#and there’s nothing tying him to the narrative
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clockwork-carstairs · 3 days ago
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okay this letter hurt like hell but you know what i'm really glad i finally know why kit was so angry at ty, because it never made sense to me before. the narrative that kit's angry because ty changed himself, took away part of himself by going through with the necromancy is a loooot better imho than kit being mad either about the necromancy or that ty didn't reciprocate his confession (when ty was clearly in absolutely no position mentally or physically to respond to that). kit being mad because of what it stood for, what it meant – the confirmation that nothing he could've done would ever have changed ty's mind, nothing would've been enough to save ty from himself/what he believed he had to do, kit himself couldn't be enough to help him, nor could anything. ty was always going to do it. hurts like HELL but i really love this slight change in perspective, makes me understand kit's point of view a lot better because prior to this his being angry to ty didn't really add up to me
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ammoknightsofficial · 2 years ago
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The Splatoon 3 Art Book is raising some very important thoughts and questions in me, specifically regarding that selection of concept art of Deep Cut.
One of them featured Big Man as a Salmonid, and… That got me thinking. Splatoon 3 really fumbled the bag by not making Big Man a Salmonid, actually. I think him being a Manta Ray was the wrong choice to make, especially from our current perspective of the game’s narrative.
In Splatoon 2, Octarians had a very stressed importance. Octo Expansion did nothing but heighten this, and all of this was very gracefully tied together with one of the news hosts being an Octoling herself- one who was trying to conceal her identity as such, which made the themes presented in Octo Expansion feel all the more real. It worked, and it worked really well. Her presence as an Octoling- even as one trying to conceal their identity!- added some much needed insight on the Octarian Experience, and how it feels to live in Splatoon’s society as an oppressed racial minority. It was fascinating. It added a lot of depth to the game’s narrative and worldbuilding.
But in Splatoon 3, Salmonids have an increased importance. With Mr. Grizz being the final boss of Story Mode, Little Buddy- though his presence is discomforting- as your companion character, and Big Run being a recurring element, you’d think they’d have a Salmonid news host to add depth to our understanding of the Salmonid Experience, much like Splatoon 2 did with Marina and the Octoling Experience. It makes all but perfect sense, and it would have worked well to repeat that formula.
But… No.
We just have Big Man, a Manta Ray with a personality and current plot/lore importance as flat as his body. He’s clearly visually alienated from Shiver and Frye, but there’s no element of intrigue to it. His presence doesn’t pose any questions like Marina’s did. He’s just a walking missed opportunity. And it’s sad.
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thevalleyisjolly · 2 years ago
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Society if instead of tying MCU Spider-Man to the Avengers, they had him connect with the Defenders instead.
#the valley is posting#the biggest disservice they did to holland!spidey imo#and you can tell that the individual movies tried so hard to break him away from the legacy of the a v e n g e r s#except the group movies kept sucking him back in until there was no way to ease up on those relationships without destroying all continuity#but. what if. hear me out. friendly NEIGHBOURHOOD spidey got to network with other new york vigilantes instead.#you can still have spidey questioning his own identity and motives! and it'll mean more because it's actually against comparable heroes!#what makes spidey different from dd? from jessica or cage or danny?#it becomes so much more meaningful for spidey to explore and define himself against people with similar experiences and situations#than trying to measure up against the legacy of big supers whom he has very little in common with and the power imbalance is so huge#anyways i have very little stakes in this but you'll never convince me that tying spidey to the a v e n g e r s was a good narrative choice#i'm not saying you can't be a fan of the relationships spidey formed within the a v e n g e r s#i just think it was a poor decision driven solely by capitalism and corporate greed to introduce spidey in that way at all#yeah; it's happened now; and there's nothing wrong with enjoying spidey's relationships with other heroes#i just wish it hadn't happened in the first place and we got to see spidey movies that were actually about spidey#instead of; y'know; spidey AND the a v e n g e r s
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llycaons · 2 years ago
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with respect to this person’s hc, I think lan jingyi being 100% lan makes him such a better and more interesting character, and actually makes him worth paying attention to as a character for what his behavior reveals about the current lan sect
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kaybreezy3000 · 2 months ago
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(F-Reader, smut w/story, soft Five + our usual cocky Five, S4 fix-it)
Broken but breathing. Longing for something that always felt just out of his reach, Five was not okay.
With fates forever intertwined, a train, and a smile he would never forget, once again, the impossible became his reality, but like always, not without tragedy.
In the end, all that mattered are the people Five loved. For them, he would do anything.
Note ~I originally started this pre-s4 release as anon request for another headcanon like my last one, but after watching the show I decided this needed to more than that because Five deserved it. This is a full story, with each letter representing a chapter with something that relates back to Five, only with a new twist, you (female reader insert). For those concerned about the Five and Lila narrative, fear not, this story is not going that route.
~mature content so if not your thing, please stay away. TY.
Warnings and Tags: Rated R for sexually explicit content, Hurt Number Five, Alternate S4, Whump, Mental Break Down, Self-Doubt, Angst-humor-love, Uncle Five, The Deli Fives, Starts with Five in a very dark place, Not the end the show gave us.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Amor Fati is a Latin phrase that may be translated as "love of fate" or "love of one's fate." It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.
It's an idea that everything recurs infinitely over an infinite period of time.
A-Aim
Whether Five was setting his sights on saving his family, or when he was focusing all his attention on the crosshairs of his scope, his focus was always impressive. 
From a very young age he took on every challenge with a ruthless level of determination, but that unfortunately made him come off disturbingly detached, and now, even though Five no longer needed to be that feral creature, his behaviors from the past were alienating him from his family, and the rest of the world.
It's not that Five didn’t have a very good reason for letting himself become so removed, but now, gone were the days when he had glorious purpose.
Sitting alone in a powerless world that Reginald had dumped them in while biding his time at the end of a bar with his face curtained by the dark fringe of his shaggy hair, Five was feeling exceptionally defeated.
He hypnotically swirled the amber liquid in his fingerprint smudged glass.
Over and over, he repeated your name in his head.
He liked the sound of it, but he liked the way you smiled at him even more.
Five saw you nearly every day on his way to work, but as much as he may have wanted to, he never said a word to you. When you’d look his way, and catch him staring, your eyes would come alive as your lips perked up just a little, as if daring him to crack.
He didn’t.
He couldn’t. 
That was the way Five thought it had to be.
But then, something happened.
He could still feel that...
That...
He didn't know what it was.
Shutting his eyes, Five raked a hand through his snarls while disappointedly shaking his head. He knew he shouldn’t let himself do this but he couldn’t help it.
It was just another day, mundane as all the rest. All the seats had been taken by the time you entered the train. You were stuck in the middle, standing in front of him with nothing to hold on to. Less than thirty seconds into the ride, the air between you filled with static.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
The train unexpectedly shifted.
You started to fall, and the next thing Five knew, he had you in his arms so fast it was as if he had his powers to blink again.
With the warmth of your butt pressed against him and your hair catching in the light stubble shadowing his chin, Five inhaled deeply, trying to ignore how oddly alive he felt as he discreetly as possible savored how good you smelled.
Before he could put together why he felt so amazing, or before you could tell him off for being too handsy, the train shifted again, only sharper this time, forcing him to hold onto you even tighter or you would have tumbled into the man in front of you.
“Oh, my god! I am sorry,” you’d gasped as you clung to him, your fingernails digging into the thick wool suit coat covering his forearms.
Realizing you weren’t mad, Five let his hands slide a little further around your midsection, firming his grip.
“Thank you,” you embarrassingly gasped as the train continued to aggressively rock your body against his.
“It’s my pleasure,” Five breathily chuckled into the fluff of your hair.
A second later, the train switched tracks, and everyone was flung forward again and your computer bag swung backwards, violently jabbing him in the dick.
Still at the mercy of the wild train, with Five doing his best to widen his stance to gain more balance so you both didn’t fall, you sheepishly cocked your head back at him.
“Are you ahh -"
“I-I am good,” he coughed, cutting you off.
Then, to your surprise and his, though still visibly in pain, he started laughing.
By the time everyone stopped getting thrown around, you were laughing too. As you turned to face him, Five reluctantly let his hands slip from the narrowest point of your waist, his fingers gliding along the fabric of your shirt a little slower than necessary.
Face flushed, you quickly introduced yourself, but he said nothing as he smiled at you with a dreamy look in his eyes.
“I am pretty sure we just took a detour to the moon back there, but I still can’t believe I just did that,” you joked.
At a loss for words, other than things he knew he shouldn’t say, Five’s amused smile began to fade.
“Thank you for saving me from a nosedive. Let me at least buy you a coffee or something… It’s the least I can do after stomping on your foot and nailing you in the-” 
You looked down.
“Shit… That big scuff wasn’t there before, was it?” you asked, anxiously referring to the mark on Five’s shoe, not something notable going on in the dick region of his expensive looking dress pants.
When the handsome stranger staring at you still said nothing, you began to worry your bottom lip, sucking it in on one side.
Feeling so many things he’d never let himself feel, Five wanted nothing more than run his thumb over the alluring pink flesh and tell you that getting his dick assaulted and having his shoes ruined was well worth it because of the way you were looking at him with your face more beautifully flustered than he’d ever seen anyone’s.
He wanted to say that, but he didn’t.
The train slowed to a stop.
The doors opened, and without another word, Five took off. Stepping into the crowd of commuters that were rushing out the doors as they elbowed their way through the busy subway station, he'd never felt more spineless.
That morning, when it came to his unbreakable determination and legendary aim, he didn’t even shoot for it with you, so he could hardly call it a missed target. Still, he felt awful. Almost as soon as he’d hit the street above and he was inundated with the less than savory smells of the city, he knew he’d missed something huge.
Racing back down the stairs, heart racing, the rush of air blew past him as the train with you on it pulled away.
B-Boners (AKA Mistakes)
At this point in his life, as much as Five hated it, he still had boner issues. Your overactive dick in your pants kind of boner issues, and the other kind, such as when committing social blunders, like rudely blowing you off when you were simply trying to be polite.
Being young again, with hormones what they were, the first boner problem was an unavoidable way of life, and speaking of which, his thoughts about you once again drifted back to how good it felt when your body melted into his, your ass perfectly molding against the crotch of his pants as he held you steady.
Feeling things he shouldn’t be while perched on a barstool at a bar filled with other people, Five subtly shifted his legs apart. Willing his over eager cock to calm down, he looked up at the mirrored wall behind the bottles of liquor displayed along the back wall.
The young man looking back at him frowned, but his body remained aroused despite his sorrowful reflection.
Unable to hold his own hateful glare, Five looked back down at his almost empty glass.
Hopelessly horny, and far past slightly buzzed, he muttered a slurred sounding, “ Grrrrrr- ate . ”
With an irritated huff of air blowing his hair out of his face, Five yanked his tie even looser and tipped back his head, swallowing the rest of his drink. Feeling like he could breathe a little easier, he threw down an overly generous tip, assuring that even though he technically wasn't 21 yet, his ID said he was, and combined, he’d be served again.
Ready to go, his hot palms gliding down his tensed thighs, Five’s eyes fluttered closed for just a second.
His head spun, but not with the sickness of too much drink.
In his whirl of thoughts, he was back on the train with you.
He could practically feel your ass in his hands, his fingers groping greedily as he shamelessly ground his shaft between your legs from behind.
Sadly, at this point, Five still had never been with anyone real. Yet, the disconnect of not knowing what this would really feel like, or how he should be going about doing it, was doing nothing to ruin his bizarrely timed fantasy of animalistically fucking his rock-hard erection into the warmth of your curvy body in any way he could.
God, he wanted to touch his dick!
Opening his eyes, the room spun even more and not in a good way, but still Five refrained from doing that and instead clung to the pleasant visions in his head.
Over the years, with little to give him the feeling of satisfaction he so desperately longed for, Five had unwittingly become addicted to self-stimulation, and it was not just the thrill of that chase that tormented him. Five craved anything that gave him that all-consuming high, though when it came to bloodshed, he refused to admit how great it felt being so good at his job back when he was the Commission’s most celebrated assassin.
Feet hitting the sticky floor, Five’s thoughts blurred with an endless reel of bad ideas, only one of them being the idea of hunting you down so he could re-start your conversation from the train, this time pushing past his reservations for why getting to know you wasn’t an option. 
Screw that!
This time Five was going to charm you, wine and dine you, and take you home so he could do all sorts of naughty things to you- if you’d let him, of course . He was a monster, but not that kind of monster .
A few seconds later, hand pushing the bar’s grungy advertisement-covered door open, the cool night air hit Five’s overheated face, but it did nothing to get his head on straight or make him realize he had no idea how to treat a real woman who could talk back or think on her own.
Yes, in this body and one that was much younger, Number Five Hargreeves hit on strippers and waitresses to get a rise out of them, but having an actual two-way conversation with them, followed by any form of true intimacy, no.
No, he’d never done that, but today, with you, he wanted to, so damn badly.
No matter how drunk he was, Five knew that letting himself think like this about you wasn’t right or helping the tent in his pants get any less prominent and he hated himself for it. With his bloodshot eyes struggling to focus, he dizzily turned towards the staggering reflection in the store window next to him, taking in the sad face looking back.
“Pathetic,” he grumbled, before trudging away with his chin lowered to his chest.
C-Cycle of Loneliness
Stumbling along the sidewalks while on his way home, Five felt trapped. He was finally free of all the death and endless killing, but that didn’t mean he felt like he could live, or that he even knew how to.
With his past what it was, he was unable to let anyone other than his family know who he really was and like before ending up powerless in Reginald’s new world, they were failing to see that he wasn’t as okay as he was pretending to be.
Like always, despite what Five felt about this, in most situations, he managed to keep his composure. He acted like he was fine. Putting on a stoic face of impassivity, he attended most family functions when asked. He’d gotten his PHD in record time and handled his work within the CIA professionally, but at the end of the day, he was merely existing and the reasons for it were becoming harder and harder for him to justify.
D- Distance and Diffidence-the opposite of confidence
When it came to shyness and a lack of confidence, most of the time Five Hargreeves would be the last person you would think of, but self-doubt had always plagued him. Growing up with a father that never thought he was good enough was the trigger that inflamed his insecurities, but even worse, after the trials of his youth and his lifetime alone in the apocalypse, he believed that if he’d never left and messed up the way he did, his family never would have died.
Never a day passed that Five didn’t tell himself, If I hadn’t lost it and jumped to the future and got myself stuck, none of this would have happened.
Knowing that none of his siblings were exactly thrilled with how things had gone for them over the last five years, nearly every time Five was around them, he couldn’t help but feel like that was all his fault too.  
Ironically and tragically, long ago, Five was the one that initially distanced himself from his family, but in typical Five Hargreeves fashion, now he’d been overcompensating for his feelings of inferiority by lashing out on those he loved, only further complicating his problems.
Only twenty minutes from the suburbs where Allison and his niece Claire lived with Klaus, who was dealing with the aftermath of his sobriety in their bubble wrapped basement, since they’d been there, Five had only been to their house once.
Looking up at the four-story brownstone looming over him, no less drunk after walking the twelve blocks it took to get home, Five realized that not one of his family members even knew where he lived, and he was surer than ever that they didn’t care to.
They didn’t need him anymore.
E-Egotistical
Five knew he could become preoccupied with his own affairs, often showing others contempt by rolling his eyes at them in annoyance and boredom, or both, but his smug behavior wasn’t as simple as him having an exaggerated perception of his own worth.
Five never meant to become so estranged from his family. They were everything to him, and in addition to that, he never meant to treat you as coldly as he did by running off when you were merely trying to treat him like any other normal person would treat someone else.
No one would have believed it, but the truth was, Five was scared of rejection more than anything. All along he had been trying to protect himself with a mask of indifference as his mighty shield.
F-Fumbling, Fuck It
Fumbling with his keys, Five was confused by his own behavior, and even more bothered by his inappropriate thoughts about you when he didn’t even know you. He was hardly what anyone would call a brainless idiot, but the title seemed to fit as he tripped over his own feet while talking to himself like a total nutcase.
“Hi. Sure… No problem, it’s all good. My shoe and my dick are fine, really. Oh, and what a lovely name. My name is Five. Yeah, that’s right. It’s a fucking number,” he sardonically laughed, then dropped his keys when after several tries, he couldn’t get them to align with the keyhole.
Swooping down to get them, he tipped over, his head banging into the door, swinging the flimsy panel of wood wide with the force of his skull until it slammed into the wall inside his apartment.
“It wasn’t even locked, you dipshit!” he cursed himself as glass skittered across his shoes from the picture frame that just smashed to the floor, the one with a picture of him holding his newborn niece, Grace.
“Fucking, FUCK!” he cried, picking up the picture. 
He started brushing off the tiny shards of glass sticking to it.
When a white line tore right over the bundle in his arms, ruining her little face that was staring up at him as if he were worthy of her look of wonderment, instead of angrily throwing a fist into his already crumbling plaster, Dolores’s familiar voice started to filter into Five’s mind, proving he was doing particularly awful that evening.
As his once beloved mannequin, the one who wasn’t even there, encouraged him to move towards this kitchen and set down the photograph before his bloodied fingers damaged it even more, the suggestiveness he’d created in her calming words had Five’s lips turning up in a drunken smirk of craziness.
You need to sober up, Five… You can’t keep doing this to yourself. Come to bed with me…’
Dripping blood in his cast-iron sink basin, thoughts of a totally different kind of self-absorption filled Five’s head, and with them, a renewed rush of blood went places that had hardly let him forget they were dying for his attention.
Acting in an alcohol induced form of autopilot, obeying Dolores, Five poured himself a glass of water from the tap, drank it, then clumsily navigated the darkness of his one room flat, heading towards his bed, where he fell like a ton of bricks into the rumpled bedding, still fully clothed.
With his knees digging into the bed, lifting him, hands racing to unfasten the buttons on his waist coat and shirt, this was one of Five’s many, many fuck it moments, not that he had much of a choice in how he landed with his head smashed into his pillows.
But…
As he rolled onto his back, his dick twitching from the mere pressure of being pressed into the bed, his hand slipped over his pants, and that was another matter at hand that was all him.
The dips and valley of Five’s abs flexed as he lay there, his youthful body bleached and pale in the slivers of light streaming in from between his blinds. As he let his hands wander and he began to stroke his cock through the layers covering him, the languid motion of his hand was weak in contrast to the sharp angles of pleasure contorting his face.
With the cool air in his room hitting his exposed chest, Five shivered. His eyes narrowed, locking in on the long shadow of his erection that was making a mockery of his pants.
It felt so fucking good to touch himself. He whimpered, as he dug his hand into himself harder, then let up again.
He didn’t mean to, but he lived for this.
In the apocalypse this was all he had. 
Now, going at it at his desk, having spent a long day at work, the papers in front of him hardly stimulating enough to hold his interest, jerking off was just another part of his daily routine.
Lying in bed, in the shower, or even sometimes in the bathroom at work if he found himself unable to reign in his body’s needs, Five would stroke his dick, hard and fast, and before he knew it, he would be biting back guttural moans, head leaned up against a bathroom stall, coming all over a wad of toilet paper, or at his desk, dispensing his load in an already used shirt or anything else that he could reach that was expendable.
It was juvenile, and perverted as all hell, and he knew it, but just thinking about it, the wrongness, and about you, Five was getting harder, his balls filling with that delicious ache that made him feel alive.
“You can touch it, sweetheart” he whispered as he began to unzip his pants, trying to concentrate on the illusion that Dolores was there with him.
He teased himself, brushing his fingers lightly over the cotton still covering his cock.
As if watching it from outside himself, the resin covered peachiness of his beloved’s hand merged with the fleshiness of your real hand.
Palming himself with growing need, the face Five had been seeing looking down at him suddenly smiled the way you smiled at him as the visions in his head became a muddling array of unquenchable desire.
“Fuck, I want you,” Five groaned as his fingers snuck inside the fly of his underwear for just a second before pulling out again.
Acting out your part, he tightened his grip on his girth, making pre-cum begin to leak through his underwear, forming a darkened spot where the head of his cock was begging to be let free.
“Yeah, just like that. Go slow,” he moaned, his fingers wrapping around his length, moving over the stretched fabric as he began to pump, still gently as he possibly could.
Pictures flashed through his mind. His lips on your jaw, your eyelids heavy and expressive as his lips slightly parted, his hair flowing away from his face, tickling your silky skin as he held you from behind like a trusted lover.
At the phantom like sounds of your little laughs filling his ears, Five’s dick pulsed in his hand, blood flowing full and fast.
Unable to take it, he reached inside his underwear, giving in to touching himself more directly.
Five twirled his finger around the end of his cock.
Lowering your head, the heat of your mouth began to slip over the thickness of his leaking tip, tonguing the pool of stickiness gathered there. 
“I knew the second you looked at me, you wanted me,” he arrogantly huffed as you went down on him.
Though Dolores had heard it all before, glaring at him on the sidelines of his mind, she suddenly looked appalled.
You can’t say things like that! she chastised him.
Determined to shake her, Five put all his attention on the feel of his cock entering your throat.
Snuffing out any remaining thoughts of Dolores out of his head, Five quickened his pace, drowning out the sound of her panicky warnings that were trying to make him see that this kind of fantasy was even worse than his others with her.
Five! You are only hurting yourself with this!
“I don’t care!” he growled.
He bit down on his lip and closed his eyes, only to be greeted by the memory of your hair falling over your shoulders as it brushed against his face when you were both back on the train.
He breathed in and he could smell you.
Then his brain trying to piece together what really happened, he saw your look of shock as he rushed away from you like you were the plague or worse. 
“What’s wrong with you?” he heard you angrily yell, even though you had said nothing when he did that.
“Please don’t stop. I’m sorry,” he panted, mad at himself for hurting you, and even more panicked by his own madness.
Fighting back, he kept his pace, and just like that, you just as quickly forgave him, taking him to the hilt, your nose hitting his pubic bone.
Dark hair in his eyes as he watched his entire cock repeatedly drive down your throat, Five hissed, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes-"
Dolores’s voice cried out. Five! You’re losing it again!
‘Go away!’ Five’s mind screamed at itself, proving she wasn’t wrong-he was losing it .
For the next few minutes, the sounds of Five sadistically berating himself as he violently masturbated were absorbed in the quiet of his dark, empty room.
Shame filling him, his stomach twisted.
He was so fucking close. 
His shoulder blades flushed as small beads of sweat formed on the back of his neck. The muscles in his back and arms tensed harder and harder as he quickly moved his hand.
Angling his face to the ceiling, his eyes scrunched shut and his right arm dropped lazily to the side.
His butt cheeks clenched over and over as his bed springs creaked, his thrusts enough to make his headboard bang into the wall as he frantically pumped his body upwards into his hand.
“You-ff-fu-ah-cking lov-vvve my cock-fuck-you’re amazing,” he grunted and writhed, his sweat covered legs burning under the wool of his rumpled pants that were trapped around his ankles as he bent his knees up and his heels dug into the bed.
Already putting on an impressive one-man show of insanity, wanting more of your mouth’s wet heaven, Five let go of his dick, spitting in his hand. Returning to the length of flesh waiting for him, he thrusted up into his fist with louder and louder noises of slicked ecstasy.
