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arget-star · 20 days ago

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By Any Other Name

Sakura Haruka x F!Reader

A/N: Alright SO. I know I am primarily a Fire Emblem blog. however, Wind Breaker took over my life in the span of like a week and I could not get this thought out of my head and well. here we are. Not beta read, this is my first xreader fic i've ever posted. i hope you enjoy!

tags: fluff, a tiny bit of blood, feelings

wc: 2k

about: You met Sakura about six months ago, and have essentially wormed your way into his little walled off heart. He comes home to your now (mostly) shared little apartment, battered and bloody after saving a girl who looked like you

You’re not living together.

That’s what Sakura says, despite the fact you stay over four nights out of the week, and somewhere in the six months you’ve been dating, half your stuff has ended up in his ramshackle little apartment. “You deserve better than a leaky faucet”, he’d said, cheeks red and nose scrunched in a scowl. You’d merely laughed, kissing his forehead before replying, “It adds to the charm.” And that was that.

You’re not living together. So why does he hope you’ll be there, curled up on that cheap little couch you’d insisted on bringing over, that lovely smile on your face as you greet him?

Those assholes must’ve hit his head harder than he realized. Sakura grits his teeth, an arm banded around his throbbing torso as he wobbles along the sidewalk. Weaklings, all of them. Acting tough solely because they have nothing better to do with their time. Seriously, it’s just plain pathetic.

He spits out a glob of blood into the nearby bushes. He doesn’t remember biting his cheek; maybe he’d ground his teeth against it after taking a particularly nasty kick while dodging someone else’s punch. Wasn’t he past his body locking up, his muscles moving with all the speed of a turtle?

The girl had been clutching the long strap of her purse with all her meager might while surrounded by leering thugs. The type of guys who coast by on looks rather than action. Intimidation instead of respect. At least now he’s able to articulate—better yet, understand—what pisses him off so badly about guys like that. Sakura would’ve leapt in regardless, but then he caught sight of her underneath the lamplight, and her shade of hair matched yours. The purse even had a keychain dangling from it, the charms jingling in faint alarm.

She wasn’t you, obviously. You were already home, had probably cooked something simple yet delicious and were keeping it warm until he arrived.

So he froze, mismatched eyes wide as a new type of fear unfurled within his chest, and then all hell broke loose. He knew how to protect someone in a fight, finally, and while the poor girl flattened herself against the side of a nearby building as he sent the idiots flying, his attention still kept flicking to her. He kept thinking what he’d do if it was you, and on one such slip of his concentration, that bastard’s boot came out of nowhere.

He’ll have to report this to Umemiya in the morning, and tell you all about it tonight, and—

Sakura looks up. He’s nearly there; the derelict building doesn’t seem so foreboding, especially once he catches sight of the warm yellow light on in his apartment. Maybe, just maybe, things won’t be so bad after all.

The doorknob wiggles. You carefully place your bookmark inside your book, sitting up properly in your seat. Sakura’s home a bit later than usual—he probably got stuck eating at Café Pothos with everyone else. Good. You’re grateful he has so many friends, even if he acts like a cat who fell into a puddle of water about it.

“Welco—Sakura!” Your book tumbles from your hands in your haste to stand up. He stands in the doorway while you catalogue his injuries as if in slow motion. Blood drips down the left side of his face from a cut above his eyebrow. His nose is bleeding, too, running down his chin and staining his white shirt red. His knuckles are raw. It’s subtle; yet he sways, quickly placing his right hand against the wall to brace himself. The motion is enough to jolt you from your surprise.

You’re at his side in a blink. His reaction is sluggish; lips parting in belated surprise when you loop his right arm around your shoulders. Normally, he reads your movements almost before you make them, bracing himself for whatever contact you’re about to subject him to so he’s never caught off guard. But slowly, like water eroding rock, he’d learned that he can let his guard down around you, even at his most vulnerable.

Especially then.

“‘M fine,” he mutters out of reflex. You only scoff, walking him over to the couch with a small huff of effort. “Just a small fight.”

Carefully, you help ease him down onto the cushions, releasing your hold only once he’s settled. “A small fight?” You echo, disbelief in your tone. There’s no reprimand or ridicule, just a healthy doubt. He doesn’t know exactly when he stopped looking for the irritation he’s so used to hearing. Leaning his head back, he sighs. “Some guys were causin’ trouble. A new gang, I think. Trying to rob a girl—” he cuts off abruptly, and you watch his cheeks turn a brilliant shade of red, nearly blending in with the dried blood caking his skin. Sakura immediately looks away; he misses the knowing glint entering your expression.

Spinning on your heel, you head for the kitchen. The faucet doesn’t leak as badly now, after you’d finagled a temporary fix with determination and a healthy amount of internet research. He deserves more than a crappy sink, even if he won’t admit it. “You were by yourself?” You ask, opening the drawer and removing a towel. (Yet another item that had miraculously wound up in his space one day. When Sakura confronted you, you’d shrugged, then asked what he wanted for dinner.)

Sakura watches you for a moment, ignoring how something deep within his chest settles as you run the towel under cool water. It’s a familiar scene, enough that he no longer feels the urge to yell and raise his fists in defense. “Yeah. Nothin’ I couldn’t handle on my own.”

Strange. Suo-chan and Nirei-chan always shadow Sakura. Unless Sakura is going home—they haven’t invaded his space since the day they’d discovered him sick on the floor. Now, especially, Sakura would rip their heads off if they came snooping around while you were home. The faucet shuts off. You wring out the towel once, twice, then pad back over to the couch.

“I never doubted that, Grade Captain,” you tease, arranging yourself so you’re sitting on your knees. Drops of water drip down your wrist and onto the cushions below. His blush deepens, and you don’t bother hiding your smile. “Now hold still.”

“Shaddup,” he mumbles without heat. Instinct makes him shift back an inch; he’s always taken care of himself, alone. Sick, bruised, bloodied—he proved time and again he didn’t need anyone else. Then you breezed into his life, upending his entire world with your musical laughter and patient touch.

This is far from the first time you’ve patched him up. He no longer hisses and rages and scowls, a teenage version of a toddler’s temper tantrum, yet neither can he completely disregard a lifetime of gut reactions to others extending a hand in his direction.

You never minded when his hackles rose. You understood him, remaining endlessly understanding while he let his fear run its course. The damp rag hovers in the space between you and him. Sakura zeros in on the blue material instead of your face.

“Ready?”

That’s another thing. You ask him about things. Wait for his brain to catch up with non-dangerous situations. It’s weird, and scary, and wonderful.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be gentle.”

“You always are.”

The smile you give him is radiant. Your free hand cups his less bloody cheek, keeping him steady, while you tenderly press the rag to his chin. He hisses out a breath through clenched teeth.

It’s quiet, as you slowly clean him up, beyond the soft scrap of material against skin. There’s a rhythm to your movements. Sakura finds it soothing, despite the circumstances. You both study each other; Sakura, like you’re a puzzle he’s still trying to solve, and you, like he’s something precious.

His golden eye truly is beautiful. He told you others have compared it to twilight, but you think it’s more akin to burnished gold. Rare, and infinitely treasured. He closes it, keeping it safe from harm as you run the now pink-tinged cloth over his browbone. A shame, you think, he keeps himself so locked away.

The slight pressure leaves his face. You move back, giving him room to breathe, holding the rag loosely in your hand. His eye opens again, a coin glinting in a riverbank.

“There,” you say, unfolding yourself from the couch, brushing your thumb across his cheek before you release him completely. “I’ll be back with the first aid supplies.”

Sakura just nods. He never says the words thank you; but you hear it in the way he lets you take care of him, how he takes your hands so reverently in his once your all finished, cradling you like he’s afraid you’ll snap in half if he squeezes too hard.

You’re opening the cabinet underneath the sink when he speaks again. “She looked like you.”

He says it so quietly, you nearly miss it. You freeze, half-bent down to reach for the ridiculous amounts of bandages and antiseptic bottles stashed neatly in their respective baskets. (Another thing you’d changed one day, much to Sakura’s initial chagrin, until he’d stumbled home covered in half a dozen cuts on the rare day you weren’t waiting for him, and found everything he needed without cursing his lack of organization.)

Mechanically, you grab the necessary materials. You’d assumed as much, based on his reaction when you told you the cause of his current state. A shudder runs down your spine as you imagine what the other guys must look like, lying defeated in the street. Sakura doesn’t fight just on behalf of someone else—at least, that what helps him sleep at night, though you know his tune has changed after all his experiences with Bofurin. For him to fight on your behalf, however tangentially related, makes your heart flutter.

Kotoha will practically jump for joy when you tell her.

For now, you let this newfound knowledge settle into your skin, your fluttering heart, smiling to yourself as you exit the bathroom, arms loaded with supplies. “Did she, now?”

Sakura’s sitting upright, head down, once again avoiding your gaze. His fingernails dig into the fabric of his school pants. Beneath the curtain of two-toned hair, you can see the blush sitting high on his cheeks. It’s a miracle they’re not permanently stained pink.

“Y-yeah. I knew she wasn’t you, but for a moment…I need to teach you how to defend yourself. I can’t patrol everywhere, and I’m not the strongest yet. Anyone from Furin will keep you safe, but if we’re not around—”

This is new. You swallow, setting the first aid supplies down on the tatami, sitting down with your legs crisscrossed. (One day, you’ll convince him to buy a table, but there’s only so much furniture you can squeeze in such a tiny place.)

“Sakura,” you say, but he doesn’t hear you.

“—I need to know you can take care of yourself until I get there—”

“Sakura.”

“—and send them all flyin’—”

“Haruka.”

That shocks him into silence. He inhales, then looks up sharply, lips curling into the angry snarl you know so well. It’s his only defense mechanism, beyond his fists, and he’d never raise those at you. (That thing lodged within his chest stirs again. No one’s called him by his given name in years. It feels right, that here, in this space you two have created together, you should use it.)

He’s quite the sight, half patched-up and spluttering mad. One eye darkens like a storm at sea; the other kindles into molten gold, ready to burn any who get in his way.

You’re surprised, too. But you didn’t know what else to do. He’s never spiraled like this before, and it hits you that for perhaps the first time, he was genuinely scared for someone else. You shake your head, breaking eye contact, and reach for the gauze. “I’m sorry, Sakura. I should have asked before using your first name.”

Your fingers shake only a little when you grab the nearest antiseptic, flipping open the cap with your thumb. He watches it all, struck dumb. He doesn’t want an apology. He wants you to say it again, but he doesn’t know how to ask.

All of the fight leaks out of him. His shoulders slump forward. Haruka. Haruka. You hadn’t said it in disgust, or fear, or hatred. If he had to guess, you sounded concerned. Haruka. “I liked hearin’ you say it,” he replies.

A laugh bubbles out of you, born from nervous relief. You nearly spill antiseptic all over you instead of the gauze. “Really? May I call you Haruka, then? Not all the time…just here.�� Rising to your knees, you crawl over to him, taking one battered hand in your soft one.

His throat tightens. An odd pressure builds behind his eyes. “Fine.”

“This’ll sting,” you murmur in warning, almost like an afterthought. “You can use mine, too. If you want.”

Sakura’s about to respond, tell you he’ll do it if it’ll make you happy (and make his own heart beat a little faster), but then the gauze descends onto his split knuckles. It’s not like eating a kick to the face; it barely registers in comparison.

Maybe it’s the emotions he’s kept bottled up since the fight. Maybe it’s the fact you called him Haruka and the world didn’t explode. Both things, he assumes, and that’s why your healing touch hurts worse than a dozen roundhouse kicks.

It fades, after that first bright burst.

Neither of you say anything again while you continue your ministrations. Once his knuckles are taken care of, you move on to his face, tenderly smoothing his bi-colored bangs off his forehead to ensure no strands get caught underneath the small bandage you apply to the cut above his eyebrow.

The entire time, he replays this strange evening over and over again in his head. It all leads back to you, caring for him, using his first name like it’s nothing when it in fact means everything. He hates himself, a little bit, for not being better at this.

For your part, your focus on him turns clinical. You can deal with the emotional part of it later. When you’ve finished with the last bandage, you stare at him a moment. Take in this boy who pushed away the entire world when it wrote him off, the very same boy who harbors no malice in his heart, just kindness hidden by anger.

You press a soft kiss to his lips, then slide away before he can reciprocate. He splutters again, blush back in place, and it’s such a Sak—Haruka thing to do, you bite back a laugh.

“Are you ready to eat, Haruka? You get hungry after a good fight.”

He offers you a rare smile in return.

#sakura haruka x reader #sakura haruka #wind breaker #sakura wind breaker #char writes #i suck at titles bro rip me #i am truly obsessed with this show sakura has bewitched me #also i realized AFTER i wrote this in a fever dream that i may have fudged the layout of sakura's apt a bit. shrugs #.sakura haruka

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munsonthings86 · 9 months ago

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steve’s always there to wipe your tears

warnings: fluff, slight angst, protective!steve x sunshine!reader, reader has a bad day, 0.6k words

it was written all over your face. your pouty and fraught little face. though steve wasn’t a bookworm, more so the opposite, still, he could read you like a book. if your eyebrows being pulled in so tight and your eyes being stained red with exhaustion wasn’t evidence enough, it would be the way you slammed the door shut as you entered, carelessly tossing your purse onto the already cluttered kitchen counter.

today was one of those days.

returning home from work in a mood that was a drastic shift from the rather chipper one you were normally in, wasn't a rare occurrence. the job you worked for wasn't one that you particularly cared for and given the way they treated you, you were certain that your co-workers would say the same about you.

with your elbows crashing onto the surface of the marble counter cruelly, you veiled your face in your trembling hands with a huff. steve was already finding his way over to you, wrapping warm hands that were a vast difference from the chillness of your own skin, around your waist.

"what's wrong, honey?" he mumbled, running a comforting hand across the plane of your back. you try to speak but its lost in translation against your palms that muffled and mazed your words. the only terms that steve is able to make out are "tired" and "done", though he's still able to grasp what it was you were struggling to say, regardless.

"who do i have to teach a lesson, hm?" he said it as a joke, slightly chuckling to himself when he saw your shoulders shake with what he initially deemed to be your laughter, but soon realized it was quite the opposite. when your chest heaved, breathing increasing by the second as you sobbed, steve coaxed you away from the counter and into his arms, blanketing your distressed self into secure, strong arms.

even in the midst of your very obvious turmoil, you were still relentless in your effort to articulate everything that was weighing on your mind and chest, though the only sounds able to escape your lips were wobbly words and sharp inhales. steve's never felt his heart ache so much, so intensely.

the only thing he could bring himself to do was to lace his lengthy fingers through your shaky ones, resting the tangled mess of hands against his chest, using the thumb of his free one to gently sweep away the salty tears drowning your beautiful eyes. the muscles of your face relax a little as he lulls you, pressing soft kisses to your forehead, cheeks, jaw, and temples with little whispered, "it's okay"s in between.

once your breathing steadied, the backs of his fingers tapped straggling tears away, soothing the skin under your eyes that was developing a deep shade of red.

your stevie hated seeing you like this.

typically, you were so bubbly and so full of light. always spirited and excited. but with this job that you had, the light in you that steve fell so deeply in love with was dimming; extinguishing with every terrible day it gave you. and steve wanted nothing more than to be the one to help you keep your light ablaze, reminding you that he loved you and would always be there whenever you needed him.

you pulled yourself back into his arms, head buried in his chest as steve's head found solace on top of yours. you loved hugs like this. hugs where though no words were being exchanged, volumes were being spoken. you were safe, loved and protected. nothing could hurt you here. and steve knew that if the day ever came where he needed you, you'd be right there to protect him just the same <3

💌 1 new message from jojo: needing a steve rn ugh :( anyways, inbox is open!

#stranger things #steve harrington #steve harrington blurb #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington fluff #steve harrington x black!reader #steve harrington oneshot #steve harrington fic #joe keery

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enteroctopusdarkysilis · 6 months ago

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✨Bionicle insect !✨

Yay, back to Bionicles MOCs !

I made fewer of these, but here is the first one (other images and additional details below the cut).

I’m still not entirely convinced of the edited photos, but given the size of these MOCs, I didn’t really have much choice but to do how I did. At least the ones with background give a few colours.

Anyway, photos of the left and underside !

This was really a fun one to work with, obviously largely inspired by the Visorak sets (I kept the head piece and the claws), but with more legs !

