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j-eryewrites · 1 year ago

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The Dancing Men (Final)

Part 18 of The Arbitrary Lives of the Occupants of 221B Baker Street

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Word Count: 6.7k

Warnings: Guns, violence, descriptions of violence and crime scenes, gore, canon typical violence and shenanigans, Sherlock is Sherlock, crime, breaking and entering, mentions of stalking and yandere themes.

Author's Note: Finally, it's out. Yay! I really hope you enjoy it! Also thank you so much for your patience with me!!

Good News and Bad News. That’s how it always seemed to go in Sherlock’s line of work. Good news: Sherlock had cracked the code; This finely crafted lingo of dancing men turned into words and cohesive phrases. Now that the code had been broken, the case was soon close to an end. Bad News: The last phrase of code was an ominous one. The contorted drawings spoke of one thing and one thing only, death. Hilton Cubitt was going to die. The man behind the code was going to kill Cubitt.

Now once bad news came Sherlock’s way, more bad news tended to follow. The first wave of bad news came in the form of Sherlock's lack of car keys. John had them in his possession and John was asleep in another room with the door locked. As a consequence of the late hour, Hilton was not answering his phone. That was the second wave of bad news. Now came the third wave. This bad news took form in the shape of ignorant police men.

“No! You aren’t listening. My name is Sherlock Holmes. I’m a consulting detective, and my client is going to be killed. Hilton Cubitt. That’s his name. Lives on–” Sherlock barked. His voice thundered about the shared room. His feet walked him back and forth about the room adding to the noise that jolted Y/N awake.

“Sherlock?” Y/N hoarsely said as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

Sherlock barely glanced Y/N’s way. His frustration with the oblivious, obtuse, bird-brained officer over the phone. A man’s life was at stake and as a fallout so were the lives of a mother and child.

“You’re awake. Get John!” Sherlock told Y/N before turning back to the phone. “A man and his family are in danger. Someone will die and worse may happen if you do not listen to me!” Sherlock reprimanded the officer over the phone.

Worry began to overcome the weariness in Y/N body. Why did she need to get John? Hilton was in trouble? His family? “Sherlock?” Y/N said with concern.

Again, Sherlock paid Y/N no mind, all of his efforts were going into convincing the officer to send someone out to the Cubitt home.

Sitting up from the bed, Y/N approached Sherlock’s disoriented figure. His intellect fighting with idiocy, for the sole purpose of pride and correctness was one thing, but with the cost of a man’s and quite possibly his family's life on the line in the battle of intellect was another thing.

Carefully, Y/N placed a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. It was only a hand, but it lent the man a beacon of light to ground himself to. Sherlock’s chaotic pace stilled as some peace crept into his mind. He wasn’t alone.

Tension filled the air as Sherlock’s jaw tightened and Y/N’s grip on Sherlock’s shoulder tightened. Sherlock turned his head away from the phone to glance over at her. “John,” Sherlock harshly whispered. Y/N tilted her head in confusion. “John has the keys!” Y/N’s eyes widened as she understood what Sherlock was asking her.

Immediately, Y/N withdrew her hand from Sherlock’s side and ran out of the room to bang on John’s door. Like the beating of a drum, Y/N pounded on the door over and over again until the door creaked open, and a groggy John came up to the door.

She didn’t give John the chance to say anything before she dragged him back to her and Sherlock’s room with a look of panic on her face. Once the door was shut, John was now privy to the conversation. It did not take long for John’s face to mirror the concern and horror on Y/N’s face.

Words were said. Seconds passed, yet they felt like years, as Sherlock crushed his fingers around the phone. The officer had hung up, but not before telling him he was a wanker who had a few too many drinks at the pub.

It was silent. John’s eyes were wide as the dumbfounded expression grew on his face. Y/N brows clenched together in a worried expression as she watched Sherlock. He was as still as the surface of a lake in the early morning with not a ripple in sight. His mouth was close, his eyes neutral as he stared at the distance. The only sign of life in Sherlock was the whitening skin of his hand as his grip constricted his phone more and more.

“He’s dead,” Sherlock whispered.

John and Y/N shared a distressed look with each other. Yes, a man would now be dead. His family was put in danger, but what scared John and Y/N the most was their friend. He looked broken. Defeated. Sherlock had lost clients before, but never like this–never in a battle with ignorance.

Y/N gave a comforting squeeze to Sherlock’s shoulder. He wasn’t alone, yet Sherlock couldn’t help but feel trapped in the empty halls of his mind.

_____

The car ride up to the Cubitt household was a solemn one. Everything seemed paralyzed: the streetlights flickered on and off and not a soul was outside. John didn’t enjoy the view outside, but the solemn view was better than the view of Sherlock’s stone-cold face with his blue eyes filled with anguish.

A sickening feeling stirred in each of their stomachs the closer they got to the Cubitt home. As the familiar roads twisted and turned the insides of their stomachs sloshed around. Y/N felt like she was going to be sick.

As they reached the street where the Cubitt home was, a new feeling grew from the sorrow in the consulting detective gut–fury. Where once was a yellow warmth from the streetlights, there was now the blaringly cold, red and blue lights from police cars.

The cab came to a halt and the three of them climbed out onto the street in front of the Cubitt home. Police were everywhere. Some carrying their cameras taking photos of everything they deemed important and others whispering amongst themselves about who knows what.

Y/N gulped at the scene and found herself reaching for Sherlock’s concealed hand. She needed the comfort, to know that she was not alone. The moment her fingers brushed past his, Y/N’s hand was enveloped by Sherlock’s warmth. It seemed that he too needed to know he wasn’t alone.

“This is a closed crime scene–” An officer approached the three of them with his thick fingers spreading apart to stop them from moving even further.

Something snapped in Sherlock at the officer’s gesture and his grip on Y/N’s hand tightened. “Nothing you could do would stop me from entering the scene. I am Sherlock Holmes–”

“Ah!” The man’s eyes flashed with recognition. “I suppose you’re the detectives from England,” the officer said in the most nonchalant voice possible. “The one who called last night?”

Before Sherlock could implode and before her finger lost all feeling, Y/N stepped forward. “We are. We were hired by the Cubitt family and know more about this case than you idiots who ignored our concerns last night. Now a man is dead.” A silent fury was coming through Y/N’s voice as she spoke.

“Excuse me miss. That’s not at all–” the officer tried to redeem himself and the Clifden police department, and was doing so poorly.

Y/N took in a deep breath before slightly raising her voice. “No, I'll stop you there. Where’s your Chief Inspector? I–we demand to see him.”

“Right, miss,” the officer paused, looking between the three of them. “The Chief Inspector wanted to see you anyway. This way.” Then the officer turned around and walked away expecting them to follow.

Through the crime scene they traveled; What once was a cozy family home, with only happy memories is now an empty casket with no family to be found.

“Where’s Elise and–” Y/N questioned the officer.

“Save your questions for the Inspector,” the officer replied.

Y/N scoffed and felt Sherlock’s hold on her hands tighten again. She glanced up at his stern figure and saw that his jaw was tightly clenched. He looked as if he wanted to strangle the man and add another body to the crime scene. She tugged his hand towards her direction causing Sherlock’s gaze to fall on her.

“It’s alright,” she whispered as she began to rub her thumb across his knuckles.

“These the English Detectives?” A husky voice boomed.

“Yes, sir,” the officer said before leaning in to whisper something into the other man’s ear. Once the message had been relayed, the officer excused himself.

The new man didn’t take long to introduce himself. His hair was an auburn shade with gray strands speckled amongst his head. Matching his hair on his head, was a patchy beard with adorning sideburns and hazel green eyes that appeared more brown than green.

“My name’s Martin. Inspector Martin of the Clifden Constabulary.” He extended out his hand waiting for someone to shake it. No one did. Awkwardly, Martin put away his hand and cleared his throat.

“It’s a terrible business,” said Martin “They were both shot, Mr. Hilton Cubitt and his wife. She shot him and then herself—so the neighbors say. He’s dead and she’s in the hospital. Not to mention their daughter’s gone missing. I can only assume the worst.”

“What do you mean their daughter’s gone?” John asked.

“Well…we’re not quite sure. All we knew that the child was missing when we arrived. Mr. Hilton was dead, and Elise was wounded,” the Inspector explained.

Y/N’s face paled. This case turned out worse than she thought it’d be. First, the death of their client, the injury of his wife, and the missing presence of Hilton’s daughter.

“Mr…” the Inspector asked.

“Holmes.”

“Right, Mr. Holmes, if you don’t mind me asking, the crime was only committed at three in the morning. How did you know the incident would happen?”

This question irked Sherlock, but nevertheless he answered it. “I anticipated it. I called the Clifden police in the hope of preventing it,” Sherlock said as every part of him oozed contempt for the inspector.

The Inspector’s face paled slightly as he cleared his throat, realizing his mistake. “Then you must have important insider knowledge that we need for the case.”

“We only have the dancing men,” John said.

The Inspector only looked puzzled at John’s answer. Before the Inspector could open his mouth to respond, Sherlock stepped forward. His blue eyes bore a warning to the Inspector.

“In order for me to help you and your insolent police force, I need one thing and one thing only…” Sherlock’s voice was cold. The Inspector nervously gulped. “Access to the crime scene and all knowledge you have gathered from it.”

“Done,” Inspector Martin said with a shaky voice. “Although I must apologize on behalf of my staff. It would benefit us all if you worked with us.”

Sherlock made an expression with his eyes as if to say, “You don’t think?”

Despite all the hesitancy and nervousness that the Inspector previously displayed, he seemed to understand what he needed to accomplish next: He promptly showed the consulting detective and company to the crime scene and provided Sherlock with the space he needed to observe.

They were in the Hilton’s master bedroom. It wasn’t a room that they had previously seen before. It was a well decorated room, and one could tell it was a safe haven of sorts for its late occupants with the memories hanging on the wall and the sentimental works of crayon art. The bed sheets and throw pillows were the same scarlet red. A shade that mimicked the pool of liquid underneath the body in the middle of the room.

Hilton lay on the floor with a hole in his chest right where his heart should have been beating. He was shot. His death was quick and painless. At least that’s what John had gathered looking at the body. The information would have been of the sort that would be used to comfort those living, but not Sherlock. It didn’t matter how Hilton had died, he was dead, and it was a death that could have been prevented. As he examined the body, John found it extremely hard to look at Hilton’s face. Thoughts of “if” were running through John’s brain as he looked at Hilton’s lifeless body: If he had just woken up earlier, if he and Sherlock took the room with two beds, if Y/N had the keys. Hilton’s eyes were still open, frozen in the instant of his death. John was sure if he looked close enough, he’d see what Hilton saw when he died.

Meanwhile, Y/N occupied herself with the rest of the room. Her eyes refused to look at the body of the man she knew had been alive hours earlier. She wouldn’t–couldn’t let herself grieve. Hilton’s daughter was missing and that was her priority. As she walked about the room, Y/N’s mind pondered the words of the Inspector. He had believed Elise did it. He concluded that Elise shot her husband and then herself in the stomach. A shot that would have been fatal in most cases, but it seemed fate was merciful. The bullet had only skimmed her vital organs.

Despite all the evidence pointing to the Inspector’s conclusion, Y/N knew that he was wrong. She believed it with every fiber of her being.

Sherlock, on the other hand, pushed every ounce of feeling that boiled to the surface. This case was like any other, except that it wasn’t. He’d visited crime scenes before and that’s all they were–crimes. Crimes were built like puzzles: you’d have all the pieces–the facts, and then connect them together to see the truth. That’s all they were supposed to be, facts, yet now the facts were stories. They were smiles. They were fears. They were alive, well, not anymore.

“Inspector?” Sherlock called out. The Inspector appeared in the doorway. “Has the body been moved?”

“We haven’t moved anything except for Elise,” Inspector Martin explained. “We couldn’t leave her lying wounded on the floor.”

Sherlock nodded his head as his mind placed Elise’s figure into the crime scene. “Has anything been touched? Any evidence removed from the room?” Sherlock asked.

The Inspector shook his head. “We’ve only had time to take photos of the scene before you arrived. Oh, that reminds me, there are footprints.”

Sherlock turned around to face the Inspector. “Footprints?”

“Yes, footprints by the window.” The Inspector pointed his fingers towards the window that hung open in the early morning air. Strange, thought Sherlock; Most people tended to keep their windows closed in the colder months. Then Sherlock quickly stepped closer to get a better view. There were indeed footprints underneath the window: dirt and grime still wet, from what Sherlock observed was the rain, was imprinted into the rug. Raising his brow, Sherlock peered outside the open window and looked down.

Pulling back from the view outside, Sherlock nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets before making his way around the room. He needed to find the puzzle pieces: the body, the gun, disturbed bed sheets, open window in the middle of November, footprints by the window, missing child, wife hospitalized with her haunted past, and the dancing men.

Y/N watched Sherlock as he moved about the room as if he was in a dance. His feet were placed meticulously on the floor as he traced the steps in his mind. It was amazing to watch Sherlock work. Just from the look in his eyes, she knew the wheels in his brain were turning. Each image his eyes produced would be remembered. Each thought would be cataloged along with the evidence in his mind palace. It was a forlorn sense of beauty watching Sherlock.

As the dance continued, Y/N noticed Sherlock pullout his phone. His fingers grazed the surface of the screen, quickly typing something before placing the device back into his pocket.

“There was a third person,” Sherlock announced.

Inspector Martin’s look of perpetual confusion grew. “What do you mean there was a third person?” It was almost a scoff. The noise continued to chip away at Sherlock’s patience.

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed at the Inspector. “The footprints. Both inside the room and in the flower bed beneath the window.” Inspector Martin, cautiously meandered to the window to see, and indeed there were matching footprints in the flower bed below.

“How did you even see it?” Inspector Martin asked in awe at the new evidence.

Rolling his eyes Sherlock answered, “Because I looked for it.” John and Y/N held back a snicker. “Hilton–the body is barefooted,” Sherlock continued. “Elise Cubitt’s feet are too small to fit the ones underneath the window. Therefore–”

“Another person,” John finished.

The Inspector glanced between Sherlock and John before clearing his throat. “Do you have any clue as to who?”

Sherlock looked at John and Y/N. “No clue. But I believe that more evidence can be found in other rooms of the house. Where’s the child’s room?”

The Inspector was startled by Sherlock’s new demand but showed him and the others to the daughter’s room.

A light pink and floral wallpaper lined the walls of the room. It was a delicate design that reminded Y/N of a magical forest you’d only see in fairytales. On the far side of the room there were two windows, one of which hung open with the latch undone. In between the windows lay a tiny oak bed that would fit a small child. The sheets were a snow-like white with numerous stuffed animals and toys on top. As Sherlock, John, and Y/N stepped further into the room, they noticed the set of drawers that lie open and disturbed. Clothes were scattered on the neighboring floor: dainty socks, dresses, shirts, trousers, t-shirts, jumpers, and even some shoes.

The evidence in front of Y/N pointed to only one thing. “Sherlock–did he…”

“Not now, Y/N” Sherlock hushed. It wasn’t a dismissal of any sorts, but more a request for silence that Sherlock’s magnificent mind needed if he was to solve the case.

Peering outside the open window, Sherlock observed, once again, the very same footprints found in Hilton’s room and in the flowerbed. In the blink of an eye, Sherlock darted out of the room and weaved between the officers on the scene to find himself outside.

By the time John, Y/N and unfortunately, Inspector Martin had caught up to him, Sherlock’s theory had been proven correct. The footprints outside the daughter’s window were deeper than the ones in the flower bed outside Hilton’s room. The culprit kidnapped Cubitt's daughter, causing a deeper impression in the dirt when he exited out the window.

“Sherlock, what are you doing in the mud–” John began.

“The daughter was kidnapped,” Sherlock stated as he got out of his crouched position on the ground.

Y/N felt sick to her stomach as her fears were confirmed. Sherlock continued, “The foot impressions here are deeper than those in the flower bed underneath Hilton’s bedroom. The daughter’s room was in disarray as if the culprit was searching for clothes and other necessary things to care for the daughter. Then he made his escape with the materials and child in hand.”

“Why?” Y/N muttered under her breath.

Sherlock opened his mouth to supply Y/N with his theory, but Inspector Martin cut him off with his imprudent questioning. “Who do you suspect?” Martin asked again.

Sherlock turned away from the Inspector and began to march to the rental car. “I don’t have a clue.” Then Sherlock looked over his shoulder and called, “John. Y/N.”

Together the three of them left Inspector Martin dumbfounded standing in the garden with a completely new case and so many questions in his mind.

_____

A wave of confusion befell John and Y/N as they sat in the rental car. It was a lie. Sherlock had lied to the Inspector. If they had learned anything from the consulting detective, it was how to catch a lie. Even so, Sherlock didn’t even try to conceal the fact that he withheld information from Inspector Martin. The man in question sat in the passenger's seat directing John as they drove along the winding roads of the Irish countryside.

After a moment of silence from the trio, John released a vocalized sigh before turning his friend seated beside him. “Why’d you lie?”

Sherlock returned the sigh and that was an answer enough. John pinched the bridge of his nose.

“They’re the police, Sherlock. You can’t just lie to them,” John muttered.

“I can and did,” Sherlock said.

“Sherlock,” Y/N hissed. He looked at her with expectant eyes. “You know who did it. Don’t you?”

Sherlock nodded. His eyes briefly scanned the cab’s surroundings as the car drove away from the Cubitt home to a destination only Sherlock knew; Although the destination was hardly a concern for the other passengers in the car.

“How–how did you know?” Y/N asked.

“I feel like I owe you both an explanation,” Sherlock began.

John let out a sarcastic chuckle. “An explanation would be nice. Also, where the hell am I driving to?”

“A place called Eldridge's Farm.”

“Right, exactly. Eldridge's Farm. How could I not have known?” John grumbled to himself.

“John,” Y/N hissed.

John glanced back at Y/N as he responded. “Sorry, it’s just–”

“I know and I get it. We are all feeling on edge, guilty, responsible, you name it. We are all together in this, but right now, we need Sherlock to answer some questions for us,” Y/N pleaded. John nodded in agreement and returned his sight to the road.

