#and prowl was actively going to loose it

[wyrm-with-a-why]

I had a dream where megatron broke into the autobot base to steal prowls bra for shockwave who didn’t have one for some reason

[keferon]

Please I’m begging you, make a master post for these glorious designs

(Mech au)

Because….BLURR……PROWL!MECH…….JAZZ’S MECH…..VORTEX’S…….

Im loosing the OG posts of these designs and that make me so sad everytime I’m like ‘WHERE DID IT GO ?’

Every single of these design are a hear me out to me.

Im. In love with the way you design mechs. Seriously I can’t. Begging for more BECAUSE RAAAAAAWWWWR…..Masterpiece. Absolute masterpiece TT

Im just dying…..I just remember everytime I stalk your account WHY I WANT TO DESIGN THINGS AS A LIVING JOB. YOU ARE SUCH AN INSPIRATION.

anyways, enough of me being a fanboy ;_;

Yeah a place where we can find easily theses designs please, dear Keferon

O^o

Thank you fhjhhgihihih yeah m. I'm actively thinking about the way I could organize this au. Like. For any people who are late to the party but want to understand wtf is going on. But until then, here. Imma just gather all the designs in this post and tag it as #ref to you all could find it with the search bar:)

Upd: this is official reference post now lol

[thebluester2020]

[SDV] "Sins of the Guilty"

Summary: SDV Bachelors lusting over the nun that's recently come to visit Pelican Town Warning(s): Not proofread, Sacrilege of nuns, Sub!Sebastion [Reader is kinda a dom in his part], Sebastion doesn't have active sex with the reader, it's only imagined, I kinda favored Sebastion's part ngl, Dom!Shane [The usual lol], This is the filthiest thing I've ever written ngl, Elliot is the king of making readers squirt fight me on that, Elliot is a simp low-key, Bachelors loosely follow the plot of the verses, Unprotected sex [Wrap it before you tap it folks], Pure filth, Porn with plot. Word count: 8,285 wordsSide note(s): Inspired by the fact that- I like nuns and priests man. Going to religious schools all your childhood will do that 💀. Also, sorry for not including all the bachelors. I mostly wanted to focus on those who I think would struggle the most with being presented with a pretty nun in front of them cause it's more fun that way pfft.

MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS DNI

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ

Shane - "Hopeless Sinner" 1 Peter 5:8 - Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

♡ - Never in his life had Shane been a religious man.

Too much had happened in his life for him to even consider the possibility of a god, and even if there was such a thing? There was no way that they'd look down favorably upon them, especially with all the sins that weighed down his soul.

And he had a lot.

He was a drunk, he could hardly keep his eyes open half of the time. It was common for him to stink, absolutely reek of alcohol and past missed showers and he far too commonly let his alcoholism get him into frequent situations that he would only come to regret the next day. And to add to that list of sins? He wasn't exactly a people person.

He was rude and curt, saw people as an annoyance and treated them like such. He wasn't open to hearing people be kind to him much less try to suggest ways to change himself. The only time he felt semblances of happiness was when he was with his niece and even then? Those times were fleeting and brief, all because of his aforementioned addictions to the bottle.

And...despite all of that, all those troubles...he wasn't intent on changing.

In his eyes? He was a lost cause, too far gone and there was no point in expending energy on something that was damaged. And he only doubled down on that ideology when rumors began to circulate that a nun was going to visit the town for a little while. He even made it a mission to avoid any places where you could've possibly been at!

The last thing Shane needed was some old woman lecturing on the goodness of Yoba and the sins that came with drinking. How that "he wasn't too far gone" and that he could be "saved", all if he just believed and dedicated himself enough.

At least...until he saw you in person one day outside Pierre's shop on his way to get some cans of beer.

. . .

"You must be Shane, I'm Sister Y/N. It's a pleasure to meet you!"

It was like the entire world paused for the briefest of moments.

Just enough for him to truly take in your features the moment he saw you, right in front of Pierre's shop no doubt.

Your smile alone could have chased away the darkest of storms and replace it with a sun that shined as much as your eyes did. They were as wide and big as a dog looking up at its owner, he thought. As if you were expecting some type of praise or reward for greeting him with so much enthusiasm. You were slender-figured but graced with long legs, your skin appeared smooth and your lips were pink and full. Yet as Shane looked back down, he was shocked that you weren't wearing a long black dress like he had thought nuns wore but...shorts-

"Shane? Are you alright?"

"Huh? Y-Yeah...I'm fine." He cleared his throat. "How in the hell do you know my name anyway?" He continued, surprised when you didn't flinch at his rude tone.

"The Church made sure to brief me on people's faces and names before I came to visit!" Of course they did…though, he didn’t know whether or not to complain at this fact or to allow himself to silently be happy in a way. After all, it wasn’t everyday that someone cute knew his name off the bat, much less greeted him with a smile that didn’t have badly hidden disdain or disgust behind it.

“Anyway…” You cleared your throat. “You should come to service this Sunday! It’ll be my first one in the valley and I’d love to have everyone there, I-if possible of course.”

He clicked his tongue.

At the very most? He’d think about it.

“Maybe,” Then, he walked past you.

. . .

After the two of you first met, Shane tried avoiding you the rest of the week until Sunday passed him by.

But though be was successfully avoiding you physically, mentally was a whole other issue as no matter what he did? No matter how much alcohol he drank, you’d always find a way to squeeze your way into his thoughts. When he cringed at his own smell at times, suddenly he’d would be hit with a wave of grace as he remembered the smell of your light perfume. It was even beginning to infect his dreams.

Dreams that…were far more pleasant as of late.

In his dreams, you’d sit with him and talk out in some meadow somewhere. Perhaps you’d go on and on about the book of Yoba all the while you steadily inched closer and closer to him before you’d place a hand on his arm. Your chest touching him as your sweet words grew more sensual, forgoing the talk of holiness to instead invite Shane to touch you through your clothes.

But before getting to the good part?

He’d always wake up, left with an aching hard-on and his alarm screaming at him to get ready for work.

That was the first and possibly the only time that Shane began to believe that there may have been such a thing as "The Devil". After all, why else would he suddenly have these thoughts of someone who just arrived in town a few days ago? Especially someone so out of his league?! Also, the two of you only met once and you probably didn't even remember his name!

But after the fourth time of waking up, his own brain once again blue-balling him?

He knew he had to see you in person.

Even if it was just to hear your voice again.

. . .

So, the next day, he went to the shrine of Yoba where he knew you'd be.

And the second he knocked on the door, you responded with a gentle "Come in" before he stepped inside. And...he couldn't help but feel like a black sheep amongst all the holy symbols and the gentle sound of a religious choir playing from a phone, suddenly, the paranoia of Yoba knowing about Shane's unholy imagination of you began to glare up. He felt as if he was going to burst into flames as punishment for daring to offend a sacred place with his presence!

Once he had turned a corner and saw you sitting on a pew, facing the statue of Yoba however...all of a sudden, he was calm and he remembered why he was there.

He simply wanted to confess his sins and have someone hear him out.

"Shane?" You said as you turned around, a smile immediately jumping onto your features. "I thought that was you! It's easy to recognize grumpy voices in this town."

He rolled his eyes.

"Can I help you with anything? What's going on?"

When he opened his mouth, he realize that he didn't have a single clue about how to admit that he wanted to confess his sins. Especially when those sins revolved around you (not that he'd ever dare to say that part out loud). "I uh...want to confess my sins."

Your smile grew. "Oh? Please, sit." You scooted over on your pew before tapping the space next to you.

Obediently, he sat down but a considerable distance away from you. His hands started to sweat and shake, how was he supposed to confess that you were the source of his sins?! How was he going to tell the pure nun of the valley that he was struggling not to masturbate to you defiling yourself on his unworthy cock? The imagination of your moans combined with the image of you begging him to fuck you against the shrine of Yoba plagued his mind. And what's worse?

He didn't feel an ounce of guilt for it really...he just wanted to be around you. Be it fuel for the mind or something more, he just didn't know.

"...Something tells me that you didn't come to confess." You spoke breaking the silence and snapping him from his thoughts.

His heart dropped to his stomach. Did he do something to give himself away?

"How do you-"

"I've been doing this for a while, you tend to pick up clues." You chuckled. "So tell me, what's really going on? I'm a good listener."

The moment you turned around and looked at him, his breath hitched in his throat as his dream from the night prior suddenly flashed in the forefront of his mind. Your pretty pink lips soaked and glistening from your spit whilst you panted heavily like a bitch in heat, practically for him to do something to you, anything to you. Already, he started to feel his cock twitch inside his boxers, causing Shane to quickly clear his throat and look in front of him.

He tried to think about anything else to keep himself from getting hard in front of you.

"...I've been having weird dreams." He finally admitted. "Dreams that aren't...good."

You hummed to yourself for a moment before you responded. "Like..."I may do something awful" type of bad or another type?"

"Lustful." He muttered.

Like the flip of a dime, it felt like the atmosphere in the room changed.

"You've been lusting after someone?"

He nodded his head.

"Who?"

"Does it matter?" He said snappily, eliciting a chuckle from you.

"Don't be so snappy, I like a bit of gossip as much as the next person..." You scooted closer. "Though, if you've been struggling with these thoughts then...the correct thing for me to say as a nun is to suggest you to stop. To be tempted by the flesh is a sin, your thoughts should never be focused on such things."

Finally, Shane forced himself to look at you, fully expecting you to look at him with some type of reprimanding disgust in your eyes but...he was shocked when he found nothing of the sort. You looked at him like a tiger would eye a piece of prey. "But...?" Shane said.

"But, I as an individual say that you should pursue this person. Who knows, she may like you."

Now that made him snort, there was no way that you would like a drunk like him. He was certain of that. "I'm the town drunk, why would she— you like me?" He decided to be upfront, to which you met his words with shock for a moment before you offered him a simple smile in return.

"Nuns have needs too, and who said this had to be a permanent thing? I'll only be in town for a few more weeks, all your sins will simply...wash away, stay between us, once I leave."

It felt like his dream was becoming truer by the second. Only...you were naughtier than what he originally assumed based on your appearance, but it added to the charm, and with each sugar-coated word that fell from your pretty lips, the further his mind slipped into depravity and what he wanted to do with you as he felt his cock chub up against his thigh. After all, when was the last time he'd gotten his rocks off? His right hand and his brain could only stave off the longing for a real tight cunt for so long!

And as he watched you start to lift your dress and slip your panties down your legs.

He immediately took the plunge.

. . .

"F-Fuck!" You cried out as your legs were spread, Shane on his knees as his lapped at your cunt like a man-starved.

And he might as well have been.

He felt as if he had been in a desert for months and had finally spotted an oasis, your slick upon his tongue was sweet and dripped from your pussy like a nonstop faucet, something that he wasn't going to dare let go to waste as he alternated between tongue-fucking your sex with his tongue and moving onto sucking your clit whilst his calloused fingers plunged in and out of your weeping hole.

And you couldn't get enough of it.

"Sooooo d-deeep...." You whined as your eyes started to roll into the back of your head.

Shane's resolve would've snapped if he hadn't been so focused on both eating yu out and prepping you to take his leaking cock, the sound of you, a nun sounding so fucked out and horny...practically crying out for his tongue and fingers made him rut into the air to try and alleviate the tight feeling within' his pants.

"S-Shane...I'm- I'm cumming-" Your high-pitched whine suddenly died on your lips when Shane stopped pistoning his fingers in and out of you as he stood and shredded his clothes.

"No you aren't lil' slut, you'll be doing that on my dick." He grumbled, his hands practically shaking from how eager he was to get inside of you before he finally freed his dick from its confines and lined himself up to your entrance, his hand coming up to press against the middle of your leg and push it till it nearly touched your chest.

Your mouth opened in a wide O at the size of him, causing the man to chuckle.

"Never had something this big in your pussy?"

You unconsciously shook your head but, your pussy nonetheless twitched in eagerness for the man's cock. Despite Shane's eagerness though, he made sure to be as gentle as he could be with you as he gently pressed his mushroom tip against your hole, the feeling sending a rush of electricity over your skin at the feeling of a cock touching your pussy.

It was strange and...it felt hot. Hotter than what you expected it to be.

Shane gripped his cock at the base before beginning to press his tip against your hole, steadily inserting it into your hole before thrusting forward a little as he steadily filled you. The man groaned at the feeling of your wet walls clenching onto him, almost as if you didn't want to let him go despite you possibly being the first man you've ever been with. "L-Loosen up..." He whispered, already feeling a knot begin to form and tighten in his stomach.

It seemed he hadn't been laid longer than what he originally thought. It took ever ounce of Shane's strength and will not to fuck you like a toy, to be as gentle as he could be until he was certain you were ready to be fucked into the pew like you were begging him to when he first started to eat you out.

Then again, you weren't going to last long either as you had just recently had your orgasm denied.

"Y-You're too big..." You whispered, trying to relax your cunt like instructed to but it hardly seemed to do anything at all. You moaned when you felt Shane's cock twitch at your words, a cocky smirk crawling onto his stubbled features as he leaned closer to you. "I'm big huh?"

You nodded your head breathlessly, a moan tearing from your throat when Shane finally bottomed out inside of you, his hips pressing against your ass whilst he tightened his grip on your leg to keep you from trying to escape the stretch his dick gave you.

"J-Just fuck me..." You hissed, shooting a glare to try and chase your denied orgasm. And the man gladly did as you wished, slowly pulling himself out of you before suddenly slamming back into you, almost knocking the air from your very lungs before he immediately went into a harsh and brutal pace. Shane almost had a mind to tease how you looked, your lips flushed and lips wet from your shared salvia from your earlier kissing session.

Your moans were loud and unbridled, to the point where even he was worrying about whether or not your slutty moans would attract unneeded attention to the shrine!

But as his balls slapped against your ass, the sensation in combination with your cute moans only served to make his balls tighten in anticipation of his impending orgasm. "Oh Yob, r-right there!" You yelped out when Shane suddenly positioned himself to fuck into you deeper, his cock slamming into the deepest part of you with each thrust. Shane then moved his hand down from its position on your leg to your hips, using the leverage to pull you onto his cock as he threw his head back to let out a drawn-out groan.

"Fuuuuccckkkk..." He moaned, his mouth hanging open before he lazily looked back down at you, smiling at your fucked out expression as he spotted drool beginning to dribble out from the corner of your lips.

At that moment, his thumb reached to wipe the drool from the corner of your lips before plucking the digit into his mouth with a smirk at your taste. "Can't believe how lucky I am...Yoba must be real," Shane snickered. "I get to fuck one of his cute lil' slutty nuns...especially one that doesn't know what to do with herself when presented with a real dick in her cunt." He continued as the need to fill you up grew with each thrust.

You nodded stupidly, Shane had an urge to kiss you but...your moans sounded too good for him to risk messing up his position and ruining your pleasure that was causing you to cry out so abashedly.

"C-Cummin-" Your climax hit you like a freight train as your body suddenly went rigid. Your cunt spasmed and clenched impossibly tighter around Shane's cock like a vice grip, nearly making him stutter in his movements as you came around his cock. "Y-Yoba-" He hissed, sucking in his bottom lip as he leaned forward a little at the sheer pleasure your spasming cunt brought him.

Shane only managed a few more thrusts before he spilled into you, his stomach clenching and his body stilling as if it were putting all its remaining energy into filling you up.

A breath he didn't even know he was holding released when he finished and looked back at you. Your gaze was unfocused as your cheeks were flushed red and spit trailed down the corners of your lips.

"Oi, you with me?" Shane said as he pinched your cheeks together with his hand, gently shaking you to try and snap you out of your daze.

You could only respond with a soft moan before you looked at him but not at him. He chuckled, he would accept it for now. He just needed to get you dressed, after all...he definitely wanted to discuss if his confessions with you could be a regular thing, at least...until you left of course.

Elliot - "Forbidden Desires" Proverbs 6:25 - Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes;

♡ - When Elliot and you first met. It was on the beach of all things.

Out on the wooden pier that overlooked the ocean. Frequently, the writer would visit here to collect his thoughts for his writing and try to find inspiration from the gentle waves that crashed lightly against the pier and beach alike. Yet it was when he turned his head to the side briefly, the world suddenly seemed to stop on its axis.

He thought you were gorgeous.

Baked in the backdrop light from the sun, he nearly thought you had a halo on your head. Glowing with your holiness that made all the features on your face that much softer, like the way your hooded eyes looked out across the water almost longingly as if you were beckoning for a wave to come and carry you somewhere else. How pieces of your hair escaped your veil and blew with the sea breeze along with your dress.

The longer he admired you quietly, the more he thought you were an ethereal spirit, completely unaware of how you were tempting him despite your outfit telling him that you were the sister that the town had been expecting for about a week now. It was your job to be a role model as to how not to sin.

Yet...he wanted to do the opposite- "Are you going to keep looking at me, or will you say hello?" Your voice snapped Elliot from his thoughts before he finally noticed you were looking at him with a curious but soft gaze, a smile gracing your features when you saw how his cheeks began to tint red.

"E-Excuse me." He said as he stood up and dusted himself off. "I was just in shock, I wasn't expecting the long-awaited nun to be at the beach."

As the two of you stood side by side, he noticed how you were shorter than himself. "Oh," You said. "Did I interrupt your alone time?" You smiled.

Elliot smiled and shook his head. "Oh no, I don't think you could ever do that." He responded, your mouth hanging open a little as a blush of your own started to coat your cheeks. It was then that Elliot quickly cleared his throat and tried to find a way to apologize. It seemed like he wasn't himself, his thoughts kept coming out before he could fully think about whether he could say them or not!

"Sorry, I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable."

You then turned your body fully to face him. "Oh, you're not doing that. I find your forwardness charming." You were dangerous for Elliot's heart, the way you looked up at him made his mouth dry while equally making him feel as if he were floating amongst the clouds. Up until you caught his attention again with a laugh. "What's your name?"

"Elliot," He answered immediately.

"Y/N." You responded. "It'll be hard for me to come to the beach with my duties and all...you should try visiting the shrine in the Pierre's shop. I'll be there most of the time."

"How long will you be staying in town?"

"Two weeks." He struggled not to immediately frown at that answer, all while he simultaneously struggled to not throw a curse at Yoba for making him feel this strongly about one of his devoted followers. Elliot could be frank with himself, he knew that you would be in his every waking thought from this point onward. All he'd think about is how to get closer to you, get to know you and so much more!

"I hope you'll enjoy your two weeks here then sister." He finally said.

"Oh, I'm certain I will." Then you turned to walk away, your faint perfume tickling Elliot's nose as he was left along with his thoughts, his thoughts settling on the newfound fact that you were his muse.

All of a sudden, his inspiration to write came to him like rushing waves during a typhoon. Stories of how a man fell into a forbidden relationship with a woman, or perhaps a shorter tale of how a man falls in love with a spirit, someone he longed for but knew he couldn't ultimately have. Yet, as all the thoughts flew through his mind. One thing was for certain, you left him with a burning ache in his pants.

. . .

Later that night, he admittedly felt slightly guilty for palming himself over his pants at the thought of you. The pretty nun with the soft voice and heavenly features, although Elliot tried not to think too hard about your words from earlier, to not misunderstand how you phrased your words or how you looked at him as a signal for something more...the image in his head was far too addicting to let go so easily.

The thought of you bouncing on his cock while he sucked at your breasts, planting kisses all over your body as you moaned for more...was it wrong of him to have those thoughts? Then again, surely you knew how you sounded when you spoke to him on the beach! You sounded like you were interested in him! That you may have wanted to pursue something more with—

"Ah...look at me," Elliot murmured to himself, running his fingers through his hair as he scoffed at how ridiculous his thoughts were.

You were a nun.

You were just being friendly!

What he was doing was wrong. To think about a holy sister was potentially one of the greatest sins (at least, to what he knew about the book of Yoba).

Perhaps he needed Yoba more than he realized.

. . .

And that’s what prompted him to visit Pierre’s shop three days later, specifically where he knew you’d be, the Shrine of Yoba.

Elliot’s plans were simple, to confess his sins, receive your judgement and advice, then leave. Of course though, he’s leave out the part where his thoughts revolved around you despite the fact the both of you hadn’t known each other for that long. But once he was standing right in front of the door that would lead into the shrine…he felt like his entire body had frozen in place.

Were you actually a nun or secretly a demon? He thought.

No person should ever have power over another like this. But the moment Elliot’s nerves loosened up a little, he quickly knocked a few times on the door before a gentle “Come in” could be heard from inside, causing him to walk in before he immediately saw you getting up from your kneeling position at the shrine.

You smoothened out your clothes and then looked at Elliot with the same angelic look you gave him the first time you met him. “Elliot?” You said. “You came.”

He nodded his head, keeping his head down just long enough in an attempt to ease his blushing. “I figured I was overdue for confessing my sins.”

“Don’t be silly,” You chuckled. “We all come and confess our sins when we’re ready, there’s no pressure.”

It was easy for you to say, he thought.

You weren’t the one who was losing sleep over imagining the naked form of the person you just met. And as Elliot walked to sit on one of the pews, the more he couldn’t help but think that this may have been a bad idea. Although your attire was similar to what you wore on the beach, he didn’t know if his eyes were tricking him or not but…your clothing appeared…tighter.

Around your chest to be more precise and it was driving him nuts.

He silently begged Yoba that you wouldn’t come close enough to where you’d be able to spot his steadily growing hard-on. And thankfully, you kept your distance via sitting on the pew just in front of him with your back turned.

“Now, you may confess when you’re ready to begin.” You murmured a quick prayer before clearing your throat as a sign you were attentive and listening.

Elliot sighed. "Sister, I've been...well- I've had unholy thoughts as of late. Thought that revolve around a woman that I'm infatuated with."

When you didn't say anything in response, he continued.

"She's the most beautiful woman I've ever been blessed to see. But it would be wrong for me to pursue a relationship with her."

That was when you spoke. "May I ask why?"

Elliot's throat bobbed up and down at the question. "She's a nun."

The silence that followed was so loud that it nearly rang in his ears. Yet, as you turned around to face him, his mouth immediately fell open to apologize until a certain glint flashed in your ears as you looked at him with a smile, a finger tugging at the collar of your uniform.

"And...what do you want to do with this nun?"

"I want to kiss her." At his confession, it was like a string had broken before you and Elliot's lips crashed together. In the writer's mind, it was as if your lips were meant to be with his own, the taste of your mint-flavored lipstick addicting to his tastebuds as he felt around in your mouth. Your breathing became heavier, pressing yourself as close to Elliot as you possibly could despite the pew that still separated the two of you. "What else do you want to do to me?" You panted when you both separated, your breaths labored and heavy as a single string of spit still connected you two.

Elliot silently eyed the rest of your body.

"May I show you, sister?"

. . .

Had you known the man you met a few days ago was capable of this. You would've fucked him right then and there out on that wooden pier.

The position Elliot currently had you in was making you see stars and galaxies behind your eyes, your legs spread out on his lips as he held you tight against his form, almost as if he were afraid you'd disappear right before his eyes whilst he fucked up into you like a man on a mission. Each thrust making his cock assault your sweet spot deep inside you, you felt as if your organs were molding and reshaping themselves just to better fit Elliot's cock.

"Y-Yoba's name..." He whispered hotly against your neck, pressing wet open-mouthed kisses against the side of your neck and all the way down to your exposed collarbones from him hastily pulling down the front of your dress. "Y-You're so tight-" Elliot grit his teeth together as he groaned against your skin.

However, each time he fucked up into you, the sound of your sexes meeting reverberated throughout the small area of the shrine as your slick poured down from your pussy to pool and coat the front of Elliot's thighs, you were starting to...feel something.

A certain coil beginning to tighten tighter and tighter by the second in your stomach.

Compared to the orgasms you've given yourself in the past, privately when you were in your room or in an area you were certain was vacant of other people. This one was more intense and threatened to wash over you with such a force that you worried you'd pass out from the intensity! But, it was hard to voice such a worry when you were being fucked to the point that you couldn't utter a single syllable, to where you nearly had a mind to forgo this life and simply be the plaything of Elliot for the rest of your days.

"E-Elliot...!" You keened as you wrapped your arms tighter around his neck, Elliot's thrusts somehow growing even more ruthless as he tucked his face into the valley between your breasts.

"Shit..." You managed to hear him breathe out.

Your mouth steadily started to form a large O shape as the coil inside your tummy tightened more and more until it finally burst.

Suddenly Elliot stilled his movements to raise your dress higher to witness the wetness that flowed from your pussy like a fountain spewing water, his mouth dropping in shock whilst the lust inside his eyes grew at the arousing sight of your orgasm spewing from your cunt and splattering onto his thighs.

He was only snapped from his trance when he heard your fucked-out moan and your hand tap his shoulder.

"Truly, you are the woman of my dreams," Elliot said with an equally fucked-out voice as if he were the one who just came. "Do that again." Your eyes snapped open as you tried to quickly voice your protest but not before your words were shooed from your lips when the writer fucked up into you again, resuming his previous pace before he gently leaned you back, his hand resting on the small of your back to keep you steady whilst his other went to lift your leg higher so that he had a better view of your cunt.

The squelching noises were like a symphony to his ears.

But all he could think about was you squirting again.

The pew you both sat and fucked on was already dirty...defiled.

It didn't matter to defile it some more.

"Please, squirt on my cock again," Elliot begged. "Will this help my dear? Don't hold back, please." Without a single word of warning, the hand that held your leg up dived down to rub quick circles on your clit with his index and middle finger.

"F-Fuck! Elliot...baby, w-wait- you're going to-" Your entire body shook and convulsed from overstimulation as you struggled to keep your head and thoughts straight, moans falling from your lips shamelessly as you could hear Elliot's raspy moans and throaty groans, the sexy noises only serving to make you clench around the writer's experienced fingers.

Elliot took your pussy getting tight as a sign you were close once again, causing him to speed up both his thrusts and his fingers as they rubbed side to side without abandon on your clit. You tried to cry out for him to slow down, to give you a short break but your moans fell on deaf ears as Elliot only silenced you via fucking you harder to the point your moans took the place of the words you wanted to say as he abused your cunt. "Ahhh...." You moaned in pleasure as you felt something begin to well up inside you again.

"E-Elliot- f-fuck...." You couldn't do anything else but whine and beg, his name slipping from your lips repeatedly as his fingers on your clit sped up whilst he rose you forward a little to plant kisses along your breasts.

"Don't be embarrassed my dear," He whispered against your skin. "Just cum, I got you...please." At the sounds of his begging, that earlier feeling of a coil beginning to tighten started to nearly grow unbearable inside you, your eyes barely staying open as you allowed your body to take all the pleasure your eager lover was bestowing onto you.

"Oh, Yoba...fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck-" Your body once again grew rigid as Elliot's eyes darted to where the two of you were connected, his eyes widening as your pussy clenched onto him tighter than before as a clear liquid squirted out from you and around his dick. Upon seeing that sight, he wasn't too far behind from his climax, managing a few more hard thrusts before his head dropped forward a little as he moaned.

The two of you sat in silence for a few minutes, trying to catch your breath until it was you who broke the silence as you steadily rose your head and slid your hands to rest on Elliot's shoulders with a soft moan and a dopey smile. "You know..." Your voice was hoarse as your hand moved to catch Elliot's chin under your hand before you tilted his head back to make you look at him.

You pressed a chaste kiss to his lips, a sweet lovesick moan leaving the writer's lips before a smile slowly came onto his lips. "We should do this again."

"How..." Elliot took a moment to further catch his breath. "How long will you be in town?"

"Couple of months, we can discuss about this being a regular thing as well as...you possibly taking me out on a date next?"

He couldn't think of anything better.

Sebastion - "Hungry Recluse" Genesis 2:18 - Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

♡ - He had heard about a nun coming to the valley when his mother brought it up at dinner a few weekends ago. And back then? He didn't have a mind to care really.

He was a recluse.

He had nothing against religion but he preferred to stay away from crowds. If a nun was to come to the valley then he was more than certain you would bring a crowd, preaching about Yoba and the likes and he respectfully wanted no part of that.

So, imagine his shock one night when he was outside his home smoking. Only to spot a nun doing the same.

"A nun, smoking?" He nearly choked on his own cigarette. His words catching your attention before you cursed under your breath before you dropped your cigarette and quickly stomped on it with the heel of your shoe.

"Goddamn it..."

He scoffed. "And you curse too?"

You rolled your eyes. "If you're going to snitch to someone, do it now." As Sebastion stared, thinking about how much he wasn't going to snitch to anyone (after all, he believed it wasn't his place nor did he feel like anyone would believe him should he have wanted to do it). He couldn't help but think about how...well, how pretty you looked.

You sported a more roguish look to your uniform compared to what he was originally thinking you'd look like. Clean outfit with a bright smile, maybe a hand carrying a bible or the cross of Yoba perhaps. Instead? One side of your dress was bunched up, exposing quite a considerable amount of thigh as well as the black stocking you wore underneath, and the similarly colored boots that would've typically been hidden underneath.

Your make-up was gothic and you had a septum piercing along with a couple more piercings on the outer edge of your right ear.

And if he was seeing things right...was that black nail polish on your fingers- "Are you going to keep staring?" You said bitingly.

"Sorry," He apologized, quickly looking somewhere else. "I just didn't expect the nun to be-"

"A sinner?" You interrupted with a heavy sigh.

"Different." He finished his sentence.

You clicked your tongue. "Yeah well...that's what you get when you're an unwilling member of the church." You spilled.

Now he was really curious about you. This entire time, he had expected a goody two-shoes sister who would rave on and on about Yoba anytime that they could! Or maybe even some old hag as old as Evelyn was, nagging and constantly haggling people about converting and praying more to Yoba.

But instead? The town received neither.

Only you.

And he was absolutely enthralled by you.

So much so that he found himself unconsciously walking up to you before he cleared his throat. "Do...you want to talk about it?"

"I'm not looking for pity if that's what you're-"

"I'm not trying to pity you." He interrupted. "You just seem to be in need of a confessional as much as anyone else." He shrugged, his words sparking a chuckle that sounded like a melody in his ears.

. . .

And that was the beginning of you and Sebastion's relationship.

One where you two would meet under the guise of night every other day after you had finished your "performance" during the day of playing the innocent nun who wanted to spread the word of Yoba. Something that Sebastion quickly learned was nothing but complete bullshit. The two of you would rant about your lives and how much you two wished you could change things.

Whether it was from Sebastion's dreams of moving away from Pelican Town and into the city, to you ironically praying to Yoba that he'd give you an outing from the church.

The one day you'd be free.

"...Why are you stuck in the church?" Sebastion had asked one day, lighting your cigarette before his own.

You blew a puff of smoke before sighing. "Mommy and daddy had unresolved debts and issues." You said. "To pay 'em off, they got rid of me." You continued.

"Now I wear this damn get-up and play "Good follower of Yoba"." You mumbled a few curses under your breath afterward, ones that made Sebastion snicker under his breath as he considered your situation. Although obviously different, the similarities in your stories were eerily similar. The two of you longed for another life, felt as if you didn't belong in the current one you both lived, and, as much as you both could, you tried to actively change that.

But...where Sebastion could easily pack some things, get on his bike, and head for the city.

You didn't have that luxury.

"Why don't you move here?"

"Unresolved debts remember?"

"I know but...there's a lot of abandoned places here in the valley. We even have an abandoned farm not too far from here. You could live there."

"My cage would be no different then, just a new window to look out of."

A small smile crept onto your features when you spotted an apologetic frown appear on Sebastion's face. One that made you flush a little as his cheeks appeared puffier and cuter. You appreciated being able to talk to him, more than you'd ever be able to convey but...you weren't looking for sympathy or solutions to escaping that only involved you living a life on the run and in hiding.

In truth? Being asked by the higher-ups to visit this small town, meeting Sebastion?

It was as close to a blessing from Yoba as you'd ever get.

Back home, you were a glorified maid if not eye candy for old men. You'd clean for them, cook for them, bring them drinks...it was such a dull life. You hadn't even been able to go to college. You couldn't even do most math but you could damn well recite random passages from the book of Yoba.

You hadn't nor would ever be able to find love!

All talks of boys and falling in love were strictly forbidden, seen as nothing more than a gateway for potential sinning, something you'd eventually learn was nothing but complete hogwash as there were plenty of times you've seen your fellow sisters open their legs for priests when it pertained to the topic of being able to get away with some things. Here in the valley though? You didn't feel that pressure.

You liked it here.

You liked...well, you liked the people. They were nice.

"You should be happy here Sebastion." You said, breaking the silence.

"You have a good life here, it may not be the one you want it's the one that's the best path for you at the moment."

Sebastion rolled his eyes. "Easy for you to say, you don't live here."

"Maybe, but I'd need a million more fingers in order to count how many situations are worse than this." You sighed. "After all...you never know, one day you may find yourself liking it here. Life is funny like that." At those words, you placed a gentle hand ontop of Sebastion's for only a brief moment before you got up and walked away.

An act that only served to leave Sebastion's heart skipping beats and...strangely upset.

. . .

And he must've sat outside for an extra thirty minutes before he finally went inside.

Dinner tasted bland, and all of a sudden Demetrius' snide remarks and insults didn't even make him turn nor lift his head to briefly glare! All Sebastion could think about was you.

You, you, you, you, you.

He didn't know what sounded weirder or more pathetic.

Him chasing after you like he was in some chick-flick, exclaiming how he wanted to be with you despite only knowing you for going on close to a week now. Or if he said that you were the only person in this entire town who seemed to understand him! The only one who made him truly happy aside from the small yet rare-found joys in his life! He could introduce you to his friends, Sam and Abigail, he thought you'd get alone well with them.

Maybe you could teach Sam to play new songs? He remembered you mentioning how you knew how to play the guitar a little. Or maybe you could simply be another girl added to the group, someone for Abigail to hang out and talk with.

As Sebastion sat on his bed. His mind further diving into his racing thoughts that concerned you, so many situations revolving around the question of 'What if?' that he could barely keep track of them all! He wondered then about what if you'd be another addition to the farming community here. If you would actually take over that abandoned farm.

What would you grow, would you be good at it or would you only prefer animals like Marnie?

Or...maybe you'd be something else?

A writer like that one guy who lived at the beach with Willy.

Or maybe an inspiring somebody like himself or Sam?

Another member to the Adventurer's Guild perhaps?

He considered it all but the one scenario that made his heart strangely ache the most was...if you were with him.

You made him smile the most out of everyone here. Sebastion enjoyed your curt personality that blended well with your shockingly soft tendencies. You were pretty and when your lips weren't covered in dark lipstick, they shined a surprisingly glistening red. Your eyes were the most gorgeous underneath the moonlight ad your figure (if he couldn't guess from the first moment he met you) was something that made his jaw drop every single time.

Suddenly, there was a throb in his pants at the thought of what you'd look like underneath your clothes.

But no, even if you stated you didn't want to be a nun.

He'd give you the respect all the same. He wouldn't dare to do anything inappropriate with your face in mind. It wouldn't be right.

. . .

But oh...did he think it would feel so right.

It wasn't a bad thing to touch himself to the thought of you, was it? You weren't there and so long as you didn't know then technically sin would have ever been committed! At least, that's what he comforted himself with as he furiously jerked himself off underneath his covers, breathless moans leaving his lips as he imagined it was your hand stroking him off rather than his own.

And as he did so, he swore he was more turned on than he ever had been in his entire life.

He imagined you were wearing your dark lipstick as your hand went down to massage his balls, your lipstick leaving smudge trails up and down his cock as you flattened your tongue to trail along the prominent vein that ran on the underside of his cock. Yet as you did so, you kept a firm eye on him as you looked at him through your lashes.

"You must've been so pent up Sebby..." His cock twitched at the nickname. "Waiting for me to do this to you, you must've been thinking about this since the day we've met. Huh?" A whine left escaped him at your words, his vision beginning to blur from both pleasure and growing embarrassment as his cock began to leak more and more pre.