The claws are combined with feet to add some shape (the two pieces work quite well together) to the end of the legs, then I made of 4 joints articulations to give it a proper insect-like stance. The middle legs are slightly longer (using a long transparent blue piece, instead of the small dark one), which makes it less linear.

I kept the disc of the Visorak, held in place by…a broken Pirahka headpiece. Yes, I’m not exactly very original in my techniques, and I have a lot of these broken pieces. As you might see in the third picture, I have the secondary connectors of that piece attached to the belly of the beast, so to speak.

Although, speaking of techniques, the one I’m using for the 'tail' is not exactly recommendable. It’s a bit tough to see, but there is an elastic band attached to the foot used as a tail part on the third picture. It’s the only element which connects the end of the tail (shiny Visorak claw in second picture) to the rest of the body, which makes it wobbly but offers some interesting movements if needed.

Oh yeah, I also used Vakama’s disc launcher again, as mandibles this time. I originally tried to make a transparent blue disc (from all promotional sets) inside, but it doesn’t fit well enough).

I’m considering making another in another colour, but I’ll have to see if I even have enough ressources to do so~ Maybe green and silver, since these are pieces I have a bunch of, or black and silver…Only time will tell.

#lego #lego moc #bionicle #lego bionicle #visorak

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apocalypse-shuffle · 6 months ago

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I gotta be honest the Black Noir/Earving having the mind of a seven year old thing leaves me…perplexed. Sure a seven year old child can follow instructions well enough, but what seven year old does anyone know of who can still function independently and have as much social tact and mental & bodily discipline as Noir does?

Like, did someone say that shit in the show and I just can’t remember, because why is that belief so prominent?

The man is brain damaged but he’s not illiterate, he strings together sentences just fine - though you can gather through the way he writes that there is some dissonance between his finer coordination or something considering how large/wobbly his letters are and how stilted his speech is (though there can be an argument made that he was only writing so stiltedly because he had to convey his thoughts quickly on a piece of paper) but either way mentally he’s able to convey his emotions and thought process clearly enough — he is a bit emotionally immature as well, but so is Homelander and no one says he has the mind of a literal child. And, yeah, you could say that most children have stilted speech and bad writing, but Noir does still have brain damage and that does heavily factor into things, I’m just saying that brain damage doesn’t automatically mean that someone disabled is brought back to the mental faculties of a child.

Noir’s also able to learn new things and adapt to shifting situations very well and he’s also not as emotionally unregulated as a seven year old (though lack of regulation like that in of itself doesn’t automatically make someone a child either). He’s regularly being manipulated to some degree also but so are all the other characters that work under Vought so I don’t think that counts either.

It’s just incredibly confusing because it’s like, am I supposed to write this man like a lil ass child despite the fact that he quite literally (yes, even with his hallucinations) never acts like one? What am I supposed to be doing here exactly because no fucking seven year old acts like he does? His development was no doubt stilted by the damage to his brain but that doesn’t automatically render him a child mentally, he’s just disabled, but maybe I’m wrong idk.

I don’t know how to articulate myself on this issue the best but I’m trying to convey my confusion and frustration clearly here so if anyone has any answers or insights or whatever they’d like to share that’d be nice. I want to write him well, and canon accurate enough, not just write him like he’s seven years old - how ever that’s even supposed to look.

#the boys #black noir #earving #the boys meta #the boys earving #the boys black noir #the boys amazon #the boys analysis #i speak bitches

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cipheramnesia · 1 year ago

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Vivisection

I sloughed the shell in a flourish of our shared sweat, blood, and mucus. Cold on the steel-grated floor lift, tech eyes wide over me as my psyche twitched itself back together from the needles. My eyes said you must be new but my mouth spoke in thick puked up fluid whilst my sopping slick shuddering fingers clawed nerve pads off my tits and slid catheter from my dick. All of us nerves had little twitches of pleasure as we found ourselves whole, and made it to sitting.

"Towel," I found language, and the tech handed it, eyes carefully elsewhere at the pink and red cockpit still quivering in urgency, wet with quenched desires. Methodically cleaned under the wet warm terrycloth ministrations, top to standing, adjusting to eyes and ears 'side skin and taste. The hangar was all echoes of more experienced crew on the teardown fifty feet up and down the shell, didn't need the look I turned anyway at my love, the crab. Rested claws in bands of carbon, four squat legs and rolling condensation off the quieting spiracles. Charred, twisting armor coated over with clotted brown patch like scabs and fading blue drips of other less evils' blood, sparkling at places from shattered refractive layers, spongy intrasteel glistening through here and there. Below it discharged glutinous tar from the trap, all spent oil and shock fluid plus shells and fused filters, burned heat hexes all and all bound for the reprocess, someone else's hand-me-down armor or shoes.

The wasp staggered past us to its own home sweet safety net so I hung the rail in a gentlemanly way and bade our tech meet my goddess in crime at her door. "They have their own lift," the tech observed. My goosebumps agreed, emphasizing the questionable temperature, but a lady must pay her respects. "I don't care," I suggested so we went.

Parked up under those gangly legs adripped with the glow and silver of thirty confirmed kills and gored holes through musculoskeletal tubing told the tale, I held my arms in chivalry as the mandibles underside the shell parted ways and dripped Ari into my embrace along side her own deluge of girl-juice and veined amniogel shreds. Knees buckled as my stomach protested my lack aforethought, but no one could dispute the benefits of a girl pressed against my breasts, slinging her long arms around me. She barfed over my shoulders, warm and phlegmy.

Ari'd pulled her cords in the shell like a good girl, still shook gainst my skin as she stuttered, "fuh- fuh- fuh-" while I jerked my head at the tech who shrugged. Outta towels, well my bad. Leaned us on the railing and thought about tonight, you know the human body's pretty heavy all said? "Your... skin is... freezing!" she articulated, not a request mere observation, but my arms acquiesced nevertheless. We leaned on each other watching black muck drain from the wasp's thorax, standing around naked in a pool of shell vomit. "Yer dumb," she added, hocking up more phlegm. "Now're both shlimy." The other shells crawled in with the tide, blasted with sterilizing powder and steam, various scorpions and mosquitos and spiders seeking succor as we finally made our way down the textured rubber steps.

"Fuckin so hungry," Ari slurred, dribbling blood and saliva while my own stomach answered midst shouts of our squad as they were reborn, crawling free and bloodied from the shell, some still babbled nonsense, tried to move limbs no longer bodied and no shame to them. "You threw up so much, 'spected," I said. Watched Spinning Jenny shaking mucus off his head, snapping teeth together.

"Gonna eat three horses," Ari added. "Fuck potatoes, my dick can fuck a pile of potatoes I'm starving." She shook my shoulder, my legs wobbled in tune, "Clingy bitch." But her hand stayed, fingers digging the tense muscles in my back, mine squeezed her hips. "Casey I want you to hold me down and force feed a gallon of cheese into me." Managed to cross the whole hangar naked, didn't eat shit. Techs hooted appreciating and I tried to bow but just did a cockeyed vanity wave. Brain twitched but kept my cool, remembered I don't see in sonar. "Maybe later tonight," I murmured sotto voce. I cleaned the fresh blood from my ears with a pinky finger.

Lockers, showers, Ari always liked when I soaped and dried her, little bit of a tease, ease of limbs back into bodily limits. She was wiping gunk from her eyes, still going, "I fuck shit swear I'm getting mission reruns in my sleep now. Bullshit we don't hang on to PDN memories, I've deffo had the same shit we throw at the elves in my head at night."

"They're not elves," I said.

"Whatever, magical monster tree bugs, I dunno, are you getting shell feedback?" I was toweling her thick curls, my own short hair dried sweet quick. Threw on those almost paper scrubs. Sexy. "Babe, we all got feedback, I'm not even sure how much me is in my mind."

She grabbed my hair and gave my head a little shake, "Lucky you, I'll fuck your brains out anyway," and blew my hair out my eyes. I grabbed her hand and pushed back, she swooned, we crushed hard as team shelled and molted, in bed or in field. Just a way to anchor, comes with the piloting, nothing new. Lots of pilots fall in twos and fours of strange bedfellow - gets you back in mind after so long parted. "Shut the fuck up," she said to my smile, shoved back, I reeled her in and smiled more til she punched my shoulder. "Fuck you, feed me." We joined the aching crowd clustering to the mess hall.

Slammed our piled trays on a table, minutes later. Scatter Hawk had beat us there somehow, last in the bay, first to the hay per usual. Jelly was still in their hair and they were tearing into a pile of beef flavored protein patties they'd slathered with garlic chili sauce and pickled carrot chips. Shoved it in their blood-smeared face with mixed results twohanding a fork, missed the target 30% of the time. "Glad you're a better shot with the 40," I suggested and they replied, "Slip your own dick sideways fish brisket," spittle and snot sprayed with each word, language not quite in the altogether I guess. I slapped some nerves back into their shoulder and they grunted wetly and appreciatively.

Ari pushed me onto the bench and dropped down, catted up against me and chugged hot sauce from the tube, followed by a fistful of fake bacon and chips dripping with jalapeños. "Thid fit gess weeper effy dah" she spat out with a mouthful of half chewed food, elbowing my ribs in the process, so I slipped my hand over her thigh and gave her a reassuring stim. I was busy with whatever passed for kimchi and pork flavored protein while the table started filling up with other pilots eating an entire day's worth of food in one sitting, trying to feel and speak and touch and taste all at once with mixed successes, all of us trying to pick our nerves up from the sludge being in the shell made out of our bodies. DeeDee shoved a fork at us and said, "Fuck were you, suckin dick? Tank's supposed to keep hits off."

"Yeah, take many hits?" I wiped the dribbled of blood off my lip.

"Like ten! Two in a lung!" He jabbed a beef patty for table wobbling emphasis.

Barely audible Ari whispered, "You're alive aren't you?" Head was drooped under her curled hair near to my level, flying below table radar, still about hit direct to a nerve with DeeDee's bloodshot eyes going big and Hellis beside scooting its flat ass away but none of us got further into what manner of dicks weren't or were sucked (my carefully planned speech - about the pincer move we broke while I was still jamming longways thanks and the relationship of DeeDee's dick being vaporized vis a vis our suckage - wasted). Squad command rudely storming our table with the demand: "Death Claw! Kill Strike!"

Silence resumed in sudden shock as he stood authority thrust chinward, all our eyes tracking the table. He repeated the command, "Death Claw! Kill Strike!" Silence abounded, roamed the plains, handed him a look of weary resignation as his lips, with all the distaste of gingerly dropping a dead rat into a toilet, formed, "Kitty Candy and Raccoon Enchantment," he struggled to recover his momentum but the wind was dead, "I need to speak with you both." Tablewide "ooooo" and Spinning Jenny added "someone's in trouuuble," as we took our ways in the talking wake of the baron of bluster.

Followed breadcrumbs of wet bootie prints and bloodsmeared walls back to the old bay so he could scream at us with an echo. "You semen stains mind explaining what the fuck you were doing back in that shitshow?"

Her nose was bleeding heavily again and I could feel Ari's arm spasm as she pushed close behind me, whispering without sound. I had answers mercifully drowned in a wad of spit and phlegm suddenly dumping into my mouth and down my chin.

"Gods you're all fucking sick. Disgusting. Got nothing to show for it?"

I swallowed another gob of something unpleasantly solid which mercifully shot from my lungs into my mouth giving moments for me to think forward. Rare enough, I treasured them. Figured best not mention what was the thing, blowing the drop bolts early cuz she wanted to try and fire the primary on the wasp from directly above a banyan whilst midair, sans stabilizers, which for the record she hit the thing but caught an extra eighth mile sky above the crate.

"Listen," I gurgled, wiped off my face. ("Listen SIR," he interjected, so I waved indulgently.) "Hurgle. My decoms pinged a hostile lake, looked like a stand of banyans an' a anthill so we bailed at drop beta." Ari's fingers drug out blood from under my paper sleeve, fuck ridiculous she's like eight inches taller trying to make my ass into partial cover.

"Drop beta," he repeated the words to emphasize their unwelcome intrusion to his shriveled brain. I realized the part of my memories with this squad commander's name got sliced in the shell. His face was twitching as bad as mine ever has. "There was no drop beta! There was one site, slash and burn, the end!"

"Well lucky you! We set one up before that swampfire cut our lines up, no thanks necessary please, you know we do it for the love of our jobs."

He looked at the melted up muscle and vatsteel carapace curves of my beloved crab and wasp. Some mirror shaved surfaces, bug blood all black where it congealed. "Fuckin trannies, disgusting, undisciplined- Why we hire so many I don't even-"

"C'mon, you know we're your best guys."

"You're literally my worst guys! If I had anyone else fucked in the head enough to shove into those- those fucking meat grinder abominations, I'd dump your freakshow asses so far in the back beyond you'd fart just for the conversation!"

I elbowed Ari in the gut before she said something dumber than I had in mind. "You know the old saying, a tranny in the shell will give em all hell."

His face snapped shut like crab's load-in maw. Gritted teeth rumbled, "Scrape duty for the next two hours." He shoved us out of the way off to ruin someone else's sex lives, his own probably.

Two hours and two trays of congealed processed protein with vinegar and hot peppers, we trudged down the narrow hall to bunk. The ganglia stopped twitching but it'd been a minute last I had this much elf blood under my nails and my hair reeked of burned polyfilament lubricant.

Ari stretched her arms back because the ceiling was too low for up grumbling, "Don't wanna spec nother fuckin face for a whole shift." I shrugged half drop slept and headed my roomways, brought to heel with her hand on my wrist. "The fuck you think you're going, you promised." Her, lips, just as crusted with blood and snot as mine still a cute pout in dire times.

I gauged my cramping stomach up against that hand and those lips. We hadn't been on-mission for a sec, and fuck for the moment I'm only human and very horny. Still. "You said-"

"People, I mean people." She punched the latch and I let her reel me into her narrow cabin, coming attractions you could call it. I said, "Babe, you gotta pick up your underwear - or anything - sometime." Ari grabbed a bottle of the rancid wine someone was making from cooking oil and caramelized vinegar. She put it against my chest, and put us against the stowage wall, and put her tongue into my throat. Her lips were gunpowder nachos, burning hot, both of us careless to chapped cracked open blood. I took a slug of the wine, with its notes of artificial PTSD raspberry flavor, as she pulled the bunk from the wall. I held up the bottle, tipped it to her lips, spilled it into her mouth, on her face, down her bare flesh and cheap scrubs.

Ari yanked it away and tossed it to the refuse under her fully unused sliver of a desk. I grabbed her by the front of her scrubs, they tore, so I grabbed her arm and fumbled us against the edge of the cot, struggling with my pants and paper booties. "Fucking elastic, now it works?" Ari tried to rip the pants off, snapping a yelp and a shock outta me when she snapped the band on my stomach, so I pushed my hand into her pants and grabbed her dick, hip checked her onto her back on the cot, then furiously yanked both our pants off. We smashed tongues and lips again, her guided by my fingers in her hair, me by her nails on my back, furrows through the grime mottling my acne scarred skin. I clambered onto her, a full tangle of legs and elbows with the sweet serenade of the cot, joints protesting weight and unwelcome thrashing. But I had hold of her now, me and my little growls, her softly repeating "please," as I pressed our hips, tits, lips together. Teased and pinched on and around her nipples, scratched the welcome back real world long her ribs, pulled myself to myself with her rhythmic panting breaths. Shudders passing through from her to me, traded in kind as we reminded our bodies and each other of the dwindling human embers in our chests, the dregs of what once was bright and happy in the world still enough between us to reignite into the shape we suffered through bereft of shells. A minute for our hearts to hammer together, to take in the mossy dried blood scent, the reek of sweat and metal, both of us hard and slick against one another.

When she murmured, we gingerly squirmed our legs and arms around and across each other til Ari lay on her stomach, the pathetic, thin excuse of a mattress rolled under her chest and arms. Lube was spread over her ass and my fingers with wasteful urgency. I worked my hands slowly down her back, gently caressing her sync ports with my thumb, watching them contract and gape with her moans. The lips of them tingled and sent pulses of pleasure through my hands from lingering protonerves. Moved downward to her ass and sliped in one finger at a time, stroking inside her folds, touching her walls, three in and rhythmic spreading and relaxing as she sucked in air, so I leaned up close and slipped my tongue into her neckport, the sphincter closed tight and opened wide and I could feel my ports sympatic response, taste her tasting tasting her. She twisted her pillow into knots and I pushed my cock into her as my fingers slipped out, slowly, feeling her tense up and relax.

