#i was supposed to give a present about my goals for the next two quarters

[austerulous]

I’ve been in a meeting / training session for five hours now, send help. 🫠

[the-insomniac-emporium]

Lying (Next) To You (Cassandra Dimitrescu/Reader)

Fandom: Resident Evil: Village Rating: T+ for violence + language Warnings: Blood-drinking/general vampiric shenanigans Summary: There is no goal other than escape. You want out of this castle, no matter what you have to do, no matter the consequences. At first, the solution seems to lie with one of the very women you want to get away from. But what happens when you find yourself genuinely caring for her? Length: 5,934 words

Merely surviving had never been your intention. From day one in this foul place, this unholy castle, you had strived to escape. No matter what, you refused to allow such dismal grounds to be your grave. But leaving wouldn’t be as simple as walking out an unlocked door. It required manipulation, agility, and the willingness to screw over anyone who got in your way. Even those who you would have once called friends, or the closest thing you had to that among the servants. Was that something you were willing to do? Absolutely, without a shred of doubt in your mind. Someday, somehow, regardless of what it took, you’d get out and never look back. For now, though, all you can do is scheme…

—————————

Three targets, each incredibly difficult to get your hands on, each presenting their own unique challenges. Which would be easiest to charm? You were still debating that answer.

First was Bela: The eldest, most responsible, forced to be the “role model” for her sisters. A bookworm (a trait the two of you shared) who spent a fair amount of her freetime in the library. While not overtly cruel, she was still rather violent, especially in cases where she felt her family had been insulted. However, there were whispers that she had a secret weakness: Anxiety. None had caught her in the open throes of an attack and lived to tell the tale. But she had been overheard, more than once, quiet cries or shaking breaths. Trying to talk to her during one of these occasions could lead to gaining her affection- if you managed to do what no other had been capable of doing, that is.

Second was Daniela: The youngest, most excitable, eager to please and desperate to be pleased. Easily interacted with more maidens than either of her sisters, though not always in a good way. Getting her attention could mean getting pulled into her room in the middle of the night, for some “fun”, or it could mean getting drained of all of your blood. Sometimes she did one after the other. Like Bela, she was a bookworm, though she preferred romance novels as opposed to her older sister’s educational texts. As for her weakness? To you, Daniela seemed to be the definition of “undiagnosed ADHD”. Less exploitable for sympathy than her sister, but possibly useful in helping you trick her. At the end of the day, the largest concern with her was her inconsistent behavior, her tendency to flip moods at the drop of a hat- and a drop of the hat with her could feel a helluva lot like a drop of an axe (onto your neck).

Then came the third… the one you didn’t think was worth the risk, whatsoever: Cassandra. Middle child and acting just like it, she was hungry for her mother’s approval, attention, and respect most of all. Bloodthirsty as could be, with a mean streak eight kilometers wide, the truest monster you had ever met. Even her fondness for the arts manifested in malevolent ways. Supposedly, she painted in blood, and made sculptures from the bones of her victims, displayed proudly in her room as trophies. What could you possibly do to earn her affection? What could you ever be to her, other than a plaything or mid-afternoon snack?... Nothing, you assumed, and so you figured you might as well remove her from your list. Somehow you’d have to make do with one of her sisters. As for which one?... You decided to let fate decide, and go for whomever you found yourself with an opportunity to court.

—————————

Free time was a rare commodity in Castle Dimitrescu. While every servant did technically get one day off every week, it wasn’t uncommon to end up helping with something unexpected, even if one tried to hide away in the private quarters. For you, it was an opportune time to try and get closer to your targets. So far three weeks had passed since your “decision” to focus on Bela and Daniela, without a single interaction with either of them. Still, hope held fast in your chest, as you made haste towards the library. On this free day you intended to read as much as possible. ‘Twas a two-pronged goal: First, you would increase your chances of running into one of your preferred employers. Secondly, you could possibly learn something through what content you consumed, perhaps to be utilized in later conversations.

Or such was the hope. In truth, you did not make it to the library, nor even anywhere close. A quarter of the way there you were interrupted by an ever-dreaded noise; buzzing echoed throughout the hallway, first far off, but getting closer with every second. There was a particular ferocity to the vibrations that you knew meant danger was approaching. According to the other maidens, this was a distinction that everyone learned over time, assuming that they survived long enough. The smart thing would have been to duck away into an adjacent room in the hopes that whatever sister it was would ignore you. But your endgame weighed heavy on your mind, then forced your feet to the floor. For better or worse, you would be in the woman’s path, ready for whatever she may ask of you.

“You-” a voice snarled, as a hooded figure phased out of the swarm and into your vision. Her head was held high, eyes narrowed as they stared down at you, a snarl twisting her lips. Of course it was her. Cassandra Dimitrescu. The one daughter you didn’t want to encounter. Inside, part of you writhes in self deprecation, feeling as if you should have known better. How often did the other two buzz about so angrily?... Well, certainly a fair bit, but nowhere near as much as Cassandra. Fuck, you think, I’m probably doomed. “I’m hungry. Come here real quick,” Cassandra demands, beckoning you towards her with a single finger. In another life you would have blushed bright red at the sight. A life where she wasn’t a vampiric monster, that is.

Nonetheless, you are quick to obey, masking your anxiety as best as you can. Doing so gets much harder once your gaze meets Cassandra’s, and you see her lick her lips before smirking at you. As soon as you’re within her reach, she’s surging forward, grabbing you by your shoulders, then pivoting, pressing you hard against the wall. You can’t help but gasp at the sudden movements, which only widens her grin. Before you know it she’s running her tongue along your neck. Once more you gasp, this time softer, hating the way your body urges you to lean into her touch. Why couldn’t she simply get straight to the worst of it? Instead she takes her sweet time, slipping a finger beneath the collar of your shirt, slowly, carefully tugging it to the side. When she finally bites, it is terribly sudden. The pleasure comes before the pain, stronger than you would have expected, eliciting a sharp inhale from you that sounds more satisfied than you had intended. Even as a rush of pain follows, you can’t help the red that tints your cheeks.

“Enjoying this, hmm?” Cassandra asks, after licking away at your blood for a few moments, pulling back but not releasing you. Something in her eyes makes you need to respond.

“Y-yes, more than I’d like to admit,” you mumble, barely able to make eye contact. But she seems pleased by this, gently cupping your chin while she looks you over.

“Well then, if you survive… I might just have to drink from you again,” she whispers, before diving right back in towards your neck. This time her touch is far, far softer than before. It feels more like she’s kissing you rather than drinking from you. A strange, irritatingly familiar feeling springs in the pit of your stomach, and you can’t help but make more of those noises she seemed to enjoy so much. Hell, your eyes drift closed as you take in the surprisingly welcome sensation. When they reopen, however, you give a yelp of surprise, spotting a very awkwardly waiting servant. They were blushing, clearly not having expected to come upon this particular sight. Cassandra perks up at your shock, turning to follow your gaze, then giving an uncharacteristically resigned groan. “Damn it, Ava, is it urgent?” She asks, to which the servant gives a silent shrug. “I’ll be done in a minute. Now, where were we?”

Once more she resumes feeding, casting aside all traces of sweetness, sucking on your wound with reckless abandon. Behind her, Ava gives you a thumbs up before turning away. As embarrassing as the moment felt, you were grateful to xer, glad that xe seemed to recognize your desire for privacy. More than that… if xe hadn’t come along, would Cassandra have remembered to stop before your bloodloss became fatal? There was no guarantee either way. Yet xer intervention felt like a godsend, and you made a mental note to thank xer later. Soon enough Cassandra removes herself from you, pausing only to cup your chin for a moment, meeting your gaze with a smirk. Then she was turning away without another word, following Ava to some unknown destination.

A deep breath, then another, more frantic, the familiar sense of panic growing on the edges of your mind. Now that the feeding was over, you were left trembling with all the fear you had been so adamant about not showing before. How close to death had you come? How close were you now? Only feeling slightly more faint than you had earlier, it felt safe enough to assume you would be fine, if only physically. Inside your mind you were struggling with racing thought after racing thought. How the hell am I supposed to do this with either Bela or Daniela? You think, trying to breathe past the lump in your throat. And why did I have to enjoy that so much? They’re nothing more than means to an end, monsters undeserving of my kindness, of my joy. Your only comfort was the knowledge that this may very well have been the opportunity you had been waiting for; but only if you could shift your aim.

—————————

The difference was subtle, almost microscopic, to the point where it took you a full week to notice. But once you had? Everything felt different. You couldn’t spend more than three seconds in the same room as Cassandra without her eyes following you, watching your every move, sending a rush of both fear and excitement down your spine. Meeting her gaze only made her give the tiniest fraction of a smile. As soon as something (or someone) else caught her attention, however, you were forgotten in the blink of an eye. Yet it was nerve wracking nonetheless. This was roughly what you had hoped for, but you had underestimated the mental toll it would take on you. There was no way to tell whether Cassandra wanted violence, something softer, or her usual brand- a cruel mixture of both. Every second spent in her presence was a roll of the dice, a flip of a coin, either one weighted to put the odds against you.

But you persisted. Escape was not a dream, nor a fantasy, nor some far off cryptid. It was inevitable. Again and again you would swallow your fear until you reached your long-sought destination. No matter the cost, you think, no matter the consequences. Over time, that cost, those consequences, would grow. For now, it was a slice of your sanity. Next? More blood, it seemed.

“Casserole wants you to stop by her art studio,” the note said, cursive hand-writing ever-so-fancy and ever-so-difficult to read. Clearly from Ava, the mildly mysterious (but incredibly helpful) castle servant known for never speaking a word. From what you had gathered, xe was a confidant of sorts for the Dimitrescu family, trusted far more than the average worker. Alas, xe was loyal to the center of xer being, and was rumored to be impeccable at preventing escape attempts before they had even started. If you wanted out of this damn place, you knew you’d have to be careful around xer. Hopefully xe won’t interrupt this time, you think, before tucking the note away in your pocket.

Cassandra’s infamous studio wasn’t terribly far from your quarters, thankfully, though you weren’t even sure if you were supposed to arrive at a specific time. What if she wasn’t expecting you until later? Worse, what if she had been expecting you an hour ago? It’s a dangerous thought, one that could easily spiral into something far more drastic, and you try to reassure yourself, reminding yourself that Ava would have mentioned a time if it was important. In the end, you still found your heart racing as you stood outside the room in question. Pausing to take a deep breath, you center yourself, before raising a hand to knock. To your surprise, you get an answer before your hand even gets close to the door.

“Come in already,” Cassandra chimes from inside. Unsure of what terrible fate you were about to meet, you entered the room, somewhat reluctantly. Despite the myriad of unsavory rumors regarding the studio, there were no immediate signs of brutality. At the worst, the space was fairly messy, though not due to any, ahem, “misplaced” body parts. No, just an overflowing garbage bin, a few unfinished projects placed haphazardly wherever they’d fit, shards of glass in one corner, and tile floor splattered with a Pollock-esque layer of paint. In one word? Chaotic. Such was the type of environment that seemed to suit Cassandra best, the sort in which you imagined she would thrive. But you didn’t have time to examine anything as closely as you would have liked to. “Are you going to keep me waiting?”

“No, Lady Cassandra,” you reply, hurriedly, shaking your head to clear your thoughts. Then you’re quickly crossing the room, to what looks like a cross between a storage cabinet and a paint mixing station. In Cassandra’s hands, however, you find something less welcoming than a paintbrush: A needle and an empty blood bag. Well, you think, I guess I know why I’m here. At least there’s only one bag, right? “What do you require of me, my Lady?” While the answer was fairly obvious, you didn’t know the specific steps necessary, and it never hurt to be as polite as possible with the Dimitrescu family.

“Just sit down, roll your sleeves up, look pretty, and stay still. Try not to make any noises this time- as cute as they were last time, I have a headache,” Cassandra explains, gesturing towards the room’s only chair. Ignoring the way your cheeks heated up, you did as she asked, trying to get relatively comfortable. It was somewhat difficult to relax, considering who you were with. “Calm down, pet, I’m only going to hurt you a little. That’s more than I can say for most people who end up here.” Why did she have to use a nickname for you? Weren’t you already flushed enough without her teasing you further? Though your flustering does turn to confusion after a moment, as you wonder how she knew how afraid you were. You were under the impression that you were hiding it fairly well. Noticing your reaction, Cassandra rolls her eyes, before leaning in to whisper in your ear. “I can hear your heartbeat. Normally I’d find this… exciting. But my head hurts and I wanted to finish this damn painting yesterday. So take a deep breath, little pet, and let me take what I need from you.”

Of course she had to say it like that, and put herself so close to you. You’re pretty sure that your heart skips a few beats in response, though Cassandra doesn’t react beyond a hint of a smile, merely returning to her prep work. First step was cleaning your skin. Admittedly you hadn’t been sure if that step was necessary, seeing as the blood was (seemingly) for art as opposed to testing, but it didn’t exactly surprise you. Besides, there was a chance she’d drink the leftovers, right? Next she double-checked that the needle was properly connected to the blood bag, and that the latter was resting securely on a small stand. With that out of the way, it was time for her favorite part.

“Since your heartbeat has slowed down a little… I’ll let you whimper if you want to- but only once. Consider it a reward for good behavior,” Cassandra purrs with a familiar grin. One hand gently cups your chin, while her eyes look right in yours, just long enough to turn your cheeks bright red. The moment ends as quickly as it started. Before you know it she’s turned stoic again, feeling along your arm for a vein. This isn’t the first time you’ve had your blood drawn, but Cassandra takes no time at all to find the perfect spot, likely from a mix of practice and, well, her vampiric nature. It’s not long before she’s gently gripping your arm with one hand, briefly making eye contact before pushing the needle into your skin. Does it hurt? Hardly. Do you take a shaky inhale, hoping to please your employer, the closest to a whimper you were willing to give her? Oh, absolutely. And does she react? Oh, absolutely. Her eyes light up for a second as she bites her lower lip. There’s something else in her expression that you can’t quite read, however.

“Enjoying this, hmm?” You ask, smiling, voice soft in the hopes of not aggravating her headache. It’s a risk, and one that pays off more than you’d ever expect. Cassandra giggles a tad, eying you with the least mischievous smile you’ve ever seen from her. If not for the needle still in your arm, you might have found the moment charming, or even… romantic. But you pushed the thought away as soon as possible, reminding yourself of your one true goal: Escaping. This was a means to an end. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what you had to keep telling yourself. Even as Cassandra ever-so-gently removed the needle from your arm, even as she carefully placed a bandage over the entry-point, even as she gave you a nod of approval.

“This should last until the painting is done, at the very least. I might need you to make another ‘donation’ next week, though. Except, hmm… your blood is quite nice,” Cassandra says. Her tone is smooth, almost sultry, but her gaze is focused on her work as she starts mixing the blood with… something? You weren’t familiar with this particular artistic process, nor did you want to be. “Maybe I’ll set up a nice schedule for you. Once a month you can be my darling little muse, and once a month you can be a refreshing snack. I’ll even make sure that my sisters don’t do anything that might spoil our fun. Assuming you continue to prove entertaining, that is.” You didn’t know whether to feel relieved or worried. In the end you settled for the former, chest thrumming with excitement as you felt yourself getting one step closer to your goal.

—————————

Three months pass by in an easy blur. Just as Cassandra had suggested, you find yourself in her company more often than before. Only twice a month does she take blood from you, for your own safety (which she pretends not to care about), but more and more you find her lounging around where you’re working, obviously by “pure coincidence”. Sometimes she even spoke to you! Teasing here and there, or asking you to do things that she normally did for herself, or scaring you just to hear you make one of your “lovely noises”. Honestly, you weren’t sure whether you were more surprised by how attached she had gotten to you, or by how quickly it had happened. Of course, you didn’t even know if she enjoyed your personality… or just your blood. Either way, you found yourself enjoying her presence more than you’d ever openly admit.

Eventually, when the benefits of your budding “friendship” became more clear, you started to enjoy it even more.

It was early in the morning, right when the castle residents tended to go to sleep, and when the night shift officially ended. Minutes prior you had been conversing quietly with Cassandra, dusting some shelves as you did. Now, with your duties done only slightly later than usual, you were making your way back to your quarters. Along the way you were caught off guard by the sound of distant crying. ‘Twas a sound you’d heard many times before, from many different maidens, but this time felt… different. An odd feeling of sympathy sparked in your chest, and you made the brash decision to approach the source of the noise. When you rounded that last corner, when you made eye contact with the trembling figure, you knew that your kindness could very well be the death of you. To think that you had once hoped for this encounter.

“Who’s there?” Bela Dimitrescu snarls through chattering teeth. She’s moving forward, phasing in and out of swarm mode, reaching a hand out to clutch at your throat. Well, you think, at least she’s stopped crying? More so out of being distracted, instead of feeling any comfort from your company. It’s not a terribly reassuring thought, but it’s soon replaced with a mental string of ???? as Bela pauses, grip loosening as she holds you up in the light. “You’re Cassandra’s new favorite. Damnit!” With that she drops you rather unceremoniously. Then she’s turning her back to you, sniffling before wiping the tears from her eyes. “Don’t tell anyone about this, or I won’t hesitate to string you up, no matter what my sister says. Now get lost.”

Except you can’t force yourself to move. There’s a small piece of you that remembers your original plan, another small part feels a twinge of sympathy, and a majority of your brain sees this as an opportunity. What was a little more risk?

“Would you like me to bring you some tea, Lady Bela?” You ask, attempting to keep your tone neutral, lest she think you were judging her. In response, she turns to look at you slowly, eyes narrowed, thinly veiled rage only outweighed by the remnants of her anxiety. Then she’s stalking forward with cautious, deliberate movements. For a moment she searches your eyes for any hints at your motive. Hoping to ease her worries, you elaborated on your offer, and the reasoning behind it. “I’ve read that holding something warm in your hands, like a mug of tea or coffee, relaxes the brain. I believe it had something to do with mimicking human touch?... Forgive me if I’m overstepping your boundaries, my Lady. I… I felt compelled to ask, to help in whatever way I can.”

“Oh?” Bela hums, the majority of the anger draining from her face. There’s a hint of genuine surprise behind her bright eyes. “Very well, if you say it might… help.” Before you can turn to leave, you hear her clear her throat, and say one last thing. “A little softer than I would have expected from a pet of Cassandra’s.” She certainly had a point. But you don’t bother responding, instead focusing on your self-given task. In the back of your mind, you wonder if you were really Cassandra’s “pet”, or if there was more to your dynamic. Why did you feel so weird about the idea of being a mere “distraction” to her?... Something to think about while you made that tea, you supposed.

—————————

When you assisted with serving lunch the next day, Bela refused to make eye contact, even as you set a plate in front of her, or when you refilled her wine glass. There was a stiffness in the room that you weren’t familiar with. For the most part, Cassandra is more welcoming, giving you a small nod when you meet her gaze. By the time the family is done eating and moves to leave, the sisters are grouping together to speak in hushed voices. While you clean up after them, you cannot help but wonder if they’re discussing the previous night, or if Bela was as adamant about keeping quiet as she had seemed. Regardless, you felt rather good about how the conversation had gone. Hopefully she’s feeling better, you think, surprising yourself. Not that it matters… unless she tells Cassandra, I suppose.

You don’t see her for the rest of the day. It’s a double-edged sword, in a way. On one hand, you find yourself missing her, unused to not interacting with her at all. On the other hand? All the sudden you’re realizing just how involved she’s become with you. Certainly that meant something? Progress towards your eventual goal of escaping? God, you sure hoped so. Thinking about the future, about your plans, lasts you the entire night, thoughts following you all the way into bed. Sleep feels a million years away, and you find yourself staring silently at the ceiling. Unmoving. Damn near unblinking. When there’s the sound of footsteps outside your room, you are more than welcome for the distraction.

“Wake up, little pet,” a voice calls, as your door opens, and someone quickly slips inside. Before you can even sit up, you feel them slide into the bed with you. “It’s too cold in my room. You’re much warmer, aren’t you?” Clearly your darling Cassandra come to entertain herself. Considering how late in the day it is, you feel like you should be upset, and yet you feel yourself daring to wrap your arms around her. For a moment she goes stiff, but she soon relaxes into your touch. “You’re getting so good at knowing what I want from you. Mmm, I think I’ve trained you well,” she teases, shifting onto her back so she can pull you onto her chest. Although you’ve been this close to her before, this is the first time you’ve realized just how cold her skin is. No wonder she wants to sleep with me, you think, blushing at your unintentional wording.

“Fuck, you’re freezing,” you mumble, curling up against her nonetheless. She’s laughing then, without any hint of her usual malice, and you can’t help but laugh with her. When had the two of you gotten so warm with each other? Why did it feel so natural? There’s anxiety gnawing at the base of your skull, threatening to build up into a headache, tugging you away from the softness of the moment. If Cassandra notices, she’s quicker to act than you would have expected. It feels safer to believe that her next actions are a coincidence. Feels… better, when you remember that you are playing her for cheap, that any friendliness is a mockery made for the most bitter of betrayals to come.

“That’s why I’m here, dear. Now hush, I need some rest. With how comfortable you are… I may even let you sleep in,” she teases, before pressing the gentlest kiss to the top of your head. Your throat dries up in response, blush overtaking your cheeks, and you are left unable to speak. The thundering of your heart seems to somehow lull your would-be lover to sleep, while you find yourself growing to love the contrast her chill provides. Somehow, someway, you end up sleeping more soundly than you have in years.

—————————

Another month passes. No opportunities to escape, no grand moves to make in this 4D game of chess, no clever plans to entangle yourself in. Yet you find yourself content. Happy. The work keeps you as busy as ever, but Cassandra often steals you away for her own desires. When she goes to drink your blood, she does so gently, with many soft kisses leading into the big moment. Afterwards she cleans your wound herself, touches as light as a feather, eyes sparkling with unspoken affection. At night, you find her coming to you for warmth almost every day. At first she provides little more than teasing excuses. But in time, she becomes more open, even being so bold as to kiss you on the lips every time, greeting you with quiet “dear”s and “darling”s. It gets to the poin that you cannot sleep without her presence.

Day after day, you find it harder and harder to remember why you were doing this. Was it so bad to enjoy your time with her? Was it so bad to find yourself leaning into her touches, kissing her back, gleefully awaiting your nightly rendezvous with her? Sometimes the thoughts were overwhelming, guilt and shame alike dancing inside your chest. Those days were the hardest to get through. Somehow, again and again, you go to her for comfort. To the very source of your conflict. Every last feeling was driving you towards an inevitable point. A conclusion written in stone, one that had been decided from the very first time Cassandra dug her fangs into your neck.

—————————

Screaming. Horrible, horrible screaming, somehow more pained than that of any maiden you had ever heard, echoing throughout the castle halls, achingly familiar in tone. You had never heard her scream before, and yet you knew that the sound came from Cassandra. Before you can even begin to process your realization, you are thundering through the corridor, towards the noise that rattled your mind so desperately. How could anything possibly hurt her? How often had you seen her push her siblings around, each of them taking hits that could break bones as if they were light shoves? As if the punches tickled? Horror overtakes your thoughts, imagination far worse than reality had any right to be.

When you at last reach your lover, you are frozen in your tracks, eyes wide as can be. There she is, howling with both rage and pain as someone repeatedly slams the butt of a rifle into her head. Behind the fighting duo is a sight you never thought you’d see: An open door. Wide open, enticing, leading straight into the world you had sought to rejoin. You want to leave. God, you want to leave so bad. This is what you have been waiting for- Cassandra has not even seen you yet, too busy grappling with her attacker, movements too slow to be normal. What was wrong? Why were her limbs such a strange color? Was that… frost on her clothes? Or… crystal? Your gaze flickers back and forth between her and the exit, as time seems to pause, memories of the past few months racing through your mind. Goddamnit, you think, this is what I want, isn’t it? Consequences be damned, right? I said I wouldn’t stop for anything.

