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siriannatan · 15 days ago

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Adventures of Superlad - Chapter 3

Tim's poor heart is going to explode at this rate :{

Apparently, the ban on superhero work at night didn't extend to Cadmus investigations. Well, Lex was also in the lab as Conner eyed an abandoned building at the docks.

He was scanning the building for the number of goons, the presence of lead and so on when suddenly there was someone behind him. A heartbeat he recognised. As he turned around his eyes went wide. One. What was Robin doing in Metropolis? And two. There was no way it was Tim Drake-Wayne under that mask. Not with how his lips were twisted in annoyance.

“What are you doing here?” Robin asked. His voice was a lot like Tim's to his super hearing. So maybe it was Tim?

“Status?” he heard Dad ask in his ear.

“I'm investigating something,” Conner said slowly and disabled his Comms temporarily. Sorry dad. “Earlier today two thugs associated with this place tried to hijack a LexCorp truck in the Meadows,” he said, arms up, feeling conflicted that Tim had no clue about his true identity. “My team tracked them here,” he pointed to the building with his head.

Robin listened and nodded. “Okay, team player. Since this is your turf until the real Superman is back, I won't argue, we can investigate together,” he decided with an unfair smirk. So annoying.

This was going to be a fun night, Conner thought as he turned Comms back in. “Robin will be joining us,” he informed everyone. Really fun night. He thought again as he quickly texted Dad ‘How much should I tell him?’

‘Whatever you think will help later,’ Dad's response was all kinds of worrying. Was he that worried about Cadmus? Or was it just his usual overprotectiveness? All questions for later.

“So? What did you see?” Robin asked, crouching next to him as Conner returned to watching the compound. He was wishing really hard he wasn't aware it was Tim behind that domino mask. Pretty, smart, witty Tim he had pizza with, and would not mind having lunch with again.

“About thirty goons, eighteen outside, rest inside. Door’s locked with a fancy lock, no signs of lead anywhere,” he said and Robin whistled.

“Impressive,” he said even though he didn't sound all that impressed. Conner rolled his eyes. “So you have a whole team somewhere around here?”

“We can't all get our suits from Batman,” Conner shrugged while studying goons' patrol routes. Calculating the spots where they had no vision of each other. “Stay here I'll take them out,” he said and was about to fly off when Robin stopped.

“Since when are Super’s all stealthy?” He asked, sounding seriously offended.

“Since it's me? And this whole thing is delicate, and I don't want it to be super obvious I was here,” Conner hissed and proceeded with his plan.

And of course, Robin couldn't just sit back. He had to help. And almost get them caught. Wasn't Batman known for being stealthy? At least the team was mostly silent. Or muted.

Then was the lock. Conner pulled out the decryptor. It couldn't be hacked. But it should stop working once it's out of power.

“Really? Gadgets?” Was Tim really going to be a snarky ass the whole time?

“Breaking the wall would make it pretty obvious who was here,” Conner rolled his eyes as he flew to find and fry the fuse boxes connected to the lock. According to his calculations, there is no chance the power inside the building would go out from this.

And he was right, thank you Dad's genius-level intelligence. He knew no one was watching the door. Confident the guys outside were enough of a protection so they managed to sneak in and get to the rafters.

Well. Conner quietly got them to the rafters. “Don't freak out,” was the only warning Robin got before he picked him up by the scruff of his outfit to fly up when he was fully confident no one would see them.

To his credit, Robin didn't freak out. “Bit of a warning next time,” he grumbled while fixing himself.

“I did warn you,” Conner shrugged. Goons here were not that much more careful. Less actually since they were counting on the squad outside.

“Whatever. What now? We silently knock everyone out to have our sweet time investigating?” he could feel the eye roll even if he couldn't see it. Wasn't Batman all about stealth?

“Basically,” Conner whispered back, not mentioning the thing outside. And sneaked to where he thought was the best spot to start. He vaguely heard Robin mumble something rude. “Language,” he chastised.

Overall it wasn't hard to knock everyone out. And once they were out cold and tied up in one corner Conner went to get any data on them he could. Sadly nothing on Cadmus, the location of their main base or their boss. But there was a mention of a mysterious cooperator. Maybe Cadmus.

“They seem to have bases all over town. Disguised as storage facilities or still establishing businesses,” Robin called out from where he was investigating.

Conner walked over to him, having copied all the data this base had access to. Robin was right. And there was even a map “Doesn't look like any of these is the main base,” Ash hummed in his ear and Conner passed it on adding “One of these must have more information.”

“We can agree on this,” Robin said while stifling a yawn.

“We should go and call the police before they wake up,” Conner hummed glad tonight wasn't a total waste. Using his powers at night was more draining.

“You sure? One of them might know something,” Robin countered.

“They're just goons,” Conner shook his head. “And we need to talk,” he added before, this time with a warning, disabling his comms after assuring them he'd be in contact if anything happened.

Robin, as hesitant as he was to work together, actually agreed to listen to him out. And even to a late-night snack. So Conner ordered takeout to a special spot in town. Using a card under a pretend name. Colin Cloves liked his random pickup spots.

With their food, they settled on a rooftop and watched the cops raid the hideout full of knocked-out goons. It still amazes Conner that fast food was faster than cops.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” Robin asked once they settled.

“Why I'm here… umm I'll be easier if you can see my face,” Conner decided to trust Robin. Or at least Tim. “Sorry I kind of figured out your secret identity already," he grinned after removing his glasses. They were what made the scrambling work.

“Con… what? How?” Tim demanded, clearly shocked but kept his mask on.

“Your heartbeat. It's hard to not focus on the heartbeats of people I think are important, and you're kind of my first friend outside Dad's company,” Conner explained, taking a bite of his burger. “Sorry,” he said once more.

“Okay… at least we're even with you showing me your face, I guess. So what were you doing here? It's not just about your dad's truck?” Tim let that go.

“Well… kinda does. That truck was connected to a specific project that was closed a while ago. Project that went rogue and made… well me,” letting it all out was harder than he thought. And yes, maybe it was a bit soon, but Conner really would like to have someone to fall back on in case of a mess. Someone other than his dad.

“Shit. I forgot you're a super. Yet you're Lex's son. How?”

“It's complicated but I'm somewhere between a clone and artificial baby of my dad and Superman made without any side's consent,” he said with one breath and an awkward silence fell over them.

“And I guess that's why you guys didn't go to JL?”

“They would never believe Dad didn't have anything to do with Cadmus, the name of the project, we use it for simplicity,” Conner sighed.

“So you're just going out alone? With no training or anything?” Robin huffed clearly, not happy about it.

“I'm more durable than you, have a whole team dedicated to keeping me safe, and when we have enough proof dad wasn't involved with my creation and how evil Cadmus potentially is we plan to send it to Batman since he's close,” Conner shook his head. “Getting Dad to let me help with even the smallest things around the city was a miracle,” he added with a chuckle.

Robin, or Tim as Conner would rather call him. Tim was nice, but Robin was a jerk. So far at least.

“I was such a jerk back there,” Tim whined.

“Eh, just be nicer next time we run into each other?” Conner offered and finished his burger. Dad wasn't going to be happy he was eating junk food at this hour.

“Lex Luthor being a good dad is still hard to imagine,” Tim chuckled and yawned. “And I'm helping you with this especially since Black Mask is involved.”

“He's the other reason we decided Batman would be the point of contact, one of his villains in Metropolis is not a good look,” Conner added and gathered their trash to toss it perfectly into a trash can on the corner. Spooking some drunk students stumbling back home. “Anywhere you're comfortable with me taking you to?”

“What?” Tim mumbles still staring at the trash can. And yawned.

Conner rolled his eyes as he put his glasses back on. “You're clearly exhausted, I won't insist on taking you home but I'm taking you at least close to it, we can meet up tomorrow for lunch and talk more?” He offered with a smile, even if Tim probably couldn't recognise it anymore.

“You know what, whatever,” Tim sighed and yawned before giving Conner a building he was comfortable being taken to.

“Hold on tight,” Conner said before picking Tim up. This time properly. One arm under his knees and the other behind his back. For some reason, Tim's heartbeat went up. “I promise I won't drop you,” he assured and took off. Gentler than he usually did.

By the time he dropped him off Tim's face was all red. “All good?” He asked, trying to get his temperature.

“Perfectly, just tired,” Tim assured but his voice sounded strained. “I shouldn't have trouble making it home from here.”

“Okay, good night,” Conner nodded as started to float. Should he go to the lab or straight home?

“Good night and sorry if you're in any trouble, for you know, telling me,” Tim waved awkwardly. He must have been quite tired.

“I'll be fine, Dad left it up to me as to how much I wanted to tell you,” Conner waved it off and flew away. “Should I go home or to the lab?” He asked as he turned the Comms back on.

“Home, the boss left already,” Celine told him. “Have a rest kid, you've earned it.”

Conner thanked her and wished the whole lab a good night before flying right home, making sure it wasn't too obvious where he lived.

“Dad?” He called out once inside.

“You're back fast, did it go that bad with Robin?” Dad was in the kitchen having tea.

“No, it went well with him, I kind of told him everything and he seemed to believe me, we’ll be investigating Black Mask together,” Conner explained with a wide smile. “And I kinda already knew his identity… I'm not.”

“Don't, he trusts you, and that's hard to earn,” Lex shook his head. “Go to sleep now, talk more in the morning.”

Conner nodded, and while yawning widely wished Dad good night before going to quickly shower. Being a hero was fun, but also exhausting. Lex's cats followed him despite being almost asleep on the couch. Conner didn't mind sharing a bed with the two Persians.

Once in his apartment. Barely inside. Tim had a small freak-out. Superlad and Conner Luther. The two people he was attracted to, even if at first based only on their physical appearance. Were the same person. And Tim was a jerk to him for a solid moment as they investigated. And he still wanted to talk to him.

“Why must his costume be so tight fitting,” he groaned, jumping as his phone buzzed on the coffee table. Where he left it before leaving.

It was Bruce. “Yeah?” He said doing his best to not show he was tired. He didn't want a lecture.

“How's Metropolis?” So it was Bruce himself and not Alfred with his phone while Bruce patrolled. Grand.

“Good, I met the Luther kid today, he seems like a decent sort despite his… family history,” Tim shrugged. “I found a hideout of Black Mask's goons but nothing on where he's hiding.” He wasn't going to mention he ran into Superlad there.

“Okay, I appreciate you're looking into it but don't overdo it, you're still not in shape since Jason showed up again,” he said sternly and Tim just rolled his eyes.

Wasn't it why he was in Metropolis? To distance himself as Jason settled in around Batman. Well, it was good to have him close in case he got some crazy ideas again.

“I'll be fine, Bruce, Black Mask isn't that bad,” he chuckled.

That seemed to satisfy Bruce so Tim briefly showered and went to bed. Instantly falling asleep to dream about blue eyes, pretty smiles, strong arms and being carried.

He woke up feeling incredibly awkward. How old was Conner even? Like not physically, physically he was about Tim's age. How long ago was he… created, for the lack of a better word?

“It'll be so awkward to ask,” Tim grumbled as he got up to get his coffee machine heating up while he washed his face. It was already pretty late. Close to lunchtime. He really hoped Conner didn't send anything yet.

With a steaming cup of coffee in hand Tim checked his phone. Nothing from Conner yet. ‘You free for a late breakfast?’ He wrote as a sign that he slept properly. He didn't need Conner to know how bad his relationship with sleep was.

‘Sure, eleven at the same mall as last time? Need to talk to dad first,’ Conner wrote back almost instantly

Tim glanced at the time. It was barely past ten. Conner was likely in the LexCorp office. Enough time for Tim to finish the second coffee and make himself presentable. ‘Sure’ he sent back and speed ran his ‘morning’ routine.

Conner was glad Tim contacted him first. Dad seemed pretty serious when they had their breakfast. Not when they talked over last night. That went well.

Apparently the media and the public were done with Conner avoiding one-on-one interviews. They wanted to know more about the mysterious heir to one of the top companies in the country, if not the world. They were excited to have their own Dick Grayson.

Conner thought it was a waste of everyone's time. But Dad said he'd eventually have to give an interview, so he told Conner to come by the office to discuss which publication he'd be comfortable taking to.

“So what are my options,” he huffed once in Dad's office.

“Daily Planet, Metropolitan, the Metropolis Gazette, Violet, that last one is an absolute rag, I have no clue how they're still working,” Lex listed off.

Conner hummed. “Maybe Daily Planet? They are supposed to be reputable, right? Probably won't mind us having certain topics be off limits?” He decided, frankly picking. The one title he was at all familiar with.

“Good pick, I'll get our PR team to arrange something,” Lex nodded. “Any plans for today?”

He was likely hoping Conner would take a break from superhero work. The city has been a lot calmer lately.

“I’m meeting with a friend for lunch and then… we'll see I guess,” Conner shrugged and just then remembered he never told Dad he befriended Tim. “I kinda accidentally befriended Timothy Wayne,” he chuckled.

Dad sighed. “I guess it could have been worse. Could have been a Queen,” he shook his head. “Have fun, the team downstairs is working on the stuff you've found, I'll let you know when the interview’s set up.

Conner grinned, hugged Dad and left for his lunch with Tim. He had to pick a place with some privacy.

#my stuff #my stories #fanfiction #dcu #dc universe #very much AU #conner kent #technically conner luthor #timothy drake

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vinxwatches · 1 year ago

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watching transformers prime season 2

Orion Pax, Part 1.

i do like that we get to see more deception from the decepticons. this is the first time they seem smart.

"your mom looks good in leather" that's not a very straight line... or i'm Very gay (ok either the second or both).

i thought there might have been an element of hope to get his friend back in megatron, but it seems he just wants him for cold hard practicality.

damn, they are really making soundwave the scariest one around. we have seen them fight once against someone's nemesis, and it wasn't a fight. it was a quick and easy putting her in her place. and now they are the calmest and most efficient fighter.

starscream here makes a lot of sense. powerful and stealthy enough to get in and steal food. and of course being out of the loop he blows everyone's cover. this'll either result in his death or instalment as him being a rogue element is too dangerous. probably the second as he's hard to kill.

part 2

starscream found a potential powerful ally. i am curious where it'll go. stay a villain? join the goodguys? sometimes useful third party?

oh, new season, new damage and death options. like loosing arms

i love that it makes a lot of sense with that we know that decepticon base is on top of the place important to the primes.

part 3

feels like they didn't exactly do a lot with prime as a decepticon, but a perfectly fine storyline.

Operation: Bumblebee, Part 1.

fuck, so megatron just destroyed bumblebee's voice box which is why he can only communicates in beebs now.

fuck they just stole his kidney. it's also interesting that these super advanced robot people have not figured out created organs. the thing we as humans are now developing. did they just not consider it possible like how long range communication in sci-fi wasn't as big in the past as it is now? or would not giving them that just allow for more plot threads?

i'm still hoping starscream will grow into a reluctant not enemy, but joining the third party to some capacity would work too. oh, it works Really well.

Part 2.

man these robots have so much trauma. i love it. i don't think i could ever pick up on all this as a kid but now? loving this trauma drama.

mmm, maybe not quite as well. he's getting so fucked over. that's definitely why i want him to make a turn to the not evil. he's getting fucked disproportionally to everyone that just killing him at some point doesn't feel like it'd be satisfying. also shows at least nowdays are pretty big on having at least one enemy turn good, generally multiple, maybe also having good guys turn bad, to demonstrate that being good or evil is a choice, and one you can always change. you are not set in your ways. and it's something i like.

Crossfire

HOLYSHIT that is the worst gore we've seen so far. villains v villains can be so much more brutal.

definitely like the way starscream seems to grow into the roll of asshole useful not (active) enemy

Nemesis Prime

damn, mech just became a whole lot more literal. also that was a damn good plan by fowler.

Grill

oh, interview episode. those can be very interesting, or a gimmick to make a short plot last longer.

nope. clip and introduction video of sorts.

why does RC get no points on personality unlike everyone else?

Triangulation

sadly starscream wishes to stand against everyone, appealing to everyone when they have something to offer, but when he believes he has all the power he will spite everyone. would love it if he either learned he will never have enough power or that not everyone needs to be spited.

Triage

will they continue to make soundwave brutal and scary?

Hurt

oh, it's not only the bots that have trauma now. Niko just discovered that justice is just vengeance, and vengeance is just anger, and indulging in it doesn't make things better.

Megatron looks honestly horrified that "a human girl" could kill one of his own.

Out of the Past

girls episode and trauma episode at the same time? what a treat! (not because girls with trauma but because \o/ girls and trauma is so interesting to explore, and seems to really be the theme of the show. well, trauma and the negatives of vengeance)

well, it was mostly backstory, but also a lot of trauma and grief (is there a difference?), really good episode.

New Recruit

yea, i don't trust the newby. he's going to defect in 5 episodes max.

oh, yea he's either really dead or wishes he was. brutal.

Inside Job

that's the first time we've seen optimus have an emotional outburst.

but really, starscream, this is the best plan you have? is megatron really trustworthy enough?

Patch

a clip episode, but one that does continue the story.

Darkest Hour

excuse me. what the fuck. MAN OF STEEL STOLE IT'S PLOT FROM TRANSFORMERS PRIME!? seriously. the badguys are using terraforming technology to transform earth into something better for them which'll kill all, thus the goodguys and forces the hero's to destroy the only method for their race to return.

they really love ending seasons with optimus out of commission.

#transformers: prime #transformers: prime season 2

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ranhaitanisgf · 3 years ago

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Hello so glad to see you write for Shinichiro!! Could I have some headcanons of spending the day as Shinichiro’s s/o with Shinichiro, Mikey, and Emma? Maybe having a picnic or going to the mall together? Just some fluffy Sano family time!

spending a day with shinichiro sano (feat. emma & manjiro sano): headcanons

[𖤐] hii anon; thank you for requesting this!! it was so cute and fluffy to write i kinda melted a little bit when i was writing this aaaa, i hope you like it!! <333

❧ masterlist

✂︎ honestly, the day was supposed to be just a casual date with shinichiro; going to the mall and doing some window shopping and maybe buying a few things, then going to the food court to get some food before riding to the riverside to watch the sunset. nothing really out there, but just spending time with him was enough for you, so you didn’t really need any sort of fancy date.

✂︎ at least, that was the original plan. you weren’t sure how you had ended up taking emma and mikey along with the two of you, but frankly, you didn’t really mind. there’s probably a lot of other people who would have some...thoughts, if their boyfriend’s little siblings tagged along on their date, but emma and mikey were always such sweethearts, (to you at least) so you actually thought it was a nice change of pace.

✂︎ hm, well, now that you think about it, the both of them coming wasn’t really supposed to happen in the first place. it was pretty nice weather out, so you and shinichiro had decided to walk to the mall instead of taking his bike. the both of you had figured it would be a nice change of pace and that the fresh air would do both of you some good, but you two were so wrapped up in your conversation with each other that you didn’t even notice the steps following you two. it wasn’t until you were almost at the mall that you and shinichiro had realized emma and mikey had tagged along.

“what were you thinking of buying, (y/n)?”

“hm, i’m not really too sure yet, maybe some-”

“i can’t believe that didn’t see us the entire walk!! we’re just that stealthy, emma!”

“what the hell-”

✂︎ and just like that, your date was crashed by the two little kids who had followed you on your way to the mall. according to emma, the only reason she was here was because she was trying to stop mikey, but by the time she finally was able to pull him back, she didn’t know how to get back home, so she just decided to follow you. according to mikey, he had followed you two because...well, just because he wanted to.

✂︎ mikey’s response earned him a punch on the head from shinichiro, who started yelling about how he can’t just crash his date, ‘just because he wants to’.

✂︎ it was obvious from his body language that shinichiro was feeling pretty exasperated from all this, and you can’t really blame him. i mean, who would expect for their little brother to purposefully follow him while he goes on a date?

“sorry about this (y/n), i should’ve noticed they were following us sooner. if you don’t mind, i can run them back real quick while you go look at some shops, how’s that?”

“...hm, actually, if it doesn’t bother you, how about we just take them with us? i don’t really mind that they came along; i really like emma and mikey, and if we take them with us, then you don’t have to go all the way back. is that alright with you?”

“are you sure, (y/n)? mikey can be a little troublemaker sometimes-”

“hey, shut up!! am not!!”

“yes you are!!”

“i’m sure it’s fine, now both of you stop yelling at each other, people are staring!!”

✂︎ gonna be honest here, the two of you looked like a family when you walked into the mall. mikey was sitting on shinichiro’s shoulders while shinichiro kept a firm grip on his legs, and emma was holding your much bigger hand in her smaller one, looking around a bit curiously.

✂︎ as you all walk around, looking at the different shops, there’s going to be a lot of commentary about literally everything from mikey. he’s going to be commentating on everything he sees, whether it’s clothing or a food stand that he wants to go try, his commentary will just be endless.

“do girls really wear that sort of thing??”

“woah, that looks super cool!”

“can we get the dorayaki that’s over there, (y/n)-nii?!”

✂︎ you’ll probably start to notice emma’s longing glances at some of the things that she sees in the windows. she won’t really say anything about it, but you can tell that it’s something she wants, so you’ll go into a couple of the stores with her, asking what it is that she wants. she’ll definitely be surprised at first, but she’ll get really excited that you’re willing to get stuff for her and will show you the things that she thinks are pretty. she’ll probably start talking about how she wants to be able to wear all of the cute stuff she saw in some of the other windows someday, so you just ruffle her hair and tell her that when the time comes, you’ll definitely buy it for her.

✂︎ your actions don’t go unnoticed by shinichiro, so he’ll just be waiting for you outside the store with mikey, looking at you with a small smile on his face. he doesn’t know why, but whenever he sees you getting along with her and mikey, it just warms his heart and reminds him of how much he loves you and how much he wants to be with you for the rest of his life.

“stop staring at (y/n)-nii, it’s weird.”

