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razorblade180 · 4 years ago

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Interdimensional Moms pt3

Part 2 right here! <-

Team RWBY continue their interesting chat about their respective worlds. After the emotional roller coaster that was Weiss’s, a bit of light hearted stories would be welcomed.

Yang:Okay, does anyone have some real feel good things to talk about for their world? Just run of the mill pleasant life?

Ruby:Guess I’m going last....

Yang:Oh no!

Weiss:We’ll circle back to you then. Blake, I guess you’re up.

Blake:Wouldn’t you want calmer stuff at the end?

Yang:Blake, I would very much like to go at least ten minutes without wanting to cry.

Blake:Hmmmm I can guarantee you like...six I think.

Yang:I’ll take it! Blake Belladonna, tell me about a world where you and Jaune Arc are happily married. How did such stars align?

Blake:You make it sound crazy?

Weiss:Blake, there’s list of people I could see you with. Now I’m not saying Jaune couldn’t be one of them, but he’d have to fight his way up that list.

Blake:You...that’s kinda fair. It’s a bit hard to explain really. It happened back at Beacon initially, or our bonding did. Some days his team was busy and I didn’t tag along for the crazy antics you three wanted to do all the time, so we occasionally bumped into each by circumstances. He’d go to the library for a book, I’d do training and he was there, or sometimes he’d knock on our door and not realize I was the only one around.

Weiss:Was he trying to sing to me?

Blake:That plan did show up at our a few times, yes. One of those times I asked him out of nowhere to sing the song anyways because I just had to know if it was any good. Hehe, it wasn’t sonically pleasing at times, but you could tell it was genuine. Eventually though...he just sort of gave up on you. It was actually a little sad to see, even you thought so. It was strange. Jaune was definitely stumbling through his flirting and it came off as childish, yet the day he gave up, it was easy to see his heart was breaking a bit. Like all his insecurities ate even the faux confidence away.

Yang:Ma’am, it has barely been three minutes and I’m getting sad about thinking of Jaune being sad.

Weiss:Yeah don’t tell me I broke his heart!

Blake:Whoops, sorry. It’s important though. Jaune kinda kept to himself a little more after that. He still chatted pretty regularly but it was easy to tell he dived more in studies as a way to keep his head clear, which lead to us being on a project together. I was the only person in our friend group that wouldn’t actively try to make him open up about how he feeling. At first I thought it was a bit rude when he told me that, but I didn’t room to talk when it comes to socializing.

Yang:One more time for the people in the back.

Ruby:I’m the back.

Blake:*smirks* I was very against socializing about my feelings at Beacon.

Ruby:Yeah you were.

Weiss:I couldn’t even ask if you slept well without a lukewarm answer sometimes.

Blake:I’m better now. That’s all that matters. Romance and feeling love is a personal thing and talking about it is uncomfortable. I think we both recognized that in each other during our project. Trouble is, there’s only so many conversation starters and small talk subjects. Talking only about the project was dry and eventually all the facts a person could say about themselves ran out. Favorite food, color, hobbies, etc. We eventually had to dig a little deeper into those topics. To our surprise, we actually more in common than we thought when it came to how we felt about certain pieces of literature and music.

Ruby:Awwww, bonding over smut.

Blake:*red* It wasn’t all adult literature! Some were poems and stuff. Even when the project ended, we began being less formal around each other and hanging out. We went to the bookstores we mentioned and he even got us tickets to bands I liked. It...it was nice. I never really got to have just a normal teenage experience before without it being political. He always felt bad about being average compared to everyone but average was so foreign to me that I welcomed it. I liked having a normal time out. It was a thing we all took for granted. Especially when Beacon fell.

Yang:Yeah, that probably put a real bind on your relationship.

Blake:Actually....we technically never officially started to date.

Ruby:What? You courted each other all of Beacon.

Weiss:Ruby, who the heck says courted? I’m a Schnee and even I have never used the word courted.

Ruby:Hush, I read a lot of bed time stories to a five year old.

Blake:We were a bit shaky on labels. Me for obvious reasons. As for Jaune, it’s really true about what they say about guys when they get heart broken.

Yang: “Never again.”

Blake:Hehehe, it’s funny to look back at it but he’ll tell you it’s a bit cringy. He was so on gaurd. I could tell all the time when he was mentally telling himself to not be excited whenever we hung out or I complimented him.

Ruby:Hey it takes guts to shift feelings to a teammate of your first crush. That could blow up in your face.

Blake:Yeah...about that. *looks at Yang* you...were another reason why nothing was official. You uhhh, we actually had some jumbled up emotions.

Weiss:*sarcastic gasp* You and Yang, liking each other? Who could’ve seen that coming?

Yang:Was it mutual or...

Blake:Very mutual. Also...intimate at times.

Yang:*red* Oh....yeah. Yeah that tracks.

Blake:That jumbled mess was only more confusing after you got hurt trying to rescue me from Adam. Meeting up with-

Ruby:Question, so was Sun just not on your radar?

Blake:Sun? We’re just friends. He’s cute and I’m glad he was there for me when I needed help but things between us were always pretty calm. I think he noticed how confused I was with other people in my life and chose to not add to it.

Ruby:Bless him. Please continue.

Blake:Learning about Salem and reconnecting with you all was a lot. I’d really been out of the loop and my Yang and I were on....shaky ground.

Yang:That’s what happens when you leave someone who’s been left their entire life.

Blake:Sigh...yeah. It was a trying time, but not with JNPR. It’s funny, Oscar and I also hit it off quite well from the jump. I think we were both glad to have each other learn on the craziness at once. Even with readjusting, Jaune and I fell back into a groove naturally. Instead of doing average things we day dreamed of the things we did. Once again we become this little slice of simple life in this crazy adventure. Still didn’t date.

Weiss:What is this, a slow burn!?

Yang:Weiss, you literally didn’t date your Jaune until Atlas.

Weiss:There’s a difference. I didn’t make any heart eyes at him until around Atlas. I say I may have been a little quick. These two were “courting” for over a year at this point.

Ruby:Stop making fun of me!

Blake:Well anyways, I wouldn’t say much was too eventful in terms of romance with world destroying things happening. Salem, she was way too much to deal with. Every move age did was calculated and unrelenting. Keeping our head above water wasn’t easy. In fact, it was boarder line impossible. Yang and I barely beat Adam after all.

Yang:How’d you two feel about that?

Blake:Relieved. Huge weight off my mind, and yet...a piece of me still wishes things never got so dire. At least now I know that in another world, things aren’t.

Ruby:Sounds like your world was put through their paces? You survived though.

Blake:Not conventionally. I gotta say, hearing the ages and how you beat Salem so far makes me feel more than a little embarrassed. To be frank, we didn’t have this grand battle that involved the entire world making a final stand. We had Atlas, and then we had Haven. With their might and a plan to gain more time, we managed to seal Salem in a vault.

Yang:*chokes on water* Y- cough what!?

Ruby:You put her in a vault!?

Weiss:Thah sounds harder than a last stand honestly.

Blake:No matter what way we looked at things, we just weren’t ready for her, so we locked her away until we were. Two years on constant defense from her followers and grimm until Ruby had trained enough to use her silver eyes and we were all strong enough.

Ruby:Two years!? How old was I then?

Blake:Twenty I believe.

Weiss:Hey, you beat mine by a year.

Yang:Not mine, I think we either tied or just narrowly beat yours by like a year. Honestly it hard to keep track of birthdays and stuff.

Ruby:Wow. No offense to myself, but that’s a little disappointing. I guess being the same person really doesn’t mean we were all at the same level.

Blake:Hey, my Ruby put everything she had into saving the world. There wasn’t a second she wasn’t trying her best to defend it!

Ruby:My point exactly. If that was her at her absolute best then by all accounts, she doesn’t hold a candle to me; at least back then anyways. But I have no reason to believe she would be at my level now.

Yang:Okay little miss prideful, care to tell us when you saved the-

Ruby:Seventeen.

The reaper took a long swig of coffee while the others processed that information. It took a her a couple of seconds to realize she may be acting just a tad bit arrogant.

Ruby:Uhh, sorry. I think I was tooting my own horn a bit there.

Weiss:Seventeen....why so soon?

Yang:Why? Don’t you mean how?

Blake:That’s....almost unbelievable.

Ruby:Really? I don’t think so. I’ll dive into it when it’s my turn but for now all I really gotta say is people needed help, and I was going to answer those cries. I bet your Ruby had a similar urgency in her, but for some reason or another just had different limitations. I got hurt a lot as a kid. Maybe an injury did more damage in one universe than another? Who can say?

Blake:I...wouldn’t know. Odd, I know if my Ruby heard this, then she’d probably be more than a little upset. Saving lives is still what she’s all about. I know when she put everything she had into fighting Salem when the day came. All that training paid off. Her skills were polished and her silver eyes eradicated the grimm essence in Salem.

Ruby:Wait, she’s not dead?

Blake:No. Salem roams Remnant with Oz keeping an eye on her until one day she can finally grasp the lesson the gods wanted her to have.

Yang:That uhhh sounds risky.

Weiss:Yet oddly okay?

Blake:Funny, my Weiss said that too. Those two get checked on in secret. Can’t be too careful. With Salem beaten though, Remnant entered a state of...let’s call it average chaos. All in all, it’s way more peaceful but you know, people will be people. Downside about a secret war is you don’t get the unity of the masses. Atlas and Haven working together was still a great step in the right direction though.

Yang:Woah, I’m a little jealous. My world felt like a race against the clock. The pressure either broke you or made you harder than diamond, with most people crushing under it.

Weiss:Yeah. The tension and meet of extremes I had on the frontlines was beyond imagination. The unity was great, but to feel it on the battlefield against the odds was feeling with way too much adrenaline and stress. Can’t say I enjoyed it. I simply lived through it.

Blake:Well it isn’t like I had a walk in the park. But I guess in comparison, my experience was a tad more mellow. Still, people were lost and hurt. Oscar isn’t himself anymore, don’t have Penny, former classmates and a few enemies turned allies fell in battle. Family.... it took a bunch to get the plan of containing, then it took a lot more to do it. In a way though, the two years of training is time I can’t regret. It tested bonds, strengthening and reestablishing others.

Ruby:I take it since love couldn’t bloom on the battlefield, it bloomed in the training yards?

Blake:*red* You can say that. That’s when Jaune and I got serious. *frowning* But.....

Yang:We fell apart?

Blake:Yeah. I didn’t learn my lesson well enough the first time about the potential problems of dating a partner. Only difference this time was I felt like I was the one being cruel. We had gotten into arguments and apologized more than once. Your fear of being left and my own insecurities just kept butting heads. I’d cry, you’d cry, our friends would be concerned. Then the day came where you put it all on the line. You confessed genuinely how much you loved me and how you felt a bit jealous when it came to Jaune. I had never seen you look so vulnerable; letting your gaurd completely down. And though a piece of me loved you and wanted you in my life for ever....this sense of genuine comfort Jaune gave was something I want-needed for so long. So I did the one thing I didn’t want to do. I broke your heart. I hurt you again.

Yang:Sigh....*leans back in chair* Okay, let’s see how well I know myself. My eyes went red automatically, followed by tears. I lashed out at you angrily out of pain and embarrassment until I was probably blue in the face. But to take make things worse, somebody probably overheard. No matter who it was, I yelled at them too for trying to calm me down and then I eventually run off leaving everyone unhappy. A good old meltdown. Sound about right?

Blake:To the letter. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so distraught.

Yang:Of course not, I’ve never been in love before meeting you. I....did a similar thing with my Blake over the stupid Adam shit. *covers face* of all the things to be similar, it had to be my temper. Please tell me our team didn’t suffer too harshly?

Blake:The good thing about two years of training was it didn’t have to be together all the time. Team RWBY didn’t fall apart, but it didn’t feel comfortable either. Outside of missions, the four of us didn’t hang out as much. It was three at the most. Nobody pinned blame on me or Yang for it but it was obvious.

Ruby:I mean how can you blame someone for feeling sad or not in love with someone? Pointing fingers doesn’t do anything. However, I bet missions were rough.

Blake:Bumblebee was shelved. We did any other team up we could. When push came to shove, Yang and I did put feelings aside. Neither of us wanted our feelings to get anyone killed. That’s probably what kept us connected for awhile, especially with Salem. I don’t think we questioned each other when it came to watching one another’s back. Slowly, our relationship got a bit better. Until....we stopped speaking to each other altogether about a couple years later.

Yang:Wait, why!?

Blake:I got pregnant.

The three listeners’ faces scrunched up and they let in a sharp breath like they just got cut. No one had considered that bombshell.

Blake:Marriage was rough enough. Having Jaune’s kid and starting a family just...cut deep I guess. You didn’t make a scene or anything if that’s what you’re worried about. One day you told me “I just can’t do this” and exited my life. I wanted to keep you close to me, but you wanted to be closer. That was a thing I couldn’t do. Hehe, I can’t tell you how weird it is talking to you like this again.

Yang:So that’s it!? We just don’t see each other at all!?

Blake:Certain events and celebrations have us in the same room, but that’s all. Ruby is the only thing that regularly links us, but she’s busy living life too.

Ruby:Is it a good life?

Blake:The best. You’re the huntress you always wanted to be and a hero to many.

Ruby:*smiles* Really? That’s good. May she ride that high for as long as she can. Though I bet she wished she had a special someone to share that with.

Blake:Huh? Oh, you married Weiss.

Weiss:*red* What!?

Ruby:Aye, nice.

Weiss:Weren’t you upset about thinking of other people with Jaune besides you!?

Ruby:Yeah, but I won’t deny if I am going to be with someone that isn’t him, I’m very happy it’s the other special person in my life. I mean come on, the only reason we don’t get weird in your universe is because I married your brother and you already invited my sister.

Weiss:I mean...it’s mainly the brother portion. The second part...

Ruby:Weiss, that’s weird.

Yang:Eh...

Ruby:IT’S WEIRD! YOU CANNOT TELL ME OTHERWISE!

Yang:*sips coffee* Eh.

Blake:Anyways, Weiss, you’re running your company. The Schnee Dust Company was scrubbed top to bottom to remove as much corruption as possible. No department was overlooked. In times of money, there’s a notable decrease in how much the company used to make.

Weiss:Gee, I wonder if that’s because the other me is doing oh let me guess, paying all their workers and not cutting corners in safety?

Blake:The SDC people approval has gone up considerably, just so you know that too. Turns out people like it when the company they buy from have good morals.

Weiss:Am I happy though? I make time for my social life and hu- I mean wife?

Blake:Yea, you’re happy. In a way I think we’re all happy, but....

Yang:We’d be happier if we were all happy together? Yeah, that’s how it works. You’re only as happy as the most miserable person in a family or group; if you all care about each other that is. Ugh, I wanna punch the other me. I get how she feels but it’s fucking immature to just ignore years of teamwork and family. At the end of the day, team RWBY is a family! Can’t believe I’d runaway from it instead of figuring out...I don’t know! Something!

Blake:*small smile* Well if you feel that way then there’s no reason to believe she doesn’t. My Yang just struggles with it more I guess, but I hope she can come around one day. Not really for my sake, but for her own peace of mind. As well as Lucas’s.

Ruby:Lucas? Your son I take it?

Blake:Mmhmm. My strong and lazy young man. He got his father’s hair but my eyes and ears. I can’t think of a person who warms my heart quite like him. He acts uninterested in a lot of things, but his heart is so big.

Weiss:Ah, so he’s just you?

Blake:More or less hehe. Though I’d say I was passionate about things all my life. Lucas will sleep all day if he could and doesn’t like going out without a reason.

Weiss:Still sounds like you if I’m being honest. Teenager?

Blake:Seventeen, almost eighteen.

Yang:You said he’s need peace of mind too? I’m not...hostile towards him am I?

Blake:No, not by a long shot. On the occasions you two have meant, you were polite. It’s just he knows why you don’t visit or talk to me. That’s rough, knowing your parent’s closest friend stopped being apart of their life because you were born. I think sometimes he believes it’s actually his fault.

Yang:I really, really want to meet this other me and have a few words. She needs to know she isn’t trying hard enough. I’m proof.

Ruby:Yeah, but you’re only well off because the person that helped you get over Blake, was Jaune. Yeah she still can find love, but who that person will be would be uncharted territory for everyone.

Blake:Also I’m not entirely sure exactly if my Yang is even bi like you.

Yang:Sigh....

Weiss:Love.

Blake:Huh?

Weiss:As long as a person shows your Yang genuine love and a place in their heart where she’ll remain forever, Yang would fall for them. They just have to make it a point to make her feel like they’ll stay. Yangs are softies like that.

Yang:Wow, you an expert on me and all the versions of me now?

Weiss:No, you’re just a bleeding heart that’s super emotional. Let me guess, you fell for Jaune the moment you realized just how relaxed and vulnerable you could allow yourself to be around him.

Yang:*red*.......he holds me when I’m overwhelmed.

RWB:Awwww

Yang:Shut up! Blake, take the heat off me.

Blake:Not too much more. Lucas is a smart kid who generally stays out of trouble. Unfortunately, trouble finds him. Mainly because of his semblance.

Ruby:Don’t tell me...

Blake:No no, it’s not bad luck like your uncle, but Lucas can’t always control it so their similar in that regard. Premonitions, that’s his semblance.

Weiss:Like...the future? You child can see the future?!

Blake:Yeah. *sips drink* it’s terrible.

Ruby:What? That sounds so handy! Man, if I could someone fighting me before it happened, I’d be a monster on the battlefield.

Blake:Lucas isn’t a fighter. Well, he’s not aspiring to fight. He can fight, pretty dang well in fact.; but randomly seeing the future is not a gift. Imagine picking up a book and you suddenly know the ending, or watching a movie and you start seeing the middle of it right after you press play?

Yang:Ahhh, that’s why he’s lazy and unmotivated. His semblance is massive spoiler alert. Half the fun of new things is not knowing what will happen.

Ruby:Oof, you have a point. I’d be paranoid to no end.

Blake:To a point, he was. Ever since he was ten. Disasters happen at the drop of a hat. Lucas isn’t the kind of person to watch bad things unfold, so whenever it was possible or even if it was risky, he’d do whatever he could to prevent said disaster. But.....there’s only so much anyone person can do. There’s only so much information he sees. The constant strain and guilt that came from failing ate him up. The. There’s the incidents he’s seen that didn’t show him how it began or how it will end. *rubbing her hands* It’s bad...

Weiss:Hey, I...I’ve noticed your hands and frankly even your face are a bit....slim. Your skin isn’t as colorful as I’m used to either. Almost like it’s regaining color.

Blake:Hehehe.......I guess you were bound to notice of all people.

Weiss:Of course. I may not run a a company in my world but I keep tabs on my brother and have had my fair share of visits to a doctor. Why wouldn’t I notice.

Yang:So can we talk as if there are people who have no clue what’s going on?

Weiss:Blake has had one of two things happen to her. She’s either worked way too hard to the point she’s not taking care of her health, or she’s fallen very ill and her body is still recovering.

Blake:Yeah, it’s more of the second one, but probably because of the first one as well. Forwarding equality, I was overzealous with it. One day Lucas just started shaking and crying when he was twelve and I couldn’t understand why. Turns out he kept seeing me bedridden and unconscious without a reason. Day in and day out he simply cried and tried his best to get another premonition to learn more, but couldn’t. A week later I started feeling a little dizzy, and then blacked out after vomiting. At first I thought maybe I had the flu or something. Nope, a tumor.

Weiss:What?

Ruby:Blake!?

Yang:Oh shit, are you-

Blake:Perfectly fine! *smiles* I’m fine. Liver cancer, but it was caught early. No more tumor what so ever, but the meds and the entire process was really draining. Got sicker a couple of times. Not once did I feel like I was dying necessarily, more like...slipping? I felt myself getting drained. The whole time Lucas was so scared; blaming himself for not preventing this or knowing how to fix it. Though simply knowing he saw me like was a warning most people wish they got. I know I said seeing the future is terrible, but the scariest part through all of this was not knowing how it ended. Choosing medicine, doctors, surgery possibilities, it made me crack under pressure a little. I think he noticed that. I wasn’t sure if I picking an option that lead me dying or getting better. The stress alone may have killed me. Ever since then Lucas hasn’t been so outgoing.

Ruby:....

Weiss:....

Yang....It was already said, but there was no way this wasn’t going to get sad was there?

Blake:Take it from me, there’s joy in pain. So many people came to visit me when I was recovering. Even Yang dropped by for a bit. After I got out, I don’t think Lucas ever hugged me so hard. Jaune tried to stay calm through the whole ordeal but it was rough for him too. He was all but spent emotionally when I came home.

Weiss:I’m surprised Lucas didn’t become an older brother.

Blake:The last thing a recovering patient needs is a pregnancy, but as far as missing me goes...

Ruby:You can stop right there with that tangent.

Yang:We’ll talk about that in private. I wouldn’t mind that story.

Blake:*playfully rolls eyes* These days I try not to over do things. I’ve only officially been deemed completely cured for about a year. I can feel that I’m still not entirely up to strength. It’s fine though. It gives me an excuse for Lucas to dote on me a little. He’s a mama’s boy at heart. My biggest worries these days is peeling him out of this shell his semblance had put him in. At the very least I want him to smile like he used to and find away to live in moment when possible. His entire life is ahead of him. Hopefully he doesn’t see all of it.

Ruby:I guess too much of anything really is bad. Knowledge included. I hope things work out.

Yang:Me too. A happy life is something you definitely earned.

Blake:Thanks. That seriously means a lot, which is why I made sure to not end this on a sour note.

The happy faunus pulled out her scroll to scroll through pictures and her friends eyes lit up. The first one was a beach photo. This Jaune was different from what they were used to. He let his hair grow a little bit longer and the back went down his neck, but it was definitely still him. This jaune was pretty toned and went for a lean look than bulky like Weiss’s, but a tad slimmer. On his shoulders was an adorable toddler with wide amber eyes and big blonde cat ears. Both men were enjoying the sunset on the waves.

The next photo was more recent with Blake right in the middle of hopping into Lucas’s arms. Weiss noticed the girl still had on the hospital bracelet. She must’ve just gotten cleared. Lucas had grown like a weed. He was now roughly Jaune’s height. His hair was messy and looked like Jaune’s in his younger years. Also like his father, Lucas was jacked! His sleeveless purple shirt should off his biceps as they wrapped around Blake’s torso for a hug. His baggy purple shorts had black and gold trim through the seams and the shorts stopped right below his knees; but showed of his well defined calves. A smile of pure joy and what could’ve been a few tears were visible as he looked lovingly at his mother. It warmed all of the ladies hearts. Still, the girls also could tell under his eyes were a little dark. Lucas must’ve been very tired.

The final picture had to be the most recent. It was Blake and Lucas sparring. Both looked at each other with excitement and ease as their wooden blades clashed. Their clothes mirrored one another by being black and white kimonos. They even wore the traditional shoes and everything.

Weiss:Yeah, that’s your kid.

Blake:Damn right. Unfortunately that makes him a little too stubborn. But I guess that’s okay. Without a doubt, someone’s gonna break through that shell of his.

Yang:Oh? It sounds like you already know who?

Blake:Well....I have a hunch.

xxxxx

RING! RING! RING! Lucas’s scroll chirped, in the middle of the night. The boy let out a long, agitated groan of sleepiness as he rolled over in bed; reaching for his scroll on the nightstand to answer.

Lucas:Hello?

???:Did you know you are mathematically more likely to choke on a hotdog than get attacked by a shark?

Lucas:....Serenity, who gave you my number?

Serenity:Your parents, and it’s Serendipity!

Lucas:Too many syllables. Also a bit ironic given who you are. With the way you act though, my name for you is better.

Serenity:Ooooo so we’re moving on to pet names? How forward of you.

Lucas:Five seconds before I hang up. Three...two-

Serenity:You’re late! You promised to guide me around the beach at twelve. That’s now.

Lucas:.....P.M. Twelve P.M. Serenity. Why in the world would I mean midnight!?

Serenity:It’s romantic and personal. Nobody else is around. I thought you were trying to use that Belladonna magic on me by acting all cool and aloof in the moonlight.

Lucas:.....

Lucas:Please delete my number.

Serenity:Not on your life, my whiskered bodyguard!

Lucas:Don’t have whiskers-

Serenity:If you don’t wanna move that butt of yours to hang out with a pretty girl in a floppy hat and sundress with a bikini underneath, that’s your loss. I’m still going for a dip.

Lucas:Do not go in the water when nobody is around.

Serenity:Pfft, I’m a strong swimmer.

Lucas:Sharks.

Serenity:It’s more dangerous to eat a hotdog.

Lucas:Sharks feed at night.

Serenity:Are you trying to tell me the statistics aren’t as reliable just because it’s nighttime.

Lucas:That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Serenity:Then you better move your butt just in case. Either you get a snack or the sharks do. Either way, I get attention.

Lucas:Difference is one wants to eat you.

Serenity:My goodness Lucas, oh brazen of you.

Lucas:......

Lucas:Tell the sharks I said hi.

Serenity:Okay! Byyyyyyeeeee! *hangs up*

Lucas:(She’ll be fine.)

..........

Lucas:*putting on shoes* This is bullshit. Who thinks midnight!? *walking down stairs* Can’t have a peaceful day or night....

Jaune:*watching tv* Hey Lucas, going some-

Lucas:I’m giving out your phone number to a homeless man the first chance I get! *walks out door*

Jaune:.....(Whatever gets you outside more.)

It took about fifteen minutes of aggressive walking for Lucas to wrap around to the back of his house towards their section of the beach. Where Serenity walked around humming and collecting seashells without a care in the world.

Lucas:The next shell you grab will have a crab in it.

Serenity:Huh? Oh hey you’re finally-ahhhh! Ow ow ow ow ow ow!

Lucas:Should’ve listened.

Serenity:Have a better warning!!!! It won’t let go!

Lucas:Pull it off.

Serenity:That’s hurt!!! Lucas, help!

Lucas:Fine, if you delete my number.

Serenity:*sniffling* Stop being mean!!! This really hurts, it’s breaking the skin. Isn’t a young and pretty girl’s tears payment enough!? I thought you were getting paid to-

Lucas:Oh my goodness! Okay, just shush. I’m too sleepy for this.

Serenity:You’re mean when you’re sleepy. At least your waking up voice sounds handsome though.

Lucas:Please....stop. Stop everything. *removing crab* Happy?

Serenity:No, you’re not happy. Also my finger is bleeding.

Lucas:Yep, looks like you can’t go swimming now for real.

Serenity:Eh, I lied anyways. I’m not getting in that water. There are sharks in that watery grave.

Lucas:So. Why. Did. You. Wake. Me. Up?

Serenity:....*red* I...don’t really, have friends here. Besides you. Umm *points to pail and shovels* sandcastles?

Lucas:*inhales*......I’ll get the water.

Serenity:*smiles* Yes! I’ll delete your number later.

Lucas:*red* You....can keep it of you really want.

Serenity:....Kek, okay Mr. Tsundere

Lucas:You can remove the next crab alone.

Serenity:Don’t joke like that! That was a joke, right?

Lucas:Welp that pail isn’t gonna fill itself. *leaves*

Serenity:What!? Lucas!!! You were joking right!? Right!? *looking around the sand* you’re a lousy bodyguard!

Lucas:Good, fire me.

Serenity:I...you....ugh!

Lucas:Cheer up, I’m happy now after all. *smiles*

Serenity:*pouting* This is why I’m a dog person.

#rwby #the void #jaune arc #ruby rose #weiss schnee #yang xiao long #blake belladonna #rwby knightshade #lucas belladonna #rwby ships #rwby premonition

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shirtlesssammy · 4 years ago

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3x06: Red Sky at Morning

Then:

Sam wasted a bullet on brodepency

Now:

A woman jogs along a lonely marina at night. She stops for a drink of water and sees an old timey ship flicker into existence and then disappear. It’s a little weird so she runs home.

While taking a slightly male-gaze shower, a shadow lurks in the background. A hand then appears on the outside of the shower. She pops her head out to look around her HUGE bathroom only to find nothing. Too late! The noise was coming from inside the shower stall. She’s attacked and strangled.

Sam and Dean are on the road. Sam’s getting a lecture from his big bro about using the Colt on the crossroads demon. It didn’t get Dean out of the deal, but Sam had to try.

