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hanaasbananas · 3 years ago

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your love is all that i need (the only blood that i can bleed)

The tragedy of Adrien Agreste. Written for the MWG March event. Last line prompt: "this can't be the end"

AO3

The labour is hard. Harder than most.

It is long, gruelling, and bloody. At the end of it, there is a boy. He is born healthy.

This is his first crime.

For his mother will never truly recover from the ordeal, and his father will never forgive him for it.

She holds him afterwards. Looks down at the squalling, blonde haired baby in her arms and says that he is perfect.

Father is more critical. He prods at Adrien’s pliant limbs, at his soft undefined features. He looks at his child and sees not a son, but a lump of clay waiting to be shaped, to be moulded into perfection, into something worthy of his love.

II.

They see him, and say that he is lucky. Better to grow up with everything than nothing at all.

And for a time, he does have everything. Or what seems like it. An empty house doesn’t seem so empty when you have someone there who loves you. A lonely childhood isn’t unhappy when there is someone who will hold you close, who will wrap their arms around you and protect you from harm.

It doesn’t always work. His mother is bedridden, and cannot be constantly at his side. But she tries. Oh, she tries. She coddles him as much as she can. Gives him all the love that his father will not. All the love she has in her heart, she gives to him, until there is nothing left for anyone else.

A child is not passive. A child takes up space, demands attention. Demands food. They cannot help it, it is in their nature to need. To want.

This is his second crime.

In time, he will learn to be unobtrusive, to make himself as small as possible, but not yet. For now, he is a happy child. His green eyes follow every newcomer that seems to appear out of nowhere, looking for the flash of teeth, the smile that makes him gurgle happily in response. His mother delights in his every movement, in the way his starfish hands curl around her fingers, tug at her hair, and put the strands in his mouth.

As he grows, she teaches him to read at her bedside, plays games with him under the covers and soothes all his ills. She holds him close when father scolds him and feels her heart break when she sees him growing more cautious, wishing that he could be a little more boisterous, a little more free.

Adrien tries. He does. He sees what his mother wants him to be and plays tricks, cracks terrible jokes just to make her laugh. But still he is careful, always colouring within the lines, tongue poking out of his mouth as he concentrates on his colouring book, making sure that not a single pencil stroke escapes the thick black outline of his favourite cartoon.

Father likes it when his work is neat.

III.

The arguments become more frequent once he’s older. Mother forgave father for his distance when he was a baby, but now…

Now Adrien hears them arguing, long into the night. About him. About fathers' indifference. Still, nothing changes. Gabriel Agreste has never listened to anyone but himself, after all. But mother looks sadder now, her face drawn, and even Adrien’s jokes aren’t always enough to make her laugh.

“Why does father hate me?” he asks one day, startling mother with his question. She looks at him with stricken eyes, her answer automatic.

“He doesn’t—”

“Yes he does.” Adrien’s words are matter of fact. He’s mulled this over for some time. Has spent hours looking in the mirror, examining his features, cataloguing them all. Sometimes, he wonders if it would have made a difference if he’d looked more like his father. If, perhaps he’d seen himself in his son and found it in himself to love him.

Adrien will never know.

“It’s okay, I don’t mind.. I just want to know why”

Mother doesn’t reply. Instead, she pulls him close, dropping a kiss to the top of his head. “I don’t know.” she admits, finally. “But I can love you enough for the both of us.”

IV.

When he is ten, father finally finds a use for him.

He looks at Adrien’s blonde hair, at his green eyes—so like his mothers—and sees a profit. Sees a way that his son can atone for the crimes he does not know he's committed.

Mother is overjoyed, sending him off every morning with a tight hug and a kiss on his brow, telling him: “be good for your father, now!”

She is delighted by his fathers newfound interest in him, and Adrien doesn’t have the heart to tell her that they don't even travel in the same car in the mornings. That he spends his days being shuffled from room to room, getting dressed, and primped for the camera before being bought in front of father so that he can approve him for the day's photoshoot.

So instead, he spins stories, telling mother about lunchtimes spent together, and pep talks before shoots.

The shouting stops for a while, and he is glad.

He doesn’t know that mother is too weak to shout. Doesn’t know that her heart breaks with every lie he tells her, that with every passing day that she grows weaker, she worries not about herself, but about what will happen to her son.

Adrien is twelve when his life falls apart for the first time.

Father doesn't let him see her when it happens, and he is glad. It is one of the few kindnesses he will ever show his son.

After the memorial, he stands in the doorway to mothers room, and stares at the empty bed, the pillows piled perfectly against the headboard; the covers tucked in and smooth. Everything is packed away neatly, all signs of his mother cleaned out so thoroughly that he struggles to even conjure up the image of her, struggles to remember what the room had looked like when she had lived. When he had learned to read at her bedside, had lain with his head in her lap—the only place where he felt truly at peace.

Overnight, the house becomes almost unbearably quiet.

Adrien hadn’t noticed the silence before, hadn’t recognised just how many empty rooms there were. But now the silence is his companion. It wraps around him like a thick blanket as he eats alone, drapes itself over him as he does his assigned schoolwork, and abandons him when he cries himself to sleep at night, as tears soak his pillow and the sound of his weeping echoes loudly in his room.

VI.

There is a restlessness inside him. A yearning to do more, to see the world and truly experience it instead of being locked away inside. It festers and grows, an itch underneath his skin that can’t be scratched. Until he can’t take it anymore.

Father won’t notice, he tells himself as he makes his plans.

Father won’t notice, he thinks when he enrols himself into school.

Father won’t notice, as he eats breakfast on his own once again, excitement thrumming through his veins on his first day of school.

He never does.

VII.

Father does notice.

Not that he cares enough to bother stopping him, or even to check in after the entire city is sent into upheaval by Stoneheart, by the arrival of two young superheroes. Instead, Nathalie lectures him about maintaining good grades along with his modelling, her eyes trained on her tablet as she pretends to read off of it, pretends that the words she speaks are not her own.

Part of him bristles at the farce, wants to demand father come and speak to him himself, but a larger part of him knows such a request is futile. Father has never bothered with him before, why would he start now?

Once he is dismissed, Adrien finds himself pausing just outside mothers old room. He hasn’t been inside since the memorial, unable to bear the emptiness, but now his hand hovers above the door handle, hesitant and almost afraid. He knows what lies behind the door. Knows that mother is not lying in bed waiting to hear about his day, but if he closes his eyes, just for a moment…he can imagine it.

If mother was still here, Adrien would have told her everything. About his new friends, and about his disastrous first meeting with Marinette. He'd ask for her advice on how to make amends, and she’d certainly pick up on his blush, would tease him, and pinch his cheeks and tell him just be yourself, my darling, and she is sure to be charmed. And he would be content.

Blinking away tears, Adrien shakes his head to dispel the melancholy threatening to settle on his shoulders. Mother isn’t here, but he isn’t entirely alone either. Not anymore.

Now he has Plagg.

In his room, Plagg zips around, inspecting anything and everything, trying to eat it all, no matter how inedible. He chatters incessantly, and even as he complains loudly, filling the silence with demands for camembert of all things, Adrien sees what his new friend is doing, and for that, he is grateful.

VIII.

He could fall in love with her, he thinks, as he watches Ladybug stand tall, addressing the city with blazing eyes. It would be so easy to give her his heart. But there is another who has laid claim to it and as he fights alongside Ladybug; as he bumps his fist against hers at the end and they grin at each other he thinks that in this partnership, he would rather have friendship.

Afterwards, in school there is a thunderstorm, and an apology. An umbrella, and the brushing of hands, and laughter.

Marinette’s laughter is captivating—it makes his heart race in his chest and a blush heat his cheeks and all he wants to do is make her laugh, to always be the one to make her laugh, and hear it always.

When Plagg teases him, and calls them lovebirds, Adrien does not deny his feelings. He simply looks back over his shoulder at her, and says “I hope so.”

IX.

It doesn’t take very long for Ladybug to become his best friend.

The akumas don’t stop coming, and soon they set up patrol schedules, where more often than not they both end up talking for hours on end instead. She brings sweets and snacks, and he brings a big notebook and teaches her all the games that he’d play with his mother, all the games they made up to entertain themselves.

He’d thought that with mother gone, those games would be forgotten, that they would become a distant memory in the recesses of his mind. But as he watches Ladybug scribble on the paper, watches her hold it up with a triumphant flourish and announce her win, he sees now that these games can live on.

He swallows the lump in his throat and congratulates her.

And if he misses his mother a little more keenly that night, nobody has to know.

It takes a year for him to ask Marinette out.

A year of awkward flirting, and blushing. A year of daydreaming about what it would be like to hold her hand, to hold her close and kiss her. A year of near misses and confusion, until Nino—and even Alya—finally get sick of his dithering and tell him that Marinette likes him too.

It still takes him a week after that to process the information before he asks her out, but when he does, she says yes.

XI.

Adrien loves going to Marinette’s house.

He’d been before, of course, with their friends. There had been after school study sessions, movie nights, even just hanging out, but ever since they’ve started going out, he has a standing invitation to dinner once a week and he has yet to miss a single one.

He watches her parents as they bustle around the kitchen, shooing him away when he tries to help. Their affection is clear in everything they do, in the lively chatter over the dinner table, in the casual touches—a hand on a shoulder, a peck on the cheek—that come so naturally he wonders if they even notice them anymore.

Marinette’s house is never silent. It is small, and cosy, brimming with so much life, and love, that it doesn’t take very long until that love extends to him as well. Tom will ruffle his hair as he passes by, Sabine offers him extra portions of desserts, and won’t take no for an answer, and all the while Marinette’s hand is hot in his, as she twines their fingers together and squeezes his hand under the table, laughing and telling him to go along with it.

He doesn’t want to bring Marinette to his house, and she doesn’t ask.

Perhaps she senses his apprehension, perhaps she simply doesn’t care. But…something inside him is afraid. Is afraid that if she was met with the choking silence of his home, if she met his father and saw just how little he cared, she’d realise that she shouldn’t care about him either.

Instead, his visits to her house become even more frequent once it becomes apparent that her parents truly do not mind. Marinette grouses that her father has stolen him away when they play Ultimate Mecha Strike for hours and Adrien will kiss her in apology until she forgives him. Sometimes they’ll fall asleep on the couch and he will wake up to find a blanket draped over them, and the quiet murmur of her parents talking in the kitchen.

This is happiness, he thinks in those moments, when Marinette has her head tucked under his chin and is snuggled close. And then:

Mother would have liked her.

XII.

He is seventeen when his life falls apart for the second time.

Father stands beside him in silence as Adrien stares down at—

—at his mother. His hands shake and he shoves them deep into his pockets, trying to make sense of what is in front of him. The floor seems to tilt beneath his feet, his heart pounding in his chest and making his head spin as nausea makes his stomach roil.

Still, he can’t look away. “What…” he clears his throat. “What is this?”

“I think you know…Chat Noir.” Adrien barely even starts at the use of his alias. That seems to be the least of his worries right now, though a small voice inside of him finds amusement in the revelation. It seems father pays attention to him after all.

Father turns to him then, finally. “This is what I’ve been fighting for. To bring your mother back.” For a brief moment in the low light of the repository, his eyes almost seem warm as he reaches out to Adrien. “Now you can help me.”

Adrien almost laughs, pressing his lips together to contain the hysterical giggle that threatens to slip from his mouth. Of course. Of course father is Hawkmoth. Father is the one he’s been fighting for years now, the one who has been relentless in terrorising the city. He should have known.

“Will you join me?” Father’s voice comes to him as if from a great distance, muted by the blood rushing in his ears, but Adrien cannot bring himself to respond, his mind racing.

He thinks of Ladybug, thinks of their friendship cultivated over so many years. It’s their patrol night today and he’s more than a little late. She must be waiting for him. Wondering. Worrying. He thinks of rooftop picnics and late night chats, of fighting side by side and commiserating over their disdain for Hawkmoth. She is his best friend.

Father is still waiting for an answer, his palm up in front of him, watching him expectantly.

Could he betray Ladybug like this? Turn against her without any explanation and leave her to fight alone?

He looks to mother again. Underneath the glass, she looks exactly as she did the last time he saw her. More serene, perhaps, her face no longer lined with pain, but he half expects her to open her eyes, to smile at him as she always did and draw him in for a hug.

He misses those hugs. Misses her voice. Longs to have her with him again. A wave of yearning washes over him then, so strong that it threatens to knock him off his feet. He feels like a young boy again, standing alone at the threshold to his mothers rooms and wishing desperately for her return.

And now he can do it. Now he can make that wish come true and all he has to do is—

—it is an impossible choice. How can he choose between them? But he must.

He must make a decision.

Mother, or Ladybug. He cannot have both.

His heart pounds, beating out a rhythm in his chest mothermothermother—

He takes his father’s hand.

XIII.

The next akuma attack is his last.

He waits until the fight is almost over before emerging, bile rising in his throat at the way Ladybug’s face lights up at the sight of him.

“You took your time!” she teases, breathless from exertion and still happy to see him. He says nothing, avoids her gaze and so misses the myriad of emotions that flicker across her face—bewilderment, confusion, disappointment—before finally landing on hurt as he vaults over to the akuma’s side and gets ready to fight her for the first time.

I’m sorry, he wants to say, but the words won’t come, sticking painfully in his throat. Such words are useless after all. They will not undo the damage he is about to cause.

Steeling himself, Adrien thinks of mother, and attacks.

XIV.

Once, there was a time when Adrien had craved his father’s company. There had been days when he would sit outside his office, playing quietly with his toys for hours and hoping for acknowledgement that never came. The only thing he’d received was disappointment as day after day, father swept past him without so much as a glance at his son.

It is strange then, when father starts joining him for dinner. The first few times it happens, they do not speak, simply sitting in silence as they eat, both assessing each other across the table, neither willing to make the first move to start a conversation.

Adrien isn’t sure what father’s motivation is, but he knows there is no paternal instinct involved. Father doesn’t have a single paternal bone in his body. They have spent so much time—hours upon hours—poring over the Miraculous Book together, plotting new akumas and planning ways to get Ladybug’s earrings. He stays out of battles and watches them alongside father, advising him about Ladybugs weak spots to skew the fights in their favour, and still Adrien sees in father’s eyes that he barely tolerates his presence, even now.

Sometimes, it makes him wonder if he made the right choice.

When those moments come, when doubt creeps up on him and guilt settles like a heavy weight in his stomach, he steals away to see mother, to sit by her side and talk to her, to remember why he is doing this.

He has to remind himself a lot these days.

XV.

Adrien still goes to Marinette’s house for dinner twice a week. They go on dates together, and double dates with their friends, and in her presence he can almost pretend his life is normal.

But there is a strange melancholy that surrounds Marinette now, a sadness he cannot seem to get rid of, no matter how hard he tries. When he does, she simply smiles at him and tells him not to worry, curls her body around him and hugs him tightly, as if afraid to let him go.

XVI.

When he’d first got his Miraculous, he’d snuck out of his bedroom in the dead of night. Racing through empty streets, vaulting high in the air and feeling the wind ruffle through his hair he’d been unable to stop the whoop from escaping his lips and echoing in the night. Because for the first time in his life, he’d felt free.

Now, it doesn’t matter how long he runs for, or how far. Where before, the crisp night air had felt liberating, now it is stifling. Instead of racing through the streets, talking to civilians, and sparing them a smile as they pointed and waved at him in astonishment, he hides in the shadows. Nobody is happy to see him anymore. They look at him in fear, they remember the day he turned against the people and cower at the sight of him.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. It will all be worth it, in the end.

If only he could really believe that.

XVII.

They’re camped out in her room again, a movie they aren’t paying attention to playing on the computer and he has his head in her lap, finally relaxing for the first time that week as Marinette combs her fingers through his hair.

He loves these quiet moments, loves this simple intimacy that exists between them. If he could bottle this moment up and live in it forever, he would. He wants it to stretch out into eternity so that they will never again be discontent.

Without really thinking, Adrien begins to speak, his voice slow and quiet. Though he works with him now, father never wants to discuss what will come after, and Adrien knows better than to push him.

What he doesn’t know is why he has never spoken to Marinette about his mother, but as he tells Marinette about his mother, about those early days—the happy days and the sad— the conflict constantly brewing inside him quietens down, replaced by a strange sense of peace. An acceptance.

He doesn’t want to do this, he realises with sudden clarity. Mother wouldn’t want him to either. She wouldn’t want him to waste so many years in pursuit of bringing her back.

I had my time, he can imagine her saying, pushing his hair away from his forehead and pressing a kiss there. I lived my life. Now it is time you live yours.

He’s still talking, words spilling out of him faster than he can even think of them, talking now about the games his mother invented for them to play, the notebooks they filled up that he still has, hidden in the back of his wardrobe. Marinette’s hand stills.

“You’ve never…you never told me this before.” Her expression is stricken as she looks down at him.

“I know,” he says. “But I want to share it with you now.” Rising up, he kisses her, tangling her fingers in her hair and smiling as she clutches at his shoulders, deepening their kiss.

I love you, he leaves the words unspoken, but she hears them anyway.

XVIII.

Adrien agonises over how to tell father his decision for two weeks, but in the end it is taken out of his hands.

“Ladybug has…demanded to speak with you. Or rather-to Chat Noir.” Father sounds amused as he tells him the news over dinner as if he is relaying the antics of a particularly precocious child. “Alone.”

It is the perfect opportunity, practically dropped into his lap and before he knows it, Adrien finds himself fitted with an earpiece and shoved out the front door.

She’s already waiting for him when he arrives, landing softly on the rooftop behind her. The scene is painfully reminiscent of so many of those patrols they’d spent together and when she turns to face him, he sees in the way that her eyes glisten that she remembers just as well.

For a long moment, they don’t move, simply staring across at each other in silence. In his ear, father hisses to get on with it!

He turns the earpiece off.

Adrien opens his mouth to speak and then pauses, struggling to find the right words, the perfect opening.

“I made a mistake.”

“I know who you are.”

They both speak at once, voices overlapping and echoing in the quiet night. Adrien stumbles back, her words hitting him like a punch in the gut. Distantly, he wonders if the Parisians know what is going on on this night. If they feel how momentous this night is.

Because nothing can ever be the same. Not now. Not after the decisions he has made, the mistakes.

“What?” He whispers, unable to raise his voice any higher. The pit in his stomach grows ever larger, threatening to swallow him whole as Ladybug steps forward, her expression earnest and no longer apprehensive after hearing his own confession.

“I know who you are…Adrien.”

And that is when everything explodes.

XIX.

When Adrien awakes, it takes him far too long to reorient himself. Shaking off the debris that had landed on him, he rises to his feet, blinking the dust out of his eyes. Spinning on his heel, he searches for Ladybug through the smoke, terror gripping his heart.

Of course father had planned an ambush.

Of course he hadn’t told Adrien about it—he was expendable after all. He had been in denial for too long, but this…this was indisputable proof.

The confirmation didn’t feel particularly satisfying.

He finds father, eventually, far away from the rubble of the building. Standing over Ladybug, he has his cane raised over his head, ready to strike. Adrien breaks out into a run.

“Get away from her!”

Quickly, too fast for Adrien to see, father moves his cane to the side, hitting him squarely in the middle, the impact sending him sprawling to the ground. Struggling to catch his breath, Adrien cannot bring himself to mind the pain, not when father is walking away from Ladybug, when she now has a chance to escape.

“I thought we were working together,” he says, glaring up at his father.

Father laughs, the sound terrible and manic. “Did you really think that I would let you survive this? You, the object of my wife’s destruction?”

Rage bubbles up inside of him, the likes of which he’s never felt before. With it comes despair, tears streaming down his cheeks.

He has lost everything. And for what? To simply be erased from the story, not even an echo of his existence remaining?

Father towers over him now, his eyes gleaming with triumph. His lips are pulled back in a sick grin and Adrien almost laughs at the thought that he had once wanted this man to love him.

The cane comes down.

His cataclysm is faster.

XX.

Ladybug is not lying in the rubble.

Marinette is.

She smiles weakly up at him, fingers fluttering in a half wave. “Surprise.”

Marinette is Ladybug.

The thought might have left him reeling another time, but…Marinette is lying in the rubble, blood slowly leaking from a gash in her temple. One hand rests on her stomach, covered in blood, attempting badly to stop the flow.

“Thanks for stopping your dad there,” she murmurs, wincing as he falls to his knees beside her. “I think a second hit would have killed me.”

