#broke my heart to see him perform so poorly

[calkestis]

YUKI ISHIKAWA during the 2024 Olympics Argentina vs Japan (Men's Volleyball Tournament)

[see-arcane]

Blood of My Blood: Something to Cry About

Consider this a spinoff of a spinoff. Based on @ibrithir-was-here's Blood of My Blood and directly jumping off of @bluecatwriter's chapter, Overindulgence.

In which the Master of the castle runs into an unexpected concern regarding his dear vassal and being the monster in the picture is not quite as fun as he recalls.

(Warnings for suicidal ideation and domestic abuse.)

His eyes were shut, but he wasn’t sleeping.

It was not the first time his friend had greeted him so. Back in that first private summer there had been something of a game made from it. Whenever his friend was caught supine in bed or on a couch without the will to drag himself to consciousness and perform for his Master, the latter would sometimes test the limits of the act. A hand on his throat. Another under the shirt and over the drumming heart. That had been back when only one of them carried a chill.

What a distant thing that season was now. The dark-haired youth had only been able to hide his expression because fatigue still left its miserable countenance stamped on him. He had not been able to fully hide his shudders then; not when the hands began to move. Now here was his friend just shy of the full metamorphosis, human by the thinnest wisp of definition, a marble statue in his bed.

Stained marble. He was so drained as to nearly match the silver-white corona of hair on the pillow. There were the usual shadows under the eyes and the mottling spots that showed where his family nursed at throat and wrist. But the palette broke anew along one side. Even if it was to allow space for the bandages.

Bandages that had started white but now flared in spots of scarlet. Rings, rather.

Bites.

Ah, he had indulged deeply. 

Enough to sand the years away to those earliest days when he himself had been a youth peddling soul and sacrifices away beneath the Mountain. Amusing as it was, and infinitely worth the woman’s face upon seeing the full claim of her husband in action, he did catch himself counting the hours until this whipcord stage would fade out of him. It would be a pain in and of itself for bone and beard and build to all even out again into full manhood. Just having his own voice in his ears would be a relief in itself. Unquestioned as his rule was, even he could not play deaf to the absurdity of the lord of the castle sounding a year short of his first shave.

He could almost fool himself into thinking dear Jonathan was playing ignorant because he did not recognize his Master’s voice. Almost.

“She wrapped it poorly,” he hummed. He sat at the faux dreamer’s hip. “The stain should not be visible.”

Jonathan’s eyes stayed shut. His breathing did not change, thin as it was. Perhaps the woman was in his head, whispering behind his back. But a simple check showed otherwise.

Mother and child were both out from underfoot for the moment, amusing themselves with animals. The boy maintained the wolves as his most cherished creatures, as was right, but the other beasts in the dark had hooked his eye as well. Bat and rat, owl and fox. The latter had scared him once, hearing it scream for the first time—a human shriek from an inhuman throat. The woman was out with another of her husband’s doting gifts, a book of fauna with all the airy definitions and dissections that mortal science had seen fit to cage the local range of species in. It was something to keep them busy and another little facet to add to the boy’s knowledge.

The woman felt him prying and a reflexive response tried to leap back at him. He shut her out before she could know where he was. Not that it would matter. He could revoke her meager privilege with his friend as he liked. But this was not for others to intrude on. Supposing Jonathan dropped his act sometime this decade.

“Oh, dear. I had not realized you were so depleted. Perhaps I should fetch some donors from the village and have them pipe their veins into yours. It worked so artfully for other patients. Or,” he made a show of slitting open a wrist to let the dark vein ooze, knowing the gesture was sensed even behind closed eyes, “since you are so set on the repose of death, we could go ahead and rescind all the playacting and reach denouement early. It would surely save much in time and tears and—,”

Jonathan’s eyes were open. Not looking at him. The pale hands remained folded atop the sheets. One was limp. The other was lax only from the effort to avoid becoming a fist.

“There you are. Ah, and there is the opportunity gone.”

His wrist was already healed. Sealed shut almost the instant it was cut. Even two nights on, he was swollen with his friend’s draught. He had to admire the vitality required for such a task. Poor Lucy would have wilted at the first two bites, with or without her impotent ring of suitors dumping their blood into her to drag out the inevitable. In truth, he had half-hoped that the sweet diversion of the Lesson would end with Jonathan’s heart stopping altogether. The feeding of blood was only a requirement if the transformation was intended to be a slower process, as it had been meted out to the woman.

Had Jonathan died, he would be undead within the same night. Perhaps even the same hour. Being siphoned for almost half a decade by three vampires would leave no room for the process to drag its heels. What a treat it might have been to see the woman realize what she’d done. All her beloved’s sacrifice thrown away because she’d grasped beyond what was hers. And better still to have the weight of the farce finally shrugged from his shoulders as it was ripped from Jonathan’s. The boy would have cheered, he knew, to see his Papa finally in their ranks completely.

And then would come their first hunt…

But he was woolgathering. And, in the fashion of a youth, chasing mere impulse when he knew the fruits were not yet ripe. Let the game play out, young man. He would have his way by the end, do not throw the foreplay away now.

Jonathan still did not look at him.

“You seem unable to turn your head, my friend. Did I truly spend so long with your neck? Memory does not lie and I can see myself that the shoulder received far more attention.”

Jonathan did turn his head—to face the wall. The ghost-light eyes hovered on the calendar, brow furrowed in reading the weeks. His lips moved in silent muttering.

A clawed finger reached out, hooking the pallid chin until Jonathan turned to him. There was a genuine wince as he did so. He had bitten deep and not with the usual set of teeth. He’d called upon the Wolf’s rows to be sure of strength and for the demonstration made before his greedy audience. But even with the heady extra helping of blood, even with the Lesson successfully taught, there was no sidestepping the fact of the method’s sloppiness. Intentional in the moment, yes, but…

But what? He will heal. And if he doesn’t, he will die and do better than heal. Call it a Lesson for him too. Such is the lot of one who clings to the role of livestock. Really, it is probably a boon to his penitent soul. A belated lashing for what he still considers his sins. 

“Does it hurt?” he asked aloud.

Jonathan did not answer. Only stared at him. There was no fear there, nor even that constant element of melancholy. There was only a queer flatness. It might nearly be mistaken for the same glaze of placidity the woman tried to hide her rages with. But no, it was not even anger. What, then?

“Have you lost the use of your tongue as well?” The question came with a flicker of mesmer. It hooked the root of Jonathan’s tongue and yanked.

“No,” Jonathan offered blandly. And no more than that. As if there were truly no other words he had to spare for his Master.

“I had not realized you stored your vocabulary in your arteries.”

“Even if it were otherwise, I imagine I’d have little to say worth sharing.”

My friend, is this you sulking? It has been years!

Years since that last pregnant silence as he showed Mr. Harker the wolves at the door. Since he watched the young man sit and stew and struggle against tears before ascending wordlessly to his room. What a raw little thing he’d been then.

But the thing staring back at him was not raw. It was something leaden and tired and…bored? Was that it? Something near to that, perhaps, but sharper.

“Now, there is no need to pout. You know I have never ceased to cherish our little talks. But I do see you are making do with only water and bread. Dear Mina has left you like a lame pet up here.” In reality the water was fresh and the bread, baked the day before, was joined by what non-perishable goods the woman had scrounged by way of a breakfast. Even the boy had left him with what he considered a treasure by way of a bowl brimming with wild berries he’d picked himself around the castle. All this had been sampled, if thinly. “Yours is the only tongue here left to appreciate a vintage in its original state rather than filtered through a vein. Shall you have a claret or something stronger?”

“Neither. Thank you.”

Flat as a skipping stone. He did not even reach for the old half-joking insistence that he did not dare risk an overindulgence of wine or liquor as, quote, ‘If I drank every time I felt I needed it, I would be an alcoholic within a week.’ Instead, the stare. Still ongoing. Seeming to realize this, Jonathan made himself blink before trying to turn his head away. Back to the calendar.

His Master locked a full hand around his jaw and twisted him back. Another wince.

No fear. No sorrow. No anything. Just that blunt void of acknowledgment. That unknown thing hovering between ire and lethargy.

“Might I ask what it is that so fascinates you about the date? It must be some worthy holiday to outweigh your Master’s presence.”

“Not a holiday,” Jonathan allowed. “Though I suppose I should mark down the evening three nights prior as a milestone. Something to keep on record.” Three nights prior. When the Lesson was taught. “Your first bout of physical abuse on me. I had thought you couldn’t hold out beyond two years. Most of you don’t even make it past the first two months. Yet you are patient, so I figured there would be an insulation period.” 

It was his turn to stare back. Jonathan waited as he did, seeming oddly like he was itching for a pocket watch to tally how many minutes he was wasting breath on this exchange. His Master’s hand moved from the pale chin to the bandaged shoulder.

“Most of who?”

The hand squeezed. Jonathan grimaced, but didn’t blink.

“The demographic of men I had hoped you were better than. There was evidence enough to suggest it. At least a ratio of odds that favored something less predictable. Despite what proofs there are to the contrary, you are not a violent man, Sir. Not when you can happily do worse than violence. Certainly not when the prelude to it provides better results and entertainment. Why else would you take such care to drag out a season of captivity or play your games on the Demeter? Why feed on a victim by drops rather than ravage outright but for the joy of watching their comprehension of the inevitable? The only instances in which you resort to straight aggression are when you want something over with.

“A mother eaten by wolves. Sacks of children thrown like scraps. Your own aide waiting ashore, slaughtered and stuffed in a stone wall to muddy your trail. Quick, quick, quick. Violence bores you in the same way doing linens bores a laundress. If it must be done, fine, let it be over with—but it is no more or less than something to scrape from the schedule. At a guess, that night’s violence was for Mina’s sake. I had not changed anything in my routine. Quincey had done no ill. Mina, I suspect…what? Blinked incorrectly? Asked to see me for a heartbeat beyond the scheduled feeding? Dared to request a moment of make-believe where you do not own us all, as if the very act of imagination equated a challenge to you?

“But that is all beside the point. You have stepped fully into the cliché. And I had accounted for that. The first round tallied. Fine. The issue comes with the timing. Your insistence on who else ought to be in the audience.” In his lap, one hand finally lost the fight and hardened into a fist. The other, attached to the bitten arm, only twitched. “Mina was the point of the show. But our son? Was he part of the Lesson too? Did you order him to stay as yet another hoop for her to jump through, to make her act and lie beyond all extremes? No, I should not ask. Of course he was.”

The ghost-light eyes burned.

“This, when he loves you as his Father. When the entire point of all this is giving him a life he can trust in. You saw him smile for you in this room. He held you and beamed and heard your stories. And then what? What did he ask before you left him in his coffin?”

The woman had not been in his mind at the time to overhear. She could not know. She could not have told her husband what the boy asked.

The boy, his smile fading, his eyes sunset-bright and wondering, blankets fidgeting in his hands.

‘Are you sure Papa is alright? He looked really tired…’     

His Father had told him yes, of course, but Papa had been so enchanting that night that Father had not been able to help himself. Not to worry, his Mum would take care of him as she always did. All’s well, diavol. And the boy had tried to smile. Tried to believe him.

And couldn’t.

“He turns five next year. Five. And you are already blasting holes in the foundation of his faith in you. In what we have been building out of debris to produce a happy reality for him, in which his parents are not monsters.” Now a note of true venom slipped through his voice, the hollow-burning eyes narrowed to cold angles, and at last the feeling was recognized for what it was, and it was... “In which he does not have to be yet another actor for your benefit.”

…Disappointment.

Cold and grey and coarse with recognition. With experience.

“All of that being said, Sir, if you feel you must make another show of the obvious,” the fist uncurled to gesture at the mauled shoulder, “I ask that you reserve it strictly for the adults.” Finally the lambent gaze skidded away, looking not at Master or calendar, but at his still-resting hand on the covers. The fingers still hadn’t curled further than halfway to his palm. “Perhaps I’ll blame it on a doorknob next time.” Then, as if the entire topic were dismissed, he reached across to the nightstand. A notebook sat beside the dish of food. Not another diary, but a weighty planner. Jonathan folded it open to the latest page. The fountain pen’s cap was worked off with some difficulty by wedging it between the fingers of the lax hand. “Most of the itinerary was cleared a week ahead. The triplicates will take a little longer than I’d hoped, but they should still be ready within the month.” The nib poised on the page. “Was there anything else that needed attention, Sir?”

Besides you? said the ghost-light eyes.

His Master regarded him for a moment. Another. A third. As he regarded him, a clawed hand floated out and pinched the book out of Jonathan’s hold. The book flew like a discus into the furthest wall. Outside, a summer storm grumbled. He felt a distant twitch of his senses as the woman and the boy both prickled with worry. Storms were never just storms around the castle.

Jonathan capped the pen and waited. Even devoid of a psychic voice, his eyes spoke with an articulation so clear he might have talked aloud:

Go on. The moment fits the criteria. We are our only witnesses. Fetch a switch off a tree or a broken bottle while you’re at it. Really round out the scene.  

“I came here,” his Master grated with rigid courtesy, “to offer some manner of respite. Perhaps even a token of reward for so expertly assisting in a much-needed Lesson. But I see I was mistaken. If I had known you were in such an ungrateful state, I would have waited. As it stands, it appears you need educating of your own. Poor Mina, she will be so disappointed to learn that her dearly-bought visits are now revoked.” He feigned his own interest in the calendar. Then at the vast window that looked out on the plummeting height of the tower and the half-moon squinting through the thunderhead’s cracks. “Our son’s as well, I think. He really is so spoiled in his free time. Bothering his poor beset Papa night and day when he has so much to do…

“Ah, but then, perhaps this is remiss of me too. I am no child despite my current face. I have run the entirety of this castle and its domain singlehandedly for centuries, all without any novice solicitors to flutter around my office. Likewise for the tending of the castle itself. Really, my friend, what reason is there for you to be so abused as to leave this room at all? To be bothered by maintaining the performance for mother and child? Such a labor, such a trial.

“Well, no more of it! You can stay here, they can stay without, and whenever it comes time to feed, you may empty your veins into a cup. Far tidier that way, and so much closer to the human façade besides! You do want the boy to learn how to pantomime humanity in full, yes? Of course you do. So that is how it shall be from here out. You in your tower, they in the crypt, and I shall endeavor to play go-between for all to the best of my ability. How does that suit you?”

He bared his teeth to the gums with his grin. Waiting for the tears. For the shattering of the dull mask. For the bribe, the plea, the grovel. He did all quite beautifully when the occasion called for it over the years. His wife did well enough, especially for one grappling with the impulse-weight of the Vampire, but Jonathan had it down to an artform. Indeed, he saw the first shine of dew come over the brilliant white-blue of the eyes, the quirk and twitch of his face into a grimace—

No. No, not a grimace.

A rictus.

The corners flinched up before Jonathan could hide it behind his hand. By then it was too late. Assuming the man could’ve stopped himself. A noise that tried to be a sob leapt through his teeth. It came out as a laugh. As did all the sounds that followed. A long hideous string of giggles boiling over into a cackle that brought rivers of tears to his shining eyes. It was not a man’s sound, but the mock-laughter of hyenas, the baying racket of jackals.

Unbidden, he leaned an inch away from his friend. Several inches. The movement snapped Jonathan’s eyes back to him, wide and wild and blazing and for one lunatic instant they seemed to brand the afterimage of the house in Piccadilly on the room, that surreal moment in which he first saw the uncanny Thing that wore his dear friend’s skin; a Thing that could and would kill him with his steel or his own hands. Even in a crowded street.

But that moment passed—long, long ago now, back before the insurance of the woman and her collared will were his precious cudgel—and Jonathan himself seemed wholly oblivious to the recollection. In his face there was only a madness of such profound despair and scorn that the effect dizzied.

“You do not understand. You really truly don’t, do you?” The words were cracked and brittle, barely holding an intelligible shape. “You talk of tokens and punishments. As if I have ever dared to hope, to even think of wanting anything for myself, since that night in October. As if I have not already imagined and lived, expected and met every possible nightmare that God could throw in my path and hers. I lived the first twenty years of a pointless joke of a life already under every bootheel the civilized human world had to offer, as did she. We grasped at crumbs of joy, of hope, of respite from the reality of our lots. This we could do because we had each other and our faith. Faith that for all the ills that humanity dealt out with the good, there was at least a chance for us. There was, we prayed, something better waiting on the other end of life. If we were good. If we did good.     

“But then you had to prove it all wrong. To burst the lie. Not that God is not real. He so very clearly is. But you—all that you are, all that you’ve done, all you will continue to do without so much as a slap on the wrist from the divine Powers that Be—proved that He is fickle. That His love and protection is wholly conditional. That someone as good, as pure, as blisteringly virtuous as Mina could be burned by the Son for another’s sin, abandoned and denied like a used rag for the crime of someone else’s violation. All to have the ransom of her humanity dangled over our heads to spur a handful of strangers onto the hunt after…what? Four centuries’ worth of you owning these mountains and its people, all of them dutifully cowering and dying behind their own half-helpful crucifixes?

“But oh no! Too late! Complications abound! The mother is with child and it does not matter to the good men who swore to slaughter her! And God must have declared them good men, for they did so good with Lucy. Lucy, who has surely gone to Heaven with her slaying…or not. What proof is there? What guarantee is there that anyone with your poison in them can hope for salvation, alive or dead? They saw her corpse and nothing else. They choked on hope and called it evidence that this was the right thing to do. God’s will be done.

“I have already murdered to go against His will. I slew those good men to keep them from making an Isaac and a slaughtered lamb of my Loves. I damned myself then as I had been preparing to damn myself since the moment I woke to her screams and your work. Do you understand?”

Despite the sultry rainstorm air trying to bleed in through the window, the room was cold. Somehow it had grown outright frigid around the bed and the Thing hunching out of his sheets.

“I have nothing. Nothing at all but purpose. Nothing I would dare to want, knowing it will be lost. Nothing I have left to lose, having ceased to believe the lie that I have any potential for joy beyond a reflection of my Loves’ peace. Nothing resembling anything so laughable as respite on any level. I am reduced to a talking trough for the sake of a family who deserves worlds beyond the stain you and I would leave on them without supreme effort. So, go ahead. Play jailor. Play glutton. Play king of the castle and lord above all and whatever else you stopped being able to play with your last captive audience once they were worn down to cackling husks that only had room in themselves for hunger and jeering, knowing that you had no more to threaten them with after taking all that they had.

“In fact? Here. Since I still have some feeling in my left hand. Wouldn’t want you giving me a holiday from work without due reason, and it shall save you the trouble of inventing an excuse to maim the rest.”

As he spoke, Jonathan tore at the bandages. They fell away in grisly ribbons to reveal a far grimmer map of injury than expected. It was worse still when Jonathan twisted to show his back. Bites and bruises patterned him like gruesome puzzle pieces. There were stitches closing two flaps of skin together. In one portion there were small chunks of flesh entirely gone where the teeth had torn them loose.

“Go on. Get on with it. Or would it be better for you if I threw in a scream and a plea to top things off? Pick a script, Sir, let me know.”

Jonathan kept his back to his Master. His Master only stared. Then, with a hand laid gentle as a feather on the ruined shoulder:

“I believe you were right at the start. You do have little to say worth sharing.”

The hand traced the first of the marks. A broad bite clamped along the carotid; the kind that could have torn the entire throat out, Adam’s apple and all. If its maker were not cautious. It was only the ensuing that had been ragged, tearing at muscle more than vein. To make a necessary a point.

As if his friend cared. As if he should care whether his friend cared.

His thumb brushed over a small crater where a canine had torn away so thickly that the flesh dimpled.

Jonathan waited for it to be joined by others like it.

Waited. Waited.

It was almost a full minute before he realized the light touch on him was no touch at all. He turned to see his Master was gone. If he’d had the energy to leave the bed, he might have gone to the door. His Master was on the other side, turning the key over in his hand. As he lingered, a bat summoned to the window. Beady borrowed eyes peered through the glass, waiting for Jonathan to rise, to go to the door and see if it was open.

Should he lock it as he rose? As he tried to turn the knob? Or did he skip the key entirely and simply hold the door shut to watch him scrabble one-handed at it?

The bat watched Jonathan hobble from the bed and to the chair of the writing desk. He dragged the chair to the window. Sat. Stared out through the glass at the moon.

His Master willed the clouds to cover it.

Jonathan stared still.

Still.

Still.

His good hand was the only part that moved. There was something white being fidgeted with. A stick of chalk.

It was only when he felt the woman and the boy heading for the tower that the key was pocketed unused and its owner drifted as a mist through another window. The bat watched as Jonathan pocketed his chalk and stood from his chair upon hearing the child’s chirruping voice echoing up the stairs. Papa-Papa-Papa-are-you-up? Papa hid the bandages and donned a robe before grabbing a book at random for his lap while his good hand pinched cold food from his plate. The boy bounded in, mother in tow, Papa, Papa, look-look-look. Jonathan looked dutifully at the new drawings he’d made, including one done from life of a red fox that let them get this close before running off. Jonathan was duly impressed. His weak hand was in his woman’s fingers, gently held, more gently curling and testing the limp knuckles.

Their Master did not linger long enough to know whether Jonathan would tell her of their visit now or later. It was moot. The scene cloyed.

The bat flew and the mist sank away.

He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been in his women’s chambers. Even the sole woman left in the castle hardly bothered with them. Antique treasures were buried under the modern trappings he’d tossed their way in preparation for England. They would have been with him once he set the groundwork in London. Them and his good friend.

All dust now.

Like the dust now glazing so much of the old rooms. Jonathan had taken a Herculean task upon himself some years prior to try and chip at the disuse and damage of a room at a time between his usual work. The paperwork, the horses, the errands, the cautious playing of mouthpiece and shield between Master and subjects. Between all that, he set himself to the tidying of this hall or that chamber. It was as impressive as it was embarrassing to note whenever his Master passed by one of these rooms in a state of surprise. He’d half-forgotten most of them existed, let alone what they had looked like before the ennui set in. Even the tarnish on the fixtures and doorknobs was cleaned away.

‘Perhaps I’ll blame it on a doorknob next time.’

He curled his lip and shoved the thought away. Then shoved over a bookcase for good measure. Novels in half a dozen languages went tumbling alongside a few expensive baubles. Old gold bookends, glass statues, cut gems so large and hollowed they could hold a wealth of rings and bracelets. All to pair with the tailoring of the wardrobes. These stood at attention beside abandoned easels, instruments, and myriad other distractions. All things given to be taken away. Only as was merited, of course. Such lazy mincing things, his old Loves. Coaxing anything but bile or idleness from them was like convincing a snail to run.

And most of what was goaded had been—

‘You yourself never loved. You never loved!’

—not a fraction of what they had given at the start. Not even their beginnings had amounted to much after the consummation. Stolen or bartered or lured, his Loves had lapsed so quickly into backhanded camaraderie. They had made cats of themselves, knowing they were craved simply for the fact of their presence and it gave them as close to free reign as their Master would ever give. Not enemies, but pets. Pretty faces and musical laughter to populate the nights with more than his own echoes.

For there had been laughter. With him. At him. Sometimes he had even let them claw or snap at him just for the excuse of the punishment he would inflict after. Really, for the sake of something to actually do with them beyond their nightly sniping.

He left the chambers and frowned down the hall. Moonlight fell through the nearest southward chamber, the window clean for the first time in ages, the interior righted and swept. It held books he had read two centuries ago, an old chessboard he had lost a century before that, now with its polished crystal men standing at attention, fallen curtains beaten from their dust and hung anew, paintings and an elderly world map peppered with monsters reframed and set upon the walls. The latter had been drawn to his attention by Jonathan himself, smiling with the boy in his lap, mentioning idly that he had found a map of fascinating creatures he had no name for, might Father know them..?