"Not going to answer~?" You purred. "That's okay, you seem to be way more talkative down here than with that mouth of yours."

"P-Please..." He whispered.

Your smirk grew as your hand quickened in its pace, your face leaning in closer to his to the point he could almost imagine your breath gently blowing on his face. "Please fuck me..." He moaned. "R-Ride my cock, j-just do something more with me."

"Such a good boy~"

As you sat up, you licked the tips of your fingers clean from his pre as straddled him to where your pussy hovered over his cock. He twitched at the feeling of your heat, his eyes glued on your dripping pussy before your finger tipped his head to look back up at you. "Keep your eyes on me." You ordered before swiftly pressing a kiss to his lips. A choked-up moan escaped Sebastion's lips when you suddenly sunk yourself onto him. Your hips immediately started a fast pace that made his eyes roll into the back of his head.

Until you suddenly slowed down. "W-Wha...?" He said dizzily, looking back at you. "Why-"

"Eyes on me Sebby~ or what? Is my pussy too good for you to listen to me?" You suddenly slammed your hips down, Sebastion's hand gripping the bedsheets with a loud moan before you resumed your original pace. "You should be following what I say more diligently than this Sebastion" You pouted. "A holy nun is giving you her untouched pussy, the least you could do is look at her~"

"Y-Yes!" He moaned. Tears flowed down the sides of Sebastion's face as he kept his eyes on you, the sounds of his balls slapping against your cunt echoing throughout the room as a familiar knot steadily started to appear in the pit of his stomach. His cock twitching inside your warm pussy as the feeling of your walls nearly drove him to insanity.

Your moans, your face contorting in pleasure as your hands roamed up and down his chest underneath his hoodie. Everything about you made him want to exclaim just how much he had developed a crush on you, something that he wanted to take farther rather than just simply have sex with you. Yet, as the heat in his belly turned white-hot, his moans sounded closer to wails as he begged to cum.

He had to remind himself that this wasn't real.

You weren't even here.

Something that was slapped into him the second he felt his cum pool over the top of the hole he made with his hand rather than feeling it fill you up.

"Y/N..." He moaned as if you'd magically appear before him.

Tomorrow, he would definitely confess his feelings. Religion be damned, he knew that he wanted something with you.

[talesfromlissom]

TFP!OPTIMUS HEADCANONS //  Megatron x Orion Pax (briefly) || Part 1

WARNINGS – implied/referenced abuse 

A/N – Hi, it's been a while. Most of these headcanons have been jumping around in my brain. They’re mostly based on TFP Optimus, some of it being actual info while others are just of my own creation, enjoy. These are used loosely (or not) in my future series Starbound and are sometimes mentioned in other works with him. .I’m probably going to split this into two parts, with part one being about Orion and part two about Optimus. 

PART 2 ->

One of the first data runners. According to The Covenant of Primus, Optimus (or Orion at the time) was put in charge of carting data across Cybertron to combat the quintessons. These people were called data runners (not according to the Covenant, I made it up). Most data runners were killed, and he’s one of the few remaining ones left alive and not horribly disfigured (physically) 

Before the war, Orion was a floater friend. He didn’t have a ‘main’ friend group, as he constantly shifted between at least four different ones, each with different dynamics. 

This was mostly due to his data runner role in the rebellion. Not many people know about him being one, given that was the whole point, but he made a lot of friends along the way. 

This actually scared the crap out of people. Orion was mostly quiet and unassuming; many people didn’t even bat an eye at him. Around the time Orion started meeting with Megatron, people were actively avoiding him, assuming he had these relationships for malicious reasons. Most people wondered how the heck someone like him even got into friendly relations with half of the people he was close to in the first place. 

He was friends with Megatron and Soundwave, both low castes but Soundwave was an ex high council member. He could easily ask Megatron to get Soundwave to do something and Soundwave probably would if Megatron convinced him that he himself also wanted it. 

Soundwave never liked Orion. Every time Orion walked into the room he’d imagine he was exploding him with his mind. 

When Megatron rose to fame, he mostly hung out with Megatron and Soundwave. His relationship with Megatron was perfectly healthy. There were a few hiccups in the beginning, but they became close very quickly, which made Orion happy. Most people avoided him, and it was nice to have a new friend. 

Orion used to be romantically involved with Megatron. It was a close friendship that eventually blossomed into genuine affection. However, as Megatron grew more desperate and power-hungry, he also became more controlling. The relationship started to become toxic around the time the two went to speak to the high council. Orion broke it off before things got too bad, but it was difficult for him. 

That was one of his first and longest romantic relationships, so it sort of skewed how he viewed romantic relationships for a while.

Before that, however, he alternated between three other friend groups. One group consisting of Jazz + Prowl. Jazz and Prowl were both upper middle castes, with Prowl being an enforcer (police officer) and Jazz being some sort of cultural investigator/detective. Due to this, Orion had plenty of info on what was happening on the criminal side of Iacon and Cybertron in general. He had access to places he probably shouldn’t have had due to his close relationship with the two. This was mostly due to the two going to him for any information inside the Iacon Hall of Records. 

Orion tended to behave a lot more openly with this group than the other three and spent most of his time with Jazz + Prowl. They were mostly just partying and exploring abandoned places, while dragging Prowl along with them. 

He spent most of his time with these two and would probably do so after the war. 

The second friend group he was in consisted of Ultra Magnus and Ratchet. Eventually, Elita-1 was added to that group after he became a Prime. The three of them were high caste, with Ratchet being a doctor, Elita-1 being a council member, and Ultra Magnus being an Elite Guardsman. 

Out of the three, Orion hung out with Ratchet the most. Ratchet was a lot of fun when he was younger. Otherwise, Orion really looked up to Ultra Magnus. Admittedly, there were times when he thought Ultra Magnus was too stiff or uptight, but he thought he was good leadership material. It was part of the reason why he wanted the caste system abolished. He believed that all of his friends could achieve something more, but them being restricted by their alt-mode was stupid. 

He absolutely despised Elita-1 in the beginning but eventually grew to respect her and genuinely like her when she helped save him from shadow play later on. 

He then had a third friend group that was mostly middle caste however, which consisted of Ironhide, Roller and Hightide. Hightide was a fisherman who went after deep water creatures, Ironhide was a weapons manufacturer and Roller was a fellow data clerk. 

Hightide is Orion’s oldest friend, second to Ratchet. This is mostly because some Quintesson loyalists threw Orion into a lake, and Hightide saved him from being stuck at the bottom.

Hightide seemed to only really cheer up around Orion when they were younger, probably because Orion always snuck him energon goodies. 

After the Quintesson war, Orion wasn’t seen as a typical data clerk (other than the obvious). His frame was a lot bulkier than most data clerks' frames, so he wasn’t interacted with much. Roller also wasn’t seen as a typical data clerk, so they became friends through that. (This was also due to his relationships with powerful people, as stated before) 

Orion beat Ironhide in a shooting contest once. He was drunk. 

He’s actually considered to be fairly average-looking. 

Orion is the last of his fellow data clerks. This is due to the High Council. 

WORD COUNT – 657

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[rotworld]

Sheep's Clothing

you live and work in eastridge. the mountains are close enough to see but not so close that you worry much about those werewolf rumors. tonight, though? you're worried.

->contains workplace harassment, feral behavior, a few mentions of vomit and vaguely sinister behavior.

.

.

.

You deserve hazard pay for the things you see and unwillingly experience during weekend shifts at Club Mountainview. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of insufferable behavior from shitfaced and entitled patrons, and a lot of vomit. Whoever decided that Eastridge’s most popular nightlife attraction needed a restaurant is a genius and a misanthrope. The food is overpriced but nobody cares after a few shots and some uncoordinated flailing on the dancefloor. Taking orders has made you an expert at lipreading and interpreting inebriated miming, a necessity to understand anything over nonstop synth melodies and pounding bass. You smile through a lot of bullshit because the people who don’t forget to tip entirely make the whole night worthwhile.

For some reason, tonight is extra bad. The girls at table four manage to spill not one, not two, but all five of their drinks, leaving ice, broken glass and a sticky, sugary alcohol mess all over the booth seats and floor. You have to call in one of the bouncers when a drunken brawl breaks out in the party room over mozzarella sticks and a chair is lobbed at your head. A guy argues with you about his mini tacos never arriving despite your insistence that he ate them ten minutes ago, and then he pukes on your shoes.

“It’s the full moon,” Donna grumbles. She was already at the bar when you got there, head resting against her hand and eyes bloodshot. A few long, blonde strands of hair escape from her ponytail and she’s forever pushing them behind her ear before they fall loose again. “Makes people act weird. All our worst shifts are during full moons.” 

“Full moon, huh?” you mutter, rubbing your temples to soothe an oncoming headache. The bar’s design straddles a cave and cabin concept, the back wall textured like stone and the counter a natural-edged slab of wood with a glassy finish. It’s the only place where your eyes and ears can rest, far enough from the dancefloor that the noise is tolerable and the lights soft and steady, firelight orange instead of flashing neon. 

“Rough one tonight, huh?” you hear. A glass of water slides across the bar and you find Irving’s sauntered over to chat while he works. He moves like a well-oiled machine, hands quick and graceful as he juggles empty glasses, mixes drinks and pours ice. “I hear there was a bit of a scuffle in the party room earlier. Glad you two got out unscathed,” he says conversationally, wearing his perpetual charismatic, glad-to-be-here smile. You have no idea how he maintains it this late into his shift.

“You’re so fucking lucky to be on that side of the bar,” Donna grumbles. 

“It’s not exactly a walk in the park back here either. I’m not sure I’ll have a barback for much longer, Tim looks about ready to quit. Someone threw a drink at him earlier.” Tim, the new hire sheepishly collecting empty glasses at the other end of the bar, is staring forlornly at Irving like a castaway watching a ship leave him behind. 

Donna insists, “Full moon.”

“That sounds more like a werewolf thing,” you say.

Irving shakes his head. “That’s a myth, actually. Moon phases don’t do anything to them. You know what, though, this is their hunting season.” 

You stare at him, waiting for him to laugh or say he was just kidding. He doesn’t. “Hunting season?” you echo, morbidly curious.

He rests a forearm across the bar counter, leaning in a little and lowering his voice. “Mhm. Late spring to early summer. They’re opportunistic, but this is the only time of year that they’re actively on the prowl. Did you know that the majority of people who go missing in the mountains around here disappear sometime in April or May? You two should be careful, actually, I hear they’ve got a thing for overworked waitstaff.”

“You’re so full of shit,” Donna says.

“I’m serious! My girlfriend told me—”

“Your werewolf girlfriend who nobody’s ever met and only visits when we’re all conveniently too busy to meet her, right?” 

“Tale as old as time,” Irving sighs. He gives you a wink before he drifts back to the other end of the bar. You linger for a little longer, nursing your water. That must’ve been a joke, right? You’ve never heard of a “hunting season,” but you don’t know enough about werewolves to be sure. You’ve never met one. Then again, people say it’s hard to tell. Your gaze wanders the club scanning the dancefloor crowd, the groups chatting further down the bar or squeezed around booths, the loners leaning against the wall. Would you even know one if you saw one?

Donna heads back to the trenches first when she spots a couple wander in and you’re not far behind. Right on time, too, because a huge group just walked in and meandered over after looking around all starstruck and delirious like they’ve never been in a club before. You do a quick headcount as they make their way to the restaurant seating area. Eight, nine, ten guys—you hope it’s not another bachelor party. 

“Welcome to the Mountainview Club Kitchen—” Your throat tightens before you finish the sentence. They’re all looking at you. Which shouldn’t be weird, you were trying to get their attention. But the second you spoke up, all of them went from distracted and overly interested in the decor to laser-focused on you and only you. That still doesn’t seem sufficient to explain the cold grasp of heart-stopping terror keeping you frozen in place. You don’t feel like you’re talking to customers at work, you feel like you’re standing in the woods late at night and something big, powerful and hungry just stepped into your path.

Cornered. That’s what you’re feeling. Like a trapped animal. Like a rabbit chased by…

No way, you think. You quickly plaster on a smile. “Uh. Welcome! You’ll have to give me a second to check how many tables we’ve got open right now, I can push a few together for you if there’s enough.” 

“Don’t sweat it, I’m the only one eating.” One of them waves off the others with a chuckle. “Go on, get out there and mingle. I’ll hold down the fort, yeah? You guys are guests tonight so it’s my treat if you want anything.” He looks normal. They all do. Not really dressed for clubbing but nothing that weird, lots of tank tops, denim and well-worn sneakers. The group disperses without a word to you or each other, leaving you alone with the friendliest one. 

You search him for anything amiss, anything that screams “werewolf” and come up empty. He’s just a guy. Black jacket, band t-shirt, jeans with ragged knees. Not unusually tall or tough-looking, honestly a little on the scrawny side, dark hair that curtains his face and feathers around his shoulders. Were you just imagining that feeling earlier? He sticks his hands in his pockets and tilts his head slightly, amusement tugging at the corner of his lips. “Something on my face?” he drawls. Shit, you’re staring. You try to play it off as spacing out and lead him to a table, wrestling with paranoia. You’re relieved when he starts scrutinizing the menu instead. 

“This is new, isn’t it?” he asks absently. “There wasn’t a restaurant last time I came here. I guess it’s been a while.”

“It opened a few months back,” you tell him. “Are you a regular?” 

“Eh, not really. I’m here like once a year.” 

Always around the same time? you wonder. Right around April or May? You scold yourself. Irving loves fucking with people, that’s all that was. And even if he wasn’t, a nightclub doesn’t really seem like prime werewolf hunting territory. “Can I get you started with something to drink?” 

“Just water, thanks. What’s good here?” He rests his chin against his palm while you try to think of a recommendation, smiling up at you. “I’m Corbin, by the way.” His eyes flick to your name tag and he reads it in a slow, teasing drawl. “So. You local? Live in Eastridge?” 

“Uh, yeah,” you say, utterly blindsided. “Uh. All of the appetizers are pretty good, and the tomato soup comes with this really good bread—” 

“Corbin.” You nearly jump out of your skin when one of the other guys seems to appear out of thin air, suddenly standing beside you. Sure, it’s hard to hear much of anything with the music, but he’s right there and he’s not exactly small. You aren’t sure how he snuck up on you. “Purple or green?”

Corbin tilts his head, glancing at something past the guy. You follow his gaze and see some of the people he came in with chatting up some college kids on the dancefloor. One’s in a sequined purple dress and the other’s wearing a green t-shirt. Corbin’s face scrunches up in distaste. “Neither,” he says. The other guy nods slowly like he’s just heard something truly profound and walks off. You have no idea what to make of the exchange and Corbin doesn’t let you dwell on it. “Is it always this busy?” he asks.

You shrug. “On the weekends, mostly.”

He hums, lips pursed and brows furrowed like you’ve just told him something heartbreaking. “Is it hard? A job like this? Seems pretty thankless.”

“A job’s a job,” you say with a tight smile. 

“It doesn’t have to be like that, y’know. There are places that would appreciate you so much more than this.” The discomfort must show on your face because his expression softens a little, less of a smirk and more of a sad smile. His voice gets softer and softer and you have to lean in to hear him clearly. “Sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean to freak you out. I’m just being nosy. But the thing is, I’ve got a good intuition. I can tell when people are…dissatisfied. Unhappy with their lives. You laugh it off, but it’s getting to you; how effortless it is for these people to hurt you. How brittle the bonds between humans are.” He pauses for just a moment and then he’s full of boisterous energy again, grinning. “Tomato soup, huh? Could I get that, and maybe the mozzarella sticks? Oh, and the wings too! They’d probably like that.”

“Sure,” you say weakly. You’re not entirely aware of your movements, running on autopilot to take the menu from him with numb fingers and put in his order. Why do you feel so shaken up? This is obviously a shitty place to work, anyone could see that. But it was more than that. The way he said it, the way he looked at you—like he knew you. Really knew you, the way strangers aren’t supposed to.

You try to shrug it off, make your rounds to other tables, but he’s on your mind all night. You bring him water and he takes it before you set it down. The pads of his fingers caress the back of your hand and slip away slowly, hesitantly, his eyes never leaving yours. “Thank you,” he says, his smile affecting you in embarrassing ways. You run to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face, trying to shock yourself out of whatever weird, emotional haze you’re in. 

Corbin is thankfully distracted when you come back with his appetizers. Someone else from his group swings by the table with his arm around a younger guy. “Oh, you’re on summer break? What’s your major?” Corbin asks. You don’t linger but you catch bits of conversation, enough to hear that the guy Corbin came with barely says a word. Is he the wingman for all of his socially awkward friends? You look around and see the others scattered around, a couple perched at the bar with a woman giggling between them, a few lurking around the dancefloor. One makes eye contact with you halfway across the club and your heart skips a beat. 

You’re getting that feeling again—the prickling on the back of your neck. The primal sense that there’s danger lurking somewhere nearby, hungry eyes raking across your skin. 

Corbin’s friends and their hookups drift by the table frequently. Every time you glance over, someone new is hovering next to him or sliding into an open chair with their plus one chatting happily. You’re not really surprised. There’s something magnetic about him, an effortless charm in his open, welcoming body language, the way he makes you feel like you’re the only two people in the world. Strangely, none of them stay long. People cycle in and out until you’re sure his whole friend group has stopped by at least twice, sometimes snagging something from an appetizer plate, but they don’t stick around.

Eventually, someone else entirely—a club regular, not someone Corbin came with—snags the chair across from him. They’re flirting and he’s apparently not interested, hardly looking at them, humming or muttering disinterested, one-word answers to their questions. You come back with his tomato soup just in time to see the interloper storm off, tears in their eyes. Corbin watches them go, leaning against the table with his lips curled in a snarl. “Packless,” he mutters, the word rolling off his tongue in disgust. He stiffens up when he notices you standing there, plastering on a smile. “Oh, that looks so good! Thank you!”

“Enjoy,” you manage to say, struggling to make sense of what you just saw. Corbin isn’t looking at the food, even when you set it down in front of him. 

“Why don’t you sit with me? I wanna talk more,” he says, nodding to the chair beside him. 

You laugh nervously. “I really can’t.” 

“Aw. Not even for a little bit?” You’re a little surprised but nonetheless grateful he doesn’t push. Instead, he pulls a hair tie out of his pocket to keep the long strands falling around his shoulders from falling into his food. “Sorry, sorry. I’m doing it again. It’s my intuition, y’know? I feel like we’re both missing out if we don’t get to know each other! But no worries, I know you’re on the clock.” He tosses the long strands of his ponytail behind his back and smiles at you.

Your heart drops into your stomach. You didn’t notice it before with his hair hanging around his neck, but he’s absolutely covered in painful-looking marks. Some are old, puckered scars and some are fresher, scabs and scrapes and flushed half-moons. They’re littered across both sides of his neck and even more disappear beneath the neckline of his shirt. There’s no mistaking them for anything else—those are bites. Big, human-sized bites, left by teeth too sharp to be a human’s. Your gaze darts back to his face and you know he caught you staring. 

He looks euphoric, eyes half-lidded and smile dreamy, like you’re fulfilling some exhibitionistic fantasy. 

“C…can I get you anything else?” you force yourself to ask.

He’s not discreet when he looks you up and down, gaze lingering on your hips, trailing slowly up your chest and eventually returning to your eyes. He licks his lips. “Nah,” he says, grinning. “I’m good for tonight.” 

You know he watches you for the rest of your shift. No matter where you go, you feel him staring. You want nothing more than to avoid him until he leaves but you don’t want him to complain about being neglected, eventually circling back to refill his water and take his empty plates. You don’t make eye contact and he doesn’t strike up a conversation. He pays his bill without anything weird happening until he hands you an insane tip, a few big bills rivaling your paycheck.

“We’re kindred spirits, y’know,” he says, looking satisfied by your wordless shock. “But you’re stuck in this awful world where nobody’s taking care of you right. So I’ll just have to do it myself until…” He never finishes the sentence, smile widening when you look at him questioningly. “Take a picture with me!” he says. You don’t argue. You’re so tired, so exhausted from all the mixed signals, and you’ve decided he’s ultimately harmless. Weird as hell and uncomfortably perceptive but harmless, and if he tips like this, you’ll give him all the pictures he wants.

Corbin pulls you down into the chair beside him with an arm around your shoulder and holds out his phone for a selfie. You fully intend to look at the camera but your eyes are pulled slightly off center by the sight of his bites displayed on the screen. It comes out awkward. Your smile is half-hearted and Corbin’s not quite looking at the camera either, his gaze focused on you with an uncomfortably fond smile stretched across his face.

[fallout4-reacts]

if you dont mind doing reacts based off other posts, how would companions react to a low int but max luck sole?

hoping links work in asks 😭

I sincerely believe that as long as I don't plagiarise another author's work, there should be no problem. However, if I have a writer who is upset because I've been asked the same request, I hope we can clarify it Unfortunately, it appears that there is an issue with the link, but I believe that it's better that way so I can react without being influenced by what has previously been done

So there! How companions react to a very stupid yet extremely fortunate Sole (It makes me think of Gontran from Picsou). I write them a little clumsy to add effect, hope you'll like it  PS : Yeah, I know, I have forget Cait... but it's fix

Cait : She wasn't really paying attention as Tommy wooed the stranger on her behalf. As long as she has her psycho, she doesn't give a hoot about anything else. Now, Sole and Cait were prowling an ancient factory in search of salvageable equipment and materials. They had hardly gotten a few steps ahead when they heard someone else's feet approaching.

Cait reached for her weapon and signalled for Sole to keep silent. They peered over the bend and saw a band of raiders coming at them with weapons blazing.

“Methinks we have some guests," Cait whispered. "We must find a way to flee with haste."

After agreeing, Sole turned to run, but their foot became hooked on a stray part.

A loose piece of metal grabbed Sole's foot as they turned to run, and they lurched forward, toppling a pile of crates with a loud crash.

As soon as the raiders noticed them, they opened fire, sending bullets flying past their heads. While Sole and Cait were running through the factory, dodging gunfire and looking for an exit, a stray bullet hit a gas tank, causing a massive explosion that sent debris flying in every direction.

Miraculously, neither Sole nor Cait were hurt as they were tossed to the ground. However, the factory was completely destroyed, and all of the raiders were wiped out in the explosion.

"I cannae believe it," Cait exclaimed. " Ye almost killed us, but we made it oot alive."

Sole smiled awkwardly. "I already told you. I seem to attract unusual luck."

Cait shook her head, but a grin spread across her face anyhow. She remarked, "Well, I dinnae ken how ya do it. Verily, I am relieved to have ya by ma side.”

Codsworth : From day one, when Nate activated him, he could see the extent of the damage… and somehow understand why they made his purchase in the first place. On that first day, he was able to count thirteen accidents. From something as stupid as stepping on the carpet to failing to set the house on fire for a cup of coffee, Sole is a walking disaster. That’s why Codsworth goes way beyond being Butler to make sure Sole doesn’t touch anything in the house. Since the bombs, the poor robot has been having anxiety attacks. How could someone barely able to survive in a relatively safe world do so in an extremely dangerous one? But ironically, it does. Like when Sturge asked Sole to install a suitable water line for Sanctuary and the city wall collapsed in the river, sparing the purifier. Since then, they have a clean pool free of any radiation, to the delight of all who can go wading and unclog a little at the end of the day without risking becoming a ghoul. Sturges has learned a lesson, and Sole is forbidden to touch anything that could be crucial for the colony since. Anyway, it’s not like the poor bastard can distinguish a battery from a switch.

Curie : Before she realised there was a living being on the other side of the door, the said door literally collapsed on itself. Curie never left the chamber where she had been kept for so long. She doesn't need to be asked to accompany Sole inside the vault. Unfortunately, one of the molerats carrying the infection bit Sole. To be honest, they fell on the corpse and stuck the teeth in their buttocks, even though the man in Sole's company had taken care to exterminate them all to ensure Sole was not worried. However, Sole refuses the treatment. Instead, they want that Curie cures a child. Curie is concerned about the virus's repercussions. But, once again, she has no idea what God Luck the Klutz must pray for, but the virus does not appear to be suitable for development in Sole's system. They will have to deal with some repercussions, but Curie has seen influenza cause more harm.

Danse : As he was about to give up after seeing the ferals rush waves after waves, he heard a voice behind him.

"Don't be afraid! I'm here to assist—oops!"

And Danse sees all of the security fences around the police station collapsing one after the other. How is that even possible? He has no idea. These barriers are built to withstand violent attacks. They are now sure they are dominoes. As panic gripped the Brotherhood, he realised that, by an incredible chance, the barriers had collapsed on the ghouls, flattening them like pancakes. When the last one has passed, the soldier turns to face the newcomer and a companion who appears to be in exasperation.

"Good…work…I guess. You have just spared us from terrible death." "Good job?" Rhys, the knight, becomes irritated. "That jerk almost got us all killed in less than a few seconds!"

"Keep calm," Haylen said as she shaved him on the train. "In the end, we are saved."

The paladin looks at his officers, then at the newcomer, who is attempting to untangle a chewing gum caught under his sole. When he loses his balance, the man beside him advances almost instinctively to receive him, almost as if he had the strength of habit.

"So, uh... listen, I have a mission for you if you're interested."

The man in the Minutemen's hat looks up, surprised, and drops his friend to make large hand movements, but it's too late. Sole, sitting on their hindquarters, nods their head.

"With great pleasure!"

Deacon : To put it simply, he hasn't laughed this hard in... ever. He was having problems laughing despite his attempts to drown his misery in humor, and he now goes to bed every night with a stomach ache so severe as he bends in half all day. He has seen them evolve in the world from the day they left the vault and has only one regret: not having popcorn. He has no idea how the individual made it this far. First, the Concord raiders: Sole fell down a well when the hatch that concealed it crumbled beneath their feet, unleashing a deathclaw in all his rage. While Sole ran like crazy up the street to avoid the huge beast's claws, the monster literally shredded all of the raiders present. When the deathclaw followed Sole into the museum, they collapsed the platforms on which the raiders were standing... raiders that the deathclaw has now shred in pieces. Finally, as Sole climbed four to four floors to escape their pursuers, the monster slipped and fell two floors on his head and died. Deacon almost roasted himself at the time, an intense chuckle escaping him despite himself. The adventure did not come to an end there. A completely taken aback Minuteman also arrived at the scene, but instead of making him laugh, it seemed to make him believe in the possibility of fate. So he began by worshipping Sole... for a few moments. Everything went to hell when Sole opened their mouths. This person isn't simply clumsy; they're plain dumb. But Preston appears to have a good heart in the face of bad luck; he takes Sole under his wing, and their adventures that begin then give Deacon so much pleasure that he is eager to go and tell everything at HQ.

Dogmeat : Dogmeat is delighted with his new master. But they can be strange at times. His new master seemed to disregard everything that people normally know. Instead of bang bang bang, they threw their weapon at a molerat. Dogmeat is unfazed; he shreds the molerats. Then there are the men-who-kill. Sole appears to believe that they can be their friend and greets them enthusiastically. When the men-who-kill turn towards them by raising their weapons, Dogmeat grabs Sole by the bottom of their trousers to make them get back. The metal plate on which they stand then falls beneath their feet, revealing a furious deathclaw. When the monster chases Sole and Dogmeat, they run belly-dn ahead. Sole does not accompany Dogmeat forks into a place where he knows they will be safe. They kept running straight forward, as if they could outrun a deathclaw. Dogmeat lets out a whine and dashes behind the deathclaw. It has been stated that Dogmeat was a bright dog, but the canine never imagined that he would one day be more intelligent than a person.

Elder Maxson : Danse stands behind the new recruit, completely uneasy. The Elder addresses him first.

"I'm having difficulty comprehending your report. You appear to be saying that Sole is the element that helped your missions work in your benefit, but you also appear to have some concerns. Why beg for their promotion and support them while expressing uncertainty?"

"I recommend that you make up your own mind."

The Elder then turns to the recruit and begins his lengthy speech. Sole maintains a straight posture and attentive listening throughout. Maxson is animated and takes his time explaining himself. When he has finished his long speech, he turns to Sole, waiting for their decision.

"So... I can get a Power Armor?"

Arthur is shocked. He frowns and glances at Danse, who appears to be trying to hold back a grin.

"Indeed, yes. But, more importantly, do you understand what is being asked of you?"

"Oh, to put on your uniform and go about doing your errands. When will I receive my armor?"

"Our… errands?"

"Yes. Go there, Sole, and bring that back. I'm not upset. But I'm looking for my armor."

Maxson's eyes widen in astonishment He again catches Danse's eyes, and he is certain now that the paladin keeps his cool not to chuckle. He instructs Sole to await them on the bridge.

"What's the backstory?"

"This... this recruit is a very interesting element. He fulfils all our requests. But to be honest, it's a miracle more than anything else."

"Do they... do they appear uh... capable of thinking?"

"I have my doubts. The Minutemen who accompanied them were equally sceptical. Furthermore, I do not recommend accompanying them on a mission or entrusting them with anyone. But they do the job... in their own way."

Arthur pauses for a moment before sighing.

"I must admit that the hopelessness of our situation compels me to grant your request. As a result, as you suggested, I raise them to Knight. I have a first task for both of you."

"Us two, sir?"

"You brought them to me; now you will manage them."

Danse lets out a sigh. That was his greatest fear. But, hey, Sole isn't a bad guy. He's only had concerns after nearly being roasted alive in Arcjet.

Hancock : "Wow! Insurance! You're such a kind man!"

The mayor of Goodneighbor looks at the newcomers with a snigger. Finn is defrauding them. Then he encounters the irritated, perhaps tired, look of Diamond City detective Nick Valentine. He doesn't want his drifter to play games with someone he likes, so he approaches Finn and instructs him to comply.

"Nick Valentine makes a rare visit to town, and you’re hassling his friend here with that extortion crap?"

"No problem here," the newcomer hurriedly stated. "This gentleman was just selling me insurance."

Nick seems to open his mouth in protest, but Hancock take it in hand.

"You’re soft, Hancock. If you continue to allow strangers walk all over us, there will be a new mayor."

"Come on, man. This is me we’re talking about. Let me tell you something."

Sole seemed to be aware that something is about to occur. They approach towards the mayor, opening their mouth to speak, but their foot become caught in a slab on the ground.

"Oops!"

However, they cling to the dagger that Finn hid to cut Sole's throat at the first move, and the little scoundrel turns impaled on his own blade. Hancock, for his part, didn't have time to pull his own, which he had hidden behind his back, ready to impale Finn as well. He seems perplexed, Sole apologising repeatedly to Finn's body, which is now stiff on the ground.

"I'm very sorry, man. I didn't want to murder him... Mr. Ghoul, are you listening? I didn't want to murder your citizens. Please do not hurt me."

Nick shakes his head in disbelief, and the mayor cracks a faint smile.

"It's not the sharpest pencil in the box, is it?" He then explains "This guy was going to cut your throat. You had an amazing chance."

"Wait, no, I think you're wrong; he just wanted to sell me insurance."

Nick raises his hand as Hancock prepares to explain again in simple terms.

"Lost time, pal. Take this buddy as they come. I don't think they've realised I'm a synth yet."

"I'm not that stupid!" Sole objected. "But I know you don't make music. So, if you want to pretend to be something you're not, go ahead; but stop wanting—

"Synthetic! Not synthesizer!"

Hancock busts out laughing, and someone else behind his back does as well. He recognises Deacon's voice, but as he looks about among the street drifters, he doesn't see the Railroad agent.

Gage : Weeks of effort. It took weeks of miracles to get the stiff hands on a common project. The entire Gauntlet has now collapsed. Gage sighs and shakes his head. This new player is not playing. They are, nonetheless, intriguing. They will now have to handle Colter at the arena's door. Porter uses his intercom to confront the newcomer.

"Who's the one talking?"

"Porter, please answer the intercom. Approach, we’ll talk."

"Porter? That's... God's new name?"

Gage pauses, frowning. But dammit, he's met the stupidest guy he's ever encountered, and yet he evolves above the raiders.

"It's the intercom! It's on the wall! Near the lockers."

"Ah! Eheh. Yeah. I see. So, what do you desire?"

"If you play it right, we'll work together."

Porter then has a second thought. He can't possibly appeal to this person's brains. He shrugs his shoulders and decides to improvise.

"Look, you're going to find a water gun in a locker...hello?"

"Oops! Sorry. I was... looking around..."

"Huh? Power to the Arena's down by 30%. You do that? Not bad. You're still gonna need the gun, but... that oughta help."

Sole finally found the water gun after numerous clues. Porter began to question if his strategy was really that good...

MacCready : Hancock ushers a newcomer into the VIP room. Poor timing. Those idiots Winlock and Barnes have tracked him down and are attempting to intimidate him. It's going to get ugly fast...

"Wow, this is a true family reunion! Wow, you've got a lot of guns!"

MacCready was still astonished after Hancock struck his forehead. Giggles escaped the gunners. Mac rushes to return them to their home.

"Are you the mercenary I can employ?" It's Hancock, he stated I need God's help and don't know who I can afford to stay alive."

Mac casts a glance at the mayor, who shrugs and walks out of the room, unable to keep back his laughter.

"Yeah, I do offer my rifle services to those who can afford them."

"Oh, yes, caps!"

The new person slings a bag over their shoulder, but in a clumsy action, all of the contents and the container fall to the ground. They see something under the table as they bend down to pick up their mess.

They reach out their hand and pull out a plasma grenade. MacCready rushes to take the toy from their grasp as they prepare to engage it accidently.

"Obviously, you're going to need all the help you can get to survive, but if you really want to pay for my services, it'll be...500 caps."

Sole takes out a purse containing their belongings.

"There must be at least five or six hundred. It's difficult to count that many. Okay, maybe ten or twenty capsules. But more than a hundred? You're insane; I don't have all day."

Perplexed, the mercenary scratches the back of his head and sighs. He didn't expect the new would accept such a high price, so he's not going to start recounting behind them. There are clearly several hundred caps by weight.

"Well, you've just paid for Robert Joseph MacCready's services!" he attempts cheerfully.

"Great!" exclaims the other. "I'm Sole. That's how they refer to me."

Nick Valentine : After only a few minutes, he begins to question if it might not be preferable to remain trapped in the vault. Dyno died literally laughing. He fell over the railing and into the atrium at the bottom after seeing the other get entangled in wires while attempting to draw their rifle. Nick has been waiting impatiently for the other to figure out how the terminal works since then.

"Listen, uh... detective, I'll be right back."

Nick hears the other one come down the stairs, then return after a long time. Dyno appears to have had a piece of paper with the password in his pocket, and Sole can finally open the cage, which is not gilded at all.

"Ah, my knight-in-shining-armor. But the question is, why does he come all this way, risk life and limb, for an old private eye?"

"Who! Is that a robot? I'm sorry, Mr. Robot, but I'm searching for a detective. Did you happen to see him?"

"I believe I'm the detective you're looking for."

"No, I mean a private investigator. I was told he went to look into Malone's side of the vault and that we haven't heard from him since."

"I am the private detective."

"Nick Valentine! That's his given name. Nick Valentine, I recall."

"I AM NICK VALENTINE."

"Okay. Is this some sort of a game? You've been programmed to deceive others? What happened to Nick Valentine?"

Nick takes a deep breath.

"I’m a synthetic man. I’m a synthetic detective."

"You’re a synthesiser? So, you're a musician? Wow. When the detective’s going to figure it out... But I don't have time to listen to music; I need to save the detective."

"Lord…"

Piper : "Play along!"

"Are you playing a game? Great!"

Piper casts a sidelong peek at the new one, but she's not going to pass up this opportunity. She eventually persuaded Danny to open it up to her with a lot of luck. However, the person in blue almost blew it. She rushes into Diamond City as soon as the gate opens, and the new follows her, but she will worry about them later, as MacDonough awaits her around the corner.

