#but after cell division you keep growing and growing

[shallowseeker]

The weirdest ship I've thought about?

If they'd gone the direction of Jack-and-dark Kaia. They had some odd tension in Galaxy Brain, plus some interesting themes of not fitting into the worlds they want to be a part of:

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Then Claire would have her Kaia:

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And Jack would have something weird with messy, psycho alt!Kaia who definitely unfairly expects too much from Jack:

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Dean would not approve:

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ANYWAY, on top of being weird and hilarious to me personally that Claire and Jack hate each other love doppelganger people...

They could've hammered home the theme that alternates are their very own individual people and, like Chuck and Amara, can individuate even further through their continued experiences.

[blessedbucky]

we tried the world, good god, it wasn't for us! (part 4.2)

pairing: autistic!satoru x suguru x autistic!reader

word count: 12k (oh hey look this one is actually shorter than the last)

summary: that second year of high school has a clear division within your mind—before summer and after. this is the after.

tags: autistic!reader, autistic!satoru, bisexual!reader, bisexual!suguru, continuing the existential crisis of realizing a bunch of old dudes poorly control the future of your teenage life, hidden inventory angst, mayhaps some poor coping mechanisms, maybe some codependency

beautiful people who asked to be tagged 💕: @ichikanu, @iceheartsice, @anders-is-being-a-simp-again, @honeydew-cheesecake

author note: HIDDEN INVENTORY TIME! also, putting on full blast a couple of common things with autism—strong sense of justice and a love of routines! the next year will most likely be split up again because i have so many plans and most of them aren't good! we do be talking about JJK here. please like, reblog, and comment! it makes my heart flutter!

chapter links: ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR [PART I], AO3

[YEAR TWO.]

[PART II]

At the bottom of the mountain path that leads up to campus, you’re seated on a bench. You were here alone as you waited on the car to pick you up, but Satoru and Suguru showed up. They detail the specifics of the incredibly important mission personally assigned to them by Lord Tengen. The more they reveal to you about this, the more anxious you become, the bigger the cloud of dread over your head grows. Your nervousness is made apparently by the way you nervously spin your cell phone between your fingers.

There’s so much about this that you hate. It’s too big. It truly is the weight of the world on their shoulders—the jujutsu world. It isn’t right that they’re being entrusted with something that could change the course of every sorcerer’s life. Shouldn’t that kind of pressure be left to a more experienced sorcerer? This is the work of adults.

Another thing that’s been bothering you…

“Erase?”

Satoru and Suguru are standing in front of you, most likely too nervous to sit still. You’re glad that they’re not blinded by their ego and seem genuinely troubled. Satoru is nervous, though he’d never admit to such a thing. He rocks on his feet from side to side. Coins jingle as he tosses them up in the air and catches them.

Suguru has his arms crossed over his chest, frowning. “Yes,” he confirms quietly. “When the Star Plasma Vessel fully assimilates with Lord Tengen, there will be nothing left of her.”

“That…” You duck your head to hide the sadness that you know is written all over your face. It doesn’t matter how you feel. You are a sorcerer, and this is no time to be soft. At the cost of one life, Lord Tengen will continue to live, sound of mind, and all the barriers that keep sorcerers safe will remain intact. “That seems cruel,” you blurt.

“So…what do you want us to do?” Satoru suddenly asks.

Your head snaps up, attention back on them, blinking in shock. “Huh?”

Instead of Satoru, it’s Suguru that repeats, “What do you want us to do? That’s why we came to you.”

Your brain stutters over their words, unable to process the things they’re saying to you. You sit there, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. “What…what does that even mean?” You press your thumb to the center of your forehead. Stop when you realize you’re copying Suguru. “Why do you want to know my opinion? What does it matter? What I’ve got to say means nothing.”

“What a silly thing to say, Squid,” Suguru scolds. “Your opinion means everything.”

With a little more thought, a little more looking between them and studying them, you finally understand where this is all coming from and where it’s all going. There’s an air about them, more to their nervousness than just stress over the weight on their shoulders. “You want to do something really stupid,” you sigh, “and you want me to give my blessing which also makes me an accomplice.”

“Accomplice is such a dirty word.” Satoru pouts. “Is it illegal to get some advice from our best friend?”

If it was Shoko here, she’d already be walking away. Unfortunately, you care about these assholes. “What stupid thing are you planning to do?”

“Nothing yet,” Satoru answers vaguely.

You ignore him in favor of Suguru. If you need to pout, you will, and he’ll cave because you hardly ever bring it out. “Satoru is right, technically. The decision won’t be up to us. Satoru just asked a logical question—what if the Star Plasma Vessel doesn’t go through with the assimilation?”

“You know what would happen,” you point out flatly.

Satoru pipes up with, “We don’t know that for sure!” You stare at him, deadpan. He gets all huffy because you didn’t just simply accept that. “Look, the world always has a way of balancing itself out. If this person doesn’t want to assimilate with Tengen, then someone else will eventually come along that does want to. Tengen will be fine.”

“Let’s say this girl doesn’t want to go through with the assimilation, what will you do then? Are you going to protect her for the rest of her life? They’ll send every sorcerer after her. You might even have to fight Lord Tengen himself. They’ll label you as curse users—”

“Will they?” The ego is back in play because Satoru declares, “We’re the strongest.”

Suguru tries to soften the severity of this stupid plan by explaining, “We’re too valuable as sorcerers. We’d be severely punished, maybe, but I doubt it. The girl has a caretaker with her, so we can cover them while they make themselves disappear.”

You throw up your arms in frustration. “Why did you even ask me, then? You’ve clearly made up your minds!”

“Yeah, okay, you’re right,” Satoru admits while rubbing the back of his neck.

“Believe it or not, we’ve actually thought about this more than you think we have,” Suguru tells you. “Everything you said is true. We know there’s a possibility that they do actually banish us and declare us as curse users. There’s a chance that we won’t come back—”

“But we don’t want to lose you!” Satoru interrupts. He’s a little too enthusiastic about this prospect because he goes on to excitedly ask, “If we leave, will you run away with us?”

The answer is out of your mouth before you can even give it a second thought. “You know I will.”

There’s a little part of your brain that reasons you should’ve taken more time to think about this, but the bigger part of your brain knows that the answer wouldn’t change. Somehow, that was the easiest yet most difficult answer in the world. No matter which option you chose, there would be a huge shift in your life, so it boils down to what would be easier to accept. If you were to stay behind like a good sorcerer, you would have to find a way to live normally without two of the most important people in your life and that…

The thought of not having Suguru or Satoru in your life is so terrifying that it makes you physically ill.

You’ve started to spiral. It’s not until a hand comes in view and yanks on the string of your hooded sweatshirt that you’re pulled out of your darkening thoughts. When you tilt your head up, Satoru is towering above you, smiling with such a genuineness that it makes your heart hurt.

“Don’t worry. It’ll all work out,” Satoru tries to assure you.

Your voice is weak, shaky. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

It’s either to make you feel better or lighten your mood, but Satoru holds out a crooked pinky. You lock it with your own. Then, to be cheeky, he extends his other pinky to Suguru. “A pinky promise? That’s childish, even for you, Satoru.” But Suguru takes it. And maybe you’re taking this a little too seriously, but you also offer your other hand to Suguru. His expression softens before he’s taking it.

In the end, the three of you are making a promise to each other.

“See?” Satoru grins. “It’s a super promise.”

“Okay,” you accept quietly. “Be safe, then. I’ll see you in a few days.”

***

Gojo Satoru is…

…was a fucking liar.

***

Just as you’ve coaxed the cursed spirit into exorcising itself, Kusakabe’s cell phone rings. He’s been off to the side, insistent to see your cursed technique for himself. Remembering that Sensei said Kusakabe could potentially be the person to vouch for you to become Grade 1, you bowed and did as he asked.

Anyway, the call.

As you approach him, you see him rush through many emotions at once—panic, anger, relief, and resignation. When his gaze darts over to you, he looks at you with a sympathy that makes your stomach start twisting into knots. On instinct, you pull your phone out to check for any texts, but there’s been nothing since Suguru said that he was on a plane back to Tokyo with the Star Plasma Vessel.

Kusakabe calls out your name, gesturing for you to pick up the pace. When you stand across from him, you shift nervously, clutching tightly at your sketchbook. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” Kusakabe starts with a soft apology. He takes a step toward you, putting a hand on your shoulder. “There’s been an incident at the school…” You wait on the news with bated breath. It’s bad. It has to be bad, your brain reasons, because you’ve learned Kusakabe is a naturally reserved person. He doesn’t seem like the type to show sympathy so easily unless it’s really, really bad.

“Gojo Satoru is dead.”

The sketchbook lands in the puddle at your feet as you drop everything and run.

You never leave Suguru’s side.

Apparently, he was found outside the Tombs of the Star Corridor—the place Lord Tengen lives. The wounds went deep, needed to be stitched. The medical staff at the infirmary said it was a shock that he hadn’t bled out.

When Shoko returns from Kyoto and clears the medical staff out, she curses their shoddy stitch work. That irritation is turned on you because you refuse to let go of his hand and she snaps at you, but you won’t budge. She harshly tells you to make yourself useful, so you help her remove the top half of his gown. Tears prick the corners of your eyes, and you have to quickly look away when the red, jagged slices across his chest are revealed to you both.

“That’s going to scar,” Shoko mumbles as she glides her hands over his chest. You’re so close that you’re in her crossfire and the aches and exhaustion from keeping vigil fade away. “Where is…” Her hands, glowing white with her technique, clench. “Did they say where they put him?”

It takes you a few minutes of swallowing down grief before you answer, “They said his body is missing.”

“Yeah,” she agrees hoarsely. “Yeah, that makes sense. That idiot always bragged about the bounties on his head.”

“Or…or maybe…maybe he’s…”

Shoko knows what you’re going to say before you even say it. “I walked past where it happened,” she explains lowly. “Duck, I’m sorry, but there’s no way he came out of that alive.” She powers down her technique. You assume there wasn’t that much damage and he’s been unconscious so long because of some painkillers the medical staff gave him. “They found the Star Plasma Vessel’s caretaker. I’m going to examine her body. See if there are any clues that can lead us to whoever has his body.”

You know you’re in denial. Logically, if he was alive, he would be here, in the infirmary. But…you can’t accept it. You just can’t. “I’m going to find him,” you swear.

“What are you going to do against someone that killed Gojo Satoru?”

You remember the finger of Ryomen Sukuna. The cursed energy that touched you. “I’ll make him tear his own heart out,” you say furiously.

“You’ll give yourself an aneurysm, if you could do it at all.” Shoko puts her hand on the top of your head. “Don’t make us lose another friend today.” You cover your mouth to muffle a sob. She reels you in, so your face is squished against her chest. “There was nothing we could do. We have to accept that.” She bends over and presses a kiss to the top of your head. “This is our life now. It’s what we chose when we became sorcerers.”

But why does it have to be like this?

It doesn’t take much longer before Suguru is waking up.

You have to help him when he tries to sit up and sways too much to the side. The drugs are still lingering in his system, so you nervously watch as he blinks slowly and tries to process. You don’t want to overwhelm him, but you also want to comfort him, so you compromise by reaching out to take his hand and squeeze tight. That simple gesture holds his attention. There’s something about it…or maybe he’s remembering everything that happened before…

Suguru’s expression doesn’t change, but tears begin to trickle down his cheeks.

You practically drag him forward by the front of his hospital gown, desperate to get your arms around him. “I’m here,” you promise as your own tears begin to fall again. “Suguru, I’m here.” His arms lock around your waist. His quiet, hitching breaths are in your ear, and his shoulders are subtly shaking under your arms.

“I failed, Squid,” he chokes out.

It never should’ve been put on you, you want to say but what point is there in that anymore? It doesn’t change the fact that it happened and Suguru was the only one left behind. We can’t save everyone. Empty words. Strength has cushioned you all from the realities of sorcery. Suguru has been told that he’s the strongest practically since you two came to Tokyo. He’s not supposed to lose.

Satoru wasn’t supposed to die.

“I’m here,” you repeat because it’s the only thing that you can think to say.

Now that he’s completely healed and the painkillers have worn off, there’s no more reason to keep Suguru in the infirmary. And when no one is around, he admits that he wants to be left alone in his room. You can tell yourself that you’re terrified to leave him by himself, but, deep down, you know it’s that you’re scared he’ll disappear if you don’t stay with him. This is all somehow so surreal yet so viscerally true. Simultaneously dream-like and so real. Like a child, you want to cling to him. Have you not lost enough already?

The two of you walk out of the infirmary, hand-in-hand. At the sight of Sensei waiting, you puff up like a street cat. You sidestep and put yourself in front of Suguru, flashing your metaphorical teeth and hissing. “Get out of the way.”

Suguru and Sensei both sigh your name. You don’t back down. Just square your chin. “The campus is still covered in fly heads.”

“Go exorcise them, then. You can make more cursed corpses.”

“I’m not here to ask Suguru to handle it,” Sensei gently corrects your assumption. “I agree with you. Suguru should rest.”

You relax a little. “Oh.”

“It would be easier if you can exorcise them all at once.” Sensei frowns. “Or make them disperse, at least. They can exit the barrier. If they make it off the mountain, into the city, they won’t cause too many problems for non-sorcerers.”

You angle your body toward Suguru, glancing up at him with furrowed brows. “Will you wait for me?”

“I’ll leave the door unlocked,” he whispers.

It’s not what you wanted to hear, but you can’t push him. You wordlessly nod, squeeze his hand, and then he’s walking away, headed toward the dorms. You watch him until he’s completely out of sight, immediately twitchy and nervous when you can’t see him anymore. Desperate to be beside him again, your cursed energy flares up.

“Not here,” Sensei says when he feels you gearing up. “You won’t reach them from here. They’re mostly centralized in one area.” He takes a deep breath. “You need to prepare yourself. They haven’t cleaned up yet.”

Cleaned…?

Oh.

It’s where Satoru was…

For a moment, you doubt that you can ever prepare yourself for something like this. You’re no stranger to gore, though, you remind yourself. You’re a sorcerer. You’ve seen the result of a curse’s rampage. But…those people weren’t your best friend, as cold as it is to think.

The only thing that pushes you forward is realizing that if it isn’t you, it’ll be Suguru.

There’s no way he came out of that alive, Shoko had told you.

You understand now, what she meant.

There’s a small crater that hints to the force that he was thrown down with. Hit with. You don’t know. No, it must’ve been some weapon because…the blood. The blood. There’s so much. It’s splattered everywhere across the concrete. The man that killed Satoru hated him. Loathed him. This wasn’t a clean and professional kill like with the Star Plasma Vessel and her caretaker who were taken down with neat shots to the head.

The monster that did this didn’t even hesitate when he confronted children. Because that’s what you all are, in the end. Children with too much power at your fingertips being guided by old men too scared to get their own hands dirty and all too happy to let the new generations die on their behalf.

And this is already so horrifying as is, but the assassin had to defile these corpses, too.

He wouldn’t even let Satoru have a proper burial.

I just want to find him.

You hunch in on yourself, fists curling, tears pricking at the corners of your eyes. The shattered pieces of your heart scream that one demand—I want to find him, I want to find him, I just want to fucking find him and bring him home. You know it will never be. This world is not kind. But, nonetheless, someone answers your call. Multiple someone’s, actually.

Around you, the fly heads have frozen in place. They float listlessly, even their buzzing quieted, waiting with anticipation for a command that you didn’t recognize you were preparing to make. The command that you should make, the one for them to exorcise themselves, is on the top of your tongue. What use can the fly heads be? From what you were told, the attacker left no residuals behind. The residuals left behind by Satoru and Suguru would be too faint…

…they would be too faint for a sorcerer to track. A cursed spirit is different. Their senses are different. They’re sharper and more attuned to cursed energy because it is both their life force given by non-sorcerers and a threat when wielded by sorcerers. Weaker spirits are constantly on the hunt for more cursed energy to gain power.

You could command them to search for Satoru’s residuals, but your influence over them will wane with distance until they’ve forgotten the order completely.

Unless…

Unless you can influence a spirit that you know is bound to another.

Die, you demand of the fly heads.

Slowly, they all start to expand around you until they explode with a loud pop. You don’t stick around any longer to make sure they’re all gone. Sensei can take care of that. Just like he can handle the few fly heads that have spread around campus. You’re too busy planning now.

For the rest of the afternoon and the whole night through, Suguru doesn’t speak, and you don’t make him. He really only moves when you do because when you crawled into bed with him, he’d manhandled you until he could curl around you and place his head above the beat of your heart. You don’t ask him about it. You understand the reason that he clings to you. It’s why you can’t stop running your fingers through his hair, can’t stop touching him. You don’t want him to slip away.

Around three in the morning, Shoko texts you. She’s done with her autopsy. Eavesdropping, too. There are no clues. She’s overheard Sensei on his cell phone with higher-ups and they have no idea where to start because so many people have put bounties on his head over the years. They’re also scrambling to figure out how to break the news to Lord Tengen that there will be no merger. You tell her that she’s done enough and to try and get some sleep.  

After you snap your phone shut and drop it on the bed, Suguru immediately picks it up. Your fingers itch to stop him from reading the texts, but that’s not your place. From your position above him, you watch his eyes carefully scan over the text, face unmoving.

The room is bathed in darkness once again when he snaps it shut. You think that’s the end of that, but he whispers, “I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t, either,” you confess as quietly. Even seeing all that blood…this is being in denial. Is that what’s going on? You’ve never had a loss like this ever before. You don’t know what to do with yourself. No. That’s a lie. You know what you want to do. “It’s not fair. That they took him, I mean.”

“I’m going to look for him,” Suguru announces. “I…just wanted this one last night with you.”

You tug at his hair meanly. “I’m going with you.”

“No,” Suguru replies with an air of finality.

“Bullshit,” you snap. You’re not letting this go. “No, you’re not leaving me here like some—”

Suguru suddenly rolls over on top of you, knocking the breath out of you. He lifts up on his hands and knees, shifting up so that his face is hovering directly over yours. With only the glow of the moon, it’s hard to make out the fine details of his face, but you can see the frown, the hard set of his jaw. He snatches your wrists, keeping them pinned up by your head, immobilizing you completely and giving you no option but to look at him.

“He has no cursed energy in exchange for a Heavenly Pact. Do you understand what that means?” Suguru asks harshly. “What are you going to do against that? You’re—” weak. You squeeze your eyes shut, hurt lancing through you. He tries to soften the reality with, “You’re not suited against that type of fighting style. You’re better for support.”

“Let me support you, then!” You dig your nails into whatever skin of his you can touch. “I know I’m weak, but…” Your bottom lip wobbles. Definitely not helping your case. “You couldn’t beat him, either. You…you said that you were split up, so…maybe two is better than one…”

“I’m not losing you. I can’t lose you, Squid. Can’t you understand that?”

“But you want to make me grieve you, too?” You scramble for anything that can make him change his mind. “I doubt we’re going to run into danger, anyway. It’s been so long already that…that he’s probably collected the bounty on both heads.” You lean up to knock your forehead against his. “Please, Suguru.”

“No.”

“You promised! You promised that it’d be me and you!”

As your vision blurs, you can make out Suguru’s expression softening. “Don’t cry, Squid,” he begs. One of his big hands let go of your wrist, cupping your cheek. “Why do you have to make this so much harder on me, huh?” He flops down next to you, carefully guiding you to bury your face in the crook of his neck where you continue to cry. “Okay. Okay, I’ll bring you. At the first sign of danger, you have to run.”

You won’t, but you nod and lie, “Okay.”

Little do you know, you’re not the only one who’s lying.

With the sunlight comes the truth of the matter. You wake up alone, the bed empty, and with a note on the nightstand beside both your cell phone and Suguru’s. I’m sorry, the note reads in his neat handwriting. I’ll be safe, but I’m not risking you. At the very end of the note, there’s a line of text, but you can’t tell what he wrote because it’s so scratched out. The page is nearly ripped on that little section.

You, who planned to lie yourself, have no room to feel so betrayed. Anger, though, you think you’re allowed. Grief crashes over you all over again, too. You chose this life, you know, but shouldn’t children be protected a little longer? It never should’ve come to this. Ten minutes is all you can allow yourself because you don’t know how long Suguru has been gone and you need to find him.

Before you rush out the door, you shoot Shoko a text for when she wakes up, letting her know your plan. You also tell her that if he comes back before you then she needs to punch him in the nose on your behalf.

Late in the afternoon, as the sun is setting, there’s a breakthrough.

By this point, you’re jittery and exhausted. You’ve swallowed down so much coffee to keep yourself going that it’s probably in your veins now, but you’re at the point of exhaustion that it’s just not doing anything anymore. Not only have you been walking around the city on foot, but you’ve been keeping your technique running as you have cursed spirits try to lead you to Satoru’s residuals. With as much cursed energy as he had, it should still be radiating off his body enough for a spirit to pick up. That’s what you’d thought, anyway.

Until every spirit that you pull under your influence just…stops. It’s like there’s some invisible barrier that they simply won’t cross. You step past that point, and they’re compelled to follow you, yes, but they struggle against you. Some of the stronger ones outright free themselves and go running.

Something or someone is scaring them.

The problem is that you don’t know how wide the perimeter is of this barrier, how close or far away that Satoru is. But when a pack of vaguely centipede-shaped curses rush past you, out of the invisible area, you know your solution. Just like in movies where animals are the first to know of a disaster and try to outrun it, curses are acting the same. You will run toward where they are running away. At some point, you’ll have to find epicenter.

As you’re still running, further ahead of you, in the distance, there is an explosion—a bright flash of red light, a boom so loud that it vibrates in your chest, and a shake of the earth that makes you stumble. The non-sorcerers around you do the same, some of them even tripping, but they’re not turning in the direction of the flash. No, between all the chatter, you make out people questioning if it was an earthquake or a terrorist attack.

Non-sorcerers can’t see cursed techniques.

And then there was that red light…

Red.

There is something rising up inside you, something dangerous. Hope. All the blood that stained the concrete, the horror that Suguru described that you know extended to Satoru even if Suguru didn’t witness it himself…that all flies out of your head. This is the only thing that makes sense, you reason. There’s only one logical conclusion for why cursed spirits would be running away, refusing to pass that point. A dead boy’s residuals wouldn’t scare them like that.

He’s alive, you think. What else could it be? Nothing, your desperate heart reasons. Then, it’s on repeat. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive—

Not even five minutes pass before, in the middle of your sprinting, there’s yet another explosion. With this one comes a bright purple light and an even bigger explosion. It sends you stumbling, tripping over your feet, and you manage to catch yourself on your hands and knees, but they don’t come out unscathed. They’re busted open, but you ignore that pain. Adrenaline has you up and back to running.

Looming tall, getting closer and closer, is a temple. Gold and white marble. An eyesore that makes your retinas burn. Is this…the headquarters of the Star Religious Group that Suguru had told you about? One of the two organizations that was targeting them on their mission? It must be. Kusakabe said that the other group, Q, was defunct. Satoru and Suguru even sent pictures posing with the leaders that they beat.

The path that leads to the entrance is lined with tall pillars on either side. The further down the path you run, the evidence of a fight becomes more and more abundant. Some of the pillars are totally crushed, others chopped in half, rubble everywhere, and practically stinking of Satoru’s cursed energy.

Why…why does it feel so different? Are you…you’re not imagining that, are you? For someone that should be on the verge of death, it’s so strong. Stronger than it’s ever been before. The weight of it is almost oppressive. Familiar, but…sharper. You’ve unthinkingly slowed to a stop. Too stuck in thought to move, maybe, or…too scared. It’s as if the connection with the cursed spirits is lingering and their terror is bleeding over to you. Weak and feeble prey against a predator so unimaginable.

This can’t be your Satoru, can it?

“Sketch.”

And the last year and a half of memories comes crashing down on your head when you hear the sound of his voice, suffocating the noise of your panicked hindbrain. When you raise your head, unaware that you’d ducked it down to stare at nothing, he is standing there. A few meters away from you. His blazer is torn open, white button-up underneath it stained with blood, the same as a section of hair covering his forehead. It’s a horrifying miracle…but a miracle, nonetheless.

“Sa—” your mouth snaps shut because your throat clogged with emotion. You don’t know what the fuck you’d say, so you just don’t bother with it. You shut the hell up and run. Tears are blurring your vision, you’re more out of breath than you were getting here because the sobs are bubbling up in your chest, but you don’t stop. You can’t. Not until you know that he is solid and real and alive.

It’s when you throw yourself right at him, arms locking around his neck, that the dam of emotion inside breaks. Before you know it, you’re sobbing. “Satoru!” You’re being rough with him. Clinging too tight. One of your hands is grasping tightly the hair at the nape of his neck and the other fisting the fabric of his blazer. “Satoru!”

Satoru mumbles your name, shoulders slumping under your grasp. “Oh.” His voice cracks a little. Then, he’s giving you a hug of his own, hands splayed across your back. “Oh,” he repeats, almost dazedly. “It all still feels so, so amazing, Sketch.” You try to lean back, but he smushes his cheek against yours, sighing in something you’d think is pleasure. “I want to keep feeling this way forever…with you, Sketch.”

“Satoru—”

The breath catches in your throat when you can lean back enough to catch his gaze with your own. How did you not see these eyes before? Something has changed. Infinity isn’t active, but they’re still glowing bright. Sparkling like the sun glinting off the clearest ocean waters. These eyes are beautiful, entrancing, and…almost inhuman. His world has shifted. He has stepped up on another level. He—

Satoru is kissing you.

You’d been so stunned that you didn’t pay attention to his face inching closer to yours until you feel the warmth of his breath against your mouth. It’s a soft touch of his lips against yours. You could…you should…stop this. You need to…to…check on him. But…oh. Oh, he cups your cheek, hand so big and so, so warm. His hand is at the small of your back now, a gesture that sends pleasure up your spine.