And jumping right into the case without exposition or anything, we find the brothers interviewing the aunt of the victim, Sheila. She’s 100% pervy towards Sam, but HAHAHA, amirite? She found her drowned in her own shower. She asks if they’re “working with Alex?” And Dean agrees right away. The aunt also mentions the mysterious boat (did Sheila call her aunt on her run home? When did she have time to do this?) “Do you think it could be a… ghost ship?”

Yes. Yes, it is.

She then touches Sam unnecessarily and GURR.

Later, Sam and Dean discuss the case and the fact that ghost ships have been seen in this town every 37 years --and with it dryland drownings.

So they’ve got to find what boat appears to people before they die.

They head back to where the Impala was parked, to not find it where they left it. Dean freaks out and has a panic attack. UGH. I have that feeling when I forget what lane I parked in at Target so BBY DEAN I HEAR YOU AND SEE YOU.

Bella appears and tells them she had it towed. So kind. Sam guesses right away that she’s the “Alex” that the aunt mentioned. She tells them to back off, and wanders away.

A dude, getting ready for bed, finds his tub filling with gross, green water. He turns off the faucet and stares into the black water for a second before a hand reaches out of the depths and strangles him.

Later, we find Bella interviewing the brother of the deceased. Sam and Dean interrupt and tell her to stop bothering the grieving man. They ask about the ship his brother saw, and the man describes it and admits that he saw it too.

Bella shows up again to further antagonize the brothers.

Later that night, the brothers watch the grieving brother box up his brother’s stuff. And I haven’t watched this episode enough to see the parallels before, but there they are! The guy sees them watching him and gets upset, realizing they’re not cops. He insults Dean’s car and tells them to stay away from him. He tries driving away but then his car dies. A drowned rat of a ghost shows up in his car. Before Sam and Dean (and their shotguns) can get there, the guy drowns.

Later, while driving, Dean tells Sam, “You can’t save everybody, Sam.” (And, HAHA, certainly not his brother is who destined to die because what’s the fucking point of rebar anyway?)

Bella, once again, finds the brothers. They’re laying low in an abandoned house researching shipwrecks. She knows what ship they’re seeing before they die. It turns out the ghost was a traitorous sailor that was hanged on this ship, but not before his hand was cut off and made into a hand of glory. They need to find that hand, and Bella knows where it is.

We’re next treated to a little Dean objectification when he walks down the stairs in a tux. He hates it, but Bella is impressed. I can’t help it. Dean’s a cutie here.

For We’re Going to Objectify Him Anyway Science:

They arrive at the soiree accompanied by a swanning musical score. Sam wriggles away from his handsy Gross Old Lady ™ companion to complain about his decoy duties. Dean and Bela show no inclination to give him any reprieve and slink off to pull their heist. Every door is guarded by an off duty cop, so Bela swoons in Dean’s arms.

He explains that she’s imbibed a little too much. A guard escorts them upstairs to a secluded den and leaves them to “recover.” Bela casually insults Dean’s intelligence yet again and then sends him off to complete the heist.

Sam continues to experience non-consensual touching by Grabby Gertie. UGH SAM we’re so sorry.

Dean, meanwhile, cracks a safe - a scene which I find HIGHLY APPEALING. While he’s hard at work, Bela deflects the guard from discovering that Dean’s missing from the room by pretending to have a romantic interlude. Dean’s return is comically timed, and the guard leaves happy thinking he’s just witnessed a cuckolded husband and clandestine affair. I guess whatever floats your boat?

Dean brandishes the hand of glory at Bela and they prepare to leave the party. Downstairs, Sam is DRENCHED in discomfort, but Grabby Gertie contributes something at last to the case. She reveals that the two dead brothers were rumored to have killed their ultra-rich father. And her niece had been involved in a fatal car accident as a teen where her cousin died.

Dean and Sam head off in the Impala, only to discover that Bela once again pulled a fast one on them. She replaced the hand with a model ship in a bottle, which she stole while she was waiting for Dean in the den.

Elsewhere, Bela fondles her money in a convertible until she sees DUN DUN DUN a ghost ship in the distance.

In their room, Dean rants about Bela’s theft to an unsympathetic Sam, only to have Bela pound on their door. The ship’s after her now and she already sold the hand to someone across the ocean. As one does.

Sam drops more case details: the captain of the ghost ship was the brother of the hanged sailor. “Very Cain and Abel,” Sam notes while I grind my teeth. The targets of the hauntings: people who have spilled their family’s blood. Dean taunts Bela while she sits in haunted turmoil. Dean, babe.

Sam and Dean insist that Bela reveal her dark emotional secrets to them before they’ll help her which is some real trash behavior. Sam finally relents, and tells them there may be one thing they can do to save her.

In a darkened cemetery, Sam lights candles around a pentagram.

It starts to pour. Sam starts an incantation which reads “Azael, Castiel…” and I’m about to lose my goddamned mind. Sam continues to invoke the arrival of his brother’s husband in the following season like he doesn’t have any clue about Dean’s epic love arc with the angel Castiel.

The ghost appears, flings Dean across the cemetery, and starts to drown Bela. Sam frantically reads and as he finishes the incantation, the ghost’s brother appears. The captain apologizes for killing his “own brother” and I chew my own arm off.

The two ghosts...cancel each other out, or something? Thanks for the symbolism, Chuck.

The next day, Bela tosses some cash at the Winchesters as a thank you. “Ponying up ten grand is easier for you than a simple thank you? You’re so damaged,” Dean says. Bela calls Dean on his bullshit projection.

Dean decides to take the money Bela gave them to go on a holiday to Atlantic City. (Amara, is that you?) Dean assures Sam that he’ll be fine once he’s dead. “You’re stronger than me,” Dean tells him. I shriek at levels so high it’s practically undetectable.

“I’m a big boy now. I can take care of myself,” Sam retorts (not helping his case, let’s be honest). He tells Dean that the important thing is to SAVE DEAN. He wants Dean to care that he’s dying!

Dean stares at the road with the eyes of a drowning man, slipping helplessly under the water. “I think I’ll play craps,” he decides while Sam gives his best grouchface to the passing streetlights.

Shipping Quotes:

“How do you sleep at night?” “On silk sheets, rolling naked in money”

You know when this is over, we should really have angry sex

Don’t objectify me

Want to read more? Check out our Recap Archive!

#spn recap #dean winchester #sam winchester #spn 3x06 #red sky at morning #supernatural season 3

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whileiamdying · 3 years ago

Audio

If you asked ten people at random what they know of Vincent van Gogh, they would probably tell you ten different things: He was an artist - Don McLean wrote a song about him. He loved sunflowers; he lived in a yellow house. Kirk Douglas played him in Lust for Life! He fought with Paul Gauguin. He cut off his ear. He went to an asylum. He painted the Starry Night. He committed suicide. All of these facts are true, but they only begin to sketch the broadest outlines of the tortured story behind the existence of this man, who remains one of the central figures in Western Art.

Van Gogh didn't begin painting until he was twenty-seven and died ten years later. But during that brief lifetime, he created over 2000 works of art, including the nearly 900 oil paintings on which his reputation rests. There have been many biographies of him, which tryto make some order of his life; assigning blame to his family and his strict religious upbringing. And there are numerous catalogues of his art, where you can look at the works in chronological order and try to use them as a key to break the code of his lifelong mental unrest.

But what Massimiliano Siccardi and Luca Longobardi have brought here is something completely different. To begin with, it's not a conventional art exhibition where the paintings hang on a wall, while you walk by them and connect the dots in your own mind at the end. It is a unique combination of art, music, cinematography, and immersive theatre that Siccardi has been developing for nearly 30 years.

From humble beginnings with a single slide projectorto the technical wizardry you're aboutto experience. This is called Immersive van Gogh with good reason. The projected images and haunting musical soundscape will surround you and make it impossible for you to react passively. You will not be presented with completed works that you can study dispassionately. Siccardi wants you to understand, no, to feel, what the act of creation must have been like for van Gogh.

Images assemble before our eyes from darkness, with a line here, a splash of color there - until the painting finally reveals itself. And all the while, Longobardi provides you with music that stirs your senses further - sometimes classical, sometimes original, sometimes from the world of modern song - dipping into sources as diverse as Edith Piaf and Thom Yorke.

Is it presented in chronological order? Yes, and no. There are fourteen segments; van Gogh's Stations of the Cross, as it were. And though the overall arc of the presentation passes through the major places of van Gogh's career - Antwerp, Paris, Arles - the paintings do not necessarily appear when they were created. Rather, it is as though we see them when they emerge from van Gogh's consciousness, at a particular point in time. And when is that point? Could it be in the last moments of the artist's life? Or during the day-to-day struggle that existence became for him in his final years? Perhaps the answer can be found in van Gogh's own words, "l dream my painting, and I paint my dream."

(04:06 - 04:28) Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, Prélude begins to play (04:29) Colm Feore continues

Immersive van Gogh doesn't begin at the start of the artist's life, not immediately, at any rate. First, Siccardi wants us to meet the man who painted his final works at daytime, in the fields, swatting away hundreds of insects from his canvases, as he tried to convey his vision. Or indoors at night, where he wore candles on his hat so he could paint long past midnight, burning with a passion to communicate. Next, we're plunged into a world of yellow, the color van Gogh employed with increasing frequency in the final years of his life. A color that, in Siccardi's words, "breaks forth like an epiphany, appears and disappears inside his mind like a memory recorded only on canvas".

And then, we are in the Netherlands, where Vincent Willem van Gogh was born to a strict, Dutch reformed family on March 30th, 1853. Named after his grandfather and most tellingly, a brother who was stillborn a year to the day before Vincent's birth. Although drawn to art at an early age, van Gogh tried to please his family by immersing himself in business, then religion, working as a missionary in the Belgian coal mines, but failing at all he tried. Siccardi describes the world he brings us at this point as, "made up of thousands of gazes from all the people he met, hard days, religion mixed with rebellion, a constant feeling of strain, and wanting to be accepted."

This period in his life came to an end around his thirty-second birthday when his father died and his fiancé attempted suicide. Van Gogh said goodbye to the stifling atmosphere he had endured all these years and painted his first great canvas, The Potato Eaters, as a summation of all that helped to form him, for better or worse.

After a frustrating year studying at The Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, van Gogh finally broke away to Paris where he moved in with his younger brother, Theo, who was to be his financial and emotional support for most of his remaining life. Siccardi sees Paris in van Gogh's life as not only a destination, but the symbol ofa journey of personal growth.

Paris is the place to become great, among the great ones. van Gogh found himself admiring and sometimes adopting the colors and techniques of the impressionist artists of the period: Cezanne, Seurat, Signac, and most importantly, Paul Gauguin, who was to have a tremendous impact on his life.

The years in Paris were an important time of growth for van Gogh, but his heavy drinking and constant socializing wore on his health and his relationship with his brother Theo deteriorated. For all those reasons, van Gogh moved six-hundred kilometers to the south to the town of Arles, hoping the climate would improve his health and dreaming of what Siccardi calls, "a big hope" - gathering a community of painters under the light of Provence, in order to create and grow together.

Van Gogh only lived in Arles for fifteen months, but it was the most creative period in his life yielding 200 oil paintings and over 100 drawings and watercolors. He became obsessed with Gauguin joining him there to establish their colony of artists and lease the famous yellow house, furnishing it for Gauguin's eventual arrival, which took place on October 23rd. The two men painted together happily for a while, but before very long, their relationship grew strained and van Gogh threatened Gauguin with a razor.

On December 23rd Gauguin checked into a hotel fearing for his safety and that night, van Gogh severed his own left ear with the razor. Gauguin left Arles soon after; van Gogh spent weeks in and out of the hospital suffering from delirium. As Siccardi says, "lines shatter, perspectives distort themselves lighting up the dark night sky pervading us with imaginative powed' On May 8th, 1889 van Gogh committed himself to the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy.

(08:55 - 09:16) Pictures at an Exhibition: the Great Gate of Kiev by Modest Mussorgsky plays (09:17) Colm Feore continues

Van Gogh seemed to improve during his initial months in the asylum and painted some of his most famous works including The Starry Night. In Siccardi's words, "locked up behind high walls, in a round and always repeating path, the trapped body wanders relentlessly. The mind is frozen inside the void, but a thought breaks forth like a kaleidoscope - multiplying the colors, the matter, the spaces." His condition soon declined, but he still left the asylum after a year and moved to the Paris suburb of Auvers-sur-0ise to be treated by Doctor Paul Gachet who had worked with other artists. He found himself drawn to the wheat fields, writing to his brother, Theo, that he related to their sadness and extreme loneliness, "The canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words."

Finally, on July 27th, 1890 Vincent van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver and died just over a day later from an infection. According to Theo, the final thing he said was, "The sadness will last forever. But Vincent was wrong. Within a decade, international exhibitions had made him a highly esteemed figure in world art and, as more became known about the tragic circumstances of his life, his painfully empathetic work served as an inspiration for millions of souls. He shows us that even the darkest night can be bright with stars.

Siccardi concludes that the lasting power of van Gogh's work is that we are witnesses to a life filled with passion and unstoppable desire, and we abandon ourselves into this timeless beauty.

(11:13 -12:10) Adagio for Strings (Recomposed) by Luca Longobardi plays

#van gogh #immersive experience #las vegas

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tracle0 · 4 years ago

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WIP Bops Tag

So I got tagged for.... two music/listening related games in the span of two days so I will. Do both in one to save myself idk making another post lmao

First one: I think you just list things you’ve been listening to. Maybe the last ten things you listened to? I don’t know man. Tagged by the wonderful @kaatiba thank you boo

I have been listening to...

Cloud Cult - I stand by the fact that Cloud Cult 500% have the best bops for apparently all my wips. ‘Time Machine Invention’ is peak Leon, don’t try and tell me otherwise. ‘It’s Your Decision’ gives me big Percival vibes. ‘Good Friend’ apparently works for every single WIP I have because I write about friends too much.

Night Vale - I missed Night Vale ok. I’ve listened to it all already, but I wanted to hear the Strexcorp arc again, and the liveshow and Carlos man. Carlos.

I’ll Follow You Into The Dark - isolated song, but I have been listening to it over and over again, because it’s somehow playing my heart strings rather than a guitar. I am obsessed with this song. I learnt it on the ukuele as soon as I could. Major Mika vibes. Made me realise ‘ohhh he’s Catholic ain’t he’ and also made me figure out his friendship with Lynne more. Thanks, song.

Vienna Teng - someone else mentioned her recently, and I went ‘oh yeah I used to listen to her I should do that again’ the only memory I have of hearing her songs is. Not good. So I’m trying to get other memories down lmao.

I need to listen to...

Jake Parker Plagorised My Book which is a very cheerful subject. Quick run-down; Jake Parker is the creator of the yearly Inktober challenge. He plagorised the book of a black artist. I figured I should understand the Drama and then decide what I’ll do in October if not Inktober.

Okay that’s like five, good enough. Next tag game;

Rules: Share some songs that have inspired your WIP or characters, then tag some people to play! - tagged by @albatris thanks homie and I’ve decided I’m going to jump around between WIPs becuase I want to.

So first off I feel like the songs that first made me go ‘oh I could make a story out of this’ - DIAS spawned from ‘Hopeless Opus’ by Imagine Dragons. I got the idea for like. Two characters who were seperated for some reason, both regretting something, and went ‘okay! How.’ and my brain spat out Leon and Ant.

Whereas wip4 sort of spawned from both ‘On Melancholy Hill’ by Gorillaz, obviously, and also ‘Light a Roman Candle With Me’ by fun. And I cannot tell you at all why this story spawned from these songs. I think it was mostly... for Melancholy Hill, it gave me isolation vibes, and Roman Candle was more... a desperate reach for connection. wip4 has a focus on friendship. I guess that works?

DIAS again - ‘The Cave’ by Mumford and Sons is. Peak DIAS, not gonna lie. I have officially storyboarded out an entire animatic that is just the entire plot of DIAS to this song. Every verse sort of follows each act of DIAS and uhh

So make - your sirens song and sing - all you want I will not hear what you have to say

I can’t say why because major spoilers, but that lyric. Fits. Very well.

I mentioned ‘Time Machine Invention’ by Cloud Cult being a major Leon song, because it is, so I’ll talk about that here; Leon gets blown up at one point, and loses his leg. This, along with the fact he thinks Ant is dead, makes him Very Depressed. Vincent comes along like ‘hey dickhead stop being depressed’ except said in a slightly nicer way, and gives him a vote of confidence he needs to get up and try and fix one of the problems he has, that being the leg.

If we give this moment our fullest attention, we’ll just keep moving forward, with no need for going back.

Which is honestly, just really good life advice, but is also kinda Leon finally starting to let go of the guilt he has over possibly killing Ant and starting to live life without any new regrets.

wip4 again because this is getting long but I still have things to talk about; ‘Turn The Lights Off’ by Tally Hall is big It vibes, and I cannot tell you how but it does. I’m delighted to put ‘Holding Onto You’ by Twenty One Pilots as a major Keaton song, for the simple reason that Holding Onto You has tried to be a wip song for EVERY SINGLE wip, but it finally actually fits. Heck,

I’m taking over my body, back in control, no more shotty, I bet a lot of me was lost, t’s uncrossed and i’s undotted

is like. The first verse, and is also major Keaton being like ‘WOW WHAT THE HELL I WASLITERALLY DEAD UM WHAT’ and also the entire struggle against It. Fun times.

‘Hello, My Old Heart’ by The Oh Hello’s is a Big Percival Mood, and I can’t really explain why - extreme protectiveness over himself and trying to save himself??? Maybe. Uhh. I’ll give you an Abby song and then done with wip4 - ‘Icicles’ by The Scary Jokes fits her freakishly well. I just found out the artist is nonbinary, which is cool, but I’ll talk about that another day.

I can only be forgiven if I'm givin' myself up to you On a silver serving tray Must I bare myself to the stabbing of your knife and gnashing teeth While our lovely company appears so entertained?

I think Abby recognises that she is in the wrong for a lot of the story, but also thinks that admitting this to Percival would sort of... reverse their roles? That he’d want revenge and would inflict the years of pain she’d put him through onto her. He wouldn’t but she doesn’t realise that. So ‘must I bear myself to the stabbing of your knife and gnashing teeth’ is just. What she assumes she’d have to deal with.

Okay! Final song and it’s for DIAS and also for Simon cause we’re talking about villains okay. He’s got ‘The Greatest Show’ but specifically the cover by Panic! At The Disco. Simon is, to quote the lovely Summayah, ‘a dramatic fuck’ and this song is dramatic as fuck.

Don't fight it, it's comin' for you, runnin' at ya It's only this moment, don't care what comes after Your fever dream, can't you see it gettin' closer? Just surrender 'cause you feel the feelin' takin' over

Which is a pretty good way to explain Silvertongue commands and his general attitude to them, don’t you think?

I’m done now. I have more songs and entire playlists but I’m done, I’ve rambled enough, this is long. I will tag: @joyful-soul-collector @druidx73 @petrolstationflowers @scmalarky @the-starlight-chills and you sir, over there, please, tell me about songs.

#writerblr #tag game #songs #tagged in #id k man #was combining two tag games where I was bound to ramble a good idea?#maybe not #but we did it anyway and here is the result #congrats if you read this far this took me super long to type out for no reason lmao #if anyone wants the wip playlists they can have them #the dias one is the best of the two #because dias has been written and so I refine it constantly lmao #whereas the wip4 one is me going 'this kinda vibes chuck it in'#and when it's being written I'l be like 'oh I never used this song I shall remove it'#but yea if you wanna listen to them feel free lmao

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xxx-cat-xxx · 5 years ago

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What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood

Summary: The universe is saved, Thanos is defeated, the Vanished are returned, and Tony has survived (though with severe radiation burns and one less arm). Everything should be good now - except that it isn’t.

While Tony embarks on a painful and frustrating recovery, he wrestles with the fear that he’s no longer capable of caring for his family. Meanwhile, Peter tries to find his place in a world that just doesn’t feel like his own anymore.

Words: 13.5k

Tags: Irondad, Spiderson, Ironfam, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-it (but it takes a while to get there), Emotional and Physical Whump, very faint mention of death ideation, Injuries, Vomiting, Everyone needs a Hug

A/N: For @aderymoonlight. Thank you for the prompt and for waiting half a year until it was finally ready. A million thanks to @whumphoarder for being the world’s best beta reader (seriously, I don’t know how I would have done this without you). Additional thanks to @sallyidss, @twentyghosts, and @newnewyorker93 for helping me with the tricky details. You are amazing!

Link to read on AO3

___________________________

Like the flame of a candle caught in the wind, the arc reactor in Tony’s chest flickers, resists, and then eventually dies down. And so does something within Peter.

“Stay back!” Dr. Strange shouts. He draws a sparkling circle into the dusty air, encompassing Tony and Pepper before making them disappear right in front of Peter’s eyes.

And suddenly, Peter feels a wave of exhaustion crash over him. The world shimmers before him like it’s about to dissolve. He sinks to his knees, drawing in laboured breaths. It’s simply too much. Within one day, he went from a school bus, to another planet’s moon, to the battlefield where the fate of the world is being decided, and he feels as if some parts of him are still scattered throughout the universe.

Peter thinks he might throw up (or possibly faint), and he figures that he should probably alert someone to that, but the only person he actually knows around here is Mr. Stark, who might be dead, and oh god-

“Spider-Man?” It’s Colonel Rhodes, to whom Peter has spoken maybe twice in his life. But the man looks at him as if he’s known Peter for years, as if he’s relieved to see him alive, and as if he still isn’t sure whether Peter is actually back or just a dream. “Are you injured?”

“I don’t- I don’t know,” Peter stutters, and he honestly doesn’t. He tries to get to his feet, but the world starts to spin around him in a nauseating way, so he sinks back down onto his knees. He can taste bile at the back of his throat and instinctively presses a fist to his mouth.

“Okay.” Rhodey gives him a quick once-over, apparently not liking what he sees. “Stay put. Now where’s that goddamn magician -”

Then Rhodey is gone and maybe a minute, or a year, or a century later, the world explodes into golden sparkles and Peter has the unnerving feeling of being crumbled up into small pieces and sucked through the hose of a vacuum cleaner before being spat out again. He lands on a very clean linoleum tiled floor, his stomach in his throat.

He starts gagging for good then, and someone is shoving a kidney-shaped pink basin into his hands. Hospital, his brain registers while he heaves up the breakfast he ate years ago mixed with dust from another planet’s moon, all the while his heart pounding with worry for his mentor. He clings to the basin with all he has because something in him is still convinced that he might dissolve again at any moment.

“Take it easy, kid.” Someone is patting him on the back, and all Peter can do is nod before he is throwing up again. “Be right back,” the someone says, but then nobody comes back for a long time. There’s all hell broken loose around Peter, doctors and nurses running hectically to and fro, wheeling patients around. He knows that he should probably help - he’s Spider-Man after all - but he isn’t sure whether he can stand up just now.

It seems like years that he sits there, faintly wondering whether everyone has maybe just forgotten about him. He stops throwing up at some point, but still feels dizzy and his bones seem weirdly light, as if he might float away if he isn’t careful.

Then, finally, there’s a voice he knows. “Kid? Kid, is that you?”

“Happy?” Peter glances up and there he is, older and heavier and with a child in his arms.

“Kid? Peter? Oh god.” He sets down the girl and then encases Peter in his arms, tightly, the second completely unexpected hug today. “It worked. Oh my god, it worked. Where’s Tony?”

“I don’t know,” Peter croaks, and then, out of all the questions in his mind, he picks the most recent one. “Is that your kid?”

“What? No, no. That’s Morgan. She’s all Tony’s.” The girl has started to cry, tugging at Happy’s coat with one hand while hiding from Peter behind the man’s knees. “Okay, let me get her to Pepper and you into a bed - you look about ready to pass out.”

Ten minutes later, Peter is lying in a hospital bed, his suit pulled down to his chest to reveal dozens of bruises, an IV in the crook of his elbow and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his bicep, and all he can think is Mr. Stark has a daughter?

After a while, Happy comes back and shoves a phone into his hands. May is on the other side, breathing heavily. “Oh god, Peter, oh my god,” she chokes out. Peter tries to reply, but suddenly everything comes crashing over him and he’s sobbing, heaving, hyperventilating, until someone empties a syringe into his IV port that knocks him out.

May is there when he wakes up. The sedative is dissolving quicker in his body than it would in a non-enhanced human, but it’s making him drowsy and slow and his limbs so heavy that it feels impossible to even move.

“Hey darling,” May whispers, blinking tears away. May doesn’t cry very often, so this must be bad, he thinks woozily.

“I’m okay,” Peter slurs, despite having no idea whether that’s even true. And then, although sleep is pulling him under again, he simply has to ask, “Were you… here?” Because he has to know if she had to spend another five years in grief - has to know just how broken she is.

“No, honey, I was gone. Reappeared in our living room in the middle of someone else’s family dinner, just to see that they finally painted the walls.”

“Okay,” he breathes, and then, his eyelids already closing, he murmurs, “How’s Mr. Stark?”

“He’ll live,” May says. She adds something else, but he’s gone already.

When Peter wakes up the next time, May asks him whether he’s okay with her joining the understaffed nurses in treating all the wounded. Besides those hurt during the battle, many were injured while Returning, snapped back to life in the middle of road crossings or deposited into thin air where there used to be five-storey buildings. May’s a doer - she hates to sit idle when she could help - so Peter agrees immediately.

He’s got a bunch of broken ribs, a concussion, and a number of deep cuts, all of which are already starting to heal, but they let him stay the rest of the night because it’s not like he has anywhere else to go. The hospital is overcrowded, so they have to move him and that’s how Peter ends up in a bed next to Tony’s. There’s a thin curtain separating the patients from each other, but it isn’t pulled completely closed, so Peter is able to catch a glimpse of his mentor.

Tony is hooked up to so many tubes and wires that he looks like a Cyborg. Despite knowing that these are the very machines that keep him alive, Peter suddenly has the irrational desire to tear them all off and free him, as if that would make him healthy again.

He doesn’t, of course. Instead, Peter drifts a little, unable to really go back to sleep, and that’s how he witnesses Tony waking up for the first horrible time, before they put him in a coma for days. His mentor takes one painful, wheezing breath, and the only part of his face that isn’t covered by bandages shows raw panic. He makes a choking noise, gasping for air, and then cries out in a way that sounds barely human anymore.

He might be dying, Peter thinks. What if he dies here and now and I can’t do anything to stop it? But then a doctor bursts into the room and minutes later Tony is out again.

That’s the first time that Peter wonders how much it cost to bring him back.

Five days later, when Peter is long out of the hospital and the world is slowly starting to shift back into a state that once used to be called ‘normal’, when Tony finally stirs and his eyelids flutter open, Bruce expects a joke. A punchline. Triumph. A retroactive kick to Thanos’ ass.

But instead, Tony whispers, brokenly, “Please tell me it’s over.”

And then, to Bruce’s horror, he starts to cry.

The Parkers’ old apartment was rented out to new tenants during the five years they were gone. May takes one look at the family staying there, too many people for the three tiny rooms, and decides that she doesn’t have the heart to enforce her right of return.

Instead, they now temporarily stay in an awfully luxurious home that Happy arranged for them through Pepper. Peter knows he should be grateful for not ending up homeless, but he’d have almost preferred to live in one of the shelters where the rest of the Returned are staying, just to make him feel a little less out of place.

Everything is still settling - the bureaucracy’s gone crazy, and school won’t start for another month at least, which will likely result in severely shortened summer holidays - but May is already back to work. The hospitals are still overfilled and every person with medical knowledge is needed. Thus, Peter spends his time catching up with Ned and MJ and trying hard not to think too much about what happened.

A few days after Tony has woken up, Happy texts Peter to let him know that he can visit.

Happy picks him up with an electric car that opens with a fingerprint sensor - despite half of the world’s engineers being dusted, technology seems to have advanced quite a bit. He’s as grumpy as ever, but somehow in a softer way that makes it clear to Peter he doesn’t really mean it. He glances at Peter every few seconds through the rearview mirror as if he still can’t believe that the kid is back. Peter can’t blame him. He himself has a hard time digesting what all has happened, and more than once he’s woken up bathed in sweat from a nightmare of Titan.

There are drawing books and a plush toy in the backseat of the car and Happy doesn’t say anything when Peter eats a chocolate muffin and the crumbs fall down onto the leather upholstery. It’s nice somehow, but also weird. Just another detail that makes Peter realise what all he’s missed. Happy is ‘Uncle Happy’ now.