“There are rules that every ‘secret’ code follows,” Sherlock explained. “From the first dancing men message, it was hard to decipher anything, but I was positive that one symbol stood for the letter E.”

“Why E?” John questioned.

“E is the most common letter in the English language, so it's expected that a small message would contain at least a few E’s. There were fifteen symbols in the first message and four of them were the same, so I made the reasonable conclusion that they must stand for E.”

“Huh, makes sense,” Y/N commented, her eyes filled with intrigue as Sherlock continued to reply to their questions.

“But for the other symbols, I had to wait for the next messages in order to find their alphabet counterparts. Then it was a simple matter of using the next few common letters: T,A,O,I,N,S,H,R,D, and L. In the second message, there was one word that consisted of two E’s. Then I tried a few different words until I found one that fit.”

“So, then you knew what those symbols were? So, you could solve more words?” Y/N asked.

Sherlock nodded. “Exactly. As I was going through this tedious process, it occurred to me that Elise’s name would be present in the message. With those letters discovered I continued my search until I was able to decode the first message: AM HERE ABE SLANEY.” Sherlock looked back at Y/N to gauge her reaction. His eyes were wide open as if he expected a specific answer from her.

Y/N only responded with a confused look. “What? Am I supposed to know who that is?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and returned to his original direction. “Abe Slaney is an American. The name ‘Abe’ is an American contraction of the name Abraham. This also factors in Elise’s mysterious past in the United States.”

“Sherlock,” Y/N chuckled. “Just because I’m American doesn’t mean that I know every American. The country is huge! It’s bigger than the United Kingdom.” Y/N had to bite her lip as Sherlock mumbled angrily under his breath, for someone quite smart he could be clueless.

“Since the man is American, I called a frie–a colleague for more information and–” Sherlock was cut off by John.

“You called your brother. Mycroft.” It wasn’t a question but more of a conclusion.

Sherlock took in a deep breath through his nose. “It was my brother. That’s besides the fact, Abe Slaney is a gangster from Chicago and one of the most dangerous criminals there.”

A silence fell over the car as John and Y/N consumed the information Sherlock had just given them. Soon a tapping was heard as John began to fiddle with the car’s steering wheel.

“Eldridge's Farm. That’s where he’s at. Abe Slaney. We're driving right into the hands of a murderer and kidnapper.”

“We are driving to Eldridge's Farm; Abe does not reside there.”

Sherlock’s words did little to ease John. “You lied to the Inspector; you could be lying to me…” John mumbled under his breath.

Y/N adjusted her sitting position and leaned forward so her head was between John and Sherlock. “Just tell me we won’t be doing anything illegal. I don’t want John nabbed by the cops again.”

John shivered remembering what happened while they were solving the Blind Banker case. ”Yeah, I second that. Sherlock, no illegal stuff.”

Sherlock did not give them an answer.

_____ It was very much an action that would and could be considered illegal in a court of law.

“You want me to do what?!” John gasped.

“Break into the house,” Sherlock replied. “It’s easy. Break the glass and unlock the door.” John groaned. “You served in the military, John. This should be easy for you.”

“Sherlock! If I remember correctly, breaking into someone’s home is a crime,” Y/N reprimanded.

“You’d be correct,” Sherlock agreed.

Y/N raised her brows waiting for Sherlock to continue. At the very least, she wanted an explanation as to why they were breaking into a home. It was an explanation that did not come.

“John, you don’t have to do this,” Y/N said as she approached John by the door.

“No–I can. Sherlock! Why can’t you do it?” John questioned the curly headed detective.

“My coat is not thick enough. If I broke the window the glass would cut into my skin and–” The sound of glass shattering stopped Sherlock further explaining further.

“I did it,” Y/N muttered as she swung the door open.

For a moment John and Sherlock shared the same look of bewilderment on their faces.

“What?” Y/N looked back at them. “If anyone asks, it's because I’m American. It’s in my blood–I’m being sarcastic, just let’s go.” Then she entered Eldridge's Farmhouse.

A quick expression of pride flashed on Sherlock’s face as he watched Y/N enter the home. Then he and John followed after her.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Y/N asked as her eyes peered around the dark room. It was in the early hours of the morning where there was barely enough light illuminating through the windows. Y/N contemplated using the flashlight on her phone, before deciding against using such a bright light in a home that she broke into.

“Elise and Hilton Cubitt’s daughter,” Sherlock stated.

John and Y/N froze and turned to look at Sherlock’s dark figure.

“You said Abe wasn’t going to be here!” John harshly whispered. “Sherlock!”

“I said Abe did not reside here. Eldridge's Farm is a BnB. Abe is a guest,” Sherlock clarified.

John furrowed his brows and placed his hands on his hips as he muttered a few curses.

“Hey, let’s focus more on finding the kid, calling the police, and getting out of here before a gangster from Chicago wakes up with intruders in his BnB!” Y/N quietly suggested.

“John, take the rooms to the left. Y/N and I will take the rooms to the right,” Sherlock instructed.

John grumbled a bit before sneaking his way to the room on the left side of the home, leaving Sherlock and Y/N alone in the dark.

There was something so tranquil about standing in the living room of a home in which you were intruders. Though, Sherlock determined it was not that different from the frequent guests coming and going as they went about their travels. It was quiet and a small breeze snuck through the cracks in the glass causing a few goosebumps to creep onto his forearms. The other tiny bumps along his skin were from her. It was the only reason. They were alone. It was dark and he could feel her presence standing near him. He could hear the air pass through her lungs as it energized her existence. As they stood there, his mind thought of one thing; That night when he should have gone after her and molded his lips to her. It was that night he should have told her that just like the air in her lungs, her presence gave life to his universe. Sherlock cursed himself. This was the worst of times; he shouldn’t be thinking abou–

“Sherlock? Are you coming?” Y/N whispered.

Suddenly, a bright light cascaded the room. Sherlock and Y/N briefly clenched their eyes shut before reorienting themselves.

“I wouldn’t go anywhere if I were you.”

Under any other circumstance, Y/N would have been overjoyed to hear someone else speak like her. There was only so much of “you sound like a movie star” that she could handle. However, there was the context that the man who was speaking was a gangster with a gun to John’s head. Immediately Y/N froze in place as from the corner of her eye she saw Sherlock take a small step in front of her.

“Abe Slaney,” Sherlock addressed the man. He had dirty blonde hair and dull blue eyes. He stood a few inches taller than John, but his height was still significantly smaller than that of Sherlock’s. However, everything about Abe screamed ‘threat’.

“So,you know who I am. Bravo,” Abe said sarcastically.

“You killed Hilton Cubitt,” Sherlock noted.

“Again. Congratulations on figuring that out–”

“But Elise…” Sherlock continued as he chose his words carefully.

Abe’s grip around John tightened. “What about her?”

“You killed her too.”

At this suggestion, Abe’s face paled. “What? I didn’t kill her–she!” Worry began to set in Abe’s face. “Elise…”

“Then what about the daughter?” Sherlock continued.

Abe squeezed his eyes shut. The light reflected off the tears trickling down his face. “I LOVED HER!” Abe bellowed as he pointed the gun in Y/N and Sherlock’s direction. Y/N gasped and grabbed hold of Sherlock's arm as he placed himself farther in front of her. Sherlock’s clear gaze never faltered.

Then a sob escaped Abe’s mouth. “I could have never hurt her. When I say that a man could never love another woman like I love her, I would be saying the absolute truth. She was mine until that–” Abe’s voice grew sour, “until Hilton took her away from me. I was only taking back what was mine!”

“She was married, Abe.”

Abe's sad expression grew into a sneer. “Until death do us part, right? That’s how it goes? But when I killed him, Elise, she tried to fight me. She had her–that man’s gun and was going to shoot me. I–” Abe began to cry again. The weapon found its resting place back on John’s head. “The gun. She–”

“So, you killed her,” Sherlock finished.

“NO! No, I–she was still alive when I left. I called the police. She’s alive. She has to be.”

John winced in pain as Abe constricted his airways. “Sherlock,” John groaned. “Maybe don’t anger the man with the gun to your friend’s head.”

Sherlock’s eyes briefly flashed with worry at John’s condition before continuing his interrogation. “Their daughter.”

“She’s not his daughter. She’s–She looks so much like Elise,” Abe explained.

“So, you thought, since you killed Elise, that you’d take her daughter instead?” Sherlock inquired.

“I DIDN’T KILL ELISE!”

“Sherlock!” Y/N whimpered as John flailed around in Abe’s arms.

“Tell me about the code. Why the dancing men?”

Abe seemed to calm down with the change in subjects. “Elise’s father. He’s the boss. He wrote the code, so we could work in secret. Elise never liked that business, so when he came, she ran away. She was mine. We're supposed to be married. That kid was supposed to be mine, but she left me. I told her that I would find her again and I did.”

As Abe relayed his story to them, Y/N couldn’t help but a prickling of fear spread all over her body. Abe was obsessed. He called it love, but he was possessed by Elise. The poor woman only wanted to get away. She wanted to be safe, and she was with Hilton. He never asked about her past. He never asked her to relive that horror and trauma, but Abe had found them and destroyed her peace. With how Abe acted, Y/N was beginning to fear the worst. He was a stalker, kidnapper, and murderer. Who knew what else he was willing to do at this point? It was all about Elise. All of his motives were for her.

Y/N’s eyes widened as she came to a realization. Cautiously, she loosened her grip on Sherlock’s arm and stepped out from behind him. “Abe,” Y/N said softly and with as much gentleness and care she could muster, she continued to address him. “I can tell you really loved Elise.” Abe nodded. “Good. Now, think about what Else would want you to do. Would Elise really want you to take her daughter back to the business she hated?”

Y/N could see the wheels turning in Abe’s head as he listened to her words. “No, she wouldn’t–”

“See. Abe, can I tell you a secret?” Y/N waited for Abe nod. “The greatest act of love is letting the person you love go. If you love Elise as much as you say you do, then you need to let her go. You need to let her daughter go.”

Abe’s face contorted as he fought with Y/N’s words. Sherlock could only watch as Y/N pleaded with Abe. She was beautiful. The panic in her eyes as it blended with the gentleness of her soul. He couldn’t take his eyes away, and for a moment Sherlock thought he never would be able to. She was magical–no that wasn’t the right word. Y/N was intelligent in a way Sherlock could never be and it was breathtaking.

Slowly, the gun fell from John’s head and Abe let John go. Soon after the man collapsed to the ground in distraught. In his obsession, maybe he really did love Elise. It didn’t take long for Y/N to find Cubitt's daughter. The young girl really did bear a resemblance to her mother; a mother who was recovering from her life saving surgery in the hospital.

Abe Slaney didn’t struggle as Inspector Martin placed dull handcuffs around his wrists. He kept his head down and his mouth shut as they led him out to the car. Just as the police opened the door to the guarded backseat of the patrol car, Abe snapped his head up as if he just remembered something. In a loud voice, he called out to Sherlock.

“M says hello,” then the door was shut and Abe was gone.

_____

Normally, once a case was over, the trio would call it a day and return to their lives at 221B Baker Street; However this was not a normal case. Elise was released from the hospital a week after her incident and a funeral for Hilton was held a few days afterward. Normally, Sherlock never attended funerals. The dead were dead and that was all he needed to know, but this wasn’t a normal funeral.

They stood in the back. John, Y/N, and Sherlock, in that order, stood with their heads hung low. Each of them shared a sense of guilt as all the questions of ‘if’ from before filled their heads. Even if they didn’t pull the trigger, it felt like they helped aim.

The service was nice. There was a lot of sentiment and a lot of condolences for Elise and her daughter. Y/N made sure to bring flowers to leave on Hilton’s grave, but once the flowers were placed, the three of them excused themselves. To them it felt like they were imposters imposing on the grief of a family, and not the heroes they were painted out to be.

Not a word was said once, Y/N and Sherlock got back to their hotel room. The two kept to themselves as they prepared for their journey home. Y/N busied herself with packing, so long as her hands were busy she wouldn’t be able to think. Sherlock, on the other hand, had already packed and was forced to sit with his silence. Instead, he sat on his bed and his eyes were placed in the direction of the window, but Sherlock wasn’t looking at the view. He was trapped in his own mind. All the emotions and fears burst to the surface of his mind. Sherlock was forced to feel and he felt alone.

It was the stillness that caught Y/N’s attention. Sherlock wasn’t really one to sit still in silence unless it was for a case, but even then there was much going on around him. After a few moments, the worry began to set in. Y/N left all thought of packing behind as she approached Sherlock’s bed.

The scene in front of Y/N broke her heart. Sherlock’s lips were shaking as his eyes glossed over, yet not a sound was coming from him. Slowly, Y/N kneeled in front of Sherlock with one hand coming out rest on his hand and the other on his cheek.

“Sherlock,” Y/N whispered as she feigned a comforting smile. “Sherlock.” His pupils dilated as they refocused on her. “I’m here.” Y/N took a deep breath. “You are not alone…It is not your fault.” Her eyes darted between him before she leaned in and entangled him in a hug. It was the best way to prove to him he was not alone.

Sherlock devoured the warmth that came from Y/N’s body as he buried his head in the crook of her neck. Y/N was there with him. He wasn’t alone. He was in her arms and it felt like that was where he was always meant to be. In her arms, he was safe. In her arms, he was home. At that moment, Sherlock only thought of one thing. He didn’t think about Hilton. He didn’t think about the failure of a case. He didn’t think about Elise or Abe. At that moment, he knew he was in love. Sherlock loved Y/N.

Pulling away from the hug, he bore into her marvelous eyes and saw the world. With each breath his gaze fell downwards until he saw her lips. The very lips he should have kissed all those days ago. At that moment, he didn’t care if she had a boyfriend. Sherlock didn’t care if she was his employee, a friend, and his neighbor. The only thing Sherlock cared about was tasting her lips and sharing a breath with her. He knew if he didn’t kiss her then, that every breath he took, every sip of water, and every wink of sleep would never be enough to sustain him. So he did. Sherlock brushed his lips against hers and decided that he wanted it all. With a desperation he never existed, Sherlock kissed Y/N and she kissed back. As Sherlock kissed and ignored his lung’s pleas for air, a voice echoed in his mind.

“The greatest act of love is letting the person you love go.”

All of a sudden, Sherlock remembered. Y/N had a boyfriend, she was happy and he was perfect. Sherlock was not, everyone was saying so. She was his assistant, his neighbor, and friend. She was practically Mrs.Hudson’s granddaughter. She was everything he couldn’t–shouldn’t have.

The room felt colder as he pushed her away. He left her in the room as his legs retreated to the streets of Clifden. His shoes clacked across the sidewalks as his mind came to one conclusion: he was alone.

______

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Author's note: after 117,809 words they finally kiss. I know, I'm all for the angst, but I promise that it will all be worth it. Please just hang in there. Also, thanks for reading and if you could show your support by commenting or reposting that would be amazing!! Great Game is up next!

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rin-itoshi · 4 years ago

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mc’s departure | obey me

summary: how the brothers would react to MC returning to the human world after a year in the devildom

contains: fluff , angst , ?!!!!&;@;&:idk

♯ LUCIFER

he’s the one to see you off, reminding you of the many things he had taught you so that you’d never forget.

his pride is much too large to admit that he will miss you to death and that he loves you dearly.

after you’re gone, he’s gone for hours at a time, holed up in his room with as much as work as he can take on.

he overworks himself with the intention of getting rid of the heavy emotion on his heart.

everything reminds you of him, even the paper clip on his desk that you had once found under his bed.

he gets easily irritable, feeling rather empty now that you’ve gone and left him alone in this now quiet house.

barely leaves his room, only works.

never cries but gets quite emotional when he finds a belonging you left behind.

♯ MAMMON

he cried every single night up until your departure but never showed you that side of him once

after you left, he cried non-stop, not caring if he looked like a cry baby in front of his brother’s who watched him with pitiful eyes.

once his eyes dried up, he soon never returned home as he partied all day and night.

he forced himself to attend parties after parties in order to forget about you.

it never works because everything reminds him of you.

sometimes he sits in his car and just stares into space, wondering what you’re doing now that you’re back on earth.

literally cannot stand the mention of you or your name or he may break down.

pretends to be okay but can’t go a day without getting upset about your absence.

money soon becomes pointless when he realizes no amount of cash will bring you back to the house of lamentation.

♯ LEVIATHAN

curled up in his bath tub and cried himself to sleep.

stopped leaving his room in general, continuously playing games all day and night.

couldn’t look at his ruri-chan figures because they somehow reminded him of you and how much you used to admire them with him.

every inch of his room has your touch on it and it makes his heart ache painfully.

struggles to attend online school but manages to make it through the day by zoning out in class.

claims he doesn’t care about a normie like you but genuinely misses you

sends you messages, forgetting you can no longer contact him without your D.D.D

writes about how much he misses you on his blog fully aware you’ll never see it.

♯ SATAN

reading. that’s all he does.

he hides in his room and reads every single book he has stacked up along his room, even rereading them if he finished everything.

uses books to get his mind off of you—or more so the lack of you.

will sometimes get excited about a stray cat he sees but stops himself when he realizes he can’t tell you because you aren’t here.

gets angry. a lot.

the smallest things set him off and he can longer feign a smile when he hears your name or anything related to you.

he misses you so much that he wants to tear out his hair and rip apart all these book page by page.

his room is in shambles and he can’t seem to think straight anymore.

♯ ASMODEUS

loses his interest in everything.

forgets his skin care routine and lets himself go without caring about it.

forces himself to go to parties and tries to sleep with someone to feel better but when it fails, he stops sleeping around in general.

like mammon, he doesn’t come home often to avoid seeing the house he had lived in with you happily.

cannot forget about you no matter what he does, and that frustrates him the most.

wishes he had done something to stop you or at least slept beside you one last time.

neglects himself for a while.

♯ BEELZEBUB

poor bby isn’t hungry for once.

can’t seem to eat now that you’re not sitting beside him, giggling about something he had said.

spends a lot of his time doing weight training and exercising to get his mind off of you.

misses all the meals you used to make on the nights you were in charge of cooking.

sometimes forgets you’re not around whenever he’s about to go downstairs to eat dinner.

clings to belphie in hopes to fill the gap in his heart.

accidentally broke down your room door in an angry fit when your absence finally set in.