It’s a clumsy kiss, maybe. You’re not sure what to do with your mouth and your noses bump against each other. Then, he tilts his head to the side a bit and it falls into place like two puzzle pieces coming together. Your eyes flutter shut and instead of pushing him away, you’re tugging him closer by the lapels of his blazer.

Heat explodes across your body when he takes it a step further, tongue gliding across the seam of your lips. You’re not sure if he’s aware of it or not, but it’s a dirty move when he cups your cheeks with both his hands. He tries to pull you closer, like he can’t get enough of this. Of you. And that’s…that fucks with a person’s brain. You’ve been swept up in his whirlwind, so you go with it. Your mouth opens and he’s licking into your mouth. You always thought it’d feel gross, but it’s just…hot. The smacking of your lips, the small noise of pleasure he gives…

Satoru pulls himself away from you, the both of you panting harshly. “I…” He licks his lips. “I am super high right now.”

“High,” you repeat hoarsely without much thought to it. You’re dazed and he’s pinning you down with those eyes again. It takes you a good minute to comprehend what he said. When it hits, your body jerks. “High?”

Instead of doing something like elaborating, his brows furrow, and he turns to look over his shoulder at the temple. “Hey, I need to get Amanai’s body. You might wanna leave.” He faces you again, looking like he’s trying to gather his all thoughts. “I blew a hole in that Zen’in guy with Purple. And…I kind of want to slaughter all those people in there. I can see them in this big meeting room, clapping because she’s dead now. I don’t want you seeing that.”

Don’t do that, you should say.

But how can you find mercy in your heart for people who celebrate the death of a child? Who paid a man to swoop in and shatter your life? Those aren’t good people. They’re not innocent. Shouldn’t they be punished in some way?

“Be safe,” you say instead.

Satoru doesn’t kill them.

Not soon after Satoru left you had called Sensei to tell him that Satoru was alive and found the Star Plasma Vessel’s body. And almost as soon as you hang up the phone after Sensei assures you that Shoko and the cleanup crew will be there shortly, Suguru shows up.

When they walk out of the temple, Suguru comes back to meet you while Satoru goes on ahead to hand over the body to those that will make sure she’s treated with respect. Suguru doesn’t look at you when he tells you that he talked Satoru down from killing them all.

“There would be no meaning it in.”

It’s clear that Suguru is troubled, trying to justify that to himself. While you don’t really believe him…well, no. It’s more that you simply don’t care if there’s meaning.

“You’re right,” you lie as a comfort and reach out to thread your fingers through his.

***

For four days after they come home, you never see them.

Suguru is still texting you—somewhat, anyway, since he’s more focused on taking care of Satoru who hadn’t been able to sleep for three days straight. Still high on…something. You and Suguru were trying to speculate what put him in such a state since there was no point in asking a practically incoherent Satoru. He died, Suguru told you in the middle of night two. I think, he then followed up with. The Six Eyes are fully realized. All the pieces fell in place.

He’s high on the power, you think you summarize correctly.

Suguru thinks that Satoru is finally leveling out when he sleeps for twenty-four hours straight.

You’re the first person to know that he’s awake when you’re walking across campus, planning on a late night konbini run because you can’t sleep, and almost get smacked in the head by a floating wallet. You duck it, but a rock gets tangled in your hair. There’s a bunch of rocks and some empty soda bottles, looking like one of those asteroid fields that you see in space movies.

“Oops,” a familiar voice calls out. “My bad, Sketch.”

“Satoru?” You fully expect him to be there behind you, but when you turn around, there’s nothing. You look off to either side of you, too. Nothing. “Where—” wait. Did it sound like he was speaking above you? You tilt your head up and, yeah, you definitely forgot that Satoru could float even before…everything.

Satoru is cross-legged, floating there in the air. All the debris surrounds him now as if they were planets in his orbit. Your brows furrow. “Why does it feel like you’re showing off?”

“I’m not!” Satoru protests with a pout.

“It just…feels different,” you mumble while trying to figure out what exactly is giving you that idea. This isn’t totally out of the ordinary for him. He was blocking massive chunks of destroyed buildings and tearing apart houses before. “Oh. Your output is so low now.”

“Bingo!”

There was a little delay, but your brain finally catches up. “You’re awake! What are you doing out here? You should’ve gone to see Shoko as soon as you were up!”

Satoru waves the concern off. “I’m running Reverse Curse Technique now. I’m good.”

“You…what?” Logically, that makes the most sense. Despite all the blood, you hadn’t seen a mark on Satoru that day at the temple.

“Yeah! Who knew that getting stabbed in the neck is what it’d take for me to figure out Reverse Curse Technique, huh? Never let Shoko become a teacher. She can’t explain things for shit.”

Avoiding overwhelming emotions isn’t a new concept for you. You’re notorious for it. That doesn’t mean you can’t feel the emotions for Satoru, though. Stabbed in the neck—you didn’t think it was possible for your heart to crack more than it already has.

“Come down here so I can hug you,” you choke out.

Satoru blinks, looking almost baffled by your turn of emotion. Does he really not know how fucked up that is? Can he not understand why you’d be upset? How terrified he must’ve been, you think as you reach out for him when he slowly lowers back to the ground. Sure, he beat Death, but that doesn’t make the sight any less horrifying.

“You gotta stop being such a crybaby or I’m gonna have to give you a new nickname,” he muses when you get your arms around him. His arms slip around your shoulders, crushing you against his chest. “I’m okay, Sketch. Alive and kicking. Got some badass scars and, as the geezers in my clan would say, my Six Eyes are fully realized.”

Be serious about this, you want to demand of him, but who are you to do that? “Don’t make fun of me for worrying about you.”

“Suguru is already doing enough of it, y’know,” Satoru remarks softly. “Go worry about him.”

“I can worry about you both, thanks.”

“You’re cute, Sketch.”

The memory of his mouth against yours makes itself painfully known. Back of your neck prickling with heat, you try to bury your face further against his chest, not wanting him to see whatever might be on your face. In the silence between you two, your mind runs through so many questions. Does he remember? Why in the world did he do that? If it’d been Suguru there instead, would Satoru have kissed him instead? Should you even ask about it? What would you say if you did? Do you even know enough about how you feel for him to have that talk?

Satoru demands to escort you to the konbini when you tell him what has you out so late. He’s almost aggressive when he takes your hand in his and starts tugging you forward again, listing off all the snacks that he wants to buy. At the bottom of the mountain, finally out on the street, you notice that he still hasn’t let go of your hand, so you stop him. You’re fully prepared to talk about it. Okay, you’re not, but you feel like you need to talk about it.

But then, under the glow of a streetlamp, you catch the glint of that scar at the base of his throat.

You’ll bring up the kiss some other time.

***

“What?”

For once, Sensei doesn’t look you in the eye. “You heard me.”

“Did I? Because it sounds like you told me that some old man is here to force Satoru and Suguru out on solo missions—”

He pinches the bridge of his nose and breathes out your name. “It’s just to ease them back out in the field—”

“Stop lying!” Sensei’s mouth snaps shut at the sound of your echoing shout. “I’m not dumb! These are assignments that only they can do as Special Grades. The higher-ups wouldn’t bother with wasting them on something the rest of us grunts can do, would they?”

“Please. Calm down—”

“It hasn’t even been three weeks!”

Sensei calls in backup. Looking over your shoulder, expression pinched in discomfort, he begs by way of order, “Nanami, Haibara, let’s end class early. Can you take her back to the girls’ dorm—”

There have been only a few times that you’ve ever been so furious in your life and, not-so-shockingly, they all had to do with Suguru. When you were both eight, inseparable, Suguru had finally confessed where his bruises truly came from. You learned that the lack of food wasn’t from poverty or neglect, but maliciousness. The bruises weren’t from scraps with spirits that he was trying to tame.

You’d been downright distraught. You hadn’t let him leave your house for as long as you could. Begging your parents to let him live with you, offering your plate up if there wasn’t enough food in the house for four people. When Suguru wasn’t in the room, you told them what he said, insistent on your parents calling the police for help because you knew they were supposed to help with bad people and what else were Suguru’s parents?

The first few times, your parents lied and said that they’d handle it. After a year of nothing happening, you’d gone to a teacher instead because your parents outright told you that how Suguru’s parents disciplined him wasn’t their business. Suguru was out for about a week, and you hadn’t been allowed over. When he came back to school, arm in a cast, he told you about a person visiting, and how furious it’d made his parents when that lady left.

Finally, you learned a cruel lesson—that trying to help would only punish Suguru.

Maybe that’s something you should remember right now, but…you’re blinded by that same sense of justice that you’d had as an eight-year-old girl. You have a voice here. You’ll scream until your throat bleeds. If they want sacrifices, you’ll offer yourself up in place of Suguru and Satoru. Just to let them have peace a little while longer.

“Senpai?” Haibara hesitantly touches your shoulder.

Nanami and Haibara, smartly, move out of your way when you whirl around and storm out of the classroom. You’re not sure how much time you have left, but you need to ditch your escorts, so you go back to the dorms like Sensei requested, fuming the entire time. You don’t speak a word to your juniors, scared that you’ll snap at them unnecessarily. They’re just following orders, same as every other fucking sorcerer.

As soon as you’re inside your room, you’re immediately sneaking out the window, and pinpointing Satoru and Suguru’s cursed energies. They’re at the entrance’s torii gate, getting lectured by some withered husk. Satoru, as always, looks disinterested, but Suguru…

Suguru looks tired.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

The old man slowly turns around to face you, eyes narrowed. “Who do you think you’re talking to like that?” For someone that’s hunched over and clutches to his cane with a trembling hand, he sure does have his nose stuck up pretty high in the air. “Ah, I know you.” He says your name. “Mind your tongue, girl. You’ll ruin your chances at success with this type of behavior.”

“They almost died and you’re throwing them back out in the field this soon?”

He scoffs. “Is that what this is about? I’ve spoken with Yaga. They’ve been healed.”

“Are you stupid?” If he can’t scrounge up an emotion in his black heart, you’ll appeal to logic. “Do you not understand that if you don’t give them proper rest and run them ragged then they’re more likely to make mistakes and die? Let someone else handle whatever you want them to do.”

“Who? Like you? Stop acting like a child. You may be a sorcerer, but don’t think you could be of any use other than collecting information. You’re weak.” You hate this man, but you hate that he’s right even more. Is running your mouth really the only thing that you can do? “Know your place.”  

Behind the old man, Suguru and Satoru puff up.

Something ugly is festering inside you as you watch him walk away. You’re not sure that you’ve ever felt so much hatred toward another person. How can such weak people have all this power? What more can you compare them to other than an invasive parasite—hiding themselves away as their host supports them and weakens itself until there’s nothing left and then they’re on to the next pray. That’s how they rose so high. Everyone else threw themselves on the sword until only these cowards remained. It isn’t fair that you’re forced to bow down to them.

You should worship us, you think viciously. Rage is making your body go haywire. You’re trembling all over, fists clenched so tightly that your nails are digging into your skin causing sticky, wet blood to slip through your fingers. Prostrate yourself before us, you wish you could scream at him. How much blood have they spilt with their callous and cruel demands? You can’t even begin to imagine, but you smell it. You taste it. You can’t even register that something is slipping from your nose, over the bow of your lips. Your eyes are losing focus, your ears are ringing, and you’re shocked that you can focus enough to think anymore with how agonizing this headache is.

Prostrate yourself.

A lot happens all at once. Just as someone snatches your upper arm, the higher-up goes down with a crack. An actual crack of a bone. He twists himself awkwardly as he’s going down, ending up spread eagle on the ground right in front of your feet. He turns his head to the side, forehead coated with blood from getting busted open on the concrete. He clutches at his hip, trying to move, but failing every single time.

Then, you’re gone.

Feeling like your stomach drops out under you, along with your feet, you’re warped to a completely different part of campus by Satoru’s hold on your arm. All at once, the world comes rushing back in, and you’re suddenly aware of your body. You collapse to your hands and knees, watching as drops of blood plop on the blades of grass beneath your face. Even this much, holding yourself up by your shaking arms, is hard.

Just being conscious is hard, apparently, because you wobble before you’re crashing on the ground and passing out.

“You were right to bring me to her first. Fuck. She had a brain bleed. What the fuck happened?”

Shoko’s raised voice might be what pulls you back to consciousness. Or the fact that you’re clearly healed now. The only remnant that there had been something wrong is the flaking blood on your face, sensitivity to light, and the lingering exhaustion because she can’t fully replenish cursed energy.

The lack of noise has you turning your head to the side. Shoko, Satoru, and Suguru—all in a circle—have turned to stare down at you. There are varying degrees of concern on their faces, but Shoko is the only one that’s also furious. She points an accusatory finger at you. “You’re going to tell me what you did later, Duck. Do you understand me? Right now, I have to go heal some old geezer’s broken hip.”

Ah. You’d been right, then. A bone had broken.

You broke that bone.

Because you…

In the heat of that moment, you weren’t comprehending what was going on. What you were doing. But you know now. And the implications of it terrify you. What’s even worse is that you weren’t even consciously thinking about doing it. It just happened, so what if it happens again by accident? What if one of those things thought in the heat of the moment that you’d never say out loud comes true?

You didn’t want this. Not this. You never asked for it. This is too much power for one person. How do you shoulder the weight of something like this? You can’t. You don’t have it in you. You’ll hurt someone, you know it, and it’ll be someone that you love, and when it happens—

“Squid.”

Suguru’s hands appear in your blurry line of vision. They’re meant to be a silent question, to ask if you’re okay to be touched right now. You answer by grabbing his wrists and yanking them down to your cheeks. You don’t know what possesses you to do it. Maybe it’s to pull him in closer because seeing his softening expression makes you feel less overwhelmed. They understand better than anyone, after all, that power is a burden.

It’s not a full breakdown. More a moment of overwhelming pressure and guilt. Suguru and Satoru, both now sitting down next to you in the grass, don’t say anything until you calm down. When you’re just sniffling, Suguru’s thumb that’s been stroking your cheek stills. “What happened, Squid?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Satoru speaks up. “Your persuasion isn’t only limited to cursed spirits anymore. It’s anything with cursed energy, isn’t it?” You nod, mouth twisted with misery. “We really need to come up with a name for your technique.”

“Not the time, Satoru,” Suguru sighs. He brushes away some hair that’s plastered across your forehead. “You don’t seem as surprised by this as I think you should be.”

“Shoko put the idea in my head at the start of the term,” you mumble. “I told her about that mission with you—the one where I caught your cursed spirit and that other sorcerer’s shikigami. I could maybe understand why yours was affected because the spirits have different cursed energy than yours, but…the shikigami is a manifestation of a sorcerer’s energy. Shoko took it to its next logical step. I didn’t want to believe her.”

“It was so weird.” Satoru is tapping his bottom lip, thoughtful. “It was like your cursed energy was infecting that geezer. It was only a second, but I guess whenever you gave your command, I swear that it was like there were two of you. It was seriously trippy.”

“And then you gave yourself a brain bleed. Do you know how lucky you were that Shoko was on campus?” Suguru presses his palm against your forehead, and you look back up at him. The corners of his eyes are tight with worry. “Promise me you won’t do that again.”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” you purposely deflect. Does this power scare you? Yes. Would you use it again if it meant keeping the people you love safe in both body and mind? Another yes. “I’m just…worried about you both.”

“Squid, you can’t keep us here forever. I know you’re worried, but—” he fumbles. Briefly, his gaze darkens, but that emotion quickly passes. “We’re the strongest. We can take care of ourselves.”

“It’s not about whether you can do it or not,” you whisper. “It’s about rest. You almost died. You…you lost. And…that leaves wounds that Shoko can’t heal. Why can’t you have more time? Why does it have to be you?”

“The world has to keep spinning, Sketch.”

Yes, the world is cruel like that, isn’t it?

***

The start of middle school had felt like a month-long blowout in your household.

About two weeks in, while you were curled up under the blankets with a hot water bag pressed against your pelvis, grandparents that you rarely saw had come to visit from the village over. It’d felt like such an invasion of privacy when your both your mother and grandmother presented a bowl of red rice and congratulations on becoming a woman that you’d snapped. Why celebrate such a stupid thing? You’d ranted and raved. It’s what the body does. Why make a big deal? Do you do this with boys when they get their first erection? And all hell had broken loose.

Your father had outright smacked you in the mouth for speaking so crudely and disrespectfully to his mother. After an hour or so of being banished to your room, your frazzled mother and shrewd grandmother had come to interrogate you on how you knew about such a thing—the thing being erections. You’d told them because you saw nothing wrong with the truth. You hadn’t known it then, but Suguru had started puberty a few months before you. He’d told you about the exhausting and awkward conversation his father had been forced to give him.

By the end of the weekend, you’d been ready to choke your grandmother. The way she hovered over your mother, stirring up shit by whispering in your mother’s ear. The worst offense, in your opinion, had been how they turned Suguru away at the door every single day. You couldn’t sneak out because your grandmother slept in your room at night while days were spent going over what boiled down to glorified etiquette classes. Ladies don’t talk about crude things which included basic bodily functions, ladies don’t sleep with men unless they’re married, ladies are demure yet try to make friends with their peers, ladies this, ladies that, and on and on it went.

And you’d overheard conversations at school, knew that most of your classmates hated it as much as you did when their grandparents visited, so you’d hoped the hell would end when they were gone. It hadn’t. That Monday night, your mother had declared that there would no longer be any sleepovers, and you think that may have been the first ever time you screamed yourself hoarse.

You’ve always been too close to that boy! Your father had been the one to step in, absolutely laying into you. I tolerated it because you needed to have one friend, at least, so we could pretend our daughter is normal, but this is just becoming borderline inappropriate now! You’re lucky that I don’t ban you from seeing him, period! And think of him! Don’t you think that he’s sick of spending so much time with you? He’ll never have any other friends if he’s seen spending so much time with you! Let the boy be a boy, damn it!

That’s when the doubt started, you think.

This fear has always plagued you—the idea that you need Suguru more than he needs you.

Zen’in Toji changes that.

Sometimes, when you’re too stuck in your head, you worry that you’re still acting like a child, tugging at his sleeves, annoyingly demanding his attention. Now, it almost feels like the roles have reversed. Not that you’re annoyed. No, if he tried to hide himself away, you’re pretty sure that you’d be waiting outside his door like a lost puppy begging to come home.

Really, the only difference between now and those childhood days where you two were practically joined at the hip is that Satoru is included.

Now that Satoru and Suguru are on their own, you’ve been unofficially added to Nanami and Haibara’s team. What happened to headquarters wanting you to spy on Suguru, huh? This might be a punishment. You don’t mind it, obviously, because you like to be a good mentor, but it’s not just them that you’re helping. Helping is a loose term, though. You’re almost as busy as Suguru and Satoru are, running to pacify and record spirits for the seasoned sorcerers.  

A thing that you’ve started to learn is that sorcerers are…eccentric. More often than not, they don’t try to make small talk with you which you’re happy for, but it’s still exhausting to be around all these strangers. It seems like you’re always running on empty. It feels like your art is suffering, too, because you can’t find it in yourself to practice in your spare time. You feel as if you always have to be available.

Things might be easier if you had some time alone, but you never are anymore, even when you’re on campus. Would Satoru and Suguru respect your wishes if you asked? Yes. But you never do. You always feel too guilty to ask for such a thing when they’re working so hard all the time. Thankfully, Suguru is fine to sit in silence with you and Satoru can talk and talk without you ever saying a word back.

Things are changing between the three of you—even a person like you who always has things going over her head can see that.

You’re not quite sure when it started but there is always someone in your bed. None of you talk about it, though. If they hadn’t started leaving pieces of themselves behind in your room, you’d wonder if they even knew that the other is with you when they aren’t around. In your need to have things in the correct places, you’ve assigned them spots—Suguru’s cigarettes are tucked in the corner of your nightstand, Satoru’s stash of blueberry sodas is neatly stacked inside your minifridge, Suguru’s spicy ramen is in the cabinet closest to the door and Satoru’s melon bread are next to the ramen.

People talk about walking in the shadows of The Strongest, but…for you, it feels like their shadows are swallowing you whole.

Where do they end and where do you begin?

It’s getting weird inside your head. Not that it hasn’t always been. It’s just…you sometimes feel suffocated. On bad days, you wonder if you’ve started to create a mask for them—something you’ve never felt the need to do, especially with Suguru. And yet, in spite of it all, you’re terrified to push them away, and not because of what happened to them.

Bitterly, you think about that river in your village, and how if you were thrown in it with no way out but forward that you’d let yourself drown in that familiarity rather than face the unknown that awaits on the other side of the river.

You’d scolded Suguru for picking up smoking, but maybe he and Shoko are on to something with it.

The stars have aligned just right so that you, Satoru, and Suguru are all on campus at the exact same time. It’s a bitterly cold December morning and you’re gathered in the smoking area. Sitting next to Suguru on a bench, you eye the cigarette, tempted to try, but decide better of it. You’ll settle for the smoke that curls in the air and clings to his clothes. You tilt to the side, putting your head on his shoulder, and Suguru settles his cheek on the top of your head. Satoru, across from you and munching on pocky, has been watching you two with an eerie intensity.

“You two should come home to Kyoto with me.”

“Meeting the parents already?” The question was intoned by you and Suguru, at the exact same time. You lean away, glancing up at Suguru with the same surprise mirrored on his face, and then the two of you break out in a loud fit of laughter that’s becoming depressingly rare these days.

Satoru stands there, red-faced and fuming. “Sorry for wanting to spend my birthday weekend with you, you assholes!”

After collecting yourself and catching your breath, you ask, “Are we even allowed?”

“Doesn’t matter if you are or not,” he replies with a shrug of the shoulder. “I’m head of the clan, baby. I can do whatever I want, and no one can say a damn thing about it.”

From next to you, Suguru snorts. “Why don’t you just stay here since you obviously don’t want to go, Lord Gojo.”

“Future head of the clan,” Satoru reluctantly grumbles. “I could stay here,” he goes on to defensively. “I’m just being a nice person! The last time I saw my parents was last year when I moved on campus. I’m doing them a favor before I’m eighteen and never looking back.”

“Oh? Are you giving up your position when you graduate? Otherwise, you’ll probably be seeing them to do fancy, important clan stuff,” you tease.

“Screw both of you!” If life were an anime, there would be steam blowing out of his ears right now. “I was even going to let you guys go all out when we get fitted, but now I’m choosing for you, and I’ll put you in the ugliest colors!”

You cock your head to the side. “Fitted?”

“They want traditional clothes for the birthday celebration.”

“How traditional?”

“Ofurisode for you and montsuki for us,” he answers casually.

Oh, no. No, no, no. There have been only a few times where your parents rented a kimono for you, and you hated every single second of it. Granted, you were young, but you remember how much you hated it. “No.” You shake your head. “Absolutely not. I refuse.”

Satoru’s brows furrow. “Eh? Why?”

“What do you mean why? I can’t believe you’re okay with it! You don’t like clothes clinging to you, right?”

“Actually, it’s more like I hate when my clothes get wet. Besides, if something feels like it’s rubbing against me wrong, I can shift Infinity to sit between my skin and the fabric. Anyway, my montsuki are always silk, and I like how that feels.”

Your eye twitches. “Yeah, well, not everyone has Infinity. Do you even know how many pieces there are in an ofurisode? It’s so heavy and tight and—” you visibly shudder.

“Good point.” Satoru hums and taps his chin in thought. “Best I can do is a chu-furisode, though. I don’t doubt that they’d kick you out on your ass if you showed up in anything less formal or if we tried putting you in something for the married women.”

“You’re forgetting something,” you point out wryly. “I can just not go.”

“Sketch,” Satoru whines. “It’s my birthday.”

“We can celebrate here before or after you leave.”

“Also,” Suguru finally speaks up, “that’s too much money.”

“Oh, don’t worry, my little country bumpkins. It’s all on the Gojo dime and it won’t even be a drop in the bucket.”

Deadpan and once again at the same time, you and Suguru say, “Rich boy.”

Satoru claps his hands together in front of himself, ducking his head. “Please, please, please,” he loudly begs. “Don’t leave me on my own with my shitty clan! It’ll be like a sleepover! You guys did those when you were kids, right? My one wish is that I get a turn having a sleepover with Sketch and Suguru!”

We have sleepovers every time you’re on campus, you aggressively think. But, after a moment of reflection, you realize that, actually, not all three of you have slept in the same room. On the few times that they’ve been on campus at the same time, neither of them tries to sneak into your room at night or text you to ask. You think you know what they do, though. Just as they’ve started to leave pieces of themselves in your room, you see them in each other’s. And, sure, you could put that as them hanging out, but you’ll sometimes catch whiffs of cigarette smoke on Satoru’s sheets and pillows.

You still want to tell him no. It’s a daunting thought, being in an uncomfortable kimono, surrounded by people that don’t even respect their own future clan head let alone people like you and Suguru who have no sorcery in your bloodlines. But what else is there to get the boy who has everything? And…it’s a rare chance to have them to yourself because the higher-ups are giving him leave and, if Satoru insists, his family will request the same for you and Suguru.

“Fine,” you agree with a frustrated sigh.

Suguru also gives a sigh of his own. “I’m smoking, whether I’m allowed to or not.”

“Best birthday ever!” Satoru cheers.

***

For obvious reasons, Satoru puts off going on his clan’s estate as long as possible. There are people at the estate that could measure you and Suguru, but Satoru pulls you both into a shop that’s probably so expensive that it costs to breathe. You’re glad the prices aren’t displayed. Thankfully, you don’t really have to put up with strange hands all over you yet. They simply take a tape measurer to you and then let you pick out the fabric. Like Satoru, you decide on a beautiful silk that starts out forest green before fading to a navy blue near the bottom.

Kyoto is mostly religious sits—temples, castles, shrines, and the like. It’s very beautiful. Satoru takes you both to the Fushimi Inari-taisha, a long path that’s nothing but bright red torii gates. Satoru is surprisingly quiet, so it’s a peaceful moment. After the shrine, you wonder if it was just a way to calm you down before you’re forced to face the crowds to find food. It’s…honestly not as bad as you expected because with Satoru and Suguru’s huge bodies in front of and behind you, people can’t bump into you that much.