“wha- i wasn’t-!”

“yes you were! i saw you!!”

“be quiet mikey, i’m trying to have my moment!”

✂︎ ah, well, he actually does know why his heart skips a beat whenever he sees you smiling and getting along with emma and mikey, but he’ll save that for later.

✂︎ when you and emma walk out of the store, the giddy smile on her face makes shinichiro smile down at her before turning his gaze to you, who was looking at her with a giant grin on your face as well.

“let’s go look at some more places?”

“definitely!!”

✂︎ emma is a lot more vocal from that point onward, pointing out all the different things in the shops that she thinks would look best on you. she actually has a pretty good fashion sense, so you ended up buying some of the stuff that she suggested.

✂︎ she’ll even have you try on all the clothing that she picked out for you so that you can show shinichiro, (she whispers to you it’s so that he’s struck with love when he sees you). her plan definitely worked though; when you came out of the dressing room in the clothes she had picked out for you, shinichiro was wordless for a few moments, so captivated by you that he doesn’t even know what it is he should say. he’ll probably stutter out some words after a few moments, the broken sentence resembling that of a compliment, but you’re not quite sure since it’s all pretty broken up.

“wow, uh, you look, uh...wow, you’re very...wow…”

“shinichiro-nii, can’t you think of anything else?! i thought you were supposed to be their boyfriend!! you’re making my plan fail!!”

✂︎ mikey will probably be more interested in going to the food court, and will be asking every five minutes when you guys can be finished with window shopping so that he can eat because he’s absolutely starving, (it’s a lie, he just wants dorayaki).

✂︎ you’ll probably tell shinichiro that he should probably get some new clothing as well, with emma chiming in that his taste in clothes is kinda boring and that he should spice up his wardrobe, (he feels very wounded by this and puts a hand to his heart as if he’s been fatally shot). with that, the four of you will start to look for new clothes for shinichiro. it’s quite the serious mission, so the three of you will be closely examining him whenever he steps outside of the dressing rooms. it’s also like you three are judges at a fashion show, and if you could, you would all be holding up numbers that were rating his outfits, (the employees are fairly amused by all of this).

✂︎ after you all finally find some new clothes for shinichiro, you’ll be making your final stop at the food court, the place mikey has been pestering you about going to for the entire time you were there. he immediately dragged you all over to the dorayaki place, eagerly asking if he could get one. really though, how could you say no to those eyes?

✂︎ after getting everyone something to eat, you’ll all be sitting down, emma and mikey chomping down and their food, and you and shinichiro resting your feet after all the walking you had just done.

“remind me to never bring you to the mall on a date again.”

“what, you didn’t have fun?”

“no! no, that’s not it, i just...my wallet feels lighter than before…”

“you’re so dramatic sometimes, i swear.”

“but you love me.”

“...yes.”

✂︎ by the time you all are done with your food and are exiting the mall, it’s dark out, and emma and mikey are barely able to keep their eyes open, meaning that for the walk home, you were carrying emma on your back and shinichiro was carrying mikey. the walk back was rather peaceful, but what you enjoyed the most was the whispered conversation you were keeping up with your boyfriend, who was complaining about how mikey was drooling on his neck and he could feel it dripping down to his shoulder.

✂︎ after putting both the kids in their respective bedrooms and tucking them in, the two of you just crash on shinichiro’s bed, tired from all the events that had happened that day. you really had to admit though, it was times like these that you would always remember the most. the way he looked like when he was beside you, his eyes already closed as he rested his head on your arm. god, he looked so pretty…

“hmm, what do you think you’re doing?”

“just fixing the hair of my beautiful boyfriend, that’s all.”

“i see...carry on then.”

✂︎ neither of you bothered to change out of your clothes into pajamas, just deciding to leave them on and stay in each other’s embrace. in your opinion, there was truly no better way to end a day than to have shinichiro on your arms, his head fixed into the crook of your shoulder as he peppers kisses all over your neck and jaw.

“love you so much (y/n)...”

“mhm, i love you too.”

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zukuist · 4 years ago

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𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐨𝐮𝐭

— and if they would get caught or not —

fandom/s: 僕のヘロアカデミア // boku no hero academia [bnha]

includes: s. todoroki, i. midoriya, k. bakugō, h. shinsō, m. togata, t. iida

your name is shortened to y/n, f!reader but i don’t really specify on any part

*not nsfw*

notes: ok so before you guys come at me and say “you’re 14, why are you writing abt this?” it’s just the bnha boys admiring you lol. i don’t mention any explicit details

—

shōto todoroki

— glances a lot

the type of boyfriend that would glance at you for a split second

only to look away, and then look back

is he slick? i mean.. you don’t notice at first.

but people only started to notice, when mina pointed out that todoroki kept staring at something

and besides, his stare is quite intense?? like you could literally feel his eyes on you

BUT YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE

when he gets caught, he plays it off really well though, but shouto will be like

“why.. did i get caught?” like it’s a genuine question for him

besides all that kinda stuff, todoroki’s gaze on you is pretty innocent

he’s always staring at you with curiosity. like.. he’s anticipating your next move

it’s cute.

izuku midoriya

— gets all blushy

he’s the type that’ll stare for a long time

only to get real blushy when he realizes what he’s doing

he’s not slick in the slightest

like.. not at all

everyone can tell he looked at you, once they see his cheeks all pink and flushed, speech stuttering.

uraraka can only laugh just watching him realize his own actions,

and bakugou is left scoffing in disgust.

but i’d say his staring isn’t all explicit, he surely stares at you all innocently

but.. his eyes do wander

besides that, he finds himself staring at you when you’re explaining something to him

he can’t help but admire the way your lips move with each syllable

katsuki bakugō

— does not care at all

i mean at first, he only checked you out whenever you were looking at a different direction. like when you’re walking infront of him, because he made you do it

and this was before you guys got together

but as soon as you caught him staring, he really didn’t care.

he’ll even look you up and down, smirking afterwards, paying attention to the flustered look on your face.

though he might as well admit it, he hates getting teased by the bakusquad.

but he’s pretty slick when it comes to being discreet

people can only assume he’s just acting like himself again, due to the glare he worn on his face.

but he’s actually just admiring your beauty so.. yeah.

‘those extras should mind their own business.’

but even someone like bakugou has his innocent moments

he’ll find himself staring in silence while drinking his water, watching you train your quirk.

he’s just really proud, seeing you train yourself like that, and he’s just left to admire you.

hitoshi shinsō

— never gets caught

man is SLICK, and SMOOTH.

never gets caught, and never will he get caught.

though if you ask him about it, like.. if he ever did check you out that one time

he will come clean, but he’ll be very nonchalant about it.

like.. yeah 🤨 i was admiring your beauty. so what?

his movements are very stealthy.

like.. he’ll check you out as soon as he’s able to confirm that no one is looking at him

he’ll stare at you for a few seconds, then he’ll avert his gaze, staring at a floor

hitoshi won’t look at you for a while, because he doesn’t want to draw too much attention by continuously looking at you

but like almost all of the characters here, he has his innocent moments

he’ll stare at you when you’re napping, admiring all of your features in such a non creepy way

sometimes he’ll just stare at you when you’re looking, and this is on purpose

this gets you embarrassed, but he can assure you that he really likes your expressions.

but he will never have the guts to check you out when aizawa’s in the room so.. yeah

mirio togata

— is never embarrassed

this guy does not know what it feels like to be embarrassed i swear

he doesn’t really have a routine on when he admires you

it’s just..

if he feels like checking you out, he will.

like.. “hmm.. i haven’t stared at y/n in a while, i should go do that!” because why tf not

when you guys are together, he will sneak up behind you and wrap his arms around your torso

“you look really nice,” is a very common thing he’d say to you,

his eyes will scan over you for a bit, tongue poking out from his bottom lip slightly

and then he’d return to his usual thing

as if nothing happened

it definitely works on getting you flustered, and i also don’t really recommend calling him out on it

he will turn the tables and make YOU flustered

tenya iida

— really ashamed

his eyes do really betray him sometimes,

but he will constantly deny that he even WAS staring at you in that way

tenya will also scold himself for staring. he’s usually under control with keeping his eyes up

“iida tenya! this is wrong of you to do so. y/n would be ashamed!”

but he still can’t help it, sorry y/n

when he’s looking at you, and his eyes go to.. places they shouldn’t belong.

tenya would probably take off his glasses, so he wouldn’t be able to see 😭🖐

“maybe if i remove my glasses, i wouldn’t be able to see.”

...

“tenya, why aren’t you wearing your glasses?” and that’s how you catch him.

on a brighter note, he does love complimenting you. he’s such a sweetheart, y’know?

but, it makes him feel so.. WRONG, especially when he stares at you without your consent

otherwise, he does love looking at you. just.. give him the go.

—

©️ izukulie 2021, bnha|mha belongs to horikoshi kohei. do not steal ❕

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bcdaily · 4 years ago

Note

jily childhood friends running into each other years later?

Ta-dah! Thank you for the prompt! Now I have to write shorter things, or I’ll never get another done. XD

She knew that hair.

It was a glimpse—a fleeting hint of familiar dark chaotic strands protruding above the multitude of milling heads inside the crowded hotel lobby. Lily stopped where she stood, certain—certain…but that was foolish, surely? It was hair. Billions of people had hair. Even distinctive hair like that. And what would he be doing here, what were the chances…She darted left, slipping through other conference attendees, following the bobbing head of black. Her fingers toyed absently with the lanyard around her neck. Her feet kept moving. She was closing in. But—shit—he was turning into the next doorway. She’d lose him—

“Potter!” she shouted.

The bobbing black head stopped in the doorway threshold. He turned.

Something pulled inside Lily’s chest.

God, it was.

His mouth—an older mouth; familiar features spread across a matured frame, sharper and wider—formed her name. A question. His head tilted.

She squirmed around the last huddled group of conference-goers blocking her path. A middle-aged skeletal bloke shot her an annoyed look as she prodded past him. A server carrying a tray of canapés swerved around her. She wished the tray had been alcohol. She might need it. She wasn’t sure.

James Potter had grown up to be tall. Cresting six feet, easily. His limbs were long, his chest wide, but his hair—that hair—hadn’t changed a bit. Neither had his smile: bright, crooked, with the same infectious delight he’d managed so easily at eleven, now captured just the same in a man of twenty-four.

Twenty-four. They were twenty-four now. She hadn’t seen him in thirteen years.

“Lily Evans,” he said, audibly this time, and the smile grew brighter. “Shit.”

“Shit,” Lily repeated, laughing. Now that there was nowhere to go, no further crowds to weave through, no mop of dark hair to stalk, she was not quite sure what to do. She hadn’t thought past the part of just confirming it was him. Somehow, magically, him. Strange, strange, strange. Now they were standing before each other and—

And he was good-looking.

Had been, back then, at eleven. But that was eleven, and those things didn’t often last. Features shifted. Bodies changed. Conventions came and went at whim. Who could keep up?

James Potter could, apparently.

Not that that was the point. She hadn’t chased him down because he was fit. She could only see his head, for Christ’s sake. She hadn’t known. Not about the height, about the posh specs and the twinkling hazel eyes, about the tanned, sculpted forearms revealed beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his button-down. It wasn’t—

He eyed her, eyeing him. “Do we…hug…or…?”

She snorted. “I don’t know.”

“Reckon I ruined it by asking.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Not as natural now.”

“Yes, quite ruined.”

“Ah, well. Will do better next time. Meet again in another…what’s it been? A decade or so?”

“Thirteen years, by my count.”

“Thirteen? Bloody hell, I can’t wait another thirteen years. I’ll be dead. Let’s just—”

And then somehow he was hugging her, and Lily was laughing again, and her fingers were digging into his back as she clutched him to her.

He had a nice back, James Potter did.

A nice smell, too.

The first boy she’d ever kissed remembered to shower. Lovely.

In the past ten seconds, she’d grown greedy and impetuous. As he pulled away, she darted up on her toes and dropped a hasty kiss to his cheek. Stolen, like a criminal. She was in a hotel lobby filled with barristers, and not a single one could convict her, so stealthy was she.

His fingers trailed down her arm as their bodies detangled. Her skin burned along the path.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, stepping back. She really, really needed to step back. “I mean, it’s good to see you—strange to see you, really, but—you’re a barrister?”

It didn’t fit the James Potter in her head. The boy who’d grown up alongside her, had lived in the sprawling, noble house at the top of the hill, running wild with the lot of them in Cokesworth, until he wasn’t. That boy had certainly had the cleverness and confidence to pull off law, but not the patience or deference to its structures and politics. He would’ve collapsed under the piles of paperwork. He would have crowed agony at the rules, the formalities, the bureaucracy. Had that swotty boarding school his parents’ packed him off to changed him so very much?

James pulled a face. “Fuck me, no. I’m running the catering for the conference. My mum—”

“—owned a restaurant,” Lily recalled, somehow delighted not to have pegged him wrong. She closed her eyes wistfully. “God, that’s right. When you moved, we were all bereft. I think I still smell that eggplant appetizer of hers in my dreams.”

“The caponata?” His grin turned sneaky. “She still has it on the menu.”

“Where?”

“Casa. SoHo.”

Lily had heard of it. To think, James Potter, her childhood friend and mild fixation, just a few tube stops away, for who knew how long. “So you’re in London?”

“Since university,” he confirmed. Then his head tilted, and the sneaky smile turned coy. “So you’re a barrister? In London?”

“Yes.” She waved her conference lanyard like a white flag, surrender. “Wildly disappointed?”

“No. It fits.” Humour weaved through his voice—deeper and cooler now, all grown up. “No one could ever win an argument with you. And I tried. It was fun.”

He’d been a menace. He’d taken such delight from getting a rise out of her. But even as children, talking with him had been addicting. There were so few who could match wits with her, even fewer who didn’t take it personally, who dusted themselves off after a rousing debate and stuck out their hand, a shake of respect for the good time. James Potter had been like that. It’s why she’d cornered him behind a tree in the park where they all used to play, just before his parents had packed up house and he’d left for boarding school. With his back against the tree bark, she’d pressed her lips against his and waited to see what he did with it.

He’d cupped her chin with both of his hands and pressed his lips harder against hers.

It was closed-mouths, mere seconds. A first for both of them.

But to this day, Lily’s knees still went weak when someone held her face.

Silly. Stupid. She talked about work to make the memory go away.

“A bit less fun now. It’s mostly forms and deadlines and”—she waved her hand around the room—“swotty, deadly dull networking conferences. I’m just out of school. I hardly do anything yet.”

“But you’re good at it,” James stated, definitive.

She didn’t bother to hide her preen. Was wary by how much pleasure she took out of his automatic confidence in her. “Yes. I’m very good at it.”

They stared at each other, grinning.

He had a girlfriend. Lily was certain of it. There was no way this man did not have a significant other. Or maybe there was a very good reason, because she knew absolutely nothing about him. She hadn’t seen him in thirteen years. Entire lives were lived in thirteen years. Who knew what kind of person he was now? He could cut a dashing figure, hold a conversation, but maybe he also cut up bodies in his flat for fun. Maybe he bit his toenails. Maybe he liked The Big Bang Theory. Maybe he drank milk straight from the carton and then put it back in the fridge.

“You didn’t grow up ugly, James Potter,” she said.

“I looked you up on Instagram a few times,” he replied immediately. “You never post pictures of yourself. But I like your cat.”

“His name is Bosley.”

“I know.”

Lily squinted at him. “What else do you know?”

Hazel eyes gleamed. “Interesting question.”

James Potter’s hands were much larger now. If he worked with his mum in her restaurant, they were probably rough—calloused from use, nicked with cuts and crevasses from an absent knife or oil burned too hot. Eleven-year-old James’s hands had been cool and soft. This James’s hands wouldn’t be.

Lily quelled a shiver.

“You—”

“James?” A server appeared out of the doorway behind him, looking frazzled. “They left behind a case of champagne. I don’t know how. The quiche is running low, and Darnell is feeling ill. What—”

“Send Darnell home. I’ll—” He let out a dissatisfied hum, glancing at Lily, then back at the server. His lips pulled into a frown. He swept a hand through his hair. “Sorry—”

Lily waved him off, though her spirits sank. “No, don’t be silly. Work calls. Feed the hungry. Go.”

He hesitated, his eyes skimming her. “Will you—we’re just catering the event tonight. Swotty and deadly dull, yeah? So you’ll probably skive as soon as you can.”

“No.” She didn’t have any reason to say it so firmly, so quickly. That was just the way it came out. “Work calls for me too. I’ll be here.”

“Yeah?” The frown righted slowly.

She couldn’t believe how ridiculous she was being. Maybe how ridiculous they were both being. She could be a serial killer, for all he knew. Did he not care for the health and safety of his own pretty little head?

Her plan had been to duck out of this conference opening mixer as soon as was physically possible. They were unbearable. That shouldn’t change.

“Yeah,” she said instead.

She was eleven years old, heart fluttering behind a tree. She was an idiot.

“Good.” His body turned, but he was still looking at her. He nodded and repeated, “Good.”

Lily lifted her hand. “Thanks for the hug. See you in thirteen years?”

He smiled. “Something like that.”

She watched his back as he turned through the doorway, stared at the familiar mop of hair until it disappeared around the next corner.

She pivoted on her heels slowly, feeling silly and prickly.

In her pocket, her phone vibrated. She pulled it out and absently glanced at the screen.

She laughed.

James Potter had requested to follow her on Instagram. And he sent her a message.

You didn’t grow up ugly either, Lily Evans, it read.

She was twenty-four years old, heart fluttering in the middle of a hotel.

She shook her head, and pressed ACCEPT.

#jily #bcdaily #drabble #hey hey hey I WROTE SOMETHING #Anonymous

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yandere-sins · 4 years ago

Note

Poison for Miya Osamu please!

Our good boy! Thanks for requesting ^-^

Poison - “How dumb did you think I was? Of course I knew of your little prank.”

»»———————— ♡ ————————««

As expected, Osamu was overjoyed when you offered to make dinner for him.

It was one of the rare nights that Atsumu wasn’t around to bother the two of you, and ever since Osamu had instructed you on making basic dishes that didn’t need dangerous tools, you had regained some freedom when it came to food. Much to your delight as well as his.

It was never a big thing that you cooked - or rather prepared - for him, and Osamu was always by your side, watching over your shoulder. In the relationship you two had, there would always be a certain degree of mistrust, but at least it wasn’t as overbearing as when you were with his brother. And eating your onigiri or sandwiches made Osamu as happy as if you had just kissed him, which gave you a lot of plus points with him. It was nice to see him relax after a long day at work too, and it always worked in your favor to please your captors.

Not least because it gave you back your hope. Hope to make a change in your life.

It had been far too long since you started to surrender to what they were saying and doing, just so you wouldn’t get hurt. Regaining the tiny bite of freedom to prepare your own food had made you realize the dependence you had on them for everything. It was their schedule you suited your day to, you justified going to the bathroom to them, and you asked for them to bring home things you wanted to eat. In a way, it was infantilizing, and in another, dehumanizing.

As Osamu was now, you’d never think you could have a chance against him. Even if you managed to trick him, you didn’t want to imagine the lengths he could go to that you hadn’t seen before. The worst you had seen so far probably wasn’t the worst he could be. If the twins were together, you thought your chances to be below zero, but now that it was only Osamu, you hatched a plan. Only, he had to become weaker than he was in his current state.

It had been weeks in the planning, ever since the first few times he let you prepare food for the two of you. Building up trust as you chatted away normally with him while forming rice balls and other cold delicacies, you used a few bad days to push your two kidnappers over the edge enough to sedate you. No one said it would be easy, but it was excruciating not to get caught storing away the sleeping pills they used on you. More than once you were ready to give up and return to pleasing them for your own sake, but you persevered in the end, all for this moment.

“Can you set the table?” you asked him, innocently enough. Even if Osamu had stuck to your side like glue at first, he was now more willing than ever to play pretend with you, especially if you asked him sweetly. Just as if you two had a normal relationship and were fond of each other, that’s what Osamu preferred to believe. Nodding, he set aside his glass of water, brushing his lips to your head before reaching over you for the plates, arranging them at the counter with his back turned. Immediately, you reached into your pocket to retrieve the capsules, opening and spreading them over the white rice balls you had prepared.

Just as quickly did you wash the leftover casing of the medicine down the drain, pretending to wash your hands before picking up the bowl of rice and bringing it to the countertop on which you usually had dinner at. Osamu had watched you again after setting the table, so you gave him a smile before taking a seat, waiting for him to follow. Everything so far had been going exceptionally well, but you composed yourself to not give away the excitement you felt.

You snatched the one spoon you two usually used together to scoop up some of the rice, trickling soy sauce onto it and holding it up to him. Osamu’s eyebrows shot up in surprise as you offered to feed him, and you calmly, with a big grin, said, “Aah!” to animate him to eat. Seeing his ears grow red in response as he hesitated to take the bite gave you the confirmation that you needed that your plan was working.

Finally, Osamu took the bait you offered. When you quickly scooped up a second spoon to give to him for good measures, he didn’t even raise a brow anymore before eating it. Yes, the boys may be your captors, but they weren’t perfect, and you had been their weakness all along. It didn’t need the second spoon for the medication to hit, but you were convinced that it was better safe than sorry.

It didn’t take long for it to take effect either, and you thanked Atsumu only this once for needing very effective travel medicine. Osamu took a big sip of his water right after the second spoon, and by the way he grew weary and nervous at the same time you knew something felt off to him. ��Are you okay?” you asked, feigning worry as you scooped up a third spoon to give to him. “Yeah, just got a bit dizzy there.”

One more can’t hurt, you decided as you gave him a sympathetic smile, knowing he couldn’t resist your kindness, eating out of your hand again. He was barely able to swallow the rice, holding his hand over his mouth, and you saw in his eyes how torn he was between wanting to keep eating with you but also wondering if the food was spoiled.