Father had, of course. The boy had been enraptured for nights with his definitions, with the monsters proven wholly imaginary or simply animals or, he knew from experience, terribly real. Tales he had relayed giddily at the next family meal, his Papa wasted but smiling on between him and his mother who had already heard her dose of legendry down in the crypt. Holding his Loves with two good hands.

He knocked a dresser over as well.

What did he care? What did he possibly care whether his dear friend took some overdue recompense for his betrayal? For upending meticulous plans and striking a scar into his Master’s brow and daring to haggle for the chance to squat here, under his lenient aegis rather than order the woman to tear into him and their brat and bash her own skull to gruel? Really, his friend was lucky to have such a meager toll to pay.

Other than vassalage. Other than slaughtering in Love’s name over God’s and sending the hunting party’s scraps limping away. Other than complaining of his mangling only because it upset the child; because the child had to hide that he was upset, just like Mum and Papa hide from Father. Other than actively laying foundations for a second invasion of England once the boy is grown, selling himself further down the layers of Hell, for Love’s sake. Other than this, yes, most meager. Practically nothing. You are many things, old devil, but the least you can be is honest with yourself. Or are you not still preening to yourself even now at your bargain?

Your losses: A scratch on the head. A two-decade wait. A handful of women.

Your gains: Your mind. Your future no longer being a mere checklist. Your Harkers.

Your friend.

Draga ta.

He first bristled, then sighed. His mind was walled off. There was no spying. He could admit the obvious to himself.

Not now, not tomorrow, but eventually. No need to fret over it. Time is the sea that eats away all stone, however stubborn. He will break given ages enough. It took the weight of the Mountain and its Lessons, but you broke too. And you were better for it. This sour period will pass. They will all break and learn and be pieced into proper shape.

Obvious, obvious. Of course.

His feet took him to the southward room. Map, art, chess, books. One of many rooms with forgotten treasures. Converted and cleaned and left like little oases. For the boy, for the woman, for his Master.

And yet Jonathan’s own room remained bare.

There was a little bookcase, he knew. But was it used? Was there anything else in the man’s room but a bed, clothes, and a desk? Memory ticked back along his mind. All the visits made to drink or talk or, in his friend’s sleep, simply to watch. What was there to that room that was not already waiting for him when his Master first ordered him in?

Sometimes there were drawings or wild bouquets from the boy. Food from the woman whenever he worked into one of those stupors that made him forget his meals. No more than that. Almost five years under the castle’s roof, diving in and out of the place’s uncounted rooms, going to and from the towns or ordering from afar, and there was not a single thing within his personal four walls to suggest it. And was that not strange in itself? True, he might occasionally be locked inside the tower, but not as a constant.

If the point of giving something was to have it taken away, the reverse held true too. He did let his friend roam where he may more often than not. And his friend did make use of it and his limited access to his Master’s coffers.

For anyone other than himself.

Yes, well. He does have his chair and his window. If he has gone so long without need of more, so much the better. Far easier upkeep than some hangers-on you could mention.

The thought failed to raise a smile on him.

He gripped the bookcase before him—jammed end to end with hardcovers of multiple eras, not a volume out of place—and thought for several minutes of tipping it over. Perhaps throwing it into the courtyard. Instead, he walked his fingers along until they landed on a history text. Written in the native tongue, it was one of the less maddeningly misinformed volumes of the late 17th century. Even the illustrations were passable. Jonathan must have overlooked it. He had been as adamant as their son once upon a time when it came to unearthing old histories. More, he was making more than fair leaps with his practice in the different languages of the mountains.

The book left the room with him.

The book stayed with him for the rest of the night and all of the day.

His eyes were sent elsewhere.

The bats slept, but the rats were busy. Or they would be, if he’d had need of more than one left loitering in the shade under Jonathan’s wardrobe. Animal-fear waned to animal-confusion waned to animal-annoyance as hours ticked by and its verminous little belly went empty as it continued to keep watch for its Master. Eventually it was swapped for another, this one peeking through a crack near the roof. Fear-confusion-annoyance under his thrall again. The same went for a third and fourth rat. Their eyes all showed the same tedium.

Jonathan Harker only ever allowed himself leisure when he had no choice. He only had no choice when he was recuperating from exsanguination. It turned out that his idea of this amounted to either laying in bed or shuffling to the chair to look out the window. Sometimes he even stood and gripped the windowsill. And once, just once, he undid the latch and swung the pane open.

Looking out. Looking down.

His good hand moved on the windowsill as he stared. The chalk had returned. Scratch, scratch, scratch it went, all the way along the stone, like a student writing out a long verse. It was the damned shorthand, of course. Yet it couldn’t be a message for the woman. Her mind was sunk deep in the torpor. Deep enough that her Master could filter into her unnoticed. There was hardly anything worth digging for beyond the usual infantile fantasies of his brutal demise and carrying her Loves off into the sunset. All he needed was at the surface.

Just a few notes. Just enough to make sense of the arcane little dashes.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, Jonathan wrote.

His Master angled the latest rat so he could read it all and filter it through the woman’s knowledge. The rat squealed and flinched away into its hole as its Master’s own shock prodded its speck of a mind.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT

FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

He twitched in his coffin, almost rising wholly from the anchor of the death-sleep.

But then Jonathan sighed and closed the pane. The chalk was erased. A return to the chair, a return to the stare. This time with new tears tracking down his cheeks. He didn’t move again until his stomach snarled. The doorknob was checked—unlocked—and he took himself away to eat. His Master’s borrowed eyes followed him all the way down, watching him cook and carve a fish without relish. Watched him try and fail to open the office door—locked—before idling down one of the in-progress halls. He worked in the dust and the decrepit furnishings for a few hours before marching back up to the tower. His hands were empty despite having handled an array of oddments and literature and art.

Up. Chair. Stare. Bed. Wait.

It is nothing but a recent spell. He has been here almost half a decade. He’s not spent his time only in his little labors and bloodletting. Who could? Perhaps he dwells on the pending retribution for his outburst. Waiting for the sword to fall.

And what of the threadbare room? What of the trips that brought home nothing but sustenance to let him feed his family, give or take a new treat for them bartered from what allowance was spared for him?

What of it?

He did not answer himself. Only waited until the woman made her exit to the tower. The boy was called to under the level of her psychic awareness.

Come here, child. I have an important task for you.

The boy was still in his coffin, reading in the heap of blankets and fairy books. He poked his head up over the rim with a look that balanced between worry and curiosity.

A Lesson?

Not at the moment. Unless you wish for a Lesson on why not to keep your Father waiting.

But the boy was already scurrying out of his box and up the steps of the tomb. He paused to look up in wonder at his Father.

“Your face is coming back.”

So it was. Finally. He felt the itch along his cheek and jaw which told him adolescence was waning finally back to his prime, just as the shiver of bone announced the return to full stature. There was a reason he rarely drank this deep.

“It is. The body prefers its natural shape even after an indulgence too far. It may only be another night before I am myself again. But that is too long a wait for this. Here.” He passed the history text down into the boy’s small hands. “Be mindful of not turning to the wrong page. There are sights inside that your poor parents would not approve of.”

An easy bait, that. The boy’s eyes glittered like a little Pandora’s. For an instant. But then a cherubic moue passed over him as he mouthed out the title. What little blood he had in him flamed up to his cheek.

“I don’t think I can read this yet, Father.” The boy admitted as much as though it were a crime.

“I would be stunned if you could, child. No, this is something to bring to your Papa. He is a fiend as much for history as the trudge of modernity and I know he is as eager as you to master all tongues in the mountains. This shall be a fine practice for him as your little tales are for you. Come, I shall walk you up.” He reached to tuck the boy under his arm in the usual way only for the child to shrivel under his hand. His gaze had flicked away from his Father in the same moment as his buzzing little mind tried clumsily to bury something. “Diavol. Is there something you wish to tell me?”

The boy started to shake his head, knew better, and simply shrank deeper into himself. His eyes were nailed firmly to the hardcover. He hugged the volume like a paltry shield.

“Child.”

The lips trembled and cracked at the same time those brilliant ruby eyes rolled up to him. Fear hovered there, but it was not quite of his Father. It was the kind of fear a Father was meant to dispel.

“Are you and Papa fighting?”

“Where would get such an idea?”

His hand reached out again. The boy still cringed, but did not shrink from him. They walked from the tomb and on toward the stairs.

“Since our last meal he hasn’t talked how he used to.”

“Oh, dear. He has gone mute?”

“No. No, he talks. Only he skips over things now. Things he used to bring up all on his own.”

“We are not playing a guessing game, diavol. Speak plainly.”

They had made it to the floors aboveground now. The boy paused mid-step to look up at his Father, his face turned pale as ivory in a window’s moonlight.

“He has not talked about you, Father. Before he brought you up at least once whenever we were together. Asking what you taught me last. Sometimes he’d bring things up like you do. Little hints and edges of things I would have to go to you or Mum to ask about. Papa was the one who brought up journalism—the power that records the world—and told me to ask Mum about it. And he told me that you knew how to find buried treasure on a magic night, that everyone else was too scared to try. And…” His narrow throat worked with a strain. “And he told stories about before me. About how you and Mum and him all came together.”

A crest of the innate fondness rose and fell in the boy’s look at that. He was ever a fiend for the romance of his parents’ history before they came to live in the castle. The romance as their Master had scripted it.

Yet the child’s cheer over it blew out like a candle.

“He won’t talk about you at all now.” The ruby stare flicked up at him. “Not since we ate.”

Not since you tore at Papa like a wolf with a rabbit, Father.

“It has been less than a week, child. For all that I am an occasional favored subject,” he failed to ignore how something twisted in his chest at that, “it is nonsense to expect he keep a checklist of things to speak of. He is recuperating and things will slip a hazy mind. But, to answer your question, no, Papa and I are not fighting.”

The boy did not look away. Even the expected smile could not follow the rules.

And since when does he have rules of acting to follow?

“Was there something else?”

The fear was back. Redoubled. Not the kind dispelled by a Father.

“Father, are you the one who’s been making him sit?”

They had been walking again. Halfway to the tower. Now it was Father’s turn to freeze. Even to gawk.

“What?” The boy shivered at his tone, half-hiding behind the history book. He winced as the white hand at his shoulder grew out its claws. A long breath was forced. The claws retracted an increment. Then, again, “What do you mean ‘making him sit,’ child?”

“Do you remember when I had the Lesson about trancing?”

The one in which mother, child, and Master sank their psychic teeth in dear Jonathan’s mind and almost tore it three ways down the center with their mesmeric quibbling? Yes, vaguely.

“I recall.”

Now the boy looked away entirely. Facing the tower’s direction. Dread came off him like a perfume.

“Do you remember the sharp thoughts in Papa’s head?”

“…I do.”

“Mum said before—,” another lurch of the little throat, almost choking, “before we all jumped in him, when the Lesson started, that she could make him do things. Things people aren’t supposed to do to themselves. Like walk in a fire or make him stay in one place for hours and hours, not doing anything. No sleep or food or anything that keeps Papa alive. She could do that. But she didn’t. She hasn’t been. Papa would know and he’d not be so mad at her that time when she used him in the Lesson.” The child rattled where he stood, intent on the shadows that led up to the tower. “He was sitting at the window before that night. Lots of nights. And days. The first couple times, I thought he was waiting for me. Back when I first learned to do climbing. I snuck up to his door to surprise him. Watching in the keyhole.

“And he sat and sat and sat there, looking out the window. Sometimes he stood up to look closer, sometimes he scratched something out on the stone and wiped it off. Then he’d go back to sitting. It was strange. I didn’t know what it was. But then the Lesson happened and I saw—I saw him—,”

He could not finish and did not need to. His Father remembered.

Vision of a daylit escape. Rising from the chair. No message written on the sill. Just the open pane, his feet on the ledge, and a tipping over into gravity’s arms. Down, down, down. Gone. Among other methods by rope or steel. But the fall came first and crispest to his flailing mind.

Before. He was thinking of it even before that night. Since the boy started climbing. At least two years. And that was just when it was noticed.

The boy was making noise at him again. Accusing.

“Are you the one doing it, Father?”

He would have been mad if it was Mum. We all know no one is allowed to be mad at you. Right, Father?

He struggled with a sudden urge to snatch the child up by his scruff and drag him the rest of the way up to the tower. To hurl him squealing into the room where the loving couple roosted, watching their faces drop slack with horror, and then—

And then..?

Then his mind fell into a red haze. A livid shapeless blank where something like release from the growing storm behind his temples would finally come.

“No, child. I am not responsible.” He stole his hand back with a twitch. “Go the rest of the way yourself. There is something I must see to first.” The boy peered up at him. Doubt in miniature. “Do I need to tell you twice?”

The boy fled. Not walked, not ran, not ambled. Fled. From him.

What of it, old devil? Is this not the proper way? Your adversaries and their spawn cringing and scrambling from you at every turn, quailing under your thumb? This is victory at its height. Is it not so?

He thought of three harpies who mocked and robbed and tittered as he piled their centuries up with gifts and weeping sweetmeat.

He thought of the spur of a delightfully infuriating woman and the admiration of an impossible child.

He thought of his friend, red-handed with the enemies slain for his wife and his Master, slipping silently into servitude and his tithes of blood and obedience, the quiet misery free of charge, Sir.

He thought of his friend, sweeping dust from his mind as blithely as he banished it from his forsaken rooms, varnishing and whetting his nights to an edge finer than a surrendered kukri.

He thought of his friend, who had begun as a mere pending addition to his colony and was now evolved into a thing worth bartering for, worth sheltering and hoarding and honing despite a betrayal paid triply in death and deeds on his Master’s behalf.

He thought of his friend, screaming in his jaws. Clawing his way towards a laugh, look, son, see, son, it’s alright. No, Mina, no, let it be, let him do it, please, Mina, don’t, Mina, do not risk yourself, our boy, please, please.

He thought of his friend, mauled for another’s Lesson, half-dead, streaked in gore and sweat and tears, patched together with inexpert hands. 

He thought of his friend in his desolate box of a room, staring out the window with a piece of chalk as the only barrier between life and death.

He thought of all these things and many more. He went on thinking them as he stalked away to his own room and went to work.

An hour had come and gone since he finished what was needed.

An hour and fifteen minutes since he masked himself from their senses and planted himself outside Jonathan’s door. He listened to the cadence of them as one might strain for snatches of birdsong. Only Jonathan and the boy were audible, but even the woman’s mental chatter carried a bristle on the air. His Harkers made such a warm sound all together.

The sound stopped as he turned the knob.

Three heads lifted like a trio of deer hearing a huntsman’s boot disturbing the grass.

They were huddled together on the bed, as always. The woman guarded her husband’s wounded side. The boy sat under his Papa’s good arm with two books open across their laps. Here was the history book and one of the fairy tale collections. They had been taking their turns reading a page apiece, son reading meticulously through a moment of fantasy in Hungarian while his Papa overdid a silly dull drone in the same tongue over the drudgery of an overpacked page for the child to groan at. Mum would cap the whole act by way of glancing at the page and then thinking a flash of knowledge into their heads. There, done. Thank you, Mum. Laughter abounded.

Until now.

“Goodness, such a hush. Do I interrupt?”

Jonathan, the immaculate actor, smiled and shook his head.

“Nothing that did not want interrupting. For some reason I’m failing to win any appreciation for the recital of 200-year-old politics across the Carpathians. Perhaps it’s my delivery.” The latter was directed half to his Master, half to the boy. He even cupped the child’s shoulder. Hinting. The boy offered him a smile in return.

And tried, “They didn’t make it like a story. Just a lot of, ‘This happened and then this and then this and then this.’ You and Mum could write it better.”

The woman offered a sing-song rebuttal of, Or you could, Dearest. It would make for very thorough writing practice.

The boy made a face of dismay and denial, pretending to take cover behind his book of fables. Cute. Precious, even. The whole charade was. Their Master felt his own grin strain to hold in place as he strolled to the bed. Anxiety thick enough to gag floated on the air.

“I leave such judgment to mother and son. For now, Papa and I must speak in private.” He set his gaze level with Jonathan’s. “There is something I require your assistance with, my friend.” His hand uncurled to take. “Come.”

“Of course,” from Jonathan. Not so much as a tremor. He turned to the woman as his good hand gave the boy a parting hug, then raised it to set in his Master’s palm. “I’m afraid you must take up the mantle of inflicting ancient territory disputes on him—,” But then found his good hand was trapped. By the boy. The woman tensed. Jonathan froze. “Sweetheart…”

“Papa, don’t go. Please don’t go.” The boy held fast around his Papa’s hand and half his arm, a feeble anchor whose attention jumped fitfully among his parents; not including his Father. “Mum, tell him not to. Please?” A hesitant thread of mesmer squirmed in his voice. His Father could have rolled his eyes. This tug-of-war again? Was the child dense? “He’s going to do it again.”

The room chilled.

Jonathan flicked a frantic gaze to his wife, blasting silent urgency through his thoughts. The woman fought an enormous urge of her own to spare her Master a glower before addressing her son:

Dearest. You know that night was only an accident. We are a long way from another meal besides.

Then, thrumming with the weight of a lie:

It’s alright.

But the boy would not swallow it this time. He was an amateur at playing pretend in the way of his parents. A child fed on blood and fairy tales full of monsters who lived in the house as much as without. The boy held onto his Papa and shook his head. Fear crashed up against sorrow and sorrow up against anger.

“It isn’t! You all keep saying it is, and it isn’t! Papa, he hurt you and he did it on purpose! He didn’t kiss you at all! It was just tearing and hurting and—,” a word stuck, choked, flew, “—and lying. He says you aren’t fighting, but you are, or he wouldn’t hurt you and make you sit and be sad and sharp all the time and…and…” His eyes were close to running now, the words melting into a hiccough. “…and he never even said sorry…” The boy forewent his Papa’s arm and clamped around his middle instead, hugging tight and hiding his face in the man’s side. “Papa, don’t go with him…”

Him, him, him.

Was he not even Father anymore?

“Quincey, I promise you we aren’t fighting. Even grownups make mistakes. That’s all that night was.” Then, silk-smooth, “Father apologized already.” He turned to the woman, expecting reinforcements, “Mina, you remember—,” But the woman was looking through him and into the boy. The boy, who had peeked up enough from his sniveling to think out at her, showing the little chat shared between Father and son on the way to the tower. Inhaling it, she looked to her husband with renewed alarm, reflecting their child’s tattling into Jonathan’s mind.

Jonathan lost another shade in his pallor. He turned all but snowy as his wife turned her attention to their Master. A blazing thing, all horror and hate and, surprised that she could still feel it, a new level of shocked disgust.

Even this is not beneath you?

‘This’ being the vision scraped from her son’s spying through the keyhole. Hours and nights and days’ worth of the sight of Jonathan Harker mesmerized by his window.

Her hands had drifted by reflex to grasp her husband, her position shifted in paltry protection of her prize. Likewise for the boy who now clung wholly around his Papa’s waist. Jonathan, meanwhile, appeared truly and entirely terrified to a degree his Master hadn’t seen since their last nights together in that long-ago summer. Afraid for them.

He held them each as best he could before lifting his good hand again—

“My Loves, it’s alright, I promise, I—,”

—and having it caught in his Master’s.

His Master, roiling with ire, pulled him forward. His kin, roiling with fear-hate-love, pulled back. Three iron grips all working against each other.

And what was begun in a battleground of the psyche not so long ago was made flesh upon the bed. Briefly. Just before they heard the pop.

A muffled sound, almost comical. Wet and cracking and quick.

Pop went Papa’s shoulder.

Papa made his own noise to go with it.

The iron grips turned to jelly, their owners flinching back as one. Jonathan caught himself on his working elbow and fought down another agonized note as its own pain throbbed up to the mangled shoulder. This he tried to turn into another smile as his breath came in a huffed stutter of a laugh.

“Oops,” he panted, wavering up on his knees. His only hand went to the sagging shoulder, the hold still too weak to hoist it. “See? Accidents happen.” A hoarse noise, fighting not to be a sob. “Darling, could you..?”

But she was already on him, aligning shoulder to socket, bracing, shoving—

Pop!

—the arm back in place. Another noise from Papa, this time through locked teeth.

“Thank you. See?” The fingers of his right hand flexed experimentally. Weak, but functional. “It’s fine, Sweetheart, it’s fine, you didn’t mean it, no one did, it’s alright…”

But the boy was past mere sniffling. Now he bawled. Red rivers of tears emptied from his eyes, turning his little face wax-white as he scrambled to his Papa, blubbering fragments of apology, of denial, of no no no, Papa, it isn’t alright, no no no. The woman’s eyes were running too. Shame and rage and pain streaked her face like a mask of grief as she wrapped herself around her husband, her mind a litany as garbled as her son’s.

Jonathan Jonathan sorry so sorry Darling my Love sorry sorry sorry sorrysorrysorrysosorry—

“It’s alright,” Jonathan echoed mindlessly back, the most he could do by way of dialogue through pain and panic. “It’s alright,” as his arms, now both water-weak and crippled, folded around wife and child. His back to his Master as if he might shield them.

His Master felt somehow as if he had ceased to be in the room. Now he was watching a lackluster play unfold. See here, the poor little family menaced and ravaged by the monster. The monster looms over them, gloating over the injuries left, waiting to strike again as they weep. The boy cries, the woman cries, Jonathan cries. And why not? The monster gives them something to cry about. As monsters should. As is right. The family belongs to the monster, not the reverse. The monster has no place within the family. Fragile and grating little thing that it is.

See how easily it’s wounded? How quickly it turns on the monster for a mistake? Not even his own! Not entirely his own, at least.

This time.

So. You can admit it.

The boy, the woman, Jonathan, all crying. All huddling against him. Away from him.

As if any of them can spare the loss of blood. As if they expect him to open his veins and refill them to make up for their own idiot blubbering. As if he can waste more of himself on their fumbling and failures. As if he has not hollowed himself of everything, feeding his blood and his time and his toil and his soul until he has only a husk left for himself, picture of the good husband and father, give give give, work work work, feed feed feed, and all they offer him is more need, more pain, more excuses, sorry, sorry, I did not mean it, Papa, I did not mean it, Darling—

He watched Jonathan raise his head enough to look over the heads of his Loves. A single pining glance at the window.

I did not mean it, draga mea.

“Enough.” It was not the bark he wished it to be. He was not even sure if his Harkers heard him. But they didn’t need to. Within a heartbeat he had shot forward snaked his arm around Jonathan’s middle. He hoisted the man like a doll, shock alone making him flinch and scrabble at the hold. The child keened piercingly and the mother’s mind erupted with hate-panic. Her Master flung an order out.

Hold the boy. Do not follow.

The woman spasmed against the order until every cord of muscle stood out from her like wire. Then she was giving a mute howl as she fell upon her son, snatching him up and trapping him in her arms. The boy shrilled deafeningly and fought his mother in a blur of little limbs, tugging, reaching, kicking, begging.

“Let go! Mum, let go! Papa! Papa!”

The boy’s face was a horror of running blood, his eyes turned to marbles of red glass.

Jonathan was little better. His Master had not allowed him to stand. He would waste time if he had; would have tried to dawdle, to scramble back and soothe the tantrum away, to trap himself and his Master another endless minute in this squalling hell of a room. So his Master had hoisted him up first as a farmer might trap an errant lamb under his arm, then threw him over his shoulder.

