#i got sick and could only work on it in tiny increments

[boo-topia]

@ginnyweatherby Just for you bestie💖

[thecleverdame]

Control and Release - 29

Series Masterlist

TEDTalk!Sam x Reader

Summary: After the rest of the staff is caught in a snowstorm, you find yourself acting as a personal assistant to the notorious Sam Winchester. As the arrangement becomes more defined, you and Sam begin a sexual adventure with dangerous consequences.  

Warnings: Dom/Sub, humiliation, embarrassment, sexual objectification, mutual masturbation, spanking, cum play, fingering, anal play, orgasm control, nipple clamps, dub-con, breath play.

Beta: @ilikaicalie

Words: 2.4k

Parts 1-35 are currently available on Patreon for a monthly pledge of $2.50. This includes early access to all my stories, including the ABO series Gods of Twilight and Patreon exclusive content.  >> CLICK HERE <<

-

You fully intend to clean yourself up before the big presentation. Despite Sam’s insistence on your experiencing the full after-effects of your quick afternoon fuck, you’re not living in a twenty-four-seven sexual fantasy. This is real life and you can’t have cum dripping down your thighs while you’re presenting to Toni Bevel.

After a pit stop in the bathroom to clean yourself up, you head to the conference room. You manage to get there with just enough time to set up your presentation and pull yourself together before people start arriving.

Toni is the last to show up. She arrives with Mick, failing to even acknowledge your presence as she sits down and begins reading something on her iPad. Part of you wonders if she’s still carrying a torch for Sam, there has to be a reason she hates you in such brazen style. Maybe she hates everyone, she seems like the type.

The beginning goes well. You’re halfway through a slide show, trying to make office comradery seem invaluable when you can feel it. There’s a wet sensation and the slide of what’s left of Sam’s cum is making its way down your thighs.

It’s not that anyone would know, but the instant you feel it happening there’s a sick feeling. You fidget around, trying to clamp your legs together, garnering looks from both Cole and Toni. Stumbling through the next few slides you’re all too happy when a corporate video pops up and you push play, excusing yourself to run to the restroom.

Both embarrassed and a little turned on you clean yourself up for the second time and make it back to the conference room just in time to see the video finish.

“Does anyone have any questions?” you ask.

“I’m not sure I fully understand,” Toni begins. “So your position is to talk to people, make friends and...what? Help wayward outsiders acclimate to their new role?”

“It’s more nuanced than that.” You refuse to look away as she stares you down. She knows your secret, but you know hers too. Simply having the knowledge she’s slept with Sam Winchester and that he rejected her, shifts the power. She’s still the heavy hitter but you’ve gained a bit of leverage.

“Oh, I’m sure it is. The devil is always in the details.” She blinks, unmoving and locked onto you like a bird of prey.

“It’s been invaluable,” Cole speaks up, leaning forward. “My job is to pick teams that work well together. The liaison position isn’t just socializing. It’s analyzing the quarterly behavioral preference tests, sorting through the employee satisfaction survey we take every month. Winchester believes that pairing the right people is what sets W&S above and beyond other firms that provided these services. We’re effective because we have the right people in the right places. That’s what Y/N does.”

“The right people in the right places,” Toni repeats with a subtle hint of amusement and your cheeks turn red. “Right, then. I’m not sure this required an entire presentation but I can see the value.”

Almost everyone leaves and you check your email as Cole does the same.

“You alright?” he asks.

“I’m fine, why?”

“You seemed...agitated, distracted. That’s not your norm.”

“I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“I know certain topics are off limits, but if you need to talk to someone about the panic attacks, I’m here. I had a rough time after I got out of the service. I get it.” His offer is casual, in fact, he barely glances up and you’re grateful. Not everything has to become such a big deal.

“Thanks.” The truth is you like Cole, you have from the beginning and having a friendship would certainly make everything else easier. “Maybe we could have a drink one night.”

-

There’s a metal bar affixed to the door that leads to Sam’s bedroom from the parlor. It’s normally higher up, he uses it for pullups in the morning, but tonight it’s been lowered and repurposed. Your hands are in cuffs above your head, looped over the bar. The flats of your feet are able to touch the ground, but just barely, forcing you to focus on posture so that your weight isn’t a strain on your wrists.

The first thing he did was strip you naked and tie a blindfold over your eyes. You can’t see the rest but you can feel it, nearly shaking in anticipation, waiting not-so-patiently while he gets you ready.

There’s the click of metal and cold steel around both ankles. It only takes a minute to realize you can no longer close your legs. He’s using a spreader bar to hold you open. There’s nothing but the sound of him moving quietly around you and then a warm hand on your belly. You flinch at his touch, excitement and nervous tension building in tandem.

“Do you know what this for?” he asks. He’s close, so close that you feel his breath on your cheek when he speaks.

“Yes.” You nod, mouth open in an anticipatory pant.

“Tell me.”

“I came without permission.”

“You came twice without permission. Both times after I specifically instructed you not to.” He corrects, swatting your ass with an open palm. You yelp, twisting in the restraints, dangling and trussed up.

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“No, it won’t.” One finger trails up your spine and then around your ribs, stopping to trace the underside of your breast. “There are repercussions for a lack of self-control.”

“I understand.” This is definitely something new. He’s normally not one for toys and contraptions. While he often incorporates a dildo or vibrators, it doesn’t get more elaborate than that.

“Open your mouth. Stick your tongue out.”

Your jaw falls open as you wait to find out what comes next. A sizable ball gag is shoved between your teeth and fastened at the back of your head.

“This,” he grabs your pussy, cupping your sex with one huge hand. “This is mine. Your orgasms are mine. Do you understand?”

“Ahuh,” you mumble through the gag as his hand leaves your crotch.

“I’m not sure that you do.” His voice is deadpan, emotionless and yet filled with the disappointment of an unhappy father. Two hands cup your breasts and then tweak both nipples in tandem, squeezing and plucking until they’re stiff little peaks. Then he’s gone again, only to return with the sound of metal clanking in his hand.

Without warning you feel a metal clamp close over your right nipple, tiny little teeth sinking into flesh as you jerk against your bonds. Before you stop moving he manages to attach the second one as well, both of them painfully tight.

Your clit throbs and your pussy goes slick in a matter of moments. In the past, there’s been a build up to this point. He’d use the clamps but tighten them incrementally. Tonight he’s using them as punishment, crushing your tender buds with no warning.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, giving the chain between them a tug. You yelp into the gag and nod fervently in confirmation. “Good. I bet your cunt is wet.”

His hand pushes between your thighs, his middle finger wiggling into your pussy to check. He finds exactly what he expects, you’re slick with arousal, body forever betraying how much you enjoy the pain.

“You can’t help it, can you? You need it, to be disciplined, taught a lesson. This desperate little pussy is begging for it.”

“Uh,” you moan, feeling drool ooze from around the gag and slide over your chin.

Sam tugs the clamps with one hand and swats your ass with the other. Three tugs and three spanks as you squirm, utterly helpless.

“What’s the safe word?” he asks, leaning closer.

“Op,” you manage a muffled version of stop.

“Louder,” he instructs.

“Op!” you repeat.

“Good. I don’t expect you to use it unless you absolutely need to. This is supposed to be a punishment. You’re not going to enjoy all of it. Are you going to be good for me?”

“Yesh,” you agree.

You’ve never used the safe word before and the fact that he’s brought it up has you a little worried.

He swipes the drool from your chin and wipes it on your breasts, purposely pushes against the clamps. Whimpering, you hang there, trying to listen for any hints. You feel him spread your sex open to expose your clit. Then there’s something gooey rubbing over your little bud. He massages the substance for a few seconds and then backs away.

There’s nothing...then a cold sensation. It starts as a little tingle and then gets more intense. It gets colder and colder and the sensation becomes more complex. It’s straddling the line between stinging and tingling, more intense than you were prepared for.

You moan again and again, yanking at the cuffs and crying in desperation to close your thighs for some relief, but the bar at your ankles has you permanently open.

Nipples burning, clit engulfed in this sensation, your cunt is aching, slick sliding down your inner thighs. You’re often aroused despite feelings of humiliation but this is a whole new level.

“Control yourself,” he hisses and gives your pussy a nasty spank. You jerk, neck falling back as the clamps jiggle and your clit begins to throb harder. There’s a second whack, his hand managing to hit your clit and pussy at the same time. He wipes your juices on your belly. “Look at how fucking wet you are. You’re drooling from your mouth and this needy little cunt. How am I supposed to teach you a lesson when you enjoy the punishment this much?”

His finger finds your clit. It’s burning now, swollen and tingling with cold fire as he pinches it between his fingers. You try to pull away, twisting and shuffling your feet but there’s nowhere to go.

“Look at you...you should see yourself.” He presses his chest against your back, rolling your bud between his fingers. ��Desperate and swollen and begging to be fucked. Do you want a cock in your pussy?”

“Hmm,” you groan, eyes opening and closing behind the blindfold. It’s not really a response, just a desperate sound. You’re so mixed up you don’t know if want it to stop or keep going. You don’t know if you want him to fuck you or spoon you. What you do know is that you’re aching to be filled.

“You’re so wet I could probably fist you...if I wanted to. Stretch you open while you’re strung up. You couldn’t stop me if you wanted too.”

“Oo,” you shake your head no. The idea of him fisting you is something you might be willing to consider but not in this position.

He chuckles, two fingers scissoring on either side of your clit and pressing down.

“You want my cock?” he asks, the heat of his chest pressed against your shoulder blades.  

“Yesh,” you nod furiously. There are tears on your cheeks while he slowly masturbates you.

“You’re not going to cum tonight. Do you understand?”

“Yesh.” You’re feverish now, broken at the thought of being this worked up but being denied relief.

His hand leaves your clit, fingers curling around your hip and pulling you back toward him. A moment later you feel his cock poking against your ass before slipping between your thighs. He takes his dick in his hand, guiding the head into your soaked hole from behind. From this position he can easily fuck you without the danger of getting any of the mysterious substance on himself.

With one thrust he pushes forward and pulls you back in tandem. You’re on your toes as he strokes deep inside. You whimper, drool dripping from your chin onto your breasts. Reaching around he gives the clamps a tug, slowly fucking you and yanking on the clamps in rhythm until you’re delirious from the wonderful combination of pleasure and pain.

You could cum if you let yourself. If you relax you’ll have an orgasm on the spot but you keep your mind focused on the task at hand, holding yourself together long enough for Sam to finish. He must be worked up because it doesn’t take him very long. He’s normally got unmatched stamina, but the buildup had an effect on him. It’s only a few minutes of his drilling into you before he grabs one breast, the other hand on your hip, pulling you back into him as he cums. His thrusts slow down, fucking you slow and measured until his load is running down your legs for the third time that day.

“Fuck,” he huffs. He pulls out, letting you feel the final drag of his cock before it pops free. You’re wound up tight, vibrating in pleasure and pain, hovering right at the edge of what could be the ultimate pleasure, but you’re not about to break the rules again.

You grunt into the gag, and immediately he’s unbuckling it, pulling it free from your mouth and letting it drop onto the floor.

“Are you alright?” he murmurs, his mouth pressed into your cheek.

“I think so. I’ll let you know in a minute.”

Sam quickly releases you from the restraints and then picks you up with a satisfied little grin and carries you to the shower where he washes you gently until all traces of the event are washed away.

“You were incredible,” he says, kneeling on the tile, wiping a cloth softly between your legs. When he does he places a kiss on your belly. You watch this beautiful man on his knees in front of you, the water cascading over him like something out of a dream. He catches you watching him and stands up.

“What did you put on me?” you ask as both his hands slide under your jaw. You’re still swimming somewhere on the edge of pleasure, whole body quivering like jelly.

Sam grins, tilting his head as he inspects your face, apparently enjoying what he sees.

“Toothpaste.”

“Really?” You’re surprised, amazed that something so simple could cause such delicious torture.

“It’s effective without being too much.” His thumb lands under your chin, tilting you up to focus on him. “It wasn't too much, was it?”

“I would have told you if it was.”

Once you’re both cleaned up, you wander out of the bathroom wrapped in a thick robe. Sam’s got a towel around his hips, balancing a laptop on one hand, already checking his email. You stop to admire the sight of him, wet hair slicked back and strong, long muscle. He somehow becomes more attractive the longer you’re with him.

Out of the silence, comes the muted music from somewhere outside the building.

“What’s that?” you ask, sitting on the couch.

He cracks open the door to the balcony and the soft strains of a violin waft inward. “There’s a string quartet playing on the street.”

“I love this place, being right in the city like this. I’d never want to live here full time or anything but it’s a nice change of pace.”

“I agree. Room service?” Sam towels off his hair and brings you a paper menu, before going back to his computer.

“Yes,” you snatch it away from him looking over the options.

It’s as you’re reading the ingredients list for the chowder that the old familiar sensation bubbles up. It starts as a tingling somewhere in the back of your head, accompanied by an anxious feeling. Unknown panic builds slowly as you try to regain control, taking a few deep breaths and sitting back against the cushions.

“Sam.” You close your eyes, fists balling up.

“Hmm?” He’s distracted.

“Something’s happening.”

“What kind of something?” he asks but in reality, he already knows, his voice moving closer and the couch sinking down beside you. “Right now?”

“Ahm,” you nod, opening your eyes to look at him. “I can’t breath.”

“Yes, you can.” He snakes a hand inside your robe, placing it over your chest. “Deep breaths with me. In through your nose, out through your mouth.”  He breathes in and out loud and slow as you try to match him.

For a moment you think it’s helping but then you feel a surge whirling up from the depths and before you know it you’re hyperventilating and your vision goes fuzzy.

“I-I’m gonna…pass out,” you wheeze, gulping desperately for air like a fish on dry land. You reach out, grabbing his hand and holding on tight as fear takes over.

“It’s okay, I’m right here.” He reassures you, watching with a furrowed brow as you stare at him wide-eyed, losing consciousness. His face is fuzzy, then blurry and the sound of his voice slows down. “You’re going to wake up in a few minutes and you’ll be just fine. I’m right-”

And then nothing.

[cianmars]

Peter Benjamin Anthony Parker-Stark was kidnapped from his home when he was four years old. Tony Stark searched tirelessly for him for the next ten years, only to have him fall into his hands by chance... only probably being that Peter was being 'looked after' by Hydra that whole time. Peter was injected with something just before being saved, could this ruin his chances of finally having a somewhat normal life.

AO3

Chapter One:

August 10th 2006 - August 10th 2010 - August 10th 2020.

Anthony Edward Stark was fourteen when he had decided that he would never become a parent. It was when he had been unceremoniously dropped off at MIT, forced to pose with his ‘proud’ parents, then as soon as they were out of the view of the worlds’ media his father had slapped him for wearing a ACDC shirt, within five minutes his mother and father had left him, driving away for yet another ‘well deserved’ vacation, Tony filled the hole left by their departure with the serbian vodka Obie had given him as a leaving present.

Tony later met Rhodey and the loss of his parents was forgotten, or at least he pretended it was, but his own promise stuck in his mind: He was never going to be a father.

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It had worked for years, he had always made sure to have protection, to check that the many women he slept with were clean and they were being safe, not that Virginia Potts ever seemed to believe that, it became like muscle memory.

There had been false claims of course, enough that there was an entire legal department of Stark Industries devoted to it, none had been convincing enough to go far enough to get on Pepper (and therefore his ) radar.

He was safe.

Always.

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But nothing was entirely effective, there was always going to be a small, incremental, chance that a pregnancy would occur.

It had been Mary Parker who had turned all of that around. She had been the exception to the rule. She had passed every test and had the bump to prove it.

She didn’t want a pay off, for it , or for the whole workplace sexual harassment thingy which Pepper had been very mad at him about (she had only gotten madder when he had suggested that she was just jealous that a different red head had caught his eye, he had kept his mouth shut about only half kidding or he would have lost her).

It had taken Tony one night of getting way too drunk, driving way too fast in his car, and falling into Rhodey’s apartment instead of into another girls bed like he had intended, for Tony to realise that he couldn’t stand to have a kid out there and to not know about them, to not be part of it.

He amended his own, decades old, promise: He would never be a father like his own father had been .

It took another two weeks to fully convince himself that he could do it, well he believed it about 80% which seemed like it was enough to tell Pepper and Mary Parker his decision, in that order.

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The next six months passed in a slew of changes, he moved all his weapons out of all his workshops in all of his properties, he stopped drinking, stopped taking drugs, he even started sleeping more, though he insisted that those three things weren’t linked, mostly to wind Pepper up. He looked up houses in Malibu, close to one of the Stark offices, but a good place for the kid to grow up, better than Manhattan, his kid was going to grow up around the beach, the year round sun, he’d take him to do all that outdoorsy scout shit his own father had never encouraged (he had once sent a house and home magazine type thing a photograph of Tony in a purchased scout uniform with the caption something about Tony particularly loving going fishing with his father, Tony often wondered if the sale of deadly weapons had increased after that).

He bought every possible product he or Mary would need, set up bank accounts ready, he took classes on everything from infant first aid, to some infant martial arts class or something (okay perhaps he hadn’t paid much attention to that class but he had still taken it, it might have been like tai chi or something). He built nurseries in all of his homes, he baby proofed all of them, made sure that no weapons were allowed in any of the buildings, not even his current penthouse a the top of the Stark Tower. He insisted that if, when, they moved to Malibu he’d pay for whatever and whoever Mary needed to move with.

The further into the pregnancy the more Mary Parker seemed to be around, but the quieter she was, there was something wrong but she insisted she was okay and would bring the talk back around to the one topic which could distract Anthony Stark:

Peter Benjamin Anthony Stark.

The names they had finally settled on after finding out that the baby would be a boy, Tony kept trying to add Parker in there too, partially because he knew that his father would have hated it, but Mary insisted no, Benjamin was after a brother of hers who had died, that was enough for her. She had insisted on the Anthony too, she had insisted it sadly after distracting him away from their original deal of 50/50 custody, he thought she might cut and run but she actually told him that she thought it would be a good idea for him to have the baby a little more, that she would work (and no she wouldn’t accept his handouts so he should stop asking).

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When Mary went into labour a month early and immediately rushed off due to complications Tony Stark was certain he was going to have a heart attack, instead he had a panic attack in the waiting room over the fear of losing his baby. Pepper had been at his side, had calmed him down, had been his anchor in the storm, or whatever the saying was.

Hours, years, lifetimes, later the doctor called him into the room.

He led Pepper in, holding her hand, she looked as scared as him, he only let go of her when he saw the hospital crib in the middle of the room, next to the empty and freshly made bed. His son.

He was okay, the doctor insisted, a little smaller than ideal, but he was okay, he’d be okay, he was a fighter.

Mary had been a fighter too, she really had, but there had been a clot, a massive one… she hadn’t survived.

He was set out of the hospital three days later, with the tiny baby he was terrified to hold but couldn’t stop himself from holding, with Pepper, but without Mary. Peter Parker-Stark was already starting life with the disadvantage of only having 50% of his parents.

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Fatherhood was something which Tony was never quite sure he was achieving, or ever part of, not for those first six months anyway. Peter struggled to grow, he cried every time someone who wasn’t Pepper or Tony held him, he just wouldn’t sleep. Obie kept trying to get him to either sign over the company to him or to at least attend some of the meetings so he would, with Peter in this scarf-like contraption keeping him to his chest, Obie hadn’t been happy about that, but that was kind of the point.

Tony figured that Peter would fall asleep if he talked to him, or if they listened to Tony’s secret greatest 80’s hits playlist, that he liked to try and tinker in Tony’s office with him, that he loved the natural history museum, and their summers in Malibu where he played on the beach and Tony would do his best to keep his son out of the press as much as possible.

They celebrated every holiday together, him, Peter, and Pepper, who was just part of them now, not that she had ever been anything else. Tony’s birthdays stopped being huge parties and instead became a disney then, when the kid fell asleep, an action movie, and takeout with Pepper and Peter.

Tony didn’t know enough about Mary Parker to tell their son, she had refused to talk about herself, something he was only realising now, so he bought some books on organic chemistry, her specialty, and read them out loud to Peter until the, now, toddler fell asleep against his chest.

Being a father was a mantle which Tony had grown in, excelled at, and had become the best Stark father in a century.

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Peter was what he owed his own success to, he was a clingy kid, but he was an angel, so much that Pepper would sometimes joke about getting a DNA test, he was incapable of lying (something he found when he had told Peter -who Tony had believed was asleep- that he loved Pepper and was going to ask her out on a date), he was so smart too, smart enough that at the age of four he had matched his father’s ability to design and build a circuit board, who made his Uncle Rhodey wear sparkly pink stickers when Tony and Peter had visited him at work, Rhodey had kept them on all day. The kid was still small for his age, but he never stopped talking, especially if it was to “daddy ‘n’ mommy Pep”, when Tony and Pepper got married in a small (only a thousand or so people) ceremony Peter dropped the Pep part, as though the kid had been waiting all his life for that day.

In short, they were a family, they were happy, they struggled, they argued, Peter had tantrums and got sick sometimes, but for the most part they were happy.

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It happened when Peter was sick, when he was tired and whiny, when Pepper was across the country at some board meeting or scholarship awards ceremony night thing, whatever it was Tony had lost track off between the time difference and the crying, feverish, four year old who was clinging to him.

“Daddy…!”

“I know buddy, I know, c’mon Petey-Pie, just lie on the couch while Daddy gets your medicine.”

“Don’t wan’ you to go!”

“Bambi, I’m not going anywhere, just grabbing it from there,” he let out in a sigh, pointing towards the kitchen, he pulled his son close to him, running his hand through his slightly sweaty brown curls before pressing a kiss to his forehead, “okay buddy. You trust me, right? I pinky promise I’ll be right back, as soon as you’ve counted to six.”

“To six?”

“Yup,” He sent him the smile which was reserved for only Peter and Pepper… maybe Rhodey if he wasn’t annoying him, “unless you can’t count to six…”

“I can!” The kid shouted, his enthusiasm overtaking his tears. “Go daddy.”

Tony grinned, relieved it had worked without having to carry the kid, even if he was small enough that it wasn’t really a hassle, but Tony was starting to get older and feel those aches and pains of carrying a child nearly every day for four years. Tony pressed a last kiss to his forehead then let go of his son.

Peter began to count.

“One.”

“Two.”

Tony was in the kitchen.

“Three.”

Tony grabbed the bottle of medicine, his cellphone was ringing, it was one of the important ringtones, JARVIS would usually put it on speaker for him but Peter was there, he fished his phone out of his pocket, his back was to his son.

“Four.”

The pain came hard and fast, something hitting the back of his head, hard, he fell to the floor unconscious.

Peter never got to the number five.

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Tony awoke in hospital, he had been kicked enough after he had passed out that he had broken ribs, a broken nose, apparently someone had even bothered to break his arm while he was down on his kitchen floor. He would have had some sardonic comment about them really wanting to be rough with him… but instead he asked for Peter.

The room went silent.

He demanded again, this time louder, more forceful, even as he shouted he was trying to push himself out of the hospital bed.

Pepper burst into the room as nurses tried to stop him from ripping IVs out of his arms.

“They’ve got him! Someone took him! Tony, they took Peter!”

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The years kept coming and they didn’t stop coming after that:

Tony was kidnapped, nearly died a few times, became a superhero, had his big coming out thing, nearly died from poisoning, scienced the shit out it, saved himself, joined the ‘Avengers’, Pepper died, or nearly died, he saved her, they finally fixed their marriage for good, helped Steve Rogers snap Bucky out of his funk/murderous assassin Buzz Lightyear Spanish mode thing, accidentally unleashed an evil AI, sacrificing Jarvis. They all had a fight in a Denny’s parking lot before realising it wasn’t worth it over some paperwork, instead they worked together, amending and rectifying the accords, eventually they got them passed.

And spent nearly ten years chasing down every hint, clue, whisper of Peter Stark. Nothing. Ever.

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His phone rang, Rogers, who preferred to text which Tony found eerie coming from a nearly one hundred year old guy, he picked it up, knowing it would be a mission, something important, as they all treated him with kiddie gloves this day every year, not letting him get drunk, not letting him beat the shit out of human scum, not letting him be alone, not letting him go on missions.

“Ya?” His eyes flicked to the bottle of Johnnie Walker blue, onto the framed photograph of him, Pepper, and Peter, all together on Christmas morning. He had been so excited that day, he was finally old enough to understand it, he and Pepper were beaming at Peter as though he were their gift. “New York, yeah sure, 4 minutes…. Cap, I can look after myself, I’m fine, I’m used to it. Cut it out, and tell the others not to start, or I just won’t bother coming.” He hung up.

He found himself stuck to his seat for  a minute. “Happy Birthday, Petey-Pie.”

