#feels very unequal if you ask me but since I make him laugh and be happy then all is alright and good | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thewritingginger · 3 years

Text

This was a product of Tumblr’s doing smh. I saw a handful of DILF Reiner and I- It got to me 🤡 So here you go.

Sorry it’s late oops also not thoroughly edited so mind any mistakes :)

Fandom: Attack on Titan Pairing: DILF Reiner x Fem! Nanny Reader Word count: 3.8k+ words Warnings: 18+, Age gap, Unequal power dynamic, Reader is 21, Alcohol consumption, Spanking, Nipple play, Pet names (Baby, Sweet girl, Sweetheart), Slight Daddy kink, Oral sex (M! receiving), Unprotected sex, Praise, Choking, Slight orgasm denial, Slight corruption kink, Belly bulge, Slight possessiveness

Enjoy ~

It is about a quarter till nine and you’re cleaning the kitchen from dinner earlier that night. With the children in bed you were left alone to finish your nightly duties. As you’re loading the dishwasher, music quietly playing from your phone, you didn’t hear the front door being unlocked. It wasn’t till he was at the entrance of the kitchen when you noticed your boss had arrived.

“Oh, Good Evening, Mr. Braun.” You say partly shocked. He chuckles softly.

“I’m sorry, Y/n I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no you’re fine. I just didn’t hear you come in.” You try to laugh it off.

To be honest you weren’t expecting him to be back till later tonight. Not that him coming home earlier than expected is bad, especially because this is his house but you were a bit embarrassed.

After dinner you and the kids decided to make milkshakes and things got a bit messy when one of the kids accidentally turned the blender on before the lid was attached. No big deal, you just had to change your clothes. Once finished you left them to enjoy their shakes as you quickly changed into something less sticky, which just happened to be your pajamas that consisted of a white tank top and blue polka dotted cotton shorts.

At the time it was fine but now you’re standing in front of your boss in what now feels like the tiniest pieces of clothing and an apron.

Your tummy flutters when you see his hazel eyes do a once over of you before undoing his blazer and turning.

“Would you mind fixing me a drink?”

“Of course, Mr. Braun.”

One he turns to go up the stairs you finally breathe again, realizing you’ve been holding your breath the entirety of the time with his eyes on you. Turning the water off and wiping your hands you start on the drink you’ve made him countless times, a whiskey neat.

His drink was waiting for him at the bar of the kitchen as you continued cleaning. Closing up the dishwasher a more casually dressed Reiner sits with his drink. He is adorned with a tight black t-shirt and grey sweatpants. Wiping off the counters you try to ignore his eyes on you, which are very clearly moving up and down your form.

“I hope the kids were good for you today.”

“Oh yeah, perfect as always.”

“I don’t normally see you dressed so comfortably.” He says into his glass making your face heat up, thank god your back was to him at the moment.

“Sorry about that. We had a bit of an ice cream incident earlier and I needed to change.”

“No need to apologize.” He is humored by your verbiage of the events from that evening.

You both are quiet after that. You finishing up the kitchen and him enjoying his beverage.

“Since it’s not too late, would you care to watch a movie with me?” He asks as you hang up the dish towel. You turn to him as you take off your apron.

“Uh sure, why not.”

“Great. Why don’t you make yourself a drink and I’ll get it started.”

Now it’s no secret to you that Reiner likes you, he’s said it many times however only stated as platonic verbally but his gaze tells a different story. You don’t hate the attention he gives you, especially because he is quite handsome despite him being roughly fifteen years your senior. He has kept his good looks throughout the years and his strong build too. At times you forget how lean he is when he’s dressed in his suits but stripped down to a thin t-shirt you feel weak. His toned chest and strong arms on display almost feels rude. Bosses are supposed to be someone you tolerate and have formalities with, not an object of desire when you lie awake at night.

Safe to say that sitting beside him on the couch, no children around, alone in your leaving-little-to-the-imagination pjs was causing issues for you. He is reclined comfortably in the corner of the couch, feet propped up on the ottoman, arms stretched out over the back looking flexed and touchable. You try to stay focused on the movie playing before you but your eyes keep moving back and forth between the TV screen and him. As time goes on you’re sure he is starting to take notice of your behavior.

“Do you not like this movie?”

“Huh? Oh, it’s fine.” You say, even though you have no idea considering you haven’t been watching it much. Reiner saw through your fib.

“Yeah, it’s not all that great. A little slow for my liking. I prefer to watch things with more action.” He says, turning towards you ignoring the playing film.

“What do you enjoy watching, Y/n?” His question is accompanied by a small smile and your heart skips a beat.

You shake yourself mentally, trying to think of an answer.

“As basic as it may sound, I guess I enjoy rom coms. But who doesn’t enjoy a bit of comedy and romance?” You laugh, slightly flustered by his gaze. The way it burns into you feels hot enough to set you on fire but that feeling is soon broken when he speaks once more.

“No judgment here, I agree. Tell me, what kind of romance do you seek out? In a film that is.” Resting his head upon his open palm he looks at you almost amused, as if he knows what he’s doing to you.

“Ah, I don’t know.” You say, unsure how to answer his seemingly suggestive question.

“Sure you do. Do you like your romance light and sweet or do you prefer it more passionate and full of desire?”

He’s playing with you, you can tell by the glint in his eyes and gentle curve of his lips. Your infatuation with Mr. Braun has not gone over his head, he’s suspected it for quite some time. You know this because his interactions with you, over time, have become increasingly more playful - teetering on daring.

It started with friendly smiles and compliments on your appearance. Then small physical contacts such as a pat on your arm and a nudge to your lower back when he passes behind you. But this is far more than what he had done before. Although he hasn’t touched you physically his eyes have been undressing you all evening and is now asking you a question disguised as innocent, but you both knew it wasn’t.

He must get drunk on the power he has over you and not just as your boss. He sees how you melt under his gaze and he likes it. Not tonight, you tell yourself that if he wants to play this game you’re done being just a toy in it.

Before your courage is taken away by logic you take the last sip of your drink and slide over the plush cushion to sit closer, your knees now touching.

“Both are enjoyable but I don’t care for anything too cutesy, if you know what I mean.” You say, with a small smile and looking down. That last shot of alcohol is really warming your belly and you feel your mind fuzzing a bit which is greatly helping your nerves.

“Yes, I believe I do.” He says with a smile of his own, leaning closer to you but you don’t budge.

Looking you over once again his next words makes your heart almost stop completely.

“Do you like me, Y/n?” His question stuns you but you recover by answering as casually as possible.

“Well you’re a great boss so yeah I’d say I do.” You want to slap yourself at how idiotic you must sound.

“I’m glad you think so but I think you know what I meant when I said ‘like me’.”

You don't know what to say. Well you do but all ideas are terrible. This one moment will change your relationship forever. It will go from a harmless crush to a potentially job-altering situation. What if he’s just toying with you and making a joke and telling him you do like him as more than a boss was part of it? Or is he asking because he may like you as more than an employee?

All these thoughts swirl in your head but no words have left your lips and time is just ticking by in need of a response.

“Uh, Mr. Braun, I don't know what to say.” You say honestly.

“Well why don’t I help you. I think you do like me, you’re just too scared to say it.”

“Um, I mean-” He cuts you off.

“There is no need to be afraid of your own desires. We all have them, myself included.” His hand ghosts up your exposed thigh making your spine tingle.

“Perhaps it’d make you feel more comfortable to know my thoughts of you.” Your eyes shoot up to him, silently waiting for him to continue.

His rough hand continues to explore your bare flesh, feather light touches tickle your nerves as they move up and down your leg.

“I’m quite fond of you, Ms. Y/L/n, especially with this little number you have on. It’s so sweet and inviting. I want to touch you and I think both you and I have known that for a while now.” His words are making it hard to breathe. It wasn’t just in your head. The lingering glances and flattering words, all were more than innocent.

“Would you like that? My hands on your body?” His face moves closer to yours, his hot breath brushes your lips.

“Yes.” You whisper, looking up through your lashes. Eyes flutter and breath quivers when his strong arm pulls you atop his lap.

Straddling his hips you look down at him as his hands rub your waist then pull your neck down, his lips next to your ears. His free hand grips your ass under your shorts making you gasp.

“You should wear these more often. They make your ass look fucking amazing.” He punctuates his statement with a firm smack to your bottom. Connecting his lips to your neck, sucking a mark on your jugular. You let out a small yelp at the unexpected act.

Rubbing the reddened cheek he pulls away to whisper in your ear.

“As much as I’d love to hear you crying for me, you don’t want to wake the kids.” His dark chuckle vibrates down to your warming core.

Holding his shoulders you bring one hand to turn his face and finally connect your lips for the first time. Accepting your touch he opens his mouth for more access, your tongues dance together, you can taste the whiskey from before on his lips. The kiss is deep and needy. His hands roam your body greedily trying to explore every part of it. Holding your thigh with one he grasps your breast with the other, you moan into his mouth.

Retracting his hands they grab the hem of your shirt, pulling it over your head. Willingly you break the kiss and lift your arms to help, leaving your chest bare for him to see. You watch as his eyes, glazed over with lust, scan every inch of the newly exposed expanse of skin. Drinking in your beauty, you begin to feel a bit self conscious of his gaze before his lips take in one of your nipples. Pleased sighs leave your mouth as he licks and gently nibbles your nipple and plays with the other between his fingers. Switching to the other he repeats his actions. The heat between your thighs is beginning to become unbearable, needing more you begin to gently rock your hips against his hardening member.

“You like that, Baby? You like having your cute little nipples played with?” He says in your ear, pinching both between his fingers. Enjoying the scrunched up expression on your face and how you needily rub yourself against him.

“Look at you rubbing your needy cunt against my cock. You feel how hard I am for you?”

“Yes.”

“You want it don’t you? Want me to rip off your shorts and fuck you into the couch?”

“Ah- yes, Mr. Braun.” He loves how you moan his formal title, still so obedient, not letting his first name slip from your lips.

“Stand up.” Lifting you to your feet Reiner turns you around, yanking the waist of your shorts down your thighs. You stand there, back turned to him, completely naked. You gasp when his palm comes down on your plump cheek once again.

“No panties, what a dirty little girl you are.” His large hands hold your hips as he gives your ass a few chased kisses and bite before laying you on your back.

Your mind is racing, adrenaline pumping making you dizzy. He stands beside you, completely clothed staring at your naked form, a very clear erection strangled under his sweatpants. Licking his lips he strips himself of his shirt revealing his rippling abs and toned chest.

Reiner enjoys your eyes on him, scanning his body, hungrily awaiting to see more. He catches your eyes glancing down at his crotch then back to his eyes. Looking into your eyes he runs a hand down his chest and grips his manhood over his pants.

“Is this what you want, Sweet girl? I see your eyes begging for it.”

“Uh huh.” You hum propping yourself on your forearms, unconsciously wetting your lips.

“That’s what I thought. Sit up. ” He says, taking a step towards you.

With his pelvis level to your face you look up at him doe eyed and waiting.

��Go on take, take Daddy’s cock out.” He encourages you with a sly smirk. Looking down you wrap your fingers around the band of his pants. Pulling them down his manhood springs up and your mouth goes dry at it’s size. It’s long, thick and veiny. His red tip is thick and leaking precum. He sighs at the freedom from his pants and cups your cheek, pulling your gaze back to his.

“You like what you see?” You nod your head in response, he smiles. With his free hand he wraps his hand around his girth, bringing the tip to your pouty lips, his precum coating them.

“Open your mouth.” You do as he says.

Opening your mouth you struggle to get more than half of him in your mouth. Your jaw is sore trying to fit him in. Tears begin to sting your eyes as he starts to pump into your mouth.

“Ah- Fuck! You look prettier than I imagined with my cock your mouth. Struggling to take it? Is my cock too big for your little mouth, Baby?” He chuckles as you moan around his shaft making him groan in pleasure. Your hands rest against his thighs as he continues to gently pump into your mouth, hand gripped in your hair holding you close.

After letting you go Reiner leans down and grabs you by your throat, lightly applying pressure, planting a firm kiss to your lips.

“I’ll be sure to use that mouth of yours again but for now turn over.” Releasing your throat he picks you up and places your hands and knees on the couch. Holding the back of the couch with your hands you look over your shoulder to the man tsking behind you.

“Look at the mess you’ve made.” He says referring to the wet patch where you were sitting. With one foot on the couch he leans over you, gripping your cheeks, to be nose to nose with you, a hand running down your spine and giving you another spank. Rubbing the sore skin before slipping between your thighs.

“Sweet girl, you’re so fucking wet for me. Did you like having my cock in your throat so much?” His fingers play with your soaked folds before sliding two fingers. You let out a choked moan as you stretch around his large digits moving in and out of your dripping hole. He shushes you, placing his index finger over your lips.

“Remember we don’t want to wake anyone up. So be a good girl and keep those cute sounds to yourself.” He says with a kiss.

His fingers move and curl inside you making it increasingly harder by the second to keep your sounds at a minimum. Reiner loves the view of you struggling to restrain yourself which only makes him work harder to pull them out of you. Releasing your face he moves his hand to assist his other by rubbing your clit. With the added stimulation you cover your mouth and hang your head to muffle your whimpers and moans. You’re so close to your first orgasm. The coil in your belly is winding so tight it hurts. Your tight walls squeeze his moving fingers as your knees begin to wabbel. Coming to the end of the tightrope it’s lost when he pulls his hands away. You cry your frustration into your palm.

“Shh shh. Now, Sweetheart, don’t worry Daddy will let you cum but you have to be patient. You aren’t the only one that’s been waiting for this moment.”

Laying you on your back, climbing over you he slides his hand down your body to rest on your hip. Connecting your lips once again you wrap your arms and legs around him pulling him closer. You daringly wedge a hand between you and grab his length, giving it a few strokes. He sighs into you, replacing your hand with his.

“Uh uh, you can stroke my cock all you want later but right now you’re going to lay back and look pretty for me as I fuck you into the couch.”

Sitting up, your legs still wrapped around his waist, he looks down at his tip rubbing through your folds, making your hips buck when it grazes your clitoris.

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to ruin you. Stretch out your little pussy and watch it swallow my fat cock.” A groan comes from his throat as he teases the both of you by prodding your entrance.

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes, Mr. Braun. Please, I want your cock inside me.” You beg. Unable to say no to that he sheaths himself into your tight walls.

A loud gasp escapes your mouth before you can catch it. The sting from stretching around his girth is amazing; you don’t even care.

“Fuck, you’re so tight.” His grip on your hips tightens like a vise.

His hips snap against yours, the sound of skin slapping fill the air alongside your collective breaths. He moves one hand to hold your neck down, your mouth hangs open as your eyes flutter shut.

“You’re taking me so well, Baby. You like having your boss’s cock stuffed inside your little hole, huh?” He leans down to your face, his other hand now pressing down on your lower abdomen. He lets out a low chuckle, a carnivorous smirk on his face as he feels himself moving inside you.

“I love that I can feel my cock stirring you up inside.”

You can hardly hear him over the flood of euphoria you’re caught in. The way his powerful body takes you and molds you to him is intoxicating. You love how his large hand wraps perfectly around your neck like it was meant to be there, cutting off your oxygen just enough to make you dizzy in the best way possible.

His hand on your belly moves down so he can rub your neglective clit with his rough thumb. The moment he made contact, your back arches and you begin to move your hips with him seeking your own pleasure.

“That’s it Sweetheart -fuck- you're squeezing around me so tight. Take my cock!” He says leaning into you more, his grip tightening on the sides of your neck making you feel like you’re floating. Your mouth is hung open only meek little whimpers are able to escape.

The coil in your belly burns with desire, searing your insides, so close to snapping. Needing to be closer to him you pull Reiner’s neck down to connect your lips. He releases your neck to rest his arm next to your head. You’re lost in the sloppy kiss between you, with his cock penetrating you skilfully and his fingers eagerly rubbing your sensitive bud. You can’t help but wrap your arms around him and hold him close.

You’re so close but your high just won’t come, breaking the kiss you let out a desperate whin. Cradling your cheek in his head, Reiner begins to coo at you, coxing you closer to your end.

“Oh, you’re so close aren’t you, Sweetheart. So close to cumming around my big cock that’s stuffed inside you. Why don’t you cum for me, Baby? Cum for Daddy.”

His fingers and hips are relentless in their pursuit to make you cream all over his shelf. Your fingernails rake down his back leaving behind red streaks, immortalizing this moment your bodies first joined. This shameless and unprofessional act is shared between employee and employer, it’s so wrong but feels amazing. It’s exhilarating to be taken by such a powerful man, his large body moves and bends you effortlessly till you become putty in his hands.

You clasp a hand over your gaping mouth to restrain the moans seeping from it. Coming undone beneath him, back arched, eyes squeezed shut and legs wrapped tightly around him. The hot wave of euphoria washes over you as your body trembles and becomes overstimulated by his persistent movements.

“God, you’re so beautiful when you cum around my cock.” Sitting up, retracting his hand from your clitoris, Reiner firmly grips your hips to piston himself into your already abused cunt. His movements are becoming sloppier byt he second revealing his impending release.

Teeth gritted together and looking at the joining of your bodies he continues to spit out profanities and lewd sentiments.

“Take my cock, milk me of everything I’ve got. God you feel amazing! From now on only I can see you like this, you hear me? This little pussy belongs to me now. Do you understand?” He says looking right into your eyes as he lays ownership over you and you can’t help but agree. Shaking your head trying to hold back the cute whimpers and moans you’re making is enough for Reiner to fall over the edge.

With a few final messy pumps he pulls out and squirts his hot thick ropes of cum onto your belly. Your hand falls from your mouth and rests on your chest as you try to catch your breath. You both are coming down from your high; the weight of your actions begins to hit you.

You just got unbelievably fucked by your boss and you loved it.

Did you enjoy that? Let me know!

I think there’s a lot that I could do to make it better but oh well.

I’m sure I’ll end up making more DILF! Reiner content in the future so if that’s something you’d like to see, let me know.

Feedback, likes & reblogs are always appreciated :3

💛 ~

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highfaelucien · 3 years

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Hmmm maybe lucien and elain playing with nyx and elain marveling at how good lucien is with children...

@bow-dawn also requested "give us elain watching lucien playing with nyx and that warms her heart enough to have a talk about their mating bond 😭" Everybody wants Lucien with babies because they know he's baby catnip. And I have no idea how children work but an attempt is gonna be made!!!!

send me ship prompts! platonic or otherwise!

Elain's arms were starting to get sore. Even with her being fae now. Arms that had stabbed the King of Hybern were somehow unequal to holding one small Ilyrian baby.

He was a very important baby, to be sure. Since he was her nephew. And the son of the two most powerful people in Prythian's history. Or so everyone kept saying.

Maybe he knew that. He was certainly doing everything in his power to make sure the whole of the Night Court, maybe the whole of Prythian, was aware of him right now, with the racket he was making.

They weren't sure which powers of his parents' the babe would inherit yet, he was too young. But he had an incredibly potent pair of lungs, of that she was sure of.

She'd been holding him for what felt like decades, bouncing him in her arms and trying to soothe him. He had managed to wear through her considerable patience, and she was now bordering on the edge of desperation.

This was her first time babysitting by herself. Feyre and Rhys had trusted her with their son, and she couldn't get him to stop crying! She was a terrible aunt. What kind of mother would she be? Unable to comfort her flesh and blood.

That thought made her stomach plummet. Had she lived out that other life, the one she sometimes saw reflected mockingly back at her in mirrors and pools, and married Greysen...She'd likely already be a mother. Would probably have at least one baby of her own.

She pushed that thought away before she joined Nyx in his crying.

"Cauldron boil me, Feyre!" A voice called from the stairs leading up to the roof where she'd taken Nyx hoping some fresh air might calm him. "What in the name of the Mother are you doing to that hellspawn child to make him scream that way?"

The voice was familiar, but unexpected. But she barely had a moment to process that before the door banged open and she found herself staring at Lucien.

"Oh," they said simultaneously.

Then Lucien, his cheeks changing colour to match his hair, said, looking abashed, "Lady Elain, please forgive me. I, I expected to find Feyre up here."

"I can tell," Elain said, giving him a little smile, "By the way you were shouting her name."

"Yes, well," Lucien muttered, looking rather flustered.

She found she quite liked that look on him. She always tended to see him as the polished, silver-tongued courtier, always composed and prepared to handle anything.

"I, I'm sorry, I didn't expect you to be up here. I would not have spoken to you that way if I'd known you weren't Feyre," he said, with a bow.

"Why not?" Elain said, cocking her head to one side, "I'm not some delicate flower that can't handle hearing curse words, you know," she told him, almost defiantly, "Amren has taught me many new ones. Cassian showed me how to do it in Illyrian. Rhys can be quite inventive when he's grumpy. And when all that fails, I can always just fall back on the word fuck."

He blinked at her, then grinned broadly, "Shockingly, I don't make a habit of cursing at people that I don't know all that well. Feyre and I are good friends, so she has earned my fragrant cursing at her."

"She's also High Lady of the Night Court," Elain said, raising her eyebrows, "With more power than anyone in Prythian's history has held in a long time."

Lucien waved an idle hand, "I knew her before she became all Made and Rhysandish," he told her, "Once you've seen someone puke faerie wine into a fountain of the mother at the Solstice it's hard to see them as too grand to curse at anymore."

Elain giggled at that, then winced, as that apparently seemed to upset Nyx even more.

Lucien raised an eyebrow at them, "Cursing aside," he said, leaning idly against the wall, "My question about that one still stands - what by the Cauldron have you done to him?"

"Lots of things!" Elain said, her voice snapping a little bit, "I've fed him, and I've changed him, and burped him. I've tried to put him down for a nap. I've tried to rock him, and bounce him, as swoosh him side to side. I've talked to him, and I've sung to him, and I've begged him and he still. Won't. Stop. Crying!"

Lucien smiled slightly, which made her want to smack him, because this was absolutely not funny, and she felt tears of frustration starting in her eyes.

"Feyre and Rhys trusted me to look after him on my own and I can't get him to stop crying! I don't know what I'm doing wrong," she confessed hopelessly.

"May I hold him for a moment?" Lucien asked.

Elain hesitated a moment. But Feyre had let him hold her son before. She had seen tears in his eyes when he'd done so, and it had bridged some connection between them that had never fully healed since the war. She didn't think her sister would protest, as long as she was still here.

And she was so tired. Her arms were so sore, and Nyx was becoming a very heavy and dense weight in her arms. So she nodded gratefully, eagerly pushing the little bundle into Lucien's arms.

Lucien held him with a surprising ease, as if he'd done this thousands of times before. A broad, genuine smile spread across his face as he peered down at him, bouncing him slightly in his arms.

Nyx peered up at him. Elain expected this to trigger an increase in the volume of his howling, but, incredibly, he quieted almost at once, seemingly entranced by Lucien's face, his glinting metal eye.

"There we are," Lucien said, smiling, but raised a finger as Nyx started grumbling again, "Now, now, we won't be having any of that," he told him calmly, "Ah, you have wings, don't you? Let's see then..."

Lucien carried him over to the table, unwrapped his blankets. Before Elain could protest about the cold, he rewrapped him, but gently extended his wings first, and curled them around his little body, securing them in place around him with his blankets.

"You know about babies with wings?" Elain asked, bemused.

Lucien nodded, "Certainly," he said, then seemed to consider, "Not Illyrians, and not Rhys-spawn," Elain giggled against her will, "But I'm hoping the principles are the same."

He scooped him up and bounced him. Nyx actually giggled at him, the little monster.

"How did you do that!?" she demanded, peering down at the baby, who was now lifting his chubby little hands and grabbing, as if trying to catch the glinting eye above him.

Lucien smirked, "I have a known gift," he said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself. Elain would have whacked him for that, if he hadn't been holding her baby nephew.

"You, you've been around a lot of babies?" she asked.

Nothing in his history, though admittedly she knew little of it, had implied that babysitting had been a big part of it.

"Oh yes," he said, very seriously, "Fae with troublesome younglings came to me from all over Prythian, every court, lesser and high alike so that I could use my gifts and soothe them."

Elain put her hands on her hips and growled at him, "Don't you bullshit me Lucien," she said, as sternly as she could, poking a finger into his chest.

He snickered, still grinning at her, shifting Nyx slightly in his arms as he started to fuss again, "I have a very big family," he said, shrugging.

"I thought you were the youngest of your brothers," she said, frowning.

Lucien nodded, "True," he confirmed, "But I have lots of aunts and uncles and cousins, and friends," he added, with a flicker of some emotion she couldn't quite read. He took a breath and added, "Regardless, they all felt that, as the Lord's seventh son, I didn't have anything better to do with my time than babysit all of their offspring. I've had a reasonable amount of practice."

"Well you saved me today," Elain said, collapsing into the seat that Rhys always liked to sit and brood in, overlooking the Sidra, "I don't know what I did wrong," she muttered, bracing her chin in her hands and sighing dejectedly.

Lucien cautiously approached, Nyx still cradled in his arms, and sat in the seat next to her, also glancing out over the city. "If it helps," he said, "You did everything right. Sometimes babes are just tricksy little bastards," he said with a shrug,

She frowned, trying to determine if he was patronising her.

"They like to be dramatic and seek for attention," Lucien told her calmly, "Especially when they have Rhysand, Night Discomfort, Death Irritate, the most dramatic bastard to ever spread drama, as their father" he added in a lofty voice that acutally sounded uncannily like Rhys.

Elain stuffed her fist in her mouth to stop herself snorting as she laughed.

"He is very dramatic," she agreed, tickling Nyx's tummy.

Lucien smiled down fondly at the babe, and for all his comments about him being dramatic, there was a tenderness in his face she had never seen before from him.

It made him look younger. His face was still scarred and strange, with that mechanical eye, but there was a gentleness in him she hadn't seen from most fae in her time in Prythian, it made her feel safe and calm.

Nyx started fussing a little again, and Lucien hushed him, and fluttered his fingers in the air above him. Little lights appeared above him, circling like a mobile and flashing different colours.

Elain let out a little gasp of delight watching him, which was echoed by Nyx.

Lucien glanced up at her, a wry smile on his lips as he said, "My magic isn't particularly powerful or impressive, but it's very good for entertaining infants."

"I think it's beautiful," Elain said, quiet, but sincere.

Lucien smiled.

Then he turned his head back to Nyx, tickling him with his free hand while the lights continued to circle, swooping down and booping the child on the nose, causing him to giggle.

Elain felt a sudden pulse of warmth and joy blossom in her chest like a swelling rose, and she let out a little, "Oh!"

Lucien glanced up at her, startled, "Are you alright?"

She put a hand to her chest, without breaking eye contact with him, "I, I fel you," she said quietly.

"I apologise," he said, looking truly sorrowful, "I usually keep better control of myself, but being around you makes that more difficult."

The little river of his joy faded away as he closed off the bond on his end.

"No!" she cried, with a desperation she couldn't quite explain, reaching out and putting a hand on his arm, "No," she repeated, more quietly, "Please don't, don't close down on me."

He raised his eyes, and held her gaze, unwavering, unfaltering. She felt that river again, the joy at holding the babe still there, but also excitement, anxiety, and almost unbearable anticipation. Though she had the sense he was trying to keep her from the worst of it.

"It's good," she whispered, "It feels good. I've, I've had dreams of you," she told him, "So much pain. So much guilt, and sadness, and hopeless need."

He ducked his head, turning away from her, seeming ashamed, "I'm sorry that you-"

"No," she said, quiet but firm, cupping his face in her hand, tracing his scar with her thumb, "No. You don't apologise to me for the things that others have done to you. You never do that," she said, with a fierceness that surprised even her.

"I shouldn't have let that touch you," he said quietly, "I, I don't want anyone to feel that, least of all you."

Elain held his gaze and, for the first time, she tentatively tapped at that string inside her, on her bottom rib, that one that extended beyond her in a way even her newfound Sight did not.

Through it, carefully, she pushed all of the depression, all of the pain, and all of the grief, and hopelessness, and even the darkness that had almost claimed her, caused her to step into it and never return.

He started, and his eyes filled with a thin veil of tears. But not because of the emotions she shared, but the fact that they were twin to his own. The fact that, as he looked into her eyes, he knew that she had felt what he had felt.

"We are the light for so many," she said quietly, "The sun that they grow towards, the thing they reach for in their own darkness, when they need hope, and someone who will always find a smile for them."

Lucien nodded, and picked up that thread she'd left dangling for him, causing one of his orbs to circle close to Nyx. The baby tried to catch it, giggling, and Elain saw that, but also the shadow it cast on his soft skin.

"But where there is light, there is shadow," he murmured, eyes not leaving hers, "That is the quiet burden we bear to be their light."

Elain nodded, and together they looked back down at Nyx, and let the warmth and joy at him flow, tentatively, between their bond.

***

thank you!! I hope you enjoyed!!!

#elucien #lucien vanserra #elain archeron #Nyx archeron #acofs #acotar series #acotar fic #elucien fic #my fic #mine #answer post tag #fic prompt fill #taryn fills prompts #IM DOING IT OKAY IM DOING IT #IM MAKING MY WAY #THERE'S JUST A LOT #AND I CANT STFU #long post

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forasecondtherewedwon · 4 years

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Hex Life

Fandom: WandaVision Pairing: Darcy Lewis/Jimmy Woo Rating: E Chapters: 10/10 Word Count: 34k

Summary: Guest starring Agent James E. Woo as himself and introducing Dr. Darcy Lewis as Mrs. Darcy Woo!

Or: Darcy and Jimmy are sent into the Hex to retrieve Captain Monica Rambeau. Finding out Westview has cast them as a married couple is only the first of the surprises that await them.

read ch. 1 one / 2 two / 3 three / 4 four / 5 five 6 six / 7 seven / 8 eight / 9 nine / 10 ten

this fic is now complete!

Jimmy’s going to be a dad. He was going to be a dad in a black-and-white sitcom world and now he’s going to be a dad in a world on the regular spectrum, so the colours really aren’t as big a deal as his impending fatherhood. Possible fatherhood. As much as he’s always secretly wanted his own little Jimmy Woo Jr., he didn’t know if it would be in the cards for him—pun obviously intended—and the last thing he wants to do is influence Darcy either way, especially since he’s only known her a couple days and doesn’t have a clue if a baby was really part of her life plan.

It can’t just be rose-coloured glasses making him see his wife warming to the idea though; when she continues down the hall ahead of Jimmy and Monica, he spots her careful cradling of the baby bump. He can barely stand not touching her. The instinct to shelter others has always been one of his strongest and now he feels it intensely. He longs to protect Darcy, to hold Darcy, to love— Well. Jimmy clears his throat at the very thought and Monica gives him a suspicious side-eyed glance.

“Dry throat,” he lies, tapping his neck in a probably highly unconvincing gesture.

“Uh huh.”

Yeah, she doesn’t sound convinced.

He’s rescued by a burst of sound from the bedroom and dashes ahead of Monica in case Darcy’s in trouble. When he bangs the bedroom door fully open, she’s fine. She’s laughing. He sighs and looks where she points. The queen-sized mattress they shared has changed back to a pair of narrower beds.

“Seriously,” Jimmy says flatly.

“Well, the big bed worked its magic,” Darcy concedes. She pats her rounded stomach. “Mission accomplished.”

“Aw jeeze.”

Ignoring his distress, she sits on the end of the closest bed.

“What I like is that they’re magically made. I didn’t end up having to change the sheets. This is really the next step in home technology.”

“Honey, don’t encourage the magical forces that control our home décor,” he pleads, beckoning until Darcy rises and takes his outstretched hand.

“Better than getting on their bad side. In the AI uprising, you wanna make sure you’re friends with the robots.”

This is an outrageous statement coming from a credible scientist, so Jimmy squints down at her for a minute before saying, “Thanks, house,” aloud, just in case appeasing the Hex now saves him from being closed into a room with no door later, if the walls rearrange to form the ’70s model of their current home.

“You did the smart thing,” Darcy assures him.

As they leave the room, she keeps hold of his hand. He shoots adoring glances at her.

“Hey, Monica,” she says, calling to their guest, who seems to have gone to investigate the walk-in closet. “Accommodations aren’t going to be a problem. I can give you some pajamas too because I think I own at least a dozen pairs, as I’m sure you’ve already discovered…”

But when they look in the closet it’s… not a closet.