“I don’t feel so good,” he finally admitted, and you furrowed your brows worriedly. “Do you want to lay down?” you were quick to suggest, and Osamu nodded slowly, not unhappy as you offered to help him back into your room. Seating him down on the bed, you fluffed up the pillow, feeling nothing less than pride that ran through your body as your plan worked out so perfectly.

“Could ya bring me the water?” Osamu asked as he laid down, and you simply smiled as you complied, returning to the kitchen to fetch his glass.

Patience, you told yourself. Nothing good would come from rushing it now.

However, when you returned, Osamu seemed already out of it, chest slowly rising and falling. His eyes had yet to fully close, and out of your own experience, you knew that it was only a matter of minutes now before he’d fall asleep. You set down the glass, pretending to still be worried as you placed your palm on his head, feeling for temperature. “Are you okay?” you mumbled quietly, and he still reacted with a grumble. He was too awake for your taste. Once he was fully gone, you’d be safe to find the keys for the locks and get everything you needed. But as he was now, you’d still have to wait for a little bit longer.

“I’ll get you a blanket.” Standing up, you turned to leave when a sudden grip around your wrist held you back. Surprised, you snapped back around only for Osamu’s hand to tighten more and more until it was hurting you while he reeled you in.

“You usually need about 5 minutes before it takes effect, don’t ya remember that, [Name]? I do because I always have to hold you down until then.”

His voice was back to normal, no slurred words or grunts and nods this time. Osamu sat up calmly, pulling you closer until you had to kneel down on the mattress to comply with his strength. “W-What are you talking about?” you questioned, feigning ignorance while you were pulled over Osamu and onto the spot next to him on the bed.

“What I’m saying is, we still have another minute or so until the drug ya gave me will put me to sleep. What should we do until then?”

Next thing you knew, Osamu was on top of you, holding you down by your hands and sitting down on your legs to restrain you. “Drug? What drug? I didn’t give you any such thing!” you nervously defended yourself, twisting your wrists in his grip. This should have been way easier, and Osamu should have failed to keep up his strength. Was it his build? Or because you put it into food? Did the medicine affect him so differently than you were used to?

“Come on, [Name], how dumb did you think I was? Of course I knew of your little prank. Didn’t you notice me watching as ya put the damn stuff on the rice?”

Your heart sank as you listened to his words. You thought you were quick and stealthy as you prepared the food, so how could he notice? “Also, I know you hadn’t taken the pills for a while. As I said, you always stop struggling after five minutes, asleep after eight, but your times had been messed up the last few occasions we had to give them to you. I have to know it, I am the one taking care of you, don’t ya know that yet?”

Biting your lip, you felt yourself panic inside. This was bad, pretty bad. Until the sleeping pills really started to work, Osamu was in charge, and he didn’t seem pleased either. When he suddenly let go of your right hand, you quickly clawed into his arm that was still pinning you down by your left, hoping that with combined strength, he’d let go. You completely missed him reaching into his own pocket and bringing his hand to his lips, only noticing the white capsule sticking out from his mouth when he reached around your chin and made you face him again.

But before you could react and slap the pill out of his mouth, Osamu had brought his lips down to your yours, breaking through them even though you struggled to keep your mouth shut. His tongue playing over yours didn’t stop you from rejecting the pill he transferred to you. Osamu didn’t linger for too long - even when he was mad, never overstaying his welcome - but before you could spit it out, he clasped his hand over your mouth. Finally letting go of both hands your hands, you used them to try and pull his hand off you, but before long, he had sealed your nose off as well, giving you no other chance than to swallow if you wanted back your air.

Even though you wanted to pretend to swallow it, Osamu didn’t retract the moment he saw you gulp for the first time, waiting it out until he deemed it most likely that you indeed swallowed. Unfortunately, with enough saliva, it slipped past your tongue and down your throat easily, tears shooting up your eyes as you realized that you couldn’t have stopped it. Only then, Osamu let go, and you snapped for air, frustrated cries escaping you.

“Why did you do that!” you complained, and Osamu didn’t flinch away as you pounded your fists against his chest in anger. “Why did you even swallow the food if you knew I put something in it?!”

For a while, Osamu kept quiet, letting you live out your tantrum before you finally gave up on your anger. Catching your hands as they fell to the sides, he kissed them both gently while you felt more and more drowsy by the second. Only now you realized what he gave you, the feeling very similar to whenever the twins had drugged you before. “Why did you eat it?” you mumbled, the sobs slowly but surely dying out with the rising sleepiness you felt.

“Because I love you,” Osamu said nonchalantly. Suddenly, his whole body seemed to collapse, and you could be glad your arms blocked him from falling square onto you. Up to the last point, he had still made sure you wouldn’t be bothered more by him, as you were able to push him off you, the sleeping pills’ effect almost making it seem like he was dead as he laid beside you.

It had been the perfect plan; you just didn’t think that Osamu was that attentive. There was still a lot you had to learn about the twins, but there would most likely be something new to experience the moment you woke up again and having to face an angry Osamu. But maybe one day. Maybe you could do it another day.

But you had your doubts that it would get any easier from here on out.

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backtothefanfiction · 4 years ago

Text

WHAT BENNY DOESN’T KNOW | Chapter 3

A TRIPLE FRONTIER STORY

Summary: When you find yourself stranded at a bar, Will is luckily on hand to take you home.

Warnings: Mature 18+ ONLY!!! The smut train is back kids, you have been warned. This chapter features strong language and scenes of a sexual nature. (oral male receiving, unprotected sex {you know the old saying kids, don’t be silly})

Word Count: 4815

A/N- This ones for the Will Miller fans. I’ve just come from a very chaotic work shift so I cannot wait to get all your wonderful feedback as always to make me feel better. I also want to take a moment to give some unspoken subtext for clarity due to some of the aspects of this chapter. Reader is very open about their body and so all TF gents are aware of birth control situation and that reader is protected in that way. Also I have never been on a motorbike so take this chapter as creative license and forgive me. I also just want to say I have written the Italy chapter which will be coming to you Monday. It is a fucking monster (pardon my language) and I can’t wait for you all to read it, but for now enjoy chapter three.

PART THREE | 6 MONTHS LATER

You and Santiago's had both gone on missions mere days later which saw you away from home for a good six months. When you got back you found that Santi had come back for a few weeks about a month ago but had had to take off again before you'd had a chance to see him.

You had been back for a couple of days and decided to organise an evening at your favourite local bar with your sister for a catch up. You sat on the bar stool waiting anxiously, the bar tender giving you looks of pity ever couple of minutes. You're phone, which you had placed on the bar top pinged and you eagerly checked the text on the screen. 'Sorry, something came up with Jared and I'm not gonna make it. Can we take a rain check?' you slammed your phone back onto the bar top as you let out a small animalistic grunt of frustration.

“Well you look like you're nights going just as well as mine is.” came a familiar voice from beside you. You looked up to find Will taking the seat beside you. “When did you get back?” he asked an arm coming out to wrap around you, pulling you into him.

“Two days ago.” you said into his ear, your head resting comfortably against the top of his shoulder as you hugged him. “What are you doing here?” you asked him as you pulled your arms back, shifting yourself on your bar stool to get a better look at him.

“Shitty date.” he said.

“I didn't realise you were putting yourself back out there.” you said, your fingers reaching to fiddle with your glass in front of you.

“Yeah, well I can't mope around forever.” he sighed deeply. “You want another one?” he questioned, pointing to the now empty glass in your hand.

“Uh, I was supposed to be meeting my sister but she bailed on me.” you began to explain.

“Shitty husband?”

“Shitty husband.” you confirmed. Will was well versed in your family drama. He'd once had to break up a fight between your sister's husband and Benny at a BBQ when Jared had gotten drunk and decided to challenge Benny. It had not been pretty.

“Still you want to stick around for another drink with me or...?” He let the question hang openly in the air between you.

“Sure.” you said. “I mean it'll probably take a while before I can get a taxi home anyway.”

“I've got my bike outside if you want me to give you a lift back, save you spending money on cab. I mean if you don't mind the bike that is?”

You thought about it a moment looking back down at your glass before looking back up to meet his eyes again. “Uh yeah, okay. That'll be great. Thanks.” you said. He turned and gave the bar tender a nod, grabbing you two more drinks.

“So what have I missed?” you asked.

“Well, Pope came back last month. I hadn't seen him since we all went out for Benny's birthday.” you raised your eyebrows in disbelief. “Yeah. We hung out with him a bit while he was back. Kept going on about some girl he'd slept with that night, saying it was the best sex he'd ever had. Brought it up any chance he could get.” you snorted and choked slightly as your drink went down the wrong hole, the statement leaving you shocked. “Hey, you okay?” Will said, a hand gently patting your back.

“Uh yeah. I'm fine, just went down the wrong hole.” you coughed, wiping at your face with your sleeve. “Um did he say when he was coming back next.”

“No. I think he said maybe four months but he said it could be longer depending. What about you? How long you back for?” he questioned.

“Not sure yet.” you replied. “Until the next assignment comes in I guess.”

You carried on talking like that for another 40 minutes, the conversation flowing easily. “Hey you ready to go?” he asked when he noticed you'd finished your drink.

“Uh yeah, of course.”

You followed Will out the front to where his bike was sat waiting. He handed you his spare helmet. “You bring this just in case your date went well?” you teased him, poking him with the helmet before you began placing it on your head.

“Yeah, something like that.” he said, giving you a sheepish grin. He hooked his leg over the bike and you climbed on behind him, your arms wrapping tightly around his torso. “When's the last time you were on a bike?” he asked you as the bike roared to life beneath you.

“Probably Columbia, two years ago.” you shouted over the noise. You felt his body shake as he let out a laugh. He was about to enjoy this.

He took off quickly, speeding out of the parking lot, catching you off guard making you let out a squeal as you took a moment to find your balance. You felt his stomach move beneath your fingers as he let out another chuckle at your expense. You gave him a playful slap before resting your head against his back, easing into the feeling of the air around you and the hum of the engine between your legs. You wrapped your arms tighter around him and buried your nose into him, breathing in his smell. Will always smelt good. He took a hand off one of the handle bars, brushing the back of your hand gently, reassuringly, before securing it back to the bike. The feeling had sent a buzz through your skin and you couldn't help but be aware of the way it passed through your body. You felt a fluttering feeling between your legs and you bit your lip. Uh Oh. No, no this was not happening, this couldn't be happening. You were getting turned on by this.

You quickly adjusted your hold around him, trying to focus and ground yourself but your hand ended up brushing against his crotch. It had only been a brief second but it had made you flinch in embarrassment and you wrapped your arms around him even tighter, pulling yourself forward on the bike, grinding into his butt between your legs. Shit! If he hadn't felt your hand brush against his cock he had definitely felt that. You braced yourself as he stopped at a red light, your breath held tightly in your chest. You nibbled your lip anxiously, your eye's squeezing shut waiting for him to do something, mock you or chastise you. What he did do next surprised you.

He took his hand off the handle bar again, his fingers searching for yours across his abs. He wrapped his hand around them, lifting it gently away from where you had been holding him and intentionally moving your hand down, placing it over the growing bulge in his jeans. You lifted your head up to look at him, but he kept his eyes forward. He let go of your hand, reaching to run his fingers along your thigh, resting against the side of the bike. You licked your lips nervously. What was happening right now?

The traffic light before you turned amber and Will placed his hand back on the handle bars, revving the engine of the bike in preparation but also sending a flood of extra vibrations through the bike that buzzed against your core. You couldn't fault the Captain, he knew exactly what he was doing.

You still had one hand around his waist and one hand over his cock, when he pulled up outside your place. There was a sudden silence as the engine cut out and he climbed off the bike. You couldn't help but watch him intently. Will was more of a man of action than a man of words. He took off his helmet, threading it onto the handle bars, before turning towards you and leaning against the bike. His arms folded before you as he waited for you to gingerly take your own helmet off, not once breaking eye contact with him.

“So what do you wanna do?” he finally asked when you had decided to remain silent. You licked your lips as you thought over the best way to respond.

“Do you want to come in?” was the line you finally decided on, but your voice was timid, it lacked conviction. You wanted him to take control. He nodded slightly before taking a step back, allowing you some room to attempt to get off the bike as gracefully as you could. You placed the helmet on the seat, while Will put his hands in his pockets. He fiddled with his keys as he attempted to hide his nervousness.

He'd be lying to himself if he had said he'd never thought about you in that way before. Seeing you in a bikini when you had all taken a trip to the beach. When you had gone out dancing for his birthday and chosen the skimpiest dress in your closet to wear. On lazy Sundays when you had stayed over at his and Benny's place, your tiny pyjama shorts riding up as you reached for things off the top shelves of their kitchen cabinets. That's exactly where his eyes fell now as he followed you up to your apartment. Your jeans hugging your ass just right as you walked up the stairs ahead of him.

You gave him a sheepish smile as you unlocked the door, ushering him inside. The silence was filled with the clicking of light switches as you began to switch on lamps, creating a cosy atmosphere. He was so stealthy you hadn't notice him come up behind you until you turn and was faced with his chest. You slowly lifted your eyes up, your head tilting to allow you to look at his lips, then up further to his eyes. “Just tell me if you want to stop.” he said before placing his finger under your chin, guiding your face closer to his.

You couldn't even call it a kiss the way his lips barely grazed yours but it was electric, sending shivers throughout your whole body making you want to throw yourself at him. He whispered your name against your lips, a question, he wanted you to answer the previous statement.

You gave your head a slight shake. “No.” your voice was quiet. “No, I don't want to stop.” you closed the gap between his lips and your own, your hands snaking up to wrap around his neck. He wrapped his arms around your lower back, pulling you closer to him, deepening the kiss. You exhaled deeply through your nose as you let out a breath you hadn't realised you'd been holding.

Will brought one of his hands up, to brush away the hair that was falling over the side of your face, getting in the way. He tucked it behind your ear, before letting his fingers rest around the base of your head, his thumb grazing your jaw. You found yourself moaning hungrily into the kiss, but then a thought crossed your mind that made your rapidly break away. “Wait, wait.” you said breathlessly. He dropped his hold around the back of your head and leaned back to get a better look at you. He waited silently for you to continue as you caught your breath. “There's something I have to tell you.” you said licking your lips, already missing the feeling of his against them. You relaxed your hands from around his neck, allowing them to rest on his shoulders and you were glad when he didn't try and pull away. “I was the girl Santiago slept with after Benny's birthday.” you said trying to make your words as calm as possible.

Of all the things Will was expecting you to say, it was not that. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth as he lowered his head slightly shaking it. You weren't sure if it was a grin on his face or a grimace. “I just thought I should say. I don't want to make things complicated between you guys.”

He took a step back from you, a small huffed chuckle escaping his lips as he ran a hand up through his hair. Your face fell to the floor. Shit you'd fucked this up. You shouldn't have said anything. “Does this change everything?” you asked timidly to the floor.

Will chuffed in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?” he asked stepping forward to you, making you look up at him. “If you heard the way he talks about that night. You think I'd give up the chance to experience that?” Your eyes looked at him hopefully. He closed the space between you, smashing his lips into yours, his hands planted firmly either side of your face, not allowing you to get away from him. You flung your arms around his neck and he dropped his own hands down to cup underneath your ass. He lifted you up into his arms seamlessly and began carrying you towards your bedroom.

He took a seat on the edge of your bed so you were straddling his lap. You broke off the kiss, reaching down to lift your shirt up over your head, throwing it across the room, Will following your actions quickly took off his own. He took a moment to take in your boobs, his hands reaching up to grab them, leading your body back closer to his so he could attach his lips to yours again. You fixed your hands around his shoulders, pushing them backwards towards the bed. Your lips followed his the whole way down, your hair falling around both your faces.

You reluctantly broke your lips away, leaning back to flick your hair out of the way, but also to give your hands the space to move between your two bodies as you began to unbutton his jeans. You slid yourself backwards off of Will and the bed, your knees hitting the carpet as you pulled both his jeans and pants down at the same time, his hips lifting slightly allowing you to get them off easier.

You pulled the items of clothing off of his ankles throwing them behind you. You were aware of him shifting slightly on the bed and looked up to find he'd propped himself up on his elbows to get a better look at you on the floor before him. His gaze made you pause a moment, fully taking him in. All of you had been out of active service for years but Will looked exactly the same as he had at the height of his career. You knew his younger brother took good care of his body, what with him now having a ‘somewhat’ career as a prize fighter, but you hadn't realised just how well Will had maintained his muscular physique.

You let your eyes drop from his piercing eyes, letting them trail down the defined lines of his chest then abs, until finally they landed on his half ready member. You looked back up to his eyes, keeping eye contact with him as you sat yourself up properly again, his legs adjusting slightly to allow you a better position between them as your hand slowly raked up the muscles of his thighs until they reached the prize that lay patiently waiting for you at the top of them.

You watched intently as Will's head dropped backwards, his eyes closing in bliss at the feeling of your hands wrapping around his cock, your gentle grasp slowly working him up. A small grin began to take over your face in reaction to the feeling of his member growing and getting ever harder under your controlled touch, a sensation of power taking over you.

Will let out a breathy groan of satisfaction as he suddenly felt your tongue, swipe up his entire length. “Fuck.” he exclaimed as he pulled his head back up to look at you, one of his arms reaching out to place a caring hand around the side of your head, guiding you as you began to take his length into your mouth. You both made an effort to keep eye contact as you bobbed up and down on his dick but Will lost it when you took him to the point he hit the back of your throat and you gagged slightly. His eyes closed as his head hung back in bliss again. For a moment it felt like he'd died and gone to heaven and it took him a second to put himself back into the room. He couldn't believe this was happening.

You pulled back, allowing yourself a moment to breath, as you used your hand to continue working at his saliva covered cock. Will looked down at you once more and before you had a chance to take his length into your mouth again, he was sitting himself up, reaching his hands out for your face, pulling you into a deep kiss instead. He made you stand up straight and you had to let go of his cock as his fingers brushed down your body until he reached the waistband of your pants. You stared down at him in silence as his fingers began undoing the buttons of your jeans. He leant forward to leave kisses across your stomach as he gently pulled down your jeans and underwear at the same time, just like you had for him. His lips tickled against your skin and you found your hands reaching out to steady yourself against his shoulders as your eyes closed, head relaxing due to the sensation passing from his touch that sent a fuzzy feeling all the way up to the very tip top of your skull.

You felt the fabric pool thickly at your ankles and you maintained your hold on his shoulders as you pulled your feet free from the tangle of denim that engulfed them. He tossed the jeans out of the way with one hand, the other taking a firm hold of your hip, his thumb circling across the bare skin. “Will.” his name fell breathily from your lips and he looked up to take you in, his other hand coming to rest on your other hip, his hold becoming firmer.

“Come here.” his voice came back, gentle yet commanding as he pulled you back onto the bed on top of him as he lay back against the mattress. His hands came up to grasp either side of your head, his fingers tangling into your hair as he pulled your lips down against his own. You felt his tongue brush against your lower lip and you happily relaxed further into his mouth, your tongue coming out to gently melt against his.

You felt his hips grind up into you, his erection rubbing against your clit sending a sensation through your core and you sighed into him. He used the opportunity to suck your lower lip in between his lips, pulling at it slightly, only intensifying the feeling growing between your legs. You felt one of his arms reach around your lower back and before you could even acknowledge the feeling of his other hand becoming firmer on the back of your head, you found your whole body being flipped round, Will settling himself on top of you between your thighs.

He manoeuvred his arm out from under your back so he could run his hand up the length of your leg, encouraging it to wrap around his side. You broke away from his lips to look intensely into his eyes in anticipation. He brushed his thumb across your cheek with the hand that still cradles your head while his other hand lines himself up with your entrance. You exhale sharply when you feel him drag his cock through your slick folds, the tip nudging your sensitive clit. You feel the hand against your cheek grow firmer as he forces you to keep eye contact with him as he gently eases himself into you, your mouth hanging open in a silent gasp as you adjust to his size. You pursed your lips together and you watched as Will's eyes followed the movement before he smashed his lips back against them, his hips rolling himself deeper inside you. You let out another gasp against his lips at the sensation. “Ah fuck.” you breathed the words against his mouth as he gave you a moment to adjust, the hand against your face smoothing your hair back.

You began moulding your lips to him once more and he took that as his sign to begin slowly thrusting his cock in and out of you. He was in the perfect position without even trying, his cock dragging against your gspot with every agonisingly slow thrust. You brought your hands up either side of his face and pushed his forehead into your own as your mouth hung open, breathing becoming laboured. His pace was torturous, controlled, making you feel every motion his cock made inside you. He forced you to continue looking at him, his eyes watching your every facial expression carefully, forcing you to stay in this moment with him, to be aware of every sensation and remember who it was who was making you feel that way.

This wasn't just some quick shag or one night stand, this was a friend making love to another friend. Just like Santiago before him, Will didn't know if this would ever happen again between you and he wanted to make sure he savoured every second. Wanted you to know the love he had for you. He wanted to make you feel good. He wanted you to remember this moment and how he made you feel in it.

Your hips began to squirm as your orgasm steadily built in your core, desperate for something more, desperate for that release. “Will please?” you breathlessly begged against his lips. Will grunted at hearing you begging for him to make you cum, but he didn't want to rush this. He felt your back arch as you tried to change the angle slightly, drive him deeper, reach that release. He snaked his arm around your back, pulling you tighter to his body, lifting you from the bed. Your hold around his neck became tighter and you buried your head into his shoulder as he lifted you up, his cock still deeply inside you.

He turned you both around and he sat on the bed, pulling you down even further onto his cock. The new position really allowed you to grind down into him but forced you to maintain the slower pace Will wanted to keep. “Oh my god.” you groaned into his neck, your head still firmly buried into the crook of his neck. He kept both his arms firmly around your back, forcing your body to remain tightly to him, guiding you as you moved up and down on his cock. The feeling that had built inside you was fit to burst and when he lifted his hips and thrust up into you, you lost out. Your orgasm was shattering and you buried your head even deeper into his neck, your eyes firmly screwed up, tears threatening to spill out of the corner creases from how sensitive you felt.

