#but i have been trying so many ways to get slash to stop clamping down on our arms with glee

[darkwood-sleddog]

Expected Dog tm behavior: behaves when asked to behaved, is motivated for training, likes listening to people. You don’t want me on furniture? That’s fine! I am soft friend of every person and every dog!

Primitive Dog Behavior: NOT. That.

[mackeydoodledoo]

The Blacksmith Chpt. 2

Pairing: Dimitrescus x (Fem!)Reader/Daniela Dimitrescu x (Fem!)Reader

Summary: You are a human, a human who is in charge of the armory; polishing, blacksmithing you name it. You are strongly valued by the Dimitrescu family, specifically one that has strawberry-blonde hair. She’d always come visit you whenever you’d be working on a new piece of armor or weapon.

Warnings: Fight; ends slightly bloody, Fluff at the end

A/N: So, I’m obsessed with armor n such and hearing that there’s an armory when you fight Cassandra.... So, we are making a story about a Blacksmith falling for one of the Dimitrescu daughters! So this one’s short but stay tuned for part 3! 

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

When you adjust yourself, you fall off the chair you fell asleep on. Falling off the chair makes you fully awake however, a headache surges through your head as you gain your bearings.

“You’re awake,” Cassandra says, from the other side of the room

“Lady Cassandra,” You groan in pain, trying to gain your eyesight again, “When did you get here?”

“For awhile now,” She says, “You looked real peaceful sleeping, so I decided to not wake you.” 

“Oh, well- thank you,” You say standing up, “I was in the middle of the sheath for this sword but I guess I passed out on it. This is what I’ve been burning the midnight oil on.”

You sigh as the metal lining for the top and bottom of the sheath barely holding onto the base form you have made. 

“This shouldn’t be too hard,” You talk to yourself, “We just have to clamp them down more...”

You find some clamps and clamped down the design and leave it. However, while you were waiting for the sheath to finish up, you turn to another table and there was the sword you had finally finished. 

“Ahhh,” You sigh in relief

When you picked it up you began to do some practice swings. However, when you stopped swinging it, you noticed how the blade began glowing. It began creating some kind of engraving you clearly had not made. 

“What-What’s going on?” Cassandra asks you

“Do you think I know?!” You ask back

The room began glowing slightly brighter than earlier. When you looked at the blade itself, you somehow began reading the engraving.

“Whomever shall wield this blade, shall be worthy of all,” You read aloud

As sudden as it came, the brightness went back into the blade and your surroundings go back to the way it was before. 

“’Whomever wields this blade shall be worthy.’?” Cassandra repeats your words, “What is that supposed to mean? And how were you able to read the engraving? It looked to be in some ancient language.” 

“Do you think I have the answer to that?” You ask her, “’Whomever wields this blade’... Lady Cassandra, try to lift the blade.”

“Why would I-”

“Just do it,” You say, not being able to put up with her arguing as well as wanting to end the arguing with her

She finally decides to not question you any further and grabs the handle of the sword. However, when she was able to move it however, she wasn’t even able to lift it off of the ground. She quickly puts the sword down and straightens herself out. 

“Won’t Uncle Karl be here tonight for it?” Cassandra asks

“Yes...” You say, “But, if he finds out about that whole ‘you are worthy, you get to wield this longsword’ and the moment he will realize he ‘isn’t worthy’, he will have my head...”

“I won’t let that happen,” A familiar voice says

Both you and Cassandra turn your heads to see Daniela walking towards you. However she does not look very happy.

“This is my cue to make my leave, I will see you around y/l/n,” Cassandra says as she leaves

“Before you even go off on her and I, she was in here by the time I woke up,” You explain, “I do need your help my lady.”

Daniela’s scary demeanor drops once you explained the issue.

“I was going to pester mother today,” Daniela says, “But for you my dear, I will.”

You smile in relief. You begin guiding her through sword making. Although you only had so many hours before Heisenberg would come for his long sword. However, you didn’t realize how much time went by because You look at the door and notice Alcina in the doorway.

“My lady,” you gasp, dropping the newly crafted blade

“my daughter, I have been calling for you in the last hour,” Alcina states to her daughter, completely ignoring you

“Sorry mother,” Daniela says sorrowfully

“It’s not her fault my lady,” You interrupt, “I asked for her help.” 

“And with what did you need help with?” Alcina asks, clearly frustrated

“Something happened with the blade that I had made earlier,” You started, “You may not believe me, but Cassandra had also witnessed it happen. The blade was engraved with ‘whomever wields this blade shall be worthy’... I’m worried that blade is only meant for me... And I have never seen combat.... But, I’ve asked Lady Daniela for her help to make the exact same blade before Heisenberg gets here. I believe I can take care of everything else at this point. You really have to give your daughter credit my lady. She’s a real help. Maybe yo should have her come down here more often.”

Daniela blushes at your compliment however, Alcina only gives an “hmm.” Before taking her daughter out of the armory. You and Daniela make eye contact and she blows you a kiss. You catch it and gently place it over your scar that Daniela had made the day before. You turn back to your sword and begin the leather work on it, making sure it’s pristine however done as quickly as possible.

As you finish the sheath, you hear the door open. You quickly place the blade into its sheath and turn to greet whomever had come through the door. 

“Sir Heisenberg,” You greet him, “My Ladies.

“My gosh you look tired y/n,” He sighs, “Perhaps I had made you do too much...”

“You’re such a fool Heisenberg,” Alcina ridicules her younger brother, “If you had given y/n more time she-”

“Not at all sir and my lady,” you lie, “You’ve given me things to do and I’d much rather be doing my blacksmithing work.”

You hold the blade up to him as he takes it. You watch him draw the blade and do some practice swings with it.

“Perfectly weighted,” He mumbles, “Exquisite designing... Now we have to test its durability.”

Shit..

Whenever you’d make a new blade, you’d always test the blade’s durability first however you didn’t get the chance to yet because they all came in at the same time. 

Heisenberg walks up to one of the armored stands and raises the blade. You hoped that no one else could see  the sweat running down your temples as Heisenberg walks up to a set of armor and slashes it. The blade is bent.

I’m dead....

“What the hell is the meaning of this?!” Heisenberg walks up to you, “You are one of the best blacksmith’s in the region! How could you let this happen?! I shall feed you to my lycans!!” 

No words were formed out of your mouth, however, being a protective mother of her castle, Alcina takes Heisenberg by the wrist as Daniela stands in front of you, all protective like.

“You do not make the rules in this castle Heisenberg!” Alcina snarls, “I say what’s to say with her.”

“Shut your damn mouth!” Heisenberg growls

He takes you by the collar and begins to practically drag you out of the castle.

“y/n!” Daniela yell, “Don’t take her away from us Uncle Heisenberg!!”

“You can find another plaything to eat,” He continues dragging you

Daniela yanks on your ankle in an attempt to get a grasp on you, Heisenberg yanks harder, making Daniela fall forward.

“Heisenberg you let go of y/n this instant!” Alcina scream as soon as she sees her daughter fall 

“Then why don’t you try and make me?!” He taunts his older sister

As Heisenberg enters the main entrance to drag you out of the castle, all five of you begin hearing an explosion.

“Intruders?!” Alcina calls out, “I’ll have their head! Daniela, make sure they don’t lay a finger on y/n.”

“I’ll make sure she won’t be touched mother,” Daniela says, slightly angered

She yanks you form Heisenberg’s grasp and carries you over her shoulder.

“Daniela I can help,” You say, “I just need to get back to the armory and-”

“You are not to help us!” Daniela yells

“Why not?!” You ask

Daniela puts you back onto your feet as she looks at you.

“Daniela answer me.” You say, more firmly this time, “Why wont you let me help?!”

“You’re human and you need to be protected!” Daniela states

“I may be a human, but I’m also a blacksmith!” You yell this time, “I can for sure as hell handle myself out there!”

“You’re still not going to help!” Daniela yells back

“Why the absolute hell do you want to lock me away knowing you might die?! Do you want to leave me here?! Why is it so important to you that you keep me safe?!” You ask all of these questions

In a quick motion, Daniela cups your face in her hands, lips crashing onto yours.

Chapter 3

[happyandticklish]

Not Just An Annoyance

Notes: For the ask by @ticklish-sidekick. Based somewhere between the Titan’s Curse and The Battle of the Labrynth. As someone who was once the younger kid with the stupidly obvious crush on their older peers, I related a lot to Nico throughout the series. I hope you enjoy my sweet emo child as he receives all the tickles he deserves! :)

Summary: Nico keeps annoying Percy to get him to tickle him, and Percy is oblivious as per usual.

“What’s that?”

Percy jumped near out of his skin at the sudden presence of the other boy peering over his shoulder, banging his knee into the cafeteria table. There was something about the way Nico moved that made him slightly uneasy, like he was sliding out of the shadows. He glanced down at the sword Nico had asked about, which mere moments before had been a pen; Percy had wanted to polish it while everyone else was out at activities.

Evidently, not everyone.

“Uh, it’s my sword,” Percy answered, holding it up for him to examine. “Riptide, technically. Haven’t you seen it before, in battle?”

Nico’s eyes widened at the sight. Before Percy could do anything the boy had snatched it out of his hands, running his fingers over the blunt side of the blade. “Yeah, I mean, a couple times. I’ve never seen it up close though. How come it has a name? How does it turn from a pen into a sword? Do you actually know how to fight with this? Could I try?”

The questions buzzed around Percy’s head, whizzing too fast for him to concentrate on one. He decided to focus on the last one, as he figured that was the most prominent one. “Absolutely not. You’ll get yourself killed.”

He held out his hand for the sword, but Nico was already swinging the sword down in a wide arc, flushing in excitement as it whooshed through the air. “Awesome.”

“Nico, c’mon, give me my sword back.” Percy stood up, attempting to wrestle the hilt of the sword away from him. Nico was small and squirrely however, and easily evaded his grasp, clumsily slashing at empty air several more times. “That’s not safe, you know. And your technique is all wrong.”

“Then teach me the right way,” Nico responded brazenly, completely oblivious to Percy’s growing annoyance.

Percy narrowed his eyes at the insolence. He knew the kid didn’t mean to get in his way, but that didn’t stop him from making endless troubles for Percy. He thought back to Manhattan, and all the times he had acted up in similar manners. He remembered a certain technique his mom had used on him in those circumstances, and he figured they would surely be just as effective now.

While Nico was distracted attempting to heft Riptide into a natural thrust, Percy managed to sneak up behind him and place both hands on his sides. Nico froze, his entire face going red though Percy of course couldn’t see that.

“Give me the sword Nico,” Percy demanded. “Or else.”

Nico stiffened, trying to act brave through his apprehensive confusion. “No. I’m still using it.”

“Okay,” Percy said, shrugging as if to say the matter was taken out of his hands. “You asked for it.”

The last thing Nico expected was for two pairs of fingers to dig suddenly into his sides as Percy enacted his tried and true method. Nico jumped, bursting into uncontrollable giggles as he squirmed in his hands.

“N-Nohohoho!” Nico protested, attempting to wriggle out of his grip but finding that Percy’s strength vastly outmatched his own. “Ahahaha, Nahahat fahahahair!”

“Are you gonna give me the sword?” Percy asked, knowing that technically speaking Nico’s grip was weak enough on the weapon by now that he could grab it himself if he wanted. He decided it was more fun this way, however. “Hmm? What’s that? Are you at a loss for words?”

That’s a first.

“Stahahahap!” Nico screeched, dropping the sword finally and attempting to pry away Percy’s hands. “Ehehehe, pffft, nohohoho mohohore!”

“Are you gonna leave me alone?”

“Yehehehes!”

“And quit asking so many questions?”

“Yehehehes, yehehes!”

Finally Percy backed off and Nico collasped to the ground, wrapping his arms protectively around his middle. Percy calmly retrieved his sword while the other glared at him. “Tickling is not fair.”

“It’s called strategy,” Percy informed him, bumping him affectionately with his foot as he walked by. “See, you did learn something.”

Nico watched as Percy capped his sword, the weapon instantly shrinking down into a pen that he pocketed before walking off to go find the others. His skin still tingled anxiously as phantom tickles ran up and down his sides. He slowly clambered to his feet, trying to shake off the leftover embarrassment from acting so childish in front of someone as cool as Percy. Crumpling into a ball of giggles in front of your hero certainly didn’t help when you were trying to look tough.

But there was something about the way Percy had smirked when he had grabbed his sides, the teasing lilt to his voice, that awoke strange, fluttery excitement in the pit of his stomach. Percy was normally so dismissive of him, treating him as some annoying younger brother; it was nice having all that attention focused on him for a change.

So for the next couple weeks, Nico found himself doing everything in his power to provoke Percy into another “attack”. And, as most would say about him if asked, Nico could be very persistent when he wanted to be.

“Nico!” Percy spluttered, resurfacing after the other had shoved him quite suddenly and unexpectedly into the lake. “What the hell?”

Nico shrugged, flashing him an impish grin. “I wanted to see if the Son of Poseidon could swim better than normal people. I guess I was wrong though, because you seem to be struggling quite a lot.”

“Because you shoved me—” Percy exclaimed, before cutting himself off with an irritated smirk. “Alright then. But you only have yourself to blame for what happens next.”

“What do you mean—wah!”

Nico yelped in surprise as Percy’s hand shot out of the water suddenly, grabbing his ankle and jerking him into the lake with him. He landed with a splash next to Percy, waves cascading out around him. He came to the surface with an indignant gasp, and barely had time to get his breath back before Percy had pulled him into his arms, fingers wiggling into his now soaked shirt.

Nico shrieked, instantly squirming and attempting to evade his grasp, but Percy’s grip on him was too strong. “Ah, wahahait, nohoho, Pehehercy!”

“This is what happens when you mess with the great Percy Jackson,” the other triumphed, squeezing his sides rapidly and prompting a flood of embarrassing squeaks and giggles from Nico.

“Ihihihit wahahahas juhuhust ahahaha prahahahank!” Nico protested, throwing his head back with a wild grin and kicking his legs out violently in the water. “Thihihihis ihihihisn’t fahahahahair!”

“It’s perfectly fair,” Percy argued. “This is revenge, plain and simple. I wonder what would happen if I just…” He grabbed both of Nico arms, holding them above his head with one hand. With the other, he started rapidly spidering fingers in his left armpit. Nico promptly freaked out, writhing and bucking like crazy as the unbearable sensations took over. It was a credit to Percy’s superior abilities as a swimmer that he was able to keep both of them afloat through the process.

Nico got truly desperate when the touches changed from light fluttering into intense drilling, directly in the spot where his armpits met his ribs. “Nahahahaha, stahahahahap, stahahahahap, ohoho myhyhy g-gohohods!”

“Alright, alright.” Percy let go, whereupon Nico’s arms hastily clamped to his sides, and paddled their way back over to the dock. Nico gratefully pulled himself up and collapsed on the wooden platform, freezing cold and giggling.

“That was mean,” he accused, throwing an arm over his face to hide his growing blush.

Percy pulled himself up besides him, playfully poking him in the side to hear him yelp and scramble away. “Hey, sometimes you gotta be mean to teach someone a lesson. Besides, you’re too easy. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone as ticklish as you are—it’s kind of adorable.”

Nico opened his mouth and closed it, attempting to somehow stammer out a response to that. Before he could, Percy had shot to his feet and was off again, presumably to go dry off. Nico flushed violently and, after a moment of hesitation, followed in suit, the slight breeze combined with his dripping wet clothes causing goosebumps to scatter up his arms.

Nico failed to get any sleep that night, as Percy’s words echoed over and over again in his head until he eventually buried his face into his pillow in delighted embarrassment.

The provocation only continued as time went on. Nico sprinted frantically across the camp grounds one late afternoon, dipping in-between confused campers who stared after him quizzically. In one of his hands he clutched a simple necklace—a necklace which happened to belong to one Percy Jackson, furiously in chase behind him. Already, helpless laughter spilled from the young boy’s lips as the anticipation of the chase caught up with him.

“Nico!” Percy yelled after him, hastily apologizing to campers as he bumped and stumbled into them. “That’s important, give it back!”

“Make me!”

Evocative words, a tease Nico knew the other couldn’t resist. Sure enough, Percy soon caught up to him, and instead of grabbing him he skipped straight to digging hands into his sides as the two rolled over on the grass. Laughter spilled already from Nico’s lips as electric shocks coursed up and down his body from the sensations. Percy quickly forgot about the necklace, as he did most of the stolen objects in these games they played, and simply went about wrecking the boy, wiggling fingers into every ticklish crevice on his body until Nico was squealing and begging for him to stop.

Only once Nico had truly reached his limit did Percy back off, letting the other breathe as he collapsed on the ground. Percy retrieved his necklace easily, as it had fallen from the other’s hands quite a while ago. Nico rolled over on his sides, leftover giggles wracking his shaking frame.

“Don’t take my stuff,” Percy warned him, trying to sound angry though most of the anger was stripped from his voice as he beheld the happy boy before him. “I mean it this time.”

Nico nodded frantically, but deep down knew this wouldn’t be the last time.

Weeks went by before either of them said something about it. It was a colder night, one of those midsummer evenings where one could feel the hints of autumn creeping in, and thus Percy sat huddled by the fire, his eyes closed as he absorbed the heat gratefully. There were a couple others milling in and around the fire pit, most either in their cabin or engaged in late-night conversation with friends and lovers. Nico hesitated before approaching him, worried for the first time in quite a while about being a bother. Normally he wouldn’t care as it usually resulted in Percy tickling the ever-loving shit out of him, but he was always worried that he might be going too far and that one day Percy was just going to snap at him in anger.

Not to mention, he looked so peaceful with his head tilted back, eyes closed and wind gently tousling his hair. Nico flushed, pushing the invading thoughts aside. He was well aware of the hopelessness of his crush, but that didn’t stop it from encroaching at the worst times.

“Hey,” he said, lowering himself to the ground and crossing his legs besides Percy. The other startled at his presence, whipping his head around to face him. “Nice night, huh?”

“Yeah,” Percy replied warily. He waited for a moment, clearly expecting something from the other. When Nico did nothing, he relaxed slightly, allowing himself to face the fire again.

“Hey,” he said hesitantly after a couple seconds of silence had gone by, an awkward note to his voice. “I just wanted to say sorry. For, you know, torturing you for the past month. It’s just… I don’t know, I guess I’m just not that used to dealing with kids, and I went a little overboard with you. I know you don’t mean to be annoying, or anything—”

“I do,” Nico interrupted, surprising both himself and Percy. He hadn’t meant to say the words—they had slipped out without his permission. “Mean to be annoying, that is. It’s… uh, on purpose.”

“Oh,” Percy said, frowning a little. “Why?”

Nico shrugged, picking at his fingernails and avoiding the other’s gaze. “Dunno. I guess it just… it felt nice to have your attention, you know? You usually treat me like a pest, or some minor annoyance you don’t want to put up with. I guess it was kind of fun having you hang out with me.”

“Fun?” Percy repeated incredulously. “But I was always so mean to you! I mean, what, do you like being tickled out of your wits all the time?”

Nico blushed furiously, staring intensely at the ground and not responding. It took a moment for the realization to hit Percy. “You do like being tickled? Wait—is that why you’ve been bothering me all this time? So I would tickle you?”

Nico grunted noncommittally.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Percy exclaimed, knocking his shoulder against the other affectionately. “I would have just tickled you, if you had told me that was something you wanted. You didn’t have to force me into it—in fact, I think I would much rather you ask as opposed to just stealing my stuff all the time and shoving me into lakes.”

Nico whipped his head up to stare at him for the first time throughout their entire conversation, his eyes wide. “You don’t think it’s weird?”

“I mean, I don’t personally understand it,” Percy admitted sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean, I think I would die if anyone tickled me as much as I’ve been doing to you all the time. But if it’s what makes you happy, then it makes me happy. You’re my friend Nico—not a pest or an annoyance. I care about you.”

Those words, such a simple thing for Percy to say, meant the world to the little boy staring up at him. He flushed, trying to figure out how to possibly respond without sounding like a lovestruck dork about it. “Thank you,” he muttered, before kicking a foot out and digging it into the other’s side. “Idiot.”

Before he knew what was happening, however, Percy had latched onto his leg, locking an arm around his ankle and thus securing his foot in place. Nico swallowed nervously as Percy removed first his shoes than his sock, the cold air blowing preemptively against his now bare foot. Nico’s toes curled in anticipation at Percy’s growing smirk.

“Oh Nico,” he said, clucking his tongue regretfully. “You shouldn’t have done that. Especially after you just admitted that you like to be tickled, well… I mean, it’s really your fault what happens next here.”

Nico grinned, ducking his chin into his chest in embarrassment. “I hate you.”

Percy matched his grin with his own and Nico’s heart fluttered traitorously in his chest. “Of course you do.”

The camp soon rung with the sounds of Nico’s crazed giggles, leaving many a camper to stop and stare at the sight of what looked like the famous Percy Jackson tickling the shit out of the new upstart Nico di Angelo. That wasn’t the last time they witnessed such a sight either, and in the end, Nico found he couldn’t be happier with the way things had turned out.

[karlnapity]

Heaven and Hell Were Words to Me

AO3 link

TWs: violence, manipulation

Now, Michael knows when things aren’t his business. He knows when things should be left to the past, when he shouldn’t pry.

