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ckret2 · 6 months ago

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Chapter 55 of human Bill Cipher finally having a little fun for the first time in over a month of captivity in the Mystery Shack:

Bill does his level best to teach Mabel everything he knows about everything as fast as possible (while Ford eavesdrops). In the process, he finally reveals something about his home dimension!

But not everything about his dimension.

"Did you have rainbows in Flatworld?" Mabel had started drawing her shapesona again at the bottom of a fresh piece of paper. The heart was holding out one hand with several strips of glue shooting in a beam out from the palm; Mabel started shaking glitter onto the glue strips to make them rainbow.

"Not natural ones."

"Awww!"

"We could make them with flashlights and prisms, though."

"That's something." Still, it wasn't as cool as a real rainbow. She started carefully drawing Bill floating above her shapesona. (She probably should have drawn him before she put down glitter. She had to push up her sleeve and lift her wrist to avoid smearing the glue.) "When's the first time you saw a real rainbow?"

Bill didn't answer.

Mabel glanced at him. He had a hard look in his eyes. "Bill?"

####

For the first time in his life, the triangle was up—up but not north—in space, in the third dimension, looking down but not south at the plane where he'd spent his entire existence. It shuddered and rippled and cracked, contracting, as the entire universe crunched together around him.

Great walls of pale blue flame half a googol light years wide erupted into third dimensional space, where stars were caught and crushed between the quickly collapsing cosmic tectonic plates. He hadn't known his flat universe had stars of its own.

His home world shattered and crumbled, shrapnel and rubble spraying out, stone instantly pulverized into dust. Distant oceans rode the waves of the convulsing universe, flinging billions of gallons of water into space in a fine thin spray, glittering in the sunlight.

As the triangle watched, a great flickering rainbow ring formed in front of the ejected ocean, like the hollow eye of a hostile god staring at him in judgment.

He stared back.

And he felt himself fill with more and more and more power.

####

"Bill?"

"Sorry, I was trying to remember!" Bill sat back, laced his hands behind his head, and shrugged, "It's not coming to me. But I'm sure it was after I took charge of Dimension Zero. From time to time planets with weather systems would fall in through a wormhole, I must've seen a rainbow on one of them!"

"Oh." The answer disappointed her, but she couldn't quite put her finger on why. She puzzled over it as she drew a fireball shape around Bill's hands in glue and shook on pale blue glitter.

Bill nodded at the page, "So what are we up to?"

"Fighting evil! With rainbow lasers and... whatever that magic fire thing you do is!"

"Hey, superheroes! Sounds fun. Who are we killing?"

"Superheroes don't kill people!"

"Fine. Who are we sending to the hospital with third degree burns?"

"I don't know, I haven't made up a villain yet." She almost asked Bill what kind of monsters existed in his world; but the question died in her throat. That might be too depressing a question. She added a heart-shaped glue outline around her shapesona and shook on a glitter rainbow, and set the picture aside to dry. She grabbed a fresh paper and tried to imagine what a two-dimensional butterfly would look like. Would it just have flat little stick wings since that was more aerodynamic? That sounded boring. She started drawing a two-dimensional squid instead.

Bill studied Mabel's latest finished work—the glitter-outlined heart, the glitter rainbow laser, the glitter fire, and the plain him. After a moment, he casually mentioned, "I used to wear body glitter."

She blinked at him. "What?"

"Earlier you asked me about glitter in my dimension," Bill said. "Body paint was makeup to us. I wore it when I went dancing."

"WHAT!"

"And I'd cut open glow sticks to paint my arms and legs!"

"What color glitter did you wear?!"

"Usually gold."

"What?! Bill!" Mabel laughed. "You're already yellow!"

"But I didn't glitter. That's important!"

"You're boring."

"Shut up! I was gorgeous and I knew it! Why mess with perfection?!" He gestured down at himself, perfection, as though he'd momentarily forgotten what body he was in. "Listen, club fashion gets repetitive. If you've seen one equilateral in cutesy primary color gradients, you've see 'em all. There's beauty in simplicity—not a lot of shapes can pull off a solid color with a little light highlighting and still look flashy!" He'd sat up straighter, chest puffed out proudly, as he talked about how pretty he thought he'd been. "Buuut sure, sometimes I highlighted my points for fun. And to keep from stabbing people—it's hard for other people to judge distances with strobe lights on."

"What colors."

"Usually red, blue, or purple. You know—nice contrasts with gold."

Mabel grabbed another paper and started drawing Bill dancing. He leaned closer, elbows on the table, watching with more interest now. Mabel asked, "You had clubs with strobe lights?"

"Of course we did, we aren't barbarians." Bill picked up yellow and black markers out of Mabel's supplies, leaned over to her drawing in progress, and started adding a decorative border around the nearest edge of the paper in dots and dashes.

"What kind of music did you listen to?"

"It was... It's closest to the music in— You've never been to that dimension. Well, it kind of sounds like... I'll never hit those notes with human vocal cords." He drummed his fingers on the table. "Hold on. Let me get Questiony's piano."

####

It turned out that Flatworld club music sounded kind of like a broken tornado siren.

"It doesn't sound very good on a human piano," Bill said, giving the electric piano balanced on his knees a disapproving look. "The intervals between notes are tuned wrong, it's about four octaves short, and it's missing that tympanic membrane shredding tremolo when the treble jumps."

Mabel regarded the piano with some dismay. "Do you know how to play anything else?"

Bill sighed.

He played "Don't Start Un-Believing" for her. He even did that cool thing where you drag a finger up half the keyboard at once.

####

By now, Bill seemed a lot happier to answer Mabel's questions about his world; but she quickly worked out which ones he'd actually give a direct answer. He was the most free with science-y questions, hit or miss on the fun cultural questions, and instantly evasive when asked about his own life or uncomfortable political issues.

When she asked if shapes and their houses just kinda floated unattached to anything because they didn't have a home planet, Bill said they did have a home planet—hundreds of miles below, marking south by its gravitational pull—and they lived in the sky in between their planet and its rings. When she asked what kind of clothing they wore, Bill said they usually didn't wear anything, unless it was for practical purposes (gloves for gardening; goggles for chemistry; elbow-, knee-, and corner-pads for spelunking), and when she asked about his top hat he said slyly, "You mean my telescope?" and gleefully refused to explain further.

But when she asked if it was true that equilateral triangles were the lowest rung you could stand on before getting knocked off the social ladder altogether, Bill said that was a pretty rude question to ask a triangle. And then he said his world didn't have ladders.

When he casually let slip that he'd been able to see the third dimension when nobody else could, she asked how that was possible. He'd paused, looked up from his seventh completely incomprehensible drawing of an animal (she'd asked him whether Flatworlders had pets), and, with an eager gleam in his eye, he asked, "How much time do you have?"

####

Ford heard Bill's voice the moment he opened the door—"All right, star girl, pop quiz, let's see how much of that you kept in your noggin."

"Oh, I'm so ready!"

Baffled, Ford leaned in the living room doorway. The room was absolutely plastered in crayon-covered papers—illustrations, lists, mathematical and scientific diagrams—stars, cells, planets, vehicles. At the moment Bill was pointing at six papers taped together with a diagram on them that Ford thought was a Punnett square that had been expanded into a four-dimensional tessaract. "A polygon's sides are determined by...?"

"Genetic inheritance!" Mabel announced, the proud student who knew all the answers. "You have however many sides your parents have genes for!"

"And the idea that polygons increase by one side each generation...?"

"Is propaganda! Because if everybody hides their kids without enough sides, and they only talk about the kids that did go up a side, it makes everyone think that's what always happens and their family is the only one that's failing!"

"Perfect! And the highest natural amount of sides a shape can have?"

"Twelve! Decadoggins!"

"Close enough, dodecagons! But this isn't Greek class, I'll give you full points. So, any shapes with more sides than that got them through—?"

"Random mutation!"

"Correctamundo! Meaning the only way to get shapes with hundreds of sides is..."

"Crazy bonkers inbreeding! Because the same rich families just keep marrying each other!"

"With consequences including—?"

"Um..." Mabel puffed out her cheeks as she thought. "Skeletons getting all crackly, having a hard time making babies, and high—uh—infant morality!"

"Mortality."

"Lots of dead babies."

"Yes! And remember: when a mutation makes a body produce so much more of something than it needs that it starts harming the body, that's called...?"

"Cancer!"

"Meaning circles are...?"

"Tumors!"

"And what do we do with tumors?"

"EXECUTE THEM!"

"YES!" Bill ripped the Punnett tesseract off the wall. Behind it was a piece of paper that read, in blood red crayon, ANTI-MONARCHIST ANARCISM. "You're ready to man the guillotines! A+, star girl! Give yourself another sticker!"

"Yes!" Mabel peeled a sparkly purple star off a sticker sheet and stuck it on her cheek. Her face had over twenty star stickers.

Ford leaned against the living room doorframe, watching the scene inside with wonder. He was more than a little iffy about the political lesson—he, personally, was incredibly opposed to the idea that it was morally imperative to execute anybody with extra body parts, nobility or not—but the presentation of it was certainly captivating. It had been a long time since Ford had seen Bill like this. (It had been a long time since Ford would have trusted any lesson out of Bill's mouth.)

"Now let's get back to biangles." Bill picked up a fake crystal ball that he'd drawn various lines and shapes on with a marker.

"Awww, again?!"

"Hey. Listen," he said firmly. "I believe in you. You'll get it this time, I know it."

Ford looked around the room, taking in the scene more fully. The floor was scattered with drawings of aliens. A few of them were various polygons—regular and irregular, with the irregularities further broken down by whether they otherwise showed radial or lateral symmetry—each with thin limbs and an eye on a corner. Most were fantastical alien animals, a few that Ford had seen or been warned about on other worlds. Some had been scribbled out and redrawn when Bill's limited artistic capabilities didn't live up to his unknown standards; a few were in Mabel's art style, meaning Bill must have described them to her while she drew.

Twenty pieces of paper had been taped together on the wall behind the TV, with a drawing of a planet surrounded by a circular ring of small blobs—a planetary ring?—and a moon further out. The empty atmosphere between the planet and the ring was filled with squares and rectangles, which were grouped together in red blobby circles that were each labeled by letter: "Country △," "Country B," "Country C," "Country D (communists)," etc. A badly-drawn sea serpent slithered along the outside of the ring with the words "Here There Be Monsters" written over it.

A tall column of taped together papers was covered in examples of alien writing systems—some of them Ford recognized from his travels through other dimensions. From the ones he understood, it looked like the words were demonstrations of Mabel's name in dozens of alien writing systems. Sometimes Bill spelled her name Maybell or Mabelle.

And there were so many papers scattered around the room with little graphs and symbols and arrows Ford couldn't make sense of. And in the center of it all, Bill, alive, energetic, his full attention enthusiastically focused on his student.

Bill had to be up to something; but Ford couldn't imagine what, based on the bizarre assemblage of information in front of him. What nefarious purpose could be behind showing Mabel how to spell her name in alien languages? Unless his goal was to so enchant her with tales of other worlds that he could persuade her to help him open a new portal...? No, even for Bill that felt like a stretch.

He looked at the wall again. Surely, that wasn't Bill's homeworld. Ford had spent years of his life trying to find the world Bill was from; surely Bill hadn't just drawn it in the middle of Ford's living room. Had he?

"Okay, let's start with spherical geometry from the top," Bill said, polishing the crystal ball on his leggings to rub off the marker lines. "Don't tell anyone I can do this." He held up the ball, tapped it twice on the bottom, and it hovered in place when he let it go, freeing up both his hands to hold a ruler and marker. (How long had he been able to do that? Had he even noticed Ford was standing right outside?) He drew a line across the surface of the ball, "Pretend it's a planet. If you draw a line on a sphere, it's obviously curved, right?"

"Right," Mabel said.

"But now pretend you're on the planet. The surface of the world is a flat plane to you. From your perspective, you can walk in a straight line from point A to point B."

"But it's actually a curve. From space."

"Now you're catching on. That's what makes spherical geometry a little weird: when you're on the sphere you treat everything around you like it's 2D even though when you're off the sphere you can see it's 3D." Why in the world was Bill teaching Mabel about spherical geometry?

Bill drew two more lines to connect to the first. "So! You can draw a triangle on a sphere, no problem, right?"

"Right."

"And something you can only do in spherical geometry... is... pretend this is the North Pole and the South Pole..." Bill carefully rotated the ball under his marker as he drew a straight line from one "pole" to the other, and then drew a second straight line from pole to pole next to it. "Ta-da! If a tri-angle has three angles, a bi-angle has two angles. You've got yourself a two-sided polygon. Right?"

Mabel hesitated. "Right."

"You with me so far, Shooting Star?"

"So far," she said, with a tone that suggested she expected that to change very soon.

"But if you try to transfer that shape from spherical geometry to Euclidean geometry—" Bill turned to an expanse of still partially-uncovered white papers taped to the wall like a makeshift whiteboard, drew two points, and drew two straight lines, red and blue, between the points, "—it just doesn't work. You can't see a biangle in a flat world."

And now Mabel was squinting suspiciously at him.

Bill said, "I lost you."

"But where does it go!"

Bill shrugged. "You lost it when you lost the third dimension."

"But you said when you're on the sphere it's two dimensional!"

"From your perspective it's two dimensional, but there's still a third dimension enabling the sphere to exist."

"Then from my perspective when I'm on the planet shouldn't a biangle look like that?" Mabel pointed at the two straight lines on the piece of paper. "Since everything looks all 2D to me? But it doesn't! It's like flying from the North Pole to the South Pole through America and then flying back through China! China and America don't just squish together into the same place just because you're going in a straight line on a sphere!"

"I'd kill to hear you give a geography lesson to a Flat Earther convention."

Mabel gave him her best angry scowl.

"It was a compliment! I think you'd inspire some hilarious arguments, that's all!" Bill put two dots on the paper and offered Mabel the marker. "Look, try it for yourself! Draw a biangle."

Mabel took the marker and, after a moment of thought, drew two curved lines between the points, making a football shape.

"Those aren't straight lines, kid."

"Argh!" Mabel pulled the paper off the wallpaper, bent it into a curve, and shakily drew a straight line between the two points; but no matter how else she twisted or bent the paper, she couldn't find a path that would let her draw a second straight line between the points without overlapping the first line she'd drawn. She crumpled the paper, tossed it on the floor, and whispered, "It's witchcraft, Bill."

He burst out laughing. "I could name a few horror writers that felt the same way about non-Euclidean geometry."

"But whyyy does the biangle disappear when it goes from a sphere to normal flat paper."

"Because..." Bill groped for an explanation he hadn't already tried. He crossed an arm across his chest and tapped a knuckle just under the bow tied in his hoodie's draw strings the way some humans might tap a hand to their chin, his eyes narrowed in thought. How many times had Ford seen him make that exact same face in his true triangular form, whenever Ford was struggling to understand a lesson on portal physics and Bill was struggling to find a way to translate it into concepts Ford had encountered in his human education? "Let's try this another way."

The scene made Ford ache.

Look past the paper and the crayons, and the graph- and figure- and writing-covered walls looked so much like the advanced physics lessons and blueprints that Bill had coated Ford's starry blue dreamscape in during his sleep. Look past the flesh and bone, and Bill moved and gestured and spoke the way he had when he was teaching Ford how to build a bridge between worlds.

It was the first time since Bill's death that Ford had seen 100% of his personality shining—unhindered by grief, secrets, or a disdainful human audience. It was the first time in decades that Ford had seen Bill at his best.

In that moment, for a split second, Ford forgot how to hate Bill. He couldn't see Bill the traitor, Bill the invader, Bill the homicidal party animal. The only person in that room with Mabel was Bill Cipher the Teacher, Mentor, and Muse that Ford used to know so long ago. Like an ancient god who'd chosen to spend a day roleplaying as a giddy professor—Bill was holding back a tsunami's worth of vast, ancient, unintelligible alien knowledge so that he could drip out revelations at a faucet's pace, slow enough for his student to catch each drop in her hands.

Over thirty years ago, there had been moments when this Bill peeked out behind the above-it-all façade—and that had been the Bill that Ford was happiest to see, the Bill that Ford had thought of as a friend rather than a mere teacher... but each time, it hadn't been long before Bill seemly caught himself and turned off the faucet for the night.

Because he couldn't let Ford learn too much, or he would have seen through Bill's ruse.

Hatred tiredly crept back in.

"I've got it!" Mabel triumphantly flung her hands in the air. "It's like orange slices!"

"Orange slices?" Bill repeated.

"Be right back!" Mabel zoomed to the kitchen, shouting, "Hi Grunkle Ford!" as she passed.

Ford watched her go, then looked back at Bill; Bill had glanced at him for the first time. But all he did was frown and mutter, "I don't remember inviting you to audit this course."

Before Ford could decide whether to retort, Mabel charged back into the living room with an orange and a sharp knife. "Okay! If you draw a triangle on the orange," Mabel said, doing so with a marker, before cutting into it with the knife, "and then you��you cut it out all the way to the center..."

"Be careful with that," Ford said. Mabel was holding the orange in one palm and stabbing into it from the opposite side.

Bill said, "Lay off, Six Fingers. I'm keeping my eye on her, she's not gonna hurt herself."

"I'm being careful!" Mabel was struggling to get an even wedge cut all the way to the center of the orange; she eventually gave up and dug into the orange with her fingertips to tug out a messy mangled handful of fruit, attached to a roughly equilateral patch of orange peel about two inches to each side. She shook orange juice off her fingers. "Pretend I cut that out better."

"I dunno what you're talking about," Bill said. "It looks flawless."

She pointed at each corner of the peel triangle. "Okay so, these are the three corners of the spherical triangle, right?"

"Right."

"And if you want to make a regular flat triangle, you can... try to cut a straight line between the corners, like..." She squeezed the rest of the orange between her knees, held the edges of the triangular peel with her fingertips, and sawed off the orange pulp underneath, trying to cut a flat level plane as near to the triangle's corners as she could. Ford almost warned Mabel about the knife again, but glanced at Bill's face and his expression of unworried, keen curiosity, and kept quiet. Bill reached out and caught the sawed-off chunk of orange pulp before it hit the ground.

