#ao3 by the same name

[captainkirkk]

Love spotting an author I know and love in the kudos or comments section of a totally separate fic. It's like looking behind you in the movie theatre and seeing a local celebrity munching on popcorn right there with you.

[fitpacs]

if you’re going to miss the qsmp content whilst the server is down, may i suggest indulging in some of the fantastic fics that this fandom has to offer - there are fics of all sizes, genres, ships (romantic and platonic), basically whatever you could want, there’s a fic for it!

fic writers in this fandom are phenomenally talented, and i urge you to show them some appreciation during this time without the server - some of the fics are so realistic it’s like you’re reading canon lore anyway :)

i would suggest ao3 as a starting off point as it’s very easy to filter tags based on what you may/may not want to see.

show appreciation to the authors, they work hard and let’s get each other through this break and the server works behind the scenes to iron out the issues🌟

[umbrellajam]

y'know what let's do it. have Jack Drake accused of murdering Janet for a different flavor of drama and whump

he was in a coma and then wheelchair-bound for weeks/months after the incident you say? he was FAKING, it was all arranged, a ploy to appear helpless and sympathetic, how else could he have woken up and recovered so smoothly from the same poison that killed his wife

new evidence is produced of a suspicious payment trail from before the hijacking, leading from Jack's DI funds to accounts that appear connected to the Haitian cult/cartel responsible for the Drakes' kidnapping and Janet's tragic demise

the widow of the Drakes' personal secretary, Jeremy Whatzizlastname, and other employees all come forward and wag their tongues about the alarming frequency and escalation of the fights between the deceased and her aggressive, belligerent husband in the lead-up to that final fateful trip - how they were openly arguing about divorce

mysteriously, this relentless mud-slinging media blitz only begins after Drake Industries starts to go downhill and CEO Phil Marin comes under investigation for embezzlement/insider trading...

since it's post-NML the scandal blows up even further. the press hounds young Tim Drake, the iconic NML Kid known to all as the face of re-opening Gotham after the quake. muckrakers gleefully tear apart the recent image of a desperate, loving father who was broadcast on national television putting all his resources and influence toward bringing his lost son home

...actually. doesn't Drake Industries going broke happen right in the middle of Bruce Wayne: Murderer? (checks notes) aha, Robin #100 so lmfao yes, it does.

GOOD EXCELLENT PERFECT, Tim's father figures can both be accused of murder simultaneously 😈 and then the Bats have to divide their efforts and resources between exonerating Robin's dad and attempting to clear the civilian name of an infuriatingly uncooperative Batman…

[sheliesshattered]

TWW fanfic: The Don't List

Josh/Donna, 9800 words, Rated T. Post s07e19: Transition. One airplane flight and one long conversation that was a long time coming, as Josh and Donna figure out what it is they want from each other.

So many thank yous and my deepest appreciation to @jessbakescakes and @jezunya for beta-reading this for me, your suggestions were the finishing touches this story needed for me to really be happy with it. And a big thank you to @bartletslesbians for cheering me on, and to my sweetheart Jack for reading this entire thing even though he's never seen a single episode of The West Wing.

Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

The Don't List

Be still and listen to me. I don’t know what this is. And you don’t either, which is perfectly fine and understandable. Whatever the build up, it’s all happened amid absurdly heightened emotional circumstances — the election, Leo’s death — there’s been no moment to so much as take a breath, much less figure any of this out. And now this roller coaster’s plunging into the transition, with its time pressure demands, and then the Inauguration, and it’s hit-the-ground-running, and the first hundred days, and before you know it, the midterms and the new Congress, and then we’re running again, and four years becomes eight, and we’ve never had The Talk. And you can lose that look of panic in your eyes, we’re not going to have it now, we don’t ever have to have it. But there’s a window. I’d say four weeks. If we can’t get it together in that time to figure out what we want from each other, then clearly it’s not worth the trouble.

—The West Wing, season 7 episode 19: Transition

Josh waits until the captain has turned off the fasten seat belt sign before launching into his well-crafted opening line. He’s not nervous, exactly, but this seems like a cruising altitude, no-seat-belts-necessary kind of conversation. It’s an excruciating wait, but finally the garbled announcement from the cockpit ends, the little seat belt icon overhead goes ding! and Josh turns to look at Donna, who is at least pretending to be absorbed in the paperback spy thriller she bought in the airport.

“So I hear there’s a window,” he says, in that sort of conversational volume he’s honed over thousands of hours of plane flights, loud enough for Donna to hear above the ambient noise of the plane but not so loud as to invite everyone around them into the conversation.

She glances up at him out of the corner of her eye, her attention still primarily on the novel in her hands. “The window’s all yours, Josh,” she says easily, gaze sliding back to the book. “I’d rather have the aisle seat, because— you know.”

Because her leg still bothers her sometimes, as much as she tries to keep that fact hidden from everyone else. Which he did actually know, which is why he picked seats on the left side of the plane when he booked the tickets and why he took the window seat when he boarded, so that Donna would be able to stretch her right leg out into the aisle whenever she needed. He knew that, he actively thought about it, and he did the kind and caring thing for her, just because it was the kind and caring thing to do, and for half a moment he wants credit for that.

“No, I know, that’s why I— nevermind,” Josh says, quickly pulling himself away from that line of thinking. This no-seat-belts-necessary conversation isn’t about scoring little points with Donna, and he definitely doesn’t want to think about the injury she’s still recovering from, or that lonely flight to Germany when he’d been nearly out of his mind with worry about her. Wrenching his thoughts away from those particular memories, he shakes his head. “No, I meant the— you know, the time window.”

His delivery is all off, now, not at all how he’d imagined during his quick packing and frantic dash to the airport, when the words he wanted to say to her wouldn’t stop circling his mind. He was going to be smooth and romantic about this, and it’s not off to a great start.

But somehow he seems to have caught Donna’s attention with his clarification, at least, and she turns to look at him more fully, resting the paperback in her lap with one finger trapped between the pages to mark her place. “The time window,” she repeats. It isn’t a question, but she’s looking at him like she expects him to keep talking, so he does.

“Yeah, the four week window. Or, three weeks, five days, and,” he glances at his watch, “I don’t know, nine hours. Or whatever, it’s gonna be hard to keep track with the time zone change.”

“And you want to have that talk now?” she asks with gentle disbelief.

Josh shrugs, the motion somewhat muffled by the airplane seat. “I don’t want it hanging over us all week.”

He watches as she glances away, down at the paperback in her hands, then out at the narrow aisle just beyond her seat. He doesn’t think she’s contemplating ways to escape this conversation — Are you really going to try to convince me that I’m the one who finds this all awkward and hard to navigate? she’d said, and of course she was right, Donna is always right — but one of the benefits of doing this on the plane is that neither of them can walk away. There are no meetings to get to, no phone calls to interrupt them, nothing that needs read other than the mass-market novel in her hands.

“Josh, we don’t have to talk about it now,” she says, sad and soft under the steel determination she tries to clad her words in. “We don’t have to talk about it at all this week. We can just enjoy Hawaii and not worry about any of it. We don’t have to talk about it next week, either, or the week after. We don’t ever have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to, though,” he says sincerely, smiling at her and taking her left hand, the hand that isn’t currently acting as a bookmark, and lacing their fingers together. It might be a no-seat-belts-necessary conversation, but he thinks it might also be a holding-hands kind of conversation. At least, he hopes it is. “That’s not why I was panicking when you brought it up the other day.”

“Really?” Donna asks in a sarcastic deadpan. But her hand is still in his, and Josh decides to take that as a good sign.

“Yes, really,” he says, grinning wider at her.

“I definitely detected panic.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t panicking. Just not about that.”

“What, then?”

There was one particular thought that had stormed in to occupy his mind as soon as he understood what she was getting at with her four week window speech. One thought that wound him up beyond even his usual levels of stress, that kept him awake at night and distracted during the day, despite his best efforts. One thought that was so overwhelming, so life-altering, that he couldn’t hope to tackle it head-on, not even in the privacy of his own mind.

“The size of the question is too big, is the thing,” he says, managing not to stumble over his words this time, and that’s slightly better, closer to how he imagined this going. “And I don’t want to get it wrong.”

“It’s not an SAT question, Josh. There isn’t a magical right answer.”

“I know that. But still, you have to admit, it’s a pretty big question: what we want from each other.”

“It is,” she agrees hesitantly. She starts to move, pauses, then seems to think better of it and follows through with the action of stowing her paperback in the seatback pocket in front of her, no longer bookmarked. Another good sign, he hopes.

“So I figured,” Josh says once Donna settles back in her seat and turns her gaze to him again, “that maybe I’ve got to come at this from the other side. Figure out what I don’t want. Cut the question down to size a bit.” He’s very consciously not calling it a problem. It’s a big question, and the answer carries a lot of consequences regardless of how this shakes out, but it is absolutely not a problem.

“Like what?” Donna asks, seeming genuinely curious.

“Like how this morning, you said you can’t work for me again, if there’s something happening between us. So that’s an easy one: I don’t want to be your boss again, not ever.”

“Then what was the Deputy Press Secretary offer?”

“That was—” He cuts himself off with a laugh, because it was stupid is what it was, and he knew it at the time. “It was the best I could do off the top of my head. It was desperate, if I’m being honest. I just didn’t want you running off to accept a six-figure offer from some thinktank or NGO before I could find the right fit for you in the new administration.”

“I accepted Helen’s offer,” Donna says in a rush, as though it’s a secret she’s been keeping from him for months, rather than a possibility she already told him about not twelve hours earlier. “First Lady’s Chief of Staff.”

“Donna, that’s great!” he says, throwing all of his enthusiasm into it, making sure it shows on his face and in his voice. “We’re gonna be Chiefs of Staff together!”

“And you’re okay with that?” she asks, and it hits him that she’s genuinely worried about it, that she didn’t call him earlier in the day to tell him she’d accepted the job because she was worried he wouldn’t take it well.

“More than okay,” he assures her, squeezing her hand. “You’re going to be great at it.”