Late in the afternoon, as the sun is setting, the three of you are in a random park. Satoru is dozing off, head in Suguru’s lap, and Suguru is reading a book. It’s good inspiration, so you draw them. Not like that’s anything unusual. You do feel a little sad, a little nostalgic when you flip through your personal sketchbook and see the gradual loss of…youth, you guess. Even Shoko isn’t unaffected. You wonder how you look to everyone else.

At twilight, Satoru decides he can’t stall anymore, and he finally picks up the phone that he’s been ignoring all day.

jjk

“Your parents aren’t what I expected,” Suguru comments when the three of you shuffle into his obscenely large bedroom.

Meanwhile, your question is, “Is this not your room?” Sure, Satoru brought a lot of stuff when he moved on campus, but this room is…weirdly empty. Not a hint of his love for Digimon, no posters, and the bedsheets look like they belong to an older person rather than a teenager.

“Right? My parents are super weak. They were low on the Gojo ladder, but then they had yours truly, and they’re practically worshipped now. I’ve never lived with them much, though. They handed me over to tutors and people who could teach me about sorcery,” Satoru explains. “I was in another section of the compound, but when I come to Kyoto, I’m a good son and stay with my parents.”

Suguru voices what you’re both thinking. “Satoru, that’s…really sad. You know that, right?”

“Eh.” Satoru shrugs off the concern. “It’s probably how every other rich kid is treated. Non-sorcerers get boarding schools, and I got training and missions.”

“Missions?”

“Yeah?” Satoru cocks his head to the side, genuinely confused by your disbelief. “What? I’m Gojo Satoru, wielder of the Six Eyes. You think I was sitting around on my ass until high school?”

Suguru is pressing a thumb against the center of his forehead. “I’m too tired to tell you how fucked up that is, Satoru. We’ll save it for another day.”

“Agreed,” you say with a nod. “And don’t expect me to be polite to any of your family.”

“I don’t get you guys, but okay. Let’s go to bed.”

It takes a bit of maneuvering. There’s some giggling when, as you three try to get settled in Satoru’s massive bed, you all bump into some ticklish spots. You argue even more about the positioning. Finally, you decide that the birthday boy is stuck in the middle. Besides, he’s always ice cold, so he won’t get too hot, anyway.

Satoru has an arm thrown around your shoulders and Suguru’s. Suguru’s cheek is up in the crook of Satoru’s neck while yours is above his heart. It’s a nice sensation, listening to the frantic beat of Satoru’s heart slow as the minutes pass by. Suguru is half-asleep when he reaches out to lace his fingers through yours, placing them on Satoru’s stomach. They’re both asleep before you, which isn’t a surprise. They must be exhausted, constantly coming and going on missions.

I wish I was stronger.

Strong enough to shoulder these burdens with them, strong enough to face down the old men that treat Satoru and Suguru like weapons to be used and feared, strong enough to stop childishly clinging to everyone else, strong enough to protect these so very precious moments, strong enough…

I’m weak.

And that’s a bitter truth but a still a truth regardless.

[sasoarts]

Cassoscriptumling, the Written Media Borderling

The Cassoscriptumlings are Borderlings resembling large heaps of newspaper. Eyes dot most of their pages, and they move and blink as if they're functional. The printed text is unrecognizable to any human language. Black ink pools below the Cassoscriptumlings, but stains surfaces for only 24 hours before gradually fading. Their form are monstrous and vaguely humanoid with long, drooping snouts and gnarled, twisted fingers, which drip the same black ink as their underbellies. Arm count varies between individuals, coming with two to six pairs. Cassoscriptumlings with an odd number of arms are rare.

Touching the ink alters the Witness's ability to write coherent sentences, although the person isn't aware of the Borderlings' effects. This leads to confusion and hilarity once it wears off after an hour. The Witnesses called the species "the Calligraphers," after their way of rewriting existing print.

A corpse of a Cassoscriptumling shows that the creature has a similar cardiovascular system to ours with very little inaccuracies. Ink never seems to run out. The body's pages are blown to the wind after death, and their eyes and print slowly fade away.

The Cassoscriptumlings slowly move, dragging themselves similar to that of a mollusk. Sluggish and careful, they move without haste. They are never hostile and wouldn't strike or misuse their ink. They touch the bottom of each word while reading, which causes printing errors that vary from subtle to blatant.

Once finished with a newspaper or book, the Cassoscriptumlings place the book in a tedious manner and take out the next one they see. Typing errors vary each time they read.

One or two Cassoscriptumlings appear in one place after common closing hours, between 8pm to 4am. They seem to enjoy each other's company, resting their heads on one another and patting their backs, as if meeting an old friend or relative. The companionship changes when rewriting ink, as they push and shove in a slow, lazy manner. Only Impure Cassoscriptumlings can cause harm, pulling off paper from the other and writing misinformation on magazines.

They seem to coexist with the Inspectolings, sharing visual and written information. More to come when more information is given.

Witnesses who encounter the Cassoscriptumlings will receive newspapers at the front door of their homes once a week. Teleportation is instantaneous, and the Borderling appears only when delivering the paper. The newspapers include current locations of different Borderlings and what species are currently active.

A sample for one week. Dates change each week. i.e, Botanoling sightings will appear beginning at 8am, but in the 3rd week, they are mentioned again but appearing at 7am.

1. A factory at midnight - Agoralogoling

2. In the park's garden at 8am - Botanoling

3. The walk in freezer at 3am - Visceracrassusling

4. In front of a local Café at 8pm - Scopoling

5. In the residential neighborhood at 11am - ( Tempestasling)

6. The sky at night ( no time given ) - Nubesbalaenaling

There are no dates given. A Witness must keep an eye out for these Borderlings during the times they manifest.

News of Witnesses' whereabouts are there in different segments along with occurances involving Borderlings. This helps other Witnesses to gather stories about sightings and help newcomers identify docile and hostile Borderlings.

The Cassoscriptumlings are found behind shops which sells newspapers, magazines and books. When manifesting, they generate as a single sheet of paper, blowing in the wind. Once it lands on the ground, ink bubbles around it and splits into more paper, similar to cell division. It duplicates and grows until it is a fully developed Borderling. Ink stains and scattered papers are telltale signs of its activity.

If you encounter a Cassoscriptumling, it's best to introduce yourself by taking a piece of paper and drawing an eye on it. Give it to the Borderling, and it will reply with a friendly greeting, drawing another eye on the opposite side of the paper, tracing yours. If the Borderling finds you interesting, expect your weekly newspaper to come the week after the greeting.

Image source

[tearsoftime0086]

An Eternal Warpath for You and Me

Chreon scene from a "Leon gets infected with a variant of Wesker's superhuman virus" AU I've been tossing around in my head~

Leon's been caught and contained after a week of being an absolute threat against biohazard leads. Chris is still reeling from all of this. Pain ensues.

~

“It would be so easy, Chris,” Leon murmurs, cat-like eyes unblinking. “Just a couple years of this… hell, maybe months. I could do so much-“

Chris squeezes the containment cell bars. “And then what? You know just as well as I do that our work never ends. When would it be enough for you?”

“You say that as if our efforts are meaningless,” Leon clips. He’s motionless against the opposite wall. At this point, it feels like Leon’s observing him behind a containment cell. Him - tired, heartbroken, Chris Redfield, wondering when he started losing hope.

Leon grimaces after he doesn’t respond – god his eyes look so much like Wesker’s – and flexes his fingers. His skin subtly gleams with the setting sun, aged back years to peak human condition. It mismatches with the unholy glare in his eyes. “I’ve done more work in the past week than my entire division covered in a year. Maybe Walsh was onto something.”

Was it a side effect of that prototype virus causing Leon to be like this? Or was it truly just his own logic, built up over years of service?

“Sure you did. But I- we lost you for that whole week.”

Leon peers at him, as if he’s a stranger who just interrupted his monologue. “Me?”

“Look, if I got all utilitarian about this, I’d give up and admit you’re right. Maybe it would be better for the world this way. But you know what? I can’t – I’m too selfish.”

“Chris…” Leon’s voice is softer now. Nervous.

He blinks, only now putting the pieces together. He'd been so close to confessing that secret he’s buried inside him for years. No – Leon would never be persuaded by his fool’s wish for intimacy – especially the Leon watching him right now.

“Forget I said anything,” Chris grits, shaking his head and stepping away from the bars. “I’m just… no. Look, we found the rest of Walsh’s doses. If you really want to keep going, I’ll tell Rebecca to stop looking for a cure. Just… give me a day before you decide.”

Leon’s expression is unreadable, alien. “A day?”

Yes, a day to purge himself of the dreams of fighting as brothers in arms, of growing old together one day, of a tomorrow with possibilities.

Chris turns around and shuts the door. “Yeah – a day to grieve the Leon Kennedy I knew.”

[prydonacademia]

From a scrap of paper found in the ruins of the conservatory, on Theta Sigma:

It was all a tremendous secret.

Lungbarrow, a House that hadn't been granted a looming for centuries, was to have a new child.

No member had died. None were missing, even, and if someone had passed they hadn't been left long enough to be sure. Of course some were terribly close, in the last decades of their last bodies, but it's impolite to wait for someone to die no matter how much you want a baby.

Lungbarrow couldn't afford a looming, let alone all the costs that followed it—so when the permit was issued, along with a generous grant directly from the Citadel, the shock went through every member of the House down to its very foundation.

One morning, the Kitriarch was fretting about where to buy appropriate biodata—genetics of high quality were so hard to find these days and she wouldn't let the neighbouring Houses outdo her again. That evening, she had gone perfectly still.

The House Mother resumed fretting in her place: Everything had to be presentable, the TARDIS kept behind the barn, if you would, until the chameleon circuit was fixed and it looked clean again. The children were washed and stuffed in their best robes, then rushed to bed before anyone could witness the robes or check if they had really washed behind their ears.

The blinds were shut, keeping the night-cold out, but they couldn't block all the light of a landing ship. They couldn't hide the whirrs of stabilisers or the urgent hushed voices in the entrance hall. Some of the children—the ones that didn't fear punishment or wished to satisfy their curiosity more—later whispered excitedly about Time Lords with high golden collars and about a shroud on the dining table. One, the youngest at the time and eager to hand off that status, claimed to see the face of a woman, eyes shut and dark skin gone grey. Nothing quite sure, nothing less exciting because of the vaporous rumours surrounding the matter.

The loom has been active since. No matter how busy, no-one in the House of Lungbarrow can resist watching it for hours at a time—the liquid inside sets and shifts and rises; in the centre particles gather like a salt crystal, slowly forming a foetus.

It's too early to say anything about them yet. One day they will have a future, a kaleidoscope of futures, almost certainly a number of bizarre ones considering their peculiar origin.

The Ministry of Loomography insists that reloomed biodata contains nothing but the base genetic code needed for the loom to function and any personality traits are set by the childe's primary education. But you can't quite believe that, can you? There has to be something strange about this one, considering how mysteriously they arrived.

There's a hush over the House. No one speaks of the loom. No two people go to see it at once, but everyone has visited and given their blessings. The entire house of Lungbarrow is holding its breath.

After two months, the childe will be taken from the weft, a boy with sharp eyes and a weak heart. Three days later, on Otherstide, he will be named, and five days after that he will reject his given name and take his own.

You always felt it. Something odd about him, this secret in Lungbarrow—one too many within these walls. He's bringing something upon the House. Something in the world has changed; a Division only just beginning to heal, or beginning to deepen.

For now, they're no more than a cluster of cells. Watch them grow. Watch the kaleidoscope shift. Witness their second beginning. Give them a future.

See what they make of it.

[shmreduplication]

@laffy-taffy-creations

So intrigued and would love to hear more about the horrors in developmental biology

You sent me a message but I’m making a post because more people should know about this, and also it’s a little fun to tell people because it’s just the right amount of gross that everyone gets mad at me when I talk about it IRL

This is going to get long

OK so that meat berry thing is cellular biology which is my expertise but unfortunately my college didn’t have enough classes for it to be a major, so they combined it with developmental biology and molecular biology.  Molecular biology is basically what it sounds like, molecules that are necessary for cells and how cells acquire+move them around.  Cell bio is all the stuff happening inside of cells so like the organelles inside of them and how they replicate+grow, so it’s one level higher in scale than mo’ bio

The next scale up from cell bio is, well you have two options: microbio which is just like all of the single-cell organisms and how they interact with each other, and developmental biology which is about how cells in a multicellular organism grow and change over time

You see, all of your cells have the same DNA and all of your cells have always had and will always have all the same DNA.  But: you don’t have the same number of cells thru-out your life (you started as a single cell), and not all your cells act the same (your eyeball cells act differently than your stomach cells, for example)

This brings us to the fundamental question of dev bio: how do cells grow and change over their individual lifespans, and how do they grow and change over the lifespan of the organism? 

And the extremely concise answer is: every cell “knows” where it is in the body because it came from a previous cell that “knew” where it was, because that cell came from a previous cell that “knew” and so on and so on back to the very first cell division.

So after the sperm and egg fuse into one cell (a zygote), that cell starts dividing into two cells which both “know” where they are in relation to the other one.  Then those become four which all “know”, etc etc until the organism is fully grown.

and the follow-up question is “how do they “know””? (ok I’m going to drop the quotation marks but keep in mind that I’m trying to limit the amount that I anthropomorphize biology)

and the extremely concise answer is: cell-cell signaling.  A new stomach cell is only going to grow next to already-developed stomach cells which release signals that say “we’re stomach cells so you should be too!”.  Those signal molecules enter the new cell and turn on all the “be a stomach cell” genes and turn off all the “be an eyeball cell or any other kind of cell” genes.  But those genes still exist in those stomach cells

OK we’re getting p close to the answer but I need to shift to give you a bit better of an understanding of how do we know anything about which gene does what thing?  Well.......unfortunately.................the main way to know is............................we break or otherwise silence the gene and then watch what happens to the organisms without it.  Or..............over-activate a gene and watch what happens when there’s too much of whatever that gene codes for.  These strategies only work for genes where the absence or over-expression isn’t lethal to the organism and weird side effect is that we know more about chromosome 21 in humans because people with down syndrome have an extra one, and we know more about the sex chromosomes in humans because some people are born with only one or with too many (there are different names depending on how many people get.  So someone with one X chromosome has a different diagnosis name than someone who has XXX or XXY, etc)

fortunately we have some scientific ethics so the majority of dev bio is done on plants.  I took a lot of plant bio classes as a result.  However, the people funding scientific research don’t want to learn about plants, they want to learn about people.  So we have a number of animals that we decided are ethical to experiment on because animals are more similar to humans.  One of those is fruit flies, which are already really gross.  And if the primary way of designing experiments is to turn on/off genes at moments and in locations that they’re not supposed to be on/off then................you’re going to get some really fucked up fruit flies

So I had to read a paper that iirc was about “when are the “become an eyeball” genes turned on (in fruit flies as they develop in eggs)?”.  The researchers already knew which signal molecule turned on the “this cell should become an eyeball” gene and they had a bunch of fruit fly eggs and a bunch of this signal molecule and they injected the molecule into each egg at a different time and they used a dose that was much higher than what would normally be produced by fly fetuses.  Iirc the molecule would break down in a certain period of time so eggs that got the molecule too early would still end up with two eyes because the additional amount would break down and then they’d produce the normal dose in the normal location to activate two eyes.  And eggs that got it too late would also have two eyes, organisms have some literal biological clocks that make it so a lot of genes can’t be activated after they’re supposed to be.  This is why trans men don’t experience a growth in height when they hormonally transition after puberty, testosterone is a signal molecule for a lot of genes but the “grow taller during puberty” gene can’t be activated after puberty.

OK back to the flies: the eggs that git the high dose at the right time got soo much of the signal molecule and got it all over its body that it grew too many eyes.  There were pictures.  Absolutely covered in eyes.  And the cells at the edges of the eyes knew that they only wanted to be next to eye cells and whatever cells flies have right next to their eyes, so as a result all the abnormal eyes were bulging out and hanging off of the fly’s body in order to maximize their distance from the body parts they were growing next to

Most of the professors for my dev bio classes worked with plants but the one that made me read that paper for homework worked with fruit flies and she just had this glee in her voice every time we talked about fruit flies which made the whole thing that much worse.  If someone told me about this and was clearly grossed out about it then I would think they’re a safe person to be around, but if they’re giddy then it makes me think that they’d do similar experiments on me if not for the scientific ethics that we have in place

[epacer]

Technology

Momentum grows for cell phone bans in schools

Cell phone bans for schools are surging across the country as educators and state lawmakers look to tackle learning loss and reduce distractions, but within the movement there are significant divisions. 

New York City, Los Angeles and the state of Virginia have all moved to forbid student phones from classrooms in recent weeks, despite some parental backlash on the measures.

Parents fear not being able to reach their children during a school shooting or other emergency, while the pesky problem of how to actually keep technology out of young hands poses a practical challenge.

“I think we have good science to show that banning cell phones in classrooms during class time is really important,” said Mitch Prinstein, chief science office for the American Psychological Association. 

“We know that because there’s no such thing as multitasking. We all are just engaging in task-shifting back and forth, and kids’ brains are not fully developed enough to be able to task-shift as well as adults,” Prinstein added. “So it’s really important for academic achievement that we have those cell phones out of the classroom.”

Virginia is the latest to take action on phones in school after Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) directed the state’s Department of Education to draft guidance for schools on creating policies “that establish the age-appropriate restriction or elimination of cell phone use during instructional time.”

“This essential action will promote a healthier and more focused educational environment where every child is free to learn. Creating cell phone and social media-free educational environments in Virginia’s K-12 education system will benefit students, parents, and educators,” Youngkin said last week.

Other major metropolitan areas serving hundreds of thousands of students have also jumped on the wagon to create phone-free environments. 

New York City Public Schools is looking into policies on getting rid of phones, and the Los Angeles school board approved a policy to restrict the devices, although the details of how America’s two biggest cities will get the job done have not been finalized. 

Some are advocating for students not to have their phones at all throughout the school day.

“There are many, many, many reasons why a class-time, instruction-time policy doesn’t work,” said Sabine Polak, co-founder of Phone-Free Schools Movement. 

Polak said a ban on phones only during class puts the burden on teachers to police classrooms, and that students are less likely to socialize face-to-face during lunch or other breaks if they have access to screens. Class-only bans also leave the phones available for illicit activities such as recording and taking photos, she said.

A recent survey by Pew Research Center found 72 percent of high school teachers believe phones are a major distraction to students, though only 33 percent of middle school teachers and 6 percent of elementary educators feel the same way.

All-day bans have been undertaken by multiple school districts, with Renesha Parks, chief wellness officer at Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, previously telling The Hill her district invested in pouches designed for students to put their phones in when they arrive and which cannot be opened until the end of the day.

“The phone can’t be left on the person unless it is in a locked pouch like a Yondr pouch,” Polak said. “We found that even if they are locked away in personal lockers, kids are still finding ways to leave the classroom in order to access their phones.” 

But others say the focus should be on class time, since it’s the most important for student focus.

“In general, we should be limiting the amount of time that kids are on social media. However, there is no research that says whether doing it in the three minutes before classes or doing it at home is any different or, you know, better or worse,” Prinstein said. 

While 82 percent of K-12 teachers say their school has a cell-phone policy, according to the June Pew Research survey, 30 percent of those educators say it is hard to enforce them.

Classroom-only bans would also help parents who fear not having access to their children during an emergency event, though advocates of cell phone bans argue such access could in fact increase the danger.

“As far as like big emergencies […] your child is more unsafe if they have their phone on them when there’s an emergency because their attention is distracted. They are not paying attention when their teachers are giving guidance on what they’re supposed to be doing because they are too worried about trying to text friends or family to let them know things are OK,” said Mileva Repasky, co-founder of Phone-Free Schools movement. 

As for students, Pew found 70 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds say there are more benefits than harms to phones, and 45 percent believe phones make it easier to do better in school.

And some land on the students’ side, arguing that even bans outside of class time are a step backward. 

“I take the opposite stance here, because I think that banning cell phones is, at best, a missed opportunity, and at worst, maybe not worse, but one of the more harmful results that I can predict is that it will actually produce a group of kids who aren’t prepared to be productive in society,” said Bill Salak, CTO of Brainly, an online education platform.

“I would say this is a problem that should be solved on the spot, locally, at the most local level, so teachers reprimanding and escalating problems that are happening in their classrooms. Parents being more involved, parents being better educated and this is where schools and parents can connect, and schools can talk to parents about tools to install on your kid’s cell phone to limit their access to social media during school hours,” he added. “There’s all these tools that that if schools and parents are working together and they’re communicating like we’re going to have a better outcome than just using a giant hammer to say, ban all cell phone use in school.” *Reposted article from The Hill by Lexi Lonas on July 16, 2024

[dreamsandroots]

The View from Down Under

The rarest treasures are often the ones hardest to decipher: that which operates only within the interior of the epistemè, obscured from outsiders. A secret path back home. An anachronous story which changes with the teller’s inflections, their changing dispositions. If there’s one thing the West excelled at (at least since the onset of market libertarianism) it was making its own story accessible. Perhaps accessible is not quite the right word here. Unavoidable might serve more aptly. 24/7 availability, the dream that never sleeps. Excitement in your face, your eyes bleeding, a narrative of Capital Realism that engulfs the horizon. What can you even say about a story that’s so catchy it sticks in your head even as it strangles you? Its jingles and theme tunes ringing in your cells, snaking through your interior circuits? The lens changes: what you see when your eyes become free from the joy of hunger, defined only by the absences of what you can and cannot take. Apocalypse is only a secret whose articulation would certify the ego’s erasure. Scare it into a bullet. The original trick. Fascism’s pull works best behind a pretty face. Gather enough pretty faces, arrange them to cover over your dark corners, and you can divert attention from any atrocity, any factory polluting as it builds its landfill or its bombs. The beautiful ones, the lucky ones. Soon you’ll be made to feel crazy, a paranoid fool, for pointing at anything beneath the surface. The beautiful face becomes the arena within which the ongoing dialectic of division plays indefinitely. A white face, an androgynous face, a coloured face, a trans face, all of them beautiful faces pointing towards the edges of a misplaced sense of self-righteous anger that is tied to our sense of belonging from one moment to the next, and the distinct sense that the battlegrounds of identity have been constructed to keep us looking out to our other in envy. How might we place ourselves in the centre of gravity once again? Don’t they realise how much we have struggled too? The algorithm’s inner logic: a magical formula that predicts and predicates profits on the margins of social dissolution.

But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves here a little. Let’s step back for a moment and think about the dream we had, the one which confuses the hell out of us every time we think on it: not necessarily in a way that leaves us frustrated or exacerbated on the knife’s edge of reason, but rather in the same way that we might imagine it to be pleasing for the plant to think of the different routes it might travel of a day in order to best drink up the sun’s energy. This must be what they mean by ‘quanta’, the superposition of that which is unable to be measured. Nothing in its box. Fixed categories, the static noise of holy conception, trickling and clicking in susurrations and blips through the skin. To stay indefinitely in this gelatinous state of mass, though impossible, must at times seem tempting. To lay snug in our beds comfortably, our needs, our hungers fed intravenously, or via some hare-brained rendition of the digital cloud, must seem something close to a post-lapsarian, pre-eminent paradise. Cycles beget cycles, our bodies growing towards the sun, the moon and various other heavenly bodies, cell by cell. Forget the false binary of dead-cat-living, we are all of us swarms of creatures, balancing tentatively, the species of the brain aware only through a kind of mass-extrapolatory intuition of those in the belly, the mouth, the lungs, the throat, your fingers, the soles of your feet. If only we didn’t have to go to work on Monday, or the day after that. But, I guess every Matrix comes with its own built-in Neo. The ego’s storm clouds. An interior gut punch, a vortex in the pit of your belly. Why can’t we dream forever?

As you walk the dusty streets you realise yourself as the inconsolable deficit. You are white skinned like it’s some kind of blessing. You wear trousers like a man does. You stand up at the urinal to pee, it’s true. Ugly stubble prickles the skin on your face. The chemicals raging in your body, along with the 10y gap in any sense of physical intimacy with another person, have you falling into the embarrassing slobbery drawl of the gaze, staring at what you believe to be the solution to your shortfall: slender, smooth-skinned, expensive clothes, perfect hair, an alluring scent, the ultimate in sublimation, and you have to alleviate yourself from the male fantasy that these angelic beings emerged from heaven’s egg perfectly constructed as if by the hand of God Themself, and that you’re some kind of Odysseus, strapped to the mast of his own ship, navigating through the sublime waters of the sirens. You’re reminded, too, of the cultural boneyard that is Sydney/Gadigal, its highways superimposed on top of sacred spaces, travelling grounds for the one remaining world culture that can provide evidence of continuous cultural practices that date back (according to Neale & Kelly) for at least tens of thousands of years. It’s only in recognition that our problems are skin deep in comparison, the realisation that to approach the problem with the requisite curiosity and open-heartedness of the dreamer, rather than the knower, means also to leave behind the tools you have collected to make sense of the world.

I’m a settler, but aren’t we all? According to various socio-political models which attempt to make sense of, and demystify the automated rollout of self-replicating power structures, what seems most urgent is to develop a sense of class-consciousness, a sense of unification that can come only with the recognition of our shared agency, to halt the ongoing hegemony of market freefall. To examine the relationship of ‘Western’ models of learning and the culturally diverse and variegated systems of knowledge evident in First Nations people throughout the world, feels analogous to the image of a man, dying of thirst who, when approaching the river, thinks immediately that the water is his by right. The cultural work of today is an ongoing labour of building bridges and reforesting places drained of life-force. To recognise our common despairs, but also to find a way to share the joys. Australia’s last hope for cultural identity is to recognise its ongoing systems of oppression, to understand what colonises all of us, to see the pollution of domination, control, fixation, for the mental pollution that it is. If I can approach this task with honesty, sincerity patience and understanding, then maybe one day I’ll be able to say, in sincerity, that I have done the work of an Australian, and I will call it my home.

