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xxdragonwriterxx · 4 years ago

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🔥You Are Human, And Damn It, You Are An Important One!🔥

A/N: Hey everyone! I’m back! It looks like my tags finally decided to sort themselves out so I wanted to (finally) post a new story! I’m still working on requests though, so don’t worry, those are coming soon! I just wanted to post this in the mean time while I edit those and test if my tags are really fixed on one of my originals so that any requested fics will actually be seen later should an error occur. Thank you so much for your continued support and patience, you guys are so amazing! I hope this makes up for my temporary hiatus! This one actually has a bit of a heavier tone to it but I think I’m finally happy with it! Thanks again for the support, and don’t be afraid to talk to me! Shoot me a message or just spew random bullshit and I’ll still respond 😂. Enjoy!

(Warning: themes of non-con & abuse. This is set in a brothel, but there’s nothing explicit, it’s just mentioned or implied. Just wanted to put it out there! Viewer discretion advised!)

🐉Song Recommendation: “The Gardener” By: Sarah Sparks 🐉

Word Count: ~7k

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It was that time of year. The time of year that Levi hated the most. The Underground Market Festival. It was the time of year in which merchants from all around would come down to the Underground City, away from the prying eyes of the Military Police, and sell anything and everything to the nobles who weren’t exactly looking for orthodox materials. The normally filthy, mostly empty streets would be filled with members of the wealthy, dripping in jewelry, cash, and lavish clothing as they paraded around the sorry excuse for a city, boasting of their wealth and privilege as they bought enough food and luxurious goods to feed three times the number of people in the Underground while sharing none of it.

The days were starting to blur together. Levi honestly couldn’t tell if it had been a day, a week, or a month as the drugs in his system continued to work just like the brothel owners wanted them to, rendering him practically inoperative and perfect for use. His head pounded, swimming with confused thoughts. His gaze was unfocused, warped, and his whole body felt suffocatingly hot despite his lack of cover, his legs shifting as his body instinctively searched for a relief he didn’t even want. But that was exactly how they wanted him.

The sound of his door being unlocked made him look up slowly, his eyes taking a few seconds to fully focus on the man standing in the entrance of his room, a wide, malicious grin on his face. Levi couldn’t help but wrinkle his nose in disgust. The man smelled of sweat and stale alcohol, and his unkempt appearance made Levi itch, even when drugged out of his mind.

“Oh, Levi…” the man cooed, making Levi shudder. “I have another customer for you.”

Even though Levi had been through this time and time again, even though he had been trapped in his filthy room since he was caught stealing from a merchant friend of the brothel owner at age twenty, even though the drugs in his system were making his body scream for what this new customer could give him, he still couldn’t help the wave of dread that washed through him, the fear. Levi didn’t fear much, having grown up on the streets of the Underground alone since he was abandoned by Kenny at the age of ten, but this? This he was scared of.

He thought back to the wretched old man that had abandoned him as a small child and wondered what he would think of him now. Would he be disgusted? Unsurprised? Angry? Not that it mattered. Levi knew he would never see him again. But even so, his brain couldn’t help itself from going down those roads, asking questions of “what if?” no matter how many times he reminded himself that it didn’t matter. He was just some bastard thug turned whore in the Underground. Nobody was going to even remember him, let alone care about who he was or who he may be in the future.

Levi was once again brought out of his daze when the pig in the doorway moved to the side, letting a noble woman saunter into the room. She had a wicked grin on her face as she approached him, ignoring the brothel owner as he slammed the door shut behind her, giving them some privacy. She was covered in glittering jewelry, and although the dress she wore was extravagant, it was very tight fitting and low cut, barely considered decent, her large breasts one breath away from spilling out over the top. Her hair was pinned up in a lavish braided style, twisting and coiling tightly, and held together with real gold pins that Levi knew must’ve cost a fortune.

“~Well, hello sexy,” the woman purred as she approached the raven-haired man.

Levi had to force himself not to grimace, even with the effect of the drugs, when she slithered her way over his thighs, her hands reaching up to cup his face. The smell of whatever custard perfume she had on was overwhelming, making his eyes water and his throat close up. Her hands felt clammy from all of the lotions and creams she had slathered over her skin to make it look shinier, making them feel like dead fish rubbing against his cheeks.

“Well? Aren’t you going to ask my name?” The woman demanded in a sickly sweet voice, making Levi close his eyes in barely suppressed agony.

“What is your name?” Levi asked in a low voice. He felt the woman preen above him at the sound of his voice, knowing she thought his deep tone was for setting the mood rather than the effect of his despair.

“My name is Lady Clarissa! What’s your name, hmmm?”

“Levi,” He said quietly.

“Oooh, Leevviiii, I like that,” Lady Clarissa practically moaned. “Say, Levi, you were quite expensive. That must mean you're really good at what you do. I can already tell that you fulfill my personal tastes in terms of appearance, so why don’t you convince me of the rest and give me a good time. Don’t make me regret spending my good money on you. Don’t make me punish you.”

Levi gritted his teeth when she ground her hips into him, trying his hardest not to fight back. He knew it would be difficult, the drugs making his movements and mental processes much slower, but at that moment, all he wanted to do was shove her off of him. Swallowing the bile in his throat, Levi reached for her as she leaned down to force her tongue into his mouth.

It was that time of year. The time of year that (Y/N) hated the most. The Underground Market Festival. It took everything in her to avoid groaning in annoyance as the people she was expected to call her friends dragged her down into the filthy Underground City for a day of “fun”. (Y/N) would much rather be back at home, reading a book in the library, or relaxing with the horses in the barn, or secretly practicing her sword fighting skills with the guards of their estate. But her father had forced her to go when her friends had shown up at the house, begging for her to come with them. He claimed she needed to get her priorities straight and actually present herself, show the honor and pride that came with being part of the (L/N) family. (Y/N) thought there was very little honor and pride in parading their wealth around like they owned the world, especially in front of people who constantly struggled to survive on a daily basis.

(Y/N) walked slowly down the worn cobblestone streets, suppressing the urge to gag at the sight of other nobles walking around, looking and acting as if they were rulers of the walls. She barely looked at anything, only stopping to occasionally buy food when she noticed the hungry children hanging around, looking for a scrap to steal. She could tell they were wary of her, but she never stopped trying, always offering them the food in some way, even if it meant leaving it in a secluded space for them to find later.

Her friends constantly tried to get her to engage, running up to her with crystal jewelry, silk clothing, and delectable foods, attempting to entice her, only to get pushed away. (Y/N) wanted no part in any of it. Even her attire spoke volumes about how little she wanted to be there. She knew that to the people of the Underground, the dress she wore would be considered something of utmost value, but when compared to the nobles around her, she looked underdressed and plain. She wore nothing more than a subtle red dress covered with a black leather jacket, paired with black combat boots and matching gloves, no jewelry to be found except for the simple white earrings she wore in her lobes.

Her father had been less than pleased with her appearance, but stopped arguing when she announced she was leaving, the lord just happy she had at least agreed to go to the festival. She knew he was disappointed in her, annoyed that she wasn’t like the other noble ladies who loved to flaunt their luxurious lifestyles and bend to the every whim of the lords around them, looking to marry early for money and power. (Y/N) wouldn’t be surprised if the entire reason her father wanted her here was so she could possibly win over the affections of a single lord milling about, one that was rich and influential. It was for that possibility alone that (Y/N) had originally thought to wear something that made her look underdressed, having to swallow the bile that rose in her throat at the prospect of catching some snobby noble’s attention.

“Yeah, her name is (Y/N)! She’s the one right over there, I think she could use a good time.”

(Y/N)’s head snapped up when she heard her name, her eyes shooting over to where her friends were standing in a group in front of a large building. All of them were looking at her, covering their faces with their hands to hide their giggles. Dread filled her to the brim when she saw the sign in front of the building, her face paling in horror.

“That one, eh? I think we can arrange something like that,” the brothel owner said, a smug smile on his lips as he stared at her, his grin only widening as her cheeks flushed a brilliant red. “Don’t worry, I’ve got one in particular that could give you a good ride. He’s expensive since he’s my most popular, but he’s worth it.”

(Y/N) opened her mouth to argue, her cheeks on fire as her brain fought to think of something, anything to get her out of this situation. She didn’t want to fuck some random stranger for no reason, but she especially didn’t want to have sex in a brothel. She found them vulgar, repulsive, and horrible. The way they treated their “workers” was appalling. Just as the words finally reached the tip of her tongue, one of the girls she had come to the festival with cut off her impending argument.

“Damn, I’m jealous! If he’s that good I’m almost tempted to take him myself. But she needs this. She hasn’t loosened up the entire time we’ve been here and I think this might help. She’ll take him.”

The greasy man smiled and wrote her name down, happily accepting the roll of cash her friend handed him before getting up, supposedly to let the man know that he had another customer on the way. (Y/N) tried to escape when she could, but her friends rushed up and caught her before she could slip into the shadows, dragging her over to the brothel and shoving her towards an open door where the brothel owner stood, a creepy smile still plastered on his face.

“Guys! I don’t want this!” (Y/N) whispered frantically as she was dragged towards her doom.

“It doesn’t matter if you want it or not, you need it!” One of her friends said with a laugh. “Besides, you’re going to have a fun time. Don’t make us regret spending that money for you!”

(Y/N) was practically thrown into the room, stumbling as she fought to catch her balance, before the door was slammed shut behind her, the loud sound of the lock being latched reverberating around the room with the finality of a death toll. Huffing in anger, (Y/N) stood and brushed herself off, smoothing out her dress and straightening back up to her full height, fighting off the panic slithering up her spine.

A low groan of pain coming from behind her made her whirl around in surprise, her eyes landing on a shorter, pale skinned man with stunning silver eyes and raven black hair. Gods he looked pathetic. She could definitely tell he was attractive, it made sense now as to why he was a popular choice, but he looked sickly, his cheeks hollowed out, dark circles under his eyes, and a muscled yet neglected body starting to wear thin from years of hunger and constant overuse. The sight made her want to be sick. How could anybody be cruel enough to force themselves onto this obviously abused man? How could anyone willingly pay money to fuck him rather than help him?

“Um, hello,” (Y/N) said quietly. “W-What’s your name?”

The man raised an eyebrow, not used to the soft, kind, almost shy way she asked for his name. The women and occasional men he dealt with most of the time were demanding, controlling, and sadistic, knowing they paid for a man they could use, and their voices usually projected that. Yet, this woman looked as if she had been forced to do this, further supported by the way she had been nearly thrown into the room by whom he assumed was her friends.

“Levi,” he said quietly, waiting for the usual routine to start, no matter how much his gut twisted in disgust at the thought.

“Hi, Levi, I’m (Y/N).”

“(Y/N)...” Levi murmured softly, training himself to memorize it despite his swimming brain, knowing she would want him to scream it out later. Whether in pain or in pleasure, he wasn’t sure yet.

“Um…” (Y/N) was about to speak, her mind scrambling for something to say when her eye caught sight of a large bruise on his neck. Her eyes widened and suddenly started scanning his entire body, her stomach roiling more and more the longer she stared. Now that she was really paying attention, (Y/N) could see painful bites, hickeys, and splotchy bruises littering his neck, jaw, chest, and thighs. Her eyes narrowed on the long, bloody scratches running down the length of his chest and back, and she noticed blooming red patches of skin all over him that were raw and aching from being slapped hard and rough over and over again.

He was wearing a loose pair of worn boxers as his only cover, and (Y/N) could only imagine what other horrors the thin cloth was hiding. Glancing down, she saw him shift uncomfortably, his boxers tented by his arousal. The sight made her growl in anger, knowing that to keep him going after he had already had so many customers for the day, a drug was being used to make him insatiable, forcing him past the point of pain and probably clouding his judgement and mental process as well. It made her want to go cut up the brothel owner and serve him to a pig.

Without thinking, (Y/N) rushed to him, reaching out to him, only to freeze when he flinched. She heard him curse at the involuntary movement, knowing it was his job to appear as unaffected and sexually appealing as possible, and it made her heart clench even harder, her hatred for this place and the people who ran it increasing tenfold.

Taking a deep breath, (Y/N) immediately slowed her movements, trying to appear as calm and unhurried as possible. Her gaze softened and glazed with unshed tears when he closed his eyes, his arms reaching out as he prepared for her to sit on his lap and have her way with him like she knew every other man and woman who used him did. Gritting her teeth against the fury she felt, she carefully slid her way across his thighs. She felt him force himself to relax under her as he leaned forward to let her kiss him.

When he felt nothing, and heard something click, Levi cracked open his eyes in curiosity, only to have them fly open all the way when he felt something cool and wet against his neck. Looking down at the woman in his arms, his lips parted in shock, watching in confused awe as she leaned back and soaked a small cloth in some water from a bottle, rinsing the fresh blood from the fabric. Looking to the side, he saw a small first aid kit by her feet, the container open to reveal a variety of medical tools inside.

(Y/N) leaned forward again, raising the towel to his neck to dab at his abrasions, washing them carefully, reverently, almost... lovingly. Levi opened and closed his mouth but no words came out as she continued to work on him, delicately cleaning his jaw and neck before carefully moving on to his chest. Was this some kind of strange ritual she always performed during sex? Did she just find him dirty and want to clean him up before putting her lips or her pussy on his skin? His mind was running a million miles a minute as she worked on him in silence, only pausing when he hissed quietly at the feeling of his gashes being washed.

(Y/N) frowned as she gently swiped the cloth along the red gouges in his skin. They were deep, most likely caused by the long, sharp nail extensions some ladies liked to wear, or the dull blade of a man with violent tendencies. It didn’t surprise her, a lot of the men and women who used people like this did have sadistic qualities, but it didn’t help to quell the now roaring fire in her blood, wanting nothing more than to fight against the injustice of this man.

“W-What are you doing?” Levi finally managed to ask.

“Cleaning your wounds.”

“Why? Is this some kind of-”

“Preparation? No. We aren’t going to do anything. I just want to help your injuries heal.”

Levi felt like his brain was full of static, like his mouth was stuffed with cotton. He wasn’t complaining, far from it, but he couldn’t get a reading on this woman. Why would she, a noble from the surface, want to help him, a hopeless whore from the Underground?

“Wha-”

“Before you ask what my intentions are, I’m just going to tell you that I didn’t even want to do this. I was forced to come to this festival because my father wants me to become more of a proper noble woman. But since I wasn’t too thrilled about having to be here, the people I came with thought I could use an opportunity to loosen up, and paid for me to do this with you in the hopes that I’d start having fun with them afterwards. But I have no intention of doing any of that. I hate how everyone in the Underground is treated like shit, and the last thing I want to do is take advantage of someone who obviously isn’t in control of his situation. I just want to help.”

Levi closed his mouth, all of his protests dying on his tongue. He still had questions, a lot of them, but he decided those could wait, her explanation making him feel surprisingly relaxed for someone who had trained himself to never take the word of a noble at face value. He had never met anyone like her. Even before he was forced to whore himself out, all he had ever known of nobles was their complete lack of humility and egotistical sense of self-importance.

It was silent for a moment, but this time, the silence was more comfortable, both of them starting to relax a little as (Y/N) continued to patch him up. Levi felt himself loosen up a bit, his muscles unwinding as his hands settled on her waist, keeping her securely balanced on his lap as she worked. Pride swirled in (Y/N)’s chest as she felt his tense muscles soften, her eyes sparkling as she started to work her way towards earning his trust.

“What’s your happiest memory?” (Y/N) asked suddenly.

Levi quirked an eyebrow in suspicion, “Why should I tell you, brat?”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” (Y/N) said, shaking her head and stifling a giggle at the nickname. “I only asked because I figured we may as well talk while we do this. Not only that, I feel like you could use some happiness right now. But I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, so if you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to.”

Levi was silent for a minute, the cogs in his mind turning as he tried to make what he believed to be the right decision despite the fog clouding his judgement. Just as she had promised, (Y/N) waited patiently, not pressuring him to answer, or even bringing up another question. She merely sat in silence, her clear (e/c) eyes narrowed on his injuries as she worked to make him feel better.

“There was a time when I was with my friend Farlan, a few years back. We were doing a job, trying to get rid of a troublesome merchant for a client of ours when we found out the merchant had a cat. We were hiding around the corner, waiting to strike when that damn cat jumped up onto Farlan’s lap. I’m fine with cats, but that was the day we found out Farlan had some kind of allergy to them. He was trying to hold back his sneezes but finally lost control right when the merchant came around the corner, and Farlan ended up sneezing really violently in his face. That merchant got so scared he must’ve jumped at least three feet in the air, and even managed to piss himself before he took off. We still had to finish him off later, but in that moment, when Farlan was mortified and our target was running for the hills because of a cat induced sneeze, I couldn’t help but laugh a little.”

(Y/N) had paused in her work to listen to him, and couldn’t help but smile when he finished his story. Going back to work, (Y/N) didn’t ask what happened to Farlan, not wanting to drag him back down after she had finally gotten him to talk to her, about something so personal no less.

“What about you?” Levi asked.

“Hmm, I think I’d have to say when I got my horse for my birthday,” (Y/N) said. “I was never around the horses, wasn’t allowed to be in the barn because it wasn’t “proper for a lady”. But I loved them, loved seeing them on the streets when other nobles would come visit my father or when the soldiers from the Survey Corps would come back from a mission. I couldn’t stay away, so no matter how much my father tried to squash my love of them, it just wouldn’t happen. My mother eventually convinced him to let it go, and surprised me with a little chestnut filly that I named Sashay when I was about sixteen years old. Now, she’s my best friend. We’ve been through everything together, and she’s the only one who doesn’t try to force me to be something I’m not. Aside from the royal guards, I guess. They learned a long time ago to stop trying to get me to sit still and look pretty when I beat all of them in the sword fighting ring.”

Levi’s brows shot up into his hair at that, his lips parting in surprise. “You know how to sword fight?”

(Y/N) chuckled. “Yeah, not what you were expecting, huh?”

“No,” Levi said. “I’ve never heard of a noble woman who could fight, let alone with a blade. Are you any good?”

“I tend to think so, but that all depends on who I’m up against,” (Y/N) said with a cheeky smile.

For some reason, Levi couldn’t help but smile back for the first time in years. His lips felt chapped and strained from disuse, but it felt good, a light feeling flooding his chest with warmth. “You said earlier that your horse’s name is Sashay,” Levi said, suddenly changing the topic.

“Mm hm.”

“That’s weird.”

(Y/N) giggled at his bluntness, making another fluttering feeling swirl in his chest. He had never met anyone other than Farlan who saw his language as something other than rude.