♯ BELPHEGOR

either he sleeps even more or somehow gets less sleep.

no matter what, he feels sluggish and blank.

locks himself in the attic, almost as if he was never released in the first place.

even though he hated humans, your absence affected him the most after he had grown to love you as a human.

nearly went demon mode on diavolo when he found out that you were being sent back to the human world.

partially wishes he never met you but cherishes his memories with you too much to ever wish for that wholeheartedly.

sleeps in your bed often to hold onto your lingering scent that was fading quickly.

complains to beel that you were nothing but a stupid human who turns their backs on demons like them, but he never means anything he says.

“Why is it so quiet in here?” Diavolo asks as he opens the front door of the House of Lamentation with Barbatos at his side. The man’s golden eyes scanned the entry hall, noticing how it was so eerily dark and quiet that it almost felt like something out of a horror movie. It felt like no one had lived here in over two thousand years. “Hello?”

Upon receiving message from Diavolo, everyone had exited their rooms for the first time in a while, looking like they were dragged through the mud. The state they were in made Diavolo jump with surprise, shocked to find that even Lucifer looked like he was ill. “What happened to you guys?!”

“What is it that you need, Lord Diavolo?” Lucifer asked as he ran a hand through his hair to compose himself a bit in front of the red haired man. “If is nothing important, may I kindly ask you to leave and return another time?”

Diavolo sighed, shaking his head lightly as he crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t know what’s up with you guys, but I brought everyone’s favorite person along with me so sing your praises now!”

Mammon huffed, “If ya’ talking about that butler of yours, ain’t nobody care right now! We got bigger things to worry about!”

Barbatos simply smiled, taking no offense to the sly insult thrown his way.

Diavolo cocked a brow in confusion. “What? Of course not! It’s-“

The person stepped out from behind Diavolo, catching the attention of every single male in the room. The seven brother’s choked, staring at the one person they had longed for these past few days.

“[y/n]!” They shouted in unison, practically flying down the stairs to get to you. Mammon was the first to reach you, wrapping his arms around your entire body as he tackled you to the floor. The other brother’s climbed on top of you two, hugging you so tightly that you feared this would be where you’d die. “You’re back!”

Diavolo chuckled boisterously. “This is amusing! You lot are acting like you didn’t know they’d return today!” His laugh came to an abrupt stop when he saw the flat expressions coming from each and every brother. “Oh- Did I not inform you?”

“Obviously you didn’t.” Belphegor scoffed with a roll of the eyes, burying his face in the crook of your neck to inhale your scent. “[y/n]...”

“Ya can’t ever leave again! I’ll seriously get angry at ya if this happens again! Ya either go to the human world with me or ya don’t go at all!” Mammon snapped, cupping your cheeks while getting dangerously close to your face to yell at you.

“I’ll severely punish you if you ever leave this manor without giving me a heads up as to where you’re off to. You’re not just an exchange student anymore. You’re special.” Lucifer explained, a panicked glint in his tired eyes as he reached out to pat your head gently with his gloved hand.

Satan sighed, pressing his forehead against your back. “If you leave again, I don’t know if I’ll be able to control my emotions, so don’t leave.”

The avatar of lust whined loudly, “my beautiful self can’t handle a life without you! Don’t ever go anywhere without me again!” He clutched onto her waist tightly.

“Don’t... Don’t go anywhere.” Leviathan said with a sad frown on his lips as he held your hand, bringing it up to rest against his cheek. “It’s so empty without you.”

“Let’s eat dinner together, [y/n].” Beel suggested, his voice full of emotions as he drooled at the thought of dinner with you.

A million emotions ran through your veins as you sat there, basking in the warmth of their touch. It was overwhelming to receive so much love all at once but it was amazing.

A smile slowly crept onto your lips as you leaned into their touch, enjoying the way they clung to you as if you’d disappear any moment now. “I missed you guys, too.”

“What a lovely reunion!” Diavolo exclaimed happily, snapping a view blurry photos on his D.D.D to send to the group chat later.

After the heartfelt moment, they quickly disappeared upstairs to fix up their appearance before rushing downstairs to the kitchen where you stood. They clung to you like bugs to a light, hounding you about your sudden departure, only to find out that you had gone up there with Diavolo and Barbatos to help the man experience human world activities he had never gotten to try before. Diavolo was sure he had told them that but seeing as they were genuinely distressed, he assumed the message never reached.

Even though they were beyond pissed with Diavolo and his carelessness, they were just glad you were back. Them being here with you really was their idea of a perfect life.

a/n: UH YEA K GOODNIGHT

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casualwriters · 3 years ago

Text

Cupid Love Arrow | Steve Harrington. |

Summary - You never thought in ten million years that you are going on a date with fucking Steve Harrington, you were never the type who like the little Miss perfect of Hawkins, but one night out of no we're Steve asked you out and maybe you enjoyed it.

Type - Fluff

MASTERLIST

Paring - S1 Steve Harington X Nonbinary Reader. ( for male or female readers.)

unnecessary Tags - @peakyrogers @princess-kaija @iwannadeletemyself @suchababie @comebackjessica @motherofdicks

A/N - Hope yall enjoy I was in the mood for some cute fluff (:

Walking up to your Locker the fresh start of your new day in

Hawkins, You and your family moved here only a couple months ago, your mom wanted a fresh start away from the City and away from your old life so now you are here, stuck in this small country Highschool. Shutting the locker after you shoved all the books in your locker you closed it turning around to walk around the hall because there was still some free time before the Bell ring. "New kid watch out!" You heard the screaming and when that happens you turned your head to see what all the commotion was going on and before you could even move the football hit your face gulping for a second, not noticing how embarrassed you have gotten you cover your face "What the fuck?" you question turning around to see a couple boys you wiped the blood that was dripping down your noise the football still in hand, one of the guys was cute but they all looked stupid. "Here you damn ball back" You threw it at the main guy with mid force hitting him in the chest making the other boys chuckled and laugh nudging the Alpha male. "Idiots" You whisper under your breath hearing the Main male walk over to you "What your name?" The male asked he was handsome, but his hair was bigger than most of mine and god his cologne. "What do you want?" You moan hearing the bell knowing that be a good way to ignore him but he was still following you like a stalker. "Steve, um Steve Harrington" Turning around now in front of your class "y/n, now I am going take my noise that is still in pain and leave bye Steve" You scoffed entering your class.

The day had gone fast sitting on the side cigarette hanging on the left side of your lip, you were annoyed and had a shitty day getting hit by a football and all the teacher were just dicks, now putting the cherry on all of it missing your bus your mom would not be off work for another hour, she would not be happy. The door open next to you hearing A male and two females talking Oh speak of the Devil. Stomping out the Cigarette standing up to not be stuck with Prisses and Captian jock Pass for sure. Now I just got to figure out if I want to walk the five miles or call mom and wait. "Later You Two, Hey Y/n Wait up!" He yelled across the parking lot. "What Do you want? The bothersome was clearly shown on your face and You think Steve could tell but it was almost an hour after the buses left so Steve wonder why you were here all alone. "Why you all here alone?" He was actually not trying to be Cocky or an ass which was a shock for both of you. "Miss the Bus," You say swinging your bag over your shoulder Steve followed you as you were walking to head home, he was hot on your tracks and stop in front of you. "Steve do you have anything better than harass me?" You questioned ur folding your arms so you do not end up strangling the poor kid. "Why don't I give you a drive home and in return why don't you let me take you on a date" Taken off guard wasn't the only thing you felt the red crept up on your cheeks now your ending up looking at the top of your combat boots. Looking back up " A month of you being my Taxi driver and then I will go on a date with you" You said bluntly hoping he says yes because you do not want to ride that discussing bus again. Steve was a bit taken back about blunt you were but he thought it was kinda cute He smiled "I pick you up tonight It a deal! let's go" he says making you rolled your eyes "I am fucking coming," You yelled at him.

The snap of the seat belt and looking around in the car was a sweet ride but you did not want Steve's head to get too big. Sitting in there in quiet with glances from Steve part could not stop you from smiling but hid it well the day was long watching Steve pass the trees and watching the Fall leaves get crumpled under the wheels you heard Steve say "When did you come to Hawkins?" Steve asked Sitting up from laying your head down "Couple months ago from the City, mom wanted a new start so dragged me halfway across the state to Hawkins" Steve nodded "it gets a bit lonely here when you do not have any friends." He chuckled " It seemed like you are Mister Popular" Steve turned on your road but he looked at you shaking his head and he said nothing, you decided not to push him so you stayed quiet and just talk about yourself. "Don't need to answer" you smiled at him seeing that he had stopped at your house, You Grinned "see you Later Steve?" you say hanging in the window and walked inside to get ready for the date that was weird to say, maybe you don't hate him that much even if Cupid screw up a bit.

"I will be home at Ten sharped okay" You smiled at your younger siblings brush their hair out of their face and kissing them goodbye walking over to your mom with a worried glance, she has been working night shifts since we moved here and she been passing out every time her body hits the couch. "Love you, Mom." Walking out the door shutting it softly to not wake her up waving to Steve in the car but he was already out there with a bouquet of flowers, they were lovely the shock was on your face smiling "Such a romantic" You say plucking the bouquet out of his hand they were red Roses how cute. "I Adore Roses now hop in were losing the night" He teased.

"Steve, why do I have to keep my eyes closed?" You asked Steve had told you to keep your eyes closed since you got in the car and you were curious why " Oh do not ruin the surprise And no it not a party" He says with a small smile you knew Steve seemed to be Mr. Hot guy, at school and fooled all the woman but this was another side of him that you saw even if you guys just met, it not that hard to pick up on things. "You going to be the death of me" Steve poked your side making you squeaked. "Jerk," you mumbled playfully at him.

Hearing the car stop "Okay just hold on okay?" You were quite confused and wondering if this was gonna be how you die, like in one of those horror movies, you really hoped it wasn't "Is this when I die Steve?" You heard the door open Steve chuckled "If your lucky you won't die." Steve help you out of the car feeling his arms wrapped your race goosebumps came across your arms and He smiled "Open them" You were taken back you could see all of Hawkins from you, "Steve it stunning" you say You Lean on the car saying "My worries seem to be gone when I am up here and of course with you" you teased. "Is your mother okay" Steve could tell it was not just the nerves of the date that was bothering them and the drapes were open. "She been working a lot, Me and my siblings have to take the bus to school I am sorry you did not hear to listen to this.'' A shy whisper came from your lips Jumping to sit on the front of the car Steve shakes his head sitting on the car with you, Looking at you seeing that you were wrapping your arms around your shoulder, "Come here you idiot" He teased taking the demi jacket off and t slipping it over your shoulders. "Tell me what up?" He asked knowing that since you got in the car ride you have been deep in your head he just wanted to make sure you were okay. Taking a large sigh "My mother lost our farther only three years, ago but he always treated her like complete shit" You grew angry just thinking by it your fists curled Steve seeing that has he moved closer putting his hand over your red knuckles. "He drinks too much, I always had to take care of my siblings, my mom was working two jobs and my dad was out at multiple bars." Huffing thinking this was the normal laying On the car. Steve just stared at you in Awe you looking at the stars he was content this way and that was okay. "Steve come lay down" you Snicker at the young man tugging at his hand like nothing you just said bother you. " My Folks are never there I know it was nothing like what happens to you but staying in that big house all alone fucking sucks". Nodding keeping your eyes on the stars pointing to one and another. "It, not a completion every story has a their tragic story" Steve saw you leaning your head on his shoulder seeing you relax in his arms. Wrapping his arm around you nodding and enjoying the silence. "Maybe we should do this again," Steve says looking toward you.

Smiling at Steve " Maybe we should Uh".

#steve harrington #stranger things #small account #billy hargrove #nonbinary s/o #alyssastories #images #max caulfield #y/n #stranger things 3 #y/n x reader #fanfic

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lokilickedme · 3 years ago

Text

The Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was something I needed to do, finally.

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

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

And thank you.

----------

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

----------

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

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

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

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

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

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

That was the year James died in his sleep.

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

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

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

So maybe it’s time I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But sometimes, not quite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None.

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

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

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

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

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

----------

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

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

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

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

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

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

----------

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t want that at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

----------

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

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

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

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

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

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

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

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

No reason.

He’d simply died.

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

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

We pretended not to see it.

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

They came back different.

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

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

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

I decided not to go.

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

----------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That land is cursed, he said.

----------

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

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

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

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

He was gone.

----------

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

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

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

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

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

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

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

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

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

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

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

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

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

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

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

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

More than once.

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

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

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

“That land is cursed,” he said.

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

----------

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

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

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

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the-moons-ace-card · 3 years ago

Note

How did Majin react to tokoyami?

This is something one of my moots asked one time in the DMs, so I gave him the full story. Warning you now, it wasn’t pretty.

Maji is very laid-back and chill. He doesn’t discriminate. He doesn’t care who his brother dates as long as he’s happy and the relationship is healthy. However, he almost made one exception. And that exception was Fumikage. Why you may ask? Let’s dive into some backstory

The Kuroiro brothers were raised by their aunt because their parents are dead. Did a little incorrect quote on that, the one with the ouija board. Their parents aren’t dead because of a cliché car accident. We’re talking splatter movie killed. Shihai was only a baby. A year old at the time. He didn’t see it. He doesn’t remember. He only heard the story when he got older.

Maji was much less fortunate. The ruckus of the murders had woken him up. It was 3 AM when he heard some weird noises that just didn’t seem right. Completely terrified, the seven year old got out of bed and crept to the living room to see what was going on.

What he saw would scar him forever.

Their parents were on the floor, slain. Their father had his neck torn, their mother had her insides on the outside. Maji was able to see the fear still lingering in their eyes. That, and something he couldn’t quite place. He later learned that “something” was death.

He also saw his parents’ killers. One was an average height man with long black hair and red eyes. His quirk is a giant shadow like monster. It’s jet black, razor sharp fangs, and hard to see in the dark if it weren’t for its red eyes. The other killer is a short woman with eagle features, including talons in place of feet and a sharp yellow beak connected to her stark white eagle head.

Based on these descriptions alone, it’s clear to say who these two are.

Maji may have forgotten several things from his childhood, as everyone does, but he will never forget the horrors of that night. How he scooped his baby brother up in his arms and escaped the house with his quirk. He went to a neighbor’s house in tears and got the police called. However, the killers got away before the cops arrived.

So, of course, as soon as Shihai introduced Fumikage to his brother, all Maji could see were the bastards that left a permanent mental scar. He believes in giving people a chance, but the trauma was preventing that this time. He didn’t want to allow it, fearing for his little brother’s safety. It was the first time he and Shihai had a legit fight over something serious. It took a while, but Maji eventually caved and agreed to give Fumikage a chance.

He quickly realized he had jumped to conclusions too soon. Especially once Fumikage opened up about his own home life. He formally apologized and became more open to Fumikage dating Shihai.

#shihai kuroiro #kuroiro #shihai #kuroiro shihai #fumikage tokoyami #tokoyami #tokoyami fumikage #fumikage #bnha oc #mha oc #boku no hero academia oc #my hero academia oc #answered ask #maji #maji kuroiro #kuroiro maji

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jaceyneedsabetterusername · 4 years ago

Text

Gin and Paleta

Pairing: Javier Pena x Reader

Summary: When a storm knocks out the power, you ask Javier to spend the night with you to ease your fear of the dark. A few drinks later, you admit more than you ever meant to.

Warnings: Drunk and emotional reader, a wee bit of angst at one part, anxiety because of the dark, Javier teasing you, mentions of prostitution

Word Count: 5400

A/N: This is my first time writing for Javier and I’m a little nervous about it. Hopefully it’s alright!

__________________

The wind outside howled with an intensity that you hadn’t experienced in a long time. You clutched your hot tea to your chest, allowing it to warm you in the nice cool Bogota night as you watched the rain fall hard and heavy outside your window. Every now and again there was a flash of lightning that crackled across the sky that was followed by a loud rumble. The storm was right over you and the lightning had gotten closer and closer to the apartments the embassy had put you up in when you moved to Columbia.

It really was quite beautiful, this storm that raged across the city. It had been hot and muggy for days leading up to the storm but now the angry gray clouds that blocked out the stars and the pounding rain brought a blanket of coolness to offer refuge from the constant Columbian summer heat. Your favorite scented candle burned on the table, the smell mixing perfectly with the scent of wet earth, asphalt, and trees overtaking your apartment through the small crack in the window you’d left for exactly that purpose. The TV played mindlessly in the background to create further ambience.

Suddenly, there was a loud flash just outside your apartments that lit up the entire street, sparks flying everywhere out your window. You yelped in shock as the power surged and then cut out completely, leaving you in total darkness aside from the flame of your candle. At the same time, there was a deafening rumble and the whole apartment shook with thunder.

Your heart raced and you panted as you walked towards the window to see that the power was across the next few blocks. There was a downed wire in the next street down that still sparked occasionally in the rain. Car alarms went off in the street. Lightning must have struck the wires.

Then the darkness crept in. When you turned to face your apartment, the utter darkness and silence of every corner began to feel suffocating. You reached over to the table and held the candle up as your breathing struggled to stay level. On shaky legs, you made your way over to a set of drawers that held various boxes of matches and a few old lighters before searching the house for every candle and flashlight you could find. After about ten minutes, you had set up candles all across the main room of your apartment but it still wasn’t much light. Small halos of warm yellow light illuminated only a few feet in diameter around each small flame.

For the final, and perhaps most paranoid move of all, you reached to grab your gun but stopped, fingers flexing and clenching into your palm as you tried to calm yourself down. “It’s just the dark,” you told yourself, breathing deeply, “Just the same things that are here in the day time. Stop being ridiculous.”

It was irrational to have your gun on you. What was gonna happen? The boogeyman was going to jump out of your closet and eat you? Maybe Escobar’s men would come and pick you, Steve, and Javier off now that it was dark. They did know where you all lived and they had already shown they had no problem flexing that fact when they killed Steve’s cat. That also was irrational and you knew it. They had better things to do and plot a whole assassination on three Americans during a power outage when God knows they had many other more menacing enemies.

And even so, every little creak from the storm that had previously been endearing now became footsteps of intruders or monsters. Here you were, someone literally trained to take down drug lords, who had been in their fair share of gun fights and seen first hand the horrors that men can do to one another, cowered in the couch trying to stave off a full blown panic attack as you sat alone in the dark.