Panting and moaning your name, sweat dripped down the curves of Five’s back. Through sharp propulsions of his hips, he cursed. Throwing his other hand back, he clutched and pulled at his own hair.
He held his breath as his mind screamed and his come poured over his fingers.
Lost in what he was pretending was the feel of your mouth accepting him, yet still wanting to spare his sheets, Five aimed his dick inwards, letting his seed pour out over the fine trail of hair leading up his abdomen, the white beads flinging across his otherwise unmarked skin.
Pulses of pleasure took him as he watched the eroticism of defiling himself.
His broken gasps got quieter and quieter. “FFFUUCC-ffff fff-mmmff."
His balls tightening as hips jerked more and more erratically, Five felt the betraying warmth of his tears pooling in the corners of his eyes as he rode out wave upon wave of the orgasm he’d longed more than anything for you to be part of, the defeated voice of his own creation ruminating in his head so loud he couldn’t ignore it anymore.
She doesn’t even know you.
“I know,” he whimpered back with the hand not on his cock, coming up, covering his red face.
G-Grief
Most of Five’s life was filled with intense mourning. He’d witnessed the death of everyone he’d ever loved, more than once. His anguish over having to bury his family left him in a state of ruin, not unlike the burning world he’d found himself in at the ripe age of thirteen.
Hours after he’d drunkenly cleaned up the mess that he’d made of himself, sucking in, mind adrift, Five suddenly couldn’t breathe.
There was too much ash.
So thirsty he could barely swallow, he ran his tongue over his cracked lips, only getting more of the bitter taste of powered cinders and the tang of his own blood.
The smell of burning flesh made him gag into the suffocating white of his pillowcase.
His stomach turned even as it growled with hunger.
Five was asleep, but the horrors he couldn’t outrun were creeping in like the maggots on the thousands of corpses he could see laying all around him, the sickness of it all wiggling into his periphery as he kicked out his legs and tangled himself in his blankets.
I'm going to die here!
It’s too hot!
I can’t get out.
He was being crushed.
Fingers clenching, hands shaking as his chest became tighter and tighter, it was as if he was the one that was dying even though it was the lifeless faces of his siblings flashing in front of his terror filled eyes that were darting around his dark bedroom, seeing nothing but the endless nightmare of his past.
H-Happiness
In another timeline, while not having a nightmare of the panic attack inducing kind, along a sunny roadside, Five had a very revealing conversation with the woman that had plucked him out of hell, only to throw him into a new one.
Ice cream truck stuck motionless, a bullet seconds away from rearranging Luther’s brain, Five stood there in his schoolboy shorts, his pistol pointed at The Handler as he said, “I'm not looking for happy.”
Like so many times, he watched her perfectly painted lips curl with a certain brand of mischievous cruelty that was all her own. “We're all looking for happy, Five,” she coolly corrected.
Looking away, Five tried in vain to hide his panic.
He did want happiness! That was the problem, only he’d given up on it for himself long ago and the Handler knew that pointing out his lie was the perfect way to break him all over again.
Not about to let her win, Five ground his teeth together and defiantly looked back up at her, not bothering to show is venomous disdain as she towered over him in her shiny red heels.
The world never cared what he wanted, but he’d be damned if he’d give up fighting to save it, but now, as he rushed from his bed to his bathroom sink, helplessly sobbing as he filled his hands with scoop after scoop of cold water, trying in vain to bring himself back to reality, who was going to save him?
I-Ignored
It was the day of his niece’s birthday.
Leaving work, after another day of reporting back to his superiors about The Keepers’s activity and them not giving a shit how far he’d gotten infiltrating their cult like secret society, Five looked down at the colorful invitation in his hand, then the package he’d wrapped the best he could in the other.
The shiny paper was lopsided, revealing an electronic toy puppy’s face peeking out from inside.
The last time Five ran into Diego and his family while out at the same store, his goddaughter had told him how much she wanted a very specific chunk of robotic plastic that was over in the nearby toy section.
“I know its the next Tickle Me Elmo or some shit, but we don’t have the money for that. You know that, Grace! Why do you always have to push and push this stuff,” Diego said, scowling at her.
Lila rolled her eyes at that, then unfazed by her look of disapproval, Diego kept moving, throwing more important items in their cart.
The twins, covered in groceries, fussed and cried in their car seats as their parents moved on, not saying anything else to Five other than a flippant, ‘see you later.’  
Like always, they weren’t happy to see him and the little girl looking up at him shared his same look of disappointment.
Hating how let down she looked, Five smiled. “What do you think his name is?” Five asked, pointing to the barking box just down the aisle that said, ‘Makes chocolate poopies you can eat!’ in bold letters.
“I don’t know, Uncle Five,” Grace said, shyly looking down at her shoes. “What do you think he wants to be called?”
Turning back, looking even more irritated as she put back a box of sugar filled kids cereal that Diego was trying to sneak into the cart, Lila yelled, “Grace! Come on!”
The little girl ran off, but Five answered her question after purchasing the toy puppy, programming it to wag its tail as his voice came out through its recorder, saying, “I’m Mr. Pennycrumb and you are my best friend. You should listen to me even though I am a toy dog. Your parents are idiots, but I am still smarter than them.”
A few hours later, after his daughter excitedly tore open her favorite gift of the day, and he heard Five’s special message and Grace’s squeals of delight over it, as he envisioned karate kicking Mr. Pennycrumb into the rafters, Diego’s eyes damn near bugged out of his head as he yelled,  “Really, Five!”
“What,” he said, shrugging.
Clearly Diego and Lila weren't happy with him, but it wasn't like it mattered. They were never happy with him.
Even while in the presence of his family, as Five leaned back against the rainbow ball pit’s netting, it felt like he might as well still be rotting away in the apocalypses still. While at the birthday party with Luther bashing the shit out of the pinata, their bickering and problems with each other never seemed to end. He tried his best, talking to Ben and the others, but once the small talk was done, it was as if he wasn’t even there unless he said something shitty.
Five was just a figure on the sideline, someone who his own family didn’t want to know.
All he wanted his entire life was to get back to them, but when he did, they had moved on. They didn’t understand him, and he couldn’t blame them for that, he didn’t even like who he was, but at least he was owning that. Jerks act like jerks.
If not for the sound of Gracie calling out to him as he was about to leave, Five would have ended up at a bar again, alone and miserable.
“Thank you so much for coming. I love you, Uncle Five,” she said after she ran over to him.
“I love you too,” he quietly replied, trying not to let her hear the crack in his voice as she put her arms up, silently asking him to come down to her level so she could hug him.
That little hug was all it took, and not much after that, Five found himself out in the parking lot with the rest of them, meeting a very strange man named Sy Grossman.
J-Judgement
Most of Five’s life was defined by punishment. He often mused that all the bad things had been inflicted on him as retribution for his many wrongdoings. As for which of his crimes he was paying for now, after finding Viktor, then having a night out at dinner with his family that went all sorts of wrong, the world was set to end again in twenty-four hours, so it didn’t really matter.
No matter how remorseful Five was, or how much he’d already suffered, or how he tried to make things right and move on without hurting anyone else but himself, it seemed that the sentence of this endless destruction would always be his penance.
K-Keepers
Five should have seen it. Both that Ben had tricked them with his sake toast, and long before that obvious con.
Sitting there dressed like an idiot, his fake mustache thicker than it had ever been when he’d been 19 years old the first time around, he had chatted it up in the therapeutic round circle of crazy people, going on and on about how he was walking around in a body not his own.
He was a 65-year-old man for Christ’s sake! This shouldn’t be where he was!
He told those weirdos that he’d lived through things people couldn’t even begin to imagine!
He lived off all kinds of nasty creepy crawlies, his teeth breaking through the crusts of their exoskeletons, the ooze of their insides almost impossible to swallow, but he did it anyway.
He’d brought on so much suffering to others as he traveled through time, briefcase in hand, murdering anyone he was ordered to eliminate.
Some days Five would look in the mirror and get so confused that he’d forget where or who he was. He didn’t know what was real or not anymore.
He didn’t have to pretend that he was nuts, that was why The Keepers let him get closer. That was why he had run into Lila out skipping book club, trying to feel the danger and excitement she’d once lived for before becoming a tired mother who felt like she was drowning in the monotony of her marriage.
Looking away as Diego fumed about catching his wife with her creepy little Greek boyfriend, Five angled his face towards the window.
His mind reeled. Diego was asking for his help! Him of all people!
Everything was falling apart.
After a van ride covered in puke, listening to Baby Shark on repeat, they were all being shot at.
Heart racing, he blinked, just as a shotgun shell was going to split his skull in two.
Only just then realizing he had his powers back, Five landed in a subway station that had not been under the street he was standing on when they got there.
L-Love
Narrowly fleeing from the set-up in psycho Christmas Town, The Hargreeves had escaped unscathed once more, only they didn’t. The marigold in their bodies proved they weren’t who they were before, and the mangled bodies lying all around at the farm they’d come to while looking for Ben verified that once again, they were way in over their heads.
Reginald couldn’t or wouldn’t help them anymore than he already did, and they couldn’t help themselves. Ben was going to die all over again and his love for Jennifer was a curse not meant to be broken.
Watching his brother doing his best cop impersonation, all Five could think about was they were never going to win; they weren’t meant to, even if that was what they were brought up to believe.
The Keepers and their purpose proved Five’s life new life was a shame. He failed to see that his direct report was one of them. He failed to listen to the things inside him that were telling him none of this was real.
No matter how much Five loved his family, it was never going to be enough to fix this.
Later, as Diego tore open filing cabinets in the abandoned office of Dr. Jean and Gene Thibedeau, Lila pursed her lips at Five for about the hundredth time that day, signaling again that she wasn’t happy with him. Hitting his arm, she quietly said, “I say we go off on our own and try to figure out what is going on with this new power of yours. Pull your big girl panties up and stop being a baby.”
Ignoring her, Five watched as Diego entered the next room, then feeling as if he was having an outer body experience he looked down at his hands. They tingled with energy.
He slowly walked to the window, looking down at the street below.
It felt like his heart stopped and he’d been sucked into a vacuum. 
Everything went quiet.
There you were, walking down the street, the sun lighting up your face like a spotlight just for him. Stopping to tie your shoe, you stepped aside, excusing yourself to the person behind you.
You smiled apologetically. 
Something inside Five broke.
It was the same smile you’d given him.
It meant nothing.
The feeling of something special happening when he’d touched you was as fake as the rest of this!
Of all the people he would see in a time like this, it was you! The one person he’d been dying to see since he’d first laid eyes on you.
It was like some cruel fate, same as the one always chasing him, nipping at his heels with imminent death. Everything was just another reminder that no matter how much he wanted things to be different, he had nothing, and he never would.
He wanted to know what it was like to be loved by anyone even a little, but good things weren’t meant for him.
“Five!” Lila loudly whispered, getting even more upset. “We need to try something other than digging around in garbage cans, like that idiot in there! Give me your damn hand and let’s do this already!”
She began to come his way, hand outstretched.
Lila’s voice cracked with emotion when he looked down at it. “Five, I need you…your family needs you.”
Knowing full well that they had no idea what they were going to do about the impending Cleanse, Five’s brows pulled together, and he shook his head, no.
In a daze, still looking at Lila’s hand, the sight of it filled him with memories from the night before, all of them laced with the same sickness and regret he couldn’t escape. 
After a chance run in at the secret Keepers meeting, when a woman wearing a name tag saying Nancy, ran those same reaching fingers across a man named Jerome’s upper lip, tenderly wiping off the powdered sugar from his pastry, Five had thought of you and the one small chance he’d let go to have even a few hours of happiness by your side, just getting to know you.
Eyes moving to his brother, pain in his chest, in a flash of violet hued light, Five was gone, seconds before Lila could reach him.
M-Martyr
Five’s entire life was an example of sacrifice. So many times, he could have given up, or put himself first, but he didn’t.
Thinking of his family and their kids, stuck feeling like he had no other option, he stumbled out of his portal, his eyes scanning the musty subway platform and the train waiting for him.
N-Naïve
Five missed out on so many things that anyone should have the chance to experience during a life as long as his, and because of that, he struggled when navigating the nuances of anything normal.
There was no doubt that Five was full of wisdom, and he didn’t hesitate to pass that on or place judgment on others he saw as beneath him, but there was also an unmistakable childlike innocence behind his eyes, and an explosive immaturity in his outbursts and in his thinking that he could do this alone.
"How long do I have to suffer!" he screamed, his voice echoing down the subway tunnel, then out into the sky above as the light from the day and another apocalyptic world shone down on the filth covered subway steps in front of him.
Rubbing his grimy hands down the front of his tattered waist coat, he pulled out his journal.
It had been seven years, and he had been traveling the labyrinth of tracks, shooting from one timeline to another, each time trying to jump back to before Ben had been killed the first time.
He’d thought if he could just prevent that, it would finally fix everything.
Five knew his power didn’t work the same as before, but he thought it wouldn’t matter.
It did. It mattered big time, and he’d fucked up big time.
Most of the time, he couldn’t even jump backwards. Most of the time he’d climb the stairs, pull his hands together, trying to draw in the strength to do it, and he’d end up right back at the bottom of the steps, staring up at a world that was no more.
Some days, he’d prove he wasn’t a completely impotent imbecile. He’d reach out at the hands of time, yanking them backwards and he’d be thrown into the unimaginable ether that had always been his domain.
He’d find himself standing in a world with living breathing people again!
Racing to the academy, grabbing anything he could steal and stuff in his pockets or his mouth along the way, he’d feel a flicker of hope.
That never lasted long.
Never finding their real timeline, Five had been attacked, over and over once inside what had been his home, but clearly wasn’t anymore. Sometimes he wouldn’t even get that far, having found himself in a place that was at first glance not where he had meant to be based on floating cars or other bizarre things dotting the skyline.
Out of his mind with hunger and more mentally ruined than he’d ever been, he noted the marks on the floor, a long skid mark from something dragging and that there were three light bulbs out overhead. Fairly certain he hadn’t been there before, looking like a scraggly haired bum that was wearing some guy’s trashed business suit, Five jammed the notebook back in his pocket. Reaching in the other, he pulled out his pistol. Started talking to himself again, his feet stomped up the tiled stairs to the street.
“If I see that little fucker again, and he shoots at me, I swear this time I am going to go over there and choke the shit out of him,” he growled, referring to the fun of being shot at by another version of himself so many times before this that he couldn’t even remember how many times it had happened to him anymore.
His voice was cracked and hoarse, only adding to the pained sound in it as he cursed himself out. He was beginning to feel lightheaded again from lack of food and from how much his lungs were struggling to match up to the blood that rushed around his body from the mere effort of carrying himself out of the darkness.
When the first piercing sound of the other him’s rifle reverberated across the barren landscape, Five flinched, the full metal jacket projectile missing him by only a fraction of an inch as it blasted apart an already crumbling piece of concrete next to him instead.
Stepping forward, arm shaking as he held up his gun, Five screamed, "Just kill me, for fuck's sake, you asshole! I don't want to live like this anymore!"
Eye narrowed on his scope, the other Five, trying to survive, just like he had done when it was him, with no one but Dolores by his side to keep him sane, pulled the trigger like all the other Fives he'd come across did, for some reason, not even thinking twice about killing the first living person he’d seen in twelve years.
O-Oh, Shit!
“OH, Shit!” Five’s voice shrilly rang out as the solid copper tipped point of the projectile ripped through his left arm, tearing the muscle in his bicep clean through as it flew out behind him, zipping down the stairwell.
Refreshed clarity of the life and death kind hitting him hard and fast as the warmth of his blood drenched the inside of his sleeve, Five got down as far as he could, spinning towards the safety of the subway entrance. 
“At least I fucking hesitated when I saw the Handler!” he breathed, just as another bullet ripped through him, this time nicking bone in his right thigh.
He dropped to his knees.
“Fuck you, you crazy fucker!” he screamed.
He’d asked for it.
It was dumb, but he did.
He knew that he was also a crazy fucker in this situation but that did nothing to make him want to kill the other him any less.
Bleeding out in two different places, Five’s fingers clawed at the ground, and he growled in anger, forcing his body to get back up.
Half falling, half running down the steps, the soft tissue in his upper left shoulder suddenly felt like he’d been stabbed with a zillion fiery needles as the spinning force of the next bullet went straight through his back and out his chest.
Lunging for the doors of the train, Five fell into the closest seat, his eyes wide as he looked down at the crimson bloom spreading across his dress shirt.
P-Pain
As a murky curtain of darkness moved into Five’s narrowing field of vision, he clung to the metal support rail attached to his seat. He knew that feeling the rocking motion of the train as it raced to the next station was a good thing because it meant his powers hadn’t failed him yet, but it wasn’t much to hold onto. Each tiny shift in the track felt like it might kill him.
It hurt to breathe.
Even if he made it to the next stop, there was no way he’d be able to jump back to a time when there may have been a hospital and someone living and breathing to get him there. 
This was it, the end.
 ~~~
As you were disappointingly tossing another aluminum can with a broken seal, this one that had at one time held the syrupy sweetness of what you determined might have been peaches, the pile of rubble you were sorting through started to shift, the smaller chunks of debris skittering down the slope of junk.
“What the-”
Even more odd, you started to feel the ground vibrating under your feet, followed by the sound of a train screeching down the subway tunnel located in the subterranean level of your search area.
Your bag slipped off your arm, scattering your finds on the ground as you turned toward the subway entrance a few yards away.
This made no sense, so naturally you tried to rationalize what you were feeling and hearing.
There was no train.
There was no electricity.
There was no anyone, or anything anymore.
All around you, there was nothing but the remains of long ago destroyed buildings and the sun-bleached bones of the dead.
You lived in a world with no voices but your own, no horns honking, no smells of food carts wafting past.
“Impossible…” you breathed.
By the time you made it down the subway station’s cobweb infested stairs, the doors on the train that shouldn’t be there were opening. Hesitantly coming closer to what you were sure was evidence that you’d lost your mind, the humming of the train’s powerful engine slowed.
There was a feeling of static that shouldn’t be there in the dank air.
The hair on your arms prickled in warning.
Still, you came forward, your boots kicking up thick layers of dust. The fluorescent lights hanging above illuminated the tiny particles slowly swirling in front of you, making everything seem even more surreal than it already was.
The lights inside the train flickered as you came towards it.
You could see a pool of red liquid on the long fiberglass bench just inside the threshold. Even more ominous, there was an array of bloody handprints leading to the motionless blood covered body on the floor.
Creeping around to get a better look at the young man lying there, you kept your guard up, but other than him, the train looked empty. 
Looking down at him again, your breath hitched. 
He whispered your name just as his eyes fluttered closed.
You gasped his name back, then the lights went out.
Q-Quiet
“Oh, my God! Five!” you repeated, not believing your eyes as you dropped to the floor next to him.
He was conscious, but you could hardly see his eyes under his slitted lids, and his words came out so weak you almost didn’t hear them as he said, “You’re not supposed to know me.”
“What are you talking about!” you frantically cried.
His reply to that came as the quietest whimper.
“Five?”
He said nothing.
You lowered your ear to his slightly parted lips.
Thankfully, you heard the softest breaths coming out of him even though he was breathing so shallowly his chest didn’t appear to be moving at all.
Terrified, you did what you could to tighten the necktie that was already pinching the blood flow to his arm, and then you checked the belt he’d already tried to secure to his leg to stem the worst of that bleeding. Rolling him so you could lift the back side of his jacket, you saw the blood-soaked exit wound in his upper left shoulder blade. Having nothing but the scarf you had on to use as a bandage, you pressed it over the hole, wrapping it around him tight, then tucking the ends under his shirt and vest to add pressure. 
Five remained unconscious as you readied him, and he stayed that way as you began hauling him up the stairs, then outside where you loaded him on your cart.
With his legs dangling and his feet nearly touching the ground, it wasn’t the ideal form of transport, but he wasn’t going to make it if you stayed there, or if you left him and then came back with something bigger.
“Stay with me,” you begged, checking one more time to see if he was still with you, then you shoved forward, pulling him along as you thought about what he just said.
Of course, you knew Five. It all started after the war that ended it all.
Dressed in his Umbrella Academy uniform, Five had been wandering for the third day straight, looking for anything he could use to help him survive the apocalyptic hell he’d found himself in. Exhausted, he was about to give up and go back to his blanketed shelter, but then he spotted what he thought was another person sitting over in the toppled mess that was left of one of the city’s shopping centers.
The person was waving at him with the only arm they had left, but as Five came closer, disappointment filling him as he looked down at the lifeless face of a female mannequin, he heard something.
Tap! Tap! Tap! Tapppppp-Tappppp-Tappppp. Tap! Tap! Tap!
The air around him swirled, ruffling his hair as it covered his young face in cinders. 
He stopped and listened, but as everything became still again the eerie quiet of mass death was all he heard.
He started to walk away.
Tap, tap, tap. Tapppppp-Tappppp-Tappppp. Tap, tap, tap.
“Shit,” he breathed, stopping short as his mind processed the pattern. That wasn’t the sound of some random piece of metal flapping in the smoky wind.
Racing towards where he’d thought he heard the repetition of morse code, trapped in the darkness, under layers and layers of broken concrete, you started your distress call again, rhythmically moving a chuck of rock against one of the building's mangled trusses.
You were sure that you were going to die down there, just like everyone else that survived the initial blast only to find themselves buried, but then you hear something break through the quiet.
Someone was calling down to you through the cracks left in the massive pile of building material. You cried back, but it felt way too muffled for it to matter, but it did.
He kept calling out, telling you to look for anywhere you might see light, asking you all sorts of questions that at the time made no sense, like if there was room behind you or in front of you and how much, if you were pinned down, or if you could determine which way was up.
Then, one second you were alone in the darkness, dehydrated to the point of dangerously low blood pressure, your legs hardly having more than a few feet to move, and the next, you were blinded by a burst of light, something solid and warm was behind you and then you were weightless.
When your feet hit the ground back on level ground, your legs felt like jelly and your stomach flipped. 
Dizzily trying to adjust as you looked at the boy holding onto you upright, your eyes slowly moved from his, to the famous Umbrella Academy crest embroidered on his blazer. 
It couldn’t be…
The superpowered boy the world had known as Number Five Hargreeves had been missing your entire life, but there he was, looking about the same age as you even though that was way younger than he should have been.
R-Rain
Looking back at this older Five, his limp body rocking with each rotation of your cart’s wheels, your eyes blurred as tears streaked down your cold cheeks.
As if you didn’t know you had to hurry, the clouds in the west were moving in fast, meaning another storm was coming.
With the strap at your waist digging in hard enough that you could feel your skin rubbing raw, you forced your body to move faster. “Come on!” you roared, gritting your teeth with the effort of moving the weighted down cart over another deep washout in the road.
Years ago, Five had taken you down that same road. 
You could still see it that morning, Five running back to your campsite, his straight white teeth flashing in the sun as he smiled with boyish excitement that made your cheeks feel warm.
Talking about a mile a minute, he told you that he’d found a structure that wasn’t completely ruined, and by some miracle, attached to it, there was even a greenhouse that still had most of the glass hanging in its windows. Even better, inside it there were all kinds of bags filled with unspoiled seed.