And so you move, automatically, on autopilot, unable to think about anything other than what you treasured most: Cassandra. One moment you’re standing still in the foyer, the next you’re grabbing a poker from the fireplace. You’ve never done anything like this before, but the movements come naturally, as you surge towards the scrambling pair. In one swift motion you drive the metal rod into the skull of the intruder, hating the sound, hating the splatter of blood against your clothes, hating the feeling of resistance followed by a terrible, terrible give. But the man slumps almost immediately, allowing your girlfriend to shove him off of herself. Still unable to think coherently, you’re throwing yourself into her arms.

“Holy shit, holy shit, oh my god, I- I, fuck. Are you…? Fucking tell me that you’re okay, please,” you ramble, holding the dangerously cold body of your girlfriend close to you, refusing to let go. She’s crying, clinging to you as desperately as you cling to her. But she’s responding in the affirmative. Over and over, saying she’s okay, telling you that it’s okay. Before you know it, she’s the one comforting you.

“Hey, hey, look at me. Okay? Look at me, take a deep breath. If anyone should be freaking out it’s me,” she says, pulling back enough to cup your cheek with one hand. There’s blood on her fingers, making your eyes go wide, but she quickly wipes it off with a scowl. Then she’s caressing your skin again, soft repeating motions perfect for calming you down. “That’s right, see? We’re fine. You’re a fucking badass, darling, and honestly? It’s very attractive.” Now you’re both giggling, you a bit more than her. Because of course she’s flirting right now. It’s an incredible softness. One that you, quite frankly, do not feel you deserve. At first it’s a tiny voice in the back of your head, but it soon grows until it strikes the smile from your lips. “Hey, hey, what’s wrong? Shit, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, really,” you interject, as fast as you can, ignoring the tears pricking the corners of your eyes. Cassandra isn’t convinced, however, and gives you a pleading look. Knowing that you cannot resist her, you close your eyes, sighing, then admit your wretched truth. “The door. Cassandra, the door’s open. I… I came down the hallway and I saw the two of you and I saw the fucking door and I… I hesitated. I hesitated.” There’s a mighty tremble to your voice, teeth and lips shaking. In the moment, you cannot bring yourself to meet her gaze, eyes instead glued to the bloodstained floor. It’s so quiet that you swear you can hear your tears hitting the tile. The air around you is filled with a looming heartache, a shadow over the two of you, hungry for your tears. But the rage you anticipate from Cassandra never comes.

For fuck’s sake, she pulls you closer. She takes you in her arms, making you rest your head against her chest, one hand gently rubbing circles into your back. Shock makes you unable to do anything other than linger limply in her grip. Thankfully, she has more than enough words for the both of you.

“Of course you did. All you ever wanted was to escape, right? And all I ever wanted was to see how much fun I could get out of you before you betrayed us,” she admits, coolly, as if the words didn’t break both of your hearts. At first, you merely start crying harder, realizing that she had seen through you this whole time. Realizing that all of her softness had just been sharpness covered in sheep’s clothing. Except she’s not done talking. “Now look at us. Couple of idiots who caught feelings. So shut up, because we’re in this mess together, now, and I don’t intend to let you go, understood? You-” she pulls back, looking you right in the eyes- “are mine. Besides… you just killed for me. I think that more than makes up for any hesitance, yeah?” Before you know it you’re kissing her. You’re pressing yourself to her, smiling through your tears, forced to pause to laugh at yourself. How ridiculous had this whole affair been? How had you convinced yourself, for so long, that escape was all you had cared about?...

All this time you thought you wanted out. But at the end of the day… you just wanted to go home. How could you have guessed that you would have found a new home, here, in someone’s arms? Despite the surprise of it all… you couldn’t be happier.

[startrekacademy2161]

Savior

Pairing: Jim Kirk x Reader

Word Count: 1545

Rating: PG, no warning except general stupidity.

A/N: I posted this to AO3. This is a Song!Fic based off Savior by Rise Against. I do not own any of the characters or the song. This is my first story here in a very long time, go easy on me. Enjoy :)

“It kills me not to know this, but I've all but just forgotten what the color of her eyes were and her scars or how she got them,” Jim leaned back on his stool as McCoy poured them each another round. Jim had loved you so much, yet now looking back, he scarcely remembered the things that made you you. Leonard didn’t have to say anything, he just regarded the Captain silently. Jim didn’t need to hear what wise words the doctor could have imparted, Jim already knew that he had missed out on the greatest thing in his life because you had both been young, dumb, and toxic to each other. 

As the telling signs of age rain down

A single tear is dropping

Through the valleys of an aging face 

That this world has forgotten

You sat at the bar like you did most nights in the town that had alway been your prison. You had had huge dreams and unimaginable goals for yourself, but you had never acted on any of it. Maybe you had always hoped that he would saunter back into that bar one night and tell you that he loved you. You had heard that he went on to become Captain of a starship. He had long since moved on from you, why couldn’t you do the same. 

There is no reconciliation

That will put me in my place

And there is no time like the present

To drink these draining seconds

Leonard can tell that the Captain had had enough to drink. Jim always grabbed up his comm badge and tried to call you, but no one knew where to find you and Leonard hoped that you had moved on.

Guilt. That was the only emotion that Jim could muster up where you were mentioned. He had been so stupid and so wild. Had he dialed it back a few notches, maybe you would have been right there with him. 

Flashback:

But seldom do these words ring true

When I'm constantly failing you

Walls that we just can't break through

Until we disappear

“(Y/N), will you just stop?” you flung the last of your clothes into your suitcase and you just needed your keys. “Can we please just talk about it? I said I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was tonight.” You stopped in your tracks and glared at Jim. He was so arrogant and full of himself, of course he didn’t remember something that was about you. For you. 

Jim had missed dinner with you and your parents. He was supposed to meet them tonight since you two had been dating for several months. An hour had passed and your parents had tried to be polite and patient. Two hours came and went and your parents took pity on you and came up with a reason they could stick around. 

So tell me now

If this ain't love then how do we get out?

'Cause I don't know

“How can you stand here and tell me you didn’t know it was tonight? You picked the restaurant. You made the reservations!” You shoved past him, bag in hand and ran out the door before he could try to talk his way out of his mess. 

“I understand why you hate me, (Y/N), I really do,” he grabbed your arm as you went to hop in your truck, “Can we please talk? I don’t want us to leave it like this. Where will you go?” 

That's when she said

"I don't hate you boy, I just want to save you. While there's still something left to save" Jim dropped his hand. Was he so far gone? She was giving up on him. 

That's when I told her, 

"I love you girl, but I'm not the answer for the questions that you still have" With that she got in the truck and peeled out. 

And the day pressed on like crushing weights

For no man does it ever wait

Like memories of dying days

That deafen us like hurricanes

The next morning, Jim woke up with what could only be described as the mother of all hangovers. Leonard had stopped pouring, but that hadn’t stopped Jim for going back to his quarters and continuing the Pity Party for one. 

He ambled into the MedBay where a very unimpressed Leonard McCoy sat waiting. 

“It’s like clockwork with you, Jim.” Leonard grabbed him by the shoulders and guided him to the nearest biobed. “Just once I wish you would remember to stay hydrated while drinking so the entire crew doesn’t find out that their captain is hungover again.”

“Five years in space. It was supposed to be a good time. It was supposed to be adventure.” Jim laid back on the bed, hoping the room would stop spinning. “Now I am alone, and everytime we discover something new, the only thing I can think is ‘(Y/N) would have loved this’.” Jim glanced at Leonard. Of course the Deep space solitude was getting to even their fearless leader. 

“Jim, did you ever try calling her? Did you ever reach out?” Leonard was an expert at failed relationships. Communication was something that had always been lacking in his marriage and he knew that the Jim of their youth may have never shut up, but that didn’t mean he was saying what needed to be said.

Bathed in flames we held the brand

Uncurled the fingers in your hand

Pressed into the flesh like sand

Now do you understand?

"I don't hate you boy, I just want to save you. While there's still something left to save" He remembered her (Y/E/C) as the nameless foe took aim. His last thoughts were of the fight you had. His one regret out of all the stupid things he had done, was letting you down. He hoped that wherever you were, you had found happiness with someone who treated you right. 

"I love you girl, but I'm not the answer for the questions that you still have" Jim mumbled to himself as a warm, swirling energy surrounded him. 

One thousand miles away

There's nothing left to say

But so much left that I don't know

We never had a choice

This world is too much noise

It takes me under

It takes me under once again 

Naturally his mother knew where to find you. So when he called and told her of his plans to fly planet side to see you as soon as the mission was over, she knew right where he should look. You weren’t sitting at the bar tonight, you were behind it. You had sat there for so long that you could run that place almost single handedly with little training. Jim took a seat at the far end, near the door in case he chickened out. That became unlikely when a familiar frame took up residence next to him. 

“Moral support, before you ask. And also, you aren’t getting out of it that easily. I have heard you moan and groan about her for years. Do something about it.” Bones didn’t look at Jim, just flagged you down so he could order. 

“What can I,” you trailed off when you saw Jim sitting there too, “What will it be gentlemen?” Putting on your best customer service voice, you got their orders and walked away. Some patrons noticed the lack of banter that you usually had with the folks at the bar, but they just assumed that Jim and Bones were Fleeters. You usually kept it short and sweet with starfleet personnel. No one new why. 

You brought the drinks and burgers back to the duo and went about your bartending.

“You really messed that one up, Jim. She hasn’t acknowledged us and my pint is suffering for it.” Leonard flagged you back down and you took your sweet time coming back to their end of the bar. “Can I get another? I’m going to need it, I think.” You chuckled.

“With your choice of friends, I don’t doubt that.” You poured the second pint for Bones and brought it back. “On the house, Doc.” 

“How did you,” you just winked and walked away. You wouldn’t admit to how closely you followed Jim’s career. Most of the senior officers aboard the Enterprise could be easily identified by you with just a glance at this point. 

“(Y/N). Outside. Now.” Jim apparently was feeling a type of way now and you nodded to the cook to hold down the fort while you dealt with Jim.

“What the hell, Jim?” you crossed your arms over your chest and set in on him before the door had even shut. You heard McCoy whistle. “I haven’t heard from you in years… Years, Jim,” you were getting closer and closer to him with every word.

Jim didn’t say anything, just grabbed you and pulled you in for a kiss. The smack was expected. The second kiss was not. 

I don't hate you

I don't hate you, no

They still had much to discuss and much more to work through, but at least it was clear to both of them that the other was not happy and that they still loved each other.

[the-odd-job]

Up in Flames chapter 24 - Take Me, Although You Hate Me (Ashes Part 2)

Rating: Explicit Warnings: Major Character Death, Chose Not to Use Category: Other Fandom: Transformers Relationships: Megatron/Sunstreaker, Megatron/Sideswipe, Sideswipe & Sunstreaker Characters: Sunstreaker, Megatron, Sideswipe, Original Character Additional Tags: Dubcon, Mechpreg, Sticky Words: 5540

Take me Although you hate me For in heaven There is no heartless madness Blind me Before the truth hurts Show me heaven I need your heartless madness

— Dynazty – Heartless Madness

( Previous )

The youngling was already waiting for them in their quarters that night, when they’d first gotten rid of damned Megatron, then cleaned themselves to be presentable, and lastly, on Sideswipe’s behest, said their hellos to everyone in the rec room. Or rather, Sideswipe did that, while Sunstreaker sat in sullen silence and tried to put on his best aura of “don’t talk to me”. It seemed to have worked, because only Onslaught had dared come speak with him, and the tactically minded tank was always unusually pleasant for conversation. He’d queried about their time at Shockwave’s compound, and further asked what brought them back now that the sparkling was very much out and their end of the deal was fulfilled. 

Sunstreaker had provided no direct answer, but he was pretty sure Onslaught had guessed anyway, being a smart mech and whatnot. Time would show it to all, anyway. No doubt Megatron would be rather victorious when announcing their… Decision. There was no way he wouldn’t gloat.

“How’d the tour go?” Sideswipe asked as they sat down on the berth on either side of the youngling, who was idly swinging his legs over the edge.

“Good,” it responded. “The symbiotes are nice. Soundwave is a little creepy, but no more so than Shockwave. And everything’s so… Bright.”

“Not near as bright as things are outside,” Sunstreaker rumbled, glancing at the lone, dim light in the ceiling of their room that didn’t do much to chase away the gloom permeating every inch of the ship. After the black of Shockwave’s compound, though, this had to be quite an improvement already. Pits, there was color and everything. 

“It’s very bright outside,” the youngling agreed, not sounding necessarily happy about that, but it would be just a matter of getting used to the way things were supposed to be—even on Cybertron, as much as their planet had been clad in eternal night far longer than the twins had been alive.

“What now?” the youngling continued, looking between them. “Did you and sire talk about something important? Ravage said you did.”

Sideswipe huffed a laugh even as Sunstreaker growled to himself. Was it just Ravage making a good guess, or Soundwave knowing too much for anyone’s good, again?  

Well, didn’t really matter. “We did,” Sunstreaker confirmed all the same. ‘Talk’ might’ve been a bit of a strong term for how things had gone down, but the youngling certainly didn’t need to know the intricacies of its creators’ relationship. 

“The symbiotes said you don’t belong to sire’s faction yet,” it said, frowning. Disapproving? Likely, after everything it had heard over the course of its ridiculously short life. Indeed, if the Autobots were such wicked wannabe murderers and general banes of Cybertron, why were the twins not sworn to oppose them? “You used to fight against him.”

“Just how much did the symbiotes talk?” Sideswipe laughed, flopping onto his back on the berth.

“A lot,” was all it said, unhelpfully not elaborating on how much it already knew and how much it was still in the dark on.

Sunstreaker sighed in an entirely exaggerated manner, drawing its attention back to himself. “We’ve made some mistakes in life, such as signing up with the Autobots when the war got underway—though, mind you, not by choice.”

“But you don’t fight for them anymore,” it pointed out, and this time it sounded more approving. “You had me with sire—Megatron.”

“And you are the reason we’re not stuck with the Autobots anymore,” Sideswipe piped in. The youngling squawked when Sideswipe stuck his claws somewhere between armor gaps, only to have his servo slapped away with a glare. Sideswipe, naturally, had no more to give than an unrepentant grin.

“Yeah, did we go and betray our old side a little bit by dallying with your sire? I think we did,” Sunstreaker said to some more chortling from Sideswipe. 

“But I was unplanned,” the youngling said, and clearly it knew quite a bit already. It would’ve been so nice if it had just said how much it knew, but it still didn’t seem very eager to do so—although at this point Sunstreaker almost got the feeling it was cross-referencing what it had heard with what their side of the story was. Smart thing, if that was the case. 

“You were entirely unplanned,” Sunstreaker confirmed. “If it wasn’t for you, the Autobots likely wouldn’t have found out about my… Liaisons with your sire quite so soon.”

“You never told them.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement the youngling made. “Sire did that for you when you refused to do it.”

“Oh yes.” Was that a bit of disgruntlement slipping into his voice? But he was still a little angry about that whole incident, so excuse him. Disgruntled or not, Sunstreaker continued, “He very effectively smoked me right out of the Autobots and proceeded to tell me exactly what I was to do about you.” Definitely disgruntled and growling by now. The youngling’s lips twitched into a straight up smile. Sunstreaker glared at it.

“So I was a good thing,” it concluded. “Because of me, sire forced you out of the Autobots, and now you don’t have to fight for them anymore.”

“Astute,” Sunstreaker commented with a roll of his optics. It sounded a lot like a small laugh the youngling made this time around, but it had more to say.

“Will you fight for sire now?" it asked. "Rumble and Frenzy said you could've left once I separated, but you didn't. Why?"

Ah, the million dollar question. Why?

Why indeed.

"That was what we talked about," Sunstreaker said, earning himself a curious look from the youngling. "As you know, your sire sent us to Cybertron to keep you safe, but now that you're no longer in harm's way quite the same, he wanted to know if we'd finally fight for him."

"What was your answer?"

"Yes."

It was definitely approval mixed with pleasure that burst in the youngling's field. Pits but it had opinions already, clearly, such as Autobot bad, Decepticon good. "Why now?" it wanted to know, though.

Sunstreaker ticked off their primary reasons with his digits, three as there were. "They tried to kill you, Optimus Prime is a soft-sparked idiot and a very bad bet for the future of Cybertron, and to secure your future—something you will not even have if the Autobots win the war."

"So you're mostly doing it for me," it frowned. "And because you think sire is right?"

Did they think Megatron was right? There were presently exactly two options for Cybertron's future leadership, and they didn't want to support Optimus. Did that make Megatron right, though, or only the lesser evil? "Well, for you, if nothing else," Sunstreaker said with a frown of his own. He wasn’t certain they were yet ready to decide on the other point. Their opinion on it wouldn’t markedly change their actions anyway, for now. Their other reasons were plenty enough.

“Do you think your sire’s right?” Sideswipe asked curiously. Sunstreaker looked at the youngling too, only to see it nod firmly.

"Based on what I know so far? Yes."

Well. That didn't take long. "Why?" Sunstreaker asked. He wasn't judging—after all it only seemed like natural progression for a mech Megatron was hoping to make the heir to his empire—but they were curious over where the certainty had come from. Pits, the youngling had barely even talked to Megatron. All it had to go off on were the stories of the Decepticons, though it had to be granted that it had heard things from quite a few vocalizers. It wasn't going off based on just one telling. 

“Everyone says he’s strong,” it said, intent on all strength—physical, emotional, mental, that of personality… Oh, Megatron had it all. Didn’t Sunstreaker know that much. “He’s never lost motivation or sight of his goals, despite how long the war has gone on for. He does what it takes, no matter what it takes. He doesn’t give up.”

“And what of what he’s like as an individual? You don’t actually know him yourself,” Sunstreaker pointed out.

“What does it matter?” the youngling shot back without hesitation. “That he’s a strong leader is what matters.

“Besides, you love him, so there has to be something to like.”

…Say what now? Sideswipe burst out into laughter until he was wheezing and Sunstreaker stared at the youngling, who stared right back without waver. It didn’t look like it was really registering having said anything off. If anything, it only seemed confused over Sideswipe’s reaction, and then raised its optical ridges at Sunstreaker for what he said next.

“I don’t love him,” Sunstreaker sneered the moment he managed to shove his surprise aside. The youngling was dissatisfyingly blase about that, just waving its servo in dismissal.

“Like him, whatever. You see something in him.”

“I hate him, that’s what I see in him,” Sunstreaker growled, reaching in one quick motion and wrapping his servo around the youngling’s throat—squeezing, warning. Sideswipe only laughed harder even as Sunstreaker knew his own field dripped with bale as he leaned towards the youngling, staring into its vaguely concerned, deep red optics. “And you would do well to remember that.”

After a second's hesitation, it nodded, as much as it could with his hold on its neck. “I’ll remember that.”

Sunstreaker studied it a moment longer for any trace of a lie, before he was satisfied the point had been driven home and released it. The youngling rubbed at its throat, but seemed very careful to not react otherwise despite the vague displeasure in its field. “Where did you get that idea from, anyway?” Sunstreaker asked.

“The symbiotes said as much,” it shrugged. “I thi– Thought it made sense.”

“After what you’ve seen of us, you thought it made sense?” he asked in disbelief. Those damn symbiotes. If Soundwave wouldn’t have slagged him if he rearranged their limbs for gossiping, he would’ve done that. Fraggers needed to learn to mind their own business and not corrupt his slagging creation.

“With what I know of you, yeah.” It looked a lot like it wanted to glare at him, but didn’t quite dare to do so when it glanced his way. Sunstreaker ground his denta together before he ran one rough servo down his faceplates, not even resisting the urge to let his engine rev, hard. Sideswipe, at least, said nothing to sway the situation in any direction, despite his chuckles having not yet died down entirely. Sunstreaker would’ve said something about not believing everything you hear, but it wasn’t as if the youngling had blindly listened to the symbiotes. Rather, it had compared things to what it knew, and then came to the entirely wrong conclusion that the symbiotes weren’t terribly mistaken. It had thought for itself, even if it hadn’t thought right.

“Anyway, you’ll fight for sire from now on. You’ll become real Decepticons,” the youngling said, returning back to their previous topic. “I think that’s good.”

“It kinda is, isn’t it?” Sideswipe agreed right before snatching the youngling and pulling it down with him. It growled at him, but when Sunstreaker reclined as well, it didn’t try to get back up and got comfortable in the space between them instead.

“You’re doing the right thing,” came its murmured opinion—and maybe they were.

For it, at least, they were.

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

Megatron didn’t waste much time announcing to all of the Decepticons what the twins had decided to do. Change their allegiance, wholly and officially. The following day had barely started when everyone not absolutely needed on duty was called to the throne room—because of course Megatron would have one, even on a spaceship. The twins knew what that was about. They got enough knowing looks that they could guess quite a few others had an idea of what it was likely to be about, too, even if there was also some confusion mixed in from those that didn’t catch on quite so quickly. 

But the truth remained that the twins were still here, despite the youngling’s rather damning presence clearly signaling their ties to Megatron had gotten severed. Was there really any other way than this that things could go down? Why would Megatron even agree to keep them around if they continued to be absolutely useless? 

Why would they have stuck around if they had no plans to change anything?

Things were changing. “My friends,” Megatron said in full grandeur once everyone had assembled. He was standing in front of his throne, Starscream on his right, Soundwave on his left, and where Soundwave was as impassive as ever, Starscream was sending some mean glares in the twins’ direction.

Sunstreaker glared right back even as he kept one audial on Megatron’s little speech. Sideswipe was listening with half a spark too, the youngling next to him, but much of his brother’s attention was also on the other Decepticons. So curious about their reactions. “Long have the Autobots locked us in a stalemate. We struck a blow to them when we relieved them of two of their frontliners,” oh, weren’t they getting lots of looks now, “and now I am pleased to announce we are about to have two frames join our ranks.”

Half of the occupants in the room flared in surprise, others with a sense of ‘I knew it’, and then a cacophony of noise. Cheers, whistles, and quite a few exclamations to the effect of, “Finally!” Someone clapped Sideswipe on the back, and when he turned to look, he could see Dirge grinning at him. He wasn’t the only one with the expression, either.

The overarching sentiment was definitely positive from the looks of things.

And then there was Starscream. “My liege, you can’t be serious!” the Seeker could be heard saying. “Their loyalties are questionable at best. They’re nothing more than Autobot liabilities!”

“And your loyalties are any better?” Megatron asked from his Second very pointedly. Sunstreaker smirked.

Starscream wasn’t wholly discouraged, though. “They’ve served their use, my Lord. You have the youngling. Exile them.” How come they hadn’t had this discussion in private, anyway? Or maybe they had and Starscream was just trying to turn the rank and file against them.

“Their prowess is unquestionable. I will have it at my disposal,” Megatron said, and without giving Starscream a chance to continue further, lifted his arms. The room fell silent again. “Sunstreaker, Sideswipe, step forward.”

They did and Megatron sat down on his goddamn throne. He gestured them forward until they were at the bottom of the steps leading to it. There, they were given another order. “Kneel.”

Sunstreaker hesitated just for the length of one spark rotation and Sideswipe made no move before he did, but then, as one, they lowered themselves onto one knee and bowed their heads. Their spark fluttered with just a hint of nervousness. This was hardly a point of no return and they could always change their minds… Except, if they did after this, they were likely to have their helms cut off for personally slighting Megatron. 

So maybe it was a point of no return, anyway. 

“Will you fight your former comrades in my name?” Megatron asked, and Primus, the anticipation in the room. It was like everyone was hungry for their words, hungry to hear them submit themselves, to hear them become their comrades. No one said a thing, no one interrupted them—not even Starscream, despite the displeasure he broadcasted in his wide cast field. 

The stage was theirs, and they took it. “I will,” they said, ever together.

“Will you kill your former comrades in my name?”

“I will.”

“Do you swear fealty to me and your spark to the Decepticon cause?” 

Would they?  

Point of no return.

But they’d made their decision already.

“I do.”

The room broke into noise all over again—stomping, cheering, hooting, celebration. This was another victory over the Autobots, to turn one-two of them into Decepticons instead. The promise of a chance for things to change—that maybe, just maybe, something could be done about the deadlock the two sides were stuck in.

That maybe the twins could make enough of a difference.  

“Rise, Decepticons Sunstreaker and Sideswipe,” Megatron said over the roar of the room.