Mabel held out the peel slice. "There! Right? Spherical triangle on top and flat triangle on the bottom!"

Bill considered that, one hand on his hip. He popped the orange chunk in his mouth. "All right. So far so good."

"But if you make a biangle..." Mabel drew two lines between the top and bottom of the remaining orange, and cut a wedge free. "There isn't anything extra to cut off to let you make a flat shape. There's just a straight line between the two points!"

"Ha! Okay, all right, that works! Brilliant! What do you need me for? You just taught yourself the whole lesson!" Bill ruffled her hair so enthusiastically that he knocked her headband askew.

She shoved him away, laughing, and straightened out her headband. "Bill!"

"What did I say! Didn't I tell you you'd get it?" Bill was beaming at her, impressed, delighted, proud. "Congratulations, you've just mastered college-level geometry."

"Wh—What? Are you serious? This is college stuff?" She shook her head. "No way, you're lying."

Bill pointed at Ford without looking at him. "Tell her."

He felt a little like a dog being commanded to bark; but he said, "He's right. I didn't start studying spherical geometry until my second semester in college." He was sure he could have studied it sooner, if his high school had offered it; and he doubted Mabel had absorbed an entire semester's worth of spherical geometry; but he didn't see any reason to point any of that out when Mabel's face lit up in excitement.

Bill said, "There you have it! Way to go, star girl! Two big stickers."

"YES!" Mabel peeled off two jumbo-sized star stickers with smiley faces and stuck them onto her earrings. "So does that make a biangle a girl or a boy?"

And Ford was immediately lost again.

"No," Bill said.

Mabel sighed loudly and tried again. "Does that make a biangle a line or a polygon?"

"Still no, but for a different reason. Externally, they look like lines to anyone who isn't psychic. Internally, their anatomy usually functions like a polygon's. But socially, you've gotta ask. Some of 'em consider themselves lines, some polygons, some claim biangularity is neither linear nor polygonal. Personally, I say they're whatever they say they are. Because," he said grandly, "I'm just that open-minded and accepting."

Ford stifled a derisive snort. But Bill's self-aggrandizing aside, Ford's mind was reeling trying to keep up—spherical geometry, the (gendered?) socialization of shapes, Flatworlder anatomy—what did psychics have to do with anything? Ford's fingers itched for a pen. He wished he had his journal with him.

Bill grabbed several papers off the floor and the floating crystal ball and climbed on top of the wooden TV cabinet. He left the ball hovering behind him seven feet up in the air, tossed aside several papers he'd already used both sides of to let them flutter back to the floor, and taped the rest to the wall with their blank backsides turned out. "Now back to remote viewing." He drew a grid in blue lines on the papers, said, "Toss me that triangle wedge," used a marker to draw an eye on the triangular orange peel, tapped it twice like he had the crystal ball, and stuck it against the grid, where it sat unmoving.

And the entire time, Ford watched with his arms crossed tightly.

Almost a month ago, Bill had given Ford his manipulative trap of a birthday gift, a miniature grimoire, five pieces of paper, margins filled, two rows of text per line, packed with as diverse an array of magical spells and occult knowledge as Bill could fit. It wasn't a gift, it was a boast and a taunt: look at everything I know that you don't; look at what I could teach you if you let me live.

It was something Bill could have given him all along—effortlessly, with no cost to himself—but didn't, until Bill wanted something from him.

On his birthday, Ford had wondered, furiously: when this was what Bill could have been—gift-giver, wish-granter, teacher, guide, friend—why did he choose not to be?! It was an internal scream of rage, the howl of a wounded victim at the condemned criminal as he was marched to the gallows: you monster, you monster, you monster, when it would have been so easy for you to be something better, why instead are you a liar, manipulator, torturer, murderer, life-ruiner, world-ender? Answer for yourself: why are you this instead of someone better? How dare you?

It had made Ford want him dead even more.

This was the exact opposite of the grimoire.

The question in Ford's head wasn't a scream of rage anymore. It was grief. It was a plea. It was one last desperate attempt to understand:

Instead of being who he was, why couldn't Bill have been this person? This charismatic, energetic, ecstatic muse who ruled like a king over a classroom he'd constructed himself, eager to share a trillion years of collected wisdom with a fragile mortal mind, lighting up with joy whenever she grasped something that was trivially simple to him? This guide to the vast wonders beyond Earth, competent and encouraging and funny, delighting in the weirdness of the wide wide universe? The Bill that Ford had once liked so much—the Bill that he'd called his friend?

"Okay," Bill said, all sunshine and excitement, "Back to how to view the third dimension from the second dimension—"

Mabel said, "Can you view the fourth dimension from the third?"

Bill hesitated a split second, but said, "Sure! You can view any dimension from any dimension! You've just gotta bend your eye the right way to see higher ones!"

"What does the fourth dimension look like?"

"Well—hm. Imagine the way that the third dimension looks different from the second, and that's the way the fourth dimension looks different from the third."

Mabel stared at Bill.

"Eddie wrote an entire book about a square meeting a sphere because that was the closest he could get to telling other humans what seeing the fourth dimension is like! If I could still visit dreams, I could just show you, but..."

"Isn't the fourth dimension time? Blendo showed us the time stream! Is that what it looks like?"

"Nnn—close! You're close. The fourth dimension isn't time, but time is in the fourth dimension."

"How's that different."

Bill pointed at the floor. "If the carpet's the second dimension and the lamp's shining on it, the third dimension isn't light, but light is in the third dimension."

"Ohhh." Mabel gasped. "That's why you called some weird thing flying around in a higher dimension an eclipse! Because eclipses were in a higher dimension in Flatworld!"

Bill's face lit up in surprised delight. "All right, skip three lessons ahead, why don't you! In a week's time you'll be teaching people how my dimension works." He turned back to his papers and started drawing a branching river. "So! That time stream you saw isn't time itself! It's a visual metaphor being generated so humans can see time too—sort of a hologram projecting from the fourth dimension into the third—have I explained that the universe is a hologram yet—"

Why weren't you this person, Ford wondered. Why did you choose not to be this person? When it was so easy for you to be this? When this made you happy, too?

Why couldn't you have been this person?

Why are you only like this now, when you're about to die?

####

(Hope y'all enjoyed Infodump: The Chapter. This is one of those chapters with something hidden in it that'll unravel the whole fic if you happen to find it, so have fun searching for that. Let me know what you thought of this week's chapter! And get excited—we've got Big Things coming up... soon.)

#bill cipher #human bill cipher #gravity falls #gravity falls fic #gravity falls fanart #fanart #my art #my writing #bill goldilocks cipher

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fanaticsnail · 11 months ago

Note

Imagine trafalgar law putting his hat on his shy, vulnerable s/o that's riding him for the first time. Barely being able to take it and sobbing in both ecstacy and frustration, the size and situation in general being way too much to take. His s/o was very sensitive and shy in general so i guess hes getting a good show🤷‍♀️

Don't Be So Shy

Word Count: 1,428 (lol this was meant to be a lil drabble. Whoops.)

Masterlist here

Collab with @sordidmusings because I couldn't think of words. A saint, lady and a scholar.

Warnings: Afab!Reader, no plot, shy reader, Law is a little bit of a sub-leaning switch, smut, mdni

A whimper was pulled from within your throat as you shakily drew down your hand to circle the base of his shaft. You drew his length upwards, collecting the slick trail of arousal from between your legs and took your bottom lip between your teeth.

Trafalgar D Water Law lay back, watching intently as his hands laced behind his head. He focussed his yellow-grey irises on you, jaw hanging slightly slack as his pupils blew with lust and desire. His hat was firmly attached to his head, hands cradling the cotton material within his palms.

You slowly drew the tip of his throbbing cock against your entrance, your lips automatically parting at the contact as you began to take him in. Your eyes were clenched shut, wincing as you stretched to accommodate just the initial inch within your core.

“I know you’re staring at me. S-Stop it,” you lightly reprimanded him, trying to sound firm but only able to whimper for him. A small chuckle erupted from within his throat, his body shifting beneath you as he leant up on his forearms. His torso elevated, prompting you to unintentionally take more of his length within your walls. You winced at the intrusion, mewling briefly as you adjusted to the further stretch. Law moaned at the sight of him pushing more arousal from you, enraptured as it dripped from you and down his shaft. He looked back up to the timid expression on your flushed face.

“If me seeking out your beautiful eyes while you ride me is such an issue for you-,” you felt the firm touch of material being thrust atop your head. The broad brim of the bill of his spotted hat covered your eyes, automatically bringing you comfort to hide your expressions from your lover between your thighs.

“-Although I do adore watching your face when you take me,” He cooed up at you, ghosting his hands over your breasts as he traced patterns into your sensitive flesh, “-I know how shy you get.” A warm envelopment of heat drew its way up to your cheeks, prompting you to elevate your hands to draw the brim of the hat down further atop your head to conceal more of yourself from Law. “Just think of this as practice for when you can look me in the eyes while I fuck you.”

A small frustrated sob fell from your lips as you splayed your hands over his tattooed chest, inching your way further down his girthy shaft. You felt every curve, every veiny ridge of his twitching, solid cock as he lay perfectly still for you to impale yourself with everything he had.

As the hat concealed your eyes from his, Law allowed himself a small break of his stoic demeanor; expressing his lust over his own face. His brows contorted in a deep, focussed frown; his jaw clenching tightly with his whiskered chin protruding at every slow and calculated gyration you circled atop him. He stifled a growl from releasing within his throat, instead expressing his lust through his eyes rolling backwards into his skull.

It was taking everything in him to contain himself, to withhold the urge to flip you and pin you against the bed and bring both yourself and him to climax at a hastened pace. His greatest joy of late was watching you unravel beneath him; your cries and whimpers serenading him with their melody as they graced his ears, and tempted him further and further from sanity. His cock twitched hard at the thought, rising a choked mewl in your throat as you finally took his impressive length fully into you.

Your walls fluttered, strangling Law with your tightness as you adjusted. Feeling completely full with him within you; you tested a small circling sway of your hips against him. The curled hair above his shaft brushed your clit, causing another sobbed cry to release from your parted lips. Feeling more secure with his hat covering your eyes, you felt no need to withhold your movements and sensitive responses with your cries of pleasure.

Law was hypnotized. As statuesque as a victim falling before medusa, he continued to stare his glazed eyes up at you as you rode him. Each movement pulled a whimper and mewl from you as you thrusted, circled and ground yourself against him. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from you, entranced by you chasing your ecstasy; using his body to seek out your own pleasure.

Exhaustion began to overtake you in your chase, feeling overwhelmed with how your body adjusted to him and frustrated at his lack of movement below you. You panted and huffed as you continued to ride him, reaching blindly out to find Law’s wrists and claim them within your circular grasp. You pinned them above his head and blindly collapsed down onto him, breasts brushing against tattooed pectorals as you allowed a gasp to release from your parted lips.

He opened his mouth, his words forming within his fraying mind but refused to depart from his throat and tongue for fear he’d break you away from your trance. As you pressed yourself down against him further, pinning his arms against the pillows and stabilizing yourself above him, he couldn’t help but allow a choked gasp to flee from his lips onto you.

At that soft whisper of emotion, you halted your ride, releasing his left hand from your right and pulled his hat up to reveal your eyes to his while remaining fully sheathed atop him. As your eyes met, you tested a small rise of your hips and roughly sat back down atop him. His eyes widened, his breath hitching as you descended back with unbroken eye contact. He took his left hand and placed it on your hip, soothing over the flesh and massaging with his skilled, tattooed fingers.

“Do you think-,” you began, your voice soft and apprehensive as your brows drew down in concentration, “-Can you move a little?” Law chuckled as you released his right wrist from your grasp and placed your left hand beside his head.

“But you’re riding me so well,” he praised you, caressing your cheek briefly before mirroring his left hand by placing his right on your other hip.

“Law,” you poured his name from your lips in a whined moan, feeling the coil begin to wind tighter within your abdomen. The tingle in your toes had already started to elevate up to your knees, your thighs shuddering as your soaking walls began to flutter and shudder against him.

“Don’t ask me,” he groaned up at you, refusing to aid you both in chasing your highs. He wanted you to take charge. He needed you to direct him. He didn’t want to think, he didn’t want to assume. He wanted you to lead him.

“Law,” you stated more firmly, dragging yourself up to take just his glistening tip and holding it firmly within your entrance, “Move.”

At that firm direction, both of your bodies began to move in perfect synchrony. The slapping of hips meeting hips; the lewd sounds of your arousal sucking him into your walls, and the mutual cries of bliss had you both chasing the end.

With Law’s hat firmly clutched to your head, and his hands dragging your hips up and down his lengthy shaft; the tunnel began to reveal it’s whitened bliss as the band wound ever tighter. The small and unrelenting bob of his cock within you, and the noisy calls of your stuttered name flew from Law’s lips as he shot ropes of his thick release within you. The sticky backsplash of his cum danced with your slick arousal as his staggered movements beneath you continued to spur you further on to find your own release.

“Y-You feel s-so good like this,” He groaned into you, overstimulating himself while continuing to sing your praises up to you. At his voiced affirmations, you mewled and sobbed through your intense orgasm. Your walls squeezed and pulsed against his deflating shaft, pulling a feral groan from him as you cried his name.

Law released your left hip from his right hand, drawing his inked digits to rest atop your hat-adorned head. This small gesture had a small flushed heat rise to tint your cheeks, alongside his.

“Don’t be so shy,” he huffed, a smile plastered against his lips. His hand stroked down from his hat to cradle your cheek; forcing your eyes to meet as he gestured up with his chin to your head, “It looks better on you.”

#trafalga d waterlaw #x reader #trafalga law x reader #one piece #trafalga law smut #trafalgar d water law #op law #law x reader #law x reader smut

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robthegoodfellow · 30 days ago

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whenever I see a post about corvid intelligence or crows befriending people I wanna write this scenario where Eddie accidentally earns the loyalty of Hawkins' crows. Like it starts with him tossing his leftover sandwich crusts at a few hanging around the trailer park, and then...

A squawking fracas woke him one morning, so obnoxious that he dragged himself outside to investigate—to chase away the mob of birds fighting over dibs at the dumpster, he assumed. Instead, he followed the noise to the rusted fence behind his uncle's place that'd been holding on by a corroded thread for years—until approximately ten minutes ago, when the racket started up. Beneath the fallen section of flaking chain links was a tangled lump of black feathers, beaked head poking through to bay at the air. Its comrades ducked and bobbed around it, pecking at the metal bars, but every tug only ensnared the trapped bird worse.

On reflection, rushing in with an oh, shit wasn't the best move—the crowd of hecklers launched to hover in the air, feinting at him in screeching chorus.

"I come in peace!" he cried, hunched under pleading hands. Kept one arm raised like he sported an invisible shield, one eye on the dive-bombers, and crouching low, groped at the snarl of metal on the ground.

One bomber dove for his face, veering to avoid a defensive swipe.

"I'm trying to help. Quit murdering me!"

The hecklers heckled. Tough crowd. Eddie grimaced, trying to get a grip that wouldn't also give him tetanus, and managed to lift the shorn links. Soon as it raised off the dirt, the squished feathers wriggled and twisted, yanking free with a rattle.

"See?" Eddie shouted, as the bolt of black shook itself and took to the air. "You're welcome. Now shut the fuck up!"

They didn't, but allowed him to escape back to his trailer unmolested.

He hadn't thought anything of it, until a few days later, when he found a small pile of shiny trash on his doorstep. Broken teeny-bopper bracelet, a crusty nickel, a bottle cap... and a guitar pick.

A squawk drew his attention to the pair of crows perched on the roof. Bending, Eddie grabbed the pick.

"This?" he said, waving it. "This is legal tender! Not the rest of this junk. Although..." He crouched to get a better look at the bracelet. "This does have its charms," he admitted.

The crows heckled. Eddie ignored them, fiddling to detach the dolphin, repurpose the clip to latch the plastic chain round his wrist. Liked the contrast—garish neons against his leather cuff, dark bands of brown and black.

"Fuck it, right?" He raised his fist, newly bedazzled, to salute the supplicants with some devil horns. "Rock and roll."

And from then on, he and the crows had an understanding. If they were making a racket within earshot, he'd go check if they needed help, and if they found something he might like, they'd leave an offering on the stoop. Highlights included a BIC lighter and a tattered twenty dollar bill. Once, he'd accidentally left his keys at the picnic table where he did business and barely had time to notice, patting his pockets with sinking realization, when they clattered to the pavement—just dropped from the sky.

"Ah, killer!" Relieved, he scooped them up, then put fist to palm and bowed his thanks to the crow alighting atop the van.

As a sign of respect, he'd started incorporating crows as part of his aesthetic: got some sick tattoos on his chest and forearm, had a growing collection of feathers he kept in a jar like a goth bouquet, added a couple silhouettes to perch inside the Os of the Corroded Coffin banner. Even designed a druid character with a crow familiar, which he kindly gifted to Gareth when his player got roasted beyond revival by a wyvern.

"You're like Snow White," Jeff joked, as Eddie pocketed a quarter, binning the rest of the stoop offerings. Jeff was crashing there for the weekend to escape divorce drama at home.

"Quid pro crow, man," said Eddie, shrugging. "Do them a solid and they'll get you back."

A pair of hecklers cawed from the roof. Ed flipped them the bird. They were his regulars, the ones he’d dubbed Statler and Waldorf.

Jeff paused, squinting at them, speculative. Then dug out a packet of half-eaten peanut butter crackers and tossed them up, one at a time. Cue the jubilant, cackling duet.

“Yeah, that’ll do it,” Eddie predicted, motioning him inside.

Didn’t know at the time how right he was—or how closely his crownies were following his movements around town, monitoring from on high. And not just his movements, but the people considered part of his “flock,” so to speak.