Maybe you could hang out with Steve and Connie for the night, at least until the power returned, you considered. No… they had Olivia now and you were sure they had their hands full without worrying about a whole grown ass woman who was just scared of the dark. You weren’t close with anyone else in the building except for Javier but that idea made you cringe. He would just make fun of you and you knew it. You already knew how dumb it sounded to be an adult who was scared of the dark. You really needed to just grow up and get over it. That was exactly what you’d resolved to do.

Twenty minutes passed before you gave in. Twenty minutes full of startled gasps when the wind blew some leaves off the tree and into your window, the car alarms were silenced, or the wood floors creaked beneath your feet. Against your initial judgement, you pressed yourself off the couch, scooped up the candle that you’d had placed on the table and made your way downstairs to Javier’s apartment.

You rubbed your arm nervously while you waited for him to answer the knocks, already foretelling all the shit he was about to give you. He opened the door and you noticed the single flashlight in his hand that seemed to be the only light in his entire abode. “Y/N, you alright?” He asked, noticing right away the way you kept peeking over your shoulder with an anxiety that radiated off of you.

You nodded, “Uh, yeah. Your power’s out too?” The question was stupid and obvious and you both knew that. No shit the power was out. There wasn’t a single light on in the entire building.

“Yeah.” He answered simply but there was little intonation in his voice that was certainly mocking you in his typical lowkey asshole way. He leaned against the doorway coolly and if you hadn’t been freaking out so badly, you would have stopped to admire. Maybe it was best that everything but his general outline was concealed in darkness. You’d been pushing down a crush on your friend and partner for months now, knowing it was unprofessional and knowing that he would probably never think of you the same way even if it wasn’t unprofessional. Coming to him like this made you feel like a damsel in distress and you weren’t sure if you liked that analogy, especially considering that you were convinced nothing would ever come of it.

You rocked back and forth on your heels, “I was wondering if, um, maybe you’d be willing to hang out with me until the power comes back on?”

A small smirk appeared on his face with a quirked eyebrow, “Are you scared of the dark, L/N?” He asked, using your last name as if to exaggerate the humor in the fact that a DEA agent who’s been shot at before is scared of something as little as the dark, “How old are you? Eight?”

You rolled your eyes, cheeks burning red but playing it off with a chuckle. “Shut up,” you whined, “Look, I know it sounds stupid but I can offer beer or gin and a few paleta that I need to eat before they melt now.”

Javier looked you up and down in the low glow of the candle that was held between your hands, almost as if you were using it to keep your hands warm. He couldn’t help the little endearing smile that crept on his lips. In all honesty, he didn’t care much that you were afraid of the dark. He just loved to see the way you got flustered when he made fun of you. His jokes were never meant maliciously, especially when directed towards you, and he was glad you could take the jabs and even throw them back. It was one of the things that made him crazy about you.

After a moment, he nodded, “Yeah, I can come hang out for a few. Just let me grab my keys.” He disappeared back into his apartment, flashlight illuminating his couch and table as he grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter. Soon, he was following you down the hall and up the stairs to your apartment.

You hadn’t even locked the door in your hurried state to get down to Javier but you knew it wasn’t going to be a long trip. He noticed the various candles burning around your apartment, lowly illuminating the small space.

“Beer or gin? I got water too if you want that though.” You offered, making your way to the kitchen to hold up your end of the bargain.

“Uh, gin, please.” He walked in and made himself at home like he practically lived there. He had come over often to go over files sometimes over drinks and food late into the night. He was comfortable in your space and you were in his, with the exception of that hyperawareness of your every move when you’re around the person you like. There was a slightly electric feeling in the air for both of you but neither of you knew that the other felt it too.

You brought two glasses of gin, probably a little fuller than they should have been, in and handed one to Javier and one for yourself. The pair of you sat on your tan sofa and you quickly inspected the packaged popsicles in your hand, “I have cajeta and chamoy.”

“Don’t really care.” He shrugged, “sipping” his gin. You looked between the two and picked your favorite, giving him the other one.

Two hours later, the pair of you were two paleta and three-quarters of a bottle of gin down (most of which you had drunk) and things had gotten personal. Topics had bounced from work stuff, to you teasing him about his well-known rendezvous with his informants, to childhood pets, and more. A silence had settled over the pair of you. Neither of you knew how late it was anymore, just that it was silent out save for the rain and the occasional gunshot. It had become evident early on that Javier held his alcohol better than you did but even he was slipping after this many glasses of hard liquor.

“Do you ever get tired of being alone?” You asked out of the blue, staring up at the ceiling.

Javier looked over at you, the way you tapped your nail against the side of the glass with too much focus. He couldn’t tell if you were trying to avoid his gaze after the question or if you really were just that interested in the sound it made in your drunken state. Your partner just shrugged though and deflected the question, “Get a dog or something.”

Your face twisted in an over exaggerated look of thought. “I thought about it but it makes me sad to-,” you hiccuped, “to think about a puppy being stuck inside all day while we’re out chasing Escobar. No yard or anything for them to run around in.”

Javier nodded in understanding, “Guess you’re right. Wouldn’t be a good life at all.”

“See, though, Javi,” You pointed sloppily at him with a lifted finger from your fifth - no sixth - glass of gin, “You and I both know that’s not what I’m asking. But who am I kidding? You’ve always got all those little informants of yours hanging around. You’re probably not too lonely.”

Your partner sighed, used to Steve giving him crap about it but you didn’t usually say much about it. “Yeah, well we all have ways of dealing with the loneliness.” Seeing the prostitutes in town wasn’t his proudest repeat offense and, if he was being honest with himself, he didn’t just see them for the information they had on Escobar. Even for people who had commitment issues, like himself, being alone got really damn hard sometimes.

“It’s so unfair that they don’t have male prostitutes like they have women. What about all the lonely and frustrated women of Bogota?” You complained, taking a sip to punctuate your sentence.

Javier couldn’t help but laugh a little, “You’re telling me you’d really go see a prostitute if there were men out there that did it?” Yeah, right, he thought.

You shook your head and sighed in defeat, “No… I don’t think I would. I think I actually want someone to love, y’know?” You laughed at your own clicheness, “What about you, Javi? I know you have all your lady friends but have you ever loved someone?”

If perhaps you’d been sober, maybe you would have noticed the way he sucked a guilty breath in and backstepped, maybe even might have apologized for prying into his personal life. In your drunk state, though, you had no qualms with your personal questions.

“I, uh, I did. Once.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

He scratched his nose and hesitated. Another one of his less proud moments that he didn’t like to share. The only person he’d told that wasn’t family or a friend from back in Texas was Steve. Nevertheless, he swallowed hard and continued, the drinks even making him loose at this point, “We were supposed to get married but…”

“But?” You pressed, the intoxication making you obnoxiously impatient.

He gave you a vaguely testing look before continuing, “But I never made it to the wedding.”

You gasped, leaning forward and setting your drink on the table, “You left her at the altar?!”

Javier flinched back at your sudden lurch towards him and looked at you with a slightly annoyed expression, “I know it was a shitty thing to do!” While he didn’t appreciate the judgement because he already felt shitty enough about the whole incident, he knew it was more the gin than you to blame for your outburst. He leaned forward and pulled your half-full glass of gin back towards him, not to drink for himself, just to get out of your grasp. “What about you? You ever been in love?”

You bit your lip, “I don’t know. I’ve never really been in love before but there’s this one guy that I know that I think I could be pretty close to it.”

Javier’s chest tightened at the thought of you loving another man. He knew he had no right to your heart but that didn’t stop the pang of jealousy at the thought. Part of him wanted to pry further, just so he could know you were safe (or maybe to fuel some twisted personal hatred for the man he didn’t know). In typical angsty Javier fashion, though, he opted for the aloof, detached, and slightly annoyed response, “Then why are you complaining about being so lonely? Sounds like you have someone.”

You pulled your knees into your chest and threw the blanket that was draped over the couch over your now balled up form. You shrugged, glancing up at Javier with a look he might have noticed was longing if he hadn’t been looking anywhere but at you. “I don’t think he likes me the way I like him. I think maybe that’s why it feels so lonely. Knowing you could have someone but still being alone.”

“If you could have him then get him.” Javier Pena, always the blunt one, especially when his own feelings were in the mix.

You shook your head, “It’s not that simple.”

Suddenly, Javier got a little nervous at your tone, “He better not be one of Escobar’s fucking men.” The thought of you loving someone else made him jealous and angry but the thought of you loving a sicario made him lividly angry. There was no way you could possibly love a monster like that but it didn’t stop the thought from crossing his mind.

Your mouth dropped in offense, “Fuck, Javi, is that how low you think of me?” Your moods had been swinging all night thanks to the gin but you were pretty sure you still would have found the very suggestion just as offensive if you’d been sober.

“What- wait - no. That’s not what I think of you, I ju-”

“Well, clearly it is or you wouldn’t have suggested it.” You stood up off the couch, stepping away angrily but tripping over the low coffee table in the dark. Your slowed reflexes weren’t enough to catch you and crashed to the floor, “Shit…” You groaned, rolling over and trying to push yourself up to a sitting position. Your hair hung messily over your face when you looked down at where your hand met the floor.

Javier jumped up and clumsily made his way to your side, “Shit, Y/N, you alright?” He knelt down and placed a hand on your arm, offering his other one to help you stand. Sparks flew where his skin met yours but you convinced yourself that you were just feeling because of the alcohol.

You waved him off drunkenly and swiped your hair clumsily out of your face. Instead of sitting up, you leaned back and looked up at him, tears welling up in your eyes for who the hell knows why. Were you angry or offended or desperate or just a drunk mess? You couldn’t tell anymore but you weren’t used to losing your emotions like this and Javier wasn’t used to seeing it either. He halted, uncomfortable at the way your eyes shone in the candlelight with your tears.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have even suggested that you’d be in love with a sicario. I really don’t think you’d do anything like that.” Javier apologized, a rare occurrence for the man but, gosh, would he say anything if it meant that your tears would dry. Drunk or not, he couldn’t stand knowing that made you cry.

You sniffled, wiping a crocodile tear from your cheek, “Why the hell do we even sit here and make ourselves sad, Javi? Y’know? I mean I sit here every night and pine over a guy who I’ve convinced myself won’t love me. Isn’t that stupid? I convinced myself! How the hell would I even know? So instead of womaning up and actually finding out the truth, I just resign to the thought that there’s no way he could love me. Isn’t that pathetic? I should just learn to be like you. Confident. Women don’t say no to you because… well how could they?”

Javier shook his head and looked down, “No,” He admitted quietly, “It’s not pathetic. It’s different when you’re talking about love versus lust. I pay for twenty minutes with a poor girl who has to do it to survive. If anything, that’s what’s pathetic. Honestly, I’m scared shitless when it comes to love.”

He thought about your words and how much sense they actually made. The reason he hadn’t told you about his feelings for you were partly because he thought you’d never feel the same way. He was convinced that his reputation as a womanizer asshole, that he had rightly earned prior to you moving to Bogota, had turned you off entirely. Besides, wouldn’t he just mess it up? He thought he loved Lorraine but look how that turned out. The logical reason he told himself was the relationships amongst partners would be frowned upon but he knew that was a lie. Since when did Javier Pena follow the rules? The only thing holding him back really truly was himself. So why did it feel so impossible to come clean?

Javier shook the thought from his head. You were drunk and rambling. Even if he were to man up and confess his love for you, this was not the time to do it. He’d be surprised if you remembered anything in the morning. Besides, you were on about some man you loved and he could only imagine who it was. He’d seen your gaze linger a little longer on Carillo than was usual for a colleague. Perhaps that was who it was, the mystery man that you couldn’t have. He was married, after all. It would be a logical road block.

Part of Javier wanted to probe your brain and know the truth. He couldn’t tell if it was something that would make himself feel better or worse. It would put him out of his misery. Maybe if he heard it straight from your mouth that you didn’t love him, he could finally get over you. It would take a while, certainly many drunken nights and a few visits to Freckles, but he could do it. But if he did know, he also knew himself well enough to know he’d harbor some silent resentment for whoever the man was for taking the girl he loved.

He shook his head at his thoughts when he saw the way you swayed a little, as if rocking on a boat despite being on solid ground, your eyes drifting shut while you struggled to stay sitting upright. You weren’t in your right state of mind and to ask you such a personal question would be a total breach of trust and respect. He’d be furious if he found out anybody else had done the same to you.

“C’mon, let’s get you in bed.” Javier swallowed hard before shifting to help pull you up by your arm.

Your body flopped loosely to your feet and you whined, “Noooo! We were just talking! Besides, you’re just gonna leave me in the dark and go back home.” You pouted, head lulling against his as the full blown weight of the alcohol hit you. Any composure you’d managed to maintain, which admittedly was very little, melted away into Javier’s chest as he hoisted you up and carried you bridal style to your bedroom.

He glanced down at your made up bed and laid down your body as gently as he could, though you did roll on your own accord more clumsily than he had hoped. Javier flinched when your hands shot up to grab his shoulders, “Javi! Don’t leave me! It’s dark and scary still.”

He sighed, his hands settling on his hips once he managed to pry your hands off his shoulders, “Just let me grab you some water and you’ll be fine.”

“What if I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s still completely dark!”

“I have a feeling you won’t be waking up for a while, hermosa.” He chuckled at the way your face was already half smashed into the pillow, your hair was laying over your cheek, and your eyes were closed shut, surely already halfway asleep.

You reached up blindly for whatever you could grab, your fingers sliding down his forearm before they managed to hook onto a few of his fingers, “Please, Javi. I gave you popsicles and alcohol! The least you could do is stay the night and keep me company.”

Javier reached down and pulled the blanket that was folded at the end of your bed over your body. “I’ll be right back.” With that he left your room, feeling his way to the kitchen to get you a glass of ice water before returning to find you curled up in the blanket with your eyes closed. A small smile grew on his face, astounded by how you could still be so beautiful even when you looked like such a mess. A few strands of hair had fallen over your face and Javier reached down to gently brush them away from your mouth and behind your ear.

You shifted a little, “You can sleep here.” Your hand stretched out to feel the other half of your queen sized bed.

Finally, Javier decided to give in. “No, I’ll just make up a bed on the couch.”

“There’s plenty o’ bed to share!” You giggled, thinking what you said was way funnier than it really was.

Javier shook his head, “You're drunk, Y/N. I don’t want you waking up in the morning to see me in your bed and you go getting the wrong idea.”

“You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to wake up to see you in my bed.” You snuggled further into the pillow, your words barely above a murmur.

“What?” Javier’s whole body seized up and he couldn’t look anywhere but you. He shook the thought away. There was no way you meant that. It was the gin and nothing more. He couldn’t get his hopes up, “Nevermind. You just close your eyes. I’ll be on the couch if you need anything.”

You shook your head, “This is why I’m in love with you, Javi. Always the perfect gentleman, even when you’re an asshole sometimes.”

Javier’s breath caught in his throat. He couldn’t deny your words this time. This was different. There was a difference between this is why I love you and this is why I’m in love with you. “In love? With me?” He told himself he wouldn’t pry earlier but the question came out before he could stop it.

“Oh yeah... I’ve had a big ol’ crush on you for a long time. I don’t know what the hell love is but I think I might have it for you.” The wall that kept back your deepest thoughts came crashing down and your sentiments came flooding out like a semi-coherent tidal wave of admittal. “This is why I didn’t want to say anything because I know you don’t like me like that. You got all these beautiful women at your beck and call and I’m just boring old me who’s scared of the dark, spends more time working than living, and couldn’t dream of looking as beautiful as those ladies do.”

Javier struggled to figure out what to say that wouldn’t be crossing the line, “There’s nothing boring about you, hermosa, and you are so much more beautiful than any other woman out there.”

“But you don’t love me.” You insisted, cutting him off.

He chewed the inside of his cheek. This had to be the worst time to be talking about this. If he said he did now, you probably wouldn’t remember it in the morning. Maybe you’d even write off your feelings as just drunken blubbering and he’d have to play along as if nothing had been meant. If he didn’t say it now, would it lock it in your mind that he couldn’t love you? “That’s not true.” He mumbled the words quietly but sincerely. He looked down at your form that was halfway asleep by now and pat your shoulder comfortingly, “Go to sleep. We can finish talking about this when you’re sober.”

By the time the words left his mouth, you were already snoring. With a heavy breath, he looked away from you and walked back into the living room. He kicked his shoes off by the table and laid down on the couch, getting comfortable beneath the blanket that you’d left there earlier. Your conversations ran through his head about a mile and minute and he couldn’t slow them down. You actually loved him- nay, were in love with him. His feelings weren’t one sided. He tossed and turned for a while, battling with himself on how to address this (or even if he wanted to). He wasn’t so drunk that he had no control over what he said but he was just drunk enough to fuel a confidence that made him devise a plan to admit his feelings for you in the morning, even if sober him would most likely back out.

When morning rolled around, neither of you were in the mood for admitting feelings. It took several cups of stove brewed coffee before either you were even able to form any more than a groan. The sunlight killed your eyes, even through the grey clouds. Your head pounded and you felt nauseous for the first half of the day. Javier was just slow and a little grumpier than usual. The two of you ate some tortillas that you’d thrown on the stovetop for breakfast in relative silence.

The power was still out, the constant drizzle outside making it too dangerous for the power lines to be worked on. Thankfully, the sun cast enough light for you to not be freaking out anymore. Around eleven in the morning, you were finally feeling a little better and you looked up at Javier, who still had yet to leave your apartment. “Thanks for staying last night. Sorry for getting wasted.” You laughed a little at your expense.

He sipped his coffee and rubbed his eyes, “Of course. You’re a mess when you drink, you know that?”

You buried your face in your hands, feeling your matted hair. Gosh, you needed a shower. “Yeah, I’ve been told that before. That’s why I don’t get that drunk very often.” You sipped your own coffee, reveling in the scent that a few hours ago made you feel sick to your stomach but now smelled like the best thing on this planet. “You can take a shower if you’d like.”

Javier gestured towards the front door, “I’ll just take one when I get back to my place.”

