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daydreamer-much · 10 days ago

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Whispers In The Quiet - Ahkmenrah x Reader

The museum was quieter than usual tonight.

No footsteps echoed from Larry’s patrols. No dinosaur thumps. Just the occasional whisper of wind against the glass roof, and the soft, steady rustle of fabric as Ahkmenrah moved through the hallways, golden robes trailing behind him like memories he couldn't quite escape.

You were sitting alone in the Egyptian wing, tucked in the shadow of a marble pillar, arms wrapped tightly around your knees. You hadn’t meant to stay this late. But the storm outside had turned violent- hail thrashed the windows and thunder cracked like cannon fire. Somewhere deep in your chest, old panic stirred.

And you couldn’t go home. Not yet.

Ahkmenrah found you there, shivering- not from the cold, but something older. Something worse.

His expression softened when he saw you. “Y/n?”

You blinked up at him, tears stinging the corners of your eyes. “I’m fine,” you lied quickly, like a reflex.

Ahkmenrah’s brows drew together. He knelt in front of you, his hands gentle but firm as he reached for yours. “Please,” he said, voice low. “Do not lie to me. Not with eyes that haunted.”

You didn’t mean to fall apart. Not really. But there was something about him- his calm, his warmth, the way he always looked at you like you were someone worth saving- that cracked the dam wide open.

“It was just a memory,” you whispered, ashamed. “One I thought I buried.”

He didn’t ask for details. Not yet. Instead, he sat beside you, his shoulder brushing yours, the warmth of his skin grounding you in a way no one else ever had. “Memories buried alive,” he murmured, “have a way of clawing to the surface.”

You leaned into him then, and he wrapped his arm around you carefully, like you were made of glass. He smelled like sandalwood and something ancient- something holy. “They can’t hurt you here,” he said. “Not while I breathe.”

You looked up at him. “But you don’t. Breathe, I mean.”

He smiled faintly, brushing a thumb along your cheek. “Then let this heart beat for you instead.”

In that still moment- bathed in stormlight and silence- you let yourself believe it was true. That safety could be found in the arms of a boy who’d died thousands of years ago, but somehow made you feel more alive than anything else ever had.

____________________________________

The museum changed after that night.

Not in the way it looked, but in the way it felt.

You started staying late more often- not always out of fear, but because of the peace you found there. And because of him. Ahkmenrah was always waiting, always watching you with that unreadable expression that somehow said everything.

You talked for hours. About his past—his childhood under the sun-scorched sky of ancient Thebes, the loneliness of immortality, and the burden of being born into power. About your present- what haunted you, what kept you awake at night, the way some scars never really faded even if no one else could see them.

One evening, he brushed your hair behind your ear, and your breath caught at the softness of it. He didn’t pull away.

"You fear being touched," he said quietly, not as an accusation, but a truth laid bare between you.

You nodded. “Most people don’t… mean it. When they touch.”

"I always mean it," he whispered, as though making a vow.

The intimacy grew in silence, in the way he sat closer each night, shoulders brushing, fingers grazing yours. One night, you leaned your head against his chest and listened to nothing- but you felt the warmth of him, and it was enough.

"You smell like old paper and cinnamon," you murmured into the linen of his robes.

"And you my dear," he said, nose brushing your hair, "smell like rain just before it falls."

You didn't kiss him then, though the air pulsed with the want of it. You didn’t need to. His hand threaded through yours and stayed there until the morning light forced him back into stillness.

A week later, he pressed his forehead to yours, eyes closed like a prayer.

“If I could choose to be alive again, just once more,” he said softly, lips barely a breath from yours, “I’d choose it to be with you.”

Your hands curled in his robes, grounding yourself in his presence. “Even knowing it would end?”

He opened his eyes. “Especially knowing it would end.”

And that night, you kissed him-finally- slow and tentative, like something precious you weren’t sure you were allowed to have. His lips were warmer than you expected, reverent in the way they claimed yours, and he held you like the world had finally stopped spinning too fast.

____________________________________

The nights after blurred into stolen touches and whispered laughter. You fell asleep once on the stone bench in his wing, curled in his lap, and when you woke to find his arms still around you, tears pricked your eyes.

"You don't have to protect me, you know," you whispered, voice cracking.

"I don't have to," he agreed. "But I want to."

____________________________________

The museum was empty again. Larry had left early. You wandered, restless, until you found yourself- as always -drawn to the golden light of the Egyptian wing.

Ahkmenrah was already there, waiting as though he felt you coming.

You weren’t sure when the way he looked at you started to burn. But lately, every glance carried weight. And tonight, as your eyes met, something unspoken passed between you. Something heavier than silence.

“You were with him,” he said after a moment. Not accusing- just… quiet.

You tilted your head. “With who?”

“The guard. The new one. He speaks to you like he knows you well.”

You stepped closer. “He offered me coffee. I said no.”

Ahkmenrah’s jaw tensed, then relaxed. “You did not have to explain.”

“But I wanted to.”

There was something electric in the space between you now. Something aching to break.

“I don’t like the way he looks at you,” he admitted. “As though he’s entitled to your smile. As though he could ever understand what you’ve given me.”

You reached up, fingers brushing the edge of his collar. “He doesn’t know me. Not the way you do.”

That broke him. His hand cradled your cheek, and then he kissed you- slow at first, but filled with weeks of restraint unraveling. His lips were soft, reverent, almost trembling with the effort to hold back.

You didn’t want him to.

You tangled your fingers in his robes and pressed closer. His hands explored you with sacred patience- touching, not taking. Every brush of skin asked permission. Every kiss answered yes.

When he lifted you into his lap and wrapped you in his warmth, you melted against him. Your shirt slid from your shoulder, and his lips followed- down your collarbone, reverent, worshipful.

“You are not mine to claim beloved,” he murmured against your skin, “but I would give up eternity to be yours.”

“Then be mine,” you whispered. “Just for tonight.”

His eyes met yours- dark, golden, eternal. “Then I am yours.”

You made love in the quiet stillness of ancient stone. No rush. No demands. Just gentle, aching devotion.

He held you like a wish. You touched him like a secret. And when you both trembled in each other’s arms, there was no past or future. Only now.

Only this.

And when dawn threatened to steal him back, he buried his face in your hair and whispered:

“Even in stillness, I will remember the way you loved me.”

—————————————————————

The next night, Ahkmenrah didn’t meet you in the usual spot.

You wandered the museum in silence, growing more uneasy with each empty hallway. He was always there. Always waiting.

Until tonight.

You finally found him standing alone before an ancient mural- a faded depiction of Ra guiding the sun across the sky. He didn’t turn when you approached.

“I thought you’d gone,” you said softly.

“I did not trust myself to see you yet.”

That caught you off guard. “Why?”

He closed his eyes. “Because today I watched him touch your arm again. Laugh with you like he was already inside your story.”

You reached for him. He didn’t flinch, but he didn’t lean into it either.

“And I hated it,” he said- voice shaking, lower now. “Not with fire, but with fear. Fear that I am just a dream to you. Something you’ll wake from one day and forget.”

You pressed your forehead to his back, your voice trembling. “You’re the only thing that’s felt real to me in years, darling.”

Finally, he turned- slowly, reverently- and took your face in both hands.

“Then let me be real to you,” he whispered. “Let me show you that I am more than gold and silk and memory.”

And when he kissed you this time, it was deeper. Possessive. Not in a way that took, but in a way that held- like he was claiming space in you that no one else had ever been gentle enough to reach.

You barely made it to the shadows before his mouth found your neck, and your back met the cool stone wall of the temple. He kissed you like a man desperate to carve himself into your bones. His hands found your waist, your hips, your lower back- holding you like he was afraid you’d disappear.

“You are not his,” he said against your skin. “You are not anyone’s. But tonight… you are mine.”

Your fingers tugged at his robe, baring the warmth of his chest, the place where a heart should beat. “I’ve always been yours.”

He made love to you again there, slow but unrelenting- grounded not in lust, but need. He worshipped you like something sacred, whispered your name like a prayer, and touched you like a man asking the gods to spare him this one human joy.

And afterward, as he held you on the cold stone floor beneath carvings older than time, he spoke so softly you almost missed it.

“I was a pharaoh once. A god to my people. But only with you… have I known what it means to kneel.

____________________________________

It began with the Tablet.

Or rather, the moment it cracked.

No one saw it happen. One morning, the tablet in the Hall of Conquerors had simply split clean down the middle. Not shattered. Not broken in chaos. But parted- like something old and tired had finally exhaled.

And Ahkmenrah... bled.

A cut bloomed across his palm when he picked up the broken half, crimson bright and impossible.

He stared at it in disbelief. Breathless.

Because he was breathing.

The museum pulsed with strange energy that night- electric, frayed at the edges. The relics hummed with a thousand silenced voices, and all around you, magic seemed to wilt gently back into the earth.

And when you found him- Ahkmenrah was standing under the moonlight in the Temple of Ra, barefoot, eyes wide, chest rising and falling like a man discovering the ocean for the first time.

“I can feel my heart,” he whispered, tears in his voice. “It hurts.”

You stepped forward, shaking. “That’s what being alive feels like sometimes.”

He reached for your hand. This time, the warmth was real. No illusion. No borrowed magic.

Just skin.

And blood.

And love.

“I don’t know why,” he said, fingers trembling, “but the curse- it's gone. The gods… they gave me back my life.”

He pulled you close, hands cradling your cheeks, pressing his forehead to yours like he was anchoring himself there.

“I am mortal again. And I will die someday,” he whispered. “But for now… I get to live. With you.”

And this time, when he kissed you, there was no eternity hanging over it. Just time- ticking, sacred, fleeting. A kiss that tasted of rain and cinnamon and new beginnings.

____________________________________

Ahkmenrah moved in to your apartment three months later. The gold jewelry stayed, but the robes gave way to jeans and soft cotton shirts. He learned how to use a toaster with suspicious awe, but swore coffee was still inferior to Nile spice tea.

He got his own toothbrush. And took his first hot shower. He watched old movies with the reverence of a scholar, then sobbed through Wall-E like it was divine scripture.

You built a life together slowly- quietly. He took classes in ancient history under a fake name. You found a rhythm in shared grocery lists and tangled limbs under patchwork quilts.

Sometimes he woke up in tears, hands clutching at a life that was no longer endless.

And sometimes you’d touch his face in the dark and whisper, “I’m still here.”

He’d smile, broken and golden, and pull you to his chest where his heart beat- soft and real- against your ear.

You never stopped visiting the museum. Sometimes, the two of you would walk the halls at night with a flashlight, his fingers brushing ancient memories carved in stone. The world he left behind never left him. But it didn’t own him anymore.

One spring morning, years later, he knelt before you in a sunlit garden, hands shaking, and asked, “Will you be my queen in this life?”

And you whispered yes into his mouth like a promise made between stars.

____________________________________

Because sometimes… the gods do listen.

And sometimes… immortality isn't living forever.

It’s loving without fear.

Together, you learned to do both.

And this time-this-time—it was enough.

____________________________________

The morning light spilled across the kitchen like honey, slow and golden.

Ahkmenrah stood at the stove, barefoot, his hair tied back in a loose knot. He wore an old band tee that clung to his frame and a pair of sweatpants that should’ve been retired months ago. You leaned against the doorway and watched him- marveling, as you always did, at how someone once wrapped in divine silk now hummed off-key while flipping pancakes.

You snuck up behind him and wrapped your arms around his waist.

“You’re burning them again,” you murmured into his shoulder.

“I am not,” he said, but he flipped one over and winced. “That one was a sacrificial offering.”

You laughed and kissed the base of his neck. “The gods accept your tribute.”

He turned in your arms, still holding the spatula like a scepter. “And what of my queen? What does she demand in return for her endless patience?”

You raised an eyebrow. “Coffee. And a cupcake.”