Adrien can only stare in horror, hands hovering over her middle, over her head, looking for a place to rest that won’t hurt her. There are no words for this, for the horror enveloping him now.

With a beep, his own transformation drops and he finally lays his hands down, brushing the hair out of Marinette’s eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Marinette I’m so—this is all my fault if I hadn’t—” A sob builds in his throat and Adrien wants to scream. Wants to rage and yell and fight the universe that has dealt him this hand. His own suffering he can accept. He had accepted it, long ago.

But to drag Marinette down as well? To destroy such beauty? The beacon of hope not just for the city but for himself too?

Fingers brush against his, and he meets Marinette’s eyes. There is no reproach in them, no anger. Only forgiveness.

Somehow, that is worse.

No.

Carefully, so as not to jostle her, Adrien removes Marinette’s earrings, ignoring her small cry of protest. Plagg’s expression is solemn, an impossible sadness in his eyes, but he does not try to discourage him.

Marinette watches him anxiously, her breathing becoming more and more laboured. Bending down, Adrien presses a kiss to her forehead, careful of her wound, feeling the sheer power of the Miraculous’ clasped in his hand. He thinks of his mother, and everything that has led him here. Thinks of father, and for the first time, truly understands his ambitions.

He cannot lose Marinette. He will not. This is not the end of their story. He refuses to believe it.

This can’t be the end.

#banana writes 🍌#miraculous ladybug #adrien agreste #gabriel agreste a+ parenting #hello friends have some angst on this fine thursday morning :)

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funnywormz · 3 years ago

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not really a ship bc its basically canon but do you like suselle from deltarune. I think it is cute.

I LOVE SUSELLE!!!! ive actually drawn them quite a few times on here, i think one of my posts abt them is in my top posts currently actually!

THIS GOT RLLY LONG IM SO SORRY ANON im putting it under a read more lol. tldr for those who can't be bothered reading: i also think it's cute lol

maybe this is a predictable answer but i just think they're really neat......... i love noelle and susie as their own individual characters and they go so well together. susie has kind and caring side to her underneath her mean/rude exterior and noelle seems to be one of the ppl who instinctively figured that out straight away. she's still a bit scared of susie but i can tell she knows susie is a good person.

in turn i think susie is a bit intimidated by noelle in her own way, although for different reasons. it sounds funny at first bc noelle is like. the opposite of being intimidating but hear me out. noelle genuinely likes susie, and the things that normally make ppl dislike susie or not trust her (e.g. her impulsiveness, her scary appearance and outward manner, etc) are things that noelle finds endearing instead. noelle is clearly interested in susie and wants to get to know her better and i don't think that's something susie is used to at all. you can tell she likes noelle and appreciates her company but she's obviously nervous when they hang out too bc she's not used to someone being into her like that which is kind of adorable tbh

just in general susie is becoming more vulnerable and letting her kinder side show as the chapters pass. it's really sweet to see her find friends who care abt her

i also think noelle seems to be very passive and lets herself get pushed around a lot, into doing things she doesn't want to do. the most obvious example of this is in the snowgrave route, but even outside of it, the expectations her mother puts on her are clearly stressing her out. she very much gives the feeling of someone who bottles up her feelings for the sake of others and does things for other ppl, rather than herself. she is very selfless and kind but that has its downsides too bc she needs to figure out what she really wants and what she thinks is right. in the pacifist route we see her start to break out of this by standing up to queen, and also she seems to be braver around susie too.

i think it would be cool if susie ended up showing noelle how to stand up for herself and do things she wants to do instead of letting other ppl push her around. susie and noelle are kind of opposites in the aspect that susie always follows her own path, she flat out refuses to obey/pay attention to the player's orders/suggestions, and always does what she wants to do. conversely, noelle lets characters like berdly, her mother and queen kind of boss her around, and in snowgrave she's pretty much just peer pressured by the player into killing ppl/acting as a tool/weapon for the player, even though you can tell she knows it's wrong deep down.

it would be nice to see them help each other balance out, to see susie become softer and more accommodating of others, and in turn to see noelle become assertive and advocate for herself more often. i think they have a lot to learn from each other. and there are clearly somewhat mutual romantic feelings there as well, like you said it's practically canon lol.

it's still early days with them and they know hardly anything abt each other but there's definitely the potential there for them to have such a great relationship and be so good for each other. they just have a rlly nice dynamic and i hope they do end up together

#ask #anon ask #suselle

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jangofctts · 4 years ago

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Sink Your Teeth In (Part 2 of Are You In Or Out?)

Rated: Explicit (Paz is in the next chapter DONT WORRY)

Word count: 7.5k

Warnings: mentions of violence, blood, the cold?, reader is in PERIL YET AGAIN, vaginal fingering, oral female receiving, unprotected vaginal sex (wrap them schlongs yall), brief hand jobs, swearing, angst, very VERY light choking, din is a sub sorta?? bottom energy

Summary: Well. At least you aren't dead. After a solo hunt gone wrong, you’re dumped in a cave on Csilla. Hopefully someone finds you before you freeze to death.

a/n: hey…so uh. HOW ABOUT THAT EPISODE HUH?!? aheM anyway--yall I just wanna thank everyone first off for all the love and support!!! I see all of your comments and tags and AH IM SO LUCKY TO HAVE ALL OF YOU GUYS. ALSO SPECIAL SHOUTOUT TO @djxrxn THIS WOULDNT HAVE BEEN DONE WITHOUT YOU BB GORL

Well—

Here you are.

Taken by surprise by another bounty, further proving how irrevocably incompetent you are at this line of work. You blame the binders. An older, clunkier model—easy to pick if you’re clever enough and yes. Maybe you should’ve asked to borrow a carbonite chamber, but hey—where’s the fun in that?

Not much, as it so happens.

Your feet had been kicked up on the dashboard, dozing and unaware of the freed bounty creeping up behind the pilot’s seat. Something delightfully blunt smashed against your temple, jolting you into a brief conscious state where the only thing you could think before passing out again, was a resounding—

Oh, fuck me sideways with a fucking lightsaber—

The rest is hazy. A blur of colors and the fuzzy shapes of your bounty’s face sneering in amusement when she bound your wrists and ankles and left you in the cargo hold. Vaguely you recall your ship being commandeered, swung into an unidentified atmosphere and landing on said unknown planet Or planets. Planet hopping to cover up a trail.

The bitter cold, sharper than a needle through skin is what shook off the last dregs of unconsciousness. The bounty’s hand was hooked into the collar of your clothes, dragging your limp body through drifts of snow and ice. You would’ve fought back—should’ve even though each extremity felt like a numb block of lead. Not very useful in a fight…

Soon, the snow turned to mud and the mud to stone as a mouth of a cave slid over the impossibly blue sky. Dumped in a cave, and left to die—perfect way to bite the dust. Your bounty turned captor lands a sharp kick to your ribs, mouthing some curse in a language you don’t understand, and left without a second thought.

Seems about right. You have a knack for lying helpless and half dead in places you ought not to be in.

Two days and counting, you’ve been holed up in this blasted cave with no food, no supplies and no comlink. It’s going be a fucking chore to find you—nearly impossible. You’re lucky in that aspect you guess—you know enough bounty hunters to sniff out a a needle in a whole stack of needles, so all it is is a race of time against the elements and how long it takes for one of them to notice.

Aeris is no help. He left a day before you had—hired as personal protection for some syndicate leader halfway across the galaxy. Ives is in a similar boat, off-world and unavailable to drag your ass out of the hole you’ve dug. Which leaves…

You sigh and pinch the bridge of your nose between your forefinger and thumb. Anytime you even think of those two a migraine cumulates behind your eyes. It’s…it’s not like anything bad happened in the aftermath—there’s been no fallout or arguments with barbed words as weapons. It’s been quiet. Like stepping onto a sheet of cracked transparisteel in a library full of tight-lipped academics.

The questions lurk under the surface of every conversation and longing look cast your way. You’ll need to clarify and sort things out eventually, but fuck—it’s such a mess of frazzled heartstrings and fine strands of impossible thoughts that lead into an endless void of doubt. You’re shoving that emotional time bomb to the very back of your mind—everything is still so raw…

So you ran.

Picked up any and all jobs that the Guild provided just to escape the looming decision of confronting a certain pair of Mandalorians. That and with them having their own tasks to complete, it was rare to see them, let alone together in the past few weeks. A simple run in here and there in the halls of the Covert, but you were too busy to stop and chat—forced a chaotic schedule upon yourself as an excuse to avoid staying in once place at a time.

Coward.

The word knots in your stomach like gnarled tree roots escaping their prison of dark soil on untrodden land.

Maker—how did everything become so tangled?

You draw your knees up to your chest and release a long, drawn out exhale that echoes through the cave. You sniff and force the swell of tears that prick at your eyes away. You’re pretty sure they’ll freeze and you’re not hoping to find out.

The only good thing about being dropped on this Maker-forsaken, wasteland devoid of anything but snow, is the free ice for the nasty gash on your forehead. A nice little parting gift.

It’s shallow…you think—it stopped bleeding the night before and is now just a scabbed over, tender wound that throbs whenever you move your head too fast. Concussion maybe—a mild one.

Maker willing when someone finds your sorry ass they’ll have bacta. Or a blanket. Either would be peachy.

Sitting up with a wince, you shuffle to the mouth of the cave for the thousandth time and scour the skyline for a familiar ship. Or, any ship really. The only thing you do see is a lonesome wisp of cloud against the grayish blue sky much to your chagrin. You scowl and stalk back into your little hovel and slump back onto the ground.

The hours drag on, the watery light of the dying sun barely doing anything to warm you. Sulking is hardly what you should be doing—not great for the burdened mind and all that, but ah, it’s so fun to wallow in misery. You curl your knees up to your chest and you must slip into a doze because when you’re snapped back into the present, footsteps punch through the frozen tundra outside your cave.

Adrenaline crackles down your spine—the bounty changed her mind. Ultimately decided she’d be safer in the long run with you dead. Fine.

If this is where your grave is going to be, might as well get in one or two punches. What’s another black eye anyway?

A shadow flickers at the mouth of the cave, curling around the wall as she draws closer. A brown boot kicks through the snow and—

“Changed your mind? I—“

Your words die on your tongue as relief floods your veins. Din Djarin stands before you, a sight for sore eyes in these trying times.

Frost glitters on the burgundy chest plate, glinting in the dim sunlight that touches the mouth of the cave. A delicate feathering of the dainty crystals that no high end lace maker could ever hope to mimic curls up the front of Din’s visor and eats away at the edges of his cloak. His heavy step forward reverberates off the walls, some of that ease replaced by the prickle of dread. His silence is unnerving.

“Din,” you say again, just so he’ll say something. “I can—“

You move to stand, but he interrupts with a halting;

“Sit.”

Your mouth snaps shut and you drop back on the floor. This…is not good. His footsteps are heavy as he approaches you and every muscle in your frame tightens like a fist wrapping around your ribcage and squeezing. The precise edges of his helmet are not a forgiving sight and even when he kneels onto one knee you have to resist the natural urge to flinch. Like this, despite hunching over, Din is broad. All hard muscle and sinew amplified by the bulky layer of beskar.

Your tongue runs over the insides of your teeth as you track his hand that he thrusts foreword. You hiss and jerk away at the sudden needly pain when his gloved thumb finds the edges of your head wound. A low sound of disapproval filters out through the helmet in a low metallic buzz.

“You won’t need stitches,” he says. Din reaches into one of his various supply pouches and pulls out a tiny vile of bacta. He casually pulls off his right glove, unscrews the vile and smears the bacta over his thumb. This time you don’t make a sound, even though your nerves scream at the razor like sensation of his thumb working the bacta into the damaged flesh. He doesn’t ask how the injury happened and you don’t care to tell him. There’s a time and place for stories about battle scars and near misses—it’s much too fresh to be spoken of right now.

The brief torture finally ends after once last glance over for other presenting injuries. He finds none, replaces his glove and stands with a muted grunt. You know what’s next. You’d rather avoid it—you aren’t keen on the berating lectures—as deserved as they are.

“I found your ship on Sato 3,” Din begins with a growl. “Imagine my surprise when I found your bounty selling it for parts.”

Ah, there it is. You wince and study your fingernails. “Pile of junk anyway…”

“I thought you’d be smarter about these things,” he snarls, his sharp tone deadly enough to slice through bone. “Was the hole blown into your lung not enough for you?”

You swallow and bite your tongue.

The bristling Mandalorian, continues and jabs an orange tipped finger at you. “You are reckless.”

Your chest constricts as you look away, shame blooming in the pit of your stomach.This is a new facet of Din you’ve never encountered. You aren’t naïve—even the most docile of people can harbor a temper, you know that. And you know Din is by no means passive—he’s an elite warrior equipped with a small arsenal at his disposal. You don’t expect him to coddle you or treat you different than any other companion; but…but it’s hard not to take his ire to heart. Not when it’s the kind of anger that boils deep in your chest and erupts with molten streams that leaves scathing wounds and blistered feelings.

You chew your lip hard enough to taste blood and avoid his piercing gaze. You think if you do you might catch fire and burn to a crisp. “I’m sorry.”

The meek apology settles in the air like a heavy fog. Din’s anger still brews, looming and dark but he reigns in his temper and switches out the searing cadence of his words with chilly informality. You’re not sure which is worse.

“No more bounties.”

“What?” Your brows knit together. The fuck does he mean.

“No more hunts alone—“

You interrupt with a scoff. “You’re grounding me?”

He strides across the small space and plants himself on the opposing wall. “Until you’re competent enough, you have no business being out in the field. You might as well be bait at this point.”

“Competent.” You echo through clenched teeth.

His helmet dips, leveling a steady glare of indifference. “The Crest is a half cycle’s walk from here. In the morning I’m taking you back to Nevarro.”

“I’m not a child. You can’t just,” you throw your hands up in dismay, “ban me from bounty hunting.”

Din’s armor clinks together as he moves to sit. He rests one elbow on his propped up knee, extends his other and rolls his helmet to meet your eyes. “Your actions reflect the Covert now. We can’t risk discovery because of one stupid mistake or a careless loose end.”

That hadn’t even crossed your mind. Stars, you want to smack yourself. Your ship, as shitty as it was, hosted a good chunk of sensitive information, all encrypted and translated into binary. A mediocre slicer could hack through it in hours. Not exactly foolproof but hey, at least you had something. Good thing your bounty wasn’t in the market of selling stolen ships to the Empire.

“Din?”

The Mandalorian makes no noise of affirmation that he heard you. You sigh and take his silence as a go ahead and clear your throat. “How long was I gone for?”

Here, in the cave it’s been nearly three days, but the rest of it you’re not exactly sure. Hunting the bounty down took up at least a week or two and even longer to capture her and there’s no accounting for the time lost after your ship was commandeered. Your teeth roll over your bottom lip as you wait for him to respond.

“Almost two months.” He replies evenly. “Your transmissions were cut three weeks ago and I didn’t think anything of it. Comms are always patchy in Wild Space."

Leather creaks as his fist balls at his side. “You didn’t answer for days. Paz and I tracked the ship to Sato 3, but you weren’t there. Do you know how difficult it was to pick through all the planets recorded on your log?”

You blink and return to picking at your fingernails.

“You weren’t easy to find, I—“ He severs the rest of his sentence with a crackling sigh and tilts his head back. “You’re lucky.”

The hesitance lacing his words makes you bite your tongue, the snarky retort crumbling to ash in your mouth. Din doesn’t bother to filter his words—he’s blunt. Efficient and to the point when he does decide to speak. That…well that was different.

He was worried—

You rub at your cheek—numb with the cold and curl into yourself. Din was worried. Easily the most feared bounty hunter in the parsec, worried that he couldn’t find you.

A different cold—one that settles deep into the marrow of your bones and hugs your soul with a sheet of frost, makes a home in your heart. The severity of what could’ve happened replaces that sheen of hilarity and fuck. You were closer to freezing to death than Din finding you here—alone in some stupid kriffing cave.

Somehow the idea of that is worse than the brief brush of eternal slumber you had on Nar Shaddaa. Up to that point you expected to die young—no harm and no foul in it either. You had no attachments, no debt to pay—a drifter in an endless galaxy.

Now you’re here, buckling under the weight of mismanaged friendships and your uncanny skill at weaseling into any and all trouble.

Neither you or Din jump to fill the silence. The ashes of disaster settle in nicely with the frozen echo of an endless winter.

It’d been a couple hours shy from sunset when Din arrived, the sun providing weak light that hardly touched the mouth of the cave. Now as the shadows grow longer and with the temperature dropping, the two of you are swallowed up by the unyielding darkness of night.

Din shuffles and fishes out the solar light from his supply bag. It clicks on and warm, orange light illuminates the cave. It bounces off his beskar, fracturing the light like a million tiny suns in the tempered metal and in the impossibly dark visor. He looks up, and tosses the light over.

You catch it easily and despite the warmness of the light it emits, it offers no heat for your chilled fingers. You set it to the side and tuck your hands into your armpits.

By no means is the cave warm—the natural thermal vents kept the ground dry and free of the ice and snow that rages outside, but it doesn’t protect you from the occasion chilly draft that cuts through each layer you wear. Then again, you weren’t planning on taking an unexpected vacation on Csilla. No time to plan really.

You sigh and pull your knees up to your chest and cast a glance at your ever radiant ray of sunshine across from you.

He looks nice and cozy—leaned back against the cave wall, one leg crossed over the other while his hands sit intertwined just below his navel. The beskar must provide insulation—maybe a fancy heater in that bucket of his, or maybe he’s just too stubborn to show anything other than indifference.

Another bout of shivers tear through your frame and you’re certain Din can hear the enamel of your teeth clack together. You shove your hands deeper into your armpits and tuck your chin into your chest to preserve heat and pray that sleep isn’t far off—can’t be cold if you’re unconscious.

Metal scrapes over stone as Din readjusts himself and you can feel him looking at you. It’s not a terrible weight to bear; intense and analytic, sure and in the past it would’ve unnerved you. Now, instead of it feeling like he were peeling back each fibre of your soul each time he stares, it’s familiar. A pattern of sorts—

It happens each time Din wrestles with an uncertain question. He deals in absolutes, and it’s no surprise he rarely knows what to say to you.

“You’re shivering,” he states. You roll your eyes. “Are you cold?”

“Boiling, actually,” you snip. “Why else would I forget a jacket?”

A sharp hiss of air crackles through the vocoder. “Don’t get mouthy with me. It was a simple question.”

“Well—there’s not much to do about it,” you sneer, watching your breath condensate in the air. “I’m freezing, exhausted, and hungry.”

You know you’re being snide—but your nerves feel like they’ve been severed at the root with a dull vibroblade. You have neither the time nor energy to spare for simple questions. Din should understand that—seeing as he’s a man familiar with short temperament.

The space between you is ripe with crackling tension, and maybe—if you weren’t so fucking cold—you’d play the mediator. Thread stitches into the gash you both sliced into your friendship, as small it may be. You’ve lost friends over less—this could end up no different.

You sigh and turn your head. This is a problem for tomorrow.

Irritated and upset, you squeeze your eyes shut and chase after sleep. You slip in a doze faster than expected, any and all discomfort fading away a you toe the line between a deeper sleep and waking dreams. You think you imagined Din saying your name—Maker you can’t even escape him in your own fucking head—

It doesn’t end—like a nagging buzz that swells until it’s right near your ear. Spite spurs you to ignore It and exhaustion convinces you to drift further away. That is, until a hand, gentle and warm curls around your shoulder. You once again hear your name rumble low through Din’s helmet, but it’s much too difficult to open your eyes. Why can’t he leave you be? You barely feel the cold now…

“Stay awake.” Din sounds distant, in some other plane of existence despite the steady hold he has on your arm. “Maker—you’re colder than kriffing ice.”��

“Go away,” you grumble through numb lips. Such a pest.

He’s talking—but the words don’t make sense. Muddled—split between that hazy line of dreaming and consciousness where you can’t decipher what’s real. His hands however—you can feel those plain as day. A bare palm cups your cheek—shreds through the layer of frost you’re positive has crystalized over your skin and rouses you to a more coherent level of presentness.

“Don’t quit on me yet—“

“Nah,” you mumble. “I’m hard to…to kill. L-like a scrap rat…”

Din grunts in response. “Rat is a compliment. You’re more of a spider-roach.”

The ends of your mouth quirk. It’s the best you can do—a full smile just might push you to the brink of death.

