#but i do remember using my math set with two half circles and tracing a giant circle for her head and colouring a full rainbow tail hahah

[starbiology]

so i lost all my art from elementary but I do vaguely remember my neopets faerie oc and decided to draw her c:

DollPalace rainbow tail and all hahah

[starshipsofstarlord]

Sebastian convincing you to have another baby...

Pairing | Sebastian Stan x reader

Summary | Seb wants another baby, but he still has to convince you into wanting the same thing.

Warnings | smut, breeding kink, fluff, oral sex (fem receiving), unprotected sex, mentions of birth control, creampie, swearing, cockwarming

Requested ✖️

Y/e/d/n = Your eldest daughter’s name

Y/d/n = your daughters name

Y/s/n = your son’s name

Quick link to my masterlist, if you’re interested in reading more of my crap 😬

The idea of pregnancy gave you many things to think about, the gruelling and simultaneously tiresome journey had been one hell of a rollercoaster. The countless times (approximately two) that you had endured the swelling of your feet, and the divine hunger for the strangest combinations of food, had left you with three beautiful children.

First you had birthed a little girl, that sparked a new light behind your husband’s eyes, and reinvented his world. She was the princess he adored, and the one that you loved to watch Disney movies with, even if she insisted on Frozen every singular time.

And then, after her, you had a pair of perfect twins. They brought sound and restlessness to the household, after your daughter demanding that she wanted a sibling. Deep down, you had wanted more at the time too, but now, you felt as though your life goal was fulfilled.

Your family was everything that you had ever wanted, it felt as though you had been taken off an idealistic screen and transferred into reality. And if that had happened, you wouldn’t be one to complain, for all your greatest wishes had come true.

But if you were to ask your husband, he would make it very clear that he wanted more little devils running around the house. There was a joke that Evans and Mackie had with you every time that they saw you on set, clothed in a tight catsuit to fit your role. They would act amazed at the appearance of you not bearing one of Sebastian’s gorgeous children, their false shock earning laughs from your various co stars.

It wasn’t the fact that you weren’t open to the idea of another child to grow within your womb, however, it was more out of fear. You were well aware that you had been blessed with the birth of your lovely twins, though you were scared that you would endure the premise of double labour again, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of pain that you were willing to experience for a second time.

Being practically split in half once was bad enough, but twice, one instance straight after the other was bound to be the worst torture that a mother could be provided with. As you stirred your evening cuppa, watching as your kids were all huddled playing a board game after their dinner, two arms found placement around your waist, lightly tugging you back into a strong chest.

“Look at our babies.” Your husband mumbled into the crown at the back of your head, his fingertips rolling circles beneath your shirt. “Aren’t they the sweetest?” He asked, pressing a delicate kiss upon the back of your neck. The feeling of his stubble making your body shake wantonly, but you withheld from making sounds, not wanting to draw the attention of your children.

“When they’re quiet.” You agreed, watching as your eldest helped the twins with beating her. “They’re the most important people in my life, and then, it’s my annoying husband, who cannot stop trying to get in my pants for five minutes.”

“That’s called love; your husband loves you.” Sebastian stated, nibbling on your ear lobe as you ushered a sound of approval, clutching onto his hand that was firmly planted on your side, as his tongue traced the shell of your ear. “And I’m sure he’d love to show you how much, if you stop being mean to him.”

“Mean?” You laughed, taking a sip of your drink before spinning in his arms, allowing him to push you flush against the counter. “I can show him mean.” Biting your lip, you traced the seam of his sweats, that appeared to be all that he was currently wearing, brushing your hands up and against his well attended to torso. “But later.”

Seb groaned, leaning his head back, as he moved closer to you, pushing his thigh between your legs, glancing over your shoulder at the kids. “We could put them to bed right now, and then go to our room, then, you can show me how much of a horrible wife you are.”

“As much as I love that idea bubs, the twins need to be bathed, and you have to help your daughter with her math homework.” Leaning forwards, you pressed a kiss on his bicep, moving out from the entrapment of his arms, and lightly patting his ass.

“You know I was joking about you being mean, but now I’m seeing some truth behind my earlier words.” Sebastian plodded away, and towards the open living space, plopping down on the sofa, as he watched his offspring on the floor, smiling at their kindness to one another, though he was sure that tomorrow would be another story.

With one last look, you headed upstairs, going to the main bathroom, and began to slowly the run the tap. During the time you allowed it to run, you grabbed some pyjamas for your babies, as well as a couple of towels and flannels. By the time you had returned to the bathroom, and put everything down ready, the tub was half filled. And so you stopped the stream, putting in a tad of cold water before descending down the stairs.

“Honey, help y/e/d/n with her school work, I’m gonna get these two trouble makers ready for bed.” Your husband nodded as he pursed his lips, trying to ignore how you leant down to pick the twins up, pretending as through the top of your breast had not been caught by his eyes.

And with that, you got the kids cleaned and ready for the following day, meeting Seb at the doorway of y/d/n’s and y/s/n’s room, giving them each a kiss on the forehead before tucking them in for bed.

As you were walking towards your own room, Sebastian lifted you from behind, carrying you the rest of the way. “You can’t keep it in your pants, can you Mr Stan?” You laughed as he dropped you upon your double bed, him instantly kneeling at the end of it to peel your shirt off.

He trailed kisses along your legs, humming from the much desired contact, as his blue eyes flickered up at you. “That’s your fault, you deprive me.” He muttered against your skin, reaching his fingertips up higher to grasp at the sides of your underwear, pulling the material down.

Your husband blew hot air upon your pussy, grinning to himself as it instinctively clenched around nothing. As he moved closer, he breathed in your scent, rubbing the tip of his nose along your clit, before diving in to feast, sneaking his tongue through your slit, instantly prodding at your entrance, causing your head to wind back, and your hand grasp his hair.

“We should have another.” He mumbled against you, and you were almost too delirious to complain, although a light groan emitted from you, as you fought with yourself whether to let him continue eating you out and not respond, or do the responsible, adult thing, and speak about it.

With much resilience, you pulled his head away, licking your lips at his slick stained chin away, tugging him to be laid beside you. “Is that really want you want Seb?” You asked, biting your lip, wanting to hear his thoughts in hopes that it would relax you for the possibility of you bearing more of his children.

“Of course it is draga.” He answered, his icy pools making your own freeze, he cupped your chin, bringing your lips to his own, placing a few pecks upon your lips, before continuing. “I know that you’re nervous, but I will look after you every step of the way, like I have done both times before. Anyways, I feel like directors take a kick out of challenging themselves with making their actresses appear not pregnant, look at both you and Scar through the years.”

You nodded, understanding that your career wouldn’t take the brunt of things. “I want another but... I’m scared. Just, what if I have two again?” You rambled with your hands, and he clasped them between his own, pausing your panicked hand signals, and rubbing his nose against each set of your knuckles.

“The chances of that aren’t very high my love. But if it happens, then maybe this time you’ll let us call them Wanda and Pietro...” his words earned him a light eye roll and a tender hit on his shoulder, as he rolled on top of you, causing you to squeal. “Remember, don’t wake the kids.”

“Kinda hard when I can feel how hard you are.” You retorted, moaning as he began to suck at the spot on your neck that made your knees shake, his hands drifting beneath your shirt, as he began to raise the material up your torso, and over your breasts. You whipped the material over your head, discarding it as his attention turned to your boobs. “I’ll never get tired of these.”

He hummed, before leaning down, taking a rosey pebble to be captured within his mouth, sucking on it as his fingers fiddled with the other. “Seb, I just need you in me.” You prodded his hips with the heels of your feet, pleased when he leaned back, pulling down his sweats, so that his erection bobbed upwards, the head already leaking precum.

“You want a baby that bad?” He asked in a brisk voice, clambering back onto your awaiting body once again, grasping his base with his heavy hand, dragging his tip to circle around your clit. “Want me to fill you up, so that you grow nice and full with my baby.”

A furrow made its way onto your brow, as you held onto his biceps, lightly rolling your hips up against his leaking head. “Honey.” He paused his movements, staring carefully down at you, reading your expression. “I’m still on birth control.” You informed him, watching as his eyelashes fluttered, and he pressed down unto you again.

“A little practise never hurt gorgeous.” Sebastian spoke, slipping his cock into your entrance, sinking into you as you moaned out his name. “Fuck, so tight, even after three kids.” He groaned, putting his hands either side of your head, as he began to thrust in and out of your pussy, breathing heavily through his nose.

“So big.” Your hands grasped at his naked back, casting down to grasp his ass, causing him to suddenly buck deeper into you, emitting another series of moans out of you. “Love your cock.”

“Yeah?” The romanian smugly asked, his lips drifting up the tip of your nose, before running them back down to your own, biting onto your upper lip, as one hand continued to brace his weight above, and the other moved down to fondle with your clit, causing you to tighten around him, your eyelids blinking repeatedly. “You love my fat cock inside of you, about to pump you full of my cum?”

“Yes Seb, love it.” Your eyes screwed shut, tears slipping out the corner of your eyes, as he made his administrations harder, hitting his hips languidly against your own. “Love it so so so mu- ah - ch.”

“Cum angel. Coat my cock, pretty girl.” You complied, reaching your high, as your legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him closer as your essence pooled around him. “Want me to make you round with my babe, want me to make you full of my cum?”

“I do, I do, I do.” You squealed, your breath hitching as he stilled for a minute, filling you with seed. “Fuck.” You breathed, your chest rising and falling, as he remained in your for a moment, before pulling out, but you stopped him, clasping his back with your sweaty hands. “Stay.”

“Okay.” Seb said tiredly, his skin flushed as he rolled over, so that you were laid on his chest, your head falling to below his chin. “So beautiful, you know that?”

“Mmh.” You hummed, drawing circles upon his skin. “I’ll come off my birth control tomorrow, then, we don’t have to just practice.” He leant down to press a long kiss upon your lips, sneaking his tongue through their natural seam, gently sucking on your own.

“That sounds more than good to me darling.” He stroked down your back with his talented fingers, pulling you closer again. You felt his dick twitch within you as he felt both of your mixed juices trailed down his balls, that huffed from the sensation.

[disgruntledspacedad]

The Rules of Engagement (3/5)

The Better Love Series

pairing: Javier Peña x fem!reader/ofc (Ears)

summary: (slow-burn, sexual tension, angst, a little bit of h/c in later chapters) He’s a DEA agent. You work for Centra Spike. Peña’s not your boss, exactly, but you’ve been fwb long enough that certain people are starting to think of you as An Item, and that just won’t do. 

words: 3.4k 

warnings: 18+ for alcohol, language, smut, violence, body horror, general trauma. Please, please heed the warnings on this chapter, guys. It gets pretty intense.

a/n: Unbeta’d. I know I said this was going to be three chapters, but I lied. Sorry, my dudes - this one got away from me. Inspo credit goes to @tiffdawg​, as always.

part one | part two | part three | part four | part five

MASTERLIST

Well, fuck. You bite back a massive sigh.

You really, really don’t want to walk through that door.

It’s been a month, and you life has changed profoundly.

For one, you’re not at the office as much anymore - Stechner had made good on his promise to consider you for more flyovers, and boy, has Centra Spike been busy. Some new vigilante group is terrorizing Medellín, and while it’s not Search Bloc’s priority to go after them, they’ve undeniably kept Pablo and his sicarios busy. The radio frequencies are hot right now, and you’ve been doing eight, sometimes ten flights a week. 

You absolutely love it. The hours are less predictable and definitely more shitty, but listening to a radio from the cockpit of a plane is much more fun that listening to a radio in a stuffy basement office, so you consider it a fair trade.

It keeps your brain busy, too.

Your social life has taken a massive kick to the nuts. Ana is back at university, and you miss her more than you thought you would. You’ve reverted to communicating with Emilio with gestures and smiles more than words. It’s nice because he’s nice, but you miss actual conversation, stilted as it was. Ana wasn’t all that bad, either.

And then there’s Javi.

You haven’t spoken to him since That Morning, not even a polite 'how are you?' in the hallway. Granted, you’re not seeing him as often anymore, given your new position and hours, but then again, you haven’t exactly sought him out, either.

The memory claws at you every time you relive it - and you relive it often. That anger, that wounded expression. The slammed door, his retreating footsteps. Each time you’re in that building, the walls seem to close in on you, and you have to stop yourself from looking for him, actively keep your gaze from roaming straight to his desk.

God, as if you could make it more awkward.

You’d had one nasty conversation with Murphy about a week after the incident - you’d told him in no uncertain terms that he could either mind his own business or fuck right off, you didn’t care which. He’d left you be, throwing his hands in the air and muttering something about how “you two deserve each other.”

Asshole.

Still, that aborted conversation haunts you - so many aborted conversations haunt you - and you wonder what would have happened if you’d just taken the bull by the horns and addressed the issue with Javi head on.

I’m sorry you caught me rubbing one off on the morning after you almost died, Peña. I can assure you, it won’t happen again. Your friendship means the world to me.

Yeah, right.

God, though, but you miss him.

You miss him so much it aches, a gaping hole that reaches right down to the core of you, but there’s nothing to be done about it. You’d fucked this one completely and thoroughly - any chance of restoring your friendship had drained away with the shower-water, and the more time you spend fretting over it, the more awkward - and pathetic - it would be to say anything.

So, you’d cut your losses, held your head high, and tried not to waste too much time wishing you’d have just kept your fucking fantasies to yourself.

Now, though, you’ve got no choice.

You’d been on Centra Spike’s early morning flight, just another routine scan over Medellín. The shift wasn’t intended to be more than a training run for you, but as luck would have it, the Medellín cartel’d had a busy night, and you’d been caught in the crossfire.

Your plane had just touched down half an hour ago, and now you’re standing on the front steps of the embassy building, fingering a shoebox cassette player loaded with a freshly taped recording full of juicy intel destined for the desk of DEA Agent Javier Peña - an entire, private conversation featuring none other than Verdugo himself.

You’d know that voice anywhere. You’ve studied it for hours, what few snatches you’d been able to glean from the embassy archives. It’s almost as if Verdugo is smart enough to steer clear of the city, or to just avoid phone conversations all together, the absolute fuckwad.

Until early this morning.

On the plane, you’d intercepted a new signal and tapped in on a whim, intending to practice your Spanish more than anything, but what you’d overheard was a fucking gold mine of information.

Verdugo is in Medellín. The sicarios are getting ready to move Escobar. He didn’t say where - fucking bastard knows not to spill all of the beans in one conversation - but apparently the plan requires a rendezvous in El Centro first. Verdugo is en route, and will be there until the next morning.

You’d worked frantically all night, tracing and retracing the signal, triangulating potential addresses, then back-tracking to account for environmental distortion. Each calculation had led you to the same place - an unassuming little house right smack in the middle of Medellín.

Bingo.

“You take it in, Aarons.” Torres had declined your offer to do the honors. “It’s your intel.”

So here you are, bleary-eyed and running on less than two hours of sleep, cassette player clenched tightly to your chest, summoning up all of your courage just to go speak with your ex... well, ex whatever-the-fuck Peña is.

‘This is your job,’ you remind yourself fiercely. ‘You can do this.’

As pep-talks go, it isn’t very effective.

Fuck it. You toss your head back, wishing you’d had time to at least grab a cup of coffee on the way in, and breeze around the corner.

“Agent Peña.”

He glances up lazily, thoroughly uninterested in whatever you have to say. When he realizes it’s you, he blinks once, dropping his cigarette in the ashtray and sitting up to eyeball you with a wary expression.

"What can I do for you?” he asks cooly.

You remember him saying that once before, but the context was totally different.

You shake it off. “Centra Spike has new intel that you’ll want to see right away.”

He purses his lips, tilting his head to indicate the growing pile of bullshit on his desk. “You can leave it here.”

Oh, so that’s how it is, then?

“I can’t.” You pin him with a stare, and he meets your gaze evenly, raising his eyebrows in silent challenge. You clear your throat and clarify. “I won’t.”

He scoffs as you carefully rest cassette tape on his desk, along with a map of El Centro. “We intercepted a four minute conversation with Verdugo this morning. He’s here.” You point to the safe house on the map, which you’ve already circled in red ink. “Feo and Limón are with him. They’re leaving early tomorrow.”

Peña frowns down at the spot where your finger rests. “And can you corroborate that information?”

Oh, the motherfucker. “I verified his voice personally, Peña,” you say carefully, doing your damndest to keep the annoyance from your tone. It’s well within his right to ask questions, after all. “It’s a direct match for the audio samples we have.” You tap the tape for emphasis. “You’re welcome to listen for yourself.”

He doesn’t make a move for a long time. Something hot and painful burns in your gut as you wait.

God, he knows you, knows you better than anybody else in on this goddamned continent.  He knows that you know your shit, that you want to catch Escobar as desperately as he does. And this evidence that you have spread across his desk, recorded on tape and marked plainly in red ink, is irrefutable, undeniable - it’s a huge break. He knows that, too.

His apathy is palpable, and it’s driving you up the fucking wall.

When he finally glances up at you, it’s with a doubtful little smirk on his face. “Hmm.”

And oh, wow, you’re shocked by just how much that hurts.

All your life, from the moment you were born into a family of brothers, you’ve had to fight tooth and nail to be taken seriously. It was a fact of life as early as you can remember - ‘look after your sister,’ or, ’she’s just a girl,’ or ‘wow, you’re really great at math, for a woman!’ You’d settled on your career as an analyst because you’d wanted it, not because you’d had something to prove, but still, the military is a male-dominated field, and from the start, the odds had been stacked against you.  Landing this CIA gig had been the achievement of a fucking lifetime. Still, the bar is set high in the Colombia, and it’s set that much higher for a woman. You’re well aware of this; you’re reminded every single day.

Point being, you’re used to defending yourself and your abilities; it comes as natural as breathing.  

But until now, you’ve never had to fight this battle with Peña. He’d taken you at face value from the moment he'd laid eyes on you, treating you like just another operative. Sure, he might take a crack at you every now and again, but that's all in good fun, and you’ve never been one to shy away from a laugh.

Christ, you never realized just how much that respect meant to you until suddenly, it’s gone.

“If you have something to say about my skills and qualifications, Agent Peña, then I suggest you say it.” You lean over his desk, speaking quietly, enunciating each syllable with deadly precision. “Otherwise, I think we both know that it’s in the best interest of Search Bloc and the Colombian people that we collaborate quickly, so we can put boots on the ground and land this motherfucker behind bars where he belongs.”

Peña’s eyes narrow, and he cocks his head, studying you. You meet his gaze, biting back a snarl. You won’t back down. You won’t allow him to intimidate you.

When he nods sharply and reaches for his phone, you know you’ve won.

♠

Ten minutes later, you’re situated in a conference room with Peña, Steve Murphy, Martinez, and a couple of the other higher ups of Search Bloc whose names you haven’t memorized. Your maps are spread over the table, your tape displayed for all to see, and every eye is on you.

“Verdugo is here,” you say, leaning over the map to indicate the marked house. “He and his entourage arrived late last night, and they’re planning to leave early tomorrow morning.”

“Plenty of time to get a team together.” Murphy interjects, glancing between you and Peña with open curiosity.

You narrow your gaze at him. Drama-mongering bastard.

Peña’s not moving. He’s standing with his hip cocked toward the desk, frowning down at the map with his fingers curled to his chin like he’s totally oblivious to everything happening around him.

You know he’s not, though. That’s Javi’s thinking face, the one he makes when he wants people to shut the fuck up and forget about him until he can work something out. You’re pretty familiar with that one.