[envysnest]

Snakeskin (Sephiroth/Reader) (ch. 8/?)

AO3 / Pillowfort

Rating: Explicit

Chapters: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14

Tags: First Time, Reader-Insert, Hurt/Comfort, Bittersweet Ending, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Frank Discussions of Past Rape/Abuse, Everyone is Queer, Canon-Compliant (if you squint), Pre-Crisis-Core Seph, Slow Burn, i continue to disappoint my friends and family, sephiroth is a virgin and in this essay i will, Reader is a Cis Woman, fluffy sex, Praise Kink, Gratuitous Biochemistry

Summary:

You are a young biologist, fresh out of graduate school, working in Shinra's R&D Division under Professor Hojo. You had long since given up on finding a partner and starting a family, preferring instead the company of your cell samples and your scientific instruments.

As the conflict in Wutai worsens, you strike up an unexpected friendship with a First Class SOLDIER.

(Sephiroth/Reader Slow Burn)

TW's for this chapter: We're finally making good on that E rating. Read with discretion and make sure your grandma's out bowling or something.

---

That night, you peeled the gauze off of your hand. The cut Masamune had left was, fortunately, shallow: an angry gash, like a paper-cut, across your palm. Dried blood stained the bandage. You flexed your hand and winced against the answering jolt of pain. Doing lab work with it was going to be challenging, to say the least.

Before work the next day, you grabbed gauze from the corner store and tried to wrap your hand. Sephiroth’s impeccable bandaging technique was impossible to replicate, and as the sun rose higher over the horizon, you gave up and went to work with gauze dangling from your palm.

Hammond was the first to notice. “Woah. What happened there?”

You draped your coat over the back of your chair. The office was near-empty now, sitting awkwardly in the nothing stretch between the holidays and New Year’s. “Just, uh. Cooking accident? I cut my hand real bad slicing avocados.” You mimed cutting your hand with a knife.

Hammond let out a sympathetic hiss and shook his head.

---

That night, you went in to feed the cells. 029 had died from mako exposure, but J - 180 - L - 9177 looked…different.

The cells were now thriving.

You placed the plate underneath the microscope and increased the magnification. The cells had the same strange appearance as before: irregular, clawing shapes, with multiple nuclei to a cell and that sickly gray cast. But cells now crowded the once-bare plate, pressing up against each other and against the dish, as if they were straining to get out. Even considering the time between when you had last fed them and now, this was an outrageous explosion of growth: from freezer-burned and forgotten, to climbing over themselves for space.

It was time to split the line if you wanted to keep growing them. Splitting involved making a brand-new plate using a few cells from 029-1: your current plate. It was risky enough cultivating one plate, let alone multiple. But J - 180 - L - 9177’s ravenous appetite for mako haunted you; how could you pass up the opportunity to learn what was different about these? After all, you’d be in just as much trouble with Hojo when he found the first plate versus when he found the seventeenth plate, several generations in. 

You took a fraction of the J - 180 - L - 9177 cells and placed them into a brand-new Petri dish, covering them with warm liquid media. This new plate, you decided, would be labeled as 029-2. The name was just vague enough to avoid suspicion while still following a naming convention you recognized: "2nd generation of stolen cells." There was no mako currently allotted to your lab, and so you couldn’t dose them without arousing suspicion.

You grabbed a clean tube. Within it, you mixed a second portion of the thriving J - 180 - L - 9177 cells with glycerol, producing a viscous back-up culture that could be frozen in cryo until you needed to regrow them again. You placed the tiny tube in the storae tank, hidden amongst your other, older samples that no one ever touched.

The original J - 180 - L - 9177 (still in disguise as 029-1) went into the biohazard, like 029 before it.

---

On New Year’s Eve, you stayed home. Somewhere in the middle of the night, you received a single text from Sephiroth: his gloved hand holding a sparkler in the dark. You tweaked the brightness on your phone. Barely visible in the background was a bustling SOLDIER encampment. Sparklers dotted the grassy landscape like stars.

You smiled, cheeks growing hot, and typed out a reply:

>> :)

Later the next morning, Sephiroth sent another message.

>>Missing you fiercely.

You fell asleep that night wondering how it would feel to kiss him as the clock struck twelve. Like sparklers, you thought: like stars of hope against the dark.

---

It was hopeless, you thought to your reflection in the barracks elevator. No matter how gentle you tried to be with the eyeshadow, you still put too much on. You groaned as your index finger came away black with mascara. At least you chose a skirt that fit a little better this time; you felt less like an overgrown toddler and more like Sephiroth's equal.

As the elevator climbed to the 43rd floor, you thought back to the last message Sephiroth had sent you that afternoon: come hungry. That didn’t sound like someone who was apt to kick you out Saturday morning. Then again, you could never tell. 

The elevator chimed quietly and opened up to that sleek white hallway. Snowflakes clumped against the window at the end. Below, Midgar twinkled in the fog. An overnight bag thumped against your left arm as you walked; even someone who hated their partner liked them to at least spend the night. Your medication rattled inside.

You didn’t understand what “come hungry” meant: was it literal (as in, come hungry for food), or was it an innuendo? Despite yourself, you felt a little sick as you knocked on 4301.

How was it possible that you could fall over yourself to come here, could even look forward to this, and still feel like you were sticking your head in a guillotine?

He won’t hurt you, you thought to yourself, over and over. He won’t hurt you. 

Sephiroth opened the door in an apron, his black shirt rolled up to his sleeves. “You’re just in time,” he sighed. “I’m just about done.”

The smell of spices and cooking meat hit you all at once. Oh, come hungry, as in, I am going to feed you actual food, not my dick. You were right to skip dinner before coming up. The nervousness began to ease, as did the nausea.

Sephiroth walked into the kitchen as you were kicking off your heels. “You hungry?” he asked. Over the bar top, you could see a tall pot steaming on the stove, which he was peering into like it was a scrying pool. A strainer full of egg noodles sat on the countertop nearby. Next to the strainer sat two gleaming bowls, illustrated with a lush forest; if you squinted, you could make out a black bear peering out from the trees. The apartment was warm to the point of being uncomfortable.

“Very,” you said. 

He came over to the counter. "Take your coat off. Sit. Get comfortable." He gestured to the bag on your shoulder. "What's that?"

You looked down at it and shrugged it off of you, as if you had casually forgotten it was there. "An overnight bag," and, oh damn it, your voice cracked. "Just like, some clothes? And my meds?"

You watched as the corners of Sephiroth’s lips twitched upwards in response. He was wearing jeans this time: a worn, acid-washed pair that looked a decade out of fashion. "You came prepared." There was a different kind of breathlessness to his voice this time, and it sounded suspiciously like excitement. You felt yourself smile and hid it against your shoulder until he had returned to the stove.

Whatever he was making, it smelled incredible: savory, burning hot, and perfect for a snowy night in January. You pulled yourself up onto one of the bar chairs. From here, you could watch Sephiroth over the counter as he spooned a dark red soup into each bowl. The front of the refrigerator was a mess of magnets, photographs on film, and souvenirs.  

As he topped each bowl with a generous heap of noodles, he spoke again. “I’m realizing now I didn’t ask if you had any allergies. Or if you ate meat.”

You shook your head. There was nothing in front of you you couldn’t eat, and anyway, you weren’t about to turn down a home-cooked meal he had clearly slaved over. “I’m good.”

He looked up at you as he opened the fridge. “Are you sure? I can make you something different.”

The idea of Sephiroth breaking himself over again, just for your comfort, at once startled and soothed you. He looked as if he’d toss the entire meal into the trash and start over again if you said the word. “I’m sure. I’m…really excited, actually?”

“Good.” You watched as he dug in the fridge and extracted two Chocobo eggs, larger than life and speckled with blue dots. 

“Don’t SOLDIERs have a meal plan they’re supposed to follow?”

“They do,” said Sephiroth carefully. He cracked one egg into each bowl, tossed the shells into the sink. “This fits my macros.” He smirked and added, “Will you tell on me?”

You shook your head, grinning. 

The meal he set in front of you was some kind of stew. The Chocobo egg, runny and perfect, steamed atop a red miso broth laden with vegetables and a dark, fatty meat. 

You jumped as you felt a gentle hand on your back. Sephiroth had rounded the corner from the kitchen and had put a hand between your shoulder blades to warn you. He set his own bowl in front of the seat beside you. 

“I’ve still got that Junon red left,” he said. “Do you want a glass?”

“Mm-hmm.”

He touched that space between your shoulder blades again as he passed you. You felt yourself melt into the touch, chasing it even though he was already back in the kitchen, rooting around for two wine glasses. When you picked up your chopsticks and poked at your meal, the egg yolk broke and ran into the broth. 

The first mouthful was perfect. You happily tucked in to your meal, only looking up long enough to thank Sephiroth for setting a fresh glass of wine in front of you. The red miso broth mixed perfectly with the strips of beef, the bean sprouts, the egg, and the bok choy. He sat next to you, looking comically small for the bar chair when your feet couldn't even touch the ground. The two of you ate in content silence for a while.

When your bowl was half-finished, you took a sip of the wine: it was just as good as you remembered. 

Sephiroth nudged your bare foot with his and leaned towards you. “Did you like it?”

“I loved it.” There was enough for two meals in front of you; you felt pleasantly sated. Sephiroth had already cleaned his bowl and was now eyeing yours with a slight tinge of envy.

You pushed your bowl towards him, and he shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’ll save that for next time.”

Next time? You two hadn’t slept together, had done hardly anything together, and there was already going to be a next time? You took a gulp of wine so you could hide your expression from him.

He stood. “You’re thinking again.”

“How do you know?” you said to the countertop.

“You get very, very quiet,” he said. “Well," and he tilted his hand this way and that, "quieter than normal.” His hand appeared in your vision as he removed your bowl. “And you suddenly look exhausted.”

You rested your chin on your forearm while you twirled the wineglass against the counter. The dark red liquid danced in the light. “I’m always exhausted.”

“I want you to feel relaxed while you’re here.” The remaining soup was sealed in glass containers, which Sephiroth then placed in the fridge. “Not stressed.”

“I don’t feel stressed now.” The nausea from out in the hall had abated. Maybe Sephiroth was good with working with traumatized people; maybe he was using some high-level magic on you.

Or maybe, you thought, you just naturally relaxed around him.

He chuckled as he loaded the dishwasher. “Well, good.” He turned to face you, leaning up against the counter with a smile. You stared at his exposed forearms, the way the muscle stretched taut to accommodate his weight. “Then I’m doing my job.”

You looked away from him. There was still that bowl of clementines on the far counter, next to an espresso machine. In the corner of the kitchen was a stacked washer and dryer, both Shinra-co. branded and featuring more dials and knobs than you had ever seen in your life. In fact, everything in his kitchen was from Shinra: the fridge, the dishwasher, even the espresso machine.

You turned back to Sephiroth, who had already removed his apron and was hanging it on the wall next to the fridge. “I did it again. The, uh, the thinking? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” he said gently. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

You stared into your wine glass as he rounded the corner into the living room. He hesitated next to you. 

“If I may,” Sephiroth said quietly. 

When you looked up, he shifted from foot to foot and cleared his throat, shoving his hands in his pockets. He looked so shy again. How did he do that, you thought, oscillate from confident to shy and back again?

You set the glass back down on the counter and inclined your head. “You may,” you said.

“You look…” He took a deep breath, eyes roaming the length of your body. “Absolutely, astonishingly beautiful.”

Your breath hitched. “Wait, you…?” You sat up. “Are you serious?”

He gave you a withering look, the inquisitive tilt of his head asking if you had bumped yours on the way in.

“Seph.”

He laughed and rolled his eyes. “Yes, I mean it,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that if it wasn’t true.”

“I…” You blinked hard and looked down at your feet. That tender, oozing feeling was back in your belly. You smiled at the floor. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

A tense silence descended upon the two of you. You rubbed your calf with your heel and looked up. Sephiroth was studying the hallway off to his left, as if it was suddenly the most interesting place he’d ever seen. 

You slid off of the bar chair. Sephiroth looked back to you.

You shuffled forward and tentatively placed a hand on his chest, at your eye level. For a while, you stood there, Sephiroth watching you as you felt his heartbeat under your palm. He seemed so patient, the look in his eyes hopeful. You felt small around him, but it was beginning to feel less like you were prey.

No: you felt small in a good way, more like a cherished object on a shelf, or like a well-loved pebble in a child’s pocket. 

When you touched your forehead to his sternum, he sighed as if he had been waiting for you. He wrapped his arms around your shoulders. The two of you stood there, holding each other in comfortable silence. You pressed your cheek to his chest and closed your eyes. The soft fall of his hair brushed your back, your face, as he bent down and pressed his nose against the top of your head, breathing deeply. He smelled like the flowers he had given you.

You spoke up first, quiet like you two were in a church. “You feel nice.”

“So do you.” His voice was equally hushed.

You craned your neck to look up at him. “Would it hurt you to kiss at this angle?”

He crinkled his nose at you when he smiled. “Why? Do you have something better in mind?”

You walked your fingers across his pectorals. “We couuuld…sit down?”

Sephiroth let go of you and beckoned you to follow him with a smile. You wordlessly trailed after him, helpless to his pull, like he was one of those burning sparklers in the field on New Year’s Eve: warm and bright and inviting against the backdrop of snow falling over the city. When he sat down, you settled on the couch next to him, and before you could say anything, he teased, “This won’t hurt either of us,” and leaned down to kiss you again. It felt every bit as wonderful as the first time, just as you remembered it: he was passive, letting you surge up into the kiss and press up against him. His fingertips danced along your spine, and you shivered with pleasure. 

He pulled away. There was already a cramp in your neck from the odd angle, but, you thought, better uncomfortable than sorry. When he had laid you down against the couch, you had dissociated on him. Better to keep sitting up. You brushed the hair out of his eyes, and to your amazement, he leaned his cheek against your hand, chasing the touch, like he couldn’t get enough of you.

You rubbed the side of your neck. “Can I...can I sit in your lap?”

“Please do,” he responded.

You swung your leg over his lap and straddled him. Sephiroth’s eyes flashed with glee as you settled on top of him to kiss him again. He honest-to-God moaned against your mouth, sending a hot rush of arousal through you. He seemed hesitant to move his hands past the small of your back.

“Seph,” you murmured.

“Mm?”

“You can, um.” You took a deep breath and steadied yourself. “You-y-you can try touching me.”

“On one condition.”

You scoffed. Of course there's a catch. “Alright. What is it?”

“Call me Seph again?” Sephiroth said it quietly, almost under his breath, as if he was embarrassed to ask you. 

You felt a surge of protectiveness over this man, locked away in his gilded cage at the top of the world, waiting on pins and needles for the chance to touch you again. You held his face in your hands, watched his eyes flash with that boyish hope again. “Seph,” you whispered against his mouth, and he leaned up to kiss you again, fierce and hungry. 

“I’ve never had a nickname,” he said when he pulled away.

You rubbed your thumbs against his cheeks. Everything about him was so soft, so unbearably good. “Do you like it?”

“I do,” he purred, and he tilted his head, leaning in towards you, seeming to say without words, please kiss me again, that question in his eyes as to whether you’d actually do it, and God, you wanted to. You indulged him and leaned down to his lips.

Finally— blessedly— his hands fell to your ass, pulling you against him. He didn’t grab or drag you, you noticed with relief; in fact, he seemed tentative, his fingers dancing up and down your back again, like he wasn’t sure where to touch first. You cupped the back of his neck and sighed into his mouth. You felt like you were going to burst into confetti.

“Is this alright?” Sephiroth murmured.

“It’s great,” you breathed. “Keep going.”

His right hand broke away and wandered curiously up your thigh, darting under the hem of your skirt. You tensed, but he didn’t go further, instead resting his palm on your leg near your hip. You gently stroked his hand and, when he didn’t move, lifted it and placed it on the small of your waist. He kneaded the soft flesh he found there, making you gasp and buck your hips. Judging by the way he kissed you harder in response, he liked how it felt, too. 

You counted your limbs. Yes, you had two hands on his shoulders, and your legs were folded underneath you. You took slow inventory of yourself: your hair in his fingers now, your ass sitting firmly in his lap, your knees on the couch cushions, your heart racing in your chest. 

But then he pulled away and murmured, “Show me where.”

You took a deep breath. There was a right answer and a wrong answer to this; you knew as much from other partners. “Anywhere,” you whispered. “Anywhere you’d like.”

He shook his head. “None of that. I want to know.”

You hesitated. Held this close, there was nowhere for you to hide from him, but the idea of begging for what you wanted from him was mortifying. Your voice was soft as you settled for, “I don’t know what I want.”

“You don’t know?” He shifted your weight on his lap. “That makes two of us.”

You snorted. “I—“

“You’re sorry. I know.”

You covered your face; your cheeks were burning. “You’re terrible.”

He reached up to your cheek, brushed a thumb against it. You followed his touch like a moth following the flame. “Are you shy?”

“More…embarrassed?”

He laughed and closed his eyes. His thumb passed over your cheek again: affectionate, apologetic. “So you do know, and you’re not telling me.” When he opened his eyes again, you squinted against the mako glow. “Do you think I’ll judge you?”

The joke fell out of your mouth before you could stop it. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone did.”

His face fell. He brushed his knuckles against your cheek. You moved your head out of his reach. He said, “That won’t do,” and you weren’t sure what he was referring to.

You shook your head. This conversation (the “my life is a terrible daytime soap you’d see on Channel 6 and I’m real fucked up about it” conversation) was always uncomfortable; at worst, it would sound a death knell for whatever good thing this was. No one wanted a fuck-up in their bed.

Fear welled up from deep within you. You looked down at his chest, watched it rise and fall— it was unsteady, you realized, because he was just as aroused and nervous as you were. You picked at a loose thread on his shirt.

Out of the corner of his eye, you saw his head tilt. “We could talk about it.”

“There’s a lot,” you said softly. Oh, there was the lump in your throat, right on schedule. The tears were fast approaching. “Maybe another time.”

“Would you like to stop?” His voice was gentle; you wished it wasn’t. It was somehow worse, you thought, when the other person was actually listening. You stopped picking at the thread, put your palm over his heart instead. When you didn’t respond, he traced a finger up your spine.

You cleared your throat, but the lump wouldn’t leave. “I just don’t like being asked,” you said, “what I like.”

“Okay.” He didn’t sound upset; if anything, he was still being gentle (too gentle) with you. “Why?”

“No-no one ever really wants to know.” Tears pricked at your eyes. “I th-thin-think they do it to feel, like, better about whatever comes next.” 

He pressed a warm palm against your back. “I do want to know.” He sighed. “I…don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything about it.”

“No,” he said. He hesitated again; when you looked up, he was looking away. He knit his brow: the expression of frustration was so naked, so childish, that you sat up straight. “I mean, I’m not sure how to touch you.”

“Like…?”

He tilted his head this way and that. The hand at your back fluttered. “I don’t have much experience with women. Or…” He flicked his hair out of his eyes. “Any experience with women.”

The shock hit you all at once. For a moment, you stared at him in silence. 

A blush started from his nose and spread across his face.

“Oh my God,” you said softly. “Not at all?”

He leaned back against the couch and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Do your worst,” he sighed.

“You…?” Sephiroth wandered Gaia looking like that and had never once found a woman in his bed? The sheer number of members in the Silver Elite suggested he was not without options. To think, you had been so fearful of him rejecting you for someone prettier, more experienced, when all along he had been frightened of you. All you could do was stammer. “Seph, seriously? Never?”

He spoke to the ceiling. took a deep breath; it sounded like he had rehearsed this many times in his head, waiting for the day to tell you. “Once you best them in training enough times, everyone stops talking to you. You’re just competition after that.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “By the time I made 1st, I became untouchable. Everyone“Fooled around a few times in training,” he said, “But only with other male recruits. Lockers, the showers, dorms. Always in secret. I never got very far.” He ’t help that I don’t look right.”

You toyed with the ends of his hair. “That’s terrible.”

“I’m well aware.” The bitterness in his tone was palpable. He added, “It doesn’t help that I don’t look right.”

Had the elevator taken you to another planet?  “What do you mean you don’t look right?” You gestured at him with his free hand, feeling helpless. “You’re….you.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Come on. Don’t say that.”

He scoffed. 

You busied yourself with working out a knot from his hair. The silence in the room felt heavy. 

Here was a fresh slate for the both of you, an opportunity to sow something new: no bad habits for him to unlearn, no desire to force you or take what he wanted out of expectation. You let go of his hair, braced your hands against his chest. You wanted to be good for him, and not just to sate him: to give him safe harbor, the same as he had offered you. 

“I’m honored to be your first,” you said.

He wouldn’t look you in the eye. That faint pink tinge hadn’t left his cheeks, so vivid against his pale skin.

You leaned down and caught his eye. He looked up at you with surprise, like he had forgotten you were there.

“It’s not hard,” you said. “I promise. I’ll help you.”

A smile tugged at the corner of his lips: self-deprecating, shy again. “And here I thought you’d leave.”

You grinned. His eyes lit up with delight. “I’m a good teacher.”

“I know you are.” He gently pulled your forehead down so he could kiss it. “Shall we move to the bedroom?”

This was it. Don’t, the voice in your brain pled. You won’t be able to come back from this. You won’t be able to stop him.

But that wasn’t right. He had had every opportunity to hurt you the last time you were here, and instead he had stopped what he was doing and put a blanket over you, held you while you cried, sent you flowers. He had told you something you weren't sure he told anyone before.

He’s trying to show you that he likes you, you thought. This is how he’s doing it.

So you took a deep breath, slid off of his lap, and said, “Sure.”

He stood and took your hand. You let him lead you past the couch and down a sharp left turn into that narrow hallway. The kitchen was open to you on your right; on the wall ahead of you hung a painting, showing lush, rolling fields. “The Western continent,” Sephiroth said when he followed your gaze. There was a small white door off to the right; presumably the bathroom, because Sephiroth turned left instead and led you into an enormous bedroom.

The walls of his room were a dark cream color, like coffee made with too much milk. Unlike the rest of the apartment, the floor was covered with a white, fluffy carpet that felt soft between your toes. Those same floor-to-ceiling windows from the living room made up the far wall again. Sephiroth walked over and drew curtains across it, hiding Midgar's skyline.

An old, well-loved leather armchair sat in one corner near the windows, along with a matching leather ottoman. The leather had already cracked around the chair's arms. A smaller wooden bookcase, stuffed with books, climbed the wall beside it. Sephiroth had piled yet another stack of books on a small wooden end-table, well within reach of the chair.  An enormous, if shallow, closet took up the wall to your right; shuttered wooden doors had been pulled across it, hiding its contents from your view. You could see yourself, hunched over and meek, in a long mirror hung beside them.

Sephiroth’s bed dominated most of the room. It was a size you didn’t think possible to manufacture; you could’ve laid in the center, stretched all of your limbs out, and still not have touched the edges. It was neatly made, with a plain, cream-colored comforter tucked neatly into the mattress. Four fluffy pillows lined the dark wooden headboard. You looked down at the floor; there were a few books Sephiroth had hastily kicked under the bed when you walked in. Their covers peeked out from the white bedskirt. Does he not want me to see those?

You sat on the edge of the bed, facing the door. The mattress was sinfully soft. There were matching wooden bedside tables, each kitted with a single drawer, on either side of the bed. The one on your side was bare; you looked over your shoulder. Sephiroth rummaged in the opposite bedside table’s drawer. On top of it stood a few other books and an empty water glass; clearly, that was his side of the bed. 

Here you were.

What were you going to say to him? What if you had another episode? You pressed your palms against the comforter. What if you were bad?

Your voice shook when you spoke up. “I just, um.”

Sephiroth looked up from his rummaging.

“I just want to warn you,” you said. You gathered the comforter in your fists. “I’m—I’m—I’m kind of a hard s-s-sell.”

“A hard sell?” 

“I don’t really, um, come with partners.” The words came out all in a rush. Deep down, you knew why: you were too keyed up, too uncomfortable, too afraid to let go and show yourself to the many people who had ended up in your bed. That vulnerability would be yet another weapon used against you later. You remembered the anger and frustration in one boyfriend’s voice: You need to relax, said like an insult as he rolled off of you. You’re impossible. You smoothed out your skirt and turned away. “Like, ever. It, um, it makes people m-mad? So please don’t be upset if, um, if-if-if I don’t, like, finish.”

“Well.” He set a few items on the bedside table: a box of condoms, lubricant, a hair tie. The mattress dipped as he crawled over to you. “Can I try to get you there?”

You sat as still as possible. If you moved, you were afraid the entire room would come crashing down, falling forty-three stories to the streets, to your unheated apartment in Sector Eight, to your empty twin bed and your alarm clock startling you awake.

You whispered, "It’s really not a big deal."

“It is,” he replied, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. “I want you to feel good. Let me try.”

The warm little flame in your belly, the one you had pushed down in the cell culture room so long ago, flared up again. You ducked your head in embarrassment when he sat cross-legged on the bed in front of you. 

Sephiroth leaned down to catch your eye. “Shy again?”

“A little.”

“You can tell me to stop anytime you like.” His hand landed on your thigh. The heat of his palm was like a brand, even through your black tights. It was the best pain you’d ever felt.

“You can tell me to stop, too.” You fiddled with the hem of your blouse and looked up at him. “I want you to be comfortable.”

He was so close you could feel his words on your lips. “Shall we go slow, then?” 

“Mm-hmm.” 

You craned your neck upwards to kiss him again, syrupy-sweet and gentle. He broke away from you long enough to tug on your wrists, and you climbed gratefully back into his lap as if you had always belonged there. He was already hard, just from kissing you; you couldn’t suppress the small noise of disbelief you made. 

When you pulled away, Sephiroth looked you up and down like he was trying to decide what to do first. “I’m going to kiss your neck now,” he said finally. “Would you like that?”

You nodded.