And he doesn’t, not for the most part. He lets things happen around him, sticks to the side. He’s seen his fair share of chaos, had his part in it.

He doesn’t know what’s happening with the prison. He doesn’t dare ask.

But god, is it interesting. Something about it pricks his interest, makes him pay attention when it’s brought up. He doesn’t know if it’s the mystery, his lack of knowledge, a want to belong to something of the server. He tries not to pry, he really does, but sue him if he asks an extra question here or there.

After all, he’s a neutral party.

(He’s not. There’s an evergrowing feeling of dissent… it starts with the fact that there wasn’t a trial, then the fact that he has only a number of guards, and it grows and grows, but he doesn’t dare say anything.)

>

There’s a certain sort of discomfort when you’re the only one on the server. It’s so very quiet. Every time he mines a block, drops a tool, it feels so loud, so stressful.

It’s a strange feeling, a little shiver on the back of his next as he wanders through the usually vibrant server.

It feels wrong.

[Dream joined the game]

The uncomfortable feeling grows. He shakes it off. He can’t deny the way his interest peaks, but there’s no use wondering.

[Dream] michael come break me out omg

Oh.

Oh.

He can’t deny it’s slightly tempting.

...Okay. Pretty tempting.

Before he even really knows what he’s doing, he’s already slotting his pickaxe into his inventory, already pulling out his trident to jump in the water outside.

He’s not quite sure what possesses him, what drives him into the frenzy that carries him to the side of the prison, what drives him to throw his pickaxe against the wall despite the pressing ache of the mining fatigue.

There’s just the absolute, overwhelming need to <i>get him out</i>.

There are ever-present messages in the corner of his eye, and it only encourages him further.

His heart is beating in his ears. This is risky. This is stupid. This is what he needs to do.

He only gets so far.

[Awesamdude joined the game]

His blood runs cold. He gasps at the way his heart drops. The voice starts behind him.

“Michael. You don’t understand what you’re doing.” It’s not a question. It’s a threat.

He’s stammering something, desperately trying to think of something a little less insane than I was trying to break the only jailed criminal on this server out because he asked me to even as his brain shouts get him out get him out get him out now and then there’s a hot burning down his back.

He gasps in pain, stumbling forward. He turns just in time to see Sam raise his sword for another slash, cries out and backs away.

He’s whimpering something like please please please no as the message jumps into the bottom of his vision.

[Dream] He understands he’s just an idiot

[Dream] Kill him

Michael sobs, in pain and confused and so so scared. He blubbers something like he asked me to, please don’t, he told me to as if that would make it better, and Sam’s gaze shifts into something like disgust.

“I will not be this nice next time.”

And with that, he leaves the game.

Michael hauls himself to his feet, whimpering as it exacerbates the slash up his spine, and vaguely resists sending a why did you say that why I thought you wanted me to help why would you do that to me message.

He can’t. And he needs to leave anyways.

The climb out of the prison is painful. He didn’t make it to leave without another person He has to stop, a few times, just to make sure he doesn’t bleed out. He doesn’t have any healing pots. There’s no choice but to wait to heal on his own, or beg someone else.

He tells himself he’s lucky to have not lost a life. Every passing second a small, vindictive part of his brain resists that notion. It hurts so much.

He lays flat on the prison roof, legs still over the edge of the hole he used to climb in and out.

He’s probably just lost a lot of blood, but he plots a next break-in plan anyways.

He keeps checking for another message from Dream.

God. He’s either delirious or insane.

He rolls over and pushes himself to his feet again, already bracing for the drop off the edge. He instead stumbles and throws up what’s probably all of this week’s and last’s meals. Ow.

>

He’s just gotten down when he’s intercepted. He’s practically gasping for breaths now. He doesn’t want to know what kind of blood trail he’s left. He avoids looking to see how many hearts he has left.

“Holy shit, Michael, are you okay?” The voice is loud in his ears and it leaves his head pounding.

He opens his mouth, mutters something about I’m fine and a don’t worry about me, but he’s not quite sure what it is he says.

His eyes are having a hard time focusing, the ground pulsing and spinning around him. He’s having a real hard time thinking.

All of a sudden there are dots dancing in his vision. He turns to whoever is talking. He’s pretty sure he’s said I’m going to pass out if he’s lucky.

He falls. There’s a faint shout.

>

He comes to on a bed. It’s way nicer than his own.

He’s lying on his stomach. He hisses in pain. His back hurts. He’s almost at half health. At least it’s better than before.

He takes his time getting up and shrugs on the sweater left on the end of the bed. It’s painful to move, but he manages to get out the door.

This is Las Nevadas.

He had a suspicion the minute he woke, but this only confirms it. It’s only a simple house, but the glitz and glamor still make their appearance. He turns to examine it better.

“Like it?” He turns so fast it makes him dizzy. Quackity grins.

“Here, you look like you’re about to fall over. Come here.” Quackity takes his arm and leads him into the next room, seats him at a table.

“So, dude, what happened?” Quackity asks, and there’s actual concern there.

That’s interesting. They’ve hardly talked, after all.

He doesn’t want to say it. Quackity will try to stop him, just like everyone else.

“Sam was a bit angry with me,” he settles on.

Quackity frowns. “Sam? I know he’s been a bit short-tempered lately, but… did you do anything? That could’ve upset him?”

Michael sighs. He knows he’s not getting anywhere without actually saying it, and Sam will probably tell Quackity anyways. Better to get it out now.

“I maybe… kinda… triedtobreakintotheprison?” He runs his words all together, forcing them out as fast as possible.

Quackity freezes from where he’s turned to put on the kettle. “You… what?”

“Tried to break Dream out,” he mutters.

“Michael… why the fuck would you do that?” He demands, whirling around. He slams his hands on the table. His face is twisted into an anger Michael doesn’t think he’s seen before.

“He asked me to,” he says softly, as though he hadn’t already been thinking about it. “He sounded so sad. And he said he’d do anything, he was begging.”

He’s probably making his case worse, but it’s the truth. His heart hurts at the thought of Dream still stuck in there. He hopes Sam doesn’t do anything.

Quackity takes a long, deep breath and sits again. He takes Michael’s hands.

“Look, Michael.” Michael does. Quackity’s face is full of something like pity that he doesn’t understand. It unsettles him. “Do you know why he’s in the prison?”

He shakes his head. There’s a pit growing in his stomach.

“He.. he hurt all of us. He was our friend at one point, but something went wrong, I guess. But the main reason why he’s in there? Why he doesn’t have the right to go free like us? Manipulation, Michael.”

He doesn’t want to hear this.

“He was manipulating you. He wants out, and you’re the right person for it. Because you weren’t there to see what he did.

“He deserves whatever he gets, okay? Don’t feel bad. You don’t need to get in trouble with Sam for someone like that.”

It feels like a betrayal. He wants to slam his hands over his ears, barely resists. He wants to cry.

“He told Sam to kill me,” he whispers, and nearly clamps his hands over his mouth.

He didn’t just say that. He shouldn’t have. He doesn’t want Quackity to think of Dream any worse, why did he say that, if Dream knew he’d feel so betrayed, why did he-

Quackity rubs his shoulder in sympathy. “He’s evil. Sam wouldn’t do that.”

He doesn’t sound like he believes it himself.

He claps his hands together. “Look, Michael. I’m sorry this happened. I gave you some pots and you should be okay to go, there’s just some residual pain and stuff. There will be a scar, and I’m sorry for that. I’d recommend not going anywhere near the prison for a bit, Sam will have a conniption. And I’m sorry Dream did that to you. I promise it won’t happen again.”

Michael shivers. He doesn’t like the sound of that.

“I don’t want him to suffer,” he starts. “It’s okay, really-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Quackity continues smoothly, clapping him on the back. The way it only barely misses his wound feels almost intentional.

The air in the room feels oppressive.

“I have to go,” he says suddenly, rushing back to his room to grab what’s left of his things. Some of them are missing. Quackity’s shadow behind him no longer feels comforting.

>

He wanders, after that. Things feel so much emptier than before, even if nothing has changed. His brain isn’t together enough to get back to work, and he’s not sure if it’s residual effects of blood loss or something else.

“Hey, Michael!” He turns for the source of the voice. He smiles. Puffy.

“Hey.”

She runs up to him and sets a hand on his arm. Her face is pinched. “Are you okay?”

He shrugs then resists a wince at the way it pulls at his wound. “Yeah, why?”

She gestures up and down at him. “You’re kind of… bloodstained? You look like shit, sorry.”

“Oh.” Something tugs at him, a sort of contentedness at being noticed. “Yeah, you know, just got kinda. Lightly stabbed.”

She frowns and pulls him with her. “Come here, let’s get you cleaned up.”

As she sits him down at his second table for the day, he muses that there’s something about Quackity stopping the bleeding but leaving him blood-covered. There’s something there he’s not smart enough to dissect.

She dampens a cloth and runs it over his face, his arms, hands him one of her sweaters. She gasps when he turns to take off his own.

“Holy shit, Michael, what happened?” He doesn’t give her a chance to get a good look.

“It’s not important,” he mumbles. He sits and she resumes cleaning off his hands.

And that’s when he gets the message.

[Dream] are you ok

He gasps.

“Shit, Michael, you okay?” Puffy asks, incorrectly assuming she’s hurt him. He doesn’t respond.

[Dream] i hope sam didnt hurt you

[Dream] ily

He feels tears. Puffy, now thoroughly confused, sits next to him and rubs his shoulder while he cries.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” She asks. “Because I would really like to know why someone stabbed you. Are you safe?”

Is he? Does it matter? He has to go back to the prison anyways.

[Dream] do you know when you can try again

He sighs, runs his hands over his face. “I’ve gotta go, Puffy, thanks.”

She grabs his hand, flicks off some more dried blood- how much did he lose, god- and frowns. “At least let me finish here.”

“No, but thank you.”

“Michael?”

He stops.

“My office is open whenever you need it, okay?”

He nods, even if it isn’t.

If she knew what he was going to do, she wouldn’t be this nice. It should sting a bit more than it does.

>

He stares at the messages. Dream has sent five more, throughout the course of the day, keeps asking.

He thinks of what Quackity said.

Dream can’t be manipulating him.

He can’t.

No one on this goddamn server gave him the fucking time of day until he got injured. Until he was visibly suffering.

Except Dream. Dream reached out to him, is nice to him, cares for him.

He needs to get him out. Michael is so excited to see him.

He piles up the blocks from the prison in his house. It’s a sign. A promise.

>

[MichaelMcChill] soon

[Dream] my hero

[love-toxin]

kiss of death; thanatos.

a/n: zagreus isn't the only one that's desperate to get out of the underworld.

warnings: yandere thanatos, kidnapping, death, possessiveness, post-canon, violence, blood. 

“...Thought you could get away from me, did you?” 

Words spoken so softly they almost fell upon deaf ears, but the chill of his voice crept up on the back of your neck as if he’d touched you, his fingertips cold as death’s embrace itself. Plumes of black smoke gathered around Thanatos’ ankles as he appeared, his eyes void of mercy while his scythe gleamed in the light of Elysium’s false sky. It could just as well have been night when his presence was so near.

A thousand answers rose in your throat and died on your lips, and you felt the heaviness of the exalted souls’ emotions around you--you felt the urge to drop to your knees and plead for your life, just as so many had done and would continue to do after you. However, your misfortune knew no bounds, and you had no need to pray to the gods to know that he would never accept your pleas for mercy. 

“Answer me.”

With speed contesting even Hermes, he swung the scythe downwards and slashed through the air, as if he meant to cut the string of your life himself and send you hurtling back into the river Styx a thousand levels below. He had once threatened to drown you in it during an especially miserable argument--and though such a fate was horrific to imagine, your grip tightened on your stolen spear when you reminded yourself that giving up now would be so much worse. 

“...So, what now? You’re going to kill me with that, are you?” 

He didn’t even bother to gesture to your trembling hands clamped around the hilt, your body nowhere near meant for the warrior’s path you’d taken, even in death. Zagreus had carved his way through a thousand souls and clawed his way out of the Underworld to reach the glory of Olympus, and though you'd gotten a head start yourself, you were nowhere near capable of the same prowess and skill that had allowed him to escape his fate. But you'd be damned if you didn't at least try, even when it meant that Thanatos would sniff you out and hunt you down like a bloodhound once he returned and noticed your absence. 

Though he exuded raw fury and ominous strength, his eyes had become empty and lifeless. Soft, fluttery sounds of lilting voices and a breeze blowing gently through trees that only appeared to be alive cut through the silence, the peace of Elysium doing little to ease your terror at having been caught by your gravekeeper. Thanatos stepped forward silently, the grass of the courtyard where he'd stopped you withering and dying around his feet...and with as careful a touch as ever, he laid his fingertip against your blade and slowly trailed it downwards, leaving a clean streak through the viscera that bloodied your weapon. 

“...Give it a try, little bird. The lesson will sink in better when you struggle to put down what cannot be killed.” 

As the words dripped off his lips like the venom of a spider's jaws, the pressure of his finger on the hilt of your sword suddenly grew stronger. The force was so much, in fact, that it took barely a moment for the imbalance to break your grip and your weapon to clatter to the ground, and skitter out of your reach with a firm tap of his heel. Thanatos caught your chin with the palm of his hand, your face tilted up to look at him while he undoubtedly pondered what lengths he could go to make you suffer for your betrayal. 

He had once told you that it was a great personal sacrifice to let you reside in Elysium while he travelled between the surface to Tartarus, but he had done so to preserve the freedom and happiness you so craved as a mortal that had once lived and breathed. He did so for you, because he loved you, he said. Your gaze was caught in those steely eyes, your hands trembling around his wrist that flexed as he held you.

"I've loved you since your last breath, the moment that I first held you in my arms."

Strands of pearlescent hair fell into his face as he searched your expression for answers, for remorse, for anything to direct his resolution towards. The only way forwards, he decided, was in moving in so close that your noses brushed aside one another, and your resolve crumbled entirely once his lips met yours and his breath chilled you from the inside out. 

Within seconds you felt the weakness overcome you, and it only grew stronger the longer Thanatos went without breaking the suffocating kiss. Your nails scrabbled for purchase on his cloak while he gripped you so roughly by the back and your exposed thigh, and the deeper he pushed his affection the more you struggled against the feeling of faint, much less try to keep your breathing steady. Your eyelids fluttered closed at long last, the end of your suffering near as your limbs slowly went limp...and you hung like a doll in his arms, completely incapacitated before your journey back to the mortal world could even truly begin. 

It made little difference to Thanatos, however, as he collected your body and carried you like a corpse's bride down the path he knew so well towards the House. By the time he arrived, you would have pulled yourself from the pool of Styx and would start having your meltdown at realizing you were on Hades' doorstep, the comforting tranquility of Elysium far from your mind as you begged in such a pitiful way to be let go. 

For such a lovely soul, you really could be such a miserable wretch when you were pushing away his love. What compelled him to make you his, he might never know...but surely it would be much easier to have you clinging to his arm this time, when you were weeping and wailing at his return and begging him to bring you back to where you "belonged". 

“I don’t have to force you. You’re mine...you don’t have any other choice.”

[ficforce]

Strong For Me

Sagamiya Konro x Reader

SFW

Set during the great fire in Asakusa

Established relationship

Watching Company 4 roll in on their metal vehicles and dousing the last of the dying flames filled Y/N with more anger than she thought she could bear. They came in like triumphant heroes but where had they been when the fires were roaring and their people were turning into Infernals?

Nowhere.

It had been the Hikeshi running through the town fighting fires and saving anyone they could, it had been regular people throwing endless buckets of water in an effort to save their houses and many of the people who had an ability to control flames were exhausted. She shoved past one of the Fire soldiers as they tried to direct her elsewhere, drawing Konro’s sword on them when the man tried to grab her - she was quickly left alone.

The sword had been given to her before Konro ran off with Benimaru; he had told her to use it to protect herself whilst he was away from her side. The weapon was one of the most precious things he owned and by giving it to her he was telling her he was going to come back.

Only… he hadn’t come back to her yet.

Y/N stepped out of the way as the Captain of the 4th Company headed up the street, glaring at him as he passed but then she heard Benimaru’s voice from a short distance away, “Beni!” Running hurt her possibly broken ribs but it was hardly on her mind as she spotted Konro propped up against a building, “Konro! Konro you’re o… okay?” Dropping to her knees on the side Benimaru wasn’t she reached out to cup his face, turning it a little to properly look at the slash across his nose, “That’s gonna scar but you’ll still be handsome.” Konro tried to smile at her gentle teasing though it came out as more of a grimace and Y/N finally seemed to notice that his skin was smoking.

Her eyes widened once they saw the burnt and still burning flesh over his shoulders, his arms and his neck, “This…” it wasn’t a normal burn, it wasn’t even the kind of burn that someone with fire resistance skin could get in extreme cases - it was burning from the inside out. Inside some of the wounds, she could see what looked like embers and she realised what he had done. “Konro… you… you didn’t have to go so damn hard! What did you do?!” Hearing her voice too loud and almost shrill she covered it with her hands and tried to fight off her tears. Through her blurry vision, she saw him try to lift his arms to hold her but it seemed it was either too painful or they were too damaged.

“I’ll be okay, Y/N.” Konro grit his teeth as a spike of pain shot through his shoulders again, “Just be strong for me.”

x - -

The town was abnormally quiet, even though two days had passed they were still finding their dead and trying to figure out who combusted and who died from some other cause. Asakusa had always been quick to pick itself up and go about its day but this was something different. The fires had destroyed most of the buildings, the Guardhouse was overfull with the homeless even though everyone with a house left were taking in as many as they could - many were frightened that another Demon might appear and Konro wouldn’t be able to beat it this time.

She had been handing out food and blankets to those who needed them when she came across the massive crater Konro had scarred into the land.

It was terrifying to see.

Not only because of what a full-powered Akatsuki could do. Not because it marked where something as catastrophic as a Demon had appeared either. It was where Konro had been willing to sacrifice everything for his Town. Her lover had gone as far as knocking Benimaru out in order to take the Demon on - not because Benimaru couldn’t have handled it but because Konro wanted to make sure someone who loved and could fight for Asakusa as much as him survived.

She could have lost him completely…

Konro had led as many able-bodied men as he could with Benimaru to protect what they could. The crater in front of her didn’t feel real, it felt like if she stepped forward it would dissipate like some sort of mirage. “Y/N,” a thick coat was wrapped around her shoulders as Benimaru came to stand next to her, worry laced his voice as he forced the woman to stand back a little. “You’ll fall in.” He didn’t say anything more as she pulled the coat closer to her body and pressed her face into the material, it was Konro’s coat, it smelt of him - like he did before all of the medicines and charred skin. “I’ll take care of giving the rest of this stuff out. Konro’s asking for you…” What he actually meant was that Konro was in agony and was calling for her.

She turned her head to look at him, her eyes were a little wider than usual and she was trying to smile at him in the same reassuring way she always did. Her hand reached for his hair and she brushed it back a little, stroking her thumb over the bruise on his temple, “Y/N… I’m sorry. I should have done more. I should have been stronger.”

“Y/N…” Konro whispered and tried to reach for her face, wanting to wipe away the stray tear she was trying to ignore - it was agony. His jaw tensed as he tried to clamp down on the pained sounds wanting to escape as he tried to force shredded muscle to work.

Y/N shook her head, “He buried you, Beni… he would have broken your arms and legs if it would have protected you. There was nothing you could have done.” The young man was never going to forgive himself for not being there for Konro, she could see he was already blaming himself and wouldn’t listen to reason. Konro had explained to her how Benimaru had been at his limit, how he had been overheating and for him to be shoved aside so easily further proved that Konro had done right by him.

“…He’s calling for you, Y/N.” He took the supplied from her and headed for the next household that needed help.

Konro appeared to be asleep when she entered the room, the doctor glanced her way before hanging up another IV of who knew what inside, she didn’t care as long as it helped him. There was a large bowl with pinkish water and bloodied bandages soaking inside, shredded packets of medical patches, discarded cooling blankets designed for someone overheating… the room was a mess. The medical rooms were already taken up by the injured so they had moved him to his own room to recover and avoid infections.

“How’s he doing?”

“We’re sedating him as much as we can without killing him, Y/N.” The doctor sighed and began gathering the supplies they’d strewn out of the floor, “It’s tephrosis, his skin is carbonising and the lack of oxygen to his muscles has caused tears all over, he’s got limited mobility in his arms and the muscle around his shoulder blades will take months to heal… if it does.”

Neither spoke as Y/N let that sink in. If Konro couldn’t fight anymore… Strong men were respected in Asakusa, no one challenged the authority of the Hikeshi because it was led by the strongest. Technically, Benimaru was the strongest in a fight but he didn’t have the confidence to lead - someone could easily chip away at his resolve or Benimaru could lose his temper and go too far.

“It’ll heal, he’s stubborn.” The doctor gave her a weak smile and Y/N bit the tip of her tongue, waiting for more bad news.

“His lungs are shot.” There was no gentle way to tell her, “He’s going to be more prone to pneumonia and it won’t be easy for him to fight through it. If he uses his ability excessively not only will it be excruciatingly painful but it will impact his breathing and… the tephrosis could spread.”