“Yeah, I suppose so,” (Y/N) said. “But I named her that because she is a sassy chestnut mare. I like to imagine that if she were human, she’d be someone you wouldn’t want to mess with, someone who wouldn’t take shit from anyone, but would do so with a spicy attitude. So I named her accordingly.”

Levi huffed a laugh at her response but almost immediately regretted it when the movement of his chest caused the rough gauze at her fingertips to brush against his injuries a little harder than before, the stinging sensation making him hiss in pain.

“Sorry!” (Y/N) said, quickly retracting her hands and holding them up, waiting for him to give her the signal to continue.

“Not your fault,” Levi mumbled, motioning that it was alright for her to get back to work. “Thank you, by the way. I don’t think I said that before.”

(Y/N) shook her head. “You don’t have to thank me. I want to do this.”

Levi wanted to ask her why but remembered what she had told him at the start of this and decided to trust her word, swallowing the question and instead changing topics. “Why do you even have this? Do you always just carry a first aid kit around?”

“Only when I come to the Underground. I want to have it available for those who really need it.”

“You do know that at least half of the people down here would kill you without a second thought to get to that medicine. Or they’d kill you if they thought you were pitying them.”

“I know, but I’d like to think I can handle myself a bit more than the average person. Even so, I usually keep it hidden unless I really want or need to use it on someone, and it’s only for quick patch-ups anyway. I can’t really fix anything major.”

(Y/N) finally finished with his front and carefully slid off of his thighs, moving slowly to begin working on his back. She made sure he was okay with everything she was doing before settling herself down onto the edge of the bed behind him, her hands reaching up to start her work once more.

Levi wanted to know more about her. He felt as if he could talk to her for hours, as if he had known her for years. He wanted to know what made her laugh, what made her cry, what her vision was for the future. It was insane, so much so that Levi idly wondered if he’d fallen off the deep end. But he couldn’t deny it. She was just too intriguing, so surprisingly kind, so genuine.

What was your childhood like? What are your favorite things to do? Do you come down here often? When will I see you again?

The questions continued to rattle around in Levi’s head as they once again lapsed into a comfortable silence but he forced all of them back, not wanting to seem either too desperate to get to know her, or be seen as coming on too strong.

After debating with himself for a while, Levi finally settled on, “You’ve mentioned your father a lot, and how he doesn’t want you to be yourself.”

(Y/N) tensed a little, her face twisted in a grimace behind Levi’s back. “Yeah… he used to be better about it, but ever since my mother died, he’s been like a tyrant. He’s upset he didn’t get a son in the first place, but now that he’s stuck with me for a daughter, he’s even more disappointed that I’m not someone he can easily make profits off of by marrying me off to someone. Not only have I been adamant about not allowing it, but no nobleman wants a woman who can think for herself. A woman who can ride a horse, go toe to toe with her soldiers, has an opinion, and is knowledgeable about current conflicts. They want someone who will dress up all pretty for them and be in bed, ready to satisfy them when they get home from gambling and drinking all day while sitting on their parents’ money.”

Levi scoffed and (Y/N) huffed in agreement. “I’m just not that kind of person. Every suitor that has ever met me has run away from my casual attire and sailor’s mouth.”

“Your father wasn’t like this when your mother was alive?” Levi asked.

“He was, but he wasn’t as bad. My parents were in an arranged marriage, but they got along alright. At least my father loved my mother enough to listen to her most of the time when she told him to lay off of me. I honestly think she’s the reason why I have such a strong fighting spirit.”

“I’m sorry she’s gone,” Levi said awkwardly, not used to providing words of comfort.

“Thanks,” (Y/N) said genuinely, a warm smile gracing her beautiful features.

“I didn’t know my mother that well,” Levi said haltingly, still unsure why he felt comfortable telling her about things he hadn’t even talked to Farlan about. “She died of a disease when I was four years old. She was a prostitute, like me, so I never knew my father. When she died, I was picked up by a man named Kenny, who I thought might’ve been my father for a short while, but as I grew older, I realized he wasn’t. I don’t have any proof, I just know. When he abandoned me at ten, I was alone for a few years before I met Farlan.”

“So… you didn’t get stuck doing this because of your mother?” (Y/N) asked carefully, almost afraid to ask in case it made him shy away from her.

“No,” Levi said slowly. “I was twenty years old when I was caught stealing from a rich friend of this brothel owner. I had made a mistake and there was no way out. He figured out who I was, a thug who was known at the time for carrying out favors for people, whether that meant stealing or killing depended on how much they were willing to pay. Unfortunately, this led them to Farlan, and he gave me a choice. Me, or my best and only friend.”

“And you chose to save your friend at the expense of yourself,” (Y/N) finished for him in a hoarse whisper, filled with horror and unbridled fury at what this man had been through. She figured she should’ve been alarmed, he had just admitted that he had blood on his hands. He was a thief, a thug, a criminal, a murderer. But (Y/N) knew those things were nearly requirements for living in the Underground and no matter how she thought about it, she couldn’t think of anything that would make this man deserve what he was going through.

(Y/N) opened her mouth to say something just as she put the last bandage in place when a loud pounding on the door startled them both. “Time’s up, you two!” The brothel owner shouted through the door.

(Y/N) shot up from the bed and rushed around to where the water and first aid kit sat, quickly packing up the little box of supplies and splashing her face with water, trying to make herself look sweaty enough to look convincing. Once everything had been packed away, (Y/N) stood and shrugged off her leather jacket, throwing it to him.

“Here, take this, it’ll keep your boss from seeing the bandages and trying to get rid of them. It’ll also give your injuries a little more protection from the bacteria in this room.”

Levi wanted to refuse, tell her he couldn’t accept a gift like this, even if it was temporary, but no words would come out as he watched the beautiful woman in front of him mess up her hair and swipe her fingers across her lips, trying to make herself look as wrecked as possible. When she finally looked the part enough to seem convincing, (Y/N) made her way to the door, turning one last time before she opened it to throw him a wink and a sweet smile.

“~Goodbye Levi, I hope we can see each other again soon.”

The lilt in her voice was fake, an act for anyone who may be listening on the other side of the door, meant to be taken as a sickly promise of more sexual endeavors to come, but he could feel the genuine emotion in her statement.

“I hope so too,” Levi said quietly after she had already left, the once comforting quiet of his room now making him feel lonely and empty.

The sound of pounding on his door woke Levi abruptly, making the raven-haired man growl in anger and annoyance. It was rare that the poor man got to sleep, not only because customers could come in at almost any time, day or night, but also because of the horrible insomnia that often plagued him. It made him even more irritable to be woken up, his body sore and his mind groggy as another round of pounding roused him further and prompted him to swing his legs over the side of the small cot he was provided when not busy fucking, and make his way to the door.

“What?” Levi snapped when he swung open the door, genuinely surprised that the pig who owned him hadn’t just burst into his room like he always did, raving about yet another customer for Levi.

“Get your shit, you’re going to the surface.”

Levi blinked. This had to be some kind of joke. The brothel owner never let anyone under his foot leave the brothel, let alone the Underground. Even the highest class noble women couldn’t request for him to come to them, the old man not trusting his prostitutes to be sent back. Especially Levi.

“Oi, your ears gone to shit now? Grab your pathetic bullshit and get out of my sight,” the man snarled, his small, watery eyes narrowed on Levi like he was the scum of the world.

Shaking himself out of it, Levi didn’t hesitate for another moment, rushing back into his room to grab the pitifully few things he had with him, including the leather jacket he had gotten from (Y/N), draping it over his shoulders to hide his healing injuries just in case it was a trick. The festival was still going on afterall, this could just be some ruse the old man set up to make the experience more interesting for the men and women who paid for him.

When Levi returned, the man pulled a gun from his jacket pocket and jerked his head, signaling Levi to follow him. Levi knew better than to risk running. In his full health he could’ve easily escaped from the man’s clutches, but with little more than a half hour of rest, his injured body, weak muscles, and the remnants of the drugs still working through his system, Levi didn’t trust himself to outrun a bullet, and knew the pig wouldn’t hesitate to fire, no matter how valuable Levi was to him.

Even though Levi kept expecting the brothel owner to turn down a secluded street and lead him right into an ambush or trick of some sort, he never did, leading Levi right to the stairs exiting the Underground. When they reached the guards at the base of the stairs, the man took two slips of paper from the inner pocket of his worn brown coat and showed it to the guard. When he was cleared to continue on, the brothel owner turned and motioned for Levi to stay close as he stomped his way up the stairs, grumbling incoherently to himself all the while.

Breaching the surface, Levi brought an arm to his face, shielding his eyes from the intensity of the sun as it attacked his face with warm, bright light. He eventually got used to it, slowly lowering his arm and rushing to catch up with his boss, who was impatiently grunting for him to hurry up.

Passing through what appeared to be a busy market square, Levi followed the brothel owner along the lively cobblestone streets until they reached a quieter part of the town, stopping along the edge of a beautiful flower field, the grassy meadow filled with colorful blossoms that secretly took Levi’s breath away.

The sound of horse hooves caught his attention, and Levi looked up only to have the air fly from his lungs when (Y/N)’s bright face came into view, the stunning woman seated astride whom he assumed to be Sashay and flanked by two armed men.

“Right on time,” the brothel owner grumbled, his little pig eyes narrowing when he saw her passive aggressive smile.

“Of course I’m on time, this is my deal, remember?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the man growled. “Are you sure you want this one? He’s my most popular, I’d hate to lose him.”

“Yes, he’s the one I want. Besides, I believe the money I’ve paid you has far exceeded the profit you have earned from having him around. I’m sure you will be able to manage.”

The man sneered at her but didn’t respond, using the muzzle of the gun to push Levi forward and digging in his pocket to fish out the same pieces of paper he had shown the guards on the stairs, handing them to (Y/N).

“Thank you, sir. I believe we are done here.”

The brothel owner slunk off, casting dark looks at her but refusing to argue as he hunkered off to head back down to the Underground, where he would continue to rot like the rat he was. Levi watched him go before turning to (Y/N), surprised by the bright smile she flashed him when he met her gaze.

“(Y/N)? What’s going on?”

(Y/N) smiled even wider and held up the pieces of paper she had been handed. One of them was the file labeling him as a slave to the brothel owner, keeping him from escaping, and the other was a bill of sale. His eyes widened when he saw her signature on the bottom of both pages, officially registering her as his new owner. He opened his mouth, about to speak when she took both pages in her hands and ripped them in half, letting the torn pages float onto the street below, forgotten, useless.

“There, you’re free now.”

Levi was at a loss for words, his mouth gaping open. “(Y/N)? What-”

“Before you ask me what my intentions are, I’m just going to tell you that I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I couldn’t stop thinking about your life, your sacrifice, your pain, and I decided I could do something about it. You are human, and damn it, you are an important one! I couldn’t just leave you there. Now, you won’t have to work for anyone but yourself. You won’t have to cater to anyone else’s needs and you can fulfill whatever dreams you have.”

“But, that must’ve cost you a fortune, to cover more than the amount of money he’s made off of using me? What about-”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Levi. I want to use my funds for good, put them towards the people who need it the most. That includes you. Especially you. I couldn’t bear the thought of you having to stay in that shit hole for even a second longer than necessary.”

“What do I do now, then?” Levi asked, trying to focus on keeping his voice steady.

“Well, you can do whatever you want now. You’re a free man, you can find a house and settle down somewhere, or you can go back to the Underground and pick up your life where you left off. You can join the military, or you can start a small business here in the square. It’s anything you want. You get to choose your life now.”

“And what if I don’t want to do any of those things?”

(Y/N) couldn’t help the smile that flashed across her face then, her heart filling with warmth. “Like I said, it’s your choice, you can do whatever you want, carve your own path, but if you want to come with me, you’re always welcome to.”

Levi’s lip twitched and he took a step forward, reaching up to pat Sashay’s muzzle as he got closer. “Alright, I’ll follow you.”

(Y/N) beamed before turning around to nod at each one of her guards, dismissing them. When they had left, presumably returning to (Y/N)’s family estate, she reached down for him, her hand extended for him to take. Placing his rough palm into her warm hand, he allowed her to help him up into the saddle behind her, his arms wrapping around her waist to keep himself secure as (Y/N) kicked Sashay into an easy canter. Sighing blissfully, Levi let himself relax, his chin coming down to rest on (Y/N)’s shoulder as they made their way home, together.

Levi had never expected to see the day when he would willingly go with a noble, but then again, he never thought he’d ever meet a noble like (Y/N). Now, as he felt her warmth soak into his chest, he knew he’d made the right decision.

Levi finally felt the remnant effects of the drugs in his system fade away as the sun beams broke through the fluffy clouds in the sky, leaving his mind clear. He was making this decision all on his own, nothing left to impair his judgement, and no matter what, he knew he would never regret the path he chose to take just so long as (Y/N) stayed by his side.

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jaegercentral · 4 years ago

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⠀⠀⠀ “PROLOGUE”

selene set her phone down on the bathroom sink, rubbing her face (hands washed ofc). this is really happening, huh? she thought. walking out of the bathroom, she cleared her throat which was previously worn out from crying. selene, with her test in hand, sat on the couch, waiting and waiting and waiting for haru to come home from work. the time was 8:28PM and she had nearly fallen asleep until she heard the quiet unlocking of the front door. selene sat up and saw her boyfriend walk in, paper grocery bags in hand. “little help here?” he chuckled, seeing her focused gaze.

he snapped in front of her face to get her attention and she shuddered, nodding harshly. “yeah, of course.”

he rolled his eyes at her in a teasing way. she was always a little dazed. he found it cute.

he then looked down at the coffee table, seeing a little rectangle box wrapped in pink wrapping paper. “what’s this?” he reached to pick it up but she got to it faster. haru looked up at his beloved girlfriend and frowned. “hey? what is it?”

“it’s nothing!” selene pressed her lips together. “okay fine it’s a pregnancy test.” haru’s eyes widened to the size of an american quarter and he smiled softly.

“are you pregnant?” she nodded and he set down the groceries, pulling her into a hug, stroking her long black hair.

“what are we going to do, haru? aren’t we too young to start a family?” she sobbed into his shoulder and he patted her back.

“well, we can talk about that after i make dinner. is that good with you?” selene sniffled and mumbled a quiet ‘yes’. haru grinned and ruffled her hair. selene sat down at their small dinner table. soon they would have to add another chair. “okay. how about..i make your favorite dish?” he made jazz hands, waiting for her reaction—at least a smile.

selene looked up at him and tears filled her eyes again. the smaller man rushed over to her, pulling her into his embrace. “no no no, don’t cry. you’re okay, baby.”

haru helped her stand up, leading her over to the couch. “i’m scared, haru.” she curled up into a ball, feeling comfort in the way his arms were wrapped around her. he was her home.

“i know, i know.” he caressed her hair, kissing the crown of her head. the young couple sat still for a while, holding each other. selene stopped crying but only because haru started.

“no, you can’t start crying too! that’s my thing!” she huffed, wiping his tears.

the boy suddenly started laughing, which shocked selene. “and laughing is my thing.” she giggled and kissed the tip of his nose.

selene pressed down on her thighs and finally stood up. reaching for his hand, she sighed. “okay, let’s do this.”

haru took the girl’s hand and stood up with her. “what? make dinner?” she punched his shoulder and he feigned hurt.

“you know what i meant.” the girl rolled her eyes and yanked him towards the kitchen where they spent the next 45 minutes fixing a meal.

*six months later*

“i don’t know, tora. he’s just been pretty distant lately.” selene rested her hand on her stomach, where her bump had grown even larger.

“do you think he could be planning something? that’s why he’s been extra busy?”

“i guess? there isn’t much that kindergartners do so i don’t think he’s too busy with work.” her best friend snorted, finding her retort kinda hilarious.

“oh, well i have to go, selene. kou just texted me, asking where his phone was. ttyl!”

“yeah, thanks! bye.” she hung up, sighing heavily. selene looked down at her bump. “you’re a real pain, y’know.” she poked at it like it was some kind of jelly.

the front door of their apartment opened harshly, and selene flinched. their apartment doors were always so loud. we should probably get that fixed, she reminded herself. there stood her boyfriend, arms full of bags of candy. halloween was always his favorite holiday. selene smiled at the dorky boy who was still struggling to reach the marble island.

“i’ll get it.” she spoke, arms stretched out to reach for a bag. haru turned away from her, trying to keep her from doing any heavy lifting. “hey! let me help you!” haru thought she looked like an angry penguin when she stomped towards him.

“no! the doctor said you can’t do any heavy lifting until after you give birth!” he had set the bags on the island and selene looked at him like he was prey. her hands gripped onto the counter; she was ready to lunge at him. haru’s face as she chased him was priceless. it was a weird mixture of worry, fear, and joy. “oh shit!” he exclaimed, losing his balance as he tripped over one of the shoes she threw at him.

“i don’t care what the doctor said. i’m helping. besides, from the looks of it, the candy can’t be THAT heavy.” she tried reasoning, but when she lifted the variety bag, it tore open and spilled all over the kitchen floor. “well i guess it can, huh?”

haru, with a hand on his hip, gave selene an ‘i told you so’ look.

“you look a lot like your mother right now.” selene pointed out, painfully bending over to pick up a hershey bar that fell seconds ago.

“now that’s just sad. and wrong. she’s all old and wrinkly now.”

selene’s face went 😟 as she saw the small figure behind her boyfriend. with a mouth full of chocolate, she spoke, “babe you should shut up right about now.”

“no! i still have more to say.” selene glared him down, nearly making the poor man pee his pants. like his mother once said, if you value your life, never make a pregnant woman mad.

“who’s old and wrinkly, haruto?” his face suddenly lost all color as he heard the familiar, sickly, sweet voice from behind him. “and do tell me what else you had to say. we’ll be around for dinner so you have time.”

“oh it’s nothing.” the boy rubbed the back of his nape, a scare smile painting his face.

“right, mhm.” haru’s parents practically adopted selene after they started dating since hers were absent for most of her life. for people who are supposed to be parents, they sure stopped caring about selene after the wife finally got pregnant. “selene, darling, how are you? is the baby healthy? how many months along are you?” the aforementioned girl blinked harshly, trying to process what she asked.

“um, i’m good, so is the baby. and as of three weeks ago, i’m six months.” haru’s mom walked up to her, tucking her hair being her ears.

“poor girl. you must be in so much pain. plus, my little dweeb of a son must be making it worse.”

“oh, so much.” selene exaggerated, watching as haru frowned. he knew she was joking, but it still hurt him. he could be doing so much more for his girlfriend, but no. he’s been spending so much time trying to plan the perfect day to propose to her that he didn’t take the time to understand how she must’ve been feeling. horrible and lonely, he would’ve guessed.