“C’mon—I won’t let either of us freeze,” Din sighs. His fingers find the magnetized latches on his cuirass and it slips off with practiced ease, the armored thigh plating following a moment later. He neatly sets it to the side and grabs his cloak to fasten it around you. With another sigh, Din shuffles in behind you and wraps an arm around your middle, nestling his legs and body snuggly around yours.

Maker—you don’t have time to bother about the intimacy of this because all you’re drawn to is the furnace like heat. Fuck, he’s so warm. You have only a second to enjoy it before your body begins to thaw—bringing forth waves of achey pain.

His chest molds to your back, both arms curling over your own arms that are scrunched up tight around your chest. You shake in his hold, vicious waves of cold clashing against his body heat—it hurts—like sticking your bare foot into hot coals.

You squirm, little gasps of discomfort slipping out that echo around the cave. Din shifts, tucking you further under his body until he’s nearly crushing you. It’s a bit tricky to breathe like this but hey—you’re not complaining. Not when your nose is buried in his soft undershirt that smells purely of Din.

Your fingers and toes still throb as they thaw, but it’s working. Cuddling Din Djarin to stave off hypothermia—sounds kriffing ridiculous.

“You’re still shivering,” he says. “I might…”

Your breath catches in your throat as he trails off. “Might what?”

Another shiver wracks through your body as his frosty helmet catches on bare skin when he dips his head in embarrassment. You don’t quite catch what he says and he doesn’t bother to clarify. “Forget it.”

You turn your head as much as you can, straining your eyes to meet the strip of visor. “Tell me.”

He mumbles under his breath again and cuddles closer, slotting his hips against your ass. “Might know…know another way to keep us warm…”

Oh.

A spark breathes to life in the pit of your tummy. You wiggle onto your back, your nose brushing the vizor. “Does it involve me taking off my pants?”

Din huffs, his hands, previously latched onto your hips, starting to crawl up your waist. “It could…”

You smirk and rock your hips back, eliciting a low growl that rumbles through his chest. With your whine of approval, Din’s hand slips between your legs and gives the meat of your inner thigh a squeeze. You let your knees fall open as far as they can in this position and it’s all Din needs to cup your cunt through the thin material of your trousers.

Crackling pleasure flood your veins as the heel of his palm grinds into your clit, and while the pressure is nice, it does nothing to satisfy. Only feeds the growing flames of desire with brittle kindling.

You pull at his undershirt and whimper, thrilled once his deft fingers, calloused and thick unlace your pants and yank far enough down to fit his hand. His fingers trace your outer lips, a ghost of a touch as arousal swells in your stomach. He parts your folds once your wetness begins to dribble out and coats his fingertips with your arousal.

Stars—you need him. You arch into him and whine. “Touch me. Din, please—“

You jerk as Din’s thumb swirls a slow circle over your clit, a rush of endorphins surging out like unrefined fire whiskey. Din’s head tilts to watch you writhe over his fingers and the sudden chill of his helmet touching the inside of your flushed neck steals away your next inhale. Goosebumps race down your entire being, adding to the influx of your excitement that pools in your lower belly.

Your hands tangle into his undershirt, pulling him closer until you can’t find where he begins and you end. His heart pounds in his chest, thrumming to the dance of your own heart that yearns to break free from your ribcage. Your breath catches when two of his thick fingers tease at your entrance. Your walls flutter around him as the slip in easily.

His fingers roll forward and stroke against something devastating inside of you, and he when his palm rolls back, it bumps against your clit with that divine firmness you need. Your cunt tightens around the two digits as they curl.

“Fuck. Can you hear yourself?” He pants, groping your breast to elicit a high pitched wail. “You always make—make such pretty noises.”

Butterflies erupt in your stomach at his words and fuck. You’re already dipping head first into release. A moment later you’re arching into his chest as every muscle stiffens in a crescendo of bliss, your stuttered breathing harsh even to your own ears.

Your quick pants fog up his visor as Din rests the crown of his helmet on your forehead, the metal a cool relief to your flushed skin. He slips his fingers out of your dripping cunt, your chest still heaving with exertion as the last strands of your high fizzle and ebb away. Din shifts and and snakes his fingers, still shiny and wet with your arousal, beneath the lip of his helmet and sucks them clean with an appreciative groan.

“Fuck—“ You breathe, pushing your face into his hand as he cups your cheek. Din’s thumb brushes over your cheekbone and swings his leg over your hips to hoist himself over you.

“Do you remember...” He starts, his voice buzzing through the vocoder. His fingers tickle down your cheek and trace the parted outline of your lips. “When you let me taste you?”

You nod, and it’s all you’re able to do. You’re not even sure you can formulate words, let alone voice them right now.

Din’s thumb pulls at your plush bottom lip, and you can’t help but slide your tongue along the digit. He grunts and slips his thumb into the wet heat of your mouth. “I think about you every night…how you came on my tongue—”

Your stomach flips as a rush of arousal sweeps through your tummy. You groan and you’re half sure you’re gonna dissipate into the floor from how hot your cheeks burn. “Din—"

He continues without missing a beat.

“You were so fucking wet for me—dripped all over my hand,” he murmurs, nuzzling his helmet, still chilly and frosted over, into the crook of you neck. “I want to do it again—can I?”

You’re nodding before he even finishes his sentence. He wasn’t the only one longing for his head between your thighs on those long nights apart. Remembering those plush lips and addictive touches could only get you so far and well—he’s here now. You said it once and you’ll say it again—there’s no chance in hell you’d be passing up this opportunity.

Din lifts his head and as you watch the light glitter in the reflection of the beskar, a sudden stray thought ricochets into the forefront of your mind. “Din, the light—your helmet.”

He pauses, his body tensing as he mulls over his options. “It’s—I—it’s ok…It’ll be ok.”

Din inhales a stuttered breath and casts a brief glance over his shoulder. It’s a dim light, kicked into the corner and laying on its side. From this angle, his face would be partially obscured in shadow…but still. There are easier ways to go about this. Ways that don’t risk jeopardizing the very foundation of who he is—what he stands for and what he so devoutly follows.

To say you know anything about his religion is laughable. Everything you know can fit on the back of a thumbtack and even still, you’re sure that half of that is still based upon rumor and speculation. But this—what Din is hinting at, you know is not something to be taken lightly.

He’s stripping his soul bare for you—allowing you to glimpse at that bleeding heart of his he guards so securely within layers of flesh and bone and impenetrable beskar. Din is gifting you his trust and there’s no where else to put it except for the space beneath your breast bone.

Yet, even still—this could mean nothing at all. You have no way to know the exact magnitude of what this means to him. If he’s alright with this, who are you to question?

He mumbles one last thing about the light and sits up. Goosebumps rush up your bare skin at the loss of the heavy warmth of his body. You whine and curl up closer to his legs, greedy for any spare iota of heat like you’ve been denied it your entire life.

Maker you hate this fucking planet—

Your attention snaps back to Din when he makes a noise of uncertainty. His hands are cupped around his helmet—hesitant, nervous and you suspect if Din’s hands weren’t plastered so tight around the metal, he’d be shaking. You chew on your lip and prop yourself up.

Cautiously, so as not to startle, you reach up and curl your fingers around his wrist. You can feel his pulse thrumming through his veins—alive, flesh and bone like you. Not some heap of sentient metal built for the horrors of war. You don’t know why you do it—just seems right to pull the fragile and vulnerable skin of his inner wrist to you mouth. You plant a gentle kiss there and smile when he cups your cheek.

“You don’t owe me anything, Din,” you say, staring into the darkened depths of his visor. “Least of all this.”

Some of that tension held in Din’s shoulders melts. He utters something in that clipped language of his people, and the only thing you can make out is your name. He lurches foreword and fuck—you’re terrified for a split second he’s gonna cave your skull in but instead he lightly bumps the crown of his helmet over your forehead.

“I want to. For you—only you.”

Din doesn’t leave any time to unpack all of that. He sits up again, wraps his hands around the beskar—

The metallic thunk of the helmet reverberates through the cave like a crack of thunder.

You were right.

You can barely see his face—if you really look, you can see the murky outline of his nose, dark hair and a sliver of his tan skin that the light touches. Attractive—but you knew that already. You touch his cheek and smile, your thumb catching over wiry facial hair and soft skin. Din makes a sound low in his throat and pushes his cheek into your hand.

“I still want to taste you,” Din says, his voice richer when stripped of that tinny vocoder. You like listening to him speak without it, you think, and it’s a damn shame you never get to hear it. “Please.”

Before he can escape and fulfill that fantasy, you yank him into a blinding kiss. He kisses the same—all wild edges and with desperation lining each motion—but there’s a new found tenderness here. Like he’s savoring each gasp and every brush of skin you grace him with like it’s your last night left in the galaxy.

He breaks away from your mouth and peppers kisses and nips down your jaw, then lower as you arch and expose the bare skin of your throat. There’ll be a plethora of bruises tomorrow, and with no hope to cover them either but fuck it—Din can leave as many hickeys and teeth marks as he wants.

If not for the cold still latching onto your very soul, you’d ditch the shirt; give Din better access instead of him needing to shove a hand up under and grope at your breasts. He gives the fabric an annoyed tug, but it’s fruitless. There’s no use when there’s better things to be sought.

He shoves your shirt as far up as it goes, shivering as he mouths down your stomach, licks around your bellybutton and sucks a bruise onto your hipbone. Your pants are already pulled halfway down—one sharp yank and they’re around your ankles and off in the next breath.

Cupping your knees with both hands he gingerly spreads your legs and drapes them over his muscular shoulders. Din rubs his patchy haired cheek along your thigh and hooks his hands under your ass, his ivory white teeth catching the light as he smiles.

“Fucking perfect—“ He groans, planting his lips over your inner thigh. His tongue swipes a wet line up, stopping just before your aching cunt to dig his teeth into the sensitive flesh. You jump at the burst of pain and shoot a hand down, tangling your fingers into the soft curls atop his head.

Din grunts and jumps to your other thigh, leaving no inch of skin neglected and without evidence of his teeth and lips. By the time his thumbs touch the outer lips of your cunt, the aching need for him is burning you from the outside in. He has to still your twitching hips with a calloused palm, and only after you settle does he surge forward.

His tongue meets your swollen clit, ripping a tangled cry from you vocal cords. He’s just as eager as the first time he tasted you, if not more—every action backed by needy abandon. He sucks at the bundle of nerves then sweeps his tongue lower. Din’s thumbs part your lower lips as he runs his tongue though your soaked folds, the tip of his nose bumping against your clit that send delicious sparks throughout your whole body. Little noises and breathy gasps fill the cave, encouraging Din to push his tongue deep into your aching entrance.

Your hand fists into his hair as your hips stutter and rock into the searing heat of his mouth. The noises you make are obscene, and Din is no better. Each pass of his tongue over your pussy is matched with his own deep moans that vibrated against your clit. Fucking hell he’s devouring you alive.

Your orgasm sneaks up on you, robs you blind and crashes over you in deep waves that drag you out to sea and never to be found again as you spill onto his greedy tongue. Your fingers are threaded tight in his hair as you squeak and press harder into his mouth, riding out your pleasure until it shifts and becomes raw and sore.

Din doesn’t pause for even a second—all too happy to stay put between your thighs for eternity. Your legs are trembling when you force his head away, a nice, tingly warmth settling into your limbs

A dark thrill rushes down your spine when he looks up, wild hair and mouth covered in your slick. If not for the low lighting you imagine his eyes would be glazed over and Maker you want him again. Din swoops down and presses his mouth to yours, the taste of yourself heavy on his tongue that slips past the seem of your lips.

You whine after he breaks away and sits up—an opportunity for your eyes to roam down his body. He’s still got his trousers on, a considerable bulge tenting the front. With a smirk you reach up and grab a handful, delighting in Din’s startled grunt. “Easy.”

You flash him a wry smile and give his clothed cock a playful squeeze. “Take them off.”

Din huffs and pulls at the drawstrings. “Needy.”

He says it with no bite and no coquettish retort on your end springs to mind—especially when his thumbs hook into the waistband and pull. A slow reveal of sun-kissed skin and a sparse happy trail that your eyes eagerly drink up.

Din’s cock bobs as his trousers fall around his knees, tip shiny and wet and curling towards his navel. You bite the inside of your cheek and reach out, a rush of arousal pulsing through your core at Din’s low moan. He’s heavy in your hand, deliciously thick and throbbing—and all of it for you.

Din gasps out your name as you lightly squeeze and stroke down, your pace dreadfully slow and teasing. Who knows when you’ll get another chance like this—a Mandalorian willingly on their knees for you.

Your other hand slips up his chest as you stroke him, intent on grabbing a handful of his thick hair that curls softly against the column of his neck. Your fingernail lightly scrapes across his nipple and he sways, pitching forward before he catches himself and straightens. Din’s eyes are squeezed tight, chest heaving with shallow pants as a smirk tugs at your lips.

“It’s ok, Din,” you whisper. “I won’t break.”

Your fingers twist into the hair at the base of his skull and guide him back. He slumps forward with a sweet moan, laying his weight onto your body that you’re all too happy too bare. His nose is nestled into the slope of your neck as his hands lock around the dip of your lower back while the other cradles the back of your head, drawing you into a loose semblance of a hug.

Something snaps and crumbles deep in your soul that bleeds the heartstring blues, humming with broken chords in the presence of Din’s soft fragility. Your hand moves from between his legs to instead wrap around the wide expanse of his back, squeezing him tight to your chest. You hold each other like there isn’t tomorrow to look forward to and you wonder if this is how it feels to fall apart. Two spinning halves of a supernova torn apart and destined to collide and shatter into a million fragments of dazzling light.

Yes, you’re scared he might blind you or burn you with his brilliance, but you can’t look away.

Your fingers crawl up his muscled thigh and settle on his hip. “Lie down for me?”

There’s no hint of hesitation or complaint as he maneuvers himself onto his back, patiently allowing you to clamber over his legs and straddle his hips. His cock rests on your inner thigh, pulsing and leaving a dribble of wetness every time it twitches.

“Good boy.” It’s subtle but it ripples out like a heavy stone thrown into a still lake. Din shudders and says your name in a cracked whisper. He rolls his hips, both of you groaning at the sensation of his cock running along your dripping center.

Another time for that game maybe.

Your desperation is running hot and wild to have him inside you and you know he’s in a similar boat. You grab the thick shaft of his cock and grind the tip of him through your lips, breath hitching when it extracts such a perfect moan from the man below you.

“Ride me,” he pleads, clamping his large hands over your hips. “Fuck—I need you.”

How can you deny such a request?

You line the wide head up with your aching center and slowly work him in. Shivers wrack through you, and Maker—he’s splitting you apart, molding your insides to the shape of him. Beads of sweat dot your hairline by the time you’re seated fully on his member, the both of you pushed even closer towards madness.

Din squeezes your ass and props his knees up, rolling his hips up into you. You whimper and tip forward, propping your palms over his chest as he sets the pace. You may be on top but there’s no changing the bold colors of power and lust that cloud his mind, fueling the brutal movements of fucking up into you. Your thighs burn already and Maker—why the fuck are you already tired? You’re not doing any of the work.

Quicker than lightning, Din curls forward and manhandles you onto your back. You squeak as he grips your thigh and yanks it around his narrow hips, thrusting in deeper. His right hand crawls up the front of your shirt and wraps his fingers around your throat in a loose hold. His thumb hovers over the dip at the base of your neck but he makes no move to press down—just allows the weight of his palm to do the work. And fuck—it works.

Choked garbles of his name pass through your lips as you buck and squirm in his hold, feeling your arousal begin to drip down the back of your thighs. You’re skirting the edge of sizzling release that alights your nerves with liquid wildfire. Your nails harpoon into the meat of his shoulders as your eyes squeeze shut. Din won’t allow it.

“Look at me,” Din snarls, yanking your head back by your hair. “I want to—to watch you cum for me.”

A blush scalds your cheeks but you listen. Your eyes flutter open for him, sliding to the dark shadows of his eyes that sweep you into their own gravity well with no hope to escape. You don’t mind.

“You’re so g-good for me—always so perfect.”

White hot light bursts behind your eyelids, and that’s all it takes. Your body seizes, your cunt squeezing impossibly tight around his cock as you cum. This one is different—steals your breath away and leaves you a broken husk of a person lost in most delectable forms of agony and pleasure. The cry of his name pierces the air only spurring the Mandalorian into a jarring pace to seek his own peak of ecstasy.

Din’s nose nuzzles into your neck, his pants hot and sharp against your flushed skin. “You f-feel so—fuck. Say—say my name.”

You leap to his request and with a playful nip to his earlobe, you whisper it to him with the sweetness of starcherrries and the promise of better things.

He tips over the edge, his hips faltering into no discernible pace as he cums. Din buries his teeth into the skin below your jaw, a mess of whines and begging gasps of nonsense as he fills your cunt to the brim.

Your harsh breathing mingles as you both lazily slip down from your high. He rests his head over your sternum, listening to your beating heart that drums in a wild staccato as your fingers carefully comb through his hair. If not for the ache in your hips you’d keep him here forever. Din pulls out and you both groan at the loss.

He doesn’t completely move away and you’re glad for it. He brushes his knuckles down the expanse of your cheek and dots a tender kiss to your hairline. Your name rumbles low in his throat as he shifts lower and gives your ear lobe a playful nip. His stubble scrapes along your neck, and you can’t help but giggle and squirm—but the weight of his body keeps you pinned. Your name slips from his lips a second time, breathy and drawn out in a sweet sigh, like he’s savoring the sound of each syllable and roll of the tongue.

Din lifts his head, only slightly—near enough that his nose bumps into yours and his lips scrape along yours that are still parted and wet. “I—can I tell you something?”

You cup his cheek and steal a kiss. It’s supposed to be quick—but instead he leans into it, guiding your mouth into a slow dance of sticky sweet movements that are caught in a slow draw, like crystalized honey abandoned in a glass jar. You’re enraptured by his touch—his skin mottled with scars yet somehow still unfairly soft. He smells of snow—like metal and soap and something gentler, that’s uniquely Din.

Fuck—you can feel your mind slipping away, wrapped up so snugly in his presence you almost forget to answer. “Yeah—anything.”

Crackling static suddenly rips through the cave, startling you both. A distorted voice chatters on the comlink that lies forgotten beside your pants. It blinks and the transmission ends just as abruptly. With a sigh Din brushes it off and tilts his head to tempt you into another kiss but—

Whoever’s trying to patch through is persistent.

His lip curls in a scowl and snatches the comm. “Jorhaa’ir.”

You only catch your name being mentioned twice as rapid Mando’a is exchanged. Aeris maybe judging by the tone, but no that’s not right.

“Wait—is that Paz?”

The muscles in Din’s shoulders tense, confirming your suspicion.

“Is everything ok?” Din doesn’t resist you when you pry the comlink out of his fingers and patch in. “Paz?”

Your heart skips a beat.

“There you are,” the comlink crackles and you smile. “You’re a pain in my ass, you know that?”

Stars—you didn’t think you’d miss hearing Paz’s voice. Your chest aches.

The conversation is short, he asks you how you are and when you’re coming home and in the time it takes to answer, Din is peeling himself from your body. While you're distracted, he pulls on his pants and sits at the edges of your vision.

You both pretend when you say goodnight to Paz, return the comlink and crawl into his arms that nothing has festered with savage detachment. You don't remember to ask him what he was going to say and he lets you forget. The golden heart that bleeds molten ichor slips from your sight and becomes shut behind walls of beskar and bushes of thick thorns and overgrown ivy.

He still holds you, but it’s the coldest you’ve ever been.

Tag List: @teaofpeach @corrupt-fvcker @nelba @datmando @ben-is-a-hoe @dreams-like-clockwork @aeryns-library @auty-ren @huliabitch @anxiety-riddled-mando @phoenixhalliwell @cptnbvcks @thesoftdumbass @krissology @starlite41 @legally-a-bastard @basslinedweller @cloud-of-roses @elenamiria @goldafterglow @maybege @equalstrashflavoredtrash @wandxrlust @hdlynnslibrary @calamity-queen @sgtbookybarnes @pinkninja190 @lackofhonor @darthstyles @spacegayofficial @absurdthirst @blue-writes-a03 @max--phillips

#din is a certified bottom #ANYWAY welcome to pound town #din djarin x reader #din djarin x you #din djarin x reader x paz vizla #paz vizla x reader #paz vizla x you #paz vizsla x reader #paz vizsla #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian #star wars #sw #fanfiction #sw fanfiction #my writing #are you in or out?

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whump-town · 4 years ago

Text

Without A Word

Hotch sits with Emily right after her death.