Slivers of amniogel squished against my cock in her ass, protonerves shot echos of her through me, flaring and then crushed between us. We pressed ourselves closer, trading pulses back and forth, that one flashing minute of her ass against my hips and one hand on her dick, my face in her hair, one hand pressing into jer back ports, letting her suck the lube from my other hand. It was almost the ecstasy of feeling our minds dissolve into one another. Then we moved again. Hours or minutes, I felt her cum trickle over my hands and wiped it on her thigh as I kept going. Mucus spilled from her contracting back sphincters and my own. Fucking the trace of vat grown life to death until we might have a hope of sleep tonight.

It was humid and reeked of sex, everything about Ari barely fit, except for me, so we stole away these moments from each other to remember and forget. It was nothing in the world, but it was better than dying alone. My leg hung off the bed when we had rolled free of one another, too filthy to breathe and too wasted to shower. My elbow and hip hurt from banging against the wall. Her legs were curled up and her left knee jabbed painfully into my thigh, I couldn't find a place to put my right arm and it was falling asleep but the tingle felt better than trying to stand up. Head was jammed into my neck, couldn't be comfortable, I brushed tangles out of her hair. Muffled, she said, "You smell bad."

"You love it. You missed my pit stank, my demure little corpseflower." She made gagging noises into my clavicle. "I'm gonna have to go back to my nice bunk where the floor is clean, can't stay under my wing forever birdie."

"Whatever," I felt her lips mashed against me with each word, and braced for her to shove me off bed, but her arm just squeezed me closer. "Can so stay f'rever," she sounded almost asleep, her head pushed closer to me and she muttered something like "glove mew bits."

Rolled eyes, but pressed a little closer. "Sure, marinate some new strain of bacteria, they can spatula us out the morning." Unprepared by her momentary snuggle, my ass hit the floor in a pile of unwashed tanktops with a sleep slurred "fuck off."

I left my dignity in the laundry and blew a kiss. "You're gonna hate you in the morning if you sleep that way," she made and grumpy noise and wrapped herself around the rolled up mattress, trying and failing to fit on the metal cot. I tripped a little on the way out the door, on my half naked way to a luxury five minute hot shower to a low bid bargain cold sleep.

Dreams told tales from the shell. Techs all swore in the slice nothing transfers. True enough we lost a short term or three but that's the balance to cost against feedback, they said. Dreams were my four legs crushing earth compact from the drop jump as my decoms rolled over the banyans and bugs slinging spells, my nightmost terrors unfolding from the PDN and flooding their foci and fetishes. In the mindscape ground ran fluid under mechanized polyplastic muscle, the world putty with my gargantuan claws. Chaff launched from deep inside my chambered shell to spark the incoming green, a deathly spray to casual sunblock rads, no mind to armored skin.

Myriad wave of banyans moving, windblown, roots crawling, but there she is, my darting wasp hurling her thousand stings, finding targets in my trackers n hackers through the grassfield bugs. Their blood glows blue, all the work of their spells to brittle silver threads that fall to pieces. She lands and I bathe the hill in freaks, veritable fog of messy tracking til her thorax slides open and erects its throbbing, winged main gun, legs planted, struts in, and a hurricane throws banyan trunks to shreds, clears a canyon of death, and she screams, and I see the branches from the earth tearing her apart, I am slow, bogged in sudden mud, green spears her, the angry earth rips her legs from limb, black ichor and green coolant and I wake up screaming as she shouts for me to go. Clutching the metal edge to my cot, seeking my body again, for a moment unable to hear or see, I exist only as pounding blood and raw nerves til each flexed muscle brings me to human.

Some time passes to rise, rollout hours more hence, I spent time to feel my body, put on shorts and t-top and try to forget the dream and Ari's voice screaming for me to leave her.

I tried to sleep the echo away, then folded my cot and dug the glass bottle of beauties. Rattled a couple hatch-down to flatten it out. Nothing doing, no washing or wiping or jerking off removed the unwelcome night haunt, so I made my soft shod way down to mess.

Rigs like these, there's never quiet. Air cycles, night crew, the odd distant clatter we all always hoped wasn't the seconds off warning of full breach. I paused by Ari's door, halfway to clacking it, but moved counterspin towards mess. No sense both of us losing sleep over one misfire of psyche. Half light in the mess, couple plotters and binders poked listless fried protein and I took my separate peace with a cup of the juice. Sick sweet chemflavor kicked caffeine to my heart and guts enough to winnow away the hours trying a dozen different flavors of artificial spice on artificial food, feeling artificially alive.

DeeDee showed in first after rollout, guy was never not angry at me over some shit, angry at something, put a lot of that through the lines good for us. Hellis always hung round, I specced on their afterhours but never pried the privates. Wouldn't have minded a bunk with either, but oh well. Shadow Jumper and Stepper and Jenny and so on filing their way through gallons of sickening juice and overcooked daybreak. Ari was last in, skulking through the rising shine and din of the mess, caught a tangle of her eyes but crowds were parting our ways.

"See how long you last without that filter, you'd hurl minimal," Jenny kept prodding at Scatter Hawk putting away more forkfulls than any two of us, just grunting back, while DeeDee yelled down the table at Stepper over horrendous and audible farts. I couldn't find a minute to catch Ari's eyes, roll em back and forth with mine, she was digging a hole through her tray.

I spent a frustrated week shipping past her nights. Some asshole I learned was apparently in charge of the squad demanding press-ups and running laps spin wise. Got mad when I said we don't use any muscles and I had to do extra sit-ups, and I threw up and didn't see Ari in the lockers. Tear down on the crab, coming and she was on her grease stained way showers, grimacing. Asleep when I catted around her doors at the odd hours. Anxiety in my spare space left my skin crawling. Ran into her at the psyche cracker and said hey, how you doin? Ari said, "Fine," with those tangled up eyes.

"You okay? I do something you wanna talk?" Whatever was left inside my skull felt like it wanted me to vomit it through my ports. My intestines wanted my skin rippled.

She shook her head. "It's not. You're good, you're good, I just." She shook her head again, tugged the hem of her shirt. Bless I was horny as fuck but just wanted to untangle her eyes, please.

"Listen, I got-"

"Casey!" The skull breaker slid its door up. Check-in time, its glassed eyes and masked mouth glittered, jovial work for a septic system.

"Ari, one second doc. Hey."

Backing down the hall, miming apologies. "I'll see you around Case."

I got a good grade from the psyche. "Very little degradation today," it exclaimed. "Your connectivity must have been quite well balanced! If you maintain this synchronization, we can expect to keep memory and autonomic function nearly optimal. Please ensure you take your supplements to maintain neural plasticity, excellent work!"

It always ignored my questions so I didn't ask anymore but one time I looked up "autonomic" and I was not very excited about the implications. Clacked Ari's door on the way back roomwards, to no result. Shut my door hard, rattled more beauties down my gullet and lay on the floor, tossed aside my psyche chart with all its healthy green and admonishing yellow. Degradation did not feel minimal, I was fragile with worry and my body wanted to fly apart, uncontained by the shell and trembling with skin crawling fear. Nothing flattened, the spin felt too fast, and I wiped confused wetness off my face. I clenched fists to my sides and shook uncontrollably. When would the drop would come?

Rolled out and rounded up came down soon enough against my liking. Marched our asses cross to the bay and posted us up. The squad leader looked uniquely miserable for each syllable of "Kitten Candy! Raccoon Enchantment!" He might actually kill me if he figures out how I changed our call signs.

Ari lurked behind me, sleep deprivation coming off her in radiant heat. I'd woke on the aching floor to rollout chimes, back still sharp from the sleep I should've skipped. She'd been doing teardown some long hours fore we got the callout. "Since you two reliably fuck up anything more complicated than bright colors and shapes, you're doing drop targeting. Three sites, think you can handle it?"

"Probably not, SIR!" I said, and he was not amused, Ari flopped hands affirmatively over the task a drone could do.

"Get synced up because that's the mission. Fuck off, the adult pilots are talking."

Could've argued, didn't, not with the halides in my skull and Ari walking away for the wasp. "Hey! Hey." Caught up around and walked with her. "Lotta radio silence, you good? I mean, girl, you look like shit, but you good?" We reached the lift. My hand was more tentative on her shoulder than my first time trying on a bra. "Are, like, are we? You know, did I say something?"

"Shit, you're fuckin impossible," Ari pulled a smile from an awful place. "Never said nothing except all I wished-" She started climbing. "Ah, fuck off, you know you're good. So good I want... like, fuck. I'm good. Had feedback something fierce this week. Hcch." I walked behind her, hand at her back and lifted, she grabbed my wrist. "C'mon, bitch, gimme a boost up."

The tech up top had the wasp open, long tongue dangling, pink, dripping ready to enfold. The mandibles were an umbrella over us, the whole cockpit slung between a sensaray and fire platform up front and the main gun taking up most of the thorax, flightless wings for short jumps and bristled with beams and missiles webbed into veins and live nerves. Ari stripped off her clothes and I helped her with the mass of thick tubes dangling from the soft flesh of the wasp's underbelly. Gentle with the catheter while she gripped my shoulder, taping the skin contacts on, then slipping the fat red sync cables and their gently writhing filaments into the sphincter along her neck and spine.

"Hey." I looked up from making stirrup hands and Ari's fingers lifted me from kneeling. "You be here when we come back, kay? I don't wanna open this cage if I don't see your ugly mug waiting."

"You fuckin wish," I said. "Believe, I'll be here, I got nothing better to do."

She had that smile, eyes almost past her tangle. "Yeah, what the fuck do I care, you're just, like. Well fuck you, anyway, you better be here, no excuses."

I put my hands together and knelt. "No excuses, bitch." She stepped into me and I hoisted her up until the closing mandibles caught her and pulled her the rest of the way in. The wasp began to breathe, the metal and polymer exoskeleton tightening as it straightened. The multiplicably enfolded legs flexed all their joints. I made my way from Ari's lift to my own, perspective and spin distorted neath my crab all encompassing the view and my world. The stairway to its cockpit was considerably longer, but no aid was needed. Sixfold mandibles waited for me, tubes lay cross the steel grate for my own administration. That same tech still couldn't look as I stripped and strapped. Didn't need help with my ports, just held crab's feelers up and they squirmed their way to the intimate fibers of my spinal cord. I sighed and my ports contracted to pull the connections deeper to the nerve.

The tech muttered, "I can't cope with the freaky shit," stepped off lively. Probably thought I couldn't hear as I wound myself into the folds of the crab's intimacy, and was encased in the dark. The peristaltic folds squeezed and swallowed me into the wet warm depths in the heavy polycombine plate armor of our turret. Impact gel, amniogel, blood and mucus flowed over my feet and hands, the added nerves and plasm more deeply fusing us. I felt my vision shriveling through a tunnel, my gritty eyes black in my skull, each muscle of my limbs unfurled from bones to thread themselves into the limbs of a colossus. My spine grew through my skin to blossom across a carapace and turret, flexed my claws and the wide flat armor wings across my back, felt the hangar through its myriad complex electrical systems and programs running in constant state of adjustment. I could smell the synapses of the crew inside the rig, all the redundant added systems, multiple layers of security, still so vulnerable inside this soft underbelly. My web crackled and fluttered along my body. I could kill everyone around me with a thought and leave only my fellow, slumbering shells for company.

I vacuumed air through my body and filters, hundreds of pounds in a breath. Piece by piece I cut my mind free of its cage, each part of it a point in a web of a thousand stars to guide my way. How had I ever let myself believe I could be human? How could I be when I was this, so much more, the parts of my mind I never before realized were incomplete. Destroy me, I urged the crab. Consume the last of my flesh and bones, and let me free once and for all. I slipped my claws out of their bands and tested link with wasp - with Ari. She vibrated enthusiasm, her stimulant chemicals were flooding overtime, and I selected the clam path of her many input and system indexes to aid her, grant her focus to the still before the burn. The dropship waited and we obliged, neither of us patient for departure and planet fall, once again to taste the alien atmosphere and feel true gravity pull at our tissue and joints.

Countdown for slow minutes, and we jammed to our sync. I felt at peace, each part of my psyche sliced from itself, and we lay distributed across our body, through small cortexes fired with the parts of my consciousness. We ticked through systems and my subconscious night terrors spooled into projectors while my self sense expanded to the decom in preparation for target tracking. Ari and I could feel one another as we synced, her slender body and long legs torquing their secondary legs into alignment. Her deepest horrors became a narrow band of foci, accompaniment to each one of her eight gun placements

We swayed for a minute as the drop slid out through the bay doors til thrusted still in a white noise of rocket and atmosphere. Open doors spilled a flurry of blinding light and boiling air. We cut the cord and took flight. Fission cycled to jets and Ari soard around my less graceful lander module decel, both flirtatious and efficient. Earthshaking on point, I breathed in the beacon for the first drop target, then pulled myself free of deeply fertile soil, felled the odd red thornbush in the way of our determinedly stealth free journey. Ari was more nimble in her travels, caught us both up fair to the prep kit. My decom swept all sides of the range for crevices of organized blue, and looked through my wavspec for tattletale knurled arms and segmented torso trunks.

"Whistle clean," I thrummed to Ari and she slipped up through to the prep barely shifting a twig. My hearts beat in time to her showy work then my pace crushed the evidence in passing. Exultation flooded my glands and fluttered my filtration, we set to the lungs of the future. My claws could lift and move enough whilst Ari's more dexterous complex digits hooked in power, nutrient starter, bacteria loads. All color coded and writ large enough couple pilots couldn't fuck it up, track records notwithstanding. Few hundred and we'd be able to turn the toxic swamp of atmosphere to nearly breathable. Plenty for firsts, let them deal with the messy genes for the twenty-threes to come later. Not us, not our yards and acres of lungs filtered enough to breathe near vacuum. Minutes confirmed the bactomix was good, and we beamed our confirmation.

"Nice and tidy," Ari observed the dirt churned circle round the target. I tasted the ground, messy but starter ready.

"Good enough. It'll be dust in a year anyway. Grab a ride?" We're supposed to march it point to point, no riders no passengers, but it's slow n tedious. She grappled to my exo instead. Put a safe-ish distance from the drop target, hunkered. Earth churned to mud and boiled around my feet as we sank down, I wrenched all I could from dirt rocks clay, sprayed hot waste out my vents, and we exploded into the air on jets carved from living thorns and earth, second drop in record time. Nothing rumbled I could spec but still. "Tastes sour," I trembled contact to contact. Ari slithered down and crouched near my shoulder.

Moments she said, "It's stilled air, might be some action crosswinds." Her wings flexed a bit and we looked for the petrichor druid chemsign. At range I could pick out just the echo of their craft, the sizzle of their spells registered a bare zero zero DV scale. "Specced it, action's noways near," I thrummed between us. "Sus, though, we're ahead of schedule, let's walk it." She affirmed, and we moved like glass, opened the target pack and specced every step.

Thorns still, sharp rocks earth clay uphill still, air still, but the maddening aquamarine fuzz of rain cluttered my sights. Ari flexed her wings on her thorax again, rocket platforms twitched nervously. "There's too much fizzing," she hissed, picking up my discomfort. Gauss guns on her sensary pointed hither and yon. "Fuck it," I thrummed, "Bact's good, bail." She mounted me from behind and we dug in the dirt, boiled and processed and locked. Branches burst up from earthbound as every spec greenlined on me, and I screamed in sickeningly fractured agony.

I could feel my exo cracking where the branches of an Atlas banyan crushed around three of my legs, pain and fluids pouring out of my body. Had to be a twin trunk, at least. Even my spiracles bled. Jagged shapes stung my left claw and numbed one of my injured legs. I could hear Ari's screeching and felt her weight shift from me to the ground. My specs were greened out in swampfire, I could taste the ozone and my own charred exo, but I was blind.

"I can't scope!" Ari's panic crackled and echoed through my body, fuled the rush of toxic stims and lit up my heat sinks bright from overclock. "I'm on it, I've got guidance," I lied, throwing a narcofilter into com. I dialed in broad spec and fired a wave of chaff, unspooled PDN for mass nightmare. Swapped high-speed into UV infra sonic organize scope range til I could line out the elves. Ari's screeches spiraled in time to hits I felt in my neuron clusters, dirt and rocks rattled from being skywards. Contermanded a second hit of stims in my system, cooled collect.

