#but the bones on the inside??? RANCID BAD

[dear-saint-anthony]

Gio and Maria

TW: depression and kind of neglect 

Maria and Gio’s relationship is complicated to say the least. They love each other deeply, being the only present figure in each others lives for a long time, and reflect one another. However, their similarities cause conflict, neither of them enjoying the parts of themselves they see in each other. For a long time Maria was not a stable parental figure in Gio’s life.

Maria has never been able to handle her own issues, even when she was a young girl. She experienced bouts of depression as a child/teenager which her mother chalked up to her being purposefully difficult. Maria would often act out, snapping at her peers, breaking her possessions, sneaking off to perform or, most notably, running away when she was only 17. Maria’s acts of defiance could be seen as a form of self medication, chasing a feeling to subdue what she was or wasn’t feeling. 

Maria’s mother fed into her disillusioned coping mechanisms, it was impossible for her to see that her daughter may be struggling. She blamed Maria for how she felt, pushing her further away.

Maria had a troubled adulthood what with having her fiancé, and only friend, cheat on her multiple times with her knowing, being completely cut off from her family and financial insecurity. After running away from Narciso after becoming pregnant with Gio, Maria faced one of the few instances of debilitating depression she experienced. She had been depressed before while with Narciso, being unable to attend shows or move on with tour due to being ‘under the weather’, but this she had to face completely alone. After giving birth to Gio she suffered post natal depression and found herself unable to truly care for him. 

Throughout Gio’s early childhood he can remember dark patches, when his mother wouldn’t come out of her room, where he was left hungry but too little to reach the kitchen counter. He missed days of school, he itched his skin, unclean but unable to figure out how the bath worked. The dark patches were few and far between, and when Gio was very young, he and Maria never discussed it. One day she would simply come out of her room, pick him up and kiss him, and it was like it never happened. Gio thinks back on it now and wonders if it was just some persistent bad dream he had, as whenever he tries to mention it to his mam she denies it. (Most of these occurrences happened after visits from Gio’s father, or interactions between Maria and her family, which were very inconsistent and were rare occurrences)

These instances were easy to forget as Gio got older, until they were almost unsalvageable from the back of his mind. At least they would have been if not for the death of his uncle. Francesco died in a ‘terrible accident’ although almost everyone knows it was a suicide, no one will admit it. Francesco died, who was the only one to helped Maria in her darkest moments, who welcomed her back with open arms when she came home, who was the only one there when she gave birth to Gio, who let Gio experience what having a dad would have been like. Maria fell into a deep depression, which lasted many months. Gio remembers almost none of it, like one entire chunk of his life was picked from his brain and erased. The moments he does remember were disturbing, crying at his mothers closed door, tugging on her arm to feel sharp bones under paling skin or lying in bed beside her and watching the basin of her collar bone fill and fall with her rancid breath. He remembers this awful dreadful feeling that his mother was going to follow his uncle, that he would lose her too. Strategically, Gio does not think on this part of his life at all. But her remembers the sick rolling feeling that would lull from his little body and into the carpet beneath him, making it sway under his feet when he would attempt to climb the stairs. They would stretch on into darkness, a gaping smelling yawning at the top of the stairs, as the end of the corridor, and inside it his mother. Long black hair, lying on her side in a dim room that smelled like stale air and sleep filled mouths. 

Maria drew herself out of this depression after learning about Narcio’s other sons, her little boy’s brothers, and flung herself into the long process of fostering and adopting Juan. 

(Side note: This may be the only point of contingency Gio has towards Juan’s adoption. He’s always harboured a grudge, not towards Juan but towards his Mother, that Maria was able to pull herself out of her depression for Juan and not for him. Maria was always able to fully parent Juan quite consistently, while Gio never truly got to experienced this.)

When Maria was well, which was most of the time, their relationship waxed and waned. Maria was never quite sure how to raise Gio, and walked a fine line between too strict or too lax. Maria and Gio were extremely close, having only each other, so even as a child Gio shared very similar tastes with his mam, the same music and shows and activities. And with Gio having very few friends, almost all of his time was spent with her. However, whenever conflict arose (Which was quite often as Gio was quite a…difficult… child) Maria found herself falling back on her own mother’s parenting. Shouting and punishing without clear reason, ‘because I said so’’s and frequent silent treatments. Maria wasn’t able to deal with her own emotions, let alone Gio’s, so when tension grew she would simply pretend he didn’t exist until he apologised. 

Maria deeply feared that Gio would turn out the way she did, so she used strict demands to keep him from following her path. Forcing him into classical music extracurriculars, church twice a week, confession, confirmation, alter serving, all devices to be handed into her at whatever hour she felt. As Gio began developing odd behaviours and conversations, Maria read his diaries (This probably let to a lot more secrecy from Gio, he never truly forgave her for that.) She would change her rules at random, leaving Gio to struggle to catch up, never confident in her own parenting. 

Besides the strange bouts of strict parenting (Mussolini treatment in Gio’s words), Maria could flip very easily into being a very lax ‘cool’ mam. Despite the conflicts that arose from their similarities, there was a lot of solidarity there. They shared an odd sense of humour and a general distain for their neighbours and people at Gio’s school. Maria would swear around Gio, and allow him to do the same, she’d let him wander to the beach whenever he fancied and together they amassed an impressive audio library of any and all music. She would let him read any books he got his hand on, and even encouraged him to pursue his own literary interests over whatever his school set him. (Maria had a long history with Gio’s schools, always defending him no matter the behaviour, they share an unpleasant attitude towards organisations and neither like to be told what to do.) She never pushed him to make friends, knowing he hated the idea.

Maria’s ability to flip from being completely chill and relaxed into extremely strict at the drop of a hat always left Gio confused, never knowing what he could or couldn’t say to her, likely leading to him keeping things from his mam, in order to keep the peace. Even now, he keeps secrets to not distress her, knowing any wrong thing could send her spiralling into distress or anger. Gio has many mood swings that reflect his mams.

To say the least, when things were good between them they were vey good, and when things were bad they were very bad, neither Gio or Maria do things half way, so their relationship is a pendulum swing of extremes. 

When Gio thinks back on his childhood with his mother he can never make up his mind about how he feels, to him his mother was both his best friend and his dictator (He’s very dramatic). He’s made his peace that they’ll never go too long without arguing, that he’ll never truly make his mother understand his perspective on things, and him hers, and that there are things that happened when he was a kid that he knows shouldn’t have. But he knows that at the end of the day his mam would shout down teachers for him, would spend whats little left of her money on anything to make him happy, that she’s just scared and unwell and wants whats best for him, even though her ways of achieving this may not always be the best. 

tldr:

Maria and Gio are not ‘half arsed’ kind of people and their relationship reflects this.

[beautyofsorrow]

fic author q&a

tagged by @onmytallesttiptoesspinning :)

why do you write fanfic?

my brain is a kinder space to live inside when i write, and fic is the quickest way to get words down on the page these days. also, thinking about the characters is not enough. i need to put them in enclosures and study them. i need to take notes. i need to read those notes obsessively. i need to scatter my toys all over the carpet and invite my friends to admire and compliment them and play.

which of your posted stories do you think of the most even though the story is "finished"?

...........this one. it's definitely this one.

if you could give yourself fic advice from when you first started writing fic, what would that advice be?

stop quoting bible verses. let the characters curse. don't freak out when a b7 shipper shows up in the comments section of your friendship fic, you're not going to get sent to hell for being interpreted as writing gay fanfiction. in fact, give it another ten years and you WILL be writing gay fanfiction. on purpose. with your whole chest. please put the jadzia and worf action figures down and back away slowly, you're just gay for dax, you do not really ship them.

what's your relationship to fic stats?

unfriended, blocked, reported. i have workskins installed so i can only see my total word count. on individual works i can see word count, chapter count, and whether the fic is in a collection or not but that is IT. my life has gotten immeasurably better since i did this

is there a pairing or scenario or friendship that you miss writing? if so, why? if not, why not?

raffi & rios. my god i miss raffi & rios. every day i yearn for the day i can take that box off the highest shelf of the closet and open it back up

what motivates you to write?

brainworms. literally the characters are in my head and i need to get them out. if they stay there too long shit starts getting rancid. i also really enjoy participating in gift exchanges because it gives me a deadline, structure, and a community that is focused on writing rather than a specific fandom. we are all cheering each other on in our various anonymous projects and it's so great!

why do you write for the fandom(s) you write for?

mostly it's because a character or characters have crawled inside my brain. sometimes they're there for a month or a season, other times i come back to them multiple times over a span of many years (star trek is the main example here). since entering the exchange scene i have occasionally picked up one-off fandoms if a pinch hit needed filling or if i needed to make myself matchable in order to participate. i've created some of my favorite fics that way and written far outside my comfort zone. it's great :)

if you're stuck writing a WIP, what do you do?

take a break. take a break take a break take a break. let the story breathe. let myself breathe. come at it from a different angle. read poetry. steal the poem's bones. use them as a scaffold. if all else fails tuck the work into the abandoned folder so i can't see it anymore but do not under any circumstance delete. it's not a failed story. it's just not the right time yet. no work is wasted work. it all breaks down into compost. every tributary feeds a lake.

what do you wish people knew about comments?

whenever i post a fic, there is an absolutely agonizing period of time between posting and first comments when i am very seriously considering deleting my entire internet presence and disappearing into the mountains. this is a me thing. i understand that. i've come up with various coping strategies through the years with mild success, but no matter how much i believe in the work or how much coaching i provide for my brain, there is always that voice in the back of my head that wonders what if it's actually bad. what if it's really really bad. what if they're pointing and laughing and making fun of me. comments shut that voice up. comments provide tangible, outside-of-my-brain proof that the words i wrote made a positive difference in someone else's day, and sometimes they make a difference in ways i never expected. you do not have to tell an author that you like their fics, but when you do, you are never ever bothering them. they're not thinking you're a weirdo or a creep. they're actually probably grinning in relief. they're backing away from the delete button. they're unpacking their suitcase. they're breathing more easily and re-opening the word doc and showing up at the sandbox of creativity to play another day.

maybe there's a question you wish had been on here. what's that question (and answer)? -> what are some fanworks that have inspired you or fed your own creativity?

Candy and Chlorine by scioscribe is so sharp and smart and sexy. 100% biggest inspiration for my jennifer's body fic An Unofficial Anthology of the Online Fandom for the Yellowjackets Tragedy by banerries is so CREATIVE and so FUNNY. it reminds me that at the end of the day fic is supposed to be about play i recommend this barbie/dracula fic to a different friend at least once a month. stunning character study, so unusual, i love love love crack treated seriously a little lower than the angels by mylittleredgirl got me to see the vision of b'elanna/kes for one lovely lovely sitting. i am forever grateful to rarepair writers. they encourage me to think deep, write hard, and trust the process of creativity @stardustcityhag's art is stunning. i am always on some level trying to channel the feeling of it when i'm writing @zannolin's fics consistently feed my desire for delicious-ambiguous-something-amphibious not-shipfic-but-not-not-shipfic. i've written some of my best and most favorite fics after reading their work. their national treasure polycule fic pops into my brain at least once a month. i adore it @73chn1c0l0rr3v3l's smut is some of my favorite smut in the whole world. so sensuous, so vivid, so lush and vivid and aching. i am always at all times meditating on this una/la'an bathhouse thunderstorm fic they wrote me. also, this una/nhan breathplay fic. and this satanic panic fic. and this la'an + insomnia one. i could go on

tagging @zannolin and @ceruleanphoenix7

[vampiromano]

okay uhhhh all my thoughts are scrambled so this is just kind of midnless yapping. about. stuff

1. okay so the king is. yeah idk why I trusted him when I should've logically understood that the guy has absolutely no idea about the previous convos we had. it does make me wonder whether I could've changed his mind by asking EVERYTHING and gifting him th flower all over again but. I doubt it. why would he change if this is all he has y'know. and if his literal god sorta told him he was doing what he had to.i dunno he's very interesting and I'm actually looking forward to the next fight

2. also looking forward to my next chat with loop. gotta wonder what they'll have to say about the guy who was so desperate to be understood thry Wished to get another self to talk to. I'm not sure it's gonna be the chat that gets me to The Reveal Of Loop's Identity as Siffrin2 or whatever BUT it's certainly heading that way if it isn't.

or maybe not! they're fun like that.

3. colours!!!!!!!!! nothing more to add just Colours.

ACTUALLY definitely something to add. did the same thing that happen to colours happen to the island????? is that it???????? will it be explained????? i really doubt it'll be explained. alas.

4. How Does Loop Feel About Their Home Country No Longer Existing. do they feel like Siffrin? or are they avoiding it the way Siffrin was for a while? are they detached bc now it's technically not theirs (assuming they're Alternate Siffrin and not Future Siffrin, bc I don't think Future Siffrin would make that much sense? okay maybe. some sense but. idkkkkk)? LOOP I NEED TO LOOK INSIDE YOUR BRAIN

5. Isabeau is soooo perceptive I luv him. my aversion to the crush has gotten slightly better the more Siffrin is reciprocating it and the less I'm thinking of Siffrin as Guy I'm Playing As (the more I think of them as A Character and not An Avatar, is what I mean). so I'm growing to appreciate him a lot more he's my fave guy. truly so cool. I get him. if nobody got me I know my man isabeau got me. he's my best friwnd.

6. fuck okay where was i. anyway everyone's reacting differently the more time passes and I think it's bc Siffrin is having such an astronomically bad fucking time it's transcending time. i feel like if I were in a room with them I'd just DIE I'd just say fuck this stupid baka life and drop to the ground and never move again from how rancid their vibes are. Siffrin is having the worst time anyone's ever had and I feel so sorry for him I hope I can at the very least lead him well enough he'll TALK to ANYONE(other than loop) about ANYTHING or else.

(I feel like talking to Loop is not very helpful bc Loop is just THEM but WORSE. like they already had their worst life. I don't think much good can come from talking to the version of yourself that DEFINITELY had it bad as well and seemingly BECAME A FUCKING STAR about it. idk. I'm rambling. I need to know more about Loop I need to help them also. I hope they get a happy ending with my Bones.)

7. Odile my best friend Odile is ALSO being very perceptive but she's kinda scary about it. either way I hope god do I HOPE she'll be the first to figure the loops out. or SOMETHING. bc I need Siffrin to talk to her about them I need to know what she THINKS.

8. irks me that nobody ever mentions that Siffrin poses for the picture!!! they're literally smiling!!!! every time!!!!! anyone say anything please!!!!!

9. Siffrin cut himself on glass. I was surprised! not sure it's quite self harm yet bc it didn't seem intentional BUT I have a feeling we're heading down that route!!! which is interesting!!!!!! they're certainly very self loathing and quite safe of Proper Death. idk. need to keep playing I guess.

10. Messi❤️

11. anyway yeah that's it I've got a lot of thoughts I hope someone found them mildly amusing at least!!!!