It was difficult to imagine what Konro was going through physically and mentally. He wouldn’t regret risking it all for Asakusa but she knew this would be difficult for him. Y/N stood in the doorway with her hands balled up in the material of Konro’s coat, she took in his prone form as if that was going to make her understand how to deal with this. There were cooling blankets beneath him to help fight the inferno beneath his skin, he was pale and even from across the room she could see his skin was clammy as the heat seemed to pour out of him - when was it going to burn itself out?

They hadn’t bandaged his wounds yet, hoping that the air would aid in the healing.

As silently as she could she made her way to his side after the doctor had left, she knelt beside him and reached out to brush the hair from his sweaty forehead, “Y/N?” She nearly jumped at the sound of his voice, her heart hammering against her ribcage as she saw his eyes flutter open weakly, he looked exhausted and her own eyes watered as she saw how much pain was reflected in his. He was doing his best to hide that from her.

“I’m here, Konro,” Y/N leaned down to place a gentle kiss on his lips, “What do you need?” She had never seen him down like this, she had never seen him looking so… weak. He was supposed to be a strong man, he was Asakusa’s protector and now they were saying he would never fight again. Benimaru was torn up inside with guilt. Asakusa was in ashes and its people had lost their usual fighting spirit. “Do you need some water? Or… I can make you something to eat - I c-could…” Her voice got stuck in her throat, the lump that had been forming all morning finally grew too big and she nearly choked on a sob.

“Stop!” She grabbed his hand and lowered it to his side, keeping hold of his hand in both hers, “Please don’t.” Even with her voice breaking she still tried to smile for him, “Don’t hurt yourself anymore, Konro… please.” Y/N could hardly breathe anymore, she pressed her forehead down to his and forced the sadness back - she needed to be strong - “You’ve done enough. You don’t have to give anymore.”

He was the man everyone went to for help or advice, he was the one who brought Benimaru under his wing after the Master had died and kept him on the right track. He gave and gave and gave…

Konro let out a shuddering breath, his lungs ached and he began to cough, every single jolt to his body hurt worse than the previous and he couldn’t repress the pained gasps this time. “It’s okay, Konro, I’m here, I’m gonna look after you.”

x - -

“Building was completed this morning, every house has the bare necessities, schools are open, the market  is trading as fairly as they can and we have a few new recruits training to join the Hikeshi by the end of the month.” Benimaru let out a small sigh as he finished his report whilst trying to learn how to treat Konro’s wounds. He wanted to help in any way he could and somehow, being able to properly treat Konro made him feel somewhat better.

“Three months to rebuild the Town?” Konro mused, “Was it supplies or labour?”

“Labour. Builders worked flat out but most of them were laid up till recently.”

Y/N listened quietly as they spoke, occasionally she would explain to Benimaru what she was doing but it was good to have the young man there to distract Konro. Months had passed but he was still in a great deal of pain, still burning on the inside but the Haijima patches seemed to help prevent the spread and provide some pain relief - she just wished it was something they could replicate so they didn’t need to rely on the Empire. She heard the pained hitches in Konro’s breathing and sometimes he would stop mid-sentence when it got too much. Sometimes it was enough to bring Konro to tears and he was hiding it the best he could to protect Benimaru and Y/N.

“H-how are the twins?”

Benimaru handed Y/N more bandage as she started to wrap Konro, “They’re assholes… they’re gonna come by later and tell you a bunch of lies about me - anything they say is a lie and if it’s not they deserved it.”

“…If Y/N and I ever have kids you’re not allowed to babysit.”

Benimaru snorted and gathered up the medical supplies to toss out, “That’s fine with me.” He stood up and headed towards the door, “Though I doubt any kid of yours would be as mean as two little girls on a sugar kick.” Not a moment after the door had slid shut, Y/N and Konro heard a crash and two little voices mocking Benimaru - it was followed shortly by their squeals and the sound of a nearly grown man chasing two little girls.

Y/N laughed at the noise and for a moment it felt like old times.

Life was slowly returning to Asakusa, it wasn’t surprising really, they were a resilient bunch. “We’re all done for today,” She kissed his heavily bandaged shoulder and rested a cooling blanket over the top, “Ready to eat?”

Konro winced as he turned his head to kiss her temple whilst she rested lightly on his shoulder, “Not really but you won’t take that as an answer, right?”

“Nope,” Y/N had been keeping his meal warm to the side and picked it up as she moved to sit just beside him, more than ready to feed him as she had for the last few weeks, “Konro…” he gave a hum in response, recognising in her tone there was going to be something he might not like. “I know you said you wanted to do it but let me put your sword on its stand…”

Since the day of the great fire his sword had sat in the corner of the room against the wall, she had made sure to clean it but he had told her he wanted to put it back. It was like a target he had set for himself, that if he could pick it up and place it on the stand on top of the dresser, it would prove something. It felt like such a sad thing to see it neglected and thrown aside - Konro had saved up and worked so hard to have it made.

Konro shook his head, “Be a little more patient with me, Y/N… besides, look,” There was a little more light in his eyes and he slowly reached out and took the chopsticks from the tray, “I’ll be feeding myself in no time!” he opened and closed the utensils and Y/N smiled back at him.

“Okay, that’s pretty impressive.” It was a good sign, it meant that he was healing and a part of her was relieved - being strong all the time, keeping his mood up and helping where she could was exhausting. Konro wasn’t a burden to her, she loved him and even if she ha to feed their whole life she would. She wondered how he managed. “You’ll be lifting your sword in no time then?”

“Yeah.” He parted his lips as she fed him a mouthful of rice.

Whilst he chewed Y/N bit her bottom lip a little nervously, “A-and then you’ll lift me up next?”

“Carrying you around is one of my favourite things, Y/N” She brushed a piece of rice from the corner of his lip where she had seemed distracted and missed. “What other challenges have you got for me?

Y/N hesitated before placing the bowl down and she reached for one of his hands, carefully bringing it to her belly, doing her best not to pull at him, “Do you think that in six months time… you could lift our baby?”

“…W…?” Konro’s eyes widened and he stared at her in shock, his mind turning over what she had said and as it began to slowly sink in, a smile a much brighter than any he had had since the fire spread across his face. “You…” Unable to think properly, he moved forward and wrapped his arms around her as best he could, it hurt like hell and she was going to yell at him but he didn’t care in that small, hopeful, moment, “I’ll be strong enough for you both.”

[willadisastercry]

More than ‘just a little tired’: the aftermath part 2

tw: lil bit of gore described, burn wounds, collapsing, lots of pain described, muscle relaxer used and effects described, slight paralysis ensues, emotionally heavy towards end.

Keith finally let’s his friends help him but his adrenaline is fading rapidly and everyone is still focused on fussing over Pidge. Lance is distraught with how cold Shiro is being, he doesn’t understand why no one is listening to him while he’s literally supporting Keith with his own body as he crashes. Hunk needs to look at something other than the blood and gore so he tries to find Coran’s magic cream and is just proud he only threw up once.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

“Woah, Hunk! He’s going down!”

Lance dropped to his knee as he struggled to keep Keith from falling further out of his grasp, his face now deathly pale and pressed against his shoulder as he took in large, shuddering breaths to try remain conscious.

“We’ve gotcha bud,” Hunk’s hand snaked around his waist then as Lance righted himself and they brought him back onto unsteady legs, his right not even strong enough now to put much weight on without buckling.

“C’mon we gotta go...”

With his arms slung over either boy’s shoulders and their hands hoisting his hips up by the supply pack on his utility belt, they made their way to the med bay relatively quickly, a feat of which was only possible because at some point Keith had stopped trying to keep up and allowing himself to be dragged was surprisingly a lot faster.

The whooshing of the med bay doors after what felt like an enternity was what startled Keith into opening his eyes again.

“Oh, hey guys...” Shiro said, sparing only a partial glance their way before continuing to pour over Pidge with Coran and Allura. She was awake and fighting the helping hands.

No one seemed to notice Keith’s prone form held up entirely by his friends who stood frozen in the doorway, a bit at a loss for how to proceed.

“I think I’m fine, guys! Seriously. All that’s left is already half healed and not nearly deep enough to warrant a freaking pod!”

“Maybe, but you still lost a lot of blood that will need to be repelenished...” Coran pointed, his mustache twitching as he attempted to convey the necessity of the percaution and failed.

Keith’s legs hadn’t been contributing much to the effort of keeping him standing but admittedly had some part in it because the longer they remained where they stood the more they seemed to melt into jelly.

The adrenaline had almost entirely worn off by then, leaving his body buzzing as the pain slowly intensified.

“G-guys...” Keith whispered weakly, his voice was barely audible.

“What’s—“

“Need to sit... like now...” he managed before his legs were wobbling dangerously, suddenly devoid of all the strength that remained in them.

“Alright, that’s okay. Over there, Lance,” Hunk assured, his injured leg completely useless as he transferred even more of Keith’s weight onto his hip to make up the difference while they ushered him towards one of the chairs across the room.

“Uhhhh, how much longer you guys gonna be with Pidge?” Lance questioned nervously once they’d settled Keith down, his heart clenching with fear for how grey his face had gotten, his hands never leaving his drawn up shoulders out of fear of what would happen if he did.

Hunk was already across the room tearing apart medicine cabinets for the burn cream he’d mentioned and Keith was finding it increasingly difficult to support his own body weight.

“Woah! Okkay—that’s okay, just lean against me,” Lance offered when Keith couldn’t keep himself from swaying as he narrowly avoided leaning back against the chair, nearly tilting out of it before Lance righted him and guided his head to lean against his hip.

“We’ll be done as soon as Pidge stops being difficult... why?” Shiro asked, his eyes still scanning the partially mended slash across the smaller girl’s stomach.

“Just uh, Keith is sort of not doing so well.”

Lance wasn’t entirely sure he understood why everyone was being so curt and dismissive, not tearing their eyes away from a clearly fine Pidge, who yes, at one point had been not fine at all, but was now.

And Keith wasn’t.

The blasts on his back were... bad.

Bad enough for him to be in so much pain he was forced to accept his friend’s help. Lance also figured the haunting glaze of exhaustion in his eyes and purple bruises beneath them had a good deal to do with lowering his defenses, the realization of just how tired he was sending another jab to his chest.

The material of his suit looked like it had melted into his skin, lining the edges of the puffy burns with a smokey black. Some were larger than others but there were at least a dozen and they were all bleeding steadily, the constant rise and fall of his chest making it impossible for any of them to clot.

“I’ll come check him out once—“

The burns were so deep, like little caverns carved into his skin and Lance was suddenly concerned about how zapped the nerves must be that he didn’t even realize he’d been injured this severely.

They looked so painful.

Breathing looked painful. And sitting, and talking and the way moving air brushed against them.

Shit, Keith.

“No, Shiro...”

The words came from deep in his throat, his voice low and serious, a stark derision from his usually charming vibrato.

“I think someone needs to check him out now. We’re talking about Keith here! You should know better than anyone that when he’s says he’s not okay, he means it.”

Shiro’s shoulders dropped as he straightened up, Lance couldn’t even find it in himself to worry about getting told off for his tone with how angry he was, his irritation justifying itself as he watched Keith’s breathing devolve into something more and more erratic.

The room seemed to silence all at once after he’d raised his voice. The inflection of it, shrill with fear and frustration is what got Shiro to finally look their way, his already weary expression falling further at the horror of how Keith looked against Lance. Slumped and panting, his features tight in anguish as blood dripped steadily from somewhere and collected in a now sizeable puddle on the floor.

Pidge was being forced to lay back down when surging up to see what was wrong had her keening and clutching her middle, Allura remaining at her side while Shiro and Coran raced over to the boys.

“What the fuck happened?!” Shiro demanded, his eyes grey pinpoints that bored into Lance with a sort of accusation until the two men reached the pair, both gasping simultaneously when they got close enough to take in the sight of Keith’s back.

“I don’t-I don’t understand, you said you were tired Keith!”

“Plasma blast burns... most of them 2nd degree it looks like...” Coran offered, his eyes flicking wildly as they scanned the burnt and bloody skin.

“He is tired...” Lance assured, turning his gaze back to Keith’s shaking shoulders. His trembles seemed more like spasms then, each jerk prompting a fresh gush of red from the wounds.

“He’s fucking exhausted but was too stubborn to tell anyone he was hurt...” he continued as Coran left muttering to himself in search of supplies, joining Hunk in his endeavor of locating more than just the burn cream now.

“S-sorry... really thought it was just one...” Keith explained before Shiro shushed him, crouching down to run his hand through his hair even though it was slightly damp with sweat.

His eyes weren’t open so he tensed when the hand first fell into place but soon softened under Shiro’s touch, the cold weight of the galra metal oddly comforting.

“It’s not on you, bud. I should’ve checked in more thoroughly, looked you over myself...”

Lance seethed at that, Keith was feeling guilty when Shiro was the one who had fucked up by ignoring him. He didn’t even sound sorry.

“Damn right you sh—“

“What’s that?” Shiro entreated, cutting him off and lifting his head to face the younger boy with something so fierce in his eyes that Lance had to force himself to look elsewhere.

As much as he wanted to tell Shiro how royally he’d fuck up he knew it wouldn’t be productive. Knew full well that the last thing anyone needed was more chaos.

But before Lance had to take actual precautions to contain his anger, Keith made a noise as if he wanted to respond but all that came out was a defeated whine as his chest stuttered which pulled even more at the mess of his back, sending him into a fit of flinching and hissing.

“Hey, you’re alright—“ Lance cooed, the additional hand on Keith’s neck centering him while he tried to ride out the pain without causing more “—that’s it, just take a second to calm down...”

But Keith couldn’t calm his breathing in time to avoid the waves of agony that followed such harsh breaths, eventually becoming desperate enough to clamp his lips shut and hold his breath until his heart let up with its incessant pounding.

This admittedly made the general haze clouding his mind so much worse, sending black dots dancing across the floor as he stared at it against Lance. He hadn’t realized when his hands had traveled up to clutch at Lance’s stomach but they were there now, clawing at the unwavering material stuck to his torso like glue for something to hold onto.

There were so many hands on him but he couldn’t feel much of anything other than the heat on his back and strain in his lungs as he continued to restrict his breathing. It had come to hurt so badly he was afraid to even try to breath normally again.

“-ith!”

Voices sounded so weird and distant then, like they were calling to him from across a noisy room.

“KEITH!”

It wasn’t until someone was knelt down next to him and nearly screaming in his ear that he could understand anything.

“Stop doing that, you have to take deeper breaths or you’ll pass out...”

But he couldn’t manage anything other than short and rapid inhales that weren’t nearly enough. He didn’t care if he passed out. It wouldn’t hurt so bad if he were unconscious and it had gotten to a point where he sort of wished for that kind of relief.

Coran was speaking to Shiro over them then, of which Keith had only ascertained from the way Shiro’s hand left the base of his skull to rest more on the crown of his head just as a dull and disordered humming began.

His hearing had abandoned him again once Shiro left his position, reducing the conversation to unintelligible murmurs drowned out by the rumbling in his eardrums. The static spotting his vision not letting up as the blast wounds burned relentlessly on his back. It felt like there were literal flames licking up at even the slightest movement and marring deep as the fire only seemed to spread.

The entire expanse of his upper body had gone numb with it, his arms slack at his sides and his neck weak under the weight of his head as he put all of his concentration into slowing his breathing and keeping it as controlled as possible. He didn’t even feel the hands slipping under his armpits or fingers tugging at his supply belt, only the scorching stretch of his body straightening as he was pulled to his feet.

Lance and Shiro shifted around him with care, Shiro guiding his head to rest on his shoulder when it rolled limply, Coran hovering anxiously as they struggled to lift him to his feet without jarring his injuries. In reality, it was entirely unavoidable but hey, it’s the thought that counts.

Keith really tried to hold his own weight this time, but as soon as he was upright, his back lit with a new fury that had his vision whiting. Soon he couldn’t even be certain his feet were still on the ground as his body went lax and the darkness that had been teasing him descended quicker than he could process.

He assumed he had screamed bloody murder since his stinging throat was the only pain he could pinpoint as he lost consciousness, but by then he wouldn’t have been able to hear his own voice if he spoke so he wasn’t be sure. All he knew was that he’d pitched into a slew of arms like his bones had spontaneously emulsified, blissfully unaware as to how the whole room seemed to cry out when he did.

Pidge was near tears with Allura struggling to assure her that Keith would be fine, and Hunk was so startled by the commotion that he had nearly flung the supplies he was organizing on a sterile tray.

“Let’s get him settled comfortably before he comes to,” Coran ordered, his voice sharp and anguished as he motioned towards where Hunk was stood.

Together and with considerable effort the three dragged Keith’s limp body to the other side of the room, careful to keep his torso straight and his injured leg from bending so they didn’t inflame his wounds further, depositing his lifeless weight onto the table on his stomach where all of his injuries could be tended to.

“We have to get as much of the suit off as possible... some of it will of course take a little more effort,” Coran sighed as he poked at one of the darker blast marks with a wider radius than most of the other. There was a ring of molten black around it that looked like it had dripped into the pit of missing flesh from where the material of the suit had melted off. The sentry that shot him there must have been only a few feet away.

“Alaran...” Allura gasped out as she made her way to the group once Pidge had calmed down enough to be left alone.

“These are going to need extensive cleaning before we can put him into a pod.”

“I know, Princess. Let’s get started, maybe we can get the bulk of it finished while he’s still uncioncious,” Coran postured, distributing the supplies Hunk had gathered to everyone.

The task was harrowing and had everyone slightly queasy, but the urgency to complete the process before Keith woke up prevailed everyone’s gag reflexes, even Hunk’s.

Being enveloped by the black that had teased him so long wasn’t as bad as Keith had imagined it would be. It was warm like this, more absent of cold than possesing a distinguishable heat. Pleasant. Peaceful even. A more than welcomed improvement to the inferno he was slowly being consumed by when he was awake and alert.

Sounds started coming back to him slowly as his body recovered from the shock of his plummet in blood pressure. His friends’ words sharpening gradually to where he could almost make out what they were saying.

“...suction... yes, that bit has to go as well...”

He still felt floaty and numb from the pain but knew he was laying on his front and could feel a sensation of tugging and pulling on his back.

“...keeps moving... waking up...”

It wasn’t so much painful as it was uncomfortable in his state of semi-consciousness.

“...dangerous to... sedative before a prolonged stay in the pod...”

His brain was just too fuzzy, still replenishing the blood supply to his brain.

“...looks like he’s in pain...”

Each moment he remained in limbo he grew more restless.

“...Coran I can’t... this piece... tearing the skin...”

The in and out of everything was making him anxious, he’d rather just be entirely out or entirely conscious.

“...should will help with any discomfort...”

Whatever was meant to help wasn’t. He was aware he’d probably been given some sort of drug or medicine but still he couldn’t relax.

It didn’t matter that he was utterly exhausted, his body was reacting to the anxiety bubbling in his stomach whether he had the energy to support such a reaction or not.

“...easy Keith...”

That’s the thing, he couldn’t take it easy. His mind was wired and his body was going into shock once again as things clarified and he woke up more.

“You’re alright number four... steady now, just breathe...”

If he thought it was hard to breathe before it seemed like it was absolutely impossible now.

“-us? Keith...? Keith, can you hear us?”

He could. He could hear everything now. It was all so loud and piercing, everyone’s voices, the tools clicking, his heart beating, the tear of medical supplies packages. Everything was so crisp and right there, the smallest noises sending tingles down his spine that made him want to cringe and he struggled to surpress the urge to.

“Quiznak! Coran I’m gonna hurt him if he keeps squirming!”

He was panting now, his mouth hung open against the towel folded under his face that was catching the blood still leaking from the wound under his eye. A hand came down on the back of his neck and he jumped.

That did it for the pain that seemed to have been numbed, not gone, just too far away for him to register. It was just as close as all of the sounds were now.

Hands clutched at his shoulders and forearms and hips as he wailed, pushing him flat so his flailing didn’t make it worse. He sobbed loudly and unabashedly as the pain surged its way back to the forefront of his awareness, a strange warmth similar to the one he’d felt when he had passed out taking the edge off but not staving it much.

“Keith! Listen to me, you have to relax. I know this is torture, but you’re only going to make it worse if you keep struggling,” Shiro urged, his voice the closest.

Shiro was right, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t in control of his movements anymore, because if he was he would listen. He didn’t want to hurt anymore but his body didn’t seem to give a shit.

“Coran,” Allura said sadly, her eyes looking at him with a sort of heart breaking resolution.

“Okay, Princess,” he agreed, his expression falling dejectedly.

“What-what is it? What just happened?!” Lance asked worriedly, knowing something had seemingly been decided but no idea as to what.

“We’re going to have to give him a muscle relaxer to keep him still, but it won’t take away his pain. We simply cannot risk putting him in a pod while medically sedated, we couldn’t be sure he would ever wake again if we did.”

For the second time that evening a collective silence fell over the room, one filled with such aching and regret and fear that it was as if it wasn’t silent at all.

“Do whatever you have to,” Shiro advocated, handing the tools he’d been using to Hunk.

“But he’ll be in pain Shiro?!” Lance noted desperately, his indignation back in full force.