One day, Gareth and Jeff showed up for practice a little worse for wear, victims of the knuckle-draggers that populated the football team. Ripped shirt, bloody lip. The usual.

Unusual was the crowd gathered in the parking lot the next day, a baffled circle around the quarterback’s hot rod, which that morning gleamed red but at some point during school had been treated to a fresh coat of bird shit. White gooey splatters from hood to trunk.

It was a convertible. He’d left the top down.

And stuck to the windshield, like a calling card: a black feather.

Eddie was quick to corral the guys away, hushing all vengeful laughter until they were safely in the van, then they let loose. Jeff was wiping tears of mirth, wheezing: “You weren’t kidding, man.”

“Look,” Frankie cried, pointing out the windshield, and lo—Statler and Waldorf were perched on the wipers, joined by Damsel, so named because Ed was pretty sure it’d been the one he found in such distress, way back when.

As one, the band saluted their benefactors, and Eddie swore the birds puffed their chests, bobbing their heads in satisfaction.

From then on, it was swooping season for anyone who bothered him or the boys under the keen surveillance of those eyes in the skies.

But Eddie knew he’d gone beyond Disney princess status that summer. He was fooling around on the Warlock outside the trailer, unplugged, lounging in a lawn chair, humming under his breath—just some Ozzy, flying high again—when a sudden flapping weight dipped the neck of the guitar.

“You scratch this thing, I will murder you,” he warned, eying the pinchy talons gripping between the pegs. Damsel cocked its head, like oh, really? Eddie gently jerked the Warlock, a shooing motion, and the bird hopped with a huffy flutter onto his knee.

They stared each other down for a sec—a measuring stare. Almost daring. Some of the feathers around its neck stuck out all scruffy where the fence had bit into it, left a scar. Halting, hesitant, Eddie extended a finger, then his hand, nice and slow, intending to… give a scritch or something?

An inch away, the beak snapped at him, barely missed, and he jumped so hard the damn bird launched skyward, flapping to hover.

Behind them, he could hear the hecklers in hysterics.

“Bitch!” he shouted, clutching the Warlock close to calm his racing heart. “See if I ever save your scrawny necks again.”

Heedless, Damsel swooped to land on his knee—again. Like it knew full well he would. Save them. Again. If it came down to it.

“Calling my bluff,” he muttered, aggrieved. “Gonna make me eat crow?”

Statler and Waldorf voiced their displeasure.

“Fuck off! You love it.”

They did, was the thing. Eddie knew it. They’d thrown their lots in with him, and he with them. So in the end, he wasn’t so much a princess.

More an accessory to murder.

Also on AO3

#eddie munson #and his affinity for crows #and puns

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leth-writes · 5 months ago

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Hellooooo i love your work❤️

Can I request Paul x reader where reader has a facial scar that they are really insecure about. One day, one of the other pack members makes a comment about it, and the reader gets really upset.

🤠-anon

Hello, lovely Cowboy anon! What a cool idea, and thank you so much for the praise! I’m still new to the whole posting my writing thing, so I’m always a bit nervous as to how people will react 🙂

Warning: the character expresses some opinions about their looks that aren’t actually true; obviously, facial scarring doesn’t make a person scary or bad. This is just the mindset of the character, not the author.

You had a scar. It wasn’t a small one; it split your face in half in a jagged, red line, marring your skin and just barely missing taking out your eye. It felt like the only thing people noticed about you; usually it was the first question anyone asked. Everyone always wanted to know what horrific, sordid tale you had, but the truth was even worse: nothing special had happened. It was a bad injury as a child from an accident, though you couldn’t even remember what had happened, you’d been so young.

Sometimes it felt like that was worse. If you had some gruesome tale, maybe it would distract from the scar and give you some confidence. Instead, all you had was a face even your parents struggled to look at and a huge physical therapy bill.

When you’d met Paul, you’d finally felt seen, like someone knew you for who you were and not what you looked like. He hadn’t even really asked about the scar, he’d been so focused on staring into your eyes. That’s what drew you to him, initially; he looked into your eyes. No one had done that, not as long as you could remember.

Paul honestly didn’t really register the scar beyond it being part of your face. It was just another feature that defined you as unique, like your expressive eyes or adorable laugh. He hadn’t even thought about how anyone else would react, let alone how you would feel about it. All he wanted was to introduce you, his imprint and the center of his universe, to his best friends, practically his siblings.

When you expressed concern about what the others would think, Paul assured you they would never do anything to hurt you. In fact, he told you, Sam’s girlfriend Emily had a similar scar, so everyone was used to being polite.

He was wrong.

The first thing Sam said when the two of you walked in was a snarled “Paul, what did you do?!”. He practically leapt across the room, dragging him bodily out the door as he struggled not to shift. The two stood on the far side of the yard, clearly arguing, Paul struggling not to shift. You weren’t sure what had upset Sam, but you knew it had to be serious for the, as Paul had described, normally calm man to be so angry.

The next thing that happened was Jared walking in, muffin hanging from his hand, as he exclaimed “holy shit! What the hell did Paul do to you?”. Then, it hit you. They were talking about your scar. For once, you hadn’t even thought to wonder what they would think about you, Paul’s confidence at their presumed lack of care had rubbed off on you. You realized Sam was convinced Paul had hurt you, had shifted and created the large, hideous crater across your face. All along, he had been wrong; the scar was all anyone would ever see. You couldn’t even meet Paul’s friends without someone thinking you’d had some horrific incident, forever injured by your imprint’s wild temper.

You opened your mouth to defend Paul, only to slam it shut as your eyes filled with tears, damaged tear duct stinging at the salt. Your face fell, mouth wavering as you tried not to cry, and you flew out the door and down the yard. You raced to the car and hopped in, slamming the door shut and quickly backing out.

The drive back was quiet and solemn, all alone for the first time in weeks, and you had to stop multiple times just to cry. You should’ve known better than to get your hopes up. By the time you reached your house, you had no tears left to cry. All you wanted was to bury your head in blankets and never come up for air, maybe save the world the sight of your face.

Once you entered your bedroom, you spotted Paul, shirtless, by the window. He radiated warmth into the now cold, dark room, looking sheepish.

“Hey. I’m sorry about what the guys said, Emily’s gonna talk to them and make them apologize. They didn’t mean to scare you off by talking about your scar…” He said, rubbing his arm in thought.

“I-I just thought that, maybe, someone would look at me for me, not my scar! It’s all I wanted, all I ever want, and you’re the only one that sees me! Am I going to be stuck this way forever?!” You vented, hands reaching up to clutch at your forehead in frustration.

“No, no! I promise, the boys will love you; it was just a surprise, is all. Please, just give them another chance,” he pleaded stepping closer.

“And you aren’t hideous. I love your face, scar and all. It’s part of what makes you who you are.” he continued, bringing you into a tight hug and burying your head in his warm shoulder. “If you want, I can beat them up for you, maybe give them a scar and see how they feel?” He joked, smiling at the soft, hiccuping laugh that rang through you. You sighed, further melting into his chest.

“Hey, how about we cuddle? I can feel your goosebumps,” he teased, dragging you to the bed as you sighed. Laying down, he gripped your leg and threw it over his hip, wrapping his arms around you and rubbing your back. He pressed a gentle kiss to your forehead and traced your scar, whisper-soft. “I love you, okay? Don’t ever forget that.” He sighed, putting his chin to your forehead. You hummed, burrowing in deep, already drifting off. Maybe you would ask him to make the pack train extra hard as compensation.

#twilight x reader #wolf pack x reader #paul lahote x reader #lethwrites

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seresinhangmanjake · 2 years ago

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Oh, Baby

Dad!Jake Seresin x female reader

Summary: You might not have been his girlfriend, but when you left town one night a month after sleeping together, it completely broke Jake's heart. Now, a year later, you've returned and you're not alone. You have a new little companion that just so happens to bear a startling resemblance to Jake.

Warnings/notes: its mostly fluffy. cursing, i think. mention of pregnancy. that might be it.

Words: 2900

Oh, Baby Masterlist / Masterlist

His Girls (Following Part)

-----

Staring is rude; that’s what his mama told him. That, and a handful of other little rules that didn’t fit the bill of ‘gentleman.' But he couldn’t recall a single one of them now. His mind was occupied and nothing else mattered. Maybe nothing else ever would. So he let himself stare.

You smiled and the air got trapped in his lungs for a moment before it decided to fight for freedom by way of harsh, sharp bursts. If his coughing drew the attention of others, he didn’t notice. It didn’t draw yours, and that was for the best. He needed another second to breathe; to watch your face light up under the influence of the infant in your arms.

Two months old, that’s what Rooster had told him.

You’d left town one night, leaving no note, no means of contact except through your parents who texted Rooster every once in a while to let him know you were Ok, but never to tell him where you were. Maybe they didn’t know either. Then, according to Rooster, you showed up at his door with a bag, a smile of apology, and a two-month-old baby cradled in a wrap around your chest.

Jake didn’t know what to do with that. He didn’t know how to process what you’d brought with you, or why you went to Rooster instead of him. Maybe one more thing that didn’t matter at the end of the day. As it was, everything in front of him was too much to handle.

“I don’t want to overstep,” Rooster said through the phone. His call had woken Jake, but the anxiety in Rooster’s tone cleared any grogginess faster than a cup of coffee. “Did you and Y/N ever…?”

Jake swallowed and sat up a little straighter in bed, running a hand down his face. Everyone had guessed there had been something going on between you and him. Everyone assumed that even if there wasn’t, if they were wrong, eventually the two of you would get there. You’d figure it out because it seemed inevitable. Jake had always hoped they were right. He’d pined for painfully long, and while it seemed like you felt something for him too, he wasn’t going to move until you did. And then you did.

It was simple, really. He thought there would be something more complex to the two of you finding your way into bed together, but it was so easy. So natural. Simple and easy and natural enough for you to seek him out three more times before you disappeared from his life, breaking a part of him as you did.

“Why do you ask?” Jake said.

“Um—fuck.” It was a soft curse from his friend’s mouth, just barely detectable through the speaker. But it carried a heavy weight with it that Rooster’s voice alone did not. “Are you sitting down?”

“Yea.”

“Good.”

The seconds passing were nearly as painful as the day you left—that moment he realized you were no longer in his bed. He’d called everyone. No one had an answer for him. “Rooster, what the fuck is going on?”

He sighed, which was never good. Rooster wasn’t much of the sighing type. Sighing meant thinking. And he wasn’t much of the thinking type anymore, either. Hadn’t been since Mav had knocked that behavior out of him while he was in the air. That new mentality just so happened to carry into the rest of his life, and he lived in a world of impulsivity. Don’t think, just do. It was the exact same with his words. Rooster only ever spoke his mind, didn’t hold back, didn’t hesitate, and yet now he was.

“She’s back, Jake," he finally said. "Showed up last night.”

His heart stopped beating. He felt it seize in his chest. And then it began again, starting with incredible force and livening his entire body.

“But, um…that’s not all,” Rooster continued. “She’s got a baby with her, and—” His breath was shaky, matching Jake’s hands. “Alright, I’m just going to say it—the kid looks exactly like you, Seresin. Spitting fucking image. Now, if you two never got together then I’ll chalk it up to a wild coincidence, but if you did…” He paused. “If you did, I think you need to get over here.”

Jake had never run so fast in his life, never driven so recklessly, never stormed through the front door of someone’s home the way he did Rooster’s, but how could he not?

“Where is she?”

Rooster shot to his feet from his spot on the couch. “At the store. She took the kid with her. We should probably wait—”

“The one down the street?”

“Yea, but—what are you doing?”

He was already at the door, the knob squeezed viciously in his grip. “I have to see for myself,” Jake said. “I won’t ambush her. I’ll keep my distance, but I have to see.”

And he saw…everything. The woman he loved, casually walking up and down the aisles of the grocery store, looking at labels and deciding on brands and placing things in a cart, with his baby strapped to her chest.

And that was his baby. He knew the moment he saw the eyes that were his, just smaller and on a face full of features that were also his, save for the curve of the lips that belonged entirely to you. Had his mother been by his side, she might’ve stumbled back from how similar this baby looked to her own. He would have too had his feet not been stuck to the floor.

Every bit of him was holding back from reaching for you as his instincts demanded of him, but he had to move before you saw him. You could turn your head at any moment. So he had to go.

—--

“When did you even…I mean, everyone always figured you would…but…when?”

Jake lifted his head from where it was resting over the back of the couch. “About a month before she left. A few times.”

Rooster nodded. “She’ll be back soon. Are you sure you want to do this now?”

“I–”

As if on cue, the front door opened and you stepped through with a bag of groceries in each hand, one of which fell when your eyes met Jake’s. Little jars rolled across the floor, making the only sound in the otherwise dead silence of the room. His lips parted, but nothing could slip out of them, nothing that would make reasonable sense, anyway. His mind was too much of a jumbled mess.

The baby broke the tension, its little wiggle causing you to glance down at the tiny head resting against your chest. You set the other bag down and took an immediate turn to the left through another door that Jake knew led to Rooster’s guest room. You returned a moment later, without the baby, your arms crossed in front of you as you walked toward him.

He thought he would be mad; maybe betrayed; at the very least bitter and devastated, but all he wanted was to pull you to him and hold you and kiss you and thank whatever deity necessary for returning you to him.

“You couldn’t have kept it to yourself for a little?”

He didn’t know what you meant until he realized you were looking directly at Rooster.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Rooster replied. He nudged his head Jake’s way. “He was a fucking mess when you left, and it’s so obvious that the kid is—” He paused when your eyes fell to the wooden flooring. “I’m sorry. I’ll give you two some space.”

Jake waited until his friend was gone before he dared to take a step your way, but he stopped short at the hand you held up.

“Y/N…”

“I don’t want to argue with you,” you said. “I’m not going to get into why I did what I did other than to say that I thought it was best for you, me, and her.” Your arms fully uncrossed and one hand began to pick at the other’s fingernail. “At the time, anyway.”

“She’s mine.” It wasn’t a question. He knew it. He knew it in his soul that the little girl in the next room belonged to him as much as she did you. But still, he needed to hear you say it; needed to watch the shape of your lips form the words.

You nodded. “She’s yours.”

“And were you going to tell me?”

“I came back to tell you,” you said without a lick of hesitation in your voice; something that made him feel a bit lighter. “I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it yet, but I didn’t want her to wake up one day and start asking me fair questions that I only had unfair answers to. I couldn’t imagine telling her that her father had no idea she existed. So,” you took a deep breath, “I figured I’d see if you might want her, too.”

If. He could’ve laughed under different circumstances. If he wanted his daughter? There was nothing to mull over or consider. Of course, he wanted his daughter. Her and you, if you’d have him. But he couldn’t press that now.

“What’s her name?”

“My family calls her Evy, but it’s Eve.”

“After my grandmother?”

“She was always nice to me when she would come to town, and I know you love her.” Your shoulders rose and fell in a shrug, but he knew there was nothing nonchalant about it. It was a deliberate choice, a careful choice. You could’ve named her anything under the sun. You could’ve named her after your own family, but you didn’t. “I wanted our daughter to have something of you other than just your DNA.”

The weight was back. A heaviness in the air from the beauty of what you’d just confessed mixed with the undeniable question of What now? He wasn’t going to push you. You were in complete control, always had been. Control over him, over what happened between you, over the future he had once hoped you may share—the future he thought was lost, but maybe could now be found.

“Do you want to see her?”

His eyes widened, a confusing emotion filling his heart. He wasn’t sure you would offer, and giving him that chance swelled the love he felt for you. But more than that, adding to the confusing feeling was the hopeful note in your tone. Did you imagine he might deny you? Did you think he’d turn his child away?

“Yes,” he said with absolute surety, and by the grin you gave in return, he knew you felt his sincerity.

You turned, leading him into the room he’d spent a drunk night or two in. A room in which he’d woken up insanely hungover and begging for the sun to die just to give him some relief. The irony. He silently snickered. You moved aside, facing him as he took in the sight before him.

Your baby—his baby—laid on her back in the small travel crib, her eyes closed and body wrapped up snuggly in one of those sleep wraps he saw his sister use on her son. Her delicate face was so peaceful. Her long lashes rested on plump, rosy cheeks. Her lips were parted the slightest, the sweetest breaths making the softest of sounds. Her dusting of blond hair reflected the slim ray of sunlight sneaking through the drawn curtains turning the strands into pure gold.

Unshed tears stung the corners of his eyes.

“You can hold her if you want.”

“She’s—she’s asleep. I can’t—”

“She’s a heavy sleeper,” you said. “Honestly, the best baby, Jake.”

Of course, she is, he thought. If she was anything like you, she’d be perfect. She was already perfect.

Reaching into the crib, you carefully grabbed the baby and held her out to Jake. He’d held a baby before, plenty of times, but something about holding his own…he couldn’t describe it fully, just that it made his nerves fire off. His fingers began to twitch, but when he looked at you, he saw the familiar glassiness coating your irises and you nodded in encouragement.

That was all he needed: the mother of his baby asking him to hold their daughter. So he did, extending his arms and gratefully accepting his little gift.

She was so small. His hands and arms and chest dwarfed her compared to how she looked against your body. Up close, she was porcelain in form, fragile and light, and he would surrender his every breathing moment to protect what you and he had made.

A soft sob echoed in his ear and Jake’s head shot up to see those tears had fallen, crafting rivers down your cheeks as your hand covered your mouth.

“I’m sorry.” The apology was muffled through your fingers. You shook your head and finally dropped your hand. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t think—I didn’t think I would ever see this.”

With the hand not cradling his child, Jake cupped your cheek, smoothing your tears back into your skin with his thumb. You leaned into his touch and he suppressed a gasp. The first time in a year that he’d felt you, and it was like coming home. He’d missed everything about you, every ounce of your being and presence. He missed your scent filling the air: the vanilla perfume, the fruity shampoo, the minty chapstick that he’d pick up right when he was about to kiss you. All of it. Everything. And now you were here, and he wouldn’t be able to let go.