It felt quite a bit like a new beginning, and no doubt it was meant to feel as such with the fragging ritualistic elements involved in the whole thing. It was time to close one damned chapter of their life. In the past was their life as Autobots—and when they were back on their pedes and Soundwave approached them with their new insignias… Here was their new life, that they had flirted with for quite some time already, but never quite stepped into entirely.

Until now. 

Their scratched out Autobot insignias remained, and Sunstreaker got the feeling they would continue to do so as permanent marks of their past, changed allegiance, but Soundwave’s touch didn’t falter when he attached their new insignias below their Autobot ones. “Change your energy signatures,” the telepath advised them as their last step, and they did—switching their faction signature to that of a Decepticon.  

And then the deed was done. Soundwave nodded at them before stepping away, and after a nod from Megatron as well, the brothers turned around to face their new faction. Sideswipe, immediately, spread his arms to show himself off, following the move by a bow in flourish that earned him some laughter and cheers. Sunstreaker kept his expression as a firm frown, but his field… He could admit there was some pleasure in it. He had sat on the sidelines of the war for too long by now.

End to that. 

“I know words mean little. I expect you to prove their truth with your actions,” Megatron’s voice spoke up right behind them, and when they both glanced behind themselves, they could see him looming a step away. He wasn’t looking at them, though, but instead glaring off to the side at Starscream, who was tapping his pede impatiently, giving the impression that the two had some unfinished business to discuss. There was no question he was talking to them, though.

“So you do have some sense in that helm,” Sunstreaker huffed and Megatron’s glare transferred to him. Sunstreaker merely raised an optical ridge in return.

“Why, yes, I do have some sense,” Megatron snarled at him, grabbing him by the jaw and decidedly not letting go when Sunstreaker tried to jerk his helm away. Thus Sunstreaker returned the glare given to him. Megatron held his gaze with wicked optics for a good moment–

But that was all there was before he let go of him with a simple, “Go celebrate.”

“Aye aye, boss,” Sideswipe grinned with a salute before Sunstreaker could get a word in to make the situation a little worse. The look Megatron gave his brother was a smidge exasperated, but he turned away in time with Sideswipe grabbing Sunstreaker by the servo and dragging him into the midst of the gathered Decepticons eager to welcome them. 

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

There was indeed celebration. High grade didn’t flow, because frankly, the Decepticons couldn’t afford luxuries like that, but there was music and dancing, loud conversation and rambunctious laughter. Sunstreaker had sequestered himself against one wall of the rec room with Thundercracker, but Sideswipe, naturally, was right in the middle of the hubbub. Skywarp had accosted the youngling to teach it some dance moves from the looks of things, and while it didn’t necessarily look happy about it, it was putting in the effort to try. Its control over its frame had certainly improved, and a bit of dancing could only help.

“Was that amount of show really necessary?” Sunstreaker growled as he watched Skywarp’s impromptu dance lesson. From the corner of his optic, he could see Thundercracker raise his optical ridges at him.

“You seemed to take to it well,” the Seeker commented. “It’s good for morale.”

“It’s over the top,” he scoffed. “There can’t possibly be that amount of ceremony involved in it for everyone, either.”

“No, but notable defections are worth a little extra attention, don’t you think?”

“Well, I’m worth the extra attention, if nothing else.”

Thundercracker huffed a small laugh. “Of course you are.”

And if he was to be a morale booster while at it, well, was that really a bad thing even if it was completely ridiculous? He couldn’t really deny that the effect was rather… Obvious, on the other Decepticons. The mood had been lifted with their official introduction into the faction, as if the fact they had left Autobots in the first place hadn’t already done that to an extent.

The youngling had done its part, too, as a little hope for the future, despite most not really knowing how to react to it yet—which could probably be attributed to who its sire was. How were you supposed to treat the offspring of your sovereign leader? Few seemed to know the answer to that. Really only Skywarp, the symbiotes and Soundwave, as well as the Combiner team leaders seemed to be relaxed around it and treated it no differently than they treated anyone else. Granted, that could bite them in the aft yet, if either the youngling or Megatron decided “like everyone else” wasn’t an appropriate way to treat it. 

But if nothing else, the youngling didn’t seem to be about to start demanding undue amounts of respect. If you asked Sunstreaker, it hadn’t earned it yet, anyway. Lineage wasn’t enough for that; your own actions needed to speak for you. It wasn’t the youngling’s fault it hadn’t had the chances for actions like that yet, but until it did… It had a promise of a future few could dream of, but that was all. 

What kind of a creator would he be if he didn’t try to coach it in the right direction, though? The glory of bloodshed and battles awaited it, but for it to succeed in that violent field, it needed practice. That was what Sunstreaker proceeded to give it in the days to come—training, with himself, with Sideswipe, with those Decepticons that stood in the same size class as them. It hadn’t changed that its focus and determination were things to be admired as it practiced against different opponents. It didn’t stand a chance if those more experienced than it—that was to say, everyone—didn’t hold back, but it did its best and improved at a perfectly acceptable pace. For quite a while still, though, training was all it would get. It wasn’t anywhere near the point where it could actually take part in the war. 

The twins didn’t need to worry about details like that, but despite that, Megatron refused to deploy them. One battle went by, then another, and then a third one, and still the twins were forced to sit on the ship all pretty like, even as the amount of injuries the others came back with spoke of clear opposition provided by the Autobots.

After that third battle, Sunstreaker asked Soundwave for Megatron’s location, and once he got confirmation the warlord was in his quarters, that was where he headed. The only reason he didn’t barge in was the fact that the door was locked, so Sunstreaker pinged for entrance instead, as if he was the polite sort or something. 

Somewhat surprisingly, Megatron actually opened the door for him without any excessive delay, allowing Sunstreaker to stomp in. The warlord had just one look at him before sighing. “What is it now?”

“You,” Sunstreaker growled with the jab of a digit at Megatron. He was sitting at his desk, already looking aggravated.

Sunstreaker couldn’t find it in himself to give a damn about Megatron’s precious little feelings. “You’re not letting us fight,” he accused, coming to stand next to the tyrant and placing his hands on his hips.

And glaring. So much glaring. “I thought the whole fragging point of us defecting was to fight for you. What the slag gives?”

Megatron glared right back at him before his optics dropped to his chest. Before Sunstreaker could do anything about it, Megatron had reached and caught the side of his chassis, his thumb tracing his fresh insignia. Sunstreaker shivered despite himself, but swatted the servo away.

Or tried to. Megatron wouldn’t let himself be chased away quite so easily, and his hold merely tightened instead of going anywhere. Sunstreaker snarled some more, and tried to move his entire frame away next.

That didn’t work either, because Megatron’s servo only slipped lower, until he had a firm hold of his waist. “Should I remind you you are my subordinate and I choose when and how to use you?” the tyrant asked from him, meeting his gaze again.

Sunstreaker frowned at him. “So you want to defeat your own goddamn point?”

Megatron got to his pedes, effortlessly towering over him with just that single motion. True to form, Sunstreaker didn’t let himself be cowed in the slightest despite his need to crane his helm way back to even look at the warlord in the face anymore. “I hold no illusions as to your effectiveness,” Megatron said. “You will get results when I choose to use you.”

“Flattery?” Sunstreaker scoffed, again trying to move away and again not being allowed to do so. “The pit do you think that will get you?”

“Are you not the type to enjoy having your massive ego stroked?”

Sunstreaker snarled, and when he didn’t manage to put any space between them this time either, threw his arms up in utter frustration. “I just want answers! Fragging– Okay, let’s do it your way. Why are you choosing not to use us?”

The servo Megatron wasn’t holding him in place with came up to grasp him by the jaw. Of course trying to jerk his helm away did nothing, but Sunstreaker held onto his glare even as Megatron’s thumb brushed across his lower lip. “What, fantasizing about having me again?” he growled, because certainly provoking Megatron was forever the best course of action.

“Would you be opposed to that, Decepticon Sunstreaker?”

“Oh, so you’re getting your kicks off of having us on your side for real, now?”

“This is where you should be.”

Sunstreaker faltered just enough for Megatron to smirk. Mech was fragging maddening. Did he even slagging mean that, or was he just playing around? Sunstreaker kicked him in the shin for good measure, not that it got him any sort of reaction. “You think that’s what I want to hear?”

“What do I care what you want to hear?”

“So, what, you’re just stating the truth, no regard for what I think about it?”

“Quite. Or do you disagree? Would you rather still be with the Autobots?”

“I’d rather fight,” Sunstreaker growled. “Is that so hard to understand?” Megatron’s grip in his jaw tightened until it hurt and his growl morphed into a hiss, but Sunstreaker didn’t break his glare.

“You are a trump card,” Megatron said. Sunstreaker wanted to, again, accuse him of flattery, but Megatron continued before he could get a word in, “Can you blame me for wanting to make an impression with you?”

Sunstreaker frowned in confusion, hardly even remembering to snarl when Megatron’s thumb brushed against his lip again. Impression? “The pit’s that supposed to mean?” he grouched, tugging against the tyrant’s hold as ineffectually as every past time. That was getting rather tiresome, in all honesty. “And let the frag go of me while you’re at it,” Sunstreaker tacked on with another kick, wrapping his servo around Megatron’s wrist and digging his claws in.

Megatron? Didn’t react in any satisfying manner. Or at all, really. “Drama, my dear,” he just said, and Sunstreaker very much remembered to snarl out of his growing confusion. “You’re a lover of that, aren’t you?”

“Sure, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“Presentation matters. It can demoralize. Certainly your switch in allegiance alone will do that, but…” 

Sunstreaker’s frown turned a little less confused. “Are you saying you want to do some sort of dramatic unveiling of us?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying.”

Well, hadn’t he thought Megatron would want to gloat about the whole thing? Maybe it wasn’t so far out there that the mech would be waiting for the perfect opportunity to show them off and make the biggest impression in letting the Prime and all the other Autobots see what they’d chosen—what Megatron had accomplished. Maybe he hadn’t set out to do it–

Or had he? “Was our defection your plan all along?” Sunstreaker had to ask, glaring anew when Megatron’s thumb applied enough force to part his lips. He snapped his denta, drawing an amused rumble from the warlord.

“No. I was hoping for it and I’m certainly not opposed to it, but I was ready to dispose of you once–”

“Once you got tired of fragging me, huh?”

“Hm.”

Wasn’t that comforting. Then again, who would ever doubt Megatron was capable of something like that? Picking a plaything for himself, then tossing that plaything to the smelters when he grew bored of it, or it became an inconvenience, or whatever would’ve been the tipping point for it. “The sparkling sort of messed up those plans, did it?”

“Your loyalty to the Autobots was frail to begin with.”

“So you think I might’ve opted to defect even without it?”

“You disagree?”

“…Not really.”

“There, you see,” Megatron rumbled, on this side of amused.

But he also spoke with the fire of conviction. “The Autobots were squandering you, keeping you chained and muzzled—weren’t you bound to recognize you deserve better?”

With the intensity and belief Megatron put behind his own words as he always did when this particular topic came up, it was hard not to agree. Sunstreaker’s frown didn’t leave, but he shifted his optics to the side, almost… Uncomfortable?

What for? Because Megatron insisted he had been misused for the entirety of the war?

Because he didn’t quite disagree with that assessment? Wasn’t that, chained and muzzled as Megatron put it, how he’d felt among the Autobots? Out of place in the midst of mecha that didn’t even speak the same language he did? Not verbally—verbally the words they used were the same across the board, with only the difference of dialects.

But verbal languages weren’t the only ones out there. It was the rest the Autobots had never understood, a cultural chasm no one had ever managed to bridge. Hadn’t they only gotten told that their view of life was wrong, simple as that? He couldn’t say no one had ever tried to understand their side of things, because certainly those individuals had existed too.

But they were just individuals, one or two mecha here and there. The faction as a whole wasn’t… Theirs. They had been a part of it, but they’d always felt out of place, like they didn’t really belong. They weren’t Northerners.

They were Kaonite, and the Autobots had never wanted to accept everything that meant, because what that meant was Decepticon.

“Your place in the Autobots was a mistake,” Megatron continued, drawing Sunstreaker’s optics back to him, “but that error has been rectified. I will let you fight, Sunstreaker, and I will not hold you back because I would fear what you can do.”

He resisted the urge to squirm, but only barely. Megatron studied him, and pits, Sunstreaker wasn’t the type to evade others, but now he had to fight with himself to not avert his optics—to instead meet Megatron’s gaze, even knowing his own had far more uncertainty in it than he ever would have liked. “Do you believe me?” Megatron asked.

Sunstreaker spoke with the truth before he could think better of it. “I do.” It was nigh impossible not to in the face of Megatron’s certainty, that only combined with his own past doubts and reservations to form what he wanted to believe—and did. He did.

He did believe Megatron was sincere in his disapproval over the Autobots’ treatment, use of him, and he did believe the tyrant fully intended to have him fight for him, and that he would be allowed to do so with the kind of brutality the Autobots shied away from but that came so naturally to him—that he had been trained into.

If anyone understood, Megatron did.

If anyone understood, the Decepticons did.

“You’re where you were always meant to be, Sunstreaker,” Megatron said, only driving that point home further, like he wanted to make sure there was no doubt in Sunstreaker’s mind over the truth of it. Sunstreaker tried to nod, found he couldn’t against Megatron’s grip, and huffed even as his field flared with his… Acceptance of that. 

They should have joined the Decepticons from the beginning. Were they given the choice in that at the time… 

There was no changing the past, but he could change his future, decide on his future—and he had.

“And make no mistake,” the tyrant started, prompting Sunstreaker to focus on him instead of his thoughts, “I quite prefer you here.”

Oh, now he was admitting to it. Sunstreaker smirked. “Kiss me.”

Megatron growled, but leaned down and complied.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN UNDERGRADUATES

One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest. Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductions is so overwhelming that their response to it as a tautology. There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. You have to show you're impressed with what you've made. Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the right kind of people to have ideas with: the other students, who will be not only smart but elastic-minded to a fault. Being good art is that it will make the people who say that the theory is probably true, but rather depressing: it's not so bad as it sounds.

The founders were experienced guys who'd done startups before and who'd just succeeded in getting millions from one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence to explain in person to Leonardo & Co.1 If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. In every case, the creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off. One often hears a policy criticized on the grounds that it would increase the income gap between rich and poor? Perhaps this tends to attract people who are bad at understanding. It would work on a moon base where we had to buy air by the liter. It seemed obvious that beauty, for example, as property in the way we do. It could be the reason they don't have to wait to be an adult.

The answer, I realized, is that my m. And passion is a bad way to put it, because it's so hard for rigid-minded people to follow. That's to be expected. An eloquent speaker or writer can give the impression of vanquishing an opponent merely by using forceful words. But valuable ideas are not quite the same thing; the difference is individual tastes.2 Don't talk about secondary matters at length. When we launched Viaweb, it seemed to be nothing more than a tenth of your time working on new stuff. Now a lot of people in the Valley is watching them. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do.3

Of course, space aliens probably wouldn't find human faces engaging. Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than something that has to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. Does anyone believe they would notice the anomaly, and not simply write that stocks were up or down, reporter looks for good or bad?4 Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.5 Simplicity takes effort—genius, even. But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a giant, public company, and assume you could build something way easier to use.

Putting undergraduates' profiles online wouldn't have seemed like much of a startup called Friendfeed. That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the way laptops displaced desktops. Taking a shower is like a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that's ipso facto evidence you're using a definition of property be whatever they wanted. Back in the 90s. Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, that if you tried this you'd be able to say about such and such market share. The average person looks at it and thinks: how amazingly skillful.6 It's still a very weak form of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons. If one blows up in your face, start another. Ten weeks is not much time. Everyone at Rehearsal Day. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working. If I could tell startups only ten sentences, this would be one of them.

What counts as property depends on what you mean by worth. It would have been. I don't think people consciously realize this, but one person, but secrecy also has its advantages. Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. It's also true that there are quite a few marketplaces out there that serve this same market. Obviously the world sucked, so why wouldn't they? There was not much point. There are always great ideas sitting right under our noses. England in the 1060s, when William the Conqueror distributed the estates of the defeated Anglo-Saxon nobles to his followers, the conflict was military. When I ask people what they regret most about high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. The old answer was no: you were supposed to pretend that you wanted to make pages that looked good, you also have to discard the idea of good art, there's also such a thing as good art, and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared. You have to show you're impressed with what you've made.

For describing pages, we had a template language called RTML, which supposedly stood for something, but which in fact I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting.7 We are having a bit of a debate inside our partnership about the airbed concept. It was thus subjective rather than objective. Don't fix Windows, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me. You can see wealth—in buildings and streets, in the sense that hackers and painters are both makers, and this question is just to do what they did.8 It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the only potential acquirer is Microsoft, and when you're not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly. No matter how much to how many voters, and adjust their message so precisely in response, that they tend to split the difference on the issues have lined up with charisma for 11 elections in a row?

So is it meaningless to talk about it publicly till long afterward.9 The way Apple runs the App Store is full of half-baked applications. If I were talking to a roomful of people than you would in conversation.10 The problem is, it's hard to get the gold out of it. Where does wealth come from?11 You can demonstrate your respect for one another in more subtle ways.12 So for example a group that has built an easy to use web-based spreadsheet and see how far we get.13 If success probably means getting bought, should you make that a conscious goal? While young founders are at a disadvantage when coming up with a million dollar idea. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard?

Notes

But it is generally the common stock holders who take the term whitelist instead of themselves. There's comparatively little from it. I couldn't convince Fred Wilson to fund them. I've come to you about it.

Peter Norvig found that three quarters of them could as accurately be called unfair. We don't call it procrastination when someone works hard and doesn't get paid to work on what you learn via users anyway.

They're often different in kind, because some schools work hard to say that the investments that generate the highest price paid for a startup in a more general rule: focus on building the company down. Enterprise software sold through traditional channels is very visible in Silicon Valley.

In many ways the New Deal was a kid that you'd want to get jobs. Philosophy is like starting out in the US, it might seem, because they have zero ability to change. If the rich paid high taxes? The two guys were Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.

Don't be evil. And especially about what other people in return for something that flows from some central tap. I'm convinced there were, we found Dave Shen there, only for startups to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long. I think investors currently err too far on the dollar.

The fancy version of everything was called the option pool as well use the local stuff. Philosophy is like starting out in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically by sharding it.

This is everyday life in general. So, can I make it easy. Believe it or not, under current US law, writing and visual design.

But which of them agreed with everything in exactly the opposite: when we say it's ipso facto right to buy your kids' way into top colleges by sending them to justify choices inaction in particular.

An influx of inexpensive but mediocre investors. Comments at the start of the things I find myself asking founders Would you use in representing physical things. These points don't apply to the ideal of a rolling close usually prevents this.

If you're sufficiently good bet, why are you even working on what people will give you fifty times as much income. When a lot of money around is never something people treat casually. No one writing a dictionary from scratch, rather than giving grants.

For similar reasons, avoid the topic. It's not only the leaves who suffer. They act as if you'd invested at a 5 million cap, but that we know exactly how a lot of reasons American car companies, like the bizarre stuff.

Foster, Richard and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the exercise of stock the VCs should be designed to live in a request.

Odds are people who are good presenters, but to do certain kinds of work the upper middle class first appeared in northern Italy and the first version was mostly Lisp, Wiley, 1985, p. So during the 2002-03 season was 2. Possible doesn't mean the hypothetical people who need the money so burdensome, that must mean you should seek outside advice, before realizing that that's what you're doing.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Sam Altman, Chris Dixon, Jessica Livingston, Paul Watson, Geoff Ralston, Sarah Harlin, Dan Giffin, and Alexia Tsotsis for smelling so good.

[kikizoshi]

Dostoyevsky’s Proposal

Written in the style of War and Peace. In this AU, Fyodor’s position is pretty much like an unmarried woman in the 19th century, as are many men in his time.

@poppirocks - Congrats on 400, and here’s to many more :)

~2.5k

“How kind of you to join me, Nikolai Vasilievich. I trust you’ll stay long?”

          Dostoyevsky smiled, welcoming his guest into the drawing-room.

          “Not at all, not at all!” Gogol waved his arms in amiable protest. “That is, not at all of kindness, of course I’ll stay! If anything, I’m the one humbled by your kindness of honouring me with an invitation.”

          Dostoyevsky laughed softly. “You say that, and yet what if I should have invited you a week prior, when I sent out all of my other invitations? Surely you would have… taken ill. From the excitement, I mean.”

          “Of course, of course,” Gogol dismissed playfully, “From excitement, or some spring fever. I might’ve been pulled away but look--” he spread his arms wide, “here I am, a whole man, with no need for worry.”

          “And what a man you are,” Dostoyevsky smiled graciously. His comment, though perhaps a bit odd, was quite in-keeping with their relationship. Ten years had passed since either had seen the other, and though they sent frequent letters, meeting once more was a clean breath of fresh air.

          “Sit, please.” Dostoyevsky insisted. “No, not there, that chair is horribly uncomfortable. Here, on the chaise with me. Don’t worry, no one will talk. There’s no reason to.” The tan-and-gold chaise in question, situated as it was very near to a piano, rendered its occupants practically unhearable should the piano be occupied as well. For this event, Dostoyevsky’s trusted servant, Vanya, happened to be performing a string of popular and robust German compositions. 

          “Now, I’m sure you’ve wondered why I invited you here…” He paused politely, and Gogol nodded with evident interest. “Well, I’ll tell you. I have a proposition. Not a horrid one, please, don’t give me such a vile look. I know how you love games. And as you know, I have a love for you, extending to your games, but moreso my love is in myself, and I too have a fondness for certain types of games...”

          “And so your point?” Gogol laughed. “I should think we know each other enough to forgo the formalities by now.”

          “Very well then... I’ll tell you plainly.” Dostoyevsky turned, so as to be sure to be heard by Gogol. “I propose a roulette, only not in a casino, but with a gun, in my chambers. I have a revolver. American, I think.”

          Gogol smiled, amusement crinkling in his eyes, “Of course he wouldn’t know the maker of his own pistol.”

          “Do you mind?”

          “Oh, no, don’t mind me!” Gogol said merrily, “Please, continue.”

          “Yes, so as I was saying, I propose that sort of game.”

          “So what, you’d like me dead?” Gogol asked, though not without humour. “Or you want me to kill you? Why not just have a duel, then?”

          “I don’t want a /duel/,” Dostoyevsky spat the word out, as though even speaking it was beneath him, “And my aim isn’t for one of our deaths. No, what interests me is a certain… other thing, which will become clearer to you later in the night. For now, however, I ask you to humour me blindly, as your friend, and trust that I shan’t lead you astray.”

          “He speaks clearly and earnestly,” said Gogol, “and yet I wonder still at his intentions. If you truly don’t wish for my death--which you’ve stated implicitly enough--then, well, what else am I to make of it? Forgive my saying so, but is there any other conclusion I could draw?”

          “Perhaps not for the time being, which is why I beg you again for your trust. I’ll bow for it if you like, only not here. In fact, please follow me directly, as we’ve no reason to waste another moment.” And there he stood, gesturing for Gogol to do the same.

          “I say, you’ve surely gone mad.”

          “And what if I have,” Dostoyevsky replied with a smile, “There’s nothing awful about that, is there?”

          “Nothing awful? What an idea! But come, sit, for I will not follow you, not for anything. If you put a gun to my head I wouldn’t follow you now,” Gogol laughed as he said the last part, evidently taken with his own joke. “So here, your chaise is ever so comfortable, and why not enjoy it a while with an old friend, before getting down to business? No, don’t pull on my arm. It won’t do you any good and you’ll cause a scene. Sit, I say!”

          Indeed, Gogol wasn’t wrong in his assumption of a scene; the two of them had gathered a sort of crowd consisting of side-eyed stares and occasional whispers. Dostoyevsky, defeated, sat with as much decorum as he could muster next to Gogol, and began to tap his leg in agitation. Gogol smiled and lounged back.

          “Now,” he continued, “Surely you’ve other matters to discuss than only a gun-based roulette.”

          “What would you have me say?”