He leaned down and pressed a wet, warm kiss to your pulse. His mouth was clumsy, unpracticed against your skin. You relaxed as he meandered kisses down your neck, across your collarbone. He felt impossibly warm, his hair soft between your fingers.

“Good?” he whispered against the divot of your collarbone.

“Mm-hm.”

“What else?”

 Your breath caught in your throat. The hesitation must have shown to him, because he prompted you again, gentler this time: “What else?”

“I want—I—“

Your breath hitched again, unable to voice what you actually wanted. This felt indulgent, somehow, like you were staring down the opportunity to eat an entire cake by yourself. Sephiroth nosed inquisitively at the juncture of your neck and shoulder.

You finally said, “I w-w-want you to…to k-kiss me again?”

“I can do that.” He resumed his clumsy kissing across your neck, up the column of your throat until he reached your face again. You caught  his soft lips again, and when he kissed you back, it was hungry. Needy.

His tongue was hesitant against your bottom lip. You opened your mouth in response, and he gasped as if you had told him a secret. The sound went straight to your groin. You felt like you were floating, but in a good way: this time, your body was coming with you, tethered only to the bed by his warm hands over your shirt, the gentle rub of his cock against your tights.

You couldn’t stand the tender way he looked at you when he pulled away; you squeezed your eyes shut from shame. 

“May I touch you again?” he whispered.

“Yes,” you whispered back. “Please.”

His fingers met the small of your back, where they ducked under the hem of your shirt. He traced a path up and down your lower spine again, not daring to go higher than what you’d permit.

You would permit him anything.

You wanted to sink your greedy hands into the cake and shove fistfuls into your mouth.

You wanted to gorge yourself on him, on the feeling of being wanted and cared for.

He said, "I’m here. You don’t need to ask for what you want.”

You nodded frantically. His touch made you shiver. “Okay.”

“Are you afraid?”

You answered without thinking: “Yes.”

Sephiroth’s hand stilled. “Of me? Of this?”

“This,” you squeaked, and despite yourself, you felt yourself tearing up. You could barely remember the last time someone was this gentle, this permissive. You opened your eyes. 

He drew back and eyed you with concern. “It’s too much,” he said, “isn’t it?”

“It’s…” You took a shaky breath, trying to focus on his face. “I d-don’t remember the last time someone was…this nice.”

He reached out a thumb and wiped your cheek. You were crying, and you hadn’t even realized when you’d started. “You don’t need to ask for anything,” he repeated. “Are you enjoying it? Is this bad?”

You laughed and swiped a hand across your cheeks. “I’m really enjoying this.” Why did you feel like you were admitting something terrible? You looked down, found the juncture of where you had pressed yourself against him. You blushed and looked away. His walls were so plain: no artwork, no photos. There was nothing to distract you from how hot you felt just from being kissed. The last time you felt this way was…

Never.

“It’s not going away,” he murmured, bringing you back to him. His hand found the back of your neck, massaging the tension he found there. “I won’t take this from you.”

You felt so tender it hurt. “You won’t, um.” You looked up at him. “Think…?”

He tilted his head when you trailed off. “Think what?”

“I always thought I was…ugly, somehow? When I was, um. Enjoying m-m-myself?”

“Who told you that?” 

Who didn’t? You held on to him so tightly that your nails dug into his back; if he noticed, he didn’t seem to mind. You willed yourself to relax, not wanting to hurt him. When you replied, your voice was soft, halting. “Just…past…partners?”

He said your name gently. “They were wrong,” he said.

You looked up at the ceiling, at the bare walls, at the books on his nightstand. “You don’t know that.”

Sephiroth leaned to one side, catching your eye. He half-laughed as he said, “Do I get to find out for myself?”

You couldn’t help but laugh, even as a few more tears escaped your eyes. You made to wipe your cheeks, but he beat you to it, wiping your tears away. You whispered, “Damn it.”

“If it helps,” and here Sephiroth’s voice became soft, hesitant, like your own, “I’m afraid, too. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

It did help. You brushed his hair out of his eyes, only for it to fall back into place. Now you know why he wore his hair long: he was remarkably expressive around you, the hesitation written plainly on his face. He was twice your size and wielded a sword you couldn’t even carry, and yet he seemed so small, innocent in his own way, a young lover trying his damndest to care for you. Suddenly, all of this didn’t seem frightening anymore.

“No one does,” you said.

“Will I hurt you?”

“I don’t think so.” 

He squeezed his eyes shut, tilted his head just so as he winced. “That doesn’t reassure me.” 

“Do I get to find out for myself?”

He scowled and caught your answering laugh on his lips. Your cheeks were still wet, but that little flame of desire welled back up in you as you kissed. His hands were firm on the small of your back, keeping the two of you pressed against one another. Your face hurt from smiling.

Sephiroth pulled away and pinched the side of your waist, just firm enough to make you yelp in surprise. He grinned. “Brat,” he growled under his breath, and the term of endearment made you feel dizzy.

“First-Class,” you replied.

Hir as he guided you back against the pillows. You stretched against the soft mattress. He rolled over to sit up on his edge of the bed and reached towards the nightstand. “Let’s leave work out of this,” he said over his shoulder as he picked up the hair tie, which he promptly stuck between his teeth. As he shook out his wrist and began tying his hair up.

You watched with fascination as his muscles pulled and stretched under his shirt. Soon, you thought, soon you would get to touch them. “Some people like that,” you said.

“And you?” He pulled the elastic onto his wrist and began tying his hair up.

“I think I like ‘brat,’” you said quietly, still staring at his back. Even from this short distance, you could still feel how warm he was. Or was it just you?

“Ha. Come on.” Sephiroth shook out his ponytail and leaned over you from the edge of the bed. Even now, he didn’t overwhelm you, choosing to stay on your left. From where he was, you could easily roll away from him and reach the bedroom door if you wanted to leave. The courtesy wasn’t lost on you. 

He drew a slow finger down the bridge of your nose; you went cross-eyed trying to follow it. With his bangs pulled away from his face, you could count his freckles. “You’re not a brat.”

You could see his face now that he had pulled his bangs out of his eyes. You reached up and cupped his face, swiping your thumbs against his cheeks. To your wonder, he closed his eyes and leaned hard against your palms. You wanted to count every single one of his freckles, his lashes; you knew he would sit patiently as you categorized every cell, right down to the beauty mark near his upper lip. 

Your voice was hushed when you finally spoke. “You’re very pretty.”

He opened his eyes, scrunched his nose as he smiled. “So are you.”

You tilted your head towards him rubbed your nose against his. He let out a trembling sigh and lowered his body onto yours, grinding slowly against your right leg. Of course, you thought; here you were, being romantic, and you were keeping him waiting.

But when you sat up and reached for your blouse, Sephiroth gave you a startled look. “Something wrong?” he asked. He backed away on the bed to give you space.

You raised your eyebrows. He had wanted to stay like that?  “No,” you said, letting your hands fall into your lap. “No, I…” You wiped your sweating palms against your thighs. “I thought you were getting bored?”

“I could never be bored of you,” he replied, reaching inquisitive hands towards you. “You have a strange definition of ‘bored.’”

You laughed under your breath and put your hands around his wrists. He was thwarting you at every turn: you knew the rules of this game, you had played it dozens of times, and here was Sephiroth, telling you to throw away the rulebook and enjoy yourself. You pushed your thumbs under his sleeves, felt the soft skin there; he turned his hands palm-up, watching you touch him. The man in your bed now spoke like the partners in your most shameful, secret dreams: understanding, patient, submissive. The green and blue veins you had tried so hard not to look at in the clinic— miniature strands of the Lifestream, full of blood you had analyzed a hundred times over— were now yours to admire. His flesh was yours to touch, kiss, dote on.

“Can I,” you started, then hesitated. “Can I see you with this off?”

He reached for the hem of his shirt. “You may,” he said, and he pulled it up over his head.

This wasn’t the first time you had seen his chest exposed to you, but it was the first time you had seen him without a stitch of clothing on his torso at all. Sephiroth somehow looked broader, bigger, without the shirt. He was just as solid and well-built as you expected. As you stared at him, his chest rose and fell with those deep, uneven breaths. He was still so nervous.

You exhaled and looked up at his face. “I am going to rip you apart.”

He chuckled and looked away.  “Is that so?”

“I mean—“ You gestured helplessly at his torso. “Not, like, literally. Come here.”

In your dreams, you had imagined he would fall to his hands and knees, crawl over you on the bed with a devilish grin. What Sephiroth actually did was scoot awkwardly forward on his ass until he was within touching distance. 

You pressed your palms flat against his torso and gasped at the warm, solid muscle you found there. Sephiroth shivered as your hands drifted across his pectorals. This close, you could see and feel dozens of different types of scars: cuts, bullet wounds, all manner of minutiae telling the tale of his years in battle. There was white hair,  soft as down, everywhere: on his belly, the divot of his chest, his forearms. You trailed your hands down his chest and paused to touch the pink, gnarled flesh of a past burn. You could almost see that medical report in your head, pointing out the same burn on that blank body outline. Sephiroth’s hands settled in your hair, stroking it, curling a stray lock around his finger; the casual intimacy of it comforted you.

When you leaned forward and pressed a slow kiss to the old burn, he let out a sharp exhale through his nose. When you looked up, his eyes were closed, his brows furrowed as if he needed to focus on not moving. You knew that look: the face of someone trying to preserve a good thing in amber. This was a memory he wanted to keep close.

You whispered against his skin. “You like that?”

“Mm.” His entire body was tensed under you, like he was trying not to frighten you away. 

You trailed open-mouthed kisses against his skin, relishing the way he shivered and panted under you. There was so much you wanted to look at, linger on: a scar from an earlier surgery, an old bullet wound that was almost gray with age, the way silver hair gathered below his navel, leading down past his belt, past where you could see. When you kissed his way up his sternum, he began stroking your hair again. There was not a single person on the planet who didn’t like to be worshipped, you thought— not even this young god, brought low and submissive with only your mouth.

You pulled his left nipple into your mouth and sucked gently. Sephiroth murmured, “Yes,” above you, sighed it like a prayer, tightening his fingers in your hair as you grazed your teeth against the sensitive flesh there. Time seemed to slow down; the room was silent like a cocoon as you kissed your way to his right nipple, drunk on the way he moaned when you rubbed his neglected nipple with a thumb. 

You chanced a glance upward. He was watching you, a look of awe on his face, like he couldn’t believe you were there. His heartbeat thundered somewhere under your mouth.

He pushed your hair back so he could see your eyes. “So pretty,” he said quietly. “Can I call you mine?”

You nuzzled his chest. When you thought about it, weren’t you always his— from the second he laid eyes on you? 

And based on the way he was looking at you now, he had always been yours. 

“Yes,” you said against his skin.

His eyes fluttered shut, and he tilted his head back. “Mine,” he sighed. 

You kissed the space just above where his heart was: where he wore your charm, your favor, against his skin. You pressed your forehead against his chest and trailed tentative fingers down his belly, down to his jeans. 

When your hand brushed his cock through the fabric, he gasped and jerked his hips. He was big, you thought. Was he right: Would he hurt you? But no, you thought, as you rubbed him through his pants, listening to the way he groaned and mumbled your name, he wouldn’t dare, would sooner leave himself unsatisfied than hurt you for his own pleasure. Even through his clothes, he was white-hot in your hand.

You started when he tugged on your blouse sleeve. Sephiroth’s voice was rough with want. “May I take this off?”

“Oh.” You were still clothed. You reached your arms over your head, letting him remove your blouse for you. He let it fall on the bed.

When the tattoo came into view, he let out a low whistle.

You reached behind yourself and unfastened your bra. “Here, it’s better— it’s better when you can see the whole thing.”

Sephiroth’s hands were on your chest the second the bra was off: tracing every bumpy line in fascination, eyes roving over your exposed chest. You tossed your bra on the floor. “How long did this take?” he breathed.

“Like, hours?” You puffed out your chest in pride. “I can’t even remember anymore.”

“It’s…” He trailed off as he found the roses growing in the center of your belly. His finger traced a path to where the Lifestream sprouted like weeds among them. “The Ancients believed in this.”

You smiled when he glanced up at you for confirmation. “It’s, um. It’s why I got it.”

“Tell me what it means.”

“It…” And before you could finish the sentence, he had resumed kissing your skin. “It’s the Lifestream,” you said, and he trailed kisses across your belly, along the waistband of your skirt. “It’s the lifeblood of the planet,” and he kissed up your belly, up over your sternum. “And I wanted to make….m-make my body a, a happier place? One that I rec-rec-recognized?”

He looked up from your chest.

You wrung your hands. “I didn’t mean to bring the mood down.”

“You didn’t,” he said gently. “It’s a beautiful tattoo.” He was gripping your hips, brushing his thumb over your skin. You wanted to burrow in him and let the world turn around you.

You brushed a spare lock of hair out of his face. “Will you keep kissing me again?”

“Mm.” Sephiroth nosed the side of your breast. “Now that you ask…”

When he took your nipple into his mouth, you gasped and arched off of the bed. His lips were just as gentle as the rest of him, kissing your breast over and over again. 

“Harder,” you gasped, and he complied immediately, sucking on your hardening nipple like his life depended on it. His tongue deftly flicked it, once, and you gasped again. He opened his eyes and tilted his head so he could watch you with that gentle interest. You looked over his back, towards the wall over the closet. There were patches of paint there, like he had taken something down and hastily spackled the wall in its place. What was there before?

He released your nipple with a pop and nuzzled your sternum. His eyes fluttered shut. “Still good?” he murmured.

“Very good,” you replied. Too good, is what you wanted to say. It felt almost awkward, being cared for and attended to. 

“Then I’ll continue.” He covered your breast, now wet from his attentions, with one hand, idly rolling your oversensitive nipple between his fingers. Sephiroth’s hands were just as big and broad as the rest of him, you thought, covering and kneading your entire breast like it was nothing. As he kissed his way to your other breast, he looked up at you again. 

Your voice was hoarse as he took your other nipple into his mouth, still watching you. “Hi.”

He crinkled his nose, still sucking on your nipple. “Mmf.”

You snorted and covered your mouth with your hand.

He let out a hard exhale, breath ghosting over your skin, and released you. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk with my mouth full.”

“I forgive you,” you said around your palm.

“You know,” and he began to unzip your skirt, and you lifted your hips to let him, “you have a charming laugh.”

“Come on. I sound like a pig in heat.”

“You do not.” He pinched your waist; you let out a squeak and smacked his hand away, causing him to laugh in turn. “Stop that. You sound like you.”

You were about to reprimand him when he hesitated, eyes focused on your underwear through your tights. He gathered your blouse and skirt in two hands and tossed them over the side of the bed.

“Wow.” He hooked a finger under the waistband of your tights. “I wish I could have you through these.”

A thrill ran through you at the idea of him bending you, still fully-clothed, over one of the counters in his kitchen. “Maybe next time?” you murmured hopefully.

He nodded once, the same definite nod he had given you in front of the elevator. “Next time. Maybe tomorrow, if you’d like.”

“Tomorrow? Like…?” You lifted your hips so Sephiroth could roll your tights and underwear down your legs. “This weekend, tomorrow?”

“You’re funny.” He briefly glanced up at you with a smile before returning his attention to removing one leg, then the other, from your underthings. “You brought a bag, didn't you? I was hoping you’d stay through the weekend.”

You watched, dazed, as he began to undo his belt. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d love to.”

There was an odd sort of calm that washed over you when you were both naked. Sephiroth was still nearly twice your size, broad and muscular; you were a soft little thing compared to him. Even so, when he laid you down on the bed and put his lips to your breast again, he seemed so delicate. You sighed as he sucked on your nipple; he hummed in response. His free hand trailed down, down, down, until it settled between your legs. You lifted your hips to try and encourage him to touch you.

“So wet,” he murmured.

“Sorry.”

He raised an eyebrow and looked up at you. “Why are you sorry?”

“I don’t know.” You sighed when he slid one finger easily into you. “I just…”

“Shhh.” He kissed the delicate skin between your breasts. “I like it.” He pumped the finger into you, withdrew it slowly. You shivered.

“Here, let me…”

He raised himself up on one elbow to watch you, and you guided two of his fingers to your clit. You asked, voice soft, “Can you press hard and rub in a circle?”

You didn’t have to ask twice. Sephiroth curled over you as he touched you, like he was trying to protect you from all of Midgar. You squeezed your eyes shut; he kissed the bridge of your nose. When he lifted his hand away, you let out a frustrated sigh and dug your nails into his thigh. He laughed, that same gentle laugh he had given you at the holiday party— and really, you were beginning to take tally of all the little things he did, because he was not going anywhere, and you couldn’t believe your luck— and he pressed your clit twice as hard. You jerked your hips upwards with a sigh.

“Feel good?” he whispered.

You nodded frantically, your eyes still shut.

He let out a low hum. “Good.” You felt him draw his tongue over the sweat gathering between your breasts, slow and filthy. You tried your best to make a sound, wanted him to know how much you were enjoying this, but all that came out was a sharp exhale through your nose. He resumed kissing all over the tattoo: every strand of the Lifestream, blessed with his soft mouth and tongue, trailing down, down, down, past the flowers sprouting over your belly. You shivered as he nuzzled the damp hair between your legs, kissing your lower belly like he wanted to leave tribute to you there.

You remembered how stressed you were the night before, plucking and shaving and trimming every inch of your body. You had been trying to get away from any awkward moments, the sideways comments of "I like it better when you..." How you wished you could go back in time and shake yourself: he won’t care, you wanted to scream at that frightened girl from before, he likes you, he won’t care.

You sat up. He had settled between your legs, eyes roving over your cunt as if he expected to find the secrets of the universe there.

The intensity of his staring made you feel warm, even uncomfortable. You shifted on the bed. “Everything okay?” you asked.

He started and looked up, as if you had snapped him out of a daze. Sephiroth blinked, and before you could say anything, he laughed. “Yeah.” He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m overwhelmed.”

“You don’t have to do anything.” 

He turned back to your exposed cunt and continued his study. You had done the same thing the first time you had had sex with another woman: just stared at how she had laid herself open in front of you, feeling frightened and aroused in turns. He reminded you of you: wide-eyed, unsure, wanting. 

You reached down and patted his hand. “I’m serious.”

“Can I—actually.“ He looked up at you, and his cheeks flushed scarlet. “Can I taste you?”

Your breath hitched. There was vulnerability there, as if he expected you to push him away for his inexperience. And when was the last time a partner had eaten you out?

“Yeah,” you said. “Please?”

He ducked his head, and you felt his tongue probe you gently: just the very rim, barely penetrating you, as if he was truly tasting your cunt. You shivered. He made a soft, satisfied sound under his breath, and his tongue delved deeper inside of you: impossibly close, lapping at the wetness he found there.

You let out a soft huff of pleasure as his nose bumped against your clit. “Can you….?” you started, and his eyes opened and swiveled up to yours. You gestured with your thumb, jabbing it towards the ceiling. “Higher up?”

“Anything you want,” he said against you, and you shivered. 

When he pulled back to examine you again, you pointed to your clit. “Here,” you said, and your voice was rougher than you expected.

“Okay,” he said, and then his lips and tongue were there. A warm wave of pleasure rolled through you. You sighed; without thinking, your hands went to his head, pushing him closer, silently urging him to be rough with you. Sephiroth complied, pressing his tongue flat against your clit, where he rubbed it in slow circles.

“Good,” you gasped, and he opened his eyes to watch you. His pupils were fat with desire as he fucked you with his tongue, and when you looked down the length of his body, you saw his cock was leaking onto the sheets. You looked to your left, towards the curtains, trying to escape how close he was to you, how wonderful and hot and wet his mouth felt on your clit. You tugged on his ponytail, and his answering growl was so deep and feral that you bucked your hips in response, feeling at once afraid of him and like you needed him to open you. His nails dug into your hips briefly: a warning, maybe, or no, when you looked back towards him his gaze on you was lazy, even amused. He’s happy. 

Sephiroth’s teeth brushed your clit— too close, he’s going to bite you, he’s going to hurt you.

You yelped and scrabbled backwards on the bed, causing him to lift his head and stare at you in alarm. 

Your voice was high and afraid: “No teeth! No teeth.”

“No teeth,” he repeated. “I’m sorry.”

An innocent mistake, then. You began to relax. “No, it’s okay.” You waved a hand, and he sighed with obvious relief. The care he took in pleasuring you wasn’t something you were used to. “You didn’t know.”

He pressed a kiss to your belly in silent apology. “I’ll be careful.”

You sighed as he returned his mouth to your clit. It was difficult to believe he hadn’t done this before: his tongue was just as deft as it had been on your nipples, his breath coming in short bursts. You dared to look down again, and you tried your damndest to take a snapshot for your memory: Sephiroth’s nose pressed to your pubic hair, the serious furrow of his brow, the way his eyes were closed like he was trying to focus. While you watched, he rocked his hips once, twice, against the comforter: he was getting off of this, on how you tasted and felt on his tongue. When he pressed his middle finger to your entrance again, you sighed, “Please,” and then he was sliding it in you again.

You spoke up. “You can do a second.”

“Mm?” He looked up at you.

You held two fingers, palm up, at his eye level. “Curl them,” you said, and made a beckoning motion. “Like this.”

He pressed a second finger to your entrance and slowly slid it in next to his middle finger. When he beckoned, once, twice, nothing happened.

You said, “Pull them out a little first.”

He did. Nothing.

“Further.”

Nothing. He gave you a desperate look.

“Further.”

He lifted his head so he could watch, and when he beckoned again, you yelped and arched off the bed, a shot of pleasure running like lightning from your cunt to your brain.

The two of you cut each other off: “There—?“ and “Yes—“ and “Okay, good—“

He returned his mouth to your clit with renewed fervor, his fingers working inside of you. It didn’t take him long to discover that you liked when he thrust upwards, grinding his fingers against your rim. You covered your mouth to muffle your pants; you tried to moan for him again, and it came out as a soft wheeze. Noise, perhaps, was still out of reach: it had been beaten out of you from unsatisfying sex and living in an apartment with thin walls. 

There’s time to learn, you thought, dizzy from pleasure. There’s so much time.

You looked down, and Sephiroth’s eyes were bright between your legs as he watched you. His fingers filled you so perfectly: as if he was made for you, as if he had waited his entire life just to please you like this.

You trembled, and suddenly, your orgasm hit you before you could anticipate it or warn him. You closed your eyes and thrust your hips against his mouth, shivering head to toe, panting with the intensity of it. You felt yourself clench around his fingers, taking him deeper still. 

When you came down, he was still going at you with the same intensity. You squirmed and pushed his head away. “Ow. Ow. Seph, stop. I finished.”

His fingers stilled. He lifted his head just high enough to speak to you. “You came? From that?”

“Yeah,” you breathed.

And then you started to laugh, trembling with relief and oxytocin and the pure joy of finally, finally orgasming in someone’s bed. “I did.” You covered your face, smiling so hard your cheeks hurt and your eyes watered. “I did!” 

“There you go.” There was a satisfied tone in Sephiroth’s voice as he gently removed his fingers. “That wasn’t hard at all.”

When he climbed back up the bed to hold you, you giggled against his shoulder, hiccuping with joy. The orgasm had been so easy, so natural. “I did it,” you said over and over, the excitement overwhelming your senses. “I did it. I did it. Thank you.”

Sephiroth’s laugh was right near your ear when you threw your arms around him. “You’re sweet. I told you I’d get you there.”

“How are you so confident all the time?” you gasped.

“I’m not,” he said over your shoulder. “But I’m not satisfied until you are.” 

You pressed your mouth to his shoulder and fell silent.

After a while, he gave you a final squeeze and leaned back to take his hair out of its ponytail. 

A sigh left your mouth. “I, um.”

He tilted his head in a silent question.

You continued, “I w-want you inside me. Like, now.”

“Are you sure?”

You had never been surer of anything in your life. “Mm-hmm.”

He shook out his hair and placed a reassuring palm against your sternum, right over where the Lifestream split in two to curl over your breasts. He leaned over to his nightstand. 

“How do you want me?” he asked.

The question made you feel fuzzy, cared-for. You brought your knees to your chest and hugged them. “I think…you lying on your back. Do you need help with that?” you added as he settled on the edge of the bed with a condom.

He frowned and shook his head as he set the bottle of lube on the comforter. “No.” When he looked over his shoulder at you, he had a mischievous glint in his eyes. “I practiced before you got here.”

You giggled despite yourself.

“What?” he laughed. He ripped open the condom wrapper.

“Nothing.” You leaned over and traced mindless shapes on his back as he rolled the condom onto himself. “You’re just…cute.”

“Cute,” he scoffed, but he was still smiling. “The most feared man in the three continents is cute.”

“You literally cooked for me. Like you’re my little wife.”

“Hush, you.” The condom now on, Sephiroth turned to you and nudged you aside. “Let me lie down.”

You put some lube on two fingers as he settled back on the bed. It still shocked you how relaxed you were, how ready you felt for him; two fingers slid inside of you easily. He placed a warm hand on your hip as you straddled him.

You whispered, "I'll go slow, okay? Just hold still."

His lips parted when you sank down on top of him. You couldn’t stop staring at his face: awestruck as you slowly took all of him. You waited for the sting of pain, the moment where you’d have to grit your teeth and force yourself down, but when your hips connected with his, you realized that moment would never come. This won’t hurt either of us, he had said on the couch.

Your voice was hoarse. “Okay, you can move.”

“You sure?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Still think I’m cute?”

You laughed and covered your mouth. “You’re still stuck on that?”

Sephiroth squinted when he smiled up at you. “I am not cute.”

“Okay, fine. You’re not cute.” 

He rolled his hips. You let out a small gasp.

"Like that?" he whispered.

You nodded silently, not trusting your voice. He felt impossibly big inside of you. When he thrust into you again, you cried out involuntarily from the jolt of pleasure that went through you: a tiny moan, a sound you didn’t think yourself capable of making.

You immediately covered your mouth and looked away.