He left the lab ready to go on a mission, to prove to himself that he was right, that he was okay and he could do this until…. Until they had confirmation on Peter, one way or the other.

[goodlucktai]

don’t make a noise, don’t leave the room

good omens pairing: aziraphale/crowley word count: 2926 title borrowed from you are jeff by richard siken

read on ao3

x

Aziraphale wakes up, which is a distinctly disconcerting feeling when one doesn’t often sleep in the first place. Added to his discomfort is the fact that he’s on the floor, limbs sprawled every which way, with a pounding in his head that makes him think he forgot to sober up before falling asleep.

“Ugh, really, my dear,” he grumbles, pushing himself upright. “Just how much did we have to drink?”

He expects to open his eyes to the back room of the bookshop, but he doesn’t. There is no worn-thin carpet beneath his hands, no aged coffee table or yawning loveseat, and certainly no snake-eyed demon draped on a flat surface nearby to poke fun at Aziraphale for being a messy drunk.

In fact… Aziraphale doesn’t know where he is at all.

“Finally awake, are you?” a familiar voice snaps.

Aziraphale’s heart sinks. He turns around to find himself under the scornful scrutiny of the archangels Uriel and Sandalphon.

What on earth?

“What, um, are you doing here?” He pushes himself to his feet, looking around at the unfamiliar room they’re in. “What am I doing here?”

“I don’t know what’s happened to you to make you so different,” Uriel tells him shortly, “but if you haven’t Fallen yet, you can probably be rehabilitated.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, and Aziraphale doesn’t know where to begin.

“Ah, no thank you,” he decides to go with, straightening his waistcoat for something to do with his hands. He’s terribly uneasy, bordering on frightened, with having been summoned here by them in the first place. It’s safe to assume he won’t want any part of their plans to rehabilitate him, whatever that could mean. “I thought we had agreed I was best left to my own devices. I’m perfectly happy on Earth.”

Going on as if he hadn’t spoken, Uriel says, “You’re never going to be a proper angel while you’re running around with a demon, of all things.”

Aziraphale goes cold at the mention of Crowley. He finds himself listening more intently now, preparing himself for fight or flight.

“You’ll see,” his estranged sibling tells him, as if to reassure. “He can’t actually care about you, Aziraphale. He’s not capable of it. I’ll prove it to you, and then you’ll come home.”

“I don’t care about all that,” Sandalphon says with a cruel smile. “I’m only here for the show.”

Uriel waves a hand, and something appears in the middle of the floor. It’s Aziraphale, or a likeness of him, sprawled in a heap like a discarded puppet. Its eyes are vacant and staring. There’s a sword driven through its chest and the burned outline of wings outspread on either side of its body.

Aziraphale feels sick just looking at it.

“You’ll see,” Uriel tells him. “Just watch.”

Their horrible plan is beginning to take shape. Horrified, Aziraphale surges forward, beginning to say, “You mustn’t—” when he runs headlong into what feels like a brick wall.

The hard collision all but bounces him back, sending him staggering. Eyes stinging, Aziraphale looks down at where a binding circle lay at his feet. Dormant until he tested the lines, it’s glowing with holy white light now. The work of an archangel, and well beyond his power to break.

Aziraphale tries his luck against it anyway, gritting his teeth through the sharp recoil.

Uriel and Sandalphon watch him with a remote interest, like he’s a little animal doing something clever, and Aziraphale shouts, “Don’t do this! Let me out!”

“But it’s just getting good,” Sandalphon says gleefully, and that’s when Crowley’s bright presence appears on the scene.

Aziraphale feels him coming before the others do. He whips around just as the door flies open, his lovely demon flying through like a mad thing.

“I got your message, angel, could you have been anymore cryptic? And what are you doing way out here any… way…”

He stops dead when he sees the archangels, his face twisting into a snarl.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale calls, hoping against hope that Crowley might hear him.

Crowley doesn’t so much as twitch in his direction. Goddammit, Aziraphale thinks with a venom that should surprise him, and throws his metaphysical weight against the barrier once more.

“What have you done with Aziraphale?” he hisses, more serpent than man now, despite what his body may look like. They will certainly be having a talk later about his lack of self-preservation in face of two archangels, but for now Aziraphale can only watch in terror as Crowley begins to stalk. “You both think you’re hot shit. I know he’s here, I can feel him.”

“Or what’s left of him, anyway,” Uriel says flatly, and steps aside to show Crowley her creation.

The look on Crowley’s face breaks Aziraphale’s heart.

“No,” he mutters. “No no, angel, no.”

He’s across the room without moving, skipping through space-time like he’s forgotten how to do it the mortal way. He crashes to his knees in the ash around the corpse and his hands tremble as if they don’t know which direction to fly in first.

His yellow eyes are stark and wild. The sword impaled through the puppet’s chest is flung violently away by work of a crude miracle, and only then does Crowley touch him.

Human, so human, in the way his fingers fumble against Aziraphale’s wrist for a pulse. Searching out the familiar heartbeat, the reassuring sound of life.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale screams it so loud it all but tears his throat. “Lord, spare him this! Let him hear me, please!”

The Almighty isn’t granting prayers today. Crowley is kneeling in what he thinks is the burnt-out remains of Aziraphale’s grace. His fingers are sooty and dark with feather dust.

Uriel and Sandalphon are watching the scene raptly, as if waiting for Crowley to break character, to stand up and dust his hands off and say “ah, well, so my evil plan turned out to be a wash.”

But he never does. He doesn’t even seem to remember they’re there. He might as well be alone in all the world, so possessed he is by grief. He hauls Aziraphale’s body up into his arms, bows his head, and begins to weep.

Aziraphale’s holy core burns within him, bursting at the seams and straining so ferociously against the archangel’s binding that it’s a wonder he doesn’t melt his human body clean away with the effort.

“It’s enough!” he cries. “You’ve seen enough! What more could you possibly want?”

“Disgusting,” Sandalphon says gleefully. “Whoever heard of a demon mourning?”

But demons were the first to mourn, Aziraphale thinks, dazed by such willful ignorance. They were the first to have lost.

“But it isn't real,” Uriel says slowly. “It can't be.”

Crowley goes abruptly, terribly still.

His shoulders freeze in the middle of a sob. He’s a creature of sudden stone, an anguished work of art. Aziraphale is pressed hard against the barrier between them, blinking wetness from his eyes, trying to see what’s happened, what changed.

Crowley’s lips part, the forked edge of his tongue darting out almost too quick for the eye to follow. He kneels there, his awful collapse of limbs and sorrow, his arms wound around the shape of Aziraphale, and scents the air again.

Then he lifts his head. There’s no chance for anyone to react before Crowley stops time. There are still the sounds of traffic outside, and rain, and Aziraphale himself is still present and aware; so it’s only the archangels that have been displaced from the steady onward drum of the universe.

It’s silent. Aziraphale’s heart is the loudest thing in the room, pounding against his chest.

Crowley lowers the body gently to the floor, his hands lingering, the curl of his fingers reluctant. When he finally lets go he does it with a painful yank, and he pushes himself to his feet as though gravity is somehow ten times heavier where he's standing.

His eyes are burning yellow, like sulfur, like the bright warning bands of a venomous reptile. He doesn’t move the way a human would, or even the way a snake would; he moves like he’s rearranging the fabric of space and time in tiny step-like increments, bearing him closer to where Uriel and Sandalphon are still standing like sculptures.

Aziraphale watches as Crowley draws right up to them. He studies Sandalphon’s face closely; the archangel’s mouth is twisted in a sneer, caught in the act of throwing Aziraphale a look of hateful triumph.

And then, following Sandalphon's line of sight with utmost deliberation, Crowley turns his head and looks directly at Aziraphale.

Their eyes lock, and Aziraphale’s next breath chokes him. Crowley’s expression puts Aziraphale in mind of natural disasters, of wars and kingdoms put to torch, floods and plagues and children drowning. The demon might as well be desolation itself, given blood and bone and a suit to wear, a bleak, yawning absence where there should be a wily, mischievous good nature.

Even the day the world was scheduled to end, when Crowley holed himself up in a little bar and wept himself sick among bottles and bottles of clear spirits, wasn’t as bad as this. Nothing could be as bad as a corpse.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale sobs, pushing himself forward. The barrier is hot against his palms, on the cusp of burning, and still he pushes forward. “I’m right here, Crowley, I’m here! I haven’t left you, sweetheart.”

Crowley must not hear him. He certainly doesn’t see him, scanning the empty space with his eyes. But there’s a seed of something unquelled inside him, something rebellious. A tiny kernel of what might only be denial, what might just be hope— elbowing its way through all the despair, making room for maybe and what if because the alternative is too much to bear.

Crowley starts to walk, with his hands outstretched before him, fingers splayed and searching. Each step is deliberate and determined, and his eyes are off-focus now, an inch or two to Aziraphale’s left, but he’s headed in the right direction.

“That’s it, my darling,” Aziraphae whispers. His voice is a wreck. He hates to be trapped here, aches to meet Crowley halfway. He’s as close as he can get, clustered against the wall with all his might.

There’s only a moment where Crowley falters. When he steps into the dust of the archangels’ cruel trick, where the outermost tip of an angel’s wing is burned into the tile. His stride stutters, and his eyes dart away to the shape of his dead husband on the floor, and Aziraphale could scream.

He is terrified that Crowley’s burdened faith might desert him before he’s made it all the way. There is nothing he can do to give Crowley strength, no signal or sign he can provide that this painful march will be rewarded.

Please, he prays. He sends it outward this time, not upward.

It seems to reach. The demon’s mouth screws up. He staggers forward two quick steps, a third, stepping over the dust and moving— unknowingly, hopefully— in the right direction.

Aziraphale shuffles to the side so that Crowley is directly in front of him. He’s holding his breath when Crowley finally reaches him. His long fingers meet resistance in thin-air, and he chokes. He presses his palms to the invisible wall, and Aziraphale mirrors him.

“You’re there, angel?” Crowley whispers. “You hear me?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale whispers back. “Of course I am. Of course I do.”

Crowley looks down. The circle is a lurid, vivid glow at Aziraphale’s feet. Crowley can’t possibly see it, but he’s always been far too clever for his own good. With a snap of his fingers, the floor begins to crack. The tiles bearing Uriel’s handwork rupture as if in a miniature, localized earthquake, and the second the lines are broken, the barrier disappears, and Aziraphale falls forward against Crowley’s chest.

“Oh my God,” Aziraphale blasphemes, gathering him up in shaking handfuls, hauling him close. “Crowley. I have you. I have you.”

It seems to take a moment for Crowley to process Aziraphale’s sudden appearance. His arms are slow in creeping around the angel, his embrace a trembling, tentative thing. But he takes a breath— breathing in deep, nose pressed into cloudy white curls of hair— and seems to come alive again.

When his fingers grow claws, and his broken halo burns the air around their faces brassy and hot, and the secret self of him threatens to push out of its tight mortal confines with every second, Aziraphale breathes a sigh of relief. What should probably rightly be horrifying is instead the sweetest comfort he knows.

“There you are,” Aziraphale says, swaying their bodies side to side. He thinks he could stand there holding Crowley until the next end of the world and Crowley would let him.

Over the demon’s shoulder, Aziraphale has full view of the archangels who tormented him. If Aziraphale were capable of hatred, they would know the full force of it. If he could bring himself to bring them harm, he would make them hurt.

“I can feel that,” Crowley mutters, muffled against Aziraphale’s neck. His voice is thick and wet. “Leave those unholy thoughts to me, angel.”

Aziraphale presses a kiss to the side Crowley’s face, right above the snake sigil. It’s the only spot he can reach without peeling his husband off him and he has no plans of that.

“How did you know? How could you tell?”

Crowley’s eyes give away how he’s hurting, despite how much practice he has had over the millennia in schooling his voice to perfect dispassion. He looks like he would like to tuck away out of sight again, but the cradle of Aziraphale’s hands keep him still.

He turns his face, pressing into one of Aziraphale’s palms. His lips part there against the salt and sweat of hands that have spent all of history keeping him still.

He says, “Didn’t smell like you.” And suddenly Aziraphale understands.

This body has carried him soundly since the Beginning. Even if his core had been burned away, the body left behind would have presumably smelt like his cologne, or his books, or whatever it was he’d eaten last. Of course, it’s something the archangels would overlook. It’s something they wouldn’t think to copy. It’s something intimate and human.

‘I know what you smell like,’ the demon had snapped at him not long ago.

Oh, to be so known, to be so loved. Aziraphale could cry for days if he let himself linger on the notion.

“Let me take you home, sweetheart,” he says, speaking the words into Crowley’s hair. “Where I can keep you close to me.”

Crowley hums what is probably an assent, but when Aziraphale glances into his eyes, he finds them turned away from his own and uncomfortably fixed; staring without blinking at the archangels who let him think Aziraphale was dead.

Aziraphale touches Crowley’s face with his free hand, a brush of his fingers against a sharp cheekbone. Love swells in his chest like pain.

“You’ll have to let them go sometime,” he says with a lightness he doesn’t feel.

“No I don’t.”

Truly, the remarkable creature might find it within the realm of his imagination to trap them as they are for eternity. But…

“I don’t want them on your mind, darling,” Aziraphale says, both gentle and unrelenting as he turns Crowley’s face back towards his, so that those slitted eyes have no choice but to follow. “I don’t want them in your thoughts. Let them go.”

Crowley bares his teeth, sharper and longer than usual, and snaps his fingers. A wall of hellfire appears at his whim, curving around Uriel and Sandalphon in a vicious mockery of the trap that had held Aziraphale, standing at easily ten feet high.

“They can puzzle their own way out,” he sneers, and only then does the time in the room reorient itself to the rest of the universe.

Aziraphale doesn’t wait a moment longer. With a thought, he brings them home to the flat above the shop. The bed has turned itself down for them, pillows plump, sheets smooth and cool.

He walks Crowley backwards, lays him down. Crowley's hair is a glorious spill of red against the pale pillows, but his eyes are still manic and afraid, his fingers clutching fistfuls of Aziraphale's clothes as if to keep him from disappearing again. “As long as you need, Crowley,” Aziraphale assures him, pressing their foreheads together. “I’ll hold you just like this as long as you need. We can lay here until the end of the world if you like.” Crowley makes a watery sound that might have, an hour ago, counted as a chuckle. “Until you get peckish, you mean.”

Humor is always how they've dealt with a blow. Aziraphale smiles at him, thumbing a rogue piece of coppery hair back behind Crowley's ear.

“For you— and only for you, mind— I would be willing to go without.”

“Hah!” Crowley's death grip on Aziraphale's shirt has loosened. The hairline slits of his pupils have rounded out a bit to something less likely to panic. He's giving himself, ever so slowly, back into Aziraphale's hands. “Who are you, and what have you done with my angel?”

“It's me, love,” Aziraphale says. “I'm here.”

It ruins their little joke, but he has to say it, now that he can.

Crowley's eyes get very bright, the same way they did in the Garden, and Aziraphale is certain that Crowley heard him loud and clear this time.

[keelywolfe]

FIC: Bedside Stories ch.3 (baon)

Summary: Edge is finally home, ready for a week of relaxation and healing! Yeah, about that...

Tags: Spicyhoney, Established Relationships, Domestic, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, 

Part of the ‘by any other name’ series.

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Read it here!

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So, thing was, Stretch loved Edge. Like, really loved him. It was hard to believe a few years ago if he’d stumbled across Edge drowning in a lake, he probably would have offered him a nice glass of ice water. To be honest, Stretch didn’t even like to think about those days because it had a lot less to do with Edge and a hell of a lot more to do with him being a raging dick, but eh, it happened, they’d worked through the hedge maze of their issues, and the prize at the center was finding the love of his life.

A few bumps in the road didn’t change that, a little stupidity shared on both sides. He loved Edge, Edge loved him and that was a fact.

So it was kinda nostalgic, in a way, how much Stretch wanted to murder him.

Okay, not really, but he might’ve considered a little light maiming, if Edge already being maimed wasn’t the main issue at hand.

Literally zero people ever would be surprised that Captain Control Issues was a very shitty patient. Stretch liked to think that he personally raised annoying doctors until they cut him loose to a new artform, destined for museums and private galleries alike. But Edge, ah, he didn’t argue with doctors or nurses or brothers or husbands or whoever took the time to wander into his life to give some much needed medical advice, no sir.

What he did was politely allow them to state their piece and then completely ignore it and do whatever he decided was the best course of action instead, and if that ended up with him passed out on the bathroom floor that one time after a nasty bout of Monster flu, welp, next time he’d probably just try harder not to get caught.

The irony of him demanding to be able to take care of, oh, everyone and not allowing anyone to give back the favor was bitterly delicious.

Getting Edge to promise to behave was a pretty good first move, but that had problems of its own. To begin with, Edge tended not to give promises the weight that Stretch thought they deserved, and he didn’t much feel guilty if he decided it was in everyone’s best interest to break it.

Two, even if he was keeping to the letter of the promise that did not mean he couldn’t be an asshole about it.

Stretch could admit he’d probably been setting himself up for a fail by asking Blue to give them a ride home from the hospital. His reasoning for doing it made sense at the time; Blue was feeling a little left out by his big bro, so while Andy could’ve done it and would’ve probably rejoiced to be asked, Blue had been freaking ecstatic.

Problem was, there was only so much ecstasy to go around and Blue took up all the best shares.

The drive home was like getting served up a nice, rare slice of hell, with Blue chattering nonstop about how Edge needed to follow the doc’s directions and that he needed to listen to Papy, and that he’d be happy to come over and help out with chores and he could clean the kitchen, do laundry, whatever they needed, they only had to ask and Blue would be there in a flash, starry-eyed and ready to work!

Edge’s noncommittal grunts morphed into strained silence, then to something very nearly a subsonic growl of restrained murder, especially when Blue mentioned touching the kitchen. Stretch could only desperately go for the diversions, not an easy task when he was origamied into the tiny backseat, prying his knee out of his mouth long enough to change topics.

He’d felt like a batter at a baseball game filled with maniacal clowns that’d tied one hand behind his back so he was stuck desperately swinging at any ball that got hurled in his direction on the off chance he’d get the miracle of a home run.

The straw that finally broke his wounded camel’s back was Blue innocently asked if Edge had scheduled his mental health assessment yet, and that was interesting for two reasons; one, that he obviously hadn’t and two, that Stretch didn’t know about it, which was a little bit of bullshit. There was already one person in this relationship who liked to lie by omission, they didn’t need two.

“you need to get an assessment?” Stretch asked, cautiously, because he could read a room, thanks, “for what?”

After a long moment of deafening silence, Edge said, “Everyone involved in the incident is required before they return to work, and, no, I haven’t scheduled it yet.”

Stretch got the nuance in that right quick, he was pretty damn familiar with his baby’s quirks, and the growl layered under his voice meant, ‘I do not want to talk about this, so I cordially request you stop, lest I am forced to do something awful that I will feel guilty about for days.’

Shame Blue wasn’t fluent in Edge-ese, since he immediately started in, “Oh, but you should, it’s wonderful! I stayed for a few hours just to chat and--”

“I will get around to it!”

That snarl was loud enough to echo in the car and Stretch cringed as Blue fell silent. This...this sucked, this was awful, a parody of all the times Blue interceded when he and Edge were still at each other’s throats, only Stretch wasn’t nearly as damn good at it, he didn’t want his husband and his brother fighting, but anxiety was choking him as he tried to think of what to say to take things down a notch.

Blue beat him to it, saying with easy mildness, “All right.”

He snapped on the radio, and that he chose an easy listening channel that Edge was fond of was a pretty nice concession in Stretch’s opinion.

He wasn’t so sure Edge agreed. The car had barely stopped when Edge was out the door, simmering gently while he waited for Stretch unfold himself from the backseat and get his crutches out of the trunk. Stretch only offered them silently, watching as his husband bumped his way up to the porch, balancing awkwardly on one leg to unlock the door, which he shut firmly behind him.

Okay, yeah, got that loud and clear.

Seemed like Blue wasn’t as oblivious to the early stages of homicide in the air as Stretch thought, because he didn’t follow, only left the car running as he got out. It was so frustrating, Blue’s heart was always in the right place and damn if there was anything Stretch could think to do about the sadness in his smile as he said, “Why don’t I just bring over a casserole later?”

“that’d be great, bro,” Stretch said honestly, even as he waffled helplessly. He knelt and pulled him in for a hug, holding on tight. That Blue snuggled in happily made him feel a little better, and he whispered against the side of his brother’s skull, “keep me from trying to burn down the kitchen making dinner.”

Blue nodded, his chin digging into Stretch’s shoulder. “Tell Edge I hope he feels better soon? And if you do need anything, please call.”

“i will,” Stretch promised, then lingering outside to watch his brother drive away. Only then did he go in and that was when the real battle began.

Here he was, ready and willing to give his baby anything and everything he could possibly need to help him heal and what the survey was coming back with was that what Edge wanted was absolutely nothing.

Help getting into the shower? Nope. Help propping his leg up on the precise stack of pillows he’d insisted on making himself? Nada. Food at least he took with grudging thanks, eating it with sharp, precise bites while he sat glaring at either the television or his phone. Stretch almost told him if he didn’t pay attention, he was gonna bite off a finger, but eh, there were times when it didn’t pay to test your luck.

Three days in and about the only thing Stretch could be grateful for was that they didn’t have any hair because both of them would’ve been ripping it out in handfuls by now. If Edge was going stir-crazy in slow increments, then Stretch was just plain going nuts. He was sick of watching the news, sick and sickened, all the debates back and forth about the responsibility of Monsters for what’d happened. Two Humans died in the explosion, but no Monsters had and somehow people were adding two plus none and getting bullshit because conspiracy theories were sprouting up like daisies over that. Even worse, since the trip hadn’t been advertised all the junk blogs were howling about deception and plots. Like any other ambassador for any other country went on the press junket before they went out of town?

It was all so stupid and Edge was working on jittering his way to bonkers because he wasn’t allowed to do anything about it. Normally Edge didn’t need much in the way of sleep, but that didn’t apply so much when his body was trying to heal. He should be getting plenty of rest, snoozing away in their bed with Stretch cozied in next to him or sprawled out on the sofa, his leg safely propped up while some ancient black and white movie rambled on in the background. Instead, he was staying up way too late watching the damn news, and if Stretch had known Edge was going to be laser focused it, he would have blocked the stupid channels. Shadows were starting to show under his sockets, faint reddish stains and yeah, he was keeping off his feet, but it wasn’t like the doc knew he was supposed to order Edge to sleep. His fault for assuming the Director of Operations for the Monster Embassy had the common sense of a baby moldsmal.

The fourth day was kicker.

Stretch’s pitiful cooking skills were getting one hell of a workout since he didn’t want Edge to have to live on casseroles and frozen leftovers the whole time he was convalescing. Grilled cheese at least he could manage, he’d helped Edge make it often enough, and he forced himself to stay right by the stove while it was cooking, no wandering off for one second, no quick check of his twitter. He stared that toasting bread down until he was golden perfection. Okay, yeah, the cheese was sort of oozing out of the sides but close enough. That along with some of Edge’s homemade tomato soup was a pretty good lunch and Stretch carefully put it all on a tray to take it out to the living room.

Edge was sitting exactly where he’d been for the past three days, in the corner of the sofa with his cast propped up on a very precisely placed stack of pillows. The side table next to him was filled with pens and notebooks alongside scatterings of post-it notes. He was watching something on the tv with painful intensity, scribbling furiously.

It was hard not to snap at him that he wasn’t supposed to be working, especially since he technically wasn’t because nothing he was doing was getting to any of the folks at the Embassy. Frankly that only made it more irritating, all this stress was for nothing.

“hey, it’s about that time,” Stretch said with forced cheer, carrying the tray over.

“I’m not hungry,” Edge said curtly. He didn’t look up, still writing furiously.

“except you should be, because you barely ate this morning,” Stretch said, calling on reserves of patience that he’d been storing up since he heard Edge would need to stay home for a week.

That only got him a scowl add-in, free of charge, “I don’t want them, I’m fine.”

Stretch gritted his teeth and breathed out through them. “except for how you’re totally not fine. you have a leg that is barely healed from being broken and you need to eat something so you can take your meds.”

“I’m not hungry and I don’t need them right now,” Edge repeated, sharper. “I’m trying to listen to this.”

For fuck’s sake, it reminded him of Blue when he was a toddler and didn’t want to stop playing even for lunch, but the brief mental picture of Red trying to deal with a stubborn babybones Edge wasn’t enough to calm Stretch’s growing irritation. “except you don’t need to listen to it, you’re off the clock. what you do need is to eat something and take your pills per the doctor’s instructions because you told me you would. you promised me.”

