#i just get tired of being exposed to the most insane opinions known to man y'know

[knaveofmogadore]

Maybe I block people too flippantly. Maybe I go too crazy with it

[prismartist]

Ponk’s discoveries and what they mean

Y’all haven’t been paying attention to Ponk and it shows. /lh

He has made many discoveries in his recent streams that are just begging to be talked about, and I, as the resident maker of farfetched theories, will take up the job of compiling and connecting them to the current lore.

For those who don’t know, Ponk recently built up the lore of Not A Very Good Town Town, aka the village that went mad, through a book he found in the basement of Jack’s (the potato farmer, not Manifold) Ye Old Farmhouse, written by Jack himself. And it reveals some interesting information.

There’s going to be a few sections for this post: first, breaking down what is in the journal, then theories as to what exactly happened to the village, and how these discoveries can tie into the current storyline.

The journal

For one, Jack seems to have interacted an entity that’s eerily similar to Foolish. In the first page there’s an entry that reads:

“Day 790 The strange man is back, his body made of straw but eyes of emrald.”

On the second page as well, it mentions:

“Day 800 A NEW LAND! A land that uses sand as stone! Gold.... GOLD EVERYWHERE!”

Which, of course, probably pertains to Foolish’s desert home, which also has a significant amount of gold due to the Egyptian theme.

But why would we get Foolish lore from Ponk of all people, instead of the totem god himself? Well, Ponk was the first person Foolish interacted with on the server aside from Dream, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they talked more after that and collabed for lore.

But anyways, now we move on to the more interesting section:

“Day 840 The Strange man has returned his name still unknown... BUT! he has brought a caravan of good! he talks about ancient magic and gifts 21 statues transported in make shift boats.”

Jack then goes on to describe that the statues are “calming” for him, before the next entry, written ten days later, show a disturbing shift in attitude.

“Day 855 CATS I HEAR CATS, CATS IN THE WALLS IN THE WALLS”

And another one five days later:

“DAY 900 murder... the cats murder ,,, the people I showed Shrimpy my satues he seems too intrested BUT THEY ARE MY SATUES”

Now those who saw the episode know that Jack and Bob (Shrimpy) turned out to be the murderers of the “canon round”. Seeing as those two people were the only ones exposed to the statues as we know, it’s logical to assume that the statues were the reason they went mad.

And this is backed up by the next entry:

“Day 905 SUDDEN URGE TO MURDER, THAT HELGA WOMEN IS TEMPTING BUT DAMN HER HUSBAND NEEDS TO GO BY ANY MEANS NESS…..”

Then there are two blank pages before the journal concludes

“Day 1040 Just me and Shrimpy and the cool statues life is good go od goo d g ood go odgood g oodg ood go odg good goo dgood goo dgood g ood good good good goodgoo d go od g ood go od dgo od g oo go od go o d - JACK”

It’s creepy as shit. But moving on.

There’s a lot of questions to be asked here. Why did Foolish–if it is Foolish–visit the Town? Why exactly did he gift a bunch of statues that drove Jack and Shrimpy to madness and murder? Why are there cats in the walls?

(Well, cats are very significant to Egyptian culture, even to a cult-like status, but that’s for another post.)

There are a few possibilities.

What exactly were the effects that Foolish had on the Town?

(Here’s the farfetched theories part lmao)

The simplest (and let’s be honest, the most likely) theory is that the statues probably had way too much power that caused people to become overprotective over them. Foolish just didn’t realize and wanted to give some nice gifts, but the statues drove Jack and Bob to insanity after being exposed to them for way too long. So they killed everyone.

However, considering certain factors, there is another possibility, specifically surrounding:

The “non-canon” round.

Did Karl say that it was a practice round and thus not canon? Yes. Am I suggesting it’s canon anyway for the sake of this theory that probably won’t be true? Also yes.

Besides, Karl probably also didn’t plan for TVTWM to be influential to the storyline, but because of it his character’s now a time traveler and Ponk is pulling out more lore so.

I think Foolish came by and gifted the statues, the first round did happen, and he brought them back to life after the first game. But the resurrection affected Jack and Bob, driving them to madness à la gothic horror lit character that just saw something they weren’t supposed to. Perhaps their attitude became cult-like, praising Foolish, thus the overprotectiveness over the statues as they were connected to the god, or they were of the opinion that “Hey no, everyone’s supposed to be dead,” and then sought to make that true once again.

“But then what about the first round, where everyone also died?” You may scoff at the ridiculous theory, poking my chest accusingly. “Why were the killers different?”

Well, I have a simple answer for that.

Egg.

“What, the egg again-“ I know, I know, it may seem tiring tying everything back to the egg, but hear me out.

In another one of Ponk’s streams, “Dreams of potatos?”, at 58:15 (correct me if wrong) Ponk had a dream where Mayor Jimmy was saying disjointed sentences to Jack, scolding him, telling him to stay away from Helga, and also something about burning Miles Memeington being burned at the stake for being a witch (????). At the end of it, Jimmy turned to the camera.

And his eyes were red.

Which, of course, is a telltale sign of being infected by the egg.

The egg being the main plot right now, seeing as it can easily be connected to the “Red-Eyed Village Wars”, and the fact that it is known to control people to murder, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to point to it as being the cause.

It also helps that Jimmy was only a character from the first round; in the “canon” round, Bad had changed his character to some sort of constable or something.

So the egg may have controlled Jimmy and Cornelius, the murderers in the first round, to kill everyone, Foolish then came along, resurrected everyone murdered in the first round, gotten rid of the egg’s influence, and then left. Then whatever effects the statues had on Jack and Bob took affect.

Alternatively, the statues may have been the ones to resurrect the dead, or have been given as protection from any threats, but became haywire for one reason or another. They influenced Jack and Bob to protect the statues at any cost, and they took it too far. Which may seem a little hypocritical as the egg literally does the same thing, but fire fights fire and all that.

And, just like with Karl, if Foolish has had to deal with the egg before, it makes sense why he’s so averse to it now.

Current lore

Now, how does this tie into the current storyline?


Aside from the egg, if resurrection and items do affect one’s psyche, then maybe that’s the same reason why Schlatt and even Dream–the only other two who know how to resurrect–acted the way they did, becoming apathetic to the wellbeing of other people.

Also, it is worth noting that in the basement where Ponk found the journal, there were 21 villagers in boats, the same amount as the statues. Thus Ponk concluded that they are the statues. And Foolish does have an affinity for villagers, if King Toad is any indication. This implies that Foolish can not only bring dead people back to life, but can also grant life to objects that never lived in the first place. Or, they were once living, but had their life taken away from them before getting it back for one reason or another. If Foolish really has this much power, it could be foreshadowing for future events where those powers will be utilized.

About the bloodvines, if Foolish has defeated them before, there’s a chance he may do it again. Unless something goes wrong and he accidentally drives a few people to madness.

(or maybe they were predisposed to madness, who knows-)

TL;DR

Foolish may have interacted with Not A Very Good Town Town before to save them from the egg and resurrect the dead, driving Jack and Bob to insanity as a consequence. Thus he could have a lot of power and will be the one to potentially defeat the egg once again.

[sweetpxsin]

Soulmate AU! ; Bang Chan

        >> Genre: Soulmate AU! :: Fluff

        >> Member: Bang Chan (Stray Kids)

        >> A/N: None [ Request box open ] <Please I need help with writing ideas>

•Flower tattoos connected soulmates

•When they met both flowers will appear entwined on both of your wrist/forearm but will only intertwine when you make direct contact (look at moodboard for reference)

•And each person is born with a flower tattoo that resembles their soulmates personality

•Someone born with a Gardenia would have a soulmate with purity and sweetness and indicate a secret love but if your flower was to turn into a black rose that would indicate your soulmate  was on the verge of death/ has passed

•You were born with an alstroemeria flower, also known as a Peruvian Lily

•This meant your soulmate was devoted, prosperous, able to withstand trails of everyday life, and was following his/her dreams and achieving their aspirations

•And if you were being honest it would have made you fall more for your soulmate if it hadn’t been for the fact you weren’t really in a rush to find your soul mate

•Sure some of your friends had already found theirs and would post about cute things they did together

•And although it did spark a small jealousy in you, you pursuing your own passions were more important to you than love

•That being said you became a trainee at the infamous company YG

•Not only were you a trainee you had helped compose some songs for some of the groups

•You could say your hands were pretty filled with school and trainee life along with the fact you would help at your parents cafe

•So you could literally say you had no time to worry

•On the flip side your soulmate was very similar in some ways but was way more infatuated with the idea of soulmates

•His tattoo was of a red carnation meaning deep love and admiration

•He would find himself tracing  his finger over the small dainty flower on his wrist while he was trying to compose a song and would quietly smile to himself

•”Changbin-hyung… why is Chan smiling creepily like that again?”

•”I don’t know the old man is probably going insane from his lack of sleep.”

•”ExUsE mE bUT i cAN hEAr yOU, YoU LItTLE pRIcKS”

•”And?”

•Que eye twitch followed by a serious face

•AnYwAYs

•Sometimes he would write little songs about his soulmate and imagine cute things with you but never to the point it would interfere with his work

•Nevertheless you could say he was way more ecstatic than you

•One day while you were going to practice in one of the rooms you accidently bursted into the one were Stray Kids from JYP would have been practicing

•You had heard they would be doing the traditional JYP v YG but you never imagined or intended to accidentally burst in on them

•Your face progressively got hotter as all eyes landed on you out of surprise

•”I-I’m so sorry.” You bowed multiple times before leaving in a rush

•Although at the time you didn’t feel it Chan most certainly felt it

•As soon as his eyes had landed on you he pulled up his sleeve and was left with disappointment upon seeing that his flower remind alone

•Shaking  his head he guessed it was just his imagination and proceed to practice and help ease the younger ones nervousness

•Once it came time to actually meet the YG trainees you were long gone from his mind knowing his chances of ever seeing or meeting you again were slim

•WElL tHiNK aGAiN cHAn I think I’m funny

•Everything was going smoothly with meeting the other trainees actually till YG had walked in late, dragging a smaller trainee with him

•The room was filled with hellos till JYP had caught a glimpse of you

•After a little explaining You were introduced as one of YG’s aces and was asked to stay as part of it considering you’d make a good unbiased opinion

•it was awkward as hell for you considering they were the group you had walked in on you sorta had a hard time evaluating them but still complimented them on their skills because come on they obviously had something going for them *cough* talent *cough*

•Afterwards you quickly bid goodbye and good luck to the trainees and Stray Kids shaking each of their hands politely

•All was normal till you had gotten to the leader of the group

•You’d be lying if you said he hadn’t already caught your eye the moment you saw him start to perform but you never thought it was because he was your soulmate

•So instead of shaking his hand you opted for giving him a small smile along with kind words not sure if you could take the “burden” of him being your soulmate

•Chan noticed and frowned a little as he watched you leave the overwhelming feeling of affection was too strong from him to not notice or even ignore

•”Jeonwoong who was that  again.”

•”Why?”

•”They walked in on us practicing.”

•”Oh they’re (Full name)”

•With a smile he thanked the boy before slipping out of the room to try to find you

•It didn’t take him long considering there was only one room in the hallway that was blasting music super loudly

•Taking a deep breath he placed his hand on the door

•”Chan!”

•”Jesus christ Jisung!”

•”We’re leaving now let’s go”

•Just then the music cut off and Chan quickly grabbed Jisung and walked down the hall to exist the building

•”Hyung what were you doing.”

•”Nothing Jisung.”

•with a sigh he slumped  into his seat trying to figure out how in the world was he ever going to see you again

•Sure you guys were soulmates but that didn’t mean you both were destined to met

•After all some people had their tattoos changed into a butterfly weed meaning “leave me” indicating  their soulmate had fallen in love with someone else (Of course only appearing when the relationship was destined to stay ex. When their soulmate was to get married)

•Once they had made it back to the company Chan instantly walked to the practice room to wallow in his own misery

•With a sigh he opened up his laptop and took out a pencil and paper

•If he was going to be sad and mopey why not busy himself with creating a song

•And within a few hours Chan found himself staring at the clock that read the time of 2:34

•He could barely keep his eyes open but at the same time he didn’t have the heart to fall asleep

•Grabbing his laptop and things he walked out of the building and headed to the nearest cafe to continue his work

•Where were you?

•Well you were leaning over the cafe counter a book in hand as you waited for the next customer to appear from the busy streets of Seoul

•You look up when the door bells jingle and you instantly straighten up

•”Welcome to Brew and Bakery cafe.”

•When your eyes met the boy standing in front of you, you wanted nothing more than to pass out

•Lowering your head in a lame attempt to hide your face you waited for his order

•”Can I get uh…hot chocolate.”

•As a lowkey coffee connoisseur you lifted your head up in amusement totally forgetting your earlier dilemma

•”Really? I took you as an espresso kinda guy.”

•You joked as you punched in his order

•the fact that he laughed at your boring ass statement made your heart kinda flutter, you didn’t know if it was because you were tired or for the fact his laugh was just the cutest

•”I took you as knocking kinda person.”

•*cue fidgetiness*

•”Th-That wou-ld be *ahem* $2.95.”

•”Here keep the change.”

•You nodded and turned around to make his simple hot chocolate

•”So what makes me a expresso kinda guy?” He mused

•”You look like a sleep deprived dad.” You played along trying to lighten the atmosphere for yourself

•”I get that a lot.”

•With a smile you turn around and hand him his hot chocolate

•”Here’s your hot chocolate..”

•”Chan.” “Expresso man.” (Ya’ll taking in unison what cuties)

•He shot you a smile as he grabbed the cup his hand brushing against yours

•At the same time you both felt the overwhelming sense of affection and adoration again

•Taking a glance at your exposed wrist you noticed the intertwined flowers of peruvian lily and red carnation

•”I guess this means were soulmates.”

•”Y-Yeah.”

•”Mind if I treat you to some of my hot chocolate?”

•”I’m more of a (insert favorite drink) kinda person.”

•Shaking his head lightly he chuckles lightly

•Afterwards the both of you kinda bond with Chan explain about what he was doing up so late and you explain your thought process on the whole soulmates situation right now, in which Chan totally understands

•Thought Chan is totally up for the challenge of making you fall for him as much as he did when he laid eyes on you

•In order to do so he would often come late at night with a song of his asking for your advice or to just bond over coffee

•In all honesty the boy seriously knew how to make your heart flutter

•With his witty jokes, funny faces and determination to debut with his members as 9

•Not only that but you were a huge fan of his music as much as he was of your different coffees you would make for him

•But what brought ya’ll closer than anything else was music and it was the thing that brought you two officially together

•Chan had brought you to the company wanting to hangout at the practice room rather than at the cafe for one day

•Both of you sat in front of the small desk as  he worked on his most recent piece

•Despite being in your own chair your legs were on his lap with your arms lazily holding on to his waist with your head resting on his chest

•Chan honestly thought it was the cutest thing ever tbh

•and when you start to mumble his rap parts with him he just could stop himself from smiling to himself

•like you were literally being so cute and he just had to steal a kiss

•he’d dip down and give your lips a quick peck to see how you’d react

•once he saw the light blush on your face and how quickly you hid your face in his chest he knew he had your heart just as much as you had his

•guys I’m melting this is so cute omg..wow did I just compliment my writing..#concededisme

•wow I just ruined the moment…well in my defense it was the end…okay I’ll shut up now I hope you enjoyed it sorry for it being so long (and for that I’ll give you small bonus)

•dates with Chan would literally be so late but so worth it because you always end up wrapped up in his arms

•the dates are either at yours or his company or at the cafe

• The boys call you composing koala couple

•they literally gush at the sight of both of you

•when it’s just the two of you relaxing Chan has the cutest habit of tracing the flowers that are entwined on your wrist and will occasionally kiss the tattoo because he’s literally so in love with you and the fact that both of you are together

•literally can’t stop saying how much he loves and highkey enjoys it when he catches you staring at him

•tells you to take of yourself  and literally will ask you if you’ve eaten or rested well almost every day once a day

•and in return you give him words of encouragement/congratulations BeCauSE YOuR MAnZ IS tAlENtEd

•but overall both of you are just perfect for each others and love each other with every inch of your living being

[yoongiandchiminie]

Addicted. {Mafia & Soulmate AU) Part 1

Series: When you’re born, you can’t see a color until you meet the eyes of your Soulmate for the first time. Bangtan is known as one of the most infamous gangs around. This series will focus on the lighter side of things, their soulmates- Well, maybe they’re lighter. Maybe. 

Genre: Angst, Mafia!AU, Soulmate!AU, Fluff

Pairing: Yoongi x Reader

Warnings: Swearing, violence, substance abuse, mature themes, strong language

Word count: 4,085

Summary: Suga, the Stealth and Weapons guy of Bangtan meets his Soulmate with a bang. He’d grown up believing in the idea of finding the person he was destined to be with and won’t let her get away. Even if she’s addicted, he’s determined to help her. He just wants to save his Blue girl.

You were fucked up. You were incoherent at this point, but goddamn did you fucking love it. Getting messed up, doing what you want… it was the lifestyle you had adapted to. As a child, you were the star of your parents lives. Straight A’s, sports, clubs… Everything to the nines as a privileged baby. When you left for school it all changed. You found drugs. You found alcohol. You found a love in breaking rules.

Right now you were cruising down a highway with your roommates. You’d moved off of campus for your junior year into this shitty apartment that you could all barely afford. There were four of you and right now you were all high as fuck. They were just high, but you… you were so twisted. Scotch whiskey never tasted better than on a fall day. They kept going on about the color of your hair today and how vibrant it looked. It was a normal golden brown, but you wouldn’t even know. Your brown was the color of grey.

His blue must have been grey. He definitely had it worse, not being able to see the clear skies or waters that were all around. It was terrible, not being able to see the color of your soulmate's eyes until you saw them. Some people were denied the most beautiful sights until they ran into their soul mate. You were lucky- it was just a brown. Well, gold. Throughout your life you’d gotten all of the gold medals, but they didn’t really mean too much as they were just a plain grey.

It was all dumb, the way this world worked. Predetermined things deciding your fate… fucking insane.

You were at your high, windows all rolled down, smoking a blunt into the sunset. Throwbacks were blasting through the car as were the sounds of other cars, driving into the distance. You were happy. Laughing, singing. Everything was good. It was always good.

Then there it was. A moment of eye contact as you passed a black van. He had blonde hair and beautiful eyes. It was a brief few seconds, but you saw it. The specs of gold in his eyes that looked bored. He looked out the window to avoid whoever he was with. He was met with your eyes. Met with a fate.

He was intense. Min Yoongi was the most intense man he knew, as chided by everyone around him. Bangtan. The name of his gang that ruled the streets around them. He wasn’t in charge, but he wasn’t to be messed with. He stood almost 5’10 and this month his hair was blonde to throw off the allure that he was Bangtan’s baddest boy.

They’d just come back from a shootout. There were three of them in the car as of now and he sat shotgun while his friend Jin drove and Taehyung sat in the back. They were listening to old school Eminem and the two of them were rapping. They were shitty in his opinion, but he wasn’t in the mood to be vocal.  He just looked out as they passed the other cars, until his attention was drawn away. The first car on the highway to pass them revealed the most beautiful color his eyes had ever seen. Blue.

The world around him changed in the brief moment and suddenly the grey color in the sky was blue. It faded into the sunset, but he saw it. He saw the color of Jin’s jeans and the color of the car in front of them as it sped on by.

“Drive faster.” He demanded.

“What the fuck, dude?”

“Catch that blue car. I can see it. Catch that blue car.” And Jin stepped on it. Tae tried to buckle his seat belt, but instead he found himself struggling and flailing around the car. He eventually got it down.

Your friends were fucking confused. You went on and on about how you saw the color brown now, but they didn’t quite comprehend. None of you thought to try to flag down the other car, but then it hit you. The black van he was in hit your friends blue convertible. The four of you were stunned at first. You flew forward, the windshield broke with your weight being thrown threw it and you felt yourself bleeding. Your friends were both fine and the other car looked okay too. Her car was fine, other than the windshield you shattered. Your eyes dropped to the ground.

Feet were suddenly in view. There were black boots the cut off around the ankles and a pale white hand reached out to cup your face. Now, you could see the sunset. In front of that beautiful sight, was another one. His eyes bore into yours and he studied them. He didn’t pay attention to how hurt you were, he just looked into your eyes. Then he reached out and picked you up. It was so weird, being as incoherent as you were in this life changing situation, but he didn’t even notice.

You guessed he was blaming your state on the crash, but then you threw up on his black boots. Maybe then he got the picture.  You couldn’t even lift your head up to marvel at the new sight, but this was him. He’d understand if you vomited on his shoes. Maybe.

You woke up in a dark room in new clothes. Your body hurt, fuck it really fucking hurt. “Was I kidnapped?” Your broken voice surprised you, but not as much as the other voice in the room.

“No.” It was brash and deep. He sounded- tired. “It’s me- you don’t know me, but… it’s me.”

The light flickered on and he came into view. He wasn’t as tall as you’d pictured him, but he was taller than you. His skin was a milky white and his hair was blonde, but you could almost sense it wasn’t natural. He wore all black, except for his grey socks. Maybe he’d confused them with blue when he put them on; Before he had  met eyes with his soulmate.

You two locked eyes for a moment and he scrunched his nose. His demanding, scary aura faded as he smiled and reached out to rub a fresh cut on your cheek. “Y/N.” you spoke, reaching up to touch his fingers. A vibrant shock flew through both of your bodies, but you kept your hand uptop his.

“Yoongi- But nobody calls me Yoongi. It's Suga to the rest of the world.” His voice was full of secrets that he seemed full well ready to expose to you. That name seemed familiar and you had recalled hearing something about the nefarious Suga and Bangtan Gang. You never really got involved with that shit, even though it was big in the town you now lived in. Your own life was complex enough without watching people die all of the time due to rivalry and drugs- you preferred to stay out of it.

“What am I supposed to call you?” Your voice was small. All of this was new and the only thing that was set in your moment was that you wanted to throw up again. And get high. You had a problem. Literally. “I’d like to call you Yoongi.”

“That’s fine.” his response was quick, “I’m not going to call you Y/N in front of people. I don’t want them to know your name. I’ll call you Blue in front of people.”

“Suga and Blue?” You couldn’t even make some snarky response because of how ill you felt at the moment. Your head was close to his and his hand was still on your face. You brought it forward to touch your forehead to his. “I don’t feel well.” you whispered.

His face was straight. “Nervous?” he looked prideful.

“No, I’m deprived.” he furrowed his eyebrow, obviously confused. “I- I don’t have a problem.” Classic excuse. “I just need something.” He was still confused, maybe he hadn’t figured out that you were fucked up earlier and that’s why you threw up. He probably thought it was from the car crash. The crash. “Where are my friends?”

“They went back home. We’ve purchased them a new identical vehicle. They’re fine.” He stood up and stretched his back. You guessed he was here for hours just watching you passed out. Maybe making sure you didn’t vomit in your sleep and choke to death within hours of meeting him. “Now, what do you need?”