“Or maybe the Hex destroyed all my pajamas and I should take back my overtures of friendship,” Darcy corrects.

“Welcome to your nursery,” Monica says. “I’m guessing from the look on Jimmy’s face that this is new.”

It’s spartan, but there’s no doubt in Jimmy’s mind that the room is now intended to be exactly what Monica said. There’s a crib in pieces on the carpet and a rocking chair in the corner. Though he can’t remember this room having even one window, there are now two. The blinds are drawn against the night and curtains patterned with stars and streaking comets hang from a rod mounted above the window. Automatically, he pulls Darcy into his side. He feels her rest her head on his shoulder.

“Man, the Hex is really giving us the hard sell,” she comments.

Just like that, he’s guiding her around by her upper arms and propelling her from the room. He glances over his shoulder to see Monica following with an amused smile. At his nod, she pulls the door shut.

“Ignore it,” Jimmy tells Darcy. “Don’t let that room influence you.”

“Oh, like that’s easy.” She rolls her eyes.

“I know it’s hard not to picture reading Jimmy Junior to sleep in his crib, or watching him learn to roll himself over on the carpet, or cuddling him in your arms in the rocking chair as the morning light—”

“Jimmy Junior?” Darcy asks, interrupting Jimmy’s rapidly solidifying daydream.

“You know what? I’m starving,” Monica announces, putting a hand on each of their shoulders to head off the awkward pause. “How about you two show me some hospitality? I’ve had a long day of being mind-controlled.”

“How ’bout some comfort food?” he asks. “I make a mean bowl of chili.”

“Sounds great.”

So, Jimmy cooks for them. His attention is unequally divided between the simmering pot, Monica leaning against the counter next to him as she recounts the scene at the meeting when Wanda went to take his call, and Darcy sifting pickily through the contents of their fridge. He glances over after putting the lid on the pot to let the chili finish cooking and sees his wife contemplatively holding an egg like it’s Yorick’s skull. Ok, well, he’s just going to leave her to her thoughts.

He sets bowls of chili for himself and Monica on the dining room table. Darcy, justifiably finnicky, takes longer to decide what she’ll be able to stomach, reflexively rubbing the baby bump as she plunders their kitchen. Finally, she comes to sit down. She’s brought a spoon. That’s it. Jimmy’s going to ask, but Darcy just scoots her chair close to his and takes intermittent mouthfuls of his serving while the conversation continues on. He sighs in unannoyed exasperation and alternates dips of his spoon with hers.

It’s just another weird routine they’ve settled into, and like everything else, it didn’t take long.

“You two didn’t know each other before this assignment, right?” Monica checks, motioning between Darcy and Jimmy with a slice of buttered toast.

“No, why?” Darcy asks, dropping a chunk of tomato from her spoon onto his. (Apparently, she doesn’t like tomatoes.)

Monica smiles and says, “No reason.”

She seems ready to accept them as they are, whatever they are. She goes back over the events of this afternoon for Darcy’s benefit—who was zoned out staring at an egg at the time—then the three of them turn to talk of tomorrow. What does Monica feel she needs to try before she’s willing to concede and leave the Hex with them? What can she try? How can Jimmy and Darcy assist her? They talk themselves in a circle of possibilities, limitations, and Monica’s unswerving negative answer to suggestions of her leaving the Hex without getting through to Wanda. Eventually, they decide that the best plan may be no plan, since they’re up against Westview’s ever-shifting magical properties.

“We’ll get up in the morning and see what the world looks like,” Monica says.

Jimmy’s going to reply when the Captain’s expression alters.

“Are you remembering?” Darcy asks her astutely. Monica stares at her. “I don’t want to pry, I’ve just seen that look on a lot of people’s faces lately. People who came back.”

“This isn’t dissimilar,” Monica admits. “When I get anywhere near Wanda or the other characters with speaking parts and start to lose control to… Geraldine—” Jimmy thinks the look on her face is both disgusted and deeply hurt. “—I do get this feeling like the world is going on without me. Only I’m there. I’m right there. I haven’t made up my mind yet if it’s worse than being gone entirely then coming back to find nothing’s the same.”

“Yeah,” Darcy says, soft, sympathetic.

“I don’t know what else the members of this community have been through, but I know I don’t want them to have to keep going through this too. I can’t imagine how tight Wanda’s grip is on the people who were here when she started this. Not sure I’m qualified to be the one to tell her how to let go of her grief and move on.”

Monica blinks quickly and gives a forced smile.

“That was good chili, Jimmy.”

He nods in thanks because he can’t find the right words to say.

They’re all carrying something and Jimmy thinks about that as the three of them clean up, then splinter off to get ready for bed, tired for different and shared reasons. (He changes into his pajamas in the nursery—they found their clothing in a new, regular-sized closet in the bedroom—while Monica and Darcy take the bathrooms.) The Captain’s carrying her recent bereavement and the unignorable sense of responsibility she feels to help Wanda and the Westviewers, possibly precisely because she isn’t ready to confront her own loss. Darcy’s doing some literal carrying with the baby bump her pajama top is buttoned over when she steps out of the en suite bathroom to let Jimmy in to brush his teeth. She’s an astrophysicist who, while studying a television diversion from reality, was brought rudely back to earth by circumstances as real as they come.

What Jimmy’s carrying is actually carrying him: his hope. It’s a good thing to have in his line of work, but a tough thing to keep when the world’s been through what it has. A baby is the least likely and most longed-for thing he would’ve confessed to wanting if someone asked him what was missing from his life.

When it’s acknowledged through awkward glances that, yes, Monica’s taking one of the beds and Jimmy and Darcy will share the other, he climbs under the covers his wife holds open for him. She rolls away from him to lie on her side and he gets comfortable on his back. The Hex has definitely eased up on what it wants for their romantic development because this is the first time he’s been in bed with Darcy and not felt himself caving to the need to have sex with her. Oh, the desire to touch her is as powerful as ever, but the kind of touching he craves is as tender as the flesh of that peach he brought her earlier in the day.

But he doesn’t want to crowd her. Figuratively or literally. Between finding Monica and calling Wanda, making love to Darcy all afternoon and being presented with her pregnant belly in the evening, it’s been a dog’s breakfast of a day. The mission abruptly became just the second most daunting thing he needs to pull off. Now, he’s driven by the impulse to be near Darcy. She doesn’t know it, but she’s drawing him in like gravity and he can only cross his fingers for a soft landing.

Jimmy almost jumps when she reaches for him in the dark, hand feeling behind her until it finds his. She drags his arm over her and he flips onto his side to make it easier. Though Darcy lets him go when his arm’s around her, he doesn’t know where to rest his hand. Tentatively, he places it over her belly and she wriggles back into him. Heart bursting, he holds her more securely to his body, smooths his hand over the bump, and soon falls asleep.

—

The floor wakes him up. He’s just fallen out of bed.

Disoriented, Jimmy sits up in a tangle of comforter and squints at his bed companion in the morning light. They must’ve repositioned while they slept, but that alone wasn’t what forced him to and over the edge—he can see the shape of Darcy’s belly beneath the sheet. It’s noticeably larger than it was yesterday.

He’s still trying to come to terms with that when she sleepily grasps the comforter and yanks it back over her body. Jimmy chuckles and rises into a stretch. Monica’s bed is empty and neatly made, so she must be up already. Before entering the Hex, his internal clock was strict too. Since, he bends to the needs of his subconscious, which seems happiest when it’s allowed to sleep in, particularly if Darcy’s warming the sheets next to him. This is only their third day in Westview and the second time waking up here, but it feels wonderfully routine. As satisfying as completing his consistently-timed morning run or pouring exactly the right amount of milk into his cereal.

Although he’d like to let Darcy sleep, it’s weird now because he’s staring. Anyway, they need to tighten up their operations even further today if they’re going to get out of here soon. Monica requires either success or closure with Wanda, so Jimmy’s determined to help with that. And if Darcy’s pregnancy takes another leap forward, well… that’s another time crunch to consider.

She’s lying on her side, facing him, belly in the space where he fell asleep. Gently, he brushes hair out of her face and strokes lightly up and down her arm.

Darcy gives him a murmured “Hi” with her eyes still shut.

“You gonna get up?”

“Inaminute,” she promises, words running together.

“Alright.”

Jimmy hovers for a second, then darts down to kiss her forehead. She pats his shoulder clumsily in response.

He might as well have had his own eyes shut, blind to everything but Darcy, because it takes opening his wardrobe to realize Monica was correct—everything’s changed again. WandaVision has embraced the ’70s. The shirts and suits he was pretty comfortable with have been traded out. Those items still exist, but now they’re aggressively patterned. There are flared pant legs. There is so much corduroy. Out of the row of shoes tucked into the bottom on his side of the closet, half have platform heels.

“Oh god,” Jimmy groans softly, sifting through for something that won’t feel too much like a cheesy costume.

He ends up with jeans—his only pair of pants without a pattern—and a striped shirt with wide lapels. The Hex’s makeover of his closet has him so beaten down that he doesn’t even pick out a jacket. He doesn’t have the heart for business casual. At the sight of a long-sleeved jumpsuit, Jimmy closes the closet door securely. They have to get out of here. This will be the thing that breaks him.

Slouching into the bathroom, he drops his selections on the counter and takes a shower. As he washes his hair, his fingers slow their scrubbing. Is his hair… longer? He finishes quickly and steps out to find the mirror fogged with steam. He wipes it clean with his forearm, examining his reflection. This place isn’t through with him yet: the Hex has given him a mustache.

Jimmy screams.

“Fine!” Darcy shouts back to his wordless noise of dismay. “I’m up! God, you could’ve just set an alarm and OH MY GOD, HAVE YOU SEEN THE SIZE OF THIS BABY BUMP?!”

He sighs on behalf of himself and his wife, slicks his too-long wet hair back with a comb, then starts in on shaving off the mustache. It immediately grows back.

“Come on,” he complains, cursing the Hex. “Why’d you give me a razor then?!”

Luckily, his annoyance fades the minute he sees Darcy. She’s swearing up a storm about needing to pee and her head looking too small for her body because the Hex has straightened her hair, but he takes all of her restless irritation in with a dazed smile on his face. Adjusting her glasses—now almost circular, with rounded off corners—she catches sight of his new look and erupts into laughter. Whatever the Hex does to mess with their appearance, at least they’re each other’s best medicine to combat it.

“I don’t want to be insensitive,” Monica starts when they walk into the kitchen hand in hand, “but are you significantly more pregnant than you were yesterday?”

Jimmy watches Darcy nod and slips away from her to throw some more bread in the toaster from the bag Monica’s left out on the counter for them.

“You’d think it’s just this big, shapeless dress,” Darcy says, “but no.” She pulls the fabric taut over her stomach to show the size of her belly more accurately. “I don’t want to say it, but the size of this thing makes me think the Hex is leaving me room to grow.”

“And if that dress is only for today…” Monica says.

“Jeepers,” Jimmy concludes.

They eat together in their reconfigured living room. It’s not until Monica’s kicked back in one of their low chairs, ankle propped on her opposite knee, that Jimmy notices her patterned pants.

“Those aren’t from Darcy’s closet are they?”

“No. I’m assuming they’re my clothes from yesterday with the matter recycled for a new decade. Believe me, this outfit wouldn’t have been my choice if I had anything else to pick from.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure. I had a whole closet and still ended up with this,” Jimmy says, motioning to himself.

“My retro Secret Agent Man,” Darcy states admiringly, leaning her head over to bump against his shoulder. Ok, he thinks, smiling at her, I can be alright with this for her.

When Monica rises to turn on the television, Jimmy realizes this is the first time they’ve had one in the house. He remembers seeing a set in the Vision residence when he and Darcy were watching an episode on the S.W.O.R.D. base, but he didn’t notice the lack once they got here. Probably because that first night was taken up with flirting, and then yesterday was split between scouring the downtown for Monica and holing up in the bedroom with Darcy. Watching the screen buzz to life now is like witnessing something truly futuristic and spectacular.

“Well, whaddaya know,” he says as the opening sequence of WandaVision begins.

“You think the TVs in here play anything else?” Darcy wonders aloud.

“Maybe not,” Monica says distractedly as they all turn their attention to Wanda and Vision’s adorable antics—the ice cream, the tandem bicycle. “It’s a pretty big coincidence that this show started right when I turned it on.”

“I can see an even bigger coincidence.”

There’s no need to guess what Darcy means. Wanda’s baby bump is obvious in nearly every shot of the introduction, particularly emphasized when she and Vision dance together, his hand on her belly. It’s all maternity clothes and Vision reading pregnancy books and while it’s wholesome, it’s also chilling.

“We’re doing the same plot,” Jimmy says.

“It’s like we’re… their understudies,” Darcy agrees, shrinking back into the cushions.

“Maybe Wanda figured, if you two wanted to be in the show so bad, she’d put you in the show,” Monica theorizes. “Her show. Exactly the way she’s living it.”

“So she’s teaching us a lesson? On what? Abstinence?”

“Could be a misguided attempt to gain your sympathy.”

“Or it really is all about control,” Jimmy suggests, cynical after the reveal that the pregnancy that’s upended his entire life isn’t really theirs. It’s not original. They’re following a Newlywed Couple template.

“Hey,” Darcy says, grabbing his arm, “this wasn’t all Wanda. She might’ve set the scene and, yeah, maybe we were more the goatherd puppets than we were Fraulein Maria and Captain von Trapp, but we did this.” She pulls his hand to her belly. “Wanda doesn’t decide what we do next.”

“What I suggest you not do next is consult Dr. Misogyny over here,” Monica says, gesturing at the television.

The doctor is condescending to Wanda and Vision about the facts of life during a checkup (in their living room?). He lowers himself even further in Jimmy’s regard when he refers to expectant mothers as “little ladies” and implies that the changes in their own bodies are beyond their understanding.

“What a quack,” he decides. “We’re not going to see that guy.” He’s startled to recall his promise to Darcy the previous evening, about options, his intention not to make up her own mind for her. Lowering his voice, he tilts his head close to hers. “I mean, we’ll do whatever you want. Including…”

Jimmy trails off and casts his eyes down. He still means it, wants Darcy on board with this 100% or not at all, but the whole thing’s been a roller coaster and he’s not great at pretending not to feel anything. With his wife so much further into her pregnancy today, it’s obvious that this baby will be born and they’ll need to decide who’s raising it. He thinks the two of them together could rear a pretty incredible kid, but if she wants out, is he prepared to be a single parent? The other option besides her, him, or both of them raising the baby is adoption. They’d need to leave the Hex before taking those steps (it’s not like he’s going to encourage Darcy to hand the baby over to a mind-controlled Westviewer), and just thinking about it, with everything he already feels for the baby, makes him certain that he’d rather rearrange his entire life than pass on this chance at a family. However unorthodox their beginnings.

“Don’t worry,” Darcy says calmly, pulling him from his spiral. “That guy will never get the chance to compare my uterus to a vegetable garden.”

“Fruit,” Monica corrects without looking away from the television.

“Right. Fruit. He’ll have no say about any of it. And he definitely won’t get the opportunity to be patronizing as fuck while he tries to give us the sex talk.” She looks Jimmy right in the eye and says, “I won’t let the asshole doctor-man say a word about your banana.”

Chuckling, he looks back to the screen. The doctor has departed and Vision’s currently baffled over Wanda’s newly expanded stomach. Uh oh. He jerks his head around to check and, yep, Darcy’s baby bump appears to be keeping up with the sitcom star’s.

“You two stay here,” Monica instructs, on her feet when Jimmy glances over.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“To Wanda’s. If things continue at this rate, she could give birth in this episode. That’s going to make her even more protective of her family and her space and I’ll have an even harder time getting near her.”

“Are you sure you want to interrupt?”

They both glance at the television for a moment to observe Wanda and Vision debating baby names in the nursery. There’s nothing distressing about the scene—in fact, the couple looks as much at ease as Jimmy’s seen them on the show—but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t change, and quickly, if Monica inserted herself. He just isn’t sure how that would go and he doesn’t like any plan where he can’t foresee all the possible outcomes.

“Guess I just have a feeling,” Monica says, looking unsettled.

“Well,” Darcy pipes up, “in the world of science, having a feeling is forming a theory, and in this place… I think having a feeling you should do something might be Wanda giving you your cue.”

“You’re not beyond her control,” Jimmy tells Monica, “just farther away from it. What if Darcy’s right?”

“If Wanda wants me there, I’m not going to resist,” she replies firmly. “She’s the key and we need her cooperation.”

“Good luck,” Darcy bids her.

With a nod to them both, Monica strides across the living room and opens the front door.

“Speaking of keys,” Jimmy recalls, but the door shuts before he can offer to let her borrow their car to get to Wanda’s.

Maybe the Captain has a different plan. Maybe she’s just bending to Wanda’s influence. Whichever it is, he can’t go after her. Monica was right—he has to stay here with Darcy today, especially because her belly seems larger when he looks again. He glances at her face with a question on his and she nods.

“And I felt a kick,” she says.

“Really? Could I…? Do you think I could…?”

Darcy rolls her eyes at his reticence and guides both his hands to the bump. When he feels something nudge his palm, Jimmy tears up.

“That’s our baby,” Darcy confirms.

“Feels like they have my softball windup,” he murmurs.

“Or my pre-coffee restlessness.”

“Our baby,” Jimmy repeats, staring into her eyes—finally blue for the first time in days, give or take a decade.

They’re having a marvelous family moment until the power goes out. Lights, TV, the hum of the fridge in the kitchen, everything. Seconds later, it all comes back.

“That was strange.”

“I wondered what Wanda’s magic was doing to the power grid,” Darcy says. “I’m still curious about the finer points of what happens when electricity meets power generated by an Infinity Stone. Really, I’d expect Wanda to have this kinda thing under control, but I guess if she’s— Ugh!”

Her pained noise has Jimmy cupping her face, pushing back her hair, trying to figure out what happened.

“She’s distracted,” she says.

“By what?”

“Labour.”

“What? No.”

Sure enough, when Darcy stands (with Jimmy leaping to his feet to support her) and stretches her back, her bump looks big enough to contain a baby that’s almost ready to be born. Ready to be born?! Jimmy thinks. In our house? With no doctor? Just because the one on TV rubbed him the wrong way doesn’t mean he’s prepared to write off every doctor, nurse, and midwife in Westview. He would very much like to place responsibility for this delivery in the hands of a medical professional, not his own!

Even as the TV’s flickering back to life, he helps Darcy away from it. That just shows how serious things are. He knows how quickly she became invested in the sitcom when they reviewed the ’50s episode at the base.

After some frantic thought, he’s thinking the bathtub is going to have to do. People do that right? With home births? Although he attempts to guide Darcy in that direction, she doesn’t even want to sit down on the edge, let alone climb in. No, she wants to pace, and as she paces, she rubs at her lower back, wincing.

“We could look at the nursery,” he proposes. “Might take your mind off it.”

Jimmy knows it could be a weak suggestion, an insult to imply that anything could take Darcy’s mind off whatever discomfort she’s currently feeling, but the Hex, with its radioactive walls, smiles down on them for once. With his arm around her to take some of her weight, they hobble into the baby’s room and it’s… perfect.

The walls are dark blue near the ceiling, almost black, fading to periwinkle halfway down the wall. The lower portion transitions from blue to pale yellow, then a blazing orange right before the baseboard.

“It’s a sunrise,” he comprehends.

“Yeah,” Darcy says softly.

Though he feels like he got slightly ripped off by not being allowed a chance to do any of the decorating, he does admire the Hex’s choices. At last, his wife’s been represented in this space, in this house, and it’s beautiful. There’s a shelf full of space-themed board books, a plastic jumble of play versions of scientific tools like telescopes. A dangling mobile of the planets. After easing his wife into the rocking chair, Jimmy holds up a pack of glow-in-the-dark stars.

“Should I put these up?”

She smiles.

“I would be all over that shit if I could, but I trust you to do a good job.”

“Oh no. Do you want me to do real constellations?”

“The baby’s not gonna know the difference. Make it look however you want.”

She rocks, assuring him something about the motion is helping her manage the intensifying pain of her contractions, and Jimmy finds a small stepping stool to help him reach the ceiling. The sway of the chair in the corner of his eye, the morning light through the curtains, and the sound of Darcy breathing are things he already knows he’ll never forget.

Before he’s stuck all the stars in the pack to the ceiling’s white paint, she calls him down from the stool.

“I need to walk again.”

Darcy says it with grit and Jimmy doesn’t argue, even when walking appears to put her in even more distress; she groans and pushes her free hand against the wall as they stroll out of the nursery and down the hallway.

“Let’s check in with Wanda,” Jimmy says helplessly.

This is who he is now: a husband in over his head, desperate to gain tips about delivering a baby from a TV sitcom. An overwhelmed real estate agent. A man with a mustache.

They return to the living room and the TV playing WandaVision in time for Monica’s entrance. Based on her free use of ’70s slang and the general discord between the Captain Rambeau Jimmy’s been getting to know and the woman on the screen, he knows they’re looking at Geraldine. Wanda’s back in control of her character alright, and Jimmy wants to know who it’s helping. The scene’s centered around some joke about Wanda attempting to hide her pregnancy, which is no good for him. He needs a step-by-step guide, not a magic-resistant stork!

“There better not be a fucking bird in here,” Darcy gripes, alternately crouching and standing as every position fails to make her comfortable. “If I see a fucking, goddamn, sonofabitch, motherfucking—”

“I know, sweetie, I know,” Jimmy assures her, rubbing circles between her shoulder blades with the flat of his hand.

“The betrayal,” she mutters when Wanda elects to lie down behind a couch.

It completely blocks their view. If this were a regular show, Jimmy would understand that. Sitcom viewers would definitely appreciate a little TV magic over graphic, up-close-and-personal birth footage, but here at the Woo residence, one FBI agent and his astrophysicist wife really just want the truth! If Monica had agency, he’s sure she’d shove the couch aside to help them out, but with Geraldine at the helm, he’s confronting the fact that he and Darcy are on their own.

“Let’s go, Darcy,” he says, steering her towards the bathroom. “We don’t need her.”

“Are you sure?”

He’s never heard Darcy sound so uncertain and knows he’ll have to bluff his way through this. When the Avengers aren’t around, the regular people must step up. Reminding himself of that has gotten Jimmy through more than one tough day on the job and he tells himself it’ll get them both through this.

“Of course.”

In the bathroom, Darcy kicks out of her underwear and uses Jimmy as a crutch to climb into the tub. Her face is scrunched up severely and her hands are braced against the walls of the bathtub, so he tries to watch and understand what she needs. When all the tension in her face and body burst out in a shout, he grabs her hand. Her fingers curl around his palm in a death grip.

“How about some nice warm water? Water, Darcy?”

She nods rapidly, eyes clenched shut, and he turns on the facet, then quickly reaches behind her to plug the drain. The stream wets his sleeve and, when he withdraws his arm, hits her hair around the level of her shoulders and begins to soak the back of her dress. Between contractions, Darcy sighs in what sounds like relief.

“That feels good,” she acknowledges.

“Good,” is all Jimmy can say back. He kisses her face and squeezes her hand in his. “Good.”

He’s back to scrambling for a solution soon enough when the warm flow of water down her back stops being enough to soothe her. He helps her out of her sodden dress, tossing it behind him to splat on the tile floor.

“What do you need?” he asks wildly, leaning over the tub.

“Earplugs,” Darcy tells him before emitting a scream shrill enough to probably be heard by their neighbour’s dog, Dipper, down the street.

Jimmy doesn’t think, he just does. Snatching a towel off the rail, bracing his wife’s foot against his shoulder as her leg spasms, reaching into the water to collect their baby when the Hex (he assumes) does them the favour of letting one long push be sufficient to expel him. Him. Jimmy and Darcy’s son.

He’s beaming through the happy tears, delicately wiping at the wailing baby with the towel and passing him into Darcy’s outstretched arms as she shakes with astonished laughter, hair wet, head resting back against the jut of the faucet.

“That wasn’t so hard,” he jokes.

Darcy sits up, sending a splash of water over the side of the bathtub to slap the floor, and he knows the Hex is interfering again to make her capable of anything besides exhaustion after what she just accomplished. She twists sideways in the tub until she’s closer to Jimmy. He wraps an arm around her wet shoulders and peers down at the face of their boy, already drowsy after exercising his tiny lungs. Jimmy can feel Darcy studying his face.

“Jimmy Woo Junior?” she asks.

And he knows the rest is going to be gravy.

—

Inside the Hex, the magic of television is real. They didn’t need to fake Darcy’s pregnancy with a cushion to make her belly, round and taut as a beach ball, disappear entirely only minutes after giving birth. They didn’t need a set of twins or triplets playing Jimmy Woo Jr. to swap in a quiet baby for one that starts to cry. There’s no trick lighting or fudged angles, just Darcy sitting on the couch (in dry, non-maternity clothes) catching their amazingly calm, less than an hour-old son up on the details of his origin story—Darcy’s wording.

It’s shaping up to be a nice, if highly unusual, family day in, until the tension starts to mount on-screen. Probably something Jimmy could’ve caught sooner if he weren’t spending 50 seconds out of every minute stroking the baby’s teeny-weeny hands while he hopes Jimmy Jr. retains zero memory of his dad’s mustache. When he hears Monica mention Wanda’s brother by name, he’s fully alert to the episode and knows he has to act. That close to Wanda, Monica’s control should be fully suppressed beneath the character of Geraldine. If she’s breaking through to ask Wanda person questions, questions that are almost definitely going to provoke an emotional response, Monica must be fighting like crazy to surface. Jimmy decides that’s his signal to get over there and help bring this thing to a satisfying conclusion so they can all leave the Hex.

“You’re not going to Wanda’s without me,” Darcy informs him, planted in front of the door when Jimmy returns from grabbing his keys.

“Darcy, you can’t. The baby. I’d stay with him and let you go, but I’ve never heard you mention particular skill in hand-to-hand combat and I can’t guarantee things won’t turn violent.”

She snorts.

“Liar. I could be the world’s biggest hand-to-hand badass and you’d still be trying to protect me right now.”

He stares at her and Darcy stubbornly lifts her chin as she holds his eyes.

“Ok,” Jimmy concedes, “yes, I would.”

“Please don’t leave us here,” she says, cheek pressed to the baby’s. No, no, no, he can already feel himself wanting to surrender, to have them with him. Darcy kisses their son’s face, then holds his hand to gesture while she pitches her voice higher, pretending to speak for Jimmy Jr. “I want to meet Auntie Monica.”

He gives her a look and reaches past her to open the door. Instead of trying to exit around his family, he waves Darcy through ahead of him. (She looks down at the baby in her arms and goes “Yaaaay! Isn’t Daddy a soft touch?”)

“You didn’t persuade me,” he says, leading them to the car and holding the door for Darcy while she climbs into the back seat with the baby. “This is strategic.”

“Is the strategy common sense? I feel like you should’ve gone with that from the beginning. Bringing a scientist to a magic fight is good thinking, for, like, balance and shit.”

Jimmy backs down the driveway as gently as he can. Their car’s been modernized (well, for the latest decade) and while it now has seatbelts, it wasn’t equipped with a car seat for their son. He’s going to have to drive with the utmost care.

“Hopefully, there won’t be a fight,” he reminds Darcy, “but if there is, you won’t be anywhere near it. You and Jimmy Junior are staying in the car. Alright?”

When he darts his gaze to the rear-view mirror, he sees his wife looking out her window, making a show of not listening to him. Jimmy sighs.

Without thinking, he navigates back to the street where they dropped Monica off yesterday. Wanda’s house is just down from Dottie’s; he remembers the number from watching WandaVision. Jimmy draws up to the curb and parks. He glances back at Darcy, but she’s still ignoring him.

“I’ll try to be right back,” he tells her anyway, eyes dropping longingly to the serene face of his sleeping son. He’s heard that about babies and car rides.

Jogging up the driveway, he does a doubletake of a ragged slash in the wall between Wanda’s property and her neighbour’s. There’s not exactly anything wrong with a damaged cinderblock or an amateur handyman job, but the crevice in the stone stands out in a world so aggressively styled and manicured.

Wishing for the reassurance of his gun at his hip in case things go south (it’s the first time he’s even thought about the gun since the night he and Darcy arrived), Jimmy enters the Vision residence without knocking.

Orienting himself to what he was just watching on TV in a house less than a mile from here, he walks across the entryway, attracting the attention of both Wanda and Monica. They’re standing across from each other in the living room. Raising his hands to show he intends no harm, Jimmy sweeps his eyes over the scene in assessment, like he has a hundred times before. Monica’s expression is alarmed under superficial friendliness—the look of someone trying to placate an attacker. With her aggressive, forward-leaning posture and the way she’s positioned herself between Monica and the cribs (he’s surprised to see more than one, but he did miss some of the episode while he was delivering his son in their bathtub), Wanda fits that role.

“Wanda,” he says, taking a step towards the seating area, “you don’t want to hurt her.”

“Are you working with her?” Wanda demands. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

“James Woo. I’m not here to hurt you. Neither is Geraldine.”

“You don’t want to hurt me? Then why do you come asking questions? Saying things—” He can see her chin wobble from here as she teeters on the edge of tears. “—about Pietro. You didn’t know my brother.”

Her statement is directed at Monica, but Jimmy tries to bring her focus back to him. Of himself and the Captain, he’s the one with an exit at his back, whereas Monica’s hemmed in by a large bookcase.

“I didn’t know your brother,” Jimmy agrees. “I do know about him, but we don’t need to talk about that. I don’t want to upset you, Wanda, I just want you to let me leave with Geraldine.”

“Oh, I’ll let you leave,” Wanda says, cocking her head as she raises her hands. This motion conveys the opposite meaning to Jimmy’s—she does intend them harm.

He’s contemplating what’ll happen if he tries to rush her when Darcy charges through the front door he left open.

“Don’t!” Jimmy gasps, making a grab for her, but his body is tense with caution and Darcy has the momentum to dodge him, stepping down the level into the living room.

“Look,” Darcy demands of Wanda, whose expression is torn as she chooses between facing Monica and this new intruder.

Jimmy’s mentally composing and rejecting ideas of how to proceed when their unwelcoming host lowers her hands. She’s looking where Darcy directed her to, at the baby in Darcy’s arms.

“He was born less than an hour ago, and I only found out I was pregnant yesterday, but that doesn’t matter. I know it’s the same for you, the circumstances and the… yeah, whatever. You know about the Big Bang, right?” she continues, jumping to the next thought.

“Yes,” Wanda says carefully.

Jimmy’s terrified to move closer and set Wanda on the offensive again. He glances at Monica, who seems to be thinking the same thing, frozen in place.

“From nothing to so much, in an instant,” Darcy’s saying in her condensed history of the universe. “Science is supposed to be full of all these rules. Like, every scientist dude important enough to remember had some law or formula or method that we map everything on top of when we’re pretending we understand all this. Being in science isn’t a goal I’ve had for a long time—I mean, I probably wouldn’t be in it now if the world hadn’t more or less ended—and if all I ever heard about the workings of the universe was rules, I would’ve stayed away. Who likes rules, right? Who wants to be told that things are the way they are because something outside of your control says so? My point is…”

She takes a deep breath, then another one, shifting until she’s blocking Wanda’s expression from Jimmy’s view.

“Sorry, I just gave birth, you know how it is,” Darcy says when she goes on. Jimmy’s stricken with exasperation, adoration, fear, and pride. “My point is that I love science because, while science is laws and rules and equations, science is also standing outside at night and staring up at the dark. There are explanations for every light that’s up there and why, even when you’re away from big cities and the sky seems so black and close, you don’t fall up into it, although it kinda feels like you could. Science can tell me why, and it still feels like magic when I look at the stars. And we’ve all been traveling out here in space together, getting made and unmade and made again because the right ingredients needed to create something as precious as a planet, or a baby, or the clay that’ll make the bricks that’ll make the house never disappear. Suns explode, asteroids collide and get chipped away… things can separate down to their smallest part, life can…”

“End?” Wanda asks.

