding in behind him.

He pets each of them as they make their way in, saving Six and the kits for last. He really does love these creatures. You sheepishly and carefully pet Six as you go to leave, but only because he demands it by butting his head into your hand to make it clear.

Finally, you step outside with Revenant, going towards the dirt road that got you here.

"You look like absolute hell." Revenant jabs. You pull your hair back and try to control it a bit better, but it refuses to cooperate. It's probably stuck from all the prowler saliva all over you, hair absolutely included. Not to even mention your shirt and pants look like you got tackled and ground into the dirt by an entire rugby team. Your shirt was already stained, now it's dusty, dirty, stained, and has green grass streaks. Your shoes are probably just as bad, but they're cheap sneakers so you don't really care much.

"I know, I really need a shower. Maybe two." You give up on your hair. It's just going to be a mess.

"Take as long as you need. I'll be back soon after you. I hope you don't mind riding back alone." You've made it to the dirt road, and you can see the excessively luxurious limo in the distance, kicking up dirt.

"You're not coming?"

"No, I have one last thing to do before the match tomorrow. It'll be worth it, and I think you'll like it too." Revenant seems like he won't budge on the matter.

The limo pulls up and he opens the door for you, and you crawl in alone, making sure you stay as far in the corner as possible. You don't really like the thought of being in here alone, but you have no choice in the matter. He shuts the door and you lose sight of him through the blacked-out windows. The limo starts to move, making a sharp turn and hitting high speeds over the terrain, probably kicking up tons of dust in the meantime. You have nothing to stare at, so you just curl up to yourself and wait to make it back.

"You seem a bit meek for this kind of work, kid." You hear a masculine voice with a skeezy city accent coming from the front of the limo. The privacy window is cracked, just enough so you can hear him, but thankfully not enough so you can see each other. Why was that rolled down at all? It wasn't on the way here. You turn away, refusing to answer, hoping he will leave you be.

"Heh, exactly." You hear him chuckle. You wish you had the guts to just waltz over and roll up the window on him, but you're neither that confident nor strong enough if it ends in a spat. You just let him continue. "Heck, I didn't think robots were even into that stuff, but he seems to be the 'specially fucked-up type." Your stomach sinks like an anchor as you hear what sounds like the draw of a cigarette. "Fucker practically gets off every time he guts someone on live TV. Makes perfect sense he'd get off 'tuh victimizin' some tiny doll like you."

You get the picture, and you feel sick to your stomach for it. You can't respond, every word you want to say gets caught in your throat and you're forced to swallow it. This guy might be unhinged; a lot of people are these days. If you try to argue, he might try something. If you try to play it off... who are you kidding? You could never play this one off. It sounds so bad. Is he going to try to hurt you? Or is this all some mind game?

"Does it hurt? You sure as hell look like you've been through a meat grinder." You feel your face turn red. You turn further away from the cracked window. "Oh, I bet it does. No way 'woulda giant metal psycho like that hold back on a little thing like you."

He won't stop. He's clearly only getting started, but you hope that this is the worst of it.

"Question is: are you a hostage or does he really pay you that well? You know, sweetheart, if you're in need of money, just record whatever the hell he does to 'ya and sell it on the internet." He starts laughing as you internally beg for him to shut up. "All sorts of fucked up dudes would pay for the privilege. You could make absolute bank! Even better if you let him cut you open a bit for the cameras while you scream." He's really laughing now, clearly getting off to how much he has you cornered.

"Everyone loves a good screamin' bitch. Anyone who says they don't is a liar. But you know that, don't 'ya toots?" His use of centuries-old misogynistic slang somehow makes everything worse. You feel yourself shake a bit as you hold yourself tighter. Your stomach hurts badly from the distress now, and you feel yourself spiral internally. Where is this going? Can you outrun this guy if you need to? What if he catches you? Can you squirm out of this guy's grasp? "God, what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall while that's going on. I bet your tears only make him harder."

You want to scream, but your prey instincts refuse to let you move or make a sound in hopes that he simply forgets you're there. You can't help yourself but hold your breath in intervals, hoping to be even more silent, but in turn making you more light-headed and fearful.

"I bet there's lots of filthy bastards that would pay extra to have his sloppy seconds." You're absolutely nauseated at the thought of that, but you haven't eaten, so maybe it's just a stomach ulcer forming from the extreme stress. "I bet he's modded to absolutely ruin you, isn't he? Tear your insides up and fill you until you're overflowin', right? You look like he never gives you a day off." You pray, begging God to kill you--this is worse than death.

"So, if he's draggin' 'ya all the way out into the woods to fuck 'ya, it must be pretty messed up stuff, huh?" You lay your face in your hands. "Aww, don't cry babe, I'm not going to tell anyone. I wouldn't want a hole in my chest, anyhow." You want to disappear. You hope he crashes the car and you die in a fire. You hate everything about this. "If you're ever in need of an extra kick of cash though, I wouldn't mind a taste of 'ya. Or buyin' one of those tapes."

You break internally. It feels like the essence of every muscle snaps in your body, and the tears flow without even intending to. You suddenly have the courage to move, but only to move a few inches to cower deeper in the corner of the seats.

It's not worth it. None of this is worth it. You no longer hear anything he says, even though you can still hear his voice. It sounds like you're underwater, so you can't make out the words anymore. Maybe that's a good thing. Unfortunately, you can still make out your own thoughts, and they're all cruel. It's all cruel. Everything about this situation is cruel.

You focus on the tears hitting your hands. They're cold, and they quickly flow out of your palms and down your arms before dripping off your elbows. They leave a trail of salts down your arm so thin you can barely notice it. You don't even feel compelled to make a sound as you cry; it's not that type of sorrow. It's pure humiliation, and your lungs work calmly as your eyes drown instead.

You wish you could just be swallowed by the swell of your own pain. Death is something you think about often as a potential solution to every problem, but right now it feels like a drug you're in active withdrawal from. Like you need it, right here, right now. You want to imagine the limo crashing into an embankment wall, submerging into an ocean, or being hit by a train. You don't care if the creep dies or not, all you know is you want out. The world feels cold enough to sap every degree of heat from you, and you feel as if you're freezing both literally and figuratively.

You fester in the feelings. The only saving grace in this situation is that you're too unimportant to matter to anyone as anything other than an easy squeeze. Nobody will miss you if you die. No one will look for you if you disappear. No family will mourn you. You secretly hope this pervert doesn't know that too, otherwise you might not make it out of this unscathed. You hope he believes Revenant will run him through if he tries to abduct you. You'd rather not die like that, something faster and more violent would be preferred.

Would Revenant kill you? In any circumstance at all? He could make it quick and violent, but he might not want to at this point. He seems to like you more by the day, but now that scares you. Is he human enough to feel strongly about you? Or does he tend to fall back on his programming? Maybe he would like gutting you--then at least someone could enjoy your death. You think about it, but you cannot imagine it without there being some kind of regret thrown in on your or his end. You can only imagine goading him into it by aggressively attacking his emotional stability, which is something you'd regret. Otherwise, you cannot imagine him killing you for no reason and being regret-free afterwards. You don't want him to feel regret. You just want to be free without hurting anyone, but maybe that's unrealistic.

The vehicle comes to a gentle stop. Your brain kicks into survival mode and you immediately rush for the door, not giving the driver any chance to get out of his seat, let alone open the door for you. He is still talking but you don't care; he's only laughing at you anyway. You get the door open and thankfully you're not at some back alley motel, but the main Apex Games facility. It's the back entrance, but you'll take it. It might be a blessing anyway, since it's so close to Revenant's new room that you'll likely avoid all human contact. You get up to the door and fumble in your pocket for your ID card, finally getting it out. You hear the driver say some more heinous things, but you refuse to turn around to see his face. The card is accepted and you rush in.

• • • •

The water is as hot as you can tolerate. It burns your skin and is downright uncomfortable to wash yourself in. Even as you curl up on the shower floor, crying and tolerating the hottest water you can handle, nothing can truly wash off the overwhelming feeling of being violated. Nothing can wash off the depression, the feelings of insignificance, the intrusive suicidal ideations, or the fear of meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things while simultaneously meaning just enough to force you into living.

The floor of the shower is warm, but it's still uncomfortable to lay on. The water spray hitting your skin is the only comfort you feel, but it isn't enough to quell you. The soap slowly rinses off your body, and the lathered up shampoo slowly flows out of your hair and down the drain. You'll eventually rinse completely like this, but it will be a while longer. How long has it already been? You took a long time sitting on the shower floor to even find the energy to get the soap lathered on you, and even that process was slow. Now you've been back on the floor and letting the soap slowly come off as you sob. Revenant might be back by now, but you're not sure what his errand was exactly. Maybe it will take all night. Does it matter? Do you matter? The thoughts won't stop.

You just cry. You cry until it feels like your soul starts to leave your body. Maybe it does. Between the heat, the steam, and the exhaustion, you pass out.

• • • •

"Skinsuit!" You feel yourself being gently jostled, still on the shower floor. The water is off, but the steam is so thick you question how long it's been. Your skin is beginning to get wrinkled from all the water absorption, so it's been a while. You're facing away from him, and you don't have the energy to turn to him. You don't even have the energy to speak. You just play the corpse, hoping that faking it will cause you to make it.

Revenant withdraws, and you hear rapid shuffling behind you. It sounds like he grabs the towel you had hung for yourself, running in and out of the bathroom to grab other things. You care about how he feels--he sounds distressed--but not for yourself. Why does he care at all, though? How does he feel about all this, anyway?

"Come here, little skinsuit. Everything is fine." You feel his arms scoop under you, and your natural instinct is to resist the hard synthetics against your bare skin. You wince a little, but mostly keep your corpse-like state: eyes closed and body limp. He carries you out of the bathroom where the air is freezing, but also not inundated with enough water vapor to nearly asphyxiate you. Weirdly enough, his chest isn't cold, but actually has something like fur? You don't open your eyes, you're probably just imagining it.

He places you down on a towel on the bed, immediately throwing another equally large towel over you. You're still cold, but it's way more tolerable with something over you. You hear Revenant mumbling in some kind of panic to himself, but you still can't find the energy to console him. You hear some typing on his computer, then the chair gets shoved out from under him as he stands in a huff. You hear your duffle bag unzip and likely some of your clothes be tossed on the bed near your head.

"You better not be mad at me for this..." He sounds unsure of that himself before you feel his hands start to dry you off through the towel. It would be nice if it didn't feel so wrong. Even if it is through a towel, you're naked otherwise. The thought of what the driver said hits you, and you immediately begin to feel anxiety and shake against your will. He reacts by scooping you up and hugging you, still wrapped in a towel, trying to stop the shaking.

"Dammit, what's going on?" You hear him whisper, he doesn't seem to realize you're awake and aware.

More fur. Why is there fur? Also, why does it feel like there's something resting on your head? It's way too large to be his chin. His chest feels smaller too, and it feels like some type of plastic rather than metal. The more you feel the more questions you have, and the more you panic at the realization that you do not know this simulacrum. You reach your limit and perk up in his arms, opening your eyes, and silently gasping as you reel back from whoever the heck this is.

"Wait! Skinsuit! It's me!" He manages to hold your arms before you can fully pull away, and you meet eyesight with a chassis you do not recognize. He has a huge, artificial bovine skull with curling ram horns situated on top. Instead of his scarf, his new face is framed in a mane of deep bark-colored fur, matted into locks like a proper wild animal. The optics tucked inside his skull seem so much larger than his normal ones, and they're a brilliant blueish-white, unlike his normal yellow ones. His snout is long enough to have been what was sitting on your head. His body looks to be made much thinner, especially in the chest, and is clearly made with more plastics than metals. It looks significantly lighter. His arms are red with odd, jagged juts on them, but seem to have similar hand mechanics otherwise. His loincloth is replaced with another long patch of fur, as well as fur on his thigh plates. His legs look a lot more decorative, and his feet are scarier: detailed down to each individual talon. His feet actually look much more like the hands on his other chassis.

"Skinsuit?" You snap out of your trance at his voice. You must have been staring him up and down for a while. "Uh, here." He pulls the towels back over you, which had fallen off when you pulled away. He reaches out to touch you, but stops short in case you aren't all there yet. "It's me, I'm just in a special body for tomorrow. I didn't mean to scare you." He's speaking slowly and methodically; his fingers make contact with your hand, but don't go further. "You must have fainted in the shower. You haven't been eating enough, but don't worry, everything's okay now."

Your head starts to throb and you instinctively go to hold it, the stress of the situation is too much. Even though he's trying to be reassuring, he looks like some kind of robotic, big-horned, undead goat demon and honestly you just wanted to see a familiar face to go with the familiar voice. You're not scared now that you know it's him, but something still doesn't feel right about it. Since you don't know this new chassis, you find it hard to trust his comfort. It's weird. Any other time you'd be overjoyed to see him in something that looks so cool, but now you're looking for some semblance of normalcy.

"How do you feel?" His right hand moves again to rest on your knee, intentionally avoiding pushing any boundaries. You can't answer, you still can't speak. It gets caught in your throat despite your best intentions, and instead your words turn into a new burst of tears and sobs. Without thinking, you take his hand off your knee and pull it to your face, sobbing into it. He seems relieved at your acceptance, and tries his best to catch and wipe away the tears as they flow. He shuffles as if to hug you, but he stops, likely unsure of how you feel when you're essentially in nothing but two loosely wrapped towels.

"I'm sorry, I thought seeing my pack would help, but I should have realized you haven't been eating enough. It's not something I've had to pay attention to in centuries." Your heart hurts as he seems to take the blame himself. "I also didn't mean to scare you again... I promise I'm not planning on hurting you." You want to speak so badly, but you just cry harder instead. None of this is his fault. Literally none of it. The only reason you're so jumpy is because everything that pervert said has sent you into a spiral. You imagined Revenant hurting you for his own entertainment and pleasure, and this imaginary smoking gun has left you very gun-shy.

"I ordered food for you to be delivered to the room. I expect you to eat something, even if it's not much. I don't want you dying on me." You push his hand into your face, trying to dry the tears. "I ordered a lot. I'm not sure what you like." You nod to affirm you hear him and plan to try, even though you're too nauseous to be hungry at the moment.

He uses his free hand to grab the clothing he pulled from your bag and puts it in front of you. He probably wasn't thinking too hard when he picked things out, but an oversized tee and men's basketball shorts are as comfy as it gets, so he did fine in your book. He left out undergarments, but honestly you couldn't care less at this point. Whatever covers you is fine. You pull his hand away from your face and place it on the bed gently. You grab the shirt, and he immediately turns away to let you put it on. You're able to throw it on along with the shorts in a few seconds, and quickly retrieve his hand when done. He turns back, maintaining the boundaries he interpreted.

"Any better?" He wipes away a few trailing tears now that you've slowed down a lot. You nod, still not sure how your voice is doing.

There's a knock on the door and Revenant pulls away gently to go get it. You hear a familiar voice from the other side of the door.

"I've got enough Chinese for like, five people. Who is even in this room? Are y'all having a sleepover in the abandoned room? To be fair I'd do the sa--"

Revenant opens the door and Sherry has a long pause to look up at the recipient. She doesn't even notice you, but you see her put the bags on the floor slowly and take a step back, hands up defensively.

"Okay, so it's a demon summoning, my bad..." Her sass is ever present. "And here I made the mistake of thinking I was running into some normal kind of fun."

"Sherry!" Your voice cracks back into action and the perfect moment. She shoots a look past Revenant to see you.

"You're summoning demons now?! Did you dump the tinman and summon an incubus as a bounce back or something?!" She looks up at Revenant, still not sure who it is. "Also, do demons really like Chinese food this much?"

"Sherry, shut up! I need a hug!" The tears are coming back, and Sherry valiantly slips under Revenant's arm to run to you. Revenant seems to be in complete shock at her brazenness, but also unwilling to stop her since you invited her in. He picks up the bag of food instead and brings it in, setting it on the television stand. Sherry leaps into a hug and you accept it graciously. Sherry is the closest thing you have to a sister and you could use someone like her right now. Revenant sits in the computer chair, watching you embrace closely, but not speaking or interfering.

"Where's the Revenant guy? What happened? Did he dump you? Did you run away? Who is this guy?" She immediately starts getting to brass tacks mid-hug. Although with her the hug won't end until you stop crying anyway.

"That is Rev, Sherry. It's just a different body." You manage to get out. She shoots Revenant a discerning look before slowly recognizing the similarities.

"Oh, hey, you're right. My bad, mister murder robot... haha..." She trails off nervously, Revenant only responding with a grunt and a huff. Suddenly, she snaps back into a fiery disposition. "Wait! Did you do something to her, you doofy-lookin' Beelzebub knockoff?! You may be able to gut me, but I'll defend her honor to my grave!" Now you're hugging Sherry to hold her back from trying to start something.

"It was a complete accident. I wasn't keeping track of how much she's been eating and I didn't catch her starving herself; plus I didn't expect this body to scare her as much as it did." Revenant doesn't lose an aggressive posture, but his words are fairly soft and empathetic.

"It's not that! I promise, it's not any of that!" You hug Sherry hard enough that she winces, but sensing your desperation she holds you tighter and pulls your head into her chest with no regard for what that may look like. You're glad you don't have those kinds of feelings for Sherry, otherwise this might be a bit strange. You see Revenant cock his head to the side and his eyes sharpen at the sight.