Intellectually, Stretch knew what came next was an accident. Edge was only gesturing, a sudden, fierce sweep of his arm filled with all his frustrations that was supposed to punctuate a snarl of what he thought about doctors and promises, and fuckall else that was bringing him down. He didn’t mean to clip the side of the tray, sending soup and sandwiches flying. Totally an accident and that was the truth.

That didn’t stop Stretch from yelping in surprise as he was promptly covered from brow bone to crotch with soup. It didn’t hurt or anything, it wasn’t that hot, but he could only stand there, stunned, blinking at Edge who looked equally shocked through a dripping curtain of tomato.

Okay, yeah, looked like here was a good place for a time out.

Silently, Stretch turned on heel and went right back into the kitchen, ignoring Edge calling his name. He snagged a dish towel and wiped off his soupy face, then tried the same with his sweatshirt and pants as much as he could.

Through the door, he could hear the thump and bump of a skeleton on crutches, Edge would be coming through it any second now.

Stretch didn’t wait around for it. He shortcutted out, even though that was a surefire guarantee that he’d never get the damn stains out of his sweatshirt; apparently a trip through the void made it a lot harder to shout it out.

He only went as far as the porch, dusting the tiny drift of snow off the steps to sit down as he pulled out a pack of smokes. He lit one, inhaling deeply and letting the soothing nicotine wash over him, easing the low simmer of his temper. He couldn’t help being a little amused that it tasted a bit like tomato soup.

The cigarette was nearly burned down to the filter by the time the front door opened. Stretch didn’t look up as Edge limped out, standing behind him, leaning heavily on his crutches as he said softly, “I’m sorry.”

Stretch exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, “gonna need more specifics than that. sorry for redecorating my shirt? sorry for being a shit? sorry for working your ass off when you’re supposed to be resting?”

There was a long silence, the crutches creaking as Edge shifted his weight. “Am I allowed to choose all of the above?”

Wasn’t possible to hide his smile and Stretch could nearly feel the tension easing in the air, “sure. can you come down here?”

“Yes, but I can’t promise I’ll be able to get back up.”

Carefully, Edge eased his way down, his casted foot stretched out in front of him as he settled on the stairs next to Stretch. Not that they stayed next to each other for long, Stretch went ahead and curled around him from the side angle, one leg across his lap and the other knee braced against Edge’s spine. Made it easy to wrap his arms around his baby and pull him in close, pressing a kiss against the side of his skull.

He cupped a hand at the back of Edge’s skull, smoothing along the curve with his thumb. “babe, i know you’re trying to help, but you really need to take care of yourself first. you’re supposed to let me help you, you know?”

Edge leaned into his touch, but his words were firm as he said, “I need to do this.”

“why?”

“I need New New Home to be safe, I need you to be safe.” It almost sounded like a confession and Stretch wondered what was going on in his husband’s beautiful, battered skull. How much he was beating himself up for what happened, because, what, he couldn’t predict the future?

“baby, i need you to be safe, too. safe and healthy and taken care of, no,” Stretch insisted when Edge tried to interrupt. “listen to me now. i let you run a little wild with the protectiveness because i know it’s something you need, okay, but, we’re married, full partnership. that means sometimes i protect you and take care of you, i don’t give a shit what nonsense red’s pounded into your skull. it’s my turn now.”

He waited until Edge nodded, reluctantly but it was there. “and i get that you need to see what’s going on with the embassy, but you aren’t going to be any good to them if you go back exhausted. you need to take care of yourself. let me help. turn off the tv for the day, hide your phone in your desk, and get some rest.

For a long moment there was nothing but the hush that came with lightly falling snow, then Edge sighed heavily, “Okay. “ He swallowed hard and the dregs of shame in his voice made an ache rise in Stretch’s soul as he said, softly, “I feel like I’m doing everything wrong for you lately.”

Stretch pressed a rough kiss against the side of Edge’s skull, breathed in hard the scent of his magic faintly tainted with tomato. “might feel that way, but you’re not, babe. i promise. come on, let’s try something different, yeah?

He helped Edge wobble to his feet and followed him inside, biting back a couple choice words when he saw Edge’d already cleaned up the soup disaster. Not worth an argument and Edge did let him help to get settled on the sofa, his cast propped up on its pillow nest.

“comfortable? in any pain?” For once he wasn’t going to fuss about the pain meds.

“Yes and no, in that order.

“Great.” And without preamble, Stretch pulled his sweatshirt over his head, then pushed his track pants down to puddle at his feet. Didn’t bother to try for seductive, there wasn’t much need, anyway. Edge was usually seduced by him breathing, proved it by staring with wide sockets as Stretch sauntered over. “think you could use a distraction, don’t you?”

“I...yes. Yes.” The word shifted closer to a moan as Stretch straddled him, and he could say with a good amount of smug pride that very soon, Edge was pretty damn distracted.

Afterward, while Edge was sleeping peacefully on the sofa, Stretch went upstairs for some fresh clothes, taking a second to scrub the last dregs of tomato off his bones, ugh, used soup wasn’t much of an aphrodisiac, but he’d made do. Letting it linger like the world’s worst perfume was out of the question, though, people downwind would think he was Sans. He scribbled a quick note to leave on the coffee table and paused, looking down at his husband.

The blanket rose and fell with every breath, and beneath it, Edge was still bare to his bones. His sockets were finally closed in sleep, all the tight stress-lines on his face eased, making him seem oddly young, or maybe just his age. Looking at him, Stretch felt a surge of love so strong it made tears sting. He leaned down and pressed the lightest kiss against Edge’s forehead, the softest touch. He didn’t stir, days of exhaustion catching up to him, although Stretch liked to think it had something to do with the last pleasant hour, too.

He left Edge sleeping and headed out to the bus stop, settling into his seat as the bus droned on to Ebott. There was someone who owed him a favor and Stretch was about to call it in.

~~*~~

tbc

[lubdubsworld]

Change of Heart ( Taehyung x OC)

[  This chapter’s a little short but the next one will be a lot longer.] 

Chapter 1 / Chapter 2

Chapter 3

I woke up in small increments of pain. 

My arms and legs felt heavy and there was a sort of pressure on my rib, and my eye stung like it was being doused with acid. there was an acrid taste of blood in my mouth and I tried to open my mouth to exhale but my jaw ached somehting fierce. 

When i finally opened my good eye, i nearly had a heart attack. 

Luna was looming over my face, her eyes wide and lower lip caught between her teeth , a look of great worry on her tiny face. She looked absolutely stricken as she stared at me and i tried not to have a panic attack.

“Hey , sweetie.” i croaked out weakly and she let out an ‘ oh’before leaping off the bed and racing away. i took a deep shuddering breath before levering myself up into my elbows. I seemed to be unharmed from the waist down so after a little bit of wincing and straining , I’d managed to sit up , cautiously lowering my feet to the floor. My ribs felt like splinters and each breath was painful. 

Luna had run out of the room, presumably down the hallway and I heard her scream from about a dozen feet away. 

“PAPA!!!! SHE’S AWAKE!! MISS LEE!!!! SHE’S AWAKE!!!!”

I groaned. So he’d brought me home. I vaguely remembered demanding him to but I’d never for a second expected that he would actually listen. I glanced around the room , surprised by how...normal it looked. There was a TV, a small bookshelf, a reading chair and some plants on the window sill. The curtains were a cool aquamarine blue , filtering out almost all of the weak morning sun. Outside, the rain had slowed down to a steady drizzle and a cool breeze drifted in through the open shades. 

I heard the door open a little and swallowed when i saw Kim Taehyung , framed by the mahogany doorway. He was dressed in pressed black slacks, a soft white shirt half un-tucked and there was thin black a bow tie hanging loose over his neck. 

I felt something wrap around the base of my belly, gripping hard and pulling and i had to press my thighs together just to fight the sharp , painful flash of arousal that shot straight to my center. 

It really wasn’t fair , how beautiful he looked. 

I looked away quickly, aware that he could probably hear my heart pounding.

“You’re going to be okay. Nothing’s broken. The doctor thinks in a few days you’ll be as good as new.” He said finally and I swallowed. It certainly didn’t feel like it would be fine in a few days but I wasn’t going to argue with him.  

Of course, it was my fault. 

“I understand. . Is there a way i can get back to the mainland?” I said , groggy. 

He didn’t reply for a second.

“For security’s sake, I think you should stay in the preserve. There’s an investigation going on from last night and they’ve arrested the wolves who were involved.” He looked uncomfortable.

I stared back up at him, my heart sinking a little. 

“I wasn’t going to press charges.” I said weakly and he shrugged.

“They broke the law. It wasn’t right. It’s not right to attack humans that way” 

I felt the urge to say that technically him and his cohorts had pretty much instigated the whole thing by rallying werewolves against humans on the preserve.  

“I’m glad you’re such a crusader for justice.” i said , unable to keep the sarcasm out of my tone. 

A few seconds of silence had me fidgeting.

“Well?” I stared at him and he flinched. 

“Nothing , I.... You told me you didn’t have any family back in the mainland...” He moved a little closer and i stiffened , some primal instinct screaming at me to run. I felt my throat go dry as I shook my head.

“i have... friends. i can take care of myself.” i said softly. Taehyung had stopped a few feet away and he held both his hands up. It took me a second to realize that I had curled away and held my fists up in defense. 

“I’m not gonna hurt you, Mirae ssi.” He said carefully, eyes worried as he stared at me. I felt a hysterical laugh build up inside me. 

“It’s too late for that.” I snapped out, which , fine, it was unfair, but i refused to feel bad about the flash of guilt that went across his face. 

“Mirae....” He began again but the door opened , Luna hurtling in with the speed of a tiny tornado. Before either of us could react, she had jumped into the bed, her arms reaching out to crush me in a hug. I flinched, bracing myself for a pain that never came. 

A second before she managed to reach me, Taehyung had plucked her out of the bed, arms secure around her waist as he hauled her up into his embrace.

“Sweetheart, Ms Yoon is still getting better, you don’t wanna hurt her do you?” He said rather sharply, voice vibrating with his signature alpha growl and I felt myself flinch at the tone. 

His daughter apparently, had a similar reaction to her father’s voice. 

Luna’s lips wobbled for a few seconds and then suddenly without any warning a pair of fluffy , fur ears popped up on her head. I almost yelped as she turned around to look at me me, face a little furry and forehead creased together and wrinkled, her chubby little nose flatted into a nub. 

The laughter got torn out of me before i could tamp it down.

“Oh my God, you’re adorable...!!” I exclaimed. 

The wobbling lips stiffened and the forehead stopped scrunching. 

“wee-ally?” She sniffled around a pair of razor sharp fangs curving over the top of her lip. Her eyes were wide and blue, almost cerulean in their brightness.

“Jesus...” Taehyung muttered under his breath, eyes flashing red at his daughter. She blinked , giving him a broody pout before slowly shifting back. 

He carefully deposited her back on the bed before giving her small hug. 

“Go play with Ms Lee...” He said softly, voice brooking no argument  and waited till she was out of the door, before turning to me.

“I can’t stop you if you want to leave, but if you hear me out, that would be great.”

I stayed quiet, watching him.

He cleared his throat. 

“Luna has been a bit difficult the past few months. It’s... She lost her mother last year and it has been a hard transition for both of us. She doesn’t take to kindly to strangers or even her babysitters. For the past nine months I’ve blown through sitters like a pack of cigarettes.” He grimaced.

I frowned.

“What does that have to-”

“She likes you.” He said softly, his tone suggesting that it was painful to say out loud. “I spoke to your associates at the research center. They can only offer unpaid leave for the next three weeks and I know that they can technically reassign your living quarters during the time.  If you agree to stay on the preserve, I’ll arrange for you to be remunerated.”

“I feel like there’s a catch here...” i said wearily.

“My daughter needs someone to keep her company.” He said hesitantly.

i bit my lips. It sounded like the perfect recipe for disaster, straight out of every tragic love story in the world.

“Alpha  Kim..” i began , almost desperately. 

“Call me Taehyung... please.” He said softly. 

I stared at him.

“Alpha Kim.” I said firmly, “ I’m not equipped to handle were babies. I have no experience.”

A perfect pair of brows went up, questioning yet judging. 

“They’re just like human babies, Ms. Yoon. They want to be loved.” He said dryly. 

I bit my lips. There was nothing i could say to that. 

He waited for a few more seconds before sighing.

“She’s a lot like her mother. She needs to have her own way and she is affectionate to a fault. She grows attached too quickly and...” He shook his head. “ She hasn’t lost control over her shift in the past two years but after we met you...she’s so distressed , she shifts over the smallest thing. “ He hesitated, looking conflicted. “ I don’t want to offend you but you do smell a bit like my ...wife. She wasn’t human but she....preferred to wear a scent very similar to yours.”

I frowned. i hadn’t used a perfume in years, because i worked closely with sick wolves with really sensitive noses. But i didn’t really feel compelled to argue the semantics with Taehyung.

“If it makes you feel better, you’ll have zero contact with me....” He said quickly, like it . Mrs. Lee will be with her, she’ll take care of all her physical needs. Food clothes... all of it.... I’m just ...”  He bit his lips and there was genuine pain in his gaze, “ Just asking you to keep her company. I have a very important campaign coming up and I just...I’ll rest better knowing that my daughter is happy and she genuinely seems to be happy with you. ”

“You’re not really giving me much grounds to refuse. i don’t have anywhere else to go and i need the cash.” i muttered.

“And...?” He prompted.

“And I do adore your daughter. So yes, I’ll stick around for a couple of weeks.” I said finally. 

He relaxed visibly, reaching out to tousle his messy hair. 

“Are you sure?” He said softly. 

I tried not to stare at the silky locks, which really seemed to glow with every shade of gold, honey and whiskey.

“Uh.. yeah. I’m sure .” I shrugged.

He smiled suddenly and without warning and I felt my heart skip three consecutive beats. 

Oh, Christ the man was gorgeous. 

I was in so much trouble. 

[lazywriter7]

part by part

“And you won. Congratulations.”

Stark’s ribs are starting to show, ridges of bone pushing against pallid, stretched-out skin. His face is sallow, his fingers trembling. Nebula knows he hasn’t eaten anything for the past sixteen hours. He must be delirious; it’s why he’s saying such things.

But he sounds so sure. Like winning is that easy. Achievable. Like it hasn’t been designed for the express purpose of being a remote point on the horizon, to chase after with no peace or rest or end.

(warnings for canon violence and abuse)

They test her.

Component by component, before they attach it – (graft it, screw it onto her body, weapons bolted to a hunk of breathing flesh) – test the arm and leg and cranium. Melting point, freezing point, corrosion by acid and plasma, ability to withstand concussive impact. They ponder on the best metals, the best configuration. And then the components become parts of her and are tested again – because you couldn’t have a nervous system shutting down due to massive shocks, due to something as commonplace as pain. What use would that be? What use would she be?

You were insufficient before, Thanos tells her, and she’s so grateful for his honesty. For his commitment to making her better. You have to evolve.

But night falls on Sanctuary II, lights dimmed in homage to Titan’s diurnal cycle, and she’s strung up limb to limb and there’s no one. No Korath to sneer at, no Gamora to resent, no Thanos to grit her jaw for and pretend that she’s stronger than the agony. Just a body that has never been hers, and long fingers that trail delicately through the air, pulling her open.

You are replaceable, the Maw whispers – and in the dead of space, there’s nothing else to hear. She’d have torn out her vocal chords if she’d been allowed to keep screaming. Her heart is deadened under plated ribs and an engineered sternum. No value except what we choose to bestow.

Night falls on Sanctuary II, and Nebula believes him.

 ~

 “And you won. Congratulations.”

Stark’s ribs are starting to show, ridges of bone pushing against pallid, stretched-out skin. His face is sallow, his fingers trembling. She knows he hasn’t eaten anything for the past sixteen hours. He must be delirious; it’s why he’s saying such things.

But he sounds so sure. Like winning is that easy. Achievable. Like it hasn’t been designed for the express purpose of being a remote point on the horizon, to chase after with no peace or rest or end.

They’re shaking hands now. “Fair game. Good sport.”

Maybe it’s reachable if the rules are designed different. It’s a traitorous thought – her mind wants to flinch away from it, even now. There are other thoughts to console her – if he’d been in a better state, not half an inch away from starvation, she’d never have been able to beat him.

But he doesn’t look beaten. Stark looks calm, and has a warmth in his eye that is the most alien thing about him.

“You had fun?”

“I had fun.” She rasps – and the world tilts on its axis, and the world stays the same. Because she can’t go back, now. She’s accepted the victory, and it sweeps over her, baffling and wondrous. It’s nothing she remembers feeling, and yet she’s the same person she’s always been.

“Here.” Stark maybe says, and food is being pushed into her hands, and Mother smiles. Her silver hair has gone ragged and grimy-yellow, the sleeves of her tunic hanging loose on knobby wrists. They’re hunched under an awning together, water splashing around their ankles where the Close has been waterlogged for over two weeks now, same as all the narrow alleys in Sector V. But she’s holding a mallowfruit in her palms, slightly squashed at one end but still bright and purple, and Nebula rips it from her hand even though her own fingers don’t completely fit around it.

“Leave some for Aramis.” Mother cautions, but she’s smiling at Nebula’s grubby face and sticky chin, running grimy fingernails through her spiky locks of hair. “You know he hates it when you don’t share.”

Sweet on the outside, with a juice tangy enough to burn the back of your tongue. She hasn’t tasted a mallowfruit in decades. Stark would probably like it.

He doesn’t look surprised when she nudges the food back. It feels like a bigger revelation than winning.

 ~

 Thanos believes that true gratitude is only possible when you know from where you came. From where you’d risen. It’s why he leaves her all the memories.

Pink skies over the city of Luphom, vivid and brilliant, like the colour of a Krylorian’s skin – tinting to a peach-like hue closer to the horizon. Hilly terrain, sloping streets, air sticky-hot as dawn ripened to dusk, humidity bursting to torrential rain when the night came. Every night without fail – it’s what she’d been named for. The constellations and nebulae that Luphom never got to see, a distant dream.

The rain fills up the streets, drains too narrow to flush out the sheer volume – and they all find their vantage points, the water-climbers. Up on a metal dumpster with a part of its lid still intact, the roofs of speeders long deserted in closed-down garages, in low-hanging balconies whose owners would never come out in the spitting rain. They’re water-climbers because they can’t be anything else, squatting in wet season on the streets.

Aramis can climb with the best of them. They are a laughing, frolicking pack – holey shoes and flyaway hair, not a full set of teeth between them. They find footholds in nothing, sail paper boats down the flooded road, splash and tumble and pull each other up; and Nebula shivers in her little awning, water licking at her thighs, mouth pursed stiff and envious eyes.

He always comes back though. He comes back when the rain stops and dawn is a fine film of mist away; slips a coin into her ragged pocket, and rests his head on her bony shoulder. She stays still until he starts snoring, and then winds her fingers through the fluff of his hair.

Aramis is eight, when the Sanctuary II warship blots out the pink skies of Luphom. Nebula is ten.            

Heavy boots splash through the streets, dogged by the sound of snapping mongrels. Blasters. Crying. They’re all nimble, all hardened by what fate has chosen to dole out to them throughout their lives. No one escapes.

Except Nebula, you see – because she is separate from the pack. Separate from the masses huddling together, thin shoulders and pale faces, flinching back from the drooling maws of the mongrels. Shepherded together, knee-deep in water that tranquilly reflects the skies – pink that is steadily darkening as blood seeps into the streets.

She is separate and Thanos takes it to be a mark of strength. Takes her, and it isn’t until they’re halfway up the ramp to the warship that she scrapes together the courage to look back. Peers over the massive arm steering her trembling shoulders, sees the herds in the water. They’re too far now for her to make out any faces.

She searches anyway. Sight leaping from blurry face to blurry face – there, that glint of light off a pale head, that could be Mother–

The arm around her pushes. Nebula snaps her head away reflexively, immediately. She walks. Step after tiny step, till the water level recedes from her ankles; a last, clutching grasp before ebbing away entirely.

She remembers the feeling for years after. The touch of water retreating from her feet as she finally climbs high enough, and the sick pit of self-loathing in her belly.

 ~

 The Benatar is unsettlingly quiet. It is an M-class spaceship, with only the two of them to putter around, but the raccoon has never struck her as the silent type.

He’s silent now, as they fly out of the Hiberlac system – all the planets in the vicinity have been hit hard by power and supply shortages in the aftermath of the Snap. They dropped off a shipment, and took off straight after by unspoken agreement; neither were comfortable with the all too palpable gratitude in the eyes of the people. It isn’t like they were up to helping with any of the real needs here – leadership, shoring up a crumbling social system, dealing with a population reeling with uncertainty, no idea of the true causes behind what had happened.

They’re in the cockpit now. The racco– Rocket, has been fiddling with the nav panel for the past hour, screwdriver held between his sharp teeth. He put it in there half an hour ago, after one too many times of opening his mouth as if to speak to a spectre, before clacking his jaw shut. He reminds her a bit of Stark in that way – the same strained, uneasy quiet while working, like they were too used to babbling at someone that was no longer there.

(After the glowing woman in Kree gear had brought the ship down to Terra, Stark had offered Nebula a roof for as long as she wished, even though he’d just been reunited with his wife – she’d considered it for a second, before remembering Rocket’s diminutive figure silhouetted against the massive, empty entryway to the Benatar. It hadn’t really been a choice, in the end.)

Rocket screws open a corner of the panel, before screwing it down closed again – he isn’t really paying attention to what his paws are doing. His eyes, beady-black and reflecting the shine of the plasma lights, are staring fixedly at a point on the floor. There seem to be a few grains of something brownish, maybe soil, flattened against the grey flooring.

He reaches out in increments, brushes against it gently with his toe.

“Do you want to play paper football?”

“Wha…?” Rocket blinks, head swivelling in Nebula’s direction.

Nebula presses her lips together, awkwardness twisting up her tongue. She can’t say it again. “Nothing. It’s just a stupid game.”

Rocket doesn’t say anything for a while, before – “Can’t be any stupider than Arcade Defender.”

She ponders that for a second. “What’s an arcade?”

“Hell if I know.” Rocket absently sets his screwdriver down, where it rolls away from him unhindered. “Quill had the game on him when he first left Terra. We couldn’t get Groot to stop playing it…. stupid handheld thing… you could only go left and right, and shoot at bits of light falling from the top. How dumb is that?”

“Very dumb.” Nebula says.

“Quill wouldn’t admit it, but he hated it when Groot started beating all his high scores. Insect chick just stood over Groot’s shoulder and watched like it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen.” Rocket’s whiskers fluff up a little, like a quiver of amusement. His eyes are glassy. “Drax only tried it once, and got game over in thirty seconds. Said, this machine has thwarted me, and never played again.”

Rocket’s small shoulders curl inwards, bent even smaller. “They were all so, so stupid.”

Nebula’s eyes flick over the metal ports embedded in his back, draggled fur and skin red and scarred-looking around them. It prods at the ache in her own mechanised joints. “Once… when we were younger, Gamora had just been rewarded for making her first kill. She came to find me, to share her winnings. We were both punished when this was discovered.”

That’s… not a funny story, just so you know. Stark’s imagined voice echoes in her head, a warm reproach.

But Rocket barks out a laugh, claws tapping heedlessly on the nav panel, “Yeah. She was pretty stupid too.”

Silence relapses in the cockpit again, six empty chairs and both of them squatting on the floor. A detached part of her mind wonders if Quill left his music-machine down here somewhere.

“It’s.” Rocket begins abruptly, words escaping half-bitten. “It’s better. Having someone around who also knew them.”

It’s like a glitch in her brain, trying to connect better with herself. Her entire life has been about eking out achievements, desperately clawing for better – how did she get it the time she isn’t even trying?

“You too.” The words escape her tongue on reflex, and Rocket nods as if he understands, even though she doesn’t.

Gamora would be proud. Strangely enough, it’s her brain forming the thought – not Rocket, or some remembered echo of Stark. The words don’t ring hollow, or false.

She would, Nebula repeats to herself. And I would totally beat her at paper football.

 ~

 Coming face-to-face with herself is like cracking open that old pit in her stomach – loathing bubbling out uncontrollably.

Or at least, only for the first few seconds. It spikes and fades, and Nebula is left studying her own mirror-image, wondering what the others see when they look at the past version of her.

Cruelty. Slavishness to a despicable cause. All things worth loathing.

Yet, it’s remarkably difficult to hate something when it looks this desperate. This terrified. Maybe it’s why Gamora (herealiveherehere) tries to reason with the past version of her, even if Nebula knows for a fact it won’t work.