"Piper! Who you let you back inside? I told Sullivan to keep that gate shut!"

"Hey!" interrupts the newcomer right away. "How could Quincy's surplus have been sold to...crazy Mirna... if you had left this gate closed?"

«It was a lie to go home," Piper says as she passes past.

"Do you mean I'm not a Quincy trader? Oh, how I would have liked that."

The mayor, by some miracle, appears to believe that the newcomer is important and ends up leaving them alone, tail between their legs, after the other voices two or three well-placed remarks. Piper is impressed, because in fact, they appear to have only two cells, one to keep them from peeing everywhere and the other to...

"So, Blue, do you want to tell me a little bit about your backstory?"

"Blue? Why do you call me Blue?"

"The vaultsuit."

"Oh, yes, it's true that it's blue."

Piper lets out a sigh. She hasn't even left the inn yet.

"Please join me at the Publick Occurency (if you can find it) and we can talk. Okay?"

The new one says, "Agreed." Piper rushes away, wondering who she has just met, when she catches the smile of a guard she does not remember.

Preston : Oh my fucking goodness! Preston isn't the sort to curse, but as half the museum collapses on the gunners and deathclaw, the notion flashes through his mind as vividly as if he'd said it aloud. He, on the other hand, cannot believe their good fortune. It's amazing! To accomplish such a feat, this individual must be a genius. But as he watches them emerge from the rubble, he begins to wonder if...

"Wow, that's impressive. But a couple of shots could have done the same thing without... destroying everything."

The blue person simply steps over the balcony and approaches Preston.

"Hello there! What exactly are you doing here? Isn't this a really depressing place to be?"

Preston looks at the refugees before returning his gaze to the vaultie.

"The raiders threatened us, so we took refuge here. But now that we've done that, we must decide what to do next. Sturges?"

Preston notices that Sturges is entirely frozen in place, detailing the new one as if it appeared out of nowhere.

"They did... they destroyed the museum!"

"Yes, Sturges. I was present. But, at the very least, the city has been cleaned up. We can proceed safely."

"Safe? With…that?!"

"That's referred to as Sole. Pleased. You are?"

"The survivors of Quincy."

"And we'd like to be able to survive," Sturges continued. "There will be no more williboumbatpouf! Okay?"

So, the survivors of Quincy and Sole set out for the location seen by Mama Murphy: Sanctuary Hill. When they arrive in one piece, Preston has the brilliant idea of inviting Sole to assist Sturges in establishing them. And that results in a lot… a lot of problems. 

Strong : Strong doesn’t see the problem. Strong finds the puny humans very lucky. Other humans seem to think the puny human is stupid. Strong think the puny humans is very smart.

X6-88 : He cannot conceive of this individual being able to conceive Father. Probably the other parent was a genius outside of their field, and Father got the best of both worlds. There is literally no other option. And their chance! Surely, wherever they go, this extraordinary chance rescues them from the direst situations.

"Wow, X6! I stumbled onto a honey storage tank. It's incredible!"

X6 heaves a murmur of exasperation as he leans over the edge of the rusted tank, whose metal has yielded under Sole's weight. It is indeed honey that has been partially solidified but is still viable.

Truly an incredible chance.

[zerogate]

Mao took advantage of a simple peculiarity of human nature: the rebelliousness of adolescents. The defiant attitude of teenage punk rockers and heavy metal head-bangers may seem like a rage spawned by the unique disorders of Western culture, but it is not.

Adolescence awakens defiant urges in nearly all primates. In chimpanzees, it inspires a wanderlust that forces some young females to leave the cozy family they’ve always known and go off to make a new life for themselves among strangers. In langur monkeys, it triggers a restlessness that’s much more to the point. Adolescent langur males kick loose the bonds of their childhood family life and cluster in unruly, threatening gangs. Then they go on the prowl, looking for some older, well-established male they can attack. The adolescents’ goal is to dislodge the respectable elder from his cushy home and take over everything he owns—his power, his prestige, and his wives.

As we’ll see later, humans are driven by many of the same instincts as our primate relatives. Consequently, many adolescents of our species also resent the authority of the adults over their heads. Their hormones have suddenly told them that it is time to assert their individuality and to challenge the prerogatives of the older generation.

Schoolchildren were encouraged to find other literary works rotting with revisionism and antirevolutionary notions. The children leapt avidly to their homework assignment. But they became even more enthusiastic a few months later when a new directive came from above: ferret out bourgeois tendencies and reactionary revisionism among your teachers.

The new task was one to which any youngster could apply himself with gusto. That teacher who gave you a poor mark on your last paper? He’s a bourgeois revisionist! Humiliate him. The pedagogue who bawled you out for being late for class? A capitalist rotter! Make her feel your wrath. Revenge had nothing to do with it. This was simply an issue of ideological purity.

Students examined everything their teachers had ever written. In the subtlest turns of innocent phrasing, they uncovered the signs of reactionary villainy. At first, they simply tacked up posters reviling the teachers as monsters and demons. Then all classes were suspended so that pupils could work on sniffing out traitors full-time. Instructors who had fought faithfully with Mao’s revolutionary forces were suddenly reviled. Others who considered themselves zealots of Maoist thought were pilloried as loathsome rightists. Some couldn’t take the humiliation.

Among their teachers, the diligent students “discovered” the vilest of the vile. Gao Yuan says that they uncovered “hooligans and bad eggs, filthy rich peasants and son-of-a-bitch landlords, bloodsucking capitalists and neobourgeoisie, historical counterrevolutionaries and active counterrevolutionaries, rightists and ultrarightists, alien class elements and degenerate elements, reactionaries and opportunists, counterrevolutionary revisionists, imperialist running dogs, and spies.”

The students armed themselves with wooden swords and hardware. At night, they imprisoned their teachers in their bedrooms. Another instructor at the Democracy Street Primary School was driven past endurance and hung himself.

-- Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

[randomwriteronline]

(A Day)

The sun was pouring in through the window, calmly, stretching like a drowsy Liepard. They had forgotten to get the blinds down, yesterday - but in their defense they had been too horrendously tired by the end of their snickering dinner to remember to do that, or to move back to their respective rooms for that matter. It still felt incredible that Elesa had managed to remain lucid and awake enough to go home on her own.

Emmet was asleep still, his cheek resting on his brother's sternum and arms wrapped in a loose hug around his neck. Ingo patted his back softly, intermittently, trying to follow along to vague memories of songs.

He wasn’t used to being awake before anybody else - usually he would continue snoozing only to be quickly yanked out of his torpor by a sudden sound caused by the activity of somebody already up and about, whether that be Tangrowth stumbling out to get some sun, a clansman checking on him, a Pokémon prowling around in an attempt to strike him unprepared.

It had taken just a moment to assess that his twin, even trembling so fiercely and twitching uncomfortably with his brow furrowed deep, muttering something like ‘viva’ in a pleading tone, was very much not conscious.

His nightmare had been dissipated quickly, thankfully, when his nape was scooped into a scarred hand and his hair kissed by a dry mouth that began to soothe him by muttering a litany from the Icelands, with a soft beat like patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat, patta-pat.

It was a sort of nursery rhyme, if memory served him well, to scare away Ghosts and bad dreams; and now Ingo struggled to recall the words to it.

There was one about Bergmites, but it had their ice armor melted in the sun, and this one was more of a playful march. He was half sure it featured an increase in number of some sorts - or maybe he was confusing it with the Aipoms swinging across the side of a river? Very likely; though he still had a feeling math played some part in all of it. What Pokémon do scare off Ghosts... Well, that’s easy, Dark or Ghost types, but it certainly wasn't about Glalies or wandering spirits. Might have been about... Riolus? Or Glameows. No, no, Riolus was more likely. Walking in rows after a Lucario acting as their teacher, or training together by attacking and blocking. Ah, but that didn’t have anything to do with shielding from apparitions - they couldn’t even touch them, Fighting types that they were! Though Steel is very effective against Ice... But what did Ice have to do with anything? Now he was thinking of Irida and Gaeric.

He rushed back to focusing entirely on the beat against his brother’s ribs before his mind wandered into territory that turned his own chest into a suffocating iron cage collapsing under the deep sea pressure.

Patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat - patta-pat, pat, pat, patta-pat.

Not remembering the lyrics was making this quite a challenge.

Did he at least know the melody?

Ingo tried humming a note or two, just to hear how that would sound like. He remembered to draw them out a little, like chant, or a lament. When he had heard Lian sing it to one of of Kleavor’s smallest Scythers while swaddling it in a blanket, his young voice had sounded a bit akin to the whine of a Swinub; Ingo traced over the fuzzy memory of his singing with his own buzzing throat, as if the still incomplete tune were a drawing and he himself an unskilled child learning to draw by following someone else’s lines on a paper held against the sun.

Had he ever listened to it properly? No, probably not. What a shame.

A part of him thought it was a relief. That meant it would have been easier to go back to everything being normal, being right; he would leave all of Hisui behind himself in some lost nook of his brain like he had left it behind in time and space alike, and he would return to being whoever he had forgotten he was, and it would have been good.

Not a trace of change.

(The warden that was bound to fade away from his self eventually was fiddling with the stark white kimono Irida had given him, lamenting without words how he wished he could still see in its place the pale pink of his former tunic, and mumbled that he didn’t like the idea of forgetting. It was just something that nobody could stop, Ingo tried to reason with him, sheepish and defensive: it wasn’t out of malice, but simply how things are. The warden looked at him very sadly, with that pale unhappy face of his.)

(I think it was about stars, the warden said: I’m not certain, but I believe the words sounded a little like this.)

The head on his chest lowered for a moment, nuzzling his ribs, and its shoulders moved as if trying to properly push down or take off a shirt too tight.

“Oh,” Ingo said, interrupting the string of vowels he had begun singing and stilling his hands over the bony back. “I apologize. Did I wake you up?”

Emmet shook his head with a sleepy groan; his arms stretched and tensed to make his joints crack imperceptibly, imitated by his legs; his eyes were still closed, and his mouth felt full of clay-like paste that stuck his tongue to his palate and his teeth to his lips.

“Already awake,” he lied.

“I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Don’ worry.”

He tucked his knees against his chest and curled up a little more to be more comfortable, slightly tightening the hug he had his brother ensnared in. He couldn’t remember sleeping like this, like a rock placed on top of an ironing board, in what felt like ages. It felt warm, and nice, and familiar.

His twin’s hands rested back on his spine, as light as feathers, no longer patting it. Emmet hoped he wasn’t embarrassed by it, nor that he thought himself silly for it. It was calming, really.

He could have stayed like this for another hour.

Huh. Weird for him to want to keep sleeping. He was the early riser. Could have been the sleeping pill again. No, no way. He must have had digested it by now.

But his brother definitely would not wake up before the alarm.

“What time is it?” Emmet asked, groggy voice a little gurgling despite the fact that his mouth seemed drier than the Route 4 desert.

“I don’t know,” Ingo replied, “But considering the sun, it’s morning.”

Considering the what?

The sun doesn’t rise anywhere near 5:30 in the morning in early spring.

Emmet furrowed his brows and slithered, with some difficulty, one of his arms away from under his twin’s neck. Forcing his eyes to open (shutting them for another moment with a groan as the light bothered his not yet constricted pupils) he squinted at the numbers on the Xtransceiver. It took him a hot second for his brain to once again comprehend any written sign.

It was currently 9:03.

“Shit,” he croaked out with a wheeze.

With all the gracefulness of a nightstand falling down a spiral staircase and launching itself through the wide enough hole in its railing to bounce with a horrid crunch directly into a den of hungry Bidoofs, he began climbing down from his brother’s hold face-first, possibly emulating Eelektross when the dastardly Mold Breaker emanating from Haxorus would reduce him to pitifully crawling on the floor like a wet tube in disdainful protest.

His attempt at not worsening his disastrous delay was however quickly vanquished by a pair of arms slipping right back under his armpits and around his neck, which pulled him back up, and by the body attached to them, which turned and squashed him against the back of the couch.

“Fucker,” he spat out.

“You’re still tired,” Ingo commented casually like he wasn’t constricting his younger twin in a grapple: “From what I understand, you spent the entirety of yesterday extraordinarily drowsy. It can be dangerous to go about not well-rested, you do know that, right?”

“Let go. I am verrry late.”

“By how much?”

“Three and a half hours.”

“Ah! That’s quite a shame. At this point it might be better for you to take another nap and head out later, if not at all entirely.”

Punches began pelting his back.

As a response, he leaned a little heavier; his younger brother made a sound that reminded him of a Magby whose paw got stepped on, and started hitting him even harder.

“You’re a little weak,” Ingo noted, genuinely slightly concerned: “Have you been eating enough?”

“Fuck you.”

“I am very serious.”

“So am I! Fuck you!” and seeing as brute force was having no effect, Emmet was now trying to wiggle his legs back up to his chest in the hopes that he would manage to punt his feet directly in the older twin’s stomach. “I am already late on schedule! Don’t make that worse!”

Hm. A reasonable complaint. Very well then.

With a final squishing that got him another fist banging on his shoulder in an attempt to stab him with air (as there were no knives or other silverware available) Ingo sat up, stood on his creaking legs, and began making his way to the kitchen so his poor mess of a baby brother could sit down and get something in himself stat, before he decided he did not need to ingest anything before spending a whole day doing Sinnoh knew what with nothing to keep him standing upright on those bony ankles of his.

He spaced out for a moment once in the room, right before the fridge which still buzzed as loudly as the day before, wondering why his arms seemed to be occupied when he could have sworn he wasn’t holding anything in them.

Once he actually opened his eyes - must have been tired himself, trying to sleep even as he walked - he noticed he was indeed holding something.

That something happened to be Emmet, whose hands were holding extremely tightly on the fabric of his older brother’s shirt and whose legs were wrapped around his sides in a similar iron grip as to not fall onto the ground despite the fact that firstly, the arms keeping him airborne were very much not going to let go of him, and secondly, he could have easily stood on his own feet if he just put them back on the floor since they were the same height.

Emmet might have forgotten that in the throes of being picked up like a packet of potato chips, because he seemed slightly terrified by the current situation.

Ingo gently put him back down.

“Sorry.”

“I don’t like that you can do that,” his brother stated plainly. “You could use that for evil.”

"I most certainly would not," Ingo scoffed. "And you are just thin. Please sit down and get something to eat."

His twin fake-slapped him to shut him up. The slaps turned more frantic as he unceremoniously picked Emmet from under the armpits and hoisted him back up in the air, completely deaf to his string of no-no-no and sorries and ingos and put-me-down-put-me-down-Dragons-above-put-me-down until he planted his ass on a chair.

“You are going to eat,” he declared.

Excadrill, who had just scuttled into the room, agreed loudly with the sentiment.

In true younger brother fashion, Emmet pouted: “See,” he argued as he slumped in his seat: “I was right. You used it for evil.“

“I wouldn’t call making sure you don’t starve an ‘evil’ motive.”

“It is! Because I’m late.”

“By three and a half hours.”

“Exactly.”

“Which is so late, at this point the schedule must have been already rearranged to accommodate for your absence,” Ingo rationalized, trying to search through the fridge: “So might as well take your time and eat properly first.”

He then spent a few moments looking mesmerized as Emmet struggled on his chair against apparently nothing with such violence that, after rocking it over and over in all directions, he finally slammed so hard on its back that he should have by all means launched himself right onto the pavement tiles. Instead, he stopped just short of that, winning against gravity in a way that made no sense; the chair settled very gently back on all fours, and the younger twin whipped his head around to stare directly into Chandelure as she deflated in the relief of having caught him in time.

He then turned back to his brother older by eleven minutes exactly. His mouth was flat and his eyes told of unspeakable rage.

Ingo turned to the haunted light fixture: she gracefully showed him her back.

He could hear the younger twin wheeze and whistle in fury like a kettle left too long on a burning stove as he retreated back in the metal parallelepiped in search of something that could have constituted a good first meal. He sighed, re-emerging from the cold.

“Please let him go,” he demanded politely.

His brother gave a victory groan and slammed his face on the table to make sure the Psychic bindings on him were completely gone.

Archeops took the opportunity to sit on his nape.

“No!!” his trainer’s shout was muffled by the weight pinning him down as he reached up and harshly scratched the scaly body covered in feathers with hands hardened into claws. The overgrown snake-headed chicken gargled delighted by the annoyance of his mischief accompanied by Excadrill’s snickering chitters while Ingo reached out to get something in the pantry he was pretty sure he had seen yesterday.

Resuscitated fossil manhandled off of himself with the help of a couple belly rubs, Emmet jumped to his feet and shot him a glare.

“I am Emmet,” he announced irritated, “I am tired of being bullied.”

His brother hummed: “When are you set to return home?” he asked, completely ignoring the other’s demand.

“Eleven thirty at night.”

“I see,” Ingo commented.

The strange conciseness of the sentence set off alarm bells.

The second he tried to move forward to grapple him again, the younger dropped into a defensive stance and grasped the table to keep it as a barrier between the two of them.

“Nooo,” he growled.

“I will not pick you up again,” Ingo promised, only half-lying.

Emmet pointed at his face: “No!”

If the older took a step to the left, he moved to the right, and vice versa. They did that old comedy routine for maybe less than a minute before juvenile impatience overwhelmed the younger brother, and his brain suddenly shot to a completely different topic: had their Pokémon eaten? He glanced around to find their bowls, planning to pull off a fulminous move in some way or another and disappear first into the livingroom to somewhat set up breakfast for their teems and then into his own room to change shirt at record time and teleport out the door before he could be wrestled into a chair again.

The bowls were missing though, and the cabinet holding the various Type-specific foods had been left open to reveal its insides empty if not for a variety of edible pellets that must have fallen out as they were moved out.

Right. They were smart. And Gurdurr had sort of human-like hands. They probably got tired of waiting but didn’t want to wake their humans up. Especially not with one of Crustle’s spoiled baby tantrums. Dragons, how come that crab of a Bug was still behaving like an unsocialized only-child Dwebble? They had trained him like everybody else. Maybe it was because of that time they made him a fancy shell. Now he exploited the fact that they loved him to death and back. Verrry unfair.

The crackle of a clear plastic packet being opened got him focused on avoiding his brother again.

“Emmet,” Ingo sounded a little exasperated.

“I am Emmet. I am verrry late.”

“If you do not eat anything, you risk fainting in the middle of the day and putting yourself in danger.”

“False! I didn’t eat anything for a whole day once. Twice. I am alive. I survived. Cease and desist.“

Hm.

Considering the wide-eyed, pale-cheeked, brow-furrowed, very noticeably worried look he was getting, maybe that had not been the best thing to reveal to his renownedly protective twin at this time.

“Forget that,” he ordered in the bossy tone of baby brothers.

“I think I will singe it into my brain instead,” his brother replied in a horrified tone. “Emmet, what the hell do you-”

“I survived!” Emmet repeated.

Ingo ignored that and approached him directly: “Two days, you forgot to eat?”

“Not consecutively!”

“That doesn’t change anything!”

“It does. And I’m still alive!”

“That alone is surprising,” the older brother replied, nonchalantly handing him something no larger than his palm, “And your survival is not an indication that you are safe to repeat that experience whenever you want.”

The younger stuck out his tongue as he took what was being offered to him without even looking and opened it, almost as a reflex: “I can handle it.”

“Not if you faint in the middle of the street.”

“I am Emmet. I have never fainted ever in my life.”

“Maybe so, but I’m afraid that I truly cannot remember an occasion in which you have not fainted before.”

“I have not! You-”

He interrupted himself, biscuit halfway bitten through. His face fell into such an annoyed frown so fast that Ingo couldn’t help snorting a bit.

“First you lift me. Then you Psychic me. Now you use your amnesia to bully me.”

“Chandelure was the one to Psychic you, I unfortunately lack the power to make you sit down consistently with my mind.”

“You’re the worst.”

The lifeless delivery stung a little, hit a bit too seriously. But the comically disgruntled grimace that accompanied it, similar in every way to how a Pachirisu tries to fold its face into itself after biting into a horribly sour Rawst Berry, both eased any possible tensions and felt so familiar that he couldn’t help cracking a misshapen dastardly smirk at it.

“I am only looking out for my baby brother,” he defended himself.

Emmet groaned at being called that, shoving another biscuit in his mouth.

“I am not hungry anyways,” he still argued back as he chewed, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “I don’t need breakfast. I’m fine as I am.”

Ingo only looked down at his hand and replied: “Alright.”

His twin followed his gaze to the clear plastic.

He squeezed it with a crackle, the last few biscuits inside it swimming in crumbs.

“Fuck you.” he spat through the fifth bite he was taking.

Ingo snorted horrendously loudly.

Boldore peeked in to somewhat chirp at them, with its strong tripod legs clicking very gently against the floor and Eelektross in tow, who wrapped around his trainer in a loud gurgling hug. He rested his huge mouth on his head careful not to scratch him but all the same insistently reminding him, in his own very loving and very deadly enormous electric tube of a lamprey kind of way, that they were supposed to go, possibly as soon as they could, and he was notably being very slow this morning.

As Emmet grabbed his long head and swayed it back and forth, sputtering something like a whiny ‘I knooow’ through his mouthful of biscuits, Klingklang tried to persuade their impatient flatmates by whirring that he likely deserved a lie-in, or at the very least that they should have let Ingo have a bite to eat first.

Before Durant could agree or Galvantula could sneak off to try and get some jam for herself (because she was one bastard of a lady) Archeops began screaming wildly, jumping up and down all antsy and obnoxious in the hopes of speeding up the process until Crustle got bored of the other crybaby and threw a pebble at his coarse bald head to shut him up.

That worked for approximately ten seconds. Then the overly scaly chicken turned all teary eyed and wobbly lipped and broke out into wailing sobs, waddling away to Haxorus to get some comfort from his fellow reptilian.

“Harsh but fair,” the twins sentenced in favor of the hermit Bug.

The fossil bawled harder.

Excadrill interrupted the heart-breaking scene to ask her trainer if he was going to sit down and eat something himself or if her, Gurdurr and Chandelure would have to make sure he did that in his stead with a stern chitter.

In response, he showed her three ravaged clear packets, without even crumbs inside: “Ah, don’t worry! I’ve already met my stomach’s needs for the morning.”

His brother eyed the spoils with mild bafflement: “What- when?”

“Earlier, while you were making a fuss about not eating.”

“How do you eat so fast?”

For a moment, a rush of paranoia made him inclined to just lie. His common sense managed to shove through it, however, reasoning that he just had to not say one single stupid word, and how hard would that have been? So he looked straight into his twin’s eyes, praying his voice wouldn’t shake in a way that made it clear something was up, and told him, dead serious: “Sneasles are horrible little thieves.”

After a long second of confusion, the reply he got made him almost deflate in relief: “Oh right. You were on the mountain.”

“Yes.”

“Lots of little burglars.”

“Exactly. Heaps and nests of them, to be quite frank.”

“Man.”

A loud wail distracted them.

“YES!” the younger twin almost yelled, launching the clear plastic into the sink - or at least trying to, as it was so light that it got caught in the air and fell to the ground with a miserable pirouette of sorts to be picked up by Garbodor’s slinky arm for her to snack upon it. “I AM AWARE! We are going. Hold on.”

He marched out of the kitchen to a variety of jubilant shrieks of Joltiks waiting for nothing other than to be left alone to wreak havoc (accompanied also by the distraught beeps of the ones who didn’t want him to leave) and fetched his Pokéballs in a somewhat swift movement, trying to recall all six members of his team to varying degrees of success.

As he watched him fumble, Ingo suddenly remembered something he’d been aching to ask since yesterday.

With barely any fanfare or build up he ensnared his brother’s wrist in an iron grip; he hadn’t meant to spook him into stillness, but before he could apologize different words were already leaving his mouth as fast possible, as if afraid they wouldn’t have gotten through otherwise: “May I come with you?”

Emmet blinked for a moment.

“Where?” he asked - a little stupidly, he had to admit.

“To the Station.”

“... Why?”

“I’d like to see it. The inside of it, I mean. I’ve never... I’ve yet to see one. Since I’ve gotten my amnesia.”

Ah. Yes. Good point. Reasonable request.

Problem: nobody was aware of the fact that previously-missing-for-years Local Minor Celebrity Guy was back in the region, except for people who definitely were not going to disclose such a detail to the public before the man in question was allowed some time to at least re-acquaint himself with everything in a geographical sense and also with his own family instead of letting the doors of the media circus swing wide open to drown him in unwanted attention.

Second problem: previously-missing-for-years Local Minor Celebrity Guy was perhaps one of the most recognizable people in the region after a maximum amount of three glances in his direction.

In conclusion: fuck.

Emmet stared into his twin’s eyes for a span of time that would have made anybody nervous and uncomfortable, and to be completely fair, Ingo himself wasn’t necessarily enjoying the situation either.

Finally he clamped his older twin’s shoulders between his hands, tightening his grip around them for a moment: “Dress up,” he only ordered.

“Pardon?”

“Yes. You can come. But. Dress up,” he repeated, trying to formulate a proper sentence in the chaos of having to change and trying not to worsen his delay and making sure hordes of journalists wouldn’t materialize as soon as his brother stepped out of home: “Change clothes. Get normal ones. Random ones. Not much attention. Unrecognizable. Otherwise. You know. Newspapers.”

The last word clued Ingo in on the bigger problem, as his eyes widened and he nodded with an air of great gravitas: “The Sewaddles of life...”

“The Sewaddles...” his brother repeated with a horrified expression, agreeing.

Now the older twin clamped his hands over his shoulders, tone growing almost comically determined as he reassured him: “I shall endeavor to give myself as generic an appearance as possible!”

His brother gave him a thumbs up and launched himself in his own room.

It dawned on him, suddenly, that he’d been wearing the same clothes for something like 48 uninterrupted hours.

An invincible itching took over his limbs.

If he didn’t change immediately he was going to physically explode.

-

Ingo had only gotten a glimpse of the station when Elesa had kindly taken him to the fairgrounds the day before: despite his eyes feeling almost magnetized in its direction he’d barely seen it as they had passed it in a rush, an imposing cement shadow colored in a light muted yellow intervalled by steel blue veins.

Its entrance was framed by white stairs and pillars, he could notice now that he was walking directly towards it, and each of them was topped by what resembled an opaque petrol green gem, the same color as the roof.

Its windows seemed rather dark from the outside. From the upper floor a sort of balcony stuck out; he recognized red and yellow banners hanging beside it.

The style reminded him vaguely of the Galaxy Team’s headquarters, though notably smaller in size and completely different in coloration, and otherwise void of elaborate rooftop decorations or visible chimneys. It’s rather modern, professor Laventon had commented when he’s seen him look at it intently once, to tentatively try and strike up a conversation before he found out the warden’s love for his study subjects: I suppose it wouldn’t look quite as out of place if it were in Galar instead of here among much simpler architecture, don’t you think?

He stumbled on his own feet for a moment as he attempted to take the whole thing in as it came closer and closer, becoming larger and larger. Emmet was still pulling him by the wrist, and kept him from falling.

There must have been some kind of carpet before the door even though he hadn’t noticed it, because the clack of his soles was muted for a few steps.

In a moment he was hurtling down a flight of stairs, barely getting the time to acclimate to a strange sort of artificial light that gave them an orange hue (no, it didn’t give them anything, they were simply colored like that, he realized as he looked  better) - and then the sound beneath his feet turned completely different again, shoes hitting unfamiliar terrain, yellow tiles looking like bricks that had been worn and smoothed and dimmed and lightened by constant passage, almost vibrating from the way they were illuminated until somebody walked in front of him and cut him off, and he stumbled back, head rising from where it had been stuck staring mesmerized at the floor to catch brownish veins slithering through it before fixing his eyes on the face of a large clock, the glass encasing its hands gleaming in a way that burned his retinas against the dark grey behind it; he shut his eyes only to be shoved off by a passing shoulder that was already gone when he turned to apologize, and a different golden shine made his pupils hurt enough for him shove the brim of his cap down on them - but now that he couldn’t see came the noise, an incessant downpour of noise, voices talking, someone screaming, music playing, metallic words being spoken garbled and aloud from all around him at once, something rushing hurriedly making the air tremble, discussions about food school work outings did you see what they and then she said are you coming to the damnit i told you it’s not I’ll see what I can that lying piece of next train for delayed by ten arriving in platform 3 unavailable mother what is the it not clang twang you to stop here! where what minutes hour drift theater route 14 8 20 12 1 9 sand of to which go by from juice next close crack rrrrrrrrrrr up at in nacremistrusveilton bank multi single ville train track grrck see now then soon when down here him? in in an the that this it’s those go! ahead behind he’s she you how we’re sorry for ‘scuse me get off open on buzz go! inconvenience it not got rot thought hold on--

Suddenly he felt cotton on his skin, and a force yanking him away, and then he gasped for breath and saw his own face looking back at him in a dim light.

A hand was exerting pressure intermittently on his palm. He was holding that hand’s wrist.

He gasped again. Then took a deep breath.

“I-”

“It’s a lot,” Emmet preceded him. He kept pressing intermittently. “It’s a lot.”

Ingo nodded, staring at their hands.

It was a welcome respite from the overload of that unfamiliar environment.

(But it should have been familiar, shouldn’t it? He had worked here. He should have known its every nook and cranny. It shouldn’t have been so disorienting and frightening, to find himself inside it again.)

“It’s alright,” his brother reassured him. “It’s always a lot. Weird light. Weird sounds. Too much light. Too many sounds. Too many people. Many bump into you. Verrry bright. Verrry loud. Verrry intimidating. The first impression is always like that. Always a lot. I cried the first time. It was too much. Verrry much too much. The first impression is always a lot.”

The older twin swallowed, feeling his mouth dry: “But it gets better?”

“Yup. You get used to it quickly. Stops being so scary. And the hat helps.”

The conductor hat did have a rather large brim, he noted absentmindedly. Must come in handy against the golden sheen of everything.

Speaking of that, wherever they were at the moment was notably azure in hue.

Ingo blinked at the four walls around them.

“Where are we right now?”

“Elevator. We’re going down to the control room.”

“Ah. ... Wouldn’t an elevator go up, considering its name?”

“That’s the good part. Goes both ways.”

“Fascinating...”

Emmet snickered a little at his very honest delivery. His thumb began squeezing slower, slower, slower on the scar of a cut on his brother’s palm, until he stopped pressing completely.

They waited a moment more in silence.

“Better?” he asked.

Ingo nodded; he watched the gloved fingers leave to press a button, and held onto Emmet’s wrist a little tighter for the surprise when the elevator moved.

“The control room is better,” his twin reassured him: “A lot less lights. Dimmer ones. And less sounds. And less people. A lot of beeping but it’s not bad. The Depot Agents will be there.”

An extremely vague idea of what the title meant struggled to resurface, so he felt safer asking: “Is that bad?”

“What’s bad?”

“The Depot Agents being there.”

“Nope! They work here. They know you.”

“Ah,” Ingo noted in a weird tone.

The thought of a room of people who knew him made him uncomfortable. Pokémon were one thing, to have re-introduced to himself in bulk, but humans - so far they’d shown up one at a time divided by fairly long intervals, giving both him and them some time to assess and handle the whole thing. Would they have asked a lot of questions? Did they even know he likely didn’t remember them? Would he freeze up on them? He feared this would have ended badly.

His brother waved beside his hand with a wide motion, snapping him out of his worried musings: “They know about the amnesia. They won’t be mad.” he smiled. “I bet they’ll be verrry happy to see you.”

The older deflated a little: “That’s a relief.”

For now, he would blindly believe in his little brother and hope for the best.

His hand was squeezed intermittently again, slowly, softly. It hushed away his worried thoughts, allowing his eyes to wander.

The elevator whirred very quietly as it descended.

“There’s something misspelled on your coat,” he noted.

The other blinked: “Something what?”

Ingo pointed at what seemed to be a paper square of sorts hanging for dear life on the white fabric through a piece of tape: “It’s misspelled,” he repeated, “I would guess it’s meant to be ‘substitute’, with an additional ‘s’.”

Emmet plucked the makeshift tag to examine it; then he gave a short wheeze; and pocketed it without a single explanation.

A soft ding: the elevator’s sliding doors opened upon a dark colored corridor, much more pleasantly lit than the upper level had been. It wasn’t particularly long, opening into what, even from the relatively limited angle they had as they stepped out of the machine, appeared to be a fairly large room out of which was running a young person in dressed in green from the bottom of their trousers to the top of their hat - very similar to Emmet’s in shape.

“Cameron,” the conductor greeted.

The man blinked twice and stopped in his tracks with a little difficulty, skidding across the pavement for a moment, genuinely surprised.

“Boss!” he exclaimed; he sounded rather young. “We thought you weren’t--”

His boss interrupted him: “I am verrry late. Didn’t hear the alarm. Awfully sorry.”

“Oh, I mean, we got everything under control, sir, that’s no problem, it’s just that we’ve already, uh, we’ve... We’ve... Uh... We’ve...”

His words had begun trailing as soon as he’d spent just a moment too long on the man who was standing a little hunched and awkward next to Emmet, just long enough to recognize the shape and color and brightness of the eyes stuck between the face-mask and the brim of the hat.

Under the intense gaze of those vaguely disbelieving ever-widening eyes Ingo realized there was little to no reason to keep his frown hidden in a so deeply underground place, where media outlets very likely had no chances of hounding him. Should he have taken the mask off in the elevator? Should he take it off now? Should he leave it on? His time in Hisui hadn’t exactly left him looking, as the kids and various medical professionals who had been one breath away from declaring him legally dead say, good. Was this a good time to be self-conscious?

Emmet picked up the conversation again: “You have?”

“Oh, uh, yes, we’ve - we’ve adjusted shifts and everything to cover for, to cover for everything, so, so, yeah, you know? Yeah,” Cameron stammered, struggling to take his eyes off of Ingo.

He fiddled with his hands a moment, looking about to ask a question but holding himself back. At that point the amnesiac decided to try his luck: mask hastily taken off with a little titubancy, he watched the Depot Agent’s face turn bright with recognition and, more concerningly or heart-warmingly, genuine excitement.

“Good morning,” Ingo cawed out on instinct.

The young man flashed him a huge smile: “Good morning, boss!” he replied, almost a little out of breath: “It’s been a while!”

That was oddly sweet.

“He asked to come,” Emmet butted in.

Cameron turned to him with his fingers shaking: "Is... Does, the press--?"

"Absolutely not."

“So we’re the first to--?”

“Yup.”

That seemed to throw the agent for a loop. A very awed, clearly happy loop, but a loop nonetheless - one that was keeping him planted where he stood, entire body jittery with a joyous energy that couldn’t find any release.

“Cameron,” his boss called him.

His shoulders jumped a little as he turned to fully face the white clad subway master: “Y-yes! Boss!”

“You were going somewhere.”

 The enormous grin on the young face faltered in an instant to be replaced by pure terror: “RIGHT!” the poor boy shouted; his head sunk into his shoulders immediately in utter mortification at the realization that he had yelled in their faces, and he repeated with a squeak as his legs began anxiously attempting little steps to bypass them (offering apologetic glances as they helpfully moved away to let him get to the elevator): “Right, sorry, sorry, right, I should- sorry, I’ll-! I’ll be, I’m going now, sorry, sorry - right on schedule, right, sorry— ah, boss!”

Both twins raised their chins in his direction and widened their eyes ever so slightly, to assure him they were all ears.

Cameron smiled again, all wobbly and earnest: “Have a good day!”

“You too!” they replied in unison.

His excitedly waving hand vanished behind the sliding metal doors, and they were once more by themselves in the short tunnel.

It had gone… well.

It had gone well. All things considered.

Ingo repeated the sentiment to himself a few more times as he was turned around until the moving machine was no longer in his line of sight. It had gone well, with a single person and his brother by his side. Maybe it would have gone well for a whole room of people with his brother by his side, too.