Peter’s stomach is curling anxiously when they pull up to the hospital. He wants to see Tony, but something about the memory of him wheezing in the hospital bed is gnawing at him. He wonders how much Tony has changed in the five years that passed. He wonders what he’s going to say to him.

In the end, it turns out that his nervousness was in vain. Tony is fast asleep when he arrives at the hospital, knocked out cold by the combined force of painkillers and the effort of having been awake the whole morning. He doesn't flinch when Morgan scrambles over him in the hospital bed with her stuffed animals. The girl doesn't seem to be phased anymore by the tubes and wires sticking out of her dad, but Peter is careful not to touch anything, afraid that a single wrong move might worsen Tony's condition.

Tony looks a bit better than he did the day of the battle, but not much. His right arm is gone - nothing left there to be salvaged, they say. His face is still mostly covered in bandages that run down to his shoulder, but Peter can see that his right eye is continuously leaking tears from below a burnt eyelid.

“We'll let him know that you came by. He'll be glad,” Pepper promises, and Peter nods and thanks her but secretly he isn't so sure that Tony would be glad about being seen in this state by anyone. On the other hand, that was the Tony of five years ago, and the more Peter observes everyone around him, the more he realises that he knows practically nothing about this new Tony.

He asks Happy to drop him off at Ned’s and they spend the evening getting up-to-date on the state of the world’s computer games. For a few hours, he almost manages to pretend that everything is normal.

Recovery isn’t a straight road.

Ten days after the battle, just when Tony is able to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time and the doctors are starting to reduce the meds that keep him high and loopy and generally incoherent, Tony’s stump arm gets infected.

Pepper first notices the chills that run through him while he weakly plays with Morgan in the hospital bed. By evening, he is throwing up what little lunch they managed to make him eat and the next day his temperature is up to 103 degrees. The meds do nothing to keep away the fever dreams. Pepper finds herself at her husband’s bedside once again, squeezing his one remaining hand while he moans and shivers his way through the nightmares and pain.

He has a seizure the night after that when his temperature hits 104. Then Tony’s heart gives out and for a few terrible hours Pepper is afraid that after all he’s gone through, this is how they’re going to lose him. She has Morgan in her lap on the waiting room bench outside while the medics are shocking the life back into him, not sure whether her child is holding onto her or the other way around.

Tony wakes up with a gasp. His memory is a blur of pain and surreal, screwed images of a world in which everyone he loves is dead. But that can’t be true because just next to him, his wife and daughter are sitting, very much alive, looking at him with obvious relief on their faces.

“What appn’?” he croaks, trying to reach for Pepper with an arm that isn’t there.

“Drama queen,” Pepper whispers, and he notices she’s crying. “I almost thought we were gonna lose you.”

“What, because I took a bath in gamma radiation?” he replies with a smirk. The words get stuck somewhere in the middle, but she understands anyway, smiling through the tears on her face.

Tony, it turns out, is stubborn as a mule. After they resuscitated him, the antibiotics finally showed some effect in fighting the infection. His fever breaks two days later.

It’s the only time Pepper has cried since they left the battlefield. Rhodey talks the doctors into putting a second bed in the room and takes Morgan out to the playground for some distraction. Pepper makes it to the bed before collapsing, then sleeps for 14 hours straight. Tony, still feverish and weak, joins her for most of the time, but watches her whenever he wakes, wondering how he ever deserved someone like that.

He remembers the battle with a mixture of horror, awe, and disbelief. They did it. They won, just like the kid said. Everyone is alive, has come back to life, except for Natasha, who definitely deserved better. But Tony knows that everyone in his team would have thought it worth to trade their own life for so many others’, the assassin included.

It should all be good, then.

But it isn’t. It won’t be for a long, long time.

“Tony, it’s okay, you’re okay, hey, just wake up -”

“Oh god,” he jerks awake with the leftovers of a scream on his lips, taking huge, desperate gulps in an attempt to suck in air. It was real - so fucking real.

“Breathe with me.” Bruce’s voice is impossibly calm and reassuring. Tony would call him out on not being that kind of doctor if only he could spare the breath to do so. His chest is hurting so much that he’s almost sure he’s dying for real this time. “In and out. Come on, Tony. Look at me.”

Tony tries, tries so hard, and after a few minutes he’s gotten himself enough under control that the pain in his chest subsides and the air actually reaches his lungs. But with the oxygen comes the realisation, crystal-clear. It’s not over. It will never be over. Even after his death and defeat, after being killed not once, but twice, Thanos still has a firm grip on Tony’s mind. The disappointment hits so hard that it drives tears to his eyes.

“It’s okay,” Bruce says. “You’re okay now. We’re all fine.”

“It’s not okay,” Tony croaks, defeated. “It’s not fair. It’s over, we won, this isn’t supposed to happen anymore -”

Bruce gives him a sad smile. “PTSD doesn’t end when the threat goes away, Tony. That’s why it’s called post-traumatic.”

“I know,” Tony replies impatiently, remembering New York clearly enough, how he never really left space even after coming back to earth. “I just thought that now - now that we’ve brought them back - that it would make a difference.”

But that’s it, the ultimate proof that it’s not Thanos who is responsible for how screwed up Tony’s mind is, but Tony himself. Defeating Thanos was not a magical solution to all of Tony’s problems the same way that Thanos’ plan was not a solution to any of the universe’s problems.

He almost wants to cry. “Will this ever get better?” he asks, voice impossibly small.

Bruce gives him a sad look. “I’d like to say that it will, but I don’t want to lie. You know, my father died almost thirty years ago, and there are still nights when I wake up and feel like he’s leaning over me, about to hit me with a belt.”

Tony bites his lip upon that admission, feeling ashamed and angry all the same. Bruce is somehow dealing with his trauma - hell, everybody is. He shouldn’t be having so much trouble pulling himself together.

“Don’t think that.”

“What?” Tony asks.

“I can see it on your face. Stop thinking that you’re being silly. You’re not. I know how much it screws with your mind.” Bruce’s voice is warm as he continues. His huge finger lightly brushes Tony’s hand. “We’re all here for you, you know that, right? And once you’ve recovered a bit more, maybe you could give therapy a chance.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, his voice lacking conviction. “Thanks, big guy.”

He doesn’t want to go back to sleep, but the meds he is on don’t really leave him any choice. He sinks back onto the pillows. Minutes later, he is falling through a hole in the sky. Thanos is exactly where he left him.

When he was younger, Peter used to own a game in which he had to tilt a small wooden maze back and forth until the tiny metal balls contained in it rolled into the right divots. It’s a little how the world feels to him now. People are trying to find their place, struggling to fit in, but there are just too many metal balls and not even close to enough divots for everyone.

Peter’s lucky. With May, Ned, and MJ all having been snapped, nobody close to him has moved on without him. This is what he tries to tell himself whenever he doesn’t recognise a reference to a movie, or when he realises that his juniors are suddenly a whole head taller than him, or when he mourns the loss of all his personal possessions. Ned is much worse off. Only half his family got snapped, and his mom moved on - and in - with a new boyfriend in the meantime. After Ned and his father Returned, his parents have been fighting without break until Ned temporarily moved to stay with one of his uncles. MJ categorically doesn’t talk about her family, but May’s heard rumours that MJ’s older brother left during the five years and still hasn’t been found.

Peter’s lucky. That’s what he tells himself when he gasps awake from nightmares of Titan, of Tony’s deathly pale face in a heap of rubble, when he has to dig his nails into the back of his hands so hard that they draw blood just to convince himself that they won’t dissolve in front of his eyes.

Instead of crime fighting, he goes out scouting. One night, he climbs a garbage heap near their former apartment and finally finds the old suitcase that holds Ben’s few remaining personal items. He cries a bit then, because it’s the middle of the night with no one to see the tears on his cheeks, and it’s all just a little too much.

May doesn’t ask where he found the suitcase when he hands it to her during breakfast the next morning. She just brushes a finger over the dark rings under his eyes and hugs him tightly before making him the first cup of coffee he’s ever tasted.

Tony’s spent a lot of time in his life ‘recovering’ from something or another. There was the heart surgery he underwent after getting his arc reactor removed, the terrifying weeks in the cave with Yinsen where painkillers were a rarity, blurry periods of rehab in his twenties that he can’t really remember, and the time after Siberia with a cracked sternum that he doesn’t want to. He’s used to dealing with a body that’s held together mostly by morphine and willpower.

So when the doctors tell him that it will take a long time until he will be able to walk again, that blood pressure regulation will likely be an issue for the rest of his life, that the nervous system on his right side is fried, that he is lucky he didn’t lose more than an arm (and technically an ear, since he is almost deaf now on his right side), Tony doesn’t break. No legs for a while then. One ear, one arm. It’s not ideal, but he can work with that.

Tony spends the next week with Pepper and Morgan, eagerly awaiting the day he will be allowed to go home. He is usually exhausted enough by lunch that he has to sleep for a few hours, which annoys him almost more than anything else. The fever keeps coming back in the evenings, but he ignores it the best he can and dials up the morphine enough to be able to think through the pain without getting drowsy. He bullies Rhodey into smuggling a tablet into his hospital room and clumsily starts to draw up schematics for a prosthetic arm with his left hand during the nights when he is alone.

The kid visits one day. He looks tired and sort of nervous, but he is still absolutely alive (which Tony knew, of course, but there are only so many times you can see someone die in a nightmare before you start having doubts), so alive that Tony feels himself tearing up a little.

Peter stops dead in his tracks when he enters the room, his eyes widening at the sight of Tony’s burnt and scarred face. The stump arm is only covered with a light bandage now and Tony’s sunken eyes and hollow cheeks betray the days spent in a feverish haze. Pepper said that the kid visited before, so he must have known what was coming, but Tony guesses that it’s still kind of a shock to realise the permanent nature of all the damage. He himself still avoids mirrors as much as possible.

Sensing that the situation has every potential to slip into the worst levels of awkward, Tony ploughs ahead. “Guess that’s it for the Playboy cover shoots then,” he jokes lightly.

For a moment, the kid looks baffled. Then the corners of his mouth lift and curl into a smile. “I think they would make an exception for the superhero of the year.” He steps fully into the room and carefully settles on the chair next to Tony’s bed before blurting out, “Mr. Stark, I’m so glad you’re not dead!”

Half an hour later, the two have pulled up the schematics for the prosthetic arm and Tony is explaining all the special features to the kid. Tony’s head is aching and the phantom pain is bad today - he knows he was due for more painkillers a while ago. But this is fun, this is what he’s been missing for five goddamn years, and for a moment, it feels like nothing has changed at all.

The kid looks exhausted and Tony makes a mental note to check in with May as soon as he’s more able to make sure that there’s no lasting damage from their involuntary trip to space.

“You’re adding a soldering iron to your own prosthesis?” Peter asks, flabbergasted.

Tony smirks. “Come on, you can’t tell me it’s not cool.”

“It is, but then add some more real-world practical things as well. Like a can opener.”

Tony sputters. “Next Pepper will ask me to integrate a spice grinder for her cooking. And Morgan will want storage space for Alpaca food.”

“You have an alpaca?” Peter’s face screws up and Tony can practically see how he is trying to fit this new information into the mental image he has of his mentor.

“It’s all the kid. Morgan has a very soft spot for animals. Even spiders.” He winks. “But she’s also into race cars and explosives, so don’t worry, I’m pretty sure she’s actually related to me.”

Peter chuckles and Tony is overwhelmed by the urge to take Peter to the lakehouse to meet Gerald and his daughter just as soon as he’s allowed to go home.

“Fireworks,” Peter says eventually. “You should add fireworks to the arm.”

Tony opens his mouth to protest, then closes it again and slowly makes a note on the sketch for the prototype, the letters a bit awkward from writing with his left hand.

“Speaking of special features, I’m gonna make you a suit with the newest tech and then you can go patrolling again,” Tony promises. “I know you can’t wait to get back to your secret identity. Just hold on a few more days before going out, okay?”

“Sure, of course,” Peter says with a nod, visibly happy that Tony has brought up the topic.

Then the nurse comes in and coaxes Tony into taking his meds and drinking water, for which he has to sit up completely. It leaves him dizzy and a bit out of breath. He leans his head back against the headboard and holds onto the sheets with his hand, counting down from ten. When the black fades away, Peter is looking at him with a faraway and slightly sentimental expression on his face.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Make it Tony, will you?” Tony says. “I think we’re past the formalities now.”

Peter swallows. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, Tony. I just...thank you for bringing me back. For saving us all.”

Tony waves his hand dismissively. “Eh, a few more times saving the world and I’ll get a free frozen yogurt.”

Happy comes to pick up the kid and drop a package off for Tony, who passes out as soon as they leave. When he wakes up in the late evening, the nurse informs him that Pepper and Morgan visited for a while but didn’t want to wake him up.

After choking down a tasteless dinner (he really needs to make a hefty donation to the hospital so that they can upgrade the cafeteria) Tony shifts gingerly to the side of the bed and bends down to pick up the cardboard box from where Happy set it. It contains the two pieces of the first prototype for the arm he’s designed over the past week.

It looks almost like a real arm, but he couldn’t resist adding some red and gold around the wrist and on the fingertips. The robotic prosthesis is based on musculoskeletal modelling, is neuro-adaptive, and, of course, powered by a tiny blue arc reactor set into the palm. Tony positions the upper part between his thighs, then takes the lower in his hand and sets out to connect the two pieces and -

It doesn’t fit. He tries again, thinking it was just his shakiness or a stubborn hinge somewhere, but no, it simply doesn’t fit. Upon closer inspection, the lower piece is about three millimeters wider than the upper one. It’s a small error, but enough to make it impossible to connect the pieces into a functioning prosthesis.

“FRIDAY,” Tony asks, trying to drone out the growing panic and the sound of his heart beating loud and fast in his ears. “There must have been an issue with the printer.”

“No, sir,'' the AI replies from the speakers of his phone on the bedside table. “It was printed exactly according to the specifications you entered.”

“Who made those measurements?” Tony asks, his breath quickening. He knows the answer. Of course he knows the answer.

“You did, boss.”

And that’s when Tony breaks.

Of course, the past week he’s been in pain and on drugs and not exactly clear in his head, but he’s worked in much worse states before. High on cocaine and perpetually drunk throughout most of his thirties. In Afghanistan, with a car battery keeping his stuttering heart alive. God, he invented a new element while literally dying. He is Tony Fucking Stark. He doesn’t make mistakes.

Except this time, he did.

The doctors say it will most likely not get worse, but they’re not sure whether it will ever get better. Tony’s brain, his essence, is most likely forever going to be damaged.

He is still cleverer than the majority of the human population, so nobody seems to think much of it. Tony, on the other hand, can’t help but feel like his world has been shaken to its core. Physical impairment is bearable; he has worked with that before. But if he can’t trust his own mind, he’s useless. Worse, he’s a liability.

He nods politely at the doctor whose last sentences are already being swallowed by the rushing in his ears. Then there’s only silence and the long, deep breaths he takes to fight the tightness in his chest.

“We’re gonna figure this out, Tony.” Pepper’s hand comes down on his shoulder. She looks at him as if she’s expecting a panic attack, and the funny thing is, he’s expecting one as well. But that’s the thing about anxiety; it’s anything but predictable. It rarely strikes when you expect it to.

Tony swallows. He doesn’t trust his voice, so he just grabs her hand with his remaining one and squeezes tightly. He once tricked his own heart into functioning again, but this time, it’s the very source of his intelligence that’s bailing on him. He doesn’t admit it to Pepper, but the truth is, he has no idea how to figure this one out.

They let him go a few days later.

“Daddy is crying,” Morgan points out in a stage whisper when Pepper pulls into the garage at the lake house.

“I’m not,” Tony corrects from where he is sitting next to her in the backseat. “My eye is a bit broken, just like when the tap was leaking in the kitchen, remember?” But his voice is suspiciously hoarse and through the rearview mirror Pepper can see him blinking rapidly. She can’t blame him - she’s feeling pretty sappy herself at bringing him home. For a while, neither of them were sure he’d ever see the lakehouse again.

The short walk to the front door and into the living room is tedious. Tony is operating a crutch with his left arm, his stump shoulder supported by Pepper while Morgan is impatiently running ahead of them. By the time they settle down onto the living room couch, all colour has drained from Tony’s face. He is panting and sweating and generally looking about ready to keel over.

“Let’s go and feed Gerald!” Morgan begs, climbing up onto her father’s lap and pulling at the chords of his sweater. “And then I’ll show you the tree house I built with Uncle Rhodey while you were at the hospital, and then we eat dinner, and then you have to read ‘If you give a mouse a cookie’ to me.”

“Sounds good, Morguna,” Tony replies in a slightly choked voice. He pulls her close to his chest and rests his chin lightly on her head, closing his eyes with a tired exhale. “Let me rest my legs for a bit, and then I’ll see what we can do, okay?”

And Pepper can see it, can spot on every inch of his face the frustration over how his body and his mind are betraying him battling with the gratitude for what he still has left. She can see his love for their daughter seeping from every pore of his body, but it is overshadowed by a fear that’s been in him for as long as she’s known him - a deep-sitting worry that he’s not good enough for any of the good things life gives to him.

All she wants is to find a way to make him understand that he deserves every scrap of happiness they can find together. She’s told him, in the early morning hours when nightmares would bar both of them from sleep and they were too tired to keep up their usual snark and banter. But sometimes words are not enough to make someone believe they deserve better.

She settles for bending over the two of them and pressing a long kiss to the top of each of their heads. Then she straightens up, puts on a smile and asks, “So, since it’s a special day, who’s up for cheeseburgers?”

It doesn’t really get easier. Something inside Tony seemed to have expected that things would miraculously improve once he was home, but of course they don’t. He’s still in a wheelchair most of the time. The physical therapist makes him stand up for longer and longer every day, which hurts like a bitch and regularly sends his blood pressure down to his ankles. Tony gets to see the living room from the perspective of the carpet more often than he ever wanted to.

He sleeps a lot. Maybe it’s his age that makes this recovery more difficult than all the previous ones, or the fact that the gauntlet has deep-fried his brain circuitry, but he can’t stay awake for more than half a day. Tony, who has been dealing with insomnia for as long as he can remember, thought he knew how it felt to be tired. But this is a different kind of tiredness, one that seems to stem from an exhausted brain, not body. He hates all the lost hours, hates the fog in his mind when he stays up too long, hates the nightmares that sometimes morph into anxiety attacks. Though it is arguably more bearable now that he wakes up to Morgan next to him playing with her Lego sets rather than a beeping heart monitor and a sterile hospital room.

Tony doesn’t give up on tinkering immediately. He tries to work on his arm again soon after he returns, but this time he can’t remember the exact modifications he'd planned for the dimensions. He hasn’t written them down anywhere and starting again from scratch seems like accepting defeat. So he boxes the arm back up and moves on to Peter’s suit.

He’s 3D-printed a new suit and is halfway through updating the safety systems when he notices the smell of smoke the same moment that FRIDAY starts sounding alarms. By the time the garage sprinklers have extinguished the flames, half of the suit’s fabric is black and charred, the central chest piece melted into the work table. It turns out that Tony configured the charger wrong, putting 2200 instead of 220 volts into it. The wires connecting it to the plug overheated and ignited the fabric.

Tony knows what he should do. He knows that he should replace the wires, correct the charge load, finish the update, and print another model.

But this time, he can’t. It was one failure too many. This time, Tony doesn’t start over. Instead, he keeps staring at the remains of the suit until the spider emblem seems to have burnt itself into his retinas, feeling dumb and useless and old.

Peter got his mentor back, except that he didn’t.

Not today, kid.

He stares at the phone angrily, wondering why he’d ever expected anything else. It’s been the same reply in different variations all week, and he can’t pretend not to be bothered by it anymore. He knows that Tony is still recovering, but he’d said a few days before Peter’s new suit would be ready, and that had been two weeks ago. Many things might have changed in the five preceding years, but Peter can’t believe for the life of him that any version of Tony Stark would be able to resist the challenge of improving his tech.

Enough is enough, Peter decides as he pulls his very first suit out of the cardboard box that contains the few things he’s salvaged from the garbage dump. The empty days are starting to wear him down, and New York is going haywire with crime. With its population suddenly doubled, people are seeking out the houses where they used to live, fighting over homes, life partners, adoption papers, and much more. Peter knows he shouldn’t go out against Tony’s wishes, but then again, the Tony he used to know wouldn’t make him wait for weeks without a suit while sending him nondescript text messages that explain exactly nothing.

Peter needs an aim, and New York needs her Spider-Man.

He puts on the costume and looks at himself in the mirror. The old suit is a bit too short at the ankles and wrists, but it will serve its main purpose of concealing his identity. The one he was wearing during the battle got so damaged that it was practically useless even before they cut it off him at the hospital. And anyway, he wouldn’t want Tony to be alerted of his whereabouts.

Peter climbs out of the window and takes a moment to enjoy the wind on his face before swinging to the top of the opposite building. “Let’s go, Karen,” he declares, and then tries to ignore the ache of disappointment in his chest when he remembers why there is no reply.

It was one of the better days, up until the point when Tony decided to run a bath for Morgan.

Pepper is away for an SI event and Happy was looking after Morgan while Tony’s PT trainer tortured him during the afternoon. Afterwards, they settled in front of the TV, Tony swearing that he was fine and Happy could go home already, only to wake up two hours later to Happy stretched out on the sofa, glancing at him with a knowing smile while getting his fingernails painted green by Morgan.

His driver-turned-bodyguard-turned-forehead-of-security-turned babysitter left after dinner, and Tony practiced walking up and down the stairs for a while with Morgan cheering him on. It was almost like their evenings before, almost, if not for the nagging feeling in the back of Tony’s head that he’d be incapable of protecting her in case something happened.

“I want the blue bubbles,” Morgan decides when he helps her settle into the bathtub. “And the subarins.”

“Submarines,” Tony corrects with a smile. He pours the blue bath foam into the water and brings her the box with all her bath toys.

“Did you take Gerald inside his house?” she asks with a serious frown between her brows.

One evening the previous week, Tony forgot to take their alpaca back into the stable, cuing it to disturb their breakfast by shoving its face through the porch door in the morning and trying to eat Morgan’s cereal. Nothing bad came out of it, but it seems to have left a dent in his kid’s brain because she’s been asking Tony about it every night since then.

“Let’s see. Did I bring Gerald inside, FRIDAY?” Tony addresses the wall.

“Yes, boss,” FRIDAY replies. “However, the porch door is still open.”

“I’ll go and close it,” he says to Morgan. He playfully splashes a bit of water onto her face before pushing himself up with a groan, his back and legs making him very aware of the exercise he did today. His blood pressure isn’t really cooperating with the change in elevation and he has to brace himself against the wall inconspicuously to wait out the headrush before he can continue.

Tony slowly makes it down the stairs, relieved when he finds the wheelchair where he left it downstairs. He rolls out onto the porch. The sun has just set on the lake, and there is something peaceful about the scene. The first stars are appearing, but not enough yet that he has to look away and find something to hold onto so as not to lose his grip on reality.

Or that’s what Tony thinks. But when he blinks, the sky is suddenly pitch black and he is covered in goosebumps. Tony pinches himself and then glances at his stump arm to make sure this isn’t a flashback.

“Shit,” he curses, rolling back into the house. “FRIDAY, how long was I out there?”

“One hour and thirteen minutes, boss.” She seems to hesitate for a moment before adding, “Your vital signs did not indicate any stress, so I did not alert you.”

Tony curses again. He ditches the wheelchair and takes the stairs as fast as he can, black spots dancing in his field of vision. He almost staggers into the wall before shoving his shoulder into the bathroom door and-

“Look, Daddy, my fingers are all wrinkly now!”

Morgan is sitting in the now lukewarm water, surrounded by toys, presenting her hands to Tony with bright excitement on her face. He stops, his heartbeat thudding in his ears and sweat running down his temples, then slowly lets himself sink to the floor.

“Daddy?” Morgan prompts, realising that something is off. “My fingers will be alright, won’t they?”

Tony swallows hard. “Yeah, kiddo,” he replies tonelessly and forces a smile onto his face. “Your fingers will be just fine. Come on, let’s wash your hair and get you dried off.”

Tony manages to keep it together until he has settled Morgan in bed. He reads her her favourite book, his voice and arm shaking only the slightest bit. Morgan stares at him suspiciously, so he flicks her nose and tickles her until she is gasping for breath. He kisses her goodnight, closes the door, supports himself down the stairs to the master bedroom, and only then does he break.

Tony hasn’t had a panic attack this bad since just after he came back from Titan, but the helpless feeling he has now is much the same as then. At that time, he was unable to save the universe, had let Peter die in his arms; now he’s letting down his family, unable to protect those he cares about. Or, even worse, he’s actively putting them in danger by zoning out for an hour.

It’s been years since Tony has thrown up from panicking. He tries to keep it down, but then the nausea gets so overwhelming that he has to scramble for the trash can near the door and heave and retch until all that comes up is burning stomach acid.

Pepper finds him like this twenty minutes later - panting and shaking, still clutching the trash can to his chest. “Tony!” she yelps, then catches herself and lowers her voice. “What’s going on?”

He swallows heavily, searching for words. “I-I forgot Morgan in the bathroom. She, it must have been an hour, and I, I just- I can’t-”

“Shh, calm down. She’s okay, Tony, we’re all okay.” Pepper crouches down next to him and lets her hand rest on his. “Breathe with me, alright?”

He gulps down bile and air and tries to concentrate on sucking in oxygen. It takes a long time until his heart slows down a little. Pepper gently takes the bin away and then settles next to him, wraps an arm around his shoulders, and pulls him close. Tony feels himself go limp. He lets his head fall back against her collarbones, his body heavy with exhaustion and failure.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, huh?” she asks after a while, handing him a tissue that he tries to take with his right arm before remembering he can’t.

“I’m nothing without my brain,” he replies, choked. “My brain, my mind - that’s who I am.”

“No, that’s not true. Who you are is this.” Pepper taps on the scar tissue on his chest, then lets her hand rest there, warm and reassuring. “And this is all that counts. I know it, and so does Morgan.”

And Tony would love to believe her, but he can't any more than he can use his right arm.

Peter is tired and school hasn’t even started yet.

He’s tired from not being able to sleep, from waking up to the ever-same nightmares in the early morning hours. Tired from having the same conversations over and over again, Oh, you got snapped? What about your aunt? Did you get your apartment back? Tell me, where did this bruise come from? He’s even tired of Ned’s and MJ’s subtle concerned looks and May’s not-so-subtle suggestions that he let his secret identity rest for a bit. He’s tired from looking at his phone and wondering whether there’s ever going to be an answer to the texts he keeps sending.

He’s not tired of Spider-Manning, but the crime rates are skyrocketing. Often times, nightly patrols stretch well into the next morning, and despite feeling like he is finally able to do something useful, it starts to wear him out after a while, making him reckless and more prone to mistakes than usual.

A week after he resumes patrolling, a robber breaks his finger and he spends the night shuffling back and forth between the freezer and his bed, replacing the ice again and again. A woman who Returned to find her husband living with a new wife wreaks havoc at their house and hits Peter with a baseball bat when he tries to stop her, giving him a concussion that forces him to bunk over at Ned’s for May not to realise. She does anyway, and lectures him about being more careful while dosing out painkillers into his palm the morning after. Another night, May has to stitch up a slash wound he got from a man trying to blackmail an employee of the insurance company not to revoke his life insurance money.

Then, after a more peaceful patrol when he is already on his way home, Peter finds an elderly woman with dementia trying to enter her old apartment in which a new couple is living now. The woman introduces herself as Mrs. Jackson and offers Peter jellybeans from an ancient-looking package in her handbag, which he politely declines. Peter manages to talk to the two men before they call the police, then tracks down the woman’s daughter and drops the lady off at her new address. He declines the money the daughter tries to give him, but accepts the chocolate bar, munching on it as he one-handedly swings his way back home. The sun is just setting and he watches it go down from one of his favourite viewpoint on top of the Daily Bugle building.

“That was a good day,” he says to himself. Still looking towards the river, he shoots a web over his shoulder to the building he knows is on the other side of the street and lets himself fall backward.

The problem is, Mrs. Jackson is not the only one who sometimes forgets that the city is not what it used to be five years ago. The building on the other side of the street has been demolished. Peter’s web sticks to nothing. He realises this a split second too late. Frantically, he shoots another web into thin air in an attempt to save himself, but it’s fruitless.

While falling, Peter thinks that the integrated parachute in the Iron Spider suit would be really useful just about right now, and that’s when his body crashes into a streetlight. Pain flares up in his stomach. It feels as if he’s being ripped apart from the inside, and that’s the last thing he knows.