The others are babbling in Spanish, discussing logistics and the likelihood of this being another trap.

It’s not. You know this deep in your bones. You’d heard that conversation in real time, had translated, triangulated it.

This is legit.

You’ve just decided to leave them to it when Javi snaps his eyes open.

“I agree with Aarons,” he announces out of nowhere. You’re startled by the confidence in his tone. Curious, you glance up, but it’s difficult to get a read on him. He’s pinning every person in the room except you with a hard stare. “We need to move out now.”

Several of the others make noises of protest, but Peña shuts them all down, one by one. Finally, his eyes flicker up to meet yours, just for a brief second, but there’s something different in his gaze, something new and heavily guarded.

You think it might be an apology.

“Let’s end this.”

♠

He’s on a plane to Medellín within an hour, wearing that stupid bullet proof vest. For just a split second, you wish that you were going, too. You don’t have enough experience, though - you’re not an agent; you haven’t handled a gun since basic. You’d be useless in a real fight, a liability, even.

Still, you feel some ownership in this operation, today more than ever. You don’t even try to kid yourself about Javi anymore, either. Those fucking feelings haven’t faded in a month, not a bit, not even after the awkward conversation you’d had in his office.

‘But he stood up for you, too, afterward,’ something whispers in the back of your mind. You replay that little glance in the conference room over and over as you watch Search Bloc board the plane.

He’s looking for you this time, standing on the ramp with his eyes shaded like he knows you’ll be waiting. He doesn’t nod and you don’t wave, but you make eye contact for a lingering moment, and again, there’s something in his expression that you don’t recognize.

Then the plane takes off down the runway, and you feel as if your heart is swooping away with it.

♠

You volunteer for the late shift at work, monitoring the radio lines in case something comes up. It’s an unusually quiet night, as if all of Bogotá collectively holds its breath, and you mostly spend it watching the clock, calculating the hours in your head.

One to land in Medellín. Two more to mobilize the men. Another half to get in location.

From there, your speculation gets fuzzy. There’s no way to predict the outcome once Verdugo is engaged. Javi’s told you a million stories, each more unbelievable than the last - car chases and rooftop shootouts, standoffs in the street, a fistfight in a church sanctuary, bodies of children littering dark alleyways… you cut off the recollections. They aren’t doing you any favors.

Verdugo is a dangerous man. Anything could happen.

By seven am, your brain is mush and your eyes are hyper-focused in that bleary way that happens when you’ve gone too long without sleep. Your third cup of coffee has gone cold, and people are starting to trickle in. You wave half-heartedly to Torres as you slip out of your headset, rubbing your fingers over your scalp to ease the tension that comes from wearing heavy earphones all night. A shower sounds nice, you decide, and maybe a quick nap afterward.

Somebody will page you with news.

Getting out of the building does a lot to wake you up. There’s something oppressive about the CNP headquarters that seems to abate when you step into the streets of Bogotá. The city buzzes with life even in the early morning, and air is warm in a way that seems to energize rather than sedate. Optimism is easier to invoke as you walk down the street in broad daylight.

Javi had looked at you, at least. He’d listened. He’ll call in to the office as soon as he can. Your intel was good, and they’ve flushed out the rat, he’d promised you that.

Everything will be okay.

You round the corner of CRA 70 and Circular, waving to Emilio, who is working the register of the pharmacy today.

“Orejas!” He shouts, reaching below the counter to hold aloft another bottle of aguardiente. “¡Mira! Solo para ti!”

You grin back at him, raising your voice to shout a greeting, and then, with absolutely no warning, the store explodes.

A loud boom.

A whoosh of impossible heat.

A massive orange fireball billowing from the windows.

Your body flying, flying through the air.

Bright blue sky, and then darkness.

♠

You find yourself lying flat on your back in the middle of the street. Your ears are ringing. There’s a pat-pattering in the air, soft like falling rain.

You blink hard.

It’s not rain, you realize dizzily.

It’s fucking ash.

The air is dark with it, hot and heavy. It coats your tongue and stings your eyes. It’s hard to catch a breath. Your throat hurts, your chest aches. You cough weakly. The smell is terrible, acrid and bitter like burned metal. You can taste it on your tongue.

Slowly, you tense your muscles. Your chest is still burning, but there’s nothing sharp to suggest a serious injury. Your back is sore, your head fuzzy.

You sit up, wincing a little, relieved to realize that you’ve just had the wind knocked from you. You’ll have some bruises tomorrow, but that’s all.

Sound slowly filters in. The hiss and crackle of flame. A shout in the distance. Further away, a wailing siren.

Reality slams into you all at once.

Emilio!

You stand, wobbling more than you think you should, but you push past it. Reality seems to pitch and roil, as if the ground is hitching its breath beneath you. Rubble coats the street, dust clouds the air.

Oh god.

A gaping, smoking crater is all that’s left of Emilio’s pharmacy. The windows are blown out of the businesses on either side, their outer walls bowing under the pressure. Your apartment on the top floor is demolished, the roof caving in, flames licking at the the collapsed floors.

You gasp one long, shuddering breath, taking it all in, and then you’re running, sort of, picking your way through hunks of concrete and twisted metal.

“Emilio! Emilio!”

Your voice is hoarse, the world hushed. Nothing sounds quite right. Your legs are shaking and you can’t catch your breath. Some of the rubble is hot to the touch, and you feel like you’re moving underwater, slow and awkward and stupid.

You approach what’s left of the store, and the smell hits you first. Like cooked meat - charred, greasy, heavy.

You press your hand to your mouth to stifle a scream.

You found Emilio. He’s pinned beneath part of the collapsed roof. You look away quickly, but not before you catch a glimpse of blackened flesh, of bone, blood, and pink frothy tissue.

Acid rises in your throat, and you stumble to your knees, stomach clenching painfully into your ribs as you vomit onto the street. It goes on and on, over and over for an eternity, tears and snot and bile and ash leaking mingled down your face until there is nothing left in you to expel.

The encroaching wail of a siren draws you to your senses. You glance up, suddenly painfully aware of your situation. The ceiling is arching above you, just to your right, and it’s creaking ominously. The fires are still burning, and your shirt is clinging painfully hot against your back. You stagger to your feet once again, dizzy, almost drunkenly. A small crowd has gathered, pointing and gawking, calling out to you in Spanish that you are far, far too overwhelmed to translate.

Gasping, you raise your hands and side-step away, careful of the debris that litters the street around you.

A firetruck arrives on the scene, squalling to a stop between you and the onlookers, and you leap at the opportunity, ducking down the nearest alleyway before anybody can follow.

♠

You aren’t sure how much time you waste in the alleyways of Bogotá.

Seconds?

Minutes?

The time after the explosion is all a blur, and you run until you literally can’t anymore, until you’re doubled over and wheezing, coughing, hacking, panting.

Some primal survival instinct clicks in your brain then, and suddenly, your mind is clear. You glance around, swiping at your cheeks and brushing the ash from your shirt.

Now what?

You take a shaking breath and think.

Okay, first order of business, you’re absolutely disgusting. You need a shower before you can even think about doing anything productive.

Your bathroom just went up in flames, along with all of your clothes. Your heart clenches as you think of Ana - she’s at university, so that’s out. The embassy has a nice bathroom, but no showers that you’re aware of.

There’s only one place you know to go, and that’s Javi’s apartment.

You glance up at the sky. The sun is still pretty low - it can’t have been more than an hour since you’d left work, and that was around seven am. Javi obviously isn’t home, and you don’t have a key, but if you hurry, there’s still a chance that you could catch Murphy before he leaves his flat.

It’s a long shot, but you decide there’s nothing to lose for trying.

[bokutokoutarou]

— break your heart (||)

pairing - sugawara koushi x f!reader

synopsis - in an au where everyone has their own warning label that appears on them when they get a new significant other, you see the words “will break your heart” appear on sugawara koushi’s wrist the moment he asks you out

Part 1  | PART 2 | Part 3

[a/n] - this is part 2 to my 100 follower special. there’s gonna be one more part after this <3

masterlist

Empty. Everything seemed empty.

His wrist, his mind, his heart. There was a hollowness that ached deep within Suga’s chest after you ran out of the room, and although his mind was racing with enough thoughts to make him feel dizzy, it felt strangely blank. There was something he was missing — someone he was missing — and that someone was you.

But who were you?

That simple question replayed over and over again in his mind to the point where he felt like he was about to go insane. Nothing seemed real anymore, because everything had happened so fast. He was about to receive the ball at a game and in the blink of an eye he was lying down in a hospital bed, feeling a throbbing pain his head and the warm sensation of a stranger's hand holding his.

A stranger...no, you couldn’t be a stranger — not with the way you had looked at him as though nothing else in the world mattered to you as much as he did. The nurses wouldn’t have let someone who didn’t know him into his room, so it was impossible for you two to have never met before.

You were apart of his life — you had to be — yet no matter how hard he tried to think, he couldn’t recall a single memory inside his mind that had you in it.

Suga let out a deep sigh of frustration, and despite how utterly weak he felt, he gripped the white sheets of his hospital bed so tightly that his knuckles began to turn white. He didn’t know if his head was pounding because of his injury or because of how hard he was trying to grasp onto any sliver of a memory that could tell him who you were, but it was no use. Every one of those memories were empty.

“There’s nothing...” Suga whispered to himself defeatedly, allowing his head to fall back onto his soft pillow. His attempts to remember you had been futile, because it was as though you had been erased from his mind without warning. 

Warning. The thought of that singular word made him instinctively grab onto his left wrist with his right hand, and he used his thumb to trace small circles over the blank spot on his skin.

According to you, there had once been a warning label there.

According to you, he had gotten that label because he asked you out.

It all seemed so surreal. How could he have gotten his first warning label without even remembering what it said? He couldn’t even rely on his own memory, so all he had to fall back on were a stranger’s words.

No, not a stranger’s words. Your words. His eyes immediately darted to his sports bag, which was resting on one of the chairs by his bedside. He weakly stepped out of his hospital bed, flinching as the coolness of the ground surged through his bare feet, and he pulled the bag’s zipper to reveal his phone resting on top of his jersey.

The sudden brightness of his phone screen illuminating the surrounding darkness sent a wave of pain through the grey-haired boy’s already aching head, but that didn’t matter to him. In that moment, all that mattered was that his most recent photo had you in it.

It was a moment frozen in time, a moment that existed in the software of his phone rather than in his own mind. He was fast asleep on your shoulder, and you had the brightest of grins on your face as you held out a playful peace sign to the camera. Nishinoya and Tanaka were hovering over the back of the bus seat you two were sitting on, holding out peace signs and sticking out their tongues goofily.

“So it’s true...” he whispered, his heart stopping in his chest. He immediately went to his messages to see if he had a chat with you, and sure enough, your name held the position of the top-most chat on his screen.

“[Y/N] ❥”.

“[Y/N],” he whispered your name, the sound of it feeling so familiar yet so foreign as it rolled off his tongue. He repeated it once more and closed his eyes, half-expecting all of his forgotten memories to instantly flash through his mind, but not a single one appeared.

His mind remained empty.

“It’s no use,” Suga sighed, collapsing back in his hospital bed and staring up at the ceiling in a daze. Although he didn’t remember who you were, he knew that you must have meant something to him, because your absence left a gaping hole in his heart that he so desperately wanted to fill. 

Who were you, and why did he feel so empty without you?

Suga closed his eyes, the surrounding darkness to encompassing him as he drifted off into a peaceful slumber — away from the throbbing pain in his head and the hollow feeling in his chest.

Empty. Without you, everything seemed empty.

After spending the night in the hospital and undergoing a multitude of examinations to ensure he was alright, Suga was discharged the next morning.

He had tried to tell the doctors about his amnesia, but they simply stated that there wasn’t much they could do. Only time would tell whether his memories would slowly come back to him or just not return at all, so the doctors told him that he’d be able to go to school the following day and resume life as normal.

Well, at least as ‘normal’ as it could get.

After scrolling through all his photos and text messages, there was no denying that he had been in a relationship with you. Not when there were pictures of you wrapping your arms around his neck as you gently kissed his cheek, not when there were text messages of you two saying the fateful three words: “I love you”.

If he did love you, then love was cruel, because any feelings that he harbored for you had disappeared, instead being replaced with a feeling of emptiness, a feeling of curiosity. He wanted to remember what it felt like to love you, but he didn’t know how.

On Suga’s daily walks to school, the feeling of the crisp morning air usually calmed his mind for the coming day, yet there was nothing relaxing about his walk to school the next morning. Anxiety flowed through his veins because with every step he took, he was closer to seeing you.

And he was right about that, because upon arriving at his destination, there you were.

You were sitting in a desk at the front of the classroom, a blank expression on your face as you took your binder out of your bag and set it down in front of you with a light thump. Your lips were pulled down into a permanent frown as you flipped through your notes, but it didn’t seem like you were looking for anything in particular. Your eyes were empty and your movements were slow — you were clearly hurting and Suga knew that he was the reason why.

Suga was never one to avoid confrontation, but at that moment, all he wanted to do was run out of the room. Although he had forgotten who you were, it was hard to forget the tears that streamed down your face as you pleaded with him to remember you. Suga couldn’t face you knowing that he was the reason for your pain, even if it was unintentional.

“Koush — um, I mean, S-sugawara-san,” the sound of your startled voice snapped Suga out of his thoughts. He looked up and froze in place when he realized that you were staring at him with wide eyes and parted lips, as though his very presence had caused your whole world to come crashing down around you.

“[Y/N] ...” Suga gulped as he rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, but when he saw your breath hitch in your throat, he realized that saying your name was a huge mistake.

“Y-you...you remember me?” you stuttered out, making Suga’s heart drop in his chest. Your expression had immediately brightened, and there was a glimmer of hope in your previously lifeless eyes. But as much as Suga didn’t want it to disappear, there was no use in lying.

“No, I...your name is in the contacts on my phone. I’m sorry,” Suga apologized, turning red in embarrassment. It pained Suga to say these words, but he couldn’t even bring himself to imagine the amount of pain you were feeling.

“Oh...” you said in almost a whisper, but the pain in your voice was as clear as day. You looked back down at the notes on your desk, the light in your eyes dimming and your expression saddening once more. “You sit beside me, by the way...in case you forgot that too.”

Suga didn’t know what to say, so he simply walked towards you and took a seat in the desk beside you. He noticed that his very presence made you stiffen in your seat, and you didn’t even spare him a glance as the teacher walked up to the chalkboard and began her lesson.

“Was this your way of moving on?” Suga thought to himself, not even attempting to listen to what the teacher was saying. Although the boy had no memory of your relationship beginning, he didn’t want it to end. All he wanted to do was remember, for everything to go back to normal — but he couldn’t even remember what his ‘normal’ was.

Throughout the entirety of the lesson, Suga kept sneaking glances at your wrist as you copied down the solutions that the teacher was writing on the chalkboard. Your wrist was empty just like his was, devoid of any warning label that signified a relationship between you two, which made the boy wonder what words could have possibly appeared on your wrist when he asked you out. 

Suga didn’t realize that the lesson was over until he saw you open your textbook to start working on the assigned homework. He followed suit and opened his book too, yet instead of working he simply stared at the equations on the page, hoping that the confusing math problems could distract him from all of his problems in real life.

“Hey, Yoshida,” the girl sitting in the pair of desks behind yours and Suga’s whispered to the blond boy beside her, snapping Suga out of his daze. “Can you check over my answer for question three?”

Suga’s eyes widened in surprise upon hearing the eleven words that had come out of the girl’s mouth. A spark had lit inside of his mind, making glimpses of the past appear before his eyes at the speed of light.

“[Y/N], can you check over my answer for question three?” he remembered asking you, his past words echoing in his mind as the image of a page with the words ‘go out with me’ written on it danced before his eyes.

He remembered the initial look of surprise on your face, the way your lips were parted in shock before they curled upwards into a smile as you told him that his answer was perfect.

He remembered the way your eyes watered in fear when you saw that your warning label claimed you were ‘too idealistic and stubborn’, and he remembered the laugh of relief that escaped your lips when he told you that he thought that it was cute that you always had your head up in the clouds.

And finally, he remembered the feeling of his heart sinking in his chest when he rolled up his left sleeve to reveal the words ‘will break your heart’ on his wrist.

“Are you okay, Ko — Sugawara-san?” you asked, snapping the grey-haired boy back into reality. His heart was racing because of the sudden memory that had flooded his mind, yet the sound of your voice made his heart race even more. “You look kind of lost...do you understand the homework?

“N-no,” Suga shook his head, not even daring to mention the memories that had flashed before his eyes because he didn’t want to bring your hopes up. “Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t think I remember a single word our teacher has said all semester.”

He wasn’t lying when he said that. His amnesia must have went further than simply forgetting you because he truly didn’t have any memory stemming back from the past few months, yet he could have sworn that he remembered the mundane task of buying a new binder before his math course began. Life was cruel, because of course his memories had to be cut off at the point right before he met you.

“I can help you, if you want,” you told him, and his brown eyes widened in surprise at your sudden proposition. “We can meet in the library to review at lunch like we always d—”

You stopped speaking mid-sentence, and Suga knew that it was because you had realized that he had no recollection of what you were talking about. Suga knew that no matter how many memories would come back to him, he couldn’t get them all back. He wanted to remember every single study session, every single inside joke, every single moment that had made him fall in love with you.

“That sounds good,” he gave you a small smile, pretending not to notice what you had stopped yourself from saying, and as if it was perfect timing, the bell rang to mark the end of class. The two of you simultaneously stood up from your seats, putting your books in your bags before walking out into the hallway.

You gave Suga a small grin before you parted ways with him, which made his heart flutter in excitement. Maybe he was starting to remember the feelings he had towards you. Maybe spending time with you would help him remember something else. He didn’t know if the sudden memory he had in class was a fluke, or if he could even intentionally trigger getting another flashback, but he had to try.

Suga couldn’t contain the smile on his face as he walked the rest of the way to his class, yet little did the grey-haired boy know that the moment you turned away from him, you finally allowed the mask on your face to fall.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know if I can do this.”

Suga’s brown eyes immediately darted up from the pages of his textbook at your sudden words. The two of you had been sitting in the library for the entirety of lunch, and reviewing a whole semester’s worth of math work was exhausting, to say the least.

“Hmm?” Suga hummed, twirling his pencil boredely in his fingers. “It’s alright, I’m tired too. We went through a lot today, so we can go through the rest of the lessons tomorrow. Thanks for helping me, by the way.”

“No...you don’t understand,” you shook your head, making the boy’s brown eyes widen in confusion.

“What don’t I understand?” Suga furrowed his eyebrows, tightening his grip around his pencil to stop the momentum of it spinning in his fingers.

You didn’t respond at first. You simply stared down at the pages of your textbook, and Suga noticed that your eyes were starting to water.

“[Y/N], are you oka—“

“I thought I’d be fine, but being with you right now...I can’t take it,” you interrupted him, your voice breaking as you spoke. “I can’t just sit here and pretend that everything’s alright when three days ago you forgot that I even existed.”

Whatever strength left inside you that allowed you to keep your calm for so long had finally collapsed, allowing the river of your tears that you had been holding back to stream like a waterfall down your cheeks.

“But I...I didn’t want to forget,” Suga felt a pang of guilt strike his heart upon seeing you break down before his eyes. “You don’t know how much I want to be able to remember, and I’m actually starting to. Today in class I remembered the moment I asked you out, and I’m sure I’ll be able to remember more things if you don’t push me away.”

Your tearful eyes widened at his his sudden statement, but you didn’t allow your moment of hopefulness to last very long.