Then moved to the window.

The boy shrieked.

“Papa! Papa! No, let him go! Papa!”

“Please,” Jonathan’s voice was a hoarse whisper. His hands clung without strength to his Master’s back, trying to drag himself loose, straining towards mother and child like a dying flower bowing toward the sun. “Please, Sir, not like this. I have to go to them, have to explain things, I have to—,”

SLEEP.

Jonathan became a dead weight over his shoulder. The window was opened. Another scream from the boy, this one so great it turned into a nigh rupturing cough.

“Papa,” a reedy sound, “Papa, wake up, Papa..!”

Out the window they went.

Mid-descent, monster turned to mist, carrying his prey like a leaf in a breeze. Down and away and around the castle’s side. Finding the way back in that no eye or mind within the castle could discover.

Jonathan woke half an hour later.

He did so with a surprising lack of pain. As sleep melted off, he became aware of new wrappings layered on both shoulders. The left’s ragged side was plastered with a cooling sleeve of linen strips. His right was bound with something that felt like a fuzzing velvet numbness trapped under its bandages. Each side ate away their respective aches.

“Alchemy as men know it never did manage to turn iron to gold. But it bridged many gaps between simple medicine and magic’s bending of bodily law.”

Jonathan raised his head enough to see his Master sat at the opposite end of the bed. If one considered it a bed. They were in a nest of blankets and cushions that had been layered into a den of alien stonework. While not musty in the way of other ancient bedding strewn around the castle, they carried the spiced stamp of aromas from the work that was done in the adjoining room. Over his Master’s shoulder he could see a heavy oaken door left a crack open. A lamp glowed there, highlighting glass and clay vessels arranged on a far worktable. Some smoked. Some glowed. Some seemed to look back at him.

“Nature would have you heal over the course of weeks. Likely months. Supernature,” his Master gestured at the bandaged shoulders, “will see you healed within the next two nights at the latest. Of course, this will hardly matter if you decide to forsake your little chalk notes and throw yourself from the window.” Jonathan held his tongue as his Master sunk both eyes into him like brands. “The boy did not catch what you wrote on the windowsill, if it’s any consolation. You could let them go on believing I have been so monstrous as to force my poor friend, poor Papa, poor Darling, to sit dull and dead before the window for hours upon hours whenever he does not work or sleep or bleed. I am so suddenly the only monster under this roof as well as Master.”

Jonathan swallowed. Once, twice.

“Apologies. I shall—I shall explain things to them. Please, forgive me, Sir.”

“No.” Jonathan stared at him. Worry and confusion clashed and crumbled into each other behind the ghost-light eyes. “No,” his Master echoed, “this is not something that is forgiven any more than it is forgotten.” His hands clenched to white stones in his lap. “How long have you been like this, Jonathan?”

Do not lie.

Jonathan twitched but failed to catch his tongue in time.

“The first time was in mid-May. Back when I first started to suspect you. The prospect rose and fell in me more than once until the end of June. If it were not for the chance of seeing Mina again, I would have walked into the wolves on that last night together. I was still thinking of cliffs and wolves the day I escaped, prepared to take that route rather than have the Weird Sisters’ teeth pin me here forever. But those thoughts came and went.

“It wasn’t until October 3rd that the urge came back and never left. That was when I stopped being sure whether or not Mina would heed the threat of death potentially leading to undeath. I know she still thought of high buildings. Of train tracks. Fires. So I started thinking of them too. Just in case. After November, after the killing, I just kept thinking it. Whenever I was not busy or seen or sleeping. I have heard that suicides are damned outright. Murderers of good men too. I have thought sometimes that I could take that leap and die, but I would not know the difference once I woke to Hell. Sometimes I think I jumped an eternity ago and just can’t remember.  

“I know I cannot risk it, of course. It would risk them too and leave them hurting besides. All it amounts to now is a sort of meditation. And I do appreciate the view. It is no more than that, I swear.”

“You swear,” his Master nodded. “You swear in this particular moment. Just as, not so long ago, caught in a snare, you thought of taking yourself away in earnest. The leap or the rope or the knife reached for in full daylight. A most effective slap to rouse your greedy little family from their play. But it does not bode well for this, your current oath. Only a thought, only a meditation. Not to worry. This is what you would have me believe?”

“Thought is not action, Sir. I would not still be here if it was.”

“Indeed, you are here. And doing what? Ah, let me specify. Doing what, besides working and bleeding?”

Jonathan frowned at him.

“Raising my family.”

“Which falls under work.”

A deeper frown, almost stormy.   

“It hardly feels so, Sir. My Loves are not the burden you would paint them as.”

“Even if I believed you, you still have not answered my question. What are you doing, Jonathan Harker? What are you doing solely for yourself? You stare out a window that you must convince yourself every day not to leap from. You clear dust away from every room in the castle but your own. You touch a book only when you must be seen reading, you sing only when there is an ear besides yours to hear it, you wear your smiles the same way a maid dons her uniform. You do not answer me because you have no answer to give.” Lantern eyes burned. “In the five years since you have been here, you have done nothing but hollow yourself of everything. Blood and fealty and life and love. Yes, true, you live. Because that too is in your itinerary. Just another chore of maintenance.”  

 Jonathan sat up fully now.

“And?” A whisper. A thing of lead. “What does it matter?”

Why do you care?

“It matters because, even without a stomach, I am not immune to nausea. Call it secondhand indignation if you like. I have made deals with many devils and played pupil to the best of them. You see what bounty such Lessons have afforded me compared to,” he waved a clawed hand in Jonathan’s direction, “the usual lot of misery that comes to the would-be hero and the practicing martyr. If I should ever get around to some dire retribution from kismet, it will only be after nigh half a millennium of unchecked power and slaughter with nary an angel flying by to chide me for my play. Even Faustus got to have his allotment of pleasure before Mephistopheles tore him to shreds and flung his soul to Hell. But you? You spoke the truth before.

“You have nothing. You began with scarcely more than that. A narrow starving life with only the distraction of a woman who hardly merited the pedestal you lifted her on for playing nursemaid and starring, as so many muses do, within a theatre of high romance you painted around her; she, a soul as commonplace as a grain of sand in a desert. For her, you damn yourself. Her and the unholy miracle of the boy. You started with crumbs and gave away all you had and more, gaining nothing but the safeguarding of others’ fortune. Others’ lives. While you whore your life and veins away and tell yourself a chair and a window are sufficient for the last dregs of self you permit to exist.

“Do not mistake me. It is hilarious in the abstract. I would laugh if you were on a stage. But you are here and real and proving insufferable with your insistence on denying yourself any opportunity to do something other than play the role of grist in a mill.” He bared his teeth. It was not a grin. “But I waste my time telling you what you already know, yes? You have clearly made peace with this Spartan half-life. You did not even bat a lash at the prospect of mother and child’s visits being stripped away.” Jonathan’s breath stopped as his Master looked down on him. Lantern eyes now infernos. “Until tonight. There is a crack in the performance now. Father is suddenly a monster and he has stolen poor Papa away.

“And here, in this space, Papa can never be found. Not even by his wife’s prying mind.” White knuckles rapped against the strange black stonework. “It was not easy making this place. A genius loci can only flex so much. But the Scholomance exists in a space that is not possible and it was with brick from that Mountain that I formed these walls. A little sanctum away from Earthly meddling. Back before my condition required the grave soil. How nice to know it will not go to waste.”

Jonathan’s face fell as his Master stood. In less than a blink his Master was at the door, then through it, filling up the threshold. Perhaps too late it occurred to him that the nest of a room had no light lit in it. Not so much as a candle. The only illumination left was the faint glow at his Master’s back and the fires that were his Master’s eyes.

“You have a new task before you, my friend. Something to meditate on without distraction. No work. No window. No wife or child. The task is this: Think of something to do, to be, to want, that serves only you. An addition to your life that you can drop into the raw pit you have carved out of yourself to feed the clamoring maws of your dear family.”

His hand curled around the handle.

Jonathan’s eyes were wide and bright as stars.

“Wait—,”

“In the meantime, for as long as you fail in this endeavor, you will be here. To the boy and his mother, you will be a ghost. Undetectable by mind or sound or scent. They will only know you live by the taste of you in the cup. But do not rush yourself. Take however many nights or years you need.”

Jonathan fought his way out of the tangle of covers.

“Please, wait—,”

“I’m certain they will take it well.”      

The door shut and bolted. A moment later there was a hammering in the dark interior, fists drumming against the thick oak. From the exterior it sounded barely louder than the patter of rain. The shouting only the buzz of an insect. Rain and insect grew slightly louder when the laboratory’s light was put out, erasing even the outline of the door. All was dark. Hammer, patter, shout, buzz.

Silently, the Master of the castle sighed.

He just as silently took a seat outside the door. His eyes were their own strange points of light in the pitch and they glanced down into the open face of his pocket watch. It stood out clearly enough to him. One hour. Two. Three. His friend carried on at intervals through them all. Shouts or sobs, pleas or pounding.

Out in the castle, mother and child were hunting. Father and Papa were nowhere to be found. They threw out the feelers of their psyche as far as they could go, scented the air, raced and called to each other on every floor and through every room. Nothing, nothing. The woman even dared to breach her Master’s bedroom.

Ah, close! So close! Did she detect her husband there? An echo of his presence?

Of course she did.

Her husband was the only one other than her Master to be allowed in that room, and then only with their Master’s beckoning. Even if she had no reason to doubt the freshness of the hint, there was still no following. Not into this space that only a student of the Mountain could detect, let alone enter. She came and went within walking distance of her beloved. All as he screamed out for her. For their boy. For their Master.

By the fourth hour the room had quieted.

He held his ear to the crack:

“Please…” came a croak almost too thin to count as a voice. “Please, I don’t understand this. What do you want from me? What am I supposed to say? Just tell me, please…”

I did. I did and you still cannot make sense of it. Draga mea, has this been you your whole life?

He wanted to laugh.

A curse was mouthed instead.

He stood, relit the lamp, unbolted the door, and found his arms suddenly full of his friend. The bandaged arms clung to him while a face streaked in tears and sweat ground into his chest, eyes somehow still running. He made a note to force a carafe down the man’s throat before he passed out. For now, he let his friend hold to him, shaking.

“Sir, Master, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for angering you. I only want to understand what has to be done to mend this. Please.”

He held his friend in turn, stroking through the white cloud of hair.

“That you say this means you have not taken the order to heart. How is it such a trial to want something? Whether you fear it being taken or not, how is it you cannot even name a thing you desire?”

“I don’t know.” The words left his friend like millstones. He seemed almost to deflate in his Master’s arms. “I don’t know.”

“You could not have been so before you were here. Before you were mine. Even the destitute will dream. Did you not want for anything then, however meager?”

Quiet unspooled for almost a minute. There was a small breath. He waited.

“…Wanting gets conditioned out of some lives,” was his friend’s answer. “Need comes first. Need is always there, taking up your mind and your time. Urgency. Efficiency. Every cent and minute hoarded. Books were a luxury. Second and thirdhand purchases, the rest from the library. Theatre was a treat to reserve once a season at most. No concerts, no revelries, no records playing in the apartment on a phonograph never afforded. The first time we did not know need was after the man I considered a father died and left the gift of his will behind. A house and a business and a bank account that finally did not sting to look at, traded into our hands at the loss of another precious life.

“Between Lucy and Hawkins, there was not even a heartbeat in which to be more than performative in appreciating our changed fortune. Not before the trap of you sprang again. Van Helsing’s call to arms. You know the rest. Even Mina, even the blessing of our child, those priceless wants above all others, were made into another thunderbolt from Fate. Another proof that some people are just not meant to want, let alone have. No matter how great or small a treasure. I learned that Lesson well enough even before you. And so I have schooled myself out of it. Wanting.

“The part of a mind that craves for itself has been atrophied and beaten into dust in me. But if you say I must want, I can perform otherwise. Tell me I am sick of the window and I shall board it up. Tell me to read, I will read. Or sing a song. Or dig up old recipes to enjoy even when I am not cooking to flavor myself. Or whatever else. Even while you all sleep. Even with no one looking.” Jonathan pulled his face away from his Master’s heart and turned bleary eyes up to him. Blue ringed in rose. “Whatever fixes this. Please.”

Throw him back in. He will do better in a week. A month at most. Do it.

He sensed mother and child outside the castle now. Running, circling. They had taken clothes from Jonathan’s wardrobe and, against the Lesson so gravely taught, son watched mother order the wolves to her, demanding they take her husband’s scent and search, go! The wolves would lead them to the usual route Jonathan took to the towns, no more. But they were desperate. Still weeping. Bloodless and starving for grief.

Do it.

Jonathan stared at him. Waiting for another blow. For a laugh, a sneer. A cold hand tossing him back into the dark. The dog laying before his Master’s rising boot, knowing the fine quarry brought home was no excuse for not wagging his tail as he did so.

A fine dragon you are, old devil. Are you so soft now? You laid out the terms. He has not satisfied them. Do it. Do it!

“Fifteen years. That is how long the boy has left to nurse from you if you have your way. Fifteen more years until he is a man, innocent of taking a single life. Likewise for his mother. Because you feed us all. Wasting and wasting until that final night. Do you expect to die and remain dead at that hour? Do you think I would lose you, even if Mephistopheles himself came up to collect?”

“No,” barely a breath. Jonathan seemed to wilt another inch as it left him.

“No. The wait ends. Your unlife begins. Which means what?”

Jonathan could not bring himself to speak. Only looked away. His Master thumbed away another tear.

“Eternity in potentia,” he answered himself. “Centuries. Longer. We both know the Vampire is made of its wants before anything else. Such is our nature. I will give credit to dear Mina for her control. She has far more cause for loathing me than her Sisters did and she does admirably against her own desires. Even if she only has as much will as my own allows, it is a thing of iron in itself. But what of you, draga mea?”

Recognition pinched Jonathan upright again. The ghost-light eyes gaped with what was uncertainty or else the wish to be uncertain.

“You will no longer be as you are. No more playing vassal. No more wearing the yoke of mere servility. No more stalling in your martyr’s Pit. You will be Vampire, you will be want. And what will you do if there is nothing of the latter there to catch you? What shall you do with infinity? Will you only be as my missing shadow? Only your woman’s faithful dog? Will you still have the boy, grown and whole, pulling at your apron strings? A servant, forever caught between bowing to others or laying as a corpse in the moonlight for lack of anyone to serve. That you would be for eternity?”

The hand that wiped the tear moved to Jonathan’s jaw. It held like a strut against his attempt to turn away.

“I always kill my pests. I may torture an enemy before his end. But I would ultimately be rid of them, not leave them to such a Hell as the one you seem so dedicated to crafting for yourself.”

The hand was a snare and it kept Jonathan facing forward. Straight into the basilisk gaze and the mesmer at its heart. An order that was a plea.

“Think. Think of one single thing you want for yourself tonight. Just one.”

The trance worked deep. Snapping at the heels of Jonathan’s mind like a hound after a fox. Further, further, down, down, through a pinhole of a tunnel into the abandoned gloom where the carcasses of hope and yearning had been thrown away. The trance dug. The trance prodded. The trance found a coin’s worth of treasure, like dead men’s gold hidden under a blue flame.

Here was another view from another window. After the departure of a captor. Before the arrival of the hypnotic mists and their hungry smiles. Sweetly in-between, here was the sight of the moonlit world back when it had been a beautiful balm. A sole comfort in his terror but a heartbeat from being spoiled by his hostesses’ threat.

Jonathan Harker had seen small shapes moving on the wind. An owl soaring far below. Moths fluttering past like living petals. So high, so close to the peaks and stars, a needle of nostalgia had found him. The boy within the young man who had wished with the hopeless fantasy of all hungry children looking up from their sparse plates and miserable families and through tatty curtains at the open and untouchable sky. Wished with sweet-somber futility for escape. For…for…

Jonathan spoke the wish aloud. A last wet trail fell from his bloodshot stare. His Master wiped this too.

And found Jonathan’s mouth with his before willing him back to sleep.

Mother and child were returning from the road. She had taken the boy up in her arms again, cursing as she half-ran, half-flew. The child had ceased sobbing, at last, but he rattled in her embrace. This had never happened before. They had not thought such a thing could happen. That anyone, let alone Papa and Father, could simply disappear. Especially from her senses. It was impossible to lose track of them. She always knew where they were. Always.

And now…

“Mum?” She had stopped. Her head cocked like a wolf’s, ears pricked high, eyes flaring. “Mum, what is it?”

There. They’re right there. How?

“Where, Mum? Are they close?”

She didn’t answer. Only took off at another rush, firing herself and her son like a spectral bullet through the forest. Perhaps the boy would have been more stunned than afraid that his mother could be such a blur if not for his worry. His senses were smaller than hers, still reaching and searching for whatever it was she’d found. It wasn’t until the outline of the castle came into view that he skimmed the presence of his fathers on the air. They were at the castle, but not within it.

Two frantic sets of eyes hunted around the grounds, trying to make sense of how the mingled presences could be so near and invisible at once. Closer. Closer.

Up.

They craned their heads until the moon met their gaze. That and the two shapes against the sky.

Jonathan was held close in his Master’s arms. The two of them were a speck against the stars. A moment more and they were drifting down to the ground. Jonathan was set lightly on his feet and almost knocked off them as his son clamped around his waist. His wife almost finished the job by locking her arms about his mending shoulders. Their Master watched on at a careful distance; no sudden moves to alert the herd.

The next hour was devoted to running both men’s tongues ragged.

Yes, diavol, he had lied. There had been a fight and he was embarrassed for it. But it was not what caused his Father’s tearing at Papa. That was his Father forgetting himself, forgetting how easy Papa was to break. Father grew angry at himself first for the mistake, then again when Papa was upset for frightening their son, and then most of all when, old man that his Father was, he had forgotten a remedy he had once known to cure away the injury and make Papa well again. It made him stormy, as all saw. He hated having a solution just out of reach.

But he had remembered at last. That was why he had come to take Papa away that evening. To put his mistake right. But then had come all the hurtful words from their harsh-tongued child, the tears, the fretting, and then that nasty surprise of a second mistake. Again, poor Papa was forced to pay the price for an unruly family. And Father had snatched him away before more pains could add up.

He had gone to a place that, he will be honest, did not exist properly inside the castle. Like a ballroom tucked into a woodshed. It was where his older magic was stored, back before Father was all that he was, back when he had need to worry about skin and bone. There he took Papa to heal. And to talk.

About his sitting and staring. About how he did this for lack of joy alone. Papa made himself so busy and tired that there was nothing left in him to play or take pleasure all on his own.

Was it the sharp thoughts again, Papa?

A tremor here from the boy. Begging, but bracing.

No, son, only absurd ones. The kind that grownups do not like to admit out loud because they do not wish to seem foolish or idle. Other things too. Little things that would need asking for. But your Papa hates to ask for anything, and so he hid all that in his head too, so he would not ask at all.

Yet Father had made him talk and ask and it turned out it really wasn’t such an absurd thing at all.    

“I asked to fly.”

“Like us?”

“Like you. Isn’t that silly?”

“It’s silly that you didn’t ask! I always wanted to fly too, seeing Mum and Father do it so easy.” The boy held tight to him again, grinding the coagulation of old tears against his Papa’s neck. In a small voice he shuddered, “I thought you wanted to do something else. I thought…”

“I know, Sweetheart. I’m sorry for scaring you all before. I would never listen to the sharp thoughts like that. It’s just a sour part of imagination. That’s all.” He rested his chin atop the boy’s head. One hand cupped him close. The other looped around the woman’s shoulders, the ease of the gesture proving the strength of the medicine. Her eyes dug in his. Knowing and shelving the truth for later. “I promise,” Jonathan breathed.

…Do you still want to fly?

“Once you have another meal in you, Darling. I think we are all too worn out for now.”

“No,” the Master intoned from the castle’s shadow, “You need not soften it. You are worn out, all of you. I remain the only one overfed and hale. I shall still be so once you are ready to feed again.” He waved his hand. “I shall skip my helping at the next feeding, lest I burst like a tick.” The boy perked up in his Papa’s lap while his mother narrowed her eyes. Father never skipped his taste of Papa. Not ever. Father only grinned. “But before Papa plays family dinner again, it must be agreed that he needs a holiday. I believe he had some ideas he wished to share with you.” His gaze flicked to Jonathan. “Is it not so, draga mea?”

Mother and child each recognized the term as it hit the air.

The woman was considerably less enthused than her son, who knew the words from the fairy tales. The magic words between one true love and another.

Jonathan distracted them both with the first small thing: A phonograph and new music to play on it. Perhaps even sheet music of their own, if any of them would dare to risk each others’ ears with the practice.  

What was a phonograph, Papa? Was that like the music boxes he’d brought home for them?

Something like that…

Chatter carried on under the moon until Jonathan’s stomach growled. The woman stopped just short of carrying him off to the kitchen. Master and child dawdled behind. The latter pretended interest in a moth that had landed first on a flower, then a stone, and then up on his Father’s shoulder like a great grim tree.

But the moth flew off and still he did not look away.

“…Yes, child?”

“I’m sorry, Father.” Thank every god below the Earth, he did not bring himself to tears as he said it. Though he looked close. “I should never have thought you’d hurt Papa.”

“Ah, but I did hurt him. We all did. By accident, with carelessness, without ill intent, still he was hurt. We are fortunate that he is so forgiving a soul and strong enough to weather us. Such men as him are rare. I do not think I have met another like him in four hundred years.” The child’s eyes shined just short of another bloody tide he could not afford to lose. Sensing this, he snuffled and squinted and fought the weeping back. Good boy. “He will be alright. Amends will be made and we shall not repeat our mistakes with him. Papa does so much out of love for us. We will do the same, yes?”

He held out his hand. The boy forsook it to duck wholly under his arm in his accustomed spot, huddled close as a pup to his kin. The open hand drifted down to stroke his hair.

“Yes,” the boy nodded against him, scrubbing the last dry tracks of tears away on his suit. “Promise.”

“Good. No more tears tonight, diavol. There is nothing to cry about.”

[bucky-barnes-lover]

Kinktober day 16: Vaginal Fingering

Fic: Harry Styles

Harry Styles x Fem reader

Warnings: SMUT!! 18+, Vaginal fingering, Proposal/Engagement, Poorly written smut.

746 w.c

This was supposed to be a Drabble but I got a bit carried away. Not proof read because I'm tired and it's 1 am so you'll just have to deal with the spelling mistakes/errors. P.S sorry if it's really bad

The lights flickered as I exited the stadium. Colourful feathers lay on the ground and glitter decked the seats. Happy chatter echoed throughout the building, however a couple silent tears didn't go unnoticed by me. I could tell everyone was really happy about seeing H perform his last show in Melbourne but I could also tell many of the fans were upset that the night had come to an end.

"Hi baby" I greeted, as I made my way to the dressing room at the back of the stadium.

"You sang so well tonight!" I exclaimed, planting a chaste kiss on his lips while I ran my hands through his brunette curls.

"Thanks Love, I'm so glad you could come and watch tonight." Harry admitted, returning my kiss.

Leaving him to get changed from his stage attire, I took a seat on a sofa nearby. Sarah came over to me, holding baby Scout, that she had left with her mum for the duration of the show.

"You played so well tonight Sarah" I enthused, earning a blush from the drummer.

"Thanks y/n. I'm so glad you could be here, At mine and Mitch's last show."

"I'm so sad you guys are leaving" I complained. Leaning over to give Sarah a hug and kissing baby Scout's face.