The first time he wakes up, everything is blurry and moving in slow-motion. May is there, holding his hand, and he is in much less pain than he remembered. Peter blinks a bit and tries to feel for the boundaries of his body, but he seems to have become one with the hospital bed. He closes his eyes again.

The second time, he’s much more lucid. A worried-looking Happy is sitting at his bedside and explains in a forcibly slow voice that May has “finally” gone to sleep and Tony is on his way to the private hospital they took him to. Peter nods, which seems to set in motion a chain reaction in his body, because ten seconds later he is retching bile into a basin Happy hastily shoved under his chin.

They had to remove his spleen, Peter learns later, when his stomach has calmed down a little and he is sipping Sprite through a straw. From what he can gather, he wasn’t in any mortal danger, but that is mostly due to the fact that his spider powers took the brunt of it.

The cup grows heavy in his hand while the nurse is explaining this, and then Happy takes it from his fingers with an unusually kind gesture, briefly brushing his hand through Peter’s curls before he nudges Peter’s head onto the pillow. “Get some more rest,” he says, and Peter obliges, woozy and relieved that Happy isn’t angry.

Tony, as it turns out, is.

Peter wakes up when he hears the tap, tap of the crutch on the tiles. He is thrown back to the walking cane of his fifth grade math teacher until he hears Tony’s voice ask someone “Is he awake?”. Then his mentor opens the door to the hospital room.

Tony looks better than the last time, but somehow simultaneously worse. His burn injuries are healed - the scars still stand out, though slightly less angrily than Peter remembers. But he’s lost weight, the circles under his eyes are larger than ever, and his usually meticulously shaven beard has become an unkempt mixture of grey and black. All in all, he has the air of someone who isn’t taking care of himself.

“You look kind of bad,” Peter starts, and maybe this isn’t exactly a polite thing to say, but his brain is still a bit messy and a part of him is simply pissed at his mentor.

“You are one to talk, boy-without-a-spleen,” Tony rebutts, the sarcasm sharp, his usual playfulness lacking completely. “So that’s what I get for snapping your ass back and asking you not to play superhero for a while.”

Peter stays silent now and bites his lip. They’ve been here before and there is really nothing new to say about it. He isn’t even scared now - just weary. He feels centuries older than that time he stood at the edge of the city and Tony took his suit away.

“So we’re doing the not-talking thing now?” Tony asks, almost casually. He sits down heavily on the chair that Happy left abandoned, and it doesn’t escape Peter’s notice that a sheen of sweat has already formed on his forehead from the strain it seems to have taken him to come here. “Because, trust me, I’ve got four decades more experience playing that game than you.”

“That’s not it,” Peter protests. “It’s not like I want to go against you, but what was I supposed to do? Sit at home while all this crime is going on in my city and do nothing about it?” He takes a breath, his cheeks burning from anger and embarrassment. “Nobody even hurt me, okay? This just happened because I messed up.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?” Tony demands. “Because it’s literally doing the exact opposite. Fuck, kid - do you realise that this is exactly why I asked you not to go out? You need to get used to the city again, get settled in your new life. I asked you to wait. I wanted to keep you safe -”

“But I don’t want to be safe!” Peter interrupts, exasperated. “Nobody needs a safe Spider-Man! If you’d wanted that, you’d never have taken me to Germany!”

That’s a low blow - Peter can see it. Tony’s tired eyes widen a bit and he takes a deep breath before continuing in a forcibly calm voice, “I was there in Germany with you. I knew what we were dealing with. I was looking after you, something you don’t seem to be capable of doing on your own.”

“I get hurt sometimes, so what?” Peter asks bitterly. “All the Avengers do. You did - you nearly died. So why is it a problem if it’s me? If you think I’m not good enough at what I’m doing, just say it. Because I don’t know what you even see in me.”

Tony sighs and runs his hand through his thinning hair. “What I see is potential, kid,” he says, softer than before. “So much potential. But you would need someone to steer you in the right direction, to make sure you don’t die before you make it through college. And that someone can't be me.”

“Because you have your family, I get it.” Peter tries not to sound too bitter, not to let the nagging, ugly feeling of jealousy take over.

“No, Peter - no that's not -” Tony cuts himself off, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. “Damnit, kid!” he snaps. “Why do you have to make this so hard?”

There's tears burning in Peters eyes because it's not him who's making it hard, it's his life that won't ever give him a damn thing for free, ever let him keep something beautiful.

“Kid. Look at me,” Tony urges him. “I care about you, a lot, okay? I can't watch you get hurt, not after…” Tony trails off, swallows, looks away. “I realise that I can’t keep you away from patrolling. It was dumb of me to even try, and I won’t do it again. But I can’t - I won’t be involved in this anymore.”

It’s like someone has punched Peter in the gut. He would have been fine with Tony banning him from patrolling or talking May into giving him house arrest. He expected that, almost. That would have easily been worth the crimes he prevented over the last week. But this - this hurts somewhere else, somewhere deeper than his pride and his childish desire to be taken seriously.

Everything he thought was there between Tony and him seems to have dissolved to dust on Titan.

Tony takes out his sunglasses and puts them on, not bothered by the fact that it’s still before sunrise. “You know that bird guy you webbed to the floor during our little tussle in Germany? Calls himself Falcon. I’m not a fan, but I think it might be good for you to meet up with him sometime, practice superheroing. He’s got…” Tony takes a deep breath, his voice shaking a little now. He suddenly looks so, so old. “He’s got Cap’s shield now, I’ve heard. I’ll ask Happy to send him your number.”

He doesn’t want me. I’m a burden.

Any reply burning in Peter’s throat is gone. When he looks up, he thinks he glimpses tears in Tony's good eye, behind the dark glasses.

Peter’s own eyes are stinging. He swallows. “Okay, Mr. Stark,” he says tonelessly.

His legs feel numb when he pushes himself up. There’s a heavy feeling of nausea in his stomach that has nothing to do with his injury. “I’ll go and take a shower,” he adds without looking up at the older man.

“Will you be okay on your own?” Tony asks.

Peter doesn’t even know whether this is about the shower or something bigger. He tries not to care too much. “Yeah. It’s fine.”

He doesn’t look back before shutting the door.

“It’s fine,” Peter told Tony.

But it isn’t. Nothing is fine.

Peter gets out of the hospital the next day, and that same evening, he’s back on the streets. Happy sends him Falcon’s number, and apparently, even sent Falcon Peter’s because he receives a constant thread of texts asking for a meeting. Peter ignores them; the last thing he needs is another person promising to look after him only to quit halfway through. Or, maybe, he thinks when he barely escapes a mugger’s bullet the weekend following, maybe that’s not entirely true. But he doesn’t want one anymore. Spider-Man can just as well work alone.

Happy keeps calling him, but Peter doesn’t answer his calls either. Thinking of Happy makes him think of toys in the backseat and a small girl with Tony’s eyes, and he doesn’t want to remember that because then jealousy boils up, hot and sour in his stomach. He feels infinitely stupid for ever thinking that there could be more between Tony and him than their superhero relationship, for thinking that he was anything more to Tony than Spider-Man.

“I see potential,” he keeps hearing when he tosses and turns at night in his bed, and yeah, that’s all he ever was to Tony, apparently.

School starts again and they finally move into their own apartment, almost an hour away from their old one. And maybe, just maybe, Peter should have been more careful in a neighbourhood he doesn’t know yet. Maybe he should have read the news and followed his suspects for a while before starting to fight. But every time he webs up a criminal, every time he hears a thank you from someone he saved, it feels like he’s proving Tony wrong.

So Peter keeps doing it, studying by day, fighting crime in the evenings, and sometimes he is so exhausted that he actually manages to sleep through the rest of the night without any dreams. He’s tired, and he’s reckless, and he’s doing the exact opposite of what Tony has asked him to. But that’s just one more reason not to pick up Happy’s calls.

Tony doesn’t hear Rhodey approaching from the right with his bad ear, so by the time he realises that his friend has found him, it’s already too late to escape.

Rhodey cuts straight to the point. “When Pep told me she couldn’t find you, I thought you’d have escaped to the workshop or be out flying around with the suit. But this worries me almost more.”

Tony looks up from the box he’s been bent over at an awkward angle from the side of his wheelchair, packing screwdrivers and bolts. It’s a wheelchair day, of course, as were all the days in the past week. And the one before that, as Pepper kindly pointed out this morning.

“Why?” Tony retorts. “Didn’t you all tell me it was a good choice to retire?”

“Retire from being Iron Man, yeah. But Tony Stark not tinkering? What the fuck is going on?”

“Nothing left to tinker with,” he says simply. “And I’ve got more time for Morgan this way.”

“Tony, I’m not buying it,” Rhodey says with a huff. “Just because you got some memory problems? I mean, there’s gotta be an easy way around that. You can programme FRIDAY to remind you of everything important, you can- ”

“I know,” Tony cuts him off. He’s done that, of course - first thing after the bathing incident. He doesn’t leave the house anymore without an earpiece connected to FRIDAY’s server, and has programmed her to alert him of the tiniest things he might forget. But it doesn’t help. He can’t explain the feeling of inadequacy, of constant fear that he’s missed something important, something vital, something that is going to put everyone he loves in danger. He can’t trust his brain, and thus, he can’t trust himself with anything he’ll build.

“What about your arm?” Rhodey asks. “I thought you were making a prosthesis.”

“Not a big loss,” Tony says with a shrug. “One is more than enough for cooking and reading bedtime stories.”

“And the spider kid’s suit?”

Tony stiffens and sticks his chin out slightly. “What about it?”

“I’m not dumb, Tony. The reason we pulled off the whole time heist in the first place was because the only way you could get over your survivor’s guilt was to either bring the kid back or die trying.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Tony scowls.

“Yeah, and now?” Rhodey demands. “You’re just gonna let him get killed by a random thug on the street because he doesn’t have a proper suit?”

“It’s not -” Tony breaks off, inhaling sharply. “I’ve got him monitored, okay? And he’s supposed to get in touch with Cap’s feathery friend. I just - I can’t do this mentoring thing - not anymore. It’s just not feasible.”

“And why would that be? Wouldn’t it be better if you were looking after him as best you can instead of completely shutting yourself off? Wouldn’t it be better if-”

Tony cuts him off, “Maybe it would have been better if I’d just died during the snap.”

There’s a sudden silence. Rhodey’s eyes keep holding Tony’s steadily while he slowly shakes his head, but Tony can see the sadness contained in them. He already regrets that he said it out loud, his stupid mouth running ahead of him and spilling out what nobody was supposed to ever hear, but it’s too late now, always too late.

“Nobody wants that, Tony. And I don’t think you do either.” Rhodey swallows, then goes on in a softer tone. “You think you’re useless like this, but you’re not. Not to anyone. You’re way too absorbed in mourning what you lost to understand what all we gained.”

“I am seeing what I gained,” Tony insists, sounding almost desperate in his own ears. “I’ve got my family. This is what counts, not the tech I build. I am okay, Rhodes - stop giving me that kicked puppy look. I am fine.”

“Yeah,” Rhodey snorts, turning around to leave. “Convince yourself of that first.”

The warehouse is huge, filled with alien tech that definitely shouldn’t be being loaded into a stolen Joey’s Pizza van. There’s only two of them moving the product, and that should have probably made Peter think a bit more before jumping down from the ceiling with a “Boo!” and webbing the two men’s hands to the pillars. The tech they’re stealing is emitting a constant low-pitched hum and that’s messing with Peter’s senses, which probably should have been yet another reason to wait before he engaged.

But it’s been four nights and 20 hours of sleep in total, and the paparazzi published a picture of Morgan Stark’s first day of school today, showing a worn-out looking Tony with sunglasses waving to her out of the open car window. The headline read “Shocking Revelation: Iron Man Too Weak to Walk His Daughter to the Classroom Door?!”

Flash showed Peter the magazine with a raised eyebrow, casually commenting, “Guess that’s it for your Stark internship, huh?” Peter flipped him off, but the rest of the day he just felt empty.

“Resistance is futile!” Peter shouts at the criminals while webbing their feet to the pillars for good measure. Then he fumbles for his phone in the suit pocket in order to call the police, and that’s when his whole body explodes into pain. It feels as if every single one of his cells is individually being hit with a baseball bat. His knees give out under him, and while falling, he can see the sardonic smile of a woman with a taser stepping out of the shadows.

“I’ve never liked spiders,” she announces. Then Peter’s head hits the floor with a thud and he blacks out gratefully.

“Boss.”

“What?” Tony jerks awake at his work desk, his heart hammering up into his throat. “What - What did I miss, Fri? What did I do?”

“You did nothing wrong, boss. But I thought you might want to be informed that Peter Parker hasn’t returned from his nightly patrol. He is four hours past his usual curfew.”

“The kid? What? Where is he?”

“I cannot say this for sure, but security footage saw him entering a warehouse in Brooklyn at 9pm. A Joey’s Pizza van left from there an hour later, which has now reached the following location.” She displays a map with a highlighted area in the upstate region. “This warehouse is not an official Joey’s Pizza property.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Tony mutters. “Are there any security cameras inside the building?”

“Negative, boss. However, I can locate Mr. Parker’s smartphone in a two-mile radius of the warehouse. It makes sense to assume that he is being held inside.”

“Is he injured?”

“I can’t tell from the data I have. It seems that Mr. Parker is not currently using any of the suits you made for him.”

Of course he isn’t. Tony feels a surge of self-hatred rising in his chest, together with the all-too-familiar guilt. He should have known Peter wouldn’t play it safe. He should have checked on him much earlier. There’s a whole laundry list of shoulds and woulds for him to deal with later, but right now, he doesn’t have time for that. He needs to get Peter out of there.

“FRIDAY, inform Rhodey. Get him there ASAP.”

“Doing so as we speak, sir. However, Colonel Rhodes is currently in New Jersey and will take approximately 40 minutes to reach the location.”

“Shit,” Tony mutters. “What about Falcon?”

“Mr. Wilson is on a visit to Wakanda.”

Tony curses under his breath. He scours the map again, then racks his brain for anyone else he might call. But, honestly, who is he kidding? The decision has already been made.

“Boss-” FRIDAY begins when he pushes himself out of the wheelchair and reaches for his crutch, breathing through the headrush that comes with standing up too quickly.

“Save it, FRI. I need a suit.”

The AI directs him to the cabinet where he stores his nano housing units. The Mark 85 would have been a better choice, but he hasn’t even tried locating it since coming home after the battle. For all he knows, its pieces are still lying somewhere on the field of rubble that used to be the Avengers Compound.

The armour envelopes him with a feeling that is both familiar and strange, like coming back to a childhood home. It also hurts. The suit is doing most of the work for him, but the sheer strain of being upright without a crutch is a lot, and the extra weight on his legs and back is enough to have him panting by the time he staggers to the garage exit.

“Fuck,” he breathes when his vision clouds up from the effort. “This is not working.”

“Sir, Colonel Rhodes is already on his way. I advise you to wait -”

“Stop it.” Tony takes a deep breath to drown out the rising panic. “FRIDAY, is there any morphine around?”

“That is not a wise idea, boss.”

“Come on, we’re running out of time!”

The AI silently lights up a path through the cardboard boxes littering the ground to a medicine cabinet on the other end of the garage. Tony finds the morphine and injects himself with a dose as high as he dares without his mind getting fuzzy. He needs to think clearly now.

The relief is instantaneous. The pain is still there, but it’s muted enough that he can walk out of the house and take off relatively steadily.

It takes Tony less than ten minutes to reach the old warehouse. By the time he touches down, he is severely lightheaded, but the adrenaline and morphine are holding him together just enough that he doesn’t fall over. He makes a quick detour to the back of the building and then blasts himself through the front door (“Here’s my plan: attack”) because time is a sensitive factor, and frankly, he doesn’t have any better ideas.

He takes the first guy out before the man even has time to react. The second one jumps behind the van that is parked in the middle of the large hall and starts to shoot at Tony with something that is emitting blue energy sparks and is definitely not legal. Tony takes cover behind a pillar (while definitely not leaning against it) and breathes for a moment, surveilling the scene.

Peter is being held in the back of the warehouse. They put him in a cage - a fucking cage with enhanced security that Tony constructed years ago when they were fighting alien wolves in Central Park, and this fact alone makes his insides burn with rage. The kid is apparently unconscious, chained to the bars with handcuffs way above his head, which appear to be the only thing currently holding him upright. There’s blood on his face that seems to stem from a wound on his head where he must have been beaten, but it’s dried. FRIDAY informs him that the kid is breathing, thank god.

The guy with the electric gun is situated between Tony and the kid, so he’s gotta deal with him first. “FRIDAY, I want a big boom in twenty seconds,” he instructs.

“Timer set, boss,” the AI replies into his good ear.

Tony steps out from his shelter into plain view, ignoring the exhaustion weighing him down. He fires a series of blasts that tear through the walls of the van, causing the vehicle to skid towards the right side of the building. He can hear a curse and then the sound of hasty footsteps as the man runs towards the backdoor, trying not to be crushed by the vehicle, and that’s exactly where Tony wants him to be.

“Hey, asshole!” he shouts. “Come out of your rabbit hole and show your face!”

The man cocks his electric gun. “Iron Man, what a surprise. The papers say you’ve retired? Shouldn’t you -”

Tony never gets to know what it is he should be doing, because that’s when the bomb he planted outside the back door blows up with a satisfactory boom. The man is blown off his feet just as he shoots a blast of light blue energy at Tony, flying a dozen feet through the air. Tony doesn’t hear the thud when he hits the ground because he’s too busy getting out of the line of fire. He almost succeeds, but it’s not enough. The blast catches him at the side, sending him stumbling blindly back into the pillar.

“Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark, please! Can you hear me? Tony!”

Tony isn’t sure at first whether he is actually hearing the kid’s voice or it’s just a memory conjured by his hazy mind. His good ear is ringing, the other one gone completely deaf. There are sparks of white dancing in his field of vision and the suit is pretty much the only thing holding him upright now. He turns slowly, staggering on the spot, and yes, the kid is awake, thank god, though he is barely holding himself upright.

Through the haze, Tony can see that Peter is signalling something to him, frantically nodding his head at something behind Tony. “What?” Tony shouts, his own voice sounding weirdly far away.

“-one more,” he can make out, and then it clicks. Tony raises his gun-arm and spins around, just as the woman crashes into him full force. The impact is more than enough to make him lose his balance completely. He hears shots while they tumble to the ground, feels something hit his helmet, his vision blacking out completely. He fires blindly, repeatedly sending out electroshocks until the body on top of him goes limb.

Then Tony breathes, in, out, pain coursing through his body like acid, his head throbbing as if it’s being hit with a hammer. He can’t really feel his right leg, but the pain in the rest of his body is more than making up for it. It’s not as bad as the snap - nothing ever was as bad as the snap, that was a million on a scale of one to ten - but it’s enough to let him know that any movement in the coming few minutes will most likely result in him passing out.

So Tony listens to his own breaths until he is sure he’ll stay awake. Then he turns, slowly, and rolls over onto his side until the woman’s body slides off him. He opens his eyes. His HUD is obscured with blood, so he opens that as well and finally gets to look at the kid.

Peter is crying, the tears that are running from his eyes slowly mixing with the blood on his cheeks. The moment his gaze meets Tony’s, relief blooms on his face. “You’re alive,” he breathes.

“Yeah,” Tony croaks. He isn’t sure whether his voice is loud enough to travel to the kid, so he says it again, convincing himself. “Yeah, I’m alive. And so are you, kid.”

“Can you -” Peter takes a hitching breath, almost a sob, “Can you get me out, please?” His hands wriggle in the handcuffs. It must be painful, because his expression turns into a grimace and he stops again.

“Yeah,” Tony reassures, then adds, “Just hold on. You’re fine, kid, you’re okay,” because Peter has started to cry again and looks seconds away from a breakdown now.

Tony pushes himself up on his arm. He gets one leg under him, then the next, and kneels there on the floor in his own blood. That’s as far as he gets before his strength leaves him and he slumps back, barely managing to stabilise himself. The world spins around him as if he’s on a fucking merry-go-around, the dizziness so overwhelming that he’s afraid he might throw up. Peter calls his name, and Tony tries again to get up - tries, and tries, and tries - but there’s a rushing in his ears that makes it clear this is a battle he isn’t going to win.

“Sir? Tony, please?” Peter sounds panicked.

And that’s what it comes down to. Tony, on his knees, mere metres away from the kid who is calling out for him, yet unable to reach him. He just isn’t strong enough. And this is it, this is the hard and cold reality, the true reason why he kept away from Peter for so long. Because when it truly counts, he is bound to fail him.

“I, I can’t get up.” Tony’s voice breaks when he finally admits it out loud, “I can’t, kid. I’m sorry.” It feels like he is saying so much more than that, and he wants to tell him, wants to explain how fucking much it hurts to fail him, once all across the universe and now again, and it seems like he can feel the dust coating his fingers once more. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, his cheeks feeling damp. “I am so, so sorry, Peter.”

“It’s - it’s okay,” Peter mumbles through sobs, but Tony knows it is not.

And this is how Rhodey finds them when he storms into the warehouse fifteen minutes later. Tony must have closed his eyes at some point in time, because it takes him a bit to react when his friend shakes his shoulder.

“Tony, thank god,” Rhodey says when Tony blinks up at him, the look on his face somewhere between relief and anger. “Why the fuck didn’t you wait for me?”

“You know why,” is all Tony says. “How’s the kid-”

“Oh god, Mr. Stark, Tony, are you alright?” Peter is walking towards him with an emergency blanket draped around his shoulders. He’s sort of unsteady on his feet and fresh tears are springing from his eyes when he kneels down next to Tony. “You, you sort of faded out, and I was so scared and I couldn’t get out of that cage and then I was thinking of the battlefield again, and -”

“Shh, it’s okay.” Tony didn’t think he’d have the strength to move and get out of the armour, but the sobbing kid in front of him gives him new energy. “FRIDAY, open up,” he murmurs. The nanobots retract and form a shield behind his back. Tony is grateful because he isn’t sure whether he’d be able to sit upright under his own power.

“Come ’ere, kid,” he says softly. Peter gives him a doubtful look, so Tony opens his arm and pulls him towards him. The kid leans his head against Tony’s chest, crying harder now, tears soaking Tony’s shirt.

“You’re okay,” Tony murmurs, just like he would when Morgan would come to him in the middle of the night, scared of monsters. “You’re okay, kid.”

“I f’cked up,” Peter sniffles. “I, I should have listened to you, I’m sorry- ”

“No,” Tony says firmly. “No kid, you didn’t. I fucked up. I fucked this up epically.”

“You saved the whole universe,” Peter protests through his sniffling. “You brought me back from the dead! And then you retired, but you still came here and saved me when I needed you.”

“But I couldn’t save you all the way,” Tony says quietly. He takes a deep breath, feeling his heart beat hard and fast in his chest. Time to be honest.

“Listen, kid. The snap messed up my brain.” He holds up a hand when Peter starts to protest. “No, I mean, quite literally. It doesn’t work as well as before. I...I forget things. I make mistakes - silly mistakes, dangerous mistakes. I didn’t...I didn’t think I could take care of you anymore. And tonight proved me right. But it wasn’t your fault, and I should have made that clear to you. I’m sorry, Peter, I should have told you.”

It feels weird to admit it to the boy what he hasn’t really been able to even acknowledge himself. Saying it out loud gives it an air of finality.

This should be the end, then. Giving up comes almost as a relief.

But then Peter gazes up at him with a look as if Tony had just said something incredibly stupid. “But I don’t want anyone else,” the kid sniffs. “I only want you as my mentor. I don’t care if your brain works or not. You just saved me, you came all the way here, and you - just, please, don’t go away again, okay?”

And sometimes the universe has weird ways of letting you heal. Sometimes it takes months of falling before you hit the ground, hard. And sometimes you need to feel the impact, really feel it, before you can start to pick yourself up again.

Tony looks at the kid in his arms, and he makes a decision.

“Okay,” he whispers. He pulls Peter closer and holds him through the weakness and the pain that encompass them both. “I promise.”

“Again! Do it again!” Morgan giggles.

Peter looks over at Tony, who raises his arm high into the air and gives him a nod, then Peter taps the instructions into the Starkpad. There’s a quiet pop sound from the bionic arm and a moment later sparkling fireworks erupt from it into the night sky, the red and gold reflecting magnificently on the surface of the lake. Morgan cheers and claps, and Peter feels a smile spread over his face.

“Again! Again!” the little girl demands, jumping up and down impatiently.

“Enough for today. Daddy’s tired, Morgan,” Pepper says firmly.

“But-”

Pepper gives her a stern look. “Why don’t we go inside and ask Uncle Happy to read you a story?”

“Okayyyyy,” Morgan pouts.

Peter turns his head towards his mentor. Tony does look exhausted and kind of in pain - Peter knows that the prosthesis hurts him whenever he wears it for too long - but there’s a warm shine to his working eye that Peter hasn’t seen before. He looks… at peace, in a way.

They make to follow Pepper and Morgan back to the house, Tony a little unsteady on his feet. “You okay?” Peter asks quietly so as not to alert Morgan, offering an arm to his mentor.

“Yeah,” Tony reassures, but then, after a moment of hesitation, he takes the arm and leans a bit of weight onto it. “What about you, kid?”

And Peter has to think for a bit, wondering about where his life could have gone and what it has actually turned out to be. He thinks of the battle and the nightmares and the hours in the cage and of Tony on his knees, unable to reach him.

Then he watches the last sparkles sink into the lake, followed by a loud “ohhhhh” from Morgan, and turns back to his mentor.

“Yeah,” he replies firmly, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

__________

All my fics

Taglist: @toomuchtoread33 @yepokokfine

@badthingshappenbingo - This is my prompt fill for the square “Cry into Chest”.

#irondad #spiderson #whump #hurt tony stark #hurt peter parker #fix-it #endgame #morgan stark #pepper potts #bruce banner #rhodey #vomiting #recovery #angst #emotional hurt/comfort #physical hurt/comfort #ironfam #this is the longest thing I've ever written and I am kind of proud

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eerna · 5 years ago

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“me freshman year of high school? yeah thats a protag” PLEASE elaborate

You got it. I shall now dramatically overshare how cliche my first high school was. God I went to a different place writing this. Watch me wake up tomorrow and delete it in panic, but just for tonight, let us relish in the drama

So, at 15 I was weirder, more shy and unaware of my own worth, had a resting bitchface and a 500 page book in hands at any given moment, had like 2 friends, kept a detailed diary, wanted to become an architect, had a not-like-other-girls mentality, and looked EXACTLY my age. Here, you enter high school based on your academic success and career path, and none of my friends made it into my Wow We’re So Smart school, which means that year I had the opportunity for a completely fresh start. I did it by spending the year growing into my very feminine nature, learning how to break my Cold Honors Student exterior and actually make friends. What a great premise for a high school drama heroine.

Drama plot no 1 was the BOY PLOT YAYYY but not really. Looking back, there was 5 recurring boys interested in me, and it ranged from childhood friends whose advances I was completely oblivious to, to jock classmates who hit on me head on for the first time in my life. But, being your everyday YA heroine, I didn’t really get it, because WHY would ANYONE be interested in borin ol me??? I must be SEEING THINGS~~ Enter resident Mean Girl- she sat behind me in class, our surnames were next to each other so we’d always get paired for assistant duty, and had her gang of annoying rich fashion girls who thought they were better than everyone else even though no one else did. She dated both of the jocks during the year, and the second one became her serious boyfriend for the rest of the year. Now, I have no idea what exactly went down, but apparently she couldn’t get over her boyfriend(s) paying attention to me, so she started doing the typical Mean Girl spiel. She gossiped, mocked, threw eraser particles at me, cut my hair when I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t take it silently, but I didn’t exactly fight her, either, because, um….. Her precious boyfriend was abusive. We all knew it. We all pitied her. What was I supposed to do but ignore those petty provocations.

Drama plot no 2 was when one of my middle school friend started acting like a movie cliche, too, and was personally offended I chose not to do it myself. Without going into detail, at the beginning of the year I was convinced I had to stay with her or she would do something horrible to herself, but she was a horribly unhealthy influence on me, and my heart was broken when we parted ways. (She’s great now btw!! She found help and is happy and content)

Drama plot no 3 was that, the longer the year went on, the more I realized I hated being there. Among the students, I was known as the smartest kid of the year, but suddenly I was facing- *shudders*- S E X I S M. My teachers were ignoring me, the rest of the Smart Squad TM (fully composed of boys) did too. Once we got a special assignment for math, and I uncharacteristically teamed up with the boys to solve it. I was the one to crack it, only to discover they took my work and presented it as their own, and I had no proof to go against a gaggle of teachers’ pets.