Shiro just looked at him sadly and moved to drag a stool over to the other end of the table where Keith’s head was, his face twisted up as his sounds of pain continued.

“How can you be so heartless? It wouldn’t be so painful if Allura had partially healed him too! If you had given enough of a shit to notice sooner! To notice at all!”

The sound of Lance yelling bore into Keith’s skull sickeningly, his body unable to contain the shiver that overtook his muscles at how bone deep the sound irked his now oversentive ears.

“Lance—“

“No, Allura. He’s right, this is my fault. I was too focused on the fact that Pidge was hurt to notice that he was too and now he’s worse off because of it. I didn’t listen to him when I should’ve. Administer whatever you have to Coran, I’ll help him through this, it’s the least I can do right now...”

Coran didn’t have to be told twice, skillfully pulling liquid from a vile with a syringe that he poked gently into Keith’s neck.

Hunk nudged Lance’s arm to break his death glare at Shiro and get back to freeing one of the wider wounds on his shoulder as the medicine took affect almost immediately.

“Sh-sh-shir-Shiro...”

“I’m right here, shhhh, don’t speak. Just relax, I’ve got you,” Shiro soothed, grasping Keith’s hand tightly as he took shuddering breaths that grew more and more shallow as whatever control he had left over his body slipped away from him.

With some last few twitches he sagged completely into the table. The hand clutching Shiro’s released its grip and the older boy started to thumb assuring circles into the limp appendage since he could still feel it.

“This is gonna suck, but just focus on me okay?”

Keith couldn’t nod, couldn’t move his exhausted body at all now, so he sighed instead. The tears that had welled at his eyes falling defeatedly and mixing with the blood staining his right cheek to make a slightly pinker mess on the towel beneath him.

“Just focus on me...”

[lapinlunaire-games]

Seared in heart, and lone, and blighted, /More than this I scarce can die.

Content warning: violence, gore/blood. Please engage with discretion.

They’re everywhere. The Veil swarms your vision, flashing in glowing blotches until all you can see is a dizzying minefield of smoky silver-dappled darkness. It’s impossible to see, and depth perception is a fond memory; you try in vain to find a pattern in the bursts of light and strike, slashing out with your paperknife and meeting only air.

A had been right beside you when you entered, but when the Veil had exploded, you’d lost them in the burst of silvery light as the world phased in and out of focus around you. You could only hope they’d managed to find their way back out—and that the lack of response to your calls of their name were because they had successfully fled, and not because they couldn’t call back.

You can hear your target taunting you, swooping close enough to mock you before cackling as you stumble forward with the momentum of your swings. Sweat slicks your palm, the handle of your knife dangerously slippery in your fist.

“Come on and face me!” you shout, brandishing your blade. Like your voice, it glints impressively in the darkness, but you can’t deny how pitiful its weight is against your grip. “Or are you too scared of a thrashing?”

A hand lands on your shoulder from behind, fingers digging into you tightly—you twist around and stab, fury fuelling the motion of your arm. The blade connects with solid flesh, sinking in with a sickening, wet slice; you rip your arm sideways, flinging blood into the air as your knife tears through flesh. Not so pitiful after all.

Your raw grin falters at the sound of a pained, shocked gasp.

A very familiar gasp.

The giggling in your ear fades and the Veil stops ricocheting across your field of vision; you squeeze your eyes shut to clear them of the lurid afterimages floating over your sight. No, please, no.

Let me be wrong.

It’s no use; you open your eyes at the heavy thud of A falling to their knees, one hand pressed against the jagged gash in their stomach as they stare up at you in disbelief. Your knife clatters to the floor as you drop down too, clamping one hand over the wound—A’s blood is hot and thick, gushing too quickly out of the glistening mess spilling from their midsection. Red spreads over their clothing like ink through water, blooming from their stomach with the metallic tang of iron. Their head drops into your lap, breath coming shallow and fast.

They croak your name, lips trembling as their face goes even paler. You can’t tell if you’re nodding or shaking your head; the only thing you can focus on is the weakening pulse of hot blood over your fingers and the numb shape of “I’m sorry” as it falls from your lips like desperate rain.

“I can’t…I can’t feel my ears,” A whispers. Your name cracks as it drops from their ashen lips. Their eyes are wide, so wide and glassy and scared, and you don’t realize you’re crying until tears splatter on their skin. “It’s so cold…”

Their hand fumbles against your leg before finding your free fingers and clutching at them. Their grip is tight enough to hurt, but the pain of their knuckles squeezing yours is a welcome one; it means they still have the strength to do it at all. Your finger slips and scrapes against raw, wet flesh; the swear that sizzles from your mouth echoes in the darkness as you tear at your clothing, scrabbling against the damp fabric for enough grip to rip a strip off and bind the gaping slash in A’s stomach.

“Keep pressing here,” you order in a voice that doesn’t entirely feel like your own, “and stay still. I’ll be right back, I’ll go get help.” You’ve done this before. You won’t make the same mistakes.

“No!”

The bright blue eyes you’ve fielded so many good-natured glares from are glazed with pain, struggling to focus on your face. “Don’t go,” A begs through shallow, fragile pants. “Please don’t go, please…I don’t…”

Their eyes flutter shut, lingering for just a moment; panic spikes through you, ugly and sharp, and now it’s your turn to crush their hand in yours as you shake their shoulder with increasing desperation.

“Hey! Hey! Open your eyes, Gordon, come on. I’m not going anywhere, I promise, but you have to open your eyes! Don’t sleep, stay awake with me, come on—”

A’s eyes slowly flicker open and you let out a sigh of relief. They attempt a reassuring grin, only to wince halfway through, their head grinding back into your leg as they let out a shallow groan of pain.

“Don’t leave me, please…” Their voice trails off, paper-thin and translucent. A grits their teeth and tries to raise their head, only to cough and fall back almost immediately. A wet sheen of blood coats their lip, splattering over their chin. A’s breaths turn panicky, coming fast and shallow; you do your best to calm them back into a steady rhythm, but there’s a scream building in your chest and their face is blurring behind a hot, stinging glaze of tears.

The blood on their chin is cold on your thumb when you wipe it away, and you don’t want to think about the fact that the waves pumping out of their ruined midsection are coming more and more sluggishly. An anguished whimper runs through the air—A’s fingers tighten on yours, slick with cooling blood, and you realise that it’s coming from you.

“I’m so sorry,” you manage one last time. A’s eyes focus back on your face, though there’s something faraway in their gaze that you don’t like the look of. Desperation burns along your back, warring against the cold prickle of guilt that sits heavy in your gut.

They’re barely breathing now, the rise and fall of their chest so shallow you have to squint to see it. The only thing keeping your sobs chained in your throat is the fragile shuddering of their ribs.

A useless, bitter wave of resentment rises like bile in your throat: once upon a time, before the Veil littered your vision like so much shattered glass, you could have done something more. Saved your partner—your friend. The hollow ache in your veins flares up, twisting like a phantom knife in the deepest parts of your being. Would they even have wanted that kind of salvation?

A’s grip falters on your hand—horror seizes you, icy cold and inescapable, as their eyes drift shut again. Lips barely moving and voice dream-soft, they mumble, “Thank you…I didn’t…didn’t want to be alone.”

“No, no—stop saying it like you’re about to—”

“I’m sorry fo’being selfish.” Their voice is slurring now, fainter with every breath. “You sh…shoul’ go…not safe.”

Urgency splits their voice, echoed by a feeble tightening of the grip on your hand. “Take the knife. I-I’m sorry…I didn’t want t’be alone…didn’t want you to leave too…”

Something gleams at their temple and you squeeze your eyes shut on instinct, realising only when you open them again that the shine is real liquid, tears tracing uneven paths from the corners of A’s eyes into their hair.

“I won’t,” you promise, still trying to shove together the gaping edges of their stomach despite the cold squelch beneath your hands and the tiny voice in the back of your mind whispering that it’s too late, too late, always too late. “I’ve got you, I’m here. You’ll be alright, you will. Be. Fine. You have to be fine, Gordon, we’re a team! You can’t—you can’t die on me.”

You don’t realise how much blood is on your hands until you clumsily try to wipe away their tears; you choke back a sob at the rust-coloured smear that follows your thumb and drop your hands to your sides. A makes a soft, distressed noise that drops into a choked gurgle as blood bubbles up from their mouth in a coppery froth.

Their hands are cold, so shaky that you have to press your intertwined fingers against the pulse thundering in your own stomach to steady them. The hot sting behind your eyelids is gone, and you can’t help but feel like a monster for it: you don’t want to remember A like this: waxen pallor artificially flushed with flat, flaking streaks of rust-red, already half-corpse. They’re always so alive, so easily washed pink with cold or laughter—seeing them like this, eerily still and pale, resonates wrong in every fibre of your being.

Smoothing their damp hair away from their face only makes it worse, the trembling drag of your fingertips raising imperfect lines over their temples and cheeks. You clutch their hand tighter to make up for their own failing grip, bite your lip to silence the frantic scream battering in your throat. The air smells of metal, salty and harsh in the back of your throat.

They murmur something—so soft, it could have been anything—and you nod frantically. Words spill from your lips, a disembodied river that starts with their name and ends in apology, fast and furious enough that for one white-hot second, you think the slight pull at their lips is a smile and not a grimace.

And then their hand goes slack in yours and something inside you breaks.

[gumnut-logic]

Can I be cheeky and ask for a wheel spin for Scott? ^^"

I did the spinning thing and got ‘concussion’ and ‘office cubicle’

Here be the result.

Spin the wheel and send me a prompt with a character :D

-o-o-o-

Carly had been through a lot in her short time at Tracy Industries, but this took the cake.

“I assure you, Tracy, if you give yourself up, everything will go much, much better for your employees.” The man’s voice was gravelly as he projected across the office space. She couldn’t see him from where she was crouched in a random cubicle, but she didn’t need to.

The man was a villain straight out of a movie – dark-haired, more muscle than brains, he even sported a moustache out of the eighteenth century. Carly had seen one like that on one of her great times whatever grandfathers.

Mom was really into genealogy.

But none of that was important.

What was important was her boss. Scott Tracy, a man she admired beyond belief, was curled up in the cubicle with her, his head in her lap.

Of course, this was a position she may have daydreamed about at some point, but those dreams usually involved summer days and lazing in a field under a tree with a picnic rug and a bottle of bubbly.

It should also be noted that they were daydreams that were likely shared by ninety percent of the female staff in the building and in no way ever considered an actual possibility.

And never involved a gun man or his six equally armed cronies.

Mr Tracy had simply been walking towards his office. He made a point of making his way through the cubicle forest and saying good morning to any he encountered. Those who had been here long enough claimed that it was a tradition sprouted by Mr Tracy Senior before his tragic death.

Every one knew how good the Tracys were.

She had never worked in an environment where so many people so admired their employer. Even if he wasn’t in the building very often, he still put in effort. There were teleconferences, his hologram was a familiar sight as were the interruptions followed by some dramatic news story where X amount of people were saved by the same man and his brothers.

They were led by a hero.

And their work reflected that aim. Tracy Industries was a massive engine churning out so much good into the world. It still worked as a business. It had to, to stay solvent and stable in a world much less kind than the Tracys themselves. But it was the small things. The disability aids, the charity work, the environmental projects, the doing simply because there was a need. The profit margin kept so much going that was so needed in the world.

And in the middle of her office stood a man who wanted to take that all away.

“C..arly.” Fogged blue eyes searched for her as his head bled on the print of her dress.

She touched a finger to his lips without thinking. A motion she would have done for her boyfriend and never for her boss, but the massive presence of Scott Tracy had been reduced to an injured man who had almost died as the bullet clipped his temple.

There had been so much screaming as her workmates dove for cover. Whether the gunman wanted Mr Tracy dead or for some other nefarious purpose, she didn’t know. She would say she didn’t care or that it was irrelevant, but it did matter as she had seen enough movies to know that that would affect what the asshole was willing to do to get to her boss.

His hand reached up and took her finger away. “Help me up.” And he was straining to climb to his feet.

“No.” It took very little to hold him down which only proved that he should stay down.

“He’s going to hurt pe’ple.”

Carly pressed her lips together as she caught the eye of Barb in the cubicle across from hers. “You let us worry about that.”

His eyes widened and he shook his head, only to have to close his eyes at the movement.

She brushed a hair off his forehead.

“Scott Tracy! Is this one your secretary?” A woman’s cry echoed across the room. “She is very beautiful. You picked a nice one. A dead one if you don’t show yourself by the count of five.”

Scott tried to get up again, this time opening his mouth to yell something.

She clamped her hand down and muffled whatever he was trying to say just as the gunman squawked in pain. “You bitch! You bit me!” There was the sound of a scuffle and the gun went off.

Silence followed.

Mr Tracy’s eyes widened in horror and glistened in the overhead lighting. Again, he tried to rise, but couldn’t.

Carly shook her head and mouthed a silent ‘I’m sorry’. She had to blink away her own tears.

“You’re not going to find him.”

Carly blinked. That was Marcus, the guy who fixed her computer. Ever the nerd, he wore a Trek tie to work almost every day and the days he didn’t, it was a Doctor Who tie.

She bit the inside of her cheek.

The click of the gun. “And who is going to stop me?”

Barb scuttled out of her cubicle, her headset on her head whispering ever so quietly. Her eyes pinned Carly and clearly told her to keep their boss safe.

Carly swallowed hard.

The shift of an office chair. “I will stop you.” The voice shook but held strong, this time a woman she didn’t recognise.

“Me, too.” A wavery male voice.

“And me.”

“And me.”

Then there were many voices filling the audio space of the room.

“Then we will kill you all.” The gunman yelled over the ruckus, only to scream out in pain. Anger and screams overtook and Carly clutched her boss to her, tears running down her cheeks.

A roar suddenly drowned out everything. A roar that every employee knew well.

The roar of a Thunderbird.

The sound of breaking glass.

More yelling.

But no more gunfire.

Mr Tracy’s blue eyes were wet and struggling to focus on her.

Until they closed and didn’t open again.

Shit.

Her fingers scrambled for a pulse as her own staggered until she found it.

“Please, Mr Tracy.” She brushed that same stray hair off his forehead and it stubbornly flicked back.

Barb suddenly appeared, a woman in IR blue-grey beside her. Security.

“John, I’ve got him. We need Virgil in here.”

“FAB.”

Carly barely registered the exchange, only that there were suddenly hands attempting to take her boss away.

Her unconscious and possibly dying boss, Mr Tracy.

She struggled a moment, but the woman’s grip was like iron and Barb grabbed Carly, soothing words spilling all over her.

A man in green and blue appeared with a stretcher. Curt words, an examination and Mr Tracy was whisked away.

Carly found her hands empty.

“Are you okay?” A young man, blonde, blue eyes, IR uniform slashed in red. His hand gently urged her to stand. When she did, she rose into a world that was no longer a cubicle forest and more like a war zone.

Office furniture lay scattered everywhere. Several cubicle walls had been pushed over. Everyone was milling about, some angry, some crying. IR security was everywhere, intermixed with Tracy Industries security.

“Ma’am, please sit down.” A chair was found and she was deposited in it. Alan Tracy, because that is who he was - Carly knew that, as much as she knew she was likely in shock, she was shaking so much. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “Mr Tracy was shot.”

“We know. Virgil’s on it.” As if on command, Thunderbird Two, which had been hovering outside the windows, spun midair and tore off into the distance.

The absence of its engine roar left a gap that had many of the people in the room muttering.

“What happened to the bad guys?” She blinked.

“They didn’t stand a chance.” The youngest Tracy was checking her pulse and frowning at her.

“Who got shot?”

Barb answered. “Julie from social networking was shot in the shoulder.  Ms Kyrano says she should be okay. Took a chunk out of the bastard’s arm with her teeth though.” Barb was actually smiling.

Alan was staring at Barb, frowning.

The office coordinator caught his stare and threw it back at him. “We take care of our own, Mr Tracy. No asshole is going to mess with our family on my shift.” She squeezed Carly’s arm before turning back to the chaos and began issuing orders.

Alan turned back to Carly.

“Wow, she’s a little scary.”

Carly straightened, finally finding her spine. “We’re all the same, Mr Tracy. You don’t mess with Tracy Industries.”

Her lip trembled as his blue eyes widened.

She swallowed suddenly aware of exactly what she had been willing to offer. “We protect our own.”

-o-o-o-

[juliandev0rak]

Bullet

Chapter Five of I’m Your Villain

Words: 3315

Warnings: mentions of death, blood, minor injuries, and brief mentions of past physical abuse

There is a long list of people that Cadmus hopes he will never have the misfortune of meeting again. He’s made many enemies over the years, both those forged through his job and his alliance with Avronne and those made through more… personal faults. 

Julian Devorak fits all of those categories.

When they’d first met in Macawi Port nearly five years prior, the red haired man had simply been another pretty face in a tavern. Julian was a traveler passing through the port city just as Cadmus had been, so Cadmus had flirted. He’d done a bit more than flirt. 

They’d hit it off, shared a few drinks, and when Cadmus had suggested going somewhere more private Julian had agreed. When he’d pulled him back to where he was staying Cadmus was a bit too preoccupied to care that the lodging in question was a boat. It wasn’t until later that he’d noticed the boat looked familiar.

He’d been sent to the port to find a pirate named Captain Wayland. As usual, Cadmus hadn’t asked why. He’d simply been sent to a specific location, given a description, and told to get rid of the target. He’d had no luck finding the Captain’s ship so he’d made a detour into one of the port’s many taverns where he’d gotten a bit distracted. But as Cadmus looked around the lower deck of the ship, he’d noticed a crate labeled “The Eel”, the name of the very ship he’d been looking for. 

At some point during the evening he’d learned that Julian was a ship’s physician travelling with a pirate crew across the world. It had never occurred to him to ask which ship. But here he was, exactly where he needed to be. 

So Cadmus snuck back up the stairs, certain that the red-haired man was asleep in the hammock he’d left him in. He’d found the Captain alone in his quarters and it had been quite simple to disarm the old man and take him out. It had hardly been a fight, really. As he’d cleaned his sword on the edge of the dead pirate’s coat he’d planned his escape route, confident that everything was going to plan.

But luck was not on Cadmus’ side that night and his companion hadn’t been asleep after all. 

A voice had startled him away from the dead Captain, and Cadmus turned to find an equally confused and furious Julian Devorak.

“What did you do?” He had yelled, and like any good doctor Julian rushed towards the body on the floor. 

It left Cadmus with a perfect escape route out to the port where he could disappear into the crowds. As he’d been making his exit, Julian lunged towards him so Cadmus had lashed out with his sword to block him. But he’d misjudged the doctor’s reflexes and instead of moving out of the way as Cadmus had expected, the blow had landed. 

Cadmus could only watch in surprise as blood seeped through the puffy sleeve of Julian’s white shirt. He’d mocked the man as he’d pushed past to get to the door, “There’s something to remember me by.” 

And he can still remember the icy tone in Julian's voice as the man had vowed, “If I ever see you again I will kill you.” 

After that, Cadmus had gotten away with little struggle. By the time he’d returned to his horse he had all but forgotten about Julian Devorak. He hadn’t thought about him once in the following years, until now.

Now Julian stands in front of him, only a few feet away. Cadmus holds his breath and shrinks back against the corner as he watches him. He hopes his illusion spell will last, but he’s never been very good at magic.

It’s not that he’s afraid of Julian, no, it's just that it’s terribly awkward to meet someone you’d once fucked in a hammock who had then sworn to kill you. Cadmus makes it a rule to never meet the people he’s slept with again. He’s a one and done sort of man, it’s for the best really. And adding revenge to the mix, well, it’s a bit messy even for him.

It would be better for everyone if he could get off of the ship now without anyone noticing, but he’s out of options. This ship is his only way out and if he has to kill everyone and learn how to steer it himself he will. Julian reaches for the barrel directly in front of Cadmus and he curses under his breath, wondering how he could have gotten so unlucky.

But Julian simply picks up the barrel and heads back up the stairs. Cadmus exhales in relief, thinking he’s safe, but as he inhales he feels a sudden tickle in his nose. He clamps a finger under his nose a moment too late and sneezes. He can’t help it, he’s allergic to dust and there seems to be quite a lot of it aboard this ship. 

“Merde,” Cadmus whispers. If his illusion spell had been strong enough it would have muffled the sound but, by the looks of it, his spell was nowhere near strong enough. He resists the urge to bang his head against the wall in frustration.

Julian stops halfway up the stairs and turns around. “Who’s there?” 

Cadmus stays silent, laying his back flat against the wall. He closes his eyes and tries his hardest to focus on maintaining the illusion spell, but he can feel it’s slipped. Agatha coils around his ankle and he tries to draw from her strength, it’s worked in the past but he feels nothing from her now. Julian stalks back to the corner, placing the barrel he’d grabbed on the ground as he searches the storage area.

Cadmus hears footsteps approaching and braces himself as a familiar pair of black boots stops in front of the row of barrels again. “I heard someone sneeze, I know there’s someone in here.” 

There are only so many places he can hide on a boat, there’s really no use in trying. If he gets up now at least he’ll have the element of surprise on his side.

So Cadmus moves out of the corner and lowers his illusion spell, watching as Julian’s eyes widen in shock. “Perhaps there's a ghost with a cold on board?” 