He grinned, eyes crinkling. “Your wish is- finally-within the scope of my mortal capabilities.”

You kissed him, slow and familiar, your hands finding the soft cotton of his shirt and the steadiness of the heart beating beneath.

This was the future you never dared imagine back when he was gold and stone and sorrow.

A future where time ticked softly instead of looming.

Where he aged slowly, beautifully- lines beginning to frame the corners of his eyes, smile-worn and loved.

Where you fought over closet space and took Sunday walks and kissed each other through dishes and deadlines and doubts.

Where he got sick sometimes, and you made soup. Where he stayed up with you when your nightmares came back. Where you reached for each other in the dark, and found each other every time.

It was ordinary.

It was sacred.

And as he handed you a burnt pancake on a chipped plate, winking as though it were treasure, you thought:

This is eternity.

Not the kind carved in stone.

But the kind made of morning breath and mismatched mugs, of whispered I love yous and soft laughter across shared pillows.

And when he caught you staring at him like you were still a little in awe, he smiled and said:

“You always look at me like I’ve hung the stars.”

You tucked yourself against his chest and whispered, “That’s because you’re the only miracle I’ve ever believed in.”

#ahkmenrah #night at the museum #rami malek #rami malek x reader

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pseudowho · 4 months ago

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Hello Ms Haitch,

I’m 26 years old and have never been in a relationship before. I have been in love and have gone out with guys before, but they’ve never progressed into us dating and becoming official, most often resulting in me heartbroken and ending up in terrible situationships that cause more grief than anyone can imagine. I even completely stopped looking for love these past two years, to give me time to grow into myself and know who I am and what I want from life.

All my friends and everyone else in my life don’t seem to have a problem with finding love or commitment, and deep inside, it kills me to know that they have the companionship that I yearn for. And approaching my late 20s when almost all my close friends have plans of starting families with their partners, I just can’t help but feel disheartened at what feels like my fate to be the designated single friend who would eventually have to settle for a reality I don’t want. But more often than not, even when I am comfortable with my singlehood, my closest friends push me to find a man and that makes me feel even more hopeless (especially with news of engagement parties and potential wedding dates entering my planner). Often in my lowest moments, I wonder if it is my looks or my personality that just icks people off.

I have put myself out in the dating world and have done everything from going to different clubs and events to find people that share my interests, to being set up by my friends. Heck, I even moved across the country for my job and still have no luck with a new and different crowd.

Do you have any advice on how to cope with being the leftover friend, because frankly, I don’t have it in me to hear another “your person is out there waiting for you!” or “you just have to put yourself out there!”

Thank you,

Anon

Hi!

I'm only sorry to say that while I haven't been in your position, I ache to hear it, and I'm sorry you're suffering such loneliness, and fear of the future. One of my closest friends is 37, and has been through much the same as you for quite some years, and struggles with the same. I shall advise you as I advise her.

I think you need to view this through a practical lens, as well as an emotional one. You know how you feel about this emotionally, and have verbalised it well; you're worried about not having this theoretical life partner for you, but also worried about how you are being perceived. In this vein, you are already spiralling down writing yourself off as (amongst others): unattractive, in possession of a bad personality, and leftover.

So, let's look at the practicality: the hard honest truths, the catastrophism, and the futures unknown. You ultimately don't know if you will meet your person tomorrow, in a week, in a year, or ten, or never ever. You need to accept, as a truth, that you absolutely must know and like yourself whether you are going to meet your person, or not.

The truth? You cannot place all of your hopes of happiness on a potential future that you know nothing of whether it will happen or not. Or, you can, but risk misery in the unknown intervening years. Your boat is going through this sea, and you need to be the one true constant. If you are waiting for happiness, or belonging, to happen, based on a theoretical maybe person, there is a chance you will be unhappy your whole life.

I'm a real 'plan for the worst, so if that happens I am prepared, but if anything better happens, it's a bonus' kind of girl. If you do meet your person, do you want to meet them in this state where you dislike yourself? Do you want to meet someone who may not be right for you, but for whom you lower your standards because your greatest fear is of being 'left behind'? Or do you want to meet either of these people as someone who has embraced either path that their life may take?

This sounds like such a write off. It will always feel that way, because you're clawing for an answer that nobody can honestly give you. Most people give you those 'life laugh love' recycled phrases, because they're uncomfortable confronting the truth; that you're unhappy, and lonely, and struggling, and I'm sure at points envious, and they don't know how to help you with it.

So in truth: I cannot help you with this, and I know that. I can only try to help you build the infrastructure you need to help you to weather the storm. I wish I could crystal-ball this for you; I'm sure if you knew, hands down, what your future held, it would be easier to cope with whatever is to come.

I wish I could give you something more concrete.

Tl;dr: You are not leftover. You are not food to be consumed or wasted. Whatever path your future takes, you can seize control, and choose to approach it with your head held high, or with the belief that you are worth nothing.

Love,

-- Haitch xxx

#pseudowho #haitch #Agony Aunt Haitch

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ackerfics · 2 years ago

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family line — a house of the dragon fanfiction | aegon ii targaryen x oc — masterlist

AESIRA TARGARYEN is not her father’s daughter.

He may have played a part in how she wailed in her first duet but she doesn’t crave bloodlust the way he did when he slayed the masked monsters that terrorised minds and cut off men’s cocks for their crimes. She’s sure that when the gods flipped her father’s coin, it never landed, still flying in the air — he was both a slayer of men and a natural doer of sins and debauchery; a figure so loved and so stigmatised by those who weren’t likened to the deities of the Old and the New. She doesn’t have the urge to swipe the throne from underneath the court’s eyes, doesn’t have the urge to soil and taint the innocence of her younger nephews — straying them from their birthright. Though named after a fairy tale warrior children revered so much, she steers clear of anything that her father ever touched. The way of the sword and warfare circulates her twin brother’s blood. Being the best dragonrider is her little brother’s dream, never hers.

She is not her father’s daughter.

While the second prince who had nothing to inherit (but the cries of the people) wore their House with pride, she thought it was a burden to carry. She knows the gods knew on which side her coin landed but she tries hard enough to erase it. (Can she truly change her fate, though? When the whispers in between the red bricks haunt her so about how deep her parentage is?) Instead of wearing the blood red and the coal black of their colours, she chooses everything easy on the eyes; pastel demeanour and soft disposition — I am light and he is dark; I am separate from the blood running in my veins; I overcome him through thick and thin, as the novels and the sayings go — Light conquers Darkness whichever way you see it.

She is not her father’s daughter.

Why would she be if he abandoned her and her siblings as he married the next innocent thing? Why would she consider him as her father when her twin brother cried about him never loving their mother one night when they were five name days old? Why should she be his daughter when he couldn’t even look her in the eye when the day required the family to be together?

She will never be her father’s daughter.

But she is in every way her mother’s. The lies flowing from her mind are all inherited from how her beautiful, lovely, caring mother crafted them as the woman stroked her slender fingers through the waves of her hair, “He will come back to us, darling sweetling; He loves you both so much and this little one I’m carrying as well.” Because of her mother, she can lie to save millions.

However, the anger she holds for her father makes her burst all of the edges of her being. She wants to stab him with her brother’s sword, make him hurt like the way she has been hurt when he gave them his back. Scream at him until he becomes deaf with how loud her thoughts are. The more she thinks about what could have been, the more she can see the coin the gods flipped at her birth. The madness of loneliness is truly the most pitiful thing. She’s surrounded by people who claim to love her but she longs for the family in her distant nightmares — the one that lights up a hearth in the cold of the longest winters in the lands, sharing blankets on the carpeted floor; one that rings laughter and padding feet on stone floors and expansive windows; one that has a father and a mother to cherish. She wants to burn down everything with her dragon’s flames so that everyone can feel the heavy, suffocating grips preventing her heart from breathing. She wants to claw her eyes out after hearing the remark that she has that lilac shade everyone keeps saying a certain prince holds, just as she carries the last name he is so proud of.

We are not the same. We are not the same. We are not the same. We are not the same—

And as she stares into the looking glass, all she can see is her father’s face.

There’s nowhere to hide from the truth.

AESIRA TARGARYEN is truly her father’s daughter — a piece of greatness and madness meshed into one.

AEGON TARGARYEN, the second of his name, is not the prince that was promised.

The weight of being the unnamed heir is too much for even the Skybearer to handle. He doesn’t want the moulded circlet of heavy stones simply because he knows he is the living embodiment of a disappointment — to his father who wistfully stares at the only piece his first wife left behind, to his mother who he stole a girlhood from, to his grandfather who had dreams bred out of greed and thirst for power, to everyone who dares glance at the king’s firstborn son with irises lined with disbelief. He doesn’t have to hear their words to know what they were thinking. This poor boy with wine for his blood and daring exhibitions for a daily schedule … is the most awaited son of The Peaceful King? The blasphemy is horrendous.

He is not the prince that was promised.

Because of how his father doted on his older sister even when the woman gave birth to two bastards and is pregnant with probably another one, he’s not the heir — Seven Hells, he’s not even the spare. A large part of him is whispering that it’s better this way. More time to inebriate and find himself in the places that he felt most comfortable with, where adventures welcome his insatiable need to discover. The thing about never being the apple of his father’s eye is that he can be free or as free as Mother and Grandfather allow him to be. It means he can marry for love (prays to the gods that he does; he can only think of one person anyway), and have spontaneous trips to the streets of King’s Landing with his closest friend — it means breathing through the littlest areas of his life. Yet a smaller (most likely better) part of himself dyes the roots of his static silver hair into the most melancholic shade of blue at the fact that it’s easy for Father to be this neglectful of his other children that don’t bear the name of his greatest delight. Everything he did, it was for Father. All of it to feel the sliver of pride he reserved in a waterfall for the loved child.

He is not the prince that was promised.

It’s seen in the way Mother looks at him. He’s convinced she doesn’t love him. Mothers are supposed to love their children, people say; but not when you’re the reason why she has to accept the heaviness of reality. Her anger manifested the more he grew up. A single misstep is all it took for her to shout his name. All of the things he did (he tried learning a different language in the dead of the night, read the books recommended to him by the Septa, practised the sword until he perfected the right grip, tasted dirt in his mouth with how much he stumbled) but it will never be enough like his entire existence isn’t enough for her. And despite wishing she could love him more, he strayed even further to not feel the harsh sting of her rings, which resulted in Mother taking back the smallest amount of love she has for him.

He will never be the prince that was promised.

The first sip of alcohol, when he was a babe, cemented his dependency on his eleventh name day. The numbness, carefreeness, and the occurrence of fading into black that it brings is absolutely freeing. He’s the god of intoxication and the patron of exhilaration. Nobody can touch him.

Except for one.

His personal Maiden, the girl who sauntered in the Red Keep clutching her baby brother close to her chest, the beauty every beholder says is the image of salvation, the hands that he doesn’t mind cupping his face — the remembered princess of the realm. She is in every gasp of air he intakes; in the corners of the halls; in the whispers at the back of his head, urging him to look at her from the corner of his eyes as if she’s the secret the castle never tells; in the thoughts plaguing him; and in the dreams that paint different kinds of smiles on his lips. She always smells like the lemon candies her brother munches on, the pastels she wears are ingrained in his core memory; the books her hands have touched are extraordinary; the scrunch on her face, when she finds something borderline revolting in her walks across the castle, is beyond adorable; and the way her face lights up as she picks the next ugly insect that she will give to his own sister stuns him in place. Fuck him to the Sevel Hells and back, he’s consumed with her. It’s amazing how because of her, he is willing to change. Why consume all the cups in all the lands, when a single glance at her, he’s already under the influence of her existence? It’s a fact he only realised upon reaching a certain age.

One look at her and he sees himself being a better man and a better competitor for the throne.

She is a constant in his life.