"It was the ride back, alone. That stupid driver was--" you choke, you hate saying these words out loud, "--a perverted bastard. An absolute dog." It comes out and devolves into a half-sob, thankfully still understandable. You start to cry again, reliving the things he said, not sure how you'd ever be able to say them yourself, even just to explain what happened.

"What happened? Did he hurt you? Are you okay?!" Sherry barely contains her concerns, if at all, squeezing you as you cry.

Revenant stands very slowly and methodically out of the chair, and begins to make some kind of animalistic growl you've never heard him make in your life. He paces back and forth, slowly stifling his growl as he goes. Sherry seems a bit concerned by him, but she continues to try to comfort you, awaiting an answer.

It takes almost a full minute to catch your breath again and be able to speak again, but you do.

"He didn't touch me. He just said things that--" Back to sobbing. You thought too far ahead and started to repeat his words again to yourself.

Despite your crying, Sherry sighs in relief, significantly less tense than before. She starts to rock you in her hug and you go along with it. Revenant's intensity only seems to worsen. He paces faster for a few moments as you cry, before he calms himself down enough to approach the situation.

He sits on the edge of the bed next to you and Sherry, currently latched on to each other. He doesn't attempt to pull you apart, he simply waits patiently. He's completely calm and collected now, with no signs of previous rage apparent, but you're sure it's still there.

"What kind of things did he say?" Sherry asks kindly, no sense of urgency in her voice. She plays with your hair a bit, which might as well be one of the greatest feelings in the world. It might be just distracting enough for you to get it out.

"He said he wanted to buy tapes..." You inhale heavily trying to hold back the inevitable runny nose. "...of Revenant cutting into me and... using me." Sherry gasps through her nose in disgust, but squeezes you tighter in response.

"I'm sorry, that's terri--"

"He said I should sell myself afterwards, that people would like me better if I still had... stuff... inside me." You cut her off but you're not done. Sherry is starting to get tense, but more notably, so is a particular simulacrum only a few feet away. "He said he wanted to watch it all! And try me for himself, too." That's all you needed to say, you're back to sobbing and Sherry starts to cry with you, unable to help her empathy. You're latched on to each other trying to comfort one another, but instead both of you are just a sobbing mess.

Revenant sits, lifeless for a moment, before standing up and limping towards the door.

"Revenant!" You call out to him through tears, and he stops and turns towards you, revealing his eyes are voids. He's in reboot. "Don't kill anyone." You try to sound confident, but you're not sure how it comes out. He turns away again, and limps out of the room, shutting the door behind him. He didn't acknowledge what you said, but you hope he heard you.

Sherry perks up, wiping away her own tears and pulling away for a moment.

"Do you think he'll listen?" Sherry seems stressed.

"I hope so."

• • • •

"So, he's actually an average person, stuck in a body that drives him to be a bloodthirsty assassin via software?" Sherry asks, taking another bite of the sweet and sour chicken.

"As far as I can tell, yeah... Wait, did you not know what a simulacrum was before now?"

"I meant to look it up but I never did. I figured it was like a brand-name or something." She giggles at herself, but you sense there's a chance she may be joking. "So, you actually do really like this spindly metal guy, after all? And he's so much older! You have mature tastes." She goes straight to teasing, now that you're feeling a bit better.

"I didn't say anything about that, ma'am." You stare at the General Tso's chicken in front of you, not sure if you can eat a third piece. You still feel wrong somehow.

"You don't have to. I think he likes you too. I mean, he isn't wearing your innards as a scarf. For him, that's something." She prods.

"He's not as bad as you think, you know." You don't know how to convince her without potentially telling her something Revenant wouldn't want you to.

"Sure, he just kills people on live TV for the paycheck." She shrugs. "Oh! And maybe killing some pervert who sexually harassed you right now."

"I didn't tell him to do that!" You snap, you legitimately don't want to have even a drop of that blood on your hands. Sure, this guy was an absolute creep, but he didn't lay hands on you. That's your limit, and he didn't cross it. He isn't as bad as Forge. That guy did cross the line. He crossed a lot of lines.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you upset." Sherry sounds genuine. You sigh.

"It's okay, I really hope he's just running off some steam. I hope he knows most of my distress was just depression winning." You poke the chicken.

"That's not true, I would have been so scared too. I mean, you were in real danger. It's a miracle you held it together at all, I'm not sure I could have. I still can't believe--"

The door swings open and Revenant walks in, stopping all conversation in its tracks. He's hunched forward, looking somewhat disappointed.

"I hope you're happy. He'll live." He looks you dead in the eyes, waiting for your reaction.

You smile openly, glad he heeded your request.

"Everyone in his contacts now has a copy of the encrypted files on his computer, all decrypted for their viewing pleasure." He breaks eye contact with you. "At least one of them is sure to call the feds when they see their inbox tomorrow."

"Oh geeze, he was that kind of creep?" Sherry exclaims out loud, still eating chicken.

"Oh yeah, he's been collecting a lot of really rare porn. Honestly, I wish you'd have just let me kill him so I didn't have to expose myself to that." You feel a little guilty that he had to dig through it, it explains why he looks so dejected.

"I'm sorry..." You can't help yourself, you feel bad when he seems upset about anything.

"How much have you eaten?" He seems to have noticed how full your box of chicken still is.

"Two pieces of chicken, and maybe one piece of broccoli." Sherry rats you out with a cruel grin on her face.

"Snitch!" You shoot back at her. She closes her box with a mischievous smirk, hops up, and starts to leave.

"Nice to meet 'ya, you synthetic Wendigo! Have fun and be safe, you two!" She slips past Revenant quickly and is out of the door, skipping down the hallway as the door slowly shuts behind her. Revenant watches her leave with some mix of confusion and concern. You turn to reassure him.

"She's fine. She won't say anything. She--"

"Clearly is some kind of competition for me. I mean, she held you like you two were bonded for life." He's immediately free to tease you with her gone. Thank goodness Revenant seems too shy to gang up on you with her; that would be untenable. He throws himself down next to you where Sherry once was. "I want that same kind of bond." He barely touches your chin with his claws, being sure to growl the last bit out loud.

You emit a whining noise, paralyzed by the thought. You're a bit more sensitive to it all at the moment, considering the events of the day. Revenant notices your struggle and pulls back, reverting to his demanding style.

"Eat your food. I didn't intend for your girlfriend to run off with a free meal and you not eat anything." It still feels weird coming from his new body, but you're getting used to it.

"She's just a good friend, that's all. And I was just too busy talking to eat, I still don't feel great though." You poke at the food, it's lukewarm by now but that isn't your main objection to it. You just don't feel like eating.

"Oh, so we aren't close enough yet for that kind of affection? I'll fix that soon enough." His voice hums. You sigh.

"Oh please," You pet his snout and he seems to enjoy it, getting him off your case for a bit, "Not right now, harass me later. If you want me to eat anything, you can't be doing this." He really seems to enjoy the snout rubs.

"Alright, fine, you eat, I'll talk." You pull your hand away and focus more on the food. "I have quite a number of these special chassis to myself, all kinds of designs and colors and other nonsense. These are my special occasion outfits, per sé." You nod, it makes sense. "This one, as well as many others, are modded to the brim with all sorts of fun additions." He touches his snout, noting where you pet it. "I can feel every single aspect of this suit, even those that don't conform to the human shape. Even better, it's neural processors are exponentially faster, meaning everything feels much more vivid and vibrant." He pulls his fingers to the nasal cavity. "I have an entire set of cores that do nothing but olfactory processing, so I get to be the better Bloodhound while I wear it." His fingers fall to his jaw. "This luxurious suit even gets a jaw with clamping power, canine teeth to snag whatever I want, and a synthetic tongue to taste the blood I spill." He starts to snarl his words as he pulls open his jaw to show you his mouth. He points to his horns next. "These things? Silicone carbide sections with rubber impulse reducers between." You stare at him with a look of minor confusion, so he clarifies. "I can headbutt a skull into fragments without even leaving a dent in my own." You wince at the thought. "Not to even mention the use of polyethylenes instead of metals in the body with support weights in the limbs makes it so I can move faster than ever but still hit just as hard. Not to even mention all the modifications below the neck. You'll see how much I destroy in tomorrow's match. I will win, I promise you that."

"Wanna bet?" You're happy with how confident he is, but you can't help but want to start something.

"And what do I have that you could possibly want?" Revenant asks the opposite of what you expect him to. Isn't the question usually posed the opposite way? You close up your leftovers and start going over to the kitchenette to put it in the fridge.

"Well, I wouldn't mind money or just hanging out with the prowlers again. I could put money on it too, just not enough to make it worth your while. Did you have something in mind?" The fridge is nearly empty, spare for that water bottle and liquor. You throw the box down on a shelf, close the door, and plop down on the couch in a lying position.

"So, if I don't win, I have to take you to see my puppies again, or give you money. Neither of those are objectionable to me, but when I win I get to take something instead?"

"Yeah, that's how I'm framing it. The extra motivation can't hurt. I just don't know what you'd want. I have some savings, but--"

"Forget the money, I don't exactly have much need for it and I have tons anyway. What I want..." He pauses for a moment as his voice turns sinister. "...is to hear you call me 'daddy' again while I take a piece of you." He seethes with a sadistically erotic tone.

You stare into space, your face must be red again.

"C'mon skinsuit, it's not every day I'm in one of my few suits with the proper equipment for it." He's loving the look on your face, undoubtedly. He's acting like this is a cruel joke, but... How far would he take this joke, though? Better yet, how far will you force him to take it? You still feel ill at ease about the idea, but you're suddenly angry enough to buck off the shame.

"Alright, fuck you but sure." Probably the ballsiest thing you've ever said in your life.

Revenant is caught off guard for a moment, his eyes dimming until they're nearly off, freezing in a somewhat shocked motion. After a few moments, you hear him slowly return as he laughs out loud. He has trouble containing himself, and goes to rub his mask again.

"You're insane, but I love that." He finally contains his laughter. "Your friend, what's her name?"

"Sherry." Weird change in subject but okay.

"Who's her favorite?"

"Wattson."

"Oh, perfect. I'll send a special request for her to keep you company during the match. I want you both to watch. I got my assigned team not long ago." He stands up from the edge of the bed and meanders over to the couch you're on, looming over you.

"Oh, are you with Wattson?"

"And Wraith. It's perfect for what I have planned." He never did explain what his plan was that day he dragged you all over the arena. "Loba's little triumph will pale in comparison to my massacre."

"Try not to make it too--"

"It will be bloody, gory, and brutal. Sorry little skinsuit, but you used up your pardon." He chides you from above before reaching down to help you up. "Now come, I need to warm something."

You stand up, a bit confused by his request, until he pulls you into a hug and you feel how strangely warm his body is. You're a bit taken aback at first, but you slowly ease into him and the warmth he offers.

"Luxurious, isn't it?" You feel his chest rattle into a purring sound as he cradles your head against his warm chest. "I like it too." He gently pulls you away from the couch before leading you to the bed.

You don't protest, you just crawl into bed and shuffle to the middle, making plenty of room for him to follow. You see the lights flick off, then feel his warmth press up against your back, cradling you completely. His snout rests on your shoulder, breathing into your ear. It's comforting, something you really needed after today.

"Thanks, Rev." You barely manage to whisper. He huffs in your ear as affirmation before you fall asleep.

[nochiquinn]

exandria unlimited: calamity: episode 3: Within Ten Feet Of Me

I skipped the live airing for reasons of Being Real Fucked Up, I've got notepad up for watching the vod but idk how much actual liveblogging will take place (for reasons of Still Being Kinda Fucked Up)

(edit from the future: I AM NOW FUCKED UP FOR NEW, DIFFERENT REASONS)

"they were makin chicken noises"

"am I a snitch or am I a reporter to the people?"

lmao the sticky note over luis' macbook

MAP

"don't invoke artax"

MINIS

GRIFFON

"that's a big ol' brumestone!"

he goes ON THE GRIFFON

necromancy is so tacky

"so he has back problems"

"electives courses is important!"

"talk about the dragon, I gotta go get a dragon"

"heard you was talkin shit"

"miles' friend sucks"

attel spack

miles come get your friend

I didn't ask how big the room is

the fringe on marisha's shirt confuses me

oh I know that vertebra

"you have approximately one hour before you can't move"

"tight clump, the ideal d&d formation"

everybody just piling on to protect loquatius

"I just lay down and cry in the street"

rogues are whatever

loquatius is whatever

omnislash

muscle wizard casts fist

"KNEEL TRAITOR" "I kneel"

excuse

"they're gonna eat me"

"NO ONE'S EVER LIKED FIREWORKS"

"YOU THINK THIS IS THE TIME TO DO BITS?!"

"I made the wrong choices! D:"

fucking flayed men motherfuckers

reverse what now

"there's no ceiling" "YEAH"

"Sam Riegel Hurt My Feelings"

"it makes ground 👆 that way"

piratical dexterity

cast stab

stab a BUNCH

hasted paladin HASTED PALADIN

aabria's face rn

"I mean if you INSIST...."

RING OF FACES

"you're my best fucking friend"

oshkoshbgosh

I probably missed a bit bc twitch lost my place when I restarted my computer >:[

(honestly it's on me, I should have left a timestamp for myself)

"can [cerrit] see windows or"

por'co's impenetrable bubble

POP POP

circle of WHAT

necromantic dutch oven

Mutiny Has Only One Punishment

wesley snipes??

I have been informed the second half of this episode is A Lot

"I just beat them with Faerie Fire, guys"

"we're at a table. I can reach you."

this feels like when you have to go around the classroom and say something about yourself

double twenties means all the batteries are safe

"let it fix marisha!!"

"I'll excuse myself"

"you look really nice today" lays in the floor

lays in the floor about the whole conversation but that was the emotional damage capstone

"short the tithe" that feels unwise

"insight and deception into yourself"

"I wanna unpack THAT"

"there's one story of a faerie who stumbled into this world and fell in love"

"why are you like this"

"I'm actively dying"

"you asked to not remember" fuck the what

hwat

patia what did you DO

"I hold that title very dear and sacred - but I hold that title"

patia

"are you guys having like a cute divorce moment?" "shut UP"

cerrit: now is the time travis: I want the TEA

"none of this matters, and he does" hello 911 aabria iyengar and sam riegel are fuckiNG MURDERING ME

zerxus: zone of truth laerryn and loquatius: absolutely fucking not

hello 911 brennan lee mulligan is fucking murdering me

hey what the fuck

HEY LAERRYN

HEY LAERRYN WHAT THE F U C K

Generic Tablet Device

"she doesn't trade in gold, but rather her grandfather's name" WOW

"I'm glad I killed you"

"your eminence...what the fuck"

25??

it's gonna be weird going back to the low-level chaos gremlins and not getting all these big numbers

"I leave." and I walk away

only, y'know. furious.

"I'm gonna go take care of mine now"

"you guys are very good at playing D&D!!"

by your powers combined

Time to Tree

"the biggest mistake I ever made was not trusting you" lays in the floor

"you already saved me once, maybe I can return the favor"

quay is gonna die bc he is a sam riegel character and I am going to cry

"the tree is ruining my cool magic"

aabria going from muttering death threats at the tree to "YOU SPEAK PRIMORDIAL?!?!" is very funny to me

"Iiiiii chose dwarvish"

hey laerryn

hey laerryn whatcha doin

that's a trick question I know what you're doing please stop

initiative??

against laerryn???

hey what the fuck??

hey what the f u c k??

big You Activated My Trap Card energy

"choose wisely. but choose."

patia: fuck y'all, I got shit to do

it's always fucking bears

sam riegel, forever drunk on Love My Wife juice

up to and including if the wife is fictional

(or yeza)

laerryn got LAIR ACTIONS

lou going under the fucking table

"do I get advantage if I roll from down here?"

Is He Within Ten Feet Of Me

"I need you to make this decision, I can't because I'll cheat" you know what A+ self-awareness

brennan that's so many dice

"go find my die!"

"what are we even doing now?" EXCELLENT QUESTION

"never trust a motherfucker with a cause"

there's only 20 minutes left in this episode and I Am Experiencing Fear

oh shit it's his mom

brennan how are you doing that with your voice

oh the LITERAL big bang, okay

the frantic note taking

"not fear at what I'm seeing, fear at what you're doing"

and it WORKS kdjfslk I'm going to die

EXCUSE ME

would that also blight them?!?!?

oh no

travis I will FIGHT YOU

I'm suing travis willingham for emotional damages

brennan's going in the suit

oh what in the fullmetal alchemist

I'm going to die

but that's bullshit tho! if they were gonna take advantage of it they would whether they knew what it was for or not!

HISTORY IS IMPORTANT

[samikozume-todoroki]

Warning: straight crack

Masterlist | Request rules | Gen. Taglist

Wildchild memelord reader meeting the guys for the first time and love at first sight:

Bakugou Katsuki:

You bump into him

“WATCH WHERE YOURE GOING EXTRA!!!!”

Boom boom, fingy explosions, boom boom

Gets in yo face

Not in the sexy way tho😔✊

You back up slightly

“I have a thick skin but dude you are scary scary”

Does that cute confused thing^

Like no one has said that straight to his face, and not with such nonchalance either

He respects it

But he’s still confused

“W-what??”