“Why did you leave me?” he whispered.

“We had only slept together a few times,” you sniffled. “Doctor said I got pregnant that first time. Good on us for using a condom, right?”

He chuckled half-heartedly. Neither of you had one on you that night, and foolishly, neither of you cared. Pent-up desperation took over, and being inside of you, feeling you, became his sole need. Nothing short of you shoving him away could have stopped him.

“Anyway, this wasn’t in your plans,” you said. “And I didn’t want to force it on you, but I also didn’t want to give her up. It scared me, so…”

“I would’ve helped you. I loved you. I’d been in love with you. I would’ve—”

“You loved me?”

Oh. He hadn’t planned on saying it. Certainly not now. Before you left, he’d hoped you already knew somehow. Then you were gone and he was sure the opportunity to tell you would never be within reach again. But, intentionally or not, you just presented him with a moment for the words to fall right out of his mouth, so they did.

“Well…yea,” he said. “You could’ve told me you wanted a baby and I would’ve given you one.”

Your eyes shifted from his and you stared into the blank space next to his head, like your brain had short-circuited and your whole world was flashing before your eyes. You took a wobbly step back and dropped to sit on the edge of the mattress. Jake gave another long look at his daughter before kissing her forehead and placing her back in the crib.

Kneeling in front of you, he said, “I still love you.” When you didn’t speak, he grasped your hands in his, intertwining your fingers. “I love you, and I already love our daughter. And I want you to stay. I need you to stay with me.”

He could hear his heartbeat in his ears. Only you had that effect on him and he couldn’t say that he didn’t once hate it. It drove him insane for ages. He would simply think about you and the beating would start. That thumping would keep him awake at night, distract him at work, drown out the voices of his coworkers, but he accepted it now. It was an indicator of what he felt for you and that was too real and honest and beautiful to be bothered by.

Finally, your fingers squeezed his back. A sign, small as it was, that you were understanding.

“Look at me,” he whispered, and you did. He smiled as he peeled his fingers away from yours to frame your face between his hands. His thumbs ran along your cheekbones, then he leaned in a little closer. “Come here.” Another whisper, a bit broken on the final syllable.

You didn’t protest when he pulled your face to his. You didn’t push him back when hot breaths caressed each other's mouths. Your fingers loosely fisted the collar of his shirt and you let his lips brush over yours in a gentle kiss.

And that was it. You were it. You had always been it for him. He knew it then, and he knew it now. But he didn’t want to overwhelm you.

He pulled back a few inches to grant you some space, but your mouth chased after his, your hands sliding into his hair and holding him so you could force your lips together again. Harder, hotter, more desperate. You’d missed him, too. It was undeniable now.

“Promise me, honey,” He said when you separated to breathe. "I can't lose you. Not again."

“I promise, Jake.” Your eyelids fell closed and you rested your forehead against his. “We’re not leaving you.”

------

tags: @thespeeder @nobody7102 @fangirlingoverfangirls @blue-aconite @my-soulmate-is-mycroft @dempy @chaoticassidy @alana4610 @hotch-meeeeeuppppp @dracosluvbot @smoothdogsgirl @smit41 @wkndwlff @rileyloves5 @gigisimsonmars @hangmanbrainrot @withakindheartx @teacupsandtopgun @himbos-on-ice @xoxabs88xox @happypopcornprincess @violyn20 @jordanturpen @buckymcu12 @jerseybagel @nagygreta @rintheemolion @coldmuffinbanditshoe @avengersgirllorianna @oliviah-25 @talkfastromance4 @ysl-bby @chibijusstuff @kmsryles343 @sometimesicryintheshower @cookielovesbook-akie @yanna-banana @taylahk109 @buxkybarnez @elijahmikaelsonbitch @ravenhood2792 @potato-girl99981 @eccentricnos @kembry107 @pono-pura-vida @topguncultleader @v0id-chaos @scrappybear89 @stiles-banshees @audri_janis @caidi-paris @jake-seresins-girl @sass-masterkittenmama

#jake seresin #jake seresin x reader #jake seresin x you #jake hangman seresin x reader #jake hangman seresin #jake hangman seresin x you #jake hangman x reader #jake hangman x you #jake seresin fluff #jake seresin angst #dad!jake seresin #jake seresin x female reader #jake seresin x female!reader #top gun maverick #top gun hangman #top gun fic #jake seresin fanfic

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lovebugism · 2 years ago

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Hi I am begging on my knees for more of your steddie x reader it’s so good I’m crying

BIZARRE LOVE TRIANGLE | baby fever

summary: steve's got a bad case of baby fever. it's not so bad until you start getting sick with it too. eddie has to come up with a solution before all of you fall ill.

pairing: steve harrington / f!reader / eddie munson

a/n: i just realized i haven't posted anything steddie related in almost three months. i am so sorry. this is a total travesty. please enjoy this 3k blurb and find it in your heart to forgive me <3

You squint at the grocery list scribbled on a bright blue sticky note. It’s a mish-mash of all your different handwritings. Some are certainly neater than others. “This just says crabs… I think...”

“It doesn’t say crabs, you loon,” Eddie laughs from where he mans the shopping cart beside you. He’s steering the thing about as well as his van. “It says cereals.”

“No, it says a bunch of gibberish that no one can read but you,” you retort with a giggle of your own as you follow him down the breakfast aisle. “And we just need one box of cereal, alright? Singular.”

He turns to you with a cartoonish pout on his lips. “But why?”

“Because you’re like a kid, Eds. You eat the entire thing in one sitting, and then you’re absolutely haywire for the rest of the day.”

And, just like a child, the boy stands in front of the vibrantly colored boxes of cereal with a wide grin on his face.

The local grocery store was smaller compared to the others in town, but they had every brand of the breakfast food known to man, stacked in neat rows from the floor to ceiling.

Eddie’s got a twinkle in his eye as his gaze runs over them all. And even though you think it’s all boyish and hilarious, you let him have his fun.

He grew up unable to enjoy all the goodness of overly sweet cereal because bills and food with actual sustenance were always more important. Now, he’s got a halfway stable job with Wayne at the car shop, and he’s living at his own place with his boyfriend and girlfriend, and he can buy whatever the hell kind of cereal he wants.

So, as far as he’s concerned, everyone who said he’d never amount to much can suck it.

And you know you’ll let him buy the whole damn grocery store out of their cereal if that’s what he wants. It’s the least you can do for the world’s best boyfriend — a title he begrudgingly shares with Steve The Hair Harrington.

You’d give him the world if you could, but for now you’ll have to settle for a couple of boxes of Lucky Charms.

“Okay, so the OJ’s we got last time tasted like absolute shit,” Eddie mutters, mostly to himself as he crouches to peer at the lower shelves. “I saw a commercial for Waffle-O’s this morning, and they looked pretty good. But I know you like Breakfast With Barbie and Steve ate a bowl of C3PO’s every day for, like, two weeks, so…”

You stand by the cart and laugh at his rambling. You turn to look behind you with a lighthearted joke sitting on the edge of your tongue. It dissipates when you realize Steve isn’t next to you.

Instead, he’s still standing at the end of the aisle with his back to you and Eddie — like his feet forgot how to work when he caught sight of the family across the store. It’s a mother and a father, dressed in their mid-weekday finest, with a baby swaddled at their chest and a toddler bouncing in the seat of the shopping cart.

And you know it’s got the boy totally lost in his own head. You know he's picturing you and him and Eddie as that happy family — the one fills every store you walk into with baby babbles and bubbly laughter.

Steve told you his senior year of high school he wanted a baby, that he wanted six of them, and that he wanted them all with you. And you were just a stupid seventeen-year-old girl who would’ve done anything he asked you to, though you definitely drew the line at babies.

But you’re older now, and far more settled than you had been all that time ago. Steve’s ready for a family, but you don’t think you’re anywhere close.

“How about we just compromise and get all three?” Eddie finally concludes with the boxes already in his arms. He dumps them into the cart and notices that your attention is elsewhere. He realizes then that Steve’s gone too because his attention is stuck on a nice family minding their own business.

“Not again…” he murmurs to himself while you go rescue the boy.

“I’ve never seen someone so sick with baby fever in my life,” you laugh as you drag Steve back to the cart by his wrist.

“I can’t help it!” he defends weakly. “They were so cute! They were all matching and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I can’t wait to coordinate outfits with our baby. Doesn’t that sound like the cutest fucking thing ever?”

“It sounds very adorable, Stevie,” you nod understandingly and try to ignore the way your stomach twists at the thought of him and his baby girl wearing matching pastels every time they step out of the house. “And we can be just like them in five years—”

“Five years?” he gapes.

“Maybe even ten,” Eddie shrugs and nonchalantly tosses a box of Count Chocula into the cart.

“Ten years— You guys are insane if you think I’m waiting ten years to have a kid!” Steve protests with a pair of buff arms crossed boyishly over his chest. “I’m not getting any younger over here, you know that, right?”

“You’re twenty-five, Steve, stop being so dramatic. We’re just now trying to get settled. I’m still in school, you’re still working at Family Video, Eddie’s still… Eddie. Don’t you think we should have actual careers before we have a kid?”

Steve huffs and rolls his eyes, feigning annoyance even though he knows you’re right.

It’s not like he wants to keep working at the stupid store on Main Street. He keeps putting off the conversation with his dad about another job, because he puts off every conversation with his dad. He’s scared of what asking for a position at his firm will do to his pride.

“She’s right, and you know it, Steven,” Eddie tells him, then scoffs. “I mean, can you really imagine me with a baby strapped to my chest on tour?”

You and Steve both pause and tilt your heads to the side as you picture the sight, terribly in sync as always. You can imagine it, quite perfectly actually, tangible enough to touch.

“Well—”

“That’s the cutest thing I think I’ve ever heard,” Steve finishes your thought for you.

Eddie cowers at the sudden attention. “Okay, stop looking at me like I’m a piece of meat, alright? We are not having a kid right now. There’s no fucking way.”

Steve all but deflates at the rejection as Eddie pushes the cart down the aisle, desperate to escape the bubble of tension the conversation had created in the cereal section.

You smile sheepishly over at Steve and wrap your arms through the crook of his elbow, standing on the tips of your toes to press a kiss to his cheek. “He’s being grumpy about it, but he’s right… It’s just not a good idea right now— but it will be, okay? One day. Just not… to-day.”

┄

The day, for you, comes exactly seven of them later.

You accompany Steve on his morning run and his routine stop for coffee. You’re not quite sure how he’s still mobile because your muscles are screaming, even after the warm shower you took to soothe them.

You left him alone for all of half a second to use the bathroom while he ordered drinks for him and you, and something extra for Eddie for when the boy decides to roll out of bed.

When you return, you find him bouncing a baby on his hip — a young thing, maybe three if you had to guess, with two buns in her hair like bunny ears and a sparkly pink dress to match the bows she wears in them.

Steve smiles down at her, talking to her in a baby voice and saying something you can’t hear because you’re frozen in place. You resemble him at the grocery store a week ago, when he was thrown into a daydream so suddenly that his body all but shut down.

You look at him now, tickling the baby’s sides just to hear her giggle, and you see him with your firstborn — sleep deprived, covered in spit-up, and still the most beautiful human you’d ever seen.

You have to shake your head to remove the thought before it ruins you entirely.

Freshly jostled from your stupor, you walk over to him. “Steve… Please tell me you didn’t steal someone’s baby.”

He laughs. “What? No! She was just a little fussy, and I offered to take her while her mom looked for something,” the boy explains. You look just behind him to see the woman bent over at one of the smaller tables, sifting vigorously through a large baby bag.

“She doesn’t seem very fussy now,” you observe, eyes flitting between his and the child's and noticing they’ve both got matching grins.

“She doesn’t, does she?” he smiles, softly scratching at her sides again to make her laugh. And she does, most enthusiastically so, tilting her head back and letting the giggles spill from an open mouth.

He turns back to you, with wide eyes and raised brows and a bemused grin. “I like she likes me.”

“Of course, she does,” you scoff. “Babies always like you.”

The mom returns with a snack in hand and a relieved smile. Steve passes the baby back to her with little effort. She whines at the loss of him, though the brightly packaged treat is quick to quell her sorrow.

“Thanks for taking her,” the mother's grateful smile falters with exhaustion. “If I don’t give her the same snack at exactly the same time every day, she tends to go a little nuts.”

Steve tells her that it’s no problem, that he was a part-time babysitter at one point in his life, and that her kid was better than those little shits combined. He censors himself before the swear slips out, though.

You go your separate ways when the barista calls out your drink orders and walk hand in hand back to your place.

“Did you get their names?” you ask him before taking a sip of your latte.

“The mom’s name was Maeve and the kid’s name was Harper—”

“Holy shit,” you mutter.

Steve snaps his head over to you because he thinks you’ve burnt your mouth. Instead, he finds you with a distant smile on your face.

“Those are the cutest names I’ve ever heard. It sounds like something out of a fucking cartoon or something.”

“Yeah…” is all he can say because his mind is preoccupied with a million other thoughts. He doesn’t tell you them, obviously, but you know they’re there. The sly smile pulling at his lips makes it obvious.

“…Why are you looking at me like that.”

“Because I’m totally gonna wear you down,” he grins and brings his coffee to his mouth, sipping through his smirk.

You only scoff in response. “Never.”

┄

It doesn’t take you very long to realize that Steve was right.

You spend the rest of the day thinking about it — about him with a baby and how perfect he'd be as a dad. The thoughts plague you far more than they usually do. They take up the entire frontal cortex of your brain and make it nearly impossible to think about anything else.

You’re self-aware enough to beat yourself up about it.

You were just telling him that it wasn’t time yet, and you knew you were right. As far as you’re concerned, you still have another few good years before you’re ready to even start seriously considering it.

But here you are, having to calm yourself down every time the thought of Steve Harrington with a baby, your baby, crosses your mind.

You wait until the boy heads to bed to talk to Eddie about it. You find him in the kitchen, eating handfuls of Breakfast with Barbie like a maniac. You’re too preoccupied to make a snarky comment about it.

“Steve wasn’t lying,” you warn him.

“..About what?” he wonders through the mouthful.

“About him not waiting ten years to have a baby! He wants one now!” you explain through a yell-whisper hybrid. “And he told me he was going to wear me down, and he was right.”

Eddie’s eyes go wide too, like he’s just learned you caught some sort of plague. You have. It’s called baby fever, and it’s only a matter of time before the entire house is afflicted. “Shit…”

“So you have to be the strong one, Eddie.”

“Oh, god,” he whines with pinched brows. “Why does it have to be me?”

“Because I saw him hold a baby today.”

“…And this is a bad thing?”

“Of course, it’s a bad thing! My hormones went crazy, okay? It’s like my brain stopped functioning, and I started thinking with my ovaries or something! All human instinct told me to lay down and procreate the second we got home!”

Eddie laughs to himself. “Are you sure it was human instinct, or was it just you on a normal Wednesday?”

“I’m being serious, Eddie,” you tell him, a sudden solemnity to your features. “You have to put your foot down whenever Steve talks about it because I will cave.”

“Alright, alright, have some Barbie cereal and settle down,” he tells you with a playful grin.

He offers you the box and you pout for a moment before sticking your hand into it and pulling out several red and purple butterfly pieces.

The boy wraps an arm around you with his free hand. He pulls you closer and noses at the crown of your head. You sigh as you relax into him.

“I’ll take care of it, okay? I actually have the perfect idea.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” you waver through a mouthful of cereal.

“Don’t worry about it,” he lilts with a grin, smacking a kiss to your forehead. “Let me take care of it.”

┄

You and Steve are tangled in bedsheets, both slowly rousing but trying desperately to go back to sleep.

You’re laying on your stomach, face smushed into the pillow you clutch to your head. Steve lays halfway on top of you — his legs knotted with yours, arm splayed over your back, and softly snoring in your ear.

Both of you noticed the lack of Eddie’s presence, but chose not to linger on it too much, figuring he must’ve gone for a breakfast run.

He returns hardly a moment after the thought of him crosses your mind. You hear the door open and shut again, then the shouts of your names entwined with a muffled barking.

You groan at the intrusion on your sleep.

Steve huffs and shifts against you, voice gruff with fatigue as he wonders: “Why do I hear a dog?”

The mixture of confusion and subtle knowing has you both shuffling out of the bedroom and trudging into the living room.

You round the corner and find Eddie standing by the door with a rowdy goldendoodle bouncing at his feet. He’s trying hopelessly to undo its leash when the thing starts to squirm at the sight of you and Steve.

Eddie’s eyes flit to the both of you when he notices you standing across the room. A smile bursts like early morning sunshine on his face. “Surprise!” he beams.

The metal of the leash clicks when he finally gets it unbuckled. The dog dashes your way, all but jumping into Steve and then spinning in circles with excitement as it tries to figure out who to accept attention from.

“You got us a dog?” the boy wonders, head cocked back to dodge the thing as it licks at his chin.

“You said you wanted a baby,” Eddie shrugs. “So, I got you a baby.”

“This is so not what a meant,” the boy grouses in response, though he’s got his arms wrapped around the dog like he’s hugging it. “I mean, it’s not even a baby— it’s huge.”

“The woman at the shelter said he was eight months old. And he is a he, so stop calling him it.”

You crouch beside Steve, scratching the dog behind his ear. He pants with his tongue sticking out, almost looking like he’s smiling. It makes you smile too.

“We don’t even have dog food. Or toys. Or a bed,” you stress. “What are we even gonna name it?”

“Well, I took care of exactly one of those things,” Eddie lilts with a grin. “They only had that gross artificial shit at the grocery store, but they did have some badass collars and an engraving machine, so…”

You and Steve peek through the dog’s golden curls and find a black band with silver spikes dotted around the neck. “Super metal, huh?” you hear himEdiejoke as you reach for the dangled heart pendant handing around the collar.

“…Ozzy?” you recite.

“See what I mean?” he beams. “Metal.”