AEGON TARGARYEN, the second of his name, is not the prince that was promised, oh, no.

But with his AESIRA by his side, it will be through his bloodline that this promised prince will breathe their first breath.

And with all this chaos, there is you.

contents:

act zero: the prince and the siren

act one, chapter one: aesira and aether, aether and aesira

act one, chapter two: the red-bricked road

act one, chapter three: little boy gone

act one, chapter four: first, a dead wife; second, a dead mother

act one, chapter five: the birth of the golden

act one, chapter six: the queen of love and beauty

act one, chapter seven: ravens caw, dropping strings on smooth palms

act one, chapter eight: matters of the heart

act two, chapter one: the story has yet to be written ...

an aegon x oc story bc my love for what could have beens overpowered my need to enjoy my vacation <33

reply or send an ask if you want to be added to the taglist !! mwa

#— rory's passages 🌼#hotd #house of the dragon #hotd x oc #hotd x reader #aegon x oc #aegon ii x oc #aegon targaryen x oc #aegon ii targaryen x oc #aegon x reader #aegon ii targaryen #aegon targaryen

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kyndavibin07 · 30 days ago

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disclaimer:

this post is laced with agony and despair and is basically a massive ventpost dont read it if you dont want to read about someone being lame on the internet

i dont think there are any tws unless you count just like. the never-ending feeling of loneliness

genuinely i think just once i would love to know what it feels like to be wanted in a space. I wish i had people who missed me when i was gone. everyone i have ever cared about has left me (and yes im being that person. sorry.) and i can’t discern why. I Know that it is my fault. I Know that if everyone around me leaves the common factor is me. But i cannot find what i am doing that makes them leave. I havent watched the pattern for long enough and nobody will tell me no matter how much i cry and scream and beg. I have never ever in my life had a group of friends for longer than a year or two because they all fuckjng leave and when i was a kid it was because i was stupid and made shitty choices. People just leave but even people who barely know me seem to just have no interest in talking to me and i desperately want to know what it is that makes me so fundamentally dislikeable that i just. Nobody in the world would look for me in a room full of people. Nobody misses me when i am not somewhere. I haven’t been to or held a birthday party for years because i don’t ever get invited. I’m going to go through highschool having never once been invited to a party. I’m going to go through highschool having never once fucking dated anyone. And it sucks!!! Some part of the problem is likely tied to the fact that im autistic but i refuse to push all of the blame on that because theres no way its the only reason. Some part of it has to be something fucking wrong with me and how i interact with others but i try so so hard to be kind and understanding and i let people hurt me long before i ever let them leave. Everything i ever let go of has claw marks lacerating so deep they scar. and i just. i just want it to feel like people want me around for a little while

#hi #sorry tumblr i know this is dumb as shit #but i have nowhere and nobody to tell anything like this #so i just #wanted it to go somewhere #doubt anyone will see it anyways its fine #the feeling of loneliness will never leave 🥳🥳🥳🥳

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nesquik-gone-too-quick · 3 months ago

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‼️⚠️Triggger warning ⚠️ ‼️

Physical, mental and emotional abuse mentioned, proceeded with caution.

My mother, Their daughter

Verse 1

Growing up I always felt lonely, You and dad would come home exhausted.

Your bodies heavy from a long days work, you’d attempt to muster up the energy to play with me then but it always ended the same.

Alone in a tiny apartment bedroom, my toys scattered about as I muffled my sobs of loneliness.

Too young to understand why I was always left alone and excluded, but it was never long before I had to wipe my tears and smile.

After all crying was weakness and there’s not many places to hide in a tiny apartment bedroom shared by four people.

Verse 2

As I got older the world and my family made me colder, where was the warmth and love I had been told about in the fairytales?

A father who grew with strict and distant parents, and a mother who grew up beaten black and blue by her father.

Her own mother too afraid even when not a single hair was plucked from her head once, stood back and threw her own flesh and blood to the wolves.

Around that time you began to miss those exact people who hurt you so, so much you packed a bag and left in the night while your babies slept.

Only to stop after driving for hours and turning back, and while you were there physically I never knew that you never returned emotionally.

Not until it was too late.

Verse 3

When I was yet again older now in high school the secrets began to truly unravel before me and reveal the truth.

I learned of that night you left us, learned the stories of what your father had done to you as a child.

The words spilling from your lips like molten lava as a rage filled me, an inferno lighting inside of me.

The anger deep inside, the one you held towards them now passed down to your children.

How you were forced to raise your own siblings, forced to care for your mother and father as a child.

Both so unfit and not ready for children of their own, your childhood stripped from you as you endured beating after beating.

Skin so black and blue that there wasn’t enough makeup in the world to cover up.

Verse 4

I felt pity for you then and an undying rage for the people I’m forced to call my blood and flesh, now as an adult I’m simply tired and angry.

My anger remains for them, a constant daily battle with myself to not let the flaming beast out. To not let it rip into them and burn everything in its path.

To close the voices out when they whisper in my ear to give in and open the door for them, all while my mind races and the flames claw at me from the inside.

Yet even as I chain the beast down why do you gaze at me so? Why do look at me with so much anger when the anger I feel towards them is your own.

Where has my caring mother gone? The one who’d always fret over me when I was sick or hurt, the closest I’d ever gotten to feeling your warmth.

Where is the woman who always made sure I was safe if left alone? So tell me, whose daughter is it that now stands before me with such eyes?

Whose daughter is it that turns a blind eye to all the unjustness being directed at me by her unfit parents. Whose daughter is it that would allow me to die to save her abusers.

Who are you? You are not my mother, you are simply a daughter so twisted and lost that I don’t exist to you at all.

Even when I stand before you screaming and crying for my mother, she refuses to appear. Walking past me you embrace those monsters while sacrificing every bit of yourself to serve them.

I am tired of screaming and crying at someone else’s daughter, when all I wanted was my mother.

#generational trauma #poetry #my poem #tw abuse #original poem #sad poetry

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campbluelake · 2 years ago

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Then fight until you deserve to win.

Though Vual had grabbed Malyce by his very muscle fibers and puppeteered him, every nerve in his body was still his own. The kicks and swings and slices still made contact with him, and set his body on fire. This was Hell, and this was his penance. His mind writhed as he struggled to break free from his prison. Vual had his soul, and now he can never be free.

Was this the price of power? Of fame? Something so pathetic... All Malyce wanted, all Marion wanted, was someone to see him and truly understand him. He thought for a long time that fame was the answer to his loneliness. If millions of people adored him, then that means at least one person out there in the sea of souls loved him. Truly loved him.

But fame wasn't love. It wasn't even close. He never felt so happy he could run laps around a camp because of fans. He never cried because seeing fans fall in love and find happiness. Adoring viewers never warmed his heart and made him feel like he was home. That was love, and even if he never sees them again, Marion Faustino loved the counselors of Camp Blue Lake. Each and every one of them.

[♫♫♫]

With every attack to his body, Malyce's soul grew stronger. The twitch of a fingertip was the start, but then he could feel his body react to his own mind. His own thoughts became his own actions, and eventually, his voice became his own again.

"We're fucking done here, you conniving, cruel, manipulative, and shallow son of a BITCH!"

Malyce cries out, reaching clawed hands into his inky black face. He grabs hold of something, and begins to wrestle it from him.

"I love everyone here, including Abbie! Fucking sue me!"

Vual grunts in frustration at the rebellion, sending jabbing pain all throughout his body. Not only physical, but psychological. Years of rejection, pain, abuse, and neglect all relive themselves in the matter of seconds as Malyce screams in pain.

"My body is not yours to control! My soul is not yours to own! No one here is ever going with you! When I leave this place..."

The world seemed to distort around Malyce as his fingers dig deep into his own face, improbably so. He finds the one he once called master. The Duke that called him a genius, and a prodigy. For a long time, Vual was one of the few who made Malyce feel like his hard work paid off. Now he realizes it was all a Demon's trick. But Malyce won't be so easily tricked anymore. A gloved hand leaves Malyce's body, pulling the black ink with it.

"... I'm taking everyone with me!"

Malyce slams down the figure to the ground, howling in pain from severing his entire being from the demon. The ink begins to melt away as the true form takes shape.

"And that includes Abbie, you fuck!"

The demon duke stands from where he had been ejected, and you’re able to see your true enemy for the first time. A great, towering figure with the body of a man but the head of a camel stands before you all as he brushes the dirt off of his suit. His expression is that of immense displeasure, and a sneer grows on his face. If you didn’t know better, you would even say that there might be…fear?

“Traitorous thing! I give you all you have ever longed for, and you treat me this way!? You would leave Abigail for the likes of these humans?!”

A scoff.

“Very well, then, slithering, treacherous thing. You shall meet your end in the same manner that the other ilk will.”

The man(?) turns to face you all, fury etched cleanly on his face. Like a loyal dog, Eve rushes to his side, crouching down low and baring her teeth as her wings flare out behind her. His hand raises and points towards you, counselors. Though you have fought hard, it appears this may be the end.

“Now, submit to the flames--”

#ch6 #trial #malyce

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starliitstories · 2 years ago

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nightshaderps:

Xion gave an small laughter at his response. It seemed like they were now hanging out together for more than just a moment. It wasn’t something Xion would have anticipated, but she was glad. She enjoyed having company and tried to interact with someone on almost daily basis. She had gained so much from hanging out with Roxas and Axel when they were part of the organization. Xion had changed from a blank canvas, a puppet, to her own person. Her friendship with those two was everything. And those days had instilled her an need to be part of something, that she wasn’t an outsider. She wanted to keep on cherishing the bonds she had created, but also create new ones. People always said worlds were filled with ugly people, but she would never forget that there were many good people too and she would be excited to meet them. She inserted a coin inside and looked at him as he talked once again with such friendliness. “I could have an slushie. It’s a deal”, she nodded with appreciative smile as she grabbed the deep blue gun. Two options appeared to the screen: One player or two player. Xion pointed her gun at the second option and pressed trigger, starting the game for two. After that targets started to appear as cartoony men with guns. Xion wondered how this game would go. Aiming would be easier than controlling a character for sure, but would she be fast enough? “Since we’re now a team - ” Xion started with pleased smile on her lips as she did her best to get their opponents. “ - it’s only natural to know each other’s names. Mine is Xion.”

Devon could help but smile at her. It was just genuinely fun to hang around her. Their height difference just made it even funnier and Devon found it amusing to lead her by shoulders. It was easy for him to feel comfortable around her. New friends had been hard to find since his release day from a prison. Almost everyone of his old friends preferred staying away from him. It was fine by him. If they couldn’t handle his past, it was better this way. Andy had moved to the Spiral Universe because of Amethyst and Devon was just happy for them. He was still able to spent a lot of time with his former cellmate. But Devon also wanted to give him enough time and space to focus on their relationship with Amethyst. So Devon had been just wandering around, trying to kill some time alone too. Because of a loneliness which has been lingering around him, meeting this black haired woman felt even better. “Nice to team up with you, Xion.” He said back, flashing a friendly smile at her. “I’m Devon.” A man nodded at her before shooting an enemy right in front of him. Honestly, he didn’t care how good they were in this game. Devon would still buy her a slushie. “We should do this more often. Play games and spend my money on claw machines. I bet your dolphin gets lonely at some point.” He chuckled with a boy-ish grin on his lips while focusing on shooting as much as possible.

#nightshaderps #rp [ devon everson ]#threads

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its-deputy-caleb · 4 years ago

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Karl Heisenberg HC’s

okay so i’m actually in love with this man and i couldn’t help but write some soft generic HC’s for him! this is really rushed and unedited but i hope it’s good anyway!! it’s unedited like always and is pretty gender neutral so that everyone can enjoy!

—————————————————

Karl Heisenberg has always had difficulty in letting his walls down. He’s got this metal wall around him, and it’s not just the gates outside his factory. This poor man has been lonely for some time now, sealing his heart away behind a metal wall.