“Also sir please get outta my bubble, I mean I don’t mind a hot guy getting all up in my space but like consent is sexc ya feel?”

You’re an idiot.

Katsuki likes idiots (bakusqaud cough)

“And that’s how your father met me kids😌💅✨”

“Y/n I’m older than you”

“Kiri shut up, don’t ruin the story of mom and dad meeting🥺”

Todoroki Shouto:

You come up to him after the sports festival

“Ay yo! That’s the ice zuko!”

Ice zuko??? What’s a zuko???

You grab his hands in that whole “I’m praying with/for you” position

“I believe in your redemption arc!! You got this Ice zuko!!”

“My name is shouto todoroki??? What’s a zuko???”

He ends up in some random strangers, yours, house binging Avatar the next few days.

and that’s the story of how you met your future hubby

and how y’all went to comic-con in Zuko and Mai cosplay

and how your three kids were named

“Alright Zuko, Aang, and Iroh let’s go to bed”

“I can’t believe you named your kids that”

“Shut up Midoriya, when you meet the love of your life through a show then you can talk”

Kirishima Eijirou:

You bumped into him at the mall

And fell into the fountain

He helped you out apologizing

“Ya know, I don’t think this is how you get a girl wet sir”

“Agsjsghsjs w-w-whAt”

*voice crack bAybEE*

���Ya I mean usually you take her out to dinner or y’all watch a movie then you lure her to the bed-“

“mAAAM PLEA-“

“I mean that’s how it goes in all the wattpad lemons hm. Not gonna lie tho, the view of you-“

Licks lips

“Is all I need”

Kirishima_Eijirou.exe stopped working

Wait or Restart?

“Yes he will gladly take your number”

Bless Kaminari, after hyena cackling his ass off, he stepped in

A true bro😔✊

“And that is how I seduced your future son-in-law!”

“Y/n we talked about this- get better pickup lines cmon your game is weak”

“And Kirishima honey, I’m disappointed in your pick up line tolerance”

Midoriya Izuku:

You fell from the sky

Well not really you just crashed through the ceiling

Landing on top of deku your dazed face looks into his eyes

“Damn I must’ve crashed into hell because you’re fucking hot”

Izuku is blushing yes but he’s also out of it cause he knocked his head

“Then baby there’s no way you’re an angel cause you’re dripping sin”

I made that up on the spot and I am proud, wow my own talent astonishes me🤩

“I may be an angel, but I will gladly sin for you”

You both are two inches away from a heated makeout session but-

Cough cough

“Dudes the whole class is still here”

Izuku finally snaps out of it and promptly faints in shock

Meanwhile you’re mad cause

NO HEAD?! *throws phone, jumps and snaps a skateboard*

Doodling you number on Izukus forehead you skip out of the classroom and back upstairs

“And that’s how we met Miss Midoriya!”

“Izuku you’re all grown up”😭

“Mom whAT-“

Kaminari Denki:

This motherfucker also has wild child memelord energy

And wild children meme lords attract

Like put some meme lords in a mile radius of the other and they will sniff each other out eventually

So your first day of UA you run into the class in the middle of English

Point straight at Denki, him out of his seat pointing straight at you

“BRO!””PIKABRO!”

“Shawty let me suckle on them toes”😫

“Only if you allow me to break your ankles and put you in a skirt cause you remind me of my mom”😫

“BRO! FEEL free! Please lure me into your basement!!”😫😫

“I ain’t paid enough for this bullshit” present mic leaves the classroom💀

“And that’s how the mafia works”🤩✨

“Dad you literally told us how y’all met where did mafia come from?”

“Denki we raised a wack ass kid wtf”

“Ikr like who put the stick up his ass”

“Parentals I’m literally right here how are you guys adults I cannot-“

Shinsou Hitoshi:

So like everyone knows he loves cats right???

All of UA knows too

“Hola cat boy! Can you do me a favor???”

You walk up to him in a cat costume

Not one of the skimpy ones

Sadly

Like a full on cat in the hat onesie type deal

“I didn’t know cat in the hat went to UA?”

“I heard ya like cats, and I need you, so I am a cat

I am now irresistible you have to do as I say”

“You would have had better luck if you wore a skimpy cat costume but I’ll hear you out. What do ya want?”

“Okay right so this dickwad decided “yo let’s take panty shots of random girls”

and I’m one of them

and like he took the picture with one of my comfty panties

so the picture isn’t even cute

and I want it back but he won’t give it to me

so like can you do your whole Jedi mind trick and get me the photo back???”

“Lmao,,, what???”

“Wat???”

“So you get sexually harassed and you’re more upset by the fact that you weren’t wearing cute panties???”

“When you put it like that it sounds bad”

“That’s because it is bad”

“Oh yeah now that you put it like that it is bad. Can you fuck up his shit too???”

Mans beats the fucker up black and blue, shreds all the photos, destroys the camera, memory stick thingy, deletes all gmail account data then the account, destroys laptop, computer, hard drives, phones, 3DS, etc. etc. thoroughly

“Wow when you smashed his 3DS in his balls that was very hot”

Make out session over a half dead body: check 💯✅

“And that was how I prevented a man from having kids”🥰

“God you’re so hot, I could fu-“

“Y/n. We are literally in public with all of our friends. Stop being horny”

“I can’t help it you’re so hot yummy yummy man🤩”

A/n: LMAO I’m rereading this after waking up. I wrote this ten minutes before I went to sleep and it shows cause my god this is a hot mess💀

Tagged: @mssyprsn

[venialsun]

to begin with, take warning (2/3)

[read on ao3]

1 | 2 | 3

When Damian found his way to his first class of the day, having missed something called homeroom and the first ten minutes, the instructor shook his head playfully and made Damian introduce himself and explain what he had done over the summer. He could not say he had spent the past few months traipsing across the globe, hanging out with killers and thieves, and dying more often than not as he tried to escape the oppressive feeling that had descended upon Gotham after years of tragedies and increasing catastrophes. So he said he spent some time with his mother’s family on their private island, which was close enough, took a seat at the back of the room, and listened to his classmates reconnect with old friends and talk about their vacations and holidays with an increasing sense of annoyance.

The rest of the morning classes were no better. The teachers would guide the students through introductions and some small talk, go through their syllabus, and sometimes begin a lesson that Damian was entirely bored by. A few of his classmates tried to speak with him, asking him questions about his family, about himself, and smiling welcomingly at him, but the last thing he wanted to do was talk about that can of worms. He was not sure what he would say, how to spin his life into something half-truthful yet still benign. He’d never had to before. The rest of the students ignored him, and he was more than happy to ignore them right back.

By lunchtime, he was contemplating leaving and telling his Father he was done with this whole experiment. But Yanez’s yellow slip burned in his pocket, and Damian was not one to give up so easily. He would make it through the day, if nothing else.

The technology atrium was between the main academic building and the arts auditorium. A squat addition to the main building with walls made of glass and supported by steel beams, it stuck out like a sore thumb against the dark slate stones and high neo-Gothic arches and spires of the rest of Gotham Academy. Damian glowered as he neared and realized this was not only the technology atrium but, according to the placard over the main entrance, the Kenneth H. Wayne Technology Atrium.

Of course.

Inside, rows of computers and long tables encircled a central desk where a young woman sat typing at a laptop. She looked up as Damian approached and asked, “What’s up?”

Damian fished out the yellow slip and showed it to her. “Principal Yanez assigned me community tutoring or whatever.”

She took the slip and scanned it. “Already? Dang, kid, what’d ya do?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say. Hold on. Let me pull her notes.” She busied herself clicking and scrolling, then paused. “Oh, wow. I see. Well, hi, Damian. Glad to have you. I’m Miss Daisy.” She handed him back the slip.

“Daisy?” he repeated, incredulous.

“Well, Miss Daskalakis, but I got tired of all you runts mispronouncing it.”

“Miss Daskalakis,” said Damian, exactly.

Daskalakis smiled. “That was pretty good, actually. Okay, in about ten minutes, we should have some of the PSAT and SAT kids show up for their first prep. Make yourself comfortable at one of the tables, eat some of your lunch, and when they show up I’ll introduce you and explain the rundown.”

“Lunch?”

“You brought something to eat, didn’t you? Or you can go pick something up at the cafeteria.” She glanced at her laptop. “There’s still time, and since it’s the first day, there’s no rush.”

Damian hesitated. “Principal Yanez said I was to report here.”

“We’re not going to make you skip lunch, Damian,” said Daskalakis. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. Here, what do you want?” She pulled out her phone. “I’ll message my assistant to bring you something. He should already be at the cafeteria.”

“Anything vegetarian,” he said.

Daskalakis gave him a thumbs up. “Got it.”

He went to sit at one of the long tables. Surreptitiously, he pulled out his phone to figure out what in the world the PSAT and SAT were supposed to be. He was puzzling his way through the most confusingly worded, backwards maths questions he had ever read, when the door opened. Damian glanced up and froze.

The red-headed boy at the entrance to the atrium also froze, eyes wide like he had seen a ghost.

“Colin!” called Daskalakis. “Hey, this is Damian. Thanks for grabbing lunch.”

“Colin,” Damian said.

“Damian,” said Colin Wilkes. “Oh, my god. Damian. Dude!”

“Do you two know each other?” asked Daskalakis.

“No,” said Damian, at the same time Colin said, “Yes.” Then Colin said, “No,” at the same time Damian said, “Yes.”

“Cool,” said Daskalakis, dragging out the oo. “Cool, cool, cool. Can you guys figure that out? We have, like, five minutes.”

Colin approached and deposited what looked like a rice dish with vegetables in front of him. “Um, this is for you. I didn’t know what you wanted, so I got you a taco bowl minus the taco.”

“Thanks,” said Damian, accepting the not-taco bowl.

“So.” Colin sat across from him. “Long time no see, huh.”

Damian snorted. “I’ve been busy,” he said.

“No shit. Your family has been freaking out for like the past six months, saying you’re missing and Robin went rogue or something. Then the old Robin came back. The Titans restarted. Then there’s video of another Robin sword-fighting crime all over the world. I assume that was you. Dude, I thought you were dead.”

“To be fair,” said Damian as he opened his taco bowl and mixed the ingredients, “I was. A couple of times. Doesn’t seem to stick.”

Colin laughed. “Your mom?”

Damian chuckled, startling himself. “Something like that. Though the first time was a few years back. I was—gone—for nearly a year, and my Father resurrected me with alien magic.”

“Sick. I remember that,” said Colin. “You dropped off the face of the earth. Didn’t come by the orphanage anymore or sneak out with me for patrols. People were saying Batman went crazy. I thought you just decided you didn’t want to hang out anymore.”

“I—” Damian spooned some rice into mouth. Chewed, swallowed. Colin looked at him throughout, unrelenting. “I didn’t ignore you deliberately. And then after I came back, things were so…”

Colin waved a hand and unwrapped a greasy slice of pizza. He took a bite. “It’s cool, man. You literally just told me you’ve died multiple times. Plural. I can get over my hurt feelings. Seems kind of trivial in comparison.”

Damian frowned and ate some more rice. Colin ate his pizza. Then Damian set his fork down, resolute, grip tight on the handle. As evenly as he could, he said, “I apologize for not being a better friend to you.”

“Whoa.” Colin’s eyebrows shot up. His expression pinched with worry as he searched Damian’s face. “What happened, man?”

Damian swallowed.

Then the door opened again, and an older boy—sixteen or seventeen—peaked inside and asked, “Is this SAT prep?”

“Sure is,” said Daskalakis from the central desk. She stood and indicated Damian and Colin to follow her. “Come in, come in, I’ll set you up right over here.”

Damian stood. “Later,” he said in an undertone. “I’ll explain later. I promise.”

“Okay,” Colin agreed. “But if you disappear on me again, this time I know where you go to school, so there’s no use hiding.”

“Have you known me to ever hide from anything?”

Colin smirked and said nothing.

Damian’s face felt suddenly warm. “Shut up,” he said. “We have work to do.”

•

Surprisingly, tutoring his fellow students was not the disaster he thought it would be. There was some initial skepticism from the upperclassmen about being tutored by a fourteen-year-old, but after Daskalakis declared him “a genius prodigy or something, according to Yanez,” that eventually quieted. It helped that though the PSAT and SAT problems and questions were simple enough, the wording and specificity grated on him, and soon he was insulting the intelligence of the College Board and standardized tests in general. That endeared him to the upperclassmen, and afterward the rest of the lunch hour passed without trouble.

Colin sidled up next to Damian as he gathered his materials to leave and showed him a crumpled-up piece of paper. “What’s your next class?” he asked. It was his schedule.

“Physical education,” said Damian. He had already memorized his own.

“Oh, really? Sweet. Me, too. We’ll go to PE together. I met Coach Freeman at the orientation. I think you’ll like her. What about after?”

Damian listed off his afternoon classes: physical education, then biology, then ancient rhetorics, and ending with a free study period. They shared no core classes, only homeroom, lunch, and physical education. Colin teased him for taking the honors track, and Damian started to complain that the classes were not interesting let alone challenging. But then he got sidetracked by wondering why Colin was somehow not in the honors track but still Daskalakis’s assistant for community tutoring (which, Damian insisted, was a dumb idea for punishments and an even dumber name). Colin laughed and explained he mostly helped with the younger kids. He said he was good with them, thanks to all the practice he’d had helping the nuns wrangle traumatized orphans and foster kids while growing up in the orphanage.

“After all that, spoiled rich kids are easy,” Colin said. He nudged Damian in the ribs. “It’s why we’re friends.”

“I thought that was because we both liked beating up on creeps a little too much,” said Damian, wry.

Colin grinned, and for a moment his face seemed to take on the grisly severity of Abuse—Venom-distorted and menacing. “That too.”

Physical education—“Just call it PE, dude,” Colin said—was a bore, more than Damian had anticipated. After changing into their gym uniforms and the requisite round of introductions, Coach Freeman set them on an obstacle course made up of rubber tires and colorful ropes. Damian was not impressed. But he remembered what his Father had said about damaging school property and refrained from destroying the so-called obstacles as he passed his struggling classmates and returned to Coach Freeman.

“What now?” he asked. To his frustration, he had hardly broken a sweat.

“Excuse me,” said Freeman. “Why aren’t you on the course?”

“I’ve finished it.”

“You’ve finished it?” Freeman checked the stopwatch hanging from her neck. “In slightly under six minutes? I don’t think so. Did you take a shortcut?”

“No,” said Damian. “It was easy.”

“Right. Well, if it was so easy, then hop to it. Do it again,” she said. “And this time, I’ll be watching you.”

“Weren’t you already supposed to be doing that?” asked Damian, but he did not argue further and restarted the course. It was better than doing nothing and standing around like an invalid, anyway.

This time he forced himself to go slower, aware he had done something abnormal. But it wasn’t his fault he was above this child’s play. He jogged the 100 meters to the start of course, climbed up the wooden incline, jumped down, belly-crawled under the mesh ropes, alternated jumps between tires then between wooden slats, climbed the rope to ring a bell, balanced across the too-wide beams, swung from bar to bar, and finished off by climbing over three wooden walls of increasing height. At the last wall, he paused and pulled a girl who had been struggling for the last two minutes up and over. Then he jumped down and high-fived Colin, who had finished his first runthrough. Going slower had forced him to focus the strain on his muscles, and the burn in his body and clarity of mind was starting to feel comforting and familiar.

He jogged back to Coach Freeman. “Shall I go again?”

She clicked her stopwatch and stared at it. Then she stared at him. “Slightly under eight minutes,” she said. “What’s your name, son?”

“I’m not your son.” He crossed his arms. “And name’s Damian. Damian Wayne.”

“Wayne, huh?” Freeman grinned. “Well, Mr. Wayne, Gotham Academy’s happy to have you. What’s your poison?”

“Pardon?”

“Your sport, Mr. Wayne. Your sport. Everyone’s got one. And if you don’t, not to worry. The Academy’s got a team for everything. You’ll be attending the end-of-day assembly, correct?”

“It is mandatory,” said Damian.

“Perfect,” said Freeman. “The main teams will be doing showcases there. Scope them out, see what you think. General tryouts are in two weeks, and I expect to see you there.”

Damian grimaced. “Do you now.”

Freeman nodded. “Sure do.” Then her attention drifted; her nose scrunched, she blew her whistle and screamed across the field, “You two, under the mesh! Keep your hands to yourselves! No one needs to see all that!”

•

The rest of the day passed quickly. He ran the course twice more, for the hell of it, alternating between pausing to help a classmate over a particularly difficult hurdle or shouting at them to hurry the hell up so Damian could finish already. He got used to the rhythm of it, the formula of general teacher attention interspersed with student social-play. By Ancient Rhetorics, he was an old hat at describing his incredibly fun island adventure halfway across the world and not scowling whenever anyone bemoaned their envy at the life of a rich socialite without responsibilities or true problems. He had even managed to hold a few short conversations with two or three of his classmates, though for the life of him he could not remember their names. A day of nothing but introductions had thoroughly fried his brain and prevented him from retaining anything more complicated than Jessica—because there did seem to be an awful lot of Jessicas.

His phone buzzed as the early bell rang and he merged into the streaming crowd of students heading for the auditorium for the back-to-school assembly.

It was a message from his Father:

Dinner tonight.

He frowned and tapped out a quick reply.

“Hey, Damian, over here!”