Will continued to slowly thrust up into you, his arm wrapped around you tightly making you maintain the slow steady rhythm you had created together. Your clit dragged across his skin from how close your bodies were and it did nothing but increase the orgasm taking over you. You're moans of pleasure came out stuttering between breaths as you felt yourself clamped tightly around his cock. You were so earth shatteringly aware of everything.

You forced yourself up straight, wanting to look directly into Will's eyes, allowing him to see the devastation and bliss he was causing you. His lips attached hungrily to yours at the sight. He felt your overstimulated body stutter and freeze, desperate for a break but he wasn't done with you yet. As you tried to take a moment to let your orgasm pass and compose yourself once more ready to do it again, Will lay himself back down upon the bed. With you're arms still wrapped tightly around his neck you happily let your body relax with him, resting against him, your head finding a home in the crook of his neck once more, taking in deep breaths.

He had allowed you maybe two seconds to appreciate and acknowledge your come down before his arms tightened around you, holding you in place against his chest as he brought his legs up onto the bed. He dug his heels into the mattress and began thrusting up into you at a rapid speed. Your fingers clawed at his skin as you felt another orgasm rapidly building inside you once more. You cried out as the sensation took over you once more, your body practically going limp. You attempted to use his shoulders as leverage to prop yourself up, hoping a change in angle would lessen the sensitivity in your fluttering cunt. Will reached up to take your face in his hands. You're arms went weak and gave out slightly and you were grateful that Will did have a hold of your head, to keep it up right.

He maintained each devastating thrust and watching as your eyes became unfocussed, completely cock dumb for him. It was one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen. “Ah fuck.” he grunted as his thrust became sloppy, his own release so fucking close with how you were looking at him like that. You whispered his name and he lost it completely, his thrusts stuttering as he quickly pulled out, his own release over taking him as he closed his eyes, pushing his head back into the mattress.

He gently released your head from his hold and you relaxed it against his shoulder, your back arched inward, your breathes heavy and laboured as you worked through your come down. Will let out a deep breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding and turned his head to try and get a better look at you. Almost like you sensed what he was trying to do, you lifted your head to meet his eyes. A goofy grin broke out across his face.

You attempted to climb off his lap but your legs were spent and wobbled like a new born deer. He laughed at you as you collapsed onto the bed beside him. “That was,” your voice said heavily beside him, you laughed a giddy feeling from your orgasm washing over you. He propped himself up to look at your face but you just turned it away from him, burying it into the bed, bashful. He laughed at you again before mustering as much energy as he could to stand and go find something to clean you both up with.

When he came back into the room, damp cloth in hand, he watched you intensely, a smile plastered across your face, as you still struggled to make eye contact with him. Your still overstimulated core was making you rub your legs together in an attempt to channel the energy there. He let out a chuckle, he had never had this reaction from being with a girl before and the fact it was you made him feel even more special.

You finally met his eyes and smiled back at him. He felt like you were reading his mind and he too now felt bashful. He tossed the cloth he'd been fiddling with between his fingers at you in an attempt to stop the silent conversation that was going on between you. You caught the rag between your fingers, your body rolling slightly and relaxing as you took him in, your gaze softening.

Neither of you needed to say anything. You both knew what this was. It was a comfortable curiosity. You were his best friend and he was yours. There was no doubt of the platonic love you had for one another and now you just had a greater appreciation for each other.

You cleaned yourself up as Will pulled his boxers back on, before climbing back onto the bed with you. You tossed the cloth across the room, aiming for your hamper but it missed landing on the floor as Will wrapped an arm around you. You cuddled into him, your head resting against his shoulder, his fingers drawing lazy circles across your skin. “I love you.” you said softly but confidently.

“I know.” he said back, leaning down to place a kiss on the top of your head, a content smile fixed permanently to his face.

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Hope I didn’t forget to tag anyone and as always if you want to be added to the tag list just pop it in writing and I’ll add you for next time. As always if your tag doesn’t work properly I’m sorry.

@icanbeyourjedi @theshiningharmony @darnitdraco @kesskirata @wyn-dixie @rosiefridayrogersunday @actual-spawn-of-satan @clydesducktape @asta-lily @honey-hi @heythere-mel @heidi-toevs @wigofokoye @choricenter @goodgriefitsawildworld @lostgirlheather @d0uwannkn0w @justdrawings101 @nicotinebirds @bisexualolympus @babyratt19 @cookiecat22 @peterhollandkait @a-bang-for-your-bucky @asta-lily @codenamewife @lazyunknownwerewolf @emmy626 @natura1phenomenon @fanfics-that-hit-my-feels @fangirl-316 @thisisthewaytofiction @rosiefridayrogersunday-reads @aficwhore @slayerx147 @alberta-sunrise @itspdameronthings @nano-pax

#triple frontier #triple frontier x reader #will miller #william ironhead miller #will miller x reader #reader insert #frankie morales #frankie catfish morales #frankie morales x reader #santiago pope garcia #santiago garcia #santiago garcia x reader #benny miller #what benny doesn’t know

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lokilickedme · 3 years ago

Text

The Way

I’m writing horror again. I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason. And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly. Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note: I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you. But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed. It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case. We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to. There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did. If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us. We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew. Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care. It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE. There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish. As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me. I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

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This is, regrettably, a true story. Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

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They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway. Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption. Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances. We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks. Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well. You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave? The one who died under mysterious circumstances? That one.

He left the way he always came in. Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking. She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998. I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband. He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live. It wasn’t bad. He’d tell you otherwise. The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it. I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times. But now I know. That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back. It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway. This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of. The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon. My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other. James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him. Perception bias, he said. Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly. We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe. We meant it. He made people nervous. He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know. It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones. We were the smart ones, in retrospect. I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family. But mostly the congregation. It was always more important than anything else. And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking. Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right? The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition. They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home. Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed. God’s not like that. And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it? I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain. A moral code, yes. But isn’t that what God is, really? Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us. But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result. Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned. And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water. The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow. He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest. So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay. I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that. Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself. It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day. The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that. It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further. Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different. What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person. I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then. You were just weird, or you weren’t. And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking. But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to. He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known. And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now. I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult. There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it. My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later. My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though. He took the easy way. He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

----------

December 22, 1998. Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us. The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work. We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years. The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires. Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making. He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot. Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time. I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother. He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior. The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong. Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult. It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

----------

My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation. They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise. I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son. I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy. She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather. Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much. He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders. My grandmother couldn’t swim. We could make another Ruthie, he said. But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice. I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy. I was never close to him. But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me. I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life. But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak. I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear. And I felt bad. I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized. My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying. Granddads are supposed to be fun. Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam. And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him. She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on. She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown. That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next. How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand. It affected her. She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it. And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for. He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad. The homestead. The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived. A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives. James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for. She’d wanted us all to stay. We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said. That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be. We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke. It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me. James was dead, had been for years. Robbie was dead now too. Dad was gone, so was granddad. Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them. We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life. And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts. Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land. And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew. The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it. It was just an old grave. The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground. My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it. He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line. It was a cool jacket. Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era. He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door. To this day I can’t sort it. It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for. It was cold. I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it. And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said. He’s in his house. I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told. He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants. There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do. And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point. He said he didn’t know. He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important. Something tells me it was. Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again. He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow. I’m sorry.

What do we do? I asked him. I’ve never felt more blank. What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother. I remember thinking that was a good idea. Robbie would know what to do. He always did. Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them. He would get on it, whatever needed doing. He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut. I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

----------

It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it. Someone you saw just yesterday. Someone who was alive. Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow. And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from. The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life. I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him. I never saw him. I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van. I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with. And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that. Some days it helps. And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped. I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill. Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable. We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm. Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office. There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down. And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice. By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose. The end report was obtained two months later. It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue. There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death. His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life. There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery. He was a secretive person, intensely private. He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family. He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep. There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box. He simply hadn’t woken up to use it. Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said. He was melted, literally. It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say. He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me. I’ll go with you if you want to go. But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead. I never saw any proof that he was gone. He just wasn’t there anymore. There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

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Dad was different from that day on. He’d always been stoic, terse, strict. My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years. The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him. He was nicer suddenly. Mellow. Kind. After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny. The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before. He and I became friends. I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it. But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again. And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again. He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him? She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished. Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes. I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager. I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well. She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority. She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me. I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down. I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever. It changed me forever. That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either. She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me. It was the first of several disownings over the next few years. I got used to it. We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk. It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

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A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together. It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him. The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there. I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric. James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end. The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it. I don’t know why. It was dry.

He was gone.

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David and I laughed a lot that day. James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted. And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me. He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him. He was unknowable and therefore unbindable. But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub. I’m not sure what it went to. Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on. There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it. Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before. Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved. David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his. I told him to take it. It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something. One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

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My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived. After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge. He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another. There had been several more on the floor around the bed. My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone. Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how. Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with. My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing! We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common. Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation? Dad was the only one that spoke to them. They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that. My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

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The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it. Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

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The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us. There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway. There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret. In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring. We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death. We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me. James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway. The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

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We never felt safe on the hill again. Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession. She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice. We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness. But we knew she was evil. We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right. But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself. She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive. The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife. He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails. He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat. One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death. She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming. She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies. Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come. At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized. She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load. She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

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We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house. The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would. She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it. The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to. They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out. I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her. She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently. No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face. It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment. That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are. I can’t do that. I won’t let her win that way. I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name. I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away. My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said. He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered. But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

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Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking. He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west. The way we were going. And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

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jq37 · 3 years ago

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The Report Card – Fantasy High: The Seven Ep 6

Bitches Be Shopping

What is up y’all. A little late but let’s jump in with episode six of The Seven where our girls have just received a LOT of information, Sam most of all who got put into a little vision coma that she’s just now waking up from.

She explains the vision to her friends (as she interprets it, the other Eidolons didn’t die, just became part of the natural forces of the world) and then the bear that Penny made on a whim last episode (who is Russian, named Koda, and somehow a trained circus bear) gets into a fight with Katja with their friends buffing the two to make things more interesting because these are still idiot teens, life or death situation or no. Yelle decides to be the adult and tells them to knock it off and get back on mission.

That means Katja needs to call her dad since he’s knows the guy who’s the best lead to getting to TK ( Talcidimir Tallbreeze who I’ll call Tal). She actually manages to get her dad this time who is inside a giant snake on his hell mission. Katja asks what he knows about TK and he says she’s a sorcerer but also has a spell book so maybe she’s multiclassed. Sam and Ant desperately want to know if they boned and Katja absolutely is not interested in that knowledge. Yelle decides to just ask which makes her dad a little annoyed since he’s kind of in the middle of something (literally) and that annoys Ant, Ost, and Sam who--respectively, accuse him of gaslighting Kat, cast Command on him, and cast Bane on him to aid the Command spell.

Mr. Cleaver fails the save and Ost commands him to tell Katja the truth. He admits that he did hook up with TK and he regrets it (note: it wasn’t like he cheated. It was just a casual hookup that wasn’t fulfilling it seems). Ost demands he apologize for not being there for Kat and Sam berates him for being at the top of the world and not lifting up his daughter too. For his part, Kat’s dad seems genuinely apologetic and promises to do better.

“You don’t need to be the best father, you just need to be there,” Katja says, making her dad break down crying.

Yelle, who has no daddy issues, is a bit less aggro and says that everyone makes mistakes and he can start making it up right now by helping with the Tal situation. She also gives them the tip that a cold spell will probably get them out of the snake lickety split. She is on the money with the snake tip and Mr. Cleaver gets them all invites to a masquerade ball Tal is hosting. It’s being held on the Rumbosa which is this city-sized leisure ship. Mr. Cleaver says he’ll be back as soon as he can and, in the meantime, she should take care of her friends, “even the first 2 that were terrifying to me.”

The girls give Katja the axe they took as a birthday present (it was apparently her birthday the day before which Rekha just decided and Ost/Izzy refuses to accept without a fight because she *knows* Kat’s bday) which is identified as the Axe of Sundering (it can shatter objects, people, and sometimes concepts like halving movement). The two unnamed potions Yelle found are also ID’d as a Potion of Fly and a Potion of Gaseous Form. She distributes the Heath Potions to people without heals. Ant’s new arrows bypass some resistances and let her treat whatever she hits with the first one like it’s her favored enemy.

According to their invites, the ship they need is docking in the city of Gravalvia soon (a very old city in the Baronies) so they need to figure out a plan. They have some downtime, during which:

Zelda tries to hype up the team.

Zelda tries to see if Ost is OK wrt dad stuff and Ost has a Full Breakdown after badly pretending she’s fine.

While Zelda, Ost, and Penny are being Emotional and Sam is trying to literally cool them down with her powers, Ant and Yelle keep watch and experience emotional stability as the Adults Of The Party

Anyway, after a night of rest, they head to the golden city of Gravalvia which is this very cool, very pretty city with mosaics and fountains and I assume columns. They get there and there’s a dramatic fight happening in the square which is halted when one of the fighters realizes that the country he’s fighting for doesn’t exist anymore. And now, it’s time for what we’ve all been waiting for. Shopping Montage! Let’s go girl by girl.

Katja and Ost

Kat asks for help from Ost with getting fancy for this gala since she’s never really done anything dressy before (and she had no mom to help--Kaaaat) and Ost is happy to oblige, dressing them both like “Jersey trash”. Kat, of course, still wears her Khakis underneath.

Antiope

Ant decides to get a vibe for what people here wear and picks something that will blend in but be forgettable so she can be stealthy. Classy blue dress and mask.

Penny

Penny...OK, I absolutely cannot describe what happens here in any way that will do justice to the scene. I am going to tell you what matters to the plot. You have to watch this yourself if you want to see the entire table have a collective breakdown.

While looking for a costume, Penny runs into a halfling who is a member of the Society of Shadows--Laertes. He wants to know why she hasn’t responded to their invitation yet. She says she’s really eager to join, she just wasn’t sure how to respond (and also, she’s kind of in the middle of something). He says she can join by just messaging back and then her loved ones just have to sign waivers to have their memories wiped of her and she’s good to go. Say what now? asks Penny. She didn’t realize this was like a full Men in Black situation.

He says it’s ultimately her decision and leaves.

Of course, I left out the parts where he ate a handful of Candy Heart’s remains, became violently ill, almost projectile vomited into Penny’s mouth, and she tried to kiss him despite him being a full adult. It’s A Lot, ok?

Also, we don’t find out until later but Penny picks a sexy duck costume for reasons that make more sense if you watch the scene but not *much* more sense. She also burns one of the healing potions on this dude as he is bar

Danielle

Danielle tries to get some info on the guests at the party and gets the names Lawrence LaDuc, Princess Autumn, and Duston who is the playboy cousin of Tal. She also hears some dude saying some colonize and plunder the earth BS and casts Heat Metal on him, fully mercing the dude. Ice cold.

She tries to play it off like it’s the Curse of the Forest and when that doesn’t work and people start coming for her, she wildshapes into a dragon wyrmling and starts roasting people, killing 1 and dropping 2 to zero.

Unfortunately, one of her party members is a known dragon hater and uses her new arrows to snipe her right out of the sky. Ant is horrified once she realizes what she’s done but Yelle says it’s all good. It’s NOT all good, says Ant, I STABBED YOU. You’re allowed to be mad! Yelle says she’s just really good at compartmentalizing but what Ant’s getting here is that Yelle doesn’t really believe that her feelings matter which echo the fears of her moms.

Sam

Sam uses a combination of Mantle of Inspiration, glamour magic, performance, and good old flirting to get herself some killer clothes and also start a spontaneous musical number Giselle style.

Brennan says she looks resplendent and, honestly, when does she not?

They reconvene, Zelda in a classic hoop skirt. Yelle realizes she never got a costume and just whips out a Met Gala level, autumn themed, Queen Mab-esque costume with Druidcraft which she could have done this whole time so I guess that’s why she was cool spending her shopping time getting gossip and playing Poison Ivy.

They get to the ship and the way this works, everyone has to make an entrance and the really rich people (including Tal) are on a dais up top watching everyone come in. They all have to give fake names for the night since it’s a masquerade and they have to do Performance or Persuasion checks to see how impressive they look going in.

Before they go in, they plan a little. Penny wants to look for TK. Sam wants to find Dunston. Ost wants to talk to the bouncers. Yelle wants to see if there are plants she can manipulate (there are btw) and for any exits.

A quick rundown of how these all go:

Katja aka Mere (which means both mom and horse): 16

Ant aka Midnight Huntress: 18

Penny aka Penny Duckstone: 13

Zelda aka Madame Goodparty: 2 (Poor Zelda)

Sam aka Songbird: 22 (but she takes a hit to entrance save Zelda from totally flaming out)

Ost aka Stanley Gucci: 13

And Danielle, who never hogs the spotlight and is embarrassed to admit that maybe she does want to be the center of attention for once in her life with a Natural 20, gets a 29, absolutely bringing down the house as Empress Anima. As she walks forward she feels a voice say to her, “You got this. I love the name. You wear it well.”

Tal seems very impressed by her and a lady in a rabbit mask (Coeliabranca who I’ll call Coel if she comes up more) comes down to bring her up to the top with the high rollers. As she leaves, Sam casts Fly on her, just in case and holds the Concentration.

Ost and Kat go talk to the bouncers and Kat decides to pretend to be her mom to get access to the area Yelle is. She rolls low and is told, “Hey, aren’t you already up there?” Kat is like, fuck and Ost saves her by using her charm earrings to get an entourage of guards who will let them through and do what she says. Once up there, Kat doesn’t see her mom which I can imagine she has mixed feelings about.

Sam finds Dunston who is talking about Fantasy Bitcoin and seems like a real “Step on me mommy” type you know? Like, I feel like he’s into findom. Anyway, Sam charms him and his hangers on and learns about a procedure called a Phlebectomy that involves something going into their nose and then they feel better. Sam is rightfully horrified because, as I said, she is Most Likely To Survive A Horror Movie and can sense BS when she sees is. It’s apparently all the rage with the rich people here which is, como de dice, concerning seeing as they’re surrounded by them but we’ll get to that. Sam takes advantage of Dunston’s proclivities and gets him alone, knocks him out, steals him clothes, and pretends to be him (a *very* good scene by Sephie).

Penny sees a gnome gnome boy (Lysander Higgins) shining shoes and finds out from him that there is a copper earth genasi woman here. In a very Cinderella move, she asks what shoes she was wearing. Then, she makes out with him which like, sure. At least it’s not a grown adult man this time. Before she gets her kisses in, she does tell the group what she learned.

Up with the rich people, Yelle is introduced to Tal’s friend who is into Eidolons because of the name she chose. Between the shoes and her knowledge, they confirm that it’s TK! Yelle asks what she knows about Eidolons and she says that 7 is a very powerful number.

We cut to Ant who is patrolling the room as the sun sets and she suddenly hears a little beeping. It’s coming from a small crystal that was in Preston’s shirt (which she still has on her because???). Guests start dripping goo from their noses and transforming into monsters. Ant realizes that some kind of spell is happening triggered by midnight and this beeping. Hope these costumes are battle ready cause it’s fight time baybee!

Superlatives

Danielle: Most Likely to Be on The News for Murdering Fantasy Jeff Bezos

I cannot imagine what was running through Yelle’s head when she decided that, having just rolled into a foreign country, her next move was to start using lethal force on anti-environmentalist colonizing capitalists. Like, she’s not *wrong* per se but she is wild--in all senses of the word.

Random Thoughts

Kat keeps saying yesterday was her birthday which Ost/Izzy (and the rest of the group to a less vocal degree) are simply not having because maybe her dad would forget her birthday but her girls absolutely would not.

“You’re great because you stayed,” is the other killshot Kat line to her dad.

At a certain point Sam says, “This is so unhealthy,” to I think Yelle and like, if SAM is telling you your coping mechanisms are unhealthy, get thee to therapy.

OK, so someone, presumably Anima’s spirit, talks to Yelle as she makes her grand entrance which seems like info they should get to Talura ASAP, right? Cause that’s evidence they’re not dead-dead, just changed in form. But also Anima, girl. Don’t talk to Yelle. Talk to your rampaging sister!

"That's my secret, I stay in initiative."

Just a process note, notes are taken for the next ep and I am working on getting that recap up ASAP. As a battle ep, it will be in the abbreviated style that I did for last battle ep.

In this episode, Penny rolls a Nat 1 (which she rerolls) and one of Brennan’s NPCs rolls a Nat 1. Ant rolls 2 Nat 20s, Yelle rolls 1, and Brennan says that one of his NPCs gets a 20 which sweeps him entirely into Sam’s dance number.

#dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #the seven #the seven spoilers

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babypandawrites · 4 years ago

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Allies, Pt. 10

The Waterbending Master

Pairing: Sokka x F Reader Warnings: None Word Count: 3,827 Summary: The Northern Water Tribe, you've finally made it! It's certainly not the trip you thought it would be though.