She spends every Saturday night on his couch, tangled in his unusually long limbs and the blanket he keeps draped across the back just for these nights. Drinking whatever cheap beer she finds at the corner store a few blocks from his apartment until he’s had enough and gets out the wine. Between them, there is no need for long-winded conversations or many words at all. The night turns in and she finds that since stepping into the room neither of them has said a word. Not when he ordered their dinner. Not when she finished his discarded beer.

Not a word.

Those Saturdays are her favorite.

Were.

They were her favorite and they were something she used to do.

She’s no longer allowed these things.

She watches him from the stiff, unforgiving mattress beneath her sore body. Her arm aches where the IV has sat for so long in the crook of her elbow and she knows all she needs to do is say something and they’ll likely move it but she’s afraid of how she’ll sound. To her own ears, all she will hear is the pathetic rasps and whines of such a silly complaint. To the staff, it’s the way they’ll soften and she’ll be forced to see the pity they have for a dead woman.

And, more than anything else, she’s afraid of what Aaron will hear.

To see the quirks of his face as he reasons through what it is that he, himself, thinks. Will he disapprovingly narrow his eyes, tightening his lips as he thinks about his own nightmare. George Foyet and the many nights he spent in the hospital recovering from not just one impalement but nine brutally drawn-out stab wounds. Will he look at her with soft eyes and force her to watch him avoid her eye so she won’t see the pity. Will there be guilt? The hardening of his jaw as he clenches his teeth and cast his eyes anywhere but at her.

It makes her wish she’d never known him.

Not to surpass the worry she feels about his perception of her (deep down she can acknowledge that he must love her to be here now) but to prevent all of this. To pull him from the stiff-backed chair he has restlessly has fallen asleep in and send him home to his son. Go back to a time when she didn’t know what it was like to be hurt -- physically, emotionally, and sexually. To be seventeen again gulping down coffee with no cream or sugar because she thought the bitterness would make her stronger, more of an adult. But life requires one to be greedy about the things in life that feel good.

Reid taught her that, watching him pour mountains of sugar in his coffee. Bitterness is not the measure of adulthood or success. It’s one ability to take one more longing glance at the mug in their hands and decide whatever body part might shut down in a few years is not worth the disgusting sludge in their mug. Indulge while you can before you find there is nothing but bitterness and no sugar to sweeten the mess.

Indulge before it’s too late.

She never indulged herself enough.

“You’re awake.”

She watches the micro-expressions (pain from sitting in that chair, happiness that eats up a dimple, guilt that pulls down his eyebrows like a bar with too much weight on its ends) slip across his face before it settles on passive worry. There’s an intensity to his eyes that makes her aware that she’s being watched, not by Aaron and his soft edges but by Hotch who will fight with nurses and get himself kicked out of the hospital. She wishes she could feel something past the numb itchiness of her nose and the distance of her hands, then she might be able to worm her way into his brain. So she might live alongside his thoughts.

She thinks she’d probably enjoy herself there.

“Emily?”

She looks down where his hand touches her own. Emily. She can’t feel the warmth of his fingers sitting over the top of her own but then he’s always been cold. Blankest always tucked around his broad shoulders. Hands tucked into his pockets. Her favorite part is that he hates summer, despite what could be assumed about its escape from the dreaded winter. But people have a tendency to overcompensate with air conditioners. He fucking hates the summer.

She won’t see that this year.

She’s dead.

“I’m sorry.”

She wonders how it is that he steals the words right out of her mouth. Because it should be her apologizing. For not trusting him despite how many times he’s leaned into her. For running away when she’d called him a coward for wanting to do the same thing. For getting herself killed and hurting him, for making his worst nightmares come true once again.

She opens her mouth and he rises with deep groans from his lower back and his knees old hinges from door frames older than them combined to stretch and get her water. She didn’t even realize how much her throat hurt until she’s greedily pulling from the straw he’s bent to allow her access to the content of the little cup. “Not too much,” he warns softly, pulling away. “Water doesn’t mix well with the meds.” A lesson he learned the hard way when she’d done the same for him when it was him in the bed and her sleeping in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair.

She couldn’t save him from the nausea of her good intentions but he can spare her the pain of too fresh stitches being tugged by a heaving stomach.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Between them, there is no miscommunication. She knows him as she might know her own hand or her favorite book -- as an extension of something past herself. More than Emily Prentiss. He knows her the same. So, there is no need to clarify and even less of a need for her to have to say the words at all.

She’s right, of course. His being here disrupts the flow, it’s a wedge in the crack of the team’s trust, and each time he finds himself here that wedge sinks a little further.

He repeats back to her the words she’d whispered to him only a year ago. “You shouldn’t be alone.” She’s surprised he can remember that at all. There had been only a small debate about who it was that could stay with him that night, but she was glad it was her answering his questions when he woke drowsily with the drugs and when he’d tried to send her home. But insubordinate is a word that perfectly explains their friendship and she’s never been afraid to toe at his “firm” line of what he’s willing to deal with.

She narrows her eyes at him and he does it right back, both baiting the other. He’s right and so is she. She hates it when he’s right.

“Sit.” She croaks pulling her arms up to put weight on them and inch her body to the left so that he can sit.

He grabs her wrist, stopping her. “Don’t,” he commands softly. “You’ll pull your stitches.” Another hard lesson to learn, one he can spare her. He’d done the same for her in the hospital but powered on despite the feeling of the stitches pulling at his skin. The nurses had not liked him very much, he wasn’t very good at sitting still.

Without a word he carefully leans onto the bed, sitting right where her hip is. Close like she wants without actually needing her to move. His eyes wander and he finds himself glued to the heavy gauze wrapped around her abdomen. His mixed feelings are met with a smile from her, “we’ll match.”

He grimaces, “you don’t want that.”

He won’t be there to talk her through healing. The way things burn and itch and ache and that she’ll get so light-headed she’ll nearly pass out. That she might need iron supplements like him and that they taste like death and he’s seen and smelt enough of that to know that it’s a very correct description. How the nightmares ignite the pain and if she thinks the anxiety and the panic are too much she’ll be floored the first time she feels the attack again.

He can still feel Foyet’s hands all over his body. He’d take any punishment, as many tactile nightmares as his body could handle, to save her these things. The betrays of mind and body.

Her body is heavy and she can feel the pain returning. “Aaron?” She needs to say it now because when she wakes up after this she’s going to be in too much pain to think about what she’s left unsaid.

“I know,” he whispers. He knows that she loves him. That she thinks he’s the biggest dickhead she’s ever met in her entire life and no one is as insufferably annoying as he is to her. That someone, preferably Garcia, needs to take care of Sergio and to take care of her plants. That she’s going to miss him so fucking much and she’s not sure how to function when he’s not there anymore.

He knows. God, he knows.

“You’ll be here when I wake up?”

“I have other places to be,” he states, uncharacteristically trying at something playful. She narrows her eyes at him and he caves. “I’ll be here.”

Eyes closed she hums, “it’s not like you have other friends.” The comment is meant to be light but it... hurts. He’s burring his friend. He can’t tell Dave how he really feels. Can’t accept Garcia’s attempts at comfort. He’s sending her away and the false hope that she’ll ever return is more damning than if she’d died.

“No,” he replies thickly. “I suppose not.” Next time, he vows, he will die with her because he won’t survive this again.

#criminal minds #aaron hotchner #emily prentiss #hotchniss #but not hotchniss

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paperanddice · 4 years ago

Photo

Image ID: Two pictures of game stat blocks for the defacer. The first is for 5th Edition D&D and the second is for 13th Age. Full text is available below the read more. End ID.

Defacers are undead raised from the corpses of humanoid shapeshifters such as doppelgangers and changelings. Their faces are wiped away, along with their ability to willingly shapeshift into other beings. This is often torturous for the former shapeshifter, driving it to the fury that so many undead experience, though they are still bound to the directive of their creator. The defacer’s blank head is surrounded by swirling, ghostly faces that they’ve successfully stolen from their victims. These faces constantly scream and wail piteously driving terror into the hearts of those the defacer hunts.

A defacer’s primary goal is to steal the faces of other creatures, an act that has given them their common name. When a defacer strikes a creature they can plant one of the disembodied souls they’ve stolen before into the person’s body, causing a ghostly image of the screaming soul to manifest over the target’s face and completely overwhelming the victim. The worst one however is when a defacer kills a victim with its attack. The victim’s face completely vanishes, along with their soul, leaving behind nothing but a perfectly blank canvas where it used to be. Their face and soul join the chorus that surround the defacer, adding to the screams and wails that the creature carries with it at all times. Nothing short of a divine intervention can return the victim to life, but luckily if the defacer is destroyed within 24 hours of stealing a face then the soul immediately returns to the body, bringing it back to life as long as it is relatively whole. Any longer however and the victim’s soul is bound permanently to the defacer, and killing the undead damages the soul too greatly for it to be raised by mortal magic.

Some have sought to use defacers as assassins, as their ability to steal the face of their target means speak with dead and similar magic can’t be used to identify the killer, but defacers are so rare that anyone who has created one is instantly a suspect if a faceless corpse is found. In addition, if not given a face regularly the undead may go rogue, hunting for a face to satisfy itself from its creator’s own forces.

Originally from the 3.5 Monster Manual IV. This post came out a week ago on my Patreon. If you want to get access to all my monster conversions early, as well as a spot on the Paper and Dice Discord server, consider backing me there!

5th Edition

A defacer can be created by casting create undead from a 9th-level spell slot on the corpse of a doppelganger or a similar creature that uses polymorph to imitate humanoids, raising it as a defacer. However, every time control is reasserted over it there is a 5% chance that the spell actually fails to reassert control and the defacer can ignore its creator’s orders. There is no indicator that this happens, and the defacer can hear its creator’s mental commands, allowing it to fulfill orders until it chooses to break the connection permanently.

Defacer Medium undead (shapechanger), neutral evil Armor Class 14 Hit Points 110 (13d8 + 52) Speed 30 ft. Str 14 (+2) Dex 18 (+4) Con 18 (+4) Int 7 (-2) Wis 13 (+1) Cha 14 (+2) Skills Perception +4 Damage Immunities necrotic, poison Damage Resistances bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks not made with silver weapons Condition Immunities poisoned Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 14 Languages understands the languages of its creator but can't speak Challenge 6 (2300 XP) Frightful Keening. The defacer is surrounded by a whirl of disembodied faces that constantly wail and scream, audible out to a range of 60 feet. When a creature enters that area for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there, that creature must succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or become frightened for one round. Steal Face. If the defacer reduces a creature to 0 hit points with its slam attack, the target immediately dies and the creature's face is physically erased from its body, leaving a smooth and blank surface. The creature's soul is also drawn from it's body and becomes one of the faces that whirl around the defacer's head. Attempts to return the creature to life with magic or communicate with it via speak with dead automatically fail. If the defacer is killed within 24 hours of stealing a creature's face in this way, the victim immediately returns to life (stable at 0 hit points) if its body is still whole, with its face restored. Actions Multiattack. The defacer makes two slam attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d8+4) bludgeoning damage plus 9 (2d8) necrotic damage. If the target is a creature with an Intelligence score of 3 or higher, it must succeed on a DC 13 Intelligence saving throw or be stunned for 1 round.

13th Age

Defacers are occasionally created by the Lich King to murder his rivals, though they are incredibly rare and tend to go rogue from his service relatively quickly. They collect small numbers of other undead to help them hunt their chosen targets, often working with ghouls and ghasts and letting them eat the corpse once the face has been stolen.

Defacer Double-Strength 3rd-level spoiler [undead] Initiative: +7 Vulnerability: Holy Slam +10 vs. AC (2 attacks) - 10 damage Natural Even Hit or Miss: The defacer can pop free from the target. Natural 16+: The target is stunned until the end of the defacer’s next turn. Steal Face +10 vs. PD (one stunned enemy) - 20 negative energy damage and the target must start making last gasp saves as the defacer steals the creature’s face. On the fourth failure, the target immediately dies and its face is completely erased from its body. The target’s face appears as a ghostly shape swirling around the defacer’s head. If the defacer dies within 24 hours of this event, the target returns to life at 0 hp as long as it’s body is whole, and it’s face reappears. Fear: While engaged with the defacer, enemies with 15 hp or fewer are dazed and do not add the escalation die to their attacks. AC 18 PD 12 MD 16 HP 90

#D&D #DnD #Dungeons and Dragons #5th Edition #13th Age #homebrew #my homebrew #monster #undead #shapechanger

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hilltopsunset · 3 years ago

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4 Ways to Breathe New Life into the Pokémon Franchise

I love the Pokémon franchise. It’s because I love it that I truly want new installments of the game to feel meaningful, to make an impact, and to provide players with something new, different, and worth coming back for without relying on complexities that could turn away new players.

As I will talk about in a later blog post, Game Freak seems afraid to stretch Pokémon’s creative muscles any further; meaningful innovation has been petering out since the end of Generation IV in lieu of minigames like Pokémon Contests and Super Training alongside inconsequential time sinks like Secret Bases and Poké Pelago. While I do enjoy the inclusion of things to do outside the main storyline, these additional events and sidequests should not be the only significant additions to new generations of main-series Pokémon games.

The main attractions of recent generations have provided slight twists to gameplay with the addition of mega evolution and Z-moves, but these changes don’t fundamentally change or challenge the way players experience the game on a moment-to-moment basis. And despite the graphical and processing power of recent gaming devices, and even the long-awaited shift of the franchise to a main console, we are still getting the same low-effort and outdated battle animations we’ve been seeing since X and Y. We are continually denied a more genuine battle experience with Pokémon physically interacting with each other through animations that more appropriately suit each Pokémon’s unique identity.

So what can be done? Here’s a short but detailed list of 4 things I would like to see in a new Pokémon game, in no particular order of importance.

1. Let the Player Character Be an Active Part of the Story

When has the player character ever been a consequential part of a Pokémon game? They never speak; they never have any personality whatsoever. They never experience any growth, regardless of NPC’s trying desperately to iterate how much the trainer has grown over the course of their journey. Certainly the Pokémon carried by the player character have some impact on the story, but the trainer?

Let them speak! Let the player character actually interact with NPCs in meaningful ways rather than just listening at all times. Give the trainer a personality of some sort. Don’t just slap a never-changing pleasant face onto the model regardless of tense, frightening, or sinister scenarios (I’m looking at you, Sun and Moon).

Giving the player character a more active role in the story provides intrigue—as a player, it doesn’t feel compelling being pulled from one place to another; it’s not interesting when the only thing pushing me forward is NPCs telling me I need to get the gym badges, or stop Team Rocket. It would be much more interesting if the Player Character had some imperative reason to pursue these endeavors, rather than get involved simply because “it’s the right thing to do” or, worse, “it’s the ONLY thing to do.” I want to watch the character I’m controlling grow as a person and make choices that have positive or negative consequences on people they care about and the places they visit, rather than be a perpetual observer of events with no real stake in the game.

2. Trainer Levels

Speaking of the player character, create a leveling system for them. There are so many possibilities for a system where the trainer more actively impacts gameplay. For instance, there could be a class system and each class can have unique skill trees that provide access to passive and/or active abilities that improve how the trainer interacts with the world throughout the game. It could be required to choose your path at the beginning of the game, or perhaps you can access them all throughout the game, but can only have one active at a time.

Here’s a list of example possibilities:

Explorer: The explorer class specializes in travel, as well as tracking and catching new Pokémon—this tree can be subdivided into those paths: Travel, Tracking, and Catching. This tree provides skills that assist them in accessing otherwise inaccessible locations, increasing encounter rates with rare Pokémon, and specializing in different types of Poké balls to improve catch chances. Experience for this class is gained through catching Pokémon, encountering rare Pokémon, and exploring (walking in new places, finding treasure, accessing hidden areas, etc.).

Combatant: The combatant class excels at offensive battle prowess through its three branches: Type Affinity, Commands, and Reputation. This tree allows a trainer to specialize in certain Pokémon types (up to 2) to improve their STAB damage. Eventually, you can get a skill that provides STAB for your specialized types even for Pokémon not of those types! You gain access to in-battle shout commands that provide momentary buffs to your party, like improving damage, resisting a big attack, or improving critical hit ratio. A strong reputation will allow you to avoid battle even with trainers who have caught your eye; and in battle, an enemy Pokémon may flinch due to your intimidating presence. Experience is gained by knocking out Pokémon, winning battles, using moves of your type specialization, and issuing commands.

Breeder: The breeder focuses on developing deep relationships with their Pokémon. Skills of this class can be divided into the Breeding, Bonding, and Healing branches. Through this tree, trainers can hatch eggs more quickly, improve high IV chance from newborn Pokémon, develop friendship levels more quickly, etc. Bonding provides Pokémon with beneficial defensive capabilities during battle, like providing a chance to survive an attack that would otherwise bring HP to 0, and having a strong will to resist abnormal status effects like paralysis and confusion. A Breeder’s knowledge of caretaking allows for healing outside of battle, and can even teach Pokémon how to slowly recover in-battle. Experience is gained through hatching eggs, developing friendships with your Pokémon (through feeding/petting, etc.), participating in Contests/minigames, and having Pokémon in your party with whom you have developed a close relationship.

The establishment of a class system like this, where experience is gained through different means relevant to each class, incentivizes players to participate in those aspects of the game, and provides extra rewards for players who already want to get involved. It makes the trainer feel like a relevant and impactful part of the team, rather than a hollow vehicle strictly used to lug the real heroes—your team of Pokémon—from battle to battle.

And for those who think the inclusion of such a mechanic would trivialize the content, I have several suggestions: first, they could easily make the game content more difficult to compensate. Second, they could mitigate the strength of these class skills during key battles like Gym Leaders, the Elite Four, the Enemy Team (Rocket, Galaxy, etc.). Third, NPCs (especially the aforementioned key NPCs) could have access to these skills as well. Remember, I’m asking for significant changes, and this would provide something new, interesting, and impactful.

3. Battle Animations

Update them. It’s that simple. Let Blastoise shoot water out of his water cannons rather than out of his face. Let Scorbunny run up to its opponent and give it a nice kick! Get rid of the old, outdated animations of a drawn foot—we now have well-rendered 3D monsters on gaming systems capable of handling the graphical processing necessary for this to happen. Give each Pokémon a more unique identity with their animations; make them feel like they’re actually in a battle with one another. It’s time.

I acknowledge that providing significant animation updates for the 800+ models is an enormous undertaking that would require a massive amount of time and manpower to make possible. To this I say: spend the time doing that rather than developing Dynamax or whatever. Spend the time on more significant animation development instead of wasting that time on another gimmick that isn’t going to significantly impact gameplay anyway.

To be honest, this point alone would be enough to convince me to buy a new Pokémon game.

4. Populate the World with Pokémon

I know that the Let’s Go series and Sword/Shield did this a little bit, and while it certainly wasn’t executed perfectly, it was fun running around and actually seeing all the Pokémon that inhabit it. Spawn rates in both games were often a bit too high, resulting in cluttered areas. Adding aggressive Pokémon would further enhance the immersive experience—being required to sneak around certain stronger Pokémon could be a really fun mechanic and provide tension; it was a bit too easy to avoid Pokémon in Let’s Go and in the Wild Area. While it was nice to get through Mt. Moon without encountering a single Zubat, imagine instead running through a section of the cave with a trail of 15 Zubats on your tail? Make me work for it a little!

Ultimately, I want to see Pokémon behaving more naturally in their habitats, and not just in sections of the world that I can’t get to. I want to run into a Caterpie hanging from a tree, or a Fearow fishing for Goldeen, or a Pikachu grooming itself. I want to interrupt Pokémon from their lives, not run into a giant gaggle of automatons circling tiny areas for no reason.

So there it is: a look at just a few things Pokémon games could include to make things more interesting and breathe new life into an aging franchise. These changes would require work, but any new game should—I would hate to see Pokémon continue the troubling trend of easy and/or insignificant content when there is so much potential to do so much with what they have.

With all that said, I do want to offer a bit of praise—Sirfetch’d and Galarian Ponyta are pretty awesome, and Galarian Weezing is perfectly ridiculous. But I ask that you keep in mind what your money is telling Game Freak when you purchase their games: it tells them that you don’t mind the severe lack of innovation and improvement. It tells them you don’t mind Scorbunny hopping in place as a giant, orange, human foot strikes its opponent. It tells them that you’re willing to fund their copy/paste animations from 6 years ago, their uninspired gameplay updates, and their ever-increasing focus on gimmicks and minigames.