“But you can’t control that, Koushi,” you shook your head, your voice coming out in a shaky whisper. You didn’t even try to correct yourself when you said his first name. “What if you don’t remember? Then what? And even if you do, you can’t remember it all. There’s always going to be something missing, and it isn’t your fault, but I...I can’t handle it. I’m sorry.”

You started to get up from your seat, and Suga was speechless as you started putting your books away in your bag before standing up and starting to walk away.

“Wait!” Suga called after you, gently grabbing onto your wrist to stop you from leaving, but his brown eyes widened in surprise when you flinched under his sudden touch. He was confused at first, but then he realized which wrist he had grabbed onto.

It was your left one. He was holding onto the spot that was once etched with words that foretold a warning for your relationship. But now the words were gone, erased, just like his memory of you.

You two were frozen in shock, staring into each other’s eyes as his hand was gently clasped around your wrist. But he didn’t let go, because he didn’t want to let you go.

“What happened to you being ‘too idealistic and stubborn?’ Why are you giving up on this?” Suga’s voice came out strained as he looked into your eyes pleadingly, and in that moment, he looked just as broken as you did. “I might not remember the feelings I had for you before I asked you out, but I remember how happy I felt when you said yes. Isn’t that enough?”

Your eyes widened momentarily at the mention of your label, yet Suga could have sworn that he saw your expression soften for a second. You didn’t say anything at first, but after a couple of moments your eyes glistened with even more tears than before.

“I’m s-sorry,” you finally whispered. “It isn’t even your fault, I just can’t bring my hopes up again. Let’s just forget about this once and for all.”

And with those final words, you pulled your wrist gently out of Suga’s grip and walked out of the library, leaving the stunned setter to sit alone and contemplate where it all went wrong.

“Go home, Sugawara-san.”

“Come on, just let me in.”

“I said go home. You need to rest.”

The rest of the school day had gone by in a blur after what had happened at lunch, and before Suga knew it, he was standing in front of the gym pleading to be let into practice. Daichi had locked him out, only swinging the door open occasionally to scold the persistent grey-haired setter and tell him to leave.

“I’m fine now, just please let me practice,” Suga sighed, trying to sneak a glimpse of his team practicing in the gym, but Daichi was standing in front of the entrance, blocking his view. “We need to get ready for—”

“You’re not fine,” Daichi interrupted the boy, crossing his arms sternly. “You just got out of the hospital. Go home and rest up. You can practice again next week.”

Not even giving the boy another second to insist on being let in, Daichi stepped back and slammed the gym doors shut, the sound of a click ringing out in the air to indicate that he had just locked it.

“Great...” Suga huffed in annoyance, his breath coming out as a foggy puff in the cool air. The sky darkened with each passing second, revealing the moon and the stars in the wake of the previously bright blue sky. The boy knew that there was no use in waiting there any longer, as Daichi had made it clear that he wasn’t getting past him, so he tightened his grip around his sports bag and began his long walk home.

Although Suga was walking home alone, he had the millions of thoughts that were racing through his mind to accompany him. In reality, missing a practice was the least of the boy’s worries. He just needed something, anything, to distract him from the words you said earlier.

Was it really over?

Did you really want him out of your life?

Did you really want him to forget it all for good?

He didn’t know why he cared as much as he did — it felt like he had just met you, yet at the same time it felt like he had known you for his entire life. Maybe his label was gone, and maybe his memory of you was too, but he wasn’t ready to let it all go.

A sudden gust of wind snapped Suga out of his thoughts. He had been zoned out for the entirety of the walk, so the cool breeze brought him back to reality and made him realize where he was.

The sight before the grey-haired setter’s eyes was beautiful. The full moon rested high in the starry sky, its light illuminating the dark blue lake water that flowed beneath the bridge that he had been absentmindedly walking on. He had always taken this route during his walks home because of how picturesque it truly was. 

Suga walked over to the edge of the bridge and rested his elbows on the grey railing that was the only separation between himself and the water below. He stared up at the night sky above him, yet instead of seeing the lone moon, or the thousands of stars, his vision was clouded with a memory that he never knew existed.

And at that moment, it all came flashing back.

[a/n - okay don’t scream at me bc it obviously doesn’t end here! as i said earlier, i’m making one more part, so don’t break my kneecaps bc i’m giving y’all the ending that you deserve!

[shipaholic]

Omens Universe, Chapter 14, Part 1

Warnings! Asphyxiation, child endangerment.

Link to next part at the end. (From the beginning)

(last part)

(chrono)

---

Chapter 14

Oh.

Shit.

Zadkiel grabbed Adam. His hands engulfed the boy’s shoulders. Had he always been this tiny? Focus, focus -

“Adam, reality will listen to you. You are in control. Anything that you believe will come true.” Desperation tried to worm into his voice. He held it at bay. “Listen to me. You can hear me talking, right? That means there’s air. You can breathe, you just have to believe there’s air. Come on now.”

Spacedog was hollering. Adam clutched the dog to his chest, painfully tight. His arms were as pale as death.

Zadkiel made a strangled noise. He pulled Adam into a bear hug and dived.

Proxima Centauri B rushed up to meet him. He was breaking most laws of physics right now. He punched through the atmosphere, and didn’t bother to slow his descent as they streaked to the ground, miles of hard earth and marbled mud coming in fast -

Zadkiel burned through the alien sky, flaming like a meteor, and pasted himself on the rocky landscape.

His one safety protocol was to make sure Adam landed on top of him.

With a small explosion, Crowley and Aziraphale were flung apart like rag dolls.

Spacedog wriggled free and tried to lick Adam’s face. The space helmet got in the way. Spacedog pushed it into Adam’s cheek and frantically licked the glass. He whined, a piteous, unbroken sound.

The sprawled bodies did not move.

Then Adam’s face gave a twitch.

“Stop that, you silly Spacedog.”

Spacedog yapped his head off and ran around in circles.

Adam flexed his fingers, experimentally. They still held the Book.

Crowley and Aziraphale realised they had escaped being discorporated. To their dismay, this meant they had to move. They managed to roll over and flop towards Adam and each other. Sitting up could wait.

“You alright, Adam?” Crowley said without moving his lips.

Adam got the gist, even with none of the consonants. “Yeah. Thanks. It’s cool that you did that without being in a rocket.”

“Hell yeah,” Crowley managed.

“I’m so sorry, my dear boy,” Aziraphale said to Adam, just slightly more coherently than Crowley. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“He’s fine, children bounce,” Crowley said, his eyes closed.

Aziraphale tutted. “You’re incorrigible,” he said. Or tried to. It proved a little too difficult in his current state.

Crowley cracked an eye open. “Did you say I’m ineffable?”

“In. Corri. Gible.”

“Good. We don’t use that kind of language in front of the kid.”

Adam sat up, wincing. Spacedog leapt into his arms and tried once more to mash the fishbowl helmet into his face.

~*~

When they’d all recovered a bit, they took in their surroundings.

Crowley had been to the Grand Canyon. Proxima Centauri B was like that, but stranger. Its winding rock tunnels and quarries were an odd, half-melted brown. The sun was low in the sky, either setting or rising, no-one was sure. It was a shockingly pinkish-red, in a night sky tinged a deeper, richer purple than any twilight on Earth.

Crowley tried to appreciate it. It was home, now. And presumably, forever.

Perhaps he just wasn’t in the mood. They were all a bit on-edge. Aziraphale kept sneaking glances at Adam to check he was still breathing. The damn green dog seemed perfectly at home, but that just put Crowley in a worse mood.

He skulked at the back of the group, hands in his pockets. Aziraphale fell back and stood beside him.

“You changed back,” he said, nodding to Crowley’s outfit.

“Eh, yeah. White was never my colour.”

“I suspect it isn’t mine, either,” Aziraphale said, softly.

Crowley’s gaze slipped over the brown and blue and gold of him.

“No. You’ve a bit more character than that,” he said.

Aziraphale smiled up at him from under his lashes. There was a flicker of intent to that look. Heat crawled up Crowley’s neck.

Adam giggled nearby as Spacedog swam laps around his head. They turned to watch him.

“Do you think he’s still the Antichrist, out here?” Aziraphale said.

“Is that a, strand the King of Spain in outer space, is he still a King, kind of thing?”

“I suppose that’s an interesting question. Although I meant it more in a, does he still have his powers out here, kind of thing.”

Crowley’s eyes lingered on the frolicking dog. He sighed. “I think he probably does.”

Aziraphale looked grim. “Poor old Earth,” he murmured.

Crowley shook his head. “If we’d just got on the portal and not let him yammer on about the dog…”

“I didn’t think,” Aziraphale said, sadly.

“Me neither. And I’ve got no excuse. Beelzebub briefed us on that hellhound for an entire Thursday afternoon.”

They watched the boy and dog in silence.

“I suppose it is the Earth that will still - ahm. Be affected by his powers?”

“How do you mean?”

“There’s no chance he’s brought Armageddon with him?”

They stared at each other. They peered at the sky. No sudden rains of blood or other omens appeared.

“Nah, reckon it’s probably still going to happen on Earth.”

Aziraphale looked miserable.

Crowley put a hand on his arm. “Hey. All we could do was get out.”

“I know.”

“Don’t torture yourself.”

Aziraphale mustered a weak smile.

They watched Adam rooting around for a stick to throw for Spacedog. He found a sturdy one right at his feet that was the right size and hurled it across the marsh. Spacedog took off after it, yipping. It was unclear how, in the helmet, he was going to bring it back.

“There isn’t any wood on this planet,” Aziraphale said, carefully.

Crowley nodded glumly. “Guess that confirms it. Reality still bends to his will.” He thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, I doubt this planet has much of an atmosphere.”

“Mmm, yes. That should have been our first clue.”[1]

“I think a regular child would have frozen to death while he was floating in space.” And/or exploded. Crowley felt he’d seen something like that in a film once.

“...This wasn’t a very child-friendly plan, was it?”

“You’re just noticing this now? We kidnapped an eleven-year-old from his parents.”

“You talked me into it.”

“Of course I did. Demon.”

“A temptation worthy of a commendation,” Aziraphale said, with only a trace of a scolding.

Crowley turned and slipped his arms around Aziraphale’s neck.

“They’ll have to put it in a cannon and fire it into space. Hope it reaches me in a few thousand years.”

Aziraphale chuckled. It was a wonderfully warm, wry sound. It always sounded like he knew he was getting away with something. Crowley watched the tips of his hair stain pink in the alien sun.

Suddenly, Aziraphale’s face fell.

“Crowley, we don’t have to teach him maths, do we?”

~*~

Half an hour later, the euphoria wore off.

Adam trudged across the squishy, marshy ground, investigating his new territory. Spacedog trotted at his heels. Aziraphale and Crowley stood and kept an eye on him from a distance. It was nice, like an amiable family walk across a muddy field in late September.

And then, like an amiable family walk across a muddy field in late September, the mood soured. The mud that had been fun to tromp through sunk through the soles of the walking shoes that were supposed to be waterproof. The rustic landscape grew dreary. That cow had a mean look in its eye.

In other words, it dawned on Adam that he hadn’t eaten for hours, the alien planet all looked the same for miles around, there was a shocking dearth of cinemas, sweet shops or comic books in this area of the galaxy, he would never see his family again, and he had very recently almost died. Also, he forgot to bring snacks.

A suspicion had brewed at the back of his mind for a few hours now. It bubbled away, growing, gaining certainty. Now, grubby, cold and hungry, it was time to ask.

“Are you two actually aliens?”

Aziraphale and Crowley were having a murmured grown-up conversation behind him. They stopped. Their faces went blank in the way grown-up’s faces went when they were thinking how to lie to him.

“Perhaps it’s time to drop the pretence,” Aziraphale whispered.

Crowley frowned. “It’s not like the truth is any less weird.”

“I dislike lying, on general principle.”

“I’m in favour of lying, on general principle. Let’s compromise and say nothing.”

“You know full well that would be a lie of omission. Don’t think I’m going to start falling for tricks like that after six thousand years -”

“Would you both just stop talking?” Adam said loudly.

They shut up.

“You’re always talking rubbish and I don’t understand it.”

Adam frowned. He held the Book under one arm. For a moment, he heard its pages rustle.

“My whole life is just everyone talking rubbish at me, all the time. Nothing anyone’s ever told me made any sense. Like the stuff about how I was going to destroy the world. And then you two, with the alien stuff. I just believed it because everything was so weird, it’s not like aliens could be any weirder. The only person I’ve ever met who seemed like they properly knew what was going on was that woman back in the car. She’s the one who left me this.” He hefted the Book in his arms. “I’ve got more proper answers from this than I’ve got from anyone, ever.”

“What is that?”

Aziraphale took a step towards him.

Adam’s arms tightened around the Book. Spacedog leapt in front of him and growled.

Aziraphale blinked and halted. Crowley held out an arm.

A chill wind picked up.

“That woman was the only person who seemed like she wanted to help me and tell me what was really going on, and she said I shouldn’t leave. She said it was a mistake to leave. And I didn’t listen. And you zapped her away.” Adam pointed at Crowley.

Crowley inched backwards. “Hang on, I was under a lot of stress…”

“And you grew wings and flew around that bookshop. Aliens don’t do that. You didn’t look like an alien, back then, you looked more like…”

Adam stopped.

“I shouldn’t have come with you,” he muttered.

Aziraphale and Crowley stared at each other.

“You remember you forced us to bring you, right?” Crowley pointed out. “Just saying.”

Aziraphale frowned and nudged him.

The wind whipped at them. Adam was only in a t-shirt. He wasn’t cold.

“I want to go home,” he said.

It was not the lament of a lost child. The words resonated around the landscape. Aziraphale and Crowley felt them down to the bones.

A whirring pulse sounded from high above them, faintly. Nobody glanced up, but a prickle of warning ran up their necks.

“I don’t have to be here. You said reality will listen to me. She said the same thing. In this book.”

An emerald-green spotlight shone down on Adam. The wind became a roaring gale. It whipped Adam’s t-shirt. He stared down Aziraphale and Crowley through eyes that were suddenly dark under the livid green light.

Crowley squinted into the sky.

He said, “What.”

Aziraphale kept his eyes on Adam. Carefully, as though the boy were a skittish animal, he raised his hands towards him.

“Adam, we were not honest with you. I apologise. It is our fault you are in this mess. There are forces at work that it was too difficult to explain to you. You see -”

“Angel, you should take a look at this,” Crowley interrupted.

“Not now, Crowley!”

“Aziraphale, it’s a goddamned flying saucer.”

Aziraphale looked up.

A round, whirring alien spacecraft hovered in the sky above them.

“What,” he said.

Adam stood in the disco-glow of the green spotlight. Furious pulses of wind flapped down on him. He met Crowley’s eyes with a long, hard stare. Spacedog’s hackles rose.

Crowley blinked first. He edged back, one hand on Aziraphale’s arm.

The flying saucer whirred and spun. In a series of loops, it meandered down to the surface of Proxima Centauri B. It let out a gust of steam as it settled like a soggy cake.

A door opened in its side with a hiss.

A ramp descended, and three aliens got out. Two of them were green. The third was a small hump with wheels and an egg-whisker sticking out of it. It quickly got stuck in a marshy patch and made some angry distress noises that the other two ignored.

Adam stood like a king greeting foreign dignitaries as the remaining two aliens walked over to him.

“Hello,” he said.

The alien leader, who had a face like a duck,[2] approached first. “Adam Dowling?”

Adam squinted up at her. The spotlight was still blinding. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“All right, sir. I believe you called for a taxi service.” The alien looked slightly put out to be used as such, but she hid it well. “We’re here to take you back to Earth.”

“Erm,” Crowley said. “Hang on.”

Everyone ignored him, to his relief. He had no idea what he would have said next.

Adam followed the aliens back to their saucer. The slightly taller alien helped the pepper-pot alien back up from where it had tipped over in the mud.

“Wait - Adam -” Aziraphale called.

Crowley put an arm around him. Neither moved to follow. Without speaking, they conceded that this was going to happen whether or not they found it plausible.

The three aliens shuffled back up the gangplank. The round, beeping alien left a long streak of mud as it trundled inside the spaceship. Adam and Spacedog walked behind them.

A scrap of paper flapped loose from inside the Book. The wind carried it directly to Aziraphale. He caught it reflexively.

Adam reached the top of the gangplank and vanished without a backward glance. The spaceship door sealed shut.

The spaceship made a Whomm Whomm Whomm noise and floated into the air. It wobbled a bit, and then streaked into the stratosphere, leaving a green comet trail behind it.

The howling gale abruptly blew itself out. The planet’s surface was deafeningly quiet.

Nothing broke the calm but a tiny green speck in the sky, already winking out of sight.

---

[1] When you only breathe out of habit, you stop thinking about things like oxygen.

[2] “Ducks,” Crowley almost blurted, as a Pavlovian response.

(Link to next part)

[dobrienbabe]

Remember Us || Stiles Stilinski

Pairing: Stiles Stilinski x pregnant!reader

Word Count: 2720

Summary: You are pregnant with Stiles child during season 6a. Enough said. 

Warnings: 6a spoilers, teen pregnancy, pregnant in high school

Request: oh gosh I can’t believe i forgot! prompt 43 with Stiles Stilinski. i’m so sorry!

Prompt:  43. “Do you think it’s possible that I…might be… pregnant?”

Note: Thank You for requesting this! This is set season 6a. It was kinda a fun thing for me to write. I hope you like it and Thank you for re-requesting.

So this was supposed to be posted yesterday, But i wanted to add something more to it. I think it flows better now. I hope you like it. 

This is obviously already been posted, but since I started my smaller blogs, I wanted all my work for each fandom in one place. Instead of just reblogging everything I figured that I would repost it.

Request/Taglist

Masterlist

“Stiles,” you called from your sleepy daze. You reached to the other side of the bed feeling around for your boyfriend. You found his clothed chest beside and he laced his fingers in yours pressing a kiss to your knuckles.

You had stayed over at his place the night before after some freak supernatural incident in the woods. Stiles and Scott came across a car that only held a little boy; his parents were missing without a trace of them anywhere beside a hole in the windshield. Stiles was freaking out really bad and had insisted that you come over and spend the night claiming he just needed to hold you. 

You didn’t fight him. He was too worried. You just got in the car and drove over to his place after the meeting in the junkyard. He had gotten there first and greeted you with a warm hug before he dragged you to his room. The two of you had stayed up into the early hours of the morning just talking about your future and the rest of your senior year. 

“Morning,” Stiles voice whispered sending chills up your spine. You opened your eyes to be greeted with the bright light coming through the blinds and Stiles’s sleepy gaze. 

Your hand rested on his chest sliding closer to him. 

“How did you sleep?” Stiles asked.

“Pretty good,” you said rubbing his clothes chest. “What about you?”

A lazy smile creeped its way onto Stiles face. He intertwined his fingers in yours. His other arm found its away around your waist pulling you closer to him. He pressed a quick peck to your lips.

“Better with you here,” he said. “Are you feeling well enough to eat? Do you want breakfast?”

You let a smile creep onto your face as well. You moved to snuggle your face into his neck. You weren’t really in the mood for food. Mornings were the worst and had been for about three weeks now. You had gone to the doctor questioning why only to find out that you were pregnant. 

You told Stiles right away, and he was beyond happy. It wasn’t really the best time in either of your lives to have a baby, but that didn’t change the joy you felt over it. 

You had told your parents and Noah. Neither Noah nor your parents were too excited about it, but they were still super supportive of the two of you. You hadn’t told your friends yet knowing how they would react, but you were planning to soon. 