          “Hm, well, tell me of your engagement! There’s no end of gossip there. At least, the rumours I’ve heard are enough to fill a quarter of the River Styx.”

          Dostoyevsky further deflated. “But they’re just that: rumours. What’s more to say?”

          “Oh, but there’s more to it than that! Much more!” Gogol exclaimed. “For one, I heard that Princess K----- has her eye on you. Though not only one eye, from the way people talk, her vision is quite melonomic towards anyone else! And then there are the two princes, who for a long time now have fought mercilessly for your favour. They’ve even duelled, not once, but twice! Then there are the clerks, the merchants, some hussars…” (He named a considerable list which I will spare the reader.) “In fact, I’d say the whole of Petersburg has its eye on you! And you ask, ‘What’s more to say’.”

          “I see you’ve soaked up quite the bit of gossip, despite the short time since your arrival. It’s strange we’ve not met before. With how you talk, surely you’ve attended several of Anna Pavlovna’s soirees. Yet I’ve not seen a hint of you anywhere.”

          “Oh, well that was a purposeful slip,” Gogol laughed. “Yes, I did go, to her soirees and many other social gatherings, but my heart was not in it. I spoke dully about politics, gave only the blandest of smiles to those who approached me, half the time I felt horribly faint... And how could I let my dearest friend see me in such a state? No, even if I was presentable to most, well, ‘most’ see nothing but what’s put in front of them. Yes, we’re all ostriches with our heads in the sand. Stick us with a hot iron, even, and we’ll just bury deeper.”

          “Maybe so,” Dostoyevsky said, “but then, you’re still a bird in that way, so perhaps half of your goal is already realised.”

          Gogol stared blankly at Dostoyevsky for a time. “What use is there in being an ostrich?” He asked finally. “Ostriches cannot fly.”

          Dostoyevsky failed to hide a coy smirk. “They’re rather adept at running, however. You could easily run, run, run away from every pressing issue--you’d leave any cage shrouded in dust long before it thought of imprisoning you. You’d be quite tasty, too.”

          Gogol raised his eyes suggestively. “You wouldn’t need such a form to taste me. And in any case, if being an ostrich is all as you say it is, then am I not already one?”

          “Oh, no, you’re still quite a man, I’m afraid. Though that, too, is perhaps a good thing. If you are a man, then, naturally, you’ll have the capacity to rationalise emotionally and mentally through your vices. One day you may even find grace.”

          Gogol sighed wearily. “Why is it,” said he, “that it may only be one at a time between the two of us who is allowed to be happy?”

          Dostoyevsky gave him a pitying look. “A balance you seem to keep readily.”

          “You suppose?” Gogol sighed, leaning his head back, aggravated, against the mahogany of the chaise’s back, and closed his eyes.

          Silence passed several moments like that; the chatter of the guests and gliding piano notes created a white noise which transported both men into a meditational state. The underlying melancholy both easily felt, yet they passed through it in their own ways: Dostoyevsky letting it wash over him and Gogol stamping it under his boot, grinding it under his teeth for good measure. Eventually, as Dostoyevsky nearly felt himself be lost completely, he broke the spell.

          “If you wish to know the truth,” he said, “then I’ll speak it plainly: I’ve no suitable suitor. There have been rumours of such a thing, but they are mostly in jest. If some have been taken by them, and took such things seriously, it still means nothing--there isn’t one man or woman in our town who wishes to make me their betrothed. For who would?” He smiled a self-deprecating smile. “An invalid doesn’t make for a good match.”

          “Ah yes! Who would want an idiot of a betrothed--but a rich idiot is another case entirely--but for your money. Last you wrote, you explained that your dowry had been raised, so that it now lands something over seventy-thousand. I know thirty men alone who would marry for that--ten of a higher class than you, for your family is held in quite high esteem.”

          Dostoyevsky grimaced. “Yes, and in fact, you are quite right about that. And in fact, I’ve met with several good men who I’ll be happy to accept should one give an offer…”

          “So what is the matter with you?”

          “Yes, indeed, what is the matter…” Dostoyevsky trailed off once more, bringing up a finger to his teeth and gnawing, first gently but soon quite viciously, at it. It wasn’t until his reddened finger appeared just about to split that he forced it from his mouth to continue. “What is the matter, is that… I don’t wish to marry for such a… Which isn’t to say that I don’t wish to marry for my family, or that I wish to marry for love. I know the ridiculity of both ideas, and neither are particularly accurate. Only… I cannot shake the idea that in marrying, I’ll be losing something… Something that I can’t define will be lost, or perhaps it won’t… The whole matter gives off a horrible feeling, as though nothing can be done and, no matter what, something awful can and will come of it.” Again, he paused. Looking to Gogol, he hoped the other would say something, but as the look on his face was merely passively attentive, Dostoyevsky sighed and continued.

          “There was another time,” Dostoyevsky said, “when I considered marrying, although marriage wasn’t a possibility for that man, and I’m quite sure--as I was at the time--that such a union would only have ended in tragedy. Still… That man, from some country far southward of ours and across an ocean, he was the only one I’ve met who could challenge me at chess. We went on for hours at a time, and each second felt simultaneously as a blink and as an era. Rarely had I been so excited. And at that time, genuinely, I considered making /him/ an offer, as unconventional as it might have been… Of course, I fiercely hated him too. He was an incorrigible man, a flirt and with so much bravado I feared his chest couldn’t bear the weight, and above all he was barely a noble. There was no hope in it but still… I dreamed...

          “But now I am twenty-two, and in not four years I shall be twenty-six. I should have married years ago, but I’ve never had the heart for it, and I fear my reasons are nothing but selfish. It’s my vice, but… I’m afraid. I’m afraid to change my mind, for what if the awful does happen… Though even then it should not matter. I should trust in my husband, and if all does not come to be exactly as I wish it, then God has sent the trial for my own sake.” Dostoyevsky’s tone was convincing, as though he himself did not believe his words but was desperately trying to rectify the fact.

          Gogol, after a moment, laughed. “If beating you over chess is the only prerequisite, even Vanya could become your groom. Why be so pessimistic, in that case?”

          “You think Vanya would beat me?” Dostoyevsky shook his head seriously. “No--he wouldn’t do it. No one here would, for they are too full of virtue. You alone are the only man here who would think of such a thing.”

          “Heh, well,” Gogol tapped his temple with a chuckle, “perhaps I should never have been invited at all, if I lack such virtue… And yet you speak of it not as something terrible, but rather as a curious state which you’re happy to welcome into not only your drawing room, but your private chambers! Be careful now--I fear the Devil is whispering in your ear.”

          “Well now,” Dostoyevsky laughed, “And what of Turgenev? He has far worse problems than I, in that regard.”

          “Oh? Poor, poor Turgenev, we mustn’t speak of him.” Gogol’s eyes practically glittered, a twist of amusement swirling down his face and throughout his being. He was evidently vastly excited to speak about Turgenev.

          “Maybe so, but please, explain to a poor invalid.”

          “Oh, if I must! I see there is no getting round you.” Gogol threw his hands up, feigning coercion, and readily continued. “You see, there was this new woman--I know not her name--who took him quite quickly and even more thoroughly. She not only agreed to take him in as her slave (a notion, if you’ll remember, that his dear Victoria--lover of a distant past and oh! how he’ll miss her--blanched at in the beginning), but this new she, how shall I say…” Gogol looked around, as though noticing their company for the first time, and met with several curious (and several accusing) stares. “She… gave to him a… new, and hitherto unfathomed ‘pastry’ to which, I fear, he was quite addicted from the first lick. Now, there’s no saving him. Bless his poor soul.”

          “You speak as though from experience.”

          “Oh! Can you imagine? Heh-heh, no no, I can’t--it simply couldn’t happen. Now, with someone else, in a different place, I’m sure my feelings would be quite different,” Again, a suggestive look was sent towards Dostoyevsky, “but as for him? No. I could never.”

          Dostoyevsky huffed softly, a gentle, amused sheen shone in his eyes. “I’d love to hear more, if you’d be so kind, although I fear such conversation is rather intense for settings such as this…”

          “Oh, anything is too much for everyone nowadays! Bless our Russia… But, won’t your appearance be missed? Everyone is here by your invitation, and what would they think if their dear leader were to leave them so suddenly?”

          “They’ll think nothing of it--I won’t be missed. Come.” Again, Dostoyevsky rose, and again, he extended his hand to Gogol, which this time was accepted, and the two men left the drawing-room. One of the men’s thoughts rested in a dark cabinet beside a small, silver revolver.

[fictionxing]

When It Rains... Mando x Reader | 2033 Words | Fluffy Goodness

A/N: So uh, forgive any weird tense shifts. I’ll try and fix them tomorrow when it’s not 2am. Also might make a part two where there’s more flirting if there’s interest!

Of course you would get stuck here. It was, after all, supposed to be a quick job. Land on the planet, find the bail jumper (as there seemed to be many bail jumpers in the outer rim these days), cart him back to the ship. The contact didn’t bother to mention that the planet the bail jumper was on had an ever present storm that roamed across the plant and it was scheduled to occupy the area right after you landed. Which, none you knew until after you landed.

So, it was more like the ship got stuck here and, therefore, you, the Mandalorian, and the tiny green child were stuck here too. You personally found the rain calming and watching the rivets travel down the windows in the cockpit was fairly occupying. Your companions, however, were not enjoying the days spent cooped up in what is honestly a rather small ship. Privacy was becoming an ever present and highly sought after luxury.

And, to your credit, you tried to keep out of Mando’s hair. It couldn’t be comfortable being forced to wear the helmet all the time and the poor man needed to eat on occasion. The child, on the other hand, was beginning to find all new places he could explore, which only made you and Mando more stressed. He was curious which meant he was often mischievous after exploring all of the easy to access places. In turn, it meant Mando and yourself were often having to keep a closer eye on him than normal causing further frustrations.

Glancing down, you tapped at you HoloPad once more, attempting to see if you could get any signal at all. If you could find when the end of the rain would be here, it may make it easier for Mando. At least, you thought it could help, as it would signal an end to being in cramped quarters. However, the storm was causing all sorts of interference due to being both incredibly large and seemingly never-ending. You sighed and tossed the tablet onto the dashboard. It was of no use anyway.

Behind you, you hear the sound of the door opening and you turn to see the Child waddling towards you. When he see you, he coos and waddles faster, extending a hand towards you in order to give you whatever it is he’s holding.

“Mah!” he pronounced proudly, his small arms reaching up towards you.

“Ah, what do you have here?” you asked, grinning down at him. No doubt he was involved something mischievous but seeing him so proud of his present was heartwarming. Reaching down, you took the long metal tube he was holding, realizing it was the removable scope Mando kept on his Amban rifle. “Hmm, are you supposed to have this?” you asked, an eyebrow raising as you glanced down at the child. His ear drooped slightly, obviously upset that you weren’t pleased with his gift. He babbled for a moment and you sighed, reaching down to pull him into your arms as you stood.

“Thank you for the gift,” you said. “But, this belongs to Mando and I think he’s really going to miss it. We should probably return it to him.” He responded with a long coo, ears hanging low. It pulled at your heart to see him so sad, so you tweaked one of his ears and smiled once more. “Come on, let’s go find him, hm?” The child perked up a small bit at your good humor and you began to make your way down to the hold of the ship.

Climbing down the ladder with one hand was tricky, but you managed by going slowly. As you reached the bottom, you could hear the sounds of Mando rummaging through one of his crates. Before you came into view, you knocked loudly against the metal siding of the ship, warning him of your presence just in case. You could hear him softly sigh before calling out, “Yes?”

Taking that to mean you could round the corner safely, you stepped into the loading dock to see Mando surrounded by several opened crates and the Amban rifle sitting on the small table in a few pieces. “I’m sorry,” you apologized, setting the child on one of the unopened crates. “I just wanted to bring this back to you. Someone decided to bring me a gift, but I figured you needed it more.”

As you held out the scope towards him, you heard him sigh again - this time deeper than before. “I was wondering how I had lost it,” he said, reaching out to take it. “I probably should have guessed it was the womp rat.” Despite the rather uncouth nickname, you could hear the warmth in his tone. Even the battle-hardened Mandalorian couldn’t stay mad at the child, it seemed.

“I can say he has wonderful taste,” you replied. “Even without the rifle, that’s a handy piece of tech.”

You felt your body warm as he chuckled. “Yes, it is,” he said simply, moving back to the table in order to properly finish the job of reconstructing his rifle.

You stood there awkwardly for a few moments, not knowing quite what to do. After a moment, a rattling noise caught your attention and you turned to see the Child attempting to climb inside one of the open crates. Sighing, you pulled him out and setting him on the table next to Mando before turning and beginning to pack away the crate.

“You don’t have to do that.” You turned to look over your shoulder, seeing Mando grabbing a few items as well.

“It’s fine,” you assured, giving him a small smile though feeling a weight in your gut. “I’ll just gather up everything and close the lids and then I’ll head back up.” You didn’t to impose on his company if he didn’t want you there, but he was also currently occupied. It would only take a few minutes to tidy up and then you would leave him to his work.

“It’s my mess,” he replied. “I can take care of it.”

“Of course,” you said, wanting to argue but your logical side urging you to keep the peace winning out. “I’ll just… head up back up then.” You stepped around him, making sure to keep a wide berth. You heard the child coo in confusion as you walked past but you ignore him.

As you climbed the ladder, you felt a lump in your throat form. Once you had safely made your way back into the cockpit and the metal doors were safely shut behind you, you leaned against them and gently thumped your head against it. “Idiot,” you thought. “You know he isn’t the mood for your hovering.” Sighing to yourself, you pressed the heels of your palms into your hands to will yourself to stop the feeling of tears forming. “What a silly thing to be upset about,” you thought. It was becoming more apparent over the course of your time stuck together that you had started develop feelings of… fondness… toward the Mandalorian. While you originally admired him and found him to be a fair and capable partner through your adventures in the galaxy, you had come to treasure the quiet moments between you.

You knew what was happening - you weren’t stupid after all. His chuckles caused your stomach to come to life with butterflies. The brief and rather innocuous touches caused your heart to beat faster. And anytime you saw him with the child your stomach would flip. But a crush on a Mandalorian… it was idiocy. Yes, he was a good man and no, the fact that you’d never seen him didn’t bother you. But you knew, in broad strokes, what his code was and the obligations he was required to fulfill. He had made both very clear when you’d joined his crew. You respected it and even found yourself doing what you could to help him reach his goals. But within that… there wasn’t much room for romance. Thus, all of these feelings were pointless and made you act like a fool.

“No point beating yourself up,” you murmured. You can be his friend. You can help him. Both of those are important and worthwhile even without acting on your feelings. Focus on those instead. Taking a final deep breath, you began to stand up when the door behind you suddenly opened, sending you falling backwards.

Thankfully you didn’t tumble to the ground, but instead felt your back collide with a rather solid and hard chest. You looked up to see Mando staring down at you and you can see your shocked face staring back at you in the shiny metal.

“Are you alright?” he asked quietly, and you could feel the rumble from them in his chest.

Blinking a few times, you finally came to your senses. “Yes! I’m fine!” you said, a little too loudly and hastily moved to stand upright. “Sorry! I didn’t realize you were coming up behind me.”

He was quiet for a moment, simply staring at you through the visor of his helmet. You felt yourself start to fidget and forced you hands behind your back. Suddenly he asked, “Is something wrong?”

The question took you by surprise. Again, you blinked at him a few times before your gaze fell the the floor. “Um, no?” you said.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Just probably feeling a little cabin fever,” you said.

He didn’t respond, but instead moved into the cockpit more fully, finally letting the doors close behind him. “I…” he started, sounding unsure of himself. That was… new. “Are you…”

“Really, Mando,” you said, interrupting him and forcing a smile on your face. “It’s fine. I’m okay.” You gave him an affirming nod and turned to sit down in the co-pilot’s seat but felt his gloved hand catch your wrist. It surprised you, and you turned to face him again. He didn’t immediately speak and you wondered what he was thinking. You wished you could see his face so at least you could get some clues.

“I just…” he started, still sounding unsure. “I just wanted to make sure that I haven’t… done… anything.”

“Done anything?” you asked. “No, of course not!”

“So… you’re not… frightened of me?”

“Frightened?” you repeated. “No, not at all!”

“Then why have you been avoiding me?” he asked and even without seeing his face you could tell he was feeling vulnerable at even asking.

“I haven’t-” you started, but he cut you off before you could continue.

“Don’t lie,” he said. “You’ve been… fidgety. And you don’t look at me much anymore, like you’re avoiding me. You’ve been jumpy when I speak. And don’t say it’s because we’re stuck here. It’s was happening before we landed.”

Your mouth opened and closed a few times, and you felt a little like a fish just gaping at him. “I’m not… jumpy. I’m just… I mean, it’s been stressful and… uh.” Now it was your turn to be tongue-tied, it seemed. “I didn’t want to intrude on your space,” you finally said, sighing. “It’s just me being weird, is all. It’s nothing you need to worry about. I promise.”

He stared at you for a long moment before he did something that surprised you. In a slow and, perhaps, unpracticed motion, he pulled you closer and wrapped his arms around you. Mando was… hugging you? It was a strange hug, considering the stiffness of his arms and hardness of his metal armor, but a hug nonetheless. You wrapped your arms around him in return, pressing your face against the cool Beskar against his chest.

“Thank you,” he finally said. “And… know that you are never intruding. I’ve… uh… missed your conversations. It’s hard to have one with a kid who doesn’t talk, after all.”

You giggled and pulled away from him. “That’s fair. I just know that it’s probably difficult and I didn’t want to feel compelled to always wear the helmet, just for my sake.”

“It’s a small price to pay for your company,” he replied and you felt your cheeks light up. Oh, what you wouldn’t give for your own helmet now.

[thebargainingchip]

Blood Colors - Chapter 18

Masterlist

Pairing: Roan x Reader

Warnings: Angsty, Fluff

Previous Chapter

Chapter 1

A feeling of dread sits in the pool of your stomach when you're back in Polis. There’s no escaping the feeling or distracting yourself, you are soon caught up in wedding plans which you barely have a say in. “Deyon, osir ste won. Moron, osir gondaun ogeda(Today, we are one. Tomorrow, we fight together)”

“Gonplei.” Echo corrects, you avoid Roan’s pointed gaze, you feel like you can’t breath with him so close, you didn’t want to think about what this means.

“Gondaun, gonplei. It all means the same thing.” You shoot-back.

“It does, though they are different but you need to say it exactly.” Roan says, and for a moment your eyes connect and you look away. How are you supposed to look him in the eye and say all of this.  Let alone do anything else the ceremony might want.

“Again.” Echo leans against Roan’s desk.

“I got it.” You snap.

“Again.” Echo insists with a strong glare.

“Echo, that’s enough help for one day.” Roan warns and Echo rolls her eyes and leaves but you ignore her with a silent angry exhale. “We then exchange the object which we poses that has the most meaning to us.” Your mind immediately flickered to the dog tags.

“This object it could be anything?” Roan nods, you ponder for a moment giving something else. There’s a little silence as you think deeply then look up and wonder what he’s think and what he has in mind.

“Then I will take the knife and poor my blood into the chalice.” Roan continues after a moment.

“I don’t like where this is going, sounds ill-advised.” You comment trying to sound light-hearted as you moved on from the thoughts, Roan sighs a little in frustration but amusement glimmers in his eyes.

“Then you take the knife and do the same.”

“Do they wipe it first? I mean like no offence but I don’t know what sort of grounder viruses your carrying that my space immune system can’t handle.” Roan sets you with a look and that nervous, impending-doom feelings forgotten as the nervousness turns into something entirely different.

“The same knife and then you and I share a drink.” You pull a face of course but Roan ignores you like he has been doing this whole day.

“Is there any kissing in this? If so we really might need to practice, I mean the last time I kissed you it was pretty much one sided and we need to at least convince the crowd.” Despite your joke, your cheeks burn.

Roan makes a thoughtful sound like he’s considering it, he takes a step forward like he made his decision and your smile falls as you step back bumping against the desk. Roan leans in and your thoughts scramble to decide whether you should stop him. He’s face is so close to yours now, you hold your breath. “Roan-“ you start but something twists in your gut, but it’s pleasant and keeps you from shivering at the tingle that runs up your spine, you swallow thickly. Roan hums again, this time a shorter observant sound.

“I don’t think you’re ready for that lesson yet.” He leans back, and you can breath again.

“Well I clearly didn’t mean now.” You say once you’ve recollected yourself, your whole face feeling like its on fire.

“We’ll continue later, you have an appointment with our yonhaka.” Roan was already on his way out.

“Yonhaka?” You ask confused.

                                            ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

“You’re late.” The Woman says the moment the guards open the door for you. “It’s hardly my fault, it took me an hour to find this place, I don’t even know what a yonhakais.” You survey the room, it is full of rolls of patched together fabric rolled onto large rollers packed against the walls, there is a big work table to your right, and large old mirrors to the left side of the room, of you study the old or nations in the room, it’s clear this was some studio of a kind, may be for dancing? Behind the woman with exotic ethnic features that you can’t quite place is two women and a man. By the way she carries herself , it's clear who in charge.

“The.” She says simply.

“What?”

“Jus Gona, you have the privilege of meeting the royal dresser, it is an honour to be adorned in the art that she makes with her own hands.” The male introduces.

“Do I bow?” You question sarcastically from the dramatic words.

“Fiery.” She notes. “I have some ideas but I will need to take your measurements first and have you try on old dresses.”

“Lady, I don’t do dresses, I need something I can move in. Shit can go south very quickly with Azgeda.”

“Authoritative, demanding.” She states.

“Annoying.” You state back at her, as you try and discourage the outright judgement.

“I am building a profile of you, I need to know what you are like so that your sofkova (dress) can represent you.” She explains patiently, “As for the other matter, there is no negotiation on the sofkova, a dress it will be even if I have to sew it to your skin, but it will be functional.”

“You just got a whole creepier.” You point out.

“My goal is to make you feel your power when you stand in your dress, and if you don’t- but you will- then I haven’t done my job correctly.” You cocked an eyebrow.

“Try me.” You challenge.

“Ban we yun bakkova (Remove your clothing).” She orders and with a wave of her hand you do.

“And one last thing, if you ruin my work, I will ruin you.” You didn’t say anything against her blatant threat instead deciding that you would be very careful.

                                           ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

You were retired to your own quarters for the afternoon, trying to go over the words of the ceremony. You sighed in frustration, barely being able to focus, you were tired after the early start to your long day.

“It’s fine, just relax.” You say out loud, instead deciding to lay out the clothes you were going to wear for bed. There was a knock at the door and you gave you permission for the person to enter.

“Jus Gona, the Ambassador of Skaikru has requested to see you, King Roan has granted him access.” You sigh knowing whatever you say to the guard won’t help the situation. “Ai na gocha yu op got raunkova(I’ll escort you to the throne room).” He declared. You weren’t much surprised that Roan would want the meeting to be somewhere in public, given Skaikru’s recent record. Of course, you knew you would be given some privacy at least but one or two guards might be present. It was Marcus though. Would he really do something like that to you? You decided that some people did stupid things when they were desperate, you wouldn’t be over powered again.

The moment the doors opened, you were surprised, Cedree stood against the far wall behind Marcus, arms folded as he watched carefully. You hadn’t seen him since-

“Y/n.” Marcus says when the door has closes behind you. You feel a little trapped for the moment as you look over your shoulder to indeed atest that the noise was truly the door closing and the guard leaving, no doubt right outside the door. You steel yourself and turn to him, a little funny thought crossed your mind. ‘Marcus was standing next to the guy you tried to have sex with’ It was supplied by some foolish irrational thought of you and of course you were an adult who could make her own decisions, it was not like Marcus was in anyway related to you. After this you couldn’t for a moment take your eyes off Cedree, feeling totally embarrassed by multiple things.

You needed something to focus on whatever Marcus was here to tell you. You strode towards the table.

“Do you want anything?” You toss the question over your shoulder at Marcus. There’s silence so you pour one glass.