He’s always found it difficult to talk to people, always trying to act confident and like a know-it-all but deep down he’s missed having someone who he can really be comfortable with.

That’s when he found you one day by the gates of Castle Dimitrescu bleeding and barely clinging to life. You had deep gashes along your abdomen, a tell tale sign that you had escaped from the wrath of his sister.

At first Karl had no idea how to interact with you. After he took care of your wounds and did his best to patch you up and wipe the blood from your face, he looked down at your sleeping form dumbfounded.

He couldn’t deny that he thought you were beautiful even with the bruise on your temple and the slight cut to your lip so to distract his shaking hands he gently wrapped a blanket over your shoulders and hoped you’d be okay.

It was awkward at first, Karl spent most of his time tinkering away in his factory working on projects, doing his best to perfect his machines for his army but he found himself slowly wanting to spend more time with you. He began to leave his workshop more and more to see you and he would be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy it.

One night when you weren’t in his quarters his heart broke. The small living room was empty from where you usually sat on the couch reading. The room was dark without you in it, the air in the room thick without your sweet laughter and smile to keep it light and Karl realised just how much he wanted you to stay...

However, when you walked through the door holding a bag of fine meats and fruits from a trip to the Duke, all walls Karl hoped in keeping up came crumbling down.

He instantly rushed into your arms, his slightly taller frame knocking the bag from your hand as he clung to you for dear life, hiding in your shoulder.

A stray sob fell from his lips as he felt your arms wrap around him, for the first time since childhood Karl didn’t feel like the world had abandoned him. Your fingers moved through his hair in soothing motions as you held him. The food completely forgotten.

“Don’t leave, please... I don’t want you to go”

You two spend a lot of time together after that. Each night you’d stay up late chatting about all sorts of things that interested you both. Some nights you would tell Karl all about your life before you were captured by his sister and your favourite things to do around the village.

Other nights Karl would tell you all about his latest projects and experiments which ended up with you falling asleep when the sun was coming up, your face tucked under his chin as you fell asleep cuddling together.

Eventually he’d open up to you about some of the darker things that trouble him like his past and his big plan to betray Mother Miranda but you wipe away any stray tears and kiss him gently, promising to remain by his side until the very end.

That’s when he felt it, the feeling of comfort and home, he couldn’t help but kiss you again, needing that constant touch of yours that makes his heart melt and heat rush to his cheeks.

He practically melts into you, treating you so gently with lingering kisses and tender hands along you face and in your hair. He’s gonna worship every part of you because he’s so happy that you want him back and he wants to cherish that forever.

Of course, he’s absolutely shit scared to lose you as well so he’s extremely over protective of you. Half of it is that he doesn’t want any of his family near you because he knows the minute Miranda or Alcina hears about you they’re stop at nothing to take you away, but the other half is that he doesn’t want you to leave. He doesn’t want the loneliness to come crawling back and he’d never forgive himself if something happened to you.

He’s very clingy in that he always wants physical contact because he’s touch starved. He’s constantly going to want to hold hands or cuddle up to you or even just have an arm wrapped around you when you go for walks because he craves your affection.

Karl is extremely creative and finds working with metal extremely calming and almost therapeutic so he’s going to be bringing you all the gifts he can craft.

At night when you both lie in bed together, he’ll take the opportunity to worship everything about you. Kissing all over your body, leaving light bites and marks that make you shiver. He’ll whisper in your ear how much he loves you, how beautiful he thinks you are and how he is the luckiest man alive to have you in his life.

“Fuck... you’re so beautiful- I love you...”

He’ll kiss along the scars on your stomach, left there by his sister’s long claws, vowing that no one will ever hurt you like that again. He’s promised himself that he’ll protect you, making a mental note to get revenge on his sister for ever hurting the only person he could ever love.

#karl heisenberg #karl heisenberg x reader #resident evil 8 #resident evil village #RE8 #alcina dimitrescu #gn!reader #resident evil headcanons #i love him 🥺🥺#donna beneviento #salvatore moreau

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mcdonaldsnumberone · 3 years ago

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insanity

finally read mhyk anni 2 story and it destroyed me so bad i had to write for sanbaka

spoilers for mhyk anni 2 story

Mithra, at his core, is a man of ambition. The difference between wanting to be strong and wanting to be the strongest is a different of only three letters and an infinity of agony and bloodlust. You would never imagine that a man as undetermined and selfish as him would be the face of compassion—let alone empathy. He doesn’t try to be kind or particularly understanding towards anyone, but seeing his drenched and half-dead body trekking across the sand makes you realize that even the strongest are not invincible.

It’s easy for him to wave you off and scoff in your face, muttering under his breath that he’ll destroy you next if you don’t let him brood by himself. He’s reminds you of one of the old-fashioned punching dolls: down on minute, and up the next to destroy Oz. But you still take the leap of faith as you’ve always have with him, and when you reach out to touch the wounds crisscrossing his body, all Mithra does is wince slightly in pain but doesn’t push you away.

If you were any more selfish yourself, you would use whatever humanly power you have to wrench a promise out of him to never fight Oz again. But that’s a death wish, both literally and spiritually, and when you see that undying venom flickering behind his deceptively listless eyes, you come face-to-face with that roaring loneliness deep inside of him. Maybe the reason he faces Oz with such vitriol day after day is to simply feel something again. Setting himself ablaze with rage is better than fading away into nothingness.

And that seems to be the Northern mantra Mithra has carved deeply into his heart. When you pad at his chest with a warm washcloth and he complains about the sting, you wonder if he can feel the warmth and sadness that wells up inside your own chest. He surely must be able to, if he lets you tend to his wounds to this extent. You can’t replace the hatred in his heart with just love, but slowly, you want to show the terrified little boy who knew only the lake that there’s a world out there where people love him and can teach him something greater than the despairing apathy that threatens to swallow him whole.

But for tonight, you let the wave pass. There’s no use scolding the past, and his assertion over Oz’s power is his own coping mechanism. You can’t turn back the clock, but you can change the way it moves forward. Utopia may be a hopeless dream, but teaching Mithra the same courage and kindness that drew him initially from the Lake of Death is something within your power. And you’re sure, by revealing your heart to him until your time in this odd world runs out, that Mithra will one day develop his own immunity to the tragedy that gnawed away far too long at his naïve and ailing heart.

“...I’m tired. Hurry up, and hold my hand. I’m going to sleep, and when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll find a way to destroy Oz.”

Owen bleeds not from his heart, but from his eyes. There’s an irony to that: seeing him clawing at his own face while he waits for his own healing magic to kick in. It feels like you’re watching a wounded animal crying for the end rather than a powerful wizard piecing himself back together, and you finally understand what Cain means when he says he feels no malicious intent towards the venomous wizard. Owen’s world is both truth and deception—Fate has designated him to be their Schrödinger’s cat. Neither knowing or unknowing, it’s only through stolen glimpses that he can find himself.

You can barely register the curses he spits at you when you step closer, tipping his hat up so you can assess the damage. The magic is working fast, and soon enough, he sits before you with his hands threatening to crack your life open and letting it waste out. But he stops when you reach out to brush your thumbs over the freshly healed skin of his eyelids. He stares at you, his expression that of pure shock rather than the usual frustration and coy manipulation he tosses down at your feet.

You wonder what kind of mysteries his eyes must hold. With no recollection of who he is, he’s forced to witness the world not through his eyes but the eyes of what everyone says he is. Even his biological eyes aren’t his, he quite literally views the universe through the lenses of another wizard. Owen is an amalgamation of countless other wizards and their conflicting emotions building up inside of him, and he brands them inside of him as if they were truth.

You don’t know what to tell him. Doing anything to help him find himself would be to force your own perception of who he is onto him. It’s a journey he has to take alone, to grapple with the snippets of his past, to decide how he’s going to live from now on. All you can do is pray that no matter what face he decides he’s going to keep, whatever life he’ll come back to after refusing to die again and again, that he’ll remember the way you’ll keep your arms open for him time after time. Even if he might steal your eyes away and drain your life right from your body, you want him to know that the confusion he faces is one that you’re privy too as well.

You two look like a scene straight from the climax of a painting, cradling each other while worlds apart. Wallowing in your own respective miseries and crises, you swaddle him in your embrace while sitting in a pool of his blood. It stains you, much like how he’s tried to stain you with his fear and power multiple times, and you welcome it with an open heart and what you hope is an open mind. Your time with him is short, but maybe through a miracle and many wishes on your part, one day, Owen will come to see the world not with the metaphorical eyes of others, but with eyes of his own.

“You’re pitying me. I hate pity the most. Be good and run away when I tell you, or I’ll pluck your arms and turn them into decorations for my walls.”

It feels foreign to see Bradley as anything other than a wizard, but watching him scarf down Nero’s cooking while he’s been battered to Hell and back makes him seem more like a being of flesh and blood like you than that of magical mysticism and moonlight. Your heart pangs with a desire to make sure he knows he’s loved, and when he trudges to his room to be alone, your feet find themselves following him all the way to his door. He looks up at you, a new array of scars adorning his body, but he doesn’t tell you to leave.

Bradley’s intelligent, and that’s most likely why he’s the hardest out of the Sanbaka trio to fully understand. He predicts the edge to your empathy faster than you can even recognize it yourself, and he licks his lips as if he wants another plate of dinner. He looks nothing like the sniper that was pointing his gun at the crown prince of Central Country mere moments ago, and the empty sigh that falls from his lips is proof of the betrayal and the growing emptiness that claws inside of him.

He’s no fool, and he yearns for that community again. Someone to hold him and love him unconditionally, someone to hold him up by his feet during his times of need, someone who’ll laugh next to him and share a beer after a long day. The many souls that must have fluttered past him far outnumber your own understanding, yet the only one that stands before him in this moment is you. A plain nobody that doesn’t even come from this world, you’re the only one that extends your heart towards the bandit boss.

It isn’t physical healing that Bradley needs then. It’s closure—closure for his own abandoned emotions, closure for the past that’s being revived right before his eyes, closure for the future that everyone else is squandering before the moon tears the world to shreds. It’s unreasonable to demand that closure from you, a bystander with a side act in his own dramatic play, but when you take him in your arms and cry for him as if you were the one that had been betrayed and run over, he selfishly wants to be unreasonable.

Bradley doesn’t forget. He’s sure that once you’re long gone, be it safely in your world or god forbid by some wicked mechanism of this one, he’ll sweetly keep your memory in the scars on his body. But for right now, the memory he wants to keep is the warmth of your arms around his rough skin and the tears that wet your cheeks and fall onto his face like rain to prove to him that out of the infinite questions he won’t find answers to, he’ll find the answer to at least one through you.

“What are you all blubbering for? If anyone saw you, they’d think you’re the one that took the ass-whooping instead! C’mon, quit it. You’re worse than Mitile, I swear!”

#mahoutsukai no yakusoku #mahoyaku #mhyk #mithra #owen #bradley bain #x reader #my writing

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zmwrites · 3 years ago

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#FridayKiss Tag Game III

I was tagged by @the-orangeauthor! Thank you!

Rules: post a smooch between your OCs for Friday. It can be as light as a peck or intense as a makeout. It can be romantic or platonic or familial. As long as a smooch takes place it’s free reign!

Going back to Remnants again! A total of 977 words.

I’ve skipped ahead to The Kiss, aka the first real kiss between Radka and Damir:

“I’m sorry, I know you don’t like being touched. I’ll try to make this quick,” she said, tilting his head so she had the best angle.

He hummed his understanding, watching her closely as she started her sutures. The cut was a little less than four centimetres long, so she figured six would do the trick if she placed them about seven millimetres apart.

She tied off the second stitch and paused to press a fresh cloth to the wound. Rinsing the cut had helped somewhat but it was still bleeding more than she liked. “Let me know if you start feeling uncomfortable or crowded; I can pause for a bit to give you some space.”