#published by bug #steve harrington x reader #eddie munson x reader #steddie x reader #stranger things x reader #steve harrington imagine #eddie munson imagine #steve harrington fic #eddie munson fic #steve harrington x y/n #steve harrington x you #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x you #st drabbles #stevie drabble #eddie spaghetti drabble

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enemywasp · 7 months ago

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i want your billdip headcanosn i recently watched gravity falls and i see such potential for them but id like to hear otherintwrpretations

The JOY I got at receiving this ask!!! Billdip has been my otp for years I've got so many.

Dipper is obsessed with finding answers and intrigued by basically everything, which is of course what drew him to Bill.

Bill finds the Pines family in general fascinating, they're his playthings and Obsession in his own way. Pinetree is the only one who he's really focused on though, the way he talks back and is determined for answers entertains him more than anything

Dipper needs Bill, he's the only one he can really decipher and understand as he's been bullied and outcast his whole life.

He's also the only one who can keep his busy mind occupied

Bill keeps Dippers nightmares at bay as he's got a lot of troubles from his adventures, doesn't mean he won't give him his own little dreams on occasion with a special cipher touch

Bill teaches Dipper magic and runes, mostly out of curiosity but he ends up silently impressed at how much he is capable of as a human.

They fight and argue a LOT. They're at complete different ends of morality, and that makes them clash. Though Dipper finds himself less and less concerned by Bill's behaviour as time passes, and if Bill happens to gain a soft spot... who can say anything.

I think there relationship would be initially built on a deal, something that protects the rest of the Pines family for certain. But Dipper is Bill's. He can do what he want with him.

They do have soft moments, despite it all. Dipper sharing stories of humanity that Bill would never truly understand, and the demon in turn sharing tales of the past and the universe itself.

Bill initially just wanted to use Dipper and manipulate him through whatever means necessary but instead he fell hard.

Bills only capable of a very obsessive kind of love, anyone who gets too close to HIS sapling should be wary.

Dipper has a moral crisis about weekly, he's dating a demon. Who tried to destroy his entire family. But god he can't pull away and Bill makes some very compelling arguments.

If and when Bill would be able to get his own human form it would be built specifically for Dippers pleasure and want.

Being human does make Bill seem more human, though he is of course still himself sometimes he finds himself feeling a new kind of fondness he never knew before

Dipper also sometimes forgets until he pushes too hard and his demon side makes it clear where they stand. Bill will always be the more powerful one in the relationship and Dipper will always be HIS.

I think I'm going to leave it there for now. But I could probably rant forever about these two. I tried to keep this broad so I can definitely do more specific hcs in the future.

#billdip #headcanon #send asks!#proshippers please interact

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wisteria-blooms · 1 year ago

Text

*NSFW* strawberry wonderland (ii) (bill weasley & reader)

*MINORS DNI!*

PAIRING: Bill Weasley/You SUMMARY: Unbeknownst to you, you have more of an effect on Bill than you could ever imagine. And he can't stop thinking about all the things he wants to do to you in Nice. WARNINGS: sex, fingering, oral, masturbation, unprotected sex

A/N: To get me out of a writer's block, I present you this. I've only read it over it once so I'll fix any mistakes as I go. I hope this doesn't ruin long hair & tattoos for you... it doesn't need to be part of the original series if you don't want it to be. It's set after Bill and Reader arrive in Nice.

STRAWBERRY WONDERLAND (II)

Strawberries.

That’s what you smelt like to Bill Weasley. And very much overwhelmingly so as you nestled into his arm, preparing to disembark the ship that had just docked the nauseatingly rocky French shores. He attributed it to all the fresh strawberries you crushed up at the bar.

“What kind of liquor do you reckon goes well with this?” you asked, holding up the bleeding purée to his face.

‘Anything that would get you to kiss me,’ a voice in his head willed him to say. He swatted that thought away and instead replied, “Rum.” All his family recipes and all his female cousins’ favourite girlish drinks came to mind.

“Hm.” You turned away from him and perused the shelf for the highest of top-shelf rum. “And what else?”

“Maybe some simple syrup, a dash of lime and—,”

You slammed a bottle of rum on the table and twisted it open. Bill closed his mouth and let you speak. “Keep rambling and one might think you’re an expert at cocktails or something of that sort.”

“You asked me!” Bill said in defense, a chuckle erupting from his lips. A lush haze was concentrating in your eyes from the wine you’d inhaled the moment you boarded the ship. Bill figured his taller and heavier figure was better in diffusing the alcohol than your smaller one.

“Whatever,”—you slid the cup of strawberry puree towards him—“let’s just drink.”

And now the scent of fresh strawberries, lime, and wine lingered on your person, stuck to it like summer honey. It was the most heavenly of scents. He imagined it would be most concentrated on your lips and tongue, and he would risk everything—a lot—to test that hypothesis. And what if that old saying were true? ‘You are what you eat.’

Would you taste like strawberries elsewhere, dare he dream, on another pair of lips?

“Do you think we had too much?” you asked him, snapping him out of his dirty reverie where he was in between your legs. “I might be sick.”

“I’m sure the sea made it worse,” he reassured you, letting you grip him tightly. He looked back at the relentless waves. Merlin, if you kept touching and squeezing his arm, he wasn’t going to make it until after you left. “And you best recover before your dinner tonight.”

“Right—ooh.” You drew the last vowel, lips rounding, which sent a chill up Bill’s spine.

Then when you let out a deep sigh into the crook of his arm, he found himself at war with himself. He looked down at your eyelashes, fluttering down to cover your eyes and traced your pouty pink lips. You were the sweetest, most innocent thing at twenty-three years old. And he didn’t realize how much desire had stirred up inside him in the past few months that he now really wanted to kiss you—Oh, what was he sugarcoating his own private thoughts for? He wanted nothing more than to fuck you.

He just wanted to know what your innocence would feel on him and his experience. But he couldn’t. He was much too old, much too tainted compared to the likes of you. What he wanted was above any voice of reason.

Fuck it, he was tempted by the thought of ruining you.

Bill Weasley had to wonder how he got himself in this tricky predicament as he settled into a bed miles away from home. With age came maturity and emotional growth, right? At thirty-one, he had years to leap over and meet his milestones. Clearly, he missed a couple landmarks because he felt as if he was trapped in the body of a fourteen-old boy who’d discovered pornography à la Wicked Witches Weekly for the first time.

Everything in his mind was just wrong, wrong, wrong.

After the whole debacle with you walking in on him mid-shower complaining that your own room had flooded and him checking that it really had, you’d insisted on taking the couch in his own room. He pulled off his shirt and shut the lamp off. Then, he laid on his left side and tried to make out your figure on the couch.

He shouldn’t be thinking about having sex with you as you were peacefully asleep a few metres from him. He was supposed to be the epitome of your older, more mature (pretend) boyfriend who could will away an inopportune erection at any time. But what was consuming his mind right now was, well, the fictitious scenario where you did agree to share a bed with him tonight. There wouldn’t be a cold and empty space beside him. You’d be right up against him, unknowingly grinding up against his aching nether region as you combed through a bad dream, and teased out his erection further as a result. The fantasy echoed in his mind again and again until sleep finally caught up with him.

“Ngh, Bill,” you whined, your voice thick with sleep.

You nestled into the cove of pillows, trying to chase away your bad dream. Your body followed suit. Your ass was turned towards him, giving him full permission and the ability to grind against you. He meant to be gentle, but his thrusts—like his breathing—were growing more rapid and frantic.

His hands weaved their way past your loose cotton top and landed atop your naked breasts. He was grateful that your shirt was cut so loose and short. His hands latched onto your breasts tightly, mainly out of lust and secondarily to find an anchor for his writing body. His calloused fingers began their usual routine of teasing your nipples. He pinched them occasionally as he continued to rub his stiff cock on your behind. You were responsive, both in the soft moans that left your lips only to be subdued by the pillows, and the wetness collecting in your cunt.

Your panties were fucking soaked. Bill could detail your folds through the slickness, and feel your spilling entrance through the thin fabric. And that thin fabric was the only thing preventing him from thrusting his full length into you. You writhed harshly when he pinched your left nipple again. The nub was standing at full attention for him.

“What do you think?” asked Bill, voice husky as he asked in your ear. “Can you take my cock or will I have to stretch that tight pussy out?”

You responded with nothing more than shaky breath. You grinded against him, trying to shove your panties aside. “....want… your big cock inside me, Bill.”

That was all the confirmation he needed.

One of his hands hastily left your breasts in pursuit of your panties. He shoved one side to join the other which gave him freedom to trail the head of cock against your cunt. How much better you felt without a fabric barrier was indescribable. The precum leaking from the tip of his cock met your own wetness. He felt like he was being enveloped in silk. And your opening swelled as if inviting him in, begging him to fill you up with his endless cum and impregnate you.

He dove two fingers straight into you, just to really confirm you were ready. He immediately began curling his fingers inside you, feeling the engorged, sensitive area inside that drove you wild.

“Your cock, Bill,” you whined.

His hand was drenched when he pulled his fingers out. Immediately, he replaced the emptiness with his cock. With one thrust, he entered you. You let out a sharp gasp. He knew his size was hard to take, and it always took you a minute or two to adjust to him. But he knew how much you wanted him to ruin you, begging him to fill you up to the hilt. And he could only oblige in those moments, watching as your eyes rolled back every time your orgasm washed over you.

“Please,” you begged through gasps. “I need… need all of you inside me.”

Bill flipped you over so your face was pressed against the pillows. His hands spread your ass cheeks apart. He could see the tight ring of muscle that was clenched around his thick cock. He was really stretching you out. And as much as it hurt him to do, he pulled out.

“No,” you whined, your hand flying back to find and guide him back into you.

“Patience,” he commanded.

He ran the tip of his cock up and down your folds, gathering enough lubrication to meet your increasing demands. And when he felt it was sufficient, he slid himself back into you, pushing past the drier spot that was cutting him off halfway.

“Yes, that’s it, ah—,” you moaned, meeting him halfway for the last couple inches. Your ass raised in the air, desperate for more of him. You held yourself up with your elbows, using them to anchor yourself as you pushed back on him. You worked through the part of him that was thicker than the rest. It was always tricky, but how fast you got there depended on how horny you were, and tonight, you were insatiable.

“Fuck,” he whispered, feeling himself being enveloped by more of your sweet cunt. You were so helpless and needy for him. When he looked down again, he realized he was completely sheathed inside you. He began thrusting, the first couple of seconds working at a steady pace. He earned a few moans. Then, he pulled himself all the way out only to fill you completely again.

“Bill!” you screamed. Your legs trembled as you clenched around him. He did it again, and again, so hard and fast, aching to hear those delicious screams. Wetness dribbled down your thighs and onto the sheets as you lost yourself in the pleasure.

“Stop, Bill, I’m going to cum—”

Bill woke up with a jolt. His chest heaved up and down and his breathing was significantly laboured. When he grew accustomed to where he was—the Malfoy summer house in Nice—he looked over to you. You were buried under your covers, blissfully unaware of the lewd positions he held you in in his dreams. He hoped you didn’t hear his breathing, or that he hadn’t said anything weird in his sleep.

He felt a severe ache between his legs. He had feeling this was the most intense erection he’d had in ages. He already knew he was intensely red and swollen.

Maybe he needed to have sex with someone, anything that wasn’t his own damn hand, but he wasn’t fond of an anonymous hookup.

Curiously, he reached past the waistband of his briefs, looking for some sense of relief. He was pulsating hard and it was barely what, seven in the morning? He gave himself a stroke, gripping hard at the base and letting go near his wet tip. He suppressed a moan. An image of you, edging him with your tongue, came to mind.

No, he couldn’t do this with you in the room. It would be most improper and he had to hold himself to a higher standard. Instead, he grabbed a newspaper on his nightstand. It was two days out-of-date, but he figured he should get up to speed with what was going on in Egypt. He was certain that reading about excavations and pyramids and uprisings would take his mind off things.

Not more than a few minutes later, he heard some ruffling and kicking about on the couch.

“Morning,” Bill greeted.

“Good morning,” you said, rubbing your eyes. “How’d you sleep?”

“Very well,” he responded. A fucking bold-faced lie. “You?”

“I slept well, too.”

You were all bed-headed, doe-eyed innocence in the white sheets and he was corrupt was hell.

You got on your feet and pushed open the curtains, letting the sun fully stream in. Bill gulped silently, watching your legs sway around the room. Fortunately for his sanity, you had on some white shorts. Unfortunately, they were so short that any unplanned movement could reveal your panties, and he wouldn’t be able to stop there.

“We usually eat breakfast together downstairs," you yawned, covering your mouth, “but maybe some caffeine is in order first. I’m still waking up.”

“A morning swim is the best way to do that,” Bill suggested. He was really treading a fine line with that suggestion; he was adding fuel to his own wildfires. He really loved the idea of a morning swim, he really did. But there was the bonus aspect of you having to be properly suited for the occasion, and you weren’t going to do it in those itty-bitty shorts and a tank top.

“It’s one of the things I miss about Egypt that we don’t have back home. And it helps quell the heat, too.” He, honest to Merlin, did do this in Egypt. But not for any underlying reasons.

“That’s a good idea,” you said with a nod. “Let’s do that.”

When you arrived at the private stretch of beach, Bill watched as you slowly unwrapped yourself from the shawl you had on. When you found the will to submerge yourself, even if it was just a toe, he approached from behind you.

“Gently grazing the water isn’t the definition of a swim, you know,” he said, lightly tapping the inward curve of your bare hip.

“I know,” you mumbled back, a tinge of pink on your cheeks.

He jumped in without thinking and you soon followed suit. He submerged his whole body into the pristine waters of the French Riviera. When he resurfaced, he was treated to a view he was sure he didn’t deserve.

The wet, white material of your bikini clung onto the skin of your breasts like it was a matter of life or death. Drops of water dotted down your cleavage, slowly, tantalizingly so. The weight of the water dragged your bikini straps down, giving him an expansive view of your breasts. And was that an erect nipple poking through? The cold water must’ve teased it out.

Yeah, the swim was a bloody awful idea.

“You’ll never catch me, (Y/N),” he teased. He sent another wave of water towards you to stall you, laughing as you squeezed your eyes shut and sputtered.

“This means war, Bill!” you cried. You outstretched your arms to pull him back towards you. You were aided by a little current that carried you closer and your fingers finally made contact with his strong shoulders

“Ha!” you exclaimed, your fingertips getting a grip on him. “You’ll be sorry!”

He held his breath as he fell back into the water with you on top of him. When he felt sand and little pebbles dig into his back, he knew you’d both arrived on shore. Slowly, he opened his eyes and saw you directly on top of him. Your wet hair grazed his cheeks and—

It wouldn’t be technically wrong to say you were grinding on him, not with the way your legs were splayed on both sides of him and the pressure you were putting on him. Your breasts were planted on his chest, and he could appreciate the clothed erect nipple on his skin. And as he looked down, there was more to see of your breasts than before. One wrong move and he would have a full view of the girls. It would be such a shame if your top came undone. But never mind that, he had to resist to urge to plant his hands on your hips and—

“Bill, it’s too deep,” you whined.

Bill’s hands were planted firmly on your hip bones, holding you down, forcing you grind on him with his cock deeply planted in you. You’d enveloped him to the hilt before, but you’ve never had him like this before, not in this position, and it was becoming too much.

“I think you like it, (Y/N),” he said with a chuckle. You looked down, embarrassed at the sudden spurt of wetness that ran down your thigh from your sex. As he began thrusting, you lost any sense of speech besides the ability to give a silent moan. When one of Bill’s hands loosened their grip on your hip to tease your engorged clitoris instead, you threw your head back.

The moment you’d realized how you’d fallen, you yelped immediately and apologized.

“Time for breakfast?” you offered impassively, carefully looping your other leg over and rolling yourself off him. Sand stuck to the side of your wet legs. You offered him a hand.

“About time for it,” Bill responded as you pulled him up.

“That was fun,” you commented, wrapping the beach towel over yourself and slipping into your sandals. “Better than my usual idea of a swim.”

Bill hummed in agreement, saying, “your idea of a swim isn’t much of a swim,” and followed you back into the house.

When you were back in your room, you’d dried off hastily, saying you were going to be late to breakfast.

“Is there a set time for breakfast?” he asked, eyeing as you flew around the bathroom looking for a comb.

“Not really, but it’s always at eight, and I was already chastised for being late yesterday.”

He had suppressed a comment about how beautifully haphazard you looked. Your hair was half-tamed, your cheeks flushed. You looked like you’d just had a good long romp in the sheets.

“Then I’ll join you in a second,” he promised. “I’d like to look a little more presentable for your parents.”

“You look fine,” you commented. “But that’s alright, I’ll let them know.”

When you’d left the room, Bill headed straight to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and removed his clothes. As he felt his hardening cock spring loose, his frustration grew tenfold. He shouldn’t have suggested the swim; he was going to lose circulation to his brain if you kept turning him on like this. He stepped in the shower and placed his left forearm on the wall. His right hand reached out to stroke his uncomfortable erection.

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself. Drops of cold water ran down his back as he leaned over. He was so close already and thinking about your body atop of his, your wet cunt pushing down on him, begging to be fucked, was really expediting the process. “Shit.”

In no time, he felt the intense pressure break. He bit down on his lip to keep from making too much noise. Ropes of cums spurted out of his cock, falling into the shallow water that’d accumulated in the shower base. He heaved, his heartbeat rapid, as his strokes slowed.

When he looked down at the mess he’d made, he could only think: ‘what a waste.’ It should’ve gone into some orifice of yours instead. Maybe your mouth, where his hold on your head would be iron-clad, and he’d make sure you swallowed every single drop. Or even better, your cunt, where it would all spill out on the sheets the moment he pulled out because it was just too much for you.

When Bill felt himself harden again, he cursed the higher deities. He’d never recovered this quickly before. Again, not since he was a teenage boy. And there was what, another two weeks of you frolicking in bathing suits and sun dresses?

You were slowly and surely going to be the death of him.