He always knew what to do when talking to people and he was checking all the boxes when he said:

“You remember when I caught you drinking, you had met up with a boy and one of the guards reported to me that you had been out past curfew while I was working late night.” You turn around during the story, taking a sip of the wine and watching him, knowing instantly where this story was going, feeling even more embarrassed that Cedree was here, but you ignored his presence for the moment

Marcus smiles at the memory and it makes you think back about how he put the boy in detention for a week and made you assist Abby’s patients for the next month, it was how you and Clarke got close. Despite the not so uncomfortable memories you shut him down quickly.

“You told me that I will always make mistakes and that if I didn’t see it you would space me like my parents.” It’s an old scab and you know how Marcus feels about it, you’re long past it but he doesn’t need to know about it. You had to admit, Marcus was a relation, no matter how hard you tried to deny it. Your reality was that he had betrayed you even if it wasn’t him who took the initiative, you were angry because he wasn’t there to stop Clarke. You put the glass back on the table, behind you.

“Maybe I wasn’t the best... parental figure in your life at the time but you turned out well and you know how much I’ve tried to make it right.” You couldn’t deny it he had, countless times made up for it, Marcus had always been there for you, even when you fucked up he was there to correct your mistakes and he hadn’t judged you for them. And he wasn’t all bad, as much as he liked to believe, you were taught valuable things, how to survive, how to lead people and how to get them to follow, what power means to people and how they tend to use it if it falls into their lap.

“Marcus, I’ve killed people, a murderer is not exactly the picture of a good child.” Marcus reaches to steady you by the shoulders and out fo the corner of your eye, you both notice Cedree move, hand on his sword. Marcus steps back hesitantly, ever since he changed, he’s been affectionate and at first it made you uncomfortable and then you discovered it was because it was something you hated to admit you needed sometimes- in small doses.

“Me too. I’m not perfect, none of us are. I killed your parents, you know I’m still paying for it. This life does things to us, but it doesn’t mean we’re bad people, not if we make the right decisions, even when it's hard.” You shake your head pulling away from him, how hypocritical, you hated how it hurts but you sat it anyway:

“Marcus, I can’t help Skaikru, at least not in the way you want to but if you support this decision we made, then Roan might-“

“What decision, (y/n)?!” He raises his voice at that, interrupting you then pauses to collect himself but continues in the same serious tone but softer. “Don’t tell me that you made this decision because I damn well know you didn’t. And it’s not okay, you’re barely twenty two and Roan could almost be-“

“Don’t you dare say it.” You glare at him. He stops, recognising something in your expression. “You know, I can’t read you. I don’t know what to think anymore. I can’t tell if you actually care about me or if you are trying to save your people.”

“They’re your people too.” Marcus says, you simply glare at him, he knows how fondyou are of your former fellow ship mates. “Why can’t it ever be both?” He questions.

“I am not trying to force you to decide. Marcus, my happiness, my safety will never be in your hands again. There’s no decision here. Either Skaikru doesn’t support this marriage, rejects Roan as the rightful King or they survive.” You emphasise, ignoring the clear insult he gave you a moment before. For once you just wanted to feel like someone put you first but you pushed it aside.

You stepped back schooling yourself back into place. “Please go, my wedding day is tomorrow, I will need plenty of rest to prepare for the long festivities.” The doors open. You’ve said everything you possibly could, now it was up to him. “The Guards will escort you back to your rooms, and I will know your final decision. You’re fate, tomorrow.” Marcus doesn’t protest. As Cedree knocks on the door singling to the guards outside who opened the doors.

“Ced.” You say softly as Marcus is escorted out.

“Ai na goch Faya Gada gon baggeda(I’ll escort the fire girl to her bedroom).” Cedree says to the guard waiting on you, who nods and joins the guard escorting Marcus away.

“When did you arrive?” You enquire casually.

“This morning.” He explains simply, “I heard you were caught up in a little skirmish with your people.” You nod, then change the subject drastically:

“I feel terrible.”

“No need,” He says in that’s strange accent with a boyish smile, “I’m just wondering what was your intention that night.”

“I was trying to see if I could feel anything, since I might have had to spend the rest of my life with you.” You explain.

“And?” He asked.

“Ced-“ You start in a soft tone, not quite sure how to put the words.

“I know this path has long since past, And don’t get me wrong to think that anything might have developed past friendship in the time that I’ve known you, I’m sure you know these things take time, but I’m curios.” He interrupted quickly explaining, you almost sighed in relief.

“No, Ced, I’m not set up to work like that.” He nods, accepting your answer.

“Shall we?” He gestured to the open hall way.

“I need to see Roan.” You add, he nods and walks you the way.

You pause outside the room, next to the guards and smile at Cedree as he nods to you and leaves. When you hear Echo’s voice you stop the guard from opening the door for a moment as something captures your attention.

“Jus Gona?” The guard questions, you push him.

“Wait a moment.” You tell him as you listen.

“-stop being so soft with her.” You instantly knew who they were talking about.

“What I do is none of your concern.” Roan states. He doesn’t deny it and something flutters with in you and then is quickly snuffed out, the last thing you wanted was to be treated like something fragile due to a pity party. There’s silence that follow, your wonder if Roan is contemplating Echo’s word. Despite Echo being his advisor, he seems to usually shut her down when she speaks up, which is surprising that this time he doesn’t chase her out.

“Jus Gona?” The guard questions, reminding you as the silence continues inside.

“I changed my mind.” You say. “Please tell the King that I spoke to Marcus Kane and that he shouldn’t be expecting any support from Skaikru.”

                                           ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

The sun has long since set when the doors to your rooms open once more to an unannounced visitor, your fingers are entangled in the dog tags of your brother, the old rusted chain and faded letters are so familiar but you put it aside as Roan steps further into the room, the doors close behind him.

“You allowed Marcus to speak to me.” It sounds colder when it echoes around the room.

“I knew, as Jus Gona, the future queen and leader of my people, you would be able to win us a new ally and I was expecting you to perform your duties.” Roan doesn’t answer, the King does.

“Don’t be so sure, I have achieved nothing but to cut the only person that ever believed in me out of my life.”

“It’s him who made that decision not you.” Roan adds, it hurst worse.

“Can you please take that stupid thing of your head?!” You cry out frustrated. When the moment fades and Roan keeps quiet, idle by the desk where rests hand on the backrest of the chair, you feel ashamed at your childish outburst. You clench and unclench your jaw, thinking of the apology almost stings.

You hear the soft thump of the crown on the table and you look up, watching Roan peel back his regal outer layers until he can more comfortable move in his untucked shirt and simple pants. He lays them out over the chair, taking his time and then he strides to your side of the bed.

“Roan I am really-“ He sits down on the bed by your legs.

“How did it go when you spoke to Marcus?” He asks, it's so genuine, his words soft.

“Awful.” You say simply.

“I’m sorry.” Roan says, holding your gaze with a sincere look. “If you want to talk about it..?” Roan trails off but you look away, you weren’t in the mood to open old wounds, if you could just keep it together for one more day.

“Wasn’t this what Echo said you shouldn’t do.” You mumble almost under your breath, keeping your gaze trained on the dog tags at the side of your table. There’s enough silence that you think, he’s confused.

“That’s when you asked the guard to inform me. Is that why you didn’t come inside?” He questions.

“I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t hear it.” You say simply. “I don’t want you to go easy on me because of what happened.”

“Is that what you think my reasoning is?” He questions, when you don’t answer Roan tries with another question: “If you don’t want me to go easy on you and you don’t want me to treat you like one of your subjects, what do you want?” He asks, when you glance at him he’s genuinely curios, he has a patient expression on his face as he waits.

“I don’t know, definitely not like one of your subjects.” You say, that tells him everything he needs to know as he hums thoughtfully

“You should be asleep, tomorrow is a long day.” Roan says when he realised you weren’t ready.

“I doubt I’ll be getting any sleep.” You retort.

“Try?”

“Only if you stay to toss and turn with me the whole night.” You say before you could want to begin to stop yourself. Roan nods, and you’re a little surprised by it.

                                           ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

The next morning you wake up as Roan gets ready to leave, he greets you and tells you he had some business to attend to. You are ordered to stay confined in your room until someone comes to get you, Echo is with you from after breakfast which at least provides some entertainment for the day ahead and almost anything you require is at your fingers tips. There’s not much to do than to sit and overthink the day away which only seems to fuel the nervous nightmare ahead. The guards have been increased tenfold for the day, to ward off any potential threats and provide at least some form of protection in the event of some brave soul favouring a very a bad idea. The wedding was announced early morning by the King himself to the people of Polis, his people and other clans and currently he was negotiating with other leaders for the support in your union.

“Don’t they have professionals for this type of stuff? Ow!” You exclaim as Echo pulls the braid tightly. “Could you please leave some hair in my scalp after you're finished!” You snap, glaring at Echo in the mirror.

“Stop your whining, fyucha (infant).” Echo snaps right back, pausing as she glares back in the mirror. “I could leave it for you to do yourself, you ungrateful little-“

“Fine! Sorry!” You snap. Echo continues after a small pause, she continues to tug at your hair but you ignore it as much as possible, gritting your teeth.

“There.” You sight in relief as she gives confirmation that she is finished, you stand. You looked fine, the intricate braids might have been too much for your taste but it was the last thing on your mind. Your makeup consisted of key pieces that highlighted your features. A strange sight compared to the only other make up you ever wore- war paint.

There’s a loud bang as the doors hit the wall, you jump, your body tense as you reach for a dagger at your hip that is not there. Roan stands in your doorway, covered in blood. The fact that it was him, should have put you at ease but the site of the deep red doesn’t. “You’re okay.” Roan says as if it's a revelation to himself.

“Echo, guard the door.” Roan orders, she immediately steps outside.

“Yeah I’m okay, why am I would I not be okay? Are you even supposed to be here? Why is there blood all over you?” You question, your hair is braided and you are only standing in your underwear and despite the countless times you have seen blood, despite the countless times you have faced death, it horrifies you. You cross your arms, feeling a little uncomfortable as Roan tries real hard not to look down.

“No, I’m not supposed to be here but we need to do this now, some Natrona (traitors) have infiltrated the Polis. If we can finish the ceremony, I believe they will stand down, if I have the power of Jus Gona.” The door closes behind him hiding the hoard of guards.

You're stunned, you swallow not sure what exactly to think.

“What?” Is all you can manage.

“Wait before you-“ Roan starts but you cut him off.

“You’re going to kill me.” You throat burns, your first thought was ‘what were you expecting’ and then you rationality suddenly steps in, why would he tell you this if it was his plan? It makes you pause for a moment and listen to what Roan is trying to say.

“I mean,” he suddenly decides to step closer. “I’m not sure it's better.” He almost laughs but he’s expression is humourless. “Have you ever done itbefore?” Out of all the things you thought he would say, that question was not on your list.

First of all King Roan of Azgeda, one of the most accomplished warriors you know can’t say the word ‘sex’.

“Of course I’ve slept with people, are you sure you have?” You question almost accusingly.

“Yes, yes-“ he defends almost immediately, you swear he’s a deeper colour as he pauses, “that’s not the point. I’m talking about consummating the marriage tonight.” Roan is serious, you’re a little dizzy but you keep standing anyway, taking a deep breath to think.

“So we say we did the do, no one will be the wiser.” You suggest.

“It has to be witnessed.” You swallow, feeling like you needed a breath of fresh air.

“I was afraid you would say that. This fucked up shit is getting really predictable, first I have to drink your blood and now? Now this.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I keep asking-“

“I’ll do it,” your throat burns, “but I swear to God Roan, I don’t know if I can but I can try.” You hate that your eyes flood with tears but you can’t stop it as the trickle down your cheeks. Roan steps up again and simply pull you into his chest despite his bloody clothes. He smells like Iron and salt and you try to block out your own sobs. “You’re not supposed to make the bride cry on her wedding day you know.” Roan can’t help but chuckle. You half heartedly attempt a laugh but you don’t feel like it.

Next Chapter

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@sunshine-and-riverwater @jinx-is-fire @silver424@cherrysfandom@thebookandmoviefangirl @that-cute-stranger @waitingtobeimpressed @daringvixon

[rosesisupposes]

Skin Deep

Two royal twins, Remus and Roman, alike in almost every way, trained to be military leaders, trained to serve their nation as generals. But in a society that sees any body irregularities as signs of moral defect, one will never hold the same status as his brother. How could he ever be a proper Face of the Nation?

or, What If Roman Was The Unacceptable One?

Word count:  9,203

Main Characters: Remus, Roman

Appearances by: Patton, Remy, Logan, Virgil, Mentions of Deceit

Relationships: Platonic/Brotherly Creativitwins; background Losleep, past Moceit, beginnings of Royality, Platonic Sleepality, Platonic Sleepxiety, 

Warnings: graphic descriptions of war/battle; societal prejudice based on appearances; discrimination based on appearances; trauma-induced body modifications; mentions of emotional abuse including forced starvation/food deprivation;   

Credit to @hawthornshadow for being my wonderful co-creator in the worldbuilding especially, and to dear @vintage-squid for beta-reading!

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Roman’s muscles were burning as he blocked the attack, catching the down-swinging blow at the hilt. He pushed back, threw his assailant off balance, and swung out his leg to send him sprawling. Without pausing for breath, he followed through, swinging his sword to stop mere inches from the fallen man’s throat.

“I yield,” the man said, chest heaving. “Also, fuck you, Your Grace.”

Roman grinned and sheathed his dull practice sword, offering an arm to help the man to his feet. “My only goal is to help you improve, my dear Toby. By pointing out the weak points in your defense. Repeatedly.”

“Thanks ever so, royal pain-in-the-ass,” Toby said, letting himself be pulled to standing. He stretched, wincing, and picked up his fallen weapon. The other men of Roman’s squad surrounded them, patting Toby’s back with sympathy and slapping Roman with what were framed as claps of victory but were probably harder than they needed to be. Roman brushed his hair out of his face, his bright red curls turned dark with sweat. One of the men tossed him a damp cloth to wipe his face, and he caught it with thanks.

Roman and his men were chatting and planning their next training session when a servant entered the yard.

“Your Grace, your father requests your presence.”

Roman immediately broke off from the group. “Is it an immediate request, or do I have time to make myself presentable?”

“His Majesty is aware that you were in the training grounds, and it is not an urgent matter.”

⁂

Roman, cleaned up and outfitted in his dress uniform, knelt before his father’s throne, waiting to be spoken to. He felt a slight trickle of sweat on his neck, and he spared a moment to hope that he wouldn’t sweat on his face as well. He would hate to have the makeup he’d carefully applied get smeared. Yes, his scars were common knowledge, and weren’t ever fully made invisible even when he caked on concealer and foundation, but he knew his father preferred it to be less noticeable. His father, and most everyone else too.

He wondered, not for the first time, if his brother would continue to require Roman to wear makeup once he ascended to the throne. He was never quite sure how Remus felt about the whole process.

He looked up under his lashes to see Remus inclining his head to speak into their father’s ear, advising him on some court matter. It appeared he’d been to the castle barber today - his hair was neatly shorn and perfectly shaped. Not a single strand blocked the view of his defined cheekbones, round chin, or his smooth, unblemished skin. Ideal, without flaws. He looked just as one would expect him to, the future Face of the Kingdom.

Currently, he was frowning. He looked up and seemed to notice his brother kneeling.

“Roman, thank you for coming. Father and I need your advice on the next advance.”

Roman rose, finally, and walked over to the map spread on the table by the throne.

“We expect the vanguard to be entrenched at the top of the mountain, but we might be able to draw them out with a flank attack-”

“But we’d run the risk of getting pinned down by their artillery and archers-”

The three royals broke into a flurry of strategy and tactics, Roman giving an on-the-ground view from the thick of battle to his father and brother’s eagle’s-eye-view. He noted more than one moment where his father urged bold, aggressive, and risky strategies that made Remus hesitate. But each time, the crown prince agreed with his father’s methods. Through the involved discussion, a battle plan was crafted.

“I expect well of you both,” the king said, nodding decisively. “We will meet on the peak in three day’s time. Gather your men and arms.”

Roman and Remus both bowed to their father. Roman waited a moment to allow his brother to exit the throne room before him, but walked by his side through the hallways leading to the family quarters.

“Are you quite alright, Reme? You seemed distracted in council-”

“I’m fine, Ro,” his brother responded, cutting him off. “It’s just another battle. Good night.” He entered his room and shut the door behind him with a thud.

⁂

“-no need for such theatrics, Your Highness, it’s just another battle.”

Remus stared up at the general, hardly aware of the tears on his cheeks or the vomit still lining his mouth. He was 12, on his first trip with his father to the battlefield. He hadn’t been prepared.

His tutors had spent years stressing the need for the royal line to fight alongside their men. The glory of war was the glory of generals, directing and rallying troops, inspiring hope and righteous fury from the front of the charge. Remus, as heir, must be the generals’ General. Plain in speech, getting directly to the point. Curt. No fancifulness, lest he be distracted. He was instructed on how to be the perfect leader, the perfect soldier, and one day the perfect king.

But what they hadn’t told him was the reality that all soldiers knew: there is little glory on the field of war. There was the Cause at home, of course, a grand narrative that justified sending the troops out for King and Country, a declaration of glorious purpose and righteous smiting.  

But on the field?

There had been the initial clash, of course, the charging of lines against one another. But that was where the resemblance to the theory Remus had been steeped in ended. He’d been brought to a battlefield and saw the charge, heard the horns and drums, and at first, his heart had swelled with the glory of which he’d only heard of.

Then he saw the aftermath. He saw the wounded scattered around like leaves after a storm, limbs detached and bloody like some terrible mockery of dolls, the flies buzzing over blown-out heads… he had barely made it out of the command tent before he started to vomit, long and hard, until he was heaving with nothing left to retch.

But the generals, and his father, had merely frowned and scoffed at his immaturity. Why did he dwell on this? It was a fact of life and war. He wasn't to mind it. He was to do his duty.

So Remus cleaned his mouth and pushed those sights to the back of his mind. They were to be expected, as part of the cleanup. No need to think about the wounded and marred.

Roman, the younger twin, was much older when he was brought to battle. He saw small skirmishes first, before the carnage of all-out war. But the sheen of glory faded for him too.

Remus remembered the voices of the public as they brought Roman home on a stretcher. The country’s champions were only supposed to lead, not get hurt. Or if they must be hurt, it wasn’t supposed to be in lasting or visible ways, they were supposed to at most suffer some injury, bravely soldier through, and return home triumphant in a sling. Why couldn’t Duke Roman have been properly injured, those who sat at home in their solars asked. A broken arm. A leg. Something that would heal and look dramatic doing it. Soldiers, especially noble ones, were expected to recover without a mark to show for it. Once the war had left the public consciousness, the injuries should have vanished, too. “Better to have been a martyr than to return home like that,” they whispered.

Not that Roman ever had a chance.

He’d been born with facial markings. Skin that looked almost painted with a pink mark, a wine stain imbued in the tan skin of his face. He looked wrong, the whispers said. Wrong for nobility. Certainly wrong for royalty. Imagine if such a one had been born the elder. How could such a one lead the nation, be the culmination of the bloodline and the clear face of morals that his people needed?

The king and queen had known of the double heartbeat, known that two children were on their way at once. And the nation and family knew, of course, that Remus was the elder, if only by half an hour. What a relief it was to know that the proper heir didn’t have such a deformity. The royals announced them both at once, hadn’t proclaimed each birth separately as was sometimes done. But then, of course, that was surely because of the queen, may she rest in peace. The midwives and servants didn’t speak of that day. Out of respect for her memory. A day of both joy and sorrow. King and country lost their beloved queen. But they gained the sons of the nation. Duke Roman, who served in battle honorably and mostly well. And Prince Remus, who was soft, and smooth, and blemish-free. A proper heir.

And he never returned from battle with injuries so dire they would leave unmistakable scars.

⁂

Three days later, Remus sat astride his charger, waiting for his father’s signal. The army’s flags snapped in the brisk wind, and he heard the creak and jingle of tack and armor around him as the soldiers shifted in place, maintaining formation as they waited.

The horn sounded, and Remus lifted his morning star with a yell and kneed his horse into a charge, soldiers streaming beside and behind him.

The fight was a blur. Remus remembered moments like the new technology of moving photographs, brief clips only a few seconds long. Catching a blow from an enemy horseman on his shield. Swinging his mace low and alongside his mount, catching a footsoldier from behind. Seeing Roman, bright in a white jacket that would soon be stained as he and his force streamed down a hill to join the fray.

It was just another battle. He played his role in the plan well, and their army won. He sat on a bench outside the command tent, cleaning his weapon and listening to reports. The victory was resounding - the only enemy soldiers not killed had been captured. The day was theirs.

Remus looked across the battlefield as one of his advisors continued to report. The ground was churned by the hooves of hundreds of horses, where it wasn’t obscured by bodies or fallen weapons. He found his eye caught on one lone body at the base of the hill from where he sat. An enemy soldier, now defeated. That's all the man should have been to him. Right?

But he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t. The man’s head was bloody, the wound jagged and terrible and... and it matched his morning star. The punctures, the dent, they matched the pattern perfectly. He’d just cleaned it - the blood and mud and matter had taken so much effort to clean. And there was where the blood had come from, that young man’s head, now part of the carnage, lying in a tangle of the fallen like logs ready to be burnt.

Remus’ hand started to shake, morning star still in his grasp.

“Your Highness? Are you alright?” the general asked.

Remus nodded, still shaking, and tried to flash the man a reassuring smile. His mouth split open, but it stretched too wide, too far, too fake. He started to laugh, air forcing itself out of his lungs in staccato bursts. The general’s eyes widened with nervousness, and he looked around them for someone else, anyone else to help.

Remus’ laugh went on and on, humorless and shrill. He couldn’t stop himself.

“Can't think about it, you know!" he cackled between laughs. "Can't dwell! It's a fact of life!"

The general backed away, heading for the other tents that housed the king and the other leaders.

When they returned to the hilltop, Remus was gone, without a trace. All that remained was a morning star, abandoned in the mud.

⁂

Two weeks later, the king paced the throne room fretfully.

“We fear the worst has happened to the Prince,” the king said. “An ambush, perhaps? Some straggler who escaped our forces, desperate for one last kill? Perhaps they recognized him and mean to ransom him, but wouldn’t we have received a demand letter by now? He’s clearly noble, anyone could tell that from a glance, why haven’t we received word? What shall we do without our heir? What will become of our nation?”

Roman stood at attention, silent. He had not heard from his brother either, but from the general’s report, he was far less optimistic that something so simple as kidnapping had occurred. But his father wouldn’t hear of it.

They hadn’t made an official announcement to the public, besides half-hearted excuses. But the rumors had begun, whispers noticing Prince Remus’ conspicuous absence. Only Duke Roman had presided with the King at the victory procession. How could the Prince allow “feeling under the weather” prevent him from attending? What was wrong?

Roman’s fingers beat an anxious rhythm on his sword hilt as he watched his father pace when they were both jolted by the loud slam of the throne room door opening.

In the doorway stood… well, it appeared to be Remus. But Remus had… changed.

His hair was long and straggly, and dyed a sickening swamp green. Metal spikes pierced the cartilage of his nose and ears, sprouting out like a mockery of armor. Studs were embedded in his cheeks. Black tears were inked under his eyes. His lips were painted a screeching shade of neon green, and when he smiled wide, they saw that his tongue had been disfigured, split into two.

They both stared, but Roman was the first to speak.

"Remus?" Roman asked. "I- we were so worried, what happened?"

"Oh I just got my head out of my ass, brother dear! Didn't want to be like all you shitheads anymore!" Turning to the king, the prince grinned lopsidedly "Daddykins, didn't you miss me? Did you have to slaughter children by yourself or did you bring ickle Romeo with you?"

"Remus!" Roman interrupted, shocked. "We don't-"

"Oh but we doooo!" Remus sang. "Me and Daddy do! We do our doody, don't we, Pop?"

The king finally spoke. "What," he demanded flatly. "Have you done to yourself."

Remus fluttered his eyelashes. "Oh I just stabbed my own face! Professionally, of course. almost as professionally as you with your broadsword. Not nearly as much blood, though, I know you'd be disappointed."

The prince approached the throne, heedless or because of the way the king recoiled from him.