“You don’t make me uncomfortable,” he said, voice pitched even lower than usual.

Radka’s brows pulled together. “I thought you don’t like people touching you.”

“I don’t. You’re different.”

“Oh.” She studied him, gauging his willingness to elaborate. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I trust you.”

“Then I’d better stop letting you bleed out,” she replied.

He smiled and she removed the cloth to start her next suture. Even though she’d already known that he trusted her, the added information that her touch didn’t make him uncomfortable because of that trust still warmed her insides. It was an odd sort of accomplishment and one she was fiercely proud of. It probably wasn’t healthy to have formed such an intense attachment in such a short period of time, and probably spoke to the deep loneliness they both carried, but it was still comforting to know she wasn’t so broken as to be unable to form new connections. There was no reason to be afraid of it, not until she felt fate’s claws in her throat.

“Do you—” Damir stopped, frowning and fiddling with the cloth she’d handed him. “Do you regret what you did in the forest? Or in Brenik?”

“You mean the times I’ve saved your life?”

He hummed an affirmative.

Her smart retort died on her lips as she took in his dark, pensive expression. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Would you have preferred it if I’d left you to die?” she asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

There was a pause. “No.”

“That wasn’t very convincing,” she replied with a frown of her own as she tied off her last suture. She stepped away from him, immediately missing the warmth that radiated off of him, and packed up her medical kit. He didn’t respond, didn’t move, and when she looked back at him, he was staring at his hands. She sighed and sat next to him on the edge of the tub, fixing a stray hair above his ear. “No, I don’t regret what I did.”

“You could be in Brenik still, or building a life for yourself in Yetrar.”

“Or I could have frozen to death in the woods or been hanged by the Liberty Conclave,” she countered. “There’s no use wondering about what could have happened, or where we could have been. We’re here now. We’ve got to do the best we can with our current situation.”

He still looked doubtful, and had yet to look up from the bloody towel he was fidgeting with.

She reached over and laid a hand on his. “If I regretted either of those choices, I wouldn’t still be here.”

Finally, he raised his gaze to hers. His beautiful brown eyes were focused on her, intent yet soft in a way that took her breath away. They were too close again, shoulder to shoulder, pressed together for no reason other than that they wanted to be. Damir turned his hand so their palms were touching, his fingers tracing the inside of her wrist. The now-familiar tenderness bloomed in her lungs as a shiver ran down her spine.

Gods she wanted this. Wanted him. Not just physically, though her entire body thrummed with an electrifying hunger, but in every way possible. She wanted to know every corner of his mind, every centimetre of his soul. She wanted to know every part of his past and to be by his side wherever the future took him.

Her breath caught in her throat. This isn’t allowed, a tiny voice whispered, but then he wavered closer and she couldn’t find it in herself to care. His forehead pressed against hers and she had to shut her eyes. Their noses bumped together, his light exhalations whispering across her cheek and down her neck. They were close, so close, all it would take was—

She tipped her face into his, brushing her lips to his as softly as she could. Softly enough that she could tell herself it was an accident.

Whatever was left to hold them apart crumbled. Damir cupped her face with one hand, pressing even closer, yet being so achingly gentle with her as though she would break. She pushed back and tangled their fingers together, bunching her other hand in the front of his shirt for leverage. He smiled against her mouth.

She thought her heart was going to burst with how full it was. Everything felt so right—from the warmth of his palm against hers, to the soft press of his lips, to his calloused fingers on her jaw. Like she’d finally found what she’d spent so long searching for. She’d forgotten what it was like to be so full of love and joy that nothing else in the world mattered.

A frigid knife of terror slid between her ribs. The words that had haunted her since she’d been twelve years old echoed sorrowfully in her mind. [Redacted.]

Radka slipped, almost pitching off the edge of the tub, and Damir pulled away enough to steady her.

“Radka?” His brow furrowed with concern.

Love. How had this happened? Guilt, rotten and cloying, spilled through her veins as the truth overwhelmed her.

I love these two so much and I hope you enjoy the long lead up to a relatively short kiss.

I tag @drabbleitout, @josephinegerardywriter, @starry-sky-stuff, and anyone else who wants to play! As always, no pressure!

#tag games #remnants #remnants excerpt

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asweetprologue · 4 years ago

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this is for @pencilscratchins who has been plaguing my dash with TFA era dinluke concepts. I did not think my first star wars fic would be about rey and luke but here we are! based on this post and more specifically a scene in rebecca’s google doc lmao

a·wak·en to rouse (a feeling)

Rey finds him at the edge of the city, where the rough geometry of the buildings crack and fragment apart as they give way to dust. It’s one of the areas she’s avoided most intensely; the dense fog of loss lingers here, clawing for her attention. The more she opens herself up to the Force lately, the more she feels the echoes of the life it touched before. The land remembers, and the bones beneath them speak to her in sharp little bursts of time lost.

Beyond, the desert stretches out in its infinite, unforgiving ambivalence. Where the city is a roiling mass of lives long since passed, the ocean of sand before them is a void. No suffering, no pain, no agonized voices crying out. No joy, no love clinging to the rocky surface. There is Force there too, she knows, permeating the stone and air and even the smallest insects scuttling below the surface. No more or less pure than that found in the city, but quieter. She takes a moment to breathe it in, tasting it on the backs of her teeth.

He isn’t meditating. She can feel his disconnect from the Force like a wound, jaring and discordant. But here at the edge of what has become her home, the home he scraped together with the Mand’alor for a dying people, it doesn’t feel so abrasive. Rey hovers for a moment, unsure, before taking a seat beside him. When Luke says nothing, she tries to drop into meditation herself, but as always her mind fights her. She wonders what happened to cause such a great disruption in Luke’s psyche. Such resistance to opening himself to the Force. She thinks about trying to cut herself off from it, now that she has felt its presence in and around herself, and balks. It would be easier to cut off her own hand, she thinks.

She shifts slightly, looking for a more comfortable position, and Luke huffs. It’s an amused sound, and Rey’s eyes blink open to regard him curiously. Luke is looking at her, something bittersweet on his face. “What?” she demands.

“If you’re trying to meditate,” he replies, “you’re not doing a very good job of it. I can feel your mind going a parsec a minute.”

“Well I’ve not exactly had the best instruction,” she grumbles, relaxing from her more formal meditative stance.

Luke’s beard twitches, and though he’s smiling, she can sense his wariness in the air around them. No one hides in the Force. “What makes you think you’re ready?” he asks.

It’s a question that she’s been expecting, that she’s spent hours building arguments around. I’m strong, she had planned to say, or I can already do so much, or I have nothing. I have no one. Make me into something of use. But now looking into Luke Skywalker’s sad eyes, she only has one real answer. There is only one real thing that makes her feel like she must do this, one thing that makes her desperate for guidance. The truth that brought her here.

“There’s no one else,” she says, and for a moment the vast loneliness of the statement washes over her, smothering. It’s probably the most honest thing she’s said since her feet sunk into the sand of New Mandalore. “If it’s not me, there’s no one. So I’m ready. I have to be.”

Luke takes a breath, a glacial motion that seems to carry all the weight that she feels within it. He looks up at the sky above them, shoulders slumping. The moonlight reflects on the desert sand, turning it into a silver sea stretching out infinitely beyond them. The lights of the city are far behind them; the only creatures that keep them company here are the stars, and the ghosts.

“I can’t be a good teacher to you,” Luke says. His voice is clear and crisp; it offers no opportunity for rebuttal. “I failed before. I can’t be a father, or a mentor. I’m not even a Jedi anymore, not really. Maybe I never was.” He laughs, a harsh, cracked sound. “I barely knew my old masters. Most of the teachings of the Order are lost. I tried to rebuild it, and I just forced history to repeat itself.” He drops his chin down, meeting her gaze again. His eyes are very blue, she realizes, maybe for the first time. They’re younger than the rest of his face. The Force suddenly brushes against her consciousness, offering her a fizzling image of a young man with windswept blonde hair, in a desert so similar and yet so different from this one. The man is bright and shining, desperate for adventure, ready to be someone. So deeply, terrifically afraid of the burden the galaxy had placed on his shoulders. The image fades, Luke’s face aging before her, but his eyes are the same. Still bright, still scared.

Rey understands.

“You don’t need to be anything to me,” she says. This does not ring with the truth that she offered moments ago. “I haven’t had anyone, ever. I’ve been alone all my life. I can be what they need without you.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. Steadies herself, forces her rapid heart rate to settle, lets her emotions leak out into the Force until it washes back into her with all the calm of the wide open desert. “I don’t need you, Luke Skywalker. But your help would sure make my life kriffing easier.”

Luke laughs again, and this time it doesn’t seem so bitter. He shakes his head, gray hair flopping across his forehead. “Well, Din will be pleased,” he says lightly, and Rey feels a sense of relief wash through her that’s so powerful for a moment she can’t breathe with it. He’s going to do it. She’s got a teacher. She laughs too, feeling bright and shining and afraid.

They sit together at the edge of the world together, and in the face of the endless desert she finally feels something like hope

#rebecca pencilscratchins i hope ur happy #look at what you made me do #THIS close to writing a fucking 60k TFA au smh #i have a life you know #i promise i'll have some dinluke stuff soon that's like... actual dinluke lmafo #dinluke #VAGUELY but they're married here #rey #luke skywalker #star wars #sw #my work #fanfic #fic #>5k #@pencilscratchins

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snackhobi · 5 years ago

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pairing: jungkook x reader / word count: 7.4k / genre: pacific rim au with brief smut (NSFW, 18+)

summary: there are no secrets in the drift. if jungkook were to see the mess inside your head and heart, laid utterly bare, he’d turn away from you.

warnings: sexually explicit content (briefly), unprotected sex (please be safe when you have sex) / reference to injuries but nothing graphic, giant robots powered by love punching big alien monsters

a/n: this is a birthday gift for the amazing @yeojaa. happy birthday, erin. this is completely self serving and is stuffed full with inside references that I hope you’ll enjoy. I wrote this in two days and it kicked my ass because I did so much reading and researching that turned out to not even come up in the story 👁👄👁 you know when I said I was studying? I lied. I was writing HAHAHAH ily I hope you like it hhhh (this is unbeta’ed so please forgive any mistakes it’s 1:30am as I’m scheduling this) (also summaries are so hard, I’m sorry)

Jeon Jungkook really is the perfect posterboy for a Jaeger pilot.

Broad across the shoulders and trim at the waist, all sharp punches and hard muscle, resilient and tough, with a face that’s the perfect balance of angles and softness; the cut of his jaw easing up and into his pretty mouth, the line of his brows subdued by his warm eyes—he’s a Goddamn vision, raw masculinity overlaid on rich veins of boyishness, glittering stratum that sparkle and shine even under the harsh lights of the Shatterdome.

He pouts when he thinks and his hair hangs a little in his big, big eyes and he has dimples that appear when he grins, teeth poking out onto his pretty pink lips, like someone took a rabbit and turned it into a man and packed on pounds of muscle alongside. Undeniably powerful and strong, but youthful and sweet, too.

Alongside Kim Taehyung—arresting and beautiful and somehow affable and approachable, all at the same time—they’re exactly what South Korea needs right now, propelling the country’s new look for their renewed assault against the kaiju. They’re the lucky new Rangers who’ve claimed ownership of the only Mark-5 that their homeland has produced, Bulletproof Striker, a fucking gorgeous Jaeger bristling with the latest and greatest technology that the world has produced.

But that doesn’t mean they’re the best that South Korea has to offer.