Note: Like I mentioned in the last part, I do have a little outfit thing going on with the story- Brought that in a little late tho and we are changing it up in this chapter heh

-Navigation- | -Atla Masterlist- -Last Part- | -Allies Masterlist- | -Next Part-

Taglist: @boomeraangin | @brokennerdalert

“I’m not one to complain but,” Y/n’s attention lazily turned to Sokka as he started to speak, her eyebrows raising. “Yes you are.” He ignored her and continued. “Can’t Appa fly any higher?” The bison drifted a bit lower, his paws brushing against the water. Aang turned around to face them, looking at Sokka with a mix of annoyance and anger. “I have an idea, why don’t we all get on your back and you can fly us to the North Pole?” “I’d love to! Climb on everyone-” Sokka wiggled his butt in the air. “Sokka’s ready for takeoff!” Momo jumped up on him, in response to the sarcastic remark. “Look, we’re all just a little tired and cranky-” Katara got cut off by Y/n. “And cold.” She added, hugging herself as she shivered. Sokka looked at her with a blank expression. “Yeah I’m sure you’re freezing over there in my coat!” “Hey! Don’t complain when you offered it to me!” Katara breathed out a sigh. “Like I was saying- It’s just because we’ve been flying for two days straight.” “And for what? We can’t even find the Northern Water Tribe. There’s nothing up here.” Suddenly, splashing noises sounded up ahead, as ice rapidly shot across the water towards Appa. Aang screamed, yanking the bison’s reins causing him to bank right and avoid the ice. Though, Y/n, Katara, and Sokka nearly fell off the saddle, having to hold onto it for dear life. Appa jerks to the left as another ice attack comes from the waves, the ice slams into his underside making him fall into an uncontrolled spin into the water. The water around Appa solidifies, trapping him and the group in place. From behind the icebergs, several wooden skiffs float out to surround Appa, manned by people in Water Tribe clothing. Katara looked at the people with joy, Sokka and Y/n pausing their reach for their weapons as she spoke. “They’re waterbenders! We found the Water Tribe!”

Once Appa was freed from his icy prison, he swam through the water in formation with the Water Tribe boats. Aang stood up, and pointed ahead. “There it is!” Y/n shuffled to the edge of Appa’s saddle, and leaned over it to look where Aang had been pointing. “Woah…” “The Northern Water Tribe…” Katara spoke with wonder. “We’re finally here…” The crew on one of the skiffs start to waterbend in unison, opening a circular slot in the ice gating around the tribe, revealing a short tunnel. One of the waterbenders motioned forward, telling them to go on. Appa swam through the tunnel, which led into a lock system controlled by waterbending. Several waterbenders worked the system, allowing them into the city. “I can’t believe how many waterbenders live up here!” Katara commented, watching the benders working the lock system. Aang looked at her with a smile. “We’ll find a master to teach us, no problem!” Appa followed after a skiff that led them through the canals in the city. People gawked at them as they went through the town, clearly in awe. Though the people of the Northern Tribe weren’t the only ones in awe, The Northern Water Tribe was really a sight to see. With its beautiful ice buildings and scenery, Y/n found herself in complete awe of the city. Katara was in awe of the city as well. “This place is beautiful.” Y/n nodded in agreement, as Sokka spoke up from behind them. “Yeah, she is.” The two girls turned to look at him, seeing that he was balanced on Appa’s tail, staring at a passing boat that a girl sat in. They shared a look, rolling their eyes at Sokka.

Awkwardly, Y/n shuffled to take a seat between Katara and Sokka as Chief Arnook addressed everyone attending the festivities. She would have been there sooner, if not for the women who ushered her away for new clothes. Of course it was nice to be in appropriate clothing for the weather, but they’d been a little... difficult. “-rrival of our brother and sisters from the Southern Tribe, and they have brought with them someone very special, someone whom many of us believed disappeared from the world until now. The Avatar!” The crowd cheered at his words. “We also celebrate my daughter’s 16th birthday. Princess Yue is now of marrying age.” He stood aside to show Yue, his daughter, as she approached the table accompanied by two attendants. Now, Princess Yue spoke. “Thank you, father. May the great Ocean and Moon Spirits watch over us during these troubled times.” “Now, Master Pakku and his students will perform!” The chief motioned towards three men who stood on a dais in front of the fountain opposite of where they currently sat, who began to bend water from three enormous amphorae in front of them. The crowd cheered and clapped at the display. Aang, Katara and Y/n watched in delight, as they all clapped as well. Y/n’s attention was pulled from the waterbending show, when Katara rested a hand on her shoulder to get her attention. “Say, Y/n. Have you ever tried to waterbend before? Cause I mean, your partaly from the tribe and if you happened to be a waterbender, this would be the best place to learn it.” “I tried as a kid, but to no result. I think I can say I’m not a waterbender with pretty high confidence.” Katara’s expression fell from hopefulness to disappointment, as she nodded in understanding. “Oh, I see.” Part of Y/n wondered why Katara was so hopeful that she might be a waterbender, and just how long she’d been waiting to ask that. She offered her friend a sympathetic smile, slightly tuning into Sokka’s conversation with Princess Yue. “-I’m kinda like a Prince myself!” Scoffing, Y/n glanced over at him. “Prince?” Katara let out a laugh. “Ha! Prince of hat?” Sokka turned to look at them, angrily. “A lot of things! Uh, do you mind? I’m trying to have a conversation here!” “My apologies, Prince Sokka.” Katara offered a mocking bow as she spoke, causing Y/n to laugh. “Ah, yes, sincerest apologies.” She barely got the sentence out, before she started to laugh again. As the girls laughed, Sokka turned back to Princess Yue, both Y/n and Katara trying to sush each other's laughter to continue listening in. “So it looks like I’m gonna be in town for awhile. I’m thinking maybe we could.... Do an activity together?” “Do an ‘activity’?” Turning away from the Princess, Sokka stuffed his mouth with food, clearly embarrassed from his poor flirting attempt. Katara watched her brother in amusement. “Very smooth.” Y/n, also watching in amusement, nodded her head softly. “The smoothest.” He glared at them, as he swallowed down the food. “Shut up.” She raised her hands in defense, as Katara moved her attention to eating. “By the way, loser-” Sokka looked at Y/n, exasperated. “Hey!” Ignoring him, she picked up his coat which had been resting on her lap, and shoved it towards him. “Here’s your coat, thanks for letting me wear it so I didn’t freeze to death earlier.” He took it, looking somewhat relieved. Probably because he wouldn’t have to be without a coat in the North Pole anymore. “Yeah it wasn’t a problem.” He paused for a moment, to pull on the coat. “Actually, that was a lie. It was a problem, do you know how cold it is around here?” “Yeah, I do know how cold it is around here. But sorry, do you want me to make it up to you Sokka?” She paused, grinning. “Maybe I could take you to do an activity sometime.” “You. You are the worst.”

Breathing out a sigh, Y/n stared blankly at the ceiling. It was the next morning, and everyone had gone off to do something, leaving her alone with Momo- who was currently curled up on her chest. “Is this how you and Appa always feel, when we have to leave you two behind to be stealthy?” The small lemur chittered. “I am so sorry. This is really the worst.” It’s not like she wasn’t accustomed to being alone, before meeting Aang, Katara and Sokka she didn’t have anyone. Maybe over the past however long it’s been since they met, she’s gotten a little two attached. Another sigh pushed past her lips. “What happened to me, Momo? I used to be fine on my own. I thrived being by myself, now look at me, staring boredly at a ceiling because everyone is busy!” She lifted one of her hands to the ceiling as she spoke, before letting it fall back to her side. When Momo chittered, she gently patted his head. “Well, Katara and Aang have their waterbending practice and well, we can’t really do anything about that. Maybe we could go watch? We might be seen as some kind of distraction to them though. Then Sokka… I don’t know what he’s up to.” She paused for a moment. “What is he doing?” Another pause. “Ugh, why do I even care?” Momo chittered once again, causing her to look at him offended. “Momo! How dare you! I was going to invite you to come to town with me but know I’m not so sure.” He chittered again, causing her to breath a sigh. “Okay, okay, you can come with me. But it’s cold, so you might wanna hang out in my coat.” Y/n picked the lemur up, to move him from her chest so she could get up and pull on her coat and boots. After letting the small animal snuggle into her coat, she headed out for a day on the town. She walked along the streets of the city, occasionally petting Momo’s head when he popped it out of her coat. “Isn’t this nice, Momo? We can go around and do whatever we want, without a care or worry in the world.” Her steps slowly came to a stop. “Hmm. It’s kind of… boring, actually. Never thought I’d say that.” Shaking away her thoughts, she decided to go into one of the shops she was walking past, a quick look around told her it was a clothing shop. A quiet bell jingled when she opened the door, which seemed to alert the older woman who came from the back room. “Oh! Welcome, how can I help you?” The woman offered a kind smile, the contagious kind.” Offering a smile, Y/n stepped more into the shop, looking around a bit more closely. “I’m honestly just here to look around- Um are animals allowed? I have a lemur in my coat.” As if on cue, Momo popped his head out. “As long as he doesn’t mess with anything, I don’t mind.” “Alright, you heard her Momo, don’t go messing with anything.” She paused, turning her attention back to the woman. “I promise he’ll behave.” The woman breathed out a laugh. “I’ll take your word for it. Let me know if you need any help dear.” “I will, thank you.” Y/n started to walk about the small shop, looking at the clothes and accessories that were being sold. Since she’d just gotten the clothes she was wearing yesterday, she didn’t intend on buying something new in the regard, but maybe she would purchase one of the accessories in the shop. Everything here was beautiful after all, it might feel like a crime to not get anything. “These pieces are gorgeous..” “Thank you.” She turned to look at the woman when she spoke up, watching as she moved to stand next to her. The woman carefully picked up the bracelet she was looking at. “May I see your wrist?” Offering a nod, Y/n pushed up the sleeve of her coat some, holding her wrist out to the woman. She tied the bracelet around her wrist. Most of it was woven, with soft brown materials, though in the center of the bracelet was a beautiful blue stone with the water tribe insignia carved into it. “All our products are hand made, we put care and love into each one. My son crafts most of the jewelry we sell, this was actually the last piece he crafted before taking leave.” Y/n looked closer at the bracelet, slowly twisting her wrist to watch the

stone glint in the light that came through the windows, as the woman continued speaking. “You seem very enamored, are you going to buy it?” “I definitely want to. I’d have to talk to my friends about it though, we have a shared budget.” “Understandable.” The woman started to untie the bracelet. “I can keep it on hold for you, so if you’re able to you can just come right back and it’ll be ready for you.” She paused for a moment, as she took the bracelet over to the counter to wrap it in parchment. “Though, my son didn’t just craft jewelry. He also worked out here and helped customers so I could focus on making my orders in the back room. If your maybe interested in getting some more money for you and your friends, I do have an opening.” “I think, I just might be interested.”

“How’s warrior training going?” In response to his sister's question, Sokka kicked a bag on the floor in anger, before falling to his knees and dropping his head on the bag to use as a pillow. Y/n watched him with a raised eyebrow. “That bad?” “No, it’s Princess Yue. I don’t get it. One minute she wants to go out with me and the next she’s telling me to get lost!” He paused for a moment. “So how’s waterbending training?” Katara flopped onto her sleeping bag, causing her hood to flip over her head. “Master Poophead won’t teach her because she’s a girl.” Aang explained. “Why don’t you just teach her, Aang?” “Why didn’t I think of that?” Katara got up. “At night, you can teach whatever moves you learned from Master Pakku. That way you have someone to practice with and I get to learn waterbending. Everyone’s happy!” Sokka crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not happy.” “But you’re never happy. Come on, Aang.” Katara left the room, Aang following close behind, leaving Y/n with a very sulky Sokka. Momo chittered at the male, but was given no response. Silence lingered in the air for a few moments, before Sokka spoke up. “Hey, Y/n, you're a girl. Maybe you can help me with this.” He sat up, and moved to face her. “Why do you think Princess Yue is acting like this?” “Um, well…” Y/n stumbled over her thoughts, really unsure on what to say. “Maybe… she’s just scared of liking you?” Sighing, his head slumped forward. “Am I really that bad? Would it ruin her reputation as a Princess or something to date me?” “No! No, that’s not what I was trying to say! What I mean is that- The only reason we’re here is so Aang and Katara can learn waterbending, right? So eventually we’re gonna have to leave and Princess Yue is probably aware of that.” “Oh. Yeah… Yeah that makes sense.” Sokka breathed out a sigh, falling onto his back, before rolling onto his side. “I think I’m gonna just go to bed. Goodnight.” “Goodnight, Sokka.” Breathing out her own sigh, Y/n moved to lay on her back, staring blankly at the ceiling. Why does he care so much? Why does she care so much?! For a moment her thoughts lingered on the day they went to that fortune teller, but she shut that down really quick. Nope, not going there. Another sigh escaped from her, as she drapped an arm over her eyes. Maybe she just needs some sleep. Yeah.

Apparently, Aang teaching Katara what he learned from Master Pakku didn’t do well. That was pretty obvious to Y/n as she stood in front of the tribes council, Chief Arnook, Princess Yue and Master Pakku alongside her friends the next day. “What do you want me to do? Force Master Pakku to take Aang back as his student?” “Yes- please!” “I suspect he might change his mind if you swallow your pride and apologize to him.” Katara glanced at Aang for a moment, before looking over to Master Pakku. “Fine.” She was clearly not happy with this development. “I’m waiting, little girl.” Pakku spoke with a smug smile. “No! No way am I apologizing to a sour old man like you!” As she spoke, a crack started to form in the floor beneath her, a show of her bending getting a little out of control. “Uh, Katara…” Ignoring Aang, she pointed her finger at Pakku. “I’ll be outside- if you’re man enough to fight me!” Princess Yue gasped in surprise, as the man in the room stiffened. Katara turned, and stalked out of the room. Aang watched as she left. “I’m sure she didn’t mean that.” “Yeah, I think she did.” Sokka disagreed. Y/n offered a nod. “Oh, she definitely did.”

The three followed after Katara, walking down the long steps of the citadel with her. “Are you crazy, Katara? You’re not gonna win this fight!” Katara took off her coat, and threw it at Sokka in response, hitting him in the face. “I know! I don’t care!” “You don’t have to do this for me. I can find another teacher.” “I’m not going it for you! Someone needs to slap some sense into that guy!” “You're right Katara, I think you can do it. Kick his butt.” “I will. Thank you Y/n.” Sokka looked at Y/n exasperated. “Don’t encourage her!” She elbowed him in the side. “If not for your idea, we wouldn’t be here, so maybe you should be a little more encouraging. Especially since you’re her brother.” As they all reached the bottom of the steps, Pakku appeared at the top. Katara turned to look at him. “So, you decided to show up?” He just walked right past her. “Aren’t you going to fight?” “Go back to the healing huts with the other women where you belong.” He… he did not just say that. Visibly raging, Katara bent a water whip from the ground and used it to whip Pakku on the back of the neck, causing him to freeze his steps. Slowly, he turned to face Katara. “Fine. You want to learn to fight so bad, study closely!” Pakku pulled the water from two large pools, bending them around himself. Katara ran at him, but was flung backwards by the water Pakku was bending. He starts to bend the water around both of them, making it spin faster and faster to create a whirlpool type effect. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you!” He spoke mockingly, as the water constricted around them. Before it could constrict enough to knock her down, Katara swung her arm, changing the trajectory of the water. The water flung away from her, but ended up hitting Sokka and sending him flying backwards with a loud “OW” exclamation. Watching him get knocked back like that, Y/n shuffled to stand behind Aang in case more water was shot their way. Attention turning back to the fight, she watched as Katara ran at Pakku from behind with a water whip. He raised a ramp of ice in front of her though, which she slid up onto before flipping off and landing on the guardrail of the citadel steps behind him. Pakku liquefied the water, and threw it at Katara, but she bent it out of the way. “You can’t knock me down!” The small crowd that’d gathered to watch the fight cheered. “Go Katara!” Aang cheered out, as Y/n cheered “You got this!” Katara ran at the man again, liquifying the sheet of ice he put between them. She threw several punches at Pakku, which he was able to dodge pretty well. Bending a large glob of water, he threw her into a nearby pool. When she rose from under the water, some people in the crowd cheered again. She raised a circular pedestal out of the water, before shooting thin discs of ice at Pakku. He broke most of them with quick movements, but the last one just narrowly passed by his head. Katara bent a stream of water around her, then threw it at Pakku, who caught it and began to bend it around himself. Katara ran at him again, but was quickly knocked back from a wave of water Pakku sent at her. She was fully knocked to the ground from the force, landing just a bit aways from the staircase. Despite her heavy breathing, she was quick to get on her feet again. She moved her arms, bending the two ice pillars that were behind Pakku, causing them to collapse, just barely missing him. “Well, I’m impressed. You are an excellent waterbender.” “But you still won’t teach me, will you?” “No.” Katara raised the water near her feet, freezed it and sent it in a rolling wave along the ground at Pakku. He raised himself from the ground with a pillar of ice when it reached him, before liquifying the base of the column and bending it to glide forward. She raised a stream of water and used it to knock Pakku down, but he was able to manipulate her water into an arc around her, which he slid across. He knocked Katara down as he passed her, causing her hair to fall loose and her necklace to fall onto the ground. Pakku bent a huge column of water from one

of the pools near him, making it whirlpool in the air before freezing it into shards that he shot at Katara. None of them seemed to hurt her, but they did trap her. She struggled against the icy prison, but to no result. “This fight is over.” Master Pakku said as he walked past her. “Come back here! I’m not finished yet!” “Yes, you are.” He abruptly stopped, looking in surprise at Katara’s necklace. He bent down to pick it up. “This is my necklace!” “No it’s not, it’s mine! Give it back!” “I made this sixty years ago- for the love of my life.” The ice holding Katara in place suddenly liquified. “For Kana.” “My Gran-Gran was supposed to marry you?” “I carved this necklace for your grandmother when we got engaged. I thought we would have a long, happy life together. I loved her.” “But she didn’t love you, did she? It was an arranged marriage.” Katara walked up to Pakku. “Gran-Gran wouldn’t let your tribe’s stupid customs run her life. That’s why she left. It must have taken a lot of courage.” Princess Yue, who’d been tearing up at what Katara was saying, started to cry- before running off. Aang leaned closer to Sokka. “Go get her.” When Sokka chased after Yue, Y/n watched, breathing out a quiet sigh. So, this is how this visit is going to be.

#avatar the last airbender #atla #avatar the last airbender x reader #atla x reader #reader insert #sokka x reader #sokka x y/n #sokka x you #team avatar #slowburn #book one allies

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snackhobi · 4 years ago

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pairing: min yoonji x reader / word count: 9.7k / genre: f x f smut, assassin!au

summary: a fic inspired by this post and that’s pretty much it-

warnings: sexually explicit content (NSFW), talk about death/assassination (nothing graphic dw! but they are assassins, so), mild violence, unnecessarily sexually charged lipstick application, face riding, fingering, multiple orgasms, oral (f giving/receiving), use of restraints, overstimulation, squirting, kind of dom!yoonji?

a/n: this is an entirely self-indulgent fic I wrote as a gift to myself for my bday, it’s a lil rushed bc I wanted it done for today! women are so very beautiful and I am so very weak, thank you ladies for all being so amazing ily. this was meant to be a short pwp and now it’s almost 10k but I have no regrets bye

la petite mort French literal meaning: ‘the little death’; also an expression used to refer to the brief loss or weakening of consciousness, specifically the sensation of orgasm as likened to death; an orgasm.

“It’s just unacceptable.”

The woman in front of you is clearly wealthy. Her dark hair is perfectly styled and her pale nails are perfectly shaped and her subtle makeup is perfectly flattering; she’s starting to get older but rather than shy away from it, she’s leaning into it, and she looks almost imperious in her beauty, eyes sharp and set of her lips severe. Park Dahye was born into wealth and has clearly thrived in the life that she’s been afforded.

“Mmhm.” You try not to yawn.

“He’s flitting around with some young, silly thing on his arm, with no consideration for the family’s reputation— my reputation,” she continues. Her posture is perfect, from the set of her spine to her crossed legs to her folded hands that rest on her knee, somehow demure and yet highlighting all of her beauty and riches; the jewellery on her wrists and fingers, the expensive heels on her feet, the slit of her haute-couture dress, no doubt tailored for her and her alone. “I’ve already spoken to him about his behaviour, but he’s just ignored my warnings. We may have agreed on the divorce but we’re currently still husband and wife— has he no shame?”

“Awful.” You don’t even try to hide how bored you are, but Dahye is so quietly incensed that she doesn’t even notice as she launches into the next part of her queenly diatribe, and you muffle a sigh.

That’s the problem with rich clients. Sure, they’re willing to fork over stupid amounts of money to you, but they also think that their issues are of paramount significance— like they’re the centre of the universe and their problems are the only important ones in the world. Like you’re interested in what they have to say. Like this is the only job you’ll ever do that holds real weight or meaning.

For them, it’s a life-changing (life-ending) decision.

For you? It’s another Tuesday.

“Yes, yes, that’s just so terrible, gosh, I don’t know how you manage it,” you say once she pauses to take a breath, using the opportunity to cut her off before she launches into another part of her articulate rant. “Anyway. Would you prefer if his death was embarrassing or quiet?”

For the first time since you’ve met, she seems unsettled. “Pardon?”

Namjoon is much better with people than you, smooth and charming with his boyish dimples. Normally any discussions would go through your handler, but this woman had demanded to meet you personally and had been willing to pay for the privilege: so here you are, with your relative bluntness instead of Joon’s winsome smile.

“You know,” you say, gesturing with your hands. “When they find the body. Do you want him to be caught with his trousers around his ankles—literally or figuratively, that’s up to you— or would you rather it seemed like something natural and unpredictable? Like a sudden heart attack in his sleep, for example.”

When it comes to rich clients, a lot of it is about reputation. When someone’s shuffled off this mortal coil, it’s not just that they’re removed from the equation, it’s also about the ripples that their death leaves in the high society that they’ve lived in. Does she want her (soon-to-be) ex-husband made a mockery of, or does she just want him out of the picture?

She can’t see your face, behind your mask as it is, but you can see hers in perfect clarity. For all that Dahye seems put together and almost impassive, you see the tiny flicker in her eyes. Ah. She’s not just mad because he’s ruining their reputation. She’s hurt.

Man, that sucks. Honestly you bet it’s easier being an assassin than a rich housewife. At least when it comes to backstabbing you can literally involve a knife to sort your problems out. (Well, knives are messy, but you get the picture.)