As for me, I will continue holding Pokémon to a higher standard and hoping that, eventually, Blastoise will fire water from his cannons.

#pokemon #game review #game freak #hilltop sunset #suggestions

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patchdotexe · 4 years ago

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explorers of arvus: heading back / 3.11.21

zoom and enhonse

LAST TIME ON ARVUS taure passed out and we are now down a healer! also we met a disciple of halvkar, and surprisingly did not murder her. this is fine. we have instantly gotten distracted by our various carts. cats. our various cats

DID ANY OF US CATCH TAURE, SHE FELL OVER sieron tried to catch her and smacked charlie+thorne in the face (he rolled a nat1, f) BUT the catboy is to the rescue bc silje is the designated Not Incompetent of the group today

CONSULT THE CHILD hewwo yrel yrel: her mind is being consumed by the serpent of nightmares. :D charlie: HELLO?????//

so, dendar(?) the night serpent is imprisoned beneath arvus! she was formed from the nightmares of the first sentient being, and sometimes she eats people's nightmares. if she's exceptionally hungry, she'll force nightmares onto people for her to feed off their fear. yrel thinks taure will Probably wake up. there's a thing on arvus mentioned by the locals called a "sleeping sickness" where people will fall asleep for a few days, sometimes longer, but will wake up. its magical in cause, the people afflicted by it have horrific nightmares, and its just kinda. a thing. wowza

(i have gone back to spelling yrel's name as yrel bc i think it looks nice)

OH HEY SOMEONE POSTED A THEORY ON ONE OF MY STICKMOLUS ANIMATIONS man i should get back to stickmolus sometime. once dsmp releases its awful grip on me.

i keep getting distracted by seeing myself in the camera preview. i have a tooth gap! what the fuck its cute?? K I KNOW WE'RE SUPER BLURRY IN FRONT RN BUT PLEASE HELP ME STAY FOCUSED I SWEAR -leo

we're gonna build a sled! to put taure on. thorne: i have a good strength score. ....i say, out loud charlie: i am four feet tall. [cue argument between thorne & sieron about them both being horcs but sieron has a +0 bc strength is his dump stat] OH, OKAY, THORNE ROLLED A NAT20 TO CARRY TAURE. NICE

[discussion about what to tell everyone at camp vengenace] thorne: the last thing we need to do is a witch hunt charlie: --and we already hunted the witch! the witch has been hunted.

time to discuss strategy! we need to figure out how to head back to camp vengeance, eg if we want to follow the path we already took or if we wanna do some trailblazing. looks like we're gonna try and take the most direct path! which means we'll prolly risk tangoing with some undead but im willing to risk it TINY HUT STAIRCASE sorry i just remember it now and then

nyx: [meowing at his cats] thorne: uh... why is silje meowing? jorb: silje's food bowl is empty jorb: you look at silje's food bowl and there's a divot in the middle and the food is all on the sides emotionally, we must bully the catboy silje saw something interesting and started meowing

thorne: ill take first watch silje: ill also take first watch. charlie: [quietly] gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy (but, like, extended for 15 seconds)

silje: [takes watch] [rolls a nat1 and gets distracted by looking at his crush]

THORNE HAS LOCATED A DOG the dog does not give a shit about the tiny hut. THE DOG HAS PEED ON THE TINY HUT goodbye dog

EVERYONE IS ROLLING AT LEAST 1 NAT1 thorne: wow! that sure is a dog. thorne has drawn the worst possible dog. thorne has erased the worst possible dog. we dont speak of the worst possible dog its the dog version of honse. DONSE

sieron is now on watch! MAN we are havin trouble rolling today. at least kali's here to make sure sieron doesnt stare at a rock for 50000 years sieron sees a mouse! bottom text

charlie is now on watch! kali is havin a big ol thonk. nothing meaningful has come of this

i am perceiving some deer. sieron is not perceiving some deer. silje is perceiving some deer, but better the deer are fucked up and undead! silje has gone from "we should hunt these deer for food" to "we should hunt these deer for sport"

charlie: i do not feel like being jumped by five thousand skeletons

charlie takes first watch with sieron! WHY ARE OUR ROLLS SO TERRIBLE taure is super cursed right now. that's not very pog charlie: this place sucks. thorne: to be fair, we havent-- charlie: YOU'RE ASLEEP, SHUT UP

oh hey coolname galvanic finally partied. nice.

thorne is at watch! solar: hey, is leomund's tiny hut an orb? there's a critter digging around! AH, THE CRITTER IS UNDEAD. this could be a problem

solar: hey michael, how much does the horrific sin against god dog i drew look like this creature michael: [dice roll noises] about 50%.

michael: if anyone likes, they can make a nature check-- solar: ME MEMEMEMEME ME ME ME

its a bulette! aka a land shark. problem: they are not normally undead. this one is undead.

jorb: imagine if you could tame one of those and use it as a mount. leo: IT WOULD JUST DIG UNDERGROUND AND LEAVE YOU THERE

we are just calling it a weird dog

we're going to mail a letter to the heart of arvus. HEY, CHECK OUT THIS WEIRD DOG,

JORB FOUND ART OF A BABY BULETTE. WEIRD PUPPY!

solar: hey guys, check out this sick art of a bulette i found

silje kept a lookout for the weird dog but its just fucked off. goodbye, weird dog give it up for day 3!

man there's been like, three incinerations today in blaseball. what's up with that. I SWEAR IM MOSTLY PAYING ATTENTION its just been an eventful day in blaseball. also im wearing my garages bomber rn. jaylen is home wooOOOO the wind smells stinky. this is fine.

we're actively avoiding whatever combat michael keeps nudging at us bc we're carrying around an unconscious person and i SWEAR hes gonna throw something directly at us once he's done with our shenanigans

UHH MICHAEL ASKING FOR PASSIVE PERCEPTION LOL

huh. this place used to be inhabited? we're in the woods rn but there's some like, stone ruins? like, VERY ruins. like, not really any structures standing, but enough evidence to show there Were things. WE FOUND A STATUE charlie: i want to smash my face against the lore.

used to be a circle of standing stones, but most of em fell over or got overgrown. inside of the circle has been cleared, although v roughly-- ground's torn up statue is of fjolnir! warrior holding up a spear and shield. AH, THERE ARE CORPSES, a human got REAL fucked up here. one of the corpses is straight up impaled on fjolnir's spear. n ... not pog.

i am trying so, so hard to pay attention. but i also kinda wanna take a nap.

charlie: [stares at statue] [rolls a 4] i wonder if he had a dick.

okay so something rolled in, tore up the overgrowth inside the circle, and murdered a couple dudes. and was also super tall and human-adjacent. hrm.

oh my god why are we rolling so shit today. time to stealth away and hope we dont get casually dismembered

k: jorb's hair is so long... leo: K, PLEASE,

time for a break! i am very tired but im gonan see if i can push through a little further. nyx is petting his cat why do orangatangs look like that

first watch is thorne and sieron! have they even, like, talked thorne unhabby ): thorne's worried we were tresspassing when checking out the statue, meanwhile im thinking about that one time when sieron got bit by a groundhog

(oh my god this is from late 2018)

leomund's tiny hut, aka the anti-sea bear circle we are getting SO much mileage out of the tiny hut. SILJE HUMS A SONG WITH KALI cute........... FINALLY I HAVE ROLLED ABOVE A 14 wait no i rolled a 16 twice. anyway we are not dead

nearly at camp vengenace! boy howdy i hope camp vengeance didnt get burned down. AH FUCK TAURE IS UNCONSCIOUS SO WE CANT CAST FOR DETECT POISON kaepora nearly made us all shit ourselves but its okay he just saw some bison and thought it was cool Michael Is Consulting Several Tables

WHY DOES JORB'S CAMERA ZOOM LIKE THAT why am i hungry. i have so many questions

HEY, TALL GUY [smacks sieron]

camp vengeance looks better! like, nobody's Obviously Sick anymore, the medical tents arent overfilled, we did it! we saved the dayyyyyy time to report to ryder! taure's getting dropped off at the medical tent

man remember when charlie didnt wear pants

oh man, with taure unconscious charlie is now taking point with social interaction. wild. jk im making jorb do it bc im tired HAHA NAT 20 PERSUASION BC OF ME HELPIN SIERON man ryder is such a cock. he was totally ready to keep throwing troops at heaven's brazier to die until we managed to persuade him out of it. jorb: did we tell ryder about the vision? michael: you kinda just took a look at him and went STINKY BOY!

okay yeah anything that dies on arvus will just pop back up as undead. man, arvus sucks.

ryder: alright, dismissed. charlie: seeya, soldier boy! :D hahahahaha im gonna eat his knees.

SILJE NEEDS ENRICHMENT IN HIS ENCLOSURE

charlie: ive decided he sucks. silje: we've already arrived to that, you're late!

LMAO WE WALKED IN ON INGRID AND HER CRUSH they fuckin. nice. you go, you funky lesbian

jorb: we've got the tiny hut, we could go anywhere leo: we could go to SPACE! nyx: we could not go to space. leo: WITH A TINY HUT STAIRCASE, WE CAN,

we are 320 miles away from the spaceship that exists on arvus. nice.

michael: justin sees you-- roll a strength saving throw. leo: i cant wait to die! [rolls a 3] I AM CRUSHED BY MY DOG michael: he rolled a nat20.

BOSS ENCOUNTER: CHARLIE'S DOG (the small circle next to him is one of the medical tents.)

THORNE IS PACT OF THE GUN solar: PARRY THIS, YOU FUCKING CASUAL

sieron, to ingrid: seems like youve been doing well charlie: i punch sieron. sieron: sieron: the camp, of course.

man we have no idea if the heart of arvus is actually related to the prophecy or not. theres a Lot of stuff lining up, but not enough, and its hard to say how much of it couldve been literal?

solar & michael: [discussing exposition] me: [cracking up bc penn sent me a funny dsmp joke]

prophecies are weird.

charlie is just s she is just sitting here SILJE PLAYED CARDS REALLY GOOD AT ME nyx rolled a nat20 and took all my money

oh cool we can talk to yrel telepathically! time to hoist yrel. THIS IS SO SCUFFED thorne mentioned yrel and now we're trying to explain to ingrid that we have a magic talking snake charlie: I WANT TO GO HOME. thorne: we cant go, we have a GOD-KING to kill! "i think theyre insane, theyre talking to a snake" "ingrid, druids exist" "oh. im gonna go back to getting railed by my 7 foot tall girlfriend"

#leo chirps #ttrpg #explorers of arvus #OKAY WE'RE CAUGHT UP NOW sorry abt that lmao

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theshatteredrose · 4 years ago

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Relic Keepers: Awakening of the Red Lily (Chapter 19) - Original Fiction

AN: I was planning of having the entire series through Eishirou’s POV, so readers learn along with him. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have small segments from Zayne’s POV just to have him fawn over Eishirou :3c

Ao3 | Wattpad | Inkitt | FictionPress

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter 19:

Zayne had no idea what time it was. He truly didn’t care. After the hectic and completely disorganised evacuation of Flutterlight Forest, time seemed meaningless. It moved quickly in moments of chaos. Moved slowly in the quiet aftermath.

And it seemed to drag on even more as he sat by Eishirou’s hospital bed in the medical wing.

The bed was standard for its purpose. And yet it seemed to dwarf the slender Passive that rested upon it.

Eyelids gently closed, hiding his golden eyes. Soft, light pinks parted ever so slightly to offer the softest of breaths into the oxygen mask. Soft brown hair against stark white pillows. Skin a washed-out, unhealthy pale. Yet, colours were starting to return to his cheeks.

White sheets. A silently beeping heart monitor. The methodical drip of saline IV fluid.

All Zayne could think was that Eishirou didn’t deserve to be in such a state. In such a place.

But he was.

Zayne sighed and ran an agitated hand through his hair. He wanted to get up and pace. Get up and do something. But he didn’t want to leave his seat, leave Eishirou’s bedside.

So he sat. And as he sat there, he started to think. He honestly couldn’t remember much of what happened at that tower. Fleeting images. Possibly like the ones that Eishirou saw in Recordings. There was a blinding white light. There was Eishirou on the ground, clearly in agony. And after that, as ShadowDwellers continued to gather around, he saw red.

Those ShadowDweller bastards did something to Eishirou. They had to be responsible.

Zayne had felt an absolute fury. One he had never felt before. Elites were trained to be cool and calculating in battle. Show intelligence and skill in all attacks.

But Zayne pretty much lost his shit.

He’d admit it. He lost it. Who wouldn’t in his position?

Other Elites. Of course.

…Who gave a shit what they thought? Surrounded by ShadowDwellers. Their healer in unknown agony. Trapped in an ancient tower. An injured member of another team unconscious and in the crossfire. Let those other Elites claim they could have done better.

They couldn’t have. Had it been another team, they’d be dead. He was certain of it.

Zayne huffed an irritated sigh and leaned back into the hospital chair. He tilted his head back to stare up vacantly at the ceiling for a moment. He soon tilted his head back down and raised his left arm.

And he stared down at his forearm.

There were no marks. Not a wound. Not a scar. There wasn’t even any swelling. Absolutely no sign that he had received any injury.

Yet, that was the arm that was penetrated by three or four steel-like bards. An attack by a ShadowDweller. One that tried to attack Eishirou.

He had moved instinctively.

His whole life, he had been trained to focus on defeating ShadowDweller first and foremost. Anything, everything else came second. But back then, in that tower, Zayne’s first priority was Eishirou’s safety.

And he was going to use any means necessary to ensure it.

Eishirou needed it. He deserved it.

Eishirou…

He was unlike anyone he had met before.

Zayne remembered their first meeting. How Eishirou cheerfully greeted him. How Zayne was slightly taken aback by how…cute the guy was. Despite having just met the guy, he was somewhat startled by how immediate his protective instincts were.

And he remembered how Eishirou had subtly winced, unconsciously backing away from him ever so slightly when his golden eyes landed on Zayne’s Elite badge. He managed to maintain his smile, yet it had lost some of its warmth. Replaced with trepidation and resignation.

It was then that Zayne knew the guy was a Passive.

There was a moment where Zayne thought the guy would turn and flee. Like other Passives in the past. Yet, he stayed. Smiled apologetically when he revealed Zayne’s team was escorting them on a mission. Continued to engage with him, even after knowing he was an Elite.

It might have been because of Zayne’s dismissiveness of he being a Passive. But that wasn’t it. Not fully.

There was no reason for him to indulge Zayne’s curiosity. No reason to talk openly about anything but work and ShadowDwellers. No reason to speak with him so informally.

But he did.

And it was in those short conversations that Zayne’s protective instincts heightened. Something in him just decided; Eishirou was adorable and delicate, and he had to protect him no matter what.

It was an odd feeling, he had to admit.

But he trusted his instincts. Not in the way he was taught. But he trusted his gut all the same.

Zayne had never met anyone so genuinely…excited about, well, anything before.

The way his eyes lit up; his amber gaze practically shimmering. The smile on his lips was broad and genuine. How his prattled on and on, almost to the point of breathlessness.

And how…happy he looked when Zayne expressed interest.

Zayne reached forward to idly touch a lock of Eishirou’s hair, allowing the soft brown strands to fall between his fingers and back onto the pillow.

Passives were…fragile.

Zayne needed to be more cautious. Be more careful.

And be far more protective.

The sound of sharp footsteps prompted Zayne to pull his hand back and push himself back into his chair. He turned his head toward the door to the small ward and noticed a member of medical staff.

The blue-haired professor, Neriah if he wasn’t mistaken, stepped into the ward once more. His glasses sat on the edge of his nose as he concentrated on the tablet in his hands. He idly glanced up, likely to check up on Eishirou, only to do a subtle double-take. He was obviously surprised and startled that Zayne was still there. By Eishirou’s bedside. Still dressed in his bloodied clothing.

“You should get some rest,” the professor stated, not suggested.

“Elites are trained to stay awake and alert for up to four days,” Zayne responded without much thought.

Neriah, however, arched an eyebrow. He was surprisingly not intimidated by him, by his words or presence. He simply nodded his head as he walked around him, unconcerned, and stood by the foot of Eishirou’s hospital bed.

“Oh, I know,” he responded. “Unlike Researchers who do it because they’re surprisingly stupid.”

The corner of Zayne’s mouth twitched into a smirk but chose not to otherwise respond. Eishirou had mentioned previously that he, along with other researchers, had the habit of forgetting to eat and sleep.

Still, it was nice that the Professors of this academy weren’t afraid of Elite students. Not like the one he transferred from…

“Though, since you’re still here; remember anything previous to the evacuation?” Neriah suddenly asked. Likely just wanting notes for his files.

Zayne huffed up a breath to blow a strand of hair from his eyes. “Nah. I remember losing my shit. And then doing what it takes to get out of there.”

Neriah nodded his head idly as he tapped at the screen of his tablet. “Running on adrenaline and instinct, then.”

Protectiveness and rage, too, probably.

“As the adrenaline declines, you may begin to remember more,” Neriah continued as he sighed something off with his tablet.

Zayne nodded his head absentmindedly as his gaze shifted back toward Eishirou. Disappointed that he was as still and as pale as before. Only the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathed quietly.

“He has extreme mana depletion and exhaustion,” Neriah unexpectedly explained. “He’s unlikely to awaken for a day or so.”

Zayne was unable to prevent a frown from appearing on his lips as a twinge of guilt gnawed at him. Mana depletion. Through the continuous use of mana. Was his condition from the numerous Recordings he had pulled? Or was it because he had healed Zayne of his injuries?

No, it had to be both.

“He’s in stable condition and I’ve got my rounds,” Neriah said as he walked toward the door. “Shout if you need anything.”

“Sure,” was all Zayne uttered as he watched the professor walk out the door. The sound of his footsteps fading away.

Back in that stifling silence, Zayne leaned his head back against his chair and stared up at the ceiling.

What happened? What actually happened in that tower?

A bright light. Blinding. And when it faded, Eishirou was…on the ground, clutching his chest with blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. There was something else. Something red floating before him. He…regarded it. He seemed to know what it was.

And after that…?

Eishirou had…healed him. Somehow. Without touching him. But Zayne knew, beyond doubt, that it was Eishirou that had healed him. That gentle, warming presence. He felt it before. When he battled against that Centipede ShadowDweller.

Only the healing was far stronger than before.

And he felt intense anger after that.

It was protective. Primal in a way.

The ShadowDwellers had swarmed him after his wounds had healed. He…remembered that part. After…after Eishirou fell to his knees, blood trickling from the side of his mouth, the ShadowDwellers suddenly reacted differently. Instead of focusing on Eishirou, like they had done previously, they turned on Zayne.

And he slashed the shit out of them. They attacked him in return. Some managed to land, yet…he didn’t feel any of them.

He remembered feeling a sense of satisfaction when they circled him. Slopping and scurrying about. He remembered thinking; “good, now I can kill you all at once.”

The sooner he killed the bastards, the sooner he could get to Eishirou. And get him to safety.

That was all that mattered.

Zayne was pulled from his musings upon another presence entering the room. He instinctively looked over and watched as Professor Chryses, or Jacob, Eishirou’s godfather, entered the room. His face was drawn, his expression sombre.

It was a tight expression. One used when they were reigning in their worry and concern. He had that same expression when he met them in the helicopter bay with the medical team.

Eishirou looked so…small when Jacob hastily took him from Zayne’s arms and held him in his own.

He really was a mountain of a man. Even by Elite standards. He looked like he could be an Elite. But he was a Passive. He definitely was a Passive. He didn’t act like an Elite. Didn’t walk around with a sense of superiority. Or had his head shoved clean up his own ass.

More importantly, he didn’t treat Passives like shit.

Jacob was Eishirou’s godfather, but Zayne had to admit that he was surprised that the man was so openly affectionate about the kid.

As Jacob walked into the room, his attention was forced entirely on Eishirou. It actually took him a moment to realise that Zayne was also present. When he did, he was momentarily surprised.

“Oh, you’re still here, Zayne?” he questioned, curiosity in his voice as he walked over to stand on the other side of Eishirou’s bed. “I’d figured Sigmund would have snared you by now.”

Zayne shrugged, deciding not to mention that he hadn’t told Professor Sigmund where he was. The stoic Elite professor could find him on his own if he needed him so badly. Though, he had to admit he was surprised that Earnesta hadn’t hunted him down.

“You did a good job bringing Eishirou home,” Jacob suddenly said. “And you protected him the best you could. You have my thanks.”