Jimmy’s stunned to hear the word come out choked. Cautiously, he leans to get a glimpse of Wanda’s face. It’s covered in tears. Darcy’s nodding.

“But everything’s valuable. All matter gets reused.” Jimmy wants to grab her and pull her to safety when she takes a step closer to Wanda. “I get it if you’re sad and you’re not ready to talk about it. I’m not gonna say it’s ok, because I’ve heard Monica’s testimonial on exactly how much it sucks to have you in her head, but I do think you should let us leave now so you have a few friends out there when you inevitably need people on your side.”

“You can go,” Wanda agrees, swiping at her nose. “I won’t hurt your baby.”

“You’re not going to hurt my friend either,” Darcy says, beckoning for Monica to cross the room behind her. “Or my husband.”

“No,” Wanda says.

Monica reaches Jimmy and they wait for Darcy in the entryway.

“I bet all that control feel really good,” Darcy theorizes. “Taking it into your own hands. But I think you know that focusing on the beautiful, magical stuff doesn’t mean the rules no longer exist. Maybe you can find a way to accept them both.”

“It’s time for you to leave,” Wanda says, firmer now.

“Not looking for a life coach, got it.”

She joins Jimmy and Monica, bouncing the baby lightly in her arms. Wanda ushers them out of the house ahead of her. Jimmy glances back to see her close the door after herself with a twist and red glow of her hands.

“What about waiting in the car?” he mutters to Darcy as they stride down the lawn.

His self-proclaimed wife stares at him.

“I’m not the kind of person who waits in the car. Would the kind of person who waits in the car give a speech like that?”

Jimmy’s at an honest-to-goodness loss for words.

She gets into the car willingly enough now, Jimmy in the passenger’s seat while Monica slides behind the wheel.

“Wanda’s told me how to stand, how to move, how to walk since I got in here,” Monica says, turning the key in the ignition. “I’m driving myself out.”

“It’ll part for you when you get there,” Wanda calls to them from the lawn. “The barrier. I suggest you do not attempt to enter again.”

“I think we’ve all had our fill,” Jimmy informs her cheerfully through his rolled-down window.

She doesn’t respond to this, so Monica executes a three-point turn and takes them back up the street the way they came. From there, they turn out of the subdivision, but Jimmy snags a last look at Wanda through the back window. There’s a light breeze blowing her dress and hair and she looks like she could be anyone. A suburban mom of twins? Why not. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever see her again in person, but he has plans to catch her show.

“Wanda’s changed the roads,” Monica says as she drives. For his son’s sake, Jimmy’s grateful that she isn’t speeding, though he wouldn’t blame her for trying to get out of here as quickly as possible. “None of them lead out of town.”

“Literal tourist trap. Brilliant,” Darcy declares from the back seat. Jimmy reaches an arm back blindly and feels her close her hand around his.

“But,” Monica adds, “I remember Ellis Avenue being the closest cross street to the edge of town. We find that, then drive over the grass. Things may get a little bumpy.”

“We’ll survive.”

Jimmy twists around to look at Darcy. He nods. They will. They’ll survive.

They cross Ellis and take the car off-road. The barrier remains invisible, but…

“I can feel it,” Darcy says.

“Like we did the day we came in,” Jimmy recalls.

“It still wants us out,” Monica interprets. He sees her staring uneasily ahead. “Was I naïve to think I could change anything by coming in here?”

“No, Captain. It was brave.”

“Didn’t work though. We aren’t leaving with Wanda.”

“It could work,” Darcy says. “We left her with a few things to think about. We’ll watch WandaVision and see.”

“That’ll be strange after being a part of it.”

“You think so?” Jimmy wonders. He takes a deep breath, enjoying the fresh air and the sunshine, playing with Darcy’s fingers laced through his. “I think it’s returning to regular life that’s going to feel strange. Out there, it’s easy to see all this as a TV show, but everything in here is real.”

“We’ll make Hayward understand that.”

“I’m bringing back some compelling evidence,” Darcy says, followed by kissy sounds directed at Jimmy Jr.

The air just a couple of car lengths ahead of them abruptly glows red as Wanda reveals the wall of the Hex. Jimmy and Monica exchange a look, but she doesn’t slow down. They pass through without resistance. All of a sudden, it’s night. Monica lets out a relieved sigh.

The S.W.O.R.D. base is looming, exterior lights ablaze, but Jimmy looks backwards, checking that Darcy and the baby are alright.

“Same as you left us,” she says, pulling back the blanket to show him the face of his son.

He gives her a slightly melancholic smile.

“Not quite, Dr. Lewis.”

“I’ll have a lot of work to do,” Darcy notes thoughtfully, “but time for you and me to go on dates will be on my list of demands.”

“You have a list of demands?” Monica asks, laughter in her voice.

“After being forced into the Hex, where I could’ve lost my life? Fuck yes, I have a list.”

“What else are you asking for?”

“The coffee I requested on day one and a desk in a better spot so there’s room next to it for the crib that will also be on my list.”

Monica laughs aloud now.

“Is this a benefits negotiation or a baby shower registry?”

“Let’s get back to the part where we’re going on dates,” Jimmy says. “How’s that going to work?”

“Jimmy, darlin’,” Darcy begins, “will you go out with me?”

He leans to look around his seat at her.

“Darcy, we were married. We have a baby. Don’t you think we can—”

“Answer the question, Agent Woo.”

“Of course I’ll go out with you,” he says.

“And that’s how it works. Easy-peasy.”

She gives his hand a squeeze before releasing it to hold Jimmy Jr. more securely as Monica pulls up to a building and brakes. Already, S.W.O.R.D. agents are rushing out to meet them, but Jimmy drops back against his seat and smiles to himself.

“‘Easy-peasy.’”

#my writing #Hex Life #wandavision #wandavision spoilers #Darcy Lewis #Jimmy Woo #Darcy Lewis x Jimmy Woo #Darcy x Jimmy

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arewelonely · 3 years

Text

Eugenia, The Fat Lady.

—

They were idiots when they arrived, and they were idiots when they left. Seven years of schooling never changed this, but it amused her to watch their progressions all the same. Their bickerings, their romances, their stressors. Sweaty kids stumbling in after Quidditch, nervous energy tittering off of them when they left in the mornings before N.E.W.T.s. The ones who could barely muster up the energy to say the password, the ones with glassy eyes and a lack of facial expressions. Eugenia saw them all, and a few of them saw her back.

She had been named Eugenia by her painter. But the man was a prat, and the dark cloth forbade her from seeing the world until she was nailed into the Gryffindor door, so he deserved none of the credit. Instead, her friends raised her–Eugenia and Anne scampered throughout the portraits, seeing how far they could jump (Anne was too afraid of tripping, so Eugenia always won, sometimes skipping past three paintings before turning around to wave at her friend). At nighttimes, they sang throughout the hallways, giggling as their voices echoed and seeing how loud they could get before another painting called out for silence or a professor was summoned to bid these rambunctious kids goodnight.

The two obviously did this less during school times. They were too tired: Anne from directing the new students around the castle from her perch at the top of the Grand Staircase, and Eugenia from making sure that only the correct students were allowed in her common room.

Thank Merlin, she was stationed outside of Gryffindor. She had heard stories about the other houses: the portrait outside of Ravenclaw’s common room had to come up with a riddle each time a student entered, and the Hufflepuff portrait was far too lenient on who they allowed in! The Slytherin students sounded far less kind than Eugenia’s Gryffindors, but that also could have been a rumor. The students were difficult to understand–far too many streams of gossip and incredibly few facts. They sometimes chatted right in front of her for oh so long before giving the password… she rolled her eyes and huffed as loudly as she could each time. She had things to do, songs to practice, didn’t want her mouth full of grapes and cheese when it finally was time for her to ask for the password. She was not unreasonable, Eugenia, but the students were just little pricks. Joyful little pricks.

By her twenties, she had mastered getting back from just about any point in the castle to her station in under ten minutes. This was no small feat, and her chest swelled proudly each time she beat a student back to their common room.

“Password?” she’d sniff, chin held high.

And they’d give it to her, unaware she had been exploring some uninhabited hallway just a few minutes before. She and Anne were still friends, and they still frolicked around the castle whenever they got a chance.

Anne kissed her first, very briefly right before the end of class rush, and Eugenia felt the blush blossom across her cheeks before she was left alone in her hallway, hearing the students’ chatter coming closer, feeling her lips tingle from her friend’s touch. They went farther in the months following, and they were merry and laughed at each other as their limbs tangled, Eugenia’s head dipping backwards to let her giggles climb to the sky.

She had never wanted a romance; didn’t feel the need and couldn’t find the want in her chest, but this was fun and she had always loved Anne’s company and Anne was fine with the lack of romance–she had another lover a few floors up, anyway.

In the days when Anne and her other friends were all occupied, or when the rush of students in and out never seemed to end, the creatures around her kept Eugenia company. They enjoyed grazing from painting to painting, and Eugenia was blessed with ponds and blue skies, so she got to experience the most wonderful array of animals. Her favorite were the hippos, but the birds and butterflies were lovely as well. Many of them liked her, but a few just did not care–a bird even pooped on her head once, and Eugenia barely let out a screech before she was jumping up and waving them out of her frame. It took them many months of repentance before she allowed any animals back in her scene.

“Are…?”

Eugenia stared down at the girl–well, a woman, really. It had been, what, four years since this one had first entered the castle? And what did she want now? “Yes? Would you like to give me the password? I don’t have all day, you know.” And she didn’t, she had plans later: a picnic with a new friend… if she could get away.

The girl fumbled with her hands. She was usually much more composed, really. Betty, her name was. Gryffindor Captain. Usually held her shoulders high, said the password quickly, let Eugenia get back to her life.

“Yes, sorry,” Betty murmured. “I just, I saw you and another woman here earlier, and I was wondering… are you two, er, a couple?”

Eugenia snorted. “No, we are not.” She stared down at Betty’s face as it fell, as fear darted over quickly. “We are friends, Anne and I. We live like the Greeks,” she gestured with her grapes. “Don’t have time for that coupling nonsense.”

Betty blinked quickly. “Ah, so you…”

Eugenia cleared her throat. Alright, she could move this conversation along. She was supposed to picnic at sunset, and at this rate she wouldn’t get there until the moon had risen fully. She crossed her arms and shifted on her seat. “It’s Euphraïlde for you, isn’t it? The Lestrange girl?”

Betty’s head jerked up, her curls bouncing, her eyes wide. “I–uh…”

“Personally, I thought it was an odd choice,” Eugenia informed her. “A Slytherin and a Gryffindor? Really?”

“Oh, no,” Betty shook her head rapidly, “she’s so lovely, don’t think like that! She’s kind, and funny, and she just…”

Eugenia raised her eyebrows when Betty’s words ended and a pretty smile took over her face. “Did you have a password for me?”

“Do you have a name?” Betty blurted.

Eugenia sniffed. “I do.”

“May I know it? I’ve been here for a while, I was realizing I just don’t really know much about you.”

The hippos behind her gave a grunt and she held in a groan. “My name is Eugenia.”

“Eugenia,” Betty smiled again. “My name is Betty.”

“Yes, I know, you’ve been here for four years. Now, do you have a password or not? I have a picnic to get to.”

Anne teased her about it afterwards–“no longer anonymous, are you?”–“other students have known my name, you can shut up now”–but Eugenia couldn’t deny that this was different. Betty brought her girlfriend by a few weeks later, and even though Eugenia truly wished to keep the Gryffindor space closed (she had enough students bothering her already), she was forced to let Euphraïlde in after she saw how timid the girl was, how she bounced back and forth, and how Betty’s arm never left her back.

Eugenia placed her head in her hands when the door swung shut behind the two. She would hate it, this idea that had just popped into her head. Anne would be far too happy about it. But it was necessary.

In her thirties, Eugenia made sure to invite all her lovers to her portrait at some point or another. She enjoyed the company, she did, and she enjoyed the looks on her students’ faces when they saw her with a new suitor, gender be damned. Some of the students were idiots, but they always had been, so this was not too surprising. Some of the students were like Betty, and smiled at Eugenia softly, nodding at the people in her frame before heading off to class. Some of the students asked her name, and she begrudgingly gave it each time, if only for equity of information–Eugenia knew far too much about all of these dumb students, it was only fair they know a piece of her as well. Unequal relationship if not.

“So you do have a relationship with them?” Anne asked, and Eugenia scoffed, pushing her shoulder until she fell backwards into the flowers. Anne grinned up at her, and Eugenia hid a smile.

She supposed the nickname some students adopted for her only made sense; not everyone asked her name, and everyone needed something to call her. While she might have gone with ‘Lady Who Guards the Gryffindors’, Eugenia understood this was too long for everyday conversation. And so, The Fat Lady she became.

She had started meeting with Brian a few years ago. He was a decent enough man when he was Headmaster, and his painting was quite a delight. He enjoyed making the climb from the Entrance Hall to Eugenia’s nook, and always kissed her cheek before departing at the end of their time together.

“Are you free next weekend, Brian?” Eugenia would ask.

“Brian The Third,” he’d toss over his shoulder, jumping over a rock or across a stream.

She’d smother her smile. “Are you free?”

“Depends on whether you call me by the proper name, Eugenia dear.”

And she never would, and he’d always return.

He enjoyed lavishing her with food–“you’re my queen, darling, and I want to treat you well in every aspect”–and he blessed her with smooches every chance he got. He was particularly fond of her hair free, and sometimes she’d sneak down to his portrait in the dead of night, locks curled around her shoulders, to kiss him awake.

“It is okay with you,” she confirmed, “that we aren’t… together?”

Brian raised his eyebrows and tossed a grape in her mouth. “We are together right now. We were together last night.”

“But we–”

“And you’ll return to your Gryffindors, and I’ll come visit you. If you’d like.”

Eugenia nodded. “Yes, I’d like that. But I don’t…” she pressed a hand to her chest, pushing on her sternum, wrapping a hand around her waist.

“I like you as a person,” Brian told her. “I like spending time with you. I like when you kiss me. I like to kiss you.”

“I like to kiss you too.”

Brian tossed another grape, and it bounced off of her breast. She rolled her eyes at him when he grinned. His smile faded, though, and his eyes were sincere. “Then?”

“Then nothing,” Eugenia told him. “Just checking.”

Brian hit the other breast with a grape and Eugenia cackled, then pelted him with a few in retaliation.

By her forties, Eugenia was fairly confident in her singing. It called her lovers to her, it repelled students, and honestly, what more could she ask for in a talent? She enjoyed that this was part of her personality to students–just being The Fat Lady was only moderately degrading, and she liked that they’d groan when they heard her, coming up the hallway. Sometimes she’d serenade them, making the loud ones blush, making the shy ones grin, telling stories of her youth–how had it been so many years already? Headmasters had come and gone, past students’ children were entering the halls… Eugenia shook her head and sang louder.

The day she discovered she could crack a glass with her voice was an outstanding one. She yipped with glee and the dog asleep on the lawn next to her groaned at being awakened.

“No, you don’t understand,” she chortled, “my voice! Is so stronggggg!” She leaped into the air and sang until Anne came to congratulate her.

Eugenia knew her fifties would be the prime of her life–and this was only partially because she would be fifty until the end of time. Her youth had happened, and honestly, she was still in it, but also, what had to change? She was as plump as could be, had friends and lovers all around the castle, and fairly decent working relationships with the professors and students, after only a few years of strife in regards to the volume of her singing. The students were still idiots, but there was the occasional one every now and again who was halfway decent, and many each year with whom she had talking relationships–“no, Anne, like a professional talking relationship, like I have with the professors–no, those aren’t real relationships, no, go back to your portrait now, shoo.”

There were a few students for whom Eugenia refused to bend the rules. Poppy Pomfrey was allowed to visit her girlfriend Minerva, and Rubeus was allowed to reenter when his friends brought him by. Eugenia was all too happy to play innocent when Albus would ask her if the boy had been seen in the castle–he was a prick as a student, a prick as Headmaster.

Tom Riddle, however, was not allowed to enter. Eugenia hated the way he watched the others, and she didn’t like his smooth mannerisms–namely, the way he informed her there was someone he had to meet inside, rather than respectfully asking for entry. She never allowed a non-Gryffindor to enter alone, and the flare of his nostrils when she told him no was enough to ensure he was never allowed to enter at all.

She wasn’t surprised when she later found out Tom’s goals. She had seen the students grow more fearful over the years. She saw the Muggleborn students watch over their shoulders a bit more. She made sure to sing louder when they were in the hallway, so they knew they were never alone. She let no Slytherins into the Gryffindor common room for several years.

And then Sirius Black stood in front of her one day. And he had the correct password. And as much as Eugenia tried to sniff her way to superiority, this Slytherin-born child would not let her.

“Oi, narrow-minded hag, let me the fuck into my common room!” He stomped his foot, the petulant kid he was. “I have the password, you imbecile, I literally told it to you, what more do you want?”

Eugenia crossed her arms. “You’re telling me you’re a Gryffindor.”

“I literally came in here last night.” He gestured to her wall, eyes wide. “I literally slept in there. I’m a Gryffindor.”

“But your fa–”

“Don’t you even dare,” the boy marched forward. His eyes were dark and his hair long. He stopped right in front of Eugenia’s face. She didn’t allow herself to back away. “I am a Gryffindor.”

She held his gaze. He was strong. His jaw was set. And Eugenia let him in, closing behind him with a smirk as he swore strongly in passing.

The boy did not like her, calling her “piss off” and “go to hell” (to which she responded that this portrait was, in fact, her home, and she would be here indefinitely)–and Eugenia didn’t like him, except for the fact that ‘hell’ was a Muggle concept and even as he swore at her she saw the corner of his mouth lift. She saw him talking with the Muggleborns in their year. She snuck around the castle to see what he got up to in his downtime, and saw him causing mischief absolutely everywhere. Anne tried to convince her that she liked him, and, as per usual, Eugenia told her off.

She most certainly did not like that Potter boy–equally as cheery as his father before him, far too loud and incredibly obnoxious, waking her up in the middle of the night, entirely invisible, to let him in and out of the common room. Hogwarts at night was a serene place, not one for immature children to roam around. But her job was her job, and she could not deny a Gryffindor entry.

“You know,” Anne told her one day, resting her chin on Eugenia’s shoulder, “we were exactly like them.”

“No, we were not.”

“Yes, we were. Two young kids, flirting and running around–”

“Flirting?”

“Have you seen Sirius with Remus?”

Eugenia frowned.

“Watch them, I’m telling you.”

And Eugenia watched them, and she made sure to invite Anne around, and Circe, a new friend from a few floors up. She kissed Circe square on the mouth as Remus walked up one day, bade her farewell, and waited while Remus gathered himself before sputtering out the password. Eugenia was pissed when, a few years later, he and Sirius woke her up as they snuck back in late at night. Yet, she couldn’t deny that her chest warmed when she shut the door behind them, hearing their soft murmurs from inside.

“I have a question for you,” Eugenia asked Sirius one day.

He pushed his hands into his pockets (jeans, of course–why wear something wizard when Muggle would do?) and smirked. “I was going to give you the password, calm down.”

“No, not that,” Eugenia shook her head. “You’re not a Slytherin.”

Sirius crossed his arms and stepped backwards. “I thought we discussed this years ago.”

“Calm down, boy, we did. You’re not a Slytherin, but your family is. Don’t you have a brother here?”

Sirius lifted his chin. “Depends who’s asking.”

Eugenia snorted. “I am.”

“What’s your name?”

Eugenia sighed. “Eugenia.”

“Well, Genie–”

“Don’t call me Genie.”

“–there is another Black child in this building. He lives down in the dungeons, with the brainwashing brats.”

Eugenia inhaled. Offering favors was always difficult. And unenjoyable. But she remembered Betty, and knew it must be done. “You could bring him here, if you wanted. I do occasionally allow Gryffindors to let members of other houses in.”

Sirius’s face froze. “You… yeah?”

“To visit,” she quickly clarified. “This could not be a habitual act. Strictly occasional.”

“No, yeah, of course…”

“Hm,” Eugenia pretended to think. “Perhaps in return, you and your friends could wake me up less in the middle of the night, because it truly is quite rude.” She leaned back and popped a grape into her mouth. “Just something to think about.”

Sirius’ mouth twitched.

She hummed. “I’ve seen that Severus lad around though, and I don’t think he is welcome.”

Sirius laughed. “No, Snivellus is not.”

“I don’t like the way he talks to Lily,” Eugenia informed him.

Sirius nodded. “We don’t either.”

Sirius had a new nickname to add to his repertoire after that, and although Eugenia corrected him brashly every time he asked what wish she would grant, the name ‘Genie’ stuck. She noticed that Peter liked this new name, in particular–he had always winced when calling her ‘The Fat Lady’ in the past, and she felt he made more eye contact with her in using this new name. He was the only one she wouldn’t correct. James said it too gleefully, Remus with too much unfounded sass, and Sirius was just an asshole.

The asshole grew up, though. He mentioned offhandedly that Eugenia, despite all her warts–“hush child, I’m voluptuous and incredible”–was better behaved than the portraits that lived back at the Black house.

Brian was here for this, and he raised his eyebrows at Eugenia after Sirius had left. “You’re better than the portraits at his home?”

Eugenia did not let him come back to her portrait for a few weeks, purely out of principle. But she made sure that her insults were much less harsh after that. The boy was a Gryffindor, after all. He should feel safe at home.

She and Anne talked often about how odd it was that their students never really returned. Yes, some did, as professors, but they didn’t really. Minerva nodded at Eugenia kindly when entering the common room, but there was a bit of embarrassment as well–Eugenia had known her when she was bumbling around with the school nurse. Eugenia was a third party in what was now a friendly professional relationship.

Eugenia wanted to mention, somehow, that she knew much about sexual relationships coexisting with friendships, and friendships taking priority, and that, honestly, Minerva didn’t need to worry so much–Eugenia had been mentioning this to her for years, hadn’t she?–but there was never really a time, and Minerva was an adult now. Minerva was an adult, and the world was at war.

The portraits huddled together right outside the room where the professors discussed this war. They listened for anything that might alert them to what was going on in the world outside, and they ran around to tell their friends and dispel of nervous energy after the doors burst open and the news seeped out.

It did not surprise Eugenia that James and Lily had a child so soon after graduating. The two were always too dramatic, even though Lily had always made sure to never use that stupid nickname that Eugenia missed from time to time. It did surprise Eugenia that they died not even two years after the child’s birth. It distressed her that she knew the murderer. It bothered her, greatly.

Eugenia would let none of her lovers see her for weeks. She walled off her portrait and let in only the Gryffindors. Some students begged for their significant others to be let in, and Eugenia refused. She understood a war rampaged. She just didn’t want to allow it inside Gryffindor.

It was Poppy who came to her one day, many months after James and Lily’s deaths. The sweet boy Peter had died. Sirius Black was in Azkaban. Remus Lupin was lost to the world.

Poppy sat across from Eugenia, her knees knobby, her frame smaller than when she had anxiously paced back and forth, waiting for her girlfriend to come out for their date.

Eugenia would not give her the pleasure of speaking first. “Spit it out,” she hissed.

“Your judgement is sound,” Poppy said.

And the women stared at each other, and Eugenia could not make the words leave her throat.

“You do a good job here,” Poppy told her.

“I never get to see them again,” Eugenia whispered. “They leave, and they take their mischief with them.”

Poppy’s smile was wobbly. “And we are not there anymore to heal them.”

Eugenia spent the night in silence, and the next morning she informed each Gryffindor who left the common room that she would again open the doors. “But I have jurisdiction,” she said.

“Of course, Genie,” a fifth-year replied, winking at her. “You know best.”

She tried to hold back her flinch at the nickname, waiting until the child had turned the corner before she shuddered. A hippo rumbled behind her and she turned around to flip it off.

Severus came back a few years after, and it was as if he had never left at all. Tall boy, not grown into himself yet, sitting at the professors’ table when Eugenia peaked her head in. She didn’t like to sit in the Great Hall paintings–too much commotion–but enjoyed hearing the gossip. Sacrifices had to be made for gossip.

Eugenia liked whispering ‘Snivellus’ as he walked past her, hiding behind a rock in a landscape. He stopped and turned around, eyes darting every which way, and Eugenia held her snort. She gave a full belly laugh when he was gone, though, and scampered off to tell all her friends, her dress waving behind her.

She knew Harry Potter had to come at some point, but his wide eyes and horrific scar were not any easier to see with this vague preparation. She sang louder on his first night than she had in decades, and Anne sat a few portraits away to listen.

Harry’s friends were questionable, but of course he didn’t have a wonderful pool to choose from. Ron was too happy, Hermione was nosy and asked Eugenia’s name the first day the two met, and Neville forgot the password and made Eugenia late to far too many picnics for her to count.

Circe, from her position up by the towers, tried to get Eugenia to befriend a Slytherin–she pretended that wasn’t her motive, but how could it not be, sliding the boy’s name into every other conversation and using adjectives such as “lonely” and “snarky” to entice her? A Slytherin had to be brought by a Gryffindor, though. Eugenia had never let a random non-Gryffindor inside, and she certainly wasn’t going to start with Draco, a boy who made Hermione cry and hit her knee on Eugenia’s frame in her rush to get inside. The cheery boy Ron even lost his cheeriness every once in a while due to this lad. The slugs were funny, though, although Eugenia visited the infirmary that night and heard Poppy discussing the intense dehydration they had almost caused.

She and Anne spooked Draco for the next few months in any downtime they could find. It was like they were teenagers again, and the two adored it, stealing kisses in between jumping from portrait to portrait and calling his name–

“Draco…”

“Draco!”

“Draco, over here!”

“Draco…”

–so he didn’t know where to look.

Hogwarts was unsafe again, but Eugenia wasn’t really sure it had ever returned to safety. Since she had seen that boy Tom stand in front of her, she had always been a bit on edge. She found it ridiculous that Albus was still in charge–the previous headmaster hadn’t lasted nearly this long, and he didn’t have as many issues with her being a bit late to her post. Albus was a bit more of a stickler in that sense, the obnoxious man.

Eugenia tried to tell Minerva that she would make a better headmaster, and while she could tell the woman was pleased the first time she mentioned it, the conversation seemed to bring her annoyance more than anything else afterwards. Minerva’s strides would increase so Eugenia was in a full-on run between portraits, following the professor back to her classroom after a meal. The exercise was enjoyable, though, and Eugenia did snicker when telling the tale to Brian a few nights later, so it all was worth it.

Relations with Circe grew difficult, however. Eugenia feared at first that she hadn’t made herself clear, or that Circe wanted more from her–

“No, no, I’m fine with what we have,” Circe said, pushing her hand through her hair. She bit her lip and wouldn’t meet her lover’s eyes. “It’s just hard to watch. There are students here whose lives you could change.”

Eugenia scoffed. “Excuse me? I let them in and out of their rooms every day; they can’t function without–”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Circe placed a hand on Eugenia’s. “Of course you’re a presence in their lives. Of course their lives change because you’re in it. It’s just… you have the ability to do more.”

Eugenia pulled her hand away.

“I don’t understand why you won’t take the lost ones under your wing.”

A jolt ran through her. Circe’s eyebrows knit together.

“I just… you could do so much.”

“Take the lost ones under your own wing,” Eugenia snapped.

“I’m trying. I talk to them, I do, but they don’t listen…”

Eugenia laughed. “And they would listen to me?”

“They have to talk to you, you quite literally have a space where they could feel at home–”

Eugenia stood, pulling her dress up, over her shoulders. The fabric felt wrong. Too heavy on her body. “They have to talk to me? Oh, no, they don’t.”

“Don’t leave,” Circe pleaded. But she remained seated, and bit her lip. “I just mean, you could make Gryffindor a place for people to feel at home. Like you do for the queer kids. Like you do for everyone.”

“Not everyone,” Eugenia said, and she turned to walk away, Tom Riddle’s face pounding in her brain.

Severus Snape, who still walked these halls.

Draco Malfoy, fast asleep in the dungeon.

Sirius Black, the boy she let con her.

Remus Lupin reentered the castle the following year. Eugenia watched him walk in with Anne, the two muttering about his face, the facial hair they had watched him grow, the scars they had witnessed appear. Eugenia noticed the same inability to form a full smile that she had seen from many students before. She understood why he felt blank.

He sought her out and she was grateful for it. He just strolled up one afternoon, and she looked at him solemnly.

“Password?”

He cracked a smile. “Ah, no, not today. I just wanted to come, and…” he looked around at the empty corridor.

“Am I the only one who knows?” Eugenia asked.

Remus met her eyes. “Yes.”

It fell silent, and Eugenia’s voice shook when she spoke next. “I hate him.”

Remus’s face wobbled into a smile. His voice barely made noise at all. “I love him.”

And Eugenia closed her eyes and sobbed, loudly and for a long time. When she opened her eyes, Remus was gone, and a crowd of students waited to be let into their common room.

Harry Potter was not like his father, and perhaps for this alone Eugenia liked him more. He was quieter, more respectful of others’ space and ears, and his snark was sparing but when it came out, it bit. Eugenia had to work very hard to hide her smirk each time she overheard it, and she loved that.

Nights were a bit quieter without Circe. Eugenia still had Anne, and Brian, and a few others, but she was more hesitant to make new friends–lovers or platonic. This castle was only so large, after all, and avoiding Circe’s disappointed looks took up far too much energy. Eugenia spent more time with the animals, letting cows come to graze and sheep curl up at her feet. She perfected the whistle to get her favorite dog to come and shoo all the animals away when the smell became too much.

But there was very little she could do when an animal existed outside of the painting. She couldn’t do anything but watch as the black dog in front of her watched her open her eyes. She didn’t know what was happening as the dog grew–

“Oh, fucking Merlin,” she breathed. She clutched her arms.

Older, yes. Withered. But the same hungry look in his eyes. Same glint like he knew more than she did. Same disrespectful stance, walking closer to her.

“Genie?” he whispered. “Genie, let me in. I need Harry, I need to–”

“Remus!” Eugenia screeched, like someone would come. “Minerva!” Her voice echoed down the hallway and Sirius turned.

“Re–what?” He shook his head. “No, Genie, I need Harry, let me in–”

“There is no way I am letting you in, Sirius Black–” she raised her voice again– “Sirius Black!”

“Eugenia!” he hissed. “Let me the fuck in, I need to get to Harry, he’s my godson–”

“Sirius Black!”

“Fucking–Eugenia, let me in!”

“Someone help me! Someone come! Sirius Black is here!”

“Oh, fucking shit, I–” he reached around the edges of her frame and Eugenia held herself, leaning backwards. He pulled and pulled, his face contorting and wincing each time Eugenia screamed louder. “Peter is in there, I need to get that son of a–”

“Get the fuck away, you shithead! You’re mad, Peter is dead, you–”

“Let me in–”

Sirius began to claw at her painting, and she shrieked and ran back. Her dog was barking now, and scurried off to other portraits. She could hear the castle come alive with the animal's yelps. Sirius stared at her, his jaw shifting, breathing heavily. He swallowed, morphed back into an Animagus, and scampered away.

There was very little Albus could do to console her. She tried to explain this to him many times–he had been obnoxious as a student, too rigid as a Headmaster, and now, clearly, not nearly rigid enough, if a murderer was on the loose in his school. Albus tried to explain that she’d have all the time and peace she needed, and he had her moved elsewhere for recovery. She swore at him all the way. She did not need to be moved, she needed confirmation Sirius Black had been locked up again. She needed Tom Riddle gone. She needed every Slytherin checked for their true alliances.

Eventually, she returned to her post at Gryffindor. Eugenia contemplated cutting off all her hair over the next year. She wondered if a lack of hair would give her a new mindset. She kind of wanted to grow a whole new part of her that had never seen tragedies before.

Brian sat with her while she cut it off; he spread the hair in the breeze for the birds to build nests with.

“Will you still find me attractive?” she asked.

Brian laughed. “It would take the work of a very dark wizard indeed for me to no longer find you gorgeous. Just… gorgeous.” He held her face in his hands and smiled. He kissed her softly. Eugenia walked back to her portrait slowly, listening to the sounds of the castle. She lay down in front of the Gryffindor common room and slept.

