#do I understand lighting now? no <3 I do not <3

[vasilissadragomir]

y’all i really think sid abernathy is intellectually and/or developmentally disabled. idk if this is a common belief or not, but after the audio excerpt i’m more convinced than ever. here’s why:

1. sid’s dialogue and behavior

“you said be your rooster. you said you wanted to get to the woods at daylight.”

“haymitch!” wails sid. “the sun’s coming up!”

sid’s language and cadence suggest a young child. which makes sense; he’s 10, which is a young child. so it’s consistent that haymitch would tell sid to be his “rooster,” which is, of course, a callback to “tuck your tail in, little duck.” however, while katniss’ pet name for prim is humorous and light-hearted, her intention in using it is to make prim feel better facing the imminent reaping.

sid’s joy on reaping day, especially the reaping day of the second quarter quell, suggests sid is at best aware but unconcerned about the day’s proceedings, but realistically, that he doesn’t know or understand whatsoever what will occur. as far as he’s concerned, the most important event of the day is haymitch’s birthday.

granted, sid is 10, and prim, at 12, is reaping age. but there’s no way he can avoid the truth about the games or reaping day at school. and haymitch “resistance is not an option” abernathy would not indulge such wanton disregard for the dangers of the day. acting like the reaping isn’t happening is insolence in and of itself. unless, of course, sid’s behavior is not disregard, but true ignorance. and the only way he’d be ignorant of the reaping is if he is, at least in the eyes of haymitch and his mother, incapable of understanding it.

2. sid needing an explanation about the reaping

“i wonder whether it'll be me or ma who sits him down beforehand and explains about his role in the reaping, how he had to look nice and keep his mouth shut and not cause any trouble. even if the unthinkable happens and his name gets drawn, he's got to suck it up, put on the bravest face he can muster and climb onto that stage, because resistance is not an option.”

as implied by sid’s happy attitude in the excerpt, and now confirmed by the audio clip, sid will need to have the reaping explained to him when he turns 12. but in his worry about sid’s first reaping, haymitch is concerned with telling sid step-by-step what to do. and it’s not just about where to stand or the proceedings themselves. he will have to explain to sid that he needs to be quiet and docile.

no kid in district 12 would need it explained to them how to act on reaping day by age 12. that is, unless the normal district 12 peacekeepers would otherwise know that the kid means no harm in stepping out of line. on reaping day, with peacekeeper reinforcements and cameras, the same lenience would not apply. an intellectual disability would explain not only that, but why haymitch and their mother intend to keep sid in his happy ignorance as long as they can.

3. sid’s death within two weeks of haymitch’s defiance

the most common question about snow’s punishment of haymitch is why he didn’t have sid or lenore dove reaped. on lenore dove, it would be too obvious to reap haymitch’s girl just a year or two after haymitch’s games. that’s especially true if haymitch’s insolence is so egregious as to warrant a punishment as severe as the death of all his loved ones. after a year or two lenore dove would be aged out. to create some plausible deniability for the capitol citizens, the only realistic option for snow to reap would be sid.

with sid, he would have nine years to choose exactly the right moment to punish haymitch in this way. if sid is anything like prim, he’d be beloved in the capitol during haymitch’s games, largely for his youth and innocence. but katniss herself considers prim to be reaped. that’s a particularly strong possibility once prim was older, and thus less angelic and harmless in the eyes of the capitol. even still, rue is evidence that age is not reason enough for the capitol to grow sour at the idea of any tribute’s reaping.

so why wouldn’t snow wait it out for sid? i’m sure we’ll get plenty of reasons in the book, but the best explanation is that it would create blowback for snow if sid was reaped, regardless of his age or how beloved he is in the capitol. the most realistic scenario why that would be true is if sid is too naive and “simple” to be a threat, even as an older teen in a strong, adult-like body.

that’s not to say the capitol is “above” reaping a disabled child (see: the boy from 10 in the 75th and wovey in the 10th). but a beloved younger brother of a quarter quell victor who is ALSO developmentally disabled? the optics would be terrible for snow. that’s especially true if the capitol’s attitude toward people with mental disabilities is anything as patronizing as that of the people of district 12 (see: the people at the hob treating greasy sae’s granddaughter like a pet out of ignorance rather than malice).

4. it’s great device to explain the games to the audience without too much info-dumping

we’re going to spend much of the games in haymitch’s head. even in the midst of a battle royale, that can get boring really fast. that issue was avoided in tbosas by snow’s narration, since the boring bits of lucy’s gray’s time in the games were easily supplemented by snow’s life in the capitol.

with katniss, the quiet parts of the games were broken up with flashbacks. the flashbacks served double duty of keeping things interesting AND creating character development/worldbuilding. we saw katniss’ father’s death, her interaction with peeta, her friendship with gale, and her life at home with her mother and prim. her father’s death explained her character, the bread incident her feelings about peeta, her friendship with gale her worldview, and prim/her mother the inter-12 seam/town tensions as well as katniss’ motivations.

unlike with katniss, though, we know a lot about who haymitch is and what happened to him. we don’t need as much basic worldbuilding (and i doubt he’d have much more information than katniss does at this point, anyway), so the only things left are his family and district 12. for haymitch’s family, which is 100% seam in a way katniss’ is not, we’re going to need a new lens through which to view 12. it can’t *just* be typical single-mother seam life; we got most of that through katniss and gale. haymitch’s story has to provide a new angle.

i think that additional layer *has* to be sid. haymitch, unlike katniss, was himself reaped—what is motivating his survival? what makes him different than all the others in the seam, who are reaped to an inevitable death? a clear explanation could be that sid is incapable of surviving if haymitch dies. even with their mother working, everyone has to contribute. and if haymitch doesn’t have a gale, sid’s protection is even less guaranteed.

sure, haymitch might just have the same maternal instinct katniss has for prim, but that’s one of the key distinctions between them in the trilogy. haymitch loves peeta and katniss like they’re his own, and yet he lies to and betrays them in a way that katniss considers unconscionable. and, imo, if it’s as simple as haymitch wanting to protect sid’s innocence like katniss wants to protect prim’s, the similarities between them become less parallels and more replicas. what’s the point of sid’s death if katniss and haymitch are so similar that the loss of their siblings conveys the same message?

[demigod-shenanigans]

Leo And Jason DoorDash A Baby

Summary: Jason made a displeased noise as the lights came on. He said something that sounded like half a nickname in garbled Spanish and grumbled about it being late and being abandoned to sleep on his own.

“Yeah. Sorry about that, Sparky,” Leo said. “More importantly, though: look at this baby I found.”

“Can you please come to bed first and make jokes at me after?” his husband complained, yawning. “I just want to cuddle for a bit.”

“I would, but I think we’ve got more immediate problems than me depriving you of cuddles. Namely: the fact that I’m holding a child.”

“Leo, I love you, but what in the world are you talking about?” Jason murmured, finally starting to untangle himself from the blankets.

Then the little girl in Leo’s arms started crying.

Jason sat up with a start, wide awake the instant it dawned on him that this wasn’t one of Leo’s jokes. “What did you do?”

Leo looked his husband dead in the eyes and said, “I cloned myself.”

—

Or: someone leaves a baby at the entrance of the Waystation in the middle of the night. It’s not quite how Leo and Jason expected this whole adoption process to work, but, well… when has anything in their lives ever gone the way they expected it to?

Word Count: 7.3k

Rating: Teen and Up (just to be safe)

CWs: mentions of past traumatic experiences, since those are gone into to a certain extend (Jason is not going to be okay about finding an abandoned child when he’s been an abandoned child in the past).

I have spent a lot of time waffling with @queenjunothegreat about this concept and had a lot of fun writing it out! Ended up quite a bit longer than I expected, but I’m not complaining.

Main focus of the fic is accidental baby acquisition feat. married Valgrace, but there is also some lost trio content (Piper is having a great time during that particular Iris message, lmao), and little Emilia McLean from this fic is also here, a little older now! There’s references to that fic in this one but reading it is not a requirement to understand this fic.

———

It was 3 am, and Leo was just trying to get to the bedroom after finishing up his latest magic object repair project in the workshop. As was the case with the Waystation sometimes, he tripped out the front door instead.

That was just how it worked, living in a magic building. Sometimes it was convenient, like when someone was hurt and the Waystation made the infirmary appear in the next room, or when Leo and Calypso had needed space after their breakup and simply hadn’t crossed paths for a week. Sometimes, it was a little less convenient, like when the workshop was suddenly next to the bedroom so Jason only had to cross one room if he wanted to drag his sleep-deprived husband to bed. Once, when Leo had neglected maintenance for too long, the Waystation had dropped him into the pool fully clothed. It had an attitude like that.

Currently, Leo couldn’t think of anything he might have done to piss off the building, though, so there was probably a different reason why he’d ended up out here. 

The air was cold enough that he pulled the large hoodie he’d borrowed from his husband a little closer around himself. He realized how stupid the impulse was a moment later—he could have just upped his body temperature instead. That was sleep deprivation 1, Leo Valdez 0.

It was a night of a full moon, and between the moon’s soft glow and the street lights, Leo could see alright. No need for a flashlight or to light himself on fire. 

He let his eyes wander, trying to figure out why he’d been thrown out of his home in the middle of the night. They didn’t have to wander far. 

Someone had placed a basket beside the entrance to the Waystation. And inside that basket…

“Holy shit.” Leo pinched himself, trying to confirm he wasn’t so sleep deprived he was hallucinating the whole thing. 

Nope, the basket was still there. And that was definitely a baby. What the hell?

He kneeled down next to the basket, looking at the infant that had been left here all alone, with no one but the moon to guard her.

They were wide awake, looking at him with large, dark eyes. 

“What are you doing out here, hm?” 

He scanned the area again, trying to see if there was a parent around who’d come back to collect their baby. He couldn’t see anyone. Not that leaving a child on some stranger’s doorstep to go buy groceries or something would have been peak parenting, exactly.

The wind was bitingly cold. And if it was that bad for him, Leo couldn’t imagine basket baby was doing much better, in their thin onesie and blanket.

“Okay, we need to get you inside,” he decided, reaching out towards the basket, then stopping suddenly as he spotted something tucked underneath it.

It was a small piece of paper, no larger than a postcard. He pulled it out from beneath the basket so he could take a look at it, slowly, so as to not startle the child in the process. Words had been hastily scribbled onto the paper. 

‘I can’t care for her, but I know she’ll be safe here. This is what’s best for both of us.’ 

Leo’s heart was hammering in his chest, aching for the poor kid and whatever demigod had dropped her off here—and it had to have been a demigod. No one else would think to drop their child off at what the general public considered to be a generic event space—never mind in the middle of the night—expecting her to be safe.

Leo folded the note and put it into one of his many, many pockets. 

He hesitated again, trying to remember whether he’d washed his hands properly coming out of the workshop. He decided better safe than sorry and went for the effective, if slightly unusual, disinfecting technique of temporarily setting his hands on fire.

Once he’d put them out and cooled them back down to a semi-normal temperature, he reached out to scoop the baby up out of the basket.

Thankfully, Leo wasn’t completely useless with babies. Em, his honorary niece, was three now, but he’d held her enough times as an infant to know how this went. Make sure the head and neck are supported first, then place the other hand under the baby's bottom and lift them up carefully.

He still remembered how Piper had first explained it to him, Reyna glaring at him from across the room like she was fully expecting him to drop the baby. That had made two of them.

He’d been weeping, still reeling from the declaration that the girl was named after him—as a gesture of love and because in a world where names had power, the name of someone who’d defied death twice and found his happy ending against all odds was good luck. He’d spent so long thinking of himself as a curse that someone choosing his name as a blessing hadn’t quite computed.

“Don’t mind my lovely wife. Rey’s just nervous,” Piper had whispered to him, patting his arm encouragingly while he held Emilia for the very first time. “You’re the first person aside from us and the hospital staff who gets to hold Em.”

Leo had understood nervous, then, with his best friend’s kid snuggled up against his chest. He understood nervous now, with this small, vulnerable human in his arms. Despite knowing exactly what he was doing, he was still anxious he might hurt her accidentally. This had to be terrifying for her, and the last thing he wanted was to make it even worse.

The Waystation roulette was merciful. After walking back up the ramp with the baby in tow, Leo found himself standing right outside his bedroom door.

Thank the gods. He really needed Jason right now.

Okay, technically Emmie and Jo would probably have been more convenient than Leo’s poor husband, whose experience with babies was about the same as Leo’s own—limited to playing with Em and babysitting for Percy and Annabeth back at uni. But Emmie and Jo weren’t here right now. They were in New Rome with Georgina.

The thought of Georgina at NRU was still weird as hell. Leo had known this kid since she was seven years old. The fact that she was attending university now would never, ever, feel normal to him. 

But in all honesty, even if his foster parents had been at the Waystation right now, Leo probably still would have wanted Jason. He was pretty sure wanting your husband there was a natural instinct when one found a child on their doorstep. He’d have to ask around for reference.

Leo pushed open the bedroom door with his hip, wincing as it creaked. He’d been meaning to take care of the rusted hinges for a while, but between the dracon incident last month and an emergency pegasus landing two weeks ago, he’d been preoccupied with other fixes and forgotten about this one. He hadn’t exactly thought to account for the inconvenience the issue might cause to any babies found on the doorstep in the middle of the night.

The little girl in his arms scrunched up her face like she might start to cry.

“Shhhh. Hey. You’re okay,” he tried to soothe her, bouncing her awkwardly. “That’s what I get for prioritizing fixing the person-sized hole in the roof over some rusty hinges.”

The baby didn’t start crying, though she still looked very unhappy about the entire situation. Leo couldn’t say he blamed her.

Jason shifted in his blanket heap.

Leo wasn’t surprised he’d woken up. Creaky door or not, he almost always woke up when Leo came to bed. His husband had always been a light sleeper—all too ready to jump out of bed with his sword drawn at even the hint of a threat. Even though more than a decade had come and gone since he’d been an active member of the legion, he’d never quite managed to break that particular habit. 

Usually, Leo felt bad for waking him. Right now, that he woke so easily was a huge relief. Having to shake Jason awake with one arm while balancing a baby in the other wasn’t an experience Leo was particularly sad to miss out on. 

His husband made a displeased noise as the light was switched on. He covered his face with one arm, said something that sounded like half a nickname in garbled Spanish and grumbled about it being late and being abandoned to sleep on his own.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry about that, Sparky. More importantly, though: look at this baby I found.”

“Can you please come to bed first and make jokes at me after?” Jason complained, yawning. He patted the mattress next to him. “I promise I’ll laugh, even if I’m way too tired to understand the joke. I just want to cuddle for a bit.”

“I would, but I think we’ve got more immediate problems than me depriving you of cuddles. Namely: the fact that I’m holding a child right now.”

“Leo, I love you so much, but you know I don’t have the capacity for your sense of humor at this hour. What in the world are you talking about?” Jason murmured, finally starting to untangle himself from the blankets. 

As if on cue, the little girl in Leo’s arms started crying. Whether this was because she was hungry or cold or because the existential dread of being ditched on a stranger’s doorstep by the only person she’d ever known was starting to hit her, Leo couldn’t immediately tell.

Jason sat up with a start, wide awake the instant it dawned on him that this wasn’t one of Leo’s weird jokes.

He looked at the two of them, eyes wide as saucers. “What did you do?”

“I cloned myself,” Leo said, looking his husband dead in the eye. The joke didn’t entirely work. Her skin was a shade darker than his and the tufts of hair on the girl’s head were clearly brown instead of black.

He rocked the baby gently against his chest. 

“What?” Jason was out of bed at a speed that was honestly frightening, even for someone who had seen him go from zero to battle-ready in under thirty seconds before.

Jason looked frantic, apparently completely willing to believe Leo’s stupid joke, the obvious inconsistencies be damned. He moved to stand beside them.

“Kidding, mi cielo. I’m still working on cloning.” Leo grinned at him. He felt as terrified as Jason looked, and even now, despite the fact that he was supposed to be a semi-responsible adult and had been married for almost a decade, jokes were sometimes the only thing that helped. “I just ordered DoorDash. Not sure why they sent a baby. I’m pretty sure I just asked for fries.”

“Leo, whose child is that?” 

Okay, that was enough with the jokes. They might have been helpful for Leo, but it was obvious they were doing the opposite for Jason, and getting him even more worked up would probably not help the situation.

“I have no idea,” he admitted. He continued to rock the baby, but it wasn’t helping. She just wouldn’t stop crying. “It wasn’t DoorDash, but someone did leave her at the entrance of the Waystation with no intention of coming back.”

“Oh.” Jason’s posture immediately changed. The tension went out of his body, replaced with a kind of vulnerability Leo had only seen his husband show a handful of times. “But she’s so small.Someone just abandoned her?”

Leo’s chest constricted. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Jason sound so utterly broken.