“I’d prefer something quiet,” she decides. “I’d worry that it could lead back to me, otherwise.”

You’d be offended at the idea that you’d leave any trace that could implicate anyone or that this man’s sudden death was in any way suspicious, but she’s paying you enough that you find that you don’t care. You take pride in your work, but for the amount of zeroes involved in the fee you’re being paid, you think you can take an unintentional insult or two. Or three. Or ten.

You like money, what can you say.

“Sure thing,” you say, giving her a lazy, two fingered salute. You’ve been reclining against the desk of the hotel suite, flicking the complimentary, heavy metal pen between your fingers, twirling it like the world’s most underwhelming baton. You straighten up and let the pen drop back into the pen pot—wait, no, of course it’s a handmade porcelain jar, an alarmingly well-made Joseon porcelain replica. Everything in here stinks of money. “RM will confirm where the money is to be deposited. Half of it now as collateral, and half upon completion of the job,” you say. “If you change your mind between now and then, we’ll be keeping the original 50%, but if for some reason something goes awry, you’ll receive that money back. Sound good?”

She seems surprised at your directness. “I—”

“Fabulous!” You clap your hands together, although the sound is muffled by your gloves. You’re not about to leave your fingerprints everywhere, geez. “Alright, time for me to skidaddle I suppose! I’ve got work to be doing, people to be watching, men to be killing!”

Dahye flinches imperceptibly, but by this point you’ve already slipped out onto the balcony and into the night.

Being an assassin is hard work.

Technically, everyone has the capacity to kill another human being. But killing as a job involves a lot more than just caving someone’s head in with a rock—that’s why Cain isn’t referred to as an assassin, what with how he’d just bashed his brother Abel with a convenient stone that happened to be lying nearby. He was just a straight up dick.

No, when you kill professionally you need to be familiar with an array of different techniques, each one far more sophisticated than the last. You need to know how to be stealthy, how to blend in as you watch your target, how to set up the scenes of their death in a way that doesn't arouse suspicion. Or, instead, how to set the scene up in a way that lets any onlookers know that this person had been offed by someone who knew what they were doing, and knew it well. There's a difference between being a killer and being an assassin and you are firmly in the latter category.

So, if your client wants her husband to be shuffled off quietly, then that’s what she’ll get.

They really have pulled out all the stops for this charity gala. Everything is shining, glittering and bright: the surroundings, the food, the people. Especially the people. The rich elite have come together for an extravagant and exquisite night of ostentation and luxury, all in the name of raising money for some needy cause. (You try not to think of the irony and/or hypocrisy behind that.)

It’s almost laughable how easy it is to blend in here. Namjoon had secured (forged) invitations for you both, and so you hang off his arm as you make a slow sweep of the room, trailing unnoticed after your target. You’re not planning to make a move right now but you want to feel out exactly what he’s like: the more information you have about the person you’ve been contracted to assassinate, the better.

Plus it’s an excuse to dress up nice and eat free food— though that last part is mainly Namjoon.

“God, these canapés are so good,” Namjoon moans quietly to you, hoovering up the flaky pastry crumbs from his fingers with single-minded intent. You dig your fingers subtly into his arm.

“I thought we agreed on not eating tonight, Joon,” you mutter to him, although you say it with a beatific smile in case anyone is watching; the place is heaving with people but you’re always on guard. (Even if Namjoon is right. The hors d’oeuvres that are on offer do look incredibly tempting.)

“You have a glass of champagne,” he points out.

“And you may have noticed that I haven’t drunk any of it.” You titter, as if he’s just told a funny joke, and lightly slap his arm. Again, you’re fairly certain no one is watching, but you can never be too careful. “It’s all about creating a facade, Joonie. It’s what we in the business call a ruse.”

Even throughout your back and forth, you’ve kept your eyes on your man of the night: Park Minjae, a middle-aged businessman who’s been greeting people and getting swept up in conversation, all while a slip of a blonde clings to his arm, stuck to his side like a pretty limpet. She’s cute, sure, but she lacks the poise that Dahye has, so you frankly don’t get it. Then again, not everyone finds strong women as attractive as you do. Weirdos.

You’ve been focused on Minjae but your eyes have also been flitting around the room, drinking in your surroundings, drawing up a detailed map of your environment (of course you’d scoped out the building before tonight, but with all the banquet tables and chairs around the layout is a little different). The people, too, have been subject to your scrutiny, although so far they all seem summarily unimportant and uninteresting, just as you’d suspected. You lift your glass to your lips and pretend to take a tiny, demure sip, glancing up through your eyelashes to scan the room again, and you freeze.

Holy shit.

You take back what you just said about everyone being unimportant and uninteresting.

The woman who’s just walked in is fucking stunning. Her sleek dark bob is unstyled, but perfectly frames her beautiful face: sharp eyes, soft nose, flushed lips. Her cocktail dress lets you see almost every inch of those perfect legs, the line of her thighs to her calves and— oh, you swear you could shed a tear of joy. She’s already tall and she’s made even taller by the heels she wears, towering above most of the men here, a fucking Amazonian goddess who looks powerful and undeniably elegant at the same time.

(Thank you for your service, tall women.)

You don’t know who she is, but goddamn, do you want to. She’s scanning the room, and for a brief moment, your eyes touch. A tiny thrill shudders up your spine at the darkness of her keen eyes, that quick and astute gaze.

It’s only the tiniest of moments that’s over as soon as it’s started. The dark-haired beauty looks away and is already disappearing into the crowd before you realise, and it’s only then you notice that you’re staring, utterly drawn in by her cool poise and presence. You’ve been frozen in place with the rim of your champagne glass resting against your mouth, and your eyelashes flutter as you blink and glance down.

The imprint of your lower lip has been left on the glass, stark red visible against its edge, and you squeeze Namjoon’s bicep.

“How does my lipstick look?”

He takes one look at you as he swallows down another tiny vol-au-vent. “Like half of it is missing,” he says, and you frown.

“Ugh. I’ll go touch it up in the bathroom. Keep an eye on our guy, I’ll be right back.”

It’s not until you’ve made it to the toilets that you realise that you do not, in fact, have any lipstick in your ridiculously small clutch bag. When it comes to your actual work, you’re meticulous and thorough and well-planned, but for some bizarre reason, a tube of lipstick is never the top of the list when it comes to equipment. Unbelievable. (You knew you should have worn the 24/7 stuff, but it was always such a nightmare to get off.)

You’ve been so busy rummaging through your bag that you’re completely caught off-guard at the sound of a quiet voice from behind you.

“Lost something?”

Oh, fuck. It’s her, your dark haired and dark eyed beauty, meeting your gaze through the mirror when you glance up from where you’re resting your bag against the marble counter (marble, marble, marble, it’s all marble: the floors, the counters, the sinks; why do rich people always love marble?). She looks altogether too amused at your plight and at how your eyes have widened perceptibly upon seeing her again. But can she blame you? Her presence is so graceful and commanding and she’s so dizzyingly attractive it’s insane. Surely she must get this all the time.

You stare for a little longer than is probably polite, and even behind her fringe you can see how one of her eyebrows rises.

“Sorry for staring,” you say once you notice. “You’re just so beautiful.”

She pauses as she takes in the compliment. You see how her eyes flicker over your face and settle on your mouth; your upper lip, tinted burgundy red, while the lower is faint and smudged.

“Lipstick problems?” She cocks her head at you, still staring at your lips in the mirror. God, she’s so hot.

“Can you tell?” You sound rueful as you glance down at the reflection of your mouth, touching your bottom lip lightly with a fingertip. “I forgot to bring any with me so now I’m stuck.”

She finally looks away from you. You hear a small, metallic click as she unclasps her evening bag— marginally larger than your own— and lifts out a small tube of liquid lipstick. “Would you like to use mine?”

Fuck yes you would.

“Oh, would that be alright?” You finally turn around, and you have to tilt your head back to look at her, taller than you in her heels. Jesus Christ. She’s going to be the death of you. Why are women so gorgeous? Who gave them the right? “I’m not sure the shade will match, though?”

You watch her beautiful mouth curve up into a small smirk as she pulls out a tiny pack of makeup remover wipes from her bag, and you swear could propose to her there and then. Beautiful and tall and organised? Holy shit. What a woman.

She’s got her bag in one hand, while the lipstick and wipes are clasped in the other; her hand is held up in such a way that you think she means for you to take them from her, but when you reach out she shakes her head.

“I’ll do it for you,” she says. The quiet note of authority in her tone makes you go weak at the knees.

Thank god the toilets you chose aren’t the main ones, because it means there’s no one around to see how she tilts her head at the marble counter in the universal gesture of get on there. It’s entirely unnecessary, but you, of course, immediately comply. You brace your hands against the cold stone before hitching yourself up, careful with the draping folds of your dress; the cold touch of the stone is noticeable through the material of your dress, but it’s instantly forgotten when your enchantress steps closer.

You spread your knees so she can stand between them. Holy shit, she’s even better up close. Her lashes are wispy but they’re the perfect frame for her gorgeous eyes, which are dark and intent. You suppress a shiver. You hold yourself still as she leans forward and around you so she can put her clutch and lipstick down, trying to ignore how close she is, but there’s no way she can’t realise what she’s doing. Your heart is pounding. You wish you didn’t have a job to do tonight because you would so much rather be getting, ah, acquainted with this woman rather than following some old businessman around.

The only noise in the bathroom is the sound of peeling plastic as she opens the tiny packet of wet wipes before she curls one around her finger, glancing at you through her lashes.

“Open,” she instructs.

Your mouth drops open immediately. She sweeps the wipe over your lips, bottom, then top, touch firm but careful, drawing away the red from your skin; you stare at her as she works, how her eyes are cast down as she stares at your mouth. She’s using her free hand to grip your chin and you feel deliciously powerless in her grasp.

You purse your lips a little to try and help her, watching the way her eyes flicker as she pulls the wipe back over them— somewhat firmer, this time, with more intent. Lingering. The only barrier between her finger and your mouth is soft and flimsy, the texture of the wipe against your lips like cotton as it drags across them, and it would be so easy to pull it out of her hands.

She flicks the dirtied wipe aside, heedless of how it lands on the unsullied marble, before reaching for her lipstick. She twists the tube in her fingers, motions of her hands precise and deft, and you’ve never been so attracted to how someone’s uncapped something before.

You watch her hands. (She watches you.)

Your eyes trail over the wand as she pulls it out, dragging the doe foot against the rim to catch the excess before turning it towards you, putting the tube by your thigh, near where your hand is bracing against the marble. She takes hold of your chin once again. You stay quiet as she starts to sweep the lipstick over your lips, painting them the same flushed pink as her own. Once again she’s staring at her work so you’re free to drink her in, almost drunk from her beauty, eyes catching on the tiny moles on her pale skin, the smallest freckles that are only noticeable because you’re this close.

The squelch of the applicator sliding into the tube is almost lewd in the silence of the bathroom, and this time you can’t suppress a shiver when she pulls your chin down to open your mouth so she can go back in again on your lips, drawing a sharp, crisp line. Tracing the edges of your lips, the flushed swell of them, the peak of your cupid’s bow.

She glances up. For a moment you’re both still, staring at each other, tension in the air palpable, but then she smacks her lips and you copy the motion, evening the application of the makeup on your mouth.

“Perfect,” she murmurs. “One more step.”

A small, confused frown flits over your face. She’s put the lipstick aside but then she lifts a finger and points towards your still parted lips. You take in a small, shuddering breath when she speaks again and you realise what she means.

“You don’t want to get lipstick on your teeth, do you?”

Both of her eyebrows have risen and she’s looking at you like you’re being silly if you disagree with her.

“No,” you say. You’re not about to deny her. “No, I don’t.”

Your eyes remain locked. You lean forwards, taking that perfect, long finger into your mouth, dragging your lips upwards so that any excess lipstick is caught against her pale skin, a ring of deep rose circling her bottom knuckle; you curl your tongue around her, hot and wet, feeling the crease of her knuckles and pad of her fingertip against your taste buds as you slowly, slowly pull away.

It’s undoubtedly indecent and risqué and you can feel the flush of arousal settling in your lower belly, an almost embarrassing flush of wetness leaking out of you at the taste of her skin. She, however, remains unmoved, although she lets her finger linger just for a moment on your bottom lip, almost rough against their softness— but before you can swallow those fingers back down and ruin her meticulous work, she pulls away, lifting the discarded wipe to sweep it around her finger, catching the lipstick you’d left on her skin.

“Done.”

She steps back and you feel like you can finally breathe, a breath so deep you can feel how your lungs fill, oxygen rushing to your brain so fast you feel lightheaded. You watch as she sweeps everything back into her bag, clicking it shut with a note of finality; the sullied wipe is cast carelessly into a tiny, chrome bin with a flick of a wrist, her every motion regal.

You slide off the counter. You still can’t take your eyes off her and you don’t want to. It feels like whatever heaviness was in the air has dissipated, gone in an instant with a turn of her head— normally you’d let it slide, even if you feel disappointed, but she’s just so magnetic.

“Thank you,” you say. You can see yourself in the mirror now and to your complete lack of surprise, your lipstick is perfect. The shade is lighter than one you’d have chosen for yourself but it’s beautiful on her, of course.

“You’re welcome.” She’s in the middle of washing her hands, but she glances over her shoulder at you, and the firm set to her face lightens a little as she smiles. It’s a small, sly thing, and you realise with a start that she knows exactly what effect she has on you.

I’m coming back for you, you think to yourself. You have work to do tonight, but—

“What’s your name?”

She pauses. She shuts off the tap with a quick motion, reaching forward for a rolled hand-towel, a neat stack on a metal tray nearby. You wonder if she’s not going to answer but then she speaks, looking at you instead of the soft cotton she’s rubbing over her skin. “Yoonji,” she says. “I’m Min Yoonji.”

Min Yoonji is the most gorgeous fucking woman you’ve ever seen.

“I love your dress, Yoonji,” you say, and it’s true, you really do— but you’d prefer it if it was off. Not that you’re about to say that, of course.

She lets out a breath of laughter. “I know.” Oh, god, you love confident women. “What’s your name, darling?”

You have that same split second of hesitation, similar to Yoonji’s only moments prior. You use a codename when you work, of course, and you have a plethora of fake identities that you use and are intimately familiar with— but the idea of your real name falling off Yoonji’s flushed, petal lips? Woof.

“Y/n L/n,” you say.

Oh, Joon would be so unimpressed right now, giving some mysterious woman your full, real name just because you think she’s the sexiest thing since sex, but whatever. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.

“Well, Y/n,” Yoonji says. You were right, your name sounds so good falling from her mouth, the mouth that’s turned into a small, almost smug smile. “I certainly hope to see you at the charity ball in a few weeks?”

“Of course.” Your schedule has been magically cleared and you’ll definitely be in attendance for whatever ball Yoonji is referring to, even if you have no idea what it is. You only come to these things if you have to for work but for Yoonji you’ll make an exception. You’ll make a hundred thousand exceptions. A hundred thousand quinquagintaquadringentillion exceptions. “I’ll make sure to remember my lipstick next time.”

And there it is, the thing that seals the deal, the final nail in the coffin: Yoonji glancing at you out of the corner of her eyes, a sharp, dark touch that shoots through you as her smile edges into hunger.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m sure it won’t stay on your lips long enough to matter.”

The thing you’ve discovered about Minjae is that, with his divorce due to be finalised soon, he’s apparently lost any sense of routine and is revelling in his new found freedom, which is kind of irritating when you’re trying to tail the guy. Sure, you’re still going to take him out, but you prefer it when targets have some sort of schedule that they adhere to— makes it easier to set up a kill.

“You’re certain that he’s going to be here tonight?” You’d been sceptical considering how the guy’s apparently thrown his schedule out of the window, but Namjoon had been certain.

“Positive.” He’d said. “He’s there every Tuesday night. You’ll have plenty of time.”

The house appears to be deserted. The driveway is empty and all the windows and doors are locked tight. It’s just one of the properties that the Parks own in the city, and for all its size and lushness it appears as though this one is rarely frequented; you imagine that the cleaners and gardeners spend more time here than the owners themselves.

It doesn’t take you long to evade the watchful eyes of security cameras to pick a lock and slip inside. You're grateful for the dying evening light that helps cover your tracks from any onlookers from the street, although you imagine the high walls do good work at preventing people from seeing into the grounds anyway.

There’s still enough light to navigate through the house, the golden tinged sunset casting warm shadows across the spotless furniture and fixtures; you take a moment to let your eyes slide across a huge canvas hanging on a wall that spans two storeys, some impressionist piece that’s surprisingly ugly for all the talent that’s obvious in its brushstrokes. Maybe that’s why the Parks are never here? You’d certainly try to avoid seeing this thing if you could. Eurgh.

Even though the building is empty, you’re careful as you start to make your way forwards. You always place your toes down first whenever you take a step, soundless as you start to map the house out in your mind; there are so many rooms you can hide in, but you’d prefer to be close to wherever Minjae ends up. Saves faffing around later.

You’ll overpower him, inject the toxin into his blood and wait for him to die before setting him up on the toilet— it’s surprisingly common for people to die while on the shitter, the strain leading to an untimely heart attack, especially in older people. The poison you’re using tonight will mimic the symptoms of a heart attack in the case the coroner decides a post-mortem needs to be undertaken.

(Being found on the bog might not be a particularly graceful way to die but when you’re dead it’s kind of hard to be embarrassed.)

You’ve eased the door open into a large bedroom, and you’re just inspecting if it looks like this room sees more use than the others when you pause. It’s deathly silent in this building, the air still minus where you glide through it as you move, but there’s a feeling in your gut, some instinct that makes all the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You freeze, ears straining to catch any noise to let you know if there’s someone else here, when—

There. In the reflection of a burnished pot, the tiniest shifting movement.

You react almost faster than the eye can see. You spin to parry a hit that was aimed for your head, and the strength behind it shudders through your arms. You only have a second to take in the details of your assailant— dressed in dark clothing, masquerade style mask in place, a professional just like you— before you’re deflecting another flurry of blows, flipping backwards out of reach before spinning into a kick, hooking that burnished pot with your foot and sending it flying towards the other assassin.

They dodge it. You both ignore the sound of clattering metal as you lunge forwards, trying to catch them off guard after their sidestep— your fist makes contact with their palm instead of their face, your hand engulfed in theirs, and you startle at their speed. You might not be the strongest but you’re damn fast.

There’s a pause, and you can only see a slither of their eyes through the sockets of their mask, but you can tell that they’re impressed. And honestly? So are you.

The moment shatters when they use the hand they're holding to twist you, locking an arm around your neck and putting you into a chokehold; they’re strong, stronger than you, cutting off your airflow. You need to get out of this before you fall unconscious, but if they’re trained as well as you then they’ll know how to combat the usual ways you’d use to get out of this.

So, in a demonstration of your flexibility you kick a leg up, using the strength of your thighs and calves to slam it into the arm that’s around your neck. Your assailant lets out a noise of surprise and pain as you slip out of their hold and cartwheel across the room before spinning to face them.

There’s a beat. The air is tense. You get another chance to take in the details of whoever’s just tried to choke you out; you stare at her as she stares at you, the two of you poised and ready to strike, watching and waiting.

Knives might be messy but of course you’re not unarmed. You have multiple sheathed weapons in your clothes, though you don’t make a move to draw any of them. Yet. “I suppose you wouldn’t tell me who your employer is, would you?”

Your opponent tilts her head. “You don’t know?” She sounds amused, even through her mask. “Minjae took out a contract on the assassin who has a contract on him.”

Your lip curls back from your teeth. The only way Minjae would have heard about your contract is if Dahye had told him. Presumably to try and shock him out of his behaviour, or something, who knows. “This is the last time I’m accepting a job from these rich old farts,” you mutter.

“That’s for certain,” she says.

She starts to move and you catch her arm just as she goes to unsheathe a wicked looking blade, knocking it aside before she overpowers you and you start to wrestle. It’s messy and graceless but sometimes you just have to fight dirty.

Whoever this woman is, she still has the upper hand because she was expecting you and you weren’t expecting her; she knocks you onto the bed and pins you down, swooping the knife up from where it had been thrown onto the mattress. You go utterly still as she holds it against your throat, towering over your from where she’s straddling your waist and kneeling on your arms. Any sudden movement from you now could lead to your untimely demise— and, unsurprisingly, you absolutely want to avoid that at all costs.

Namjoon would never let you live it down if you were killed on the job.

You hum. “It seems like we’ve reached an impasse.”

She doesn’t respond. The knife doesn’t dip any lower, though; you’re undoubtedly at her mercy but you notice she’s careful to keep the knife still, hovering above the skin of your neck, but not making contact.

“Well,” you continue. “At least I’m going out the way I’d always hoped to.”

Even in the dying light and with how her face is covered, you notice her face shifting behind her mask— a silent, questioning raise of an eyebrow. You give her a cheeky smile that crinkles your eyes.

“In bed with a beautiful woman, of course.”

At this she huffs out a laugh. “Do you flirt with every person who tries to kill you?”

You’re trying to look as non-threatening as possible to keep that knife away from your jugular. The longer you talk, the longer you live, even if you can’t see a way to get out of this situation right now. “Only the pretty ones.”

The small laugh she lets out this time seems more like a scoff. “You don’t even know what I look like.”

“Please.” You roll your eyes. “Any woman who can fight like you and knows how to handle a knife? Automatically hot. I don’t need to see your face to know that.”

The knife still hasn’t moved. She continues to stare you down and you go tense when her free hand moves. She tugs the cloth of your mask down to reveal your face, the air of the room almost cold against the suddenly bared skin, your breaths free to curl out unhindered.

“Usually I like to be taken out to dinner at least once before we get this intimate, but for you I suppose I’ll make an exception.” You’re still grinning cheekily at her, but your mind continues to race as you try to think of a way to get out of this, especially now that she’s seen what you look like—but you suddenly notice that she’s gone very, very still.

“Y/n?”