“You.”

He hadn’t expected the amount of vitriol in the other man’s voice and replies the only way he knows how, with bravado. “Hello Devorak, it’s been a while. You don’t seem pleased to see me?” 

Julian laughs incredulously, shaking his head as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing. “Why are you on this ship, Durand? Why would you come back after what you did?”

Cadmus reaches for his sword as Julian takes a step closer, just as a precaution. “I’m in a bit of a predicament. I’m sure you’ll be able to understand if you just give me a chance to explain-” 

“I said, why are you here?” Julian pushes the barrel blocking Cadmus out of the way and Cadmus takes a step back, feeling like the man is getting too close for comfort. “I needed a boat, I saw a boat, I got on the boat, it’s as simple as that.”

Julian grimaces, taking another step towards him. “You’ll pay for what you did to Captain Wayland! He was a good man.”

“Now, now, there’s no need to make a fuss. I’ll simply take my leave and you can forget you ever saw me.’’ Cadmus takes a step to the side, subtly getting himself out of the corner and towards the middle of the room.

“Not a chance.” The look in Julian’s eyes is one Cadmus knows well, it's the look of someone who’s about to attack.

Despite his obvious anger, Cadmus doesn’t believe that he’ll put up much of a fight. Sure, Julian is tall, and more strongly muscled than he looks beneath all of those ridiculous layers of coat, but Cadmus is certain that if it comes to a fight he’ll be able to take the scrawny man down. 

“Alright if you insist, we’ll do this the hard way. From what I remember you prefer it that way,” Cadmus laughs, drawing his sword. Julian glowers at him and takes a step back as Cadmus approaches. “En garde then.”

Before Julian has time to draw his own sword, Cadmus attacks. It’s not exactly gentlemanly, but he’ll take any advantage he can get. Julian reels backwards, barely dodging the blade as he reaches for the sword hung on his belt. He grabs it just in time, blocking Cadmus' next attack and using the momentum to launch himself forward as Cadmus retreats.

“I can do this all day,” Cadmus gloats, tucking one hand behind his back as he easily blocks Julian’s attack. He starts up the stairs, looking to get above deck where there’s more room and the possibility of an escape route. 

“You deserve to pay for what you did,” Julian calls as he chases Cadmus up the stairs, nearly slashing Cadmus’ leg. He’s fast, Cadmus can admit that at least.

“What, are you going to kill me? You?” Cadmus laughs, taking the final step up the stairs and onto the deck. “Don’t doctors take a sacred oath to do no harm?” “Yes, well, you’re not my patient. You’re a murderer.” Julian frowns in concentration, narrowly spinning out of the way of Cadmus’ blade as he emerges onto the deck. “And you’re a pirate.” Cadmus quickly scans the area, noting in relief that there’s no one in the immediate vicinity to aid his opponent. 

“Unlike you, I don’t enjoy hurting others.” Julian takes advantage of Cadmus’s brief moment of distraction and manages to graze his arm. 

Cadmus hisses and reels out of the way before lunging towards Julian like a wild animal. Julian jumps back and Cadmus notes with delight that a look of genuine fear flashes in the man’s eyes. Despite Cadmus’ intimidation Julian attacks again, hoping to take him off guard.

Cadmus parries easily, moving closer to return the attack. “You barely grazed me, you’re out of practice.” 

What he doesn’t expect is quick reflexes blocking his next hit before it can land and knocking the sword out of his hand.

“And you’re out of luck.”

Suddenly there’s a sword resting at his throat. Cadmus looks up at Julian, furious and trying to hide his utter disbelief that this man has nearly bested him. 

“Do it then, cut my throat and get your revenge,” Cadmus growls, pushing back against Julian as he presses him against the edge of the deck. He wonders if Julian will push him overboard instead, it would be less messy. Before Cadmus has a chance to see whether the man really has it in him, they’re interrupted.

“BOYS!” A brusque voice calls.

He looks behind Julian to see a short older woman running towards them. The sword at his throat drops and Julian sighs as he takes a step away. Cadmus tries to make a break for it, if his opponent is stupid enough to let him go he’s taking the chance. But Julian seems to anticipate the escape and grabs him by the arm before he can move. 

Cadmus gasps in pain as Julian’s hand clamps down on the spot where he’d cut him. He fights through it, managing to land a punch on the side of Julian’s face which sends the man flying backwards. He’s winding up for another when the woman pulls Julian further away.

“Ilya Devorak! What are you doing?” The old lady is brandishing a wooden spoon and somehow Cadmus feels she’d be a fearsome opponent even with only cutlery as a weapon. 

“What am I doing? He started it! That’s Cadmus Durand!” Julian sputters, taking a step away from the woman as if he’s also wary of her spoon. “That’s the man who killed Wayland!”

“I know who he is.” The woman turns to look at Cadmus, giving him a once over that makes him feel far too exposed. She and Julian have blocked him in, he has no escape unless he wants to jump overboard. 

“Well, we can’t let him live!”

The woman shakes her head in disapproval. “I won’t have murder on my ship, not unless you want to clean it up.”

“What are we supposed to do then, Mazelinka? Let him go?” Julian’s voice sounds flat with anger, and his face has grown nearly as red as his hair.

“We’ll lock him up until we decide.” Mazelinka yanks Julian away by the ear. “And you’ll bring him a meal later and see to that nasty cut you gave him.”

“But he’s a murderer, Maz!” Julian frowns, rubbing at his ear to dispel the pain where she’d grabbed him.

“And you nearly were too, Ilya. Follow me, we’ll take him to the hold.” Mazelinka grabs Cadmus by the arm, roughly pulling him back downstairs. She’s stronger than she looks, and from the way she’d said ‘my ship’ Cadmus realizes this woman must be the captain. 

Julian follows behind them, pouting as Mazelinka descends below deck. When they enter the storage room Cadmus calls for Agatha, if he has to be stuck in a cell he wants her with him. She slithers out of the corner towards him, hissing in alarm. He lets her drape around his shoulders, smiling as he notices both Julian and Mazelinka recoil. He might be a prisoner but with Agatha he can still defend himself.

Mazelinka brings him into a cell with thick iron bars and locks the door behind him. This certainly isn’t the first time he’s been imprisoned, but he’s never been locked up on a boat before. He truly has no way to escape and the thought quiets him, any taunting remarks he’d thought of die on his tongue. 

“Why do you have a jail cell?” Cadmus asks instead, scanning it for weak spots or loose bars out of habit. 

“We’re pirates.” Mazelinka grins. He can’t help but feel a shred of respect for her, she’d made him feel threatened with only a spoon and anyone who can do that deserves some credit. Now that he’s behind bars, she and Julian retreat to the deck. He can hear them arguing, though he can’t make out the words. 

Cadmus feels the boat start to rock as it pulls off from shore, and distantly he hears the sounds of someone above deck calling out orders. There’s really no escaping now.

A few minutes later, Julian comes back with a basket of supplies and a steaming bowl of stew. Cadmus warily accepts the bowl, trying to surreptitiously smell it for poison. He considers handing it over to Agatha who has a much better nose for poisons but Julian surprises him by taking the bowl instead.

“It’s not poisoned,” Julian sighs and takes a large bite. He waits for an exaggerated moment then hands the bowl back. “See, I’m not dead.” 

“Fine, give me the lousy stew.” Cadmus angrily takes a bite, finding that it’s nowhere near lousy. Whoever made this can really cook, at least if he has to be stuck here he’ll be fed well.

Julian reaches for his arm and peels back the shreds of Cadmus’ blood-stained shirt so he can see the wound. Luckily, it doesn't seem very deep and it’s already stopped bleeding. Cadmus is used to magical healing, his mother and her trained magical physician had always seen to it that his wounds were healed when he came home damaged. Though in some cases, his mother had been the one to cause the wounds. Simply part of his training.

Cadmus yanks his arm away, eyeing Julian suspiciously. “I thought I wasn't your patient.” 

“You're hurt, I’m a doctor,” Julian says, as if that explains anything. He rolls his shirt sleeves up to get them out of the way and pulls a clean rag out of the basket. He douses it with something from a glass bottle and Cadmus leans closer, wishing he could see what it was. He doesn't like being out of control like this.

“Earlier you seemed to be trying awfully hard to kill me, that doesn’t seem very doctorly of you.” Cadmus hides a wince as Julian cleans the wound with what smells like strong alcohol. He doesn’t understand why Julian would bother healing him.

It’s too dimly lit beneath the deck to see anything clearly, but he can see Julian's face silhouetted in the candlelight. He looks tired but resigned to his task. The flickering light highlights the sharp planes of his face and the blooming purple bruise on his check from where Cadmus had punched him. Cadmus finds himself staring despite his best efforts not to, it’s a good distraction from the pain at least. 

Been there, done that, bad idea, he warns himself, turning his gaze towards the wound instead. 

They fall into silence as Julian bandages his arm and Cadmus finishes eating. When he’s done Julian hands him a clean white shirt. “Yours is ripped to shreds.” 

Cadmus grudgingly accepts it and pulls his ruined shirt off. He hears Julian clear his throat and he smirks, taking his time pulling the new shirt on. He can feel Julian’s eyes on him but he keeps his firmly fixed on the task of buttoning the shirt. “Thanks for the shirt, Devorak.” 

“Get some rest, Durand. Try not to move your arm.” Julian rolls the sleeves of his shirt back down, fiddling with the cuffs in what looks like a nervous tick. 

“I thought you wanted me dead,” Cadmus laughs, lying back on the cot in the corner of the cell. Though the blanket on the cot is thin, this is certainly one of the nicer jail cells he’s been kept in. He stretches out, putting his good arm behind his head in a show of relaxation, though he feels anything but relaxed. 

“Yes, and I could just as easily heal you as kill you in your sleep, so perhaps you should listen to what I say and get some rest.” Julian still sounds angry, but the effect is dampened by fatigue. He looks at Cadmus for a brief second more before turning to leave, locking the cell door behind him. 

Cadmus can relate to the bone tiredness the doctor had displayed. He’s been on the run for days now, he can’t remember the last time he slept properly. Though his brain tells him he shouldn't trust these people, he figures he might as well get some sleep. If Julian wanted to kill him he would’ve done it already.

He tosses and turns fitfully, and when he finally manages to sleep his dreams are confusing and frightening.

He finds himself back in the snowy clearing from the dream he’d had before and he can sense he isn’t alone. When he turns he sees his sister standing before him. She wears a white dress stained with something dark, it drips off of her dress and pools in the snow below her. Though she stands only a few feet away with her arms outstretched towards him, Cadmus is stuck in place.

“Come back, Cadmus, you have to come back!” She pleads.

When Cadmus tries to open his mouth to reassure her no words come out.

“Don’t leave me here!”

Cadmus reaches out for her but his feet are still rooted to the ground. She calls for him again and suddenly Cadmus feels like all of the air has been sucked out of his lungs. He can’t breathe and he can’t move, and when he blinks Daphne disappears, leaving him alone and suffocating in the snow.

He wakes up with a start, trying to calm his racing heart as he takes in lungfuls of air. For the first time in his life, Cadmus feels something close to guilt.

[chaseatinydream]

pirate king (83) || atz

The blade seems to sing in the ghostly light of the half moon as you take one step, then another, down the length of the ship. The deck seems to have been vacated, silent and empty, but you’re screaming inside your mind for someone, anyone, to step out and see what you’re doing - to stop you from what you’re about to do.

No one does. All you hear is the sound of the sea, waves lapping against the shore, pulling your mind into a trance like quicksand, impossible to escape from. You take another step forward, and just like that, and you’re at the door to the captain’s cabin - the light from the lamps inside flickering across your face.

One step away from committing an unforgivable sin.

You raise your hand to the door, knocking three times, the other clutching the blade behind your back.

Please don’t respond, you beg, screaming through the haze of your mind. You feel like you’re merely watching your actions play out in front of you, completely unable to control your body in the least. Keep seeing me as a monster, be afraid of me. Don’t open the door!

The door swings open.

There he stands in the doorway, eyes tired, but a gentle smile on his face. You would rather it be twisted with wariness, with hate, with anything but that guileless expression. Your fingers tighten around the handle, the carved decorations carved into steel digging into your skin.

“Kill the human captain, and return to whence you came.”

When he sees you, he steps back, holding the door open a little wider so that you can come in. You curse yourself, desperately trying to resist the powerful magic of the reflection in the water, but your feet start to move forward of their own accord.

“Yeosang decided to bed down with Wooyoung in the hammocks tonight, to give me some time alone to think.” Hongjoong says, closing the door behind the two of you as you turn around to face him, effectively hiding the blade with your body. “I just... It’s good that you came. There’s much...” He hesitates, taking you in with his one good eye, unfathomable sorrow flickering in its depths. “There’s much that we need to talk about.”

You don’t say a word, lips clamped firmly shut. Your mind, however, screams with the effort to move your mouth, a warning, a cry, something!

“About what we were saying earlier, I’m sorry about it.” Hongjoong’s words are low, regretful as he leans against the table in the middle of the room. Too far for you to stab without alerting him, the dark voice in you whispers. A tiny fraction of relief spills across you. “Jongho doesn’t mean any ill will, he was just being cautionary, and-”

“He’s not wrong.” The words escape your mouth without your permission. “I almost killed someone. It’s right for you to be cautious of me.”

Hongjoong nods, looking relieved that you understand. It’s not me, you want to cry. Get away from me, as fast as you can! “So, what are you going to do about the Royal Navy?”

Hongjoong gives you a faint, little smile. “Well, it might be the last battle that the Treasure will see.” He says softly, and you have to strain your ears to catch his words. “There’s no other way but to fight, after all.”

Dread wells up inside of you. Is there truly no way to save the Treasure? In the end, it’s all because of you that the Treasure has gotten mixed up with the Royal Navy in the first place, so what if they could just...

You have no soul, so if the heart of the sea were to be robbed from you, you would cease to exist. All traces of your existence would be wiped from this earth like a blank slate. None of your so called family would be able to remember you, much less your existence nor sacrifice.

Your breath catches in your throat.

But... they won’t even remember you.

All the memories you’ve made with them, the first time you had gone drinking with them in the tavern, to learning how to use a sword with Jongho and Yunho, from the time Hongjoong had journeyed with you through the sea witch’s lair, to sitting on the pink beaches of Eleuthera with Mingi. Learning how to cook with Seonghwa and Yeosang saving you from a bullet. Embracing in the darkness of nightmares with San and sitting on the masts with Wooyoung to watch the sunrise.

They’re all going to be erased.

All gone.

This entire life would have been worth for nothing.

“But I have a plan.”

Your eyes widen at the news, and you look up to see your captain with a shadowed, pensive expression on his face. “Earlier today, while you were still unconscious, an envoy from the Royal Navy approached us. He said that the commander-” you catch the almost imperceptible grit of his teeth, “-would be willing to speak to us on a small island somewhere between where the two of us are now. A no man’s land, if you will. To, well, negotiate.”

That can’t be right, you think, confused. The Royal Navy clearly has the upper hand in this situation, so why would they be willing to negotiate?

“Of course I know it could be a trap.” Hongjoong’s sigh breaks your train of thought, and you look up to see him running a hand through his hair. “But it’s the best option that we have now. Wooyoung, Yeosang and I will be going tomorrow while the rest of the crew will be targeting the command ship, so I want you to stay with San - safe and out of sight.”

You want to argue. It’s got to be a trap, you can’t just go blindly walking into it like that! But you only nod, quiet and accepting, eyes downcast. The sides of Hongjoong’s mouth turns up in a sad smile.

“Good girl.” He exhales, breath a little shaky - he must be afraid, too. “We’ll come back to you, alright? Since you promised me that you’d stay alive, I need to do so too, am I right?”

If you were in control of your own body right now, you would have burst into tears at his words. The weight of the dagger is heavy in your had, yet you can’t let go of it, metal seared to your skin. Hongjoong rises to his feet, turning away from you to look over the map spread out over his table. “If it all goes according to plan tomorrow, we’ll be able to escape.”

His back is turned to you.

You frantically try to scream, to make him turn around, to warn him somehow, but your body refuses to listen to you. You rise from the bed, dagger clutched in hand, taking slow, measured steps towards him.

No!

“It’ll be a narrow chance, of course, but it’s still better than giving you up to the Royal Navy.” Hongjoong continues to speak, tracing the map with a finger. Your hand is trembling, as you desperately attempt to wrench your hand away from its intended path - you won’t let yourself hurt your captain, not now, not ever.

Don’t do it, you beg yourself. Please, don’t make me do this. I’d rather die than hurt him like this-

Despite your best efforts, however, your arm raises the blade high into the air, your eyes fixed firmly on the side of his neck, where warm lifeblood flows the strongest. Just one slash, quick and clean, and you’ll be free once again-

All of a sudden, there’s a wicked fast flash of silver, and the point of something cold presses to the tip of your throat.

You find yourself staring down a long silver blade, a single cold, green eye reflected in vicious steel. A bead of cold sweat trickles down the back of your neck as you look up to see the man in front of you.

Hongjoong looks terrifying.

Fear, nauseating and dizzying, gnaws at the pit of your belly as you freeze, too scared to move an inch. You’ve seen him give enemies this stare many times, but it’s never once been directed at you, and you’re so, so afraid.

“You’re not Chin Hae.” Hongjoong’s voice is cold, measured. His blade doesn’t waver in the least as he stares you down, fearless light in his eyes identical to the ones that burn when he faces down insurmountable waves and impossible odds. “What are you?”

Your body doesn’t react for a moment, before a high, cold laugh suddenly spills forth from your lips. “So, you know her far better than I thought you would. How did you tell?”

Hongjoong lets a snort escape him, not amused in the least. “From the very second you stepped into the room. The last thing Chin Hae saw before she fainted was her patient being shot. Knowing her, he would have been the first thing she asked after.”

Your heart clenches. He knows.

“Secondly, when I told you about my plan to take the commander of the Royal navy hostage, you didn’t argue.” Hongjoong continues, grip on his sword cutlass tightening. “The real Chin Hae would have protested, asked me to give her up to the Royal Navy instead, because she’s selfless like that. You’re not her.”

“So, you’re observant.” Your tongue flicks out to swipe at your lips, head tilting to the side, uncaring in the least of the blade at your throat. “That is truly a pain to deal with.”

“Get out of her body.” Hongjoong’s lips curl back into a snarl. “I don’t care who or what you are. Leave Chin Hae alone.”

Your voice leaves you in a mocking hum. “You mean, leave her to die in your arms, human captain?”

At the words that your mouth utters, Hongjoong stills, his eye going wide with shock. Your heart plummets into the pit of your stomach, horror spiking through you. Silence looms heavy and oppressive over the two of you.

He looks terrified.

“What?” He finally utters, voice cracking with what you know as fear. Another laugh escapes your mouth, mocking him, taunting him. “Oh dear... seems like the two of you weren’t quite as close as you wish you were, captain... she must not have told you.”

That’s not it! You scream into the dark recesses of your mind. I just... I just didn’t want you to worry, I just couldn’t bear to see you hurt. Hongjoong, please, don’t think that way...

You remember the last time he had clung to you, like you were the only anchor in the middle of his storm. The way he had broken down in your arms, had wept for you and the crew is still fresh in your mind.

While Hongjoong is distracted, your body takes the opportunity to strike. Lashing out with the blade, your hand curves down in a sweeping arc, aiming straight for the jugular at his neck. He barely manages to react in time, diving out of the way before the blade sinks into the wood of the table, splitting it clean down the middle in a show of strength you’ve only witnessed once in your life.

“Perhaps she thought of you as unreliable to trust.” Your voice coos, voice sickly sweet with false sympathy as you raise the blade again. Raising the blade once again, you swing at him faster than you’ve ever moved before.

Hongjoong curses, dodging to the side and the blade narrowly shaves off a few strands of hair from the back of his head. They go fluttering in the air, but before they can even reach the ground, you’re already lunging for him once again in a jab to the throat.

Your captain, unable to react in time, grabs the blade by the hand, stopping it right before it can pierce his neck. Hot, red blood, however, flows crimson down his palm and onto the ground, staining the blade of the knife. Horror lurches in your chest.

He’s hurt!

Ducking around you so swiftly that you can barely follow his movements with your eyes, Hongjoong pulls on you hard, arms wrapping around you and yanking you into his chest. “Stop fighting!”

Your body lashes out with inhumane strength, and Hongjoong is flung into one of the bookshelves lining the walls. Books fall all around him, scattered on the ground, and Hongjoong lets out a moan of pain that tugs at your heartstrings - you hurt him.

A sob almost leaves you. You hurt him. He was just trying to protect you, and you hurt him like that with your own hands.

“You’re remarkably curious, human captain. It’s rather entertaining to see what that bloodied boy on the beach has grown up into.” At your words, a low growl leaves Hongjoong’s lips, more animal than human. “In your hand there is a drawn sword, yet you have not used it. Are you truly afraid that you might hurt her?”

Your heart breaks as Hongjoong struggles to his feet, using his sword to prop himself up. One of his hands are pressed against his side, possibly a broken rib, you realise. And yet, he’s still wearing that indomitable expression on his face, unwilling to give up.