The parent that had left the girl here probably had their reasons—and, speaking as someone who’d spent a lot of time in the care of foster parents who hadn’t been fit for the job, sometimes not having a parent at all was definitely the preferable option.

But how could Jason have thought of anything other than the feeling of being that small, abandoned child, waiting in the woods for a mother who never came back?

Leo wanted to pull his husband to his chest and soothe him, but currently he had an armful of wailing baby, which made that a little difficult.

“Come on, let’s sit for a while, yeah?” Leo suggested gently. Jason nodded, and together they sank down onto the edge of their bed, the mattress creaking slightly as they did. “You wanna hold her for a bit?”

“I…” Jason hesitated, then nodded. “I do, actually.”

Leo very carefully handed him the baby. That made her crying even worse. Leo gulped, wondering if she thought she was being abandoned again.

“Hey, cariño, I’m not going anywhere, okay?” he said soothingly. “That’s Jason. He’s nice, I promise. I wouldn’t have married him otherwise.”

He gently poked one of the girl’s palms with his finger. She immediately grasped for it, meaning she had to be very little. He knew that because he loved being Em’s tío and had been endlessly bummed out when she’d grown out of automatically grasping his fingers at five months.

“Hey. You’re going to be okay,” Jason said to the girl, sounding almost shy. His voice was quavering as he cradled the child protectively. He looked at her with all the determination of someone who knew exactly what it was like to be abandoned and would have done anything to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else. “I’m sorry. This is so, so much, and it has to be so overwhelming for you. But you’re safe. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to you, I promise.”

His voice cracked.

Leo wrapped his free arm around his husband, placing his head down on Jason’s shoulder. Jason was shaking.

“You’re okay, too,” Leo reminded him gently, pressing a kiss to the side of Jason’s head. “I’m not going anywhere. Expert at sticking around, remember?”

Jason nodded, smiling weakly.

“I love you,” he sniffled, leaning into Leo. His eyes were brimming with tears. “She’s so upset.”

“I know, Jase.”

Leo thought for a moment, then started humming the melody of an old lullaby his mom had sung to him when he’d been little, the words of which long since been lost to time.

Between this, Jason’s gentle rocking and Leo’s finger grasped tightly in her little fist, the baby startled to settle down, staring at them with large, dark eyes.

“There you go. That’s better. You’re way too young for that level of existential dread,” Leo joked, heart aching. “I could go find you a warmer blanket, if you want? You’re a little cold.” He tried to pull his hand back, but the second she lost her grip on his finger, she started crying again. “Or not! Maybe you’ll continue to hold my finger hostage instead,” he decided, letting her grasp it again.

She immediately quieted back down.

Leo’s tool belt wasn’t super helpful at producing blankets. It could do car covers and cleaning rags, but Leo wasn’t convinced those materials were baby-safe, so instead he leaned as far as he could off the bed without removing his finger from the girl’s little fist again and pulled a fresh bed sheet out of a drawer. Then, he asked the tool belt for scissors.

~~~

A few minutes later, Jason had wrapped the baby up in the remnants of a very wrecked bedsheet. She cooed happily, still hanging onto Leo’s hand, though he put a stop to it when she tried to stick his finger in her mouth.

“Trust me, kid. You do not want to do that. My hands are clean-ish, but you don’t know where I’ve been.” She scrunched her face up again. “Nope, I’m not budging on that. You do not need to know what oil tastes like yet. Spoilers: I’ve tried it. Do not recommend.”

He hummed at her again, which slightly soothed her offense at the terrible injustice of not getting to eat his fingers.

“I wish we had a pacifier we could give her,” Jason said quietly. 

“I’m not sure Georgina’s twenty year old pacifiers still exist, but even if they do, I don’t think they’d be any safer for her than my fingers,” Leo commented, sighing. “I wish we had something to give her, too. Her bio parent at least could have had the decency to dump her on our doorstep with some basic necessities.”

“They’re really not going to come back for her, are they?” Jason asked. He didn’t look like he was about to break down in tears anymore, but his breaths still came shakily.

“No,” Leo said, running his free hand soothingly down his husband’s arm. “The note they left made it sound pretty permanent.”

Looking at him—at the way Jason was smiling down at the child, so, so very gentle despite all his grief, and the way all three of them fit together—something in Leo’s mind began to click into place. 

Before he could decide what, exactly, that something was, Jason beat him to it.

“Can we keep her?” he asked suddenly, with no preamble or warning. He was tense, anxiety written all over his face. He continued hastily, “I know it’s not really how we planned to do this, but-”

“She’s here now. And she needs someone,” Leo finished, smiling at the fact that their minds had gone to the same place. They were like two gears in the same machine, running perfectly in sync.

Jason nodded. Some of the tension went out of his shoulders. 

“You don’t think I’m being completely ridiculous?”

“For wanting to adopt a child you met maybe ten minutes ago?” Leo beamed at him. “I mean, a little. But I can’t be making all the ridiculously impulsive decisions in this relationship.”

He pressed a kiss to Jason’s temple.

Jason smiled weakly. The grief in his expression started to melt away into something soft and almost hopeful. “So you’re saying we’ll think about it?”

That would have been reasonable. This was maybe not the sort of decision one should make at this hour of night. But Leo had never been the reasonable sort. Mostly, this had been to his benefit—if he had been reasonable, he would have been extremely fucking dead, and Jason with him.

Honestly, Leo made some of his best choices when he wasn’t overthinking things. 

Besides, considering how easily the girl had settled in his husband’s arms, and the soft way Jason was looking at him…

Well, fuck being reasonable.

“Eh, I’ve told you before that I try not to think too much. It interferes with being nuts.” Leo grinned. “So, I guess we have a kid now?”

Jason leaned forward and kissed him.

~~~

Maybe Leo should have been freaking out more. That seemed like the reasonable way to act when you’d suddenly become a dad from one minute to the next with no warning.

But apparently he’d gotten most of his frantic energy out of his system when he’d found the baby, and now that Jason was with him and they knew they’d be keeping her, the whole thing didn’t seem quite as ridiculously terrifying anymore.

When the baby started crying again—utterly inconsolable this time in a way that, from all their past baby experiences, made Jason and Leo agree she was probably hungry—he didn’t let himself panic. He briefly left his husband and the baby to go bother the nice mortal couple down the street about diapers and formula and a baby bottle, fumbling his way through an explanation about unexpectedly ending up with a Safe Haven Box baby. He figured that was close enough to the truth. 

Preparing the formula wasn’t too hard, but he was glad he had practice from babysitting.

When he got back to the bedroom, Jason was hovering—like, literally hovering a good foot above the ground—and talking to the baby in a hushed tone. 

“What in the world are you doing?” Leo laughed, raising an eyebrow at his husband.

“I don’t know. She seems to like it,” Jason told him, slowly floating back down.

The baby was still obviously unhappy, but she wasn’t crying quite as hard anymore. Huh. They'd have to put that down for future reference.

“Hey, cariño. I brought food.” Leo waved the bottle at her. “Jase, do you wanna feed her?”

Jason’s eyes gleamed. “Would that be okay?”

“I mean, it’s not like this is a one and done kind of deal. I can feed her next time. Besides,” Leo continued teasingly, “seems only fair that you take more of the baby feeding shifts. We both know I’m gonna be making most of her food once she grows out of formula and puree age. You’re a safety hazard in the kitchen.”

“You’re impossible,” Jason laughed, sitting back down on the bed and adjusting his hold on the baby to get her into a better position for feeding.

“I’m also right.” Leo smirked. “Remember that time back at NRU when you tried to make popcorn and somehow exploded the microwave?”

“That was ten years ago,” Jason pouted. 

“And you’ve since managed to fry our microwave a minimum of five times, and the oven at least twice. You are not helping your case, mi cielo.” He handed over the bottle. The baby looked at it suspiciously for a moment. “Solid instincts, cariño, but I made that one. It’s good, promise,” Leo told her, feeling incredibly smug when she started to drink.

Her tiny scrunched up face started to relax.

“There, that's much better, isn’t it?” Jason asked soothingly. 

“Look at that. A bit of Chef Leo food and she’s immediately content,” Leo announced, ignoring the fact that in this particular case, his specific input in preparing the food had been minimal. “I can’t believe she’s been with us for all of an hour and she’s already taking after you.”

His husband gently headbutted Leo in the neck, like he sometimes did. He was a fucking weirdo. 

But he was Leo’s fucking weirdo. Forever.

“Hey, it’s not our fault you’re a great cook.” Jason was smiling softly. “She’s gonna fit right in.”

“Yeah, she is.”

Leo was transfixed on the image of Jason holding their baby. Their baby. They had a daughter now. 

It was almost startling, how quickly the certainty of it had settled over him. How right it all felt. They’d been talking about adopting for a while, and it had felt more and more like it was the right time.

Her appearing on their doorstep now… it was something like destiny. 

Normally, the concept of destiny would have set off alarm bells in Leo’s head. For most of his life, destiny hadn’t been a good thing. So little of his and Jason’s lives had ever been coincidental. They’d both spent their entire childhoods tangled up in strings the Fates had woven for them.

But he figured after all the awful things he’d been destined to be—an orphan and a hero and dead—being a dad wasn’t a destiny he minded all that much.

“The note didn’t mention a name, right?” Jason asked as he put down the bottle. Leo shook his head. “Does that mean we get to choose one?”

Jason shifted the baby in his arms, holding her upright and gently patting her back to burp her. 

“Yeah. She seems very enthusiastic about being named.” Leo chuckled. “I’m partial towards Leo 2.0, personally, but between me and Em, that might get a little confusing, so 3.0 might be better.”

“Serious suggestions only, please?” Jason asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Sorry, if that’s your condition you’re gonna have to find a different husband.” 

Leo flicked him in the head, still grinning, but then he dutifully redirected his attention towards the baby. He thought back to the list of baby names they’d made—a list that he’d always figured they most likely wouldn’t need, considering most adoptees came much older than this, with a name already attached. Jason had insisted they make a list anyway, just in case. Leo hadn’t had the heart to tell him no.

And, well, considering their 3 am postal delivery baby, that was a point in favor of Jason’s incessant need to prepare for all possible scenarios.

Names—especially demigod names and the power woven into them via the Fates—were kind of a huge deal, and not a decision to make lightly. He was more than glad their past selves had narrowed it down.

“What do you think of Sofía?” he asked, tilting his head at the baby. 

She cooed at him. 

“She seems to like it. I think that’s a good sign.” Jason smiled, but there was a hesitation in his expression, like there was something more he wasn’t saying.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me. If you’d rather name her something else-” Leo started, but Jason shook his head.

“It’s not that. I think Sofía fits her. I just thought maybe she’d like a middle name.” He bit his lip, but then he looked right at Leo with those startlingly blue eyes of his that Leo loved so much. “We don’t have to, if it doesn’t feel right to you, but… what do you think of Sofía Esperanza?”

Leo’s heart skipped a beat.

It had taken him longer than he felt comfortable admitting to talk about his mom to Jason—to really talk about her. The good times they shared and the joyful memories and the stinging feeling of loss that still remained, despite everything.

Leo had gotten closure. He had a mother who loved him dearly, throughout life and beyond death. Jason’s mother had been such a dickhead that she’d made a point of breaking out of the Underworld to re-traumatize him. How was it fair to burden him with all this—to share his mourning for a kind of love Jason had never known?

But when Leo had finally fully shown that part of himself, Jason had held him through it, and gladly. Through the joy and the pain of it all. 

They carried each other’s burdens, the way they always had.

Jason wouldn’t have made the suggestion lightly. He must have been thinking about this for a long time. Maybe since they’d first made that list, back when the child in question had still been entirely hypothetical.

“Would that… is that really okay with you? I mean-” Leo stammered, struggling to find the words—struggling to find any words at all. His thoughts were failing him utterly. 

In his defense, it was almost 4 am, and they’d just adopted a baby on a whim. These things tended to turn one’s brain to mush even when they occurred separately.

“Of course I’d be okay with it. It was literally my suggestion, mi vida.” Jason smiled softly at him. “Besides, Esperanza means hope, right? If we’re worried about names having power, I think this one is powerful in a good way.”

And, as was the case far more often than Leo would ever admit out loud, his husband was right. They’d both learned a long time ago that hope was perhaps the greatest power of all.

“Wisdom and hope, hm?” Leo gently booped Sofía’s nose. “Guess we’re really trying to drive home the fact that you’re not related to either one of us.“ Sofía smiled up at him, catching one of his fingers in her little fist again, and Leo laughed. “Look, Jase, she’s got your reflexes.”

Her hand was warm and soft and her adorable little smile made Leo melt. 

Jason looked down at their daughter with pure adoration in his eyes. 

Oh, they were in so much trouble. Leo wasn’t sure how they’d ever manage to tell her no on anything.