The grin freezes on your face. Oh, you’re so boned. You’re so very boned. Like, yeah, you’ve been seconds away from death for the past, hmm, five minutes, but this is somehow worse. How the fuck does she know your name?

You’re given the answer almost immediately. She withdraws the hand from your chin and reaches for her own mask. Your eyes widen and your breath stutters in your throat once you see who it is.

“Holy shit,” you breathe.

Yoonji is staring down at you. She’s every inch as imperious and stunning as the last time you’d seen her— hell, even moreso now that you’ve seen what she’s capable of. No wonder you hadn’t been able to find out anything about her after you’d met at that garish charity gala. Because she’s untraceable, just like you.

“Well.” You stare back at her, not even attempting to keep the surprise off your face. “If anyone has to kill me at least I can die satisfied in the knowledge that it was you. Can I make a request? I’d be eternally grateful if you smothered me to death with your thighs. Just a suggestion, feel free to ignore it if you want.”

Yoonji cocks her head. Her bob is tied back, but there’s a loose lock of hair curled by the side of her face that shifts at the motion. Your fingers twitch. If she wasn’t kneeling on your arms you know you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from tucking it behind her ear. Any excuse to touch her. “Do you always talk so much?”

“Hey, if it means I get to feel your legs around my face before I die, I’ll give a full fledged TED talk,” you say. “I have to admit, though. When I pictured us in bed together I didn’t think it would be like this.”

The knife still hasn’t moved from your throat. She continues to stare, as if considering what to do next, though her face remains impassive. “What did you think it would be like?”

“Well, you know. Less knives and clothes involved and a lot more making out,” you answer. “You, telling me what to do. Me, entirely at your command. Anything the lady wants, she gets.”

The human body is a fickle and strange beast. Ever since you discovered who’s straddling you, you’ve been growing wetter and wetter, even if you’re trying not to let on that you’re steadily growing more aroused— you’re still distinctly aware of the knife that’s only centimetres away from your skin, but somehow your body is more focused of the fact that the woman you’ve been daydreaming about is finally in front of you again.

(Well, less in front of you and more on top of you, which is an admittedly preferable option, sans the knife involvement.)

You see how Yoonji’s eyes are darting over your face. No doubt taking in how your pupils are dilated, how your breaths are a little shallower, quicker— signs of fear and signs of arousal are surprisingly similar. You wonder if she can identify which it is. Probably. You’re not exactly very subtle in your attraction to her.

“I forgot my lipstick again,” you add, and Yoonji’s passive mask finally breaks when she rolls her eyes.

“Didn’t I say you wouldn’t need it?”

Even the way she throws the knife aside is gorgeous. The sharp undulation of her wrist as she sends the blade skittering across the polished wood floor is careless and fluid. Her hands cup your face as she bends down, and you send up a mental thanks to any god or higher being who might be listening before Yoonji presses her lips to your and your brain goes blank.

Apparently Yoonji likes it messy. One of her hands is grasping your chin in a mockery of the last time you’d met and she’d painted your lips— your mouth is open and she licks past your lips as you shudder beneath her. She’s still got her knees pressed into your arms, pinning you down, but you desperately crane your head towards her, chasing that kiss; you tilt your head to deepen it, and the whine that leaves you when she pulls away is almost embarrassing.

The sun has finally dipped below the horizon and the room is dark, painted in shades of grey and deep blue. You wish you could see Yoonji properly and you can’t help but wriggle a little underneath her, but then you watch her raise her hands and clap three times in rapid succession before the room floods with dim light. Sound activated lights? Damn.

Yoonji’s mouth shines, covered in a sheen of your mixed saliva, her pretty lips flushed rose pink; even without makeup they’re beautiful and their colour is deep, the blooming petals of a flower. Your eyes trail over her face, down her neck, over the fall of her chest and stomach— you’re both far too covered up in these stupid ensembles of yours and you want to strip the clothes off her. You want to see every inch of her beautiful, majestic body, bared for your lips and hands.

Fuck, she’s so gorgeous.

“Not to, um, ruin the moment, but my hands are going numb.” The weight of Yoonji’s body being pressed into your arms has pretty much cut off the blood flow to your fingers and you can feel the telltale sensation of pins and needles spreading through your skin. “Can I have those back, please?”

Yoonji lifts her knees just enough for you to slide your arms out from underneath them. You immediately shed your gloves and go to grab her ass but she gives you a sharp look and you freeze, slowly settling them on her thighs instead, which she allows with only the slightest raise of her eyebrows.

“Watch,” she commands, and who are you to disobey?

She reaches for the tie in her hair, tugging it out and letting her dark locks fall to frame her lovely, beautiful face. You hungrily swallow down each sight that she feeds to you, the skin that’s revealed as she shrugs off her layers of clothing. She unbuckles the weapons hidden underneath her clothes as she sheds them; she’s a veritable arsenal of firearms and knives, all cast carelessly aside until her upper body is finally, blessedly naked. You’ve been staring at her the whole time, the graceful column of her throat, the delicate lines of her collarbones, and your gaze falls to her breasts, small and perfect, nipples dusty pink and hard. You want to put your mouth on them.

“Holy shit, you’re perfect,” you say.

She smirks. You watch as she rolls her body, lifting up from her knees and standing up, towering above you on the bed—your hands fall to the mattress as she pulls her trousers down, tight material dragging against her skin as she slides it over the curve of her hips and down her long legs. There’s a dagger strapped to her thigh, which she unbuckles and lets fall to one side, but god, if she used it to kill you right now, you would die a happy woman. The image of Min Yoonji towering above you in nothing more than some flimsy underwear is one you want to take to the grave.

You can see how the material around her entrance is darkened with her arousal, and you feel your own body react to the sight, pussy throbbing, your own lower lips slick underneath all your layers of clothing. Yoonji hooks her thumbs into her panties and pushes them down, and you’re enraptured as you watch how the wetness clings to them, before that last bit of clothing is cast aside too.

You moan, unable to stop the sound bubbling up in your throat. From how she’s standing above you, legs spread from how her feet are either side of your hips, you can see everything—how her cunt is flushed, how wet she is, her folds shining. You bet she tastes so fucking good.

You let your mouth fall open, tongue lolling out in a way that’s obscene. You see Yoonji’s eyes flicker as she traces the motion, the way she takes in your expression: wide, hungry eyes, parted lips, wet tongue. Your hands skim up the back of her calves as she shifts forwards and returns to her knees, her naked core so, so close to your mouth, and you dig your fingers into her skin.

“Bon appé-fucking-tit,” you murmur, and then you pull her onto your face.

Yoonji gasps.

(You were right. She tastes so, so fucking good.)

You’re utterly shameless as you slurp up her juices, the wetness that continues to leak out of her as you bury your face into her cunt, tongue lapping over her entrance as your nose brushes her clit. Your hands have moved to the flesh of her ass and you encourage her to grind against you, rolling her hips towards your greedy mouth; you’re staring up at her, drinking down her reactions, the way her face twists with pleasure and the shuddering breaths she takes in, perfect little breasts jumping at the motion. There’s a flush spreading down her neck and chest, pale skin blushing pink, and it’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.

You purse your lips against her clit, circling it with your tongue before dipping back down between her folds. Each time you breathe in all you can smell is her scent, heavy and dark, all your senses filled with Yoonji, Yoonji, Yoonji. When you hum against her, Yoonji arches her spine and throws her head back, so when you press your tongue into her you hum again, letting the vibrations shiver through her.

“Yes,” she gasps, rutting against your face. “Yes, yes—”

Her thighs tighten around your head. You redouble your efforts, watching her face as you continue to swipe your tongue up her slit and through her folds; you wish you could swallow each of the noises that are falling from her lips as she reaches the crest of her pleasure, the little gasps and moans each time you move your tongue in a particularly wicked way.

“There,” she says. “There, there, just like that—”

Your jaw aches but you don’t even register it, too intent on keeping your mouth open and hot and wet against her. It only takes a few more swipes and flicks of your tongue before she shudders violently, canting her hips towards your mouth as her legs go tense and she cums. She continues to straddle your face as she rides out the waves of pleasure, and you swallow down the wetness that flushes out of her rippling cunt, ignoring the throbbing between your own legs.

You can’t talk, muffled by her as you are, but your mind is singing. Look at you, you think. Look at how gorgeous you are. God, I could eat you out all day. (What a blessed life that would be.)

You can tell when Yoonji’s edged into oversensitivity, jolting when your tongue sweeps over her swollen clit; she settles back, knees spread as she rests against your heaving chest, legs tensing each time an aftershock shivers through her. Your mouth is open as you pant in air, but she watches as you swipe your tongue over your lips, catching the lingering taste of her on you, your chin opalescent with her arousal.

“Okay,” you say, breathless. “I’ve done everything that’s worth doing. I’ve peaked. Everything is downhill from here. You can kill me now.”

You’re only half joking, but your thighs instinctively go tight to rub against each other when you see how Yoonji’s eyes darken.

“I’m not done with you yet,” she purrs.

Yoonji might be naked while you’re still clothed, and so still armed, but she’s undoubtedly the one who’s in control right now. You are so, so okay with that. You watch with wide eyes as she shifts back, her hands grabbing the material of your jacket to tug you upwards, but before she can strip off your clothes you capture her lips with your own.

The taste of her is still heady and deep in your mouth and you nip at her bottom lip before pressing your tongue forwards. The kiss is already slick from Yoonji’s wetness and when you pull away, there’s a thin string of saliva that connects you for a moment before it breaks, which Yoonji wipes away from your chin with the pad of her thumb.

“Dirty girl,” she says, and you bite back a moan at the unabashed lust in her voice. Her grip on your chin is firm. “Did I say you could kiss me?”

“No,” you answer. “I couldn’t help myself.”

She tuts, as if disappointed, and every one of your nerve endings feels electrified, ready and anticipating whatever Yoonji is going to do next. “Such a shame,” she says. “You just can’t keep your hands or mouth to yourself, can you?”

“Can you blame me?”

Yoonji huffs out a laugh through her nose. She strips your jacket off in one sharp motion and then your shirt is similarly pulled off with single-minded intent, along with every other piece of equipment cinched to your arms and body. When you reach for her, though, she captures your wrists, her face stern.

“If you keep moving without permission, I’m going to take that privilege away from you.”

You don’t have to see your own eyes to know how your pupils will have dilated from that statement, blood thrumming through your veins, and you can tell Yoonji has noticed when her expression shifts.

“Oh.” A small, triumphant smirk appears on her face. “I see.”

You lift your arms up so she can pull your sports bra off (of course if you had known you’d been running into Yoonji again you would have worn something nicer). Rather than touch your heaving chest, however, she pushes you down onto the mattress, a hand around your wrists so they’re held above your head.

“Keep still,” she says.

She reaches for the holster that you’d had around your upper arm, lazily casting the knife aside before looping it around your wrists and pulling it secure.

Yoonji’s fingers ease under the nylon as she checks the fit. It’s tight, but not so much so that it’s painful or dangerous, and there’s a hushed moment when the realisation hits you— Yoonji and yourself are both skilled enough to know that you could easily free yourself if you wanted to. It would only take a little motion of your wrists and hands and you could slip them out of the makeshift cuffs in an instant.

You melt into the mattress. Yoonji’s eyes shift away from your wrists as she takes in the way you’ve gone utterly relaxed and limp below her, staring back at her. You see an expression flit across her face faster than you can see, before she slides down your body so she can push your legs apart.

You lift your hips to help her strip your trousers off. Her hand lingers on the concealed holster around your thigh, eyeing the small pistol nestled inside it, before that too is stripped off and cast aside. Her hands trail over the soft skin of your hips and stomach, eyes skimming over the bared length of your body before settling between your legs, the slickness of your inner thighs.

“You got this wet just from eating me out?” Her pretty mouth is curled into an expression that’s almost mocking, and your legs jolt as she runs her fingers lightly over your lower lips before rubbing her fingertips together to feel the wetness she’s gathered. “I haven’t even touched you yet.”

Your nails dig into your palms as your hands twist against each other and you shift your legs further apart. “Please, Yoonji,” you plead, shameless from desperation and arousal.

She laughs at your obvious hunger. “I suppose I should return the favour, shouldn’t I?”

You watch breathlessly as she lifts her fingers to her lips, swallowing them into her mouth to get them slick and wet. The motions of her tongue are languid as she licks across her fingers. You’re like a livewire, thrumming with electricity, and the sensation of her finally sinking one of those fingers into you sends sparks throughout your body.

Yoonji’s maddeningly slow. Your body takes her readily, her long finger gliding easily in and out of you, but she makes no move to speed up; you let out a small noise and she moves upwards to kiss you, as if indulging you, and you’ve just relaxed against her mouth when she plunges a second finger in.

She swallows your gasp as her fingers speed up, before she starts to kiss across your jaw, your neck, between the valley of your breasts and then closing her mouth over one of your nipples— she times the flick of her tongue with the thrust of her fingers, and then you feel how she takes her thumb to press your clit at the same time and you’re gone, falling over the edge faster than you’d expected. Your orgasm is fast but deep, your walls clenching tight around the fingers that continue to curl in and out of you, but she doesn’t stop.

“Yoonji,” you gasp. “It’s too— oh—”

Those two fingers continue to rub your sweet spot as you edge into oversensitivity but Yoonji doesn’t let up. She continues to lick and bite at the skin of your chest, putting her mouth to your other breast and circling the hardened bud of your nipple with her tongue before kissing down your stomach, your pubic bone, and then pressing her lips to your swollen clit.

You whimper. Her pace of her fingers has quickened, and she curls them each time she almost pulls them out, the squelch of their motions obscene as they slide through the cum of your first orgasm. She stares up at you, lapping at your clit with her tongue, and you can feel the saliva that’s dripping from her mouth and over your flushed core, every inch of you oversensitive but screaming with pleasure.

It’s almost painful, but you can feel an orgasm creeping through that ache; you wring your hands together and sob as Yoonji continues to finger fuck you without mercy, her pace almost bruising, the thrust of her knuckles against you each time she bottoms out just one more layer on top of that overwhelming pleasure.

“Yoonji,” you gasp. “I’m g-gonna cum again.”

She hums against you, and you make an incoherent noise at the feeling of that sound against your clit, almost too much— and then she presses one more finger into you, and that’s it, that slight burn and stretch sending you hurtling over that edge again. When you cum, your hips buck and you gasp, air rushing into your lungs before it escapes you in a moan of ecstasy; the only sensations registering in your mind right now are the ripples of pleasure spreading through your cunt as Yoonji pulls her fingers out of you, pressing down on your clit in a way that’s almost cruel, and you sob as your legs instinctively try to tighten but are prevented from doing so by Yoonji’s unyielding presence.

She’s staring down at you as you start to go lax, and you think she’s finished with you, but you watch with widening eyes as she takes her ring and middle finger to run them through your sodden folds. You sob again when those fingers plunge back into you, palm pressing against your clit each time she curls her fingers, and you squirm underneath her.

“Yoonji, it’s too much,” you cry.

“One more.” Yoonji’s leaning back and staring at you, taking in the sweat that’s beading across your skin, the tears that are gathering in your eyes and threatening to spill down your face and into your hair. “You’re doing so well, darling, you can give me one more, can’t you?”

Your reply is incoherent, a small noise that shudders out of the back of your throat. You’ve never been thrown so thoroughly into pleasure like this, overstimulated and aching, but there’s that flicker of pleasure still between your legs, growing each time Yoonji beckons with her fingers, curling over your abused sweet spot again and again and again.

“Just say the word and I’ll stop,” Yoonji says, the wet plunge of her fingers into your abused pussy so messy and loud but not enough to drown her out. “One word and I’ll stop.”

You don’t say anything. You just let your eyes roll back into your head as you cant your hips towards her, trying to latch onto that thread of pleasure that’s thrumming through you below all your screaming nerves, and the noise Yoonji makes is pleased.

“There we go,” she praises. “Look at you, so good for me. Pretty darling.”

You can feel how your pussy clenches around Yoonji’s fingers, how the coil in you is squeezing tighter and tighter, how another orgasm is somehow creeping up on you— you tilt your hips towards that feeling, towards Yoonji’s hand, and then she’s pulling her fingers out of you in an almost rough motion and you’re cumming harder than you ever have before.

“Oh, fuck!” You sob.

It’s indescribable. The sensation rips through you as your back arches off the bed and you’re cumming and squirting and gasping and you can feel the wetness that slicks out of you, your toes curling as your brain goes blank from the staggering pleasure and static consumes every one of your senses. Your entire body feels like nothing more than a vessel for the ecstasy that’s shooting through your veins, spreading out from your core and to every corner of your insides and limbs.

It takes you a while to come back around, aftershocks wracking through your body. You feel sluggish and slow as your mind slowly clears, focusing on the sensation of warm hands stroking over the skin of your stomach and hips and thighs; your eyes flutter open and when you glance down you can see the shine to Yoonji’s skin, evidence of your pleasure painting her in a thin sheen of liquid.

“Oh my god,” you moan. “Holy shit.”

She smiles. “You were so, so good for me,” she says. She leans down to press a light kiss to collarbones and you shiver. “So beautiful. How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve died and gone to heaven before coming back again,” you reply. “Oh, that was so good, Yoonji. I’ve never squirted before. I didn’t realise I could. God.”

Yoonji laughs lightly. You can’t help but watch the way it transforms her face, the way her chest jumps at the motion, every inch of her gorgeous and majestic and cute and pretty. “You did so, so well,” she praises, before she kisses you, her mouth so soft; you barely notice the sudden easing of pressure around your wrists as she releases you, more intent on the sensation of her soft petal lips against your own.

You stare up at her as she pulls away. Powerful, amazing Min Yoonji, kneeling between your legs, naked but not helpless. Definitely less vulnerable than you right now. And yet she’s still making no moves to grab one of the many weapons littered around the bed so she can finally finish her contract by completing the kill. It would be so easy for her.

The silence of the room is suddenly broken by a tiny buzzing noise. You both glance over at the sound, one that Yoonji doesn’t recognise but you do— the communicator in one of your wristbands, the one you use to keep in contact with Namjoon.

You watch the twisting of Yoonji’s body as she leans over the bed to hook the band with a finger before proffering it to you. You pause, but then grasp her wrist and lightly pull so she ends up pressed against you, softness of her breasts against your own, and you hold the communicator between your faces as you accept the call.

“Thank god you answered.” Namjoon’s voice is obviously frantic even through the tinniness of the small speaker. “Dahye cancelled the contract because Minjae wants to reconcile with her, but apparently he’s already put a hit out on you— tonight was a ruse, Minjae isn’t going to be there, you have to get out of there—”

“Bit too late for that,” you interrupt. Yoonji’s hair is tickling your cheek. “Don’t worry. I have it in hand. Send some flowers to Minjae for me, will you?”

“Flowers?” Namjoon sounds understandably confused. “Why?”

“As a thank you for taking out a contract on me,” you say. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m a little busy.”

“With what?”

“With me,” Yoonji says, and you hear Namjoon’s surprised intake of breath before you cut the line.

You end up laughing to yourself. “Oh, he’s going to hate me for that,” you giggle. Yoonji’s hand trails up your stomach and you continue to giggle at the ticklish sensation. Her skin is still slick against yours, and you suddenly realise how cold it is in the room, the air touching the cooling liquid that’s rubbed off against your skin, and you shiver. “Mm. I think it’s time to clean up. Want me to scrub your back in the shower? I give very good massages.”

Yoonji’s eyes are dark and warm before she presses her nose to your neck, lips soft as they touch the delicate skin of your throat. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

#yoonji x reader #min yoonji #yoonji smut #cypherwritersnet #bts smut #bts oneshot #one day I'll learn how to efficiently use tags... one day #joy.masterlist

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knullanon · 4 years ago

Text

l.d fic #2

heres the second part! this one is long too lmao

words: 3227 (bonus at the end too!)

warnings: shotgun, kidnapping

Driving past the beautiful buildings and apartments, you rested your elbow on the car handle where you almost laid your head against the window had it not been for Mercy. “_____, you can’t sleep here.”

You mumbled out something strange before you rested your head on the head of your seat. You really wanted to sleep, as you couldn’t feel your feet when you got into the car, but you knew that your bed would be a lot more comfortable in the long run.

You turned to look at Lex, and he was on the phone with someone. You didn’t even notice him, probably because he was whispering in an exasperated voice. You didn’t try to tune in, as he would probably notice either way, so instead you kept on looking out the window. You saw shops, restaurants, even other gala places like the one you were just at. You even saw the Lexcorp tower.

One thing you remember from your past life was that someone… Was it your mother or father? It was both, right? Anyway, either one would always take you on a night drive every month, usually on a Tuesday for some strange reason. You would usually listen to music on these drives, and the lights in the towns and cities were always so pretty. Even now, it was pretty to you, since there weren’t many people this late at night and the shops were still running. You looked up to one building noticing the bright lights that accompanied the sign. But your attention turned to the top of the building.

There seemed to be two people, one who was extremely tall, with two… sticks in his hands. And the other had a cape and a hoodie, who was shorter than the other man. This one also had a katana. You tried to get a better look, but the car started to move again, and you again tried to look back. But Mercy noticed.

“____, what are you looking at?” She asked, looking where you were watching. You looked back, but there was nothing there. “... I guess there was nothing there.” You whispered to yourself. “What?” Mercy asked. “Nothing. I thought I saw a person on the roof.”

Mercy didn’t say anything and she went back to looking around to make sure that the driver was going the way they were supposed to.

~~~~~

“Dick, what the hell?!” Damian whispered to his older brother. Currently, they were hiding behind a wall on the building you were looking at. Dick sighed before he said, “Well, you were there too, so don’t just put the blame on me!”

“I’m not tall and I don’t wear bright colors!”

“Oh really-” Dick then noticed that Damian was not in his normal yellow and red suit, but instead he was in a more stealthy color.

“The only thing I have is a bluebird on my chest!”

“A big blue bird-”

“Can you guys just… try to follow the car?”

Tim was at his breaking point: he was really at his breaking point. Damian was heard arguing with Dick for a few more seconds before Tim just decided to follow the car himself. Which somehow worked.

“Does anyone have a tracker on that thing?” Duke asked, also following the car. He wasn’t as tired as Tim, but he understood where he was coming from. “Yeah, I’ll send the location to you in just a sec.”