“You’re still standing? You humans are really so interesting.” Your voice is teasing, the dagger in your hand raised once again. “Human captain, since you’ve impressed me, let me tell you something. Did you know that killing you will save Chin Hae’s life?”

Hongjoong’s uncovered eye flies open in shock, and he blinks at you, unable to speak. “Wha-” Instantly, you’re terrified. he had said once before that he would rather willingly take on all the pain alone than see any of you suffer, so what if he... no, you don’t dare to so much as think about it, but...

“Only killing you will be able to save her, human.” Your mouth moves on its own, without your permission. “If you truly care about her, you’d die for her, wouldn’t you?”

Terror immediately floods through you, so acute that you feel like you’re falling apart, piece by piece. She’s lying, you want to say, even though you know she’s not. Anything to stop that sudden hopeful light in his eyes, the way his eyes fix on the knife in your hand as if that’s the only thing they see. “That’s all? Just my life?”

Just his life? Ache wells up in you, so fierce it hurts you from deep within. What does he mean, just his life? Does he really intend to die for you, just like that?

“You can tell I’m not lying, human.” Your voice sinks into a dark, enchanting purr, almost hypnotic. You take one step forward, another and another until you’re crouched in front of him, blade in hand. The expression on Hongjoong’s face could break your heart clean in two. His eyes search yours, a pained smile on painted on his lips.

I’m sorry.

Your hand raises the blade into the air.

“I’ll make it quick for you, favored one.”

A silver crescent cuts across the air.

The blade comes down.

[modern-inheritance]

Modern Inheritance: Collateral (Smoke and Mirrors)

(A/N: A post-Feinster conversation between Brom and Arya. The whole end of Brisingr has so many implications for reawakening trauma for everyone, especially these two. 