“anyway, are you guys ready to go? i think it’s almost an hour until the reservation is actually valid.”

“i am, but i don’t know about haru.”

haru feigned an offended look, his hand pressed against his chest. “are you kidding me? i went to the grocery store in this suit.”

“well, haruto, don’t you know that that can cause creases and wrinkles?” his father asked, checking his watch.

her boyfriend shrugged, running his hands through his hair. “i do, but i just wanted to be extra prepared.”

“now that that’s settled, why don’t we head out?” selene offered, haru handing her her shoulder purse.

they all agreed, following after selene while haru locked up.

*45 minutes later*

as the clock hit 6:47, the group pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot, exiting the car. they were seated at a small round table, with a waitress named harlowe.

minutes passed by, they ordered, they ate, and then they left. it was now 8PM and fatigue was starting to take over selene. they waited by the entrance for their car to be driven back to them. while waiting, haru’s anxiety was kicking in. right now. do it. right. now. haru kneeled down and selene raised a brow. “are you tricking me again?”

haru shushed the girl and looked down, rethinking his words. “selene, i’ve known you for six years now and i think this has been long overdue. i’ve known you were the one for me since the moment you walked into the gym, bumping into the door, announcing your role as a new manager. and i’ve loved you ever since.” people were starting to crowd around the couple and normally, selene would’ve been scared out of her mind, but now she didn’t care because she was finally having her main character moment. “now here’s the scary part,” her boyfriend whispered. “miyasaki selene, will you be the roxanne to my max? my forever and always? will you marry me?” selene giggled at his “a goofy movie” reference and eagerly nodded, grinning like a child at disney world.

haru smiled with her, pulling her into a bear hug. he wiped her tears that were unbeknownst to her and declared his love to her as he slipped the peridot ring on her finger. “you remembered?”

“i remembered.” back when they were in high school, selene begged him that when, not if, they got engaged, he would give her a peridot ring instead of a diamond ring. she always believed that worth was subjective and haru knew how much she loved her birthstone, so he got the ring custom made.

“you’re perfect.” she exclaimed, basking in the attention they were receiving from the bystanders.

*three months later*

“haru, you asshole! if you don’t show up within the next 10 minutes, i’m divorcing you.”

“don’t worry, babe. i’m right around the corner!”

“don’t ‘babe’ me, just show up!” she violently screamed into her phone. the bloodlust was practically oozing out of her and if her fiancé didn’t walk faster than 2mph, she would make sure that he would never see the child that she was on the verge of giving birth to.

the door slammed open, and there stood her fiancé. it felt like déjà vù but selene was NOT in the mood. she just wanted the pain of being in labor to end.

after around 27 minutes of pushing, screaming, and selene cursing her fiancé in her head, the baby popped out of her. “it’s a boy!” the overly cheerful doctor exclaimed.

“well no shit, we saw in the ultrasound.” selene retorted, finally able to breathe again.

“i apologize for her.” haru smiled at the doctor who looked like she was about to start crying. as soon as they cut the umbilical cord and did whatever they do to newborns, they gave selene her baby, afraid she was going to snap at them again.

selene and her boys slept on that very hospital bed for the night, relieved. her baby was healthy and the love of her life was there to see. he was definitely happy that selene wouldn’t divorce him. they weren’t even married yet!

*two months later*

“bye, haru!”

selene kissed him on the cheek and haru kissed her and hikaru back. “bye, selene! bye, hikaru!” he waved and closed the door, going off to the school.

“why don’t we go on a walk to the park? well, i’ll be walking and hauling your cute little ass around, but it’ll be fun!” she claimed, clapping her hands together.

selene gathered all of hikaru’s baby food, diapers, clothing etc. and put it in the baby bag in his fancy, new stroller that his grandparents bought him. changing into some leggings and a graphic tee, selene and hikaru left the apartment, and went off to the park.

it was half way into their walk that selene received a call from an unknown number. “hello?”

“hi, we are here to inform you that your fiancé has been involved in a car accident, caused by a drunk driver.” selene covered her mouth, tears streaming down her face like a waterfall. seeing his mother cry, hikaru started wailing loudly. “ma’am? are you there?”

the, now, widowed mother regained her composure. “may i ask which hospital he’s at?”

“highland hospital, miss.”

“thank you, have a nice day.” selene placed her phone back in her pocket and sprinted in the direction of her car.

[at the hospital]

selene, holding hikaru on her hip, paced back and forth around the room, waiting for news.

suddenly the door opened, revealing the man’s parents. their eyes watered at the sight and his mother ran over to embrace the poor girl. his father took a seat at the bench and sobbed quietly into his hands.

haru’s right arm and leg were severely broken and he would’ve definitely been required to have surgery. across his face and shoulder were extremely long wounds that were still bleeding. he didn’t look like your fiancé anymore.

hikaru was still confused about what was going on, for he was looking around the room, watery eyed, for his father. he couldn’t recognize the man on the bed, which added to the sadness.

within a fraction of a second, the machine that was taking and recording his vitals started beeping and doctors started rushing in, pushing everyone else out. now, there she was. sitting outside of the icu room, she hugged hikaru tightly and prayed to whichever god was present to save her fiancé. she couldn’t lose him. not yet.

but death is natural. and although it takes some too early or too late, for the right or wrong reasons, it’s still natural and destined to happen some day.

and that’s when she received the news. “miss, we’re sorry to inform you that the patient has unfortunately passed away. we give our condolences.” suddenly, every single noise in the hospital drowned out and everything went black.

“hey! we need a doctor over here. my daughter-in-law has collapsed!” was the last thing she heard before losing consciousness.

*a day later*

the light was blinding and coming back way too fast for selene’s liking. she searched the room for her family. not even hikaru was present. only the doctor. “w-what happened?”

“oh, good. you’re awake. apparently, you went into shock and collapsed in the middle of the hallway after hearing the news of your fiancé dying.” she was suddenly reminded of the news as her eyes glossed over. she let out a small ‘oh’ at the thought and cleared her throat. another doctor burst in and yanked the man aside.

“gee, aaron, who kicked your dog today?”

“aaron?” selene looked at the man again and looked for any familiar features.

“that’s dr. aaron to you.” she fiddled with the blanket which was uncomfortably thin. the female doctor ordered him to leave the room and sat by her side.

“sorry about him. he’s not good at interacting with anything but his body pillow of ariana grande.” selene grimaced at the thought and she laughed.

“it's fine. everyone has their flaws, i guess. do you happen to know where my son is?”

“oh, hikaru? what an adorable little boy. he’s in the waiting room with his grandparents.” she caressed selene’s arm. “my name is zoey, in case you were wondering.”

“thank you, zoey—i-sorry, dr. zoey.” zoey shook her head and laughed.

“don’t worry, i’m not like that uptight little shit named aaron. you can just call me zoey.” she beamed at selene, showing her gummy smile. she was about to leave, but quickly turned around and snapped and pointed at her. “right! i came in here to tell you that you’re okay to be discharged right about now.”

“thank you, again, zoey. you’ve been a great help!” she nodded as a ‘thanks’ and left the room. selene went back to fiddling with her blanket. he can’t really be gone, can he? i mean, it all happened so fast.

it took her a while to finally come to terms with the harsh truth that her fiancé was dead and she would never see him again. the next couple months would be the hardest, despite what she thought.

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A/N: ngl, i kinda sobbed when i wrote this. and OMG :0 this chapter is 2,578 words long- that’s like the longest thing i’ve ever written without any guidance or prompt. so congrats to me! and i promise that this is the longest the actual word by word text will be in this fic. i’m too tired to write any more stuff so 👍

#haikyuu smau masterlist #hq sakusa #sakusa smau #hq x reader #sakusa kiyoomi x reader #sakusa x reader #pure angst #pls cry with me #i hate myself #haikyuu smau

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realityhelixcreates · 4 years ago

Text

Lasabrjotr Chapter 72: Ring Road

Chapters: 72/?

Fandom: Thor (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe

Rating: T

Relationships: Loki x Reader

Characters: Loki (Marvel), Thor (Marvel)

Additional Tags: Post-Endgame: Best Possible Ending (Canon-Divergent),

Summary: A funeral for a giant.

You woke up to the gentle alarm sounded by Loki's magic. You were warm, and comfortable, and...mildly sore, but not too bad.

Oh, right.

Loki was curled protectively around you, snuggled up so close, he was like a second blanket. The sun had not risen yet, but that didn't mean much at this time of year. The sun was rising later and later, setting earlier and earlier. Winter was close.

You rolled over in his arms to face him, but he was already awake, gazing adoringly at you.

“You're still here.” He murmured.

“Of course. Did you think I wouldn't be?”

“I'd hoped you would.”

“Hey. Hey.” You cupped his cheek. “I'm not going anywhere, okay?”

He helped you dress, sensual and loving touch smoothing the wrinkles in your clothes, then shared a light breakfast with you. He'd had you start sitting under a special lamp once the days had started shortening; this was common for humans in Iceland, he said. To maintain health. So you had a portable one you could take with you most places-to lessons with Saga, to his rooms, even to the council rooms and throne room, so you could have simulated sunlight wherever you went.

“It makes you radiant.” He said.

“I wonder what people here did before these were invented?”

“Suffered, probably.”

You ate, bathed in light.

“Loki...”

“You have questions. I anticipated this. I do not know why I am so small compared to other Jotun, but I do know that I was born this way. I was not expected to survive, and so I was left to die in a special place, as part of a Jotun ritual.”

“That...sounds awful.”

“It is their way. In a way, Odin taking me with him was a final insult to their very culture. But it allowed me to survive.”

“Why can I touch you like this, but not like that?”

“This isn't an illusion. I am more than just an illusionist, I am a shapeshifter. You can touch me in this form, because it's real. When I am in Asgardian shape, I truly am Asgardian.”

He held out his milky hand, and you caressed his palm.

“Everybody else knows, don't they?” You asked.

Loki nodded. “Once I found out, I knew everyone else would eventually. I wanted to control the method of the revelation, so I...well I wrote a play.”

“A play? You can write too? Is there anything you can't do?”

Loki flushed. “A few things.” He admitted bashfully.

“I want to see it!”

“Not yet! I mean, we don't have facilities, or actors. We don't have the time. But someday, yes.” He seemed nervous. Maybe he was embarrassed about it. He never said it was a good play, after all.

“Loki, if you're Asgardian when you shapeshift into one, then why worry about being a Frost Giant to begin with? You can be anything, and it's real.” You asked.

“Humans are highly mutable.” Loki explained. “Your cultures move and change quickly. Even those whose identity goes back thousands of years will find that not all of their customs are exactly the same as they were. It's kind of admirable, actually.

But Asgard moves much more slowly. The war between the Frost Giants and Asgard is over, except that it isn't. It's barely been a single generation since then. Thor was born in the middle of that war; I was born at the end. It is within recent memory. I was raised around people who had fought, people who had lost loved ones. I was raised on the residual hate. It became a part of me.

Maybe that would be all I was grappling with, if I had known from the start. Maybe I would have had time to come to terms, to grow a thicker skin. But the centuries of lies on top of that; the man who raised me watching that prejudice grow in me and not bothering to do anything about it, as if he thought a lie could ever last forever with me around.”

“But it did, didn't it? Almost forever. Did you ever question?”

“Yes and no. I knew something was wrong, but I dismissed it. Ignored it. I didn't want to look into it.”

“The only person who can lie to you is you, huh?”

“Oh, stop being so insightful, will you?” Loki scowled.

“Sorry, can't. It's my job.”

******

Two days later, you were on the road again.

This was a funeral procession. You, Loki, and Thor, as well as ten einherjar and six masons, two cooks, and the Asgardian equivalent of a priest.

And, of course, the giant.

He had been tightly and carefully wrapped, almost like a huge mummy, to keep his head in place, and make him safe for transport and handling. He had been placed in a wooden cart, which would act also as his coffin. He had been veiled, and most of his possessions placed in the cart with him, along with what the Asgardians considered peace offerings. Honor, even towards an enemy, was a matter of common practice. After all, if one sent an opponent to Valhalla, it wouldn't do to leave them angry with one upon one's own entry.

And so a helmet had been placed with him, and a nice blanket, a pickax, a basket of wheat, and a pan flute. You had left him a book, but you wondered if that was any good as a gift. After all, a thousand years ago, your language hadn't existed in the form you knew. Saga had shown you what Old English looked like, and you hadn't even recognized it. It had made you feel strange and small.

Was it an appropriate gift? A book he couldn't understand? Or was it the thought that counted?

“We don't really do grave goods where I'm from.” You'd told Loki. “I don't really know what to give.”

“What do you value?” He'd asked. “If it means something to you, it should be fine.”

And so it had to be a book. Old stories of Americana-Mark Twain, and Maya Angelou, and Edgar Allen Poe. Little chunks of your culture over time, and from different perspectives. You hoped if he could read it in that big black hole in the sky, that he found some enjoyment from it.

You, however, were finding very little enjoyment on this trip. Not only was it violently cold, but the wind was a cruel whip that lashed at you until Loki draped his heavy cloak over your head, creating a tent. That kept the wind out, but also completely blocked your vision, forcing you to let him guide Acorn, instead of you.

Though Acorn was a sturdy and stalwart little thing, born and bred on the frigid Icelandic landscape, she was distressed by the Frost Giant in his cart. To keep her calm, Loki moved the two of you forward, closer to him, but that just increased your frustration.

You wanted to be close to Loki, and he clearly wanted to be too, but there was no time, no opportunity. You were frozen out on the road, and this was a funeral procession. There was propriety to observe.

From under Loki's cloak, you could not see any of the beautiful landscape around you, and while you were enveloped in his comforting scent, the cloak also blocked out what little sun the island got at that time of year. For the entire four day trip, you saw little light, other than the evening cooking fires when the procession set up camp.

Then, with the tents set up as a windbreak, and dinner cooking over the fire, you were able to look up as the crystal clear sky, scattered with diamonds and flowing ribbons of color.

You'd never seen the auroras before this, but you could see how people became enchanted by their otherworldly aura.

“It's like the Bifrost, isn't it?” You said to Loki, who was staring up into the night just like you were. He was tucked up close to the fire with you, stealing the only moments of intimacy the two of you could find. “Is that what they saw, way back when? A way to reach the gods? How many ways did people interpret this, if they didn't know the science behind it?”

“Knowing the science doesn't necessarily remove the magic, now does it?” Loki said. “We know how lightning and thunder works. We know what causes it. We know that men should not be able to command it, and yet...”

“Is it magic?” You asked, staring at the swirling colors.

“Perhaps.” Loki said. “Of a kind.”

There wasn't even any privacy to be had in the tents; they were large group affairs, meant to house several people each, with little dividers hanging between them. The best you could get was wriggling your hand under the divider to hold Loki's, but the cold permeated just enough that you couldn't do it for long. You eventually had to hunker down into your thick, fluffy sleeping bag until only your nose and mouth were exposed to the open air.

You dressed yourself in the mornings in very heavy, but much less elaborate clothing than usual. Loki had insisted that you wear some of your armor on the trip, your breastplate and helmet, just in case there were any opportunistic enemies out in the countryside.

“When you are writhing in my arms,” He had whispered into your ear. “I don't want it to be from pain.”

On Acorn's back, under Loki's cloak, you tried to come up with an appropriate blessing for the dead giant.

What could you say? You still felt some kind of responsibility. You hadn't tried to deescalate the situation. You hadn't tried to talk to the giant. Hadn't tried to calm him down, or warn him. Just threatened him, antagonized him, distracted him.

But the kids...He had already killed several people, injured Kolla right in front of you, and was threatening the children...

What would you have done, if you knew nothing about Frost Giants? If Asgardian prejudice had not been taught to you?

Screamed a lot and gotten squished probably.

Would it be insulting to the giant's spirit to beg forgiveness or show remorse? To consider his death a terrible accident that could have been averted? Would a warrior want words like that?

The funeral procession had traveled back to Akureyri to get onto the Ring Road, a highway that circled the entire island in a single, unbroken stretch of asphalt. It was much easier to navigate than cross country would have been, but went a little out of the way as well, taking you along the northern part of the island, when your destination was in the east.

It seemed they had drawn a lot of attention as well. There weren't many tourists at this time of year, only the most hardcore of explorers, but the Icelanders themselves used the road regularly. Every now and then you peeked out from under Loki's cloak to see an ever-changing entourage of people; on horses, in small cars or buses, all waving and calling out, either questions or encouragement, you weren't familiar enough with Icelandic to tell.

Loki and Thor took it well, chatting with people who were brave and careful enough to approach. Some of them expressed what you thought was probably fear or shock at the dead giant, but more reacted with curiosity.

That was the general reaction Icelanders had to Asgardians. Iceland was a Christian country, but not quite in the way that America was. The vast majority of Icelanders that you saw showed no hostility toward Asgard, even though they represented a major religious crisis. It was very different from the fractious contention Asgard generated back home. You definitely preferred this.

How long, you began to wonder, until you weren't American anymore? Was it possible, as an adult, to absorb enough culture from another land, that it made you something other than what you'd grown up as? Or would you always be a foreigner; exotic, but accepted?

The long road split off towards the eastern interior of the island, before reaching Rekjavik, leading you even further away from civilization, and into the wilderness. But Okjokull was a depressing reminder that civilization had reached out into the wilderness, and touched even the most remote of places.

Okjokull, or rather, just Ok now, had once been a glacier, covering an extinct shield volcano. Now, the volcano and the glacier were both extinct. Under Loki's cloak, you had studied on your phone, looking up pictures of the glacier back in the nineteen-eighties, when it covered the whole area. But now, the horses hooves ground the gravel of the exposed landscape; a barren area, with only a few scattered chunks of ice, here and there. Over the course of one human lifetime, the whole thing had disappeared.

It disturbed you. Icelanders certainly believed in climate change. They'd seen this happen. They'd held a funeral. And here you were for another one.

The masons fell into building, directing the einherjar. After getting permission from the government, Thor estimated it would take no more than a day and a half of hard work to build a decent barrow for the giant, whose decaying body might-might-help to rebuild the glacier.

If not, his presence here might become just another tourist destination, another relic of the islands past.

You watched them dig out a large hole, deep enough to roll the cart into, and cover it halfway. Then they began packing in the larger stones, building a large mound that would hold up under it's own weight. Next came a low wall, surrounding the entire grave at a distance of about ten feet, to indicate that this was no natural formation, and lastly, a bronze plaque, set into a large stone at the front of the fence, declaring what this was, and urging caution when approaching.

Thor had been correct; the entire thing was finished before nightfall on the second day. The entire entourage gathered as the priest said a simple farewell to the giant, and everyone present murmured their own blessings before releasing a glowing, golden orb of magic into the sky.