[emmy-dekarios-bg3]

Heart of the Weave - a Baldur’s Gate Fanfiction

CHAPTER 3

I get dinner prepared and have it ready for Gale on the stove once he’s finished with his studies. Sweet potatoes, green beans, and some delicious steak I got from a nearby butcher. I ate just a little, but nausea found me again like a cold-blooded killer, so I lay back down on the sofa, feeling overwhelmed with these disgusting feelings. The body aches make themselves present as well, bringing an overwhelming extra sense of discomfort along with the struggle to breathe properly, as if a heavy stone is sitting on my lungs.

“Emmy, my dear, won’t you go to the city to see a doctor?” Tara asks, sitting on my legs. I sigh and begin scratching her tiny, soft head. She purrs as I stroke her soft fur with the tips of my fingers.

“Is there even a doctor here in Waterdeep? Surely there is, right?” I ask. Droplets of sweat pour down my forehead like waterfalls, but chills cover my entire body. Hot flashes certainly are not a good sign.

“Unfortunately, no. There was, but they left. Now, one must travel to Baldur’s Gate to get any sort of treatment. With the evil gone, it would be worth a try.”

“I’m a little paranoid of doctors anyway, thanks to the House of Healing.” The scalpels. The blood. The screeches of the nurses.

“The House of…what?” I forgot Tara wasn’t familiar with the disturbing events that happened in the Shadowlands, one of them being a fucked-up doctor who murdered patients and considered it curing them. In the name of Shar, of course. The images of a hollowed-out human head and the mutilation of the human torso isn’t exactly a pleasant memory I want to be reminded of.

“Nevermind.”

“If you want to feel better, you will need to travel to Baldur’s Gate, I’m afraid.” Hearing the words ‘Baldur’s Gate’ is bringing back more trauma than I anticipated, and I was born there. How things have changed ever so drastically, but how badly I want to find answers. Maybe it won’t be so bad; maybe the entire city has changed since the death of Lord Enver Gortash and his obnoxious Steel Watch.

“What do you think could be wrong with me?” I ask, my voice raspy and weak. “I’ve never felt so awful. Well, not in a long time anyway. Not since the Bhaal Temple.” Ah, yes. The lingering odor of rotting corpses is definitely hard to forget. Then again, the adrenaline rush made it hard for me to stay sick and eventually the rancid odor was easily accustomed to. Sad, isn’t it?

“I don’t want to say, just because I don’t want Gale to overhear me.” Tara knows something, or at least has a strong suspicion, but why doesn’t she want Gale to know? “Plus, I could always be wrong.”

Gale comes down to the kitchen, grabbing his dinner but notices my dreary body on the sofa shortly after. He stares at my heavy eyes, bags sagging underneath them as if I’m a decaying corpse or rapidly aging somehow. My fatigue is making itself known, inside and out. Back when I was fighting and saving the day, no spells would make me feel this dreadful, so whatever this is must be serious.

“Baby, we need to take you to a doctor. As soon as possible.” His voice is filled with concern; he can’t stand to see me like this. I groan loudly, but take a moment to catch my breath. Walking to Baldur’s Gate will be a huge pain in my body, but surely I’m not dying. Whatever it takes, right?

“Can’t we just…call Shadowheart? Where’s that old man Withers?” Gale laughs lightly, admiring my humor but it quickly fades to a serious tone again.

“You’re so cute. Well, we can certainly try to summon the bone man, but I’m not quite sure neither him or Shadowheart will be able to assist in your vile and spontaneous predicament.”

“Unfortunately, we will need our other companions regardless. It seems the only option is to go to Baldur’s Gate for some sort of diagnosis or cure.” Gale sits down by my feet, rubbing them with his bare hands. He half-smiles as he delicately attends to my aching body, but I can see in his eyes a sense of fear.

“I assume Tara told you. Quite the intelligent tressym she is. Must have gotten it from her father,” Gale teases. I can’t help but laugh at his little comment. I often wonder how this man loves me as much as he does; I’m no sage.

“Well, of course she did! Now, wait…” Gale gives me a puzzled expression. “It’ll take us days to get there and you work at the Academy tomorrow.” He kissed my forehead, and at that very moment I realized the heat radiating off my body; I could feel it on his lips. A fever.

“It’s much appreciated that you consider my job in mind, but you mean the world to me and your life is valuable. I don’t want to risk losing you again. Plus, a fever is certainly not a good sign. What if you have some sort of internal infection? You never know how the world is nowadays.”

So, we decided to call upon Withers. We found him in a tomb and he, for some reason, has helped us ever since. He can help resurrect those who die (most of the time, anyway), and can assist us in various ways if we’re struggling. He’s been a godsend to us.

He gave us a spell for us to summon him in case we’re in danger or need of dire assistance: Mort Tal Witheris. At that very moment it was cast by Gale, he showed up in our living room. His decayed skeleton-like body and gentle mannerisms are hard to forget. I wonder what the old bone man has been up to these days.

“Ah, Withers. Thank the Gods the spell worked. Listen, we have a very urgent…uh…task that we need to handle,” Gale says, then looks over at me with sad eyes, realizing I’m becoming more weak by the minute. Withers makes eye contact with me, observing my body’s weakness and nods his head slowly. It’s as if he knows and Gale doesn’t even have to tell him. The question is, does he know what’s wrong with me? Surely the honest and blunt Withers would say what it is, right?

“Ah, thou art in need of services. It appears she is very weak and needs medical attention urgently. I advise the journey over to Baldur’s Gate but it appears there will need to be extra assistance on the way there. Does thou need the former companions to make the way there?” It’s as if Withers immediately knew the urgency of the situation and figured it would be hard for Gale to fight alone, in case anything were to happen along the way.

“Oh thank Withers… We need our companions to help assist us on yet another journey to Baldur’s Gate. Emmy is violently ill and I can’t have her fight if there is danger. Is this something you can help us with?” Gale and Withers both look at my dreadful eyes and weak posture.

“I shall call upon thy companions to guide you along this journey. May the weave protect her and the spawn as you make your way back to Baldur’s Gate. Wait here for a moment.” Withers vanishes into thin air, a cloud of vapor lingering around the room for a moment.

“Wait, what did he mean by ‘spawn’? I wonder if he was referring to Tara,” Gale teases.

“Gale! I’m offended!” I laugh at Tara’s remark with her sassy tone. Hopefulness is more present than doubt at this point, and I’m really looking forward to finding a solution to this illness. It doesn’t feel like a stomach bug, but rather much worse. Please don’t let it be some sort of infection or parasite. I could honestly live with anything else.

Just a few moments later, Withers appears in the room once more.

“Thy companions should be here by tomorrow. Please make sure she stays hydrated. It’s more vital than you acknowledge.”

“Thank you,” I say with a soft voice. He nods and vanishes once more. I wonder where he disappears in the meantime. Gale and I look at each other, both of us just a little nervous but thankful that Withers came through after all. I wonder what lies in store for us?

“Well, Withers is helping us, and I’m forever grateful for it. That’s a good sign,” I say.

“True. Despite the rather petrifying circumstances, it’s a good day. We’ll get to see our old friends once more, just like we talked about earlier.” Though feeling rather vile, I do have a small glimmer of excitement that’s keeping me going.

[sl1tcl1t]

Life Update: Idk where else to write down my thoughts and experiences for almost the past year.

To get myself caught up with the last post I made from last year, it was my final year in HS and I never wanted to leave that rancid hél/hø\e so damn bad. I finally graduated and got into college. This freshman year is the absolute worst. On top of that, I couldn't get a dorm room, which is expected according to the hierarchy of classmen. But anyway, this year's schedule has been extraordinarily harmful to my physical and mentally. Since I don't have a dorm, I gotta commute to my classes every single day. In my case, I must drive all the way from the south to the city (1hr 30min on avg.) This is not a bad drive, unless u wanna beat the I-75/I-85 9 - 5 traffic. Which ALSO MEANS I gotta wake up at 4:00 am and leave the house by 5 if I want to arrive in time for my 8 and 10 am classes. Additionally, my last class during Mon,Weds, and Fri ends at 5pm. I don't get home till about 7. AND on top of all that, Tue and Thurs is when I work my part time shift. The latest my shift can end is at 7:30pm and it takes me at least 30 mins to get home. If I want to get the most sleep possible, I gotta be in bed by 9. My sleep schedule bc of this is incredibly fùçk3d up. Luckily, me and my friend made a little room for me to sleep in my car. Which is also another problem. Bc Im too damn sleep deprived, I oversleep multiple times and end up missing classes. Classes where I can't easily get a PowerPoint w/readily available info to write. I feel incredibly behind.

My mental and physical health has gotten progressively worse since I moved outta my mom's house. I really don't wanna get into grave detail abt my family, but TLDR; both parents are complexly problematic, but one's more flexible than the other. But, Jesus Christ Almighty, living with this man is insufferable. Nothing but complaining, guiltripping, nonchalant shaming, and being plain irritating. He brings a wave of negative energy anytime he enters a room. Granted, there are things that he complains about that are justified, but he's getting more and more senile everyday. So he just gets mad at anything now. It pisses me off but also makes me sad. Another thing is that work is overexerting my well-being whilst giving me such a low pay. For context, I work in a warehouse now. Lifting boxes every other day that are half the size of you will give you nausea. My feet have blisters and my hands are cramping. My calves burn, my entire arm is aching, and my head pounds harder than ever. My friend suggests that I might have burn out, and I believe it with every bone in my body. Working at a place that accepts newly hs grads, ofc there would be å$5h0lés my age and worse. The smell has gotten worse since I moved in w dad. He essentially lives in a white trash neighborhood, so the smell outside is horrendous. This smell has affected the inside of my house and now I reek. And the ppl at work love to remind me abt my smelly ass despite trying my hardest to mask it. I seriously cannot stand other day in there and hopefully I can get a new job this upcoming summer.

But apart from all this, the cherry on top of this shit show was today after work. I got off early and wanted to visit this little gravesite around in my area to take pics and upload on here. I chickened out. It's too damn dark for me to take any so I walked around, contemplating life per usual. I decided to go inside the convenience store. I asked if there were any sleeping pills/melatonin and the guy had asked a question that made my mind go blank,

"Are you homeless?"

Never in life would I hear those words issued to me, but if I'm gonna be completely honest, I live at my dad's house, not paying any bills or insurance (yet), I sleep in my car majority of the day, and I have the worst pay to labor ratio. So technically, Imma borderline broke ass freeloading bum. But anyway, I was even more in shock when he rang my items. I forgot my wallet in the car and told him I was going to run out n grab it, but he just gave me the bag with an empathetic, "it's okay". And now I feel like a piece of shit to completion. Bc in hindsight, Im not HOMELESS, but it damn sure feels like I am.

I can't believe Im turning into every person I've met in the workforce. Ppl who just live paycheck to paycheck and just let the days past by; not doing anything but working. I use to make fun of those ppl at my last job as a cashier while in HS, but seriously, I got the realest reality check of my life. I really cannot live a life like that for 30+ years if I can't figure something out by graduation. Else I'm better off with maggots in my eyes and my skin wilting in the ground.

I'm done ranting, I need some sleep.... GN and happy Halloween ✌🏽

[overmorrowrpg]

MANIA KARINE NOTTURA — 28, M — MAGIC.

A HAGSTONE WASHES UP ON THE SHORE. You find it, you of the eternal gazes, you of the endless wanting. You find it and you find yourself— hole through the center, buffeted by the waves of others into the form you take now. How does the saying go? You're born under a bad sign. Or maybe a star simply laughed in the hour of your birth, and there you were. But really, it does not matter where you are born of. What you are born of. What matters is the smell of sea water gone rancid, the way that the mysteries of the world unravel under your fingers. Most have magic, rivulets of control thrumming in their veins, but you: frenetic fingers flicking through a book, pilfered from a woman who will never miss it, believe that you might be the one to perfect it. You were never one for the rhyme or reason of The House Above The Waters, their rhetoric classes and persuasive speeches, their seminars on successful communication. WHAT IS EASIER TO COMMUNICATE THAN POWER? Than hunger? Ghosts and gods folds under the weight of your history, gutter rat dreaming, cutting through the frigid air. There is no sleep for hungry things, and you, who only know the shape of your want through the way that it eats through your being, take the means and weave them into ends. You only want control— over your life, your destiny, your name. The rest could perish in your quest. It would not matter. There has only ever been a vicious ache that you are running from, a untenable and uncertain future to run towards. Where will hunger go when it has been sated? Will you ever find it?

CONNECTIONS

PRAGMA — A HUNGER STILL UNRAVELING.

FINGERS ACHE, EYES STARE. They are a marvel, an oddity. They are something that ought to not exist. Most ghosts only linger as echoes, memories and emotions clinging on to the skin of the world in discombobulated folds. But PRAGMA is different. PRAGMA is a thing still living, a mind whirring akin to your own. In your own fascination, you nearly miss the way that they trail you, ever hopeful, ever unsure. Your fingers ache, wanting to reach into their insides and see their secret for yourself. If they want answers, you might provide them— but are they willing to let you take your due?

STORGE — THERE IS NO REASON FOR THIS, ONLY A STARVED DOG'S LOGIC ABOUT BONES.

It's not that they're not deserving— by whatever metric that might be measured by, and really, people are so strange about their metrics, their measures and their graphs. But it's that you know you could be better. Sharp eyes watch the way that STORGE conducts their movements, the routine of a soldier still laced through their movements. The others flock to them, find solace in the direction given. But fingers twitch, eyes blink. MOVEMENTS COME LIKE THE TICK OF MACHINES. They are simply too predictable, too set in their understanding of what must be done. In the dark quiet hours, you dream of what you would do in their stead. What you might do if loyalty could be held like a leash. Hands twitch, fingers shake, as you reach for their throat.

EROS — I WANT EVERYTHING YOU HAVE.

It's the sort of attraction that ought to fade. The sort of feelings that have no place in the cavity of your ribcage. THEY ARE BOTH DESIRE AND LOATHING— apathy is a cardinal sin in your world, boredom a word you cannot endure. There can only be hunger. And yet, they make light of your need, your ever busy fingers. They are far too soft— child coddled by luxury, an absence of need— and yet all your plans are transformed into foolish fancies in their mouth. This is not affection formed from delicate touches and the looks of a lover's language— this is something that you have no name for, which races through your veins with a fire's vitriol. Do you want them at your side? Do you want them kneeling before you? Do you want to lace your fingers through their life and watch as the whole thing unravels? You cannot even tell for yourself what the meaning of this feeling that nestles close to your heart is. All you know is that it might be the blade to undo you: you must refuse to relinquish it.

TAKEN BY KIERA ✧ XING YE ZHI JIAN

[i-did-not-mean-to]

Chapter 9 : Fíli

For @laurfilijames, my beloved friend, I submit another fic for @deanobingo 2022.

This is chapter 9 of the blursed AU, featuring Rhee - a tired HR lady who has to deal with too much crap from her co-workers and superiors relating to their messed-up love life - and her college friend Michele who'll meet a very surprising man.

Character: Fíli

Prompt: Meet-cute

Words: 1,9 k

Michele groaned as she pulled her coat tighter around her shivering frame; she had been waiting for her friend to meet her in the square for 10 minutes already and Rhee was seldom late.

After checking her phone once more – no new messages – she shoved it into her pocket resolutely and decided to walk a little to cast off the chill that was seeping into her very bones.