A gentle pressure on his palm asked him if he felt ready to go into the control room.

He nodded without a word; they began walking again, a little slower.

It was definitely darker than the main hall, which was a pleasant surprise: the deep petrol green of the roof coated the walls, light bouncing off of them with a slight metallic sheen, coating the entire chamber in a nice penumbra. A few doors broke their compact appearance, leading deeper into the entrails of the earth, away from civilization, from the noise, from everything. Perhaps they opened upon spaces specifically designed for quiet and repose, or dedicated to specific functions or people. He imagined Emmet must have had his own private quarters of sorts.

Illumination was provided by thin insertions between the panels glowing a bright neon green, as well as coming from the wide curved screens that took up half of the room itself, all blue gradient backgrounds and dark magenta squares popping up on them every so often, azurish words blinking or typing themselves into existence. The floor too was of a deep blue that made it almost seem, if one were caught up in their own thoughts enough, like a large shallow puddle of semi stagnant waters, like those of underground springs or basins. Ingo had moved his first steps on it very carefully, holding onto his twin’s arm, convinced he would have heard a muted splash each time he shifted his feet.

Emerging from the pavement was an imposing hexagonal table emitting a dull glow from whatever the screen upon it was displaying. He noticed several chairs, and long desks full of dark buttons and small lights and smaller screens like those of old televisions, and a few strange stiff metal stalks with what looked like porous round petal-less flowers on the end protruding forward.

Those are microphones, you dollar-store poet, a little voice smacked him from inside his head. Hopefully his embarrassment wasn’t obvious.

A small concert of beeps, trills and cues filled the air just enough to be noticed without resulting as totally overwhelming as the cacophony a few hundred meters above his head. Even the chatter, although very much present, was also notably more subdued.

It felt comfortable, all in all.

He’d likely spent hours upon hours every day in here.

It really was no wonder that he’d taken to caves as naturally as a Zubat might have. Him being constantly magnetized towards them made so much sense now.

Also it thankfully meant that it did not have anything to do with the electromagnetic field around the mountain, or the enormous space-time distortion directly above his head, which certainly gave him some manner of confused relief from a vague concern he was still unable to articulate.

The rubber soles of his shoes were awfully quiet as he advanced into the room, in stark contrast to the click-clack of his twin’s.

That did not stop a fairly older man from noticing him near instantly and making his way over to them at a fairly quick pace, his face ever so slightly contorted into a gentle reprimand as his hand already stretched out to stop him.

“Sir - sir, I’m sorry, passengers are not allowed in this area of the station, I must ask you to return to the upper level,” he explained in an amiable tone; his gaze shifted onto Emmet for a moment, with almost a hint of exasperation in his eyes as he noted how he was holding onto the dark sleeve trying to slip away in mortification at the scolding: “Boss, what about following the rules?”

“I am following them.”

“Bringing some other person here like that is following the rules? You more than anybody else know only personnel have access to the control room, it’s a…”

His pupils had shifted back onto Ingo as he’d spoken, and while the vowel dwindled in the man’s mouth he could tell the cogs of recognition apart as they grinded as fast as they could to process every bit of visual information available to them. Finally the agent smiled in a vacant manner, like someone who struggles to believe what they’re seeing, and adjusted his cap.

“It’s high time I got myself a pair of glasses, it is,” he corrected himself with a short laugh. His hand, square and wide, stopped halfway over to the younger man: “The name’s Ramses, by the by. Sorry for the scare, you’re not in trouble.”

He quickly shook it, surprise overtaking his momentary fear of having messed up.

The strangest part was that the agent had immediately recognized his anxiety. Had he suddenly grown more expressive?

Then he realized he had moved to be almost completely behind the back of his (by barely above ten minutes) younger brother, actively trying to make himself smaller, and in order not to crumble into twelve thousand little bits from the embarrassment he hid his face all the way behind Emmet’s shoulder blade.

In part also because he noticed, not without a slight apprehension, that more and more people were turning towards them to stop everything they were doing and stare, very pointedly, very specifically, at him.

Ramses cackled without any malice to turn over to his boss again: “While you are rather late, aren’t you.”

“I am Emmet.” his interlocutor replied, unamused: “I am aware.”

“May I ask just what happened to cause such a strange lapse?”

“Didn’t hear the alarm.”

“Only that?”

“I was. Verrry tired. Also a victim of a conspiracy.”

“A conspiracy!”

“Yes.”

“And what would that have been all about?”

“Nobody wanted me to get out of the house.”

“A tragedy, truly.”

“Ah ha. Ah ha. Ah ha.”

“By all means, I admire your dedication, boss, but I really don’t think it would’ve been that bad for you to–”

Somebody gave a loud, gross cough with the specific intention of focusing the general attention onto their person.

That happened to be a gaunt young man who seemed to have been clenching his jaw from the second he had begun having enough teeth to grind them together, who had still had the courtesy of spitting up that racket into the crook of his elbow instead of the open air.

A less intentional cough wracked him as eyes settled on him.

Must have been the nervousness.

Finally, he found a way to articulate the words he was trying to get out of himself: "Emmet, sir, sorry - but are- are we allowed to perceive-" and he made a nervously stiff wide motion with his arm to indicate the man in dark clothing, though there was still something respectful about the way he flailed his hand about, "-This? And, and acknowledge, the situation currently happening? Or is there an unspoken rule to not... Do that?"

Emmet did not answer right away.

"Hm!" he eventually replied, not necessarily responding. He turned to his brother, who had remained all but frozen in place where he had been pinpointed, and looked right into his eyes: "Since you're the one this will be impacting the most: do you wish to agree to subjecting yourself to the mortifying ordeal of being known?"

Ingo blinked.

"That was very verbose," he noted flatly.

“Please answer.”

Ah. Yes, right.

He turned to the agent who was trying to singe holes into his head by staring at him with the intensity of a billion suns concentrated through a magnifying lens that he couldn’t decide if it was enormous or minuscule - whichever made the light burn hotter.

He retreated a little more. The man must have realized how impressively intimidating he was being and moved his gaze a few inches away, to allow him room to breathe.

Masking a cough that was meant to give him courage, Ingo forcibly dragged himself out of his brother’s shadow and extended his forearm in his direction, lying only a bit as he said: “But I can assure you that I have no problem about my existence being acknowledged by the people in this room, mister...”

"Isadore, sir!" his interlocutor replied. He rushed to shake his hand - his arm nearly dislocating for the speed at which he had moved.

His stalwart grip wasn't particularly strong, and unlike the nervous warmth of Cameron's gentle if slightly trembling hold it or Ramses’ jovial light pressure it seemed to almost carry a sort of chill, an attempt at maintaining the correct distances at all costs in the name of professionalism; despite his best efforts, however, his dark eyes shook a little as he tried to set them somewhere on Ingo's face, failing.

He opened his mouth - a small mouth all in all, more akin to an isosceles trapezoid than a circle or a line - to suck in a breath: "I'm honestly glad to see you again," he said, tenser than a well-pulled rope, serious. A little emotional.

Ingo nodded and hoped not to come off as too stilted: “Likewise.”

He thought he heard something crack weakly, in a way that did not inspire alarm - like a thin layer of half-melted ice breaking between the soles of a boot and steady ground.

Then his brother nudged him a little, and the comfortable murmuring arose again.

Suddenly, he felt fine.

The people in the room no longer appeared as oppressively terrifying as they had been just a few moments ago, not even when they reached out to him to introduce themselves all over again.

He took note of each name being offered to him, each differently built face smiling at him, to store them in pairs somewhere in the back of his mind. It felt familiar.

(It was the same as the first few days in the Icelands, the warden reminded him in an absentminded tone: he was more disoriented than nervous, and more trying not to freeze where he stood than to keep himself from hiding somewhere he could find enough air to breathe, but his modus operandi had been the same - associating sounds to as many somatic traits as possible to minimize the embarrassing chances of mixing people together.)

(He didn’t have the heart to slap his mouth shut, feeling as though that would have been uselessly cruel.)

(It was completely different now, he reasoned with him gently. And as he had noted earlier, they needed to stop thinking about Hisui. It wouldn’t be good for them.)

(The warden looked at him sadly as he slowly greeted more people.)

(It’s not that different, he murmured.)

(Then he fell back into silence.)

The green and yellow of their uniforms also felt familiar, comfortable, easy on the eyes, and the worn cotton of their gloves gave him the strangest sensation, like an incorrect deja-vù: he recognized the texture, yet found the lack of stitches running along the sides of his fingers awfully weird.

He must have worn plenty of these for days on end across the years before everything had happened if that specific feeling was so ingrained in his brain.

And he had forgotten he hadn’t been wearing gloves for about three years, after all, hadn’t he?

Not forgotten, actually - just, assumed he was wearing a pair.

Hm. Yes.

He had definitely spent a lifetime in gloves like that.

An entire lifetime.

…

They must have reeked.

Heavy steps bounced off of the floor with a notable stomping rhythm; he turned his head around for a moment to find the source of the noise together with a few others until he ended up facing towards the corridor that led in from the elevator.

Something was there which had certainly not been there beforehand.

It appeared to be a smaller replica of Emmet, head turned to the side.

One that had not seen the gentle hand of a cleaner in quite some time, if the spent dullness of its form and the heavy grey patina covering every inch of the subway master uniform was of any indication.

An even smaller humanoid form trotted next to it, dragging around a black ponytail larger than their entire body without any apparent struggle.

It took him a moment to realize that those were not long black gloves, nor black shoes, nor wide, pleated, bright yellow pants - though in his defense he had been misled by both their shape and the presence of a red vest, which instead was, indeed, an additional garment.

And of course nothing could have prepared him to see the supposed hair snap open to reveal a sparse set of sharp teeth and what looked like the inside of a mouth.

His shoulders had jolted at that, he was certain.

He turned his head left and right, to check if anybody else had seen it: not a single person in the room seemed to have any interest in whatever was happening at the room’s entrance, glancing over in silence and returning to work.

Was this a common occurrence?

Was he having some kind of hallucination?

When he turned his gaze back to it, the head of the replica was definitely in a different position.

Which distinctly did not help.

His fingers grasped his brother’s white sleeve, pulling gently if with a very obvious urgency to direct his eyes to the very uncanny sight of a smaller, dirtier, technically (hopefully) unmoving version of him standing not that far away.

Thankfully, he followed his gaze without question.

Puzzlingly, he smiled a little wider, and waved.

The eyes of the statue twitched, the head shifted slightly to look at them.

And then the mouth opened with a squeaky, delighted sound.

“Oh!”

The dusty miniature living copy of Emmet was not, in fact, as he could now tell while it approached very quickly with a gait that was nothing like his brother’s save for the intensity, a copy of Emmet.

For starters, it was not nearly as pure white or extreme in pallor, skin taking on a faint maybe yellower undertone, hair being a grayish brown whilst also lacking their distinctive sideburns, replaced by braids. The nose also bumped forward around the eyebrows’ height and hooked to fall straight down instead of pointing outwards - possibly having been broken once, too. The mouth was much too thin as well, while the shape of the eyes was almost exactly an inversion of the twins’ hooded ones: a flat line underneath, turning rounder towards the eyebrows.

And obviously neither had irises of such a dusty, rotten green.

A small hand in a white glove was extended out to him before he could fully process just how quickly the distance between them had been traversed: an incredibly angular turn of the lips’ corners forced the previously emotionless neutral expression into the amiable squint of a smile.

“Pleased to meet you!” a voice that sounded the way overly saccharine artificial strawberry tastes squeaked at him: “Briosa Crociera, Substitute Subway Master! I’m a recent development.”

He greeted her just as enthusiastically, noticing vaguely the lack of even the slightest budge at his volume or handshake: “My name is Ingo!”

He liked that description - recent development.

Something about it put him at ease. Perhaps it was the somewhat elegant way it managed to completely remove his amnesia from the conversation’s equation. Of course he wouldn’t be aware of any recent developments even under normal circumstances, like taking a three year long vacation or moving to a new region or getting himself another job, or something similarly plausible.

“She’s deaf,” Emmet filled him in, as though the fairly crucial detail was little more than an afterthought.

Almost as if to corroborate or prove the statement Briosa continued cheerfully without taking her eyes off of the man she was replacing, oblivious to the fact that she was repeating the same exact information: “I cannot hear a single thing!”

That explained her total stillness when he’d yelled his name in her face.

Hearing people tended to shirk away afterwards.

“If at any point you need to communicate with me, please refer directly to my hearing aide, Mawile, so she can translate you!”

His gaze shifted even lower to encounter a pair of crimson eyes on a short yellow snout looking back up at him. The Pokémon greeted him with a nod that had the black flaps (hair? Ears?) framing her face sway a little, small arms folded behind her back.

He could read now, on her vest, a proudly displayed SUPPORT POKÉMON written in big bold letters.

She seemed surprised, or perhaps amused, when he somewhat awkwardly sat on his heels and extended his hand to her as well, to shake her paw as he had done to every other human in the room with him at that moment.

“It is a pleasure to meet you!” he told her, as genuine as they come.

She chirped her own greeting and shook on it.

Her black paw felt less fuzzy than he would have expected, as well as cold but receptive, like Klingklang’s core, Excadrill’s claws or the surface of Magnezone’s body: she must have been a Steel type then, despite not looking like one at all. The unusual appearance and more lively texture must have come from a secondary Typing. Psychic, perhaps, considering her role?

“Pardon my curiosity,” he added following that train of thought; she craned her neck and listened intently. “I hope it’s not a bothersome question, but, ah - may I ask how exactly does a translation work? I’m not quite sure I can imagine it…”

The little creature nodded. He would have assumed she might have simply redirected his words into her trainer’s brain or something of the such through a telepathic power; instead, much to his surprise, she let go of his hand, unfolded her other arm, turned to her aidee, and began making a slew of quick signs with outstanding precision despite how small and stubby her fingers were.

Briosa waited for her to finish before looking at Ingo and gesturing to the proud beastie: “Like that,” she answered in her stead.

“Ah!” he noted loudly, impressed, eyes very wide. “I see!”

Mawile huffed a cackle through her nose. What a whimsical human. He’d known him again for less than five minutes and yet his at times sort of awkward propriety and excited politeness were already bewitching her body and soul, as she liked to exaggerate. Which was an impressive feat considering only Briosa herself had won the throne of her affections in more or less the same minuscule amount of time.

(Unseen, Emmet shot her a glance and signed: “Be nice.”)

(“I am nice,” she replied in equal silence: “He is fun and silly. I like him.”)

(“You never told me you like me. In two years.”)

(“I did not.”)

(“You wound me.”)

(The Fairy snickered and discreetly signed a little ‘love you’ at him. His small triumphant smirk made her cackle in silence again.)

The substitute snapped her face with a sudden stilted movement: “By the way, good morning! Did you sleep well?” she asked the twin in white, using a particular inflection on certain words that made them almost sound like rubber being bent and released to produce a goofy kind of wobble.

Emmet placed his nails against the underside of his chin and lazily thrusted his fingers forward, producing a soft ‘twhip!’ noise as his skin was pulled along.

Briosa turned to Ingo: “Did he sleep well?”

Being addressed made his shoulders jump for a moment, and he forgot she could not hear him: “Oh, uh, I - yes, yes, I believe he has, at least, for the most part.”

Thankfully he’d nodded vigorously as he’d spoken, so the other had still managed to get the gist of it: “Yes, I could tell,” she reassured him, “His eyebags are looking a lot less sapient today.”

Emmet repeated the gesture with an added stiff emphasis.

He regretted it as his brother asked: “Does that mean something?”

“Nope.”

“That means fuck you,” Briosa helpfully corrected, helped by Mawile’s snitching.

“Does not.”

“He’s telling me to go fuck myself.”

“Am not.”

“He’s denying it, isn’t he?”

Ingo nodded.

“Ingo,” his brother said in his most betrayed monotone.

“Hold on,” his substitute stopped Emmet before he could go on and turned around, once again repeating the gesture: “Anybody know what this means?”

Several hands left their duties to spell and an equal amount of voices arose to reply, in a slightly confused tone since she should have known that well: “Fuck you?”

She triumphantly faced Ingo again: “See, that’s a fuck you.”

To which he craned his neck towards his younger brother and exclaimed quietly, flabbergasted: “Emmet!”

“She’s being mean!” was the explanation he got.

“Well, you cannot just walk around telling people to go fuck themselves whenever they are mean to you!”

His brother groaned loudly.

Then, a mischievous glint overtook his eyes.

“You’re right,” he conceded.

His hands then carefully signed a sentence that caused Briosa’s amused expression to morph into a puzzled one, furrowing her brow and reducing her mouth to a thin austere line as some of her fingers joined together to attain a peculiar shape that seemed to ask ‘what do you mean?’.

The thin strip of paper that read ‘susbstitute’ was handed over to her.

She held it for a moment, staring at it quizzically.

“It’s not misspelled,” she objected.

A helpful finger pointed her to the superfluous S.

It took another few seconds before she spurred into action, but when she did she slammed her hands closed, trapping the heinous label between her palms before hastily shoving it in one of her pockets.

The look with which she gazed up at Emmet was mostly barred from Ingo’s view, as he was still sitting on his heels, but he did catch the glimpse of an absolutely furious smile wobbling with an attempt not to laugh; her hands flew with the quickness of intense, snickering anger at his brother’s face, probably promising who knows what sort of retaliation, and he wheezed out a cackle of his own.

Ah! So they were friends.

The realization felt like a strange weight off his chest.

-

The agents were, of course, laser focused on their job.

A subway station, especially the region’s central subway station, needed constant care and supervision, after all. There was always something lurking out there ready to create a Situation of some kind which would then require to be remedied somewhere between ‘as soon as possible’ and ‘if we could do it instantly it would be great but alas we are mere humans incapable of even the simplest Skullbash without caving our heads in so we will be handling This as best as we can, Please Hold On, We Are Very Tired’, and the more brain and muscle power available, the better.

However.

In their defense.

It was really hard not to want to look at what Ingo was doing.

Partially because, of course, he had disappeared from the face of the world three years ago and then re-emerged out of the entrails of a snowy mountain in a foreign region with said region’s most powerful teenager in tow, which to be honest felt a little bit unreal, so it was nice to see that yes, it had indeed happened, and yes, he was physically present in the room.

But in larger part it was because Ingo reacquainting himself with the machinery he used to operate daily was a joy to watch.

He looked around the control room like a kid in a candy shop.

Granted, neither twin had been too enthusiastic about duty calling Emmet onto the Battle Lines, and everybody could see how their boss had very clearly wished he could tear himself in half to keep one eye on his brother and do his job at the same time; but in the end he had been forced to compromise with the promise that Ingo would remain with at least an agent at all times, even in the case he would leave for the upper levels.

Luckily for him the chaos and brightness and noise that had first welcomed him had not made leaving the underground chamber particularly appealing to the just repatriated man, who had gladly preferred watching the subway’s hidden machinations behind the trains for entire hours now.

At first he’d stuck to looking at screens and wandering very carefully, with an exceptional silence to his step, in order not to bother anybody.

The pose and attitude reminded Furze of an old man watching a construction site - the kind that stands there a little hunched, with their hands held behind their backs, just above the hip bones, that always waves back at polite Gurdurrs and Conkeldurrs and tries to yell instructions at them sometimes because ‘he knows how it should be done’.

Ingo had not the faintest idea what he was looking at nor how it worked, so he refrained from offering suggestions or tips.

Instead, at some point, after gathering enough courage and being as certain as possible that he wasn’t being bothersome, he very shyly approached Eloise and bashfully asked if she could explain what an ATO was.

Once he knew all about Automatic Train Operation, he asked about everything else.

It was pretty fun actually, to split the various topics between them to sort of teach him the ropes as though he’d been a newbie - he was an attentive listener after all, making pertinent questions, interrupting explanations only when necessary, and by the way he looked at both the agents explaining and the object or program being explained he was very much one notebook and pencil away from compiling an entire work guide where he stood.

It also helped that the various explanations took up a discrete amount of time, meaning that it was almost midday and the entire control room had successfully contained the still sort of flighty ex-conductor.

Not that they didn’t trust him to be out and about, of course!

It was just… Well, they’d been worried about him.

As everybody had been.

And now he was back, and there was still a sort of fear that any wrong move would have had him bolting away and disappearing into the fog again.

So knowing he was there with them, asking questions, being interested… Showing how, despite the time passed, despite the amnesia, he was still indeed very much enamored with their job…

To call it a relief would have been putting it mildly.

But when the bulk of the questions were over and Ingo’s presence had melted back into familiar commonality again, their attention to where he was at all times might have sort of faltered slightly.

It did not lead to losing track of him, thankfully - but it did lead to them all freezing in horrified realization as an announcement about the train to Undella experiencing a five minute delay rang out across the correct platform by a voice that was notably not coming from any of their mouths.

Furze met his boss’s eyes just in time for the older man to widen them in a sudden shared awareness.

“I should not have done that,” Ingo peeped, guilty as charged, hand still near the mic.

The agent did not reply yet.

He turned around quickly, checking a couple of things. One: Isadore was notably absent. Good. Two: were the others thinking what he was also thinking?

Jackie definitely was, because he and Jackie had a lovingly defined “telepathic connection” since they were kids that came with people who grow up together and are obsessed with trains to the point of either exploding or phasing through the floor about it, so he knew they were absolutely down for what he was thinking; Josh had a notably vacant gaze that would not express anything beyond a very intense dial-up tone, so jury was still out on him; Hank, one of the older agents, seemed very intent on waiting for him to proceed with the plan - he definitely knew exactly what it was about, and as a fairly important figure to the youngsters in the room he wanted to make it very known through his expression that he thought it would have been funny as hell; Eloise on the other hand was gripping her desk in an attempt to repress or at least hold herself back from beating him to the punch with a delighted scream that might have scared the hell out of the poor man.

Everybody else in the room approached his inquisitive gaze with either trepidation (like Vip) or a shy attempt at stopping him that didn’t quite work (like Billie).

Oh come on. They’d done way worse bits when prey to boredom before.

Strengthened by the general agreement, Furze raised both hands and took a big breath through his open mouth, making Ingo worry. Then he curled his lips inside his mouth, held still by his teeth as he appeared to be trying to eat his own chin, and cocked his head to the side.

“Technically, that’s… Not good,” he admitted. He clicked his tongue very loudly before continuing: “Because, you know. You’re, uh… Not here yet. In the region. Technically.”

“I apologize,” the poor amnesiac cut him off. “I don’t-”

“HOWEVER!” the agent cut him off now, both index fingers outstretched to point upwards - causing a few to actually look up.

Pause.

“However. I don’t think. That anybody, here, would be too sad about having some… Help, with announcements. You know. Since we’re all busy with other stuff…”

Ingo’s face lit up at the prospect of being helpful.

Oh hell yes.

This was going to be so funny.

Would anybody even notice that the missing Subway Master was now warning about staying behind the yellow line? Probably not, since even when newly maintained the intercom still garbled voices just enough to make them hard to recognize.

Even if a few of them did, they would probably just be really confused - which only added more fun to the bit itself.

The problem with this assumption is that Furze’s brain was so overwhelmed with the love for anything related to railwork that he had completely forgotten a couple of fundamental things: firstly, that humans are extremely nosy creatures that really, really like to make friends or strangers aware of any weird business they come across; secondly, that the Subway Masters were still immensely popular figures in the region with their fair share of fans and an indescribable amount of clips of their voices readily available on the internet, so it wasn’t that hard to recognize them.

Also, thirdly, this was Nimbasa City.

A not insignificant percentage of the urban populace probably met the twins more times than they could count properly.

So imagining that the Nimbasians wouldn’t have near immediately recognized the voice of a minor local celebrity who was technically still missing through the vague garble of the speakers was like imagining that a shiver of Sharpedos wouldn’t have found a wounded swimming tourist bleeding profusely in the Hoenn seas.

Which is to say it would have been incredibly stupid.

But Furze (and Jackie, and Hank, and Vip in a way) lived in a world that did not account for such silly things, and so the control room had a bit of a blast for the better part of an hour listening to their boss bellowing out warnings like nothing had changed..

Then a little crackle coming out of nowhere made them all jolt, and a well known voice calling out for an answer had them all getting a little heart attack.

Josh fumbled a little with his radio and finally replied: “Yes, boss?”

“Why is Ingo’s voice doing the announcements?”

“OH you know!” Josh quickly replied as he began sweating buckets. His voice failed him for a few more instants before he wheezed out: “Briosa. And her... Impressions.”

The other end remained quiet for a moment.

“Sure, I’ll take that,” Emmet said cheerfully.

Then the radio went silent and the depot agent gave out a wheeze.

Billie would not, however, let him take a break: “BRIOSA?” she nearly shouted, “The ONLY deaf person here?”

“I panicked!” the poor man shrieked back.

“And you chose HER?”

“What was I chosen for,” the Substitute asked roughly at that moment, her small size and light weight allowing her to make her way over to barely two centimeters away from Vip unnoticed until it was too late for the agent, who proceeded to jump and smack her in the face with her elbow by mistake as they retreated for the spook.

The hit did not make her budge in the slightest; the girl, on the other hand, immediately clutched said joint in pain.

Her Mawile's large mouth snapped sharply when the small gloved hand pointed at her: "Apparently I got chosen," Briosa stated plainly. "Chosen for what?"

She had not seemed that threatening when Ingo had first looked at her earlier.

The agents, frozen in place, with eyes wider than tea saucers and cold sweat coating their brows, clearly had a different opinion.

Hank at last waved a hand with a sort of airy, light-hearted motion, smiling as amiably as he could despite the anxiety making the stubble on his abundant chin wobble: "Oh, you know, we were just comparing out impressions of Mr. Ingo here - and in the end, see, we concluded yours might've been the best!"

He swallowed a knot in his throat as the small three-fingered hands signed.

The Substitute read them intently, laser focused; then her mouth produced a squeaky sound, as if her tongue had been made of whistle grass, that couldn't have come out of Ingo's lips after a thousand years of practice.

"Sure, I'll take that!" she replied cheerfully.

Immeasurable relief swept through the depot agents in a fairly noisy cacophony of wheezes and sighs and held back breaths being released.

Completely oblivious to it, Briosa turned her attention solely on Ingo, gazing at his face with a small smile, flat lips barely curved upwards: “Have you been to any of the train platforms yet?”

He shook his head.

It dawned on him, in the time that it takes for the thunder to crack a small distance away from where the lighting has struck, that he hadn’t seen a single train so far outside of the ones in the books they had at home.

“Would you like to?”

His eyes widened slightly with interest.

Could she read his mind?

Ah, no - the subject was different. Still, the outcome was the same.

He nodded.

Or at least, he was fairly along in the motion when Jackie slithered between him and the small conductor and hurriedly began signing: “Maybe it- maybe it would be better not to, actually! Right?” they turned to Ingo for all of two seconds before deciding he agreed with the sentiment: “Right! Right.”

Briosa stared directly at them and blinked, slowly, leaving a long beat of silence: “Why?”

Even with their reputation as the most off-putting of the Depot Agents, Jackie couldn’t help but shrink a little at the weird inflection and pause. Their fingers felt as though they could only move in a small area, mimicking their voice as it came out in a whisper: “It could be dangerous. For, for, you know. News.”

The only answer he got was a second, slower blink.

Ingo felt the weirdest kind of deja-vù, like he was looking at a Purugly intimidating a Beautifly into submission, with the main difference being that the Purugly was excessively small and the Beautifly was not flying at all.

Point being, it was so utterly alien that he could not tell what was happening other than that it was comically strange.

Eventually Jackie began slinking over behind him, gently pushing him forward to take their place (to shield themselves or not to hinder him?) as they conceded with nervous signs: “But he’ll probably be fine, it’ll–”

“He’ll be fine,” Briosa finished for them.

“Yeah, yeah, it’ll be fine, you’ll be fine boss, don’t worry, you’re in good hands, right?”

A chorus of ‘Right!’ replied from the rest of the room.

Rotten olive eyes shifted back onto Ingo: dusty eyebrows raised beneath the cap to silently repeat a question, and he nodded again.

The sudden grip on his wrist did not hurt, but it did make his heart jump in his throat from the scare; not even the time to yell out a prayer into his head that he was already being dragged away with the same ease as a fairly large leek.

In the tunnel preceding the elevator the substitute casually remarked: “Sorry for throwing you back into the pits of hell that’s the upper level but I’m imagining that whatever you did that got pinned on me is not something you could do outside of the control room, right?” and turned to him briefly, staring him down with an unblinking gaze inside the azure walls.

With a foreboding feeling crawling along his spine, Ingo nodded. An apology, stuck in his throat, decided to get swallowed back down just in case it attracted her ire.

“Nice!” was the calm reply; at the hit of a button the elevator doors closed, and the machine began rumbling upwards. “Remember to pull your face mask back on once we arrive. Do you have any Pokémon with you?”

He shook his head.

Maybe it had been a bad idea, in hindsight, to leave without any of his Pokémon in tow; but Emmet had reasoned that being back in the subway after all that time would have filled his team with the urge to launch themselves into battle thus causing a rather destructive commotion, an hypothesis which had instantly proved itself to be correct when they’d all perked up at the mention of any sort of scuffling, each quivering excitedly with sportsmanlike bloodlust.

Ingo also still hadn’t properly reacquainted himself with their movesets, their personalities, their dynamics and the ways they each took on the battlefield, so he would have likely been left at the mercy of their enthusiasm, unable to handle them nor lead them into a satisfying match. It would be better to practice on their own somewhere quieter.

Briosa clicked her tongue in a rather curious manner at his answer, the hint of a sympathetic smile on her face. Her small hand reached wordlessly to her belt to pull out a Pokéball, opening it without even looking.

The beastie emerging from the metal sphere was relatively stout and not too big, easily standing without too much trouble on her arm. Its paws were relatively small, white much like the fur on its belly, while the flaps of skin between them were of a bright yellow replicated on the round cheeks, or at least on one of them. The other had an enormous gash of naked skin ripping through it, joined by a few more which forced one of the black eyes into a perpetual squint and one of the nostrils to reach almost up to a lacrimal duct. One of the black ears also seemed to have been halfway through a rudimental shredder.

“This is Emolga!” Briosa cheerfully introduced the defaced rodent: “He will make sure you’re not getting bothered.”

“Ah,” the man only commented. “It seems he’s gone through quite a lot.”

“He has! A Mandibuzz tried to have him for lunch but he disemboweled it and ate it instead!”

“Oh my!” Ingo noted, now genuinely impressed.

She grinned, handing her partner over to him: “He’s not going to bite off your face, don’t worry,” she reassured him as she made a motion for him to cover his mouth and nose while holding the door closed for a moment more. “These days he’s more into fruit and Type-specific food, you know, like a normal apex predator.”

He waited until Emolga had crawled onto his shoulder before pulling up his facemask and following her out: “Perhaps he’s related to Gligars.”

“Hm! Never saw one,” she replied, easily bulldozing her way through the crowd via a one-armed iteration of Emmet’s patented terminator walk as she held Mawile aloft on her other hand to keep on listening to her ward.

“They are fairly common on Mount Coronet,” Ingo helpfully explained: “Their main means of sustenance is sucking the blood from prey.”

“Hm! Intriguing! You ever got bit?”

“No - luckily, my quick reflexes have left me unscathed from Gligars and Gliscors, their evolution, alike.”

“Ah, good for you!” she spoke louder now, to be heard above the chatter of the station: “I can’t stand getting blood taken to be honest! Even when it’s just for a blood check I have to look away and clench my fists really tight, so I guess if something tried to suck it out of me I’d freak out and knock it clean off. No clue why it bothers me so much!”

“It’s always more comforting knowing one’s blood is not out and about,” Ingo noted thoughtfully.

She nodded, solemn in her motion: “So it is, so it is.”

Emolga squeaked gently on his shoulder as if to join the conversation while getting comfortable; kind scritches behind the round ears had the mangled rodent chittering in delight.

They must have kept talking about blood or Gligars or similar small death machines, if anything because while he struggled to retain information he could still feel the way the facemask molded and stretched around his mouth as it kept opening and closing. He was rather glad of her determination in keeping this somewhat gruesome small talk going, as he was so concentrated on replying to her that the mass of bodies and sounds and colors and lights couldn’t pierce through his senses as it had when he had first entered the station: it still hung all around him, waiting to strike him at the worst possible moment, but so long as he had the muted grey coat to follow and answer to he found himself powering through the sensory overload with relative ease.

It somewhat helped that the rest of the crowd wading through the station seemed to magically part at the first glimpse of her, likely repelled by her potent aura of menace.

Her voice was squeaky as it raised in volume, her words getting lost along the way between the chatter and the fuzziness of his senses but still managing to lead him along through the dark and dull gold with a candy rose trail. He wasn’t perfectly aware of where they were going, though he did thankfully take notice of the stairs; otherwise he would have likely catastrophically crashed along them knocking out anybody who accidentally happened to be in his way like a Golem down Bolderoll Ravine.

The rush of wind from the tunnel distracted him as he was answering something. While not daring to step over the yellow line he still leaned a little towards the darkness snaking away into the earth, just in time to see the blinding light of a pair of beady Bug-like eyes rise out of it as it kept approaching.

It was almost more reminiscent of an Onix than of a Steelix, if he had to be honest; and if he really had to ponder over the matter a moment more maybe he would have even preferred comparing it to a Gyarados, between the roaring and the fairly evenly sized sections of its long body. Of course none of them blasted light from their eye sockets, nor did they travel on long threads of metal or carry dozens upon dozens of people inside them, opening their enormous bodies to let them in and out.

Emolga’s paws kneaded into his shoulder, and he realized he was heaving inside his facemask. A hand went to place itself on the black and white fur so he could ground himself while its twin reached out beneath him to be sharply stopped by a firm palm around its wrist.

“Are you ok?” he heard being asked to him.

Ingo swallowed and looked down, meeting Briosa’s unmoving eyes. Something in her and Mawile’s faces read like slight worry.

He nodded as he absentmindedly caressed the electrical rodent’s ear.

“It’s... Awfully loud,” he explained, like it was an apology.

The substitute tilted her head sympathetically once it was signed to her: “So I’ve been told,” she replied, and without him noticing she pulled him away from the crowd pouring in and out of the steel shell, towards the end of the platform. “Can’t know from experience, I’ve never been on a train before I was twelve - but it sure does look like it’s real loud.”

“You were not deaf at twelve?” he asked, to unconsciously distract himself.

“I was, actually! But not before that.”

“May I ask what happened?”

“No.”

“Understandable. My apologies for prying.”

“Don’t worry.”

The train huffed and puffed and groaned, and at last it pulled itself forward, gaining momentum faster and faster until the lights of its tail disappeared behind a curve of the dark tunnel.

Emolga squeaked and bumped his soft head against Ingo’s. A tepid comfort washed over him at the contact.

Furred Pokémon were such blessed creatures to have around. Ah, why did he have to favor the ones with harsh skin, jagged scales, impenetrable carapaces and cold metal bodies? No, that was not the right question - why did the universe have to be so cruel not to grant his most beloved beasts with at the very least some kind of plush texture, just to let them be hugged more often? Why did it have to make his body so delicate to the point where he could not hug them without bruising himself?

Not that their rough exteriors deterred him all that much, but it would have been nice to lay his head on a comfortable tummy that wasn’t Excadrill’s yet again. The others deserved to have their own chance as living pillows, too.

Doors sliding shut spooked him out of his musings. What was it with making doors slide? Who was making them slide? Wouldn’t they slide open due to centrifugal force?

This was going to drive him insane.

Much like the noise.

The noise might have done him in first.

Luckily, the rumbling beast was off somewhere else already, dragging a wide number of people and its infernal chatter along with it. Those whom it had deployed onto the platform slithered away like generous swarms of frightened Zubats into the tunnels leading upwards, towards the main hall, and the void they left was quickly filled again by other commuters arriving from the opposite direction.