“Oh right, you live here,” You groaned and chuckled at your stupidity, “Sorry, my brain is still moving kinda slow.”

He smiled down at his coffee, fingers playing with the handle of the orange mug. “I, uh, I wanted to ask you about something, actually.” He began, his confidence from the prior night failing him. Javier could be suave as hell when he was trying to pick someone up at a bar but with you, all he could get was radio static in his brain.

Your face twisted nervously, “Oh gosh, did I say something totally stupid last night?” You were already mentally facepalming. There were about a million things that ran through your mind daily, even sober, that you would be humiliated if drunk you had let slip. Things that ranged from a stupid dream you’d had about strapping bombs to pigeons and flying them into Escobar’s fincas to your unrequited harbored love for Javier ran through your head and you desperately hoped you had dumbly mentioned the former of the two topics. You could handle being teased about pigeon bombs. You didn’t want to lose Javier forever because you had your crush on him slip.

One of Javier’s hands moved to his thigh and ran up and down the rough fabric of his jeans. “No, it wasn’t stupid at all, actually.” His pause made you nervous, expecting only the worst. “You said that you were in love with me.”

Oh gosh. This was it. The moment you feared most.

“I did?” You asked like a deer caught in headlights. You could feel your face visibly pale as you stared at Javier with wide eyes. His eyes flicked from yours down to his coffee and you panicked, “I’m sorry. I didn’t-”

“I love you too.” He interrupted quickly and bluntly, knowing that if he waited any longer either you’d say it wasn’t true or he’d back out and either way it resulted in him never getting the words out. This was his shot at happiness and he was going to take it.

Your mouth moved with failed words before finally sputtering out, “I’m sorry, what?”

“I love you, Y/N. And I’m sorry if you didn’t mean it and I just ruined everything but you said last night that we sit around and make ourselves miserable by convincing ourselves that it could never happen and I just- I just figured I’d try to find a way out of the misery.” Javier wasn’t one for grand gestures or sappy heartfelt speeches but the confidence he’d had last night had returned to him for only a second to give you the closest he’d ever gotten to either.

His words seemed to snap you right out of your foggy hangover haze and you couldn’t seem to take your eyes off him and the way his brown eyes seemed to bore into yours with a depth that made you almost scared to look away. “I-I love you too, Javi.”

His eyes lightened up and his mustaches quirked upwards with his lips in a cautious smile, “Really?”

You nodded, your voice breathy when you whispered out, “Yeah. I just- I never thought you could love me.”

“Hermosa, I don’t know how anyone couldn’t.”

#javier pena #javier pena x reader #javier pena imagines #javier pena fics #javier pena x y/n #javier pena x you #narcos #narcos imagines #narcos fics #narcos drabbles #narcos headcanons #pedro pascal #pedro pascal fluff #pedro pascal imagine #pedro pascal x reader #pedro pascal x you

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trashscenariihxh · 3 years ago

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Pariston x fem!reader x Wing part 9

Um so there is some very dubcon, bordering on noncon in this chapter. Avoid it if it’s not your thing! Basically in this installment, Pariston is a massive asshole.

Tendrils of fear crept up your back as you stared unbelievingly at Pariston’s car. You checked your phone. It was only eleven pm. Pariston never got home this early. Tugging your coat around yourself, you hurried inside, hoping that Pariston had just gone to sleep, rather than wait up for you.

No such luck. As soon as you were through the door, the sound of Pariston’s mellifluous voice reached your ears.

“My my, Dearest, what’s kept you out so late?”

Anxiety gnawed at your stomach. Pariston’s voice was smooth, innocent, yet you knew better. Pariston was never innocent.

“Darling,” he pressed, voice growing colder by the second, “I asked you a question.”

You looked at the floor as if searching for answers. What could you say?

“I was with a friend,” you said finally. Not a total lie. Perhaps Pariston would buy it.

Pariston’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “But Darling, you have no friends.”

His words stung, yet you knew them to be true. Ever since marrying Pariston, you’d slowly grown apart from all your friends. Texts and emails had dwindled to nothing, and you were left alone with Pariston. Only Pariston, forever and always.

Knowing that Pariston wouldn’t stand for your silence, you continued, carefully. “I ran into a friend the other day. We had dinner tonight.”

“Hm, that must have been a late dinner.” Pariston’s gaze darkened for a moment, and you worried that he would ask more questions. Luckily for you, he sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “Very well. I suppose you deserve to see a friend every once in a while. After all, who knows when this one will move on and out of your life.” He smiled at you, sanguine and sickly sweet. You felt sick to your stomach.

“What’s brought you home so early?” you asked, knowing that Pariston had no intention of letting you just go to bed.

“You, my dear. I had hoped we’d have dinner together, but I suppose you had other plans. If I had known…” he paused, letting out a soft laugh and waving his hand dismissively. “No matter. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

You could only nod in response. When Pariston said nothing more, you spoke. “I should really go to bed,” you said, feigning a yawn. “Long day.”

“Yes, I suppose you should.” Pariston eyed you closely, and for a moment you swore that he could see right through you. “Goodnight, dearest.” You turned to leave, but Pariston’s voice stopped you. “Darling,” his voice dripped with ice as he walked over to you. Gently, he gripped your chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting your head up to him. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? It would break my heart if I found out you were lying.”

All you could do was shake your head in tight, jerky movements as you gazed into his dark eyes.

“Good.” Pariston beamed down at you, his smile not reaching his eyes as he ran his thumb over your bottom lip. “Now, get some sleep.”

You smiled meekly at him before heading up to your bedroom. You desperately needed a shower. Thinking that Pariston wouldn’t be home yet, you’d forgone a shower at Wing’s place. You sighed as you stripped out of your clothing, inspecting yourself in the mirror. Wing had been careful not to leave any marks on you, which you appreciated greatly. You doubted you could explain away bruises and bitemarks.

As you stepped into the shower, you allowed yourself to relax. You’d managed to evade Pariston’s probing questions for now. Hopefully, he would drop the subject. Hopefully. As you washed yourself, you couldn't help but think about Wing, his softness, his sweetness. You thought dreamily of when you’d be able to see him again.

Shit.

You remembered that you’d promised to meet him tomorrow or the day after, but Pariston seemed to be in one of his attentive moods. There would be no way to sneak out under his watchful gaze, not that you’d dare.

Clean, you turned off the shower and slipped into your bathrobe. Quickly, silently, you dried off, rubbed expensive lotions and serums on your face and body (just as Pariston liked) and headed to bed. Pariston was in bed already, ostensibly asleep, but when you got into bed next to him, he lazily slung an arm around your waist and pulled you close.

You recoiled at his touch, eager for him to remove his arm from your person. He didn’t move it, if anything, he tightened his grip around your waist. You sighed in defeat, resigning yourself to a night of poor sleep.

***

You slept fitfully, dreamlessly. The weight of Pariston’s arm around your waist kept you awake for most of the night; instead of comfort, it brought forth a litany of negative emotions, from shame to dread. Feeling his breath on the back of your neck made bile rise in your throat. Everything about him was so unpleasant, so loathsome, that you didn’t think you could bear for him to touch you any longer.

Your attempts to wriggle out of his grasp in the early morning halflight were met with Pariston grasping you closer and stirring. “____,” he murmured sleepily, drawing you into his chest, “whatever is the matter?”

You said nothing, pretending to be asleep, but there was no fooling Pariston. “Darling,” he purred, pressing a kiss to the back of your neck, “I know you’re awake.”

He kissed you again, and to your horror, you felt the beginnings of an erection pressing against your ass.

“Pariston,” you protested weakly as his hand ran up your body to cup your breast, “please, I’m tired…”

“You're always tired,’ Pariston snapped before sitting up in bed and staring down at you with cold, hard eyes. Per usual, a false smile was plastered on his face. “Now, my dear,” he cooed, reaching out to run his hand along your thigh, “I want you to get undressed for me.”

Shivering, you complied. How could you not? Nobody ever said no to Pariston, not even his own wife. Especially not his wife.

“Good girl.” Pariston stood, shucking his pajamas before rejoining you on the bed. You moved to lie down on your back, but large, strong hands caught you about the waist and flipped you over onto your stomach. You exhaled sharply in shock; Pariston’s strength always came as a surprise to you. A tug at your hips forced you up onto your hands and knees. You squeezed your eyes shut as you positioned yourself, readying your body for what would come next. From behind you, you could hear the soft slapping of Pariston stroking himself to full hardness Without offering you any preparation, he positioned himself behind you, and pushed inside.

You groaned at the sudden stretch. Pariston gave you no chance to adjust before he began snapping his hips against you, burying his cock in your aching sex over and over. His grip on your hips was like iron; you were sure that he’d leave bruises. Without warning, Pariston tangled his hand in your hair and wrenched your head back. Your back bowed as you tried to pull your head forward to relieve the tension of it all, but Pariston held on tight. His thrusts had taken on a staccato rhythm, his hips pistoning against your ass with wild abandon. You felt sore, used. You closed your eyes and tried to imagine that you were literally anywhere else, with literally anyone else.

With Wing.

Pariston was taking you even more roughly now, his ragged breaths a sure sign that his release was closing in on him. His grip on your hair never loosened; if anything, he gripped you tighter, pulled your head back a little farther. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he came, his hips snapping forward against your ass and stilling as he filled you.

With a short gasp, Pariston pulled out, releasing his grip on you. You fell forward onto your forearms as soon as your hair was freed, your chest pressing against the soft bedsheets as you struggled to regain your composure. You felt so fucked out, so used. Pariston hadn’t even tried to bring you to orgasm; to him, it wasn’t even an afterthought.

Before Pariston could chide you, you got up and headed to the shower to clean up. As soon as the hot water hit your skin, you let out a choked sob. What had your life become? You tried your best to stifle your cries, but it was of no use; your tears fell freely. You vaguely wondered whether Pariston could hear you. You were sure he could, and even more sure that he enjoyed it.

***

When Pariston left for work, you didn’t text Wing. You couldn’t, after what had happened. How could you face him after what had happened? You thought it odd, in a way that while you had been married to Pariston for years, and only been with Wing twice, you felt as though fucking your own husband was a betrayal of sorts.

Mid-afternoon, your phone buzzed. Predictably, it was Wing, asking if he could see you again. Unable to face him, you ignored the message, and waited for your husband to come home.

#tw abuse #tw abusive relationships #tw dubcon #tw noncon

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rhysismydaddy · 4 years ago

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Naughty Neighbors pt. 1 (Elriel)

Synopsis: Elain’s stuck in a dead end relationship, bored beyond belief with her life. When she befriends her brand new neighbor, it’s like taking a breath of fresh air. But with each day of friendship, she grows more and more drawn to him and the past he’s desperate to escape. His smile is all she thinks about, invading her head at the most inconvenient moments. He’s made his intentions with her perfectly clear, but she’s determined to resist his charms. She won’t allow him to turn her calm, quiet life upside down. Right?

I’M SORRY THIS HAS TAKEN SO LONG. Moving did NOT go smoothly, and my professors are taking online classes a little ~seriously~ even though they haven’t started yet lol.

Part 2 should be out by Wednesday, and it’s in Azriel’s POV :))))) This one’s a slow burn ladies and gentlemen, so get ready for some pent up desire

______________________________________________________________

Elain rolled over in bed, somehow too hot and cold at the same time. Gods, she was miserable. Her boyfriend was next to her, snoring loudly, and the sound did nothing to help her worsening mood.

She was so exhausted-- when you owned a flower shop, wedding season was always hectic--but sleep had been refusing to find her for the past hour.

It didn’t help that she had a moose-sounding man in the room.

Reminding herself that she loved him and definitely didn’t want to strangle him in his loud ass sleep, she rolled over and pulled a pillow on her head.

Somehow, after two years of dating, she hadn’t gotten used to how loudly Lucien snored.

Thank the gods we don’t live together, she thought, then admonished herself for it.

They would eventually.

She just had to get used to it.

The pillow over her head became suffocating, only adding to the over-heating problem, so she threw the covers off, grabbed a robe, and walked out. After going up a few flights of stairs, she found herself on the roof.

It was the place she always went when she was stressed or sad or just needed to see the night sky. She’d even started a garden a few months ago, so she started to head over to check on it.

But then she saw who was sitting on the bench in front of her rose bushes and paused.

Paused and stared, because the man sitting in front of her wearing dark clothes and a smirk was both classically beautiful and dangerous.

He was the kind of man most men would do anything not to fight and women would do anything to bed.

Smoke curled around him, and the shadows somehow seemed to cling to his tall frame. The stranger dwarfed the small bench, large frame taking up enough space for two. Even though he was sitting, she could tell he was well over six feet. And built like a Greek god, if the way his black, long sleeve t-shirt clung to his chest was any indication.

He was the most attractive man she’d ever seen, and that was without taking in the strong, clean shaven jaw, hazel eyes, and hair the color of spilled ink.

And oh fuck, he was studying her, too. A shiver ran over her as she realized she was covered in just her robe.

Her body begged her to both run far away and draw closer, and for some reason, she listened to the urge to do the latter.

“Who are you?” she asked as she walked through the maze of flowers.

“Who are you?” he shot back, not answering her question. Her body reacted to his voice alone, goosebumps raising at the cold but somehow soothing tone.

A breeze caused her hair to swirl around her as she replied, “I’m Elain. What are you doing here?”

He jerked his chin at the cigarette dangling from his fingertips, but that wasn’t exactly what she’d been asking. “No, I mean what are you doing here?”

“I live here, Elain.”

She realized she shouldn’t have told him her name, because now he could say it in that sexy, very manly voice of his and it would do strange things to her sanity.

He said her name like a lover would, soft and sensual, but also coldly amused. He sounded like he knew her, like he’d known her for years.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.” His eyes are laughing at her now, but he didn’t sound mean.

"Which apartment?”

“4B.”

Elain’s eyebrows pinched together at that news. She lived in 4A and hadn’t even noticed she’d gotten a new neighbor. Then again, she’d been at work all day. “Oh. I guess we’re neighbors then.”

A small smile graced his full lips, and she studied it before forcing her eyes back to his. “Lucky me.”

Oh, gods. Was he... flirting with her?

She didn’t even know. It had been so long since someone had that she’d forgotten what it sounded like.

So she rolled her eyes good naturedly, leaning against the brick railing encasing the roof.

“Sneaking out for a smoke?” His voice was like gravel and smoke, and his hazel eyes raked over her body in a way that made her shiver.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

He nodded, then extended the cigarette to her in question. She smiled but shook her head and said, “I don’t smoke.”

“A good girl, then.” He didn’t sound at all bothered by that statement. And once again, his hazel eyes skirted down her body. “Do you want to sit down?”

There was almost no room on the bench, but it beat standing on the edge of the roof on such a breezy night, so she walked over and sat as far away from him as possible.

It was still way too close.

Her arm was pressed against hers, allowing her to feel the dense muscle covering it. She doubted she could wrap both hands around it completely, but she shut down the urge to try as she crossed her legs casually.

The warmth from his body seeped into her, goosebumps raising where they touched. “You’re warm,” she commented stupidly.

“Are you cold?” he asked, hazel eyes scanning her face, then dropping slightly.

No small amount of horror grew when she realized what he’d glanced at. She crossed her arms over her chest, then scowled when he grinned.

Her eyebrows flew up, though, when a heavy arm landed across her shoulders and tucked her into a warm, firm side.

Oh, gods above every place they connected was tingling. Heat rushed into her--both between her legs and from his side.

She needed a heat CT.

“Is this your garden?” he asked, taking a puff of his cigarette and blowing the smoke away from her.

She nodded, then realized her head was pressed against his chest. Elain pulled away slightly, then asked, “Will you tell me your name?”

His hazel eyes were dark, like molten caramel. She felt lost in him. “What will you give me in return?”

Every inch of her body went taut and loose at the same time. Her thigh was suddenly warm, and she looked down to see his hand resting on her skin. The back of his hand was covered in scars and tattoos and his palm was covered in callouses, but it was nothing but gentle and warm on her thigh.

Her maybe-neighbor was perfectly still, his face cool and composed while he waited for her to react. But his eyes told her exactly what would happen if she leaned into him just a tiny amount.

And gods, she wanted to.

Something was holding her back though. A small voice was screaming at her, and a disgusting amount of guilt crept up her shoulders. Almost jumping out of her skin, she remembered whose existence she’d forgotten completely.

Lucien.

Her boyfriend.

The man she’d been attempting to sleep next to not an hour ago.

She pulled away, instantly missing his warmth. “I have a boyfriend,” she said unceremoniously and with about as much enthusiasm as someone declaring grandma was dead.

His eyes went a little darker, even as the corner of his lips twitched. “Hm.”

“I should go.” That was beyond true.

Lucien was trusting, and their relationship was relaxed, but practically snuggling with another man wasn’t right. Even if it was all she wanted to do at the moment.

“Okay.”

“I hope we can be friends in the future,” she said, trying to maintain polite normalcy. “But only if you tell me your name.”

Once again, those amber eyes slid over her, and she was very, very grateful she’d crossed her arms. “We’re never going to be friends, Elain.”

The way he said it didn’t feel like a rejection; it felt like a challenge. Her body thrummed, even as she shook her head slightly and started back down the stairs.

The picture of his face followed her all the way into her apartment, sticking in her head until she fell asleep with a soft smile on her face.

The next morning, she woke up and had breakfast with Lucien, who hardly glanced up from his eggs as he asked, “Where’d you go last night? I heard you get up.”

Her heart started to race even though she’d done nothing wrong. Technically. Calming her voice, she said, “I went to the roof to check on the garden. Couldn’t sleep.”

Lucien just shrugged, knowing this was pretty typical for her.

She knew she should tell him she’d met their new neighbor, but for some reason, her mouth stayed shut. Probably because she didn’t even know his name.

It definitely wasn’t because she’d almost kissed him.

“I have to go; I have an early meeting.” He worked at a corporate finance place downtown, so this wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. He got up from the table, navy suit slightly wrinkled, and kissed her brow. “Thanks for breakfast. I’ll come back Friday, okay?”

This also wasn’t news. He stayed at her place a few nights a week, most of the time Sunday and Friday. She didn’t go to his that often because she didn’t have a car and liked to walk to work.

Elain nodded and smiled, then went to get ready once he’d left.