Zayne snapped his head toward him, unable to prevent a frown. Thanks? What for? Eishirou was lying pale as a ghost on a hospital bed. He hadn’t moved for hours. Unlikely to do for hours more.

He had done nothing to be thankful for.

“Not the ideal condition, sure,” Jacob said with a forced half grin. But his expression soon took on a sullen, nostalgic hue. “As long as he’s home. We can deal with anything after that.”

…Eishirou was truly cared for, wasn’t he? Yet, his own godfather seemed to trust him. Trust him to protect someone so important to him.

Despite everything that had happened, Zayne felt his resolve strengthen. He had been given the position of ensuring Eishirou’s safety. And he was going to see to that.

No matter what.

… … … … …

Eishirou was in that strange state of semi-consciousness. Where he was awake, but too tired and too comfortable to move. His bed was warm and soft, and his body felt too heavy to attempt to move. He was conscious enough to know that he wasn’t dreaming and to have the coherent thought that he should get up and be productive. But tired and lazy enough to simply roll over and go back to sleep.

Hmm. He couldn’t remember if he had any dreams last night. He must have been exhausted and just fell into bed.

“Eishirou? Can you hear me?”

Huh? Jacob? What was he doing in his room? Why did he have to wake him up? He was tired and comfortable, and just wanted to go back to sleep.

“Come now, Eishirou, I need you to wake up now.”

Strange. There was a sense of urgency in Jacob’s voice. He had better wake up and see what he wanted. It must be important.

It was a struggle to open his eyes, surprisingly. His eyelids felt heavy and could only muster to weakly flutter them open. He found himself staring up at a while ceiling. A ceiling he wasn’t all that familiar with.

A movement from the corner of his eye prompted Eishirou to roll his head to the side. Though his vision was blurry, he could make out the form of someone familiar.

“…Jacob?” Eishirou murmured as he squinted his eyes. His throat felt unexpectedly dry and tight.

Jacob looked undeniably haggard; dark rings under his eyes, hair a mess, and rather pale. He, however, managed a smile as he ran a hand through his short hair. “Christ, kid, you had me age ten years.”

He was…worried?

Eishirou furrowed his brow and swallowed thickly. “Where am I…?”

A movement from the right side of the bed immediately prompted Eishirou to roll his head to the other side. He was surprised to find that Neriah was there, too. Sat on the right side of his bed. A stethoscope around his neck and a medical clipboard in his hand.

“You’re in the infirmary,” Neriah was the one to answer. “You’ve been here for twenty-four hours.”

Infirmary? He was back at the academy already?

Wait, a day? He had been sleeping for the entire day? Wow. He hadn’t done that before!

“Ok, kid, I need you to tell me what happened,” Jacob said, his tone serious. “Ernesta told me as much as she could, but I need to hear it from you now.”

Eishirou rolled his head back to blink up at the ceiling. What happened…?

He was on an assignment, wasn’t he? To Flutterlight Forest. To investigate the forest and the underground chamber. He remembered walking through tunnels. A cave painting. A recording. And then…

Missing Elites. They found one.

A white tower. A small key. A puzzle on the door.

Inside the tower was a stained glass mosaic.

They were then ambushed by ShadowDwellers. Humanoid ShadowDwellers.

And then…

Eishirou’s eyes widen and he sprung up in bed. “Wait, the Red Lily!”

His vision abruptly blurred and his hearing was drowned out by his pulse throbbing in his head. His world tilted, and so did he. He had to desperately grasp at the bedsheets to prevent himself from toppling out of the bed.

“Easy!” Jacob immediately scolded as he reached out to grasp him by the shoulder and guided him to stay upright. “Your blood pressure is low so no sudden movements.”

Eishirou dropped his head forward to his chest and he grasped at his forehead with his right hand. His hearing was still slightly impaired by the throbbing in his head. He felt somewhat nauseated, too.

He pushed all that aside as he grasped at Jacob’s arm and looked directly at him. “Where’s Zayne?”

“He’s been here,” Jacob pacified. “Neriah here had to kick him out so that he could get some rest himself.”

“He wasn’t hurt?”

“No, not an injury to be found,” Neriah was the one to answer, which prompted Eishirou to turn to in his direction in time to note a half smile on his lips. “From what I understand, he had been by your side the throughout the entire ordeal.”

Eishirou uttered a sigh of relief. Good, he wasn’t harmed.

“But, what about Mikiel?”

Neriah unexpectedly rolled his eyes. Yet there was a sense of fondness in the motion. “Full of questions as always. He’s alive. His injuries have been largely healed. Yet, he still lies in a coma.”

Eishirou couldn’t supress a wince at the memory. “He had swelling of the brain.”

“And a skull fracture, I know,” Neriah replied as he nodded his head idly. “He’s stable. You did what was necessary. You kept him alive.”

That was honestly the best Eishirou could do with the circumstances he was given. At least Mikiel was alive. He was sure they would be able to handle anything that followed.

But that led to a few more questions. He was in a bed. In a medical bay. In the infirmary. His last memory was ShadowDwellers and the sudden appearance of the Red Lily. Nothing after that.

“How did I end up here?” Eishirou asked as he motioned idly to the room around him. “I don’t remember the journey back.”

Jacob leaned back into his chair that had been pulled close to the bed. “Team 3 contacted Communications requesting an emergency evacuation,” he explained as he folded his arms across his chest. “Zayne was the one to ensure your safety. I know about the white tower and the stained glass. Zayne informed me. I haven’t had the chance to inspect the report or photos, but I’ll get to those later.”

Didn’t have the time? That meant he had stayed by his bedside for the entire time, didn’t it?

“Now, lie down and relax,” Jacob ordered lightly. “I need your side of the story. What happened when those ShadowDwellers attacked?”

Eishirou allowed himself to sink into the mattress and pillow. He found himself staring up at the ceiling as he became lost in thought.

Right, what did happen?

“I’m…not sure,” he admitted. “I just remember fragments. The ShadowDwellers were unbelievable. Zayne was protecting me. He got hurt. And…there was a bright light. And the Red lily suddenly appeared. It was just…there.”

Had it been inside the tower the entire time? Why did it appear when it did? More importantly, how did it appear suddenly like that?

Did it react to something? To him?

Eishirou uttered a sigh and clutched at his forehead. He had so many questions. One thing was clear to him, however, that the Red Lily did appear. And it appeared during a desperate moment.

“I…used the Red Lily to give Zayne my healing,” Eishirou continued. “I think. I can’t remember.”

Jacob sat forward in his seat. “Used?”

“I heard a voice. It asked me what I wanted to do.”

It called him something, too. Something soul. Something else he didn’t fully remember.

However, he certainly remembered how it felt to have his energy drained from him. That was exactly what it was; his healing skills and mana were drained from him. And given to Zayne.

It hurt. A lot.

…He shouldn’t tell Zayne.

Eishriou uttered a sigh as he dropped his arm listlessly to his side. He licked his lips and swallowed thickly. It was difficult, though. “Can I have some water? I taste copper. Was I coughing up blood?”

“You were,” Neriah answered as he reached toward the bedside table where a water pitcher sat. “You were clutching your chest, too.”

As Jacob helped Eishirou to sit up, he barely supressed a grimace. He couldn’t imagine how unnerving that sight would have been. Especially if it happened just after encountering the Red Lily.

“How bad am I?” Eishirou couldn’t help but ask as Neriah handed him a cup of cool water.

Neriah’s answer was thankfully brief. “Better than when you first arrived. Severe acute exhaustion and mana depletion. Now, drink slowly.”

Eishirou grasped the glass with both hands. The urge to gulp it down was there, but he resisted. He sipped at the water slowly until he drank the entire glass. It felt so good against his dry, terse throat.

“What happened to the Red Lily?” Eishirou asked as Neriah retrieved the glass from him.

Jacob leaned forward in his chair to rest his elbows on his knees. “It’s at the museum. You had it clutched tightly in your left hand. It took a while for us to coax you into letting go.”

Eishirou blinked. “The Red Lily is here?”

Jacob abruptly raised his hand to silence any further questions he had. “Never mind that now. How are you feeling?”

It honestly took Eishirou a moment to figure out how to reply. He didn’t feel all that bad. “Just a little dizzy and tired.”

“That’s to be expected,” Neriah said as he idly adjusted his reading glasses. “And those symptoms are likely to linger for the next couple of days. Less, if you actually take it easy.”

Eishirou frowned. Whenever a doctor would say “take it easy” what he really meant was to do absolutely nothing. And he didn’t like doing absolutely nothing. Especially if there was a relic around for him to help investigate!

“What about classes?” he asked.

Neriah sighed aloud and immediately snapped his gaze toward Jacob. “He has inherited your inability to take it easy,” he stated, sounding surprisingly bitter.

“Hey now.” Jacob immediately threw his hands up in front of him in both a surrender and pacifying manner. “Don’t try to pin that on me.”

“I really shouldn’t expect a man who forgets to eat for an entire day to instil a sense of self-preservation in his apprentice.”

“It is perfectly natural for researchers and chroniclers to possess a determined work ethic.”

“Work ethic? Working until you collapse from exhaustion isn’t exactly what I would call a healthy work ethic.”

“Now you’re just being overly dramatic. I haven’t passed out from exhaustion for years.”

“What about last month?”

“That doesn’t count.”

“Yes, it does!”

Eishirou had to snigger quietly to himself at the two professors as they bicker back and forth across his bed. They had been friends for years. And it was easy to tell.

Over the continuous bickering, Eishirou heard the sound of rapid footsteps in the hall just outside the room. He turned his head in time to watch the door to his room fly open and a certain blue-haired Elite stood on the threshold.

“Eishirou?”

Eishirou immediately perked up. “Zayne!”

Zayne used the door frame as leverage to push himself into the room and Eishirou raised his arms, outstretched toward the Elite. As Zayne reached him, he crouched down next to his bed and allowed Eishirou to wrap his arms around his neck. While he slipped his own arms around Eishirou’s waist.

Eishirou rested his chin on Zayne’s shoulder and hugged him back as tightly as Zayne held him. Neriah did tell him that Zayne was fine. No injuries whatsoever. But he still felt relief seeing him with his own eyes.

After a lingering moment, Zayne finally pulled back. He kept his hands on his shoulders, however, as he knelt on the floor next to his bed. “You’re ok?”

Eishirou nodded. “I’m all right.”

“Did those ShadowDwellers do something to you?” Zayne asked him with a brow furrowed in concern.

Eishirou shook his head this time. “It wasn’t the ShadowDwellers. It was the Red Lily.”

Zayne’s concern soon turned into confusion. “That relic?”

“I…used it to heal your injuries,” Eishirou explained the best he could. “It took a lot of energy. That’s why I’m exhausted. I’m all right, though.”

Zayne didn’t appear all that convinced. He also looked confused, which was hardly a surprise. Eishirou himself didn’t remember how he used the relic. He barely remembered much of what happened after those Humanoid ShadowDwellers ambushed them.

Speaking of which;

“What happened to those ShadowDwellers?”

Zayne hesitated for a moment, his expression blank. Yet there was a sense of…something in his eyes. “They were…defeated.”

There was something he wasn’t telling him. Eishirou had to admit that he was curious. But he was sure Zayne had his reasons and it would do no good to anyone to demand answers here and now.

Eishirou was just relieved that Zayne was ok.

And the rest of the team, too, of course.

The thought of Elite Team 3 reminded him of Mikiel, and ultimately of the condition they found him. And how he was alone.

“What about those missing Elite Teams?” Eishirou asked.

“They’re still searching for them,” Jacob was the one to answer, abruptly reminding Eishirou that he was indeed still there. “They’ve sent several veteran Elites to investigate the island and to deal with those ShadowDwellers.”

Veteran Elites?

They were Elites who were in their mid-thirties or older. They didn’t move in teams, but rather worked solo. They were more than capable of handling things by themselves. As the name indicated, they were warrior Elites who had decades of experience.

Administration must be worried to send those harden fighters to explore the area.

“Needless to say, the Midnight Islands and Flutterlight Forest are off limits for a while,” Jacob continued. “Which means-”

“Which means I won’t be going back to inspect the tower, huh?” Eishirou interrupted with a disappointed pout.

Jacob nodded his head solemnly while Neriah sighed in exasperation and pinched the bridge of his nose. Zayne, however, looked somewhat baffled. No doubt wondering why he would want to return to that place after such a close encounter. To him, returning to inspect the stained glass wouldn’t be worth the time or effort.

And Eishirou couldn’t really blame him for feeling that way. A part of him felt the same. He didn’t want to head back in if it meant putting Zayne and his teammates in danger again. Yet, the other part of him wanted to out of sheer curiosity and wanted to learn more about the Red Lily.

Never mind any of that, though. It wasn’t like he could be rebellious and go back on his own. He’d doubt they would let him out of the hangers. And he certainly couldn’t walk to the destination. Swim, more like it.

He’d muse about the Red Lily later. First, he needed to sweettalk his way out of the infirmary. The mood that Neriah was in, he suspected it wasn’t going to be easy.

“So, anyway, since I’m awake and all that, can I go back to my room?” Eishirou asked.

Neriah picked up his medical chart and replied in a matter-a-fact manner; “I want you to stay for one more day.”

“I can’t just go back to my room? I promise not to do anything strenuous,” Eishirou pleaded, even going as far as clapping his hands in front of him in a further pleading motion.

Neriah narrowed his eyes ever so slightly. The movement was subtle, but Eishirou knew exactly what it meant. He had lost this conversation long before it even started.

“We’ve already established that Chroniclers are incapable of taking it easy,” Neriah said as he poked Eishirou in the middle of his forehead. “Personally, I want you to stay a week. So, I’m being nice. Don’t push it.”

Don’t push it indeed!

“Zayne will just have to keep you company,” Neriah continued. “Until lights out, of course.”

Eishirou glanced over at Zayne. Well, that didn’t sound too bad.

#original fiction #writblr #young adult #scifi fantasy #rpglit #gay romance #relic keepers: awakening of the red lily

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emospritelet · 5 years ago

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WL verse: 27 Can you have Nurse Faye or someone make a passive aggressive bitchy remark to a recovering Lacey about Tilly being in the ICU?

27: “Is there anything more I can do?”

Prompt list here

[AO3]

Lacey Weaver wasn’t used to being sick.

She had always been fairly robust, despite living on the streets and in abandoned buildings for years. After meeting Weaver, and settling down, she had flourished, rarely even suffering from colds. But the virus was indiscriminate, it seemed, and it had affected her badly. Even now, able to breathe again and her fever gone, she was as weak as a newborn kitten. It was some comfort to know that neither her husband nor her daughter had caught it, although she worried for the child that was soon to be born.

She ran a hand over her belly, the IV tube taped to the back of her hand catching on a fold of the blanket. The chair beside her bed was empty, and she hoped that Weaver had gone home to get some proper sleep. It was hard to know what time it was in the hospital, but there was light coming in through the window. Perhaps he and Tilly were eating breakfast together, seated around the kitchen table of their new home in the suburbs with the morning sun streaming in. Or perhaps he had relaxed the rule she herself had set down about eating meals at the table, and was letting Tilly eat her breakfast on her knees in front of the TV. He almost certainly had. The thought made her smile.

The door opened, and Lacey pushed herself up a little further on the pillows as Nurse Faye walked in, pushing one of the meal trolleys. She was efficient enough, but cold and clinical, Lacey found.

“How are you feeling, Mrs Weaver?” she asked, her tone dismissive.

“Fine,” said Lacey. “A lot better, actually. Can I go home?”

“That’s for the doctor to decide.”

She moved the tray table into place, taking the breakfast tray from the trolley and setting it down. Lacey looked at it without enthusiasm. A bowl of porridge with raisins, a cup of peach yogurt and a bagel. Her appetite had not yet returned, but she knew she needed to eat. The cup of tea to the side was more welcome. Nurse Faye took her pulse, then her temperature, nodding stiffly and making a note on her chart.

“Stay in bed,” she said, in a tone that suggested Lacey had been planning on racing up and down the corridors on a gurney. “Your fever is gone, but we need to be sure you don’t pose a danger to others.”

“I’m not exactly gonna go around licking the door handles,” said Lacey tartly, and the nurse frowned at her.

“No, but you might decide to go to the ICU to check on your daughter,” she said, matching Lacey’s tone. “The doctors are extremely busy, and you’d only get in the way.”

Lacey blinked rapidly as a cold hand squeezed her heart, making it thump in fear.

“What?” she demanded. “Tilly? Are you saying she’s here? She’s sick?”

“Yes.” Nurse Faye was watching her impassively, but there was the tiniest quirk at the side of her mouth that made Lacey’s hackles rise. “Didn’t your husband mention it?”

Her mouth twitched further, a twist of her lips bordering on a smirk, and Lacey’s eyes narrowed. She gets off on giving people bad news. She likes having that power over the patients, keeping them in the dark until they say something she doesn’t damn well like. Bitch. Dammit, Rafe, why the hell didn’t you tell me?

“I guess maybe he did, but I was half-asleep when he came in,” she said, trying for a calm she didn’t feel. “How is she?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nurse Faye lightly. “Although if she’s in the ICU, I don’t suppose it’s a mild case.”

Lacey wanted to scream at the woman, but she held her nerve. Her fingers dug into the blankets, fists clenching.

“I need to see her,” she said, and Nurse Faye shook her head, tutting.

“I just told you that wasn’t possible.”

“Then I need to see a doctor.”

“I’m afraid they’re busy.”

“Dammit!” Lacey snapped, slapping the blankets. The smirk grew a little, and she wanted to strangle the woman. “When can I see her?”

“When I tell you,” said Nurse Faye, and nodded at the tray. “Eat your breakfast.”

She closed the door, and Lacey glared after her. Her anger faded into fear as she thought of her daughter, lying in a bed in intensive care, sick and scared. Turning back to the breakfast tray, she pulled a face. Any appetite she might have had was gone, but she needed strength, and so she wolfed down the tepid porridge, followed by the yogurt, and crammed the bagel into her mouth between sips of tea. At least that was hot.

Slipping from the bed, she tested her strength, a little unsteady on her feet. There was a hospital issue gown on the chair by the bed, which she had used on the few occasions she had left to use the bathroom. Anyone seeing her out in the corridor would assume that was where she was going. If she happened to take a detour to the ICU, Nurse Faye would never know.

The house was too quiet.

Weaver had not expected to sleep, whatever Nurse Gale had said, but she had been right. He had lain down fully clothed on his bed when he got back home, and the next thing he knew, it was dawn. The house was silent, and the blissful oblivion he had felt on waking from sleep vanished in a flash as he remembered why. His mouth was dry, a foul taste in his mouth, his clothes wrinkled and uncomfortable, and he sat up, running his hands over his face. His wife was in the hospital recovering from the virus, his daughter was in the ICU, and he was sitting on his arse doing fuck all to change it.

Getting angry at himself usually helped him to get moving, and true to form he pushed to his feet, tearing off his wrinkled clothes and heading for the shower. Thirty minutes later, he was clean, dressed, and nursing a cup of coffee in anxious hands, waiting until he could head to the hospital. There were restrictions in place for visitors now. He wondered how Lacey was doing. Whether he could bring her home. He needed to tell her about Tilly, and felt guilty for lying to her, but while she was still weak, perhaps it was for the best. He glanced at the clock, and gulped the rest of his coffee, wincing as it scalded his throat. Time to go.

Lacey made her way down the corridor, wheeling her IV on its rack beside her. The floor was cold beneath her feet, and she knew she needed to get back to her room quickly before she was missed, but fear for Tilly made her keep going, turning the corner and almost bumping into a running junior doctor. The ICU was hectic, filled with hurrying staff and the odd desperate-looking family member, and she saw a young nurse with brown, shining hair and an air of calm efficiency herding the visitors out in a line, instructing them to keep their distance from one another. Lacey slipped past her as she was arguing with a particularly vocal woman.

“I told you, only one family member per patient,” she said. “And only when the doctor says it’s okay. I need you to take a seat and wait.”

Lacey slipped through the door, fingers tightening on the chrome stand of the IV as her eyes swept around the ward. There was no sign of Tilly, and she was unsure whether to be relieved or not. Perhaps Nurse Faye had been lying, and Tilly was safe and well, at home with her father.

“Mrs Weaver?”

A familiar voice made her turn, and Lacey tried to look as though she was meant to be there. Dr Milliner was kind and knowledgeable, and had been the one to treat her when she first arrived at the hospital. He looked tired, his eyes hollow and his cheeks unshaven. She wondered when he had last had a full night’s sleep.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “What are you doing out of bed?”