Instant recovery between the chaff and PDN. The stinging cold geometry faded its intensity on my exo. I experienced the reward of disrupted Atlas' soundscreams enduring the mortifying ordeal of being scoped. Shortburst the dial range to Ari. Caught backflow of her relief. Found the seconds we needed to move.

The Atlases were over halfway out of the soil, still partly wrapped their heavy branches over Ari and me. Quad trunks, fuck. Druid support, double fuck. The fully exposed organizing casters ways off, spec a kilo or two, but their alien decoms were holding up to the PDN. I pulled back to Ari and my pain receptors shut off the instant my legs twisted and shed broken exo like ice, steel grinding itself each movement. I checked her stat. Half a leg and one wing had been torn off. Her body was coated with slick black and green fluid, mixed with white foam. Her secondary leg was intact and functional, but I could see six bad hits from those light spears.

I cut loose a second wave of chaff, narrowed for the type-beta shieldworks from the druids, scattered an arch of green spears - I put my wings and claws out front to do their job just in time to take the secondary hit of jagged blue geometry. My back legs twisted excessively past their limit. The tri-polyplate claws held, mostly, some smoldering layers blasted free and others melted. I tight focused neural disruptors at the Atlases, cut more chaff, joyed at their screams of fear and agony. "Ari, my target." She swayed but unfolded her stabilizer struts, hit one of them with three rockets, a particle shot, and a full sec from the gauss, frosted it's decom and tore up the left half of its body. Glistening dark blue blood exploded across the other two and it laid out, alive but no threat. Heat fins spread wide open white hot underside her wings, her legs. "Casey your fuckin legs they-"

I flickered low beams at the druids, didn't connect but gave em a minute to think, redirected a broad neural disrupt at our six, more encouraging screeches, I filled the crab with the worst of my mind to saturate multiple kilometers in the PDN of my own fears and nightmares. "Ari, not now, cover."

Even on a wing and half a leg she was a beautiful flower of agony, spread of rockets, heavy beams, blistered depslugs streaking from her to seek the druids proved weakest by their alchemical conversion to bright blue explosions of blood and bone. Steamed heavy off her sink. The second Atlas was fighting up through my disrupt. I hit it with a PDN flare mix, and didn't catch the green blue spellwork shield crackling twixt its bark til I had to duke it.

The Altas caught a claw with one limb, put two more into my main body, right center, and I was overwhelmed by the vomit stench of my tissue and exo and endo rupturing, polymuscles shredded, but I boiled my feet in deep with stage one for jump, and got my other claw on its middle trunk. My com was choking garbled but I said, "Ari-" before I felt the left rear third joint sheer and snap.

She was to me before I could waver with her forelegs' high beam up to max in its face. Light hotter than stars burst the banyan into three flaming pieces, sheer through the trunk, bloodless, charred beyond recognition in a second. She buzzed me. "We can't stay." The last of the Atlases was pulling a highdef organized multiplier out of the earth. Looked like pine tree trunk but carried in a single limb. I specced another Atlas closing. One good HDOM shot would dust my armor. One bad shot would vaporize Ari. "You're right."

I tried to spool up, but the PDN was dead, so I blasted chaff along the ground in front of the Atlas. Give it some hot shrapnel to work through, dialed the rest for max dispersal, and cut three quarters skyward. "Grab a lift," I snarled and she was on me. "And set your main."

The earth churned and my legs threatened to give, but held. "Case. I tried that last week, rec? I couldn't hit shit."

"Yeah. You tried it. We didn't." I hit the jump, we caught sky.

Ari's limbs folded around my body, and her remaining claws clamped, support struts pierced my exo secondary limbs unfolded to add more stability. She shifted the main rifle forward from inside her thorax and opened the remaining wing, heat vents fully extended, coolant spraying out of her wounds as it pumped triple time through her sinks. Her thorax flexed heavy with breath and the gun's wiring and nerve rigs flushed the scent of her excited musk around us. I wrapped my three remaining legs up over my body and clung to her, spun us with my wings on our axis. We had a beautiful aerial view of the remains of our own ambush, our legs fallen close like hands of dying lovers.

The main gun of the wasp would not be possible to see if we had human eyes. A three stage system requiring the finest care with aiming and multiple stabilizers to the firing platform ensuring a clean hit, combined with full heat dispersal for blowback. It would break up shield and decoms, disruptors and polyplate, followed instantly by a particle beam depslug mixture.

I wrapped my claws over her cockpit segment and she fired. The slug obliterated the Atlas, its multiplier detonating and spraying organized green spears haphazardly with blue geometry. The drop target went up and threw a cloud of concentrated bacto over what looked like eight kilometers. I saw the beam digging a canyon through the earth moments before the bacteria and debris blacked the site.

We were thrown, I lost a second leg and both wings. Deaf to coms. My chaff clattered off us, shredded our armor. The full thorax and both of Ari's rear legs were torn away by recoil and a furnace blast of overheating power couplings as I held fiercely, even when my left claw was cleanly severed by the last flash of the beam and my main body punctured and boiled by her shrapnel. I realized I wasn't deaf, I simply was unable to hear anything except Ari screaming and lost valuable seconds - nothing to see but sky and only rushing air over our spinning bodies.

I jetted waste from my secondary vents, they spat angrily but caught air. Risked it, held Ari with my only two legs and put my claw between us and the freight train rush up on drop target three. I hoped enough was left of her to hear me shout, "Impact Impact Impact!"

The ground was very wide and very fast and black. It was-

Nothing. Black.

Casey. Casey. You need to get up.

"Casey," Ari's hiss was a near inaudible comm. "Casey please... I can't move my legs."

I specced, half blind, dialed it through. There was a flicker of distant green. Move. I felt joints and plastic muscle, raw tissue and white foam dig the earth, I moved in a little circle. The drop ship was waiting - no pilot, just auto for a grunt mission in and out.

"I'm up," I lied to Ari. She hissed, "I know you aren't." I specced myself. One leg could move, claw somehow intact, thank you polyplate. Other legs just partial joints, trailed their hydraulics and burned nerves. Quarter chopped off the rear platform. "Am so," I thrummed and put my claw in the ground, levered. Slid my partial legs underneath and my one good one up. "I'm up." I started pushing myself along the earth.

Felt like dragging the big protein drums on kitchen duty, couldn't lift much as rock myself back and forward one side at a time. I found what was left of Ari.

"How's it look," she hissed. One of her two remaining legs was shattered in half a dozen places, congealed foam doing nothing for the fluid leaks. Her other leg might last. Sensary might even be salvageable. There were holes gaping in her deformed cockpit, gel and blood oozing through cracks. "Looks great," I thrummed. "You lost so much weight."

Her laugh wheezed. "You got one good leg Ari, I need you to hitch a ride." She fumbled in the mud and found the tattered edge of my exo, dragged herself half onto what was left of my main body, and I pushed. Her voice was distant now, "Hey Case, remember that night fight, we jumped a bunch of elves with a flashblind."

Just a few meters. "Yeah, pretty funny. Guess they remembered us." She wheezed again, her comm was rattling. "And that time we used ice for heat sig?" My claw hit metal. I strained on the loading ramp without traction. "That was pretty good too, yeah." Fuck it. I grabbed one of the less important control struts and heaved, pulled. Felt my innards and Ari slither along metal, almost home. One more pull. "Hey Casey, hey. Remember when the fuckin elves ambushed us with our same dumb ideas and you thought I should shoot em on the jump."

I punched the recall code, the hatch cranked shut, dumped the tangled mess of our bodies into the drop bay. Acceleration crushed us. "Yeah Ari, that wasn't the best idea ever." The rig loomed up. "Right Ari? I'm an idiot." The comm was quiet.

We were in the bay and I was in a pool of sludge. I could feel my legs and arms and bruises and my own real blood on my face. I could walk and and almost stand, crawling clambering falling down the lift stairs before the tech could say anything. He slipped after me, clutched railing and tried to keep his footing in the mucus as I went sidewinding to our sad and shattered shells, tech prying open the jaws of Ari's with hydraulic levers.

I shoved through as the seal cracked, reek of poisoned atmos and stagnant amniogel, the snap of bone and it fell open, pouring Ari onto the hanger floor, washed up against me. I was on my knees, she was in my arms. Bone showed through one of her broken legs and a bloody hole in her ribs frothed blood. Her bottom lip split so bad I could see her shattered teeth sticking through it. Blood from her ears, nose, eyes, whole body a contour map of bruises.

Ari's one good eye cracked and she gurgled wet and rough, "You look like shit, Case." She spit blood.

"Told you. No excuses bitch."

"Fuck. No exchs." Nitrile gloved hands pulled us apart, and meds were shoving tubes into her, slapping dermals on her. They had a stretcher. Someone shone a light in my eye, I felt the cold slap of a dermal on my shoulder blade. "No excuses," I slurred as loud as I could. He said, "You shouldn't be standing up." I didn't know if Ari could hear. "I'm gonna be waiting!" They hit me with another dermal and goodnight.

It was like that for awhile, before I could go back to my bunk. Lot of debrief, I got a commendation, which mostly meant some extra cash in my account if I lived to spend it. Some looks. DeeDee came by and said "Mad respect." Scatter stopped in with some nearly not paint thinner whiskey. Squad leader came in and chewed me out. Then some days in my smaller, worse bed. I lay on my clothes and punched back painkillers and beauties, then got out of my space and flipped the latch on Ari's room to get into hers.

It looked the same. Laundry unlaundered, whiffs of fermented sweat and sex, crumpled up wrappers for hot sauce, thermalprint hentai, congealed shampoo and soap blocks. I held a tanktop to my face and inhaled, poked around her trash listlessly til I saw a scrap of print. Her last psyche, pages of red and yellow, warnings cautions, parts of it printed red on black. I banged out of her room with it clenched in my hot fist, storming along the counter spin corridors to Ring 2.

Medical. Deep breath. I pushed the door in and gave Ari the biggest smile I could muster and she asked, "Oh no. What's wrong," from where she was still ensconced in tubes to keep her lungs working while the biogels slowly closed her skin over. "What do you mean, what's wrong," I forgot to separte teeth for talking. Maybe a couple weeks before she was walking wounded. "You got a smile like you dropped a battery pack on your foot."

She looked better with her lips stitched back together. Her new front teeth were steel. I blinked and shook and pursed my lips so I wouldn't snarl when I unfolded the psyche chart she'd left balled up under her desk. Needles prickled along my feverish forehead. Tried to find words as she shifted her eyes away from mine and just said, "Oh. That."

I dropped it on her stomach. "Why? You could've- It... Why?" I've been called poetic in my time.

Ari started to bite her lip then stopped. Rubbed her eyes with her palms. "Ow. Everything hurts - Casey, what are you gonna do when you get outta here?"

"Because you can- Huh?" I blinked several more times rapidly. "Uh, I dunno. Little place with some twenty-threes? Maybe a dog? Nothing too special, just wanted a shot at like... living yeah?"

"But you think about it and... y'know, you see something?"

"Yeah, I guess, I mean a little. Who knows?"

She shut her eyes. "Well I didn't see anything." Squeezed her eyes. "I didn't think I'd- Case, I didn't come here for a shot at living. I... didn't see that. That idea." Tears slipped out of her eyes and she grimaced, shoved her hands against them. "I never planned to live that long," her breath hitched.

I didn't know what to do with my hands, whether to move over to her, or what. I nodded to her closed eyes, felt stupid. "Ari, I'd, uh, like it if you did."

She let out a long breath and opened damp eyes. "That's what, I mean, I met you. It's been good, and like. I realized I had started thinking about it."

"Thinking about it?"

"About being alive. Somewhere there, I mean, like, I thought about that I might want a future if it had you in it. And I guess I freaked about the idea it might not happen, and I wanted to keep you somewhere safe where I wasn't going to mess that up."

I folded my arms. "Ari, I fucking swear." She looked back at me. "I don't care how much it hurts, move the fuck over right now, I'm gonna hug you so bad you break another four ribs."

She slid a bit, and I managed to half lay in the bed around the IV tubes. I managed not to break her ribs. Big, stupid and hot tears dripped down my cheeks and nose as I squeezed, then grabbed her hands in mine. "Every day you wake up. I'll give you that future. You might not see yourself and that's okay because you'll see me, and I hope that's enough."

"I kinda kinda love you bitch," I clutched her tight. She kissed me, stitches rough against my lips, and smiled as she did. "You can stay," she said.

"I'll stay." And I did.

#gore cw #body horror #t4t #mecha #original fiction

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pbforeva · 5 months ago

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imma try to post a story on here but like this will be part 1

fandom: wbb (uconn)

synopsis: **TW: DV**

When Paige Bueckers and Evelyn Park meet during their second year at Uconn, they are both intrigued by the complexity of each other's characters and slowly become friends. Paige eventually realizes she has developed feelings for Evelyn; however, Evelyn is in a committed relationship with her boyfriend, Blake. Will Paige be able to articulate her feelings to Evelyn, and will Evelyn reciprocate those feelings despite her boyfriend? *Paige doesn't get injured in this story*

ok actual story now

—

Evelyn's pov:

I hate waking up, especially before school. The blaring alarm seeps into my ear while I muster enough strength to turn it off and get out of bed. It is too early for this, I think as I stare at the digital numbers that stare back reading, 8:03 a.m. I groan as I stumble into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face, which wakes me up a little more. After brushing out my hair, I go back to my room to get dressed for the day, and I grab a pair of ripped mom jeans from my closet and a pink crop top to pair with it.

As I'm walking to campus, thinking about the date I have planned with my boyfriend, Blake, and I trip over the curb in front of me. Omg, this cannot be happening, I think as I await the inevitable impact of the hard concert below me; however, instead of feeling the hard ground, I feel two hands grab me around my waist.

As I collect myself, I begin to turn around to face the mysterious stranger who saved me from getting up in front of all my peers, except now I have to face the embarrassment of facing this faceless stranger. When I turn around, I'm greeted by a tall blonde in front of me. I looked up to meet her deep blue eyes, and my cheeks flushed as I saw the smirk and the worried look on the two friends who surrounded her.

Her voice soon invades my ears, and she says, "Hey, are you good? I'm Paige, by the way," her words embed themselves in my brain as I try to think of a plausible excuse. "Oh yeah, thanks, by the way, I guess I just got lost in thought, oh, and I'm Evelyn," the words wobble out of my mouth with a hint of embarrassment present. Her smirk grows after noticing the pink on my cheeks and the humiliation in my words.

"Well, Evelyn, this is Aubrey," she says, pointing to the tall girl on her left, "and this is Azzi," pointing to the stunning girl on her right. Gosh, why are they all so pretty? I think to myself. And tall, I wonder. "Well, it was nice to meet you guys, and thank you again," I say, turning back to Paige, "But I have to go to class now, sorry!" I finish before I pivot and stride away toward my Advanced Psychology class that I am now late for.

As I'm walking away, I catch Aubrey, I think, saying, "Well, she was nice, Paige." "Yeah, and the...," I hear the start of Paige's response before I'm out of earshot. I mulled over her words for the entire walk to my class; however, I was still curious about the blonde's words during my class. What was she saying? A plethora of options swirled in my mind, drowning out my professor's voice. Annoying? Weird? Clumsy? Ugh, I am never going to stop thinking about this.

Paige's pov:

"Well, she was nice, Paige," I hear Aubrey say as my eyes are still fixed on Evelyn's curly hair getting farther from us. "Yeah, and she was cute too. I mean, did you see how flustered she was?" I laughed, tearing my gaze away from her figure and focusing on Aubrey. I wondered if I would ever bump into the beautiful brunette again before Azzi interjected, "Yeah, but did something seem off about her to you guys? Cause it did to me." Aubrey and I shrug, and we continue walking to the basketball facility.

We arrive at 9:05 a.m., and as we walk into the locker room, KK suddenly shrieks, "Why are you guys late?" I begin to speak, but Aubrey interrupts me by saying, "We were on time, but then Paige performed the heroic act of saving a girl from falling, and we had to stay for a moment because Paige was staring at her after." she dramatically giggles out, while a blush rises to my face as I try to defend myself, only making my predicament worse. I hear a course of laughter coming from the rest of the girls in the locker room, and I give up and head to my locker, chuckling a little, recalling the look on her face.