After years of fighting the elements and starvation together, you had found your first break from the burdens of the apocalyptic world you were stranded in. 
If you could just get him back there now, it would be okay. 
It had to be.
Your breaths were becoming more and more labored as you went, only becoming worse as you thought about the last day you were with Five. 
That was over five years ago.
It was midsummer. You had been with him at the home with the greenhouse attached to it for several years at that point.
That night, like he always did, Five was sitting at the kitchen table, running over his numbers. He was getting close; he was sure of it. You were both going back very soon, and he was going to stop this all from ever happening. 
Scratching his face as he concentrated, Five unknowingly smeared a smudge of black ink from his fingers down the narrow bridge of his nose.
“Fucking, fuck, mother fucker,” he mumbled as he angrily scratched out nearly half a page of his equations.
Even though you knew he was mad, you couldn’t help it, your breath started coming out of you in little puffs of amusement.
With the heel of his palm dug into his forehead, Five looked up at you through the fringe of dark hair hanging in his eyes.
“A genius with your captivating use of the word fuck, along with you being the savior of the world is sure to drop some panties when we get back,” you’d teased. “I hope you don’t forget me when you have all those other people to glare at.” 
Not waiting for him to verbally retaliate, you turned and raised up on your tippy toes to put your dinner dishes up where the mice wouldn't walk all over them.
Within seconds, you felt the comforting currents of energy building in the air around you as Five blinked. The warmth of his mouth pressed against the back of your neck. 
Brushing your hair aside with his face, his arms wrapped around your midsection, possessively locking you in his high voltage embrace.
“Forget you? Not a chance,” he said, letting his lips tickle the shell of your ear. 
You wriggled and laughed as his fingers started crawling under your shirt. Hot palms claiming your breasts, he began a soothing circular motion, threading his fingers over your nipples until they were hard, and of course it all felt so good being taken over by him that soon he had you moaning his name.
“That’s right. I am all yours,” Five smugly hummed as he continued to pluck and pinch.
Your head dropped back against this shoulder as he kissed along your neck. Moving his awakening manhood against your butt, his fingers slid around your hip, going right between your legs.
“When it comes to panty dropping, your delicious cunt is the only one I’ll ever be interested in devouring, sweetheart,” he promised as his fingers moved faster. “I just need to get us back and then I am going to really destroy you with this thing.” 
To punctuate which thing he was referring to, Five he rammed his cock into your ass.
Mind going bananas over the dirty things Five was saying and doing, your body clenched around his fingers and your legs starting to tremble. 
So much had changed over the years.
You were no longer just two people walking the Earth, fighting to survive.
In that place together, you became each other’s everything.
The sun’s setting rays coming in from the window above the sink reflected Five’s beautiful face next to yours as he burrowed his face into your neck.
“As long as you’ll have me, I’ll never let you go,” he lovingly whispered.
And he didn’t let you go, not until hours later, when a rush of cool air coming in from the window replaced where he’d had his body warmly snuggled up behind you.
Rolling over, in the dim light of the bedroom, you could see Five bouncing around as he tugged on his discarded underwear. 
Hard droplets of rain started pelting the floor next to the bed, but before you could move to do something about it, Five blinked over, shutting the window. Just then, something outside loudly crashed into the side of the house.
When he quickly started to head out the room, your eyes widened with worry. “Where are you going?” you asked.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be right back,” he chuckled. “I need to crank the windows closed in the greenhouse before it gets too windy. I just fixed the levers on the upper awnings, and I don’t want to have to go back to watering everything by hand out there when normally the lighter rains do such a nice job of it for me.”
You could hardly argue with that, or with what Five said next.
“Since you finally decided to let me hump the sweet fuck out of you, I have way better things to do with my free time then lugging around tiny watering cans,” he added, while shamelessly taking in the sight of you laying there naked, except for the thin blanket you’d started to modestly to tug in front of you. 
Already getting to you by being ridiculously sexy, standing there with his hair sticking up everywhere, Five gave you a cocky grin that would make the devil blush. 
“Don’t go anywhere,” he taunted. 
Still wiping the sleep from your eyes, you dreamily replied, “I won’t.”
Looking as wild and handsome as ever, hardly dressed, Five disappeared through the bedroom door, heading out through the townhouse’s back kitchen.
Suddenly, lightning flashed, and the entire room shook so hard you were sure the roof over the less habitable parts of the house might collapse.
You sprung out of bed to the sound of glass smashing.
Running after him, at first, all you could see were darkened plants carpeting the raised garden beds. 
Coming around the small table in the center of the greenhouse, fragments from the broken window above embedded in the soles of your feet, but you didn’t even feel it because Five was lying there on the cement floor, the rain drops dancing in the puddles of red all around him. 
The long shard of glass that had sliced his neck clean open was still laying in the palm of his hand as his empty eyes looked up, staring off at nothing.
Nearly falling down as your foot got stuck in a rut in the road, you knew you needed to keep your mind in the present, but you couldn’t. 
There was blood everywhere! 
That was just like this Five! With him dying as he lay there on the floor of that train!
A cry that was part anger, part anguish crawled out of your throat as you turned, looking back at him on your cart.
“Please say something,” you begged, not sure if he was dead or not because he hadn’t moved or made a noise. “Five!” you screamed, when he didn’t respond. 
The first icy drops of rain began to hit your face.
Then, just as you were going to run back there, Five quietly moaned your name as he slowly lifted his arm, pointing a finger at the sky. “You and the moon in the same timeline, makes sense…both always just out of reach for guys like me,” he said, choking on what sounded like a laugh.
On the verge of full hysterics, trying not to think about the horrors of what happened before, or what that moon and timeline stuff was all about, you dug the toes of your boots in, pushing off the broken blacktop as the deep purples of twilight disappeared in the blanket of angry clouds.
It was raining hard by the time you got back. By then you were both soaked, and Five’s complexion was cast in a deathly gray that made your stomach sink with bottomless dread.
S-Stitches
Other than that odd comment, Five remained mostly out of it as the cart bumped and bounced along on the debris-filled road, but as you lugged him inside almost an hour later, he woke up, full alert.
“FFFFUUCK!” he growled as you pulled him upright with his right shoulder under yours, lifting him.
Dragging his bad leg, you both staggered the few feet it took to get to the front door.
“I am sorry,” you breathed as you lugged him inside, kicking the door behind you to a continuous chorus of his breathy ‘fucks.’
A few seconds later, moving across what at one time had been the home's parlor but now served as the bedroom as well, collapsing on the bed, Five’s wet hair fanned out on the pillows.
Rushing over to place a fresh pile of wood on top of the dying embers in the hearth, Five’s face rolled to the side, watching you as he listlessly took in his shadowy surroundings.
Turning towards the adjacent kitchen area to get the medical supplies you needed, his eyes followed you again.
“Dolores?” he croaked. 
Not done washing your hands yet, you turned. As you figured, he was looking at the mannequin sitting at the kitchen table, but for some reason Five looked oddly confused by the sight of her.
“I am sorry, Dolores,” he said, his voice quivering. “I tried. I really did, but it had been so long, and before that, it was- You know I was try- I was so fucked up. And I- I just couldn’t move on and I- They needed me and I-"
“It’s okay, everything is going to be okay,” you said, trying to calm him as you rushed back, setting your supplies on the bedside table. 
Not stopping, your hands quickly moved over him, undoing the necktie on his left bicep so you could work his jacket off and remove his soiled dress shirt and vest. 
Replacing his makeshift tourniquet, you lifted his right hand, placing a wad of gauze in it before pushing it down over the bullet hole just below his left clavicle. “Try to keep pressure on that if you can. You lucked out. That one missed your lung, but I need to pull these down to see what’s going on with your leg,” you said, having already unzipped his fly, your hands on his hips waiting for his consent.
Five nodded, so you undid the belt cinched around his upper thigh.
Carefully pulling down his blood-soaked pants, not far down you gasped, and not because he wasn’t wearing any underwear.
“Who did this to you?!” you asked, slipping the leather strap back around his leg to pinch off the blood flow again.
“An even more fucked up version of me did it back in the wrong timeline I landed in before this one.” 
Something in your already tense expression must have changed to something much worse because Five’s dazed looking eyes moved away, looking at Dolores again.
“I’m my own worst enemy,” he said, deliriously trying to laugh about it before he continued to ramble things that made no sense. “That day you fell into me on the train, you were being so nice. I felt… I was- I don’t know… I wish I had at least had the courage to accept your offer to buy me a coffee. I wanted to, but I didn’t think I should. All I ever wanted was to have something like that in my life. Someone to talk to, someone to be even just my friend.”
His eyes misted over.
“I blew it, but it didn’t matter anyway. Everything went to shit. My powers don’t work right! I have been trying to get back for seven fucking years and I can’t, and that timeline is ending in a few hours anyway. Everyone was counting on me, and I failed them again.”
Before he said all that, you knew in any normal circumstance it would have been impossible for the Five laying on your bed to be the same one that was buried out in the yard, but your heart wanted to believe differently so badly. 
He looked exactly like him.
He’d known your name. 
He knew the mannequin neither of you were willing to leave behind, because if not for her, he’d have spent a life alone and you would have died.
But he wasn’t your Five. 
Looking even more upset than you were getting about all this, he kept on trying to explain things, telling you about this other world he had been in, and something called ‘The Cleanse.’ 
Wiping the mess of blood off his cold skin, you smeared antiseptic around the jagged edge of the hole in his thigh. Not knowing what else to do to prepare him, you soothingly shushed him. “It’s okay, everything is going to be okay, Five. We will figure it out.”
You wanted to believe that, but you didn’t even know if he’d make it through the night.
Popping some long-ago expired pain pills in his mouth, then lifting a glass to his lips, Five swallowed your offering with no question, half the water going in, and the other half running down his chin.
As you pulled on a pair of sterile gloves, his fingers brushed against the side of your leg. "How do you know me?” he quietly asked. “I never told you my name and you aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Bite down,” you ordered, ignoring that question as you placed a rolled towel in front of his mouth. 
Again, he listened, biting down. 
“You are lucky the bullets that hit your arm and chest went right through you and didn’t hit anything important, but the one in your leg is still in there. I need to get it out before I stitch this one closed, and if you think it hurt when that other you filled you with lead, get ready, because something tells me this is going to be much, much worse.”
Lifting your sanitized surgical tweezer, you lowered the long-pointed ends to the seeping wound in his leg.
Not even close to the casing you needed to reach, Five was forcing air through his nose at a panicked pace and his legs were starting to shake.
Pressing down on his knees, you held him as still as possible as you dug deeper.
As the tweezers sunk into his flayed skin, kicking out, Five howled through the cloth in his mouth, “Ffff-rrrrrrrr-ffffuuuuCCCCCKKK!” 
“Almost there,” you breathed as you felt the end of your tweezers tapping against something hard. 
A few painful seconds later, after pulling the lump of metal back through Five’s torn muscle tissue, you dropped the bloody chunk of metal in the bowl on the table, then went for the needle and thread you’d already prepped. 
“This is the worst one. The others won’t be as bad,” you assured, moving along gently as possible, with the point of your needle pulling through the mangled edge of his broken skin.
After the third stitch, as you began to pull Five’s skin together, his entire body started to quake so hard you had to move over, sitting yourself on top of his knees to keep his legs down.
“Just a few more,” you said, determinedly biting down on your lower lip as he brought both arms up, grasping the rungs on the headboard with a white knuckled grip. 
Two more stitches, and one more pull, and Five’s sweat covered chest was heaving. The faintest sound, like the squeak of a small animal crept out from between his clenched teeth. One more pull and his eyes rolled back in his head, and he went completely limp.
T-Touch
Fevered nights turned into long worry filled days and you never left Five’s side unless you had to. Cleaning his wounds, and then his entire body, no modesty allowed in the state he was in.
Five was entirely at your mercy just like once, long ago, you were at his. 
As he lay there with no shirt, and no pants on, covered in a mound of heavy blankets that smelled cleaner than anything he’d slept on in seven years, unable to avoid it any longer, you explained why you knew him. 
You didn’t even come close to telling him all of it, but still, you could see that what you did say didn’t settle well.
Brining another spoon of thin soup to his lips, stopping you short, Five shook his head. “I don’t deserve this,” he quietly whispered as the shutters rattled against the windowpanes in the cold wind that blew outside.
Moving closer, you set the bowl down. Gently as possible, you pressed a cool cloth to Five’s sweat covered brow. He leaned his face into your hand, whimpering.
Five may not have been starving from hunger like he was the last time he’d found himself stuck in the apocalypse, but the things he’d told you happened to him proved that for his entire life, he’d been starved of almost any kind of touch from someone other than people who wanted to hurt him.
After he’d laid it all out there, you realized helping him wasn’t going to be as easy as closing his wounds. His life started the same as the Five’s you had known, only his took many different turns, all of them bad, leaving him a broken man in the body of a boy again. Then, him saying that he'd lived nearly a lifetime alone with no one there for him but Dolores wasn’t even the worst of it.
That wasn’t what killed his spirit.
In his own words, even before that, he had all but given up, and he regretted that part of his life more than anything. He’d mistakenly pushed his family away. He said that there wasn’t a day as he rode his time travel train to nowhere that he didn’t think of them, and you, all the while wishing so badly he was able to go back and do everything differently. 
Laying down next to him, curling your body around his as much as you could without hurting him more, Five’s body trembled, trying to heat itself as the infection gnawing at him raged.
“None of this was your fault, Five,” you whispered as you watched his face twist with pain.
The fire crackled, the only sound filling the room as you felt for his hand, your fingers slowly running across his torso until you found it at his side. 
You threaded your fingers around his. “Just keep fighting, okay?”  
Shivering, he squeezed your hand back.
U-Unexpected
It was the start of summer, and the sun was shining in from above as Five sat at one of the chairs pulled up to the table in the greenhouse. Breathing in, his lungs filled with the sweet smell of hundreds of ripening strawberries.
It had been months since those first pain-filled nights, and as the days passed it was becoming harder and harder for him not to lose himself to the growing contentment he was feeling.
It was entirely unexpected, but then again, so were you.
Like the twist of fate that made you stumble into him that day on the train, like something out of a dream, there he was listening to you obnoxiously singing along to the CD boombox sitting in the next room. 
‘Y o, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want-’
The selection laying around was slim when it came to CDs that weren’t too warped to play, but watching you shake your booty as you danced around the kitchen made Five totally forget that he didn’t like pop songs.
‘If only I could keep finding batteries that fit the radio… ’ he silently mused while fighting the urge to start belting out the girl empowered lyrics with you. 
Five had an endless supply of scenarios running around in his head of how this morning could go, only one of them was him coming in there, sweeping you off your feet while he sang the blaring lines about making it last forever as he also slammed his body down and wound it all around on yours.
‘You gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta!’ you sang, waving at him as you reached for another handful of green beans to snap.
Thinking about how just a smile from you made him feel hot, and how much he wanted to be your lover, and how he sounded nothing like you or the Spice Girls when he sang, Five stretched his bad leg under the drape of the tablecloth. His muscles still complained but the dull ache was nowhere near what it had been, and even better, he could walk without needing you to help him, or without needing a cane.
Looking over at Dolores who was sitting across from him, Five’s smile soured. “I hated that cane,” he quietly grumbled. “All I needed was a monocle to go with it and I’d have looked like some younger alternate universe jackass version of that monster.”
‘Reginald was many things, an alien included, but in the end, he did try to help you, and you in no way looked anything like him with your cane,’ Dolores reminded him.
Averting his eyes from hers, Five decided it was not worth arguing with her. If he kept it up, you were for sure going to hear it and he didn’t need that happening again. You’d been very understanding when he’d feverishly admitted way too many things about his relationship with Dolores, but…
Yeah. 
Sipping the herbal concoction you’d so sweetly brewed him that morning, Five looked down at the old notebook sitting there. It was filled with equations that were very close to getting the math right for getting back, only he was not the one that had done them.
No. He was not that Five, and at the age of 20, like that Five had been when he almost figured it out, he himself at that same age was nowhere near it. At that age, he almost died of dysentery. 
Five looked down at his own journal filled with scribbled notes about stains on floors, broken vending machines and burnt-out light bulbs. 
Spreading his fingers, palms warming in the sun, just the thought of blinking filled him with that familiar buzz of energy he used to live for. But no matter how many times he tried to blink himself even a short distance across the room, he’d still find that it didn’t work that way anymore, and then he’d be flung out of his purple-colored portal into the subway tunnel where you’d found him.
Five pulled his hands back in his lap and slipped the strap back around the leather journal, closing it as he tucked it away.
He couldn’t get back on that train. 
“The only thing I can promise you if we get on there, is that we will be lost,” he’d told you when trying to explain it. He could do that to himself again, but he couldn’t do that to you.
He felt horrible about it, but you never pushed him on it. You never blamed him. You always said it was okay.
He didn’t get it.
Then, after coming back to the house a week ago from another failed jump, something happened. Hearing him kicking stones along the road as he cursed like a maniac, you dropped your garden trowel, ran over, and hugged him.
Smiling up at him, you said, “Five, you need to stop this. You are breaking my heart all over again by looking so pouty all the time.”
Five knew you cared about him. He knew you cared about the other him, but past your caring about either of them in a way that was more than survival based and simply supportive and platonic in nature, that he couldn't figure out. 
You’d told him so many things about the years you were with the other him, but when it came to the details, he could tell you were holding back.
Not sure what to do about it, but knowing exactly how he felt about you, that afternoon in the yard, not more than a few feet away from his own grave, Five had hesitantly let his hand move up your back, hugging you back. He’d never done that before.
He figured, even if you didn’t feel the same way, it wasn’t like you weren’t already intimately familiar.
You’d held him before…
You’d seen him at his worst, fully exposed, laying there in a bloody mess of tears.
He’d told himself that desperately clinging to the person that meant everything to him, even if he’d fallen hopelessly in love with them was normal. Right?
Fuck, he knew it wasn’t… and neither was having to roll himself out of bed almost every night, taking off like a creeper in the night under the pretense that he needed to take a piss, when really he needed to take care of other personal business involving him grasping his dick.
Worried about him, you’d come outside to check on him more than once, and you’d come very close to busting him beating his meat, but Five wasn’t about to stop sleeping by you if you were willing to keep letting him, even if that meant he was constantly waking up hard with his hands on parts of your body that they shouldn’t be touching.
Trying not to think about that, and if you noticed him accidentally doing that or not, instead, as the sunny sky shown down on you holding him like he was a big man baby, Five tried to focus on the feel of your head resting on his chest and how you were soothingly playing with the hair dangling at the nape of his neck. 
Of course that wasn’t really helping, and because of that, he totally missed that you were up to something more than indulging him like you usually did.
Seemingly totally unaware of what you were doing to him, other than that you were turning him into a worthless puddle of goo, sneakily reaching up, you aggressively started ruffling his hair into a chocolatey nest of fuzzy tangles and unruly waves.
Shocked by the unprovoked attack, as you pivoted away from him, looking about as tickled as you could be over how easy it was to get him, Five’s mouth opened, but nothing came out, and that got you really laughing.  
“Oh my God, Five, I love you!” you breathlessly teased.
“Whhh-ahh…?” 
Taken by either his inarticulate reply, or at how ridiculous he looked, Five wasn’t sure, you came back to him, looking up at him sympathetically. “Five, beating yourself up over this isn’t going to change anything.” You gently brushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. “Maybe let it go for a while and just try to live a little. You deserve that.”
With that, you leaned in, your lips feather soft as they pressed against his cheek, then you walked away, leaving him dying to kiss you back.
V-Voracious, a wanting, devouring, feeling emotions to an intense degree
After that day, and the many others that came after your spicy Spice Girls kitchen bean snapping show of cuteness, Five did let himself live a little more, and you teased him even more, oftentimes tickling him into submission, and to him, it seemed like you might be doing it for nothing other than the joy of watching him squirm. But maybe not.
As you smiled at him from the other room, Five felt what had become his normal feeling of butterflies in his stomach and that pitiful aching in his chest. Doing the daily domestic things, like watching you change the bedding as he busied himself in the greenhouse, he could almost forget about all the bad things that had happened.
His family were out there, yet not. They were frozen in time as far as the space time continuum and his fucked subway time travel loop were concerned. It had been almost eight years since he’d left them, only hours from facing their demise, but to them, if he could get back, they wouldn't even know that he wasn't there to begin with.
In many ways, they were gone, not him, and it had been that way for so long.
If Five could have gotten back, it would start all over. He’d have hours to figure all this out, but he had nothing figured out in the way of helping them. That should have tormented him incessantly like it had before, but now, feeling like he had no other choice but to accept this fate, the last thing on his mind when he looked at you was the Cleanse, or other timelines that were about to be destroyed.
Even more crazy, he didn’t hate himself the way he used to and that was because you didn’t hate him for any of it.
Also, crazy, if he didn’t think you might knee him in the nards, he had half a mind to come over there and toss you on that mattress and show you that you weren’t the only one who knew how to play dirty.
He may not have been able to do anything to help his family or the rest of the world, but fuck did he want to show you he still had some fight left in him by putting those old bed springs to the test, rocking his hips into you to the beat pumping out of the tiny speakers sitting on the table behind him.
Watching you bend over to pick up your growing pile of linens, Five’s smile grew. When you disappeared from view, he called out your name. “Hey, why don’t we leave this work for later? Come out here and join me. I’ll let you beat me at a game of chess, and you can even use the unicorn charm as your queen this time.”
Coming around the corner, you dropped the laundry on the floor and shook your head at him. “I’m the one that lets you win, and we both know you are the magical unicorn around here,” you said, pelting him in the chest with a large berry you just picked from one of the bushier plants near the door.
“Sure,” he mockingly drawled, as he began to water the plants again. “You know I love magically fooling around with this cute little watering can all day because I aim to please the lady of the house.” 
Five grinned. 
“You know…with me being pretty much worthless otherwise," he added, not even looking as he pegged you in the boob with a berry.
The song playing ended and another 80’s song about rains in Africa started. Using the music to cover your footsteps, from the corner of his eye, Five still saw you coming. Just as you were about to come up behind him to rumble up his hair until he looked like an asshole, he turned, tipping the watering can over your head.
The dribbles he let escape ran down the length of your hair, a few of them raining down on your perfectly stunned face.
“Oops,” he said, grinning even wider. 
“Was that necessarily?” you asked, trying to scowl at him, but clearly having trouble doing it.
“Yes,” he smugly replied as he casually set the watering can down.
“Why?” you challenged, your eyes following his every move.
“Because,” He reached out, slowly running a finger across your wet cheek as he leaned in, whispering in your ear. “Maybe I just wanted to see if I could get you wet.”
You no longer looked like you were about to burst out laughing.
Five knew he was playing with fire, but he couldn’t take it anymore. He had to know.
He glanced up at the boarded-up window above, then his eyes met yours again as he quietly said, “I’ll never stop being sorry that I am not him, but-”
“Five-” you started to argue, no doubt planning to tell him it wasn’t his fault that he died and that now he couldn’t get you out of there.
“Shhhh,” he uninterrupted, pressing a finger to your lips to silence you. “I’m not done.” His smirk softened. “I know he loved you, and that’s because I love you. The question is, do you love me too? Like this?” he clarified, lowering his chin, the tip of his nose brushing against yours.