Drama plot no 4 was just a lot of parties and going clubbing for the first time, ya know, the music montage parts of movies except it alternated between me having fun and crying in the bathroom bc I kept getting overwhelmed. I never got further than tipsy, though, so I don’t have a corresponding story for that part of YA experience, sorry :///

There were a lot of small things too, like the time a friend shared a hotel room with the jock bf during a school trip and he kicked him out to spend a wonderful night with the Mean Girl, so he joined our sleepover and there were like 6 of us in one small bed and we were all cramped but happy. That same night we had a forbidden party in our room, and had lookouts for security and secret signals and had to hide from lights being shined through our window.

First day of school, I realized I already knew Mean Girl’s best friend, but not because I’d met her before or even seen her picture, but because one of my middle school friends knew her and her descriptions throughout the years were incredibly vivid (she hated her guts and went on rants about her ugly nose mole - which was not that large - and her inability to stop talking about her sister - during her “tell something about yourself” she showed us a note her sister, who’d graduated from our school, left in her pencil case - and how annoying her trumpet voice was - self explanatory). There was that time a friend’s friend asked me for nudes and, after a small heart attack, I spammed him with pictures of gorillas in heat.

Then, the obligatory sex ed episode, when the Mean Girl and her squad, being the only sexually active girls, bragged high and low abt some stuff I knew wasn’t biologically correct but had no interest to argue. I also found friends who liked anime, and we went to local cons together and had a blast. On my sixteenth birthday, I returned from the lunch break only to find the entire class (or most of them, I guess) standing around a desk and singing Happy Birthday, as a cupcake with a candle waited for me, and ngl I cried a lil bit. For New Years’ I had to attend three parties throughout the night bc I didn’t expect to have any plans, so I accepted three different offers without thinking (funny story, I didn’t get the photos from one of them until a month ago. Talk about a blast from the past). The first day after spring break, when a friend intercepted me as I was entering the classroom and requested me to close my eyes. I refused, very suspicious and caught by surprise, but he kept perstering me until I reluctantly did it, only to find an Eiffel Tower keychain in my hand- a gift from his vacation.

And the triumphant ending of my YA story, the conclusion of the character arc, came in October of the following year, when I realized I was so successful in reinventing myself my life flipped upside down and I decided I was more suited to a life of pursuing art and small pleasures than having to spend my life proving myself to people who didn’t make me happy. It was a tearful goodbye, no one really understood why I did it, but I transferred to music school, and from then on, my life became HSM and was like ten times less dramatic and wayyyy happier. The end

#personal #in case someone has it blocked bc hoo boy this is personal #eernanon #eernask

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magic5ball · 5 years ago

Text

Nature Trail to Hell Arc I: Nature Trail to Hell (5)

Chapter 5: Being Bad is Good as Long as You’re Being Bad to Bad Guys

Having slogged through the worst days in my ten-year-old life, it seemed like things were finally looking up. Well, that’s a stretch ever for me, but at least now I had a mission to distract from how sucky everything was. My theivery, or ‘Acts of true selfishness’ as Hilda called them, started with basic stuff: ketchup packets, napkins and the like. But my favorite was a trick where I’d rip the stickers right off kid’s shirts, replaceing them with sticky notes before they even noticed. The ol’ Switcheroo, I called it. Now, I know what you’re thinking:

‘Watt, if you were such a good kid, then why were you stealing?’

To which I’d like to point out that it ain’t stealing if you’re doing it from the bad guys. Like Robin Hood!

Meanwhile, Shatner was raising ticks and Lord knows what else under his bed. Whenever we reconvened, I’d always see them in his hands, little red marbles swollen with blood. Never did ask where he got the blood, though. Probably for the better.

Sometimes, before we lay our offerings to the Vessel of Darkness that was our camp mascot, Shatner and I would have a little talk. Turned out, he didn’t really want to eat boogers.

“Like the great snake tamers of old would gradually inject more and more venom into their veins to get an immunity, so I have tasted my own nasal mucus in hopes of being granted resistance to that fiendish concoction our benevolent hosts call ‘Turkey Meatloaf Surprise’.”

So if you couldn’t tell, Shatner was an arrogant prick who liked using a lotta big words, but prison breaking has a funny way of bringing the oddest people together. And we were no different. One day, we’d been bickering about whether or not the dreaded meatloaf surprise was from a mutant blob or something called pink slime when Shatner dropped the big one:

“If I might inquire, what drives you to abscond from this wretched hive of tyranny?”

I had no idea that half those things were even real words, but I got the message, so I told him about the big misunderstanding with the Leprechaun that had started it all, and my poor Gamekid at home, probably dying from neglect.

Shatner fished around his pocket and took out a crumpled piece of paper. After he unfolded it, I realized it was one of those old Kodachrome color photos. Now, I’m not what you’d call an arachnaphobe- back at home, I’d pick up spiders with my bare hands to put them outside- so I think it says something that the critter in the photo made me jump back a foot. The spider- at least, that’s what Shatner told me it was- was the ugliest little bugger I’d ever seen. It was at least the size of a dinner plate- no, dinner plates were the size of it- with fangs thicker around than my thumb and black eyes like bullets. Most spiders have hair, but this thing? I’d seen wooly mammoths that were less shaggy. But the most shocking thing of all was the photo showed Shatner wearing the thing like the world’s creepiest coonskin cap.

“This is Hixson. I think I forgot to feed him before I left.” He gripped my shoulders. Hard. “Listen, Watt. I’m a strong kid. I’m actually like fiber O’s. I could endure the vilest punishments of Hell if need be. But I cannot stand idly by while my best friend starves!”

I began thinking that wasn’t too bad for a prick who ate his own boogers, when in swooped Hilda, snatching up the photo and tearing it to pieces.

Shatner stared, on the verge of tears.

“Wh-Wot the deuce you do that for?!”

“Cool your jets, Shatner. We must offer our desires to our Dark Lord if he is to fulfill them.” She sprinkled the photo pieces like confetti around Freddie’s cage, the bits blending perfectly with the newspaper at the bottom.

Compared to Shatner or me, Hilda was a bit of a weirdo, which was really saying something, all considered. She never told us anything about why she wanted to do this, and when we did ask, she’d tell us it was none of our business. Or worse, threaten to turn us in.

Felt kinda bad for her, though, since being Camp Mascot Keeper meant she had to work harder than either of us to look like Hobag’s stooge, and I could see by the way the color drained from her face it was really taking something out of her. Smelled funny, too, but I never told her that.

The upside was she could pull some strings, so we’d often find ourselves paddling the same canoe, literally. Hilda said she just wanted time to hang out, but I knew it was cover for our little operation. She even thought of clever things like bringing along board games Shatner and I liked.

It was only over the last few days of our operation I noticed something odd going on with Freddie. There’d be flickers of time where his beady eyes would be filled with something like malice only his cute little self. On at least one occasion, I swore I heard him squeaking rap music backwards. I just figured he’d been listening to Hilda’s IPod. Though maybe I should have been more concerned with the technical details. Especially after he started vomiting up blood whenever we mentioned Jesus around him.

And that’s the way things were for a while. Shatner and I gather offerings, while Hilda would set them up around the cage, all while pulling the wool over Hoebag’s eyes. By the time a week passed, we’d made a tidy little monument to what could only be described as the world’s most gruesome scavenger hunt. Ms. Hoebag had even given Hilda a special scratch and sniff sticker as a reward for taking care of Freddie. Ripped it up and stomped it into the ground first chance she got. Guess I should also mention the chanting. It was how we’d end our secret meetings at Freddie’s cage, doing it holding candles for maybe five or ten minutes, then we’d go back to whatever hellish chore Ms. Hoebag had designed to build our character. Don’t remember the specifics of the chant (or chaunt, as Shatner liked to say), other than it sounded pagan-y with some belching. Still funner than singing about baby sharks, at least.

#My writing #Nature Trail To Hell #ferret #goth

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johaerys-writes · 5 years ago

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Dorian Pavus x Trevelyan

A World With You, Chapter 12: Fire in the Embers

Where Tristan accompanies Dorian to the Gull and Lantern to meet his father, even though Dorian is still mad at him and they’re barely speaking to each other. WELP

Follows Dorian’s personal quest “Last Resort of Good Men”.

Read here or on AO3!

**********************

“Gaps in the Armor.”

Tristan glared at Heir, the elven woman that Leliana had brought to Skyhold to train him. She was short and lithe, her dark, deep set eyes unabashedly meeting his in a level stare. The long stick she was holding was propped on the ground and she was leaning casually on it.

“We have practiced this attack already” he said.

“That doesn’t mean you did it well” she retorted flatly, not batting an eyelid. “Do it again.”

Tristan pursed his lips. He had never thought that he needed further training -years of sword fighting lessons in Ostwick had given him adequate skills to hold his own in a fight, any fight, or so he thought- but Heir had a mind of her own. She was apparently a master assassin, if anyone could be called that, and infuriatingly thorough in her instruction. She was shorter than a child, but her austere gaze made him feel as if he were ten years old and practicing with his fencing tutor.

With a sharp exhale he lunged forward, moving his dagger as precisely as he could, targeting the vital points that she had shown him. Shoulders, ribs, elbows, knees, any part of the body that could be peeking through plate armour, any place where a tendon could be slashed, incapacitating an opponent swiftly and mercilessly. The sun fell hot and burning on his skin as he flowed through the movements.

Heir avoided his attacks easily, moving only an inch away from the tip of his dagger, her hands holding her stick clasped behind her back. Maker, but she was impossible to catch.

Tristan took a step back, panting with the effort.

She didn’t even wait for a moment before ordering him again. “Mark of Death” she commanded in a low voice.

Clenching his jaws, Tristan obeyed. A half turn, a leap, a quick and flowing slash right for the heart. She evaded it effortlessly, stepping back as if she was lighter than a feather and turning his practice dagger to the side with the end of her stick.

“Again.”

Tristan scoffed as he returned to position. He threaded a finger through his matted hair to push it away from his face.

Another attack later and she had knocked his dagger out of his hand, his wrist was lodged firmly under her arm and her stick just a hair away from his face. He thought he saw contempt flashing in her dark eyes before she unhanded him without so much as a word and returned to her position.

Tristan ran his palm over his brow and let out a long sigh. His body was slick with sweat, fat drops arcing lazily down his back. It stung when it reached the sword wound that was still healing on his arm. The one Dorian had helped stitch and wrap.

It had only been a few days before, but it felt like a lifetime ago. Tristan knew he needed to have the stitches removed, but going to the healer to remove them always seemed to slip his mind for some reason.

His gaze drifted as if by instinct to the tall window on the side of the library tower above him. The window looking into Dorian’s study. Some mornings he thought he could sense him looking down into the yard from his spot in the library, watching him. Whenever Tristan looked up, though, there was no one there. Perhaps it was only his imagination.

“Inquisitor” Heir barked.

He jolted and blinked at her. She was staring at him so intently, for a moment he wondered whether he had broken a vase or dragged mud in the house from the garden.

“Knife in The Shadows” she said, flinging him his dagger.

He caught it in the air, and with an agile roll, he moved towards her and lunged, just as she had shown him. She parried his blow easily, but he kept slashing at her, again and again. A thrust close to her sides, and another towards her chest, and one more-

The elf rolled to the side just as he was about to dive in for her belly, landing on soundless feet behind him. The crack of her stick on his shoulder blades echoed across the yard. Pain, white and hot, spread along his limbs.

“Too slow” she said, swinging her stick along her side. “Again.”

Tristan took a deep breath, struggling to keep his composure, and shot her a menacing stare. It was with great difficulty that he resisted the urge to throw his dagger on the ground right there and then and make his way towards the tavern. A good drink would be just what he needed at that moment. He hadn’t had one in days. Ever since returning to Skyhold he had been avoiding going there, in case… Well. In case Dorian was there.

He looked back up towards his window, as if by rote. He wondered idly if Dorian even remembered he existed.

Heir’s voice came like a rude awakening. “I said again.”

Tristan grunted as he returned to position. “I heard you the first time” he grumbled, and leapt towards her.

This time, he managed to get close enough to her to almost touch her sides with the tip of his dagger, before she brought her stick down and cracked it against his wrist.

His dagger flew off his hand, and he growled in pain as he clutched his wrist close to his chest. He turned to her, his teeth bared in a snarl. “I swear to the Maker, if you touch me with that infernal stick again, I’ll-“

“You’re too easily distracted.”

“I’m distracted because you keep hitting me with that thing!”

She smiled, a cold, reserved smile that did not betray an ounce of emotion. “Unless you stop looking up at that window all the time, I’ll continue hitting you. You’re not paying attention. And in a real fight, if you don’t pay attention, you’re dead.”

Tristan grunted, rubbing his wrist, which was red and already starting to swell. “You think I don’t know that?” he spat. “I’ve been in more fights that you probably have!”

Heir scoffed, and the sound of it took Tristan by surprise. He never would have thought that this passionless being was capable of mirth. “You’re strong, Inquisitor. But you’re unruly. You can’t achieve anything unless you’re taught discipline.”

Tristan could feel himself trembling with anger. Biting his tongue, he bent down to pick up his blunt dagger just as a messenger arrived, looking at them both quizzically.

“What is it, Jim?” Tristan asked, pushing his hair away from his face.

The agent bowed his head reverently. “You Worship” he mumbled. “Commander Cullen is expecting you this afternoon in his office to go over the armoury report.”

“Right” Tristan said breathlessly. He glanced at the sun overhead, which was slowly reaching the center of the sky. “I think that’s as good a time as any to excuse myself.”

Heir fixed him with a hard glare. “Our training is not over.”

“Oh, I think it is” Tristan retorted, flinging his dagger on the ground and flashing her a smile that was not at all friendly. He picked up his shirt from the ground and pulled it over his head. “Tell the Commander I’ll come see him as soon as I’m ready.”

Jim bowed his head before leaving. “Of course, Your Worship.”

Tristan didn’t even spare a glance at Heir’s sour expression as he swiftly walked away.

The water from his bath pooled around his feet as Tristan got out of the tub. His muscles still ached from that dreadful journey through the Dales, almost a week after he had gotten back. Training with Heir every day had not done much to lighten his mood, and the bruise from the blow on his wrist was slowly turning purple. He swore to give Leliana a piece of his mind when he saw her again as he patted his sore arms down with a towel.

His clothes were clean and folded on his bed, no doubt by one of the many servants and came in and out of his quarters all day, and he dressed himself with slow, languorous movements. He was in no mood to hurry for his meeting with Cullen. He could allow himself a few moments of peace before having to think of all that.

Several reports were on his desk, signed and folded, as he had left them before going to his training. He took his time melting a little of the wax stick over a candle, and sealing each envelope with his signet. When the seals were dry, he placed the letters carefully in his coat pocket, and, with a soft sigh, got up.

He was halfway across the room when his eyes fell on the books on his coffee table. The books that Dorian had helped him find before they left for Val Royeaux.

Dorian.

Tristan almost wished Heir was there with that blasted stick of hers to chase the intrusive thoughts away. His heart tightened when he remembered that fight they had had, all those days before. Dorian’s face so close to his, the anger flashing in his eyes, the pain in his voice. But most of all, Tristan’s own reaction. Or rather, his lack thereof. He couldn’t help but curse himself every time that particular conversation came to mind. And it did come, often and at the most inopportune times, no matter how hard he tried to suppress it.

Things between them had not been the same after it. They had barely exchanged a few words while travelling. The only times they had talked were in the mornings, when Dorian would emerge from his tent to find Tristan sitting by the fire. Even then, their conversations had been so forced and awkward, that even remembering them made Tristan cringe.

A brief talk about their travelling schedule, or a comment on the weather. A polite smile. A momentary glance before they both looked away. Uncomfortable silence.

After that, Dorian would trail behind on his horse, not sparing so much as a glance in his direction. In the evenings, when they set up camp, he rushed through his dinner as if he couldn’t bear to be in Tristan’s vicinity, and then swiftly retired to his tent to read. Tristan could see the lamp light in his tent flickering until the small hours of the morning, hours that he spent sipping from his flask, staring at the fire. If it weren’t for Sylesta and her apprentice, he would have spent the entire journey in silence.

It wasn’t that he didn’t welcome the silence. After all the meetings in Val Royeaux, the months of running around on missions, those few days felt almost… calm. It would have been fine if his heart didn’t want to plummet every time he was met with Dorian’s reticent smile and the view of his back as he turned around and excused himself from his presence.

It had hurt, just as much as he had thought it would -perhaps more-, not talking to him as they used to. Whenever he happened to see him in the corridors in Skyhold, he had nothing but courteous greetings to offer him before hurrying along. As if they were strangers. Casual acquaintances. As if Tristan was simply a high ranking somebody, and greeting him was just a matter of propriety.

The thought left a sour taste in his mouth.

He shook his head stubbornly, willing the thoughts away. He was a fool. He knew that. All his life, he had done one foolish thing after the other. But he knew, with more certainty than ever, that cutting ties with Dorian was the best option at that point. No; it was the only option. For both of them. No matter how many times he ran the incidents of the past few days in his mind, or how many times he fantasised about having done things differently, having responded differently, having said literally anything that wouldn’t have reduced whatever he had had with Dorian to stiff greetings and awkward exchanges, the situation remained the same.

He had let Dorian come closer to him than anyone else had in years. He didn’t know what it was exactly that drew him to him, but whatever it was, it was nothing but a mad fancy on his part. A foolish daydream, that he had to put an end to. Dorian was much better off without Tristan, and Tristan without Dorian. Things didn’t usually go very well for those who found themselves close to him. Distancing himself was, undoubtedly, the right thing to do.

Then, if it was right, why did it feel so wrong?

“Because it is” a voice said behind him.

Tristan jumped, his hands instinctively reaching for daggers that were not hanging from his belt. Cole was sitting on his desk, his legs dangling over its edge. His pale face was obscured by the shadow of his wide brim hat.

“Cole” Tristan breathed, placing his palm over his rapidly beating heart. “Don’t sneak up on me like that. You almost gave me a heart attack.”

The boy mumbled something barely audible, his fingers pulling nervously at the frayed edges of his shirt. “Golden, gleaming, glittering to gloss a hidden hurt. Makes you laugh, can’t hate him if he shines so brilliantly. Angry words that hurt like stones, walls crumble, only to be erected again.” He hopped off the desk, drawing closer. Tristan almost took a step back when he extended his hand towards him. “He thinks about this sometimes” he said, touching a spot by the edge of Tristan’s mouth. “It makes him sad.”

Tristan gaped at Cole, struggling to make some sense of the torrent of words that was coming out of his mouth. “Wha- Who are you talking about?”

“He wonders why you haven’t gone to him. Home far away from home, searching, silent, seeking. You’re very much alike.” Cole chewed on his lip and turned to look at the fire in the hearth. He paused for a moment, as if trying to listen to something that Tristan’s ears couldn’t pick up. “Staring into darkness, thoughts heavy, spinning, things you couldn’t say but wish you had, things you said but wish you could take back. His voice helps you drown out the noise.” And without another word, he slowly walked away. He almost seemed to melt into the shadows along the staircase as he descended the steps towards the door.

Tristan stood frozen like a statue for several long moments, staring at where Cole had disappeared. Even as he walked out of his quarters, he was still unsure whether the boy had actually been there, or whether he just imagined it all.

He hadn’t properly stepped through the door, when he almost bumped on Mother Giselle. The woman bowed deeply as soon as she saw him.

“Revered Mother” he said through tight lips as he returned her bow with a curt nod, and tried to brush past her.

She smiled expectantly as she stepped before him to bar his way. “May I speak with you for a moment, Inquisitor?”

Tristan bristled, straightening up and fixing her with a hard stare. “I’m afraid I’m quite occupied at the moment” he said, a bit more tartly than he had intended. A chat with a Chantry sister was the last thing he needed that day. “Maybe some other time.”

“It’s regarding one of your companions” she blurted out as he pushed forward, swerving to the side to get away from her. “The… Tevinter.”

Tristan stopped in his tracks. His brows were furrowed when he turned to face her. “He does have a name, you know.”

His grim tone made the woman step back a little. “Of course, Inquisitor. I meant no offense.” She wrung her hands and regarded him seriously. “Are you familiar with Lord Pavus’s family?”

The unexpected question took Tristan aback. “I have heard of them. I know they’re not on good terms. What is this about, Mother Giselle?”

“I… have been in contact with them.” Before Tristan could challenge her on the reason of her being in contact with Dorian’s family, of all families, she continued. “They communicated to me their son’s estrangement, and they pleaded for my aid. They have asked that a meeting is arranged with a family retainer. Discreetly, if possible.” She emphasized the word in a way that made it clear to Tristan what she thought of his usual way of dealing with problems. “Since you appear to be on good terms with the young man-“, she uttered that bit with a slight wince, as if it pained her physically to acknowledge it, “I was hoping you would take him to this meeting.”

Tristan folded his arms before his chest and frowned at her. He had a good mind to really tell her what he thought of Dorian’s family’s laughable plan, and their even more laughable attempt to include both Mother Giselle and him in it. Glancing around the throne room, and catching the visiting nobles’ and Chantrics’ gazes that were already drifting towards them in curiosity, he quickly decided it was not a wise idea.

He let out a huff and ground his teeth in annoyance. “Mother Giselle” he said, lowering his voice to almost a growl, “I’m afraid I’ll have to remind you that it is not my place -or yours- to deal with someone else’s affairs. Not to mention the possibility of it being some kind of Venatori trap.”

“I… understand your caution, Inquisitor. The thought did cross my mind. In that case, you would be better equipped to deal with this than I. But if it is not, and it really is from Lord Pavus’ family” she said pleadingly, “would you stand in the way of parents wanting to reunite with their child?”

Anger flared hot in his chest, half choking him. He swallowed many of the more vulgar curses that came to his mind before speaking through tight lips. “I am not aware of the reasons why Lord Pavus decided to leave his ancestral home, but something tells me his parents had something to do with it. Why should they be given a chance to speak with him? If Dorian wanted to reunite with them, they would have written to him directly, don’t you think?” he hissed.

The woman’s eyes widened just a hair, and she opened her mouth to speak, but her words died away when Tristan waved whatever she was going to say away. “Still, you are correct that you wouldn’t be equipped to deal with a Venatori attack. Give me that blasted letter.” He extended his hand to her, gesturing impatiently. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Inquisitor” the woman said, evidently relieved. Reaching in the pocket of her robes, she handed him a letter. “I would suggest you read it carefully. Perhaps it will be illuminating as to their intentions.”

The parchment was thick, smooth and clearly quite expensive, and the writing on the back elegant and flowing. Whatever was in that letter, Tristan did not dare open it without Dorian present. He inspected it gingerly as he made his way towards the library, not even glancing at Mother Giselle before walking away. Dorian needed to see this, the meeting over the armoury reports be damned.

Tristan ascended the stairs to the library, where Dorian usually was. With every step that he climbed, his heart felt heavier and heavier, until he thought it would fall down past his ribcage.

What would he say to him? What should he do? Dorian wanted nothing to do with him, and for good reason. Tristan had behaved like an ass and had pushed him away without offering him the slightest explanation. They had avoided each other meticulously for days. And now he would show up at his desk, holding a letter from people that he possibly loathed?

He tried very hard, but he couldn’t come up with a worse scenario for them to get back on good, or at least speaking, terms.

Dorian was sitting on a plush, velvet armchair, sipping tea from a flowery porcelain cup, and flipping the pages of a thick book that lay across his lap. Upon noticing Tristan’s steps, he glanced up, his features tightening visibly. He let the book fall closed before placing it softly on the desk beside him, and stood up, smoothing his palms over his dark red robe.

“Inquisitor,” he said, bowing his head in formal greeting.

Tristan swallowed thickly, in an effort to dislodge the lump that had suddenly found itself in his throat. Dorian’s heady cologne reached his nostrils, chasing away any coherent thought that might have crossed his mind. His stomach was in knots, and the only thing he could think of doing was to turn around and walk back the way he had come. But even he could, he didn’t think he would ever want to turn his back to him.

Even as Dorian greeted him stiffly, almost ceremoniously, even when there was nothing but cool politeness in his steely grey eyes, Tristan didn’t think he possessed the willpower to tear his gaze away from his.

The letter felt cold and stiff in his hands. His voice, when he spoke, was a muffled croak. “There’s something you need to see.”

Dorian blinked at him and leaned forward only slightly, as if he hadn’t heard him. “I beg pardon?”

Tristan felt his face heating up as he cleared his throat. This was getting worse by the second.

“I… There’s a letter you need to see” Tristan said, rather ominously. No reason to dance around the matter. He was only in danger of embarrassing himself even more.

Dorian looked at him curiously under furrowed brows. He crossed his arms before his chest and titled his head. A small, slightly perceptible smile curled his lips. “Under any other circumstances, I would have asked you whether it is a naughty letter. But knowing how serious our Inquisitor tends to be, I’m only going to ask what makes it so important that you had to deliver it personally and not send it with one of the agents that usually do your bidding.”

The scathing comment stung, but Tristan didn’t let any of his hurt show on his face. His lips were only a little tight when he straightened up and glanced at Dorian levelly. “It’s not just any letter. It’s from your family.”

“My family?” The smug expression on Dorian’s face fell visibly. “Show me this letter” he commanded crisply, letting his arms fall. He snatched the paper from Tristan’s fingers and tore the seal open impatiently. His eyes ran swiftly over the page, the colour on his cheeks becoming brighter as he read on.

“A meeting?” he growled. “My father wrote to you to ask you to trick me into a meeting? Oh, this is so typical! To think that he had the gall to involve you in his pathetic schemes….” He huffed in frustration, the letter crumbling up in his fist. He was clutching it so tightly, his knuckles had gone white. “I bet this “family retainer” he wants me to meet will just club me on the head and drag me back to Tevinter!”

The anger in his voice tore at Tristan. He took a step forward before he could stop himself. “They can’t make you do anything against your will, Dorian. Not while I’m there.”

Dorian gaped at him. His eyes had gone impossibly wide, and for the first time in days, Tristan felt like he was really looking at him, and not through him, as if he had suddenly materialized before him. “You will… come with me?”

Tristan couldn’t tell why his heart thumped so wildly in his chest at the breathiness of his voice. The rotunda was buzzing with activity, but it felt like there was no one there but them. Any and all reservations flew out of his mind as he and Dorian looked at each other, holding their breaths.

“Of course I will,” he whispered, holding his gaze. “We can leave now, today, if you wish.”

Dorian glanced at the letter in his hand. His shoulders relaxed as he let out a sigh. “Thank you,” he whispered. There was some of the familiar warmth in his gaze when he raised his gaze to Tristan’s face. “Meet you at the gates in an hour?

Their journey to Redcliffe village was swift and mostly in silence. Dorian kept his eyes on the road for the most part, looking quite grim and taciturn as he swayed on his saddle. Their horses were both sweating and their mouths frothing by the time they handed the reigns to the stable boy of the Gull and Lantern, the inn Dorian’s father had indicated in the letter.

They ascended the stairs to the room the meeting was to be held, not saying as much as a word to each other. Outside the door, Dorian paused. Producing a small comb from his pouch, he combed his dark curls in place, then smoothed his palms over his dark brown coat.

“Now I’m ready,” he whispered as if to himself, and took a deep breath. He knocked on the door and waited.

The man that opened the door was older than Tristan expected. And his clothes looked much too expensive for a retainer.

“Father” Dorian growled.

The man returned Dorian’s angry look with a calm and composed one of his own. “Dorian” he said. He was well in his late-fifties from what Tristan could tell, but his thick mane was just as dark and glossy as Dorian’s.

His dark eyes fell on Tristan, and he bowed his head in acknowledgement. “Inquisitor. I am Magister Halward Pavus, Dorian’s father.”

Before Tristan could open his mouth to respond, Dorian took a small step forward. “Can we skip the pleasantries and get to the point?” he snapped. “This whole story about the retainer was a smokescreen, wasn’t it? You knew I would never agree to come if I knew it were you from the start. And bringing the Inquisitor into this… Quite the elaborate plan, don’t you think?”