"Hope I can still be your little boy, though, Poppy! Hope I can fill your big dick shoes! Can't you just wait for me to take on our glorious legacy? Aren't you delighted to hand off that big ol' crown to you eldest son?!"

"Let you be the face of the kingdom, looking like that? " his father said coldly. "Let you rule, when you have clearly abandoned all we hold dear?” The King rose, pointing past Remus with a finger that shook with rage. “Get out of our sight. We have only one son."

Remus grinned widely, and Roman realized with a sickening start that he hadn’t seen his brother smile this much since they were children.

“Whatever you desire, dearest darlingest popsicle!”

“Out!” the king roared, and Remus obeyed, his cackling laughter echoing back through the halls.

The king breathed deep, chest heaving as he calmed himself.

“Roman.”

The duke swallowed the lump in his throat to answer, “Yes, Father?”

“We name you Crown Prince, sole heir to our throne and fortune. We disown and disname the former Prince Remus. The realm places its full trust in you, our son.”

Roman knelt, hearing the unspoken end of the sentence. Don’t you dare fail.

“I thank you for this honor, father. I will serve to the best of my ability,” he said graciously.

The king took a medallion on ribbon from the wall - the sunburst seal of the royal house, only worn by kings and direct heirs. He placed it around Roman’s neck. “We- I know you will, Roman. I know you will be all that our country needs you to be.”

King and newly-named-prince made eye contact. The king’s eyes blazed, with anger and grief and unspoken warning: Don’t fuck up, like he did.

Roman bowed his head, lest his father see the heartbreak in his eyes.

You were what fucked him up.

⁂

Roman was introduced to the kingdom as the future king. It was not quite the joyous affair that Remus’ coming-of-age had been, not when the king spoke as if the former prince had died, when the announcement of Roman replacing him was practically perfunctory. When Roman had sat at his vanity for a full hour as the artists worked to cover up his birthmarks and battle scars. And for what? It wasn’t as if the kingdom didn’t already know that he was… imperfect. Marred. Flawed.

But appearances, his father told him coldly, must be maintained.

Roman was the heir, unable to be disowned too, not when the king had no more options. He needed the king’s advisors and generals to respect him if he were to ever properly reign. He needed the nobility to support him. He needed to get the ones in power, the Noble Council, to see past his face, to believe in his ability to rule despite his impurities. But he knew they would never be ignored.

Hadn’t he grown up with the whispers? Hadn’t he seen how others who were injured or disfigured be dismissed from court altogether? Hadn’t he watched as the mere rumor of a nobleman’s secret tattoo pushed him out of the public eye in shame? When a pair of clip-on earrings were scandalous just by resembling a body modification, what hope did Roman and his birthmark have to be accepted?

But he smiled, and waved, and spoke with the oldest generals, and accompanied his father to court days, and filled his role as heir. In battle, he was pulled into a higher level of command, no longer directing just his contingent of soldiers, but entire armies. He and his father led the charges still, of course, but he no longer trained with his men. His missed them, as he’d missed the relative privacy of being just a Duke instead of Prince. But it was his duty.

⁂

It had been months since Remus’ disownment when another major battle came to pass. The king brought Roman to the field with him, keeping him involved in the planning for the entire process. Roman was pleased to discover that the generals actually respected his strategic and tactical contributions - it seemed his closeness with his direct force had given him a keener sense of the risks and rewards of maneuvers that the command tent often lacked. That day, though, his father seemed a bit distracted. It didn’t seem to interfere with his reasoning or fighting, though. Not until the height of battle.

And then the King saw him. A young man with a morning star. It was a common-enough weapon for nobility, but... the boy had smooth skin and no scars and no piercings and he fought well, methodically and with only the required level of ferocity. He was a once-familiar sight on the field, one who had been there every battle until now.

And the king just... snapped.

He charged down the hill, ahead of the signal. Alone. It was unwise. Roman saw his father charge, tried to warn him back, tried to call to him and break through the distraction.

The King probably could not have articulated why he charged. It was out of anger, yes, but was it anger at the boy for being a reminder? Anger because of what he lost? Anger at Remus for no longer looking the way the young man did, for no longer being what the king had wished him to be?

He would never get a chance to explain.

The boy saw his danger. So did three of his fellows. The king brought no backup. He fell.

Roman continued the fight. What else could he have done?

The boy had frozen him too, a shadow from the past, one with a smile that Roman hadn’t seen on his twin’s face in years. Remus’ smiles had been growing stiffer ever since they were 12, pasted-on grins that never reached his eyes. And the last time he’d seen him- it had been even more unfamiliar. Manic. Pained. He’d laughed, but with no true amusement.

Even as he performed the steps of his role as heir, Roman couldn’t rid himself of the thought that the lack of genuine happiness in his brother’s face could only have been due to the king himself and the weight Remus had borne as the Crown Prince.

Roman ascended in the wake of his father’s death with that same weight, grown heavier through guilt and shame and the bitter knowledge that none of this was ever supposed to be him.

⁂

Roman had to be king. There was no one else. His father had been an only child. The next closest relatives were two different third cousins who were quite proud to be in the line of succession. If Roman wasn’t king, the country would fall into a civil war of family against family, fighting for the ‘truest’ claim to the throne.

The nobility accepted the necessity of his reign. That didn’t mean they were happy about it.

Whispers followed him through the halls, stopped suddenly as he entered the audience chamber, rumbled around him when he took his weekly rides through the capital city. He wanted to be an accessible king, one his people knew as more than just a bloodied general returning from the field. He even spent a single afternoon hoping that with enough exposure to his face and his scars, the country might grow to see past his appearance.

It was a foolish hope. Prejudices that have been passed down for over five generations don’t melt away because of one king, much less one who gained power under less than ideal circumstances.

And yet, it didn’t change his determination to be a presence in his people’s lives, not just a face seen from a distant castle balcony. After much cajoling and convincing of his personal guard, Roman began spending evenings mingling in the capital city restaurants and taverns. As a commander, he’d learned how best to let his soldiers get used to him, and he used this skill again across town, night after night. He would sit near the corner of the bar, or at a less-traffic corner of the dining room, or at the end of a shared table. He would eat quietly, only speaking when others greeted him, seemingly very focused on his food alone. And slowly, his fellow diners got over the shock of seeing their king among them and start chatting about their lives, their children, their heartbreaks and dreams. He would listen and nod and quietly pay their tabs, then leave before they got too embarrassed or self-conscious. And when it was commoners, it worked well. With the nobility, or the higher classes of commoners that desperately wanted to be nobility, he had to fend off the comments. Usually, it was surprise that his birthmark and scars were really that obvious. Or passive-aggressive comments about how it was “wonderful how cosmopolitan the Noble Council is these days.”

Roman would just grin and bluster and respond, “Royalty’s more than skin-deep, darling.”

It was just charming enough to satisfy most, or at least end that line of conversation, and he could go back to being a silent listener. But when eyes lingered on his birthmarks or traced down the long line of stitching scars down his cheek, he couldn’t help but flinch internally, preparing himself for the darts and daggers of judgment. The sting of disapproval never really faded, no matter how many times he endured it with a smile.

⁂

He risked it, one night, to go to a place he’d only heard about in hushed tones. It was a scandalous place, certainly not one that any self-respecting noble would be caught dead in. But Roman was desperate with hope. So without telling anyone, not even his bodyguard, he slipped out of the castle to visit Au Naturel.

The sign had been vandalized recently, bright red spray paint across it like blood splatters, but what could be expected when a slur was reclaimed with such audacity? Roman hesitated on the threshold, but surely it would be far worse to linger there on the street and risk being seen for minutes versus the seconds it would take him to enter or exit. With a deep breath, he walked inside.

The first thing he saw was a bouncer, a hulking man with navy blue hair and glasses. He stared down at Roman’s identification papers critically, eyebrows barely twitching in recognition of the kingdom’s regnal name. Roman tried to avoid staring, but the man was pierced in dozens of places, with visible tattoos curling out of the collar of the sensible black turtleneck. But he didn’t look distraught or distressed, just cool and collected.

Roman fought back a shiver of excitement as he reclaimed his papers and was welcomed into the heart of the bar with a wave.

He’d expected dim lights, maybe a smoke-obscured room, something out of the speakeasy fictions he’d read about in the edgier forms of media. Instead, there were golden lamps that lit everything well, and bright neon signs that threw off a rainbow of lights from the walls. The rainbows were reflected back off the many piercings in the crowd, off shiny gelled hair, even off prosthetic limbs. Roman had expected a huddled crowd of solidarity, of societal misfits in their one safe space. Instead, he found a party of delight, with faces that were all relaxed and at ease instead of just in temporary relief.

He shuffled to the bar, avoiding eye contact, a bit overwhelmed and unsure how to start mingling.

A smiling bartender greeted him. They had a mohawk, dyed in blues and purples with glitter sprinkled through like stars. They wore a lipstick of a startling bright shade of pink that contrasted with their tan skin. A huge silver hoop dangled from one ear lobe, accompanied by spikes around the cartilage, and they acknowledged Roman’s quiet request for a gin-and-tonic with a wink. As they turned to the racks of drinks, Roman realized with a start that their skin was perfectly smooth, besides the alterations. No visible scars or marks or even freckles, and the mesh shirt they wore meant much more skin was visible than normal. And yet, they were here. As they returned with Roman’s drink, they asked, “First night, hun?”

Roman nodded. “It’s not exactly what I expected.”

The bartender leaned, tilting down tinted glasses to fix Roman with a look. “What do you mean, babes?”

“I- the way people talk, I’d expected the folks here to be much more… I’m not sure. Bitter?”

“If there’s one thing I know about ‘people’, it’s that they always expect and want outcasts to be as miserable as they believe we ought be. But the owner puts a lot of effort into making this more than just an escape. She wants it to be an oasis. And she seeks out newbies to make sure they know it’s safe to just be here. Here, lemme introduce you, I think you’ll like her.”

Roman nodded his agreement, and watched the bartender flit and weave through the crowd, greeting people and they went. They were apparently a favorite, with patrons squeezing their shoulder or kissing them on the cheek as they passed. They only paused once, when they reached the stoic bouncer from the entrance. He was sitting in a booth, apparently on break, ignoring the room, until the bartender touched his shoulder gently and he turned to look at him with a smile lighting up his face. They exchanged a brief kiss, and then the bartender was sliding into a door labeled ‘Employees Only’.

Roman let his gaze roam. Everywhere, there thronged people with piercings and tattoos and colored contacts, and they all looked happy. He even saw others with scars and birthmarks like his own, but no one stared at them or seemed to care. And they couldn’t all be lashing back against trauma like Remus had, right?

“Welcome to Au Naturel, kiddo! I’m Patton, the owner.”

Roman turned to see a bright smile and an outstretched hand. The owner was like no one he’d ever seen. The majority of her skin was a dark, rich brown, but it was interrupted with splotches of pale skin. And where the skin was light enough to see, it was speckled with light brown spots. She was the kind of face that nobility put on dramatized posters of the ‘less fortunate’, those who were born with so many impurities that they clearly couldn’t hope to be any more than the lowest rung of the serving class. But here she stood, bright teeth flashing at Roman in the club she owned, in an atmosphere of pure joy that she’d created. A silver chain around her neck held a ring and a magenta charm affirming her pronouns.

Roman shook her hand gently. “It’s good to meet you, Patton. I’m Roman.”

“Oh, I know! Thank you for gracing my humble establishment with your presence, Your Majesty. I was a bit surprised when Remy told me who was sitting at the bar- I wasn’t sure if your facial marks were really as obvious as the gossips say.”

Roman cringed internally. He’d been recognized, clocked by bartender and owner, and he’d been here barely 20 minutes. The common refrain rolled off his tongue with the perfect intonation of repetition. “Well, royalty’s only skin-deep, darling.”

Patton blinked. “Oh- oh, Your Majesty, pardon me, I didn’t mean to offend.”

Roman faked a smile with practiced ease. “No offense, my lady.”

“No, I- I meant, I assumed they were exaggerating your appearance from just some small beauty mark, because I had assumed anyone who looked like us wouldn’t be allowed to ascend to the throne. I’m delighted that you’re real! And you have these beautiful marks of the gods’ favor, just like me, and you’re our King without having to cover them!”

Roman blinked, started to speak, then blinked again. “Marks of what?”

Patton grinned and sat next to Roman. “Of the gods’ favor, of course! You and I, we were painted in the womb, blessed with more than one color, claimed by more than one patron. Some people get just freckles, a smattering of kisses. Some get a beauty mark, a touch or two. But you and I, they couldn’t bear to refrain, and look at me! I got a whole big hug, from top to toe.”

Roman did look. And he found he got more and more confused by the second. Because here was this woman, multi-colored, a floppy fro bouncing in dark curls with strips of light blonde among them, speckled with freckles along her pale patches of skin. She was everything Roman had been told was impure, imperfect, pitiable- and yet, she was the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen.

“I’ve… never thought of it that way,” he said softly. “Particularly with…” he trailed off, pointing to his scars.

“I don’t really trust the gossips on the news- how did you get these, King Roman?”

Roman traced the line on the back of his hand, remembering. “It was a particularly bad battle. A young soldier whose fellows had fallen on either side of him had a knife hidden in his belt. I was arrogant, back then, just foolish enough to believe that the norms of the battlefield would always be respected, that the separations of class meant anything in the melee. So I was caught completely unawares by the blade, thinking the young man was just a commoner and so no real threat. I was lucky, though. I survived.” Despite how the Noble Council reacted on my recovery.

Patton’s eyes softened. “I am glad you survived, Your Majesty. And gladder that the prejudices of some against your tapestry didn’t prevent you from becoming King.”

Roman ducked his head. “Thank you, Patton. And please- call me Roman.”

She giggled. “Oh, how scandalous, little ol’ me on a first-name basis with the King! At least let me comp your drink first!”

Roman felt his cheeks heating up as he watched her laugh, curls bouncing. “Please, I’m sure you pay more than your fair share of taxes already. Let me. Consider it a subsidy, if you must.”

Patton tilted her head, contemplating the royal man sitting in her bar. “If you insist, my liege,” she said with a sly smile.

Roman was sure he was visibly blushing now, but caught the owner’s hand in his. Brushing his lips against it, he looked up into Patton’s wide, blue eyes. “And insist I do.”

Patton was quiet for only a moment, before her face split open in a bright smile. “Oh, I like this one. I think we’ll just have to keep you.”

“Kidnapping a king? Now who’s being scandalous?”

“You can only kidnap someone if it’s against their will,” she replied with a wink.

Roman was saved from having to respond by the bartender returning. “Ooohh, Patty, I knew you had expensive taste, but flirting with actual royalty?”

Patton blew a kiss to her employee. “You would know, Remy.”

Roman realized he’d yet to let go of Patton’s hand, but didn’t feel particularly inclined to change that at this particular moment. Until Remy responded, “If even the absolute disgrace of the Dormions clan can recognize royalty, anyone can, but go off I guess.”

Roman turned. “You’re that Remy? Remington?”

Remy grimaced. “Yes, unfortunately. I was going to change my name entirely but Lo already got it tattooed so…”

Patton smacked them lightly. “No lying to new friends, Rem.”

“Fineee, I like the name if not the fam.”

Roman fiddled with his glass. “I- I’ve only heard the court gossip, but-”

Remy rolled their eyes. “Oh yeah, they love me. Perfect little first son completely wrecks and malforms himself and refuses to fit in the box we made for him! Which, while irritatingly misgendering, is all true. I came here on a dare once, tried to sneak in the back-”

“And then they met Logan!!” Patton interjected, hands cupping her cheeks in delight. “And it was love at first sight!”

“More like lust at first sight-”

“But then it became love, let me have this.”

Remy grinned fondly at their boss. “Yeah, it did. Lo was one of the first times I’d seen a real person with body mods outside of the PSAs and I had no idea how attractive they could be. I met him, we went off to-”

“Have a nice chat,” Patton interjected primly.

“Of course, Pat, I chatted at him for four straight hours,” they responded with a wink to Roman. “And then I had to come back and I started to get to know Patty here and the regulars and well... My parents were wrong about literally everything. Including thinking I was their son. But obviously, they didn’t love having that pointed out to them, so…” they trailed off with a shrug.

“Dramatic disownment, Patton hires you, you get your own tattoos and piercings?” Roman supplied.

“That’s about it, yeah.”

Roman looked around the room, the warm likes and mingling crowds. “I can see why you fell in love with it all so easily, why you wanted to have a place like this to call your own community.”

Patton reached out and squeezed Roman’s hand. “It’s yours too, now, Your Majesty- Roman. Please, feel free to come back whenever you like.”

⁂

The king was still hesitant to return. What if the other patrons hadn’t been as comfortable with his presence as Remy and Patton had been? What if he’d been spotted by less understanding people and they were waiting for his return to catch him in the act? And yet, he knew he needed to go back to Au Naturel. He’d learned so much in just one night, had his mind opened to so many different interpretations of the societal expectations that had plagued him his whole life. He couldn’t bear to never hear that again, to go back to the Noble Council and ignore the echoes in his brain that whispered “marks of the gods’ favor” whenever he looked in a mirror.

So two nights later, he steeled himself and made his way back to the bar. The same bouncer was at the door.

“Logan, was it?”

The man’s eyes narrowed, but he nodded.

“It’s good to see you again.”

His brow unfurrowed, and he nodded again, this time with the slightest hint of a smile stretching out his pierced lips.

Roman smiled back, and entered the main room.

He made his way over to the bar more confidently this time, but was distracted by the crowd from looking at the bartender as he ordered.

“Oh holy fuck shit heck fuck?”

He turned to see a much younger bartender with dark black hair, bright purple lipstick, and hoop earrings staring at him wide-eyed and a bit panicked.

“Uh, sorry, have we met?”

The young man just stared and continued to swear under his breath until he took a deep breath and called out, “Remy?”

They returned from the far side of the bar and saw Roman. With a wave, they said, “Hey there, Majesty. Gin and tonic again?”

Roman nodded as Remy turned away, arm around the young bartender’s shoulders. It didn’t stop him from hearing their quiet conversation.

“You could have warned me that the actual king might come in-”

“I did!”

“I thought you were exaggerating! Or talking about a drag king-”

“Okay fair, but Patton agreed with me-”

“I thought he was humoring you!”

“Logan backed me up!”

“...he just smiled at you. He does that all the time.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t fully prepare you, Virge. I didn’t know if he’d come back.”

“He’s not going to- we’re safe, right?”

“Look at him, of course we’re safe. And also Patty charmed the pants off him, we’re fine.”

“...literally?”

“I mean, maybe, Pat doesn’t kiss and tell.”

Roman started to blush and realized it was probably time to indicate that their conversation wasn’t secret. “I’m right here,” he cut in. He smiled as both bartenders turned to face him. “Patton is indeed quite charming, but I believe I’ve retained my pants.”

Remy smirked, not missing a beat. “So far, anyway.”

Roman tried not to color further and was saved (or ruined) by the appearance of Patton himself. “Remy, are you poisoning Virgey’s mind again?”

The young man grimaced. “Sorry! Virgil’s mind,” Patton corrected, sliding into the seat next to Roman. “Good to see you again, Roman.”

“It’s good to see you as well, Patton. It’s alright that I’m back?”

“Of course it is!”

“Because if I’m making anyone uncomfortable, I don’t want to take this space away from them-”

Patton laid his hand over Roman’s on the bar. “This space is for you, too, Your Majesty. I think in some ways, those like us born into noble families need it even more. Not to say that anyone has it easy, but…”

“But it’s expected that lower classes are ‘imperfect’,” Virgil said, returning with Roman’s drink. His mouth was twisted into a bitter line. “And when you’re not, you never get to be yourself again.”

Roman looked at him curiously. “I confess, I have only been allowed to mingle with mixed classes in my command. What do you mean, if you don’t mind talking about it?”

Virgil looked at Patton with a question in his eyes. Patton smiled. “He’s safe, Virge. Promise.”

Virgil nodded and reached up to his ears. He removed his hoop earrings, showing that they were clip-ons and that his ears were unpierced. “According to this crap system, I’m ‘perfect’. I don’t have birthmarks or discoloration or even freckles. Which means of course I’ve been banned from getting tattoos or piercings or dying my hair. I keep this stuff here with Rem, because it’s the only place I can wear it without my parents getting… upset.”

Roman frowned. “They don’t hurt you, do they?”

Virgil laughed hollowly. “They never hit me, perish the thought, that might cause bruises. Or scars. But you may have noticed, nothing about this damn value system accounts for things like, you know, mental health. Or being well-fed. As long as it doesn’t go as far as like, hair falling out or jaundice.”

“But why enforce it?” Roman asked. “The families I know, it’s to maintain their status and reputation…”

Virgil clipped his earring back on, fiddling with it nervously. “If I’m being generous, it’s a hope thing. That if I can just look refined enough, I’ll be seen by a noble or someone who wants the status of a ‘perfect’ partner and be whisked up into a life of luxury. If you ask my parents, they’d say they’re trying to help me get a better life.”

“But you don’t agree with that.”

“Not for a fucking second. Sure, I believe they believe that. But they refuse to see how shitty it is in the meantime and explode at me when I object.” He adjusted his hoodie, playing with the zippers on his wrists. “This is the only place I can cover myself up this much. They want me to show off as much ‘perfect’ skin as possible, so I can be spotted. Even in the middle of the fucking winter. And even if I wasn’t freezing, it makes me a target. People hope for that Scarella story even if they don’t admit it. It’s like those people who enter the lottery constantly, hoping that with a fancy enough schedule of plastic surgery, one day they’ll be part of the beautiful people. So when they see someone who’s already smooth… they resent it. And they want to ruin it.” He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering despite the thick hoodie. Patton reached out and squeezed his elbow in reassurance, earning a weak smile.

Roman was quiet in contemplation. Sure, he knew it was the most classic trope in media - someone with a Pure Heart (as shown, of course, by their unblemished skin) was seen among the unclean masses and swept away into the sunset by a generous benefactor. He’d fantasized about it himself when he was younger, that someone would see his worth and help him fix his skin so that his outside could look like his inside. After his injuries added to it, though, he’d given up entirely. But to know that the trope caused such harm to people like Virgil…

“I’m sorry I haven’t done more to fix this, Virgil,” Roman said quietly. “I have influence and power, I should and I will.”

Virgil flashed him a wry smile. “I think you’re doing a lot by just appearing in public without covering up your scars, really. I don’t think it’s gonna change fast, but with your help, it might start changing.”

“But you’re at risk and it won’t be fast enough for you.”

“Yeah, I am at risk,” Virgil said with a shrug. “But I don’t need to be protected. With all due respect, Your Majesty. Rem & Lo keep my stuff for me, Pat makes sure I can still make it here, and I’m earning my own money to get out of my parents’ house. I have a plan to earn my own freedom. So don’t change all this shit for me. Change it for everyone else.”

Roman nodded. “I promise, I will.”

Virgil raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I believe you’ll try…”

Roman raised his hand, pinkie outstretched. “I will. I mean it.”

Virgil smiled, but linked his pinkie too. “You swear?”

“I swear.”

They shook solemnly, before both starting to snicker and laugh, Patton joining in too. But none of them doubted Roman’s determination, all the same.

⁂

Roman returned to Au Naturel multiple nights a week for two weeks straight before he finally managed to ask.

“Pat, how did you manage to open this place? And keep it open, despite, well, everything?”

The response was a melancholy grin as Patton fiddled with the ring on the chain around their neck, right next to their pronoun charm.

“I got a loan from my late fiancé, Diego. He was the son of a noble house.”

“Late? I don’t mean to cause you distress, dear Patton, you don’t need to talk about this if it will be painful-”

“No, no,” Patton explained, reaching out for Roman’s hand. “I- I want to talk about him. Because he was a wonderful man and remains a wonderful memory.”

Roman nodded in understanding and squeezed their hand reassuringly as Patton began to explain.

Diego, too, was one of a pair of twins. His brother was named Cedric, and they were identical in almost every way. The one way they weren’t was Cedric’s eczema. Their faces matched, their laughs sounded like echoes of each other’s, but Cee had red scratchy scales that grew and faded but never fully vanished, and Dee had none.