"Have fun on your break Sarah. We'll miss you here" I choked up before allowing a small sob to escape my lips.

A couple minutes later, after Sarah had scurried off to find Mitch, Harry came out of the dressing room. Dressed in a hoodie and trackies with a big smile on his face. He walked over to the sofa and took out a small velvet box out of his pocket. Kneeling down on the ground, he started,

"Y/n. You have been by my side ever since Fine Line. You have come to every single one of my Love On Tour shows in the past 3 years. You have supported me through my tough times and when I've been at my weakest. You love to cheer me on, and to make me happy. You bring the kind of joy into my world that nobody else ever has. And for this, I would love to spend the rest of my life with you. I love you with all my heart and soul. Would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?" He asked as he held back tears.

I didn't know how to react. Obviously I knew the answer but the proposal had come so suddenly, I never would've guessed it would be today. Without a second thought I screamed out,

"YES H!!" "I love you with all my heart! I would love to be your wife."

A small sob escaped my lips as Harry stood up, sliding the gorgeous rose gold band on my ring finger.

He leaned in, kissing my lips passionately. Applause erupted from around us, 'Congratulations' and 'I'm so happy for you two' were heard through all the noise.

A couple hours after the proposal, Harry and I had returned to our hotel room. He had just gotten out of the shower, and I was lying on the bed in some sexy lingerie. He walked over and lay next to me on the bed. Leaning in, I kissed his lips. Within moments, it had become a full on make out sesh. Harry was grabbing my hips and grinding himself into me, I was running short of breath but didn't pull away. Moans escaped the both of us as H slid his hand down to my panties and pulled them aside. Harry broke the kiss as he whispered in my ear,

"My god darling. So wet for me already."

Sliding a finger in through my folds. My brain fogged up as he started pumping in and out of my soaking wet cunt. Going harder and harder. Removing his finger then pushing it back in without warning.

My moans got more and more desperate, and the thought of release got me screaming his name.

"Oh, H! Please, harder!" I moaned. Harry's thumb started working my clit as he inserted a second finger. He caught my lips just as I was about to let out a loud moan. Relief washed over me as my orgasm hit.

"Good girl" He said as he removed his fingers.

Harry kissed my forehead and helped clean me up. He had another shower, but this time with me. Let's just say we had some more fun in the shower. 😏

[cutielando]

win | george russell

synopsis: in which he finally gets a win

pairing: george russell x girlfriend!reader

my masterlist

Waiting for your first win ever was excruciating.

Going into every race thinking it might be the one and then slowly losing hope as the race would progress, realizing there was even more waiting in store before it would happen.

That's how George felt.

He had been in Formula 1 for quite some years now, but his win seemed nowhere near happening. He was slowly losing hope, getting used to the idea that he wouldn't win a race in the near future.

His family kept reassuring him that his time would come, but George's faith in himself left his body with each race that passed.

You knew how frustrating it must be, seeing all the drivers around you consistently getting wins and you struggling to get just one.

It was tough on someone's mind, it would ruin their thinking.

You, however, didn't let yourself think like that. He had been so close to winning so many times, you could feel it in your bones that his win was approaching with fast steps.

And oh, how right you were.

♡♡♡♡♡

Silverstone was a fan-favorite track on the F1 calendar for the fans, but it was even more special to both George and you.

You met at Silverstone, you started attending every race after it and became George's good luck charm, it was his home race and the UK was home for the both of you.

Plenty of reasons that supported your certainty that George would get his win at Silverstone.

He had been a nervous wreck all weekend, aware of how much the track meant for everyone, including you and his family, and he wanted to perform well.

"Baby, can you calm down? You're stressing yourself out for nothing" you had tried calming him down at your apartment in the morning before he had to get to the circuit.

He had barely slept, didn't want to eat anything ahead of the day and had been pacing all around the apartment since the moment he opened his eyes.

"I can't. Don't you realize how much is at stake here? I can't disappoint everyone again and not win this one. I'm going to be a failure and everybody will hate me" your heart broke when you heard George talk about himself so poorly.

You quickly got up and jumped in front of him, finally making him come to a halt and stop pacing around.

"You listen to me, Georgie. Nobody is going to hate you if you don't win today. I know you think they will, but they won't. Their support and love for you doesn't depend on whether or not you get a win today or in the next race. You're still young, baby, you have so much time to show the potential and talent you have, so many great years ahead of you. Your win will come at the right time. Please don't be so hard on yourself, I hate seeing you talk so badly about yourself" 

He bit his lip but nodded, kissing you on the forehead before bringing you in for a hug.

"I'm sorry for being like this. I just want to make you and our families proud" his voice was muffled slightly because he had buried his face in your hair, but you understood him nonetheless.

"We're proud of you no matter what. We just want you to have fun and be safe. If you end up winning, we'll cheer you on. If you don't end up winning, we'll still cheer you on. We'll love you no matter what" you stood on your tiptoes and pressed your lips against his, silence sealing the promise that you would love him no matter what.

It was all he had needed to hear, his body slowly relaxing under his touch.

And it was also all he had needed to hear to motivate him to win today.

♡♡♡♡♡

You had never seen George drive so well. 

From the moments the lights had gone out, he had been driving like his life depended on it. He was overtaking like it was second nature, battling for position with Lewis before the team had ultimately made the decision to switch cars because George was faster, racing Max for the first place like he had never before.

The whole garage was on the edge of their seats, staring at the screens with anticipation.

It wasn't until George had overtaken Max and crossed the checkered flag first that the chaos and celebrations had really begun.

Engineers high-fiving each other, shaking hands and screaming in delight, you and George's parents hugging in a corner away from the madness.

You hadn't even realized you had been crying until Alison had wiped off your tears, laughing when you noticed that she had been crying too.

As you walked out of the garage with the rest of George's team and waited for him to return to the pitlane, you couldn't help the excitement flowing through your veins.

All the sweat, the tears, the bad races, the bad strategies, the hopes and dreams of being a Formula 1 Grand Prix winner had finally paid off.

George had officially become a race winner.

And you couldn't be more proud of him.

When you saw his car approaching and parking in front of Number 1, you felt more tears run down your cheeks as you observed him getting out of the car. 

The moment his helmet had come off, his eyes were searching for you in the crowd. When he spotted you, he gave his helmet to one of his engineers and quickly jumped over the barriers, scooping you up in his arms and twirling you around.

"You did it!" you exclaimed in his ear, holding onto his body tightly.

"I did it for you" he said, kissing your neck before putting you down.

"I'm so proud of you, my love. You can't even understand" you said as you held his face in your hands, running your fingers through his damp hair.

"I couldn't have done it without your support" he said before leaning down and kissing you, smiling a little when you both head his team wolf-whistle behind you.

As you stood there in the pitlane embracing each other, celebrating his first ever win, you knew that you would overcome everything life would throw at you together.

The win didn't just belong to George.

It was a win for both of you.

Yours.

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[hessafeelsfordayss]

Some of my thoughts about Bridgerton season 2 (these will be out of order) MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS:

• First off, I just want to start out by saying that Simone and Jonathan's performances were out of this world. You could feel every emotion they portrayed; you could feel the yearning, the frustration, the passion, the angst, every single time they were in a scene together. They brought Kanthony to life better than anyone else could have ever dreamed of.

• Because of them, Kate and Anthony's chemistry was unmatched. Every touch, every lingering stare, every almost kiss, had my heart fluttering and me biting my fist from pure excitement. During their intimate moments it almost felt like I was intruding on their privacy. I felt like Anthony and Kate were real people, and not just actors playing a part. All I'm saying is Jonathan and Simone better get all the rewards!

• I've already stated this, but Lord Featherington and Portia's scheming 'romance' was really boring to me and also quite gross. The fact that it came out of nowhere and the lack of chemistry was a turn off.

• But I'm so so proud of Portia for choosing her girls without hesitation. She has made some questionable decisions no doubt, and isn't the best at showing her affection towards them, but I know she does love them and want them to be happy. If she didn't she would have gone with Lord Featherington, because she obviously did have feelings for him. Big props to her for that.

• I'm gonna get hate, but I don't really like what they did with Edwina's character. In the book Edwina is more understanding and happy for her sister, and knows exactly what she wants in a husband, but then again Anthony didn't propose to her in the book 😒 I can understand her feeling hurt, truly I can, but I feel like she took it too far when she told Kate that they are only half sisters. That was a low blow, especially considering Kate felt she needed to earn her way into their family, and set aside her own happiness to ensure that Edwina and Mary got theirs first.

• Even when she wasn't blind to their feelings anymore, and she could see how much they truly cared for each other, she was still acting bitter and treating Kate poorly and calling her an unkind person and not forgiving Kate until the accident. Edwina in the book would never do these things. I still love her though. She is only human after all.

• I saw a lot of growth with Colin towards Pen this season. The way he stared at her when he first saw her after a while, him protecting her and her family and telling her she's special to him... Only for him to once again regress at the end. I love angst though, so I'm not really bothered by what he said. It makes me think that in season three it will play a big part in his and Penelope's story. What I am upset about is how he laughed at the expense of her with the guys. That was really messed up, especially after he had just got done telling her she was special to him and that he will always protect her.

• I better see Penelope distancing herself from him, or better yet straight up ignoring him. I want him confused and I want him to pine for her presence without even knowing that's what he is doing. Most of all, I need Penelope to have suitors. I need obliviously jealous Colin like I need the air to breathe! I want the tables flipped, I want Pen to give up on the fantasy of Colin and actually show interest to these suitors. After the little stunt he pulled, I need Colin to be the one doing the pining this time.

• My heart broke at Eloise and Penelope breaking their friendship. I love them both dearly, but maybe this is for plot purposes? Like maybe so Penelope won't be around the Bridgerton' s anymore, which will affect Colin? And Eloise and Penelope as well. Because let's be real, Penelope and Eloise are for life. I just wonder if El is going to tell her family or anyone about Penelope's secret.. 🤔😩

• Loved all the Bridgerton family scenes, along with all of the individual family members. They will always be one of my favorite things about the show. The playful jabs and banters, all of them always being there for one another no matter what, the raw emotional moments, etc.

• When Anthony sniffed the air when Kate walked by and Lady Danbury caught him and loudly cleared her throat - that was peak comedy 😂😂 I snorted so loud I was afraid I woke the rest of the house up.

• Not to mention his reaction to seeing her bare thigh.. the man is a capital R Rake but was left speechless and flustered at just seeing her leg. He already had it bad. 🤭

• Marina being the number one polin shipper... Hell yess! I didn't see it coming, but I'm so happy about it.

• The Queen's storyline was boring as well, but I love her so much for putting her own desires aside and approving of Kate and Anthony's love. If it wasn't for her, I'm not sure how Kate and Anthony could have ended up together without tarnishing their families names.

• That's all I can think of right now, but if I happen to think of more I'll be sure to share them with you all!

[dollwritesarchive]

𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓂𝒾𝓃𝒹 𝒾 𝒸𝑜𝓊𝓁𝒹 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓈𝒶𝓋𝑒 ⎹ 𝓡.𝓑.

fandom harry potter / the marauders masterlist

featuring regulus black x riddle!reader ( f )

rating none of my work is meant to be viewed by minors ( anyone under the age of eighteen ), and i will happily block any that interact with my posts or my blog. all characters are 18+

content warning technically a dark fic, ( poorly written ) angst, betrayal ( both ), Walburga and Orion being literally the worst, torture ( the cruciatus curse ), fanon take on a canon death, this hurt me so much to write

summary regulus stole from the dark lord and now he wants out. you were sent to take him out.

word count 2.4k / mini musing

attention do not repost or translate, even with ‘credit’. just don’t do it. reblog instead of like. leave feedback if you enjoyed.

you had been mourning Regulus since the moment you learned what he’d done.

too many times had he whispered doubts. doubts about the Dark Lord and his plans. doubts that you desperately tried to dispel with reassurance. you were adamant about stomping out the embers of uncertainty. “You have to trust him,” you would cradle your young love’s face in both of your hands and stare deep into his grey hues, “trust your family. Trust me. We are on the noblest path.” but he was unconvinced. you could see the rebellion in his eyes. it broke your heart. “You know what becomes of traitors. You’ve seen it.” the execution of those who betrayed Voldemort was always performed in front of all of you. to remind every Death Eater that loyalty was nonnegotiable. “If you love me, you won’t force me to watch you die at the hands of my father.”

deserting his people was one thing; running from his responsibilities or hiding from them, but stealing from Voldemort with plans to kill him— that was another entirely. Regulus would be made an example of. “He’s betrayed me, but he’s also betrayed you.” those words echo in your mind now; the words of your father before you left, “And your broken heart must heal with an act of vengeance. You must be the one to kill him.”

“I—“ everything in you screams to protest. how could he ask you to kill Regulus?

“Did you love him?”

“With every fiber of my being.”

“Did he love you back?”

you had frowned. “Yes.” of course he did. Regulus adored you; you could always taste his love on his lips or feel it in the warmth of his embrace. see it in the twinkle in his eyes. “He loved me.”

“Then, why did he turn his back on you? Why did he hurt you? After all of the times you begged him to stay true to the cause, he looked into your desperate eyes and still chose to betray you.”

you were speechless, eyes cast down to the floor where Nagini lay coiled at Voldemort’s feet. until he uses the butt of his wand under your chin to tilt your head up, and you stare into his eyes. your loyalty and kinship with him ensured that you were never frightened of his demonic visage. “Mend your fractured heart, my dear, by killing the traitor who broke it.” you nod; what else could you have done? “Very good. Walburga has convinced him to come home.” you subdue a cringe threatening to scrunch your shoulders. she betrayed her own son? she would deliver him to his demise so easily? “The House of Black waits for you. You must go tonight.”

“Will he not be executed here, in front of all of us?” if given the chance to plead for his life to Voldemort and the others, perhaps you could convince them that he was worthy of sparing. that you could bring him back to his sanity.

“No. He chose to walk in shadows, and now he must die in one.”

now, as you take the stone steps deep beneath Regulus’ family home, led by Walburga herself, you can hear the muffled shrieking getting louder. you knew it was him, and your stomach tied itself in knots. “What are you doing to him?” you demand with furrowed brow.

“We are disciplining him.” Walburga answers in a stern tone, but you stop on the step and glare down at her. after a few more, when she realizes that you’ve come to a halt, so does she, and turns to look up at you. you have the sudden urge to strike her down here and now, heart pounding as the cries for mercy die on the bottom of the staircase. she must’ve misread the anger in your countenance, because she frowns. “I could never kill my own son, no matter how severe his offenses. I’m grateful the Dark Lord sent you, and we would never go against his will.”

you purse your lips, forcing them to remain sealed. there are so many things that you want to scream at her, and most are vile curses that would rip her apart from the inside out, but you can’t. you nod, breathing in. she waits for you to take the final few steps before she follows you into the dimly lit dungeon.

Regulus’ agonizing screams are the first things you hear— an assault on your ears. you want to clasp your hands over them and pretend you’d never heard your lover begging his own father for mercy.

“Crucio.”

“Father, please—!” his voice breaks, his body writhing on the floor. even from where you stand in the doorway, you can see streams of crystal tears on his cheeks, the red and puffiness of his under eyes, how tight his jaw is pulled as he grits his teeth to try and relieve just a single ounce of his suffering. but the torture curse is too wicked, and the more he struggles, the more it hurts.

Walburga goes to stand by her husband, the devil wielding the curse on his own spawn, whilst you stand frozen in the doorway.

Regulus doesn’t see you at first, because his tear-filled eyes focus on his mother, and he drags himself pathetically across the floor to throw his own mangled body at her feet, fists gripping her skirt. “M— mother please, stop this! It hurts, make it stop hurting!”

Walburga frowns, turning her nose up and away from him. “You humiliated your own family. You tried to destroy everything we’ve built, and you want mercy from me?”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, mother. Please, make it stop… Please…”

“Crucio.”

another earth-shattering scream that Regulus gags on, curling up and grasping at his gut, then his chest, trying to pinpoint where the pain was focused— but it’s impossible.

with both Orion and Walburga’s backs to you, you realize you’ve taken out your wand and have it aimed at them. you were grimacing. with a flick, you could stop them. you could kill them. you could stop the agony that the boy you loved was in. they wouldn’t even see it coming.

but you didn’t.

because you couldn’t.

“Leave us.” both parents turn to look at you; your wand was still raised, as if to threaten them with it, but it was unnecessary. they would never do anything to disobey you or your father.

Regulus’ wailing fades into miserable babbling as the two step disappear from the room, leaving you alone with him. you don’t put away your wand, but you do drop your arm by your side as you take a few steps closer. he’s made his way to his hands and knees, now, head hanging forward; he looks shameful. “I should’ve known—“ he croaks, voice coarse, “that Walburga was lying the moment she told me I would be sa—safe.”

there’s a fat lump in your throat that makes swallowing difficult and painful, but better than exhaling your shaky breath. “I didn’t know they would use the Cruciatus Curse on you.” you murmur, as if that was, somehow, supposed to make it better. “They shouldn’t have.”

Regulus chooses to ignore what you said, and looks up at you from under his unruly tawny locks. “You’re to take me to him, now? Why didn’t my family just—“ he stops, his gaze falling to the wand at your side, noting how desperately you clutch it. as if realization begins to sink in, he shakes his head. “No…”

you bite down hard on your lower lip. “I have to,” you whisper, weakly, but you can hear him calling your name over and over, getting louder each time. it almost breaks you, “I—I have no choice.”

“You do have a choice,” he insists, looking up at you, desperately. “You have a choice. You and I, we— we can put a stop to this. To him.” you shake your head as he speaks, what was he saying? “We can stop him together, and you don’t ever have to do his bidding again. I know how, I can show you—“

“You can’t—“ you let out a groan of frustration, clenching your fists, “you can’t say things like that, don’t you see that?! Saying these things, betraying him, that’s why you are where you are right now.” hot tears well up in your eyes, but you try your best to blink them away. “Why couldn’t you just trust me? I begged you to trust me.”

“We are not on some noble path,” Regulus combats, struggling to push himself up on to unsteady legs. one arm remains hooked at his stomach, grasping what you assume to be an injury brought on by the torture. his breathing is shallow and wheezy, broken ribs, perhaps? “We’re killing people. Innocent people. Voldemort,” Regulus sees you flinch as he spits the name, “Voldemort has all of you brainwashed with the promise of power, but he means to keep it all for himself. Don’t you see that? He doesn’t want wizards and witches to rise, he wants to stand on the backs of them to elevate himself. He means to make us all slaves to him, pure blood or not. Some of us already are.”

you can feel your trust in your father wavering, but your trust in your lover has been broken. you have to look away from his piercing gaze, lest you find that trust wanting to mend itself.

your name falls from his lips, and the way it does leaves you breathless. a longing whisper, and you feel his hand take your free one, and squeeze it as tight as his weakened muscles will allow. “Come with me. Please. We can free each other from our bondage.”

the tears break the dam of your ducts and slide over the apples of your cheeks. everything within you screams to say yes. in a perfect world, you would have. in a perfect world, you and Regulus would take on the world together, and win, because in a perfect world, love conquers all.

but this was not a perfect world.

“I’m not a slave,” you murmur, finally turning to look back into his eyes once you’re certain you can do so without falling apart. “I’m a soldier.”

he doesn’t look taken aback, and maybe he isn’t. simply despondent, as if he hoped for something different, but expected this reaction. “And I’m a traitor.” he replies in a soft, resolved tone. brand new tears have blurred his vision.

“Yes.” your voice is too weak, too unsteady.

he looks down at his hand enveloping yours, and so do you.

“Regulus,” his name nearly feels foreign on your lips now; it is the first time tonight that you’d spoken it. “You know what I have to do. I have to.”

Regulus nods. whether he becomes compliant because there’s no use in arguing with your loyalty, or he’s suddenly recognized that to attempt to turn you against Voldemort would be a death sentence for you, too is irrelevant.

“I’m grateful to the Dark Lord,” he mutters, dropping to his knees before you. the pad of his thumb caresses your knuckles. “For sending you, at least.”

“Why?”

tilting his head to the side, he stares up at you with his own liquid diamonds falling over his cheeks. he fixes his mouth into a smile, but it’s forced and frightened. you can see it all over his countenance. he’s afraid of dying, too young to leave this world for the next, and you feel the same.

you’re terrified, too young to take a life. especially one that you treasure so dearly.

“Because your face will be the last thing I see,” he answered through a shaky breath, “so, god willing, I will carry this last moment with you into the after life; death doesn’t seem so bad as long as I have that.” expelling a shuddering scoff, you choke on the taste of your own tears. his smile contorts into a wince, as if seeing you cry was more painful than the torture curse he’d just been under, and he squeezes your hand again. “Don’t cry,” he begs, rolling his bottom lip between his teeth, “I don’t want my final memory to be of your tears.”

you close your eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths. “I don’t know if I can stop.” you whimper, pathetically and finally. you’d spent the entire trek to the Black House preparing yourself to kill the man you loved, but now that you’re here, it seemed impossible. “I’m scared, Regulus. I don’t— I can’t—“

“I’m scared, too.” Regulus sniffles, holding on to your hand, “Look at me.” you do, albeit slowly. he nods, shifting on his knees. “Do it, before you lose the strength. Just,” he hesitates, swallowing hard, “tell me that you love me.”

your knees buckle at his plea, falling to your knees with him. you squeeze his hand, tight, and stare into his eyes, no matter how torturous it was. you owed him that much, at the very least. “I love you,” you whine, “I love you. I have always loved you. And I will always love you.”

he smiles, weak, and pulls your hand up to kiss the back of your palm. “I love you,” he recites back, “I have always loved you.” he takes a deep breath, eyelids fluttering closed. “I will always love you.”

the killing curse is uttered in a broken sob, your eyes closing tight as if this were just a horrible dream. you held tight to his hand, even when you heard his body collapse on the floor, and prayed that you would wake up from this nightmare. you would open your eyes and be in your bed, Regulus asleep beside you, and everything would be the way it was.

for several moments, you pray to every higher power you can think of for this. all in vain, of course. because when you finally do open your eyes, you’re still in the dungeon. on your knees. in front of your dead lover. his eyes are closed, which is a blessing. he appears to be asleep, just like you’d prayed for.

your broken heart doesn’t feel mended, like your father had promised. you feel even more shattered.

you let yourself fall completely to shambles in this moment, with no one around to see you, and crumble into a sobbing heap on the floor, enveloping him with both arms and pulling his head into your chest. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

[sly-merlin]

S A C R I F I C E

SACRIFICE - A STORY OF LOVE, BETRAYAL, REVENGE AND BARGAINING

CHARACTERS : prince jaehyun x princess y/n

GENRE : fluff, angst.

WORD COUNT : 7k

TIME PERIOD : OF SHY GLANCES AND BLOOD BATHS. WHERE LOVE IS FORBIDDEN AND HATRED NOT.

WARNINGS : Includes dirt play, revenge. Major character deaths like MAJOR, mentions of blood, murder, killing, assassination and an explicit scene of killing.  Cw : food mentions  SMUT WARNING : kissing! mentions of undressing.

DISCLAIMER : THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. FICTION. FICTION. NO DESCRIPTION REPRESENTS OR GIVE ANY HINTS TO JAEHYUN'S REAL LIFE CHARACTER. 

a/n : part of heartbreakhotel monthly event by precious network @nct-writers

SUMMARY : heart in one hand, a blade in another. Which one goes down under the weight of other? Who is brave enough to sacrifice the other?