On the upside: they’d make sure little Sofía Esperanza would never feel unloved a day in her life.

~~~ Leo was officially never sending a vaguely worded Iris Message again.

His first impulse had been to call Piper—because, well, it was Piper—which would have worked great if she had been awake, but that seemed like a long shot at this hour. The thing was: Piper slept like a log. When she was out, she was completely dead to the world, and if that was the case, they would be sent right to rainbow voicemail.

Going with “McLean household, Oklahoma. Just give me whoever is most awake,” had seemed like a safe bet at the time. If Reyna and/or Piper were up, they were good. If neither of them was, then they’d at least know that it was pointless to call again tonight and they’d just try again in the morning.

Except, well… Leo was currently looking at his three year old niece.

“Tío Leo!! Uncle Jason!” Em beamed at them. “I’m up!”

“We can see that.” Leo blinked at her. “Uhm, as awesome as it is to see you, could you maybe get one of your moms? Either one works.”

“But I wanna talk,” she pouted. Then she sat bolt upright. “You’re playing dolls? Without me?”

“I would never,” Leo said in mock-offense. “Also, that's a baby, not a doll.”

He shifted Sofía in his arms so his niece could take a proper look at her. Jason had handed her back to Leo when he’d gone to collect Georgina’s old bassinet from the attic that had mercifully decided to pop up next door, and Leo had been holding her since.

“A baby?” Emilia stared through the rainbow with wide eyes. “She’s so small.”

“Yeah. Babies are kinda just like that. They don’t come in too many different sizes,” he explained with a shrug. “This is Sofía. Say hi to your prima, cariño.” The baby just kind of blinked at Em, but she was smiling, which he figured probably counted. “Sorry. They don’t come very talkative at that age, either.”

Em didn’t seem to mind. She waved at the baby excitedly.

“Hi Sofía.” Her voice was full of wonder. “She’s adorable.”

“Yeah, she’s kind of perfect, isn’t she?” Jason’s voice was stupidly fond. Leo would have married him all over again in an instant.

Before anyone could say anything else, the door to Emilia’s room opened, light spilling inside from the hallway.

Leo made a little shushing noise at his niece, holding the baby just out of frame. Emilia giggled.

“Emmy, I thought we decided you were going back to sleep,” Piper’s groggy voice came from somewhere beyond the rainbow’s visual range. “Hang on, is that an Iris Message? What the-” A second later, her face appeared in the corner of the rainbow. “Leo? Jason?”

“Pipes! Hey!” Leo beamed at her. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“I say this in the fondest way possible, but I am literally going to kill you guys. I just managed to get her settled back in bed.”

“Sorry,” Jason said immediately. “It’s kind of an emergency.”

“What sort of emergency requires you to call my toddler in the middle of the night?” She looked at them incredulously “Leo, it’s four thirty in the morning. I know it’s a full moon, but can you please get your werewolf husband under control?”

“No, I cannot. May I remind you that you were the one who said if you wanted a responsible godfather, you would have picked someone else?” Leo asked with a grin. “Though, in our defense, we were technically trying to call you or Reyna. Iris just decided to be funny.”

“Uh-huh.” 

“I think you’ll probably forgive us, considering the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?” Piper narrowed her eyes, looking suspiciously from Leo to her giggling toddler, like she expected them to have hidden paint bombs across the house together.

Talk about bearing grudges. They’d only done that once. 

…okay, maybe twice. But still. 

Besides, Leo was halfway across the country right now. That made getting into trouble with his niece a lot more difficult.

“And what were you trying to call us about? Because you both seem way too cheerful for this to be an actual emergency.”

“It is an actual emergency. The good kind, though,” Jason explained, voice soft. He wasn’t even looking up at Piper. He’d gone back to smiling at Sofía. The little girl cooed happily at him.

“I don’t think that’s a thing.” Piper paused. “What was that noise?”

“Surprise! You’re an aunt now!” Leo lifted his armful of baby into the frame. “Sofía, this is Piper. Piper, Sofía Valdez.”

Piper rubbed her eyes. Then, apparently realizing that the baby was very much still there and not going anywhere, she stared at him in utter disbelief. “Leo, what the f-”

“No cursing!” Jason yelped, moving to cover Sofía’s ears.

Emilia burst into a fresh fit of giggles. “Mommy said a bad word.”

“Yeah, I did. But it’s a mommy only word, reserved for special occasions, so please don’t use it, okay?” Piper said quickly. She covered her face with her hands. 

“Okay, no saying fuck,” Em agreed, causing Jason to make a fresh offended yelping noise while Leo just burst into laughter.

“Not. A. Word,” Piper grumbled, glaring at him. 

Leo would have pointed out that technically, he hadn’t said anything, but figured that if he was planning to see his daughter grow up, he should probably leave it.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said instead, taking a few breaths to try and get himself to stop laughing. It was only semi-successful. “Emilia, listen to your mom, okay?”

“I am!” she pointed out, grinning. “No using the word. Just said I won’t.”

“Smart kid,” Leo said approvingly, which just made Piper glare at him even harder. Hey, it wasn’t his fault his niece had inherited Piper’s chaotic energy and Reyna’s ability to win political debates. His only crime was not discouraging her. 

And honestly, which decent tío would have? As far as he was concerned, she should be allowed to make use of her natural talents.

“Matters of teaching my child to curse at four thirty in the morning aside,” Piper sighed, shaking her head, “would you guys please tell me what in the world is going on? Whose child did you two kidnap?”

“She’s ours,” Jason said, completely matter-of-factly. “No kidnapping involved.”

“I’m a prima,” Emilia told her mom, beaming.

“That’s great, sweetheart.” Even through the rainbow filter, it was easy to tell that Piper was barely listening to Emilia. She looked from Jason to Leo to Sofía, wide-eyed, apparently reassessing the situation. “You two are actually serious.”

She sat down hard on her daughter’s bed. 

“Yeah. Why would you think we were joking about that?” Leo asked, shaking his head. “Gods, Pipes, I’m thirty years old, for crying out loud. Don’t you think I’m a bit too mature to prank call you at four thirty in the morning?” Despite the fact that she was obviously in shock, Piper still raised an eyebrow at him at that question. “Okay, fine, maybe I would do that, but what would the punch line even be in this case?”

“I don’t know!” Piper gestured vaguely. “Where did you guys get a baby at four in the morning?”

“Annabeth had Cooper at one in the morning,” Leo told her with a shrug. “Babies don’t exactly come with business hours.”

Sofía cooed in his arms. 

“That’s different!” Piper protested, clearly exasperated. “I saw you guys last weekend! If one of you had been pregnant, I’m pretty sure I would have known!”

“Someone left her on the doorstep of the Waystation an hour ago,” Jason explained, that same fragility from earlier creeping back into his voice. “She’s ours now.”

“Oh.” All the fight drained out of Piper in an instant. She turned to Emilia, putting a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Can you do me a favor? Can you go wake your mamá for me, sweetheart?”

“But I wanna stay,” Emilia pouted. “Sofía’s cute.”

“I know, honey. But she’s still gonna be here when you get back. And mamá’s gonna want to meet the baby, too.”

Emilia thought about this intensely for a moment. Then she nodded and climbed out of the bed. “Okay.” 

“Besides, mommy might need to use a few more curse words, and I do not want you around for that,” Piper muttered after her daughter had left.

Jason crossed his arms. “Hey, you can’t curse at our child, either.”

“She’s not gonna remember at that age,” Piper said. She looked a lot less confused and a lot more upset now. “Is she okay?” she asked, wringing her hands.

“Dunno. She had a bit of a crying fit when I brought her inside, but Emilia had a lot of crying fits at that age without you guys ditching her at a random event space, so I’m not sure that’s related,” Leo told her. He gently bounced the baby in his arms. Sofía was cooing at him again, waving her little hands around. Considering everything that had happened tonight, Leo was surprised she still had this much energy. “We’ll ask Nico if he can shadow travel Will over in the morning so he can check her over. She doesn’t seem hurt or sick, but we figured it’s better to be sure.”

“She’s really small. I don’t think she actually understands what’s happening,” Jason added. “But we’re gonna make sure she’ll be okay.” He said it in such a fierce, protective way, and Leo’s heart broke for his husband for the umpteenth time. 

“Are you guys okay?” Piper asked. She was looking directly at Jason now. “This is a lot.“

“We’re okay,” Jason said, in a way that made it blatantly obvious to both Piper and Leo that he wasn’t. “It has been kind of overwhelming, but I’m managing. Leo’s been amazing.” 

“Superman’s being unnecessarily modest,” Leo told Piper, shaking his head. “He’s doing a great job. He fed her and found her a crib and everything.”

Jason smiled weakly. “I- thanks.”

“She’s lucky to have you both,” Piper said. She still looked tired and seriously worried, but her voice was fond. “I mean it.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’re amazing, and you only want to kill us a little bit for Iris Messaging your toddler in the middle of the night,” Leo said, smiling at her. 

“Just this once, you’re pardoned due to extenuating circumstances,” Piper decided solemnly. “Besides, I’m not orphaning your child.”

“Thanks?” Jason said. It came out more like a question than a statement, but his voice was tinged with amusement, and after everything that had happened tonight, that was a huge relief. “We wanted you and Reyna to be the first ones to know. And, uhm. Maybe ask if you’ve still got some of Em’s old baby clothes?”

“We do.” Piper smiled softly. “Reyna couldn’t bring herself to get rid of any of them. She’s incredibly sappy at heart.”

“Oh, we know,” Leo said with a grin. “We’ve seen the way she looks at you.”

Piper sighed contently. She opened her mouth to say something else, but she was interrupted by the sound of a door banging open.

“Em said you used a bad word and also something about a kidnapping?” Reyna asked, sounding seriously concerned. “Who are you IMing at this hour? Is anyone hurt? Do we need to send out search parties?”

She stepped into range of the rainbow, but she wasn’t looking at the Iris Message. Her eyes were firmly on her wife, their daughter clutched protectively to her chest.

“No one’s hurt. No one’s missing, either.” Piper made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “So glad our three year old covered all the important bullet points.”

“I got mamá awake,” Em reported, yawning.

Leo couldn’t blame her. It was almost morning. He was starting to feel seriously tired, too.

Sofía wasn’t. She was still wide awake, cooing and wiggling happily in his arms. Leo wasn’t sure if that was normal, but he figured it did not bode well for the amount of sleep he and Jason would be getting going forward.

“That you did, sweetie,” Piper said, smiling at her daughter. Then she looked up at her wife. “Morning, Love. I promise it’s nothing bad, but you might still want to sit down.”

“Hi Reyna,” Leo greeted her. “So, uhm, funny story. You know how Jason and I have sort of been talking about adoption for a while?”

~~~

By the time they got off the line with Piper and Reyna, it was well past six am. Em had dozed off on her mamá’s lap more than an hour ago. Sofía was somehow still awake, though she’d been wiggling a lot less and yawning a lot more in the last half an hour. 

In the end, it took a diaper change and a second feeding session for Sofía to finally start dozing off in Leo’s arms. By then, the sun was starting to come up.

He still held her for a while after, making sure she was well and truly asleep before swaddling her properly and gently transferring her into the bassinet. The sunlight through the window was tickling his face as he sat back down on the bed with a quiet thunk.

“I can’t believe she’s inherited my awful sleep schedule. That's not good,” he joked, letting himself sink into Jason’s side. “Make better choices, kid!”

“On the bright side, you probably won’t have any trouble staying up with her,” Jason said, wrapping both arms around Leo and pressing a kiss to his curls. “We’re really doing this, hm?”

“Yeah. Weirdest adoption circumstances of the century, maybe, but we are.” Leo laughed. “Man, this is so on-brand for us. We can never do anything the normal way.”

Jason laughed right along with him—a low, rumbling sound that reverberated through Leo’s body with how close they were pressed together. Leo loved that laugh. Loved that it wasn’t the suppressed chuckle that had been Jason’s default when they met. It had been so hard to make him laugh, back then. Not that it had ever stopped Leo from trying.

For a while, they just sat there, all wrapped up in each other as the sun slowly rose on the other side of the window.

“There’s so much we don’t know,” Jason said eventually, breaking the silence. Leo didn't have to see his face to know he was looking at Sofía. “Do we have any idea what we’re doing?”

“Do any parents? Especially demigods?” Leo asked, raising an eyebrow. When that just made his husband grow even more tense, Leo hugged him tightly. “Hey. We managed to save the world when you didn’t know anything except for your first name, sword fighting and whatever vague mythology fun facts your godly stepmom decided to leave inside your skull. Compared to that situation? I think we’ve got a lot to work with here.”

“I just don’t want to fail her,” Jason said, very quietly.

“I don’t think we’ve ever failed at anything we did together.” Leo paused. “Well, at least not when it comes to anything important. Despite your best efforts, I’m still a really shitty dancer,” he amended.

“You’re not that bad,” Jason insisted, pressing another kiss to his hair.

“Right. And you’re only a mildly terrible cook,” Leo teased, still holding on tight. “We’ll figure things out, Jase. We always have.” 

“You’re probably right,” Jason sighed, sinking into him and gently nuzzling Leo’s cheek. “Together.”

“Always. You married me, so you’re never getting rid of me now,” Leo told him, failing to suppress a yawn. 

It had been a long night, but he wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.

Leo looked back at Sofía, who was peacefully snoring away in her bassinet. 

If ‘together’ meant three of them instead of two of them now… well, he was more than okay with that.

Leo had faced the end of the world with Jason by his side. He figured they could probably handle parenting, too.

———

Fic Notes:

-Sorry about the extremely silly fic title. Juno made a joke about this to me forever ago when we were first talking about this concept and it just kind of stuck.

-Fun fact: I've been working on this fic on and off since last year! I cannot believe how long it ended up being, lmao.

-Family stuff is super fun to me, and considering Jason’s was abandoned as a little kid and Leo knows exactly what it’s like to not have anyone look out for you from his later childhood and teens, I always knew they'd somehow end up adopting. Me and QueenJunoTheGreat have been chatting about Sofía forever now, and I’ve made several tumblr posts about her, so it’s a little strange that this is technically the first fic I’ve posted about her.

-This kid has a lot of lore and thoughts attached to her (as does Em, though this is technically her second fic), so if you wanna read more about her you can always just scroll through my tumblr and specifically the (specifically the “pjo next gen” tag)! -Would actually love to write some more fics about these kids, but we’ll see how it goes.

Thank you so much for reading! Comments extremely appreciated!

[pickingupmymercedes]

Your future was Ferrari - 3 / ?

Chapters - 1 / 2 / 3

summary: Some rules are meant to be followed—others were made to be broken. And they were breaking them all.

pairing: Lewis Hamilton x Ferrari Engineer!Reader!

warnings: alusion to mature content.

wordcount: +3K

a/n: Let's head into the season then, each episode is probably going to cover 2 gp's, except for the more important ones.

As always, I'm open for feedback, come say hi!

MILD CONTENT UNDER, -16 PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

______________________________________________________________

It was your first Sunday after a real GP weekend and the garage hummed with the controlled chaos of post-race analysis.

The sharp scent of burnt rubber and fuel still lingered in the air, a stark reminder of the battle fought on track just hours ago. You sat at your workstation, eyes flicking between the telemetry data on the screen and the notes scattered across the desk.

The tension in your shoulders refusing to ease, even as you forced yourself to take slow, measured breaths.

Carlos’s podium was a win for the team, a much-needed morale boost, but Leclerc’s brake issues gnawed at you like an unsolved equation.

You know the motto, every fraction of a second on F1 it’s a universe on its own

And honestly, if you had a dollar for every time Ferrari found a new and exciting way to stir up Charles’ race, you could probably afford your own kart by now.

That was your job now though, make sure those mishappens were reduced to none, if possible.

Your phone buzzed beside you, lighting up with a familiar name.

Dad.

A small smile crept onto your lips as you answered. “Dad, before you start, yes, I saw the race. Yes, I know the exact moment Charles started having those brake issue. And no, I don’t need you to tell me we should have pitted him earlier.”

Your father chuckled on the other end. “I raised a sharp one, didn’t I? You sound tired, though.”

“Not tired, just over-caffeinated and slightly delirious”

You glanced around the garage, watching as engineers worked through their notes, tweaking simulations for next week. “It’s just… Charles could’ve been on that podium too, but the brake issues ruined any chance of fighting.”

Your father hummed in understanding. “You always did hate problems you couldn’t fix.”

“Tell me about it” You leaned back in your chair, rubbing your temple. “Carlos did an amazing job, though. I should focus on that.”

“You should.” He paused, his voice turning softer. “And you should also enjoy this, Y/N. You’re in Ferrari, at the track. You dreamed of this.”

You swallowed past the sudden lump in your throat. “Thanks dad.”

Your father sighed. “And I know you, which means you’re probably stressing about something else, aren’t you?”

You exhaled sharply, rolling your eyes. “Can I get through one phone call without you playing therapist?”

“Not a chance” he quipped. “Now, tell me, have you met Lewis Hamilton yet?”

You nearly dropped Your phone. “Dad!”

“Oh, come on, kid. He’s my favorite. I also know how much the media has been circling around his struggles. And if I had to guess, I’d say you’ve been paying attention.”

Y/N’s grip tightened around the phone because you had been paying attention.

Too much if you ask me, but you’ve always ignored warnings, so go ahead, do Mercedes’ job as well, why won’t you?

But it wasn’t just the headlines dissecting his performance or the murmurs in the paddock. It was the way your stomach twisted every time you caught a glimpse of him, the way you couldn’t let go of that night in Abu Dhabi.

You cleared your throat. “He’s not my concern. I have to go though, call you later okay?”

Your father laughed. “Not yet buddy, not yet. Talk later then, love you.”

As you hung up, you heard a familiar voice behind you.

“Talking to your secret boyfriend?”

You turned to find Charles leaning on the counter beside you, arms crossed, an amused glint in his eyes.

“Just my dad” you replied, raising an eyebrow. “I’ll let him know you think he’s my secret boyfriend, though.”

Charles smirked. “Well, tell him I said hi. Now, what’s the verdict?”

 “Those brake issues cost you more than I’d like to admit.” You sighed, gesturing to your screen.

Charles groaned dramatically. “Tell me about it. I was fighting that car more than the others drivers.”

“Oh, trust me, we could tell.”

Charles rolled his eyes but couldn’t hide his grin. “Welcome to Ferrari, we love to keep things stress-free and simple” he quipped.

Carlos, who had just walked into the room, scoffed. “Where’s my analysis?”

Y/N grinned. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Podium. You did great.”

Carlos rolled his eyes but a grin tugged at his lips. “That’s the spirit.”

Carlos nudged Charles. “Hear that? I’m the favorite now.”

Charles scoffed. “For one race. Let’s see how long that lasts.”

Before you could reply, a voice called out from across the room.

“Y/N!”

Fred stood by the entrance, giving you a small nod of approval. “Good work this weekend.”

It was brief, but it meant everything. You nodded back, feeling a swell of pride. Maybe you did belong here.

As Charles and Carlos continued their playful banter, you let yourself enjoy the moment. Because for the first time in a long time, despite the chaos, despite the ghosts of the past, you felt like you were exactly where you were meant to be.

And if you just so happened to check Lewis’ latest interview later on? Well, that was nobody’s business, right?!

By the time the Saudi Arabian GP rolled around, you had found your rhythm.

Meetings, data crunching, strategic planning—it was a symphony you were beginning to conduct effortlessly.

“Kid’s got guts.” you muttered, watching the Ollie’s onboards. “Thrown into the deep end and still holding his own.”

Leclerc nodded beside you. “He reminds me of someone.”

You raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“You. You acted like you belonged here from day one.”

You chuckled. “Fake it till you make it, right?”

As the race unfolded, Bearman’s performance cemented his place as an impressive stand-in, but your attention, no matter how hard you tried, kept slipping toward the Mercedes garage.

Toward Lewis.

His struggles were written all over the timing screens. The frustration in his radio messages, the dissatisfaction on his face—it gnawed at something.

Get a grip, Y/N. His problems are not yours.

You’d been hoping for a quiet night at the hotel. You just wanted a cup of tea, something to wind down after a long day at the track and podium celebrations afterwards.

But I could always count on the universe, ever the comedic genius, to shove him directly in my path.

He was sitting at the hotel bar, fingers absently tracing the rim of a half-empty glass. He wasn’t talking to anyone, no entourage, no Mercedes engineers hovering around.

Just him. Alone.

Abort mission. Walk away. Nothing to see.

But before you could turn on your heels and make a clean escape, Lewis looked up, and his gaze locked onto yours.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” His voice was quieter than usual, lacking its typical confidence, the easy charm that was him.

You considered lying. Saying you just happened to be passing through, had a Zoom call, an emergency meeting—anything but admitting you couldn’t sleep because your brain refused to shut up.

But lying required energy, and you had none left.

“Something like that,” you admited instead.

Lewis motioned to the stool next to him. A small, barely perceptible invitation.