“Five,” your voice cracked with emotion. 
Your lips pressed against his. 
The softest sound crawled out of his throat, moving up through his nose as Five kissed you back, innocent, and beautiful in his not knowing exactly how to do it but doing it anyway. His hand moved behind your head as he parted his lips, letting his mouth move against yours, his tongue just starting to play along your teeth, pushing for more.
From there, with your hands reactively moving up into his hair, pulling him to you even more, his kiss grew deeper and more desperate.
Coming up for air several minutes later, you breathlessly whimpered, “I love you so much, Five. I always will. I just didn’t know if you wanted this with me. You kept saying things that made me think maybe, but then you-”
Hearing that, he frantically started pressing kisses down your neck, then down to your shoulder. “Fuck yeah, I wanted this,” he said as he took your breath away. His trembling hands played at the hem of your shirt before he suddenly stopped and broke away, peering at you.
“Is this okay?” he asked, his hands tentatively sliding up over the cotton covering your back as his excited smile exposed more of his charmingly boyish dimple.
Your reply came with you suddenly lifting the material in his way all the way up over your head. 
Speechless, Five’s intense gaze fell over your naked upper body.
“Holy shit, I was not expecting that,” he breathed. Recapturing your lips a few seconds later, he kissed you two more times, then, still trying to kiss you, he mumbled, "I have imagined doing this for so long, just ask the flowers by the front door that have been watching me jerking off every night. They know just how badly I wanted to see these perky tits.”
You started to giggle over that new piece of information, but that quickly turned into you moaning into Five’s mouth from the feeling of him sliding his fingers over your nipples. Encouraged by that, he continued with his ministrations, slowly and softly caressing you until you moaned even more.
When he released your lips, you let out a small whine at the loss, but you were quickly placated as Five moved his kisses along your jawline, stopping for just a moment to nibble on your ear.
“Gah- ahhh,” you gasped, it felt so good, and to that, Five bit down on your lobe, his teeth stinging your flesh as he pinched your nipples at the same time.
You squeaked, your legs clenching together even tighter.
Five let out a breathy laugh as his lips moved over your ear, seductively whispering, "Was that good?"
“You really are still the same cocky little shit you always were, aren’t you?” you shot back.
Nodding his head yes, Five leveled his lopsided grin at you. “Probably worse,” he admitted
“Take your shirt off, “ you demanded, hardly able to believe how silly and hot he was being.
Happily obeying, Five tore off his emerald green sweater that matched his eyes, tossing it over with your shirt on the floor.
“Better?” he questioned.
“Much,” you replied as your fingers began to graze his skin, exploring the hard expanse of his toned chest, down his stomach, delighting in the lean ‘V’ of muscle leading towards his hips.
As your fingers played along the dark, almost jet black trail of hair leading into his pants, dipping below his waistband, then coming back up so you could rub your hand over his crotch, Five shuddered under your touch, so you increased the pressure. 
“So sensitive,” you teased.
Ignoring that taunt, his left hand quickly found your breast again and his other clamped onto your ass, giving it a hard smack before he suddenly yanked your skirt up.
“You have really been enjoying fucking with me,” he laughed, then said, “and what the fuck is this song talking about!”
With his hand under your skirt, his fingers moved slowly, massaging his burning handprint, and he didn’t stop punishing you there. Five’s fingers stopped just shy of the heat between your legs. There, he rubbed the elastic panty line lying along your groin as he smiled like a fucking jerk.
“This song is talking about a man and his love for a girl, but he’s torn between her and the continent he loves, and please, Five! Please don’t stop!” you begged.
“There we go!” he laughed. “Just what I needed to hear. Keep it coming, honey.”
With that, memories of another Five being ridiculously obsessed with you getting you to cry out his name, blended with this one and his equally interesting quirks and many miss understandings about things that to you seemed obvious. 
Before you could come up with an appropriate comeback, your brain gave out on you because Five’s fingers slid under the thin panty barrier he’d been toying with, moving between your folds, determinedly pressing into your clit.
“Fuck, you are wet. I guess watering you worked,” Five mockingly groaned as he gently kissed the side of your neck, letting the smallest scrap of his light facial hair tickle you. 
Giggling and squirming even more, he gave your neck a little nip. 
“Hold still, damn it, I am trying to finger fuck you to this stupid song,” he laughed.
Hand still jammed in your underwear, Five drew you back with him, the backs of his legs bumping one of the chairs next to the small garden table.
Taking your hand off the hard bulge in his pants, you moved it with your other, shoving him down in the chair with enough momentum to make the legs cry out in complaint as they slid across the concrete. Not stopping, you crawled over him, wrapping your legs around his waist.
“I missed you acting all adorable like this,” you said as cheekily as possible, while laughing at his lustful expression of bewilderment.
Not about to be out done, guiding you up against him even tighter, Five wrapped your lips in a warm kiss that quickly escalated into a heady, deep kiss. It didn’t take long just doing that, and you were both breathing much harder than normal again.
Seductively pulling at your lower lip with his upper teeth, Five looked up at you with his mossy eyes softer than you’d ever seen them. 
“From that first day I was with you on the train, you were all I wanted. I didn’t even know what I’d missed until then. I thought I did, but not really,” he said. “I don’t know why or how this is happening to us over and over, but I know one thing for sure and that’s I am never letting you go again.” 
That was almost exactly what Five said to you the night he died. 
Jolting you from the moment, a near paralyzing fear hit you like another slap in the ass, but then, just like so many times when Five touched you, the next time he brought his lips to yours, your entire body tingled with a whole different kind of all-encompassing feeling.
The air felt alive. 
As you eased your body back into his hand that was tracing lines up and down your spine, Five’s lips closed around one of your taut nipples and his hand lowered between your legs, moving again.
“Yesssss,” you moaned, rocking your hips against his, driving your bottom down against his erection.
Pinned under your weight, Five whimpered and his cock throbbed with so much need he felt like he might come in his pants. Not wanting that, his fingers moved faster, slipping up and down in the cramped space of your panties, and that got you to let up on him, which was both a good and bad thing.
You arched your back as he flicked one of your tits with his tongue. Scraping his teeth along your peeked flesh, he sucked it back inside the heat of his mouth and you ground down on him harder than before. 
Unable to take it, Five’s mouth popped off. “Fuck. Keep. Doing. That!” he groaned as he started with your neck and earlobes again, trailing sloppy kisses down to your collarbone.
Flipping your skirt completely out of the way with a whip of his wrists, Five slid your panties to the side with a quick tug, then the tip of his index finger gently started pushing into your hole.
“Mmmm fff, Five,” you whined, as he moved deeper inside you.
“So…fah-king tight,” he breathed, equally taken by the feel of your body fighting him. He looked up at you with adoring eyes, his worry coming out in his soft words. “You okay?”
“Yes,” you said, your body opening for him more and more each second a part of him was becoming a part of you.
Once he was past knuckle deep, you started to work your body over the hard length of his trapped cock again, totally destroying his pants as his finger started to fuck into you, in and out, hooking and pulling, doing anything and everything he could to get you moving faster.
“Oh, ffff,” you cried as Five, with no warning, added a second finger and then started to dip in and out at the same punishing rate as his thumb circling around your clit.
You pushed yourself against his hand, biting your lip as your body quickly coiled and tightened around him. “Fff-vvvv!” you cried. 
When your orgasm hit a moment or two later, your wet gasps filling the greenhouse, he couldn’t believe it.
Your forehead fell against his. You slowly unclenched your fingers, your fingernails leaving half-moon marks all over his shoulders.
“Did I do it?” Five excitedly asked.
Still hardly able to open your eyes, you nodded, panting, “Fuck yes you did. Fuck, Five…”
With his cock about to rip through his pants, Five pulled his fingers from your quivering cunt, bringing them to his mouth. Smiling as he tasted you, slowly licking a few more times for effect, he said, “I can confidently say that I have never done anything as amazing as that, and you taste so delicious I might never eat anything else ever again.”
Laughing at the absurdity of that considering you knew just how much Five liked to eat actual food, and he could in fact do the unimaginable by traveling through time, even if he couldn't do it the way he wanted to anymore, on doe like legs, you climbed off of him, letting your panties slip to the floor.
“Your turn,” you said, straddling your magical unicorn, your hands already starting to unzip his pants to the sight of his approving gaze of god-like sexiness staring back at you.
Carefully pulling him from the confines of his pants, you’d only given Five’s cock a few gentle tugs and his smug expression was gone. 
“Thank you for this, fuck, thank you,” he quietly repeated, his eyes about rolling back in his head as you lazily pumped him, making him leak even more glistening fluid from the tip of his cock.
Lost in what you were doing to him, Five fingers dug into the seat on the wooden chair.
“That feels so fucking good,” he groaned as you twirled your finger over him, spreading his precum to make your hand move faster as it dropped down over the long veins feeding his impressive length.
When you moved forward, guiding the thick head of his cock through the swollen valley between your legs, Five couldn’t take it anymore. Frantically pushing his heels into the floor, he reactively tried to thrust upwards, but it did him little good because he wasn’t inside of you like his mind was telling him he was.
“Ah-ah-ah,” you warned. “Slow down, old man. I’ll get you there, I promise. I want your first time to be special,” you lovingly cooed.
“This is pretty fucking special. I have waited over 70 years for this,” he growled, trying to hump up into you again but clearly only doing it that time to watch your tits bounce.
Shaking your head at the craziness of it all because Five looked nothing like his real age despite him being that old, with one hand on the back of his neck, your feet fell flat on the floor, allowing you the leverage you needed to ride him. With his drizzling tip pushing all the way up to the height of your belly button, you lined him up, then started frotting, pressing the hot length of his cock against your swollen clit in a sinful game of slip and slide.
“That’s right, baby. Let me fuck you,” you praised, already feeling that lustfully addicting pleasure rising in you again. Yanking his hair to further the fun, Five moaned, but he didn’t fight it, and that only turned you on even more, because you knew how badly he wanted to.
Five Looked like a broken angel fallen from heaven. His beautiful eyes were cutely drowsy as he watched you fucking him, the sweet feel of your sex, your body rocking in his lap, all of it felt like nothing he had ever felt before.
The fall sun was shining down.
The heat building.
The strangest choice for a fuck song was playing on the CD player, the band Todo singing their topical ballad as your bodies worked together to the inspiring rhythm of the drums.
♫  I bless the rains down in Affff-ri-cAAA! 
Five shut his eyes.
The pure love and acceptance he was feeling made the shadow of doubt hanging over him from his own death and from his horrible past feel like it couldn’t touch him.
“Five, look at me,” you ordered.
He did.
One look at you as you rode, unable to fight it, he let out a guttural groan of unrestrained pleasure. Unclasping his fingers from the chair, he ran his hands down, under your ass, lifting and pulling with you, making you move your hips and hand pinning his cock down even faster as you fucked him against you.
He was trapped and so were you, but Five felt anything but trapped as your thighs quivered and the tension built more and more with each pass of his cock thrusting up through your pussy lips.
“Kiss me. Please. I need you to kiss me,” you begged, your words breathless as you worked hard to give him the ride of his life while he sat there like the king of the world, watching you buck and pant.
The second Five’s lips touched yours, you locked your fingers on him tighter, pulling him as close as possible. 
Your nails scratched along his scalp making him fuck up into you harder. 
The chair groaned in protest.
You brokenly whimpered into his kiss, and again, Five felt that strangely familiar burst of energy in the air. 
Your head flung back. You’d reached the edge and tumbled over it again; this time he knew it and he’d never felt closer to you.
He cursed a breathy gasp, his lips parted against your chest as he pushed his pelvis up and down at the same faltering pace as yours. Pulses of his release, a creamy white heat of pent-up pain and love started to spread against the silky expanse of your body as Five moved his cheek next to yours. 
Mouth against your moistened skin, he groaned and hissed. “Ahhhffuuuuucccccckkkkk-ffffff-”
A sticky mess between you as his balls twitched under him, still out of breath, Five peered up at, grinning like a fool.
Just when he thought he couldn’t possibly deserve more, you brought your hands to his face, running your fingers over his flushed cheeks as you tilted his chin up. “I love you, Five. It will always be you.”
You placed the softest kiss along his jaw, then down his sweaty neck. Five’s entire body trembled, as much from the gentle sensation of you showing how much you loved him with the touch of your lips, as in what it meant to him hearing you say that.
You said it again. “I love you, Five.”
Tiny shivers danced up his spine as a low moan resonated deep in his throat. Your mouth continued to move over him. 
“I love you too.” He exhaled your name slowly as you moved your way back up to his lips, your fingers soothingly playing with his hair. 
Right then, no matter how many times you let him have this with you, Five knew he’d never get enough of it. 
As he told you, you were all he wanted.
Now, nothing else mattered. 
W-Why
Autumn days of sunlit leaves floating down from above passed by, and with them, Five’s mind and heart were at peace for the first time in his life. 
Nights with you in bed, hot breaths against each other’s skin as you explored new ways to love each other were everything to him. 
Laying on a blanket, under the stars as the white plumes of your breath made clouds of heat above you, Five was in heaven even if he was in a world of crumbling foundations.
He even had the moon this time.
It was perfect.
You had the greenhouse and a roof over your heads, but you still needed to scout for other food options. Just like the last time he was in the apocalypse, Five spent hours on end each day, searching for anything he could use to help get through the harder times. But now, as he wandered down the stairway into the old subway station he hadn’t been to in months, the pressure of getting back felt almost non-existent. 
Maybe he could trap something alive down there, he’d thought. Rats were awful but you weren’t picky, and neither was he, and rabbits had been hard to come by lately with the colder turn in the weather.
Just thinking about bringing a rodent in the house and acting like he slayed a dragon for you made him smile. 
You loved when he acted stupid, and he loved doing it for you.
Feet quietly moving across the debris filled landing, just then, when it felt like nothing was more important than finding new ways to make you smile, of course that was when fate decided to prove he was wrong.
Noticing a strange mark on the floor at the edge of the subway platform, one he’d never noticed before because the light down there was so bad, Five pointed his flashlight down. 
There was something scratched into the tile, and it was done so poorly he could hardly see it, but it was there, and it was no accident.
Bending down, he slowly traced the intricate circles and paralleling lines done in an interlocking pattern that suggested a mathematical projection of infinite sums, or better put, infinite outcomes. 
His heart sank as his finger cleared the grim from the interdimensional map, or that was what he’d suspected it was the first time he’d seen it tattooed on the chest of the ancient version of him that was dying in the paradox proof chamber back in the Sparrow’s timeline.
Looking around, he saw nothing else. Jumping down to the tracks, Five ducked his head below the small lip where the electrical lines were hung. There was a box that some of the larger lines fed into, and it was directly underneath where the sigil was placed. 
Reaching his hand up, blinding feeling around in the cobwebs and dead bugs, he felt something. 
“No,” he breathed, looking down at the leather-bound journal, his eyes rapidly moving over the pages. 
All of them were filled in, unlike the one he had back at the house. And even more shocking, this one showed the way to get back.
“Five?” you called out, coming down the stairs. 
“Yeah, down here,” he replied, quickly shoving the book inside his shoulder bag.
~~~
Stretching his toes under the sheets as his body came down from the feel of having his dick pushing down your throat, Five dreamily looked down at you nestled between his legs
“I love your hair, honey, but I like it best when it’s like that,” he teased as you looked back at him, stretching your jaw, your hair a total ball of fuzz ball from you romping around under the blankets.
You smiled. “Fuck you, Five.” 
“Fuck me, you say… Sure.  I am game to do that again, only it has to be roles reversed until I can get it up again.”
You rolled out of bed, escaping before he could pounce on you and throw his face between your legs. 
“Aww, come on. It won’t take long,” he whined, watching you trot away.
“I know,” you called back, blanket dragging as you tiptoed the cold floor out to the kitchen to get a glass of water from the cooled boiling pot on the wood stove. 
Coming back, you passed by the fireplace, tossing a few logs Five had brought in the night before. Moving on, you stopped at the bookshelf, eyeing up the selection that had grown substantially since Five had gotten there. 
Still lazily lying in bed, he smiled, knowing you were going to pick something and ask him to read it to you while you snuggled on him in bed until mid-day. He loved the bitter temperatures that had settled in because it meant time outside was limited and there was more time for this.
While crossing his arms over his head, looking around the little home that he shared with you, Five started to smile again. The shelves in the kitchen were covered with canning jars filled with the evidence of how hard you had both worked to prepare for the winter. While he was thinking about how the massive amount of work involved in living this way did nothing to diminish how happy he was, something over by you hit the floor with a thump.
Five hadn’t noticed you stepping up on a chair to reach the highest shelf, but you had. Now you were getting down, looking at what had fallen.
His heart was suddenly beating so hard it felt like it might rip out of his chest. Too late, he threw himself out of bed, snatching his pajama pants off the floor as he rushed over, one leg in, and one out of the cold flannel.
“What is this?” you questioned, rapidly turning the pages in your hands. “Five?” you said again, waving the notes you’d just found wedged behind the other books.
“It’s my journal,” Five said, still pulling up his pants as the worried line between his brows grew deeper.
“I know it is, but it’s not that one,” you said, pointing to the other on the table beside the bed. “This one is…It looks like you figured it out…. The key to the subway map is all filled in.” 
You quickly turned to the pages that Five already knew were there, the colorful triangles and circles and squares and numbers that had made no sense were all noted with his handwriting, explaining what they meant and how to navigate them. Trying to make help sense of it, you’d looked at it so many times, but like him, you’d gotten nowhere.
Five reached for the book, and as if you’d lost all your strength, the journal fell into his hands. Your voice tremored. “Where did this come from?”
“I found it under the edge of the subway platform, next to the tracks.”
“When?”
“Months ago,” Five flatly replied, his voice coming out steady, even if he wasn’t.
Your eyes glossed over. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
As he looked into your hurt filled eyes, he felt like he was dying as he said, “You know why.”
“Five,” we can’t stay here pretending there isn’t something we can do,” you said, saying exactly what he knew you’d say.
“What can I do!” Five all but screamed, making you jump back, and that only made him look even more upset.
Ashamed that he’d just done that, his entire body shaking, Five’s hands came up, covering his face, the journal falling to the floor as he started to ramble, “I can’t lose you! I can't help them! I-” 
He breathed your name, much quieter before starting again. 
“If we go, there’s no telling what we’ll find back there. My family and I didn’t know what to do before I left, and I don’t know what to do now. Having you with me is the last thing I want if I go back to that place. Don’t you get it!” he cried, losing it again. “That timeline is just another like this one that will be destroyed, only this time, nobody is going to survive!”
“So this is it?” you quietly asked.
Five looked up and only then did he see the tears rolling down your cheeks. 
“Isn’t this enough?” he asked, his voice cracking.
You came closer. “Five, you will always be enough for me, but-”
When you didn’t finish the ‘but’ and instead chose to wrap your arms around him, Five sucked in a panicked breath, his entire body shuttering. 
Feeling worse, but slowly getting a handle on himself and what this meant, eventually Five forced himself away from the safety of your embrace. His voice lacked any signs of weakness from his melt down when he looked at you and said, “We are going back.”
X- X-factor, as in an exceptional quality or talent that sets someone or something apart. Not so much what the gang is displaying here.
Escorting you along the snow-covered sidewalk leading up to Diego and Lila’s house, trying to be optimistic, Five said, “Maybe they figured it out after all. Everything looks normal.”
Opening the door, Diego’s eyes widened as they moved from you to his brother. “What do you know? Five finally decided to join us and he’s not alone!” he called out just as Klaus came to join him in the entryway, shoving a handful of trail mix in his mouth.
“And who’s this,” he questioned, wiggling an eyebrow at you.
Five was still trying to introduce you when Lila came over interrupting. “Awwww,” she said, scowling at Five. “It looks like hell really did freeze over because you brought a real live, non-plastic date. You’ve clearly been busy, though not surprisingly busy doing nothing to help us figure this stuff out with Ben.”
“We don’t know where Viktor is, or Benny and his Jenny,” Klaus chimed in, “but that doesn’t mean this Cleanse stuff is happening. Dad lies all the time.” Looking puzzled, he looked down at the floor. “Actually, I don’t know what’s going on. Allison and Claire Bear just dug me up from a pet cemetery. I’m still feeling a little shaky about all that and for other reasons too, so I haven’t really been much help either.” 
He glanced at Claire, and she smiled. “It’s okay Uncle Klaus. One step at a time We’ve got your back.”
Coming your way, dressed in a track suit that way too small for him, Luther said, “Hi, I am Luther. Not sure if Five told you about me.”
“Five, told me all about you. It’s so nice to finally meet all of you,” you said, smiling at Luther, then Five, who was already looking like his head might explode.
Luther turned his goofy grin at Five, giving him a not at all discrete thumbs up as he whispered, but not quite enough that everyone else didn’t hear it. “Nice job!” Suddenly looking confused, he added, “Are you together, like together-together? Not that it matters, it’s just Lila is right. You don’t date, and we’ve never seen you with anyone other than Dolor-”
“Woopsie,” Allison said, walking past, smacking Luther on the back of the head.
Letting out the breath he’d been holding, Five angrily spat, “She already knows about me and Dolores! And not that any of you give a shit about my life, but yes, we are together! I am madly in love with her and for some reason, she loves me back!”
“Ohhhh. I love this… When did all this happen?” Klaus excitedly asked, totally engrossed in the drama unfolding as he sat down on the couch with his bowl of trail mix on his lap.
“Recently.” Five heatedly replied. “And that wasn’t all I was doing, Lila!”
Five raised his voice as he glared at his sister-in-law but that only made her challenging smile even brighter.
“I have been gone for almost eight years,” Five raged at her. “I tried to use my powers to go back in time to save Ben but instead got myself trapped in the apocalypse again where I topped off that series of epic mistakes by getting shot by another me. I would have died if not for her being trapped in one of the apocalypses I ended up in, and believe it or not, that one was on me too! So go ahead, start lying into me about how this is all my fault! Sloane! Your discontent in marriages and your fucked up lives! The Cleanse! Everything! Let me have it. I have heard it all before!”
“I told you that you needed my help,” Lila irritatedly huffed, as she pulled a sticky chunk of red licorice off the front of her shirt.
As Five moved his bitter gaze to Luther, the big guy frowned. “I never meant to blame Sloane on you,” he said very sheepishly. He looked at the others for help but wasn’t getting any. “I am sorry… I was so… And I didn’t mean to-”
“Wait. Hold up…” Claire interjected from the sidelines where she’d been quietly watching the showdown. “You tried to save us, all by yourself?” She looked from her angry Uncle to her mom, clearly confused. 
Allison smiled at her daughter. “Believe it or not, you Uncle Five is the most selfless jerk you’ll ever meet, and he’s right. We have been pretty awful about things since he’s been back, and that’s because like him, we are jerks whose lives are a mess, but that is not his fault.” Turning to Five, she said, “We love you, Five, and I couldn’t be happier that you finally found someone, even if it was in a place you never should have been to begin with. Funny how that shit works. I can tell you all about it and Ray would too if he were still around, but…he’s NOT.” 
She raised her drink, pounding all of it as she flopped down on the couch next to Luther.