Lacey hesitated.

“I - someone told me my daughter was here,” she said. “Is that true?”

“Lacey?”

She glanced around to where her husband was standing by the door, his eyes wide and frightened. Dr Milliner glanced away, sucking in his cheeks as Weaver strode up to them. He hadn’t shaved either, and looked just as tired.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, sounding as close to scared as she had ever heard him. “Did - did something happen?”

“How could you not tell me our daughter was sick?” she demanded, and he looked pained.

“Lacey…”

“She’s gonna be alright,” interrupted Dr Milliner, before Lacey could respond. “I - look, it’s only supposed to be one parent at a time, but since you’re a patient, Mrs Weaver, I’ll waive that. Come with me.”

He led them swiftly to a bed at the end of the room, where curtains were still drawn around it, and pulled them back. Lacey clutched Weaver’s hand as Tilly was revealed, lying with her eyes closed and a ventilator mask over her mouth and nose, brown hair curled on the pillow. Weaver threaded his fingers through hers, squeezing tight, and Lacey could feel tears prick her eyelids. Machines were beeping, keeping pace with her racing heart, and she shook her head.

“She looks so small,” she said thickly.

Weaver released her hand, putting an arm around her and pulling her close. Dr Milliner gave them a tired smile.

“You did the right thing bringing her to us,” he said. “Her fever had spiked, and she was having trouble breathing.”

“I was told she was in a bad way,” said Weaver, sounding anxious. “How bad are we talking?”

Dr Milliner shook his head.

“She’s gonna be okay,” he said gently. “Last night I was worried about her prognosis, but she responded well. We’ve brought the fever down, sedated her to calm her down and let the machine do its work getting oxygen into her. She’s stable, and no longer critical.”

“Oh thank God!” Lacey felt like hugging him, and Dr Milliner’s smile widened.

“I want to keep her in for a few days, make sure there’s no sign of pneumonia, but she’ll be okay. She’s a tough little cookie.”

“Takes after her mother,” said Weaver, and Lacey laid her head on his shoulder with a shuddering sigh of relief. He kissed the top of her head.

“Right,” said Dr Milliner. “Well, you should really get back to bed, Mrs Weaver. I’ll be along to run some tests in a while, and if I’m happy with the results, you can go home today. How does that sound?”

Lacey nodded, wanting to cry with relief.

“That sounds great.”

“Good.” He glanced between them. “Now. Is there anything more I can do?”

“No, thank you, Doctor,” said Weaver. “Thanks for saving them.”

“Anytime.”

Dr Milliner hurried off again, and Lacey turned to face her husband, taking his hand in hers. Weaver was watching her with a wary, almost guilty expression on his face, and let out a heavy sigh, opening his mouth.

“I get it,” she said, before he could speak. “I get why you didn’t tell me.”

He seemed to sag with relief, his grip tightening on hers.

“Maybe I should have,” he admitted.

“Maybe,” she allowed. “Would I have, if our positions had been reversed? Probably not.”

He smiled faintly, and leaned in to kiss her.

“Well, you heard the doctor,” he said. “Back to bed with you, or I won’t get to take you home.”

Lacey leaned into him, taking a moment to rest against his firm chest as she gazed at their daughter.

“Are you sure she’s gonna be okay?” she whispered, and felt him nod, his arms going around her.

“You heard the doctor,” he said. “I’ve cornered the market in tough cookies, it seems.”

“Weavers are hard to kill,” she said stoutly, and he chuckled, a deep rumble in his chest that made her cling to him a little harder.

“I’m sure the newest Weaver will be just as tough,” he remarked. “Come on. Let’s get you back to bed.”

#sprite's pandemic promptathon #fic: white lies #woven lace fic #woven lace #my fic #anonymousnerdgirl

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zip-toonz · 4 years ago

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So can do you ship Storm E. X Forest? I mean they did blush at eachother ya know?

Im assuming you're really new here.

To preface this I have watched the entirety of WLLL 3 times and my stance is this:

Both forest x storm e and and ace x jewel felt rather tacked on instead of being developed naturally. Probably for the same reason many shows add hetero ships, to try and decanonize the idea of a character being lqbt+.

But if you took the time to check this blog or my Lalaloopsy reboot blog youd know that I have stated that I find both storm e x jewels and storm e x forest cute. With the former having potential. Unexplored potential given WLLL had a total of 1 season but potential. But that doesn't mean its inherently better.

It doesnt have to be one or the other in the first place, people can be polyam. I dont have to pick a side. Storm e can be with forest and jewel at the same time in a healthy non love triangle or cheating way. And on my reboot blog Ive talked about the trios dynamic.

So why haven't ive drawn forest x storm e? Because unlike storm e and jewel i don't have a reboot design for forest yet and probably wont for awhile nor was he in Lalaloopsy girls. Sure I could draw their canon designs but I have a lot more fun working with mine.

This may come off as an aggravated response but to tell you the truth, you submitting art to my blog of your ship and then this ask felt really passive aggressive. I considered deleting both. But id thought id take the time to explain that different people have different taste. Like I've said on my reboot blog different boats for different folks when talking about shipping and sexuality headcanons.

The 'They blushed at each other' argument is ????. If that was the only requirement to be in a relationship then I'd be in a relationship with my entire graduate class. I joke a lot about 'oh look they looked at eachother they're in love' but that's meant to be just that. A joke.

Everyone ive talk to in the past. Wacky, rosie, aft, storm e and even the users on deviantart who draw weird bubble fanart have been super polite when it comes to headcanons and ship differences.

#im not trying to be in any way #but the way this was presented was porly done if it wasnt meant to come off as agressive

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bluepenguinstories · 4 years ago

Text

Remoras Full Chapter XII: Fever Ray

Hmm...where was I? When I opened up my eyes, I noticed I was laying down in a bed, but not my bed. A Talking Heads song started to play in my mind, but I couldn’t remember which one.

I leaned up and saw a tube attached to me, and next to me, IV bags.

Did I get my organs stolen again? I couldn’t help but wonder. Sure, it had been a while since such a thing happened, but there could’ve been some debt I needed to pay off that I forgot about.

That notion was swept away as fast as it had been drawn up. Someone entered through the door in a pair of scrubs and that was when I realized that I was in a hospital room.

Damn, my mind must be such a fog right now, considering it took me THAT long to figure it out.

“Hello again, Ray,” the doctor (or head nurse. Or surgeon. Or could have been an intern. I was still trying to sort my mind and I felt like I was ready to pass out again) greeted with a familiar, icy voice. But no, it wasn’t Remora.

“Hi Shirley,” I opened my mouth to speak. It was more like a creak, a croak, or even a groan. Tired, weak, and a hint of hoarse. If I could bring myself to joke, I would have said that I swallowed hoarse-radish.

“I told you: I’m Dr. Cole-Slaw. We’re not close enough that I’ll allow you to refer to me by my first name.”

Ah, Dr. Cole-Slaw. The doctor formerly known as Shirley Cole. But coleslaw was good, too. Especially with the right ingredients.

I managed a smile. It felt forced, even if the intent was genuine.

“But that can change, right?”

“Perhaps, but when you’re my patient, you will refer to me as ‘doctor’. Understand?”

Such charm. It was good to know she took her job seriously. That’s why she was my preferred doctor. But the question still remained as to why I was there. So of course she would tell me before I even had a chance to ask.

“I presume you know why you’re here, yes?”

There it was. I opened my mouth, but she spoke up again before I could reply.

“Your wife found you all stiff and purple, and then you fainted. Fade to black. End scene. Understand now?”

Oh. There it was. The arm thing. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t even move my head, but she must have seen in my eyes that I understood the situation.

“We spoke about this a few months early when you asked for a check up. Even though it must have been an issue far longer, you just let it go untreated.”

She moved about the room in less of a pace and more of a march. Eyes focused on me the whole time.

“First, your hand got shot. Hole right through the middle of your palm. Hurt like hell, I presume. Fine enough so far. Except you did not clean it.”

“I went right to the diner and took care of other business,” I recalled.

“While still bleeding? I hope not. Think of the poor floor. Good lord. Such indecency. Don’t you have a first aid kit in your establishment? I would think so, given the business you tend to deal in.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I dismissed. We already went through that very conversation when I asked her to check out my hand. At this point, it sounded more like she wanted to rub salt in my wound. My untreated, festering wound.

“I wasn’t finished,” she dismissed my dismissal. Of course. I should have known better than to talk back to a doctor. She took a second, as if to make sure I wouldn’t interrupt her. “Then, you went on for months pretending as if you were fine. Your wound on the outside healed, yes, but you already exposed them to the elements. Your hand became paralyzed, and you tried to hide such a fact. Honestly, I was surprised it didn’t happen right after you got shot, but, delayed reaction. It happens. Moving on.”

I didn’t even notice until she turned a page on her clipboard that she had been holding one.

“So here we are: your entire arm has been infected. Not only are you not able to use it, but if left untreated, it will spread.”

Maybe I had been in the vicinity of carelessness. Things happened. It was an easy mistake to make. But now that I was there, I could get antibiotics and it would all be fine. So it was fine. No need to worry.

“Hey,” she showed some grit in her voice. “Look at me.”

Well, how could I say no? I turned my head, and she stared down at me, and for a moment, I thought it was in contempt, but I had a slight gut feeling that underneath her face mask (which was endearing), deep down, she was getting a kick out of this.

“If you’re thinking of telling me that it was all an ‘oopsies’ and you were just careless, don’t. Out of all of your faults, being careless is not one of them. You are nothing if not meticulous. So refrain from that bullshit.”

That was one of my favorite things about being her patient; the lack of bedside manner really made me feel like it was less a talk between doctor and patient and more of a talk between friends.

“In any case, it’s none of my business if you want to die, but rather than construct an elaborate ruse around your loved ones, you could have talked to a therapist. I know a really good one. I’ve got his business card in my pocket right now, if you’re interested.”

“Pass,” I told her, with less of a passion than I wish I had. It was the tiredness the IV gave me. I felt the lights would soon fade, anyway.

“Very well. In any case, before you decide to check out of this existence, I think you ought to know that your condition is treatable, albeit you may want to consider the treatment before accepting as it will involve amputating your arm.”

That serious, huh? What was this, the 19th century?

“I see,” I managed to form the words. “Is Sunny around?”

“Yes. In the lobby.”

“I’d like to speak with her…” but I started to yawn and drift off.

When I awoke, I was still in the hospital bed. Which was good. That meant I hadn’t been kidnapped by a gang wanting secrets out of me. Of course, I didn’t even know if I had any secrets left to tell. Not even the secret about my arm now that Sunny knew.

To make matters worse about how out in the open I now was, I turned my head to the left and was shocked to see Sunny seated right next to me. Her hands were on my one uninfected hand. I did my best to muster a laugh.

“Careful. You should really put gloves on.”

To my surprise, she didn’t look all that angry for keeping something so serious from her. Well, the seriousness of it was up for debate. It wasn’t like I had cancer. No broken bones. No coma, either. Worst case scenario, I’d die due to a lack of action. Best case scenario, I’d go out on a limb.

“Hey hun,” I smiled. I felt a tear run down my face, so I closed my eyes.

“Looks like you managed to slip one past me as well,” she remarked. No hint of anger in her voice, either. I think I would have preferred her angry. It just seemed more appropriate.

“What can I say?” I meant it to sound more cheerful. Like, “what can I say? I’m good at what I do and I do it often.” You know, to be jovial. But instead, it sounded more like I was asking her what it was I should have said. I opened my eyes and saw her look up and around the room.

“I don’t know, but you’re clever, so I’ll let you think of something,” she replied, with a chuckle to boot. Passive-aggression? Genuine playfulness? My mind was too fogged up to tell the difference.

“I think I figured it wasn’t important enough to mention,” I began to tell her. Good. That was a start. “Like it would just resolve itself, y’know?” Hmm. Did I really believe that? Maybe I should have started over.

“Actually, I figured it was a small problem. Yeah. Like, what was one hand, right? You were gone for a while, and when you’d come back, I figured you’d barely notice. I didn’t expect it to spread.”

She gave no reply. Maybe I needed to try something else.

“Or maybe this is just who I am: I’m a curious person. I test things and I like to see what happens next.”

Not that one, either? Well, I was probably on the right track. Just a couple more explanations and I’d be there.

“You know, when I found out last night, my first thought was that it was my fault for being away so long,” she said at last. “But I just figured it would be like usual: we’d both do our things, have fun, and then when I came back, we’d both have fun together. That’s how it’s been in the past, hasn’t it?”

“It can still be like that,” I assured her. “I’m never not having fun. Even now, I can’t help but laugh.”

She let out a forced laugh. “Yeah. Me too.” Then, she let go of my hand. I watched as she got up. “Tell me, what were you thinking?”

I still couldn’t detect any anger. It didn’t even sound like she was upset.

“Ah…” I think it took me a moment to find the means to speak again.

“It wasn’t planned,” I told her at last. “It was the night in which I set out to recruit Remora. When I went to speak with her, I ended up irritating her just enough to the point that she shot right through the palm of my hand.” Oh, all of that was such old news, it didn’t seem worth repeating. But I did so just in case I never told her. “The pain was intense, and indeed, much blood was spilled. I took it all in stride, however. After all, I understood that it was a risk. In spite of her not being very emotional, she can be rather violent to those who piss her off. Or maybe that was the old her.”

I continued after I drew a quick breath. “I figured the handkerchief would suffice to stop the bleeding, and then I’d treat it later. After all, it wasn’t the first time I’ve been shot at.”

“Indeed, but go on…” My sunshine replied. So I did.

“I guess I treated it. Somewhat. The wound closed, there wasn’t a hint of blood. It was kind of a DIY job. In other words, it hurt like hell. Somewhere along the line, I started to notice that I was losing function of my right hand. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. By then, I just figured I may as well let it happen. Later, I had Dr. Cole-Slaw check it out and she confirmed. At the time, suggesting that I take antibiotics. Or that I should have taken them. Oh, it’s such a blur right now.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I didn’t. I figured, ‘why?’ If it was going to get worse, why not just let it happen? I’m someone who deals in high risks and high rewards, and sometimes, the risks and the reward are one and the same. You know how it is, right? Win some, lose some.”

I saw her shake her head.

“We both deal in dangerous things. I’m not upset about that. But if you know you can get your wounds treated, why wouldn’t you? If you don’t, how do you expect to live the life you want to?”

Heh. To that, I couldn’t help but smirk. I didn’t even care whether or not she saw me.

“To be honest,” I replied. “I’ve just never taken life all that seriously.”

After that, I went back to sleep. Blame it on the IV.

Of course. Sunny was still there. Times in the hospital was just like that; asleep, awake. Asleep, awake.

“Still here?” I asked.

“Of course! Can’t get rid of me that easily. Unless you want to lose that bet, too.”

I managed a chuckle. Ah, nostalgia.

“Hey, remember when we first met?” She sprung the question out of the blue. Just like Sunny. We were both such nostalgic people.

“You mean the night we got married? How could I forget?” I retorted.

I wondered how she saw it, and if I saw it the same way.

Ah, but before I got too ahead of myself, that wasn’t the story I told people, now was it? I’d often tell people that Sunny and I were high school sweethearts, a young couple who would spend time on the school bleachers during the sports team’s off-season. That wasn’t quite how we met, though. There were enough details that were true so that the “high school sweethearts” story wasn’t a total lie: for one, we did attend the same high school, and coincidentally, we did tend to sit at the same bleachers during the sports team’s off season.

We just never really noticed each other until way later.

So the version of the story that we told others was sweet enough. An ideal narrative. Maybe because the truth was far more ridiculous.

See, it was at a county fair, or something of the like, when it all happened. I passed by rigged games and carnival rides. Cotton candy, elephant ears, and hot dog stands all paraded as well. Wherever the crowds would migrate to, there was something ready to sucker others out of their money. Which was what brought me there in the first place.

I looked around and thought of all the ways I could make easy money fast; all I had to do was come up with a rigged game with a cheap prize attached and dollar after dollar would drop. Children begging their parents, a romantic partner urging the other to keep going to win them something. I already saw it all around me.

But before I could plan too far ahead with my scheme, I was stopped by the voice of an old woman.

“Heya sonny,” she crooned. It was funny, because she referred to me, and not Sunny. “I’ll read your fortune for a dollar.”

I laughed. I laughed so much that I decided to let myself get swept up in the thieving festivities.

“Very well,” I sneered while pulling out a dollar. “Let’s see what you got.”

She told me to hold out my palm. Great! She really played up the act! Excellent! After she closed her eyes, she took a moment, then said:

“The next person you meet will be the love of your life.”

Oh my! That was too good! Out of all the bold psychic statements, that’s the one she had to go with, huh? Very well, I thought. I’ll take her up on her bet.

I turned around and saw a buxom lass with curly brown hair all tied up in a thick, long pony tail.

“Hey there,” I said to her and pointed to the psychic’s booth. “Nice to meet ya, I’m Ray. I know we just met and all, but wanna prove this psychic right and get married?”

That was it. The moment that should have sealed the deal and proven that psychics were just as fake as all the other attractions.

She laughed. Like, a real chortle. Just a full-on hoot right there. Then, she put her hand on my shoulder, smiled a daring smile, and said, “that sounds stupid! I’m in!”

With that, the two of us left the fair and went down to the courthouse to fill out a marriage certificate. It only cost us, like, what? Fifty bucks? Afterward, since the day was still young, we opted to sit out on the grassy fields of a park.

“So, husband and wife, huh?” She turned to me and laughed.

I can’t believe that actually came true, I must’ve thought. Then again, it’s all in the wording. She never said anything about getting married. Just ‘love of your life’. We’ll see how this goes.

“It would appear so,” I nodded along. Then, I got a call from my best friend/roommate, Lucky.

“Hey bro, we still up for sucking each other off tonight?” He asked in that shameless manner that I loved about him. Too bad I had to be the bearer of bad news.

“Sorry, I’m married now,” I broke it to him in a nonchalant manner.

“Whoa. Dude. Since when?”

“Just now. We decided to prank a fortune teller.”

“Well grats, bro! Wish I was invited to the wedding.”

“Yeah, well, we didn’t have one.”

“All right, well, just to let ya know, I still expect cuddles tonight.”

“Of course. Talk to you later.”

I hung up the call and put the phone back into my pocket. Sunny must’ve heard the whole thing.

“Should we have had a wedding?” She asked, then changed her mind. “Ah, but then my family would want to be invited, and then they’d hate that I married a scoundrel. My mom and sister alike would’ve probably taken me aside and say, ‘you should’ve married someone nice and have kids’, which, y’know. Totally boring.”

I gave it a good thought and took zero offense to any of that. I knew who I was, and I was good at who I was.

“I get that. I got no problem with kids, myself. I used to launder money at a daycare. If I recall, I had a drug dealing business at the time. Don’t remember which drug, though.”

“Far out! The most adventurous thing I’ve ever done is explore abandoned buildings. Sometimes I find cool things people left behind and it makes for nice keepsakes!”

“You don’t say,” I made a note of what she said. “Well, I wouldn’t call what I do ‘adventurous’. It’s all about knowing the right people and avoiding the wrong ones.”

“Oh yeah? Then what would you call yourself?”

I shrugged. “I’d say I’m the wrong person who acts like the right person.”

I noticed Sunny pull something out from the corner of my eye. While my instinct wanted to say “gun”, I favored my odds that it wasn’t.

“Do you smoke?” She asked. That’s when I noticed that she held a joint between her fingers.

“Not really, but I keep a lighter around just in case,” I replied.

I lit her joint, and she took her first hit, which conjured up a mighty cough. She passed the joint to me and I got the clever idea to make a bet of it.

“Betcha I can take a hit without coughing.”

“You’re on,” she challenged my bluff.

Alas, it had been my first time, and although I would end up getting high many more times in the future, luck was not on my side. Within seconds of inhalation, my lungs waged a war against me and it took me a good bit to settle down.

“Oh yeah. Forgot to mention. This is the dank shit right here.”

We laughed along as we got to know each other more while waiting for the high to set in.

“So, like, get this...I’m like, pretty sure my sister’s into chicks, but she’s too preoccupied with the notion of being a caretaker or something like that. Like, she talks wanting a family ‘n shit, but it’s, like, so obvious.”

“Who’s to say you can’t have both?” I suggested.

“Oh yeah, totally. That’s me. I’m into chicks, but I also, like, guys are cool, too, and either way, it’s a win for me. Y’know?”

“Yeah, I get that. You did hear what I said to my bro on the phone, yeah?”