“Dorian” the man pleaded, in an effort to appease him. “I never intended for the Inquisitor to get involved. I only wanted-“

“Why am I not surprised?” Dorian said, cutting him short. “Magister Pavus couldn’t well come to Skyhold himself and be seen with the dread Inquisitor. It would cause quite the stir, I’m sure. So you preferred to lie once again and lure me here. What exactly is it you want, father?”

Magister Pavus gave Tristan a sharp look, then straightened his back before speaking. “Why don’t you come inside?” he offered, gesturing towards his room. “I can explain everything there.”

“I’m quite fine where I am, thank you,” Dorian replied, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

The two men stood at the opening of the door, glaring at each other. Dorian had no intention of backing down, and from his father’s sombre expression, it didn’t seem like he was any less stubborn.

Clearing his throat, Tristan took a step back. “Perhaps I should leave you to speak with each other in private.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Inquisitor!” Dorian said with a toothy grin, that made him look menacing rather than cheerful. “We’re a warm, happy family. Everyone’s welcome here. Isn’t that right, father?”

Magister Pavus let out a long sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose as he shook his head. “This is how it has always been. I only want to talk to you, Dorian, I’m not here to fight.”

“Talk, then! Tell me how mystified you are by my anger. Of course, you would know nothing about that, since it’s through no fault of your own, yes? Why don’t you tell the Inquisitor what your problem is, so we can have everything out in the open?”

When his father simply stared at him, his lips pinched tight, Dorian turned to face Tristan, uncrossing his arms. “Since my father appears to have lost his tongue all of a sudden, let me tell you what his problem is with me, Inquisitor, and why I left Tevinter, never to return.” He took a sharp breath, and fixed his father with a glare. “I prefer the company of men. My father disapproves.”

Tristan glanced at Dorian, then at his father, whose face was a couple shades paler than a few moments before. A couple that happened to walk down the corridor looked at them curiously as they passed them by.

“I…see,” Tristan said slowly. Magister Pavus’ gaze was on him now, intent and examining. He was no doubt trying to puzzle out Dorian’s relationship to him. Apprehension mixed with anger rushed through him as he returned the man’s scrutinizing stare. Tristan knew that sort of stare very well. It had followed him most of his life, and unless he backed away right that moment, it would be him exchanging harsh words with Magister Pavus instead of Dorian.

He cleared his throat and took a careful step back. “Really, I should probably leave you to-“

Dorian clicked his tongue in irritation. “Let’s just go,” he said and brushed past Tristan, stalking towards the stairwell.

He ignored his father’s plea to stay as he descended the stairs and walked briskly towards the inn’s exit, Tristan at his heel. It was only after they were outside, the golden light of the waning sun catching in his glossy black waves, that he turned around, huffing in exasperation.

“Can you believe him?” he said in a voice trembling with anger. “That’s what he’s always done. Lying, scheming, involving everyone he knows in his pathetic little plans. One would think that with time he might have gotten wiser. But this! This is… It’s just…”

He let his words trail away, rubbing his temples. Tristan watched him as he muttered under his breath, as the line between his eyebrows got deeper. He couldn’t say that he didn’t understand his frustration. Memories of his own quarrels with his mother, and her cold glare that could bore holes through him flashed in his mind. Admittedly, Dorian was taking the whole thing quite well. If it was Tristan in his stead, he didn’t know if he would have been able to keep his composure for so long.

“Dorian” he said softly, touching his elbow. “If you want us to leave, just say the word.”

Dorian’s eyes shone oddly in the dusk. He shot a glance towards the inn. “I…” he started, then stopped. He wrung his hands before looking at Tristan. “Perhaps we should.”

The pain in his features felt like a punch in the gut. Dorian looked crushed, hurt, helpless. It was all he could do not to pull him in his arms and hold him close, and then have their horses bridled and saddled and ride back to Skyhold at dead speed. He knew that if it had been his mother up there, he would have wanted nothing more than to run away, as fast as he could.

Yet, it wasn’t his mother. And giving Dorian advice based on his own experience with his family would likely make a much bigger mess of things than there already was.

When he spoke, his voice was half chocked with the effort of keeping it level. “I think you should go back up there and speak with him.”

“What?”

Tristan tried to ignore his blazing stare before he spoke. “Don’t leave it like this. You might regret it later.”

“I have… nothing to say to him” Dorian replied with effort, shaking his head.

“Let him do the talking. If anything goes wrong, I’ll be right here, waiting for you.”

Several slow, awkward moments passed before Dorian nodded reluctantly in agreement. With a deep sigh, he turned around and walked back inside the inn. Tristan watched him go up the stairs before he found an empty seat near the bar, and ordered a glass of brandy. “Make it double,” he told the bartender.

The man turned to leave, but stopped short when Tristan called him back. “Actually, you know what? Just bring the whole bottle.”

The innkeeper shot him an appraising look, but it just slid off Tristan like water off oiled leather. It was going to be a long evening, and he needed something to calm his nerves.

It was about half an hour later that Dorian’s father descended the stairs. Tristan sat up in his chair and watched him, a silent question in his gaze, but the man only nodded his farewell and walked swiftly out the door. Dorian, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen. Tristan sank back in his seat, and waited.

An hour later, the inn’s common room was slowly emptying, and Dorian still hadn’t appeared. Tristan was contemplating going up to the room to check whether he was still alive, when he saw him coming down the stairs. He looked worse for wear, his red-rimmed eyes downcast. His face lit up slightly when he saw Tristan watching him from across the room.

“You’re still here” he said softly as he took the seat next to him. “I thought you would have left.”

“And go where?” Tristan replied, his lips widening in a reserved smile. “I came here with you.”

Dorian let out a quiet laugh and rubbed the back of his neck tiredly. Tristan pushed an empty glass towards him, and filled it with brandy. Dorian picked it up, bringing the rim close to his nose and breathing deeply. “Now, that’s just the thing I needed.”

“I would have needed ten of those if I were to meet my mother” Tristan said, refilling his own glass.

Dorian harrumphed as he took a sip. “Is she as terrifying as my own father?”

“Perhaps a little more” Tristan said, nodding thoughtfully. “At least your father had the patience to talk with you. If I didn’t have an entire Inquisition behind me, she wouldn’t hesitate clubbing me on the head and dragging me back to Ostwick. Even so, I have my doubts about whether the Inquisition can actually stop her.”

“She definitely sounds intriguing.”

“That’s… one way to put it.”

Dorian laughed and took a sip from his drink, wincing as he swallowed.

Tristan watched him quietly, marking the tightness in his features, the long, elegant fingers tapping on the sides of his glass. He looked terribly strung out.

“Are you alright?”

A soft sigh left his lips. “Not really. But thanks for asking, anyway.” He gulped down the rest of his drink, and stretched for the bottle again. He spoke so softly, Tristan had to strain his ears to hear him over the gurgling sound of the brandy hitting the bottom of the glass. “He says we are alike. Too much pride. Once, I would have been overjoyed to hear him say that. Now, I’m not so certain.”

He took a long draught, then wiped his mouth with his knuckle. “He… asked me to forgive him. I don’t know if I can do it.”

Tristan looked at him, compassion and affection mingling in his chest. He knew what it was like to be unwanted, considered a failure by one’s family. When his own mother had found out that he was not in the least interested in marrying a young girl from a rich, noble family, she had regarded him with cold indifference and thinly veiled contempt. But then again, when did Esme Trevelyan have anything but contempt for everyone around her? From a very young age, he had almost convinced himself that he didn’t care. Almost.

He sipped on his brandy, a question still gnawing at him. “I know this is between you and your father… but what did he do, exactly?”

Dorian stared at the bottom of his glass, his eyes following the amber liquid swirling inside it as he moved it in his hand. “He was the one who taught me to hate blood magic. “The resort of the weak-minded” he would say. Yet when I refused to do what he asked of me, he tried to… change me,” he said, choking on the last word. “He was going to do a blood ritual. Alter my mind. Make me… acceptable. I found out. I left.”

The horror that seeped through Tristan made his stomach lurch. He glanced at Dorian, trying as hard as he could to keep his eyes from widening. It had been painfully evident that there was bad blood between them, but he imagined it would have been an argument, some harsh words and lots of resentment from both sides, but this… This surpassed any and all of his expectations.

He struggled for words, but they all felt stiff and bitter in his mouth. In the end, he settled for the only ones that he could whisper through the impossible tightness in his throat. “I… don’t know what to say.”

Dorian chuckled weakly. “I guess there’s not much to say, is there?” A small smile was painted just on the edges of his lips, as if forgotten from a time when there was a reason for it to be there. He let out a sigh, and it came out sharp and heavy, finally freed from its constraints. “I tried so hard to be perfect. Perfect son, perfect mind, perfect mage. Anything for him. Anything to make him proud. I wouldn’t even try things that I might have been bad at just out of fear of disappointing him. And to think that he would risk a ritual that could have left me a drooling vegetable… it crushed me.”

He paused and glanced at Tristan. It was only a brief movement, a twitch of the eye. He downed the contents of his glass in one gulp and set it back down on the table.

“It’s funny, you know,” he said, picking up the bottle and tipping its mouth over his glass once more. “People always talk about choice. That you can choose how to live your life, how you want to be. Even I believed that. I hated that I couldn’t just go along with what everyone wanted of me. That I couldn’t pull myself together and show the world the face it wanted to see, marry the girl, keep everything unsavoury private and locked away. I often wondered; how bad could my life possibly be? Compared to others, I had pretty much everything. Many would kill to have the opportunities I had. I could have just obeyed my father and lived the rest of my life in luxurious despair. It might have been hard at first. I would have betrayed my ideals, my desires, everything I stood for, but in the end, with time, I would have gotten used to it, no? Isn’t that what life is, after all? Making choices and living with the consequences?”

He fell silent for a long moment. Tristan didn’t think he had ever listened so intently, so attentively to anyone before. In the few moments of quiet, he thought he was able to hear his heart, beating through his chest, through his clothes, through the air between them.

“It was never a matter of choice for me” Dorian said quietly, his fingers tightening imperceptibly about his glass. “If I did all that, it would have been worse than betraying myself. I would have tied the noose around my neck myself, and I wouldn’t even know it.”

Silence stretched long and heavy between them. The common room was now all but empty, the fire in the hearth reduced to glowing embers, their pulsing light peeking through the small mountain of ashes and the blackened logs. It was odd, really, how brightly they shone amidst the darkness that surrounded them. Tristan gazed at their amber glow for a long while, willing the lump in his throat and the impossible tightness in his heart to a faint, if insistent, irritation. He wondered that he hadn’t noticed it before. At that very moment, as the weak warmth emanating from the fire seeped into his bones and the liquid in his glass reached the bottom, it felt as if it had been there forever.

Dorian gazed at his drink with unseeing eyes, oblivious to everything around him. His shoulders were slumped, his head low. Tristan did not remember ever seeing him so utterly, so devastatingly silent.

His hand moved as if on its own, stretching tentatively towards him, the few inches between them seemingly endless. He hesitated only for half a breath before placing it gently it on his shoulder.

He thought he felt a small shiver pass through Dorian under his fingertips. Dorian looked at him then, really looked at him, his eyes glistening with unshed tears.

“I’m so sorry, Dorian.”

The words left his mouth before he could think to stop them, before he could rightly say what they really meant. He didn’t even know whether he was apologising, or sympathising. At that moment, he only knew that these were the words he needed to say to him the most.

Dorian blinked at him, his eyes gliding slowly over Tristan's features. He opened his mouth and closed it again. When he spoke, it was soft and gentle, as if he were speaking to himself. "Don't be. What's done is done. We can only try our best to accept it and move on."

Tristan couldn't tell why his sombre words made his heart thrum with painful longing in his chest. Before he could respond, the innkeeper approached them and bid them goodnight, leaving a bottle of expensive malt whisky at their table, “courtesy of Magister Pavus”.

Gingerly, he let his hand fall from Dorian’s shoulder. Straightening up, Dorian picked up the bottle, examining its label before pulling the cork.

“At least we got something good out of this debacle. It’s no Aggregio Pavalli, but it will have to do” he said with a bitter smile as he filled their glasses. The whisky was aromatic, and surprisingly strong. Tristan thought his tongue was on fire as he drank it down.

The light from the embers in the hearth danced in Dorian’s glass as he swirled his drink. “Maker knows what you must think of me after that whole display.”

“I don’t think less of you” Tristan said simply. He was already feeling the effect of the brandy and the whisky he had drunk, but he made no effort to stop himself. He took a sharp breath, and for once he wasn’t feeling as if his tongue was in knots. “More, if possible. Standing up for yourself, walking away from everything you knew, fighting for what’s in your heart… It takes a lot of courage. If that’s not admirable, then I don’t know what is.”

He noticed a strange flicker in Dorian’s eyes when he turned to look at him. His bottom lip was glistening with the remains of his whisky. His hair was only a little out of place, his cheeks slightly flushed.

Memories of a kiss, drunken and ill-timed, but still the softest he had ever received floated in his mind. The feel of velvet, pliant lips retreating under his own, the taste of brandy on his tongue, Dorian’s face so close to his. The sadness in his gaze, the smile to gloss over the hurt. They gazed at each other for what felt like aeons, the vice around Tristan’s heart tightening until he could barely breathe.

With a soft sigh, Dorian tore his eyes away. He picked up the bottle, its glass neck clinking against the rim of his glass. “In any case, let’s drink ourselves into a stupor, shall we? It’s that sort of night,” he said in a cheerful tone that felt much too forced, and filled Tristan’s glass as well. “And I promise I won’t try to kiss you this time.”

Tristan huffed a laugh, but it felt hollow.

#cw: alcohol #dorian pavus #dorian pavus fic #dorian x trevelyan #dorian x inquisitor #dorian/trevelyan #dragon age inquisition #dragon age fanfiction #dorian x tristan trevelyan #dorian x tristan #a world with you #johaerys writes

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aerinmelina · 6 years ago

Text

Birthday Pt 1

Since Kendra won the vote... here’s Kendra’s birthday. :) Probably not quite what anyone was expecting, but I’m enjoying writing Kendra and Seth as [little] kids. I hope you enjoy!

“Hey. Hey Kenny. Keeeeennnyyyyyy. Kendra. Kendra Kendra Kendra. Wake. Up.”

She swatted at something in front of her face and mumbled incoherently.

“Kendra!” A sudden weight hit her stomach. Her eyes opened and she jolted awake, then realized her brother had jumped on top of her and was laying across her midsection.

“Ow, Seth!” she shouted, complaining loudly. “What is your problem!?”

“Happy Birthday!” he exclaimed, smiling at her. “Dad made waffles!”

She moved aside the blackout curtains from her window and gazed outside to find a nice autumn day waiting for her. Maybe she’d be able to get some more soccer practice in today.

Wait. The smell of waffles and bacon finally reached her nostrils.

Her stomach grumbled.

Waffles.

She pushed Seth off of her and jumped out of bed as all traces of sleepiness fled from her presence. Kendra ran out of her room and down the stairs with Seth hot on her heels. Would there be strawberries? Syrup? Whipped cream? Or were they chocolate chip waffles? Banana? Blueberry?

“Good morning, sunshine,” Dad greeted when she appeared in the kitchen.

“Hi, Dad,” she replied, carefully eying the nearby stack of waffles. He’d made scrambled eggs, too!

“Happy Birthday, Kendra!” Mom called, peering around Dad’s shoulders so she could see her daughter.

“Thanks, Mom!”

“Is breakfast almost done?” Seth asked with eagerness.

“Yep, just finishing the last waffle now,” Dad answered. “Your mother is cutting up strawberries.”

Yes! Mom’s got strawberries!

“This is the best breakfast ever!” Kendra squealed.

“Well, it’s not every day that our daughter turns six,” Marla smiled while she and Scott shared amused expressions.

“It’s my birthday!” she cried. “Can Alyssa come over!?”

Dad laughed. “Yes, Alyssa can come over,” he said. “Actually, a bunch of your friends are coming over later. Remember? For your birthday party?”

“Yes!” Kendra shouted, throwing a few fist pumps into the air. “It’s my birthday!”

“It’s Kenny’s birthday!” Seth was also happy to share in the excitement and jumped up and down a few times.

Marla started transporting plates of food over to their dinner table while her children danced with happiness. “Hey, Seth, can you grab the whipped cream from the fridge and put it on the table?” she asked.

“Whipped cream!?”

Could this day get any better!?

Seth ran over to the refrigerator and pulled out the container of whipped cream, then placed it on top of the table and sat down. Kendra pulled out a chair and joined him, and both kids stared at the food in front of them in anticipation. Marla took a seat and Scott joined them shortly thereafter. They had a quick blessing over their breakfast, and then everyone dug in.

They weren’t chocolate chip or banana or blueberry waffles, but there were strawberries to put on top, and syrup, and whipped cream, too! And bacon and eggs on the side!

“Thank you for making breakfast!” Kendra called as she started eating.

“Yeah! Thanks!” Seth agreed.

“You’re welcome,” Scott and Marla responded in tandem.

Breakfast was a relatively quiet affair at first, but conversation seeped in after a few minutes.

“So, Kendra,” Marla began, “Your party is at noon today. After breakfast we need to vacuum and do dishes, and then we can hang up decorations. Does that sound good to you?”

“Yes!” Kendra looked up from her breakfast. Marla bit her lip to keep from laughing – her daughter had a whipped cream mustache.

Scott, however, could not keep from laughing. “Maybe a bath after breakfast first,” he said, then gave himself a whipped cream mustache to match his daughter’s. Seth followed suit, although he had food all over his shirt as well.

“I think you might be right about a bath,” Marla agreed.

“Mommy, you don’t have a mustache!” Seth chirped.

“Family mustache!” Kendra giggled.

Marla rolled her eyes and sighed in fake exasperation. “Family mustache? Who ever heard of such a thing?”

Kendra and Seth raised their hands and continued to giggle. “Come on, Mommy! Do it!”

“Yeah, Mom! Do the mustache!”

Marla gave Scott a pointed look, then ran her fork through the whipped cream on her plate and added a mustache to her own face. Kendra and Seth burst into laughter in reaction. Scott and Marla joined in after a few seconds; their children’s laughter was contagious.

Breakfast continued to prove to be a messy, albeit happy, affair. Both kids took quick baths afterward and, once they were dressed for the day, Scott took Seth to the supermarket to pick up a birthday cake and grab some other things while Kendra stayed at home with Marla in order to set up for her party that afternoon.

“Wow, Mommy! This looks cool!” Kendra cried in awe when they’d finished putting everything up. It was a soccer-themed birthday party. Streamers hung from the ceiling in swooping arcs, a soccer ball cloth had been placed on top of the table, posters were on the walls, and Marla had planned a few party games or activities so there were supplies for those out as well. “I love this!”

“I’m glad you do,” Marla said. She looked at the clock on the wall. “Your friends will start getting here probably in about half an hour or so. I wonder where your father is?”

The sound of the opening garage door rumbled throughout the living room. Kendra beamed. “They’re here! They’re here!” she shouted, rushing over to the door which led into the garage. She opened it in time for Seth to run into the house and announce, “We have the cake!”

“What’s it look like? Seth, what’s it look like?”

“It looks awesome! Like a big soccer ball! And Daddy got soccer candles for it!”

“Soccer candles, too!?”

Best. Day. Ever.

Scott called for help and Marla joined him. They both entered the house shortly thereafter, Marla carrying the cake (which was concealed within a pink bakery box) and Scott followed behind carrying a couple of grocery bags.

“Mint chocolate chip and cookie dough flavors,” he said to Marla as they made their way into the kitchen. “I couldn’t find that strawberry one she loves so much.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Marla said. “It’s still ice cream-”

“There’s ice cream, too!?” Kendra thought she might explode from excitement.

Marla laughed. “Told you so.” She playfully stuck her tongue out at Scott.

“Why do I foresee ten or so sugar high kids in our living room within the next hour or so?” Scott asked.

“Because it’s inevitable,” she replied. “That’s why we have outdoor games to play outside after cake and ice cream.”

“You’re a genius.”

“Thanks. You can also thank Mother Nature for the lovely day today. I thought it was going to rain, so we’ve caught a break.”

Three and a half hours later found Kendra and Seth passed out on the couch and the house otherwise devoid of visitors, minus Grandma and Grandpa Larsen, who had made it just in time for the party. Marla shook her head fondly at her sugar coma-ed kids and smiled as she felt Scott wrap his arms around her waist. He placed his chin on top of her head and they both watched their kids sleep for a few minutes.

“We should help your parents clean up,” Scott said in a tone which clearly conveyed that he did not want to follow his own suggestion. Hank and Gloria were currently in the back yard.

“Yeah, we probably should,” Marla agreed.

Neither of them moved.

Marla sighed.

“Look at them. They’re so cute when they’re not fighting.”

“They’re cute all the time,” Marla chided. “They’re just particularly cute when they’re not fighting.”

Scott chuckled. “Fair enough.”

“Kendra was so excited today.”

“Seth was maybe even more excited than Kendra was, and it wasn’t even his birthday.”

They both laughed a little at that.

“Do you think we should move them to their beds?”

Marla shook her head. “Nah. Just let them crash on the couch for a while. Let’s just hope the sugar doesn’t turn them into cranky munchkins once they get up.”

Their light laughter turned into mutual cringing.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Scott began, releasing his hold on his wife and turning so that he could make eye contact with her. “Your parents are in town.”

“Yeah? So?”

A mischievous grin crept over his face. “So… what about an impromptu date night? You and me? Leave the sugar high, potentially cranky kids with their grandparents…?”

Marla laughed and lightly slapped her husband’s arm. “Oh, you’re evil,” she said. “I love it.”

“The best part is, Gloria and Hank probably won’t mind even a little bit. And I’m sure Seth and Kendra would love to spend some more time with their grandparents.” Scott’s grin widened.

“I’m in. Help me clean up and then I’ll ask them if we can sneak out for the evening.”

“You got it, babe.” They broke apart and each rushed to pick up discarded paper plates, take down the streamers and other decorations, and put away games and unused party supplies. They’d vacuum after the kids woke up from their sugar-induced nap.

This day had turned out to be a win for all of them.

Best. Day. Ever.

#fablehaven #kendra sorenson #seth sorenson #sorenson family fluff #birthday fic #aerinm writes

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starlling-writes · 5 years ago

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Bewitching Monsters - Elf (Aero) Part 3

Series Rating: 18+ Chapter Contains: minor swearing, minor adult dialogue/themes Pairing: f/m (m/m mention) BeMo Masterlist ☆ Writing Masterlist

“Dish, Witch.” Despite the café being packed with hungover patrons, Honey took the time to sit down across from me and hold my potpie hostage until I answered her. “How was your feis?”

“It was lovely. Now give me my food.”

She slid the plate over to me, a subtle scowl tugging at her features. “What did you two get up to?”

I savored a large bite, ignoring her until the cloying hunger ripping through my belly started to subside. “We kissed.”

“And?”

“Kissed more.”

She hopped to her feet, slamming her hands on the table. “That’s it? You kissed? You only kissed? Ugh! You two are so frustratingly, disappointingly vapid!” She marched back to the counter and returned to her work. Her yelling made many people stare my way. I glared at them in turn until they looked away. Nosy gossips.

A half hour later, after I finished my food and handling some work on my tablet, I was standing to leave when Honey ambushed me again. She placed three bags on the table and beamed a deadly, manipulative smile at me. “Heading out, dear Witch?”

“Yes,” I answered simply. What did she want?

“Could you deliver this for me? The café is so busy I’m not able to make this delivery. You’ll be compensated of course.”

There were red flags all over the place, but I could at least hear her out. Maybe the payment would be worth whatever trouble this actually was. “What’s the offer?”

“Five pounds of chocolate covered blackberries.”

“Deal.” Curse her for getting me hooked on those. They were too good to pass up. She gave me the address and I was off.

I arrived at a lovely apartment building ten minutes away. Lovely if you liked the neutral tone, nouveau riche look. I buzzed the apartment.

“Who are you?” They weren’t explicitly rude, but their tone still hinted at arrogance—or maybe that was my bias.

“I have a delivery from Honey Cup Café.”

There was a long pause. Then the door buzzed as it unlocked. Oh, no problem. I don’t mind bringing it up to you, I silently sneered at them. Could they really not be bothered to come down themselves or just say something?

At least they were prompt in answering their door. However I was not expecting to be greeted by Aero in only a skirt—actually a plain sheet tied around his waist.

“Two gifts in one. How blessed am I?”

“You’re not who I talked to,” I accused. So he was why Honey had sent me on this errand. I should have guessed.

“No, that was my roommate and boyfriend. Come in, you should meet.” He didn’t give me the option to refuse as he pulled me inside.

Their apartment was open and airy, filled with a number of large, potted plants and even more candles. Incense hung heavy in the air. Aero dragged me to the kitchen then took the bags of food from me. He had half of it pulled out and on the breakfast bar when the boyfriend in question walked in.

“So you’re the witch I keep hearing about,” he smiled then bowed. He was similar to Aero in height and build, with the pointed ears of a fae race. His hair was pulled into a messy bun with a few errant blue curls in his face. His vitiligo perfectly highlighted the V of muscles dipping below his skirt—a proper skirt, unlike Aero’s. “Call me Willow.”

“Nice to meet you. Call me Witch.” I shot a pointed look at Aero.

With a roll of his eyes he said, “Yes, yes—sorry for not telling you sooner. Though as kissing-friends I didn’t realize it’d be such an issue. Unless you decided you want more now?” His coy smirk didn’t have the energy I’d come to expect. Then I noted how dark his eyes were. Did the hangover really hit him that hard? I guess I did have the unfair advantage of having made a rehydration and healing potion to drink before bed so I wouldn’t be a hot mess. All things considered, I let this laps in information go.

“Not today.”

He shrugged, having expected my answer. Aero pulled out my berries but I quickly snatched them up. He looked at me, offended. “Not going to share?”

“Hey, these were my payment for delivering to you guys. A delivery, I might add, I haven’t gotten a tip for.”

Now his smile was closer to his usual self. He stepped closer, sliding his hands up my hips then pulling me against him. “You want a tip?” His head dipped low, an inch away from a kiss. Part of my heart fluttered. Another part remembered that Willow was standing two feet away.

“Don’t mind me, love,” he dismissed, noticing my hesitation. He was more concerned with the food. “He’s done far more in front of me.”

Aero drew back. “Are you not comfortable with polyamory?”

“That’s not it,” I shook my head. “I’m fine with that. No—it’s more so that we just met, and I was completely unprepared for…” I gestured vaguely to all of us. “This.”

“At least we met like this and not when you had a minotaur balls deep in your ass.”

“What?” Where the hell had this conversation diverted to?

“You’re really gonna start with that story?” Aero groaned.

“What better one to start with?” His boyfriend beamed wickedly. “Anyways, long story short, we met at an orgy. With a minotaur balls deep in his ass.”

“There are… so many questions I have now.” And one hell of a mental image. “Should we be drunk again for this?”

“Gods no!” Aero protested. “I am nowhere near recovered and ready for another bender.”

Willow hummed and walked up behind him and kissed his neck. “That’s why Daddy is here to nurse you better,” he said as his lips trailed up towards Aero’s ear. The air elf had closed his eyes and melted into the other male’s touch. Willow looked at me. “Drink?”

There was no stopping the shit-eating grin on my face. I was learning so much about Aero today. “Sure. Juice or water, I’m not picky.”

We moved our chat to the living room and sat on the floor around a low table, the surface of which soon filled with food and drinks. Aero had no shame in dishing out more stories. They frequented a variety of BDSM events and some swinger parties. Aero was a complete submissive and enjoyed a number play types that I hadn’t even heard of. Willow was a caregiver, though never participated in any of the sexual scenes. His pleasure was in making sure everyone else was enjoying their time. They had many stories to offer, opening up an unknown world to me. And they invited me into it.

“Okay, while I am open minded, I am not sure an orgy is for me,” I conceded. Aero tried to steal a berry—he had managed five so far—but I slapped his hand away.

“Clearly ‘cause you’re terrible at sharing,” he dared.

“Pssh, no I’m not. You’re just a greedy berry thief trying to steal my hard earned pay.”

“Wait, no!” he said and snapped his fingers. “It’s because you just don’t like others seeing you naked.”

I picked up the nearest pillow and started beating him with it. “I thought. We got past. Bringing. That up!” I said in time with my hits.

“Back on topic,” Willow chimed in with a chuckle, not caring about the buffeting his boyfriend was receiving. “I wouldn’t start you at an orgy. Start with a private exhibition. Very controlled and small.”