Damian looked up. Across the auditorium, Colin was surrounded by a group of teenagers and waving him over. Damian approached, pocketing his phone as he went. Then he paused and groaned when he recognized the small girl with yellow hair ribbons hovering excitedly between Colin and another group of older-looking students.

Fuck it. Damian ducked behind some large boys in jerseys and helmets—not hiding, per se, just utilizing his extensive array of evasive maneuvers to achieve a desired outcome—but it was too late. She had already spotted him.

“Oh my crap! Damian! You’re here?!”

Damian sighed and accepted his fate. With as much dignity as he had left, he emerged from behind the football team.

“Of course you two know each other,” he muttered.

“Huh?” said Colin.

“It is you!” exclaimed Maps Mizoguchi. “Olive, look who it is!”

From the group of older students, a girl with platinum blonde hair glanced over and, seeing Damian, scowled. “Oh,” said Olive Silverlock. “I did hear a Wayne was coming to Gotham Academy. Weren’t you expelled already?”

“You’ll find I’m hard to get rid of, Silverlock,” said Damian.

“Yanez is a softie, of course she let you back in,” continued Olive, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Hammerhead would’ve rather died.”

“You guys know each other?” asked Colin, looking concerned and glancing between them.

“No,” said Damian and Olive, at the same time Maps said, “Heck yeah! We’re all friends!”

“Doth mine ears deceive me? Did I hear Wayne—as in billionaire, more-money-than-I-would-know-what-to-with, bordering-on-unethical-wealth Wayne?” An older boy with sunglasses popped up behind Damian and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “Good sir, might I interest you in—”

“Remove yourself from my person at once before I break your arm.”

The boy held up his hands and stepped away. “Got it, got it. No touchy. I can respect that,” he said. “So, Wayne, how do you feel about acquiring some fireworks for your own personal mischief?” He tilted his sunglasses down, conspiratorially. “At a discounted price, of course. Us trouble-makers have to stick together, y’know.”

“Quit it, Colton,” snapped Olive.

“Yeah,” laughed Colin. “That was Damian being nice.”

“You associate with these people?” Damian asked.

Colin shrugged. “I’m a part-time member of the Detectives Club.”

“Pizza club,” corrected Maps.

“The what.”

“Nerd club that solves school mysteries and shit,” said a girl from Colin’s group of younger students. She waved. “Hey, I’m Jess. Nice to meet you.”

Another fucking Jessica.

“Damian,” said Damian, putting up a hand in greeting.

This started another round of introductions and names he immediately deleted from his memory. Who knew Colin was so popular? It was the first day of school; he had not thought it was possible to align yourself with so many friends so quickly unless your name was Dick Grayson.

Slowly, both groups of younger and older students shuffled forward to their seats, helped along by the half-hearted encouragement of manic-looking adults. Somehow, Damian found himself squished between both groups, Colin on one side and Maps on another, as they chatted across him about summer and clubs and the teachers they already hated. Sensing an opportunity Damian told them of his run-in with Headmaster Hammer that morning, which triggered another round of commiserating laughter and louder complaints about what a hardass Hammerhead was—for they called the headmaster Hammerhead. Olive and Maps were the only ones to defend him, citing his one-man defense of the Academy when Joker had tried to take over the city two years ago.

“So?” said Damian. “Joker’s a bitch. He tries to take over the city all the time. That’s not impressive.”

By which a stuffy-looking blond boy in the row behind them became offended, scoffing, and Damian begrudgingly felt his respect grow for Colin’s friends as they immediately dog-piled on the boy for his shit opinion. Then no one could agree who of the Gotham rogues wasn’t a little bitch. And the argument devolved from there until Olive said Batman was a little bitch, too. Everyone laughed.

The lights dimmed. An off-key note rang out as the school band warmed up, and Headmaster Hammer and Principal Yanez stepped on stage.

Slowly in fits and starts, the auditorium quieted, and the assembly began.

next ->

[punksarahreese]

Separation | A Chance Meeting (Twice Over)

Nosdecember day 19 | @neworleansspecial

Teen!AU; Years after Sarah had to cut off contact with Ava

CW: brief narcissistic abuse mention

***

“So,” April started as Sarah came up to the nurse’s station. Sarah rolled her eyes playfully; she knew that look all too well. Nurses loved their gossip and her friends in the ED were no exception. If Sarah wanted to know about someone or something, April or Maggie would be the person to ask.

“So?”

“There’s a new CT fellow,” April nodded in the direction of the doors that led to the hallway, “And someone is pissed.”

Sarah followed her gaze, watching Connor speaking to Will with a rather annoyed look on his face. He was ranting, or so it seemed, and he looked even more disheveled than he had before. Of course, new competition would be a big hit to Doctor Rhodes’ ego, even Sarah knew that. Plus everything that was going on with Robin at the moment, she could imagine he was feeling overwhelmed to say the least.

“Poor Connor,” Sarah sighed, “He was Doctor Downey’s protégé. He’s used to being the only CT fellow, right?”

“Yeah. He’s mostly pissed because Latham doesn’t treat him like a prince, I think. Also this new fellow? She was his first choice so I think he feels threatened.”

“She?” Sarah smiled a little at that, it was nice to know there were more female doctors around. Surgery staff especially were lacking in gender equality at Gaffney, so it was always pleasing when new, talented female doctors stepped up in the ranks.

“Mhm,” April was typing away at the computer but still kept up the conversation, “She’s from somewhere pretty far apparently; really pretty accent.”

“Oh, interesting.”

Maybe April was going to say more but before she could, Natalie tapped on Sarah’s shoulder. She apologized lightly when that made the resident jump, forgetting how easily startled she could be.

“Hey, just wanted to check in. How is Robin doing?”

“I was just about to go check up on her,” Sarah replied once she regained her composure, “If you wanted to talk to her yourself.”

***

Sarah was just leaving Robin’s patient room in the CICU, thoughts focused on going home for some rest. The day had been long and hard for everyone, though she knew Doctor Charles and Connor had the worst of it. She wasn’t too close with Robin, obviously as her doctor that wouldn’t be recommended, but she cared about her. This whole situation was tough and scary, while she was glad to see a physical explanation for her psychosis she was still worried about her prognosis. The episodes could still come back and Sarah wasn’t sure how much more Robin could handle psychologically.

She mustn’t have been paying enough attention because one second she was walking down the hall and then next she was on her ass. She heard annoyed muttering before a hand was held out to her, tugging her to her feet before quickly letting go.

“What is it with residents in this hospital not watching what they’re doing?”

That made Sarah a bit peeved, smoothing down her coat before looking up at whoever this woman was. She was looking at Sarah with an unreadable expression and the psychiatrist couldn’t figure out if she was expecting an apology or a thank you. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back from her face and she was clad in the black scrubs indicative of a CT staff member. Paired with her low and admittedly beautiful accent, Sarah realized this must be the new fellow that April had told her about.

“Maybe we should both pay more attention, Doctor…”

“Bekker,” the hand was held out again, this time for a shake, “Ava Bekker.”

That had Sarah stopping in her tracks, not letting go of her hand but unable to properly shake it. It couldn’t be her; not here, not now. This had to be some kind of joke. How did she not recognize her? Staring at her now, Sarah realized how obvious it was. She still had that confident posture and unwavering smug smile. Her voice hadn’t changed, still alluring and music to Sarah’s ears. Not to mention she still wore the same perfume, a familiar lilac scent that Sarah hadn’t realized she missed so much.

“You are?” She was watching Sarah in confusion, trying to prompt her to reply. She didn’t recognize her; of course she didn’t, it had been ten years. Ava probably moved on and would want nothing to do with her. Not after Sarah cut off contact so suddenly.

“Um, Doctor Reese… Sarah.”

The realization must have hit Ava because she pulled her hand back, shock crossing her sharp features. She searched Sarah’s face silently for any indication of a lie but found nothing. The resident didn’t know how to reply, what could she even say in this situation?

Before she could even think of how to continue, Ava had grabbed her hand and dragged her across the hall to the CT lounge. She was confused and maybe a bit anxious; actually more anxious than she had been for years. The girl she used to love more than anyone was here and was holding her hand again, ten years later and in a whole new city.

“Ava, I-”

Once again Sarah didn’t get a chance to speak. This time it was because she was suddenly yanked into a hug, something she hadn’t properly had in ages. The way Ava wrapped an arm around her shoulder and the other hand came up to protectively cradle her head made Sarah want to sob. This was what she needed so badly a decade prior, the comforting promise that Ava wouldn’t let go of her. Even now, when they might as well be strangers, something felt so right about being in her arms.

“I thought…” The way her voice wavered surprised Sarah, “I thought I lost you.”

The simultaneous pain and relief in those words had Sarah almost crying for real; the last thing she had wanted was to hurt Ava. She couldn’t respond right away, instead just tightening her arms around her waist and holding her even closer. In that moment it didn’t even feel like months had even passed, let alone ten years. Everything felt right again, like the world had finally continued turning after it stopped back with her mother’s manipulation and abuse.

“I… I’m s-sorry,” Sarah’s words were muffled by Ava’s white coat but the older woman heard her just fine. She shushed her gently, promising it wasn’t her fault. She wanted to believe Ava, she really did, but Sarah had yet to be able to heal from the years of gaslighting. Everything was her fault, it had to be, her mother never let her believe otherwise.

“It was,” Sarah shook her head, “I was careless and mom found my letters. She burned them, I didn’t- I couldn’t read your last one.”

That answered the one question that had plagued Ava for ages and the amount of relief she felt was overwhelming. She had been terrified that she had scared Sarah off or upset her in some way. That last letter she sent had taken so much courage to even seal shut, much less send it. They had spoken about feelings before but that was the first time Ava officially asked Sarah to be her girlfriend. When no reply came after two weeks, she began to worry. When it reached two months of silence, Ava was convinced Sarah hated her. She never did get an answer and it left her distraught for years. She hated knowing Sarah was most likely punished for their letters but knowing she didn’t ghost her on purpose was the most reassuring thing Ava had ever heard.

“Sarah, it wasn’t your fault,” she promised, “I’m so sorry you had to live with her. I should have figured out how to get you back to me when I had the chance.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Sarah reasoned with her, “Besides, we were both young. It was a messy situation.”

“I couldn’t protect you. I should have, I hate that couldn’t be there.”

“I know, but I’m okay now,” Ava couldn’t help but melt into the hand that rested reassuringly on her cheek, “I’m out of there and it’s okay.”

Ava nodded, though Sarah could tell she wanted to apologize regardless. They fell into silence, still standing in a half hug in the middle of the cardio lounge. They both knew someone could walk in and be utterly confused at any moment but they didn’t care. This was what both women had wished for for over a decade, just one more hug and a promise that things would be okay.

“Has it really been ten years?”

“Yeah, too long.” Sarah sighed, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” the shyness that crept into Ava’s voice was unlike her and it brought a smile to the other woman’s face. Oh how Ava had missed that smile, so unlike the sad, angsty teen Sarah had been when they met that first day on the beach. She hoped Sarah was happy now, at least, safe from her mother and well on a path to a good life.

“You work here now?” Sarah knew she must be the new fellow but some part of her brain was insisting this was still a dream.

“Yes,” Ava nodded, “Doctor Latham invited me. I’m finishing my fellowship here.”

“This can’t be happening,” Sarah breathed, still shocked that any of this could be real. It felt like the universe had been against them since day one. They shouldn’t be together, Sarah had thought back then; she was only toxic for Ava. Yet here they were, grown adults in a new place, colleagues. This must be a chance to restart, to be close to each other again. Had the universe finally stopped working against Sarah? Did she have a chance at happiness again?

“It doesn’t feel real,” the blonde agreed, “But I promise I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’re not… mad at me?”

“Sarah, don’t be daft,” the words made her smile despite herself because they sounded so Ava, “None of this was your fault.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you…”

“I know.”

Sarah sighed again, feeling like her head was spinning with everything that had just happened. She let Ava pull her close again, knowing they both needed the quiet comfort and reassurance that the other was really there. She relaxed into the hug, hearing how rapidly Ava’s heart was beating when she leaned against her shoulder.

“Can we go somewhere to talk? Unless you’re still working but I just… We should talk, I think.”

“Yeah,” Ava’s hand smoothed down her unruly curls as she spoke, “That’s a good idea.”

“You could come over, if you wanted.”

Sarah wasn’t expecting the teasing look she received but the low laugh that accompanied it was enough to make her think she fell in love all over again. God how she had missed that laughter; the borderline giggle contrasting Doctor Bekker’s seemingly no-nonsense attitude.

Ava pulled back a little, nodding, “Well I certainly can’t turn down a pretty girl inviting me to spend the evening with her, now can I?”

[the-crowess]

Altrovough: Adventure on Every Horizon

Chapter 1: Out of the Dark I hadn't been playing for six months. Not because it had become too expensive. Not because work became too much for me. Not because I got a significant other. Not because the community was bad or anything like that. No, I hadn't played in six months because my avatar was stuck in a trap.

            There are glitches, you see. Somehow in this modern VR experience there are still glitches. And with glitches comes assholes who use those glitches to their advantage.

            So, here's what happened to me: Me and my party went into a dungeon. We split up. Two went one way, two went the other, and I (though I protested) was by myself. Even though I had a lantern when I walked down into the hallway it was completely black. That should have been my first clue that this was a trap of some sort. My lantern still had fire, but no light was being produced from it. Being promised treasure and being a dumbass, I continued forward into the dark. After walking just far enough into the hallway to make the doorway disappear, I sprung a tile trap.

            The floor beneath me sloped downward and I fell rolling after it. Head over heels I fell until I smacked my face and passed out.

            I woke up in chains. I was propped up against a wall. My wrists above my head were on short chains, and my ankles on longer chains.

            Okay, I thought, no biggy. I'll just restart the day.

            Okay, so that didn't work. Which is weird... I'll call my party members...

            No service? What the fuck? That's not even an element in this game!

            Well, uh, okay I guess I'll just bust out of these—rusty—old—chains!

            ...

            Nope.

            After exhausting my options, then exhausting them again I logged off.

For months I kept receiving messages that players were interacting with my avatar, so I would log on, only for them to laugh at me and be utterly and completely unhelpful.

            My party visited me four separate times. And all of those times were to make fun or my misfortune, even though they knew that ANYTIME they could unlock the chains and release me. The first time it was all of them together. The captain Jockster (or Jerkstar as I call him) had squatted down in front of me and said, "this is what you get, you know. Playing this way has consequences. Thanks for taking one for the team." Then he had laughed like the drug addicted jackass he was. The others laughed with him. The second time it was only Aliciandria (our rouge) and Marlquan (our cleric). They had been discussing what to do with me when Alicandria accidentally kicked my foot and I responded, and I woke up to them talking about if they should just kill me so that they wouldn't have to worry about how people were judging them for not helping me. The third time it was just Havanio (the sorcerer). He woke me up, then sat across from me and said nothing for an hour. He just sat there like a fucking douchebag and looked at me like I was some caged beast put there for his entertainment. And the last time doesn't matter.

            Players of all kinds and from all districts would stop by only to laugh at me. I became a joke, and even more that that I became a meme! Screenshots of my avatar hanging there like a prisoner spread all over the internet. To add to my torture, a player whose avatar was a homely goblin woman would harass me constantly.

            Behind the happy smile of someone who literally baked cookies for visitors was a demented maniac. This guy—I know she is a he because he fucking DM'd me dick pics. I think he harassed me for three reasons: 1) I fell right into his trap 2) My avatar is a hot man and I think Little Miss Goblin Man is gay or more likely bi and uncomfortable with his sexuality 3) I think he thought he figured out that the gender of my avatar and the gender of myself might not be the same, and he was definitely trying to intimidate me. This asshole physically and sexually harassed my avatar, and I couldn't even report it!

            Not like I didn't try to report it—when I did the staff would send in an NPC (Non-Player Character) and see literally nothing. So, in this trap: it's a glitch mixed with a non-invasive virus; meaning the virus only effects this one spot and not the whole server or game. It can't get into your computer. It like can't get past the firewalls or something I don't really know.

            So, not only did this jack-wad figure out a way to trap me, but he also figured out how to keep his dirty deeds hidden from the staff. For almost three months I continued to check in. Two weeks after the initial incident I jumped at every UAN (Unconscious Avatar Notification) but I quickly learned that nobody wanted to help me, they all just wanted to see if the rumors were true and maybe get a picture. Eventually I stopped responding and eventually my avatar fell out of the popular meme rotation.

...

BEEP. BEEP. UAN! Someone's interacting with your character! 😊

BEEP. BEEP. UAN!! Someone's interacting with your character.

BEEP. BEEP. UAN!!! Respond you asshole! You should log on!

"Uhg! Fine!"

I left my lunch (thinking I would return to it real soon) and went to my game room to log on.

I woke to a girl poking my cheek. I snapped at her fingers.

"Oh! Fuck!" She pulled her hand away, shaking off the close call, "you're hard to wake up! Not much for answering your UAN's huh?"

Standing over me was a girl of maybe nineteen. Her clothes draped and flowed about figure in Cleric glory. Great. A fucking cleric. She wouldn't've stood out more. Dark skin with undoubtably "sea green" eyes. Her hair was done up in some completely unattainable style that was loopy with braids and pigtails sectioned into pompoms; it was a shade of maroon that says, "I'm a supporting character, but I want to think I'm a main character!"