“I don’t think it’d be a good idea to eat,” you said stifling a laugh. “I don’t need to puke it back up in math.”

Stiles laughed and pressed a kiss to your temple before he got up out of bed. You watched as the half-asleep teen dragged his feet over to his dresser, and started to get ready for the day. You rolled onto your back as you starred up at the ceiling above you. The opening and closing of drawers was the only sound that you could here. 

You sat up in bed and watched as Stiles changed his clothes. You crawled out of Stiles’s bed after he pulled on his jeans and walked over to him. You wrapped your arms around his waist as he pulled off his bed shirt. 

You put your head on his shoulder. You could feel him smile as he rubbed the top of your arms. 

“Babe, you need get ready,” he said. “We have to go to school soon.”

You just groaned and buried your face into his shoulder. His rough hands ran gently and soothingly over your arms. Stiles turned around to face you. Looking up at him, he placed a kiss sweetly on your lips and rubbed your arms. 

“Okay, go so I can get dressed,” you said pushing him away. He let out a hearty chuckle before walking out closing the door behind him.

You stood off to the side watching as your boyfriend kept walking into Malia’s senior picture to add something more about his theories about last night. You couldn’t help but laugh at his always so enthusiastic behavior. 

“You’d think he’d just realize to wait,” Scott said beside you. 

“I don’t think he will ever realize,” you said shaking your head. 

“I’m going to have to agree with Y/N on that one,” Lydia said just laughing with you as Stiles interrupted yet another take of the picture. 

You just walked around to sit at a table. Lydia and Scott got books out of their bags right away and got to work as you just watched Stiles continue to get into Malia’s photo. You sat in between the banshee and the werewolf. Eventually, she gave up and came over to join the group. 

“Why would I want to ruin your yearbook photo?” Stiles said trailing behind the were-coyote. Malia moved to sit on the table behind Lydia before she spoke again.

“Maybe because you haven’t signed up for your own photo yet?” Malia said like she just came up with the best explanation the world had to offer. You stood up from your seat to wrap your arm around your boyfriend’s waist. He rested his arm around your shoulder loosely as he pulled you closer to his side. 

“Yes, he did,” you said nudging stiles. He dug around in his pocket looking for the small paper. He finally found it and pulled it out to show her. Stiles struggled to unfold the paper from it’s small square with one hand. He offered it to her.

“See,” he said not even looking at it. You caught a brief glance. It was completely blank. You furrowed your eyebrows. You sat there and filled out the paper with him.

“It’s blank,” Malia said glancing between you, Stiles and the paper. You turned to Lydia see she was still seemingly uninterestedly starring at her book.

“Or maybe you’re sublimating the stress of graduating by avoiding key milestones,” Scott said. The words coming from Scott’s mouth had caused even Lydia to turn to him shocked. You had been helping Scott with his school work, so it wasn’t really a surprise for you, but for everyone else it was life changing.

“Psych paper,” Scott said. Everyone just had a moment of realization. You patted Scott’s shoulder. A resounding Oh filled the air from your friends. 

“Hey, the deputy searched the car,” Stiles said bringing the attention back to him. “No slugs, no exit holes. And the addresses Alex gave my dad, it’s an abandoned house.”

No one said anything. They all just stared at him. You weren’t sure where he was going with it either. You slipped out from under his arm to return to your spot on the bench. 

“Come on!” Stiles was getting frustrated as he tried to make his point. “Missing parents, suspicious guy on horseback, magic bullet. Who’s comin’ with me?”

“I’ve got to retake my photos,” Malia said shaking her head.

“Yeah, not interested,” Lydia said causing you to laugh a little. 

“I’m free,” you said waving at Stiles. He just frowned and shock his head as Scott spoke up next. 

“I cannot miss any more class,” Scott said. 

“Scott, Scott,” Stiles said looking at his best friend pleadingly. 

“I missed 38 last semester,” Scott said. “And Lydia’s mom is the only reason I’m still in school. I can go after school.”

You looked at him with wide eyes. 38 was way more than you had thought. Everyone else shared the same look. Lydia almost had a smug look on her face in reference to her mother’s power at this school. You thought Scott’s proposal though was reasonable. 

“You know what?” Stiles was frustrated at this point. “Forget it. I’ll take Liam.”

Stiles let out a deep sign. You stood up and pressed a sweet kiss to his lips. His shoulders relaxed. He put his arm around your waist again and turned to look for Liam. His gaze quickly found the young teen and he pursed his lips in disgust. 

You looked over to see him making out with Hayden. You scrunched your nose up and you looked to your friends you were also staring at the young teens with a look og disgust. 

“Yeah, I’m not taking Liam,” Stiles said.

“Mmhmm,” Scott said.

“Sorry babe,” you mumbled to him. You were willing to go, but Stiles was in no way planning on taking his pregnant girlfriend leaving him with no viable options until after school. 

“hey can I get a candid?” the yearbook photographer asked. 

“Uh, no,” Stiles said as Scott agreed and pulled Stiles to the bench. Stiles pulled you along with him landing in his lap.

You leaned into your boyfriend as his arms circled your waist. 

“Okay fine,” Stiles started in a hush whisper to Scott. “If you can explain to me why this is blue, I’ll let it go.”

You turned to see the piece of glass that Stiles had taken from the broken windshield of the car last night. Stiles turned to the camera as you looked over Scott’s face as he analyzed the shard. You knew that look.

“Everyone smile,” the photographer said bringing your attention back to her. You smiled widely as she snapped a picture of the five of you.

Everything had been going just fine. The past month nothing had really happened. Everything had been complaining that something felt off, but there was no real indication that anything was different.

It was odd that you had gone so long without any sort of supernatural occurrence. You were trying to not let it bug you. 

You walked down the school hallway to your locker at a leisurely pace. You weren’t feeling good as of late, but you were pushing through. You figured it was some sort of lingering stomach bug which was luckily calming down as of lately. 

“Hey, Y/N,” Lydia called out to you. You turned to see her walking with Malia as you got to your locker.

“We were thinking,” Malia started excitedly.

“You haven’t been out on a date in a while,” Lydia said cutting off Malia’s suspenseful draw. “You need to get back out there.”

“Are you saying you are trying to set me up?” you said raising an eyebrow at the grinning teens in front of you.

“Exactly,” Malia said emphasizing by pointing at you aggressively. It looked out of place for the conversation, but you brushed it off as her social awkwardness.

“I was thinking Dave,” Lydia said. She had a wide smile on her face. You were gawked at the strawberry blonde girl. Malia took a moment and mirrored your look. 

“Isn’t he with that Audrey girl?” Malia asked. Lydia didn’t seem phased a bit by mention of Dave’s girlfriend. 

“Aubrey,” you said nodding. “They’ve been dating for four months.”

“Whatever, he’s still cute,” she said waving her hand in front of your face. 

The bell rang alerting you that it was time for class. You were glad for the opportunity for escape. 

“Remember we have a pack meeting at Scott’s house after school,” You said as you grabbed your math textbook out of your locker. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Lydia said. Turning and walking away. “I’ll see you later.”

You closed your locker as Malia still watched you move around. There felt like something you needed to say to you, but you weren’t sure what it was.

“Bye,” you said without another word the both of you turned around and walked in opposite directions.

You stood in Scott’s room pacing back and forth practically making a rut in the carpet below your feet. Scott, Malia, and Lydia sat on your bed looking at you expectedly. You had called a pack meeting to talk to them, but you weren’t sure how to actually tell them what was going on. 

You looked over to them. Malia seemed to be getting annoyed as you all just sat there, but Lydia was on her phone passing the time. Scott just kept looking at you trying to figure out what to say to make this better. 

“So, I’ve been sick a lot lately,” you said nervously picking up your pace. Lydia set her phone down and diverted her attention to you.

“Is that why you always seem to smell like vomit in the mornings?” Malia asked with no shame. You looked down embarrassed. You loved the girl but you really wished she would understand why it was mean to be so blunt all the time. 

“Yes, and I’ve been trying to come with all the possible things that could cause that,” you said looking into all your friends’ eyes as you spoke.

Scott nodded along while Lydia actually looked intrigued about where you were going with this. Malia looked more confused than anything else. 

“Do you think it’s possible that I…might be… pregnant?” you said. You started playing with your fingers nervously. Scott looked more shocked than you had seen him in a long time, but Lydia seemed like she already knew. 

“Okay, not to be completely oblivious or anything, but how would that work?” Malia said. “Last time I checked, you have to have sex to get pregnant, and honey I’m pretty sure you’re a virgin.”

Malia had a point. You couldn’t recall a single time in your life that you had had sex. Sure, you had kissed boys and gone on dates, but you had never taken it that far. You just had this feeling like something in your gut was telling you that you were pregnant. 

“I know it sounds crazy,” you said looking at the baffled faces, “But I just feel like we need to check. I’ve been feeling like there’s something greater that’s off. I f I can prove this then maybe I’m right.”

You were practically pleading to your friends as they all looked at you like you were a complete lunatic. You looked to Scott. You knew he was feeling a little off to. You and him had had an conversation at length about it just yesterday. 

“Come on, Scott. I know you feel it too,” there were tears budding at the corners of your eyes as you spoke.  You just pleaded with him not breaking eye contact.

“Okay,” Scott said after a moment. “it wouldn’t hurt for you to take a test.”

You perked up at that. You made the three long strides across the room to your bag where you pulled out a pregnancy test you had purchased earlier that day. 

“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” Lydia said skeptically. 

“Okay, you realize how crazy this is, right?” Malia said. Lydia elbowed her in the side causing the girl to let out a small screech. “Fine whatever.”

“I’ll just got take this,” you said heading in the direction of the bathroom.

Sitting on the side of Scott’s tub you looked down at the picture of you with your three best friends. It felt like something was missing though. You turned the picture over in your hands and read the inscription on the back. ‘Remember Us’ is read in scribbled quick handwriting that you didn’t recognize, but it strangely brought comfort to your upset stomach. 

The timer went off and Scott knocked on the door as he pushed it open enough to see you inside. He leaned on the door frame looking at you. He shared the same expression of scared that you did.

“Want me to be here while you check it?” Scott said. His eyes were soft as he looked you over.

“Please,” you said turning to collect the pregnancy test from beside you playing careful attention to not look at it. Scott sat down beside you and placed his large hand on your knee. 

You took a deep breath as you looked to Scott. He was looking at your hand that was wrapped tightly around plastic device. Your fingers were turning white as you sat there not moving taking deep breaths to keep from hyperventilating. 

“Ready?” he said. He squeezed your knee. You just nodded as you moved your hand to reveal the results. 

Positive

“Now, we just have to figure out who the father is,” Scott said. Looking into your panicked eyes. Shit things just got more complicated.

[dvp95]

can’t breathe when you touch my sleeve - chapter 11

pairing: dan howell/phil lester

rating: e

warnings: none

tags: alternate universe, slow burn, fluff & humour, tiny bit of inner turmoil wrt sexuality but trust me it’s not that deep, deeper than anticipated but still not that deep y'all this is primarily silly, eventual smut, idiots in love

word count: 3,995 for this chapter (49,787 total)

summary: Dan keeps making a fool of himself in interviews, to the point where it’s basically a meme. Now he’s got to sit down for the better part of an hour and sell his show to the YouTuber he’d had a massive crush on when he was a teenager.

read from the beginning on ao3 or on tumblr!

read this chapter on ao3 or here!

The flat is dark but for the string lights over Phil's headboard and the candles on his nightstand. Phil's fingers are tracing patterns on Dan's chest, loopy circles and spirals that leave goosebumps in their wake. He's humming something familiar under his breath that Dan can't place and his eyes are half-lidded behind his glasses.

They're tangled up on Phil's bed, ostensibly getting ready to sleep, but Dan is struggling. He doesn't want to miss a single moment he's got left with Phil. He'd thrown on some boxers in concession of sharing space with a dog, and Phil has gotten completely dressed in Dan's pyjamas with muttered complaints about the cold. Dan already misses looking at his body, but he has to admit that he likes looking at this, too.

"Remind me again when you're leaving?"

Dan sighs, lightly tapping a line of freckles down Phil's arm and tangling their fingers together when he reaches them. "Sunday afternoon."

"Too soon," Phil says, quiet and light like he's trying to play off how much it sucks.

"Too soon," Dan agrees. "But I'll be back as soon as I can. And we can - I mean, I want to still, like. Date you. Even when I'm not here."

With a little hum of a noise, Phil blinks up at Dan. He looks a little perplexed. "Well, yeah," he says. "I'm just gonna remind you again that I introduced you to my parents. I wasn't planning on running off with the next local idiot who fawns all over me."

"I did not fawn," Dan protests, but his lips are twitching. He presses them to Phil's forehead to hide the movement. He didn't actually believe that Phil was thinking of this as something with a time limit, but it's nice to be reassured. They're quiet for a long moment, and then Dan has to ask the embarrassing question that's been plaguing him. "Are you, like. Are you my boyfriend?"

Phil laughs, not unkindly, and nuzzles into Dan's neck to press a kiss there. Dan can feel the curve of his smirk when the sensation makes Dan shiver.

"Yeah, Dan," says Phil, low and fond. "I'm your boyfriend."

"I'm just making sure," says Dan.

"You're so stupid," Phil says, pulling back from Dan's neck to grin up at him. His eyes are so bright that it almost aches to look at.

There really isn't a good argument for that. Dan shrugs, pulls Phil close enough that he can feel Phil's heartbeat. He buries his face in Phil's hair so that he doesn't have to watch Phil's expression change when he says, "Yeah. I told my brother about you, actually. Told him you were my boyfriend."

Phil chuckles. "I told my brother about you, too. Dunno why you're embarrassed about it."

"Yeah, but that's different," Dan mutters. "You talk to Martyn."

"I get that your family is," Phil says, pauses for a brief moment, "complicated, but I'm not bothered by them knowing about me."

"That's good," says Dan. "Because, er, I'm having lunch with my mum after the morning interviews tomorrow, and I thought - well, y'know."

A gentle hand in Dan's hair pulls him back from the cuddle so that Phil can look at him. His eyes flicker over Dan's face like they're looking for something. Whatever it is, he doesn't seem to find it.

Phil smiles indulgently, shaking his head a bit. "I actually don't know, Dan. I'm gonna need you to use your words. Because right now it sounds like you're inviting me to lunch with your mum. Which, to be clear, wouldn't be weird for me, since you've met mine, but I get the feeling it might be weird for you."

That hadn't been at all what Dan was asking. He thinks about it, though, wonders if if would be better or worse to have backup for this lunch.

Dan loves his mum. Their relationship is strained, distant, has got a heavy buildup of guilt and mistrust on both sides, but he loves her. He isn't sure he can bring Phil into that and explain it, not when he's met the wonderfully warm people who raised Phil.

"I was actually just asking if you'd be okay with me mentioning you, but how about," Dan says slowly, turning the idea over in his head. "We meet you at the park after lunch? I wanted to whine until she brought Colin, anyway, this gives me a good excuse."

"Colin?"

"My family dog," says Dan. "Don't make fun of his name, your dog's name is nerdy and a pun."

Phil laughs and kisses the tip of Dan's nose. "I wouldn't dream of it. I like animals with hilariously normal names."

"So, you'll come? You really don't have to."

"Sure, I just," Phil says and pulls a little face, like he doesn't want to voice whatever he's thinking. "Is she... one of the people reacting badly? Wanna know what I'm getting into, here."

"No, she's been great," Dan says quietly. "She might be weird, but she won't be... y'know."

"I do know."

The smile playing around Phil's lips makes Dan want to kiss him, so he does. He can't believe that he's just allowed to do that, can't believe he somehow stumbled into being the luckiest person alive.

Dan's done a lot of things over the past decade that he thinks would shock and awe his teenage self. He's met and worked with some pretty big names, gotten drunk with his costars at some pretty big events, and publicly made a fool of himself in some pretty big ways.

He thinks this would take the cake, though. Just the simple act of kissing his boyfriend in bed would have been more than teen Dan could have dreamed of. He'd wanted that, of course, in a pipe dream sort of way, like how he'd wanted to stop hurting his girlfriend, wanted to feel some kind of acceptance for who he was so terrified to be. But the world had been way too fucking scary for him to consider it outside of daydreams.

Not to mention the fact that the man he's kissing is AmazingPhil. Dan laughs, pulls back from Phil to grin at him.

"You know," he says, "I used to have the biggest fucking crush on you."

"Used to?" Phil teases, brushing his fingers over Dan's ribs to make him squirm and laugh harder.

"Shut the fuck up," Dan says fondly. "I mean, like, in 2007."

Phil blinks. He's a lot sleepier than Dan is, which Dan very generously attributes to how long it takes Phil to do simple math in his head. "Wait, you seriously had a crush on me when you were sixteen?"

"Maybe," says Dan.

"Oh, that's so cute," Phil coos. He gives Dan a smug little grin and rolls on top of him. Their limbs are so long and they're both so clumsy that Dan isn't surprised by Phil almost kneeing him in the balls in the process, but he's also so far gone that he barely cares. "And what would sixteen-year-old Dan think of all this?"

"He wouldn't believe it," Dan laughs, settling his hands on Phil's hips. "Like, literally, this would have never occurred to him as a possibility."

"Why not?" Phil teases, knocking their noses together gently. Dan gets the impression that he's more charmed than he's letting on with his dry voice. "You didn't wanna come to Summer in the City? Make an impression?"

That makes Dan honk a laugh right in Phil's face. Objectively, that's mortifying. Phil just snorts, though, so Dan decides not to worry about it on top of everything else he's constantly anxious about in Phil's presence. "The impression I would have made on you in 2007 or even, like, ten years ago, wouldn't have been anything good. You think I'm awkward now? You can only imagine what I was like before I had any kind of confidence."

"I'm sure it was very cute," says Phil. "I'd have added you on MySpace."

"I hate you," says Dan, not least because he'd sent Phil a friend request on MySpace. He is absolutely not going to bring that up, though.

"Yeah, sure seems like you do," says Phil, grinning.

Dan doesn't like the smug look on his face, so he takes Phil's glasses off and sets them aside, chuckling when he immediately starts to squint. "It's bedtime," he reminds Phil.

"Bedtime," Phil agrees, and he blinks a bunch before he laughs. "I can't see you. You gotta kiss me goodnight."

Definitely a request Dan can handle.

--

Once again, Dan finds himself staring at the ceiling of Phil's flat. He's got a snoring dog at his feet and a snoring man draped over him, and he should really be relaxed enough to drift off by now. He's comforted by the smell of Phil's sheets and the soft pattering of rain against the small windows, but it doesn't help get him any sleepier. It's frustrating. He's got interviews all morning - the last of the Isles leg before they get shipped off to the continent for another two weeks of the same circus - and he doesn't want to be cranky for them or have to apologise to another makeup artist for the dark circles under his eyes. He tries for a really long time to fall asleep before he gives up on it for the moment and reaches for his phone.

The familiar cycle of applications helps settle some of the restless energy that's thrumming under Dan's skin. The fingers of his right hand run over Phil's shoulders and through his hair, gentle and idle enough to avoid waking him, as he scrolls through different social media sites with his left thumb.

His feeds are busy enough, since it's not quite late enough to be considered unreasonable in Atlanta or Chicago and Los Angeles is fully awake, but none of it is really catching his attention. He likes a bunch of dog photos and gets lost in a Twitter moment on a topic he's never heard about before. Three different times, he almost buys something that's being advertised to him before he remembers that he already owns something similar to it.