She hated being out in the open like that; despite having fled across the country, she could still feel his rancid breath gusting down the back of her neck like toxic fumes.

Shaking the feeling off with a violent shiver, Michele looked up at the tall, menacing buildings and struggled against the sick feeling in her stomach. What if something terrible had happened to Rhee? 

She was so lost in thought that she did not see the man hastening across the plaza until she bumped into him; she would have fallen in her visceral shock if his strong hands had not – with incredible presence of mind – wrapped around her arms and steadied her. She flinched back with a small cry as the feeling of being restrained triggered a wave of nauseating panic within her throat.

“Lady? I saw you pacing around, looking harried, is anything the matter?” the stranger asked gently; he had bright blue eyes that held a good-humoured twinkle and his bulky frame shielded her from the cutting wind and potential prying gazes.

He laughs often and heartily, she thought and the realisation that there wasn’t an ounce of bad temper in that open gaze made her churning stomach settle a little after a moment of blind, demented fear.

“No,” she squeaked softly. “I am waiting for a friend, but she’s nowhere to be found. Is this a dangerous place?”

He cocked his head pensively and looked up at the building she was patrolling so faithfully.

“Hmmm,” he then hummed, “I don’t think any bodily harm has come to her inside these walls, but she might have been driven insane by the idiocy of her colleagues.”

He cackled at that and wiped an apologetic hand over his mouth as if to take back his harsh words. “They’re our rivals,” he explained, “and I have to badmouth them any chance that I get.”

Then, he extended that saving hand confidently and introduced himself as Fíli, senior manager of Erebor, before inviting her to grab a warming drink at a coffee shop down the street with him while she waited. “No need to turn into an icicle, right?”

“What are you doing here then? In the middle of the workday?” she asked warily, too distrustful to follow a stranger to a second, undisclosed location.

“I am chasing my best pal, Ori,” he informed her soberly and stepped back when he understood that the flash of renewed anxiety in her sea-green eyes was provoked by his casual familiarity; Fíli didn’t like to overstep, and he would never have made someone else uncomfortable on purpose. He pulled out his phone and showed her a picture of Ori to distract her, mumbling dramatically about how the Finwëans might have taken his friend hostage.

“Is that something that happens here?” Michele gasped, wide-eyed.

“No,” he admitted, but a minute frown appeared on his handsome face. “He has not been himself today and I worry. We already have two friends who’ve disappeared now…”

Michele leaned closer to inspect the photograph more closely.

“I know that dude,” she cried out suddenly. “He went to college with us!”

Her face darkened and an ominous “uh-oh” escaped her pinched lips; Michele now knew what might have kept her friend and she didn’t like it in the least.

“Who is ‘us’?” Fíli asked eagerly, nodding at the corner of the plaza again when he saw her shiver and shake in a particularly vicious gale. “Come, I’ll buy you a coffee or a tea. I promise that I mean you no harm and – anyway – there will be plenty of people who are on their lunch break, so you won’t be alone with an unknown and rather peculiar man.”

He could easily see that something dark was haunting the beautiful woman – standing forlorn in front of a forbidden block of stone and glass – and he instinctively felt that he could not leave her alone; despite not knowing what it was that had frightened her so, he was sure that she was not lying and willing to protect and defend her.

Confident that he was doing the right thing, Fíli conjured up his most disarming smile to put her at ease so he could get her out of the cold and into a safe space where he could survey all the exits.

“The friend I was supposed to meet,” Michele replied vaguely and followed him at a distance as he started moving slowly towards the brightly lit shop looking like a sparkling, colourful gem amongst the drab grey office towers.

She did not tell him how bitterly Rhee had cried about that unprepossessing creature who had kissed and fled like a despicable heartbreaker, because angering the powerful-looking stranger – all broad shoulders and mighty arms – seemed like a dangerously bad idea to her.

Moreover, this was not her secret to tell. She wondered though whether Rhee was aware of Ori’s presence in her immediate vicinity; maybe, her coming here would turn out to be a blessing in disguise for she didn’t even want to imagine what state her friend would be in, once she found out that her old nemesis was alive and well. 

The placid lagoons of Fíli’s eyes turned into sharp ice within an instant and, despite having reached the front door of his destination, whirled around brusquely to glare at Michele.

“Someone from his college is here?” he asked, intensity flaring in his gaze and stiffening his demeanour drastically; Michele drew back in intuitive fear.

Immediately, Fíli lifted his hands placatingly in a gesture of goodwill. “It’s just,” he muttered as his fingers clutched the doorknob so tightly that his knuckles were white under his tanned skin, “that he had his heart broken in college. It’s taken a long time for us to build him back up.”

“He had his heart broken?” Acid disbelief and stinging mockery infused Michele’s voice now – an echo of the woman she had been before – as she placed her hand above his and drew the door open without commenting on Fíli’s hesitation. “I very much doubt that!”

Sheepishly, he followed her inside. Warm, fragrant air thawed their stiff limbs and allowed them to relax just a little after this moment of tension.

It was clear that they both were keepers of secrets that were not their own and that they were now wondering – each within the safety of their own most intimate thoughts – whether they held sharp-edged fragments of the same story. 

As by tacit agreement, they pressed their lips into thin lines, signalling thus that they’d not divulge more than their biting remarks and bristly reactions had already given away.

“So,” Fíli smiled as soon as they had sat down at a small table, steaming coffee mugs clasped between their clammy hands, “what brings you to this place? Are you just visiting your friend?”

His eyebrows twitched ever so slightly upon understanding that a part of him wholeheartedly disliked the idea of this mysterious, fearful yet principled woman disappearing as suddenly as she had cropped up in his life.

“I…” Michele faltered. “I don’t know.” She had not found either the time or the energy yet to think about her future beyond the next few steps – getting away from that dreadful man, leaving her home under the cover of night, making it to relative safety – and she had been relying on Rhee to help her figure out what was to be done after.

“We’re always looking for people,” Fíli grinned invitingly. “Forgive me if this is an unwelcome pitch, but – with the unchecked growth of the businesses around here – we are constantly hiring. Just in case you wanted to stay a little longer.”

“Do you have a lot of staff turnover?” Michele inquired pointedly for she was much confused by this person who treated her as if she was an esteemed friend rather than a complete stranger.

“Not really,” he said casually. “It’s hard to explain to outsiders.”

He scratched his golden beard pensively and retied his equally as shining hair into a clean ponytail at the back of his head to gain some time.

“We’re all locked up together in this cauldron of madness,” he then chuckled, “and we do our best to drive one another mental, but – at the end of the day – I don’t really know what we’d do if one of our competitors left to settle somewhere else. It’s intense and annoying, but…” 

He shrugged and gave her an infectious, blinding grin of boyish mischief. “So, you said your friend works for the Finwëans? They’re a tough bunch!” 

“Yeah,” Michele replied slowly; she had kept in touch with Rhee, so she knew how much her friend loved her job despite the more than just occasional office drama between her co-workers.

“Well, here’s my number,” Fíli said and dug out a pristine card from the breast pocket of his flawlessly starched button-down, “in case you’re interested in working for Erebor Inc. or if you want to have coffee again sometime maybe?”

“I’ll…think about it,” Michele answered evasively. In her heart of hearts, she had to admit that she had not felt as safe and happy in a long time as she now did in the calming presence of this sturdy blonde who kept grinning at her as if her presence was truly delightful to him.

Just as she was about to say something to that effect, her phone rang, and she breathed a sigh of relief as soon as she saw Rhee’s name flash across the display.

“Sorry, I have to take this,” she whispered to Fíli and turned aside a little. “Hey,” she breathed into the phone, “where have you been? What has happened?”

Fíli heard a flood of words pour out of the device but he couldn’t make any of them out; he would have to find out more about this Rhee, he decided, and his first stop would be Ori if he ever managed to extricate his friend from the clutches of the Finwëans. 

No doubt, if this siren remembered him with so much suppressed emotion, Ori would be able to tell him more about her and that mysterious friend of hers in turn.

When the woman nodded apologetically first at him and then at the exit, his hand shot out, but he merely brushed his fingertips tenderly along the inside of her wrist instead of grabbing her passionately as was his instinct. 

“Your name?” he mouthed pleadingly.

“Michele,” she replied with a smile that was brighter and more earnest than any he had seen thus far; his heart sped up and he had to fight the urge to actually prevent her from leaving.

“Yeah, as you were late, I went to have coffee with a dude. I was about to faint from the cold. Hmmm? It’s a long story…see you in a bit,” Michele spoke into her phone in the precise staccato of a woman who knew that her interlocutor was able to follow her fast speech easily.

With a last, lingering look at Fíli, she left the coffee shop and hastened back to where he had first found her and where – he sincerely hoped – he would stumble upon her once more very soon. 

So, this was a short glimpse into the blursed AU. I love you @laurfilijames and I hope you'll enjoy this <3

If anything is too unclear, I am happy to answer any and all questions about it :)

As always, lots of love from me <3

-> Chapter 11

[sseanettles]

nothing grows in corpses (in the earth of me)

dream x hob gadling | mature | Finally cross-posting my take on the fandom classic of the show progresses as the comics do, even to The Wake. Until Death resurrects Morpheus and forces the choice of "redemption" upon him instead of suicide. It goes...horribly. No good. Very bad. Instead of learning the lesson, Morpheus (in his infinite wisdom) opts instead for a highly effective existence strike until one day Hob Gadling stumbles upon his ghastly handiwork and immediately decides that this just won't do. Man Who Refuses To Die vs. Man Who Refuses To Live: fight.

Dead Dove, Do Not Eat for the following: graphic depictions of starvation, illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, blood and gore, loss of autonomy, etc. etc. This is some classic old world whump, folks! But I promise it's also supremely healing in the end.

CH. 4: spiegel im spiegel | 4.4 k | AO3 link | prev part | next part

(for those who have been so very patient, Hob finally arrives)

Little remained after that point that tethered him to reality. With Delirium and Barnabas his only steadfast attendants, Morpheus oscillated wildly between the comfort of the dog’s warmth and softness, kaleidoscopic colors, whirlwinds of butterflies and frogs and fish, hellish hallucinations that crawled along his skin and burrowed into his bones, and then the plummeting dark of unconsciousness where his only other companion awaited him, armed to the teeth with Nightmares that had once been his own to wield.

Barnabas continued to steal food and water for him, and each time he left his offerings within his reach. And each time, Morpheus would let it go to the rats, to the pigeons and the crows and the feral cats who hunted all of them and came away hungry still. Sometimes, his scavengers were of the human variety, and when they came, Del and Barnabas were nowhere to be found. It was only him, in the hot, humid air of the latest heatwave, feeling every molecule of grime and brick and grit against his skin like a jagged-edged boulder. The sweat had been horrid when it had existed. It had cloyed like a rancid honey and filled his nose with a new kind of stench.

When his sweat dried up, when not even that was within his body’s ability to conjure, what followed was worse.

Far, far worse.

Where once he had felt gummy, his skin now stretched to an old, forgotten drum skin that split and peeled and blistered. His eyes stopped blinking, and when he did manage to creak them open, his vision burned and dried so quickly he had to pry them shut again.

Sometimes, sometimes, Morpheus very painfully surrendered to his thirst despite his petty obstinance, because the headaches that came in this state were horrible, horrible, horrible. His insides hurt. His outsides hurt. So much pain, so much twisting and fading and hot and cold and falling apart. Everything hurt. Water was the sole thing in his mind on those days, and he hated himself as deeply as he hated the beasts from which he forged the gates of the Dreaming for every sip he took. Even when he did manage to down the liquid, he nearly threw it back up, choking and coughing on every first attempt he made.

As the summer months waned on, Barnabas tried more and more frequently to ply him with water. Once, and no further, the dog tried to get him to down some kind of sports drink during the worst of the heat waves, and the effect had been instantly grotesque. His desiccated insides writhed and twisted, and he threw the sickly-sweet fluid back up as soon as it hit his gut, his throat spasming shut as his stomach continued to heave long after it was empty. It was horrid, it was ghastly, it was no, no, no—

The bugs returned, then, as they were wont to do when Delirium saw him overwhelmed with one noxious stimulus and tried, in her own sweet, ill-conceived way, to distract him with something else. Now, though, they were in his hair that had somehow continued to grow despite his starvation, in his beard that was wiry and just as brittle as his hair as it sprouted across the lower half of his face. Barnabas barked and pushed at his charge, driving her shimmering mirage of a self back until she was out of the alley and around the corner.

All the while, Morpheus continued to scratch and swat, and his brittle nails split alongside his skin as he let out a wheezing sort of scream that was nothing but a strangled breath. His mind yelled its pleading, unanswered litany.

STOP! Del, stop, please, stop—

o\\__oOoOoOo__//o

In the deepest throes of his delirium, he imagined that he saw Destiny standing there at the mouth of the alley, staring down at him with something that was either indifference or disapproval. It was not really Destiny, of course, because Destiny did not care enough for his younger siblings to appear like this. That would mean leaving his garden, leaving his maze, and Destiny did that for nobody.

What was it he had always said?

I wish I could live your life for you.

Do you still wish you could live my life now? he demanded of his brother’s visage with as powerful of a mental voice as he could manage. His real vocal cords had long since gone mute, withered away from disuse.

Destiny only stared at him, his book still open in his shackled hands, a single page still waiting between his callused, aged fingers—partially lifted off the next but not yet turned.

Morpheus never once thought to describe the way his eldest brother looked at him as sadness. Such an interpretation was a weakness of his own mind, a lie not to be entertained.

It was like this, entombed within this complete detachment from reality, that the kid found him.

Internally, he referred to them as kid, though they were near adulthood if not in the early stages of it already. Physical appearance of age was a rather useless, inaccurate indicator to one of Morpheus’ former existence. Appearances had been nothing but deceit, and frequently the younger something looked, the older it was.

He had yet to learn that this was sometimes the case of mortals, too.

The kid was on the scrawny, slight side, all angles and sharpness in the manner of one newly grown into their body. Their eyes matched the humid summer storm that brewed overhead, the first monsoon that heralded the shift of seasons from summer to autumn. Their dark curls frizzed into a full-bodied tangle about their head and framed their long, light brown face as the rain prepared to break. They had a soft, warm voice, like a fireplace, but it hesitated, faltered, like guttering sparks instead of the steady blaze of a well-tended hearth. It was a voice not used to burning bright but rather expecting to be doused and stamped out.

They ducked into Morpheus’ alley one early, early morning, hiding first from drunken shouts laced with vitriol and hate and then the flash of police cars and their subsequent torches. The exposing harshness of their lights neared, scanning the mouth of the alley in preparation to pry deeper into the gloom, when a dog’s vicious barking echoed down the road like the thunder brewing overhead.

The lights snapped away from them to the animal. The barks broadened and lengthened into howls and snarls, and the booted footfalls drew away.

Morpheus made a weak note to thank Barnabas. It would be lost by dawn, slipping through the sieve of his mind to the shattered, buzzing dissociation that was most of his existence now.