The shimmering, colourful, geometrical patterns of the bronze kaleidoscope motivated your heels to exultant jumps, simply sending tingles to your friend's mind who quietly stood beside you wondering what new pattern had caught your eye this time. She was equally excited yet waited for you to be absolutely gratified. After all, a pattern viewed once could never be seen twice or remembered long enough to be claimed to have hit our eyes.

The light hues of the unreachable sun coloured the small market in its natural glow making terrible winter evening walks a little more bearable .You loved it. You loved the scenery, all the more so because it was deemed to be yours. Every corner of this small kingdom had your father's crown engraved on it yet you weren't permitted to move around in a place you dared to call your own. Hence the poorly patched long cotton skirt and lazily stitched full sleeved shirt covered you like you were a fugitive in disguise or maybe belonged to some impoverished village. Same was the case with your pretty friend who, once averse to your youthful shenanigans, found the silver jewellery most fascinating in the whole market and not to omit the street food that turned the palace food to be flavourless.

 You had never been very keen on lying to your parents, popularly called the rulers of the kingdom and your poor attendants who thought you were busy with your evening naps that you had suddenly taken upon a liking towards since the past month. But it was a necessity for you. Roaming in the same humongous rooms no more satiated your travelling mind. You wanted to be out, to be free, to just breach all the restrictions you were placed under as a princess to satisfy the hollow rules. As much as your morals and conscience despised hiding truth, this little game you played harmed no soul. Your safety was their priority and you were safe and secure as long as you didn’t leave her side. And this excuse inadvertently spiralled you in this endless circle of hide and seek taking control over your better judgement, throwing the need to pause this rendezvous in the background. What once done out of curiosity and to experience the fanatic lives of your subjects, was now a sine qua non. From patiently performing and learning new tasks suiting your position to skillfully diverting your maids, you indeed had all the prerequisites to be the best queen of your future kingdom. Even though the praise of achievement always resided only in your head, you found yourself to be impressively regal.

"Let me have a look too, y/n" zara, your dear friend pleaded not so politely.

Reluctantly removing the device from your eyes, you pushed it onto her hands, backing away slightly, allowing her in the space.

"Why don't you go and look at some silver jewellery instead?" Huffing, you suggested to lure her.

“The new ones arrive next monday!” Not paying heed to your tender, she kept smiling, enthralled by the beauty captured between the pieces of mirrors.

You nudged her playfully, the action meant to drive her to the end of her patience but she dogged your efforts with continuous giggles. Relentless you were too and she was always reminded of that in a hard way. What your elbow failed to do, your fingers completed. As soon as your fingers in her ears, she bitterly pulled herself away to face you.

“This is unfair y/n. This hour of freedom is not for your pleasure only” puckering her lips, she said while her eyes squinted at you. 

Suddenly, her forehead was smeared with thoughtful lines, “y/n! It’s been twenty minutes already. Where is your lover?” surprise rained over her whole face, “Do you think he got caught?”

You were almost ready to refute her former statement that he certainly wasn’t your lover yet but her latter question of suspicion appalled you and there was no need for her to ask you any further as she noticed your face shrinking, distorting your pretty lips into a worrisome pout. She immediately left the metal device, focusing on you.

“hey! I am not serious. I was just trying to distract you” as she cupped your face, a pout of her own greeted you.

Her words were not reassuring at all. There was no unlikelihood of what she said. Jaehyun was, without any doubt, illustrious in the fouled game you both played but neither his family resided here nor was he allowed to enter the premises of your kingdom. The said man was corrupted by his youthful glow that granted him enough courage of frisking around the walls of the forbidden territory.

Inhaling sharply, you uncloaked your worry,

“do you think he real-

“no no absolutely not love. He’s too clever for that and he’s been doing since months, way longer than me and you! Let’s wait for a few more minutes.” Cupping your chin, she jested and cooed, “Also won't he perish without seeing your beautiful face. He would be here any minute!”

 Just when you responded to her with a grim nod, a well acquainted shoulder bumped into you, mitigating your distress with a familiar touch. eyes closed in relief, you looked at zara for approval which was given right away with a playful wink.

Giggling like a little child, you skipped to the back of the market where jaehyun waited for you every evening. Hiding your face in the silk grey scarf, you sneaked away avoiding everyone’s sight and waiting for your arrival, Jaehyun stood there with the lower half of his face concealed with a black cotton headcover. 

As soon as he saw you, the hand glueing the cloth to his face fell down and his face lit up with a smile worthy of putting stars to shame if compared. The wrinkles on his face and the dips in the cheeks had you wanting to hide in those spaces, away from everyone who had heralded this union to be forbidden.

 There you stood, staring into his dark eyes like he wasn't someone you were supposed to keep a good distance from. 

But the light in his eyes diminished on seeing your excited face.

"You did that again! Why don’t you follow anything I say to you? At least, look back and confirm my presence. What if someone had followed me?” deeply whispering, he frowned at you.

And fondly, you smiled at him, something that he never found fascinating but it still left him flustered.

"Don't smile at me like that. I won't melt this ti-

"I apologise?"

You blurted out taking him by surprise. His mouth opened and closed several times, body slightly rocking in confusion. Finally, he spoke, 

"I didn't mean it like that." His voice softened, "i just can't - 

Cleaning his muddy hands on his pajamas, he placed them on your cheeks, engulfing your whole face with his long fingers.

"I just can't see you in danger. If any of my uncle’s spies came wandering and recognised you at this hour, they'd not hesitate to slit your throat y/n" the way his face contorted as he recited the known truth,  it was evident how just the mention of it was painful to him. "Don't follow unless you see my face. I know there's no one harming you in your own country but you never know when odds might defeat you" 

"Do you-

You began but his questioning eyes stopped you. His eyes talked only in worry and love. Both for you. But even if you were content with what he showered you with, greed for little more was something you never deemed unnecessary.

"I what?" 

You wanted to continue but the perpetual worry planted on his face disturbed you as well.

"Jaehyun-'' your fingers brushed away the strand of hair on his face, “I mean don’t you find it tedious? Giving me the same instructions every other day, wasting the ten minutes of the limited time we get.”

He left your face and focused on cleaning the remaining dirt from his hand. To avoid suspicions and blend into the environment, he always covered his hands in mud, giving an impression of a forlorn daily worker. Nobody questioned a person who looked homeless and unhappy, even if he meandered near the barbed wires.

“I got in trouble.”

You hadn’t even sat down on the bench and he was already bombarding you apprehensions.

“how?” inaudibly, you asked.

He broke his eyes away before responding,

“they saw me leaving the palace yesterday. From tomorrow, I shall be accompanying my cousin to verify the supplies in the production department.” his chuckle forced you to let out one as well. his irresponsible behaviour had fables of its own, as jaehyun had told you once. the little penalties he was subjected to weren’t discomforting either but this time it involved you as well.

“for how long?”

 “my family’s care agenda would hopefully end within two weeks and then I shall be free again. but we might need a new place and new time too.”

His words were muffled in the back as your eyes remained transfixed on his hand sheepishly rubbing his neck. Under your inappropriate scrutiny, he found himself tinting and your strong gaze posed more problems for his already thumping heart.

He coughed you out of your daze, eyes wavering everywhere. Picking your lip, you suppressed your giggles.

Finger under your chin, you pretended contemplation. Your comical stance earned a groan from him,

“how about you get serious for once and I’ll buy you steamed food.”

Smiling widely, your greedy stomach took the offer immediately.

“not everyone lacks intelligence, prince jaehyun.”

He huffed and crossed his arms, feigning offence at your statement. “Now what are you implying princess y/n.”

“that I might already have a place decided. So hurry up now and feed me food while telling me about your day.”

“You are impressive, my lady! How am I going to live with your notorious self?”

“you plan on living with this notorious princess?” you clowned even though his question showed you more than just a hope.

“the inquiry hour is closed princess and so would be the shops if you choose to delay more. Soooo, shall we leave?”

Responding to your sharp gaze, he took your hand and pressed his plump lips onto them, disrupting the chain of your rational thoughts.

As the atmosphere tuned cooler and he bid adieu, you went back with a new assurance, ready to put your life on hold for the next few weeks.

lying on your back, you let out muffled giggles to celebrate another successful classified evening. clothes were changed, chess was out. You were prepared for any intrusion.

Zara's laughter soon died down, happy and heavy breaths replacing them. Seated on your bed, she faced you,

"So my courageous y/n, did you confess today?"

Abruptly you raised yourself, looking at her in bewilderment,

“Of course not!”

“What? Why not? What are you waiting for? Time is slipping away love.”

“I know. I just want to be a little more sure before taking this a step further. I do not want to misjudge his momentary affection for a promised future.The detestation our families share for each other has always proven to be deadly. Unless I’m sure that jaehyun’s feelings are indisputable, I shall not be proceeding." Mumbling out the last part, you began playing with the hem of your deep blue skirt to hide the disappointment that settled in within your heart. 

"Okay. I can't force you but do know that saving your heart from misery is better. Oh and does the poor boy have any hint about me." Zara advised lacing her words with a chuckle in the end. 

"Don't worry. You are just a maid friend whom I love and trust the most. He believes each of my pretty lies you know.”

"Oh my love. He truly fancies you. I wish your brother wasn't so incapable of harbouring feelings. How delightful life could have been only if he was like you." She wistfully spoke just like other times. Your heart hurt for her. She never got the love she was capable of giving yet the kindness never withered away. She was just like that. 

Soon your peace was interrupted and you were escorted to the dinner table. 

There sat your parents with their favourite child. You weren't loved any less yet it weakened your heart, watching them walking past your capabilities to applaud his undistinguished skills. His gender screamed for power when his capabilities barely had any knowledge of whispering about them. You abhorred it. Not your brother for he was raised with a rode in his neck but the stars that never aligned in your favour crushing your dream of wearing the crown for your own kingdom, under the grime rules made by those who were dead. Only god and zara knew how much hatred you held for your ruthless ancestors who never favoured women.

Sans any relish, you bit on the food which definitely tasted better for something you were not very fond of. but the almost good meal was ridden of all the salt as you felt conscious of their eyes on your face.

"Is there something you want to say to me?" you asked with a reluctantly polite voice.

That's when you noticed how their attention was divided to both you and zara.  Your brother Donghae’s serious eyes bored into her face as she tried to avoid him while sitting right across him on the dining table.

Finally your mother spoke.

“Donghae was looking for you throughout the whole evening, zara.”

Zara lowered her head, look on her face screaming help which only you understood so you took the charge on her behalf,

“We were in my room.”

“And what is so important in your room that you both chose to ignore constant calls from your maids?”

“After an exhausting and unentertaining day, we both play chess, share all the amusing stories of our respective days, details of which can be given to you if asked with some enthusiasm and then we sleep for an hour, in peace without anyone spitting orders on our faces and since when have my brother changed so much that he actually got some time to look for his wife?”

“May I know from where this disrespectful flow of words is coming through? Is this a way to talk to your elders?”

“I mean no disrespect, mother.”

“This ends today. From tomorrow you shall be spending those two hours with our bakery chef.”

Instead of your mother, you directed your next plead to your father, who was an expert in nodding at household matters

“No! This is the only time I get with zara. within a year or two i’ll be married off to some rude man who won’t even let me put my feet outside the threshold of his palace.” pouting, you said.

Waving his hand, he dismissed the matter that meant whoever got the last sentence was the conqueror of the discussion.

"Why are you here?" Counting and aligning the stars to form another shape, he interestingly asked.

"I wanted to explore this dead garden. What about you? What brings you here in the enemy land?" You jested.

"to meet a very beautiful enemy."

"a woman?"

"Yes yes. She's a woman. A very pretty one I must say but very feisty and dangerous to be around."

"Oh how so?" You asked now genuinely interested in his description of yours.

"I've heard she has a heart of stone."

"Huh? Have you seen her heart to be so sure of your accusation?"

"I've enough instances to prove that."

"Like?"

"She meets a handsome prince, spends an hour staring at his eyes with all but love and still chooses to stay silent. It's a dangerous game she's playing with him. It almost - it hurts him."his fatalistic expression left you stunned. The ancillary confession beleaguered your heart instead of calming the storm.

Nibbling on your bottom lip, you tried your best to focus on the constellations instead. you pulled the poor blade of grass harder in a futile attempt of breaking it apart but it was snatched from you.

“answer me.” He demanded the answer that was resting on the tip of your tongue.

"I love you."

He blurted out and you felt his fingers finding home in yours as he interlocked them. the moisture of the grass swamped your hands and you finally found your warmth within each other.

“the whole palace is under your charm y/n” you stopped the stirring at zara’s words.

“how so?”

“they haven’t seen your wrath in the past few weeks. You didn’t shout at minji for throwing your burnt cake either.”

Swatting her hand away from the pot, you replied, “let them enjoy their peace days.”

“may god bless jaehyun! The whole palace is saved until you are happy.” Bumping her shoulders into yours, she took the charge from you. “what about the haunted garden y/n. aren’t you afraid of going there. it’s been weeks and I haven’t heard you screaming about any ghost.”

You scoffed at her naive self, “the only ghost that haunts the garden is in ME!” dragging the last part, you successfully scared her into dropping the ladle in the hot pot. Resultantly, she chases you off in the whole kitchen until you agree to turn the muddle of vegetables into something edible.

Jaehyun’s presence generated so much happiness within your soul that you were afraid one unfortunate day would snatch him from you yet you never fought against the urge to drown in the love he poured on you. He mirrored the boy you met in your books, just as dreamy, if not more. His princely chiselled face was a sight to die for. He was a typical example of a lotus, a beautiful flower born in mud where it lived and died and you wanted to change that for him.

“What do you fear the most?”

Nestling your face in his neck, you couldn’t help but ask the question. He snuggled you closer to him, the sheet beneath you crumpling making the leaves and the grass it covered rustling under you. He shifted his head only to face your hair. Removing his one hand from your waist, he moved your chin to inspect you. He never understood how you came up with most bizzare and inquiring questions. But he was always more than happy to speak or in this case, express.

“that I will forever remain indebted to you.”

grasping his hand that held your chin, you saw him gulp down the words he hesitated to utter. 

"Love is not a debt jae. Just keep loving me like this, make me hap-

Abruptly your view of him changed as he floated over your figure. Resting your head on the sheet, his fingers traced the path along your face, feeling every inch of the skin he had learned to admire from afar. With adoration filled eyes, he drew nearer.

His lips were delicate against yours. Moving gently, he comforted your vulnerable ones, winning a pleased and dry whine from your throat. Hands dropping to your neck, his lips travelled down to your jaw where he sucked lightly at a candied spot and the little tickle kisses he gave you reaching your collarbones left you squealing in its wake. He hovered over your face again, this time to taste the bliss you felt and courageously, you pulled him closer and like it was designed, Mist of delight clouded your minds as  you forgot your fingers in his nape. If finding stars in his eyes was your expression of love then dancing against your pulsating lips, he perfectly found his interpretation as well. 

He drew back when he was done with bruising your skin. Staring into your eyes, he asked for something. With a blink of the same, you conveyed it. 

Curving your back, you allowed him to unzip the lavender dress you were wearing. As he uncovered your skin, he greeted it with beautiful, praiseworthy kisses, covering you with his undying love.

That night he resuscitated you, sending you into an oblivion. 

The reason being the incantations that he served you with.

I wish to give you a ring!

And the simple words resonated the promise that you could hardly wait for him to fulfill.

Sympathy combining some unknown feeling washed over you as you heard your father talking about the neighbouring kingdoms and the pitiful state they were in. you had always known about the lack of resources those people lived with but that was the end. It was just a topic of discussion and theory to learn about the blunders of their ancestors and the brutal history of their treason to an old ally, your father and grandfather.

With a contempt laced tongue, once again, your father recited the story of betrayal of the lees and the jungs. The story was religiously told to every child once they were old enough to understand the terms like loyalty, allegiance, infidelity and betrayal.

You had vowed to change that. a seed of hatred planted in a younger mind would only yield a crop of vengeance. you aspired to end it. Jaehyun, too, wanted to wash the stains of treachery from his family name.  

 To your dismay, the army was out to roam the small towns and villages, looking for trespasser enemies. 

One day, you were resting in jaehyun's arms and the next day, you were left to sulk as the guards had suddenly decided to reaffirm the reliability of all the hinges. The doors were smacked, locked and unlocked, leaving you with million suspicions and a heavy heart. 

The only assurance you had, was in Jaehyun's capability of fooling the security forces. Proud as you were, the unsettling feeling of a blurred future did not let you sleep. For three nights.

Jaehyun wrapped his arms around your waist, hugging you tightly from behind.

“easy jaehyun! it tickles!” you exclaimed while controlling your giggling.

“i thought you won’t be here tonight but yo-

“but i managed to sneak!” you finished, turning in his arms to see his beautiful face glistening in the moonlight. “and i don’t know for how much longer i can fool my attendants, what if one day they got in trouble for negligence. The security is doubled outside all the chambers. If I pulled anything, father would not hesitate to behead them.” your face dimmed with the mere thought of the fate of your precious maids and if anything happened to them, your soul would be forever encumbered with the guilt. 

your worried eyes didn’t escape jaehyun as he leaned forward to give you a small kiss, soothing your nerves. the small peck left you wanting for more as you bit your lower lip in anticipation of his further actions.

“nothing would happen. it’s been 2 months and nobody in the whole kingdom knows where and with whom their gorgeous princess spends her nights! and besides i’m here to ease the worries of your forever wandering mind. "

"Why do you always have to talk in riddles jae!"

He laughed through your smacks before circling your figure twice, leaving you staggered and dumbfounded.

"What are yo-

"I'm serious. I’m just here to fulfil my promise love.” he caught and pulled you again, keeping just a little distance between you both

“what promise? i don’t remember anything!” you asked genuinely perplexed by his words. as far as your memory too you, the only promise he made was-

your eyes widened at the realisation! jaehyun removed his one hand from your waist, putting it inside the pocket of his pants.

at this point, you could hear your own thumping heart whilst looking at him expectantly.

“let’s relieve you of a huge burden my princess!” he said with a smiling face but as you tried to mirror his expression, a sharp pain coursed through your abdomen.

you wobbled as he left your waist, the pain doubling when he pulled the small knife out of your body, a smirk adorning his features instead.

your body felt hotter than ever as the blood slowly oozed out of your abdomen. no scream left your lips as you pressed the wounded area in a try to lessen the ache.

The solemn tears falling down the cheeks were not for the physical damage but for the broken promise Jaehyun had bestowed upon you with.

“wh-why?” was the only word you could form before your other hand went to grab his arm but was only met with air.

jaehyun loomed closer and his knife met your stomach once again, this time a grievous shriek filled the silent garden. 

Your legs lost life, your body finding it harder to withstand the twist of the knife as you fell on the grass, darkness consuming your soul.

“because i couldn’t be on the throne as long as the heir of this kingdom was alive. but your death won’t be worthless love. I shall wear the crown of your sacrifice and reclaim all the lost honour.”

Instead of a deep breath as you had expected, a choked sob left your lips and the whole body convulsed with the painful effort.

Your eyes remained glued to him as he rubbed his face with this sleeve regarding you with the cruelty you never knew he was capable of.

contempt in his orbs served as his last offering towards you as he exited your sight, calling for someone.

After what felt like years, you heard a human voice again but your body gave up before you could comprehend anything. 

“you did it my boy!”

Jinyoung broke his hateful glare from the throne and patted a demented jaehyun on the back, congratulating his prime pawn for the successful acquisition. The so called disqualified heirs were now the rulers, a dream that was once broken by their backstabbing friend, the now murdered king of this kingdom.

“and you shall be rewarded for you have made your deceased father proud.” Hand caressing Jaehyun's shoulder, he pretended to wipe the few tears that escaped due to the bitter memory. Cleaning his eyes with the sleeve of his dusted robe, he took the gold crown from his younger brother, jinseok and ran his eyes from jaehyun to the majestic chair on the silver podium.

With pride clotted blood, Jaehyun bowed to him before taking his seat.

The crown was set atop his head, fitting him without any doubt.

It weighed more than he thought.

With a sinister smile, his uncle ordered the assassination of all the loyal members of court.

Guards were beheaded and bodies were counted.

The palace was foraged, to find and kill all the runaways.

A manhunt was announced for the one who wasn’t found.

Nobody knew there were more to be found.

The triumphant smile lit Jaehyun's face for he lost nothing.

Three weeks later.  

Donghae’s hands lost all the strength, the plastic bag filled with potatoes now rolling down the uneven and mud washed floor of the hut.

The day he had been anticipating with broken hope and glistening eyes was not a dream anymore.

Your fingers finally trembled against the hard, rugged and rough mattress.

You had decided to open your eyes after three weeks.

Finally he allowed himself to cry.

I'm going under and this time I fear there's no one to save me

Crown hanging between his fingers, his gaze pierced the ground.

You were lying there three weeks ago.

Were you taken away?

Were you no more?

There was no probability of inhaling after how perfectly he had spun his knife.

No man had ever survived his knife, not even his own teacher. There was no way you could have. All the odds were in his favour for all the cards being played with accuracy.

Did he hope for your life?

You were an enemy, just a play. Then why the thought of never beholding you again hurt him so much. 

why the weight of the crown crumbled on him with such intensity.

Why did he choose your chamber to stay in?

Yet Why was he unable to sleep?

He grew up seeking answers and  taking orders and this time there was no one to respond to his cries.

Neither did anyone care enough to ask him the reason for his quotidian visits to the garden.

I let my guard down and then you pulled the rug

It wasn’t home. But the eyes looking back at you undeniably reminded you of it. A day has passed since you saw the light of the world again but all you did was listen to the gut-wrenching fate your family had met with. Half of the family!

Your parents were murdered in the coup premeditated  by none other than the neighbouring jungs. What was equally agonising was the fact that your brother never got to give your parents a respectable farewell. The troops had charged upon their sleepy selves and the mere hanging crown on the naked and bloodied sword of jin young was enough of a proof of the successful attack. Their escape hadn't been easy either but with a little help from the general, they had managed to flee. Zara had led them to you. 

 Unknown fear consumed you as you read your surroundings. But it was time you admitted to your mistakes and faced the consequences. If there were any brutal ones left. There was nothing you would be unable to endure. So you began with the unanswered questions.

“what is this place?” you asked with a sore throat.

“this is jung’s territory. They are too blinded by their victory that this barren land is the last place they would send their troops to.” donghae replied, feeding you spoonfuls of the soup.

“But how did we reach here?"

"Through the underground war doors. They once joined both of our territories before the jungs were disqualified from trading. This end was opened by our general when we lost too much blood. Their bloody nephew is sitting on the throne, uniting this useless kingdome with ours." He seethed. 

You bit your lip to compose yourself. you knew you had to tell them about jaehyun and a broken trust was the last thing you wanted to inject in him but necessity clawed on your heart to reveal everything.

Caressing your face, he acidly began, 

"We'll take back everything. No one shall be spared. We are contacting our alliances. By next month, our kingdom would be in the state of siege. Every drop of blood shall be avenged. Jaehyun would pay for what he did."

At his mention, you withdrew your sight from him. Guilt crept up within you as you tried to affiliate every past event with the current one. It was clear as day you were a mere instrument to find a place for the entry of their troops. You were just a puppet. Unknowingly, you had allowed them to enter your parent's bedroom too. You had blood on your hands. Of countless people.

A single tear slipped and the lack of his expression on your face scared zara. She ran to occupy the other side of the bed and caught your head before you broke down in her arms. Jaehyun's lies and betrayal of your love was left somewhere in an old rusted chest of your mind and the pure anguish shattered you into millions of pieces.