Were twenty-four year-olds supposed to feel like this? Like they were stuck on a conveyor belt, destined to do the same thing for the rest of her life?

It sometimes felt like she’d gone to sleep and woken up in the life of a fifty-year old housewife.

Whenever he stayed over, he liked coming home to a clean house and meal, so she cooked for him, pretending to love it, when in reality, she’d be just as happy eating takeout on the sofa.

She greeted him with a smile, and they talked and watched TV together, then went to bed at the same time every night.

And gods, it was starting to get boring.

Even the sex was starting to follow a routine. It wasn’t written down, but Elain had noticed they slept together at the beginning of the month, then not at all for a few weeks.

She missed the beginning of the relationship, when they were so in love and crazy about each other they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

She didn’t expect fireworks after being together for so long, but... it had only been two years. And despite never mentioning it, Lucien was bound to propose at some point.

Could she do this for the rest of her life? Go to work, come home, cook, go to bed? Did she love him enough for fifty years of the same routine?

That thought shocked her. Of course she did.

He was perfect for her. He didn’t keep secrets, had a good job, and treated her with kindness and respect. So what if the fizzle had worn off?

So what if she got more turned on sitting on a cold bench next to a complete stranger than after actual foreplay with her boyfriend?

It meant nothing.

At least, that’s what she told herself as she put on a light blue dress and sandals and fixed her hair.

Once she was ready, she walked outside and started down the street to her store. It was only a five minute walk, one of her favorite things about her apartment’s location.

“Elain,” came a low voice from right next to her.

Surprised, she turned to see her brand new neighbor walking next to her. Just like last night, he was dressed in dark jeans and a black t-shirt. But with the light she could make out his features better, and it did nothing to sway her of how attractive she found him.

“Good morning.”

He smiled, and she found herself mimicking the expression.

I mean, when someone who looked like a villainous Prince Charming smiled at you, you smiled back.

“Better now,” he told her in a low tone, still smirking.

“You’re a horrible flirt,” she laughed, brushing off how the comment made her skin tingle.

“Horrible?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, lighting one as they walked. “I’ll have to step up my game then. You look beautiful today.”

“I amend my statement. You’re a mediocre flirt.”

He blew a cloud of smoke around him and rolled his eyes, and she grinned agian. She did that a lot around him, she realized. It was easy to.

There was just something alluring about him. He was dark and cold and beyond mysterious, but also sensual in a way she’d never seen before. It both threw her off guard and made her want to be reckless for once in her life.

“Where are you going?”

“Work. I own the flower shop down on third street,” she told him proudly. The shop was her life’s work, and it made her insanely happy to tell people about it.

“The Archeron?” he asked, and her brows shot up in surprise. “I work across the street. Start today, actually.”

“Oh, at the tattoo place?”

The idea of getting a needle stabbed into her skin over and over again made her nauseous.

Azriel noticed her expression. “You ever come in, I’ll give you a discount.”

“I’ll absolutely never take you up on the offer, but thank you. If you ever want a lovely bouquet, feel free to come on in.”

His hazel eyes met hers. “And what if I just want to see you? Do I still have to buy flowers?” There was a blush on her cheeks, and his eyes darkened when he saw it. “I like making you blush.”

Gods above, the man wasn’t giving up.

She was surprised to find she didn’t want him to.

She deflected anyway. “Fine. You’re an average flirt.”

“Oh, baby girl, you have no idea.” They were somehow already in front of her shop, and he looked through the window and grimaced. “On second thought, if I want to see you, I’ll just knock on your door. Lot of flowers in there.”

“That’s kind of the point,” she reminded him, blocking out the picture of Azriel coming over to her apartment. “If I want to see you, who should I ask for?”

Humor flickered across his hard features, but he still shot down the request.

“If you need me, I’ll be across the street encouraging people to make horrible decisions.”

Laughing, she unlocked the store and watched him walk away. Somehow, even though it was broad daylight, he was a spot of darkness on the street.

She didn’t even know his name, but she was tempted to follow him, just to see his smile again. If seeing him smile made her feel that happy, how would it be to hear his laugh?

More than anything, she wanted to find out.

And Elain knew right there that he’d been completely right: they would never be friends.

______________________________________________________________

Part 2

@cursebreaker29 @sjmships @starrynightsbooks @lovemollywho @januarystears @astreia-oniria @wineywitch202 @captainthefangirlofhp @perseusannabeth @girl-who-reads-the-books @aelinfeyreeleven945tbln @studyliketate @over300books @justgiu12 @maastrash @a-bit-of-a-cactus @aesthetics-11 @bamchickawowow @b00kworm @sleeping-and-books @musicmaam @savemesoon8 @hizqueen4life @maybekindasortaace @poisonous00

#azriel #azriel x elain #elriel #elriel fanfiction #elain #elain archeron #acotar #acowar #acomaf #acofas #acotar fanfiction #a court of mist and fury #a court of thorns and roses #a court of wings and ruin #a court of frost and starlight

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falloutjay · 4 years ago

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Stan x worried reader where reader comforts Stan and tries to make him feel better. Never giving up on him and even having to be forced away from him, that's how worried she is. Stan sneaks into her house when her parents are out and thanks her for trying so hard and they cuddle 💕

First of your requests done! Im kinda happy how it turned out and I hope you enjoy it as well. Cant wait to get to the more detailed one, but that one will take a little while longer. 😚

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Stan Marsh x worried!Reader

You stare at him.

Your eyes scanning him up and down but never leaving him. Maybe you should pay attention to what is written on the board, but you honestly couldn’t care less. This stupid math bullshit didn’t matter anyway.

Nothing did.

All that mattered to you sat in between Kenny McCormick and Kyle Broflovski in the row in front of you. Stan Marsh, your boyfriend, and also the person that was constantly on your mind. But not in a good way, like you’d normally think of your boyfriend.

You worried a lot about him, and it made you insane that seemingly no one else did. Not even his super duper best friend forever Kyle.

Did no one see the sadness in his eyes? How his smile faded whenever he thought no one looked? Were they all blind?

You weren’t blind. You saw through his façade. And you were determined to make sure he will feel better, no matter what was bothering him.

You stared at the message on your phone. “Where are you? I thought we wanted to hang out for a while before you go?”

A deep sigh escaped your lips. Hesitantly, you typed; “Sorry, family emergency. Can’t come.” And pressed send. It hurt you to just lie to your friends, but you had to. You could see Stan slacking at his beloved Football training, so it only confirmed your suspicion, that something was up.

He seemed unfocused, messing up throws, the ball slipping his hands or stumbling sometimes. His thoughts weren’t here at all.

You watched him play and sat through the whole training. It sure bored you, but it didn’t matter. He mattered. And that’s why you sat there for two hours. You didn’t even sit with some of the other people watching. Now you were waiting for Stan in the hallway, waiting for him to come out of the locker-room.

You saw Clyde and Craig come out, and they gave you a quick wave, smiling at you. You did the same, but your eyes were still glued to the door, waiting for a certain black haired.

When he finally came, he seemed surprised to see you. “Y/N, you’re still here? I thought you only stayed for training?” Stan questioned, that fake smile you hated so much resting on his face. “Nah, I wanted to spend time with you. That ain’t a crime, is it?” Stan shook his head and took your hand.

You two wandered through the school and finally got to the parking lot, where Stans small car stood. It was of course plastered with Tegridy Farm advertisement.

You were happy that Stan didn’t have to wear his 100%-Hemp-Shirt anymore. You hated that one so much.

To your surprise, you spotted your parents car and your mother not too far away. “There you are!” She called out and you stood there frozen in place.

“Hello Stan!” She greeted your boyfriend when she came over and looked at you sternly.

“I send you a thousand messages and called you endlessly. Why didn’t you answer?”

“Phone was on mute, sorry.” You mumbled, genuinely embarrassed.

“Doesn’t matter, it is fine, your Grandmas Birthday dinner is tonight, did you forget about it?”

This hit you like a ton of bricks. You really had forgotten it. You were so busy with worrying about Stan that you forgot your favorite Grandmas birthday. Your mother immediately could tell by your expression what was going on and let out a sigh. “Well, I’m just glad I had a hunch where you could be. Come on, we need to get home and get ready. We will be in Denver until Sunday.”

“But-” You wanted to protest.

You felt conflicted. You loved your grandma and those amazing food-tastic weekends in Denver. And yet there was Stan and your ever growing worry…

“I-…Can’t I stay here and skip one time? I wanna stay with Stan!”

Stan looked at you surprised. He knew how much you loved going to your Denver-Grandma. You always told him about the amazing food she makes and the money she secretly gives you.

“Hun, it’s okay, you can go. We can hangout next weekend.” He said, giving you a peck on the cheek. You shook your head.

“No. I don’t want to.”

“Y/N, come on, we don’t have time for this. We need to get home.” You mother said, taking your hand.

“But-”

“No but’s, come on now.” She sounded a little annoyed and you looked at Stan with a horrified expression.

“But I need to stay with Stan.”

“Y/N, you see him every day basically. You’re gonna go to Grandmas, whether you like it or not.” Stan simply gave you a smile, waving goodbye.

“I’ll text you when I can okay?” You called out, while your mother basically dragged you to the car.

“Don’t worry about it. I can wait!” Stan replied and went on his way to unlock his car.

The TV was almost annoying at this point. What were you even watching? A quick glance told you, that Family Guy was on.

Cartman better not hear of this.

You turned around, laying on your stomach, hoping you would not die of boredom in a few minutes. Stan wasn’t replying to you, as he was helping his parents with something apparently. You came back from your Denver Grandma adventure just a few hours ago.

The weekend wasn’t bad at all, you actually had fun and a great time with some of your relatives. But yet Stan didn’t leave your mind and you were sure, some people could tell you weren’t happy.

And you turned again, now laying on your back again. You just keep turning every few seconds, waiting for something to happen, yet nothing did. All of a sudden, you hear a bang.

Confused, you turned your head and looked at the direction at the noise. It seemingly came from the window. You felt scared. You were home alone, your parents out for dinner and you were left alone. You watched too many horror movies and murder mystery shows for your own good and millions of possible scenarios began racing through your head.

Carefully and trembling, you scooted closer to the window and looked outside. There in the drizzle stood Stan, throwing small rocks at your window. You opened the window, still utterly confused.

Somewhat swiftly, Stan began climbing up to your window, using the growth support for your mothers’ roses. Once inside, he smiled widely at you.

“You do know you could have just rung the doorbell? My parents aren’t home.” You said while deadpanning.

“Oh. I didn’t know. I’m here now anyway, so who cares.” He laughed and hugged you tightly.

“Are you alright, Y/N?” Stan asked with genuine worry in his voice. “Me? I could ask you the same thing!” You exclaimed, waiving your hands around. “Why? I’m alright?” This just pissed you off.

“Seriously? I’m no fucking Kyle, Kenny, or Eric! I see that something is off. I see that something is going on inside you.” You poked his chest and continued your rant. “I’m not an idiot and care about you. For fucks sake. Sorry for cursing but you just won’t tell me what’s going on!”

You finished and took a deep breath, feeling relieved now that you spoke your mind. Stan was taken aback, holding his hands up in defense.

“Jeez, sorry for making you worry. I’m really alright. I was just bothered by some shit my idiot dad spoke about. He keeps talking stupid shit when he’s high with Towlie, shit like me having to take over the farm when I’m out of high school, so that he can become a “Weed-Grandpa”. That’s all, it’s nothing serious, I promise.”

Stan offered a hug to you and after a few seconds in which you thought about what he said, you went straight into his arms.

“You will tell me if there’s actually something going on, right?” “You will be the first one to know, babe. Thank you for caring so much about me.” You nodded, now feeling more relieved than ever.

“I’m sorry, for not telling you about the shit my dad said. I didn’t know it affected you this much.” A smile crept onto your face. “Please don’t actually tell me that shit your dad says when he’s high, I swear, he’s so weird sometimes.”

“Agreed.” Carefully, Stan navigated you to your bed and you two made yourself comfortable.

“For how long are you gonna stay?” You asked him, while you cuddled up to him. He pressed a sweet kiss onto your forehead and whispered:

“For as long as you need me.”

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maybedefinitely404 · 4 years ago

Text

Day 8: Moceit

@tsshipmonth2020

Day 8 - The temperature of your chest gets hotter when you are closer to your soulmate and colder when you move further away.

Content warnings (oh boy): This is an afterlife fic! Meaning there is technically character death, but it is essentially the beginning of a whole new life, and the death itself is only briefly touched upon. That being said, warnings for; hypothermia/frostbite, death, car accident, talk of past death, mention of cancer, brief description of body horror (no gore).

Word count: 2.8k

It started when Janus was two. His parents were awoken by his feral cries, throwing open the door to his room, imagining the worst. They recoiled immediately upon touching him, his skin almost freezing to the touch. They closed the bedroom window and piled him in more layers until he stopped wailing, but that was only the start.

When he was six, his mother explained soulmates to him. He looked at her with huge eyes, fiddling with the sleeves of his oversized hoodie, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

When he was ten, he had grown sick and tired of the constant cold. A majority of his classmates and friends hadn’t met their soulmates yet, but they all didn’t seem as bothered by it as he was. They didn’t keep their winter jackets on in class, no matter the season, and their hands were never too cold to hold a pencil.

When he was thirteen, he caught hypothermia. At the insistence of his older brother, he joined him outside in the snow for a hike in the forest. His countless layers and heat pads in his pockets only did so much when they got hopelessly lost in the woods, and while his brother seemed to be unaffected by the cold, Janus woke up the next day in the hospital. He could vaguely remember falling face first into the snow, his cold slowly morphing into pleasant warmth, his brother shouting his name. The doctors were unable to save his left eye, leaving him half blind, and his frostbite scars never quite disappeared. They said the very fact that he survived was some kind of miracle. He didn’t go into the snow after that.

When he was sixteen, his mother took him to a doctor. After thorough examination, the man could find nothing wrong with him. He suggested B-12 supplements and a list of ways to increase his circulation, and when that did nothing to help months later, he sat them both down in his office and explained it most likely meant Janus’ soulmate had died. Janus didn’t know until that moment that it was possible to miss someone you’ve never met, but he cried on the way home. His mom said nothing.

When he was eighteen, Janus was alone. He had become reclusive and standoffish, unwilling to spend time around any of the people who tried to befriend him. All of them had soulmates. All of them got to be happy.

When he was twenty, his family suggested group therapy for those who had lost their soulmates, and he had reluctantly gone to one session. For a moment, he felt at home, surrounded by other people in thick sweaters and jackets and gloves, until he learned that all of them had lost their soulmates after meeting them. They had been able to spend years together, enjoying each other’s company, before losing the love of their life. When he explained his situation, he was only met with the same sympathetic looks he’d received everywhere else in life, and he never went back.

When he was twenty-two, he graduated with his Bachelor’s degree in psychology. The crowd was the quietest it had been all night; no one knew this guy, but it felt wrong to not cheer at all. He shook the Dean’s hand with thick yellow gloves and took the diploma, ignoring the man’s confused raised eyebrow and walking away to the noise of half-hearted claps.

When he was twenty-five, life was okay. Not good, just okay. He’d found a lab job in the psychological social experiment aspect that paid decently and wasn’t a total bore. Most nights he was numb, especially after experiments that revolved around soulmates, so he turned on Netflix and poured a glass of wine and fell asleep on the couch, wrapped in a thick weighted blanket. Life is fine, he told himself. It could be worse.

And when Janus was twenty-seven, he died. It was an accident; a mix of a long tiring day and an ignored red light just as he was crossing the street. The car barreled through the intersection, other car horns blaring, and he looked up just in time to see the person looking down, probably on their phone. He’d never know. The impact was quick, and he didn’t even have time to feel pain before the world went dark. He was a little grateful for that.

It stayed dark for a long while after that. Well, in full honesty, he didn’t know how long it was. It felt like a long time, but it also felt extraordinarily short. The seconds turned to years and millennia became mere minutes, the very concept of time fading away just as he did. A minuscule part of him was still aware that he was conscious, and he probably should have been a little scared of that, because did that mean he was destined to float around as an unattached subconscious for eternity? A larger part of him was just relieved to finally rest, with the weight of student debt and an exhaustingly lonely life finally gone.

Until it wasn’t. The light crept into the center of his vision first and he grumbled in annoyance. Let me just enjoy it a second longer, he thought distantly, but the light didn’t listen as it slowly spread across his vision like molasses. For the first time in his life, he realized with a start, he didn’t feel cold. There was a heat in his chest that he’d never felt before, and he was scared when the darkness faded, so would the warmth.

“Janus, are you okay?” A desperate voice broke through his dark haze in whisps, slowly clearing the fog that had set in. It rambled on, “Oh, stupid question. You just died. Sorry! Can you see me?”

His vision lit up all the way, replacing the darkness but not taking away the heat. Perfect. He was about to answer no to the stranger’s question; there was just a blur of blue and white and green, until the figure loomed that much closer and came into focus. It was a man, probably his age, with bright blue eyes and floppy golden hair, his freckled nose just inches from Janus’. His eyes held concern but he was smiling like no tomorrow. The man seemed to realize when Janus could in fact see him clearly and backed away, holding out a hand to help him up. Why was he lying on the ground? Where was he?

That question was answered as soon as he took the offered hand, looking around him in shock. Apparently the dark void hadn’t held him for as long as he thought. A distant siren pierced the air, and people’s shouts rang over each other as they milled around the body in the street, his body. The car that had hit him was nowhere to be seen. It was all too surreal, too uncomfortable, and he turned back to the man standing in front of him. They were standing on the sidewalk, just meters away from the gruesome scene on the street, and Janus suddenly felt very lightheaded.

“I carried you away as soon as your soul formed. Didn’t want to overwhelm you when you opened your eyes for the first time.”

“I’m dead?”

“Yep,” The man answered just a bit too cheerfully, before noticing the newcomer’s expression and softening, “Sorry. I’ve been here for a while, the shock has kind of worn down.”

“What’s here?”

“The afterlife. Deathny World. Aliven’t. I’ve heard it all.”