This version of her hasn’t spent three weeks drifting in space with a frail Terran man brave enough to go against Thanos. Hasn’t said ‘I wasn’t always this way’, only to hear back ‘neither was I.’ Doesn’t know a basic, solid truth –

It won’t stop hurting. Nebula watches her own face and feels the loathing seep away. Feels nothing. You think it will, but it won’t. He won’t stop hurting you if he likes you. He said he loved Gamora, and he came back with the Stone, and Gamora never came back at all.

This version of her lies on the ground, after Nebula presses the trigger. It doesn’t feel like an act of hate.

 ~

 When she steps out on the battlefield, the Sanctuary II is looming in the skies.

For a second, she’s frozen in time. Chin lifted, heart frantic in her chest, watching a too-familiar nightmare. Except then the chaos around her filters in – the yells, the clash of steel, the sparks of magic and lightning and mongrels getting mowed down where they stand.

This isn’t a massacre. This isn’t an array of the defenceless, whose existence was deemed too burdensome to be allowed to continue. This… they’re fighting back.

The air is thick with dust, and Nebula breathes in it all. Her batons sizzle by her sides, electricity arcing up and down her arms.

She hacks and slashes her way through – plunges a baton into the gut of a mongrel and rips it right back out. One leaps onto her back and bites at the steel of her shoulder; she catches it by the head, and snaps the neck clean.

She’s brought down to the ground in the very next instance; a giant blade lodging itself in her knee, attached to a long, black handle – ah, Corvus Glaive. She’d always found the Black Order particularly repellent.

She turns on her back while she’s on the ground, rams a baton right into Corvus’ filthy maw. He howls with the pain, and she takes the few seconds to wrench his scythe out of her knee and swing straight for his head. It separates clean, and rolls to a stop next to her side – Nebula grits her teeth, spits out blood, and yanks her kneecap back in place. Pushes herself up; the pain is secondary. And she has yet to get to the figure in the centre of the field, towering over everyone else.

“You should have killed me.”

“Would have been a waste of parts.”

By the time she slaughters her way to the epicentre of the battle, Captain America and Thor are already down. Thanos is a hulking figure with his back to her, tall enough to eclipse almost everything else. He’s facing Stark, who’s half-braced on the ground, face bloody and ashen and etched with lines of desperation.

Not him. Nebula holds her batons at the ready, metal crackling viciously at her fingertips. Rage swirls through her head, a building blaze. Not him not him not him nothimnothimnothi–

Even across the distance, she can see Stark’s eyes flicker over to her, perhaps caught by the arcing electricity. His hand is half-raised, red-and-gold knuckles glowing with five blinding points of light.

Her fingers slacken, and the batons drop to the ground, sizzling against the soil. She stretches out a hand, unaware of what her face might be saying. Do you believe I can do this?

Stark’s face twists for a second, visible conflict and agony. Then his jaw straightens, firms up in resolve, eyes clear and trusting – and reaches his hand out toward her.

Thanos lunges forward, all-too-clearly realising his mistake, but it’s a second too late. The gauntlet streams through the air, broken down into its component parts – the wrist cuff slamming into her cybernetic hand, metal on metal, the interlocking plates following shortly behind. The Stones are six glowing points of heat on her unyielding skin, and she waits for them to slide in place before closing her eyes and breathing out.

Snap.

 The pain. The pain is–

Nothing. Her arm begins to liquefy, gauntlet charring and dropping to her heels, elbow sloughing off after it. It’s nothing she hasn’t felt before, nothing that registers beyond the cold, furious triumph ringing in her head.

Her shoulder moults to a stump, and Nebula pushes herself up to her feet.

She looks down at the slurry on the ground. This is who she is. This is how she was made. An amalgamation of replaceable parts, each one discarded to make way for something better. This is the body she has, and it belongs to her.

At the corner of her vision, she can glimpse Stark’s face – bright eyes and lined with a savage sort of pride. There’s a ember of gratitude beginning to light in her chest, but there’ll be enough time for that later.

Nebula walks. She walks till she’s facing Thanos on his knees, and goes up even closer. Takes in every detail of the man – the dark eyes, the stolid chin, the lips so often flattened in dispassion but now trembling with pain.

Look at me. I did it. I did what you spent your entire life chasing, what nearly killed you, and it couldn’t even keep me down for a minute.

She doesn’t say any of it. Reaches out with her remaining hand instead, runs two fingers over where his brow is beginning to disintegrate.

“You never loved her.” She strokes down his cheek, like he used to with all of his children. His soldiers. And she smiles. “I won.”

Thanos crumples to dust at her feet.

 ~

 It’s been pouring for the past hour.

Water plinks off the drainage pipes set into the roof, patters on the wet soil and rush-green leaves, hits the surface of the lake to set off a thousand ripples. The wind is angled enough to soak the back porch too, but Nebula is disinclined to move.

The floor is cold under her thighs, the wall colder against her back. She folds her legs in tighter, feels the spray of the rain on her shins. The world smells freshly washed. There are puddles forming beyond the porch, little pools of grey that ripple continually as the drops continue to fall.

She hears bare feet padding across the floor – her ears prick, but there’s no tell-tale sound of slipping heels or a yelp. She looks straight ahead, breathes out and waits.

Morgan comes and sits beside her, legs folding one over the other in imitation, till her bony knee pokes against Nebula’s thigh. Nebula doesn’t twitch.

A minute elapses, maybe more. Morgan fidgets with the hem of her t-shirt. “Do you like the rain?”

Nebula turns her head, regards the small face looking up at her. “I do.”

“I like the rain too.” Morgan scooches up closer to her, till they’re almost hip-to-hip – Nebula extends an arm on automatic, so the cold of the wall doesn’t filter through the thin material of that t-shirt. Morgan presses her back to the arm, small torso warm against Nebula’s side.

“Do you know how to make paper boats?” Nebula asks.

Morgan shakes her head.

“I’ll show you.” A brief pause, then Morgan presses her cheek to Nebula’s side. She’s said she likes the smoothness of the metal.

Nebula settles her hand on the back of her dark head. Winds her fingers gently through the hair, and watches the rain fall.

[mollymauk-teafleak]

Widomauk and their baby?? Maybe just parent fluff?

You got it! Based off a wonderful idea that the lovely @minky-for-short had!

Caleb had become very used to waking up to the sound of screaming, even before he became a father. And he did have to admit, the shrill, plaintive cries of his daughter were much preferable to the echoing, hollow screams of his nightmares.

He sat up, vision soft and unreliable as sleep still clung stubbornly to his exhausted mind. But with a press of the heels of his hands against his eyes and a few deep breaths, he won the fight for his own consciousness and could now pick out the room around him. He and Mollymauk had never kept a particularly tidy apartment and, with most of their time taken up with raising their newborn, things had only dissolved more into chaos. Books were scattered across the floor, the piles they’d been in finally stacked too high to support themselves, with bookmarks jutting up at random points through their pages and the sides thick and dog eared from frequent readings and highlighting of passages and scribbling his own annotations in the margins to try and tweak the spells inside. In amongst that was clothes, Molly’s in a vast array of colours to rival any artist’s pallet and all of Caleb’s sticking resolutely to the beige, brown and mustard end of the spectrum, much to his husband’s mortification. A few plants in various stages of their death throes sat on the windowsill, looking ghostlike in the moonlight, amongst glass bottles, misshapen crystals and other purposeless trinkets Caleb had collected over his time. Home, in a word and it made his tired, frayed nerves relax a little to find himself still in amongst it all, his sleepy mind often fretful that he’d wake up one day and find the life he loved so much and had worked so hard to build snatched away.

Mollymauk stirred in the blankets behind him, always slower to wake than Caleb even when their daughter was at full bellow.

He felt his tail buffet the small of his back lazily and a voice that sounded like it was coming from the pits of hell mumble, “Tell me that’s not our baby girl. Tell me that’s the sounds of a ten car pile-up outside our window.”

Caleb managed a rough chuckle, reaching back and stroking his husband’s hair out of his eyes, “Afraid not. I’ll see to her, you go back to sleep.”

Molly slumped immediately back into the pillows from where he’d managed to rise by a few increments. “I adore you,” he moaned, “You’re the light of my life. I’m so blessed.”

“Yeah yeah…” Caleb grinned, staggering up and snatching the closest piece of fabric that looked vaguely t-shirt shaped. It turned out to be the cast t-shirt from Molly’s theatre’s production of Oklahoma.

With that and his slippers, he picked his way around the clutter on the floor and made his way to the nursery, just next door. Doing so, he caught the attention of Frumpkin, curled up on one of Molly’s scarves on top of the dresser. With a blink of his amber eyes, he was up and wobbling sleepily after his master, having apparently taken it to heart that the small, green, noisy little monster his master had brought home a few weeks ago was his responsibility too.

The nursery was a warm, inviting space, all soft butter yellow walls and rainbows painted on the walls and toys spilling off every surface, gifts from their daughter’s team of eager aunts and uncles. However, the effect was a little tarnished by the howling coming from the crib.

“Hey now, hey,” Caleb murmured gently as he reached in and plucked his daughter from her nest of blankets, “What’s the matter?”

Una, still as frighteningly tiny as the day they brought her home, most of her form taken up by the enormous, bat like ears that dwarfed the rest of her, clung to her papa with sharp little nails, hanging off him with a desperation that suggested to him that she’d had yet another nightmare.

“Oh, mein Süßling…” Caleb sighed gently, rocking her in his arms as best he could when she was clawing the front of his shirt, “Everything’s okay, don’t worry.”

Still, the little goblin cried, at a volume that seemed almost unbelievable for how small she was, no matter how many times her papa walked her around the room slowly or murmured to her in soft German or stroked her tight mop of black curls. Frumpkin put his front paws up on Caleb’s shoulder from where he crouched on the changing table, sniffling hopefully at Una, but not even the sight of her friend could make the tears stop.

Nightmares were heartbreakingly common for their new daughter. The nurses at the orphanage couldn’t say how she’d come to be left with them, who had done the leaving, what had happened to her parents, what she’d been through in just the few days she’d been alive before she fell into Caleb and Molly’s laps. But from the way she clung to them, the way she’d wake up crying and shaking in the night, the way she couldn’t seem to shift her perpetual sickness, Caleb couldn’t imagine those days had been sweet. Just another reason he’d brought her home, that he always held her for longer than he really needed to, that he saw a little bit of himself in her large, round eyes.

“Still no luck?”

Caleb looked up, surprised for a moment, seeing a very sleep tousled Mollymauk leaning in the doorway of the nursery, naked but for a loosely tied robe that hung off his lithe shoulders. He felt more than a few stirrings at the sight (parenthood had been seriously eating into their time for other things, not just cleaning).

“No,” he shrugged helplessly, as Una still fussed and grizzled in his arms, “I said you could go back to sleep?”

Molly shook his head, coming to stand by him, “I felt guilty. And besides, this sounds like a two dad job.”

“It might be,” Caleb had to admit, shifting Una to his other shoulder, as if that would make all the difference, “Something’s upset her really badly.”

“Dreams again?” Molly asked delicately, expression softening sympathetically as his husband nodded.

The tiefling pressed a kiss to his daughter’s fuzzy head, feeling the same heavy, bitter uselessness as Caleb. The hardest part about having a baby, they’d quickly realised, was knowing there were some hurts they couldn’t heal for her.

“Here, can you take her for a second?” Caleb sat up a little straighter, an idea suddenly coming to him, “I think I might have something…”

Molly took Una, where she clung to him every bit as tightly as she had to Caleb and whimpered miserably, sliding down to the rocking chair, “Oh?”

The wizard got on his knees in front of them, holding out one palm, “I’ve been practising this, I thought she might like it…”

He moved his long fingers rhythmically, almost as if he was beckoning something that no one could see but him. Molly was confused briefly, until he saw a warm, ethereal glow start to bud between his husband’s fingers. It pulsed softly, leaving tracks of fading light along its path that disappeared after a few moments, growing and unfurling slowly like some odd kind of plant until it broke free of Caleb’s hold and bobbed through the shadowed room, a free floating orb of off white light.

“Wow, babe,” Molly blinked, admiringly. Of course his husband had much more powerful magic than glowing lights but there was something especially beautiful about this, borne of its simplicity, the innocence it seemed to hold as it wavered there in amongst the dark.

“Thanks,” Caleb looked proud as he let another form, more blue than white this time, and then another and another, rose and sunshine and butter and teal, blooming from his palms until the room seemed full of their own, private collection of stars.

And Una was utterly transfixed. Her tears stuttered and stilled, mouth opening in awe to reveal her little rosebud pink tongue, one thin little arm pulling away to reach for them as they floated past.

Molly beamed down at her, hand gently cradling the back of her head, “Look what your clever old papa did for you, darling…”

Caleb snorted, though he was every bit as thrilled at the clear joy on Una’s little face. Nightmares were entirely forgotten, everything they had to worry about, all the chores that needed doing, tomorrow’s anxieties were all completely left behind for the few hours the little family spent together with Caleb’s lights. All the hurts they shared, that would never fully heal faded away just the tiniest bit as they laughed together.

And that was all they could hope for.

[nandasachra]

the spirit of aging

This past year shaped another perspective of mine about aging. I used to be anxious and agitated on the particular aging moment called birthday but now I am about to receive it with a warm welcome. 

Since the catharsis process I went through a couple of months ago, I can feel my heart feels a bit well-ventilated and my mind feels a bit lighter. Thanks to the healing journey of catharsis, I can find meaning—even strength, from the painful feeling that I was intentionally facing—even seek. This catharsis process is indeed destroying me, yet so much empowering at the same time, a proof to my own self that I’m bigger than my own fear. Even I had tried to convert my fear into love. The very kind of love that I know will always there, intimate, hanging on the air of that sentimental city, waiting to fall like a clean rain washing out the dust on the ground of fear. 

Yes, I did it, also left some of it for another time. 

That moment also did a favor of emptying my emotional bucket that apparently has been full since my mind rotating around fragmented subjects of my existential angst, as preparing myself for whatever misery will come to me in a spur-of-the-moment, the action of anticipating my disguised fragility. Maybe some people are unwittingly a living paradox, they can be firm on their shells just to protect their delicacies. Or may I say all of us? 

Anyway, emptying my emotional bucket gives me outcomes to be more fair and sensible towards every choice that life has been given recently. And I guess, this catharsis process is one of the trials of whatever I learn from it.

-

5 July 2021

I woke up in the morning, half-awake to the yellow light softly came through my window, I believe when I’m fully awake & aware I can see the dust heavenly dancing around the beam—I’ll be joining them in a minute.

I heard distance movements from the living beings such a clear sign that the island is waking up. I grunted while I moved my body steadily. I felt much safe and easy under this blanket, the soreness of my body really want to makes me root onto this bed.

-

Days in my sicknesses, I finally decided to do COVID swab test and then got a positive result. It’s an “Uh-oh” moment, seems that I’ve got another unexpected birthday present from the universe huh. Who knows this virus would eventually be a personal blessing for me we’ll see. I’m quite sure it is COV19 because the illness spreading so fast in one day. Five persons in our place having a symptoms altogether then 4 of us were resulting positive. Greeting to the virus, evidently there will be no place in this world really have a privilege of the immune state, not even this tiny remote island. A reality that we must accept, a measurement that we must undergo.

My life feels like hit a pause button going thru this time. The symptoms was high in the early few days, like cannot breathe properly without the reserved O2 for several nights is a real thing. It’s been 6 days the very moment I write this. I’m a bit in distress not only because of the physical pain I felt, but I’m afraid if this virus could spread easily on this island by something we cannot anticipate at this moment, though we’re doing what we can do to make this isolation system works properly by the very least interaction—still, there’s slight interaction cannot be avoided. Also we can never be sure how each person’s immune system responds to the virus and how the body reacts to it. No sufficient health facility, so, fingers crossed.

However, being isolated on this island is actually way better than going off to be isolated in the city. Think I’m lucky by getting COVID while I’m here, for the virus cannot spread pervasively. When I feel decent I can do morning sunbathe at the beach to get Vit D, still can dip at sunset to release any tension, still can have a mindful walk around the trees in 50m proximity to get fresh air supply. I’m giving cheers to this isolated island’s made for.

The fact that I’m isolated with 3 other rangers that also infected makes me get to know them well. The isolation obviously could make someone feeling disconnected whatsoever, of course for me too, but for me also there’s a connection with people who bear the same struggle. In one very tiny building occupied by 4 sick people, we’re checking one another, entertaining each other by the silly stories, jokes, off-tune singing, and absurd behaviors. It’s been light-hearted in some ways. Treat each other more as friends than co-workers, no professional agenda. And day by day I’m able to understand each of them slightly deeper and build more intimacy that I always long for in people, develop my empathize with them.

By the time I’m basically pushing away work and other responsibilities as much as I can, let me just first reflect on life at the moment—like birthday always be a moment of reflection. Birthday will always be a very personal to me, it’s going deep inward rather than human-relational as one of the social-phenomenon I’ve been used to witnessed in this eon. It’s quite contradictory that I like to keep a mark for my close circle’s birthdays, like family and my closest friends—for the highest mark, in my prayer. 

For the moment of birthday, I’d like to get to the point that I understand myself a little better. To look at how myself experience life a bit wider—emotionally, spiritually, physically, and see how much I experienced intimacy, warmth, and compassion towards my own self and those around me. After all, I look at how myself progressed and regressed and what can be done to maintain this progression and rectify any regression. And as I’m getting older I also contemplate of how this trivial, annual incremental number means to me.

I recall one dusk time in Sorong, myself was sipping a Malaysian coffee while I listened to someone’s story echoed at my table. He’s a friend of mine, Don, 60 years old seems like 40 something. I asked him why he seems way much younger than his age?

He told me story, he had cancer when he was 30, he was being an army. It was the turning point of his life when he got a chance to live longer, cured of his illness, and then he felt like he was reborn to someone new, because it makes him rethink about himself and redefining his meaning on this life as one single human blessed with second chance. From US then he moved to Jakarta, looking for another way to live, from an army then being an engineer in an oil & gas company. He said maybe that’s why he looks younger because his life started again ever since. I know he was just trying to make fun of it, but somehow I love the spirit at the end of the story. Currently in his 60s he’s actively trail-running jump around the woods in Sorong nearby, hence I met him.

The point of his chronicle is not because of his illness regarding me fighting against COVID at this moment, I can say this is nothing compared to his—thanks for the full dose of vaccine shots that I got a few times ago, ease up the symptoms. But this is about the spirit of aging that emits from him, that whatever number you’ve been stand in this world, you’re still functioning. You can still choose how to bring yourself to the world, what act of services you can do to others. You can still learn everything and be whatever you want in alignment with your purpose. Your brain and your potential won’t decay over time as long as you sharpen it very careful and precise.

I believe aging is a biological phenomenon, the thing is after so many times it becomes a social symbol well-tailored by the culture—by the certain age you have to get a job, you have to get married, to bearing children, to be on top, to do this and to do that.. we have to be conform—and for this reason, I can tell you why. it. always. makes. me. uncomfortable, by getting older.

But now I get to embrace aging by the moment of getting mature, not getting old. Mature by healthy mindset, healthy lifestyle, healthy soul, also a broader set of knowledge to get along with people from a wide range of ages and backgrounds, just like Don. Even, he also displays that aging—the physical phenomenon itself—hasn’t necessarily dictate our own physical—boom. It’s adding more accuracy that age really is just a number. 

Your whole being, decide.

Last but not least. A special note for my birthday, I’m grateful that I’m not alone going thru this.

Stay safe, everyone.

[lxiewrites]

Cursed to Be Happy

I’m making a story of a man who’s always happy a tragedy. Let’s get to it. Here’s your bedtime story Ellie! @ciuucalata

One can gain magic in many, many ways. Some good, some bad. Magic can be earned. It can be given or birthed. It can be raised. It can also be taken. Forced. Magic is also different for different people, for some, it’s a gift, a blessing. Others, a curse.

This is a story of how a blessing became a curse.

 It started benign enough. A happy nameday approached and neighbors and friends showed for miles around for the couple’s newest babe. A happy baby boy with bright blue eyes and a charming gummy grin. A cheer rose up in the village at his first laugh; he took to strangers with a warrior’s spirit and bubbling giggles. Everyone was charmed by this little miracle, even the Good Neighbors.

But that’s when it went wrong.

Magic was given on that nameday. One might think by the fairy, whose name was lost in retellings, the only clue to her name is the term hag. But no. She didn’t start out that way. And neither did she cast the spell. Her apprentice, one so beautiful and kind and once naïve, alluring in the worst of ways, cast the blessing on this tiny baby boy.

In practice for the royal christening she decided to bless this beloved child with all the best intentions of the world. Her mentor applauded her. Encouraged her even. But every spell cast must have a loophole. Tis the way of the fae.

The apprentice hovered over the cradle of the child, he greeted her with a happy giggle and gently, even for a little babe, touched her silver locks.

Warmth enveloped her heart. What better to bless this child with than what he already gives?

And with a wave of her hand she blessed him to be happy.

Always.

 At first his parents were overjoyed with the news. A child who is never sad or hurt, who won’t cry or be angry. It sounded like a dream come true. They went the first few years in blissful relief but their other children were concerned and soon they did too. They were a rambunctious family after all. They have watched their littlest brother walk away from playing with bruises, cuts, and blood, with a smile and a laugh. His arm would be bent and through pain filled tears that he didn’t understand asking them why they were the ones crying. Why was he?

Even though the fairy had made sure he was blessed with happiness no one could be happy forever right? That’s what his siblings thought. They merely waited until the happiness gave out.

 He grew up as a happy child, but, of course, what choice did he have? Nevertheless he was happy. What made him extraordinarily happy was making others happy. He would laugh and tell jokes. Sometimes he would reduce to physical comedy, strange salty liquid in his eyes that always confused him—because that’s not what supposed to be there right? —whenever he went too far and sharp throbbing pain permeated his body. Anything to make someone crack a smile.

He found though that not everyone wanted to smile all the time.

 When someone he loved was hurt or was sad he tried to make them happy. Anything, a light in the eye, twitch of a lip, but sometimes they just couldn’t bring themselves to create a fake smile just for him.

The older he got the more he found that he couldn’t make people be happy and that made him feel…not happy. He didn’t know what it was but he knew it’s not the feeling that had been with him since birth.

He found himself more and more alone. The distance between him and others too much for his happiness to breech. Even when they’re done being not happy, faces dry and puffy, ready to smile again, they keep their distance from him. He tried. He really, really tried. But they stopped sharing the other emotions he never understood and he found that they stopped sharing their happiness with him.

He knew he was missing something. Something was wrong with him. He couldn’t connect with people.

When he told his family that he was leaving they cried. He was too innocent. Too sheltered. Too happy. The world would eat him up alive and leave nothing but empty laughter.

He didn’t understand.

 He set off on his journey to find the fairy that cursed him with happiness. He had no idea where to start. No experience outside of his village but he was optimistic. What else would he be? He came across many horrors in his travels. Would they still be considered horrors to someone always happy?

Horrors. Something that his brain registered as “bad” but nothing he could really feel.

Sickness was well enough for him to help. Some jokes and juggling and those children were laughing between coughs. It didn’t help when one of those children succumbed to the sickness. “Why are you still happy? Didn’t you care?” parents asked.

He moved along.

Hunger was another beast that he could stab at. Happy that the little food that he had helped the hungry family he encountered. But when the food ran out there were only more hungry families and they couldn’t eat smiles.

He couldn’t do anything.

Death and grief is something he doesn’t want to even think about. No one wants a fool at a funeral.

 Finally, he caught wind of the fairy that cursed him. Who, then, was a close friend of the royal family, blessings at the christenings, wishes granted, prayers answered.

Her face lighted upon seeing him, her work a stamp, a mark that she’ll always recognize.

“The happy boy,” she recognized. She greeted him, respectful distance away. She inquired about his life so far.

“….happy,” he replied.

“Excellent.” She clapped her hands. “So far it has been successful.”

“No,” he breathed. Desperate, but not. “No, it has not.” He was not happy. He felt nothing else but happy. There was happy and there’s nothingness. If he didn’t feel happy then he didn’t feel anything at all. “There’s something wrong,” he tried to explain. “Something not right. Please, please break the curse.”

She stepped back, shock plain on her face. Curse? He believed she cursed him? That wasn’t what she intended. That wasn’t it at all. She just wanted this beloved little boy to always be happy.

“I’m alone,” he says. “I’m happy but I can’t share it with anyone and no one wants to share their happiness with me. Even now I should feel something. I know I’m not happy but I can’t feel anything. What other feelings are there but happy? I must know.”

She took a breath. The loophole that her former mentor told her. The fairy that turned, her advice used for good. How ironic.

She approached him and laid her hand on his hair. “I was young when I cast the spell but even then I cannot reverse what has been cemented without much pain. Pain that I’m afraid you won’t be able to endure as a mortal. There is a loophole, but it will require sacrifice.”