Age had not granted Ron Weasley any more quietness. Eugenia kept waiting, but even four years after she first met him, he spoke loudly and with glee. He made Harry and Hermione laugh far too often. Naturally, it was the moments when he and his trio were silent that intrigued Eugenia the most.

“Yeah, he’s at Professor Lupin’s house, he’s sending me letters–”

“I really can’t tell Mum, she’ll be horrified that Sirius Black is communicating with you–”

“No, I think she knows, I think they’re all working together–”

“I really don’t think so, I mean she was really–”

Eugenia stood up, and the sudden movement startled the three. “Are you talking about Sirius Black?”

Harry blinked. “Er, yes.”

“What are you doing with that man?” She felt her heart pump. “Is he here? Are you in danger?”

“No, no.” Harry stepped closer. “He’s innocent. He’s my godfather.”

And Eugenia listened, and her limbs barely waited to let the three in before sprinting down to Albus’ office. She screamed at his door until he came out, and she screamed at him once he stood in front of her.

She berated him for ruining this man’s life, for ruining that boy’s life, for keeping two people apart who very clearly needed each other. She screamed until her voice ran out, and then sat while he spouted bullshit at her, gulping water from the stream next to her. She interrupted him when her vocal cords worked again, and informed him he was to never stand in front of her again, and she would never allow him inside the common room again, and she–

Eugenia put her hands to her head.

“You’re an absolutely awful excuse for a headmaster.”

Eugenia saw Minerva on her stalk back to her portrait, and Minerva’s eyes dripped with tears. Her mouth opened, and Eugenia nodded, and heard Minerva’s steady voice grow shaky as she walked farther away. Good. Minerva would handle this.

She stopped Harry the next time he exited the common room alone. She told him she had known his parents. She told him he was most like his godfather, but that she could see parts of all of them in him. She loved the look on his face when she spoke of his family.

“Would you… I mean, could you tell me about them sometime?” Harry bit his lip and Eugenia nodded.

“I would. Perhaps you could do less sneaking out in the middle of the night, as payment.”

Harry blushed. “Ah, right.”

“It’s just, I’m fast asleep, you know. And then I’ve got to let you out, and then back in…”

Harry pushed his hand through his hair. “Yeah, no, yeah. Well, thank you.” He smiled up at her, and Eugenia felt her heart beat. “Your name is Eugenia, right?”

Eugenia leaned back and nodded slowly.

Perhaps it was time to bring this awful nickname back. Perhaps a boy’s sass could bring his adult self some comfort. Perhaps Eugenia wanted to change her own legacy in this castle, in her home.

She waved her grapes around in the air, and spoke to the boy. “Yes.” She smirked pleasantly. “I go by Genie.”

#eugenia #the fat lady #wolfstar fic #jily fic #harry potter #hp #harry potter fic #harry potter fanfic #harry potter fanfiction #marauders #the marauders era #marauders fic #arewelonely #gn mes amours

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xiaomoxu · 4 years

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MLQC CN Victor - Chapter 37

SPOILER ALERT!!

A main story from CN server which hasn’t been released in EN server. REALLY contains detailed spoilers. A mixed feelings such angst, sweet and love-his-dummy by CEO Victor!

PART 1

Downstairs LFG, the film crew is still busy in an orderly manner.

A month ago, LFG launched an unprecedented charity project, mobilizing all the resources of the group, and watching the last moment before the arrival of the comet group with all mankind.

In addition to regular material donations, psychological counseling, and medical assistance, there is also a special item one wish list.

In the last issue of "Miracle Finders", we selected this subject for reporting.

Photographer: Everyone pay attention, go one first, and prepare the light for one-

Teenager: Ok, can I just say the words directly?

Willow: To put it straight, there is nothing to worry about, we can do it again, let's do it again!

The teenager was encouraged, and smiled and showed two small teeth.

Teenager: I am seventeen years old. I am an ordinary high school student. Although you can't see it now, I have lived in darkness for these seventeen years.

Teenager: Due to chromosomal abnormalities, I have suffered from congenital blindness since birth...

Teenager: The doctors all said that despite the advanced level of medical technology, they are still helpless against such diseases and hope that I will accept the reality.

Teenager: But I still don't give up. I don't want to usher in death without actually seeing the world, so I contacted LFG Group with the last hope!

Just as the teenager expected, LFG quickly found a Healer Evolver on the Island, and treated him so that he finally saw the light.

Teenager: Although I can only look at the world for a short time, how many times in a person's life can I witness miracles happen? I am very satisfied!

After he finished speaking, he gave everyone a young and a little embarrassed smile. The beautiful dark eyes are full of light, especially bright in the night.

MC: ... That's nice.

Until the last moment, miracles continued to happen.

I raised my head and looked at the towering LFG Building in front of me, thinking back to Victor when he started the project and jokingly said-

"I hope everyone can be like an idiot, as long as they fulfill their wishes, they will be happy." The tone couldn't help but felt a moment of surprise.

I hope that the last issue of "Miracle Finders" will produce satisfactory answers to him.

With emotion, I strode into the LFG Building.

At this time, most of LFG's staff has left, and most of the work spaces in the building have been vacated.

Even if some are still willing to suspend their posts and help Victor handle some charity projects, they are no longer sitting here and only exchange information via phone and email.

Goldman: I have been waiting for you for a long time!

I was still in a daze, and Goldman came over with aggrieved expression. Probably because I told him that I was almost there an hour ago, but I didn’t come up because shooting for most of the day in the downstairs town.

As soon as he saw me appear, he cast a "God finally" look.

Goldman: The CEO handed it to you, I'm going to prepare for the next meeting.

He hurriedly put the previously prepared contract into my hand, lightly approached the door of the CEO's office, and knocked the door.

Victor: Come in.

Hearing Victor's voice coming from behind the door, I quickly hid the hand holding the contract behind my back.

Goldman opened the door halfway and walked in.

Goldman: CEO, can we conduct an induction interview now?

Victor: Interview? When is it scheduled?

Goldman: Yesterday, I remember it was in your schedule.

After a short silence, Victor gave instructions indifferently.

Victor: Bring it in.

I strode forward, held back a sneer, and stood still in front of Victor. Before speaking, Goldman hurriedly took the door out, leaving a room of silence.

MC: Hello, CEO! I am the candidate for interview today!

I said hello to Victor very politely, and even bowed symbolically, with a sincere expression when I raised my head.

Victor: ....

Victor let out a sigh of relief, as if he had lifted his spirits from a long and exhausting work, and couldn't help but laugh when he met my sincere gaze.

MC: Reporting to the CEO, although I have limited work experience, I am active in doing things.

MC: The CEO of the most ruthless venture capital company in the industry has won a 500 million investment!

MC: Moreover, the level of stress resistance is first-rate, no matter how big the challenge is, how many plans are rejected, you can face the difficulties!

MC: In addition, I am quite familiar with LFG's business and can start working in a short time.

Victor sighed lightly, probably because I was too noisy.

Victor: Only you can make such boastful remarks without blushing at all. You come to LFG, don't care about your company?

MC: The final issue of "Discovering the Miracle" will soon be filmed, and sister Anna will be responsible for the remaining post-production work. I don't need to worry about it anymore.

MC: I always find a place to shine and heat, right?

MC: Or I have to be a rice bug for a month...

MC: In short, I am especially willing to share the worries and problems for the CEO

Victor touched his lips slightly, revealing a smile.

Victor: Didn't you often say that being a rice bug is your ultimate dream? Now that you have a chance to realize your dream, but you are not willing?

He was so eloquent, so that scenes of past scenes of bluffing and saying that I didn't want to go to work really appeared before me.

MC: But I have already changed my dreams.

I stepped forward two more steps, narrowed the distance with Victor, and stared quietly into his eyes

MC: My dream now is to be with you.

The outline of Victor's smile on the corners of his lips curled up, and his expression sank duplicity, and put out the CEO's frame in a serious manner.

Victor: LFG’s attendance system is strict, and the consequences of absence are serious. Be mentally prepared.

I walked up to him, took out the contract that had been hidden behind my back, and unfolded it on the table.

MC: I won't be absent, I will do what you say.

Speaking softly, pressing his usual fountain pen directly on the contract, it seemed to be "forcing the signing".

MC: If I can't do it... I will be punished.

Victor hastily flipped through the contract, which was only a few pages long, and paused as his gaze passed by the post.

Victor: Confirmed?

MC: Yes!

I deserved to be confident and without any explanation. Victor raised his head and looked at me with a clear smile in his eyes. He turned the contract another page.

Victor: The contract is valid for three years.

MC: Huh? It should be the contract template copied by Goldman, right? Renew after the three-year period expires!

Victor neatly signed his name on the last page, stood up and took my hand.

Victor: Let's go, the meeting is about to begin.

MC: What meeting? Wait, am I going to work as soon as I start?

Victor: According to the contract, every minute of yours belongs to me, and it takes effect immediately.

Is there such an unequal clause? Goldman's drafting of a contract is quite tricky

MC: You capitalists are squeezing employees too much!

Victor was slightly late to me, with a smile on his lips.

Victor: Well, capitalists are like this.

The conference room was already full of people, only the first two seats were still empty.

One of them is where Victor often sits.

I remember when I came to LFG for a meeting for the first time, I could only sit on the small bench in the corner and couldn't see his face even when I stretched out my head.

Victor: let's start.

I sat down next to Victor, glanced across the crowd, and leaned silently on the back of the chair.

Goldman opened the prepared PPT and stood in front of us.

Goldman: Now carry out the relevant reports on the work of last week,

PART 2

A sign hung at the door of Souvenir, which said that today is the last day of the restaurant’s business.

MC: Thank you for your preference for this restaurant, Souvenir will permanently close the store

LFG provoked too heavy responsibility, and Victor had no time to take care of Souvenir. I raised my head and looked at the blue light on the TV tower.

During the eternal night, the TV tower is bright yellow during the day and blue at night, marking the day and night. These days, people have been accustomed to measuring time in this way.

It seems that no matter what kind of predicament they are in, as long as there is a moment of peace, people are willing to steal a moment of peace and delay satisfaction.

I am no exception.

With Victor in front of the wind and rain, I even occasionally forget the reality that I am about to face, can let go of all my worries, and be silly in front of him carefree.

If time can be reversed, I can go back to the first time I stood in front of Souvenir...

I lowered my gaze and pushed the door into the restaurant.

MC: Mr. Mills, I

Before I could say hello, I was stunned by the scene before me.

Souvenir, who had always been cold and cold, is now full of voices, all seats are full of seats, even those who have never been before, and he has added new chairs.

Mr. Mills was busy between the tables with a smile on his face.

I hurried over to ask if I need help.

MC: Mr. Mills, shall I do this?

I was about to take the tray from Mr. Mills, but he shook his head hurriedly.

Mr. Mills: No, no, it's going to close in a while, the manager is waiting for you inside.

MC: Alright!

I walked towards the kitchen, and along the way, I was surprised by the food on the guests' table.

Like what the customer wanted to eat, Victor made something for them.

At the last moment, Souvenir's rules are no longer important.

Girl: Mom, this one is delicious, so delicious!

Six or seven-year-old children ate the little cakes with all their faces, holding their little hands and sending the spoons to their mothers, wanting their mothers to taste them too.

The young mother cooperatively ate the cream in the sentence and smiled hesitantly. She gently touched her daughter's head, but her eyes were full of sighs.

The family at the table next door talked about the topic of the younger son's college entrance examination this year, and they were rushing to plan for his future. They seemed to believe that someone would come out to save the world.

I stepped into the restaurant and walked into the back kitchen.

MC: Victor....

He stood at the window with his back straight. There was a deep night outside. I dazzled my eyes to see his black suit melt into the darkness, lonely and silent.

I walked over and pulled his sleeve slightly.

MC: Have you been busy all night?

MC: You can call me over in advance, and I can give you a hand.

Victor: With your culinary skills, you can't match up with Souvenir's back kitchen.

Victor glanced at me from the corner of the light, smiled faintly, and closed the slightly open window.

The moment he raised his hand, I saw that the pointer on his wrist watch was already three o'clock in the morning, but everyone didn't realize that the night was deep.

The world freezes in the dark, making time lose all meaning.

MC: The guests outside all had a good time.

MC: By the way, there was a little cake that a kid ate, with a few blueberries on top, and a layer of soft stuff inside. I don't know if it's ice cream... it looks super delicious!

Faced with my vivid expressions, Victor looked helpless as expected.

Victor: Three year old are not as good as you in eat. A pair of eyes fixed on the food all day long.

MC: Isn't it great? I will eat everything you make clean and happy, and I will change my way to praise your superb cooking skills!

I used an exaggerated tone to learn the child's way of speaking, trying to make Victor smile, but he still looked calm.

Victor: Ah, very good.

Those eyes that met me were as light as water, and they saw an unspeakable feeling in my heart. After he came back, something changed in his eyes.

I can't be sure, but I just faintly feel that the person standing in front of me at this moment is stronger than before but also lonelier than before.

In the past, silence was due to work habits and character.

The silence now means that no matter what you face, you can be calm and calm. The calm is strange.

MC: Victor, seven of the travel coins you gave me have not been exchanged. You said before that you would do everything you promised me.

I changed the subject suddenly, and Victor was still indifferent.

Victor: Seven? Didn't you secretly put a lot in the box again?

MC: … you’re not paying attention.

Victor: Really, when I don't pay attention?

The silence of the night was always reflected in his eyes, brewing the silence deeper.

MC: So you won't break your promise, will you?

MC: Everything you promised me will be honored in the future, right?

Perhaps it was because my words were too impatient to be too direct, Victor finally touched my hair as if calming down, and stepped forward to get closer to me.

The familiar temperature fell on the front of my forehead, which made my panic feelings find support.

Victor: Don't worry, I won't break my promise. Not now, and not in the future.

At this moment, I saw a slight surge of joy in his eyes.

Mr. Mills: Mr. Victor.

Mr. Mills walked in slowly, smiling.

Mr. Mills: Mr. Victor, after proofing today, I would like to continue to look after the restaurant. Please allow me.

Victor: Mr. Mills

Victor took two steps forward and solemnly nodded to Mr. Mills.

Victor : Of course. Over the years, thank you very much for taking care of Souvenir.

Mr. Mills turned to look outside the kitchen.

Mr. Mills: The guests all had a nice evening, and they hoped that I would convey my thanks to the chef.

Victor: It is..

Victor paused slightly and thought of something.

Victor: Excuse me, please take out all the wine in the cellar and give it to the guests tonight.

Mr. Mills: .... I understand. Do you need any congratulations?

Victor turned his head and looked at me, raising the corners of his lips indifferently

Victor: Just thank time for giving us abundant food and accumulated wine... With the feelings that have passed through the years.

Outside the window, the silent snow fell slowly in the dark night. In the cool night breeze in midsummer, a layer of untimely coolness blows off.

PART 3

Victor: Is this your specialty?

MC: Do you look down on tomato scrambled eggs?

Victor did not speak, but frowned slightly to express affirmation.

MC: The scrambled eggs with tomatoes are delicious. You can't judge the taste of a dish by its difficulty. I feel wronged for him.

When the Haikou that I once boasted was fulfilled, I vowed to make a rich meal for Victor.

Victor probably feels a headache for me to prepare a home-cooked meal and have to put out ten kinds of kitchen utensils...

He has been standing in the kitchen supervising the work since the beginning, and I don't know if he's afraid of what would happen to the kitchen or what'd happen to me .

MC: Can you stop staring at me like this, I'm nervous.

Victor: What is the guilty conscience?

MC: It feels like waiting for you to approve the plan.

MC: I dropped the eggshells into the bowl when I was beating the eggs just now, I was thinking that you must spit me out.

Victor took out a bottle of red wine from the wine cabinet and unsealed it skillfully.

Victor: I'm used to it as you are.

I dealt with the ingredients in my hand and smiled without saying a word.

In the fireplace in the living room, the wood made a snapping sound under the lick of the tongue of fire, and it sang softly to the piano music from the record.

The fine snow outside the window disappeared into the night as soon as it fell to the ground, and time seemed extremely long at this moment.

I carefully handled the ingredients in my hand, and did not notice Victor's gaze.

He put down the wine glass, the glass collided with the marble countertop, and there was a pleasant sound.

At this moment, the night snow stopped in the air, and the fire and the record were speechless. The whole world stopped, and everything was quiet.

Victor: If I let time eternally stop at this moment, would you think I am selfish?

He murmured, as if asking himself or answering himself.

Staring silently at her profile for a while, he stretched out his hand and silently hugged her in his arms.

This is an overly tender hug, without a trace of strong attitude, even the palms that are close to the back appear cautious

MC: Victor...

I stretched out my hand and hugged him tightly without leaving any gap.

Victor took a breath, as if he didn't expect that I would break away from his Evol, but didn't say anything.

MC: If I were not the dignified Queen, I would be completely controlled by you. Your Evol is stronger than I imagined.

He laughed and teased me helplessly.

Victor: It's amazing.

Although he was smiling, I heard a dumb sigh in his voice, so I opened my arms as much as possible to hold him tighter.

MC: Not even...

I stayed securely in his arms, with no intention of leaving this embrace.

MC: It’s just that I always remember the reason why I want to fully awaken, because I don’t want to let you bear everything. Always remember.

This dinner took longer than expected. When we sat down on the sofa in front of the fireplace with red wine, the night was already almost reaching the sky.

For all this time, I have a lot to say to him.

Whether it is the heated discussions in the recent issues of "Discover Myself" or the process of LFG helping people realize their wishes one after another, I am deeply moved.

A couple wanted to go to a very famous sea island to watch the sunset before the end. Unexpectedly, before the trip, the island disappeared overnight.

MC: In fact, I also feel that it was a pity that I couldn't help them realize their wishes. I had seen that island before on the Internet.

MC: At that time, it was also selected as one of the "Top Ten Scenic Spots to Go to Before the End", I did not expect to be submerged by the sea so soon...

Victor: This is what you often say, do what you think of, and don't leave any regrets for yourself. Sometimes impatient fools can do things that many people can't.

I listened to every detail and smile in his voice, and my fingertips drew across the texture of the leather on the sofa.

The more I get to this kind of time, the more I feel that even his laughter seems precious.

MC: But I was a little surprised. The wishes that everyone wants to achieve before the end are so simple.

MC: Look at the light, look at the world, eat a delicious meal with the most important person.

Victor: What people really want has always been very simple. Before that, it was only controlled by desire.

Victor: No matter how long this moment of tranquility can last, for many people, it is enough to enjoy the life they still have.

MC: It is not easy to find the true desire in the heart.

Victor put the empty glass on the coffee table.

Victor: What about you? What is your wish?

After drinking a few glasses of wine, my thoughts were empty. I only heard his low and hoarse voice falling in my ears, and many pictures flashed before my eyes.

MC: I want to see your heart.

I turned to Victor and wanted to find the answer to this question very seriously.

MC: I want to see the real Victor. Without the burden of the CEO, there is no need to worry about the world...

MC: I can put down all the responsibilities on my shoulders, just be yourself... In this way Victor, What will it be like?

He paused for a few seconds, but quickly laughed faintly.

Victor: People cannot put aside all the past and responsibilities independently. In front of you, Victor will always be the most true.

I turned to him, stared at his deep eyes carefully, then stretched out my hand and slowly touched the position of his heart.

When the five fingers fell slowly, I already felt the warmth under his shirt.

A little closer, and the fingertips rubbed the texture of the shirt, and soon, my palm felt the rhythm of his heartbeat warm and powerful.

Victor: ...

With a sigh, Victor reached out and held my fingertips lightly.

Suddenly, the scene before me changed.

PART 4

This is a space I have never seen before.

The solitary galaxy and the dazzling sunlight are constantly flashing in front of my eyes, just like every ray of time that has been inscribed in memory, the brilliance of the moment only flashes, making it impossible to capture.

MC: Victor

He was sitting in the seat directly in front of me, proud and lonely.

All the changes in the stars passed through his silent and deep eyes, and he just stared lightly.

Time passed, he had been sitting like this, his back was straight, his eyes were firm, and he was silent without a word, yet he caught every light and shadow in his eyes.

He seemed to had been sitting here for thousands of years.

For a while, my heart felt like being held down by a deep sea-like loneliness, which made me breathless. After a slight pause, I walked along the long carpet to him.

I squatted down in front of him and looked up at him.

He lowered his head and met my gaze, as if waking up from a long wait, with loose eyebrows at the corners of his eyes.

I stretched out my hand, my fingertips slowly climbed over the edge of his slender finger, and squeezed him from the gap between the slightly bent fingers.

At this moment, I recovered, seeing Victor's eyes reflected in the fire of the fireplace.

We don't know since when we clasp our fingers together and hold our hands together.

In a silent night, only the firewood was still snapping.

MC: Victor, are you tired?

Victor: What do you mean?

MC: Everything.

*All the fatigue of endlessly walking through the timeline, all the tragedy you had to witness, all the pain that you had to bear, all the hopes that you've repeatedly dashed countless times .

MC: You said that it is enough to enjoy your current life before the end. You already know the ending, understand the truth, or do you want to move on?

Victor: Not enough.

Victor spoke softly, but every word made a sound.

Victor: I am not someone who can transcend desires, I also have my own desires.

He doesn't need to say anything, I already know everything.

I curled up on the sofa, silently nestled in his arms, clasped his waist tightly with my hands, and fell on his sturdy chest.

Victor pulled the blanket and put a light hand on my shoulder.

With fire light and falling snow, the sound of two hearts beating is clear.

I know that I am embracing the most real Victor, the extremely real Victor.

PART 5

Time passed quietly, and it came to the last moment.

The whole city is shining bright neon under our feet. Busy and calm-as usual, as if we can wait for every night in the morning light.

MC: Victor, when you brought me here for the first time, did you expect the world to become like this?

Victor shook his head.

MC: So what was the anxiety in your heart when you stood here?

Victor turned his head and looked at me, then smiled.

Victor: It is impossible to completely hold a fool in his hand, hold it tightly, and keep her from leaving.

MC: Did I make you worry a lot? I know you have been looking for me for a long time.

Victor: Not long.

Victor: After experiencing real time, I only feel that the years when I found you were as short as you went to buy me a cup of coffee

Heard what he said, I couldn't help being reminded of memories long ago.

MC: I just thought you were really harsh and annoying. There were so many conditions for asking me to buy a coffee.

MC: .. Now, I really want to buy it for you again

MC: No matter how many weird conditions you have, I will never get it wrong again.

Victor looked towards the boundless sky with emotion. In the night, countless meteors slowly fell, dazzling light across the blue to dark night sky.

It's not long since 19:17.

MC: Victor, I want to do something very important.

Victor: I know.

MC: But I just want to be your dummy and live the most ordinary and ordinary life.

MC: Let you have endless heart and endless planning plans every day, and bring you all kinds of trivial troubles.

MC: Then in the blink of an eye, you can...

With tears in my eyes, crying was already entrained in my voice, so I refused to continue.

Victor: She also said that she didn't like crying anymore.

I took a few breaths and stubbornly held my voice.

MC: I didn't cry!

Victor stepped forward and held me tightly in his arms. Surrounded by the familiar smell, I closed my eyes and gripped the corner of his suit with my hands.

My only wish is to be with him.

It’s okay to laugh and being embraced in his arms like this, I don’t want others.

But more important than this wish...

It's him. He can't just usher in the ending like this.

MC: When I come back, I will bring you a cup of coffee.

I grab his arms and made a promise, and he softly responded by caressing my hair.

Victor: Alright.

MC: That’s all? Don’t you have anything else to say?

MC: In the past, you always remind me about the deadline of my proposal, you would remind me not to oversleep like an elementary school kids for the meeting the next day.

MC: At this important moment, don’t you have something else to say?

MC: I’m going to do something big this time.

Victor loosened his arms around me slightly and looked at me.

Victor: I know.

Victor: But you’re no longer a dummy you used to be, there’s nothing you can’t do.

I have already understood his calmness from his eyes. As expected, I can’t still beat him.

I want to say something, but I felt something. There were snow-white feathers on my fingertips.

There is no time.

I subconsciously grabbed Victor’s hand--

MC: Victor..

My heart was overwhelmed by the huge perseverance, I almost called his name from the deepest part of my throat.

As he was holding me, there’s deep complex look between his brows.

Victor: Are you afraid?

I kept shaking my head, shaking my head anxiously!

It is not fear, nor regret, no matter what is waiting for me in front of me, at this moment I will walk firmly.

But even so, I still want to stop for another moment, a moment is enough for me to call his name again, to look at him again. .

Even... hoping that time can stop at this time.

I don't want to let go of his hand.

Victor hugged me with one hand, lifted my chin, and dropped a deep lingering kiss.

During the exchange of our breathing, I looked into his squinted eyes & saw a love that I had never seen before.

The tears that kept spinning in my eyelids were still drawn from the corners of my eyes when I was on my post. I gripped his shirt tightly, very tightly.

Aware of my silent choking, Victor clapped his hands and wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes with his index fingers.

Victor: Don't be afraid. No matter how difficult things are in front of you in the past, can't you always do well?

Victor: This time, there will be no exception.

The scene in front of me and his voice were slowly dissipating, and I looked at him deeply, unable to say a word.

I clearly felt that Victor held my hand tighter, tighter than ever, as if he wanted to keep me too.

Like he didn't want to leave me alone.

He opened his mouth, what he was saying, but I couldn't hear anything and my senses were blurred.

Victor: ...Remember, to get me back.

MC: What?

I vaguely heard something, but couldn't be sure.

The white wings spread out in the dark night, and the sky is connected one after another, and the scattered white wings sit on the tall buildings together with the meteor, and fall into the street...

Victor let go of my hand and stepped back half a step, his eyes showed unprecedented joy.

MC: Victor!

Victor: I....

He was telling me something. His deep voice was mixed with a firmness that I've never heard before, but I could only vaguely recognize the words that I wanted to hear the most from his mouth. After that she calls his name

MC: Victor...

The sight was finally dark, and Victor's deep gaze disappeared in front of me.

The city fell into the night amidst the noisy shouts-

Victor slowly opened his hand and caught a piece of pure white feather in the air. The corners of his lips were gentle, his eyes drooping slightly.

That feather just lay quietly on his palm, soaked in moonlight, as slender as she looked at him at the last moment.

---- END ----

I’m sorry if there’s some mistranslation. Kindly tell me if you found some :) thank you for read it~ ^^

#mlqc #mlqc cn #mlqc translation #mlqc victor #mlqc li zeyan #mlqc spoilers

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secretpajamas · 4 years

Text

a different kind of rush;

an ezra x reader fic

pairing: ezra (prospect) x female reader

rating: explicit

genre: romance/smut/and they were roommates (oh my god they were roommates)

words: 5.6k

part 2 of 2 (read part one HERE)

please scroll to the end to “content” if you would like to know specific smut-related content before reading!

When you emerged from the shower, you changed into your long sleep shirt (the thing was far too old and ratty at this point to be considered a “nightgown”). Even though it wasn’t dark out yet, you figured you might as well go to bed at the rate this day was going.

As you slowly crept through the tent partition, you noticed that Ezra was gone—and so was his gear.

You found a note in Ezra’s barely-legible scrawl placed at the foot of your bed.

“Starstone quality check,” you mumbled, reading the note aloud.

Starstone was so finicky that it was necessary to check up on it in storage to make sure it maintained its stability. But you knew in your gut he was avoiding you. While he was out, you cleaned the filters and checked the tanks like you always did—minus the filter and tank that Ezra was currently using—the methodical work helping soothe your nerves a little.

When Ezra came back in, you were sitting up in bed, reading the book Ezra’s kid Cee had hand-written (“She didn’t come up with the story, but she basically rewrote the whole damn thing herself. Smarter than she knows, that kid.”). It wasn’t your usual kind of story, and not even your usual medium of consumption (you preferred late-night radio dramas, but they broadcast from the Ephrate—the signal was spotty at best in the Fringes and nonexistent here in the Reach), but it was captivating nonetheless.

You didn’t look up from the book as Ezra walked in. Neither of you said a word.

Part of you was relieved that you didn’t talk about it.

The other part of you was desperate to talk about it.

The next morning, you woke to Ezra sitting at his makeshift desk—a chair set in front of an old wooden shipping crate—swirling together the starstone enzyme bath. He was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a gray t-shirt, his hair already matted with perspiration from the heat.

You grumbled and slowly sat up.

“Mornin’, sunshine,” Ezra said, not lifting his eyes from his work.

“Mmph,” was your sleepy response.

“Oats are ready if you have a hankering,” he continued, gesturing with his head towards the “kitchen”—another wooden shipping crate, this one with a battery-operated stove placed on top.

You were suddenly very awake at the promise of food. “Please tell me there’s coffee, too.”

“Haven’t made it yet,” he replied. “Go easy on the stuff, you’ve drunk near all my supply.”

“I believe food and board is included in my contract.” You yawned before shuffling your way over to the stove.

“Food and board, sweetheart, not drink.” Ezra held the canister of freshly mixed enzyme solution between his knees as he twisted on the cap with his hand.

Your stomach rumbled and you eagerly grabbed your bowl of oatmeal. After wolfing down your breakfast, you filled Ezra’s rickety kettle with water and set it on the stove, turning the power up to high. You pawed around the mismatched collection of canteens piled next to the stove until you found two clean ones and set them out, along with four packets of powdered coffee (three for you, one for Ezra). It was the instant stuff anyone could grab for cheap at a shuttle station, and it tasted wretched, but it did its job.

As you waited for the water to boil—not long when the water in storage was already warm thanks to this planet’s heat—You heard Ezra stand up and approach you. When you felt his hand brush the small of your back, you shivered.

Ezra huffed. “Are you cold? For cryin’ out loud, woman, it’s hotter’n two channel-rats fuckin’ in a wool sock.”

“Must be caffeine withdrawal,” you lied, knowing full well it was Ezra’s touch.

He rubbed his thumb back and forth and you nearly shivered again. “I suppose it’s high time I replenish our supplies,” he said, “lest you pillage the remainder of my coffee.”

When the kettle began to whistle, you switched off the stove and poured equal amounts of hot water into the cups—and unequal amounts of coffee packets. All the while, Ezra’s hand stayed on your back.

“Speaking of supplies, we could use another full O2 tank,” you said, trying your best to ignore how your stomach did somersaults every time Ezra absentmindedly rubbed his thumb against the material of your sleep shirt, “and coolant for the air circulators.”

“I’m well aware,” Ezra said, “but thank you kindly for the reminder.”

You offered Ezra his canteen of coffee. You mourned the loss of his hand on your back, but feeling the brush of his fingers against yours as you handed him his cup was nearly as electrifying.

“S’posin’ we pull a good haul of starstone today, I can ready the pod for the shuttle station tomorrow,” he said between sips. “Be back within a couple days’ time.”

You swallowed down a lump in your throat along with your coffee. You did need supplies, but it was hardly urgent—was he really that keen on avoiding you? But the way he just touched your back—he’d never been more intimate than friendly pats on the shoulder before—

“The shuttle station gets a clearer radio signal to the Ephrate,” Ezra continued, “I can have a good an’ proper talk with Cee.”

Oh. He wants to talk to his kid, you moron. Why did you make this about yourself and your ill-timed masturbatory ventures?

“I’ll hold down the fort, then,” you said between gulps of your coffee.

“I’m countin’ on it,” Ezra said. “Now let’s score some stone afore this bitch of a planet bakes us alive.”

–

Ezra was gone before you woke, but you had expected it. He told you as much last night. But you still couldn’t shake the notion that he was avoiding you. You sighed deeply before untangling yourself from the bedsheets and crawling over to make your morning coffee.

On the table, the kettle was already set out on the stovetop, along with three coffee packets, a clean canteen, and a note from Ezra.

“Radio at 21:00,” you mumbled. That was tonight—so he was planning to call you as soon as he got in. You couldn’t help but smile as you made your coffee.

You didn’t have to mine today or tomorrow, thanks to working double-time yesterday (and your aching muscles certainly reminded you of that), but there was still plenty to do around the tent. After gulping down your coffee, you started with the pile of laundry in the corner. It was the most urgent order of business, based on how it was beginning to climb up the wall—and how much it stunk. You filled a basin with water and soap and got to work.