He scratched behind Emolga’s ears again; the sight of Briosa still leaning against the fencing by his side quieted down his worries.

She locked eyes with him for a moment and gave him a tiny smile.

“Better?” she asked.

“I’m… Not sure, actually,” he admitted: “I fear I’m not used to so many people and lights and noises all at once anymore. But I’m certain exposure will help me.”

“You were on a mountain, right?”

He nodded.

“Without anything around you?”

“Aside from the occasional Pokémon cries or small avalanche, there was not much clamor, no.”

“Yeah, a large city’s subway station will do that to you then. Must have been real quiet.”

“It was.”

“Do you miss that?”

(No. Not at all. Not in the slightest. The quiet had been horrifying at first, maddening, and then it had curled around him and prevented him from resting. It felt impossible that ever since he left he’d been able to sleep so easily when it had become such an arduous feat.)

(Not even the warden could deny that.)

“I prefer the noise, in truth. Even though it’s not always pleasant.”

Briosa hummed: “I feel you.”

(Ah. Of course.)

(She more than anyone must have understood the restless terror of the quiet.)

A second loud cacophony quickly approaching had Ingo startle out of his skin and try to back away into a trashcan, stopped only by the conductor’s titanium grip and Mawile’s jaw very quickly wrapping around his leg to put it back on the ground with a surprising amount of gentleness for an appendage made specifically to maul and chew.

He looked on with dismay and disbelief as the train returned, causing everything that had happened barely a few minutes before to repeat in a nearly identical manner.

Did it…? How the - no, there was no way. It had just-

“That’s not the same one, is it?” he asked just to get confirmation on his doubts, because otherwise that would have been absolutely batshit.

“Same what, train?” she replied. When he nodded, she clicked her tongue: “Aaah… No, it’s a different one, that’d be way too fast even for our standards. These ones pass every three to five minutes. It’s a busy commute, so there’s usually a very small waiting time between them.”

Oh, thank goodness. He wasn’t fully sure of how long the whole journey might have been, but certainly the train wasn’t just running in circles in three minutes.

Speaking of the second train, the beast had already departed with no more additional fanfare than a derogatory flash of the headlights on its tail, dragging its body into the tunnels with as much clanging and roaring as it could, and the new passengers were already congregating on the cement floor, all careful to stand by behind the yellow line.

It was frankly a little amazing how the chatter and general noise never subsided at any point. It was less like waves washing upon the shore before being pulled back and more like a school of extremely young Magikarps jumping constantly in shallow water.

Despite that, however, he couldn’t help but sense a sort of disturbance among the disharmony - some kind of even less pleasant sound intermingling in it.

Almost on the other end of the platform a woman let out as high a shriek as possible.

She then proceeded to yell at length at the top of her lungs.

A second similar voice replied in the exact outrageous volume.

Ah.

So that was the additional worse noise.

Oh joy.

On his shoulder, Emolga growled.

Everybody else either shut or lowered their voices, turning to the extremely loud argument before facing away, not interested in joining the two screamers who very much looked ready to tear each other apart from what he could see among the sea of passengers dutifully waiting. Glancing at Briosa to figure out what the right procedure in this case would have been, he found her blissfully continuing to lean onto the railing of the platform’s end with not an ounce of concern in her eyes; Mawile on the other hand, sitting next to her on the same railing, had a paw to her face pinching the bridge of her snout, approximately five seconds away from taking a long inhale before sighing just as deeply, ruefully and tiredly as a Fairy could.

Hm. Perhaps he should help.

His hand was blocked by gloved fingers before it could gently nudge the substitute’s shoulder to get her attention, eliciting the same desired effect of having her turn to face him in an inquisitive manner.

The problem of communication returned to his mind at that moment, though in the span of a second he had already opted for the simplest of solutions: without a word, he pointed his index finger straight at the two commuters violently yelling and making threatening gestures at each other without a single concern for the space nor the people around them.

She turned towards the source of the commotion. Clearly being too short to properly visualize the matter, she then effortlessly pulled her body to stand completely vertically upon the metal bar through the strength of her arms before settling her feet down on it and getting a better look.

The groan she let out was more like the sound of a revving motorcycle with chainsaws for wheels.

“These types again,” she lamented, flat lips parted in an annoyed grimace. As Mawile climbed up her coat to get on her shoulder she extended her hand over to Ingo: “Can I have Emolga back for a moment?”

He complied, allowing the electrical rodent to climb into her palm.

The little scarred beast laid on it on his belly, pointed directly towards the disrupters; his trainer then reeled her arm back, snapped: “Get’em, GGGuts!” and launched him into the air, apparently attempting to splat him against the opposite wall - which thank Palkia did not happen, as he opened up the flaps beneath his arms to stall in the atmosphere a moment and angle himself so that he would land right on the head of one of the screaming idiots on the platform.

Said screaming idiot shrieked even louder for the surprise.

Hm!

Interesting technique!

Briosa patted his arm as she jumped back on the floor: “Gonna be back in a hot minute, do NOT move,” she simply instructed, and before he could even just nod off she was, cutting through the crowd like a Mamoswine through a snowstorm.

Ingo might have kept on looking (and if had indeed been solely focused on her he might have eventually gotten to take in the rare sight of Substitute Subway Master Briosa Crociera, roughly as tall as two lemonade cans and as heavy as a Leppa Berry and a half, lifting two entire women three times her weight and height into the air to hurl them up the stairs to the platform like a pair of feathers after harvesting at least a couple molars from each of their mouths) if the next train hadn’t rushed into the station at that moment, distracting him.

Rivers of people poured out once again, blocking his visual. Hundreds of feet tried to cover the enraged yelling with the sound of their stomping - thank goodness he’d been shoved a little away or he would have been right in the middle of the flood - passing over the gap between metal and cement in either direction.

Among the indistinct clamor rang out the name of a flower.

He turned immediately, as though he’d been called.

His eyes searched immediately, feverishly, looking for something or someone like he knew exactly what he was searching. A bloom? Sprouting from the cement, from the paint on the walls? From the lamps? The faces rushing past him?

(The flower had roared before talking, and roared straight at him, with the viciousness of a little prune moving little hands like little claws, but he couldn’t remember that.)

Pupils fixed onto the heads slowly disappearing left and right, all unfocused as they passed faster and faster despite his attempts at… At what? He had no clue, no clue at all. He sifted through them over and over, left and right, left and right, only managing to catch glimpses of each of them, not finding anything, anything, not even the slightest thing.

Somebody called out once more to a flower.

Bodies passed, eyes and noses and hair and mouths and ears, and he just kept on searching, and searching, and searching, without even knowing what to look for, so focused that he didn’t even notice every head he looked like was turned to show the profile except one.

Hold on.

He just lost that one, actually.

A sudden panic struck him and closed his entire digestive tract in a painful knot.

The impact on his stomach had him double over, but at least it completely obliterated that terrible feeling.

His face’s disastrous descent towards his own knees was stopped only thanks to his chest hitting something soft and voluminous that was doing its absolute best to lodge itself into his body just below his sternum; arms were wrapping his waist in as tight a grip as it was humanly possible, holding onto him like a lifeline, trying to sway and strangle him all at once.

He choked something out as a reflex, though the words were completely unintelligible even to himself. His hands found small, sturdy shoulders, with the kind of still wiry muscle that kids who haven’t yet finished growing have - he pushed them away from himself as the embrace around him loosened enough for him to actually manage that.

While he struggled to inhale after getting the breath knocked out of him so suddenly, the girl came into his focus very slowly - first her hair, of a dark and deep violet color, held fast by some yellow bands of sorts, then the brown of her eyes, the shape of her nose and mouth, the little faded scar next to her ear from when (she’d run into the edge of a table faster than a Blitzle as a tiny itty bitty prune and started to cry as loud as she could and he had cried even louder with her in solidarity so that she would stop to try to console him while her dad fixed her up, but he couldn’t remember that), the hunch of her back that made her seem so small, the strength in her hands as she still held onto his middle, onto his clothes.

She seemed about to apologize, but between her huffs and humid eyes she could barely make a sound.

A boy shouted for the flower again.

A half-asleep conversation came back to mind.

His grip on her shoulders tightened slightly.

“Forgive me for the strange question,” Ingo asked with a sudden hurry: “Would you happen to be my cousin?”

She inhaled in a noisy, watery way a few more times, a trembling smile creeping up on her face as it lit up.

She nodded.

A moment later arms were lifting her into the air from under her armpits in a bone-shattering hug, so tight she could feel her chest being compressed and yet filling her with such an incomparable wordless joy that she couldn’t help shrieking out a laugh as she wrapped her legs around the man’s middle, holding onto him like a Komala to its log. He swayed the both of them left and right, faces buried in each other’s hair, gripping so hard they were probably bruising - then suddenly pulled away to face her again, eyes wide and shining like he was about to cry.

“I’m sorry!” he apologized, “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, I wasn’t aware that you were such a beautiful young lady!”

Iris laughed even louder and found it impossible to stop herself from tearing up a little, and gently slapped his cheeks over and over, forgetting her soon-to-be nineteen years of age in favor of returning the five-year-old who didn’t like to be called like that because she was a Dragon Tamer, not some noblewoman.

She buried her face in his shoulder again, heart beating frantically. Ah, why did words have to be so hard now of all times!

A sob wrecked through her, unable to be contained.

Before she could chastise herself for it, an absent minded hand had already started patting a song on her spine.

She hugged him even tighter.

She knew it.

She knew he still remembered her.

She knew they couldn’t have been that unlucky.

A male voice called for her: she unwound herself from her cousin to turn around, his white arm still gripped tight in her palm, wide and tearstained grin illuminating her still somewhat child-like face.

“Marshal!” she cried out, waving at the man whose approach was slowing down more and more the closer he came to the formerly missing Subway Master as though frightened by the possibility of doing something too brash, too wrong, to come off too strong, “Marshal, come here, quick! He knows me! He knows me!”

(That would have been an exaggeration, but this wasn’t the time to make it known.)

He looked at the empty expression on the ghost of a man before him as bright white eyes stared into him.

He’d been stuck in situations that sparked and screamed with tension before, competitions and brawls and battles alike, close calls and last hits the anticipation of which had made time stretch endlessly as though it were a long, infinite rubber band struggling to return to shape after being released in an ocean of air denser than drying cement, but this - this had his heart and throat in an iron grip, squeezing them so hard that he could feel every single vein pulse with how desperately quick his heart was beating against his chest.

Speaking didn’t come hard to him usually. He’d honed that skill like many others, balancing himself as he always had been taught to do. And yet now his tongue felt dry and tangled, and his mind was blanking hard.

Should he have even said anything at all? Should he have just waved? He could have always turned around and left. He would have been ashamed of it for the rest of his life, like any fighter with some self-respect, but it was still an option. He could have just gone.

But could he, really?

How much had he missed him? That idiot who’d gotten poisoned by toxic trash enough times to become immune? To whom he’d tried to teach capoeira with no success at the tender age of seven, only managing to flail him around despite their difference in height? Was he seriously going to leave him like that, staring, not even offering a simple greeting, an introduction of even the barest kind?

His cousin was looking at him.

Not vacantly.

With purpose.

He raised a hand to give a little wave, offering a small bashful smile with it, but didn’t get to accompany either with any sound: the taller body slammed into him after carefully setting his sister back on the platform so quickly he barely saw the motion, and squeezed him in the spindly arms.

It took him a second for him to fully feel the hug.

A few moments after he heard a loud bony pop coming from a spine that wasn’t his own and reverberating against his arms, he realized he was hugging back.

Oh boy.

That must have hurt a bit.

“I did need that,” Ingo thankfully wheezed in his hold.

Marshal coughed out a laugh. These guys - they had such a way of being goofy…

His embrace grew a little softer as he nestled his face into his cousin’s shoulder, and he allowed himself to chuckle again: “Good to see some things don’t change, eh?”

The grip around him seemed to grow fonder.

-

Ingo was not there.

Locating him in the control room should have been easy. For starters, he would have stood out by being the only person not wearing any uniform; then, even if he could have melted into the penumbra with his dark clothes, the area of his head was so white between eyes and hair and pale skin that it would have been impossible to miss.

So, vice versa, the fact that he was not immediately recognizable among the small crowd and dim lights made it all the more obvious that he wasn’t there.

And if he wasn’t there, either he was somewhere else, or he had never been there to begin with.

Both of which were equally terrifying possibilities.

Cloud jumped a little when a hand grabbed their shoulder with a grip strong enough to just yank it off of their body in one go like a dangling baby tooth waiting to be pulled out of a child’s mouth.

“Where is Ingo?” Emmet asked with a face that could have effortlessly killed a man.

Luckily for the Depot Agent, their gender crisis which had decreed them to be no such thing decades ago spared them long enough for the moment of blinding terror to subside and let them answer in a peep: “With Briosa, boss.”

“Where is Briosa?”

“She should be on one of the platforms - she wanted to show him the trains, I think-”

“Which platform?”

“I - I don’t know, boss, it’s-”

“When did they leave?”

“I, ah - uh,” they scrubbed their brain to recall what the other had said and checked the clock: “About, uh… Maybe an hour ago, an hour and a half at most, by now.”

Perhaps they should have lied - whatever little color was in Emmet’s face was draining rapidly leaving him almost transparent, and based on how his grip was trembling, how his chest was squeezing quicker and quicker, how his eyes were shaking to find something to focus on, he was very close to breaking down.

They needed to fix the mess they made now, before it turned into a catastrophe - but how, how, how…

By chance their eyes fell on a printed copy of the staff schedule.

The subway master jumped when a palm laid on his wrist: kindly furrowed brown eyes forced him to look into them to ground him.

“Boss,” Cloud spoke more securely, “Briosa’s on the Single Train right now, right? Her shift started a while ago and she didn’t come back to the control room, so she likely went straight to the train. Ingo seemed interested in seeing one, so maybe she decided to let him tag along and let him watch some matches!”

It sounded right; it sounded plausible. Emmet gave a few small nods: “Yes,” he conceded, “Probably. Maybe. Possibly."

“You can check in on her on the radio,” they continued, “Just to make sure.”

Radio! Right! Right. He had the radio. He could contact her. He could ask her.

He should have done that.

He should have thought of that.

He would go do that.

He would go.

His hands unclenched: “I’ll call her,” he managed to force out of himself.

Cloud offered him a smile and gently patted his forearm: “Sounds like a good idea, boss. Your office is probably better for these sorts of things - we’ve got everything under control here.”

“Yes. Thank you.” he breathed. “Verrry much.”

“Anytime, boss.”

Bless whoever had ever decreed the existence of the Depot Agent profession.

Who knows where he’d be without them by now.

Emmet counted the long swinging steps that covered the distance spanning across the control room, the short corridor opening from its wall, and the office it lead into; then he counted them again as he marched laps around the furniture, trying to find a spot where he could lean onto (sitting would have worsened his panic, he just knew it, he had had a taste of that on his own skin enough times before that he was certain he had to keep moving) while searching around in the pockets of his coat.

At last having found the small radio, it sizzled to life as he tuned the correct frequency and spoke into it: “I am Emmet. Calling Briosa.”

He could feel a panic attack climbing up his leg.

It hurt like hell when he slammed his shin against the side of his desk, but at least it staved off the spiraling thoughts for a moment as he hissed.

He waited for the snap of Mawile’s maw to come through the receiver and urgently asked: “Is Ingo with you?”

The answer came a moment later, extremely calm: “He’s outside.”

“Where?”

“The city.”

“Alone?!” he almost shouted, stopping in his tracks..

“Nope,” Briosa popped her lips: “Two people came over to pick him up I think, one girl looking younger than I do, one guy not older than me, both from the Opelucid train. Ingo said they were his cousins and they were all sort of crying in the middle of the platform, so I figured I could let him go with them.”

Opelu - oh!

The tension in Emmet’s shoulders completely dissipated as they uncorked with a snap when he laid against a wall, like the cap of a heavily carbonated drink flying away, and he let out a relieved sigh.

Oh, alright. This changed everything. Thank goodness. 

“Champion Iris and Elite Four Marshal?” he asked just to be sure - though that was most definitely them. They must have heard about that mess with the announcements somehow, and the girl had probably dragged her half-brother to see Ingo as soon as possible. They had both missed him dearly, after all, he was certain of it.

The other end remained quiet for a bit longer than usual.

“If that’s a code I don’t know what it means.”

“No - question. Were the people Champion Iris and Elite Four Marshal.”

“I don’t know.”

Confusion settled on Emmet’s brows, making them furrow.

“What do you mean?”

“That I don’t know.” Briosa repeated.

“Don’t know what?”

“I don’t know if they were who you said.”

“The Champion and Fighting member of the Elite Four?”

“Yes.” now she started to sound annoyed. “Should I know them, anyways?”

Out of all the new things to learn about his co-worker today, this was not one he had remotely considered.

Also!

It was possibly the worst thing to short-circuit him at this precise moment, while he had no clear whereabouts of his brother and was beginning to doubt if his company was indeed who he thought they were and not somebody else.

His Xtransceiver decided that was the right moment to start ringing: an unknown number blinked on the display.

“Please hold until further notice,” he ordered automatically, too torn between panic and bewilderment to think, and just as he shut down the radio before getting an answer he opened the call.

His own eyes, magnified, replied.

A distinctly much louder and more expressive voice then made the speakers shriek: “HELLO! EMMET! CAN YOU HEAR ME!”

“No,” the conductor replied thoughtlessly with a wheeze that almost collapsed him.

“OH NO!”

“No no no, he can - he can hear you just fine, don’t worry, maybe just- just lower your voice a little, actually, I don’t think the speakers can survive that,” a definitely darker hand said as it came into view to gently pull Ingo away from the screen so that he wasn’t trying to shove his head through it.

The video feed trembled as it was yanked a little lower, revealing bright maroon eyes and an enthusiastic smile: “Hi Emmet!!”

“I am Emmet,” he replied fondly, out of breath: “Hello Iris. Hello Marshal.”

After another adjustment, the Fighting Elite Four member also properly came into view, waving back at him.

“You’re looking nice,” was the first thing he said.

His not-quite-cousin’s eyes narrowed, smile turning playfully angry: “Ah ha. Thanks.”

“No, seriously, you seem well-rested! That’s a relief!”

“It’s likely due to the fact that he slept in today,” Ingo snitched.

Iris gasped: “Slept in? Did a shooting star pass by? Did someone pray for a miracle?”

Oh no. Not this again. “I have been bullied enough about this already.”

“Oh yeah?” Marshal egged him on, “By who?”

“Ingo. My team. His team. The Agents. Briosa. Elesa, if she finds out.”

“That last one doesn’t count.”

“Yes it does.”

“She doesn’t even know it!”

“She will. And she will bully me.”

“Can I call her on this as well?” his twin instantly asked their cousins at that, feigning innocence: “She will surely be glad to hear he’s gotten enough sleep.”

“No.” Emmet prohibited.

Iris ignored him candidly: “Oh, you can call her right now if you want-”

“Nooo,” came from beyond the screen, and she giggled. “Stop that.”

“You only need to get the number pad open down here and then you type in–” Marshal began to coach him.

“Stop that!”

Ingo snorted loudly at his furious pout: “Don’t worry, don’t worry - I will delay the inevitable as of now. I shall save her contact and call her later in the day to let her know of your prolonged nap, which I’m certain she’ll approve of.”

“Do not.”

“I cannot make promises.”

“Yes you can. Promise you will not.”

“I would have to make a promising gesture in order to do so, but unfortunately both my hands are occupied.”

“No they’re not.”

His supposedly free hand came into view, very much held by Marshal’s own in an invincible grip. The young man’s smug grin followed suit.

Emmet almost forgot he was behind a screen and tried to physically wipe it off.

Remembering he was behind a screen, however, brought him to a slightly delayed realization - together with the much needed question, as embarrassing as it might have been, of whether or not he was still suffering from the excessive sleepiness of the day prior in order for him not to be noticing horrendously obvious things.

If anything, he concluded, getting more rest was proving to be much more detrimental to his attention than getting less, so he probably shouldn’t have slept at all instead.

Everybody he knew would have likely strangled him for coming to such a conclusion, but even they couldn't have argued against the stone cold facts his lackluster performance was serving up.

Anyways.

“You have an Xtransceiver,” he noted with no shortage of relief.

“Took you long enough!”

A gentle elbow playfully pushed the girl’s head away: “Give him some slack, Iris, he was busy letting us make fun of him.”

“Ha ha. I was also verrry worried. I didn’t know where Ingo was. I got verrry scared.”

Ingo’s mouth was already halfway open to offer an apology, but Iris beat him to the punch, throwing her arms in the air triumphantly: “Well you won’t have to worry about that anymore! Now you can just call him whenever you want!” she added, moving her hands in a very goofy way as if to showcase an invisible product: “On his brand new welcome back gift we got for him so he never loses track of anybody of us again! And we don’t lose track of him!”

“Which I’m assuming was the main point,” her constantly frowning cousin pointed out.

“Good job making him feel like we’re putting him on a leash,” Marshal mumbled at her sort of jokingly, getting a slap on his arm for it.

“Oh no, by all means, it’s perfectly sensible! It will certainly be much easier for you to keep track of me than the opposite - I’m still not sure how to use most features on this blasted thing, I’d likely mess up any simple function spectacularly…”

“Trust me, we’ve seen worse.”

“Yeah, nothing can beat Grandpa Alder on that.”

“He took out the batteries by accident once, I don’t even know how, just pulled them out manually somehow. We brought it over to the manufacturer and even they couldn’t figure out what he’d done. You’ll be fine.”

“You’ll figure it out super quick.”

“You still should have told somebody. Have them send a message to me. I was worried.” Emmet brought the three of them back on track sternly. He still allowed a smile to creep up on his lips, relaxing his shoulders a little: “But I admit, it’s a verrry good idea for a gift. Yup!”

“Of course it was,” the girl gloated, “I had it.”

“She did not,” her brother shot her down.

“Yes I did!”

“For the sake of truth I must confess,” Ingo interrupted their argument: “It was Marshal who first proposed it.”

Iris gasped at him in furious outrage: “You’re supposed to side with me! I’m the baby!”

“I thought you disliked that definition?”

“It’s situational,” Emmet predicted.

“It’s situational!” she replied a moment later. Her piqued finger took up the entirety of the screen: “You shut up.”

The conductor wheezed in her face.

Overwhelmed with righteous fury, the current Unovan Champion loudly stomped her foot: “Whatever! I had a better one right now!” she declared, “And it’s to go get lunch because it’s midday and I’m kind of starving.”

Then she gasped again, and smiled wider: “You could come too!”

“No.”

Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Too abrupt. Damn panic.

“I’m working,” Emmet added hastily before she thought he was denying out of anger or annoyance. “I can’t. Sorry. I should not leave the station. Sorry. Sorry.”

“It’d be quick!” she pleaded back to him, and the saddened look on her face made him want to crumple into a dead leaf and turn to dust. “It could take what, maybe fifteen minutes? While you’re on your way we can get a sandwich or something, we hide Ingo in the bushes so he’s safe–”

“Excuse you-”

“-Shush, and then we can eat out here! And maybe once we’re done the three of us can go around to see the city and you can go back to work, just–”

“My,” he started, and then stopped. He had a hard time swallowing the lump in his throat, but there was no need. It was the truth. “My lunch break. It’s not now. Later. I’m working. Sorry.”

“We can wait then!”

“No. You’re hungry. You get cranky when you’re hungry.”

“No I don’t!”

“It would be disastrous. Can’t put Marshal and Ingo in that kinda danger. Better appease you verrry quickly.”

Iris furrowed her brows at him and pouted.

It would have been funnier if looking at her didn’t feel like getting stabbed in the gut.

“Not sure if it’s a good idea though,” he decided to change the subject, “Walking around with Ingo.”

“Why not?” Marshal asked.

“You know. Paparazzi. And other Sewaddles of life.”

“We can deal with those.”

He doubtfully scrunched up his face in response.

His cousin took that personally: “What, you don’t trust the Champion and her loyal fist-fighting knight to be able to handle a couple flashing cameras?”

That had Ingo turn to the still somewhat distraught Iris with eyes as wide as the moon itself, shining brilliantly with absolute surprise and a pride that was undoubtedly going to explode into a sonic boom in roughly eight seconds: “You’re the Champion?”

“Yeah?” she just replied.

Emmet quickly pulled the Xtransceiver down and stuck it close to his back. His fulminous reflexes saved him from the shrieks of the speakers as the latest contender for the title of world’s loudest BRAVO rippled through them in an attempt to make them explode.

He could envision the ear-ringing state of deafened daze Iris and Marshal were in at the moment extremely clearly, which likely said something about either himself, his brother, his cousins, or all of the above.

“YOU DID NOT MENTION THAT!” his brother was continuing in the same volume of voice, too caught up into the prideful euphoria to lower it: “CONGRATULATIONS!”

Faintly he made out Iris shakily replying her thanks.

“THAT’S INCREDIBLE! WHEN DID YOU MANAGE SUCH A FEAT?”

She responded it had happened around four years ago.

Whatever Ingo shouted next was completely unintelligible, so perhaps he should have intervened before the Xtransceivers completely gave up and burst into flames on their wrists, which would have been notably distressing.

.

“Fine! Fine.  I am Emmet and I’m convinced. He’ll be fine. Go for it. I trust you with him. Show him the city. Catch up with him. Hide him in the bushes.”

“Emmet.”

“I am Emmet.”

“Please do not advocate in favor of shoving me in any nearby shrubbery.”

“Would be a good hiding place.”

“Emmet.”

“It’d be much more effective than having you pretend you’re a lamppost.”

“Marshal.”

“It’s true!”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Iris insisted. “We can wait just fine, seriously…”

“I am Emmet. I am sure. My lunch break is at… “ fuck. When was it? “Two. Do not worry for me. I will eat. Have a good meal. Go see the rest of the team home. They’ll be verrry happy, I bet. And Elesa. But don’t tell her I slept in.”

At least she smiled mischievously: “Immediately tell her you slept in, got it.”

“Nooo - avoid.”

“Instantly.”

“No!”

“Right now.”

“Iris Wittle Wyvern Lophiris. Stop that.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Call you what.”

“You know what you did!”

“I do not. Anyway!” he decided to cut it all short, before the credibility of his excuse began to dwindle: “Enjoy yourselves. And avoid paparazzi like the plague. I love you.”

They must have answered. He wasn’t sure he heard that.

By the time the call was closed and he wasn’t under their eyes anymore he was fairly sure the only thing keeping him still upright was the wall against his shoulder and the grip of his soles on the dark pavement.

Maybe he should have fainted for a while. Just slumped right down on the cold floor and lost consciousness for about half an hour. Maybe he could have gotten himself a nice little cardiac arrest for all of two seconds to ragdoll his way out of the wildly spinning tornado of thoughts passing by his neurons so fast they were essentially incomprehensible, some shifting amalgamation of panic and shame and a general desire to slam his head very hard somewhere and cause a dent either on the unfortunate surface of the day or in his skull.

What was even the matter? He hadn’t even talked to them. He hadn’t shut his door in their face. He had just not answered after the first two calls.

He hadn’t even been rude.

(I love you.)

(What a stupid fucking thing to say after as prolonged and obstinate an avoidance as his own. He was going to–)

Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

How did that… The stupid one… How did that song go? About the, uh… The stupid… Ugh. He scratched at his forehead. The one… With… The fish. Captain.

Ca-pitan Findus, controilran-cido As-do-mar…

He couldn’t scrape the rest from his brain, but at least it cleared it enough.

Should have used this instead of medicine. Then again, he’d been half asleep and easily conditioned by his brother’s own less than stellar feelings, so he was excused.

Normal things now.

Things to do.

… Save the number. That would have been verrry useful.

He opened his eyes as little as possible to check on the display, so that he wouldn’t fuck it up by trying to do that blindly.

A warning; he selected ‘yes’ without even reading.

That was something he’d have to figure out later. Or tomorrow. No matter. Just… Not now, please.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Things to do.

The ringtone made him first jump, then cuss.

Dragons help him. These five minutes were feeling even more never ending with every millisecond that passed.

Breathe.

Marshal nodded at him in greeting from the screen as he walked leisurely.

“Heya.”

“You just called.” Emmet noted dryly. He bit his tongue at how annoyed he sounded to himself; luckily for him, it came out just as monotone as always.

“I wanted to talk with you for a moment more. Without the whole…” he moved his arm in a fairly eloquent way towards a couple of louder voices off-screen. “You know. And it was Ingo who called you first, to be precise.”

“Tamayto, Tamato. Same thing.”

“Ugh, whatever,” the younger man stuck out his tongue at him.

“Unsportsmanlike. Penalty.”

“Hey!”

“You taught me that.”

“Can I talk to you for a second or are you going to keep doing this?”

“Hm. Perhaps.”

“Cuz…”

He was smiling. He was smiling - he wasn’t angry. A little annoyed, but in the way one is annoyed at a friend being a little too goofy. He was even chuckling a bit - his chest shook slightly from it.

The relief the sight of such a simple expression gave him left a disgusting aftertaste all over his mouth, not sparing even a singular cell. It was similar to that of gastric acid.

“I’ll be quick, I know you’re busy and all,” Marshal got to the point, now that the interruptions seemed to have finally stopped. “I just wanted to say it’s good to see you again, too. Even if you’re only on a screen.”

Emmet’s throat dried up.

Marshal didn't notice: “Maybe another time we can all meet up, with Mom and Dad too, and Grandpa. I bet I could rope Grimsley in if you wanted,” he laughed a little.

“Maybe.” his cousin conceded faintly. “Another time.”

“You’d be up for that?”

No. “Yup. Sure. Another time, maybe.”

“Of course! Of course.”

It was still weird to see white teeth when he grinned. He was so used to him wearing that teal guard over them in recent times (recent years, a few years ago, which meant they weren’t so recent anymore, and it made him want to look away and leave and curl up in a ball and apologize and never talk again) that he’d almost forgotten that wasn’t their natural color.

“I’ll see you then,” his cousin waved.

The conductor waved back a little: “Bye.”

“Have a good day!”

“You too. Love you.” (what a stupid thing to–)

“Love you too!”

The image sizzled away; Emmet breathed in again sharply through his nose, swallowed, and slid down the wall until he was sitting in midair.

He waited in a limbo devoid of thoughts for a few seconds that felt more like a couple hundred minutes, eyes closed, trying to quell any tremor that attempted to make his muscles quiver with nervous antsyness.

They’d looked honestly happy to see him.

Honestly it was going to make him cry.

Or have a breakdown.

Calm down, calm down - other things to do, there’s other things to do first.

Work to do first.

Briosa to call first.

To tell her.

And also for the other thing.

He turned the radio back on and spoke into it without registering the action, clawing his way back into his body as the words left it. Mawile’s snap arrived right on schedule to assure him his messages were being received.

“It was our cousins,” he confirmed.

“Oh, nice.”

“But.”

Silence.

“But what.”

“You don’t know what the champion looks like?”

“No.”

Emmet willed himself to calm down. Maybe she hadn’t kept up since Alder had gone off in grief; champions change often. That made sense.

That could not be applied to Marshal.

So he changed his question: “You don’t know what the Elite Four look like?”

“No? Should I?”

He could not answer that in a way that kept him sane. So he remained silent, absolutely stunned.

“Am I supposed to know them?” Briosa insisted.

Was she - “They’re the League!” he replied.

The response came in the same unbothered shrug of a tone as before: “I don’t know the League.”

She what.

“How.”

“I’m not into competitive battling.”

…

Huh??

“This is. This is the Battle Subway. You work at the Battle Subway.”

“Yes! And here we just run over trainers. By the way you should get over to the Multi Line as soon as possible, would be better somewhere around uhhhh this precise instant, there’s an obnoxious pair that’s been very slowly making their way through the twentieth car with some kind of stalling strategy and should be done in about fifteen minutes. If they come in and you aren’t here I will not guarantee for the safety of their tendons.”

Alright. Yes, he should have returned to the train. Ingo was safe with family, so he had nothing to worry about.

And he could have continued this hell of conversation much more easily, too.

-

Emmet was notified of Ingo’s return to the control room somewhere around six in the afternoon, while he was still rushing through the tunnels of the Double Line. Moments before the arrival of the next challenger, he was then notified that his brother was currently snoring away on one of the breakroom’s couches.

When he peeked his head in a little less than two hours later, he was still asleep.

Iris did have a tendency to drag people around as though they had as boundless an energy as hers, and while Marshal had trained for years and had enough stamina to actually keep up with her, her not-quite-cousins definitely did not; so his poor twin was probably exhausted from being flung around the city like a gymnastic ribbon on a go-kart passing through a wind tunnel, or a wacky inflatable tube man being pulled into one of Tornadus’s storms.

A weight settled on his bones.

Ah, damnit. He should have eaten his lunch after all. Not his fault he forgot about it.

His glove scratched his eyelid a little as he rubbed it.

Hm, yes, had to be sugar withdrawal. Nothing else. Nothing at all. Not sleep, definitely. He was Emmet. He wasn’t tired. And certainly it wasn’t having stayed here instead of going to see his cousins. Nope. No way.

He’d been busy. Verrry busy. He was working. He couldn’t just go around. Sorry. He could not. Nope. Sorry. Sorry. Verrry busy.

He repeated the words to himself ad nauseam as he mindlessly chewed through his previously abandoned sandwiches with all the glee of a thoughtless automaton spending its days stamping bottle caps. He could have sat for a moment, just to stretch a bit and get this torpor out of him - yes, he nodded with a yawn, he’d do that, timing himself with Ingo’s snores.

A hand shook his shoulder: “Boss, you’re needed upstairs.”

Emmet opened his eyes to find himself hunched on his knees.

When did that happen?

“How long?” he asked vaguely, feeling his tongue stuck to his palate.

Thankfully, Hank had a degree in barely awake communications and was currently getting a coffee not too far away: “About ten minutes, maybe,” he replied.

“Yeah, that sounds right,” Ramses nodded.

Their boss hummed; like a Purrloin, he snapped his back into a sitting position, listening to his spine as it popped while stretching his arms upwards.

Well, that didn’t do him good.

He was going to need a chiropractor. Or maybe Marshal could have just realigned his backbone with some kind of grapple.

If he ever managed to crawl back to his cousin in shame.

“I am Emmet,” he groaned to ignore his own thoughts: “I’ll be there in a second.”

Ingo was still sleeping. His brother gave him a gentle pat on the arm and left him to continue resting.

-

By the time he opened his eyes again he felt like a few geological eras had passed.

He checked the nearest clock, squinting to figure out what he was looking at: the hands told him it was 10:23. Most likely in the P.M.

He was suddenly very hungry.

They probably would have eaten once they were back home though, right? In the meantime he should have probably had some water. He felt like a dried up Petilil slowly shriveling under the midday summer sun.

On second thought, where was he, exactly?

Because this did not look like home, or the control room, or his hut. Perhaps he had been abducted, which however sounded unlikely as he did remember finding the elevator with Cameron (Cameron? That was his name, right? Not Cloud. Cloud had longer hair. Hm, yes, that was Cameron.) and descending away from the piercing golden glow all around himself.

“Oh! Finally. We were thinking you had a heart attack.”

His eyes shifted groggily onto some gaunt young man almost glaring at him..

“Is… Adore?” he tried, unsure whether it was that or Isaiah but feeling a preference for the former.

The agent nodded and reached for some weird large thing standing against the wall to stick a sort of key in it before poking at it repeatedly with one finger: “You’ve been asleep for four hours and forty-seven minutes,” he let him know with surprising precision. “Did you sleep at all before coming here today?”

“Yes,” Ingo replied dryly. “The whole night.”

The weird thing spat out something similar to a very small paper cup.

Isadore looked at him in bewilderment as something trickled into the tiny container; he shook his head after a moment, as if remembering something: “No, that makes sense.” he nodded again.