 “You must learn magic,” she explained as she led him to her magical cavern. “The spell was to make a human boy forever happy.” She handed him book after magic book. “If you become something other than human then the spell will release. Remember,” she says, staring into his eyes. “Magic always has a catch.”

She left him with his studies.

 He learned the way of the fae. The twisted words and double doors. The catches and releases either for him or someone else. He had yet to find a spell that turned him not of the mortal plane.

He studied.

Years go by.

Books are read.

He learned to perform small magics. Fruit was always ripe, he always got the best cut of beef, the bed was always soft. But he had to build the magic. Gather it like wool stuck on thorns. Slowly, gently, carefully, in small increments.

One day he found something that he thought might work. After the years he had the ability but it takes time to gather the magic. He waited.

 A circle, candles, the elements at every corner of the star in the middle. He sat in the center and began the incantation.

He felt his body lifting, becoming ethereal then soon fading until there’s just consciousness. The spell didn’t do what he expected. His mind watched as his physical being slowly faded into nothingness. Contrary to what his family believed what was left of him was not laughter but the whispers of a spell gone wrong.

He floated.

For how long? To this day he doesn’t know. Not until the fairy showed calling out his name. She stopped mid-shout and looked directly at him. She walked to the middle of the circle, past the left over numbs of wax, picked up the book. “You fool.” She doesn’t shout, a statement. A fact. She looked at him once again. “You’ve turned yourself into pure magic.”

For the first time in his life Lance cried, but there are no tears to fall.

 She says that given enough time he could turn himself human or at least physically connected to the human plane. It will take time and a lot of magic.

Sadly, —sadly, he can feel sadness— he learns he is only a conduct of power. He finds that he needs others to gather the magic, fae, witches, even humans, anyone with a magical ability.

He still finds that he loves making people happy, his curse did not change that part of him. This way he can help them. A little girl wishes on a star that her family would find enough money to eat the next day? Done. The boy who blows all of the fuzzies off of a dandelion wishes for a dog? Done. The man who prays for the love of his life? Not done. Impossible really. He could not conduct fate or humans as he could magic. It has occurs to him that he could collect the magic they gathered to become human but what he could do filled him with joy.

It meant something. He made a difference. Sometimes seeing their situations made phantom tears roll down his nonexistent cheeks. Or angry and indignant on their behalf but he knew the importance of those situations. Of feeling. The unnamed welling in the soul that spilled over on cheeks and lips. He wouldn’t want to wish that on them, taking away those feelings. Every single one. All of them made everything worth living making happiness that much more so.

It might take him years to become human. He might never want to be human. But he’s finally enjoying life as one.

[alcoholicseraphim]

Temporal Peripatetics

She was fourteen when she first manipulated time.

Her Head of House placed the Time Turner into her cupped hands as it were no more significant than handing over car keys. Hermione received it with studied nonchalance despite the awe and reverence that nearly overwhelmed her. Rapidly she had learned that she must pretend not to be surprised by anything, lest acknowledged gaps in knowledge should poke holes in the image she was careful to maintain. So she looked at her Professor and not the device while soaking in every word of Professor McGonagall's lecture on the rules of time travel. Rules. Those were good. Constraints. It would be chaos otherwise, right?

"We, and the Ministry, are placing a great deal of trust in you. Not that there's a whole lot that can be done with it, you see, but you could still travel about four hours forward or backwards. Any more than that would cause undue risk to your person. It is strictly to be used only to attend your classes. Are we clear?" The wrinkles around Professor McGonagall's mouth creased further, and she glowered over her folded hands at Hermione.

"Of course, Professor! I would never break your trust," she cried. "You can count on me, I promise!"

The wrinkles softened, as did her glare. "Yes, I believe we can."

Once back in the hallway, Hermione had a choice. She could either head straight to the library to analyze and research this fascinating artifact, or she could go straight into a more hands-on study. Curiosity overruled her nagging desire to read the instruction manual, so to speak.

Where could she go that would definitely be unoccupied no matter how far back she went? Not a bathroom stall, as was her first guess. How horrifying would it be if she appeared while someone was using it? Still, that kind of absolute privacy was hard to find anywhere else in this bloody castle. Well, if a bathroom could hide an illegal potion and go undetected for a month, why couldn't that same place hide her for a few hours? Slipping the Time Turner under her shirt, she smoothed her uniform and walked briskly down the corridor to Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Even though both the bathroom and Professor McGonagall's office were on the first floor, it was still quite a ways to get there. Her calves ached from the half-run.

Fortunately, the ghost girl was probably somewhere in the pipes. It didn't particularly matter where she was, as long as she wasn't there to bother Hermione.

Hermione sat- what would time travel feel like? would it make her dizzy? probably better to sit down, just in case- against the wall furthest from the door, the one connecting the stalls to the sinks. She eyed the sinks warily for a moment before turning back to the matter at hand. The device was quite small, fitting easily into the palm of her hand. It was also flat, probably for the convenience of wearing it as jewelry. A dial on the side connected to a thin rod clearly visible through the thick protective glass that made up the ornament. It's purpose, however, appeared to be executed entirely through that tiny little black cylinder.

She turned the dial only once; caution would behoove her until she knew exactly what she was dealing with. A force far greater than she could resist forced her eyes to shut, so she could only rely on touch and sound. There was only a faint buzz, and an increase in temperature so slight she may only have imagined it. When she was allowed to see once more, she looked around and noticed with no surprise that nothing in her environment had changed. Even Moaning Myrtle was still absent, or at least silent. A flick of her wand and a muttered, "Tempus," revealed that she'd gone back just a little more than an hour. The imprecision of it made her frown, but she supposed it did make sense. How effective of a measurement was a "turn", anyway? She would have to fiddle with it a little more to pin down exactly how far back a single degree would get her. Frustration and disappointment made her sigh, but if there was anything Hermione knew it was that one must work before they got to play.

She was still fourteen when she finally determined that she could use the device as she was meant to. She would be fourteen for some time, but for a far shorter period compared to her peers.

Once the tiniest of marks were etched onto the Time Turner by intervals of ten degrees, Hermione practiced sending herself through time by the tiniest and largest increments she could manage. Each degree controlled just about six seconds, making the full 360 degrees come to one hour. Convenient, that.

Just as Professor McGonagall had said, the dial would only turn four times in either direction. When she went full capacity the buzz would become louder and the heat would increase, causing nausea to form in her belly and head like carsickness. Unpleasant as it was, it lasted for only a few moments. What would more than four hours do to her body? The nausea would become worse, logically. Still, it was hard to predict symptoms when she could only access the very beginning of the process. Not that she really wanted to discover personally how broken the body becomes through excessive time travel, but curiosity was a beast she had no desire to tame and she didn't really feel that she had a choice.

The books in the Hogwarts Library didn't help, though she hadn't checked the Restricted section. Why would that sort of knowledge be Restricted, anyway? If anything, it would act as a warning. Perhaps information on time travel was closely guarded by the Ministry. It would make sense, after all, but then again why allow a third year to use such a device if they believed knowledge to be so dangerous to the public?

Maybe the research she wanted didn't exist. Maybe no one had gone very far at all. Maybe it was assumed that their grasp on time travel was tiny but safe.

It was arrogant to think that a barely-pubescent girl could accomplish more than fully grown, knowledgeable research teams. Hermione knew that. But still, once the thought entered her head it was nearly impossible to dislodge.

What could she do, with such limits? Well, all she could do: push the envelope.

True, she could only coax the Time Turner into giving her four hours at a time. But once those four hours were granted, who's to say she couldn't request more? If she took it in skips, it was possible to go back further. Or forward further, though she felt uneasy trespassing on the future. She became intimately acquainted with time-sickness, though she supposed that was the price she must pay for scholarly advancement. There were always costs for those sorts of things.

She was fifteen when she first saw the accelerated passage of time.

At first it didn't seem hugely significant. Interesting, yes; it appeared to be a wonderful dynamic landscape of color. Less of a blur, and more... twinkly. There were no two the same in any given place, and even staring intently at a single point would produce a different color in the end than the beginning.

Beautiful, yes. Fascinating, yes. Helpful, not so much.

Still, it felt like progress.

It took many, many more travels before she was able to see each spot in more detail. They weren't just colors after all, but scenes. Minuscule creatures and objects shifted about, playing in no particular order and with no discernible sense of organization. It was difficult even to pick out a perspective, since there didn't seem to be one. Really, it was a wonder her brain could understand what was going on at all, as she'd never looked at the world from every angle at once. Perhaps it was due to adjustment. She'd started out seeing just colors, hadn't she?

The scenes took up so much of her thought and focus that it took a while before she realized that her other senses were assaulted in different ways as well. The buzzing, too, became more distinct. It was no longer just a drone, but a cacophony: voices, mostly, but also wind and creaks and some she couldn't even begin to identify. The heat and the nausea were less severe than they had been. While they hadn't gone completely, Hermione got the feeling that they were tentative, as if testing her to see whether she deserved comfort.

Hermione had no doubt in her mind that whatever it was she was dealing with was intelligent. Not in the way that she was intelligent, necessarily, with emotion and reason. This intelligence was the mindfulness of something unfettered by even space, and most assuredly not weighed down by feelings. This thing- for it wasn't a being, she knew that much- had the knowledge of everything that had ever been and ever would be, and the wisdom that that must lend was beyond Hermione's comprehension.

If a thing could be curious while simultaneously satisfying that curiosity, then that was how Hermione imagined the thing saw her. What an oxymoron.

She was approximately sixteen when she first lost control of the Time Turner.

Rather, she didn't suppose the problem was with the device. The Time Turner itself did very little except process her request, similar to a train ticket. Just what happened after she showed her ticket was up to the driver. The driver apparently decided that it would not move her the hour and a half necessary to make it to Muggle Studies, but instead a whole fortnight. That first time, as far as she could tell, was just to show her that it could happen. Unless she'd inadvertently fulfilled some purpose, which was also entirely probable. Once she got past the first few weeks of panic, her academic nature urged her to follow whatever path time led her down. Something told her that very few, if any, had gotten as far as she had.

Losing control, to the girl who micromanaged everything and everyone around her, was a nightmare. For a long time she struggled to keep her feet on the ground, as it were. But putting so much effort into staying grounded only strained her mind, and the concentration could really go into more useful things than clinging to a reality that no longer existed for her. So, she let go.

Almost immediately, the storm calmed. She was no longer going back further than she'd asked for every time she tried, and she was no longer forced to make up that time in the same way as everyone else. As soon as she let the current take her, an hour was an hour.

The time-sickness faded into nothing so gradually Hermione couldn't pinpoint exactly when it went away. Probably when it started whipping her around the timeline. There was a sense of fairness to it that Hermione liked.

Sometimes she would still end up somewhere different, but she was usually returned within a few hours. She didn't mind at all.

She was still sixteen when she was first transported without the Time Turner.

It started small, naturally. Tiny, just a few minutes. Then hours, then days, then weeks. It was jarring, certainly, but Hermione wasn't sure she could turn back at this point even if she tried. Why would she do that, though? She was two years older than her friends. It could seem like a small amount, until she considered that those years were made up of hours. She'd manipulated time so frequently she'd lost count. "Prolonged exposure" was a bit of an understatement at that point.

The worst times, though, were when she was moved in her sleep. Or in the middle of a project. Especially when she ended up somewhere entirely different from where she'd been before, like the middle of Muggle London or by the side of the road in some unfamiliar desert. Those were not only the least comfortable, but the most confusing. After a bit of thought she began to comprehend that space simply wasn't an issue for time. Or perhaps it was because wizards are already manipulators of space, so her power combined with time's...

She was exhausted and invigorated all at once. It was glorious and strenuous and a constant challenge, and Hermione had never enjoyed herself more.

Ron and Harry noticed, which said a lot in and of itself. They never noticed anything that didn't actively crawl down their throats, so the change in her must be decidedly pronounced. Perhaps it was also that she looked like a seventh year while she was supposed to be fourteen. She hated to admit it, but she was beginning to grow bored of them. She loved them dearly and would gladly kill and die for them, but their company grated on her already fragile tolerance.

The year in her proper time ended. Hermione excelled in all of her classes, but dropped Muggle Studies and Divination at Professor McGonagall's urging. She parted with the Time Turner with less reluctance than Professor McGonagall probably expected. Hermione saw the looks she gave her, like she was hiding something. And wasn't she?

Later that night she confirmed that time no longer needed the Time Turner to take her when it pleased. It had latched onto her.

Certainly she was far more successful in her research than she'd anticipated she would be.

Ron looked at her like a girl, something she would have been overjoyed about before this whole mess. Pride was there, but it was drowned by discomfort. Harry started looking at her differently as well, but not in the same way. It had been a stressful year for him, after all, and he needed someone to hold him up. Hermione, self-assured, compassionate, loving Hermione, was the ideal anchor. And really, wasn't that what she'd always wanted to be for him? She was uniquely suited to help him. She had all the time he could ask of her within her influence.

When the three parted at King's Cross station they promised to owl her. Of course they did.

She left with her parents, who seemed almost nervous to be collecting her. The feeling was mutual.

"You've grown," her mother commented, glancing at her in the rear-view mirror. "Just a few months ago you were our little girl, all baby fat and happiness!" Her parents shared a chuckle, but it sounded sad to Hermione's ears.

Hermione smiled and lied, "I'm still your little girl." They probably knew it wasn't true. The rest of the drive may as well have been spent in silence.

She must have been seventeen when she first willed herself into another time. Maybe eighteen. She'd lost track, and did it matter, really?

It was downright silly to be concerned with going to the Yule ball on someone's arm, so she wasn't. Viktor sought her out on his own, and he did so for all the right reasons, so she agreed. She'd already turned Ron down, and knew that there would be conflict later, but she was flattered that someone, someone famous, would see something special in her. Besides that, he was her age, even if he didn't know that.

"You don't go anywhere without that planner, do you?" he asked, referring to the book peeking out of her robe pocket. The sun hid behind a film of silver clouds, casting a subdued light on the grounds. It was chilly, but they had warming charms. It was mundane and peaceful and boring.

"It's important," she said, and changed the subject. It was better for everyone to think she was just hyper-organized for the hell of it. Really, though, jumping around so often made it difficult to keep track of important events. Especially now, when this man tried to monopolize every bit of her time he could grab hold of. Relationships were exhausting, Hermione decided.

Ron pitched a fit, predictably. Hermione responded with fury and tears, also predictably. She left the room and, feeling sorry for herself, wished to be somewhen else. She was already all dressed up, wasn't she? Why waste all the effort she'd put into her appearance? Maybe she could recover her equilibrium at some other Yule function.

The familiar voices filled her ears, whispering what sounded like consoling words, and the scenes swam before her eyes. Her hand stretched out and touched one that appeared to show another ballroom, with strangers having the time of their lives. She could use that sort of unbridled joy.

A blink later, she found herself standing near the wall. The room was huge and dimly lit. Outside it was dark, and Hermione moved toward the window. A surreptitious flick of her wand told her that it was nearly midnight on December 21st, 1952. She had no clue just where she was, but she couldn't bring herself to care.

Many experiences taught her that the "rules" of time travel were bullshit. Time preserved its own, and if she weren't meant to be in a place then it would not allow her to be there. It was as simple as that, so interacting with her environment wouldn't do any harm.

Footsteps approached, but Hermione didn't turn around. Silently, she marveled at how swiftly her attention was sought. She observed the man's reflection in the window. As far as she could tell, he was an exceedingly handsome man, with even, symmetrical features and a slender build.

"Excuse me," said the man.

Hermione took her sweet time in acknowledging him, but he didn't seem to mind. "Yes?" She didn't bother with being endearing or cute. Her mood, while improving rapidly, was still too sour for that sort of farce.

"My name is Alphard Black. Would you do me the honor of dancing with me?" A grin stretched across his face, urging her to agree. If she was in luck, mischief was on the menu and Hermione would gladly partake. He took her outstretched hand in his own and led her to the middle of the dance floor. As Alphard led her in a waltz, he explained, "I am led to believe by the expression on my lovely sister's face that she plans to feed me my own limbs for supper if I embarrass her in any way, and who could resist such a tempting offer? I mean, I could strip down and start jumping on the tables, but doing something so dramatic would likely give her an aneurysm. Vexing her into an early death isn't quite my goal, so we'll begin with a lack of decorum in regards to the opposite sex. Should you find the idea intolerable, please do feel free to run away screaming. I believe that would mortify Walburga just as well."

"I pegged you well," Hermione remarked, an answering grin forming. "Do as you will, Mr Black."

"We can begin by calling one another by our names, if you're amenable." He really was a marvelous dancer, and the twinkle in his eyes was disarming, to say the least.

"In that case, I'm Hermione," she said. "I was hoping for some form of entertainment, but I hadn't expected something as fun as this. Do tell me, why are you seeking to irritate your sister? And why request the aid of a strange woman whose personality and connections are entirely unknown to you?"

Alphard laughed, a lovely full-throated baritone that tugged at the corners of Hermione's lips. "Besides the hilarity of her reaction, you mean? Well, if you must know, she's talking far too much about her fiancee. Orion is a right git, and her cousin at that."

"Her cousin? I can't say I'm horribly surprised, as impolite as that is to say to the brother of the bride. And the cousin of the groom. Are they not concerned about the heirs?" She was pressing just a bit too hard, toeing the line into cruelty. She wanted to feel guilty, but her inward search revealed not even a single drop of remorse.

Fortunately- or unfortunately, Hermione wasn't sure what she'd wanted from him- he didn't appear offended in the slightest and even agreed with her. "Well, at least we know exactly what they'll look like, yeah?"

Hermione giggled, a sound which turned into a squeal at the sharp pinch to her waist. "No need to get violent, now! So your response to her excessive pride is embarrassment? Some brother you are."

"I'm younger, and by a few years, so I believe I'm allowed. That's what I was born for, right?"

His hair was absurd. His everything was absurd, when Hermione thought about it. He did have a point: keeping the genes within the family discounted unpleasant surprises as far as appearance went. If she could say one thing for the Blacks, it was that they'd perfected the art of natural beauty. Alphard watched her with amusement in his grey (yes, grey. What's inbreeding for if not the hoarding of recessive genes?) eyes.

"Are you quite finished?" he said, poking her side again.

"Oh, hush," she chuckled. "Now about my second question. Why me?"

Alphard shrugged, a surprisingly elegant motion considering both arms were occupied in whirling her around. "No real reason; it was precisely because I had no idea how you would react. No great cosmic power at play here. My apologies if that's disappointing to you."

"Not at all," she said dryly, trying to keep the smirk off of her face. "Only curiosity, and hoping you didn't have some nefarious agenda. How old are you, anyway?"

"Have you noticed wrinkles?" Alphard said, grinning. "After all, I've hit the ripe old age of twenty."

Hermione nodded. "You will die soon," she remarked sagely. "Though surely Walburga will die first."

"If that is so, I must perform my task quickly. You were warned," Alphard said. "I'm going to do something shocking, so please don't hit me." Before she could respond, his lips crashed into hers.

She'd kissed before. Viktor, naturally; an Irish girl named Emily in the eighties; and Adrian Pucey, once. This one was different. Not better, by any means- she wasn't sure if anything would ever surpass Emily's- but this was a production. It was a kiss borne not of attraction, but impishness. It was good, and somehow exactly what she needed. She couldn't remember grinning having ruined the efficiency quite as much as just then, and something about that made her happy.

The scandal didn't cause a huge scene, as Hermione had half-expected. Alphard assured her, however, that old Purebloods have memories for deviance, and this would be brought up for years to come. "Probably even after I'm dead," he said with a shrug and a twinkle.

When she returned to her own time, with glowing cheeks and a wide smile, she saw Ron in the Common Room. He ignored her, and she could honestly say that she didn't care.

It was odd, being an adult when she was supposed to be a freshman in high school. If she attended a Muggle high school, of course. It appealed to her in a way, but she supposed she could do it at any time she wanted, so there was no need to drop everything just to do that. And they encouraged regular attendance, which Hermione didn't find herself favoring at all.

Rather than allowing herself to be hindered in her learning, Hermione spent many (many) of her extra hours studying. She had the unique ability to meet anyone she wanted to, if she were willing to work for it, so not all of her learning was read. Wand in hand, Hermione went anywhere and anywhen she fancied.

Having to come back to her original time was becoming a hassle. There was so much more for her! She'd met the Founders, for Merlin's sake, and Nimue as well! And yet, she still had to attend History of Magic, a class she could easily have taught herself, with bored fourth year students. She daydreamed of leaving and never coming back. It would be perfect, it was well within her grasp, and the things she could learn were limitless.

As absolutely wonderful as that would be, she couldn't. Or wouldn't, rather. Harry still needed her, and in a way she still needed him. He would survive the Triwizard Tournament if she had to burn the whole bloody maze to the ground. She had no illusions that his trials would end there, because obviously they wouldn't, but she would drag him through each one of them until he died a peaceful death in his sleep after a few centuries. He needed her.

Harry was the only thing that could have kept her there.

So she sat in the bleachers next to Ron and stared so hard at the impenetrable green vine wall that it was a wonder it didn't catch fire. If she weren't so emotionally invested in its outcome, it would have been the worst spectator sport imaginable. As it was, it had her full and undivided attention.

Maybe she was the first to see when he arrived. She couldn't say for sure. She could say that she was the first to start moving toward him, though she was overtaken by Cedric Diggory's distraught father.

She should have cared about Cedric. He'd been a nice boy, fair and kind. She should have cared, but she didn't. Not even afterwards, when she searched for any sorrow, any sadness at all, and found only regret for Harry. At the time, with all the noise and emotional overload from all directions, she clung to Harry's torso with single-minded determination. She held him even as he held Cedric. She held him when he let go.

Professor Moody took him inside. It's not like she really could have said anything, and he flat-out forbade her from coming along. Because it wouldn't do to hex her professor, she reluctantly let them leave.

To her fury, she found out hours later what happened. Professor Moody wasn't Moody at all, but an escaped Death Eater whom everyone had believed had successful lived up to the name of his organization. Barty Crouch Junior. If the Dementor hadn't gotten there first, she would have killed him.

No one would take Harry from her again. Not after that.

He curled up against her in the soft darkness of the boy's dormitory, muffling his sobs into her neck. Even after he fell asleep, she stroked his hair and held him close. Time didn't sweep her up, almost as if it knew her limits. She would not have left his side for anything.

Ron was jealous and awkward and silent. His every emotion was so transparent to her, and she found she didn't care to ease his discomfort. Harry needed her far more than Ron did. Actually, she often doubted whether Ron needed her at all. Wanted her around, certainly. Held her in high esteem, obviously. Would be upset if she were to disappear, surely. But he didn't need her, and she didn't need him as much as she loved him. Without noticing she'd made her choice, and Harry would be her first priority without a doubt.

Rather than feel guilty, she just felt a vague sense of sympathy.

It was harder than ever to allow Harry to go with his aunt and uncle. She'd never liked doing it, and always felt like she was complicit in the abuse by allowing him to return to it every summer, but this time only the thought that Harry wouldn't appreciate being kidnapped held her back.

Her parents watched her with worried eyes, but they let her leave the house every day without putting up a fuss. She was still their rule-abiding, practical, sensible daughter, and they didn't think for even a second that she would do something to get herself in any serious trouble. Besides that, they didn't know that the Trace on her wand was gone and she could use it as she pleased. Not in her house, naturally, because the Ministry still kept tabs on her residence, but anywhere else was fine as long as she was careful about it. Apparating to Harry's neighborhood required next to no effort. She'd taken the test years ago, so although she wasn't registered under her own name she felt confident in her ability to do it safely.

His neighborhood was so cookie-cutter, even more so than her own. Every house looked the same, save the different degrees of care put into their yards. All of the grass was lush green and a uniform length, but some houses had flowers and bushes while others were more spartan. Harry's house was somewhere in the middle. Neatly trimmed bushes lined the wall on either side of the door, and flower pots flanked the front door like guardians. Like they could stop her, she thought, pocketing her wand.

She knocked three times in quick succession, each rap crisp and proper. Harry's aunt Petunia opened the door with a polite smile, which Hermione had no trouble returning. "Hello, my name is Hermione Granger. My mother is starting a little service, for those families with children whom they don't feel comfortable leaving at home alone. There's no charge, and we're just trying to get the word out. Does your family have children?"

Petunia nodded slowly. "We do, but I stay home and watch them."

"And that's just marvelous. But we know how much trouble kids get into when they're bored. Our goal is to keep these children busy and productive, and most importantly, out of their parents' hair. Life doesn't take breaks, and we just want to take away a bit of stress. We take in children of all ages, but we do tend to focus on the older ones, just because their capacity for causing trouble is much higher." Her tone was professional and cordial, but with an underlying steel wire. She tried her best to channel Professor McGonagall, and by the look on Petunia's face she would guess she was succeeding.