The team and I walk out onto the court and start our warm-up. I run down the court, and I can't stop myself from wondering if I am ever going to see Evelyn again, I try to shake the thought and focus on basketball, but her face won't leave my mind. Suddenly, I am ripped away from my thoughts by the voice of my coach, "Bueckers, get over here!" he shouts from across the court. Oops, I guess my dissociation was a little too noticeable, I think as I jog over to him.

"Bueckers, I don't know what you are thinking about, but it is clearly not basketball. Go take five to get some water, and when you come back, I expect you to have your head in the game," he assertively says to me. I need to get her out of my head. I go over to the bench and try to think of anything else while I drink my water. I take a deep breath and head back onto the court with Evelyn tucked neatly into the back of my mind as I focus on the drills we are doing.

Soon, 11 a.m. rolls around, and practice finishes without any other issues. After chatting with a few teammates, I start the trek back to the dorms so I can shower. During the walk, I see the shiny brown curls of no one other than Evelyn in front of me. I walk faster so I can catch up to her, and soon, we are walking side by side. I look down and say, "Oh hey, Evelyn." She looks up at me, startled before her features soften in recognition, and she then replies, "Oh hey, Paige."

I watch as her eyes flicker down my practice jersey before asking me, "Oh, are you on the basketball team?"

"Oh yeah, I am," I reply, wondering if she didn't know who I was. "Is that why you and your friends are all so tall?" she asks, "Oh my gosh, no I'm sorry that was rude," she rambles out before I interrupt her, "Oh, you're good," I laugh out before adding "But yeah I guess," still laughing. I glance over and notice her pink cheeks before I realize I'm at the dorms. "Well, hey, it was nice talking to you, but I gotta go now," I say, looking into her eyes, noticing a glint of disappointment before it quickly disappears, and she replies with, "Oh ok, I suppose I should go too, my boyfriend is waiting for me." She then turns and walks away as I turn to walk into the dorms with a tinge of regret for not talking longer.

#paige bueckers #uconn wbb #slow burn #oc #wlw post #new story #first post #aubrey griffin #kk arnold #azzi fudd #paige x fem oc

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nilesdaughter · 1 month ago

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seal my heart and break my pride

Fandom: The Legend of Vox Machina Characters: Percy De Rolo, Cassandra De Rolo, Keeper Yennen (Mention), Anna Ripley (Mention), Shaun Gilmore (Mention), Raishan (Mention) Word Count: 697 Note: SPOILERS FOR TLOVM S3E6 [Also found on AO3.]

The dawn, Percival decides, is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because it signals the beginning of a new day. Another day to live, another day to fight. The Sun Tree, however charred, still stands. Whitestone still stands even if she and her people are limping in order to do so.

But it all still feels like a curse because the weak sunlight lays bare all of his mistakes and regrets. He swore to honor his family’s memory by taking up the responsibility that he was never actually meant to inherit, and he’s failed so spectacularly at it. He hates that he wasn’t here, because he should have been. His people are decimated and his city is in ruins and there’s still so much smoke lingering in the air.

(Why must he always choke on smoke, suffocate under its weight?)

He turns away from the main square, away from the piles of dead being gathered, and looks for his sister. When he does find Cassandra, his stomach twists even further as he watches her direct scattered members of the Pale Guard, never mind how much pain she must be in, how many bandages she’s wrapped in. She’s doing so much— has done so much—for Whitestone while he’s been away.

(He wasn’t here. Not when it mattered.)

He tries to swallow down the guilt and approaches her just as she falls back onto the nearest piece of debris that seems sturdy enough to bear her weight and isn’t actively smoldering.

“Cass—” he begins, voice cracking in a way he so desperately hoped it wouldn’t, but she fixes him with a startlingly sharp look.

“I know that tone and I don’t need pity right now, brother.”

“It’s not… I wasn’t…” he flounders, certainly not expecting that to have been her response. “No, I wanted to apologize.”

“Why?”

He blinks, taken even more aback by that, because there’s an entire list he can pick from.

(And he’s so tired of lists.)

“I should have been here,” he settles on, because that is what currently sits at the forefront of his mind.

Cassandra falls silent as she studies him, her expression unreadable as she does so, before she eventually sighs and shakes her head. “You got here when you could. I think the consequences would have been far more dire if you arrived any later than you did.”

Percy frowns—she should be more upset with him, should hate him when this isn’t even the first time he’s abandoned her when she needed him most—but sighs and nods in acknowledgement. Rather than continue arguing, he asks, “Is there anything you need help with at the moment?”

“Keeper Yennen and I have it handled, I think.”

“Of course,” he replies. He pauses and hesitantly adds, “You’re doing a good job, Cassandra. I hope you know that.”

“I’m certainly trying,” she says wryly.

“I suppose that’s all any of us can do at the moment.”

Cassandra nods her agreement and lets out a small sigh, turning her head a little to look up at the castle in the distance. “...I’m tired of losing our home,” she admits in a small voice.

Percy follows her gaze, feels the guilt rise up acidic in his throat, twist like a knife in his gut, as he watches plumes of smoke curl up the towers. “As am I.”

He let Ripley go. He should have been here, protected Cassandra, protected the people of Whitestone. He saw his city rebuild and even begin to flourish again and he was so sure everything would be all right. He thought Gilmore’s wards would be enough. He led Raishan to Whitestone. He let Ripley go again —

“Percival?”

He blinks and looks at Cassandra, notices the way her brow is furrowed with concern.

“It’s been a long night,” he says weakly and leaves it at that so he doesn’t have to try to articulate his spiraling thoughts.

She lets out a single, sharp laugh. “It truly has.” She sighs and pushes herself to her feet, wobbling a little when she’s upright, but managing to maintain her composure. “And I’m afraid it will be an even longer day.”

#critical role #the legend of vox machina #tlovm spoilers #tlovm season 3 #percy de rolo #cassandra de rolo #I'm begging the cast to leave Whitestone alone ;w; that's my comfort city #Tia writes

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winterwhisperz-blog · 1 year ago

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hi there! can i ask for headcanons of the touchstarved lis reacting to a mc serenading or singing a love song to them? thought it’d be cute!

EEEEE Omg yes tysm for the ask!! This was such a fun prompt to write 😭

I ended up uhh, accidentally making these more like one-shots rather than just headcanons—so I’ll have to split these up into parts. The first batch is Ais and Leander so I hope you enjoy them !!

Warnings: None really, characters just might be a accidentally a bit ooc.

Notes: Gender-neutral MC, fluff.

Alright les get into it !!

How The LI Would React Fo An Mc Who serenades them/sings them a love song

Ais

Okay okay okay okay- so, this is my first vision.

Bear with me as I attempt to articulate this.

You and Ais have just left a night at the tavern, where the conversation of love novels and plays was brought up. The chilly air of twilight is fading into a grey, murky morning. You both are a bit wasted, (if you don’t drink, then blame this on literally getting no sleep.) and as the earlier conversation resurfaces in your mind, you make a comment about how you’d do all those dramatic theatrics far better than those characters in the books.

And since this is with Ais, who imo probably takes anything as a challenge, smirks at this comment, his red eyes piercing the hazy fog of dawn.

“Oh yeah? Are you going to sing for me, Sparrow?”

Chuckling, you give a lazy shrug. “Sparrows are song birds, right?”

He quirks a brow, grin widening as he evidently waits for your promised performance. But your head is pounding with exhaustion, and when you open your mouth to sing, a loud, eye watering yawn is the only thing to come out.

You wobble on your feet, knocking lightly into Ais’ chest, somehow still warm even in the cold air. You feel his laugh before hearing it. “Hmm, maybe later. Let’s get you home first.”

And even though forgetting what happened after Ais guided you home and helped you to bed—you awoke, your mind ringing with your earlier promise. And since I’m guessing this MC is a theater kid, you aren’t going to rest until you fulfill your claim of being better than those sucky, frog croaking characters in those books.

So throwing on your clothes, you get the instrument of your choice, spend the rest of the day rehearsing, get some flowers and head over to Ais’ place when evening closes on the horizon.

Ais can only be explained as being utterly amused when seeing you dramatically throw open the doors and toss him the flowers. You see him about to make a comment, and put a finger on his lips, shushing him.

Your performance is obviously, extraordinary. The words slip from your lips with ease, a smile brightening your eyes when watching Ais’ adoring expressions.

ALRIGHT

that was my first vision— now for an Mc that’s a bit more timid, and less likely to do the previous performance—

I can see you kneeling on the floor of Ais’ place, Princess snuggled up on your lap as you sing a little tune you’ve been making up for the past few days.

Bandaged up fingers gently petting her head as she lets out a few soulless style purrs of contentment.

Ais overhears this, taking a few moments to take in the sight cause OMG THATS HIS FAVORITE PERSON SINGING TO HIS PET

But once you seem to be done, singing drifting to a low humming, the sound of his footsteps snap your eyes upward, where you see his usual smirk playing on his lips. “Didn’t know you could sing.”

A flash of embarrassment spreads across your chest—you aren’t used to people hearing you. You keep your eyes on Princess, clearing your throat and trying to respond but getting a bit tongue-tied. You end up muttering, “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

His lets out an amused breath, and settles down next to you. For a few quiet moments you both give Princess MUCH DESERVED attention, before Ais lets out a little whistle that perks her up, stretching before leaving your lap. Before you can even protest, Ais replaces her weight, plopping his head in the center of your lap. Eyes closed contently, a smile twitching as you let out an annoyed huff.

“My turn.” Is the only thing he says, leaving no room for arguments as he makes himself quite comfortable.

And even though you pretend to be annoyed, it’s honestly really cute. With a roll of your eyes, you start combing your fingers through his hair. “Why do I put up with you?”

“Mmm, because I introduced you to Princess.”

“Ah, there it is.”

With a fond laugh, you end up singing the same tune to Ais, warmth blooming in your chest as you watch as the tension melts from his shoulders.

AWWWWW

ALR

So there was Ais. NOW

UNTO LEANDER

Leander

We’ll start at the Wet Wick, it’s a night full of laughter, dancing, and chaos. It didn’t take the crowd much convincing to get out the instruments and break into drunken songs and shanties. The bartender frantically swipes cups and mugs off the counter as piles of boots stamp across the wood, stomping to the bustling rhythm.

Leander is talking with the Bartender, trying to calm them down as they gesture to the rowdy bunch messing up the tavern. Seeing his stress, you try to find a way to keep the energy, but douse it enough so the crowd doesn’t end up bringing down the roof.

You grab the nearest instrument, climb unto a table, and clear your throat. It’s been long enough that you’ve already gotten most of the Bloodhounds respect, so the mere sound gets the majority to quiet—the scattered noise snuffing out as they get harshly shushed.

All eyes on you, especially the toxic green of Leander’s, you feel your confidence flicker for a moment before you straighten your back and try out a few tunes on your instrument. Mustering up your best confident smile, you dramatically gesture to Leander, who looks curious, amused, and definitely a bit confused.

“I would like to dedicate this song to our dear Leander, and—“ You shoot a glance at the Bartender and wink. “And our lovely, ever so gracious, patient host.”

The crowd laughs, lifting up their drinks with encouraging smiles. The bartender massages their temples, though you spot a hint of a grateful smile before you dive into the corniest, sappiest love song known to man.

****

ALR

Now again, unto an mc who’s a bit more shy.

It’s been a long day, and it shows on the both of you. Though Leander’s eyes always look like he hasn’t once slept in his entire life, you can tell by how slow he moves that he’s more exhausted than usual. He leads you to your room, stopping at the door to unwrap your bandages, pressing a kiss to your knuckles.

You almost want to ask him to stay this time, in hopes you can get him to sleep. At least for a few minutes. But when you open your mouth, you feel the words die on your tongue. It ends like every other time, you say goodnight, he leaves—begrudgingly—and you go inside your room regretting not saying anything.

But this time, as you’re washing the dirt of the day off your face, you keep thinking about him, how tried he looked—nope, you gotta find a way to get that man to sleep.

Drying off your face, you slide your door open and start your search for Leander. The tavern is buzzing with the usual energy, but he’s not among the crowd. Carefully avoiding everyone, you slip behind the counter and into the back.

(I have like, no idea what the back looks like—but for the snippet, I’m guessing it’s some kinda kitchen.)

You see him, his large figure shadowed by the dim light. You can hear a faint humming as he sluggishly cleans off grime from one of the counters. Taking no notice of you yet, you inch closer, listening as the humming turns to quiet lyrics.

It’s a love song you know, sounding deeper, almost solemn in the tone of his voice. It’s calming, soothing, though it makes you feel a little sad.

You walk closer, closer—until you bend over his shoulder, chiming in with a more cheerful take on the song. He flinches, head whipping round—eyes widening in shock before softening at your face.

“Oh, Mc, I thought you went to bed.”

You shrug, “Can’t sleep.”

His brows furrow in concern, tired eyes looking over yours. Before he can say anything though, and before you can lose your confidence, you plunge for the first words to come to mind. “Not without you.”

His eyes widen again, blinking.

That…did not sound nearly as subtle as you had hoped.

Heat rushing to your cheeks, you plow on. “I—mean you just, look really tired. And I’ve never really seen you sleep before—not like I would’ve watched you or anything. But look, everyone needs to sleep at least a little. So I was wondering if you would be okay with coming to my room tonight. Does that sound weird? I didn’t mean for it to sound weird—“

Leander’s laugh helps ease your embarrassment a bit, and he reaches for your hands, eyes glinting with adoration. “Well if you’re the one inviting me, how can I say no?”

If you knew it would’ve been that easy, you would’ve asked a lot sooner.

When Leander settles next to you, you reach for him and guide his head to rest over your chest, fingers stringing through his hair as you try to soothe the tension still in tightening his shoulders. You don’t ignore how frozen he feels, or how his heartbeat never slows enough to ease into sleep.

You kiss the top of his head, softly singing the song from earlier. Hoping it will help.

The night stretches on, and though your efforts put him at ease, you fell asleep before he ever did. His eyes only flickering closed for a few precious moments before he jolts awake. Leaving in the morning before you can worry over him again.

TA DAAAAA!

I’m so sorry those turned out to be long 😭 next time I do headcanons I’ll make sure to make them actual headcanons— but yes! Thank you so much for the ask !! The next batch will feature the rest of the LI and I’ll try to make them shorter.

For now though, I hope you have a wonderful day, find a heart shaped cloud, play your favorite game and that your pillow is cold on both sides! 🫶

#touchstarved #touchstarved leander #touchstarved headcanons #touchstarved x reader #touchstarved game #writing #answered asks #thanks for the ask!#touchstarved ais #virtual novel

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guardevoir · 8 months ago

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So!

Arts and crafts convention!

I got dragged to one on very short notice because a friend I hadn't seen in forever suggested I take a quick little day trip to visit her and look at the spinning guild's con booth while I'm at it, and despite being notoriously bad with short-notice plans, I actually fucking got over myself for once!

It was fun! Even if I apparently remain completely incapable of dealing with crowds.

I found myself one of those little 3D-printed articulated dragons/lizards I've wanted since forever, got some assorted bits 'n bobs (like a cheesy metal raven skull pendant that'll go great with my vulture LARP character), and also got to hang out with the spinning folks for a bit.

Tried out a Kromski Fantasia (surprisingly pretty irl, and also a surprisingly nice, agile-feeling wheel for a double-treadle*, but ngl I'm still happy I went with my Kiwi, even if I still think it's comparatively really ugly. Turns out the upside of the rough-hewn boxy IKEA look is that it's incredibly fucking stable and has zero wobbling anywhere compared to the Fantasia or my vintage wheel), tried out one of the Ashford top-whorl spindles (they don't feel as heavy in person as you'd expect them to and I liked them a surprising amount (they are speedy!), but at the end of the day I find bottom-whorl spindles more comfortable to use)

Here's my tiny skein of very badly chain-plied yarn from that spindle:

(I promise I know how to chain ply better than that (vaguely), but between the sensory overload and the unfamiliar equipment, I'm glad I got a yarn out of it at all)

And they also let me take one of their "blended by random booth visitors" rolags!

This is very likely to turn into pure mud, but I was intensely intrigued by the mystery of it all.

*I'm sorry, I know people like their double treadles, but I just hate how they feel. If there had been a good, foldable budget option with one normal-width goddamn treadle I would have gone for that one immediately.