I want to make it abundantly clear, Brom and Arya never have and never will have any sort of romantic/couples thing between them! They’re more of father/daughter, mentor/student and traumatized war buddies. They’ve known each other so long that there’s a lot of trust and understanding between them concerning their traumas and the ways they cope. Anyway, cheers!)

~~~~~~~~~~    

“What the hell! Brom!” 

The elder Rider jerked, nearly inhaling the entire half smoked cigarette that he held to his lips. He whipped around to face his accuser as he choked on the ash he had sucked in, his first words of protest lost when he immediately had to double over in an attempt to clear his irritated lungs.

Arya scowled from where she had stopped not a yard behind her mentor, arms crossed as she waited for Brom to finish his coughing fit. The elf hadn’t exactly planned to seek him out after leaving Eragon and Saphira to rest at the house they now occupied as the Varden secured Feinster, instead looking for a place to sleep in the sacked city. But the steady trail of smoke from behind the corner of a half collapsed stone building had drawn her eye.

“The pipe? That’s fine! I could live with that! You sourced your own stock. But this shit?” Arya plucked the smoldering stick from his fingers as Brom began to raise his hands in defense. “For fucks sake, you know what’s in them! Enough’s enough!” She threw the cigarette to the sandy gutter beside the house and ground it out with her heel. 

Brom finally managed a handful of words edgewise. “I’m out of pipe weed. The whole city is out.” Grumbling to himself as stepped back to lean against the wall, he began fishing his hands in the pockets of his coat. Arya’s eyes narrowed when his hands reappeared holding a beaten, half empty pack of Talon Filtereds and a squashed box of matches. “Don’t start with me again, girl. I’m not in the mood.”

As usual, his former student ignored him. “You’re chain smoking again?” Her words were sharp, almost accusing, but beneath it all edged a hint of worry.

Brom snorted, pale smoke venting from his nostrils as the cigarette caught and held. He took a deep inhale, let the feeling circulate in his lungs, before releasing a stream of grief and anger with the acrid vapor. “Would you rather I drink?”

Arya growled quietly and fell back against the wall next to him. This wasn’t a battle she could win, and she knew it. That didn’t change the way she felt. “No, I want you to deal with your fucking emotions in a healthy way.”

At that the Rider let out harsh bark of laughter and a cloud of white. “Look who’s talking, girl! Wait, what’s that?” He held up a hand and sniffed the nicotine laden air theatrically. “Do you smell that? Suddenly it reeks of hypocrisy here!” 

The elf gave a wry grin, the pain behind her own bottled up grief and night terrors tugging at her lips. “...Touché.”

They stood together in silence for a handful of minutes, haloed by smoke and the dim glow of the lanterns that replaced shattered street lights. 

The previous battle was unique for them. It had reopened old wounds that had just started to scab over, gashed a fresh one right across their hearts. She had faced the horrors of her nightmares brought back to life. He had watched helpless as his son and the boy’s partner of heart and mind nearly died. Both had lost the man that practically raised them, the one person they assumed they would never need to expect would die. 

Brom broke the thick silence. He took a short pull of his cigarette and tilted his head to regard the woman beside him. “Are you holding up?” 

He hid his grimace by lifting the stick back to his face when Arya dropped her gaze and refused to look at him. That was never a good sign. And she had been doing so well before Feinster.

“I’m fine.” The elf flicked her eyes in Brom’s direction when he moved, and scoffed when she saw the pointed, rather familiar expression he now gave her. “Oh, what?” Brom didn’t answer, merely put the cigarette to his lips again and raised his eyebrows even further. “Everything right now is just…. It’s fucked up, Brom. There isn’t time for me to...I don't know, vent?” She scowled and pushed stray hair back from her forehead, trying to gather her thoughts. “Fall apart? Sort through it. You know that.” 

The elder Rider let out a grunt of acknowledgement around the dull orange of the tipping paper before gesturing to Arya’s neck. “Not enough time for healing that, then?”

Arya’s hand came up to touch her throat subconsciously, the dark marks under her jaw giving a light twinge at the contact. Eragon had healed the internal damage to her throat and muscles, but battlefield healing and exhaustion had let the surface injuries remain. 

“They’re just bruises.” Still, her fingers lingered there, testing the injured flesh. Trying to chase away the feeling of cold hands around her throat and the smell of blood and concrete, the face and triumphant, gleeful snarl of another man-shaped monster. 

Brom watched her out of the corner of his eye. When Arya abandoned the bruises to rub the back of her neck, that telltale tic that she had used for well over a year now, he ashed his cigarette and gently tapped her shoulder with the back of his free hand. “It wasn’t him. He’s dead and gone. Eragon saw to that.”

Arya let out a shaky stream of breath and dropped her hand from where she had been smoothing over the scars that slashed above the edge of her tank top. “Yeah, I know.” Sliding to the ground, the elf balanced on the balls of her feet and plucked a pebble from the earth before mumbling, “Doesn’t change how my brain sees it though.”

She looked up at her mentor, doing all she could to hide her desperation for a distraction as the old scenes loomed in her mind. “What about you, old man? Hanging in there?”

Brom’s lip twitched in a sudden snarl, the cigarette bobbing with the motion. “I’m going to kill that demon’s spawn.” 

The change in his voice sent a sudden chill down Arya’s spine, chasing away the lingering sparks that raced across her scars. This wasn’t the voice of the man who had lived the last seventeen years. This was the voice of the man Arya had met on the trails of Ellesméra, a walking embodiment of rage, betrayal and anguish that could burn all in his path. “You mean Murtagh?”

With a violent jab of his hand Brom stabbed out remnants of his first smoke on the wall behind him. He ignored the pinpricks of blood that welled up from his fingers as he yanked a fresh stick out of the box and clamped it in his teeth to light as he growled, “He doesn’t get a name anymore. He’s dead when I see him, dragon or no dragon. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.” The first match he struck snapped in half and fizzled out. Brom swore and threw the shattered bits away and broke his cardinal rule to light the soothing cigarette with a spark of magic at his fingers, angrily puffing as it took.

Arya regarded him steadily, hearing the pain that edged the fury like so many razors. It would do no good to remind the Rider that Galbatorix had been in control when he struck the final blow against Oromis and Glaedr, nor would he want to hear that the young man and the red dragon were not Morzan and his twisted mount. 

“...You really wanted them to be different, didn’t you?” The moment the words left her mouth Arya felt the folly of letting them loose. 

Brom’s brilliant blue eyes turned to her, nostrils flared in rage as they jetted twin streaks of smoke. His hand lifted slightly, hovering near head height where Arya crouched beside him. The elf tensed, ready to take the blow if he struck. 

He stopped. His fingers flexed, as though they could not make up their mind. At his lips the cigarette trembled, the trail of smog from its end wavering. For the briefest of moments, Arya saw a blazing flash of...failure...in his eyes. That was failure, failure and agony at the lives lost, though two still walked among the living. And then it was gone, replaced by an intense but controlled anger.

Brom lowered his trembling hand. “...Just let me smoke, dammit.”

“Fair enough.”

Another ten minutes passed, the only sounds being the Varden watch patrols calling out to each other in the sleeping city. Brom let his somewhat crumpled cigarette burn down to the mashed filter before grinding it out. His shaking had calmed, the enraged light in his eyes dimmed. 

He cleared his throat as he shook another snout from the dwindling box. “...You had a shift watching Eragon and Saphira earlier?” Arya nodded, rolling the pebble she had picked up in her palm and shifting her balance in accordance with its movements. “And how are they doing with all of this?”

Another wry grin tilted the corner of the elf’s lips, though she did not raise her gaze. “Exceptionally better than we are.” The two shared a short laugh before she spoke again, almost hesitant. “Eragon is...having trouble. With something that happened while he was helping clear out Feinster.”

“What happened?”

Arya rocked back onto her heels and recounted Eragon’s telling of the boy that had startled him inside one of Feinster’s homes. The sheer shock he felt when he saw the youth, his pang of recognition, and, later, the horror he felt when he realized just how close he had come to killing an innocent civilian. “It’s been eating him up inside. Saphira’s told him over and over that he didn’t actually kill the kid, that it all worked out, but he’s still thinking about it.” She sighed, and with a flick of her wrist threw the pebble down like a dart. It gouged a crater into the compacted, sandy soil, the quiet thud and depth of the impact betraying her unearthly strength. “I told him to stop and just forget about it when he asked me how I would handle it.”

Brom paused. “...That’s unlike you.”

The elf rubbed her temples and shifted back to the balls of her feet, agitated and indecisive. “Yeah, well...I shut down a bit when he mentioned it. He wanted to try and get me to open up again, seeing as it’s gone well the last few times.” She shook her head, braid swaying. “I couldn’t. Not to them. Not about that.”

Realization dawned on the older Rider, and he pinched his cigarette between his pointer and thumb as he drew a long, deep pull and gathered his thoughts. He exhaled slowly, a heavy sigh of memories that were only partly repressed by the nicotine’s taste in his mouth, before slipping a hand into his pocket and peering up at the half concealed stars above. “Right. Thornwell.” He flicked the ashes away. “...Now that’s something I’d rather forget.”

“Fuck off. The day we forget Thornwell we better be fuckin’ dead.” Arya’s tone was harsh, laced with the bitterness of failure and a vehement streak of self-hatred that the elf rarely let out into the open. “We’re the only ones left to remember it, and it was our fucking fault. Don’t you dare try to brush it off.”

“I’m not.” With a soft pat, Brom dropped his free hand onto Arya’s head. The touch was sudden, so much so that the elf nearly jerked away until she felt the tension in the man’s muscles, the miniscule tremors that the cigarettes couldn’t suppress. 

He knew. The memories still hurt plenty. He couldn’t let them go either. 

Arya sighed and ducked her head, breaking the contact. “Good.” Her voice wasn’t as sharp now. Just...tired. 

The taste of rich dirt, acrid smoke from a magic fueled fire and burning plastics rushed her senses with the memory of Thornwell’s resurgence. Uncaring if any of Eragon’s guards were in sight, she spat to the side, trying to rid herself of the shame laced flavor. Again she found herself resentful of her mind’s sensory recall, bitterly wishing elves memories could fade to washed out images and sounds as humans did.

“Here.” The combat liaison looked up to see Brom offering his still smoldering cigarette down to her. She stared at it for a long moment before gingerly accepting the roll between two fingers and shot a wary, questioning look to her mentor. “I don’t just smoke them for nicotine. It’s the only thing keeping the tastes out of my mouth.”

A moment later saw Arya coughing and gagging as she thrust the cigarette back. “That’s awful!” She spat again, choking on what felt like burning fumes. “Fuck!”

“But it worked, didn’t it?”

“I’ll tell you when I stop feeling like there’s acid in my throat!”

The old man was right, though. The acrid, vile taste had drowned out the pervading scents and flavors of that one day so many decades ago.

As the elf took a sip from the canteen off her belt, Brom turned his gaze back to the clouded stars. “...That was the day you broke my jaw, wasn’t it?”

Arya snorted into the neck of the canteen before muttering, “I cracked your cheekbone. I was…” She paused, screwing the cap back on and trying to choose the words that would cause the least pain for both of them. “We both were fucked up in that moment. You just wouldn’t realize it. I had to do something.” 

“...I was like that a lot back then.”

“Yeah.” Arya clipped the canteen back on her belt. Rubbed her hands together. 

She couldn’t bring herself to admit just how scared of him she had been that day, even before the accident. Brom carried within him a level of intensity at times that transcended rage. Thornwell was an incident where that blind fury led them both to ruin, at the cost of innocent lives. 

Brom cleared his throat, drawing the elf’s eye back to him. “You know...we should start easing Eragon and Saphira into the notion that...that there’s going to be collateral someday.” The words left his mouth with a grimace and puffs of smoke. “Prepare them for it. Eragon’s so empathetic, I’m worried that–”

“No!” The Rider jerked, startled by the sharp, nearly shouted dismissal. Soft flecks of ashes scattered down, drifting to land cool and harmless onto the fists Arya held clenched at her knees.

Her refusal shocked him. Arya, of all people, knew that the right preparation could help lessen the acute effects of war. Her upbringing, like Eragon’s, had done little to prepare her for taking lives, losing comrades, and the burning senses of shame, self-hatred and anguish that could all accompany a prolonged conflict. As naïve as she had been when she joined the Varden, with only the surface understanding of her eventual role, it all had left a lasting impact on the elf. 

Brom frowned. His former student’s body was ridgid, knuckles white. “Arya, you know it’s going to happen sooner or later–” 

Arya cut him off again, her voice softer yet edged with a firm, pained conviction. “Brom...we both know it’s already happened.” And she pointed out towards the city around them. “You can’t tell me there weren’t people here.”

Some of the buildings were collapsed inward on themselves. Shopfronts, family businesses with living quarters above, stood half charred or half destroyed. Behind them, towards the towering keep, the building that Saphira had torn apart tooth and claw was abandoned besides smears of gore. 

A nagging, grim understanding began creeping into Brom’s mind. 

“I know he’s your son, and I know you have more of a say in what you tell him.” Arya continued. “But I can’t let you put the idea in his head. He’s so...he feels so much, Brom. He feels for others as much as he feels for himself. Saphira tries to help him through it but through him, she feels it too.” Tiny tremors shook her fists, nails biting into her palms. “If you start trying to prepare him, they’re going to realize that it’s probably already happened. They’re going to start wondering when. Why they didn’t notice it before. How many. 

“That spiral doesn’t stop. It’s so hard to shut out, and….” She stopped, just short of her voice breaking. “I don’t want that to happen to them. Just...let them have this, Brom. Let me worry about it. Okay?”

Brom dragged the last trails of smoke from his cigarette and reached down. Placed his hand on the elf’s head and gently ran his thumb over her hair as he had always done with Eragon when the boy was frightened by his stories years ago. She tensed for a moment, before he felt the pent up stress ease. “Okay.” The older Rider tapped out the end of his smoke on the wall. “I see your point, kid.” With a gentle shift he pushed her to lean a shoulder against his leg in a comforting gesture of support and understanding. “But when it happens, you tell me. They’ll need both of us.”

“I will.”

They stayed like that for a long moment, supporting each other as the night’s words swirled through their minds. 

“...I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.” Arya muttered suddenly. 

Brom let out a soft scoff. “Join the club.” 

It brought another grim smile to the elf’s face. “Walk with me? Patrolling tends to help.”

“Fine.” Brom reached into his coat as Arya stood and stretched. He swore quietly when he found that the box of Talons was empty. 

Realizing that Arya was watching him, Brom gave the box one last longing look before crumpling it in his fist and dropping it into his pocket. “Lead the way, kid.”

[crazy-sevens]

Writing Snippet #16

“So protective,” the villain murmured. “If I had known you cared this much, I would have used it to my advantage years ago.”

Kara breathed deeply. Her cracked ribs sending shots of pain through her abdomen. “Where is she?”

He raised his brows in surprise, “And angry too. You never take anything else this seriously.”

Kara had to hold back a string of curses from leaving her lips. “Don’t you dare compare this with one of your stupid schemes! Tell me where she is now!”

His cold eyes flicked over her. Not even seeming fazed by her outburst. “You’re not really in a position to give orders.”

Kara narrowed her eyes. When she had found out, nothing could stop her from coming here. No matter what her boss told her or how everyone said she should let them take care of it. She knew it probably would be a trap, but she didn’t care. She could do this.

It was a mistake. 

There were too many guards. She took down a few, but soon they overwhelmed her, giving blow after blow until she blacked out. And then she woke up tied to a chair, facing the villain. She didn’t even think about how her mask was gone. But it didn’t matter though. If he was able to find Luna then he already knew who Kara was.

The villain walked up to her and examined her bruises, ghosting his fingers across slashes on her arms. She flinched even though he didn’t touch her. He noticed. “I told them not to hurt you too much, but you always manage to make things difficult so I guess they had no choice.”

Not to hurt you too much. Kara felt like she had been hit by a truck. Every part of her body ached, her head most of all. Add that to the list of horrible things that were happening.

“If you hurt her I swear . . . “

The villain shrugged. “She’s fine. Gave a couple of bruises to my men’s shins too.” He looked at her. “Wonder where she gets that from.”

A ghost of a smile crossed Kara’s face. Good girl. At least she was okay. For now.

“What do you want?”

“To talk,” he said. “Always running around, we never have any time to have a decent conversation.”

“I don’t really feel like talking.”

He eyed the goose egg on the side of her head. “No I didn’t think you would. I can do most of the talking if you prefer.”

“Really? A villain monologue? I didn’t think you were this cliche.”

The villain raised an eyebrow. “Says the hero who came here all alone. That's the most cliche thing I can think of,” he said. “Did you even consider the chance that you might need help before you stormed over here?” 

“I could take you down all by myself.”

“And see how that went.”

“That’s because you cheated!” Kara shouted. “Where did those guards even come from?” she asked. “What? Are you too much of a coward to fight me yourself?”

He shrugged. “I thought you would bring the whole cavalry,” he said. “You think I’d know you well enough by now to guess you’d try to be the hero and save her yourself.”

Kara scoffed. “You don’t know me.”

“I know everything about you, Kara Danvers.”

The way he said her name sent shivers down her spine. But a name was far from everything. “You’re bluffing.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Of you? Please.”

“Of caring.”

Kara went silent. 

The villain walked up close to her and crouched so their eyes were level. His face was only inches apart from hers. “You see there’s one thing I know for sure about you, Kara,” he said. “You think you can do everything by yourself. You push everyone away thinking you're protecting them from people like me.” 

He shrugged. “It worked for a while. Everyone else was safe because you believed that since you were untouchable by friends, enemies would only care about you. You have no weaknesses that you can’t control. Friends. Family. But even if for a single moment you let your guard down and started caring, you would send them away out of your own twisted sense of protection.” 

He looked deep into her eyes, searching. “And maybe a little bit of pride.”

Kara glared. The villain brushed his fingers across her black eye. “But darling,” he said. “Do you ever consider the fact that you need to protect yourself too?”  

Kara dropped her gaze. 

The villain stood up straight, seeming to have gotten the reaction he wanted. He continued on, “At least, that’s what I thought,” he remarked with a smile. “But then imagine my surprise when I found a little girl.” He pulled something out of his back pocket. It was a picture. A little girl swinging at the park, her blonde curls swung in the air and her face aglow. 

Kara had to swallow a lump of fear that welled up in her throat.

“And a picture of her in your wallet.”

Kara was surprised she was able to speak at all. But even then it only came out as a whisper, “Where is she?” 

“Sh-”

“Where is she!” She actually screamed it now, her shock finally clearing to make way for the anger she was feeling. He kidnapped her. Kara had only one thing in this life and he kidnapped her. She pulled and strained at the ropes, but all that accomplished was reopening her wounds. 

She didn’t even feel it. 

“You can talk all day about how you know me or how dumb I was; I don’t care!” She shouted. “All I care about is Luna, now tell me where she is or I’ll–”

“She’s right here.”

Kara stopped. “What?”

The villain stepped aside and right behind him was Luna and one guard standing behind her. 

“Luna?”

Her eyes brightened at the sound of Kara’s voice. She beamed. “K!” She ran over to Kara’s chair, her blonde curls bouncing the whole way. She jumped into Kara’s lap. “I missed you!”

Kara smiled through gritted teeth. Her ribs were still hurting and Luna jumping on them didn’t help, but the pain was nothing like the flood of relief that filled her. Luna was alright. “Are you okay?”

Luna smiled. “I got fruit snacks!”

Kara’s brows furrowed. They gave her fruit snacks? “That’s pretty awesome. I wish I had some fruit snacks.”

She smiled again. But then her smile disappeared. “You have an ouchie.” Luna touched her fingers gently across Kara’s black eye and the lump on the side of her head. “You need some magic sauce.”

Magic sauce was what Kara had dubbed the lotion that her mother used to use. It worked for everything, so it could basically be called magic. 

Kara smiled. “Yeah I need some magic sauce.”

“Well isn’t this adorable,” the villain cut in. “I can see why you like her, Kara. Too bad it’s time to say goodbye.”

“Wait, what?”

The guard came walking back and grabbed Luna from off Kara’s lap. Kara started to panic. “Where are you taking her? Bring her back! Bring her back!”

“Kay!” Luna screamed. She punched and kicked but her little arms were barely an inconvenience. “Let me go!”

Kara pulled at the ropes, her eyes snapping from the villain to Luna in utter confusion. No, no, no, no! She barely had any time to talk to her! “No! Wait!”

Kara had to watch Luna disappear.

Her eyes stayed in that spot for a long time. Then they shot back to the villain. “Where is she going?”

“We’re keeping her here for awhile.” He flashed a smile. “Just a little incentive for you. She doesn’t have to get hurt, but that’s ultimately your decision.”

Kara glared. “How did you know about her?” 

“We didn’t,” he conceded. “We knew about you.” He walked up close to Kara again, this time grabbing her chin to examine her face. She tried to wrench away but his nails dug, leaving her head firmly in place. “You were a little difficult to find, considering I didn’t have a name or a face. But once you have one it’s easy enough to find the other.” He chuckled. “And I have to say it’s nice to see you without the mask. I can finally see every emotion. Ones that you try so hard to hide.”

Kara spat. He released her chin. But she was confused. Her brows furrowed. “If you didn’t know about her then how. . .” She thought back to their conversation. She had been so focused on the photo, she couldn’t remember . . . wait. Where had he gotten the photo? She had forgotten her wallet at home. Her eyes widened. “You found her at my apartment.”

“You weren’t home. She was.” His eyes gleamed with malice. “Plans changed after that.”

A pit dropped into Kara’s stomach. The anger leaving, getting replaced with horrible clarity. Luna was there. Just ten minutes away. Kara could’ve been home. She should’ve been home. All of this wouldn’t have happened if she had been home. Or if Luna hadn’t even been with Kara in the first place.

She had failed. She had failed to protect Luna. 

This was all Kara’s fault. 

The villain looked at his watch. “Wow! Look at the time! We’ve got to get this show on the road!” 

And before Kara could respond a cloth clamped over her mouth. 

Everything went black.

[asknerdizzy]

Sirens Call Arc 3/3

“Did you kill all of these people!?” Izzy exclaimed mortified at the scene before her. Haven herself had to looked away from Kerberos holding her hand up to her mouth.

“No f***ing sh** Sherlock. Did you figure that out all by yourself toots?” He drawled out, not at all fazed by the carnage he had created.

“Now if you a**hats could get out of my way. That would be fan-f***ing-tastic. Or would you like to join the lot of ‘em”

“That won’t be happening.” Shard glared having his stand [Another Way Out] put up a barrier that surrounded Kerberos.

With a smirk Kerberos looks up and down Shard humming to himself. “You’ll be fun. I’m Kerberos, and this is my little friend [Pink Party].” Setting down the Stand Bow to the ground. A pink looking stand with a muzzle appears behind Kerberos in the barrier. The Stand proceeds to rapidly claws at the barrier, soon tearing it to shreds.

Shard takes a step back shocked as Kerberos pounces at him. As he does this, [Pink Party] destroy/ the floor beneath the two of them. Having them fall to the next floor. Izzy scrambles over and grabs the bow, and tries to go after Shard. Ready to jump in after him, but she’s,stopped by Haven.

“Now that he’s distracted we can get the bow to a safe location.”

“But I can’t just sit here while Shard is fighting that man! I should back him up however I can.”

“I think Shard can take care of himself. Either way, you don’t know the situation enough to go jumping down there Willy nilly. You could get in the way, or worse, get hurt.

Izzy thought it over and reluctantly had to agree.

“Let’s go to the roof. It’ll be hard for anyone to try and get us from up there.”

Izzy looks over at the hole, and reluctantly follows Haven. Wishing the best for Shard.

———————————————————————

Meanwhile Shard and Kerberos land with a loud thud on top of a huge aquarium full of colorful exotic fish. A crack forming at the impact, but the glass is somehow still intact.

Kerberos is the first one to get up. He crouched down as he allows his Stand [Pink Party] to scratch him for a partial transformation.. His wolffish grin becoming more feral as his canines grew to fangs, his nails extending into claws, and his ears becoming more wolf like.

“C’mon it’s time to Party! Come at me!” Kerberos growls out as he goes in low to slash at Shard. A barrier blocks the assault. With Shard deftly dodging out of the way.

Kerberos goes to attack Shard again in a flurry of blows. Leaving Shard with many cuts and bruisers as he keeps dodging each attack with his stand until he had an opening to upper cut Kerberos in the face.

His head flings back and he tumbles backward. However the opening made way for Kerberos to badly cut Shards arm in the process.

By how things were going so far Shard wouldn’t win. It was time for a different plan. Looking down he saw the cracks in the aquarium. That could work…

“I hope you like fish!” Shard uses [Another Way Out] and his own fist to further crack the aquarium until it finally broke underneath them.

“SH**!” Kerberos curses as he falls, fully submerging into the aquarium, while Shard stands on top of a barrier to keep him out of the water.

Trying to swim back up Kerberos is blocked by multiple barriers. Angry gurgling and pounding ensue, as Kerberos keeps trying to get out of the water. His best bet was trying to break the glass on the sides or swim up, but he keeps getting bombarded by barriers. Making it impossible for him to do any substantial damage to escape.

After a few minutes Kerberos passes out much to Shards relief. He mulls over if he should save him, and ultimately decides to jump in and drag Kerberos out. He should have some information that could be useful to the SPW. First and foremost Shard puts anti-stand cuffs before he starts to preform CPR on the man. Coughing out water Kerberos becomes alert for a moment, but passes right back with a swift karate chop from Shard to the neck.

Shard slumps over wet and exhausted on a nearby table. He used some of his coat to wrap around the worst of his wounds as he caught his breath.

“Wait…Am I forgetting something? Sh** I left Izzy alone!”

He shoots back up with new vigor running back to the theater floor where he last saw her.

———————————————————————

Izzy and Haven make it up to the roof without any trouble. “Okay give me a moment I have to call the SPW for some backup.” Izzy readjusts the bow in her grip as she pulls out a portable phone. After a few back and forth Izzy hangs up.

“They should be here any minute now. All we got to do is wait up here.”

“I-mmh-this may be unprofessional of me, but can we do a victory hug. This is my first mission and it being a successful and all….” She trails off bashful about her request.

“It’s totally fine! Come here.” Izzy pulls the taller woman into a big hug.

“It’s too bad that I have to do this.” Haven says as she brings out a dagger tipped with paralysis venom, plunging it into Izzy’s back. “We could have been such good friends, but you just had to commit the deadly sin of getting in my way.” Havens voice becomes intertwined with a deep masculine voice. As they push the dagger deeper into the paralyzed Izzy. They stab her again and again in multiple areas to make sure that she couldn’t do anything, and pushes her to the ground.

Everything was happening so fast she couldn’t react. Izzy coughed up blood, and found herself unable to summon her Stand. Internally she was panicking, and starting to get woozy from the loss of blood. She looks up at Haven trying to figure out what was happening. If she had to guess, it appeared as if there were two separate beings in front of her, but using the same body in harmony.

How could she have been so stupid to be tricked like this so easily.

“You should really consider not using code words. I just had to torture one of your members for it and you completely trusted me. Though I think it helps that I’m such a good actor.” They say more so to themselves, as they yank the bow out of Izzy’s hands. “Now I think I’ll be taking this.”

———————————————————————

Ardram finally arrives at the casino running inside. As he’s running he fetches the watch inside his coat, and opens it revealing a tiny bunny Stand inside. “Okay where is she!?”

“Noneedtobesorude. She’sotheroof.” [Out Of Touch] blurts out rapidly. Ardram clamps the watch shut, putting it back into his pocket. He full on sprints up, pushing whatever gets in his way to the side

Once he reaches the roof he found horrible scene unfolding before his eyes. A passed out Izzy lying in a pool of her own blood, and a blond haired individual, with a flickering being next to them. It wasn’t a Stand, but he couldn’t care less at that moment as he saw the blond standing over Izzy about to plunge a dagger into her chest.

Immediately Ardram uses [Fools Gold] to have a gold spike come up and try to impale the offending individual. They dodge at the last moment and look over at Ardram with a smirk.

“I think that’s our cue to leave.”

“Oh no you f***ing don’t.” Ardram yells with a look of pure unbridled rage on his face. As gold starts to cover the roof.

“Oh, I think I will.” They say as they go over to the ledge of the roof. “You could one, fight me right now, but she’ll certainly bleed out to death before our spar ends. Or two, you could ignore me and get her to a doctor. In the hopes that she’ll live. I think we both know which choice you’re going to make.”

Ardram just grits his teeth as he runs over and gently picks up Izzy. “I’m going to f***ing kill you once I see you again.”

“Oh do try. It’ll be a futile effort though.” With that Haven jumps off the building. Shadows enveloping them into darkness. Leaving no trace of them ever being there or the Stand Bow.

Ardram runs down holding Izzy’s body close to his own. He could still hear and feel her heart beat, and she was still warm to the touch. She could make it. She will make it.

He finds Shard when he running over to him looking quite pale , but looks even paler once he sees the horrible state Izzy is in. Ardram reluctantly hands her over to Shard with an unreadable expression on his face. “Heal her.”

Shard summons his Stand trying to stabilize her enough for when the paramedics would arrive. Ardram had to walk out for a moment to collect himself. He wasn’t much help when it came to trying to keep people alive, unless he made them undead. He found himself in the theater where the auction happened

Ariel stirs, and opens her eyes to see Ardram. She knew who he was from the debriefing her boss gave her, and by the look on his face the plan worked. She grins wanting to gloat their victory to the vampires face, “Looks like the boss’s plan worked. Is the pint sized b**** dead, or is it that masked freak? Hopefully both of em are rotting.” She cruelly laughs.

Without a word a gold spike erupts and pierces Ariels skull. Killing her instantly. “Oops, my hand slipped.” He numbly states, not even sparring a glance at the woman. He leaves the room once he hears the sound of sirens and rapid footsteps approaching.

[luninosity]

It’s @whumptober2020 time again! For prompt 10 – “they look so pretty when they bleed,” specific prompts: blood loss/trail of blood; AND prompt 15 – “into the unknown,” specifically magical healing!

 Time for some more Evanstan with witch!Seb! This story takes place in the same universe as “every inch of north and south.” Warnings for...blood & magically inflicted injuries? I promise he’s going to be fine though! It’s magical healing, after all!

#

Chris steps in through the side door of Sebastian’s magician’s consultation rooms, where the wards know him as Seb’s boyfriend; he’s tired but cheerful, because it’s been a productive day of meetings about the directorial project he’s taking on for fun, the film about rescue dogs, and also he’s brought coffee for Seb from that new place down the street they’ve been meaning to try.