It almost pained you to say it. You weren’t embarrassed ever except for some reason he was making you seem like you should be. He was in a gang, he dealt with drugs and violence every day. It was almost a surprise how he hadn’t gotten one look at you and know you had a problem. “I’m sorry.” you pulled your legs in close to your chest, biting onto the inside of your lip. “I just need to go- to go home.”

“To that shitty apartment you live in? With too many people, no personal space?” he scoffed and walked over to you, grabbing for your hand. “No. You’re gonna live with me from now on.”

You followed his pull, almost afraid of his harsh words. “No? You’re my soulmate Yoongi, not my keeper. Not my warden.” There was an alarming feeling in the room and he was almost confused. He kept pulling you behind him as he stepped into a hallway.

The walls were full of pictures of him and other boys. You guessed they were the rest of the Bangtan gang. Being on the inside, they didn’t look as threatening as the stories that were told about them around town. They were merciless dealers, hitman, and thieves. Now you were in their den.

“I know I’m not, but listen Blue.” you took note that you were out of the privacy of a closed door and therefore ears were on. “You’re my soulmate and I want you to be protected and not live in a shit hole that’s a step away from getting demolished. You can continue about your daily life, but now I’ll be in it. Probably the rest of Bangtan too. You can stay here with us. With me.” He stopped in front of a door that had Suga scribbled on the front of it, surrounded by cd covers. “This is our room.”

He let go of your hand and stepped back. His eyes watched your hands as they shook and slowly reached for the diamond plated door handle. It turned within your hands as it would come to a million times in the future. Yoongi let you go in alone and he disappeared without a sound when you turned to where he had been seconds prior.

The room was dimly lit already, meaning he hadn’t turned off the lights from whenever he had last been in here. There was a queen size bed off to the corner and the room wasn’t messy, it just wasn’t organized. There was a giant tv in front of the bed and on the other side of the room, there was almost a supercomputer surrounded by papers, cds. Sharpies, pens, and a bunch of different colored post its with scribbles on it.

The room was dark and you couldn’t figure out if you liked it or not. The world that you lived in was crazy. This whole soulmate thing was crazy. When you met your soulmate, it was almost routine to drop whatever was going on in your life and just to mesh with them. This was a lucky situation, the two of you were close enough to make it work and with him forcibly moving you into his life, this could be tragic or amazing. An amazing life with the man with a high bounty. Or you’d die, but that seemed to be a daily risk as of late.

Yoongi had gone to the Bangtan lounge where he’d found the other six members sitting around, discussing his brash actions. None of them were really judging because they’d all decided they would have done the same if faced with the situation. Then they all agreed that was pathetic of them to do, but they’d stick to their guts nonetheless. That’s who the seven of them were, infamous boys who acted before thinking most things through.

“How’d she take it?” Hoseok scooted closed to Jungkook leaving Yoongi room on the couch. He flopped down, forcing everyone to move farther away to make room for their Suga.

“She’s fine, but she keeps mentioning needing something, I don’t want to be invasive and divulge into her personal details, but I’m getting worried. What if she needs some kind of medication or something.” Yoongi was the lazy one of the group, despite how many kills or whatever he had wracked up over the past few years. His intentions were always grand, but it was strange to everyone else how much effort he’d put into this girl. Of course, they knew he was her one and only, they all knew that. Except, they didn’t expect this sort of change especially before barely speaking to her.

“Well, I did a bit of research.” Jimin spoke from the corner with his eyes glued to his phone. He was met with strange eyes. “I didn’t just want to let a stranger into our home with no knowledge. She could be working with the enemy or something-”

“Don’t say that, Jimin.” Yoongi groaned. “She’s my soulmate, you can’t fake that.”

“She’s an addict, Suga. She loves pills, weed, and alcohol. You got yourself a life sentence, not a soul mate.” he chuckled and Yoongi sank lower on the couch. “She’s gonna go through some withdrawal soon, must have also been why she threw up on your shoes. Go check on her, Suga. She’s sick and I guess someone somewhere thought you could fix her.”

The only thoughts that crowded Yoongi’s mind were about how if he had met you sooner he could have stopped this. All he wanted to do was blame himself. Such as if he had made a different turn somewhere, he could have saved you. He would always be full of guilt about not finding you- his soulmate sooner. He believed it was because he always stuck to the shadows when that definitely wasn’t the case. The two of you just never ran down the same path and it was something that should have been more obvious to him.

Meanwhile, you were stopping yourself from throwing up. You hadn’t been this- sober in a while. A lot of painful nights kept flashing in your mind and all you could seem to blame was yourself. There was a lot of wondering about how you wound up this- this pathetic. Relying on all of these illegal things and things to make you forget. Your life hadn’t been too bad, but here you were- suffering.

Yoongi ran into the room out of breathe. Before saying anything, he watched you writhe around on his bed in pain and his face spoke how you were feeling. “I’m sorry it’s me.” you choked out, sniffing up your runny nose. Your eyes couldn’t even look up to meet his, but you know how they probably looked. Disgust was a common thing people saw in you when you ended up like this.

Except when you mounted up the courage to look at him, they read pain. Same as yours. They wanted to help. Yoongi reached out and wiped your tears and wrapped onto of his arms around you, pulling you in tight. He moved around and positioned your hurting body onto his torn up one. The only thing in line of sight were his bare arms, filled with scars and a few fresh wounds. Your shaking fingers ran over them, tracing them up and down.

“Oh, Blue.” he hummed into your ear, flicking his eyes towards the open door. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen worse. I- I want to be here for you and help you. This shit is all crap, but- I know you’re it.” Within a flash his lips were on yours and you suddenly felt numb again. Only for a little bit and then your body was hot.

You kissed him back and the pain you were in floated away, followed by the sparks igniting from the kiss. “You don’t have to pretend.” Was all you kept thinking as the kiss became deeper. He ran has hands through your hair, brushing out the kinks that had formed within it. You pulled away first and you swore you heard a whine at the loss of contact. “I- I have class today.”

School was never truly the first thing on your mind, but maybe it would have to be now. You had begun school majoring in business, but you had quickly changed it to pharmaceuticals.  Was there even a question as to why? It was extremely ironic, but it had caught your eye along with the different things that came along with it. You swore up and down you’d stop the drugs the day you graduated, but it was clear to you in this moment that this was it. You were done because there was no way this guy was going to let you keep pushing yourself closer to death.

His eyes seemed to have seen the world and he wasn’t keen on the idea of letting you end up dead in some street because he gave you some cocaine Bangtan had laying around the home. You untangled yourself from him and woozily stood up. There was a moment before you swayed in your balance, but there he was to catch you. From now on, he’d be there to catch you. Which was good- you seemed to fall a lot.

Your eyes glanced at the large digital clock that was on his desk. “Can I shower? My class is in an hour and a half.” you whispered and reached out to the bed post to support yourself. “Then I can walk to sch-”

“I’ll drive you.” his voice was stern. “And pick you up. Our bathroom is right down the hall.” Yoongi stood up and ran almost like a maniac around the room collecting towels, shower things, and clothes for you to change into. It was so out of character for him to be crazed like this judging by his demeanor that you almost laughed. Almost.

Once he’d gathered everything, he motioned his head towards the door and you backed up to let him lead. “Hold onto the walls.” Yoongi ordered you. The bathroom was at the end of the looming hallway and as you walked by the doors, you heard noises from a few of them. Some held conversations you weren’t keen on listening into and some blasted music or a television show. However, the door next to the bathroom opened as the two of you reached the door.

A lanky man dressed casually in ripped jeans and a white shirt with dark hair had his eyes focused on you. His figure leaned against the door frame and a smirk covered his face. Yoongi didn’t take notice of this other man as he continued into the bathroom, but you had completely stopped. “So this is her?” he spoke and extended a hand to steady your shaking body. “What’s her name?” He didn’t even speak to you, just around.

“Jungkook, don’t you dare fucking touch her.” With a swift motion, Yoongi dropped everything in his hands to the ground and was in between the other member and yourself. His hands held your shoulders and his eyes threw daggers towards the dark haired man who let out a chuckle. “Go find one of your sluts if you want to fucking devour someone, don’t go near her.”

Jungkook kept a malevolent laugh going to himself as Yoongi shuffled you into the bathroom. Once he looked the door, the laugh stopped and the only open door in the home slammed. He picked up all the things he had dropped and placed them onto a shelf, laying them completely neat. “Who was that?” You questioned and sat onto the closed toilet.

“The fucking little shit of Bangtan. His name’s Jungkook and he thinks he can claim whatever the fuck he wants. His fucking beetey eyes were trying to claim you like I wouldn't fucking notice.” his tone was harsh as he spoke through gritted teeth. “Kid’s a fucking good sharpshoot, but I try not to take him around important people. He wreaks of destruction and sex.” You laughed at the one until Yoongi glanced at you to stop.

“Aren’t you all in a-” your voice turned into a whisper. “-gang.” he rolled his eyes and let out a breathy chuckle as your voice returned to normal. “Don’t you have like some weird dedication to each other and have to- I dunno, care?”

He turned on the water and held his hand under it so he could get it to the perfect temperature. “Yeah, there’s that. That whole thing, but I dunno. Outside of work I tend to stay away from him when it comes to- females. Especially that. Kid’s always in some shit with some bitch he picked up at a bar. I’d risk my life for him though. I’ve done it before. For all of them, actually. Funny how that works.” Yoongi simply shrugged. “I’m gonna go into our room.” A shiver ran through your body as he spoke the word our. “I’ll come check up on you in like 15 minutes? Your school is about a twenty minute drive so that should be enough time.”

He turned away from you to walk out and as soon as his back was turned, you began to lift your shirt. You were still in the same clothes as yesterday and it was disgusting the way they clung to your body. You pulled it off to put it next to the clean clothes he was giving you only to find his eyes on you again. Yoongi cleared his throat. “I don’t want you walking alone around the house- not yet. It’s yours too now, but I need to ease you into the boys. Okay, Y/N? They’ve been in this life for quite a bit and some have mixed reactions about this whole soulmate thing, alright baby?”

Your face was hot as his eyes roamed your body and your crossed your arms to cover your breasts in an instant. “Y-Yep, got it.”

The moment he was gone, you removed the rest of your clothes and slowly stepped into the marble shower. The shower itself was spacious and covered in gold. There was no rust on any inch of it, so you could only infer it may have been pure gold. The water wasn’t too hot, actually. It was around the temperature you preferred. Warm but with a little bit of chill to keep you lucid.

However, you weren’t exactly all there in this moment. As you rubbed the soap over your body, you felt the bruises that were covering it from the car crash. The car crash that he had caused. You’d been ignoring it, but here it was in your face. That just seemed to be the way he was. When he had a goal, he was jet set on getting it and that had carried over.

As you got lost in your thoughts, you didn’t really notice until you slid onto the floor of the shower. You sat for a few minutes before hoisting yourself up and finishing cleaning yourself. You could almost feel the bruises darkening and hurting a bit more, but luckily most of them were in hidden spots. He heard a faint knock on the door almost instantaneously after turning off the water.

“Hello?” you called out, patting yourself dry with the towels he had left for you.

“Blue, I’m ready to go whenever you are.” his melodious tone flowed through your ears. “I have your bag and everything too, alright? I'll be right here waiting.”

His dedication made you happy. You didn't know him well- obviously, but the thought of having someone who you're fated to be with that doesn't reject it was almost alarming. A lot of people simply rejected the soulmate law. They didn't want to believe that some weird push and pull of the world was truly controlling their destiny even if the proof was right there.

Author’s Note;; Feedback would be appreciated as I am going to write one of these for each of the BTS members. I’d like to know everyone’s thoughts and such!!

Hoseok’s installment!

Taehyung’s installment!

Jungkook’s installment!

Jimin’s installment!

Jin’s installment!

Part 2  →

[thechocobros]

Lunyx | Dirty Dancing Au | ch.2

Couple: Lunafreya Nox Fleuret/Nyx Ulric

Words: 4339

Previously: AO3 LINK

Summary: Princess Lunafreya Lucis Caelum - the daughter of Regis Lucis Caelum and Sylva Nox Fleuret and the sister of Ravus and Noctis - is a very good mannered, intelligent, innocent and curios young girl. She sneaks out of Insomnia’s palace to join the Glaives in the slums, only to find Nyx and Crowe enjoying their hours of freedom by dancing senseless some galahdian dances in front of hundreds of people. When Crowe gets badly injured during her guard duty, Nyx needs to find a good partner before the dance competition of next month. That may be the hardest thing to find in Insomnia. Until Luna offers.

Comment: Again, I love this AU for them. And things are getting hotter here :3 

Btw, this fic is freely inspired by the movie, so you will have some new elements in it, I hope you don’t mind. 

Aaand ... Thanks to @rsasai for the huge help in editing this chapter! You really turned my confused words in logical sentences, amazing xD 

Nyx was certain this wouldn't have been a good idea. He didn't agree with having the Princess being present at the discotheque without her family's approval and even less with the Princess being his direct partner in Crowe's place. Yet, here she was.

"If your parents find out ... If your brothers find out... I'm fired. Not only will I lose the prize, I'll lose also my primary source of income and I won't be able to go back to Galahd ever again."

Lunafreya nodded and moved to her feet, squashing her fingers in her own palms. She wore a simple, short dress for the occasion, matched with some gym shoes to feel more comfortable, but it hadn’t helped. She had never felt so nervous in her whole life.

"I know. With a wig and some good makeup nobody will recognize me when I'm on stage. The real problem is learning to dance." Nyx raised the eyebrows and made a grimace similar to a smile, crossing arms so that his perfectly shaped muscled were pulled at the thick material of the Kingsglaive's jacket.

"No, I can be a good teacher. Don’t worry about that. But we have only a month. I need to train you every single day, for hours and hours, probably until your legs will hurt and your back breaks. How do you plan to do it without your family noticing?" There was doubt in his voice and sarcasm in his eyes. Luna couldn't blame him, of course. She was the most insane partner choice for a slum's dance competition.

"I-I will arrange it, somehow."

Nyx shook his head. "Fine." He took off his jacket and abandoned it on a nearby chair, showing the perfect shape of his mix of soldier and dancer’s body.

They were in the gym hall of the Kingsglaive's department, which at that hour was empty. It was 9 pm after all. The rest of the Glaives were at Yama's already. Nyx locked all the doors anyway, just to be sure nobody wouldn't interrupt them.

Also, of course, it was imperative that nobody would find out that a Glaive was training the Princess for a dance contest.

Luna stood paralyzed in the center of the floor, looking at Nyx like he was an assassin sent after her.

When Nyx turned around he noticed, so he raised his hands in such a princely and polite gesture, but Luna knew it was to mock her.

"What's that face for, Princess? You're the one who offered."

"I'm fine! I'm just ... A bit nervous."

Nyx smiled this time, getting closer with a smug yet gentle confidence. “Relax,"he whispered, taking her into his arms. With the smallest effort he sustained her entire weight.

Of course such proximity didn't relax her at all, on the contrary. Her cheeks flushed, her heart went crazy.

He noticed and, thinking about how long the road was ahead, he sighed. He freed a hand to press against her chest, feeling her heart beating wildly against his fingers.

Luna froze, focusing on his warm fingers on the bare skin of her collarbone, the pleasant sensation of having his eyes on her.

"Are you really going to teach me how to breathe?"

"I hoped it wouldn't have been necessary.“ He smiled. "But it is. Listen, Princess." And he used the thumb to lift her chin like he did once before. Their eyes glued again, this time in utter silence and tranquillity.

"If you want to be my partner in this, I need to connect with you. Me and Crowe, we’ve known each other since we were kids. We know each other's bodies. We understand each other even before we open our mouths to speak. That's why we're good together. And if I'm not even allowed to touch you without making you feel faint, how exactly am I supposed to guide you into the ancient tribal dances from my homeland?"

Luna swallowed, magnetized by his hazel-blue eyes starring right into her soul. For some reason, the idea of having him knowing her so much scared her.

"It's ... just… I’m not used to it. No man except my father or brothers ever hugged me, and ..." Luna moved in his arms, not at ease with the words she was choosing.

His fingers deepened in the skin of her lower back, like he wanted to keep her still.

"It's not a hug. It's a dance position. I'm here to teach you, not to cuddle." Nyx smirked, trying to knock her fears away with some sarcasm, but he was the first one to know her didn’t even believe what he was saying. Of course the proximity would have been a problem for him, too.

With Crowe he had years and years of platonic affection to count on, so there was no real risk to compromise their relationship with a dance. On the contrary, their familiarity made them even more skilled. But with the Princess ... Touching her like he touched Crowe had a different feeling, something under his skin. She was a new experience, something so far from all he ever had before. It was utterly and completely appealing in a way that was difficult for words.

"I know, I'm sorry, it's just that ... this kind of dance is considered indecent in my world and I feel--" She lost her words in her own embarrassment as she kept staring at Nyx's hands on her waist.

The Glaive bit his lip in a nervous gesture as he lifted the Princess's chin again to force her to look at him.

"Don't look down. Don't look at anything else but me." Luna held her breath, hit hard by his following meaningful words: "Good manners and etiquettes are only prejudices society says we have to conform to. Thinking about what other people will think won't help you to express yourself. You gotta break the borders of your mind. While dancing ... I have to become your only world." Nyx caressed her neck delicately His eyes followed his fingers, getting lost in it. "Alright?"

Luna nodded, hesitating at first but more convinced in the end. "Fine."

To test her, Nyx lowered one hand until he reached her hip and there he stayed. He kept the other hand on her neck, surrounding it. Somehow, Luna understood the movement he wanted her to do even before he said: "Push yourself back. I won't let you fall."

With a deep sigh, Luna stepped ahead, sticking to his entire body, grabbing his shoulders like he was an anchor. Then, she let her neck incline back, losing her balance but exactly like he promised he was there to hold her. His strong arms easily carried her entire weight, because— like Nyx noticed already — she was far thinner than the dancers he was used to.

He guided her to make a turn and pulled her up calmly, focusing on her muscle tensing and relaxing. As she did the movements he requested, Nyx had to resist the temptation to place a kiss on her collarbone. It was so exposed to his sight; so soft, so alluring. He swallowed down the desire in silence and luckly enough Luna's blues found him only after that. The smile which touched his mouth was uncertain though, and he knew she could see it, too.

"Good?" she asked.

"Good." Glaives never blushed, but he had to break eye contact anyway. "Now, I'll teach you some simple moves."

----------

It had been fun at the beginning.

Meeting an attractive member of the Kingsglaive in secret gave her a vibe of adventure she never had before, so the idea of sleeping less in order to make space to the dance lessons didn't bother her.

This was, of course, until Nyx didn't speed up the pace of their dancing and her learning. And at that point, the idea of dancing felt more like the sensation of descending into hell.

"No, raise your chin when you turn. The arms should be straight here. Quicker. Put some effort in it, c'mon!"

More or less, he yelled at her the same words over and over again.

Nyx had been honest from the very beginning: The training was going to be hard and he wouldn't go easy on her just because she was a princess. He kept that promise.

He almost broke her bones pushing her to limits she didn't think she could reach.But even it was tough, Luna had finally the chance to prove herself tougher. She liked it, in a way, because it was her choice. The price of freedom was always the highest. That was what her father once told her and she found it to be quite true. So, she didn't give up, not even when she woke up in the morning with muscles she didn’t even know she had aching.

Lunafreya continued to have dinner with her family every evening, but when they moved to the large room where they all used to sit in front of the fireplace, she always said she had something else to do.

"You're very busy lately, Lunafreya,” her father, King Regis, said once. He was sitting on his luxurious red chair, his wife Sylva in front of him. "Are you sure these gym lessons are good for you? You look tired."

Luna turned to look at her parents, the portrait of elegance and calm. They didn't deserve lies, so she had to go for a"half truth" when she first explained what was going on in her new schedule.

"Yes, I'm a bit tired, but I feel better since I started the course. I was becoming lazy. I needed to get in shape."

"Becoming lazy? My opinion is that such an idea should have been from a different sibling,” Ravus commented, raising his chin from his book to look at Noctis, who was busy playing King's Knight in a corner. The younger Prince didn't even bother to answer, knowing it was betterto mindhis own business.

"Ravus, my son, please,” Regis whispered, before looking at Luna again. "It's fine, my dear. You can go. Remember to take an escort with you."

“Of course. Sir Ulric will come."

“Right. The Glaive who took the place of Lady Crowe." Luna's heart bumped for a second, sensing a hint of judgment in her father's voice.

"The man who saved my life when the accident happened,” she specified then.

Her father nodded, so Luna kissed him and her mum on the cheek, wishing them good night. As she passed by, Noctis leaned up so he could receive the same treatment, not even bothering to raise his eyes from the phone. This caused Luna to giggle. She kissed him on the cheek too and left the room.

She quickly changed her clothing, wearing a pair of white leggings and a long top of the same color. She didn't forget to refresh her make up. For some reason she wanted to look nice for her training.

Of course, the effort was repaid every night when Nyx Ulric saw her coming down the stairs, beautiful and glowing, and he forgot how to breathe.

------------

Nyx had taken her to a small theater on the borders of the city which was abandoned a couple of years before because the owner couldn't pay his taxes. Being friends with one of the policemen who was in charge, Nyx and Crowe had easily gained the keys to use the theater for their trainings.

Now, Nyx thought that a better place couldn't have existed for him to teach the Princess how to dance. The Kingsglaive's halls were too dangerous.

"So, your father really believes you're having some gym lessons?"the Glaive asked, during the break he had to give her after an hour straight of frantic training.

Luna nodded at his question.

"And what does your moral and educated conscience say about it?" he investigated further, trying to steal a smile from her. He succeeded.

"Well, it is a sort of gymnastics, isn't it?" Luna answered, breathing heavily and accepting the bottle of water he was offering to her.

"Yeah, think so. But it's not the sport's definition which would bother him, I guess."

"What then?"

Nyx shrugged. "I don't know, maybe the fact that your idea of 'gymnastics' implies that you’re brushing up all over a Glaive's body."

Luna bursted into a small laugh, sweet and crystalline. He noticed how her eyes seemed to glow differently when she did.

"Weren't you the one who said I had to break the borders of my mind and forget about these prejudices?'"

"Only if you really want to be my partner in this. You can still step back, you know. If ... If you think it's too much." He was still trying to joke but this time a hint of hesitation caressed his voice.

Luna swallowed the fresh water and took a moment to observe his features. She knew him for a couple of years by now and she always thought he had been good looking, but she never went much further than that.

However, the entire situation that had happened to them recently brought them close enough for her to get familiar with more than just his good sides, to see beyond the only surface. She started to notice the small defects on his face, the invisible scars, the imperfections on his skin due to an illness he got when he was a child, the wayhis ears were a bit larger than average. She started to notice the constant fatigue in his eyes, the mark of suffering, well hidden beyond the smug and haughty appearance.

And as she learned his flaws, she started to appreciate him more.

"I won't step back now, Nyx Ulric. I gave you my word."

Nyx never ceased to be surprised by her determination and in that moment too, he felt unprepared and unworthy in front of her gentle words.

"Thank you. You're a ... kind Princess." Usually such a statement would have been slightly sarcastic in his mouth, but the Glaive was serious now. He really meant it.