“If we meet in another life, I hope to learn your name.” You had said, while beside you, you had heard Loki mumble: “Rest. We will take care of them.”

Snow had begun to fall; fluffy white flakes sticking to everything. You wondered if it would get high enough to bury the barrow, as you were hustled off to sit on Acorn's warm back, wrapped up in Loki's cloak once more. Everyone packed up in a huge hurry: Thor told you that the procession needed to get back to the Ring Road quickly, before the smaller, country roads that led to Ok were snowed over. The Asgardians feared that if they got snowed in, you would be in danger of freezing, but the Ring Road was kept clear.

Once back on the open road, you peeked out from under the thick tent of Loki's fine cloak and gazed out over the wide countryside. Far in the distance, to the west, you could just barely see a dome of faint light that must have been Reykjavik. Loki had said he would take you there on the tour of the island he promised you this spring. But for now, this was as close as you would get.

It amazed you to think that you could traverse an entire country by horse so easily. Your old home just went on and on and on, forever and ever. It seemed no matter how many miles you traveled, there was always another mile of Iowa to go. Here, there was a single road that went all the way around. The country was self contained, surrounded on all sides by powerful and mysterious oceans.

A small flush of terror washed over you once again, at re-realizing how isolated and far away from everything familiar you really were. Floating in the frigid North Atlantic on a giant volcano, in the care of aliens. Participating in the funeral of a giant. Riding home on a horse, to hopefully fall right into bed with your divine, royal boyfriend.

Who even were you now?

#lasabrjotr #loki (marvel)#loki x reader

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mor-beck-more-problems · 4 years ago

Text

Empty Spaces || Morgan & Deirdre

TIMING: Later, after Remmy’s reckoning with Deirdre

PARTIES: @deathduty @mor-beck-more-problems

SUMMARY: “I don’t know what I think. I don’t know what I want to think. I don’t know if I take all this back in a couple of hours, I don’t know. But...”

CONTAINS: brief self-harm, mentions of past abuse and fae customs

Long after Remmy had left, Deirdre’s gaze was stuck on the door. As if they would come back, and the hole in her heart would close up. Strange, that she knew this wouldn’t be the last time she saw Remmy, but the realization brought her no measure of peace. Loss was a tricky thing. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said, eyes still centered on the door. “Try to explain my duty to them; it doesn’t change who I am, or the things I’ve done. And, I suppose, not Remmy’s opinion either.” She blinked, freeing tears to stream down. As Morgan and Remmy spoke, she remained quivering on her spot on the couch, a spot she hadn’t relinquished even when they’d gone. “And the promise,” she swallowed, remembering Morgan’s difficulty in trying to verbalize the weight of Deirdre’s killing--burdened by the promise she’d made when Deirdre first confessed it to her. “Let me take that back, my love. You shouldn’t have something like that to harm you.” She stared at the door a moment longer. Silence ticked away between them. Remmy would not be coming back, and so, Deirdre tore her gaze away and flickered it up to meet her girlfriend’s. “I release you from your promise not to tell anyone of my duty.”

Morgan lingered in the doorway, watching the empty sidewalk where Remmy had wandered off with their bags. She had wanted to give them a ride, but the words stuck in her throat along with the explanation she’d been aching to give Remmy but couldn’t: it’s not a made up construct, it’s flipping magic! Universe-bendy, real, old magic that you don’t control, you just listen to! But Remmy had been clear about what kind of life they wanted for themself, so maybe the particulars wouldn’t have mattered to them the way they did to her. And what about her? Remmy had said they were still friends, they would still spend time together, keep things separate from Deirdre, but how long would that last? Would they forgive her when she finally gave Constance what she had coming to her? Could she even tell them about the hunters at that stupid history museum? Morgan continued to watch that patch of sidewalk until Deirdre spoke.

“I just think it’s different,” she mumbled. “Your choices are so limited with your duty, and what you do strikes such a critical balance in the world, and balance is...so fucking hard to come by. But I don’t know how much they would’ve believed me or understood anyway. I think it’s hard to conceptualize, when you’ve never touched magic.” Sighing, she came back to the couch and wrapped her body around Deirdre’s from behind. “And you don’t have to do that. I can make it again if I remember the words, or with the caveat that I can only tell someone with your permission. I don’t want to get too comfortable in a moment and make some stupid mistake.” She kissed Deirdre’s wet cheek and risked squeezing her a little tighter. “I’m proud of you, you know. I know that must have been scary, and I know it hurts now, but you did so good with this. So good, my love. It means everything that you tried the way you did.” And that she had admitted to Remmy what she hadn’t been able to say to Morgan: she didn’t know what to think anymore, or if she truly thought anything at all about this. Her posturing was just a last-ditch panic effort to cling to something, to have some sort of answer at the ready instead of drowning in how much she didn’t know.

“No, I trust you, Morgan. Not to keep it--I don’t care if--” Deirdre swallowed, searching herself for the strength to turn around and hold Morgan back. Her hands felt too unclean, and her body too unworthy. She couldn’t take Morgan into her arms and ruin her too. If this house had to be tainted with her decisions, Morgan would be left out of it. “The secret itself doesn’t matter to me. You shouldn’t have your words controlled by something else. You’re free to say whatever you want, to whomever. I don’t want you to make the promise again, you don’t have to.” Wasn’t freedom what mattered in the end? Deirdre picked at her scabbed hands, slowly healing from last night’s burn. She picked until her skin stung, and blood pooled under the peeled wound. Her mind was as numb as her body, only able to hold feeling for a second before it evaporated. Vaguely, she could feel Morgan, but the longer her girlfriend lingered, the harder it was to tell her apart from the crushing weight that normally held around her. “Proud…” The word nearly made her scoff, and as Morgan continued, Deirdre’s contained scoff morphed into a bitter laugh. “Proud of what?” She turned, her fear of corruption overpowered by sharp confusion, as if Morgan were making fun of her. “Proud of kicking another person out of this house because I happen to think humans are only good for food? Because I value fae more than I do anything else? Is that what you’re proud of Morgan?” Her mother would certainly be proud of it, yet as Deirdre searched for her, she was silent. She found instead the thrum of her heart, the ticking of their new replacement clock, and her ever present tug into Morgan; the things that were her, and them.

“Hey, hey…” Morgan took Deirdre’s hands in hers and brushed her lips over the sensitive wounds, so soft she couldn’t feel it at all. “Don’t hurt yourself, babe. You never need to do that.” She drew Deirdre closer to her, trying to bundle her into her arms properly, chest to chest, so there was nothing to look at save for each other. She didn’t know what to do about the promise, if she should insist, or ask again when Deirdre was less heartbroken, or if she had to carry the responsibility of her freedom. It felt dangerous, and Morgan shivered with dread over the hopes she carried for the people in their lives. She still couldn’t tell anyone, could she? But there would be time to worry about that later. Morgan would carry that weight, if it was what Deirdre wanted.

She exhaled slowly before she spoke, making sure her voice was soft and gentle. “First of all, Remmy made a choice, and that’s different. You did everything but throw them out. But no, those are not things I am proud of. But I am proud of you.” She kissed her cheek. “You were brave enough to be honest. You didn’t lash out, you were kind. You gave Remmy all the affection you could, and respected their choice. You admitted that you don’t know what you really think about some of this stuff. And coming from a place where you were supposed to have the answers for everything, that takes so much courage and vulnerability.” Morgan kissed her again and tried to let their heads linger together, Deidre’s bloody hands still clasped in hers. She ached to pass all the understanding she held into her, all the gentleness, and all the compassion. If loving Deirdre could have unscrambled the brainwashing in her and set her free, everything would have been fixed in that moment. “I love you. You did so well. Please don’t hate yourself for trying.”

There was something familiar in the sight of Morgan’s lips against her red hands. Like the princess and the frog, she thought. Except Deirdre’s hands did not transform into something equally as pretty for being loved, it only made her feel worse to see it. Weren’t there more beautiful things for her to be putting her love on? The disgusting, wrinkled frog was only just that. “They wouldn’t have made that choice if I was….different. Would they? If I was more...human.” She winced to use the word just as she always did, as if it might be followed by a chorus of laughter and sneers. “No, I didn’t—I said I knew exactly what I think. I told them about the cattle, they just didn’t think I was the person saying it.�� Which was as ridiculous as it sounded, right? She begged her mother to return and tell her so, she considered settling even for the voice of any other family member. Emptiness greeted her and she sighed into Morgan’s kisses, her gaze glued to their laps. “Did you get replaced by something else on your way here?” She asked in seriousness, voice tinged with hopelessness. “It sounds like you’re making fun of me, and if you are. I don’t—“ She closed her eyes, desperate to summon memories of Ireland. Darkness. Any flash of her training. Darkness. A whisper of the loud fae parties and the human bodies used carelessly as entertainment. Darkness. In a flicker, she saw a piece of soggy cardboard wings, and the warped echo of some spriggan’s laughter—at her. Deirdre gasped and shook, forcing her eyes open and back to the sight of Morgan’s shirt. “You wouldn’t do that,” she said, “make fun of me. So I just don’t get what you’re doing right now.”

“It’s not a bad word,” Morgan whispered. “Human. Sometimes the way you say it, it becomes one, and it hurts. But it’s not. And Remmy was clear that they want to separate themselves from violence.” Which might mean separating themself from her, if they stuck to it. But Morgan thought that with enough time and space she could make Remmy understand the need for compromise. “It’s not because you’re a bad person. Because you’re not a bad person.” She brushed back her love’s hair and pressed more kisses to her wet cheeks. “I swear to you, Deirdre—” She murmured her name against her skin, delicate as a butterfly. “I swear to you, I am me, your Morgan, and I am speaking in earnest when I say that you handled this so well and I am so very proud of you. Remmy told me everything. And you shouldn’t be surprised that they saw through your mother’s shadow just as easily as I do. It’s okay. You’re not her, and she’s not here.” Another kiss. “Let me hold you, huh? I want to keep talking about this, because I can’t let you hate yourself for doing as best you could with this. Now tell me, as much as you can, what’s so confusing about this and I’ll try to explain as best I can…” She steered Deirdre’s face gently to look at hers, hoping that the strange capacity for perception Deirdre had for reading her would prevail, and something would click. Or at least the tortured wrinkle of doubt would ease itself from her love’s forehead.

“It’s not bad for you. But it’s supposed to be bad for me.” Deirdre tried to explain, but her words sounded flimsy even to her. All she knew was that her mother loathed it, just as she loathed other words and ideas like child and love—words that still felt wrong coming out of Deirdre’s mouth. “Violence is...around me, then, isn’t it?” Deirdre swallowed and tried to imagine herself without it. She knew death, she knew blood, she knew the feeling of pressing a knife into soft flesh. She knew it better than she knew herself. She craved its familiarity. Her life was violence, it always had been. “No, I suppose I’m just a violent one then.” Wouldn’t it be nice to have the freedom to choose a life without it? Perhaps she could understand to be happy for Remmy about that then, but all of it still hurt. All of it still felt like she’d done something wrong. “She’s everywhere.” Deirdre mumbled into their kiss, slumping against her girlfriend. “My mother; I see her, I hear her, I remember her. She never goes away, not completely.” And though she was silent now, Deirdre could feel her constant ring inside of her bones. Her mother wasn’t just...her mother. But just as Deirdre was a mouthpiece for her, she was a mouthpiece for their duty, their tradition, their ancient, harshly ingrained ideals. Each Dolan was never whole; parts of themselves chopped, quartered, and given up. They were their own cattle. Deirdre’s eyes fluttered, and she tore her gaze away from Morgan. “You and Remmy were angry enough at Lydia to leave her. But I don’t see how she and I are any different. We are fae, and we carry our sins together. The things I must do are not so different than what she must. And yet…Remmy chose to leave. What makes that different?”

“It’s just a word,” Morgan said. “It only has the meaning people give it. “If you say it like the person I used to be was just filth and garbage, then that’s what it becomes. And if you say it like it’s just something that is, it becomes that too. It’s how you use it, and what you believe about it, that makes it hurt us or not.” Her tone was gentle, and she took Deirdre’s lack of resistance as a sign it was alright to keep comforting her. She brushed her fingers through her hair, tugging gently as she went. “Violence is around both of us, and our whole world. I don’t think Remmy understands or believes that right now. Maybe they just need a long break after everything they’ve suffered. But I don’t think it’s something anyone can completely escape and I don’t think it’s always a bad thing. Violence is just a tool and sometimes you need it and sometimes you don’t. And your violence, the kind that you have to do because of your visions--” But Deirdre had been raised to think in such awful binaries, and those teachings, along with the scars they’d burned into her, were so difficult to shake. Morgan kissed Deirdre’s temples and whispered in her ear, “Well, if she starts to interrupt me, just say so and I’ll tell her to shut up and wait her turn…” She trailed off, gently sucking and nipping at her love’s ear, anything to soothe her body long enough to feel safe, to feel able to listen. “You and Lydia aren’t the same person. And town isn’t going to fall into literal, semi-divine chaos as consequence of her stopping the abuse she puts the humans she feeds on through. What you must do isn’t some social construct passed down by generations. As far as I’ve been able to understand it, fate isn’t kind or discriminatory when she doesn’t get her way. What you do helps. The ideas that Lydia’s enacting...it’s not her fault she was raised to think this is how the world is, and finding a way to feed that works for her must be unbearably difficult. But there is no good reason for making Chloe hurt the way you and I were, twisting her inside to hate herself and blame herself for not being enough. She’s already bound and devoted to her, there’s no point in forcing her to spend the rest of her existence in and out of that small, awful place that we’ve both been to. It’s a cruel, excessive choice and not even a desperate or spontaneous one if she has a whole torture basement set aside for making them suffer physically, as if being shattered inside aching for her wouldn’t be bad beough already.” Morgan heard herself getting angry, thinking about all the ways she shrank and contorted herself to please her mother, all the hours she spent begging to be let out. She couldn’t imagine being stuck that way, not even having enough headspace to delude herself into thinking things might get better someday. She took a deep, banshee-length breath and continued much softer, “No one ‘must’ do something like that, Deirdre.”

Deirdre whimpered into Morgan’s touch, eager for more yet torn asunder by the idea she didn’t deserve any of it. All she could do was squirm and muffle her sobs in her throat. She wanted to crawl back inside their warm world of love and ease, but she was stuck in this cold, unforgiving one. She didn’t understand her point about words being just words, her family coated things so heavily in metaphor that words were never just words to them—everything was a message. And she didn’t get the offer for Morgan to silence her mother, it sounded impossible and foolish. But she could understand violence being a tool, and figured that one out of three wasn’t so bad. Deirdre groaned against Morgan’s skin, mind heavy with conflicting teaching. Just as hard as she tried to understand everything else, she wanted to know what Morgan meant by stating these differences. If she could get a clean fifty percent on this, that was more or less a passing grade, right? But she couldn’t do it. She loved Lydia too much to see her doing wrong, she clung too tightly to her fae community to see their history as wrong. In her heart, she felt Lydia and her were one: secrets shared, sins equal. What better way was there? There was no better way. “It’s just what—you don’t understand it’s just—it’s not like that—she—“ Deirdre groaned again, pained. “How else is she going to—Lydia isn’t like—it’s not that bad if—but I—“ If she were less stubborn, she would have seen the transparency of her chopped sentences; even she couldn’t finish the thought. Deirdre agonized, and curled herself into Morgan. “She must,” she babbled, “she must.” Bile burned its way up her again, and she hissed all of her torrential thoughts away. “I don’t want to be better than Lydia,” she admitted, “she’s done so much good for me. I can’t be better than her on some strange moral ground. I don’t want to be. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Oh, my love,” Morgan sighed. “There’s no contest between you, no ranking system, and I don’t believe that Lyida or most people for that matter can be sorted cleanly into good or bad, better or lesser in the first place. Admitting that the way Lydia treats the humans who depend on her almost as much as she depends on them is cruel doesn’t diminish her kindness or her loyalty. This wouldn’t be so painful for me or for Remmy otherwise. Lydia used her power to get me something I needed, she never once questioned my fight against Constance, she warned me about the fae world and how dangerous it is, and let me ask her all kind of annoying questions about it and visit her when I was anxious. And she did so much for Remmy, and so much for you… none of that goes away, Deirdre. It’s all true. I just want you to admit it. And I think you already know it, at the very least…” She resumed her course of affection, curling down and inward so she and Dierdre made a cocoon out of their nesting selves. “And it’s okay, that you’re someone who would never be cruel the way she is anymore. Maybe because of what happened to you, you never could be, I don’t know. But it’s okay. I love you for it, Deirdre. You are kind and you try for your friends and you try to understand and I love you for all of it, and more besides.”

“What does it mean then...that I get to keep you while she’s...all alone.” Deirdre sighed, closing her eyes. She’d known how wrong it was all her life, in a way. As a child, watching their half-living human servants. Unease always settled inside of her with them around, though she was thankful for the unjudging company they offered. It was the same something that led that child to grow sympathetic to the animals; the child always cared in her own way. It was the very thing Deirdre hated about her. “I brought Chloe cookies,” she confessed quietly, “I bandaged her fingers.” She wouldn’t say it, but she knew Lydia wasn’t right. Her gifts to Chloe were admissions of guilt and understanding; she could not be strong enough to admonish Lydia, and she could not be strong enough to whisk Chloe away into freedom. The young child who cried for the cows, who dug her feet into the ground and pulled on her mother to spare the sheep...was her, whether she liked it or not. But the little girl that hoped and dreamed and still had the strength to try and disobey, was gone now. Only a bitter memory of something she tried to erase. “I love Lydia,” she said. “I just don’t want to be in a place where...she can’t exist. I want her here. I want people to like her just as much as I do.” Where her inability to justify Lydia cracked, tender loyalty pierced through the shell. “And all the other fae...my whole life, my community, I don’t want them...to sound so bad.” Morgan could say all she wanted to about the non-existence of moral binaries, of the rigid categories of right and wrong, but it wouldn’t stop Deirdre from feeling it. If they weren’t right in all capacity….then they had to be bad. And she couldn’t let them be bad. “They’re all I have...most days.” Tears born anew, and Deirdre pressed herself into Morgan as tight as she could, clinging to her like the only life raft in a choppy sea. “I love Lydia,” she repeated, “maybe she can...learn to be better too.” The young banshee wasn’t sure where her thoughts would be tomorrow, if she’d still hope for Lydia’s change or if the voice of her mother would come back to tell her that humans were like cattle, but she held on. The little girl seemed to breath again in the rare burst of thought, and she asked instead for her voice of rebellion. “I don’t know what I think,” she admitted, “I-I don’t know what I want to think. I don’t know if I take all this back in a couple of hours, I don’t know. But you’re right, Morgan. The way she keeps her humans is…” Deirdre sobbed in lieu of an answer; feet dug into the mud, crying, please not the pigs today. The world could never be kind enough to listen to the girl, but Morgan was.