“It’s like they say, man! Boys will be boys! That’s what dudes do, right? Dudes…”

I had the faintest suspicion she was more high than I was. Maybe I just had a stronger tolerance. Case in point, while she was divulging her family’s details, I was busy thinking about business. So of course, a business idea popped into my head.

“So, like, get this: what if someone opened up a diner, yeah? But get this, it was, like, in the most remote part of the arctic.”

“That’d be dope! What would it be called?”

It could be called something like ‘Dope Diner’ or ‘Sunny Ray Diner’, but none of those had the right ring to them. “Do restaurants even need names?” I asked, aloud, although I was sure my thoughts were somewhere nearby.

“Whoa…” That’s when I knew I got her. “That’s such a good point! Like, you may have just cracked the universe! Lemme write that down!” She got out a notepad and a pen and wrote down ‘restaurants don’t need names’.

“So that’s the best part, right? It wouldn’t have a name! It would look just like any ol’ building, and you’d have to go inside to find out it was a diner!”

“You’re like, such a genius! This has gotta be fate, man! Total universe in sync!”

I couldn’t just keep that idea an idea anymore. It was too good.

“If we’re gonna do this, we should figure out where we’d put it, yeah?” I proposed.

“I’m kinda partial to Alaska, myself,” Sunny suggested.

“Nah, not remote enough. Gotta be somewhere like Siberia. Maybe Greenland. But the less green parts.”

“But green’s the best part!” Sunny started to cry.

“All right, all right. Settle down. Maybe some green.”

I started to cry as well. “I mean, who could imagine a world without green?”

We looked at each other, the backs of our heads covered in dirt, then, we both closed our eyes and smiled.

“I think the high’s wearing down…” I told her.

“Yeah, same here,” she agreed.

My legs felt like they were folding into each other.

“Are you also turning into a mermaid?” I asked in earnest.

“It’s all a part of the process.”

Somehow, as if there weren’t enough improbable things that day, we managed to stay out all night, asleep in the grass. When we woke up, it was early morning and we were ready to say our goodbyes with groggy voices. The same grogginess that carried into present day with me in the hospital.

“See ya around,” I waved to her.

“Oh, uh,” she got out her notebook and pen. She looked about as dizzy as I felt. Guess it couldn’t be helped.

After she wrote down her address, she tore the sheet of paper and handed it to me. “I figure since we’re married now, you ought to know where to find me.”

I nodded. “Good point. Shit. I forgot about that.”

“Oh really?” Her lips curled upward into a sly grin. “How about this, then? I bet you a dollar we’ll be divorced by tomorrow.”

Ah, we had just met and she knew me so well.

“You’re on. But just to up the ante, I bet you two dollars we’ll last two days.”

After a while of upping the ante, it somehow came to the agreement that whoever broke up with the other would have to forfeit money proportional to the amount of days we lasted. So it went, and somehow, we’ve kept it going for well over twenty-five years. Which was to say, the betting pool sure was huge.

So that was how the two of us met. More or less. I may have still embellished a few details. Give or take a few anachronistic details.

“Oh, and remember how we didn’t have our first date until a month into our marriage?” She continued to reminisce.

“Mm-hmm,” and again, how could I forget?

“It was one of those five star restaurants that only celebrities and people with reservations could get into, but you got in, and not only that, we didn’t have to pay for our meal. I remember asking you how it was possible, and you said, and I quote, ‘the manager owes me a favor’.”

I smiled, even through a sigh. “If anything, I’d say the way we met just proves how ridiculous life is.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But I’d say that’s what makes it worth it.”

“Mm…” I gave it some thought. “Still, if I were to die, I’d say I’ve lived a good, long life.”

“Oh, quit it, you rascal,” she patted me over the back, though with her strength, it felt more like a slap. “You’re not that old! We’re both only 46!”

“I think...you’re right. Oh, you aren’t called Sunny for no reason.”

She snapped her fingers. “Besides, how will I know what schemes you’ll come up with next if you’re dead? The suspense would kill me!”

“Actually,” I thought it over. “I prefer living with no regrets, and, well...if I’m going to keep going, I’d like to be able to talk to my daughter again.”

“Oh...uh...right. Our daughter,” I noticed Sunny look away and out the window. “Man, I really wish we could be doing some heist stuff right now. Parenting was never my strong suit.”

“Nor was it mine,” I told her. “But even still, I care about her, and I wish we’d talk to her.”

“But what would we say? And hasn’t it been, like, what? Six years or something? We’re probably way late on that, and she probably hates us for not saying anything for so long. I don’t think there’s anything we could say to fix that.”

“She has that right. I just want to take a gamble on trying, all the same.”

“Very well. Are you sure you can hold your phone in your current state, though?” She asked, and I found myself drifting off to sleep once more with the words spilling from my mouth, “I’m not ambidextrous for no reason.”

When I woke up once more, I checked the clock to see that a few hours had passed. Sunny was no longer in the room, but my phone lay at my lap. Before I could reach over to hold the phone and dial Violette’s number, the door opened up and Dr. Cole-Slaw appeared once more in her signature scrubs.

“So, have you made a decision?” She asked. Right to the point.

“Yeah...I think I’ll go out on a limb, if you know what I mean.”

She groaned. “That’s such a terrible joke, but it’s at least better than you being miserable, so I’ll take it.”

“You’re the best, coleslaw,” I took the time to remind her.

“Repeat after me: D-R. Doctor.”

“Doctor.”

“Good. Now let’s see if you’ll be calling me the best after you wake up and find yourself missing an arm.”

“Oh, before we start the surgery, can I make a phone call?” I remembered what I wanted to do.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t you? It’s going to be a bit before we get everything ready. I don’t think the infection’s gonna spread past your arm in the next couple hours. You should be fine. But if not, yell as loud as you can, and maybe I’ll hear you.”

Ah, how was I so blessed to know such people as Shirley Cole-Slaw and Sunny Reyes/Sunshine? Oh. Right. Sunshine. Rays. I forgot why I had my phone in the first place. I dialed Violette’s number and let it ring.

After a few rings, no answer. Default voicemail message. I decided not to leave a message. But, Violette called back right as I was about to set my phone down.

“Ray, do you even know what time it is?” She sounded mad, like I just woke her up. Maybe I did.

“Not really. Time stopped having any meaning to me ever since I showed up at the hospital,” I replied.

“Oh my god! Are you all right?!”

“Yeah. I’ll live. I’m just getting my arm chopped off. Though I thought about letting it get worse and dying, but, what’ll you do, am I right?”

“That does NOT sound all right! I thought your bodyguard was supposed to protect you!”

Huh? Bodyguard? Did she just assume I had one of those? Though when I thought about it, I had a good idea what was going on.

“Ah, right. My bodyguard. Well, shit happens, y’know? Nobody’s perfect, not even bodyguards.”

“Still, you need to be more careful. Damn near gave me a heart attack, and it’s still early in the morning.”

“Oh yeah. How are you doing? Met anyone new?”

“Really? You called just for that? I thought you’d call over something more important.”

“I did, but who says I can’t check in with you?”

“Ugh. Well, there’s nothing to say. I’m better off staying at home and taking care of Elodie.”

“You haven’t tried at all?”

“Not since I got duped by your bodyguard.”

Right. I was definitely going to have a talk with my “bodyguard” about that.

“Well, keep your chin up.”

“Okay, but is that all you called about?”

“I also wanted to see if I could talk to Elodie for a bit,” I admitted. My heart started to race as the two options, whether I spoke with her or not, both gave me equal measure excitement and anxiousness. “Think I could do that?”

“Yes. Er. No. Maybe. I don’t think she’d like that.” Sunny was right. So it seemed. Even still, I But maybe...er...I could try. Hold on.”

I heard her get up and open Elodie’s door. Though she held her hand in front of the phone, I could still hear her say, “hey Elodie, it’s your dad. Wanna talk to him?”

I couldn’t make out what Elodie said, but I was ready to accept whatever outcome I was given.

“Hello?” Came a hoarse, but still sweet voice. To my surprise, I recognized it as her. Even six years later, I was able to tell what she sounded like.

“Hey...kind of unexpected, huh?” I answered.

“Yeah.”

“To be honest, I wanted to say something for a while, but I could never figure out what, and it felt like whatever I could have said wouldn’t have been good enough to make up for the pain I thought I caused you. But the longer it went, the more I felt like it was too late, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Yeah? So now you decided to try? You didn’t even bother to send me a birthday card.”

I deserved that. I expected it, and she was right to be upset. Angry, even.

“You’re right. I’ll send you one on your next birthday. And I’ll send you six more to make up for the other birthdays I’ve missed.”

“That’s not going to mean anything! You still missed them!”

“Again, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“...Still, even just like this. I guess it’s better than nothing,” she grumbled. “So thanks.”

“If you want, I can call more often. I want to say I’d visit you in the future, too, but we’ll see. One day, it would be nice if you could visit up here as well, but it hasn’t been very safe lately…”

“Maybe. But I don’t know.”

“Well, even like this. It’s a start.”

“Yeah,” she may have said to agree, or just to get me off her back.

“I’m going to go to sleep now, but take care, dear.”

“Bye.”

I ended the call, then allowed myself to drift off once more.

When I came to, I noticed bandages on my right side.

“Well, looks like it was a job well done.”

Right on cue, Dr. Shir...Cole-Slaw came in.

“Everything came back good, infection’s gone. Still, there could have been complications from all sorts of things along the way…” She trailed off, to allow herself the element of suspense.

“...But there wasn’t. You’re all good,” she finished. “Oh. But I’d stay here for the next few days, if I were you. To put it lightly, you’re gonna be in ‘hella’ pain.”

“Gotcha.” It would be fine, then. I’d just appoint Tigershark as temporary manager of the restaurant. No biggie. As soon as Sunny showed up again to check on me, I intended to tell her just that.

“Oh yeah, and might I recommend physical therapy? Considering you may be a little off balance?”

“Sure thing.” I tilted my head up. That anesthesia must’ve been some good stuff. I didn’t even remember being pulled into the surgical room.

Maybe I could think of the hospital like a little vacation resort. Or a hotel. One where the food was subpar, but I was sure I’d adjust. Now, for the other matter…

As soon as Dr. Cole-Slaw left, I noticed another presence in the corner of the room. I closed my eyes.

“You already saw me, no use pretending you didn’t,” she spoke up. Ah, all right. Fine. I leaned up and opened my eyes back up. Remora sat there with one leg over the other and with a face of total disinterest.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

I noticed her examine her nails as she sat.

“Hm? Oh. Not too long ago. The doc let me in. All I had to say was that I was a close, personal, family friend.”

“And she bought it?” I managed a chuckle.

“No. But a little bit of cash goes a long way.”

“So you bribed her?”

“No.”

“Then how’d you get in?” I asked, but then decided it wasn’t important. I guess a little like me, she’d continue to come up with a different reason, none of which being the truth. But if I had to wager, the first one was probably closest to the truth. “Oh, never mind that.”

“Good to see you’ve recovered,” she observed. “Though you should be more honest. I can’t believe you never told Sunny.”

“I could say the same about you,” I recalled what Violette had told me.

“I’m honest most of the time, unless the situation calls for it,” I could already tell she didn’t like where I was going.

“I already know you went over to see my sister-in-law.”

Remora looked stunned. As if “how? I thought I covered all my tracks.”

“I did it to get information on you,” she growled.

“Oh, Remora, Remora...you could have asked me anything. I had nothing to hide. Even if you felt the need to dig up dirt, couldn’t you have done it without hurting someone who had nothing to do with me?”

“For the record,” oh yeah. On the defense now. “It proved fruitless. The only thing she could tell me is that she thought you had a savior complex.”

Now that was a hoot. A whole riot. I began to wheeze.

“Oh? Do I go around telling Mr. Highwayman to stop robbing people?” “I know, right? I thought it was ridiculous, too!”

I shook my head and smiled. “But that’s beside the point. Do you really think she deserved that? She’s a good woman. A little naive, yes, but many people are. At least from my experience.”

“It feels weird being the one to be lectured. Especially coming from you.”

“Everyone’s got issues.”

“Yes. I’m aware. But I’m honest.”

“Mainly when it comes to criticizing others. But really? Bodyguard?”

“It’s not like I’d just tell her ‘yeah, I shot your brother-in-law, and now I’m digging up dirt on him’.

“Ha. I guess not. Even still, you don’t think that was a bit hurtful?”

“Yeah, but –”

“I know you don’t like when others are dishonest with you. Or when others are dishonest with anyone else, for that matter. So why doesn’t the same apply to you?”

“You’re right. I’ll think about it.”

“Other than that, kill whoever you want if you feel that’s what you need to do,” I gave it some thought. I wasn’t going to totally discourage her from her ways, but the complete opposite end also sounded a bit much. “Within reason. I added. No violence in the diner. People are there for a good time and a good meal.”

“I don’t know why you feel like telling me that. But yeah. Okay. Sure. Anything else?”

“Just the golden rule, don’t be a hypocrite. All that.”

“Hmm...about that…yes, but no. I’m going to have to take a raincheck.”

“Oh darn. Here I thought I reached you.”

“I’m going to need to hurt some people. Lie to those same people. It may not make them feel good, and it may not be how I would want to be treated, but that’s beside the point.”

“Why is that?”

“You’ve noticed, haven’t you? The lack of customers in your diner. The sudden blizzards. Mysterious fogs that appear. Creatures being where they shouldn’t. Even stranger creatures appearing, existing, attacking people, killing and laying waste, then disappearing into the night.”

“Oh yeah. Forgot about all that. Well, I’m investigating it. There just hasn’t been any more leads.”

“That’s why. They’re all linked. That I’m sure. I need to figure out why so I can put it all to rest. For that, I need to partake in a bit of trickery. I need you alive. And...I need you to have two functional arms.”

“A little late for that one, missy,” I joked.

“Get a prosthetic one. I’ll wait as long as I need to for you to recover.”

“Aw, I didn’t know you cared.”

“I don’t,” she shot back. “But I have a plan.”

“Care to tell me?” I tested to see if she would at least budge an inch.

“I’ll tell you as much as I need to. You may tell Sunny if you’d like. It would probably be better if you did than you didn’t.”

“I’m all ears,” and maybe it was the anesthesia, maybe it was a ghost memory of some really dank grass, but I really did feel like I was all ears and nothing else.

After she told me, excitement grew, and I couldn’t help but wish for the speediest of recoveries.

#remoras full #writing #stories #ray #sunshine #weed #fever ray #drama #hospital visit

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frmartinshomiliesandreflections · 4 years ago

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2nd November >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on Matthew 11:25-30 for Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (Feast of All Souls): ‘I will give you rest’.

Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (Feast of All Souls)

Gospel (Except USA)

Matthew 11:25-30

You have hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to little children

Jesus exclaimed, ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, just as no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’

Gospel (USA)

Matthew 11:25-30

Come to me ... and I will give you rest.

At that time Jesus exclaimed: “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little ones. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

Reflections (4)

(i) Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (Feast of All Souls)

Today is the day when we give expression to what we refer to in the creed as ‘the communion of saints’. We believe that there is a deep, spiritual, communion between those of us who are still on our pilgrim way and those who have come to the end of their pilgrim journey. As the funeral liturgy of the church states, ‘all the ties of love and affection that knit us together in this life do not unravel with death’. Saint Paul puts it more simply in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘love never ends’. One of the ways we expressed our communion with our loved ones before they died was by praying for them. If we are people of faith, we will always pray for those who are significant for us; we might light a candle for them. Just as our love for our loved ones does not cease when they die, neither does our praying for them cease, because it is one expression of our enduring love for them. Today is a special day of prayerful remembrance for our loved ones who have died. A traditional prayer we often pray for those who have died is ‘eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them’. We can often think of rest as something passive, the absence of activity. In the Scriptures, ‘rest’ has a much more vibrant meaning, as is suggested by that lovely psalm that is often prayed at a funeral, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. Towards the end of that psalm we read, ‘near restful waters he leads me to revive my drooping spirits’. Restful waters or rest is associated with a revival of our spirits. Eternal rest is an eternal revival of our deepest spirit, our deepest self. One of the early saints of the church, Saint Ephrem, wrote, ‘in the kingdom our departed ones achieve their full stature’. When we are praying that God would give our departed loved ones eternal rest, we are praying that their best self would be fully revived, that they would attain their full stature as people made in God’s image. The invitation of Jesus in today’s gospel reading, ‘Come to me’, and his promise, ‘I will give you rest’, suggests that already in this earthly life we can begin to enter into this rest, this revival of our drooping spirit. We are in need of the Lord’s gift of rest in these Covid days when our spirits can easily droop. We have the Lord’s assurance there in the gospel reading that if we come to him, if we turn to him, we will indeed experience a foretaste of that eternal rest or revival that awaits us beyond death.

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(ii) Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (Feast of All Souls)

Today we remember all our ‘faithful departed’. Most of us will be remembering people we have known and loved, such as family members and good friends. Indeed, the whole month of November is a time when we remember our dead in a special way. In most parish churches this month, there will be a special Mass for all those in the parish community who have lost loved ones over the year. As Christians, our remembering of those who have died is always a prayerful remembering. We remember them before the Lord. Remembering our departed loved ones before the Lord, praying for them, is one of the ways that we give expression to our continuing communion with them in the Lord. We believe that our loved ones who have died are with the Lord, who is with us in this life until the end of time. As one of the saints expressed it, our loved ones who have died have gone no further than the Lord and the Lord is always near to us. It is that shared relationship with the Lord which keeps us in communion with our loved ones who have died. In praying for our loved ones today, we are asking the Lord to bring them to the fullness of his risen life, as he brought the widow’s son to life in today’s gospel reading. As well as praying in petition, we also pray in thanksgiving for them, thanking God for the gift of their lives and for all the ways the Lord blessed us through them. Today, we entrust our loved ones who have died to God. In today’s’ first reading, Saint Paul tells us that ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us’. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God’s love, is the first fruit of eternal life. We pray that our loved ones would experience that life-giving love of God to the full.

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(iii) Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (Feast of All Souls)

The feast of all souls is a day when we remember all our loved ones who have died. We all have people we want to remember and pray for today. Our praying for the dead is one of the ways that we give expression to our continuing communion with our loved ones who have died. We believe in the communion of saints, that deep spiritual bond between those who have reached the end of their earthly pilgrimage and those, like ourselves, who are still on that pilgrimage. The group of women who had followed Jesus in Galilee and had come up to Jerusalem from Galilee with him, were in communion with Jesus as he was dying. They were looking on from a distance as he was dying. Once he died, they must have thought that their communion with him was broken forever. Yet, when they went to the tomb to anoint his body on that first Easter morning, they heard the wonderful news that Jesus who had been crucified was now risen and that he would soon meet his followers again in Galilee. Their communion with Jesus and his with them had not been broken by death after all. He would continue to relate to them, and they could continue to relate to him, even if in a new and different way. Beyond death, our loved ones continue to relate to us and we to them, in a new and different way. Every year, the church gives us this day, the 2nd of November, to express our relationship with those we were close to in this life who have died. We pause this day to give thanks for their lives, to pray for them, and to ask them to pray for us.

And/Or

(iv) Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (Feast of All Souls)

Today is a day when we remember all our loved ones who have died. We all have people we want to remember and pray for today. Our praying for the dead is one of the ways that we give expression to our communion with our loved ones who have died. We believe in the communion of saints, that deep spiritual bond between those who have reached the end of their earthly pilgrimage and ourselves who are still on that pilgrimage. In the gospel reading this morning, a group of women who had followed Jesus in Galilee and had come up to Jerusalem from Galilee with him, were in communion with Jesus as he was dying. They were looking on from a distance as he hung from the cross. Once he died, they must have thought that their communion with him was broken forever. Yet, when they went to the tomb to anoint his body on that first Easter morning, they heard the wonderful news that Jesus who had been crucified was now risen. Their communion with Jesus and his with them had not been broken by death after all. He would continue to relate to them, and they could continue to relate to him, in a new and different way. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection we believe that beyond death, our loved ones are being drawn into the risen life of Jesus; for them, life has changed not ended, and our relationship with them has changed not ended. Because of our communion with the Lord in this life, and their new communion with the Lord in the next life, we and they remain in communion, in an even deeper communion, even though it is not visible. Every year, the church gives us this day, the 2nd of November, to express in a prayerful way our communion with those we were close to in this life who have died. We pause this day to give thanks for their lives, to pray for them, and to ask them to pray for us.

Fr. Martin Hogan.

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