"If we don’t win the competition because of me ... I-I will find another solution to bring you the money."

"Really? You're gonna steal from your daddy's credit card?" Nyx helped her up.Their breaktime was over.

"If you want to go back to Galahd, I could arrange a --"

"I don't want your money, Princess,” he interrupted her, looking her straight in the eyes. “I don’t need a handout. We’re gonna win the competition. You'll see."

Luna swallowed and nodded. Nyx gave her a minute to realize how much trust he was putting in her and then he took out a bandage from his pocket.

"What's that?" she asked, her voice quivering. She wasn’t sure she liked the bandage very much.

"We warmed our muscles, Princess. Now the real lessons starts. Close your eyes." Nyx turned her around. Once he was behind her he tied the bandage around her face until he covered her eyes completely.

"What do you mean by 'the lesson starts now'? I'm exhausted already,” she complained, but she worried way more about being blind than about her tiredness. As matter of fact, she continued,"Nyx, wait, what is this for exactly?"

"You're too technical. I taught you the basic moves already, but these won't give us the victory. We need to aim higher. So, before doing some crazy stunts you'll need to learn to understand my body and the way I move ... blindly. You count on your sight way too much: You can't dance by looking constantly at how your feet move. You need to focus on other senses, touch being the first."

Luna grabbed his wrists, already panicking when she started to lose balance.

"Are you asking me to dance with a bandage covering my eyes? If I'm blind, I’ll barely be able to stay straight on my feet!"

"That's why you'll need to rely on me and not on yourself,”He smirked, taking her in his arms and helping her to find the right starting position.

Luna really had some big difficulties at the beginning. The Glaive made her turn around and swing a bit and the more she started to get used to being blind, the more she had to grab onto his body to not lose balance. That was right what he wanted, because doing so she was more malleable and flexible. Not having other choice, she trusted him completely for every smallest step.

He turned on the music then and they tried to move along with the rhythm, using the moves Lunafreya learned before her sight had been taken. At a certain point, Nyx surprised her by leaning down and grabbing her knee, lifting it up until it reached his hip.

The Princess gasped and held tight to his neck, almost falling back. A giggle escaped from both of their mouths as they continued to move and move, every inch of their bodies in tune, lost in the music. Luna didn't feel like his hands on her skin were intrusive anymore.

The initial embarrassment had passed after the first few dayswhere he had touched her like no other man had before.

So, she let him touch her again now, this time feeling him like she never had before that moment. Being blind amplified her other senses, and this helped her to follow the music in a different way, enjoying truly the essence of what she was doing.

Nyx's body on hers was natural. She loved the way his abdomen sticked to her breast, the way his strong arms surrounded her back, how his hands left white signs on her muscles. Dragged by the new exciting experience, Luna used her arms to lift herself up until she pressed her lips to his neck, inhaling the smell of him deeply.

It was the Glaive's turn to gasp, yet he didn't complain if not with a whispered curse. ”Damn, Princess."

"Not good?”she asked innocently, slowing the dance, fearing she really did something wrong.

Nyx bit his lip. Yes. Yes, of course it was good. But not in the right sense.

"Just keep moving,” he sighed, feeling on the edge of his self control but trying to sound like he wasn’t falling apart at the seams.

For the first time in his whole life, Nyx feared he wouldn't be able to finish the dance without kissing his partner senseless. He never felt such an urge for a girl he danced with, and he surely hadn’t expected to feel it for the Princess.

Yet here he was, passing his hands on her thighs with a greed which was not professional at all, drinking in every detail of her body, taking advantage on the fact she couldn't catch him staring. He didn't even know he was dying of thirst until that moment, when he had such an amazing bottle of fresh water like her in front of him.

And exactly like water, she moved. She was silent and pure, yet sparkling and lively, ready to adapt to his requests. What would Nyx have given to take a sip?

She didn't interrupt the dance even when he distanced from her and then pulled her back, holding her close in his arms, like he wanted to protect her from his own indiscreet eyes. Then, he raised her from the ground, making her do a little jump.

Luna screamed at that; being blind, she reacted so violently she almost hit him with an arm.

Nyx laughed when he put her down. “Tomorrow… bring a swimsuit,” he whispered to her ear, making her shiver and lose her balance even worse. "You're gonna like the next lesson."

------------

The next secret meeting took place in a pool near to Nyx's apartment. Luna guessed he payed a lot for it, since they were completely alone that night.

"You're probably wondering why I took you to the pool and how this is going to help you with dancing.”

Of course Luna was wondering about that. The idea of being in only a swimsuit in front of him didn't make her feel comfortable. It was also hard to deny that it was also because his own shirtless chest was very… distracting.

There were so many scars and magic spirals on his bare skin, it almost look like a constellation map and she feared she would have ended up studying that instead of the choreography.

"One of the stunts needs you to jump, with me picking you up,” Nyx explained then. "We'll train in the water. It’ll be easier for both of us."

---------

They already had done dozens of tries, yet something kept go wrong. Luna couldn't jump without making Nyx fall down, too. In spite of every attempt, they just kept losing balance.

Out of the water it was even worse.

"You can do the jump with Crowe, right?" Luna asked when they finally left the pool.

Nyx hesitated to answer, which was already an answer.

The Princess sighed desperately. "I'm sorry, Nyx. We'll try again tomorrow and I swear to the gods that if I won't learn, I--"

"Don't push yourself. It’s fine,” Nyx replied, opening the door of the car to let her in. It was almost midnight and they had to be quick to get back to the Palace. They lost track of time and if the Princess wasn't back soon, the gossip would no doubt start.

She never was so late.

"It's not fine. I don't want you to lose the competition because of me. The day is getting closer and I still don't know how to jump without breaking both our backs."

Nyx sat in the driver’s seat and turned on the engine. He didn't reply. He got strangely silent since they left the pool.

"Nyx."

He blinked at her and then at the street again. The roads were empty and dark. Insomnia was beautiful at night.

"The competition starts next week, isn't it?"

The man nodded.

"Yes. The selection is on Thursday. I took the day off, so I should be able to come to pick you up at 6 pm. The finale is on Friday night."

"Fine, I'll arrange my schedule." There was a minute of silence. “Nyx. Why do you want to go back to Galahd?"

A few seconds passed again before he answered: "It's my home."

"Do you have someone to wait for you there?" she asked. Nyx knew what she was really asking. She wanted to know if he had family or a girl back home.

"No. Only ghosts."

"So why not stay here? Don't you like Insomnia? Is the Kingsglaive's life too hard?"

"No, it's just..." He briefly glanced at her again because, if he were honest with himself, he was addicted to her eyes. But he knew he had to focus back on the road.

"I'm only an immigrant here and I'll always be. No matter how hard I try to distinguish myself. I may be able to use the King's magic, and I may be the best of the department and, hells, I may also be called 'hero' for some reason… but at the end of the day... it doesn't matter. For Insomnia, I'm only an immigrant. I'm fine here, but ... sometimes it's not enough, you know?"

Luna felt her heart ache looking at how serious he was under the moving lights of the city outside the car.

Nyx continued,"I need to start a new life. When Galahd was destroyed and I lost my family, I arrived here as a desperate teenager with no real purpose or hope. These years as an immigrant in Insomnia changed me. I took notice of a lot of things. I mourned. I grew up. I feel ... ready to be someone, to start something that I can call 'mine'."

"You mean ... A family?" That idea surprised Luna in a pleasant way. She didn't expect Nyx to be one to look for something similar.

"I don't know yet. A family. A house. A job. Whatever it is, I think I’ll find it in Galahd, not here. Crowe and Libertus agree, so hopefully we can go back together."

Luna got lost in watching his profile. He was so thoughtful while imagining a future far from Insomnia. Far from her, too.

"You will be missed."

Nyx was caught by surprise and smiled. "You're talking like I'm gonna die."

"No, it's just that... I mean. People will miss you." Nyx couldn't help but finding her struggle with expressing herself quite funny and more endearing than he wanted to admin.

"People, who?"

"The Kingsglaive department will miss you."

"Really? And what do you know?" he asked with half a laugh.

"... I will miss you."

And this made Nyx's heart stop. He ceased his laughing, holding his breath and looking at her. He tightenedhis fingers on the wheel, almost crushing it under his suddenly nervous touch. The silence falling inside the car after the jovial vibes felt strange and made Luna blush hard.

"You wouldn’t,” Nyx whispered, and such a sentence felt more like a plea than a statement.

"I would."

Nyx found something to do on the car's panel. He turned on the AC, he controlled the buttons of the engine, everything to avoid continuing that conversation.

Luna moved in her seat, trying to become invisible, so embarrassed that she would have preferred to die. What was she even thinking when she said that?

Once they entered the Citadel and arrived in the court of the palace, she jumped out without saying a word.

"Princess!" Nyx called, running after her. He took her by the hand so she had to stop and turned around. Nyx's eyes were still hesitating when they fingers entwined, but this didn't stop him from delicately kissing her hand. "See you tomorrow, ok? You're gonna do that jump, I'm sure of it."

Luna nodded, but the rest of her body was still paralyzed, watching him in awe.

She wasn't able to sleep that night.

[utsus]

On the Wire Overwatch Junkrat/Mei AO3

He shivered theatrically, rubbing at his biceps and eyeing the chills along her arms, running up to the exposed line of her throat. “Brrr. I get cold just looking at ya.”

Mei studied him with the most interesting of expressions, a mixed blend of temperance and uncertainty. And then, with genuine curiosity and something a little sharper, a little more ambiguous, she said: “Then you should look somewhere else.”

Jamison felt himself still, if only for a moment, and all he could think was I know.

Jamison Fawkes didn’t like complicated things. Why would he, when there were so many simpler, far more interesting options he could come up with himself in half the time it took to deal with something complicated? No time wasted thinking or planning. Just simple chaos.

Light a fuse; feel the sting against his fingertips, watch the world burn.

Simple.

Mako preferred to remind Jamison every now and again that chaos didn’t always have to be a simple affair. That chaos, in fact, could culminate into something even more anarchic with careful planning to back it up. Now, Jamison didn’t know how much of that hogwash he actually believed, but he’d seen Mako’s planning in action and the resulting destruction had not disappointed him.

The memory of the flames, licking up so high into the sky, sent shivers down Jamison’s spine.

A rare affair, that. Shivers. All Jamison could remember of the world, then and now, was heat. The sun beating down on his fried shoulders, delicate with childhood, then scarred with adolescence. The flames of the Outback, post-explosion, felt more like home than home ever had before it had become nothing but junk-riddled wasteland.

Jamison shifted on his cot, taking in a deep breath through his nose and releasing it all in one long sigh. He had no love for the metallic clamor of tools down the hall, where scientists worked, nor did he care for the stark lack of any kind of scent beyond cleaning agent. Everything smelled too fresh.

It made him want to act up, a bit.

As if sensing his thoughts, the bunk above him shifted. A meaty hand hung over the railing until it dangled in front of Jamison, demanding attention. He watched, blinking, as Mako simply waved his pointer finger back and forth, a clear and wordless don’t even think about it.

“Sure value your sleep, don’tcha?”

A grunt is Mako’s only answer, more than Jamison would usually expect on the road. He merely shrugged, stretching from fingertips to toes with another loud sigh. When he relaxed his muscles and allowed himself to sink into the cushion of his borrowed mattress, he was left to simply blink at the underside of Mako’s bunk. He could see little spots in the darkness, and when he turned to glance towards the closed door of their room his mind instantly supplied three different ways he could send his Rip-Tire down the hallway to cause maximum damage.

He wasn’t actually going to do anything, despite what Mako might have thought. He was seriously trying to simmer down enough to get sleepy, but he found his mind racing around in circles instead, tireless.

There were scientists working on who knew what just a few rooms down from theirs, and despite himself, Jamison was a little curious about what they were doing in there. Mako had mumbled something about hearing rainfall…from inside the building. Not a sprinkler system, or a hose, but rainfall. At the time, Jamison had been a little more preoccupied with the room on the opposite end of the hallway that had ice chips over the metal doorframe, and frost covering the only visible window.

His curiosity about whatever that room held left him just as quickly, though, when he came across a room that radiated so much heat he was almost instantly drawn to it. He’d approached it against Mako’s wishes, if his nearly inaudible groan of complaint had been anything to go by. But Jamison couldn’t just ignore a room that was crackling like popcorn, and had waves of heat radiating several feet off of it. He wondered about its proximity to the frosty window, for only a moment, enough time for him to place his fingertips against the door and feel his skin burn before someone down the hall called out to them.

From there, they’d been shown their room and had a quick briefing about their current purpose in the facility, and then they’d been left to their own devices. Not before the heavy-shouldered man offered a strict warning to behave. He probably wasn’t very good at reading people; not nearly as good as he was with technology and studying. A shame, really. He was built similarly to Mako, and probably could’ve made good money as a fellow enforcer. There was something about him that was almost predatory, Jamison thought. Something…animalistic. Jamison couldn’t exactly put his finger on it, but he thought it had something to do with the fact that the man was actually a gorilla.

Regardless, telling someone like Jamison to behave was akin to asking the sun to freeze over, so he responded in the only way he knew how: with reckless abandon, and a carelessness that ended up with him and Mako being locked in their room and on temporary suspension from several rooms, including but not limited to the popcorn room, the front office, and the gymnasium.

It wasn’t his fault that they’d had tires in the latter, big enough that even Mako had struggled to lift them into his hefty arms. Jamison could not help but to see how far they could fly, with a little added explosive incentive.

But anyways, suspension wasn’t so bad. Even if it was their first day on the grounds. What else would he do, anyways, besides cause more problems somewhere else on the facility? For this job, he was being paid with a special kind of favor—one that money couldn’t hold a match to. Mako thought him ridiculous, though he hadn’t expressed any verbal sort of reproof. That was more than enough for Jamison to feel content and press on with his intentions. Mako would follow him, so long as he was being paid in his own kind of currency—the promise of something greater.

It was what led the both of them on these wild adventures, to these unknown places. Their current location wasn’t as bad as it could have been, he supposed, except that it was awful.

The good of it was that it wasn’t all pristine, cold hard metal, like the other facilities he’d been tantalized into. There were areas closed off and decrepit, obviously abandoned and lost to the years when no one had been there to tend to the place. Frozen, he remembered suddenly, and all of them waiting for a safe time to wake that would never come.

Well, he amended silently, curling his arms under his head to rest against the cushion of his pillow. All but some, apparently.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that so many people had lost their lives to the frigid cold of the place, really. Jamison wasn’t having a hard time imagining it at all, actually, even as he wiggled his toes around in his three layers of socks; each pair had holes in different places, and they were the only three that he owned at all. Mako wasn’t about to share either of his two pairs, either, and Jamison had known better than to ask.

If there was any benefit to the cold, it was the relentless nature of it that Jamison could appreciate. It didn’t flicker or dance away from touch like fire did. It pressed ever closer, until even Jamison’s breath was icy. He resented it, sure, but it was impressive nonetheless. That’s not to say that he was ever going to come to like it, though. He may be three clicks past insane, but he wasn’t daft.

It was truly the last place on the planet that he would ever want to be, and if Mako had gesticulated that Jamison would one day voluntarily spend time in a place renowned for being the absolute coldest place on Earth, he would’ve thrown his steel-toothed trap at his face.

The new and still-not-yet-improved-but-hanging-in-there-by-the-mechanical-cords-of-its-threadbare-skeleton Watchpoint: Antarctica was still, in Jamison’s opinion, kind of the worst.

He was really hoping that something, somewhere would be able to change his mind about it.

He doubted it, but hope was one thing he could never really leave behind completely.

Even for the littlest of things.

✧

“Listen,” Winston sighed, lifting his head from a dejected bow for the nth time since inviting Jamison and Mako out of their sealed room that morning. Jamison wasn’t certain but he thought Mako might be counting the man’s sighs. When he glanced over to the far wall, Mako’s body language was akin to a straight face. He leaned carelessly with arms crossed over the wasteland of his chest, and his mask didn’t glint or tilt in any way that Jamison might have been able to interpret. But somehow, he just knew. It was just something Mako would do.

“I know how much you value your…freedom of expression,” Winston continued, as though he didn’t know Jamison’s attention was being stolen just about every thirty seconds by something new in the room. They should’ve brought him somewhere with a little less inventory, Jamison thought, bouncing onto the tips of his toes to glance into the corner of the room where a massive pile of broken wood laid. He quirked an eyebrow, eyes glancing immediately to the opposite side of the room to watch a small huddle of scientists light something on fire.

His eyes gleamed, bright and intrigued, and by the time he managed to pull his attention back to Winston he could tell he was almost finished with his spiel. Finally, Jamison thought idly, shifting his weight between his foot and prosthetic. His fingers twitched, wanting to set something off, set something aflame. His mind wandered around the room, to the cords hanging from the ceiling to the trapezes so high above the second floor, the sky-high ceiling, and back down to the pile of shattered something that he couldn’t quite identify from his distance.

“That being said,” Winston said, sighing once more. Jamison wondered how many that was, and knew he’d forget to ask Mako later anyways. “I need you to control yourself while we’re in here. You’ve been promised a great deal, and in order to receive it, you’re going to have to cooperate.”

“Sure thing, mate,” he assured easily, reaching out to slap a hand against the gorilla’s massive bicep. Winston blinked at the gesture, lifting his other hand to adjust his glasses. Jamison looked at his palm as if something new were inscribed there, before glancing back in time to grin wickedly.

“Muscular!” He applauded, bouncing a little in place. When Winston only gave him a bedraggled look in response, he nodded his head and flapped his hand in acceptance. “Sure, sure, I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“We mean it,” Winston implored, his voice far more delicate than suited his stature. “If you do something reckless again, like you did yesterday, they might kick you off the facility. They’ll ship you back to the Outback and you will not receive your reward. Understand?”

Jamison smirked, lifting one hand to solute the scientist. “Gotcha!”

Winston did not look confident in that response. Regardless, he turned to Mako and called, “I don’t really think I need to extend the same message to you, but I do want to be clear. These rules go for both of you.”

Jamison didn’t need to look to know Mako would nod his head and simply remain still for the time-being, even as Jamison walked past Winston to go quench his curiosity about those shattered bits. He could hear Winston pacing behind him, another sigh, but he was already crouching with fingertips sliding along the broken edges of what he had thought, quite incorrectly, to be glass.

It was ice. A pile of broken shards, sharp enough to slice. They looked sturdy, too, and Jamison gasped when he reached out and ran a single fingertip over the plane of one.

It burned.

“How do these work?” He asked, unable and unwilling to quail the excitement in his voice. Ice that burned was a kind of cold he could actually get behind. Winston rubbed at his nose, an idle habit. His expression twisted slightly, confusion playing out across his prominent features.

“It’s ice,” he said, as if that explained anything at all.

“Sure, yeah, of course,” Jamison agreed, bobbing in his crouch. “But why does it burn?”

“Oh,” Winston said, and Jamison could hear in that single word that somehow his question had put together certain pieces in the scientist’s brain. Enough so much so that he now seemed to understand Jamison a little better. “Well, it’s Antarctic ice.”

Jamison could feel his right eye twitching, impatience tugging at his restraint. His fingers twitched, and he reached out for the sharpest piece of ice he could see, with a suddenness that startled Winston a step backwards. His fingers only just barely made purchase when a quiet voice emitted over his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.

“You won’t want to touch that, I think.”

Jamison whipped his head around and studied the new presence, a woman with curves wrapped in layers and layers of blue cloth and wool. Dusty hair, falling in her face, partially obscuring the flush of her fair cheeks. Pristine, Jamison thought, studying her shy expression and then jumping to the trinket stuck through her hair, with its dangling snowflake.

“The ice here is different from anywhere else,” she continued, as though Jamison were not still blinking up at her with an openly curious expression, eyes squinted in slight suspicion. He hadn’t heard her approach them.

“You got that right,” he said, pushing himself up to stand. Even with his hunched posture, the difference between their heights was paramount. He watched her reach up to tuck a wayward strand of dark hair behind her ear, and wondered at the flush of her fingertips. She was the only one in the room who wasn’t wearing gloves, besides Jamison. “It’s colder than fuckin’ cold.”

Her laughter, he realized, reminded him of something long-forgotten. Nostalgia usually left him with nothing but char-tinged memories and history of irradiated blood samples given and taken. A wasteland of scrap and a hierarchy built upon the piles.

But this, he thought, watching the way joyful creases appeared beside her brown eyes, was different. A kind of heat—one that he was, somehow, yet to be familiar with.

He thought of moths and flames, but the thought left him quickly as the woman moved between him and Winston. She reached down and lifted the same fragment that he had intended to grasp without hesitation, and his eyes left her face immediately to watch the reaction of her skin against the ice.

He was disappointed to see nothing of note happen, even as she slid the shard between her palms with careful dexterity. And yet, when he glanced up at Winston, there was a curious kind of smugness to his expression, in the air around him. As though this was somehow a special affair.

“What’s so special ‘bout it, then?” He asked, finally, when neither of them seemed willing to give him any answers without provocation.

“It destroys, but it also sustains,” the woman answered, her voice low, and soft. Caught somewhere between longing and affection.

Winston reached out to clap a hand on the woman’s shoulder, and his smile was genuine when he turned back to Jamison with an explanation to follow the movement.

“What she means is that this ice, Antarctic ice from this site, is a weapon. There are increments of energy ingrained into the soil from which this ice came. Each mite of energy crystallized until the full embodiment of the ice itself began to express something like sentience. It took us a lot longer than it should have, far too many injuries to realize that it was finicky, particular. Lots of people airlifted out of here and over to the neighboring facility for burn treatment. That’s where the, uh, ‘destroys’ part comes into play. It’s actually quite incredible, though not my particular area of study. I’m sure Dr. Zhou here could explain it to you much better than I can. It’s her specialty after all.”

“It doesn’t burn people intentionally,” Dr. Zhou defends, cradling the shard close to her chest as though it might need protection. Jamison hadn’t the slightest clue what Winston had been blathering about, only catching a few understandable glimpses before trailing off to simply stare at the shard in her hands and wonder what the hell made it so special.

Special enough to keep a shattered pile inside the building, even. Special enough that Dr. Zhou would feel the need to defend it from haphazard criticism, apparently.

“Burn?” He asked, choosing to ignore the other hundred or so questions he juggled in his mind, like what in the hell sentience meant, and who Dr. Zhou was, and why her fingertips were pink and not chilled white, like his own. “I’m lost, mate. What d’ya mean it doesn’t burn people intentionally?”

Winston’s fingers gripped Dr. Zhou’s shoulder a little tighter, reassuringly. “I’ll leave this to you then, Dr. Zhou?”

Her cheeks turned pink, but she nodded all the same, glancing up at Jamison from under her lashes. He felt a little awkward standing there lumbering over her, unsure of how to make himself seem less intimidating since she was so glaringly shy. He lifted a hand to scratch idly at the nape of his neck, irritating the edge of a large patch of scars there.

“Uh,” he started, turning to her so as to give her his full attention. He glanced over her shoulder at the pile of ice shards, and a new question popped into his head and out between them before he could even think about it. “Why isn’t it melting?”