Normally he'd put on some AmazingPhil videos to help him fall asleep, but that feels pretty weird to do when the man himself is literally drooling on his chest right now. Not to mention, he'd have to get up to find some headphones, and that would just defeat the purpose of staying in bed.

Dan spends twenty minutes drafting an email to his grandma, hindered by only using one thumb and his brain not being at full firing power as it is. It ends up saying more or less what he'd texted to his mum, only with an apology at the end. He doesn't know why he does that. He isn't sorry for who he is, or for not telling her, or for not believing in the god that might inform her reaction. He almost deletes the apology, actually, but the fact is that he is. He is sorry for all of those things.

He doesn't want to be. He wants to be unapologetic. But this is a woman who he's always respected and who is so vocal about supporting his career that he sometimes gets embarrassed by the statuses she posts about him on Facebook. This is also a woman who brought him to church for a good chunk of his life.

It's so vivid, even now. Getting his collar smoothed down by her dainty hands, his cheeks pinched by all her friends. The stifling, muggy air and hard pew under him in the summer.

Discomfort. Physical discomfort, as a child, and a deeper sort once he realised he didn't belong there. If he has to narrow it down, he's sorry that he might be giving her a different sort of discomfort in return.

He emails so that he can check for her response on his own time instead of panicking and shutting his phone off like he did with his mum, and then he goes into the app store to download some new, mindless games. Those entertain him for a while, the easy taps of his thumb giving him something to focus on that is not all the ways he's failed his family or the terrifying reality of what he might see in his mother's eyes tomorrow.

Today, he supposes. He'll be lucky to get a couple of hours at all.

In the end, he doesn't get any sleep. He wants to, because he knows he's going to be a zombie at work and at lunch, but maybe that's a good thing. He doesn't know what his mum is going to say, after all, doesn't know if she's going to try and defend his dad or talk about his reaction at all, so perhaps it's for the best that Dan feels everything a little more numbly than usual.

Dan turns off his alarm a split second after it rings, which is never a great feeling after a hard hit of insomnia. It's the final acknowledgement that sleep is not coming, no matter how much he tries to will it. He sighs and gently rolls Phil off of him. The way Phil grumbles and curls into his pillow, cuddling it to his chest, manages to get a weak smile out of Dan. He's just... cute. That's all there really is to it. Thor perks up when Dan gets out of bed, his ears all the way up, and Dan figures that it isn't the worst idea in the world to get some fresh air.

"You wanna go for a walk?" Dan whispers. He has to bite back a laugh at the way Thor reacts - spinning excitedly in a circle on the bed before hopping down and running to the door.

The sun is just starting to rise, giving Dan enough light to avoid injuring himself as he finds something to throw on for the walk. He ends up with his own pyjama pants and some graphic tee or other of Phil's because he can't be bothered to look for something else. He figures that anyone else awake right now won't judge him for it.

He remembers to grab keys and doggy bags before he tries to get Thor out of the door without his excitement turning into barking. He hasn't really barked much in Dan's presence, but he doesn't want to take any chances. It would be just his luck to wake everyone in the building up because he has no idea what he's doing when it comes to training a dog. The dog his family had when he was growing up was cute, but he was real bad at being a dog. Dan's got absolutely no practice with making dogs listen to him, and he's not exactly assertive. He's been chased by chickens more than once.

The chill of the dawn air makes Dan glad he grabbed one of Phil's countless denim jackets, and he pauses on the pavement outside for only a brief moment before Thor starts tugging him down the road. Thor knows the area, even if Dan doesn't, so he's happy to let the dog guide them with his nose and stubby little legs.

It's too early to talk to anyone, for sure, but Dan wants to rip the band-aid off before he has to shift into his public persona. He texts his mum with one hand, can u bring colin please i miss him so much and ive got a friend for him, attaches a cute photo of Thor sniffing at a neighbour's flower box. After a moment's thought, he sends the photo to Phil as well. He'd watched Phil put his phone on silent before they got into bed, so he isn't worried about waking him up. Dan has to slip his phone back into his pocket to quietly scold Thor for eating someone else's petunias and scurry away from the scene of the crime.

Everything feels just a little hazy with the rising sun, the mist of barely-there rain, and Dan's own lack of sleep. He lets Thor guide him into a lazy walk around the block and breathes in the polluted air like it's going to make everything better.

Maybe it should be scary how right this feels. In fact, it is scary, and Dan would like to blame it entirely on his insomnia and idiocy, but he knows it's more than that. He wants this to be his routine, as stupid as that is. He doesn't want that right away, doesn't want to leave Atlanta and come right to Phil's flat, but he wants... that. Eventually. First, he wants a drawer in one of Phil's dressers, wants to text whenever he's outside, wants to meet Phil at the dog park with two coffees and a grin on his face.

Dan never really took himself for a hopeless romantic, but then again, he also never thought that he'd be able to date someone he wanted to be with for the long haul. Even a medium haul had been off the table with the girls he's dated since his last actual relationship. It was always going to be missing something.

When Thor starts whining and tugging at the lead a bit harder, Dan smiles. "You wanna go home, cutie?" he murmurs, spotting the distinctive blue of Phil's front door. "Let's take you home."

--

The questions are the same every time. Not the exact same, no, but still the same. Every publication and media site wants to know the same shit about the show, and they don't even have all the answers.

"No, we haven't heard about a new season yet," Jaime is saying for the third time in one morning, with some kind of unending patience that Dan will never understand. "Trust me, the internet will know as soon as we know. Of course it would be nice to keep working - I don't think my character's storyline is anywhere near done!"

She laughs, but Dan can tell that it's forced. It's starting to take a strain on her, too, and he knows that they're all just waiting for something original to come up. Patrick has zoned out, pulling a Full Dan and staring off into space.

There aren't any pins for Dan to comment on this time, even if he'd wanted to. The morning has been slogging, not least since he'd left Phil still asleep in bed with a kiss to his sweet-smelling hair. Dan is so tired, but he knows they're all so tired. There's nothing for them to do but paste smiles on their faces and deflect spoilery questions while they count down the minutes to their free afternoon. Well, Jaime and Patrick have a free afternoon. Dan is going to have his hands full.

His mum had agreed to bring Colin happily and mooned over Thor's photo, but Dan has been perplexed by the fact that she didn't even ask whose dog it was. He wants to tell her, wants to be clear that he hasn't gone and got himself a big responsibility just yet, but there's a larger, pettier part of Dan that wants to keep Phil to himself until his mum is face to face with him. Dan wants to see if she has to school her expression, wants to know if this is an arms-length continuation of their relationship or the start of something rocky and healing.

Since Patrick is off in his own world, Dan tries his best to be present for this interview. He makes the interviewer laugh and tells stupid anecdotes to keep the attention off of everything Jaime won't say about her character arc.

It's a good thing he is paying attention, because Dan isn't sure how he'd have reacted if he'd been caught off guard by, "And as I'm sure you're aware, a lot of fans have been speculating about on-set romances. Is there any truth to those rumours or is that just some fun for the fans?"

Jaime snorts loudly. It's very unladylike. Dan is so, so fond of her.

"Uh, no," says Jaime. "I mean, if you're talking about between the three of us - which I have seen, the shipping isn't as quiet as y'all think it is - then, I'm sorry, but there's no way. I won't even act like there is to keep people guessing. I'm not going to date Daniel or Patrick for, like, twenty thousand reasons. If you want to talk about Tanner, though..."

She winks and trills her real laugh, which makes Dan laugh in turn. Jaime's crush on the man who plays Patrick's father is such an open secret that he's surprised more people don't ask her about it. Maybe they think it's a sensitive or uncomfortable subject, but Jaime's got no compunctions about loudly fancying someone who is both a decade older than her and married. The interviewer's laugh is a bit less genuine.

"Really?" he asks, sounding skeptical enough that Dan wonders if he ought to be offended. "And the two of you think the same? No chance?"

What? If they did want to be with Jaime, why the fuck would they say that in an interview right after she'd denounced them as romantic interests? Dan wonders if this guy understands that's an insane thing to expect, or if he's just trying to get a reaction out of them.

"Er, yeah," Dan says. He looks at his costars for backup. Jaime shrugs, and Patrick seems to have only just realised he's being spoken to and has the panic of 'what was just asked of me?' in his eyes that Dan is all too familiar with. He decides to word his answer clearly enough that he can help get Patrick up to speed as well. "I mean, like, we're all just good friends. I don't think any of us have any interest in more than that. And honestly, if we did disagree with Jaime, we wouldn't force our feelings on her anyway. That'd be fuc- I mean, that would be messed up."

He sees the glint of triumph in the interviewer's face and groans internally. Fuck, he should have stayed in bed.

"Interesting," he says, "that you've already thought about a situation where you have unrequited feelings for your on-screen girlfriend?"

Yeah, Dan thinks. Super interesting. He's kissed Jaime a thousand fucking times for the camera and it doesn't do anything for him, thanks ever so. He sighs and runs a hand through his straightened fringe so he doesn't slap himself in the face for opening this can of worms.

"Look, I get that a lot of fans want to know," Dan says, keeping his tone as light as possible. "The thing is that I'd like to keep my personal life private. I'm happy to tell you that it doesn't involve Jaime in any way, though."

"I'm fine with my personal life being public," Patrick deadpans. "There's nothing going on in it and that's how I like it. We're all equally pathetic that way, right?"

"Oi," Dan says, unable to hide his offense. The lack of sleep is really making his filter drop, and that's dangerous.

Jaime throws him a life vest before the interviewer can jump on his reaction, patting Dan's knee and saying, "You know, Patrick, some of us are pathetic in many more ways. Like, do you remember the time..."

And off she goes, weaving a story about Dan making an ass of himself. He interjects at all the right moments, laughs and groans in equal measure, covers his face when he starts to legitimately blush at the memory of an entire Starbucks thinking he'd gone insane.

He's comfortable with sharing that amount with his fans, he thinks. He's not dating Jaime, he never will be dating Jaime, and he's a private person. That's really all they need to know for now.

[edmund-valks]

What Lies Beneath... the Barn

“Wait, if you can think of that, why do you need me?”

Ilandreline brushed dark hair back from her sweat-slicked brow, carefully pouring molten metal into gear molds.  “Because I can only do the calculations, not the actual magic.  Also I would prefer to be able to validate it before I get my friends sucked into terrifying cosmic voids.”

She was really glad for this setup, even more glad that nobody seemed to notice she’d built a basement into the barn using a disintegrating arcanodrill while they’d been off engaging in weird things like “commerce”, whatever that meant.  Not that she didn’t know what the word meant, but.  Is my internal dialogue supposed to be this bad?  No, it’s not.  Maybe you’re not as smart as you hoped.  Fair.

“Anyway,” she said aloud, setting the fresh gears to quench, “you’re the only one I know who even cares about my planar work, much less understands how to use it in this fashion.  You already made it better, remember?  That second letter of yours?”  She spared a glance for the other elf, trying to gauge her reaction.

Perched on a corner of her workbench, the diminutive ren’dorei was… blushing?  Either that or suffocating; her cheeks were flushed a soft violet rather than her whole face, so presumably it wasn’t asphyxiation.  “Well, I mean, anyone could have if they-”

“If you finish that sentence I’m going to hit you with a wrench.”

She stopped so fast her teeth clacked.

The Fence Macabre’s resident -- whether they knew it or liked it -- engineer continued.  “If anyone could do it, then I’m a fool for not having done it myself, and I’m pretty sure you didn’t just call me a fool.  And second of all, no, they couldn’t have, so stop trying to downplay your work.  You’re smart about this stuff and you’ve got a unique perspective.  You’re a valuable colleague and I’d love for you to be a co-author when I publish this theory.”

More colour rushed to her cheeks, making Sentua look something like a blueberry.  Poor thing!  Whatever the ren’dorei had done to themselves, it had really screwed them out of any fashion choices they may have liked beforehand.  Red and gold just… didn’t… with that complexion.

“I… would like to be published with you, thank you.  Are you sure- Wait, of course you are, otherwise you wouldn’t have said it, right?”  She took several deep breaths.  “Sorry.”

Ila shook her head.  “Don’t worry about it.  You about studied up, ready to try out the first one?”

“Um.  Let me take one more look at the diagram and re-check the math.  Then I’ll go over the runes again.”

“Sure thing, take your time.  I got a bunch of these brass bastards to make anyway.”  Anyone from the Fence who wasn’t her was unlikely to have any idea why she was making multiple copies of something that was already built.  That was probably for the best.  Nobody else really seemed to appreciate the old grandfather clock the way she did.

While she worked, her visitor did exactly as she’d said she would, tracing the structure they’d slowly developed using extraplanar theoretics combined with several known nexus points.  If they’d had access to a superior medium (who wasn’t also wholeheartedly opposed to their purpose), maybe they would have been able to determine if it was going to work without having to craft a prototype.  But what would be the fun in that?

Well, it would certainly involve less child endangerment.

Hey!  That’s not fair, she’s an adult!

...In human years, yes.  How old is she?  Twenty?

Twenty-three?  Give or take a year.

This is wildly irresponsible parenting!

I’m not her parent!

Good point.  It’s really irresponsible of them to let her hang out with someone like us.

No kidding!  What are they thinking!

“Okay, I’m getting started now.  Try to keep quiet and stay over there.  I’m… not sure what this is going to look like when I get it going.”

That made two of them.  Ilandreline very casually moved behind a thickly armoured panel she used in case one of her iron molds exploded.  “Righto, let ‘er rip, Senny!”

Despite her youth, she sure looked like she knew what she was doing.  Having grown up around an assortment of arcane manipulators (as well as normal manipulators), Ila could usually follow spellwork as it happened.  She was utter rubbish at it herself, but that was why she’d done theoretical work.  That way she never had to prove anything except on paper.

The interweaving runic designs began flaring to life, unexpectedly nightblue with pinpricks of starlight within them.  A brief peek without her goggles in place confirmed that wasn’t a trick of the lenses, it was the Real Deal.  Since she had no idea what it meant, if anything, the sin’dorei kept waiting and watching.

A subaural thrum filled the air, slowly building intensity.  Sentua seemed unbothered, continuing to do… whatever a wizard did during a lengthy ritual.  Concentrate or something.  The vibration became more sensible until it started to feel like her teeth were going to rattle from her skull.  Then it stopped and things got weird.

When your family was exiled due to a misunderstanding involving the regular sacrifice over centuries of sentient beings to dark powers, you grew up with a different baseline for weirdness from others.  As a result, this wasn’t the weirdest thing Ila had ever seen, but it was certainly up there.  She pulled her goggles off to see with the tainted vision that same “misunderstanding” had gifted her.

Portals were opening and clothing, like mouths made of eyes, evaporating as soon as they formed.  A loop made of itself (what?) turned outside-in until they disappeared inside it.  Eyes of darkness flared against the backdrop of interminable void within one of the gaping portal-maws and she felt uncomfortably seen.  Maybe I messed up the math after all.

A crackle of power flared through the starlight rune-circles, drawing constellations like the antipodal counterpart of what she’d seen in drawings from Ulduar.  This was a place she recognized, but not in a way she’d experienced it before.  There was the old, familiar whisperings, comforting as ever, slipping over and through her being with their gentle rubberiness.  The sensation of being watched, as always, and knowing what was heard wasn’t her own thoughts; just another day looking at what the authorities of Silvermoon had called “the wrong side of things” when they’d been exiled a couple hundred years back.

The ache in her jaw was new, though.  And… getting worse.  Something was affecting the pressure in the room.  Maybe I should open the door up to the barn, help equalize it?  Ilandreline tried to move but her body wouldn’t respond right.  She tried to talk but nothing came out.  The air felt like molasses, though, and it started to… ooze… into her open mouth in one of the more unpleasant sensations she’d ever encountered.

This is definitely bad, this is going to keep increasing until we pop like overfed ticks.  It wasn’t a comforting thought.  She’d die like she’d lived, though: making bad decisions with dangerously undertested experiments.  Her jaw was being forced wider and wider, until it felt like it was going to pop out of its socket.  Then something did pop and there was a roar like an entire storm’s worth of thunder if it was packed into a giant’s sneeze.

Wetness -- blood?  Probably! -- trickled from her ears, but she could close her mouth again.  She did so, gingerly, rubbing at it.  “Faoh,” she mumbled, unable to make real words quite yet.  Her brain didn’t want to form them, her mouth couldn’t.  She blinked far too often for several minutes before recovering enough to replace the tinted lenses through which she typically viewed the world.

Sentua was still standing, looking… mostly normal.  Maybe slightly dazed; half catatonic?  No more than that, maybe only a quarter.  But she was also grinning like the cat who’d eaten a smaller, weaker cat to gain its feline prowess.

“Ah wubna!” she said in triumph.

“Fwah?” was Ila’s response as she stuck her little finger into an ear, trying to pry loose the inability to understand.  It came back covered in what was definitely blood, possibly with a little extra something she didn’t want to think about too closely.

The ren’dorei worked her jaw a bit, then tried again.  “I did it!”  The words formed right that time, managing to get through the sticky haze in Ila’s ears.  “I don’t know if it worked, but it went off just like we expected it to.”

“Hleva nuhs!”  Frowning, she slapped herself once, then a second time, harder.  Wiggling her jaw from side to side, she formed the words very deliberately.  “Ve...ry… nice.”  Moving over to where the first pocket watch -- more staggered, really, as if she was quite drunk -- Ilandreline examined it.  It looked right.

She turned it just so, opened a back panel to look into the mirrored surface there, checking behind her.  And sure enough, just as she’d hoped, there was the leering grin of a lurking specter, axe poised and with a hungry look in its eyes.  “Hey, fella!  Good to see you again.  We made you portable.”  She laughed, gave a wink that the cursed entity could never see.  “Look out, world!  The Fence Macabre has portable curse detectors now!”

Her new partner came to look over her shoulder and practically jumped out of her skin.  Sentua glanced hurriedly back to the real world then into the gleaming silvered expanse.  “This… this is what you were trying to do?”

“Absolutely!”

“But… why?”

Ilandreline just stared for a moment.  She didn’t understand why people kept asking that.  It was clearly a great idea.  “Because why wouldn’t you want to be able to see what kind of horrific spirits are lurking in an area?  This is a much more portable form of the curse, one that can be replicated multiple times using the demiplanar transpositionalities we derived, augmented through a series of linking and magnifying matrices.  So long as I keep at least half of the original gears in the grandfather clock, I can use the rest to create portable horror viewers!”

Sentua stared at her for rather a long time.  It got awkward.  Eventually she shrugged, though, which was probably for the best.  “Well, as long as you’re happy and it works, I guess that’s good enough for me!  I think I’m gonna go home and sleep, though, if that’s okay.”

“Yeah, absolutely.  Get your rest, that was probably pretty draining.”  She grinned, squeezed the young elf in a one-armed hug.  “And be proud!  You did great.”

“Thanks!  I… don’t know if replicating a curse into multiple other objects was what I thought I’d be doing, but at least it confirmed our theories.”  She grinned weakly, then stumbled off to the designated teleportation corner, keying one of her completion-tokens to zap her back home.

Ilandreline kept turning the pocket watch over, chuckling.  It didn’t tell time worth a damn, but she didn’t care about that.  It had worked.  And she was going to be published again for that work, damn it, preferably somewhere that would absolutely irritate her parents to no end.

Truly, she was living her best life, and it was all thanks to the Fence.