“It just means I made a choice. Because of what happened to me, it barely felt like a choice at all, but I made one all the same.” Morgan said. “I could never stay with someone who made a person feel that small and desperate and miserable just because they could. Or I could never learn to live with myself if I did. I know too much about how it feels.” She gave more kisses and rubbed more circles into the tense spots around her body. She feared Deirdre would break under her new admissions. Deirdre didn’t know how to see gray, even if it was all over her. She described her work in terms of glory or pure evil, nothing in between, and Morgan didn’t know how to slip in between the two extremes and plant some forgiveness or mercy inside her. But at least Deirdre seemed to have lost the stubborn engine to deny the truth. Morgan sighed with no small amount of relief and whispered a flurry of you’re okays. “I knew you were kind. I’ve always said so. It’s okay, my love.” It wasn’t the same as saving Chloe or defying Lydia, but given how much defiance had been cut and tortured out of her, it was still no small thing. Morgan remembered the stories of the animals Deirdre cried over, the silences left in their wake. She remembered how Deirdre had delighted in brushing the cows on that farm they visited, how attentive and attuned to their needs she was. If she could only be less afraid...

“I know you love her, even more than I do. It’s okay, Deirdre. And of course she can exist. She’s still your friend, and I would never ask you to choose between us and her unless. As long as you’re not like that…” she could deal with the apathy and the lesser culpability. It wasn’t much different than what she was doing, keeping the rest of Lydia’s secrets from Ariana and everyone else she knew. Other people would say it was wrong, but those people didn’t know Lydia the way they did, and how impossible it was to un-know someone. “Hey, not every fae is like her. You’re not like that, and Mina isn’t like that, and maybe even Felix too. He’s got his own dead witch girlfriend, so that’s a little promising, right? No one group of people is a monolith. Maybe you have prevailing views and traditions that typically get enforced, but you aren’t all the same, and spending time with your people doesn’t always have to feel like a fraught compromise or a betrayal to who you really are. And community doesn’t have to just be fae. We can make whatever kind of family or community we want. And, you know, maybe Lydia can come to understand. Maybe she needs to hear it from another fae, or to know that she’ll still have people if she changes the way she’s doing things.” That last one sounded more like a pipe dream. Lydia hadn’t even hesitated to tell Remmy she wouldn’t love them if they were human. And maybe that was a lie and maybe it wasn’t. But there was no war or anguish inside of her that Morgan had been able to see in that basement. Only loss.

Morgan gathered Deirdre up as if to lift her, ready to take them to bed if that’s what she needed. She wished she could lift Deidre out of her doubts so easily, and that there was a whole glen of fae who were too human to sit at ease with the rest, who could take Deirdre into their arms and smile at her bare back and see who she was under all the expectations that had been put on her. “You know, Deirdre. What she’s doing is cruel and she doesn’t need to. And at least for me, I would go back to her if she let Chloe go tomorrow and let us help her start over. You can’t un-know this, my love, even if you try. But I don’t need you to have any grand answers about anything right now. You’re hurt, and you’ve admitted something painful about one of your very best friends. You don’t need to know the answers for how to be kind and yourself and in touch with fae or anything else.” Morgan burrowed her face into Deirdre’s to kiss her cheek. “I love you. Tell me what you need right now. Whatever it is.”

Morgan had a way of sounding believable, or rather, as though her truth was so simple and alluring that to disprove it would be a far greater pain. It was comforting thoughts, that kind Deirdre had always wanted to fall into—recklessly, carelessly, like she really just might be that good, kind person. It was a kind she had been told to be better than embracing. The Dolans, watchers of life for centuries, knew truth; real, unrelenting truth. The mind could be weak to the temptations of falsehood, lies were always warm and inviting. But truth was cold, buried under mounds of damp dirt, only to be dug by hand where it would reveal itself under one’s nails. And it was right. Just as righteous as them. But there was Morgan, whom she loved, and whom she would never speak of with tongues of sacrilege. Her love was good and honest, and often a seed she never thought would grow in soiled truth-dirt. Yet it did, and where she dug she found thick roots. She could keep searching around them, down below where the truth lived, but then the seed would have nowhere to grow. And so, without the heart to uproot it, she considered that the truth might never have been in the dirt after all. It wasn’t so much that Morgan was easy to believe, like the sinful lie, but that growing always took a great deal more effort than digging ever did—plants withered, roots rejected soil. Deirdre sobbed quietly in Morgan’s arms for a moment, thinking about seeds and letting them grow where they fell. Maybe this one would grow into something. “I love you,” she mumbled, “I love you so much, always.”

She sniffled, and finally bundled together the courage to meet Morgan’s eyes. “Are you sure,” she asked quietly, “that you don’t need me to admit anything? Because I...I don’t think I can. I think I’m still trying to dig. I don’t think I can try anything else right now.” she lifted her hand up, heavy as it ached to have gripped Morgan so tightly, and rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers, as if rubbing away sleep instead of tears. “I want to go to bed, I think. And I want to hold you, that I’m sure about. And I want to wake up in a world that makes a little more sense.” Deirdre sniffled again, chasing the sound away with a chuckle as she leaned back into Morgan’s face. “You know, like the way loving you does. A place like that would be pretty nice.” There already was a seed that had grown full and lush, after all. If only she could remember to believe in it more. “But don’t carry me, I want to walk with you, I want to get there myself. I can, just so long as you let me lean on you.”

Morgan returned every declaration Deirdre gave with a quiet one of her own. Her girlfriend knew, of course she knew, but she hoped they served as a gauze over all the pierced places in her heart. When it was time, she eased them to their feet without letting go, the way they often did when they were knocked this low. “Then walk with me,” she said, leading her down the first few steps. “And maybe when you wake up, that place will be waiting for you.”

#wr deirdre #wr chatzy #wr deirdre chatzy #self harm tw #domestic abuse tw #abuse tw #mentions of #wickedswriting

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ofhellsbells · 4 years ago

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@ofcupidslove

The 21 Club, often simply 21, is an American traditional cuisine restaurant and former prohibition-era speakeasy, located at 21 West 52nd Street in New York City. The Bar Room includes a restaurant, a lounge and, as the name implies, a bar. The walls and ceiling of the Bar Room are covered with antique toys and sports memorabilia donated by famous patrons. The best known feature of 21 is the line of painted cast iron lawn jockey statues which adorns the balcony above the entrance. In the 1930s, some of the affluent customers of the bar began to show their appreciation by presenting 21 with jockeys painted to represent the racing colors of the stables they owned. There are 33 jockeys on the exterior of the building, and 2 more inside the doors.

‘21’ Club debuted America's original gourmet hamburger in 1950. It was cooked in duck fat, spiked with fennel seeds, and sold for a whopping $2.75 in an era of five- and 10-cent hamburgers. In dollar-adjusted value, that price is equivalent to over $25. The price today is $36, although the preparation has changed significantly — the current version of the ‘21’ Burger is closer to a classic hamburger, with a pickled relish and served on a brioche bun with fries on the side.

Belphegor had chosen this location (through Dean’s aid) because it served one of the best burgers in New York City while also being fancy enough that it might actually seem worthy of her. They rented out the whole restaurant for their date with Cupid, though that wasn’t to say that the rest of the restaurant would be empty. In fact, they made sure the whole restaurant would be full of loving couples. With Chastity’s help, they conducted numerous interviews with thousands of couples to make sure the restaurant would be full of only the most loving couples, so Cupid could be surrounded with a large amount of love and energy. After she finished breaking Lucifer and Levi’s curses, they imagined she would need something uplifting like that to energize her.

Once the restaurant owners understood what Belphegor was trying to do (and with a significant sum of money), they allowed Belphegor to decorate the restaurant however Belphegor wanted to. They planned out a design with Chastity’s help, but ultimately, most of the work was done by Belphegor themself. At the table Belphegor had designated as the one for their date, there were four chairs. In one of the chairs was a giant stuffed animals sloth, and in the chair opposite to it, there was a giant stack of boxes of chocolates. They put Cupid’s favorite flowers on all of the tables. Chastity had helped with that part. The flowers were actually from Cupid’s shop, but Chastity had told her that they were for a wedding. She’d even invented a pretend couple with pretend personalities to make the ruse more believable, ensuring Belphegor that Cupid had no idea the flowers were for her gift. There was one additional bouquet that Belphegor picked out themself for their table in particular. It wasn’t as cleanly or beautifully designed as the other flower arrangements, but they’d wanted to try their own hand at it too to show how much they were willing to do for her. They hung up decorations, and they cleared out some tables to make some room for a small dance floor and a stage for a band. They invited Snoop Dog, since he seemed to know a lot about love, and Bryson Bernard, who made the Cupid Shuffle and named himself after Cupid.

Belphegor was in their more confident form, dressed in a pink suit. There was a lot more effort put into their appearance this time. Their clothes weren’t oversized or wrinkled and were clearly tailored to Belphegor. Their shoes were actually tied, and their hair was neatly styled and combed. Chastity took several pictures of them in various spots both in the restaurant and out of it, along with pictures of the venue itself before she left Belphegor to wait on their date on their own.

Belphegor waited patiently at their table for Cupid to come and just entertained themself by listening to all the couples around them and watching how they interacted with each other in an attempt to understand how to be a better date for Cupid. They apparently had plenty of time for it since it was well over an hour since they’d asked Cupid to meet up with them. They hadn’t originally told her where she needed to go when they’d met up with her that morning. At the time, they’d focused more with supporting her and trying to instill her with confidence in herself. They’d brought her breakfast and kissed and bit her neck just like Dean had told them. They told her that they’d text her the directions of where to meet them once the time came for them to celebrate her birthday, so it could still stay a surprise to the very end. Then, they’d just left her to her work, so they didn’t distract her for too long. Maybe that interruption was part of why she was late, but it didn’t bother them too much. What she was doing was important, and they were proud of her no matter how long it took.

An hour started to turn into several hours, but they were still confident that Cupid would show up. “She’s coming,” they assured the staff of the 21 Club when they came to comfort Belphegor, apologizing for Cupid not being there. “She’s just running a little late is all.” They all gave Belphegor a look of pity, which they didn’t understand, and left them to continue waiting. Several people approached them like this as the hours went on. Nearly all of the couples thanked Belphegor for paying for their meals. They all assured Bells that even though this ‘didn’t work out,’ they’d still find the one someday. Belphegor didn’t know what they meant by that and primarily elected to ignore those kinds of comments altogether. There were starting to be fewer and fewer couples in the restaurant anyways, so they wouldn’t have to hear it for much longer.

Maybe she doesn’t really like you as much as you think she does, spoke the Void. Belphegor ignored them just as much, if not more. They might not have understood love that well yet, but they knew more than they did before. They were confident in the fact that Cupid loved them. She’d said it multiple times, and they’d always believe her. They knew, just as strongly, that they loved her too. It added to their resolve to stay here and wait for her no matter how long it took.

Another hour passed. All of the couples Belphegor had invited were gone now, replaced with other customers so the restaurant could keep its business going. Bryson had left too, and Snoop Dog had spent the past half hour sitting with Belphegor. “What I’m saying is fuck bitches.”

Belphegor nodded, not understanding what he was talking about but just agreeing with him. “Fuck bitches,” they repeated.

“Exactly!” He nodded and sighed. “Aight, I better get going. I’ve got another gig in an hour, but it was cool kickin’ it with you.”

“Fo shizzle,” Belphegor grinned, quoting what he’d often said to them. “I’ll tell you how it goes once Cupid gets here and we finish our date.”

Snoop Dog sighed and waved them off before taking off. “See you later, kid.”

“Bye!” they called after him and continued waiting for Cupid.

Eventually, it got to the point where it was near the time for the restaurant to close up. One of the waiters came out to talk to Belphegor. “So she still isn’t here yet?” he asked. Belphegor shook their head. “Well, you better order now, or you won’t be able to anymore. I can’t get her to show up any sooner, but what do you want to eat?”

Belphegor glanced over at Cupid’s empty seat. They didn’t want to order without her, but at this point they had to. “I’ll have the Speakeasy Steak Tartare, the 21 Burger, and the 21 Express.” They’d decided hours ago what they wanted to eat, but they just picked something for Cupid based on what they knew she liked. She would’ve wanted the burger, and the last thing was a dessert they could share once Cupid got here. The waiter went off to the kitchen to put in their order, and Belphegor continued waiting. After several minutes, Cupid still wasn’t here, so they sent her a text. They’d sent her several already.

[Sent 5:02 PM]: Hey, here’s the directions. [Link attached] [Sent 6:33 PM]: Don’t worry about being late. I’m still here. Take your time :) [Sent 8:21 PM]: In case you get here in the next minute or two, I’m just going to the bathroom really quick. I didn’t leave you, I promise. [Sent 10:49 PM]: They said I had to order now, so I just ordered for you. I hope that’s okay, but we can pick up something else somewhere else if you don’t like it. [Sent 11:24 PM]: I hope things are going okay for you. I know you can do it! And if you need anything, just let me know. [Unsent 11:25 PM]: I lov

They closed their phone as the waiter arrived with their food. Belphegor thanked them, and they went off to help other tables. They waited a few more minutes, just in case Cupid got there, but in the end, they couldn’t hold back from eating their own food. They managed to finish it all, and Cupid’s food still remained untouched. As it got closer to closing time, it became clear that she wasn’t going to make it in time to eat her food at the restaurant. Belphegor asked for a to-go box, and put both her food and their dessert away. They at least had enough decency to not eat dessert without her. Still, they waited. They waited until the restaurant wouldn’t let them wait anymore.

“I’m sorry she stood you up,” said their waiter. “But honestly, with as much as you did, if she stood you up, she doesn’t deserve you.”

Belphegor scowled. “She deserves everything!” they snapped. “And you don’t know anything about her.”

The waiter held up their hands defensively. “Okayyy, but you still need to go. We’re closing for the night. I’ll have someone help you carry your things out, and you can wait outside for her if you want, but we’ve got to finish cleaning here.” Belphegor sighed, calming down a little to do what the waiter asked. The remaining staff carried their things outside, and Belphegor sat on the steps to the restaurant, still waiting.

#ofcupidslove: happy birthday #self para

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january3693 · 5 years ago

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Someone We Used to Know - Part 44

(Surprise Monday Update! Because time has no meaning right now and it’s been months anyways, schedule schmedule, right?)

(This is a Marauders Era AU about what might have changed if Sirius was expelled after the Prank. Here’s the Master List if you’d like to start from the beginning or find a specific part)

(One last note, I’m adding a warning to this and some other future chapters for alcohol abuse because, well, because Regulus is not handling this AU in a healthy way, but hey, at least he’s still alive...for now.)

Regulus Black is not having a good day.

It starts with a toddler on his lap at breakfast.

Regulus stares down at the child and tries not to scowl. It looks up at Regulus with a similarly skeptical expression.

“Aren’t you two adorable,” Narcissa coos. She’s the one who plopped her son in Regulus’s lap, though he suspects it’s a conspiracy between her, Aunt Druella, and his mother.

Neither Regulus or little Draco respond, though the child can speak now. Narcissa coaxed it—him, Regulus supposes—into saying several words throughout breakfast.

“Lovely,” Walburga says, though her tone is more appropriate for someone who’s just found a fingernail in their porridge. She claims she wants to see Regulus married and giving her grandchildren, but Regulus thinks she wants it more in theory than practice. She wants the family legacy assured, but she doesn’t actually want a daughter-in-law or babies invading the dour quietude of Grimmauld Place.

Marriage and babies.

To be honest, Regulus isn’t sure what he thinks of those things either.

He doesn’t know what to do with the child he’s currently holding. Where are his hands supposed to be? What is he supposed to do if it starts crying? What is he supposed to do if—Merlin forbid—it starts to leak? He’s already trying to avoid Draco’s tiny hands, which are constantly grasping at things and are somehow perpetually sticky. How are they always so sticky?

“I’m sure you’ll have one of your own soon, Regulus darling,” Aunt Druella adds.

Regulus can’t imagine having a child of his own.

He can’t imagine loving it, caring for it.

Draco is the most important thing in Narcissa’s world. She would burn down all of London for him; Regulus can see it in her eyes.

That sort of love terrifies him.

The only thing more frightening would be having a child and not feeling that love.

Carefully avoiding Draco’s grasping, sticky fingers, Regulus picks up his teacup and drains it, taking comfort from the burn of liquid that most certainly isn’t tea.

Things only get worse from there.

There are responsibilities that come with being a member of a proper pureblood wizarding family like Regulus’s, especially when you’re the last one carrying that family’s name. When the entire future of your house rests on your shoulders.

Not that this burden was ever supposed to be Regulus’s. It was supposed to be Sirius. The heir and the spare. That’s how it was supposed to go.

Regulus spent years wishing it was otherwise though. He spent years wanting the honors and glories and even the responsibilities that came with being the firstborn son of the House of Black. He hated how Sirius dismissed them with his self-righteous sneers.

Regulus used to wish they’d been born in reverse. Sometimes, he even wished Sirius had never been born at all, or that he would just disappear altogether.

Regulus has never heard the Muggle adage “be careful what you wish for,” but he’s living the truth of it.

They’re all watching him.

His family, his fellow Death Eaters, everyone.

They’re all watching him, and they find him lacking. Regulus can see it in their eyes.

He hasn’t quite fallen to a “Sirius” level of familial disgrace yet, but even his mother is beginning to look toward the next generation to redeem the House of Black.

Hence the child on his lap at breakfast.

Distressingly, Bellatrix seems to be the only one who hasn’t given up on Regulus.

She invites him to spend the afternoon “Muggle-baiting” with her and a few friends.

It’s not really a request.

Just like it’s not really Muggle-baiting when it involves torture and death.

Regulus brings a flask with him. He holds out some hope that if he slurs the spells they won’t work properly.

As he has so many times before, Regulus fails, even at failing.

It’s evening by the time they’re done.

Everyone else goes home to dinner as though they aren’t leaving three bodies in the middle of a wooded park.

Regulus doesn’t want to go home.

He’s too sober for that.

Thankfully, that at least is easy to solve.

The Leaky Cauldron isn’t Regulus’s pub of choice. It’s too normal. Always full of ordinary witches and wizards looking to unwind from ordinary lives where they’ve never had to watch as people were tortured and murdered. Ordinary lives where they’ve never had to participate in the torturing and murdering.