“Oh!” She said, a gentle gasp of relief, as though she were glad to have something easy to answer. Jamison had never been good at navigating conversations, but somehow he seemed to have done something right in this instance. “Well, that’s easy, actually. Winston was explaining to you how it’s becoming sentient, right? But that’s not actually correct. It doesn’t think for itself or anything, and it doesn’t have any capacity to alter itself. But it is alive, in an incredible way! It’s the energy, the figments of past life that, regardless of circumstance, were given to nurture it.”

“Lady,” Jamison began, and then flushed at his own rudeness.

“Doc,” he amended, shifting his weight. “I don’t understand a word you’re sayin’. Whaddya mean by past life? Someone die for this ice to become special?”

He watched the way that shadows skittered across her expression in waves, until she looked away from him and back to the ice in her hands. She turned it slowly, ever careful with handling it, and even when she finally spoke she didn’t look back up to meet his eyes. It wasn’t hard to realize he’d stepped on a landmine, fully detonated it while he was still in its blast radius. A rookie mistake, but when it came to conversations—especially with scientists—he was probably stuck at rookie level.

Dr. Zhou cleared her throat, and Jamison watched her trail her pointer finger over the sharpest edge of the ice without a care for the possibility of slicing her skin open. He waited for the bead of blood to emerge, to trail over the ice and drip to the floor. He waited and he waited and yet, nothing emerged but her soft voice.

“You can call me Mei,” she whispered, surprising him enough to blink for several moments without responding. He wasn’t really waiting for her to meet his eyes, but when she did, looking up through the fringe of her bangs, there was a wall between them that had not been there before. It startled him to see it, especially in the same moment that she offered him a piece of herself. Complicated, he thought, as he rolled her name around in his mouth, tasting it before speaking it.

“A’right then,” he agreed, and found his voice pitched lower than usual. That bewildered him, and he found himself studying not the many distractions around them, the sudden gauntness of her cheeks, the ice in her hand, the beams overhead, Mako staring intently at them from over against the far wall—but instead the way he responded to her. He wasn’t the kind of person to quiet himself, to change for someone else, or in response to someone else. He was always loud, and wild, and untamed. Electricity was a constant through his bloodstream, hardwired to short-circuit, calling for something, something more, something always.

That he felt so calm, an absence of static, was troubling. It made him want to lash out, to put an end to the stillness he was so unfamiliar with. But the scientist—Mei—looked fragile, more so than the ice held so carefully in her hands. It threw him off his game, pushed him off the path he’d beaten for years.

Almost unconsciously, he said, “Mei.”

She managed a small smile for him, and nodded even as Jamison continued to deal with the realization that somehow he had shifted from careless to completely and totally fucked. His fingers itched to press a button, to detonate something, to watch something become riddled in flame and melt and die.

“I hadn’t planned to deviate from my schedule for today,” Mei spoke, catching Jamison’s attention again. She offered him an apologetic twist of her lips, her eyes still smothered in shadows he couldn’t yet understand, and when she shifted the shard of ice into her right hand she reached out to him with her left. He watched her slide the ice into her pocket without hesitation, his eyebrows raised, and then he flickered his eyes from her face to her hand, and the subtle creases of her extended palm.

A handshake. An offering of greeting, of welcome, of peace. Jamison couldn’t remember the last time anyone had ever extended their hand out to him. He was usually received with scowls and looks of a certain kind of familiar disdain that he had long since grown used to. Easy acceptance wasn’t ever in the cards for him.

He reached out to her anyways, nearly in spite of those thoughts. Her hand fit his well, round palms and long fingers against the square of his grip. But it wasn’t the fit that held his attention, or the way that she offered a gentle squeeze, a subtle shake, before withdrawing her hand back to her side.

It was the flush of her cheeks that held his attention, and he didn’t know why. He blinked at her, eyes wide and jaw slack.

“I’d love to meet with you tomorrow, if you have time. I can explain it better when I have the time to get to know you a little better, too. If that’s okay. Sorry. Let me know. You can reach me through Winston, we brainstorm together quite often.”

“You’re leavin’, then.” Those were his words, and his voice, definitely his, but he didn’t know them. He didn’t understand them.

Mei nodded, tucking her hand into her pocket.

“I have to meet with a woman about an avalanche of laser fragments on the east side of the facility,” she explained, and those same lines of joy rose beside her eyes when she smiled, even if the joy didn’t fully reach her eyes. “If you’d like to learn more, let Winston know. Not to assume that you do—sorry. If not, that’s okay, too. You’re not here to learn about the benefits of nearly-sentient snow powder, after all, right? You have something far more nefarious ahead of you, I think.”

Jamison didn’t have a damn clue past noon what a nefarious was but he thought he could grow to like it, if it meant getting to see Mei smile like that. The thought was bizarre enough to root him in place, even long after Mei excused herself and left the room entirely. He allowed each of his fingertips to tap against the skin of his thumbs, flickering through the motions tirelessly, anxiously. He didn’t move until Mako edged into his vision, reaching out to bump mildly into his shoulder.

Jamison glanced up at him with those still-wide eyes, mouth still hanging open. His thoughts must have been written across his expression, because in the next moment he heard Mako breathe out a sigh of his own, heavy enough to shift his shoulders. Jamison glanced back to the ice beside him, the towering pile, nowhere near beginning to melt. He could feel several eyes on him, sending chills over his nape, and knew that his stasis had alarmed the scientists in the room. He didn’t blame them, especially since they’d already been in his presence long enough to know that it’s nearly impossible to get him to stand still, let alone do so while also being completely silent.

Completely out of character. Totally bizarre. He didn’t know if he hated it, or if there was potential for something wild and striking to come from it, like new chaos.

“How many?” he asked, surprised by his own memory even without looking to Mako for a clue. He lifted his hand, the one he’d extended to meet Mei’s, and studied the burns along his fingertips, the hatch-mark screen of scars along his palm.

Mako didn’t respond for a long moment, and Jamison didn’t look away from his palm. He was freaking out internally, for the first time since—well, he could ever really remember. He waited for Mako to shift his weight, an acceptance, and then he lifted his hands and showed Jamison seven lifted fingers out of ten.

“Only seven? Really, mate?”

Mako let his hands fall back to his sides, and tilted his head slightly in answer. Jamison nodded, accepting that, and allowed his hand to drop back to his side, too. And then he wiped it against his pant leg, as though he could physically wipe away his confusion and bewilderment and the insistent feeling racing through his veins that something in him was changing.

“Might have to dig at him a little more tomorrow then, eh? We should make this a wager.”

Mako shifted, his gas mask glinting in a way that Jamison understood as an affirmative. He smiled, but there wasn’t much to it, his mind already wandering.

It shouldn’t have been an uncomfortable feeling—Jamison was used to change. He had grown up in an environment where survival depended on adapting, on shifting your skin until you became something that the Outback couldn’t chew up and spit back out.

Jamison Fawkes was a chameleon, a master of acclimatizing. Hell, he’d even come so far as Antarctica, the land of ice and snow and cold and everything he loathed, all for the sake of his treasure.

He could do this. He could adapt to this strange series of change, of changes, of whatever was looming over him on the dawn. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that he would do what he always had, what the Outback had taught him.

He would rise to the challenge.

And he would win.

✧

Jamison was not avoiding Dr. Zhou—Mei.

Not really. It was just that he had a lot on his plate and he was busy trying to help Winston distinguish between plants, or something, and that was very important business indeed.

Apparently.

Even Mako had gotten distracted by a short rotund creature more beard than man who was waving around a battle hammer in one hand and a rivet gun in the other, while Mako merely stared down at him wordlessly. Jamison could tell in the shift of Mako’s weight that he was genuinely interested in what the short man was saying, though, so much so that he hadn’t even cast a glance in Jamison’s direction for the past hour or so. All the while, Winston had been trying to explain this plant situation to Jamison in terms he could understand, so that he could explain more about the Outback, before and after its decimation.

“You see, if the stems are viable we might be able to replicate them and increase the protein stores in that region,” Winston explained, gesturing more and more wildly as his excitement grew. Jamison, bored of the material, merely nodded. Winston was undeterred. “Amaranth is the resilient type, it’s been used for millennia. If we can segment the core of each stem we might be able to extricate more than protein, which from what you’re telling me would already be a huge benefit to the region, but also essential minerals! That’s a really wonderful find, Mr. Fawkes. Baby steps.”

Jamison cringed. Leave it to the scientists to have his dossier well and accessible. “Junkrat, mate. Call me Junkrat.”

Winston offered him an apologetic shrug, smiling wanly. “Junkrat…then.”

Jamison nodded, definitively, arms crossing and nails idly scratching against his biceps. He couldn’t help but to glance around the room, the same one as the day before, the high beams and the pile of burning ice. It called to him, an enigma and an uncertainty he didn’t like leaving unanswered. More than anything at all, he wanted to blow the entire pile up. Watch it all go up in smoke. It excited him to wonder what it would smell like, this special ice, Antarctic Ice—

But then he would remember Mei’s soft expression when she looked at the pile, the gentle way that she held that single shard in her hands, and the careless way she slid her fingertip against the serrated edge of it. She had not feared the cut. Jamison couldn’t understand why. He’d been thinking about it for weeks, and he still couldn’t understand why.

“Well, it’s not like those plants are all over the damn place,” Jamison said, finally speaking up to join the conversation—one that he had been left behind in ages ago when Winston had begun to discuss the different parts of a plant, stem, stamen, and stamina, probably. Jamison had been too interested in glancing periodically up into the rafters, at those slightly twisting beams. If he adjusted his strength just enough, he could toss one of his grenades up against the doorframe over Mako’s head and deflect it perfectly through time and air and space to roll across one of those beams. If he tried hard enough, and put his mind to it, he could definitely get a mine to make the jumps across multiple beams, and maybe even have them land perfectly in the ice pile. It would be fun to see if he could do it, and even more fun to watch bits and pieces of the lab explode.

“That’s why it’s so important for you to tell us where the Amaranth is. Accuracy is really going to help us save time; the quicker that our botanists can get their hands on those samples, the quicker we can get a replication model out there for the families of the Outback.”

Jamison didn’t flinch, or show any real outward sign of affect from that statement. Family, in the Outback. What a joke.

“Model?”

“Oh, yes,” Winston explained impartially. “As far as Torbjörn has informed me, Amaranth is specific to your home region.”

Jamison had long since grown past the quiet, simmering rage he had felt as a child, an adolescent. He was no longer the kid he had once been, who had burst into riotous reactions at the mere mention of home. His triggers were at his control, now—at his disposal. He could hold them in his hands, steadily. And he would set them loose on his time. It was for this reason that Jamison doesn’t react to Winston’s continued use of that term, the one that means welcome and safety and love. Instead, he continued to contemplate the trajectory needed for his grenades against the wall over the beams and into the pile, that damned pile, and it was easier to pretend that he was unbothered.

“That’s why it’s important for us to get to it quickly. If it is still growing, even in irradiated soil, then it’s resilient.”

“But radioactive, mate,” Jamison reminded him, feeling his lips curl up into a grin without much humor. “Can’t ever forget the radiation!”

“Yes, of course,” Winston agreed, lifting a hand to rub at his jaw. “We have a specialist, she’s incredible—she specializes in photon barriers that can absorb toxicity, it’s really something, and I think she would be invaluable in these trials. If she can create a barrier specifically attuned to Amaranth, so much so that it could filter and extricate the radiation like a toxic barrier, then we’d really have something in our hands. I’ll have Mei contact her—she’s more likely to get a positive response from her than anyone else at this facility.”

Jamison did flinch, this time, startled at the mention of the mysterious woman he’d only just met a month prior, but who had occupied most of his recent and present thoughts.

“Mei?” He asked, just this side of skeptical.

“Oh yes,” Winston grinned, a particular gleam brightening in his eyes that shone like pride. “Mei is quite the talent here. She’s very well-known across the various Watchpoints, though you’ll never get her to admit it herself. Symmetra—she’s our barrier specialist—has a certain soft spot for her.”

Something prickly unfurled in Jamison’s gut, coursing up through his chest to lock tightly in his throat. He wondered at it, as unfamiliar with the sensation as he was uncomfortable with it. He reached up and gripped his throat, uncaring of the way Winston startled at the action, and glanced back over his shoulder to see that Mako was finally looking back in his direction. He made a subtle gesture towards the clock, a reminder that they had more work to do and that Winston’s time was just about up.

“Whatever you say, doc.” Jamison lifted his peg leg and scratched his calf with it, wobbling unsteadily until the itch was gone. The clink of the titanium against the tile had Winston refocusing on him, instead of the information Jamison had supplied him with. So much information about plants, and dirt, and directions. It wasn’t that hard to navigate the wastes of the Outback, except for the part where every single aspect of it wanted to kill you. The actual directional part of it was fairly simple, though.

“Roadhog and I have plans we best be gettin’ to, with a little more spark to it than plant talk, if ya catch my drift.”

Winston graciously excused himself, apologizing for keeping him. He offered a last comment as Jamison turned and headed back in Mako’s direction, watching the bigger man push himself away from the wall and offer a subtle wave and a quiet word to his newfound small friend with the beard. “Thanks for the information, as always! This will be a huge help! Oh, and Torbjörn, would you come over for a second? I had a few questions regarding—”

“Yeah, yeah,” the short man who’d taken up so much of Mako’s free time grunted cheerfully, waddling over towards Winston with a wayward wave to spare for Mako. “I’ma comin’.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jamison echoed, flapping a hand over his shoulder at Winston. He grinned amusedly as he approached Mako and found his shoulders straighter than usual, thrust back and energized.

“Whatcha talk about?” He asked nosily, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning all his weight on his right hip. “You won’t believe how much there is to know about plants, Hog. So much shit to do with plants, and so little time. Did ya know that there’s parts to flowers? Like parts in a bomb? Except with flowers and leaves and things there’s like—“

“Just shut up,” Mako groaned, turning and heading from the room before Jamison could even catch his breath. He didn’t take it to heart, used to his enforcer’s gruff personality. He shrugged his shoulders and made to follow after him, wondering what exactly Mako had found with the information Jamison had supplied him earlier that morning, after taking a generous glance at the local facility map. As it seemed, there were a good many underground tunnels present, and it would be a shame if he and his buddy didn’t get to explore them. Who knew what kind of treasures might be lurking beneath?

Jamison found himself whistling under his breath, hobbling towards the door leading to their room, joyful with the thought of unknown treasure so close to his reach. He was so distracted that the moment he turned the corner and stepped through the doorframe, he bumped right into someone with enough force that they began to windmill backwards, a blur of blue.

He reached out without hesitation, hands gripping soft material and steadying the stranger as he finally looked where he was going with a jubilant, “Gotcha!”

Mei blinked up at him, startled and flushed. Her smile was a slow and gentle reward that sent heat through him like a blast, weaponized gentleness. He released her immediately, his smile falling to half-mast in startled confusion. He blinked at her, waiting for her to say something first and then anxiously adding, “G’day, little one.”

The endearment slipped past his defenses without his conscious control, and all he could really do about it was shift his weight and crack his knuckles in idle but necessary movement.

“Hiya!” She chirped, straightening up. She didn’t seem to mind the distance he’d put between them, though he had definitely seen her eyes trace the movement. He wondered if she was uncomfortable around him—as uncomfortable as he was around her, perhaps.

That wasn’t exactly right, though. He wasn’t uncomfortable around her, really. Just unfamiliar. She was something…complicated. Something he couldn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with. Usually he repelled people like her, shy and quiet and kind enough to think that she could save the world one environmental initiative at a time. He’d seen that kind of hope crushed time and time again in the Outback.

It didn’t seem a very promising venture, and he found that he would really rather not see the same happen to her, if he could help it. Not that he was going to do anything about it. He’d done his time, put in his efforts, and what had he gotten out of it?

Instead of getting anything, he’d donated. Involuntarily. An arm and a leg and some fragments of sanity. Nothing much, but a world’s difference between before and after.

“Tracer told me you had a busy day,” Mei began hesitantly, her smile brightening with no obvious catalyst. Jamison fingered the grenades attached to his harness, not a threat but a familiarizing measure to settle his randomly restless heart. Mei’s eyes traced the movement, though, missing nothing. “Must’ve been a stimulating conversation, if it was all about proteins and minerals.”

“Plants,” he added, and the corner of his lips quirked up in a quick splash of genuine amusement. “I’ll tell ya, I never thought I’d ever voluntarily be in a place this cold spendin’ all my time discussing plant parts.”

Mei laughed, low and quick, and nodded. Jamison stood up a little straighter, glancing over her shoulder to see Mako gesture more pointedly to the watch on his wrist, before stomping back into their room down the hall. Jamison twitched, but didn’t follow after him immediately. He glanced back down to Mei and studied the green cloth wrapped so abundantly around her. She looked fluffy. There was a soft, blended definition to her features, the smooth curve of her jaw, but as Jamison’s eyes trailed down her neck and were cut off by the wool of her coat he found himself wondering about other parts of her. Was it just the appearance of all her layers throwing those curves, or was that her natural shape?

Jamison swallowed, lifting a robotic finger to scratch idly at his sideburn. His heart rate didn’t change much, but each pulse felt somehow more powerful. Heavier.

“Tracer, you said?” Jamison inquired, remembering the brief mention. All throughout his talk with Winston, distracted as he was, he had not noticed someone studying him. “Don’t think I saw her today.”

“You probably didn’t,” Mei laughed, with quiet amusement. “She’s fast.”

Jamison frowned at that, wondering if the blur of orange he’d thought he’d seen by the doorway might have been more than he’d convinced himself.

“Well,” Mei sighed, rubbing lightly at the button of her nose. “If you tire of plant talk and feel like talking about something far more interesting, like ice and snow or climate change, then come find me.”

Jamison could tell from the shy amusement of her expression that she was trying to be funny, ironically so, and as such he found himself encouraging her. He smiled, and felt humor trail through him like a seed newly sowed.

“Ice, eh? But I think I’m more the type for fire. I love a good bang.”

“Ooh, sorry about that,” Mei laughed, and her eyes fell to give him an amused once-over that had him standing even straighter, nearly enough for him to not be hunching at all. “You’re missing out. And you’re wearing shorts. And no shirt. In Antarctica.”

“Woah!” He crowed, theatrically backing away from her, hands thrown up in front of him. “Nothing gets by you, little one!”

Mei rolled her eyes, but the action itself was nothing more than playful. She crossed her arms over her generous bust, allowing her chin to rest on one of her thumbs.

“Aren’t you freezing?”

“My balls off, yeah!”

“Why don’t you—“

“Layer up?” He asked, his eyes falling to trail over her in just the same way she had looked him over. However, when his gaze returned to hers, she was looking at her feet and he didn’t know for sure, but he was pretty certain that she was blushing. For a moment he was pleased by that idea, for reasons he didn’t have in his reach just yet.

But then he started to think about his response, and her continued silence, and maybe she’d taken offense? He hadn’t meant anything bad by it, not at all, but he kept forgetting that she was so impossibly timid. He opened his mouth to explain, for some reason it felt important to do so instead of just ignoring the tense air, but she glanced up before he could get a word out. And she was smiling.

“I do love my layers,” she responded amiably, with no trace of bitterness. “It’s the best way to dress here! I’m never cold.”

“I like your layers,” he blurted, and then realized a moment later that it was true. Partially. The layers were nice, but he was so curious about what she looked like underneath that he couldn’t entirely enjoy the fluffiness. It was a complicated mix of feelings and misunderstandings, so Jamison just ignored it altogether. He wasn’t embarrassed about admitting that, at this point. Mei, however, seemed embarrassed enough for the both of them. “Don’t think layers are really my style though. I’d burn through them.”

“Stylish or not,” Mei interjected, though not unkindly. “They’re efficient in blocking the cold. Especially if you plan on running around in shorts.”

“Ah, I’ll be fine, little one! I’ve sources of heat that nobody knows about yet!”

Mei’s eyes widened, and there was a mixture of amusement and concern there that had Jamison feeling his oats.

“Your explosives.” Jamison raised his eyebrows at her, unsurprised to find that she knew about his babies. “Definitely a good way to stay warm, but I can’t help but think there’s a problem on the other end of that spectrum.”

Jamison tried for several moments to make sense of that statement, before finally giving in and asking, “Come again?”

Mei stepped forward, then, and Jamison could see the way her hands shook as she reached out and took hold of his left hand—his human hand—and rotated his palm until it faced skyward. She touched each one of his fingertips with her pointer, so very gently, and then looked up to his wide-eyed stare with a gentle expression edged in neutral concern.

“These scars seem like proof enough, that sometimes explosives aren’t the best option for heat. Sorry, it’s none of my business, I know, but. If you need any warm clothes, please let me know. Sorry.”

And with that bomb so delicately dropped on his feet, Mei moved around him in a rush of citrus and sage, her sleeve brushing against his bare skin for only a moment. The softness of the material, of her expression; the heat of her cheeks and the corresponding heat that arose in him whenever she smiled, all of it lasted.

And lasted.

✧

A few months passed, with countless weeks spent discussing a home he loathed and seemingly insignificant factors like plants and weather patterns and geographical boundaries, and somewhere in the middle of all of that Jamison convinced himself of something monumentally important—a game-changer, even.

He had been spending some time outside in the frigid cold throwing grenades into the sky just to watch them burn out in a myriad of sparks and smoke when he’d suddenly realized.

If he stopped allowing himself to be confused by his reaction to Mei, and just let himself do what he wanted, when he wanted, for whatever reason, then he wouldn’t have to feel so conflicted and edgy. He didn’t like complications, and she didn’t have to be one.

It was a welcome epiphany, when he stopped thinking about his reaction to Mei as an inconsistency he had to fight against. He grasped, instead, that this was what he’d been waiting for all along, at Watchpoint: Antarctica.

Something interesting.

So he stopped doing all that thinking and rested on his default of action first and planning never. He was whistling as he edged around the corner of his long hallway, Mako a step behind him, and headed towards the workroom. There was a blur of blue and then a tiny woman stood before him, one hand perched loftily on a narrow hip, while the other held something large and metallic against her side.

“Heya!” The woman greeted cheerily, lifting one hand to quickly wave. Jamison paused, wondering where she’d come from. Thin air?

“G’day,” he greeted anyways, even as he squinted at her.

“Call me Tracer,” she said in introduction, and the name triggered a memory, wrapped in Mei’s voice, buried somewhere uselessly shallow in Jamison’s mind. He remembered perfectly the expression on Mei’s face, and the way she’d said she’s fast.

“You won’t be in the workroom today, love.” Tracer explained, and pointed instead to the end of the hallway, where a room separated the frosted and flamer rooms. Jamison studied each door with due curiosity before turning back to her suspiciously, eyes squinting.

“Why the change?”

“Winston’s busy off-site today, so he suggested you spend some time in the training room.”

Jamison blinked at the added emphasis. “Suggested?”

Tracer’s smile was as wicked as it was amused. “You gotta.”

Jamison wasn’t opposed to the idea, considering he hadn’t had much time to train or spar since having arrived at Watchpoint: Antarctica—or, well, what was left of it. He shrugged, easily accepting of the news. However, before he turned to head towards the training room with Mako in tow, a wicked gleam of his own shifted into his eyes. Tracer watched his eyes drop to the object tucked against her before meeting her gaze again, and his smile was mad, showing far too many teeth.