[raendown]

Pairing: MadaraTobirama Chapter: 9/18 Word count: 1983 Summary: When Tobirama is exiled from the Senju clan without warning, without even the chance to plead his case, it feels like his life is over. What does he have to live for now without his older brother to believe in him? Captured by the Uchiha in his moment of weakness, Tobirama slowly learns to live again with the last people on earth he would have ever expected to care for - or to fall in love with.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

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Chapter 9

Having never had it taken away from him in such a significant way until he was a fully grown adult, Tobirama never realized that freedom had its own disadvantages. Now he found himself standing at the gates of the Uchiha compound with his arms crossed tightly against his chest and all too aware that he wouldn’t be half as torn as he was at the moment if he didn’t have the power to do something about it. Watching Madara and Izuna’s backs as they disappeared in to the trees wasn’t the hard part; the hard part was knowing who they had been called in to battle with.

Knowing it was the Senju advancing against their eastern border left him off-balance, unsure of how to feel. It was they who had cast him out after a lifetime of love and devoted service. Should he turn his back and hate them now, stop caring for their lives simply because they had stopped caring for his? Logic told him he should be allowed to do just that.

And yet…

The very thought of Hashirama getting wounded still broke a part of him he had thought couldn’t break anymore. Thinking about any of his second and third cousins perishing in battle, about Touka giving her life in protection of the clan she loved so deeply, he couldn’t deny that he still cared for them all. No matter that he wished he didn’t, he would probably still care for them even if they had chosen to run a blade across his throat as he had once begged Madara to do. It wasn’t as if he could simply turn off his heart whenever it pleased him.

Should he have tried to stop the brothers from going, then? Asked them not to face the Senju in battle? Without Madara and Izuna on the field the Uchiha would drop like flies. There was no one else who could hope to face Hashirama and survive but how many Senju lives would be traded for how many Uchiha if they did or didn’t go? It was like an impossible math equation with no right answer and Tobirama had always hated questions that had no answers.

He almost felt like he should be there himself except he wasn’t at all sure what he would end up doing. Could he face his own brother in battle? Or his cousin? Yet to not take action would be just as terrible. To stand to one side and watch someone he cared for cut down someone else he cared for, no matter what crest they wore on their armor, he wouldn’t survive it.

Conflict raged back and forth inside him for hours until finally Madara and Izuna returned with the rest, dirty and tired, some of them bearing injuries but with no fewer clansmen than when they left. Tobirama didn’t stop to think. The two brothers had barely set foot in the house they all shared when he crashed in to them and pulled Madara in to his arms, holding on more tightly than he could ever remember doing in his life. His breath hitched when Madara gripped him back just as tightly.

“Are they–?”

“No deaths on either side,” the other murmured in his ear. He felt suddenly weightless without the leaden feeling that had been pulling at his stomach the whole damn day.

“Thank you. I’m sorry. Thank you.” A quiet noise of confusion escaped him but he leaned back gratefully for a moment when Izuna joined their embrace as well from behind, sandwiching him in the middle. It was hard to tell what he was supposed to be feeling in this moment but all he could focus on was how grateful he was that everyone was alive and well.

Madara pressed his forehead in to Tobirama’s hair, speaking very quietly. “Don’t ever apologize. Everything’s alright, Tobirama. We’re fine; they’re fine; no one got seriously injured.”

“I shouldn’t care.”

“Should or shouldn’t, you do. And that’s not something you need to apologize for.”

“Take him to sit down or something,” Izuna said, breaking away. “I’ll bring a pot of tea.”

Madara led him to the couch and tried to make him sit down but Tobirama insisted on helping him out of his armor first. When Izuna returned they both helped him as well to unstrap the minimal plate armor typical of Uchiha battle garb. Tobirama fretted internally over how they were leaving themselves too exposed and started planning arguments in his head for how he could convince them to wear something more protective until he was dragged down on to the couch at last and pressed firmly in between his two companions.

“How is this the first time that it’s hitting me?” Tobirama grumbled. Some genius he was letting his mind forget about something so big as the fact that his new benefactors were still at war with his old family.

“The Senju have been strangely quiet for a while now,” Madara told him slowly. “I think this is the first time we’ve faced them on such a large scale since we took you out of the dark. Until now it’s been mostly border skirmishes and chance meetings in other territories but no big clashes.”

“Quiet isn’t really how I would put it though,” Izuna chipped in. Madara nodded.

“I guess, yeah. They’ve been sighted absolutely everywhere but they’re not picking any fights. It’s eerie.”

Tobirama frowned and turned that over in his mind, looking at the information from all angles. It felt as though it should have been significant somehow but without any other information he was at a loss for how to interpret it properly.

After sipping his way through several cups of tea he settled down against Madara’s side in a mirror of how the older man usually treated him like a human sized pillow. He squirmed deeper in to the arm that wrapped around his back and closed his eyes to revel in the feeling of having precious ones close, appreciating it like he hadn’t before. Not all of the people he still considered precious were here but they were all confirmed as alive and for now that was enough. He trusted Madara not to have lied about that.

“Look at you cuddling,” Izuna teased, pushing on his arm to press him deeper in to Madara’s embrace. Tobirama huffed.

“I can cuddle if I want to.”

“Yeah, no one but Mads though. Unless you want to come over here and put your head in my lap?”

“Don’t be disgusting.” Turning his face in to the chest holding him up, he hoped the tips of his ears weren’t turning pink.

Although he would have to admit that Izuna was a little bit right. He did have a preference for Madara’s affection over anyone else but really his social circle wasn’t exactly large among the Uchiha yet so he figured it didn’t say all that much. Of the several who were friendly with him now he was still only quite close to these two and some of the children who had been shyly requesting his tutelage lately.

Tobirama stayed in his curled position for so long he had begun slowly drifting in and out, only half listening to the conversation still going on above his head, when he felt Madara’s fingers begin to absently trace up and down his arm. It should be illegal, he decided. No one should have the power to make him feel so safe and comfortable in a world so full of danger and hurt. It made him never want to sleep on his own again and he recognized that as a stupid thought even as it entered his head.

“Does he snore? Is he gonna start snoring?” Izuna sounded like he was trying not to laugh.

“Hush. No, he doesn’t snore.”

“You would know.”

“Shhh! Keep your mouth shut! What if he hears us in his sleep or something!?”

Madara’s whisper yelling almost made him smile but Tobirama found himself too interested to hear what they were talking about to interrupt them with a clean sign that he was still awake. Although he certainly was close enough to sleep that he felt ready to snore whether or not it was a usual habit.

“If he hears you in his sleep then he’ll just chalk it up to a dream, no worries Aniki.”

“Just keep quiet, alright? Quit it.”

“Oh come on. Everyone knows except him.”

An offended huff ruffled the top of his head. “None of you should be discussing this behind my back. It’s no one’s business but mine. And his. No, not his, I don’t want him to know yet!”

“Well good news for you, I don’t think he’s going to figure it out unless you dance naked in front of him with a banner that says ‘I have a massive dorky crush on you!’” Izuna laughed to himself, muffling the sound behind what sounded like a pillow, and it was all Tobirama could do not react. Staying still was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life as Madara whined piteously above him.

“I don’t want him to figure it out! The last thing he needs is to think I’m trying to trick him in to staying here or something.” Izuna’s laughter faded awhile while Madara continued. “He’s gone through a lot and he’s still dealing with it. Now isn’t the time to be adding something like this on his shoulders – especially since he clearly doesn’t feel the same.”

“Clearly, huh? I would say differently.”

“You would say wrong.”

“Says you. Haven’t you noticed how much closer he is to you than me?”

Madara’s body jerked as the arm around Tobirama lifted away for a moment, followed by the sound of Izuna getting the back of his head swatted.

“End of discussion.” Madara declared sternly. He returned his arm to where it had been, holding just a little bit tighter.

“Fine. Fine. I’ll keep my mouth shut. But let the record show that I think the smartest thing to do would be to tell him how you feel now so he can come to terms with his own feelings too and you can both live happily ever after.”

“Ugh. Don’t be such a sap.”

No answer came but after a minute Izuna got up and left the room, probably heading to bed. Left alone, Madara returned to stroking Tobirama’s hair in silence for a while, seemingly content to remain where he was for the foreseeable future. Eventually he did move but it was only to gently maneuver them both a little deeper in to the corner of the couch so that Tobirama could rest against his chest and he could snuggle his own head back against the cushions, ostensibly making himself comfortable for the night.

Tobirama remained silent and still until Madara’s breathing evened out and only then did he gently lift his head to stare up at the man who had taken him in and given him everything he thought he would never have again.

Apparently Madara had feelings for him. What he was supposed to do with that knowledge was something he would need more than one evening to figure out. Dating and romance had never been his forte. It hadn’t been on his mind in quite some time even before his exile and he certainly hadn’t expected to encounter those things here.

It could all wait for another night, he decided. Knowing he was dooming himself to a good round of teasing in the morning – and a little bit of extra confusion for his own heart – Tobirama laid his head back down and closed his eyes to enjoy the warmth of the embrace so freely given. Whatever complications may come from this revelation, here in Madara’s arms was still the safest place he had been in a very long time.

[our-jensen-ackles-love]

Flashes; Chapter Twenty-Two

Summary: Playboy Jensen Ackles is hurting his television show’s image. Every time he promised to get his act together, it’d last for about a week before pictures emerge of him half-drunk with some broad on his arm. Fed up and desperate, his agent decides their only hope to save some face is to write up a contract with a nobody girl who could use the money while getting to play the role of Jensen’s girlfriend.

It was only for a year and it was only for the photos.  But feelings don’t always follow the rules, do they?

Pairing: Jensen x Reader

Word Count: 1945

Warnings: swearing, mentions of sex

Author: @our-jensen-ackles-love

A/N: This one is a little angsty, but it’s not forever, I promise. It’s gonna be okay! The next couple of chapters are really going to speed things up. 

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Chapter Twenty-Two

Two Days Ago

Jensen had stepped in the bathroom to make a phone call, which wasn’t really like him, but you figured maybe it was his mother and he wanted to talk to her with a little bit more privacy. When he emerged it looked like he had seen a ghost.

Like he was on autopilot, he walked towards you and sat back down on the couch. “Sorry about that,” he mumbled, more to himself than to either of us.

“Are you okay?” You asked, your heart picking up speed at his sudden change in attitude.

Slowly, he blinked, his eyes turning and focusing in on you. It was like he was trying to remember where he was. “Uh, yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

For the rest of the day, Jensen was just off. You couldn’t quite pin point it, but whomever he had called in the bathroom had clearly given him something to think about. Even your mother picked up on it as he set the table robotically for Christmas dinner, which was more like Christmas snacking and binging on favorite movies.

When Mom finally went into her room for the night, and after she stressed the importance of safe sex as well as communication, did you snag your present for Jensen before slipping into the bathroom.

Smoothing the lacy material over your stomach and picking up breasts, making sure that you looked your best, did you emerge. For the first time all day, Jensen’s face lit up and a smirk teasing at the corner of his mouth.

“Well,” you strutted over to him, still trying to keep quiet. You could hear your mom swearing to herself as she was most likely trying to figure out her new laptop worked. “What do you think of your present?”

He eyed you up and down slowly, like he was trying to remember this moment perfectly. Usually you felt the need to blush when he scanned over your body like that, but something about this outfit made you feel confident as hell.

“I think I want to take my sweet time unwrapping it.”

You knew that Gen was going to get a long and sincere thank-you note when you guys got back.

Reaching where he was sitting on the couch, you plopped yourself down in his lap, already feeling the his excitement pushing into you. “Don’t take too long.”

His eyes softened momentarily before he grabbed a handful of the material, hiking it up enough to see that you weren’t wearing anything underneath. He groaned, pushing his lips into the nap of your neck causing you to squirm in his lap. “You know, I’m sure I could find a way to get a hotel room for the night.”

“Why would we need a hotel room?”

His lips moved against your neck, kissing somewhere between your earlobe and the top of your collarbone. “Because the things I want to do to you, there is no way in hell you would be quiet.”

Before you even had a moment to be for or against his suggestion, he had you pinned between his body and the couch, a wicked smile on those plump lips of his. He licked his lips as he looked you over once more, a hand making its way towards where you were aching the most for him.

“But I don’t think I can wait that long.”

--

The two of you had finally returned to your Vancouver apartment, clothes still in suitcases and all over the floor, taking full advantage of having the privacy you had been aching to have since the night he told you he loved you. He hadn’t been kidding Christmas night about the things he wanted to do to you; the man had to keep a hand over your mouth the whole time.

Even with your heart still pounding in your chest, you nuzzled yourself up to Jensen. “Well, you didn’t waste any time getting me naked there, did you?”

“Do you blame me?” He asked with a chuckle, his chest still rising and falling heavily.

You didn’t answer, instead just laid there smiling up at the man whom you loved with just about every fiber of your being. Part of you was in denial about the fact that this beautiful human wanted to share you with the world, something you never saw coming with you agreed to the cover for him in the beginning.  

But something was still bothering you, the same thing that had bothered you throughout your trip. It was something you had just been putting off talking about until you didn’t have to worry about you guys being interrupted. “Jay?”

“Hm?” He hummed lazily while a finger traced delicate patterns along your back.

“Who did you call on Christmas?”

His hand froze in the middle of the circle he had been starting to outline. “Oh,” his throat cleared causing your heart to jump into yours. “It was just Henry.”

Most times when Henry called Jensen it was usually concerning something with publicity. And like most cases of publicity, it involved you, well mostly your relationship with Jensen to the public. Usually, if it was super important, you knew about it, but from the way he acted after leaving the bathroom to the silence that followed – things were concerning.

Swallowing your heart, you shifted upwards, placing your weight on your elbows to look at him intently. “What did Henry say?”

“Just, uh, just to be on the lookout of some rumors circling around.”

“Jay -” you started before a loud, booming knock echoed through the apartment causing you to jump.

If you didn’t know any better, you would say that Jensen’s sigh was more out of relief than frustration in the moment. He slid out of bed quickly, reaching around for his jeans and slipping them over his exposed ass, zipping them up as he walked out of the room, his chest still exposed.

You followed suit, reaching for your bath robe instead of your clothes from earlier. Regardless of who was at the door, you still needed to shower to wash off your lay over and all the ways Jensen had just pawed at you. Also, probably check for bruises and other markings that would be frowned upon when out and about.

Barely turning the corner that led to the bathroom, you overheard a familiar deep voice rumbling through the kitchen. “She’s at our house, right now,” Jared spoke harshly, barely trying to hide the irritation in his voice. “Did you know about any of this?”

“Henry just told me about it a couple of days ago,” you heard Jensen answer, his voice straining a bit. “Is it true?”

There was a pause while you heard a pair of heavy boots scratch against the floor, most likely as Jared shifted his weight. “Yes. She just turned three.”

There was a heavy silence that washed over the room, creeping into your hiding spot between Jensen’s room and the kitchen and it was starting to slowly suffocate you.

“Fuck,” Jensen’s voice came through before you heard what sounded like flesh smacking the counter.

Peaking your head around the corner, you saw Jensen with his head hanging in his hands and Jared looking very uneasy at his best friend. Clearly your throat, you stepped forward from the shadows, “Jensen? Is everything okay?”

The look Jared gave you had your stomach in knots, but you ignored him. The only answer you needed right now wouldn’t come from him. Stepping forward some more, trying to close the space between you and the man who was clearly hurting. “Jay?”

“No, Y/N,” he shook his head aggressively, looking up with red rimmed eyes. “Everything is not okay. Everything is completely fucked.”

“What the hell is going on?”

Jared stared between the two of you, going from your look of confusion to Jensen’s look of outrage. “Wait, you don’t know?”

You shot him a look that caused him to flinch outwardly. “If I did, would I be asking?”

Jared threw his hands up in surrender, side-stepping between the two of you. He gave Jensen a hard pat on the back before muttering a quick ‘good luck’ and high-tailing it out the front door. His neediness to get out of the war zone was only making you more frustrated by the minute.

“Jensen.”

His eyes were now looking at the ceiling as he took a deep breath, but that didn’t stop you from noticing how much his hands were shaking at his sides. “I have a child Y/N.”

That knocked the air right out of you. Gripping the counter that Jared had just been standing next to, you felt your knees buckle as his words sunk in. “I’m sorry. What now?”

“Apparently, I have a child with Danneel.”

“What do you mean ‘apparently?’”

You could tell your tone wasn’t helping the situation, but you couldn’t control it. His eyes were looking everywhere, but at you – kind of like what you did when you were trying to figure out a difficult math problem. “I mean, when we broke up, she must have been pregnant.”

“But we just saw her,” you said, stating what he clearly already knew. “How could you not know that she had a kid?”

He shrugged, still avoiding making eye contact. “I, honestly, don’t know. All I do know is that she is apparently playing house over there with Jared and his family. My daughter running around with the boys.”

You both stood there in the kitchen, unsure of what to say next. Your mind was reeling with a million questions, but the biggest one was focusing on what this newest bit of information meant for your relationship with Jensen.

That thought alone was starting to break you down.

“What does this mean?” You asked, slowly, with your voice barely above a whisper.

“I don’t know.”

Your feet stayed planted where they were while you pieced the events of the last couple of days together. When Jensen called Henry, it must have been to warn him of what was possibly waiting for him when we got home, especially if there were paparazzi waiting at the airport – which would also explain why Jensen had been so adamant on switching the flights last minute to an early morning flight.

“Y/N,” his soft voice broke through your thoughts. When you looked at him, his green eyes were hard. “This doesn’t change anything.”

Trying to keep your tone even and neutral, you replied. “What do you mean?”

“This doesn’t change my feelings for you,” he said slowly, now taking gradual steps towards you. “Danneel may be using this to get what she wants, but she isn’t going to win.”

A silent sob escaped you when Jensen reached for you, wrapping you up in his arms like he was trying to protect you from what was to come. “You don’t know that Jensen. She now has a something to use against you.”

“I don’t care. I will fight for that child and I, sure as hell, will fight for us.”

Trying to control your sobs now, you took a breath thinking through your options. “Does this mean you need to head over to Jared’s now?”

You felt him nod his head that was resting on top of your own. “I’m only going if you come with me.”

He didn’t need to ask twice. Despite that your whole world had just been turned upside down, again, you knew that your feelings for Jensen still remained the same. “I love you.”

“I love you too baby girl.” He answered, kissing the top of your hair gently. “Let’s get in the shower.”

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[drosera-sundews]

A word on gambling

Hey all, I found the Elsewhere University page like two days ago but man, I was so inspired right away. Please allow me to add to this marvellous universe. 

Some words in advance: 

This story ties into a few others. Nothing but quick mentions, though; @fruedtrollism and @comerunwildwithme you two may catch brief glances of you characters :) It also features the weird humanoid/horseoid skeleton beast from this post. 

For those who haven’t seen the EU blog yet: Al you need to know is that the setting is a prestigious university set on top of a fairy hill. Have fun reading!

 A word on gambling 

Not all who come to the Elsewhere University come to study. Most have a vague idea of what they’re getting into, whether from stories told by old, withered family members or odd advertisements, folders or websites filled with cryptic warnings. An unfortunate few go in unprepared, and either catch up quickly or pay the price.

Some come to bet, to bargain or to gamble.

While some of them are just plain greedy, it’s mostly just the lost causes. The ones who’ve heard ‘no’ a few times to often by many different doctors. The other students treat them with poorly concealed pity and resigned respect. After all, who wouldn’t turn to desperate measures when in their shoes? The world hasn’t been fair to them. The gentry are, at the very least. Cruel and merciless, true, but fair and honest at their cores.