"That does sound very useful," Petunia admitted. "What sort of things will you do to keep them busy?" She seemed to be actually considering it, which was good. Hermione wouldn't have preferred Confunding her, but she would do it if she had to. Hopefully that wouldn't be necessary.

"It really does depend on the age. We aren't focused on fun, however. Much of it is community service. What better way to use their time than to help maintain our home's good image? Not only does it benefit everyone, it builds character and responsibility." Hermione twitched a wrinkle out of her skirt. Petunia was sold and she knew it. "And remember, it's free of charge."

Harry's aunt agreed, and Hermione offered to personally pick him up from and return him to the house each day to make sure he actually went where he was supposed to go. Petunia warned her in low tones that Harry was an ill-behaved boy, and to keep an especially close eye on him. Hermione thanked her for the foreknowledge and assured her that they were more than capable of keeping him well in hand.

The next day Petunia "introduced" her nephew to Hermione. He stayed silent, to Hermione's relief. She marched off with him to "her" car, a shiny little white rental. It was meticulously clean and well-maintained, and it gave exactly the right vibe Hermione wanted. Harry said nothing until they were out of Petunia's sight.

"Hermione? What's this?" he asked, reaching one hand forward to touch the dashboard, as if trying to gather tactile evidence of the truth of the situation.

"You didn't want to spend all day, every day with them, did you?" She glanced away from the road and at him. Her smile didn't falter, but some of her satisfaction drained at the trepidation on his face. "It's fine. I didn't use magic on them at all. And you can hang out with me, right? We'll do whatever you want."

Harry finally looked at her. The sunlight glinted off his glasses and revealed the bronze tones in his jet hair. "How do you know how to drive? You aren't old enough for a license yet."

"Time Turner," she reminded him. "Besides, as long as I don't mess up no one will bother to check."

"I suppose," Harry said.

"All right, Harry. Tell me what you're thinking." She stared straight ahead, glad for the excuse of having to watch the road. She'd been anticipating happiness, and instead she got wariness and bemusement.

He took a moment to respond, and then said, "Why now?"

"I didn't have the ability to, before." Was that it? Really?

The boy relaxed, though it was more of a slump than anything else. Not at ease, but no longer taut, like he'd lost the use of his muscles. "I'm tired," he said.

"You have every right to be." Hermione took one hand off the steering wheel and stretched it out toward Harry, inviting him to take it and accept the comfort of physical contact. He did without hesitation, intertwining their fingers. Their joined hands rested on the console between them, her thumb smoothing over the back of his. "When you're with me, you can be whatever you want. And if that's just tired, then fine. It's okay."

"Thank you. I love you."

"I love you too."

That day they went to a park and sat in the shade of a willow tree, his head in her lap and her hand stroking his hair. He fell asleep that way, and Hermione kept watch.

She didn't know how old she was when she first took another person back with her. Maybe she was still seventeen, or eighteen, or even nineteen.

Hermione grabbed his hand and blinked them away to July of 1978, turning on her heel to make it seem as if she were merely moving them through space.

"I didn't know you could Apparate," he said, squinting.

"You don't know a lot of things," she said.

They stood in Muggle London, looking out on a busy road. Pedestrians bustled around them. As usual, no one noticed their sudden arrival, appearing to think they'd been there the whole time.

Hours passed with Hermione dragging Harry around. As she'd expected, they met no one they knew. London was huge, so even if there was a danger of someone knowing who they were they would never meet.

She took them back to their own time, a few hours ahead of when they left. He was returned to his aunt's house exactly on time, the same as every day. Harry was none the wiser.

From then on she took him with her, though never more than a few decades. It wouldn't do to make him question why cars and electricity didn't exist.

Hogwarts welcomed them all back with cloudy skies and a glittering Black Lake. Hermione breathed in freedom and learning and companionship and... found it bitter. She wasn't nearly as excited to reunite with Hogwarts as Hogwarts was to reunite with her.

Three years. Three more years in that place. What was three years to her? A long time, as it turned out, since she easily doubled that time with her temporal trips.

Professor McGonagall watched her with wary eyes. Professor Dumbledore watched her as well, though expressed nothing and said even less. Even Professor Snape stepped carefully around her. None were afraid, as far as Hermione could tell, but they were tense. Why should they be afraid, anyway? She didn't plan on doing, or having done, anything worth being afraid of.

She went to class and did her work, but she didn't care anymore. Hadn't for a while, if she were honest. Apparently, condensing five years of growth and change into two years drew a few odds looks. Her roommates had no idea what to do with her, to Hermione's amusement.

The Ministry fiasco was mostly secondhand for her, as she was unconscious for the majority of the action. She wasn't there to hold Harry when he lost Sirius. Harry withdrew from everyone, including her, and she didn't know how to fix him. It's hard to comfort someone who doesn't want to be comforted. She couldn't even talk to him!

Ginny succeeded where she failed. Failed. Fuck.

Time wrapped her in its embrace and swept her off her feet, and Hermione gave in to the temptation, spending nearly three days in the past for every hour she spent in Harry's time.

She was twenty-one when she first killed. Twenty-one years, four months, and seventeen days, to be exact. Magic was a wonderful thing.

Well, it wasn't like the murder was intentional. Dolohov was still alive to scar her in 1996, so even if she had tried to kill him it wouldn't have worked. Time wouldn't have allowed it. Something about that comforted her. She could do whatever she wanted to the man who'd earned her wrath, and it would change nothing.

He was twenty-one when she chose to find him. The symmetry was appealing, after all. She would prove to him and herself that she surpassed him in every way, even though he'd bested her when he was triple her age. It was so easy. She'd never tried to use the Cruciatus before, but it worked for her on the first attempt. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to break his mind and body and leave him a pile of blood and bone. Time wouldn't allow that, but pain would do almost as well.

At least, it was easy until his sister came in to check on him. She was so pale and slight, looking like a princess who'd never done any work in her life. And wasn't she, really? The Reducto went straight through her chest, leaving only blood and bone. His sister was an excellent replacement, as it turned out. And that, she discovered, was the best way to ruin Antonin Dolohov. He screamed and screamed and screamed, and collapsed in on himself when she branded his torso.

She left when he finally lost consciousness, refusing to erase his memory. He would remember her face and her voice every time he thought of his sister, or felt the burn scars. He would remember that he'd been conquered easily, effortlessly. Even better, he wouldn't know why.

The looks the staff gave her made sense, then. Wariness grew into alarm, and, in some cases, fear. Killing another person cast a shadow on one's aura, as did torture. She didn't suppose her aura had been particularly light before, but now a line had been crossed. She carried it in her magic and the way she held herself, and it was easily visible to those who knew how to look for it. Those who didn't know still felt a sense of unexplained unease. Harry and Ron, as always, were oblivious. Most everyone else subconsciously avoided her.

Naturally, there were those who didn't. Some people were attracted to that danger, most specifically some Slytherins. The teasing tapered off and nearly stopped. Zabini and Nott watched her with speculative eyes. Malfoy went to great lengths to avoid addressing her in any way. She was still a Mudblood, and still endured censure and obloquy for it, but it didn't really matter anymore.

Dumbledore still said nothing, but more than once she caught his eyes trained on her. She didn't look directly into them, for her Occlumency wasn't nearly strong enough to withstand focused attention from him. She'd learned all she could from books, but the real practice would come from training under one accomplished in the art. It was actually a rare and advanced skill. She just happened to be surrounded on all sides from Masters concentrated in a single area.

So she researched. Occlumens tended to be reclusive, paranoid beings, while Legilimens tended to be more flamboyant. It was far easier to find mention of Legilimens than Occlumens. It was also rare, apparently, for any one person to be accomplished in both.

Besides that, Legilimency was once regarded as evil, practiced almost exclusively by Dark witches and wizards. Hermione didn't fancy making her presence known to such people, but she began to feel it may be necessary. That is, until an idea hit her. Snape would likely not be in any position to teach her at any point in his life, but Dumbledore would be. As she understood it, he was a bored young man, associating with simpletons and desperate to show off his intelligence. The irony was fantastically appealing. She would learn Legilimency and Occlumency from the very man she was trying to protect her mind from!

This goal would require more planning than usual. Dumbledore was clever and had a long memory, so discrepancies would be unacceptable.

She could not approach him first after he began teaching at Hogwarts, as he would be guarded and unwilling to repeat his mistakes. Before that, though, and perhaps after Grindelwald, would be just fine. She believed, anyway.

It wouldn't do to show up suddenly at his lowest moment. That just wouldn't be logical. She would have to introduce herself slowly, perhaps even years beforehand. Unfortunately, that would mean making several appearances at Hogwarts. Everything would have to be perfect, from her uniform to the various glamours she would have to put on.

Rather than relying solely on books, she made a trip to late-1800's Hogwarts. A strong notice-me-not charm concealed her century-inappropriate Muggle clothing, even though it was covered by black witch's robes. For the most part, students were encouraged to dress casually. Girls weren't distinguished by affluence, as every one wore a standard black uniform with long sleeves and loose skirts absent of ruffles or ribbons. Black robes were draped over these uniforms, disguising any hint of figure. Boys had only slightly more freedom, but most wore black slacks and closed robes. The individuality came out in the hairstyles, which varied from simple braids to complicated twists. As antiquated as she'd considered the fashion even in her own time, it had clearly come a long way.

When she considered herself ready, she cast a glamour that made her appear to be an eleven-year-old girl and made sure to be seen by a young Albus in the library, or the Great Hall, or even classes. Only Albus noticed her, as her charms had designed it to be. They didn't speak until his fourth year.

He studied alone often, as even his most ardent admirers couldn't keep up with the hours he devoted to it. Hermione, pretending to be a Ravenclaw girl, conducted her own research at the table directly next to his. Although her spell, attuned to him specifically, forced his attention to focus on her as often as would be considered natural, she made sure never to so much as glance in his direction.

Attraction in any sense of the word was fairly easy to manufacture. The first step was proximity. She would be everywhere he looked, whether in others' company or alone. He grew accustomed to the sight of her. The second step was to match him. She must be intelligent, knowledgeable, powerful, and even to some degree as physically attractive as him. The first three were laughably simple. She'd spent almost as many years as he'd been alive learning as much as she could conceive of, and beyond that had almost a century's worth of magical advancements on him. The brightest witch of her age, wasn't she?

Hermione approached him first. It was right before Christmas break, according to her Tempus. Only the most dedicated were still in the library, of which Albus was obviously one.

"Excuse me, Mr Dumbledore," she began, hovering over him and the table. "May I sit?"

Albus nodded, tracking her movements closely. She lowered herself into the chair across from him, setting her armful of books down.

"I've been looking for information for weeks now on magic having to do with the mind. Specifically, Occlumency and Legilimency. The books here only mention them in passing, and I don't have access to books other than those here in the library." She smoothed her skirt over her legs, crossing her feet neatly at the ankles.

Interest spread over his expression. "I can't say I've heard of either of those things," he admitted cheerfully. "But I would be happy to aid in your search."

"Oh, thank you!" she cried, keeping her voice quiet. "What I know of them comes from these," here she gestured to the pile of books, "if you should like to look them over. Just cast Scoporatio over them."

He leaned forward ever so slightly, placing his forearms on the table. "Scoporatio? This is also unknown to me."

"Hm?" Hermione looked up, surprise etched into her expression. "It's an idea finding spell, usually using keywords. You just wave your wand in an elliptical motion over the book or books, like this," she demonstrated, moving her wand in a lateral oval encompassing all of the books, "and say 'Scoh-poh-ray-shee-oh'. You see?" The books inched away from one another and flipped to the first match. "When you're done with that passage, tap the book and it will move to the next mention. Here, you try."

Albus, a quick study, followed her instructions over his own book and watched the pages turn. "This should be immensely useful, thank you," he said, looking directly into her eyes. Whether it was to convey his sincerity or to try to read her Hermione could only guess.

"Could you owl me over the break if you find anything pertinent? Please?" She tilted her head to the side and met his gaze head on, allowing her eyes to fill with hints of knowledge and power, directly belying her innocent mien.

"I would be happy to," he said, "but that will be difficult since I don't know your name."

Hermione laughed, flashing bright white teeth. "I'm sorry, I completely forgot. My name is Lark, Lark Mender." She held out her hand and allowed him to nod over it. "I'm sure I've kept you from your own projects long enough. I eagerly await your owl." She stood and disappeared into the shelves, where she willed herself into the next week.

Her future Headmaster would be at his home by now, or perhaps he'd accepted an invitation to spend the holiday with someone else's family. It didn't particularly matter to Hermione, as long as he wasn't in the castle.

Owls cared little about names. They relied on their master's concept of the recipient in some faint sort of telepathy. This ability was unique to owls, explaining why one would only occasionally see messengers belonging to any other species. Those countries without an indigenous owl population used other methods, but none of these have the ability to deliver without needing an address or a real name. Assuming Albus would use an owl to communicate with her, the fact that she'd given him an alias wouldn't matter.

She stayed in the Room of Requirement, which took care of the majority of her needs. That included the books containing the information she'd asked Albus to find, but her request of him wasn't directly for her own benefit. The more he researched, the more interested he would become, and by the time she contacted him he would have a working practical knowledge of the subject.

His writing was still as flowing and elegant as it would be in her own time, and just as illegible. She was fortunate to have experience in deciphering his script. They continued their correspondence for all two weeks of the break, and when it came time for the students to return Hermione made herself absent. For nearly a month, actually.

Occasionally she would allow him to see her, and she would teach him new spells and drop hints of knowledge that she "clearly" thought he would know. After graduation she dropped off the map completely.

The glamour had had to be adjusted slightly with every year, and she was relieved to finally be able to drop it entirely. It was the summer of 1900, after the whole mess with Grindelwald, when she contacted him again.

Well, she didn't suppose she could consider it "contacting". She'd merely arranged to bump into him in Godric's Hollow, the place which he would be stuck in until his brother graduated. He would be heartbroken and guilty, and just perfect for the plucking.

It was easy, ridiculously so. All she had to do was be kind and intelligent, and he soaked in her attention like a sponge. She was a font of benign knowledge and compassion, exactly what he needed during that time. She went most everywhere with him, a notice-me-not over the both of them, and he reveled in her company. Redemption and nostalgia all rolled up into one person. He taught her what he knew just to see her smile.

Legilimency was the first thing. He had her practice on him, and even her mind was gentle and soothing. She learned so many things about him- his childhood, his father, his friends. His mental shields blocked the things he was ashamed of showing her, most notably about his sister and Grindelwald. It wasn't long, though, before he showed her that too. She clasped his hands in her own and told him that his mistake would not define him, and he still had so many years left in him with which to make amends.

While she was excellent at Legilimency, after months of practice, her real talent was in Occlumency. She suspected it was because of the sheer number of secrets she had, which caused her to throw all of her focus on keeping Albus from seeing them. Pretty much her whole life up to that point would be completely off-limits. Where it took her months of constant and diligent study to master Legilimency, she mastered Occlumency in a matter of weeks.

When she determined she'd learned all she could from the nineteen-year-old boy, she left.

She was twenty-three when he died. A part of her mourned for the young man she'd gotten to know so well, but the rest of her wouldn't, or couldn't, care. She comforted Harry. That was all she could do.

They spent the summer of 1997 together, as they'd spent the previous two. That is, until the Order contacted her and asked for her help in moving Harry safely from his aunt's house. She agreed, but she wasn't stupid enough anymore to trust that their plan would work. She told Harry to say his goodbyes and then transported him to the Burrow. Dedalus Diggle and Hestia Jones still took his relatives to safety, not that it mattered one way or the other to Hermione.

The Advance Guard never got the chance to set out, because as soon as Harry and Hermione showed up at the Burrow the Weasley's informed everyone else. Moody demanded to know what she'd done and how she'd done it, but Hermione gave only nonsense answers, such as, "we were carried by an army of pixies" or "the moles dug us a tunnel". There was little he could do to her and they both knew it, and as far as Moody was concerned she hadn't actually done anything wrong.

Maybe Professor McGonagall would have been able to guess, but the retired Auror probably had no idea she'd ever had a Time Turner. Very few people did. He couldn't even use his mediocre Legilimency to take the answer from her, to his obvious frustration. Paranoid old man, certain that every little thing he didn't know was part of an evil conspiracy.

Hermione suffered through the heat of that summer, and Harry's plot to steal away to complete Dumbledore's grand mission. She humored him and Ron and just did her best to prepare. There wasn't a whole lot more to add to her already-stocked bag, and anything she needed she could retrieve at any point.

Rufus Scrimgeour handed her a book of fairy tales from Dumbledore, and she pretended to be confused for Harry's sake.

She smiled at Viktor and watched the international Quidditch star flounder before her before she took pity on him and led him out to dance. Ron's baleful stare followed her through every step and spin.

Naturally everything was ruined. Obviously none of them could savor even a single joyous event. Clearly if no one actually attending the wedding would destroy it then it would come from Death Eaters. Of course. Why had she expected anything else?

Harry and Ron were whisked away and she handed them Muggle clothing, all the while ignoring catcalls from drunk Muggle men. They fought Dolohov and Rowle and she bound their memories. Not Obliviated them, as she led the boys to believe, but left them disoriented enough that they couldn't follow them.

Grimmauld Place was a welcome refuge for all of them. Hermione had so many pleasant memories about it, largely from visiting Alphard. Whenever he asked too many questions she would drop off the face of the earth for a few months until he learned that it would get him nowhere. Alphard accepted her sudden appearances in his bedroom with relative ease, compared to how she imagined anyone else would react.

She paid him a visit that night, when her boys were asleep. As it happened, Alphard was in his room when she showed up, and she snuggled into his down comforter while she waited for him to notice.

"Galatea, I know you're there," Alphard said finally, still not turning to face her.

Hermione yawned. "What a poor host you are! You would ignore your guest?"

Alphard stood from his desk, on which there appeared to be piles of documents, and sat delicately on the edge of his own bed. "I must confess I'm relieved at your choice of words, 'guest' rather than 'lady'." She could always count on him to be smiling. Always.

"Oh, hush," she said, her suppressed giggle coloring her words with affection and mirth. Determined as usual to catch him off guard, she tangled her fist in the curls on the back of his head and pulled him back so he lay in her lap. It wasn't the first time she'd done that, admittedly, but it still surprised him.

"Definitely not a lady," he remarked, looking up at her through sinfully long lashes. "But your name does suit you."

"Marble is better than flesh, isn't it?" Hermione quipped, her hair falling around her bent head so it blocked the dim light.

He laughed, soothing her anxieties as it usually did. "You know that's not what I meant." One hand reached up to tug on a strand of her hair, and she jerked back before flicking his forehead. "Ow! You know, maybe I would like you better as a statue."

Hermione scoffed. "I'm quite sure any man who could worship a statue suffers from delusions. And that would put quite the damper on our friendly banter, wouldn't it?"

"I don't know," Alphard drawled, "Magic is good for a great many things."

"So I'd squirm if you were to jab at me, is that it? I'm wounded, sir. You value me only for my gelatinous qualities."

"Don't forget your looks," he added, smirking. Really, he was so beautiful it was ridiculous. She could hardly take him seriously when he looked like a fallen angel, which she supposed was part of why he acted the way he did.

"I rarely do," she said, scratching his scalp gently as if he were a cat. Before they could continue on that subject, she scooted out from under the covers and crawled over to lay beside him. Her legs bent at the knees and her toes touching the floor. Alphard watched her in speculative silence, the smile having flattened into something more pensive. In response, Hermione turned and cuddled into his side, drawing her legs up onto the bed. This wasn't new either.

For several moments there was nothing except the beating of Alphard's heart and both of their breathing. Just as Hermione was beginning to become drowsy, he finally asked, "Why?" His body tensed, as if prepared to trap her there should she decide to leave as she so often did.

It was a different question than she was used to. He always asked her how: how she got through the wards, how she appeared without anyone knowing, how. This time it was why, and she was willing to answer. "You'll have to be more specific," she murmured, voice somewhat muffled.

"Why are you here? With me, I mean? You could probably be just about anywhere you want to be, but you're here." She couldn't see his eyes, so she couldn't tell just what he was feeling. Legilimency was a last resort, not for petty things such as this.

"You make me feel better." Hermione traced patterns on his chest absently, if only so she could focus on something solid. "No one does that quite like you do."

He didn't respond, and his muscles didn't relax. She was almost asleep when his voice rumbled, "I should like to kiss you, Galatea, if you're amenable."

Her eyes opened and she lifted her head, searching his eyes and his mind and finding only sincerity. Suddenly the situation didn't seem quite so trivial. "I am," she said, and he bent down and pressed his lips to hers.

The angle was awkward at first, with his torso rising up halfway to be able to meet her. Realizing this, Hermione lifted herself up onto her hands and knees and straddled him, purring into his mouth when he wrapped one hand around her waist and the other in her hair. His scent, his taste, appealed to her. It was musk and lemon and mint, a curious mixture that had her nipping and exploring with more ferocity than she'd planned. This time she didn't feel at all like grinning, and she didn't think he did either.

Still, she pulled away first, savoring his groan. "Do you want me to stay?" she asked, promise lacing her tone.

"Please," he rasped, begging. How could she say no when he asked so nicely?

When she made it back to her boys she was as collected and calm as she'd ever been, more than a match for their panic. She had breakfast ready when they stumbled awake.

She was twenty-two when Time first failed her.

For nine years it had always worked for her. Not always in the way she expected, sure, but something happened. Every single time.

But Bellatrix sat on her chest and cast Crucio after Crucio at point-blank range and Hermione shrieked and sobbed and wished and wished and wished. She wished even harder when the older witch abandoned her wand altogether and carved into the skin of her forearm. Mudblood. Now she could never escape it.

It was clear that Time would do nothing to help her, so she did what she did best- lied. Reminded herself that Harry wasn't far away and was perfectly unharmed. Reminded herself that she would undergo things far worse in order to keep him safe. She'd always said that she would do anything for him, but the words seemed so real now that she had to prove herself.

She would. She would do anything for him.

Hermione woke up in Shell Cottage hours later and cried.

Without asking for it, she found herself in the in-between, sitting before a plane full of those scenes. She didn't choose one, and Time didn't choose for her. It kept her there, giving her the safest possible place to break down.

"I trusted you," she said aloud. "Why?"

There was no response, not that she'd expected one. Soon her hysterics ran their course and she lay there in stasis, trembling. Even her thoughts were numb, coming slowly and turning in lethargic circles.

The voices were audible for the first time, all of them saying the same thing, the same word. It sounded like Hermione was completely enveloped in a crowd chanting a mantra. "Necessary." This repeated for several moments until the voices faded back into incoherence.

Necessary. How arrogant she must be, to have thought this to be a betrayal. How narcissistic she must be to believe that Time's rules didn't apply to her.

Her arm still hurt. Hell, her whole body hurt. Perhaps it would for a while, but if that was the way it was supposed to be then Hermione would accept it. Now that she was thinking clearly again, it became painfully obvious that this event would shape her personality and future actions. Since she'd been chosen as a tool to mold timelines into place it was imperative that she do the right things at the right times.

It was comforting, somehow, that this was always meant to happen.

The implications were unmistakable. Her blood status had been branded onto her skin, right there for anyone to see. She could hardly gad about in high society anymore, or associate with whomever she wished to with plausible deniability. Without any negative repercussions.

Danger would be everywhere. If purebloods were unfriendly in the progressive age of the 1990's then how would it be in the 1800's? The Dark Ages? It was bad enough that she was a woman, but without even the protection of good breeding she could look forward to pitfalls no matter which way she turned.

Was she up to the challenge? Of course.

Alphard didn't mind as much as she'd thought he would. For all that he was a genuinely good person with a fantastic sense of humor, he'd still been raised to hate people like her. He could have cursed her then and there, or turned his back on her entirely. Instead, he covered her forearm with his hand and gently pushed it back down to her side before capturing her lips in a kiss.

He didn't repudiate her, but he never did acknowledge those scars if he could help it. He never mentioned her blood status. As far as he was concerned, he'd never found out in the first place.

That was fine. Better than she'd expected, after all. Still, she didn't visit him as often as before.

Harry and Ron treated her simultaneously like glass and like a grenade. Easy to break, easy to explode. Silly boys, weren't they?

She loved them to death, she really did. But gods if she was starting to hate spending time around them. Escape was welcome and effortless, so she left often. Sometimes for only an hour, sometimes for weeks at a time. She visited every Triwizard tournament in history, participated in several Samhain festivals, went to the library in Alexandria, and met as many great philosophers and authors as she could think of. Returning to her boys was a monotonous cycle of moving, foraging for or stealing food, and trading snappish glares.