This is how things started last time. A drink, a conversation. Next thing you know, you're waking up in a tangled mess of sheets again.

And yet, you sat down.

For a moment, there was only silence. Not the awkward kind, but the weighty kind, like the air between them was filled with unspoken words neither knew how to break.

Lewis sighed, shaking his head slightly before speaking. “It’s funny,” he murmured, more to himself than to you. “We spend our whole lives trying to be the best. Always pushing forward, always chasing something. And then one day, you wake up and wonder if the thing you’re chasing even exists anymore.”

Your fingers curled slightly around the edge of the bar. You recognized that look in his eyes. Not self-pity. Not even frustration.

It was doubt. Self-doubt.

Your first instinct was to wave it off, to remind him he was Lewis Freaking Hamilton, and if anyone was born to win, it was him. But something stopped you.

Because this wasn’t about his ability. He knew he was good. He knew he was one of the greatest to ever do it. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was… what if being great wasn’t enough, not anymore?

And you got that. You really did.

So instead of feeding him some empty platitude, you decided on meeting him halfway—being vulnerable too.

“I know my world isn’t the same as yours” you said carefully. “But I get it. The uncertainty, the constant pressure, the feeling you don’t belong in the place you fought so hard to get to”

Lewis turned to you, his full attention snapping into place, and it nearly made you regret opening your mouth. Nearly.

“These past two races, they were my tryouts for Ferrari’s trackside team,” you admitted. “And when we get back to the factory tomorrow, I have to give them an answer. Stay or go back to the factory.”

Lewis’s brows lifted slightly. “And?”

You exhaled. “I like it, being out there. It’s exhilarating. But… there’s so much I’d have to leave behind. My family, my life outside of this.” You shook your head. “If I follow the team around the world, I won’t see my dad as much. I won’t get to just… go home when I need to.”

Lewis studied you, nodding slightly. “You’re giving me the pros and cons,” he said after a beat. “But what does your gut tell you? What do you really want?”

Your mouth opened, then closed.

Oh, he’s good.

You hated how easily he saw through you, how he cut straight to the core of your hesitation. Because deep down, you knew the answer.

You let out a quiet breath. “I really like it here.”

Lewis’s lips curled slightly, like he knew you had always known but just needed to say it out loud.

Then you narrowed Your eyes at him. “You’re good at this.”

His smirk widened. “At what?”

“Making people admit to things they don’t want to but deep down need to.”

Lewis exhaled slowly, his expression unreadable. “Just so you know, that voice, telling you’re not good enough, never really goes away,” he admitted. “Not even after seven championships.”

Y/N let out a breathy chuckle, shaking your head. “Great. Something to look forward to.”

That made him smile, but there was something else in his eyes now. A quiet kind of appreciation. Like he hadn’t expected you to understand, but you did.

And instead of dismissing what he felt, you had met him there.

He leaned back against the bar, watching you for a long moment before a small smirk pulled at his lips. “I had one night with you, and I’m already breaking every single one of my rules.”

You couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow, playing along despite the sudden flip in your stomach. “Rules?”

His smirk widened. “I don’t open up like this.”

Your lips twitched. “Well…you were my first one-night stand, so I guess we’re even.”

Lewis blinked, looking genuinely caught off guard. “What?”

You shrugged, picking up a cocktail napkin and folding it absently.

For a second, he just stared at you, then let out a real, genuine laugh. The kind that cracked through the tension in the air and made something inside you ease.

“That makes this even more ironic.” he murmured, shaking his head.

Silence stretched between you two again, but this time, it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was fragile.

He looked away for a moment before speaking again. “I don’t even know what I want anymore. I think.”

You tilted your head, curiosity tugging. “You think?”

Lewis hesitated, then finally admitted, “I guess I just don’t want to feel like I’m chasing something that might not exist anymore.”

The honesty in his voice knocked the breath from your lungs. You had never seen this side of him before—unguarded, unsure.

You swallowed, then offered, “Maybe it’s not about chasing the same goal though, but finding something new worth fighting for.”

Lewis studied you for a long moment, a unreadable gaze “And for you? What’s worth fighting for?”

You hesitated, then smiled softly. "This dream… it isn’t just mine. My dad, my family—they sacrificed so much for me to be here. And I feel like if I don’t make it, I’m letting them down too."

Lewis nodded, understanding settling in his eyes in a way that made your chest tighten. Because you knew his story.

"I know what you mean," he murmured. " But sometimes, that weight… it gets heavy, doesn’t it?"

A small smirk tugged at your lips. “It does.”

The air between them shifted again, a thread pulling tighter, a connection neither of them had anticipated but couldn’t ignore. And for once, neither tried to fight it.

A sharp vibration startled you as your phone alarm went off, signaling the ungodly hour you had set to remind yourself to get some rest before the next travel day. You groaned, reaching to silence it before rubbing your temples.

Lewis glanced at you "Early flight?"

You nodded, stretching slightly. "Leaving tomorrow morning with the crew, heading back to the factory."

He hummed, taking a sip from his drink before setting the glass down. "Good luck on your decision"

You stood, smoothing down your shirt, trying to shake off the odd weight in your chest that came with the realization that whatever this moment was, it was ending—for now. "Guess I'll see you around."

Lewis looked up at your, his gaze lingering. "In Melbourne."

You gave him a small nod, and as you walked away, you found yourself wishing the same thing.

God help you. This man is going to be your end. And might even be mine.

______________________________________________________________

TAGLIST

@palefacestudentlove @omgsuperstarg @sltwins @lh44girl @freyathehuntress @irisesinthegarden @ncrsbrg

If you’d like to be added to my taglist you can leave a comment or send me a dm/ask.

[acasualcrossfade]

Steddie Love Month: Day 3

Barefoot on the Grass, Listening to His Favorite Song

Stranger Things, Steddie

Rating: T

CW: making out

For Day 3 of @steddielovemonth for the prompt: Perfect - Ed Sheeran

Words: 899

--------

The grass was damp with dew and it made Steve’s toes curl with cold, sending a full body shiver through him. The morning was barely awake, and the sky was streaked with the secrets of sunrise. Summer was a whisper of possibility, but the morning chill was enough for Steve to be thankful for his yellow sweater, and for his ability to talk Eddie into wearing one of his hoodies. The decision had nothing to do with his own guilty pleasure of seeing Eddie in his clothes.

Steve’s heart hummed at the sight of Eddie’s slimmer frame in his larger hoodie, and he couldn’t help but hug Eddie from behind. The movement surprised Eddie, and Eddie laughed as he turned around in Steve’s arms to pull him closer. 

“Good morning to you too,” Eddie greeted, planting a kiss on his cheek, his lips parting in a smile. His arms stayed wrapped around Steve. “Although I will say, I haven’t been up this early in awhile.”

Steve giggled, his own sleepiness turning to giddiness. “I haven’t stayed up this late since…,” he started, a yawn forcing its way through the end of his sentence. “Since school,” he finished as his eyes watered.

It had been a long night of watching the kids fight to stay awake to stay up for The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition movie marathon night. It officially ended sometime around 3am, when Mike and Will finally fell asleep against Dustin’s sprawled legs. The living room was now a battleground of fallen teenagers fast asleep in a tangle of limbs and pillows. Steve and Eddie lasted until the credits of the last movie, relishing in the silence before taking advantage of the time alone.

It was hard enough to grasp that life was as back to normal as it could get, safe enough for them to all sleep in a room together without feeling threatened. In the midst of that realization, Steve found himself selfish, craving more of these moments with Eddie. Moments when it was just the two of them, nearly tripping over themselves as they snuck out of the living room of sleeping teens in the same way Steve used to sneak out of his house. 

In too many ways, Steve felt like a kid again and relished it. The Upside Down had taken too much of all of them, and they all had a lot of catching up to do.

Steve knew he had a lot of catching up to do, and he chose the next moment to steal another kiss from his boyfriend. 

Boyfriend.

The word felt as unfamiliar as the relationship, and somehow, being with Eddie was effortless. There was an ease, no hiding away from hurts and old hauntings that came in the night or old battle scars that still beat them down on harder days. Eddie didn’t just know the invisible and untouched parts of him, but had the heart to take his time to understand them to then comfort them. 

His heart hummed at the sight of Eddie in his hoodie, Eddie in red plaid pajama pants, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, so heartbreakingly beautiful in the morning light and he couldn’t help but pull Eddie closer.

“So, what class would you call this, then?” Eddie asked, giving Steve a coy look. 

For once, Steve skipped the witty reply and simply kissed Eddie, Eddie’s lips opening to part to allow him in. Eddie moaned, pulling Steve impossibly closer, closer, trying to climb Steve like a flagpole but failing, tripping them into a tumble of pajamas and limbs that ended with them in a pile in the dewy grass. Dew pressed into Steve's hip as he sank into the grass, but that didn’t stop him from closing the centimeters between him and Eddie to complete their kiss. He confidently crawled over to straddle Eddie, not caring how the dew dampened the knees of his sweatpants.

“Whatever class this is, you’re acing it,” Eddie smiled. “And you might be my favorite subject.”

Eddie pulled him closer, tracing Steve’s lips with his tongue before taking him in his mouth again. 

“You look perfect,” Eddie breathed between kisses, moaning on his exhales. “You look so perfect like this.” Eddie’s fingers found Steve’s and wound their hands together so tight they became one. “I think you might be an angel,” he mumbled.

Steve’s eyes were heavy as he leaned against Eddie and took in his sweet and smoky scent.  “I think your voice is my favorite song,” Steve admitted. And when Eddie met his eyes, for the first time, Steve saw his future there.

Steve held back the biting thought that he didn’t deserve this, he couldn’t have this, and instead, replaced those thoughts with more of Eddie’s lips against his. 

Steve wasn’t sure how long they lay there or who may have fallen asleep first. He wasn’t sure when the dew dried or if it was weird to be asleep in the grass with his boyfriend. All he knew  that in Eddie’s arms, like this, in the grass and the disappearing darkness of the oncoming dawn, that perfection wasn’t an instant or a moment. It wasn’t a flash you had to hope to hold on to, but rather, was the promise of a future. A life together. Maybe a kid or two.

And for now, that started here, with Eddie asleep in his arms. 

[yanderecrazysie]

The Thunder Rolls (Yandere Oikawa)

Thank you for the commission!! Let me know if you want any changes, I wasn’t sure which direction to go with this >3< If you want something completely different I understand and can rewrite with more specifics.

Also, this song is one of my all-time favs and definitely inspired this oneshot. Highly recommend a listen, especially the third verse version.

Title: The Thunder Rolls

Pairings: Oikawa Tooru x F! Reader

WARNINGS: yandere themes, cheating/infidelity, swearing, a bit of angst

“Another love grows cold on a sleepless night

As the storm blows on, out of control

Deep in her heart

The thunder rolls”

From “The Thunder Rolls” a Garth Brooks Tribute by State of Mine

Dinner is ready on the table, a delicious scent in the air. There are two glasses of wine on either side. You probably took an hour to cook it.

It’s cold. It’s been 5 and a half hours since you made it- the evening having turned to early, early morning. You were exhausted, but there was no way you were going to sleep without your husband.

Rain leaves tear tracks on your windows and you shudder as a clap of thunder makes you jump. The storm outside is really picking up and that gives you a little bit of hope. Maybe the weather is what’s keeping him so long.

You check your phone for what must have been the hundredth time this hour.

Staying late at practice, be home soon. <3

He’s stayed late at practice every day this week, despite you dropping hints that you’d like to see more of him. 

You’re not stupid. You know he’s probably cheating, but you hold on desperately to the fact that there’s no evidence. Whenever you try to talk to him about the time he spends with his fans, he tells you that you’re being jealous for no reason. Don’t you trust him? 

You married him knowing he had a large fanbase, and that many of the fans want to be with your husband despite him wearing that gold band on his finger. It never seemed like a problem. 

You look out the window and watch as lightning lights up the sky. The wind is blowing the trees sideways and, after another crack of lightning, followed closely by the clap of thunder, the power goes out.

Maybe he really is being held up by the storm. You start to picture his car in a ditch, skidded off the road from all the rain, or maybe totaled from a crash with another vehicle… What if he’s dying or dead and you’re here, betraying him by wondering if he’s been cheating.

Tears prick your eyes as true worry seeps through your concerns. If Oikawa died, you didn’t know what you’d do without him. 

Headlights shatter the darkness as a car drives down your street. You literally cross your fingers, begging whatever god will hear you that it’s your husband. Thankfully, the car rolls into your driveway and comes to a stop in front of your house.

You fling open the front door and run to the car. Oikawa leaves the front seat and holds out his arms wide for you to run into, a smile on his face. You’re so grateful that he’s home, that he’s alive and safe and well and-

When you ran into his arms, the wind was blowing towards you. On the wind, you can smell a strange perfume. Definitely not cologne- it’s flowery and expensive-smelling and it’s not yours.

You take a step back and look up at his face. His smile freezes at the sight of your blank face and slowly disappears as his own face goes pale. He knows that you know now, and it’s clear that he’s weighing his options.

You spin on your heels and storm into your home. Oikawa follows, still not saying a word. You grab the wine glass and throw it at him. He dodges it and it hits the wall, exploding into a shower of glass and red wine. There’s no doubts that you know and Oikawa goes straight into panic mode.

“Sweetie? Let’s talk about this!” Oikawa tries. You ignore him and head towards the bedroom and begin pulling your clothes out of the dresser and closet. Tears roll down your cheeks even as you remain silent.

He’s really starting to panic now, “It’s not what it seems, baby!”

A suitcase is pulled from the closet and slammed onto the bed, the clothes being the first objects to go inside. You’re doing your best to ignore him, but he’s not stopping.

“Baby, please, you’re the only one for me!” Oikawa’s practically begging you to respond, but you refuse and continue packing.

“It’s really not what you think,” Oikawa pleads. You pull your wedding ring from your finger and throw it at him with as much force as you can muster. That shuts him up- his mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Oikawa chants, “You don’t mean it.”

You zip up the suitcase, finally finished packing. You’ll come back for the rest of your stuff, but for now, this is all you need.

“I love you,” Oikawa’s voice cracks, “I swear, she meant nothing. It was just a mistake- a stupid-”

“Then why do it?” you scream, “Why do it?”

His eyes widen at the volume and intensity of your voice, “It was a moment of weakness, I didn’t-”

“I don’t even care,” you laughed sardonically, “Fuck you.”

Oikawa follows you, pleading for your forgiveness, even as you close the car door in his face and drive away, leaving his soaked, pathetic form in your rearview mirror.

Your phone starts to receive notifications. Just a couple at first, then constant messages and calls. You turn it off completely and wipe your tears away so you can see where you’re driving. 

—-----------------------

I need you.

Please come back.

Where are you?

I know you’re seeing these messages. Please respond.

You stare blankly at your phone until your mother snatches it away, saying, “It’s not good to look at his messages, it’ll just make you feel worse.”

You nod in agreement. She’s right. She’s always been right: about Oikawa and his flirtatious nature. She’d never trusted him, but she has the decency not to remind you.

It’s not long until your mother goes back to bed- it’s the crack of dawn now. You hear a knock at the door and freeze. There’s a camera on her tablet that shows the front porch. Unsurprisingly, Oikawa is standing there, knocking insistently.

“Go away,” you say to the tablet, which plays the sound on the front porch. Oikawa jumps on camera, then turns to the doorbell camera and begins his speech.

“Tell me what to do, (Y/n), sweetie, I’ll do anything. Anything to get you back.”

“Cut off your dick,” you said coldly.

Oikawa chuckles, “You’re so silly. But honestly?” he moves closer to the camera, “I’d do it, if you’d come back to me… Please, just come outside so we can talk face-to-face.”

“No.”

“What do you want me to do?” he wails, tears forming in his eyes, “You want me to never talk to another girl again? I’ll do it. Quit volleyball? Kill her? I’ll fucking do it.”

A shiver runs down your spine. Is he serious?

“Get lost. I want nothing to do with you anymore.”

“Tell me in person, then. Not just over this stupid doorbell.”

Against your better judgement, you open the front door just a crack, “Go away.”

He’s sobbing now, wiping at the stream of tears and snot running down his face. His big brown eyes are glassy and his bottom lip can’t stop trembling. He looks pathetic and you hate that a part of you feels bad.

“I messed up,” Oikawa whimpers, “I know I messed up big time. But please- we can go to marriage counseling! I’ll never even look at another girl again. I’ll quit volleyball, just please…”

He lets out a sob that turns into a hiccup midway, “I- I love you!”

You step outside and put a hand on his shoulder, “Look, maybe we could-” You’re cut off as Oikawa slams a cloth over your mouth. You gasp in shock and immediately feel the effects of whatever drug he’s put on it.

“It’s okay, we’ll move past this together,” Oikawa says, still sniffling a little, “I’ll be the best husband ever from now on. Cross my heart and hope to die!”