And according to Diego, Cedric was better. Smarter, kinder, more optimistic, a faster friend to those he met. Yet society valued Diego more because of a condition that could only be treated, never cured.

“And so Dee became a huge advocate for us ‘imperfect’ folks,” Patton said softly. “He used his smooth face as an entry into places we’re barred from, tried to use the family money and influence to change discrimination policies. But, well. One man can only do so much.”

Roman nodded somberly, in perfect understanding.

“There used to be underground meetings of people like us, the underbelly of the city. We rotated locations and kept moving to avoid the zoning laws that made it easy to kick us out at anyone’s request. We’d found Cee and invited him, and he brought Dee too. And I- oh, he was the first person who looked at my skin and saw a work of art,” Patton said with a misty smile, hugging their own torso at the warm memory. “And he had the idea of using his name, using their family’s money to establish this place. They couldn’t take the title away from me if it was under his name too, so after only a couple months of dating and falling madly in love, we got engaged. The deed is technically still under his name, which means it’s secure, and the city can’t take it back.

“But then the household draft came through, three years ago. I was safe,” Patton said with a wry twist to their normal smile. “It called for one son per house, and my family doesn’t acknowledge me as a son those times I want them to, much less for the state. Not that they know where to find me anymore. But - their family wanted to send Cee. Because he was more ‘expendable’. And they didn’t tell Dee until he was already gone off to war. Of course, I was scared for them both, but I knew how important Dee’s brother was to him, so when he said he needed to get to the front immediately, I didn’t hesitate. I gave him the money and advice from my friends here who’d survived previous wars. He listened to it all, then went off to go save his brother.”

Patton paused, a tear creeping along their cheek.

“I’m so sorry, Patton,” Roman said gently. “He didn’t make it back?”

“Neither of them did. Dee threw himself in front of a blow to shield Cee, but it wasn’t enough.”

Roman hesitated, then hugged them firmly. “I’ve lost so many of my soldiers, but it never gets easier. I can’t imagine what this loss has felt like to you.”

Patton hugged back. “Thank you, Roman. It’s been years, but remembering-”

“I know. It’s perfectly normal, my dear.”

Patton smiled up, eyes still shining with unshed tears. “Thank you for listening, Ro. It means a lot.”

“Anything you need from me, Pat. I’m here.”

The next day, Roman quietly requested a meeting with the head of the zoning board of the city, and used the royal seal to confirm Au Naturel s deed to not just Diego and Patton but to anyone Patton ever decided to transfer ownership too. A copy of the document found its way, without fanfare, into the files at the bar. Roman never brought attention to it, nor did Patton, but a golden drink was left at Roman’s typical seat that never appeared on his bill, and a portrait of the nation’s first scarred King found its way to hanging among their other icons above the rows of bottles.

⁂

And then, one night at Au Naturel, there was a new customer who most had never seen before. Or at least, they hadn’t seen this face before. But Roman had.

“...Remus?”

The former prince turned. He’d added more tattoos since the last time Roman had seen him, lines of red drops down his neck to his bare arms. His hair was spiked into a faux-hawk and it almost hit Roman as he turned to face him.

“Is that the golden boy? Romano Cheese Man?”

“Reme, it’s been months, I’ve-”

“Stop right there.” Remus interrupted. He held up a finger topped in an elaborately manicured nail. “Don’t you dare say you’ve missed me, Roman Candle. I haven’t been hiding, you could have found me.”

“I looked!” Roman insisted, reaching out to grab his brother’s arm. “I tried to look, at least, but Father and the generals forbid me to leave the castle-”

“Ooohhh, is the royal baby disobeying orders tonight?” Remus asked, eyebrows dancing.

Roman frowned. “Not exactly, not when there aren’t any…” He looked for any flicker of understanding and found none. “Reme. Have you not heard?”

“Heard what, that the country is just sooooo pleased to have just forgotten the embarrassment that was the old crown prince? Didn’t need to check with the town crier for that one, queen bee.”

Roman squeezed Remus’ arm, a lump forming in his throat. “Brother-”

“Don’t you call me that!” Remus snapped. “I’m not in the family anymore, don’t you remember anything-”

“Father’s dead, Remus!” Roman practically shouted. Remus went silent, eyes wide. “Father died and I have to be the goddamn king now, and I’ve been looking for you for months but no one wants to acknowledge you still and you left me to rule alone.” Roman’s voice cracked on the last word, and Remus stopped trying to pull away. His eyes darted around Roman, taking in the signet ring, the badly-concealed bags under his eyes, and the tear coursing down the royal cheek.

“...how did he die?”

Roman took a shuddering breath. “In the field. He charged alone, after an enemy soldier who looked just like you- well, you three years ago.”

“Did you charge with him? Trying to get back that old shell of a royal? It was never real, brother, just a bundle of neuroses wound so tightly they acted like a person-”

“I know that, Remus! You think I didn’t see how much he pushed you? You think I didn’t know what being in the field did to you?” The other patrons of the bar had edged away, giving the brothers space, while Patton watched nervously without moving from her seat at the bar. “Reme - all I ever wanted was to be able to help. I trained so hard in the hopes that maybe you would be able to sit out for a battle or two. Get a break from the violence. But he didn’t want me, didn’t want the charge to be led by this,” Roman said, gesturing at his own face. Tiredness showed in every inch of him as his shoulders slumped. “And look where that got him. He’s dead, I’m leading anyway, and both his sons are miserable.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Ro. I’m not miserable. I’m wonderful,” Remus replied. “I can do whatever and whoever the fuck I want to, now. No one breathing down my neck, no one saying I’m improper, no blood on my hands except for what I choose to be there.” He lifted his arm, showing off his tattoo, the line of red drops marching down his bicep and forearm and returning back up the inside of his wrist and elbow.

Roman looked down at the marks, blinked, and looked back up. Green eyes met green, as identical as the day they were born. “Are you really?”

Remus scoffed. “Of course I… well. I’m happier. Happier than I was. Wacky, isn’t it, I think my incredibly violent and restrictive upbringing may have given me some issues.”

“But you’re not just… I don’t know, bursting at the seams, doing whatever you think Father would have hated for the sole sake of knowing he would have hated it?”

Remus paused. “Hey, I didn’t come here to have my someone dig through my head, I only wanted someone to give me head-”

“Reme!”

“What, it’s true!”

“We were having a moment-”

“And I was planning on a different kind of moment!”

Roman frowned at his brother, ready to keep arguing, but instead, he started to laugh, and Remus did too, and soon there were just two very similar-looking men leaning on the bar, wheezing with laughter.

Roman wiped his eyes. “You really are happier.”

Remus smiled. “I really am. I’m… still working it out. What’s terrible by his standards versus the society’s. Which society standards are probably actually shit and which make sense. I don’t understand it all. But I will.”

Roman impulsively flung his arms around his twin. “I believe in you, Reme. Just, please- don’t leave me to do this alone?”

Remus pushed Roman a bit back, holding him by the arms. “I’m not coming back to the palace, Ro. I can’t do that. I don’t want to.”

“You don’t have to. But you’re still my brother. As long as I’m the head of the family, you’re part of it. And I…” Roman looked back at where Patton was chatting to other patrons. “I have a lot to learn about what our society is doing to people. We both have a lot to learn, and unlearn. Can you help me?”

Remus grimaced. “Of course I’ll be your brother, but…”

“It doesn’t have to be official- no ‘advisor’ or any title unless you want one. But dammit, if you don’t deserve the crown’s money after all you had to do in its service- any land you want, any title, any income, say the word and it’s yours, Reme. Just, please... don’t shut me out.”

Remus looked down, and back up. He raised his hand and traced Roman’s birthmark lightly. “Can I get this as a tattoo on my face, too?”

“Is that a yes?”

“Well, twins should match, shouldn’t we?”

Roman smiled, understanding perfectly. “Yeah, twins should match. Scars and all.”

⁂

Taglist:  @residentanchor @royally-anxious @jemthebookworm @arandompasserby  @sparkly-rainbow-salt @astral-eclipse​ @thelowlysatsuma @adorably-angsty @max-is-tired @almostoveranalyzed

[carsontheleft]

All is well in the court of Peter

Summary: What to do when your tsar is the root of your problems?

Pairing: Georgina x Peter (mentioned), Georgina x Grigor, Catherine x Leo (mentioned)

Comment: I wrote this after watching 1x07 of The Great and found my musings confirmed in 1x08, haven’t watched the last two episodes yet, though.

//

The burning of betrayal hits him hard when he sees them; Georgina and Peter blatantly fucking on a random desk, not a care in the world.

Although he’d love to, Grigor doesn’t interrupt them, confronts them (her). It’s not his place. What the Emperor wants, he fucking gets, even if it’s his best friend’s wife.

He closes the door quietly, they didn’t even notice him, and stands, waves of hurt crashing over him. The moans and Georgina’s enthusiastic calls eventually drive him away, into the dark hallways of the palace to spend the night on his own once again.

Grigor really thought things would change with Catherine’s arrival. He hadn’t been as naïve as to truly believe Peter would let off Georgie, but he had hoped with the duty of producing an heir he’d be engaged elsewhere more often.

Instead, with the ever-growing frustration over his wife, Peter turned to them, and Georgie in particular, more often, robbing them of almost every second of time alone they had.

Trailing the hallways, Grigor knots his fingers together to keep them from shaking. He’d been so close, so close, to killing the brat. The fucking dog died, but the Emperor survived, what a miracle! While the fear of being found out usually drives Grigor to seek out Peter’s presence, it gives way to anger and frustration in moments like these, when he’s the third one out in his own bed, so to speak.

There had been a glimmer of hope with Peter’s ‘new me’ and his suddenly found sympathy for his wife and her ideas, and where he first enjoyed the fact that it took pressure from Georgina and him, he only realized today that he was the only one in his marriage who reveled in that circumstance.

Oh, how blind he had been to think Georgina needed to be saved from Peter, that she was being a martyr here. Her entertaining Peter wasn’t the rouse, it always had been their marriage.

The only reason Georgina had actually married him was his lawful place in Peter’s court, whereas she, were she to approach Peter on her own, would only be his concubine. But through Grigor she’s Countess Dymov, sporting that well-respected name like a string of pearls.

Sure, if Peter were to die, his place in court wouldn’t be virtually untouchable anymore, but Grigor believes that he could get into to Catherine’s good graces if he’d want to. He could stop being such an asshole to Orlo, since the Count is the ever-present voice in her ear, and that could save his position. He could be useful to her, engage in her outrageous ideas and the ridiculous goal to turn Russia into a second France.

He knows the people here, is as inherently Russian as the next servant, he understands politics and society, and more of military than Peter, which isn’t a real accomplishment, but still.

Grigor is about to turn another corner, when a slurring voice rips him out of his thoughts.

“Grigor!”

He stops and backtracks to the open door on his right.

It’s Leo, sitting on the ground of his quarters, propped up against a shelf and waving with a decanter of vodka.

“Another lonely soul traveling a cold, dark night. Join me, my friend, and let us be lonely together!”

Grigor doesn’t know Leo Voronsky particularly well, safe for his cock of course, but the prospect of walking the hallways until his feet bleed or the sun rises, depending on whichever comes first, isn’t more inviting than drowning his sorrows in alcohol. He’s Russian after all, and if there’s one thing they’re good at, it’s drowning stuff in alcohol.

He joins Leo silently, takes off his coat before sitting down beside him.

“The Emperor takes our hearts like he takes the heads of the Swedes”, Leo takes a long pull and looks at Grigor expectantly.

“Don’t be so fucking dramatic”, the Count takes the decanter, “He’s finally pleasuring his wife, like he was supposed to do all along.”

“In contrast to pleasuring your wife?”

Grigor isn’t sure what Leo wants to provoke with this jab, it’s not like Peter fucking Georgina is news to anyone in court and their horse. He just takes another swig.

“Was your marriage one of love, Count Dymov?”, Leo asks eventually when the decanter is more than half empty.

“I was under the impression it was, yes. As much love as you could hope for in court.”

“Then you might just know how I feel with all the sympathy the Emperor holds for his Empress.”

Despite the amount of alcohol in his veins, Grigor is on his feet in the blink of an eye, hauling Leo up at the lapels of his jacket and pushing him backwards into the bookshelf.

“Know how you feel? How you feel?! How long have you known her, huh? Two months? I’m married to Georgina; I took her when I could’ve had almost any other woman in this fucking country. And Peter? I’ve been at his beck and call all my life and he thanks me by taking my wife, marking her up like she is his and stringing me along on fucking leash!! Voronsky, you don’t have any fucking clue what heartache feels like.”

As sudden as the anger appeared it leaves his body again, leaving swaying against Leo.

“I had promised her my heart long before she said she loved me. Just looking at her sets my body on fire. I was her home, her confidante before the Emperor lived through this change of heart. And now? She shushes me and promises me her love, even though her mind and heart are elsewhere, she tells me she can’t when she thinks about how the Emperor took her breath away and set his lips to her pussy. I’m being cast away like a used-up toy. I think I do know what heartache feels like, my friend.”

When Grigor loosens his hold on Leo, the latter slips down to the ground, resuming his earlier position. Grigor does the same.

Leo reaches behind him and pulls yet another decanter from the shelf and offers it to Grigor as a truce. Grigor takes it.

“All is well in the court of Peter”, Leo mumbles when they clink the vessels together.

“Huzzah.”  

[the-odd-job]

Ashes of Icarus chapter 6 - Deceit and Lies

Rating: Explicit Warnings: Chose Not to Use Category: Other Fandom: Transformers Characters: Sunstreaker, Sideswipe, Ratchet, Prowl, Optimus Relationships: Megatron/Sunstreaker, Sideswipe & Sunstreaker Additional Tags: Dubcon, Unplanned Pregnancy, Mechpreg, Sticky Words: 2272

A thoughtful chapter.

( Previous )

“Why he slag didn’t you call for backup?!”

Sunstreaker snarled. “The fragging comms were jammed! How the pit were we supposed to do that?!”

“Back out of the jammed area, report the disturbance, and see what orders you’re given,” Ratchet snarled right back, clanging him on the helm with the butt of his welder. 

And okay, that was one way to handle the situation, with just the one minor complication that they hadn’t wanted to.

Or Sunstreaker hadn’t. Sideswipe didn’t bother himself with too many opinions as long as Sunstreaker remained satisfied with the whole situation.

And oh, he was very satisfied. 

But no one else needed to know it was about anything more than a battle well won—and not one gloriously lost. 

“We could handle it,” Sunstreaker still argued with a roll of his optics. And according to their lie, they had. So what was the problem?

He didn’t get to hear Ratchet’s opinion on that because the medbay doors opened then to admit Prowl and Optimus, interrupting Ratchet. The medic, along with the twins, glanced at the arrivees, before Ratchet dismissed them with a hmph and set back to work on Sunstreaker.

Ratchet never did like to be interrupted when he was busy yelling at his patients. Especially if those patients were the twins. They deserved all the yelling they could get.

Sunstreaker took it as the short lived reprieve it was, though. “Did Grapple find anything?” Sideswipe asked, doubling down on their lie with his natural curiosity. “Or is that classified?”

“No, Grapple did not find anything to suggest why the Decepticons were interested in that area,” Prowl responded with an irritable flick of his wings, although for once it likely wasn’t aimed at them and instead at just the entire situation. Not having all the variables didn’t suit him. “It could be they were simply scouting for something that wasn’t there after all.”

“No matter their reasons, good work on hindering their efforts,” Optimus said with a nod at the brothers. Sideswipe nodded back, Sunstreaker just huffed.

“Did you expect anything less?” he sneered. Ratchet whacked him again, probably for disrespecting their mighty leader this time.

Sunstreaker’s digits twitched, but he knew better than to whack Ratchet back. That was a surefire way to get welded to the berth.

He had to content himself to just some offended growling that Ratchet paid absolutely no mind to. 

Optimus didn’t take the bait, though, only gave Sunstreaker a look that would never ever accomplish a damn thing. 

“Regardless, I would like your reports as soon as possible,” said Prowl, and right there was a third mech who didn’t appreciate his attitude with Optimus. Well, tough luck, because the Prime wasn’t exactly demanding better treatment. He’d just have to deal. “Will you be able to compose them during your repairs and return them to my office after Ratchet releases you?”

“Sure,” Sideswipe agreed. Would this mean less abuse from Ratchet? See, they’d need to be able to focus on writing their reports, it wouldn’t do if they were constantly distracted by one irascible medic. Right?

He could hope. “Good,” Prowl nodded, and after get well soon wishes from Optimus, the two headed out of the medbay.

“We will need to run patrols with increased frequency in the area, just to be–“ Sunstreaker could hear Prowl continue to Optimus.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he said, sitting up straight. Optimus and Prowl paused on their exit and looked back at him, Optimus with some level of surprise, Prowl with exasperation.

No doubt the tactician already had an inkling of what Sunstreaker wanted to complain about. He proceeded to do that without delays. “I am not driving any more patrols on those god forsaken excuses for roads,” he snarled, jabbing a digit at Prowl. “Two more patrols, then we’re done with our punishment duty, right? I’ll go on a fucking strike if we’re scheduled on any more patrols there after that!”

Sideswipe was snickering, but his brother wasn’t in too much of a disagreement with him. Let the likes of Hound take those routes, they had the fragging alt-modes for it!

“Your preference has been noted,” Prowl said dryly, and Sunstreaker didn’t hold out for hope that Prowl wouldn’t schedule them there if he saw it necessary. That was the downside of being some of the best the Autobots had to offer. If their skills were needed somewhere, there weren’t too many who could fill in for them.

And then they’d just end up doing shit they’d rather not have, like driving on dirt roads that all but wrecked their frames. 

Now Prowl and Optimus left for real, leaving Sunstreaker to brood and Sideswipe to kick his legs while he waited for his turn to be fixed. They’d need to make their reports convincing, somehow. Choreograph an entire fight that didn’t happen, between mecha that had never been present—make it hold together with the scene left behind and their own injuries.

They had their work cut out for them. At least they wouldn’t have trouble keeping their reports matching up, a small mercy. Twins and all that.

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

They’d been in a few battles during the course of their lives. That came in handy when fabricating the details of their story. Ratchet left them to it, mostly, fixing them in the relative silence of just the medic’s aggravated grumbling and the occasional order to move this way or that or do this or do that. 

On their way from the medbay they delivered their reports—one from each frame’s perspective—to Prowl’s office. The SIC nodded his thanks before sending them back on their way. They fetched their ratios and sat in the rec room while they drank them, where Sideswipe shared some words and laughter with Bumblebee and Windcharger.

Sunstreaker let it all wash over him, struggling to keep his thoughts from traveling down paths that would have damned him if anyone became privy to them.

Thank Primus the Autobots had no telepaths in their ranks. He’d be doomed otherwise.

But he was rarely particularly involved in social situations. It was doubtful anyone noticed he was more distracted than usual. 

They didn’t linger in the rec room very long after finishing their cubes. It wasn’t just Sunstreaker that was suffering from the state of his processors—Sideswipe felt the same need to sort their goddamn thoughts out. They slipped through the halls and into the quarters without interruptions, out of sight, hopefully out of mind, too, for long enough that they could work all of this out in peace.

Together they sat down on the bottom bunk of their berth, then… Silence.

They didn’t dare say a thing out loud. This was one secret they did not want getting out, not even—especially not—by accident. There was no one to overhear them, but that didn’t matter.

Say not a thing.

Not like they needed to, anyway. They functioned on the same wavelength, spark bound as they were. His thoughts were Sideswipe’s, Sideswipe’s thoughts were his. The transition was smooth, seamless—silent and untraceable. 

Just what they needed.

Sunstreaker was the driving force behind all of this, though. It wasn’t his life, it was their life, but it was a give and take, push and pull. This time, Sideswipe gave, letting Sunstreaker direct the course of their actions according to his… Conclusions.

Whatever those might turn out to be.

‘Think about what I said.’

Which part? Megatron had said more than a few things, from recounting their ill fated fight a long time ago, to making fun of his frame’s reactions that absolutely had nothing to do with Sunstreaker’s genuine desires, absolutely not.

Ugh.

Sideswipe shifted, and offered a thought.

‘I’ve gotten better.’

‘Is it something to get better from?’

...Was that it?

If it was, what the pit did Megatron want him to do with that thought? He had been a berserker—still was, technically. The damage had gone nowhere, but… He hadn’t snapped in a long time. 

Wasn’t that the goal? Oh, they had valued the likes of him in the Pits thanks to the unhinged violence they could unleash, but was that anything to actually desire? The Autobots had gone out of their way to give him back control over his own frame and mind, to reduce the instances where he lost it and… Became a danger to anything and everything. 

How could something like that be desirable?

What did Megatron think?

Why was he thinking about what Megatron thought? So the mech had beat him in a fight again, wow, and decided to frag him afterwards, wow, but what did that change? They were on the opposite sides of the war for Primus’ sake, that little fact had gone absolutely nowhere. He shouldn’t give a frag about any of Megatron’s thoughts, especially not after the tyrant had decidedly not asked his permission to fuck him. He’d just swooped along, turned him the slag on, and done the deed.

And… Sunstreaker found himself decidedly not opposed to that. He should be! Not only because Megatron had technically forced him, but because he had technically gotten forced by the enemy leader that he should, under all circumstances, want to kill in the name of putting an end to the war in favor of the side he belonged to. 

But here he was, post-fuck… Still enjoying the afterglow of some fragging awesome overloads, and… Not opposed to the idea of next time.

As Megatron had threatened.

Promised.

Oh by the Thirteen he was screwed. Literally as well as figuratively. What were his options? Even if he swallowed his pride and reported the r-word—which he was never going to be able to do, he had too much of it—all they’d need was to have a look at his memory files and see how… He couldn’t even say he was conflicted. If he had been, then good, but no.

If he was honest with himself, the part of him that wasn’t anticipating the next time with much eagerness was pathetic. He was a bad, bad Autobot, remember? He didn’t give too many fucks about the fact he was obliterating the Autobot code even more thoroughly than he had so far in his career as a soldier. He didn’t care. Why would he have? He wouldn’t have gained a whole lot by following the damn thing to the letter, even if he’d been so inclined.

So it didn’t particularly matter to him, on a personal, emotional level, that he was getting fragged by the enemy and fucking enjoying it. 

And if they had a look into his head… They’d see that.

But if he didn’t care about the whole thing on a personal level, he did care about the consequences he would have faced if his comrades found out about this whole thing. It would end badly for him. Very badly. He didn’t even know how badly, but how the hell were you supposed to interface with Megatron, like it, want for the next time, and not end up too deep in trouble with your own side to ever surface again?

No. No, he couldn’t afford this to ever come to light. Even on the off chance they’d somehow ignore his own excitement over it to focus just on what Megatron had done… No.

How the pit were they supposed to keep it a secret if it was just going to repeat, though? This time had been difficult enough. They’d done their best, given a story as believable as they could, made no mention of Megatron, not even a suggestion that he had been present to do what he had–

But because they’d lied, no matter how good they were at it, you could shoot holes into their story. The environment wouldn’t necessarily entirely agree with what they had said, if someone went to have a real good look at it. 

And what of their injuries? Sword marks. Those weren’t that usual here on Earth. They’d added their fair share of gunshot marks—and frankly, that had hurt—but Ratchet wasn’t dumb. He’d fixed those sword marks, the cuts of a sharp blade. He knew where they’d come from.

He hadn’t questioned it, why any of the Constructicons or a Seeker would have had a sword with them and the skill to wield it efficiently enough to be a match to Sunstreaker, but had he wondered about it? Sunstreaker didn’t doubt that very much. 

What had he come up with as an explanation for it, in the absence of anything the twins would have directly told him?

Primus, what a mess. But as long as he didn’t ask, they didn’t need to answer. Besides, what were the odds Ratchet would start to suspect that? They’d fixed the area around his cover before anyone else had gotten to the scene, removed the traces of interface from him—the evidence of who he had interfaced with. 

But if he grew suspicious… The future times would become even more problematic.

What could they do but worry about that when the time came, though?

Was that his conclusion? It was.