The kid had stayed with him for a while after that, through the last heatwaves of autumn and the oscillating temperatures that accompanied the season’s storm bursts. Perhaps they were drawn to him by that pack mentality humans seemed to share when left to their own devices: that desire to approach the wounded and the withdrawn, to gather and piece together and inquire. To fix as much as they also destroyed. The kid would sometimes disappear for a day or so at a time, but always they would return.

They would try to talk to him. To coax him to eat until they caved and asked if they could have the food and drink instead if he wasn’t going to take it. Morpheus would do his best to twitch something, to exhale or inhale a little more loudly to let them know it was okay. The kid would catch his drift and would tuck in ravenously while showering Barnabas with affection and praise.

Once, the kid had risked touching Morpheus in thanks for his sharing. He laid a hand upon his knee and brought a water-soaked piece of bread to his lips in a gentle, well-meaning attempt to coax him to eat. The full-body spasm that had rocked Morpheus’ body at the contact at his mouth, the brutal shock that slammed him into the wall, chased the kid back to their own side of the alley and right into a rubbish bin themself.

They didn’t touch him again after that.

Eventually, in time, they, too, disappeared.

Morpheus hoped they were still alive. Seemed a waste of life otherwise for one so young and simply kind.

The night temperatures began to drop, deepening to bone-freezing, breath-fogging lows as winter continued to near. Barnabas, after four months of stalemate, was nearing the end of his rope. Morpheus’ lips were blue, as were his fingers and toes, the skin purpling and then whitening in turn. His position had sagged further until he now lay in a curled fetal position on the ground, back to the wall and glassy eyes fixed listlessly across the cobblestones. His beard, if it could be called that, was a mass of patchy, wiry hair and ulcers, and the bits of it that had fallen out lied somewhere beneath the ice under them, frozen.

Barnabas positioned himself around and over Morpheus’ body and settled in anyway, sinking down to lay partially atop him with a warm, body-rocking sigh. The dog feared what would happen as the winter months truly arrived, and people began to keep an idle eye on alleys and benches for those society had left to die by exposure. He feared what would happen if they happened across Morpheus and found a corpse living and breathing still, if they took him to the hospital and what naturally followed came to pass. But there was nothing more to do than this. The temperatures consistently hit freezing in the night now, and though it was bitingly cold even for him, though the blackest hours of the night sank into even his bones and set his fangs to aching and his whole body to shivering beneath his dense coat, he would stay. He would act as Morpheus’ living blanket in a vain attempt to keep him a bit more warm, to drive off the curious eyes that strayed too close.

He had promised Del. He had promised he would bring her brother back to him, and if this was what was required of him to do so, then so be it.

He was a good dog.

But today, the first flakes of snow were forecast to fill the air. He watched the cloud-filled sky with anxious eyes, a twitching nose, and waited. Perhaps the weathermen were wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, and he’d take whatever shred of mercy he could get….

There.

He tracked the single fleck of ice from the stars down to the city and finally to its resting place upon a cobblestone a mere lick away, and he watched with a disquieted whine as more began to follow in its wake.

This was not good. There were limits to what even he could withstand, and this was it.

“Morpheus,” he growled and nudged the man’s head. It moved with his touch, but the eyes did not open. “Morpheus. Snow’s come. I have to get you inside.”

Morpheus only continued to lie there, breaths shallow and eyes half-closed. Barnabas got up and sank his teeth into the stiffened fabric of his pants, catching the thick fabric that had once fit snugly to the man’s thigh but now hung loose. He growled in warning.

“I will drag you out of here.”

The man lied still. Barnabas braced himself, spreading his legs and lowering his head. He rocked his body forward and gave him one last chance.

“I am warning you!”

The dog waited a couple seconds more. And then, in the face of silence, jerked backward.

Morpheus grunted as he jolted across the ground, his arm and hip bruising along the uneven stone, and his eyes snapped open. Rage filled him, white hot, buzzing, dizzying, an eruption of every indignity and every syllable of his that had been ignored so far: every wish, every demand, every desire, every iota of his autonomy.

He gave it somewhere to go.

Morpheus glared at the dog with a grotesque snarl on his haggard face, rabid enough to match an abandoned castaway, and Barnabas yelped in surprised pain as a bony heel struck him square in the nose and drove his lips into his fangs in a coppery slash. He released his charge in a snapping retreat, and as Morpheus returned to the ground with a huff, the dog cowered, wounded in both spirit and body. The man began the slow, quaking process of dragging himself back to where he had been.

And so came the last straw for even man’s best friend.

With a low, keening whine that poured from his bloodied jaws like steam, his head sinking low and his tail dragging along the ground, Barnabas backed away toward the alley mouth. He had almost reached the threshold when he bumped into two familiar, knobby knees. He looked up slowly, as if fearing retribution, and met Delirium’s teary, mismatched eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whimpered and pressed his head into her shins, heaving a heavy breath that fogged the air between them. “I tried.”

She sank to her stockinged knees beside him, and she burrowed her hands into his fur as she encircled him in a bruising hug that buried her face in the softness of his neck.

“ ‘S okay,” she sniffled. Snow hares and partridges and doves emerged from her skirts, her hair, her shawl, and they chased each other about in a frenzied dash until the two could barely be seen through their whirlwind. “You’re still a good doggy.”

Butterflies of mistletoe and holly and sage joined the winter creatures, streamers of color and sound rendered solid, carols and hymns and ancient votives to long-forgotten gods, and in a sudden dispelling rush, they shattered apart in every possible direction.

Nothing remained in their wake.

Delirium and Barnabas were gone.

That night was bitterly cold, the coldest Morpheus had endured thus far, just as Barnabas had foretold. At least he lost the ability to feel his feet and hands, and some of the endless ache in him eased at the loss. This was better than the heat. This was like death: fading away a bit at a time until nothing at all remained to feel. Nothing…nothing at all.

That was the dream.

Desire appeared to him perhaps a few days after Delirium abandoned him, kneeling beside him with all the reluctance of one not wanting to dirty themselves while doing something and yet doing the thing anyway. They were saying something to him. Goading him as was their way, but something sharper undercut their words. Something desperate.

“—eat, drink, fuck, fantasize, something,” they were scolding, those yellow eyes glowing like the moon in the sky above them, like the alley cats that watched him in the dark and sometimes tried to nip at his hands and feet. “This is just pitiful.”

Why did they care so much? It was just a bit of cold.

And even if it wasn’t, why did they care if he was nothing but this? But this utter void, this nonreactive numbness? He desired nothing that was theirs to offer and would desire nothing of their domain ever again. They had wanted to be rid of him. Now, they were.

Was that not what they had always wanted? A dead brother?

They confused him.

And as for Death….

Death, true to her word, never returned.

Morpheus faded away into the shadows, overlooked by all for no one truly wanted to see him. He was an inconvenient truth to humans and a stubborn, mostly dead, unrecognizable relic not worth the effort to anything that wasn’t.  He sank further into his numbness. He untethered himself from any last vestiges of guilt or shame or defiance with whitened fingers long dead and gnawing teeth that wept blood at such rough usage. A fine dusting of snow graced his body like a blanket, only just melting away in the time it took the sun to rise and fall again, only to repeat overnight. Weeks and weeks (or was it only days?) passed in this manner, dawning and setting on him alone.

Alone. He was truly alone, for the first time since this whole miserable ordeal began.

He could not tell if it worsened or eased the pain. Like everything else now, it merely was.

He hallucinated once in that time that he was not alone. He imagined there were voices with him, one of which he recognized as fire-warm. It was a bit bolder now, a bit brighter, and a part of him sang deep within his chest as he imagined that they had found someone to tend their flame.

“Come on, baby,” another voice coaxed (though not to him, of course, because why would it be to him?), as he imagined he felt a heavy quilt settled over him. The speaker was older, her voice more roughly accented and deeper than average, more wizened to the world and its tragedies. Protective. Like a Mother should be.

“No,” fire-warm protested, so close to Morpheus, just beyond his frozen lashes. “No, he helped me, gave me his food! I have to—”

“Not everyone out here wants to live,” Mother told them sadly. “But seems he wanted you to, so let’s not let him down, hm?” Heels clicked closer on the cobblestones, and a perfume laden with summer flowers and sunshine touched the edges of his senses. “Let’s get inside.”

It was a nice hallucination, so very human in a way that nauseated him, and he imagined he could still feel the quilt over him long after the voices left. It smelled like the Mother and for a time carried that fire warmth with it until the winter night leached it away.

He was near comatose, tipping over the edge to an oblivion beyond even the touch of nightmares, when Despair finally appeared to him.

He heard her heavy step approach atop the fresh snow, crushing the ice underfoot until it ground back to water. She knelt beside him as if the effort required for such a simple action were gargantuan, and he had only the energy to shudder as she took his hand in hers. She was only slightly warmer than him, and the weave of her sweater that had once been so soft was like a million little needles to his touch-starved skin.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured from beneath her oily veil of hair. “Dying hurts.”

Morpheus focused on breathing. He could do little else.

“I can’t imagine having to come back afterward,” she continued at that same low rumble. The nails of one hand traced over the starved bones of her brother’s fingers and palm even as her other held him fast, and he shuddered again at the tender contact, this time so harshly his teeth clacked shut on his tongue. Thick, near-black blood welled in the wound bed but did not spill. “Come back the same but not. Left with just your pain that made you end it in the first place.”

…And for the first time in a season, the weak rise and fall of Morpheus’ shoulders began to falter. His eyes burned and smarted with no tears left to fall, and yet his body moved through the motions on automatic, helpless against his sister’s words. She reached down to him and ran her fingers through his hair, catching on each tangle and matt and pulling free in the way only Despair could:

with knifing pain to your scalp that you could barely feel anymore because everything else hurt so much already.

“I never would have done this to you. Not even if Desire had asked.” Morpheus sucked in a deeper, quaking breath that would have been a sob if he’d had any tears left in him, and he felt her rats climb upon him, squeaking and curling into him in little pockets of warmth. Their hearts beat against him, their lungs rose and fell, and he wept harder at the dozen little touches of life. Despair’s fingers continued to pass through his hair, and though his scalp spidered with pain at her ministrations, her touch moved more and more smoothly. “So, I’m going to make it stop.”

His eyes shifted to her beneath half-shut lids, for a moment alight like the days of old in the streetlight’s glow. She tutted her tongue and brushed the backs of her fingers against his skeletal cheek, breaking away parts of the brittle beard that stubbornly clung to the hollows.

“Don’t look so hopeful,” she chided. Her eyes glittered behind her hair: twin points of gleaming cunning set in a round face that he remembered with a skip of his barely beating heart had always shared its twin’s cruel streak. “You’re going to hate me even more than Death and Desire, and a part of you will always belong to me after this.” The winter’s night glittered upon the object she held between them now. It caught the shine of the cold LED streetlight and the stars and the moon along its metal curve that even as he watched frosted with the beginning touches of ice. “Just as a part of him has always been mine since I did this to him.”

He watched her close in. His breath came faster. He wanted desperately to pull away but had no strength left in him to do so, and he spasmed as Despair’s freezing hand slipped beneath the quilt to the hem of his shirt. She slipped beneath it, swept her touch over the cavern of his gut to a point a few finger-widths down from the point of his sternum. She could feel his pulse in his belly as she went, that descending aorta thrumming with the franticness of his heart, and she paused. She met his eyes. Her fingers curled into a fist, the cold press of metal touched his skin, and Morpheus took a strangled breath as her wrist twisted—

Despair’s fishhook cut into Morpheus, and his inhale stretched into a groaning, threadbare howl of a dying banshee as she opened a gash in him that ran half the length of his gut. He curled into himself in shuddering twitches, clutching the wound that pulsed his blood onto the stones. A dull aching pain dragged through his body on each killing heartbeat, worsening and lengthening as his veins steadily emptied. Despair withdrew her hand and leaned forward to kiss her brother’s forehead.

“Goodbye, Morpheus.”

Her rats lifted their heads, scenting the air as they caught the metallic tang of blood, and came to life from their cuddling slumbers. Morpheus watched them with blurry eyes as Despair withdrew into the alley’s shadows, and he tracked their once comforting feet as they moved across his body to home in on that smell that they so desired. His breaths hiccoughed and choked against each other, and he tried to summon the strength to beat the rodents away.

No.

He failed.

No, no, no, no—

o\\__oOoOoOo__//o

Hob Gadling checked his watch as he shifted his messenger bag from one shoulder to the other, easing the strain on his tired back. It had been a long day of lectures, followed by a long set of office hours as they neared the term’s end, and to top it all off, there had been a…delay on the tube that had left him stranded underground for roughly an hour as they all waited for the line to clear. He had given up his uncomfortable seat to a half-asleep woman in scrubs and a badge that marked her as a doctor in specialty training, but his courtesy did mean his lower back was now properly killing him for choosing to stand for even longer. To make matters worse, he was late getting home for dinner, again (had been since before the line delay), and the coffees he had bought as a peace offering for Gwen had long gone cold. Probably for the best. They were from the campus café and frankly weren’t very good.

He might have been better off with the poor sod they scraped off the tracks.

He'd buy her some flowers in the morning. Along with a card that offered her an extra three date nights this month. All expenses paid, of course. Yes, that should do the trick, never mind that he—

Rats, large and hungry looking, ran across Hob Gadling’s feet, scrambling over his boots and catching their nails on the hems of his slacks in the process.

He swore, stumbled, and swore again as his precious coffee spilled a tad, spattering on the snowy ground and turning it to icy sludge.

“Bloody Christ!” he huffed on a cloud of condensation and tracked the rats into the shadows of the alley beside him as he recovered. “What’s got you lot so riled?”

And Hob froze. His breath came a little faster, puffing in a growing mist before his lips.

There was a person there—a person, covered in rats, twitching in a way that he knew intimately as being eaten alive.

He surged forward with a shout, yanking back the blanket and vaulting a few of the vermin across the alley into the wall in the same motion. The poor soul was swarmed with them, and he shouted again, shooing the beasts away. He kicked and swatted—picked them up despite the way they squealed and protested with dripping teeth that he knew firsthand were strong enough to break cinder block. Their jaws set to his own hands with just as much ease before he managed to shake them free and hurl them away.

And as he finally cleared the writhing mass, as he finally revealed the thing under them, his heart hit his feet. His ears filled with a distinct ringing as his breath rushed in his ears; his heart thundered like a war drum, and the fight-lust in his veins doused beneath uncomprehending fear. The world faded to a distant, fuzzy static. He didn’t even notice Despair where she sat atop some discarded boxes in the shadows at the alley’s end, or the way that the rats he drove off ran to her and vanished into her darkness.

“Stranger?” he choked out, and those haunting, skeletal, familiar eyes shifted toward him.

[imagination-overreaction]

13. 🌸 PERFUME: Describe the setting of your WIP using the five senses.

Sight

Serene woods. Old growth, light trickling in through gaps in the leaves. The grass is long, but the closer you get to the house the drier and deader it gets. A grey stepping stone path trails from the decrepit steps of the century-old house, dotting along until the grass overtakes it completely. Boards cover most of the windows, and broken glass covers the rest. Wooden shingles, rotten boards, and lichen are now the most prominent features of this once-beautiful home.