“Ah,” Janus choked, trying to take in the environment around him without looking at his own dead body, or the paramedics that had just arrived on the scene. It looked like the real world, and obviously they were still in the real world to some extent since he was witnessing the aftereffects of his own death, but the subtle mist floating through the air was definitely new. It curled through the air gently, resting on every surface it could land on, coloring the world with soft rainbow hues. It was the real world, it was just as if he was seeing more of it for the first time. The parts that were invisible before. An orange tuft graced by his ear and he could just make out the sound of someone laughing, the smell of fresh bread, the taste of fresh jam on a summer morning. A smile tugged at his lips before he realized.

“Forgotten memories,” The man spoke up, as if reading his mind. “Every lost memory of every person winds up here. Mostly good ones, but some are bad. You’ll learn how to sift through them soon enough.”

Janus was finally able to pull himself away from the colorful world, staring into the bright eyes of the stranger. “Who are you?”

“I’m Patton,” he said with a new grin, scratching the back of his neck nervously, “I’m your soulmate.”

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

It took Janus a much longer time than he would have liked to admit to unfreeze from the revelation, Patton taking his hand gently and sinking them out to a new location. His stomach churned upon rising up, the new sensation making him nauseous. He didn’t recognize where they were, some cafe, and Patton gently pushed him into a seat before strolling up to the counter with no hesitation, starting a conversation with the barista and gesturing to Janus. The mist, the lost memories, were gone, replaced with a golden haze that gave the world a soft glow. The air was thick with the smell of coffee beans and cookies that instantly calmed Janus’ stomach. When Patton finally walked back to him, two mugs in hand, he explained.

“This is the soul world. We can pop in from the real world to this one whenever we want. Some souls choose to stay on one side predominantly, some switch back and forth a lot.”

“This single cafe is the soul world?”

“Oh! No, my bad! There’s a whole lot more outside. I’ll have to show you later. Right now, though, just relax. You’ve had a… long day, to say the least.” He pushed one of the cups into Janus’ grasp.

“What is it?” He asked skeptically. It looked like coffee, but who’s to say anything anymore.

“Whatever you want it to be. Think of your favorite drink, then try it.”

Janus narrowed his eyes but lifted the mug to his lifts, trying to think of a single drink he liked. His mind decided that this was the ideal moment to forget everything he ever drank in his entire short life, so when he finally took a sip, the liquid was disgustingly tasteless. Like warm water. He set the drink down, watching Patton intensely.

Janus took in his appearance, his general shock finally beginning to wear off. An open light blue button up over a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was pretty much Janus’ definition of cute, what with those stupidly adorable dimples and little golden locket hanging on his neck. If he’d met him when he was alive, he no doubt would have fallen head over heels for him.

“You’re my soulmate? How is that…” He cleared his throat, hoping he wasn’t blushing, “How is that possible?”

Patton hummed, wiping off what appeared to be a hot chocolate moustache, “I died when I was three. Cancer.”

“That’s awful.”

Patton shrugged, taking another sip, “It wasn’t great. I woke up by myself, still half wedged in my own corpse. It was terrifying. My parents were crying, and I tried to tell them I was there, somehow, but they couldn’t see me.”

“Totally not traumatic at all.”

The man actually laughed, despite the dark story, “I had to figure everything out for myself. Sinking down, navigating both worlds, how to control my own form… which you are doing surprisingly well at, by the way.”

Janus glanced down at himself. He definitely wasn’t alive, that much was sure, if the wisps of yellow smoke cascading down him were any indication. If he concentrated hard enough, the fog began to disappear, leaving him looking normal, albeit a bit paler. As soon as his mind drifted, however, the golden trails were back.

“This was the first place I was able to rise up in in this world. It’s kind of an easy access point. I popped up behind the counter, scared the living daylights out of Virgil.” He pointed to the barista who was currently chatting with another person ghost, laughing over identical mugs with them. “He’s been here a while. Two hundred years, give or take.”

Janus paled, the idea of eternity becoming just that much more real. “Oh…”

“Yeah. He kind of raised me. And then when I was old enough to understand, he explained that I’d left a soulmate behind. I cried for hours after that.” He smiled sadly, finally meeting Janus’ eyes.

“You knew my name,” The younger recalled suddenly, sitting up a little straighter, “Right when I was waking up, you said my name.”

Patton looked almost sheepish, focusing back on the cup between his hands, “After Virgil told me… I kind of made it my personal mission to find my soulmate. I spent a lot of time in the real world, years, trying to find you, and of course checking in on my parents sometimes. Ghosts don’t need sleep, we can sleep, if we want, but we don’t need to, so it was a constant search. And then, my parents both ended up in the hospital, long story, and I wanted to be there when they woke up. Make their transition into the new world a little easier than mine was,” His expression lit up, wiggling a little in his seat, “And while I was there, I stumbled across a certain young patient with severe frostbite and hypothermia.”

“Me.”

“Mmhm. And I felt this weird warmth in my chest, which is weird, because ghosts don’t really feel temperature. It didn’t last that long, just a couple seconds, really, but it was enough time to know.”

“The soulbond.”

“Yep.”

They both drank in unison. This time, Janus’ drink tasted like the unsweetened chamomile tea from the hospital. He made a sour face and put the cup back down. He stared into his reflection for a moment, almost captivated in the sloshing against the sides of the mug, before Patton spoke again.

“I spent most of my time in the alive-world after that. With you. And it sucked, because there was nothing I wanted more than to talk to you and hug you and just let you know I existed… you were so sad…”

“Yeah…” Janus mumbled, tapping the ridge of his cup with his fingernail. “Is that why you were at the accident?”

“I tried to stop it,” Patton whispered, a look of pure guilt crossing his face, “I couldn’t tug you back though, and you didn’t hear me. So the least I could do was pull you out when you formed and take you away from the crowd.”

The odd language was starting to confuse Janus, the weird differentiation between his soul and his body, the terminology regarding the soul world he didn’t understand… it was all just a lot.

“So… Do we age? You’re obviously not three anymore. But the barista doesn’t look two hundred.”

“Virgil. And… I don’t know.”

“Very comforting.”

“You’re sassy.”

“That I am.”

For the first time in a very long time, Janus’ lips twitched into a smile in response to the absolute beam on Patton’s face. No one had ever taken his snark as anything other than bitchiness, but this guy, his soulmate, seemed to love it.

“As far as I know, we won’t. I think I only aged along with you, and now that you’re here, we’re probably done.” He had finished his drink, the barista swooping in out of nowhere and plucking it from his grasp with an impish grin. Patton shouted his thanks as Virgil disappeared into the back room. “He’s been waiting to meet you for a long time. But he can be a handful, so we’ll save proper introductions until you’re settled. Speaking of which…” He stood up, smoothing out his shirt and offering his hand to Janus once more. “I can show you where residency is, if you’d like. It might be nice to take a nap, just to process.”

Janus considered. The vague sounding ‘residency’ was intriguing, but he was much too restless to sleep right now. He voiced as much. “Maybe later. Do you think you could show me around first?”

The grin Patton gave him was bright enough to power a city block. Janus took the extended hand and the man squealed, pulling him towards the door excitedly. Yeah. He was definitely already falling for the literal ball of sunshine that was his soulmate.

“One grand tour of the afterlife, coming up!”

#lywrites #tsshipmonth2020 #janus sanders #patton sanders #virgil sanders #sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #ts afterlife au #moceit #ts soulmate au #sanderssides #soulmate september #soulmateseptember

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tirednerd2012 · 3 years ago

Note

How about this idea: Ian is walking home from school one day and he gets kidnapped by one of barley's rivals wanting to take revenge on him or something and barley goes on a quest to save his little brother.

Bonus scene: while barley is struggling with the rivals, Ian manages to reach his staff and casts a spell at them and it saves barley, but Ian blacks out and he later wakes up in the hospital with barley and his mom beside him and Barley starts comforting him and have a brotherly moment.

Get ready for some angst with this one! Here you go! This will be the last one for the night. More to come tomorrow!

Barley was a lot of things. His mother and brother would call him loyal, annoying, exciting and overly protective. His friends would call him chill and a great dungeons master. His enemies, however, would call him a jackass or something of the sort. Just depends on the perspective.

The person who probably hated him most was his ex, Drew. He managed to avoid him. While Barley knew damn well he would never forget everything that man put him through, but he tried to move past it.

Especially after he crashed into the van, knocking Ian and Barley out and kidnapping them. He was going to kill Barley, but Ian insisted on taking his place. There was no changing Drew’s mind. He knew how much Ian meant to Barley and he knew that Barley would want nothing more than to protect Ian from him.

Barley still couldn’t sleep at night without hearing Ian’s screams and Drew’s laugh. He stabbed him, but apparently he survived. The wound wasn’t fatal and he was able to get to the hospital in time. Meaning someone was helping him, but Barley had no idea who.

Ian Lightfoot was walking home from school. Barley was working on his online classes and it was a nice day, so he decided against the bus. He texted his brother that he was on his way home and continued to make his way. He was about halfway there, on an older street that not many people lived in, when a car came speeding by.

Drew stepped out of the car. With a gun. Ian reached for his staff, but remembered he didn’t have it. He never took it to school.

“Well, well, if it isn’t little Ian. It’s been awhile, man,” he said. Ian went to run, but it seemed that Drew was reading his mind. “I wouldn’t do that. No one really lives in this neighborhood. I can shoot you.”

“Why can’t you just leave us alone?” Ian snapped. Drew walked over to him and yanked his bag and jacket off, revealing the scars from Ian’s last encounter with him.

“I’ll admit, that was pretty brave, what you did for your brother back there,” he said. Ian froze as Drew smiled at him. He hated this guy. He wanted him dead. Ian cursed his name more times than he could remember for what he did to Barley. He remembered checking in on them after Barley didn’t come home to see him choking the life out of his best friend.

“What do you want?” Ian asked, but his throat felt tight. Drew paused, looked at him with cold eyes before quickly grabbing a fistful of his hair and then slamming his head hard against the car. He collapsed and Ian felt the gravel on his cheek and his head spin. He couldn’t process a single thought, except his wrists being tied behind his back, a gag in his mouth and then his ankles tied.

Drew lifted him up without much effort and tossed him in the trunk of his card like he was nothing.

Barley looked at the clock. Ian texted him three hours ago saying he was on his way home, now he wasn’t answering his phone at all. He drove around everywhere looking, but there was no sign of him.

Worry and anger were building up in the oldest Lightfoot brother when Ian’s picture popped open on his phone. He grabbed it and answered within the first ring.

“Ian, where are you?”

“Sorry, babe, Ian can’t really come to the phone right now,” Barley fell over and landed on the chair when he heard that voice. His heart skipped a beat and he grabbed at his chest.

“Drew.”

“Who else?”

“Where’s Ian?” he demanded. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let him see you afraid. The video turned on and Barley saw Ian in a large dragon cage with a dead bolt lock on it. He tried to look at the background for clues, but couldn’t find any. He had no idea where Ian was. He felt his hands shake and he had trouble keeping the phone steady.

“Alive, but that’s about all I can give him,” Drew responded, indifferently. The camera focuses on Ian, desperately trying to get out of the cage. His forehead was bleeding and several of his scars had been reopened. “Say hi to Barley, Ian.”

“Barley, I’m okay. Whatever he wants, don’t give him!” Ian said, but Drew laughed and kicked the cage, causing Ian to fall in it. He grabbed a key, unlocked it and then dragged Ian out of the cage. Barley could tell from the position of the phone that Drew climbed on top of Ian.

“Hey, babe, does this look familiar?” he asked as he brought his hands around Ian’s neck. He began choking him.

“Stop! Stop. Drew you got me, where are you? I give up! You win!” Barley cried. He didn’t stop. He choked Ian out until his brother fell unconscious. Then he checked.

“He’s still breathing,” Drew informed him. “You have about, I dunno, it took us 3 hours to get here, you have 4 to get him before I kill him.”

“He has nothing to do with this, Drew. Please, if you’re going to kill anyone, kill me,” Barley offered. This was his mess, not Ian’s. His brother got involved because he loved him and wanted to protect Barley from this bastard.

“I could, but we both know this is much more painful to you. If you fail, his blood, your little brother’s blood, will be on your hands, Barley. If you get anyone else involved, I’ll kill him on the spot. I have nothing to lose, but you sure as hell do.”

With that, the phone call ended. Barley stood there for a second, stunned. Three hours to get wherever they were. That meant he had an hour to figure out exactly where that was, or he would be too late. There would be no room for error.

“I’m coming, Ian, I promise. Just hang in there.”

Barley, not proud of this part of the rescue mission, first threw up. He darted to the bathroom and felt all the stress turn to nausea. Then he panicked. One wrong move and Ian could be killed. His brother's life was in his hands.

He thought about Ian, alone, knocked out somewhere with someone who wanted to hurt him, and Barley is at least 3 hours away from him. He couldn't protect Ian and it hurt every fiber in his being.

Wait. Ian's laptop. He had it connected to his phone. Maybe he could find the phone's location on it. He ran up the stairs and went to Ian's desk. He looked up at the picture Ian took of the two of them at the park on day, hanging up on his wall. Then he shook his head. Focus, Barley.

He opened the computer, no password, and looked up the Find My Phone App. Sure enough, he found a location. Three hours away, north. He would have to pass the Manticore's Tavern (Maybe Corey would blow some shit up after he got Ian out?)

No, Drew said not to get anyone else involved. He had to listen, otherwise Ian would pay for his mistakes more.

He looked over and saw Ian's staff. It would be nice for Ian to have something to protect himself with. He grabbed it and his keys, left a note for his mom saying he'd be home soon, and then left. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he opened up a message.

Drew sent him a picture of Ian's back now covered in fresh cuts. Barley had to wipe his tears away to prevent from going off the road. He was going to kill Drew. Nothing would stop him this time. He would make sure the bastard was dead.

Was Ian awake? He must be scared out of his mind. He was just walking home from school and suddenly snatched away with the underline promise of death?

Barley drove as fast as he could. He gave it all he had in his van. According to Maps, Ian was in the middle of the woods. Barley could park the van a little bit away and take the rest on foot. That would give him the advantage of surprise. The only thing that truly mattered was getting Ian out of there as fast as possible.

He would need a hospital. If Barley parked far away, he would have to carry him, but that shouldn't be too hard. Ian was light and Barley had been able to carry him since the day he was born.

Barley had memories of Ian since the day he had been born. Who else could he say that about?

No, no, keep it together, Barley told himself. He made the three hour drive in two hours and thirty minutes. He pulled into the woods, grabbed his sword and Ian's staff and took off. He found a cabin and he crept close to it, listening through the backdoor.

"Barley's going to make you sorry!" he heard Ian's voice. While it was clearly pained, he managed to sound strong and determined. Barley tried to pinpoint the location.

"Your brother isn't here to save you, Ian. You're going to die for his mistakes."

"This isn't his fault! It's yours. My brother is the most amazing guy and you're the one who doesn't deserve him. I'm glad you two broke up. He is worth more than you ever could be."

Even when facing certain death, Ian defended his brother.

"You little shit."

Barley tried the backdoor and opened it quietly. He peaked in and saw in the living room, Ian was in the cage glaring at Drew. His back was pouring out with blood and his eyes showed how much pain he was in. He tried to stand strong, but his legs shook and he had to hold on to the bars to keep from collapsing. Drew was too busy enjoying Ian's suffering to see Barley coming out from behind.

He grabbed the guy and threw him away from Ian. He laid the staff down by the cage and went to look for the key when he felt something slice his back.

"Barley!" Ian cried out. Barley spun around and ducked just in time to avoid Drew's aim to his head. The two began fighting. Barley was terrified, yes, but his adrenaline and anger took over.

No one hurt his brother and got away with it.

Ian watched with horror as Barley and Drew fought. Drew was planning for this. He knew Barley would find them within no time. He knew everything to do to piss Barley off enough to get his mind so blinded by anger, Drew could kill him.

Drew managed to kick Barley in the stomach and his sword fell out of his hand. Ian saw his staff and reached for it. He didn't have much energy, and honestly, he had never felt so exhausted before in his life, let alone tried to use magic when it was like this. He didn't know what would happen.

But as he got the staff in his hands, Drew went in for the kill. Barley glanced over just in time to watch Ian's eyes fill with horror and his brother screamed bloody murder.

"No!" Ian remembered an explosion throwing him back, then nothing.

He woke up in a hospital. Most of his body was covered in bandages and he heard soft crying beside him. His mom was there, sobbing, her hands covering her face.

"Mom?" he asked. His throat burned and tightened and for a moment he wondered if she even heard him, but she looked up at him and cried with relief.

"Ian! Oh my God, my baby," she said and hugged him. It hurt, but he would never tell her that.

"What happened?"

His mom recounted the whole story of his kidnapping, Barley rescuing him, only for Drew to try and kill him, but Ian used magic that Barley had never seen before, It took everything he had, but he caused a throwback spell that was powerful enough to break the cage and get Drew away from Barley.

That's when he lost consciousness. Barley stopped the bleeding for all of his wounds before getting his brother to the hospital. He called his mom crying.

"Where is he?" Ian asked. His mom smiled sadly.

"He went outside to get some air. You've been out for hours now and it's- it's been a scary time. You had us so worried," she said, her voice thick with new tears. Ian managed to squeeze her hand just as Barley walked back in. Their eyes locked immediately.

"Ian," he said and ran over to him and hugged him tightly. Ian managed through the pain and found comfort leaning on his brother's shoulder.

"Barley, you're okay," he said, trying not to cry himself. Their mom stood up.

"I'm going to give you boys some time to talk. I need to check in with the doctors."

With that, it was just them. Barley sat down beside Ian and put his hand on top of the one without the IV. He didn't look Ian in the eyes anymore.

"Thank God you're okay," he said. "I'm so sorry, Ian. I didn't think Drew would go after you like that, but I promise I took care of it."

"What did you do?" Ian asked, but then the moment he asked it, he realized. Barley killed him.

"I made sure I took care of it this time," he answered. Then he shook his head. "But that doesn't matter. What matters is the fact you're here, you're going to be okay and you're safe."

Now that he was out of harm's way, Ian allowed himself to go through everything that happened. He was kidnapped and tortured. He was at the mercy of someone who hated his brother more than anything else in the world and the fact he was alive was a miracle.