“That a plasma bomb you got there?” He asked, though he knew just from getting a glimpse of it that he was right. She shifted protectively away from him, frowning as she hid the explosive from his view. “Think I could have a closer look?"

“Over my dead body,” Tracer hissed, eyes squinting. The very next second, she was gone with nothing but a second-long blue blur to show that she had ever been there at all. Jamison laughed heartily even as he swung around on his heel and headed for the training center, his arms wrapped over his stomach as he guffawed.

“I’ll get my hands on one of ‘em sooner or later,” he said to no one in particular, though he could tell that Mako was silently judging him. He was used to that.

What he wasn’t used to was being surprised so often. When he opened the heavy doors to the training room, the term room seemed insufficient for the sheer size of the space. It was more like a arena, or something. There were even sectioned off spaces for what Jamison assumed would be straightforward spars. As a defensive man himself, he preferred a little more cover, and gravitated immediately to the section made up entirely of walls and obstacles. Mako gravitated towards the weapons lining the walls, and stared contentedly up at what looked to be a massive jagged hook, so like his own.

Jamison whistled, looking around the place. He heard the doors open again, and glanced over his shoulder to see Mei and a group of what looked to be students trailing in behind her. She held the door open for them and Jamison began to wonder if this was all a part of Winston’s vague instruction.

“Hiya,” Mei called, waving timidly. “What do you think of the place?”

“Does Tracer keep explosives stocked?”

Mei cast a quelling glance his way, but her grin ruined the sternness of it. “Perhaps.”

Jamison grinned. “Then I give it a ten!”

Mei laughed into one of her hands, muffling the sound. “Do you mind if we stay in here for a bit? These are some students who are interning here. Their respective workspaces are currently occupied, but should be free within the hour.”

“We’ll be sure to put on an explosive show,” Jamison promised wickedly, eyes gleaming with frightening promise. He watched one of the students swallow, but was more distracted by the way Mei’s laughter traveled through the air, nearly musical. Out of vague curiosity, he found himself asking, “What kinda students?”

“Meteorologists in training, mostly. Some Earth science. Some biology. A few psychology.”

Jamison laughed, walking over to Mako just so he could playfully elbow him in the side.

“What a bunch of misfits and freaks we got here,” he crowed, eyeing the students curiously before catching sight of Mei’s disapproving glance, which he hurriedly placated by adding, “I love it!”

Still laughing under his breath, he turned to Mako and beckoned for him to come into the center of the room. He eyed the distance between them and the students and took a few more steps further into the room, estimating the blast radius of his explosives. He wouldn’t be able to use his Rip-Tire, but his grenades should be fine.

Mako hobbled into the center of the room and pulled his hook down from the holster on his back, spinning it in his palm. He took an offensive stance and Jamison whistled, darting back and forth excitedly even as he ran his hands over his various holsters to ascertain the exact location of all of his weapons and tools. When he was certain he was ready, he called, “C’mon, c’mon, I’m ready!”

And Mako did not make him wait.

He wasn’t certain how much time had passed by the time he leapt behind a solid wall and heard the final scrape of Mako’s hook against the stone. Panting, he waited for any other sounds of attack or approach, and when he found none he carefully crept out from behind the slab of stone to see Mako over at the weapons display again, admiring the Antarctic hook.

Jamison adjusted his shorts, pulling them higher up only for them to immediately fall right back down to rest just below his hips.

“Lose interest, Roadhog?”

The big man merely pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, and Jamison followed the trail to the open doorway, where Mei stood chatting with Winston. Jamison quirked his head as the gorilla said something to Mei before heading back in the opposite direction. Mei remained behind for a moment, and something in Jamison made him brazenly call out to her.

“Hey little one, you up for a spar?”

Mei flinched, turning slowly to face him. She didn’t seem put off by the idea, only surprised to have been called out to so suddenly. He could feel sweat beading on his skin, trailing down his sideburns. His muscles were stinging with use and leftover adrenaline, and he wanted nothing more in that moment than to see if Mei was a fighter. If she could defend herself.

“I haven’t fought in some time,” she mused, lifting a hand to idly tuck some of her wayward hair behind her ear. “And I have an important meeting I have to attend in just a few minutes.”

Then, before he could even say anything to attempt to urge her into the metaphorical ring, she smiled.

“Sorry—Wait for a moment?”

Jamison nodded, but the door was already swinging closed on her figure as she dashed down the hallway towards the gym. Jamison took the time to sprawl out on the floor, wide-limbed like a starfish. He pretended for a moment he was in the snow and moved his arms and legs, laughing boisterously and calling out to Mako.

“Look, Hog! Snow angel!”

Mako ignored him, but the sound of the doors opening and Mei’s soft laughter drew his attention away from the weapons assortment Mako was so intent upon.

“Not much snow in here for that,” Mei chirped. Just over her shoulder stood Tracer, squinting across the room at him with open distrust. Her presence made him leap back to his feet, the titanium of his prosthetic clinking against the hardwood flooring.

“Sorry, I can’t spar with you right now…but I found you someone who can!”

“Ever get that feeling of déjà vu?” Tracer muttered under her breath, just loudly enough for him to hear it. His smile kicked up at the corners, and though he was disappointed that he wasn’t going to be able to see Mei in action just yet, he welcomed the challenge of the little speedster.

“Ohoho,” he giggled joyfully, shaking out his hands to get more blood flowing to them as Tracer stepped into the sparring boundaries. “This’ll be good.”

✧

Jamison was a decent loser. He didn’t care to lose, but he wasn’t fond of it, either. That being said, there was something truly nagging about losing time and time again to Tracer. After their initial spar, where Tracer quite literally wiped the floor with him, he demanded that she face off against him at least once a week. He couldn’t stand the smug way she’d grin when she pinned him, her pistol at his temple, or the way she’d outrun every one of his explosives while squealing whee! the entire time.

And he hadn’t beat her once. He assured Mako and Mei both that it was because he was a defensive style fighter, and Tracer was the epitome of an offensive style fighter.

He’d thought that explained everything perfectly, until Mei, his sweet, innocent Mei, asked, “If you’re best at defense, and she’s best at offense, wouldn’t it still be a fair fight?” And then at his theatrically betrayed expression coupled with Mako’s uncharacteristically audible amusement, she quickly chirped, “Sorry! I’m sorry!”

He had yet to spar with Mei, on account of her being too damned busy and their schedules conflicting. When he had glimpses of free time, when Winston wasn’t drilling him about his homeland, Mei was on the other side of the continent sampling ice-fragmented soil, or something equally bizarre.

Their inability of them to align their schedules did nothing to stop the way Jamison was constantly thinking about her, so much so that he even began to have dreams. He could remember with perfect clarity the last time he had woken up with an erection, and it had been the same day that his favorite underground company came out with their latest upgrade for his frag launcher.

There was no frag launcher upgrades on his mind the night before he woke up with a very apparent erection nestled against his stomach. He wasn’t sure if he should be content that he hadn’t yet come all over himself and his sheets, or if waking up filled to bursting but confused and disoriented enough for the sweet sensation to wane was even worse. Regardless, he was hard and Mei was still the image behind his eyelids, her beautiful brown eyes looking up at him through her eyelashes, her lips parted around his name. When he closed his eyes and wrapped his hand around his cock, he pictured her writhing under him, and the softness of her curves against his own ragged skin.

She had curves for days, he knew it like burning, and yet the only times he had seen her exposed had been in his fantasies. She never seemed to deviate from those puffy layers, and she had them in so many different styles and colors Jamison was certain the possibility of her running out before laundry day and being forced to wear something less conservative was out of the question. He could hope, though. Probably still would.

He squeezed his hand a little tighter, enjoying the pressure, and focused on the way the figment of Mei in his mind moved, the way she sounded. If he kissed and sucked at her throat, would she moan? Would she gasp? Was she quiet and docile, or surprisingly loud? What did she sound like breathless?

Jamison bit off a gut-wrenching groan, the latter thought combined with what he imagined her body to look like under all those damned layers enough to slip him over the edge. His come was hot against his skin, starkly different from the cold air around him. It was only when he settled down, his lungs no longer pulling at air but settling calmly back into a steady rhythm that he remembered he wasn’t alone in this room.

He wondered if he’d been quiet enough, or if Mako had just heard him jerk himself off from the bunk above him. Jamison imagined him thinking something along the lines of I’m not paid enough for this.

He didn’t care too much, though, because he slept better that night then he had in weeks.

When he woke, Mako was already in the cafeteria. He’d left a note behind with a short explanation, just the word: food. At the bottom, though, he’d signed with a little piggy.

After changing into a new pair of boxer briefs and shorts, he headed out into the hallway, blinking against the brightness of morning light. He scratched idly at his neck and headed sleepily towards the cafeteria, his stomach already growling. When he walked through the doorway, he found the place relatively empty, save for a few patrons here and there. He made a bee-line for the trays and served himself a generous helping of the abysmal food they offered, and immediately found Mako in the mix.

He was only able to see Mei when he edged around Mako’s shoulder, the brute of a man having shielded her from view. His countenance brightened immediately upon seeing her there, laughing at something Mako must have said.

“G’day,” he called, meeting Mei’s gaze when she looked towards his voice. Her smile was welcoming, bright and friendly, and her voice curled around him as though it had heated fingers. He swallowed as she greeted him, a simple, “Hiya!” And hoped that his body would control itself. It was still the morning, after all. Even if he had just spent himself. He was still young.

“Mako and I were just discussing the weather,” Mei offered graciously, lifting a mug of what seemed to be hot chocolate to her lips. Jamison raised an eyebrow at that, casting a suspicious glance in Mako’s direction.

“Were you now.”

Mako said nothing in response, and Mei hummed, appreciating her drink. Jamison watched, perhaps a little too closely, and was found out immediately. His eyes were still on her lower lip before he realized she was staring back, and when his eyes met hers they were bright.

“Do you want some?” She asked, holding out her mug for him to taste. He didn’t actually, but he grabbed the mug anyways. He took a generous gulp of the sweet drink, uncaring that it was hot enough to burn his taste buds, and afterwards said, “Cheers, little one.”

Mei’s smile was warm, and it competed with the heat moving through him from his brief taste of her morning drink.

“I love hot chocolate,” she sighed, resting her lips against the rim. Jamison couldn’t help but to blink at the gesture, glancing from her lips to her eyes and wondering if she knew what she was doing to him. He cleared his throat, laughing to cover the slight warble in his trembling vocal chords.

“I would kill for some Boba! Milk tea, half sweet, that’s the best way to have it.”

“Oh my gosh!” She exclaimed, setting her mug down gently albeit excitedly. “That sounds so good.”

She pointedly ignored the very real killing intent Jamison weaved into his statement and he watched her sigh, bringing her mug back up to rest against her cheek. She seemed to be enjoying the warmth, almost like a kitten near a flame. Jamison shifted in his seat and shot a wary glance over at Mako, who was staring pointedly at him from behind his mask.

Okay. So he had definitely heard Jamison last night. And he was not being a good sport about it.

True to form, Mako turned back to Mei. Jamison tensed, squinting at him.

“I’d want a piece of cake,” he said easily, and Jamison felt himself relax. Too soon. “Or just some peace and quiet.”

“Oh?” Mei inquired, genuinely concerned. “Are you not sleeping well here?”

Jamison glared at Mako, even as he turned and his goggles gleamed in just the right way for Jamison to understand him wordlessly.

Hook, line, and sinker.

“Well,” he began, before Jamison wound his prosthetic back and slammed his peg leg straight into Mako’s left leg. He ignored the big man’s stunted grunt, and the following curse he uttered under his breath as he reached under the table to rub at the rapidly forming bruise.

Jamison crossed his fingers and perched his chin on top of them, elbows against the table and on his tray. He jarred his cup of water, but it didn’t tip over.

“He’s fine,” he reassured her, smiling brightly. He unraveled his fingers to shove scrambled eggs in his mouth a moment later, not wanting them to get cold. “Hog’s just bein’ a big baby.”

“Okay…” Mei trailed off, obviously still concerned. Mako pushed his chair back with a loud scrape against the linoleum and grunted in Mei’s direction, his only parting remark. He grabbed his tray and disposed of his food, and headed back for their room where he would inevitably plot Jamison’s premature demise. Though, he wouldn’t act on it quite yet, because he hadn’t been paid. Foolproof failsafe, if Jamison did say so himself.

“Are you sure he’s okay?” Mei asked quietly, idly swirling her tea with the tip of her finger. Jamison was mesmerized by the motion, his eyes watching the movements with total attention. He glanced up when she lifted her finger from her drink to find her lost in thought, staring blankly at a crack in the table. She lifted her finger to her lips nonetheless, and sucked the little taste of tea from her skin. Jamison just about combusted, and only managed to swallow down something breathy and heated when she went on to add, “If either of you are having trouble sleeping, I can help.”

And that was maybe worse than seeing her suck lightly on her own finger, mostly because it had barely constituted sucking at all since it’d really just been a quick lick, compared to Mei actually telling him that she would willingly help him sleep better. He didn’t know if he was just hyper focused on her, dangerously pent up, or overly hopeful. Or maybe a combination of the three. Either way, self-control had never really been his specialty but he was doing his best with what he had, and she was making it increasingly more difficult to not do or say something impulsive and inappropriate. He swallowed again, his mouth suddenly drier than the air in the Outback.

“We’re fine,” he reiterated, a little more gruffly than he’d intended to. Mei lifted her eyes to study his expression, one hand coming up to adjust her glasses a little better on the bridge of her nose.

“If you say so,” she responded neutrally, still watching him from over the rim of her mug as she took another sip of hot chocolate. Her layers were red today, a stark color that contrasted greatly with her pale skin. She looked beautiful, like always, and Jamison found himself studying the pink snowflake charm in her hair.

“So,” he began casually, stabbing into his eggs again. “Have you always been into the cold?”

Mei considered the question idly, giving it due consideration. She grinned up at him after a short moment, nostalgic. “I guess so, yeah. I grew up in China and we always had beautiful, if harsh winters there. It’s what I know.”

“That why you seem more comfortable in the snow than anyone here?”

Mei startled at that, blinking up at him in wonder. “What?”

Jamison reached out to grasp her wrist, her skin icy to the touch under his heated fingertips. He pulled her hand up between them, so that their focus was on her fingertips.

“Everyone’s fingers are always white from the cold, even in the workroom. But not yours, little one.”

Mei stared at his fingers wrapped around her wrist, and then glanced at her fingertips to see what he meant. They both studied the flush of pink skin there, before Mei glanced up to study Jamison’s expression.

“How did you notice something like that?”

“By lookin’,” he answered honestly, one corner of his lips quirking up at her sudden embarrassment with his sincerity. He didn’t release her wrist immediately, his thumb rubbing gently against her pulse until she began to carefully draw back. She hummed lowly, curiously, and stared down into her mug again as though lost in thought. He wanted to know what kind of thoughts she was lost in, considering that she hadn’t been blushing a moment before he’d reached out to touch her and told her he’d spent time staring at her hands before.

When she didn’t seem ready to say much else, Jamison offered a little bit about himself to even up the playing field. He didn’t have to, she hadn’t asked, but for some reason he wanted to.

“Me? I’m more comfortable with fire than anyone you’ll probably ever meet.”

This concession was enough to get Mei to glance back up and meet his eyes. She studied his expression, his easy smile and open display of his emotions, and a smile of her own kicked at the corners of her lips.

“Scary!” She finally answered, blinking at him. He laughed gregariously, startling the only other patrons in the room who sat a few tables behind Mei.

“Fun!” He challenged, his eyes alight with promise, and elation.

Mei rested her chin on her knuckles, and her eyes were heavy with what appeared to be something akin to fondness.

“Do you ever have anything on your mind that doesn’t involve explosions?” She asked, charmed and so, so innocent. It was apparent that she was certain that no, he did not ever think about anything other than chaos and explosions. But at that same moment, the image he’d created of her the night before flashed across his mind in stark detail—Mei lying sprawled beneath him, all beautiful exposed curves, writhing and panting his name, breathless with pleasure and want and need.

He had to bite his tongue, hard, to keep his hands to himself. His fingers twitched, and his eyes dropped to her lips, beautiful and pink, before rising back to her eyes.

He smiled, an unsteady imposter of his usual deranged joy. “What else is there to think about?”

“Oh, nothing much I guess,” Mei laughed. “Just the diminishing health of our world and climate, and maybe the militant operations at play all over the globe. But each of those involve different kinds of explosions, I guess, so you’ve got me there.”

You’ve got me there.

He wanted her—everywhere.

It was bewildering, his attraction to her. It was powerful. He had nothing recent he could compare it to, nothing that felt like it could measure up. She was constantly in his thoughts, clothed and unclothed, her laughter and her breathlessness, her smile and her gentle brown eyes. He wanted to kiss her, to reach across the table and run his knuckles against her cheeks, to tell her how beautiful she was. It was weird. The last time he’d gotten this choked up about something it’d been a weapon.

Jamison kept his hands to himself, but he couldn’t help but to stare.

“See?” He said, the words buoyant with his contentment. “You’re catching on quick.”

“Yes, well, for now I think I’ve had my fill of explosions. One of the meteorologist students accidentally set off one of Tracer’s pulse mines near my room yesterday, and now I have to repair the hole in the wall.”

Jamison sat up a little straighter in his seat at that, though he by no means broke out of his customary hunch. His eyes trailed over her arms, her body, and frustration at not being able to see any part of her skin sunk heavily through his gut, like a stone.

“You hurt?”

“Oh no, sorry, that’s not what I meant.” She assured him, hands waving to derail that train of thought. “It’s just my place that was damaged. I wasn’t there at the time.”

Lucky timing, then. He wondered, would she have been injured had she been in her room? Killing intent manifested itself in the ropes of his veins, sending a chill unlike that which was caused by the cold weather down his spine. Mei continued to try to placate him, defending the student and Tracer both. They argued a little, until Mei told him carefully that she could take care of herself, and Jamison was forced to drop it. He supposed that since she wasn’t hurt, and that was what mattered the most, that he could concede the point.

But Jamison knew what explosives could do, especially pulse mines, and especially to those caught unawares. Mei was quite possibly the last person on Earth that Jamison wanted anywhere near a hostile explosive. He chewed on the tip of his thumb, an idle, frustrated gesture, until he came up with a plan of his own. Mako would have been proud—might be proud, once he would inevitably hear about it later that day.

“The damages,” Jamison began, catching Mei’s attention again. “I’ll fix’m.”

“What?”

“Your walls, Mei,” Jamison reiterated, resting his jaw in his hand.

Mei’s cheeks flamed as she blinked up at him, clearly startled at his offer of assistance. She narrowed her eyes at him, lightly suspicious.

“I did just tell you that I can take care of myself, right?”

Jamison sighed, reaching up with his mechanical fingers to run them through his messy hair.

“Sure did,” he said, before adding, “But I’m surprisingly good with repairs.”

And upgrades, he thought, not without ulterior motives. If he could tend to her messed up walls, not only could he reinstate them powerfully with a few added defenses, but he could make sure that nothing like that pulse mine incident happened again.

An added bonus would be getting to spend more time with her, and in closer proximity to her personal space. But he wasn’t a drongo—he wasn’t going to just advertise that.

When Mei only watched him, tentative to accepting his help, he added haphazardly, “Just think, if I’m taking the time to fix your walls, then I definitely won’t have the time to be blowing things up around the facility.”

The moment the words left his mouth, Jamison tensed. Not because he was worried about her answer, but because his words were true, and that meant that he was putting plain old manual labor above chaos in his priorities, which.

Was ridiculous.

He sat up a little straighter as Mei contemplated his suggestion, and like a seed planting doubt and complication in the gut of him, Jamison began to feel conflicted. How had he gone from being undoubtedly interested in Mei to impulsively wanting to touch her, to kiss her, to place her safety higher on his list than his own enjoyment? That wasn’t the kind of man he’d grown to be—wasn’t the kind of man he was.

Right?

“Well, okay,” Mei said at last, gently accepting. She didn’t say anything about his altered countenance, or the sudden tension of his usually chattering, jolting frame. “Thank you, Jamison.”

When had he decided that he didn’t mind hearing his first name if Mei was the one speaking it? His feelings conflicted, mashed together and roiled within his gut. He nodded his head definitively, not willing to go back on his word, but he pushed away from the table in the next moment regardless. He grabbed his tray and moved out of the cafeteria without a word in passing to Mei or anyone else, and he dumped the remains of his food in the garbage bin.

He didn’t go back to his room immediately, not wanting to face a grumpy Mako who wouldn’t be a sympathetic ear to his current emotional meltdown. So instead, he wandered the facility, determined to push Mei out of his thoughts and further from his feelings than she had somehow gotten.

He wandered for hours, after that, and still his mind sparked like a rusted machine.

His heart raced in his chest.

✧

Jamison was dutiful in repairing Mei’s wall.

She had downplayed the extent of the explosion and its resulting damage, enough to make Jamison’s trigger finger extra twitchy, the desire to detonate something he might or might not have planted on the other side of the facility—just in case. And also for fun—growing the more he heard about the incident and by how narrow a margin Mei had escaped without injury.

She didn’t hover when he worked, but she did periodically bring him snacks and beverages and little words of gratitude that just twisted the already barbed knife lodged somewhere in his guts, where his emotions hung out.

He had no idea what to think of her. He knew that she was kind and gentle and beautiful and that he wanted her desperately, physically, and maybe a little more than that, in other ways, too—but what did all of that even mean? It was all too confusing and knotty and he fought against it because he didn’t need complications in his life. He didn’t want them. He wanted simple chaos, controlled under the skin of his thumb, a big red button he chose or did not choose to push.

It was easier to push thoughts of Mei out of his head when she wasn’t right there with him, too lovely for the world and too gentle for him, always. That wasn’t to say that it was easy to extinguish thoughts of her completely, because it definitely wasn’t. He still had dreams about her, but those he couldn’t help. Those were unconscious and totally out of his control.

When he was awake and alert he did his best to keep his distance and just do his own thing, with Mako in tow. He spent copious amounts of time bouncing around inside the workroom and the flamer room, the latter of which had been opened up to him only recently once he’d started setting off explosions in the gymnasium. When stern disapproval and eventual detainment didn’t stop him, the flamer room was the only viable option left to the Watchpoint: Antarctica staff.

He spent a lot of time in there, until his hands no longer shook from the need to destroy, until he could work himself into exhaustion and sleep and dreams.

Those damned persistent dreams.

He spent a large chunk of his time slung over a stool with his arms in the remains of Mei’s wall, up to the elbows in cords and wires and beams, just as he was now. He slathered a particular kind of oil he’d formulated himself, synthetic and permeable enough for the inner structures with running water to breathe, all over the interior. He wasn’t mending by the book, because he didn’t have the book, and he wouldn’t have used it if he had, and where was the fun in following instructions anyways? This wasn’t his first thrashed wall, or his first repair.

“Nǐhǎo.”