[veilsofroses]

Heyy, can i request for aizen cuddling/comforting f! Reader after she had an anxiety attack? From during his time as a lieutenant or during hueco mundo. Thank you ❤️💕

Sosuke Aizen x f!reader

warnings: descriptions of an anxiety/panic attack, abandonment anxiety author’s note: thank you for the request! i hope i did aizen justice and that you find this comforting <3 aizen being soft is lowkey hard to write yall 😔 word count: 651

‎ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ

Boom, boom, boom.

Your heart is pounding rapidly like it’s trying to break through your chest. Your ears are ringing, a never-ending, deafening nose. 

You stumble through the Las Noches palace, trying to find a place to sit down, lie down, a place just to rest and compose yourself but your head is scrambled. 

You lean, your sweaty hands clutching the marble wall, fear threatening to rise up your throat. You swallow hard as you slowly slide down the wall until you’re sat on the floor. Heavy breathing echoes through the room and all you can do is wish *he* was here right now. 

Everyone was gone. Aizen, Gin, Tosen, the arrancars. You ran through the entire palace searching for anyone, but you found no one. Had they abandoned you? After you stayed loyal and by their side. Did he leave you?

Tears begin to blur your vision, your heavy breathing replaced by sobs as you curl yourself up, hugging your knees, burying your face into them. He couldn’t have. 

You had no idea how long had passed, emotional and physical fatigue wearing you down. So much so that you didn’t notice the immense spiritual pressure that approached, didn’t react when strong arms wrapped around your waist and under your knees, effortlessly picking you up. 

Your breathing, wrecked from your sobs, was still labored. His arms held you a little tighter, “Hush.”

The man holding you took you to his bedroom, sitting you down on his silky soft sheets. Your eyes remained shut, afraid that if you opened them, you’d realize this was all a dream and you’d go back to your lonely reality. 

Rough hands caress your hair, “Open your eyes, let me see you.” It was his voice, commanding but gentle. 

You’re reluctant to open your eyes, but you finally do. Your vision still blurred, eyes slightly stinging, but when finally clear, Aizen’s chiseled face is all that takes up your view. A light chuckle escapes his lips at your disheveled appearance. 

You let out a mix of a sigh of relief and a broken sob as you lunge forward into him. Without a second thought, he catches you and holds you tight. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was certain we’d return before you noticed our absence, but nothing gets past you, it seems” he muses, his voice silky smooth. 

You don’t say anything in return. You can’t yet, your emotions are still heightened and chaotic. But he knows that, he doesn’t expect an answer right now. 

With you still in his arms, he moves to lay you down, following suit. He pulls you tightly, your head against his strong chest. He continues to caress your hair softly. 

“Did you truly believe I would leave you behind? I have always returned, haven’t I?” He snakes his hand under your chin, slowly lifting your head from his chest, your watery eyes meeting his gaze. His usual carefree expression painted his face, his eyes studying you, and he wore that smile that never reached his eyes. 

Aizen tucks a stray piece of your hair behind your ear and you lean into his touch. “You have nothing to fear. You are a part of this now, a part of me..” 

You grip his sleeve. “Do you understand?” he asks you, this time expecting a response. 

You nod your head. “Good,” he drags it out ever-so-slightly, his voice flowing through you, making you shiver. 

“I expect you to remember that. You follow me because you have faith in me, do you not?” You nod again. He grabs your chin in his hand to ensure you look directly at him. “Then do not have fear. No matter where I go, you will never be without me.” 

And you would follow him until the ends of the earth. He watched you fall asleep in his arms that night, and he didn’t leave again. 

[fierceastheocean]

5 favorite Blue Lock characters? 5 least liked characters as well.

oooo okay!

🪼my favs!🪼

1. Kunigami Rensuke

MY KINGGGGGG!!!! I adore him he’s perfect idc if he’s traumatized i love himmmmm. bros a cutie patootie. i could heal him trust. no but on a real note can we talk abt how he’s such a strong person, mentally and physically? amazing character, well written, and he’s hot. enough said.

2. Isagi Yoichi

Goatsagi 🐐you gotta love him, this mf takes stuff out of his ass and always makes it work like wtf. also a hottie, but mostly a cutie. this man has no trauma, he’s just a psycho for the love of the game LMFAOOOOO. he’s a cutie.

3. Karasu Tabito

Inteligence is sooo hot. he’s so funny too. like come on give us everything. not to mention that hes hot too, duh. I loveeeee analytical men, he’s so fine.

4. Barou Shoei

Lion king. he’s so badass, he’s the one that initially pushes isagi to go beyond what he was. actually so goated, every time he’s on the field it’s lights out for the opps trust.

5. Bachira Meguru

Cutieeeee. love the little bumblebee, he’s so cutie. he’s also a little shit. he takes over the field with his dribbling, and i adore how he truly just adores the freedom of soccer, much like Isagi.

HMs: Nagi — bros such a cutie, tired all the time and yet just pulls out these insanely creative plays. hope he locks in tho.

Kurona—bros such a cutie patootie. loveee his little talking tic.

Rin — uhmmm marry me? once he’s emotionally stable though, i understand the sibling traumas 😞

🪸least favs🪸

1. Oliver Aiku

Although i like his character to an extend, i can’t STAND men who act like little boys. take off that stubble if ur gonna be a womanizer u overrated wall.

2. Eita Otoya

Similar reason to Aiku, can’t stand cheaters. ik he said he wouldn’t do it before, but my point stands

3. Igaguri whatever his name is

WHY WAS HE THERE INSTEAD OF KUNIGAMI, WHAT THE FUCK

4. Julian Loki

Everything that Isagi said, my king clocked this sonic wannabe 🙏

5. Sae Itoshi

ik he went through some traumas which is why he’s not super high on the list, but how much effort does it take to not be a complete asshole to your little brother like hello 😭

Hm: Chris Prince like ho stop doing all these ads u are NOT allat. also noel now fuck u too but i still kinda like u idk

[cherubimcore]

golden bars, fragile hearts

pairing: caracalla x reader

part 1 | part 2 | this is part 3 !

the weight of your new role settled on your shoulders like an iron yoke as you stood at the threshold of the emperor’s private quarters once again. the scent of spiced wine and aged parchment clung to the air, mingling with the faint aroma of burning myrrh. servants hurried past you in silence, their eyes carefully averted as they placed trays of fruit, roasted meat and fresh bread on the long table.

your stomach was tight with nerves, your hands twisted and turned the fabric of your dress trying to ease your nerves, you had long bitten your nails to the quick long ago but still it didn’t help your nervousness.

your first morning as caracalla’s personal servant had been spent memorizing his schedule, learning his preferences, and understanding the unspoken rules that governed the palace, but nothing could have prepared you for the moment you would finally step into his presence as more than just another nameless servant in the background.

you entered his chambers with wobbly legs, trying your best to not fall on your face in front of the emperor of rome, the emperor that could decapitate you for something as simple as tripping. caracalla was standing near the large table where his meal had been laid out. his back was to you, broad shoulders covered in a deep crimson tunic, gold embroidery catching the light from the torches. his ginger hair was still damp from his bath, you noticed how it curled slightly at the ends.

he didn’t acknowledge you at first, his focus was on a series of documents spread before him that he was clearly not paying attention to.

you took a deep breath, steadying yourself.

another servant had already poured his wine, but no one dared to approach him directly yet.

that was your responsibility now.

you stepped forward, careful to not make a sound.

“dominus”, you said softly, thanking the gods your voice didn’t shake.

his head lifted slightly, but he did not turn. “you are late”

your fingers curled at your sides. you had arrived precisely when instructed, but you knew better than to argue. “forgive me”

a long pause.

then, he finally turned.

his blue eyes swept over you, slow and assessing, as if deciding wheter or not you were worth his attention. the air felt heavier under his scrutiny.

“you are to serve me now,” he stated, as if you were unaware. his voice was calm but carried the waight of authority. “that means you’ll anticipate my needs before i voice them. you will fetch my meals, clean my chambers and follow my orders without question. do you understand?”

you swallowed and nodded “yes, dominus”

caracalla’s gaze lingered for a moment longer before he took a seat at the table.

he gestured toward the plate in front of him, the movement almost lazy.

“serve me”

you hesitated only for a second before stepping forward, picking up the carved knife to cut slices of meat for him. your hands were not as steady as you would like as you carefully arranged the portions as you have been taught.

he watched you the entire time.

you could feel his gaze like a physical touch, studying your every movement, searching for anything that could be considered a mistake.

you moved next to pour his wine, carefully to not spill a single drop feeling his eyes on you the entire time, you wanted to snap at him asking why was he staring at you so hard, but you knew if you lost your composure it was the last thing you would say in this life.

“you are quiet”, he observed.

“i was told to be”

his lips curved slightly - something that was not quite a smirk, but now a smile either.

“and if i told you to speak?”

you set the wine jug down and met his gaze “then i would”

a beat of silence.

then, he laughed.

your eyes widened with the sound.

it was low and brief, but it was there, you remember seeing caracalla smile and yell at the gladiator fights but never saw him actually laugh like this. amusement flickered across his face, though his eyes remained unreadable.

“interesting,” he murmured, taking a sip of his wine.

you stood at his side taking a deep breath, hands clasped before you, waiting for his next command.

caracalla continued eating in silence for a time while the other servants left the room in a hurry, and you thought - perhaps - this would be easier than you had feared.

but then, without warning, his voice cut through the silence.

“by all means please talk”

“dominus?” you asked, confused, wondering if you had heard him properly.

“i would like to know what you are thinking” he looked back at you, his gaze darkened, curiosity sharpened into something more dangerous.

surely he was teasing you, you thought with yourself, but refused to back down.

“what do you truly want from me?”

“that remains to be seen” caracalla looked right into your eyes with a cold, calculating expression as if he already had plans for you in his mind but refused to share whatever it is that he was thinking “you intrigue me. few would dare to stand against me in my own arena. fewer still would survive it��

“i didn’t do it for you,” you snapped, regretting saying anything as soon as you finished the sentence.

“no,” he said softly after taking a sip of his wine, something that surprised you, you had heard of servants that had been killed for far less. “you did it for him. a noble act, but noble acts don’t last long in rome. you’ll learn that soon enough”

the scent of roasting meats and spiced wine thickened the air as you stepped through the palace corridors, walking just behind caracalla as you made your way toward the senate chambers. the usual quiet dignity of the imperial halls had been overtaken by a restless energy. servants rushed past carrying baskets of fresh fruits, their arms hurried with bolts of silk and gold-threaded linens, their footsteps muffled by the marble floors.

in the distance, you could hear the rhythmic clang of trays being arranged, but sharp bark of a steward chastising a cook, and the hurried whispers of palace officials ensuring every detail of the banquet was in place. a group of musicians stood in the corner of the hall, arguing over which instruments would be most fitting for the evening’s revelry.

caracalla, unfazed by the chaos, strode forward with his usual confident gait, his crimson cloak billowing behind him. you kept pace beside him, feeling the weight of curious glances from the passing servants.

as you reached the grand atrium, you passed a row of slaves arranging goblets of silver and gold, each one meant for a guest of high status. the senate would be there, the generals, the noble families - all called upon to indulge in the emperor’s excess. you couldn’t help but wonder if this feast was just another display of power, a reminder of rome’s decadence under its rulers.

caracalla suddenly glanced at you. “you’re quiet. i told you before i want you to speak freely in my presence”

you turned your head slightly. “just watching everything unfold.”

he smirked. “does it amuse you to see the city scramble at my whim?”

you hesitated. “it’s… impressive, how quickly they obey. but i can’t help but think - this much excess, all for one night?”

his smirk didn’t fade, but something in his gaze darkened. “luxury is a reminder. the people must see our power, not just hear of it. a hungry rome is a dangerous rome, but a rome drowning in wine and pleasure? that’s a city that forgets to rebel.”

you look away, your gaze falling on the golden torches lining the walls, their flames flickering in the midday light. you wanted to tell him that the senate and the nobles weren’t the only ones he needed to worry about, his people had been living with the bare minimum for years and you didn’t know for how much longer they would accept to live like that, the riots were getting worse for months now, it would come a time when gladiator fights wouldn’t be enough to placate the anger, but you tightened your lips and didn’t utter a word.

tonight, the palace would be a different place - filled with laughter, music, and indulgence.

but beneath it all, the weight of the empire remained.

the senate doors loomed ahead, their towering bronze surface marked with the scars of time. as the guards pulled them open, the sounds of hurried banquet preparations faded behind them, replaced by the solemn murmurs of politics and power.

the empire feasted tonight, but first it ruled.

for the rest of the day you followed caracalla between meetings with the senate, always pouring wine before his cup was empty to calm his nerves and anxious demeanor obviously excited for the feast, to his shared office with his twin brother.

the office was filled with the scent of ink and parchment, the air thick with the weight of unfinished work. scrolls and wax-sealed documents were stacked high on geta’s desk, a sharp contrast to the clear space on caracalla’s side, where only a goblet of wine sat untouched. the afternoon sun streamed through open archways, casting long shadows across the marble floors as you stood quietly to the side, awaiting instruction.

caracalla, sprawled in his chair, drummed his fingers against the armrest, his thoughts nowhere near the office matters at hand. Instead, his blue eyes gleamed with restless anticipation. “the feast will be grand,” he mused, his voice thick with satisfaction. “the best wine, the rarest meats… people will talk about it for months.”

geta, hunched over a document, let out an exasperated sigh. “yes, brother. we have already established that. perhaps now, we could actually do the work required to keep this empire from crumbling beneath us?” he gestured to the untouched stack of decrees “or is your mind too occupied with indulgences?”

caracalla scoffed, waving a dismissive hand “indulgences keep rome entertained. a distracted people do not plot rebellion”

“they also do not run an empire” geta pinched the bridge of his nose before shooting a glance toward you, who had remained silent, observing the exchange “how do you tolerate him talking about this damn feast all day?”

you blinked in surprise, caught off guard by the question.

“it is not my place to comment, your highness”, you answered carefully.

caracalla smirked.

“a wise response” he turned back to his brother. “besides, the banquet is important. there will be generals there, senators - people who need reminders of where their loyalty should lie.”

geta exhaled, clearly at the end of his patience. “and what of these orders from the provinces? we have shortage of grain in the east, uprisings in germania-”

“handled,” caracalla interrupted, his tone growing sharp. “the legions have been sent. the governors will do as they are commanded”

geta gave him a long, scrutinizing look. “you are playing a dangerous game, brother. you indulge yourself while the world waits for an opportunity to strike”

caracalla merely leaned back, tilting his head towards you. “tell me, do they look concerned?”

you stiffened under their attention, but caracalla’s gaze remained unwavering. “they are quiet because they listen unlike half the fools in the senate,” he mused. “they observe, weights the worth of words before they speak. a trait more valuable than most realize.”

caracalla smirked and turned towards you.

“tell me,” he mused, “would you not enjoy such a sight? music, dancers, the kind of celebration that reminds people why we rule and they serve?”

you hesitated, considering your words, caracalla had told you before he wanted to know what you got to say, but what if he doesn’t like your words? would he throw you in the coliseum and laugh while you fight for your life? but there was an expectation in his gaze, as if he truly cared for your answer.

“i think… grandeur has its place,” you said carefully, “but there’s more to ruling than feasts”

geta chuckled, finally looking up. “they have more sense than you, brother”

caracalla waved him off. “sense is for men with dull lives. i prefer to live as the gods intended - without restraint.” he turned to you once again “you’ll see tonight. this will be a banquet worthy of rome.”

geta sighed and resumed his work, muttering about wasted resources and the absurdity of last-minute preparations, but caracalla was relentless, continuing to revel in his own plans, detailing every extravagant element of the evening.

not long after that the discussion shifted. geta brought up matters of state, affairs of war, and the ongoing tensions in the senate. his tone grew more serious, and with it, so did his expression.

“this is not a discussion for servants,” geta stated, still looking at the papers in front of him. “leave us”

before you could move, caracalla’s voice rang out.

“they stay”

geta’s eyes narrowed, as if he couldn’t believe his brother was against him in this matter. you froze in place.

“they are my personal servant” caracalla continued, emphasizing the word ‘my’ in a way that left no room for argument. “they hear what i hear, and they speak to no one but me.”

there was a finality in his words, an unspoken warning that even geta would not challenge in this moment. but it did not go unnoticed.

geta’s eyes flickered between his brother and you, studying caracalla carefully, his sharp mind piecing things together.

the possessiveness. the attention. the way caracalla’s eyes softened when he looked at you.

it was subtle, but geta had always been the more perceptive of the two. and now, he saw something caracalla had yet to recognize himself.

‘interesting’ the younger twin thought.

geta did not speak his suspicions aloud. not yet. instead, he merely gave a small smirk, a silent promise to himself.

he would be watching.