“Mmmh… still not sure—aah!” Aero managed to snag the pillow from my grip. I lost my balance and fell into his lap.

“Would you prefer to watch me on the block first?” he offered. He leaned over and I met him the rest of way for a quick kiss. “Have some fun with me and get used to the audience?” He kissed me again.

“I thought we agreed on just kissing.”

This time the kiss lingered as his tongue danced its way into my mouth. He left me near breathless. “Scenes are different. What happens there, stays there. And you still don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

I couldn’t tell if the sparkle dancing in his eyes was him imagining me in the center of a scene, or himself with me topping.

“I’ll give it some more thought.”

— — —

BeMo Masterlist ☆ Writing Masterlist

Story: Previous — Next

Character Arc: Part 1 Part 2 [Here]

#monster love #exophilia #writeblr #elf x human #fae #fae x human #elf love #fae love #Bewitching Monsters

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veridium · 6 years ago

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Thank You 300 Followers - Here’s Some Heartache!

Thank you for enabling me, everyone

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is not a chronological part of my #Theiaphine romance arc. This story takes place a year after Inquisitor Theia Trevelyan disbands the Inquisition, marries, and moves her sights to the incoming conflict threatening all of Thedas and the world. It is also a very emotional and tumultuous moment in the lives of Theia and her wife, and as such I will warn you: it is some sad shit. Also, if you don’t want to spoil the chronology of their romance, maybe don’t read this...and I’m sorry (lol).

The Inquisition had been disbanded for a year now, and yet for Theia her work never truly ended. She still felt the pressure to perform, to represent something greater than her own identity. Even with all she had sacrificed to save Thedas, she felt spurred to give more – as if her body and spirit had finally resigned to her greater purpose. Still, the concerns of her life did not waver from her heart. She still stood at the side of the woman she loved in a time of war, and now a time of preparation. She still pushed herself to be a better Mage, even with the loss of her hand and forearm. And now, she was preparing for perhaps the most complicating eventuality of her life: becoming a Mother while one of the leaders of a covert operation to stop the destruction of the entire world at the hands of a former ally and friend.

The ocean air laced with salt, easygoing and in no hurry. It was a calm morning for the ports and for the halls of the apartments House Montilyet owned along Rialto Bay. Her healer had recommended remaining near the water for the first few months, in order to relax her nerves and keep her mind preoccupied with the business of the surrounding city life.

She gazed absent-mindedly in the floor-length mirroring metal that stood in their bedchamber, as a servant helped secure her tunic dress from behind. Her hair in wavy curls and tied up into a ponytail, a beautiful façade to a busy mind. Among her thoughts, reports from Leliana – though Thedas called her Divine Victoria – letters from the Seeker’s hideout in the mountains, and intel gathering from various agents scattered across the landscape. She did not need one for the Imperium, however; she had a direct voice from the heart in a dear friend whose voice echoed through a messenger crystal at every chance he got.

Once she was fully ready, she turned and departed her room, single-mindedly heading for her office. Well, their office. The thought of two important and busy women sharing one work space would puzzle some people, but once they were invited into the large room, it was understood why. In two corners were each of their workspaces: one corner, an illustrious library of tomes, papers, and scrolls, along with a fireplace and a bearskin run reminiscent of the décor of the Free Marches. On the other end of the rectangular room was another desk and chair, ornamentally designed, and matching the large window overlooking the sea ports. The window was rarely closed. Framing it were bookshelves, statuettes, and artwork.

Theia entered into the middle of the room, which was bordered by a long and thin balcony which overlooked the small garden courtyard. The sun was bearing down on the rustic stone of the architecture, facilitating a warm and dry atmosphere. That kind of weather did well for Theia’s pale skin, but she grew only slightly darker than she had been in their days at Skyhold; the phenotypes of her heritage were hard to shake off.

Her eyes went immediately to the leather-bound booklet of papers that rested in the middle of her desk. She grabbed it and unbound it from the leather string, opening and searching for the bottom line in all the jargon. It was from the Divine: more detected movements of elves departing their posts and homes and retreating somewhere rural, some place hard to pinpoint. Meanwhile, “special emissaries” – the Divine’s word for her spies – had been monitoring the Qunari advancement on the Imperium with grim conclusions. Her friend and now Magistrate Dorian Pavus was working under ever-increasing pressure, and his faction proved rigorous in the face of not only political opposition, but decreasing time.

With all this in mind, anyone who knew Theia during the early days of the Inquisition would say they felt a shift in her soul, as if she had aged ten years in the span of three. Perhaps it was the betrayal of her friend that hardened her heart and drew the line in the sand. Or, maybe, the loss of her arm that left her permanently jaded to a degree. The core of who she was managed to survive, if in more episodic expressions. The main thing that changed was that she was careful who witnessed it – who still got to see Theia for who she was, and not merely what she must do.

Her quiet time alone with the reports was interrupted by the sound of her partner entering with a courier, who was feverishly taking notes per dictation.

“Tell my brother to take count of all the masts we have left-over from the renovation, and see if we cannot find some use for the fabrics elsewhere. Particularly if we can experiment with designs for the several ships I need built,” Josephine ordered as she walked with determination to her desk.

“Yes, My Lady,” the courier nodded, before departing quickly back out the door.

From across the vast room, Josephine sensed her presence, and couldn’t help but grin smartly as she, too, got her eyes lost in some important documents.

“Mi amor, you brood with increased intensity these days,” she said out loud.

“Funny, and I thought the servants were merely joking when they got caught calling me Mistress Ice Dragon,” Theia mused, finishing up a sentence she was writing on the correspondence in front of her.

“You know they were drunk, do not take it personally. Besides, there is something…magnetic about such a title,” Josephine’s playfulness had an ultimate goal: avoid Theia’s now heightened temper at all costs, if it could be out-maneuvered. Such a task proved only possible for the most capable, such as herself.

“Yes, of course, I much prefer it to all the rest. In fact we should combine them all into an ultimate title: The Herald of the Ice Dragon Inquisition? It’s catchy,” her words were laced with a saltiness, as much as she tried to have a sense of humor, she could not help but have low patience these days.

With that, Josephine chuckled, and withdrew from her end of the room in order to arrive at her woman’s side. She came around to her side of the desk, sitting on the edge to her right, her eyes glimmering in the abundant daylight.

“What is the latest from the Divine? She sent me a letter a few days ago, but it was more personal in nature.”

“Nothing I didn’t already expect, unfortunately. More elves retreating to somewhere, the Qunari are not backing down from the Imperium’s borders. Solas was right, with their defeat in the Deep Roads, they are now striking at Tevinter with the vengeance of a wounded animal.”

“It was imperative that we defeat them. The Exalted Council’s destruction would have been more disastrous than the Conclave.”

“Yes, but now I fear we have won the battle only to lose the war.”

“Surely not. With the ships my brother is working on in the yard, we can have a sustainable fleet to support our forces if they need it.”

Theia pursed her lips. Josephine spoke of their months-long project they began shortly after she got the Montilyet trading fleet back on its feet. Using some of the smaller ships as conduits, they began transferring correspondences, agreements, and acquisitions in an underground, transactional process. Eventually, they even dispatched explorers to secure new raw materials for their eventual plans of a security fleet that could withstand evacuation, maritime battle, and even land-based natural disasters. A smaller, more maneuverable fleet to stand by should land become too dangerous to undergo operations.

“You still sound the way you did when we were in Skyhold. So full of hope and promise. I wonder how you did it,” Theia admitted with a vulnerability in her tone, now

“I watched the woman I thought would be lost to me forever, come back to me, from a most impossible battle. Now, she and I live the life I thought was foolish to daydream. I have an endless reservoir of foolish resolve,” Josephine played.

At that, Theia smirked. “I am sorry I’ve been so distant. Between the sickness and the affairs we have going on, there are times when I feel like I am more of the kind of person Varric said I’d be: this embodiment of intimidating ideas, and not a human being.”

“You have managed to be both for this long, mi amor, and will continue to. Just take care of yourself, please, for both your sakes,” Josephine referred to the child that was now growing inside of her, the child that would be their heir and their shining beacon of faith in a time of great duress.

“I will. I’m trying. It doesn’t help that no one else knows besides you and Dorian. I’m surprised Dorian has kept it to himself this long, it surely is a sign he has more vital matters to concern himself with. I will need to tell Cassandra and Lelia—Divine Victoria, before rumors or spies gets the information to them first. They would not be pleased with me,” she stood from her chair and took hold of the letter she had finished. Folding it up precisely, she reached for her small bottle of parchment wax, and began warming it over the one candle she had lit for such purposes.

It would only be a month or so before her abdomen would start swelling, and become noticeable even other the shapelessness of her tunic gowns. She had to devise the best and most covert way of letting her closest allies know of this recent development. Surely they would understand if she could just use the right words, or provide the most accurate context.

No matter what, though, she knew it would not be smooth sailing.

The Seeker was anxiously awaiting word from the former Inquisitor, seeing as how she had dispatched pages of updates and time-sensitive information for her feedback. The Seekers had been rebuilding and training intensively for months in the mountains, free from the momentum of politics and everyday debauchery of Orlais. She was personally overseeing the reformation, and with that came great power and great nerve. One of the few sources of solace, as well as connection to the outside world, was her frequent communications with Lady Trevelyan and the Divine.

She paced along the floor runner of the foyer, waiting for the courier to arrive with the morning letters. When he finally did so, breathing rather heavily from having ran up the flights of stairs to her wing of the fortress, her eyes sparked with impatience. He handed her a stack about an inch thick; surely one of them would be from Theia.

There were two. One that was more plain, probably of logistical reports and the status of the ship fleet. Then a second, with personal parchment, sealed with her own emblem.

Curious, Cassandra thought. Why the need for two? Has something happened?

Stepping into her private study, first she opened the plainer letter. It was official business, nothing out of the ordinary – a confirmation of support here, a comment in the margins there. So, why a need for a personal note? Typically, when Theia wished to say something personal, she snuck it in at the end of reports.

Her fingers nervously opened the second letter, the wax snapping as it broke open. Her eyes went immediately to the first line:

“Dear friend,

I would have included this in the reports, but, I did not wish for something so private to be shuffled into affairs of business. I know you will react strongly to this, but, it is something I won’t be able to hide from you much longer. I am with child, due 7 months from now. I am well, and well-cared for. Rest assured, I will not shirk my duties or correspondences during the remainder of my pregnancy. I have sent a letter to the Divine relaying this news, so do not feel bound to secrecy with her. After all, who could dare keep a secret from our beloved friend?

Sending well wishes your way,

T”

The Seeker’s heart sank deeper into her ribs as she read the note. How could she do this? Now, of all times? Her body filled with fearful dread. It was not that a child wasn’t a blessing from the Maker, it was the timing of it. Surely, she had thought Theia would remain focused on the responsibilities she had to the forces under her control and advisement, not do something that would require so much of her energy. And what of the child of the Inquisitor? Would such an identity ever promise safety in the face of war?

Cassandra sat down at her chair, pondering how to react to this news in a way that would not alienate a friend she valued so highly. Throughout all the years they had worked together, she trusted Theia to have fair judgment, and to understand the brevity of her choices. Now, something had changed.

Just as she was about to put her hand to paper, and write her response, another courier staffer barged into her study. Her face, annoyed with such a gesture, looked up with tense eyes and posture.

“Yes?” she huffed.

The man stepped forward, holding another letter, one that looked eerily familiar. It was the same parchment that Theia had used, only with a purple seal. It was Ambassador Montilyet’s emblem.

“My Lady, this came expedited from Antiva. Lady Montilyet sent it with most urgent orders to get it to your hand as quick as possible. The rider looked as if he hadn’t slept in two days.”

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed; she was exasperated with the apparent bureaucracy of the situation. Just how many personal letters would she receive from the same location? Could the two women not collaborate their message into one letter? For Maker’s sake—

As she stared down at the open letter, her heart experienced whiplash.

“Lady Cassandra,

It is with urgency and pain that I write to you to inform of that my wife, and your friend, suffered a miscarriage this morning. She is recuperating, but is under acute distress and pain, as you can imagine. I write to you not as a colleague or ally, but as the partner to your closest friend, and woman: come to Antiva to see her. She needs all the motivation she can get to recover. It would mean the world to me.

Kindest and most astute regards,

Lady Josephine Montilyet”

“Maker,” Cassandra said out loud, to the dismay of the courier standing before her. Her voice was sad, emotional, feeling, a sound that her men did not witness often.

“Have my horse prepared, and get me two guards to accompany me. I must go to Antiva immediately,” she ordered, hardening her resolve for the sake of saving face. As the man departed, she gathered the two letters, folding them into one another.

She rose from her chair and made her way to her fireplace. Without so much as a word or a sentimental expression, she tossed the papers into the fire. No one would know of her friend’s tragedy, lest they be acquainted with her blade or her fist.

The heat of the Antivan sky bore down on the back of the Seeker’s neck – this temperate weather was not her choice, nor was it what she was used to after about half a year in the mountains. The roads were hills, and the cobblestone under her horse’s feet was hot to the touch. The two guards that flanked her eyed the scenery with awe: being out of the desolate area they had been in was a much-needed retreat of sorts.

Finally, the Seeker had found the entryway to the Montilyet home. It was a tall stone façade with a gate that gave way into a courtyard, with a large double-door entryway with Antivan rounded columns. Although, the place felt eerily quiet and still, as if something very devastating had engulfed it, making it feel dimmer than the surrounding buildings.

Coming out of the opened doors was Josephine herself, wearing a dark purple gown and silver strands of ornamentation in her hair. In Antiva, mourning was marked by conservative dress and retiring from public social life temporarily – a grim choice indeed in the opulent grandeur of Rialto bay. The Seeker dismounted and immediately approached Lady Montilyet.

“Seeker, it is so good to see you,” she greeted, her hands collected in front of her, a ring being toyed with nervously between an index finger and thumb.

“Lady Montilyet,” Cassandra bowed her head in respect, “I came as soon as I got word. Where is she? How is her health?”

“Come with me, I will take you to her at once,” Josephine reached out a hand, beckoning her forward. Soon, they were walking side by side down a spacious corridor, servants stopping to look at the honorable guest that had come to see one of the Mistresses of the household.

“She bled for two days, so much so she went unconscious for several hours. The Healers were able to stem the bleeding, but, there was no salvaging the…” Josephine’s breath ran out as she blinked, trying to hold herself together. “She is still weak, but her prognosis is good. They cannot tell yet whether or not the damage has been done permanently.”

Cassandra was quiet with reverence towards the loss. “I have been praying for you both, Lady Josephine. I hope you know just how apologetic I am for this travesty.”

“Thank you. It has been…most difficult. Her pain has made her expectantly tumultuous in demeanor. I have been trying everything the Healers suggest to distract her, but, she is very stubborn as you well know.”

“If I may ask, what…was she doing, when it happened?”

Lady Montilyet was quiet, the footfalls of their walking being the only sound to remind them of where they were. Her eyes glazed a bit as she put together her response in her mind.

“We are not exactly sure. She had been preoccupied for many days, but, earlier this week she woke up screaming from a nightmare. When I awoke to the sound, I saw her crying there, hunched over, her night dress doused in blood. All I can hear is her screaming, even still. She will not tell me what the nightmare was of, nor will she sleep for more than two hours at a time, mostly out of sheer exhaustion.”

The Seeker had to hold back her own pang of emotion now, as they made their way up a flight of stairs into a wing with bedchambers.

“I must warn you, Seeker Cassandra, she is not herself. She may say hurtful, ambivalent comments to you. She does not mean them,” Josephine’s words were laced with hurt; her warning came from personal experience, and that made Cassandra feel even more sympathetic to her.

“Lady Montilyet, I…I do not know what to say to make this any easier on you, only that you of all people – both of you – deserve so much happiness for all you have endured.”

“Yes, well,” Josephine looked away, her eyes shifting as she kept hold of composure, “I have heard that many a time, Seeker, so forgive me if I come off as…unaffected. Her recovery room is just down this hall, fourth door to the left. Please tell her that I love her and I will see her tonight,” Josephine nodded solemnly and retreated back down the stairs, leaving Cassandra to stare down the hallway and feel the nerves in her chest dance. It had been many months since she last saw her friend in person, when she came to visit the fortress. Now, as much as she would be happy to see her, she almost with she could fast-forward in time and be visiting several more months from now, perhaps when Theia would feel better.

Making her way into the fourth doorway, the air was thick with incense – what she could only assume was supposed to be a sedative effect, as she felt slightly drowsy the more she inhaled. The room was dark, only lit by the reflection of the sunlight on the tile and mosaic-lined stone. The tapestries lining the balcony lightly shifted in the breeze, but otherwise it felt as though time had frozen them in place here.

There was a large bed, sheets disheveled, but covered a thin-framed figure. She then saw her messy and long blonde waves of hair. It looked as if she was sleeping, no longer able to fight the exhaustion.

Cassandra’s boots made ample noise on the floor, and soon Theia’s figure moved slightly, her legs curling and bending as they stretched. The Seeker came to a stop, several feet from the side of the bed, her eyes overburdened with sadness seeing her friend, a woman she had seen stand so tall, so resolutely against forces of peril, now facing something so much more destructive to her spirit.

Her stare was broken when Theia’s face looked back at her, her eyes slowly blinking awake.

“…C-Cassandra?” she groaned, the depth in her voice lingering from the days of crying she endured. Her face looked pale, as did her lips. The deep, dark circles under her eyes only comparable to the ones she had when she was in the prison, all those years ago, waiting to be questioned for her part in the Conclave disaster. That forlorn memory made the Seeker’s chest ache.

“Yes, my friend, it is me. I have come to see you,” Cassandra stepped forward, pivoting on her hip as she sat on the foot of the bed, an arm stretching out over the Inquisitor’s legs. Theia rubbed her face softly with the back of her hand, her brow furrowing as the surprise sank in. She pulled herself up, her abdomen still sore as she did so, but she managed. She adjusted her pillow against her back as she lay in place once more, taking pressure off of her stomach.

“I…assume, someone in particular wrote to you. And it was either our blessed Divine, or my wife,” she muttered, a hand resting instinctively on her stomach, the other falling to rest at her side.

Cassandra grinned. “Yes, Josephine wrote that I must come as soon as possible. Surely, you must not think you have to fight every antagonist without me at your side.”

“It is not a battle I face this time, Seeker, unless you wish to disembowel me and remove my ability to bear children. And that, I fear, has been taken care of already.”

Cassandra held her breath, hearing the roughness in her voice as she discussed something so horrific.

“My friend, you do not have to discuss it if you do not wish to. I came here to be of solace to you, in whatever capacity you need.”

“I do not need solace, Seeker, I need my child. Since I have lost her, I am rather satiated with the disappointment of life,” her words stung with resentment, and suddenly Cassandra saw the demeanor that Josephine had undoubtedly been exposed to for several days.

“How did you know it was…” her thinking out loud would be the death of her, but she said it, and now she was at the mercy of Theia’s answer, whatever it was.

Theia paused and looked out at the balcony, her eyes narrowed as they reacted to the contrast in light. “I felt it, it was…just a hunch, I suppose, but. I just knew. They say mothers always know, that they feel things others cannot possibly fathom. I felt her.”

“My Lady, I am so—“

“Do not apologize. I am so tired of hearing the processionals of ‘I am sorry.’ If everyone is so sorry, why can’t they find some way to return to me what was mine?” she seethed, but was too tired to fully express it. The soreness of her abdominal region curbed her fury.

Cassandra felt like weeping, watching her friend be reduced to such carnal emotions of grief. Then, as she saw the absence of her friend’s left arm, she was reminded of just how much more risky it was for Theia to remain enveloped in herself.

“Friend, are you sure you are taking adequate care of yourself, considering your special circumstances?” she asked with careful intrepedation.

Theia picked up on the intent rather easily. She was considerably not herself, but she still had her intellect and intuition in spades.

“Oh, now you fear I’ll be consumed by a despair demon, Seeker? Is this what is supposed to comfort me, my own friend looking at me as a possible target for her blade?”

“I did not say that, but you know as well as I do what the reality is of your existence.”

“I am a mother with no child, Seeker, that is the reality of my existence.”

“I know, I just wish—“

“Get out.”

Cassandra stopped herself, caught off guard by the sharp order she had been given. She had come all this way, dropping everything in order to do so, and she was being sent off as if she were a menial servant. It riled her ego viscerally, but she battled within herself to have compassion for her friend.

“My Lady, with all due respect,”

“No. Get out of my sight. You wish to scold me like everyone else. I want to sit here in my silence and grieve like I deserve. I never asked for you to come here,” she growled. From the narrowness of her gaze, her purple irises began stirring with color.

“Theia, I am not leaving.” She used her first name now, a unique and alarming urgency.

“If you do not leave you will be tossed out on the top of an ice sheet, Cassandra, I am warning you one last time,” Theia hissed back, her hand collecting into a fist that gripped onto her bedsheets.

“No. I have never abandoned your side when you needed it, and I will not do it—“

“GET. OUT.” She yelled now, in the most animalistic tone Cassandra had ever heard come from a woman. The pain almost felt like daggers shooting at her. But, if it was one thing the Seeker was always trained to do, it was to stare down the roaring fire from a dragon’s throat and continue forward, to do what must be done.

“You do not scare me, my friend,” she said calmly, stepping forward and dragging a knee across the bed as she sat close to Theia, who was now lurching away from her.

“Theia! Theia, stop,” she said low, putting her arms out and trying to wrap around Theia’s shoulders. She felt several punches against her chestplate as she slowly pulled the violent embrace of the woman she trusted with her life into her.

“Get off! I do not need to be coddled!” Theia yelled.

Some more resistance, but then she relented, one last fruitless punch against her friend’s armor. From her chest, Cassandra could hear and feel her friend sobbing, the deep, guttural sound of her voice sending sorrow through her.

Stillness, even if in agony, is still stillness.

Protectively, Cassandra stroked the back of Theia’s head, feeling the slight friction between her hair and her riding glove.

“It is alright. I promise,” she muttered as her friend now held onto her for dear life. They stayed like this for a while, while Theia’s crying seemed to be bottomless, as if the sea itself wished to be the source of her tears.

The remainder of the day passed into a night of armistice, and it was not until the following morning that the Seeker saw some reason to hope. While sitting in the courtyard and eating a modest breakfast alone at one of the tables, out walked Theia, slowly, unescorted, but tall. She wore a black dress, a purple sash tied multiple loops around her waist to gather the light fabric into some shape. Her hair was not decorated, but it looked washed, which was more than what she could say yesterday. It was the fifth night she had slept alone, reclusive.

Cassandra flinched as she saw her friend, and her eyes shined with pleasant surprise.

“My Lady, you are walking! Come, sit with me, do not rush,” she said as she chewed through a mouthful of food, standing to beckon her over.

Theia’s face was stoic, but cordial. She nodded once, accepting the offer as she made her way, fingers lightly grasping on the skirt of her gown as she stepped down some shallow stairs. She sat beside her friend, grunting under her breath as she did so.

“Cassandra, I wish to—“

“There is no need,” Cassandra interrupted, sitting down once more and anchoring her elbows on the table. “I understand that you are in a most difficult moment of your life, and I know the woman you are, underneath it all.”

Theia sighed shallowly, her eyes staring off blankly into space.

“Cassandra, that is just the thing, though – this is the woman I am. I cannot reverse what has happened, as much as I wish I could. I can never be the woman I was in the days of the Inquisition again. I haven’t been her for some time now.”

“Everyone has foundations to who they are, no matter what life’s changes do to impact their outlook. You are still the brave, kind, and strong person I befriended in war. Even if you do not find humor in the things you used to, you hold true to those virtues.”

A silence fell over them as they both sat, straight-backed and contemplative.

“Did you ever have a moment in your life when something was before you. A chance, to make your life about something you could have for yourself. Something that did not have to abide by outside rules or customs, that you nourished, and protected?” Theia’s tone almost sounded like dutiful sobbing the way it as so melodic.

“Yes, I have.”

“What then?”

“I…when I fell in love with a Mage, when I was young. I felt as though all of the rules I had held myself to no longer applied. I loved him, and he loved me, and that was the most sacred truth of us. When he died, I mourned him in private, because I did not wish to share my pain with anyone. I felt as though no one was worthy of such vulnerability. As if, such raw power of emotion could level entire buildings.”

Theia’s eyes flickered to her friend’s face as she spoke; Cassandra never discussed the Mage she once had as a lover, except that once. It was years ago. Theia never pressed her about it since, knowing just how important of a pivot it was in her life.

“That is how I feel about this. I do not want anyone near me. I feel like I have lost myself, and I’m wandering alone in in this spiral of a pathway, one side of it being some form of stability, the other the heart of my devastation. I keep trying to move forward, but I find it’s just the same twisting path, in and out of my despair. I do not know where it leads, or when I hope to stop and rest, my feet just…keep going.”

“But each time you re-enter your grief, you do so having survived it time and time again. You will continue to do so, until it feels like you have more control over just how close it gets to your heart. Trust me, my friend, you are the kind of person who can survive this.”

“I have survived everything, I am getting quite bored of it.”

“The dead would disagree with such a sentiment.”

“Spoken like someone who would know, Nevarran.”

Cassandra couldn’t help but grin in surprise. In a flash of seconds, her friend’s wit had made an appearance. She looked at her, and nodded in concession.

“Theia, I know I cannot possibly relate to your loss. But, I do know what it is to lose someone you love when a piece of your happiness relies upon them staying alive. You are anything but alone.”

Theia sighed, coupling her hands in her lap. “I understand that, but you must also concede just how lonely it is to be recognized as a heroine, someone who has done impossible things, and yet fail at what is supposed to come natural to you. It all feels backwards. I can hardly keep track of the illogical nature of my life.”

“A great deal of things come naturally to a woman, my friend. We are capable of most anything we invest our will into.”

“Yes, but that does not mean it does not bite us back for trying. If I may ask, would you walk with me? The healers say I must get some air, and distract myself,” her voice was half breath as she hoisted herself up from her seat. Cassandra agreed readily.

The gardens were lush but reverent in their stillness for Lady Trevelyan’s sorrow. Cassandra couldn’t help but notice just how lively and beautiful the scene would have been if only the fountains were spouting water, and the birds would come to visit on the disbursed seeds and nuts the servants would dish out every morning. Even the walls and facades of the building felt as though it had humbled itself to the concerns of its fair-haired occupant.

“I have had one of my assistants tend to the letters and dispatch responsibilities. I trust her to do so competently, and I will return to the duties myself very soon. I do not have a real choice,” Theia remarked as they walked.

“Theia, no one is doubting your dedication or fitness for your role. Do not race an enemy horse that does not exist,” the Seeker advised, hands behind her back.

“I know. Still, I cannot sit by and know that Divine Victoria must make up for the work of another person whilst she does the job of several. And you, my friend, cannot make such excursions to Antiva lightly.”

“We all make sacrifices for the needs of our allies. You have done more than enough to deserve such measures.”

“We all have, that doesn’t mean the world stops hurling towards disaster with each passing night.”

They came to a balcony view, one of many that overlooked the ports. They could see some of the Montilyet ships at port, secured and ready for whatever they were tasked with transporting. Somewhere nearby, surely Josephine was working, keeping herself busy whilst her mind fought off worrying about her wife, and the desire to go to her at every other minute.

“They are beautiful ships,” Cassandra complimented as they both peered down.

“Yes, Josephine was always one to combine style with pragmatism. They are fast and durable. Just like the ones we’re building for our forces, but those will be better, and well-armed.”

“Tell me, how has it been between you and Lady Montilyet? She seemed quite careful when she greeted me the other day.”

Theia let a moment of silence pass as she overlooked the shore, her throat stiffening with nervous feelings.

“Josephine and I…don’t quite know what to make of each other because of this. I am afraid I have hurt her badly. In the days after the incident I was very angry, and even malicious. I wanted to fight everyone around me. When I looked at her, when I heard her speak, it was as if every bone in my body felt this mixture of shame and resentment. I still resist the feeling that I’ve failed her,” Theia’s candidness was hard to swallow, but it felt good to speak truth to the feelings that had permeated the air.

“I am sorry to hear that. When is the last time you spoke to her?”

“She comes and bids me goodnight every night before she goes to sleep, and comes to bid good morning with breakfast. She sleeps in our room while I have recovered in the guest wing. I feel so out of my element, not having the ego to be the protective one anymore,” Theia leaned over the stone rail, elbows holding her chest up as she walked the people walk up and down the port.

“I am sure she is just as unnerved to see you be so defenseless.”