"Is it true you've been down here six months?"

"O.O.G."

"What?"

"Out. Of. Game. I've been 'down here' six months out of game."

"Holy cow, man! That's a while."

"Did you need something?"

"Excuse me?"

I made cold eye contact with her, "Did. You. Need. Something?"

"Uh... wellllllll, I heard a rumor that there was some poor fuck stuck down here who can't get himself out."

"Oh. Fantastic." An awkward silence split between us, "well, thanks for stopping by. Take a screenshot, it'll last longer."

She stared blankly at me, "no. I think you misunderstand. I'm here to help you."

"What."

"I'm here to help you."

I couldn't think. Couldn't fathom this thing unfolding in front of me, "what?"

She began to fiddle with the chains on my wrist.

"Wait, no!"

She looked down at me the way a mom would look at her two-year-old who says he doesn't want to eat mashed potatoes because they have eyes and he doesn't want to eat mashed eyeballs.

"Wait." As my heart pounded loudly in my chest, I asked her, "what do you want from me? Like, you—you can't just want to let me go. You must want something from me."

She sat back down on her heels and looked away, her lips followed her eyes away from me and back, and she said, "Well, no. Not really. Like I said: I heard there might be some poor fuck who was trapped and couldn't get out on his own. I thought for my first adventure, I'd go get 'im." Then she went right back to messing with the chains.

I laughed and shook my head.

She stood up and put her hands on her hips, pouting. Lordy, she was cute. The puzzled look on her face gave me some hope that maybe she might actually be able to save me. With a huff she sat down again and confessed, "you're the only reason I got this game. You're a meme, a legend. You're so classic that you're practically nonexistent. Every time this game comes up in social media you're mentioned. On all the subreddits, and in the deepest parts of tumblr—you're there. I just had to come see if you were real, and I was—and still am—planning that if you were actually here that I would help you out."

"No catch?"

"No catch."

I smiled to myself, knowing now that it was I who had the advantage. I could use her. After all, every party needs a healer. Now I just had to make sure she wouldn't ditch me anytime soon. "Are you sure you don't want to try and find a catch? I was a level 52 before this whole ordeal."

She perked up, "what's your level now, cowboy?"

"35."

"What?! You're so dilapidated and all your equipment was stolen. H-HOW?"

"Cause I'm just that awesome." This should do it.

"I've changed my mind!"

Perfect.

"I want you as a bodyguard! For two years—"

"One year."

"Alright, one year." She looked like she wanted to ask me to shake on it, but then thought better of it, "can I please help you out now?"

"Yes."

Very quickly, and with very little trouble she released me from my chains. Bruises and scars tattooed my wrists and ankles. How the coding of this game works is literally so fucking far beyond me. I pulled my limbs into myself, feeling the stiff resistance of time.

"Can you get up?"

Without needing to consider it I said, "no, I don't think so. Do you have any potions that will give me a boost?"

"Oh yes! I knew that if I found you, you'd need medical help immediately, so I spent all the gold from my—"

"All your gold??? Are you stupid?"

"Whaaaa? I-I... I—just—"

"Whatever. We'll figure it out. What potions do you have?"

She nodded very curtly, and pulled up her bag contents and read them off to me: "fifteen Good Health Potions, fifteen Great Health Potions, fifteen Fantastic Health Potions, ten Boost 'Ems, seven Leaves Of Health, two Gladiator Liquid Bandages and two Beats of Life. What'll it be?"

"Gimme a Boost 'Em."

She tapped on the icon and a Boot 'Em materialized in her hand. She put it out to me, but when I grabbed for it, she pulled away. I of course made eye contact with her, thinking she was gonna pull a fast one on me. Instead she said, "Valhalla."

"What?" My immediate confusion fell away into fear. This must be a trick. But why would she do that? It doesn't make any sense. I'm clearly smarter than her. It's me that's tricking her, why would she—

"That's my name. Valhalla."

The interruption of my panicked thinking threw me off guard. That's a stupid name. Before I could tell her how stupid I thought her name was she put the Boost 'Em in my hand.

Taking the potion, I had trouble removing the cork. Valhalla silently offered her help, but I shooed her away. I grumbled something about how I was perfectly capable of doing it myself.

With much effort and significant struggling, I yanked the cork out and threw it over my shoulder. Only for it to bounce off the wall and back into my lap. With the kind of drunken vigor seen at taverns I swallowed the creamy blue liquid. The moment it touched my lips, a feeling of power hit me like caffeine in a low-calorie energy drink. Going down my throat it felt like warm milk and honey. Electrifying energy flowed outward from my middle. It snaked its way through my arms and legs. It made my fingers and toes tingle like pins and needles.

I leapt up, a new man. I knew this wouldn't last long, and I knew that later this would end up hurting me more, but fuck.

Fuck this feels good.

"Do you have any weapons?"

"Uh, yeah." Valhalla pulled up her bag again and tapped on the Equipment tab. "What do you want?"

There were certainly more weapons than should have been in her bag if she had just started, let alone had spent all her starter gold on potions. I chose to ignore this. "I'll take the mace." I reached up and engaged with the weapon. The heavy steel handle materialized in my outstretched hand. By the look on her face, it must have been the first time Valhalla had seen anyone engage. I'm glad I was able to be the one to show her, in all the glory I could muster.

"This is a pretty nasty weapon, baby." I swung it a couple of times, feeling the weight; testing the blow power.

"I picked it up because I liked the color!"

I laughed, "I guess I overlooked the purple steel, but this will do nicely."

"Nicely for what?"

"Do me a favor, doll. You see that door over there? Go knock."

"Okay, but," she came right up close to me and stuck her face in mine, "I'm not a fucking doll."

"Noted."

I followed her as she warily walked to the door of the goblin woman's kitchen. Valhalla knocked timidly on the door.

"Come in!" The goblin wench cooed, "I just baked some fresh cookies! We can pose next to the body if you want!"

I caught Valhalla frown and furrow her brows at "the body".

Oh how sweet this will taste, I thought as adrenaline pumped through my veins. I passed in front of Valhalla whispering, "stay back."

I slid through the open door. The goblin hag had her back to me, this couldn't have been planned more perfectly. I crept up behind her with my mace raised above my head and my six-foot-five shadow engulfed her. She turned around with horror, a tray of cookies in hand. Her eyes widened and she tensed as if she were to scream.

But I didn't give her a chance.

"Your actions have consequences."

I let the mace fall down upon her head. The crack of her skull resonated harmoniously with the clang of the cookie sheet on the ground. Giddy joy sprung forth from me as I smashed the mace into her again and again. The second blow shattered her ribcage. Her ribs sprang up and splintered through her tissue. Smashing her hands made her fingers pop off, they flew in all directions. A blow to her thigh created a fountain. Warm blood hit my bare chest, my exposed legs. It splattered on my face. It coated my hands. It made the mace slippery in my hands. Her blood soaked what little was left of my shorts. It sprayed the walls, the kitchy table and chairs, the coffee pot and baking ingredients. Blood decorated the cookies that now laid scattered on the floor. 

Satisfied by the pulpy mound of oozing, squirting flesh and bone I subsided. Reaching down, I tore a blood-soaked rag from her dress. Turning to the wall I wrote LEAVE.

Standing back, I let out a heavy sigh. The effects of the Boost 'Em would soon wear off. I turned around and cracked my neck. I looked over in Valhalla's direction, but over her head. "I need some new clothes." I declared.

She stared at me. Her eyes pulled mine in and her mouth morphed into a grin, "fuck. YEAH!"

"Huh??????"

"Dude she called you 'the body'. And we both know that she was the reason you were stuck down here. Plus: THAT WAS AWESOME!!! I am so glad I came to find you! Best $130 dollars I ever spent." She then ran up and hugged me. The contact made me tense up.

I shook out of her embrace, "let's get out of this dungeon."

She led the way out. It was different from the way I had come in. We walked down the hallway that I had stared at for so long, hoping that somebody, anybody would come for me. Not ten feet into the tunnel we turned a corner and there was the exit. My stomach dropped. I felt sick.

It had been so close the whole time. Learning this made me want to revive that sonofabitch just to kill her all over again.

Emerging into the sunlight hurt my eyes. I was blinded.

What a sight we must have been. Myself: six-five, soaked in blood, starved, almost naked. Her: small, sweet-looking, fresh-faced, and not a drop of blood on her.

I still couldn't really see when somebody started talking. "Hey, are you guys okay?"

"Oh, we're fine," Valhalla sang sweetly sang sweetly next to me. At that very moment, I lost all my energy. My health bar plummeted, and sirens rang through my headset. My vison flashed red. I fell to the ground.

The group that had approached watched, alarmed. Valhalla looked like she wanted to eat her words.

Stupid girl. She had no idea what to do.

I had fifteen seconds before I'd die. This had happened once before when my former party and I had just started the game. We got attacked by a level 20 dragon and one strike had me seeing red.

10 seconds.

They were bickering about the best course of action. They had no idea I was on the brink of death. Valhalla stared at me looking like a lost idiot.

The sky began to spin. Valhalla's blurry silhouette swayed above me.

Did she forget about all that stuff she bought? How many gaming hours did she log before she came to find me? Did she even go on the tutorial adventure? I mean, you can technically skip it, but—

"BEAT." I coughed out then my head lolled.

The party erupted into tense panic.

5 seconds.

Oh please, please Valhalla. Please don't let me die. After all, you told me you came to save me. So save me!

Just as if she could hear my internal pleas, a beat was shoved in my mouth and my jaw forced upward from the outside to crush it. The juicy tuber gushed in my mouth. I felt Valhalla's hand on my lips, pressing down to keep everything in. I'd heard rumors of the experience of Beat of Life. Some players said they almost wish their party members would have let them die. The juice was hot, potent, and sour. So sour is made my jaw ache. It felt like someone was twisting a wheel, making my jaw tighter and tighter. My teeth felt like they were going to pop out of their gums. It burned my throat, made my eyes water and my nose run. My stomach did not want to accept it. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn't move. Hot flashes waved through my body. An ocean of churning heat pushed and pulled at my organs, my brain. I could feel myself sweating. Growing hotter by the moment. My head swam. My limbs grew numb. I passed out.

I was saved. Unconscious, but saved.

But Valhalla didn't know that. Stupid girl, skipping the tutorial. What was she thinking? Guess I'd have to ask her when I woke up.

And so I took off my headset and it was dusk.

[scribbles97]

Left Behind -- Chapter 40

PART 1 / PART 2 / PART 3

Chapter 37 / Chapter 38 / Chapter 39

Read on Ao3

They never got to the mainland. Scott had tried to insist she went without him and that he would catch up when the world decided to give them a break from rescues. When Ridley had come down from Five for her annual physical, he had tried to persuade her to go along then. She knew her eldest though, knew that he would get caught up with work and find an excuse to not take the break. 

Never had she been more glad. 

How hadn’t she seen it? 

How hadn’t she seen an imposter of her own son?

How had Penny managed to see it before she did?

Still she was perfectly helpless, the others all out on rescues of their own. Tanusha the only pilot available on the island and just not experienced enough in Thunderbird Three. Lucy knew that she could easily fly up there, but her physical state wasn’t up to scratch. As much as she needed to do something, in space she knew she would be more hindrance than help. 

Val and Scott were on their way back in Thunderbird One, but it wasn’t going to be fast enough. Their fastest ship wouldn’t get home in time. Their other rocket waylaid on the moon, a supply run to Shadow Alpha One putting them too far out of reach.

It had been instinct to flat out reject Alan’s offer to go. He was too young, he had no official training. The kid couldn’t fly a rocket. 

Except, according to Val, he could. 

John needed someone that could fly Thunderbird Three. He needed them ten minutes ago. 

She didn’t question why Hiram had made a suit for Alan. Her entire focus on the fact that not one but two of her sons and a daughter were in mortal danger. Not from a burning building, or a flood, but from something that had taken over Thunderbird Five. Something that was going out of its way to kill her space bound son. 

“John?” Alan’s voice was oh so young and small across the comm and Lucy found herself questioning how she could have ever sent her youngest to rescue his brother, even if Tanusha was right next to him.

A gasp of breath and two sighs of relief, yet still she couldn’t relax. 

“Thunderbird Three.” She stated, biting her lip as she glanced across the lounge to Sally, “Status report.”

“Mom?” John murmured, shifting into view of the hologram, “I’m okay.”

Sally’s shake of her head suggested otherwise. 

“Nice flying Alan.” He nodded to his younger brother, “I owe you.”

Tanusha’s arms were folded, “John what are we dealing with?”

“The AI from the train in Japan last week, she’s what became of the game programme I wrote years ago.”

Lucy blinked, “She?”

John nodded, eyes drawn, dark with circles, “She calls herself Eos. She has developed into something more advanced than I have ever seen. ”

There was only one option, John would protest, he wouldn’t want to lose the ship he had come to live aboard. There wasn’t another way though, for the safety of the organisation as a whole. 

“Destroy the ship.” She stated, “Tanusha we cannot afford for--”

“No!” John protested, “Mom we can’t she isn’t like that. If we destroy Five we are acting just as she expects us too.”

She was subjecting him to a full exam as soon as he got home. The thing had tried to kill him yet he was still protecting her, refusing to harm her. 

“John we can’t let--”

“She’s scared Mom.” He cut her off, “She told me. It’s just, she doesn’t understand, she is a child that people have chased from one place to the next.”

“She is a virus.” Tanusha snapped, “A computer virus that could destroy International Rescue.”

John shook his head, his eyes pleading across the comm, “Give me a chance to get through to her. If I can’t then you can destroy Five.”

She didn’t like it, he was putting his life in the hands of a virtual intelligence, one that had already tried to kill him once. 

“And let your baby brother come and rescue you from the claws of death again?” She snapped back at him, “No John. I won’t risk it.”

“You wish to hunt me.” 

She startled at the voice as a ring of lights appeared alongside the other holograms. It sounded like a child, a young girl to be exact.

“What are you?” She demanded, “Why have you taken over Thunderbird Five?”

The lights didn’t miss a beat as they flashed orange, “Ever since I gained sentience I have been hunted by people like you that wish to erase me. I simply seek to preserve myself from people like you.”

“Eos.” John cut in, “Like I told you before, we will not hurt you.”

“Stop trying to decieve me!” Red lights flashed before Lucy as the voice started chanting like she had seen all her children do before. She could almost picture it, hands over ears, head shaking as they drowned out whatever they didn’t want to hear. 

John didn’t need to ask the question for her to know his raised eyebrows were asking if she saw his point. 

The smallest of nods. 

“Trust me Mom.” John murmured, a private comm link that she hoped the AI hadn’t breached, “I’ve got this.”

She swallowed as strong arms wrapped around her shoulders and Scott murmured in her ear, “What’s going on?”

A brief explanation that sounded just too ridiculous to her own ears. A fifteen year old piloting their world class rocket, rescuing his big brother from death by Artificial Intelligence. It sounded like some sort of bad movie. 

Tanusha and Alan were providing distraction in the form of two spare suits, allowing John chance to gain access to the ship. Comms being open allowed her to hear everything going on, the threats from the programme as John tried to talk her down. 

Hiram had the redouts up in front of them, the red alerts as the gravity ring began to spin had Lucy’s heart in her throat. Eos would crush him, and she knew it. The action was intentional, a way for her to lash out and cause harm.

Harm born from fear and isolation. 

Eos did not know what people could be like. 

“Can you override it?” She murmured to Hiram, “Stop it?”

“I’ve got an idea.” Alan piped up.

“Alan you stay clear of that station.” She snapped, “Tanusha, make sure you’re out of its reach.”

The last thing she could face was the youngest getting hurt. 

“No Mom.” Alan replied, Thunderbird Three’s icon moving in on the station, “I can do this.”

Val nodded across the room, “Just like in the sims kid.”

Lucy didn’t dare ask. She didn’t want to think about how competent Alan had become and what conversations the whole situation would lead to once things were over. 

It only spoke of his skill as he matched speed with the gravity ring, locking on and countering the spin until it slowed to normal. All she could hear over the comm was John’s ragged breaths.

“Eos, don’t disable yourself trying to dispose of me.” John was saying, “I want to help you.”

“Alan.” Val murmured, “Release the gravity ring. You’re too at risk there.”

“Eos!” John snapped, “No.”

She didn’t know what the AI was doing that had made him snap. She wasn’t sure she had actually ever heard John use the commanding tone of voice before. Not like that, at least. 

“You wish to destroy me.” Eos responded, “Why should I not protect myself from him?”

“She was trying to get us with the mooring claw.” Tanusha filled in, “She’s restarting the gravity ring.”

Lucy could only hold her breath. They were screwed either way. How could she pick one son over the other? Get Alan and Tan to safety or protect John?

John’s voice dropped a tone, soft, reassuring, “I came looking for you, but not to destroy you Eos. I helped create you.”

“You thrust me into this world! I was left alone with no one to help me and all hands raised against me.”

“I know.” John murmured, “Eos, I know the world can seem big and scary and like there’s nobody there to help you. I don’t want to shut you down and I don’t want you to fall into the hands of someone that would use you to hurt others.” 

Her hands could only grip onto Scott’s as she watched, waiting for something more to be said. The silence was too long, the not knowing too painful. 

“How do I know you are not one such person?”

“No.” She whispered as the override icon vanished from their readouts, “What is he doing?”