“Thanks,” she says, and it’s still more hesitant than he’d like. Donna has seemed so confident lately, ever since Lou shoved them into a room together with a demand to figure things out, really. Confident about the work she does and her place on the campaign, confident about winning the election, confident about this thing between them. He kissed her first, sure, but after that Donna was the one setting the tone and the pace for their relationship. She’s not the one who finds this all awkward and hard to navigate, she told him so herself.

But Josh starts to wonder, with that little word hanging in the air between them, just how confident Donna actually feels about where their relationship is going. And if, just maybe, she’s been projecting confidence and nonchalance as a shield, something to hide her hurt behind in case he somehow manages to get the answer to the big question wrong.

He can’t get it wrong. He won’t.

“You’re going to be great,” he murmurs again, running his thumb over her knuckles. “We’ll have to talk policy goals, once we’re back at work. Get the West Wing and the East Wing working in coordination, right from the start. We can go to the Hill and bully Senators together,” he says with a grin, and watches in relief as Donna smiles back at him, wide and genuine and not nearly as fragile as before.

“That could be fun,” she agrees, and he can hear the smile in her voice, too.

“But,” he sighs theatrically, “that does mean that if the President-Elect ever comes to his senses and fires me, I won’t be able to come crawling to the East Wing for a job. I don’t think you should be my boss, either,” he adds more seriously.

She narrows her eyes at him with a playful edge he feels like he hasn’t seen in years. “Why? You think I wouldn’t be a good boss?”

“I know you’re going to be a great boss. I haven’t been doing such a good job with the boss thing lately, hopefully I can get you and Sam and Lou to smack me upside the head if it gets bad again. But I just mean, in terms of answering the big ��what do we want from each other’ question, I think we should take any combination of boss and employee off the table.”

“And when you sat down to come up with an answer to that big question, the first thing you thought of was our working relationship?” There’s a layer of snark over her question, but Josh suspects it’s just another part of her shield, another way to hide how much is riding on the answer to the big question, how much this means to her.

“Nah, that was just the easy stuff,” he says, waving it away with his free hand. “I don’t want our working relationship to get in the way of the rest of what we want. We’ve always been a great team, professionally, but I don’t want that to be a distraction or an excuse not to—” he makes the mistake of looking over at her, and finds her watching him with wide eyes, dark blue in the dim cabin lighting, “not to, you know,” he stumbles, unable to look away, “...have a life.” He’s not even sure if that was a coherent sentence by the end, but he has to stop talking, has to swallow hard and watch her watching him.

After a moment, she nods. “Alright,” she says seriously, and it feels more like she’s responding to something she read off his face than whatever words he managed to string together there. “I suppose,” she says slowly, the corners of her mouth starting to curl up in a smile she’s desperately fighting against, “for the good of our relationship, I can give up my long-held dream of being your boss.”

“You bossed me around plenty all those years when I was supposedly your boss!” he shoots back in mock indignation, and she grins at him properly, all teeth and laughing eyes. “I can’t imagine that’ll change now.”

“You wouldn’t want it to,” Donna replies, knocking her shoulder into his, and they’ve somehow slipped out of the shielding snark and into a flirtatious banter that he’s missed.

“No,” Josh agrees. “In fact, I can add that to my list of things I don’t want: I don’t want you to ever stop bossing me around.”

“Good,” she says, her smile nearly blinding. “Someone has to keep you in check.”

“I wouldn’t trust the job to anyone else,” he tells her, and raises their joined hands to kiss the back of her palm. Beside him, Donna stills, and he looks up to find her watching him seriously again, her smile fading and a worry he thought he’d banished creeping back into her eyes.

“What else don’t you want, Josh?” she asks, her voice low and even.

“I don’t want this to just be a campaign fling.” The words pour out of him before he can stop to think about it, but they’re the words that had been circling his mind as he packed, as he sat in the back of the cab on the way to the airport, as he paced at the gate waiting for boarding to start. “Or, well— a transition fling, I guess,” he amends a moment later. “I don’t want this to be just a weird thing that happened when we lost our minds between Election Day and Inauguration Day, something we laugh about later, or worse, never talk about. I didn’t lose my mind, Donna,” he tells her sincerely. “Not about this, at least.”

She cracks the faintest of smiles. “The jury’s still out on the rest of your sanity,” she says, clearly teasing, even though her voice doesn’t quite reach the playful tone he associates with her teasing him. “What else?” she asks again. “What else don’t you want, Josh?”

He takes a deep breath and leans his head back against his seat. That was the easy stuff, the low-hanging fruit, the parts of this it didn’t cost him much to admit. But he owes her an answer, and he knows that the only way to the things he really wants is to take the chance on honesty.

“I don’t want this to end,” he says, risking a glance at her. “I don’t want to wake up one day and realize this is over, that I screwed it up.” He pauses for another deep breath and then says the thing that had been ever-present in his mind since she confronted him with the time window: “I don’t ever want to be your ex.”

“That’s an awfully bold statement for someone with commitment issues.”

“I don’t have commitment issues!”

“Your dating history might imply otherwise,” she counters, voice dry.

“I have no interest in dating!” he says flippantly, before realizing how that sounds. “Wait, no, that’s not— that came out wrong. What I mean is, the whole concept of dating just doesn’t— It’s these little appointments, right? You set up a time to meet, and then for the next few hours you’re on your best behavior, trying to prove how charming and witty and romantic you can be. And then the date ends, and you go back to your regular life, and it’s not— That’s not real. It’s some fake version of yourself that you’re trying to sell. And I’m just, I’m done with that. I have no interest in that kind of dating. And besides, we know each other too well for any of that, anyway.”

“So you don’t want this to be a fling, you don’t want to date, and you don’t want to break up?” Donna says, like he just asked her to accomplish three contradictory tasks for the good of the country. Her tone feels wrong for the weight and importance of this conversation, but she’s looking at him with something like trepidation, so the words tumble out of him before he can stop them.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “If that’s— I mean, assuming we’re on the same page here? I swear to god, Donna, if you want this to just be a fling you’re going to have to tell me that right now, using very small words.”

“You think I want this to be a fling?”

“No! I don’t know! I hope not! I just kind of assumed we’d be on the same page!”

“We are, Josh,” she says, squeezing his hand and pulling him out of his spiral before it can really get going.

“Well, good,” he replies, too emphatically, his bluster taking a moment to dissipate. “Because I have a, you know, an actual list, and if we got derailed on ‘not a fling’, I’m not sure where that would leave us.”

“Having a fling in Hawaii, presumably.”

“I’m serious!”

Donna squeezes his hand again, keeping the pressure up until his heart rate begins to slow. “I know, Josh.”

“I just don’t want you to think that I don’t take this seriously.”

“You made an actual list?” she asks, some of that teasing, flirtatious tone working its way back into her voice. “Can I see it?”

“I didn’t write it down,” he scoffs.

“Is it an ‘actual’ list if you didn’t write it down?”

“It’s a mental list! I don’t need to write it down, I’m not going to forget what’s on it.”

“A mental list of things you don’t want.”

“I'm narrowing down the size of the big question!” he shoots back defensively.

“The ‘what we want from each other’ question,” she nods, like she wasn't the one to send him off on this tangent to begin with.

“I couldn’t just say I want everything with you, that’s not a good enough answer.”

He feels her go still beside him, where they’re pressed together valiantly trying to share the narrow armrest, and with a sudden panic he wonders if that was exactly the wrong thing to say.

“No, not everything,” she says softly, unfocused gaze on the seatback rather than on him. “Not boss-employee, not dating, not exes, not a fling.” She takes a deep breath and turns back to him, seeming to pull herself out of whatever contemplation his words threw her into. “What exactly does that leave, Josh?”

The words everything else are on the tip of his tongue, but he bites them back. There are more entries on his mental list, and they exist to give that everything else a more specific shape. That’s the whole point of the list. “I don’t think we should have separate apartments, after we get back to DC,” he says. Donna’s eyebrows furrow, like that was not at all what she expected him to say, so he hastens to add, “I just mean, we’re both going to have demanding jobs, with long hours and late nights. It would be nice to spend the time we do have outside of work together, rather than trying to coordinate when we can drop by the other person’s place for a few short hours.”

“Are you asking me to move in with you?” she asks, eyes wide and brow still furrowed.

Josh winces, realizing he probably should have done just that, but there are other complications to consider. “I think I need to find a new place, actually — CJ said something about the Secret Service taking over her guest bedroom, and I have a planning email from Ron Butterfield that I've been meaning to read. I don’t think my one bedroom, eight hundred square foot apartment is going to cut it, after January twentieth. But maybe we could find a new place together?”

“Oh, you’re really serious about this,” Donna says, more surprised than disbelieving, he thinks.

“Are we back around to ‘not a fling’?” he asks, squinting at her.

She shakes her head and turns towards him, pressing her left shoulder into her seat so she can look at him as straight on as the small space will allow. It’s somewhat hampered by her seat belt, which she deftly releases with her right hand without removing her left hand from his grasp. Josh is reminded that this is a no-seat-belts-necessary conversation, and undoes his in solidarity, if significantly less grace.

“You want to move in together,” she says slowly, like she’s still trying to wrap her head around the concept, “and you don’t ever want us to break up.”

“Yeah.”

“So,” Donna pauses, wets her lips with the tip of her tongue, and for a moment Josh thinks seriously about kissing her — but he wants to hear whatever thought she’s so clearly working up the nerve to say, so he keeps the impulse to himself and waits as patiently as he can. “Theoretically at least, we could buy a house together. Since we’re never going to break up.”

She looks up at him from under her lashes, a posture he associates with difficult questions, with answers she doesn’t want to hear but knows she needs to. Buying a house hadn’t even occurred to him, but shared property ownership fits in easily with everything else he imagines for their future, so the question doesn’t quite bowl him over the way he thinks she expected it to.

“Yeah,” he says with as much nonchalance as he can summon, and watches as her shoulders visibly relax. “Theoretically, sure. I’m not sure the transition is the best time to go house-hunting, but we could talk about it.”

“And you think we’re ready for that?” she asks, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with her free hand. “Living together? We’re not rushing into things?”

“Nah, this feels like the furthest thing from rushing. I wanted to ask you to move in with me years ago, after all those months when you practically lived at my place. But the boss-employee thing kinda got in the way.” He flashes her a smile, the one with the dimples that he knows she likes.