But Barley saved him. He faced the man Ian knew he was secretly afraid of to save him. And he killed him. Barley, his sweet, lovable, teddy bear of a big brother, ended his life. Of course, he probably would have done the same thing in his position.

"I missed you," Ian said.

"I missed you, too. I'm glad you're okay," Barley said. Ian allowed his head to fall on to Barley's shoulder and in return, felt his brother's arms wrap around him carefully this time. They both cried. "I love you so much, Ian."

"I love you, too, Barley. I knew you were coming, even if I didn't want you to."

"Well, I can't let someone take you from us, now can I?" Barley responded, with a humorless chuckle. For the first time since this happened, Ian truly felt safe. Barley was here. Everything was going to be fine. "I'll never let anyone take you from me like that. Never."

#barley lightfoot #ian lightfoot #ian onward #barley onward #onward #onward pixar #iwlg

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izcana · 4 years ago

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“Darling, I’m Home!”

Disclaimer: I do not Teen Wolf. That credit goes to Jeff Davis. The only thing I own is the plot line. Enjoy! If I'm being honest here I might as well mention that I've never watched a single episode of Teen Wolf (:p) but I've read plenty of fanfiction about it and I did some research on fandom about the plot – hopefully, it's enough! It's canon-divergent anyway so I don't think it'd be that big of a deal but if anything (vital)'s wrong, please tell me so I can fix it straight away!

***

"When are you going to tell them you're married?" Laura asked after dodging yet another crowd of fans. "You can't go on like this forever, you know." Laura was probably right. She's always right. Yet Derek couldn't do it. Separating his personal life from his acting career was the best solution and he was standing by this. Derek felt bad for Stiles, his lovely mate, at home all alone and caring for the precious pups in his stomach. Despite all this...

"I can't, Lo," Derek mumbled, opening the door to the Camaro.

"Why not, Derek?" She demanded, pulling the door angrily, though not with her full force, of course. Being an Alpha wolf meant that she could have ripped the door off its hinges. "Cora announced her marriage to Scott a couple of months ago and she's doing just fine. Plus, if you tell them you're mated, the fans will leave you alone. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"It is, okay, Laura?" Derek glared at the window, pouting at nothing. He hit the horn, though it felt more like a tap to his Alpha senses. "Cora's...different."

"For your information, Der, she's also a very sought after actress. And don't go on saying how you're more popular than she is."

"I wasn't going to," Derek replied simply, rolling his eyes.

Laura flipped her hand dismissively and glared into her phone. Derek scowled at the car in front of him and beeped his horn.

"At least talk to Stiles about this, Derek," Laura implored, her eyes softening at the mention of the said Omega. There was practically no one in the Hale family who disliked Stiles; Talia dubbed him the most adorable little boy and though he wasn't the "ideal" Omega, no one (who mattered, at least) cared and loved Stiles all the same. Derek felt a wave of shame run over him once he remembered how much he's been neglecting the pregnant little were-fox. "He'll probably want you to stay with him. He's pregnant, Derek! Start thinking a little about your mate, shall we?"

"I am, Laura," Derek denied, though he agreed that he really ought to pay more attention to Stiles.

"Your heartbeat skipped. You agree with me, so stop lying!" Laura scolded. Derek silently cursed Alpha werewolf hearing.

"Whatever, Laura, I'll think about it." And that was that. End of the conversation.

***

Derek fumbled for the keys of his apartment, having finally shaken Laura off. "Darling, I'm home!" He called into the loft. Blank silence followed.

Derek wasn't too worried about it since he could hear his mate's heartbeat beating peacefully in the background and the peaceful smell of Stiles. Under normal circumstances, Stiles would already be awake since were-fox hearing was very sensitive (Derek could think about a million other things that were sensitive about his mate but that's beside the point) despite the fact that the bedroom was soundproofed. It only worked for were-wolves and were mainly for the benefit of the Hales, who dropped by at some of the most absurd times. However, after the pregnancy was discovered, Stiles had been sleeping a lot more and he seemed tired every day (not that Derek could blame him).

He stepped into the loft quietly, making sure to drop off his shoes next to the door as his mate had apparently cleaned the hallway earlier today, even though Derek had told him time and time again not to tire himself out – it wasn't good for the baby. Stiles refused to listen, though. Stiles was Stiles.

Perhaps, Stiles might actually listen to him when the pups are almost due...

He tip-toed around the enormous leather sofa Talia had insisted they get and into their shared bedroom. He took off his clothes carefully and stealthily walked to the washroom, turning the shower console to low so it wouldn't disturb Stiles, even though Derek was certain he'd wake soon if he hadn't woken already.

By the time Derek wrapped a towel around his waist and crept into his bedroom to get his clothes, Stiles was already awake, his slightly red-rimmed and puffy amber eyes staring sleepily back at Derek, nonetheless alert. "When did you get back?"

"Half an hour ago," Derek murmured gently. Stiles nodded and stretched, showing off the beautiful milky white skin and the swollen stomach that was full of Derek's pups. Derek and Stiles' pups. "Do you want anything to eat?" Derek now knew from experience that Stiles was always hungry and came up with the most peculiar food combinations.

"Yes, please," Stiles answered predictably. "Can you get some gherkins with whipped cream?" That was one of the "favourites".

Derek went to get the said "favourite". When he came back, Stiles was on the phone.

"Huh? Oh, that. Pause. No, no, he hasn't told me. Pause. Who told you? Pause. Oh, typical. Pause. I'll ask him. Pause. I'm wonderful, thanks. Pause. Bye, Cora! Visit whenever you want!"

"What did Cora want?" Derek asked, setting the cup of herbal tea and the plate of gherkins with whipped cream on the table.

"She told me that you and Laura talked about your career," Stiles said, scarfing down the gherkins. "When were you going to tell me?"

Knowing fully well that lying to Stiles was impossible (were-fox hearing and Stiles being Stiles) he admitted "Never."

"That's what I thought. Cora seemed to think so, too."

"Do you want me to?" Derek asked softly.

"Honestly? This is selfish of me, but I do. I wish you'd be around for my pregnancy. By the pace we're going at now, you won't even be there for the birth!" Stiles cries, and to Derek's horror, promptly burst into tears. He clutched at Derek weakly, as if willing for him never to leave again but not having the strength to stop him.

"It's not selfish, Honey, you're allowed to feel what you feel," he murmured softly into Stiles's peach-scented hair.

"But..b-but..." Stiles stuttered.

"But nothing. If that's what you want, Sweetheart, I'll tell my boss tomorrow to put me on paternal leave."

"I don't want to get in the way of your work, Alpha." That's when Derek knew Stiles was completely gone. He only called Derek "Alpha" if he was in heat or upset. "You seem to like acting so much, I didn't want to slow you down," he added pathetically.

"You're my mate, Stiles," Derek said, sighing. "You don't 'slow me down', you inspire me. Where did you get that idea? I love you."

"You're a movie star! Why are you still with me? You can get someone so much better," Stiles moaned sadly, clutching his stomach when the baby started kicking at his kidneys.

"Listen. I love you, only you, never anyone else, okay?" Derek said, staring straight at Stiles, who was avoiding his eyes.

"Okay," Stiles whispered, his eyes shining with tears. One slipped out and Derek wiped it away. "I believe you."

***

Should I keep doing a/b/o stories? Please tell me in the comments – I've been very interested in a/b/o recently but I didn't know whether I was good at writing it? If you want me to, I can definitely continue; practice makes perfect!

There will be a sequel in response to requests on Archive of Our Own.

Epilogue

#teen wolf #sterek #stiles x derek #alpha/beta/omega dynamics #a/b/o #tw #au #two-shot #mpreg #mpreg stiles #stiles stilinski #derek hale #laura hale #cora hale #scott mccall

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simply-trash5 · 4 years ago

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PuppetBoy

Okay Kankuro simps, got some more juice for ya! Seriously this was so fun to write. It is a college AU about Kankuro and a reader. I am pretty proud of it. I would love to write some things for you so PLEASE request. Seriously. I’ll even try smut (I’ve never written it before so we’ll see how it goes). Drop them in the ask box and if you like what you read you should totally tell me because i am a self conscious bean.

What the hell is that noise? You think to yourself as you look around. It sounded terrible. Whatever car was making that noise was definitely on it’s last leg. You nod your head realizing it was the same guy you see everyday parked across from the education building at your college. You could hear loud metal playing from the speakers and the windows shaking as he pulled into the lot. He jumped out,slammed the door and gave the tire a swift kick. Wow he’s kinda cute. He stood almost 6 ft. tall and had on a black hoodie that hung lightly over his brown hair. His black jeans had rips in the knees and you could see he was wearing scuffed black DocMartens. You continued to follow him with your eyes as he passed you walking toward the theatre building. He had an eyebrow ring and gauges. Oh shit, I think he caught me staring. He looked at you, scoffed and kept walking toward the theatre building. Is he a theatre major? You wondered to yourself. Maybe he just has to take a fine art credit. Letting your thoughts wander you pulled the straps on your bookbag tighter and walked to your class in the education building.

The class seemed to drag on forever, and you knew after that you had to go to your nannying job which would take up most of the evening. You wished that you didn’t have to have a job, but unfortunately scholarships didn’t cover all of your tuition. You grabbed your keys from your pocket and headed toward the parking lot. Climbing into your car you started the engine and began making your way to your job. You loved kids, so nannying was a great gig for you. When you arrived at the home of a doctor in your area you were greeted by a small boy with a large grin. “Ms. Y/N, can we go to the children’s theater today? Mom said we could go if it was okay with you, she even left my booster seat so you can drive!” You giggled and shrunk down to his height. “Well if your mom says it's okay, it's fine by me. Let’s grab your jacket and booster seat and we will leave.” The small child ran into the house. His mother approached you. “Thank you so much for watching Trevor,I know he is a handful but i'm rather fond of him.” You gave her a huge smile and told her that it was no problem and explained that you were going to take him to the children's theatre. She said her goodbyes and you walked into the house to retrieve the boys booster seat so that you all could make the 4:00 production of the Three Little Pigs.

The little boy sitting in front of you on the floor giggled wildly as a wolf puppet “ran” off stage. You smiled down at him. The curtains closed and the crowd gave them a round of applause. The stage hands and puppeteers began to disassemble the set so that they could get ready for the next show when you saw a familiar face. It's car boy. You smiled in his direction, and didn’t realize you may have looked at him a little too long. “Hey, take a picture, it will last longer.” The mysterious boy gave you an annoyed look and a blush began to creep up your face. He was wearing a tight black tshirt that showed off his muscular arms and his tattoo of a sandtimer on his forearm. “Come on Trevor, lets head home,” you said steering the young boy out of the theatre.

“Oh my god what did you say back?” your friend was screeching on the other side of the phone. “Well, see, I just kinda left.” you explained not wanting to relive the embarrassing moment. “Y/N, you have got to do something tomorrow. You’re going to see him in the parking lot and you don’t want it to be weird.” You were twirling your hair around your finger staring at your phone. “Y/N are you still there?” You snapped back to reality, “yeah, I think I will buy him a cup of coffee. I’m sure he never sleeps like the rest of us. He is a college student.” You both finished your conversation and you got ready for bed. You set your alarm early so that you could go to a coffee shop and grab him a coffee to make up for the awkward run-ins you had the last few days.

“God its early” you whined to yourself but got ready anyway. You had to make a better impression on puppet boy. You gathered your things and headed out the door and made your way to a local coffee shop. You grabbed your latte and then decided it was best to just give him black coffee. You drove to your college thinking about the handsome stranger all the way there. His brown hair was shaggy and fell right into his eyes, which you melted at the thought of his hair being pushed out of his face. Your mind started to drift to what your next move would be as you pulled into the parking lot. Okay, it's 7:45 he should be here any minute. Shit what should I do? In a moment of extreme confidence you grabbed a pen out of your backpack and messily scribbled your phone number on the side of the paper cup. God I hope this works. You took a deep breath and stepped out of the car. You could hear him coming for at least a mile. Alright Y/N you cannot chicken out now. He rolled in and slammed his car door as he had every morning for the earlier part of the semester. It's now or never, you've got this shit. You beelined toward his car. He realized you were approaching and looked at you with a strange face. You immediately got nervous. You just sat the coffee cup on the hood of his car, turned on your heel, and quickly walked to the education building. “HEY! HEY COME BACK!” You heard him calling after you as you continued on your way to class cursing yourself the entire time.

Buzz

You grabbed your phone from your pocket. An unknown number had sent you a text. “How do I know you didn’t drug this coffee so you can turn my corpse into a puppet?” you laughed at the text and a blush spread over your cheeks. “Now why would I do that?” you replied. You typed “Also that is oddly specific” “What can I say, I like puppets?” The conversation continued for the next few days. You saw him a few times on campus but you never spoke in person. He would send you funny memes and videos at all hours of the night. Apparently puppetboy is a night owl. “Um btw, we’ve been talking for days and I still don’t know your name. What should I call you.” “My name is Kankuro.” “Well Kankuro, my name is Y/N. Its nice to put a name with a face.”

Shit I’m never gonna finish this run. You thought to yourself as you continued to run on the treadmill. You had your headphones in and music blaring. You loved to run and hadn’t been to the gym in a few days due to all of your nannying obligations. Okay, only a half mile more to go, you thought to yourself as you pushed your body to keep running. Out of nowhere you felt a large calloused hand on your shoulder. You snapped your head “Hey listen creep I-” before you knew it you were falling only to be caught by Kankuro. “Y/N you falling for me already?” Kankuro flirted giving you a tight smirk. You were shocked, not only by the fall, but by the arms around you. They were strong and helped steady you with ease. He was wearing a dark grey tank top which showed his muscles and tattoo off wonderfully. His legs were muscular too and looked amazing in the black shorts he was wearing. In his other hand he had a pair of boxing gloves. You began to blush and he realized you were staring at him, imagining what he looked like under that tank top. Your hand crept up to your neck where you fiddled with your necklace. He gave you a small chuckle. “I’ve got to go spar with my buddy, but if you want to you can meet me out front in an hour.” You smiled and shook your head and he turned and walked away. The shorts hugged his bottom perfectly and the tank top showed his shoulder muscles. You could see another tattoo on his back. Was it puppet strings? You pursed your lips and began to blush. I would love to see those strings up close.

The hour wait seemed like the longest hour of your life. You waited out in front of the gym as he came bounding out the door. He was sweating and his shaggy hair was sticking to his forehead. He walked over to his car and opened the door. It made a horrendous screech as it opened and you stifled a laugh. “Whats so funny princess? Just for that we gotta walk to get food.” You blushed. Did he just call me princess? Why was that so hot? “Come on, I’m starving,” he said and began walking down the sidewalk. You walked hurriedly to match his long strides. Damn my short legs. “So Kankuro, where are we going?” he gave you a crooked grin. “Its a surprise.” You giggled and retorted “well how do I know you’re not trying to get me alone and turn my corpse into a puppet?” He gave you a devilish grin, “Well sweetheart lets find out.” Another pet name. Your face turned bright red and you stared at the sidewalk. You approach a deli that you frequent with your friends. “I love this place,” you exclaimed. “Well don’t be weird and actually order some food. I like a girl with an appetite.” You laughed and smiled. You ordered your usual and he ordered grabbing your food and heading outside to a table. You both began eating and chatting casually about your lives. You found out he loves horror movies, especially ones that feature creepy dolls or puppets. You also learned that he has a lot of horror memorabilia in his apartment and that he rarely sleeps. He boxes to keep himself busy when hes not working as a children’s puppeteer. He is studying theatre with concentrations in stage management and special effects makeup. “Kankuro, thats really fucking cool,” you said and began to tell him about yourself. You were studying to be a teacher and nannying as a job to make money for college. You lived in an apartment around the corner from the deli with a friend. “So Kankuro I noticed the sand timer on your arm, do you have any other tattoos?” He gave you another devilish grin.”Yeah I have a back piece that is marionette strings. I’ve loved puppets since I was little so I thought it would be cool. Do you have any tattoos?” You blushed. You stood and pulled up your athletic top to show a tattoo of your family's crest on your hip. You had to pull your shorts down ever so slightly revealing your black lacy underwear. He looked at the tattoo and then back to your face. “Thats a nice one,” he said and rubbed the back of his neck. The conversation continued and you all talked more about your semester and your family. You laughed and told him about how you liked to run and also about how you thought it was cool he was a boxer. “Maybe one day we can spar angel,” he flashed a smile in your direction and you smiled back at the thought. You both got up from the table and threw your trash away. It was dark and cool. You pulled your jacked tighter around your shoulders. “I guess I am going to walk home and let you get back to the gym.” Kankuro shook his head “absolutely not doll, its dark and I’m walking you home.” You blushed. Another pet name, this boy is gonna be the death of me.

You began walking toward your apartment and your hands brushed several times by accident. “Damn Y/N if you wanted to hold my hand that bad all you had to do was ask. I aim to please.” You blushed and then punched Kankuro. “Still want to spar?” you said cheekily. You both walked in silence but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was as if you had known him your whole life. The comfort of him walking beside you felt so nice. “Well this is my apartment.” You sighed and reached for the door.

BAM

The door slammed shut and you noticed a strong arm beside your face. Kankuro looked down at your lips and smirked. You began to blush. The tension was so thick. I swear im going to pass out. Your heart began racing as he leaned into you. Your back was pressed against the glass of the door with a strong arm beside your head. His other hand made its way to your tattooed hip, he drew circles over your ink with his calloused thumb. His hands were so large that you could feel his fingertips on your back. The heat rose to your cheeks. He leaned in and pressed a soft kiss against your lips. He pulled back, his hand still burning a hole into your hip bone. You opened your eyes to see a smirked Kankuro. You were in shock when he reached his other hand to brush a stray piece of hair out of your face. Your thoughts raced, you wanted nothing more to bring him up to your apartment and let him give you that devilish grin some more.

“Guess I’m not a killer princess. Text me.” He chuckled, turned on his heel and walked back toward the gym. You watched him until he walked out of sight. You were ready to see him again and maybe see more of that back tattoo.

#naruto #naruto oneshot #naruto fanfiction #naruto au #kankuro x reader #kankuro au #kankuro #kankuro imagines #naruto imagines #eeeeek #im v nervous #please like it kank simps #trash writes

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