Jamison blinked, recognizing Mei’s familiar greeting but still ducking his head to see out from behind the edge of crusted drywall. He saw swathes of green first, and then Mei’s gentle smile. She lifted a hand to wave a little, surveying the blast site of his tools spread all around his seat, the powdered residue climbing around his left elbow and onto his bare chest, and then up to the almost completely fixed wall.

Jamison had spent weeks on this wall, making all of his own materials from what the facility had to offer and ensuring that everything was up to code.

That is, if code meant his own code, and what he thought would work best, and maybe that wasn’t certifiably the most efficient but as someone who knew the ins and outs of destroying walls, he also knew a surprising amount about how to fix them back up again. With his own creative augmentations. For her safety.

But he still stuck to the basics; he’d taken his time attaching the top plate into the ceiling framing, with a matching sole plate directly beneath it at his feet. Installing the wall studs between the two had been a simple affair, and the following insertion of drywall to those studs and plates was tedious and tiresome but still not out of his reach. Beams lined up just so, with drywall tape and compound hastily applied, and Jamison was ready for exterior maintenance.

Mei had been invaluable as an expert on how the temperature would change inside and effect the pipes. Just as Winston had implied, she was exactly the person Jamison had needed for the job. It had been easy enough picking her brain about what kinds of materials would need to be installed, and then it was just a matter of him boosting them to his liking. Installation was complete.

Now he just had to repair the leftover hole he’d been slowly working on for the past several days, with its diameter thinning every day. It was down to about the size of his head and shoulders, hence his ability to hoist himself up inside for last minute checks on whatever the hell was making that rattling sound, and he was just about ready to call it quits.

“G’day, Mei,” he greeted, turning back to the wall. His prosthetic slipped off one of the bars of his stool and clanked against the tile even as he continued to spread compound with surprisingly even accuracy. He already had a square of fine grit sandpaper perched in-between his mechanical fingers, ready to blend the repairs into the rest of the wall. He perched his peg back on the stool almost stubbornly.

“I’ve just about got it done,” he added lazily, slathering and dabbing wherever he saw fit. He pushed back against the wall, balancing on the two back legs of his stool for a moment to tilt his head and survey his handiwork from a slightly expanded distance. He let the legs of the stool jostle back squarely, and reached up with a spade to scratch at the skin under his chin.

“Yay!” Mei chirped, stepping a bit closer to survey the site. Jamison blinked, shimmying in his seat to a tune unheard, and turned to watch Mei’s eyes flicker over his work. He’d been coming by her place daily since having repaired the interior. Steadily, she had begun to spend more and more time with him while he worked. Part of him had wanted to tell her to buzz off, let him work alone—the part of him that got distracted too easily by the slope of her smile, the tender gleam in her eyes. The other part of him wanted her to stay, to draw more out of her, to get to know her as more than the gentle ice scientist he had frequent and indecent dreams about.

She was a conundrum he couldn’t completely understand. She was gentle, so gentle he feared just one of his fiery looks in her direction might hurt her, but she was strong. She held her own, stubbornly at times, and she was so, so kind. Playful, too. He had learned that rather quickly staying at Watchpoint: Antarctica. Mei was easily excitable and sly, even mischievous at times.

She kept him on his toes.

So he hadn’t told her to buzz off, and he had allowed himself to just enjoy the way she opened up for him so carefully, cautious and kind.

She moved a bit closer, just inside his personal space. He watched from the corner of his eye as she reached out and hesitantly grasped the metal of his elbow, calling for his attention.

“I got you something!” She squeaked, breathy with equal parts embarrassment and excitement. “For working so hard, and helping me out.”

He grunted, raising an eyebrow as he turned to face her. He let his scrap of sandpaper drop to the floor beside his other tools and scratched at the side of his neck.

“You didn’t have to get me anythin’,” he replied weakly, staring owlishly down at her. She beamed up at him, holding up one pointer finger to hold him in place.

“Just a moment,” she pressed, then turned in a flutter of earthy tones, green and dusty brown. He tilted his head after her, one eye squinting, eyebrows pinched. She turned into her room and disappeared with a reckless squeak of her boots on the tile. He could hear her rummaging around in her room somewhere. What in the hell was she doing?

He didn’t have much time to consider it; true to her word, she came back from her room just a moment later. Jamison’s eyes fell immediately to the canteen in her hands, curiosity licking up his spine. It looked heavy, an armful, and when she got close enough he caught a particular scent—one he hadn’t caught since before he’d arrived so many months prior at Watchpoint: Antarctica, and even then, it had been far, far too long.

He sucked in a breath through his nose.

“Is that?”

“Milk tea,” Mei agreed, nodding. The tilt of her smile was mischievous, like she knew too much.

Jamison exhaled heavily, sloppily, his eyes never once leaving the canteen. His hands shook.

“With—”

“Boba, yes,” Mei interrupted him, and her smile only managed to keep on growing. She almost looked smug, though her general contentment overwhelmed all else. “Half sweetened, too.”

Jamison launched himself from his stool so abruptly and with such intensity he almost knocked Mei to the ground. He managed to stop himself on the tips of his toes and peg, so close to Mei’s face he could smell the mint of her breath beyond the sweetness of the tea she had brought him. He wind-milled back a step, his arms spinning for only a moment before he grasped the canteen from Mei’s waiting grasp. It was sudden, his laughter. He pulled the canteen in against his chest and howled, his chest expanding widely around the joy of his discovery, his gift.

Once he had caught his breath, he immediately brought the canteen to his lips, uncapping and guzzling the sweet tea down with gusto. Mei laughed behind her hands, but Jamison couldn’t tear his focus away from the tea. It was perfect.

Once his belly was round with fullness and his lungs screamed for adequate oxygenation, he finally ripped himself away from the lip of the jug, capping it with pointed finality. There was still so much left, he thought with rabid excitement, his eyes gleaming wildly. He wanted to save the rest for later that night, when he could lay comfortably in a pile of busted rubber explosives and watch training dummies ignite under his detonator, his sweet tea at his side.

He turned and set the canteen down with extreme care next to his working stool, making sure it was tucked away safely, and straightened back up to his hunched height. He took a deep breath and when he turned back to Mei, her smile was enough to take him out at the knees. Instead, he allowed his delight and his adrenaline-riddled body to go free, and immediately launched himself straight at her.

The impact was a little rougher than he’d intended, probably because he was so much taller than she was, but even still he managed to tackle her rather safely. He cupped the back of her head so it wouldn’t hit the tile, his forearms pillowing her fall even under the weight of him. A gust of air burst from her when they landed, surprised and discomfited, until she felt him nuzzling against her neck.

“J-Jamison?” She asked, and her voice trembled. Jamison hummed against her throat, not pausing for a second. His arms remained wrapped around her head and shoulders, cushioning her, and his hips slotted against hers—the sensation was riveting.

“Thanks, Mei,” he breathed, and if his lips touched the heat of her skin at that moment he blamed it on the adrenaline coursing through him, the unadulterated joy. He felt her hands settle hesitantly against his back, his bare skin, her fingertips hot to the touch, and it was all he could do not to groan. Instead, he shivered and continued to rub his nose against her neck, the skin of her shoulder, and back up to the hinge of her jaw. He didn’t care if he looked like a giant nuzzling kitten, filthy and bedraggled.

She had brought him milk tea, half sweetened with boba.

He might love her.

“Where’d you find it?” He asked, not pulling back for a second. He could feel each one of her fingertips like blades of heat piercing through him, barely moving, and he wondered what it would feel like if she dragged them across his skin, pressing instead of resting.

“I made it,” she said, and Jamison thought he might embarrass himself right there on top of her, without ever having really even been touched. “If you’re wondering why I didn’t make it for you sooner, it’s because I was trying to get it right.”

“How did you know how I liked it?” He couldn’t help but to ask, taking a deep breath against her skin; she was citrus and sage, like always, like he knew she would be. It took controlled effort for him to pull away from her, if only for a moment, to gauge her expression. It was a mistake.

She was beautiful and soft and flushed and she was lying sprawled under him, her hair a fan of dusty brown around her. She chewed on her lower lip, glancing away from his piercing stare, and he greedily drank her in. Her layers had shifted in the fall and under the weight of him, and he could see the curves of collarbones, and for some reason that made his heart stutter. He wanted to press kisses against her throat, under her chin and down her neck and over her chest. He wanted to taste the sweetness on her lips—wondered briefly if she had tried the tea, if she was even sweeter.

“You mentioned it once a while back, when we had breakfast,” she responded meekly. “I asked Mako too, just to make sure.”

She seemed embarrassed by the fact, and when Jamison thought about her paying attention to him that closely, and even going out of her way to seek information about him from someone he was close to, it made him shake. “I was uncertain if he’d know something like that—what your favorite food or beverage was. I guess I was lucky. He tells me that you…talk about it often.”

That was a polite way to say that Mako had told her he never shuts up about it. Regardless of whether or not Mako had been spewing his normal amount of rancor about Jamison to sweet little Mei, Jamison would have to remember to thank Mako later. Though he certainly wasn’t about to share his treasure with him; his milk tea was a treasure all his own. As was the sensation coursing through him, something like admiration with blurred edges of need and excitement, a jarring wave of breathless laughter.

“I have a certain fondness for the beverage,” Jamison admitted quietly and without shame, shifting enough to rest on his elbows without pulling at Mei’s hair. The words were low and abruptly intimate, unexpected but welcomed even by him. He had the distinct impression that he wasn’t really talking about the tea. He allowed the fingers of one hand to trail through Mei’s hair with idle attention, too distracted by her surprised expression to care about how exposed he was leaving himself.

It was sudden, the way Jamison realized how much power Mei held over him. It might have been him lying on top of her, pinning her to the ground, hands in her hair and surefire confidence firing on all cylinders, the one making all the moves.

But then Mei shifted, only slightly, and Jamison couldn’t breathe. Her cheeks flushed, embarrassment at the situation or his words or how close the two of them were to each other, he didn’t know, but he felt his heart waver. Mei met his eyes, and Jamison’s hands shook.

He did not have the power here. He was utterly susceptible to her every turn of expression; her every breath felt strong enough to draw him in, to push him away. He was a grenade in the palm of her hand, tick-tick-ticking away, waiting for her to say boom.

It was an unfamiliar feeling. Discomfiting. His eyes raced over her features and he didn’t care that there was a tense silence hanging over them, that his hips were still pressed to hers, that he wanted to move against her almost as badly as he wanted her to move against him. There were her lips, pink and swollen from an anxiousness, and he wanted to replace that habit. He wanted to be to her what she was to him: all-encompassing and dangerous.

But he couldn’t move. He stayed perched in the palm of her hand and wondered if she would make a move, if she would show him even a glimpse of what she was feeling beyond embarrassment and surprise. He wanted to know if that softness in her expression was for him specifically, if the way she looked up at him from under her eyelashes, so unconsciously coy, was a veil of buried interest. He wanted her to be interested.

He shifted slightly, his hand pulling away from her hair to trail along her cheekbone, the scars on his fingertips catching against her smooth skin. She had high cheekbones, prominent on her rounded face. He trailed his fingertips over one, then curled his finger and allowed his knuckle to trail the same path in reverse.

Jamison had never been a gentle man, or a gentle teen, or a gentle kid. He was a ticking time bomb, had been since he was just a boy, and he had never known anything but chaos and destruction—both around him and of his own doing, from his very own fingertips, and yet—

He touched her with gentleness. His fingertips, scarred from burns, charred and broken, trembled against her. He watched his own movements, and he could feel her eyes on his face, watching him. Heat wound up his spine like a tornado, leaving chills in its disastrous wake.

It was not a conscious decision, then; his heart pulled and his body moved, and his lips found hers. He sought the sweetness of her, the softness of her mouth, and he marveled over the beauty of every part of her, without ever having touched her before that moment.

He pulled back a moment later and this time, both of them were breathless. Mei flushed all the way down to her throat, blinking up at him in blatant surprise, and Jamison felt the beginnings of a different kind of chaos beginning to unwind in his gut. It was a torrent he recognized, one he had not felt since he was a young boy and the world tried to swallow him hole.

Fear.

Jamison wasn’t good at confrontation unless it involved explosives and he was allowed to blow someone up. Since this situation necessitated neither of those things, he did the only thing that he knew to do, as a defensive-style fighter.

He ran, and sought cover.

He scrambled off her in an instant, leaping back up to his feet. He turned and the only thing he grabbed from his assortment of disarrayed tools was his tea, the tea Mei had made for him, and he hobbled down the hallway as quickly as he could, cursing under his breath the entire way.

Later, when he threw himself angrily into that pile of busted rubber and began to toss grenades across the room to the defenseless training dummies, the tea didn’t taste as sweet as he had imagined it would.

But he knew why. He knew it wasn’t the tea, but admitting that was another matter entirely; and Jamison, well.

He decided to ignore it all, to set fire to everything in him he didn’t understand until all that was left in the ashes was him, the Junkrat he knew, the boy-teen-man who survived the Outback, who refused to be devoured.

The Junkrat that needed only the treasure he’d stolen.

The flames, he thought, were familiar; they were all he knew, all he had even known, and even as they surrounded him, touched him, burned him, even they would still leave him.

This, too, was familiar.

Just him and the ashes.

✧

It usually took quite a bit of awful shit to get Jamison truly angry—enough to want to not only blow something up, but to tear everything down.

And yet, only a few months after he kissed Mei for the first time, Jamison found himself at the end of his rope. He tried not to think about that day, or the way it had made him feel. He ended up having plenty of distractions.

Those distractions became other factors that began to push him closer and closer to the point of no return; the constant discussions that seemed to be going nowhere, all reminders of a home that was never a home; the frustrated lines of Torbjörn’s face when Jamison couldn’t augment one of the weapons Torbjörn had supplied him with as quickly as he’d expected him to; the pointed questions Winston would ask him about the tension between he and Mei; and even Mako, his silent shadow, sending him disappointed glances from whatever wall he was currently perched against any time Jamison turned in his direction. There were an endless number of things driving him insane, even more so than usual, but if he were to be honest with himself, it was Mei that was at the heart of it all—and wasn’t that the damndest.

So really, with all that he was trying to repress and ignore and avoid, a few months’ time was actually rather impressive for someone as explosive as Jamison to maintain composure. Especially since he couldn’t remember the last time he had willingly repressed anything before having met Mei and beginning to dream about her even in the daytime and then realizing he felt something more for her than he wanted to admit.

A kiss and a few months of micro-irritations and frustrations building and building until his blood boiled and his hands shook with the need to destroy, to see something go boom, and Jamison finally found every last tendril of his already charred control wasted.

He’d been avoiding Mei rather successfully for months—and this time he was aware enough to admit that avoiding was what he was most certainly doing—and it frustrated him even more that he knew his success was in part due to Mei herself. He knew her well enough to know that even if she was confused or upset that his unspoken signals of stay away from me were loud and clear, she would accept them. And that she would so easily allow him to avoid her drove him mad.

Beyond that, even, were the issues of her existence in his life and how he seemed to be unable to do anything but respond to her overpoweringly, since the moment she had mentioned his scars, amplified by the taste of her lips on his own. If that weren’t enough, he and Mako had spent countless hours searching and searching through the underground tunnels only to find nothing but broken down machinations and empty ammunition canisters left behind. Winston and his team of scientists drilled him for information about the most inconsequential of topics, from plants to soil to weather patterns to the damned consistency of the metals scattered around the wasteland. Jamison had left more than one idiotic session with some of his hair pulled out in-between his fingers, and ten jaggedly aligned crescent indents in the palms of his hands.

“Hey,” Mako said suddenly, causing Jamison to pause before entering the work room. He glanced up at Mako curiously, one eyebrow lifted. Mako had been particularly standoffish since the morning after Jamison had come back to their room the night of the kiss and made the mistake of asking Jamison of Mei’s whereabouts—she had promised him pancakes—only to have Jamison nearly set his enforcer on fire for his trouble. It had been weeks since Mako had actually spoken to him. “Stay out of trouble.”

Jamison blinked for just a moment, unsurprised that Mako had caught on to his waning good mood. He laughed, slapping a hand against Mako’s bicep just to watch his arm jiggle.

He said only, “I’ll be on my best behavior.”

And he was doing his best not to set the world on fire, like he so desperately wanted to, but every little thing just kept getting on his nerves. His jaunty attitude was hard to hold onto and by the time Torbjörn came around to interrogate him about metallic consistencies and how radiation melded into them, Jamison wasn’t smiling anymore. He shifted more aggressively, unable to stand still, unable to keep his eyes in one spot, his jaded mania accelerating.

Torbjörn made one mistake; one he couldn’t have known he was making even as he spoke it, and watched Jamison’s wide eyes turn with a predacious slowness to meet his own.

He said, “I understand this is a lot of information, boy, but please try to keep up. We’re all working hard to make this relationship work. Winston has worked tirelessly to connect several different fields of scientists at this Watchpoint to aid in the revival of the Outback. Mei has not slept for the past couple of days worrying about how you’re adapting here. She’s distracted from her own work, which could be detrimental to her studies, and I don’t think—“

The orchestra of movement that Jamison made when he finally snapped was his favorite tune in the entire world: a slow click as he detached his mine from his hip, the low whir of a fuse being triggered, and the eventual cacophony of chaos unleashed in a single, timed blast.

KABOOM!

He didn’t even stand still enough to watch the massive explosion, three grenades already cradled in his robot palm. Even in a curl of rage, his aim was lethally precise. He launched each mine in quick succession at the upper left corner of the doorway with just enough force, the exact trajectory necessary for his grenades to trail through the air. They landed with light thumps on first one floating beam, and then through the air to line up perfectly with the next. He heard screaming over his shoulder, scientists in their white coats running to avoid the flames, the explosions.

He threw more grenades and laughed and laughed and laughed.

“Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock!” He howled, leaping and twisting in the air with his mechanical fist pumped. He continued to throw bombs, laughing all the while as he felt the first touch of heat against his skin, so close he thought he might start to boil. He didn’t shift away, allowed the tips of his hair to get so close they singed, caught fire, sparked. He threw and he threw and the massive room became an unstoppable echo of his chaos, explosions and fire and electrical wires cut and firing from above.

His eyes never left his grenades, the first three he had thrown, and he watched with bone-chilling satisfaction as they bounced daintily from the third and last beam, right on target.

So incredibly, perfectly on target.

When they fell ever closer to the pile of Antarctic ice shards, Jamison held his breath. He wondered for a moment about that special ice, if it could somehow defend itself from the destruction he had rained down upon it.

But it is alive, the voice whispered in his mind, wrapped daintily in the soft tones of Mei’s voice.

His grenades fell and he heard something over his shoulder, a hissing that grew steadily louder, and an accompanying icy chill. Jamison watched from the corner of his eye as a powdered spray of ice shot towards his grenades, the shard-ridden pile, and a wall so tall it upended the beams overhead formed.

Made entirely of ice.

Jamison watched his grenades deflect, hitting the wall separating them from their intended target, and gasped. He took a leaping step backwards and felt a heavy arm on his shoulder, a familiar weight. He didn’t face Mako, even when the bigger man pulled him bodily backwards and turned them, shielding Jamison from his own impending explosions. As they turned, Jamison’s gaze followed the trail of flowing ice to a gun, to a hand that held it securely, without hesitation, to spectacled eyes and messy brown hair and every beautiful curve of Mei’s face pulled taut in concentration.

And anger.

For a fleeting second, Jamison thought of letting Mako shield him, of letting his flames die out under Mei’s ice, of accepting the consequences of his actions with minimal damage. But then he remembered her voice from so many months ago—when he had only just arrived and begun to make trouble—wrapped so delicately around words that never failed to pierce deep.

I don’t understand why you’re fighting us. Her voice had trembled, her hands had shook, and he had felt like the biggest piece of garbage the Outback had to offer. Which was really, really saying something. We’re trying to help you. Don’t you want to go home?

Home.

Jamison screamed, not from fear but from rage, and pushed out of Mako’s grip.

Everything happened so quickly after that, but to Jamison it was as though time slowed for his benefit alone.

He knew that if ever there was a time for him to test the new tech he’d applied to his favorite weapon, he couldn’t think of one better than now. He reached for the handheld controller secured in his harness even as he felt the room become shrouded in chill, in ice. He flicked the cap off, pressed a button hidden on the underside of the trigger, and felt his lips pull up into a deranged grin. He heard the crunch of drywall, of plaster, and heard rubber skid against tile as his Rip-Tire tore through his borrowed room, down the hallway, and through the paneling next to the doorway to make its way to the tracker he’d installed in his belt.

It had been a no-brainer to create this new tech. He wasn’t afraid of his own explosions, had never feared anything less, and his Rip-Tire was no exception. The homing device he’d planted within its frame tick, tick, ticked, and he leapt aside just as it raced towards him, ready to skewer whatever and whoever was in its way. He lifted it easily from the wheel well, his mechanical fingers grasping tightly. He howled as he re-directed it, aiming it at the same wall he’d thrown his grenades at, and set his foot against the heated rubber.

“If at first you don’t succeed…” he laughed, voice higher than the flames licking up the walls, tugging on the fuse, “Blow it up again!”

“No!”

Mei’s voice, louder than he’d ever heard it, drowned out under the sudden take-off of this Rip-Tire. He directed it up the wall with ease, ignoring the fleeing scientists around him and those trying to help put out the flames he had caused. Mei was somewhere behind him and even as he directed his Tire up the wall and bounced it into the rafters to race across the room and jump from beam to beam, he hoped that she was smart enough to be nowhere near the pile of ice he had his sights set on. He thought that she was. He made himself believe it.

Even still, he directed the Tire and heard the whir of her gun, the spray of ice, a new wall forming in vain. At the last available second he leapt the tire off the new wall, and down the backside of the first one, and he turned in just the same second as his thumb pressed down on the trigger.

The explosions of his grenades were nothing compared to his Rip-Tire; the blast radius blew everyone in the vicinity backwards, wide and powerful enough to blow out the nearest wall and shake all the others. Jamison felt the wind knocked from his lungs as his back slammed against the wall, his eyes never leaving his explosion, watching in utter delight as the wall of ice fragmented and melted all in one single, beautiful, moment.

He saw a shadow detach from the wall to his left, a blur that moved towards him from the corner of his eyes, and it was sudden how cold he felt. Cold didn’t seem appropriate, he was freezing, frozen. He couldn’t move, and there were transparent shards obscuring his view of the show.

“Enough,” he heard, warbled slightly through the layers of ice around him. He couldn’t move, but he could blink, and he could see the flames rising in place of the pile of ice he had for some reason resented enough to destroy. He watched Mako sigh, bodily, shoulders rising and falling so much further. He came to stand beside Jamison wordlessly, turning to watch all the Watchpoint: Antarctica personnel available try to put out Jamison’s flames. White coats fluttered all over the room, busy and bustling.

He thought, revenge is a dish best served flaming hot!

And then he heard the words: who here deserved your retribution?

He couldn’t identify the voice. He wouldn’t think about the sentiment. He was an honest guy, didn’t like to lie. But the answer before him was glaring and it felt wrong, not like how he should have felt after blowing something so important up. He should’ve felt happy, and powerful, and protected.