“Josh...” she sighs, dropping her gaze to their joined hands, and with sudden horror he realizes it’s disappointment he hears in her voice.

“What?” he asks, stumbling over the words. “What did I—”

“You didn’t want to ask me to move in back then.” It’s not a question, just a statement of fact. A fact that she’s wrong about, but it’s her certainty that scares him.

“Yes I did,” he says in a rush, anxious to clear up whatever misunderstanding has led her to that incorrect assumption and get back to his list and the last few supremely important items on it.

“Then why didn’t you?” she asks, glancing up at him with her chin tucked low again. She asks it like it’s checkmate, like there is only one possible answer, like she’s caught him in a lie.

“Because I couldn’t,” he tells her honestly, the words falling out of him now that there’s finally nothing to hold them back. “Because I knew I wouldn’t be able to— to function, without you, at the White House. I didn’t last a week there after you left. If I’d told you how I felt, way back then, I would have lost you.”

“How you felt?” Donna prompts when he doesn’t go on, and oh, he can feel the weight in her words, the importance of her question, the dangerous territory he’s barrelling into. But there’s no sense in stopping now, nothing for it but to finally crash through this wall and see what’s on the other side.

“I’ve been in love with you for something like eight years now, Donnatella,” he says, the confession rolling off his tongue like he’s told her a hundred times before, like he hasn’t spent the better part of a decade carefully keeping those exact words in check. “This is just the first time I’ve been able to do anything about it.”

She turns and sits back in her seat so abruptly that the terror is instantly back, the fear that he’s said the wrong thing rushing through his veins and stealing his breath. “Donna,” he starts, clutching her hand so she can’t pull away any further.

“Shut up,” she commands in an undertone, looking straight ahead rather than at him.

“Donna.”

“Shush, I’m recalibrating.”

“Recalibrating?” he repeats. “What does that mean?” He finally tells her he loves her and she’s recalibrating??

She doesn’t answer, so he sits in silence, her hand still clasped in his, and tries valiantly to give her all the time she needs to process whatever is going on in her head. After the most tense thirty seconds he’s ever endured outside the White House or a hospital, he has to clamp his jaw shut to keep from saying something to try to hurry her along.

“You’re freaking out,” she says levelly, eyes fixed on the seatback in front of her.

“Well, yeah—”

“Stop freaking out, I’m just—”

“Donna—”

“Have you ever prepared for the wrong meeting?” she asks in a rush, still avoiding his gaze. “Just, one hundred percent ready for something that, as it turns out, isn’t happening right now?”

“I mean, yeah, but—”

“You were going to take Amy to Tahiti,” she says, finally turning to look at him.

The non sequitur throws him for a moment. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You were going to take Amy to Tahiti, and when you couldn’t go you decorated your apartment like Tahiti just for her. And then you still ended up breaking up with her a few months later.”

The comparison between then and now is ridiculous, and he would’ve expected Donna to know that. “This isn’t anything like whatever I had with Amy!”

“How is it different?” she demands, and it occurs to him maybe she really doesn’t know.

“I wasn’t in love with Amy!” he says, throwing his free hand up in exasperation. How can she not see, how can she not know?

“Then why keep dating her?”

“Plausible deniability,” he bites out. “If anyone had ever found out—”

“Can I get you two any snacks?” an unfamiliar voice breaks into their illusion of privacy. “Anything to drink?”

Donna turns to the flight attendant who has suddenly appeared in the aisle beside her seat and rattles off their usual commercial flight order with easy poise, as if they haven’t just been interrupted in the middle of what might well be the most important conversation of either of their lives. Josh forces himself to take a deep breath, scrubbing his left hand across his face before mechanically putting down his seatback tray and accepting the soda and peanuts Donna hands him, moving on autopilot even though he has no real interest in the food.

“Plausible deniability,” Donna says quietly, once the drink cart has moved on past them, “...about me?” she asks. “Because of our jobs?” At his nod, she adds, “But we never— Nothing unethical ever happened between us.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says, shaking his head. “The optics of it would have made anyone doubt our denials. Even just an allegation, or a particularly persistent rumor, could have exploded into a scandal and reflected badly on the whole administration, not to mention derailed our careers. But if I could say, ‘of course I’m not in love with Donna, I’m dating someone else!’ — even just for a little while — it helped to quiet some of those rumors.”

“And that’s why you— Eight years, Josh??” Her expression is back to that shuttered shock, like she’s questioning her every assumption. Recalibrating, he supposes, and he’s not quite sure how they ended up here, his very important list momentarily abandoned in the light of the fact that he apparently hid his feelings for Donna so well that it was a secret even from her.

“I really thought you knew,” he says, his voice a bit weak as his stomach flips over, imagining how it must have looked from Donna’s perspective.

“I really thought you didn’t know,” she fires back immediately. “You can’t just— You can’t say ‘eight years’ and expect me to leave it at that! When did you know, exactly?”

“Inauguration Day,” he says without having to think about it. “The first one.”

Her eyebrows crease as she considers his answer, probably going over her own memories of that day. “At the balls that night?’

Josh shakes his head without moving his gaze from her face. “No, earlier in the day, when we did that tour of the office and you were so excited about your desk, and that silly print-out with your name on it, taped to the wall of your cubicle.”

Her eyes are still distant, but she smiles like it’s a reflex, like she can’t help but smile when remembering that first day of the Bartlet administration. He smiles along with her, no choice but to smile when Donna smiles.

“And I realized, standing there watching you go on and on about your new desk in the White House, that I’d probably just made the best and worst decision of my entire life, bringing you with me into that job,” he says, running his thumb over her knuckles and thinking about the moment that’s been crystal clear in his memory for nearly eight years now. “Because we would get to do all of that together: get a good man elected President and then work to change the country under his leadership. What felt, at the time, like the most important jobs we’d ever have. And I’d get to see you every day, probably spend more time with you than with anyone else, strategy meetings and late nights and out of town trips and nearly every meal, for at least four years, eight if we were lucky and worked harder than we’d ever worked.

“But it also meant that I couldn’t tell you, couldn’t tell anybody, couldn’t do anything about those feelings until we were out of the White House. All I could do was try to keep a lid on it and focus on the work, and try to distract and misdirect whenever it started to get too obvious.” He meets Donna’s gaze to find her studying his face, that recalibrating look shifting into something more contemplative. “I really thought you knew,” he says again, his voice barely above a murmur. “That you, I don’t know, figured it out somewhere along the way, I guess. That we’d silently agreed to leave it unspoken.”

She shakes her head and looks away. “I always managed to convince myself that I was reading too much into every little thing you did,” she says wryly. “That I was letting my own feelings color my perception of reality. This... puts things into a slightly different perspective. Might even explain why you kept going back to Amy.”

“You dated plenty over the last eight years, too,” he says, but he manages to make it more curious than accusatory.

“Well, yeah, to try to get over you,” Donna says, flashing him a fragile smile. “Exactly the same as I was planning to do when the wheels inevitably came off this— whatever it is we’re doing.”

“Donna,” he says gently, and waits until she looks over at him, unable to stop the smile spreading across his face. “The wheels aren’t going to come off this.”

She traces her gaze over his face searchingly. “You’re sure?” she asks, her voice breaking on the last word.

He nods and kisses the back of her hand again, feeling her let out a shuddering sigh. “Turns out it’s hard to sustain a relationship when you’re in love with someone else,” he tells her against her skin. “Won’t be a problem this time,” he adds, and can’t help but grin up at her. “I’m all in on this. And there’s more left on my list, you know.”

“More?” she asks in disbelief. “Beyond— where are we at now? In love, living together, never breaking up? What else—?”

“No, hang on,” he interrupts her, sitting up a bit straighter in his seat and utterly unable to keep his grin from sliding towards smug. “We are in love, Donnatella? Are you really going to claim to be part of that we without making your own confession, or so much as admit to your feelings out loud?”

She blows out an unsteady huff of air. “You’re not the only one who got far too good at hiding their feelings, Joshua.”

It’s clearly a deflection, obvious that she’s not quite ready to talk about it, so rather than push her on it, he says, “That’s something else I can add to my list of things I don’t want: I don’t ever want to have to hide my feelings for you again. I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime. I’d rather run another Presidential campaign right now, on zero sleep and no access to caffeine, than ever have to do that again.”

Donna laughs and presses her forehead to his shoulder, but her voice sounds watery and quavering beneath the laughter. “I don’t want to hide any more, either.” She leans back only far enough to look him in the eye and says, “I love you, Josh. I’ve been in love with you for—” she cracks a smile, lopsided and genuine, even as her eyes glimmer with a hint of tears, “—something like eight years, now.”

He has to kiss her at that, twisting in his seat to try to find the best angle so he can show her just what it means to finally hear that from her.

“Something like eight years, huh?” he asks when they separate.

“Something like,” she confirms, leaning back into her seat and pressing her shoulder to his. “I couldn’t admit it to myself for a long time, but in hindsight, I know it’s one of the reasons I came back to the campaign that April.”

He turns that bit of information over in his mind, thinks back to how relieved he was when Donna walked back into the Nashua office in 1998, after he all but convinced himself he was never going to see her again — thinks about all the years he sent her flowers in April, how he couldn’t help but mark that anniversary. “When did you admit it to yourself?” he asks softly.

“When you were—” She stops abruptly, not meeting his gaze, her free hand idly toying with the cup of orange juice she’d requested from the flight attendant, balanced on her tray table. “When you were in surgery,” she says evenly, without any particular emotion, “and Toby told me it was critical.”

Toby once vaguely alluded to that conversation in the GW waiting room, and having lived through his own version of it in Germany, Josh can fill in the rest well enough on his own to understand what she means, how that would’ve been the moment when she couldn’t deny it anymore. He squeezes Donna’s hand, like he did when he woke up in a hospital bed, like he did when she woke up in hers. All those years keeping his love for her a secret, she was doing the same. She had been his all along, even when neither of them could acknowledge it.

“And you’re really going to try to tell me,” he says in that same soft tone, fighting to keep the growing sense of victory out of his voice, “that I didn’t want to ask you to move in with me, way back then?”