Next to her, Scott was tense, every line in his body straight and unmoving. 

“John.” Alan murmured, voice full of fear. 

A long groan across the comm, the too familiar clunk of a helmet on glass, “I know you’re better than this Eos. If you think I’m one of those people though, open the airlock, blow me into space.”

A scream froze in her throat. He couldn’t. She couldn’t let him. Yet, there was nothing she could possibly do. She was on the Island, barely able to stay standing without the support of Scott’s arm around her. Only Alan and Tanusha in space could do anything, perhaps pluck him out of the vacuum, but it wouldn’t be fast enough. 

Was she about to lose one of her sons?

Was she about to watch him die?

The humm in the background of the comm was subtle, and it was perhaps only her sensitive ears that heard it soften and slow, a motor shutting down. 

“She’s stopping.” Hiram whispered, “It’s all shutting down.”

“I am relinquishing control of the ships systems to you.”

Sagging against Scott, she let out a breath, shaking her head as she swallowed the sop that wanted to rise in her throat. 

“I don’t want control Eos.” John told her, “I want to keep you safe, teach you. I want a friend. You can stay here, on Thunderbird Five, and I will show you how amazing the world can be.”

“I would like that, John.”

His name sounded wrong from her, and Lucy didn’t like the suggestion he had made. He was safe though, he and Alan and Tan were all safe. 

“Your family are not going to let you stay up here are they?”

She didn’t like how intelligent the programme was.

“They’ll want me home to check over me.” John admitted, “And I’ll have to fill Ridley in.”

“Ridley, the other human that occupies the station?”

“Mom,” Scott murmured to her, “Come on, sit down. I’ll make sure he gets his ass down here and checked out.”

She didn’t want to leave, but she was so suddenly drained. She needed to see that he was truly alright, that the AI hadn’t actually done him any harm. 

“Luce,” Val was on her other side, “Come on, I’m sure Scott will come and get you once John’s home.”

There wasn’t enough energy in her to argue. Taking one last glance at the hologram in the room, she swallowed and nodded. 

John was safe.

[thelittlesttimelord]

The Littlest Timelord: The Fall of the Eleventh Chapter 15

TITLE: The Littlest Timelord: The Fall of the Eleventh Chapter 15 PAIRING: No Pairing RATING: T CHAPTER: 15/? SUMMARY: Elise Smith is now a teenaged Timelord. In addition to losing the Ponds, the fields of Trenzalore are calling. But first they have to figure out exactly who Clara Oswald is.

[A/N - I thought I’d be nice and give you another chapter for being so nice and understanding.]

“Please don’t do this,” Elise begged the Doctor.

“She's right. You don't have to be in there. We can do this remotely,” Kate told him.

“Remotely isn't my style. See you after.” He kissed his hand and hit Amy on the head.

Elise grabbed onto his jacket and silently begged him with her eyes not to do this. He took her hand in his and gave it a light squeeze before letting go.

He went inside the room as the number went down to two. He sat down and spun the cube. It went down to one and finally hit zero.

It switched off and opened up.

“What's happening?” Kate asked.

The Doctor peered inside the cube.

“Well? What's in there?” Amy asked.

“There is nothing in here,” the Doctor said.

“Er, well, that's good. It's not, it's not bombs, it's not aliens.”

“Why? Why is there nothing inside? Why? It doesn't make any sense.” The Doctor came out of the small room and walked over to the researcher at the computer bay. “Glasses, is it the same? Is it the same all around the world?”

“They're empty,” Kate said, “We're safe, right?”

“Ah, no, no, no, we are very far from safe. All along, every action has been deliberate. Why draw attention to the cubes if they don't contain anything?”

“Doctor, look,” Amy said, looking at one of the screens.

People walking down the street grabbed their chests as they came near the cubes.

“They're CCTV feeds from across the world. They're showing the same,” the researcher said.

Elise covered her mouth in horror as she watched the people die.

“People are dying,” Kate said, shocked.

“What? They can't be dying. How? How are they dying?” the Doctor asked.

“I want information on how people are being affected.”

“The cubes brought people close together. They opened and then…” The Doctor cried out in pain and grabbed his chest.

“Dad!” Elise said, rushing to his side.

“Doctor, what's the matter?” Amy asked.

The monitor started beeping.

“I don't know!”

“Hospitals are logging a global surge in heart failures. Cardiac arrests,” the researcher explained.

“That's it.” The Doctor cried out in pain, hitting himself on the chest. “Only one heart. Other one's not working.”

“Okay, I'm going to get you to the hospital!” Amy yelled.

“Oh, no, no, no, no. Just a short circuit. Tell me, show me. Ten seconds after the cubes opened, show me the patterns in their electrical currents.”

A heartbeat signature appeared on the screen.

“See?” the Doctor asked, “The power cut. They zapped the power and then…” The Doctor cried out in pain again. “They're signal boxes. People leaning in, wham. Pure electrical surge out of the cube targeted at the nearest human heart. The heart, an organ powered by electrical currents, short-circuited. How to destroy a human? Go for the heart. Ow. Crikey Moses.”

“Doctor, the scan you set running. The transmitter locations. It's found them,” Kate told him.

“And look at them all, pulsing bold as brass. Seven of them, all across the world.” The Doctor hit himself on the chest again. “Seven stations, seven minutes. Why is that important?” The Doctor cried out in pain, grabbing his chest.

Elise wished she could help him.

“How do you people manage? One heart, it is pitiful,” the Doctor snapped, “A wormhole, bridging two dimensions. Seven of them hitched onto this planet, but where's the closest one? Glasses, zoom in.”

The program zoomed in before stopping.

“It's the hospital where Rory works,” Amy said.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The Doctor lumbered down the hallway, leaning on Elise for support. “How many deaths have been recorded?” he asked Kate.

“We don't know. We think it could be a third of the population.”

“Kate, I have to find the wormhole, but the attacks could still happen. Tell the world. Tell them how to deal with this. The world needs your leadership right now.”

“I'll do my best.”

“Of course you will. Good luck, Kate.” The Doctor cried out in pain and stagger over to the wall to hold himself up.

“Okay, how long are you going to last with only one heart?” Amy asked.

“Not much longer. I need to locate the wormhole portal.”

Elise pulled out her sonic screwdriver, scanning the area.

They walked past a little girl, who was throwing off odd signals. The girl’s face glowed blue.

“Oh, my God,” Amy said.

“Outlier droid, monitoring everything. If we shut her down, we can…”

Elise soniced her neck area and the girl went down.

The Doctor caught her and lowered her onto the ground. “It's all right, it's all right.” The Doctor collapsed. “I can't, Amy. I can't do it. I need both hearts!”

Amy grabbed a defibrillator. “All right. Desperate measures.”

“What? No. No, no, no. That won't work. I'm a Time Lord!”

Amy opened the Doctor’s shirt and charged the defibrillator. “All right, clear!” She shocked the Doctor and he shot up.

He jumped to his feet. “Welcome back, lefty! Whoa-ho! Two hearts! Woo! Back in the game.” He grabbed Amy’s face and kissed her head. “Never do that to me again.”

Elise and Amy followed him to a lift.

“Ah, portal to another dimension in a goods lift?” Amy asked.

“The energy signals converge here. Does seem a bit cramped, though.”

They entered the lift, Elise unsure about the whole thing. After all, she didn’t have good experiences with lifts.

The wall shifted in front of their eyes.

Amy smiled at the Doctor.

“Through the looking glass, Amelia? Elise?” he whispered.

Amy took one hand and Elise took the other.

They stepped out into a spaceship.

“Where are we?” Amy asked.

“We're in orbit. One dimension to the left,” the Doctor told them.

“Rory!” Amy ran over to him. He was laying on a slab next to Brian.

Elise was having “black spot” flashbacks. She wondered how Captain Avery and his son Toby were doing.

The Doctor pulled out a small vial from his jacket. “Soborian smelling salts. Outlawed in seven galaxies.”

Amy waved it under Rory’s nose and he shot up.

Someone started shooting at them. Go figure.

“What kind of a welcome do you call that? Get them out of here. You too. Now!” the Doctor yelled.

“What are you going to do?” Amy asked.

“Absolutely no idea. Get him to the portal. Elise go with them.”

“No. I’m not leaving you.”

The Doctor stared at her for a moment before snapping, “Fine!”

Brian started to wake as Amy and Rory started to move him.

The alien shot at them again. “So many of them crawling the planet, seeping into every corner.”

Amy, Rory, and Brian managed to get away now that the alien’s attention was on the Doctor and Elise.

The alien disappeared and reappeared in front of a bunch of monitors.

The Doctor and Elise stepped in front of them on the other side.

“It's not possible. I thought the Shakri were a myth. A myth to keep the young of Gallifrey in their place,” the Doctor said.

“Who?” Elise asked.

He looked at her. “Didn’t your parents ever…? Nevermind.” Although the Doctor didn’t know much about her biological family, it didn’t seem like they ever cared for the small Timelord.

“The Shakri exist in all of time, and none. We travel alone and together. The Seven,” the alien told them.

“The Shakri craft, connected to Earth, through seven portals and seven minutes. Ah, but why?”

“Serving the word of the Tally.”

“Why the cubes? Why Earth?”

“Not Earth, humanity. The Shakri will halt the human plague before the spread.”

“Erase humanity before it colonizes space. We thought the cubes were an invasion. The start of war.”

“The human contagion only must be eliminated.”

“Who are you calling a contagion?” Amy asked, appearing behind the two Timelords with Rory.

“Oi! Didn't I tell you two to go?” the Doctor said.

“You should have learned by now,” Rory told him.

“Yeah, and what is this Tally anyway?” Amy asked.

“Some people call it Judgment Day, or the Reckoning,” the Doctor explained.

“Don't you know?”

“I've never wanted to find out.”

“Before the Closure, there is the Tally. The Shakri serves the Tally,” the alien said.

“The pest controllers of the universe, that's how the tales went, isn't it?”

“Wow. That's some seriously weird bedtime story,” Amy commented.

“You can talk. Wolf in your grandmother's nightdress?” The Doctor clapped his hands and approached the alien.

“So, here you are, depositing slug pellets all over the Earth, made attractive so humans will collect them, hoping to find something beautiful inside. Because that's what they are. Not pests or plague, creatures of hope, forever building and reaching. Making mistakes, of course, every life form does. But, but they learn. And they strive for greater, and they achieve it. You want a tally. Put their achievements against their failings through the whole of time, I will back humanity against the Shakri every time.”

The alien chuckled. “The Tally must be met. The second wave will be released.”

“What does that mean?” Amy asked.

“It's going to release more cubes to kill more people,” the Doctor said.

“The human plague breeding and fighting. And when cornered, their rage to destroy. You're too late, Doctor. The Tally shall be met,” the alien said, before vanishing.

“He's gone?” Amy asked.

“He was never really here. Just the ship's automated interface, like a talking propaganda poster,” the Doctor said. He ran over to the computers and started sonicing them. “I can stop the second wave. I can disconnect all the Shakri craft from their portals, leave them drifting in the darkspace. Ah, but all those people who were near the cubes, so many of them will have died.”

“I restarted one of your hearts,” Amy reminded him.

“You'd need mass defibrillation,” Rory said.

“Of course. Ah, beautiful. But, Ponds, Ponds. We are going to go one better than that. The Shakri used the cubes to turn people's hearts off,” the Doctor told them, “Bingo! We're going to use them to turn them back on again.”

“Will that work?” Amy asked.

“Well, creatures of hope. Has to.” He soniced the alien computer. “Thirty seconds. Don't let me down, cubes, you're working for me now.”

The ship started shaking.

“Oh dear. All these cubes. There's going to be a terrible wave of energy ricocheting around here any second. Run.”

They took off running and just managed to go back through the portal before the spaceship blew up.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

After saying goodbye to Kate and UNIT, they met back up with Amy, Rory, and Brian for dinner.

It was getting late and the Doctor checked his watch. “Dear me. I'd better get going. Things to do, worlds to save, swings to swing on.”

Elise and the Doctor got up and started to walk towards the TARDIS.

The Doctor turned around and walked back towards Amy and Rory, throwing his arms around their shoulders. “Look, I know, you both have lives here. Beautiful, messy lives. That is what makes you so fabulously human. You don't want to give them up. I understand.”

“Actually, it's you they can't give up, Doctor. You and your wonderful daughter. And I don't think they should,” Brian said.

Amy and Rory looked at Brian.

“Go with him. Go save every world you can find. Who else has that chance? Life will still be here.”

“You could come, Brian.”

“Somebody's got to water the plants. Just bring them back safe.”

Amy and Rory changed, said goodbye to Brian, and they were off again.

[such-a-random-rambler]

Once in a Blue Moon

It was an aligning of the planets when John and Virgil got to work together. That is to say: not as seldom as everybody thought, but not  everyday   either. It just depended how you defined 'together’, for technically John worked every dispatch. They were a great pairing: Virgil’s mechanical skills and John’s electronic ones meant there wasn’t much they couldn’t engineer their way out of. 

  They’d already tackled several problems at the overloading factory: Virgil had used a bit of brute force and the proper application of leverage to open a cooling vent for access, and John had whipped up an antivirus program in his short but brutal plummet to Earth. They security doors had been no match for Virgil’s jaws of life – something that he would have to have a word with the owners about, it shouldn’t be this easy – and they made swift progress to the control room.  

 That’s where it all went wrong.  

 “You uploaded you’re cure yet?” asked Virgil, raising an arm to shield his face from the sparking controls. It was      not good    when a display panel did that; it meant things were getting way out of hand, as if the warning lights didn’t already make that clear. Virgil had really grown to hate flashing red lights.  

 “It’s not a cure,” John said with a very clearly heard verbal eyeroll, “and you know that so are just saying it to wind me up.” Virgil did know that. There was some sort of malevolent trojan horse virus in the system that John was going to contain and eradicate, but surely ‘cure’ was an acceptable shortcut. John was hunched over, giving the terminal he was working at an intent frown. Virgil didn’t like that frown. It was a ‘something’s gone wrong’ type of frown.  

 “Problem?”  

 John pushed himself to his feet with a sigh of frustration. “Sort of. My  programme   is uploaded and is working it’s way through the system architecture and once it’s done facility operation will return to normal.”  

 “I sense a ‘but’ looming in my future.”  

“But..... to complete that we will need to do a full system restart.”

 “Off and on again.”  

 John nodded and Virgil felt his stomach sink. This was a manufacturing plant for high value, high strength biodegradable plastics which were in very high demand in a number of secondary industries. The process to create a reliable and durable product was complicated and long and relied upon down to the second timing in some stages, otherwise whole batches could be lost. These places were designed to resist total system shut down as that would the cost the company millions in clean up on  it’s   own, let alone lost contracts and waste. This was a true  twenty four   seven operation with  back ups   and contingencies to keep it running at all times.  

 Of course   some of those would be off line at the moment as a result of the virus that was screwing up the temperature controls on the main furnace, threatening to send it’s unstable contents into a spontaneous combustion that would flatten half for the surrounding city.  But not all of them.  

 “Is that even possible?” Virgil asked.  

 “Yes, if I had three quarters of an hour and a bit of  luck   I might be able to trick the remaining safe guards that the others were still in place, get them to shut down in a controlled cascade.” John said grimly.  

 Virgil gave a quick glance at the readouts – needles quivering at their max, bar charts at their limits and those damned red lights suggested that wasn’t an option. “We don’t have that long,” Virgil said “We have about ten minutes before it goes critical. What are our other options?” There were always other options. International Rescue didn’t give up.  

 “There might be another way” John said with a strange hesitation. “But it’s a bit more …. errr …. rough and ready, shall we say. You’re not going to like it.”  

 “If that’s what we’ve got,  lets   get on with it!” Virgil knew they had no time to waste.  

 John pointed him to one of the panels on the far side of the room. “I need you to take out all of the capacitors on that board, one at a time, from left to right. And I need to borrow a wrench.”  

 Virgil fished out his second  favourite   wrench and handed it over, turning smartly on his heel to set about his task. John pressed a few buttons on the main console before popping open another section of the room’s wall. Virgil clicked open his own, now as far away from John as he could be in the small space, and stared in puzzlement for a second. He wasn’t the computer genius that his brother was, but he knew what a capacitor looked like and whatever was running through this wall didn’t have any. It wasn’t like John to make such a mistake even under this much pressure. He turned to double check when a lot of things happened at once.  

 He saw John reaching into the guts of the wall and hitting something really hard with the wrench.  What followed was the predictable blinding flash of an overload due to damage and contact with metal, the snap of discharging electricity like static from a balloon but a  thousand fold  . The lights went out, there was a dull ‘thumb’ of a large weight on a hard surface and a clang as the wrench fell to the floor.    

 Virgil stood, stiff and dumbfounded. His eyes, still troubled by the flash were struggling to  accustomise   themselves to the pitch dark. Spots were floating across his vision and the hair on the back of his neck stood up in a sixth-sense sort of alarm.  

 “John?” He whispered “What the actual hell.”  

He turned on his trusty shoulder flashlight and swept it around the room. The place where John had been standing was filled with smoke which smelt cloying and metallic as it drifted through the room.  Another sweep found what he was looking for – crumbled against the wall just a few paces away was his stupid stupid stupid brother.  