 He’s expecting the familiar tickle of Seb’s magic, and he smiles, the way Seb’s wards generally smile back, all warm and smoky and glittery as opals.

 The magic is familiar. It recognizes him. But it’s also wrong. Frantic. Scurrying. Spiking. Singing and shouting, sounds Chris doesn’t quite physically hear but feels—

 He’s not a witch the way Sebastian is. But he is magic-sensitive, kind of adjacent to it and aware of it if it’s happening, and he’s Seb’s boyfriend. Sebastian’s magic knows that.

 The hairs at the nape of his neck stand up. His skin prickles.

 He takes another step. “Seb? Sebastian?”

 No answer. But Sebastian’s protective magic’s shrieking now, a cacophony of clashing melodies and scents and textures—burning scarlet and blinding gold and copper on Chris’s tongue and whistles in his ears—and it wraps coils around his wrists and ankles and begs for his help—

 He runs. Shoving coffee onto Seb’s table next to the silver scrying bowl. Heart twisting in his chest at the sight of neatly labeled herb-bottles and jars on the shelf, at Seb’s black leather jacket tossed over a chair, as if Sebastian’d expected to be right back—

 “Sebastian? You in here?” Something nags at his brain; his eyes catch up after a second.

 A space on the wall rack. A missing knife. The silver one, the moon-knife.

 Sebastian’s protected against most ordinary blades, but magicians sometimes need to offer drops of blood. Seb’s got a few specific knives for that purpose, which means a few weaknesses. Chris tries to breathe. To think.

 Sebastian doesn’t have any specific enemies, not that he knows about; magicians can be envious and prickly and wary, but Sebastian’s generous and happy and clever and kind, and good at warding-spells, also.

 But Seb had said—something, that morning—something about being asked to consult on a local case, a missing child, and of course he’d said yes, and Chris had nodded because that was a good thing, of course…but Sebastian hadn’t said it’d be anything difficult…

 Or had he? By not saying so, by smiling, by kissing Chris as a distraction?

 Sebastian’s a good witch but—in his own words—not anywhere near the sorcerers of legend. Gifted at cures and summonings and counter-curses, not at leveling mountains or flattening enemy armies. And he and Chris have only been a them for three months—maybe Seb hadn’t wanted him to worry…

 Chris is worried now. Chris is fucking terrified now. “Seb! If you’re here, if you can hear me—say something, come on—”

 Magic pulls at his arm, insistent. Wind howls past his ears, though nothing in the main consultation room physically stirs.

 He spins in the direction of the tugging. Of the two doors plus small staircase, one leads to Seb’s distillery and store-room; the other’s the private workroom, for anything that can’t be handled out in the sunny front space. The staircase goes up to Sebastian’s bedroom-slash-library, with the books on astronomy and the low cozy bed with the decadent satin sheets, where they’ve spent a lot of enjoyable time.

 The door to the private workroom has a small trickle of red underneath it, seeping out.

 Chris stares at it for a second. Then throws himself that way.

 The knob, heavy and bronze, doesn’t turn. Chris slams a hand against thick wood. “Sebastian!”

 No sound.

 “Sebastian, please! Can you—you gotta open the door, Seb—just that, you can do that—let me in, please, Seb, just try—”

 No word from Sebastian; but a click echoes through horrified silence. This time the knob turns.

 The red’s blood and the blood’s so much, a vicious trail that stretches crimson from the door to a puddle over tidy chalk lines and up to—to—

 Chris’s lips say Sebastian, without noise, even as he’s flinging himself across the room. A sizzle scratches down his spine, a hint of burning singes his arm-hair, as he crosses chalk marks; but it’s weak. He doesn’t care.

 Sebastian, lying on his back, blinks and tries to focus as Chris bends over him. He’s clearly just collapsed in place, knocking over equipment along the way. The knife lies silver and deadly amid broken ceramic bits of what looks like a coffee-mug; Sebastian can do scrying-work with anything, Chris knows, and is actually best with an object he uses daily, a coffee-cup friend, a connection. The big silver bowl in the consultation room’s mostly for effect.

 Sebastian’s bleeding from—from everywhere, all over, red soaking his shirt and jeans, Chris’s jeans where he’s kneeling in the puddle, Sebastian’s hair—red streaks Seb’s face, his nose and mouth, his ears, his bared and laid-bare arms, which Chris almost can’t look at because of the raw—

 He clamps hands over the closest wrist. Sebastian’s blood’s hot. Sticky. “Seb—oh god—”

 Sebastian coughs. Starts to talk, coughs again, then manages, “Oh, hey…love you…”

 “Jesus fucking Christ. Seb—I love you, of course I—what, how, what can I—no, no, oh god, Seb—”

 “Not…as bad…as it looks…”

 “It looks like you’re fucking dying!”

 “Well…not quite…that was his plan…but it’s not all me…the water…”

 Chris looks more closely. It’s true: it’s not all Sebastian’s blood. The water from the coffee mug’s thinned it and spread it out and contributed to the pool.

 Contributed to. Not all of. He’s keeping hands over Sebastian’s left arm, holding edges together. The right arm’s just as bad; Seb’s still horribly injured, blood pulsing under Chris’s fingers, making them slippery. “What can I do?”

 “I’m…trying to…heal it.” Sebastian’s face is white. His eyes stand out against the lack of color: that silvery grey-blue Chris loves so much, now etched with pain. “We found her…the girl…it wasn’t that hard, I’m good at talking to the earth…and to water…I just…wasn’t expecting to fight an amateur warlock for her…I won, obviously…”

 “Obviously…”

 “He’s not dead, don’t worry…I don’t do that…just in custody…sort of very not conscious, I think. Him, not me.”

 “Let me help,” Chris pleads, hands wet, jeans wet, workroom wet with hideous ruby splashes. “Please. Anything.”

 “I can’t…” Seb coughs again. Then shuts his eyes. When he opens them his voice is noticeably weaker. “I can’t ask you to…”

 “You’re not. I’m offering. I love you, Seb. I said fucking anything. Do it. I’m here.”

 “It’ll hurt.” Sebastian’s trying hard to sound more all right, and failing. “Chris…”

 “Don’t you fucking dare ask me if I’m sure.”

 “No…I know you are.” A ghost of a smile hovers at the corner of Seb’s mouth: bittersweet, evanescent, affectionate. “Okay. I can stop it…I think…but I could use an anchor…more strength…getting kind of tired, here…but you’re good at awareness, at being present…”

 “I am.” He presses harder. Some of the cuts are healing—he can see them—but not enough. “I can do that. What do you need me to do?”

 “Look at me,” Sebastian whispers. “Look at me, think about me…about who I am, who you think of…when you think of me…and just relax, be open, let me in…”

 Chris draws a wobbly breath. Lets it out. Keeps his hands over the deepest slash. Focuses on Sebastian’s face, Sebastian’s eyes.

 Sebastian, he thinks. Bright and beautiful, ridiculous and generous. Made of stories and magic, a smile through a coffee-scented drift of steam, a love of pizza and outer space and other people. Pure joy in running around the woods on a hike, by turns jumping out at Chris from behind trees or just talking to said trees, running a hand over them, starting conversations.

 Sebastian’s eyes are cool and sweet, shimmering like mist and starlight. Chris finds himself distantly aware of the rest of the world—his hands trying to hold Seb together, the way his jeans stick to his legs, the hardness of the workroom floor—but it’s all going dimmer now, far away.

 More, if Seb needs that. More intimate, more personal. In bed, under him, laughing and fearless. Sebastian sprawled out half atop him, cat-napping, both of them naked and contented in sunshine. The smoothness of Seb’s skin, the dip where his back curves into his ass, the soft little sound he makes when Chris caresses him just right.

 Sebastian doesn’t say anything aloud, but Chris feels something like a yes, rose-pink and amber-laced and dancing like eighties rock music because Seb likes Bon Jovi: Sebastian’s magic, worn thin but glinting and prismatic, reaches out. It draws him in.

 He’s always thought Sebastian’s magic felt and tasted like light, so many kinds of light: wry cool moonbeams and lazy honeyed sun-thrumming and mischievous star-twinkles and quiet shafts of shyly happy radiance unexpectedly hiding in deep green pools. The burst of airiness from a cloud-like meringue. Whipped cream and edible gold dust. The kiss of sun through water in a lake. The hushed glowing of candles, lit with a thought, pooling liquid along entwined bodies.

 Right now the light’s present—Chris can feel it, can taste it—but very ragged, scarlet-tinged. It asks without words, wistful; Sebastian’s giving him one last chance to duck out, he understands. Sebastian isn’t sure that Chris should have to do this, maybe because it’s only been three quick months, maybe because Seb himself wants this so badly—Chris can feel that the same way he can feel how much Seb loves him; no lying here in this place—and Seb is consequently afraid it can’t be true.

 Fuck that, he thinks: you saved me once already, you save me every day I get to kiss you, you make my life more full of magic; let me save you; I love you.

 And Sebastian laughs: stunned, grateful, overwhelmed. And accepts.

 Pain hits first. White-hot and searing. Chris can’t even scream. Can’t think. Can’t process the sensations. If that’s what Seb’s been feeling—how is he even talking, how is he alive, how—

 Sebastian does something else, some tug at a thread in the embroidery of shades of light around them. The pain ebbs: not gone, but covered over by clean wintergreen and mint. The sense this time’s vaguely apologetic, though distracted: Seb’s having to juggle a lot of those threads, with no energy to spare.

 Chris shakes his head. Tries to project don’t worry about me, I can take it that direction. Sebastian does a sort of mental headshake right back at him, and then—

 It’s the strangest feeling. Not bad, not exactly—but dizzying. Stomach-flipping. Vertiginous. The light’s laced itself into his head, his gut, his chest—and it pulls gently and tugs and draws something out of him, taking it in, leaving him lightheaded as it drains.

 His heart thumps faster. He’s off-balance, shaken. And it’s something like a release as well, not orgasmic but close, something like Sebastian stroking him or sucking him until the climax rushes up and out involuntarily, nothing he can do to hold it back, as he shudders and cries out at the flood of release, emptying himself into Seb’s mouth or hand or body.

 The world still tastes like mint, and a little like pain, hot and copper and iron-sharp, but Seb’s shielding him from the worst of it, he’s aware.

 He can feel Sebastian’s magician’s fingertips skillfully taking each strand, each bit of Chris’s energy, and patiently painstakingly reweaving pieces of self: closing wounds, connecting tendons, knitting veins back together. Chris stays very quiet, holding more pieces of Sebastian in his mind as an anchor, and watches him work.

 He doesn’t know how long it takes. Time doesn’t matter, not here.

 He knows he’s growing more tired, more hollowed out; he can feel that. Giving himself, and gladly—but even as he thinks that, the draining eases, and recedes, and backs away.

 Sebastian’s breathing more easily. Sebastian’s arm’s whole, under his hands; Chris blinks, discovers that he has hands, that he can see and feel a world that isn’t diaphanous and timeless and made of light. He’s sticky with drying watery blood, his jeans are ruined, and he’s starving; Sebastian, still lying in the same spot on the floor, opens both eyes. His skin’s less white, and the blood on his face is dried, not new.

 Chris holds his hand, his arm; runs fingertips over bright pink tender flesh, new-made skin. Gazes at Seb, amazed, in awe, thankful.

 “So,” Sebastian says, visibly exhausted but with sparkling eyes, “candles? And…whipped cream?”

 “It’s how you feel.” He touches Seb’s arm again. “Light. You’re not…it’s not finished. All the way.” It’s not: he can see the lines, the tracks. Closed over, safe and not spilling life anymore, but not gone.

 “It’s enough for now.” Seb pushes himself up on an elbow, gingerly; he makes a face as his sleeve lands in a puddle. His shirt’s tattered and slashed open as well; so are his jeans. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

 “I’m not—”

 “If I took much more I would. Trust me.” His eyes meet Chris’s again, less magically hypnotic this time; then flinch, glancing away from the admission of potential harm. “It’s kind of my job. Knowing how far to go. As a professional. And I can do the rest, just more slowly. Are you—”

 “I’m fine!” Drained and wobbly, like he’s just run two back-to-back marathons, and his stomach’s growling. But Seb’s alive. “Should you be sitting up? What else can I do?”

 Sebastian’s expression goes through several emotions, and then he just says, “Chris,” a sigh, a giving in; and he reaches out, and Chris puts both arms around him right there on the messy workroom floor, holding on.

 “I love you,” Seb murmurs after a moment, head resting on Chris’s chest. “I wanted—I might’ve been okay, I was trying hard, I wanted to be—but I wasn’t sure. I was scared. I kept thinking about you, and wanting to see you, and then you were here…”

 “I’m here.” He squeezes more tightly. “Brought you coffee. I had been kinda thinking we could order pizza and stay in, y’know, kind of a long day for both of us…”

 “And then you walked in and found me.” Sebastian tips his head to look up at Chris more. “Sorry.”

 “Hey, you were saving a kid.” He runs a hand over Seb’s hair. They both need a shower. Maybe like three showers. “My hero.”

 “And you saved me. It’ll rebuild—the energy I borrowed, I mean—over a day or so, I think. How’re you feeling?”

 “Hungry,” Chris says truthfully.

 Sebastian stares at him, and then dissolves into giggles: loopy, tired, relieved, and above all real. “Of course…of course, yes, always, after a major working…so am I…oh, Chris. My Chris. Yes.”

 “Yours,” Chris agrees, equally truthful and wholehearted. “What can I do, though? For you? You’ll need to rest, right?”

 Sebastian scrunches up his nose. “Shower? And…yes. We both should, really.”

 “Shower,” Chris concurs firmly, and carefully gets him up off the bloodstained floor.

 He holds onto Sebastian in the shower. He holds Sebastian while red slides away down the drain. He tenderly cleans Sebastian’s skin, trying hard to keep touches weightless over recent and sensitive repairs. He kneads shampoo through Sebastian’s hair.

 The scent of apples and soap rises around them, light and bracing. Sebastian tips his head back, eyes closed, water sliding down his face. He’s beautiful and tired and trusting, letting Chris keep him on his feet. Chris’s heart flutters.

 The world grows easier, steadier, cleansed.

 He tucks Sebastian into bed, gently, after. The workroom will handle its own clean-up—Sebastian’s got a spell in place for that, and it’s automatic—but their clothes’re probably a lost cause; Chris attempts a quick rinse and then just leaves the whole disaster in the shower for later. He can deal with it if Sebastian needs to recover.

 Seb’s half-asleep and drifting, a long-legged enervated kitten, but stretches out a clumsy hand to find Chris’s. “You should rest too.”

 “I will. I’m ordering pizza. Pepperoni okay?” He is, poking his phone, salvaged from a pocket; he plays with Seb’s fingers in his, sitting on the side of the bed. They’re more slender than his own, but long and graceful and talented in so many ways. Magical. “Shower, food, rest. What else?”

 Seb yawns. Pink and red streak his arms and his chest, a reminder; Chris can’t not glance at the marks, unable to help it. “Well…if you wouldn’t mind…there’s a jar on the third shelf, downstairs…yarrow and lemon balm…”

 “Got it.” He hops up. Throws on sweatpants. Returns with the requested jar and some trail mix and some orange juice, and eases himself into bed beside Sebastian, who smiles tiredly at him.

 Chris feeds Sebastian some trail mix, gives him some sips of juice; has some himself. He’s not a witch but he does know about exertion and depletion, and this’ll help. The pizza—from their favorite local place—will be here in twenty minutes, too.

 The food does seem to help. Sebastian sits up more, with pillows and Chris’s arm; Chris’s stomach feels better. Low lamplight paints the room in jeweled color, because Sebastian’s bedside lamp is set with tiny lapidary bits of glass. It’s soft and warm and rich, tracing light-patterns over the bed, the blankets, Sebastian’s hair.

 Chris dips fingers into spell-infused balm, and begins to stroke it across Seb’s arm. The night takes a breath, scented with healing herbs and protective lemon, and unwinds. Tension ebbs, dwindles, fades: not wholly gone but ameliorated. Sebastian’s ward-spells are quiet and pleased.

 He’d thought he’d gotten used to dating a magician. He mostly has: he’s purely delighted when he gets to watch Seb help people, find lost puppies, talk to raindrops. He adores Sebastian’s genius and Seb’s playful sense of humor and Seb’s cheerful way of getting the strings of the universe to play along.

 He’d forgotten, or maybe just not thought about, the fact that his boyfriend’s one of the most genuinely powerful white witches currently practicing. Someone the authorities ask when they need assistance. Someone who can fight a warlock at a distance and win.

 Seb says he’s not that powerful and laughs about it, but he’s comparing himself to centuries-old stories: no one’s that strong, not these days. Sebastian’s better than he admits to being, though. Good enough that other people come to him for advice. That includes other white witches; Chris knows Sebastian’s done some consultations with colleagues before.

 Chris Evans is a director, an actor, a producer of movie-magic stories. Good at empathy, moderately famous these days, and power-sensitive, a little. It’s not nothing, but it’s not the same.

 He keeps his touch cautious, not wanting to put any pressure on newly made skin. “How’s this?”

 “Good.” Seb yawns again, sleepy. “It’ll help…healing, renewing…’s an old classical recipe, this one…stored power, infused in it, kind of…it shouldn’t even scar, with this.”

 “So it won’t cost you anything, like, in terms of power, right now.” He touches Seb’s chest, spreads balm across a thin angry line. “Tell me if I’m hurting you.”

 “You’re not.” Sebastian gazes up at him: gorgeous as ever, brilliant as ever, powerful as ever, and right now vulnerable and somehow younger, framed by a navy satin pillowcase and the familiarity of them both mostly naked in this bed. “Thank you.”

 “Don’t,” Chris says, heart aching with the word, with too many complicated emotions, with love. “You don’t have to say it.”

 “But—”

 “You’d do it for me.”

 “If you ever for some reason had to fight a warlock, I would. You said you had a long day too…?”

 “Long, but good.” His hand over Sebastian’s tanned skin, his fingertips bringing healing. Sebastian’s chest lifting and falling, vital and present. “Getting things moving on the heroic rescue dogs movie. Lots of the boring stuff today—logistics, budget, all that—but it’s stuff that has to happen first, so it’s kinda fun, y’know?”

 Sebastian just looks at him for a second; the smile warms every atom of those opal oceans, and makes the small joyous lines around them crinkle.

 Chris has to laugh, half-embarrassed, paying some closer attention to healing balm and a darker less-knitted red line. “Okay, what?”

 “I love you.” Seb reaches up to touch his wrist. “I just…I’m really glad you’re here.”

 “Me too? Um. About you.”

 “Not just tonight, I mean.”

 “Hey,” Chris says, heart in his throat, in his words, in his eyes as he looks at Sebastian, “I’m glad I was here tonight. I want to be here, Seb, okay? I’m not going anywhere.”

 Sebastian’s cheeks are pinker now, but he nods. “I’m here too.”

 “I know you are.”

 “Tell me about your meetings,” Seb requests drowsily, “and all about your movie, again, and the dogs,” and Chris laughs a little, scrubs a hand over his treacherously damp eyes, and does, while gently treating Sebastian’s battle scars in between nibbles of food and traded kisses.

[whitewolfandthefox]

Call of the Wild: Part 7

Summary: Astarion continues his research as the pack searches for you.

Series Masterlist

Add yourself to my taglist!

Warnings: violence, major injury, unconsciousness, torture, violence, angst

Words: 2.7k

A/N. This... is not a happy one guys, sorry. I swear I’m not intentionally trying to kill you. Comments and reblogs are appreciated!

The Connection

You could hear the men getting closer as you ran, slowing from the pain of your wounds and the exhaustion from shifting so many times in such a short period. You tripped over a root as you looked back, chest hitting the ground and your body rolling through the underbrush. You scrambled to your feet, heart hammering from fear as you resumed fleeing.

You could hear the shouts getting louder behind you, the baying of a dog as it closed in. You desperately searched for shelter, spotting a low hanging tree branch off to the left. You darted towards it, before pain flared as you were dragged backwards, the dog’s jaws closed on your back leg. Turning, you slashed at the dog’s face, opening wounds across its muzzle. It yelped and dropped you before rushing once more. You dodged to the side, snapping at its shoulder as you moved, opening another laceration with your teeth.

Whimpering, the dog backed off allowing you to rush up the tree, digging your claws into the bark as you cowered against the trunk. The men filled the space behind the dog, carrying weapons and torches, all staring up at you. One of the men called the dog off with a sharp gesture, allowing it to slink to the back of the group. They stared up at you, faces full of malice. One stepped forward, a sword in his hand.

“Come on down, demon. We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.” You hissed at him in response, pulling your body further into itself, tail wrapped around your small body, ears flat against your head. At your actions, he grinned, baring his teeth. Turning to the man next to him, he gestured at you, “Light it up.”

He stepped forward, laying the torch against the base of the tree. Too late, you realized that the tree you had chosen was long dead, brittle and dry. As the flames caught and climbed its way up the tree, you frantically searched for a way out. None of the trees were close enough for you to jump to, you were trapped.

As the flames grew higher, you could feel the heat licking at your paws. You scrambled to one of the branches, creeping along it, silently praying that it would hold your weight. The men jeered at you from below as you gathered yourself to jump, hoping you could make it.

CRACK

You felt yourself falling as the branch broke beneath you, tumbling to the ground far below. You yelped as you hit, feeling your leg snap beneath you, wound in your side pouring hot blood as it reopened. You lay there stunned, shaken by the fall. All of a sudden, you felt hands on you, gripping your fur and legs. Your vision went white as they touched your broken limb, leaping to your feet, lashing out with your teeth in defence. You felt something tear, warm, coppery liquid filling your mouth as you clamped down on the arm near your injured leg, wrenching your head to the side as you tore a chunk of flesh, hearing the howl of pain from the man at your actions. 

Something struck you in the side of the head and you went limp, pain suffusing every inch of your being. As you lay on the ground, you felt your body being manhandled, turned to your side. “Shit, it's bleeding. The boss said it wasn’t to be harmed.”

Rough hands shoved cloth against your side, a yelp drawn from you as you were jostled, thrown over a shoulder. Your vision faded in and out, time passing in a blur as you tried to manage the pain. You felt the air change, a shiver running through your small form as you entered the stone structure, air cooling off as the guards around headed deeper. You were dropped to the ground, whimper passing your lips as your wounds were jostled. A bitter smell filled the air, mixed with the scent of old blood. Your heart sunk, you were back in your original cell.

“Ah! Such a lovely specimen, such a magnificent colour.” You closed your eyes at the sound of Astarion’s voice. “I haven’t seen your kind before, such a rare subspecies of fox. This is so exciting!”

Curling into yourself, you took a deep breath before rolling to your feet, keeping your injured front leg off the ground, lips pulling back at the sight of the sorcerer. He looked delighted, hands clasped in front of him, excitement on his face. “This will be so informative, I will be able to do so much research with you.” His face turned vicious. “Especially now that I know how to make you change.”

Your ears pulled back at that, teeth bared as a low growl rumbled out of your chest. Your tail stood straight out behind you, knees bent as you were prepared to defend yourself. He studied you, eyes sweeping your side as he observed your lifted leg, a thoughtful look on his face. “We won’t start today, sweet, I’ll let you heal first. It will give me a better baseline of how exactly your healing works. You’ve had an exciting night, get some rest and we will get started tomorrow.”

With that, he turned and swept out of your cell, door clanging shut behind you. Limping into the corner, you curled up with your back to the stone wall, eyes closing as you let the darkness of unconsciousness wash over you.

**~*~*~*~**

Geralt looked at Yennefer, heartbreak clear on his face. She laid a hand on his arm, face full of sympathy. She knew what it felt like, losing someone you cared about. Her mate had been taken from her too soon, killed during a raid on a shape shifter village. It still felt like yesterday, holding the empty shell that used to be the love of her life. The agony, the loss, the pain that came with knowing she would never see them again. She knew the agony of losing a mate and she never wanted Geralt to have to experience that. 

“We’ll find her,” her grip tightened on his arm, forcing the man to look at her. “I swear to you, Geralt, I won’t stop until she’s back with us.”

Ciri and Jaskier approached the pair, the former latching on to Geralt’s waist. Jaskier spoke quietly, “You have our teeth and our claws as well. We are with you no matter what.”

Geralt was silent for a moment, before his posture sagged. “Thank you,” his voice was soft, full of pain. “I will be forever in your debt.”

“Never,” Yennefer spoke, “This is what family does. Now, let’s go find a shapeshifter.”

**~*~*~*~**

Astarion had returned the next day to find you in your human form. You had stood to meet him, defiance clear in your face. He had scowled at you, clearly displeased that you were no longer a fox. He didn’t say anything as he approached you, driving a fist into your stomach as he grabbed your broken arm, pressing on the bone. A scream tore from your lips as the heat that came with your shift washed over you, leaving you curled on the floor, tail tucked in close. He had laughed, delighted to finally have access to his research. He had taken samples of almost everything, fur, skin, muscle, blood. 

He would leave you on the ground after he was done, telling you to rest up and he would be back tomorrow. Each time you shifted back, but it was getting harder to do so. Everytime you shifted to your animal form, it took longer for you to find the power inside you, almost as if it was hiding from you. When he came back the next morning he would just send a guard in, telling them to beat you until you shifted. You tried to hold out, you really did, but it just became instinctual to curl in on yourself in order to avoid the hurt. Other times he would use spells and knives, would have you writhing and screaming before you finally gave in, shifting to your animal form. 

It had been days, you think. You weren’t really sure, time passed oddly in this place. You drifted, almost as if you were having an out of body experience. You started counting the numbers of visits you received from Astarion in an attempt to pass the time. It broke up the haze of pain that you lived in, listening to him ramble. He would tell you about his research, how he was looking for a spell or a potion that was easily dispensed so that no one would die needlessly. He knew the key was hidden in your abilities, shapeshifters healed the fastest and could survive more grievous wounds than humans, and he was determined to find it. 

You don’t know what caused it, but one day you woke up in an even worse state than you normally did. You had accepted the pain at this point, almost expecting it as part of your daily routine, but today you had had enough. 

When Astarion came for his normal visit, he again sent a guard in. This time though, you were ready. You had found a sharp rock in the wall last night, and had spent hours honing it to an edge against the stone. As he approached you, you could feel the heavy weight in your hand, hidden behind your back. You stood firm, not shying away as the man approached you. 

He saw this, saw the defiance in your eyes. He smirked, asking “You want to play today, eh?”

You didn’t respond, only gripping your weapon tighter. As he stepped into your reach, you lunged forwards, burying the stone in his neck before pulling it back, allowing his blood to spill forth. He staggered backwards, one arm reaching for the wall to support himself before collapsing to his knees as his other hand came up to press on the wound, blood bubbling from his lips. You turned to face the rest of the guards as they rushed in, stabbing at the hands that reached for you. Another guard drew back with a howl, a man stepping forward to take his place. You could feel the blows landing on your body, but you didn’t care. Your rage overwhelmed everything, removing the pain that had been your constant companion. You lashed out with disregard for your injured limb, arm protesting the movement. You had healed, yes, but it was not completely back to normal.

The guards began to overwhelm you, stunning you as they threw you to the floor, head bouncing against the stone. You curled into a ball, arms over your head to protect it, flashbacks of your village flying through your mind. The pain, the fear was back, overwhelming your every sense. 

In your desperation, you reached for that string that seemed to lead to Geralt, taking it and wrapping it around your soul in an attempt to hide, to heal, to do what you weren’t sure. All you knew was that it had helped protect you before, had helped to take the pain away. You could almost feel his presence, it was almost as if he was standing next to you, protecting you, soothing the pain that ravaged your body. You could sense him, could sense his frustration, which quickly turned to shock and surprise. Help, you pushed at him, sending your desperation and hurt, your fear towards him.

You could feel a touch against your skin, almost as if he was embracing you, protecting you from the men who continued to rain down blows on you. You could feel your skin split under the impact, but it was quickly taken away, soothed as if a gentle cloth was washing over your skin, the pain melting away like soap washed away after bathing. You cried out as you felt your ribs snap from a kick, reaching with your mind, reaching for that thread that connected you to the Witcher. You felt him reach back, entwining your souls together as he sheltered you from the pain. 

A warm feeling washed over you, filling every part of your being with a sense of belonging. It whispered to you in a low voice, let me in, I can help. You instinctively relaxed, you knew this presence. It had helped you before, and would again. As you let yourself fall into the feeling, you could feel Geralt falling with you, wrapping around each other as you went. As you fell into darkness, you could feel power surging through you. You looked for somewhere to send it, finding a shadowed figure filled with pain, hurt, blood, someone was hurt, you needed to help them. You were a healer, it was second nature for you to push the power towards it, telling it to soothe, to heal as you finally succumbed to the tug.

**~*~*~*~**

The pack had been travelling for days, having to stop everytime Geralt would falter, pain blooming across his face. The Witcher was frustrated, he was used to pain, but what he was feeling was increased tenfold. He knew why, and the thought filled him with terror. He had to push on, to find her, to protect her, there was nothing else for him to do. He needed to stop the hurt that she was experiencing, the terror that leaked through as she went through what, Geralt didn’t know. 

Jaskier and Ciri had begged Yennefer to do something to help the man, to take away the pain she was feeling, but every time they asked she just shook her head, a sad look on her face before moving towards Geralt, herbs to soothe the pain in her hands. As soon as he was ready they would leave again, the Witcher determined to not let anything delay him from reaching you. On the fourth day since they had reached your house, a week and a half since he had left you initially, something changed. 

Geralt felt a burst of warmth surge through him, stopping him in his tracks. “Geralt?” he distantly heard Yennefer calling his name but he was unable to respond. He was suddenly overwhelmed with fear, pain, desperation, forcing any other thought out of his head. He could feel you, could feel your presence. You were calling to him, pleading with him to save you. Blindly, he reached back, wrapping you in his presence, pulling the pain out of your body and into his. 

A grunt left his mouth as his knees gave out, fingers curling into the dirt as another surge of pain came through. He could feel a hand on his arm but he couldn’t tell whose it was. He had no idea who was in front of him, where he was, what was happening, all he knew was that you were in pain and he needed to help you. Gently, he pulled your soul against his, putting his mind between yours and the pain he could feel rippling through you. You nestled against his heart; the warmth he had felt earlier was coming from you. 

Do you trust me? 

Of course.

He took the string that connected the two of you and wrapped it around his heart, his mind, and his soul, gently nudging at your own as he did. 

Let me in, I can help. 

Immediately your mind opened to him, sharing everything you were with him. Geralt paused, astounded at the trust you had immediately given to him, astounded that you had bared yourself to him so willingly. As he tied the string around you, he gently pushed at your mind, guiding you to the darkness that waited patiently below, welcoming you into its soft embrace, a space free of pain and fear. As its arms reached out to envelope you, a wave of power burst out of you, pushing Geralt back to awareness. 

His eyes opened to see his pack on their knees in front of him, Jaskier holding Ciri against him as tears silently ran down her face, Yennefer with her hand on the Witcher’s arm. Slowly, he raised his head, seeing the terror in Yennefer’s eyes as he met her gaze. 

“I know where she is.” 

**~*~*~*~**

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