Cypher Zero is smaller, lighter, older, but she’s fierce. Just like her pilots. You and Yoongi might not be the burning beacons of hope that Jungkook and Taehyung are, polished and buffed to a squeaky shine, but you don’t need to be. You’re vicious and victorious and show no signs of stopping. The kaiju kills painted on your Mark-4’s shoulder are evidence enough of that, notches for each monster taken down, spray painted in one tiny corner of the huge swathe of burnished metal plating, the red edges of her midnight skin.

Bulletproof Striker is almost untouched, deployed just once since her recent launch, flawless exterior so at odds with Cypher Zero’s battered facade. Cypher’s beautiful, of course, but bears the history of your skirmishes, inside and out: scuffed paintwork, dented metal, rust dripping down from the ladder rungs dotted across her, melting into the obsidian of her hull.

Jungkook and Taehyung move in a way that’s practiced, disciplined motions of combat that their Jaeger echoes in turn. Her mechanical movements reflect those of the men inside her head, skilled and superb. Stunning. But you and Yoongi? You fight dirty, violent and rough; messy bar room brawls; shattered glass and clawing hands in beer soaked backrooms, tinged sulphur yellow under dirty lightbulbs; two kids who fought against a world that was against them.

(Two damaged people coming together in the Drift to make something even stronger than the sum of your parts.)

(Two damaged people who survived the rough hands of the Jaeger Academy, trying to take them, push them, shape them, break them.)

(Life isn’t kind. You’d learned that young, surrounded in the splintered remnants of your childhood home, the facade of family and happiness already gone, long long long ago, leaving you aching and lonely and cold. The prospect of fighting thousands of tons of alien hatred, lifting out of the depths of the uncaring, dark sea? At least you can see the kaiju coming. Broken households and loneliness? A little harder to lay your hands on.)

(But out of everything you lost, you’d gained one thing—Min Yoongi, another quiet, damaged thing, but with the biggest depths of warmth and love underneath that hard surface; your best friend, your brother-in-arms, growing alongside you, with you. Damaged kids turned bitter teenagers turned razor-edged adults, outcasts in solitude, but together. Not alone.)

(The deeper the bond, the better you fight. Falling into the Drift with Yoongi had been easy, years of tangled connection bleeding into the images that flashed across your brain. The same memories from different angles, overlaid with different emotions, undercurrents eddying under the surface that caught both of you and swept you up in its flow; the same mind, bridged by hundreds of tons of metal and technology and firepower underneath you, linked together in the silence of the Drift.)

There’s reverence, in the way these two new pilots look at you both, reverence and awe and respect alike: older Rangers, more experienced, history written across the worn edges of your Drivesuits, the paint flaking away from your battle armour, scuffs and scrapes on the once unblemished veneer; knowledge etched into the feline slant of Yoongi’s eyes, the turn of your shoulders and hips.

You know Jungkook’s track record. You know of the endless months of assessment and sparring and psych evals and Drift tests and simulation drops that every successful Ranger has to go through, and Jungkook had trumped them all, stood atop them like a conqueror surveying his hard-won lands—gifted, talented, some even said God-touched. And yet for all this indomitable talent and skill, there’s still humility at his core, a willingness to defer with respect.

That deference is obvious whenever he sees you. Jungkook’s dark eyes will touch your own, for a moment, dark and deep and bright—and then his gaze will skitter away, cockiness and bravado dissolving into something submissive, yielding. (Shy.) You’ve watched him orbit you, the younger ranger caught in your gravity, always nearby—the Shatterdome is only so big, for its magnitude and sprawling corridors—but never broaching that final gap, that little step, into Cypher Zero’s space, Yoongi’s space, your space. Keeping himself at arm’s length.

South Korea’s golden boy, less afraid of the Kaiju than he is of his sunbaenim.

Jungkook and Taehyung are both beautiful. But you and Yoongi are less so, unapproachable in ways that the younger pilots aren’t, private and prickly, like grasping a patch of stinging nettles with bare hands, stinging and burning.

As if Jungkook isn’t terrifying and gorgeous in his own ways. As if he doesn’t shine brighter than the sun himself. Taehyung moves through the world with a thoughtless, charismatic ease that Jungkook doesn’t share—but he’s still magnetic, bold and brilliant, monstrously skilled at everything he puts his mind to, training again and again and again to get it right, get it right, get it right.

To get it perfect.

But there’s no level of perfectionism that can surmount the twisted, unpredictable nature of the kaiju belched forth from the breach. No matter how good you are, how strong or fast, how smart or seasoned, sometimes you still get caught in that hurricane, even in a Jaeger.

It doesn’t matter how many engines are packed into each muscle strand. It doesn’t matter how fast the pistons and levers and gears shift and move. It doesn’t matter that the pilots in her cockpit are impeccable and incredible. Under the cloak of deepest night and pouring rain, blanketed in darkness and water from the heavens above and the sea below, movement is impossible to track—and when Steelbrute rises from the waves, no one sees the kaiju coming.

Bulletproof Striker takes the hit. Jungkook and Taehyung fight back but they’re blindsided and overwhelmed, and their Jaeger falls to her knees in the churn of the Pacific Ocean, salt water crashing over her in choppy waves as Steelbrute’s merciless maw gapes wide open.

Cypher Zero is 250ft tall and weighs 1410 tons. You and Yoongi are tiny specks of organic matter in a fearsome behemoth of titanium and tungsten and graphene and circuitry, commanders of a weapon that’s the same size as a skyscraper—and yet you wouldn’t think that for how fast you move. Zero hesitation. No verbal communication. Cypher’s legs cut through endless waves and gain momentum with each crashing step that slams into the seafloor before you leap forward in a flurry of motion and Drift powered fury.

Your motions in the Conn-Pod are ragged and incensed, your arms and legs moving in sync with Yoongi, with Cypher Zero, a snarl ripping out of your co-pilot’s usually quiet mouth as the kaiju lurches underneath you. The world narrows down to this: throwing yourself into the fray, jagged knuckles edged with plasma pummelled into Steelbrute’s skin in a scuffle that’s vicious, aggressive, until Bulletproof Striker regains her footing.

The sun is rising, grey and cold on the horizon when Steelbrute finally sinks into the sea, toxic blood flooding the water with neon blue. When you step out of the cockpit, Yoongi’s fringe is matted with sweat, and you can feel all the places the circuitry suit sticks to your skin—piloting a Jaeger is mentally and physically exhausting, every muscle and organ and bone working overtime for endless hours as you fight tooth and nail. Without the helmets in the way, there’s nothing stopping you bumping your foreheads together, heedless of the sweat slicked there; Yoongi’s hand rests at the back of your head, a familiar cradle.

“All good,” you say. Yoongi lets out a quiet bark of a laugh, rough and exhausted.

“I want a nap,” he says, like he always does, even if you’re a long way away from that, still fully suited and due to speak to the Marshalls. There are so, so many things separating you from the bliss of sleep.

One thing that’s not part of the normal routine, though, is the other pilots catching you, demanding your recognition, respectful (Taehyung) but insistent (Jungkook). You know that Yoongi doesn’t like attention or hero-worship, but there’s nothing except gratitude, here, bent heads and words of thanks. You’d saved their lives, after all. Saved their Jaeger from being torn apart, pain screaming through their own bodies of flesh and bone, connected to their metal monster. Of course they’re grateful.

You dismiss it with a hard cut of your hand.

“It’s nothing,” you say.

You’re speaking the words you know are in Yoongi’s head—years of friendship and shared Drifts leaving his thought processes wide open to you—although you know you’re sharper than he is, harsher than he is, even, for all that he looks like the cold one from the outside. Long lashes and silken hair don’t translate to something soft and feminine and pretty, and you’re all ragged edges and rough parts, bleeding into the delivery of your words. Yoongi rounds the words in his mouth and places them into the world with a rumble of quiet strength that belies his past, but you? Your tongue is cutting and terse and drips with distrust, even when you don’t mean it to, staring at these two boys, Jungkook’s eyes so brown and large when he stares back at you.

The truth is that you care about humanity, of course. You care about humanity and you care about the millions of people in the cities that line the coasts and further inland, and you care about your fellow pilots, skilled but soft-hearted as they are. You’re stronger. You have to be. That’s what Yoongi is, that’s what you are: fighters. You fight dirty because you fight to win, not to protect yourselves. You’ll fight and you’ll die for this, for them, even if there’s no friendship there. Not yet. You’re still too distant, for all that you’d thrown yourself in the line of fire to rip the kaiju from the younger Rangers.

And when Jungkook levels a look at you, there’s a flicker of something. A spark. All the glittering of his warm eyes comes together like the cascading sparks of molten fire that fall when metal is cut through— his eyes score through you, down down down, right to your core, underneath all the armour you’ve laid about yourself throughout your life. Your heart stutters. You’ve been watching Jeon Jungkook, and he’s all cocky Ranger bravado, or innocent brown eyes and shy, curving smiles, and yet.

And yet. You know he sees this soft part of you, somehow. Past the thorns and sharp leaves, past the hard husk, into the rich, bursting sweetness inside, oozing red gems of pomegranate that yield so easily to the fingers and mouth.

(He’s temerarious and modest and wickedly perceptive too, it seems.)

“That was our kill,” he says suddenly. Taehyung—the voice piece of the two, the one who’s been smiling and speaking, easy and slow—goes still at his side.

“What?” Yoongi’s eyes pierce through him, but Jungkook keeps his focus on you.

“Steelbrute. Our kill. It was a hit from our rockets that took him out,” Jungkook says, eyes still glinting with that sparkling shine. Slicing through you with an explosion of light. “Not your blades.”

Silence steals over you, for a breath. It’s never truly silent in the Shatterdome, an iron fortress that never sleeps, but for a second, there’s quiet. It wraps around you. Tight. Almost deafening.

But then you break that silence.

You laugh.

You laugh at the cheeky grin that pulls at Jungkook’s lips, the boyish lift to his face. You laugh at his shamelessness, the sudden 180 from his earlier fear. You laugh at the way he’s diluted this astonishing, formidable thing—humanity coming together to destroy alien predators that threaten the planet—into a competition.

“You’re a menace, Jeon Jungkook,” you say.

Stinging nettles you might be, but if you’re grabbed hard and fast by confident hands, you don’t wound. Jeon Jungkook defers to respect, avoids confrontation, bows his head and quiets his mouth, but he knows, now, that he can do this. That he can push you like this, and you’ll let him, sway against it, let yourself be pushed.

Yoongi slides you a glance out the corner of his eyes, a light touch, a tacit agreement to an unspoken question.

“You can have it. Steelbrute’s yours.” There’s the smallest curl to your lips as you speak for you both. There’s something weirdly easy and familiar to this, to this interaction, even if you’ve barely exchanged words before now, giving this triumph to the other pilots hand over fist.

(Giving it to Jungkook on a platter.)

You can see the flare of triumph in Jungkook’s eyes. You know it’s not for the notch of their first kill, one they can add to their Jaeger. It’s for something far harder to achieve, something far more ephemeral: digging down and past your cool veneer and lifting out a smile, spreading it across your lips like warm butter, liquid gold.

And he keeps making you smile.

Jeon Jungkook, you find, is a force of nature, relentless, an ocean. Sometimes he’s soft, loving waves of glittering blue that crash on pearly white beaches, playful and bright. Sometimes, he’s intense, the crashing waves of a storm tossed sea, powerful and unstoppable. Always, he’s striking, even when he’s not trying—even more so because of it, moving without thought or uncertainty, a silence settling over your thoughts whenever you see him like this. See him in this raw state, so unafraid where before he’d curbed his tongue and bent his head in front of you. Now, he’s just himself, without filter.

Taehyung is there too, of course. Both pilots join your small, fiercely private circle, not just a path from you to Yoongi any more. They become intertwining lines, a pattern that’s drawn between the four of you, pilots, friends. And you learn, that for all that you’d thought that Taehyung was the dominant one outside of their Jaeger, social and extroverted and unabashed, Jungkook isn’t quiet. Not when he’s comfortable.