Sound

Gravel crunching underneath tires, and a tired engine rolling along. Birdsong echoes through the woods, wind rustles leaves, tiny paws scurry through the undergrowth, and overgrown limbs brush along the sides of the truck. The tires slow to a halt, two work boots hit the rocks, and a man sighs. There is no birdsong, no rustling, and no scurrying. There is only wind rushing through an empty frame, and hollow whistling through shattered windows.

Smell

Pine, unfinished boards, and crisp air are the only occasional reprieve from the rot. From years of mildew and mold, yes, but something else too. Something much worse, something much more fetid. There was no rats in the basement, or squirrels in the walls, or nests of rotten eggs in the attic, but the rank smell of where they must have been was still caked into the wood.

Taste

Breathing with your mouth open was a bad idea. Outside was fine, it was clean and cool, but inside there was a nauseating tang. It was a taste that forced a cough, as if the body was trying to force itself to get rid of it, quickly.

Touch

The creaking, bent, rotten boards springed underfoot. Doors were off-kilter, having to be shoved closed (if they could close at all). Countertops and floorboards were splintered and broken. Hinges and other hardware were rusted through. Wallpaper was crispy and disintigrating in some places, and soggy with rancid yellow water in others. The basement was the worst. The floor--concrete, presumably--crunched underfoot with the snapping of animal bones and garbage and god-knows-what. It wasn't a place you should stay for too long. The walls themselves seemed to groan a deep, low humm that couldn't be heard, only felt as an unsettled murmer inside one's chest.

Thank you for the ask! This one was really fun to write!

[nothingtolose-awrites]

Thoughts Together, Thoughts Alone

Somehow in my youth I was convinced there was so much inside of me begging to get out that it could escape through self inflicted surface wounds. 

Even as a child, I felt like there was something thick and rancid flowing in me and that if I bled it out, if I tore apart flesh and picked at scabs it would somehow leave my body and then I would feel okay again.

It worked, or at least I thought it did for a long time. I would hurt and then for a few moments I swore I could see it, a thick ooze from my body, invisible leeches lapping it up and then I could crush them under my toes or like big fat ticks I could crush under my nails just how my parents taught me. 

I used to have this recurring dream I would be in an accident and when people came to find me I would just be filled with bugs, pouring out of my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my ears- a never ending infestation.  

Sometimes, even ten years later I still scratch my skin just a little bit harder, like they’re still waiting under the surface. In all honesty, the ooze never really went away, I just understand now there is no bleeding it out, no broken bones to eradicate the feelings; the only real cure is honest and true healing.

It’s easier said than done.

Despite my lack of medication and limited therapy, I do honestly know I’m in a better place now. And maybe it's more of a skill now, the fact that I just simply had been bad for so long that I got good at it, that I can handle more than what others consider appropriate so now when I do struggle I am self aware enough to recognize the signs of when it’s getting bad, when i'm paranoid, when im delusional or manic or severely depressed. I’m simply prepared to handle it more than I was as a child.

I’d like to think it’s because I honestly am better now. 

I’d really like to think that, but I don’t put my heart into it. There’s only so many times you can let yourself down before it breaks your heart. 

I’m really tired of breaking my own heart.

So I try not to tell others that I’m doing better really. As much for their benefit as mine. I remember sobbing, holding myself and rocking where I sat that I thought I was doing better, that I don’t know where I went wrong or what happened, that I swore I was doing better. 

That’s an easy way to break your own heart, to have expectations for yourself and only realizing you still fall short despite how hard you feel like you’ve worked. 

So to be as non-transparent and confusing as possible, I will say that yes, I am doing better and I am also the same as I have always been.

I feel a little like Schrodinger's cat in that sense, that I may be better or just the same at the same time because who I am is inside a box and something may detonate at any time but there is no way to say for sure how or when or if it ever will.

I try to live my life through kindness. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t kind, being kind is my absolution. Even if I believe there is something intrinsically wrong with me ( I always have and worry I always will) at least I try to be kind to others no matter what, even if I am not kind to myself. 

In an honestly roundabout way, it’s selfish I know. The fact that I’m kind to others as a way to say I’m worth keeping alive, that I deserve living despite my flaws only because I actively treat others with kindness. 

But that’s not really the only reason, so I try not to judge myself too hard over it. I really do feel better when I’m kind to others, when I support and am honest and respectful, even if they aren’t always that way to me.

I haven’t decided if its all some personal ploy and extensive manipulation to make people like me somehow. I thought it was for a long time, but honestly that sounds a lot like the delusions I try so hard to get rid of, the ones that eat and pick at my brain.

[meerschweinchen-archive]

“Do you remember how the night sky of Ischia horrified me? You all said how beautiful it is, but I couldn’t. I smelled an odor of rotten eggs, eggs with a greenish-yellow yolk inside the white and inside the shell, a hard-boiled egg cracked open. I had in my mouth poisoned egg stars, their light had a white, gummy consistency, it stuck to your teeth, along with the gelatinous black of the sky, I crushed it with disgust, I tasted a crackling of grit. Am I clear? Am I making myself clear? And yet on Ischia I was happy, full of love. But it was no use, my head always finds a chink to peer through, beyond—above, beneath, on the side—where the fear is. In Bruno’s factory, for example, the bones of the animals cracked in your fingers if you merely touched them, and a rancid marrow spilled out. I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can’t stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break. Take Alfonso, he’s always made me nervous, ever since he was a boy, I’ve felt that the cotton thread that held him together was about to break. And Michele? Michele thought he was who knows what, and yet all I had to do was find his boundary line and pull, oh, oh, oh, I broke it, I broke his cotton thread and tangled it with Alfonso’s, male material inside male material, the fabric that I weave by day is unraveled by night, the head finds a way. But it’s not much use, the terror remains, it’s always in the crack between one normal thing and the other. It’s there waiting, I’ve always suspected it, and since yesterday evening I’ve known for certain: nothing lasts, Lenù, even here in my belly, you think the creature will endure but it won’t. You remember when I married Stefano and I wanted the neighborhood to start again from the beginning, to be only beautiful things, the ugliness of before was not supposed to be there anymore. How long did it last? Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad. Gennaro makes me feel guilty, this thing here in my belly is a responsibility that cuts me, scratches me. Loving courses together with hating, and I can’t, I can’t manage to solidify myself around any goodwill. Maestra Oliviero was right, I’m bad. I don’t even know how to keep friendship alive. You’re kind, Lenù, you’ve always had a lot of patience. But tonight I finally understood it: there is always a solvent that acts slowly, with a gentle heat, and undoes everything, even when there’s no earthquake. So please, if I insult you, if I say ugly things to you, stop up your ears, I don’t want to do it and yet I do. Please, please, don’t leave me, or I’ll fall in.”

Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child

[disturbedbydesign]

The Widow and the Wolf - Chapter 3

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x dark!exWidow!reader

Summary: After Natasha Romanoff took down the Red Room, the former Widows scattered to the wind. Raised to be a killing machine and released into the world with nothing and no one, you decided to use your newfound autonomy to take down the bad guys of your choosing. But now Natasha is riddled with guilt for leaving you on your own. She wants to recruit you, rehabilitate you, make you part of a team again. But the rest of the squad has reservations, and no one is more against you than Bucky Barnes.

Warnings: Graphic violence; Mentions of domestic violence, rape, pedophilia, human trafficking, child sex trafficking; eventual Dubcon (not Bucky); eventual smut; slow(ish) burn enemies-to-lovers. [More warnings will be added as necessary but these are the Big Bads.] 18+ only, no minors.

If you prefer to read on AO3, you can do so here.

Chapter Three

If you had a home, it would be Bucharest, even though you despise the place. It was the first place you went when you got free, because you know he’s here somewhere, conducting his evil machinations from the shadows, shielded by layer after layer of vile men across the globe doing his dirty work. There are plenty of men out there deserving of your particular brand of justice, but no one more so than the Viper. Sometimes you think that, if you can just find him and take him out, you might be able to move on—try to make a normal life for yourself, whatever that looks like. You don’t allow yourself to think about what will happen if you finally achieve your life’s goal and it’s still not enough for you.

You remember everything about the day you learned of the Viper’s existence. You were just 7 years old, one of many little girls packed into a shipping container. You had no idea how long you’d been in there or how long you would be in there. It smelled rancid, and there was never a moment of quiet. Most of the girls were screaming or crying, but a few (like you) were silent, just observing. You don’t know who sold you from your orphanage and shipped you off to Dreykov and you never will. What you do know is that you had no family to miss and no one to miss you, so you didn’t understand what the others were so upset about. From the very beginning, you adjusted to life as a Widow almost effortlessly, which is its own form of tragedy.

Others, though, they were stolen away from people who loved them. This seemed a foreign concept to you when you heard about it from the tiny, sobbing girl huddled next to you in the shipping container—the girl who told you about the Viper, the girl who would become your first and only friend until Dreykov took control of all of your minds. Once you were given the serum, your memories were locked up inside your own heads—none of you could have talked about your past lives even if you’d wanted to. Your words were not your own. You didn’t know what was real and what was planted there. Sometimes you still don’t, and nothing terrifies you more than that.

You have no idea how many little girls the Viper funneled to Dreykov over the years, but it was probably a decent amount. His real bread and butter had always been sex trafficking, and he’s still doing it—on an even larger scale if your intel is correct (which, of course, it is). But he won’t be operating for much longer, not now that you’re so close you can almost taste the venom. You were barely 8 years old when you decided you would kill him, and now you have your chance. You are so close, closer than you’ve ever been, but he keeps slithering out of your grasp. And so you’re in Bucharest, again, looking for answers, again. But you have other business, too—almost as important, if not more so.

You head to the safehouse on the outskirts of the city. The building doesn’t look like much on the outside, but you’ve made sure the inside is comfortable enough for the women and children who live there. The matron greets you at the door and you hand her this month’s envelope, which contains enough cash to feed everyone for the next two months, keep the lights and the water on, and some extra to fix the plumbing issues that have been plaguing the building since you bought it.

The building can house about 40 people comfortably—it’s not nearly enough, and you’re determined to create as many safe spaces as you can, but it’ll do for now. For now, you have to select your charges according to a very strict criteria: they are all women and children (and the children of women) who have been bought and sold by the Viper. Some of them escaped on their own; some of them had assistance from you and the very few people you trust in the city. But all of them have suffered, and all of them have information that you need. Individually, it’s not much, but the more women you talk to, the more pieces of the puzzle you have to work with.

Besides for the cash drop, today you’re here to see the newest resident: Irina, a 19-year-old beauty your Bucharest contacts had managed to snatch from one of the sex clubs. Irina was delivered to the Viper at 12, and her life since then has been an endless nightmare that you can’t think about for too long without feeling physically ill. She’s sitting by the window in the living room, cupping a steaming mug of tea, when you approach her. You walk towards her slowly, and when Irina looks over at you, there is recognition in her eyes even though you’ve never met.

“You’re the Widow,” she says.

“Not anymore,” you reply. “But if that’s what you’d like to call me, go ahead. May I sit?” She gestures to the seat opposite her and you settle in for a chat. “I’d like to ask you some questions, Irina. Is that ok?”

“The others told me you’d be coming.” She speaks softly, her voice hoarse from screaming or crying or both. “I know what you’re trying to do. You’ll never catch him, you know.”

“I disagree,” you say, “but I need more information.”

“Alright,” she agrees, “if you think it will help,” and you begin the gentlest of interrogations.

Irina tells you that for the first several years after she was taken, she hadn’t heard anyone mention the Viper. She thinks that a lot of the girls probably knew about him or came directly from him, but no one would talk about it because it was too dangerous or traumatizing (or both). Things were different at her last club, though. When you ask her how many of the girls at Delirium knew about him, she tells you that several of them had passed through him somewhere along their journey. One of them—one far too young to be working there—even admitted that she’d been with him only two months earlier.

Finally, after all this time, you’ve got a clear line from point A to point B. You feel it in your bones that Delirium holds the answers, that if you can just get in and poke around a bit, you’ll be able to find him. You take Irina’s hands in yours and thank her for her help, and then you hear it: heavy footsteps coming down the hall. No woman or child in the building weighs enough to make a sound like that, and no men are allowed on the premises. You know who it is before you see him.

*****

Bucky watches you enter the building from his position on the roof across the street. His contact had told him that there were whispers of a Widow safehouse at this address, though no one would dare set foot within 10 blocks of the place to find out. Bucky doesn’t believe the rumor, though. He knows you work alone, that you pride yourself on it. He assumes this is just one of many places where your targets meet their ends, and he knows enough about Bucharest to know that there are a lot of men in this city who fit your modus operandi.

Still, something is off. It’s not an empty building. There have been women and children coming and going all morning, and nearly all the apartments seem occupied. Why would you choose to do your dirty work in a place with so much activity, with so many innocents around? That seems not only impractical but beneath even you. He’s lost in these thoughts, checking each window with his binoculars, when he settles on a beautiful young girl staring out the window, looking desperately sad. She turns to look at someone he can’t see, and then he sees you emerge from the shadows and take a seat opposite her.

There’s a softness to your face—a gentle kindness—that knocks the wind out of him. Bucky can’t take his eyes off of you, analyzing your body language and facial expressions to try to figure out what the hell is going on. This is the last thing he expected to see, and he tells himself that this woman must be hiring you for a job—except the woman is nothing but a broken child and doesn’t look like someone who would be taking out a hit on somebody (and certainly not someone who could pay for one).

It’s unnerving, watching you this way, and Bucky is no longer sure that what he’s doing is right. There’s something about your interaction with this girl that makes him feel like a voyeur, witnessing an intimate moment that he should not be seeing but that fascinates him nonetheless. Still, he’s here, you’re his mission—albeit one he took upon himself—and he needs to finish it. By this time, Natasha and Steve are almost certainly on their way, and Bucky needs to get to you before they show up. He went rogue and committed to this plan; now he just has to execute it. He’ll deal with the consequences later.

Bucky makes his way across the street and around the back, where children’s toys litter the small yard of weeds and dirt. When he gets to the back door, he notices that it isn’t the usual ancient rusted lock that one finds on the old buildings in this neighborhood; it’s brand new tech. There’s a pretty decent security camera setup around the building, too.

What the hell is this place?

Bucky has two choices: he can rip the door off the hinges, or he can scale the building and climb in the open window on the top floor. You’re going to be homicidally pissed either way, so he might as well not destroy any property—you may be a monster, but the other tenants here look like civilians, and he doesn’t want to sacrifice their security in his quest to bring you in.

Bucky makes it into the building and weaves his way through the hallways. Along the way, he runs into a few women, and each one of them freezes when they see him. They are shocked and deathly afraid—a look he knows far too well—and they scurry back to their apartments and lock the doors. With his hair cut short, baseball cap pulled down, and leather jacket and glove hiding his prosthetic, it doesn’t seem possible that all of these women would immediately recognize him as the Winter Soldier. That’s what it feels like to him, though, and it’s a gut-punch sensation he does not like at all.

When he gets to the sitting room, the girl you are with has the same look of terror, and for a moment, so do you. But you snap back to yourself quickly—having gone from soft to terrified to hostile within a span of about 15 seconds. Before he can react, you stomp towards him, grab him by the jacket, and hiss, “Not here.”