[themimicwecallmeg]

Weekly Pocket Headcanons for TFOne

I will keep these headcanons as valid in an alternate universe :3

‼️‼️Spoilers will be in red‼️‼️

This Wednesday, it’s a scrap ton of DPax headcanons :3 (10 for each)

(HERE YA GO DOOMED YAOI ENJOYERS >:3)

D-16’s side:

- D is a top, Pax is a bottom YOU WILL NOT CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE-

- D is the most responsible when high grade energon is involved… (in short it’s their alcohol if you didn’t know) since he knows that Pax is the chaotic drunk type and that he will get in trouble if he’s not stopped

- D doesn’t want to admit it… but he’s kinda possessive over Pax (before becoming Megatron)

- D is usually the one that stops arguments between the two

- If Pax is sleeping with D (in a world where it’s berths and not vertical recharge stations) he’ll make sure he’s actually sleeping and he’ll try to snuggle with him as if Pax was a huge plushie

- D is the one cooking… explained in the Pax part…

- When he plays strat ball with Pax, D deliberately lets him win so he can see Pax’s smile

- If D was a Yandere for Pax, he’d be a possessive, manipulative and self-aware Yandere.

- D’s sensitive spot is the back of his neck… more info in Pax’s part :3

- If they ever did the thing… D would do “love bites” on Pax… and Pax would like it…

Orion Pax’s side:

- Pax is Bisexual… like Elita, and D is completely fine with it… understandably

- Pax is (surprisingly) the big spoon of the two, despite D being (in my headcanons) a bit taller than him

- Once, Pax managed to make a fragging energon pancake catch fire… and it’s basically impossible to burn energon… and since then, D is the one cooking

- While D is the one stopping arguments, Pax is the one starting them… usually for stupid scrap like when he thought D stole his alarm clock to mess with him but it just fell behind the bed table… D never truly forgave him for that

- He has a secret only D knows; his bio lights on his ears are super sensitive… and you know what that means don’t you? D uses this tech to calm Pax to sleep… what weRE YOU THINKING YOU DIRTY MINDED STRANGER?!

(⬆️⬆️⬆️ Idea from this comic :3)

- If Pax was a Yandere for D, he’d be a delusional, obsessive and soft Yandere…

- He teases D on the daily… (and D secretly likes it)

- He knows D’s sensitive spot is his neck (said above) and he uses this at his advantage… to surprise him! He regularly sneaks in D’s back and softly blows air in the back of his neck… it makes D jump every. single. time.

- Pax knows D sometimes snuggles onto him (like said above) but never told him… because he likes it

- He can carry D in his arms… he did it only once because D challenged him to do so…

HOPE YOU LIKE THE HEADCANONS!!! IF YOU READ THIS FAR I JUST WANT TO LET YOU KNOW THAT WHOEVER YOU ARE… YOU’RE IMPORTANT AND LOVED!!! NOW HYDRATE AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF PAL ^v^

- Meg >:3

[grandwretch]

only must i wander, chapter 9

dustin's intermission

[on ao3] [ch 1][ch 2][ch 3][ch 4][ch 5][ch 6][ch 7][ch 8]

1985, september

The gravel of Hopper's drivethrough crunched under Dustin's bike wheels. It was late, night having long since settled over Hawkins, but the cabin windows glowed warmly, beckoning him inside. He could already hear the voices of his friends inside, yelling and laughing over some joke he couldn't make out-- Excitement lanced through him when he heard Eddie's wild cackle. 

It had been months since he'd seen Eddie outside of school. Months since he'd been able to hang out with most of them, actually. He'd been grounded for weeks  after the mall fire, and once his mom had found out about Steve being a Grimm, he'd basically been under house arrest. Dustin had missed so much, catching up on the phone with El or in sadly human hangouts with Max. They had Wesen game nights, now. D&D campaigns he didn't get invited to. Movie nights where they watched his favorites without him. Summer had been torture, and seeing them in between classes at school only made it worse.

Well, Dustin was sick of it. There would be no more inside jokes he didn't understand. No more apologetic faces when they discussed plans. He was going to game night. If his mom woke up and noticed him missing, she was just going to have to get over it. He refused to let his own life pass him by because she was afraid. 

He ditched his bike next to Steve's car, the kickstand singing metallic at the force with which he snapped it in place. He hustled himself up the steps and onto the porch, shooting furtive glances over his shoulder. They were in the middle of the woods, no nosy neighbors to rat him out, but Dusin still felt hunted by someone's watchful gaze. Perhaps being hunted by the government for a few days had left more lasting damage than he'd previously expected. 

Throwing open the door with more strength than he'd intended, Dustin blinked as the light enveloped him. From the yard it had seemed cozy and welcoming, but now it stung his eyes-- He hadn't risked a flashlight to light his way on the ride here, and now he was paying for it. He recoiled from the doorway, cursing under his breath, and heard more than saw the party draw to a halt at his presence.  

"Dustin?" Steve asked, the Grimm suspicion that they'd all had to become accustomed to clinging to his voice.

"Dustin!" El echoed. At least she was happy to see him. As Dustin's vision cleared, El threw her arms around his neck, and he stumbled further back into the darkness. Behind her, Max hovered, staring off into the night to make it clear she wasn't waiting for a turn-- Of course, when El stepped back after a final squeeze, she didn't back away when Dustin pulled her in, either. She tucked herself under his chin, briefly letting herself rest against his shoulder before backing up. 

Both the girls beamed up at him, one brighter than the other, and Dustin was left with the dizzying thought of what his younger self would think of how easy it was to touch and be touched by El and Max. And, also, how little any of them seemed to care about it outside of what little comfort they could bring each other after the summer. Romance had seemed incidental, if relevant at all-- Dustin and El's newfound intimacy had very little to do with her breakup from Mike, and Dustin found himself lounging in Lucas's lap as often as Max, when they weren't in public. Hell, basketball season starting was the only reason that Dustin wasn't throwing himself at Lucas right now. The further their other friends slipped away, the tighter they clung to each other. It was more than a little odd, but Dustin wasn't surprised that their sense of propriety was more than a little warped. Look who they had for role models. 

Said role model was standing in the doorway, peering down at his charges. Dustin couldn't see Steve's face in the shadows, but he could imagine the frown that had taken his mouth. Stress lines had already begun to settle in around his mouth, years too early, the expression so common that even his smiles carried echoes of it. "What are you doing here, bud?" 

"I came for game night!" Dustin said brightly, as if it wasn't the first time he'd ever shown up to the cabin on his own. Or after 9pm, for that matter. 

"Uh," Steve grunted, that pissy little squint of his settling in. Always willing to throw Dustin under the bus in order to remain the favorites, Max and El ducked back into the cabin, giggling. "Does your mom know you came for game night?" 

Steve was a pretty terrible liar, but he was distressingly good at figuring out when Dustin was. There was absolutely no tactic that worked on him every time; Dustin just had to pick a really good one and hope that Steve was having an off night. There was one that worked more often than not, but Dustin tried not to use it too often-- Not just because of Steve, but because of his new ever-present shadows, Eddie and Robin. Even now, they blinked at Dustin from Hopper's couch, not even pretending to be interested in something else. Even on his worst nights, Steve wouldn't miss a pattern with three brains working on it. 

Blustering, Dustin decided the best way to not get caught in a lie was to not answer at all. Instead, he took a page out of Steve's own book, mirroring his pose-- Hands on the hip and all. With exggeration in every movement and word, Dustin leaned in, mocking, "What do you think, genius?" 

"I--" Steve began, and halfway through the sentence seemed to realize he didn't care all that much. Maybe Steve had finally remembered he had done his fair share of sneaking out, or maybe he was just tired. Either way, in that moment of hesitation, Dustin knew he had him. "Yeah, alright," Steve sighed, then turned, gesturing for Dustin to follow him. "Come on in."

Max and El were on the floor in front of the couch. They had pushed the coffee table out of the way and replaced it with a box of Clue, the pieces scattered across the floor. The actual board was still folded, halfway out of the box, and El was hunched over the worn cards, examining them carefully. "You're just in time to help me teach El the rules," Max said, with a smile that said Dustin would be doing all of the teaching. 

"I'm going to play the red lady," El said, not listening. Her fingers stroked Miss Scarlet's portraits, obvious envy in her voice. "She has such nice hair." 

Robin leaned over, humming as she examined the card. "Steve could probably help you do yours like that." 

Steve glanced down at the card, frowning even deeper when he saw Miss Scarlet's teased curls. "Maybe when she's sixteen," he said, every inch of Hopper's disapproval in his voice, which obviously really meant 'never in a million years'.

"Steve, come on!" Max whined as El pouted up at him, both of them suddenly very invested in Steve's dedication to El's haircare. He ignored them with all the practice of a professional older brother, throwing himself onto the couch between Robin and Eddie. Immediately, he and Robin started talking about whatever boring grown up argument they'd been having before, but Eddie's eyes lingered on Dustin for a moment longer. 

His eyes said that they absolutely knew what Dustin was up to, and that he was choosing to ignore it. It was probably the only help he was going to get from anyone when it came to deceiving Steve, and Dustin chose not to push it. He mouthed a quiet 'thank you', then nearly tripped over himself trying to claim Professor Plum before Max could snatch it from him. 

They got halfway through a game before the door opened again, spilling their warmth out into the chilly autumn air. Chief Hopper's voice boomed through the small cabin, the beloved owner's words echoing through the space, cutting through laughter and arguments. The magic was wasted on nothing much at all. "Oh great," the echoes said, "a bunch of kids in my house." 

Dustin blinked up at Chief Hopper, looming over them all from the doorway. He was in uniform, the brown monstrosity that made him seem at once incredibly silly and largely intimidating, and holding a stack of pizzas that nearly went over his head. Dustin blinked a couple more times, and the pizzas didn't fade. 

Weird. 

While Dustin was... intellectually aware that Chief Hopper was now the adopted father of his two best friends, Dustin had yet to be adjust to that, uh, emotionally. For most of his life, the Chief had been a vague and mysterious form of authority, more of an icon than a human, and his mother and peers had warned him equally to stay out of the Chief's way. As Dustin grew older, the warnings grew with him, until Will's disappearance had turned the Chief from a distant warning to a very present adversary. 

It had been difficult to let that resentment go, even if Dustin had left most of the anger to Mike. It hadn't helped, either, that none of them had any idea that the Chief had been keeping El safe for almost a year-- It had been a revelation on a night of revelations, turning into a knot of confusion and emotion. Will is in danger again, you have a new big brother, the Chief is a wonderful father and also a liar. 

Excuse him if he wasn't exactly comfortable in the man's presence. 

Especially not, Dustin thought while every muscle in his body locked with fear, when he wasn't supposed to be here. 

Dustin was the only one disappointed to see an adult in the room, apparently. Greetings flooded the room as Dustin's mouth went dry, El and Steve's the loudest. Eddie even waved, remarkably chill for a man who had spent so much time in the back of the Chief's cruiser, although it might have something to do with the arm Steve currently had draped over his shoulders. Hard to be scared of a man whose son had latched onto you like a limpet, Dustin guessed. 

"Yes, yes, hello to the children who are supposed to be here. What the rest of you doing here?" Belying his harsh words, Hopper put a gentle hand on Max's head, large palm praticially enveloping her skull. She beamed up at him, but the Chief had moved on, his eyes now locked on Dustin. As the target of swiftly narrowing eyes, Dustin got the vague impression he had just interrupted some fatherly ritual he didn't understand. "Especially you, Henderson."

"Um," Dustin croaked, squirming. He searched desperately for a lie that would hold up under Hopper's narrowed gaze, but to his shock, the man barely held his gaze for another second. 

Rolling his eyes, Hopper visibily dropped whatever suspicion he'd had about coming home to Dustin on his couch. "Whatever," he said, echoing Steve with eerie similarity, looking to the other kids. "Time for dinner. Who wants vegetarian?" 

"Awesome!" Max crowed, El brightening beside her, but Dustin swallowed around a lump in his throat that told him he hadn't made it out of the woods, yet. 

Dustin ate his pizza-- surpreme, of course, with one slice of jalapeno and ham that Eddie had bullied him into trying --slowly, not liking the way Hopper and Steve kept looking at him. If this was what having a dad was like, Dustin was glad he'd missed out; Their gazes were knowing and unflinching, and while Dustin wasn't afraid, he felt bare and stupid. What was even worse was that afterward they'd look at each other, having a silent conversation through their eyebrows and shoulders. It was a language that Dustin hadn't even known Steve could speak, a language that seemed to be bestowed upon every parent the moment their child was born. Steve hadn't had any kids, and he didn't understand spoken language most days, but it didn't stop him from keeping up with Chief Hopper. Dustin watched his head bob in Dustin's direction time and again, and chewed crust that tasted more like cardboard. 

The moment the last piece disappeared behind Dustin's lips, Steve and Robin already leaping up to help clear the paper plates scattered across the table, Hopper stood. His chair scraped across the floor with a loud sound that had the rest of the gathered party pausing in their own movements; Dustin wasn't sure how the chair knew it needed to announce the importance in the set of Hopper's shoulders, but it had certainly gotten the message across.

"Alright," the Chief said, adjusting the belt around his stomach. "It's getting late. Dustin, I told your mom I'd take you home when we got done eating." 

Dustin swallowed. Had an olive gotten lodged in his esophagus at some point? Breathing felt suddenly out of his reach. 

"What?" El asked, a sharp frown on her face. "He didn't even get to play any games with us!" 

"Sorry, Janey. His mom's rules come first," Hopper said. He did look genuinely sorry about it, at least until his gaze found Dustin's again. He saw the iron return to the man's eyes and had to struggle not to reveal the way his heart raced in his chest. "Say goodbye, Dustin." 

"Bye, everyone," he said mechanically, wincing when he heard the shake in his own voice. 

"We'll see you at school next week," Max said, with a small, awkward smile. It didn't make Dustin feel any better, really, but it did remind him that whatever happened next, it wasn't like his mom could take school away from him. 

"See ya, Dusty," Eddie said, waving behind Steve's back. "Sorry, man." 

Not sorry enough to stand up for him, apparently. 

Dustin sulked out of the cabin, followed by the Chief's large, looming shadow. He hesitated for just a moment beside his bicycle, only to scurry away when the man gave a low, displeased grunt. Waiting by the cruiser door in silence seemed like the much safer bet, actually, Dustin decided. His bicycle could rot here, for all he cared at the moment-- Living was much more important.

"I should make you sit in the back, the way I used to make Steve ride back there when he was a dickhead," Hopper said, mostly mumbling as he fished his keys out of his pocket. "Actually, I've had Eddie back there a time or two, too. Maybe you need some better role models, Henderson."

Answering seemed like a bigger mistake than sneaking out had been. Every word of that had felt like a trap, either throwing his friends under the bus or digging himself deeper into Hopper's ire. He'd never been great at keeping his mouth shut, and the habit of letting his mouth run away from him had only gotten worse now that he had Steve to back him up-- The fear of Claudia Henderson, though? That was more than enough to keep him quiet. 

Dustin could feel the nerves causing subtle changes in his body as he waited for Hopper to unlock the passenger door. His teeth elongated and shifted texture, and he pressed the rough edges against his tongue until he could taste iron. Fur sprouted on fidgeting fingers. 

Hopper seemed to take his silence as a cue, because once Dustin was safely in the car, the man didn't speak another word. That was worse, somehow. The silence pressed in on them as they rolled slowly through the forest, and Dustin couldn't help that his gaze kept returning back to Hopper's blank, stern face. Had they ever spent this much time alone before? Surely not, and surely not enough to be silent with each other. Dustin had only just barely reached that level with Steve, a guy Dustin had all but made his emergency contact, and that was only because the school had refused to accept the paperwork. 

Somewhere in the back of Dustin's mind, he was vaguely aware of what Hopper was doing. He'd never been arrested before, unless you counted the brief run-ins with the federal government as resisting arrest, which according to the agents who had so passionately argued with Dr. Owens-- Well, whatever. Dustin had never been interrogated before, was the point, but he had seen movies. He knew that silence was just as persuasive as intimidation or a kind word and a cup of coffee. He knew the game Hopper was playing, and that was half the battle. He wasn't going to fall victim to such a stupid trick. 

Except he absolutely was, Dustin thought with his stomach in knots. He wasn't a hardened criminal; he was a freshman. He hadn't even had his fourteenth birthday yet. Of course he was going to break. The only thing left for Dustin to do was try not to reveal too much when he did. 

He barely made it to them same road before his control over his mouth snapped like a twig, the words tumbling over his tongue and out of his mouth. "Are you really going to tell my mom?" Fuck.

"Well, kid. I feel like I should," Hopper said, slowly. For the first time that night, Dustin could see that Hopper felt as awkward about this conversation as Dustin was. He was all but squirming in his seat, shifting awkwardly as he frowned out at the road before them. They both would much prefer Dustin was having this conversation with Steve, probably, but Dustin's mom didn't open the door when Steve knocked anymore. Which was the whole reason Dustin had to sneak out in the first place. "Seems like the kinda thing a mom should know." 