While hanging the garments to dry, you noticed a pair of Ezra’s compression pants had a tear in the thigh—thankfully, it was on a side seam, so you could easily sew it shut. You noted to fix it as soon as it was finished drying. You wondered if you could mend anything else, noting Ezra’s ratty assortment of boxers and briefs. If he made any cash in the aurelac rush, he certainly didn’t spend any of it on underwear. You could mend holes, but you couldn’t work miracles.

As you waited for the clothes to dry, you snacked on a ration bar and read more of Cee’s book. You were invested in the characters now, despite your initial skepticism of the subject matter. You had to admit, it was a bit of a page-turner. After a while, you didn’t want to put it down. You moved from sitting at Ezra’s desk to leaning against one of the tent supports to laying on your bed mat, your eyes glued to the page.

When you finally came to a satisfying enough chapter to pause your reading, you looked around for a piece of scrap paper to mark your place. You picked up Ezra’s note and tucked it inside the pages before shutting the book. You noticed the laundry hanging up was dry—had you really been reading that long? Oh well. Time to get mending.

–

You had mended Ezra’s pants, a pair of his socks, and were about to sew a button back on the pocket of your suit when you heard your name crackle from the radio headset in the corner. Startled, you dropped your work, the button skittering across the floor.

“Gimme a minute!” You shouted, hoping your headset would pick it up from across the tent. You quickly found the runaway button and placed it on Ezra’s desk before scrambling to your side of the tent to put on your headset.

“Sorry about that,” you said, “I’m here. You get in okay?”

“All in one piece,” came Ezra’s voice in your ear, “give or take an arm.”

You rolled your eyes at Ezra’s wisecrack. “Talk to Cee yet?”

“Not yet,” Ezra said, “with the time difference between here and the Ephrate, she’s still in class. I shan’t interrupt her studies.”

You looked at the book where it lay on Ezra’s desk and smiled. “Well, when you call her, tell her I said hello.”

“Will do.”

“So, what station did you end up at?” You asked.

“Trinity,” Ezra replied.

“Trinity,” you said, “don’t think I’ve been on Trinity since the rush.”

“Ain’t any different,” Ezra said, “still got egregious docking fees and an abundance of unpleasant company.”

“Already shooed away a pick-pocket busker, haven’t you?”

“Several,” Ezra grumbled, “Damn this stump, they think I’m an easy target.”

“Were any of them good players, at least?” You asked.

“Truthfully, the boy on the panpipes was a talented little devil,” he said, “both in playing his instrument and his victims. I let him pilfer a coin from my pocket—I fancy myself a patron of the arts.”

You snorted. “You keep coin in your pocket? On Trinity?”

“Sweetheart, it’s the decoy cash,” Ezra explained. “You keep a couple low-credit coin in your pocket for the vandals so that they don’t go scroungin’ for the heavy-hittin’ gems in your suit lining.”

“Speaking of your suit lining,” you said, “I’ve been doing some mending.”

You heard Ezra’s raspy laugh through your headset. “Don’t suppose you’ve been sewin’ up my underthings.”

“Those are hopeless,” you remarked, “I meant your spare compression pants.”

“Ah!” Ezra said. “I do recall those had a rip in ’em. I was fixin’ to fix those.”

“Well, I figured I’d do it as long as I had the time,” you said. “Also darned a pair of your socks.”

“Are you anglin’ for a raise?” You could hear the smile in Ezra’s voice.

“Your listing did say ‘compensation negotiable,’” you replied.

“Hmm. That it did,” Ezra said. “Perhaps we shall negotiate upon my return.”

The radio line lay silent for a moment, and you felt a nervous pang in your stomach. Enough small talk. You needed to say something about what happened the other day—even if it was just to apologize.

“Ezra?”

“Yes, sweetheart?” He replied.

“Is everything... Okay? With us?” You asked, trying to suppress the anxiety in your voice.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Ezra replied, before quickly adding in lowered tone, “Did somethin’... rub you the wrong way?”

“Kevva help me,” you grumbled, feeling the wave embarrassment crawl up your spine. “I’m so sorry, Ezra. It won’t happen again.”

“Stop apologizin’. There ain’t a thing wrong indulgin’ in a little well-earned self-pleasure.”

The way he said pleasure made your breath hitch. You hoped like hell it didn’t pick up on the radio.

“If there’s one thing I’ve come to realize in my years,” he said, “is that there’s no use feelin’ shame in feelin’ good.”

His voice was smooth and deliberate now. That bastard knew exactly what he was doing to you. “So don’t you stop yourself because of me—truthfully, I don’t mind. Not one bit.”

Hesitantly, you reached down to press the heel of your hand against your clit, choking back a moan threatening to escape your throat—but not entirely succeeding.

You heard Ezra’s breath coming loud and heavy through the radio. “Are you touchin’ yourself right now, sweetheart?”

“Yes,” you gasped out, your previous inhibitions completely shattered.

“Fuck,” Ezra replied. “Thank Kevva this radio headset is hands-free.”

You heard what might have been Ezra undoing his zipper—and your suspicions were confirmed when you heard a low moan through the radio.

“Ezra—”

“Do you have the faintest idea what you do to me, woman?” The line swelled with static and the throaty rasp of Ezra’s voice. “Told myself not to—made myself not think of you like that. It ain’t proper. But when you—you let me watch—”

You whined and slid your hand beneath your underwear. “I was thinking of you,” you confessed, “always thinking of you—”

“It’s a cryin’ shame,” Ezra said, “all I’ve got is spit-slick and a weak hand wishin’ like hell it was you.”

You sped up the pace of your fingers as he continued.

“If you were here,” he said, “I’d bury myself inside you so deep—ah, fuck—’til you were the only thing I could feel.”

At his words, you slid two fingers inside yourself up to the knuckle, arching your hips, trying to get them as deep as they could go, thumb tirelessly working at your clit.

“I want that,” you panted, “I want you.”

“—Make you come on my cock again and again ’til you’re dizzy with it,” he said, “fuck you so hard you feel it the next day.”

Ezra’s words were pushing you close to the edge. “Ezra, I’m gonna—”

“Do it,” he groaned, “let me hear you, sweetheart.”

You came to the overwhelming sound of Ezra’s broken moans and your own desperate cries and the static of the radio and the beating of your heart—

a discordant symphony of absolute ecstasy.

–

Ezra returned the following night with a full pod of supplies. You worked together like a well-oiled machine, moving various goods from the pod to the tent in an orderly fashion. You both made small talk—Cee was doing well at the Academy, the shuttle station shop was stocked enough with what they needed, no, they didn’t have real coffee, just the shit stuff in packets.

Despite the friendly conversation, the air was thick with unspoken words.

It was hot out—as it always was on this planet—so you breathed a huge sigh of relief when you had both moved all the supplies to the tent and you could leave the sweaty pod. You both discarded your helmets and stood in front of the air circulator on Ezra’s side of the tent, sifting through the supplies and placing them where they belonged throughout the tent.

When you reached at the same time as Ezra for a can of coolant, your hands collided, sending a shockwave up your arm and stopping your breath.

You both froze, staring at your hands where they met.

Slowly, carefully, Ezra intertwined your fingers with his.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he whispered, those beautiful brown eyes of his gazing at you tenderly.

You couldn’t take it anymore—you climbed over the pile of supplies between you and pressed your lips to his.

He let out a surprised little noise against your mouth before returning the kiss with fervor, wrapping his arm tightly around you and pressing you close to his chest.

“Couldn’t—stop—thinkin’ of you,” he said between kisses.

“Do you want to—can we—” You gasped against his mouth.

“Yes,” he breathed, scrambling to work at the zips and fasteners on his suit. He didn’t object when you reached out to help remove the suit—and honestly, you weren’t thinking of it as helping him, more like getting all your clothes off as fast as possible because holy shit this was happening. Ezra had already removed his boots when he took his helmet off earlier, and you were only dressed in your undershirt and shorts, so this blasted contraption of a suit was the main obstacle.

You both managed to get the damn thing off and Ezra kicked it aside. He reached back, grabbing his sweaty t-shirt behind the collar to tug it over his head. You grasped the hem of your top and pulled it up and off, throwing it to the growing pile of discarded clothing.

You were about to strip off your shorts when Ezra reached for you again, kissing your mouth, your jaw, your neck, down to the tops of your breasts along the edge of your bra. You scrambled to unclasp it, letting it fall to the floor. Ezra wasted no time, cupping a breast in his hand and lavishing kisses on the other. When you felt the wet heat of his tongue against your nipple, you cried out, grabbing his hair and giving it a tug. He moaned against your breast before pulling away to look at you.

“Let’s take this to a bed,” you urged.

Ezra nodded vigorously in agreement and you both stumbled over to his bed mat, falling atop the sheets in a tangle of limbs.

Ezra sat up and you situated yourself on his lap, wrapping your legs around him. You could kiss him like this for hours, his tongue in your mouth, your fingers in his hair, his hand steady and warm on your back.

When you both took a moment to catch your breath, Ezra cleared his throat and looked you in the eye, his expression almost timid.

“I must confess, I have not had the chance to... partake, since I lost my arm,” he said. “I may not be as formidable a sparrin’ partner as I once was.”

“Ezra, I’m sure it doesn’t matter,” you said, leaning in to kiss him again. He stopped you with a press of a finger to your lips.

“Allow me to enlighten you.” He shrugged with his stump. “Nothin’s as it once was. I can’t even take a piss the same way. Ever try to hold a dick with a hand that ain’t there?”

“Can’t say I have,” you said.

“Oh, hush, birdie, you can understand the sentiment,” Ezra grumbled. “Everything is at the behest of my damned weak hand. I can’t read my own handwriting anymore. Can’t shoot like I used to—my grip’s shit on the left. Even gettin’ dressed is harder than minin’ aurelac.”

He took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair before continuing. “And as long as we’re on the subject of minin’, I can no longer mine most things on my lonesome. Each harvest is hardly half of my previous yields, and I got the kid to support on top of everything. Now, Cee deserves every bit of that support, do not misunderstand my words—I would move Kevva and earth for that girl. But such meager wages do tend to make one feel... inadequate. A man’s work is no petty thing.”

You listened to Ezra attentively, not knowing how you could get it across to him that he was no less of a man in your eyes than if he had two arms. You wanted to reassure him, but he pressed on.

“So please, allow me to posit this caveat,” he said, “that I intend to make love to you, and to do so to the fullest of my capabilities—but even my best efforts may prove... unsatisfactory.”

Make love. Ezra wanted to make love to you. Your heart stuttered in your chest.

You were so stunned by Ezra’s choice of vocabulary that it took you a moment to process what he said.

“Oh,” you said. “You don’t think you can make me come.”

Ezra ducked his head; you could have sworn he was blushing. “You always cut right to the quick.”

You cupped his cheek, running your thumb along the little white scar there.

“Ezra, I don’t care. I just want this. With you.” You glanced down to where you straddled his lap, rolling your hips a little against his growing arousal. “And forgive me if I’m assuming things, but it seems like you want it, too.”

Ezra moaned quietly at your movements. “My desire was never in question, I assure you,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching up into a smile.

You leaned in and kissed him softly. He returned the kiss before gently moving you off his lap.

“Lie down, sweetheart,” he whispered, and you eagerly obliged, reclining on the mattress. He settled on top of you, propping himself up on his elbow, kissing you passionately. Eager to get your hands on him, you hooked a finger under his waistband and gave a tug.

“Whoa there,” Ezra said, “slow down, spitfire.”

You moved your hand away. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’, believe me. But those clever hands of yours will have to wait, because I’ve been starvin’ for you,” he said with a sly grin, kissing a path down your breasts to your stomach, “and I can no longer deny myself a taste.”

It took a moment for your Ezra Translator to kick in. “Oh.” You scrambled to shimmy your shorts and underwear down. Ezra took over, pulling them all the way off and tossing them over his shoulder before leaning down to continue his trail of kisses.

He nudged at your thigh with his head and you eagerly opened your legs for him. Rough stubble tickled your thighs as he kissed his way to your cunt. At the first feeling of his hot breath against your clit, your hips jumped up out of their own volition, knocking Ezra off his left elbow and face-planting him onto the bed beneath you.

“Sorry!” You squeaked. You reached out to steady him but stopped yourself—you knew he hated being helped.

“Hell’s bells,” Ezra grunted. He gripped at the sheets with his hand as he slowly pushed himself to sit upright.

“Left arm ain’t worth shit,” he grumbled under his breath, “can’t even hold me up.”

“It’s alright, Ezra,” you said, “we can try again.”

“Indeed we can,” Ezra said. He lay down on his back next to you and motioned to his chin. “Take a seat, sweetheart.”

“Um,” you started. You’d done this before, but not like that. “I don’t want to—hurt you.”

“Kevva’s sake, woman, I ain’t gonna break,” Ezra said, then added with a grin, “if I suffocate on account of your cunt, I will embrace death with open arms. Well, one of ’em, anyway.”

“Oh, shut up,” you said with a groan.

“Here lies Ezra, drowned in pussy,” he continued teasing, eyeing you with a wicked grin.

You hesitantly shuffled toward him. Drumming up some courage, you knelt above him, one knee on either side of his head. You were so nervous that you could hear your pulse roaring in your ears.

Whether impatient or just eager, Ezra grabbed you by the hip, then, and urged you down onto his mouth.

You gasped, bracing yourself as you felt the white-hot warmth of his tongue against your cunt. You choked back a moan, your hips stuttering forward, trying not to grind down too hard on his face. Ezra was having none of that. He urged you to move, his hand gripping your hip and firmly pulling you forward. With a little more certainty, you rocked your hips forward and back, making his tongue slide against your clit in long strokes. You moaned again, louder this time, and Ezra hummed his desperate response, burying his face in your pussy like a man starving.

You rutted against him urgently, your thighs beginning to burn from holding yourself up over him. Your movements became less graceful, more desperate—you slid forward too far, causing your slit to grind against the bridge of his nose, and you’d be embarrassed if didn’t feel so damn good. You were right on the precipice, moments away from shaking apart, when Ezra stilled your hips with his hand and brought you back to his tongue. He latched his mouth over your clit and sucked on it, wet and sloppy and fucking perfect.

“Fuck, Ezra,” you gasped, the heat coiling inside you tighter and tighter, “I’m gonna come, I’m gonna—”

Ezra growled, his teeth grazing your clit for a moment, and the jolt of sensation just on the right edge of pain had you coming so hard you thought you might black out. You stumbled forward, reaching out to break your fall, your cunt pulling away from his mouth. Somehow, Ezra knew you needed more, reaching behind his head for you and guiding you back in place with his hand. He began to lap at you again, working you through another shaking shockwave of pleasure.

You had to pull away before it was too much. You collapsed next to Ezra on the too-small mattress, trying to catch your breath, feeling your thighs burn and your cunt twitch and your heart sing.

“Give me a minute,” you gasped.

“Take all the time you need, sweetheart,” Ezra said, equally breathless.

You turned to look at Ezra. His face was flushed red, beads of sweat dripping down to mix with your slick that had ended up all over his mouth and chin—and his nose. He looked absolutely filthy and you’d be mortified if he didn’t look so damn pleased with himself.

You reached for your discarded t-shirt and gently wiped at his face, cleaning up the most offensive wet patches before tossing it aside again. “Sorry,” you said.

Ezra chuckled. “I do not accept your apology, ma’am,” he teased. “That was sexier than hittin’ a motherlode of aurelac.”

“Now that’s high praise,” you teased back.

“C’mere and kiss me,” he all but whispered, reaching out to hold your chin between his thumb and index finger. You closed the distance and pressed your lips against his. It was almost chaste—if not for the knowledge of where that mouth had just been.

He pressed his forehead against yours. You breathed deeply, absentmindedly playing with the hairs at the nape of his neck.

You looked down at the straining bulge in his pants, snaking your hand down to stroke at him through the fabric. A little choked moan tumbled from his throat at your touch.

“Let’s take this off,” you said, thumbing the waistband. He nodded in agreement, laying on his back and lifting his hips so you could pull his pants down and off in short order. His cock sprang free, hard and aching.

You licked your lips. “No underwear?”

“Too fuckin’ hot for underwear,” he said, gasping when you gently rested your hand on the crease where his thigh met his hip.

You moved your hand up and down his thigh, making him squirm and thrust up against nothing but air. He practically whined, his hand clawing at the sheets.

“Touch me,” he begged, voice cracking.

“I am touching you,” you said with a wolfish grin.

“Damn it, woman,” he groaned, “if the heat don’t kill me, you sure as shit will have the pleasure yourself.”

“Patience,” you chided, not sure how long you could keep this up—you wanted him inside you, and you wanted him now—but you loved seeing him spread out and desperate for you.

Finally, you wrapped your hand around him and gave a long, firm stroke. He threw his head back and moaned, arching into your touch. You licked your lips as you studied his cock, the thick length of it twitching ever so slightly in your hand. You rubbed at the underside of the head with your thumb and your mouth watered when a bead of precome welled up at the tip. On instinct, you moved down to lick it off.

Ezra cursed, bucking up to meet your mouth. You held him down by the hip before taking him into your mouth as far as you could.

“Fuck, sweetheart—I—fuck!” Ezra cried out, clawing at the sheets with his hand, writhing against your hand where it held him down. When you tentatively reached down to gently squeeze his balls, he nearly sobbed.

“I’m gonna—” Ezra gasped.

You pulled your mouth off of him, then, replacing it with your hand, not moving, just holding him at the base.

“Hold on, I didn’t say stop,” he said with a breathless chuckle. “Everything alright?”

“I want you inside me,” you whispered, barely audible.

Ezra reached out to still your movements. “I don’t have protection, sweetheart,” he said, voice strained.

You bit your bottom lip, averting Ezra’s gaze for a moment. “I have the implant,” you said, looking him in the eye again.

Ezra’s eyebrow shot up. “Well, shit, woman,” he said. “Thought they only had those fancy contraptions in the Ephrate.”

“They do,” you said. “I did have some decent money, once. In the rush. Before my crew took it all and left.”

“You and I have trod similar paths, so it would seem,” Ezra said.

“The rush left a lot of us in the dust,” you said.

Ezra nodded. “The deadliest dust there is.”

After a long moment, he sat up to kiss you, just a gentle press of lips. You put your arms around him and closed your eyes, breathing with him for a moment.

“How do you want to—which way should we—” you stumbled over your words.

“You may have me whichever way you desire,” Ezra said, voice low in your ear, “and I will do my darnedest to provide.”

“Can—can you be on top?” You started, “I mean—I will if it’s easier, but my thighs are kind of killing me.”

Ezra chuckled, and you thrilled at the vibration of it against your chest. “Lay back,” he said.

You complied, laying down on the bed mat. He reached behind you to grab the pillow.

“Lift up that pretty ass of yours for me,” he said, and you did. Kneeling before you, he placed the pillow under your hips.

“Reckon my knees will hold me up longer than my arm,” he said, gripping your hip to tug you towards him.

“Guess both our thighs will be burning tonight,” you said with a sly smile.

“Worth every ache,” he replied, taking himself in hand.

He slowly rubbed at your slit with the head of his cock. You moaned, your cunt clenching against thin air as you felt wetness dribble down. Ezra dragged his cockhead through the slick, gathering it before rubbing at your clit directly. You gasped at the jolt of pleasure lighting up your body—it felt so good you could cry. You could hardly stand the teasing anymore, wanting him inside you now more than ever.

“Ezra, please,” you begged.

At your urging, he lined himself up and slid inside you with one deliberate movement. The sensation of his thick cock filling you up, the almost-aching stretch of it—it was better than you ever imagined. He grabbed you by the hip again to pull you even closer as he began to thrust into you at a steady pace.

“Look at you,” Ezra said, his voice gravelly and low, “takin’ my cock like it was made for you. Shoulda known you’d feel this good, sweetheart.”

“Ezra,” you panted, “Ezra.”

You looked up at Ezra as he filled you completely—from his pupils blown wide and his lips slightly parted, to the broad expanse of his shoulders, to the torso adorned with freckles and scars, to—fuck, where his cock was seated deep in your cunt—he was more beautiful than any gemstone.

You could tell Ezra was trying to control the pace of his thrusts, biting his lip in concentration. You didn’t want him to hold back.

“Harder,” you breathed.

“I ain’t gonna last,” Ezra said through gritted teeth.

“I don’t care!” You cried out, clenching down on him.

“Fuck!” Ezra leaned forward and braced himself against the bed, arm trembling with the effort as he set a brutal pace, fucking into you hard and deep and unrelenting. You nearly screamed.

“Touch yourself, sweetheart,” Ezra’s voice was frantic and loud, “come for me, please, please, fuck!”

You rubbed your clit for hardly a moment before you shook apart, your cunt spasming around his cock, your body consumed in flames of pleasure so intense you could hardly breathe.

Ezra managed a few more thrusts before he came with a shout, his cock inside you as deep as it could go.

–

In the aftermath, Ezra collapsed beside you, absolutely exhausted. You turned your head to kiss him, lazy and slow.

“If it’s alright with you,” he said, his breath warm and close, “I’m inclined to take the day off tomorrow.”

“We’re sure going to be sore,” you sighed.

“Well, yes,” he agreed, “but I’m keen on more...sparrin’ practice.”

“You can say sex, you know,” you laughed, “not everything has to be a metaphor.”

Ezra smiled. “I do have an inclination to run my mouth, don’t I.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Ezra just rolled his eyes before taking your hand in his, your fingers twining together.

“I just realized,” you said, looking over at Ezra’s desk, “I could’ve sat on that chair instead of your face. Would’ve made things easier.”

Ezra’s eyes widened a fraction, looking over at the chair, then back to you.

“Why didn’t I think of that? I am dumber than a box of rocks,” he said with a chuckle. “But I do believe my method is superior.”

“We’ll have to test your theory,” you said. “Do some serious research.”

Ezra nodded eagerly before setting a steely expression with a furrowed brow. “Of course.”

content: phone sex (well, radio sex if you wanna get technical), cunnilingus, face-sitting, blowjob, vaginal sex

a/n: listen. all the scifi sex I write will conveniently make use of “the implant” purely so they can raw-dog it. also like where tf is ezra gonna go buy space condoms. this is set in the fringes of the galaxy. it’s not like he can pop over to space cvs and get some cosmic cock wrappers for his magnum dong. they don’t carry them at the shuttle station, okay?

and yes I DO go back and forth in my fics deciding whether “come” or “cum” is hotter/more grammatically correct/etc and this is a come fic, apologies to the cum crowd

special thanks to taylor (@damerondjarin) for the exchange of messages that inspired this fic, and for all the moral support thereafter. believe it or not this entire fic was supposed to be JUST the face-sitting sex scene and uh it expanded from there. Oops.

#ezra prospect #ezra x reader #ezra prospect x reader #pedro pascal #pedro pascal fanfiction

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ibijau · 3 years

Text

Price of Wishes / on AO3

Nie Huaisang learns a few things and has a mild breakdown over it

It will take a full three weeks for Nie Huaisang to get to Gusu for his second attempt at studying there, because he is such a weak flyer that just attempting the trip on Chiwen would kill him in about a shichen.

That means three weeks of traveling with Lan Xichen, alone save for two pairs of other Nie disciples. Nie Huaisang must be paying for some crime he committed in a past life. This much time with Lan Xichen, this much time to stress over how the Lan will react to this new young master thrown into their midst… this is going to be torture.

The first day doesn't go too badly though. Lan Xichen can ride a horse, which is a relief for sure. He also chats quite easily with the other disciples, asking about their lives like he cares, taking time to really listen to their answers. Of course, that too was on Nie Huaisang’s list, but he can't help being a little star struck at how perfect Lan Xichen is. If he were a real person, there's no way Lan Xichen would look twice his way, but he is so kind that sometimes Nie Huaisang almost forgets none of this is real.

At night, they stop in a small inn on the side of the road. It isn't a very luxurious place, but everything is clean, and there's a pleasant smell coming from the kitchen. The down side is that there aren't a lot of rooms available, so they'll have to share.

"Since one of the rooms can only take two people, I'll share with Nie gongzi," Lan Xichen offers. "Unless that is objectionable?"

"Of course not, we trust Lan gongzi," Nie Tianru says with a laugh before Nie Huaisang can object. "And Nie gongzi will behave himself, right?" she adds with a wink.

Nie Huaisang is mortified, his face aflame. He scampers away to order their dinner, ignoring the snickers of the Nie disciples, and Lan Xichen's gently amused smile.

They all think he has a crush on Lan Xichen. Even Nie Mingjue does. Which is… it's not wrong. Lan Xichen is everything Nie Huaisang could ever want, except for the fact that he has no choice in this matter.

Nie Huaisang eats his dinner quickly, and goes to bed at a much earlier hour than he ever would normally. His plan is to jump in bed so he can pretend to be asleep by the time Lan Xichen joins him. It's an excellent plan, but Lan Xichen spoils it by leaving the table at the same time as him and following him to their room.

As far as inn rooms go, it's not a bad one. Well, Nie Huaisang guesses it's not bad. He barely looks around, half sick with nervousness. It is the first time in his life he's sharing a bedroom with someone outside his family, and of course with this situation, with the reason Lan Xichen exists… nothing between them has been particularly romantic so far, but maybe Lan Xichen was just waiting for the right moment, maybe he'll say something now that they're alone, or try to kiss him, or…

"Nie gongzi, could I have a word with you?" Lan Xichen asks, suddenly standing far too close to Nie Huaisang.

Nie Huaisang squeaks and leaps away.

It's happening.

Just because he asked for it, it's happening.

He can't let this happen.

"Lan gongzi, can't this wait?" he asks nervously. "I'm really tired, and we have to be up early. We don't want to get to Gusu late, right?"

We don't want to get to Gusu at all, Nie Huaisang thinks, terrified of what will happen if the truth about Lan Xichen is uncovered. He will be in so much trouble.

"You must miss you uncle and brother after so long," Nie Huaisang babbles, desperate to stop Lan Xichen from saying anything embarrassing. "I know I certainly miss them. Well, I miss Wangji anyway. I don't really miss master Lan. No offence! But, I mean, well, I mean…"

He trails off, unnerved by Lan Xichen's calm smile. Nie Huaisang, already nervous by nature, keeps losing his cool whenever Lan Xichen smiles like this.

"Nie gongzi, I'm sure my uncle and brother are wonderful people," Lan Xichen says, his voice deep and soothing. "But we are both aware that I have never actually met them yet, so I cannot say I miss them, that would be a lie."

Lan Xichen continues smiling peacefully, while Nie Huaisang’s blood turn into ice. The shock of that casual admission is such that his legs start giving under him, and he’d have fallen on the floor if the bed weren’t so close. He stumbles toward it, just barely managing to sit on it before the trembling of his legs becomes too great to stand. Even like this his body feels heavy, and his chest so tight he might just puke out of nervousness.

“What… what are you?” Nie Huaisang manages to ask.

He regrets asking, because Lan Xichen walks closer, kneeling next to the bed so their heads are at the same level. It’s meant as a comforting gesture, Nie Huaisang guesses, but really it’s just terrifying him.

“Are you something evil?” Nie Huaisang insists, all too aware it’s a stupid question to ask. He’s on the verge of tears, and wishes everything could go back to normal… but it’s wishing that got him in trouble in the first place, so that’s probably not a solution, is it?

“I don’t believe I am evil,” Lan Xichen says, lifting his hand to touch Nie Huaisang’s shoulder, only to stop midway when Nie Huaisang flinches. Lan Xichen’s smile falls, replaced by what appears to be sincere concern. “You really fear me so much?”

He sounds disappointed, or hurt, and it’s unfair that he is so handsome because Nie Huaisang can’t ignore him or scream for help, not when this gorgeous young man kneeling before him could be hurt… or hurt others.

“Of course I’m scared!” Nie Huaisang sniffles, his eyes burning with tears he won’t contain much longer. “You… what are you? Why are you here? I don’t understand, it was just… I didn’t think…”

“You prayed to me,” Lan Xichen explains, making Nie Huaisang freeze in terror. “Nobody had prayed to me in so long, and your mind and heart are so strong that for the first time in centuries, I had strength again… but not strong enough to find a person such as the one you were asking for,” he sighs, sounding sincerely sorry. “So I thought that I would offer myself, in exchange for what you promised.”

Tears fall down Nie Huaisang’s cheeks while he laughs almost hysterically. He promised a road, and followers, and then dropped that stupid list about his dream husband.

Nie Mingjue is going to kill him.

Or else, this god is going to kill him for failing to fulfill his part of the deal.

Either way, he’s so dead. He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s…

“From my point of view, you have already done your part,” Lan Xichen says, his warm voice gentle and careful in answer to Nie Huaisang’s panic. “You made me offerings, and convinced others to do as well. My temple has had its first visitors in many lifetimes. I am very grateful to you, and I will do my best to be everything you wished for in a husband.”

Nie Huaisang laughs harder and sobs just as hard, tears and snot staining his face. This is madness. He’s gone mad. He’s gone completely mad, maybe he’s still lying on the floor of that abandoned mountain temple, ravaged by a fever and slowly dying while hallucinating all this. It would make more sense than what’s happening, than a god talking about marrying him.

But suddenly there’s a hand on his arm, warm even through the fabric, irredeemably solid, a presence such as his mind couldn’t have invented.

Nie Huaisang flinches away from that touch, scrambling back on the bed, putting as much distance as possible between himself and…

“What’s is your… what is my lord’s name?” he asks, hiccuping from crying so hard. “This humble one has been so rude to my lord, this humble one…”

He should get up from this bed, and kowtow. Nie Huaisang is being so rude, it’s a miracle he hasn’t been struck down yet, but just breathing feels like an immense effort, he can barely speak, and if he gets down from the bed he’ll have to get close to this god and he can’t, he just can’t.

Lan Xichen, still kneeling, looks at him with an air of sadness, perhaps even of pain.

“Nie gongzi can continue calling me Lan Xichen,” he says.

“But my lord’s real name…”

“I don’t know my name,” Lan Xichen whispers, his voice so low Nie Huaisang barely hears him, and he looks away as if in shame.

His first prayer in centuries, he’d said earlier, and in the midst of his panic, Nie Huaisang feels some pity. What must it be like to be a god without followers? To be this alone, for this long?

“Is that your only temple?” Nie Huaisang asks, wiping his tears with the back of his hand.

Lan Xichen nods, and lets out a forlorn sigh. “It is my last one,” he admits. “And before you found it, I only had one altar left, in the house of an old woman. But you gave me a new one in your home, you made offerings to me… I was on the brink of death, and you gave me new life, Nie Huaisang. For this I am eternally grateful, and I will repay you.”

Nie Huaisang blinks a few times, and doesn’t notice that he’s finally stopped crying. This is still a huge mess, but he feels a little less terrified now, because the situation is less unequal than he previously thought. He didn’t contract a crushing debt just out of foolishness, and Lan Xichen could probably have found other ways to repay him for that offering in the mountain if Nie Huaisang had been repulsive to him.

“Would you really have married me?” Nie Huaisang asks.

“If you will have me,” Lan Xichen replies, sounding more insecure than any god has a right to be.

Nie Huaisang almost starts laughing again. He certainly can’t fight a manic grin, and feels a few new tears on his cheeks. This is absolute madness.

“I need to think about it,” he sniffles. “I… I know I had this list, but I’m not quite ready to marry yet and I… I don’t really know you, right? I think I’d prefer to know you a little before making a big choice like that.”

“Of course,” Lan Xichen says with a smile. “Nie gongzi is wise not to rush into things.”

“I don’t think that’s a quality people usually associate with me,” Nie Huaisang says, chuckling. Then, feeling a little less anxious now, he scuttles closer to the edge of the bed, toward Lan Xichen. “I’ve really made a huge mess of things… but also… I mean, please don’t be too mad, my lord…”

“Lan Xichen. Or just Xichen is fine.”

“Fine, I can try. Lan Xichen, you’ve made a huge mess too, I think. What are we going to do when we get to the Cloud Recesses? They know that Wangji doesn’t have a brother!”

Lan Xichen doesn’t answer right away, carefully thinking things through. Nie Huaisang, in spite of himself, admires him as he gets so serious, amazed that even the slight crease between his eyebrows is elegant. Truly, only a god could be this handsome, and Nie Huaisang’s heart thumpers wildly in his chest at the thought that he could have such a person as his partner for life, if he just says the word.