Bucky hears you speak to the girl in Romanian, “Don’t be afraid, Irina. He’s a friend,” although he knows you think him anything but.

The second you get him into the hallway, you’ve got your knife to his throat. Even with your cold blade nicking his skin, Bucky fights the impulse to disarm you. He doesn’t want to fight you. He knows that he’s intruded on something here, though he doesn’t know what, and he actually feels guilty. He could break you in half if he wanted to, but he lets you pin him to the wall—lets you feel like you’re in control.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” you growl.

“You know why I’m here,” Bucky replies, but he doesn’t know—not really, not anymore. “What is this place?”

“It’s somewhere safe,” you say, “or it was until you showed up. No boys allowed, Soldat. Time to go.”

You catch him off guard when you flip him around and throw him through the nearest door, and before he can regain his balance, you kick him straight through the window and into the yard two storeys below. The fall is nothing to Bucky, and he knows that you know that, but it certainly made a statement. He looks up at the broken window he’d just crashed through and sees you peering out with a satisfied smile on your face.

Bucky calls up to you, “I just want to talk.”

“Bullshit,” you snap.

“I mean it,” he says, and he actually does. “You can pick the place.”

He watches as you consider his offer, weighing your options—you obviously don’t trust him, but it’s clear that the sanctity of this location is important to you. Now that he’s violated it, you can’t just let him wander off. You agree to meet with him that evening—in public, at a club in Old Town.

“Come alone, Soldat,” you call down to him, “and if you tell anyone about this place, I’ll throw you out a higher window.”

Bucky tries to hide his tiny smile but he knows you see it, just like he sees the little quirk of your lip just before you disappear. He hoists himself off the ground and brushes himself off. When he turns to leave, he sees a little girl holding hands with her mother. He has no idea how long they’ve been standing there, but the girl is pointing and giggling at him.

The little girl asks, “What happened to him, mama?”

“The Widow’s bite,” she replies.

*****

“He’s not going to hurt her, Natasha,” Steve says as he prepares the Quinjet for landing.

“She might not give him a choice,” she replies, strapping herself in. “What the hell was he thinking coming here alone?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “There’s something about this girl that’s really gotten under his skin.”

Natasha looks at Steve, asking the question with her eyes she wouldn’t dare say aloud, and he picks up what she’s putting out.

“He’s not the Winter Soldier anymore. All of that programming… it’s gone. You know that. He’s just Bucky now.”

Natasha nods in agreement, but a part of her still has questions—not whether the deprogramming worked, she knows that it did, and she trusts Bucky with her life. No, Natasha’s concern is what is going on inside Bucky’s head. He was doing well, he was adjusting, he was finally ok, but the existence of you seems to have triggered something in him that the words never had. The words made him cold and empty and ready to comply, but you—you make him think, and Natasha knows how dangerous it can be to dwell too much on things you’ve left in the past.

When Steve and Natasha arrive at Bucky’s old apartment, it’s empty, but there are small signs of life—the indent of a head on the pillow on the floor in the corner, an apple core just starting to brown. He’s been there, and recently. Natasha and Steve don’t know who he would still have contact with in Bucharest, so they are left with nothing to go on. Bucky knows how to cover his tracks, and he left them just enough crumbs to get them to Bucharest but not enough that they could find him when they got there.

“He wants us to trust him,” Steve says, “to wait for him to bring her back here.”

“I can’t just sit around waiting for something to happen, Steve. I have a really bad feeling about this.”

“So what do you suggest we do?” Steve asks.

Natasha sighs and looks out the window. “I have no idea,” she replies, and that’s when she sees it: a piece of graffiti spraypainted on the wall of a building down the street—a coiled snake ready to strike.

The memory hits Natasha like a freight train. She knows that symbol. She knows what it means. She knows exactly who you’re looking for and it seems absurd to her now that she hadn’t thought of it before.

“Let me make a call,” she says. “I think I know why she’s here.”

[ocean-in-my-rebel-soul]

“I thought you didn’t want me.” for Meribela?

Thanks for the prompt!...that I'm filling six months later... Welp, better late than never! I don't write these two much, so here's hoping it works!

@dadrunkwriting

Merrill x Isabela

Rated: G

Tags: angst, immediately after the Arishok duel, iffy coping mechanisms

===

Smoke still lingers, heavy and soggy like a wet blanket dragged over Kirkwall's buildings and stairs as Merrill slogs her way back to the alienage. Blood still pools in the streets from the Arishok's assault on the city. Creators, everything in her aches, something bone-deep and exhausted; too many people needed help, and she needed something to pull her mind from the battle at the Viscount's Keep, so she exhausted her healer's kit and her remaining strength stitching up every wound she found.

Bela had come this close to dying; Merrill knows she'll be out of town on the first ship she can find. Hawke had almost died trying to save her, and it's still touch-and-go whether or not they'll survive their wounds. Merrill's mishmash little family is trying to shrink again. Maybe it's the way of her life, that she is to lose everyone she loves. The thought settles like rancid halla milk in her belly and raises her hackles with what promises to be another dry-heave.

She stumbles on the final stair into the alienage. Lancing pain shoots up her legs when Merrill falls to her knees. "Fenedhis—I'll fall and break my neck at this rate." She rubs her knuckles into her eyes for a moment before heaving herself to her feet.

"Careful there, kitten, careful." Warm hands land at Merrill's shoulders when she sways unevenly. "Looks like a stiff breeze could knock you over."

Merrill glares at the ground. "Thanks," she says, clipped, and shakes herself from Bela's grip. Merrill crosses her arms over her balled fists and stalks off toward her little cottage.

"Kitten, wait."

Merrill speeds up into a half-jog across the broken cobblestones. Bela swears and her jewelry chimes together discordantly as she follows. The cottage is a scant hundred feet away, and Merrill breaks into a run. Her heart bolts rabbit-fast in her ears.

"I just want to talk!"

Merrill flings herself at the door. There hadn't been enough time to lock it earlier in the afternoon when the Qunari had attacked, and in Mythal's mercy, it is in remarkable shape. The door groans as Merrill barrels inside, torn askew on its hinges in the assault, and it sticks in the frame when she slams it shut behind her.

Bela pounds on the other side a second after Merrill throws the latch and locks the door. "Merrill, come on—let me in!"

"I don't want to talk to you!" she yells back. Tears sting her eyes, and Merrill roughly wipes them away on her knuckles. Her nails bite half-moons into the heels of her palms. "Go away!"

A thud hits the door, followed by a long slide. Bela sighs. "I know I messed up, Merrill," she says. "And I—I've thought about it. A lot. You and Hawke must have... must have rubbed off on me or something. So I came back."

Another thump on the door, lower now—Bela slumps against the door and bangs her head lightly on the wood. She's staying, for now.

It hits Merrill dully, from a distance. Her own legs shake and she catches herself on the door. Sliding to the dusty floor, she lands hard, legs splaying before her.

"You made me feel like you didn't want me."

The tears come down in earnest. Merrill tips her head back and lets them drip down her cheeks. "You—you left that night. You've talked about returning to the sea and taking me with you, and you left me here." Her voice warbles and she wipes angrily at her face again. "I said I loved you, Bela, and I woke up alone."

Long fingers inch into the gap under the too-short door. They quest and find Merrill's hip, pet awkwardly at the hem of her shirt. "I know. I spent a long time ignoring it. And then a long time thinking about it."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"No, I—" Bela knocks her head against the door again and curses a low streak. She sniffs roughly. "Merrill—oh Maker's taint, I'm not crying, for fuck's sake," she mutters to herself, so quiet that Merrill only just catches it. "Get it together."

Bela sighs. "I couldn't stop thinking about it, you know, once I started. Feelings are dumb, kitten, and here I am, having them. You know, this morning I wasn't sure what would be worse: having to face the Qunari and return the stupid tome, damn the consequences, or having to do all that and then face you," she says with an incredulous snort.

"People died because of them," Merrill mutters. Because of you, she doesn't say, because Bela knows that already and it's not helpful to bring it up right now. Bela can talk about that with someone else. Merrill is too tired to do it. She wipes her eyes and draws her knees to her chest, bends down enough to rest her head on them. "What do you really want, Bela?"

Silence meets her question. Merrill gnashes her teeth. "At least do me the kindness of answering me," she calls through the door.

"Believe me, kitten, I'm trying," Bela grunts. The door thumps again. "What—" She cuts off on a cough, clears her throat, and tries again. "Do I still... Is this still safe harbor?"

"Safe harbor," Merrill murmured. Her hand found Bela's and she laced their fingers together. Bela blinked, almost like she was surprised, but surely she knew, right? Merrill had said it in all the ways she knew how—murmured against her skin in the night, woven in the living shield Merrill casts in battle to protect her back, hammered into the fine edge of the dagger she'd saved for over most of a year to have commissioned for Bela's last birthday. Tonight she whispered it into Bela's heart, skin sweat-slick and chest heaving, feverish. "Ar lath ma, Bela, ma vhenan. You always have a home with me."

Bela smiled. "C'mere, kitten," she said, and she pulled Merrill into a bruising kiss, her trembling hand wandering down Merrill's ribs and over her belly with a singular purpose.

And then Merrill woke up alone.

"I want to come home, Merrill. If you'll let me." A beat. "If you'll have me."

"Bela—"

"I know I'm bad at this, kitten. I know. And I want to try anyway. For you. For our misfit family."

Merrill knocks her forehead on her knees and squeezes her eyes shut. "And I'm just—I—Creators, Bela! What am I supposed to do?"

"Let me in so I can apologize properly, I hope. It's dark and fucking cold." She falls silent. "I really am sorry, Merrill, and I want to make it better."

Something twists in Merrill's gut, wounded and hurting and full of aching rage. She drags in a shaking breath. "You'll have to talk to the others," Merrill says. "You'll have to, you'll have to apologize, and explain, and all that. And you'll have to ask them for forgiveness, too, especially Hawke, and maybe they'll all be nice and give it to you. Then maybe..." Merrill sniffs and wipes her face on her trousers. "Then maybe you can ask me for forgiveness, too. Later."

"...that's fair," Bela sighs. She thumps her head on the door again. "Really screwed everyone over, didn't I?"

Merrill unfolds herself and stands up with a groan, wobbles against the door. She scrapes her nails down the wood. "You'll need to talk about that with all of them. I'm—I'm going to bed."

She gets a step away before she turns back, some needy thing scraping at the inside of her ribcage, and yanks open the door. Bela scrambles to her feet; she barely has time to protest before Merrill's got her hand wrapped around Bela's wrist and pulls her, hard, into the cottage. Merrill kicks the door shut behind them and leans back against it, tugging Bela to follow until her arms bracket Merrill in.

There's no doubt as to what this is. Surely Bela knows. Surely Bela understands. Merrill can't say it any plainer, not again.

"I thought you said you're going to bed."

"I am. We are. If you want."

Bela searches her face. "It's not this easy," she whispers, her brows pinching lightly in confusion.

"No," Merrill says. She reaches up to cup Bela's cheek, rubs her thumb along the edge of her bottom lip. "But it has been a long, terrifying day, and I'm tired, and I—" her voice warbles again "—I've missed you so very much."

Relieved warmth pools in Bela's gaze when it flicks to Merrill's lips. "I've missed you, too, kitten." She dips her head and gently, more than Merrill expects, presses their mouths together.

She sighs into it and lets her hands fall to the neckline of Bela's tunic, curling into the fabric and anchoring her pirate queen to her. "If you stay, we're going to have to talk about all of this in the morning," Merrill murmurs.

Another wave of tears threatens to fall. If.

She shakes her head against the thought and winds her arms around Bela's neck. Her heart hammers in her chest, breaking it open; Merrill has to hold it together, smother everything down against the lean lines of Bela's body to keep her heart from pelting into Bela's hands again.

"I know."

It's not fair that Bela could just leave like that, before. That Merrill wants her anyway, now. Bela trails kisses along the edge of her jaw, nudges her into tipping back enough that she can trail her lips down the sensitive skin just below her ear. Her laughter ghosts over Merrill's skin when she can't help the shudder that trembles through her.

It's not fair. Bela was gone for months, and Merrill loves her just as much now as then, even though it burns.

She closes her eyes at the frisson of selfish want that bolts through her. I know, Bela says, and Merrill desperately wants to believe.

But Bela always told her she's too trusting, too open-hearted, and where has that gotten Merrill so far? Empty-handed, empty-hearted, and lonely.

Merrill drags in a shuddering breath. The morning will come soon enough, and she can't waste any more time worrying about the inevitability of Bela's coming departure.

"Take me to bed," she whispers, and she lets herself be hauled off, curled tight into Bela's embrace, unable to let her go for even a moment.

She’s survived the dawn of every morning before. She will survive it again.

[cdroloisms]

Hello, idk if you’ll see this, nor do you have to take this request. But I’ve been thinking, and thought up: Dream joined the egg, but not because it offered him world domination or a happy family or any of that; no it offered to treat him kindly, to be affectionate, to be a friend, basically offering him human decency. (With an add on of everyone believing it was for some big reason, but the actual reason gets revealed somehow) if that made any sense. (Idk if this counts as an au or not)

[ask: if dream showed up to the red banquet, that would be very sexy of the writers to make him join the eggpire instead of the pro-omlette]

hehe egg!dream has so much potential ,, this is a ficlet i’ve been working on for a while (writer’s block my detested) but i finally finished it up !! it’s a bit unpolished but oh well - they cant all be winners lmao 

tw: body horror, blood, injuries, implied torture/abuse, starvation, possession, dark/disturbing imagery, dark content, pandora’s vault/prison arc 

Dream gets corrupted by the Egg, because of course he does.

Sapnap trudges through the vine-filled hallway, his face bundled firmly with a holy-water soaked bandana to keep out the worst of the spores. It’s a shoddy defense, but he doesn’t plan to stay long; he’s only been sent on reconnaissance, to see what public enemy number one is planning and get out as quickly as he can. As much as the entire server wants Dream dead, trying to defeat the man the first time was enough of a feat, never mind with the power of a giant demon egg on his side - to try and fight him now would be practically impossible.

The floor squishes underneath his boots, and his lips curl in disgust; the vines are thick and moist and feel ugly and rotten to the core. He can’t imagine anyone being anything but repulsed by the things, but he guesses it makes sense for Dream to be drawn here - corruption attracts corruption, it seems. It only figures that Dream would be desperate enough for power to let himself get possessed by the living - if you could really call it living - embodiment of decay and deterioration itself. The feeling of the floor giving way underneath his footsteps has another wave of revulsion crawling up his throat, though he’s not sure if it’s directed towards the Egg or his former friend or both.

He reaches the end of the hallway, an itching, pulsing feeling of wrong filling the air in the room just beyond the haphazard archway carved into the stone. With careful hands, Sapnap draws the bandana further up his face, making sure that it is tied securely behind his head - just beyond this wall lies the belly of the beast, the heart of the rot slowly but surely spreading its influence over the entire server. Something hums in the air; whispering, otherworldly sounds pierce through his armor and settle beneath his skin; he pushes on. He knows better than to listen, to try and make sense of the words within the noise - from what he’s heard, by the time you understand what it is saying, it’s too late.