“I am sorry, buddy. I didn’t even know you were gone. We love you; you know that right?” Klaus said, coming in for a hug. 
Just then, totally taken off guard because he was looking at you grinning at him with that, I told you so look he knew was because you’d told him time and time again that his family love him, Five was ambushed by his ghost whispering brother’s smothering affections, double cheek kisses and all.
“I am so glad your apocalyptic badass woman saved you, little guy,” Klaus gushed as you started to giggle over what Klaus had just called you, and at Five trying to get away from Klaus’s impressively strong clutches.
Ducking out of his grip, just then, Grace came running in. “Uncle Five! You have to see what Mr. Pennycrumb can do! He can blink just like you.”
“Hey, kid,” Five breathed, coming down to her level to watch as she excitedly flew her electronic dog around extra fast, hiding him behind the Christmas tree before popping him back out again.
As soon as his daughter was done showing off, looking serious, Diego pulled Five to the side. Just as fast, you were surrounded by the rest of his siblings, having gotten pulled down between Luther and Allsion on the couch, with Klaus on the floor at your feet, all of them firing questions at you about your time with their brother.
Scrunching his lips in a way that made his dad mustache look extra dorky, Diego said, “That sounded bad, minus the badass chick saving you part. You okay?”
“Perfect,” Five shot back, trying to smooth the rumbles out of his suit. Giving up, he muttered a few curses, then hearing something about if you were married or not, he looked over at you, tensely flattening his lips as the muscles in his jaw tensed. 
He was about to angrily spout off on all of them again, but looking flushed by amused, you shook your head, warning him not to do it. 
About to lose his mind and not sure what to say about the marriage thing anyway, Five’s mouth snapped shut.
“Oh, my God!” Lila cackled. “I think I love her already,” she laughed, nudging Five in the shoulder before coming over to you, asking, “Do you have superpowers too, because the way you shut down that little ankle biter without saying a word was bloody brilliant. You have to teach me that trick!”
“Ahhh. No powers here,” you laughed. “I think Five and I just have a good understanding of each other.” You looked at Five, widening your eyes comically at him because you could totally see why he maintained that his family were a hard pill to swallow.
“So... I did the CIA thing,” Diego said, moving right along.
“And how did that go?” Five breathed, overwhelmed, but trying to dial it back for the kid’s sake and yours.
“It didn’t. Turns out, it’s not for me. Lila and I had a talk, and we are doing better. My life with them means everything, I just needed a reminder. Thanks for giving it to me,” he said, looking down at his oldest, who was sitting on the floor in front of the TV. Slapping Five on the back a second later, he asked, “So, are you still the oldest virgin alive, or did you guys S-K-R-E-W?” 
“That is not how you spell screw, dad,” Grace corrected as Diego pulled a condom package out of his wallet, then pulled open Five’s back pant pocket, stuffing it in.
“Just in case you need it, man,” he clarified as if Five didn’t get it. “Kids are great, but not sure you're ready for all that complicated stuff yet with you being a scrawny teenager still.”
“I am not a teenager!” Five raged, “I’m 26 for the 2nd fucking time, so that makes me 71! I shouldn’t be surprised by any of this, or you not getting that, but I am! And that means for a room full of people given powers not typically seen in any other humans, all any of us can claim is that we’ve excelled at being extraordinarily stupid! There is nothing exceptional about any of us! The world could still be ending in a few hours and Luther is over there shoving whole popcorn balls in his mouth!”
“Thaaairr-rrealleeegoo,” he mumbly defended
Unfazed by her dad being stupid or her favorite Uncle flipping out on everyone, Grace pointed at the TV screen, asking, “Is that Uncle Viktor hanging out with all those weirdos surrounding the mall?”
~~~
Hours later, blinking out of the way of the gigantic blob monster Ben-Jen thing, portal violently crackling, Five reappeared in the subway station, his back slamming back down on the cement as you landed on top of him, knocking the air out of him.
Heart racing as he choked on the air fighting to get back inside his lungs, with his useless gun still in his free hand, Five rolled over, pulling you up.
“I’m sorry,” you needlessly apologized, hardly able to walk as you clung to him. 
Your head was spinning from the jump, and from getting thrown out over the second-floor mezzanine by Luther just before an arm like appendage of the Ben-Jen Cleanse blob latched on to Five, who had just wrapped his arm around you to blink you out of there.
Not stopping, Five helped you inside the waiting train, the doors closing as he sat you down, and then he joined you, staring at the ground as he gently ran his hand up and down your back.
“I am not abandoning them,” he said, almost a whole minute later, finally looking up. 
“I know.” Feeling less green, you moved closer, lowering your head to his shoulder. 
“I can’t save them in any other way but by leaving. I need to buy us some time,” he explained even though he didn’t need to, you were there. You saw it all.
Viktor tried to pull the marigold from Ben, but it was too late. They all had fought back, but they were losing badly. Like Five had told you in the first days he was with you, they were never meant to win.
His head dropped back against the side of the train as it swayed, aimlessly moving through the tunnels.
Five couldn’t even begin to pay attention to the stops as they came and went, another gloomy station of nothingness, and then another, and then another. 
With no clue what to do, he sat in silence with your hand in his.
At some point, your mental exhaustion got the best of you. Slumping against him, you drifted off to the feel of his shallow breaths against your temple.
Y-You
“Five, what is this place?” you asked as your sleep filled eyes followed his towards the glowing sign that said, “Max’s Delicatessen.”
“I have no idea,” he breathed, cautiously stepping out of the train. 
At the unexpected sound of someone saying your name, Five pivoted, protectively throwing you behind him.
The dark-haired young man you hadn’t noticed was sitting on one of the benches near the tracks laughed, then he said, “Don’t worry. I mean neither of you harm, and to answer your question since he can’t. This is the place all of us end up at some point when our time is up. That’s if we make it this far. Most don’t.” 
Getting up, the suit-wearing stranger who was a mirror image of Five, folded his newspaper under his arm and strode your way, extending his hand. 
“Hello again.” He gave you a charming grin, his eyes mischievously sparkling. “It’s been a long time, but I see that your pretty smile hasn’t changed.”
You hadn’t been smiling, but now you were, and that only made the Five at your side look even more hostile.
Unbothered by that, the other Five turned on the heel of his shiny dress shoe, casually waving you along as he said, “Come inside. We need to have a chat.”
A second later the steel bell hanging above the door rang and at least a dozen more Fives inside the deli looked your way, all of them eyeing you with open interest.
The Five you were following sat down in one of the open booths in the middle, gesturing for you to join him. Still shocked into a silence that was making you all the more nervous, Five moved into the opposite seat, pulling you in next to him on the inside of the booth.
The Five that had greeted you flagged over a waiter version of himself as he rushed by, and he swiftly leaned in, filling the cups in front of everyone.
No sooner was it poured, than next to you, Five picked up his white porcelain cup, tipping the entire contents back in one long slug. 
“It’s been a long time since you’ve had coffee this marvelously shitty, I take it?” The Five across from you chuckled as the still hovering waiter came back around. As he refilled your Five’s cup, his fingers brushed past yours on the handle of your mug.
“Need some sugar or some cream in that, sweetheart?” he asked, as the dimple in his cheek deepened.
Your Five turned his glare at the Waiter Five. “She can get her own cream, so fuck off, and yes…” he hissed at the Greeter, “It’s been a while since I had coffee.” 
Five was looking at the Waiter like he might kill him, so you squeezed his leg from under the table. After that, he took a much more civilized sip of his drink, but the warning in his eyes remained as they darted around the diner, meeting the curious eyes of all the other Fives.
“I am betting the lack of caffeine wasn’t nearly as awful this time around when you had such a lovely companion there with you in the apocalypse. She was with you, I presume…? That’s if your story parallels that of some of these other lost boys in here.”
To that, your exceedingly twitchy Five glanced at a very young looking Five wearing his Umbrella Academy uniform. He was sitting next to the door with Dolores. Staring back at the kid version of him’s baby face, Five’s own features pinched with confusion.
Seeing that they weren’t going to get any juicy details on his relationship with you, the Greeter said, “Okay, cutting to the chase then…?”
“Please,” Five cooly replied.
Obliging, the Greeter said, “Every one of us here tried to fix this mess and couldn’t. Now we are here doing anything we can to help the other Fives who still have skin in the game. Which are the lucky bastards like you. So, how can we help?”
Flipping his hair out of his eyes, Five asked, “Will going back to our first timeline and then jumping back to prevent Ben’s death change any of this?”
“No,” the Greeter Five replied.
“Would stopping the original Reginald from releasing the marigold in the first place be enough to fix this?”
“It would be, but we can’t do that. He didn't release the marigold on Earth. He did it on his home planet and then it got here many years later. We don’t have the ability to jump from one plant to another, and Reginald’s ticket here was one way. Doing that also means we will never be born. So again. No.”
With his foot agitatedly tapping under the table, Five shook his head. “What else is there that we can work with?”
The Greeter laughed. “Us. We are the problem.”
“Explain,” Five shot back.
Tiling his head to the side, the Greeter grinned at you then looked back at your Five and sighed. “The marigold that caused our births was the catalyst, and we were the by-product that never should have been. We set it all in motion by existing. Our births are what caused a ripple effect that split the timelines. They never should have happened, and because of that, we get an endless cycle of nature trying to correct itself.”
Five’s hand tightened around yours. “The apocalypse and the Cleanse.”
The Greeter nodded. “Exactly. Every one of them, and on and on it goes. We are at one million five hundred thousand, eighty-two tries to stop it at this point and we haven’t, but we are still going strong.” 
He laughed at that, his eyes moving to the Five in the corner booth who was tipping back a bottle of whiskey with about half of it running down his chin. 
“Well, most of us are still trying. Drunk Five, not so much,” the Greeter cynically added.
Not happy about that, the Drunk Five, sloshing his bottle all over his table started in. “You are missing shit as usual! There are things bigger in this world than new elements that can spontaneously create superpowered assholes and then later devour them for no good fucking reason other than an arrogant alien asshole named Reginald had zero foresight!” he shouted.
“It was Abigail who created it,” one of the Fives playing cards flatly corrected, while dealing another hand to the Five across from him. 
“Whatever! Still an asshole!” Drunk Five insisted, getting even more worked up. “Real power has nothing to do with what they gave us! It’s in here, only all you self absorbed morons have no idea what it means to feel it!” he declared while trying to point a finger at his heart, but when he almost dropped his bottle, he ended up dumping booze on his crotch instead.
Looking like he was about to cry, the very drunk Five looked over at you. “I- I’m,” 
He said your name, proving the Greeter Five wasn’t the only one who knew your name.
“I tried to save you. I tried to save all of them, but I didn’t see the right way to do it until it was too late,” he sobbed. He set his bottle down, ringing his hand through his hair as he looked down at the table. “I would have done it. I would have sacri-”
A Five wearing an apron stepped out of the kitchen, slapping a hand over his drunk doppelganger’s mouth as he said, “Zip it before you fuck this up royal, nob shine.” 
Looking at you with a gleam in his eye, the kitchen Five bent down, whispering something in his captive’s ear, then having quieted the Drunk Five, that Five came over, placing his elbows on the back of your seat, joining the party, and again you were greeted with a smile and excited green eyes.
Reaching over to playfully twirl a piece of your hair around one of his fingers, the Five from kitchen looked to the Greeter Five then to your Five, saying, “Perhaps while you boys continue this conversation, it would be best if I take the lady in back to show her how I tenderize my meat?”
“Not a fucking chance,” your Five snapped back as you let out a small but very hysterical sounding laugh.
“Actually, that might not be a bad idea,” the Greeter agreed.
“She isn’t going anywhere with any of you!” Five fumed, standing up to get in the face of the kitchen Five that was invading the booth.
Someone in the kitchen who sounded like Five laughed, yelling something about soup and sore his meatballs, and just then, the bell above the door chimed.
A much older, white-haired gentleman with a mustache came in, throwing his hat on the coat rack as he took in the scene. “Jesus fucking Christ, why does it always have to be a freak show in here,” he grumbled.
The very young Five at the booth with Dolores tipped his margarita at him in agreement as your Five opened his mouth, starting to flip out again, but right then, the Waiter Five appeared from the kitchen, plate in hand, swinging by your table to drop a thick sandwich stacked with pastrami in front of the Greeter. “Here you go, extra sauerkraut, as you requested.” 
The Waiter looked over at you, his wicked grin grew. 
“Why do you always have to fuck shit up, Briket Five?” the Greeter snapped at the Five still playing with your hair. “Nobody wants to eat this shit covered in fermented slop but you!” 
“Shut up and just eat it,” he replied while giving you a naughty looking wink.
“Brisket Five?” you asked.
The Five in question nodded. “Yes, but you can call me whatever you want, love.” 
He got up and walked towards the kitchen, after your Five swatted his hand away, but getting him off of you made Five look no less pissed by the exchange. “We need to get you out of here,” he said as he started to slip out of the booth, but coming past your table, the old mustached Five nearly plowed down the Waiter, who then rammed into your Five blocking his path.
As he looked at the commotion going on at your table and all the Five’s sizing each other up, the older Five gruffly said, “Not sure what these morons have been telling you, but I am so sick of their shit that I am about ready to shove that mop up someone’s ass. Nobody is going to enjoy that other than Janitor Five, so I’ll give you some straightforward advice that might help us all out of this mess instead. Don’t try to save the world this time.”
The Five with the mop laughed. “True on both accounts! I’m down with an anal mop fucking as long as you go gentle on me, and when it comes to fucked up shit I haven’t tried, not saving our asses is the only thing I haven’t done, so I say yes to that too,” he shouted, then went back to moping the mess under Drunk Five’s table.
Mentally on overload, next to you, in his head, ignoring what the weird mop fucking stuff was all about with the Janitor Five, your Five repeated the words that had been haunting him since the first time he’d heard them coming from another much older permutation of himself who was dying in a paradox proof bunker.
Don’t try to save the world…
As if that wasn’t enough to shake him, still reeling with deja vu, the Drunk Five called over, “We need to destroy the marigold!”
“Please shut him up before he really scares her even more than h already has!” Greeter Five shouted.
With all the other Five’s too busy glaring at each other, the Drunk Five went on even louder, this time declaring his love for you, and because of it, you looked even more rattled by the chaos of all the versions of Five scattered around you, mostly all of them losing their shit or making lovey dovey eyes at you.
Coming out of the kitchen with a frying pan in hand, Brisket Five said, “Holy shit, someone should have thrown him outside hours ago.” A second later, he pulled back to swing, and a second after that, DONG! Drunk Five was lying face down, drooling on his placemat.
“To that, we agree,” the Greeter said, looking at you worriedly.
As if Brisket Five hadn’t just potentially concussed or killed the inebriated version of himself, the Waiter Five shimmied back into the mob around your table, refilling all the coffee cups, acting like all this was all totally normal.
Next to you, Five looked like he was about to blow a gasket. Unable to get out of the booth, he was about to vault the back of your seat and start stabbing out the eyeballs of the other Fives with his sugar spoon.
Coming over, Brisket Five said, “As you’ve noticed some of these lesser evolved douche bags in here aren’t that well-mannered, and Old Five is not much of a socialite, but he’s not wrong, and neither is Drunk Five over there. They are onto something, but our gracious Greeter here, and some of the others like to think there still has to be another way that doesn’t involve our way of thinking.”
“It makes sense that statistically, there is!” the Greeter Five growled, to the dickish brush off wave of the frying pan that Brisket Five just gave him.
After threatening the Greeter, Brisket Five, looking at you in a way that made you feel all sorts of warm, he said, “Did you know that there is a quantum entanglement thing going on between us?”  
“There is nothing going on between you two,” your Five snarled.
“Sure, there is,” he reaffirmed, giving the Greeter a pointed look that made your Five and the Greeter suddenly look much less sure of themselves. 
Coming too, looking even more upset now that he just got his head bashed in, looking at you, Drunk Five started rambling. “We have something that binds people through time in ways that no one will ever understand. It’s why we ran into each other in the first place, and it was why you were there to save me, and I was there to save you! It’s an inevitability… It’s as simple as that! We just need to believe in that this time and maybe-”
“It’s wishful thinking and we need more than that,” the Greeter interrupted.
Looking very annoyed, Brisket Five said, “There are some of us that like to pretend it’s horse shit based on fairy tales and lovesick delusional nonsense, but the concept of a love-based entanglement is very real.” He looked at you again. “No matter how far or how we get pulled apart in the mess of time, we will always remain connected. It’s like that with a love as strong as ours.”
“You don’t know her and you don’t love her! I do!!” your Five snapped
Brisket Five looked at the Greeter, both of them smiling knowingly, no longer looking like they might kill each other.
“Five, what is he talking about?” you asked.
“I don’t know,” he shot back, clearly so upset that he didn’t know what to say anymore.
“Sure, you do,” Brisket Five confidently replied. "Let me ask you this…have you ever felt things you can’t explain?”
Five nodded, yes.
Brisket Five reached across the table, placing his hand over yours as he smugly smiled at your Five while asking, “Have you felt it with her?” 
Heat flooded your face.
Your Five said nothing, but he didn’t need to, the other him’s smile turned into a full-on smirk. “Has she told you that she feels it too?”
Five glanced at you, and the other Five’s all trying their best to charm you with their bullshit smiles that made him want to punch himself.
“Ahhhh-haaa,” Brisket Five laughed. “I suppose she might not have told you she has felt that invisible tether that pulls at her heart when you're there and even when you’re not, but Drunk Five’s stories can’t all be bullshit, and I can attest to it because I feel it right now. Something tells me that she’s the special one here, not us, and it has nothing to do with marigold.”
Pulling his lips to the side, looking upset, Greeter Five said your name, pulling your attention his way again. “Hey, why don’t we let them talk about all this crap alone? I am sick of the fighting, and I bet you are hungry for something that is actually edible.” 
Getting up, he offered you a hand. When you got nothing from your Five other than silence, the warmth of the Greeter’s fingers curled around yours, sliding you out of the booth to join him. 
Directing you towards the display case filled with pies, Greeter Five said, “It really is a lucky day. There’s one more piece of strawberry fluff with your name on it.”
Behind you, Brisket Five leaned into your Five’s ear, talking extra quietly. “Look, you’re the first to ever come in together, and I think that means it’s time to end this the only way we can. Our family doesn’t have to make it to the end to get what you want, just the people we love do. We are linked to them, and them to us by something none of us can explain but it is real. Maybe that matters, and maybe it won’t, but at least they will live, and this will stop,” he said, eyeing you as the other Five’s intentionally dominated your attention so you didn’t hear that part. 
Your Five’s eyes widened as he realized what the other him meant.
“All your numbers and asshole logic aren’t getting you anywhere but here again, buddy. You need to let go,” Brisket Five added, trying to smile again but the sadness in his eyes and the pain he felt about it was impossible to hide.
Getting up, he left your Five alone at the booth.
“Just do as that old dipshit said to do this time,” the Five with Dolores yelled out, loudly slurping his margarita to the bottom of the glass.
“Why don’t you give me Dolores and you got stick your dick the pickle jar again and fuck it,” a particularly grumbly looking Five interjected before going back to scowling at his crossword puzzle.
“Five, what do they mean, don’t try to save the world this time?” you said, breaking away from Greeter Five as you came rushing back.
Just then, Drunk Five started in again, this time getting up from his booth, heading your way, cutting you off. “Don’t worry. We can help. We will come with you this time. Then-” 
He almost fell, his hand swinging out to catch him on the divider between booths.
Dizzily looking at all the others, then you again, he said, “We will keep the Cleanse busy, distracting it, and we will get Ben and Jennifer out of it.” He looked at your Five, a silent understanding happening between him as he lied. “You get everyone back to the academy. Viktor will have time to pull this shit out of you, dump it, and then you get the hell out of there. If you win, we all do.”
Reaching down, instead of vomiting, which he looked like he might do, Drunk Five pulled up two heavy double barrel shotguns that you had no idea were sitting next to the mostly quiet CrossWord Five who was now also suddenly getting up, pulling two guns from his shoulder straps.
“I’m in,” the Waiter Five said, dropping his coffee carafe in favor of the potato peeler he just pulled out of the bin full of dirty dishes sitting on the next table.
Greeter Five walked over to the fire box, smashing open the case, pulling out the ax. “Fine, Let’s fuck that blob up,” he said while giving you an extra cute grin that left you even more speechless over how quickly they’d all came together.
Almost all the Fives were suddenly packing, Brisket Five included, grinning at you from over by the check-in desk as he twirled a large butcher knife around, pointing it at his head, trying to get you to laugh over how crazy they all were.
Drunk Five swooped in, wobblily kneeling at your feet, his puppy dog eyes imploring you to believe him. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.” Feeling drawn to him, as you shakily wiped a tear from his cheek, he said, “I won’t let you down this time.” Letting your fingers gently run across his temple, Drunk Five’s eyes fluttered closed, his long lashes fanning his cheeks. “I still feel it,” he whispered as that spark of something lit up inside you, his eyes opening to meet yours, his focus entirely on you, unwavering as he was in his heart. “We’ve got this, sweetheart, we always did. Just hold on to me, okay? In here. Don’t forget how much I love you and we will always be together.”
He reached up, placing his hand over yours so he could pull it over his heart.
As your Five slowly, almost hypnotically moved in, looking down at the other him with a heartsick look in his eyes, Drunk Five handed the much older, very resolute looking Five who’d also came over his other shotgun. 
“Enough fucking around! Time to end this, boys!” the white-haired patriarch said. 
~~~
“See you on the other side,” Brisket Five said, while giving you both a look that was nothing like his haughty expressions he’d been maintaining for most of the conversation inside the deli. To you, his small smile seemed to be saying something by saying nothing at all, then he ducked into the other train car that the other Five’s had chosen to ride in.
Stepping in the doors you had come out of when you got there, you watched them a car over from yours, all the different versions of the man you loved as they found their places to either sit or stand, none of them saying a word. 
They looked like they meant business, like the violent ax swinging, hell bent on retribution kind of business, and it was a stark contrast to how out of control they’d been acting inside the deli.
“I promise, we can do this,” Five said, his eyes not leaving yours even though he was aware he had an audience in the next train over.
His heart was beating so hard. He felt like he could jump out of his skin but there was no way he was going to tell you that.
He knew all of the Fives felt it. It was in the air all around them, permeating every fiber of their being. It was the accumulation of all of it. The weight of their endless devotion to the people they loved, the pain of enduring so much for so long, and it was the bitter taste of so much loss and the loss that had yet to come.
You let your fingers trail down the gully between Five’s ab muscles until they touched his waist. “Five, I am so scared.”
He wasn’t anymore.
He looked over at the other car, then back at you, shaking his head. “We have about five minutes, give or take. What should we do with it?”
You said nothing, and tears started to run down your cheeks.
Five kissed you.
His eyes met yours right as you grabbed at his leather belt, pulling his hips against you.
“I need you,” he said, his voice breaking.
The smallest noise escaped his mouth as you snaked your body against his. The warmth of your body flooded his senses, tingling from his toes all the way back to his groin.
The rapid rise and fall of your chest matched his as you kissed him with equal desperation, shaking him to the core.
With a suppressed moan, Five took you by the shoulders, pushing you down on the seat. Coming down to his knees in front of you, making is where some of the others couldn’t see you, he settled his body between your legs. 