Yet, the gamblers come in many different forms. A girl who’s lungs once belonged to another, the second son of a rich businessman, a young dancer who trained and fought for years to reach her dream and now found that her achilles tendon, both literally and figuratively, was just a few millimetres too short.  

Oh yes, you can wait for favours, but each and every person in this school with half a brain to them will do anything to help the gentry, if only not to get on their bad side. And without an agreement they may repay you in any way they see fit. The gifts will be valuable, but not what you need. You’ll need to show initiative, you’ll need to gamble with all that you have.

The problem with gambling with the fair folk is the currency. They are not interested in money, and there are very little precious goods they cannot acquire. Promises and debts are an option, but are risky when not very, very carefully defined. Some might have weird preferences (like that odd horse-like skeleton that will go to great lengths for shiny plastic beads). Most however don’t.  

They are called the Exchange Student, with capitals, because that’s what they do. They are a student, everyone is certain about that. They sit in math class, biology, sometimes in history. They hang out with the programmers and the art majors. They wear their iron, carry their salt, and seem perfectly normal, even from the corner of your eye. Unsuspecting, until you deliberately come to them.

Please leave your iron and salt at the door. Don’t worry, as long as we’re discussing business no one will disturb us. It is merely a show of faith.  

They’re called the Exchange Student because that’s what they do. Exchange of currencies. Exchange of valuta.

Don’t worry, I am a professional. The procedure will be quick and painless. I cannot promise a lack of scars, but damage will be minimal, I have done this many times before.”

“I hope you have brought a trinket?”

When the Exchange Student invites you to ‘discuss business’ you take two things with you. A trinket and an offering. The offering is something small. Some food, a nice rock, a coin. Some art majors perform their favourite song, or offer a drawing or a statue, anything goes. It’s but a small fee.

The trinket can also be anything, though of course there are rules. ‘It needs to last,’ says one of the engineers, ‘something sturdy, something that doesn’t break easily.’

‘Something small which is easily concealed. Something you can carry with you. You’ll want to.’

‘and for the love of everything, don’t take something living! Not even a plant! Well... unless you’re absolutely sure what you are doing.’

The Exchange Student will make a circle around them and their customer. Most often made of candles, rocks, or sometimes even coins. Mostly they will take you somewhere silent, somewhere not easily disturbed. Though there are tales of that one time they sat someone down in the middle of the southern canteen, their circle made out of various plastic cups and mugs. No one dared disturb them.

The procedure is painless. A few incantations, some mental exercises, guided meditation, long scaled talons grasping at the edges of your soul, carefully picking you apart.

You’ll come back to yourself, Trinket carefully clasped in your hands. Looking exactly the same as you went in. The item in your hands will have a word on it. A single word, usually golden letters and in the exact handwriting of the person holding it.

Courage, Willpower, Kindness, Insight, Patience, Optimism, Strength.

Anything goes. And that’s how the students of Elsewhere University were made to carefully reconsider their unspoken rule of ‘bet nothing you cannot lose.’

Turns out that those who take to gambling can lose more than they’d ever imagined.

It’s said that it’s a very jarring experience to have an integral part of your being cut away from you. It’s said that, although not painful, students who’ve undergone the procedure spend the first few days in a haze of discomfort, fully aware that something is wrong, something is not as it should be, and they will grab their Trinket and will press it to their skin and refuse to part with it. Their body and spirit knowing where it belongs, but just not being able to get it there.

Quite a few of these Trinkets are being kept on the campus. Most are surrounded in mystery. A few students are suspected of having made a deal with the Exchange Student, like the photographer, the one with the lip ring, who owns this small umbrella that jingles when it rains. Or the student who always wears pearls. Many have cast a glance to spy for golden letters. 

Some are more open about their deals with the Exchange Student. It’s a tradition among programming majors to bind their Insight to a rubber duck, the sillier the better. It’s ridiculed a lot, but the tradition stands strong across the years. And it’s said that sometimes when one of the programmers is really stuck in one of their endless webs of codes the others will aid them by placing their rubber ducks in a circle around the computer. The ones willing to share their Insight are said to be nigh unstoppable.

The Trinkets are like casino tokens. The gentry find them irresistible, and will go to great lengths to acquire them. They never steal them, instead opting to either win or trade them, playing by their own odd rules.

Good gamblers can get anything from the gentry. Magical weapons, exotic skills and other gifts. Sometimes in the form of small objects engraved with gold.

Just remember not to let them catch you cheating.

Another good thing to remember: even though the gentry will not steal a Trinket as by their rules, the same cannot be said of the human students. Guard your virtues well.

Losing a part of yourself is highly unadvisable, always.

Some try to cheat the system. Cutting of pieces they think they can do without. The second son who came specifically to gamble for glory decided he could do without his fears, especially if he was to join the fae for poker night. He had the Exchange Student cut away his Fear. Covered it in salt, put it in a box of rowan wood and gave the key to a friend, to safeguard. He then shamelessly stepped into the queens quarters, asking her what it was worth, what she was willing to give him.

Most were pretty sure the noise drifting through the windows that night didn’t come from rugby practice.

The defected dancer did not wish to gamble. She knew what she had, what she wanted and what she wished to sacrifice for that.

“I offer you my Preservance. I have trained and trained for years on uncertain odds. It is finely honed and very strong and I hope to not need it anymore after today. In return I would like a better body. Suited for a dancer. So that I will not get injured and that stupid things like too short tendons or too weak joints will no longer hold me back. That is my bargain.”

Ḏ̤͕̜̄E̶̱̭A̖̙͞L̮͔̙͖͖ͧ͢

No one is quite sure she got what she wished for. Her body is certainly suited to dancing. Waving and mesmerizing, hypnotizing even. All students on campus know to avert their eyes. Things like that are dangerous, they know.

Few have tried to peek at her face, to see if they could find any trace of their former classmate back. To see if she was happy.

It’s hard to tell emotions from a face that has no eyes.

She’s rarely seen anymore, these days. Apparently she dances for the queen now. An honour, truly.

Legends tell of one gambler that made it out with both her Trinket and her desired price. The girl with the lungs that did not belong to her. The girl who came to the university with only two years left to live, and nothing left to lose. She sought out the Exchange Student in her second week, bringing two large, copper coins she’d saved to put on her eyelids when all went wrong.

She did not cheat and she did not bargain. She gambled. She went to that one odd place in the library, stepped into the shadows, and was not seen for two whole months.

A single game of cards may take that long. Especially with such high stakes. Especially with the fae.

They appreciate warriors. She had come to their table, faced with the entire court. She was given cards that had no numbers, but unfamiliar runes. She was not told the rules. Yet she played. Mimicking the others, she held her own for days and days and days.

Of course she lost. The fae are rarely beaten at their own games.

When she came back, stumbling, disoriented, underfed and horribly dehydrated, she remembered barely anything. Not the faces of her opponents, not the hand of cards she was dealt or what the other players had put on the table alongside her Trinket. She only remembered losing, the cold dread as she stared down at the horrid combination of cards her weak hand could not possibly compare with. And the queens cold crackling as she reached across the table for the small copper coin. And the horrid sensation of ice flooding her chest as her Kindness was taken from her.    

A very powerful Trinket indeed.

She’d woken up laying on a table in the library. Gasping for breath through her dry, dry throat. A copper coin on a very thin chain wrapped around her neck. On one side the golden letters, on the other a complex pattern, a rune in an unknown language, (though a few very bright history student managed to decipher an ancient runic symbol for Air among the twining lines).  

They brought her to the medics, and it was only after thorough examination that the girl discovered that despite her sore throat, her breath came easier than it had in years.

She never left Elsewhere University, afraid that whatever enchantment had been cast on her would falter when away from the queen. Instead she chose to finish the study she’d randomly signed up for in her mad gamble. She ended up a teacher, a permanent part of the staff. The others understood that sending her away would not be an option. Most other teachers had been students as well, after all. They understood the ways this place can change you.

She still wears the amulet up to this day. Some say that this is not a choice born from the instinctive desire to keep a Trinket close, but that every time she removes it from her skin her breath will come short and her lungs will burn. Some even say that it cannot be removed, whether by choice or force. They say the queen enchanted it (too much, too powerful. Let it stay with the human. Where no fae can get their hands on it.)

Some come to her still, for advice and tips on gambling. She’ll send them all away, discourage them. Even though deep inside she knows she’s made the right choice.

‘It needs to last’ one of the engineers had told her. She grasps her amulet, the copper strong as ever, infused with unfamiliar magic keeping her alive. She knows her Kindness will outlast her and wonders where it will end up. 

However much the memory haunts her, she hopes that maybe one day it will make its way back into the hands of the queen. Out of anyone, she certainly needs it the most.  

[in-mutual-weirdness]

Elsewhere University: Wayward

AN: First attempt at writing a thing in a long while. I have a weakness for fae stories and urban magic-y kind of scenarios, and @charminglyantiquated‘s universe here caught me hook, line, and sinker. Still, didn’t think I’d write anything for it, until the library scene popped into my head while I was procrastinating. Hope you enjoy what it’s turned into.

----------

When you were younger, your parents had impressed upon you the importance of going into the sciences.

“Be practical,” they said. “We have three sets of tuition to pay for. You can't waste time on art or philosophy. Love is all fine and noble, sure, but debt is not.”

Your original reaction had been a slowly growing resentment. Now, you're glad for it. You wouldn't touch humanities with a 10 foot pole now.

Oh sure, you're no automaton. You can appreciate people with an eye for theory, ink-stained fingers, or the aptitude for composition. A good portion of your friend group chose to study and create beautiful things. You love hearing about what they do, seeing the way their eyes light up and their words run away from them in sheer enthusiasm. But interspersed between their conversations about theater or lit class readings, you heard...other things. “Weird and inexplicable” didn't even begin to cover it. You finally put the pieces together in the spring of freshman year, after Sydney disappeared and everybody gathered to drink in memory and mourning.

It spooked the hell out of you. No two ways about it. Elsewhere University had a reputation for weirdness, for sure. You'd be lying if you said that hadn't swayed you in favor of attending in the first place. But this went past weird. “Weird” wasn't going to get you killed or kidnapped. The only thing keeping you from just transferring straight away was the impossibility of trying to explain it to your parents. And your grades weren't exactly gonna convince any other admissions office to let you in. Nowhere comparable, anyway.

So you coped in the ways you knew how. Reading all the guides you could get your hands on. Finding source folklore. Your choice of major had already stacked the cards in your favor. And while you still hung out with your arty friends, by sophomore year you'd found another group. A group more shielded from the weirdness. Where things could be normal and nobody thought to ask doppelganger questions or carry old screws in all their pockets. Except that one engineer lady, but far as you could tell, that was just a personal quirk.

And then school brought the hammer down on you.

You knew that college was gonna get tougher. But knowing didn't mean you were prepared. Those grades that had kept you from transferring came back to bite you. That creeping unease from Sydney hadn't gone away, and it was showing up in your work habits and shattered focus. You'd talked to the student health services people about it, and gotten nowhere. Scholarship money was on the line. The second round of exams was coming. And linear algebra was the first one.

You’d done your best to stay away from Elsewhere’s weirdness. But that didn’t mean you weren’t aware. You remembered what your humanities friends had told you. There were things you could do, loopholes you could exploit. Options, options, always options. If you were brave enough to take them.

And so here you are, venturing into the lower floors of the library.

You didn’t know many specifics going in, but you did know where to look. The bio majors Facebook page didn’t explicitly mention their library base camps, but the “Spelunkers Club” did, and had drafted a map to boot. The printout is sitting in your backpack, right now, sandwiched between notebooks. You’d wondered about their ability to diagram a non-Real, inconsistent space, but the solution made you laugh in shocked delight once you saw. While the shape of the shelves would change every six days or so, even a fae-touched library was militant about the Dewey decimal system. You spot the Fashion books (746.92) and make a right, nodding at a dude you recognize from your Psych class. He gives a weak thumbs up in response. Not somebody you'd expect to come here, but the psych lecture is the morning after the exam. If any of you vanish, it'll get reported quickly.

You move off a ways, finding a row of empty carrels against the wall. All identical, save one, whose lone desk light throws shadows around the walls. The rest of the row has their lights off, but you can hear the ambient shuffle of papers anyway. Best avoid those chairs, then. You pull out your ramen packs, selecting the saltiest variety (verified with a taste test, once. And never again.) The remaining 2/3 of the packets you scatter about the table, and stash back into your pockets. Should work.

You crack open your textbook and a bag of chips, and get started.

Time passes. The sound of your pages joins the general rustling. The clatter of laptop keys cuts through intermittently. You pull out your phone to google a definition and glance at the clock--apparently it thinks you’re in Dubai. Well, at least there’s proof that the time dilation here is actually a thing. Or just that it screws with your electronics. You make decent progress through some of the practice problems, but stall whenever you hit the theorems. That's algebra for you. A lot of numbers and graphs and definitions that use letters like they're words you should understand. You don't. Which is why you're even in this part of the library right now.

It takes you a while before you realize that no letters make sense anymore. You're still thinking in English- at least, you're pretty sure it's still English. But now even the chapter headings in your textbook look merely like shapes. It might just be delirium. That's the reasonable conclusion. You’d downed your second can of Red Bull just trying to keep your eyes functioning. But...

On impulse, you try to write your uni name. (Not your real name, you're not stupid. Just panicky.) Descartes. Cogito ergo sum, and all that. It comes out successfully, but it's entirely due to memory. Making the individual letters takes as much effort as if you were writing them backward, every curve meticulously plotted and traced.

Your circle is undisturbed, thankfully. But the shuffle of pages has stopped. Wind howls from beyond the walls, and the shelves creak like old floorboards. For a moment you wonder about the psych kid. It's a moment too long. You see something move out of the corner of your eye, when you look back toward where he was.

Don't move. Nothing’s there.

Except the Red Bulls are doing a number on your system, and even though you were never the wordy sort you'd still like your language back, thanks, and even if you wanted to leave your suddenly too-small circle and brave your way back to the campus proper, that exam would still be there.

The memory of your GPA curdles your fear into anger. “I thought we were the kind of people you'd leave alone,” you snap, turning to yell over your shoulder. Your voice climbs an octave as you start to rant in earnest. “What's the deal? I'm a STEM major. Doing math. Algebra. You don't even like algebra.”

“Mayhaps,” comes a voice from behind the shelves. “Numbers and Logic are mortal things, it’s true. But you are not a number. You just work with them.”

“And other things,” you reply. You strain your eyes into the dark, frozen in your half turn, but the shelves reveal nothing. Whatever’s out there doesn’t sound like it wants to approach. Probably. Your brain is racing, just barely outpacing your heart. “What do you--is there something you desire from me?”

“Presumptuous.” There’s a cicada-like buzz behind the voice. It makes you picture some kind of massive chitin-plated thing waiting just out of view.

“I meant no presuming. Uh.” Your tongue ties itself in knots to avoid the word “sorry.” It’s surprisingly hard to come up with less dangerous words. “Tell me where I went wrong and I shall try to avoid repeat offense?”

The hum continues. It's starting to sound like laughter. Your spine shivers like a loosened spring. “I want nothing of yours, pupa. What use could I have for it?”

You're pretty sure that question is rhetorical, and if it wasn't, any answer you could give would only endanger yourself. “Then if that’s so, we may move on with our lives. I’m sure you have your own stuff to- to attend to.” You try to muster up enough courage to turn back to your desk.

“I don’t understand. My current business is talking to you.” The thing- the Visitor’s legs skitter about around the shelves, its voice circling around. It better not be getting closer. “You’re proving a rather difficult conversation partner. Most im-po-lite.”

“I did not come here expecting conversation,” you say, uneasily. God, you want out. You shouldn’t have said anything to begin with. You never know who’s listening. “I came here to study, nothing more. That’s where my lack of grace comes from, uh, good fellow.”

“Odd, that you should stroll right into somebody’s front parlor and not be prepared for conversation.”

That can’t be right. That can’t be. The map- You turn the chair fully around and reach over to your backpack, before pulling back at the last minute. Can you even show that to a fae? Is that allowed? You wrack your brain for details, and keep coming up blank. Meanwhile, your Visitor- or Host, perhaps, as the case may be now- waits patiently beyond. “I was told that this was neutral ground where I could complete my work undisturbed,” you say, finally. Your hands rest on your lap now, fingers aching from where you gripped the swivel chair armrests. “I was told that this was public ground.”

“Misinformed trespass is still trespass, hatchling.” Their tone of voice doesn't change, but something in the cadence of it makes your hand stray toward your ramen packs. “You've wandered across my threshold and barred the door. Surely even you know what that means.”

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. You raise your hands in a placating gesture. “I understand. I will-” Die? Get Taken? Tell the Spelunkers that their map is a piece of shit and they need better cartographers? “I will leave and remove the salt circle. I will find where the actual neutral zones are and leave your domain alone and not trespass on it again. And...”

And? Your brain insists that something is missing, but by now all you want to do is flee and never come back. “And yeah. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

There's a different sort of clicking now. It sounds like pincers. You swallow back the lump of shuddering fear and wait for their answer. The entire section of the library is quiet except for that awful sound. “Usually there are reparations for an offense such as this. But...” Oh God oh god what does it want now. “I see that you've already lost something. That would normally go to the offended party. But I have no use for your words. Go then, pupa.”

It’s already started to skitter away when you’ve finished processing what it said. “Wait!” You even reach out toward the shelves, almost tripping out your chair onto the salt circle. Your legs are practically wobbly enough to wriggle out of your own jeans. “My- the words! English. Do you have my words?”

“They say external ears are better for hearing. I think they're mistaken.” You don't have time for its coy amusement, but it has even less time for overt demands and careless students. You grit your teeth and wait. “I have no need of your words. But I know how to get them back. I could retrieve them for you, even. But, that would be a favor.” You catch a glimpse of something between a gap in the shelves and you look hurriedly away. There's only leather spines and library labels. There's nothing else worth looking at over there. “And I don't give those out readily, even to those who haven't offended me. That is my offer. You know what to do, pupa.”

Trade nothing you cannot afford to lose. But you've already lost- You screw your eyes shut and count to ten, in half-remembered high school Italian. Uno, due, tre... You get to “cinque” before you switch into Spanish by accident. Right. A peace offering. You look at your desk, at your backpack, glance down at your pockets.

Only one option stands out to you.

You pick up the map and throw it out at the room with a flick of the wrist. “Here,” you say, as it drifts down just outside of the yellow-y line of flavor powder. “A map. Designed by the best cartographers of my age.” In a manner of speaking. “Knowledge for knowledge. Use it to secure the borders of your domain.” You reach for your notebook, and while you can't read what it says, you recognize the formatting of the list. “Here is a copy, in my own writing. It is as a contract. Take it as confidence that I will learn and know the borders here, and not cross them, ever.”

There's a rush of movement and suddenly something with more legs than you can really perceive lunges out from behind the shelves. You can't help the scream of terror. (Nor the stream of pee either. Caffeine, what a diuretic.) The sheer speed of it blows your hair back, as if you were standing on a subway platform by an oncoming train. When it’s passed back into the shadows, you look down at your feet. The circle hasn’t moved at all.

“Do not let anybody say I am not fair,” it says. “I always give back equal to what is given in turn. You can have your letters back. I grant you 24 hours of grace period inside this building. That should be more than enough to settle whatever affairs you need to in here. Good morrow, pupa.” It slinks back into the library, the click of its legs blurring together like the sound of pouring sand. Once more, the only sound is from the phantom students on either side of you.