#guardy's fiber arts tag

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leaderpinhead · 3 months ago

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Azul - Poor Unfortunate Soul

Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial current prompt. Notes: This takes place pre-land boot camp for Octotrio. I started writing this for another prompt, but seeing the prompt for FFF this week, I decided to cut almost 1500 words off what I had originally written. I also just enjoy putting Azul in situations where he's not allowed to hide behind his smugness.

Azul should have known better than to trust the Leech brothers. He knew it the moment he realized the twins weren’t at the meeting spot. He tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t hard to imagine their mother had caught them attempting to sneak out so late. Floyd wasn’t exactly quiet, and Jade would have sounded the alarm just to be a menace.

A bright flash illuminated the water around him. Azul tipped his head towards the surface just in time to see an explosion of bright colors distorted through the water. He propelled him towards the surface.

The whistling eruption in the dark sky made him cover his ears, his hearing more sensitive now that the water didn’t muffle the explosions. Between each round of fireworks, he could hear the happy cries of the spectators on the nearby beach. A large bonfire on the beach illuminated the forms of a dozen or so humans.

“Help!”

Azul almost missed the tiny cry over the clap of another firework. He searched the area around him with narrowed eyes. His vision was already blurry when he came to the surface, but the combination of staring at the bonfire and the fireworks had spawned small dots in his vision. He would have completely looked over the nearby buoy had a firework not exploded at the same moment. The light of the fizzling sparks was just enough for him to see an odd pale blob bobbing alongside the buoy.

A small part of the pale blob lifted from the buoy. “Help!”

Azul ducked just below the surface of the water and drifted closer to the buoy. With his vision clearer underwater, he only had to wait for another firework to see the outline of two long legs treading water. Seeing the strange limbs made him relax a little. A human—a human who sounded desperate for help.

He drifted in the current just below the buoy. Perhaps the human had underestimated the currents and been pulled out to sea. Even young merfolk were warned not to swim so close to the nearby cliffs because of the rough currents. He and the twins had found enough sunken ships around the cliffs to know shipwrecks were a common occurrence. The Sea Witch herself was said to have saved a marooned sailor for a price.

Thinking of the Sea Witch, Azul swam to the water’s surface. He remained cautious, only exposing himself from the eyes up. The human’s arms desperately clung to the buoy. Azul slowly drifted closer.

The human jerked up from the buoy with a suddenness that sent Azul shooting away from them. In the light of the fireworks, Azul could make out the general features of the fuzzy figure. Long dark hair plastered against a round pale face with two wide blue eyes peeking through the strands. She looked to be around the same age as him too.

The human gasped. Uncontrollable trembling made her teeth audibly clack together. “He-help, please.”

The chattering plea settled Azul’s nerves. This human couldn’t possibly be a threat, not with her high-pitched voice and tiny limbs barely keeping her above water. The suction cups on his arms made it easy for him to pull himself onto the buoy next to her. There was just enough light for Azul to see the human’s eyes widen.

Azul smirked. The language was still a bit clunky on his tongue, but he purposefully articulated each syllable. “Poor little human. I’ll help you back to shore...for a price.”

He didn’t expect the human to lunge at him. Hands latched onto his arms, fingers pinching and pulling until she was nose-to-nose with him. His shock made the buoy wildly wobble.

“I’ll do anything!” The human sounded almost excited now. “Absolutely anything. Even marry you!”

Azul didn’t get an opportunity to correct the terms of their contract when her mouth slammed against his. Or it would have had Azul not jerked back at the right moment. "I am forever in your debt,” the human stuttered. Her arms strangled his neck as she continued her almost scripted speech. “I’ll announce our engagement to my father as soon as I return, and he will proclaim it to all the Sunshine Lands!”

Azul began swimming to shore with a desperation he had never felt before. He had heard about her kind; the type of humans with weird—what was it called again?—fin fixations? Humans obsessed with marrying merfolk no matter what. It wasn’t all that surprising since the story of the Mermaid Princess marrying the land prince was wildly romanticized in the Sunshine Lands.

Azul did not want a contract with this crazy obsessed human.

Azul found the danger of skirting around the rockier shore nearby to be worth the risk of the stronger currents. He flung the human’s body up onto the first rock he found. She dramatically gasped and strangled his neck tighter, blabbering some kind of nonsense about “engagements” and “royal families.”

He found the strength to break free when he realized her face was closing in again. With a quick twist and a floppy eel wiggle, Azul threw himself into the water. The girl crawled to the edge of the rock like she would dive in after him. “Don't leave! I didn’t even get your name!”

“Rielle,” Azul said. “My name is Rielle. So if you ever see another merfolk ask for me by that name.”

Azul ducked into the water and hurried back home. He smirked at the thought of the human begging the next merfolk she encountered to help find her “beloved” Rielle. It would be difficult to act all pure and innocent with a human lamenting a broken heart.

And with his one and only witness of the night taken care of, he didn’t have to worry about the twins discovering his embarrassing first interaction with a human.

#twisted wonderland #twst #azul ashengrotto #original character #this new OC shall return #because I have plans for her #and it may or may not involve Azul

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sweetsmellosuccess · 8 months ago

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Love Lies Bleeding

Dir. Rose Glass

In Rose Glass’ version of the American Southwest, light pollution is non-existent. Instead, the inky blackness of the night sky is pockmarked perfectly with glittering points of distant stars and planets. It’s a beautiful, unspoiled tableau, standing in marked contrast to the all the griminess of the humans back on terra firma, their hopelessly complicated and messy interweavings casting a pall on those things within the Earth’s gravitational pull.

It’s that sort of pull that draws feckless gym manager, Lou (Kristin Stewart), to vagabond bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian), new to the small New Mexico town more or less run by corrupt gun runner Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, sporting a low ring of long hair that makes him look like comic book store owner), who also happens to be Lou’s estranged father.

Lou and Jackie bond very quickly — Lou’s pronounced queerness offering precious few options beyond the mewling propositions of fellow gym-worker Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), whose teeth are rutted with yellow stains — and very adroitly (the sex scenes between them are less about nudity and more about explicit context), just in time for other complications to set upon them. Jackie was in town only as a waystation for her eventual trip up to Vegas for a huge body-building competition, but she quickly gets pulled into Lou’s wobbly orbit, as her sister, Beth (Jena Malone), deals with the horrendous abuse heaped upon her by her husband, JJ (Dave Franco, with an applause worthy mullet).

When JJ finally goes too far, and lands his wife in the hospital with facial injuries, Lou’s fury translates to Jackie’s now-steroid-addled sense of justice, which she goes to enact on JJ’s leering visage. Now embroiled in the aftermath of her vengeance, Lou and Jackie have to navigate the tricky pathways around, and eventually to Lou’s father’s mansion ensconced up in the hills.

Glass, whose previous debut feature, Saint Maud, was a marvel of psychological complexity and restraint, has fully embraced the pulpy nature of the material (from a script penned by Glass and Weronika Tofilska), a kind of modern noir, set against a backdrop of queerness (reminiscent, ever so slightly, of the Warchowski’s Bound), and studded with some of Glass’s more enigmatic, lyric visual totems (close ups of giant insects, frequent cutaways to glowing red portraits of some of the principles haunting the drug-addled mind of Jackie).

There is also a visceral component to Glass’s vision: In one early scene, a fully-clothed Lou, lying on her stomach on a ragged couch, masterbates, as her cat slips between her slightly raised feet to nosh on some microwaved leftovers still on their plastic tray; in another, Lou, who smokes like a Harry Dean Stanton character, uses the smoke in her lungs as a kind of wispy sexual prop. Everything feels grubby and vaguely soiled, the endless detritus — from plastic food trays, to empty glass Steroid vials, to the forlorn emotional longing of characters whose lives are little to no consequence to anyone else — of human existence crowded around the characters miens like loose particles of ore around a magnet.

The problem is, grotty isn’t a personality: Too many of Glass’s characters, including Lou and Jackie, are flattened out stand-ins for noir tropes: Both have mysterious backgrounds of violence, but are never illuminated beyond the immediate needs of the plot, which holds precious few surprises, beyond Glass’s more adventurous flights of lyric fancy (a scene near the end plays out as fantasy-fulfillment in a way that is particularly jarring). In some ways, the character’s domiciles — Lou’s cluttered apartment, the sweat-soaked gym where they meet — are more articulated than the characters themselves.

As such, as much as Stewart and O’Brian lean into their roles, we really don’t know enough about them to be moved by their relationship, one way or the other. Without caring about them, the film loses a lot of steam, so that by the climactic showdown between Lou and her father, the stakes feel far too minimal to make an impact. Other than fulfilling the basic tenets of narrative closure, there isn’t a lot of flame to the film’s ubiquitous cigarette smoke.

#piers marchant #sweet smell of success #ssos #movies #films #love lies bleeding #rose glass #kristen stewart #ed harris #katy o'brian #jena malone #dave franco #new mexico #lgbtq #pulp

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apparitionism · 1 year ago

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Tabled 6

“Change the vocabulary!” Myka has just exclaimed in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, in a full-throated effort to bring Helena around to her newly realized way of thinking, here in this story occasioned by @barbarawar ’s months-ago @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange request regarding what would have happened if Myka and Helena had had their Boone-proposed coffee. Much has ensued since then: meetings poor and poorer, rendering hopes faint and fainter, leaving potentials squandered and... squandereder? Seeing to it that emotional moves make sense is always challenging, I find. People want to make sense to themselves, want to make sense of themselves, and someone as thinky as Myka would, I imagine, double-want that. But while we all contain multitudes, we tend to bumble through situations as unfull representations of those multitudes: weird gotta-keep-moving sharks desperate to present consistency. I too keep moving: trying to land this thing, even as it fights against the stick, remaining *this far* above ground. Apologies as always, my strung-along giftee. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 for the convoluted way we got here.

Tabled 6

“What?” Helena says, but it’s not her usual “what”; she’s obviously flummoxed, and her echo of Myka’s characteristic bafflement is precious. Preposterous, but precious.

Myka had hoped for some spark of recognition at her transformation of “change the rules,” but the confusion... it might be better. Sweeter. She tries not to make too much meaning out of this chime of similarity, even as she wants to pull that soft, bewildered “what” from the air and cradle it.

“I was trying to be clever,” she says. “Never mind that. And never mind fixing it, because we can do something else.”

“Repair it?” Helena says: a cautious, skeptical—and, yes, still baffled—synonym proffer.

Don’t laugh, Myka instructs herself, but faced with the idea that Helena really might think they’re playing a word game, it’s hard to follow her own order. “Never mind that too,” she says, a chuckle bubbling in her throat. “Because never mind. Because that’s it. Because you know what we actually can do?”

Helena raises her hands up, high, obviously in question, but really for all the world as if she were indeed being held at gunpoint.

This is not ending as it began, Myka tells the universe. Not as it began, or any other way.

She chambers the only bullet she has, aiming it right at Helena’s heart.

She pulls the trigger with a smile: “Ignore it.”

Hands still high, Helena opens her mouth slightly, and she squints, as if Myka has morphed into a dangerously unidentifiable animal.

Yes, Myka thinks, wildly, trying to live up to that wariness, I’ve been genetically engineered right here in this island of a hotel room! A Warehouse agent crossed with a yawper who has her very own plans! Amorphous ones, but! This infusion of abandon—Moreau power?—gives her the strength to hold Helena’s gaze.

The standoff lasts until Helena gets her language working again. “That recommendation is... entirely specious,” she says. “And you sound uncharacteristically overwrought.”

It’s a wobbly pair of objections. Myka draws even more strength from Helena’s lack of conviction. “What if it is? What if I am?”

“I don’t believe the slate can be wiped clean,” Helena says, a little more firmly. “Nor do you.”

So you do think we know each other. “I’m not saying it can. I’m saying I know it’s dirty, and so do you. I’m saying we ignore it.”

Helena’s face, from her “what” until now, has been a study in something Myka honestly never expected to see from her: full (fully wrong-footed) incomprehension. Myka doesn’t blame her, for she’s finding herself pretty incomprehensible, but she presses on. “You were ready to ignore my Boone-changed opinion of you. Weren’t you. When you hoped I’d know I was the someone else.”

After a pause: “That was then,” Helena says, her resentment at Myka for having worked her way to that truth—and for having articulated it—very clear.

“Oh, not anymore?” Myka pushes. “Even though now we both know I was that someone, and that there wasn’t a Giselle?”

“That was then,” Helena repeats.

Wait... “There’s a Giselle now?” Myka can’t process it, if it’s so. If it’s so, she will have to let Helena leave, then bury her face in one of the expensive pillows from this room’s unignorable bed and scream.

Another head-toss, the most dramatic one thus far, accompanies Helena’s next words. “I’m of a mind to say yes. But pursuant to my previously articulated policy, I’ll tell the truth: there isn’t, but there could be. In the future. I agreed to meet with you today to ensure you wouldn’t mistake yourself over Pete, but I have no intention of stepping into a similarly mistaken place. I’ve done my best to let this go.”

Myka can’t accept any of those words. “Ignore that too,” she says. She would like to point out that that whole litany was pretty rich, coming from Ms. To-Continue-to-Speak-Together, but instead she zeroes in on what seems the clearest contradiction. “But if you’re letting this go, why do you care about me mistaking myself over Pete?”

“Why did you care about me mistaking myself in Boone?” Helena counters, sour.

The response is uncharacteristically incompetent, particularly because Helena already knows the answer. “I could repeat something somebody once told me, about not walking away from what she called ‘your truth,’” Myka says, with what she hopes is a “that was then” fillip. “But I won’t. What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.” She allows herself a half-breath to marvel at how unusual it is for her to have this much of the upper hand.

“I could say the same thing.” Helena is visibly struggling not to acknowledge Myka’s advantage, but she collapses, saying, “The former, not the latter. I didn’t ask you first,” her devotion to accuracy (or so Myka reads it) defeating her. “Nevertheless I could repeat the something somebody once told you. As the why.”

Myka continues to press. “But isn’t repetition boring? You hate being boring.” She hopes this observation might visit upon Helena that kick of so we do know each other: “I bet you threw your coffee on me just so I wouldn’t walk away thinking how dull you’d been.”

“That was not the reason,” Helena says, but with a press of lips that suggests a ripple of otherwise.

Here, Myka shouldn’t press. “Then what was the reason.”

“You were being recalcitrant, and you know it,” Helena says.

“And what are you being now?” Myka asks, as laconically—as lean-back, as Helena-esque—as she can.

That question causes Helena to scowl and move energy into her hands, extending and then bending her fingers; though she doesn’t quite form them into fists, her intent is clear: she wants to deck Myka. It’s glorious. Please, do it, Myka urges internally, so we can get this all out in the physical open.

But Helena resets her face and waves her hands, the flutter of fingers dispelling the energy and its threat. “Realistic,” she says, prim.

Quit acting like me, Myka would tell her, but for the fallout. What she says is, “I wish I still had this coffee,” pointing at the table, the tragic cup-ceremony of which probably now deserves replaying as farce. Or was it farce the first time? No surprise, really, that they would skip-jump their way over the natural course of history.

“Yes, because stains solve problems,” Helena sarcastics.

Maybe; maybe not. Nevertheless, Myka says what’s true: “You seemed to think they would. And anyway, they redound to your benefit.” Helena greets this with a completely reasonable additional “what,” but Myka blows past it with, “Maybe because you ignore them? Anyway, this one here”—she gestures to the now-dry coffee-map on her shirt (it looks like no country, and she’s disappointed to be unable to name it as “this Brazil” or “this Azerbaijan”)—“kept me from walking away when you thought I shouldn’t.”

“A delaying tactic,” Helena says, offering only bored disdain, as if the very idea of it had been in the end inconsequential.

Keep pushing. “How long was that delay supposed to last, anyway?”

Helena doesn’t have an answer; Myka knows it because she begins to pace. She starts, of course, at the doorway, then walks past the bed, over to the window, and back again: bed then doorway, doorway then bed, bed then window, back and forth—six times, Myka counts—before she leans her back against the door, crosses her arms over her chest, and says, “Why are you tempting me this way? Why this way? What’s changed? In this room, in the few breaths since resignation and coffee, what’s changed?” It’s a fret.

“Well, what’s changed for you?” Myka asks, with no fret at all for once in her life. “More breaths since, but why did authority let you out of Boone-prison?”

Helena’s face produces an inscrutable scowl-smile hybrid. She thrusts herself away from the door, walks to the bed, rubs her hands together. Re-gathering energy? “I suppose I could offer a long-winded explanation about having been given to understand that the balance of safety and threat had shifted. But instead, to quote: ‘What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.’”