“Josh,” she scoffs, in a tone that means she absolutely can hear his smugness anyway.

“Only, I couldn’t, ‘cause that would have been inappropriate,” he says, smiling at her. “So I’m asking you now. Move in with me? Or, you know— help me pick out a place where we can live together?”

It should be an easy yes from her, given that they seem to be on the same page, given that she just admitted to being in love with him for almost as long as he’s been in love with her — but instead Donna hesitates, opening her mouth to reply before apparently thinking better of it and clicking her jaw shut again, and Josh abruptly realizes that she isn’t smiling back at him.

“Donna,” he says, leaning forward to try to catch her eye. “I thought we were—”

“No, it’s not—” she starts, holding up her free hand to stop him, then huffs out a breath and tries again. “I want to live together, Josh, I do. It’s just— I’m still not convinced we’re not moving too fast.”

“Moving too fast after eight years?”

“Eight years of not actually talking about any of this!”

“Because we couldn’t!”

“And then this last year of hardly talking at all, until suddenly we’re doing this—”

“Can we not,” he demands, cutting her off, “invoke all those months when I was convinced that you hated me?”

“You want to talk about moving in together, but you don’t want to talk about the misunderstanding that—”

“It was a pretty big misunderstanding!”

“Yes, because I didn’t know you were in love with me!” she snaps, bringing him up short. “Because I was nursing a broken heart and what I thought were unrequited feelings, for nearly a decade, and dating hadn’t helped me get over you! Casual flings hadn’t helped, trying to throw myself into serious relationships hadn’t helped, and trying to do more in my job in the West Wing hadn’t helped. Nothing helped, Josh! I couldn’t get over you. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I left. And that still didn’t help.”

“Donna,” he starts, when she pauses to swat away a tear rolling down her cheek, but before he can say anything else, she shakes her head.

“I never hated you, Josh. Not even when we were barely talking. But then you kissed me, and then you apologized for it, and I— I didn’t know what to think! Except that maybe none of this means as much to you as it does to me.”

“Of course it does! Why would you think—”

“I thought you were going to break up with me!”

“What?” he says, utterly baffled. “When?”

“When you called me on your way back from California, after going to see Sam, and you said we needed to talk. Except I wasn’t sure if I could even really think of it as a break up, since I didn’t know if this actually qualified as a relationship in the first place!”

“And yet you apparently checked my schedule or tracked my flight or whatever, and came over the moment I got home, very intent on not talking!”

“I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted, Josh! And then I woke up alone in your bed, and all I could think to do was give you a graceful way out of this that might not completely ruin our friendship!”

“That’s what the time window thing was about??”

“Yes! And I could tell you were panicking about it, and then this morning you said there was no way you could possibly meet my four week deadline, and somehow now you have it all figured out??”

“I had it all figured out this morning!”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“Because a random hallway at the OEOB didn't seem like the right place to propose!” Josh snaps, the words flying out of him before he can think about what he's saying. “Because I couldn’t even start to get my head around where the right place would be or all the things we needed to talk about first, until Sam all but fired me from my own transition team!”

“You were going to propose?” Donna asks, the disbelief in her voice cutting through his tirade.

“Not this morning, no!”

“And now?”

“No! Wait, no— that is objectively the wrong answer— I just mean, I was thinking something more like— like a walk on the beach at sunset, or a romantic restaurant or, or, I don’t know, standing on the lip of a volcano or something! Not at thirty-eight thousand feet somewhere above the flyover states!”

“I'm from a flyover state, Josh.”

“I’m pretty sure we’re not over Wisconsin right now!”

“And that’s what’s stopping you from proposing??”

“Nothing’s stopping me!”

A familiar noise of frustration escapes her. “Josh! I love you, I really do, but we have to be honest with ourselves about this! We don’t need to set a new world speed record for jumping through every stage of a relationship in a week!”

“I am being honest!”

“Then let's focus on the living together topic and not throw around words like propose when you don’t really mean it!”

“Who says I don’t—!” He stops talking abruptly, too frustrated to continue. This argument is patently ridiculous and he can prove it to her. He frees his hand from hers with the intention of putting up his seatback tray, only to realize that the tray is still holding the bag of peanuts and little plastic cup of soda that Donna got for him. Without pausing, he tosses back all the liquid in the cup without really tasting it, then puts the empty cup and the peanuts on Donna’s tray table and snaps his tray back into place.

“Josh, I didn’t mean—” she starts.

“Apparently I’ve given you a whole lot of reasons to underestimate my commitment here, and I don’t want to do that anymore,” he says, leaning forward to pull his duffle bag out from under the seat in front of him. He unzips it on muscle memory, reaches in and finds the internal zipper pocket, quickly opening it without needing to see it, and pulls out the sole object from inside. It’s small, fitting into the curve of his palm naturally, but even now it doesn’t feel like his, it never really did — it always belonged to Donna, even when she didn’t know it. In one motion he pulls it free of the bag and plunks it down on the corner of her tray table, vaguely registering movement out of the corner of his eye as she quickly snatches up her orange juice to keep it from sloshing over the edge of her cup, while he zips his duffle bag closed again and kicks it back under the seat.

“I don’t have to pretend that I’m ready for a long-term relationship,” he says, leaning back in his seat and looking at Donna, “or whatever nonsense Amy was spouting the other day after the wake. Not with you. I am done pretending when it comes to you. The longest term you’ve got, baby, that’s what I want from you. That’s what I want us to want from each other.”

Donna is sitting stock still, her cup curled protectively toward her chest as she stares, pale and unblinking, at the small black velvet box he placed in the corner of her tray table. “Josh,” she manages after a moment, her voice choked and barely audible.

He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, trying to calm his galloping heartbeat, and it occurs to him that he let go of Donna’s hand in his rush to produce the one thing that might serve as adequate evidence of the depth of his feelings for her. Moving slowly, cautiously, he gently laces their fingers together again, relieved when she grips his hand firmly, even as her gaze remains fixed on the black velvet box.

“Listen,” he says carefully, “I know I’ve been rushing Sam, trying to get him to say yes to the DCoS position, but that’s just because we literally do not have the time for him to dither around on this, especially when it seems so completely impossible that he’d say no, that we could possibly run this administration without him— But anyway, that’s not the point. My point is: this isn’t me rushing you. I’m not trying to set a world speed record, or make your feelings fit into my calendar, or give you any sort of ultimatum, or anything like that. I just— I need you to know that I am serious about this. The absolute maximum amount of serious possible, when it comes to us. And I knew I was exactly this level of serious about it the moment you brought up the time window. I just couldn’t think clearly enough to figure out what to do about it until I was out of the transition office and packing to go on this trip with you.”

He can see Donna’s hand shaking as she tips up her orange juice and drinks it quickly, her gaze immediately returning to the little velvet box. Without taking her eyes off it, she stacks her empty cup inside his and then curls the fingers of her right hand around the edge of the tray table, not quite touching the proof he’s presented to her.

“Is that—?” she asks in a small voice.

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“And it’s for me?”

He smiles, sad and fond, at the incredulity in her voice. “It was always yours, Donna. It was always meant for you. There’s never been anyone else I could have possibly given it to.”

She looks over at him, her gaze tracing across his face even as her expression remains fixed in that look of shocked disbelief. “So this isn’t a fling in Hawaii?”

“No,” he agrees, shaking his head.

“And you’re not going to break up with me?”

“Never,” he assures her, squeezing her hand.

“And you don’t want me to, I don’t know— quit my job? Not work in the White House?”

The idea is ridiculous, and he suspects that deep down Donna knows that. But this moment seems to be about reassuring her, and so he answers with a simple and honest, “Of course not.”

“And you were going to— You brought this with you to propose?” she asks, her gaze sliding back to the little box.

“I didn’t have some grand plan I was going to ambush you with,” he admits ruefully. “But I knew I wanted to have the conversation, so it seemed like a good idea to bring it along.”

“When did you know?”

“Inauguration Day 1999,” Josh replies, and grins at her when she looks up at him again, then adds, unable to stop himself: “And when you took me to the emergency room to get my hand stitched up. And then again on Inauguration Day 2003. When you were going into surgery in Germany and asked to see me, and when you woke up from surgery and said my name. When you kissed me back after that national polling, and then like five separate times on election day. When you told me we had a four week window to figure this out, and all I could think was I never want to be your ex. Earlier today, when Sam told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to get a life. After I called you and asked you to come with me to Hawaii, and part of me was convinced that this was the only thing I actually needed to pack—”

Donna leans over the armrest and kisses him, ending his impromptu list in the best way possible. When they part, he presses his forehead to hers, not yet ready to put any space between them.

“If you think we’re moving too fast,” he murmurs quietly, “or if you’ve, I don’t know, developed a distaste for marriage as an institution or something — we don’t have to do this. But that ring is yours, Donna. It’s been yours for a long time now.”

She leans back only far enough to look him in the eye, that considering, recalibrating expression resolving little by little. “Can I see it?” she asks in a matching tone.

With the fingers of her left hand still laced with his right, it ends up taking both of them to open the hinged lid of the black velvet box, Josh holding the base of the box while Donna lifts the top. He doesn’t need to look down at the ring, he’s seen it more times than he can count, so he watches her face instead, watches a parade of emotions tick past in each little twitch of her eyebrows and curl of her mouth.

“Josh,” she says after a moment, still staring down at the box. “Josh, this is your mother’s ring.”

“Yeah,” he breathes out, weirdly relieved that she recognized it without him having to explain. “She gave it to me, to give to you.”

Donna glances from the ring to him and back. “I... When?”

“That Thanksgiving after she moved to Florida. She sat me down and told me that she wanted me to have her wedding ring, that she wanted me to give it to someone who would make me as happy as my dad had made her. And she said it with such a— a heavy implication that she knew that person was you, that I... kind of ended up telling her everything.”

“Josh, that was five years ago.”

“Yeah.”

“So every time I’ve talked to your mom in the last five years—??”

“...Yeah.” His mother knew how he felt about Donna, but she also understood all the reasons he couldn’t act on it. She’d kept his secret, but that hadn’t stopped her from privately considering Donna to be family, the last five years.