You collapse back into your chair, barely able to move. Thankfully, whatever that fae did seems to have worked. You can read your notes, and even the textbook again. The adrenaline rush of it all has thrown everything into sharp relief. You write with abandon, blasting through proofs and problems alike with new vigor. When you finally leave and walk back out into the late evening sun, you stumble back to bed and nearly sleep through your alarm. But the exam, after that ordeal, feels like a doctor’s visit. Longer than you wanted and a bit uncomfortable, sure. But nothing worse than that.

Psych dude doesn’t show up the next lecture, but you do see him during the break. Probably just came in late. You do that too, you know the feeling.

It isn’t until that weekend, when the exam comes back with a grade better than you could reasonably expect, that you get antsy.

When a about a row’s worth of people don’t show up to your systems biology midterm the week after, you upgrade to worry.

You really wish you could say that you contacted the Spelunkers Club before their page got shut down.  (Part 2?)

[roxywashere]

Feel the Fire

A long retired supervillain is pulled back into action.

Xena Noble had made her fame in the 2040’s as a supervillainess, the shape-shifting and pyrokinetic Salamander. She never killed, but she did cause billions of dollars in property damage in Danesville, Wisconsin over the ten years she was active. In the latter years she began to become disillusioned with her chaos and sought desperately for escape. She had gotten her chance in the form of Renegade, a superheroine she had fought many times. One time, she had gotten too zealous for her good, and had very nearly killed Xena. Xena had let her think she had. She shapeshifted away from the wreckage of the building the Salamander had died in, and never used that name again. Xena had never been unmasked, and would never be chased after; it was the perfect crime.

She sought normalcy. She applied for a job as a teacher at a superhuman school, the Astra Academy in upstate Wisconsin, so she could put the knowledge that had created the Salamander to good use.

By sheer coincidence, she managed to become close friends with Renegade’s civilian identity, Alice Prince, who was also a teacher at the same school. In the fifty years since, she had come out as a former villain to the rest of the superhuman staff, and had been forgiven and accepted by the vast majority of them. She had found normalcy.

But now there were some jackasses kicking around and causing chaos using her old name.

She had gone to Danesville, her old city of operation, where the new Salamanders had been making a ruckus. She was standing in front of a still smoldering arson site, as snow drifted from sky onto her afro and wind fluttered her coat. Police were still swarming the scene, and she tagged one down, flashing her Astra’s League (associate) badge. “Morning officer. I’m Xena Noble, from the Astra Academy. We have reason to believe that two of our graduates did this. What can you tell me?”

“The owner of the building said he saw...” The officer hesitated. “Well, he described them as Demons. Big, 7-8 feet tall. Pitch black skin, and glowing mouths and eyes. That ring any bells?”

“Unfortunately, yeah.” They hadn’t just stolen her name, they were stealing her look, too.

“Well thank goodness. I hope you don't mind us pawning this off on you, but we’ve been swamped this week with all of the Harlequin activity.”

“Well, today’s your lucky day. I’ll take it from here.”

“I’ll go grab some of the files.”

Xena pulled out her phone, dialed it, and held it front of her. A hologram appeared above it showing Alice Prince's elderly face.

“They definitely know my old MO,” Xena explained. “They even impersonated my old combat form. If they're both half as good as I was, well, you can do the math.”

“Feel free to call down some help,” Alice pleaded.

“Once I’m actually on their trail, maybe then. Talk to you later.” She hung up. Xena had always been a lone wolf type.

The officer returned with a data card. “This is everything we have on this investigation, and the ones with the same ID’d perps. Drop by the station if there’s anything else you need.”

“Will do.”

Xena walked off, plugging the card into her phone. She read while she walked, and by the time she had gotten to where she was going, she had read all of it. She stopped in front of an old warehouse. It was visually the same as it was before but it obviously wasn’t the same building as the one that she had headquartered in, since Alice and Xena had destroyed it in their last fight. She didn’t even have any reason to suspect that the new Salamanders would be there, she just went there because it’s what she would have done.

The building was abandoned, as it had when she had first taken up residence, because of a downturned economy. The door was chained shut, so she checked that the coast was clear, grabbed the lock, and turned up the heat in her palm, melting the brass away. She forced open the door and kept the heat in her palm going, redirecting it into a flame to light the warehouse. It almost looked too much like it did when she had lived there. If her eidetic memory wasn’t betraying her, it was identical down to the patches of peeling paint on the walls, and the grease stains on the floor.

She ignited her whole body instinctually, and absorbed her clothes and phone into herself to protect them. She turned her skin into diamond-hard black carbon, and turned her eyes and mouth into bright orange embers. This was what she had called the Salamander: A fire elemental with no set form. Her body was a domain which she held full control over, every atom and its energy subject to her will.

Xena cautiously spun on the spot, scanning the now fully illuminated warehouse carefully. As she did so she spotted two shapes crawling from shadow to shadow. She growled at them, her mouth spitting smoke and fire.

They slunk out of the shadows, like serpents, not moving but growing and receding in her direction. They solidified into the forms of two androgynous teenagers, one with pale skin and long black hair, and the other with tan skin and short auburn hair. Xena did recognise them, they had been enrolled at the Academy. They had also taken a suspiciously high percentage of her classes. Xena now realized they had just been been studying her the entire time.

“Look who finally came crawling back to the cradle,” said the auburn.

“What a pathetic excuse for an Elemental,” the brunet taunted.

“What do you want from me?” Xena shouted at them.

“We want you to suffer,” said the brunet, standing where the auburn had been.

“You’ve abandoned your heritage,” said the auburn, standing where the brunet had been.

“You’ve forgotten who you are.”

“You’ve lost your flame.”

“Why should I care what two punk-ass kids think?” Xena taunted in return.

The two were gone, as quick as a blink, though Xena could swear she hadn’t. She spun around, and was met with two Titans, 30-foot tall lumbering masses of fire, soot, and shadow. “What about what we think?” they asked in unison. One of them grabbed her, and the other surrounded her with it’s hands, and she felt their heat. She didn’t just feel it, they were burning her, and she screamed, in pain and anger. Just when she thought their fire would consume her...

She snapped out of the lifelike deception, standing in a warehouse that looked no more like the one she had called home than any other would. Her heart was racing. She looked at her hands: Brown skin, not black carbon. She felt her face, and massaged her temples. “Shit, I do need to call in some help.”

And for deception magic as powerful as that, there was only one person capable of studying it and possibly tracing it: Aradia Furst.

Aradia was Alice's niece, and though most of their family wasn't on speaking terms with itself, Aradia always kept close tabs on her relatives’ allies. When Xena had come out as a former villain, Aradia had briefly kidnapped Xena to interrogate her for her intentions. Xena had passed with flying colors, and as a reparation Aradia offered her services for any magic-related troubles Xena may encounter.

And Xena figured now was definitely the time to cash that favour.

“If I didn’t know any better, Xena,” Aradia explained after hearing Xena’s recounting of the daydream, “I’d say your mysterious and unexplained backstory was catching up with you. You’ve always said you got your powers in a lab accident, but that doesn’t line up with what I’m hearing from you now.”

Aradia was hovering, Lotus-Position, in the center of her workshop. Her black and gold robes hung to the floor, and they glittered and shone with reflections of the glyphs and holograms that covered the walls. Her long brown hair floated freely, and her golden eyes shone with their own light.

“It was lab accident. I was doing my work with Heat-Controlled Cellular Regeneration, a bit of the test culture got on my hand, and then the propane tank fueling my bunsen burner backed up and the lab exploded. That’s all that I remember.”

“Hmm.” Aradia reached her feet to the ground, and walked towards her workbench. “A propane tank spontaneously backfiring at such an opportune time sounds like the work of a Metanarrative Totem.” With a few flicks of her wrist, Aradia summoned a stylized glyph of a spider, and then X’ed it out and drew a stylized salamander in front of it with her finger. “With that kind of force at work it’s a miracle there’s only three of you. Last time a Totemic power got unleashed upon a multiverse a thousand of them went to war, and nobody wants that again.”

Xena just stared at Aradia, unused to seeing this less-than-stoic version of her.

Aradia sighed. “This reference is being wasted on you. Spiderman, Spider Totems, Spider Verse. You’ve never heard of any of that, because Marvel and DC don’t exist in this universe.” Aradia rubbed her face. “I need to get out more.”

Aradia had an apparent revelation with that sentence. “There's an idea, take me to the place it happened. I'll be able to study the magic better if I’m immersed in it. Where was the warehouse?”

“Down by the Pike River outlet.”

Aradia drew a wide circle with her fingers, which then tunneled through the fabric of reality, opening a portal to the Pike River embankment. She stepped through, and beckoned Xena to follow. When she did, Aradia gestured for her to lead the way. Xena led her to the warehouse, and Aradia started casting spells to reveal the magic that had triggered the daydream, summoning illusions and holograms displaying in complicated detail every facet of the space.

“Oh, this is definitely Totemic in nature. It’s got strong traces of Demonic influence, as well, that’s never a good sign. If the Demons are directly involved I may need to summon divine assistance.”

“ ‘Divine assistance’?” Xena asked.

Aradia ignored her question, deeming her not ready for the answer. “A Demon is a worst case scenario, though. Most likely it’s just magic based upon the Deceiver’s own, and not it actually.” She focussed on the glyphs surrounding her as they honed in on the source of the magics. “There we go. Very strong. Ancient. Absolutely Totemic. But, not Demonic, and therefore in my jurisdiction. Would you mind if I called my sister in to aid us?”

“If you think she’ll be able to help.”

Aradia performed an incantation, and after a moment, she created another portal. Out of it stepped a figure.

Thrud Furst was tall, wearing a combination of robes and gold and black metallic body armor. She had long black hair, flowing in the breeze coming from behind her, through the portal. The skin of her face, the only skin of hers exposed, was heavily tanned. Her left eye was replaced with a complicated connector, a port to interface with any other magitech. The skin around it looked violently scarred, and more scars peeked around the edges of the bodysuit hiding her neck. Her arms and legs were not organic, but instead gold and black prostheses, designed to look and act like metallic muscle. She was holding in her hands a very ornate gold and obsidian mask, with a glass slit across the front and a jack inside that matched the one on her eye. After stepping through the portal she placed the mask upon her face, and the glass slit started glowing red.

“The hunt is on, sister,” Thrud said, her voice distorted in an almost robotic manner, summoning a golden sword from the thin air behind her back.

“Indeed it is, sister,” Aradia replied. “Pseudo-Demonic magic, made to mimic the manipulations of New Jerusalem's Deceiver.”

“Nothing we haven’t dealt with before. Where are they?”

Aradia studied her holograms more. “The foundries in the south of the city. How apropos.” She summoned another portal, straight to the foundries along the  border with Chicago at the south end of the city.

“I imagine drawing them out will be as simple as you arriving there,” Aradia said. “At least, assuming they do truly wish you dead.”

Despite their reassurances that the enemy was not Demonic in nature, Aradia and Thrud both crossed themselves before stepping through the portal. Xena stepped through without ceremony.

Aradia and Thrud were standing back-to-back, watching their surroundings carefully. It was strangely quiet. None of the foundries were being worked, all the workers having gone home after a hard day's toil.

Xena assumed her pure carbon form in preparation for whatever may be coming.

Aradia spoke up. “Do you feel that?” She summoned a circular flat hologram, which rippled like a pool of water, shaken by some subaudible vibration. She pointed the hologram in a number of directions around the trio, until the vibrations spiked. “That way.”

She led them to a FursTech Foundry, where the vibrations were audible, a series of loud, steady clangs, the sound of metal being worked. “Well, they certainly have a sense of irony,” Thrud mused.

“They also have a sense of who I’d have gone to for help,” Xena Responded. She pushed through the unlocked door to the foundry, and made her way through the offices to the foundry floor, where the two Titans were at work. One of them was holding its hands over a large glowing-orange sword, heating it to be forged, and the other was hammering it with a massive golden hammer. As Xena silently approached them, they glanced in her direction, nearly rendering Xena paralyzed with fear. They finished their forging, the one who had been heating the sword hoisting it over it’s shoulder.

“Are you ready to join with us, little Salamander?” they both asked in unison, their hulking forms approaching her.

“I...” Xena stammered. Aradia and Thrud stepped out of the shadows behind the Titans. Aradia summoned a circle of seven glyphs in front of her, and each of them fired a laser of a different color at the Sword Titan. Thrud dashed up the Hammer Titan’s leg and back, and planted her golden sword cleanly in the back of it’s neck, before activating an ice spell. She ripped the now frost-coated blade out messily, jumping away, and landing next to Aradia. The Titans both cried out in anger, making a sound like the roar of a jet engine.

“Then you’ve come to die,” they both surmised. “Very well.” Their forms changed rapidly, going from soot and shadow, with burning interiors, to pure flame, surrounding a skeleton of ember bones. Their shape was more obvious in this form, showing that they were humanly proportioned, if a bit stocky, and their skulls were now obviously horned, with two thick bull-horns curving up and slightly forward.

Xena responded by matching their height. She grew her carbon skin thick, and allowed her inner flame to consume the rest of her, becoming an armor shell surrounding a being of fire. She threw the first punch, turning her fingers into long obsidian claws and swiping at the Titans’ skulls.

The Titans both parried with their weapons. Xena then focused on the Hammer Titan, and focused as much heat as she could into the weapon, trying to melt it. Aradia and Thrud, meanwhile tried to divert the attention of the Sword Titan. Thrud zipped around it’s ankles, and Aradia blasted it with various Cold, Light, and Water magics from a distance. After she saw Xena heating the metals glowing hot, Aradia shouted: “It’s Adamantium! Melting it won’t work, you’re just making it more dangerous for us!”

The Sword Titan brought it’s blade down powerfully on Thrud, who held her sword up to block and locked her body mechanically, her armor and limbs seizing into a solid interlocked frame. The swords clashed, and Thrud pushed a crater into the ground instead of being crushed outright. “This is the power of Adamantium,” she proclaimed. She summoned an upwelling of magic strength and pushed back the larger sword. “My body was destroyed by a Demon, but my sister summoned the aid of the angels to gift her the materials to rebuild me. Celestial Adamantium and Uru-mithril make me an unbreakable conduit for magic.”

“Stop talking and start fighting!” Xena roared. She attempted to tear the weapon from the Hammer Titan’s hands, but the Titan would not let go. The two quickly transitioned to wrestling, which threw their tangled forms against the walls of the foundry, and they fell through it to the outside.

The Sword Titan made to follow, but Aradia threw up a barrier preventing it from escaping from the magitech assault. It raged at the barrier, striking it with the sword ineffectually. Thrud climbed the wall nearest to it and leapt to try and stab at the burning skull, but as she did the Titan swung its sword directly at her. Thrud was sent flying through the foundry, crashing into the far wall. Aradia dropped the shield as she tried to cushion Thrud’s impact, allowing the Titan to join its other outside.

Xena had been dealing with the Hammer Titan, throwing it at the surrounding buildings, trying to entangle it in debris so she could try and wrest the Hammer from it. The Sword Titan rushed behind her, and cleaved a wide slash in her back. Xena roared and slashed back, allowing the Hammer Titan to gather itself and lift its hammer.

Aradia, rushing out of the Foundry, hit the Hammer Titan with a frost beam, blasting it’s hands and making it drop the hammer. Xena, turning and seeing the Hammer now free, quickly grabbed it, and tried to smash the Hammer Titan’s skull. The Hammer Titan rolled out of the way, but not fast enough that Xena would completely miss it, smashing it’s collarbone. 

The Hammer Titan howled, crawling towards the other, and the Other met it halfway, grabbing it’s hand. Their bones began to melt together, and they flowed into one another, becoming a blob of flame surrounding a swirling mass of bones. The bones melded together, and the new Titan started taking form, not quite twice as tall at the two had been separately, but lanky and slim in comparison. 

“YOU WILL BURN!” they cried. Almost effortlessly, they bent down and grabbed Xena in both hands, and overpowered her flame with their own. Xena resisted at first, hammering away at them, but quickly the pain became too much, causing her form to start to lose cohesion and be drawn into the Titan. She screamed, refusing to surrender. 

“SUBMIT TO OUR WILL, OR DIE!” 

Far below, Aradia continued blasting with ice and water, and Thrud lept up the sides of the buildings to try and reach weak areas of the Titan. 

Xena seethed for a moment, and then relaxed, allowing herself to be drawn into the Titan peacefully. Once her mind had been completely welcomed by the Titan’s two others, then she started fighting again. 

“I submit to no-one. You submit to me!” 

The Titan’s twin minds, not expecting to be turned against, were quickly restrained by Xena’s will, and fought her as she bottled them into a dark recess of her psyche. As she gained more and more control of her new body, she started dousing the flames, and condensing back to a normal human size. The Titans’ powers, instead of being bottled with the minds, were added to Xena’s own, giving her an immense rush as she accepted the quadruple in strength and control they offered.

The Hammer and Sword fell to the ground as the form grew too small to hold them, causing Aradia and Thrud to back away. They watched as the Titan shrunk to human size, flame swirling around it as it went out, and the form itself solidified. They approached cautiously, spell and sword at the ready, watching Xena wrestle the last bastions of the Titans into the pit in her mind.

Xena, kneeling on the concrete amidst the destroyed foundries, opened her eyes. She looked at her hands, seeing them the shade of brown that she had been born with. Her clothes wrapped snugly around her body, and everything she had had in her pockets was there once again. She noticed that there was suddenly an ice-cold sword pressed against her throat.

“Are you in control?” Thrud demanded from her.

“Why would I tell you if I wasn’t?” Xena answered.

“That sounds like her,” Aradia noted. She finished casting a spell, showing her the landscape of Xena’s mind: The roaring flame of Xena in control, and the two smoldering embers of the Titans wrapped in chains. She motioned to Thrud, and Thrud reluctantly removed the blade from Xena’s throat, sheathing it in the space behind her back.

“How do you feel?” Aradia asked.

Xena introspected for a moment. “Stronger than ever,” she eventually answered. “What was that you were saying about Adamantium earlier?” she asked, having a thought.

“Why?”

“What kind of power would be required to incorporate it into my shifting?”

“Immense.”

“I’ll give it a go then.” Xena stood up, walked over to the still-hot giant Adamantium sword, and pressed her hands against it. She utilized all her newfound power and poured as much heat as she could into the metal, scorching and cracking the ground around her before finally the metal succumbed and started flowing freely from the puddles under her hands. She quickly scooped it up, and absorbed it into her skin. Keeping it heated within herself, she used her shapeshifting to create a mold inside her, directed the Adamantium into the mold, and then sucked the heat from it.

When she was done, she carefully pushed the molded Adamantium out through the skin between her knuckles, in three long blades.

“How original,” Aradia dryly noted.

Xena absorbed another thick glob of Adamantium, and remelted the stock she already had. She moved it throughout her whole body, storing all of it in her bones, having just enough of it to replace her entire skeleton. “I’ll keep working on the possible applications of this metal. But for now, Thank you, Aradia. And thanks to you as well, Thrud. Would you mind dropping me off back at the Academy?”

“It would be no trouble.” She summoned one last portal, opening to Xena’s office at the Astra Academy. “Tell Alice I said hello.”

Xena stepped through the portal, and it shut behind her, leaving Aradia and Thrud standing amoung the rubble of the fight.

“This would have to be at least a half million worth of damage she’s caused here,” Thrud said, adding it to a mental tab of damages caused by her allies in fights.

“I can take the hit to the company funds. It’s well worth the safety this grants the citizens of the city, and the world, with a good woman being empowered by that much.”