He steps inside; the room feels, for the lack of a better word, red. He’s better suited for the place than most, being a Netherborn and therefore more used to the oppressive heat and heaviness of the air, but there’s something undeniably wrong about how this place feels, something entirely Other having made its home in the room. Every inch of the place feels hostile, angry, hungry, recognizing him as someone foreign and wanting nothing more than his destruction. Unlike the Red Forests, which teemed with life - piglins and hoglins and giant fungus - this room is little more than a twisted mimicry, sucking the air dry, leaving little more than husks behind.

His hand immediately goes to his sword, drawing it with a dull, metallic scrape. The room is eerily silent save for the Egg’s hissing whispers, and he frowns; he’d expected an attack, but the room is still, quiet; a mockery of peace that only makes the uneasy feeling in his gut grow further. He trudges forward, watching against the puddles of lava and smoking magma scattered over the floor, but nothing stirs.

There’s a growing pressure against his skull with each step into the room, and his hand tightens on his communicator; they’d set up a stasis chamber, just in case things went south, his way out of this place only a few button presses away. Still, nothing moves; no Bad or Ant popping out of nowhere, weapons in hand, no Dream driving an axe between his shoulder blades as he’s done so many times before in their spars. There’s only the sound of his footsteps against the rotting growths on the floor and his own heartbeat thudding in his ears and the Egg’s warbling voice, beneath it all - beckoning, almost kind.

He swallows, throat dry, and moves forward.

His feet carry him to the back corner of the room, to the rotting, pulsing core of the wrongness plaguing the entire server. Even through his bandana, the air feels foreign, nearly choking him, and he strains his eyes against the glare of the lava to look up at the vines’ rancid heart, the Egg. Up close, it’s almost underwhelming, only about three times his height, hardly coming halfway up to the ceiling of the room. What it doesn’t have in size, however, it makes up in sheer presence; the hissing whispers in his head grow louder, crawling under his skin and between his bones, and he curses under his breath as he prepares to call for his way back. Dream isn’t here; the mission is a bust.

“Sapnap?”

He freezes.

It takes a moment to realize that the voice wasn’t in his head, as raspy and unsettling as it was, and his eyes traced the edges of the Egg to a dull colored shape at its side, completely overlooked in his initial sweep of the room. He watches, a dull horror rising in his chest, as the shape moves, twists around on itself in an entirely unnatural way like a marionette pulled by its strings. A pale dot rises from where it had been hidden against the bright red of the Egg; it’s a face, Dream’s face, covered in clawing vines, stark against the bone-white of his sun-starved skin, vomit racing up his throat at the sight of the vines having made their homes in jagged wounds all over his face and neck and disappearing into the torn scraps of his prison uniform, each one spilling crimson in the form of writhing vines and thorns instead of blood.

“Sapnap,” Dream says again, his mouth moving with the words but something entirely other having made its home in the air of his lungs, a shivering rasp to his voice that lifts and falls with the same desperate hunger that saturates every tainted inch of the room. His neck tips to the side, shifted over by a twisting vine tangled within his hair and wrapping a crown of blood-red thorns over his forehead, tendrils drooping over his face and framing the gaunt edges. “You came.”

“Dream-” the anger comes back, familiar, at the other’s words - the same red-hot rage that had boiled within him in that first and only prison visit (you took so long) but it dissipates as fast as it comes. Dream - if this remnant, this shade, this corrupted, mangled half that seems more corruption than human can even be called the name of one he had once considered his best friend, his brother - stumbles closer, held up by the vines that twist over his shaking legs, one having the pale, ragged edge of a bone clearly having ripped through skin - and Sapnap does throw up, this time, dragging the bandana from his face and heaving bile all over the floor.

“What happened-” he cries, flames licking up his arms in defense when his friend-turned-monster-turned-this steps closer on a wreck of a leg that should not be able to bear weight, stumbles back to a roaring in his ears-

He is mine he came broken came shattered and I gave him everything I gave him his heart’s desire I am his savior his grace he asked for warmth and he asked for comfort and he asked for nothing but for someone to take his pain and he is mine he is mine he is mine

He freezes, hand tightening over his communicator; Dream stares at him with the one dull-green eye not covered by the vines splayed over his too-pale face, mouth moving but no sound coming out. The roaring, angry sound in Sapnap’s ears grows louder, follows the shape of Dream’s lips come join your friend come with me I will give him to you you have failed him once but not again not again he is mine but you can be mine also and you will be together together together

“-pnap! Sapnap!” Puffy’s words crackle over the communicator, harsh and loud and snapping him out of his thoughts, “Pull the switch, Sam! No, he’s not responding- pull the switch-”

The world dips, and he heaves in a shattered breath, lungs finally full as he breathes in clear air for the first time in what feels like an eternity, hacking coughs pulled from his throat as he tears the bandana off in one sputtering gasp for breath.

“Sap- Sapnap,” Sam pitches his voice low, comforting, a hand rubbing up and down his back, but all Sapnap can see is the skeleton of a man held together by red thread, the life leached from his skin and leaving nothing left, he asked for nothing but for someone to take the pain and he is mine he is mine he is mine-

“Sapnap,” Puffy’s voice is tinny with concern, “What happened? You stopped responding and the time passed so we pulled the switch on the stasis chamber- are you alright? Did he attack you?”

“I-” -you have failed him once but not again not again you will be together- “I need a moment.”

He scrambles away, feet carrying him away from Church Prime, away from the Holy Land, away away away until he’s standing on the Community House roof, staring at his hands at this home, destroyed, this home, rebuilt, this home, empty and wrong and a shadow of house for a shadow of a man, a shadow of a friend found, a friend lost- and sobs.

What had he done?

[taones]

If You Can Hold On Part 3

Part one and two

Pairing: Poly!AsaDaiSuga x gender neutral!reader Or is it?

Notes: PAIN

Warnings: Swearing, arguments, stranger hitting on the reader but they’re chill w/ it

You sniffed as you stirred, pulling the soft fabric underneath your cheek further into you. It smelt like sandalwood with a hint of coffee and it reminded you of how Daichi’s hugs smelt. In fact it was almost exactly the same. The pillow was strangely firm too, almost too firm. Regardless, you snuggled further. 

“Still sleepy huh?” 

Shit.

You shot up, pulling the covers off with you. Daichi shivered in the cold air as his now naked upper torso was exposed to the morning. Looking over, you saw Suga tucked in next to where you had been and Asahi on the other side of Daichi, said man tucked under his arm. It wasn’t odd for Daichi to sleep shirtless, the man ran hot at night, but you couldn’t help the hot flush that took over your face. Asahi smiled softly at you, looking over his reading glasses at your ruffled form. 

“We were gonna get up and grab some breakfast from the diner we passed” he hummed, morning voice sending shivers up your figure. 

“Once we wake sleeping beauty up that is” 

You smiled at Daichi’s comment. At least you could stop thinking about this situation for a second and just get food with them. It was something you had done before most of your big exams. All three of you used to go to the small cafe near the school and get waffles. You could still remember how they had them: Suga had two waffles with caramel and hazelnuts, Asahi had 3 with whipped cream and strawberries and Daichi had 5 with chocolate syrup and chocolate chips. You always got fed some of theirs no matter what you decided to have. Koushi thought it especially funny to boop your nose so whipped cream would stick to your warm skin. 

“Yeah sure,” you smiled “lets go get some waffles”

-

When you got to the diner, it was relatively busy but there were still booths big enough to fit you guys. As always, it was you and Asahi on one side and Suga and Daichi on the other, Asahi trapping you against the wall with his large shoulders. For the first time this trip, you were content. It was the way it used to be. Asahi even stole some of Daichi’s chocolate chips like he used to. 

Snorting was heard from your table as Daichi accidentally laughed so hard that milkshake came out of his nose. The four of you had been telling stories of your highschool days, before everything was confusing and complicated with feeling. The joy was pierced by a vibration that drew all three to their phone. Obviously, it was a groupchat. You couldn’t help but wonder if it was that person they were talking about.

“Ooh, I’m gonna order another drink” you said, asking the boys if they wanted anything.

After you ordered your drink at the counter, you walked up to the counter next to your table that had the sugar and stirrers for the drinks. As you emptied a packet into the steaming coffee that was intended for Suga. A hand settled next to you on the counter.

“Anyone ever told you how gorgeous you are?” a voice mused from next to you.

Turning, you came face to face with a man a little taller than you with dark hair and a nice smile. He was attractive but you couldn’t help thinking he was so plain compared to the current objects of your affection. The glares you could see said men sending towards the man spurred you on. Why would they be mad about this? They had no reason to be. 

Giggling, you looked up at him through your eyelashes. Screw it, if you couldn’t have them then you were at least gonna have fun. 

“Not really” you mused, “why? Are you here to do that?”

The man's smirk returned. He reached behind you, trapping your body slight against the counter, but when he leaned back he had a hand full of napkins. He winked at your flustered form and you couldn’t help but flicker your eyes towards the table which was now...empty?

The hand that was now on your chin pulled your thoughts back to the handsome stranger. The rough pad of his thumb swiped over your cheek bone and he whispered about the chocolate that had been there. Heat flushed to your face as he sucked the sauce off of his thumb. His other hand slipped a piece of paper into your pocket and your mouth opened to say something when you were interrupted. 

A throat cleared behind you and the guy. The looming figure of Daichi, accompanied by his two boyfriends, stood behind you both. You had rarely seen them angry but the glares that were being sent his way even made you shiver. Suga had his fists clenched and even sweet, soft Asahi was looking severely unimpressed with the attempt at flirting with you.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Suga hissed at the poor man, who was now looking about ready to run.

“Sorry” the man stuttered, “I didn’t realise they were taken, I’ll leave i guess”

“Wait, no i’m not-” you started, but he was gone.

You stood, leaning on the counter, absolutely baffled their behaviour. Scoffing, you pulled out your wallet and turned to the lady at the counter, apologising for the small scene that had just occurred. The three men kept trying to catch your attention but you made a point to not spare them a glance while storming towards the car. As they paid you phoned Kiyoko. You were angry to the point of shaking and you knew if anyone could calm you down it was her. 

“Kiyoko, I need you to come get me” 

“Sure, give me 10 minutes, i’m pretty close” she sounded apologetic but you didn’t care.

You just didn’t want to feel alone.

-

After the three men had paid, they walked up to you. Your figure was hunched over and you were sat on the rain soaked curb.  The clear phone case that once had a photo of you four in it was now blank. Said photo had been flipped over because you couldn’t bear to look at what you used to be right now.

“What the fuck was that?” you growled

The men looked shocked. 

“He was flirting with you y/n what do you mean?”

The confusion in Asahi’s voice made a feeling curl inside you like the waffles had suddenly turned rancid. Eyebrows knitted together, you began to yell.

“And just what does that have to do with you three?” you began

“Why do you care who flirts with me and who doesn’t? You have 2 boyfriends each and I know you’re talking to another person who why the fuck does it matter to you if I don’t want to be lonely anymore huh?”

They all looked stunned at your revelation. Their shock didn’t phase you however, you had been sitting on this for too long. Too long had you been suffering in silence while they get to live this happy story that you were only a side character in. 

“God, it hurts so bad. You won’t ever understand how much pain I am in being around you and seeing how happy you’re gonna be with another person. It hurts!” you yelled, tears welling up.

The pain had now unfurled completely in your stomach. It was paralysing, like it was stopping you from running like you so desperately wanted to. It winded you, stealing your ability to keep yelling. Instead, it turned into a resigned whisper. 

“I get that you don’t want me, but why can’t other people? I don’t want to be alone anymore” 

Kiyoko’s tiny blue car pulled up next to you as you broke down crying. A tiny blonde ran out of the car to grab you as you fell, Yachi’s soft cooing distracting you from the three men across from you. Looking up at her, you saw her eyebrows knitted together in sympathy at your curled up figure. This was humiliating. Kiyoko motioned for her to guide you to the car, stepping out of the drivers side and towards Asahi, Daichi and Sugawara. 

Yachi pulled you into the backseat of the car, wrapping a blanket around your shoulders. You saw her eyes flicker to her girlfriend and the guys but you didn’t want to think about that much right now. Instead, you stared blankly at the photo of Yachi and Kiyoko cuddling that was stuck under the mirror. If only you had that. 

The now fuming Kiyoko sat in the driver's seat. Her face was contorted in an anger that was uncommon for the raven haired woman but it flooded into sympathy at the sight of you. Obviously, you looked a mess. In the mirror, you could see tear tracks down your face and your hair was messed up from where you had gripped at the sides of your head in frustration. Yachi stroked your hair one final time before climbing into the passengers' side. 

You stared out the window as she drove off, you could see the figures of the men you had left behind. Asahi was bent over, hands on his knees and Suga rubbing his back. Daichi has his head buried in his arms on top of the car. They had no right to be upset, you thought. You let them escape your mind as their figures turned into tiny dots in the distance. 

The silence was comforting.

AS I SAID, PAIN.

[starrywolf101]

For the zombieinnit thing what about different people finding out how fragile Tommy is

The 5 Times Tommy Gets Hurt

(+1 he gets protected)

1 - Jack Manifold

He had a brief interaction with Manifold on the day he left the prison, but he was still reeling and not truly listening to anything Jack said. That day was more of a blur than anything.

But now here he was, wanting Jack to stop rebranding the hotel. It was only a couple weeks since the last time he'd seen the other, but by now he's made more strides in recovering. Nobody but Puffy, Sam, Tubbo, Ranboo, and Michael knew about his zombie status yet.

Currently Jack Manifold and him were locked in a glaring content, both of his eyes locked onto the other's heterochromic eyes.

"Look, Jack, you can keep managing it and everything, but I really need you to remember that it's my property. Not yours, you arse."

Apparantly not liking that answer, Jack sneers and shoves Tommy. Freezing up in fear, Tommy doesn't even trying to defend himself from the attack. He loses his balance and falls to the ground, skull hitting the floor with a sickening crack. Regret flairs through Jack's veins as he immediately drops to his knees to check over the kid. Tommy's eyes are glazed over as he stares blankly up. His mind is replaying the moment he died over and over again, when his skull was slammed into the obsidian floor. Back in the present, Jack calls Sam Nook for help, the robot had been standing outside the hotel as per usual. He didn't actually want Tommy dead... again,,

When the robot had started helping Tommy, the kid's new... symptoms having been recorded into It's database, Jack had nearly puked. The back of Tommy's head, where he had hit the ground, looked rotted, and... ew was that Tommy's brain??? How was the kid still awake!?

He watches in shock as Sam Nook pours a potion of harming onto Tommy's injury, nearly jumping in to stop the robot, before watching with widened eyes as the wound healed...

"YOU WILL SPEAK NOTHING OF THIS JACK MANIFOLD."

Jack had nodded silently and fled the scene. There was so much to process...

2 - Sapnap

Sapnap and Tommy have always had a... complicated relationship. Sometimes they got along, and other times they were against each other. But since Dream had cut all attachments, Tommy had shown sympathy and reached out an olive branch to the other, and Sapnap had taken it. They still don't always get along perfectly, but its back to how it used to be... playful teasing and pranks!