You wailed yourself to sleep. 

Jaehyun visited you that night. In the form of dust. And he continued breaching your peace as if killing you once wasn't enough.

Now the day bleeds, into nightfall and you are not here, to get me through it all.

Jaehyun woke up in cold sweat. When was the last time he slept with an easy mind? 

Maybe the week before he was ordered to finish off what he had started. 

He changed rooms. 

He changed floors.

But his eyes never closed for even the minor chances of meeting you in the dreamland scared him to death. 

With a trembling hand, he picked up the crown and threw it away.

Amusingly, you were still dead.

Were you really that foolish?

Perhaps you resembled every other weak hearted person for whom a pinch of affection was a desperate call to sell their soul and rationality.

You had just wanted to walk down the markets without any constraints pulling you back in. Skipping in the shadows while hiding from the sun was the only desire you had. 

Why had he bumped his shoulder into yours? Why had he repeated it again and again until had grown to recognise his touch even through the thick layers of clothing and masked faces?

It's amusing how we end up finding each other in the same place at same time everyday

He had said with a sugary tone when you had questioned him sternly. 

You had believed him.

I'm prince Jaehyun, from the other side. I just came here to see the beauty that our place doesn't possess. It's all barren and discarded. No healthy vegetables. No dry fruits. I just enjoy myself every evening and buy some good food for some poor kids. You won't mention this to anyone right? I’ll leave right away if you want though!

How righteous had he sounded!

We'll propose unification and then everything will come to life again. No bloodshed. No backstabbing. No spy plays. We’ll never let history blemish our future.

How had he managed to contradict each and every word he had spoken. 

he just changed like the patterns in the kaleidoscope as if you had never reflected in the mirrors of his heart. 

Perhaps you never did.

You despised his way of fulfilling his Imperishable love for you! 

You were relieved Zara had been the one to inform your brother of this leading cause.

How ruthless he could have been!

You wanted to give his whole kingdom a new life and all he could give you in return was a knife. 

I was getting kinda used to being the someone you loved

Jaehyun's fingers turned green for how harshly he picked at the grass. Picking at those innocent blades didn't bring you back. 

His cries thundered in the air. He begged for the time to turn itself. He yearned for the love you had shown him. He missed your warmth. He missed your careless laughs. His heart shrieked for you. The only person he had ever loved. The only being who had ever loved him.

 Why he couldn't have saved himself from being the traitor of the heart he could've ruled!

You stared at the heavy corset that was made to safeguard you.

You were no expert with a blade but still one was handed over to you as precaution. 

The general read you the instructions, mainly focusing on the need to remain hidden underground until the war was over. You and Zara were to be kept away from the weapons. 

That was what the commandments directed you to follow.

Today, the wind blew harsher. Maybe he was the only one to feel the strange stillness in the disorder. Everything had been imprudently loud for him lately. Even the riots that shook the doors of the palace. How long could they have held onto something that never belonged to them! 

As he dismissed the servant who called him to take charge against your brother, his mind pressed upon bolting all the heavy doors to ignore the murderous stream. He had led one army before but now lacked the courage to pick up his knife and sword, the ones he buried right in the garden where you once laid.

You.

The broken look on your face was the image he wanted to delete from the depths of his mind so desperately yet your presence never left him alone. Maybe it was the sanction of the heavens that you were always there with him. In his days and in his dreams. He got all of your portraits removed yet here you were, standing in front of him with a smile on your face. A quiet rare sight. The radiant face, if not impossible to find, was still very infrequent even in his dreams. The air smelled of you. The atmosphere was enticing. Suddenly, he wanted to chase his dream, to go after you. 

So he followed his heart. 

Your illusion stayed still, with curved lips making you look ethereal. Even in the darkness, your face illuminated the way for him.

His hand rose, hoping to touch you even though the rational part of his head screamed that it was a lie created by him to save himself from another night of misery but he failed to listen and caved in. Like each time, he expected his hand to pass through you, breaking the charm of his fabrication of you. 

But here he was. 

Instead of passing through the smoke that you were supposed to be, his hand rested upon the gentle skin that your face had. Retracting his fingers immediately, he fell back in fear, eyes widening and chest heaving. 

You were anything but an illusion. 

His hand grazed against your cheek before he fell down, stumbling upon his own feet. The crown that decorated his head too withdrew its support, lying on the floor like it had recognised its lawful owner.

"My king." Solemnly, you addressed him. "I hope you are enjoying your new home and title."

As you talked, you watched him collecting himself. As he unclogged the blocks of his mind, awe transformed his face momentarily shaping itself into trepidation. To your disbelief, he brightened up once again. Had he not been liable for the ghastly crimes, you’d have sympathised with the deranged state of the always self possessed jaehyun. Alas! You had nothing to offer him.

Shuffling on his knees, with his head bowed lowly, he spoke with dead voice,

"Forgive me, please." He cried into his joined hands.

"Get up jaehyun. A mighty and worthy king like you doesn't look very honourable bowing to a mere woman like me." Your dangerously honeyed voice resembled the ominous dark clouds brooding atop his head. 

But you admired his valor for he kept apologising, burning himself with the false hope of undoing the indelible smudge he had left on you.

"I thought i never loved you y/n but i was utterly wron-

"You are a deceiver King jaehyun. Do not expect me to believe you." 

"Don't call me that please!" 

"Get up jaehyun." you barked. 

"I hate myself for doing that to you y/n." Getting up slowly, he repeated twice. You were yet to see his face and when he rose to his full height, you were met with his bloodshot eyes that could've ached you if your heart hadn't been damaged to the core.

"Don't hate yourself please. You made your family proud. That is what we kids should be aiming for right. I truly admire you for that King jaehyun." The emotionless stress on the end made him close his eyes in pain as he choked out another heart wrenching sob. 

"I'm truly sorry y/n, please. I can't take your hatred. I don't want this crown nor do i want to live here anymore."

Your stomach churned at his cries. You had truly underestimated his capability to surprise you but it only made you grip harder on the knife that was tucked in your waistband.

“How naive of you to think that I'll fall for your lies again, jaehyun.”

Rubbing his face with his palms, he looked heavenward,

"No no. I love you. I really really love you.I never realised this until now. I just can’t live without you” and continued as his glistened eyes met yours, “Why are you not listening to me?"

"Don't you think you are a bit late for a true confession."

"Yours was true right. Your love was conditionless. I swear on your love! Forgive me once please. Love is the strongest, you told me this right. I just need you y/n. not this crown. Not anyone else. Just you, Please." 

A mean scoff left your lips, "Yes, i was the one who told you about love being the most powerful but that was until you taught me the strength of hatred, jaehyun. You knifed me out of the fairytales i dreamt with you and i don't think i can ever thank you enough for that. The love you are so profoundly swearing to is lying under the debris of the hollow pride and the abhorrence you sheltered for my family. You never once heard my pleas of affection and now you expect me to listen to yours?how can you stoop so low?"

You watched him screaming into the air and crumbling down. You saw him going through the pain you would never recover from yourself and you wanted to end it. For him. It was rather painful to watch him so you mumbled his name. 

With newfound belief, he loomed closer with open arms, anticipating a change of heart from you. Maybe you weren't really as unconcerned to him as he had been with you. 

but the long blade mutilated his lungs and silent gasps of pain escaped his throat. His miserable eyes ruined the shield you wore and you screamed at him while repeating the thrusts of the sharp blade. Droplets of vengeance imbued the chilled air, drizzling down your neck in the form of sweat.

Somehow the hall was lit and you were forced to see what you had done to him. His grip on the ground faltered and the blade slipped through your fingers, the clink dangerously reverberating in the hall. 

Before your hand could reach for him, something pointed grazed your shoulder. You wanted to turn around but more and more spikes pierced through you; the heaviness and the pain that seeped through your back launched you forward and you fell down on another body that had been hosted by the marble a few moments ago. The ache of the arrows left you breathless. Once again, you struggled with your eyelids. within a few seconds, relief padded your back and you discontinued your wrestling. 

and perhaps your dead heart was finally at peace.

[frostedfaves]

Repercussions (13)

Masterlist

Pairing: dark!Natasha Romanoff x dark!Wanda Maximoff x fem!reader

Summary: Wesley performs at-home surgery on you, and Natasha and Wanda remind you who’s in charge from the other side of the world.

Warnings: dark themes, mentions of stitches, poorly written medical stuff, mild injury, implied nudity, smut 18+ ONLY (cyber sex, implied masturbation and overstimulation, sex toy use and penetration)

A/N: let’s not even talk about the fact that I fully intended on not ending another odd numbered chapter with smut and then did it anyway. but also feel free to thank me, as this is (possibly 👀) the last time I’ll be able to include any smut at all so...

Previous part

-

The ringing of a phone broke the silence of the room, and you groaned against the pillow when you realized it was your iPad. Adjusting the covers and rolling over to one of the nightstands, you attempted to wipe the sleepiness away from your eyes before answering the FaceTime call.

“Printsessa!”

You grinned as Natasha and Wanda appeared on the screen, waving and laughing a bit when they waved back with even bigger smiles.

“The most beautiful women in the world! I see that you’ve landed safely.”

“Yep. Just got in the safe house and this one couldn’t wait to see your face again.” Natasha teasingly nudged Wanda’s shoulder, chuckling when she rolled her eyes and pushed back. “But I’m thinking she’s not the only one missing a girlfriend. Is that my shirt?”

“And Wanda’s scrunchie.” You lifted your wrist for her to see and Wanda cooed at you.

“That’s adorable, baby. So how was yesterday? No trouble with Wesley, right?”

“It’s been incredible! We got to play our favorite card games and watch one of our old shows, and today he’s going to make my favorite omelette!”

“You have a favorite omelette?”

“Wes makes his just like my favorite diner in my hometown. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s amazing every time.” You shrugged, relaxing your shoulders as you exhaled in the form of a happy sigh. “I can’t thank you both enough for bringing him here.”

“We just want to see you happy, printsessa,” Natasha told you with a soft smile that faded as she yawned. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we should get some sleep before we need to get out there in the morning.”

“Wait!” Wanda cut in before you could respond, her lips forming a smirk. “Let us see you.”

You playfully rolled your eyes with a shake of your head before standing up and propping up the iPad against the lamp on the nightstand. Stepping back to bring your full form into the frame, you made a big show of slowly stripping away Natasha’s sleep shirt as they cheered, even louder once they realized you weren’t wearing underwear.

“I kind of regret this now,” Wanda sighed, and you laughed.

“At least you have someone! I just have a room full of fun stuff that I’m not even allowed to use,” you pouted.

“Maybe we’ll change that in a few days. Maybe,” Natasha emphasized when you gasped. “Okay pretty baby, we’ll call again soon.”

“Okay, love you!”

You hung up before either of them could respond, shifting over to Apple music and playing the most rated R and sexual playlist you could find, wanting them to assume you were thinking of them in the shower. You were also hoping it would set the mood, leading them to tire each other out and sleep longer.

You could barely hide the proud smile that appeared on your features when you found out through the bugging device that your plan worked.

“Hey, kiddo!” Wes called as you entered the kitchen, hugging you briefly.

“Hey. Is that what I think it is?”

“You mean the special breakfast you specifically requested and threatened me over?” He raised his eyebrow and faced you as you climbed onto the counter, both of you laughing after a moment. “So how’d it go? Sleeping yet?”

“Like babies. We can head down after we eat.”

-

The two of you made your way to the basement after breakfast, and you led Wesley to the game room first to give him an overly enthusiastic tour of the space, grateful when he caught on fast and played along. You then pulled him away from a pinball machine to bring him to the TV area, pushing him toward the couch as you grabbed the remote from the entertainment area.

“Can’t believe you dangled a pinball game in my face just to snatch it away,” he joked.

“We can go back, dummy. I just had to do that because they know I’m pretty attached to that part of the house,” you told him as you looked for a movie to distract yourself from what was coming, which wasn’t easy with Wesley pulling a satchel of tools from his oversized hoodie in your peripheral vision.

“I know this is not the easiest thing to do, but just relax. I brought some numbing cream to help with the pain.”

You leaned against the armrest of the couch to bring yourself in view of the camera, trying not to react to the coldness of the ointment and really attempting to hold it together when he got started on removing the tracker from your leg.

“Would it be easier to just amputate from the knee down?” you grunted, huffing out a breath when he shook his head. “Yeah, I figured.”

It felt like days passed as you gripped a pillow hard enough to break it to deal with the pain that wasn’t numbed, when your cousin finally broke the silence between the two of you.

“Okay, I’m done. How does it feel?”

“Painful,” you mumbled as you examined your stitched skin. “Damn, you’re good.”

“Thanks.”

Wesley handed you the tiny baggie holding the even smaller tracker, and you slid it in your pocket. He moved to get up and you stopped him.

“Where are you going? Let’s finish the movie.”

“Not ready to walk, are you?” You shook your head this time and he laughed. 

When it ended, the two of you made your way back to the game room, choosing one of the racing games so you didn’t have to stand very long. After he beat you in a few races (quite easily, but you wouldn’t admit it to him), you made your way back upstairs to grab a football and head outside.

You were able to walk pretty normally and even lightly jog, but you were dying to relieve the burning patch of healing skin, so you staged a fall as quickly as you could without seeming suspicious. Wesley fussed over you appropriately, helping you into the house to the point of halfway carrying you, and you sighed in relief when you finally got an ice pack on your ankle.

“I’ve never seen someone so happy to fall.”

“Shut up.”

-

It was nearing midnight when you heard from your girlfriends again, being sure to hold an excited smile on your features as you answered the call.

“Good morning! Or is it afternoon?”

“Late afternoon going into early evening but who cares?” Wanda shrugged with a little laugh.

“What are you doing up so late, printsessa?”

“It’s only 11:58,” you replied after checking the time. “And I was hoping you’d call tonight.”

Natasha frowned at the sight of your pout. “Did something happen with Wesley?”

“Yes, but it’s not his fault. I fell in the yard and hurt my ankle, but he helped me inside and keep ice on it all day. He even helped me up here so I didn’t have to strain much on the stairs.”

“Oh baby, you gotta be careful.”

“I know, Wan, I’m sorry.” Your eyes watered a bit while your pout stayed. “I feel a lot better, though! I just wish it didn’t happen. I have so much energy right now and nothing to do with it.”

You frowned when Natasha and Wanda shared a prolonged look, sighing a little so they’d turn their attention back to you. Wanda offered you a smile while Natasha seemed to be doing something in her lap, and she nodded at Wanda before turning to face you again.

“What’s going on?”

“We think we have a way for you to burn all that energy,” Natasha told you while Wanda sat beside her looking like a kid in a candy store. “Check the nightstand on your right.”

You moved over to investigate, pulling the drawer open and frowned when you only spotted a small key, picking it up with a curious gaze.

“It’s just a...wait.” You picked up the iPad with wide eyes. “Is this to the special room?”

Natasha nodded and you squealed in excitement, jumping to your feet and making sure to wince a bit when your left foot made contact with the carpet.

“Careful baby, please!” Wanda begged. “You’re going to give us a heart attack.”

“Sorry!” 

You made your way down the hall and unlocked the door, stepping in and closing and locking the door behind you as they instructed. The iPad was placed in their preferred spot so they could watch you strip again before telling you exactly what to pick out. Their object of choice was a big, sparkly dildo meant to be attached to a flat surface, the headboard of a king sized bed in this case.

“This one is kinda big,” you remarked as you knelt beside the dildo to examine the length.

“But baby,” Natasha began with a falsely sweet tone that you’d grown accustomed to hearing in the bedroom, one that had you squeezing your thighs together immediately. “Don’t you want to be good for us?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good girls listen. Are you a good girl?”

“Yes, Natty.”

“Then you can take it.”

You took a deep breath and positioned yourself, reaching for your clit between your parted legs and trying not to gasp in reaction to what you felt.

“You’re already soaked, aren’t you baby?”

You nodded and closed your eyes as you kept working your middle finger across the sensitive nub, slowly backing up onto the erect length and whimpering as it filled you up.

“That’s it, baby,” Wanda called out breathily, and you didn’t even need to raise your head to know she was touching herself, as was Natasha. “You’re so good at this.”

You paused for a moment when your ass bumped into the headboard, giving yourself time to adjust to being stretched open like this on your own. Pulling your hand away to rest both of them on the bed in front of you for support, you glanced at the iPad to see both of them watching you, and you stifled the moan that left you when you realized they were getting each other off.

“Like what you see, baby?” You nodded in response, your eyes glued to their crossed arms just barely moving. “Then get going, or we’ll turn the camera off.”

You began to move your hips in a slow back-and-forth motion, hissing and moaning each time the toy hit a spot that one of your girlfriends usually got for you.

“Faster.”

You obeyed immediately, gradually speeding up to a pace that had the bed shaking a bit under your movements, but you couldn’t find it in you to care about the safety of it all when you were this close to the edge. Your climax came faster than you expected and you managed to keep somewhat of a rhythm through it, slumping forward and panting as you came down.

“Again.” You looked to the screen in disbelief, biting your lip when you noticed Wanda’s head thrown back, her hands holding onto Natasha’s arm that seemed to move much faster now. “I didn’t stutter. Fuck yourself again.”

So you did, and another time and another time until you finally tapped out, sliding away from the toy and falling forward onto the bed. You lifted your head to see your fully naked girlfriends smiling at you, each of them a bit flushed from their own activity as they watched you.

“You were such a good girl tonight,” Wanda praised, smiling when you simply whimpered in response. “I can’t wait to get back there and fuck you myself.”

“Goodnight, baby. We love you.”

The call ended as you rolled onto your back to catch your breath for a moment. When your legs were no longer shaking uncontrollably, you stood up the best you could and grabbed the dildo after slipping on a robe, dropping it onto your pile of clothes as you grabbed that too. Once you were back in the shared room and the toy was cleaned, you slipped it into the bag you’d hidden in the closet. You were going to miss sex with them, and something had to take their place.

-

Tags: @littlegasps @imnotasuperhero @nat-km-mh @natasha-danvers @xxxtwilightaxelxxx @creepingwolfberry @bebe404 @seventeen0 @buckmesidewaysandcallmesteve @becka107 @muted-stoneheart @its-a-long-way-to-ba-sing-se @wannabe-fic-reader @messuhp @mjaudrey @emilyprentisswife @cherrieloco @fayhar @trikruismybitch @sxphiaswitch @beforeoursecrets @want-to-watch-it-burn @just-a-normalpersons @multi-images @witchxaf @natashadeservedmore @haiiiloeee2 @darkangelxoxo @sakurat123

[aggressive-positivity-network]

Hello! I was wondering if I could get some childhood headcanons for the mercs, thank you!

I’m taking a break from the longer headcanons - I’m finishing all my existing requests before opening up my headcanons back up - so I’ll do this one to get the gears turning. There are two here, but I will do more if prompted:

TF2 Merc Childhood Headcanons

Spy:

Spy was a shy child. Painfully shy.

His family was poor, so he had to steal most necessities. By the time he was twelve, he could hop or climb over most fences and hide in most buildings.

The entire reason he became a spy was seeing poorly translated VHS tapes of American espionage films. Spy was frustrated that he never looked the part - he had no suit, no cigarette, no girls.

But, not to worry, he would get all of those things when he went to Britain for schooling.

As a child, though, all he could do was pretend.

He had a “gun” made out of sticks and rope, mimed having a tie, hat, and overcoat, and drew a few shaky feminine features onto a pillow (whom he dubbed Mademoiselle Coussin).

This change in play actually helped him socially: whenever he felt nervous, he would just pretend he was a spy instead of a petite, messy-haired boy with freckles. This caused his popularity among the street boys to spike, and they were soon at his beck and call.

However, despite his fulfilling life as a street rat, he turned back into that timid mouse of a boy whenever he was home. He never dared use his charm on his parents. He already caught a flogging when he tried slicking his hair back.

This led to an odd, one-sided relationship with life where he put on two different masks for two different places, but could only be his true self when he was alone.

He learned to stifle and release emotions at will (keeping himself from crying when he was hit and then letting the tears flow when he was fooling unsuspecting tourists), and was cynical about any relationship that didn’t benefit him immediately or at all.

Except for one.

Every Christmas, a specific fruit vendor, an elderly man named Lucas, came to town. He would give one piece of fruit, usually an apple or peach, to every child that came to his stand. They never had to pay - they only had to say Merry Christmas.

Spy only hung around the stand for the first few years - his house was so far away that by the time he got there, most of the fruit was gone - but one Christmas, Lucas beckoned him over.

The vendor reached beneath his cart and pulled out a single orange, which happened to be Spy’s favorite.

“Joyeux Noël.”

“J-joyeux Noël, monsieur.”

Lucas held out the orange, which Spy accepted gratefully and held in two tight hands.

“Merci beaucoup, monsieur! Merci, merci!”

Lucas only smiled and waved his hand.

This became a tradition for many more years.

Spy would come to the cart, wish Lucas a warm holiday, and would receive an orange that had been saved for him.

But, one Christmas, Lucas didn’t come. Nor the next one. Or the one after that.

Even though Spy knew he was never going to get an orange from that cart again, he still went to that street every Christmas until he left France.

Now, whenever Spy receives an orange, either as a mandated vitamin supplement or if he happens to steal one from a witness’s house, he puts it in his suit, only eating it in his smoke room.

And if he is feeling particularly nostalgic, he’ll, just like he did when he was a child, eat the peel.

Heavy:

Heavy had a wonderful childhood compared to most of mercs.

His father was only vaguely present - and later absent - but his mother was a huge force in his life.

Though Heavy was never bullied exactly, since he was big even as a child, he was ostracized for his size and general clumsiness.

He often broke things, hurt other kids and even staff, and put holes in the wall simply because he was a pre-schooler in an elementary schooler sized body.

But, no matter how many calls she got from the school, Heavy’s mom knew that he wasn’t violent - all she asked was for him to try and fix what he had broken and apologize to the people he had hurt.

“My child, a bear may be big, but they are strong and beautiful. So are you.”

One day, after a particularly rough week of shattered vases and bruised classmates, Heavy ran from school into a random building, blinded by tears and shame. He ended up ticketless in a large theater, but he was only a child, so no one noticed. They assumed he was just someone’s kid.

He ended up on the roof, breathless and gasping between sobs.

Suddenly, he heard an orchestra beginning to play. He looked through a glass pane built into the roof and gazed at the stage below.

He saw one petite ballerina making her way across the stage, doing a few twirls as she went. Then, a much bigger man, who was almost as big as Heavy’s father was, came from stage right and joined in the dance.

Throughout their performance, Heavy kept wincing, expecting the enormous man to crush the small woman. But he never did. The performer moved with grace and a quickness that the boy didn’t expect.

Something awakened in him - a realization that he too could be nimble, despite his size. As the performance ended, Heavy went back down the stairs, his confidence renewed.

He became fascinated with ballet, and watched tapes of shows over and over again until he knew all the steps by heart. At first, he only moved his feet so his arms wouldn’t break anything. Then, as he grew more controlled, he learned how to dance and step around things.

His mother got less calls home, more and more kids began to trust and like him.

He still wasn’t popular by any means, but at least he could play soccer without breaking someone’s arm.

With that success came interests in all things quick, dainty, and detailed. Heavy learned how to knit, paint, and play a bit of piano. He was never very skilled at any of them except for knitting, he enjoyed practicing his coordination and mitigating his clumsiness.

But, one day, Heavy made the mistake of bringing his knitting to school. It was around Christmas, and he had to finish his sister’s sweater so he could wrap it.