(Not, now, when he’s with you.)

He’s a myriad of things, endlessly deep, so different from you, from Yoongi, but—the truth of it settles inside you, your joints, the marrow of your bones, the blood that pulses forth from your heart each time it beats in your chest, liquid life running through you.

Drift compatibility.

Not that it matters. You already have a partner. You’re never going to open yourself up to anyone that isn’t Yoongi, who’s seen every part of you already. There’d been no fear about letting Yoongi see inside your brain, your heart, the raw, bleeding parts of you—because he’d already known them. Just like you’d known his. Yoongi stands to your right, inside the Conn-Pod and out, a driving force, even in his silence.

But Jungkook is softer, sweeter, for all his raw power and skill, respect engraved into his every motion, even when he’s teasing and making you laugh. Even when he ignores the social guidelines that he should follow, does follow for others, everyone except you.

And you don’t mind. You don’t bite out insults at him when he slides into the quiet hollow you’ve scraped out, a small space with just enough room for the people you keep in your heart. You’re still barbed and spiked, warding away unwanted attention, but for Jungkook, the claws retract.

You’re still you, of course. Jungkook calls you mean, says that you bully him, even as he’s flopped across your bunk, eating your rations, shovelling coveted popcorn into his mouth. He might pout and sigh and cry oppression, but you’re soft on him and he knows it. That quiet hollow in your heart is a little larger, now, a little louder. Jungkook is brazen in his claim of this space, spreading each of his limbs wide as he fits himself into every part of it. He doesn’t know every piece of your past, and you don’t plan to let him see all the messy parts bundled in your chest, but. But he’s still there.

And you let him stay. You make a home for him inside you and let him take the key. He might tilt his head and goad you, might pretend there’s a genuine challenge in the set of his jaw, but you know it’s all tempered with admiration, veneration. Friendship.

(And where he clearly respects you, you admire him in turn. You’re reminded of your differences every second he moves and breathes and just exists in front of you, but you don’t have to be similar to someone to realise just how incredible they are.)

(But though you’re different, there are similarities. You’re not a mirrored image, a reflection, like you are with Yoongi. Instead, you’re a line drawn between two separate places, an isohel, sun lighting up your world for the same sweep of the clock even for how far apart you are. Sharing that same, tenuous thing, for all your contrasting parts.)

(This thing that’s growing, held in your hands. This soft, gentle thing, shimmering, frail, unfurling slowly but undeniably. Tinged with happiness, disbelief. Disbelief that you’ve found this, that you can see Jungkook across the echoing cavern of the Shatterdome’s main hall, so far in the distance, barely visible at the foot of his Jaeger—and something will settle in your chest. Featherlight, iridescent. Something comforting.)

When you fight the kaiju, now, it’s with a deeper reserve of desperation. Taehyung and Jungkook aren’t just fellow pilots, dongsaeng that you’re obliged to look after: they’re your friends, something more than that too, part of the rare handful of people in the world who understand, this overwhelming pressure to fight and win and protect the things you love. The people you love. They understand what it’s like to step into someone else’s head, to be connected to that person on a level that’s unfathomable, anchored in a depth of love that’s endless. You’re their aegis, now, their shield.

(Jungkook’s shield.)

Maybe that’s what’s to blame. Maybe that’s why you’re so sloppy, this time. Maybe that’s why you throw yourselves in the way of the blow that was meant for Bulletproof Striker. Maybe that’s why Ojousan shreds Cypher Zero’s chest apart, her head, why Yoongi is almost ripped from you, his fear and pain screaming through your neural connection. You feel everything he feels and more beside, your heart hammering in your throat as you scream, Jaeger’s arm swinging up and around in tandem with your own motions as you try to rip the kaiju away, anything to protect Yoongi, so scared of losing him, always always always, scared of being left alone.

But you’re not alone.

Bulletproof Striker lifts up like an avenging angel. Her horns roar a challenge, an echoing battle cry as the younger pilots move in. Heavier and stronger, keeping her balance even in the turbulence of a fight, she takes the hits, gives back her own, sends the kaiju down into the crashing waves, waits for it to rise. But the monster is crafty and quick and even as you’re lifting your left arm—Yoongi’s hurt, so hurt, you know this, feel this, but he moves with you to ready the plasma cannon buried in the mechanics of your Jaeger’s hand, even if he’s keening with pain—you watch as the other pilots, too, fall victim to the clawed tail of the kaiju, screeching through layers of alloys and across their Conn-Pod.

Terror strikes through every part of you and morphs into hate. You hate the kaiju, hate your own weakness, hate the pain that’s been saved from being written into your own body while Yoongi screams and sobs even though he still fights. Your motions are anguished and desperate as you battle to overcome this beast that’s almost taken away everything that matters to you—and Cypher Zero, Yoongi, as damaged and hurt as they are, come through. (Like they always do, for you, always.)

And somehow, despite everything, for all the self-hatred and pain and fear, you pull through. You pull through. Damaged and hurt but alive.

Barely.

Barely alive.

(One hand gives, the other takes away.)

It takes hours for them to pick Yoongi’s Drivesuit from his body, crumpled around him from Ojousan’s claws, cutting into the soft flesh of his body, body ruined further by the fighting he’d been forced into despite his injuries; so many of Taehyung’s bones are shattered, and when you finally see him awake and with his eyes open, there are burst blood vessels that cast red across the usually warm expression, his friendly eyes.

You should be grateful that they’re alive. You should be on your hands and knees, weeping, benedictions dripping from your graceless mouth as you thank whatever merciless God above decided to turn their gaze on you and grant you this leniency. So many pilots have died and will continue to die, you know this, but somehow your partners are still alive.

And you are grateful. You are. But there’s bitterness on your tongue, twisted across your palate, sour and acrid and filling you with its taste. You’d been foolish and reckless and you’d almost lost the things you cared about most, even if you’d destroyed the kaiju, torn it apart and left its fluorescent indigo blood to corrode the ocean.

That’s what’s important, isn’t it. Saving humanity. One person, two people, four people—you’re the tiniest cogs in a whirring engine of billions. Unimportant. Just a spinning part that keeps the machine going.

When you’re not with Yoongi or Taehyung, an unmoving presence from their hospital beds, a hovering gargoyle carved from stone, you’re with Jungkook. Always, always, always. Somehow you’d both escaped without the injuries inflicted on your partners—you’d manage to break your little finger, and Jungkook had a black eye and a twisted ankle, and the both of you had mottles of bruises cast across your skin, pulled muscles, an ache carved into your bones, but that was it. That was it. It was almost laughable, how unscathed you are.

You hate it.

(It should have been you.)

Your legs—unbroken, unharmed—hang over steel scaffolding, motionless as you watch the tiny specks of people scuttling across the catwalks that criss-cross Cypher Zero’s body. You can see under her skin, damage peeling back all the layers of metal that should be holding her together. Endless showers of sparks fall and scatter as she’s stitched back together. Your beautiful girl is so damaged, so disfigured.

(You’d caught Yoongi as he’d fallen from the harness, listened to the horrible noises that had torn out of his lips as he’d dripped blood and pain over your shaking hands.)

The bland food you’d scraped off your dinner tray settles fitfully in your stomach, still one second, nausea bubbling up your throat the next.

It’s one of the rare times you’ve been alone, since… since everything. You’ve been taking comfort in Jungkook’s presence, unwavering and understated, needing someone there when staring at Yoongi’s battered face proved too much. Even with his own upheaval Jungkook’s been there, at your side, always close. Eyes locked on you and taking everything in, the tired set to your face, the expression that tugs down your lips, and still, he stays.

But he’d disappeared after you’d eaten, a peculiar look on his face—you know him well enough now to recognise that look, that it means he’s got something in his head, some plan he means to unfold. It’s the first time you’ve seen it since Taehyung had been pulled out of the Conn-Pod. It’s some semblance of normality, an expression of something other than pale-faced dread and bone-shivering guilt.

(You feel it too, that survivor’s guilt. Taehyung and Yoongi will recover but it’ll take time and so much suffering and you wish you could take that from them, heft that burden onto your own shoulders.)

(You know Jungkook feels the same.)

(You see it written in the tense lines of his body. Hear it unspoken in the words he shares with you. The bruises on his skin melt from red to purple to blue to yellow, but even if his body heals, his brain and heart bear the scars of helplessness.)

Jungkook reappears, finds you at the heavy steel door that leads into your room, rusted and worn but silent as it swings open in front of you. His eyes are wide and he’s breathless, like he’s been running, chest heaving as he sucks in air through his parted lips, a flash of teeth and tongue as he smiles.

Despite everything, you smile back. Helpless for that smile, always, happier now for the sight of it, for how little you’ve seen it. You want to see that smile every day. You don’t want him to worry for anything. You want him to feel the same way you do, when you see him: that quiet, maybe selfish thought that things are okay.

Maybe he does. (His eyes are so warm.) He presses something into your hands, something soft and round like a well-practised secret, and then he’s gone. You can tell by the gait of his stride that he’s going back to Taehyung, giving you a moment of lonely reprieve to wash the grime and dirt off your useless body before you follow in his footsteps, stationed at Yoongi’s side.

The door swings shut behind you.

You lift your hand.

It’s an orange.

It’s a small, overripe thing, hard nub of the stem falling away from the skin with only the lightest brush of your fingers. You stare at the fruit, its brightness cutting through the muted sepia tones of your surroundings, a point of colour in an otherwise dull room.

You haven’t seen an orange in months. Rationing is tough on everyone, even Jaeger pilots. You’d mentioned in passing, so long ago, an old habit of yours. Before something else floated above it, more important and interesting, you’d made a fleeting statement that had flitted across the surface of the conversation: you liked eating oranges in the shower. Liked that nice, cool citrus sweetness in your mouth while the rest of your body was caught in the fall of warm water.

It’s such a small, tiny thing. Just the briefest lament—there are more important things than the fact you can’t have shower oranges any more, after all—and you’d forgotten you’d even mentioned it.

But Jungkook hadn’t.

It’s almost syrupy sweet, this orange. You savour each slice, pressing them between your teeth, feeling the rush of juice burst forth through the pith and skin, and it’s so good you could cry.

You do cry.

Your mouth is full of orange and your eyes are full of tears and your head is full of—of—something, something so all encompassing that it overwhelms you, water cascading down the aching planes of your body as you crumple inwards. Jungkook had protected you with the overwhelming power of Bulletproof Striker, and he’s protecting you now, soft and considerate and kind, vulnerable and human. Stripped of tons of metal and technology, Jungkook wears his beating heart on his sleeve and is none the weaker for it.

This seemingly small thing means so much, so so so much. You understand him, and he understands you too, knows that this gesture is indicative of support and care and nurturing, a tiny fragment of peace he can offer you in the tumult of everything out of your control.

A tiny fragment of peace that’s part of a greater whole, all the things that Jungkook gives to you.

When the Marshalls gather you and tell you the plan going forwards, you’re unsurprised.

It makes sense, of course. Four pilots down to two still leaves a pair, and Bulletproof Striker is nearly functional even if Cypher Zero will stay out of commission while she’s rebuilt. Simple maths. One Jaeger, two pilots. You and Jungkook.

You’re scared.

You know you’re Drift compatible. Every fight in the Kwoon Combat Room is evidence enough of that. A dialogue, each challenge is meant to be a dialogue to show physical compatibility, and it is: there’s perfect sync in how you each move to strike, even if your motions are so different, muscles burning and breaths coming faster each time you attack, parry, strike, block. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s a conversation, one that you and Jungkook fall into without thought.

And he would be the perfect partner. That much isn’t in doubt. Loyal and open and strong, honourable and brave and kind—and you know him, have grown to learn so much about this golden boy, this bright, brilliant boy. He’s fucking indomitable and anyone would be lucky to find themselves in the same Jaeger as Jeon Jungkook.