A hiss escaped his heavily clenched jaw as he grabbed the little cup in his palm for all of one second before retreating his hand.

By the time Ingo had finally managed to sit back up without almost falling asleep in the process the liquid must have finally cooled down a little bit, because the young man was finally able to pick it up and bring it over to the couch. He took note of how carefully he maneuvered the little thing, gripping it with the precise grip of a machine, moving in perfectly strides so that the contents of the cup could not have so much as moved in the slightest.

He stood for a short while, narrow eyes fixed on the beverage.

“Do you like lemon tea?” the agent asked finally.

Oh, that sounded nice: “I believe so, yes.”

“I hate it.” Isadore replied, and with the same precise robotic motions he lowered the cup down so he could take it from him. “But I messed up my order and ended up with this, so if you’d rather drink it than let me waste it I’d be fine with that.”

“Ah! Thank you.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Still, thank you.”

Like he couldn’t tell that he’d done that deliberately, just to be nice - especially from how he insisted it hadn’t been intentional and how he’d left in an embarrassed hurry. He might’ve not had that good a relationship with Ingo before.

And the tea tasted just fine. He didn’t know what he was missing.

-

The Battle Lines were officially closed.

As much as he loved them, Emmet sighed in relief. They could really drain one’s energy worse than a whole candelabra of Litwick.

Now all that was left to do was ensure that all passengers left the station for their final destinations, return the trains to their rightful resting platforms, close down for the night, and go back home.

And make sure his brother still existed.

Because there always was the possibility of him not existing.

Which was the worst possibility, right next to him being found dead.

(Him being found dead was so close to the former in the scale of worst things to be real because by ‘not existing’ he meant specifically ‘not existing here and now back home’, not ‘not existing since the beginning’, and that left the window very terrifyingly open for the latter to happen.)

Briosa cracked her phalanxes with her thumb one at a time.

Once she was done, she moved onto those of her left hand.

She did not say anything. He focused on the quiet snaps muffled by the cotton gloves and tried to relax his shoulders.

The tension suffocating him in the elevator thankfully disappeared as soon as he stepped into the control room and an incredibly pale head all but literally lit up at the sight of him.

Ingo waved at him as though they were twelve kilometers away from each other, remaining perfectly still right where he was. Emmet waved back in the exact same manner, smiling as wide as he could.

Mawile found them impossibly silly and held back a cackle.

Billie decided to interrupt their silent waving by gently launching the older twin towards the younger with a hand on his back, promising under their breath that Vip was going to help with the last few things to check, and the man took the momentum in stride and slammed directly into his brother so quickly that neither even had the time to outstretch their arms for a hug, headbutting the shit out of each other and ending up stumbling a little for the recoil before they grabbed each other’s forearms to keep themselves from falling on the pavement.

“I apologize for falling asleep for nearly five hours!” he told him once they had established some distance again: “Iris and Marshal have the same terrible grip and powerful legs. I was no match for such behemoths.”

“Marshal was pulling too?”

“Yes!”

Memories of getting thrown around by an eight-year-old who could wrestle a Fraxure made the other at once smile and wince: “Oof. Did you try any opposition?”

“Absolutely not. They would have run me over like a herd of Piloswine.”

“Good call.”

He took a long breath through his nose and groaned.

“I am Emmet. I will admit. I am verrry tired.”

“Preach!” Vip (short for Venipede - her mothers were from outside the region and really, really liked Unovan bugs) hollered back at him unprompted before slinking her head down onto the desk in defeat. Josh, ever the sweetheart, patted her back in solidarity; Billie preferred shoving her a little out of the way.

Emmet was very tempted to imitate her, but pulled all of his remaining willpower to resist, only hunching his back forward in a slump and giving a long sigh: “Exactly. Let’s go home.”

“Oh! Is the Station shutting down for the night?”

“Yep.”

“I see! It is very late after all…”

Noticing the saddened tone, the younger tilted his head: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing, just a silly thing. It could be handled tomorrow, or another day - it’s not a big deal anyways.”

“What is it?”

“... I would have liked to see the inside of a train,” Ingo admitted bashfully, like he was confessing something embarrassing or ridiculous: “I know the vague layout of an old locomotive from the books I’ve read a little from at home, but I have no idea how current trains look…”

“Ah! That’s fine. We can do it an-”

“The last train to Anville Town departs in a few minutes,” Briosa helpfully interrupted him out of nowhere.

Mawile must have filled her in while they weren’t looking.

Josh checked on one of the monitors and nodded: she was right, the last run for the day would have left in a moment or two.

“I can accompany him,” she continued simply.

Emmet tensed: “It’ll be verrry late for you,” he tried to dissuade her.

“I’ve gone home later. Plus I’ve got business on it.”

“I know. But it’s late.”

“I know. And I need to go anyway.” she turned her head towards Ingo: “Do you wanna come along?”

“Briosa.” Emmet signed before his brother could reply, not smiling. “Look at me.”

She did.

“It’s late. We can do this another time. It’s fine.”

She gave a short hum. Her fingers moved quick in the total silence: It’s forty-five minutes of ride at most. We’ll leave around 10:50 and we’ll be back by closing time. Rapid and painless.

It’s late, Emmet insisted equally quiet: It’s verrry late. We can do it tomorrow.

Do you want to come along?, the substitute asked then.

He hesitated; then he shook his head imperceptibly.

Being on unmoving ground was making the prospect of getting back on a train worse than anything, almost to the point of nausea. It happened, sometimes. It had happened several times, in the past years. Once the seasickness had even had the horrid idea of manifesting physically, and it had been mortifying to clean that cab.

At the same time, he didn’t want to leave Ingo alone on a train launched towards an unknown destination. Anything could have happened, literally anything, and instead of arriving at Anville Town he could have ended up across the world again, or somewhere he could have never returned from, or the train could have derailed with him on it, or he could have fallen out, or, or, or…

He couldn’t know how much Briosa could have known about what was going on in his brain since she couldn’t read his mind, but she didn’t smile.

Her stout fingers just moved, with as much understanding as they could have: I’ll be with him. I’ll make sure he’s fine and return him home right on time. Nothing else will happen. I’ll protect him. You know I’m good at these sorts of things.

Yes, she was. And yes, he did.

He took a long breath.

“Is everything alright?” Ingo asked softly.

Emmet waved a hand to reassure him: “Technicalities,” he replied, hands signing as he spoke: “You can go. If you want. Briosa said she can come with you. I’ll stay here. I’m feeling a bit lightheaded. Is that ok?”

“Of course! Please take care of yourself.” then, after a moment of nervous pause: “Are you sure I can go? I can stay here if-”

“Woof, train leaves in seven minutes,” a little voice interrupted them again. “Better go now unless you want to wait a whole day. There’s other ones, actually, but this one actually gets out of the ground, which is much niftier.”

(“Woof?” Vip mouthed.)

(“Niftier?” Billie mouthed back.)

Briosa fixed her rotten green eyes directly in Ingo’s: “So! You wanna go?”

Ignoring the brief sensation that she was challenging him to a hand-to-hand combat match to the death, he looked to his twin.

Emmet gave him a thumbs up.

The older nodded; the minuscule Substitute smiled, stuck her entire arm down Mawile’s open enormous maw so the little thing could safely dangle from it instead of having to scuttle after her, grabbed his wrist with her free hand, and left without any additional words to anybody in the room.

Had the tightening deadline put wings at her feet, or was he so baffled by the fact that she had just consciously and willingly had one of her limbs swallowed by her hearing aide that he forgot to take time into account?

Either way, he could have sworn they had taken much longer to reach the platform earlier today.

He also could have sworn that they had returned to the same exact platform.

He blinked hastily several times, finding a definitely smaller amount of people than he had seen on his first visit waiting for the mechanical beast to come pick them up, and turned left and right before looking down to find his guide’s translator - still happily dangling from the arm she was chomping on..

“Are we going to-” he began, stopping himself for a moment out of uncertainty “-Opelucid City, I believe?”

“Anville Town,” Briosa corrected after raising Mawile to her eye level.

“Are you sure?”

“Perfectly certain.”

“I don’t want to doubt your expertise - you know much more than me, that’s without question - but are you absolutely positive this is the right platform? It looks a lot like-”

He couldn’t finish that thought as the conductor howled: “OOOH - oh ok, no, that’s fair, they’re all designed to look the same. They have signs before the entrance though, and Anville Town trains and stations and signs all have a brown line on them? Like that one over there.” and she pointed to a long bright brown line painted across the shorter wall of the platform. “It’s because it’s the oldest train line in the region and all stations were initially decorated with brown lines. Did you know that the slang for railway officials is brass collar?”

Actually, he did! From the moment she mentioned ‘slang’, but he did. Huh. He nodded, genuinely surprised by himself, and even added: “Or main pin.”

“Yeah!” Briosa grinned, squinting a lot: “Funny stuff to know.”

Funny indeed.

The train still made a horrid amount of noise, causing Ingo to regret not having asked for Emolga’s support again before Mawile very gently patted his leg to offer him some comfort. The sliding doors hissed open; the Substitute Subway Master positioned herself perpendicular to them and extended her arm towards the brightly lit interior of the rumbling millipede titan.

“All aboard!” she encouraged him - stretching the first word and rushing through the second, in a perfectly opposite intonation to his own and Emmet’s.

Ingo complied, stepping onto the train.

They were in the cab directly behind the locomotive (Briosa seemed to privilege this placement, as she had moved them towards the end of the Opelucid platform earlier as well) and if he turned his head to his left he could see a corridor made of long sections like the abdomen of a Bug stretching all the way into infinity, all identical as far as he could tell: same two lines of blue plastic seats built almost like sofas, same metal bars right above them, same handles dangling from them, same grey doors with wide windows, same openings into new cabs, same rows of glass separating the inside from the outside wind, over and over and over and over.

Gently buzzing above him, the neon white lights didn’t hurt as much as they could have.

(He remembered dreaming something like this once or twice.)

(Hadn’t he dreamed it in Sinnoh?)

(Not Hisui - Sinnoh. On the couch of Johanna and her child’s house… Yes, he recognized it now. He’d dreamed of sitting here, on a train, headed who knows were; he recognized now, the more he thought about that dream, the scratch of Marshal’s hair on his nape, the scent of Elesa’s Persim shampoo coming from his shoulder, Iris’s weight pressing on his lap, Emmet’s face leaning against his arm. He wondered who it had been, then, on whom he was sitting.)

A mechanical voice instructed him to stand away from the doors as they closed, and a rumble startled him so much that he almost jumped.

Briosa, at his side, made no motion nor betrayed any emotion.

The man looked around for a moment, thinking back to the plane and the car and finding a glaring problem.

He turned to Mawile with great urgency: "Where are the seatbelts?"

Both she and her aidee gave him a funny look.

"Trains don't have them," the substitute told him.

What?

The gigantic wretched beast moved with a jerk, and Ingo felt his entire body, completely stiff and as straight as a perfect line, get yanked back like a catapult towards the floor.

A thin arm pressed harshly against his back to stop him from actually making contact with the ground, keeping him upright despite the notable difference in height almost effortlessly, and as his freefall was stopped in time he became fully conscious of the fact that, oh! Yes! He had, indeed, been descending right into a concussion!

So he screamed.

The body under him seemed to shake incredibly hard for a moment; he was then grasped between two hands, manhandled for a hot second, and firmly planted on one of the smooth plastic seats.

Briosa looked directly into his eyes. Her vaguely square smile had an air of disbelief, and her hands trembled a bit.

"PLEASE MAKE SURE TO HOLD ONTO THE HANDRAILS OR TAKE A SEAT BEFORE THE TRAIN DEPARTS!" she said, not quite screaming but almost, sounding incredibly shrill. "ALSO DEAR DRAGONS YOU ARE LOUD!"

Ingo sunk in his mortified shoulders.

"I - I apologize, I did not-" he only managed to babble.

"I'M NOT MAD BY THE WAY, I'M REALLY IMPRESSED!" the Substitute interrupted him (not out of a lack of manners but because she could not have heard him if she wanted): "I DON’T THINK THE HUMAN BODY IS MEANT TO BE ABLE TO MAKE A SOUND AT THAT VOLUME! THE CLOSEST THING I CAN COMPARE IT TO IS WHEN I ACCIDENTALLY LAID AGAINST A VERY BIG SPEAKER AND A BASS LINE RIPPLED STRAIGHT THROUGH ME AND JUMBLED MY MARROW LIKE GELATINE!"

This must have been what roughly half of Hisui had felt when he spoke to them most of the time, Ingo managed to think for a moment before his brain focused on imagining how exactly something like a ‘bone marrow gelatine’ would have looked and tasted.

In a fraction of a second he concluded that it would have been abysmal, and not for the shape or ingredients; despite having apparently never eaten gelatine as far as his brain could remember he could feel it in his mouth, and the texture made him want to shrivel and implode.

He quietly snuck it on the shelf of his mind reserved for Things I Forgot I Found Abhorrent And Would Like To Forget Again.

Blissfully unaware of the plight her boss had unleashed upon himself through the power of recalling horrendous attacks at his senses, Briosa then made her tone and volume drop drastically to much quieter ones as her whole body relaxed: "But seriously, make sure to secure yourself next time you're on a subway car. You can get really hurt and injure other people along with yourself. If you screamed again you could also probably bust their hearing."

She smiled again, looking right into him as if pinning him like one does to the wings of a Beautifly, with that flat smile that stuck the corners of her lips up in a sort of strange parenthesis and her rot green eyes a little squinted.

"You can't hurt mine in a way that matters," she chirped, as if to reassure him.

That actually was a relief. He’d had enough complaints about his shouts risking avalanches and attracting dangerous Pokémon, without counting all the ringing ears he had caused; he was truly glad the only living beings in this car were himself (naturally immune to his own volume), a completely deaf person and --

His head retreated inside his shoulders as a horrified realization hit him and he turned, absolutely mortified, to the small beast sitting right beside him.

“I am - so sorry,” he started off as her big red eyes tilted curiously, “I did not mean to - I am honestly, earnestly sorry, this is - probably very bad, considering what you - did I, did I hurt you? Did I hurt your ears, was my voice...? Again, I am terribly sorry, I, I hope I did not cause you any harm...”

Mawile blinked twice before snapping her smaller mouth open with a chirp of sorts, not looking cross at all. She began twisting her tiny fingers at him, but before he could apologetically remind her he could not understand sign she realized so herself, and turned towards her aidee: Briosa read her paws and furrowed her brow, replying in the same silent language with a certain puzzlement to her motions.

There was a moment of stillness that followed - their equivalent of a beat of flabbergasted silence. Mawile then gestured something with a very amused shit-eating smirk on both lesser and greater mouths, and her owner quickly clamped her hand in front of her little face as though to force them both shut.

“Vai a ciapa’ i Patrat, bimba, vai - che sarò stanca pure io a quest’ora, eh?” she sneered softly, chuckling a little as her fingers repeated whatever completely incomprehensible thing had just come out of her mouth. The little Fairy insisted on something with a grin, getting a gentle swat from a gloved hand: “Stocazzo che glielo dico, me lo posso anche tenere per me che mi son scordata che tu ci senti per lavoro.”

She then turned her gaze on Ingo’s face, ignoring her snickering companion.

“Steel types are actually virtually immune to hearing loss!” she explained chipperly: “They’re often employed in dangerously loud jobs because their organs can only get deformed under extreme pressure from all sides, like at the bottom of the ocean! But in that case they’d already be dead before the compression could do the trick so it barely counts really. But yes. No matter how hard you scream you cannot deafen this little beast.”

Three-fingered paws waved to get her attention once more and added something else.

“She still appreciates your concern!”

The poor man wheezed out a sigh of relief. Oh thank goodness. No harm done. He would have climbed out of the train window out of mortification otherwise.

Mawile seemed to be amused by his reaction, considering the gentle chittering laugh that left her lesser beak-like mouth and the cackling snap of her larger one. Her little three-fingered paw went to pat his arm in a comforting manner, as though she understood his feelings perfectly: maybe this had already happened on a previous occasion? Or perhaps she was simply very empathetic, as Fairies tended to be?

She and Briosa appeared to be on the exact same wavelength, that was certain, since they understood each other perfectly despite the language barrier.

Wait, no, they had no language barrier.

The both signed.

Right.

Yes.

That made sense.

Wait.

He furrowed his brow suddenly: “You translated her right now, did you not?” he asked the substitute, realizing only at that moment what had happened.

She turned her attention to the beast next to her and answered him with a slight lag and a fairly satisfied smile once his words were made understandable to her: “I did! It’s a mutually beneficial kind of deal. Makes it a lot easier to understand other Pokémon as well.”

“Your communication with your team must be on another level!” Ingo replied.

“I doubt that!” she struck him down airily: “I don’t want Mawile to work overtime translating every single thing my lads say. They’ve learned to be real expressive for that. My communication with her is on another level, that’s true - I forget that five-fingered sign exists sometimes.”

“Five-what?”

“Five-fingered sign,” and she waved her fingers in a sort of cheeky goodbye. Then she held down her thumb and pinky, moving the other three as she spoke: “She only has three fingers, so she most usually tends to use three-fingered sign. She’s also fluent in five-fingered, but that takes her two hands so, you know, it’s much less convenient.”

Ingo nodded, eyes enraptured by the fluidity of her signing: “It’s as though you were trilingual,” he commented in awe. “Or quadrilingual, perhaps? I believe you were speaking something else, before...”

“Ah. That. Yes.”

The stilted way she said that had him shrivel in his own shoulders, convinced he’d overstepped another boundary.

Mawile laughed louder and mischievously gestured something at her aidee.

“Zitta.” she was shushed.

She laughed even harder.

“I apologize,” the much taller man peeped as quietly as he could, which admittedly wasn’t that much: “I didn’t mean to bring back any animosity.”

The beastie found his addition even more hilarious clearly, because she leaned her back down on the plastic seat and kicked up her feet as she wheezed and cackled uncontrollably to the point where she had to grab her stomach as it started cramping. Still coughing a little she wiped away tears of absolute mirth from her eyes as she pulled herself up once more before launching in a series of signs so fast and naturally that it would have likely caused him to short circuit in an attempt to follow had he been able to understand her.

He turned to Briosa with a frown that told of being completely at a loss.

She replied by keeping her mouth perfectly shut.

Mawile egged her on.

“Stocazzo, t’ho detto,” the substitute insisted.

Not at all deterred, the Steel Fairy snapped her maw as though accepting a challenge. As she turned back to Ingo she clearly threw sign to the wind and began, instead, to mime at him: whatever they had talked about, he pieced together from her performance, regarded Briosa asking her a question related to her hearing.

His comprehensive noises with which he began commenting on the show clearly sent the subway master into a short panic, launching herself forward to grasp her aide to shut up her theatrical endeavors before she could get to the point.

She did successfully delay the ending of the story; she also however got laughed straight at her face with each miss.

After not even thirty seconds she threw her patience out of the window with wild abandon: “Basta!!” she softly shouted as she trembled with an exaggerated cartoonish rage, “Guarda che ti mangio!”

Not frightened in the slightest, Mawile signed back a retort.

“Va bene!” the substitute caved in.

She rubbed at her eyes to try and mask her snickering as she attempted to recollect herself enough before she could properly turn to Ingo, who had been left a little concerned by their interaction.

“It’s stupid,” she reassured him immediately with a wave of her hand and an easy smile. “I just. When she told me you were worried about having destroyed her eardrums, I got confused. Because I forgot that she can hear. Even though that is literally her job.”

“Oh!” he sighed in relief. That was kind of humorous. “I see.”

“She’s not letting me live this down now because she’s mean,” she then specified, putting a special emphasis on the last word as she eyed the utterly remorseless Fairy, who seemed proud of her mischief. A gloved hand pressed onto her flat nose: “You’re lucky lip reading only gets me so far or you’d be still stuck back over there in Kalos.”

Mawile made a motion as if to hug herself before pointing back at her.

“Love you too.”

“If I can -” Ingo began, lifting a finger to catch Briosa’s attention, but he stopped and retracted it as he reminded himself she couldn’t hear him right when she actually looked at him.

His attempt at turning towards her Pokémon was however stopped by the substitute herself, who quickly motioned with her hand towards her face to incite him to speak directly to her. Had she forgotten he couldn’t sign? It seemed very much unlikely. Still, if she was encouraging him to engage with her instead of Mawile, she must have had her own reasoning, right?

“You mentioned lip reading,” he tried.

“I did,” she replied without missing a beat, staring at him. Her eyes seemed to be focused a little under his own.

“I... Assume it would be something akin to... Figuring out letters from how the mouth moves?”

“I’d correct you since I’m reading the individual words, but yes actually, it’s mostly telling letters apart.”

“Is that what you’re doing right now?”

“Yep.”

“Ah! It seems more convenient than the translation.”

“It’s not!”

He tilted his head in surprise: “How so?”

“It’s hard,” she explained matter-of-factly: “The mouth can only move in so many ways. A lot of letters end up looking exactly the same. Plus I can’t do it on phones or radios, I can’t read multiple people at once, if I’m in a group swapping between person to person is a whole struggle that gets annoying real fast, sometimes it’s just plain difficult, like when Emmet’s got his neutral face on--”

“His neutral face?”

“You know--” and she gave him a somewhat vacant smile, forcing her mouth into what she probably believed to be a V shape of sorts. “This face. The bane of my eyes. You know how he doesn’t speak much? Makes a lot of pauses? That’s actually perfect since it’s little bits of information. Easy to read and digest. But this face makes everything so much harder.”

“Ah,” he nodded without much conviction. He did remember that specific expression now that she mentioned it, but he still failed to see what she actually meant. “Why does that make lip reading difficult?”

“Because his face gets locked in place and he speaks real small and cramped keeping all his words to himself, like this,” she answered: following her finger as she pointed he noticed then that her lips moved quickly, although describing them as ‘moving’ almost sounded like an exaggeration (a more apt verb could have been ‘twitching’), barely parting as they did. “Every single sound looks the exact same. It’s a nightmare.”

“I can see that…”

 She then began switching between expressions as she continued, her entire face shifting in ways that conveyed all sorts of emotions like a theater actor’s might have: “But when he’s actually reacting to things it’s so much easier, because he uses every single muscle he has to show what he means and his mouth gets dragged along, like this! See? He’s verrry expressive. Verrry readable.“

Ingo nodded again, transfixed: “You’re very expressive yourself!”

Briosa giggled at that: “Thanks! It’s the circus training!”

Thefuckingwhat.

He shook his head to clear it of the dozen barely comprehensible questions that clamored to be asked. Keep focus. No getting off-track. We’ll be here all night if you keep changing the subject.

“I imagine I’m giving you a lot of grief then,” he noted as he got back on his train of thought, “Since I’m... Not quite good at conveying emotion through my face.”

“No, actually. You’re really loud.”

Her knowing such a detail should not have come as a surprise, because she had already remarked on it previously when he had thanked her for saving him from a concussion after almost slamming his head against the metal floor with a blood-curdling scream directly in her ear.

However, she had mentioned she could tell because the vibration had vigorously coursed through her like an electric shock.

So in the end, he was again left completely baffled.

She seemed amused by how wide his eyes had turned when he finally got her back into the focus of his gaze, cheeks almost red with embarrassment, and asked: “Is it... Is it visible?”

Her smile curled a little more; she opened her mouth as large as she could and replied at a fairly high volume, to show him properly: “The louder someone speaks, the wider they tend to open their mouth! You do that all the time! It makes it much easier to tell the individual sounds apart since there’s a little lag between each of them and they’re enunciated fairly well!”

Huh! She was right!

At least, it helped her understand him better. He’d been worried about the opposite, so it was nice knowing that.

“You are extremely observant!” he noted.

She laughed with a rubbery sound: “And you’re trying real hard to make your lips as readable as a book!”

“It seems to make it much easier to converse!”

“It does! But watch out.”

“For what?”

“Long sentences. My brain fries a little if I’ve got too much on my plate.”

“Oh! That’ll be a problem. I’m fairly talkative, as far as I’m aware.”

”I figured.”

“I must admit this feels more natural than on-the-fly translations - I mean no offense for your line of work,” Ingo specified quickly (Mawile reassured him with a thumbs up) “But it is easier to speak directly to you instead of having to relay the information to a third party first. I suppose it’s a matter of awkwardness, or perhaps just a feeling of strangeness in the process of having to first speak to you, Mawile, who then has to translate it all to you, Briosa, in order for you to give your interlocutor an answer. To put it much more simply, it just... It feels a little weird. Is it not a little weird to you?

The Fairy nodded sagely in wholehearted agreement. It was very likely surreal for her, to have the vast majority of her daily conversations be in actuality a game of telephone between two other people.

Briosa instead looked at his face intently, mostly without any emotion.

It dawned on him a little too late that his musings had been in fact expressed in a tempestuous river of words which had likely stunted her comprehension.

She shook her head repeatedly for what felt like the span of a second, very quickly, in a very brisk movement: “Got the gist of it but lost half of that, hold on,” she apologized before turning to her hearing aide: “What’s weird?”

A few quick signs.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” she then immediately agreed as well, “I forget it is because I live like this but it’s weird as all get out for everybody all the time, everytime. Ramses still tries to talk directly to me even though he's known that his mustache covers his entire mouth and I cannot read a single syllable since I first told him five years ago.”

Five years?

But she’d said...

Wasn’t she a recent development?

Five years was not necessarily recent.

Five years...

"Then -” Ingo noted, confused: “We do know each other."

"No," Briosa's reply was quick, sharp, completely flat in tone.

The train hit a harsh curve; unbothered, she simply leaned in the opposite direction and remained upright on her feet, not changing her stance in the slightest, as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

"You were definitely aware of me, but we didn’t know each other,” she explained: “You hired me and I worked here. And anyways we probably wouldn't have made much progress because I'm not particularly sociable and as far as I'm concerned you didn't sign. I've gotten to know Emmet because it's been about two years, but I didn't know him either before the promotion."

"Before you became a substitute?"

"Yep."

But he had been in Hisui for at least three years. He mentally counted the seasons that had passed again: yes, the math made sense.

The tracks had returned straight; his interlocutor had returned upright.

"Why didn't you replace me as soon as I went missing?" he asked then, confused. It made no sense to wait a year or so - running such a network alone would have taken a toll after a few months, probably.

"Oh, I'm not replacing you," she corrected: "I'm a temporary solution. Speaking of -” and before he could ask her what exactly that meant she seemingly changed the topic of conversation entirely: “How much do you remember about how to drive trains or running a station in general?”

The man blinked.

He simply shook his head.

Briosa loudly clicked her tongue in a way that briefly reminded him of how Mawile’s larger mouth would sometimes snap when opening: “Huh. Then I guess it’ll be a while before I get demoted back to depot agent. If you want to be a subway master again, of course, which is likely. Not a fan of having to wait, because I hate being responsible for things, but oh well!”

“Why should you be demoted?” the man asked, furrowing his brow. She had seemed to be doing a fine job, hadn’t she?

“Because you’re back,” the substitute replied: “I told you. Temporary solution.”

“But you are already a subway master! There’s no need to for-”

“I am not!” she interrupted him before he could finish. Mawile hadn’t even gotten to the beginning of the second sentence.

Her thin, gloved finger pointed at her dusty face, at her broken nose and flat-lipped, straight-lined mouth: “I am a Substitute,” she repeated a little slower, spelling out each syllable carefully. “I am temporarily filling in for one of the two Subway Bosses. You are said Subway Boss. You were before and you have remained as such.”

“... For all three years I’ve been missing?”

Mawile did not translate that. She answered him herself, nodding. Her owner probably had already understood.

Ingo was still, on paper, a Subway Boss.

No, actually - he had never stopped being a Subway Boss.

For all that was worth it, the whole world might as well have hallucinated his disappearance: checking Gear Station documents one would have been certain to have found him in the tunnels, or maybe in the control room, in a locomotive or one of the stops, casually making his rounds, checking maintenance, battling, driving, working as if his own friends and family weren’t desperately looking for him in every nook and cranny. Like a ghost, or a cutout. Empty air in a shape that resembled his, doing what he ought to be doing, unseen, unfelt, unheard, mindlessly performing tasks it was convinced it could achieve while being completely mute and deaf and blind and incorporeal, incapable of feeling hungry or tired. Housing the station like some kind of specter.

He had remained a Subway Boss, in Hisui. He had held onto those rags of a uniform like his life depended upon them and worn them religiously every second he could - but that was different. That was him trying to preserve and maintain whatever scrap of his own identity he had left. That was not important to others, nor did it conflict with the reality of his situation.

It was just yet another symbol of his many statuses: he was a part of the Pearl Clan, as his tunic showed; he was Sneasler’s warden, as his bracelet showed; he was a strange foreigner, as his old clothes showed.

Why was he a Subway Boss?

Why was his replacement something that should have lasted what sounded like a couple of days, maybe a week, always ready to be replaced back?

What if he had never met that kid, Sinnoh bless them, and had never had the chance to come back home?

“Why?” he only managed to say.

His throat felt weirdly dry.

Mawile made a quick gesture. The train swerved again, and the overhead handles leaned to Ingo’s left; Briosa’s body shifted towards his right with the fluidity that comes from practiced ease while her feet remained unmoved on the ground, and he watched how the corners of her rectangular smile eased downwards until her mouth was a perfectly emotionless straight line.

She looked at him intently, with her rot green eyes; she blinked.

“I don’t think anybody could ever really understand just how stubborn your brother is.”

So it had been Emmet’s decision?

What was his plan? To go on his whole life like that? Pretending his brother was still there, somewhere, doing everything he always did, just always out of reach? Was he ever going to give up, eventually? Bury an empty casket? Or was he going to keep convincing himself that somebody was still just sleeping coated in dust in that empty room until the day he dropped?

Something abnormally cheery snapped him out of his spiral.

He looked up. Briosa was smiling again, in a strangely stiff way, and looking right into his eyes like she was trying to drill through his pupils.

Her words reached him with a slight delay, her voice squeaky and disgustingly dripping with sugar-coated honey.

“I collect teeth!”

Ingo was so taken by surprise that he completely stopped thinking.

Alright.

“This is a conversation stopper!” she continued, tone unchanged, the shade of her visor over her unblinking eyes making her suddenly appear mildly terrifying. “I would like for the conversation to stop!”

Frankly, that sounded like a marvelous idea.

He gave her a thumbs up.

She cheerfully nodded in thanks. One of her hands shot up from where she had held both behind her back, pointing somewhere behind her passenger.

Ingo followed it.

The world outside the glass rushed past him, an endless cave carved by fulminous winds and globes of light flying towards the end of the train; and then the walls ended, and it was bright.

Not bright as in daily - bright as in bright, deep blues, and bright, swaying greens or golds. Bright as in bright, far off stars, illuminating houses in dots or clusters with hundreds of different colors against the shadowed backdrop the night draped over hills or plains or mountains in large blue paint strokes.

Raising his head skyward he found only bright, small white sputters in that waveless celestial ocean - all their brethren fallen to inhabit a poor thing like the Earth, to shield it from the fear of a dreaded something hiding in the same shade humans could not see through: their sparks pierced apart the foliage of any trees they found to reach bright, murky waters flowing away, streams like long sleeves of light fabric left out to flutter in the wind.

The mountain coming closer colored itself a bright, luminous silver as the night peeled back from it momentarily only to return all at once when the train ran right into the tunnel dug through its entrails, fitting within it perfectly. The lights were back once more, rectangular in shape, and began zipping past the metal giant, eager to reach what to the passengers had been the entrance - he couldn’t help but wonder where they would have gone next, once out of this cave, if they would have flown away into the sky they’d been taken away from or if they planned to head towards the cities instead to escape the monotony of their previous home - as the clanging of the rails spurred them onwards between the empty patches of carved rock left in the wake of their travel.

Outside there was a long line of darkness, extending bright, golden beams into the night sky to lead the winged beasts trying to lower themselves to the ground with utmost care: the Mistralton City Airport. How weird, when looked at like this, from the outside in! Skyla’s bright red hair would have certainly glowed in the dark, even if such a big distance would have shrunk her to the size of a doll; if she’d been out he would have been able to spot her and wave at her. But how could she notice him back? He strained his eyes looking for her, but it was too bright and too dark at the same time.

Fields of crops distracted him, black soil ready for sowing interwoven with already matured stems. He found himself half entranced by the way the latter danced in the cool wind and how they rustled, piqued, like Staravias furiously preening their feathers back in place after a gust of wind left them in disarray, as the train passed them by. Under the nightly veil they looked like a cobalt sea; beneath the sun they must have seemed like forests of green algae misplaced, somehow, on land, moved by invisible currents...

So Unova was this, too? Beyond the paved cement roads and the sturdy buildings and the endless man-made light? He looked up again: more stars had come out, but nowhere near the galaxy the Pearl Clan so adored to gaze upon, the same he’d watched up there near the peak of Mount Coronet. They seemed lonely in the same strange way that makes melancholy feel lovely.

Those were Unovan stars. The Hisuian ones had gone, had left with their era. Somewhere out there they were traveling, maybe in a train.

Maybe they were resting on the ground, in the many lights of the many cities.

He liked both of those ideas.

(He needed to stop thinking of Hisui.)

Ingo turned back to Briosa after what had seemed like ages spent looking out the window like a little kid, bright white eyes wide with wonder.

She smiled, the corners of her mouth curling it into a square bracket.

“It’s a beautiful place,” he only managed to say.

She read his lips and conceded, sweetly: “It’s nice.”

Mawile chirped in agreement.

Anville Town introduced itself first with the sight of its bridge closing in, its station appearing only once the train was fully out of the thick forests around the small settlement. From above the bricks, once everything was quiet, the breeze carried what seemed like the sound of a flute.

Through the glass on the other side of the car he watched as the few passengers still on the train stumbled out and hurried back home as instructed by the conductor over the speakers.

They awaited a minute, maybe two, in near perfect silence.

The buzzing of electric lines above them was becoming comforting.

Mawile clacked her large maw and signed something; Briosa made an indescribable face ascribed to some sort of yet undiscovered emotion, though certainly leaning towards negative and vaguely malicious.

“Excuse me,” she began.

Ingo nodded, excusing her, as she turned towards the cab.

“JACKIE! FURZE!” she screamed so loud that he jumped in his seat: “I KNOW YOU’RE STILL IN THERE! YOU’RE NOT GONNA HAVE ANOTHER STATION SLEEPOVER! IF BY THE TIME I GET TO TEN I HAVEN’T SEEN YOU GET OUT OF THIS TRAIN I’M TEARING THE PHALANXES OUT OF YOUR FINGERS AND BOILING BROTH OUT OF THEM! ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX-”

The door leading into the car slammed open: scrambling messily as though the pavement was covered in oil, the two Depot Agents forwent any friendship between them in favor of avoiding the very real threat, even at the cost of sacrificing the other.

They barely had the time to raise their hats as a goodbye with a pair of hasty ‘goodnight boss!’ before they quickly disappeared into the station.

Briosa watched them without changing expression. She took their place in the cab naturally, her composure utterly unbroken, and made quick work on the control panel to set the Grade of Automation to 4 so she wouldn’t need to drive it herself. Ingo looked as she activated the intercom for one last warning, her cavity-inducing saccharine voice reverberating through the empty Steelix carcass on wheels.

Then the sliding doors closed with a gentle, dull sound; the metal beast set itself in motion, inertia pulling the overhead handles to the side before they settled back into their unsteady stillness, shaking with every rumble on the tracks.

The Substitute walked out the cab and closed it behind herself.

“Sorry about that,” she said with such simplicity that it almost scared him. “They’re idiots.”

Ingo blinked heavily.

He turned away from her, looking instead Mawile in the eyes: “May I ask why such a harsh sentence was warranted?” he asked, watching as she translated.