He pushed your knees apart even more, then locked his mouth on yours again, his tongue thrusting inside urgently.
Clutching his shirt, you slid closer to him, until your hips met his.
Reaching for his pocket, Five closed his eyes and swallowed.
He pulled out the condom Diego gave him. Realizing what he was about to do, you snatched it and chucked it over his head, then immediately started unlatching his belt, sliding his zipper down to gather him in your palm.
“There is nothing that can ever come between us,” you said, nearly repeating what all the other Five’s had been saying but saying it meaning so much more than that. 
Five’s body involuntarily fell forward as you stroked him.
“I love you,” he breathed. It came out unsteady, a streak of hot liquid slipping from his eye no matter how much he willed it not to.
You fisted the back of his pants, drawing him closer, the deed earning you a low mewl emanating from deep within his throat.
You kissed him and brought your legs up around his waist.
His pants, already undone, slipped down his thighs, catching in a bunch of material above his knees as his cock bobbed between your bodies, fully erect.
Five moved his forehead against yours. He lifted the bottom of your dress up as you swept a finger over his leaking slit, spreading the liquid gathering down his shaft.
He hissed with pleasure.
Unable to stop himself even though he saw Brisket Five peeking over his shoulder for a second, Five took his cock in hand, and getting ready, your hands moved down behind you on the seat to keep you from slipping backwards. You arched your back, letting out a broken whimper the first time Five’s cock slid up against you.
“Holy shit,” Five breathed in on shaky air as he rubbed his tip across your clit a few times, then he positioned his cock lower, his slicked thickness gently pushing and prodding as he worked it over your hole like he’d never allowed himself to do before.
“Fuck,” he cursed, because that was exactly what it felt like as he tried to sink into your warmth but the tightness starting to surround him instantly fought back.
Gripping his length with more determination, his hand trembling, Five pushed harder. Sweat breaking out all over his body, he felt the pressure surrounding the sensitive bulb of his swollen flesh as your body started to let him inside. He felt your body clenching repeatedly around him as it adjusted and even that was almost enough to do him in.
“Tell me if I’m hurting you,” he anxiously breathed.
Biting your lip as you tried to relax, looking up at him staring back through the dark strands of hair dangling over his eyes, you nodded, encouraging him along with one of your hands winding around his neck and your other sliding around his hip, gently but firmly pushing him to take more.
Five’s lower lip quivered as he did, his hand gripping his base moved out of the way as he opened you, moving so cautiously, as he forced your body to take him.
You sucked in a breath as his hips jerked forward just a little, then back again.
“Oh, fuck, that felt- Fuck,” he groaned.
He drove in, kissing you for just a moment before breathlessly breaking away again.
“We stay together until the end,” you frantically said, “You and me. If you go, I go.”
Five knew why you were saying this. He knew your heart was breaking, just like his. They were all trying to hide the truth, but you saw right through him. 
You always did.
There was only a fraction of space between your faces. With your breathy words on his lips, Five whispered back, “You and me, always, love.”
He slipped out and then back in, bottoming out in one swift motion.
You gasped and he pulled back, then completely stilled until you quickly moved your hands down his back, pulling at his waistcoat so he was forced to dig himself inside you again.
“Don’t stop,” you begged.
One more small thrust in and out and again he buried himself full deep, jolting your body as his fingers dug into your ass, locking you to him as much as he could.
Like he needed air to breathe, Five needed to be a part of you in every way he could in the minutes he had left. Audience of horny Fives be damned. Your heart and your soul was his.
He had to bury his face in your neck to stem the flow of his breathy curses over what his body was feeling as it took yours, claiming it completely.
“You feel amazing,” he puffed against your skin. It took him a few seconds to regain himself, but when he did, you brought your hand up to his hair, slowly carding it through your fingers as you drew his lip to yours. Your kiss was soft and soothing. After a moment, his body reactively started moving again, and your kiss deepened, letting him know he should keep going.
Five pulled his hips back, withdrawing halfway before pushing back into your perfect warmth as slowly as he could manage. But as you started to lift your hips to meet his, his pace got faster, and more confident, and again it felt so fucking good that he had to pull back from your lips to breathe. He went for the skin at your neck instead, tasting it, licking you as he nipped and sucked and wildly drove himself into you with his hips rocking and his thighs thrusting forward, the tips of his dress shoes digging into the floor as he wildly plowed you.
Fighting the urge to let himself come, Five growled, “Fuck this world, and fuck all of them, you are mine!”
The cheers of the other Five’s hearing that, all of them unable not to notice the show he was putting on, only made your Five get louder, increasing the madness of it all.
“You are mine!” he said again, getting angrier, but also not, because his diabolically cute grin said something else entirely.
“Five!” you cried out as he fucked into you harder and harder, shaking your brains loose.
Out of his mind, but somehow still in control enough to bite back the pressure building, Five suddenly started to move in slow, deep thrusts that were sweet and intense, and at first, very calculated. That abrupt change got you moaning like he was slowly killing you, your fingers clawing at his ass as he undulated his cock in and out, deliberately dragging his tip back and forth where it made you cry out his name the loudest.
Despite Five’s valiant efforts to control himself and prolong the thing you’d both been denied for so long, he could no longer hold back when your heels dug into his back.
When he dipped forward, laying over you as much as he could while fucking you on edge of the bench, you kissed the hollow of his throat, your hot tongue slick against his skin.
Just like he finally knew what he needed to do, Five knew that no matter what, he would always have this, even if you didn’t remember it. 
A weight lifting that he’d been crushed by for so long, wrapping his arms around your waist, Five lifted you forward with animal-like passion, bucking into you.
Like free falling, the heat of your release caressed his length as he continued to swiftly move in and out. You were lost, eyes closed, your mouth wide against his shoulder, silently crying out as your walls trembled around him, the feeling of ecstasy not letting up because he wasn’t.
Not until his rhythm began to break and Five could no longer hold back the rising tide did he tell you to look at him.
He locked eyes with you, his hips shunting forward in a stutter of broken motion he could no longer control. “You are the best part of me,” he panted as he started spilling deep inside you.
The whisper of his name on your lips served to move his hips once more, then as you cried his name, another spasm came to close his eyes as his body weakened and his face dropped to the side of your neck.
For almost a minute, Five stayed in that spot, waiting for his heart to slow. But all too quickly he had to withdraw.
As you were both righting your clothes, one of the Fives banged on the glass between the cars. “Button it up! Time to go!”
The train was slowing.
Placing your hand on his cheek as you fought back the start of more tears, you gave Five that beautiful smile that would forever touch his soul. 
~~~
Before setting out of the train, Brisket Five put a hand on Drunk Five’s back as he said, “It’s been an honor watching you slowly trying to drown yourself.”
Pulling his eyes from the floor, Drunk Five looked at the other him who was holding the butcher knife and smiled. “It’s been awful eating that shit you call food.”
Swinging his ax to his shoulder, Greeter Five kicked the Five with Dolores on his lap in the ankle. “You watched the whole thing, didn’t you? Just look at your pants,” he said pointing to his crotch and the boner that he was trying to use their beloved mannequin to hide.
“What,” he questioned innocently while turning Dolores towards him, looking for support. “Can’t blame a guy for being curious… If you fuckers wouldn’t have gotten jealous and started beating off like a bunch of pervs over it, Dolores was game to join in the fun. Weren’t you, honey?”
Smirking as he pushed his back off the side of the train, one of the Card playing Fives let out a little laugh. “He’s got a point.”
“I am not going to miss you fuckers,” Old Five said, smirking at he rolled his eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Big Damnit here guys...
Okay so readers, I am so sorry, but Tumblr cut me off here and won't let me post more, and all we have left is Z!!!! It's so frustrating because it almost all fit on here. The end is worth it I promise, so please read it, it's not that long. I am not doing a separate post on here to end it because those get lost in the ether. So, please forgive me and head over to A03 to this link (Chapter 26, Z-Zion) to go directly to the final part of this story.
Long live the Umbrella Academy and its awesome fans. ❤️
Share your thoughts if you like but just know one way or another, thank you for reading this. It means so much to me.
Link to my MasterList
Link to all my Tumblr story and art Posts
Link to visit me on A03
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whetstonefires · 2 years ago
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i mean, i would contest some of this analysis, because there's also the fact that the films do in fact handle Tony's problem as being heart-exclusive. it should affect his lung capacity, logically, but textually it doesn't.
and he declared at the end of IM3 that he Fixed It For Good, in a little narrated science montage that framed not having gotten around to fixing his disability before this as a matter of lacking the correct form of motivation, self-respect, and clarity of purpose--as, in fact, a result of character flaws he was now triumphing over.
tony's cure was presented as a moral victory in the battle of man-against-self. he's rewarded for his strength of will and brilliance by being freed from his disability.
so the parts of the fandom that engage with the idea that tony stark has a disability that extends in scope beyond 'dependent for heart function on giant epic pacemaker that also powers his supersuit' and in time past 'Iron Man III' are the parts of the fandom that are motivated to actively read interesting human frailties into the character, even against the text. very normal fandom activity! no shade!
this is also true to a considerable extent of the people willing to engage with steve rogers as someone experienced with human frailty. it was an explicit, thematically centered part of the text in the first Captain America film, but marvel hasn't actively acknowledged it since, so you have to care about his character to read it as still relevant.
i definitely noticed back when i was still reading MCU fic that tony-centric stories quite routinely characterized steve without any acknowledgement that he hadn't always been exactly what he looks like in Avengers (2012), to a sometimes comical degree, because that was the text the fic writers were engaging with and they had no motive to engage with cap any deeper.
the thing is that i, personally, find people interested in expanding further on tony stark's human frailties tend to be really insufferable about it.
because the iron man films traffic in a moral logic where suffering somehow pays off harmful behavior. like if Tony gets tazed by SHIELD Agents this means he's been 'punished' for his 'childish' lashing-out and destructive reactions to his impending mortality, which then closes the book on those actions and relegates them to the past, paid down like bills and therefore irrelevant, in some elaborate system of balances where at the end if you get a positive sum due to stacking up enough moral tax write-offs you have Won at Good Guy.
since this is the logic of the films, it gets extended into the fandom a lot, and i find it a toxic and distressing moral framework to begin with and absolutely heinous as a way to approach disability.
like honestly i've seen the idea of tony's hypothetical physical disability as well as his actual textual one leveraged to raise his whump score and thereby forcibly render him more sympathetic so many times i am exhausted at the thought of engaging with the idea even in purest good faith, because at this point i expect it to be used for emotional manipulation.
meanwhile the people interested in Steve's history of disability can be absolutely precious about it, and the ones getting in shoving competitions with Iron Man fans can be terribly smug, but quite a lot of the time outside that they're just examining it, and its impact on his character, and its historical context, rather than trying to Win anything.
it's allowed to just exist. so i prefer that by a lot.
What would be interesting is taking the way neither of them ever want to deal with their own damage, and the deep shame they both attach to weakness, and like. Looking at how that relates to disability issues in the larger world, and how many things haven't really changed.
Something something Steve Roger's was disabled and became able-bodied, Tony Stark was able-bodied and became disabled, the processes that led to those changes were intimately connected to their becoming heroes and just as connected to their respective treatments by fandom
There's a point in here but I'm too congested to stay awake and write it out
#tony is definitely a white man come on#like even if you can find something in his family tree that isn't#he lives in the world as a white billionaire with an anglo name#i'm not engaging with this in the post but COME ON#but yeah the part where tony declares he fixed himself physically as a result of getting his head straightened out#in an ending montage#and the fandom just did not want to engage with that because it was one of the places Marvel was so deeply out of joint#with their viewership#except actually they may not have been#because the man on the street who doesn't write fandom meta#may have actually been tired of disabled-but-we're-not-doing-anything-inspirational-with-it Iron Man#idk#thinking about the idea of interrogating disability in society over the past 90 years#and how much it hasn't changed#and actually there's something you could do with how Steve is much more comfortable addressing things that are further away from himself#that it would be more natural for him to advocate for disability rights while *not* identifying himself with the community in any way#whereas tony is most comfortable in situations that are about him#but isn't actually any more willing to be open or vulnerable than steve#unless he's creating a narrative around a given vulnerability that puts him in control#so in fact if Tony decided to get in on Pulmonary Disabilities he would be all over his own lung damage tying him to the issue#while steve would need to be prodded into involving himself like 'I Had Asthma As A Kid'#he would not want to speak as an authority on the subject because that's both culturally and personally not the type of character he is#so they could go through opposite character journeys that both arrived at being able to sit with their own traumas in more honesty#the way marvel has handled tony is so funny tho#he got Bad PTSD from the nuke incident in Avengers that was tied to exactly just that and nothing else#and it went away after one film#that was objectively one of the least traumatic near death experiences the man has ever had and that's not even how ptsd works#like how do you as a fan make sense of this i can't i am out of this fandom so hard#congratulations to disney on recreating everything that's wrong with comic books lmao
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darsynia · 5 months ago
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New (Nomad Steve/Nurse!Reader)
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MCU MASTERLIST | STEVE ROGERS MASTERLIST | Ro Roll
Summary: As soon as two weeks ago he’d have said that keeping to himself was the easiest part of his life right now… but that was before he met you.
Word Count/Warnings: 2,400 | None
As 1/7 of my Birthday fics for @ronearoundblindly, NEw is a first kiss hurt/comfort fic about writing your own happy endings. It's a hugely busy week for you and there's no pressure to respond right now, they'll all be here when you have time!
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Excerpt:
Lately it feels like exhaustion is your religion. Stay up way too late, stumble home confused and euphoric and try to will yourself to sleep, then wake up and perform miracles to get yourself back to the hospital for your shift. You’ve always been a night owl, but your shift supervisor practically considers you the ward’s brand ambassador, and to keep the peace, you agreed to stay on the day shift. You’d gotten the schedule down to a science, right up until a tall, gorgeous complication started to jog at the track after hours.
The name he’d given feels fake, but nothing else about him does, and you know all about needing to distance yourself from the horrible things you’ve seen at work. You suspect he was a soldier until he got out, and after that probably a firefighter, but you’ve never asked. Mostly, you just try to keep up with him. The sum total of the words you’ve spoken to each other probably wouldn’t make for a single meet-cute in a romance novel, but they feel consequential enough to you.
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NEW
It takes Steve a painful amount of time to adjust to hiding.
It isn’t just that he’s recognizable, it’s that he’s always stood out, always. As a small baby he’d been gasped over by strangers, as a sickly child he’d see concern and aversion in their eyes, and once he’d grown into a scrawny adult, those reactions had just intensified. 
Some accused him of making himself sick to avoid the war, as though he could have secretly known it was coming and starved himself into stunted growth just in case. For some, it didn’t matter what he looked like-- any man who wasn’t at war was fair game for ridicule. Even those who didn’t care either way found his presence unnerving simply because men his age were scarce. He reminded them of the people they missed, the people who didn’t have the ‘protection’ of being physically unable to join up. 
If his life was a narrative, he’d be the best protagonist he could be.
Even so, there was a special kind of hell in wanting so desperately to fight for justice and be told how lucky you were to be disallowed. Back then, it had been important to him not to hide. There were certainly others in the same boat as he was, men who needed groceries, to watch the news in the theater, to have a walk in the fresh air. So he went out anyway. He was the example, the target, the archetype.
Once he had the serum, hiding meant all the hard work by Doctor Erskine and Howard Stark would be for nothing, so he didn’t. Even in tights.
The symbolism was even stronger when he came out of the ice. Now, people look to him as a lodestar meant to bring them all back to decency and safety, and he wants to, but with action, not iconography, no matter how potent. 
That hadn’t been enough, and now they’re here.
“You’ve been tying your shoes for five minutes, man. You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Sam.” Steve finishes up quickly and straightens. “Daydreaming, I guess.”
Sam leans over and looks out through the thin rectangle of night sky visible through the thick curtains. “At this point I think you can just call it dreaming. Stay safe out there.”
Steve watches Sam head off into the kitchen before he slips out of the apartment door and locks it behind him. He and Sam keep nocturnal schedules, but Natasha’s expert-level camouflage skills have netted her a day job that keeps them all afloat. Their plan of moving from community to community taking seasonal jobs has worked well so far. 
This is the most ‘domestic’ of their locations to date; they’re spending the lead-up to Christmas in a small city in the midwest full of people who know how to keep their heads down and get things done. No one’s expecting a trio of superheroes to settle in a satellite town whose main attraction is a vintage bowling alley, but there are other calculations to consider. People make eye contact here. They bring their real selves to the conversation, and Steve’s been struggling with some real guilt about that. 
As soon as two weeks ago he’d have said that keeping to himself was the easiest part of his life right now… but that was before he’d met you.
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Lately it feels like exhaustion is your religion. Stay up way too late, stumble home confused and euphoric and try to will yourself to sleep, then wake up and perform miracles to get yourself back to the hospital for your shift. You’ve always been a night owl, but your shift supervisor practically considers you the ward’s brand ambassador, and to keep the peace, you agreed to stay on the day shift. You’d gotten the schedule down to a science, right up until a tall, gorgeous complication started to jog at the track after hours.
The name he’d given feels fake, but nothing else about him does, and you know all about needing to distance yourself from the horrible things you’ve seen at work. You suspect he was a soldier until he got out, and after that probably a firefighter, but you’ve never asked. Mostly, you just try to keep up with him. The sum total of the words you’ve spoken to each other probably wouldn’t make for a single meet-cute in a romance novel, but they feel consequential enough to you.
As it has for the past week, your heart starts racing when you get close to the track. The problem is, you were run ragged today, and you feel just like the mermaid from the original fairy tale. Every single step is like knives stabbing the balls of your feet, and your arches are singing ‘fuck you’ so loudly you expect Ursula to show up any minute.
You stop on the bench right inside the gate to let the burning pain subside a bit. The last thing you want is for your burly new crush to think you’re a lightweight, not now that the months of forcing yourself to run after work have paid off so nicely with… well, him.  
Besides Frank, the school’s night security officer and all-around nicest tough-guy in town, there isn’t anyone else visible on the brightly-lit track. You take the opportunity to cross your ankle over your knee and reach for your shoe in preparation to swap it with the sneakers in your bag. These are a new pair, and you’d planned on wearing them every few days to break them in. As soon as you get your heel off you understand just how much you screwed up by not bringing  the others in to swap into once you realized how go-go-go your day would be. The swelling is bad, and the beginnings of blisters sting in various places. There’s no way in hell you can jog today, and walking home is going to be excruciating. It’s a god-damned miracle you have the day off tomorrow.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” you mutter under your breath. The John F. Kennedy High School campus is the same distance from the bus stop as your apartment is, but in the opposite direction. Your feet had already been screaming, why hadn’t you gone home instead?”
“Thought you weren’t coming!”
Your crush’s voice cuts through the late November chill, warming your heart. You look up and see him crossing from under the bleachers, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie. He’s far enough away that you let yourself sigh, half in addlepated pleasure in seeing him, half in utter frustration at yourself. He’s the reason you came, of course. You’d walk across fire to spend time with this guy, and by the time you head home, that’s definitely what it’ll feel like.
“Sorry, long day,” you tell him once he’s close enough. 
Hurrying, you yank off your second shoe and nearly swallow your tongue from the pain. Tears stand in your eyes, exacerbated by the surprise when you look up and your new friend is right there, almost like he'd teleported over. He’s crouched in front of you, and there’s nowhere to hide from his concerned scrutiny.
He confirms your assessment of ex-military by the professional once-over he’s doing, even more so when he takes your shoe out of your weary hand and tests the bend of its sole with a practiced hand.
“Don’t say it--”
“These are not very good shoes,” he pronounces. With a move as graceful as a ballet dancer, he shifts onto the bench beside you, still examining the shoe. You snag it from his hand and tuck it into your backpack with its mate, pulling out your tennis shoes before zipping back up.
There’s no chance you’ll be able to put them on, but, one thing at a time.
“You’re right. I didn’t expect to be the runner on the ward today, but we were shorthanded.” You wince at your feet, both of which are looking decidedly puffy. Shit, will either pair of shoes fit, at this point? “There’s a ‘best foot forward’ joke I could be making about hoping you’d be here running tonight, but honestly, I’m too wiped out to make it.” You look over as you finish speaking and catch his pleased reaction. It’s understated, but it’s there, enough to make you brave. “I have the day off tomorrow, maybe I can give you a twelve hour rain check? I bet you’re even more handsome in sunlight.”
To your dismay, his face falls and he looks down. You turn your head away, unwilling to see the evidence of just how badly you’d gauged this. He’s very clearly not interested.
“Or not! ‘Not’ is also okay, sorry about that, I--”
The words dissolve on your tongue at the gentle touch of his knuckle on your chin, turning your face back toward his in the time-honored tradition of romantic male leads.
“Please don’t-- Running with you has been-- Believe me, during the day-- I would like to, I just can’t.” Disappointment is etched across his handsome features, but more than that, you can see the way his mind is racing just like yours had just seconds ago. The man looks like he’s desperate to rewind to a moment that doesn’t feel like this.
There’s a remedy to that, and after a day of doing your best to fix everything and everyone around you, it feels like the most natural thing in the world to surge up and touch your lips to his. 
You meant to pull back right away, mirroring that thing where a couple knows each other so well that gentle brush is all that’s needed-- but your midnight warrior is still in the middle of the book. His large hand shifts to cup your cheek, holding you still for his head tip where he deepens the kiss and scrambles your brain. It’s impulsive, desperate, and honest. You grab at his clothing, needing to believe this is real, even as the two of you follow kisses with more kisses like you’re saying goodbye in an airport.
“Doesn’t look much like you’re runnin’!” the security guard calls out, his words so distant they almost don’t register at first.
That ends things abruptly, but the two of you don’t move much farther apart than a few inches, his hand still on your face, yours with a handful of his sweatshirt, right over his heart.
“Textbook,” you whisper, flattening your hand out to smooth over his chest. It’s solid muscle under there.
“Oh?” he asks, pulling his hand away swiftly like he’d forgotten how to be a gentleman in his eagerness to touch you. It’s charming as hell.
“This whole operation, it’s right out of the romance novel guidebook,” you praise. “I ought to look for cameras.” A shadow crosses his face, and you suddenly put the pieces together. “Shit, you’re hiding from something, aren’t you? That’s why you freaked out about coming here in the daytime.”
He’s already standing, but instead of stalking away from you, he’s looking around the track, turning in a circle of deep concentration. He’s looking for cameras, but not in a joking way, not as part of a bit.
“The school district would rather spend the money on Frank than cameras, if that’s what you’re looking for,” you murmur, pushing your voice into steadiness out of sheer determination. “The city contributes. It’s been so much safer when everyone who wants a night walk comes here, but there are fewer of us out in the winter months.” The fall chill is actually helping with the pain in your feet, so that's something.
Your mysterious crush is facing you again, apparently satisfied that the two of you aren't being watched by anything more permanent than good old Frank. “I’m sorry,” he says. The words have a horrid finality to them, but you’re focused on his eyebrows. They’re not on board with the rest of his body language. They’re beseeching, rather than resolute, hopeful rather than harsh.
You have one chance to get this right.
“There are some things I love about my coworkers, and let’s be real, a lot of things I don’t-- but do you want to know the thing I like least about working in a hospital?”