The boys, who now knew that Heavy wouldn’t hurt a fly, started teasing him mercilessly, calling him a sow (female pig), a bitch, an old crone, and all sorts of other nasty names.

Heavy, with growing frustration, said something along the lines of, “Will it be your dead mother, then, who will mend your shirt when you are old? Or will you willingly catch your death?”

What Heavy didn’t know was that one particular child’s mother died a few months ago.

The boy went into a rage, giving Heavy a black eye and a bleeding nose before he finally took him by the underarms and held him away from him like a rabid chihuahua. Finally, the boy tired himself out. The other kids had since run away, not wanting to get in trouble or get beat up by Heavy.

The bully, after finding that he was helpless to the situation, began to cry, letting out all the emotions he had been shoving down in order to save face in front of his abusive father.

Heavy went straight into protective mode, having dealt with his younger sisters and their own grievances. After the bully calmed down a bit, he admitted his feelings, and how awful his circumstances were.

Heavy didn’t say anything much, but just handed him a pair of knitting needles and a ball of yarn. The boy learned to knit that day, and after Christmas, many other abused boys came seeking the same kind of closure and validation.

He made many friends this way, and it pretty much eradicated his bullying problem - so much so that he was pretty much untouchable to anyone looking to make trouble.

Though violence is how Heavy makes his money now, the merc learned from the very beginning that the best way through life is a gentle touch.

[saturngrqy]

Friday Night Lights// GD

A/n; Hiii guys so my phone got taken and this is the first post I’ve done on a computer.. I can’t tell if I like it or not. Anyways this is gonna be cheesy af and I alr wrote something like it on my wattpad but something about football!gray is just :’) Also I have no idea how football works so fair warning

Wc: How do ya’ll find this shit anyways imma guess around 1k

Warnings: Just cheesy basic shit, fluff;’)

“I’ll see you tonight, right?” Grayson questioned for the millionth time.

“Yess,” I huffed. I grabbed my stuff off my desk as the bell rang, signaling the end of the day. Grayson stood towering over my desk before one of his friends called his name. He looked in their direction and nodded, before turning back to me. 

“I gotta go, but you have my jersey correct?” He asked.

“For the hundredth time, I have everything, and I’ll be there on time I promise,” I replied. 

He smirked down at me before turning around. Right before he left out the door he turned back to me and gave me a soft wave, making a blush rise to my cheeks. I put my laptop back in my backpack and rose out of my chair, slinging the heavy bag over my shoulder. I waved at my teacher and told her to have a good day (a/n YALL BETTER APPRECIATE UR TEACHERS) She responded with a soft smile and a “you too,” before I finally left the class. 

I headed to the parking lot, entering my car. I turned my car on and drove out the parking lot, heading home.

-

I finished doing my hair in the mirror, a simple ponytail with some strands pulled out in the front. I went back to my room, grabbing Grayson’s jersey off my dresser. I slipped it on, noticing how it went down past my knees, even with a sweatshirt on underneath. I pulled the hoodie out from under the jersey, also pulling my hair out underneath as well. 

I glanced at myself in the mirror before taking my phone out to send a snapchat to Grayson.

I posed in front of the mirror, doing a really awkward smile and a peace sign with the caption “I’m wearing itt”. 

He responded within a minute, a timer picture of him in the locker room with Ethan with a poorly drawn heart over the picture. I smiled to myself at the heart, something about the way it was so sloppy made my heart warm. I just sent back a picture of me doing duck lips before putting my phone back in my pocket. 

I put on some cherry scented lip balm and a champagne toast scented perfume from bath and body works. I fixed my hair in the mirror before heading back downstairs. I got out of my car, pulling out of the driveway to head to the school/

- 

I arrived, texting my friend Alexis that I was there. I had some friends, but I wasn’t wildly popular or liked. Grayson however, was extremely popular and was known and loved by almost all the kids, not just for his looks but also his charming personality. He was especially popular with the girls, as you can probably assume. Many girls did not like me simply because I’m dating him. People were shocked when Grayson asked me out, and in all honesty, so was I, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I met Alexis at the gate to the field, and we found a spot in the student section right at the front so we could get the best view. We asked Alexis’ boyfriend, Josh, who was coincidentally a good friend of Grayson’s, to save our spots while we went and got concessions. 

We walked to the concessions with our arms clung together, giggling jokes into each other’s ear before landing a spot in the line for the concessions. 

I looked at my phone, noticing a text from Grayson. 

“I say we switch it up tonight and go to Monty’s,” It read.

Grayson and I always had this post-game ritual where we would go out and get dinner. Typically, Grayson and I would tag along with his team and their girlfriends and eat at a local diner. We ate there so much they had a spot reserved for us every Friday during football season, and they knew all of our names and our orders. However this time, Grayson suggested Monty’s.

I texted back, “Why? I mean I don’t mind Monty’s but normally we go to the diner”. 

He responded quickly. “Idk, just wanna spend alone time with my girl, plus Monty’s has a new veg milkshake we have to try”.

I giggled before replying. “Sounds good to me”.

I put my phone back in my pocket. I looked back up to see Alexis smirking at me. “What?” I asked, confused. 

“He is so whipped.” She replies, snorting

I roll my eyes. “He is not, he just knows how to treat a woman.”

I hear her laugh, coughing a small “simp” under her breath. I rolled my eyes again.

We grab our drinks and snacks, me getting a bag of Doritos and a cherry coke while Alexis got a Dr. Pepper. We walked back to the stands, sitting back in our spots.

-

“And Grayson Dolan scores his third touchdown of the night folks!” The announcer tells, excitedly. I scream and yell Grayson’s name, catching his eyes as he turns to me and points, blowing a kiss. I pretend to catch it, putting my hand on my heart. He shakes his head and laughs before returning back to his team. 

There was only about 10 minutes left of the game, and we were beating the other team 20- 7. (a/n don’t kill me idk how this shit works) The other team had almost no chance of coming back after Grayson’s last touchdown. I jumped up and down, shivering, rubbing my hands up and down my arm to make myself warmer. I turned to Alexis and shook her shoulders. 

“This is so excitinggg,” I said giddily. She laughed and agreed. I turned back to watch the last couple of minutes. 

The buzzer was called, and the game was officially over, with Grayson’s team crushing the other. I almost jumped out of the bleachers, running to the side of the field. Grayson’s team cheered before he ran over to me, hugging me over the fence. 

“You did so good baby,” I whispered in his neck. 

“Thank you,” He responded kissing my cheek. I turned to him, planting a passionate kiss on his pink lips. 

“Meet me at my car so we can go get dinner,” I told him, holding his cheek in my palm. I gently tapped his cheek twice before he ran off with a nod back to his team. 

-

I waited inside my car with the heat blasted for Grayson. Suddenly the door opened, revealing a very sweaty Grayson in his team sweatshirt and sweatpants. He gave me a kiss on the cheek before going to put his stuff in my trunk. He came back in with a wide gorgeous smile on his face. 

“You scared me,” 

“I’m sorry my love. Are we ready to go?”

I pulled out of the parking lot with a smirk, driving off towards the vegan restaurant. We sat in the car listening to Man on the Moon III, Kid Cudi’s newest album that Grayson and I were obsessed with. Tequila Shots played in the background as Grayson’s hand found my thigh. 

I looked down at it before glancing up at him, noticing he was already staring at me. I blushed before looking back to the road. 

“You know, this was probably your best game yet,” I broke the silence. 

“I know right? That’s the best I’ve played all season. E said that with that performance, I’ll have college coaches looking to recruit me left and right,” He responded excitedly, making my heart flutter at his passion. 

‘I’m sure they will be, babe. You make me so proud,” I gushed.

He squeezed my thigh as a response. We pulled onto the side of the street in front of Monty’s. I unbuckled my seatbelt, about to open the door before I noticed Grayson sat still, staring at me. 

“What?” I questioned. 

“Nothing, I just love you,” He said out of the blue, making my stomach do flips. 

“I love you too,” I giggled. “Now lets go get some fucking milkshakes!”

[starduststudyblr]

love victor season 2 thoughts

MAJOR spoilers under the cut

i have Thoughts about season 2 because they all just kept. screwing up. so many times. except for felix, he is baby and i will always love him. this season was so messy and infuriating and real and i still loved it.

- is simon sick of victor yet😂it's been two seasons of simon exclusively being a high school kid's gay sherpa and those conversations seem pretty one-sided

- i LOVED felix's storyline. i thought it was so well done. it was a hard situation and they handled it with grace and authenticity. anthony turpel delivered an amazing performance and that scene where he finally broke down BROKE me. this type of situation is a reality for so many people and i loved the way they portrayed it.

- i never realized the extent of lake's toxic positivity. i always really liked her because she was such a ray of sunshine, but she handled felix's situation so poorly. like, she was so out in left field. not even in the realm of understanding. i know she had good intentions and was dealing with her own stuff too but like...yikes. it really rubbed me the wrong way. i still love lake, but pilar seems oddly like a much better fit for felix. i really love the way her character has developed since season 1.

- the whiteness thing!! yes!! I'm so glad they addressed this. as a queer poc i can relate to victor and rahim in that even the most well-intentioned non-poc won't truly be able to get it unless they live it.

- VICTOR TELLING RAHIM ABOUT BENJI'S ALCOHOLISM!! IN WHAT WORLD IS THAT OKAY!!

- mia's dad accepting the job offer made my eyes pop out of my head. I've been pretty annoyed with mia since season 1 because she never tells anyone when they upset her but i was so proud of her for finally speaking up. and then her dad goes and does...that??

- speaking of...mannn i am so sick of everyone not communicating. if i have to hear one more "are you okay?" "yeah i'm...fine *tight smile*" from any of them i'm gonna scREAM the tight smiles are killing me (looking at you victor and mia)

- the whole victor and rahim thing felt so forced. it just didn't make sense. i love rahim and i'm so glad they brought him in, but i just don't think it adds up to have something only spark between them in the last two episodes. but also i need victor and rahim's version of holy on spotify immediately

- I was rooting for lucy to be gay from the start and the twist with lake gave me so much serotonin omg🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺my lil bi heart is full

- i loved isabel's storyline so much. at first i was a little nervous because i really didn't want to watch a full season of homophobic parents, but isabel's growth was so real and vulnerable. this stuff isn't easy and i loved that they showed the real struggles that some parents have after their kids come out. isabel wasn't perfect and the show definitely didn't gloss over the ugly parts, but watching her develop over the course of the season was beautiful. also, being a Catholic who has also struggled with the church's views of the lgbtq community, watching her come to terms with her changing beliefs and stand up to the priest really touched me.

- aaaand victor and benji. on the one hand, this series is called love victor so it makes sense that the story should focus on him, but the whole relationship just felt like...a lot of victor. everything was always about victor and his issues and nothing about benji and what he was going through. not to mention victor's family issues, which must've been a nightmare for benji. i can understand how he felt. but on the other hand, i can also see victor's side because he's dealing with things that benji will never experience. benji needed to have a lot more understanding with him because they were in two very different situations. not sure who to side with on this one.

[stiltonbasket]

For the renouncement verse I’d love to see a continuation of the one with Xichen and Lan Qiren, with pregnant-with-a-girl wwx being gently coerced to be lazy for once in his life by, apparently, the entire lan clan

(author’s note: double prompt this time! and please please reblog if you can, since that’s how we get prompts for future chapters!)

Anon 2: helloooo for the renouncement verse, do you have anything during wei ying's pregnancy, like lwj fretting over wwx bc i feel that wwx would still do crazy experiments even whille he's pregnant?

__

Wei Wuxian is not particularly good at sitting still.

In fact, everyone who knew him at Lotus Pier when he was a child—and everyone he met at the Cloud Recesses, too—knows that he prefers scaling little cliffs and swimming and climbing trees to resting, even under a physician’s orders; and that never really changed until the last four years of his first life, which were riddled with barely-hidden illness after the loss of his golden core.

But his resurrection returned him to full health, and full strength, so that even the strange fits of nausea that began soon after his wedding (which Wei Wuxian naturally blamed on the bland cuisine of his married home) turned out to be a baby instead of some weird kind of mountain plague. Lan Zhan hasn’t been worrying any less since they found out about the little one, of course—if anything, he seems to be worrying more—but the point is that Wei Wuxian is well into his fourth month, which means that his sensitive stomach is back to normal again, along with his dislike for staying in bed.

And since Wei Wuxian is only with child instead of actually sick, why would he stay in bed when he could be up and causing trouble? He wouldn’t, and he won’t, which is why he cheerfully disregards all of Lan Xichen’s warnings about rest and spends the fifth day after the healers give them the news experimenting in the jishi.

With fire talismans.

And smokescreens.

And a great many other things that horrify Lan Zhan past the point of speech when he comes crashing into the workshop, and get Wei Wuxian bundled right back into bed with Xiao-Yu keeping watch to ensure that he remains there.

(He also set the jishi’s chimney on fire, which was probably why his husband broke the door down instead of lifting the locking talisman, now that he thinks about it.)

“You cannot take such risks,” Lan Zhan says hoarsely, cradling Wei Wuxian’s flushed face in his hands and pressing their brows together. “Wei Ying, xingan, anything could have happened if you had breathed in the smoke, or if you grew lightheaded while the door was locked, you—my darling, please, please leave such dangerous things for after the baby is born. It is not safe for either of you.”

“It was only a little fire,” Wei Wuxian protests, before Lan Zhan leans in and presses a fervent kiss to his lips. “And I had purification talismans in the room to keep the air clean, anyway. I’m fine.”

“Suppose they had failed?” his husband counters, tracing the curve of his cheek with a finger that shakes so much that Wei Wuxian nearly bursts into tears at the sight of it. “Suppose the fire spread from the hearth, and you could not put it out in time? What would I have done then, Wei Ying, with my heart’s beloved and my child in danger?”

“Well, I suppose...”

“No more experiments,” Lan Zhan tells him. “At least none that you cannot safely perform in the jingshi with Xiao-Yu and myself close by. Please, sweetheart.”

Wei Wuxian promises to stay out of his workroom, since he still hasn’t quite worked out how to say no to Lan Zhan yet; but he does refuse to keep off his feet, because that suggestion comes from Lan Xichen instead of Lan Zhan.

“Find something safe for me to do, then!” he complains. “I’m not an invalid, Xichen-ge! In fact, I feel stronger than ever. I’m going to go swimming tomorrow, just wait—”

“You will do no such thing!” Lan Xichen cries, horrified. “Suppose you catch cold? It is nearly winter, a fever of the lungs this late in the year could kill you!”

And then he tells Lan Zhan, the traitor, and gets Wei Wuxian banned from entering any body of water except for Zewu-jun’s hot spring until the baby arrives. He isn’t even supposed to bathe there without supervision, because the warm water might make him dizzy enough to drown without someone there to watch him even if it does wash the tension out of his back and shoulders.

Even Lan Qiren seems to be determined to keep both Wei Wuxian and the little one in the best of health, which he discovers when he stalks over to his uncle-in-law’s house in the sixth month to tell him that Lan Zhan and Lan Xichen are being tyrants.

“I’m not allowed to mess around in the jishi anymore,” Wei Wuxian grouses, counting on his fingers as Lan Qiren sighs and fills up his plate with braised pork and plenty of healthy greens, seasoned strongly enough that even Wei Wuxian wouldn’t mind eating a full serving of them. “I’m not allowed to go swimming—” and here Lan Qiren pours him a cup of sweet soymilk and pushes the dish of warm potatoes closer to Wei Wuxian’s side of the table— “and I can’t even teach anymore, since I lost my balance and sprained my wrist in the lanshi just one time!”

“You are heavier than you used to be,” the older man observes. “If you had not caught yourself in time, the fall could have seriously hurt you, let alone the baby.”

Wei Wuxian lays his head down on the table—as well as he can, that is, with the baby in the way—and groans. “I know,” he says, aggrieved. “It’s not that I want to put us in danger, but I’m so bored, and I have to be useful somehow.”

Lan Qiren freezes with a cup of tea halfway to his lips. “Useful?”

“I’m the Chief Cultivator’s husband, xiansheng. I can’t just sit around doing nothing,” Wei Wuxian huffs. “If I can’t work on my talismans, and I can’t teach, and Zewu-jun won’t let me do any of the sect work because he’s afraid I’ll get tired, what can I do?”

The teacup thumps back onto the table with a sharp clattering sound. “Wei Ying. Nephew, that is enough. I will hear no more of this.”

Wei Wuxian lifts his head in surprise. “Ah?”

“You are not here to be useful,” Lan Qiren says severely. “We are your family, and this is your home, and you may do whatever you please in it. Have you been so poorly treated here that you must sit here before me, scarcely three months from your confinement, and fret about doing nothing when you ought to be resting and preparing for the child’s arrival? Because I will have words with Wangji if so, make no mistake, and—”

“Lan-xiansheng, no!” Wei Wuxian cries. “That’s not what I mean, it’s just…”

He has the rest of the denial on the tip of his tongue, but a tear rolls down his nose and plops onto the steaming lotus roots before he can say anything. 

It hardly makes sense to him at first, because he truly does love tinkering with spells and talismans in his workshop, making cultivation as accessible to people without golden cores as he can, and he loves teaching the baby disciples and going on night-hunts with his own faithful little flock of juniors; but his body has made its exhaustion very clear in the past several weeks, and sometimes all he wants to do is curl up in Lan Zhan’s arms and sleep the day away with his childrens’ voices keeping him company from the next room. 

And Lan Zhan wants him to rest and let him dote on him more than anything, so why does Wei Wuxian keep fighting it?

“It’s not his fault,” he murmurs, dimly aware that the plate of hot-and-sour potatoes looks suspiciously damp. “It’s just… me, I guess.”

“Eat your food,” Lan Qiren tells him, sounding suspiciously gentle as he puts a sweet bean cake into Wei Wuxian’s bowl. “And make sure you finish your tea, I put strengthening herbs in it.”

__

His uncle-in-law comes back to the jingshi with him after lunch, along with Lan Xichen, and the three of them have a very long talk with Lan Zhan while Sizhui and Jingyi babysit Xiao-Yu; Lan Xichen and Lan Qiren offer him and Lan Zhan advice, and Lan Zhan pulls Wei Wuxian into his lap and comforts him without bothering about the impropriety of it, until he can finally nod off to sleep when the two of them are alone again. 

“I’m really not a bother to you, Lan Zhan?” he whispers, tucking his face against his husband’s chest and listening to his heartbeat. “You don’t—mind, that I can’t do very much with this baby?”

“No, never,” Lan Zhan chokes. “Wei Ying, why didn’t you just tell me you were feeling this way? You cannot imagine how much I want—how I need—”

“Need what?”

“Let me look after you, sweetheart,” his husband pleads. “Let me look after you both. Give me the privilege of satisfying my beloved’s every wish, and soothing your fears when your heart is heavy, and keeping you and our little one well. Please, xingan?”

(Upon further reflection, perhaps it is a good thing that he never learned to say no to Lan Zhan, after all.)

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

chin fucking up, amigo.

Titans 3.02

... eh?

SPOILERS ahead.

1. you know that music video for billie jean��where michael jackson would dance along the pavement and the tiles would light up under his feet in different colours? yeah? me too.

titans hasn’t met a table top or a support arch that it doesn’t want to light up in a headache-inducing blue like the world’s most boring nightlight. i mean, i’m not an expert on lighting or cinematography or just... colour by any means, and the quality of the video i’m watching is poor given that i can’t access hbo max, but all the orange and teal and neon is making it very difficult to really differentiate between say, the batcave and the gotham police department and hell, the titans tower. i feel like there’s oftentimes a gap between idea and execution with titans, with gotham being this almost otherwordly hellscape with an aesthetic pulled from a gothic horror novel, but the colours and design just... leave it flat and dark and dull.

1.5. like what really frustrates me is that titans has a delightful mix of tones--the fights often remind me of schumacher-era batman camp, with the contrived quips and the start-stop rhythm and krypto just sallying in and ending the fight with a fucking SuperBark (tm) but in the same episode you have red hood just casually pulling out severed heads out of a duffle bag and desperate people blackmailed into killing themselves out of drug overdoses. I MEAN. it’s wonderful! but it looks all the same. it sounds Absolutely Bonkers on paper but on screen both Quip and Murder happen in the same washed-out blue and i wanted to be excited about the batcave, dammit!

2. things re: red hood have happened at such a breakneck speed that it feels like there’s so much that’s happened off-screen that we’re not privy to. a real proper mystery! 

things that are intriguing about the red hood arc so far:

a) what was that chemical he huffed just before going to fight the joker? is it a regular old performance/adrenaline booster or is it something more lazarus-juice adjacent? if it’s the latter, i can’t imagine he got that much information from a lone chemistry textbook. and where is he getting the resources to set up his little chemistry lab? is somebody else orchestrating things behind the scenes?

b) the red hood persona, costume and mask, plus the elaborate plan he’s putting in place to both string along gotham’s rogues and enact his revenge against the titans seems too... fully-formed and elaborate to have been concocted in just a few days. how long do you think jason’s been planning this? just... stewing in resentment and building rage, dismissed and passed around and underestimated and realising that the power he thought he would get by being robin is no power, no protection at all, but something that’s left him even more vulnerable than before? 

c) do we think that the scarecrow is at least partly behind this transformation? because yes, it was batman that set up this whole hannibal lecter-esque situation with him, and he would be irresponsible enough to have jason-as-robin go talk to him regularly regarding “~profiling~” criminals. it’s not too far of a leap to assume that scarecrow could’ve been manipulating jason at a very vulnerable time, and that he could’ve passed along some of his chemistry know-how, too.

d) ... or fuck, i wouldn’t put it past titans to introduce ra’s al ghul in a fucking ten second aside

e) anyway, the thing that won’t leave me alone is jason seeking out the joker not necessarily to fight him, but to orchestrate his own death. the whole thing has to have been part of a bigger plan. he broke batman with it, after all. and he’s starting to break the titans, too.

f) i love it! i mean, it does re-tread some of the storybeats we had with deathstroke last season (turning the titans against each other as revenge, etc) but it’s... tighter, this time, and at least for now seems better-executed. and as a red hood story it’s different enough to be really interesting, and i appreciate the ways in which its reframed the revenge story to focus on the titans rather than just the batman. like fuck everything up, i say! turn it on its head! slash the innards out of that sacred cow and strew it like garlands in the path of the Story You Want To Tell!

(and yes i am fully aware that by the time i post this review, there will be a whole lot more information out but if i come across like a fool then goddammit i will be a fool!)

2. i love how every season of titans starts off with, ‘oh dick, you thought you were settling into a role and a life and a pattern of relationships? well fuck you, here’s a terrible and traumatic thing, tons more responsibility, and circumstances that will lead you to uproot your entire life and move somewhere else.’ and dick’s just like, ‘well, ok. fuck you, but all right’.

can you imagine? the man was just settling into leading a team in sf and smiling for the first time in years, and now he has to deal with jason’s death, bruce experiencing a full fledged breakdown, coming back to a city that represents more bad memories than good, red hood, and a frightening new case that seems to be targeting him and his team. it’s a testament to dick’s growth that he’s not reacting to this stress like he did last year, shutting everybody out, making irrational decisions and experiencing sharp, short bursts of anger. (not to mention a full fledged psychotic episode.)