He put a reassuring hand on the small of your back and thrust again. You grit your teeth behind your palm to keep from crying out again.

Sephiroth spoke up. “It’s okay.” Another thrust, and when he spoke again, there was a breathlessness to his words you hadn’t noticed before. “You look beautiful.”

“So do you,” you sighed, and it was true. His hair fanned out against the pillow in a brilliant silver halo; his chest rose and fell with each deep breath he took. That flush had returned to his cheeks again, climbing down his neck to paint his chest a brilliant pink. He grabbed your hips and set a steady, punishing rhythm.

His touch felt like heaven; like the sunshine, like heat, like lazy honeybees circling the flowers. This was a familiar place, warm and inviting: a home. You felt sated while you rode him, as if the city outside of his room had vanished, and there was no longer any place you two had to be. His hands were tender at your hips, keeping you rooted as you chased your pleasure. You waved your hands towards him, blindly grasping for something, anything, and you felt his hands in yours before you could speak up. He tugged you towards him, just so, and the pleasure from the new angle was so intense that you turned away, hiding your face against your shoulder.

“You—” he choked out, voice ragged around the edges, and he rolled his hips so violently that you gasped. “Beautiful.”

You squeezed his hand in reply. He raised his hand to caress your breast, rolling your nipple between two fingers. Your breath came as steady, halting pants: something between a moan and a sigh.

“Please,” you murmured, and when he sped up, you dipped a hand between your legs to touch yourself. You were on fire.

“That’s it,” he groaned, and you shivered at the vulnerable tone in his voice. “Take me.”

“Mine,” you whispered back.

“Yours,” he sighed.

You seemed to stay there forever, hovering on the edge of some invisible cliff. You were the one receiving him, and yet, it felt like you were taking him in, holding him close, and he was giving himself over to you. There had never been a time you felt like you had control in bed; now, you realized, you held him close in the palm of your hands, and when you opened your eyes, he was staring at where he was joined with you, eyes flicking between your pussy and your gently-bouncing breasts, tracing the lines of the tattoo in haunted fascination. 

Sephiroth had never wanted to hurt you, you realized. He had only wanted to please you. 

And he was succeeding.

The thought made fresh tears well up in your eyes. The flowers, the gentle touching, the way he was fucking you now, was not out of a desire to own you, to dominate you; it was out of affection. You had thought for years that loving sex was for other people, other people who weren’t traumatized and who didn’t cry themselves to sleep at night because they had been raped. This wasn’t an exchange; it was talking without words, as playful and gentle as the way you two had spoken to each other earlier. You had been so worried about paying some invisible debt, but all along, you owed him nothing. 

Had he lain awake in this same bed, miles from your apartment, dreaming of you?

He met your eyes with alarm. “I’m close,” he panted. “W-what do I…”

“Come for me,” you whispered. “It’s okay.”

“I can— please,” he begged, his thrusts becoming harder, more irregular. “Please. Say that again.”

You placed your free hand on his bare chest. “Come for me.”

“I’m c—I can’t—“

“Seph,” you whispered. “Please, I want to see you.”

“I can’t, I—“ He sighed your name, and a beatific expression crossed his face. His mouth opened in a silent gasp as he spilled into the condom, his eyes on yours: searching for permission, for forgiveness.

You cupped his cheek as he rode through the aftershocks. You couldn’t imagine he would need you for anything, certainly not for intimacy, for cradling his heart close as he came. It was a heady, sensitive feeling.

Sephiroth stilled under you, panting. He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side, visibly exhausted.

You leaned over him, staring down at his face in wonder. His cock twitched inside of you as you stroked his face with your thumbs.

He reached up and wrapped a gentle hand around your wrist.

You spoke up first. “That was beautiful.”

He huffed out a laugh. “Thank you.” When he turned back to you and opened his eyes, they seemed brighter than before. “You’re incredible.”

“Can we…?” You felt almost embarrassed to ask. “Like, stay here? Like this?”

The smile on his face was lazy, shy. You felt your cheeks warm. “Sure,” he murmured. 

The two of you sat in silence, watching each other. He felt so perfect. His hands fell to the insides of your thighs, stroking them gently. You set to categorizing the scars on his chest again.

“What’s this one?” you asked as you pointed to an angry slash near his collarbone.

He looked down, trying his best to follow your finger. “A sword got me,” he replied. “Training exercise.”

“You use real swords during those?”

“A better question.” He reached up and rubbed your bottom lip with his thumb. You kissed it, and he chuckled. “Do you want to keep going, or would you like to call it a night?”

To your relief, you felt sated. You couldn’t remember a time when you hadn’t been awake on the other side of the bed, staring at the ceiling and burning away with unsatisfied lust while your partner snored happily beside you. “I…you’re not done?”

He gave you a gentle smile. You could feel his pulse inside of you, like you were holding his heartbeat in your chest. “I’m done when you’re done.”

You smiled. “Well, I’m done.”

He inclined his head towards you. “Then let’s call it a night.”

The two of you set to untangling yourselves; you hissed at the bright shock of pain as he slid out of you. You put your hand on his chest and lied down on the bed. 

When he removed the condom, he looked at you inquisitively. That was right: sex ed tended to focus on putting on the condom, not disposing of it. You had almost forgotten that it was his first time. Fresh affection welled in you again. 

You made a looping gesture with your finger. “You tie it off.”

“Thank you.” As he tied a knot, he spoke to you over his shoulder. “To answer your question, yes, the 2nd-Classes are allowed to use real blades.”

“Doesn’t that get dicey real fast?”

“Yes, especially if your opponent has never lifted a sword.” He tossed the condom into a wastebasket by the door. “Are you thirsty?” He stood up and stretched, cracking his back as he did so. He seemed unashamed of his nakedness; a side-effect, maybe, of his strange upbringing. “Water, coffee, more wine…?”

“Water. Please?”

He looked over his shoulder and tapped the bedroom doorframe. “I’ll be right back.”

“Wait,” you said, sitting up. “Where’s your bathroom?”

From the kitchen beyond, he pointed wordlessly off to the left. 

You sat up on the edge of the bed and stretched. A sink sputtered to life in the kitchen. Everything felt softer around the edges, luxurious, as if the two of you were truly in your own world. There was a light soreness between your legs as you walked into the hallway outside of the room. In front of you was that opening into the kitchen; to your left, as promised, was a white door.

The bathroom beyond was the same gleaming white as the kitchen. To your right was a long marble counter, cluttered with various items: a red toothbrush, a crumpled tube of toothpaste (sans cap), hair gel, aftershave. To your left stretched an old-fashioned, claw-footed bathtub. Beyond was the toilet and, just beyond that, a glass-walled shower. You examined the showerhead as you sat down to pee: it seemed to be one of the fancy waterfall ones you had always coveted. You’d have to take full advantage of it while you were here.

Maybe we could shower together, you thought, and the idea excited you. You felt almost giddy, the weekend stretching out endlessly ahead of you. Perhaps you could take a bath, too. Your tub at home was too small and cramped to take a real bath in; this one looked long enough for you to stretch all the way out. Sephiroth could easily hold you inside of it. You had the welcome image in your head of lying back against his chest during a bath, letting him finger you to orgasm.

Where had this confidence come from? 

You finished and stood to wash your hands. It seemed like minutes ago, you were trembling in front of the elevator as he had asked you for a drink. Maybe it was the way he said mine when you kissed his chest, the way he seemed as happy as you when you came for him. Maybe it was that tender look in his eyes when he came for you in turn— for you, you thought, just you, when he was so handsome and you— you—

You looked up in the mirror to categorize your faults, and you stopped.

You looked…

Fine.

Your makeup was only slightly smudged, and it wasn't nearly as heavy as you thought it had been. Your concealer had stayed in place: not oxidized, not cracking, not patchy, just as smooth as when you first applied it. Your lips were swollen from kissing, a delicate flush darkening your cheeks. Your hair was mussed.

You squinted at the mirror as if it was tricking you. You expected to look different; prettier, somehow, after you two had had sex, as if his come had blessed you with whatever ethereal grace he had been born with. At the very least, you expected to see the same repulsive creature you saw in the mirror at home.

But no: you were perfectly fine, perfectly ordinary after all. Beautiful, even. There was no one else looking back at you from the reflection, no Not-You, no mousy scientist, no ugly fuck-up with too many notches in her bedpost.

Just you.

You had always looked perfectly, completely fine.

You sucked in a breath and ran a thumb under your lashes. You removed a stray clump of mascara. “Ready?” you said to yourself, and to your relief, the reflection’s mouth moved, too: ready?

When you returned from the bathroom, there was a glass of ice water on the nightstand nearest you— your nightstand, you realized. You actually had a side of the bed now. You finished the glass in a few gulps.

Sephiroth had already turned the bed over and was now sitting on the fitted sheet, just as naked as you. He was hunched over a book, cross-legged on his side of the bed. He was biting his thumbnail in concentration as he read. Ah, you thought. That’s where the hangnails come from.

You laid down sideways on the mattress and glanced at the pages. A massive diagram of a ribosome, churning its way along a length of mRNA, greeted you. Sephiroth had generously highlighted and annotated the text with notes in pencil. “Seph. Is that a textbook?”

He gave you a sheepish look. “I wanted to understand your work better.”

“When was this published?” You reached over and pressed a hand to the current page, keeping your place as you flipped to the front credits. To your shock, he leaned back to give you space to do it. “’97? Not bad.” You turned back to where he left off and patted the ribosome gently. “I can get you a more recent copy if you want.”

“I do.” He grabbed a battered red bookmark (PROPERTY OF SHINRA COMPANY LIBRARY, it said) and slipped it between the pages. “But I think,” he mused, as he closed the textbook and put it back on his nightstand, “that you are a more interesting resource.”

His flirting still made you blush, even after you had had sex. You shook your head. “They don’t pay me enough to teach. But for you? I’ll make an exception.”

When he leaned back on the bed, you rolled onto your side and intertwined your legs with his legs. He turned to face you, and he rested his cheek against his palm, his elbow on his pillow. He smoothed out your hair; you felt his foot trail over your calf. “Oh, I’m honored,” he purred. “Your only pupil.”

You smiled and laid your head against your pillow. “My best pupil.” 

“I’d prefer to be the top of the class.”

“If it’s a class of one,” you said, “then you’re automatically at the top.”

He scoffed with mock frustration. “That's disappointing.”

“I told you, they don’t pay me enough to teach more than one person.”

“They should.” Sephiroth leaned in and pressed a gentle kiss to your forehead. You closed your eyes and sighed.

As you draped an arm over his side, he pulled the sheets and the comforter over the two of you. When he laid his head against his pillow, you two were nose-to-nose, like affectionate teenagers gossiping during a sleepover. His hand was warm and gentle against the small of your back, thumb brushing back and forth over your spine.

Mine, it seemed to say. Yours.

“Was it good?” you whispered. 

“Better than good,” he whispered back. “It was perfect.”

“It gets better, you know.” You yawned and closed your eyes. “The more you sleep with someone, the more you get to know the person.”

“I just want to say,” Sephiroth started, and you opened your eyes in alarm, only to see him looking at you with that same lazy, affectionate smile, his eyes already half-lidded with sleep. “You did very well. Was that good for you?”

You smiled again and ducked your head, feeling suddenly shy at his compliment. “Yeah. I would say perfect, also? Yeah.”

“Okay. Good.” He shifted and sighed. “I’m glad. You deserve to feel safe.”

“I do feel safe,” you whispered. “I’m…” You hesitated, trying to find the right words. “I’m…actually really, really happy with you.”

He smiled back. 

You felt butterflies in your stomach. They fluttered about in the warm sunshine of his attention; the flowers and weeds of a garden were slowly, gently, making their home in you.

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[toadstoolgardens]

10 Amazing Medicinal Herbs to Grow in the Garden

1. Calendula, Calendula officinalis: with cheerful golden orange flowers that are edible and medicinal, calendula is one of the most beloved herbs. The petals are edible and the entire flower is medicinal and great for the skin. External use can heal wounds, rashes, burns, and dry skin. Internally calendula flowers are used as an antifungal, an antibacterial, for stimulating the lymphatic system, for stimulating the menses, and as a digestive anti-inflammatory. Calendula also attracts pollinators and is easy to grow from seed. It does well as a container plant too!

2. Motherwort, Leonurus cardiaca: easy to grow and versatile, motherwort is a favorite for anxiety and stress. It's leaves, flowers, and stems can also be taken as a tea or tincture to lessen pain from headaches, menstrual pain, and muscle aches. It can help menstruators going through menopause, easing hot flashes and hormonal irritability. It can be used in childbirth to strengthen contractions. This herbaceous perennial will self-sow happily and can be quite weedy, plant it somewhere where it will have lots of space or where you can control its spreading easily.

3. Passionflower, Passiflora incarnata: these gorgeous flowers are native to the southeastern United States and an important nervine sedative. The stems, leaves, and flowers are used to promote sleep and alleviate pain like headaches and menstrual cramps. Passionflower is a perennial herb that loves to climb, it can be somewhat tough to sprout (stratifying and/or scarifying the seeds will help) but will spread happily through your garden and over fences and trellises once its growing. It's a short lived perennial that usually needs replanting every three years or so, so even if it's spreading quicker than you'd like it will die back after a few years.

4. Echinacea/Purple Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea: a popular garden ornamental that attracts butterflies and bees, echinacea is a gorgeous and easy to grow plant. It's quite hardy, withstanding drought and disease. The roots, seeds, and fresh flowers are all medicinal and stimulate the immune system. Echinacea has been used for centuries to treat the common cold, coughs, bronchitis, upper respiratory infections. It increases the number of white blood cells to help your body fight off all kinds of infections. It's a perennial and will return to your garden year after year, with flowers beginning to grow in its second year.

5. Tulsi/Holy Basil, Ocimum tenuiflorum syn. O. sanctum: a relative of common basil native to India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, holy basil or tulsi is aromatic and antimicrobial. The leaves and flowers can be made into a medicinal tea to help with colds, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, sinusitis, headaches, stress, and anxiety. It has an adaptogenic effect, giving uplifting energy and aiding mental focus. You can also use tulsi like regular basil in recipes, it's just more pungent. Tulsi is a perennial in zones 10 or warmer and an annual elsewhere, but it may even self seed in cooler climates too. Its easy to grow from seed after the danger of frost has passed. You can harvest it multiple times a year by cutting the mature plant to 8 inches tall and letting it re-grow.

6. Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria: this European wetland herb has beautiful clusters of white flowers and a pleasant wintergreen flavor. It's flowers and basal leaves are used internally for inflammation, fevers, heartburn, and peptic ulcers. It makes a very tasty tea and is a wonderful tonic for arthritis and other inflammatory issues thanks to its anti-inflammatory salicylates. Meadowsweet is a hardy perennial in zones 2-8 and likes moisture. A wet meadow, streamside, or edge of a pond are perfect for meadowsweet, but it can happily grow in the regular garden with a little extra watering. It's easy to grow meadowsweet by root division, any little piece of root will grow a new plant.

7. Southern Ginseng/Jiaogulan, Gynostemma pentaphyllum: native to southeast Asia and used as a tonic for longevity and vitality, the leaves of southern ginseng can be brewed into a medicinal tea for anxiety, stress, depression, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. This vine is easy to grow and contains some of the same ginsenosides as American and Asian ginseng. It's an herbaceous perennial vine that grows about 4 inches tall and indefinitely wide. It spreads vigorously so you may want to grow it in a container to keep it from becoming troublesome.

8. Spilanthes, Acmella oleracea: with golden globe-shaped flowers and a red center, spilanthes is an interesting herb to look at and to taste. It's a powerful sialogogue (saliva promoter) and provides a tingly numbing sensation that can relieve toothaches. It's great for your teeth and gums since it's antimicrobial, stimulating, and acts as an oral anodyne. All the above-ground parts are medicinal and can be chewed fresh in moderation or turned into a tincture. Spilanthes is super easy to grow as an annual if you sow seeds after the danger of frost has passed. You can harvest spilanthes a few times during the growing season by cutting the plants back to 6 inches and letting them regrow. Only one or two plants is all you need to make over a quart of tincture.

9. Stinging Nettle, Urtica dioica: a highly revered, highly nutritious spring green. Stinging nettle can be eaten steamed, in soups, or in stir fries and the sting disappears when the leaves are cooked. The greens and tea of nettles are packed with vitamins and minerals, especially vitamins A, C, calcium, potassium, magnesium, and iron. The leaves and seeds are used medicinally for allergies, arthritis, and as a kidney tonic. It's considered a perennial, coming back from the roots year after year and will spread prolifically by runners. The fresh shoots will emerge in early spring and you can continually harvest these tender leaves with scissors and let it regrow. Gather your nettles before they flower and always wear thick clothing or gardening gloves to protect from their sting. Stinging nettle is also a dynamic accumulator and is a great addition to your compost or fertilizing mulch.

10. Wild Bergamot, Monarda fistulosa: a beautiful, medicinal, pollinator attracting relative of bee balm, wild bergamot is an important medicine. Used to treat infections and digestive issues like gas and bloating. Wild bergamot is antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and diaphoretic (makes you sweat to help break a fever). The leaves and flowers are medicinal and edible and the pungent flavor makes a great medicinal tea or a tasty pesto for a snack. Wild bergamot is an herbaceous perennial with tiiiiiiny seeds that need to be planted on the soil's surface and misted. It can also be grown by dividing an already established plant since wild bergamot spreads vigorously by runners. Since it spreads you may want to plant it somewhere on its own or contain it. The stems, leaves, and blooms can all be gathered at the peak of flowering and used fresh or dried.

This list is just some ideas to get started. Consider your needs, your region, and your climate and find some herbs that match. Choosing plants native to your area is great because you'll attract local pollinators and it's safer for the ecosystem. If you live in the United States, the National Wildlife Federation has a Native Plant Finder Tool where you can search by zip code. Non-native plants can be wonderful to grow for our herbal needs, but should always be contained and managed. Happy growing!🌱

Source

[xiaoderys]

𝐃𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 (𝐥.𝐣𝐧)

pairing: tutor!jeno x student!reader

warnings: smut, size kink, bulging kink, fem oral receiving, punishment(?)

word count: 2.5K

requested: yes

Jeno poked his tongue in his cheek as he smacked your test papers down on your desk. “Where did I go wrong?” he said, trying to keep his cool but you just sat there, staring at the paper marked with the big ‘F’ in front of you.

He angrily sighed and rubbed his temples “I asked you a question, y/n, don’t tell me you can’t even answer a question as simple as that” his frustration was growing by the second yet you just won’t budge because frankly, he’s done nothing wrong, he fulfilled his duties as your tutor and did his best to make sure you were prepared for your exams but you’re a teenage girl and Jeno is a well-built guy matched with an attractive face, you just couldn’t help but be distracted.

The tension between you two increased “I already said I was sorry!” you blurt out in a high pitched voice and the ever so patient Jeno finally snaps “I spent so long-“ he slams both his hands down your desk and you were now face to face with him “I spent so damn long teaching you this damn biology lesson over and over again, y/n!” he groaned and you refused to make eye contact with him, sitting back in your chair. You dared to look up at him for a quick second and you felt his eyes burning holes right through you so you went back to fumbling with your hands.

“Just give me a good reason why you fucking failed the test we spent weeks studying for” and yet again, you stayed silent and emotionless to which he scoffed “you’re wasting both our times” he gave up and stood up fully, ready to pack his things and go but you couldn’t risk losing Jeno, now out of all times since you were already failing two subjects “wait I- I was distracted okay?!” he rolled his eyes, “really, y/n?” He said with a sarcastic tone, back still facing you “yes! I- I just- I got so distracted and everything just- poof! I forgot everything I learned” you tried to explain frantically and he turned to face you again “And what was this ‘distraction’ that was so much more appealing than passing your exam?” He crossed his arms, waiting for a decent explanation “you” you gathered every bit of courage to say it out loud but you were desperate to make him stay. He arched his brow in response “me?” you nod slightly while looking down as you didn’t want him to see the blood rushing to your cheeks from your growing embarrassment.

Needless to say, Jeno was intrigued by your answer, of course he was still mad about you failing your tests but he wanted to dig deeper into this ‘distraction’ of yours, after all, it was his job to make sure your head was straight and focused on studying.

He walked back up to your desk slowly “and how exactly was I distracting you, Miss y/l/n?” he tilted his head to the side, awaiting your answer “well you’re not exactly what I expected when I was told I was getting a tutor” you murmured and he hummed “how so?” you inhaled heavily, building up the confidence to tell him why exactly he was distracting you even though you both knew he already knows the reason why “well for starters, you’re hotter than 99% of the guys I’ve ever seen in my life..and you always wear that white button up with your sleeves rolled up to your arms. You always leave a few buttons unbuttoned, just enough for people to take a peek of what’s inside yet still leave some things for the imagination...” Jeno wasn’t dumb, he saw the way you would shuffle in your seat and go red whenever he said something particularly flirty. He knows that you wear that agonizingly short skirt and pull it up to your waist so it rides just above your thighs for him. The way you would sway your hips when he’s walking right behind you. How you would ‘accidentally’ let your pen slip from your hand so you could bend down in front of him just to pick it up which was so fucking unnecessary but it got him so worked up anyways. Jeno knew it but he wanted to hear it straight from you. His face didn’t show any emotion while you talked but he was definitely amused by your honesty “And don’t even get me started with your your hands, fuck they’re so veiny and hot, I can’t count the amount of times I’ve imagined them-“ you cleared your throat, stopping yourself from embarrassing yourself any further “hmm?.. why did you stop?” you swallowed thickly “I -uh-“ “you were talking about how you’ve been imagining my hands?”“I was just talking rubbish, never mind that..” he leaned down so he was eye level with you yet again “no, tell me more, I’m your tutor, am I not? It’s only fair for me to know about these distractions so we can find a way to fix them” you tucked your hair behind your ear and you didn’t know where the sudden confidence came from but something pushed you to spit it out “I’ve always imagined them wrapped around my neck” you kept looking down, not daring to look up even for a second “is that all?” you nod and you could not have been any less prepared for what he says next “You don’t imagine my fingers inside your pussy whenever you touch yourself? You don’t imagine yourself, legs spread on my desk while I fuck you into oblivion?” you looked at him and it was like he wasn’t affected by whatever was going on “n-no, I don’t” lies.

Jeno stood up fully again, grabbing the text book from his own desk “come here” he said as he motioned for you to come over with a single wave of his finger and you stood up from your seat, walking over to him.

He grabbed your waist and lifted you up on his desk and you yelped at his sudden action. He opened the text book and of course you were curious ”what are you doing?” “you wanted to work on distractions, right? Then answer my questions while I play with you” you only stared at him with your wide eyes, scared and excited about what’s to come next.

He lowered himself and lift up your skirt "let's start with the basics: what's the powerhouse of the cell?" he asks and your eyes gleamed, you knew this one. “It’s the mi-“ you were cut off when he slowly traced the insides of your thigh “the mi- what?” he taunts, his ego building up, knowing you’re already falling apart just with a simple touch “m-mitochondria” He smiled “very good. what’s the first step in meiosis and cell division?” “Prophase one?” he slowly took off your underwear and you can already imagine how dripping wet you are but your thoughts were focused in answering his questions that you basically ignored your arousal “good girl, now what’s the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells?” you spent a few seconds rummaging your brain for the answer and your face lit up when you got it “prokaryotic cells are uni-cellular while eukaryotic cells are multi-cellular!” he pushed your legs further apart, your glistening folds now fully exposed to him “mhmm, so tell me why you got all these questions wrong in your test?” he moves closer to your core and he looks up at you, awaiting your answer “I guess I just forgot” you said as you bit your lip innocently “then we’ll have to find a way to make you remember now, don’t we?” you looked straight at him and his eyes were dark with lust. He smiled but it wasn’t his typical ‘it’s okay that you made a mistake, we can fix it’ smile, it’s the type of smile that made it look like he was gonna eat you right then and there.

He licked a strip of your slit and you started to whimper to which Jeno of course, mentally took a note of “aww is my baby sensitive?” you nod frantically and he let out his infamous low chuckle “now, recite all the stages in mitosis, angel”

He was now giving kitten licks to your sensitive bud which left your mind all fuzzy “I-interphase, prophase, telophase-“ he continued to lap up your arousal and stuck his tongue in you which earned him a high pitched whine “metaphase, anaphase!!” you quickly answered in a whiny voice. He removes his mouth off of you and replaces it with his fingers and with the first push of his middle finger inside of you, he immediately tried to find your sweet spot “you wanna try that again, pup?” he was pushing in and out of you all while continuously rubbing circles on your clit, leaving you a whiny and stuttering mess “I-I..ahhh fuck-“ a string of curses and incoherent words left your mouth and Jeno was pleased at how your body was reacting to him but you haven’t answered his question yet “I’m not gonna ask you again. What are the stages in mitosis by order?” He added another finger and curled them both inside you, causing you to arch your back but he used his other hand to hold you in place “Interphase, Prophase— shit!” His fingers were moving faster by the second and you felt like you were gonna explode “Metaphase, Anaphase... FUCK!” you were so so close “is my baby close?” you nodded with an exasperated whine “please..” a reassuring smile was plastered on his face “just one more step and I’ll let you come, angel”

your mind was filling up with nothing but bliss and Jeno’s fingers inside you but you were so desperate to come, you tried to remember everything you learned with all the energy you have left “TELOPHASE!!” tears gathered in your eyes and Jeno was left with a satisfied grin “that’s my girl” and with that he hooked your legs over his shoulders, pulling you closer to him as he ate you out. You tasted so sweet; so heavenly and Jeno swore he just found his new addiction.

He felt your tiny hands gripping his hair and he knew he was doing something right. Seeing Jeno devour your cunt was the most sinful sight yet you have no means of stopping him “Fuck, right there! Shit—ahhh!” your whines only made him prod his tongue inside your hole deeper “g-gonna come!” you squealed and he rubbed your clit while licking you up and down which finally pushed you to the edge.