“So far, when I’m with you my powers are strong,” Lan Xichen says at last. “I can’t explain it, but you have a very strong mind, and your belief feeds me like that of a thousand people. I think as long as you believe that I can pass as a young master of that sect, nothing should be a problem.”

Nie Huaisang’s cheeks heat up. People have called him stubborn often enough before, but when Lan Xichen says he has a strong mind it feels different. Like it’s a compliment, instead of another item added to the list of his defects.

“Then that might give us a little extra time to deal with…” Nie Huaisang waves his hands to signify this crazy situation they’re in. “We’ll still need to be careful though, my l… Lan Xichen. I have to say, so far you’re doing very well at impersonating a Lan. Have you met some of them before?”

It would make sense, Nie Huaisang figures. Gusu Lan is a much older sect than Qinghe Nie, and perhaps this god’s territory extended south once, or else maybe some Lan cultivators came near Qinghe, back in the days before there was a sect there to protect common people.

That neat little theory crumbles when Lan Xichen shakes his head.

“I was able to look into your mind for details about that requested husband,” he explains. “I found the man you wanted me to look like, checked the type of dress his sect would have favoured, and hoped for the best.”

“You do look like Wangji,” Nie Huaisang mumbles. “I’m sorry for that, it must be uncomfortable to take a face that’s not yours…”

“I don’t remember what I look like,” Lan Xichen replies in a casual manner. “And this is not a bad face.”

A mix of dread and pity worms its way into Nie Huaisang’s heart. Without really thinking, he slides off the bed to sit crossed legged next to Lan Xichen, and once again observes him.

“You really don’t mind?”

“No. And this,” Lan Xichen gestures elegantly at himself, “pleases you, right?”

“Yes. But… not if it doesn’t please you as well. I… I don’t like that it’s not real,” Nie Huaisang admits, looking down at his legs and fiddling with the edge of his sleeve. “Not just your face, but also… you’re behaving according to my list, right? That’s just… it’s not…”

“If any item on your list had been unbearable to me, I would not have entered a deal with you,” Lan Xichen replies. “But it is a very reasonable list, and I found you wanted a husband similar to what I think I once strived to be. It is no hardship for me to be the sort of man you want.”

“Oh. That’s good if you don’t have to force yourself for that,” Nie Huaisang says. “Still, you’re forcing yourself to be around me.”

At this, Lan Xichen falls silent. He remains quiet long enough that Nie Huaisang risks a glance at his face, only to find Lan Xichen staring at him with great attention, as if he were appraising a painting. It is so embarrassing that Nie Huaisang quickly looks away, mortified to be the center of such focus.

“It is no hardship either to be around you,” Lan Xichen says after another long moment passes. “You have a good heart, and a pleasant personality. It has pained me to feel your fear toward me up until now, but I hope this will be less of an issue from now on. I…” he stops for a moment, looking for words. “I have been alone for a very long time, and I told myself I did not mind. But now I see you chatting with your brother, enjoying your hobbies, and trying your best to do what you think is right and… I am reminded that it is pleasant to be around others. That it is pleasant to be alive. And I hope whether or not you decide to have me as a husband, you will at least have me as a friend. That would bring me great joy.”

Nie Huaisang looks up again, to find Lan Xichen smiling shyly at him, as if unsure whether that request might be rejected. It is a rather odd feeling for Nie Huaisang to have his company desired this way. Sure he gets along with some of the Nie disciples fine, and of course he’s friends with Lan Wangji, but this feels different. The Nie disciples don’t have much of a choice, they have to put up with their young master. As for Lan Wangji, well, it’s the same, he can hardly afford to openly reject the young master of another sect, not when they’re both sect heirs, can he?

But Lan Xichen has a choice. He had a choice in the mountain, when Nie Huaisang dropped that stupid list in front of him. And he has a choice now, when he could just say he’s only doing this because he feels obligated to it.

Lan Xichen has a choice, and he’s choosing Nie Huaisang.

“I also hope we can be friends!” Nie Huaisang says, eagerly grabbing Lan Xichen’s hands for a moment, only to suddenly remember he’s still talking to a god and probably shouldn’t be so familiar. “Ah, sorry, my lord! I just got a little excited here…”

“It’s quite fine,” Lan Xichen replies, grabbing Nie Huaisang’s hands before he can fully pull away. “I don’t mind.”

Nie Huaisang looks away again, wondering if blushing so much is perhaps unhealthy. It’s got to be. It feels mortifying for sure, and also a little irritating. Lan Xichen is just too unbearably perfect, and it is going to be hard to deal with that.

“So, hm, you only know about the Lan because I know about the Lan,” Nie Huaisang says, eager to change the subject to something that will not make his face burn like this. “That could be a problem, because I don’t know that much about them. There’s a reason I failed my tests so badly last year. It’ll be hard to pass you as one of them, unless…”

“Unless?”

Nie Huaisang tears his hands away and jumps to his feet so he can check the qiankun pouches he’s carrying his things in. It takes a few tries before he finds the right one, but before long he sits again on the floor next to Lan Xichen, careful to leave a respectful distance between them as he presents the god with a heavy book.

“Gusu Lan’s rules!” Nie Huaisang announces. “I’m supposed to have learned them by heart, but I really haven’t.”

Lan Xichen gingerly takes the book, a slight frown on his handsome face as he opens it and quickly checks the pages. It is a normal reaction. There’s just too many of those damn rules, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to remember them all… yet Lan Wangji does, so it figures that a brother of his would as well.

“Nie gongzi, what do you want me to do with this?” Lan Xichen asks.

“Read them, learn them if you can. It’ll help pass you off as a true Lan.”

“Ah,” Lan Xichen says, closing the book. “An excellent plan, certainly, but there is an issue.”

“How so?”

Lan Xichen sighs deeply.

“Nie gongzi, I cannot read.”

#xisang #nie huaisang #lan xichen #mo dao zu shi #mdzs #xisang wishes au #next update might take longer but I got very excited over writing this so yeah

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dahlia-coccinea · 3 years

Text

I reread Patsy Stoneman’s essay, “Catherine Earnshaw's Journey to Her Home among the Dead: Fresh Thoughts on Wuthering Heights and 'Epipsychidion,” and my feelings towards it pretty similar to how I feel about J. Hillis Miller’s essays. I enjoyed reading it but I don’t agree with 85% of it. I haven’t reread any of Miller’s takes (since there are a plethora of metaphysical interpretations it would be so repetitive) and that probably allows for me to still appreciate his essays as much as I do...I think rereading Stoneman’s essay was a bad idea because reading it a second time made it much less enjoyable and I read it much more critically.

There are a lot of similarities between the metaphysical and Romantic love narratives, and they also share a lot of the same failings. They tend to be very selective about what scenes are analyzed and they aren’t put into a larger context, and they tend to be the most poetic scenes. Typically these arguments cannot place the meaning of the 2nd generation into the context of the novel either. I’ve already said quite a bit about the metaphysical arguments, so I’m going to try and discuss just the points in this specific essay. Sorry parts may be a little repetitive because critics often bring up the same quotes and ideas again and again. And this will be very long.

First, Stoneman identifies that there are two popular theories about Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship: “One is the myth of star-crossed lovers, who are cheated of marriage by social forces,” and then the metaphysical argument which, “presents Catherine and Heathcliff’s love as of a kind which is in itself incapable of social consummation.” She then volunteers a third option that is based on concepts of free love and/or “twin love” that can found in Romantic literature.

It is interesting, but I’m pretty sure Catherine also thinks she betrayed her own heart? She does tell Nelly she knows in her heart and soul she shouldn’t marry Edgar, and on her deathbed, she says “If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it.” I know some take it to mean she thinks that she didn’t do what was wrong to her, but she does add “You left me too” so I think she does agree with Heathcliff that she, in a way, left him.

There is ample room in the novel to compare Heathcliff and Edgar as there are few similarities between them. The society in which they live is violent and hierarchical and that never seems to be questioned by any character - I think that is an important backdrop and allows for commentary on class, race, and gender. I don’t think this particularly has to do with how we view exclusive relationships. And based on the reasons Catherine gives for why she would marry one and not the other, I think Catherine understands she is limited by this society. Her reasons for marrying Edgar are all very practical.

Instead of any fulfillment, from the start, Nelly says Catherine struggled and had an “objection to her two friends meeting at all.” Catherine is aware they dislike each other from the start and this makes things more difficult for her as Hindley wants her to marry Edgar, Heathcliff is more and more remote, and the two of them are stuck suffering Hindley’s cruelty. Nelly even says during this time, “I’ve had many a laugh at her perplexities and untold troubles, which she vainly strove to hide from my mockery.” If what Stoneman says is true she would have to be beyond naive, if not utterly foolish, to think that a relationship with both Edgar and Heathcliff would be desirable for spiritual fulfillment after Heathcliff’s treatment at the Grange, or his throwing applesauce on Edgar (which this scene brings her to tears and she blames Edgar for Heathcliff’s resulting punishment).

Stoneman does attempt to reconcile the Catherine confiding in Nelly that she knows in her heart and soul she is wrong to accept Linton’s proposal - she says this statement is negated by her insistence of never being parted from Heathcliff and that therefore means her love for him must simply be different and Romantic, rather than romantic/marriage-oriented. I’ve written a lot about this already but so I’ll just say that is pretty selective of the whole conversation with Nelly.

Stoneman says, that from this scene and how we see Catherine greet Heathcliff this shows, “No sense of tragic irony seems to enter into her consciousness, nor any foreboding of difficulties.”? Seems to be a bit of an overstatement when you consider that Edgar’s proposal brings Catherine to tears because she feels she isn’t meant to be with him. She doesn’t excitedly tell Nelly that she loves them both, and she doesn’t seem very optimistic when she says Edgar, “must shake off his antipathy, and tolerate him, at least.” While idealistic in thinking Edgar would help Heathcliff she is still pragmatic in understanding how few options she has. She fears Heathcliff listening to this conversation and will be hurt by this, or him finding out how much she loves him. Is her "delirious” joy upon Heathcliff’s return really a sign of her lack of conformity and utter loss at understanding their jealously? Or is it more likely because she thought he might be dead for those three years? She also tirelessly spends the next 3 months balancing Heathcliff’s dislike of Edgar (which I believe also spurs her to continue concealing her feelings towards him), Edgar’s jealously, and a new fun problem: Isabella’s infatuation with Heathcliff.

I won’t go into too much detail in this because it’s so similar to the metaphysical argument, but Stoneman notes that in Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ there isn’t just the concept of free love but of “twin love” between 2 of the 3 person triangle, so it assumes that Catherine/Heathcliff could more platonic or at least asexual.

In this interpretation Catherine “revises the traditional masculinity” of the “Romantic lover:”

“Shelly’s experiment depended on women’s readiness to be generous and co-operative, and Catherine’s similar plan founders on the combative notion of masculinity endorsed by our culture. Attempting to ‘divide’ her love between men who seem to her too different to be rivals, she finds them transformed into the ‘chained friend’ and ‘jealous foe’ of convention.”

I don’t agree with the idea that Catherine sees them as too different to be rivals? She does compare them which casts them as two men vying for the position of her husband. Also, she based her decision to marry one and not the other on socioeconomic advantage, not who she loves more, or how they differ as people and might give her different kinds of love, although she points out her changing/more superficial and limited love for Edgar compared to the love she has for Heathcliff which are like the “eternal rocks beneath.”

Her love for Edgar is full of stipulations - she would “only pity him—hate him, perhaps, if he were ugly, and a clown.” Heathcliff’s degraded state does nothing to change her love, which is why I say her love for them is unequal. I honestly think saying she loves them equally yet differently, or that she is totally unaware of their jealousies is so preposterous based on the text, I don’t understand how so many critics, that have written extensively on the book all parrot it? Yet Stoneman continues to assert Catherine is “innocent” and “baffled” by their jealously. With almost everything she says about Catherine I find myself thinking, “well yes, but no?” For example, with this idea:

“Catherine’s apparent self-destruction has to be seen, not as willful egotism, but as a despairing response to her two lovers’ failure to love her enough to share her attention”

I do think this is mostly true. It is not willful egotism, and she is upset that they can’t tolerate each other - but Catherine’s illness is a long-running problem that is closely associated with her relationship with Heathcliff and his absence that began after he first runs away. Through the next three years, she says she “endured very, very bitter misery.” I’d say it has nothing to do with her feelings towards Edgar who she has been making herself distant during this whole time while telling Heathcliff (in spirit since he isn’t actually in the room): “If I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I’ll keep you.”

Again I do somewhat agree with Stoneman’s interpretation of Catherine telling Heathcliff, “you and Edgar have broken my heart,” which Stoneman says, “can only be explained if we accept that while Catherine still relates to both her lovers, Edgar and Heathcliff have broken her heart by defining love as exclusive.” I think they do break her heart by their selfishness over her, and I think she never intends to hurt either of them. She has at different times suffered to protect one or the other. But this still doesn’t change her stronger, unconditional, yet socially unacceptable and thwarted love for Heathcliff. Her issue isn’t the loss of Edgar, they broke her heart by both behaving in a way that cast Heathcliff from her company. Divorce was not really an option for her - the most dysfunctional couple in the novel, Heathcliff and Isabella, never legally separate even. So why wouldn’t she try to keep the peace between them to be near Heathcliff? The Romantic love interpretation is difficult to reconcile with her rejection of Edgar which happens on a few occasions and most apparent when she tells him, “What you touch at present you may have; but my soul will be on that hill top before you lay hands on me again. I don’t want you, Edgar: I’m past wanting you. Return to your books. I’m glad you possess a consolation, for all you had in me is gone.”

As the essay went on I felt it got weaker. Stoneman says Catherine’s haunting of Heathcliff must be read as an “appeal against his failures of generosity.” Not because she wishes she was never parted from him, as Catherine herself said? Catherine doesn’t seem to die with any animosity towards Heathcliff - she forgives him for leaving her, asks for forgiveness, and tells him, “You never harmed me in your life.”

**** EDIT *** I just meant that he goal isn’t to punish Heathcliff, since before her death she makes it clear she doesn’t want to parted from him. I do prefer the theory that she she haunts him in part to call him off his revenge and harming those she loves and to bring him back to her. I don’t think her ghost is static or simply a “reward” for Heathcliff despite all the wrong he did. I think she does become “incomparably above and beyond” them all and remains a force as she was in her life. Or she could be not a ghost at all and he encounters with could be proof of Heathcliff’s madness and later becomes a simple old folktale and superstition. (I’ll admit I like to view the ghosts are real and I think there number of references to them by other characters do suggest that we are meant to read them that way). ***

After Catherine’s death, Stoneman says, “There is, after all, something in the haunting which the usual readings of the novel fail to explain. If the ghost of Catherine wails to be let in, and Heathcliff begs her to return, what is it that keeps them apart?” I think we’d have to all agree that what Lockwood saw was actually a ghost, and I have seen this interpreted a million times? Stoneman says it is Heathcliff’s own “implacable obsession with revenge, which effectively shuts her out of his consciousness.” Which I could agree if we are reading it assuming the ghosts are real...but then she says that Heathcliff reaches his heaven only as he abandons his revenge against Edgar and “at last he ‘comprehends in his person’ the preposterous simultaneity of her loves.” This made no sense to me. I don’t see any reason for thinking he begins to accept Catherine’s love for Edgar, which he kind of already had? He tells Nelly that he doesn’t physically hurt him for that reason, he just also believes she loves him more. And I would say he does defeat Edgar and Hindley? Just because he can’t also destroy Hareton and Cathy II doesn’t negate that in his lifetime he outlives his enemies and has control of everything and everyone at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange (which he never shows signs of regretting his actions). It might not have gone as far as he originally planned, but I would say he does sort of win. And his abandonment of revenge isn’t ever associated with Edgar? Heathcliff does give some insight to what causes him to lose interest in his plot, an aspect of it being the connection to Hareton. In a discussion between him and Nelly he tells her she may think he’s insane “if I try to describe the thousand forms of past associations and ideas he (Hareton) awakens or embodies.” It is because of this intense association with him that he says, “his society is no benefit; rather an aggravation of the constant torment I suffer: and it partly contributes to render me regardless how he and his cousin go on together. I can give them no attention any more.” I believe the last time Heathcliff mentions Edgar is right after his death and he tells Nelly that, “I wish he’d been soldered in lead,” and goes on to describe yet another plot against Edgar by having his and Catherine’s graves opened on the side nearest each other so that they don’t have any barriers between them and then, "by the time Linton gets to us he’ll not know which is which!” So the idea he softens towards Edgar or becomes more willing to share Catherine in any way is...improbable to me.

The theory also suffers (like so many others), in ignoring the ending when forming the narrative. Stoneman mentions the three graves and says that the people seeing Heathcliff and Catherine’s ghosts are basically country folk who are inclined to sympathize with “Heathcliff's final possession of his 'woman’” and also most readers fall into these same “hegemonic constructions” by not considering that the "the sleepers in that quiet earth” are at peace together. I agree with @princesssarisa that it doesn’t quite fit into the fact that many of the people that see the ghosts didn’t support or even know of Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship - the young shepherd boy doesn’t seem to know who Catherine even is. To also say that the reader is projecting their desired ending doesn’t feel right because the ending is something that Heathcliff and Catherine have been foreshadowing through the whole book. Catherine says, “I’ll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest till you are with me. I never will!” She doesn’t refer to Edgar, who she says can be buried anywhere, it doesn’t matter to her (poor Edgar). She also tells Heathcliff, “I shall not be at peace,” and “I only wish us never to be parted,” as well as other similar quotes implying that she will be waiting for Heathcliff to come to her. I don’t like the view that Catherine is so lacking agency in her relationship with Heathcliff either - I’ve never thought that he “possesses” her. She’s the one who makes the demand that he leave the world behind and join her - the end does seem to be him finally following her, as she says he always does.

And then, what of Cathy and Hareton? How do we reconcile the narrative with the features of the second generation? It would seem, if we assume Catherine has a differing yet equal love of the two men, and wished for a relationship where they can be peaceful together, and then the only scene we have of them together is in their graves, it feels pessimistic. Our one Shelleyan model is dead and buried with two people incapable of overcoming their jealousies and possessiveness. When considering the ending with Hareton and Cathy, would we have to conclude this a cautionary tale of Catherine’s naivety? Stoneman does make almost this suggestion and says it could also be because Emily had watched Branwell and Charlotte get hurt by love married people, so it could be showing what tragedy befalls if love is selfish and possessive. Though there is nothing to suggest that Hareton and Cathy love isn’t any of those things?

I must be terribly boring because I think the easiest way of describing Catherine and Heathcliff is that they are, “star-crossed lovers, who are cheated of marriage by social forces.” Obviously, that is simplistic and glosses over their more spiritual aspects and certainly, they are not how the 1939 film interpreted them, which Stoneman rightly says, “recasts the novel in class terms as 'the story of the stable-boy and the lady’” - but I still think its closer than saying they are models of Freudian psychology, siblings, celestial beings, or Shelleyan. There certainly is spirituality and complexities in their love, and throughout the plot, as well as other characters, but it is still very much possible to read too deeply into double meanings and what is left unsaid.

My end take - some lyricism of Epipsychidion is echoed in quotations from Catherine and I would have much preferred to compare and contrast the two works rather than the attempt to shoehorn the rest of the story into a similar narrative. I think if you made a comparison to just the part after Heathcliff returns, a really interesting and strong argument could be made about how Catherine does try to create a similar relationship as described in Shelley’s work. I don’t think the situation was ever her ideal, but she certainly has no desire to be cunning or vampish - that’s not in her nature, and her relationship with Heathcliff doesn’t necessitate them having sex. She does try to put into practice a semi-Romantic love triangle but I don’t think she harbors any delusions of Edgar’s and Heathcliff’s animosity. Rather than a bohemian approach, it is her forcefulness and controlling that keep them both at bay. Tellingly she tells Nelly, “I believe I might kill him (Edgar), and he wouldn’t wish to retaliate.” She feels confident in her sway over him to get what she wants and she wants to be able to continue her relationship with Heathcliff in any way she can. It’s not necessary to revise and add new narratives to situations in the novel that are clearly able to be discerned from the text - such as Heathcliff’s failing desire for revenge or people seeing their ghosts at the end. I don’t think Epipsychidion is a terribly good lens to read Catherine through as her love can also be jealous, selfish, and possessive. There are too many aspects of Catherine’s character that conflict with the ideas Epipsychidion expresses.

#wuthering heights #heathcliff #catherine earnshaw #emily brontë #wow that ended up being real rant-y #it's probably i've just read so many essays now i more flippant about the ideas that don't make sense to me #thoughts

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msmkcreates · 4 years

Text

A Second Chance at a First Impression Ch. 9: The One With the Croissant

Boss may be taking care of Stretch, but he still has therapy of his own to attend, and therapy always digs up the root of the problem.

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I know it's been a while, but I've had so much going on these last few weeks, some very good (like a promotion) and some very bad,, including dealing with a death of a family member recently so all of my works have been inching along slowly in my documents.

I hope everyone is having a Happy New Year

Warnings: therapy, imposter syndrome, anxiety, working out Boss' issues, discussion of consent and power imbalances

Read on Ao3 with the above link

-or-

Read here on Tumblr

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The clinic was always empty this time of day, the sun sinking down beneath the surrounding buildings, but Boss quite prefers it when there's less people cluttering the lobby and the waiting room.

His therapist was an aging man named John, with kind eyes and a weathered wedding ring polished by worrying fingers over the years. His office was decorated simply with a handful of pictures of his wife and nephews. No children, he had told Boss once, though the why had never quite come to him. In Boss' opinion it was really none of his business, but he did wonder what could stop someone with so much kindness from passing it on.

"How are things with your new job?" John asked, looking over his glasses at him. "I know you've been struggling with your inability to join the workforce, has this helped the negative thoughts go away?"

"It helps to have another income," Boss agreed, his hands folded neatly in his lap. "And it helps that it's family, and so close to home. It isn't what I expected, though."

John hummed, leaning back in his own chair. "How so?"

"Well, to be frank, I expected it to be a nightmare," he chuckled. "Stretch and I get along like baking soda and vinegar on the best of days. Or at least, we used to...it seems like we get along better than he and his own brother now. He's kind, and thoughtful, a little naive but also startlingly wise at times."

"A good change, then?"

Boss hummed, looking down at his hands. "...I'm not sure. It's nice that he usually does what I ask, and it's nice that we don't fight all the time. But I worry that maybe...he still feels the same, deep down."

"As if maybe, he is keeping it to himself out of a sense of duty and gratitude?" John asked. "You worry that he is only this way because you're caring for him."

"...right on the money, as always," he chuckled.

It was something they'd discussed before, the fear that any kindness shown to him was out of a sense of duty, fear, or propriety. When he'd begun his sessions with John, he'd resisted the idea that he treated Red badly, only to find that was exactly what he had done and Red had only gone along with every horrid word because Boss provided protection, safety, and home. With Red's HP he had always just taken it on the chin for the sake of surviving, something they have been parsing out in small quantities and group sessions over the years, limited by Red's stubborn insistence that Boss has nothing to apologize for.

The fear was there, that Stretch was only pretending to like him because of the inherent power Boss holds being his caregiver. He worries that fear rules their relationship, that Stretch is only being kind because Boss is helping him.

"Is it wrong of me to assume that you might hold feelings for Stretch?"

Boss felt his face flush as he looked up swiftly, bristling slightly in embarrassment. "I, well, that is...I don't know what you mean."

"Correct me if I'm wrong,but every time we talk about Stretch recently, it's all very positive. Your posture changes, and you smile more. Before the accident, any time we spoke of him it was as if you'd eaten something sour, but now it's like I've just offered you your favorite candy." John leaned back in his chair, his eyes twinkling knowingly. "Is it fear of your power in the relationship that keeps you from recognizing these feelings?"

Boss hummed, looking out the minnow over the nearby park. Stretch sat there, on a bench where he had left him to wait, and he got up to walk over to the window and pulled the sheer curtain aside to look at him more properly.

He'd bought him a croissant, in the hopes he'd eat it, but looked like the soft-hearted man had felt bad for the birds with little food, as he was tearing pieces off it to feed to the growing number of cardinals and winter wrens surrounding him. They pecked at the snowy ground and hopped around his feet, and Boss could almost hear him talking to them, telling them to wait their turn as if they understood English, and he chuckled.

"Feelings are irrelevant. I only want him to get better. I want to see him smile more, to see him happy." Boss let the curtain fall back into place. "I'm his friend now, but I'm also his caregiver. If I made a move on him, wouldn't that put pressure on him to say yes, even if he didn't want to? Would he feel as if he owed me? As much as I may want him, I don't want that."

"Consent is very important, and being on unequal footing can compromise it," John agreed. "Have you spoken with him about these thoughts? Being clear in your motives and your wish for consent?"

"Heavens no," Boss chuckled, grasping his hands together as he turned back to the couch. "I think I'd much rather eat a cactus than talk about my feelings. As you know."

"Do you think that's very fair?"

"To him?" Boss asked.

"To yourself."

Boss paused, squeezing his hands together as he thought on that. "...I'm not sure. I'm not even sure what I feel for him is romantic or platonic. I can't tell if it's happiness at finding a true friend or...something more. Or if it's just the amount of time together, or just guilt. I think it'd be a disservice to tell him how I feel if it turns out I'm wrong."

"That seems sound," John said, leaning back in his chair. "Perhaps you should explore your feelings deeper?"

Boss shook his head. "I'm not so sure I want to."

"And why is that?"

"I...I'm not good for him. I'm dangerous, my LV is... so high, and only one hit from me, even with higher HP that he has now, would destroy him. What if I lose myself one day?"

"Do you think knowing you cared for him would increase the chance of that happening?" John asked. "Currently you are spending about as much time together as any married couple. Do you still thinks he is in danger from your presence?"

"Well...I guess you have a point." Boss fidgeted with his fingertips. "Maybe I was the wrong person to look after him."

"That isn't what I meant," John chuckled, standing from his chair. "I think all feelings are worth exploring, Papyrus. If you understand yourself, you can begin to make the changes you want to see. It's worked thus far with your brother, hasn't it?"

Boss smiled wryly. It was true, his relationship with Red was leagues better now than it had ever been, just from understanding and changing his behavior.

"...I will think on it." He reached out to shake John's outstretched hand. "Thank you again, John. Have a lovely weekend and say hello to the missus."

"I gave you that croissant to feed yourself, not the birds."

"I always do," John promised.

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Stretch looked up at Boss with bright eyelights, smiling wide from beneath the many birds perched on his outstretched arms. And legs. And head. And any semi-flat surface they could sit on.

"but it's so cold! where are they gonna get their food?"

Boss chuckled, the puffy jacket he was wearing rising and falling with his shoulders in a shrug. "They're winter birds. They eat nuts and berries and whatever else. They know how to get what they need, unless people keep feeding them so they never learn how to do it themselves."

Stretch smiled sheepishly. "...oops?"

Boss stepped closer, and in a flurry of wings, all his new bird friends took off into the chilly winter air. He watched them flutter off, scattering into the sparse park trees.

"I suppose I'm too scary for your birds," he sighed, sitting beside him on the bench. "And you? Am I too scary?"

"too scary? no, you're the best!" Stretch answered, and Boss noted the lack of hesitation with faint pride before he even registered the compliment. "who else is gonna buy me croissants to feed the birds with? blue just says i can't live off bread and gives me something lame, like a salad or green beans."

"Hmm, so I shouldn't make shepherd's pie for dinner tonight?" Boss asked, smirking over at him as he gave a look of disbelief. "Well, since you've decided to live off croissants…"

"noooo! i want the pie!" Stretch whined, leaning on him and tugging on his sleeve. "please! you cook so much better than blue!"

"Don't let him hear you say that," Boss laughed, gently removing his hands from his arm. "If we want shepherd's pie, we need to go to the grocery store. Are you up for it?"

"...can we also get some more honey?" Stretch asked, standing with him and trying his best to look cute. Looking cute seemed to get him what he wanted with Boss, and to his delight he got an amused smirk.

Boss turned, jerking his head so he would follow. "If you're good, we can get whatever you want. Come on, then."

#ascaafi #a second chance at a first impression #spicyhoney #papcest #finally figured out the readmore eeeyyyy #amnesia fic

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iamtrebleclefstories · 4 years

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Everything They Say is True

Jo and Alex don't really broadcast their relationship to everyone. Sure, they are excited to be together, but it's no one's business but theirs. For those who don't know about their relationship status, things can get awkward very quickly.

-or-

A fic that takes place within Grey's Anatomy canon

Hi guys! This surprise fic was born out of a dream I had last night and I wrote the majority of it while on my lunch break lol. I hope you guys enjoy this little piece of jolex fluff before I post chapter 9 of Didn't Think.

-Takes place during early season 10-

“God, is being outrageously hot a requirement to be hired as an attending at this hospital?” Gia Holt whispered to the young woman sitting beside her.

Anna Vargas looked over at the group of attending surgeons sitting together at a lunch table and chuckled softly, “It would seem so. I mean look at them. If one of them asked me to open my legs, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

“Same here,” Gia replied. “And I have absolutely no shame in saying that.”

“You know I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s a balancing act,” Anna said.

Gia furrowed her brow, “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Anna started. “Being a surgical intern is hell. We are run ragged on a daily basis. So it would be unjust if we were expected to do all this work without some sort of compensation. So, the hospital gods blessed us with eye candy.”

Gia laughed amused at her friend’s deduction, “I like how you think, Anna. But, I would hardly consider eye candy as enough to make up for the hardship of being an intern. You know we’re always on someone’s service, doing scut and everything that can’t be bothered to do. If we’re serving them on a daily basis, it would only be fair that they serviced us.”

Anna’s eyes widened as she processed her friend’s words, “Gia!”

“What? I’m being honest. How nice would it be to be taught new skills by our attendings outside of the OR?”

“You are something else, Gi.” Anna shook her head.

“Come on,” Gia huffed. “You have to have at least thought about it. I mean, you’re bi so you have your pick of whoever you want.”

“Very true,” Anna nodded. “But I don’t think I’d actually do it. Maybe a resident, but an attending? I don’t think I have the guts to do that. If you want to though, go for it. Maybe you’ll get lucky and get a surgery or two out of sleeping with one of them.”

“So which one should I make a pass at?”

Anna scrunched her face in thought, “Well first, you should probably figure out who isn’t married and go from there. I know Shepherd and Grey are hitched so hot neurosurgeon is off the table.”

“That’s a shame,” Gia sighed. “I wonder if Avery and that resident Edwards are together. I saw them making out in the hallway a few months ago. If they are I can’t blame her. I mean, look at those eyes.”

Anna hummed in agreeance, “Every time I’ve had to work with him I try not to look into his eyes so that he doesn’t see that I’m secretly melting internally. He’s definitely pretty, but I don’t think he’s what you’re looking for. He doesn’t strike me for the guy who would let you in on a surgery because you gave him some ass.”

“True,” Gia said thoughtfully. “I feel like he’s the type to give you a really nice gift after sex, but not to let you scrub in. Not that I’m looking to have sex with an attending so that I can scrub in. I’m a good doctor. I can get in on a surgery by my own merit. I just really want some hot sex with a hot guy and the guys in our class don't seem… up for the task.”

“Ooh!” Anna exclaimed. “What about Karev? The peds attending? He’s stupid hot and great with kids.”

Gia gasped, “You know what, I heard that he slept with basically all the female interns from last year’s class--some of the nurses too--so he’s not above it. From what I’ve heard, he’s really good at it too. He’s hot, got a stellar reputation in the sack, and he’s good with kids. Not that I want kids right now, but it says a lot about your character if kids like you.”

“I agree,” Anna nodded as they continued to finish their lunch. They made casual conversation before receiving pages to the pit from their resident. “You just get a page from Wilson?”

“Yeah to the pit. I wonder what happened that she had to page both of us. Did something big happen?” Gia threw her garbage away as she and Anna started running down towards the ER.

Anna shrugged, “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything. I sure hope it’s something good. I would really love to get to see the inside of an OR today.”