“Agh, she knows what I look like when I am at the end of my rope. She’s always been the voice inside my head, and in front of my face, inspiring me to find one more foot of it to hold onto. But, I think she is torn between grieving her own loss and being strong for me. And I have made it very hard for her to want to be strong,” Theia could admit when she was wrong, but she hadn’t the time or energy to do so whilst recovering both physically and psychologically. Indeed, she couldn’t even promise that this moment of reflection would resonate with her; perhaps in an hour she would be back to being distraught and mean.

“I have always told you, honesty is the best way to protect what is important to you.”

Theia patted Cassandra on the shoulder as she took a step back from the railing. “This is true, if inconvenient,” she replied. “Come, I wish to show you the rest of the place. Maybe you’ll get some sunburn, if I keep exposing you to the daylight.”

“We can all hope, friend.”

The rest of their walk was slow and sentimental, keeping to Theia’s determined pace of exertion. When she needed a break, they would sit at a bench, or stand in front of a fountain. Soon, the midday brightness dimmed into early evening twilight, and Cassandra’s attention turned towards the expectations of dinner and socialization.

“The Antivan people are always ready to share food and drink and spur you out of your grief. They hardly rest for such trivial matters such as depression or sorrow. It is most invigorating up until you suffer a personal tragedy,” a smirk had managed to appear on Theia’s tired face as she described her experience.

“They sound like the opposite society to Nevarra. There, a party is not considered worth it unless several people cry, another brings the tokens of their dead relative to pass around the dinner table, and an hour-long toast to the departed has been recognized.”

“Perhaps I should get a summer home there, so I can stop eclipsing the jovial sun here with my sulking.”

They returned to Theia’s temporary room, which had been cleaned well in her absence. The servants had taken the opportunity to change linens, freshen the flowers, and pull the tapestries back to air out the room; clearly, her leaving the space for longer than an hour had been rare.

“I should go see Josephine. Maker knows she is already aware that I have arisen from my sickbed, and is trying to conjure up the right reaction, the right words, the right tone…” Theia sighed, playing with the pyrophite bracelet on her wrist.

“Is that such a bad thing? You do know what your temper is like, surely.”

“No, but I know once we do collide, it will be as it was when we were at Skyhold: a battle of wits, then of tempers, then of wills.”

“Ah, yes. Now, those are fond memories.”

“Some things change, others remain with their heels dug in, you could say.”

“Then I will go to dinner and then to bed. I can stay one more day, but after that I must return to the mountains. Thank you for spending this day with me, it is good to see you out and about once more.”

“Thank you, friend, for everything. I shall see you tomorrow. Perhaps we can walk by the pier, and I can show you the ships up close.” Theia smiled softly as her friend bid her goodnight, and withdrew from her room. Inhaling slow, she turned and around at the room she had been confined to for days. It was so cold, so desolate to feel it around her. She could feel the energy of her cries, her wailing, her groaning in pain, almost as if it had seeped into the walls. This would haunt her mind for a while.

Josephine stood at the foot of their bed, a chalice of wine in hand and held close to her face as she stared at the freshly made sheets. Only one side of the bed had been used for the last week, and even though she tried to sleep, she would jolt awake from the resonating anxiety at hearing her wife cry in alarm.

They had not slept apart unless separated by miles since Corypheus was slain. She had believed that sleeping alone would be impossible. Surely, even in all of her foresight, Josephine had not expected such trials to drive so deep of a wedge between them. They had always been shoulder-to-shoulder, at least, when it was not a battlefield in front of them.

It gnawed at her nerves, worrying that Theia felt so alone in her pain, that she must sequester herself.

So, when her wife stood in the entryway of their chambers, she had to do a double-take to be sure it was her. When it was confirmed, suddenly so many emotions took hold. Defensiveness, sadness, relief…and so much more that couldn’t be named, for it all bled into one another.

“Josephine.” Theia said, before walking towards her. The very sight of her walking, up on her feet, like she had been before…the color in her face now reappearing. It was enough to make her fall to her knees and start crying, if she had felt safe enough to.

“Theia, you are well, and walking?” she said, setting her wine down at the nearest end table, before meeting her halfway. As they stood in front of each other, the palpable awkwardness of being in the aftermath of so much trauma took hold.

“Uh, yes. I got up this morning, and Seeker Cassandra walked with me all day. I feel my strength is returning, which is…relieving.”

“Yes, to say the least. How are you doing besides…besides your energy?”

“Good. I wanted to…to thank you, for inviting Cassandra to be here. It has helped a lot. She…is a very wise and loyal friend.”

“I know, which is why when I thought of who to turn to, she came to mind first and foremost. Are you beginning to feel like yourself, even just slightly?”

“I…am trying my best. I…agh, Josephine, let’s stop this,” Theia took hold of one of her wife’s hands, holding it to her chest as she looked at her. “We are talking like strangers.”

“Forgive me, mi amor, if I prefer speaking like strangers after these days of you speaking to me like an enemy,” Josephine pulled away, turning around and walking further into the room. The act of turning away from her hurt her on the inside, but so did the lingering sting of her words that she yelled and growled at her.

“What do you wish me to say, Josephine? That I regret feeling the pain of losing our child? That I am sorry I could not better prepare myself for the devastation of it all?”

“Theia, we were both underprepared! You forget that this was a joint venture, we did this together, like we have done everything. You turned away from me. I had to grieve alone, away from your vitriol!” Josephine turned around to face her for this argument.

“I cannot control how this affects my body, Josephine. Every hour I feel a whole different emotion, I am not myself, and you know this,” Theia came closer, but only slightly, testing the waters of just how close she could get without Josephine retreating further into the room. This was the room, after all, where it happened, and the memory of it still consumed her senses, even as she tried so hard to remain present.

“I know that well enough! Why do you think I came to you even after all had been said and done. Every morning, every night, I’d come to see you, to be met with your shoulder and indignant words. I felt like my wife had been lost along with…” she stopped herself, still unable to speak it out loud. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, turning away as tears began to form in her eyes.

“My Love, I know how you hurt from this. I want to be here for you, I want to be that protective person you married, the person who would put her body between you and anything coming for you. But I am so…” the tears were evolving for Theia now as she choked out her last words.

“I can’t, I can’t do this, not here. Not with this…this right in front of me..” she motioned towards the bed, the bed where she had woken up to the disaster.

Josephine turned around immediately, and realizing what she was referring to, suddenly the screams began in her head again. The memory of her, screaming as if she was dying, the fear in her voice.

“Neither can I…” she breathed, and she quickly found her way to Theia’s side. Wrapping an arm around the back of her waist, she escorted her out of the room, Theia leaning on her as they walked to somewhere, anywhere, but there.

Eventually they found their study, the room where they had always sought congress with each other for the most important of matters and discussions. Some of their most heated arguments, and some of their best reconciliations. Now, as they held each other on the floor, having pulled the ghastly bearskin rug into the middle of the expansive stone floor, the quiet comforted them as they comforted each other.

“I will arrange to have the bed replaced in the morning,” Josephine muttered as she let Theia lay her head in her lap, looking outward towards the balcony. Slowly, she started playing with her blonde strands of hair, another hand resting on her shoulder. Her face was soaked with tears, making her cheeks feel slightly sticky.

“Thank you,” Theia whispered, resting her hands underneath her cheek, feeling calmer now to be close to her wife, her partner, her ally in life.

Josephine’s night dress slipped off her shoulder as they remained there, graceless and fallen apart.

“You know what is going to haunt me forever? The fact that I will never get to meet her. The fact that I will never know what she sounds like, what her voice sounds like, what her hair feels like in my fingers…”

“Theia, darling…”

“No, let me get this out. It’s been resting on my chest like a boulder, I can’t breathe anymore. I…I listened every time they warned me how much it would hurt. How much…how much childbirth would hurt. But, feeling the pain and the agony of losing…all I could think was that I would endure three times whatever pain it was to have my child in my arms, and the pain of losing my arm, all in the same moment.”

A couple of tears streamed down Josephine’s face without notice as she listened to her wife mourn out loud.

“I just want to see her. Just once. Just to see what her eyes were like, if they were purple like mine. If her hair would be dark like yours. How beautiful she would be, the product of us.”

“Between your temper and my will, she would have been a force to be reckoned with. Dorian would have his work cut out for him,” Josephine said through her tears. This made Theia swallow hard, choking back the urge to break down.

“Yes, she would have driven him crazy. There would have been so much laughter….so much…” she closed her eyes harshly, letting the tears overflow and escape her eyelids.

“Shhh, mi amor, it is alright,” Josephine cooed, stroking her hair. She heard Theia inhale sharply, congestion in her nose.

“I am so sorry, my Love. I failed you. I failed us.”

“Theia Sofia, you did no such thing,” Josephine interrupted her, a hand guiding Theia’s gaze forefully up to make eye contact with hers. “Do not even begin to tell yourself you let anyone down. This is not your failure, this is not your fault.”

“You trusted me. I was entrusted with this life, and I lost it. I failed to protect the one thing that could only ever depend on me.”

“Theia, come here,” Josephine pushed her wife’s shoulders up so she would sit up, right in front of her, so their eyes made level eye-contact. Gently, she held Theia’s face between her hands, the glimmer off fresh tears under the moonlight.

“It will take time for us to recover from this loss, and I know each day will be different for you. Some will be harder than others, and I know you will need distance as much as closeness in the coming days. But, I never want you to feel as though you must shut yourself away to atone for something you need not be punished for.”

“Josephine, I have no idea what this will do to me before it’s all over. I cannot promise you I won’t be the wounded person I was these past few days. You deserve to have your wife be there for you through this.”

“I deserve nothing more than you do. We may not have the path written out for us, but we will move forward. When has the lack of precedent ever stopped us from doing so?”

Theia put her hand to Josephine’s, the end of her tears clearing her vision.

“Do you remember our vows? How we made up our own because I refused to have a fully Andrastian ceremony,” Theia chuckled under her breath.

Josephine smiled. “Yes, and everyone cried and cried,” she pulled her wife into her chest, wrapping her arms around her.

“You Mother almost fainted when we told her we would not swear only to the Maker. I thought surely she would pin me to one of the tapestries.”

“She still hasn’t forgiven you, you know. She swears you are provoking Andraste to take back more than just your hand.”

“Maybe I am. But she can try take this away from me all she wants, this…you, you are the one part I refuse to let go.”

Josephine put her lips to the top of Theia’s head. “I am not going anywhere, mi amor.”

#oc stuff #Theia Trevelyan #Non-Chronological Chapter #Post-Tresspasser #ARC SPOILERS #Inquisitor x Josephine

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loftyexecutor · 7 years ago

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clean slate (11/?)

Pairing: (eventual) addcest [LPDE] & elsain [LKATh] WC this chapter: 3600 Rating: T+ TWs: (past) abuse AU: modern/single parent Lusa (with his tiny son Arc) + runaway Esper (hah) Notes: i wont spoil anything but i feel like this is my favorite chapter so far

ao3 link

It’s with a heavy heart that Esper shoves a shirt into his backpack and then, after a second’s deliberation, grabs another one, Lusa’s, from where it’s thrown over the laundry basket. He’d never thought he would feel like this one day, throwing essentials into a bag to leave, heart in the pit of his stomach. He’d never thought he’d get attached to a place.

The last time he’d done this, much less peacefully, he’d been full of adrenaline, panic coursing through his very veins. He remembers looking over his shoulder the whole time, watching carefully if his father stirs from his unconsciousness. He doesn’t to that now; doesn’t have to, since he’d hear either Lusa or Arc coming long before they’d see him pushing all the overflowing things further into the bag to zip it up.

He can’t help but wonder if he’ll be missed. Arc had grown attached to him, and Lusa was nice to him, but ultimately, they’d go back to how they were before he’d turned up. Lusa will probably be happier, having his workshop all to himself again, not having to care for Esper’s untimely outbursts.

He resolves to stop thinking about it lest he start crying and wakes someone up with the sound.

He throws the bag over his shoulder and then picks up the note he’d spent an agonizingly long time writing up. He places it onto the dining table for Lusa to find easily in the morning. He would feel bad for leaving without even saying a goodbye, but he can’t exactly do that without Lusa attempting to stop him. He could also go for a hug that he knows Lusa would provide more than happily, but he also can’t have that, even if he feels so, so cold. Suddenly it doesn’t feel like the summer anymore.

Esper shakes his head to clear it and then slips on his shoes. He can’t handle turning around eve once more to look at the house he’d come to call home, a real home as it’s defined in the dictionaries, as opposed to the prison he’d spent his life at before.

He steps onto the dark street with quaking shoulders.

—

“Heey! Give back my dinosaur!”

“Shea!”

“But da-ad! It’s my turn!”

“That’s my dinosaur!”

“Shea, you lost your dinosaur last week. Give it back to your brother.”

“But da——d!”

“No buts! Give it back and go brush your teeth, both of your. It’s way past your bedtime.”

“...okay…”

Arme sighs, adding ‘get Shea a new toy dinosaur’ to his mental to-do list. He turns to Knight, who is still sitting on the sofa, fiddling with his phone and the strap on it. Arme’s expression melts as he sits by him, enveloping him with an arm.

“You tired?” he asks, bumping into Knight’s head with his.

Knight chuckles and returns the gesture. “A little. I still can’t believe what happened to Lusa today.”

Arme’s answer is a nod. He takes the phone from his husband’s hands and puts it onto the coffee table. The entire conversation is ingrained in his brain just as much as it is in Knight’s.

Knight had called Lusa to ask about going bowling next weekend, but it’d been obvious Lusa was not alright just from his tone of voice. Knight had put him on speaker then, and Arme had found his way into the living room, drawn by their discussion.

Lusa told them what had happened, and then promptly cried soft sobs into the phone. He didn’t want to wake up anyone, but Knight and Arme were lending an ear, he just couldn’t help it.

Knight had assured Lusa he’d personally be of help hiding the body if Asker were to ever show up again. Arme wasn't sure how to feel — because on one hand he completely agreed, but he also kew Knight was completely serious, so on the other hand he wished it wouldn’t come to that.

Finally, they managed to coerce Lusa to get some sleep, but ‘out of sight, out of mind’ never really worked its supposed magic with them.

“We’re a family,” Arme tells Knight, slow and deliberate. “We protect our own. God help those who would try harming Esper.”

Knight grins tiredly and then leans up to place a kiss to Arme’s temple. His lips linger there for a moment, and when they leave, Knight’s entire head rests on Armes shoulder instead. “You always know what to say.”

“Don’t make fun of me—”

“I’m not! I’m not,” Knight defends himself, “I mean it. That was very ice.”

Arme huffs. “You didn’t marry me because of my linguistic abilities or lack thereof.”

“You’re right, I married you for that sweet cheque you bring home every month.”

“Elsword Knight Sieghart-Ishmael, I swear—”

“Dad! Papa! We want a story!” Anpa cries from the upper floor, much to Knight’s elation. He uses the distraction to slip out of Arme’s hold and heads upstairs.

Arme watches with a fond look. He also adds ‘buy Knight something nice from that sweet cheque he brings home every month’ to his to-do list. It’s really getting too long at this point.

It’s not much later that he follow upstairs, stationing himself at the door of their boys’ room like a guard, listening in on every soft word Knight reads from the boys’ favorite storybook. The story of the fearless knight and the crystal of life. Arme knows it by heart, could probably wi a recital , that’s how many times he’d read it already. And Knight alike, probably even a few more times than him.

Still, there is no such thing calming like his husband’s voice piercing the nightly silence, and Arme closes his eyes to enjoy it to the fullest. It’s not like he can’t picture Knight’s smiles and fond looks aimed at their sons with perfection anyway.

He’s almost lulled to sleep himself by the time Knight finishes the story and places kisses on their boys’ heads, doing his best not to wake either of them. He’s smiling sleepily as he leaves the room, the click of the door handle hiding the smack their lips make as they come together.

“Let’s sleep, too,” he whispers, and Arme is nodding along with practiced ease, though he swoops down to get one more kiss beforehand.

Knight is tugging his shirt off before they’re even in the bedroom, sending it flying towards the direction of the bathroom. Arme would laugh if he didn’t feel similarly tired. He starts working his clothes off when Knight pipes up from the dresser, holding their pajamas in his hands with unnatural stiffness.

He’s staring out of the window as if transfixed.

“Is that—” He leans over the dresser, knocking over a — fortunately unlit — candle holder. “Is that Esper?!”

Arme frowns, running over so he can look out the window himself Sure enough, the figure passing their house has Esper’s hair, and is tall enough to pass for him. Arme’s breathing stutters as soon as he notices the bulging backpack on the figure’s back.

It might just be a coincidence, but then again…

There’s no one in the town who resembles Esper, especially not like that. Arme is rushing to get his phone from its charging station on the bedside table.

“We have to call Lusa,” he says, already doing just that. Knight peeks peering out the window, watches the figure go further and further down the street.

“What’s that way—?” Knight asks, but it hits him almost the second the words leave his lips. “The bus stop! Arme, he’s planning to leave!”

Knight’s panicked words only serve to make the dialing tones more terse. “Pick up, pick up, God, make him pick up alread—”

“Hm? Arme?” Lusa slurs from the other side of the line, obviously having been just awoken.

“Lusa, is Esper home?” Arme asks in a rush.

Lusa sounds confused, and Arme can almost see the little crease between his brows. “Wha? He went to bed before me…? Why’re you askin’?”

“Lusa, I need you to go check Esper’s room right the fuck now. Knight, I’m gonna start the car,” Arme instructs, pulling his shirt back on haphazardly.

There’s a distant, “Wow! Language!”

“Did something happen?” Lusa asks, starting to wake up more. Arme isn’t sure whose heavy footsteps he hears; Lusa’s or his own. The automatic light turns on as he steps onto the porch, already clicking the car lock off.

“Fuck!” Lusa hisses into his ear, “He’s not here! It’s a fucking mess, what happened?” He sounds just as panicked as Arme knows he is.

“Knight saw him going down our street a few ago,” he tries explaining. Hes jabbing the key into the ignition and pushing the phone against his shoulder with the side of his face as he peels off the driveway, making a sharper turn than he ever would during daylight. “He had a bag. Knight thinks he’s going to the bus stop.”

“Fuck! What’s he thinking?”

Arme has no answer for that question, but he knows Lusa does. There’s silence for a few blocks and then Lusa breathes heavily into the receiver and says, “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Please, stop him.”

“That’s the plan,” Arme cuts off, Lusa’s voice fading off with the end of the call.

—

Lusa’s hands tremble as he holds the paper, wrinkling it with the force of his grip. He wishes he could unread something, but alas, he has no such powers or luck.

— Lusa,

I hope you had a good rest. I decided it was too dangerous for me to stay when father knows there this is. I can’t imagine if he’d hurt you or Arc and I can’t risk it. Sorry I left without a word, but I don’t want you to try to stop me. It’s better this way. You’ll be safe if you don’t know where I am. My father is a dangerous man, you’re lucky nothing happened to you yesterday. Please please don’t look for me.

Thank you for everything. I hope I can repay you one say, somehow.

— Esper

Lusa feels like what he’d just read isn’t real, but Arme had made it all too real, and painfully so. He’s grabbing his keys before he can think about it a second longer, running out in nothing but his pajamas and bedheaded hair.

The letter gets shoved into his pocket haphazardly and Lusa wants to forget it exists, but it’s burning a hole through his jeans and soul alike. Nothing save it feels real at the moment; the dark and quiet transforms the town into something unfamiliar, strange.

The drive feels at once endless and over too soon. Lusa’s sneakers drag over the concrete as he half-jogs to the bus stop, breathing out an immediate sigh of relief when he spots a hunched-over figure.

Esper sits on the bench, the lone street lamp that reaches the secluded spot casting long shadows over his figure. Sure enough, there’s a bag on his shoulders. He was really planning on leaving.

Lusa can’t breathe.

“Esper!” he cries, breaking out into a full run and almost tripping himself over a curb.

Esper jerks, turning a wide-eyed face towards him, recoiling almost immediately. Lusa comes to a halt when he reaches him, panting and with equally wide-eyed stare. Esper is holding up his arms in front of his chest as if waiting to be struck down, to defend himself. The implications churn Lusa’s stomach in the very opposite of a good way.

How does he show Esper that he wouldn’t hurt him, never ever again? Each day, each tiny jolt and jerk and careful, fearful glance he beats himself up for contributing to it, wishing there was a way to re-do history and change not only his meeting with Esper, but everything else as well.

He only just notices Arme sitting next to Esper when he leans to look at him closer, frowning like Lusa had done something awful. And, fuck, Lusa doesn’t need him to remind him too; he’s very capable of kicking his brain himself, thank you very much.

He all but collapses at Esper’s feet, reaching out to grab his hands in his, enveloping them and warming the cold skin. He can’t hold back the tears that he didn’t even know he still had after all the ones he’d spent today.

Esper stares down at him, mirroring him with a look of agony that Lusa wishes will never cross his face ever again.

“Please, please, please don’t leave,” Lusa chokes out, back bending down in tandem with the quiet wail that leaves his chapped, bitten-up lips. His forehead comes to rest against Esper’s knees, yet he keeps talking. Esper and Arme hear him clear as day, no matter the mumbles or sobs. “Please, I promise nothing will happen to you anymore, so please, rethink it— I don’t want to lose you, Esper, please…”

Esper weeps — one would think he’d also have no tears left to cry anymore, after a day full of them, but no, his tearducts are as functional as ever and provide the saltiness diligently — and he leans over Lusa, squeezing his hand with his trembling ones. Lusa squeezes back and that simple human contact warms Esper like nothing else could.

“I—” he gasps, sniffling like a whining puppy that had been kicked. His face is a mess of various fluids and he’s thankful for the bad light so the others don’t have to see him like that. “I don’t want to leave…!”

“You don’t have to, you don’t, so please,” Lusa begs, gripping onto Esper like his entire life depends on it.

Maybe it does.

Arme rubs Esper’s back in silence. He knows there’s not much more he can do than he’d already done, or say more than he already had. He’s glad Lusa didn’t have to see Esper when he’d first realized he’d been caught in the act, fighting and begging. Really a sight Arme himself wishes to erase from his memory. He’s not sure how Lusa would have reacted.

Esper shakes between the two of them, trying to stifle his sobs and hiccups. His success is debatable, but it’s not like either of them is going to start the debate.

“I’m sorry,” he says, not without his voice breaking in the middle though, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

“It’s okay,” Lusa echoes back back to each of Esper’s apologies, pulling the man closer, enveloping him in a tight embrace. He doesn’t want to ever let go, ever let Esper slip from his fingers like he’d tried.

They’re pulled out of their thoughts, out of their tears, by the bus coming up to a stop by their little bench, tires screeching too-loud in the night.

Lusa stares at the vehicle and then looks back at Esper, holding him in place with a terrified look. With wide and bloodshot eyes and tear streaks running down his cheeks like rivulets of pain, Esper isn’t sure he’d ever seen Lusa look this scared before. Lusa was strong, he was the one who didn’t cry — today is the first time Esper had ever seen him shed a tear, and what a way to find out.

“Please,” Lusa chokes out, no more than a cut-off whisper that gets stuck halfway up his throat, “I won’t— I can’t make you stay if you don’t want to, but please— please don’t go.”

Esper sobs again, lips wobbling as he grits his teeth and fights not to screw his eyes shut. He almost knocks Lusa backwards with the force he throws himself at him again, clinging like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. Lusa feels like an anchor, holding him down so he feels real again when everything feels like a bad, bad dream.

“I don’t want to leave,” he confesses again, straight into the fabric of Lusa’s already wrinkled shirt.

“Then don’t! I promise everything will be alright.”

Esper lets himself get lulled by the soft words until the bus drives closes the doors to the vehicle again and speeds off, disappearing into the distance as its tail lights fade out of view.

“Would you like to go home?” Lusa asks, peeking at Arme over the tremble of Esper’s shoulder. They share a look full of nothing but relief, though Arme knows Lusa feels much more of it than him.

Esper nods, choppy, timid. It would’ve gotten unnoticed if he didn’t have his face pressed into the crook of Lusa’s neck and Lusa couldn’t feel even miniscule movements.

“Then let’s go, let’s get some rest.”

—

“Thank you, Arme,” Lusa says, standing in the doorway. He looks so tired now, with bags under his eyes and unable to even form a real smile.

Arme shakes his head, arms folded not defensively, but pensively. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll Knight everything is fine, he must be worried sick by now.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Again, not your fault. Not Esper’s, either. Please go get some rest.”

Lusa nods, staring off into nothing again. “Yeah,” he says finally, when the sound of boiling water and the kettle squeaking reaches his ears. “Be careful on the way home.”

“I will. Good night, Lusa,” Arme tells him. He hesitates for a moment, though, then reaches up and softly claps Lusa’s shoulder. Then he’s heading back to his car.

The clock on the hallway wall reads 3:19 when Lusa closes the door and leans back on it to catch his breath, way past his or Arme’s bedtime on a weekday. They’re all going to be messes tomorrow.

But there’s someone who’s a mess right now who needs attention. Lusa paddles his way to the kitchen to find Esper pouring tea. He’s handed a steaming mug and Esper gives a wide smile to go along with it.

“Here. I thought it might help you sleep. It’s chamomile.”

Lusa puts the mug down onto the table. “Esper,” he says sternly, but not unkindly, “You don’t need to act like nothing happened.”

Esper’s falls off like a leaf in the autumn breeze. He holds his own mug close, fingers wrapped around the colorful ceramic. It’s Lusa’s, the one he keeps, the one that has the terrible cat pun on it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quiet and gazing down.

“Come on, I wasn’t looking for an apology. I’m not angry at you, okay?”

“Uh-uh,” Esper nods, staring into the moving surface of his tea like it holds the secrets to the universe. He plays with the teabag absently, yanking at the damp string.

“I wanna… talk to you about it again, but not now,” Lusa says. His voice is soft, as gentle as he can make it. “For now, I bet we’re both tired.”

“Yeah.”

“Esper…” Lusa hesitates. Gathering all his courage to ask this, he goes ahead with it, but not until a few tense moments pass. “Would you consider sleeping with me tonight? In my room, I mean— I know, it sounds weird, but I’d just like to make sure you’re here, y’know?”

“Okay,” Esper nods, but Lusa frowns.

“You don’t have to say yes. If you don’t want to, nothing will happen. I won’t get angry.”

“No. No, it’s okay. More than okay— I’d… like to not be alone, actually,” Esper explains, a quiet confession like a giant secret no one was supposed to find out.

Lusa opens his arms and waits for Esper to put his tea away before he hugs him again. The lankier man reciprocates, squeezing Lusa with all his strength.

“Today was… long,” Lusa says as he pulls away, “I promise you everything will be alright. So let’s sleep on it, okay?”

Esper hums, nodding with a small, crooked smile. He can’t wait to sleep, really; is sure he’d pass out as soon as his head hit the pillow. Now that the adrenaline is gone from his system, his limbs feel like lead and head pounds with a headache from all the crying.

They take their teas and sip them slowly, savoring the sweetened taste. Esper makes the best tea, Lusa had decided. And the best food. And the best desserts.

He has the nicest laugh. He’s so funny. He gets scared by horror movies too easily. He gets that wrinkle between his brows when he concentrates too much. He’s skilled with anything he picks up almost immediately.

He’s family. Lusa can’t imagine life without him anymore, just like he can’t imagine life without Arc.

Esper drags himself more than walks up the stairs and Lusa can see just how badly this has affected him. Not that he couldn’t before, but with the storm — hopefully — behind them, it’s time to see what hasn’t gotten flooded. Esper hesitates in the doorway of Lusa’s room until Lusa motions him inside.

It’s okay, he repeats. To himself, to Esper. To the both of them.

They collapse onto the bed, teas forgotten on the bedside table. It should be weird, sharing such a small bed with two of them, but it isn’t. Lusa’s arms come to wind around Esper, to keep him close, almost unconsciously, and Esper kicks away the blanket so they’re not overheating. They’re still wearing their clothes — or, at least Esper is, Lusa had just thrown a shirt on to go along with his sleeping sweatpants. That should also be weird. Possibly uncomfortable. But Esper doesn’t even peep.

Just as he’d predicted, the sweet embrace of sleep takes him into its hold just as easily as Lusa does, and he snuggles up to both.

#elsword #addcest #lpde #.elsword #.addcest #.ch #.cs #.LPDE #im very fond of this chapter if im being honest here. puffs cheeks out #i wsih people would talk to me about this au its one of my favorites...........

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