However, the Leaky Cauldron does have one thing Regulus values: immediacy. It’s the gateway into Diagon Alley, literally the first place he can get a drink.

He gets more than one.

In fact, he stays until toothless old Tom hesitates to serve him another firewhisky. Thankfully, there are pubs where the barmen don’t give a fig about their customer’s health and safety. Regulus stumbles through the barrier in search of just such a pub.

Somehow, his day manages to get even more fucked up from there.

Regulus finishes puking into a toilet and squints up at the little bathroom.

He doesn’t remember how he got here. He’s not entirely sure where here even is. The lights are too bright though, and they don’t look like any candles or torches or spelled lanterns he’s seen before.

When he lets go of the toilet bowl, Regulus tumbles gracelessly back onto his arse.

A cup is pressed into his hands. It’s full of water.

Scowling, Regulus looks up at the man who handed it to him. “You look like father,” he says. It’s disturbing actually, especially since Orion Black has been dead for a year now. Although, Sirius was supposed to have been dead for five.

“Aging potion,” Sirius says flatly. “It’ll wear off in a few hours. Drink your water.”

Regulus drinks his water. He was supposed to be the obedient son, after all. He was the obedient son. He was obedient and happy and proud to be his parents’ son, a son of the House of Black. It’s all Sirius’s fault that he’s not any of those things anymore.

When he finishes the water, Regulus sets the glass aside and glares up at his brother.

“I thought you were dead,” Regulus says. He makes it sound like an accusation.

I thought you were dead, and I thought our parents or someone in our family had done it. I thought you were dead and it made me doubt everything. I thought you were dead and it broke my heart—it broke me.

All of those things tumble through Regulus’s head. He’s not sure if he says them out loud or not.

Sirius, who really does look frighteningly like their father right now, watches him stonily, his face offering no clues as to how much of his soul Regulus has just drunkenly poured out.

“Well, I’m not dead,” Sirius says simply. He stretches out an unnaturally wrinkle hand toward Regulus. “Come on, let’s get you into bed before you pass out here.”

Regulus lets his supposed-to-be-dead brother help him to his feet and out of the too-bright bathroom into an equally strange but more dimly lit bedroom. Regulus still doesn’t know where he is, but there’s a bed and Sirius deposits him onto it.

He wraps himself in the blankets and curls up on his side. Back in the bathroom Regulus hadn’t felt tired at all, but now that he’s lying in a bed that must be Sirius’s, the weight of the day all seems to press down on him. Sleep is the only escape, and Regulus sinks gratefully into it.

I’m glad you’re not dead.

Once again, Regulus isn’t sure if he says it out loud or not.

(Part 45)

#someone we used to know #someone we used to know story post #marauders au #harry potter au #First War with Voldemort #wolfstar #Sirius Black #regulus black #tw: alcohol abuse #regulus does not have healthy coping mechanisms

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successionsideblog · 5 years ago

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you know what, if you want a taste of the tomgreg i’m writing here ya go. i’m not spellchecking this and it has no title. here is your taste

The fallout unravels in a series of afters.

Fifteen seconds after the press conference ends, Kendall rips up his approved statement and tosses it behind him to the ubiquitous uproar of the roomful of press. He has just killed his father on national television, a new wave patricide for the twenty-first century, and Greg, well, Greg gave him the gun.

Thirty seconds after the press conference ends, Greg follows Kendall down a stretch of hallway like a rescue dog abandoned by the train yard having attached itself to the first person who threw it a bone. His hands are clammy against the yellow manila folder, making sweaty fingerprints against the cheap, Office Depot paper. The skin of his thumb pulls away from the nail with his incessant fidgeting and it stings like hell. Kendall is walking too fast despite his much shorter stride. Jess and Karolina crowd his side, but Kendall barrels past them.

Colourful language is exchanged. Phone calls are made. Greg can barely hear what is being said with the blood rushing from one side of his head to the other. His ears sound like oversized conch shells that swell with the shutter of every flashing camera that follows them past the podium.

“Sorry.” Greg offers them an uncomfortable wave, or what was supposed to be a gesture of apology. “Sorry for the—uh—inconvenience.”

“Alright, Greg, my comrade in arms,” Kendall says, holding out his hand, making a grabby motion. He looks composed, not even a decimal place to the right as nervous or overwhelmed as Greg is. “Sauce me the docs.”

“Right,” Greg says and surrenders them without protest. It feels good to finally let them go after they had been eating away at the argyles in his sock drawer for weeks. “Sorry, um, about the sweat. It’s my flight-or-fight response. I guess my body thinks I might be dying.”

Kendall ignores him, then passes the documents to an assistant so haphazardly that Greg almost wants to cry out, or at least make everyone in the room go through a strict vetting process before the manila folder can disappear from his sight. His worries are quickly quashed, however, when the folder is ripped open and the distribution of dozens of photocopies begins amongst the Kendall approved reporters waiting in the wings.

One such reporter, who must have seen Greg hand over the folder, pounces on him, blonde and plasticky in that white-midwestern-Fox-News-anchor sort of way that immediately waives his interest. The foam headed microphone she poises in front of his face is uncomfortably phallic.

“Your name?” she asks.

“Uh, Gregory—”

“Roy?”

“No, Hirsch. I was, um, the one who fucked up—sorry—my testimony in front of Congress? You might have seen me on the front page of Reddit. Wait—are you broadcasting this?”

He gives a statement, then he and Kendall are ushered into another room, stale with the smell of dispensary coffee and complimentary pastries, then a second room where a legal team made up of people Greg has never met pulls Kendall aside. Their conversation is hushed, their faces pinched and wrinkled like globs of malformed Play-Doh.

Greg stands in the corner, ignoring the urge to lean his forehead against the spackle wall and find his breath. He was privy to Phase 1 of the plan and only Phase 1: get in a helicopter, get on a private jet, transport the super-secret documents, attend the press conference, give Kendall the super-secret documents, watch Kendall hand over the super-secret documents, et cetera. By now, they must be at Phase 2: try not to poop your big boy pants in front of the Wallstreet Journal.

Afterwards, Kendall pats him on the back and tells him to “gear up for the clusterfuck,” so Greg does. They get into separate cars, pulled in separate directions by the tailing reporters. Greg watches the second black car shrink into a dot behind him: Phase 3, which Greg isn’t destined to be a part of, apparently.

Greg holes up in his apartment with his phone readied and ATN on mute. He waits for the word from Kendall, but it never comes. He paces, showers the corporate stink off him, and changes into sweats. As he towel dries his 100 dollar haircut, his phone pings, then pings again, again, and again. It vibrates against the custom-made coffee table with such force Greg thinks the glass might shatter.

He snatches it up. A text from Gerri, from Tom, from Shiv, Roman, Karl, Frank, all spouting a thesaurus worth of expletives and a row of question marks, as well as several emojis Greg has trouble deciphering in this context. At the top of his lock screen is a notification for the New York Times article Kendall warned him about yesterday, then the statement he gave to the tabloid in all caps, bold Helvetica font.

“Oh, okay, okay, okay, shit. Shit!”

He puts his phone on silent and goes to the balcony to smoke a joint, realizes reporters are swarming his building like worker ants in camera-ready makeup and drugstore hair gel, and hurries back inside. He flexes his fists, chews up his lips until they look like a crime scene. He knew what he was getting into when he handed over those two sad, crumpled pages he saved from certain Wambsgans branded death. But maybe not to the extent of being called out for it, or having to face the ridicule of a family he just settled into. He was supposed to be the backup, a co-conspirator behind the scenes, not the second fall guy. He texts Kendall “Hey man, I’m kind of freaking out right now” but gets no reply.

Kendall is persona non grata. As far as Greg knows, he could be holed up in a Soviet-era Siberian bunker somewhere, eating beans from a tin can and waiting out the aftermath.

Greg kicks himself. He should have thought of that.

Ten hours after the press conference ends and five hours after the media shitstorm hits peak shit, Greg hears a knock at his door. Half-asleep from a nap he was unaware he was taking, he instinctively reaches for his phone again. The sun is setting, shrinking behind the eyesore of an office building that blocks his view and decreases the property value of his apartment. He grumbles as his phone screen illuminates, stinging his dilated pupils.

(15) Unread Voicemails from Tom Wambsgans.

“Shit.”

The knocking continues.

“Hey, Greg, open up,” Tom shouts, sing-song in a threatening sort of way. His voice is muffled by the door, the knob twisting back and forth. Greg half-expects an ax to come flying through the wood and plaster. “Greg, I swear to God, open this door or else you are dead to me.”

Greg stumbles over himself, nearly tripping over the edge of his Sherpa rug as he turns on a light. He unlocks the door and yanks it open. The smell of tropical suntan lotion and Armani cologne immediately wafts into his nose, like a bowl of fruit salad left sitting on a department store perfume counter.

Tom stands there, his fists balled up at his sides like a petulant child waiting for his mother in a long line at the supermarket check-out. His skin is tan and slightly sunburnt around his nose from their time spent in Greece, but his loose-fitting yacht clothes have been replaced by a stark white button-down and an Yves Saint Laurent suit jacket. Greg tries not to notice.

“What the fuck did you do?” Tom asks.

His eyes wide, his affectation intensified by his disbelief. He looks angry, jaw jutting out. For a second, Greg thinks Tom might hit him like he has other times Greg has told him something he doesn’t want to hear. But the scale is much bigger, with implications that extend far beyond extramarital activities and open business relationships.

“I, uh, well.” Greg finds his words then loses them, then finds some new ones. “I mean, is it bad?”

“Yeah, Greg, it is. It is very bad.”

Tom pushes past him into the apartment. Greg hesitantly shuts the door behind him, trying not to shrink in on himself. Meanwhile, Tom appears to be near hysteria, halfway between laughing and crying like he was when he first dragged Greg into the death pit. Tom glances out the window where a few straggling news crews remain, then turns to face him.

“Do you have anything to say to me?” Tom asks.

“What?” Greg avoids his eyes. “Like—like an apology?”

“Yeah, like an apology.” Tom lets out a humourless, near sociopathic chuckle. “You fucked me over, Greg! You fucked me!” Every consonant is especially harsh when Tom says his name. He pinches his thumb and forefinger together. “We were this close to all of this going away and poof! Fucking front-page news. I feel like I got caught with my pants down and everyone is laughing at my junk.”

Greg tries not to let the off-colour simile faze him. “Look, Tom, to be fair, I kind of fucked us both.” He takes a step forward to close the room width of space between them. “I mean, I implicated myself as much as I implicated you. But Ken said he would take care of it.”

“Oh, he did, did he? So, what, are you his bitch boy now? First comes corporate scheming then comes marriage?”

Greg makes a face at him, ignoring the jealousy uncomfortably sandwiched between every word. Sometimes he thinks Tom forgets that Shiv, Roman and Kendall are his cousins, like a baby who lacks object permanence for Fortune 500 surnames.

“Uh, not sure I would use that term but okay.” Greg tries not to pace. “Come on, this is what you wanted in the first place. To come clean, get it all out in the open. Like, it was the right thing to do, right?”

Tom raises his eyebrows, mouth falling open. “You are unbelievable.”

“What?”

“Jesus, Greg. I know it was you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were the one who told Gerri I wanted to hold a press conference, you piece of shit.” The hurt that lines Tom’s face catches Greg off-guard. Tom tries to hide it with a self-satisfied grin, seemingly for having figured it all out, but Greg can see it in his eyes, festering. “So, now you want to claim the moral high ground? You lied to me through your fucking teeth.”

Greg had almost forgotten that had happened. It feels like it was years ago, not months. He was a fish out of water back then—he still is—but he thought it might allow him some wiggle room, help him avoid being caught in the clean-up net, gutted, then served on a platter if cruises ever came out. He supposes he could play the “I was oblivious” card—because he was—but that might not fly considering he just blew a big, shiny rape whistle on Waystar senior management.

“Look, Tom, I’m sorry, like really, I am, but you told me not to trust anyone, least of all you, and then you trusted me? It was your own advice!” Greg raises his hands as if to deny culpability. “So, you know, that, uh, that sounds like a you problem, dude.”

Something shifts in Tom’s expression, the hurt turning to resentment. “Is this unassuming nature of yours, this fresh-scrubbed sincerity, all an act?” Tom asks, gesturing to Greg and all Brobdingnagian six feet and seven inches of him. “Have I been duped, bamboozled, hung out to fucking dry? Again?”

Greg knew Tom would be upset, but this is something else, something that runs deeper than possibly facing jail time. Tom has never been especially easy for Greg to read; he masks his sincerity with deceit and covers up his deceit with generosity, trying to play at the Roy game by Roy rules until his intentions pervert into some sick joke only he’s in on.

Would you kiss me? What if I asked you to? What if I told you to?

At best, Tom is unpleasant to work for and borderline abusive to his employees. At worst, he’s strangely endearing. If Greg really wanted out from his clutches, he would have used the documents as leverage a long time ago. But Greg feels oddly attached to him still, like a pair of Siamese Twins held together by their liver: an organ that could be severed in two if need be, but Greg would likely miss the feeling of working so close to Tom by virtue of needing to keep their heads above the water before cruises sank them completely.

“Tom, come on—I just—I want you on my side.” Greg feels pathetic as he inches closet to pleading with Tom, but for what? Forgiveness? Understanding? A second chance? He’s not so sure.

Tom scoffs. “Why? Because I present a tactical advantage? Did Kendall ask you to recruit me?”

Greg would be lying if he said he hadn’t considered nudging Tom over to the Kenstar Gregco team, but Kendall had never given him the rundown on how this was going play out, or which factions the family might divide into. Truthfully, Greg didn’t think that far ahead when Kendall laid out the initial plan. There had been no time for that.

“Kendall has nothing to do with this,” Greg says, motioning between them. “The documents were a favour. I was just doing Kendall a favour.”

“Yeah, sure.” Tom grits his teeth. “You used me, Greg. You were a featherless chick, trying to fly from the nest, and I took you under my wing! Now you want to significantly alter the pecking order?” He shakes his head. “All you Roys are the same. Like a piss of leeches in cashmere turtlenecks and cable-knit sweaters.”

Greg feels the urge to tell Tom he’s technically not a Roy, but it would be fallacious. Tom isn’t one either, not really. They’re both nameless actors on the outskirts of the freak show, one of them a clown that married into the circus, and the other a clown that has trace amounts of circus in his blood. This was their choice.

“I’m indebted to you, Tom, I really am.” Greg reaches out and lays a hand on his shoulder. Even though they’re barely touching, he can feel his body heat radiating from beneath his primly ironed Oxford. “Look, what can I do?”

Tom goes quiet, glancing at where Greg has made contact. For a moment, Greg naively thinks they have reached some sort of understanding. His hopes are quickly dashed.

“Alright, Greg,” Tom says, his performative smugness returning. “You can tell me where Kendall is for starters.”

“Kendall?”

“Yes, Kendall. Come on, where is our quasi-Dmitri Karamazov? Has he gone AWOL or is he out roaming the streets covered in blood with three thousand rubles clutched in his tiny fist?”

Greg narrows his eyes at Tom, dropping his hand from his shoulder. “Okay—um—no? And I don’t know where he is. He kind of went dark on me.”

“Oh, so you two are in cahoots but not really in cahoots?”

Greg ignores how pleased Tom sounds. “Is everyone back yet?”

“We flew in a couple of hours ago.”

“And?”

“Oh, they’re beyond pissed. Your balls will be in a little brass box on Logan’s desk come morning.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Greg says but he doesn’t really believe it. Tom is just playing the game again, trying to intimidate him with lowbrow banter fit for any fraternity hazing ritual. It only signifies that Greg has passed the threshold of what is expected of him again because, in actuality, Logan is in a worse spot than anyone. Except maybe Kendall who has to deal with the consequences of putting him there. “So, where do you stand? In all of this.”

Tom snorts, but he looks unsure. “Oh, please. Stop with this which-side-are-you-on bullcrap. You sound like a fifth-grader picking teams for kickball.”

“Hey, I’m being serious. Like, what do you owe Logan? What do I owe him? I mean, I owe you more than anything,” Greg says and the compliment makes his back teeth ache. “I want you there—here—like, I want you to play on my team. Or you could, maybe, play both sides. You know, do a little undercover. It could be like a James Bond, Q type situation.”

“Greg, you’re being ridiculous.”

“How? How is that ridiculous?”

Tom just shakes his head. The sadness Greg had taken note of before returns to his face. Greg knows Tom has a responsibility to Shiv, and whichever way Shiv goes he has to follow. Greg was just hoping their alliances had yet to be decided, but it sounds like she has made up her mind, so Tom has too. No game plan, no strategizing, no conspiratorial comradery. Greg feels stopped in his tracks, pushed to the outskirts by someone who has always tried to bring him in.

Tom heads towards the door, removing his phone from his back pocket. “Keep in touch.”

It sounds like a threat and a promise rolled into one.

#i am not tagging this #it is a sneak peek for subscriber only

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johannstutt413 · 5 years ago

Text

The Doctor pounded twice on the door to Vulcan’s forge as he walked in. “You’ve got a customer!” He shouted above the din of whirring machines and hammer striking metal.

“Doctor?” She walked out, her usual attire replaced with a heavy-duty apron. “What do you need?”

“A weapon.”

A nod. “Of course. For who?”

“For me.” He reached into his pocket and unfolded a sheet of wrinkled paper. “I was going through my old files and found this. Apparently I used to carry one with me everywhere I went, but I lost it along with my memories. I was wondering if you would remake it for me.”

“I’ll let you know.” Vulcan took the paper and put it in a pocket of her own.

The Doctor glanced around the forge. “I heard your hammer going; I know it’s more of a tradition than an actual part of the craft nowadays, but I’m curious - what do you make when you do that?”

“You want to see for yourself?” She walked back towards the anvil and furnace, and he followed her. “Put on your visor. Sparks’ll be flying.”

“Right.” He made sure his usual protections were in place, and he watched with great interest as she resumed the piece she’d been working on. It was surprisingly delicate; considering her usual work, he’d expected something utilitarian, but this was art, pure and simple. Several straight beams were brought together to create something like a tower, and as she added details, the Doctor realized what she was creating with a smile.

When it was finally done - a multi-hour process the Doctor had arrived in the middle of - and cooling, Vulcan took off her gloves and face protection and addressed her audience. “Satisfied?”

“It’s fantastic,” he replied, “but do you always make Rhodes Island emblems?”

“No - usually, I make ornamental weapons or solid attachments, but the company anniversary party will be happening soon, and I don’t plan on attending in person.”

The Doctor frowned. “You aren’t?”