“Remaining in Gear Station at night, let alone overnight, is strictly prohibited,” her aidee replied, “But those two have camped in there before and will try to again. Furze because he’s obsessed with trains and Jackie because they like making it seem like they’re a ghost infesting the station.”

Ah. “That is reckless behaviour,” he conceded, “But I’m not sure the bodily harm was necessary.”

She shrugged: “It works! And I like making colorful threats.”

As mean as that was, he could believe that. It was still an exercise in creative writing or improvisation after all - even if maybe not that pleasant for others to hear, especially if it was directed at them very specifically.

“Speaking of which, I would like to ask you a favor.”

Ingo studied her face: nothing about it said that she was going to request he lend her one of his bones willingly or otherwise, so he nodded.

“Emmet should not come to work tomorrow,” she began: “It’s a scheduled break day. Every Gear Station employee including him has one and it’s a regular occurrence specifically so nobody risks overworking themselves.”

That sounded like a very useful idea. Commanding the station seemed like stressful work for everybody involved, even despite the fact that by now they were probably used to it. Between conducting the trains and the myriad of things to keep in check in the control room, departures and arrivals and delays and scheduling maintenance and whatmore and whatnot - it really wasn’t any wonder such a decision had been taken. He doubted he would have managed such a routine.

(But he had, hadn’t he?)

(He had, once. It had been his routine, once. His life. Not even four years ago, it had been his life.)

Briosa tilted her head slightly, snapping him out of his musings with the slight movement of her braids: her right one draped itself along her cheek, while the left one - which started at the front of her temple and ended up tied at the back of her head - moved away enough to show the thin sideburn following the curve of her jaw, ends split into diverted scissor blades.

Oh!

So she did have them too.

Something about them suited her face.

“Please tell him that if he so much as tries to walk in tomorrow I will fold him like a shirt and hurl him straight home through a window, frisbee-style.”

Ingo replied with a blank stare.

On one hand, that sounded a little extreme.

On the other hand, this was about Emmet.

He gave her a solemn thumbs up.

She adjusted the brim of her cap to cast a dark shadow over her rotten green eyes and gave him a toothy, rectangular grin: “Thank you for your cooperation!” her sugary voice chirped: “We hope you enjoy the remainder of your ride home.”

Mawile gently pulled at his sleeve and helpfully pointed back to the glass, to the world breezing past the three of them, only living beings in the rumorous stomach of a wheeled Gyarados, as if to steer him into a more pleasant experience with her beak-like smile and the slight snap of her much larger maw.

Ingo thanked her with a deep nod, and let himself become absorbed once more by the beauty of nighttime Unova.

-

The train arrived at 11:31 p.m., with the slightest delay. Emmet notably deflated in relief when the doors to the last car opened, his brother’s silhouette stark against the neon white light as he rushed to greet him. Briosa only peeked through without getting on the platform, upper body bent at a forty-five degree angle and face inscrutable; Ingo, though he lit up as soon as his younger twin came into view, seemed a little worn by the rather busy day he’d just had.

“You’re back,” he said. He could have sounded a little more emotive, or at least not as overwhelmingly flat - even more than usual - but evidently he was also pretty exhausted.

“I am!” his older brother replied without missing a beat. “It was a very interesting journey! It was quite enjoyable, despite a minor accident.”

“Oh? What happened.”

“Nothing to be too worried about - I simply had not expected the train to ricochet me into the floor when setting into motion,” Ingo commented (getting a slight wheeze out of Emmet), before turning a little bashful: “Briosa was kind enough to catch me before I actually fell... And regrettably, I repaid her by almost deafening her.”

His white-clad sibling furrowed his brows almost imperceptibly. He turned towards the substitute, who looked back at him with the gaze of someone who has no idea what the hell is happening but does not want to interrupt.

“That’s an achievement,” he noted.

“I would not call ‘causing irreparable damage to the senses’ an achievement.”

Emmet signed as he spoke: “It’s hard to deafen the deaf.”

Ingo did not reply to that.

Briosa, on the other hand, threw her head back and cawed out a single rubbery laugh before gently slapping the very embarrassed freshly returned (if not going to be operative for a long while) subway master’s back a couple of times, in a sort of attempt at comforting him while also sharing in Emmet’s amusement.

She pushed him a little closer to his brother: “That’s a sign you need some sleep, boss,” she said airily: “I’ll handle things here.”

The younger twin signed something at her, probably a question to make sure she was certain about that, if she didn’t need any help at all; she waved back at him as if to shove away his worries and replied silently with a formal salute - two fingers leaving the brim of her cap and a squinty-eyed smile. Mawile chirped her own goodnight to them from her shoulder when Ingo waved, jaws snapping merrily as the two men departed.

Golden lights had dimmed to dirty silver in the rest of the station to match the eerie silence dripping from the walls. Gone was the noise and the chaos; exiting into the night lit up by the spherical lights of the street lamps somehow felt as though they were still underground, rushing through a now spacious tunnel.

“Was it good?” Emmet asked as they walked: “Coming along?”

“In spite of how tired I am, I’d say so, yes,” Ingo nodded. “It’s been an interesting day, despite the noise. And I got to see Iris and Marshal!”

“That was a nice surprise, yep.”

“I wish you’d been able to come along too. They were so excited at the prospect of seeing both of us.”

“Were they?”

“Yes, I’ve told you. But maybe for another time.”

“Hm. Another time.”

“Oh - I saw Unova, you know? While on the train?”

“Oh?”

“Yes! I saw the fields and the mountains, the city lights - the airport at Mistralton City, even. It’s a beautiful place.”

“The airport?”

“Everywhere. The whole region.”

His brother smiled, and nodded.

They both yawned.

Good thing they still had some leftovers from yesterday. They probably wouldn’t have managed to cook on their own if they had to.

“And Briosa?” Emmet asked suddenly.

“Hm?”

“Briosa. How is she. What do you think of her.”

“She’s...” several words he wasn’t sure he could have found in any dictionary come to his mind, but for the sake of being at least somewhat comprehensible he had to compromise: “A lot, to be completely honest with you. But I cannot say she wasn’t also quite kind and overall pleasant company to have.”

“She is, yup! Nice. And a handful. I’m glad.”

“Of what?”

“That she was nice. And that you enjoyed her.”

“Ah! I’m glad as well.”

The faintest buzz of electricity and metallic rattling within trash cans accompanied their silence for a while.

“That reminds me, she had a message for you.”

“A message?”

“She politely asked me to tell you that if you come to the Station tomorrow, which is your scheduled free day, she will - and I quote - fold you like a shirt and hurl you straight home through a window, frisbee-style.”

The younger wheezed.

Ingo stared at him awfully stone-faced.

“She meant it.”

“I know.”

“Do you also know I too will enforce your free day upon you?”

“I know.”

“I am serious.”

“I know.”

[verbophobic]

Fics I do plan to go back to and Finish

No no particular order other than my scrolling of my AO3

What To Even Call This (actively working on this)

Zelda Series; Sidon/OC

To help his people, Sidon begrudgingly agrees to a marriage with a Hylian. All he wants is a woman who can rule at his side, someone that he may one day grow fond of like his sister Mipha had with Champion L-something-or-other. What he does not expect is Kino. A girl who seems almost clueless to the difficulties of the Zoran domain but whose heart will not let her stand by and just watch them struggle. As he learns more about her he finds himself growing fonder and he finds himself wondering, 'just who is this woman that wormed her nervous little way past his tightly guarded walls?'

What Am I Doing

Avatar; Tsu'tey/OC

A soldier is sent with Jake to the Omatikaya. She’s sent in an effort to keep an eye on Jake as Quaritch is beginning to doubt his loyalties. So Quaritch has a soldier he feels he can trust more than Jake reporting back about Jake. She tells Q to the best of her abilities what Jake is up to. Unfortunately as Jake has told the Omatikaya that he and her are both of the same clan Jarhead, they want to try to keep them separated as possible. So while Jake is off learning with Neytiri she is left to meander about and an eye is kept on her. She finds that she's fairly often around Tsu’tey - as he trusts her the least so he keeps the closest eye on her. Now she finds herself begrudgingly learning about the Na’vi’s ways and learning about the giant blue jerk. Still she reports to Q about msot of what she learns. Often asking how much longer her misison is so she can return to the base. Her way of tricking him into thinking she’s not actually having fun or enjoying learning about her friend. This fic is intended to follow the first movie loosely and into the second movie where she differs from Jake. ISO BETA

What A Clusterfuck

TMNT (Bayverse, sue me); Raph/OC

Raphael met a woman by coincidence, if you could call a hydroplaning car coincidence that it. But all the meeting for the next month and a half after that? Coincidence. Mostly. Raph would see this walking talking beacon of bad luck, and help her from the shadows. Until he didn’t. Until he stepped into the light and she was relieved he was a mutant turtle and not a mugger of New York City. Plus he was offering the poor half drowned woman an umbrella to help her starve off the rain. Now though? Now it’s just a clusterfuck of trying to figure out how her apartment ended up burning down. Raph/OC oneshots. Not yet put in order. Soon though!

Plane Jane

Lost Boys; David/OC

She was just another Plain Jane among a sea of them. In Santa Carla where everyone tried to stand out, those with the barest of differences are the most memorable. So a girl that's working behind a counter in yet another convenience store that looks like just another 'normie' was no one memorable. Dead end job for what seems like forever, no family so to speak of, and an ex who just can't fully let go; that was all just another boring day in a sea of eternal days to her. The most abnormal she'd ever seen up until a single fateful day was the cat that would somehow sneak into the store and just sit on the counter with her some nights. Until those boys came in like ghosts. She never knew how that triggered the events and she didn't care, all she cared about was the guy trying to rob her. Completely edited and beta's as of 11-20-2022 Ya'll are also welcome to suggest chapter titles.

Lost In The Wilderness/Stolen In The Wilderness

Lost- Transformers; Prowl/Sideswipe Stolen- Transformers; Elite Trine/Sideswipe

Lost: Sideswipe and Sunstreaker have had it bad since sparklinghood. Like so many others they were snagged up and put into the pits, chosen for where to end up and where to be a profit. The gladiatorial pits seemed perfect for two mechs whose steps couldn't be more in synch if they tried. But like so many others upon reaching their adulthood it's time to be put up for auction. They have the training, they have experience, they have survived their upbringing and are on their way with others to be put up for auction when unlikely rescue comes. It's not for them of course, but they are along for the ride at this point. Who are those savage black and white barbarians and what do they mean by 'Mine'?! In Search of Beta

Stolen: Spin off of my Lost In The Wilderness fic. What would have happened if it had been some other barbarians that had descended upon the caravan? Barbarians that are nowhere near as 'kind' as those we've come to know In The Wilderness? While Prowl and his group are far more 'civilized' those that rule the skies are seen as demons with wings. And poor little Sideswipe just so happened to be cute and in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this take of the wilderness, Seeker's are not nearly as kind as land mecha. But perhaps there's some charm to Sideswipe that can woo one or two of them~

Sink My Teeth Into You

Little Vampire; Gregory/OC

Rory Murry is a normal teenage. Unfortunately her divorced parents have decided to change their custody agreement and she is forced to move away from the 'big city' to the rural town she had first grown up in. Her memories of back then are blurry due to the young age she left and the few traumatizing events that happened directly prior to leaving. Such as said parental divorce. A teenager that she meets in a graveyard does tug at a few strings of memory though and she is left curious as to just who he is and why he's always hanging out in a graveyard late at night. Her own reasoning for being there? She's not the brightest there is and a tiny bit lonely in this 'new' town. Also- why is there a creepy old guy in a wanna-be ice cream truck haunting this place?

When It Bleeds

Predator Series; Pred/OC

Experimentation is not always okay. But sometimes its necessary. Ta'roga knows and understands this. But when he looks at the other experiment being paraded down the hall in front of him he feels nothing but rage and disgust at these humans. How could they do something like this to- to-Join us on our exploration into hunter territory where we learn about a code of honor that the 2018 movie tossed to the wind. Join me as i make the 2018 move better later in this story. We will be fixing up plot mistakes, and making a proper set up for the movie and not killing off every good character. I will be killing off characters that we will grow to love but saving others that the movies did dirty.

Work In Progress/Metempsychosis

MHA; Bakugo/OC

WIP: Sato Misaki is just your average girl, a young adult who has a semi useless quirk. IT's nothing she's proud of and honestly she would rather be Quirkless. That is until she meets a man in a grocery store. He works in his own way to help her come to terms with her Quirk and accept herself. Bakugo Katsuki is not the same person he was while growing up. He's grown as an individual and learned better how to handle his emotions and mostly reign in his temper. Few understand why he, of all people, would go for a girl who's quirk is so plain. Not to mention someone so oblivious as to not have a clue to the majority of Japan's hero's. This is a series of oneshots, out of order, featuring my OC Misaki and her relationship with Bakugo. One day I'll do a story for them, for now enjoy their life's snipets since meeting.

META: Metempsychosis; resurrection, rebirth, reincarnation. It has a definite definition. The being that chose this as their name has a path set before them. One that will change the hero Ground Zero’s bleak future after his lover - or rather soul mate - is murdered before him. Katsuki had met and fallen in love with a normal girl whose quirk was nothing special. But that in itself made her special to him. With having seen her life ripped away before his very eyes he’s on the brink of insanity. Until some being walks up to him with a warning of ‘pivotal moments’ and ‘not changing them’. Whatever that meant. All he knows is Misa has melted in his arms and left him. His own form is liquifying. Yet he’s able to open his eyes once more and finds his hands are small and chubby. Just like his reflection in the mirror - wait, is he five again?!

Penny For Your Thoughts

CW DC verse; Snart/OC

Prue's motto was to not let life get her down, she'd hit rock bottom while young so she couldn't get any further down, right? One would surely hope so. Seeing a penny heads up she can only hope that it means luck, that whatever was going on right now would be for the best. Taking the coin from the ground she hold it up and out to the man with a gun trained on her. She knew she wasn't walking away from here. As queasiness bubbled up in her stomach and she felt like throwing up she forced out a smile and touched her stomach as if to calm it and keep from throwing up in fear. "Penny for your thoughts?" Perhaps she'd been around her snarky boyfriend far too long as saying this to the man with a twitchy trigger finger might not be the best of plans. Snart/Oc (putting this here because as a ready I like to know exactly which ship I'm reading and not be surprised later on.)

[waffliesinyoface]

This may be a slightly controversial opinion but I think video games these days play a bit too fast and loose with the idea of fast travel. This has, granted, been a thing for quite a while, but I never sat down and really thought about it until my most recent playthrough of Breath of the Wild, in anticipation of Nintendo's upcoming Tears of the Kingdom. I'd initially been hesitant to do a replay so soon, worried that I'd become burned out on the game before the sequel had even come out, but I reconsidered after reading through several posts in the Something Awful Forums’ Zelda Megathread, when a few other users mentioned doing a playthrough with no fast travel at all, and the idea intrigued me. It wasn't until a few hours in that I realized why - it completely changes the game.

Fast travel is unlocked as soon as you start the game - before anything else, you gain the ability to warp back to the starting shrine, free of cost. I stubbornly refused to use it, to the confusion of the old man who acts as the game's tutorial NPC, but it didn't particularly make the tutorial much different – you don't unlock your main method of traversal until after the plateau, a paraglider that allows you to fling yourself off cliffs without fear – and the four tutorial mini-dungeons are all equally distant from each other. There's not much difference until you leave.

 Because, without fast travel, there's no way back.

The Great Plateau is surrounded by steep cliffs, and without several stamina upgrades or a fair amount of resources, climbing it is impossible. But, well. It's the tutorial area. You don't actually NEED to go back. You've got a kingdom to save, get a move on.

(Link)

Lacking an easy way back also made me a bit more diligent in doing side content as well. In the average playthrough, the player will slowly accumulate a large list of sidequests that fill up the adventure log, to be done whenever they can get around to it. But for me, because there was no easy way to return to any of the towns, leaving was almost as serious a commitment as jumping off the plateau – the first village you’re directed to is Kakariko, and you need to return several times to progress the main quest and get the True Ending, so it wasn’t as severe a departure as before, but I was still mindful of doing as much as possible before I’d left the area. I stuck around the village and searched out the missing cuccoos; I sold everything but the absolute essentials in an attempt to afford the exclusive stealth armor, and after that wasn’t enough, I made sure to keep my eyes peeled for any suspicious rocks or well-hidden ore deposits in the surrounding area; and when returning from Hateno village, I went out of my way to look for a beehvive, so that the little sheikah girl could make the dessert that reminds her of her dead mother. Because after I’d left for the second time, I wouldn’t return until I’d cleared two of the main dungeons, collected several memories, chased down a dragon, and tracked down the materials needed to upgrade my armor further. And it was on this return trip, that I was reminded of another Zelda game, The Wind Waker.

 In Wind Waker, you start off on Outset Island, join up with a band of pirates to rescue your kidnapped sister, and give a tearful goodbye to Link’s grandmother. After finishing the tutorial dungeon and, frankly, failing miserably at your appointed goal, you’re stranded on the other side of the map, and actively prevented from returning to Outset until you’ve defeated the next two dungeons – upon your return, things have changed. Monsters prowl the island at night, the neighbor’s pigs have grown several times your size, the local swordsman recognizes your skill, and your kindly old grandmother is literally sick with worry.

This dramatic homecoming just isn’t possible in a game with always-on fast travel. Which isn’t to say that Wind Waker doesn’t have any – the bow & arrow from the dungeon immediately following this allows you to track down a local god wreaking havoc and shoot some sense into him, upon which you are rewarded with the ability to travel to most important locations throughout the Great Sea, but that’s the point – you have to work for it.

 I’d like to make it clear that I’m not against fast travel entirely – frankly, if a game didn’t have any in this day and age, I’d wonder what the developers were thinking – but it doesn’t feel satisfying without a sense of friction. It should be a reward, something you have to work at. 

Earlier pokemon games are a good example of this – first, you start out with your base movement speed, which is just slow enough to irritate you. After running an errand for the professor, you get the Running Shoes, and it feels like the game is no longer holding you back, you can explore at your own pace. 

A few towns later, and you’ve been rewarded with the bike, which trades maneuverability for pure speed. 

A few towns after that, around the midpoint of the game, you get the Fly HM which unlocks fast travel for real. 

The sense of progression is important. Navigating the world is akin to walking through your own neighborhood – the length added by moving on foot makes the world feel bigger – to go back to Zelda comparisons for a moment, in Breath of the Wild, horses are a somewhat niche method of travel. Nice to have, but almost certainly abandoned within minutes in favor of climbing up an interesting looking mountain. In Twilight Princess, getting Epona back means that you no longer need to mash A rolling your way across Hyrule Field – in addition, unlocking fast travel gives us another feeling: relief. Or, in other words:

“oh thank fucking god, I don’t have to go through that again.”

Now, before anyone can accuse me of being a shameless Nintendo fan, I’d like to point out a few other examples. Any farming sim fans will, of course, be familiar with Stardew Valley, indie darling and successor to the old 2D Harvest Moon games. You have a limited amount of time in each day, and if you’re not back at your house by midnight, you’ll start the next with reduced energy. If you’re not back by 2am, you pass out in the streets and lose a handful of items. Once you’ve gotten a semi-respectable farm set up, you’ll be able to afford the horse, which allows you to spend even longer in the mines and still make it back on time. 

Once a year or so has passed, you’ll probably have gotten enough coffee beans to make your own steady supply of income and caffeine – for you and your horse, apparently – and then, once you’ve rebuilt the community center, made your farm into your own personal art project, broken the economy through the sheer unbridled economic might of Fermented Ancient Fruit Wine, and have set your sights on the coastal Ginger Island, you will almost certainly have obtained the Return Scepter as well as a few Warp Totems for your farm, allowing you to fast travel as you please. 

Satisfying, isn’t it?

Or, to point at another beloved example, we have Dark Souls 1. Which still, fifteen years later, is praised for its world design, and how interconnected everything is. It makes Lordran feel more coherent and real than other similar worlds, and though the other areas aren’t actually loaded in when you’re in each zone, their low-poly equivalents are, and many players have frequently reported being able to see their bloodstains from entire map zones away, because those low-poly versions are accurate to their actual locations. A more in-depth discussion can be found here, by Illusory Wall.

Now, personally, I find Bloodborne’s map layout to be much more interesting to play through, because instead of having each area be interconnected it frequently has one area connect in on itself several times – Father Gascoigne and the Cleric Beast are both equally viable as the first boss of the game, and the routes to their respective boss rooms branch off from the same starting point – but I won’t deny the appeal of, say, the Undead Burg, which links to the Dragon Bridge and then Undead Parish, the Lower Undead Burg and then the Sewers, Darkroot Basin, and Firelink Shrine, which, in turn, links to the Catacombs, New Londo, Valley of the Drakes, and so on and so forth. 

More than once, I’ve heard people claim that they went above and beyond with the map design, and that there was no reason for them to do so, but they’re glad that they did. In contrast, many of those same people criticize Dark Souls 2’s maps for being overly linear, and the world design being incoherent. I don’t entirely agree with them: for all of its flaws, Dark Souls 2 having a deliberately* disjointed world is a point in its favor thematically, even if the level design suffers for it.

(*Yes, it’s deliberate. The elevator in the windmill going up into a lava castle which does not exist was not something they overlooked, they were trying to be evocative. THAT part was good. Said lava castle being filled with katana-wielding knights who track your movements perfectly was NOT. Fuck the smelter demon all my homies hate the smelter demon.)

But there’s one big reason why they were each designed the way they are. In Dark Souls 1, you get fast travel after you’ve beaten Anor Londo and proven yourself, and the endgame levels of the Tomb of Giants, Lost Izalith, and Duke’s Archives reflect this. Much like Dark Souls 2, where fast travel is available at the start, there’s no reason for them to seamlessly mesh together with the rest of the world, because the player can just teleport out. The world design of 1 needs to be interconnected because otherwise, the lack of shortcuts would get tiring fast.

So, in the end, my point with fast travel is this: it’s a very nice carrot you’re offering, game developers, but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about carrots until you’ve beaten me about with a stick first.

[nvrcmplt]

you were the only person i could go to. //for Narciso 😈

It was a commotion and half, that was for sure. Someone was on a prowl and it causing a mess of many voices in the shadows and yet it was his door was knocked politely and now opening due to the butlers under Narciso's name that they were given the reason to the nights activities. A storm was brewing, scented in blood and aftermath of flames in the clouds, another brewing in the dangers this proposed for many of their species and yet, Narciso couldn't say he wasn't a fool for change. As he stood from his chair near the open fire, book and drink aside, he greeted the foyer with his presence to stare upon Nezumi with eyes that spoke of many questions, wariness and yet still, openness to their being in his estate. "You've done something foolish, Nezumi." Though he couldn't say he wasn't of the same passions. Mingling with humans, as if they were apex predators and hoping they too saw the benefits of working together and not killing each other was something harder to make happen than preach upon.

"Get inside, Sybil, run him a bath and a change of clothes from my own. Mattia, fetch him a meal to warm him through." Narciso did little else at that point, his manor sudden shifting to life with movements of loyal servants moving to set alight candles and welcoming the human amongst their colder selves. "Come, a room will be prepared for you with a bath ready. I hope you can tell me what it is you've done to warrant my safety as your shield." Doors closed, locked and windows the same. As much as he loved his own kind, they were a rather violent bunch when tensions were higher.

Inhaling and sighing it free from his frame, Narciso moved throughout the halls of his grand home and guided Nezumi to the room cleaned out and polished without a speck of dust in sight. The bed was stilling being made upon their arrival, but it was finished the moment his towels and change of clothes were bought in after the human. The bathroom was steamed warm… "Must I aid you in first aid, Nezumi?" He was doing his best to not scent the room, to breath in any form really because he was not in the need of wanting to be salivating at a vulnerable human in his domain. "Everyone, you are dismissed." So, that the human was on his own. Though Narciso remained, he was at a distance, arms crossed loose over his frame as he looked them over in worry and wonder.

"I'll… be downstairs, the meal will be ready for you to join me. If you seek it in your own room, call for it with the bell." It was on the wall near the bed, a direct line to the kitchen. "If I do not see you this side of the moon, rest well." He turned to leave at that point, he wasn't to drag it out if Nezumi wasn't to trust him with things but Narciso wasn't a vampire that was bitter and unwelcoming to those in need, so he held his wonder and instead told his creations to clean the manor thoroughly again, keep his own jitters at bay as he hoped he wouldn't have to slaughter those of his own kind for protection again. "Now I see why Father moved with his other half these days…"

@nezumivc103221

[twofacedtrickery]

I found the social media inquisition, thank all that is that the find in page function exists to save me the pain of endless scrolling. It's even stupider than I thought it would be.

Up front, I admit wholly that I am not being charitable in my uncensored commentary on this interaction. I acknowledge that I had and have information none of you did or do. I acknowledge that I am being unfairly harsh in many ways.

All of that being said, in what possible reality, I beg of you, does this make sense:

(I assume this to be the inciting post):

Back to doing nothing since anything I could possibly do is going to be wrong anyway. Sure, it wouldn’t matter if I had any contact with anyone I liked. I don’t.

So I get this in response:

Try Facebook With how that works, I would have literally no one to add. Shit suggestion. Don’t try again.

I admit, I could not say what I wanted to at the time, and yet. Why would the Foundation say "ah, yes, well, you have no pre-established presence on Facebook that is tied to your behind-the-veil activities, of course we'll let you loose on there, this will go well for us."

Trying again! :D! Tinder. Or Bumble. Or hell, even Grindr. No. I don’t want anything those can offer.

While I was presumed to be broken up for months at this time, I was clearly not on the prowl for a new partner or one night stand or whatever people find on there. I was also in Foundation custody, you think they'd let me go on random dates with civilians? Hell, even with other folks in the anomalous world? Not sure which is less likely. Do you think that either I or the Foundation would want to potentially endanger some random like that? Also, again, I was clearly uninterested in romance or sex at that time.

I'm not sure if this was the same one or someone else, but it's in here as it's relevant to the next one.

You're sad and lonely, aren't you? Like a sad, weird cat. Or perhaps a worm. I lost everyone I liked. This isn’t news.

I don't know what the intended effect of this was meant to be, because I cannot fathom being in the war criminal dungeon would ever be a particularly social situation. This next one, though, actually pisses me off.

Then find more people to like. It doesn't have to be that complicated. Hard to do when I have people holding me to prove a point and idiots who don’t know how to engage with me and nothing else to choose from.

How dare you come into my face and act like I'm the one in the wrong for the crime of, what? Not deciding to slide up to a guard when they walk past and try to make small talk? They have rounds to complete and little time for idle chatter, least of all with "defectionist scum" as many of you called me, and even if they did, there'd be ethical issues with a guard befriending their charge in any meaningful way.

That's not getting into how picky I am on that front.

Or was I supposed to vie for the Council's friendship and approval? I have no control over who contacts me on here, and had no control over who contacted me in there for damn sure.

I may have misspoken slightly when claiming I had no enjoyment at all of absolutely anyone there; Three was okay, Four could have been nice if it wouldn't have hurt him, maybe South or Calypso would have been nice to me, but they weren't among my visitors for one reason or another.

Still, this is the single most moronic suggestion I have ever received in my life, and you had the absolute audacity to frame it as me being difficult for no fucking reason? Die.

Then more suggestions for websites.

Twitter. Reddit. Still wouldn’t know how to talk to me. Stop.

Once again, I would not have been allowed, but I couldn't say that, but also, what could Reddit possibly have to offer me in any situation? I don't know much about it, but from the stories, it sounds like I'd just wither and die if I went on there.

And then this closer is astoundingly tone-deaf.

You are actively on a social media site. Socialize. I tried and got burned too many times, by your ilk, mainly. No point.

Socialize with who, exactly? I was not well received, over all, my keepers were very, very picky about who I was allowed to contact and I only managed to duck around it twice. I got caught once and reprimanded, they let the other one slide for reasons I don't want to guess at.

They hated me contacting other Overseers, they absolutely would have come down with fury if I tried to get to any GOI, in our reality or otherwise, a second time.

I was literally barely allowed to actively reach out to anyone directly.

I understand that a lot of this was never said, or only said maybe once and forgotten about, but it's still incredibly frustrating to receive an order from someone I do not and did not answer to, treating me as lesser for being restricted by rules I could not break. Well, I could, but as much as death does not frighten me, I'm not going to throw myself onto the chopping block for that.

Lesser for feeling defeated and beaten down after six and a half god damned months of this shit, and wanting to just give up on interactions that were only hurting me. Lesser for trying to put up some resistance to their fucked up game.

I hate you. I hate you so god damn much, whoever you were. I shouldn't, it's not fair, you were doing the best you could with the information you had, at the time, but I can't help it.

Anyway, 10 minutes later I changed the topic to potato seeds, so it ended there. I don't know how I had the presence of mind to do that, but it's fine.

[thecastawayson]

I watch him go with furrowed eyebrows, reaching out in the Force to give him a soft nudge. Almost loving.

Vader struts through the hallways of the Temple, his fury evident in every step he takes, the rocking of his shoulders, the frown set deep within his face, and the pure ice that radiates from him in the Force.

He gives you a nudge back before stepping into the courtyard, having tracked Maul's presence there.

"MAUL!" He shouts roughly, unclipping his saber, "Get over here."

"I was wondering when you'd show up and throw your little tantrum." Maul stalks forward, saber still in hand.

"Attacking my wife? With my child in her arms?" Vader growls, continuing to close the distance, "You're mine now. That was the last thing you'll ever do."

Maul hums, activating each side, "I cannot wait to prove you wrong."

The other start to advance on him too, but Vader raises a hand, their bodies shooting into the air with it. And as he effortlessly blocks his first strike from Maul, he clenches that fist, crushing each of them from the inside out. Even Kae'natan.

"I'll kill you for that." Maul spits.

Vader gives him a slow, unhinged smirk that he's only ever let loose a few times in his life. Surprisingly. "Your motive is friends. Mine is love and family. Give me all you've got, halfling."

"I AM NOT A HALFLING!" Maul pulls his saber back and strikes at Vader again, absolutely roaring when his swing is blocked. "TRAITOR!"

"YOU'RE the traitor." Vader barks back, shoving Maul to give himself enough room that he can execute his four-strike maneuver. His smirk only widens as two of those strikes hit home, evoking an enraged roar from Maul each time.

Maul steps back and shakes his head, already panting heavily. Vader isn't even breaking a sweat yet. "We fight like men." He deactivates his saber, dropping it to the ground next to him.

"You think you have the upper hand?" Vader drawls, deactivating his own saber.

Maul shrugs a shoulder, extending his legs so he's a foot taller than Vader. He grabs two knives from his belt and flips them to hold them backwards in his hands, smirking as he crouches a little into his defensive stance. "What do you have to fight with? Hm?"

Vader tilts his head, his eyes narrowing a little. "Do you even know who you're talking to?" He slowly starts to prowl in a circle around Maul. "I'm the most powerful Force user in the galaxy. I don't need weapons."

"We'll see about that, slave."

Vader growls and fake lunges at Maul, making the man come forward first. He spins around quickly and kicks at Maul's hand on the way, grinning wickedly as it makes contact and sends the knife sprawling out of his grasp.

But Maul quickly grabs hold of it with the Force and flings it back at Vader, the dark Prince dodging the blade just late enough that it slices a thin scar along his cheekbone.

Vader breathes a laugh, letting the warm blood seep into his skin for a moment as it starts to trickle down his cheek. "You want blood, Maul? We can do blood."

He calls that knife to himself with the Force and throws himself at Maul, the two of them rolling and leaping through the courtyard in a ball of growls, clashing blades, and sneered teeth.

The fight goes on for twenty minutes. Twenty straight minutes of fighting, each man giving it all they've got- and not backing down one inch, either.

They're bloody. Bruised. Beaten. But their fury only fuels them to fight harder, until even Vader is panting heavily through the fight, though his swings and kicks never falter.

The best part for him, however, has to be when his fist closes around one of Maul's longer horns.

And he tugs.

He tugs so hard that he rips the horn right off Maul's head, slicing the sharpest point of it right across the man's throat as Maul screams.

Blood sprays all over his face, matting his hair down, but he doesn't even care. In fact, he relishes the fact that he's covered in blood. Some his, some Maul's. He'll definitely start to feel the injuries he's sustained once the adrenaline wears off, but for now...

Vader tips his head back as Maul's body slumps to the ground, grinning sharply at the sky.

And then he starts to cackle.

[full-of-mercy]

Crouched astride Vash, Wolfwood shields him bodily from gunfire that never comes, never necessitating a death-roll to the floor or kicking up the bed and frame to act as a barricade. His heart hammers in his chest, combat instincts flaring feral, right down to the flex of his jaw and the cord of his arms, the glint of lupine gold in his pupils.

Tap-tap.

He blinks once, twice, peering down at Vash, eyes darting left and right, lips parting as if to question, to apologize. Something. Maybe it was in his head--something referred, something far off, something remembered. And then someone knocks.

"Stay here."

Stay hidden. He knows that Vash is unlikely to do so, but it comes out as a hushed rumble regardless, punctuated with a press of nose to Vash's brow before he shoves himself up and off of the bed. Rolling, prowling steps carry him over the scattered piles of fabric and boots, and he does not pause to clothe himself. He's out there, dark-haired and venal, still a mess from--musky, touched with sleep-sweat.

A feather or two, too, stuck to tawny skin.

He does not even think to do more than wipe his lower jaw onto the back of his arm, flowing through the motion to swipe his lighter and a cigarette from the pack on the table. It's in his lips, lit with a flick and sleight of hand--and does absolutely nothing to muffle the hiss-clunk of the Punisher's mechanisms as he scoops its massive bulk from its propped lean.

Another knock.

Wolfwood answers the rattling door outward with flipped latches and the barrel end of his gun, pivoting his wrist to activate firing mode. A pulse of green-blue light ripples jagged across the nascent shop floor. A menacing hum grinds up from the pitch of bone, dire warning. There he stands naked as the day he was born, looming in the doorframe with the huge rifled muzzle aimed point-blank at the solicitor's forehead.

"We're closed," he growls through a plume of spiced smoke.

God help him, the beanpole of a man with a bright ginger flat top and oversized goggles looks down at the other weapon first, darkens beet red in the waning daylight, and lets loose the unholiest of yelps.

"Ahaha, didn't you know the penis-- PEN. Pen is. Mightier than- the s- uh, gun. Oh God don't shoot, I'm sorry, we're sorry, we're-"

"Out with it."

There are a dozen or so others dressed in scrap gear hanging in, on, or around a pair of hauler trucks laden with jumbled sundries. They look alarmed. Amused.

Intrigued?

A couple of them reach for their pistols, but they've never seen anything quite like this - a naked man with a giant cross bristling with firepower emerging from a location ostensibly dedicated to memorial monuments. The solicitor shows his hands, backpedaling, tripping, backpedaling further.

"-guh, we- uh. We're a trade caravan?"

Wolfwood glances across the others, and then with a grunt disengages the Punisher's open flanges, rotating it around to drive stem-first into the ground just outside the front stoop. He stands behind it in the doorway, feet planted. Leaning against the arms, smoking away, he cants his hips as casual as can be. Expectant.

"For- uh. Needful. Um, supplies. Like CLOTHES - a-and. Food and scrap. Ballsy, uh, to. Go knocking, but we're fresh from the steamer lookin' for buyers."

Vash does not dream. For once, the expanse between wakefulness and resting is blissfully blank, filled with nothing but warbling patterns and warmth. Ebb and flow. Like still waters lapping against a quiet shore. 

The wings and feathers have not made a full departure and have in fact joined the tangle of limbs, pale and dark, scarred and and seemingly not, from where Vash is still mostly draped on top of Nicholas. His cheek is still well and fully smushed against the pillow of Wolfwood’s chest, and his mouth hangs partially open with the occasional huff-snort. 