2.5. but i’ve also talked about dick performing a fair amount of unwarranted emotional labour for his team(s) in that he just lets them take out their frustrations on him and... does nothing. be it his team exploding at him for jericho (both in flashback and present-day) or donna and hank needling him for handling deathstroke poorly or barbara berating him for not handling the bank situation as well as she thought batman would though just the previous episode she had talked about how fucked up it was that bruce just expected dick to step up and replace him in gotham without any real notice. i mean it’s all perfectly understandable and sympathetic from their end--and i’m not trying to bash them here!--but hank, my man, the same chin you’re asking your amigo to keep up is the one that you punched last year and never apologised for. just sayin’.

2.75. @superohclair did a wonderful breakdown of what the ‘fear’ contract could imply here and there’s not too much i could add to that. it’s just really interesting that fear ended up being such a defining feature of their lives, albeit it’s the fear of seeming less than invincible in the face of bigger, more tangible fears. am i making sense?  dick feared loss, and abandonment, and the more existential concept of turning into something that he didn’t want to. bruce so feared being alone that he’s scouting kids to replace robin within days of jason dying. 

it also goes some way in explaining the tense sort of... restraint that bruce and dick show in the wake of loss and tragedy, like anything less than complete control of your emotions can lead to tragedy. it’s conditioning that dick couldn’t shake off when he was at his lowest in detroit, hating his legacy but unable to let it go either.

2.775. but i definitely appreciate the softness that dick displays with his team now, checking on them after a mission-gone-bad, welcoming back old members with no caveats or resentments (and kory’s delight in seeing hank back! hank and dick hanging out together and hank trying to prop dick up!), and appreciating their teamwork in solving cases. that’s always been the essence of dick as a person, and the beating heart of this show: flawed and traumatised people coming together to a place that will always be open to them, where they can be their worst and be supported still, allowed to make mistakes and grow from them. that’s family.

2.8. coming back to bruce for just a sec, it’s interesting how that gotham rogue was so certain when he said that ‘batman doesn’t kill’ but it’s not a rule that either jason or dick put much store by when they were robins. the ‘no-killing’ rule clearly didn’t mitigate dick’s fears about turning into batman and jason’s never been seeing giving two shits about it. it seems to me of a piece with bruce’s distant, second-hand sort of parenting that we see in dick’s flashbacks from s1 where the fear was never about personally disappointing batman, but taking lessons from him on finding a place in gotham’s hellish ecosystem and surviving.

3. kory having waking flashbacks! i don’t buy the bullshit parasomnia episode explanation from fake!HPG (because c’mon, justin has to be some sort of tamaranean ruse) because for one, you have to be actually asleep for that diagnosis. 

(and here i was, hoping against hope that HPG would actually end up as the team’s therapist)

curiouser and curiouser! i wonder if these flashbacks are from the time between kory landing on earth and the beginning of season 1, when she was completely amnesiac? it’d be cool if the show was considering repercussions from that time, and if kory hasn’t gained all her memories back. 

4. i just love the vibes between gar and conner and kory. gar Having Things To Do is only one part of my wishlist for him, however: other parts include having an actual story arc, and actually bonding with members who are not conner and kory. (dick! dick! hank! dick!)

anyway. time to move on to watching ep3 and seeing this family bond and nothing terrible and tragic happening at all, nope, nosiree. 

[babybatscreationsv2]

Hi! Idk if ur still doing ace prompts, but ace stephen with spiderstrange please!

I am always down for ace prompts!

Warning for some mild sexual content

Stephen had never been made to feel cowardly before, yet here he was, a coward. He and Peter had been in a romantic relationship for many months now. They shared something wonderful, something beautiful, something that made Stephen feel warm and loved and respected in a way that he didn't know he needed until he had it. The only issue was honesty. Because as much as Stephen loved Peter, he didn't desire a sexual relationship and Peter very clearly did.

When they kissed, Peter pressed against him, his hard length against Stephen's thigh. His hands slid down Stephen's chest and back up his thighs. And Stephen did nothing in response. He felt nothing. Well, every now and then his body would respond to those touches, but his head wandered to thoughts of magic texts or that tricky brain surgery he had performed some years ago that still pricked his curiosity. And Peter always noticed. He always sighed and pulled away. He would force a smile and they would go back to their movie or dinner or crawl into bed. It was never Stephen's intention to make Peter feel unwanted, but it was clear that was exactly what he had done. If he didn't do something soon, Peter would leave.

What if he told him the truth and Peter left anyway?

Coward, he thought.

He was practically holding the man hostage in that case. Leading him on and leaving him hanging. He had to talk to him. Peter deserved to know even if it went poorly.

He waited until things were quiet. They had just finished brunch, sitting at the kitchen island. It was a calm day, no upcoming plans. Plenty of time to talk.

"Peter-" he started.

"Do you not want me?" Peter cut him off. He turned in his seat to face him. He looked so angry, so hurt. Stephen couldn't meet his eye.

"It's not that," his throat grew thick. He felt Peter's posture change. A little less hurt and a little more concerned. Stephen wasn't a man who's voice broke or who found it difficult to speak. He was blunt and honest and Peter's intuition was incredible enough to realize all of this with a single sentence. 

"Something's wrong isn't it?" He put his hand on Stephen's arm. "You can talk to me."

"I uh..." He felt like he wanted to cry. He wasn't a man that cried often either. Why did he feel so vulnerable?

"Is it me? I mean are you... are you straight?"

Stephen laughed, startled. Poor Peter didn't look any more assured, but it certainly made Stephen feel a little better. "No, definitely not. Well not exactly no- well it's... it's complicated," he babbled.

"Please, Stephen. Don't make me keep guessing."

He took a breath. Then he looked at Peter. His Peter who loved him terribly much. Peter who had fought and nearly died for him plenty of times. "I'm asexual," he said.

"Oh." Peter looked at him, words sinking in. "So it's not me then?"

"No, Peter. Not at all."

"And you want to be with me?"

"Very much. I can't imagine anyone else in my life."

"You just don't want to have sex?"

"It's sort of complicated." Stephen rubbed a hand along his jaw. "I'm not terribly interested in sex and I get a bit distracted by all of the things I would rather be doing."

Peter blinked at him, listening and not fully comprehending.

"The only thing that truly disgusts me is penetration. The only time I want to be inside someone is while performing a heart transplant."

Peter snorted. He tried to hold it in and failed, bursting into laughter so strong he doubled over.

"So," he wheezed. "When I'm trying to get you into bed, you're thinking about heart surgery?"

Stephen smiled. "Sometimes I think about object teleportation." He waited for Peter to settle before he continued more seriously. "I love you very much, Peter. I'm willing to give you whatever it is that you need."

Peter shook his head. "I don't ever want you to do anything you don't want to."

"Thank you, Peter."

He smiled. His hand reached for Stephen's. "I love you. I'm more than happy with what we have."

Stephen wasn't so sure as they continued on. Peter seemed happier than before as days passed, but Stephen still doubted himself. Then he caught Peter masturbating in their bed.

Peter hid himself under the covers, face turing tomato red. Stephen averted his gaze, though he stood frozen in the doorway. "I- I'm sorry, I'll just uh..."

"No, it's okay, I shouldn't have been doing that in the bed. I mean its your bed, too. Of course you would come in here to lay down," Peter rambled.

"No, Peter. You should be able to take care of yourself whenever you need to. I just didn't mean to interrupt," Stephen said. They both stood, staring at each other, each trying to figure the other out.

"Do you uh," Peter chewed his lip. "Do you want the bed?"

"I was going to do some reading, but I can sit out in the living room."

"No, I'll just go to the bathroom then."

"No, Peter really, stay."

"But-"

They both stopped. Stephen realized then that they were both trying to hard to accommodate each other when there was truly no need.

"What if we both stay? You can do whatever you're doing and I'll read my book and we'll both just, do our own thing?"

Peter settled back into the bed. "You sure you're not grossed out?"

"You don't gross me out, Peter."

"You're welcome to stay if you're comfortable then."

Stephen settled into his side of the bed. He turned on the lamp and picked up his book. Peter went back to his business. Stephen found that he quite liked the little sounds that he made. It was cute. He sort of whimpered and he breathed too heavy and he looked pretty with his eyes fluttering closed and his cheeks pink. He could see what would be appealing about watching a person like this. Stephen was no virgin, but it was easier to appreciate a person in the throes of pleasure when he didn't feel obligated to be directly involved. Which was nice because Peter made nice sounds when he climaxed.

Stephen smiled to himself. Then he leaned over and kissed Peter's forehead. Peter laughed.

"You really just watched me get off and you're still not interested?"

Stephen shrugged. "You're lovely to look at, but no." Peter smiled. "What?"

"This is kind of nice, actually. Except, I'm all gross now."

"Go and clean up and I'll be here to hold you when you're done."

"Sounds perfect."

[harrysgoldenline]

hiiii. I adore your writing, you're soo talented. I don't know if your requests are open, but if they are, do you think you could do something where y/n gets hurt (not seriously) but seriously enough that Harry freaks out cuz she's unconscious and it was 'on his watch ' or something. Feel free to change anything 😂😗

Thank you so much 🥺 my requests are always open so plz submit as much as you want! Thank you for requesting 💖

Dizzy

Y/N didn’t feel very good.

She has been helping Harry tun around with his errands, going to meetings, rehearsals, the studio and now they were on their way to a Gucci fitting for him to try on some outfits for upcoming performances and tour.

Of course Y/N loved spending time with him and being able to go see him in his element and watch him work. He loved it too because she was the perfect distraction and made the days go by faster, just by seeing her smile at him, squeezing his hand always when he needed her most.

Now, Y/N was getting exhausted. She hadn’t eaten anything and hardly had a sip water and that clock had just hit 4pm. She began feeling a little lightheaded, vision going fuzzy a bit as they entered the room and the bright lights hit her.

“Are you alright?” Harry whispered, holding her waist a bit tighter as she walked unevenly, guiding her to the bench close to where Harry would have his fitting done.

“Yep!” She squeaked, leaning up and kissing his lips quickly before moving back quickly, towards the clothing rack, “put on the lilac one on first!”

“Yes ma’am.” He giggled, already sliding off his jacket and leaving him in his undershirt before slipping off his trousers.

Soon, the stylist comes in, watching Harry as he steps before the mirror and began sticking pins where they were needed, helping the vision come to life.

“You like it?” Harry asked once the man stepped back, “think its good for opening night?”

“I love it, you look so handsome baby.” She whispered, forcing herself up off the bench.

Y/N stood quickly, vision going blurry an before anyone could she was falling to the ground, quickly going unconscious. Harry’s heart stoped, instantly panicking after seeing her pass out. He quickly rushed towards her and scooping her up, finding a loveseat and laying her across it.

“Can somebody please get us some water?” Harry shouted, eyes welling up at the overwhelming quick turn of events, “some crackers? Anything, please!”

Random staff members rushed towards him, giving him multiple water bottles and seeing a stuff member pull a bag of crackers out of their lunchboxes. Harry thanks them profusely as he began rubbing her hair softly, whispering her name to try and coax her awake.

It was definitely the longest minute and twenty eight seconds of his life, a sigh of relief escaping him as her eyes flutter open.

“Baby” he whispered, taking her hand and softly kissing it, wanting desperately to kiss her but afraid of suffocating her, “are you okay? I’m so sorry I’ve been making you run all around... these people- their so nice they got all this stuff- fuck, I’m sorry you haven’t even eaten.”

“It’s okay.” She shook her head, sitting up and softly giving him and the employees a thank you, embarrassment coursing through her veins rapidly, “I’m sorry, I... I’m sorry I took up so much of your time.”

“Don’t be.” He kissed her forehead, taking the mini water bottle from her and giving her another along with some crackers, “lets just go home, yeah?”

“Harry, you have to get this done.” She sighed, shaking her head quickly, seeing the staff slyly watching them and she shyly lowers her voice, “I’m sorry, I feel bad. I don’t... I don’t know I just feel stupid.”

He shook his head, mirroring her before cupping her face and kissing her softly before scooping her up, setting her on her feet before quickly changing.

Y/N was apologizing to all the staff for taking their water, food and time, feeling extremely guilty at the thought of getting in the way of their day. Of course they all dismissed her, explaining that she was no bother and they hope she feels better.

****

The couple arrived home a few hours ago, Harry practically carrying her to the kitchen where he quickly gave her of all kinds of snacks, making sure to give her plenty of water. Y/N of course was still quite embarrassed, she never really liked being the center of attention and that circumstances wasn’t quite ideal.

After he forced down different snacks and water he carried her to the bedroom, along with many protests from Y/N but he insisted, leading them to where they are now. Her head on his chest, hands up around his shoulder as his rubbed her back softly.

“I’m sorry, my fault all this happened, I should be taken better care of you. Hated seeing you like that... was scary.” Harry broke the silence, kissing the top of her head, “I love you so much, so in love... I’ll take care of you.”

“It was my fault, i should’ve eaten. Or at least had some water.” She joked, forcing a laugh before she got quite, tracing patterns onto her chest, “I was just so embarrassed.” She sniffles, “Everybody was looking at me and talking about me and... I know I should care but I do.”

“It’s okay, you’re human.” He shrugged, pulling her head up softly so she would make eye contact, “nobody was making fun of you, everybody was helping. Not a single soul is going to think of you poorly, probably don’t like me because it seems like I don’t let ya eat.”

“You let me eat too much.” She giggled, pressing her lips onto her jaw a few times before meeting his lips, “thank you for always being there for me.”

“My fault it happened.”

“No it’s not.” She weakly slapped his arm, both of them giggling before she kissed him again, hands going up in his hair, deepening the kiss, “I love you, you’re my knight in shining armor.”

“And you’re my princess.”

[hale-13]

Trapezius

By Hale13

For the Summer of Whump Day 27 Prompt 27 - Injured

Peter gazed out over the harbor forlornly, twisting his mask into knots in his lap. Normally he would really enjoy the view – the sun was setting in a clear sky turning the normally disgusting water a soft orange and painting the area with a soft warmth. The peaceful view was marred by the emergency vehicles, Coastguard boats and police and news helicopters which made Peter’s gut clench with anxiety. He just… he tried so hard.

Words: 2123, Chapters: 1/1 (Complete), Language: English

Fandoms: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)

Rating: Gen

Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark

Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark, May Parker, Helen Cho

TW: Injury, Poor Emotional intelligence

Read on AO3 or below the line break.

Peter gazed out over the harbor forlornly, twisting his mask into knots in his lap. Normally he would really enjoy the view – the sun was setting in a clear sky turning the normally disgusting water a soft orange and painting the area with a soft warmth. The peaceful view was marred by the emergency vehicles, Coastguard boats and police and news helicopters which made Peter’s gut clench with anxiety. He just… he tried so hard.

The sound of repulsers approaching made Peter tense and he mentally put his walls back up. He couldn’t afford to let Mr. Stark see him as a kid right now. They were colleges when he was Spider-Man, peers. He took a deep breath and held it for a moment before letting it puff out through his clenched teeth.

“Previously on Peter screws the pooch I tell you to stay away from this instead you hack a multi-million dollar suit so you can sneak around behind my back doing the one thing I told you not to do,” Mr. Stark’s sarcastic voice said and Peter held back a flinch, keeping his expression blank as he cautiously looked back over his shoulder. His back was killing him and felt hot and swollen from his Hercules hold of the ferry earlier – he had definitely felt something tear – but he couldn’t afford the weakness right now.

“Is everyone okay?” He asked instead, keeping his voice monotone and trying not to tense his back.

“No thanks to you,” the Iron Man voice made Mr. Stark’s snide tone sound slightly metallic but, more than that, it made his blood boil and he whipped around to face the man.

“No thanks to me?” He took no precautions as he lifted his lefts over they side of the concrete tower and jumped down on the other side making his shoulders throb. “Those weapons were out there and I tried to tell you about it and you didn’t listen. None of this would have happened if you had just listened to me!” His voice broke and he could feel blood rushing to his face but he did his best to push down the embarrassment. “If you even cared you’d actually be here.” He threw in boldly.

It took him by surprise, therefore, when the armor opened in from of him and Tony Stark stepped out, a grim look of disappointment on his face that made Peter stumble back a could steps, unable to hide his wince of pain but playing it off as shock instead. “I did listen kid. Who do you think called the FBI huh?”

Peter dropped his gaze, unable to make further eye contact, only interrupting to correct his age and flinching again at Mr. Stark’s yelling. “I’m sorry,” he stammered, but he could tell the platitudes were only making his idol angrier so he said instead, with the most sincerity he could push into his tone “I just… I just wanted to be like you.”

“And I wanted you to be better,” Mr. Stark said back in a weary voice before asking for the suit back. Peter heart sank further but he got it. Mr. Stark was right – he didn’t deserve to be Spider-Man if all he did was hurt other people.

The car ride back to his apartment in Queens was silent and awkward, broken only by Mr. Stark and Happy leaving the car and throwing his a pair of hideous Hello Kitty pajama pants and an oversized New York tourist shirt. It took more effort than he would care to admit to slip the suit off of his painful muscles and lift his arms up high enough to pull the shirt on but he managed it.

Happy slipped back into the driver’s seat a moment later and raised the partition but Mr. Stark didn’t return as they pulled away from the curb and Peter’s heart sank further when he realized the man had probably taken the armor back to the Tower because he couldn’t bear to be in the car with Peter another minute. His eyes were burning but he refused to cry here – he’d already proven to be a problem and he wasn’t going to cry about his well deserved punishment.

The car stopped in front of his apartment and the locks on the doors popped but Happy didn’t roll down to partition to talk to him or offer any direction so, without a backward glance as his poorly folded suit, Peter slunk out of the car and upstairs.

May was not happy with him for skipping school and not answering his phone and, with the pain of his torn muscles ratcheting up and the emotional trauma of the day weighing down on him he collapsed onto the couch and tearfully confessed to his aunt that he had lost his internship, wanting to bring his arms up to return her tender hug but physically unable to do so. His only relief was that she directed him to take a shower pretty immediately because he smelled like garbage,.

And, yeah, he probably did.

The piss poor water pressure of their dingy shower was actually a blessing today but Peter could still barely stand with his back facing the hottest water possible hoping that the heat would relieve some of his pain but he was still just as painful when he forwent his sleep shirt a few minutes later.

He healed fast. This was fine – it would all be resolved in a few days.

———————————————

“Fuck,” Peter muttered, keeping his right arm tucked close to his stomach as he wrestled with the leukotape he had bought at the pharmacy. It kept sticking to itself and the wall and his hair and basically everywhere but where he was trying to stick it and Peter groaned, balling the piece up and throwing it away.

It had been a few months since dealing with the Vulture. A few months since turning down Mr. Stark’s offer to be an Avenger but accepting his offer to become his personal intern and Peter couldn’t be happier.

Well. Except for his shoulder that is.

His left arm had healed fully after straining his muscles holding the ferry together but his right had just gotten worse and worse and it was interfering with his ability to not only be Spider-Man but also to just perform everyday tasks. He hadn’t been able to lift much with that side or even put on a shirt normally in weeks and it was starting to grate on his nerves. After spending hours watching videos on YouTube Peter decided to try some strengthening exercises and taping.

Neither was working very well.

“Fuck,” he said again, with feeling, as he bent forward at the waist to rest his head on the cool counter top of his bathroom. He was supposed to get picked up by Happy in a few minutes to go and spend the weekend at the Tower with Tony to work on his suit and there was no way he could hide this anymore. He couldn’t even lift his arm up to chest level. His phone vibrated on the counter top and he moaned, answering it without looking at the caller ID. “Hey Happy.”

“Nope, guess again,” his mentor’s voice said and Peter jerked up, letting out a strangled grunt as he jostled his shoulder. “You okay kid?”

“Why are you calling me?” Peter said instead, deflecting.

“I’m picking you up,” Tony said. “Now are you okay?”

Peter waffled for a minute but one look at his duffle bag made him ache and he let out a sigh. “Not… really I guess.”

“What’s wrong?” His mentor’s voice was sharp and he could hear the sound of his seatbelt smacking the window of his car and the door opening and closing as Tony got out of the car.

“It’s not a big deal,” Peter said, going to the front door and unlocking and opening it just as Tony left the elevator, they made eye contact and hung up their phones.

“Well you look to be in one piece and there’s no blood everywhere,” Tony said as he joined Peter in the living room of his apartment and looked him over. “So what’s going on kiddo?”

Peter nibbled on his bottom lip and gripped his right hand into his shirt tightly for just a second before releasing it. “Remember the ferry?”

Mr. Stark was silent and attentive as he listened to Peter ramble and sighed deeply at the end of his story, reaching one hand up to massage his eyes. “You really don’t half-ass anything do you?”

“Do you actually want me to answer that?” Peter asked confused and his mentor rolled his eyes, grabbing Peter’s bag from where it was resting in the hallway.

“Come on then, you have a date with Dr. Cho and the MedBay.” Peter whined but didn’t overly protest when he was directed out of the apartment and down to where Mr. Stark had illegally parked in the fire lane in front of his building.

It was just some muscle straining right? A week or two of meds and resting it and everything would be okay.

“Well its not a strain,” Dr. Cho told him just over an hour later looking at the images of his radiographs and MRI on a holotable. “You’ve torn your rotator cuff and continually re-injured it to the point that its basically just a mass of scar tissue.”

“Oh…” Peter said, a little dazed from the small dose of painkillers he had been given so that they would be able to manipulate his arm for the images. “What does that mean?”

Helen gave him the same disapproving look she had been giving him since she had taken his history and had learned that he had been putting massive amounts of pressure and g-force on an injury that he had never allowed to fully heal. “It means Peter,” she said firmly shutting down the table, “that you’ll need surgery to repair the tear and clean out all the scar tissue. And you’ll need to give it time to heal and go to physical therapy if you plan to ever use your arm to its fullest extent ever again.”

Peter’s mind went a little blank at that. “Surgery?” He asked, a note of panic creeping into his voice. “But Spider-Man–,”

“Will be taking a break,” Tony told him. “Your health always comes first Peter.” He turned his attention back to Dr. Cho. “Can you tell his aunt all of this later? Also when can we do the surgery.”

“I’ve already got him scheduled for tomorrow morning with a specialist I’m bringing in from NYU,” she said. “And of course! Just let me know when she gets here.”

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Peter groused from his spot on the exam bed but both adults ignored him and he rolled his eyes. “What if I don’t want surgery?”

“Then you’ll be dealing with chronic pain, pion and needles, weakness and continuous tearing for the rest of your life and you’ll need a shoulder replacement in less than fifteen years at the rate your going,” Dr. Cho said, typing notes into his chart. “So I’ll see you in the morning for the surgery.”

Peter glared at her but, at the twinge in his arm when he adjusted in his seat, he grumbled “fine”.

“It won’t be that bad Underoos,” Tony said later as they sat on the ridiculously large couch in the penthouse living room watching Brooklyn 99 while May spoke with Peter’s medical team. “You get to skip school for the next week while you recover and I bribed Bob Igor to give me the next season of the Mandolorian early for us to binge.”

“But…” Peter gnawed at his lip, hating the taste of blood that filled his mouth as he broke open the tender skin again. “What if this doesn’t fix it?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Tony said with a smile. “Cho is the forefront in development in regeneration. If anyone can fix you it’ll be her. And May and I will be there the whole time. You have nothing to worry about okay?”

“You’ll be there?” Peter said, fiddling with a loose thread on his shirt and refusing to look up at his mentor.

“Of course I’ll be there!” Tony said warmly with a squeeze to his good shoulder. “You’re my favorite intern.” He teased.

“Thanks Mr. Stark,” Peter said sincerely, reading the unsaid bit and relaxing a little back in the couch. Between his pain meds and his full stomach he could feel his eyelids drooping and he decided to relax more fully into Tony’s side – there was no where he felt safer.