“The Penguin team needs their gear worked on, as does the Lungmen squad, and I want to have your weapon done before too long.” She shrugged. “Not a good time for downtime.”

“Damn...Weapon maintenance is crucial, but missing out on the anniversary is...I’d wanted to take you as my date, but-”

Vulcan.exe stopped responding. “What?”

“Your commitment is incredible, your craftsmanship is impeccable, and your record, as well as that of almost every Operator here, is to your credit. We don’t stop to appreciate you often enough, in my opinion.” He sighed. “But, if you’re busy, I suppose it can’t be helped-”

“When do you want this weapon of yours finished?”

The Doctor thought for a moment. “I’d like to be able to start training with it again as soon as possible, but if you have other work that needs to be done-”

“I’ll have you your weapon before you come to get me for the party.”

“You mean you’ll come to the celebration after all?” He smiled. “What changed?”

Despite all the time spent around hot metal, Vulcan wasn’t incapable of blushing. “I...want you to know I appreciate what you’re trying to do.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll leave you to it - have some work of my own to get done, after all. I’ll see you in a few days, then? If you get a chance, you know where to find me.”

“Right...Hey.” As he left, she called out to him. “Formal or casual?”

The Doctor looked back over his shoulder and smiled warmly. “Whichever you can dance best in.”

Vulcan spend the next not-quite week working on the Doctor’s weapon; it was a tricky thing, relying on a series of moving parts that had to be crafted with absolutely hair-pulling levels of precision to ensure the weapon’s function didn’t degrade over time, and anyone less enthused with the task would quit while they were ahead. For her, however, this wasn’t just a project her boss had given her - this was a commission from someone who appreciated her work, who appreciated...her, as difficult to comprehend as that was, and besides, she was always looking for new ways to challenge herself. If only he’d asked her to design something for him herself…

The Doctor, as promised, was at her forge about two hours before the party; he’d wanted to give her time to show off her work and not have her feel rushed. Honestly, it had been a work of willpower to not visit her sooner, but seeing his gift before it was completed seemed wrong somehow, so he’d bided his time. Now was the moment of truth.

“Vulcan?” He knocked on the door; the machines weren’t on, so there was no need to be as loud as before. “Are you back there?”

“One minute, Doctor!” She called from somewhere deeper in the space. There was a bathroom behind all this, and a little farther back was the closet she called her bedroom.

The Doctor found a place to sit and made himself comfortable; a few minutes later, and Vulcan emerged from her corner...and he found himself in awe. “Wow.”

“I clean up nicely?” The hesitant smile on her face only amplified the effect of seeing her in a black dress that seemed to be woven from carbon-fiber. “I finished your weapon, like I promised.”

“Two gifts in one evening. Tonight’s already looking to be amazing.”

She picked up something from a hidden part of the forge and walked over to him; in her hand was what looked like for all intents and purposes a walking stick with a curved handle. “The blade comes out of the bottom when you press this.”

“Amazing...I had every confidence in you, and you still exceeded my expectations.” He accepted in from her as she held out her hands, and the weight balance was exquisite. “It feels like it was made for my hands and mine alone.”

“It was, Doctor.” Vulcan smiled at her matter-of-fact response.

He blushed. “Right, I guess it was...I should take this up to my room before we go to the party.”

“I’ll go with you,” she offered, “if you don’t mind.”

“No, feel free, but...why?”

They were stepping out into the hall at this point, and both checked to see if it was empty before Vulcan continued. “I was thinking of other ways I could thank you for, well...being you.”

“I would be me even if the world hated me,” the Doctor shrugged.

“Maybe,” she admitted, “but that wouldn’t change how you make me feel. To think that someone values what I do the way you do...I wonder if I’ve found my soulmate.”

At this point, there were tomatoes less vibrantly red than the Doctor. “I didn’t realize how powerful a thank-you could be.”

“It’s a little more than a thank-you, Doctor.”

“True...” He took a steadying breath. “How serious were you about me being your soulmate?”

Vulcan’s smile grew. “How seriously are you thinking about it?”

“Enough to be willing to give it a shot. We can call tonight our first date.”

“I like the sound of that...” She nodded, one of her hands brushing against his. “To our first date.”

The Doctor took hold of the errant hand, already picturing their potential future in his mind. “The first of many.”

#arknights #vulcan (arknights)#underappreciated cow-girl waifu #probably because she's practically impossible to get #damnit hypergryph!#arknights fic

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ramblings-of-a-cavill-lover · 4 years ago

Text

Dust, Earth & Ash pt. 3

Summary: As you daydream of sad blue eyes, helping a stranger takes an unexpected turn. Clark deals with his grief as best as he can.

Warnings: canon typical violence

Word count: 2,3k

A/N: It’s been 84 years but he’s back. Thank you all who love this story for your patience. I hope I don’t let you down. Thank you to the always lovely @shellbilee for having my back, being my beta and my editor at the same time. 💜

Divider by @writeyourmindaway

The days remained rainy in the weeks after meeting him.

You focused on work in the diner, doubling the attention you gave to your customers, helping in the kitchen - where you didn’t really have to be at all - and you mostly managed, but time and time again you caught your thoughts flashing back to those distraught, blue eyes that haunted your dreams and every waking moment.

You even earned a bonus for working that much.

Marla, noticed you spacing out one evening. Dinner rush had long dwindled and you two could chat for a bit, as you normally used to, the only problem being that you hardly initiated conversation anymore.

“Hey, you ok?” came her soft voice and warm touch on your shoulder.

You sighed deeply before you answered, “Yes, just fine. You need anything?”

Looking deep into your eyes she pursed her lips.

“I’m worried about you kid. I’ve been watching you working like crazy and everything is apparently going swell, but, somehow, it feels like you’re miles away and not at a resort in Aruba. Spill.”

She crossed her arms as if to tell you you wouldn’t escape this one. You lightly chuckled.

“Remember the day you missed work?” Marla nodded. “Well, that morning someone was here.”

You pause and remember as you debate telling her about his physical attributes. You decide against it and sigh once more.

“Well? Did the person treat you bad? Good? Was it a man or a woman?”

You smiled at Marla’s impatience and continued.

“He treated me… ok, I guess.” Marla frowned and opened her mouth but, before she could say anything you hurried to reassure her. “He didn’t treat me badly. He just wanted to be left alone.”

“And why didn’t you leave him alone?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Because when I poured the coffee for him, I saw the look in his eyes and it was clear that he’d been crying, you know. I couldn’t help it. I had to try and make it better.”

“And did you?” she insisted.

“I don’t think so.” you mumble, as you think about the cake barely eaten and the untouched coffee. “He took my hankie with him.”

“The one your mother embroidered?” her question was amplified by the long gasp.

“Yes."

The fact you couldn’t help the stranger coupled with losing one of the things you valued the most ate away at you, making you feel like you had failed everyone.

She touched your shoulder and pulled you in for a hug. Patting the back of your head lightly, she said it was going to be okay, though you were not so sure yourself.

As you left the diner that night, all your thoughts were focused on your conversation with the handsome stranger. Clark.

No news of any murder involving him had surfaced, so you were even more baffled as to what he could have meant by saying he had killed his wife.

He had left such an impression on you that you had dreamed about him more than once. Those nights were not the most pleasant; you’d wake up with a start, feeling a presence in your room, but upon turning the lights on, it was empty, just as you had left it before going to bed.

That same week you learned that your favorite customer unfortunately had passed, making things a little sadder. Her funeral was attended by a host of people, not only those who had worked with her, but who admired her work and wished to pay their respects.

The hot topic, however, was the absence of her husband, the not so famous, but equally well known, Clark Kent.

The buzz reached you from several sources and all of them told you a reason why he wasn’t there. Most of them, not so respectful. Even the newspaper they worked for, the Daily Planet, mentioned the fact.

Your customers talked about it, brought clippings to show you; it was on the radio, even on the tv news broadcasts. "Metropolis in Mourning” read one of the headlines, not really mourning but gossiping about the attendees at the funeral.

Your reaction was to always smile and let them gossip. You had never met the man, Lois was the one to come buy coffee almost every day. She was kind and always stayed for a while to talk to you. She bothered to ask you questions, as if you were an important person she just had to interview. She never failed to make you smile. A kind person through and through. But those were details you preferred to keep to yourself.

The walk back home wasn’t long, just a few blocks, but lost in your thoughts, you missed the fact that you were being followed.

The hand landed heavily on your shoulder and turning you didn’t know if you were more startled by the fact that someone got that close to you without you noticing, or the fact that the person whose hand had felt like a bag of potatoes on your muscles was such a small and frail-looking old lady.

“I’m sorry if I startled you.” she apologized in a feeble voice, that again, had such jarring contrast to the touch. “I called out, but you were on another planet!”

She laughed then, showing her blackened teeth, and you smiled awkwardly, not really knowing what she wanted.

She was repugnant. It wasn’t a mean observation, it was a fact. Her world-weary face was mostly wrinkles and you could tell life hadn’t been kind to her so far. She reminded you of fairy tale witches with the hooked noses and cunning eyes. The unease only increased as you took in the state of her clothes. She wore what looked like a voluminous tunic, of thick and frayed fabric. It stunk, but nothing like the city stench you were used to. It was something akin to the smell in the crypt where your mother’s remains were buried.

You shuddered and shook your head slightly to dispel the disturbing thoughts. The woman, thankfully concentrated on the movement of the cars on the street, didn’t witness your discomfort.

“Would you be a dear and help me with these?” she half requested, half complained, looking down at two very heavy looking shopping bags full of groceries, that you could swear she hadn’t been carrying when you first looked at her.

“Sure.” you replied, noticing your labored breathing as you picked the bags from her hands.

They were indeed very heavy. You wondered if she bought bricks and put them in the bottom, just for the exercise.

“Do you live far?” you asked her, as the light turned green, but she just started crossing the street without a single glance back at you.

She walked briskly, and the extra weight had you struggling to keep up.

“No, just three blocks that way.” her hand pointed to nowhere in particular ahead of you both.

“Okay.” was all you could add.

You didn’t know how you got yourself into this, but now that you were in, all that was left was to see it through. Even if you had to see the worst side of town along with it.

It wasn’t easy catching up with her, she seemed to be always a few steps ahead of you. But when you were about to give up, she stopped in front of a derelict house that looked abandoned.

She opened the door and asked you to put the groceries on the frail looking table in the middle of the living room, walking off further into the house.

You did as she asked, relieved not to be carrying them anymore, and looked back at the corridor where she had disappeared to, jumping when you saw her already next to you. It was as if she had the ability to simply materialize wherever she wanted.

“Forgive me, I didn’t want to startle you. Again.” she mumbled with a chuckle. “I have something for you. It is not money, for I do not carry such mundane things. I do believe you’ll find it useful. Eventually.”

From her pocket she pulled a leather cord, tied around a vivid, red crystal.

“You don’t have to repay me. It’s alright.” you said, taking a step back.

She merely grabbed your wrist and thrust the necklace into the palm of your hand. It was warm, and when your two hands connected around it, a blinding light emanated from it, blinking out almost immediately.

You felt heavy and sleepy, and the last thing you saw was her gruesome smile and the shears in her other hand.

Ever since Diana left, Clark had been alone with his thoughts in the silent, and aptly named, Fortress of Solitude. She had stayed for four days. They didn’t talk much, they didn’t eat or drink.

“Why did you bring me here? I told you to take me to Barda’s!” he didn’t mean to yell, but that direction wouldn’t take him where he wanted to go. He needed to blow off some steam, all of the steam, inside his head. “Kal-El, I know you are grieving, but that does not give you the right to slaughter an entire planet…” “I don’t…” he interjected, impatient. “Do not interrupt me. It’s quite rude.” she said, calmly. He hung his head, grinding his teeth. She was right, he knew it. But he was not in the mood to give her the satisfaction. “You know yourself.” she continued. “Right now, all that pain and anger at nothing and no one in particular will unleash the full force of your power on whatever enemy you have in front of you. And then what? How will you feel when you stop seeing red and all that’s left is the utter loneliness, the memory of what Lois would have thought of that, and the blood of a planet on your hands?”

The stillness in her voice had disturbed him. He hated her for it, for being right.

He actually hated himself. All the more for thinking ill of a friend. Another friend who put it all on hold to help him.

In Metropolis, Bruce would be taking care of everything. He contacted Ma Kent and was dealing with the funeral arrangements. He called the Lanes. He was the friend Clark knew he could be under that tough exterior.

“Give me all you’ve got.” he asked her. She then flew away, making him follow her, and put at least a hundred miles between them and the plane. “If you put the slightest dent on my plane I’ll never speak to you again.” she said with a shake of her head. “How would you know?” he scoffed. “It’s invisible.” He had had enough of talking and charged her. “Believe me, I’d know!” she said through gritted teeth absorbing the impact easily. “C'mon. Give me your worst.” she shouted. “You can’t handle my worst!” he shouted back, shooting up and hovering high above her. “We’ll see.” she exclaimed and attacked.

The blows coming from her fists hurt.

He couldn’t complain, as her stubbornness and willingness to beat him into venting his frustration had truly helped.

She had offered to take him back, as the funeral had been scheduled for the next day. He refused.

Now, a week after she left, after getting tired of Kelex’s updates on the state of the world outside, and not really knowing what to do with himself anymore, he decided to go back to the only thing that made sense.

Metropolis. Catching bad guys, frustrating their plans. Helping humanity in any way he could. Anything to fill the void that she left. Maybe making Bruce really mad by hunting down and putting an end to the Injustice League single handedly, or finally catching Joker… He couldn’t decide.

Indecision and life after Lois were frightening, even for the man of steel, and without her beside him to face humanity, he didn’t know what was left to ground him.

Despite that, he found a calming monotony in rounding up bad guys and had been quite effective in the short time after coming back.

He didn’t go back to work, telling Perry he needed more time, but he could now think about her and remember without all that anger taking over his every thought. He was able to feel the pain, really feel it, feel her absence, but not be consumed by it.

Metropolis had become a much safer city and he was tempted to tell Bruce he could do the same for Gotham. Slightly.

He checked on her a few times, thinking he should go back and return the handkerchief he absentmindedly took and perhaps try that pastry Lois loved so much.

The thought was dismissed as quickly as it came. It was still too soon for that kind of ritual. Her memory was still fresh in his head.

The kind woman went on with her life, and the few times he had observed her, he noticed that she went out of her way to make sure her customers were happy.

He regretted not asking her name.

He could have overheard the conversations in the diner if he wanted to, but that felt wrong somehow.

Now, flying over the area he listened for her heartbeat; it had become a habit.

She wasn’t at the diner where he had expected to hear it.

Frowning, he flew high into the clouds and concentrated.

Her heartbeat was slow, almost faint, and not in the region he knew she lived.

Speeding to the area where the faltering beating was coming from, he found her lying on the ground of a closed junk yard, still in her uniform, and a shimmering red pendant lying on her chest.

Using his x-ray vision to assess she was unharmed, he picked her up and not knowing what else to do, shot into the sky straight towards the batcave.

#clark kent x reader #superman x reader #clark kent fanfiction #superman fanfiction #musings sans muse

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living-dead-parker · 6 years ago

Text

12 Days of Christmas; Charity Event - P.P

Summary: Day 4 - The night of Y/N’s annual Christmas charity event approaches and Peter learns some awesome news! Also, who knew Peter could be so cheeky?

Warnings: cussing maybe, fluff, and sexual innuendos

Word Count: 2k

series masterlist | masterlist

The glass and diamond Tiffany's ornaments shimmer under the light you shine upon them. Peter plugs in the cord into an outlet, illuminating the 14 foot Christmas tree that would later be auctioned off. Its monetary value was at around 20 thousand dollars, as a lot of the ornaments were from Tiffany's and most of them were custom made. Along with that, the star was made with some 24K gold. It's also a 14-foot tree so that in itself is pricey. Next to the large tree stands a table with all sorts of other auction items. After inspecting the tree, you move on to the kitchen, checking to see that the kitchen staff is all accounted for and had everything they need.

The doors would open soon and the guests would be arriving not too long after. The room has a warmer feel than it did last night as the room is illuminated in warmer colors. Yellows, reds, and some greens here and there. Lot's of gold too. You fix the wrinkles in your red dress, matching the same dress Morgan is wearing. She chose matching dresses, and you agreed, thinking it was a cute idea. The dresses were red and reached a bit above your knees. They had a black belt with a yellow buckle under the bust and had some white cotton-like material at the ends of the sleeves. The dress came with a matching red overcoat with the same white cotton-like material on the lining of the coat. You both even have matching Santa hat headbands. However, she wears the small kid heels with the straps while you wear knee-high boots.

Peter walks up behind you, pressing a kiss to your cheek. Turning, you can't help but bite your lips as you check him out. He's in a burgundy suit with his hair slicked over to the side. You press a kiss to his lips, wanting him close to you. However, you hear someone clear their throat, causing the two of you to pull away.

"Hey, I'm not old enough to be a grandfather, so please stop."

You roll your eyes playfully, pulling your father into a hug. He wraps his arms around you in a tight hug, giving you a kiss on your forehead. He's always been super close with you, often confiding in you with so many things he feels he can't tell Pepper. Not that he doesn't trust Pepper, he just doesn't want her to be disappointed in him, so he usually tells you things first. When Tony pulls away, he walks over to the table set up in front of everybody and takes a seat at his usual spot. You see Pepper taking her seat, followed by May, Michelle, and Ned. Morgan is with Pepper and it feels like it's the first time this week she's left your side. You didn't mind having Morgan at your hip because you wanted to lay down the foundation of your relationship with her early on. That she can count on her big sister with anything, and never to be scared to talk to you.

Once the others were settled, you walk over to the back hall as the doors are being opened. Gently, you push Peter up against the wall, holding him in place. You press a kiss to his lips, wanting him to stay in place. When you pull away, he chuckles, smiling down at you. His hands rest on your hips as you check the time. You have five minutes until you both head out, so you make sure to take advantage of the time while you can.

"Peter, this year, you're hosting with me." you tell him. His eyes go wide, unsure of how to feel about that.

"W-what? What do you me-"

"I didn't want you to see the posters or any promotional stuff for the event because I had a surprise for you. I know I should've told you before, but I didn't want you to back out last minute from pure fear," you tell him with a guilty smile on your perfect lips. Peter's brows furrow deeper, a look of pure curiosity in his eyes as he looks over at you.

"Why? What did you do?"

With an innocent smile, you wrap your arms around him. "I may or may not have put you as Co-runner for the event. As in, we plan, structure, and host the event together. I wanted to try the hosting this year and see if you liked it. See if you wanna have a role in this whole thing."