#bill weasley x reader #bill weasley x y/n #bill weasley smut #bill weasley imagine #harry potter smut

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daintyys · 10 months ago

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Can I request a jealous Coriolanus snow fic pls?

jealousy, jealousy

MDNI - fem!reader x coriolanus snow, 1k words, angst, jealousy, cursing, possessiveness, alcohol consumption, intentional lowercase, i wrote this a hot minute ago just didn't get the chance to fully edit it until now hehe

coriolanus was making his way in the world. he had just been elected president of panem, and it seemed like everything was finally falling into place for him. that is, the fact he was infatuated with you, and had no clue how to go about telling you. coriolanus and you had gone to university together, becoming close over the years, and he assumed you just wanted to stay friends.

for weeks after coryo's election, all he seemed to be doing was hosting galas and spending hours in meetings. boring. the only thing that made him look forward to doing anything was knowing that you would be there. you were his personal assistant. whilst attending university with coriolanus, you made a deal with him: if he ever got elected president, you would be his right-hand woman. and here you were.

on a particularly busy day, coriolanus had not 1, but 4 meetings in a row, and then after that, a night long ball to celebrate the new year. he was not excited for all of it. sure, he had power, but he hardly got any sleep.

the meetings drew on for what seemed like ages, with coryo sealing his approval on bills he had no care for and huffing agreements with his government workers. what finally woke him up was a knock on his office door.

"come in." he groaned, smoothing his hair back. you opened the door slowly, a tray of coffee and cookies in your hands. "i heard you were having a long day, and thought some caffeine would prepare you for tonight." you hummed, placing the tray at the end of his desk. coriolanus' mood changed immediately, his frown turning to a grin. you knew him all too well. "that sounds about right, y/n." coryo approved as he sipped his coffee.

you leaned against his desk, arms crossed. "if you're overworking yourself, you know you can just say no, right? after all, you are the president." coriolanus leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. "i'll be fine. thank you for your concern, though." you nodded, heading for the door. "y/n, wait. you're coming to the ball tonight, correct?" the president choked out, looking at you intently. "i will if you want me to, coriolanus. just save me a dance, hm?" you giggled, leaving his office and shutting the door behind you. coryo scoffed, a huge smile plastered on his face, rubbing his temple.

coriolanus could hardly hide his smile as he saw you enter the ballroom. you looked beautiful, your hair in a french twist, and wearing a gorgeous navy-blue gown. you didn't go straight over to him, which was surprising. instead, you made your way to one of coryo's advisors, a man a few years older than you were. he watched as the man kissed your knuckles and reached out to touch your earrings, seemingly complimenting them. fuck.

coriolanus was enraged, his stomach churning violently at the sight of you and another man. you were his. you had always been his. he could go over there and just beat up the man, but that wouldn't look good in the press. you took the advisor's arm, and he lead you over to the bar, handing you a glass of champagne. coryo noticed how happy you looked with the man, how you laughed with him, and it made him positively sick.

it had never occurred to coriolanus that you could have feelings for somebody. not that you were an unloving robot, but coryo had just never heard about you dating anybody. you'd never told him, at least. maybe the man was a just family friend or something, but coryo couldn't seem to get the thought of you all giddy and tipsy with one of his employees out of his head.

coryo soon found himself tossing back glasses of champagne, trying to ease the pain and stop himself from going over to the man and snapping his neck. "fucking bastard." coriolanus chided, handing his glass to a confused waiter. his eyes bore into you, you were standing against the wall with the advisor, deep in conversation. you had promised coriolanus a dance, so what the hell were you doing?

-----

the party was drawing to a close, finally. and even though it was close to 2 in the morning, coriolanus was wide awake. he couldn't stand not being able to watch you leave, let alone not being able to watch you at all. especially not with the man. how controversial would it be for the president of panem to punch the smug smile off of one of his advisor's faces?

he'd finally had enough. his heart was aching, and it had been hours. you hadn't even looked at him. your president. how shameful. coriolanus strided over to you, grasping your wrist lightly. you jumped.

"coriolanus?" you turned towards him, flushed cheeks. his blue eyes bore into yours, narrow and concentrated on your expression. "a word, ms. y/l/n?" you nodded, and coryo lead you into the hallway. you couldn't help but giggle, the alcohol was getting to you. "don't laugh. i'm not fucking laughing." coriolanus fumed, spinning around and planting either of his hands on your shoulders.

you shuddered, he was freezing. "what's going on?" you slurred. "i think you know what's going on, y/n." coriolanus huffed, flush creeping up his neck. "enlighten me, mr. president." you tittered. coriolanus released your shoulders from his grip, and smoothed his suit jacket. "what's the story between you and that man in there?" he questioned, crossing his arms.

you paused. you knew what he was getting at. "you're not jealous, are you, coryo?" a smile toyed at your lips. coriolanus scowled, a look of irritation coming over him. "i-i'm. good god, who was it, y/n?" he loosened his tie, absolutely furious. "my cousin, if you're so interested." you leaned against the wall, smirking.

coriolanus groaned. "unbelievable. i thought you were going out with him. i would have fired him, y/n..." he trailed off, rubbing his temple. "you were jealous." a laugh escaped your lips, and you reached out to touch coryo's arm. "quiet." he whispered, holding his arm out for you to link with.

"yes, mr. president." you took his arm, walking down the hall together. you still had a dance to fulfill, after all.

asks 🩷

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2demondogs · 2 months ago

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Hiii!! I love your work so much and would like it if you could do some angst(?)/comfort with Arthur and FTM reader?

If you're comfortable with this, reader might experience some transphobia while trying to get his hair cut short at the barbers, and they refuse to cut his hair. When he comes back to camp and Arthur sees that his hair isn't cut and he looks disappointed and upset, Arthur comforts him and offers to cut his hair instead.

Thank you!! I love this prompt... everyone's experiences are different, so I drew a lot from my own here. This was cathartic as fuck I hope it is for you as well.

Since the relationship felt ambiguous to me this is as well. Can be read as platonic or romantic <3

Words: 2.2k Tags: Period-typical transphobia, misgendering (explicitly in first scene); gender dysphoria, hurt/comfort thru out

I don't serve your kind. The words keep replaying in your head as you slow your horse's run to a trot, slurring into the next warning of: 'n' neither does anyone else 'round here, girl and whatever the barber had said afterwards.

Your ears had rang with the sudden rush of blood to your face when he pointedly said girl, so you hadn't heard much besides the clearing of your own throat and the tense, panic-airy good day, then you were forced, by polite expectation of your apparent subhuman nature, to utter instead of—

Instead of doing what?

Slitting his throat?

It wouldn't even have sufficed to relieve the blackness that filled your gut to bursting.

The words were spoken the same as any declination of service might be, the way it almost always is. That silent look over your figure, head to toe, and some kind of parental disappointment. Pursed lips or a frown, scrunched nose or not, and always the same, disquieting look that begs the question of who raised you?

As if this festering discontent is as blase a decision for you to make as a toddler playing in cow manure. Some work past the fence, but it's easy when you're young and small and you can wriggle through the wooden boards nailed to the posts. Except you're too old, now, for mucking about in mud that you are smart enough to understand is shit.

As if it's a decision at all.

As if you don't already fear, sometimes, that you are mucking about in shit, whatever it could mean.

As if, as if, as fucking if.

And by the time you are starting to feel the anger again, you're blinking and Bill is barking his usual who goes there? from his post watching guard. You ignore him, your mare recognizable enough to answer one of you, if not just me.

Everything melts into hot wax, burning behind your eyes. Exhaustion, and some reactionary, snapping-dog hatred of Bill for how deep his voice is, for all the hair coating his arms; suddenly, you hate every man in camp, keep your eyes on your horse as you dismount and leave her to socialize with the others. A greenness is taking root inside you, turning the fires of maladaptive respect and twisted-sweet envy into a purely Grecian kind.

Even over reason, it burns. It's so much easier to be angry, for now, than it is to let yourself cry.

Men don't cry.

Arthur is always lurking. Built for looming around, he is, but unsure where to go about it. Any other afternoon, that awkward habit would endear you. Now, he is the last and first person you wanted to hear say your name.

He knows, you think, both about the day's events and to remind yourself that you could be asked by anyone else what the sour stink rolling off your expression is all about, only to have to stammer through a lie.

Still, you freeze and splay a hand over the pages of your journal where it rests in your lap, and then gain the sense enough to shut it. Most of it had been words that would've been difficult to read from where Arthur stood, but there were drawings peppered throughout you'd rather he did not see.

He's standing in front of your seat on your bedroll, a respectful few feet back as always, thumbs hooked into his belt. Gun belt nowhere to be seen; it must be a day off or a late-starter.

"Yessir?" You answer him. It's a teasing formality, but the lack of oomph behind it makes his face twist.

"Thought you was gettin' your haircut today, mister," Arthur says, nodding at the thicket of hair still dusting your shoulders. His raises his brows, half concerned and half prying for a story, if there is one. That would endear you, too. "Y'get some trouble instead?"

Warmth raises in your cheeks. You glance at your journal, and then the bushes that line camp, as if both might speak for you. Even if Arthur won't spit invert or crossdresser at you — though the way being treated as you were this morning leaves you feeling so raw, you're suddenly afraid his heart might have changed since those months ago — it feels impersonal and also far too personal to tell him.

Violated, you realize, is how you've felt since this morning. Seen through by the eyes of hate, and violated. That burning in your skin is crawling.

"Sort of," you finally say, and the pause clearly perks his ears.

He sucks on his teeth, slides his thumb over the stitching on his belt for something to move. "You been mean-lookin' since you got back, man," Arthur says, but his tone of voice asks: Are you alright?

Men never do ask what they mean. You had to figure that out quick when you were surrounded by so many of them, of the most emotionally-withdrawn variety to boot.

Sometimes it pisses you off. You ache to be foolish in the right ways, instead of the ways that you are.

Another pause, as you ask yourself once if you should tell him, and then stare into the grass poking up around his boots instead of actually pondering the question. You suppose you knew you would the moment he called for your attention.

Why is it so difficult to accept his concern? Why does it hurt?

Tearing your gaze from the ground, roving it around camp and finding nobody close enough, you bite the bullet. "Barber turned me away." You sigh, drop your journal on the ground beside your bedroll and draw your legs to your chest, before readjusting against the stiffness of your packer pushed uncomfortably into your gut.

God, I feel extraterrestrial.

His brows furrow. "Why?"

You just look at him, shoulders sagging. He seems to recall, as if it's something he could ever forget. Does he really forget?

"Oh," he says, rubs a hand over his mouth. His nostrils flare, and he points vaguely at the ground as if condemning the blades of grass in place of the barber. "That's bullshit. How would he...?" Arthur trails off, shakes his hand, realizing it probably isn't the question to ask you in this frame of mind. "That's real bullshit. I woulda hurt him."

You blanche. "Arthur, it ain't that— it ain't nothin'," you lie. "Not worth that."

"Yes, it is," Arthur says, as if he's disagreeing on the weather.

You can't help wishing he were right, that you could have slaughtered everyone who turned that evil eye on you without soaking your hands through to the bone with blood. Before Dutch came along, before you had a place — as transient as it is — there were no rocks to cling to, because only pebbles are laid out for men like you. If it weren't for the hatred spread so far, you'd think you were the only one born wrong.

Sometimes, you feel that loneliness, anyways.

There is no want me to do something about it? asked in the silence that follows. Although you can feel it lingering in the air after he sighs, you also know Arthur isn't a stupid man.

There is no justice for you, same as anyone deemed degenerate in the way you are, and he knows this as well you do. There is no use pretending that there can be, not today and not tomorrow. Twenty years from now, maybe fifty, maybe the very day you lay dying— but not today, and not tomorrow.

The promise of it beneath Dutch is part of why you've stuck around, despite that promise being made in the utmost secrecy.

"I'll put the bastard out of a job, at least," Arthur offers. "Won't even charge ya."

"You know how to cut hair?" You ask.

He offers a small smile, lifts his hat and bows his head. "Can't promise it'll be handsome," he says, running a hand through his own choppy hair before re-settling the gambler on his head. "I been cuttin' Hosea's, lately, old coot can't work the scissors. Used to cut John's, before we could trust him with scissors."

Your mood lifts, menially. "Is that to say you're still cuttin' John's?"

Arthur laughs. Nothing gets a belly-laugh out of him like picking on John. Somewhere, some sixth sense probably made the other man sneer with no apparent cause.

"Nah, he's too literate now. He could actually tell me what he's thinkin' 'bout," he waves a hand, then feigns a disgusted expression. "I'd prob'ly end up stabbin' him in the head."

Clearly, he's more comfortable raising your spirits this way. You don't blame him; it's easier, too, for you to get distracted from your grief than to explore it.

Most of camp is busy, the women washing and mending and reading, the men doing the hard labor and lazing around. Even out in the sticks, even above the law— those divides still find us, you think, and ignore the complexity of how you fall victim to them, too, in your own ways.

The canvas flaps of Arthur's tent are already drawn down to keep his cot in the shade, and you're thankful for the privacy despite the slight claustrophobia inside it. Sure, you've shared tents with Hosea and Lenny who both are afflicted with a constant chill only drawn canvas can resolve; and with Javier who draws the flaps because he is forever roasting, seeking the same shade that's found here. Something thick clogs the air as Arthur takes a pair of scissors from his shaving stand and drags his fingers through your hair to straighten it out, all before you've even stopped moving, as uncoordinated as most of his friendly gestures are.

Kindness just the same.

Could be thick in your throat, too, maybe that's why your eyes feel dry enough to burn — but neverminding that, you swallow and say: "Thanks, man."

Arthur grunts behind you. He's so much taller, he doesn't need you to sit to see clearly over the top of your head. It stings, a little, and then it fades.

"Ain't nothin'," he says. "How short you wantin' this?"

You try to think of anyone but him to compare your desired length to. He's already being nice. You can't let yourself appear admiring.

"Sorta like Bill," you say.

"Wanna be baldin' in the front like 'im, too?" He asks, and you can hear the shit-eating grin before he snickers alongside you.

It should probably worry you how quickly he works, pulling chunks of hair taut and snipping straight across the ends. First, a solid inch comes off your nape; then he's working closer to your scalp, rough but confident. Most finer movements, you've noticed, seem to come natural to Arthur despite his inelegance with the rest of life's motions.

You can feel the boxy pattern he cuts in. Cookie-cutter, probably, because you suppose Hosea is the only one he's ever done-up who really cared to instruct him on flattering his face shape.

That thickness raises in your throat again, and your chest presses against its bindings with the heavy breath you take to try staving off what must be tears. Only some, does it lighten, as the weight of untrimmed hair is loosened and felled.

Thanks doesn't feel like enough. You aren't often so... whatever you had been since you got back from town. And Arthur still took your vulnerability in his hands by his own volition, without asking for anything in return. Gratefulness blooms from that tacked-on clause, because you know the plight of where's my favor? too well from that false girlhood.

A haircut amongst thieves really ain't nothin', he's right — your hair has been cut by many a fool before, in shops and in camp — but whether or not it's just a haircut is a better question. It is, then it isn't, and then it's too much to think about all at once and you feel overwhelmed, slinking out of your own head and back to the present, staring ahead at the beige, stained canvas of Arthur's tent as his hands work through your hair.

He's ruffling it and nudging your head towards the barrel his shaving mirror stands on before you're fully back in reality. You need to get a handle on the spacing out, you know, but you never realize it's coming on before it does.

"Take a look," he invites as you step towards the looking glass. "Tried not to do y'too nasty."

You lean over, fix the part of your hair after running a hand through it, just to feel the difference. It's a weight off your shoulders, mentally, and you find yourself smiling.

"Looks good enough for a hat," you say, give him lopsided grin.

He snorts. "Careful." Arthur tosses the scissors back atop the barrel. "Might inflate my ego."

It's choppy and slightly cockeyed, if you look carefully, which you don't.

Straightening, you itch with the urge to hug him. Contentment wavers. Another moment of social expectations reaching into your heart, twisting around the feelings, making you wonder if men ever get that urge or if it was too womanly of you to even consider it— and Arthur must sense your pent-up intent.

He doesn't offer an embrace, though you've never known him to be one to shy from it. Instead, he claps your shoulder and squeezes in something quite like one, offers a crook of his lips.

#arthur morgan x reader #ftmreader #arthur morgan #rdr2 fanfic #oneshot #ask #rdr2 #sfw #hurtcomfort #angst #red dead redemption 2 #arthur morgan x ftm reader #reader insert #So many instances where I could've used a big strong burly manly man sulking alongside me about microaggressions

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enjoythesilentworld · 4 months ago

Text

was thinking about them yesterday. and by them i mean CrimeBoss!Wille x Detective!Simon who definitely don't hate each other.

rather than plotting i wrote this standalone scene which assumes i have done a lot of plotting. it was a mind exercise okay (also, this is a dark-ish fic. cw for violence and harsh language)

By now, Simon knew the path and followed it without a second thought, bursting through the door of Wilhelm’s office.

The office always looked the same. Perfectly organized, floors squeaky clean, Wilhelm in a pressed button-up sitting rigged backed at his desk. Except, this time it was different. The desk was chaos, loose bills and papers and trash scattered across it and falling onto the floor. Wilhelm paced the room, tie loose and hair mussed.

His sharp eyes found Simon immediately, and if Simon didn’t know any better he’d be terrified of the way they hardened and narrowed.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Wilhelm spit angrily, striding across the room and pulling the door shut behind Simon, then flying over to the windows to pull the thick, expensive curtains closed. “I told you I was busy today.”

Simon scoffed and dropped the overflowing folder which had brought him over here onto the ground, clippings of news headlines and police reports scattering. “I don’t give a fuck if you’re busy. What is this?” He asked, still fuming and really not in the mood to deal with Wilhelm’s erratic behavior and empty promises.

It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all, though, because Wilhelm didn’t respond, just continued to flit around the room, peeking behind the curtains. Only for a moment did his eyes flicker to the papers Simon had dropped, before looking up to Simon, then away again. Being ignored after everything, after coming all the way over here, only made Simon angrier.