But there are no secrets in the Drift.

To let someone in, you have to trust them. And you do, you do trust Jungkook, probably far more than makes sense, some unspoken thing between you burning like a wildfire. But while you trust him, confident in his strength and his heart, you trust yourself less.

You’ll be flayed open, naked and defenceless. He’ll see right to the core of you, every dirty corner of your crumpled soul, every shameful part of your foundations, uneven brickwork layered into your shaky temperament; strong one second, weak the next. He’ll see that you’re hard inside, too, biting and acidic right down to your shrivelled heart. This nascent thing that you’ve been building with Jungkook, been keeping safe in the cradle of your careful hands, will sputter out and die.

“Baby.”

Yoongi’s voice is comforting, a familiar rumble that rolls through your ears as you rest your head in his lap.

“And I mean that you’re literally being a baby,” he continues, and you curl your lip back from your teeth in a small snarl, menacing.

Yoongi just continues to thread his hands through your hair.

You’ve Drifted with Yoongi often and long enough to know how every thread of thought unspools in that skull of his. You know he has every confidence in the unshakeable pillar of your soul. He’s a brother to you, a connection that thrums deep in your veins even without the intimacy of the Drift, and the love you hold for him is undying and true.

But whatever you have with Jungkook is so timorous in the face of that.

“It’s different.” Yoongi looks down at the twist of your face. You know his thoughts and he knows yours too, your face and heart an open book to him. “But different isn’t bad.”

You keep your mouth shut, keep the words swallowed down in your throat, shoved down to the pit of your stomach. Keep it secret. Keep it safe.

“Baby,” he says again, softer, lower. This time, you know it’s an endearment.

At the end of the day, no matter what fear grips cold and endless at your insides, you’ll do it. You’ll Drift with Jungkook. You’ll throw everything you have into the pyre, watch it burn and turn to ash, if it means you can keep everyone safe. To save Yoongi, Taehyung, Jungkook—you’ll open yourself up to the mortifying ordeal of opening up, laying yourself bare. You have to.

It’s chaotic, anyway. The day that your practice Drift is scheduled is the day the next kaiju rises out of the breach, that dreaded rift between our world and theirs, because why would you be allowed to breathe, even for a second?

It’s a scramble into the cockpit. There’s no time for trial runs or test Drifts. You fly or you fall. Everyone’s in a state of orderly upheaval as you’re suited up and left to stride forwards into a Conn-Pod that isn’t yours, in a Jaeger that isn’t yours.

(Left to stride forwards to stand next to someone who isn’t yours.)

Your Drivesuit is grey. Jungkook’s is white. There’s a subtle hologramatic sheen laid across the planes of his armour, leaving him a multicoloured vision that shines out under the flicker of the cockpit’s endless tiny buttons and lights. Your own suit is a matte, gunmetal with accents of burning scarlet, far more battered and worn. Dark and wild in the face of Jungkook’s radiance. He’s the perfect answer to the kaiju invasion. You, though, feel like an interloper in a space that wasn’t designed for you, this circle room that’s been home to Jungkook and his true, real partner.

But he’s looking at you like there’s no one else he’d rather have by his side.

He doesn’t care that everything about this moment just cements how he’s too good for you in every conceivable way, elevated above you. Doesn’t care that you’re just a temporary stop gap. There’s trepidation, of course, skittering nerves that dance across his face for this first Drift, surrounded by all the commotion that’s swallowing the world up outside the cockpit. But there’s also that fire in his eyes, one you’ve learned to expect: Jungkook is a wildfire and will surmount any obstacle in a blaze of white-hot light.

And he wants you along for the ride.

(Burns bright for it.)

“You ready?” He asks, and the tiny tremor in his words takes you off guard even as it soothes a balm over the rash of apprehension that prickles across your skin.

(Because he’s nervous, too.)

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” you answer, truly.

His eyes crinkle into a smile, crescents of happiness as his lip peels back from his teeth. It should be jarring, seeing his sweet bunny smile in the pit of a Jaeger, so at odds with the military polycarbonate that girds his body with protection, the masculine edges of his face—but it’s not. The world is just a backdrop to Jeon Jungkook, dropping away as you fall into his eyes, twinkling stars of brightness and warmth that hold you safe, even now.

Peace and contentment steals over you. You’re almost shocked by it, the way your own face softens into a smile, the rising beat of your heart. Every ragged messy edge in you is smoothed over by Jungkook’s presence and you glow for him.

When the Conn-Pod drops, there’s the familiar weightlessness, the sway of your body in the harness as you fall. Anticipation roils through you as Bulletproof Striker’s head locks into place, whirring mechanisms securing you to nearly 2000 tons of metal, so much heavier than your own Jaeger. You’ve taken Jungkook’s usual place and he’s taken Taehyung’s, the right hemisphere, the dominant pilot, familiar with this machine in a way you’re not.

Not yet, at least.

“We’ve got this.”

Jungkook’s voice cuts through the noise, the AI talking at you, a narration of events you’ve long grown used to. You turn your head to look at him. He’s already looking at you, intent and sincere. Like always.

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, we have.”

There’s no point being afraid. In a few seconds, Jungkook will be in your head, washing over every part of you—and you’ll be in his, pressing your ethereal touch into every facet that comes together to make Jeon Jungkook who he is.

Seconds pass. There’s a little hitch in his breath, a stiffness to his limbs, and he shuts his eyes. You breathe in deep, deep, deep, sucking in a harsh breath into your greedy lungs—

—the timer hits zero—

—and then the Drift slams into you all at once, all encompassing and consuming, threading your minds together.

(Drifting with Yoongi is easy, the familiarity of coming home after so much time away.)

(But this?)

(This is throwing yourself into a cold lake on a hot summer’s day, bracing and refreshing and breath-stealing all at once, shocking life into every one of your limbs, so sharp and fast you’re scared you might drown before you breach the surface, water holding onto you and not letting you go. This is driving reckless and fast down empty roads, watching the world pass you in a blur, laughing in delight at the pleasure of it all. This is scaling a cliffside with nothing but your own hands and determination, digging your fingers into the unyielding rock, pulling yourself up-up-up, never letting yourself fall.)

(This is having Jungkook beside you. This is having Jungkook diving into the lake with all the grace of an Olympian before he rises to the surface, tosses his hair carelessly out of his face, and spits a mouthful of water at you with laughter in his eyes. This is having Jungkook behind the driver’s wheel, shifting gears without thought, looking away from the road to watch the way your hair dances in the wind. This is having Jungkook climbing beside you, waiting for you at the top, holding a hand out to pull you up and over so you can sprawl out beside him, exhausted and exuberant at the top of this mountain, basking in the sun with Jungkook just a hair’s breadth away from you.)

(He takes one look at you. He takes one look at all the dark of your memories, the cascading mess of your insides, the hidden things that are open to him in the Drift, cut open and peeled back for his gaze—and he doesn’t look away.)

(He sees everything, past skin and muscle and bone and nerves, even deeper, right into your heart—)

(—all the torrents that eddy the deep waters of your soul—)

(—and he doesn’t look away.)

(He doesn’t look away.)

(Can’t look away.)

(Doesn’t want to.)

(Never wants to.)

(Jeon Jungkook takes one look at you, your whole being, and he knows you.)

(And he doesn’t want you any less.)

It’s just a second, a flicker, a breath, this first connection in this Drift, falling into each other. But it’s also a lifetime, two lifetimes, four lifetimes; your memories, Jungkook’s memories, Yoongi’s memories in yours, Taehyung’s memories in Jungkook’s. Layers and layers and years and years piled over one another, a tumbling sprawl—but it’s easy. It’s easy, so easy, Jungkook seeing you, you seeing him, everything he is, everything you are, everything you are to each other, with each other, for each other. The important things. The things you need to know to navigate this together, in sync even before now, reading each other to a level neither had even realised.

And when you’ve killed the kaiju. When you’ve walked Bulletproof Striker back to shore, brought her back to the Shatterdome, back home, it doesn’t end. You lift out of the Drift, step out of your Drivesuits, as different as they are (as different as you are), and it doesn’t end.

Jungkook’s eyes linger, as heavy as a physical touch, and even as congratulations for a successful drop are bandied about you, he doesn’t leave your side. He keeps his hand against yours—not intertwined, but brushing, the curl of his fingers against your own. Touching. You’re not the protector here. He’s protecting you, in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling inferior or weak. You feel soft and warm and small and safe, pulled inexorably towards him, supported, buoyed up, and you don’t feel selfish for it.

Because he wants this.

He wants to be your comfort and your support.

He doesn’t want it to end.

(You don’t want it to end.)

And when you finally break away from those crowds, released from the shackles of responsibility and expectation—when you’re finally left alone, the two of you with each other, there’s no hesitation when you come together.

He lays you out beneath him and has you sobbing, back arching into the pleasure he draws out of your body, playing you like a maestro. Because he knows you, after all. He knows exactly how to trail his lips across your skin, your neck and stomach and thighs, painting marks across your body like it’s his personal canvas. He knows exactly how to have you twisting underneath him, how to pull those pretty sounds from your lips, fucking you with his fingers and his tongue until you’re a shaking mess. He kisses you sweet, merciless, letting you claw at his skin as you beg for more, more more more, wanting it, needing it, wanting him, needing him.

And you know he’ll give it to you. He’ll give himself to you, give you everything you ask for. You know how he wants to see you fall apart and you know how to move your body to have him gritting his teeth and staring in awe. You know how desperate he is to worship you, to show you his adoration and reverence, and you open up for him, unfurl like a flower, dripping nectar. When he finally presses into you, hot and long and thick, it’s so good you could cry. You draw him in-in-in, into your body and arms and heart, pressing your lips to the sweat at his brow, the taste of skin and salt and Jungkook bursting across your tongue.

There’s no Drift here, no curl of memories and unspoken thoughts between you. It’s physical and human, the crash of your bodies against each other, skin on skin, the thrust of his cock pressing into the dripping folds of your cunt. It’s the other half of that connection, the final piece, this thing you have with Jungkook, this perfect balance you have with him. It sears itself across your body and into your soul: it’s pleasure and passion and devotion carved into each touch of your lips and fingers, each roll of your hips, each time Jungkook makes you cum, gasping for him.

When he’s finally come apart inside you, spilling into your willing heat as you shake beneath him, arms and legs wrapped around his body as you pull him as close as you can, unwilling to let go—it still doesn’t end. You’re so wrapped up in Jungkook, in his arms, his heart, and you know he won’t let you go, either. He presses his lips against yours, chases those kisses, quiet and chaste to open-mouthed and dirty as the mood takes you, and then Jungkook rolls over you again, a spark in his eyes as he decides he’s still hungry for you.

You know, now, that all that time ago, when you carved that space for him into your chest, he’d done the same for you. He’d laid his heart at your feet and waited there, kneeling, for you to accept it, patient and willing. Staring at you with all the deep love you never thought you deserved, never thought you’d receive. But here he is. Here he is, love burning in his dark brown eyes. Eyes that have seen all the damaged, aching parts of you and love you anyway.

“I’m yours.”

Jungkook shines so bright at your words, a supernova of joy. His smile is so wide and his gaze is so soft, for you, for you, for you.

“Everything I am is for you,” he murmurs, letting the words curl into the air, settle across your skin, sink deep inside your chest. Your eyes flutter shut as you feel this touch of him inside you, wrapped around your heart.

And when you lift your hands, he comes so easily. He presses his cheek into the curve of your fingers, lets you hold him, lets you cup those lovely cheeks in your palms.

“I love you,” he says.

Right now, in this instant, there’s nothing but him. No kaiju, no Jaegers, no crumbling world, nothing. There’s only him, and you, together.

“I love you too,” you reply—and when you smile, gentle and tender, Jungkook falls in love all over again.

Burns bright for you.

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