He felt none of those things; in fact, he felt a particular kind of vulnerability as he stared into those flames that no longer felt like his flames. The pile of special ice was gone. He had killed it.

So he wouldn’t let himself think about it. Maybe he was finally getting the hang of this repressing thing. He focused instead on trying to breathe around the constricting cold, with fingers of ice wrapped around his throat. Mako was a silent, nonjudgmental figure beside him, but even his neutral presence rubbed Jamison the wrong way. He wished he could lash out at him, or chat his ear off until he left him alone, at least for the time being. He still needed an enforcer, for the greatest treasure he had ever unearthed. He still needed added protection.

But he didn’t want it, right now.

His eyes caught on one figure in particular, with messy brown hair and dark clothes. Mei was restless, moving to every source of fire only to extinguish it with a single burst form her strange gun. She looked ragged, unwound. Jamison wondered if she had been sleeping at the time of his attack, or if she had not been sleeping, for days, for days.

Mei has not slept for the past couple of days worrying about how you’re adapting here.

Well, he always had had a flare for giving particularly spicy answers. Now she had hers, signed with ash.

He did not think about the kiss.

She managed to extinguish every one of his flames, and he remained chilled and frozen in her prison of ice, only watching. The ice was so tight around him his jaw was squeezed shut, unable to open, unable to speak. Mei checked on the scientists and waved at the doorway to call over incoming medics. And because there was nothing else she could do once they arrived, Jamison watched her gradually approach the absence of ice. Her walls had been destroyed by his Rip-Tire, but he knew that she wouldn’t care about them.

It was that pile. That heap of whatever the fuck it was that meant enough to this facility that they’d kept it inside and protected. Mei’s shoulders heaved, a sigh or a sob, and he watched her kneel in the center of the absence of ice. She reached down until her fingertips touched the ground, and she didn’t move for several long moments. She was so still Jamison couldn’t help but to wonder who was truly frozen, between the two of them.

Winston came into the room and avoided Jamison altogether, not even looking at him. He went immediately to Mei, one hand falling gently to her shoulder, and Jamison resented that, too. The ease between them, the comradery. They spoke to one another, Mei still barely moving, until Winston seemed to convince her to stand. He brought his arm around her, comforting and protective, and they headed for the door. When they were halfway to Jamison, Mei glanced over her shoulder back to the ice, a look of longing and pain flashing across her browbeaten features. Then, she looked at Jamison.

The rage he had seen on her expression from earlier was gone. All that was left was confusion, and despair. Those hurt worse.

She stepped out from under Winston’s arm as she came over to Jamison, stopping just in front of him. She wasn’t wearing her layers. For the first time since he’d met her, so many months ago, she was exposed and he was stuck here in a rock of ice unable to say a word. He had the worst timing in the world, she probably wouldn’t want to hear anything at all from him at this moment, after he had destroyed something that for reasons he still didn’t completely understand was so dear to her, but.

But she was beautiful. He could see the slopes of her curves under her t-shirt, her supple arms. Desire coiled through him without his control, and the knowledge that now he knew for certain that it wasn’t the layers that gave her such incredible curves, but her own body, he felt like he could barely breathe. It was partly because he was so damned cold, true, but then she turned and he could see the curve of her ass and truly, truly it was not entirely the cold that took his breath away.

And he could say nothing. Probably for the best. She looked up at him and blinked, her eyes wet, eyebrows perched together in confusion. Winston reached around her and banged his fist against the top of Jamison’s ice cage like the drop of a hammer, until cracks formed and the ice around Jamison shattered. He inhaled deeply, reaching around himself and shivering, teeth chattering. He jostled from foot to peg, foot to peg, and he couldn’t really look at Mei for too long without sort of wanting to go back into the ice prison so he couldn’t speak.

“Why?” She asked, low and uncertain. A question that could be asking anything. Why had he kissed her? Why had he run? Jamison watched her hands tremble at her sides, and noted Winston hovering just over her shoulder. Back-up. “Why would you do such a terrible thing?”

Jamison always had a line for something. Whether it was an exclamation over something of value, or a simple remark to someone he didn’t even know, he always had something.

Speechlessness was a novel experience for him. He didn’t like it, so he broke through it forcefully, even if what he ended up saying was worse than his silence would’ve been.

“It was just ice,” he laughed, with more humor than he actually felt. “Frozen snow. Frozen powder. From Antarctica, I know, some special ice that all of you loved dearly and I blew it up! That’s what I do, you know?”

“That’s what you do?” Mei whispered, and there were the first dredges of anger, in the sudden sharpness of her eyes, the unsmiling line of her mouth.

“Sure,” he answered, nodding his head, still shivering. There were goosebumps on Mei’s skin, too, but she didn’t shiver. He wondered if it was the adrenaline that warmed her, or the rage. “That’s what I get paid to do. Blow things up. Steal things, too. Anything with one or both of those things is my kind of job. That’s the kind of guy I am.”

It was interesting to see sweet, gentle Mei shake with anger. Her hands curled into fists at her side, and she clenched her teeth twice before opening her mouth to speak. Jamison couldn’t help but to gaze down at her, walking a fine line by admiring the curves of her heavier body even as he offended her. Even as he had ignored her, for months. It was compulsive, though. He couldn’t look away. He didn’t want to.

Mei stepped closer, close enough that if Jamison had reached out he could have traced the soft curve of her jaw, the elusive slop of her exposed shoulder. He wondered if his scars would catch on her skin, like they had against her cheek.

“You want to know what kind of guy I think you are, Jamison?” She asked, and there was nothing delicate about her tone, or the way his name became a poison on her tongue. He didn’t like it—his name usually sounded so sweet coming from her. Like she used it carefully. Like she savored it. Now, though, it sounded like a curse.

She couldn’t hide the betrayal in her eyes, or the confusion, or the pain. She was vulnerable, even as she stood up to him. She was strong, he thought, not for the first time. He blinked down at her, cocking his head just so in inquiry, even as everything inside of him braced for the blow.

“I think you’re just a no-good bully.” Tears pooled in her eyes and fell over her anger-flushed cheeks, and Jamison’s heart stuttered, affected. “How can you even look at yourself in the mirror? You are terrible.”

Jamison couldn’t help himself, the words already slipping from the tip of his tongue as he responded jokingly, saying, “That’s cold.”

He knew that she wouldn’t take the bait. She didn’t laugh or smile, and instead pushed right past his words, spoke over them, and hissed, “I hate fools like you.”

The words, Jamison thought, were weaponized. They sliced through him, one by one, and his heart felt like Swiss cheese, pumping in vain to fuel him with blood now tainted with chills. Hate? He thought, hands dropping to his sides. This time it was his hands that curled into fists, and his jaw that clenched. She hated him?

He had had no walls up against her when she had spoken, but he felt them reinstating themselves now. Defensively, he offered, “I beg your pardon, I consider myself a freedom fighter. A misunderstood one.”

Mei was having none of it, though, and was already walking past him before he could finish his statement. He turned to watch her go, saw the way she brought her hands up at last to rub at her chilled biceps. She ducked through the doorway, still barely holding on with the crater his Rip-Tire had created just to the left of it. Winston cleared his throat, quietly, and when Jamison glanced back at him there was nothing Winston showed but disappointment.

“There will be consequences for this,” he said quietly. “I told you that from the very beginning. What you have done here…You will have to answer for it, Junkrat.”

He didn’t say anything else, or reach out like he usually would have to rest his big hand on Jamison’s shoulder, a comfort and a relief. It probably wouldn’t have felt like either, anyways. Jamison still felt indescribably cold, though. He didn’t watch Winston leave, turned instead to Mako with a bitter grin sliding over his face.

“And they said I’d never amount to anything,” he said, feeling nothing but the steady racing of his restless heart, a useless block of tissue weighing down his chest.

Mako didn’t say anything at all.

✧

The consequences came to Jamison and Mako (by proxy) the morning after the incident, and they came in the form of a jail sentence.

Well, he didn’t actually have to go to jail, but he was now forbidden to leave the facility until the scientists had everything they needed from him in order to be assured they could revive the Outback. He wasn’t always a fool. He knew that the only reason they really wanted to revive the area was so that they could reinstate Watchpoint: Outback, and have another station for more work and more military dominance. That’s never how it started, but always how it ended. He might be young, but he’d been around enough to know that much.

Along with his instated orders of lockdown, he was also in charge of repairing all of the damages that he had caused, by himself. The council of lead scientists at Watchpoint: Antarctica had agreed unanimously that he had enough skill to do so aptly. They had his dossier on file, of course, so it wasn’t difficult to see how they knew that in the first place. They might have even seen the repairs he’d don’t to Mei’s wall, but he wasn’t about to think about that.

Mako was somehow excluded from the demands, seeing as he had caused none of the damage himself.

“I didn’t see you doing anythin’ to stop it, though,” Jamison grumbled under his breath, reaching back to scratch at an itch on his tailbone with the wrench in his hands. He’d been avoided quite widely by all of the scientists that just the day before had been comfortable enough to pat him on the back or reach out to the flames on the tips of his hair and inquire how they didn’t burn him up entirely. Now, they walked around him like he had the plague. They didn’t look at him unless they thought he wasn’t looking back, and he didn’t really care.

This wasn’t the first time that he had been treated like a pariah, and it wasn’t going to be the last. The people who had brought him in to this world had treated him with less care. This, he thought, was nothing.

Except for a certain someone. She was definitely not nothing, and she was taking avoiding him to a whole new level. He had expected some avoidance, sure. She wouldn’t talk to him, definitely. Maybe she wouldn’t look at him. Ignoring him seemed like the most obvious reaction, and as such, it was what he expected.

And well, it was what he got, but in a way that really grinded his gears. If he walked into a room and she was there, she would immediately vacate. If he saw her in the hallway, she would find a reason to deviate into an adjacent room until he was long, long gone. In the few times when he forced himself to try to track her down with questions no one but Mei had answers to—and every scientist he asked directed him pointedly, and snootily, in her direction—she would deliberately evade him. Obviously so.

Case in point: he had been asking Winston about the piping they use inside the walls and how they maintain them in such damned low temperatures without suffering backups and explosions from freezing. It was something Mei had explained to him when he’d been working on her wall, but he’d been a little distracted by the gleam of her lips and the way she’d rested all of her weight on one sensuously curved hip to really pay attention.

Winston hadn’t had much in the way of explanations for him, and there was a certain look about him that had had Jamison thinking that he was deliberately withholding information. When he finally told Jamison that the only person who would really have answers for him about this particular topic was in fact Mei, Jamison was certain he was deliberately hiding answers from him. Manipulation was never fun.

Jamison still went to several other scientists first, because how the hell could only one person understand how to make the pipes inside the walls resistant to freezing over? It was just plain ridiculous! And yet, every person he asked eventually offered him the same answer:

“You should really check with Dr. Zhou. This is her specialty, after all.”

Jamison was already turning away from the scientists, throwing his hands up in the air, Mako pacing him in his shadow. Winston was standing at the doorway with a clipboard in his hands, a pen tucked in the fluff of fur behind his ear. He adjusted his glasses as Jamison approached, and with a sly gleam in his eyes he said, “If you want to finish those repairs any time this century, Junkrat, you’re going to have to put your pride aside and ask Mei.”

Jamison passed by Winston and through the doorway, only managing to bite off, “Outta my face, ya drongo!”

He put his damned pride aside and stomped his way through the facility for half an hour looking for her, until he was starting to drag his damned peg leg against the tile. Mako was still shadowing him, as always, a familiar looming presence over his shoulder until he, too, grew tired of the chase. He voiced the obvious.

“She’s not in any of her known spots.”

“Not-a-one,” Jamison snarled, lifting his mechanical hand to stroke at his chin and jaw. He tried to think of where she could be, even going so far as to squint his eyes shut as tightly as possible. He heard Mako sigh over his shoulder, and then heard his retreating footsteps. When Jamison opened his eyes again and watched him walk down the hallway, Mako gestured in the direction of the breakroom. Jamison only nodded, understanding that Mako was tired of walking around for no good reason and was going to nap in the central unit of the facility. That way, he’d be able to reach Jamison in just about the same amount of time regardless of where he ended up being.

Smart, because Jamison really had no damn clue where he should be looking. She hadn’t been in the ice room,  his obvious first choice and check. She hadn’t been in any of the other twenty or so places he’d checked—he’d even checked the flamer room, in case she was trying to deliberately throw him off her scent. Which she still was, but even more smartly than he’d imagined.

He knew that she had started using alternate routes to avoid him; choosing further walks and even paths that involved climbs just so that she wouldn’t have to see him.

It drove him nuts. Half an hour turned into an hour and then bordered on two, and by the time he ran into the barrier specialist, he was about to explode.

“G’day,” he said cheerily, pretending as though he wasn’t a few clicks away from destroying another wall or two. Where was his Rip-Tire?

“Hello.” She paused upon seeing him, shifting to push a long stream of black hair back over her shoulder. She crossed her arms daintily over her chest, observing him with startlingly shrewd eyes. Jamison considered for a moment just continuing on his search, but it was no secret that Symmetra and Mei were close. It was also not a secret that the two women were tremendously protective of one another, though Symmetra far more…scarily so. After shifting under her sharp stare and unsmiling expression, Jamison weighed the pros and cons for a hot second.

Begrudgingly, he asked, “Haven’t happened to see the little ice doc, have ya?”

She blinked slowly, deliberately. The silence built between them for a long, uncomfortable moment, and Jamison couldn’t help but to shift his weight again. Not nervously, but uncomfortably. Symmetra had a very striking presence.

Finally, she spoke. “Little ice doc?” She asked, even though Jamison knew that she knew exactly who he was referring to. He pushed on, though, and didn’t let his hearty smile wane.

He swallowed and said, “Mei.”

He hadn’t said her name out loud for weeks, constantly hearing it around the facility, constantly thinking it. But saying it felt different, was different, and Jamison fisted his hands. Symmetra shifted her weight, tilting her head again, every one of her movements graceful and elegant. Even when she spoke acerbically.

“I wonder,” she said, “if Mei would actually desire to entertain your presence at this time.”

Jamison’s right eye twitched.

“I’ve a question ‘bout the maintenance I’m doin’,” he explained vaguely, hoping she’d be lenient with him if he emphasized the restructuring of the facility. Symmetra’s next expression was one of amused pity, so Jamison knew that he’d failed pretty spectacularly. And that Symmetra was a lot scarier than he’d originally thought.

“Of course,” she spoke loftily, “You are repairing the damages you caused.”

Jamison didn’t think that warranted an answer, really, but when the silence dragged on between them he knew she was going to draw one from him anyways.

“Ya.”

“You use a…tire, as your main explosive.” It was a question, posed as a statement. Jamison responded to it easily.

“Sure do.”

“You certainly do not lack for imagination,” she offered blandly, her eyes dropping to give him a critical once over. She didn’t look impressed. Jamison didn’t actually care, but he was certain now that if he was going to find Mei, he would find her through Symmetra. Her games weren’t usually this long—she was toying with him. That meant that she had a reason to do so, right?

“Ta,” he offered blandly, reaching up to run one hand through his already messy hair. “So, how ‘bout it? You know where I can find her?”

“This facility,” she said instead, glancing at the stark metallic fixtures around them, the plain white walls. “It is to my liking. Mei enjoys it here as well.”

“Too stark, too clean, but ‘course she does,” he said immediately, folding his arms over his chest as he quickly began to lose interest in her game. He tapped his peg on the floor pointedly, chewing on his lips. Symmetra didn’t exactly laugh at him, but it was there in her eyes. He chewed on his lips with a little more force, until he tasted blood.

“I am certain that the Vishkar Corporation would love to have a presence here…though, the elements are not always agreeable. Today, however, the weather is exquisite.”

Jamison sighed, preparing to offer nothing more than a wave in farewell as he moved around her and continued on his hunt for the obstinate little ice scientist he’d been searching for all day. But then Symmetra straightened, a blank kind of innocence falling over her expression.

“I know that on days such as this, Mei enjoys some time on the east shore. That is quite far from here. Luckily for her, I have a very particular talent with transportation.”

Jamison blinked, and Symmetra’s smile curled mischievously across her face.

“Well,” she corrected herself, gracefully rotating her hand until a portal zapped into appearance at her side. “Teleportation, certainly.”

Jamison eyed the portal blandly for a moment, before realization hit him like a train. His eyes widened, and his posture straightened nearly perfectly as excitement curled through him.

“This’ll lead to her?” He asked, just to be certain, and Symmetra nodded definitively. He prepared his posture into a jaunty crouch, prepared to leap through the portal in just the same way he’d leap off of a building or into a swimming pool.

Symmetra held a hand up in pause, only for a moment, and approached him. He listened to the subtle clicks of her heels against the tiled floor, and adrenaline began to course through him. She put one hand on his bare shoulder, the weight of it lighter than a butterfly’s wings, and her smile was a weapon she purposefully skimmed him with.

“Mei has only just restored order in her life. If you disrupt it in a way that is not agreeable to her, I will come for you.” Her smile grew, her eyes slipping shut in a mask of kindness, just barely overlying her inherent lethality. “And I will put you in your place.”

She took a single step back, then, and gestured to the teleportation portal. Jamison swallowed, saluting her, and leapt through without another thought. It was strange, though, how he could still feel Symmetra’s shrewd glare right between his shoulder blades as he transported himself through space and time.

He shivered the moment he landed on the other side, both from the frigid weather blowing tendrils of frost against his skin and the waning sensation of having barely come out of that last exchange with his limbs intact.

He rubbed at his biceps, shivering and turning around on the spot. His peg leg slipped a little on the frozen tundra, but he paid it no mind. It wasn’t snowing and the sun was peering through the clouds overhead, and it was easy to hear the thawed ocean over the sounds of the wind. He followed it to the best of his ability, muttering and chattering under his breath all the while, until he skimmed down a brief ledge and hobbled close enough to see a distant figure on the shore.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he realized that this particular location was in fact not quickly accessible to Mako, or really, reachable at all. Unless he found Symmetra and convinced her to open a portal for him, which, Jamison thought, was a highly unlikely outcome.

Jamison didn’t care to pay this any further thought, though, and later he would wonder at the hierarchy of his needs in that moment; how amending his relationship with Mei somehow, if even briefly, outranked the protection of his greatest treasure.

His prosthetic sunk into the slush of ice the closer he got to her, until he was debating hopping solely on his right foot instead of sinking through the snow. He attempted it once, and promptly fell into the snow. He leapt out of it with a screech, a grenade already in his hand, ready to toss it at the offending ice. He heard movement to his left, though, and froze. Not literally this time.

He turned and there was Mei, looking at him over her shoulder with worried reluctance. He could see slivers of skin, even now, outside in the cold, and worry leeched through him. Her eyes dropped to the grenade in his hand and he cursed under his breath, before casually tucking the grenade away, as though he had not just been about to set off more explosions with Mei on the same field. Her eyes dropped to his legs, studying his prosthetic for a long moment, before she seemed to make the decision to approach him. It was a mature decision, he thought with open relief, and he wasn’t sure that if had he been in her position he would’ve extended himself the same courtesy. He probably would’ve made himself walk and sink out there all the way to him. He definitely would’ve.

“G’day,” he called, as she hesitantly approached him. She stopped a few feet from him, only long enough to gesture further away from the shore, where it was less soggy and more stable. He cast her a grateful look and hobbled his way after her, thinking for once that he wished he knew what he was going to say before saying anything at all. Sure, he’d had weeks to think about it, and sure, she’d been on his mind practically the entire time, but this was different. Being in front of her with nothing to break their focus meant that he was in a vulnerable position.

Speaking of vulnerability, he thought while looking pointedly at her t-shirt and jeans. Where were her protective layers? If ever there was a time for her to slip out of them, and he could name quite a few, outside in the windy tundra was not one of them. It wasn’t even close to one of them.

He shivered theatrically, rubbing at his biceps and eyeing the chills along her arms, running up to the exposed line of her throat. “Brrr. I get cold just looking at ya.”

Mei studied him with the most interesting of expressions, a mixed blend of temperance and uncertainty. And then, with genuine curiosity and something a little sharper, a little more ambiguous, she said: “Then you should look somewhere else.”

Jamison felt himself still, if only for a moment, and all he could think was I know.

He should; all signs pointed to leave this woman alone! He could hurt her—had already hurt her, really—but it could have been worse, too. He could’ve burned her. He could’ve left a mark, a scar—his own felt hypersensitive at the thought, reminders of the past, of pain and of what he deserved. Then and now. He did not deserve her, as a friend or anything more, and he should look somewhere else.

Honesty had always been his default, easy and true.

He could have made excuses or offered platitudes like someone with manners might have. Instead, he said something true.

“Can’t, though.”

He watched the way her eyebrows pushed together, that confusion so apparent over her expression. It amazed him that she hadn’t realized it earlier, how attuned to her he was. How interesting he found her. She genuinely did not understand what he felt for her, and he didn’t blame her for that—he still only just barely understood it himself. But for her to be completely surprised that he wanted to be near to her, to keep looking…that was irritating.

“Don’t want to, either.”

Her eyes were watchful, studying his open expression. He didn’t hide his feelings, never did and never would. Not again. He wondered how she was interpreting them, if she could see them at all. She had her glasses on, he thought with humor he didn’t yet feel. There were nerves he hadn’t known existed in him, and he was waiting to see if her response could relieve the tension in them. He didn’t expect her to, but…it would be nice.

She offered a hesitant remark, her tone utterly neutral. “I don’t understand you.”

“In layman’s terms, little one,” he began, his smile pulling the corners of his lips high in humor. “You won’t get rid of me that easily!”

When she only blinked at him with raised eyebrows, surprise evident over her expression, he found himself laughing. He reached up to rub idly at the hairs over the nape of his neck, a careless gesture. His hair stood on end, in every which direction, and Mei watched the gesture with slowly widening eyes. Realization moved through her in gradual shifts, until her cheeks flushed ever-pink, twin pools of overturned sunsets. He wondered if she was remembering their kiss. He hoped she was.

She surprised him when she derailed from the path of his thoughts, saying, “I am not little, you know.”

Jamison quirked his head at her, blinking. He approached her without hesitation, then, even when she startled a step backwards. He hobbled to a stop only when she was within reach, and stood to his full height, without any signs of his infamous hunch. He was easily head and shoulders taller than her, so much so that he had to look down to meet her eyes. She blinked up at him, her mouth opening slightly in wonder.

Jamison watched the pigmentation in her cheeks deepen and couldn’t keep the smile from his face when he realized that she was embarrassed. What was she thinking? He was fairly certain he’d never stood up straight in front of her before, because he rarely ever stood up straight at all, so this must have been the first time. He was almost desperate to know her thoughts at that moment, if she thought his height was cool or if he only frightened her; a reaction he often elicited from women.

Although…the fear might have had less to do with his height and more to do with him being strapped so tightly with explosives he’d set off neighboring airport security terminals just by entering a city. Or maybe it was the giant spiked tire he usually had strapped to his back? He did speak a little loudly, without a filter. Now that he thought about it, there were any number of things that could’ve done the trick.

He allowed himself to relax back into his hunched posture and was still much taller than her, though far less imposing. He hoped.