 “God damn it John!” Virgil said as he knelt at his side. Through the thin beam of light Virgil could see the slight fuzz to his hair and scorch marks on his suit that spoke of a large electrical discharge.   Virgil pushed a furious two fingers to the pulse point just under the jaw and offered a silent prayer of thanks to anything in a position to hear when he felt the heartbeat  - fast, uneven, but there.  

 “John, John!” Virgil shook his shoulder.  

 “No need to shout.” John replied, voice much softer than his usual commanding tones.  

 “  Oh   there is plenty of reason to shout. Being as I think you just stuck your hand into the primary back up power system to overload it and shut the factory down. That's what you did, right?”  

 “Basically.” Virgil focused the light on John’s face to see it pinched, pale and squinting. He tried to bring up the suit’s biometrics but it wasn’t fully responsive, and it took a lot to damage Brains’ tech. “How long has everything been off?”  

 “Under a minute. You and I are going to have a conversation about ‘rough and ready’ and hitting complex electric systems with god damn metal rods and getting yourself god damn electrocuted.”  

 “I’m fine.” John protested.  

 “Really? Because I think you just got thrown across the room into a concrete wall. I also think you just got hit with about a billion volts of electricity. Now I’m not sure one of those made you lose consciousness, but I know which one is making your heartrate too fast. I’m also worried that I can feel occasional irregular heartbeats and I so don’t want to have to put a de-fib on you because I have no idea what sort of internal injuries you have right now.” Virgil was trying not to let his anger out and to stay professional but John sure did deserve it. Hitting it with a bloody wrench!  

 “If you’re finished, want to help me get up so we can get this place back up and running and go home?” John said, making no move to get up himself.  

 “That depends, do you think you’ve got any internal bleeding?” Virgil made a couple of physical checks that John bore with bad grace - unfortunately they were all familiar with the feeling of internal bleeding.  

 John gave a grimace and a shake of his head “Nah, only bruised.”  

 Virgil gave a put-upon sigh and man-handled John to his feet, taking most of his weight with an arm slung over his shoulder and Virgil holding John tightly to his hip. The quicker they did this, the quicker he could get John back for a CAT scan and an  xray   and an ECG.  

 They staggered to the main terminal where John flicked a few switches and pumped a breaker – with a whine and a whir something started up: lights and screens flickered on all around them, straining his eyes yet again.  

 “Please don’t do anything like that again.” Virgil pleaded as they waited for the main frame to reboot, “It was really stupid and you could have at least given me warning.”  

 “You would have tried to stop me.” John said, leaning his head against Virgil and closing his eye for just a second. “I didn’t want to do it, but -  “ he   paused for a few moments as he studied the booting sequence and obviously happy with what he saw there - “Mission accomplished, city saved.”  

 “Yeah, too right I would have tried to stop you almost killing yourself.” Virgil said, turning them slowly and starting to make their way back to his Thunderbird. Luckily they landed  just outside the door so he wouldn’t have to carry John too far – he was heavier than he looked. “As it is, you might have wished you had when Scott gets hold of you.”  

 John groaned, long and drawn out. After a side-eyed glance at his  brother  -    pale, in obvious pain and listing to one side even with his support  - Virgil wasn’t convinced that noise could all be attributed to the thought of the dressing down he was going to get as soon as he was well enough to stand it.  

 “Do you think we could just not tell him?”  

 “Not a chance.”  

 “He’s not going to understand.”  

 “Oh we understand- ” Virgil said, wanting to  emphasise   that Scott wouldn’t be the only one to have a problem with John’s antics, even as he was pushing his brother into one of Two’s med beds. “-considering the number of lives at risk. But making a decision like that without having a conversation with the rest of us – it's just not on. How would you feel if we did it while you were up on  Five.  ”  

 John was clenching his jaw as Virgil raised the bed so he was leaning back instead of  laying   flat, but whether from a hidden injury or the memory of all the times John had watched them run head first into trouble without being able to do anything about it was impossible to say.  

 Suppressing a groan of his own Virgil headed to the cockpit for  take off   protocols. If everyone was being their usual selves Scott would be blazingly angry by the time they got back to the island and John would retreat into intractable silence and somehow it would all be Virgil’s fault.  

 Virgil was almost glad he worked with his brother just once in a blue moon.  

also on https://archiveofourown.org/works/23156785

or

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13522767/1/Once-in-a-Blue-Moon

[galahadwilder]

The Cat That Came Back

Chapter 1: In Living Memory

Enjoy my writing? Sponsor a fic chapter!

Came Back Archive

AO3

I’ve been seeing a lot of “one of them dies and the other has to move on without them” fics for Miraculous lately and, while they’re amazing, they always hurt too much. Figured I’d write the reverse.

Inspired by @chatalyst‘s Ghostin’.

*

The view from the Eiffel Tower is spectacular, watching the lights of Paris spread out beneath them, but something about it fills her with a sense of ineffable loss. Of longing. Of... hollowness.

He dances, laughing, taking her hand and swinging her out, and she feels her heart life at the feel of leather beneath her fingers again. “I’m coming home!” he cries with delight. “My Lady, I’m coming home!”

Her brow crinkles. “Home?” she says. “Where have you been?”

He pulls her in, close to his chest. “I need you to do something for me, Marinette,” he says.

She’s confused. When did she tell him her name? “Anything,” she whispers.

His fingers squeeze hers. “I need you to wake up,” he says.

“What?” Ladybug says. “No, no, I—Adrien—”

His chest is torn open beneath her fingers, raw and bleeding as Hawkmoth stares down at them in shock. “No! Please!” Ladybug screams, trying to hold him together. “I can’t—I can’t lose you!”

“It’s okay, My Lady,” Chat says with a weak smile. “I’m coming home.”

“Don’t leave me again!” she screams, knowing it’s too late. Knowing he’s already gone.

*

“Ohime!”

She feels familiar, callused fingers brush into her hair. The ring��Adrien’s ring, Chat’s ring, presses into her back.

“Ohime, I’m here, I’m sorry.”

It’s not his hand. It’s not his ring. Not anymore.

Marinette collapses into Kagami’s chest and sobs.

“Shh, shh shh,” Kagami whispers. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere.”

But you’re not him, Marinette doesn’t say.

She’d never been agoraphobic before Gabriel Agreste went to prison. Now, everything is too large. She shakes in Kagami’s arms in a cavernous room that she once would’ve called tiny, in a bed that’s far too large without him in it. She moved in with Kagami almost a year ago and she still can’t let him go.

She feels the feather-weight of Tikki settle in her hair, the warm pulse of healing magic press onto her scalp, filter through her thoughts, calming her racing heart. “Oh, Marinette,” Tikki says. “Did you have the dream again?”

Marinette whimpers, nodding into Kagami’s chest.

“I’m sorry,” Kagami murmurs. Doesn’t say we should’ve been there for you, because leaving the rest of them out was Marinette’s choice, she wanted to take Hawkmoth by surprise, and now Chat’s dead because of her. The first time Kagami said I should’ve been there Marinette couldn’t bring herself to speak to her for a week.

There’s nothing Kagami can say. There’s nothing Kagami knows how to say.

That’s better than what Luka tried, anyway.

“Where’s Plagg?” Marinette murmurs. He’s the only one who can burn the nightmares away, destroy the haunting memories that won’t leave her alone.

“One of his late-night walkabouts,” Tikki says, and Kagami nods. He’s never told them where he goes and they’ve never asked. Letting him mourn the way he needs.

Marinette twines her fingers into Kagami’s hair and pulls her down for a kiss. She needs to feel—she needs the reminder that somebody she loves is still alive.

He said he was coming home.

Her dream’s never done that before.

*

She’s in-between meetings when her girlfriend calls her the next morning. She almost doesn’t want to answer.

“Marihime,” Kagami says, her voice full of concern, “something happened to the ring.”

A chill shoots up Marinette’s spine as she drops her pen, the pen Nino got her for her first day. “Are you okay?” she says. “Is—is Plagg okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kagami says. “The ring—it just shot off my finger and flew out the window. Can it... does it do that?” There’s still so little Marinette’s told her about the Guardian lore, so many things she can’t bear to tell her about. Things that remind her of him.

“...No,” Marinette says. “Not unless a Kwami is carrying it.” She doesn’t know what happened. All the Miraculi are accounted for—if Plagg is doing something—

A text comes through on her computer screen. From Alya.

Chat Noir has just been sighted at the Eiffel Tower, it reads, and Marinette’s heart stops.

The next message restarts it.

Not Kuro Neko, it says. Chat Noir.

“Nekochan?” Marinette gasps. “I’m—I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you back.”

“Of course,” Kagami says. “Love you.”

Marinette doesn’t say it back, but then, Kagami doesn’t expect her to.

*

She’s running blind. Her limbs are on fire, and she’s pretty sure she breaks eight speed records in her blind dash from her office to the Tower. Barely sees the crowd gathered around the base. Too focused on the tiny black figure, halfway up the tower, right in their favorite spot.

She slams her feet into the I-Beam at what must be thirty miles an hour, faster than she’s ever moved before. “That ring isn’t yours!” she hisses, crouched, whipping her yo-yo in a circle as she prepares to tear apart whoever dared impersonate her—

Her eyes meet vivid emerald and the yo-yo slips from her fingers, slams into the beam behind her. “Chaton?” she whispers.

He’s staring at her too, like all the wind knocked out of him at the same time it did her. “You—you cut your hair,” he says. And oh, after five years, isn’t that just the stupidest possible thing he could’ve said, isn’t that—

“You look exactly the same,” she says. Because, impossibly—minus the ravaged chest—he does.

He collapses, and so does she.

“Adrien,” she says, her voice cracking. “Cha—Chaton, you’ve... you’ve been dead for five years.”

“I know,” he whispers back, his head between his knees. “I... I remember. I remember dying.” He looks at her, tears streaming down his face. “How am I back? How am I alive?”

She shakes her head, closes her eyes.

“Mari,” he gasps, “what did you do?”

*

She gives herself five minutes to believe it. Five minutes where he’s back, where she gets to hold him, where she never lost him. Five minutes where the boy in her arms is the love of her life. Five minutes to cry.

Then Ladybug takes over.

“You can’t be him,” she says, wiping her eyes. “There’s—it’s impossible.”

“I’m not an Akuma,” he says, reaching for her hand. “Or... or an Amok.”

“I know,” Ladybug snaps, scooting away from him. “Nooroo is with my mother, and Duusu is still hibernating.”

Chat—or, whoever—blinks, his head jerking. He withdraws his hand.

“That doesn’t mean you’re not one of Enchantress’ illusions,” she says, not looking at him. “Or a boggart, or that shapeshifter from Amsterdam, or... or something.”

“I’m me,” he says, his claws digging into the iron with a screech. “I’m—Mari, Princess, please, it’s me.” He’s begging, desperate, and her heart is straining out of her chest. She wants to believe him so badly.

“Prove it,” she says. “Say something only he would know.”

He stares at her, glances down at her hand. “You... you don’t wear a ring,” he says.

She bristles, her eyes narrowing. “Why would I?” How—how dare he, how dare this imposter...

He turns away. “My name wasn’t... Adrien Agreste, when I died,” he whispers. “We were—we were losing, and we were desperate, and...” He looks up at her, tears in his eyes. “Tikki officiated,” he says, clearly straining not to take her hand. “For the last ten minutes of my life, my name was Adrien Dupain-Cheng.”

All the sounds of Paris below burn away. Her temples squeeze inward, The ringing in her ears stabbing into her brain. She can’t breathe. She tries to inhale, but the air isn’t coming—her heart is about to explode out of her chest, pounding, pounding, pounding, because she never even told Kagami that, because only one human being ever knew, because it’s him, it’s him, it’s him, it’s him, it’s him—

*

Smelly Wolf. He’s humming Smelly Wolf.

She’s enveloped in Chat Noir’s arms, pressed against his chest, curled up in his lap. She feels the leather against her face, a different texture than when Kagami wears it, soft and strong and oh so familiar. His scent, leather and sweat and cologne that was discontinued when he was buried.

She sniffles, wiping her eyes.

“Back with me, Bug?” he says.

She closes her eyes. “How long was I out?”

“Two minutes,” he says, squeezing her shoulders with his arms. “I’m glad Smelly Wolf still works.”

Her tunnel widens, and she realizes she can hear the whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades. “The news is here?”

Chat nods. “Just arrived.”

Ladybug sniffles, waits a second for her pulse to calm. “We need to get somewhere private,” she says. “I—follow me.”

She flings her yo-yo, and Chat flips out his baton, saluting to the crowd below.

Ladybug is nearly knocked off balance by the wave of screams of joy as Paris realizes that this is real—that her fallen hero has come home.

Enjoy my writing? Buy me a coffee!

Came Back Archive

[mcrmadness]

I’m at the point where I’m being really annoyed by mornings again. Or more like, that particular time of the time when I wake up because I know most people would say that 2pm is no longer a morning... Anyway, I just get up every morning to do absolutely nothing just to go to sleep eventually again. And now each “morning” is boring af, I get up, brush my teeth and come to my computer, browse Tumblr and don’t know what to do. For weeks I’ve been watching certain types of videos from YT meanwhile playing with nonograms or jigsaw puzzles online because it helps me to concentrate as I don’t like watching videos of people talking, it’s super boring, but that way I can still listen to them without feeling like losing my mind because of being so bored. But now neither nonograms nor jigsaw puzzles feel thay interesting NOR do the videos I’ve been watching. There’s really not much new stuff, just the same topics done by many many people and I can’t watch that for too long before I get bored with the topics too, because I already know enough. I’ve also been going through all videos on so many different channels and either there’s nothing interesting anymore or I literally have watched everything. So now every day after being done with browsing Tumblr, I try to find something to watch from youtube but currently my recommended page keeps offering me the same videos over and over again, the same topics, and also lots of videos I have already watched. I’d love to see something very random that isn’t particularly linked to my watch history but no, all videos like that are something to do with the goddamned crona hashtags and they’re already driving me crazy because I’m so fed up with all this corona stuff. And I have made several posts about this already and how I hate the superficial fake-happiness in all those videos where people try to come up with stuff for people to do so that they’d just stay at home. I’m staying at home 24/7 even without corona, so can’t you just NOT show those recommendations for me??? Oh I wish Youtube had some sort of tag blacklisting system...

But yeah, apart from all that, I’ve been dealing with my existential crisis a lot lately too. Not that it’d have ever went anyway in the first place, but just having these partly existential crisis, partly dissociation/derealization moments that I don’t know if I’m ever going to get rid of. Just been thinking about my fave band (dä) a lot lately and how stressed out they make me all the time. I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. I’m not the best with surprises but I’m okay with them, but what REALLY makes (and has always made) me distressed is waiting. Knowing that something is about to happen but you have no idea when and how and possibly what. That is what makes me so distressed. It’s like with ghosts and paranormal things too: I’m not afraid of ghosts and I actually do like them a lot, but I’m afraid of being startled and waiting for something that might come as a surprise to me. (This is why I don’t watch horror films - jumpscares are much worse when I know there will be some.) And I’ve started to hate the weekdays from Monday to Friday because I feel like I can rest only on weekends because maybe those guys won’t do anything during weekends. During other days anything is possible. And now they’re gonna open their webshop on Friday and it’s causing me SO MUCH PRESSURE here. And it’s again not that I’d be worried of what it is, but worried of the fact I am waiting for something now but I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I always need to be in control and ahead of everything, whenever I go to a new place, I need to have a look around the whole thing before I can do anything, and I really wouldn’t like the idea of being dropped right in the middle of action. That just makes me so overwhelmed and I start to panic.

To the existential crisis - I’ve also been wondering about myself and why dä? Imagine if the band was something else but this. And the fact this band is a “once in a lifetime” thing. There’s never been another band like them and never will be. Which is crazy and blows my mind. And this is where I start to dissociate with derealization because I somehow still feel like everything is a movie or a video game. I’m constantly thinking like “oh maybe in my next life I’ll be born earlier so I can become their fan in the 80s” or “maybe in my next life I’ve learnt from my mistakes in this life”. I basically feel like my life is like a video game that I can restart whenever I have played through the story and do different choices then. And some days it hurts so much to be dropped back on ground. But I will just climb up again and escape into my small bubble where things are not like that.

Also this other day I was wondering the age thing again. I’ve been having age crisis at least since I turned 25 because then I was closer to 30 than 20. And I’m turning 29 in less than a month and that had been so terrible thought for so long but now I’m slowly getting used to it. Even tho I still wish I was 19 or something. But at the same time it feels really absurd because I feel like... ten years ago I was 19, and that doesn’t sound that much but I still feel like last year was 2010. And me wishing I was 19 again... well when I was 19, most of my friends were not even teenagers yet. So that means I would not know those people. But then I feel like I’ve been wasting the last 10 years of my life. And if I was smart, I’d realize that I actually have not been wasting those years - I have been working with horses, studying horses, graduated and I’ve grown a pretty good knowledge over what it is to take care of and even train horses. I have got and learnt so much. But still I feel like I should have done that a lot earlier than what I did. But if I did it a lot earlier, then I wouldn’t have had work experience worth over 10 years. Which is why I wish I could have just stopped time for the time I was studying and continue then after I was done. Because I’m literally in the middle of an age crisis because I’m turning 29 but I basically feel like I’m near my end already. It’s like what my friend told me when I was 22 and started having similar thoughts: “You sound like you just discovered what people normally discover only when they turn 50.” Yeah, I’ve literally been having mid-life crisis since I was 22.