Donna hesitates, then runs the pad of one finger over the platinum setting, the square center diamond flanked by smaller matching stones. “You’ve had this for five years, and you were just... waiting?”

He nods. “And I’ll keep waiting, if that’s what you want,” he says quietly. It’s absolutely not what he wants, but he’ll wait the rest of his life for Donna to be ready, if that’s what it takes.

What he wants from her, what he wants for this relationship, can’t be so simply contained in a word like marriage. It’s not about the labels, or the legal standing, or any sort of societal expectation, and as much as he loves the idea of being married to Donna, he would happily give it up if it meant he got to keep her in his life. He would give up pretty much anything to keep his promise to never be her ex. Whatever it takes, so long as he never has to be separated from her. He doesn’t want another misunderstanding to ever come between them because he kept his feelings from her. He never wants her to doubt how strong his feelings are for her, not ever again.

“No,” Donna says, raising her eyes to his. It takes him a moment to catch up with what she’s saying, but before he can voice his confusion, she clarifies, “I don’t want to keep waiting. I think we’ve made each other wait long enough. I think...” She bites her lip, a smile starting to spread across her face. “I think you should ask me.”

“Yeah?” he breathes, dumbstruck.

She nods, smiling properly. “Definitely.”

And then she gently untangles their hands and turns to face him, raising her eyebrows expectantly.

“...Wait, now?” Josh demands when he finally realizes what she’s implying. “You wouldn’t rather wait until we actually get to Hawaii? Do this someplace, I don’t know, more romantic?”

“This is plenty romantic!”

“Coach seats on a red-eye flight is your definition of romantic?”

“Well not when you put it that way,” she huffs. “But just, look out that window, Josh.” She gestures behind him, and he turns to look, genuinely trying to understand the way she sees the world, the way she sees this moment. “We’ve got a sky full of stars and all those twinkling lights down below. And the old-school romanticism of winging our way silently through the night while the world sleeps, knowing that in the morning, we’ll step off the plane and into somewhere completely new.”

“You know planes aren’t actually silent, right?” he teases, turning away from the — admittedly — beautiful sight out the window and back to the even better one sitting beside him.

Donna waves away his interjection. “And just think about how often we’ve been here before, the two of us. Late night cross-country flights, huddled together working under our little reading lights until I fall asleep on your shoulder? That’s romantic, Josh, all of it. Besides, it could be years before we’re able to get away to Hawaii again, but we know we’ll be right back here, at thirty-eight thousand feet, plenty of times in the future. And every time, I’ll be able to say: this is where you proposed.”

He has to take a moment to just look at her, to memorize the way she looks right now, glowing under the dim cabin lighting, to memorize the way she’s looking at him, without a hint of recalibrating, without any of her confidence-as-a-shield, with nothing but love in her eyes as she gazes back at him, unhurried and unafraid.

“God, I love you,” he says, the words tumbling out of him without conscious thought.

Her smile turns a little mischievous. “I know.”

That isn’t just an acknowledgement of his feelings, Josh realizes with stark clarity. She really knows now, finally. After eight long years of keeping his feelings for her secret, eight long years of Donna convincing herself that he couldn’t possibly love her in return, she finally knows what this means to him. She’s stopped questioning it, stopped doubting him, stopped wondering where this thing between them is headed. She knows. And she loves him back. She doesn’t want to wait anymore, and Josh is gripped with the sudden conviction that this can’t possibly happen soon enough.

Tearing his eyes away from her, he looks down at the little velvet box still clutched in his hand, trying to come up with the right words, with any words, to voice the most important question of his life. But he was never a speech writer, he’s never been any good at that kind of planned eloquence, only the kind that just sort of spontaneously happens sometimes when he opens his mouth and says exactly what he means. The nervousness that ripples through him is incongruous with the current moment, and yet he can’t help the way his heart rate kicks up. He knows she’s going to say yes, and she’s already declared the circumstances to be plenty romantic, all he has to do now is open his mouth and say what he means.

Sure. No pressure.

But first: this was always a holding-hands conversation, so he scoops Donna’s left hand up with his right again, cradling her palm against his rather than lacing their fingers together this time, and takes courage from the way she clings to him. “Donnatella Moss,” he says, looking up and meeting her gaze. “I’ve been in love with you for a really long time now, and I don’t want to keep it a secret anymore. I don’t want you to ever doubt how much I love you, and I don’t ever want to face a future without you in it.” Across the armrest from him, Donna is watching him with rapt attention, her eyes starting to fill with tears — which makes his throat tighten in response, nearly overwhelmed by the realization that this is actually happening, right now. And yet he still hasn’t managed to ask the all-important question, his brain having decided to take a rambling and circuitous route to the point. “I don’t want to wait anymore,” he says before his emotions can get the best of him. “Marry me? Please?”

Donna holds his gaze for a long moment, then takes a breath and blinks her tears away. “Yes, Josh,” she says, nodding enthusiastically. “I would really, very much, like to marry you.”

Josh grins at her, because he can’t not, and kisses her swiftly before maneuvering his mother’s ring out of the box it’s lived in for the past five years and onto Donna’s left ring finger, where it was always meant to be. She turns her hand, watching the way her ring catches the light, and he can feel her breath hitch in her chest.

“I really am going to cry now,” she tells him, turning towards him and away from the sight of the engagement ring on her finger, where he’s dreamed of it being for so long, “so you better kiss me again, quick.”

He does as she asks, laughing with a lightheaded sort of joy even as he brushes her tears away with his thumbs. He hadn’t envisioned this, when he was packing and riding in the cab and waiting at the gate, hadn’t been able to think further than telling Donna that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. But somehow this is exactly right, exactly what he didn’t know he was longing for in all those years when he couldn’t tell her how he felt. It was always going to be like this: the two of them on the move together, bantering and arguing and finally finding a way to be honest with each other. Nearly a decade of knowing her, of quietly loving her, and it was all always leading to this.

Not that this is any sort of ending, he knows. It’s just the next step. It’s what’s next.

And he couldn’t be happier.

--

To be continued in The Calendar's End

[empty-promises-too-much-to-count]

"I love you"

"Why?"

"Because you're... you"

[porcelaintoybox23]

I’ve been burdened with glorious purpose. I want to write a Wrice/Nicewreck fic but have no ideas. Shoot me some. I’ll try to aim for 2k words. I may stab at nsfw. Not via ask, just in the notes of this post.

Update: I have a wip.

Update: done.

[the-wine-bottle]

I read a fanfic of Shen Yuan reincarnating as Sha Hualing's brother and he's wearing clothes similar to hers and now I can't get the image of him wearing that out of my mind 😫. He's so cunty.

(The fic was called Shen Yuan is a demon bro if anyone is wondering

https://archiveofourown.org/works/42423771

[secondus]

Tumbling ain't the same as falling, eh👀 this was inspired by badacts' fic, which is sadly only available for registered users now, but they made me really attached to vixen neil🧡

Originally posted on my instagram on 8/5/2020

[sutherlins]

↳ YOU PUT A MOVE ON MY HEART by @conceived-angel [WIP - 31K | Rated M]

Third year college student, Sydney Adamu, meets Food & Wine's Best New Chef, Carmen Berzatto. It's the kind of chemistry her major can't prepare her for.

sutherlins fic appreciation week (please show the fics love, kudos, and comments on ao3!)

AC/SC MY BELOVED. These two have my whole heart. Sydney choosing a different route and Carmy before Empire... just that difference in their life makes such a big impact on who they are when we meet them in this fic. Angel explores that so well while staying in keeping with the Sydney and Carmy we love from Canon. The entire world is built up so expertly, it feels so real and tangible. I'm so in love with Sydney's friends in this too and I'm just as eager to hear about them with each update as I am SydCarmy (okay maybe not as excited, but it's pretty close!) Michelle, Maya (and Marcus!) are such brilliant additions to this fic! The dynamic of Sydney having folks in her corner and Carmy coming into her world flips the standard we know from the show on it's head and it's yet another interesting change in the dynamic that is being played with in this fic. My harassment of Angel about this fic means I know what's to come and ohhhhhh we are in for a TREAT!!!

Please go read if you haven't already, and show some love over on ao3! (ps. I'm doing 7 this month and intend to make this a monthly thing!)

[save-the-spiral]

Revenant

(Part Two) (Part Three)

Content warning for: Major Character Death, Gore, Violence, Blood, Torture, Human Trafficking (mentioned), alcohol (no described drinking/drunk characters), dehumanization (it/its pronouns & animal comparisons)

(Ao3 Link)

2.5K words. Vampire Whumpee(s), Human Whumper

Beau had always been a good servant. Silent, obedient, efficient. Able to work ahead, as if he knew his master's wishes before they were spoken, but was in fact reading behaviors and routines that even his master did not know he was exhibiting.

He had always known his master was an angry man. One with much responsibility and authority, and no outlet besides violence.

The anger only came out at home, where it was private. No good servant betrayed their master's secrets, after all.

Beau had been trained by his mother in the kitchens of the large estate. The rest of the staff was his family, as he had no other parent or siblings. All throughout his youth, it was impressed upon him the importance of silence, of obedience. Able to act as if one isn't there, to be as unnoticed and inconsequential as a piece of furniture.

He had attended school, but had little in the way of friends. Graduating high school was where he ended his academic career anyway, as his job in the estate's kitchens was more sure than any attempt at getting into a college or university. He wasn't smart enough to get a scholarship anyway.

Beau was good at his work. A natural, the chef would say as she ruffled his hair. Quiet as a church mouse, his mom would praise.

He had once attributed it all to his looks. Black hair and brown eyes, average in every way. On his mother, those features looked pretty, at least to him. On Beau, it was plain to the point of invisibility.

One of the maids he had grown up alongside, Eun-Yeong, insisted it was all skill, though Beau took that with a grain of salt considering her clumsiness.

Whenever Beau denied it, she tried to whack him with whatever rag or feather duster she had on hand and declared that she wished he could be as invisible to her as he was to the master and his guests. Supposedly being humble didn't suit him.

Whatever the case, it was because of Beau's skills as a servant that he had been enlisted as one of the servants that took care of the thing his master kept in the basement.