“Well played,” Myka admits. In return, she’s gifted with the little acknowledging bow of head she loves. (Loves—yes.) It draws her physically closer, that head-bow: only a few shuffling inches, but enough that she can answer, more quietly, “What’s changed is I saw a future. And I saw how much I’m willing to ignore to have it.”

“I do not understand your morality,” Helena says. This time, she sounds a note of wonder rather than censure.

So much recursion in what they say, think, feel, do—once, then back again, and then again. Maybe they’re bound to get something right, if they try everything over and over? This particular repetition-with-variation seems a little better than usual, tragedy repeated not as farce but as fairy tale... or, no: Warehouse tale. Because for better or worse, there’s no escaping the Warehouse, the curse but also blessing of wonder. She and Helena are here together today only because of the Warehouse—that necessary condition of their meeting and connection.

Myka could dilate forever upon fate and purpose, but “ignore it” must be her mantra now, her grounding principle. For better or worse... for better and worse. The true moral of any Warehouse tale.

“I don’t understand anybody’s morality,” she says, “especially not mine or yours. I’m not trying to. I’m ignoring that too.”

But what she can’t ignore—not now, not anymore—is the way in which their bodies have, so gradually, continued to near, with Helena slowly mirroring Myka’s movements, these little distance-closing developments. So small is the gap between them now, the displacement it would take to touch surely must be measured by time, not distance.

And yet she hesitates, for this raise of hand must speak correctly: not want, but offer.

Slow. Stretch that time, turn it back into space.

She does that, moving as slowly as she can. More slowly than she ever has.

Helena doesn’t retreat.

Minimalist increments... yet their yield is immense: Myka’s right hand meets Helena’s left, and their fingers link and twist, palms not pressed but near.

It is their first genuinely mutual touch since Boone.

“I will be blunt,” Helena says, soft, burred by the contact. “I need you to... just say.”

Blunt. This knife of request—indeed unsharp—meets Myka’s fears, at first bending against them, yet still bearing threat. The force of it makes her glance away, and again she’s drawn to the clock. All she can find to articulate is, “I missed my flight.”

It could have been a way of saying, but Myka didn’t mean it like that, and Helena knows it: she raises an eyebrow. The leavening takes away the knife, and it gives Myka leave to lighten too, to postulate, “Maybe we’re constitutionally incapable. Of the saying. Or maybe it’s just me? Okay, not maybe—probably. Is that a dealbreaker?”

Now Helena cocks her head, completing the gesture with a lifting twist of chin. It calls of early, early: Helena handcuffed in a chair, Myka foolishly imagining she knew how all the ensuing moments would go—then being flung up to meet the ceiling.

The book would have known that would happen, but Myka didn’t. Hasn’t. Flights, crashes. Over and over, each as unpredictable as every other. Which will Helena choose to inflict now?

“Have we agreed to a deal?” Helena asks. The question isn’t coy. “Ignoring may be a way forward, but historically, you do seem to presuppose the existence of agreements that you fail to inform me I’m a party to. That you then accuse me of violating.”

So: an objection, but one grounded in their shared history. A flight and a crash. “That is an uncomfortably accurate description of what I do,” Myka admits. “Let me start again. I missed my flight. Did you?”

“Miss your flight? Yes.” More leavening: unfunny joking, words for the sake of them. To continue to speak together... of course this has been what Myka wished too. Of course she would listen to Helena saying words about anything.

Not anything, her Boone-and-Giselle-haunted memory reminds her...

“But that was not the issue under discussion,” Helena continues. A providential interruption.

“Right. Dealbreaker. Saying. Inability.” Why are you vamping? What is the impediment? The answer is immediate: You are the impediment. “Change the vocabulary” was a nice idea, but one word was never going to be enough. “Look,” she begins, determined now to do better, “I—”

Helena tightens her fingers’ grasp against Myka’s. It’s a very different way of getting things out in the physical open. “Wanting you warps all I do,” she whispers. The words, the grasp: both are saying. Out in the open.

More even than the oh-so-welcome grasp, the words mean everything to Myka. And their meaning is itself everything—everything that matters—so she steals them and says them back: “Wanting you warps all I do.” It’s mind-clearingly correct. The relief of at last having an accurate description of the past half-decade: it hits her like that slug she’d perversely hoped Helena might deliver.

But having used Helena’s words, however perfect, while coming up with none of her own pains her, so she feels she has to modify, “Warps. And warped, but not in any of the ways that might have helped. I can’t apologize enough for how I got it all so wrong.”

Helena’s tilt of head gentles. Her chin drops. “Someone has recently recommended, rather eloquently, ignoring such things.” She smiles. “You are terrible at following your own prescription.”

Helpless to object, Myka says, “That can’t come as a surprise.”

“A surprise? No. Perhaps an obstacle.”

“Would you... surmount it?”

Helena says, “For you...”

Myka fears she hears a lift of question. “That’s what I meant. Would you?”

“As stated: for you.”

The certainty is... transporting. Nevertheless, “I don’t know how this will work,” Myka admits. “If this will work.”

“Nor do I,” Helena says, yet her admission is a balm.

So much remains to be negotiated. So fragile this semi-resolution between their hands.

Then: “I’m so tired,” Helena says, actual rather than despondent, and Myka is ready to agree that yes, she is tired too, that everything that’s taken place in this room has taxed her to her limits, but Helena follows that admission with, “Will you lie down with me?”

Myka tenses. Her immediate, insistent bodily approval of the idea jangles against her just-as-immediate worry over where such a request—and such approval—might lead.

No doubt feeling that stiffening via their still-joined hands, Helena says, “For rest. Rest, in privacy, and nothing more.”

Myka believes her. She doesn’t trust herself, for her self is a serial liar with terrible impulse control, but she believes Helena.

Who is also a serial liar, one with similarly terrible impulse control, but saying “no” to this person who has so lately spoken of want and warp, this person whose hands continue to grip hers, is not an option.

Thus in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, Myka lies down on a bed, and Helena lies beside her. They shift their bodies awkwardly, then less so, as they find a fit: Myka on her back, Helena on Myka’s left side, curled like punctuation around everything they’ve suffered.

From a position moments ago unimaginable, Myka finds room to ask, “What are you doing?”

“What? Nothing,” Helena says, as if Myka has made an accusation. She stills the slight, slight stroke her fingers have begun to apply to Myka’s hair.

More unfunny comedy. “I don’t mean with your hand. I mean, every day. In your life.”

“Oh,” Helena says. The stroke resumes. “Waiting.”

“You said you hadn’t stopped living.”

“That is not what I said.”

“If you could press pause on the semantics.” It’s true that Myka could—should—quote with greater accuracy, given that she knows exactly what Helena said. But Helena knows that Myka knows exactly what Helena said, and while continuing to speak together is the weirdly frustrating joy it is, they should really try to get somewhere.

Helena sighs; the sound contains a put-upon “fine.” She says, “I pretend to have expertise in several areas, including forensic analysis, for which pretensions I’m paid absurd amounts of money.”

“Ends before means?” Myka asks, a tiny joke.

“My own fabulism is unsurpassed.”

That’s probably a joke too, but thinking back on her own vast course of lies, Myka finds it important to counterclaim, “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Does competition truly matter at this late date? A win in this category is dubious—sinful, even—but today I’m inclined to concede your victory in anything you like.”

So she understood Myka was talking about herself; is that pleasing or disturbing? In any case, Myka does know the concession as a surprise: “You are?”

“Today. For here we are, at rest. Salvaged. By you.”

“But only because you wrecked my shirt,” Myka reminds her.

They’ve been wrecked, over and over, with stained shirts only the most recent, small detritus. Yet here they are, salvaged, washed up on some unfamiliar shore... this island of a hotel room: no Moreau; instead, uncharted.

Would that it were an island, one they could make their home.

“Only because,” Helena echoes. “Only because you were being recalcitrant... but we can’t carry such recursion back ab ovo.”

“Or we can,” Myka says with a hiccupy laugh, momentarily captured by the possibility, seeing it as a burrowing-in, a we-got-here-and-this-is-how affirmation.

“This from the woman whose mantra would be ‘ignore it’?”

“Game show,” Myka goes on, the laugh persisting; there’s no escaping the beautiful fact—she might have imagined it would be true but now it’s a fact—that lying with Helena wrapped around her makes her giddy. “Whoever buzzes in with the preceding turning point the fastest gets...”

“What?”

“I was about to say ‘a point,’ but that sounds weird. A point for a point?”

Helena’s cheek flexes against Myka’s, in what Myka suspects is her I-don’t-quite-understand squint. “A point for a point... surely that should be the name of the program? But I’m not conversant with game shows.”

“You are a little. Whammies.”

Another flex of cheek. “The current argot for being affected by an artifact?”

She’s right. But. “It’s from a game show. The coinage... it’s Pete’s.” Myka wishes she could have forever avoided introducing him into the conversation, the room, the problem. But in the end this hotel room isn’t an island.

Helena nods. The movement is an acknowledgement of what Myka has done—but it’s also yet another blessed slide of her skin against Myka’s. “What will you tell him?” Helena asks, and Myka can face the question only sideways, through the warmth of the slide.

Lying in bed is unquestionably better than sitting at a table. Myka nevertheless feels an incipient lie forming, a dodge to push off difficulty: I don’t know, she could tell Helena, and maybe that lie of omission would suffice, here as they lie in a comfort Myka has already disturbed more than enough.

However. The truth is she’ll tell him whatever she has to, to get herself free. To make him let go. So that’s what she says to Helena: “Whatever it takes.”

To her shock, the out-loud saying wallops her with a vision of a still different future, one stark and Warehouse-less. The view is empty: of purpose, of feeling. A disaster. “What happens if I burn it all down?” she asks. Her heartbeat speeds; her blood floods fearful.

“As you should have in Boone?” Helena responds, with acid; then, “Sorry. Momentarily failed to follow the ‘ignore’ prescription myself.” She raises herself on an elbow and looks down at Myka. It’s a new, breathtaking view, one that Myka feels her prior lack of as acute deprivation.

Into that negative space, Helena says, “If you burn it all down, then you and I will rise from the ashes.”

Every word is clear as still water.

Purpose: Myka and Helena, rising. Not empty of feeling; rather, replete. That reward would elevate.

“Is that what you want?” Helena asks. “To burn it down?”

“Yes.” Myka can say it; it’s true, if the rise is the result. And yet she can’t uncommit her professional self so easily and entirely. “But also no. And I have to tell him something.”

“‘Ignore’ is a powerful word,” Helena observes.

“I don’t think that will work,” Myka says, for she can hear his escalating “but why” iterations as clearly as if she were herself the Ladies’ Oracle of the uncanny book. “I’ll have to explain. That I was wrong?” she tries, but that’s too small. “That I’m always wrong and he should have known that?”

“Really? Then you must be wrong about me as well.”

“Don’t use my overgeneralizing words against me,” Myka says. She touches Helena’s temple, intending it as a rebuke.

It lands instead as a caress, against which Helena leans and nestles. “Aren’t I using them against me?” she asks, low and amused.

Myka says, because she can’t not, because the words are desperate to be said, “This. I want this.” Joking, disputing, speaking, bodies together (and so much more of bodies together): all of this.

“Me using your words against myself? I see why you would.” Helena smiles against Myka’s neck, then raises herself up again, her expression changing over. “But thank you. For saying.” She follows this by reclining, nestling closer still.

The words, and the movement, are warming, but leaning all the way in would lead down a path too tantalizing. “You’re welcome,” Myka says, but she follows it with, “When we leave this room. What will you do?” she asks, because this is something she doesn’t know but might now learn, no book required. Just a Helena.

But there’s no “just” about Helena, and particularly not when she’s gazing up at Myka, sweet yet flinty, and that look tempers her answer. “Wait,” she says, differently than she said “waiting”; now the task rings of burden and freedom both. Waiting for something, rather than waiting, without predicate.

However, that predicate: Myka is the one who must act. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I’m accustomed.”

The little shrug of resignation that accompanies those words: Myka feels it small against her shoulder, but its implications make it seem a larger shudder. Helena has waited through so much—decades of punishments, and Myka should not make her suffer anything even vaguely similar. She’s about to say “I’ll hurry,” even with no idea of what that would look like, but she’s preempted by Helena saying, into her ear, “But please hurry.” A breath of telepathic direction.

So. Now she must.

Yet that direction requires changing not the rules, nor even the vocabulary, but the speed with which the future is ushered near. It’s a daunting prospect.

Daunting but necessary, if Myka is to blunder satisfactorily. “I will,” she says. But what is necessary isn’t sufficient, not if the goal is to bring about the truly desired future. “Once I’ve done... that. What comes next?”

Helena shifts her position again, un-nestling herself from Myka’s neck, her head still on the bed but reared back a bit, looking up, and Myka tilts her head to look down. She’s often had to angle down, just that bit, to look into Helena’s eyes, but this prone person is a dramatically differently enjoyable inflection of the standing version.

As she appreciates the view, she receives Helena’s answer: “You should text me.”

So strange to hear that voice say that sentence. But relief dizzies Myka, even as she’s reclining and looking, for she realizes it’s just strange; Helena saying it doesn’t make her seem a stranger.

“And then we should meet for coffee,” Helena adds—lightly, but not throwaway.

“Or save the world?” Myka says, trying for the besting echo. Trying to overwrite the words said in Boone.

“And save the world,” Helena says. “Our world.”

The modified callback is pointed and just right; it overrides both Boone and Myka’s attempt. Myka shakes her head and says, “I’m no match for you.”

“Counterpoint: you are the match for me.”

How can it be true that Helena is saying these words? Ever, but more so here, on this day, the one Myka intended to end with the end, this day, that is instead ending with a beginning.

Not enough of a beginning, though, and Myka wants to make that clear—that, and her regret at its clear, clear, clear, yet absolutely necessary insufficiency. She says, “I want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.” Helena doesn’t move; she has to know what’s coming next, and Myka delivers it: “But I can’t.”

Helena sighs. “I do not understand your morality.”

Third time the charm—the Helena-knows-it charm.

She might as well know it, because who is Myka, really, to recognize and hold to some bright line? But to start now would entail a foundational lie—“I’m free”—one that would infect all that came after.

You could ignore that too...

Animals, animals. Of course they would advocate for the body getting what it wants, regardless of consequences.

But the dismissal of obligation, though it might seem easy now, can’t help but make realizing the future more strenuous. Myka should not increase the burden. Thus in the end, despite the pain of want, she has to get herself out from under the bodily lie she so desperately and foolishly told—she has to do that before she can give herself leave to know the bodily truth. It may be just as desperate and foolish, if differently so, but she wants, wants, wants to know it.

“Like I said, I don’t either,” she says, to ward off, for what she hopes will this time not seem forever, Helena’s charm. So as to think herself as far away as possible from the basic physical reality that a tiny turn of her head could “accidentally” join their lips, she turns the opposite way and tells the ceiling, “I have to rebook my flights now.”

“To set the future in motion,” Helena says. Agreement, but aggrieved.

Myka smiles at both of those, allowing herself a minimal turn back toward Helena. She’s a far better sight than the ceiling. “You do know something about that.”

Helena breathes out, probably in more-aggrieved affirmation, and she makes no move to sit up. Is it possible to be aggressively still?

Helena’s answer is an impressive yes.

Myka allows herself a dispensation, as she did when she watched Helena approach in the airport, so many hours ago: twenty more breaths before she takes the get-up initiative, as Helena very clearly intends to force her to do. So she breathes. Very. Very. Slowly. Inhale: beat... beat... for as many beats as she can manage. Hold, for the same: an the number is not small. Exhale again as many, then again, hold. That’s one. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Two.

Eighteen more of these with Helena warm against her; it isn’t how she ever imagined heaven, or its earthly approximation, but here it is.

For now.

Right as she reaches inhale thirteen: “Are you asleep?” Helena whispers.

“Sssh. I’m counting.”

Helena doesn’t ask “what.” She stays still, now solid and present only, until Myka reaches the pause after her twentieth exhale.

Disengagement is difficult.

After, they busy themselves with phones and booking. Myka situates herself at the desk, while Helena reclines on the bed: these stations they might have taken if they had done nothing but inhabit this room as travelers, travelers now bored before departing.

Helena finishes before Myka does, at which point her reclining becomes reclining, a grandiose occupying of space. A new Helena aspect, and Myka would never have seen it, never if not for salvage, wrecking, recalcitrance... back and back and back. How they got here.