Peter's eyes are wide and his cheeks become blushed as he looks over at you. He hesitates to answer at first, but eventually, he does come around, smiling at you. Peter checks his watch and notices there's only one more minute left. So, he holds his arm out for you, which you eagerly take. Once the clock says six sharp, you open the door, grabbing the two mics on a small table near the very door. You hand one to Peter as the crowd cheers for the two of you.

Giving it a couple minutes the crowd eventually calms down. "Good evening everyone!" you speak into the mic, not once tearing your arm from Peter's grip. "I'm Y/N Stark and this is my boyfriend and co-host for tonight, Peter Parker!"

"Good evening, everyone," Peter says as he nervously plays with the cloth of your jacket. He looks at you as you begin to speak.

"This is the fourth annual Stark Christmas Charity Event and we welcome you to enjoy a night of entertainment and fun. Tonight we have some musical performers and comedy acts. We also have a special message from my father, Tony Stark!" you say excitedly. You and Peter head over to the table as Tony stands up from his seat.

"Welcome everyone," he starts, his voice loud and proud. "I just wanna say that I'm proud of Y/N for planning this and making it all a reality. I myself wanted to start something like this, but I never really knew how to execute it or where to start. Seeing my daughter work everything out night and day for the past 12 months was such a fascinating experience as she takes her work seriously and does everything with love and passion."

Tony takes a seat and suddenly, everyone's focus is on Peter as he begins to speak. "Please enjoy your meals, the bar is only one dollar per drink and we will open up the dancefloor later on in the night," Peter explains. He goes on to introduce the first act of the night, some comedian who is up and coming. Tony felt he was promising and that he could get laughs out of everybody.

As the night went on, everybody seemed to have a good time. Laughs are shared through the night, people are up and dancing to the performers and everyone seems to be feeling good. You were slightly infuriated when you saw that Adam Wesley and his father showed up that night, but fortunately enough, they never approached you or interacted in any way. Peter hosting was becoming easier to him and while he didn't want to admit it, he was a natural. This took May by surprise as he was typically shy and never one to have the spotlight.

"Once again, I'd like to say thank you to everybody here. It's time for the auction portion of the night. So, here we have my good friends Michelle and Ned passing around the bidder numbers. Take one and we will record the numbers of every winning bidder," you state. Peter walks up to you, deciding to help with the auction.

Once everyone is settled, you begin again. "The first item of the night is a travel package. A two week stay at the Four Seasons Jimbaran Bay resort in Bali. Each villa has its own private pool, as well as options for floating breakfasts, rose baths and it's located near plenty of nightlife. Opening bid starts at five hundred dollars."

Each item, bids came in left and right. Tony always liked to be the first to bid high, wanting to set the price a bit higher. So when people did bid, he'd manage to get the prices somewhere in the thousands. Each prize was hitting it out of the park and the final item was up on the podium now, and everybody was intrigued.

"The next item is the signature Stark Christmas tree. Adorned with custom-made Tiffany's ornaments, a gold-encrusted star, and diamond encrusted ornaments, amassing a height of 14 feet, this tree starts off at 15 grand," you state. The paddles go up and the bids start. By the end of it, the tree is sold for 50 grand.

"That concludes tonight's auction and tonight's event. Thank you all so much for joining us and helping out with our cause. We hope to see you all again next year. Good night!" you exclaim excitedly. The crowd cheers and everybody stands up, saying goodbye to other people they know.

People begin to approach you and congratulate you and Peter on the night's success. They mention how fun it was and for the first time in a while, you see Peter feeling comfortable talking to as many people as he is. Even May, once again, is shocked to see Peter openly speak with all these businessmen and women. By the end of it, Tony and Pepper decide to call it a night, taking a sleeping Morgan with them. After an hour, the room clears out and now it's just you and Peter, standing under the warm lights in the room. His hands are resting on your hips and your arms wrap around his neck.

"Thank you for tonight, Pete." you whisper. He shakes his head as he looks into your eyes. Slowly, the two of you begin to sway side to side. Leaning down, he presses his lips to yours as the two of you dance to nothing.

The kiss is sweet and passionate as he pulls you closer to him. He tastes like peppermint and peach schnapps, which takes you by surprise. He notices as you stop kissing back so he pulls away and looks at you.

"What's wrong?" he asks.

"Not that I'm totally against it, but were you drinking tonight?" you ask him. He playfully rolls his eyes and chuckles as he continues swaying side to side with you.

"I just had two and my spidey metabolism won't even let me get drunk, trust me." he tells you. With a giggle, you nod, pressing a kiss to his cheek.

"How did I get so lucky to get you?" you ask. Peter shakes his head, quick to shut that down. But you couldn't agree more. You were more than lucky to be with him and that's a fact.

"If anything, I'm the lucky one. I don't deserve you."

"Don't say that. You're literally the best person in the world, I don't deserve you. You're so nice and cute. You make me happy and you're selfless-"

"And you are all of those things too. You aren't like all the other rich snobs who rub it in people's faces and you're so hot. Like, I often find myself in shock that you chose me of all people." Peter says, causing you to get all warm inside, becoming putty in his grip. He giggles at your reaction before leaning down to kiss your neck.

"Morgan will probably be sleeping in your parents' beds tonight, we have your room all to ourselves tonight and I am on such a high from hosting tonight and that Santa dress is doing you no justice-"

"Oh shut it, let's get out of here then," you respond, grabbing his arm and pulling him along to the exit.

"Christmas is coming early for me!" Peter says excitedly.

"If you say something like that again, you won't be at all," you say through giggles. Peter can be really cheeky, but it's one of the many things you love about him.

"I know I've been naughty, but I can be a good boy," Peter continues.

"That's it. The mood's been killed. I was gonna be a ho ho ho for you tonight but those privileges have been taken away now, Parker."

Please leave me requests/asks. Also, leave feedback or talk to me about anything!!

Taglist (let me know if you wanna be added/removed): @bookgirlunicorn @bands-and-shietz @wolfgamzee

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fenton-bus · 4 years ago

Text

How To Lose Acquaintances And Discourage People

All you really need to know is this:

Austin spills his Monster Energy drink on some Hawaiian-shirt wearing redhead in his Poli-Sci class and Trish ends up paying for it for the remainder of her natural life.

∞

A long shadow falls over her IPad screen.

Despite the fact that she is a grownup-esque, adult-ish, totes mature person Trish honestly cannot help the rapid fluttering of her heart, the dizzy thrill of reckless hope at the possibility that today of all days, in this crummy corner of Daley’s surrounded by sad, dreamless randoms she’s managed to find her James Darcy or Edward Cullen. Bracing herself against her chair, Trish takes a breath, turns around.

“Do you ever think about parallel dimensions?”

JK, its Dez, decked out in a leopard print vest, polka dot pants combo that screams I’m a grown man.

Trish wrinkles her nose. “What are you wearing?”

He smiles, wide and warm before choosing a direction to stare into like a pirate ship captain gazing off into the horizon. Hands on hips, dignity forgotten.

A solitary hair flip. “I woke up like this.”

“Go back to sleep. It obviously didn’t work.”

His mouth falls open in an all too real outrage, palms spread. Sensing the full twirl before it happens Trish holds up one hand.

“Flawless.” Dez intones.

The voice is more Batman than Beyoncé.

“No.”

“Bow down.”

Trish winces. Grits her teeth. “We’ve been over this freckles, you’re not allowed to blaspheme Beyoncé Carter-Knowles.” It’s way too early in her life for this. "Please go put on different pants.”

“I hear your criticism, Dez rocks back on the balls of his feet. And I’m going to go in another direction.”

“The door?”

“Nope.” There is the ear-punching scratching of chair legs being dragged across the wooden floor (and the subsequent staring of sad randoms without lives) and bam, pale, freckled, freakishly long limbs are stretching across the table to get at her pumpkin spice muffin, gargantuan Franken-feet are nudging her flats under the table, and Dez’s face, sparkling with a truly exhausting amount of joy like they haven’t seen each other in four years as opposed to four days is turned toward her like some giant, non-verbal invitation there aren’t enough versions of ‘I Renounce Thee Satan’ in the world to rsvp to. Trish grabs her iced caramel macchiato and hugs it to her chest protectively.

“Go away.”

Dez eyes her IPad. “Dude, are you tweeting Quincy Jones again? He hasn’t responded to your last five tweets. He flips his hair again. (Trish does not growl) That last one had a pretty aggressive tone.”

“Carrot face, the girl says sweetly. I’m working.”

The doof actually smiles in this commiserating way, like he lives in a world where applying for internships and writing music reviews are in every way comparable to juggling or baking brownies or riding a unicycle down the Long Island Expressway or whatever he does with his free time. Trish rolls her eyes. Seven months ago she would’ve called Dez Wade a doof and moved on but now, his status is clear: he is high king of the doofs. The Eminent Supreme Doof. On his home planet, whole civilizations of lesser doofs have carved his image in stone and decorated the halls of his palace with his stupid, doofy portrait. The amount of sheer doofiness that is able to exist in one pale, stick figure of a body is Beyond.

Sometimes, the fact that someone like Dez even exists, much less speaks to her on a daily basis is just…how? Or, it would be, if Trish thought about it for too long. At the moment, she’s up to letting it sit in her brain for a maximum of thirty seconds before she decides to go out and

Anyway, Dez is saying “Cool,” like he’s worked before, and nodding and launching into a conversation he had with his cat this morning and she’s totally succeeding at not paying attention (on goes the IPad, hello Twitter) when he claps his hands real loud, real sudden, and shouts “Okay!”

The barista formerly carrying the iced mocha latte is currently frozen in place, watching it sail across the room. Staying on its given trajectory means it’ll collide with Wall Street Guy who chose today of all days to wear his best Brooks Brothers suit. But the dude is so busy having a deep convo with Bargain Basement 90s Era Will Smith (big ears, neon green windbreaker, dark purple fanny pack, currently singing the items on the specials board to himself) that he doesn’t notice the coffee he didn’t order until it’s sloshing around in what was previously his very natural looking hair piece. (Wall Street has been coming in and ordering black double espressos since midterms. Trish can’t believe she didn’t notice the rug.)

Wall Street Guy’s yelp is drowned out by the actual scream of the woman at the table behind him, when his wet hair falls on top of her cinnamon bun.

“My bad.” Dez mutters.

Trish manages to tear her eyes away from the beautiful train wreck long enough to give him her limited-edition, Side-Eye that had he actually been looking at her, would have given him the effect of feeling judged for all eternity.

Now Cammy the Barista is gazing off into the distance. Not like a pirate captain though, she looks legitimately horrified. Trish has seen that very specific brand of shock and terror on her co-workers faces whenever her bosses go on tangents about “trimming excess”. Trish knows that right this very moment, every tiny, seemingly trivial mistake Cammy’s ever made inside these walls is flashing through her head movie montage style. (the soundtrack? Her anguish) Every messed up order, every backed up afternoon rush, every time she had to tell the long-haired, piercing-riddled, Ray-Bans wearing, tattooed, painter from Brooklyn on his usual stop in during his morning bike ride no they didn’t have Amish-made, vegan cranberry pumpkin bread maybe he should try the vegan bakery on lower sixth and even though she got here at five and has already had three encounters that made her put quitting back on the table, and even though she has the same fifty-four word conversation with a dude who chooses to walk this earth with an un ironic rat tail every single morning since she woke up desperate enough to apply here, her voice is calm and polite and even a little regretful, like a tiny part of her feels bad about the fact that a major chain doesn’t carry Amish-made, vegan cranberry pumpkin bread-and then, after all of that Judgey McShower Please still finds enough inner tool bag necessary to take time out of his busy fixie bike tour of the lower east side to pluck one of the little white customer surveys from the pad next to the bucket of skull rings on the counter and fill it out, (resting his weight on the counter like the effort exerted by being a douche exhausts him) making passive aggressive scratching sounds with his pencil as he underlines the phrase “tone was needlessly aggressive” three times.

He hands it to her silently, hoists his bike on to his shoulder with one hand, and heads for the door. Trish hopes with all of her might that he rides through Hell’s Kitchen and falls into a construction hole.

As Cammy grapples with the very real possibility of being ‘terminated’ (she has school loans and a cat, and at some point, she kind of wanted to travel-or at least see a view that wasn’t her elderly neighbors listening to Tony Benet and sucking face.) and Trish tears her eyes away from the ‘well I never’ bluster of Wall Street Guys trembly rage, (if the vicious way he’s stabbing at his phone is any indication, this melt down is going to be epic) Dez manages to execute the ‘backing away slowly’ move while sitting down. He straightens his shoulders and fold his hands on the table like the last four minutes didn’t happen.

According to Trish’s Creeper Manual, (545 Pgs., De La Rosa Publishing, $150.00 retail value, all funds go to The Trish De La Rosa foundation) sixty seconds without blinking is classified as a stare.

Trish stares back.

Dez starts humming The Jurassic Park theme.

Her eyes are in very real danger of rolling out of her head and tumbling across this dirty floor.

Thirty seconds. Forty-five.

“Oh my God, what?”

Dez starts. Smiles. “Oh, I was just wondering what I would look like if I had a carrot for a face.”

“Do you own a mirror?” She says before she can stop herself.

Inexplicably (no, she doesn’t want to know) the doof’s grin grows. “Would my face like transform into a carrot or would it just get really orange?”

“Full on carrot. Trish nods. “Think werewolf but lamer.”

“I could live with that. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting eaten unless I ran into people who really liked carrots. Ooh, maybe there’s some birth defect that causes people’s faces to turn out vegetable-y! Trish!” He slams his fist on the table, winces real hard, finds the strength to continue. "What if that’s my destiny, to gather all of the down-trodden vegta-people, looked down on, denied their rights simply for being full of folic acid.”

His voice is rising like a Wonka-vator, gaze full of heroic things only he can see (thank god). She takes a long sip of her coffee, wonders what people lucky enough not to be her are doing right now.

“Maybe that’s why I was put on this earth, to teach them to love themselves. We’ll live a life free of the judgment of you normies; we’ll build our own colony, with our own laws. He rubs his chin in thought. Maybe we’ll live in a pyramid.”

“I will pack your bags.”

“Thank you.”

Trish leans over, smiling indulgently, pats his hands. “Anything for you buddy.”

“Aww, His face changes. Wait-“

“Hey, remember when I told you to scram?”

Dez nods, “Was that before or after we planned my future as the pop star impressionist Dezyonce?"

Deep in the caverns of Trish’s temporal lobes, lies a specific set of neurons responsible for the chemical reaction to strong, talented women being besmirched by fools, thus she is just barely able to resist slapping him in the face with his own hand. Assault is assault after all, and she has the feeling anytime spent in police custody would just result in the gleeful taking of pre and post lock up selfies.

“Listen Freckles, she intones, in the sweet tone that everyone but the idiot in front of her easily recognizes as the Trish DeLa Rosa, limited edition, “I Will Bury You, Then Innocently Read the Eulogy At Your Funeral With The Kind of Solemn Strength and Dignified Crying That Could Get Me An Oscar” timbre. I know some things-the concept of personal space, how much cologne is too much-are like, totally foreign to you, but if you pay attention, there are these tiny little things called indicators, that can tell you whether or not you’re going in the right direction.”

He’s doing that rapt attention thing, looking at her with undivided, singular focus like she’s reading him the bible or describing Zalian VII spoilers or giving him explicit instructions as to how to safely survive the on-coming zombie apocalypse. Trish thinks about this look approximately zero times a day, but if she did the quiet intensity of it, marred somewhat by the eagerness with which he leans over, as though it’s necessary to hear the pauses in her speech, would make the words gently elbowing each other for a prominent spot in her mouth feel incongruous.

But it doesn’t.

And they don’t.

"For example, not only is the amount of Fantasy you’re wearing right now about four times the amount Britney would be caught dead in, but I think we can go ahead and classify it as a biohazard.” Trish straightens her back against her chair. "And it’s weird that you don’t already know this, but “go away” doesn’t mean “oh my god, come closer” in magical, confusing girl language. In general it usually means “go away”, in this specific case, she leans over making sure he’s looking directly into her eyes so there’s no goofy sitcom confusion about this later in the week, “it means the English language hasn’t created a precise set of words that would accurately describe how badly I want you to get out of your chair, and walk away right now.”

Trish squares her shoulders. “That’s an indicator.”

She means for that to be punctuation, to go back to her tablet and if there is a God, maybe, just maybe hear the squeaking of a chair being pushed back and the shuffling of oversized P.F. Flyers, and every other sound of her morning being returned to her.

But. Dez isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at the hand curled around the collar of his sweater. There is a hand curled around the collar of his sweater and his eyes are trained downward, so he can look at it without moving his head. But then he dips his chin a little, just a couple of inches and it’s hers. Her hand. Trish’s.

“It’s Curious.”

“What?”

“I don’t um, I’m allergic to Fantasy so I only…” His voice tapers off, and Trish, Trish rips her hand away.

Dez looks at his hands, spread across the table, wiggles his fingers once, two times.

“So, um…yeah.” The squeaking of the chair legs being dragged across the floor is twice as loud, an unpleasant burst in her ears. The shuffling of worn, size twelve sneakers starts.

Stops.

“You want people to be afraid of you," His voice doesn’t tapper off, is calm and quiet and if it shakes only Dez knows for sure. But they aren’t. I know what that is, and no one, nobody’s afraid of you.”

Trish looks at the looping pink cursive of the specials board, Boca patties with bean sprouts, blue cheddar hummus, mushrooms and mozzarella on chibata.

“People feel sorry for you.”

Green onions and black bean sauce. Margarita pizza grilled cheese. Spinach and kale mini kiesh. God how many specials does this stupid place have?

“Everyone feels sorry for you and they just act like they’re afraid, because that’s the politest way to do it. No one would ever say it to your face.”

The thing Cammy puts above the door isn’t a legitimate bell, it’s from some dumb door handle Christmas ornament reject thing her mom got her as a sort of homemade alarm system when she moved to Bushwick. Like something that sounds like a cat toy was gonna successfully warn her daughter about intruders. It doesn’t even work. The sound gets lost before it reaches the Beans of Columbia display.

She sits for a minute. Her index finger brushing against her th-

She sits for a minute. Orders another caramel macchiato ‘cause her first one’s cold. She could heat it up but those coffee microwaves make everything taste weird. Her laptop emits a dissonant buzz that sounds like a choir of atonal bees.

She doesn't move for a long time.

#the Dade County Arts Council #trish 'rumors of my pro-ginger status have been wildly exaggerated' dilrosa #dez 'modern day Floridian George Bingley' wade #so long to the headstrong #musical woe aus #collegiate grief aus #outlines and outliers #musical mystery inc.

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