Jeno cleaned you up with his tongue some more and was ready to pull away. Having only just climaxed, you were sensitive but you wanted more. You wanted him to fill you up and use you to his hearts content “c-cock..” he shot his head up to look at your fucked out expression “hmm? what was that?” he wanted to make sure his ears weren’t deceiving him “I want your cock, please” he definitely heard that one right but he was still worried because he didn’t want to push you over your limit “are you sure you can take it, baby?” you nod your head, desperate to feel him inside you, and that’s all the reassurance Jeno needed before he pushed his pants down and released his thick member.

He was massive and you started to get a little worried if you can take all of him “is it gonna fit?” Jeno cooed at how you looked genuinely worried that his cock wasn’t gonna fit into your tiny little pussy so he held the side of your face, brushing his thumb over your cheeks to wipe off the mascara dripping down so prettily and making you look like a hot mess “oh baby, we’ll make it fit.” He rubbed his length up and down, the tip angry red and leaking with pre-cum. You wanted a taste of it but that just has to wait for another time.

“Are you ready, angel?” You gave him a small nod and he slowly started to push himself in, making sure not to hurt you. “So. Fucking. Tiny.” He could barely fit half of him inside you even when your cunt was already dripping wet from earlier. He had to pull himself all the way back out and push it all the way in again for him to bottom out and you swore you almost passed out. The stretch burned but you tried your best not to move around so much.

It took you a few more thrusts until you could somewhat take all of him in your hole but you still couldn’t get used to it. “J-jeno, you’re so b-big, please slow down!” you sobbed which only drove Jeno mad “What? Am I too big for you? Your tight cunt can’t take every inch of my cock?” you could only respond with sobs and pleas but your walls clenching around him said enough and it only boosted his ego even more “isn’t this what you wanted, baby? For me to fill your tiny hole with my fat cock?” He gets rid of his white button up and looks down at your tiny figure as he fucks into you. He noticed a little bulge forming on your lower abdomen each time he went in and it drove him insane seeing your little tummy take all of him so he smirked and took your hand to guide it on your stomach, feeling his cock hit your deepest parts and poke through you “look at your tummy, angel.. You feel that? That’s the only cock this little pussy will ever need” his filthy words were riling you up even more which you didn’t think was even possible and you were now practically begging him to go faster “so needy and pretty” he chuckled, how could Jeno ever say no to his little baby? He picked up his pace, thrusting into you at an inhumane speed.

He pulled your body up and you immediately hooked your arms around him, clawing your nails at his back “God, right there Jeno, fuck!” you were holding onto him for dear life and was uncontrollably clenching around his length “so fucking tight, angel. How are you even taking my cock?” you brought one of your hands to grip the back of his head and pulled him in for a hot make out session. He was catching all your moans and whines in his mouth and soon enough, the knot in your stomach started to form again and Jeno could tell you were close by the way your grip on his hair tightened and your walls contracted so much around him that he couldn’t even move properly.

He started to rub circles on your clit to aid you in reaching your climax and your whines became so needy and loud “Come for me me, angel. I wanna feel you all over my cock” and with just those magical words, you reached your second mind-blowing orgasm of the day and he slowly lied you back down as he thrusts into you a few more times, chasing his own high, leaving you shaking and whimpering from overstimulation “I got you, baby” he reassures, moving the strands of hair covering your face to give you a soft kiss on the lips “such a pretty angel”.

[bushs-world]

I originally wrote some parts of this post under a reblog. But somehow half of the text got cut and I had to delete my addition. I was rewriting my points in a new post when this question struck me.

Did free will exist under HWR's rule?

After ep 1 of Loki dropped, I saw a couple of MCU fans get angry over the implication that the Avengers travelled back in time because it was supposed to happen. In their opinion, that erased each and every sacrifice and heroism of the heroes till now because they were doing what they were supposed to do. That implied they weren't actually heroic, they were just fulfilling their destiny. Loki and Mobius also discuss about the same in ep 2. Some people believe that HWR controlled people's destiny.

But this thought comes from the implication that HWR can control people's free will. Which I feel is wrong. IMO HWR can only control people's future and their path on the sacred timeline, not their free will. Let me explain this with the example of landscaping.

Now, in their natural habitat, the branches of trees grow naturally in all directions, without any interference. They don't follow any particular shape and grow to fill whatever space they can find

Meanwhile in landscaping, the branches of trees are pruned in order to achieve a desired shape. A landscaping architect decides the shape of the trees, then gardeners literally trim off the branches of the trees until the tree comes in desired shape. These gardeners are also responsible for maintaining the shape of the trees, as they keep checking the trees periodically and trim off any stray branch.

The TVA works in a similar manner when they maintain the order of the sacred timeline. We can imagine HWR as the landscaping architect who has selected a desired shape and design.

The multiverse is the tree in its natural growth, the sacred timeline the pruned tree. TVA are literally like gardeners tasked with maintaining the shape of the timeline. The nexus events are stray branches that are then pruned, like branches are trimmed in a tree. The pruned timelines are the cut off branches which are thrown away in a dustbin aka the Void. Maybe this is why many TVA posters have images of branches of trees being cut.

Now, that brings me to my original question. To say, HWR can control free will, means he can control what people can and can't do. But, that is wrong. If you believe in the principle of pre determination, then you might agree that the inhabitants of the sacred timeline are just following a predetermined path set out for them by HWR. Which kind of ascends him to godhood. But HWR is a dictator, not a god.

Going back to the example of landscaping, the gardeners can't control the natural growth pattern of the tree. They can't stop the stray branch from growing. The tree grows branches according to its natural growth pattern.

But the gardeners externally control the shape of the tree by cutting off stray branches. Which means they can't stop the stray branches from emerging, because that is determined by the cell division within the tree. But they can stop these stray branches from growing big and out of the way by cutting them when they start to emerge or become visible.

Similarly, neither the TVA nor HWR can control people's actions. They aren't mind controlling them and forcing them to do their bidding. The people on the sacred timeline choose their actions. They have the free will to make choices for themselves.

What they can't do however, is continue down a path that is not approved by the TVA. Which means the moment they step out of their assigned choices, by choosing to do something different with their free will, they are pruned and thrown into the void.

Because of this, the sacrifices and choices the hero's make are their own choices, because they made them out of their own free will. But they were able to execute these choices and continue on the sacred timeline, because these choices were approved by HWR.

I hope I am clear in trying to explain myself. Tbh this is a very confusing topic.

[capricornsims]

Strangetown Mystery 15: RUN 

“ We’re stuck here because  you!”

“ I don’t want to argue about this, Johnny. I love you, and I want to keep all of you safe. “

That was the last conversation Johnny had with his father.

Hope was long gone, buried in the cyclone of purple spores that poisoned the air. The streets of Strangetown were silent save for the groaning of spore-infected zombies, most people stood inside these days, too afraid to venture out and encounter their fallen brethren or become infected themselves. The weather that day would have been sunny if the spore clouds didn’t hang low in the atmosphere. 

Unaffected by the bizarre spores, Johnny often ventured out of the Bunker to catch the glimpses of the outside world beyond the barbed wire fence. Looking out into the horizon only drove home the fact that his family was nowhere near freedom, things were only going to get worse and he had his adulthood to look forward to living inside of a concrete box… or being transported to Division 47 to be experimented on… After all, he had not seen his father in weeks and questioning Buzz was out of the question. The General said that PT9 was running experiments, but what if he was being experimented on? He watched his family’s morale deteriorate after their father disappeared behind the laboratory doors. His mother dropped whatever façade she was putting on, choosing to stay locked in her bedroom holding onto the last piece that she had of PT9. Meanwhile, Jill was growing even more restless crying herself to sleep most of the time, and lighting things on fire in rebellion. Johnny did not want to acknowledge the schemes his uncles were plotting, the last time he saw Pascal enter the lab he looked completely insane! 

 Johnny needed to get out. The cement walls of the Bunker only served as a reminder of the freak of nature that he was, the result of an unorthodox union between a human and some extraterrestrial species. Jill even got it in her head that she deserved to be imprisoned, feeling “safe” in confinement compared to the outside world. The thought of being trapped forever instilled a fear that Johnny never felt before, as if the walls around him were closing in on him, so tight that he could not escape and return to the life he made for himself in Strangetown. If he ended up behind the laboratory doors, he would never see Ophelia or Ripp again… he needed to RUN.

He returned to the bunker before he rose suspicion, entering the bleak facility once more. The cell that his family resided in held an uncomfortable atmosphere of dread, masked by Jenny’s failed attempts at keeping things normal. That night she burned the food again because she was spacing out at the wall, too deep in her thoughts to notice Johnny turn off the stove and lead her to the couch.

Johnny: I made up my mind. I’m leaving tonight. 

Jenny: Leaving? Now? I mean- what would your father think if he returned. 

Johnny: If he returned? It’s been weeks… You and I both know that he would visit every day if he was actually working here. 

Jenny: Don’t say such things… he is fine.

Johnny could tell she was at the brink of snapping, her smile faltered as she gripped onto his arm. 

Jenny: He is fine…he’s going to come back.

She reassured herself, but the tears streaming down her face said differently. She turned to her son and nodded in agreement, she had a feeling that something was very wrong with their situation. Jenny had to face the guilt that she failed to protect her husband but she had a chance when it came to her children. If Johnny escaped the bunker, she would know he was safe. Her first son was always resilient and the harsh words he dealt with over the years made sure of that. It was hard enough to see her son grow up so fast, and the thought of throwing her firstborn  out into the dangers of the infected world scared her.

Johnny: I am going to be fine, mom. I swear Ripp is going to get me to Deadtree. That is where Ophelia lives so I can hide out there.

Jenny: I know you will be fine… but I can’t help but worry that my boy is running out into an apocalypse. But whatever it is you have a better chance in Deadtree than in here. Tell Ophelia I said hi...

Johnny: If dad does show up, tell him that I’m okay, and I that I’m sorry for yelling at you guys. 

Jenny: I’m sure he already knows… He’s proud of you. 

Tears welled up in his eyes when she mentioned his father. A pang of guilt struck at his heart knowing that their last conversation had been an argument... and even then his father would still be proud of him. Now was not the time to be emotional, but the tight hug his mom was giving him, let some tears escape before he pulled away.

Johnny leaned down to his little sister, and she wrapped arms around him tightly and hugged him close. She clung to him like a koala so he couldn’t pull away if he tried.

Jill: Promise me that you’ll come back! 

Johnny: Can’t promise much but the next time you see me we’re getting out of here! 

Jill: Then come back sooner !! 

Johnny: Look after mom, and baby bro. I will be back soon.

Jenny: Watcher, protect this boy. Don’t let him get hurt. 

3:00 a.m. 

Johnny approached the general store just as it was about to close, the sight of Ripp leaning against the wall filled him with relief as he approached him. The stars shone brightly in the sky and the sound of crickets and coyotes filled the air as they spoke. He could hardly contain his excitement as Ripp shoved snacks into his shirt pockets and planned their escape. This was happening, he was going to be free or die trying in the process. 

Johnny: Alright Ripp let’s get the hell out of here! Where is the car? 

Ripp: Car? We don’t have a car. The best chances we have is if we run as fast as we can until we reach the edge of town. 

Johnny: RIPP! That’s insane! We can’t run that fast! 

Ripp: Keep it down dude... Look I disabled Tank’s computer, he won’t be able to check the security cameras until someone fixes them... plus we need to at least try. 

Johnny: Fine we will go with your plan just open the gates already so we can get a head start.

3:05 a.m.

Ripp opened the gates of the compound, the loud sound of creaking metal rang through the air as the teens slipped through the small crack that they made. What was the point of being stealthy when their plan involved running for their lives! Johnny and Ripp shared laughter as they bounded through the desert, exposed to the outside world and tasting freedom for the first time in ages. Johnny couldn’t believe that this was actually working since Ripp’s other plan was to “Run faster!”. But so far, They were in the home run!

Tank: Huh... All the cameras seem frozen.. F*ck I need to tell the General about this. 

3:10 a.m.

Jenny: Do you really think head counts at this time is sane?!

Buzz: JENNY NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR GAMES. WHERE IS THAT GREEN BASTARD?!

Jenny: I don’t know Buzz... maybe he’s in the bathrooms or went out for fresh air. 

Buzz: THAT IS GENERAL BUZZ GRUNT TO YOU- I ONLY COUNTED TWO of YOU! Where is the SON!

Jenny: WHERE IS MY HUSBAND GENERAL BUZZ GRUNT?! Shouldn’t YOU be more concerned that he isn’t here!? 

Buzz: I-I know where he is I am asking about your - 

Tank: * over the phone * General, the security cams are tampered with, someone must have messed with them. 

Buzz: * over the phone * Not now, Tank I am with Mrs. Smith....What?! What do you mean messed with,Tank?! ... What do you MEAN THE GATE IS OPEN!?

He heard he alarms blare out, signaling the escape of Johnny Smith. His face grew a deep shade of red, the sound of Jenny’s frantic nagging pierced his ears as his mind tried to conceive what the hell was going on. He escorted Jenny back to her cell, trying to ignore her comments about PT9 and the way she broke down when she was locked inside. “ Don’t hurt him!” Was the last thing he heard as he rushed out of the bunker towards the open gate. 

3:15 a.m. 

The General shoved Tank out of the way, yelling at the top of his lungs about how incompetent's he was, the alarms blared as they stood there, looking out at the expansive desert and the darkness ahead of them. Through the haze of the darkness there were vague sounds of shuffling zombies and coyotes 

Buzz: I’m going after them! Do your job and watch the bunker, soldier!

The cool night air was thick with spores as Johnny and Ripp ran through the infected desert. The cyclone rose into the sky, as lightning struck into the crater, a great rumbling shook the ground beneath their feet as growls rang through the sky. Johnny even spotted one of the infected, dazed and sputtering nonsense as she moved and jerked around them. He had no time to waste taking in the absolute disaster that Strangetown had become. Freedom in this new world felt odd, sure he was safe from becoming a science experiment, but now he was exposed to the infection, the zombies and the townsfolk that knew who he was... He couldn’t wait to get to Dead Tree after all of this. 

3:15 a.m.

Buzz: I WILL CAPTURE YOU SMITH! YOU CAN’T RUN FOREVER!

Buzz: MARK MY WORDS, BOY YOU WILL BE SORRY!

Buzz: RUN ALL YOU WANT BUT YOU CANNOT ESCAPE!

4:00 a.m

Johnny and Ripp broke out of the desert and into the other town located near by. The atmosphere was eerie and a thick fog hung over the neighborhood as they walked through the empty streets, the faint breeze carried the sounds of ethereal groans but the source was unknown. Ripp lead Johnny to one of the creepier buildings found in Deadtree, the Meeting house. The structure was foreboding and held the odd sensation that entering it would get them killed, yet this was where Ophelia lived now, and the only place Johnny could hide.

Johnny: Oh my watcher, thank you for helping me, Ripp. I can’t thank you enough. 

Ripp: Any time bro, I wouldn’t know what to do If I found out that you were vivisected or something. It’s shady as hell so I’m glad I got you out first. 

Johnny: Can you do me a solid and look after mom and Jill, they are still in danger...

Ripp: Heck yeah, I’ll even look out for your dad and see if he’s around. Anyways, I’m sure Ophelia is tired of waiting. Let’s get you inside. 

Ophelia stood silently in the Meeting house, pacing around the small apartment she had above the main hall. She wore a plain brown jacket and the look on her face showed that she had not slept in ages. She turned when Ripp opened the door, a small smile formed on her lips as she asked about Johnny before turning back to the television she had on. 

Johnny: Ophelia, I’m here. I made it out alive. 

Ophelia: Johnny! You’re here! I missed you so much I could barely sleep. I’m so happy that you’re alive! 

Johnny: I’m happy that i’m alive too... I am here to stay for a while so we can catch up a little. 

Ophelia: I wouldn’t mind catching up with you, Johnny.

Johnny: Yeah we’ll get to that too. hehe

Ripp: Alright guys get a room. I’ll sleep on the couch tonight.

Ophelia: Yeah right! Come with us, Ripp. I think we all just need a nice break.

Strangetown Mystery 15.5: Test Subject 

The weeks following Nervous’ disappearance were agonizingly painful and dull at the same time. The moment he returned to the castle he was met with a sharp needle to the neck and the unwelcome prospect of newly designed experiments for him to be subject to. He had heard about the Strangetown Syndrome and the effects it had on the human brain, the way that it spread into the spinal chord and made the body into a vessel as the person remained in a state of unconsciousness. The way that it made the body jolt and convulse made the joints ache incredibly, the spores taking over had to get used to walking on two legs and speaking the way humans do, after all. 

All of these notes were taken down by Loki and Circe during the weeks that Nervous remained grounded in the basement, he could only tell time from the shifting of light in the glass windows and the routine experiments Loki was running on him. His entertainment was swiftly taken away upon his return, and any hand-me-down clothes he owned were confiscated, leaving him in a simple cotton hospital gown. To make matters worse, the Beakers were not holding back on the level of their brutality, as form of punishment they rarely paid attention to his pleas of mercy and continued experiments without hesitation. Not that he was fully conscious most of the time, his mind overtaken with pain killers, sedatives and the spores infecting his brain. 

Sometimes he could feel the world around him grow dark, the welcoming embrace of nothingness enveloping his body and bringing him out of the world of pain and sadness he was in. The cold boney hands of death never touched him, but he begged for him to do so, the more he pleaded for escape the bastard only spared his life, returning him to the excruciating routine of electrocutions and chemical baths. He never understood why Death never came to him, over so many years he’s seen him many times bringing him a few seconds of relief before he woke up to Loki and Circe prodding his dying body. They seemed to enjoy the prospect that even he couldn’t escape through death. 

Today, Nervous wasn’t sure what Loki was doing with him, only mindlessly following orders as the scientist tapped away at machines and made things glow and buzz. Sometimes the machines took a scan of him, sometimes they electrocuted him- he wouldn’t be surprised if it did, his right arm lost feeling long ago because of it. 

Nervous: What are we doing...today..Loki.

Loki: Silence ! You, nervous subject, address me as Dr. Beaker in this lab. 

Nervous: *grumble* Dr. Beaker.. What are we doing today? 

Loki: I’m glad you asked, test subject. We are revolutionizing medicine in this lab. The Curious brothers have failed to produce a viable antidote in the time The Government allotted them. So I, Loki Beaker went out of my way to generously aid the public and produce a vaccine for them.

Nervous: I - don’t think that’s - 

Loki: LEGAL? Well, Nervous, now’s not the time to do things the legal route. People are desperate, and they will come to ME for a cure. Thanks to you, my Nervous subject, people will be cured. 

Loki: Now drink the f*cking antidote!

Nervous: No thank you! I’ve drank enough today. I can’t keep food down...I’m tired. 

Loki: I will be sure to write that down...but THIS is a new formula. THIS will work, So DRINK IT! 

Nervous: No! I said I was tired, Loki...

Loki: DR. BEAKER - How many times do we have to go through this? And you are tired? Nervous, you aren’t the one slaving away at this antidote! I AM! All you do is drink it and puke up all my work! You are Lucky that I don’t throw you out into the street!

Nervous: We have been doing this for weeks, Dr. Beaker, it’s not going to work.

Loki: I have been doing this for weeks. Nervous, we have come so far from the beginning. You don’t cough up blood, break out into rashes, or shake uncontrollably anymore. This. Will. Work. 

The mad scientist forced Nervous to sit down in the chair next to them. His face was a deep seething red as the beaker was tipped into his test subject’s mouth. Nervous had no choice but to choke down the purple liquid while Loki glared down at him, making sure that he kept the chemical mixture in. The antidote tasted sweet at first, then the burning began at the back of his throat and spread throughout his body. He dropped the beaker and the glass shattered across the stone floor, sending Loki in a fit of rage as Nervous doubled over in pain. 

Nervous could not make out the onslaught of Icelandic curses, he could hear the beating in his heart along with an ear piercing ringing. He felt his joints tense and ache as the world grew dark once more, but this was not death... Death was comforting even if temporary, this was excruciating. 

Loki: That’s IT I’ve had it with you! You are clearly nothing but a useless guinea pig.....get out.....you are nothing....die...

Loki’s words were drawn out in between the ringing. The last thing he could feel were rough hands grabbing at his shoulders, lifting him out of the chair and dragging him across the stone floors. 

The cool desert air hit his skin as he crumbled to the ground somewhere in front of the castle. Nothing mattered now....

ŦĦ€ ΜØŦĦ€Ř ĆΔŁŁED ΔŇĐ HE ΜUŞŦ Ř€ŞPØŇĐ 

[blacklister214]

Shadow and Bone: Missed Opportunities *Spoilers*

I just speed read the Shadow and Bone trilogy. My main interest here was what was going on with Ben Barnes’ character from the trailer. In my brief little popover to the tumblr thread prior to my reading I’ve found he (The Darkling) is quite the divisive figure. Now I have passion for redemption arcs particularly involving those with romantic relationships, so I dived in. I was...disappointed. I can’t support Darklina as written, but I also understand why readers latched on to this couple rather than the cannon ship.   

Malina falls a bit short as a great romance:

1) The deep emotional bonds between them aren’t formed in the present. Their love for each other has its roots in their childhood, which we don’t see much of. Readers have an easier time investing in relationships we can watch develop.   

 2) They don’t ever function as equals until the end of the trilogy. Alina is beneath Mal, then Mal is beneath Alina. They always feel like they belong on separate paths. They seem to be more holding each other back than helping each other grow.

3) Their “attraction” is iffy to me. In the first book it seems like Mal doesn’t realize he’s interested in Alina romantically until after she’s taken away. Later he says he’s always been into her but didn’t act on it because she was his best friend. Hmmm...yeah.

4) All the book 2 whining and jealousy. Stop guilting her about wanting to save the world! Also yes, she likes her super powers. Please stop shaming her for it! You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy being Mr. Universally popular super-tracker dude. Oy. 

I’m not saying it’s a bad relationship to include, just not one with ENDGAME written clearly all over it.

Darklina for me is truly a missed opportunity. I can’t support the ship for six reasons: 

1) Tried the kill Mal, rather than imprisoning him.

2) Enslaved Alina. Literal collar. Very bad.

3)  Massacred a village of innocents, including babies.

4) Blinded his mother rather than imprisoning her.

5) Got into bed with Alina in the guise of Mal. That’s entering rape-adjacent territory, and that is NOT where we want to be.  

6) Literally told her he would kill everyone she loved so she’d have no choice but to turn to him eventually. 

Yes these reasons are quite a bit more serious than the problems with Malina, HOWEVER, you make some adjustments and you’ve got yourself a truly compelling dynamic. 

Darkling should have been the antagonist of book 1 and at least part of book two, but not the series, in my opinion. Here’s why:

Darkling was right about the crap situations in their world. Kids being drafted at 16? Grisha being sold as slaves or burned alive in other countries? Grisha having to bow to a lazy idiot rapist King? 

The Darkling seizing control in a coup and killing that asshole? He can come back from that. Sending Grisha to massacre members of the Grisha slavery guilds and executioners in foreign cities? He can come back from that. Throwing Mal, his mother, and/or Alina into a cell (rather than the blinding and attempted murder)? He can come back from that. The lies and manipulation? He can come back from that. 

You could even have him do the thing with Alina’s power, just switch the target to an enemy armada. He can come back from that because they are enemy combatants, not civilians and particularly not children. It’s like the Cut thing at the beginning of book 1 when he asks if it is really different  to use a sword to kill someone? Honestly it’s not. It would by Darkling’s reasoning be a better choice for gaining wide spread acceptance of the coup because such a display of power decisively can force a surrender from Ravka’s enemies. 

Alina’s power being used to mass slaughter in a single stroke would horrify her and create the necessary push back for her to break free, so that book could keep its ending. Eventually though I think its something she would have been able to understand and accept if not forgive.

So much could have been kept. The remote conversations (minus the bed crawling thing). The mutual betrayal angst. Darkling’s absolute loneness. 

All that had to be done was for a genocide purge to be kickstarted. Some misalliance on Alina’s part against the Darkling goes wrong and either the Priest or a human rulers decides the only way to hold on to power is to wipe out the Grisha. This way they need to re-unite and push back the threat. Ends with both of them surrendering their power in the final fight or as part of the peace agreement that is struck.   

I don’t know, its just I feel the whole “Fine. Make me the villain” thing could really have paid off in the end. Just my opinion. 

[isolemnlyswearpevensie]

Paper Cut Part 2 | Edmund Pevensie x Reader Soulmate AU

Warnings: Making out/kissing

Time/Era: Modern AU but the Pevensies have been to Narnia. 

Word Count: 2.5k

Summary: Y/N confronts Edmund about the intense injuries she had received in the past. 

A/N: Here’s the second part to paper cut :) If you haven’t read the first part, link below! Please send requests :D Enjoy! 

Part 1 | Part 3 | masterlist | read on ao3

“Edmund, I think you have a lot of explaining to do.”

Edmund’s face was unreadable, almost as if it was made of stone. He stayed quiet; the only sounds that filled the air were the shuffling of the barista and the espresso machine. Y/N wished he would just say something. The silence was damning. 

“Edmund?” His gaze didn’t falter at his name but stayed glued to Y/N’s hand. His eyes traveled up her arm, taking mental notes of every scar, bruise, bump, or cut. Edmund stood up without a word, the chair making a painful screeching noise in his path, and walked out of the coffee shop. 

Meeting her soulmate had been completely different in her head; maybe they would fall into each other’s arms in the streets of London. He would sweep her off of her feet after noticing a small scar on her neck and say something disgustingly romantic. “I’ve been waiting for you, Y/N, you’re even more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.” Then, they would fall madly, deeply in love, and adopt a dog. Fall wedding perhaps? Maybe summer? But here Y/N sat, one hand on her stomach, the other gripping a foreign notebook. Before Y/N could process what was happening, Edmund was out of sight and she was left to her own thoughts. 