*****

Jo Wilson had hoped for a light day today. It had started off as a pretty quiet day. She and Alex started their morning in the shower with some hot shower sex and then stopped for breakfast at their favorite donut shop. When they got to work, she did rounds, assigned her interns to their posts and then proceeded to perform an appy on a seventeen year old. She had just scrubbed out when she decided to go down to the pit to answer any surgery consults. She spent a few hours down in the ER when she got pulled aside into any empty linen closet. She smiled widely when she realized who it was and turned to kiss Alex.

"Hey, how's Micky? I heard you're trying to find an alternative treatment option for his Wilms tumor."

"Yeah, we couldn't get the entire thing the first time around so I'm hoping with a little bit of chemo we'll be able to shrink it enough to get good margins. And since—as of ten minutes ago—you're on my service for the next two weeks, you'll be scrubbing in with me on that and any other cool thing that comes our way." Alex grinned widely at his girlfriend.

Jo's eyes widened in glee, "Really? Wait, why am I on your service for two weeks? You didn't request me just because I let you in my pants on a daily basis?"

Alex scoffed, "Please. My friends own the hospital, I can put whoever I want on my service. But to answer your question, no it's not because you are a great lay or because I love you. It's because you're an amazing doctor and are going to become a really damn good surgeon one day. Maybe even a peds surgeon. And I don't let just anyone work on peds. Peds is hardcore. I'm not gonna let just anyone hack up a kid. I'm gonna let the best, and you are the best."

Jo grinned before kissing him again, "You are the best boyfriend and attending ever."

"I know," Alex smirked. "Okay I'm going to get lunch. Want to join me?"

"I wish I could but I just started some sutures on a lady in bed 4."

"Get one of your interns to do it. That's what they're here for."

"I would but they are currently having lunch and I'm almost done anyway. I'll come eat when I'm finished."

Alex looked at her skeptically. Knowing his girlfriend, Jo would probably forget to eat and then later in the evening he'd end up having to buy her one of everything off the menu at Joe's. "Alright, I'll see you later."

About fifteen minutes later, Jo had finally discharged the woman she had been suturing. She was about to make her way to the cafeteria when a nurse called out to her, "Dr. Wilson! There is a rig about three minutes out with a five year old girl that received trauma to the lower ribcage, upper abdomen after falling from a tree at school. There don't seem to be any breaks but paramedics are concerned with a possible collapsed lung and fluid build up in the abdomen."

" Okay, page Dr. Karev and my interns, Holt and Vargas. And have cardio on standby. "

" Right away, Doctor Wilson."

Jo sighed before gowning up and going to the ambulance bay to wait for the rig, "So much for going to lunch," She muttered to herself. Seconds later, she heard footsteps walking behind her. Turning to see her interns now gowned up she gives them a small smile before filling them in on the situation. "Vargas, go prepare trauma two and get a portable ultrasound and x-ray ready. Holt, make sure we have a peds cart ready and a chest tray for a suspected pneumothorax. I'll retrieve the patient. The ambulance is one minute out so please be quick."

The two young women nodded at their resident and ran to prepare for the little girl about to come in. When the paramedics arrived, Jo hurried and ushered the small child into the trauma room that had been prepared. She was taking the young girls vitals when Alex walked into the room.

“You paged me? What do we got?”

“Lizzie Graham, five years old. She fell fifteen feet out of a tree at recess. She’s got a pneumothorax and fluid build up in the abdomen. There isn't any evidence of fractures, just some nasty bruising. We just took her x-rays and are about to perform an ultrasound,” Jo sighed. “Her O2 levels are low and she’s got unequal breath sounds. She needs a chest tube.”

Alex furrowed his brows. He always hated this part. Chest tubes hurt like a bitch--he knew that from experience. He looked over to the two interns in the room, “Did someone contact her parents yet?”

“Yes,” Holt replied. “They are on their way to the hospital as we speak. One of her teachers is out in the waiting room.”

"Good," Alex looked over to Jo who had prepared the chest tube. Crouching down by the whimpering child, he smoothed down her hair in a comforting manner. "Hey Lizzie. My name is Dr. Alex. I heard that you took a fall today. We're gonna try our best to help you feel better. But in order to feel better, you're going to feel some pain first. The pain is going to help you breathe, so I need you to be brave for me. Can you do that? Can you be brave?"

Lizzie nodded tearfully, "Hold my hand?"

Jo's heart broke at the little girl's request, "Hey Lizzie, my name is Dr. Jo. Dr. Alex needs both of his hands in order to help you breathe but you can hold mine and squeeze as tight as you want."

They got the tube in and proceeded to perform the ultrasound, "Looks like a ruptured spleen and appendix. She might have a liver lac, but we won't know until we get in there. Holt, book an OR and prep Lizzie. Vargas, stay out here and let me know as soon as her parents arrive. Be sure to keep an eye on my pre and post-ops while Wilson and I are in surgery."

The interns nodded, "Yes Dr. Karev."

*****

The surgery went well. They ended up having to remove both Lizzie's spleen and appendix, but Alex was confident that Lizzie would make a full recovery. They were on their way out to speak to the young girl’s parents who had arrived at the hospital twenty minutes after they went in for surgery. Alex went up to the pair and motioned for Jo to follow him while the interns stood a couple feet off to the side, “Hi my name is Doctor Karev. You must be Lizzie’s parents."

The couple sprung up from their seats frantically, “Yes! How is she? How is our daughter?”

“She is doing just fine. She came in with a ruptured spleen and appendix. Doctor Wilson and I were able to remove both the spleen and appendix. Thankfully, she did not break any bones during the fall so her recovery will last about four to six weeks. I’d like to keep her here in the hospital for about a week for observation, but if everything goes well, she’ll be good to go home when the time is over.” Alex replied to the parents.

“Can we see her?” Mrs. Graham asked.

“Lizzie is in recovery right now, but I can have one of my interns take you to her room to wait for her to arrive. She will be groggy and possibly in a bit of pain, but all of that is completely normal. We will come in to check on her in about an hour to two hours to ensure everything is okay.” Jo smiled at the worried pair. She turned over to her interns, “Holt, you take the Graham’s up to Lizzie’s room? Vargas, make sure to continue to keep an eye on Doctor Karev’s pre and post ops. Both of you keep us posted if anything changes.” Both interns left to do their tasks.

“You did great in there today,” Alex complimented as he and Jo walked down the hall.

Jo grinned cheekily, “Thank you. You were a wonderful teacher as always. So, do we have any more surgeries scheduled for the day?”

"Just a hernia repair in about an hour. Shouldn't take more than 45 minutes to do. And I've been thinking, I might let you take the lead on this one."

"Really?"

"Yeah. You know how we do things; see one, do one, teach one. You've seen hernia repairs done before, and you've assisted with them, so today you lead and I'll assist."

Jo grabbed Alex’s hand and pulled him into the empty on-call room down the hall and smiled, “You sir, are doing a very good job if your goal was to get into my pants for the second time today.”

“Am I?” Alex feigned innocence. He kissed her deeply before speaking again, “Lock the door.”

*****

Laying in the afterglow had become one of Jo’s favorite parts of sex with Alex. She had never experienced such security and love as she did when she was in his arms. She snuggled closer to him and closed her eyes for a brief moment. Alex was caressing her back when her stomach growled loudly, ruining the moment.

“Dude, I thought I told you to eat lunch,” Alex chastised.

“I was going to… but then Lizzie came into the ER and I got pulled into a 4 hour surgery.”

“Jo, all you’ve had all day is a powdered sugar donut and a medium coffee. You’re a doctor, you of all people should know that’s not healthy.”

“Wow, you’re one to talk. If I can recall correctly, not too long ago I was the one getting on your ass about eating right,” Jo reminded.

“Shut up,” Alex glared playfully. “Come on. Let’s get something for you to eat. We got the hernia repair in fifteen minutes.”

They each bought a snack and went to check in on their patient before getting ready for surgery. After assuring the nervous parents, Alex looked over to the interns, “Hey, Holt and Vargas! Wilson is going to be performing the hernia removal today and I think it would be good for you to observe your resident performing a procedure. You’ll both scrub in and take turns holding the retractor and observing. We’ll meet you in the OR.”

“You know, before I was an intern, you would have never been so eager to teach. I think dating a resident has made you soft,” Jo teased as the two of them entered the scrub room.

Alex rolled his eyes as he scrubbed. They walked into the operating room and looked down at the young patient; eleven year old Hunter Miller. The interns were ready and standing around the OR table. Alex nodded reassuringly as Jo took a deep stabilizing breath, “Alright Jo. The floor is yours. You’ve got this. Don’t second-guess or underestimate yourself. Remember what I always say--”

“You wouldn’t let me hack into a kid just because you like me. You let me in on a surgery because I’m good,” Jo finished.

“Exactly,” he smiled through his mask. “Now, just walk me through everything and take the time to teach your interns about what is going on.”

She nodded and began. They were about halfway through the hernia repair when Alex felt confident enough in Jo’s abilities to begin a conversation, “So Mer wants us to go to Joe’s bar tonight. Something about Yang’s birthday and tequila shots. Doesn’t want to make a huge deal about it, but thought it would be fun to invite a whole bunch of people for shots.”

Jo looked up from her work skeptically, “Did Grey really invite me or did she invite you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes it matters. Grey hates me.”

“No she doesn’t.”

“Yes she does.”

“Jo, Mer does not hate you. She likes you, trust me. You know, one time she even told me she thinks you're a badass.”

Jo snorted, “Well she sure has a funny way of showing it.”

“She told me to invite you. And you won’t be the only resident. She’s inviting Ross and Edwards too so you’ll have friends. Besides, you live with Cristina so it would look really bad if you didn’t show up to her birthday shots and she saw you lounging in your sweats on the couch with a beer and a tub of popcorn,” Alex said.

“You live with Dr. Yang?” Vargas asked.

Jo and Alex looked over at the intern in surprise, almost forgetting that they were not alone, “Yeah we live in the same house. We both crash with Alex. I’m surprised he hasn’t kicked us out yet.”

“Shut up… I need the rent check."

“Wait, so you all live in one house together?” Holt asked.

“I like to lovingly refer to it as the frat house. Everyone has lived there at some point,” Jo replied.

“It used to be Grey’s house. A lot of the attendings have lived there at some point. Shepherd, Kepner, Avery, and some people who aren’t around anymore. It was always open for anyone who needed a place to stay,” Alex shared. “I bought it from her last year and kept up the tradition.”

Jo laughed, "I really don't know why you think Yang would notice if I’m there or not. It’s not like we’re close.”

“Look, I’d rather be lounging on the couch in my sweats watching old reruns of Friends or Modern Family, drinking beer too but if I have to go, you have to go.”

“They’re your best friends, though!”

“Come on Jo,” Alex pleaded. “If you go and decide to leave early then I’ll have an excuse to leave because we came in the same car this morning. Also, don’t forget you’re on my service for the next few weeks. I can make your life hell.”

“Woah,” Jo looked up from the patient. “That sounds a bit like coercion.”

Alex gave her an unimpressed look, “Please. I’m begging here. And you know I don’t beg. I can’t handle another night of hearing about Mer’s McDreamy issues and Cristina’s weird arrangement with her not-husband.”

Jo exhaled, “Okay. Fine I’ll go. But you’re buying everything.”

“Deal.”

The rest of the surgery goes extremely well. Jo completed the repair perfectly. The four doctors are in the process of scrubbing out when Alex spoke up again, “You know, Holt and Vargas, you should meet us at Joe’s to celebrate. Your resident just performed a hernia repair on her own on a peds patient and you both assisted. So drinks are on me tonight!’

The interns nodded in excitement and confirmed that they would be at the bar that night at seven o’clock. Alex sent them off to do a couple tasks while he and Jo went to check on Lizzie and a few of his other patients.

*****

“Can you believe it? Karev invited us out for drinks later!” Gia screeched excitedly. “This might be easier than I thought.”

“It is exciting,” Anna agreed. “We hardly ever get to spend time with everyone outside the hospital. So who knows, maybe even I will get laid tonight. You might want to wait before you make a movie on Karev, though. I am trying to figure out though, if Wilson and Karev are sleeping together.”

“Why would you think that?” Gia asked.

“Wilson is only a second year resident living with two attendings. There’s no way she could’ve moved in with them as an intern unless she was already friends with one of them, and from the conversation in the OR, I can tell that she’s not close to Yang. Her and Karev seem really close, but I can’t tell if they’re just friends or if she’s sleeping with him. I mean, he just let her take point on a surgery. Karev is known for being horrible to interns and residents. So I’m wondering if they’re friends with benefits.”

Gia tilted her head to the side, “You make a good point there. She may have already beat me to him… either way I think I’ll still try. Maybe they are sleeping together, maybe they aren’t exclusive, maybe they’re just friends. I don’t know, but Karev is hot and so am I, and we could have some really hot sex, so I’m gonna make a move. The worst he can say is no.”

They walked into the bar and saw Wilson sitting with Ross and Edwards at the bar. Off to the side, Karev was standing at a table with Yang and Grey, rolling his eyes at something they said. Doctor Grey gets the attention of the surrounding doctors before speaking, “Alright as many of you may know, today is Cristina’s birthday so we’re going to do some shots! If you are a doctor at Grey-Sloan, then please make your way over to the bar as we toast to everyone’s favorite cardiothoracic surgeon.”

A string of laughter and teasing could be heard as everyone took hold of their tequila shots and lifted them up, “To Doctor Yang.”

“To Doctor Yang!”

The atmosphere lightened up a bit and distinctions between superiors and subordinates blurred as the alcohol made its way around the room. Alex left his friends and made his wave over to where Jo was sitting at the bar and waved over Holt and Vargas. He looked over to the bartender and began to order some drinks, “Hey man. Can I get a beer for me, a vodka and coke for Jo, I don’t know what those two want but it’s on me.”

“I’ll take a martini and Anna will have a cosmopolitan,” Gia answered.

After each receiving their drinks, Alex raised his glass, “To a great day of saving tiny humans. It’s not everyday that you treat a kid that’s gonna make it, but today we did.”

The group cheered and downed their drinks. About an hour had passed, and everyone was starting to feel some of the effects of the alcohol. Alex became more flirty than usual. His statements were suggestive and oftentimes. Jo was a giggler. She found everything mildly hilarious and more often than not, lost an item or two of clothes in the process. So far, she had shed the cardigan she’d been wearing. Interns on the other hand, became more bold when drinking alcohol. Gia especially, had her inhibitions lowered and decided that she would finally make her move on Karev.

“So Karev, when was the last time you picked someone up in the bar?” Gia asked.

Alex laughed, “Honestly, I don’t remember.”

“Oh please,” Jo rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you remember. It couldn’t have been that long ago. You’d come here every other day with Avery while I was dating Jason and couldn’t hang out with you.”

“I’m serious,” Alex swore. “The last time I came to the bar and tried to pick someone up was last year before Mer, and everyone bought the hospital. I’m out of practice.”

“There’s no way,” Jo shook her head in disbelief. “You did not go that long without a bar hookup.”

“But I did,” Alex nodded.

Sensing that this might finally be her moment, Gia exchanged a glance with an equally tipsy Anna and turned to Alex, “Well, we have to fix that don’t we?”

“Huh?” Alex scrunched his face at the intern.

Jo--who had understood what was going on--burst out into laughter. She considered saying something and staking her claim on Alex, but decided to let him suffer and see what his reaction would be.

Gia smiled flirtily and placed her hand on Alex’s arm, “You said you’re out of practice, so how about I help you break your dry streak?”

Alex’s eyes widened comically as he finally caught on to what the young woman was suggesting. His eyebrows raised and he opened his mouth in shock, closing it dumbly when words failed to come out. He looked over to Jo for assistance, only to find that she was laughing so hard that tears were trailing down her cheeks. Alex laughed awkward and attempted to say something again, “Um… I’m good, thanks.”

“Oh come on, there’s no need to be shy,” Gia winked. “I know you aren’t. Your reputation speaks for itself, and I for one would not mind finding out if all they say is true.”

Alex looked at Jo with desperation in his eyes. Finally deciding to have mercy on him, she turned to her intern with an amused look on her face, “Alex won’t be going home with you tonight.”

“Why not?” Gia asked, seeming mildly offended.

“Because, tonight, Alex will be going home with me,” Jo supplied. “Just like he does every night, because I’m his girlfriend and he no longer needs to pick up random women in bars.”

Both Gia and Anna’s faces paled at Jo’s confession. Gia began to stutter her apologies to her resident when Jo interrupted her, “Holt. Relax. I get it, trust me. He’s hot.”

Alex, who had been observing the scene, felt his ears get hot, “Jo…”

“I’m serious,” Jo grinned. “No hard feelings. You didn’t know. But now you do, so if I see or hear of you making another pass at my boyfriend, you will be drowning in scut.”

Gia nodded and buried her face in her hands in embarrassment. Anna placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, “I guess I was right, huh?”

“I’m thinking I should’ve listened to you when you suggested that they might be a thing,” Gia cringed.

Deciding it was time to leave and allow the poor intern to wallow in her embarrassment, Alex pulled Jo up and started to guide her out the door. Just as the two of them were about to walk out the door, Jo stopped and gave Gia sly smirk, “Oh and just so you know, everything they say about him is true.”

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thebibliomancer · 4 years

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Song of the Dark Crystal liveblog pt 28

Song of the Dark Crystal by J.M. Lee because after all of that, Kylan finally has a bell-bird bone to make a super-duper magical firca out of.

Last times on book: Kylan, Naia, Tavra (stuck in a spider), and new party member Amri saved the Grottan Clan from millions of angry spiders who wanted their caves back. Also, the spiders got their caves back. Good compromise. They also trapped skekLi the Skeksis Satirist on top of a mushroom and found a bell-bird bone so Kylan can make a special flute that will help warn all Gelfling about the Skeksis drinking them. Everything is coming up Kylan, really. All he has to do now is make a magical firca he has no idea how to make and come up with a warning.

Chapter 28

Kylan makes a magic firca. And gets lethally embarrassed by Amri.

As Team Kylan is leaving the corrie, they find urVa standing watch dramatically.

The Archer’s mane danced in the wind where it was not tied back in braids and topknot, and he faced the direction of the breeze to take its scent.

The most dramatic urRu? Maybe.

Naia asks urVa if they’ll see him when they come out but he tells them no.

“I traveled this far in search of my others, little Drenchen,” he replied. “I found one, but it seems he will stay here. I must move on. We will meet again. Someday.”

“Are you all right? We fought skekMal... I was worried we would harm you as well.”

urVa shook his head. When he did, the wind blew his mane from his face, and Kylan saw a wound on his cheek and eye, in the same place where he’d struck skekMal in the Dark Wood.

“What is done is done. The suns turn.”

You’re a chill guy, urVa.

urVa gets ready to head out but asks the Gelfling that if they see any of his “urRu others” to tell them to meet him in the valley.

Huh! So the urRu are all just kind of spread out and urVa is seeking them. I think in the show’s conception of things, the urRu tended to gravitate toward the Valley anyway and the Wanderer was the Wanderer because he’s the one who stood away longest.

The Gelfling find themselves in another tunnel, although a short, well-lit one and as they go Naia muses out loud about the state of things.

“The Skeksis live together in the castle... They have power there, because of the Crystal, and because they are all in one place. The Mystics are alone. We found urVa trapped in the Cradle-Tree. urLii was in the Tomb of Relics. They had power over skekLi with their song... but only because he was outnumbered. If all the Skeksis were to overtake urVa alone, or urLii... if they all came to rescue skekLi, and only urLii was here to guard him...”

“But if the Skeksis come to get skekLi, they’ll have to defeat urLii, right?” Amri asked. He held up two fingers in parallel. “But if they defeat urLii, then won’t skekLi also be defeated? Right?”

“Either way,” Kylan put in hastily, “urLii stayed behind by his own will. He seemed confident he could contain skekLi safely. We have no choice but to trust him. We have our own journey.”

So this is something I’ve been thinking about since Aughra said what she said about how Skeksis and Mystics could counter each other.

Its very unequal! The Skeksis have a bunch of societal power, the Crystal, a sweet castle, and strength in numbers! The evil that Skeksis do is therefore a lot greater than the good that the Mystics do!

Anyway, the Mystics are pretty lucky that the Skeksis just avoid them out of sheer ‘ugh that guy!’

The Gelflings finally exit the caves and tunnels in a pretty beautiful area.

The mountains here were soft and undulating, not jagged and rocky. The air was clear, blowing flurries of leaves and sometimes white and pink petals by, and Kylan thought he heard the sound of chimes. It was beautiful and gold and green, but the scene left something to be desired. Kylan frowned deeply. Their belongings were back at the entrance to Tide Pass, including the Book of Raunip, the pearl amulet, and Tavra’s sword. The others were quiet, too. No one wanted to be the first to bring up the subject, but it was too important. They couldn’t just leave their things, not with the journey they had ahead.

But Naia sees an arrow sticking out of the ground which makes her burst out laughing.

Cool guy that urVa is, at some point he found their stuff and moved it over here for them to save them a trip. Nice!

Really streamlining this part of the narrative, urVa!

Kylan retrieves the Book of Raunip, turns to the section about Gyr’s Firca, and gets really in the zone!

He forgets all the terrors and troubles of the past couple days, all the worries and wounds accumulated, and even forgets his cool friends as they give him space and quiet to work in.

All he saw were the sketches of the firca and the hope it had to offer. It was like every other firca he’d ever seen or played, with one mouthpiece, which split into a fork. The pipes on either end of the fork were carved with three finger holes, one for each finger when held properly in two hands. Firca were made out of many materials, each with a slightly different voice. Most were carved from a single piece of wood, though many were made from forced reeds. The Sifa were known to make theirs from the prongs of welhorn shells, and their firca’s voices came with the ghostly roars of ocean waves. The firca was the most common Gelfling instrument, and perhaps one of the simplest, yet the many materials used in its creation also made it one of the most varied. It could play single notes as well as harmonies, while still being small enough to dangle around one’s neck.

That’s so many firca in one segment.

I’m glad that we’re getting background on the importance of the firca to Gelfling culture but its a bit funny to me that its coming at the very end of the story after all this journeying to find a special firca. Although it makes sense for it to happen now because Kylan has the bone and he’s pondering the enormity of the task.

The bell-bird bone is already forked and a little bigger than your av-er-age wooden firca. Kylan feels lucky that Amri found the Last Bell-Bird Bone in the entire mountain and that it happened to be the correct shape and not broken.

A single bone could have been used to make a flute but Kylan decides that a single flute wouldn’t have had the same impact, remembering joining urVa and urLii’s song.

No, a pipe or flute would not have been the same. The firca was special. It could play two notes at once, leaving room for a third. What that third voice was, Kylan didn’t know, but he felt instinctively that it had to do with the legend of the bell-bird. The birds that sang and the mountains sang back. Perhaps, if the bell-birds sang with two notes, it was Thra itself that sang the third part. Perhaps the firca was so valued by the Gelfling because it left a place for the very voice of Thra.

Rule of Three: the planet.

Kylan doesn’t even have any tools to sand the bone or carve the holes but he knows that if he doesn’t make the firca now, he’ll lose his courage to even try. What with it being an irreplaceable only bone left in existence.

SO HE USES DREAM-ETCHING

My god, it just keeps getting more and more versatile a skill!

It was established that dream-etching put out a lot of heat since it basically just burns things into surfaces. So Kylan just focuses the heat of dream-etching onto the surface of his thumb and rubs the jagged edge where the bone broke and he just sands it smooth with dream-etching heat!

Amazing!

The vibration of the etching heat made the bone sing in a high, resonant key.

Also, amazing.

Kylan takes all afternoon and until Naia returns with dinner.

Naia looked over his shoulder, and he opened his hands. Lying in his lap was a white firca, sculpted and smoothed to the finest detail. He hardly remembered making it, or at least, he recalled none of the moments. As his head cleared from the focus, he realized he had gone into a kind of trance. His fingers were blistered and sore, but the product of his dedication was perfect, as if he had transformed the bell-bird bone into the instrument it had always been meant to be.

Naia declares it beautiful and Tavra agrees, adding that she wished she still had Gelfling ears so she could hear him play. Because when he played the bone, it sent her flopping to the floor.

Kylan apologizes again for turning her into a spider but she’s having nothing of it.

“If you hadn’t, I would be dead. And I would not have had the chance to see the two of you succeed as you have. For this, I am only grateful... Stop berating yourself for doing the things your heart calls you to do.”

You’re a good, Tavra.

Amri cooks dinner and puts one of his alchemical pastes on the fish Naia caught which causes Naia and Kylan a Concern but it turns out enjoyable.

Kylan hangs the bone firca around his neck because after going through this whole Song of the Dark Crystal book to get it, its his most precious possession and he’s not letting it out of his grasp.

While they eat, Naia suddenly remembers that note Kylan gave Tavra and then Amri and asks what was in it. Hey, tying up that loose end!

Kylan tries to say that hey that loose end doesn’t matter lets forget about it! but Amri saved the note and he pulls it out and dodges Kylan’s attempt to stop him from reading it.

“Dear Tavra,” he began to read. Kylan interrupted in a hurry, hoping to drown out Amri’s reading.

“I guessed that whatever was controlling Tavra couldn’t read. That it couldn’t read the note on the rock wall, so it had the spiders try to conceal the message -”

“... I write to you on behalf of Naia, and Gurjin, and those others whom you have helped since leaving Ha’rar on an errand for the All-Maudra...”

“- I had to test it, so I used -”

“I know it must be very difficult for you, having been betrayed by the Skeksis in the most painful ways. I wanted to let you know that we all care for you and that, should you need us...”

“So I used what I had on hand...”

But there was no stopping Amri, so Kylan put his face in his hands and waited for it to end. Amri stood before Tavra, Naia, and all the stars and moons above, reading for all to hear:

“... simply call on us. For especially I admire your courage and your loyalty to all that is good and right, and even if I’m unable to put these sentiments into words to say to you directly, I wanted at least to give to you this promise in words that stay. Your friend, Kylan.”

Oh my gooooooooood, the boy really did it! He wrote his feelings in a letter so he wouldn’t stumble over his words! This precious bean! This poor, mortified Gelf! Everyone’s grinning at him!

Naia is saying that she’d learn to read just so she could read it if Kylan ever wrote her anything “sticky-sweet” like that.

This poor boy!

Kylan justifies that after he saw “Tavra” talking with a Skeksis he needed to be sure whether it was Tavra or not so he gave her this letter that he’d prepared ahead of time. It’s such a personal note that if it were Tavra and she could read, she’d definitely react to it.

Tavra finally pipes up, after sitting silently as poor Kylan was mortified to death, to agree that it was a clever plan.

I’m thinking that she didn’t want to pile on so she just stuck with the narrative Kylan is trying to emphasize.

Despite his conviction that she would have reacted to his letter had she been able to decipher it at the time, the All-Maudra’s daughter showed no reaction now. Kylan wasn’t sure which he preferred.

This poor boy!

And when Kylan fished the letter out of the fire and gave it to Amri, he knew something was up because no way would a Vapran princess be illiterate.

The topic changes to Kylan’s relief, so he brings up his ideas for the Big Message that this whole quest has been about.

He’s been thinking a lot about it. They can’t just use a normal message because Skeksis can read Gelfing but not all Gelfling can read Gelfling. How vexing. But urLii reminded him of dream-stitching in the Tomb of Relics.

So his idea is to dream-stitch the message into some innocuous symbol that the Skeksis won’t notice but a Gelfling will get a dream-fast when they touch it.

And since he accidentally dream-stitched “the dream of her mind to the spider’s body” he’s prettyyyyy sure he can do it.

“I will deliver the message that begins our fight against the Skeksis.”

Heck yeah, Kylan!

So with that so declared and the final chapter of this book setup, the party sleeps under the stars. Although Kylan has trouble sleeping because there’s so much anticipation for the following day.

A blade of grass moved to the side near his cheek. It was the only sign that Tavra had joined him, silently picking her way across the tips of the grass as he might hop along the pathway stones in Sami Thicket. She said nothing, balancing on the stalk of a grassflower like a tiny, delicate acrobat.

He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. There was simply a shared quiet - an acceptance - and then she left, not one word spoken.

When I first read this bit, I got so mad. I thought Tavra was going to leave the group, just vanish in the night because spider and so Kylan could play the bone firca without worrying about the effect on her. I was like TAVRA C’MON WE KEEP LOSING PARTY MEMBERS!

But on another pass, I think this is Tavra accepting his letter and his sentiments.

Aww, friends.

#dark crystal #Song of the Dark Crystal #the dark crystal #liveblog #Kylan #Naia #Amri #Tavra #urVa #the Archer #a lot of feelings in this one #it was a bit of a longer one so it took longer

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junquisite · 4 years

Text

Dangerous Love 9

WORD COUNT : 1.1K

GENRE : Mafia OC X NIS agent! Park Junhee

WARNING : None. it’s fluff or angst. idk which category sorry!

PARTS : 1 1.5 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Junhee was a very patient man, generally. Now it has been 4 hours since apparently she left Chan (yes,Chan texted him) but she still isn't back. Now logically he should call her and ask her instead of sulking in her bedroom but he was getting antsy. And again, he should listen to her because she left him saying he should stay in the room but it was getting frustrating so he ventured out. He didn't go down from that floor, worried to come across anyone other than he had seen this morning and creating a problem for her. So he stuck in the shadows, anxiously waiting for her to be back.

He heard her before he saw her. To be exact he heard her laughing as she came with a younger looking boy and saw Seungyoun approaching them. He could clearly hear the conversation.

“Seungyoun hyung!” the younger boy exclained as he hugged the older one.

“How’s the baby doing?” seungyoun said and Junhee stared. What? Baby?

“I’m 19 hyung. Not a baby.” the younger said and he saw her laughing and joining in with Seungyoun and cooing at the younger.

“It’s almost like yesterday Seungwoo hyung and she brought you here and now you’re so big! Completing studies overseas and here back with us!” Seungyoun said as if drying an imaginary tear as the younger boy flushed and she laughed.

Junhee felt someone come stand beside him and he stiffened - recognising the looming figure.

“Aaah Subin-ah! I have missed him.” Seungwoo mused beside Junhee as Junhee kept staring at the three people on the floor below.

“You know me and her found Subin years ago on the streets. He was a lonely child, close to death by starvation. We brought him up ourselves, like his parents. He's basically a child for us Agent Park. Aaah I should go down now.” he said with a notable smirk in his voice as Junhee stayed in the shadows.

Junhee watched Seungwoo go to them and call for Subin as his baby and the younger hugged him bashfully. He saw as Seungwoo pulled her in the hug and heard Seungyoun yelling “happy family!”

It left a bitter taste in his mouth.

He went back to the room, fidgeting with the burner phone in his hand and counting the minutes she stayed away from him. 4 minutes and 32 seconds later (yes, he was watching) he heard her knock on the door and peak in.

“Junhee-yaaa!” she cried as she came to hug him, forcing him to lie on the bed and flopped on top of him. He could not help but laugh and she joined him.

“I heard you force fed Yuchan and left him with groceries worth a month.” he mumbled in her hair as she snuggled close to him.

“I want him to be safe. I got him the documents, he should be easily able to get 2 weeks off or atleast week. I'm anticipating a warning by NIS in a day or two.” she said and he nodded.

It had already been almost 24 hours since he was brought here. And she had told him in the morning - they had already sent a message to NIS with his picture. They are bound to revolt.

A shy knock at the door made her sit up and giddly open the door, the younger boy or Subin as he had heard, walked in and bowed to him.

“Hello, Junhee-ssi. I'm Subin, nice to meet you.” Junhee got up and bowed himself, vaguely thinking this was the most proper introduction he ever got since he got here.

“Junhee-ya, this is the baby of the gang.” she said as she ruffled the hair of the boy who was slightly taller than her and he smiled. The kid did nothing wrong, he was sweet.

“I have heard a lot about you, I hope you can keep on making her happy.” he said as he bowed again and she laughed as Junhee waved his hand.

“Call me hyung okay?” he said and Subin nodded, happily.

“Yes hyung!” he said with a big smile on his face and somehow Junhee was reminded of Chan.