Inevitable as it was, Hermione still felt uneasy staring up at Hogwarts's towers, partially visible from Hogsmeade village.

Easy it may not be, but they would succeed. They always succeeded, no matter how the odds were stacked against them. That was always how it had been.

The illusion crumpled to dust at the sight of Harry's lifeless corpse.

She perched atop a stack of crates in a back alley in 1351's Krakow, Poland, twirling a Transfigured pair of sunglasses in one hand and holding her wand by her side with the other. Piles upon piles of rats surrounded her, all dead. Many were horribly mutilated, from being turned entirely inside out to being trussed up by their intestines. Her hands were bloody. It wasn't enough.

The sunglasses spun, around and around, several times nearly slipping off of her finger. Hermione stared at the destruction she caused.

Harry had gone to Voldemort, as he was always meant to do. Apparently. But he never returned. Voldemort threw his body at their feet and crowed. Neville took care of the last Horcrux, and it was Professor McGonagall's curse that finally killed the Dark Lord. They mourned Harry, and celebrated the end of a tyranny. It wouldn't be easy to repair society, but it would be worth it.

Supposedly. In theory.

Hermione didn't want to test it. She didn't want to help rebuild. She didn't want to see a future with Harry as a martyr.

They were supposed to succeed together, Ron, Harry, and her. Ron still lived, with most of his family intact. He was sad, sure, miserable, but his family helped ease the pain. He would heal, just like everything else.

Harry was gone, and there was nothing she could do to get him back. Harry was gone. He'd left her. After everything she'd done to keep him alive, he'd slipped away from her and met death willingly. Gladly, even. He wouldn't have thanked her even if she were able to change things. As much as she wanted to be angry with him, Hermione had to admit to herself that he deserved to finally rest.

She couldn't be angry with him, but she could be angry. Therefore, rats. Not that it helped a whole lot.

The blood was starting to dry and become sticky. She'd already taken an excessive amount of rats from miles in every direction, and Summoning more would solve nothing.

In a wink, Hermione was gone from Krakow and safe within the plane between times.

She lay prone on Alphard's bed in 1961's Cardiff, Wales, running her fingers over her bare stomach. Alphard was passed out beside her, snoring peacefully. The sheets were damp with sweat, and Hermione could see even in the dim light the proof of their exertions. Her body was sore. It wasn't enough.

Her skin was soft and smooth, and she traced around and around her navel. She stared at the bliss she'd caused.

Alphard was still gorgeous. He'd probably be gorgeous as a thousand-year-old man. It ran in his family and was especially strong in him. It was a wonder he never got married. Or maybe it wasn't. Here she was, in his bed, her legs still entwined with his. She was his first. She would be his best. The look in his eyes when he looked at her was wild and adoring, and Hermione knew instinctively that it was love. Maybe that was why he never married anyone.

She could learn to love him. It wouldn't be easy to overcome her inhibitions, but it would be worth it.

Supposedly. In theory.

Hermione didn't want to test it. She didn't want to stay with this one man. She didn't want to see a future where she was a housewife, or even a kept woman. No matter how safe it would have felt.

They weren't supposed to be together forever, Alphard and her. She knew how his life ended, and she wanted no part of that. He would be upset at her distance, but he would move on. Everyone does, eventually.

She couldn't love him, no matter how often she tried to convince herself in the meeting of their bodies. It hadn't helped a whole lot.

The sheets were starting to become cold and clammy. She'd done this too many times already, and trying any more would solve nothing.

In a wink, Hermione was gone from Cardiff and alone within the plane between times.

She stood with one foot pressing down on a man's chest in 1826's New York City, United States, watching him struggle for breath. They were alone in yet another dingy back alley, hidden from view from the street. The mans face was turning purple, and several of his bones were cracked. Power thrummed in her blood and tingled on her skin. It was starting to be enough.

He looked up at her in horror, eyes dark with mingled fear and, oddly, desire. The Muggle couldn't move through the Petrificus Totalus, which Hermione supposed wasn't exactly sporting but she couldn't bring herself to care. She lifted her foot and placed it on the ground beside his hip, moving the other foot forward as well. Then, slowly, she kneeled, sitting on his stomach and leaning forward so her face hovered above his. Oh, it was definitely desire she saw- what could she do to make it go away?

Perhaps this was a bit of an overreaction for drunken sexual assault. A bit of groping and leering was all it was, but she'd dragged him out here to have her wicked way with him, fully prepared to leave his mind and body broken or even lifeless. Had she come too far? Was she truly unhinged? Did it even matter? The Muggle still looked at her as if he would do it all over again, and that just couldn't go unpunished.

"Crucio," she said, lazily, in the same tone as if she were answering a stupid question. It was basic, but basic was all he really deserved. This would still be the worst night of his miserable life.

She could leave right now, and try to get back to the land of morality. Never do this again. Try to fix whatever had gone wrong in her mind that she would do this even knowing how awful it made her.

Supposedly. In theory.

Hermione didn't want to test it. She didn't want to stop this. This was the only thing that had given her even the tiniest bit of joy since Harry had left her.

There wasn't anyone meant for her after all. She was meant to walk between moments alone.

The man's eyes were wide and crazed, filled with all the panic of an animal dying. He couldn't move even to scream, even to close his eyes. Hermione danced her fingertips across his cheek, over his lips, up to his temple, down to his neck.

Should she kill him or leave him alive? His mind was gone already, she could see it. No point anymore. He would just be a nuisance to everyone around him.

"Avada Kedavra." Fondly, oh, so tenderly, she ended his suffering. It was like writing the final line in an essay, adding the signature to a painting, delivering the punchline in a joke. Closure. Finality. Triumph. It helped.

His corpse was becoming cold. Dead bodies held no appeal for her, but she would do this again.

In a wink, Hermione was gone from New York City and happy within the plane between times.

She waited with a bored expression in 1943's Diagon Alley, Great Britain, sipping Masala chai genteelly outside Rosa Lee Teabag. The future Dark Lord was strolling through the crowded street, arms laden with books. He appeared to have just come from Obscurus Books. To Hermione's mild surprise, he was alone, although she'd gathered that by this time in his life he had cronies aplenty, most of them with more money to their names than Hermione had seen in her entire life. His mouth was set in just such a way that he appeared friendly without actually having to make the effort. He didn't see her. That was fine.

The tea was growing cold. She stared at the boy gliding down the cobblestone road.

Hermione had grown tired of having no purpose, of being entirely unmarked by the physical world. She was tired of a lot of things, but most of all she'd grown tired of grieving. Not that she thought she would ever truly stop, but there was nothing she could do to fix things and so there was little point in tearing herself to pieces. She would make peace with this. She would study his murderer.

She would learn everything she could about Tom Riddle, and she would begin to heal.

Supposedly. In theory.

Hermione wanted to test this. She wanted to be happy again without needing to hurt something. She wanted her future to be bigger, more encompassing than that.

Time would take care of her, alone or not. It always did.

Perhaps Riddle finally felt her eyes bore into him. She'd like to think that was the case. He met her gaze steadily for one second, two... and then away. There was no reason for him to set her apart from anyone else in Diagon Alley, not yet.

Leaving her empty teacup on the delicate metal lawn table, Hermione disappeared, moving immediately to later that night. Much later. The sixteen-year-old boy slept in his tiny cot, a worn copy of The Dark Forces cradled in his arms.

"Wake up, Voldemort," she said into his ear, smirking widely. His reaction was entirely as amusing as she'd thought it would be: he sat bolt upright so rapidly Hermione thought she could hear his bones creak, his eyes searching for her frantically. She was already on his other side, though, and she waited for him to realize. He turned his head forward once again before he caught her in his peripheral vision and startled wildly.

"Who are you?" Riddle demanded, breath heaving in his chest. "How do you know that name?"

Hermione crawled onto the cot, ignoring the loud squeaking of the springs, and settled at the foot of the cot with her legs folded. "Guess," she suggested, leaning forward so her elbows rested on the thin mattress. Her hands propped up her head. If she was correct, she appeared to be the perfect image of carelessness.

"That's a ridiculous expectation and you know it," Riddle snorted, starting to calm down. His muscles were still taut, Hermione noticed. Good.

"Is it?" She looked up at him, quirking one eyebrow. "Do I? How can you be sure?"

Riddle sighed, a condescending huff of breath that Hermione could easily imagine being coupled with an eye roll. "I've never seen you before in my life, in any context, and therefore can't be expected to select one of the infinite possibilities."

"Not entirely correct, but I'll allow it," she said flippantly. "Besides, I suppose you wouldn't be so stupid as to actually guess, knowing that it would be difficult to avoid giving away information to a stranger for free." Her head cocked to the side, but she kept the same serene expression. "There's also the whole sexism thing."

"'Sexism thing'?" Riddle parroted.

"It's the forties, mate. Most people have been conditioned to view women as factory-built toys who have only the same prerecorded phrases and not a brain cell to their names. You're one of those people, though you do also have that classism thing going against you. Not that that's really an excuse, but it does make me feel better about it. Everyone needs inferiors, right? And there are women everywhere. Easy targets."

"And why does that matter? How dare you think you know me?" Indignance was beginning to eclipse confusion, she saw. Fine.

She grinned. "I do know you, darling," she lied. "And doesn't that just make you itch? That I know you but you have no idea who I am? Of course it does."

Indignance was becoming anger. Hermione could see his hand clenching, clearly missing his wand. "Who are you?" he growled.

"Please. You couldn't do anything to me even if you were allowed to use your magic. Won't you thank me? I'm being nice, and not doing anything to get you in trouble. I could, you know. Just a little focused willpower is all." How easy leverage was when Traces were put on Muggle residences. How very, very, disappointingly easy. "But then again, you bore me. Even that might not even be worth the trouble."

Anger was becoming fury. Boring, indeed. "How dare you?" he hissed, barely above a whisper.

"You don't even know how to respond, do you? You're entirely off balance. Maybe now you'll resort to-" Riddle lunged forward, hands going around her throat. Finally. "Violence," she choked out, still smiling, and then she disappeared.

She reappeared in an empty seat in his compartment on September 1st, weeks later. As always, no one noticed or reacted to her abrupt presence until several moments after.

"Out," Riddle commanded, murder in his eyes. It was clearly an order to his toadies, not to her. As if she would obey him anyway. Several boys took their leave of the compartment as quickly as they could, almost tripping on one another in their haste to remove themselves from the room. The compartment door slid shut. "I have my wand now," Riddle remarked, twirling the thing idly between his fingers.

Hermione chuckled. "Bully for you," she said. "I suggest you not try anything. This conversation would become a whole lot less fun for everyone involved. Well, maybe not everyone. I'm positive I would be vastly entertained." She slid over to the window and peaked out, turning her back on Riddle entirely. "It's actually nice today. Who would have thought?" It was sunny out, and looked fairly warm. The green of shrubbery and trees passed into and out of her line of sight so quickly it was a blur.

"You're magical, obviously," Riddle told her, completely ignoring all of her statements. "In an unTraceable way, given that I wasn't cited for unauthorized use of magic."

She still didn't look at him, but she could see in the ghost of a reflection that he was still seated across from her. "Good boy. However did you reach that conclusion? Some great leaps of logic there. Truly commendable work." She couldn't see his face, but she hoped it was beginning to cloud over with irritation.

"The sarcasm is entirely unnecessary," he responded coolly. "As I said before, I don't have enough data to piece you together just yet."

Maybe he'd learned from his first experience with her, or maybe he was just boiling on the inside. She'd find out soon enough. Unsettling this teenage boy should be simple. "I'm flattered. See, you'll have to actually work when you're with me. I have knowledge, and you want it, but you have to earn it. You're a quick learner, though. The gods know this would be such a chore otherwise."

"What kind of knowledge?" He disguised his greed well.

She stood and stepped closer before sitting lengthwise across his lap, tucking her feet between his legs and the seat. "What kind do you want?" Flustering him really was laughably simple. Still, it was the forties. She should give him some credit for not climaxing on the spot. Apparently even sociopaths were still just hormonal teenage boys in the end.

"Everything," he said, not quite hiding the husky note in his voice. Admirable effort, though.

"Remember," she told him, breath misting over his throat, "You have to earn it." Satisfied with the melodrama of the moment, Hermione touched her lips to the underside of his chin and vanished.

Playtoys weren't the only ones occupying Hermione's time. Often she visited Circe, a sorceress immortalized in legend. Her specialties were Transfiguration and Potions, though Hermione got the feeling that she wasn't exactly deficient in knowledge of the other subjects as well.

Circe did live on an island, in as opulent of a mansion as magic could provide. She was jealous and vindictive, wickedly funny, and devastatingly beautiful. Those things were true. It was also true that she used sex to gain and exercise her power. However, she didn't fall in love with her victims as the stories would suggest.

"He was handsome, to be sure," Circe told her of Odysseus. "Once all the dirt was gone. But he was arrogant and unfaithful, and I took him and destroyed him."

"And Penelope?" Hermione asked.

"I'm no virtuous woman. I knew full well I was wronging her, but I didn't care. I still don't. But he was witty enough, and if the gods wanted to help him then I could only assume he had something significant to offer." Circe scratched one nail into the wood of her table.

"Did he?"

"No, not really. He was boring in bed, too. He stayed with me a year- a whole year, can you imagine? He told me so often that he loved me, and it was all I could do not to laugh." Circe did laugh, pure mirth and no bitterness at all. "I pity his wife."

Hermione shared the sentiment. Any person who could be teased away from a person they claimed to love didn't deserve them. Didn't deserve anyone, really. She resolved then to never enter into a commitment without first verifying that she would never stray. Most likely that meant Hermione would never do it, because any one person couldn't satisfy her.

She visited Circe often. She taught Circe of patience, and Circe taught her of manipulation. A valuable trade, in Hermione's opinion.

The great men of history were so frequently the same in temperament. Sure, some were more wise and some more rash, but the ideas rarely changed. The hardships were similar. The reactions similar. It wasn't their fault; as long as history had existed men were squashed into the same mold. Women were as well, but where some bent to the pressure others twisted around the mold until the image was something else entirely.

Gods, but she loved women. Their kindnesses, their vengeance, everything. The good and the bad.

In a way, Hermione supposed they freed one another.

Sorceresses, she discovered, were made out to be evil creatures. Sorceresses, she discovered, were human. People.

Morgana le Fay, for example, was quiet and compassionate. She healed people and animals alike, whether or not they looked down on her. She hated being ignored. Unlike Circe, she fell in love easily. Every man was The One, and she gave them everything she had. These men didn't love her. They used her for her body and her adoration and refused to acknowledge her anywhere but in private. She was made to feel worthless.

Guinevere knew of this, and tried her best to keep Morgana from humiliating herself. Morgana, foolish girl that she was, didn't take well to the interfering.

The woman regretted her folly, and regretted making an enemy of her former close friend and confidante. She just felt too much. Empathy to the extremes.

Knowing the women behind the stories was fulfilling. Hermione couldn't help but feel that she was one of them, just as human. Perhaps they were villains, and perhaps the backstory didn't excuse the actions, but somehow knowing that people aren't simply born evil made her feel better.

Oh, yes, she knew she was rapidly approaching "evil". She'd killed people for sport, so what else could she possibly be? It was pointless to try to convince herself that she was good at heart.

The most useful thing she'd gained from these experiences was sex. Sex to disarm, sex to convince, sex to manipulate. No one was truly comfortable with sex without forcing themselves to be, so that kind of control was magnificently effective.

Tom Riddle would beg for her; she would make it so. She would drive him mad with touch and with words until he could think of nothing but touching her. Twisted, yes. Absolutely. But she could hardly torture him and killing was obviously not an option, so the humiliation of temptation would have to be enough.

She amused herself by appearing when he would be least prepared to handle her. Armed with a powerful Notice-Me-Not tailored specifically to not include Riddle, she would appear in the middle of class and bother him. Sometimes it was just staring at him from across his cauldron, and sometimes it was little tantalizing touches. She made sure to appear often, though not often for longer than a minute or two.

Her favorite thing to do, however, was show up in the middle of the night.

On one such occasion, it was nearly the end of the school year. He was exhausted from studying, and final exams had taken place that day. Riddle, she guessed, just wanted to sleep in peace for one night. Of course he couldn't, not when it would amuse Hermione so to drive him to violence.

"My Lord?" she hummed, her face hovering above his.

To his credit, he no longer woke in a panic. She did this far too often for him to be truly surprised. "What do you want now?" he asked, blinking sleepily.

"Don't you want to know my name?" she pouted, lowering herself until she skimmed his body. "And I have a surprise for you."

His hands grasped her wrists, keeping them anchored exactly where they were. Hermione didn't mind; he'd finally accepted that he couldn't control her. "What surprise?"

"Oh, not much," she breathed against his mouth. "Just some little things about Horcruxes, is all. Not terribly interesting to you, I'm sure." Her tongue snaked out and traced his lower lip before drawing his lip between her teeth and nipping gently.

"What's your name?" He was trying so hard to conceal the interest she'd sparked in him. That was one of the first things Slytherins learned, after all. Hermione knew better.

"Andromache," she said, pulling back just a few inches.

He understood immediately, to her delight. "Who am I, then, Pyrrhus?" His eyebrows furrowed, gaze still locked with her own.

"Not exactly," Hermione said. "I have nothing for you to threaten, much less a son."

Riddle glanced down at her lips and then back up to her eyes. "I should think you more like Hermione than Andromache."

"Do you think so?" Hermione purred. "So you are Orestes?"

"Perhaps." His grip on her wrists tightened, as if she'd tried to pull away. She hadn't. "Are you so changeable as Hermione is?"

"I'd hardly be a good judge of that, would I?" Hermione said. "Are you not curious about my gift for you?"

His hands twitched, a barely perceptible clenching and relaxing. "I am," he said. "Tell me."

"You haven't forgotten, have you?" She brought her face close to his again. "What will you do to earn it?"

Too fast for Hermione to react, Riddle released her wrists and pulled her head down to his. He kissed her like she'd imagined he would: teeth and bruising and pain. She hadn't thought she would like it, but a part of her that she didn't feel inclined to analyze at that moment returned every favor, savoring the taste of his tongue and his breath. His taste was unusually strong, bittersweet like dark chocolate.

She pulled away after a few seconds, reveling in the groan that tried to follow her mouth. His hands were still in her hair, and she could see in his face that he wanted to use the leverage to pull her back down. She could admire his restraint, for now. She would have him begging yet.

"You believe I would reward you for seeking your own gratification?" she asked. "Arrogant, aren't you?"

Riddle was intelligent enough to figure out what it was that she wanted from him. Possibly he already knew, and was testing to see if anything else would work. Unfortunately for him, Hermione wasn't easily swayed.

Training a person was remarkably similar to training a dog. She would handle Riddle in the same way that she would an excessively dominant dog: force him into a submissive position until he no longer fought it. Where she would make the dog lay down at her feet until she decided he could get up, she would make Riddle plead.

"There's no one here but me, Tom, and you already know that I surpass you. Who better to show your humility to than me? This knowledge can only be attained through me, and only one way to convince me to share it." His eyes were clouding over with defiance. Good; she'd expected a challenge from him.

"No." His grip on her hair tightened, and Hermione had to ignore the net of pain across her scalp.

Instead of the grimace she knew he expected, Hermione smiled. "We'll see." And then she was gone and in Alphard's room. Teasing Riddle always got her worked up.

It occurred to her, laying down to sleep in an empty bed in an empty house, that she was doing wrong by everyone in her life. She dropped in and out of Alphard's life and his bed, keeping him fixated on her to the point where he would never even look at another woman. He didn't deserve that. She'd seen into his head, and she knew he loved her wholeheartedly, innocently, unreservedly, purely. Maybe he thought she loved him back. Maybe he didn't. Hermione wasn't sure which would be more sad.

She'd left Ron behind to deal with the fallout on his own. Hell, she'd left everyone behind. Ron had lost both of his best friends in a single day. By choice, the both of them, though Hermione hoped he didn't know that. It wasn't so much leaving as going, she supposed.

Of course she was doing wrong by Riddle, but he was the only one who deserved it. She couldn't even bring herself to feel guilty for exposing him to knowledge that would help him in his campaign. It had already happened, in a way, and things worked out fine on the macro level. Dark Lords are inevitable, and at least she had the power to shape this one.

Did she feel remorse? Shame? Sorrow? Not really. She'd turned things like that off for a little while. She slept peacefully that night.

Hermione popped in and out of Riddle's daily life just often enough to keep him on his toes. Sometimes she made sure only he noticed her. Sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she invaded his personal space. Sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she reminded him of her offer. Sometimes she didn't.

She made damn sure that Riddle knew he couldn't just ignore her. There were no wards he could use to keep her away, no spell he could use to hurt her, no options. She would bother him until she decided she was bored with it, and that would take an awfully long time.

Seven months it took him. Seven months of persistence and pestering and prying before he finally said that one measly word.

"Please." His face was entirely expressionless, as if masquerading as marble would make up for the vulnerability of his begging.

Rather than gloating, she just smiled and said, "Hepzibah Smith possesses two of the Founders' relics, Slytherin's Locket and Hufflepuff's Cup. She's a sucker for a pretty face, and you certainly have that."

"That's all you have, then?" Riddle asked, unimpressed.

"Oh, no!" she laughed. "I have so much more than that. But for a single word, that's all you get. Pretty pleading promotes plentiful profit, don't you know."

As if he'd realized at last that they were only words, Riddle seemed to immediately resign himself to his situation. "I beg of you, give me that I desire."

"Not horribly specific or expressive, but definitely improvement. Deserves a reward, don't you think?"

When it became clear that it wasn't a rhetorical question, Riddle nodded impatiently.

Hermione seized the front of his robes and tugged him close, kissing him fiercely in exactly the way she'd discovered he liked. "I'll give you a few minutes of my time, My Lord," she murmured against his mouth. "Undress me." She double-checked that the glamour on her arm was still intact.

He didn't need any encouragement, it seemed, because without even breaking their kiss he set to work on unbuttoning her robes. Hermione wore several layers of clothing, usually, so even after her robes lay crumpled on the end of the bed she was still in a skirt and a blouse. Rather than waste more time on tiny buttons, Riddle grasped the fabric on either side of the collar and pulled, tearing it off of her.

Taking pity on him, Hermione unclasped her bra herself. Having her breasts bared before him only caused the slightest twinge of discomfort, and even that vanished at the sight of the pure greed in his eyes.

"I'll tell you when to stop," she said.

She watched him make his Horcruxes. It was a sickening process, to be sure, but Hermione wasn't nearly disturbed as she should have been. What did that say about her? Plenty. It meant that she'd gone too far. Further than killing perverts in alleyways. Further than fostering a Dark Lord.

It meant she might as well be just like him. Not stupid or egotistical enough to try to take over, but just as reprehensible of a person. Dark, evil, truly and completely.

How did she get here? Was this side of her lying dormant her whole life? Or was it how she reacted to complete freedom?

Circe laughed at her, laughed until tears came to her eyes. "It took you this long to realize? Anyone who knows you can see it. It's not a bad thing, not really. Things like that are decided by those with weak minds, those who fear being hurt. You might be evil, but that's fine. The story needs villains, too."

Hermione shaped Time and Time shaped Hermione. What was there left for her but to surrender to it? Gods, but she was tired. Exhausted and exhilarated. She'd never been so fulfilled.

She was many years old and many different people by the time she gave in. She was the mysterious figure walking alone in the park, the charismatic vixen who charmed men at parties. She was a seductress and a murderer and a demon.

It was okay. Everything would be okay. After all, Time chose her for a reason, right?

[isabellelambert1975]

My escape from fear to a healing garden

Many people are now talking openly about their physical and mental challenges and how their garden or gardening has helped them.   I want to talk about my story of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and the garden, and I hope my story may help other people.

I’ve also done a video on this, so if you prefer watching to reading a post, it’s here:

Going back to the beginning…

I was born in Gibraltar, but as my father worked for the British government we moved a lot in my childhood. After five safe and happy years living in South East England, my brothers and I found ourselves living in an unsettled and unhappy Caribbean country.

A Caribbean paradise?

Thirty-one years of an exceptionally brutal dictatorship had ended in the dictator’s assassination around a year earlier. It was also around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so everything felt very unsafe.

A series of revolutions culminated in a civil war. Fearing ‘another Cuba’, the US Army intervened and we fled the country, briefly becoming refugees.

This notice, from an old family film, sums the sense of upheaval that lingers from that time.

Earthquakes and revolutions…

After we left the Caribbean island, we then lived in another South American country. It was a wonderful place to live, but it still had the occasional revolution, a higher level of violent crime than Britain and several earthquakes.