Ever since he was a child, Beau's mother told him to never pay any heed to the screaming that came from the basement of the estate. To never ask about it, to never peek down there, and to never, ever venture down those stairs without permission.

A good servant did not pry into their master's affairs, after all. It was no business of theirs what happened down there, only to clean up the aftermath and do what they were told.

It hadn't been until the most recent of his master's victims had arrived that Beau was assigned down there. It was only to bring meals to the master- the thing his master vented his anger onto had no need to eat.

There was an air of hope regarding the thing in the basement. Rumors among servants said that it had no need to eat, to sleep, to breathe. That it healed from any wound, even those that would be lethal on a normal person. It would be around for a long time, they said. So none of the estate's staff would face their master's untimely wrath with it around.

And for a while it seemed true. Their master was less irritable. In the kitchens they knew it because he was not as particular about his food or drink, only sending a single dish back every week.

People wondered at what the thing in the basement was. It certainly didn't have any elven blood, the head butler affirmed, as despite its pointed ears. The more worldly of the maids was able to deny any rumors of it being beastkin. Even with its regeneration, it had none of the strength or build of an orc or troll.

The strongest rumor was that it was some sort of ghoul or zombie, not even alive, not truly able to feel. The kind of thing that existed only in horror movies. Some kind of botched soul magic had been attempted, only to resort in what screamed and pretended to be a person down there in the basement.

It could scream, could cry, could bleed like a person. But note the near black color of its blood. Note how it didn't need to breathe or eat. How it hissed like a feral animal at the sight of silver. How its fangs tore at its own lips like a rabid beast.

Never pity those in the basement, Beau's mother had told him long ago. That was when the master's victims had been people, homeless vagrants, those trafficked from foreign countries that used the few words of English they knew to beg.

It wasn't a kind world out there. Beau and his mother were only human. All they could do was work for their shelter and food. They had security here, knowing what was expected of them. Outside of the estate was an unknown element to Beau, who had only attended school and done little else, spending what few days he had off from work resting in the servants' quarters instead of exploring the outside world.

Beau's world was the estate. He had never known life without the occasional desperate screams emanating from the basement once every few months, lasting for a few days or a week at most until it was blissfully silent again.

This time it lasted longer, a week turning into months. The master had invested in remodeling part of the basement, making it soundproof, so he could have guests over despite having a 'guest' in the basement as well.

Something about the silence made everything more eerie. Beau had long since been inured to the screams, not startling at the sudden noises. He had always been grateful the servant's quarters were outside of the main building, so their sleep wasn't disturbed.

Once the silence filled the mansion, Beau had been assigned to bring the master meals, to ensure the man did not go hungry during the long hours spent torturing and tormenting the thing in the basement. Simple things, snacks the master could eat with one hand, the other dripping with that dark, unsettling blood.

The thing in the basement haunted Beau's nightmares ever since he began bringing the master food. It was rake thin, truly as ghoulish as the rumors said. It had unkempt hair so matted with gore that Beau had no clue what the original color had been. It had piercing red eyes, ones that gleamed even in the dim light of the basement. It had fangs, its canine teeth elongated and razor sharp.

Most of the time Beau saw it slumped on the floor. It was so corpselike that he was always surprised to see it move from where it lay in a pool of its own blood.

Beau had never thought he would grow to pity such a wretched thing. Not when he held no pity for the past victims. But he had never seen the past victims of his master, only heard their cries and screams. He had never been haunted by the sight of them, the taste of rotting blood in the air, the look in its eyes. Not even begging, but resigned. Like an old sick dog wasting away on the side of the road, knowing there would be no rescue or premature end to its suffering.

Every once in a while he was sent to leave snacks preemptively, as the master would in all likelihood visit the basement that evening after a stressful day at work.

Those moments down in the basement, leaving a charcuterie board or platter of fruit with only the thing down there to keep him company, they were the most harrowing.

Sometimes Beau was able to live up to his reputation, silent enough to leave the food at a side table and escape without waking the thing as it rested between its tortures. Most of the time he did not. The thing would be awake, eyes gleaming even in near darkness, its unnerving gaze following Beau.

It never spoke to him. Beau didn't know if it was smart enough to speak, to be honest.

This time was seemingly the same as always. The thing lay in a pool of its own dark blood, limp like a marionette with its strings cut. It wore little in the way of clothes, covered in healing wounds and its own blood as it was, there was no modesty to preserve, Beau supposed.

Beau placed the polished silver platter onto the table, opening the bottle of wine so it could breathe in anticipation of his master's arrival. The dry, almost sour smell of the white wine made Beau's nose wrinkle as he poured a careful amount into the glass, careful as he left the cork on the tray and pocketed the metal wrapping to throw away.

Thinly sliced meats and cheeses were arranged artistically, no flaws to be seen. Beau turned to leave the basement, his job done for now.

Then he caught sight of the thing. It was kneeling, closer than ever before. The chain connecting it to the wall was taut, and Beau was surprised it could withstand the strain with its emaciated body.

Its matted hair covered its face as it swayed on its knees.

Beau couldn't help but worry, not in the way of a servant fretting over a potentially broken possession of his master's, but how a person felt concern and compassion over someone obviously hurt.

He shouldn't let himself worry. He should turn and walk back up the staircase, to the kitchens where he would continue the tasks assigned to him. This was just another task, one already done, he couldn't-

The thing began to keen like a wounded animal. It slowly raised its head up to look at Beau, glimpses of scarlet between dirty locks of hair.

"I can't help you." Beau found himself saying before he could think better of it.

The keening died off and it slumped back, the chain finally lowering as it was given more slack.

"…" Beau looked between the pitiful creature and the platter of food. "…I can feed you? Just a piece of deli meat, would that help?"

Truthfully he didn't even know if the thing could eat, only that it didn't need to. It raised its head, eyes glimmering and looking so human, like it understood everything Beau had said.

Then it nodded.

"Okay." Beau spoke softly. He slipped a thin cut of capocollo off the platter, the marbled ham somehow looking more grisly in the lighting, with blood splattered on the floor.

He held it with pinched fingers, slowly crouching down and reaching out towards the thing. He could've thrown it, but that felt too demeaning when he was just trying to help.

"Here you go." Beau murmured.

The thing stirred again, straightening up, but already at the end of its chain. Beau felt bad for forcing it to exert itself so much, and leaned closer.

Bloodstained and cold hands grabbed at Beau's wrist. Every knuckle and bone seemed to be trying to escape its body, skin stretched over its skeleton like a horrific Halloween prop. Its nails were ragged and uncut, split and chipped with its own blood stuck under them.

Beau's pulse raced, and he pulled back, dropping the meat with a soft splat into one of the puddles of blood. One of the thing's nails sliced into his soft, pale skin.

Beau's blood welled up, glittering garnet under the light, the same shade as the thing's eyes.

And then it was truly over.

The thing pulled with strength Beau hadn't known it had, and Beau was swept off his feet, falling forward. His white dress shirt and black slacks soaked with blood as he sprawled onto the floor, breathless.

It still had a hold on his wrist, hunched over his hand, uncaring for the food now soiled on the ground.

"Let go-!" Beau gasped out, already trying to struggle and failing.

Then the creature bit down into his wrist, razor sharp fangs like knives through his flesh, scraping at his bones.

Beau screamed as a hot, searing pain zipped up from his wrist to his shoulder. He struggled again, feeling the fangs rip at muscles and nerves with every vain attempt to free himself, still screaming, hoping anyone could hear him, save him.

But the basement was soundproofed. Even if it weren't, all of the house's servants had long since learned to ignore the screams coming from the basement.

Beau grew faint with bloodloss and shock, held up only by his arm. He couldn't keep his head up, unable to even gather the air to scream again despite the agony. He could taste the blood pooled on the floor, foul on his tongue, yet his body had no strength to retch.

He couldn't resist as a hand sank into his hair, pulling his head up and baring his neck. His pulse was thready in his ears, the room darkening.

A agony bloomed from his neck, and Beaumont Mallory died, his throat ripped out by a vampire.

Soon enough, the master of the estate would make his way down the basement, leisurely as he anticipated a nice evening of wine and torture to destress from the day. He would find the his most recent and favorite plaything- a vampire he had been gifted by a business partner, a rare find in their circles with how isolated and secretive those enclaves could be- sobbing over a corpse.

He didn't remember the poor boy's name, or even his face, but it must've been one of his servants considering the clothes.

With a shout, the master would grab the stake from its place on one of the tables, a constant threat he had no intentions of using before now. He had enjoyed his toy that wouldn't break, a punching bag after his long days of work. But a dog that bit once would do so again.

The vampire didn't resist, still crying as its heart was staked, as it finally died the true death it had been wanting for months.

The master spat on the vampire's corpse, disgusted. He glanced to the corpse of the poor servant boy, only to watch the shredded skin of a pale throat began to knit back together.

Just like his now dead plaything.

Yet this one was once his servant and would be far more obedient.

He grinned, elation he hadn't felt since he was a young man washing through him.

Transferring the collar took just a moment, the silver chain enough to hold the beast. He went to his chair and sat, grabbing the wine glass. He delicately sniffed the white wine and tasted it.

It had been aired out perfectly, a great companion as he waited for his new toy to wake.

(Part Two) (Part Three)

[distancingreality]

you know it's been like six years and occasionally (more than I should) I think about my Obidala fanfic I'd say yes but you wouldn't want me anyway where I explore the iconic thigh stroke

and I'm still not over this

the comments I got on ff.net:

vs the comments I got on ao3:

[pastelaspirations]

Is your fanfic on ao3 or somewhere else?? I need to get to reading it lol

W e l l. U m. Okay. Like, I should have expected this. Especially with a certain TWO people going around, clamoring for people to read it. Am side-eying you, Moldiee and Anayz, h a r d-

So uh. Y e a h, it's on ao3. Linked here for your convenience. JUST. It's l o n g. It doesn't start out that way, it starts off short, but then just gets longer and l o n g e r and-

Let's just say you're going to be reading this for a while probably

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

I was talking with a friend about the canon named women of Les Mis and decided to experiment to see who those are according to Les Mis fanworks.