“Wilhelm,” he growled, circling the office and trying to get in the other man’s path, trying to get him to look at him. When that didn’t work, he changed tactics, lowering his voice and softening it, to whisper, “Wille.”

That worked, because of course it did, and Wilhelm stopped in his tracks, finally turning to face Simon.

“What is going on?” Simon asked, softly, as if speaking to a dangerous animal. In a way, he was. “You said—”

“I said,” Wihelm interrupted, taking a step towards Simon, eyes ablaze, “don’t come here today.”

Simon held his ground. He crossed his arms over his chest, ignoring the way he felt out of place in his hoodie and jeans, as he always did when he stepped into Wilhelm’s life. There was nowhere for him to go, anyway. Going against every bit of training he’d ever received, he’d accidentally put Wilhelm between himself and the only exit. If he stepped back now, he’d only run into the big, wooden desk, trapping himself further.

Simon drew his features up into a scowl, because any fear was being smothered out by anger, and said, “Apologies if your word doesn’t really mean a lot to me right now.”

This, he could do. This was normal for them. What wasn’t normal was the way Wilhelm’s features softened as he took another step forward. His hand twitched at his side, and for a moment Simon thought Wille might reach out for him.

He didn’t. Wille’s eyes flickered over to the window again, then he whispered, in a voice almost unrecognizable, “You can’t be here right now. Why couldn’t you just listen to me for once?”

With a pang, Simon realized what was so odd about Wille’s voice. Fear. There was fear, actual fear, laced amongst the words. Simon had never seen Wilhelm show an ounce of fear before.

It disarmed Simon, dampening the flame in his chest, filling it instead with an icy dread.

“I just—”

Simon was cut off, surprised, as Wille put both his hands up, eyes wide, and took another step toward him.

It all happened so quickly. The first to register was the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the long hallway and muffled voices. Then, Wille was surging towards him, yanking at the buttons of his own shirt, then pulling Simon’s hood over his head and pushing him back into the desk. Simon started to protest but was cut off again by Wille pressing their mouths together in a searing kiss.

Caught by surprise, Simon froze for a moment, and Wille pulled back slightly to mumble an apology, then his hands were snaking around Simon’s waist, hands hot even through the fabric of Simon’s hoodie, and he found himself wondering what those hands would feel like on his bare skin. This time, Simon was more prepared. This time, though he still didn’t really know what was going on, he kissed Wille back.

All of this had elapsed in about five seconds so there was not much time to ponder, but Simon had been secretly dreaming about this for weeks now. Wille’s lips on his, his taste, his hair between Simon’s fingers. It was better than any dream, but quickly over, as the door slammed open behind Wille.

Simon tried to jump back, to separate them, but Wille held him close.

“Wilhelm.”

Though he couldn’t see anything but Wille’s face still just an inch from his, Simon recognized that voice. It sent a chill running down his spine. If there had been any concern that making out with his primary person of interest might mean losing his job at the precinct, it was gone now. Now, it was sheer terror at the prospect of losing his life.

“Gentleman,” Wilhelm chuckled easily, eyes still locked on Simon’s, using his broad back to shelter Simon from the line of sight of their new guests. “You’ve caught me in the middle of something.”

The voice was Wilhelm again, so easily slipping back into his cold, unforgiving exterior. His eyes, however, were still Wille. Pleading for Simon to stay quiet, promising he’d handle the situation.

That cold voice came again. “That’s funny. We said six o’clock, did we not?”

“We did, boss,” came another, this voice unrecognizable to Simon, but its owner was undoubtedly just as deadly.

Wilhelm’s shoulder’s tensed every so slightly, imperceptible to anyone else but Simon, who felt the muscles tighten under his fingertips.

“That’s right, we did. I apologize for the delay.” Wille swiped his thumb back and forth over Simon’s back, which would almost be comforting if not for their current situation. “Lost track of time. If you’ll just give me a moment to get myself sorted, I’ll met you in the foyer.”

A loud, smoker’s chortle echoed through the room, and Simon had to fight not to flinch.

“Wilhelm, you dirty dog. If she’s a good time, send her to me afterwards, yeah? I don’t usually go for the street type, but after a good scrub down, I bet it’d be just like one of those high end whores. But cheaper.”

Simon wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but his only lifeline at the moment was staring into Wille’s, so he didn’t. He swallowed down the bile in his throat and prayed for this moment to be over, chided himself for being so terrified when this was his job, dealing with people like this was his career and yet he was nearly trembling in Wille’s arms. Perhaps it was because he’d seen those police reports, seen the photos of what this man did to those who did not please him. If Simon wasn’t only fearing for his own life, he was fearing for Wille’s, too.

The voice hardened again, losing all it’s disgusting amusement from before, “I’m leaving in two minutes. I won’t wait any longer.”

“Yes, sir,” Wilhelm said, voice steady.

There was a final, “You can fuck her after,” snickered by one of the goons before the door slammed shut again.

Wilhelm glanced over his shoulder to ensure they were gone, then shut his eyes and let out a deep breath, dropping his chin to his chest. Simon’s fingers were still knotted in Wilhelm’s shirt, and it took a moment before he could make his brain send the signal to make his hands let go. The moment he did, Wilhelm regained his composure, like flipping a switch, and quickly took two steps back.

Simon opened his mouth to say something but immediately shut it when he say the hardness in Wilhelm’s gaze. Spots of warmth still burned on Simon’s skin where Wille’s hands had been, but he couldn’t put it together with the man who stared at him now.

“Stay here,” Wilhelm commanded. He rebuttoned his shirt and straightened his hair, then he slipped out the door, leaving Simon sitting on his desk, cheeks flushed, staring at the horrible headlines scattered across the marble floor and wondering how this whole situation had gotten so out of hand.

#dont ask me what this is about bc idk #also this is unedited so dont read to closely #i just had a vision okay #yr fanfic #yr ficlet #Running with Wolves

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ckret2 · 8 months ago

Text

Chapter 50 of by this point human Bill Cipher is almost relieved to be imprisoned in the Mystery Shack again: Bill tells Mabel about his adventures, and Ford and Dipper tell Fiddleford about theirs.

But first Bill's gonna die for a bit.

"Guys! You're okay!" Mabel flung her arms around Dipper and squeezed him. "We were worried you were floating around and broke your legs when the gravity came back."

"N—no, we were fine," Dipper said.

Mabel let go of Dipper to hug Ford next—and then drew back, looked him up and down, and looked at Bill. "What happened to your clothes?"

Bill said, "We fell in the lake."

"Ha!"

"Tate was kind enough to loan us dry clothes," Ford said.

"You look like big dorks." She turned to Bill last, took in his dirty haggard appearance, and said, "And you look awful. Where have you guys been the last two days?"

"Thanks for asking! I've been in..." Bill glanced at Stan. "Am I allowed to say the name of the place I've been?"

Stan shook his head. "Not in front of the kids, you don't."

Bill sighed. "Agony. I've been in agony."

"Aww!" She hugged Bill last. "I like your stupid Fishmas sweater."

"Consider it yours as soon as I can change." He wriggled out of her embrace to point at his feet. "Check out the shoes, though!"

Mabel cracked up. "Omigosh, fish slippers! Fi— Fishlers? Fishppers?"

"Fishoes?"

"Fishoes!"

Soos said, "What did happen out there?" He was in the kitchen, cleaning and reorganizing after zero gravity had tossed everything out of order. "Did you heroically save Gravity Falls from imminent multidimensional devastation?"

Ford said, "No. Aside from the effects on gravity, it... turned out to be a benign phenomenon."

"Oh," Soos said. "Like... what Bill said?"

Ford grimaced. He managed to just nod instead of saying afraid so.

Again, he expected Bill to gloat; again, Bill said nothing. He didn't even look at Ford.

"It wasn't an eclipse, though," Dipper muttered, shooting a dark look at Bill. "It would've been an eclipse if it had gotten between us and gravity. It was basically the opposite."

"What do you want from me." The question was more sighed than spoken. "It was called an eclipse when I was growing up, I dunno what to tell you."

Ford, Dipper, and Mabel all looked straight at Bill at the mention of his childhood; but he didn't say anything more. He just trudged to the kitchen and leaned tiredly on the doorframe, watching Soos work. "Grab me something from the fridge."

"Sure thing, dawg." Soos opened the door. "What do you want?"

Bill was silent for a moment. Slowly, like a spirit medium channeling a faint message from the other side, he said, "I think... the body wants a vegetable. Gimme some guacamole."

"Sorry, dude, we had the last of it with dinner."

"Fine. Just give me an avocado and salsa, I'll make do."

"You got it."

"Two avocados."

Soos started rummaging through the jumbled mess in the fridge. "So if everything was okay, what took you guys so long to get back?"

"Yeah, I've been wanting to ask," Stan said. (He hadn't been able to in the car; when everyone realized Bill had passed out as soon as he'd sat down, they'd fallen into an awkward silence.) "Was the demon making trouble or what?"

Dipper and Ford exchanged a glance; who wanted to share the embarrassing news? Ford said, "Actually, under the circumstances, he was... well behaved." Ford resisted the urge to add the modifier "tolerably." It seemed mean-spirited. Bill had constantly complained, sure, but in retrospect could Ford say the complaints were unjustified?

"Then what took you so long?"

Now Ford felt Bill's gaze on him, watching him sharply. Ford understood now. This was why Bill hadn't mentioned saving them. He was holding it in reserve—offering a deal. If Ford and Dipper didn't embarrass him, he wouldn't embarrass them. If they mentioned his breakdown, he could cut in, claim it was natural for him to be in shock after performing such a difficult, heroic deed.

It wasn't blackmail, per se. Revealing the truth wouldn't cost anybody anything but a bit of momentary self-consciousness. But wasn't that just like Bill—only passing up an opportunity to boast so he could use it to shield his ego.

"It was Bill's fault," Dipper said quickly. Ford's heart leaped into his throat. "Because—we had to climb up and down the tunnel to Gravity Peak, and he only brought dress shoes and dumb fish slippers. We kept having to slow down."

Ford felt the pressure of Bill's gaze slide off of his face as he turned away, staring back into the kitchen. Bill said, "Yep. Guess I should have brought my hiking shoes—oh, wait."

Stan said, "You could've got some better shoes when we were at the mall! You're the one who wanted those dumb dress shoes."

"In my defense, I didn't think you paranoiacs would ever let me wander around in the great outdoors—much less force me to." He leaned more heavily against the doorway with a groan, muttering, "My legs are still jelly. Worthless human body."

Dipper glanced at Ford, as if checking with him to see if he'd made the right decision. Ford gave him a tiny nod of approval. After the day they'd had, humiliating Bill just for the sake of humiliation wouldn't have served any justice; it would have just been mean.

For the past three decades, Ford had always felt that Bill deserved the strongest possible punishment, both for his prior atrocities and to prevent future ones; but, he wanted to deal with Bill swiftly and efficiently. No gloating, no torture—just one quick shot. Sure, he got some grim satisfaction from knowing Bill was unhappy—knowing that Bill's vile intentions were being thwarted—and if anyone decided to treat Bill cruelly for cruelty's sake, he couldn't say they were wrong for it... but the thought of committing it himself made him uneasy.

He tried to remember if he'd felt that way when Bill had first arrived.

"I found the salsa!" Soos called from the fridge. "Somehow it all floated onto the highest shelf? Which kind do you want?"

"That one with a picture of a sobbing baby on it."

"Extra spicy it is!"

When Soos handed over the salsa and avocados, Bill said, "Hey, Hick Junior said his father was making announcements about staying inside and low to the ground? You didn't happen to have anything to do with that, did you?"

"Oh—yeah, I called Old Man McGucket and said I had a hot anonymous tip about what was going on," Soos said. "You said it was this whole public safety thing, so I figured the whole town should probably know? He's the local respected science guy now, I thought he'd know what to do with that kind of important information."

Bill grunted. "Terrific, he gets credit for my help. But you'd all be giving me heck if I'd said nothing and half the town broke their necks, so... whatever, net zero. Here." Bill took off the Monster-Mon backpack and swung it over to Soos. "Your reward. Good job."

"Whoa, haha, this is heavy. What's in here, a bag of rocks?"

"No, just one." Bill pushed off the doorway, wheeled unsteadily around, and trudged toward the stairs.

Soos unzipped the bag. A drugged geodite blinked sleepily up at him. He gasped. "Dude! A real Monster-Mon! Is this my call to epic adventure with a lovable animal sidekick?"

Ford grimaced, remembering watching Bill feed a geodite cold medicine. "Ah."

"I think I'll name you... Rocky," Soos said.

"That—really shouldn't be here. Its natural environment is caves, I don't know if it's safe for it to be out here—for it or us." They had been known to bite.

"Aww." Soos cradled the backpack like a swaddled baby. "Do you think it would be okay if I made it a fake cave to live in?" He gasped. "I could make an exhibit for him! I'll say he's a living meteorite! People love aliens."

"I'm not sure that..." Ford sighed. Well, none of them were going back to the cave today. "Maybe you should put it in the cellar where it's darker."

"Great idea!" Soos carried the geodite through the living room. "Hey, I've already got a mattress down there. You're gonna love it, lil dude..."

Ford hoped Soos didn't get attached to that thing. He shot a glower at Bill.

Bill was already on the stairs. "Now everybody leave me alone. Except you." He pointed at Mabel. "I don't want to do anything but lay on the floor and talk about whatever Mabel wants to talk about for the next three hours."

"Cartoons and boy bands."

"Yes," Bill sighed in relief, already preparing to turn 95% of his brain off. "Wow, yes, that's exactly what I want to talk about. I can't wait." He grabbed the handrail as he climbed heavily, leaning against it for balance as he dragged himself upstairs.

Before Mabel could follow him, Ford put a hand on her shoulder. "Oh, before you go—there's something I wanted to tell you and Dipper." Voice low, he said, "You remember when you told me that Bill had mentioned Edward Bishop Bishop?"

"Yeah? When we were drawing our houses."

"Something Bill said while we were out shook a memory loose. It reminded me of a book I read as an undergraduate—Flatworld, written by Edward Bishop Bishop."

"Aww," Mabel said. "Not an artist?"

"No, although he did illustrate the book," Ford said. "It's a novella that combines Victorian social commentary with a primer on higher-dimensional mathematics by using an allegory about sentient shapes living in a two-dimensional world."

"That's what you were talking about in the boat, right?" Dipper asked. "When Bill said something about..." He scrunched his face, trying to remember, "'Up in the sky'...?"

"Upward-but-not-skyward," Ford said, "to describe something that isn't higher than us in the third dimension, but rather, in a higher dimension relative to us."

"How do you know about it?" Dipper asked. "The first time it came up, you said the name Edward Bishop Bishop was familiar, but..."

Ford sighed in irritation, "I read it as an undergraduate—in a haze of sleep-deprived exhaustion just before finals week—to get extra credit in a course on the history of mathematics. I immediately forgot ninety percent of it—which I'm sure is why I never thought of it in relation to Bill. If only I'd remembered the book thirty years ago, when it might have done me some good..."

"It's okay," Mabel said. "I forget almost everything I've read for class basically as soon as I've taken the test. I think it's pretty good that you remember anything about Flatworld at all!"

Ford smiled awkwardly. He was afraid that might say more about Mabel's study habits than about his. "Thank you, Mabel."

"And you did have a lot on your mind thirty years ago," Dipper said. "Like, Bill. Literally. On your mind."

Mabel added, "Doing creepy possession things!"

"I suppose that's true, too." What would he have done if he had remembered the book during that frenetic, delirious period when Bill and Ford had wrestled for control over his body? He'd been in no fit shape to go to the library. "I did think about it a couple of times in the multiverse—when I was visiting Exwhylia, for instance—but at the time I'd brushed it off as a lucky coincidence that I'd read a book that invented a society of shapes. It wouldn't be the first time science fiction predicted science fact. But now that Bill's mentioned it twice, I'd say it's less likely a coincidence and more likely that Edward Bishop Bishop was another of his 'students.'"

"Is there a way for us to find out?" Dipper asked. "If he was Bill's student, would he have left behind any... hints? Coded messages?"

"Like secret society conspiracy things?" Mabel asked.

"Yeah!"

"I suppose it's possible," Ford said. "If Flatworld happens to feature a one-eyed yellow triangle sharing the secrets of the universe, we'll know for sure. But, there's only one way to find out: now that I do remember the book, we can pick up a copy for research."

"That's great," Dipper said. "If Bill told the author about his home dimension... there's no telling how much we can learn about him by reading it."

"So it's basically a math textbook disguised as a story?" Mabel groaned. "That's just like doing word problems! The most confusing kind of math problems. Why does Bill keep making me have homework this summer?"

"You know what he's like," Dipper said, elbowing her with a grin. "Dastardly villain."

"Pure evil."

Ford huffed. "If it helps, as I recall the book teaches you about math concepts, but it doesn't make you do any math."

She let out a longer, more theatrical groan. "Fine. But if there's a cousin Throckmorton I'm throwing the book away."

"I dunno, sounds kinda neat," Dipper said. "It might give me a leg up when we start geometry."

"I don't remember the details of what it covers, but I bet it could," Ford agreed. "I have to visit Fiddleford this evening to return the equipment he loaned us, and... discuss the events of the last couple of days. If the library's still open when we're done I can go by and see if they have a copy of Flatworld."

"Can I come along?" Dipper asked.

"Of course. Just give me a moment to..." He looked down at himself, "change into something a little less ridiculous."

Dipper tried not to laugh. "Okay. I'll wait here. Mabel, do you want to...?"

"No thanks!" She pointed upstairs. "I've got a captive audience to teach about boy bands. I'm going to make him listen to Sev'ral Timez's entire discography."

"He's already had a pretty bad day. Don't torture him even more."

Mabel blew a raspberry. "He'll love it." She bounded up the stairs.