~

“Y/N! Wake up!” Y/N was startled by Y/B/F/N shaking her awake. “Don’t you have a final in like an hour?” 

That sentence felt like a bucket of ice water. Y/N sprung up from her warm bed and scrambled to get ready. The clock seemed to run dangerously fast and by the time she opened the door of her lecture hall, the test was being passed out. 

“You have three hours and because I’m in such a good mood, you may use your study guide.” The professor continued to pass the packets around the room. They looked thick and time-consuming. Time management had never been Y/N’s strong suit. 

When she was handed her paper, all she could do was take a deep breath. This professor was a harsh grader, so unless her answers were 100% correct, there was no way Y/N would pass. She took the unfamiliar notebook she received from Edmund out of her bag and opened it to his scribbled notes. 

His handwriting was somewhere in between messy and neat; some of the words ran into one another and they were all slanted to the right slightly, yet the letters were beautifully constructed and entirely intelligible. Edmund also took it upon himself to highlight passages he deemed important with a note at the beginning that read: my sister had to take o chem. I asked her what’s important. That was sweet, Y/N thought. 

It seemed as if Edmund knew what he was talking about, too. Each answer was answered completely with further background information to make it easy to understand. Why would you willingly take this? Seems like hell… was written in the margins next to one of the boxes of text. I could say the same about law, sweater boy. 

By the time Y/N had finished her final, the three hours had turned into 10 minutes. She was one of three students left in the classroom and the other two were looking beyond panicked. Most of the class seemed to have either blazed through it like it was an 8-year-old’s math homework or given up halfway through and accepted their loss. Y/N, however, had to pass this class so she triple-checked her answers, took a daydream break, then checked it again. She would be lying if she said her daydreams didn’t consist of Edmund. She wondered if he would ever text her again. 

The young girl hurriedly walked out of the classroom, happy to be done with the semester. She wrapped her jacket tightly around her and braced herself to brave the aggressive weather. 

“Hey,” A voice from her right called out. It was Edmund; he was leaning against the wall lazily. His nose was a bright pink, as were his cheeks, and his hands were pushed into his pockets for warmth.

“Edmund? What are you doing here? You must be freezing!” Y/N walked over to him and looked him once over. A simple long sleeve shirt, vest, and jeans. Y/N slung her wool scarf around his neck. 

“Oh, uh, thanks…” He pushed himself off of the wall with his shoulder. Damn, his shoulders were huge. 

“I’m sorry about the coffee shop, I didn’t mean to jump you like that,” Y/N apologized bashfully. He smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. 

“No, I get it. I would have the same reaction. That’s, uh, why I’m here.” Edmund was awkward, looking anywhere but her eyes. Instead, he observed her freckles, eyebrows, and cheeks. “I was wondering if we could, uh, talk? Maybe somewhere private? Like my dorm?”

“Oh, so you want to take me, your newly discovered soulmate, back to your dorm?” Y/N had a hint of mischief in her eyes and a teasing smile on her lips. Edmund’s eyes grew wide and he started to sputter. 

“That’s not what I meant! I would never! I mean unless you wanted to, but no! I just meant to talk,” His cheeks are red again, but this time it wasn’t from the cold. 

“I’m just taking the piss, let’s go, vesty.”

~ 

Edmunds dorm was not what she was expecting. One side looked like it was hit by a tornado, but the other was very organized. Even on the floor, there was a distinct division between the two sides. The neat side, which appeared to be Edmund’s, was very plain. His bed was made with a red duvet and black pillows, his desk was blank besides a small pencil cup, and the cork board hanging above his desk had reminders and pictures. 

“Those are my siblings,” Edmund noticed Y/N’s wandering eyes. “They’re practically dying to meet you, Y/N.”

“How did you know my name? I never told you,” She crossed her arms and strained her neck to look back at him. 

“Ah, so I was right, you don’t remember me. We took a few classes together during first and second years. I always thought you were cute, so I guess it stuck.” Now it was Y/N’s turn to blush. 

“You think I’m cute?” Her arms uncrossed and turned so she was facing him head-on. 

“Well, yeah. You are my soulmate, after all, Y/N. Don’t be silly,” Edmund seemed to be growing more and more comfortable. He was enjoying watching her blush because of what he said; it made a sense of pride grow in his stomach. This was his person, and she was standing right in front of him. 

“Speaking of soulmates…” Y/N trailed off and looked towards the floor. Her hands grasp the zipper of her jacket and unzip it, before rolling up the bottom of her shirt. The jagged scar was on full display, a stark contrast against the skin of her abdomen. Edmund eyed it guiltily; he knew the exact pain she had to go through to get that scar. She had to go through that pain because of him. His own hands found the bottom seam of his own clothes and pulled it up to reveal a matching mark. 

“I can explain but you won’t believe me,” His honey-brown eyes met hers. 

“Try me, Pevensie.” 

He led her to sit on her bed and sat next to her. Y/N hastily kicked off her shoes so she could sit with her legs crossed on her bed. Her shoes tumbled to the ground with two thuds. Edmund, on the other hand, just bent one leg and let the other hang off the edge. He took her hands in his. 

“You have to promise me to listen to it all before you ask questions,” Edmund fidgeted nervously with a ring on Y/N’s fingers as they spoke. Y/N didn’t know if this was on purpose or a subconscious action, but it comforted her all the same.  

“Well, when I was young my parents sent my siblings and me to live away from home. When we were there, my little sister Lucy discovered a wardrobe in one of the spare rooms. Well, inside the wardrobe was this beautiful land called Narnia. It was gorgeous and huge! And when I say huge, I mean HUGE!” He caught himself rambling excitedly and reeled it back in. “Well, uh, anyway, there was this woman, we called her the White Witch and she manipulated me into basically selling my siblings out. The entire nation of Narnia got into a huge battle and the White Witch stabbed me.” 

“Did she lock you up somewhere cold?” Y/N asked, disregarding her promise to stay quiet. 

“Um, yeah. She locked me in this big ice cell. It wasn’t fun. I’m pretty sure I almost got frostbite but my body rejected it because I started warming up randomly.”

Y/N smiled. The paper towel. 

“But that scar on your stomach,” He took his hand away from yours and gently touched your stomach. “Is because she stabbed me. But again, my sister Lucy had this special liquid that could heal any injury.” 

Edmund seemed to smile at the memory. “Long story short, my siblings and I got crowned Kings and Queens of Narnia and ruled for a number of years. We then got sent back-”

“Wait, wait, wait, Kings, and Queens? Who are you? Alexander the Great?” Her tone was teasing and unbelieving. 

“Edmund the Just, actually. And I told you to listen!” His smile reached his eyes this time. “Well we came back to earth through the wardrobe and we were kids again! About a year later, we returned to Narnia and met our good friend Caspian. We had to fight Caspian’s home country. In the end, Aslan helped us and Caspian became a king as well.”

“Who’s Aslan?” Y/N was doing her best to keep up and believe the information, but it was quite hard. 

“He’s a big lion, he’s kind of like the ruler of Narnia. I guess you could say a God? I guess…”

“A big lion god? Edmund…”

“I know it sounds crazy, Y/N. I know but you have to believe me! I went one more time with Lucy and my cousin. We were on a big Naval ship with Caspian and we had to find a bunch of swords-”

“Edmund, love, just tell me the truth.” Y/N was sad that right off the bat her soulmate was lying to her. Edmund’s eyes seemed to lose their sparkle. 

“I would never lie to you, Y/N. Here, look.” He took off Y/N’s scarf and gently placed it on the bed before pulling his vest and shirt over his head. On his rips was a beautifully drawn tattoo of a lion that appeared to be roaring. And on his collarbone was a sword. Y/N delicately reached her hand out and ran her fingertips against the drawing of the weapon. It had insane detail and the way it was drawn made it look sharp. Y/N retracted her hand and sat back. 

“That’s one of the swords we found during my third trip. It was gifted to Caspian by the lord who owned it. And this is Aslan. His roar was the most powerful magic in all of Narnia.” Edmund searched Y/N’s face for any emotion she was feeling. Right now, she was staring at the sword with a pondering look on her face. 

“Okay, say you were a king-”

“I am a king.”

“Fine, you’re a king. What exactly did you do, ya know, as a ruler?”

“Well, me and my brother Peter ran the army and trained them for battle. Along with other things like managing trade and creating political policies.”

“So, fighting? You fight?”

“Yeah, I fought in many battles, big and small. I got stabbed, remember.” His smile was cheeky and he pulled his long sleeve back on. “Once I got good, I didn’t even use a shield. I fought with two swords.”

“TWO? Aren’t those things heavy?”

“Well, yes, but when you went through all of the training I did, it gets easier.” Edmund could tell he was starting to believe him. 

“Tell me more.”

~

The two spent the next few hours discussing the ins and outs of Narnia down to the floor plan of Cair Paravel. Y/N had decided that Edmund had way too much detail to be making it up, and even if he did, it was so magical that she wouldn’t even be mad. 

“Okay, vesty, I believe you.” Y/N says after Edmund gave a lengthy explanation about all the gifts his siblings received and what they do. He stopped mid-word and stared at her. 

“You believe me? Really?” 

Y/N smiled and nodded. “Yes, Edmund. I’m going to be spending my life with you, your highness, so I may as well get familiar with it.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Edmund scooted closer to her. “I hated it even when people in Narnia called me that. I don’t need people outside of Narnia calling me it. Especially not you.” 

She turned her head so she was staring right at him. “Why not me?” Y/N’s speech came out as a whisper. They were so close that she didn’t need to speak loudly. 

“Because if I really was your highness, it would be kind of weird for me to do this.”

Edmund placed a hand on Y/N’s jaw and leaned in. His lips barely brushed her lips before pressing firmly against them. Y/N’s eyes closed shut and she happily kissed back. 

When people described kissing their soulmate for the first time, they always explain it as an electric spark igniting throughout their entire body. They explain it as a firework show full of magnificent colors. Kissing Edmund didn’t feel like that. Kissing Edmund felt like home. She felt safe, secure, and loved as if kissing this boy was what she was meant to do for her entire life. The way he tasted, like peppermint and candy, was the best thing she had ever tasted. And they way he held her, one hand on her jaw and the other holding her close to him by her waist, felt like the warmth of a favorite blanket. The way he moved made her knees feel like jelly. 

As their lip lock continued, his fingertips danced across her back until it landed on the other side of her jaw. He pulled away from their kiss, pressing a quick peck against her nose and jaw before leaning against his headboard. 

“I’ve been wanting to do that for my entire life,” Y/N said, her voice gentle and soft. 

“Me too. The thought of kissing you, Y/N L/N, was the only thing that got me through some tough times. I had to make it to be able to feel what it was like.”

Y/N was silent for a long moment. 

“Edmund, love, do you think I will ever go to Narnia?”

Edmund looked at her for a long moment then smiled with half of his mouth. 

“I don’t know, darling, but anything is possible. Especially when it comes to Narnia.” 

[nestasgalpal]

The voyage of the smuggler [Emeriel]

Part 2

Summary: Rhysand has been killed by his enemies from Hewn City, and Feyre has died with him because of a secret pact between them no one knew about. Keir, Rhysan’s only male relative, has inherited the crown of the Night Court and the High Lord’s magic, and he is taking revenge on each and every member of Rhysand’s Inner Circle one by one. Azriel’s been taken, and Emerie has only one chance to save him before he is executed in two days.

A/N: To the people who thought the last chapter had a lot of angst... sorry in advance. This is a long one.

*If you want to be added to the taglist let me know!

Azriel

Azriel’s cell under Hewn City hadn’t existed a year ago, when he was still the Spymaster of the Night Court. The space had been built in record time just for him, and the spymaster couldn’t help but wonder if Keir had given an order to create a personal nightmare for each member or Rhysand’s Inner Circle, or if it was just for him. The light was blinding and came from the ceiling. Not even his body could cast a shadow on the marble floor because of how intense it was. It felt like an endless noon, with the sun right above and not a shadow to be seen. The cell’s walls were not average either. They were not made of raw stone or bricks, it was a flat rock surface without any breaks or divisions where a tiny shadow could grow. He was absolutely powerless there.

“Maybe this is life’s way to punish me for my crimes” he thought. The white floor was so smooth he could get a glimpse of his own reflection. It was not neat, but he could still tell that his black hair was long enough to almost cover his eyes. 

That’s what gave him the idea.

Azriel knew for sure it had been less than a day since they shove him inside of the cubicle. His whole body was tense, eager to get out before he had the chance of discovering the variety of tortures Keir and his subjects had planned for him. To take revenge on him. Azriel had known a day might come in which he had to answer for all the pain he inflicted on others, and he had been ready to endure it. But now that his destiny was so close, he felt scared. He hadn’t thought he would feel that way when death lastly approached him, but he did. Because he had dreamed of his own life ending many nights, but in his reveries, Rhysand and Feyre were alive, Amren was alive, Mor and Cassian were safe, and Emerie was still a stranger who had recently befriended Nesta Archeron.

He realized with horror that he hadn’t dreamed about his final day coming since they met. Not once had the urge of punishing himself with self-inflicted nightmares come to him since Emerie forced herself into his life with her loud arrogance and big presence. He could only look forward, to what the next day by her side might bring.

The bright light of his cell didn’t allow him to sleep, so he didn’t even get the chance of trying to imagine her in the scenario. That was probably for the best. Azriel didn’t want her to see him when his life was taken from him, even if her face was the one thing he wished to see before his eyes were closed forever.

Azriel had always understood balance. He thived from it. His power was not darkness, like many people assumed, but the mastering of shadows; those that came from both obscurity and light. He was sure darkness would come into his cell sooner or later. They had built new spaces to torture them, sure, but the protocol of Hewn City’s prison was sill the same. He only had to wait and it would come to him.

“For how long?” he asked himself. They kept Amren there for a month, but Keir’s people would probably hold him for a longer time just to enjoy torturing him with no hurry.

Vengeance upon him, what Keir had wanted from the moment Rhysand sittted on the Night Court throne’s for the first time and declared him his enemy instead of making him his mentor. Azriel, a bastard born and a lesser faerie having a bigger role in the Court’s politics than he did. He was above Keir, who was of royal blood, and that couldn’t be forgiven. Nor all the humiliations that came next.

Azriel stood up and walked around his cell. There was nowhere to sit or lay, so he had to “go for a walk” pretty often to avoid his muscles becoming sore. It was tiring, and he thought it could help him get some sleep. His wings were tied, but no one touched them further. They didn’t dare. His name still had power in the Night Court, battle-hardened soldiers flinched at the sound of it. He had a reputation, and even the people who found an imprisoned him were wise enough to be scared of the tied up and unarmed Illyrian shadowsinger.

Besides, if he stayed on the floor, he would eventually get bored, and when that happened, his thoughts went straight back to Emerie. Every moment he didn’t spend scheming a way out of the prison was invested into regretting their last encounter.

After a lifetime of chasing the wrong love, he found her, and barely a year after, they were forced to part. He could have proposed to her, but instead, he was the one who suggested never binding themselves together.

“For your safety” he had said. And she had agreed.

At least, he knew it had been worth it, because she was safe and out of this big mess Rhysand and Feyre’s death had led them into.

The loud steps of a prison guard on the corridor took him out of his trance. Azriel noted he was having too much trouble unlocking the three latches. He pushed the thick door open only enough to come inside. The male was armed to the teeth and held a bucket in one hand.

“For you” he threw it on the ground before Azriel’s feet, but the Illyrian had his stare fixed somewhere else, on the guard’s eyes, covered in shadows cast by his hood.

Azriel didn’t even had to think about it, his own instinct commanded the power in his veins to come out, the darkness that was supposed to protect the male’s eyes from the bright light of the cell, becoming his death sentence. His shadows weren’t just the union of light and obscurity, but the absence of both. They were voids shaped like black snakes with a life of their own, and they were now corrupting the male’s yes, covering them, getting inside, feeding themselves with his flesh and absorbing his life into the nothingness they were.

He died before he had a chance to scream, and the shadowsinger was there to hold his body so he didn’t make any noise when falling down. Still, he was not gentle when he dropped him on the marble floor and run out of his cell.

As soon as he stepped out into the corridor, he realized why it had taken the guard so long to open the door. The absence of light after so many hours trapped in a cube of white shine made him go completely blind. His eyes simply couldn’t see anything, not even perceive the walls around him. Azriel had to use his hands to grope for the stone partitions that formed the passageway.

“Where am I?” he didn’t know. He thought he had an idea of where his confinement might be taking place, but he didn’t recognize the texture of the walls around him. He didn’t know what way to go, and he hadn’t expected that at all. He was the Spymaster, he had been for almost 300 years now, and he used to know the space under Hewn City they used as a prison as the palm of his hand. “Where am I?”

He had to think quickly, because his options were narrower than he anticipated. And he hadn’t thought he had that many to start with. Keir had put a lot of effort into making sure he was confined in the appropiate space, because he had been in a room too well illuminated to let him find his shadows in it, and now he found himself in a corridor too dark to get a glimpse of light. If he remained near to the door, he could still gather a few shadows and send them to explore the labyrinth, but they would only go so far before the darkness was too vast for them to thrive.

But he couldn’t stay there for long either, or some other guard might go check on him and find him sitting next to the dead body on the floor. He couldn’t just go now, or he would get lost too soon to be worth it.

He needed to find the way out.

Azriel recoiled a few steps and sent his shadows to explore the way ahead. He could sense what they saw... endless walls, cold floors, and if he took three turns right, he would find... Mor? No, not her, but a familiar warmth that reminded him of his friend.

“Could it be Keir?”, he wondered; they were family, after all. No, he never reminded him of her. Their auras were almost opposites. This wasn’t Mor, but it was a feeling of safety that guided him in the darkness. Azriel was disoriented, and maybe that’s why he decided to follow what would stink like a trap if he hadn’t been so desperate.

His shadows couldn’t go far enough to tell him what was it three turns to the right that called him so badly, but he put his hands to that side of the wall, and started walking, trusting it blindly.

Only when he finally saw the orb on the floor, its silver light illuminating the space enough for him to distinguish its round shape against the rest of the tunnel, he recognized the Veritas. Mor’s family treasure had once belonged to her father. Azriel himself stole it from him and gave it to Rhysand. The last time he had seen it, it had been used to negotiate with the Mortal Queens, before the war.

The shadowsinger knew it was a trap, a piece put there by Mor’s father to play mind games with him. If he had learned anything from his missions during the centuries, it was that one should never, under any circumstances, take Keir for granted. Rhysand had thought he would be able to keep him in line if he opened up Velaris, and Caldroun knew how that had worked out for him.

Yet, the magical object had an aura so strong he couldhear it calling his name.

“Azriel, Azriel, Azriel”. It was a familiar voice. Azriel touched the orb, and a vision of the past projected into his mind without giving him the chance of resisting.

They were in Emerie’s bedroom, the snowstorm outside so dangerous she had offered him to stay for the night. They had been seeing each other for half a year, but they had never spent the night in the same house before. That night they had sex, and she made dinner for both of them. At first he thought they had been lucky Nesta was with Cassian, or elsewhere it would be the three of them having dinner in silence. Then, he remembered they only met in there when Nesta wasn’t around, so it was not a coincidence at all.

Emerie didn’t like silence, but she also hated small talk, and getting into deep conversations made her uncomfortable -At least with him. At least for now-, so when they didn’t know what to say, she would start talking about her childhood and all the good memories she treasured of the time. He had been afraid it triggered him, or it made her uncomfortable if he told her about his own past, but it didn’t, and she found the right way to mix his experience into the conversation with that dark humour of hers he enjoyed so much.

“You whiny bitch” she had called him that night. He knew a fire-related joke was coming, and a smile was already forming on his lips. “Oh, my dad set me on fire” she mocked “That’s nothing, Az. My dad...” she made a pause and pinched the bridge of her nose in a dramatic gesture, like she was trying to overcome a wave of emotion. All faked. “... My dad gave me the worst haircut I have ever seen when I was 17 years old”.

Azriel held his smile and put a comforting hand on her shoulder “Em, I...” he pretended he had no words to ease her pain. She pushed him away.

“You what?” she fake-cried. There were no tears on her face, but if she could cry on command, it would have been the perfect charade “You feel me? No you don’t! I was 17, and I looked so bad not a single boy asked me out for a year. At 17, Az! That’s like the most important age for dating”.

He thought she was funny. He thought her effort to make it easy for him to talk about his childhood without throwing a pity party for him was endearing. And she always made sure she wasn’t overstepping and hurting his feelings. She had finally mastered the fire jokes, after getting bored of the not-knowing-how-to-fly ones. Those had been the first ones she came up with, because, ironically, she couldn’t fly either.

“Em, I don’t even know what to say. I can’t even start to imagine what you went through. I mean, I can’t even remember what I was doing at 17″ He made a dramatic pause too, but his weren’t as good “Oh, wait, I was getting laid every night. Yeah, that’s why I can’t really feel your pain, sorry". He held her hand in his. He wasn’t wearing his gloves, she said she liked his scarred hands better. He didn’t believe it, but took them off every time anyway. “Maybe you should try sharing this story with someone who is ugly. Maybe they’ll know what to say”

“I’m never cutting my kid’s hair” she said. She was smiling, and he was too.

“Yeah, I’m okay with that. And if they want to cut it, I can probably do it better than you, anyway” he answered.

The room went silent. They looked at each other, suddenly serious. Azriel panicked, realizing the implications of his words. When he didn’t know what to say, the shadowsinger stayed quiet, in fear he would add the wrong thing and make things worse. So it was Emerie who said:

“Well, if you want your kids and my kids to be the same kids, you’ll have to do something about your friends who hate me”. Her voice was firm, not nearly as loud as it had been moments ago. He nodded and silence reigned in the room again. “I’m serious, Azriel. I would like to have a life with you, but... I’m not doing it unless I know I’m going to be a priority”

It was fair. She had complained about his friend’s co-dependency before, and he knew sooner or later she would bring it up again and he would have to either break up with her, or grow some balls and talk to them.

Azriel had done a good amount of unforgivable things in his lifetime. He knew that, and he had never tried to make excuses for it. After all he had been through as a child, he genuinely had trouble sometimes telling where the line was. And knowing he had already crossed it once, he thought his soul would be cursed forever, no matter if he never did it again or if he did it a hundred times over. At least he was useful, and his family loved him regardless. 

He thought no other female but Mor would be able to see his darkness and embrace it, and that was why he had been pining for her for so many years. He had thought Morrigan was the only chance of love he would ever have. It was either her or solitude. But Emerie saw him, everything he had done to others, and still loved him somehow. The only thing she asked of hin in return, was the certainty that she would never be harmed or neglected even if Rhysand asked him to hunt her down, which was fair. She had wanted to know that he would always put her first, and no matter what the High Lord from the Night Court commanded, she would never suffer by his hand.

“He would never ask that from me”

“Still”

So he went to Mor and talked things out. He told her about Emerie and how deeply rooted his love for her was after less than a year of knowing her. He told her about the bond he had felt between them that night in her house, and how every fiber in his body had known he simply wasn’t capable of staying away from her, no matter what.

He then talked to Rhysand, who was his friend, but also his High Lord, and who could, technically, use his power over him to force him. Azriel was convinced Rhysand would never cross that line, but Emerie had asked for certainty, and he was going to give it to her. Rhysand had been happy to grant him his wish, and had been eager to celebrate his bond with Emerie. It had snapped for him, not for her. Azriel was not sure if it had actually fallen into place and she was being cautious, or if her fear for his job and duties in Court was so big it was the one thing preventing it from snapping for her.

Emerie and Nest had their onw party the night they all met to have dinner together in Velaris, and he didn’t mind her not attending, it was just onther one of Feyre’s endless fancy meetings. He thought there would be many more to come. The Inner Circle reunited and they drank too much while celebrating life, and happiness, and how lucky they all had been founding each other.

When the sun came out, Azriel was the one who found Rhysand’s body in the gardens.

Stabbed in the heart, his High Lord had been killed in a city that used to be safe. Inside his house. Cassian’s hungover had disappeared in less than a second when he saw Azriel carrying their friend inside the house and had run for Feyre. Their High Lady didn’t have a dagger forged in Hewn City coming out of her chest, like Rhysand did, but somehow she was dead too. Cassian was out of his mind, desperately wanting to get out of the city and go to his own house to make sure Nesta was okay, the bond pulling, but knowing his High Lord had been murdered, and he had a duty to attend. Watching him like that, so desperate, so lost and overwhelmed by feelings, made Azriel realize he couldn’t marry Emerie now. She still had a chance of having a normal life, and he wasn’t cruel enough to ask her to leave with him into exile, not knowing when they would be caught by the enemy. By his enemy, not hers. Not if they didn’t bind themselves together.

He took care of the bodies while the rest decided what their next move was going to be, because he already knew: to escape.

The the vision changed, and he was now seeing a letter. He knew the handwriting, it was Emerie’s. It was addressed to Keir. The piece of paper was folded on a familiar wooden desk, so he could only see Keir’s name and address on it.This wasn’t a memory of his own making, but if the Veritas was showing it to him, it must have been true.

Emerie sat on the desk and with a perfect trace, she flipped the paper and signed it at the end of the page. Then she put it inside an envelope, and sealed it with a wax seal Nesta had gifted her for her birthday.

The spymaster knew this game. He understood what Keir was trying to make by showing him the letter: creating doubt. He had used the technique on countless prisoners to get information from them, to drive them crazy. That’s how he knew it was working. Because he knew Emerie would never contact Keir, he would bet his life on it, on her innocence, even after seeing her hadwriting on it, her signature. But if the Veritas was showing it to him, it must have somehow happened.

How? Why would Emerie do such thing? There must have been an answer, a trick hidden inthe text he wasn’t allowed to read, even if he couldn’t come up with anything at the moment. He hoplessly wanted to believe in her.

He woke up numb, his wings still tied together, and alone back in his cell. The bucket the prison guard he killed had brought him was right where he had dropped it, but there was no trace of the body.

Azriel knew he was not making it out alive. What he didn’t know, was that Emerie was on her way.

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