Behold: your top ten women of Les Mis.

[fuzzyclink]

Wrote a Cirrus x Vesper fic! I originally posted this on my touchstarved blog here but I've been finding that my posts from there don't show up in any tags currently, so reposting here.

Warnings: 18+ mdni, priest kink, eating, food, humiliation, violence, spitting, bad BDSM ettiquette, sadism, kicking, blood/pain. Reader gender not described(pronouns/body).

Cloying

As the last full moon of the year draws closer, the paths of the city buzz with excitement. Though not everyone under the mountain prays to the Lunar God, plenty are happy to join in the merriment or make a profit off of people who are celebrating the festival. This time of year people cluster around the usually isolated church - vendors crowding around the base of the building with their wares. You've decided to join in the celebrations yourself, donning a black seasonal mask that covers your nose to forehead, with a small, delicate depiction of the moon going through various phases positioned right above your eyebrows.

Tonight is the official start of the festival, though anticipation has been brewing for the last week. As it's your first year here, you haven't been able to attend a Lunar Cleanse service, only hearing about it in bits and pieces from people at The Leaping Bear. Privately, you're a bit excited to experience something new. You've been so caught up in your search for a cure that you think some merriment for once would do you good. And, you're curious to see Cirrus lead the congregation through the ceremony. You've never seen him in front of a large group like that before.

The ceremony is starting shortly, so you make your way to the church. The streets are alive with festival-goers milling around. The air, usually damp and still, is filled with sweet scents. It's more humid than ever, hazy air rising from delicious round buns, steamed and stuffed with savory meats and vegetables. You see a nearby vendor lay out pale sesame rice balls on small plates, sticking to the fingers of people who tear into them hungrily. Another vendor is selling marshmallow filled cookies, covered in a thin layer of white frosting. On your way to the church, a stall selling candy catches your eye. You purchase some quickly, grabbing a bag of tiny, glittering silver candies. You pull open the narrow bag as you walk, placing a candy in your mouth. As you roll the sphere around on your tongue, a delicate flavor of jasmine fills your mouth, and you crunch the rest of it between your teeth happily. It's a delight to see the backbreaking worries of the city fall away, even if it's only for a short period of time.

The sounds and scents of the busy street fade away as you enter the church. The church is busier than you've ever seen it before, the building crowded with devotees sitting shoulder to shoulder in the pews. Even though it's crowded, everyone speaks in hushed voices. The building has been decorated with gleaming ribbons, strung along the tops of the walls. The placement of the ribbon leads you to think that few other than Cirrus would be able to place the decorations. You snicker to yourself quietly, imagining him wobbling on the tips of his toes to secure ribbons around the building. Or maybe, you think as your smile widens, he stood on a small stepstool? Your exploratory gaze falls upon Cirrus himself, standing at the front of the room. You immediately avert your gaze, feeling as if he would be able to sense your daydreaming just from your facial expression. He has a way of drawing guilt to the surface of your thoughts, bobbing to the top unavoidably like a cork in water.

You find a seat at the back of the room and slide into the end of a pew, crowded rows of benches lining the chapel in front of you. Your neighbor gives you a quick nod, their silvery silk mask glinting under the light of the candles before turning back to the front of the room. You clutch your candy in your hands, placing the bag on your lap. The room quiets as Cirrus takes his place at a podium. He wears the robes you've always seen him in, but in this moment they seem almost ethereal, glowing and shimmering in front of the candles. Silver hair cascades down his back as he stands resolutely before the crowd. His shoulders stand strong and the power he emits reaches you all the way in the back of the room. The crowd leans forward in anticipation.

"At this time of year we are able to begin anew," he intones, sweeping his hands out to the audience.

"The moon is pale and shining- a reminder of the ending of one year, and beginning of another. All of us gather to praise it’s light.

"All gather to praise", the congregation murmers in response. You hastily mumble some words, wishing that the service came with a tutorial. You hadn't realized there would be a call and response.

Cirrus continues. "The Night Air pierced by Silver Light presses down upon us. The Moon shines through us. We ask for it to illuminate our darkest faults, to wash them clean. Each of you have made grave errors this year," he sternly states, gazing out into the room. "Each of you have mistakes that you wish to release." You swear you can feel his eyes upon you, and wonder nervously about any possible mistakes you have made recently. Does it count that you hadn't brought your dishes to the counter at The Leaping Bear? Or maybe you’ve been too rude to the vendors when, time and time again, they have no news for your cure?

Cirrus's voice cuts through your thoughts.

"Let the strike of bells pull your guilt from you and release it. Let each toll into your heart and feel it dredge up the turmoil within. Bring your darkness out and let it whither in the light".

He stands commandingly at the front of the room, a bell the size of his fist resting in his gloved hands. He carefully swings his arm, the sound of the bell crisply ringing through the room. It's medium pitched and sharp, startling you in the quiet. You jolt a little, shifting in your seat. As it echos through the room, he paces softly across the front of the church. Another toll spreads through the space as he reaches the left side.

"Bring your sorrows up through your chest and release them with your breath," he instructs, a lecturer to an obedient audience. You try to obey, but your breath catches in your throat at the next ring - the sound so sharp and striking that it tears your attention away and sends a shock through your body. He continues to stride slowly at the front of the room, each subsequent ring of the bell growing softer and softer until you can barely tell whether he's rung it again or if the sound still lingers faintly in the air from the previous strike.

"Let your breath serve as a reminder to you of the life given to you, and of the light that will always return to you, even when the darkness feels crushing and all-encompassing. Just as you inhale and exhale, the moon changes and is lighted anew." He pauses for a moment, solemnly surveying the audience. You feel light and unburdened, more at peace than you have felt in weeks.

"With renewed spirits and lightened hearts, let us learn from those who have walked before us. In the first book of the Lunar Scripts..." Cirrus continues onwards, describing to the congregation a particularly (in your mind), dry and archaic passage from historical literature written long ago. Your eyes begin to close as his voice continues slowly on, the soft light of the chapel blurring in front of your half-lidded gaze. Your head starts to drop and you jolt yourself awake, shifting nervously in your chair and eyeing Cirrus. You suspect that he might have been facing the other side of the room when you started to doze off. He continues through the text, emphasizing certain points with a strident tone. It's clear that he knows the text well - but due to your lack of familiarity you're having a difficult time parsing the archaic phrasing. At times, you're not even sure it's in a language you know at all. You shift in your seat, fighting against the drowziness that seeps into your bones. You hope that the service will finish soon so you, and the rest of the worshippers, can join in the festivities outside. Your fingers shift on the wrapped candies in your lap and your stomach grumbles quietly. On a whim, you ease the top of the bag open, pressing a candy silently into your mouth. Maybe this will help keep you awake and your hunger at bay until the service is over.

"Silver Light, shining down upon us. We are bleached clean in your light. Glorious Celestial One, we are grateful for your protection in the last year, and returning brightness in this New Year. Before we celebrate your fullness through laughter and festivities, let us take a moment of silence to honor your watchful guidance". Cirrus leans onto the podium with the passion in his words. Everyone in the congregation stills, and the room falls silent. Light falls on Cirrus, draping over him and illuminating his hair like spun silver over his shoulders. He bows his mask towards the floor. You sit quietly, and as the silence stretches onwards, your eyes start to close again. You desperately pry them open, but between the warmth of the building, the dim lighting, and late hour, you soon find your head tilting to the side involuntarily. When your eyes close shut a third time, you desperately reach into your bag of candy for a distraction to help keep you awake.

To your horror, your fingers catch on the edge of the narrow bag, and the contents spill out in front of you, countless candies clattering across the stone floor. They bounce and tumble, each movement sounding thunderous in the silent room. You watch helplessly as the round candies careen across the flagstones, the furthest coming to a standstill at the feet of people three rows ahead of you. Masked faces turn to you curiously as people glance over their shoulders to see what the fuss was. Cirrus's gaze snaps to your face, pinning you in place like a moth on a board. His mouth twists when he sees that you're the one who caused the commotion.

"I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry," you hurriedly breathe, sinking to the floor to gather what candies you can reach without disturbing those around you. The color is high in your cheeks, your hands sticky as you grab the candies nearby and press them into your pockets. Your gaze flits between the candies in front of you, scattered between the shoes of the other attendees but out of reach. You barely hear the end of the service, too mortified to raise your head or focus on Cirrus' words. The back of your shirt is damp with sweat. The congregation rustles to life as the ceremony concludes, the congregation impatient to finally listen to the music and enjoy the celebrations outside. You hover anxiously by your bench, standing and waiting for the rows to clear so you can gather up the mess you made. As the final attendees file out of the building, chatting to each other, Cirrus comes to stand beside you. His irritation rolls off him in waves and you shrink besides him, falling back down onto the bench without a thought.

"It's rather disrespectful, don't you think?" Cirrus says tensely, his words clipped and short. "Bringing food into the service. Distracting the church members. Irreverence on a sacred day. Such gluttony, hm?"

You have never had him this angry with you before, and your hands tremble in your lap where you twist them nervously. "Cir..Cirrus.. Father... Ah, I'm so so sorry, please, I'll clean them up right away. You're right, it was so stupid of me, I shouldn't have brought them in...I - I never meant to drop them, ppplease let me pick them up, I'll do it now..." You chance a look upwards, and the last bit of hope inside of you shrivels. He is silent, his face unmovable.

"You want to pick them up?" He asks softly. You nod, eyes fixed nervously on his face.

"I think your insatiable fingers will simply betray you again".

Your face falls, and you gesture out to him. "Sir.. Cirrus...I'll do it, I'll pick them up. Please, I'll do it right away,"

You sink to your knees and quickly stretch for one candy that's most of the way under the bench nearest to you, fingers scrambling across the dusty floor in your haste. Your heart stops in your throat when Cirrus's heavy, booted foot is placed onto your wrist.

"I said no," he hisses, the flat sole of his foot cruelly twisting against your skin. The bones in your wrist shift under the pressure.

"Your hands are clearly unreliable. And with your voracious hunger and desperation? Hmm, it's only fitting for you to use your mouth".

You lean back on your heels and crane your neck to look at him, wrist still pressed to the floor. "My mouth?"