Her phone rang suddenly and she looked down to see a message about a meeting, so leaving Subin with Junhee, she went to the meeting. For once, Junhee did not feel alone in here with the younger, slightly shy man, telling him small stories about her from the time he didn't know her.

Half an hour later, she came back, tensed shoulder and stiff mouth. Junhee felt a cold shiver go down his spine.

“NIS responded. They called war in 48 hours if we don't hand you over. They denied negotiation.”

It was 5pm. 48 hours from now on, the gang would stand against NIS for a fight with everything at stake.

She had brought their dinner in their room that night, saying everyone was too tense to have a peaceful dinner. Even if she tried to smile for him, he could see she was worried. And she should be. It was her family against the NIS and he had a gut feeling NIS would ask for more support. It would be an unequal fight - a handful of gang members against the NIS and probably the police force.

That night, she had a fitful sleep. Junhee stayed awake for hours to see her fidgeting every few minutes even after falling asleep.

He got out of bed. He needed fresh air.

He went out to a window he had seen a few rooms away from hers. He went there only to see the gang leader standing there who smiled at him as he approached him.

“You look like you could use some fresh air.” Wooseok mumbled as he moved slightly away to let Junhee stand beside him.

Junhee mumbled a small thank you in return.

“Say Agent Park, how much does she mean to you?”

Junhee was expecting this question sooner or later. “A lot.”

The leader nodded.

“You are at a crossroad now. You can leave and go back to where you came from and everything will go back to how it was - sneaking around with no future. Or i can offer you a better alternative.”

Junhee looked at the leader’s face. He had an unreadable expression on but he knew there was something more behind it.

“I’ll choose the alternative.” he said, watching the eyes of the eader light up.

He gave the agent a small smile.

“Welcome aboard Agent Park.”

#A.C.E #a.c.e Junhee #park junhee #a.c.e smut #a.c.e scenario #a.c.e scenarios #a.c.e imagines #a.c.e imagine #junhee scenario #junhee scenarios #Junhee #park junhee smut #park junhee scenarios #ACEWRITERS

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higuchimon · 4 years

Text

[fanfic] Just These Two

Yubel’s hands caressed through Johan’s soft teal-green hair, lips tracing over his for a few moments before moving to brush against his cheek. Johan’s hands swayed, grasping onto air, and he didn’t think that he could have spoken if he’d even wanted to.

That happened a great deal when Yubel and Juudai got to work on him. He was used to it, after nearly two hundred years. In point o fact, he rather liked being in such throes of passion that he couldn’t even speak. There were times and places for conversation.

Right now wasn’t one of those times. Right now, he craved what Yubel offered with a burning that thrummed inside of his very bones.

It wasn’t often that it was just the two of them. Juudai trusted his two consorts above all else but there were times when being the King of the Fae demanded certain duties, and right now, that meant going to someone who might become an ally and not bringing his consorts along. His trip involved business, not pleasure. So he’d called on two of his allies to accompany him.

When he got home, Juudai promised them both, then they would make up for all the time that they missed. Johan believed that. It wasn’t the first time something like this happened.

What it meant now was that it was he and Yubel here, and Yubel savored every inch of him. Johan dragged in a deep breath, trembling, hardly able to stay up on his feet. Yubel’s arms slipped around him in support, bracing against the tapestried wall behind them.

“Are you all right?” Yubel murmured, all three eyes glimmering with amusement. “You look a little – unsettled.”

That was one way to describe it. He swallowed, straining for words. “I-I’m fine.” He was; more than fine in fact. He’d spent the morning wandering the woods surrounding the palace, rejoicing in hours and hours of time with his beloved Gem Beasts. And now he came inside to a splendid lunch and Yubel clearly having plans on how to spend this afternoon.

Plans that he really had no objection whatsoever to.

“Good.” Yubel’s tongue flicked over his ear and Johan groaned. Ever since they’d married, he’d found himself far more sensitive to whatever it was they did to him. It certainly made for several fascinating nights – and mornings – and afternoons.

Yubel laughed a low and throaty laugh, one hand releasing him to trail down his front. Johan made a noise that had no description at all, just a groan of pure want and need and desire. Yubel regarded him thoughtfully.

“Do you want to do this?” Yubel asked, drawing enough of Johan’s attention so he wasn’t a helpless mess – at least for a few seconds.

He didn’t even have to think about his reply. He leaned forward, stretched up as high as he could, sliding his arm around so his hand rested on the back of Yubel’s beck. Carefully he tugged them down and pressed his lips against Yubel’s, kissing with every ounce of passion that he could conjure up.

It was the closest thing to a ‘yes’ he really wanted to say right now. He said it with his lips and with his hands, with his heart and his soul, and he knew Yubel would feel it even if he didn’t say it with his voice.

Yubel returned the kiss, wings folding around to caress against him, enclosing him into a warm, safe cocoon. Johan leaned in,, breathing more deeply, until Yubel gently nudged him. At first he wasn’t sure what they wanted, then it clicked.

Johan stepped carefully backwards, still concentrating more on kissing Yubel than anything else. Yubel’s hands remained on his shoulders, so even as his feet stumbled a little and one hip cracked against one of the low tables in the bedchamber, he didn’t actually fall.

If it had been anyone else, he might well have. No one else he knew had the kind of balance or grace that both Juudai and Yubel did. Their lips still sealed together, Yubel guarding his steps as they swayed from one side to the other, Yubel carefully nudged him with twitched of their wings and tiny pushes against his feet, until he could feel the bed against the back of his knees.

Johan folded down onto it, his heart racing. Without the need to protect him from falling, Yubel now loomed over him, great wings spread. He reached up to trace one hand down the edge of their wings. Yubel drew in a very deep breath, eyes blown wide with desire, and Johan smiled, doing it again.

Then Yubel returned it, in their own way, the long talons of one hand popping the lacing on his shirt. Johan had to laugh.

“I would ask you to buy me a new one,” he whispered, somewhat surprised that he managed a coherent sentence. Yubel’s claws slipped over his silk shirt, neatly shredding it.

“I’ll have a dozen delivered tomorrow,” Yubel promised. He didn’t doubt that. It would hardly be the most expensive item that either Juudai or Yubel provided him since he’d joined them. They gave him whatever he wanted and whatever they wanted him to have. Everything he wore now, everything he owned now came from them.

Johan opened his mouth to say something else but Yubel cut him off with a kiss more passionate and deeper than the one before that. His shirt soon wasn’t the only item of clothing that Yubel rendered utterly unusable. He thought that wasn’t quite fair. Yubel didn’t have any actual clothes to remove.

Then Yubel touched him and Johan stopped thinking about what was fair or unfair altogether. In fact, all thoughts vanished, replaced only by a raging need that he wanted sated at all costs. Yubel clearly knew what he felt and took their time taking care of him, stoking the flames of desire as high as Johan could stand them, while he made nothing but whimpering, needy noises.

Much later – much much later – he curled up against Yubel, soaked in sweat and the most pleasantly exhausted that he’d been all day.

“Juudai will ask how we spent our time without him,” Yubel reminded him, lips quirking faintly. Johan managed a chuckle.

“So what are we going to tell him?”

Yubel played with his hair, their talons parting his sweat-streaked locks. “What do you say to giving him a demonstration once he gets back?”

Johan considered what they’d just done and considered showing it all to Juudai. There wasn’t anything unequal about their relationship, but more often than not, Juudai called the shots whenever they were intimate with one another. For the two of them to turn that on him – a soft laugh bubbled up from his very depths.

“I like that,” he agreed, getting himself more comfortable in Yubel’s embrace. “Do you think he will?”

“Definitely. Juudai enjoys being surprised – if it’s done right.” Yubel promised him. For several minus that they were quiet, and Johan started to consider just going to sleep. Sunlight still spilled across the garden outside of the window but they’d put in a great deal of efforts and a quick nap would do wonders for his energy levels.

Then Yubel’s talons brushed over his forehead. “I can think of a few other things he might like. Care for a few examples?”

Johan wondered exactly what they had in mind. Yubel waited just long enough for him to agree, and no sooner had he nodded than Yubel started to show him.

By the time they were done this time, the sun now cast shadows over the garden, and Johan could just barely keep his eyes open. Yubel’s voice purred warmly in his ear, humming a pleasant, relaxing melody that sank into his bones.

He would have liked to fall asleep to that but he dragged his eyes open one more time.

“Dinner,” he reminded Yubel. “We need dinner.” He pushed himself to his feet, sparing a glance for the shredded fabric that had been his clothes several hours earlier. Yubel, of course, didn’t look even remotely repentant. He didn’t think they’d ever been repentant about anything in their lives. Certainly not in the last two centuries.

But now Yubel rose to their clawed feet as ell. “You’re right,” they agreed. He knew that Yubel seldom ate physical food, mostly because of Juudai’s existence. It was some strange interweaving of their magics, one that he didn’t share, but found fascinating. But he also didn’t miss that flicker of amusement. “Juudai’s going to bring home some treats for us. Where he’s going – that realm has several talented cooks in it. They’ll load him down with edible gifts when he’s ready to come back to us.”

Johan wished more than ever that they could have gone with him. But perhaps another day – and while the two of them were there, then he and Yubel would enjoy one another’s company, in every way that they possibly could.

The End

Notes: I also wrote this for two prompts on tumblr: kisses exchanged as they move around, hitting the edge of tables or nearly tripping over things on the floor before making it to the sofa or bed & one person stopping a kiss to ask "Do you want to do this?" only to have the other person answer with a deeper, more passionate kiss.

#higuchimon writes #ygo gx #johan anderson #yubel #yubel x johan #johan x yubel #bondshipping #au: fae

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xmxisxforxmaybe · 4 years

Text

Decryption_Error: “Mr. Robot”

Summary: Once Mr. Robot realizes Elliot is not going to give his relationship up, he warily turns to someone else for help. Meanwhile, Y/N’s faith in Elliot holds strong, especially now that she believes he is seeing a psychiatrist.

Decryption_Error: All Chapters

Word Count: 4700

--Narrator--

Mr. Robot’s hair ruffled in the breeze, the silvery strands near his ears fluttering as he squinted into the sun.

“This is the life, isn’t it, kiddo? The perfect excuse not to think about Evil Corp. About what they did to your dad. To Angela’s mom.”

Elliot tried not to stare too obviously at what he knew to be an empty space beside his girlfriend.

“Yes … it is a real sweet escape,” Mr. Robot said in a chipper voice, a grin spreading across his face as he stretched his arms out across the rail of the sailboat.

Elliot closed his eyes, squeezing them shut as he willed his mind to reset, to stop with the visual aid that sometimes accompanied the voice he had always known, a voice he had come to love and to fear.

When Elliot first met Y/N, it was just Mr. Robot inside of his head, chattering out cautions about getting too close when he sensed that Elliot actually liked her.

But something had happened during the incident in the server room that had scared him. It was like someone else destroyed those towers; it was an out-of-body experience that seemed to be fueled by an inexplicable rage. Yeah, what those assholes did was shitty, but Elliot had been dealing with shitty people his entire life and had never flown off the handle like that, at least from what he could remember.

What bothered him even more was that several aspects of his life now felt less grounded in reality and more like a vivid daydream. Going to therapy, talking to Darlene about DDoS attacks, reading over the Washington County court transcript and thinking about what Evil Corp did to his father—all of it felt like it was filtered through a foggy lens, one that he couldn’t get to come clean, no matter how hard he scrubbed.

Elliot’s psychiatrist assured him everything he felt was normal; she said a feeling of “fogginess” was often a side effect of the medication she had prescribed for his anxiety. It was important to stick to his medication, especially if he wanted to protect the good things in his life.

Like his relationship.

When he was with his girlfriend, Elliot knew everything was real. For the first time in his adult life, he let himself be loved, so why Mr. Robot was being so cruel was something he couldn’t figure out. The deeper Elliot became enmeshed in Y/N’s world, the more his old friend spoke up, even taking over at times to leave him diatribes on his computer, like writings in a journal. Mr. Robot ranted about the unequal distribution of wealth, about people like his girlfriend and her family, about Evil Corp, and he would fill pages of a document that Elliot would read with unease before deleting.

“She is a looker though,” Mr. Robot praised, drawing Elliot’s attention outward.

“Not in your wildest dreams did you imagine landing a fox like her. Well, maybe in your wildest dreams,” he said with a smirk.

“Shut up.”

“Hey!” Mr. Robot said, turning his sharp eyes to Elliot. “It all came true. You get to crawl between those thighs any—"

“I said shut up,” Elliot growled, leaning forward. “You don’t get to talk about her.”

“Everything okay, El?” Y/N asked, smiling softly at him in a way that always made him feel safe.

“Just a little warmer out than I thought it would be,” Elliot lied. He hated lying, but it was the only way to protect her from him.

“I figured. I brought a t-shirt for you—it’s in my blue and white bag below deck.”

“Thanks,” Elliot said, standing and offering her a slight smile as Mr. Robot stood and stretched, clearly intending to follow him.

Elliot heard his footsteps thud down the short stairs, and he wasted no time whirling around and stabbing at Mr. Robot’s chest.

“Why do you want to ruin this for me? Why?” Elliot asked, a desperate ache in his voice.

“Ruin what? Playtime with the rich and famous?”

“She,” Elliot said pointing above deck, “loves me,” he finished by pointing at his own chest.

Mr. Robot laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners and his glasses winking as they reflected the light streaming out from the short stairwell.

“Please just go away,” Elliot begged, meaning far more than just go away now; why wouldn’t he just go away?

Elliot had thought he finally lost his mind when Mr. Robot reappeared a few weeks ago. Sure, he had always been there--in. his. mind—but Mr. Robot, in the metaphorical flesh, hadn’t been around since he’d turned 15. Elliot always figured he’d just gotten too old for an imaginary friend, so Mr. Robot retreated into the recesses of his mind.

When Elliot went home from his girlfriend’s one night a few weeks ago with a headache and several lost hours and saw Mr. Robot sitting outside on his apartment’s cement stairs, he thought maybe he really was schizophrenic.

Mr. Robot laughed at him, assuring Elliot that he had way too much control over his life to be an unmedicated schizophrenic. This issue, though, was that Mr. Robot had an itch to scratch.

Revenge on Evil Corp was always Mr. Robot’s gig, always his go-to way to refocus Elliot when he needed it, but Elliot always believed it was a fantasy—a very vivid daydream in which he and Mr. Robot teamed up to take down the company that had stolen the life of his best friend and father, Edward Alderson.

Elliot and Mr. Robot stood face to face, two sets of eyes, one pleading, the other dismissing.

“I’ve been here for just about your whole life, kiddo. What makes you think I’m gonna just fade to black now?”

“Because I don’t need you anymore,” Elliot said softly as he tried to appeal to that kind side of Mr. Robot he remembered from his childhood, the side who made him laugh, thought up silly games with him, the one who never let him feel too lonely.

As Elliot got older, he realized memories of an imaginary friend weren’t enough to quiet that ache of loneliness. He needed to connect with people, new and old. Because of his girlfriend, Elliot reconnected with Darlene, and she was once again a constant in his life. Spending time with a real family, one who welcomed both of them into their lives, one who made Elliot feel like he was finally getting the family he had always wanted.

“I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

“You’ve got me,” Mr. Robot said, his voice quiet as he put his hands on the sides of Elliot’s face.

Elliot almost fell for it; he almost fell into that safe space Mr. Robot had created for him, but he was only recently realizing that it was actually a trap. It was like being stuck in quicksand—the harder Elliot fought for full control, the deeper he sank into the sand and the harder Mr. Robot squeezed to protect him.

Elliot was 27 years old; he didn’t want to be protected anymore.

“You’re not enough!” he said through gritted teeth as he pushed Mr. Robot away and watched him stumble into the decorative life preserver. “I want to let her in … all the way in.”

Mr. Robot rubbed at the spot on his chest where Elliot’s hand had pushed. It felt like acid, like if he looked down, he’d see his flesh sizzling away.

Mr. Robot was wounded, and Elliot had no idea that with those words, he sealed his fate. In that moment, Mr. Robot knew Elliot would go through with his declaration. He would let his girlfriend in. She would pull all of those hidden things out of Elliot, and he would remember. There was no way Mr. Robot could let Elliot remember; he wasn’t ready…neither of them were ready.

Even though he was not a fan of the one who mostly slept in Elliot’s mind, the one who only woke up for moments of time to lash out, full of rage, Mr. Robot was going to need his help. After all of this time keeping Elliot safe, Mr. Robot wasn’t about to fail because of some rich bitch from the Upper West Side.

“Playtime is over. You’ve gotten your practice with these other hacks, but now it’s time to go after Evil Corp … after one more hack, that is.”

Elliot’s mouth dropped open, fear prickling across his skin with alarming speed.

He shook his head back and forth as he said, “No. NO.”

“Y/N’s dad lied to his own fucking daughter—all of Wall Street knew about the Washington Township plant and they all did their part to cover it up. His connection is the one we need to finally infiltrate Evil Corp’s servers.”

This again.

Elliot and Mr. Robot had been at odds since the first time Mr. Robot had this conversation with him. Elliot’s face was twisted into a panic now, his chest closing in on itself as he warred within, wanting nothing more than just a single chance at normal. He couldn’t figure out why Mr. Robot couldn’t give him this one chance.

“I won’t do it,” Elliot mumbled.

“Won’t do what? Change your shirt?” Elliot’s girlfriend asked with a slight tilt of her head, her lips curled into a teasing smile.

Elliot’s mouth went a little dry as he balked, horrified he’d just been caught talking to Mr. Robot, who was now nowhere to be seen.

Y/N walked slowly toward Elliot, her palms up in a gesture of openness as if she were approaching a trapped cat who knew it needed help but would rather scratch and run than stay still on the chance it would become a victim.

“You don’t have to change if you don’t want to. It’s no big,” she finished, sounding too much like his sister.

Everything in my life is a fucking big, Elliot scoffed internally.

“I—I forgot which bag was yours.”

Sighing in mock exasperation, Y/N crossed the room and picked up the blue and white striped bag that had been sitting in plain sight on the bench.

“Grey or black? You’ve sort of gone back to dressing in a neutral palette, so no wild colors,” his girlfriend offered with that same smile she had given him above deck, the one that made Elliot feel safe.

“Guess I’ll get a little wild and go with the grey.”

“Mmm—grey makes your eyes even more discernable in their color,” she said, pulling the t-shirt out of her bag and tossing it to Elliot.

“Hey,” Elliot said softly, catching her wrist before she could climb back up the steps, “I love you.”

“Don’t I know it,” she answered with a wink.

I really hope you do, Elliot thought as he watched her go topside, determined to chase his happiness and even more determined to protect the person he loved from whatever it was inside of him that wanted to push her away.

--Y/N--

Sailing with Charlie and my parents seemed to put Elliot at a mild ease, though I did find myself longing for the days when I could clearly read him. As least now I could begin to understand what happened when he became closed off; something within was fighting him for control.

I wondered how much he understood.

I wondered why he never looked up the symptoms.

I wondered what would happen when he finally found out why he lost time.

When Elliot emerged from below deck, I patted the seat next to me. He sat down and seemed to decide for a moment if he wanted to be affectionate. He hesitantly laid his arm out behind me on the railing, and I leaned into him, encouraging the gesture.

I admired the profile of his face and the way his skin seemed to drink up the sun. A few hours on the boat, and he looked healthier than he had for the last month. I leaned in to press a kiss to his jaw, which made him blush and look at my parents as if they were going to scold us.

They were paying no attention, so Elliot leaned close to my ear and whispered a quiet thank you.

“For what?”

“This,” he said as he glanced around the boat. “Them,” he added as he looked at my parents and at Charlie.

And after a moment’s pause, he said, “Us.”

“Can I tell you something I really want to tell you but am afraid might totally freak you out?”

Elliot pulled his lower lip in, his jaw clenching.

“You can say no,” I added hastily.

He released his lip and muttered, “Say it.”

“If, if we consider Memorial Day weekend the start of our relationship, in exactly 4 weeks and 6 days, we will have been together for an entire year.

Please don’t freak out,” I added as I watched him.

“Isn’t … that a good thing?”

“Yes!” I grinned, “I think so at least. I mean—did you ever imagine we’d get to this point?”

“No.”

“You never imagined it? I thought that was kind of a rhetorical question, but alright.”

“What I imagined is how badly I’d screw it all up before it could ever get to that point,” Elliot clarified in a quiet voice.

“Well, you can be less than a picnic,” I stated with a smile, “but so can I.”

“You’re perf—”

“Oh no. No. No. You don’t get to say that. Don’t you remember our argument about subjectivity and words like ‘normal’ and ‘perfect’?” I teased.

“Fine,” Elliot said, a grin spreading across his face. “You’re my version of perfect.”

I laughed as I replied, “Thank you.”

“Did--did you actually just take a compliment without deflecting?” Elliot asked, his face twisted up in mock scrutiny.

“Mayyybe.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my girlfriend?”

“I love it when you call me yours,” I murmured, moving my face close to his, wanting nothing more than to kiss him for hours while the sun blazed and the boat rocked through the water.

Elliot closed the gap and pressed his lips to mine, and despite the simplicity of the kiss, the intimacy made my breath catch.

“Charles,” I heard my mom croon. “Look.”

“Motheeer,” I groaned as I turned to scowl at her, catching both of my parents looking at Elliot and I like we were more precious than gold.

Elliot snickered, and I shot him a look of surprise, expecting him to be mortified. Instead, he gave my shoulder a squeeze and said, “She actually just took a compliment for once. Didn’t even try to counter it.”

“Nice to know she’s finally becoming civil! She’s always been shamefully ill-mannered,” Mom said with an airy laugh. “Elliot, dear, did I ever tell you about the summer she was banned from every party from Tribeca to Midtown?”

My dad laughed as my mouth fell open.

“Mom—that’s really not a story Elliot wants to hear.”

“Oh, I think Elliot wants to hear the story,” Elliot grinned wickedly.

“Let’s see,” my mom began. “She had just gotten her driver’s license—"

“Sis!” Charlie shouted at me, “Haul in the jib sheet!”

“Oh, thank god,” I mumbled as I gave Elliot’s thigh a pat before I jumped up to help, hoping to avoid being a bystander to my own humiliation.

After I set the sail, I settled in beside my brother at the helm.

“Feel free to jerk the wheel. Maybe our mother will fall into the bay.”

Char did jerk the wheel, but it resulted in me nearly falling on my ass as he laughed and grabbed my arm to keep me upright.

Elliot and my parents looked back at us, picture-perfect wide smiles on all three of their faces as the sun warmed us, reminding us of the promised sweetness of summer. But what really filled me with happiness was the fact that Elliot looked like he belonged to us, like he belonged in our family.

* * * * *

At least twice a week Elliot saw his psychiatrist, but after the first session, Elliot told me he needed space—not break up space, just a day or two kind of space after his sessions.

I readily accepted the distance and reminded him, probably an annoying amount, that he could tell me anything and I wouldn’t judge him. He said his psychiatrist told him it was important to take time to process and to only share what he was discovering about himself slowly. I, of course, agreed and backed off, keeping my questions to a minimum and not prying if he only gave short answers.

His doctor had also prescribed an anti-anxiety medication, which did open up a partial conversation because Elliot knew I took something for anxiety, too. We compared brands and dosages, but he seemed more interested in learning about my anxieties than talking about his own.

I actually felt a lot more at ease since one of the biggest sources of my anxiety, the hacks, had seemed to stop. CIStech was currently in the process of upgrading Precision Machining’s servers, so everyone was busy with data backups, image backups, replacing memory, installing new cards, and closely monitoring the log files to quickly catch any errors.

I was determined to ensure it went flawlessly, mostly to heal my pride after the cyberattacks.

Even though Elliot and I were both busy at work and didn’t see each other much during the week, we still spent every Friday night through Monday morning together, usually at my place.

Since we had gone sailing last weekend, I figured it would be nice to do something lowkey—just the two of us.

It was around 5:00 pm when I locked up my office and headed down to CIStech’s wing. I said hello to a few employees on their way out, and as I made my way to Elliot’s desk, my smile faltered.

He was deep in conversation with Angela.

My first instinct was to stop and turn around, like I was an intruder. Then, I realized that she was the one at my company, talking to my boyfriend.

Employee, I corrected, attempting to convince myself that jealousy was not at all what I felt.

Angela’s employer, All Safe, was a young company, but they were still competition. Their CEO, Gideon Goddard, was an impressive businessman who finally achieved recognition when he took on cybersecurity for E Corp. Surely Elliot found that repugnant, so surely Angela wasn’t sent here to try to steal him away.

“It’s an impressive setup, El,” I heard Angela say and a little pull of unease settled in my stomach at hearing someone other than myself or Darlene call him that.

Her back was to me, but Elliot noticed my approach and stiffened. At the change in his body language, Angela turned and didn’t bother to hide her surprise at seeing me.

“Hey, Y/N. Coming to make sure your staff isn’t working overtime?”

“That would be Tim’s job, not mine. I’m just here for this guy,” I said as I gently slid my hand over Elliot’s shoulder.

Surprising me, he wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me into his side; I smiled at him before returning my focus to Angela.

“What brings you here? Surely not trying to steal away our best white hat?”

Angela chuckled, “Wouldn’t dream of it. I had a late lunch with Sarah, one of your account execs--we went to law school together. So I figured I’d just pop in and say hi to Elliot.”

“You went to Fordham, too?”

“No—Hofstra.”

“Hmm. I must be getting my execs mixed up. I’ve always preferred the tech aspect of this business rather than the sales.”

“I’m more of a people person. Computers … intimidate me,” Angela said.

“Quite the opposite of El, huh?”

Angela looked at me for a minute, clearly considering her next response; she and I both knew it would tell me all I needed to know about whether she accepted me as good for Elliot.

“You know what they say about opposites,” Angela said with a smirk. “He needed someone to draw him out of his shell when we were growing up.”

No, she did not approve of me, but despite what my mother believed, I was well-mannered.

I gave her my most charming smile and replied, “I’m glad Elliot had such a good friend growing up. Genuine friendship is a rare and powerful thing.”

Angela’s large blue eyes slid over my face.

“It is. Listen, Elliot. I’m gonna run. It was great seeing you,” she said as she stepped forward and gave him a hug, hanging on until he slowly returned her embrace.

As soon as his hands settled on her back, she pulled away, gave me a wave, and left the office as Elliot and I both watched her walk away.

“Did I … just witness a white-collar catfight?”

I slowly turned my attention to Elliot, only to find him smirking at me. It was the most arrogant expression I had ever seen on his face.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re jealous.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You are … aren’t you?”

“Darlene says it’s good for you if you aren’t always right,” I said walking toward the exit as Elliot hurriedly shuffled into his backpack and doubled his strides to catch me before the elevator.

“So jealous,” he mumbled, and without looking over, I knew he was still smirking.

Slowly, I turned to him with narrowed eyes.

“You think you’re such a genius.”

“Did I or did I not have to hear all about the ‘gorgeousness’ of some pretentious dick named Alexander Strömberg as you and my sister discussed whether he was worth fucking around with or not?”

“You pay attention to that kind of stuff?”

“Of course I do,” Elliot said as the elevator opened up.

We tabled our discussion as we navigated the busy lobby, but as soon as we were on the sidewalk in front of Precision Machining, I asked, “Did you hack him?”

“Of course I did.”

“Elliot!”

“Well …” he trailed off, probably wondering how he lost the upperhand on this conversation.

“I knew Angela didn’t go to Fordham. I was just being a bitch.”

Elliot stopped in the middle of the street, stunned, but I kept walking, a smile hidden on my face.

“You hacked her!” he exclaimed, jogging to catch me yet again.

“Just a little.”

Elliot laughed and leaned into me, pushing me off of the crowded sidewalk and into a little nook that led to a small patch of green the city only called a park so it could honor the very wealthy person it was named after.

His hands moved to my face as he pulled me in to kiss me, his teeth nipping at my lips.

“You are fucking jealous,” he said, grinning into my mouth.

“Shut up,” I said as I slid my hands from his chest to around the back of his head. I brushed my fingers across his short hair as he kissed me again.

--Narrator--

“What are you doing now?”

“Finishing up the track on the 23 IP addresses. None of them used a VPN except two, so once we get them to install the keylogger, we own them.”

“All 23 gonna be dumb enough?”

Master Mind rolled his eyes, “They’re people, aren’t they?”

“You’ve got to hurry—you’re not strong enough to keep Elliot locked up in his therapy session for long.”

“He’s safe there. He thinks he’s getting treated for his social anxiety. He’ll never know any different.”

“We haven’t done anything this extreme before,” Mr. Robot said, his normally controlled speech punctuated with concern.

Master Mind turned his head to aim his comment in Mr. Robot’s direction, “Maybe we should have. He clearly doesn’t understand what’s at stake. Maybe he’s the one who isn’t strong enough to pull off the job?”

“Is that why you fucked his girlfriend?”

Master Mind turned back to Elliot’s computer, “You saw that?”

Mr. Robot moved beside Master Mind and leaned forward, staring at him like he was an idiot.

“I see everything. It’s my job to see everything. And I don’t like that you took advantage of him when he was weak.”

“IP address list is done. When Elliot gets back, all he has to do is embed the malware link in an iframe.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem of Little Miss Fairytale.”

Master Mind’s fingers flexed over the keyboard.

“Do you … like her?”

“Elliot loves her.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Don’t tell me you think you have feelings for her,” Mr. Robot said with a laugh that sounded more like a snarl of warning. “That’s not your domain, pal.”

“She’s … one of them,” Master Mind said slowly, testing out his newfound independence to share his thoughts. Normally, Mr. Robot kept him so quiet that he often wasn’t aware of what Elliot was doing.

Months could go by and life hardly changed for Master Mind, which was probably why he felt more alone than the others; he was really only good at constructing the worlds Mr. Robot sometimes needed to occupy Elliot. And no, Master Mind never refused to help protect Elliot; in fact, he wished he could do more to help him, to make the world a safer place for all of them.

And thanks to Mr. Robot’s overreliance on Master Mind’s hacking skills, he had more time to think now, and he was beginning to realize just what needed to be done to create the kind of world that would be good enough for Elliot.

“After we hack her dad, she’s gonna know. She’ll leave him,” Master Mind decided.

“She hasn’t left him yet.”

“He hasn’t crossed a line he can’t come back from yet.”

“Once we hack the 23 jurors, we should have enough information to get Angela to restart the lawsuit. If we’ve got her working toward our goal, too, all we’ll need is Darlene to start the ring. She’s the one who has the connections.”

“She has the people skills.”

“Something Elliot still can’t quite master.”

Master Mind looked Mr. Robot full in the face, his eyes scanning him for any hint of deception.

“Is all of this necessary? He’s going to hate you if you succeed.”

“He’s not going to remember.”

“How many times are you going to reset him?”

“As many times as I need to protect him from the truth.”

“The truth of what?”

“That’s not your domain either, kiddo,” Mr. Robot said in the voice he normally used to say nice things to Elliot. Master Mind liked that voice and a part of him longed to stay, to keep talking to someone, even if it was Mr. Robot.

“Elliot is gonna fight you.”

“I think he’s gonna put up a hell of a fight, but if we can get Angela back in his life and get rid of his girlfriend, we can get him to focus on what matters—revenge.”

“Revenge,” Master Mind repeated slowly, tasting the way the word moved through his mouth, heavy and important.

Master Mind shook his head, his eyes blinking slowly.

When Elliot realized he was sitting in front of his computer, his brow furrowed. He knew he’d just left the therapist’s office not more than a few minutes ago.

“It’s just me, kiddo,” Mr. Robot said. “I needed to finish what I was working on.”

“I don’t even want to see it,” Elliot said exiting out of every window.

“Suit yourself. But you’ve got work to do.”

“You promised,” Elliot said. “You promised that if I helped you hack the jurors, we could give what we found to Angela and then you’d be done. You said you’d go away and let me live my life.”

“If that’s what you still want when I’m done, yes. I’ll go away and you can try out the whole domestic bliss thing. No contingencies.”

Elliot looked hard at Mr. Robot and a part of him knew he was lying, but it didn’t matter. Elliot was stuck. He had no choice but to take the risk.

At least Mr. Robot was letting him go to therapy, and he was starting to feel a better.

All he had to do was let him scratch a few more itches.

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