"You can't!" Dustin said, fully aware he sounded like the whining child he had always tried to avoid becoming. He had kept his cool through being hunted by federal agents, through attacks by eldritch dogs, through his best friends being drug to Hell and back. So much had happened in the last few years, and while the rest of Dustin's friends only seemed to improve from year to year, he could feel himself swiftly reaching the edges of his abililty to take random bullshit. 

"Oh, can't I?" Hopper asked, amused. The grin tugging on the edges of his mouth only twisted the knife in Dustin's chest further. 

"No! It'll--" Dustin swallowed, heart pounding so fast he thought he might throw up. "Fuck, Hop, are you trying to ruin my life?" 

Hopper sighed, shaking his head as he muttered, "Teenagers are so dramatic, Jesus." 

"Oh, sure, all parents are good and perfect," Dustin spat, crossing his arms around his chest. He wasn't being dramatic. Steve flipping out when someone broke his favorite mug was dramatic. Eddie writing a dirge for his favorite wornout cassette was dramatic. Freaking out because your mom was trying to lock you up for the rest of your life wasn't dramatic. "Why don't you call Steve's folks and tell him who he's hanging out with these days?" 

"Your mom is not Sophia Harrington, Dustin. Stop it." 

Hopper wasn't wrong, and the look he shot Dustin said he knew it, but Dustin still avoided his gaze.

"Yeah, but she--" Dustin ground his jaw, wincing at the sound the beaver teeth made in his mouth. "She's awful." 

"She loves you, and that's more than Steve ever had--" Hopper began, but Dustin cut him off with a shout. It was short and incoherent, barely more than a grunt of frustration, but he just couldn't take it anymore. 

 Guilt had already settled into Dustin's chest when he'd made the comparison; He didn't need Hopper to tell him he was out of line. Steve's mom was an even touchier subject than his dad. Whatever was going on there was much lonelier than fear or anger.

The fact of it was, though, Steve didn't matter right now. Not to Dustin. His only mistake had been bringing it up. Sure, Steve had a bad mom-- But everyone else had great ones. Even El, with no mom at all, got brought under the wing of Joyce Byers and Susan Mayfield. Where did that leave Dustin, quietly suffering alone, with no one to talk to about it? Why, because Steve had it worse? Steve wouldn't want that for him, Dustin knew that, and he wasn't about to accept it, either. 

"I'm not allowed to have friends, I'm not allowed to have a life," Dustin gasped out. With a distant horror, Dustin realised that tears had begun to well up in his eyes, but his body was spiralling swiftly out of his control. There was very little he could do, only double over, clinging to the door, as he tried to regain some composure.

Hopper's stern, detached voice only made things worse. "You disappeared for almost a week this summer, she's allowed to--" 

"She says terrible shit all the time about my friends, and everyone just passes it off as being strict! It's not just Steve and El, it's people she's never even met. You didn't even hear the stuff she said about Jeff and Gareth's families. I don't even--" Dustin choked, drawing to an end with a shuddering breath. Hopper was quiet as Dustin tried to catch his breath, chest heaving. He was still listening when Dustin continued, "I don't even recognize her anymore. The past two years have been... That's not my mom, Hopper. I don't know who she is."

Hopper's silence stayed firm even when Dustins' words finally drew to a more natural end. With a sinking heart, Dustin was sure that Hopper was just going to keep ignoring him all the way home-- That he was going to turn into ever other adult in the world and pretend that everything he didn't like wasn't happening. It would be so disappointing, Dustin thought, to know that Steve and El had been through so much and all they had to fall back on was someone who didn't listen. 

Blinking back tears, Dustin turned away from Hop, leaning so far into the door that his face pressed into the cool glass. Two could play at that game. He didn't have to listen, either-- When the lectures came, he would just let it all fade into background noise, focusing his mind on the swiftly moving lights that danced across the window's reflections. 

When Hopper eventually spoke, however, there was no lecture to be found. 

"Did I ever tell you that I went to school with your mom, Dustin?" he said, instead. Dustin peeked over his shoulder at him, but Hopper wasn't looking at him-- His eyes were still firmly on the road, though Dustin could see that his hands were clenched so hard around the wheel that his knuckles were turning white. 

"No," Dustin said, suspicion coloring every word. "We're from Chicago." 

"Well, that's where she went to college-- where you were born --but she grew up right here with me and Joyce. She was... " Hopper paused, as if unsure of how to explain himself. "Different, then, I guess. A real bright girl. Too good for a couple of outcasts like us, probably, but she acted like she didn't notice. Her and Joyce were something to see, always getting into problems, asking questions. I don't think either of them were afraid of anything at all, back then." 

Dustin tried to imagine his mother getting into trouble and couldn't quite manage it. Every attempt only ended with his mother being the one to do the scolding, to point out the danger. "Are you sure it was my mom?" he asked. "That doesn't sound anything like her." 

Hopper snorted. "Yeah, kid, I'm sure." 

"Then what... happened to her?" It wasn't just the way she acted; Dustin couldn't remember a single time his mother had talked fondly about the people of Hawkins. Chicago she loved, but Hawkins was nothing more than a prison to her, something she chose because the walls would keep them as safe as it kept them isolated. "The way she talks about Joyce-- The way she talks about everybody--"

Hopper shrugged. "I know she met your dad in college, and they settled down there permanently when they got married. She dropped out of college and joined a nursing program, instead. Spent a lot of time with your father's family, from what I heard. Joyce was worried about her, going through the same motions herself, but Claudia was happy. They lost touch after that, but she sent word when you were born. Joyce was thrilled; She was pregnant with Will and had been so afraid that Claudia would never have the family she wanted." 

Nothing abou this made any sense. Everything Dustin had ever known about his mom, about his own life, was in direct contradiction with what Hopper was saying--  but then, how many times in the past few years had Dustin's entire world view been challenged by one conversation? How many times had his mother told him something he knew was untrue, simply because she thought it was for his own good? 

"My mom told me my dad didn't have any family. It's just me and mom," he said numbly, because surely she wouldn't have lied about that. Surely she wouldn't have kept a family from him, one that she apparently had loved enough to turn her back on everything she'd ever known. 

"... I reckon that's still true," Hopper said, awkwardly. His eyes flicked towards Dustin again, just once, as if gauging how he was taking gaining and losing a family within the span of a few sentences. "When your-- When your dad passed, Claudia showed back up in Hawkins. She moved into her parents' old house, and when we asked, she said she didn't have anywhere else to go. We tried to get her settled, but it never really took. I don't know how much you remember, but we couldn't even convince her to let you leave the house until you were five or six. Took even longer for Joyce to convince her you were healthy enough to go to school." 

"I didn't know Joyce was why I stopped homeschooling," Dustin said, head spinning. He'd always assumed the doctors had convinced her; That it was always a part of the plan, and the homeschooling had been them waiting for his body to catch up. "I never even met her until Will invited me over." 

"Claudia only let her in the house if you were upstairs. Never saw anyone else come in or out, either. Joyce was thrilled the first time you came over. Lonnie was afraid she'd never let you go home." 

Had his childhood really been so restrictive? Dustin remembered feeling lonely, sure, but he had always just attributed that to being a sick kid with no friends. The idea it was something that his mother had forced on him left him feeling slightly sick to his stomach. He could have known Will for years.  He could have had even more time with someone he might never talk to again. The games they could have played together-- The conversations they could have had-- Dustin could imagine a world where he and Will were just as close as Mike and Will, as close as Lucas and Dustin were now. 

The more he thought about it, the more the idea ached. If he and Mike had met then, would Mike have been less willing to cut them all out after last summer? Would he have stayed the way they needed him to? Would Dustin have been able to save his friends the way he couldn't now? And if all that was true, what else had his mother kept from him? 

He didn't want to accept it. As much as Dustin resented his mother's attitude towards the people he loved, he had never thought that she would turn that anger towards him. She had never done anything to hurt him, not knowingly, anyway. Until now, he had always thought she was just... misguided. He was suffering under her love, that was all. It happened to people all the time. But if what Hopper was saying was true, was Dustin wrong? Was she keeping him safe by taking away everything that could ever make him happy? Did she even care? 

"And she never told you why?" Dustin said, the lump in his throat shredding his voice to reedy, pathetic pieces. "She never... She never told you how my dad died?" 

"No," Hopper said, his voice softer than Dustin had ever heard it. "You?"

"No." 

It was, apparently, another thing she'd thought he didn't need. 

Silence took over the cruiser again, both of them unsure of what to say. Dustin was sure if he asked any more questions he would burst into tears halfway through, and Hopper-- Hopper kept looking at Dustin like he knew it, like he was afraid anything he said would break Dustin into tiny pieces. Dustin was so tired of being thought of as something fragile, but he had to admit that he felt like it, for the first time in his life. 

He felt like thin, warped glass, the edges of him already turning back into sand. 

"I do have a theory, if you're willing to hear it," Chief Hopper said eventually. Dustin hugged his arms around his stomach, holding tight. He wasn't sure that he did want to hear it, actually-- He wasn't sure he could live with knowing more truths about his mother. But Dustin had never been good at ignoring his own impulse for answers, even when it might be the death of him. 

"What kind of theory?" he asked, stomach sinking before he even heard the answer. 

"You know, Steve has been sharing a lot of that Wesen stuff with me, "Hopper said. "Stuff he thinks would be useful in my line of work when he can't be around. I'll admit most of it doesn't make sense to me, but I remember one thing about you beaver folk." 

"Eisbibers," Dustin corrected, on instinct more than any offense.

"Yeah, whatever," the Chief said, waving his hand in a way so reminiscent of Steve that Dustin almost smiled. :Anyway, Steve's grandpa says that the beavers are big on family. They live in big groups, and when two families mix they often become one big family. According to him, there's one family that makes up half of a small country in Europe. The way I see it, it's... a problem there's only two in Hawkins. You understand me?" 

Not really, Dustin thought, but the unease in his stomach only settled in further. 

Hopper sighed. "Maybe just give your mom a little grace, alright? I'm not exactly thrilled with how she's been talking about my kids, either, but sometimes people have a reason to be a little paranoid." 

Dustin wanted to protest, wanted to point out that he'd seen worse than his mom ever had, but something held his tongue. He wasn't sure what it was, exactly, but a voice in the back of his head kept hissing at him. Was he sure? Was he really sure that his mother hadn't seen anything worse? Dustin tried not to follow that voice any deeper, tried not to consider what would make an Eisbiber leave her family behind. 

If there was even any family left to have. 

"Yeah," Dustin choked out, squeezing his eyes closed. 

Silently, Hopper pulled to a stop. Dustin could feel the sway of the car, the small bump as Hopper pulled up onto the sidewalk-- A small crime done with the confidence of a cop. It took a few more seconds for Dustin to get the courage to open his eyes, but Hopper waited, not speaking. 

When Dustin finally peeked out the window, he didn't like what he saw. Mrs. Morgan's prized dahlia's stared back at him, dulled by the moonlight, an ominous sign that they had finally reached Dustin's block. In a few short yards, they would be at his house-- And if his mom caught him, or if Hopper forced him to explain, there would be hell to pay. She wouldn't hurt him, of course, probably wouldn't even yell-- But somehow that made it all worse. If she freaked out a little more, maybe Dustin could properly hate her. Instead, she would just stand there, saying horrible things in a calm voice that made his stomach turn. 

"Alright, kid, here's what we're gonna do: I'm gonna park right here, and you're gonna walk the rest of the way home," Hopper said, his voice soft. "Tell her or not, it's up to you." 

It was more than Dustin had expected from him. "I thought I was in trouble." 

"I trust you to make the right call," Hopper said. 

And wasn't that a guilt trip and a half? 

Dustin knew he was right. He should tell his mom the truth, if only because she seemed to struggle with the concept herself. He couldn't be mad at her, couldn't demand answers, if he was sneaking around, too. He would have to be brave. 

Pulling himself out of the cruiser with shaky limbs, Dustin nodded at Hopper one last time. It had been a weird night, but the man had at least tried. He wondered if this was what Steve had felt like, when Hopper first started reaching out to him-- But no, that was different. Steve needed a dad, had craved one. Dustin had more parental presence than he knew what to do with. 

He walked the last block home, the pressure in his head growing with every step. Dread rose higher in his throat until it pooled on his tongue, tasting of bile, but his determination grew stronger with it. He unlocked the front door, gritting his teeth until he felt a snarl settle over his face. He needed to not be himself when he faced her, needed to be someone stronger. Someone braver. 

He envied Steve's ability to mask himself in words and gestures, but it wasn't something Dustin could learn-- And definitely not in the next five seconds. 

Dustin's mother was exactly where he left her. Claudia Henderson was at the kitchen table, reading one of the many books that Dustin wasn't allowed to look at, much less touch. She sat, as she always did, in the only chair that gave her an unimpeded view of the front door. Which, of course, meant the moment Dustin walked through, she saw him. 

He watched shock then fear settle on her face and squared his shoulders, waiting for her to strike first.

"Dusty, you--" Her voice wavered, pitching up into a frightened warble that made Dustin wince. "Have you been out all night?" 

It was hardly what he would have considered all night, barely 11 pm, but he knew what she meant. "Yeah, mom." 

Claudia rose, her clothes swirling around her as frantic as she had suddenly become. She cleared the space between them in a moment, her hands gripping his shoulders. "Where? What were you thinking? Do you have any idea how dangerous this place could be for you--" 

"I do, actually," he said. Very few in Hawkins knew it better. "Do you?"

"Excuse me?" 

Dustin sighed, feeling not for the first time like the only adult in the room. "Look, mom. We need to talk." 

As if sensing the shift in the dynamic, Claudia pulled herself up to her full height, staring down at her son with a clenched jaw. Her approximation of sterness meant nothing to Dustin, all too aware of the way her eyes still darted from place to place. As if, somehow, Dustin might have brought the danger home with him. As if him sneaking out to spend a night with his friends wasn't a danger because he might get hit by a car or might be drinking, but because the sin itself would mean monsters lurked in the darkness. 

"There's nothing to talk about except the fact that you're grounded," Claudia said, and Dustin looked up at her with pity. 

"Alright," he said, willing to go along with it if it made her stop shaking. "But I still need to talk to you." 

The fear seemed to turn to frustration in half a moment, and Dustin watched color flood his mother's face. "What could you possibly have to say to me right now?" she demanded. "What could make this better? Better yet, what couldn't possibly wait until morning?" 

"... I want to be able to go to Hopper's and hang out with El and Steve," he said, because he deserved it. Because she deserved to hear the truth of what he wanted, even if she wasn't willing to give it to him. "They have game nights every Thursday, and I miss--" 

"No," she said, disgusted and betrayed-- As if Dustin had hurt her by even asking. 

"Mom, they're my friends," Dustin said, trying to stay calm. His throat still ached from holding back tears in Hopper's car, but he didn't feel like crying now. He couldn't afford it, not with Claudia shaking in front of him, so near tears herself. He couldn't remember the last time he had cried in front of his mother, couldn't remember the last night he'd trusted her enough to take care of him if he couldn't take care of himself. 

"You have no idea what Wesen like them are capable of, Dusty!" she said. Her fingers dug into his shoulders so deeply now that Dustin bit his lip to keep from jerking away. "I know they seem like your friends now, but when you're older, you'll understand." 

"I do, though!" Dustin said, because his had already friends done wonderful, terrible things, and it had only made him love them more. "I've seen what they're capable of, and they've never once used it against me." 

"For now!" Claudia finally let go, sending Dustin rocking backwards as she stomped back into the kitchen. She filled a glass of water with shaking hands, and Dustin wondered if she was trying to hide her anger or her fear from him. 

"I don't--" Dustin sighed. "What do you think is going to change?" 

"Mind my words, Dustin," Claudia said, voice grave."If you keep running around with predators like that, they'll kill you."

Scoffing, Dustin trailed behind his mother, asking, "You think El is going to kill me? That Steve is? Come on, Mom, you've met them."

"Yes. And I've met hexenbiests before. They always seem pleasant until they're cursing your bloodline," Claudia said. The calmness she wore from day to day was nowhere to be found, every inch of her consumed by the nervous dramatics that she had passed on to Dustin. She almost reminded him of Robin when she got like this, tongue sharp and hands flying. He watched her slosh water all over the kitchen counter as she gestured angrily. "Oh, I've also met Mr. and Mrs. Harrington. They're a delight, I assure you. I still wouldn't spend a moment alone with them! I definitely wouldn't trust them alone with you, Dustin. Imagine what could happen!" 

"Steve isn't his parents," Dustin said. The louder his mother got, the quieter he found himself becoming-- He had to force himself not to mumble, now. Every word threatened to die in his throat. 

"You can't change genetics, Dustin. There's thousands of years of murder in his DNA, and I'm not going to trust his control over his instincts with your safety," Claudia said. 