Ford headed to his and Stan's guest room. Dipper took off his backpack, dropped it in the living room, and stuck his hands in his pockets—then pulled one out in surprise.

The enchanted friendship bracelets. They were still in his pocket. Bill hadn't had them on since Dipper's out-of-body experience that morning.

Dipper stared at them uneasily; then hung them in their usual place on the entryway coat rack and resumed waiting for Ford.

####

It was a rare opportunity that Bill was allowed in the kids' room; but with Ford and Dipper out of the house, the one person most likely to complain wasn't around. So after having extracted a strict promise for him to behave himself, Mabel had let him in, for ease of gossip and CD-switching.

But even if Dipper had been in the room, he wouldn't have found much worth complaining about. Once Bill had finished his snack (he'd eaten the avocados like pears, skin and all, and drank down the salsa like a chunky smoothie), he'd laid down on the floor, and since then had remained a dead lump. Face buried in his crossed arms, curled up in the oversized Fishmas sweater and a set of loose stolen-from-Soos sweats to replace the towel skirt, he might as well have been a pile of laundry that had sprouted curly golden hair. Mabel had put Sev'ral Timez's first album on the boombox, sat herself on Bill's back, and started brushing out his damp, knotted curls without asking as she talked about each track.

To her delight, Bill started insisting they skip past the slow, emotional love ballads, saying he preferred the bouncier dancier tracks; she thought the fact that he was displaying a preference rather than begging to turn the band off was a good sign. He was actually listening to the music. Possibly even liking it! Maybe she'd manage to convert him into a fan. She recounted her experiences with the band's cloned members and Bill threw in the polite "Mhm" and "Uh-huh?" where appropriate without lifting his head from the floor or opening his eyes. She'd thought he might have had something to throw in about the cloning thing, that seemed like the kind of conspiracy nonsense he might have a hand in; but if he knew anything, he wasn't up to sharing it.

When she'd wrangled his hair into some semblance of order, she got to work on his fingernails. His arm was like a dead weight in her hands, loose and unresisting but not helping, either. He shifted his head over to rest on his other arm and otherwise didn't move.

"Your fingernail polish is destroyed," Mabel said. On three fingers the paint had been all but completely scraped off. When he'd left a couple of days ago, it had just been lightly chipped. She started stripping the remainder with nail polish remover.

"Is it?" Bill mumbled. "Mmh. Yeah, probably from clawing in the dirt."

"Pfff. What did you do the last couple of days?"

Bill slowly sucked in a breath so deep that Mabel felt his back lift her a little higher off the ground; and then he just as slowly let it back out. "Do not," he said, "get me started."

He got started.

He began with a tirade about the contempt that both Ford and Dipper had shown him and his far superior subject matter expertise for the last two days; and then about being hauled out and exposed during totality after repeating over and over how dangerous it was and how much he would prefer to not do that—Ford had even admitted he'd dragged Bill out into open air just because he knew how much he didn't want that!—and from there Bill looped back to listing a whole litany of gripes against what he perceived as egregious and undeserved disrespect from Ford over the last couple of weeks—"Youmight have lied to me about that glass pyramid, but at least you didn't laugh in my face about it!"

(Mabel thought Ford pretty much had the right to be as disrespectful to Bill as he wanted, after everything Bill had put him through. Lying about a silly imaginary cult was less mean than lying about taking over the universe. But part of being a good friend, she knew well, was lending a sympathetic ear to your friend's venting without suggesting that said friend might be in the wrong. She had a Color Critters episode about being honest with your friends she could show him later.)

Bill seemed to gain strength as he aired his grievances, bolstered by Mabel's encouraging "mhm" "uh-huh" noises. By the time she'd finished repainting his first hand (she'd picked a glittery purple polish she thought would complement all the yellow he wore), he was sitting upright and Mabel had to sit in front of him to start on his other hand.

"—and my stupid feet hurt," Bill griped. "Since Stanford made me traipse halfway through the mountain barefoot because he wouldn't let us go back down before the gravity returned and I don't even own shoes for spelunking. And my knees hurt, and my back hurts, and I could have killed for a walking stick but do think they'd have allowed me one if I asked? Because I don't think so! I tripped over—I don't know, a hundred roots."

"Worst hiking trip ever." Mabel finished painting his second hand, and started looking through her miniature sticker sheets for some fun stickers to put on Bill's first hand now that it was dry.

"Worst in the history of your planet! Even the Donner party had a better hike! At least some of them got something to eat," Bill said. "All I got for two days was a handful of cereal and Stanford's liquid meat in a toothpaste tube."

Mabel stuck out her tongue.

"And Stanford walks too fast. And your brother kept trying to squeeze through gaps between trees I couldn't get through. And Stanford kept fiddling with his—stupid—useless antique Civil War lantern he's so proud of, and he's just lucky that I thought to bring a way to find a light source even though I didn't even need one, because I knew he would bring that stupid Civil War lantern..." Bill's complaints petered out.

And then, voice oddly quiet, he said, "And I saw my corpse."

Mabel looked up from carefully placing a yellow butterfly on Bill's middle fingernail. There was a dark look in his eyes. "Oh," she said. "Oh, Bill. I'm so sorry."

This wasn't just a bad camping trip. This was serious. She had to treat it seriously.

She ejected the current CD from the boombox, put in another Sev'ral Timez album, and skipped to track 4: "This goes out to anyone having a bad day. Ladies, this one's for you. 'Girl, today has been—straight whack. You don't know how you're gonna—bounce back. But any time you're down, I'll always be around; I'll drive your heart back to Happy Town'..." Oh yeah. That was the exact energy Mabel was trying to channel.

"And I didn't feel anything when I touched it." Bill was staring down at his hands like he barely recognized them. "No energy, no connection—nothing. What if there isn't a connection anymore? What if I'm just a human now?"

Did that weigh on Bill? Clearly, enough that he'd decided to endure imprisonment in the Mystery Shack rather than kill his body to see if there was still a triangle inside.

But he'd never talked about it before now; she'd thought maybe he just didn't worry about it.

But that was dumb. Of course he worried about it. He was just like her. When something scared him, he just pushed it down and hoped that if he ignored it enough, everything would be okay! Until he couldn't pretend anymore.

And she'd never heard him sound this scared before.

She took his hands and hoped that would help.

He squeezed her hands so hard it hurt. His still-wet nail polish smeared on her hand. "What if I'm really gonna grow old and die in this rotting meat doll, what if I never go home again—? There's so much I haven't done, I was going to throw an eternal party, it would have been beautiful, everyone would have loved me, but now— and now—" He let out a choked noise, head bowing over their joined hands, posture broken. Hot tears landed on the backs of Mabel's hands. "And I didn't even get to, just, die and be done with it, I have to know I'm dead, I have to know everything I was going to do..."

"Hey—come here." Mabel tentatively wrapped her arms around Bill's neck and shoulders, compressing his bouncy curls. She half expected him to pull away.

Instead, he buried his face against her shoulder and hugged her back like she was the only thing keeping him from drowning.

After spending the last two days suppressing his grief and fear so hard his body couldn't function through it—after spending over a month suppressing his grief and fear—finally, finally, he peeled the tape off his cracked shell to let it leak out. He couldn't hold it together anymore. He'd barely put himself back together long enough to get on his feet and make it to the shack. This was the only place it was safe to fall apart. He muffled his sobs in Mabel's sweater.

And Mabel—who was used to being comforted by adults but who had never been called upon herself to comfort anybody but her brother and the occasional friend—had no idea how she was supposed to comfort a zillion-year-old almost-definitely-adult alien through an existential crisis.

Not for the first time, she wondered whether she might have gotten in over her head.

She pushed the worry down. Everything would be okay. Bill needed her—she could feel him trembling—and he didn't have anybody else in the world he could trust. And if she didn't know what else to do, at the least she could keep hugging him.

Voice so tight it almost squeezed out as a whisper, Bill said, "I was going to make a utopia here, but now I'm just gonna die here."

"I'm so sorry." How do you comfort someone processing the fear of mortality? She'd never processed it herself, she was thirteen, it was just another scary future thing she'd deal with when she had to. The best she knew how to do was be nice. "But... I'm here, okay? For—for anything you need." (Anything that wasn't evil, anyway—but now was not the appropriate time to make Bill feel like her support was conditional.)

"Tell me I won't die."

"You won't die! You're never, ever gonna die." Mabel hugged him tighter. "I'll fistfight Death. I'll—break his bony kneecaps."

"Thanks."

"I'll swing at the reaper with a baseball bat."

Bill laughed feebly. "With nails in it?"

"Yeah! And barbed wire! Connected to a battery!"

"Oh, we're taking Death down. Nobody's dying ever again."

"Everybody lives forever!" Mabel laughed; but it quickly petered out. "But... I'm not gonna let you die. You're my friend, and I won't let anything happen to you."

Bill's trembling had stopped, and his embrace was less death-grippy. "I owe you one, Shooting Star." From Bill, "thanks" sounded hollow, but "I owe you one" really sounded like a thank you.

"Hey. If I tell you a secret, do you promise not to do anything evil with it?"

"Sure. Promise."

Mabel doubted it, but that was as good as she was gonna get. "I've always thought you're still a triangle on the inside. You've got those creepy cat eyes that see the future and stuff! If you were just a normal human, wouldn't you have normal human eyes?"

Bill made a noncommittal noise.

"Plus, if you'd really been turned into a human on the inside, then being in a human body wouldn't feel so bad—right? It'd just feel normal."

Bill was silent for a moment. Voice hoarse, he whispered, "I hope you're right."

####

Fiddleford answered the door himself. "Stanford, Dipper, come in! I was just cleaning up." He had a broom, and the great hall's floor behind him was sparkling with broken glass. Ford was relieved to see Fiddleford had put on shoes. Unfortunately, they were fuzzy slippers. "Pardon the mess!"

"Think nothing of it. The shack's been turned upside-down, too." Ford stepped around a broken chair. "Don't you have anyone to help you clean, though?"

"Oh, I do, I do! I built me a Janitorial Executive Drone to tidy up," Fiddleford said. "I'm just cleaning up the mess JED left."

Ford and Dipper looked around at the shattered glass, broken furniture, scorch marks around the fireplace, and torn curtains. Dipper asked, "Did... JED make this place any cleaner?"

"Not at all!"

Ford and Dipper caught Fiddleford up on their scientific findings of the last couple days. Ford was almost embarrassed to admit they hadn't found any noteworthy quantities of micro-rips, as if he were confessing to a personal academic embarrassment—even after Fiddleford pointed out that it had been his own theory, not Ford's. (All the same, Ford hated to be so wrong, even by association. Being wrong felt like a moral failing.)

In return, Fiddleford told them what he'd been up to. He'd confirmed with them NASA fellas that the odd gravity effects weren't detected anywhere but Gravity Falls. At their behest, he'd set up some sensors around town, and when gravity suddenly reversed, the measurements they'd taken had allowed him to make a very loose model of the shape of the force that caused it. He showed Ford and Dipper the model on a computer in his lab, black screen with sharp glowing green lines forming an armature in the shape of a force. It looked like an enormous flying sausage that tapered down at one end. Too little detail to tell exactly what it was; but it certainly could have been an axolotl.

It was turning to look at the cliff where they'd stood.

Fiddleford wasn't pleased to find out the information he'd passed on from Soos had originally come from Bill; but he'd suspected it and already done all his soul-searching before reluctantly sharing his advice with the masses and hoping it wouldn't come back to bite him. "He didn't bother to warn us that gravity would actually disappear today, though," Fiddleford said indignantly. "So he could crow about being right and still get to see some folks get hurt, I reckon."

"Actually, this time I don't think he was hiding it. I kinda think he just made a mistake?" Dipper said.

Ford nodded. "Dipper's right. Bill was incredibly alarmed this morning when it became clear our estimates were wrong. It only made more trouble for him."

"I suppose," Fiddleford said grudgingly; then gave them a sharp look. "This mornin'? You took him camping?"

Ford and Dipper winced. Ford mumbled, "Not for fun."

"Stanford Pines—!"

It took a minute of hooting and hollering before Ford could calm Fiddleford down enough to explain the circumstances: that they'd only brought Bill because of just how much he explicitly did not want to be brought; that it had been a thoroughly unpleasant experience for everyone and Ford had never expected it to be otherwise; and that Bill had proven useful—Ford decided not to share the details—but he hadn't forgotten that Bill always made himself useful before he betrayed someone. If a man helped a little old lady cross a street, opened her door for her, put up her groceries, and then knocked her out and burgled her house, only one of those actions mattered.

(Dipper fell silent rather than help reassure Fiddleford. Ford supposed that was because he'd objected to bringing Bill, too.)

Fiddleford grudgingly admitted that under the circumstances, bringing Bill had been logical. "But that's just the thing—sometimes your logic don't account for the fact that you've got human emotions, too."

"Ah, yes, those human emotions. One of my worst flaws," Ford joked.

Fiddleford didn't laugh. "I mean it, Stanford. The most logical plan in the world don't mean nothing if he talks you into throwing it aside."

Ford thought of all the times he'd let his temper get the best of him over the last couple of days. Could he really say he'd made the logical decision when he'd made it out of anger? "Yes. I... see what you mean."

"Just be careful," Fiddleford said. "I saw you under that demon's oppression for months and never thought it was anything worse than how you always got around finals week—heck, for all I saw, I reckon he coulda started possessing you without me noticing—and I don't want that to happen again!"

Dipper winced. Ford found somewhere other than Fiddleford's face to look.

"What?"

"He... did. Possess me." (Dipper didn't pipe up with his experience. Ford didn't blame him.)

"He what? When?!"

"Remember toward the end of the project? When I started pulling all-nighters to finish the calculations...?"

Fiddleford smacked his forehead and sank down into the nearest chair.

Ford winced again. "I should have told you." During their talks over the past year, he'd been very reluctant to mention Bill or the fallout at the end of the portal project. They both had. "But—I assumed you'd guessed by now. What did you think was happening?"

"Frankly? I thought you'd started taking something illicit."

Ford snorted. "I—all right." He'd done stupider things during finals week.

"If he was possessin' you, why didn't you ask for help? I could've found somebody who knows how to do exorcisms. Did he not let you? Or—or did I miss you trying to tell me...?"

Ford shook his head. "No, I didn't want an exorcism." He wasn't sure Bill was the kind of "demon" that responded to exorcisms anyway. "At the time, I thought... that he was helping me."

Dipper reluctantly piped up, "He... possessed me once too. I didn't know that's what he was doing until too late, but... Even after you know he's a bad guy, he's really good at making you think he's just helping."

Fiddleford didn't immediately say anything to that. Ford couldn't meet his gaze.

Finally, Fiddleford said, voice low and worried, "Just tell me you won't let him get into your head again. Either one'a you."

Dipper shook his head. "Definitely not."

Ford said, "As he is now with all his powers gone, I don't think he can enter my head. Anyway, I had a metal plate surgically installed—"

"I didn't mean that way."

Right. "I won't. I promise."

Fiddleford nodded. "Didja really get a metal plate installed?"

Ford knocked on it demonstratively.

"Hmm." Fiddleford stroked his beard thoughtfully. He pointed at a contraption in the corner that looked like a ten foot tall tuning fork with electricity arcing between its tips. "Try not to get within five feet of that thing."

Ford eyed it nervously.

####

Fiddleford insisted Ford and Dipper stay for dinner. It was the first proper meal they'd had after two days of tubes mushy meat and mushy vegetables; so they tried not to show their disappointment when they received mushy meat and mushy vegetables. Fiddleford's automatic meatloaf-and-mashed-potatoes maker did its job more competently than JED did its, but Ford suspected that was partially because it didn't have legs to let it go get in trouble.

As they drove back into town, a stoplight turned red at the intersection with Main Street. Ford glanced down Main toward the library and asked, "Do you still want to stop by the library?"

Dipper, who'd nearly nodded off, blinked sleepily. "Huh?"

"To pick up Flatworld?"

Dipper yawned. "Honestly, I kinda just wanna go home and sleep."

"I hear that." He'd almost drowned today. He was exhausted. "Perhaps this weekend."

"Aren't you going to that concert with Mabel?"

"Was that this Saturday?" He'd lost track. Mabel had won four tickets from some radio contest to see Phrancisco in Portland and had asked Ford if he'd like to come. "I'm undecided. I'd like to go—I've been a fan of Invisible Plastic Yellow since they formed." He was the one who'd told Mabel about the band after their Portland trip and gotten her their albums. He'd had a phase when he'd really gotten into cutting-edge underground new wave music. It had made him feel conventionally cool, which not many things did. Now, all his musical tastes were three decades behind. He hadn't even known Phrancisco had a solo career until Mabel came home with tickets.

"But she's bringing her friends, and whoever has the fourth ticket needs to chaperone; and I'm afraid an old man escorting around three young girls would look... odd. It may be more appropriate for one of the other girls' parents to go." But he did want to see Phrancisco. "Perhaps I'll wait and see whether Mabel talks me into it."

"Better pack your bag now, then."

Ford laughed. He had a point. "If I do go to Portland, maybe I can stop by a bookstore to pick up Flatworld. If it tells us anything useful about Bill, I suspect we'll want a household copy for reference."

He was eager to reread it. He'd forgotten so much of it since college. He only recalled the vague, overarching plot: something about a third-dimensional sphere teaching a second-dimensional square about realities with higher and lower dimensions—from zero dimensions up to four—and a stuffy society based on what geometric shape you were... but that was it. He probably never even would have remembered the phrase "up but not north" if Bill hadn't referenced it. He wondered how much it could have helped him if he'd reread it sooner.

Dipper yawned again. "Sounds good."

The light turned green; and Ford drove past the library and headed on home.

####

(After going full tilt for two months, we finally get a breather lol. I hope y'all enjoyed, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts!)

#bill cipher #human bill cipher #mabel pines #fiddleford mcgucket #grunkle ford #dipper pines #gravity falls #gravity falls fic #gravity falls fanart #fanart #my art #my writing #bill goldilocks cipher

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