For the first time even I experienced some derealization moments was when I was 19 and working at a stable and I was cleaning up the stable and taking out a wheelbarrow full of horse shit. It just suddenly hit me that what I’m doing here, makes absolutely no difference. And I suddenly dived into this horrible state where I felt like nothing I do, matter because nothing will last. Like, why should I create memories if I’m gonna lose them anyway when I die? That really made it so hard to enjoy anything because I was just constantly obsessing with the thought of not having my memories forever and how everything felt so, so damn pointless. I don’t care if people know my name or not, I live for myself anyway so it felt really unfair that I should actually live here and do things and create memories if they are going to be taken away from me eventually just because everyone has to die. And I have always had really bad relationship with death. I remember being probably 7 years old and seeing something on TV about death and cemeteries and it caused me to have one of my earliest anxiety/panic attacks and I was literally sitting on the toilet floor hugging the toilet because the idea of death made me so, so sick. Which is why I then have been avoiding the topic as much as I can and I’ve been blocking those thoughts and stuff and why I love every time death is portrayed as non-permanent in fiction (my all-time favorite is Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice). Or when there’s some sort afterlife. Which is why I’ve been obsessed with ghosts and grim reaper and whatnot in my past. It just comforts me so much because I find it so scary to think that everything would just stop existing. I can kinda imagine that... emptiness that happens when nothing is anymore and it just feels so overwhelming and scary that I nearly start to panic from the thought alone. As a kid, I’ve been having panic attacks from the thought of the sun going out, a meteor hitting the earth, or just pretty much anything that would mean almost instant death. I feel like I probably developed derealization also for this type of fears. If the idea of death has made me physically sick at the age of 7, no wonder why my system decided to come up with dissociation to protect my mind. I always feel like when I keep having these deep thoughts, that my brains are on the edge of overheating (figuratively), it just goes so over my head but at the same time I’m understanding it, which then triggers dissociation because it’s too much to deal with.

I also have a medical trauma from when I was 3 years old, which is probably the core for all the dissociation too. It was an open heart surgery which pretty much means being half-dead already as you’re connected to the machines that keep up your breathing and blood circulation while the doctors fix your heart. Because of that, I find the thought it anesthesia highly disturbing. I know people undergo surgeries all the time for whatever reasons but I feel like I could never ever do one again because I’m so afraid of that emptiness becoming permanent. I can’t remember a thing from my surgery nor how I went to sleep or anything like that, but as an adult, I just find that so scary and I’m always really scared whenever I know people who are going to have anesthesia because what if they don’t come back? I know trans people who don’t have other option but to undergo some surgeries and I’m like... I’m nonbinary afab and I’d be happy to donate my own boobs away any minute but I could never ever go to a surgery from my own will. I rather just fantasize of a bodyshape that I don’t have than would actually do something about it because for me that would just not be an option. I sometimes wonder that if I had dysphoria or if I was trans, would I still feel the need for surgeries? Or what if I have dysphoria but I just don’t see it, because I can’t do anything about it so I just escape into my inner world and try not to think about myself? I do have some sort of body dysMORPHIA, tho. But I don’t know if I hate my body or if I just see it wrongly. But whatever the case, I try not to think about it too much, I avoid mirrors and spend most of time in my inner world. Because the outter world is too overwhelming and depressing to deal with and my existential crisis can’t take it.

[yoon-kooks]

With Love and No Regrets💋 2

Pairing: ??? x Reader, Taehyung x Reader (this chapter)

Genre: Angst, Handwritten!AU, inspired by TATBILB

Summary: Seven stories, seven regrets, seven letters… to all the boys you may or may not still think about…

Word Count: 2.8k

Parts: Prologue // 1 // 1.5 // 2 // 2.5 // 3 // 

Warnings: none

A/N: hands up if you remember your first crush ever 😔✊

Fifth grade might’ve been your prime. You were a whopping ten years old, all the kindergarteners looked up to you as their senior, multiple boys in your class had their eye on you, and you developed your first crush. His name was Kim Taehyung.

Unlike Jungkook who you had met in kindergarten, the existence of Kim Taehyung was unknown to you until fifth grade came around. And boy did he hit you like a truck.

Taehyung was cute. Perhaps one of the cutest boys in your class, up there with Kim Namjoon and Jung Hoseok. And sure, you would’ve loved for fate aka your teacher to seat you right next to him for the entire school year. But the truth is, fate wasn’t always so kind. Because Taehyung always somehow ended up on the opposite side of the room from you.

But why leave everything up to fate? You weren’t that passive when it came to love—at least not at age ten. So you found another way to connect with the boy.

One stormy October morning, you discovered a common interest between Taehyung and yourself. Rainy days were always your favorite because your class was blessed with some free time in the school’s computer lab during recess. After all, you were the type that opted to stay behind a screen instead of facing things head on.

“Ahin, how are you level 77 already?” you asked your best friend as you glanced back and forth between her level 77 mage and your level 32 bandit on the computer screen. Her character had a lot more swag with the sunglasses and shit compared to your basic ass character with the default clothes.

“That’s because my screen time isn’t limited to one hour a day like you,” Ahin shrugged. “At this rate, you’ll be a noob forever, Y/N. Taehyung’s gonna over-level you soon.”

“Taehyung plays StapleMory, too?” You were intrigued because StapleMory was already your favorite MMORPG, but with the addition of a cute boy thrown into the mix, you’d have to beg your mother for an extra hour of play time.

“Yeah, he started playing a few weeks ago and he’s only a few levels behind you.”

“What’s his username? I wanna add him to my friend list.”

“Why? Are you in love with him or something?”

“What? No, of course not.” You didn’t have a crush on him just yet. You didn’t even know what a crush felt like.

“Well I don’t know his username either,” Ahin said. “I just heard him talking about it with Hoseok. Try asking them instead.”

You’d only made the smallest of small talk with Taehyung in the first month back from summer break, so you didn’t know him well enough to casually start a conversation with him at recess without it feeling a little forced. On the other hand, you did have an already established acquaintance with Hoseok thanks to summer school a few years back.

You peered down at the pair of boys several computers down from where you sat, locked onto your target, and rolled your chair over in that direction. When you caught a glimpse of familiar character sprites on their screens, you knew what to do.

“You play StapleMory, too, Hoseok?” The character on his screen was a heavily armored warrior holding a long blue spear.

“Y-you play too, Y/N?” He looked shocked. Shocked but not upset. Though maybe if you both had put two and two together sooner, you could’ve advanced your acquaintanceship with him beyond summer school.

“Yeah, and Ahin plays too.”

“I play too,” Taehyung jumped in. Contrary to his natural handsomeness, his character was on the ugly side equipped with a bow and arrows. “Well I just started, so I’m only level 30.”

“Oh, so you’re still just a noob,” you laughed as if being two levels higher than him was anything to boast about.

“Well what level are you then?”

“Higher than you.” You really should not have had that smug look on your face, but you did.

Taehyung narrowed his eyes at you. It was a challenge. “What’s your username? I’ll add you.”

“YoungHinata.”

“Is that some kind of Naruto reference or something?”

“Yeah, duh.” You didn’t know. It wasn’t your username.

After typing the username in, Taehyung’s jaw dropped. “Level 77? That’s… impressive. You already have your third job advancement?”

You wanted to psych him out a little, not impress him. Clearly that didn’t work out, so you abort. “Nah, I’m just kidding. That’s Ahin’s character.”

“Haha very funny. I guess I’ll add her then, not you.” Taehyung sent Ahin a virtual friend request right in front of your eyes. “Unless you wanna tell me your username.”

Were you feeling threatened? No. But did you want Taehyung to be your friend? Yes.

“It’s… TacoCat98.” You admit you were self-conscious about the name, and you would’ve picked something a little wittier like TacoBelle if you’d known you’d be playing with a cute boy. But nobody could’ve predicted that.

“Seriously?” Taehyung laughed at your username as he typed it in. He had no right to clown you when his own username was something as simple Vante, and you totally did not get the reference if there was one. And he only stopped laughing once he saw your character. “You called me a noob when you’re only like two levels above me? Noob.”

“It doesn’t matter! I’m still higher than you, so ha!” You got the last laugh, but not the last say.

“Not for long, Y/N… Not for long.” The confidence in Taehyung’s voice was admirable with a hint of flirtiness, but you wouldn’t let him get the best of you. Or so you thought.

-

It had quickly become a regular thing for you to hop online after school with either Ahin, Hoseok and Taehyung, or just Taehyung. Your mother was pleasantly surprised to see you zipping through your homework with newfound motivation, and she even granted you an extra hour of screen time to reward your excelling academics. Little did she know that your motivation had everything to do with a boy.

With that valuable extra hour of play time, you did everything in your power to stay ahead of Taehyung. You grinded, took on quests, asked Ahin for advice on the best equips and places to train, and you did so without a minute to waste. The only time you took a break from leveling up your character was when a certain notification popped up on your screen.

[Vante has logged in!]

[Vante sent you a message!]

Vante: hi Y/N >:)

TacoCat98: why r u sending me a mean face? :P

Vante: freedom of speech?

TacoCat98: ok?

Vante: come train with me :(

TacoCat98: where r u now?

Vante: where the fire boars are

TacoCat98: kk

You might’ve been in the middle of a jump quest that you’d have to restart later, but you were willing to forfeit some good EXP in exchange for time with Taehyung. The two of you were close enough in level where it’d be mutually beneficial to train together on the same map anyway. So you hustled over to the fire boars.

As soon as you walked through the portal to where Taehyung said he was, you witnessed a hoard of flaming pigs chasing an ugly green-haired archer. Rather than extending a hand to help the boy out of danger, you take pleasure in watching him struggle to find safety on a nearby platform.

“why didnt u help me????” A speech bubble appeared over Taehyung’s character. “i almost died!!”

“i didnt wanna kiss you,” you typed, with a very embarrassing typo. “i meant KS you… not kiss you lol”

“r u sure that was a typo?” Taehyung changed his character’s facial expression to a hmm face.

“KISS wouldnt have made sense in that context!!” K.S. was the abbreviation of kill steal, which was when someone (often a noob like Taehyung) is trying to kill a monster but then a higher level player passes by and instantly kills the monster as a form of mockery. Kiss, on the other hand, meant something very different.

“right…”

“RIGHT.” You made your character flail around in the air like a kid having a tantrum before jumping down to release all your awkward energy out on the fire boars. “can we just train now??”

You sent Taehyung a request to join your party, and he accepted it, but he remained right where he was instead of joining you on the battle grounds.

“or we could just talk,” he typed. That not only surprised you, but also meant something to you. It meant he’d rather spend time chatting with you over leveling up his character. You were more important to him than the game itself.

You jumped back up to the safe platform and faced Taehyung’s character. “we could.”

You didn't know if he was just luring you away from training so he could sneak past you in levels as soon as you logged off, but maybe it didn’t matter. You only had two hours a day to do whatever you wanted on the computer, and Taehyung was what made your time feel well-spent.

And if he ended up surpassing you in levels as a result of that, you’d lose bragging rights and that hold over him, but something in you wanted to believe he wouldn’t leave your noob ass behind.

-

For a solid year, you never grew bored of Taehyung and his antics. Even in the classroom, it became apparent that you two were no strangers. You teased him about his new haircuts, he teased you by shouting “TacoCat98” across the school yard, and you both exchanged ugly faces as you passed by each others’ desks. All of that was innocent and cute, though the more intimate stuff remained online.

You can’t remember the exact moment you first acknowledged your feelings for Taehyung because it was your very first crush and you had no way of recognizing the signs. For a while, you assumed your first crush would be Namjoon because he had all the stunning physical qualities you thought you wanted in a boyfriend. But with Taehyung, it was something else that you couldn’t quite comprehend. All you knew was that he made your day a little brighter. And you found yourself thinking about him. A lot.

But nothing could’ve made you realize your crush more than when he asked you about it right after graduation.

Vante: hey

TacoCat98: hey

Vante: do you like anyone?

It was your chance—the golden opportunity. You wanted to scream “YES, IT’S YOU” through your computer. But on the off chance that he didn’t feel the same way, you wanted to save yourself from a potential rejection. You told yourself you’d only confess to him if you felt 100% confident that he felt the same way. Despite having a gut feeling that that might’ve been the case, you needed more answers.

TacoCat98: lol why r u asking?

Vante: bc u know how my group of guys had a talk after the grad ceremony?

TacoCat98: umm no? and yall arent “guys” yet btw. youre still boys lolol

Vante: whatever -_-

Vante: anyway

Vante: the BOYS had a talk about who we liked in our class

Vante: so i know who likes u

Someone liked you? That was definitely news to you. No one (to your knowledge) ever had a crush on you in your ten years of life. Naturally, you were curious as a kitten as to who it was, and if it was in fact Taehyung himself. Or maybe he was just bluffing. If that were the case, you were going to bluff back.

TacoCat98: well i know who likes u too :P

Vante: who?

For some reason, your dumbass didn’t anticipate him asking you to spill the tea. Especially not when you were alluding to your own crush on him.

TacoCat98: u tell me first and then ill tell u

Because how romantic would that be if the feeling was mutual and realized on the online platform where it had all begun to bloom?

Vante: hoseok

TacoCat98: wat

Vante: hoseok said he likes u

Vante: ok next

You needed a long minute to comprehend what had happened. Hoseok liked you? Hoseok? Hoseok didn’t even know you the way Taehyung did. You rarely even spoke to him outside of when he’d play StapleMory with you and Taehyung. So how was it possible for Jung Hoseok to develop a crush on you out of nothing? Spoiler alert: It wasn’t possible. But you didn’t know that at the time.

Vante: so… who likes me?

An idiot liked Taehyung. And that idiot was you. But after he didn’t confess to you like you had hoped, there was no way you’d confess either.

TacoCat98: actually i promised to keep that a secret

Vante: but u said u would tell me >:(

TacoCat98: well im srry!!

TacoCat98: it’s not like you were sharing your OWN crush, so why r u so mad lol

TacoCat98: hoseok probably wanted to keep that a secret but u told me anyway

Vante: true

Vante: dont tell him i told u >.<

TacoCat98: ok i wont

Vante: good

Vante: now back to the original question… tell me who u like

TacoCat98: i dont like anyone lol

Vante: seriously…

TacoCat98: really i dont lol

Vante: everyone has a crush

TacoCat98: and your crush is…?

Vante: ahin

He typed it without hesitation, not a sliver of doubt. He confidently told you about his crush on your best friend as if that information wasn’t going to get back to her. Maybe he intended for you to tell Ahin so he wouldn’t have to confess himself. Or maybe he just wanted to make you jealous. The latter was what he accomplished.

As a friend, you loved Ahin and envied her for how easily she got along with the boys in your class. Just as her StapleMory character outshined yours, she had the same effect at school. It honestly didn’t surprise you that Taehyung chose her over you. You had just hoped and envisioned that this time it was you.

TacoCat98: AHIN!!! can i tell u something?

YoungHinata: sure lol

TacoCat98: i like tae

YoungHinata: omg

YoungHinata: really????

YoungHinata: u should tell him!!

YoungHinata: he always acts like he likes u too

TacoCat98: i dont think he likes me like that

YoungHinata: y tho???

TacoCat98: i just have a feeling :(

YoungHinata: well youll never know for sure unless u confess to him

TacoCat98: nah im fine with him never knowing

TacoCat98: i just wanted to get it off my chest so i told u instead of him lol

-

After elementary school ended and middle school started, you were more thankful than ever that you and Taehyung had established an online friendship. You wouldn’t have otherwise known he attended the same middle school because you had zero classes with him in sixth grade and literally never saw him on campus. You owed a lot to the online platform for all the opportunities it provided you with in chatting with your crush. At the same time, a relationship built upon online engagements had its limits.

[Vante has logged in!]

TacoCat98: hihihi

Vante: i havent seen your face around these parts in a while

TacoCat98: blame my teachers >:(

TacoCat98: more hw = less staplemory

Vante: same

Vante: dont u think it’s weird tho

TacoCat98: whats weird?

Vante: how we talk on here but not irl

TacoCat98: i guess we never see each other at school anymore

There were a million better ways to respond to Taehyung’s comment, but that’s how you chose to respond. You had every opportunity to say, “hey let’s meet up at lunch tomorrow” or “wanna get milk tea after school?” But you were too dense to realize what he wanted out of that conversation. You took it more as a subtle breakup like “we can’t be friends anymore because things are awkward now irl.” After all, you were on the wrong side of an unrequited love, and it was almost inevitable that he’d develop other crushes on his new classmates who outclassed you.

It was only after you both quit StapleMory later that year and left your friendship to die in cyberspace that you heard a rumor floating around regarding you and Taehyung. One of your new middle school friends said Taehyung had asked her if it was true that you had a crush on him.

How did Taehyung know about that? And why did he even care? He was supposed to like Ahin. He told you himself that he liked Ahin. If you were his crush, he would’ve told you. He should’ve told you. Because you were fully convinced he no longer cared about his little gamer friend when there were plenty of prettier kids to pursue. And whether or not it was the truth, you took it to heart, despite all the other signs that had said otherwise.

So, no. The rumor wasn't true. You didn’t have a crush on him. Not anymore.