Your whole body is practically vibrating with adrenaline, and you realize this is your opportunity to shove on your shoes. As you do that, you refuse to look up at him. The goal is to bring his critical thinking skills back from ‘fight or flight’ mode. Then maybe you can get the two of you on the same page again.
It takes over a minute, but he lets out a long breath and sits down beside you. “Tell me."
“They’re terrible gossips,” you say, looking right at him. He’s not allowed to make the obvious (ruinous, new-relationship-wrecking) conclusion about what you’re saying, not without having to look you in the eye while he does it. “I can’t stand that shit. That’s why they send me on the errands. I’ve got everyone trained to stop talking when I walk by, at this point.”
His relief is visible. “I can respect that.”
“Good.” You set both feet on the ground and decide to test things out by standing. If you’re wobbly, you feel certain he’ll reach out and catch you. “Tomorrow night?”
“Wait,” he says, the picture of confusion. “You’re not-- You think I’m hiding from something and you’re not going to ask about it?” Even in the dim glow of the nearby track light, you can see the clench and release of his jaw.
“For all I know, you’re hiding from your last girlfriend. I know I’d find it hard to give you up, and I’ve known you for what? Two weeks?” Your feet are screaming at you about as loudly as the critical voice in your head, but happiness has made both just distant enough to achieve your goals. 
He shoves his hands into his pockets, which you take to be a good sign. “Would that still be ‘textbook?’ This is all new to me.”
All of the cheeky, sarcastic, and cheesy thoughts that cross your mind would ruin the moment, so you go off script. It’s not the best, but it’s not awful, either.
“New is terrible for work shoes, but it’s lovely when it’s you. See you tomorrow night!”
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Stay tuned for more stories in the Ro Roll! Would you like more of these two? Let me know 💚
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baby-tini · 3 months ago
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Yoo tini chann was wondering what is manila mikey opinion on reader wearing a tiny skirt? Btw ilyy smm and ur writings ugh ty for everything \(//∇//)\
ilyt baby!!!
Manila!Mikey loves seeing you in tiny skirts, especially when they're so small that it barley covers your ass while you're standing up, muchless when he has you bent at the waist. He loves how effortless it is too fuck you, it gives him the easiest access to your cunt and he loves that. Now, it does depend on the reason why you're wearing that tiny skirt in the first place, cause you'll get a couple different reactions... they'll have the same end goal though; you getting fucked with your ass in the air. If you're wearing it because he told you too, well then, he expected it, but he's not complaining about it not being a surprise for him, he actually gets cocky, knowing that he was the one that picked it out for you and that compliments you so well. It just further pushes the narrative that he knows you better then you know yourself, that he knows best. If you managed too buy it on your own and keep it a secret, which would be a pretty hard accompaniment, taking into account just how much he hovers over you. The look of surprise that graces over the features on his pretty face is so satisfactory, nothing comes close too just how big your ego would get when you see the surprise flash in those coal eyes of his. If you put on the skirt with the intention of teasing him.. you're gonna have an equally good and bad time. As in, he'll figure out your game pretty quickly with the way you're hips are swaying in his face as you bend over in front of him because you "dropped" something. He also knows that you're doing it on purpose because you don't usually wear the tiniest black lace thongs you own. Small and thin enough that the piece of, barley, clothing doesn't even cover the lips of your cunt. If you wanted him too fuck you, all you had too do was ask pretty thing.
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lightvixxen · 7 months ago
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A shy boy with a dom side
SOOO i have no excuse. this may be a little series, we'll see how this does.
Warnings: SMUT its nothing extreme so I don't feel there's any warnings. AFAB reader tho, + dom!spencer!! MDNI
wc:1k-ish
summary: a Friday night taking a turn.
It was a Friday night, and you and Spencer had a few glasses of wine. And Now sat on your couch. You don’t remember how the conversation got to this point. 
“Whats…” You stop to think, swirling the glass in your hands before speaking again. “your biggest kink?” Spencer looks at you, then looks off to the side, obviously thinking about the question. 
“I’m not sure…bondage most likely,” Spencer tells you, shrugging before taking a sip of his wine. “But choking and, uh, slapping is up there too.” His face was red, and whether it was from the conversation or wine you couldn’t tell. 
“Huh, I was expecting you to say something a little more Vanilla honestly,” you say, setting your wine glass down on the coffee table in front of you. “Isn’t the bondage a little cliche though? I mean guy with handcuffs likes using them, the biggest stereotype in the book.” 
“Oh, I um.” He clears his throat, “I wasn’t talking about…handcuffs, I was talking about actual rope.” That made you raise your eyebrows. 
“So….are you the one being tied up or are you doing the tying.” You ask, your curiosity was officially peaked, you honestly had thought Spencer was going to say something like praise being his biggest kink. 
“Well considering I am a dominant, I do the tying up. I much prefer it anyway. It gives me a level of control they no longer have.” He said it so softly you almost missed it. “Anyway, back to you, what's your biggest…fantasy?” He asks, obviously trying to turn the attention away from himself. 
“Fantasy? Not kink?” You ask, a little stunned. 
“That's what I said.” 
“Well, it starts just like this…Though the person varies…” You start, trying to form this specific fantasy into words. Spencer nods along, watching how your face slowly turns red, and how you avoid eye contact. 
“And well they get up, maybe circle me for a second while we talk, of course, I’m oblivious to it. They slowly make their way behind me, and wrap their hand around my throat…and hands slowly wander…” 
You didn’t even notice he had gotten up. Before you feel the couch dip behind you and his breath on your neck. Spencer's hand slowly wraps around your throat, giving you enough time to stop him. 
“Like this?” his voice was low, it caused the hair on your neck to stand. You were almost frozen. 
“Do I have your permission to… continue?” You nod slowly, not trusting your voice at the moment. “Words sweetheart.” He demands, “I need verbal consent.” 
“Yes, you can continue.” You almost gasped when the hand not around your throat connected with your breast. His fingers expertly play with your hardening nipples through your tank top. 
“Good girl. Now, what else happens in this little fantasy of yours? Hm?” he asks, the grip he has on your throat expertly tightens, this isn’t the first time he’s done this. 
“T-they play with my breasts for a little…while also kissing down my shoulders and- oh my god.” A small moan leaves you, everything you describe Spencer does. His mouth is warm against your neck, unexpectedly he sucks a mark into your neck. 
“Keep going.” He tells you. 
“And then after a while their hands move down…” Again, he complies, his hand on your breasts moving downwards, messing with the elastic of your shorts. “They usually rub…me through my panties but-” before you could get another word out, Spencer's hand delved into your shorts.
“No panties? Surprising…knew a man was coming over and yet you go commando? Planning to flash me, my dear?” 
“N-no I just didn’t feel like it today.” your breath was shaky already. 
“Alright…Sorry sweetheart but since you can’t stick to your narrative we’re doing this my way. Okay?” he asks, his hand on your throat grabbing your chin, forcing you to look at him.  
You nod, luckily this time he didn’t need you to verbalize what you needed. Spencer's hands made direct contact with your clit. His fingers slowly traced circles against it. You gasp, your hips automatically bucking against his hand. 
“You this wet already? I’ve barely done anything…” you could hear the smirk in his voice, one of his fingers slowly tracing around your wet hole, before it sinks into you. A sinful squelch sound can be heard. 
Spencer sets a fast pace, he quickly finds that spongey spot inside you, and with terrifying precision targets it. He quickly brings you to the edge, your moans grow louder as each second passes. 
“Fuck-I’m close Spence-” you moan, grabbing his arm, you have no intention of stopping him, but it just feels too good. 
“You got it, cum for me, sweet girl.” He tells you, keeping the pace of his fingers. 
“Choke me again please!” you beg, Spencer chuckles but complies, his other hand tightening against your throat once again. With one squeeze you were coming undone. 
“Shit, shit I’m cumming.” you moan, your walls clenching around his fingers. Your legs clamp shut around his hand, he smiles behind you. His fingers continue to work against you until you wince in overstimulation. 
Your legs relax, spreading to let him retrieve his hand from the apex of your thighs. Spencer brings his hand up to his mouth, licking off his fingers. 
“For a germaphobe, you’re quite gross” You pant, head lolling back to look at the man behind you. He chuckles, walking into your kitchen to retrieve a damp cloth. 
“And for a profiler, you're not very observant.” He shoots back, walking towards your front, he kneels, gently removing your shorts to clean your thighs. 
“Well-” you’re retort was cut short when Spencer licked a stripe up your cunt, swirling his tongue around your already sensitive clit. 
“Careful how you talk to me. I have no restraints about fucking you over this couch.” He tells you, blowing against your clit before finally cleaning up your thighs. 
“Why not just do it now?” you ask, curious as to why he’s decided to stop here. 
“I don’t have any condoms, But I won’t hesitate to take you here and now if you even think a bratty retort.” He tells you simply. 
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babyaiker · 4 months ago
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It’s 3:30am but I have another rant idea. As a writer myself, when I go into fiction I tend to ask why a lot. Like, what importance does this scene have, why did this event happen and how did it affect the characters. Writing isn’t real life, and every event HAS purpose, and that to me is fun to analyze ^^
So anyway
Overthinking the purpose of the different character deaths in Red Dead Redemption 2
I know I’ve talked about spoilers a fair bit without warning, but I’m not holding any punches, so
SPOILER WARNING!!
Get ready for a long rant folks, and apologies for any spelling errors I missed,
First and foremost, rdr2 is a prequel. But more importantly, rdr2 is a prequel that depicts the explicit fall of the Van Der Linde Gang. Every death serves to cement that fact, as the game strategically will take out certain characters to both break down the gang’s stability, and the players emotions.
The first thing the game does to permanently shift the tone is to kill the comic relief characters. Both Sean and Kieran, while both complex in their own rights, serve specific, almost “gimmicky” roles in the gang (funny Irishman and whipping boy). These more comical purposes unfortunately don’t fit the game’s tone in the later chapters. And while I could go on about how interesting it would have been to see these two characters dramatically change over the course of the later chapters, their deaths are what the writers used to establish the beginning of the end.
The next duo the writing team had to take out of course had to be the smart, leveled headed characters, back to back no less. While Sean and Kieran’s deaths served to change the tone for the player, Hosea and Lenny’s deaths are what changed the tone for the gang. There’s a reason the fandom jokes that if Hosea had lived, he wouldn’t have let what happened happen. Both of these characters in their own right served as important emotional pillars for the gang, especially Dutch and Arthur. They were both rational and incredibly resourceful, two traits that made them a liability to the destined fate of the gang.
Hosea’s death also now introduces us to the section where a lot of characters die because they narratively HAVE TO. Like I said, rdr2 is a prequel, and you don’t want any loose ends popping up in rdr1 cause a character was introduced and not properly wrapped up. Lenny Kieran and Sean, while had their own purposes behind their deaths, didn’t have to die BECAUSE the story was a prequel. It’s easy to rationalize that if they had lived, their lives wouldn’t have affected the plot of rdr1. Hosea however, due to his personal connection to Dutch, HAD to die. He would have absolutely been brought up in rdr1 had he survived, as he was that important to Dutch and the gang.
That goes the same for Molly and Grimshaw. Both of these characters in my opinion would have been loose ends in the first game had they survived. Their deaths did serve other purposes though,
Molly for one served as both the gang and the audience’s sign that things were never going to be ok again. She’s the first death to happen within camp by the hands of another camp member, foreshadowing at its finest.
As for Grimshaw, standing as the last gang member in camp to stand by Arthur and John, had her fate sealed the moment she lifted her gun. By now the tone and the stakes were set, everything was falling apart, and nothing can save it. Grimshaw’s death doesn’t serve to set a tone or change anything for the characters, she’s just a victim of the gang’s fall, getting shot like a dog as reward for her years of loyalty.
And of course, we now get to Arthur,
For those who played the first game, it’s safe to imagine that when going into the next game, there’s a lingering feeling that Arthur isn’t going to make it out of this. The pinnacle of rdr2 tying its loose ends if you will.
And yet you bond with Arthur. You experience the world with him, meet new people with him, you bond with the gang and your family with him. You bathe him, you feed him, you make sure he’s rested, you make him do chores, you do little errands for others with him. You watch him grow scared and doubtful, you watch his eyes grow red, his skin go pale, his cough worsen. And because of the nature of a prequel, you know this can only end one way.
Sure, maybe the writers could write him out quietly, make it so that John would have no reason to ever mention his brother. But untouched grief works well too to keep a man quiet about his loved ones.
Despite everything, despite most players knowing Arthur doesn’t get to stick around, to live a long life, to get out of this ok, we still fall in love with him, and become completely undone at the end of the game.
And Micah’s death in the epilogue, of course, just feels good. It ties up a loose end for the first game, and it gives the player all the freedom in the world to pump his ass full of lead. It’s your reward for 40 hours of cowgirl simulator hell.
And also shout out to Strauss for not ratting despite getting kicked out and tortured, secret og right there,,
—————
Alright it’s now 5am as I finished writing this, but I have 3 more deaths I wanna quickly comment on. Davey, Jenny, and Mac, right?
Due to how sparely these three are mention outside of how they mildly affected other characters, I view their deaths as essentially worldbuilding. Characters WILL die in unfortunate and unfair ways, especially if it involves the Pinkertons. Characters don’t always get to go out with a bang, you are not immune to succumbing to the elements in this game, nor are you immune to the consequences of your actions.
—————
But of course, you can write a story however you want. I can see myself being easily convinced that any of these deaths weren’t required, as it’s all really just up to how well you can write it. I wholeheartedly think that the story could’ve been benefited by the presence of Sean and or Kieran for one. Whether it be watching Sean breakdown over the stress of the gang falling apart, or watching Kieran finally become a trusted member of the gang and break out of his shell more. And hell, I think there’s something interesting in the idea that Hosea survives, but is unable to help quell Dutch’s paranoia anymore.
There’s room to argue that each death wasn’t required, but in the end, they did die, and there were good reasons behind it. Yes, even as a fan who regularly forgets Kieran died due to the amount of “he lived” AU’s bouncing around in their head, his death was cool as fuck, and both thematically and narratively made sense. It’s beautifully tragic and deeply depressing, and the religious themes only make it that more interesting. Saw him pop up in a Twitter thread of “most graphic video game deaths” and felt genuine pride-
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sampegger · 10 months ago
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certain deangirls just frustrate me so bad. like. the ones who insist with their entire chest that dean loves sam more than sam loves him. even just talking early seasons. to see sam leaving for stanford as a betrayal to dean and proof that he loves him less is so. him leaving for college wasn't about dean. it was about wanting something better for himself than what hunting had to offer. him being able to want something more for himself than what he had with dean and john is not a betrayal. to claim that sams ability to endure misery is directly correlated with how much he loves someone is cruel and a terrible perspective to have on any relationship.
and in season 4, to claim that he chose a demon over his own brother while in the midst of having an active addiction problem, and to take that and make it about his loyalty to DEAN is so. that is so biased and evil. you should not see sams violation of his own autonomy as a betrayal to dean. i know the show likes to think they do in the later seasons but the choices sam makes do not all have to center around dean, and that still doesn't mean he loves him any less! viewing it through that type of lens will certainly make it look like he does, but that is objectively the wrong way to interpret any of sams arcs.
when it comes to season 8 i'll say a lot of the same stuff i said about sam leaving for stanford in the first place. while yes i do think him not looking for dean was slightly out of character, it is still unbelievably cruel to think of sams ability to endure pain and claim it marks the level of which he loves someone. especially when he takes on the trials this season, and the entire narrative thrown on sam is his newfound notion that pain purges sin. to have that level of misery thrown in your face (these trials are purifying me) and still insist that if sam is actively fighting against something that is making him miserable (staying in hunting) it's proof he never loved dean that much anyways is awful!!! and that whole "non-agreement" line in which bobby says that he and dean promising not to look for each other was just something that was said and it should've been obvious he was meant to look for dean. don't even get me started.
season 9 is the last season that i think people use as evidence for this. sams claim that he "wouldn't do the same thing for dean." and really. i guess i don't expect dean letting gadreel possess sam to be seen in any other light at this point. sam said he wouldn't have done the same thing for dean because he literally wouldn't have!!! there is nothing that can properly convey the absolute level of violation that that was, especially when sams entire storyline is about his struggle for autonomy. it was a selfish decision on deans end, as is most of the way that he loves sam. it is just so frustrating to see this arcs that revolve specifically around sam turned into evidence of how much he does or doesn't love dean, because that is literally the opposite of what they're about.
i could move onto later seasons as well and talk about how dean is outwardly abusive in them, but that would just be dean slander and that's not what i'm trying to do. the entire point of this post is that tying all of sams decisions to how much he loves dean is wrong and you fundamentally miss the entire point of sam as a character if you view the story through that lens.
sam's ability to endure misery is not directly correlated with his ability to love.
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bokutosbiceps · 1 year ago
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activities
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gojo satoru x f!reader | fluff + smut | 2.9k words
summary: you may or may not have forgotten about reservations that satoru made for your first anniversary…but you find something better at home anyways.
warnings: cursing (both in dialogue + narrative), ass groping, fingering, cunnilingus, oral sex (male receiving + female receiving), multiple orgasms, vaginal/penetrative sex
a/n: it took everything in my power to not make gojo’s nickname jojo. we’ll call him satoru…for now 😉 also i think this is the dirtiest thing i’ve ever written. i’m going to confession tmrw.
18+ MDNI
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The sun felt so nice on your legs that you had pushed your cozy blanket aside and changed into shorts before laying back out on the couch, resting your laptop on your tummy and scrolling absently through various social media sites and articles that piqued your interest.
Satoru had gone to Jujutsu High to “tie up some loose ends” so he could come back to your place early to spend the rest of the evening with you, since it was your very first anniversary. One year with the idiot, and you had never been happier.
A gentle vibration on your butt brought you out of your social media daze and you arched your back to fish your phone out of your pocket. You answered the call, you already knew who it was.
“Hey, schnookums.” Satoru lilted, drawing out the disgusting pet name for emphasis. You frowned.
“I thought we agreed you would stop calling me that, Gojo-san.” You drew out his last name to bother him. He whined.
“Baby, I told you not to call me that! You sound like one of my students.” Satoru’s cheery tone returned. “Fine, I’ll stop calling you schnookums. How about…sweetie? Sweetheart? My love? My everything?” 
“What happened to babe? Baby?”
“We’ve been a couple for a year and you know what they say about relationships after the first year…it’s all downhill from here.”
“Do they even say—?”
“Anyways, I thought new nicknames would spice things up a bit!” You could practically hear Satoru smiling over the phone. You figured he was heading back to your place since you could hear the throaty roar of his car as he no doubt was speeding down the roads in Tokyo, after “tying up his loose ends”. You knew this meant he had had another meeting with Yaga, to discuss his behavior. He was just as much a troublemaker as any of his students, probably even moreso.
“I will continue to call you babes. You can call me whatever you like…as long as it’s not—”
“Late for dinner!” Satoru laughed, you heard him snap in the background and just knew he had thrown up finger guns at the road. You dragged your hand down your face, smiling nonetheless.
“I was gonna say as long as you don’t call me schnookums.” You sat up a little bit, adjusting your laptop on your tummy and continuing to scroll absentmindedly. “Also, keep your hands on the wheel. Could you imagine if you died in a car accident because you were doing finger guns at nothing?” You giggled a little bit.
“Wah, you know me too well, sweetheart!” Satoru chuckled. “Anyways, I'll be by you in about ten. Be ready, okay? I love you.” You mumbled a reciprocation and ended the call, pushing your phone back into your pocket and diving back into the virtual world.
Barely five minutes later, you jolted as the front door opened and Satoru bolted into your apartment, making a beeline for the bathroom down the hall. He placed a quick kiss on your forehead before continuing his race to the bathroom.
“I just have to use the bathroom real quick then we can—” Satoru stopped, hand on the bathroom door knob, staring at you. “What are you doing?”
“I was just waiting for you to get back?” You closed your laptop and sat up straight, relishing in the sight of him. He was wearing a white button up with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, black dress pants, and his dark shades. This was his usual outfit when he wasn’t wearing Jujutsu High’s uniform or casual streetwear, but he still looked delectable. 
“I told you to be ready.” He chuckled and shook his head, entering the bathroom. You waited for him to come out and watched him as he approached the couch and peered down at you over his shades. “What am I gonna do with you, babycakes?”
“Can you please fill me in on what’s going on?” You stared up at him, wide eyed and bottom lip jutting out just a touch. Satoru couldn't even pretend like he was mad at you.
“It's our one year anniversary.” He started slowly, you nodded, pressing him to continue. “I told you about those reservations I made at that Sugar Factory place downtown. Y’know, the place where they, like, blow sugar to make it look like glass but it's totally edible! They bring out these huge parfaits with sparklers in ‘em and all the waiters sing and dance—”
You reached up and grabbed Satoru’s hand, squeezing it tightly to signal to him that you got the memo. He pauses and looks down at you sheepishly.
“I’m sorry, honey, I totally forgot. I thought we’d be spending the night in. We just went to that super fancy sushi place last week. I thought that was to celebrate this!”
“Nah, that was just cuz I love you. I wanted to take you out, show you off…y’know.” Satoru smiled at you gently. “Anyways, you're not dressed and the reservation’s in, like,” Satoru checked his watch, “ten minutes.”
He looked semi-disappointed, which absolutely wrung your heart out. You wanted to hug him. You tugged on his hand to bring him closer but he flopped down on top of you, causing you to huff out a breath of air. He giggled. 
“It's okay, sweetheart. We can go for our two year anniversary!” He sat up on his knees and placed his hands on either side of your head. “You got any ideas as to what you wanna do tonight instead?” His shades started to slide down his nose so you plucked them off his face and set them on the coffee table. 
“We could order in? I'll pay. We'll get that really gross yakisoba from that little hole in the wall joint you love so much.” You placed your hands on his cheeks and brought his face closer to yours and placed a kiss to the tip of his nose. “As for activities, I’m down for whatever you wanna do.”
Satoru smiled mischievously, his bright blue eyes sparkling as he gazed down at you. He thought for a moment before smiling again. “You.”
“What?” A hot blush spreads across your nose, cheeks, and down your neck as Satoru leaned down, pressing his nose to your cheek. He pressed a kiss to it before moving to the other cheek and doing the same.
“You asked if I had any activities I wanted to do, and I said you.” He mumbled against your skin before moving to your lips and sucking on your bottom lip. He slid his tongue past your parted lips and sealed his lips to yours, running his hands down your waist, hips, and thighs to come back up and squeeze your ass.
Your hands immediately found their way to his hair and started to tug and your legs moved on their own to wrap around his waist as you returned the kiss, much to Satoru’s delight.
Satoru broke the kiss, leaning only a few centimeters away from your face. You could feel his breath fanning against your face as the two of you caught your breath and stared at each other. Without much warning, Satoru hoisted you up by your ass and slung you over his shoulder. As he marched to the bedroom, he dug his fingers underneath the crotch of your shorts and panties to slide his fingers in between your pussy lips.
“Satoru!” You squeaked, fully not expecting the sudden contact against your cunt. He smirked in satisfaction at how much of your arousal he had been able to gather on his fingers in just one swipe, inspecting the slickness that you had left on his fingers before cleaning it off with his tongue.