But since the kid had left the prison, he's been... quieter. Seeing Tommy so quiet felt wrong.

In fact, he rarely saw the kid nowadays.

Having been looking for an excuse to see the teen, Sapnap had found the perfect thing. By a river, he'd found a rock that, if you squinted, it was shaped like a dick. Surely Tommy would get a kick out of this!

Approaching the dirt shack, gift in his pocket, Sapnap had a slight skip in step. He knocks on the door and called out for the boy.

"Tooommmyy! Are you home?"

A crash inside the home was worrying, but a quiet groan of pain set off alarm bells. Without another thought, Sapnap tries the doorknob— surprisingly the door was unlocked. Did this kid want to be stolen from??? Shaking off the stray thoughts, once again focused on the task at hand, he opens the door and enters. A light on downstairs leads Sapnap into a storage room with Tommy sitting curled up in the corner.

A rancid smell hits his nostrils and he scrunches his nose. An odor that was familiar to the awful smell of meat having gone bad.

Walking up to the teen, Tommy stared back at him with large, scared eyes. He was cradling his hand close to his chest, hiding it from view. And now that he was closer, something in the back of his mind registered that the smell was coming from the kid.

"Hey Tommy," Sapnap's voice took on a softness usually reserved for his close friends and his fiances. "Wanna tell me what happened so I can help?"

After a moment of Tommy examining his facial expression, he must've realize Sapnap meant no harm, and hesitantly holds his hand out. What Sapnap sees makes him want to vomit. Across Tommy's palm was a huge cut, but it was green and purple... the muscles torn and bone glimpseable .

Frowning, Sapnap mumbles: "Oh, kid... Here, I have a regen pot on me–"

"NO" Tommy's panicked shout cuts him off mid-sentence. "I– I mean," the kid gets quiet and nervous. "Use the one from my chest...: He shakily points towards the single chest across the room with his good hand.

Shaking off the shock, Sapnal roots through the chest and pulls out a bottle ful of a sickly potion... upon realizing what kind of potion it was, the cogs in his head turn. Rancid smell, rotted wound, potion of harming... Tommy was undead.

Sapnap scoots back over to Tommy, gently taking hold of the kid's wrist as to avoid spilling the potion on himself, and pours a generous amount of the viscous liquid onto Tommy's injury. The kid winces, but neither miss the twin looks of relief on their faces as the wound knits itself closed.

Seeing that Tommy was still clearly in a bad mental space, he remember the gift in his pocket. Pulling it out and handing it to the other, Sapnap smiles as he simy says: "I got you a dick rock."

Tommy's surprised, burst laugh was like music to his ears.

3 - Ghostbur

Ghostbur didn't understand what Tommy meant when he said he'd died. Tommy couldn't die, right...? No, his little brother was a survivor!

There was no way he had talked to Alivebur... but that look in Tommy's eyes... there was no way to fake that.

All the evidence kept piling up, and though he forgot some of it, some things never left his mind anymore. The way Tommy would get scared of taking damage, the way touch repulsed him... Tommy was also a lot quieter nowadays.

It was a nice day in Snowchester when it Ghostbur was confronted with the awful truth.

He had been visiting the small community when he spotted Tommy huddled up inside Tubbo's house. Obviously, he wondered why his little brother wasn't outside playing in the snow, so he goes to investigate.

"Tommy!" His raspy voice calls out cheerfully upon entering the cozy home. "Tommy what are you doing inside?"

He misses the way Tommy flinches, the terrified look in the youngest's eyes. Maybe Wilbur would've spotted it immediately, but Ghostbur wasn't him. He only saw the forced smile that covered it up, mistaking it for genuine happiness.

Tommy opens his mouth to respond, but he hesitated too long. Ghostbur was already talking again, excitedly bouncing in place. "I saw the snow outside and I remember how we used to have snowball fights when you were itty bitty, and it must've been a long time ago because now you're all tall and gangly! So I was thinking to myself, 'hmm, Tommy had been so sad lately! You know what would cheer him up? A snowball fight!' Except I can't touch the snow or else I'll melt so I thought we could go find Tubbo to play with!" It was a good thing Ghostbur didn't need to breathe anymore, because that whole rant would've taken a lot of air. Before Tommy could even finish processing all of that, Ghostbur grabs his wrist and starts tugging.

The unexpected contact send Tommy reeling, memories of a time when Wilbur would drag Tommy by the wrist, grip tight and unrelenting as the kid kicked and screamed. Times in the dark, cold ravine where nobody else could hear him plead for help. That morphed into when Dream started to doing the same thing during exile. Dream and Wilbur were interchangeable, their voices of anger and disappointment morphing into one. Adrenaline kicking in, Tommy starts shouting out for help, thrashing in Ghostbur's loose grip and causing the ghost to let go in surprise.

Luckily, Ranboo was close by and appeared inside the house. His teleportation ability kicking in without him realizing. He's quick to Tommy's side as the ghost watches on in horror. Quiet, comforting vwoops leave Ranboo's chest, and Tommy unconsciously curls closer to the source of familiar comfort. Once the majority of the panic was over, Tommy looks at Ranboo, eyes locked onto his tie. "Ra' boo?" The youngest slurs out tiredly.

"Hey, Tommy, you're safe. You're in Snowchester, with Tubbo and me."

Tommy simply nodded and closed his eyes, slumping over. The air is still for a moment, a tense quiet fills the walls of the house.

"Is... is he okay...?" Ghostbur finally speaks up.

"Honestly? Not really..." Ranboo answers, turning to look at the ghost, but never quite making eye-contact. "But he'll be better when he wakes up. Panic attacks are exhausting, especially for him nowadays.."

When Ranboo picks Tommy up, the red and white shirt rides up on his side a little, giving Ghostbur a good look at a nasty wound. Flesh eaten away to reveal the muscle underneath. Already feeling himself forgetting, Ghostbur watches the two teens leave the room.

4 - Philza

It had been awhile since he'd seen Tommy. Last time had been when he'd shown up to help Ranboo move. After the eyepatch incident, the base had been wrapped in a tense silence. Ranboo left for a few days afterwards, though Techno and Phil couldn't blame him. He did come back, but nobody spoke of what happened.

So, Phil hadn't been ready to run into Tommy in the Nether. He had just been on his way towards the larger SMP when he saw the kid sitting on a path, legs dangling off the side as he stared into the lava below. That sight set off so many alarm bells, and it took everything in Phil not to yank the kid back from the edge.

"What are you doing out here, mate?" Phil calls out, wings ruffling nervously on his back. He kept his voice and expression calm.

Tommy flinches, but his posture quickly relaxes again as he turns to look at Phil, his empty socket uncovered. Phil has to force himself to not stare at it. "Oh, its you." There was an apathetic tone to Tommy's voice that rubbed him wrong. Tommy was one of the most expressive people he'd ever met, and to hear him so emotionless...

Contrary to popular belief, he was not Tommy's dad. He hadn't even met the kid until his son, Wilbur, had gotten attached. But that Tommy was very different from the one he's looking at now. What had caused this change?

"You just gonna keep fucking staring at me like I'm some circus freak, or are you gonna sit down already?" Tommy pulls Phil out of his thoughts, causing the man to blink in confusion. He accepts the offer before the teen catching his mind— sitting cross-legged on the path beside Tommy, but not too close. They sit in silence for a bit, listening to the songs of the Nether. Piglins and Zombie Piglins oink and snort, there's a distant cry of a Ghast, and even the lava is bubbling to its own tune. Every now and then, Phil catches himself staring at Tommy, forcing himself to look elsewhere when he does. Tommy catches on, "I know I'm handsome and all, but staring is considered rude, bitch. Thought someone as old as you would know that," there's a hint of teasing in his tone.

Embarrassment floods his veins, causing Phil's wings to poof a bit, but he could blame it on the heat. "Erm– Sorry, mate... just caught up in my own head, I guess,"

Tommy rolls his eye and makes direct eye-contact with Phil. "I don't want your pity. I don't care for your thoughts. If you have questions, ask them now, cause you might never get another opportunity."

Phil swallows heavily and looks away. A lot of questions raced through his mind, but only one stuck:

"Did you talk to Wilbur?"

The teen grimaced, and that was an answer all in itself. "Yeah, asshole talked about solitare for months straight, would not shut up about the stupid game."

Oh... that hadn't been the answer he was expecting.

"And then continued to want to destroy the entirety of the SMP. He's acting crazier than before, but I guess I would too if I sat in a void for nine years too."

He remembers reading something about the time difference between death and life... back when he was still researching revival. Moving on from his question about Wilbur, he then asks: "How have you been doing?"

Tommy simply shrugs. "Usually? I'm either knee deep in flashbacks, or I'm aware enough to stumble about. Today? Can't feel a thing– 'm hollow. That's why I don't care about the questions,, I literally can't."

His heart breaks as he listens to Tommy's words, here is a kid so beat down and ruined by the world. To the point where he's gone numb. Not sure what else to do, Phil pulls Tommy into a hug, wrapping his wings around them. "I'm sorry."

Still for just a moment, Tommy slowly leans into the embrace, "Yeah.. me too."

5 - Puffy

Captain Puffy prides herself on being there for her friends. For trying for those she loves. Learning that she didn't try hard enough for Tommy left her broken.

And then, by some miracle, he was back. But... not as he was. In fact, the trauma he's lived (and died) through seems to have shut the once lively boy down.

She finds him hesitating outside her therapy office, or therapuffy as she calls it, fiddling with his torn and bloodied shirt. She mentally noted that he needs a new wardrobe.

"Hey, Tommy! What's up, my dude?" She keeps her voice soft and upbeat, not wanting to scare him away. "Did you need something?"

She internally frowns at the way he shies away from her, even though she's not anywhere near enough to initiate contact. Even stranger is how he doesn't fully turn to face her, half his face obscured from view. Still, she doesn't show she noticed it, and continues to smile warmly. Here was a duckling who was afraid of opening back up, but desperately in need of that love and affirmation he deserves. But she has to wait for him to come to her.

Realizing that maybe he wouldn't start anything on his own, she starts up the conversation. "Did you hear about the latest prank on Bad?" She asks. When Tommy shakes his head, the corner of her lip quirks up in amusement as she continues. "Somebody put a bunch of swear words all over his house!" That gets a chuckle out of Tommy.

They sit in silence after that, though its not awkward. It feels more like Tommy is internally debating on what to say, and Puffy didn't want to distract him. After a minute, with his voice uncharacteristically quiet, he asks: "Do you have any potions...?"

"Yeah! I've got some in storage," She hums. "Do you wanna come with me to get some?"

He hesitantly nods before turning his body to fully face her. That's when she saw it. His cheek in the left side of his face was rotted away, revealing teeth and gums. Nausea twisted in her gut, but still somehow remains calm. Instead of even referencing the gruesome sight, she simply smiles and holds out her hand. Seeming to get the message, Tommy places his hand in hers. She leads him down to where she kept most of her stuff, and sits him down on a spare surface– the place being an empty chest just sitting out.

"What kind of potion you need?" She asks, not wanting to assume and end up messing up.

"...Harming,"

Humming, Puffy digs around for a minute before successfully retrieving a potion of harming. It was a drinking one, surprisingly enough. Usually she just turned all of those into splash pots. Pulling on a pair of gloves and dousing a spare rag in the viscous liquid. Carefully holding up the soaked rag to his face, she hovers just above the rotting flesh and asks: "May I?"

Tommy nods and she presses the cloth to his cheek. She can feel the flesh knit itself back together under the cloth. Once she was sure it was healed, she hands whats left of the potion over for Tommy to drink. That'll fix up any internal damages he was possibly dealing with.

He grimaces as he accepts the bottle, "It always tastes like that shit nasty medicine i took as a kid.." he grumbles before throwing his head back to gulp the potion down as quickly as possible. Her inner pirate from days long gone idly thinks that Tommy would he good at putting down shots.

He soon leaves after that, not a word from either of them. Puffy silently promises to look out for the kid.

+1 - Techno

Tommy was being chased down by Bad and Ant again... though they were quickly gaining on him. Since coming back from the dead, Tommy's had very poor stamina, and he's not sure if its a zombie thing or him being very unhealthy thing. Being skin and bones, unhealthy underweight, would definitely affect him,, but he just couldn't seem to put any of the weight back on now.

The Egg cult must've been especially focused on him, bevause they were still chasing him, and Tommy was stumbling through a snow biome... Deja vu much?

Panting, Tommy can only hear the blood rushing in his ears, his heavy breathing, and the crunching of snow.

There's a light in the distance, though! And a very familiar cabin. Alarms blared in his head, his traitorous brain reminding him that he wasn't welcome here anymore. He didn't have much time to think, though, because his foot gets stuck in a snowdrift, causing him to collapse into the cold, frozen ground. The snow cushions his fall, though he definitely feels his foot pop off from his ankle.

"Well well well, looks like its the end of the road, Tommyinnit... again." Bad mocks in a chilling voice– it was a hollow sort of joy, a mimic of how warm Bad's voice used to be. He watches as Ant picks up the detached foot, frozen still with fear. "Any last words, Tommy?"

He squeezes his eyes shut, waiting for his swift end... knowing that Bad was lifting up an axe to swing. Only for it to never come. Instead a clank of metal on metal, and a familiar monotone voice.

"You see, I can't let you do that. You're all on my land, and I'd hate for the snow to stain red."

Peaking open an eye, he's in awe of the sight before him. Technoblade was standing in front of him, his axe having blocked the strike. Bad and Ant look at each other, nod, and back off. It was obvious that going against The Blade was a losing battle. Ant drops the foot into the snow as the two retreat.

Techno puts away his weapon and crouches down to pick up the foot. "What are you doing here, Theseus?" Techno didn't turn towards him.

"Give it back." Tommy ignores the question, putting up his wall. "That's mine, you arse."

"What do you mean its yours? Whose foot is this anyways–" Techno's words cut off as he turns to face Tommy, finally taking in the kid's appearance.

Tommy wasn't wearing his eyepatch, but thats not what caught his attention. It was the lack of a foot attached to his body. Quickly realizing why Tommy was demanding back the foot, he hands it over to the kid, watching in morbid fascination as he pops it right back onto his leg and rolling his ankle. The voices were all screaming different things,and he couldn't make sense of what they were saying.

"So... uh, the weird egg people were chasing you?"

Techno sucked at small talk, but he honestly didn't know what to say as Tommy stood up and brushed the snow off himself. "I'm immune and shit— well I was before the uh, prison visit. But I think I'm still immune."

"Ah,"

...

"Uh, I'm gonna go back home.." Tommy points towards the Nether Portal. "Thank you for saving me, or whatever.."

"Yeah.. yeah,"

...

"I'm just... gonna go."

Techno watches as Tommy starts to head off, slowly crunching through the snow.

He didn't know what terms he was on with the kid, but it didn't seem nearly as hostile as before. It probably wouldn't hurt anything if he started to watch out for Tommy from the shadows..

[Masterpost]

---

Okay its done, I've been working on this for ages! I also didn't go back and read it, and most of this was written while I was exhausted, so there's that