“I don’t want to leave,” she tells that new grandiosity.

Helena stretches, arms up then sweeping wide, as if making a snow angel. Then she props herself up on her elbows. She moves both her hands, a finger-flutter suggesting that whatever statement she about to issue is obvious. And it is: “Then we’ll stay forever.”

For a brief counterfactual burst of cosmology, Myka believes they could. But this time Helena is the one to rise and dismiss the possibility, although she does it with still more ostentation: “And yet this room is entirely inappropriate as anyone’s final resting place.”

Myka loves every muscled, meaningful emphasis. From inside that love, she pities her earlier-today self, the one who thought she could have lived without the continued possibility of this.

Well. She could have lived. But it wouldn’t have been living.

For all their need to speak together, their final minutes in the room are silent, as if refraining from using that small duration of their privacy to the purpose they set, they might be able to bank it. Against some unprivate, nonspeaking future.

As they reenter the unprivate hallway and head toward the far greater unprivate spaces of transit, Myka says, “That coffee was expensive.”

“Worth every penny.” The and you know it is inescapable.

Inescapable and true.

Helena’s flight is scheduled to leave well before (the first of) Myka’s is—New York is so much easier to reach than anyplace named Dakota.

“Not The Dakota,” Helena says when Myka shares this gloomy observation with her, as they wait for the tram to the terminals.

Myka doesn’t know whether to groan or congratulate her on the reference. She settles for a sincere “Touché,” then asks, “Should I come to your gate with you? To... sit?” She’s thinking on sitting together. Sitting together. What people see when they look.

“Should you?” Helena asks back, with an eyebrow.

“No,” Myka has to concede. “I’d want to kiss you goodbye.”

“Anyone looking would expect you to kiss me, and/or me to kiss you. Goodbye or otherwise. But you’ve made it clear that isn’t in the offing until we can fulfill everyone’s expectations.”

“Everyone’s?”

“Ours and those of fortunate observers.”

“Of course you’d think they’re fortunate,” Myka says; she hears and feels affection—distinct from want—in her voice. Affection has been gone for so long between them... she welcomes its old-friend tenderness, gently yet insistently shouldering its way through all that must be ignored.

More eyebrow, differently inflected. “Of course they are fortunate. You underestimate our beauty but, more significantly, your own.”

Such a compliment is unassimilable right now, so Myka counters with, “But not yours. I don’t underestimate yours.”

Helena leans backward. “Your saying such things is why you should not come with me to my gate,” she says, and Myka reads the lean as speaking commensurately about what is unassimilable. “Because I want you to come with me,” Helena goes on, to Myka’s delight, “and then to board the flight with me.”

“Burning it all down,” Myka notes.

“Which you don’t want to do,” Helena notes back.

“But I will if I have to.”

Helena now offers a wrinkle of brow. “There is almost always a better way. You showed me that.”

The wrinkle doesn’t belong, so Myka tries to smooth it by saying, with a lightness, “You were going to freeze it all down. Totally different.”

“In any event the way found then was better... and, I must say, better than shooting you in the head.” Helena says this dry, joking back, yet also a little stunned, probably at the idea that Myka would joke in the first place.

Myka answers that surprise with, “I’m pretty happy you thought so.”

Helena doesn’t move, but she says—tight, as if dampening some vibration—“Your understatement is rhetorically effective. In that I now want to kiss you more than I ever thought I could again be capable of wanting.”

This should be simple. Grab her right now and never let her go. But nothing is as simple as it should be, so Myka says, “I’ll bear that understatement thing in mind.”

“I suspect I’m weak for a wide array of rhetorical techniques. When deployed by you.”

The bubbling of possibility is... irresistible. “I’ll make a study,” Myka says, exerting great effort to keep herself under control. “Maybe litotes next.”

“Not ineffective, you may find.”

They are tuned tight to each other now. In public, but speaking privately. If they can keep this alignment... they’ve had it before, lost it, got it back. Myka lets herself dissolve into one final dispensation: the blissful idea that they will always get it back.

Are there any words to describe what she is, other than “in love”? If so, she doesn’t want to know them.

She also doesn’t want to watch Helena walk away. She’s mourned such walks too often. So they clasp hands one more time, then let go; Helena turns away, and Myka, after enjoying the movement of Helena’s hair the turn occasions—that swirl of fluid promise—does too.

****

At the Sioux Falls airport—which Myka, hating its provincial familiarity, always greets with an internal but why do I have to know this place whine—she wants nothing more than to roll off the plane and into the car she’d parked in the absurdly small lot so many hours or days ago, thence rolling on to the B&B and into some state that might, if she’s lucky, resemble sleep.

What she wants is not what she gets.

Mrs. Frederic is standing by the security exit.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Tabled #B&W holiday gift exchange #part 6 #barbarawar #I tried so hard to make it end here #but no dice #I can't apologize enough for getting tangled in the complications #(it occurs to me that maybe there's an artifact in that hotel room making it all so wordy)#(okay not really)#(but this thing might've worked better if M and H had had to deal with a coffeemaker that brewed up a djinn or something instead)#(could've sent the story into territory too unserious though)#(which seems like it would have been cheaty)

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grilledcheeseandguavajelly · 1 year ago

Text

Almost. Again. -- Regina Mills x Emma Swan

Well hiyah Tumblr. I wrote a swanqueen fic. I don’t really know what this is. All I know is that I was watching episode 4x05 and there was a pretty harsh cut between when Emma and Regina defeated the ice monster and when the snow queen showed up. And I thought “they cut something out. We missed something” and then my brain gifted me this. So. Enjoy, I guess…? 🙈

Words: ~2,100

Warnings: None

Summary: Sometimes battles give you a rush of adrenaline. Sometimes battles exhaust you. And sometimes... Sometimes, battles are the perfect catalyst to mend relationships and create space for repressed feelings to bubble up and boil over. But not always.

Read on Ao3

Snow monster? Melted. Emma’s hands burned a bit, but the giant thing dissolved into a puddle with a splash, so it was probably all taken care of.

Probably.

“I think we did it,” Emma panted, smiling despite herself.

Because it felt good. Falling back into their rhythm, melding their magic. Working together after however long they’d been apart. It couldn’t have been more than a few days. It felt like an eternity.

She looked over at Regina, finally catching her breath. And Regina…

Regina was looking at her with some kind of expression, emotion, that Emma couldn’t read for the life of her. But then a beat passed, and another. And Regina was still looking at her.

Emma cleared her throat. “Nice work.”

That seemed to jar Regina out of her stupor, because the next thing Emma knew, she was nodding.

“And you.” A pause. A swallow. “It seems that whole ‘learn as you go’ thing is working out for you. You didn’t need me after all.”

Emma fought the instant response, the guttural “I will always need you” that rattled against her ribs. Instead, she settled for a simple—

“I still have a lot to learn.”

Regina’s lip curved at the corner, and for a moment Emma thought that she had won. That she had earned herself a smile, after all this time. But then it morphed into something sad, and Regina pinned her focus on smoothing out the hem of her shirt. And Emma’s heart splintered again.

Always again.

The forest was silent for a moment, their ragged breathing the only thing filling the gaps. And really, it hadn’t been that much effort. Not with Regina helping. But it was the fear, the adrenaline. The feel of it all, and how much she had missed it.

Emma was chewing over what she could say, how she could tell her without Regina snapping her neck. She was so lost in weighing her options that she almost missed Regina breaking the silence. Beating her to it.

“I forgot how nice that felt,” she murmured, voice low and rasping.

Emma blamed it on the cold lingering in the air. Emma knew that she was lying to herself.

A measured breath. “Yeah.”

And then, to her surprise, Regina snorted.

“Always so articulate.”

Emma couldn’t help the smile that spread, because yes, working together had felt wonderful. It had stirred something inside of Emma that she forgot existed. Reminded her of a piece of herself that she forgot she possessed.

But this? Regina looking up at her through heavy lashes, a smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth, one hand wrapped protectively around her stomach and fingers fidgeting with her sleeve at her elbow— This was what Emma had missed. Had longed for. This felt better than any magic ever could.

Because Regina was open again. She was letting Emma in. She was—

She was stepping in closer. Closing the space between them.

Oh, shit.

“Regina…” Emma tried, but her voice wobbled. Cracked.

Another step.

Emma stepped back.

She expected Regina to stop. She expected that to be enough to break the moment (were they having a moment?), to put that wall back up between them and prompt Regina to shut herself off again.

But she didn’t. And she was still looking at Emma like that. And Emma couldn’t breathe. Dear god, she couldn’t fucking breathe.

Not only could she not breathe, apparently walking backwards had fallen completely out of her arsenal as well. Because the next thing Emma knew, she tripped over a large root and went careening backward.

And then there was bark against her back. And Regina’s hand on her waist. A nice, firm, solid tree trunk had broken her fall.

And Regina’s hand on her waist.

Emma blamed the way her lungs constricted on having the wind knocked out of her by the impact from the tree.

Definitely the tree.

“Still as graceful as ever, I see,” Regina said softly, eyes flitting across Emma’s face for the briefest of seconds before boring back into hers.

And god, anything would be better than this. Regina fully ogling her lips would be better than this. Because her eyes were dark in the deep forest, and glittering against the moonlight. And Emma was certain that Regina could see straight through her, let alone read her thoughts.

She was definitely not having appropriate thoughts.

And she blamed Regina for every single one of them, because her hand was still on Emma’s fucking waist.

“I— um.” It just fell out. Because Emma felt like she needed to say something, but there was no coherent thought to pull any kind of anything from. Not in Emma’s head. Not with Regina looking at her like that.

“We really need to work on your vocabulary.”

Remember when Emma thought she’d rather have Regina ogling her lips? When that would have been easier?

Yeah. She was wrong. She was so, entirely and completely wrong. Because in the next second Regina’s gaze dropped, and Emma’s heart went right along with it.

“I missed… what our magic feels like pooled together.” Regina’s voice was low. Careful. But Emma didn’t miss the hesitation. Didn’t miss the way that Regina’s gaze snapped back to her own.

Didn’t miss that tiny flicker of longing in her eyes.

They spent enough time dancing around each other for Emma to know it when she saw it. And she saw it. Plain as day.

And that’s why she gathered up enough courage to slide her hand beneath Regina’s jacket. Over the curve of her waist.

She let out a slow breath as the warmth seeped against her palm, eyes fluttering shut.

Her thumb brushed over the smooth fabric of Regina’s shirt, and in the stillness of the night, Emma caught the tiniest hum that racked up Regina’s throat. It was enough to prompt her to open her eyes. Because she needed to know if Regina was looking at her the way that Emma wanted her to, the way that she used to. She needed to know.

Emma startled, shoving herself back against the tree. Because Regina had gotten close, so close. Too close. And Emma could feel her soft breath washing over her cheeks. Could smell her perfume, still perfectly placed, even after the long trek here. And a battle.

And Regina was leaning in, leaning up on her toes. Closer, closer.

Emma would have closed her eyes if she hadn’t been so focused, so completely enamored with that little scar above Regina’s lip. The way it stretched as Regina licked her lips, smoothed them together.

And then Regina let out the smallest, shakiest breath. And then she pressed her forehead against Emma’s. Sighed.

Somehow, that felt more intimate that a kiss. Than a hug. Than anything Emma had been expecting. She didn’t know what she had been expecting. But she knew that this was infinitely better.

“You’re going to be the death of me, Miss Swan,” Regina breathed. And was she…? Yes. Regina was nuzzling her forehead against her.

But the words stuck, and Emma didn’t like them.

“Why do you keep doing that?” she asked softly, pushing at Regina gently. Pushing her back, despite everything that screamed for her to pull her closer. “Why do you keep calling me Miss Swan?”

Regina swallowed. Straightened. “So now I’m not allowed to say your name? It’s always infinite, pointless rules with you.”

“I wish you would.”

Shit.

“Would what?”

“Say my name.” She needed to stop talking. There was an inch of space between them now and she could finally breathe, and she needed to stop talking before she suffocated again. “I wish you would call me Emma… like you used to.”

Welp. She never could trust her heart. And here it was, overriding her brain and screwing her over once again.

Or so she thought. Until Regina didn’t push her away and tell her off. Until Regina didn’t laugh in her face and call her a stupid child.

Until Regina stared her down, jaw working and nostrils flaring with deliberate breaths. Eyes searching.

Until Regina swallowed around whatever she was about to say. Squeezed her hands into fists. And breathed Emma’s name out on a ragged exhale.

It did something, that breath. Emma didn’t quite know what it was, but it set something hot pooling through her veins and something spiky constricting around her heart.

And if she thought she couldn’t breathe then, the air got kicked out of her again as Regina repeated it. Firmer this time.

“Emma…”

She stepped closer. Pressed in. Pinned Emma against that stupid fucking tree.

And Emma could have sworn she saw Regina’s hand shaking as she smoothed it over Emma’s shoulder. Slid it down to her waist. Squeezed.

“Emma,” she breathed, and it almost sounded like a plea.

Her breath was heavy now. Emma could see her chest heaving under her shirt. Could feel the tiny, fast puffs of it against her lips. But most of all—

Most of all, Emma could feel that energy coming off of her. Crackling and sizzling and hot. Pounding through the thick of the air and pulling Emma in, in, in. Making every atom inside of her vibrate with a want that she couldn’t describe. Didn’t understand. All she understood was Regina. All she could comprehend was Regina. Their breathing syncing, their heartbeats thudding together.

And she didn’t know why it got like this, why the need rang out this loud. Why Emma’s body responded to Regina’s like this. She knew it wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t a curse. She didn’t know if it was their magic, having its own conversation and yanking them together, or if it was just Regina herself, Emma’s body ready and waiting to worship her like the goddess she was.

It wouldn’t take much now, just the smallest tilt of her chin. The tiniest shift. And Emma could do that. She could absolutely do that. But so could Regina. And she wasn’t. And Emma didn’t know if she was debating, what she was waiting for, when she had Emma literally pinned and at her mercy—

Regina’s hand tightened, nails digging in.

“Someone’s here.”

And then the moment broke, the tension shattering around Emma like her own personal wall of ice as Regina pushed away.

She barely had time to think about how fucking ironic that was, how cold she felt in this stupid forest without Regina pressing into her. And then Regina said her name again.

This time, it sounded like a warning. This time, it was too wary and too firm, and Emma decidedly didn’t like it coming out of Regina’s mouth when it sounded like that. When Regina had that look in her eye.

“We should leave,” Regina tried, reaching for Emma’s arm. Her hand? God, Emma couldn’t think. All she could register was Regina pulling her off of the tree, dragging her back the way they had come. And god, how could Regina be so put together and observant after—

“What a welcome visit, ladies.”

The wave of cold hit Emma in the stomach, pulsing off of the snow queen and hanging rigid in the air. Keeping her pinned. Slowing her down. Regina’s hand fell from hers.

Against everything, it burned.

It all happened so fast after that.

One second, it was pleasantries. Niceties. Everything was civil and Emma thought that maybe they could all actually have a proper conversation with her head screwed on straight. And then Regina’s mirror, in the wrong hands. And then those hands, lifting Regina off the ground and suffocating her. Suffocating Emma.

Ice flying, cold air filling her lungs. A whirl of snow, and quiet descending once more on the forest. Regina huffing out a long breath. Emma reaching for her, questioning. Regina glaring back, shaking her head. And then the anger, the betrayal. That acute hurt from before that had been thrown on the back burner, evaporated to oblivion by the feel of Regina’s hand on Emma’s waist.

It all came crashing back down at that look on Regina’s face, fully formed. A brick in her stomach.

Like she said, it all happened so fast. Emma asked a simple question with too much hurt laced into it. And Regina bit back. Too hard.

Emma blinked, and the next thing she knew, Regina was gone in a swirl of smoke, her words ringing low and dangerous in the air.

“I don’t want to.”

And so, Emma did the only thing she could do. The only thing she knew how to do. She took a deep breath, pretended that Regina’s words didn’t shatter her heart. Again. And then she went about the rest of her day, just like usual.

#this is my first time writing swanqueen #please don't eat me #swan queen #regina mills #Emma swan #once upon a time #ouat #evil queen #snow queen #ouat season 4 #ouat 4x05 #swan queen fanfic #emma x regina #regina x emma #ouat fanfiction #ouat fanfic #ouat fandom #fanfiction #fanfic

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