A sound striking like the crack of thunder rouses him. Rudely. Not quite so rudely as Wolfwood rolling them over in a confusing tumble and Vash ends up on his back blinking up dumbly into a forest of hair. Vash does not panic. He can react six times faster than the most skilled marksman, and yet somehow, in this instance, Wolfwood manages to be faster. 

Is there such a thing as being too comfy? Was he losing his touch?

The tendrils and wings have snapped out of sight in the smattering of chaos. Instinct, to hide the least human parts of himself from any that might have any reason to believe persons of interest were hiding behind the walls of Marlon’s Monuments. Thrown stones deal a different sort of damage than emptied gunbarrels. A few stray feathers remain, crystallized and glittering against the rumpled sheets.

“Ngh. What. What?!” Vash blinks blearily up at Wolfwood’s shadow and the sway of his glinting, silver pendant as it hangs over his face. He sits up the best he can and drooped black spikes brush up against Wolfwood’s torso as Vash drags the heel of his palm across his mouth. He grimaces when his hand comes back a little damp. 

“Did we get tracked here?” Curiously, he peers out from behind the pillar of a braced arm and taps the side of Wolfwood’s bicep to break the intensity of his focus. He tries to, anyway.

Vash does not have to wait long to get his answer, even if he does his best to crane an ear in the direction of the sound with Nicholas obstructing his view through the cracks in the window. Low light streams in, pale silver lines. They slept through most of the day.

No further deafening cracks disturb the evening chirrup of birds and worms, but a series of knocks follows in the awkward, listening and scanning silence. Vash might even describe the sound at the front door as congenial. 

“Uh…maybe we should…” Get dressed? In what amount of time? They have company knocking at the front door, and Nick already seems of a mind to greet them.

[infernalbliss]

Biting More Than You Can Chew

Kaeya Alberich x Top Male Reader

“Sir Kaeya is known for his habit of taking risks. But perhaps, the bold and suave cavalry captain should learn a bit of caution.”

CW: Rape/Non-Con, No Prep, Spit as Lube, Degradation, Humiliation, Bleeding, Begging, Dacryphilia, Mentioned Stalking, Mentioned Obsession

The entire thing was supposed to go smoothly. Flawlessly. As it had always been, especially with the help of his good looks and charming tongue.

Cavalry captain Kaeya Alberich was only letting his ear loose when he caught whispered words of a suspicious man lurking through the streets when the day's late, a cloak over his head and a rusty kamera in his gloved hands. He'd linger near the Knights of Favonius' headquarters, pacing on his feet as he went into hiding behind whatever large item he could find. Suspicious and worrisome activity indeed, he decided.

It could be hardcore fan who's just a bit too interested in one of the knights or someone who works in the headquarters. Definitely a higher level compared to the woman who's constantly thinking about his brother and nothing else, and that's saying a lot.

But as those words began to spread like a plague, reaching the ears of the other knights, Kaeya could sense the anxiety that began festering through the Ordo Favonius. Who wouldn't be, knowing that they might be the target of such a disgusting act unknowingly? He'd notice the way they've heightened their guards up at all times (which is good, but takes a toll on their mental health). Poor little Amber would glance around queasily, Lisa almost never left the library and even strong, unyielding Jean Gunnhildr could be seen on edge.

Now, this absolutely won't do. And as the kind and generous friend he is, how could he not extend his aid and provide them more safety? He'll catch this disgusting bastard, and no longer will they be glancing behind their backs every second of the day.

❧

It was late when Kaeya began his little plans. He noted down the pattern of this person's movements through what's been whispered and shared, as well as their general appearance - or at least from what they could see.

They're always seen in a dark green, dusty and tattered cloak that reaches their ankles, and their hands are covered in dark leather gloves. And they always, always have a kamera on them. Marjorie had told him that she would sometimes see them prowl around near the lower parts of the city, where not much people would crowd in. With a smile, he thanked her. Kaeya knew where to find this man now.

But maybe, just maybe... Kaeya should've practiced some more caution.

He stumbled upon that man, in all his cloaked glory, just as he took the last steps down the stairs. There, he froze as if he was caught red-handed - which he really was - and Kaeya could see the way his eyes and his kamera glinted from the minimal light the moon provided.

"Oh, would you look at that?" He crooned, grinning at the creep before him. "Right into the lion's den, I presume. Your days of stalking down our poor knights are over, I'm afraid."

He spoke of nothing in return. Kaeya sighs.

"Listen, I really want to turn you in right now, but Jean won't be too happy to know I decided to grab some guy without proof. I mean, anyone could be some random suspiciously cloaked weirdo at night, holding a kamera that's seen better days." He said, gesturing to the poor machine in the man's hands. "I'd suggest you show me what exactly you've been doing. If it's innocent, I'll release you. If it's fucked, you're fucked, get that?"

The silence that followed stretched for a moment or two, and Kaeya was prepared to resort to extreme measures, until the man sighed and turned.

"...Fine."

The captain blinked, before his lips curled into an amused grin. "A fine choice, I'd say. Lead the way, handsome."

And oh, did he lead the way.

❧

You couldn't believe your eyes when he stood before you at the dead of night, soaked in moonlight like the ethereal being he is. The moment he walked down those steps, halting right in front of you, you could feel the tent forming underneath your pants.

The beautiful cavalry captain was searching out for you, apparently, without a single suspicion that he was the one you wanted. He was the one your prowled around at night like a hungry wolf for. He was the one you desired.

“Right into the lion's den, I presume.”

And oh, was he absolutely correct.

You lead him through the gates that night, and Kaeya waved away any questions the guards have to ask. His charming smile was enough to reassure them, and more than enough to have your desires stirred up even more.

The walk was long and strenuous, and Kaeya whistled to fill the silence.

"So we're travelling now, huh? How thrilling."

So thrilling, especially for you. Because he was right there, right within your grasp. One reach of your arms, and he'll be all yours.

And how could you possibly pass that chance up?

Kaeya, ever the sharp-eyed knight, dodged the moment he saw the glint of a dagger in your hands that was sent flying towards him. But only then did it dawn upon him that you were aiming for his vision instead of his flesh, and the moment you speared the chain that kept it dangling, it was already too late. The vision stuck to the dagger, being sent flying away and rendered unusable to it's weilder.

Kaeya turned to find you lunging towards him.

The sounds of bodies hitting the earth echoed through the night sky as you tackled the captain to the ground, grabbing his wrists the moment your hands reached his skin and pinning him down to the grass. Your surprising strength held him down, and Kaeya found himself struggling fruitlessly.

He tried maintaining a calm appearance, but the way you leered down at him was nothing but calming.

“Hey, now.” He dryly chuckled, feeling his first cold sweat trail down. "Take me out to dinner first, would y—"

Lips crashed into his own before he could finish his sentence. His eyes widened before repulsion filled him from head to toe, and he struggled to turn and break away from your lips. Your little kiss seperated with a gasp for air from the captain, and you licking off his saliva from your lips.

"What the hell?!" He snapped, glaring daggers at you. "Which archon gave you the rights to do that?!"

"I don't need the archons." You spoke, your voice low and gravelly. Kaeya gulped at the way your cold eyes trailed down his body, lightly shifting in unease. "I only need you, my dear Kaeya."

He squinted at you like you're a riddle no man has ever solved, and slowly shook his head in disgust. "You're insane..." He grimaced.

"And you, Kaeya Alberich, are an absolutely foolish man." You grinned mockingly down at him. "Willingly seeking out the 'creep' that's been wanting you for ages. Years of endlessly craving for the touch of your skin, to hear your voice reserved all for me, and finally... finally... You're here, right where I want you to be. After all, as stupid as you can be, there's no denying that you are a vision by itself. Blessed by the Archons, falling from Celestia itself..."

You could see the way Kaeya's face shifted into absolute horror and disgust by the truths you unveiled and the way you spoke of him. His tanned face paled the moment he felt his arms shift as you used one strong hand to hold down both wrists, and the other one began trailing down his defined curves.

"Fuck..." He hissed, buckling wildly to free himself but to no avail. He grunted at the futility of his attempts and began panicking. "Get off of me, you bastard!"

His words went into one ear and out through the other, apparently. You ignored his growls and pressed a nail through those slutty tight pants he walked around in on the daily until it bursted through. You tugged onto that hole and tore apart a large hole, exposing the beautiful skin of his groin.

"So, so beautiful..." You mumbled, paying no mind to Kaeya's fearful protests and only focusing on further exposing the beauty between his legs until it was bare all for you.

My, such tight underwear he wore. Much easier for you to simply rip off of him, forcing a horrified yelp out of the poor captain.

"Don't-" he gritted his teeth, "don't you dare!"

Before he could react, you twisted his entire body around with impressive strength until he faced the earth. Kaeya struggled to wriggle out as you slowly crawled lower, your hands pinning down his tiny waist until your chest laid between his thighs. His ass was all bare and exposed for you, and you salivated at the tight hole hiding in between.

Kaeya gasped when he felt something wet trail up the crevice of his ass.

"Get off of me!" He immediately shrieked, trying to kick you away but you kept a firm grip on his thighs. He could do nothing but twist around in vain, his nails digging into the earth as he tried to pull himself away from you.

A small whimper escaped his lips as your tongue prodded through his little virgin cunt.

"N-Ngh..!" He whined, pressing his forehead into the grass as he felt the humiliation bubble within him. His hips buckled from the sudden odd yet overwhelming feeling, and you grinned against his plush asscheeks.

"It seems that the poor cavalry captain enjoys this..." You teased.

"SHUT UP!" He barked. "Get off, asshat! I swear to the seven, I'm gonna fucking kill you! I'm gonna—AH!"

He felt a sudden sting as something longer and bigger forced it's way through his hole, digging deep despite the dry friction that made it so much more difficult. And it hurts.

You pressed your middle finger deep into the writhing captain, crawling deep into his unexplored walls and feeling yourself swell up in bliss. Because this was Kaeya Alberich's ass you were fingering! Your dick was growing so hard at this point that it's starting to hurt.

"Shit— Stop it!" He cried out, hips attempting to buck away as he hissed from the burning stretch. He didn't think it'd hurt this bad. "Are you deaf?! I said STOP!!"

He shouldn't be surprised when you only went further, and then your fingers curled.

The sudden wave of pleasure coursed through Kaeya's lithe body, and he choked on a moan. What was that? What did you do? And why did it feel... Good?

You chuckled darkly, prodding against that one spot and forcing out broken moans from the captain. "Looks like I've hit the bullseye." You grinned. "It feels so good, doesn't it? Admit it, Alberich. You love it, and you want more."

"FUCK YOU!!" He shrieked, beyond ashamed and humiliated by how your words stirred up his composure, and how some of them were true. It felt good, but he didn't want anymore of it. Because it hurt like a bitch, and he just didn't want you doing this to him in general.

"No, Kaeya." You grinned, chuckling jeeringly. "I'm gonna fuck you."

Kaeya blanches.

"No." He breathed out, vigorously shaking his head as you stood up and pressed a boot firmly against the small of his back, keeping him in place. "No, No, NO! Get off of me you- you sick MANIAC!!"

Kaeya writhed wildly when he heard buckling coming from behind him, unable to escape from the pressure of your weight holding him down. He could feel the first sob beginning to break through, but through some ridiculous pride, he managed to keep it in... For now.

Eventually, your hands returned and groped the soft flesh of his ass, spreading them apart to reveal his hole, glistening from your saliva. Your thumbs pressed through the still tight cunt and they spread the puffy rim, all while your eyes remained fixated on the sight you've been dreaming about for years.

Kaeya began breaking when he felt the head of your cock press against him.

"NO!" He struggled, pathetically twisting and turning like a caught prey desperate for it's unreachable freedom. It amused you, the way he thought he could get away with this.

"HELP! Somebody, help me!" He cried out, feeling his eyes prickle with tears before a choked sound of pain escaped through his lips as you breached him.

He howled into the ground when he felt you press through his unprepared hole, your fat cock digging through the tight rim, forcing it to spread apart to accommodate your girth. It felt like being speared by hot iron; it fucking burns.

But to you, it felt like you've ascended to Celestia itself. You couldn't believe it, you thought you were in a blissful dream. Because here you are, Kaeya Alberich underneath you, taking in your cock even if unwillingly. It dawned upon you that this may be the only chance you'll ever get, so you'll savor every moment of it.

Kaeya was writhing and crying out the entire time as you took your sweet, agonizing time with pressing your cock into him. His sobs echoed through the night sky, pleading for mercy while desperately calling out for help. Luck was not on the captain's side tonight, as not even one patrolling guard could be seen anywhere.

"Stop! Stop, please!" He sobbed, voice hoarse and painful. "Agh! It hurts- fuck, it hurts!"

"Shh..." You whispered into his ear, sighing as your hips finally met his round ass. "You'll enjoy it soon, dear captain..."

And before he knew it, you grabbed his hips, pulled out and slammed back into him. His back arched beautifully as he screamed into the air, pain filling his entire being.

"Archons, you feel so good..!" You gasped, relishing in the way Kaeya squeezed so perfectly around your cock, his walls moulding perfectly around the intricate shape of your dick. "You feel amazing, Sir Kaeya! I'm gonna fuck you so good, captain, I promise!"

"N-No—!" He couldn't even finish his sentence when you thrusted once more, sending jolts of agony through his trembling body. It hurt, it burned, it stung and it was nothing but pure torture for the young captain. His body rocked alongside each snap of your hips, paired with the pained yet pleasured sounds pouring out of his mouth, he was the picture of a dicked down slut itself.

The sight was utterly beautiful for you. Kaeya, underneath you - even if he was facing away - shuddering and moaning as he took in your cock like the good whore he is. And his cunt gave you pleasure beyond what a man should be worthy of receiving. You couldn't help but thrust into him like an unyielding piston, fucking him mercilessly, brutally, cruelly. It was suddenly so much easier to thrust, and you know well that Kaeya's skin had broke and bled. Perhaps it was his battered body's form of mercy, to provide lubrication even if it meant bleeding.

No matter, because you only grinned in delight. Kaeya's blood was on your skin, and you couldn't be more happier.

You fucked him raw and deep, your large cock drilling into his insides and threatening to break him. His legs trembled like a wilting flower, unable to hold himself up if not for the hands that kept his ass up. His hair was all over his face, and you couldn't catch a glimpse of his beauty as he took your dick.

You decided that you didn't like that.

In a swift motion, you turned him around so he's laying on his back. Steam blew out of your nose at the ravishing sight of Kaeya's red, tear-streaked face, eyes rolling back into his head as he pants heavily. His entire body was shaking like a leaf, he didn't even have the strength to stop your hands as you hikes his knees up to his chest. His flexibility impressed and aroused you, so you began fucking him once more.

"P-please..!" He whimpered, letting out a guttural moan as you fucked into his prostate. "Stop, stop it, please..! Hahh..! I-I can't— not anymore..! Let me g-go..!"

"How could I ever..?" You frowned, utterly repulsed by such an idea. How could you ever, when you finally had him in your grasp? Mercy, what a foolish idea. There was no need for mercy when desire had taken over, and your desire took over everything.

His slender, svelte body bounced as you pounded into him yet again, wanton moans escaping those plump lips that you couldn't help but devour them once more.

Kaeya weakly tried to push you off as your ravenous lips and tongue made a mess down his mouth. You tasted every bit of his wet cavern, the tip of your tongue trailing all over his cheeks and gums that he couldn't help but shudder at the tingling sensation. You could feel his salty tears even in his mouth, and just like every part of him, it was sweet and delicious.

You broke the kiss with an audible pop, and admired Kaeya's now red and glistening lips. Saliva trailed out of the corners of his mouth, dripping down to the ground as he panted once more.

A debauched whore, you thought.

Wanting to taste more, your pulled against the cleavage hole of his blouse until his choker ripped off, allowing you more access through his slutty shirt. His nipples were brown and perky, budding in sensitivity the moment your thumbs rolled them, that you couldn't help but salivate.

Your lips wrapped around those trembling buds and Kaeya whined loudly.

"N-No..!" He cried, weakly punching against your back. "Stop, please! Please!"

Oh, poor cavalry captain, begging so pathetically. He must be feeling so humiliated right now, having his body used up like an object, all at your brutal mercy.

You sucked on his nipples vigorously, tongue lapping and swirling around his nubs while you occasionally clamped your teeth around them. Kaeya howled from the assault of pleasure that broke his mind, arching his back while trying to twist away from your grip. Your hips never ceased thrusting, and the feeling of having both his prostate and nipples abused drove him wild.

And then you grabbed his hardened, leaking cock, and all hell broke loose.

White liquid splattered all over his stomach as he cums with a scream, his bucking up as he came all over your hand. You ceased all movement immediately by the pleasant surprise, and slowly pulled off of his chest as Kaeya began panting from his forcefully pulled orgasm.

His eyelids fluttered open to find you grinning down at him.

"See?" Your lips stretched from ear to ear, rows of teeth glinting menacingly as you brandished your cum-stained hands. "You loved it."

"No..." Kaeya slowly shook his head, dawning horror settling upon him but he was too exhausted to lash out. "I didn't, I—"

"You came, Kaeya." You chuckled, "It means you think it felt good. You think my cock felt good, you whore. You like being fucked. And I'll indulge you, my sweet captain, until you're begging for more."

Kaeya felt you grab his arms, a strong grip pulling them down towards you, and threw his head back with a choked moan as you thrusted in deep. It didn't take long before you were fucking his battered body once more, returning the sting that multiplied from the oversensitivity of cumming.

"A-Ah—!!" He gasped, turning his head away as he felt the unwanted pleasure return once more. Why didn't you stop? When will you stop? Will you ever stop? He didn't know, but he just wanted this entire thing to be over. Why won't the Archons help him? Barbatos, why won't you rescue him?

The way you held his arms down forced him to press his tits together, and with each thrust you could see the mounds of flesh bounce along in sync. It was beautiful, so utterly ethereal, and it'll remain in your memory for the rest of your life.

Kaeya didn't know how long you fucked him until he felt your warm seed shoot out right into him.

It revolted him.

You groaned as you finally came, and was filled with euphoria immediately after. You came while fucking Kaeya Alberich. You came inside of Kaeya Alberich.

You pulled out, agonizingly slow for the captain, and watched the way your cum dripped out of his trembling hole.

You felt yourself rise again. Kaeya cries when he felt your hands spread his legs once more, begging for the mercy you've never had in you.

The next day, the cavalry captain resigned for unknown reasons. Unknown to everyone but you.

[poisonsage808]

ModernAU!Sandor Clegane x Reader (II)

Warnings: hints of violence/illegal business, language, mentions of anxiety, tried to keep reader gender neutral and loosely described but with longish hair & over 21

A/N: HAPPY DECEMBER! i’m having too much fun with this, if you’re reading and want to see something specific/ crave an interaction with our beloved sandor, lemme know! enjoy :3c

•Sandor Clegane works for Tyrion Lannister, the richest bachelor and previous owner of the finest strip club in King’s Landing. Mysteriously, the club was burned down a week or so after a meeting with the fat cat himself, his father, Tywin Lannister

•A coincidence, the cops told him with smug smiles and heavy pockets. However Tyrion was more than fine with the outcome, two times richer with the insurance money and he used it to start a popular chain of high end restaurants, well known throughout the many cities of Westeros

•There hasn’t been anymore mysterious fires since

•Sandor used to work for Tywin— or rather his daughter as a chauffeur/ security for her and her children but he quit when they hired his brother

•Where Gregor was, trouble never failed to follow. The fuckers been in and out of jail/ arrested more times than Sandor has fingers and toes count, the Lannisters always cover for his ass. He wanted no part of that.

•Tyrion wasn’t his first choice of a boss but the minute Sandor resigned from his sister’s employment, Bronn was handing him the youngest Lannister’s card. “Fortunately for both of us, the fewer options make for the easiest decisions.” Tyrion told him.

•The dwarfs associates, Bronn and Podrick, were practically intolerable (Sandor had a list of reasons for them both) but the paycheck made up for it

•On easier days all Sandor had to do was sit in meetings or in the same general area as Tyrion and make sure no surprises came the dwarfs way

•Regular days consisted of making schedules for security guards, occasionally checking and scaring any on duty that he caught slacking

•Hard days were rare but involved getting calls in the middle of the night, alerting him of suspicious activity

•Only once did Sandor receive said call with a description of his brother lurking around the office building Tyrion worked from. When he arrived, he searched the surrounding blocks then the building top to bottom but there was nothing out of the ordinary. No threats. No Mad Dog prowling in the shadows. No rest for Sandor Clegane the next few nights after that.

•Today wasn’t like any of those days but Sandor’s yet to decide if that was a good thing or not

•Sandor didn’t go to the gym at the crack of dawn but he still got to see you later in the morning, this time with the smaller stuttering lad, Podrick, by his side

•Their boss had a large drink order and sent Sandor to help the assistant carry a tray back to the office. He would’ve complained if it wasn’t for the obvious; he wanted to see you

•The poor man was already tormented by the thought of you but ever since that day you asked for his number, the two of you go back and forth between deciding hangout dates (your word, not his)

•You told Sandor you only worked at the cafe in the mornings because afterwards you interned for a graphic design company, which is what you went to school for. Poison Apple Ink, a brand he hadn't heard of until he met you, would offer you a real job after the internship was completed in some odd months.

•This required a good amount of your spare time and a lot of effort for little to no pay but you claimed you were happy to do it

•Sometimes Sandor received pictures of you at a social event late at night or early afternoons if you thought it would interest him

•His favorite is of you standing in front of a brick wall of a high school. An oversized, previously white shirt was splattered with paint of all colors. Some on your face and in your hair. Your eyes were tired, apparently the company had you and a handful of others (also in the picture) work overnight to complete the mural behind you that could tell the story of the Odyssey through pictures. But you had the biggest, proudest smile on your face

•Even you’re not hanging out, you blow up his phone with stupid questions or random thoughts and you use an absurd amount of emojis! All of which make the corner of his lip twitch into a tiny smile

•(His coworkers are suspicious when they see that)

•What’s his favorite food? What’s on his bucket list? What’s his favorite movie?

•You don’t get to ask these questions when you’re with him, you claim to forget because the two of you get wrapped into different conversations. Sometimes you carry them and Sandor’s happy to listen but when the tables are turned, you have a dopey smile on your face and hold your chin with one hand silently

-

“Sandor!” You leaned over the counter like he couldn’t already see, didn’t already have his eyes on you, and waved your hand high above your head. Genna even chimed in with a wave of her own. It was busy in the cafe, chatter all around but no one was in line so the two men moved from the door to the counter. You rolled back onto the flat of your feet and placed your hands on the screen in front of you but before either could order, Genna’s arm snaked over your shoulder and held a cup out to Sandor.

“You-You come here that often?” Podrick asked hesitantly, merely attempting to make conversation with him as he usually did.

Sandor took the disposable cup with thanks, then pointed at you with his chin, “This one would hunt me down if I went anywhere else.”

“I’m glad you know that because I just found the perfect spot to hide your body.” You smile more genuinely at Sandor’s friend, “Anything for you?”

They made the order, eight coffees total but you only charged for seven. Cogs were turning in Pod’s mind now, his eyes dropped to your name tag then your face again. You were talking to Sandor while making their drinks, asking him his opinion on the chalk drawing you did on the board. “That chicken scratch was you? Thought a child snuck in and drew on the wall.” you glared fiercely at Sandor’s response, actually threatened him a second time.

You didn’t actually look upset though and when you push the tray of drinks into his awaiting hands, he tells you the drawing looks good. By the end of the interaction Sandor’s smile was less prominent than yours and there was a vibrant blush on your cheeks when he chuckled.

“Your friend seems nice.” Pod says as they leave the cafe.

“They’re alright.”

Not an outright denial, he pries a little more, “That drawing was great, they could be a tattoo artist. They seemed happy you liked it.. maybe you—“

Sandor can’t help the intimidating expression that takes over when he looks at the boy, “Y’got a question?”

“N-No, sir, just making conversation.”

“Not a tattoo artist, they do graphic design.” He ends up saying while turning his attention away from the boy.

“Like graffiti? O-Or shirts and stickers?”

“Both. Interning for Rotten Apple or somethin’.”

“Oh, Poison Apple Ink, the clothing brand!” Pod smiles and nods to himself mostly, “Got a couple shirts from them in high school.”

Dropping the coffees off was Podrick’s job but since Sandor also had a tray in his hand, he got looped into sitting in on the personal meeting. Tyrion waved them both in while chatting with his brother, Jaime Lannister. Sandor didn’t personally like him but ever since the golden child was disinherited after he joined the police force, he was almost a human being. Trustworthy at arm's length at the very least, he ceased contact with his father and sister sometime after Tyrion did.

Next to the oldest Lannister was a very tall and very blonde woman that Pod sat next to. The two exchanged pleasantries while Sandor begrudgingly sat next to the second manager of security, Bronn, who shot him a smug smirk while taking a coffee. The amount of drinks didn’t add up to the amount of people in the room but Tyrion didn’t comment on it so neither did Sandor. The little shit had more than enough coin to spare.

“Good, now that you’re both back I’d like you to sign this.”

The paper and pen were first slid over to Podrick, the boy signed it without hesitation.

“What is it?” Sandor quirked a brow.

“Told you he would ask” Bronn quipped with a chuckle at their boss’ expense.

“A sign up sheet for the holiday p-“

“No.”

“I’m not asking for your soul, Clegane, it’s a social gathering for work!” Tyrion waves his arms exasperatedly, “I provide the place, festivities, luxuries and all you have to do is show up.”

“Am I gettin’ paid to show up?” Sandor raises his brow and smiles mockingly.

“In good times and merriment, yes.”

“Free booze,” Bronn drags the paper in front of the giant man, “I’m goin’.”

Sandor’s frown returns, “This says softball sign up.”

“Yes, that would be the festivities.” Tyrion gestures to Jaime, “My brother has kindly rented an indoor practice court. He will lead my company to victory while his companion Brienne will guide the opposing team to defeat.”

The oldest Lannister laughs at that while the giant woman, now Brienne, only smirks knowingly.

“You can be on my team, Clegane,” Jaime flashes that same irking smile Sandor can’t stand.

“How d’ya plan on drinkin’ while swingin’ a bat?” He mumbles to Bronn with a raised brow.

“At the same time, my aims better when ‘m drunk.”

•The meeting concludes and the sign up list is returned without Sandor’s name.

•However the next morning it’s on his desk, with Tyrion sitting on the other side of it. How long had the man been waiting for him to arrive?

“I had a brilliant idea after you left yesterday, Clegane,”

“That so?” Sandor hangs his jacket up.

Tyrion purses his lips and takes a moment to wait for the taller man’s attention to focus on him again, “Or rather Pod did. He tells me you may know someone that can make shirts for the softball game.”

“Yer assistant needs new ears. They can’t make ya shirts, they’re still an intern so can’t take on clients.”

“You worked for my sister, you shouldn’t be surprised at what opportunities money can bring people.. or take away, for that matter.” He didn’t mean to slip in the bitterness that has a habit of following after mentions of that side of the family. His father and his sister, even his oldest nephew, the disdain for them is all too clear.

The shorter man sighs and squared his shoulders again, sincerity returning to his tone, “At least have them ask and mention me by name, see if that doesn’t strike their employer’s interest. If it does, hand the job to Podrick and he’ll deal with the finalities.”

Sandor involuntarily tenses, “Could do it myself.”

“Don’t trouble yourself, Clegane, you shouldn’t take on extra work you won’t get paid for. Especially since you have no interest in coming to the party.” Tyrion knowingly smirks and slides off the chair, rounding the desk to hold up a pen.

The giant of a man mumbles something undoubtedly rude while he takes the pen. His boss leaves the room with Sandor’s name on the sign up sheet.

-

Daniel, your potential boss, gave you sole responsibility on this project for Mr Lannister as a test of sorts. He’s very confident you can handle this, Genna came in on her day off so you could come to this meeting and Sandor’s inside waiting for you. You have a binder full of anything you could possibly need and your phone’s still vibrating with every text of encouragement from family and friends. Everything is working out so far, isn’t that supposed to be a sign of a good start? You look and feel out of place being here. Everyone around you is wearing pressed shirts, expensive suits, dresses or skirts. Fancy, they all look so fucking fancy— why didn’t you think to dress like them!? You should text Sandor you’re running late so you can run home and change.

When Daniel takes you to meetings with clients he always wears the same thing, a shirt with his design on it, jeans and a snapback with the company’s logo. You interact with people like this on your own daily at the cafe. They’re busy and not always kind but you’re rather good at interacting with them and de-escalating situations where they’re frustrated. None of them were Tyrion fucking Lannister though were they!? You thought wearing a baseball tee with an example of your work was a great idea last night, now you’re fastening the buttons of your jacket to hide it as you walk into the lobby.

Sandor’s easy enough to spot once you get inside, your eyes lock with his instantly. At least he’s not wearing a suit, you might have a heart attack if he was, but he still looks ridiculously good. Casual, like on your hangout dates, even though he stands out among the sea of faces strutting about he looks like he works here. His blazer and slacks are navy blue and hug his form in an illegally attractive way— OK THAT'S ENOUGH! Don’t you dare drool over him right now, you have to be professional!

You realize you’ve made Sandor do the majority of the work in meeting you, he’s walked across the floor to stand some feet in front of you now.

“Y’look nervous.” He comments with a frown.

Your eyes are distracted for a moment, glued behind him and jumping from one perfect looking person to the next. When your gaze catches his again you manage a meek reply and a shrug, “A bit.”

Very nervous, he thinks to himself. You’re a chatterbox even when you’re not anxious so silence couldn’t be a good sign.

“We got some time. Wanna look around?”

You momentarily snap out of your trance to smile at him, “Are you going to be my tour guide?”

“Might be.”

Your heart flutters when Sandor holds his left arm out like the gentleman he looks like. You shuffle the binder in your grip to slip your hand into the crook of his elbow. Sandor walks at your pace, makes comments now and then while gesturing with his spare hand to a room. Only once were the two of you stopped. A man with slicked back hair, piercing blue eyes, a charming smile and a similar outfit to Sandor's. You don’t miss the way Sandor covers your hand with his as the man approaches, leaving you to smile as a greeting instead of a handshake.

“That lazy cunt’s Bronn Blackwater.” He mumbles right in front of Bronn who only laughs the comment off. His palm rests over your knuckles until his coworker is long gone but the butterflies in your stomach linger even after. Physically you might be strolling around this fancy building with fancy people but mentally, you were on cloud nine. With your nerves dissolving you find the energy to focus on your attractive tour guide.

“I thought you said you were security.”

“I am.”

“What are you securing if you’re here with me right now? Are you cutting out, Mr Clegane?” You tease.

Sandor doesn’t miss a beat with that smirk of his. You’ve always been playful but recently the line of that has been blurred and at some point you’ve gotten more coquettish. He denies you’re actually flirting with him but he can play this game too.

“Not cuttin’ out. Got precious cargo for the boss.”

Crap, crap, crap your blush is bad!

“What’s Bronn do?” You ask, suddenly avoiding his eyes.

“Security.”

“Why’s your boss need two security guards?”

•Sandor doesn’t like how genuine that question is. Don’t you know what the name Lannister means in this city? They’re not just famous, they’re feared

•The wrong things seem to scare you, the giant man thinks with bitter amusement and it slips into his tone

“Ya saw that twig. He doesn’t look as scary as me, does he?” He scoffs.

You hum and hesitantly look up at Sandor, “I still think I could take you.”

When you don’t make any attempts to correct yourself, Sandor chuckles darkly and quirks a brow at you. Playful, flirty threats were part of your banter with the man. But that might be the first time you’ve genuinely challenged him so boldly.

“That so?”

“Yup.” You pop the ‘p’ loudly with a smirk of your own.

If he thought you were cute when you’re nervous, what’s this he feels when you’re being brave?

“Let’s not find out today. No assasination attempts on my boss, alright?”

Your smug attitude cracks at the reminder. You’re not here to hangout with Sandor, you’re here as a representative for a potential job. The tour has officially come to an end right in front of closed doors, a metal plaque that says ‘Main Conference Room’ hanging on one side. The walls of the room are made of windows that touch the ceiling and floor but the blinds on the opposite side are closed.

“Is he, um, nice? Mr Lannister?”

Your friend shrugs a bit and with the motion, unfolds his arm and slides his hand into the pocket of his pants.

“‘Bout as nice as a Lannister can be, I guess.” Sandor’s spare grip rests on the handle of the door but he looks at you patiently, “Ready?”

Clutching the binder to your chest with both hands, you let out a determined huff of air and force a smile.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

-

Tyrion Lannister is the only one you don’t recognize in the room. Bronn and Podrick sit on either side of him while Sandor stands behind with his arms crossed. No wonder he’s security, you think as you hold out your hand to his boss.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Lannister. I’m (Y/N), thank you for your interest in Poison Apple Ink.”

“Call me Tyrion. Sit please!” His smile is also quite charming.

You pull out a chair and immediately open the binder as you sit. A quick shuffle through the papers and you pull out the examples your mentor gave you, “So Daniel wanted me to show you some designs he made in case you needed an idea for-for the shirts.”

Tyrion taps his chin as he looks over the papers you passed to him. When his expression is unreadable, your eyes dart to Sandor but he only shrugs. Bronn snatches the stack of papers from his boss’ grip when it’s held out to him. His eyebrows jump up and down while he nods or shakes his head. He mumbles something about ‘lions’ that’s definitely not a compliment.

“These are.. great, truly works of art, but I have no interest in lions. Podrick here tells me your work is fantastic, I’d like to see it for myself.”

You tug a smaller stack of designs from the binder and surrender them to Tyrion once again. You don’t have time to guess what he thinks, he begins asking you questions. Sandor tries not to look too amused now that the tables are turned on you, it’s you being forced to give answer after answer. You’re much less nervous than before. Only once you began to ramble and your eyes strayed towards him. Sandor’s chest tightened when that happened.

The meeting lasts about 40 minutes and ends successfully for both you and Tyrion. You wait in the now empty conference room for his assistant, Podrick, to return with a copy of the order. The first text you responded to was Daniel, letting him know the important details of what was discussed. Everyone else that wished you luck got an assortment of celebratory emojis. You start to lose that burst of confidence as your thumb hovers over the text threat with Sandor. It’s silly, you can’t miss him when he was just here- not when he’s still in the same building!

Y: y’know i was thinking

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: Don’t hurt yourself.

•You laugh to yourself but ignore that comment.

Y: it’s not really fair i work two jobs for you now

Y: i think you owe me

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: Who got you this second job again?

Y: some security guard that sucks at his job

Y: and i’m about to lose a lot of free time that i could be spending with him!

•Maybe you should’ve just thanked Sandor instead of being cheeky. He knows you're joking right? The bubbles go back and forth for much too long and every second takes away what confidence remains with you.

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: What do you want?

•A selfish amount of his time. His company. His attention. All wrapped up with the title of a proper date.

•But you don’t have the nerve to ask for that yet, it probably wouldn’t be appropriate with the project you’re taking on anyways. You could be satisfied with being friends, right?

Y: make me something! i make you coffee, now i’m making you shirts

Y: fair compensation i’d say

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: Make you something... Like what?

Y: �� 🤔

Y: what do you know how to do?

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: Cook.

Y: AND YOU NEVER TOLD ME!?!?

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: I get 500 questions every damn day from you. Not my fault you never thought to ask.

Y: valid. i want you to cook me dinner then! it can be like our last supper before i drown in all the shirts i have to make!!

Y: you know that i’m mostly joking right? you totally don’t have to

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: I don’t have to do anything. Just tell me when… And no “drowning” after. Knowing you, you’ll somehow pin your death on me.

Y: i would never! 🤔🪚

Y: would thursday be ok? i’ll bring drinks! 🍻🥂

Sandor 🐺🐺🐺: Thursday. It’s a date.

♡[I], [II], [III]