“You’re little to me,” he laughed, eyes crinkling shut for only a moment.

“I’m short,” she said.

“Ya,” he replied easily, blinking down at her. He watched a shy smile curl over her lips, and his heart kicked out at his rib cage. “Little.”

She shook her head, stubborn for some reason outside of his understanding. She brought hands that trembled to her hips, pointedly touching them. “Jamison, I am big.”

“Ya,” he agreed, just as easily, with no tact. Mei’s eyes dropped from his immediately and this time he liked the flush that spread over her cheeks a lot less. It spoke of less embarrassment and more shame, and Jamison didn’t understand it. What had he said to upset her? “To me, you’re little, big, and beautiful. I don’t see the big deal with the labels, Mei.”

Mei’s quiet gasp drew his interest in, and he watched her blink rapidly, as though embarrassed again. If he was being honest, he was struggling to keep up with her. He hadn’t said anything untrue, only laid out the facts as he saw them, but she seemed startled in a way that almost irritated him.

“B-beautiful?” She stuttered, pushing the bridge of her glasses up along her nose.

“Ya,” he nodded, quirking his head at her. “You disagree?”

Mei stuttered again, shifting her weight and trying to tie several different sentences together into one. Even without clarity, Jamison understood that she didn’t easily agree, and that was enough for him to frown, eyebrows pushing together.

“Holy dooley, you really don’t think so, do ya?”

“Uh,” Mei floundered, then shook her head and waved her hands in front of her, as if to re-center herself. “That’s not what’s important—you’re getting me off-track!”

“Off-track?” He asked, his frown growing a little more sullen. “And hey! Even if one of us thinks it’s important, then it’s important, right? I think it’s important, Mei.”

Mei straightened, and he could see the way that she tried to reinstate her spine with steel. Suddenly and without any kind of gentle lead-in, she said, “What’s important here is that you blew up the work room!”

Jamison blinked at the abruptness of her remark, and couldn’t help his sarcasm. “Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do!”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Jumpin’ right into things,” he said approvingly, nodding his head and lifting his hand to beckon more from her. “C’mon, then. Let’s hear it, little doc.”

Mei shook with sudden frustration, her hands fisted at her sides and her shoulders raised by her ears protectively.

“You!” She started shakily, and Jamison watched her hunt for the words. He didn’t want platitudes or niceties—he wanted her honest and true, always.

So he encouraged her, tried to rile her up even more. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, I hate waiting.”

This, it seemed, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her words slipped from her in a long and steady stream, albeit shakily, as her voice trembled. It was apparent that while she was not comfortable with confrontation, she was equally unwilling to back down when she was confident about something. He admired her strength, and her perseverance in the fact.

“You detonated explosives when there were several innocent people nearby. You could have killed someone, Jamison. Someone innocent! And even though you didn’t, you hurt people! And you blew up so much scientific research, not only the data cultivated to help revive your home, but other data, too.”

Jamison reacted bodily to the mention of his home, as he always did, but he reined himself in. She wasn’t finished, and he owed her this before he tried to intervene. So he merely encouraged her.

“Now we’re cookin’ with gas! What else, Mei?”

“Oh my gosh!” She hissed, frustrated with his jovial nature in the face of her anger. “There was data lost in your flames that could have saved lives, or preserved them. And the ice you destroyed—it wasn’t just ice, Jamison, and you knew it. But you destroyed it anyways. Because you didn’t care if it was important, to me or to anyone else. I don’t know why you did it, and I keep telling myself that if you had known, you never would’ve touched it. But even now, I’m not certain. You’ve been a careless bully, Jamison, and your behavior was totally unacceptable. And if you think the punishment you got is bad, think again! Of course you should fix what you broke. Serves you right.”

She was breathing heavily, all caught up in her own eruption, and Jamison knew his eyes were wide and bright, watching her. She swallowed, and he waited for whatever else she might have to offer. The silence between them grew, though, and he decided that he had waited long enough before finally responding.

“You’re on fire!” He giggled, smiling with teeth. He was nearly hopping from foot to peg, so pleased that he’d managed to get her pristine calm to crack. Her honesty was breathtaking, even if it wounded him, and he soaked it all in, went so far as to see if she had any more to give. “You got anythin’ else for me?”

Mei pursed her lips, frustrated. “Sorry. No.”

Jamison nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. He heaved a giant breath, let it all the way out before speaking.

“You’re right, o’ course. I lost my temper. I fucked up. I had a lot on my mind—shocking! I know! But I really did. Do. Still do. You’re one hard thought to move on from, Mei, I’ll tell you that.” He tried to wrangle the words together, to make enough sense so that Mei could understand he hadn’t just lost it for no good reason. And even then, that he understood it still wasn’t okay. Even if he had a reason.

But it was never his style to just say it all simply like that, in one go. He missed entirely the way she tensed at his mention of her in his thoughts, and continued on just as recklessly as he always did.

“What I’m tryin’ to say is I’m sorry. That it won’t happen again. The explosions in the facility part, at least.” He paused, a new thought coming to him and bringing out a new peal of laughter. “Next time I feel like blowin’ something up, I’ll just take myself outside! Like an animal, except the monkey gets to stay inside.”

It was enough to get a weak smile out of Mei, whose shoulders had come back down to rest at their normal level.

“Hey,” she protested weakly, “Don’t talk about Winston like that. He’s a kind man.”

Her defenses, he thought, were slowly dissipating. She wasn’t as on guard, and she was breathing regularly now. His watchful eyes glanced over her, and he sort of missed the panting, actually, and the wonderful movements it brought out from her ample chest.

“I’m glad that you’re being reasonable,” she continued, tilting her head a little at him. The movement almost seemed fond. “And I’m sorry for…unloading all of that on you like that. But I had a lot on my mind, too.”

Jamison nodded, excessively so, in understanding.

“Makes me wonder if what was on my mind was on yours, too, little doc.”

The way Mei abruptly avoided his eyes was startling, and exhilarating. It made Jamison think that he wasn’t wrong, and that? That was something. He wanted to needle her about it, to ask and push and get that breathtaking honesty back out from under the embarrassment it hid under, and yet. He let it go, because he had a pressing question that hadn’t left him since her ranting, and it itched to be spoken.

“You know,” he started easily, unconsciously shifting a little closer to her. “I’ve been wonderin’ about that ice.”

Mei’s expression became more structured immediately, seriousness falling over her shoulders even as her eyes became heavy, fond.

“You want to know why it was so special.”

“Ya.”

“You know how Winston and I, all of us here, keep telling you that Antarctic ice like that is nearly alive?”

Jamison hummed, rubbing at his biceps to ward off the bitter chill. The wind was still as present as ever, toying with the ends of his hair and hers, making messes of them both. Mei was stunning outside of her layers, distracting and curvaceous and so, so beautiful. If he hadn’t had such a pressing curiosity over that damn ice, he probably would’ve attempted to forgo any lines of questioning altogether in favor of pursuing far more pleasurable ventures. He hadn’t a clue how he would even initiate something like that with her, especially after being the first person to actually really light her ridiculously long fuse. But damned if he wasn’t willing to try.

“Well, the semi-sentience of it didn’t come from nowhere. That ice that you destroyed—“

Jamison didn’t flinch away from the truth of the matter, and Mei didn’t say it with criticism. She still spoke of it fondly, almost reminiscent, and it wasn’t until after her explanation that Jamison understood why.

“—it came from a polar storm. The very same one that was responsible for destroying this facility back when it was a massive station for innovation. Overwatch allotted us cutting-edge technology, minds, and pursuits that began, continued and, for many, ended here. This was a hub of countless climate manipulation studies, and a single storm was enough to knock it off the grid. It annihilated Watchpoint: Antarctica structurally, and cut communications with the outside world off completely. The scientists at the time were left stranded, and eventually, when their supplies dwindled, they initiated the only action that was left to them. They went into cryostasis as their last-ditch effort to survive.”

Mei’s eyebrows knitted together, her entire expression tensing as she focused on the story. It was the kind of expression he’d seen on many scientist’s faces as they puzzled over unsolvable problems, mathematical and otherwise. Frustration and curiosity, in equal parts.

Mei continued after a moment of contemplation.

“However, something happened with the stasis pods. Somehow the storm must have gotten into their interfaces, mingled with the code. It wasn’t a normal storm. It was horrifying. By the time the pods and scientists were discovered, the storm had left, and gone with it were the lives of so, so many.”

Silence fell over them, and even Jamison, for all of his limits in courtesy, understood that it was not the right time to say anything at all. He shifted weight from foot to peg, peg to foot, and pretended that he most definitely didn’t need more clothing. He was fine.

Mei, however, was not. She was shaken, quite noticeably, and she was shaking, too. It was surprisingly surprising to Jamison that she could even get cold, even if she was always wearing those fluffy layers. She seemed to belong with the cold, so comfortable in the snow, so confident with shards of ice in her hands. But still she shivered, and goosebumps rose over her skin. Had she not looked so vulnerable, he would have pulled her into his arms and tried to warm her, gruff in his explanation.

But she looked like a single touch might shatter her, stoic as an ice sculpture, and so he kept his hands to himself.

But he did not look away.

“The world was a different place after that. Those scientists, their cutting-edge discoveries, they were all too late. Redundant. Overwatch had disbanded, or something, I’m not sure. But it was no more. And the climate issues that had been the basis of all that research? They had exacerbated. They were so, so much worse. There were other storms, too, at other Watchpoints. They destroyed the entire eco-network. All of that data…lost.”

Mei shifted, glancing up at him for the first time in a long while, her eyes wide and innocent with sudden joy. It was something like hope that he saw there, that had him swallowing down the knot in his throat.

“Well,” she said with hidden joy, “Not all of the data.”

And then she leaned down and dragged her cupped hand through the powder at their feet, lifting it up between them. “Look,” she whispered, and Jamison watched as the wind blew over the snow and transformed it into a single bladed shard, perched delicately in Mei’s palm.

“The ice,” she gushed, “It’s special, Jamison. The ice we kept in the work room was the ice we were able to culminate from the stasis pods the scientists were in. It wasn’t a shared thought amongst everyone here, but I liked to think that the souls of those scientists stayed back. That they remained here, in the ice. That’s why it never melted. Why it never harmed.”

Jamison realized, in that moment, that he was the epitome of a drongo. The biggest, most idiotic fool in the entire world. He had blown up a host of souls that Mei cared deeply for. And he still expected her to want to see him? To share a living space with him? To maybe, hopefully, be open to the idea of him getting closer to her? Ridiculous.

“Holy fuck,” he whispered, as Mei caught his gaze with open wonder. “I blew up your beloved icy soul pile.”

And then, just like that, she laughed. Really laughed, even as Jamison was still midway through his downward spiral of realization and understanding that he had blown up her beloved pile of icy souls.

He didn’t even know if this was something he could patch up and make better—it was too heavy. But there was Mei, laughing and with tears in her eyes. She wiped at them with shaking fingers, and when she settled enough to glance back up at him her expression gentled, her gaze nearly doting.

“You did,” she admitted, not without kindness. “But maybe you set them free.”

“Uh,” he replied, in perfect eloquence. He highly, highly doubted that. But also, he wasn’t about to say that.

“Well,” Mei cleared her throat, brushing away at the last vestiges of her tears. “Seeing as you apologized, and I believe it to have been heartfelt and true—“

“It was totally true! I’m the patron saint of apology!”

Mei shot him a silencing look, though there wasn’t much real heat to it. Mostly, there was amusement, and Jamison could really get used to that.

“I’m happy that we can move on.”

“You’re not mad?” He asked hopefully, rising onto his tiptoes.

“I’m not mad,” she said lightly, smiling loftily as he deflated with blatant relief. “I just hope you learned your lesson.”

“I learned a lesson,” Jamison mimicked, swallowing heavily when her eyes turned sharp. She crossed her arms over her chest and rested her weight on one generously curved hip, tapping one of her feet expectantly. Jamison hurried to promise her, “I learned a lesson! I definitely learned a lesson. Blow things up first and ask questions later but make sure to blow them up outside,” he watched her eyebrows knit together, her lips pursing in disapproval, and he hurried on again to add, “where no innocents are,” and at her forgiving, amused smile he allowed himself to take that deep breath that he’d been unconsciously holding.

“That’ll do, I suppose.” She said, rubbing slowly at the bare skin of her arms. “You just need to chill out a bit.”

“Chill?” He asked, tasting the word and responding to it like it was poison on his tongue. His theatrical expression had her laughing again, quieter and more close to her chest this time, and Jamison realized all at once that he was in trouble. Not in the way he had expected to be, upon approaching her. Not the way he knew he had been, all these weeks after the incident. But in a new way.

An exciting way, that promised challenges he was looking forward to facing.

He gazed at her with reckless abandon, unafraid to stare even when she glanced away out of embarrassment. What had she told him? That he should look somewhere else?

Impossible.

Just then, a quiet static began to emit several paces over his shoulder. He turned and already had a grenade in hand, held over his shoulder with the fuse lit and timer ticking down. He heard Mei sigh over his shoulder, and understood why when he saw the source of the static in the shape of a portal opening before them. He laughed awkwardly, shoulders shaking with the movement.

He brought the grenade in front of him and shook it, before pretending to listen to it. “What’s wrong with this thing?” He asked no one in particular, though he made his voice loud enough that Mei could clearly hear him. “Piece of junk!”

He turned and threw the lit grenade with all of his robotic might, and watched it sail over a nearby gorge just in time for the explosion to set the sky on fire for the briefest of moments. He rubbed his palms together pragmatically, turning back to Mei and resting his weight back on one hip as he buffed his knuckles against his collarbone.

“Pesky things, those,” he said casually, whistling a little. “Minds of their own, really!”

“Uh-huh,” Mei’s smile said she didn’t believe a word he said, and his heart trembled under that expression with open admiration. He appreciated her acceptance of his humor, so much so that he found himself simply staring fondly down at her, admiring the gentleness of her content expression. She watched him for brief moments, too, periodically glancing away out of some kind of discomfiture. He was looking forward to seeing the various reactions he could get from her, the more he looked, the closer he got.

“Tick tock, tick tock, little doc,” he whispered, voice lower than he’d actually intended for it to be. He gestured for her to precede him into the portal, his smile a tamed thing in the light of her easy happiness. “Time to head on back.”

Mei’s calm smile brightened her entire expression and made her even more beautiful in his eyes. Jamison watched her as she walked past him, and turned to watch her step through the portal.

It was easy for Jamison to admit that he wasn’t mad at the view from behind.

And it was equally easy to admit, if only to himself for now, that he was looking forward to a future with Mei in his sights.

[itsworn]

Joe Rogan’s 1969 Nova Shows How a Third Generation Nova Could Have Looked

I’ll just say it: In stock guise, the Chevrolet Nova never did it for me. They were nice-looking in a box turtle sort of way, but in my opinion, there were plenty more stylish options on the market to choose from. Maybe it’s because as a kid growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, Novas were everywhere. Back then, they weren’t cool or overly muscular. Instead, they were basic transportation that you’d see dented and parked on the street with rusty rockers and holes in the quarter-panels. Sure, every now and then a side-piped and shackled fat-tire Nova SS would roll by, but for the most part, we never gave them a second look.

As time goes by, tastes change, as do industry trends and the visionaries who set them. This 1969 Chevrolet Nova belongs to MMA fighter, comedian, podcaster, and all-around automobile enthusiast Joe Rogan. It was penned by Pure Vision of Simi Valley, California, and is a perfect example of what happens when out-of-the-box thinking comes together with modern engineering and intelligent design.

According to Pure Vision founder Steve Strope, Joe had a list of six or seven muscle cars he wanted to build—a Nova being one of them. For Steve, the idea of building a Nova wasn’t new; in fact, back in 2007, Pure Vision unveiled a certain Z/28 Nova, a vehicle that asked the question, “What if Chevrolet offered the Z/28 option package on the Nova, as well as the Camaro?”

That car was Hugger Orange with white stripes, and when it debuted, it shook up the custom world and even rattled a few cages. Utilizing this car as a barometer, and after arranging for Joe to view it in person, the decision was made that a Nova would be the focus of the build, as well as the newest addition to Joe’s collection.

This time, however, the inspiration for the Nova would not come from a factory option package, but instead, from a custom 1980s Porsche that was known as the King Of The Mountain 911 RSR. Its sole purpose? To be the fastest thing on SoCal’s famed Mulholland Drive. Complete with a chopped roof, modified suspension, and a built engine, it was designed to be the fastest thing on tarmac, not the racetrack. With that car in mind, work began and Joe’s Nova started to take shape.

General Motors got involved with a new supercharged LT4 crate engine along with a six-speed manual transmission. The engine should make upward of 640 bhp, and with that new manual gearbox, the Nova will be a riot to drive when complete.

Joe was very specific on wanting an independent rear suspension, so for that, Steve turned to Art Morrison Enterprises of Eugene, Oregon. Front and rear subframes were sourced with the rear containing a multi-link IRS with a Strange S60 case and a 3.54 gearset. The package is good for more than 1,000 hp and uses stout mono-tube shocks with C6 Corvette ZR1 hubs at all four corners. After the original chassis and floorpans were modified, the subframes were welded in permanently, allowing for everything to be tucked neatly underneath and, thus, give the Nova an impressive 7.5 inches of ground clearance. A 2×4-inch rail was then inserted and welded at a distance of 2 inches inboard from the rocker panel, with its purpose being to aid in overall stiffness and additional side-impact protection.

Steve then turned his attention to the interior, and working with Eric Brockmeyer Designs, came up with an intriguing idea. During his research, he came across a dash insert that was used by famed hot rodder Don Yenko in his Corvair Stinger. It was based on the one found in the 1966 Corvair Corsa and served as a great starting point. After obtaining and massaging one accordingly (that means a lot of metal fabrication), he was able to fuse it with the first 6 inches of the original Nova dash extending from the base of the windshield. As the Corvair is narrower than the Nova, the dash also had to be widened 2 inches and required additional metalwork to accommodate a custom steering column from Flaming River. The SpeedHut gauges employ green backlighting, combined with a 1960s-era GM font.

Four custom HVAC vents mimic the look of original GM Astro vents and were fitted at the outer and inner portions of the dash. Above the vents lives the Vintage Air control panel that will be further modified (remember, this car isn’t done yet). The goal is to change the face and incorporate a black sheet with green ambient lighting, along with a clear piece of Lexan over its top to keep the look and feel based in the 1960s.

From the vent control, your eyes are drawn to a large rectangular door with the word Bellanova (“Beautiful Nova”) in billet script. A small tab allows one to slide that door down, revealing a double DIN-sized flat screen. Steve’s reasoning was that he didn’t want a modern piece of tech ruining the overall vibe, so he needed a way to keep it hidden. Door panels and modified Corbeau seats were added, per Steve and Eric’s design. The stock Nova window cranks and door handles were then gifted to the trash and replaced with those found on a 1964 Chevelle/Oldsmobile to further enhance the cabin.

With the basics in place, Steve had Joe visit his shop to plant his ass in a mildly secured seat. With the column still loose, his crew custom-fit every aspect of Joe’s driving position so he fit perfectly in the cabin. We’re talking about final seat and pedal fitment, shifter position, armrests, and so on—custom-tailored to the client. “How can you make someone spend a massive amount of money and the guy can’t even fit in his own car?” he asks with a growl.

We can’t help but agree.

For wheels, Joe wanted something tough yet simple, and these HRE CL305 beauties fit the bill perfectly. Done up with a polished hoop and brushed titanium centers in sizes 18×9.5 and 19×12.5, they give the Nova a canyon-carving, street-fighter look. Thanks to a mild mini-tub, they also allow for the running of massive 355-series Pirelli P-Zero tires out back. An oversized brake kit from Baer with six-piston calipers takes care of the stopping duties.

Believe it or not, the chassis and dash were actually conceived before the body. Now remember when I said that the original concept had been part custom 911 and part Z/28-inspired Nova? Well, that’s where it stopped. Steve began to have concerns about the widebody concept he had been visualizing. He thought that by the time the Nova was fully built, the fender-flare trend would be over. He went back to the drawing board and came up with new body lines that transform the car into something that look so much better than anything that ever left the factory.

If you have a hard time visualizing where those new contours come from, think 1969 Camaro and try to keep your head from exploding. At first, Steve was going to utilize a wheel arch similar to that of the Camaro, but he then looked at those glorious spears that run over the wheels and down the quarters, and thought, “Yep, that’s the way to go.”

The lines of a 1969 Camaro are a stunning piece of design that give the car a sense of motion while it’s standing still, and Steve wanted to capture that vibe. Once the design was mocked up in bare sheetmetal, Steve and his team realized it was cooler than they’d ever dreamed possible.

Steve also noted that balancing out how high the wheelwells were going to sit in regards to the fender spears took quite a bit of time because, in actuality, they created an entirely new body line. Another issue was that stock Camaro fenders come out to a peak at the wheelwell and then dive back in, whereas the Nova panels lay flat. The Camaro panels are so different, in fact, that the Nova gained an additional 3 inches in width without Steve and his team having to stretch or flare anything. The result turned out to be a beautifully reimagined Nova that now has a stunning Coke-bottle shape when viewed from the rear.

Two spoilers from a split-bumper Camaro were cut and widened to fit the rear haunches of the Nova. A modified cowl hood and the door handles from a 1969 Camaro were thrown into the mix as well. It’s insane to think about the amount of research, testing, and fabrication that have gone into this car to make it look like it came this way from the factory. As it stands, Steve reckons there are at least 1,000 hours of metalwork into the Nova as you see it here, and it was all done by hand by Joey Angelo, who shares shop space with Mick Jenkins, the guy who will eventually paint the car.

Knowing when to pull back in regards to design is also a must, according to Steve. “As modified as that car is, it’s also an example in restraint. There were a lot of people who would say, ‘Oh, you should also put Camaro bumpers on it.’”

Steve pauses for a moment, pondering the idea with a look of distaste.

“No! I wanted it to be a Nova, and those big bumpers are part of the Nova. If you put thin bumpers and expose a roll pan in the back, now it’s a Camaro Nova. And even though some may say that about the sides, it’s simply not. Instead, it’s just a better-looking Nova,” he explains.

Anyone who has ever spoken to Steve can attest he’s a passionate man. Although he can seem a bit eccentric and boisterous at times, he’s also one of the most committed builders I’ve ever had the privilege of spending time with. As this is written, Joe’s Nova isn’t set to debut in a finished state until mid-2019. When complete, it’ll be coated in Lexus Atomic Silver paint, still have a black interior (with some hidden surprises), and the underside will have a treatment that, according to Steve, “will look absolutely striking.”

To this, we have no doubt, except to say that now, after getting a little taste of what’s to come, Joe Rogan’s 1969 Chevrolet Nova will be one of our most anticipated builds of 2019.

Links: Eric Brockmeyer Designs http://www.brockmeyerdesign.com/ Pure Vision https://www.purevisiondesign.com/ Joe Rogan Website https://www.joerogan.com/ Art Morrison Enterprises http://metalworksclassics.com/art-morrison/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIp4mM-86L3wIVhdlkCh1hew98EAAYASAAEgLoyvD_BwE

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