"Fine," Dustin agreed. "Then I want to join Hellfire next year." 

Claudia paused, sitting the half-full glass down on the counter. "What?" 

"It's a DnD group run by Eddie Munson, and--" 

"A Munson?" Claudia's voice was sharp with shock, bordering on a shriek. "You may as well play with a rabid animal, Dustin. Sweetheart, listen to yourself--" 

That stung more than anything she had ever said about Steve or El. They were dangerous, had the potential to take out all of Hawkins if they put their minds together, Dustin just knew them well enough to know that they wouldn't. To talk about Eddie and Wayne like that was another thing entirely. They were good people. Sweet in a way that Dustin had rarely seen in his short life. A family like the kind you saw on TV, always there for each other, family dinners and talking through their problems on the front porch. They weren't the kind of family that adults approved of, but they were the kind that ever kid wanted to be a part of. 

It seemed like profaning something holy to call them animals. Eddie, especially, seemed unfair. He was just a kid. A kid who was technically older than Steve, sure, but a kid all the same. Not only would he not hurt Dustin, he probably couldn't if he even tried. Eddie was good, and brave, and had saved Steve in ways that Dustin hadn't even known that Steve needed saving but he... He had fought and killed less than Dustin had. It was like calling a baby a monster, at the end of the day, and Dustin could barely hide his disdain for the thought.

"He's friends with Steve and Robin, and he's really nice," Dustin said, the words falling short of explaining everything Eddie meant to him and their group. "There's also other prey species in the group, and I think it would be good for me--" 

"I don't even know why the Harringtons allow Wayne and that whelp to stay in Hawkins after what his father did," Claudia continued, ignoring Dustin's clumsy pleading. "Honestly, if anything good comes from Steve and him running around together, it'll be that the Harringtons finally run them out." 

Dustin's blood ran cold at the very thought. Since finding out what Steve's bloodline really meant, the Harringtons had been little more than a vague horror story, a monster people told their kids about in whispers before bed. He'd hoped they'd never come home in the same thought as wondering if they were even real, and half the time Steve seemed to think of them the same way. They were a distant threat, looming over the town but never touching it. Hopper and Steve had a plan, after all. What did Dustin need to worry? 

The idea of the Harringtons actually hunting someone-- Someone that Dustin loved-- Someone that Steve loved-- sent Dustin's stomach into spirals so tight he thought he'd be sick. He couldn't fathom it. He'd been hunted before, watched his friends evade capture and fight against monsters and the government alike, but the Harringtons were... Grimms they might be, but the Harringtons were just people. Eddie was just a boy their son was friends with. 

He couldn't imagine the ways it would break Steve's heart. He couldn't imagine the ways it would shift the dynamics of their group, of the entire town. He couldn't imagine the way it would destroy him, shifting the foundation of his entire life to watch two of his closest friends to collapse in one fell swoop like that-- And if Eddie left, if Steve fell chasing him, then what would happen to Robin? To El? To Max? To Lucas? With all his friends falling like dominoes, what would Dustin have left? 

And his mother wanted it to happen. All but prayed for it, here in the holy quiet of their kitchen.

"You know, you have a lot of guts calling my friends murderers when you're the one wishing death on people." The words fell from Dustin's mouth, cold and sharp as the ice she'd lodged in his heart. 

Claudia looked at her son, fear and anger fallen away to reveal blank, dark eyes that stared at him for a long moment. "I've had enough of you tonight, I think," she said, and her voice sounded tired. "Go to your room." 

Dustin went, stomping all the way. She was tired? Her? She had no idea. No idea at all. The shit he went through everyday, the shit she was just piling on him further--

Halfway up the stairs, he heard her voice call out. "I hope one day you understand that I'm doing this for your own good." 

His only answer was the slamming of his bedroom door. 

There, alone in the dark, Dustin promised himself that he wouldn't give up. This wasn't over, not by a long shot. One day he'll be able to hang out with El and Steve again. Eddie would be a harder sell, probably, but he should be able to hang out with Steve in the next two or three years if he keeps his head down and plays his cards right. Maybe he should start hanging out with Eddie's prey friends, Dougie and Gareth, she would chill out more? What could be so scary about an otter and a turtle? 

Dustin sighed, and sat on his bed. 

The real problem was his mother's fear. That had to be fixed before they could start rebuilding Dustin's life into something approaching normal. Maybe he would never find out what happened to his dad and their family, but he had to start somewhere, and that was the only lead he had. 

He threw himself back, arms spread across his covers, staring up at the dingy glow in the dark stars. His mother had helped him put those up, carefully placing each one according to Dustin's careful instructions, until they had a perfect representation of his favorite constellation. She had loved him, once. Probably still did, in her own way. And somewhere beneath all the resentment and hurt, Dustin knew that if he was lonely, his mother had to be drowning. 

Maybe his only way out of this was saving her. 

Dustin closed his eyes. He would do everything he could, these next four years. Anything to make her less afraid to be alive, to walk the streets of Hawkins and smile and have friends again. And at the end of it, when he finally had a diploma in his hand and more freedom than he knew what to do with, he would either have his mom back or... 

Well. He would be able to do whatever he wanted, then, wouldn't he? He would have more than enough family to not notice the hollow in his heart the shape of Claudia Henderson. 

[daddydoddsjr]

Hi! I love your work and was wondering if you could do a Rafael x reader where she’s secretly learning Spanish, but Rafael thinks she’s possibly cheating on him because she’s being so secretive and won’t let him look at her phone or something :)

Pairings || Rafael Barba x Female!Reader

Contents/Warnings || Cheating accusations, light angst, fluff ending

Authors Note || i’m glad you love my work <3 also sorry to anyone who speaks spanish if the phrases aren’t correct! i don’t know it well so.. translated :’) let me know if anything’s wrong and i’ll fix it!

You had downloaded every good language app you could find in the past few months. You always loved with Rafael spoke Spanish to you, and you had picked up on some phrases and words, but you were growing sad that you couldn’t have an actual conversation with him in anything but English. After having seen several videos of people learning their partners native languages and then surprising them by suddenly speaking it to them, you decided to do the same.

Your plan was to surprise Rafael on your anniversary by speaking Spanish as well as you could to him, along with a few other gifts you got him. Normally you never had an issue is Rafael wanted to use your phone for any reason, he even knew your password and you know his, but you began to keep your phone from him. Of course, he began to pick up on this.

He noticed that you were being secretive— not letting him touch your phone anymore without telling him why, changing your password, and not letting him look at your screen as often anymore. Rafael was dying a bit at this. He loved you, truly, and had the upmost respect and trust in you, but he was growing suspicious of you cheating on him. He couldn’t come up with any other plausible explanation as to why you began to be so secretive. He didn’t want to think that you were doing this, but he didn’t know what else it could be.

He found himself sitting on his bed one night, feeling miserable as he waited for you to come to his apartment so he could finally bring up his suspicions. He waited impatiently, replaying what he wanted to say in his head when he finally heard the familiar sound of you opening his door with the spare key he had given you. You close the door and kicked off your shoes before making your way around to find him. You walk into his bedroom, noticing the tired look on his face, “Raf? What’s wrong?”

Rafael hesitated before answering, “I… need to talk to you about something.”

You cautiously sat beside him, now even more worried, “Sure, what’s going on?”

He met your eyes, pushing the words out before he could back down, “You’ve been very secretive lately, mostly about your phone. You changed your password and won’t even let me touch it anymore when we see each other. I just need to know why. Are you cheating on me? Is there something I’m doing wrong?”

You looked, and felt, as if he had slapped you in the face. You didn’t say anything for a moment before slowly sliding your phone out of your pocket, “No, I’m not cheating on you…”

He watched as you unlocked your phone, slowly handing it to you. He takes it, looking at your main home screen until he saw a folder with every language app possible in it; Natulang, Duolingo, Babbel, Pimsleur, and many more. He was confused, staring at your phone, “I don’t understand,” he finally says, “You’re being secretive over language apps?”

You sighed, taking your phone back, “I’m learning Spanish, para sorprenderte.” {to surprise you}

Rafael blinked, the use of Spanish briefly stunning him. You noticed the look on his face and continued, “I just… started to get sick of not always understanding you when you speak it. I was going to wait until out anniversary to tell you, so I was hiding my phone to make sure you didn’t figure it out on accident,” you frown, fidgeting with your phone. “If you want to, you can check it for dating apps or texts… but you won’t find anything like that, I promise.”

“No,” he said quickly, shaking his head, “No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I accused you of that, I just couldn’t think of anything else that you would become so secretive because of. Te amo y confío en ti.” {I love you and I trust you}

You crack a small smile, piecing together what he had said, “Yo también te amo?” {I love you too} You say awkwardly, not knowing if you said it correctly. Rafael nods, his hand going to the back of your head as he pressed his lips to your forehead.

“That was great,” he says, his hand still on the back of your head as he looks you in the eye again, “I’m so happy that you’re learning, it’s a great anniversary gift.”

“A great spoiled anniversary gift,” you sigh dramatically, making him laugh a bit before responding with, “Guess my gift has to top you learning an entire language, huh?”

“Es mejor,” you smile. {it better}

[eternaljeon]

beautifully said. i have so many feelings about this because it’s literally all i ever see. i actually feel so bad for those curious casual readers who stumble upon posts and ask questions like they should and have every right to do and get told a bunch of BS. that kind of experience completely takes away from their overall effect of the stories and fandom. it’s hostile and disgusting and turns readers off from trying to fit in or accept the story in the way they want to. just as everyone should be given the same right to do.

SJM is not about to spill all of elain’s deep and dirty secrets in everyone else’s books. but she leaves clues and breadcrumbs in each story in order to lead up to it. we saw nesta as someone who was cold and indifferent towards her loved ones but also headstrong and taking shit from no one, and we saw potential in nesta’s powers during the war in ACOWAR. but then the novella and first half of her book had her isolating herself because of how terrified she was of not only her powers but of losing the people she pushed away out of that fear. she was not perfect or anywhere near that, she said and did things that shed her in a bad light. and she had to be shown actively working her way back up again. that was not going to be told in feyre’s POV and her growth and development and process of healing sure asf wasn’t about to be shown in anyone else’s book. people didn’t like nesta very much back then and now, after we got to see and understand her better, she’s probably the most loved archeron in the series.

people also think low of elain now. they happen to think she’s the worst sister of the group for whatever reason suits their fancy that day, but the point is that now that she’s the next in line there are significant things being laid out for us. we are now being shown left and right that she is not who most expected her to be, that she is capable of surprising even those closest to her. that there is some bark to her bite. they think she’s boring? too weak? too selfish? they haven’t even seen HALF of what her story is about. and her story has been the most drawn out. things have been left unresolved for her for 3 books now. her trauma from the cauldron, her powers, and the mating bond with lucien, specifically. and then we also see moments between her and azriel that are indicative of a forbidden romance that has incredibly high stakes and that’s ALSO not about to be tied up or resolved in anyone else’s book. in a bonus chapter most casual readers of the series don’t even know exists. and you know why? because aside from az being cold and broody, completely on par for his character, nothing came of it. all it did was set up the angst and tension for a forbidden romance.

there is no story for g/wyn and azriel to make. they trained together because of her connection to nesta and how important she was to nesta’s arc and development. her scenes with az were shown in a trainer/trainee fashion and is he proud of her? and what she’s been able to overcome and accomplish? absolutely. as he should be. but there was nothing else. it completely takes away from the growth and development she went through by revolving her worth around a man. and we don’t need to see her as this perfectly flawed or unflawed character because it isn’t necessary moving forward. anything that happened between her and az in that bonus chapter? almost as if it NEVER happened.

and, let’s also consider the fact that SJM herself said the novella, which most people on that side of the fandom has avidly ignored and/or told people to ignore, was laying the groundwork for the remaining spinoffs in the series. g/wyn is NOT in that novella and we have NO indication that she even would be. not a single thing. but do you know who was? nesta and her spiraling and cassian feeling the brunt of that. and lucien and elain. elain and az. az and mor. we all canonically know that mor does NOT love azriel, not in the way he loves her because she is for the girls. so what does that actually tell you? that the only viable love-triangle is between lucien/elain/azriel. she is mated to lucien and she has mutual feelings for az. that right there shows another flaw for both our elriel babies until it’s actively dealt with.

though the last paragraph seems off base, it is just there as a reminder that holding g/wyn and her morals as a character in any significant light, right or wrong, is not necessary for the story moving forward. it’s truly not a hard concept to grasp. it’s been spelled out in every possible way for us.

i’m so sorry to hijack this reply but i gotta let these things out or i’ll actually scream. 🖤

i’m laughing at the fact that gwynriels are trying to say that we claim elain is perfect and without flaws.

i’ve never seen an elriel make this claim. in fact, we are all incredibly excited to see elain’s growth in the next book for this reason. you can’t have a compelling story without a flawed character. we just don’t degrade her for those flaws by calling her boring or useless or weak, unlike them.

meanwhile gwynriels pop a hemorrhoid any time we try to say that gwyn isn’t perfect because to them, she is flawless, which is why she needs to be with azriel because he “deserves better.”

another day of them trying to twist the narrative when really they’re just pointing the gun at themselves again 😌

Hey anon 🫶

Let me get this straight:

The same Gwynriels that have called Elriels misogynistic and other non-polite words as well as attacking them for believing in the LightSinger theory or having any theory that potrays Gwyn to be morally grey instead of perfection - the same group of people that have Gwyn as the flawless friend, auntie, spy, warrior, ruler etc etc. She literally has 0 flaws. Even Gwynriels haven’t bothered to theorised about Gwyn’s character growth/journey. Its always about what she can do for Azriel/Nesta. And it makes sense. Most of her stans that are also gwynriels only like her bcs she is a stereotypical character with little depth so its perfect for stans who love to self-insert themselves.

Saying Mass doesn’t like to write about perfect characters with 0 faults but then stanning and theorising Gwyn - who has 0 flaws - will get a book… is just hilarious. Honestly, they embarrass themselves 😭

When I - or other elriels - say elain is “perfect” its said in an exaggerated, “I love this character so much” way. Not in a “she’s actually perfect and has done nothing wrong” kind of way. Yes. Elain has flaws. She has growth to do, a journey of self-discovery to grow. The difference is: Elriels just don’t hate Elain for BS reasons like Gwynriels. Elriels don’t find Elains behaviour towards Lucien wrong or something she needs to apologise for - the way Eluciens do. We do not criticise Elain the way Eluciens/Gwynriels do. Their criticism is always based on misogyny. As far as I know - elriels may critique Elain but what has that woman really done wrong? In a series where you have r4pists, SAs, emotional or physical abusers- Elain not planting a vegetable garden as a child doesn’t seem like a big thing to hold against her. Im not saying she is “perfect” she definitely needs to apologise to Feyre but for Elain - it will be more self-discovery, dabbling into her fanged beast side etc.

Yeah at this point - I don’t think antis realise how ridiculous they’re sounding anymore. Like you don’t even have to do anything and they’re just there. Spiralling whilst giving the rest of us second hand embarrassment.

[emmaspolaroid]

your heart is the only place that i call home

(my very last minute contribution to Norember 🤍🧡 closeup + alternate colors under the cut!)

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[cordiallyfuturedwight]

hyung line + chokers for @epiphanytear (cr. namuspromised)

[somegrumpynerd]

Actually it turns out I had more thoughts about that post that I forgot about lol

Would Nightmare actually give up his boys? Yes and no

If it was just a black and white situation of they're miserable, they don't wanna be here, they have somewhere better to be, then yes. He would leave them out to wherever they needed to be despite his own feelings and very quickly realise afterwards just how much he'd gotten used to the noise and company. I think he would get a little clingy with Dream about it, which I'm sure Dream would find very weird after everything but not unwelcome, he did miss his brother after all.

(If he couldn't attach himself to Dream's side for whatever reason, I think he might just sit in his castle and go insane. Or maybe he'd just spend all day at Ccino's trying really hard to project that he just likes the atmosphere and isn't lonely as hell)

But the thing is, most of them don't have somewhere better to be. Horror has his au, and Nightmare would keep up the supply of food even if Horror said he wanted to quit at this point, so he would understandably let him return home. Killer, Dust and Cross effectively don't have aus anymore though, and they tend to get into self-destructive habits when they're left to their own devices. (Obviously bringing Color and Epic into the mix to make sure Killer and Cross are taken care of eases matters, but Dust doesn't really have any friends outside their group he could go stay with - that Nightmare knows about at least).

The flipside of this is that his boys may not necessarily want to be given up. I think if Nightmare got really in his head about this he could easily end up convinced this is the right thing to do without ever asking them if it's what they want, with potentially terrible results. He's established such a pattern of always returning to find Killer when they get seperated, that if he never showed up Killer might just keep sitting there and waiting for him greyfriar's bobby style, refusing to leave because he's certain his boss is coming back.