~~~~~

Driving up to the big gates, you felt really tired when you felt the car stop, but at least there weren't any paparazzi you had to run over. You got out of the car and started to walk with Mercy to the elevator, when you thought you heard something from the other side of the empty parking garage. You turned your head, only to see empty space and columns. You tried to look around more, but Mercy had started to lead you towards the elevator already.

Getting into the elevator, you stood with Mercy to listen to the almost silent beeps of the elevator getting higher into the building.

“Ah, I almost forgot, I’ll bring you your dinner to eat in the room. I understand your exhaustion.”

“Oh, what did the cook make?”

“Honey glazed ham with mashed potatoes and gravy.”

You remembered that from before you got here. Your mother would make that every day if you asked her to. You also started to notice how… nice mercy was being towards you. You remember when you first met her, she did not like you at all. In fact the only thing she would say is… well, nothing really. However, that was months ago. Now, she greets you and gives you small talk. She even gives you little presents if you’re good.

When the elevator chimed to your floor, and the doors opened, you were expecting more guards then you saw. Usually there were more than 5 there, but there was no one in the hallway. Even Mercy looked a little shocked. However, she just took your hand and led you through the halls back to your room, where she then opened your door and pointed to the drawers. “You should probably change into something more comfortable. You aren’t going anywhere for another couple weeks at least, so that's a good thing.”

You nodded and walked over to the dresser to change. You picked out a pair of pajamas that were extremely soft before you walked to the bathroom.

~~~~

Getting out of the bathroom you heard strange music coming from below you. It wasn’t ugly, or loud, just… rumblings of sad music. It sounded nice. You walked over to your overly plush bed and you crawled in, ignoring the strange feeling that was pooling in your mind. Something telling you to be alert, but you were too tired to care. Tossing and turning wasn’t helping you either. Finally you decided that it was getting unbearable. It was then you noticed that you never got a knock on the door from Mercy for your food. Groaning, you climbed out of bed only to notice how cold it felt. You slipped on some slippers that were also extremely soft and warm, before you walked to the door and tried to pull on the handle. It was locked. Of course it was. It's never open in the first place. You sighed and wondered where everyone went. You still felt the rumbling beneath you from the music, so you knew someone was down there, but you just didn’t know who.

Instead of freezing to death, however, you bundled yourself in many different blankets, most soft, fuzzy and warm. Waddling over to the bed you stumbled into your mattress and groaned. You wanted to just fall asleep, but something was keeping you awake. It was a nagging feeling like you just weren’t alone. You crawled your way so that you were leaning against your wall and you also had a view of the room to make sure that there wasn't anyone in there with you.

You were about to crawl back down but then, there was a noise at the door. It was unlocking, you thought, it was probably Mercy finally bringing you your food. However, when the door opened, it was not Mercy. In fact, it was a… boy. Probably a new servant, but still a boy.

He looked to be about your age, and he was wearing the usual uniform that the servants would wear. He was also carrying a tray.

Looking at you bundled up in almost all of your blankets, he gave you a small bow, as to not drop the food. You looked at him up and down, before you asked, “Who are you?”

He stood there, before he coughed a little, and said, “I’m the, uh, new butler assigned to bring you food.”

You gave him a look. “I thought Mercy was supposed to bring the food? Where is she?”

The boy looked a little surprised. “She’s, um, a little busy. With Luthor.”

You gave a nod before he brought the food to you. You unwrapped yourself from the blankets and leaned over to him a bit. He had a tray underneath his arm, and he brought it out so he could lay the food on your bed. He then placed both the tray to carry your food and your food itself onto your bed. Opening the cover, it revealed, just as Mercy had said, honey glazed ham and mashed potatoes and gravy. He gave you two cans of Arizona tea- Arizona tea?

You checked the labels again, surprised that Lex would even give this to you. Usually he gave you a better drink, and something “better”. You did miss the taste of Arizona tea, however, so you didn’t object to getting the tea. Eating your meal, the boy stayed with you while you ate. He didn’t seem to care about you for a minute, before he asked, “What's your name?”

You looked at him to see him close to the bed. You gulped down a piece of ham and said, “____. What's yours?”

“... Damian.”

“Oh, nice. So. When did they hire you?”

Damian did not answer you, but instead asked his own question. “When did you decide to join Lex Luthor?”

You gave him a look. “You must be new around here if you’re asking that.”

Finishing your ham, you moved to the mashed potatoes. “I don’t know why I’m here to be honest. I was taken here a few months ago. I was only found out by a colleague of his a few days ago when they saw me. Or was it a few weeks? I don’t know. I don’t have a calendar. I don’t even know what's going on in the world.” You laughed a little at the last part. However, you saw him start to ask something again.

But then, you had a bright idea. “Hey, speaking of which, what’s happening outside, around the world? People never tell me anything here.”

Damian gave you a look before saying, "Well, Wayne Enterprises is gaining more stock, and Lexcorp isn’t too happy about it."

Putting another piece of potatoes in your mouth, you laughed. "Lex was yelling about that yesterday. Talking about loss of money."

For the next 20 or so minutes, you talked with Damian and laughed with him about different things, and he would also tell you things about the world outside your luxurious penthouse.

Finally, after you finished your food, you put your dishes and trash on the food tray before you gave it to him. "Well. Thank you for keeping me company. Usually only Mercy is allowed to do that.” he nodded and took your tray before he placed it back on the nightstand next to you.

He gave you his hand, before asking, “Lex asked for you to be walked around tonight. He said you haven’t been out of the house for awhile.”

You gave him another look before telling him, “Damian, you do know I was at a gala today for at least 6 hours, right?”

His facade slipped then. You realized that when he stood tall, and he let his arms go to his sides instead of behind his back. At first, you thought he was going to attack you, but instead he pulled something out of his back pocket and he put it on. Then he took off his uniform and-

Oh, shit.

This was the kid you saw at the top of the building.

“I’m sure you can tell who I am by the look on your face. My name is Robin, and I’m here to take you away from here.”

~~~~~~

Sneaking past the large doors was easy enough, especially considering the fact that Damian knew what he was doing. He led you through the place like he had lived there, and before you knew it, you were almost to the parking garage. But when you both reached the elevator, instead of going down, he went up.

Giving him a look, he quickly explained. “People know you’re out: They think you’re alone, and since you don’t know of the rooftop area, they’re all gathered down there to get you.”

“How do you know that-”

“SHHH!” Damian gave you a look and turned to the left corridor that led to the large double doors that led to a lounge. He turned back to the elevator, and when he realized there wasn’t enough time for the elevator to come down, he quickly dragged you over to a large statue and hid you behind it along with himself.

You tried to listen but being pressed up against a statue was kind of difficult already. However, you did recognize the steps of the person walking. Pride, power- anger. Fast moving, loud, rage, it all sounded like Lex Luthor himself. And he sounded like he was carrying something.

Mercy was with him, you quickly realized, and she sounded a little muffled.

“-the little bitch got me right in the nose, and then I got knocked out, sir. He took one of the uniforms in the closet, he has black hair, he's short, and he doesn’t have his registry on him.”

“Tell that to the guards around the perimeter. Tell them that no one is going to leave this damn place until both ____ and that fucker are found.”

And with that, you heard someone reload a shotgun before heading into the elevator that was now there.

“Where do you think they’ll be?”

“She only knows the way to the parking garage, so we should look there first, sir. I don’t know how much the other one knows, but-”

When the elevator started to head down, Damian grabbed your arm and started to drag you towards… somewhere. Mercy was right, you had no idea where anything was. You only knew the way from the parking garage to your room. However, Damian seemed to know where to go.

“Uh, where are we going again?”

He turned back to you before gesturing to a large metal door. Stairs.

“We’re going to go up there and escape. We have to hurry, though: they will realize you aren’t in the parking garage.”

~~~~~

You were almost out of breath when you finally reached the rooftop. It felt like you were running for your life. It was so thrilling, and yet, the only thing keeping you going was freedom.

It wasn’t like you weren’t unappreciative of the things given to you by Lex, but you missed being able to walk around and be wherever without having 16 guards surrounding you.

Damian said something, but you didn’t hear it due to the blood pumping to your head: It sounded almost relaxing if it wasn’t increasing.

Dragging you around a bit, he whispered something into his comm, and again, you couldn’t hear it, but from the looks of it this entire thing was almost done.

Suddenly, something dropped seemingly from thin air. A rope.

Looking up, you saw a small, but fairly large ship floating right above you. Damian grabbed you by the waist and started to pull you up. You tried to help yourself, but not going anywhere really put a toll on your body, so he did most of the work. As you were halfway there, though, you heard a shot through the air, and turning around, you saw Lex holding a shotgun with multiple guards surrounding both you and Damian. Mercy was with Lex, and she looked pissed off, even with a bloody nose. Damian was also looking around. You heard something from his ear, along the lines of, “Plan B?” to which Damian responded, “Yeah, plan B.”

Suddenly, he cut the rope you both were hanging off of, and while falling, he got you over his shoulder and started to run towards an area where guards weren’t as plentiful. You were able to look up from your spot, but the only thing you saw was Lex reloading and Mercy yelling something. More guards started to chase the both of you, while Damian seemed to be choosing where to go. He suddenly changed directions, sprinting towards the edge of one building. Realizing what he was going to do, you asked, “That’s a 6 story drop, you know!”

He didn’t listen. He instead jumped and while you expected to die, you were glad that you were at least free of the strange man who kept you here. However, you landed on something: hard. It was the ship that tried to get you earlier!

Bringing you inside, you realized he must have jumped onto a platform. He brought you over to a table where he tried to see if you were injured, however, a gunshot made you both duck. Looking out of the closing platform, you saw Lex continuing to shoot at the ship, trying to take it down, but failing.

You turned back to the occupants of the ship itself and saw three more people besides Damian: One was the one who was standing with him on that rooftop, with two sticks at his sides, one who was tall and had a bright yellow suit on him, and one was at the front of the ship where it was hard to see anything.

The yellow suit guy came up to you first and offered his hand.

“Hi! My codename is Signal, but you can call me Duke. What’s your name?”

_____

fun fact! I was actually gonna have cass instead of duke, but I changed my mind last minute! also, have a bonus for the next chapter!

Bonus:

Lex was beyond pissed. His guards failed at the one thing they were supposed to be good at, and they failed. And it cost him his daughter, too. Mercy was the only thing keeping him from going on a rampage, telling him that the batkids probably had many hiding spots, that they manipulated you into going with them, all other things.

“I want you to find out where they took her and why. Oh, also, if you do find the one who took her?” Mercy nodded, awaiting orders. “I want him alive. I want to kill him myself.”

She nodded again and walked out of his office. As Lex started to walk back to his desk, he noticed there was still reminisce of glass on it. He looked at the broken window where Mercy said she had thrown the strange boy who had taken _____, before he climbed back up and knocked her out. Sighing, he let his hands curl into fists, before he grabbed the chair and threw it across the room, and then he flipped the table.

Rage was all that he could feel at the moment. No one knew of her existence: Who would’ve known? Who had met her and had such an interest that they had to take her from him? What happened-

Suddenly remembering the gala, Lex felt his face become hot and red. He was feeling more furious than he had ever been. He stormed over to one of the beautiful statues he owned in his office, before he pulled out another shotgun from the leg of the stone. He walked over to a different statue holding something in its hand, just in his reach, and picked it up. It was ammunition, and reloaded it so it was full. He stomped out of his office, ignoring glass that cut into his shoes.

“Bruce Wayne…” Luthor whispered to himself, getting his phone to call Mercy.

“I’m going to kill you.”

#yan!dad lex luthor #dad lex luthor

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emersonfreepress · 4 years ago

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ok ok in the spirit of community, how would the ros fair in a paintball war?

(referring to this ask! like the zombie au post this ended up making me think a lot 😅)

ohh... interesting, interesting... p sure the only paintball wars i’ve really seen were the ones featured in The League, Peep Show, and Community... but let me wrack my lil head...

ok, i ended up coming at this from multiple angles like the zombie au post 😅 always so much to consider in battle environments! and in the spirit of community, I'll stick with the individual player elimination style paintball match. in the woods with other e prep seniors. last one standing wins bragging rights

Gabe

Shooting skill | 6/10 - Experience with shooting and practice with Kile ofc

Stealthiness | 8/10 - He's done a fair amount of sneaking around during his after school activities, is super observant (or just paranoid lol), and naturally light on his feet. Good luck ambushing him.

Strategy | 8/10 - Strike deals. Do favors. Form alliances. Shoot 'em in the back once they’ve outlived their usefulness. ...What? It’s just paintball.

How does he win? | Graciously. Gabe likes winning, and especially via strategic manipulation, so it puts a smile on his face. And he's in a good mood so he treats a bunch of you to ice cream or smth 👀

How does he lose? | Slumps in frustration at being outwitted or taken off-guard, sulks about it for a little while. He's not that sore of a loser but needs time to lick his wounds and stop thinking of the different choices he could have made.

Kile

Shooting | 9 - The most accurate shooter of the cast and easily one of the best shots at E Prep. Lots of practice + talent

Stealth | 10 - They're stupid good at climbing trees and 100% consider that a valid method of ambushing their classmates. People start having flashbacks to 3rd and 4th grade recess and P.E. Scanning the trees. They just start taking people out with such efficiency it quickly starts ruining the game 😂

Strategy | 0? 10?? - “...Strategy? You just stay out of sight and kill 'em all, right?” (immediately scolded by Gabe for word choice 🙄) They really do mainly stay out of sight and pick people off with max stealth, like 😆 they'd be such a terror, people would need to take them out early for anyone else to stand a chance! They spend a lot of the game staking out the most frequented paths in the area and taking out groups quickly, all at once. Then they'll get around to stalking and picking people off one by one. The real fun...

Winner type | Stoic. Likes winning combat but the stakes were non-existent, so... the win is meaningless! this just infuriates the losers more 😅 such disrespect

Loser type | Sucks their teeth and tosses their paintball gun to the ground. "Y'all suck." (they're over it five mins later tho lol)

Jack

Shooting | 3 - This is nothing like shooting light guns... ☹️

Stealth | 5 - Not just due to his size making him an easier target, but homeboy is liable to get distracted by a cute squirrel or some pretty flowers 😂 He's not great at keeping his voice down either so good conversation would make him easy to seek out. He's just out here enjoying a beautiful day 😅

Strategy | 7 - All that movie-watching (and DMing) make him a valuable creative mind for problem-solving, but he needs a cooperative team to be effective. Rescued and recruited by Rupan/Rohan early on in the game ^ ^

Winner type | Disbelief! And everyone’s content and satisfied with him winning. Except Vivian/Vincent, that jealous fool

Loser type | Doesn't mind losing at all! He just hopes he was a good teammate and was glad to have fun ☺️

Jessie

Shooting | 7 - Comes from a family of hunters, girly knows how to shoot.

Stealth | 6 - Familiar enough with woods and stalking prey to be capable of sneaking around. Having too much fun to not giggle and get overly invested in the developing plot of the game. Even more easily distracted by critters and flora than Jack 😅

Strategy | 5 - Oh, she's just here to have fun. She'll go with whatever the person she's teaming up with decides, but can adapt easily enough.

Winner type | Surprised... then elated! Bouncing and happy and it's completely contagious. No hard feelings about a single thing. Convinces Heidi to invite people to the Emerson Estate—it's a hot day and they have a nice pool

Loser type | Same as Jack! Congratulates the winner with a hug because she's sweet like that 🧁

Rain

Shooting | 2 - This... thing is so cumbersome. And ugly. At least it shoots pretty colors.

Stealth | 7 - Small and used to sneaking around different environments and seeking out hiding spots. Their height and frame makes them harder to spot too.

Strategy | 4 - Hide!!! They’re not getting assaulted with paint and pellets!! Especially not after managing to make this ugly jumpsuit look cute?? Waiting it out is perfectly legitimate. Might share snacks if you decide to join them in hiding 😆

Winner type | Falls asleep in an unexpectedly cozy hiding spot and emerges as everyone thought they’d declared the winner. I imagine R and others yelling at them to get their gun while the original winner scrambles to get theirs, just for Rain to win by pure luck of the draw. Won’t stop them bragging about it, though! (I want this spurned runner-up to be Vi bc ofc)

Loser type | "So I can stop holding this thing?" Yawn. "I'm so hungry and bored, we've been at this for hours..."

Rupan/Rohan

Shooting | 4 - Ah, shit. These don't shoot anything like light guns.

Stealth | 7 - They sneak out and around town a lot 😂 They just force themself to be careful about how loud grass and bushes are.

Strategy | 7 - They’re treating this shit like an action movie and banding together a ragtag team of misfits to take down the strongest alliances and players. Savvy enough to reject Gabe’s and Curt’s offers to join, not opposed to strategic backstabs. They're very clearly just as focused on having fun as they are on winning—and playing Predator, which honestly works with Kile runnin around. They even brought war paint and borrowed a tactical vest. Is it mostly packed with snacks and weed? Maybe. Does it prove useful for negotiations? Hell yeah.

Winner type | Raucous celebration, just pure joy and adrenaline ☺️ Celebrates with their team, brags a bit, rubs it into Vi's face, makes fun of Curt, the usual. Then invites allies out to get pizza because it's the obvious next step

Loser type | Mostly disappointed they can't keep playing. They're a little sore about being left out of the action, but soon just start chatting with other marked players about how the game went for them. Plenty entertaining on its own, they want all the details

Vivian/Vincent

Shooting | 5 - They've got a little bit of shooting experience.

Stealth | 4 - They're overly sensitive and hate being in nature. Their skin is sticky, they keep feeling bugs everywhere, they've gotten dirt all over their pants, it's so hot, they keep WALKING into SPIDERWEBS, [flails about, screaming furiously]

Strategy | 8 - They have good ideas, they're just difficult to execute alone, especially since they're getting sunburnt and getting crankier and can't stop swatting at insects 😅 they're one of the first people to figure out that someone's taking out groups from the trees, so they stay solo and try to find a single person to team up with. Really what they need is someone who's a better shot but easy to boss around. They can probably just owe them for an in-school favor...

Winner type | Barely suppressed gloating. Vi somehow finds a way to be an obnoxious winner almost entirely by the look on their face. Once they're in a smaller group, they're passionately discussing the details of the game and happily boasting about their triumphs (while glossing over all of the whining and and slip-ups lol)

Loser type | Booo, such a sore loser. (Especially in the scenario where Rain wins 🤣) If they're outsmarted or outgunned in a clear, transparent way they'll growl and stomp off, then quietly glower and sulk for way too long. If they're double-crossed or beaten in an underhanded way oh lord —they're fighting it to the end. R can't help but get involved either way, reminding them it was a damn game with literally no prize. "C'mon, Vi, chill. You want ice cream? Let's get you ice cream."

Heidi

Shooting | 6 - Some shooting experience.

Stealth | 8 - She's very aware of her surroundings and her body. Perceptive yet quiet. Tactical. All residual traits picked up from her many activities over the years.

Strategy | 9 - Most likely to outsmart everyone. The first one to figure out groups are being targeted from the trees. Goes it alone and only open to trading (unless she sees Curt with Jess in which case she puts a quick pin in her plans to rescue her 😂). She also immediately figures out it's Kile, because ofc it is. Keeps close tabs on what groups are doing, knowing that eventually Kile will come down to ground level to pick off individuals and couples. Predator becomes prey 👀

Winner type | Proud but not boasting. She doesn't need to be. Victory looks good on her, natural and fitting. Thanks everyone for a good game then takes the girls for a long ride in the Cadillac 😎 top down on a bright day, baby

Loser type | Damn. She should have won this. Maybe if she'd... She probably could have... Then she snaps out of it, roped in by the celebratory mood of congratulating the winner. She's over any feelings of frustration or regret after getting to discuss the match with the person that took her out/the winner and there's no hard feelings. If anything this was fun as hell, it should be an annual thing. ☺️

Curt

Shooting | 8 - Some shooting experience and a natural knack for it. Good reflexes.

Stealth | 8 - Curt likes to say he gets along with the woods around these parts. Sneaking around is second nature to him. Really good hearing too. He's an easy target if you manage to seduce him though, having no issue leaving himself vulnerable if it means that kind of fun 😂

Strategy | 7 - Honestly, he's most interested in seeing how long he can get away with using charm and seduction for both protection and double-crossing 😂 Eventually becomes persona non grata and gets all of his ammo stolen by a vengeful mark, barely getting away in the process. Since that jig is up, he finally starts thinking a win might be nice... and so he teams up with the only competent player who would never betray him and also inspires the least vitriol in others: Jessie. What? Is his back-up plan using her as a human shield? No! 😚 Of course not! 👉👈

Winner type | Insufferable and gloating. Rubs it in a lot of people's faces, specifically Heidi, Rupan/Rohan, and any participants who genuinely don't like him. Brags to Gabe (who is completely disinterested in gassing him up 😂), then promises he'll make things up to Jessie (who didn't mind and had fun lol). Then celebrates by asking whoever he's flirting with these days for a quick date—and a ride in the Ferrari. Makes a scene pulling out of the parking lot. Ass.

Loser type | Doesn't care one bit as long as he had fun! And he always finds a way to have fun, it's why he's so carefree 😅

#lovely anon #answered #ROs #scenarios #someone pls confirm that kile is using paint pellets thx #I can totally see myself writing this out as a an actual short story 😂#maybe as a kofi reward whenever I get that set up 🤞🏾#I don't think any of these are incomplete...

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