“So much sweeter than anything we could’ve had tonight, don’t you think?” Satoru lilted as he laid you down on the bed, pressing your back into the mattress as he kneeled above you. “Oh, how rude of me, you didn’t get a taste.” With that, Satoru expertly slid your shorts and panties off your body in one smooth motion before returning his fingers to your pussy, dipping them in and out until he had gathered a good amount of your arousal.
“Open wide, sweetheart.” He cooed, smearing your slickness against your lips. You opened your mouth obediently and sucked on his fingers, earning a moan of satisfaction from Satoru. He watched you hungrily, palming himself through his slacks as he pushed his fingers further down your throat, trying to make you choke. Another moan of pleasure escaped his throat as he watched tears spring into your eyes and felt your throat close around his fingers. He pulled his fingers out of your mouth and got to work on undoing his belt.
“I wanna choke on your cock, Satoru.” You begged, trying to help him take off his clothes. He grabbed your hands with one of his hands and placed sweet and gentle kisses to your wrists before placing them in your lap.
“Patience, love. Why don’t you work on taking that top off, hmm?” You obeyed him immediately, gripping the hem of your sweatshirt and bringing it up and over your head. Satoru felt his cock grow even harder as he watched your tits bounce out from underneath the confines of your sweater. He quickly disposed of his pants and underwear, only able to get to the third button on his shirt by the time you had gripped the base of his cock and taken his shaft into your mouth.
His hands flew to the back of your head and pushed you down his shaft further until your nose was pressed against his pelvis. His hips jerked slightly as he felt your throat close around his cock and saw your body tremble slightly as you choked. He sighed, it couldn’t get much better than this. But, yes, it could.
He gently pulled you off of his cock and shivered at the sight of your lips forming a small ‘o’ around his tip right before you parted from him. You watched him expectantly, waiting as he undid the last of the buttons on his shirt and flung it somewhere in the bedroom. He laid down on the bed and beckoned for you to come over to him. You crawled over his body and sat on his abdomen, smearing your wet pussy against his skin.
“Turn around, honey, lemme take care of you while you blow me.” Satoru made a twirling motion with his finger, his eyes filled with amusement and a smirk playing on his lips. You obeyed him for the third time that night and lifted your ass in his face to give him a full view of your pussy while you licked up the underside of his shaft. You circled his tip with your tongue and faltered a bit when you felt Satoru stuff three of his fingers into your cunt, spreading them out against your walls. You moaned against his dick and opened your mouth to take all of him in once more, willing yourself not to gag when he bucked his hips against your throat. You began to move backward to get his fingers deeper inside of you, using your hand to pump up and down his cock as your head lolled down.
Satoru’s fingers pulled out suddenly and you were about to whine in protest when you felt his hands grab your thighs and pull your pussy to his mouth, immediately latching on to your clit and sucking on it. It took all of your willpower to continue jerking him off, but your mouth hung open in pleasure, letting Satoru hear your mewls and moans of pleasure. He slid his fingers back into your pussy as he continued to eat you out.
“That’s it, baby love, you’re taking my fingers so well.” He mumbled against your clit, the vibrations sending a shockwave up your spine and to your brain, effectively pushing you over the edge. Your back arched and you pressed your forehead against Satoru’s pelvis as you came, unable to even focus on jerking him off.
Satoru grabbed you by the hips once more, unraveling you so that you were leaning against his chest and sitting on his lip. He pressed kisses to your neck and shoulder as he reached up with one hand to He sneaked two fingers back to your clit and rubbed until your thighs were shaking once more and you were begging Satoru for him to fuck you.
“Come on now, honey, help me help you.” Satoru chuckled at your exhaustion, body still limp and somewhat trembling from the two quick orgasms he had just ripped out of you. He helped you turn around so that you were facing him and straddling his hips, cunt positioned perfectly above the tip of his dick. 
You gingerly lowered yourself onto his cock, eyes rolling into the back of your head once his cock was sheathed completely inside of you. Satoru hissed at the way your walls were already clenching and fluttering around him, taking a few gentle thrusts to loosen you up a bit.
Before long, Satoru’s fingers were digging into your hips as he slammed you down on his cock to meet each of his thrusts deep inside of you. He fucked deep into you and with such vigor that you thought he might split you in half, but you held on for dear life until you thought you wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. You started to clench around him, crying out with every thrust that Satoru drove into you.
“‘Toru, I’m gonna—” You whined the rest of your sentence, too fucked out to form the words that he needed to hear you say.
“C’mon, sweetheart, I need to hear you say it.” Satoru watched as you threw your head back and arched your back while allowing your pussy to milk the cum out of his dick.
“I’m cumming…” You managed to hiss out as your third orgasm tore through your body before slumping against Satoru’s chest. He fucked you through his own orgasm, pressing hard enough on your hips to leave bruises, and moaning your name right in your ear while he filled you up.
Satoru rested his cheek against the crown of your head and ran his fingers over the crevice of your back as you both caught your breath. He held you gently as he moved to the side to pull his dick out of you, unable to keep his lewd smile from playing on his lips as he watched his cum spill from your pussy when he pulled out. 
“What are you smiling at, hmm?” You asked, exhaustion laced in every crack of your voice.
“Oh, nothing.” Once Satoru made sure that you were tucked into bed all cozy like, he got up and retrieved a washcloth to clean you up before focusing on cleaning himself up.
He let you rest for almost an hour, no sly quips or awful horrible jokes—just his arm around you and your head pressed into his chest while he cradled you.
“You hungry?” He asked quietly, rubbing your shoulder. You stirred and rolled over onto your back, peering at him out of the corner of your eye.
“Couldn’t just let us have a nice moment, huh?” You teased, mustering enough strength to sit up on your elbows.
“Hey, now, you were practically sleeping on me for almost an hour! Do you want me to starve?” Satoru leaned over and pecked your lips, an easy smirk playing on his lips. You leaned onto one of your elbows while you used your other hand to caress his face. He closed his eyes and leaned into your touch, causing your heart to melt. 
“Order the food, babes. You know my credit card information.” As soon as the words left your mouth, Satoru was up and out of bed, digging inside of the pockets of his forgotten pants to find his phone. He jumped back into bed beside you with his phone in hand.
“Best anniversary ever! I love you, y/n.” He pecked your lips once more and added a second, lingering and gentle kiss before unlocking his phone, already thinking of the yummy, slimy yakisoba he was going to order.
Satoru shot straight up in bed, staring at his phone with wide eyes. You leaned over and rested your head on his chest to see what got him so riled up after such a sweet moment. Then you saw the email from the Sugar Factory.
A $50 no-show fee has been charged to the card on file. Have a great night!
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homuraakemis · 9 months ago
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I keep seeing anti-Maiko people complain that Mai never had a redemption arc to learn about why the Fire Nation was bad, and that's why she shouldn't be with Zuko. And I think that fundamentally misunderstands what a secondary character is. Mai is not a main character. She is a secondary character. She is there to provide support to the narrative, she is there to fulfill her plot purposes and that's it. That doesn't mean she has no character development, but her character development is mostly related to her function in the narrative. In Mai's case, her main functions in the narrative are being Zuko's love interest, and being a key piece in Azula's downfall. Her character development is related to that: we have a girl who is closed off and suppresses her emotions who gradually starts to open up a little through her relationship with Zuko. We also have her feeling like she's always trapped by fear and by others expectations (by her parents and by Azula), and because of her relationship with Zuko, she is able to finally stand up to Azula. That's her character arc. That's what's relevant to her function in the story. Learning about how the Fire Nation is bad is not relevant to her main plot purposes in the story. There's no reason why it can't happen offscreen after the war, with Zuko teaching her about all the things he saw and learned about the Fire Nation during his travels. She is not a main character, the show doesn't need to focus on every single thing about her character. In case people forget, we don't get a "redemption arc" for Ty Lee either, because this is not important, neither Mai or Ty Lee are meant to be the focus of the narrative, we don't need to see them "learning that the Fire Nation is bad".
Another thing that people don't understand is that not every character has to be a copy of Zuko. People act like the only acceptable way for Mai to learn about the wrongs of the Fire Nation is by having a redemption arc like Zuko, but that's not really the case. It's not even feasible: Mai didn't go through the same experiences as Zuko, she wasn't forced to live as a commoner amongst the Earth Kingdom peasants, she wasn't forced to flee as a refugee, so she never really had the opportunity to speak to these people and see their plight the same way Zuko had. Of course Zuko is the one who gets the redemption arc, because he is the main character for which this arc actually matters to the story, but also because the circumstances of his story allow him to have this arc, while the circumstances of Mai's story don't. But that in no way means she is irredeemable or that she can't learn, it just means she will learn about the Fire Nation in a different way than Zuko did, probably through Zuko himself telling her about his experiences and the things he saw. And there's nothing wrong with that! Mai is not a main character, she doesn't need to have some epic redemption journey. She was a Fire Nation noble, just like Zuko, she was taught the same kind of propaganda that Zuko was, so of course she's going to believe in it and believe that Zuko is betraying his country when he tells her he joined the Avatar. But Mai is also not some cruel person, and she's also not a Fire Nation fanatic. If after the show Zuko told her about all the things he saw, she would listen. And in fact, the evidence we have is that she did listen to Zuko and she did learn about the Fire Nation: in the comics she works with Zuko against the New Ozai Society even after they break up. And if you don't want to use the comics as evidence, we have the epilogue of the show as evidence, in which Mai is shown to be on good terms with Team Avatar and playing Pai Sho with Suki. We don't need to see the details of how Mai learned about the Fire Nation being bad (she is not a main character, it's not relevant to the main story), we know that she did learn, we can fill in the blanks with our imagination.
Secondary characters not receiving a huge narrative focus and character development about every single aspect of their characters is not "bad writing". Bad writing would be if the show focused on every detail of every secondary character, because that would be losing narrative focus. Just because certain people don't like Mai with Zuko and use this as an excuse to say why the ship is bad, it doesn't mean that Mai not having a redemption arc is "bad writing".
Finally, this isn't a reason for her not to be with Zuko. Some people argue that Zuko would never want to be with Mai after his redemption because of her still believing that the Fire Nation was in the right, but people forget that if there's one person who knows what is like to have been brainwashed since childhood with propaganda about the Fire Nation, that person is Zuko. And Zuko was way more enthusiastic about the Fire Nation being right and the Fire Nation winning the war than Mai ever was. Why would he hold it against her that she believed in Fire Nation propaganda, when he himself knows what is like to believe in said propaganda? The most likely thing to happen is that he would want to teach her about everything he learned about the Fire Nation, he wouldn't break up with her just because she didn't magically unlearn an entire life of indoctrination.
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umalvie · 8 months ago
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what iroh should have been, and how it would've impacted zuko and azula's arcs
in terms of canon atla, aside from my criticisms of the orientalism woven into the show's fabric, its pattern of telling not showing, the tumor-like presence of filler episodes that don't do enough as character studies or dynamic studies (mostly in book 3; in book 1 i'm more forgiving of these since atla was still finding its groove), and my issues with zuko's redemption arc not challenging his political beliefs in a meaningful way, the thing that i would consider its biggest failure writing-wise is the fact that iroh is not intentionally portrayed as a morally gray character.
the thing about iroh is that he is a longtime war criminal. they try to soft retcon some of that in book 3 by making his nickname "the dragon of the west" about him pretending to have hunted the dragons into extinction and by making him a part of the white lotus, but this to me is not only grievously boring but also a waste of his character.
i understand why the idea of iroh as little more than zuko's loving, wise, and kooky uncle makes people happy. it means zuko gets to have a father figure who loves him unconditionally and makes him feel safe. that's a lovely concept! but not a very interesting one in terms of the narrative, nor is it one congruent with iroh's initial characterization.
think of the absolute contempt and terror he struck into those earthbenders who tried to arrest him in book 1. think of the fact that he besieged ba sing se for 600 days straight well into his adulthood (his age is unclear, but i'd presume he's somewhere in his mid to late 50s throughout atla, so he would at youngest in his 40s when he lead the siege of ba sing se). think of the fact that iroh only changed his mind about his very active part in the war as a grown man once his son was killed. think of the fact that iroh spent 3 years with zuko in exile without ever once actively making a real effort to help zuko unlearn the fire nation propaganda he was indoctrinated with from birth or to truly help him understand that ozai abused him. think of the fact that the white lotus didn't really do much of anything throughout the war to end it.
what picture do these facts paint? is it really that of a reformed war criminal? no, not really.
iroh loves zuko unconditionally. he is patient and kind and loving with zuko. i don't think there's much, if any, room to argue with that. i am not denying that to zuko, iroh is a loving, wise, and kooky uncle.
however, i am saying that iroh is multifaceted. he is zuko's loving, wise, and kooky uncle, and he is also a war criminal who, despite the show telling us has reformed his ways, is not shown to have done so in any meaningful way. he does not do much to help zuko to unlearn imperialist propaganda, does not do much to discourage zuko from trying to capture the avatar, and does not do much at all to end the war.
this makes for an incredibly interesting and dynamic character! this is a character who believes that his personal kindness absolves him of his heinous political misdeeds. that is why he does not do anything meaningful to challenge imperialism where he sees it. that is why he is also a kind, loving man. he's hugely flawed, but he also has virtues that make you want him to overcome his flaws! there is so much room for him to develop whether it's negatively or positively, and there is so much that can be done with the relationships he has, especially his relationship with zuko! furthermore, this is the summation of what the canon material overall most strongly presents us with.
but it's not how the narrative wants us to view iroh, so it's not how the narrative treats him.
instead, we are told that iroh is a reformed war criminal (and later even the notion that he was in the wrong for his military service to the fire nation is soft retconned) who is now nothing but a loving and supportive uncle to zuko. he's unfailingly kind to both zuko and the gaang, ty lee lets slip that she actually rather likes him despite azula's contempt of him to show us that ty lee is an antivillain who will be redeemed (despite her political beliefs never being actually challenged in a meaningful way), and really the only people iroh is unkind to or who dislike him are azula and ozai to highlight to the audience that they are villains.
this makes for an incredibly static character who essentially only exists to love zuko and act as his moral tether despite the fact that iroh never actually challenges zuko's political beliefs. iroh does not need to grow or develop within the narrative atla tells us exists. he has already done his self-reflection and repented for his behavior. he is a figure of moral authority. while this makes him feel safe and good to viewers who accept what atla tells them without question, in addition to not aligning with what's actually shown, it also makes him insanely bland from a narrative perspective.
but what if atla intentionally portrayed him as morally gray? what if they leaned into his shortcomings?
here's the thing about if iroh is intentionally portrayed as morally gray: zuko's redemption arc improves drastically, and azula's is given a much better opportunity to begin.
hear me out. if iroh is morally gray, then he is not solely there to show zuko what real, unconditional love looks like so that zuko can replace his abusive father with a loving father figure, giving him the strength to do the right thing and join the gaang. i'm not saying iroh no longer serves this function in the narrative; i'm saying that now that iroh does this, and his failure to meaningfully repent for his war crimes and to challenge imperialism creates conflict with zuko. you see, if iroh is morally gray, then his failure to challenge zuko's political beliefs (i.e. imperialism is good) is something that zuko is forced to reckon with throughout his redemption arc.
this would mean that zuko is finally actually challenged in his political beliefs as opposed to simply accepting that people are afraid of him because he is a destructive firebender/the prince and thus representative of the harm they have endured throughout the war. furthermore, it means that zuko has to go against a father figure who has treated him well, so his redemption is no longer a matter rooted in kindness but in moral conviction. zuko doesn't have to lose his love for iroh to do this; in fact, that would be a very boring way to portray this. it is far more interesting if zuko has the internal conflict of both loving his uncle and condemning him politically as he struggles to do the right thing in spite of that love.
the idea of zuko managing to grow beyond iroh and do the right thing even though it is hard, even though it means not only going against ozai's malice but also iroh's complicty, is one that would round zuko's arc out better.
it's also one that would open up the gates for an azula redemption arc a lot more than what canon does (although canon azula is still redeemable).
if zuko outgrows iroh enough to challenge his inaction, then he has outgrown iroh enough to start to really see his flaws.
one of zuko's main flaws in canon is that he has a very black and white way of thinking. this is a hugely defining flaw for him. it's why he struggled to accept that ozai abused him, why he struggled to see that his pursuit of the avatar and thus the war as a whole was wrong, why he got physically ill when he was confronted with the fact that he was harming people, etc.
but if zuko starts to see that iroh's inaction as a flaw despite the fact that iroh loves him so sincerely and is so kind to most everyone, then he can start to break this black and white thinking. like ozai, iroh is no longer on a pedestal in zuko's mind. this would lead to the unearthing of more of iroh's flaws.
in conjunction with the fact that zuko has now seen proof of azula's pain (her psychotic break in the last agni kai), this means that zuko can start to place blame where it's due with people over her pain.
i am under no delusions about the state of zuko's relationship with azula in canon. i've expanded on my thoughts about the love between them here if you'd like to see them, but i can sum it up as so: while azula cares about zuko in her own deeply screwed up way, zuko doesn't really care about azula because he is shortsighted and struggles to empathize with her or even see a need to.
however, seeing proof that azula has been harmed too means that zuko would finally see a reason she is worthy of his empathy. the first, most obvious, and easiest to identify (for zuko) perpetrator is, of course, ozai. like with the war, ozai is clearly malicious. now that zuko has admitted and accepted that his father was abusive to him, it is much easier for him to admit that their father is responsible for azula's pain too. this much i believe is likely in canon as well.
the next person for zuko to look to, which can only happen if zuko has opened his eyes, is iroh. like with the war post 600 day siege, iroh was not malicious in his treatment of azula, but he was still complicit. iroh may not have abused azula, but he did neglect her entirely. he did not give her a chance to ever be anything but what ozai told her she should be. he did not show her love and compassion the way he did zuko. furthermore, he not only failed to encourage zuko to ever try doing so, he actively discouraged him from attempting to.
to be clear: i don't think zuko should be a mentor figure to azula during her redemption. like azula, he's just a kid. he's still growing and learning himself. he also doesn't really understand her at all, even if he has realized that she was hurt too. he doesn't understand how she was, and he's going to have to spend a lot of time reconciling the way their father's abuse colored his perception of her with how she actually is. furthermore, their relationship is complicated and full of pain for them both, so relying too heavily on it to help azula recover and redeem herself would end badly if we're being realistic.
but zuko seeing that azula was abused by their father and seeing that their uncle's failure to ever give her a chance to understand real love is crucial to him realizing that the asylum is not somewhere that gives her a real shot at recovery and redemption.
whether or not azula takes that shot when it's given to her is a more complicated story that would involve both zuko and azula having to reflect more wholly and honestly on ursa than i think either of them ever have before as well as some likely very painful conversations challenging the way she, like all other fire nation citizens, was indoctrinated, but do you see how interesting treating iroh as the morally gray character he is could be?
even if you don't want to see a redeemed azula (i personally do, but the possibility of her rejecting the idea of redemption is also quite fascinating and tragic in this context), zuko's arc and the commentary made about redemption and second chances overall are made so much more interesting and nuanced by this simple choice.
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punkeropercyjackson · 9 months ago
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Bryke are definitely misogynists but it has nothing to do with Kataang,it's because of the way Azula got zero sympathy from the narrative while Zuko got all of it despite being younger than him and even more directly manipulated by Ozai,Ty Lee never getting her own story and 'coincidentally' being the only mc who's a bubbly pink girl and potrayed as a shallow boy-obsessed idiot with the bonus of having the biggest chest and Suki being given zero character outside of Sokka's gf who fixes him and is a #girlwarrior and it's worth noting she's the only relevant ainu character too with the redeemed villain being japanese.If we wanna talk about the Atla crew being misogynistic about Zutara,let's talk about how Dante Basco has fueled the ship war flames multiple times and made at least a few nsfw jokes about Katara and Zuko and even a concubine one of Mai.Take a seat so we can chat,i'll share my soda with you
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nickel156 · 2 months ago
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FIERY PLOT-HOLES:
I'm back to annoy the Elriel masses. I made a promise after all. 😘
Alright, Elriels, let’s dive deep into this retcon madness—because Lucien’s fire powers and the whole Helion reveal? Yeah, it’s kind of a mess, and it all ties back to Elucien being endgame.
Originally, Lucien’s fire powers made sense. He’s Beron’s son, the Autumn Court is all about fire, and Lucien’s temper and abilities fit perfectly into that narrative. But then, SJM throws us a curveball—Lucien isn’t actually Beron’s son. Surprise! He’s Helion’s son, and now his fire powers are conveniently retconned to come from his mother’s side to explain how Helion, whose magic is all about light, fathered a kid with fire abilities. And honestly? That’s a huge plot hole.
Here’s the issue: in this world, elemental powers like fire, water, or light come from specific courts—not just random inheritance through bloodlines. Fae powers tend to align with their court, and we’ve seen nothing to suggest that Lucien’s mother could pass down fire magic. So, where did this retcon even come from? It feels like SJM needed to adjust Lucien’s powers to fit the new Helion narrative, but in doing so, she created a hole in the established magic system. It just doesn’t add up— The fire powers being tied to Lucien’s mom is a flimsy explanation at best, and it feels like a convenient excuse to keep his fire abilities while making the Helion reveal work.
But why go through all this effort to retcon Lucien’s entire parentage? Why twist his backstory and create these plot holes? Simple: to make Lucien a better match for Elain. SJM didn’t need to throw in this whole Helion storyline, but she did it to elevate Lucien as a character and make him a more worthy mate for Elain. Think about it—Elain is all about light. She’s this pure, ethereal force after being turned by the Cauldron, and now, Lucien’s true father is the High Lord of the Day Court, whose magic revolves around light and illumination? Coincidence? Not a chance.
This is all about creating that like calls to like dynamic. By retconning Lucien’s parentage, SJM gives him a connection to light magic, which makes him more aligned with Elain. Suddenly, their bond isn’t just about the mating bond—it’s about their powers and essences reflecting each other. Elain embodies light, and now, with Lucien’s new parentage, he’s tied to the Day Court, to light itself. It’s like the narrative is saying, “Look, they’re meant to be on more levels than just the bond.”
And here’s the kicker—SJM didn’t need to retcon Lucien’s backstory. He was already compelling as Beron’s son, with a tragic past and fire abilities that made sense in the context of the Autumn Court. But by making him Helion’s son, by keeping the fire powers but tying them to his mother, SJM is trying to make Lucien seem more powerful, more special—more worthy of Elain. The plot hole is glaring, but the retcon is clear: this is all to set up Lucien as Elain’s true match. The fire powers may be a messy explanation, but the bigger picture is that this entire rewrite is about elevating Lucien to match Elain’s light, both literally and metaphorically.
In the end, this retcon isn’t just about adding layers to Lucien’s character—it’s about aligning him with Elain on a deeper, more meaningful level. The fire powers from his mom’s side might be a plot hole, but it’s all in service of pushing Elucien as endgame. The magic, the parentage, the bond—it’s all setting them up to be the couple the story was always leading toward.
So is it really a plot hole? Maybe.
Is it a retcon? Absolutely!! And it's a fucking messy one and I'm here for it.
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