"Yes. As starving as you are, we had better not let them go to waste." He places his hands behind his back impassively. "Begin."

You nod nervously and he lifts his foot off of your arm. You lower your torso to the floor with your arms, carefully picking up the small candy between your teeth. You can feel his icy gaze on your back. Chewing it quickly, you stoop further under the seats to grab the next nearest candy, shuffling forwards further on your hands. Even under the shelter of the bench, Cirrus's presence looms ominously behind you. You've just picked up the second candy when he speaks again, derision dripping from his words.

"In fact, I think it would be better if you didn't use your hands at all, hm?"

You twist awkwardly from beneath the bench, shuffling your weight back onto your heels. When you pull yourself upright in front of him, you see he's pulled out a narrow black rope. He steps behind you smoothly, pulling your arms behind your back and wrapping the rope around your wrists. A few firm knots later and your wrists are securely bound. Cirrus briefly checks the tightness by sliding the tip of his finger beneath the ropes and then stands.

He peers down at you, his mask an impenetrable shield. He can't keep a sneer from pulling at the edge of his mouth as he speaks. His anger is still palpable. "It suits you, my star. Perhaps this will teach you some restraint, since you are clearly struggling to learn. Continue."

You shift your weight forwards on your knees, testing the rope on your hands. It's tight but not unbearable. If you let your shoulders hang forwards the weight of your arms forces the rope to bite into your skin. But if you clasp your hands behind your back, it's tolerable. You lean all the way forwards, resting your torso on your knees. The spilled candies stretch out before you, some scattered as far as three rows ahead of you. Awkwardly, you scooch forwards, trying to move yourself over to a candy on the right. Your knees already feel sore against the pavement. You have much less control without the use of your hands, and you bash your spine into the underside of the bench. Pain radiates from your back and causes you to lurch forwards. Resignedly, you fully lay down, your torso on the floor and legs stretching out behind you. The floor is gritty and cool against your cheek, and you can feel the solidity of the stone through your clothes.

"There are many more to gather, my star. Best for you to progress quickly. Unless you'd rather I give you some *encouragement*, hmm?"

From the malice in Cirrus' voice, you feel pretty certain that you wouldn't like whatever his encouragement would entail. His foot comes to rest next to your ankle. The threat of it spurs you into action. You gather the candies under this row of pews with haste, twisting and contorting your body around on the stone to gather them in your teeth. The sweet jasmine flavor fills your mouth, polluted now with bits of dirt and sand from the floor. You look from side to side, your neck straining as you peer in the dim lighting. As you go from candy to candy, you pant harshly through your nose, mouth occupied. It’s difficult to progress with any kind of speed despite your efforts, and you work your way slowly across the ground, twisting and bending to shift from place to place. Your knees are starting to get rubbed raw, and your back aches from the strain of your motions. Your movements are becoming less precise as you grow tired, and you find yourself lunging for the candies with little finesse, eager to finish the job. One such motion scrapes the skin off your chin as you fall a bit too heavily on the floor.

Reaching the gap between the benches, you rest your cheek on the floor for a moment. The candies are fewer now, only beneath two wide benches ahead of you. You can feel the sweat stick to your skin. Your back burns, muscles furious from the repeated motion below the pews. Through your efforts, you've gained abrasions on your chin and cheekbone to accompany those on your knees. You close your eyes for a moment, gathering your strength.

Your body jolts when you feel Cirrus' boot come crashing into your ribs. "You think you've earned respite?" He speaks to you lowly, cooly. You squeeze your eyes shut, and find that his voice cuts into you. "You're dirty. Pathetic. Snuffling in the dust for grub like an animal." His disgust for you drips from every word. "Just minutes ago, you begged me to let you clean up. Told me how *quickly* you'd do it." On the last word he swings his leg again, this time slamming it into your gut. You gasp out a choked groan, wheezing. He continues on in a biting murmur. "I suspect that you cared more about currying my favor than righting your wrongs. I am not someone who can be plied with desperate words".

You cough a little, feeling a bruise bloom in your ribs as you do so. "Nno, I - I really am sorry, Cirrus, please, I'll continue. I want to clean it..." You feel a bit disgusted in yourself, but your desire to appease him and shame from your mistake prevails. You inch your way forwards to the next candies, painstakingly making your way beneath the benches. Cirrus walks to the row on the other side of the bench and stands there, waiting for you. You can see the faint shine of his shoes out of the edge of your eyes. Gathering the candies beneath this bench is harder. Your mouth and throat growing parched from your exertion and the endless sugar. You gasp on dust that rises from your movements. At some of the candies you find yourself resting for a moment, before quickly glancing to Cirrus’ feet and continuing again. Your back trembles as you shift forwards and you find yourself using your knees and shoulders more, doing your best to ignore how your skin screams at the friction. You've stopped clasping your hands together and they slump forwards limply, wrists aflame where the rope restricts them.

You start to feel anxious about how much is left. You've finally made it past the second bench. How many more are there? Surely you must be finished soon? You curse yourself. WHY would you be so stupid to try and eat them DURING the service? The delicate Jasmine flavor feels foul and cloying on your tongue. Glancing up desperately, you assess how many you have left to gather and realize that you only have the candies past the third bench to remove. Cirrus has walked ahead of you and stands at the remaining candies that have rolled out from under the bench. You realize, as he starts to move, that he was waiting for your attention.

He carefully lifts his boot and places it on top of the candy, grinding it into dust beneath his foot. With horror, you watch as he does this to each candy one by one, crushing each delicate silver orb into a fine, sugary powder. He drags the toe of his shoe through the mess, gathering it into a pile before he walks to the side. The powder clouds the dark leather. Cirrus waits for you, his expectation clear. Your breath hisses through your teeth as you pull your weary and aching body forwards. Pausing brings greater pain, each point of agony alighting with renewed vigor after the miniscule rest. Your clothes stick to you, damp with sweat and blood from your efforts. Reaching the edge of the powder, you shakily press your tongue into it, trying to pull it into your parched mouth. Your lips crack as you try to clean the mound up, each time leaving dust and damp remnants. You keep returning to it, trying again and again to remove it but only succeeding in spreading it more broadly upon the floor. With how dry your mouth is and your level of exhaustion, you’re unable to pick it up.

Your face slumps onto the stone next to the pile and a sob breaks from your chest. It's too much. There's nothing to be done. Your eyes squeeze shut as hot tears spill down your cheeks, leaving tracks in the grime. You curl up on yourself raggedly, body in a defensive ball. You can feel Cirrus's presence as he comes to stand by your shoulder. His clothes rustle slightly as he crouches. He grabs your chin, fingers sliding slightly through your tears. It's impossible to look at him. His voice feels gentle. "Your efforts, my star, have almost convinced me of your repentance".

"*Please*..." You croak out. You're not sure what you're asking for. His forgiveness, an end to all this, his help, rest.. Ciruss's thumb falls to your cracked lower lip.

"If you need help, you only must ask," he whispers to you.

He pulls your lips open and you feel something cool and wet fall against your tongue. Your eyes spring open to see a thin strand of saliva falling from his lips and into your open mouth. In this moment, it feels like a mercy. His jaw works and you open your mouth further yourself, accepting anything he would offer you. His spit pools in your mouth, almost refreshing after the relentless dust and sugar from the floor. It glints wetly as it falls. His hands slide to the back of your neck, carding through the damp hair at your nape for a moment. He holds the full weight of your head in his hands. His voice is as soft and as firm his fingers.

"So close, my star. You will continue. Leave your guilt behind".

Your heart trembles at that, the promise of forgiveness and his kindness so near.

You feel filthy. You feel beautiful in his touch. You feel like the stone you've spent so long inching across. His fingers slip softly through your hair and lower your head back to the ground. You feel him straighten more than you see it. With the most weariness you've ever felt before, you roll yourself to your front and gather the pile of dust into your mouth slowly, mouthful by mouthful. Your tongue and throat burn and it feels more as if the sugar tears your mouth than it does dissolve. You drag your damp jaw along the gritty floor, realizing at last that the pile is gone.

"You've done well to make amends.", Cirrus says, looking down at you in a heap at his feet.

It's then that your gaze falls to Cirrus's boots, right in front of you. They still have a fine smattering of dust from when he crushed the candies in front of you. Hazily, you blink at them, watching how the sugar dulls the reflection of the lights. With the very last dregs of your resolve, you shift forwards and lave your tongue through the dust on his boot. The boot shifts minutely, a quiet huff of surprise coming from him. You can tell he watches you as you do the best to clean his boots. Your exhaustion means that in some ways, you simply press your face and lips against them devoutly, your damp skin carrying away more grime at times than your mouth.

"What a precious, obedient little bootlicker", he breathes rapturously. "My devoted, gorgeous toy.”

Warmth sweeps through you at that, padding over your many aches and pains like a soft balm. Satisfied with the appearance of his shoes, you lay motionless on the floor. Dimly, as if to someone in a dream, you feel Cirrus unbind your hands and carefully lower your arms by your side. He rubs them gently, hushing you as you mumble in protest. You feel him reach below you and, with a motion that makes the world swing on it's axis, heft you into his arms.

"Is it ok, now?" You can't help but look for reassurance, your mind and body clinging to him as he carries you.

“Yes, little star. You are forgiven.”

--------------

Thanks so much for reading! This fic was inspired by sitting through church services over the holidays and the full moon rn. I was also inspired by this ask to Rotten Racoons (https://www.tumblr.com/rottenraccoons/703263691996545024/will-the-lis-spit-in-vespers-mouth-if-they-asked), which stated Cirrus would spit in Vesper's mouth as a reward for good behavior:D I wanted to manifest the idea of "getting punished for being disruptive in church". If you made it to the end, thank you! I'd love to hear what you thought!

[aquaticptato]

I'm writing a fanfiction that takes place post-canon and one of the previously mediocre side characters is the villain in said fic... I'm currently rewatching the show it's based on and just seeing the character is filling me with rage even though he literally has done none of the things I'm mad at him for

it's fr going like

"You took everything from me"

"I don't even know who you are"

anyway has any other fic author experienced similar deep-rooted hatred for a character for no reason except reasons you made up