So I knew that the world could literally open up and swallow you at any moment. But I always believed that I would be safe if I got back to England. When I had nightmares, it was always about trying to escape to England to be safe.

But I thought England was safe…

I came to live in England permanently when I was 18. Eventually I began working in journalism and moved into a house with one of my brothers.

On the second night we were in the house, I woke up to find four men in my room, three with balaclavas concealing their faces. They attacked me with some kind of bat and also with a knife. We subsequently discovered the knife had been taken from our own kitchen.

I screamed and my brother came tearing down the stairs to help. Fortunately they ran away.

I have no idea how long it all took, because although I wasn’t concussed I seemed to have lost a small piece of memory. It took several hours before I realised that my arms and legs had knife cuts across them and that my back was bruised from the blows.

The immediate effects

I felt as if I had stepped into a strange, unknown world, where everything seemed very bright and loud and menacing, and where I could no longer assess whether a knock at the door was someone come to hurt me or just a delivery.

For the first ten days or so, I had to deal with considerable physical pain too, as the blows and some of the knife cuts were painful, although not ultimately serious. Were those footsteps behind me a threat? What was that noise in the middle of the night?

My brain no longer knew what the rules were or how to evaluate even the most ordinary event. My senses were on hyper-alert, so that every time I dropped asleep I was jerked awake as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over me.

Above all, it was exhausting and painful, as if someone had imprisoned and tortured me.

What is PTSD?

It was, of course, my own mind that had imprisoned me and for a while it seemed as if it refused to let me go. Friends were enormously supportive and I went to counselling, which had some limited help.

A psychiatrist friend of mine has since told me ‘Bad things happen, and when they do, it’s normal to feel terrible.

But I was still feeling many of the effects over a year later and that is post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Everyone said that time would help – and it does, but so slowly and in small increments.

Take on new challenges?

However, over the next four years, I got my dream job working on women’s magazines, met my husband and had twins, all of which was wonderful.

Taking on new challenges helped me, but the jumpiness, the sleepless nights and the inability to properly distinguish between a real and imagined threat – it was all still there. I began to get panic attacks in the London Underground and in shops.

Eventually I went to my GP who signed me off sick for two months.

Learn to ‘stop and stare’.

One of the counsellors advised me to do four twenty minute sessions of relaxation and meditation a day.

‘I couldn’t possibly find time for that,’ I said. ‘Well, do you want to get better or not?’ was the reply.

It was the first time I properly understood that unless I looked after myself, then I wasn’t going to be able to look after my family and do my job. There is a reason why you have to put your own oxygen mask on first.

One of the exercises I was asked to do – every day – was to lie down in a calm and comfortable place, with the door shut and away from all distractions. ‘Take yourself round somewhere beautiful,’ they said. ‘Imagine you’re on a Caribbean beach.’

Not relaxing memories….

Well, my memories of Caribbean beaches involved armed soldiers. Not relaxing.

A healing garden

So I chose a garden for my meditation. Not a famous garden, and not my own garden (we only had a small courtyard at the time).

It was the garden of a house for sale, which a friend had shown me once. The owners had already gone, so garden was slightly overgrown. But you could still walk up its lavender lined front path and go round the side to see the beautiful raised veg beds just outside the back door.

It was long and thin, a typical English town garden in many ways, and divided up into sections. There was a tiny lawn, rose borders, a wilder part with long meadow grass and fruit trees.

As this was over twenty years ago, that blend of cultivation and wildness was before its time. It was a revelation to me.

I don’t have any photographs of that first garden, but I do have memories of other peaceful gardens. I think this scene from the Agapanthe garden in Normandy sums up the sense of a journey to a healing garden, with somewhere to sit to enjoy the greenery.

Create your own healing garden

My meditation is a mental walk around this garden, imagining the sounds, feelings, scents and sights of each part of it. I’ve put together a meditation based on going round a garden in a separate video, which you can adapt for your own imaginary garden tour if you like.

I think one of the reasons I chose a garden was also because my favourite childhood book was The Secret Garden, a wonderful Edwardian children’s book about a boy in a wheelchair, a traumatised orphan girl and a farmer’s son coming together to heal by restoring a hidden garden.

Then I started to love real gardens

As I recovered from the panic attacks, I started to notice plants and flowers in the London streets around me.

It was a grey, windy February, but suddenly the brilliant yellow blaze of forsythia tumbled over a wall. A few snowdrops or anemones pushed shyly up in a front garden. The spicy floral scent of witch hazels wafted their elusive breath across the road. A friend’s winter flowering jasmine twined around her front railings.

There’s something very special about flowers like witch hazel which emerge in the bleakness of February.

I could see that even in a bare, cold winter there could be hope, joy and beauty.

A healing garden isn’t only the answer…

Of course, the meditation around the garden wasn’t the only thing that helped. I had Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which focused more on tips for managing panicky situations rather than examining either the trauma of the burglary or my time in South America.

No-one could promise me I would never be attacked again, but tips that helped me sleep a little better or shop without a panic attack, all reduced the stress.

At the time we had a tiny courtyard – around 15ft wide and 20ft long, but I longed for a garden of my own. When we moved out of London, I got my garden. But I discovered, with a shock that loving gardens wasn’t quite enough.

I had to discover the difference between weeds and flowers, though finding my own ‘gardening style’ was the most important part.

I had to learn about gardening – fast!

It takes time

Healing and gardening both take time to learn. And it also takes time to make your garden yours. Even if you find a house with a beautiful garden, we all have to discover our own gardening style.

It took us about six years to work out what we wanted. That was the beginning of a whole new adventure, which culminated in the Middlesized Garden blog and YouTube channel.

I don’t visit that secret imaginary garden so often now – but sometimes I still need to. If I wake with a start at 3am, I re-create my walk around that garden I only visited once. I usually I fall asleep again quite quickly.

Now I’m interested and excited to find out all the plants, ideas and strategies that gardening has to offer.

I’m still learning, so do join me on that gardening journey, and let me know if you’d like to hear more about gardens and stress relief as well as garden ideas and inspiration.

And if you have a story of stress and gardening, please do share it in the comments below. If you’ve blogged or vlogged it, then feel free to include a link – everyone’s approach is different and sharing stories can help us all. Thank you.

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[gaiatheorist]

Choppy waters.

(No idea why I picked a maritime analogy, I loathe travel by boat, if I was meant to spend time precariously perched on flotsam, at the mercy of the waves, I’d have gills, but I don’t, I’m a human, not an axolotl. Immediate cross-over, there, because the axolotl can evolve from having gills to lungs, more easily than, say Germaine Greer and her ilk can evolve into the 21st Century.)

I hate boats. Well, not boats themselves, they’re inanimate objects, expending energy ‘hating’ boats would be a bit daft, what I mean to say is that I hate being on boats, it makes me physically uncomfortable. I can swim, and I’ve never been in any sort of boat-related accident, I just don’t enjoy the sensation of being miles from solid land, all rocking and tipping and that, completely at the mercy of whoever is in charge of the boat. It’s a really easy one to unpick, my near-phobia of boats. When I was a tiny child, my Father used to take my brother and I out fishing in a rowing boat, and I HATED not-being-able-to-see-land, stuck in a floating bath-tub, with a maniac in charge of the oars. When I started the relationship with the ex, it came to light that he enjoyed boat-travel, so I patiently explained that I didn’t. Then I commenced a 20-year journey of mollifying and appeasing him, and trying not to vomit on boats, because he didn’t ‘do’ sick, and his-needs-were-more-important. “Get over it!” said my ex, much like Germaine Greer.

My Dad, and my ex were both controlling men, not all men are controlling, Not all men want to make me feel at-risk. Not all men want to put me on a boat after I’ve said I’d really rather not be on a boat. (”But it’s not a boat, it’s a yacht, you’ll be fine!”- that one was when I was still breast-feeding the kid, have you ever tried to breast-feed on a yacht? It was horrible, insisting that ‘his’ wife and infant son go on his boss’ yacht for kudos man-points.) Not all feminists want to tell us to ‘get over it’, essentially to ‘man up.’ 

The older feminists are taking exception to this surge, this current of younger feminists, making another incremental push towards more-equal. I don’t know if I’m ‘allowed’ to call myself a feminist, with my tendency to generally-conceal my outwardly visible femininity, falling in the gap between the old, and the new, there. Sod it, there are no rules, the ‘new’ feminists can wear make-up and floaty frocks if they want, I’ll sit here in jeans and a hoodie, not-agreeing with the ‘old’ feminists, so, so many ways I’m ‘betwixt’ one thing and another. More Stig of the Dump than ‘the missing link’, fully engaged in my Crone-phase, I suppose I ‘should’ side with the old-school feminists. I don’t do ‘should’, though, do I? It’s a good thing I don’t drive, because the whole ‘pick a lane’ thing doesn’t sit well with me. (Oh, and I’d be one of those ‘women drivers.’) Maybe I am an axolotl after all, because ‘static’ isn’t really my thing.

The world got a little bit static, didn’t it? There was most-of a cultural shift way-back-when, when the ‘dusty desert dwelling gents’ mostly-stopped selling their daughters, then it slowed. My knowledge of history is mostly based on TV dramas, perhaps not so much ‘Britannia’, which is batshit insane, but I do love a good female-leader story. Boudicca-style, not Margaret Thatcher, or Theresa May. The Suffragettes did their bit, and then we had another static period, until the bra-burning and birth control advanced ‘the cause’ another notch. Here we go, ladies, gentlemen, and others, here comes another turn of the wheel, the ‘shrieking’ isn’t the ‘new’ feminists, as Ms Greer would have the world believe, it’s the ‘old’ feminists, digging in their (sensible) heels, and trying to stop the wheel turning, lest the ‘progress’ somehow undoes what they fought for. Stop resisting, old-feminists, as much as yonder orange clown, who didn’t look up what it was he was re-tweeting, wants to roll-back on the reproductive autonomy you fought for, you DID make those changes, and history won’t forget them. 

Various people are minimising the culture that still exists, in respect of the ‘Presidents Club’ furore, and the Aziz Ansari issue. That’s what needs to stop, the repression of the shudder of revulsion at a load of moneyed-men groping ‘hostesses’ just because they could, and poor old ‘Grace’ trying to find another word for ‘No.’, because Ansari didn’t hear that one. Society as a whole can’t keep falling back into the shadows of ‘boys will be boys’, or we accept the status-quo, and the foundation work really is undone. Greer and co  did that work, nobody can ever take that away, BUT, by asserting that ‘they’ had to put up with a lot of ‘handsy men’, and suggesting that the ‘new’ feminists should ‘get on with it’, I feel that a point is being missed. You know that thing, where a person says “Try one of these crisps, they’re HORRIBLE.” or “I’ve made you a cup of tea, but I think the milk is past its best.”, that’s what Greer and co are doing. “Well, this is awful, but it’s all we have, better soldier on.” No, no, and a thousand times no.

There is no denying that society and culture were more difficult for Greer’s generation, the advances they made were phenomenal, EVERY daughter is indebted to them, but to accuse these new-daughters of ‘whining’, for not just-getting-on-with the status quo they were seeking to challenge in the first place, they’re not just halting progress; they run the risk of reversing their own. Nobody is minimising the misogyny that Greer’s generation lived through, and sought to challenge, nobody is denying the progress made, but, to hold that level of progress as the apex we can aspire to isn’t enough for us ‘daughters’. Yes, we can have a career, rather than being barefoot-and-pregnant, but recent events have proved that we’re really not ‘having our cake and eating it too.’ (I’m not going to veer-off on the body-image-diet-plan tangent for once.) 

Between-generations, and without a ‘daughter’, I’m coming at this one from a bit of a tangled starting point. My parents were an utter omnishambles in terms of instilling any type of aspiration in me, I was ‘supposed to be a boy’, like every first-born on my father’s line forever, and my mother was terrified of men. She had reason to be. The ex’s family were very traditional in terms of gender stereotypes, the women might as well have had caps and aprons for all the autonomy they had in real terms. I REALLY rocked that particular boat, by refusing to be quiet and go back into the kitchen. If I had a list of aspirations, popularity wouldn’t be on it. I was “This girl can” shocking and defying the in-laws 20 years ago, and I haven’t spent 40 years defending myself and deflecting dubious digits from about my person to ‘sit down and shut up’ now.

Yes, they are difficult conversations, yes, a lot of it is quite uncomfortable, but we, as a society can’t continue to dismiss the ‘keep trying’ mentality in Ansari, or the blatant abuse of power at the Presidents Club. Yes, these things do happen, but they don’t have to. Greer and co telling us to ‘toughen up’ only stagnates progress. A certain type of older lady, clutching her pearls, and being aghast that ‘Grace’ was in that position at all runs the risk of reversing progress.

Choppy waters, it’s a cyclic thing, Greer and co are effectively Betamax, telling the rest of us that VHS will never catch on. The pearl-clutching-ladies, and the odious swines who “did not witness anything of that nature” at the Presidents Club are old-people-trying-to-use-a-computer. No, ‘we’ youngsters can’t all do long division in our heads, or recite Latin verb-endings, but we also don’t have to have twelve children by the age of 30, in case some of them die. The world is changing, it’s not 1900, or 1960, or even 2000, the pace-of-change has been ratcheting up the gears (don’t skew-off to the bloody Doomsday Clock.) it can’t ‘stop’ here, because this-is-how-it-has-always-been. We’re seeing the opposition to progress that others might have seen at the end of the Witch-trials, or the crossover between shitting in a trench and the introduction of sanitation. 

The ‘new’ feminists aren’t ‘weaker’ than the originals for complaining about issues that the older ones ‘put up with’, the point of a movement is that it keeps moving, I’m not preaching unrealistic-expectations, just progress. I’ve crafted this particular life to protect myself against some known-inequalities, my son has seen a ‘strong woman’ as a role model most of the time, he hasn’t seen all the times I’ve had to peel off wandering hands that men felt entitled to place on me. He has seen my frustration turn into resentment at his father, and that wasn’t healthy, but it kept him connected to grandparents he adores, I suppose the end justified the means there, even if his grandparents enabled a lot of my ex’s coercive and manipulative behaviours. I’m small-collateral there, I’m out of that now. 

The ‘new’ feminists AREN’T undoing the progress of the ‘old’ ones if they decide to wear make-up, or skirts, as much as I bang on about not painting my face, or wearing clothes that make me look ‘available’, the progress made by the ‘old’ feminists can’t be held-stagnant in crew-cuts and dungarees. At that point, it ceases to be progress, and becomes a plateau. What I think the ‘old’ feminists are failing to see is the element of personal choice, which was what they were fighting for all along. I joke about not wearing make-up, and mooching about the place in jeans and hoodies, I haven’t ‘had a hair-cut’ since 2014, just because I don’t buy into the aesthetic-angle, that doesn’t give me the right to criticise anyone who does. ‘Men’ are not animals, the vast majority of them don’t go around licking us because we smell nice, but that undercurrent, that perception that they will-because-they-can is what the ‘new’ feminists are, rightly, challenging. Even if ‘we’ do wear pink, or have hair-styles, that doesn’t mean we’re back-to-before, all dainty and helpless, because progress has been made. 

Right then, choppy waters to navigate, and this storm WILL get worse before it gets better, nobody ever discovered new territory by staying where they were, or turning back around to the relative safety of where they were before that. Humanity needs to start pulling in the same direction, and not be distracted by certain parties sticking their oar in where it’s not needed.  

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

BARRON'S PENTA How a Child of Wealth Became a Drug Addict How a child of affluence became addicted to opioids and lost everything but her life. Email Print 4 Comments Order Reprints Facebook Twitter Google+ smaller Larger By CARA COSLOW June 16, 2017 8:43 p.m. ET Cara Coslow, drug-free for seven years, came clean only after she lost her entire fortune. Shayan Asgharnia I am a recovering opioid addict. I once went to the dentist because of an infected tooth, a common occurrence normally treated by antibiotics. Instead, I persuaded the dentist to pull three perfectly good teeth in order to get one prescription of 30 Vicodin—taken in a single dose before I’d even left the pharmacy. I was so addicted to Vicodin that I needed a constant level of opioid in my system just to function, and I kept myself going in four-hour increments. Three teeth seemed a small price to pay. I come from an affluent family. My father, Sam Coslow, was a composer and movie producer who won an Academy Award for producing the 1943 short film Heavenly Music. He followed his early show-business career with a more lucrative career in finance, after founding a stock market newsletter called Indicator Digest. I had a beautiful and witty mother, Frances King, who had parlayed her opera training into a cabaret act during New York’s Cafe Society era, regularly performing at the Manhattan restaurant One Fifth Avenue. I grew up in beautiful homes in Miami and Bronxville, N.Y.; spent my summers in London and Florence; and got an undergraduate degree in English from Sarah Lawrence College. I was not supposed to end up a drug addict. If you, your child, or spouse has a drug problem, know that your family is not alone. A scourge is upon our country. Nintey-one people a day die from opioid overdoses, almost quadruple the rate in 1999, calculates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means 300,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2015, with middle-age adults being the most vulnerable. President Donald Trump has just ordered a special opioid-crisis commission. Many consider this to be the worst drug crisis the country has ever known. Now, looking back, I see there were some early red flags. I had been a panicky child, plagued by a severe case of separation anxiety from my mother. This was the 1960s: A bit of tranquilizer was considered a good way to get me to school. By the time I was in my late teens, I was addicted to downers. Cocaine and booze followed, but I found the 12 steps and stayed sober for many years, until the pressures of my budding Hollywood career produced a series of headaches. My opioid addiction began with a single prescription for Vicodin, prescribed for my migraines. I was in my early 30s and head of casting at Carsey-Werner, one of the most successful television-production companies ever. I oversaw the casting of Roseanne, Cosby, and That ’70s Show. I was nominated for an Emmy and discovered Ashton Kutcher. I had all of the material prizes: a six-figure salary, a companypaid $100,000 car, and a beautiful home in Encino, Calif., which I spent a year meticulously renovating. Coslow was a panicky girl and given a bit of tranquilizer to get her to school. Cara Coslow I had no idea that these drugs, prescribed for legitimate pain, would end up taking everything but my life. I liked the way they made me feel. Vicodin was the best antidepressant I’d ever known. These pills gave me energy and spunk. They gave me the qualities I wanted but couldn’t manufacture on my own. I went from filling these prescriptions monthly, to twice monthly, to weekly, to doctor-shopping to come up with a prescription for 30 pills every day—the amount I needed to function. The opioids no longer made me feel good; without them, I suffered almost unmanageable pain. It felt as though I had tiny coal miners with tiny pickaxes living in the center of my bones and scraping to get out. I’d sweat profusely, have diarrhea, and vomit. So I endured surgeries and injuries and tooth extractions for the next handful of pills. Opioid withdrawal is a pain like no other—it will bring the toughest stevedore to his knees. By 2000, I was putting in only brief appearances at work. My days instead were spent going from the emergency room to urgent care and from doctor to dentist in an ever-widening radius. You couldn’t see the same doctors too often, or they’d know you were seeking drugs. I faked injuries or inflicted them on myself, and ran an elaborate con game on the medical community. Glancing at a photograph of a teen behind a doctor’s desk, I’d say, “Is that a photo of your son? Why, he’s good-looking. Has he ever thought of…acting?” I’d practically promise to make the kid a star. I awoke one Christmas morning in acute withdrawal, desperately needing more pills. I was due to spend the day with friends and their child, whom I adored. But by then, I had used up all of the neighborhood medical facilities and was seeking drugs on the outskirts of town, at shabby clinics that needed my cash. But because it was Christmas, I bolted to an emergency room in Malibu—something more festive with a view of the ocean. I was very sick when I got there. I’d learned from a doctor, who was also an addict, how to fake an embolism or a heart attack and ensure my place at the front of the ER line. But that amount of drama was pointless. I needed to get in and out for Christmas dinner. I got 10 Vicodin—not enough to get me out of withdrawal. I went to dinner, sat there in misery, and as soon as it was done, I was out the door to an urgent-care facility in El Segundo. Again, I got a dose too small to relieve the pain.So, I burst into my third ER, at a proper hospital, complaining of chest pains, sweats, and other coronary symptoms, a couple of them genuine. It didn’t matter that this was Christmas; I’d been living the same day for the past several years. Only with a shot of Demerol, administered at midnight, was I finally able to sleep. The nightmare lasted for 10 years. Along the way, I lost my entire fortune—my jewelry, my furniture, my 401(k), my art, and the collection of letters written by Colette, George Sand, and Victor Hugo that I’d purchased in a small store on the Rue du Bac in Paris. I literally lost millions of dollars, some of it in future earnings but most from the compromised logic of a drug-addled brain, like quitting my six-figure dream job and walking away from property I had invested heavily in. But it’s also important to note that I got hooked on these pills in the late 1990s—a crucial time in the history of this crisis. Suddenly, opioid medications, which had been used primarily and legitimately for acute pain that came from injuries, surgeries, or palliative care, were being prescribed liberally. In Drug Dealer, MD, Dr. Anna Lembke describes the influence of Big Pharma on the prolific prescribing of pain meds that started in the ’90s. Companies like Purdue, the manufacturer of OxyContin, funded lectures, conferences, and research that promoted the use of these drugs for nonacute pain. From 1999 to 2009, I tried to get clean some 20 times, including checking in and out of 10 acute detox wards and rehab centers, the rest at home with nurses and doctors. I couldn’t stay off the drugs. The postacute phase of detox was so miserable that I invariably went back to opioids. I tried methadone and found I couldn’t function on it. I nodded out. Too zonked to make good casting decisions, I was excluded from important meetings at work. Too ashamed to tell my bosses how much I needed help, I asked to be let out of my contract. Later, I tried Suboxone, the other drug substitute used in medication-assisted treatment. But I also abused it, never sticking to the prescribed dose. If getting off opioids is an uphill climb, getting off replacement meds is Hillary Step, Mount Everest’s nearly vertical rock face. The withdrawal from methadone and Suboxone is torturous, protracted, and next to impossible. The only time I ever came close to dying from drugs was when a detox doctor told me to stop taking methadone three days before he would perform an idiotic, highly dangerous “ultrarapid detox” procedure. It was neither rapid nor a detox. The third day off methadone, I was found almost unconscious on my guest-room floor after enduring the nearly unendurable pain of methadone withdrawal. At the hospital, I had to be administered drugs intravenously in the lobby—my blood pressure was too high even for transportation to a room. Methadone withdrawal is responsible for many documented deaths. If your loved one is hooked on opioids, please find a doctor who really understands opioid withdrawal. Then, right before another Christmas in 2009, I got lucky. I met Dr. Mark Honzel during my frequent stays in the acute detox ward of Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. He was the big doctor there, and he intimidated me. He was a no-nonsense German, and I was self-important. We butted heads, and he made me cry. But, by this point, I was living half a life, with no career and very little money. Recovery was my only real option, and I knew Honzel was the one doctor I could trust. I had overheard him tell someone that methadone withdrawal is one of the hardest there is—no other doctor I knew had copped to that. On Christmas Eve, he admitted me once again to Brotman. After two weeks, my insurance stopped paying for the detox. Honzel said it was impossible for me to go home. I needed longer-care treatment, but my insurance wouldn’t cover rehab. Honzel had started working with a new rehab center in West Hollywood called Klean, a small and elegant facility close to my condo that would allow me to bring my dog Saffron, my companion who had ridden out 15 years of my ups and downs. But I was flat broke and I knew that treatment in private rehab facilities costs between $30,000 and $100,000 a month. Honzel arranged for me to get a Klean scholarship. At Klean, I was looked after by a loving and nonjudgmental staff and wasn’t forced to continuously walk in the deserts near Palm Springs, as I had been at the Betty Ford Center. I stayed at Klean for three months. It was my route out, but there are, of course, other wonderful facilities around the country. If you need help finding a clinic near you, go to samhsa.gov, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration website, and type in your address. A range of facilities for all levels of care will pop up. But if you or your loved one is trying to kick the habit, know that there are no shortcuts to getting off opioids. You just have to soldier through it. Because I had spent so long on Suboxone, it took over a year to get my energy up and even longer to feel OK in my skin. Honzel told me, “In my experience, relapse rates with opiate addiction are about 90% one year after abstinence-based treatment. It’s significantly better with medication-assisted treatment, but MAT is not right for everyone, and each patient has to be individually assessed.” I was one of those patients who couldn’t stay on MAT without abusing it, but ultimately I fell into the 10% who remained off all drugs. And now I am paying my blessings forward, working as an intake administrator for Klean, guiding addicts through the treatment process, and telling them what to expect. I haven’t taken a mood-altering chemical since I left. It has been more than seven years. It’s a different life than I had. A better life—to be sure. E-mail: penta@barrons.com