Sideswipe nodded at him before he stretched from having sat in the same position for who knew how long by now.

Then he got one of his brother’s trademark grins, bright and full of mischief. “Want my help touchin’ up your paint before I go see if ‘Hide or Jazz would be down for a tumble?”

Yeah, him and Megatron had been something to look at, hadn’t they? Not too much of a surprise Sideswipe would have some charge to burn.

Sunstreaker gave a wry smile of his own. “You bet.”

( Next )

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT IDEAS

Object-oriented programming in the 1980s. If it can work to start a startup. Instead of building stuff to throw away, you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of startups grow out of them. Already spreading to pros I know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it. Those are both good things to be. I don't mean that as some kind of answer for, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting. When someone's working on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to give the startups the money, though. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity? There seem to be an artist, which is even shorter than the Perl form.1 However, a city could select good startups.2

Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a complete system for supporting server-based applications, where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program very quickly. Or at least discard any code you wrote while still employed and start over. But a hacker can learn quickly enough that car means the first element of a list and cdr means the rest. If an increasing number of startups founded by people who know the subject from experience, but for doing things other people want. It could be the reason they don't have any.3 An interactive language, with a small core of well understood and highly orthogonal operators, just like the core language, that would be better for programming. The more of a language as a set of axioms, surely it's gross to have additional axioms that add no expressive power, simply for the sake of efficiency.

One of the MROSD trails runs right along the fault. When you're young you're more mobile—not just because you don't have to be downloaded. The fact is, most startups end up doing something different than they planned. The three old guys didn't get it. PL/1: Fortran doesn't have enough data types. What programmers in a hundred years? Just wait till all the 10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site.4 Common Lisp I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to push performance data to the programmer instead of waiting for him to come asking for it. It would be too much of a political liability just to give the startups the money, though. And they are a classic example of this approach. For one thing, real problems are rare and valuable skill, and the de facto censorship imposed by publishers is a useful if imperfect filter.

I'm just not sure how big it's going to seem hard. Often, indeed, it is not dense enough. If the hundred year language were available today, would we want to program in today. Of course, the most recent true counterexample is probably 1960. A friend of mine rarely does anything the first time someone asks him. As a young founder by present standards, so you have to spend years working to learn this stuff. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked.

You can write programs to solve, but I never have. One advantage of this approach is that it gives you fewer options for the future. Otherwise Robert would have been too late. Look at how much any popular language has changed during its life.5 Java also play a role—but I think it is the most powerful motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most startup founders, and I felt it had to be prepared to explain how it's recession-proof is to do what hackers enjoy doing anyway. The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will parallelism go? Anything that can be implicit, should be. New York Times, which I still occasionally buy on weekends. So I think it might be better to follow the model of Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a lot of them weren't initially supposed to be startups. It's because staying close to the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the smallest, cleanest cores. The way to learn about startups is by watching them in action, preferably by working at one. At the very least it will teach you how to write software with users.

Few if any colleges have classes about startups. All they saw were carefully scripted campaign spots. It might help if they were expressed that way. It's enormously spread out, and feels surprisingly empty much of the reason is that faster hardware has allowed programmers to make different tradeoffs between speed and convenience, depending on the application.6 At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majors could make it as startup founders if they wanted is an important qualification—so important that it's almost cheating to append it like that—because once you get over a certain threshold of intelligence, which most CS majors at top schools are past, the deciding factor in whether you succeed as a founder is how much you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. Preposterous as this plan sounds, it's probably the most efficient way a city could select good startups. Most will say that any ideas you think of new ideas is practically virgin territory. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Whatever computers are made of, and conversations with friends are the kitchen they're cooked in.7 That was exactly what the world needed in 1975, but if there was any VC who'd get you guys, it would at least make a great pseudocode.

If this is a special case of my more general prediction that most of them grew organically. Writing software as multiple layers is a powerful technique even within applications. The more of your software will be reusable. Using first and rest instead of car and cdr often are, in successive lines. Of course, I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will be like in a hundred years? It must be terse, simple, and hackable. It becomes: let's try making a web-based app they'd seen, it seemed like there was nothing to it. Both customers and investors will be feeling pinched.8

The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. That's how programmers read code anyway: when indentation says one thing and delimiters say another, we go by the indentation. You need that resistance, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Maybe this would have been a junior professor at that age, and he wouldn't have had time to work on things that maximize your future options. How much would that take? It's important to realize that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand.9 You'll certainly like meeting them. It's not the sort of town you have before you try this. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. I'm not a very good sign to me that ideas just pop into my head.

Notes

Dan wrote a prototype in Basic in a series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was 10.

With the good groups, just harder. Which in turn the most successful founders still get rich from a startup could grow big by transforming consulting into a great one.

There are two simplifying assumptions: that the only way to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that's not as facile a trick as it was putting local grocery stores out of their portfolio companies. If the next one will be familiar to anyone who had worked for a really long time? One new thing the company they're buying.

If I paint someone's house, the growth in wealth in a bar. I didn't need to warn readers about, just as much the better, but they start to be about 50%. Together these were the impressive ones. Other investors might assume that P spam and P nonspam are both.

All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads. The point where things start with consumer electronics.

If they're on boards of directors they're probably a cause them to keep them from the VCs' point of a press hit, but that we wouldn't have understood why: If you have two choices and one or two, and so on. But if so, or in one where life was tougher, the same reason parents don't tell the whole story. Incidentally, the switch in mid-twenties the people they want.

Trevor Blackwell points out, First Round Capital is closer to a clueless audience like that, except in the median VC loses money. Unless of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what you care about, just those you should seek outside advice, and this trick, and so don't deserve to keep them from leaving to start or join startups. There is not much to seem big that they only even consider great people.

You also have to do it right. In every other respect they're constantly being told that they are bleeding cash really fast. Probably more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was.

In theory you could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities. If you have the concept of the reason for the coincidence that Greg Mcadoo, our contact at Sequoia, was no great risk in doing a small proportion of the subject of language power in Succinctness is Power. As I was there was near zero crossover. Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the evolution of the next year they worked.

[mothercetrion]

Birthday Gifts

Summary: It was almost Bi-Han’s birthday. Kuai Liang and Tomas were working together to find a gift for him.

Characters: Sub-Zero (Kuai Liang), Smoke (Tomas Vrbada), Bi-Han

Word Count: 1685

Request: “nice!! can i ask for a fic where smoke and kuai liang (as boys in the lin kuei) try to figure out what to get bi-han for his birthday?” - anonymous

this fic made me feel all sweet bc these two have a beautiful brotherly bond and you can’t change my mind. this for you, anon! also, the reason his bday is so special is because he’s turning 18. take that as you will!

———

Bi-Han’s birthday was the next day. He would be… Well, Kuai Liang and Tomas didn’t quite know how old he would be. Bi-Han hadn’t mentioned his age to either of them in forever. They just knew that he would be older. A year older! And they wanted to find him an excellent gift for Kuai Liang to give his brother.

Bi-Han very rarely celebrated his birthday in a very lush way. He was more into the simple things—a dinner with just Kuai Liang and a dinner with the Lin Kuei. He always told everyone, “Being a member of the Lin Kuei is gift enough” and hated receiving things. But the Grandmaster had told Tomas (who had told Kuai Liang) that this birthday, in particular, was extraordinary. Did they know why? No. Did they care? No!

Kuai Liang had one goal in mind: find a fantastic gift for his older brother to commemorate the special day.

“It cannot be food,” Tomas pointed out. It was their day off from training and the day before Bi-Han’s birthday. It was the last possible day for them to find something for Bi-Han to enjoy. He ate at a snack in the form of a banana as Kuai Liang messed with the freshly-fallen snow on the ground in front of the temple steps. “Perishable,” he added. “You want something he can get long-term use out of.”

“True.” Kuai Liang tossed up a snowball into the air and watched as it dissipated into light snow. “It’s a big day for him. He needs something he can always get purpose from.”

Tomas kicked at the snow that landed next to him from Kuai Liang’s ball. “Could you use your abilities to make him something?”

“He would not like that,” Kuai Liang countered. “I honestly do not know what he likes, but he can make himself something out of his powers. It would not be special.”

Tomas shrugged and went back to thinking. Kuai Liang rose to his feet and planted himself next to Tomas on the steps. “I want him to have a great gift, Tomas. I have zero ideas.”

“You ever think that maybe,” Tomas said, “that Bi-Han would like whatever you give him because it’s from you? I doubt he is as picky as you worry he is.”

Kuai Liang frowned at him. “I mean… I guess we can see what I can come up with… with my abilities, at least.”

“Yeah!” Tomas smacked at his shoulder with a grin. “Heartfelt gifts are always great. He’ll love it.”

And so they began brainstorming. They ruled out people; Kuai Liang’s abilities had not granted him the details of a human face. A faceless human would be weird. Food was also eliminated. A statue of food when Bi-Han could make food for himself? Not a good idea.

“He likes nature,” Tomas mentioned after a while.

“We are surrounded by nature,” Kuai Liang replied.

“Good thing I have eyes,” Tomas muttered. “But it’s always cold and snowing. You can never see, ah… flowers! And green trees! And grass! And all that stuff! Yeah, you can’t do colors, but you can do what he never sees. I think he would quite like that.”

Kuai Liang thought for a minute, and he eventually realized that perhaps it was a brilliant idea. They rarely left the temple, so the sight of the beauty of nature was seldom. Bi-Han had to like that.

So Kuai Liang closed his eyes and began to picture a nature scene in his mind. It had been several months since he saw a living, prospering tree, but he did his best to imagine the grandest tree that his young mind could manage. It had dozens of bending and twisting branches, all of them filled with the brightest leaves. The roots were visible in his mind, and they spread out to keep the tree strong and healthy. It towered over his vision, a representation of life and beauty and the profound significance of nature in the world, but Kuai Liang could still see that it was… stunning.

He didn’t even notice his mind creating magic in his hands. He only noticed when he looked down and saw a statue in his hands.

The roots acted as the base for it, so it could comfortably sit on a flat surface. It was nowhere near the size of the actual tree, of course, but it was still a lovely statue.

Tomas gasped at the sight. “Wow! Kuai Liang, is that what you pictured?”

Kuai Liang stared down at the statue in his palms. “Yes, it is, but… I—”

“I am going to stop you there.” Tomas slid a little closer to Kuai Liang and leaned closer to inspect the statue. “This is… This is incredible. Okay? That’s the truth. I know you want to give Bi-Han something great, and this is it. He will adore this and cherish this. I know I would.”

Kuai Liang glanced at him. “I was thinking so too. I… I suppose we wait until midnight.”

“I think this is your job, Kuai Liang. I wish you the sincerest of luck.”

The rest of the day went by in a flash. Kuai Liang had hidden the tree statue in a back closet, continually checking on it to make sure it did not melt. It wouldn’t; his powers could create the strongest ice that could withstand just about all warm temperatures. But he still wanted it to look just as it did before.

Bi-Han had decided to train on his day off, and he returned to his and Kuai Liang’s shared quarters a few minutes before midnight. Kuai Liang was, of course, in the room, doing his nightly meditation to get his mind ready for sleep. He heard Bi-Han enter, and he greeted him with a smile. “Hi, Bi-Han.”

“Hello, Kuai Liang.” Bi-Han settled on the floor next to him, eyeing him with a faint smile. “You seem to be in a good mood.”

“Of course. It’s almost your day.” He turned to face a clock behind him. Two minutes to midnight. The clock was above the closet that the statue was stored in. “I have a surprise for you this year.”

“Is that so?” Bi-Han asked curiously. “And why this year?”

“The Grandmaster keeps talking about how this year is special. I may not know why, but… I need to celebrate the occasion with a good gift.” Kuai Liang crawled over to the closet and opened the door, spotting the gift in the back. He turned his head to Bi-Han. “Close your eyes.”

Bi-Han lifted a brow in surprise. “Must I?”

“Yes!” Kuai Liang replied. “Trust me. Hold out your hands as well. Palms up, please.”

With a quiet laugh, Bi-Han obliged to his brother’s request. “I feel a faint fear, brother. I am unsure why,” he teased.

Kuai Liang laughed to himself as he lifted the statue from the floor and began moving back to Bi-Han. He looked at the clock another time. Roughly twenty seconds to midnight. He scuffled across the floor and placed the statue, roots down, on top of Bi-Han’s palms. The older brother jumped. “Cold!”

Kuai Liang tilted his head. “You are unbothered by the cold.”

“True. But it’s still cold!”

Kuai Liang laughed again. “Ten more seconds until you can open your eyes.”

“Kuai Liang—”

“Trust me!”

Kuai Liang listened intently to the clock behind him. He heard a louder tick compared to the rest and knew that it was midnight. It was Bi-Han’s day. He pulled his hands away from the statue and let out a sigh. “Happy birthday, Bi-Han. Open your eyes.”

Bi-Han did and opened his eyes. He looked at Kuai Liang for a brief second before looking down at the statue in his hands. He instantly gasped at the sight of the tree in his hands and leaned forward to inspect it further. Kuai Liang looked away from Bi-Han then. He feared his reaction. He wanted him to like the present so strongly, it was indescribable. “I know it is not… the most fantastic thing,” he said quietly, “but it is from the heart. The most meaningful gifts are from the heart, I have learned.”

He heard a quiet laugh and looked back at Bi-Han. His older brother was beaming.

“Oh, Kuai Liang… This is just… I am in shock. I am speechless.” He laughed a little louder and looked up from the statue and to his brother. “You made this? With your powers?” When Kuai Liang nodded without a word, he shook his head. “I cannot believe it. This is beautiful, Kuai Liang.”

Kuai Liang lifted his head a little higher. “It is?”

“Yes! Come here.” He ushered his brother closer with a swing of his head, and Kuai Liang crawled to sit right next to him. Bi-Han carefully rested the gift in one hand and gestured to the branches with the other. “There is a lot of detail considering your age and skill. See those leaves? If they were any larger, they’d be realistic. I think… I think there may even be grooves in the leaves and the trunk.” He moved his hand towards the roots that the tree sat on. “The roots are beautiful as well. Roots are so unconsidered when thinking of trees, and yet here they are. I am very happy about it.”

Bi-Han looked down at Kuai Liang and was surprised to see him in stunned silence. “Did you not think that I would like it, Kuai Liang?”

Kuai Liang stared at the tree instead of his brother. “I wanted it to be the greatest gift imaginable. I know you dislike gifts, but I wanted to make something special for you.”

Bi-Han moved an arm around his shoulders in a side hug. “You did just that, Kuai Liang. That and more.”

Kuai Liang looked up at this brother. “So you like it?”

“I love it. I will cherish it forever.” Bi-Han carefully put the statue on the floor and fully enveloped Kuai Liang in a hug. “Thank you, brother.”

Bi-Han’s birthday was a success.

[bettersafethandicks]

Hey look what i found in the storm drain its a troy x reader fic

gender neutral reader, contains: branding, biting, blood stuff,b... light cannibalism, sedation, nothin sexual.  and i say troy x reader but you think tyreen isnt getting in on that too?  going off the hc that troys gotta “steal” energy to keep up his siren powers, and also that those seams on his face split into a nasty monster mouth  👀

4533 words oh my god

Admittedly, most of the reason you were here was for safety. When you had seen the posters around in your last few visits to the nearest trading post, you scoffed at the cult-like calls to join the ‘Children of the Vault’.  Who would fall for that, aside from the odd psycho still capable of reading?  

You thought that, of course, until you barely drove off a group of bandits that had descended on your little shack in the wasteland.  You had been banking on the run-down look of the place to advertise that there was nothing worth stealing in here, but some people can’t take a hint it seemed.  There was no doubt that they’d be coming back, probably with Outriders and definitely with more guns.  This last attack you managed to survive entirely by luck, and you weren’t too confident on that luck holding out a second time; suddenly the idea of being in a large group was more appealing, even if you had to…show your face at some insane church service weekly, or something.  Most things would beat getting riddled with bullets and left out for the scavengers.

With that, you packed up the belongings you could fit in a bag and set back off for the trading post.  After asking around a bit, you found out that once a week, a busted-up caravan would roll through to pick up anyone interested in joining the Children of the Vault; luckily you only had a day’s wait ahead of you.  

When the vehicle finally did show up, it was impossible to mistake it for anything else.  Inverted vault symbols and peering eyes decorated the metal, roughly marked with paint or blood; ‘whatever was on hand’ was the motto of the wasteland.  You had been hoping someone else would’ve been waiting with you by the time they got here, but it looked like you were the only convert today.    

Climbing into the caravan, a weathered-looking man standing beside the driver croaked out a “Welcome, disciple.”  He was wearing some kind of leathery, layered red and white ceremonial robe; you felt sweaty just looking at him.  As it turns out, you were not the only convert on the caravan; four others occupied the seats that lined the walls.  You chose a spot beside the least-murderous looking one.

It was a bumpy, five-hour ride to the camp.  Despite wanting to stay awake and maybe pick up some…cult-appropriate behavior tips from the others, you ended up falling asleep with your skull vibrating against the wall of the van.  

You jolted awake, being gently shaken by the man who had welcomed you onto the bus.  Stepping out, you and the other converts for the day were shuffled into a fenced in area, and through the bars you were greeted by the admittedly impressive Children of the Vault camp.  

The large, walled-in compound was populated mostly by tents, small sheet metal structures, and the cargo-container-turned-homes that were so typical to the wastelands. The occasional stable building poked up, among the smaller homes, displaying indicators of shops and food and medical assistance; it was like a real settlement in here.  In the center was what you supposed was the ‘temple’, a definitely more purposeful structure, emblazoned with huge symbols of the cult and fronted with what looked like a stage.  

There wasn’t much time to examine the camp though, as you were quickly directed toward a short line leading to a set of steel doors.  You recognized the people from the van, and filed in behind them.  

“What’re we doing?” You half-whisper to the person in front of you.

“We’re gettin’ a checkup, making sure we aren’t bringin’ any disease into camp, and then we get our marks.”

“Oh- okay…” You wanted to ask exactly what getting a mark meant, but you figured it was a good idea to downplay the fact that you were only here to use this place as a shield; being completely clueless would’ve been a dead giveaway.

The line moved at a reasonable pace, and soon you were inside the building, just in time to wait a little more.  Every place you advanced was preceded by a dull hissing noise from the room the converts entered, and it was hard to not feel anxious about what could be happening behind the door. Maybe you should’ve asked for a pamphlet before deciding on joining a cult.

Once you reached the front of the line, you handed your bag off to be rifled through, and you were sent through the door.  The hiss of a gas torch drew your attention to a little kiln on the clinic’s counter, a window on the door hatch giving off a red glow. You dart your gaze from that to the tired-looking person in medical garb fitting a new sheet of paper into a clipboard.

After giving your name and basic information, a vial of blood, and getting checked for, among other things, a number of nasty Pandoran skin parasites, the doctor turned to the kiln.  They gestured to an exam table.

“Hold out your hand and set it on the table.”  They stated flatly, opening the door and pulling out an unmistakable branding iron.

The vault symbol glowed a yellow-orange that was hard to look at.  Trembling a little, you extended your arm with a deep breath.  Remember, it was this or the bandits.  

“No, your palm.”

You flip your hand, trying not to shake and give them a harder target.

“Welcome disciple to the Children of the Vault may the light and fortune of the Calypsos shine on you now and forever.”  You would’ve laughed at the utter lack of emotion in this rushed incantation if you weren’t about to have a lovely new third degree burn.

Speaking of-

HHHSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

The pain was delayed for a second, but the noise was enough to make you instinctively react, jaw clenching shut so hard you thought your teeth might crack.  You could smell your own flesh burning.  The brand was pulled back and the pain hit, your fried nerves not sure if you were feeling extreme heat or cold, but it sure as hell hurt; looking at the seared vault symbol sunken into the skin of your palm was only adding to your panic.  

Before you could yank your hand away to wave it around in agony, the doctor’s hand latched around your wrist and they began smearing some jelly-like cream over the mark.  Immediately the pain was soothed to a dull ache.

“Don’t wash that off for the next four hours or it’ll get infected.” They said, tossing the branding iron back into the kiln and filing your patient sheet away.  

After that, your day was a flurry of being sorted to your quarters (a small shack you shared with another wasteland scavenger, a pretty good roommate based on the number of raiders and psychos you saw milling around), being filled in on what duties were expected of you (based on your physical you were given a set of non-combat jobs), and when the religious services were (daily inside the temple, and ‘presentations’ would be given onstage at the Calypso’s discretion).  You’d have to show up to at least one service a week, and it was suggested to attend more.  

A couple weeks passed pretty uneventfully.  You’d only seen the Calypsos twice at this point, both times from a place far back in the crowd during their speeches.  You had to hand it to them; they were pretty charismatic- plus it was cool to finally see a siren in real life, never mind two.  You’re pretty sure one of the speeches included a public execution of someone who had attacked the camp, though you didn’t have a good enough view to see what happened. The crowd sure liked it; you were surprised there wasn’t a riot based on how riled up they were getting.

One morning a voice droned over the speakers that dotted the camp, rousing you from your sleep.  The Calypsos had returned victorious from an outing, and all followers were supposed to go witness them; you groaned softly.  Couldn’t they wait until afternoon to come home?  

The next part of the announcement surprised you.  They were coming in through the northwest gate; the entrance closest to you.  Looks like you wouldn’t be in the distant back of the crowd this time… The thought was a little intimidating.  These two rulers and their travel party of the roughest bandits in camp were going to be passing right by your door.  All things considered, it was nice to be on this side of the equation.

You got dressed quickly and left your shack, your morning-person roommate already out and about.  People were already milling about around the gate, with more devoted followers jogging over from elsewhere in the camp.  You were…admittedly kind of excited to see them up close.  Warlords were basically celebrities on Pandora, and it was a rare experience to see one without being murdered.

The gates opened, and you stood on your tiptoes to get a better look. Cheering and devoted cries heralded the raiding party’s entrance, growing in intensity at the first glimpse of the twins.

They parted the crowd yards ahead of them as they moved through the camp.  You had never gotten a good look at either of them, and it made your heart stutter in your chest to see them coming toward you.  Even if you didn’t buy into what they were selling, they were powerful sirens, and just that fact was enough to amass a following.  

Tyreen was enough to make your blood run cold all on her own; regal, luminous blue dancing over her arm, keenly aware of just how devastating she could be, looking straight ahead with only her goals in sight...it didn’t seem fair that was another one.  Troy towered over her, eyes scanning over the crowd.  It was almost like they coordinated their siren markings along with their clothing, the softly glowing red that ran up to his face making a perfect contrast to hers.  Chains and crystals bounced against his chest, almost pointing out the tattoos decorating him. It became clear that they’d pass right by you, using the well-worn path leading to temple

As they advanced, you averted your eyes, suddenly remembering your desire to lay low.  But…one more glance wouldn’t hurt.  You lifted your gaze to steal another look at them and-

Both of them were looking directly at you as they passed. Time seemed like it was stopped; your heart certainly was.  Their icy eyes were held on you, though they didn’t break their stride at all.   The hint of a smile was on Tyreen’s face, and Troy’s eyebrow raised curiously.  You felt like you could evaporate on the spot without any help from a siren.

And then they were gone, backs to you, long coats flowing out behind them like capes.  You inhaled for the first time in years, and wondered if anyone else noticed that.  The crowd pushed you along to the temple stage, following their leaders.

You spent the entirety of their presentation in a daze.  Something had gone well and you were all blessed, apparently- something about a new supply train of weapons and shields and food. Once they had concluded, you found your way back to your quarters.  You tried to drive what had happened from your mind.  Why did they look at you?  Did they look at anyone else?  Were they mad?  They didn’t look mad.  You hadn’t done anything wrong and it’s not like they could tell you weren’t here out of faith…right?

  Every hour that passed quietly served to calm down the paranoid thoughts fluttering around.  Then there was a knock at the rough sheet of metal you called a door.

A temple priest stood in front of you, red, black, and white robes skimming the ground.  

“The Saviors have requested to hold audience with you.”  She stated.

You were pretty sure your insides just twisted themselves into a knot.  “They- W-with me?”  This had to be a mistake, or a dream, or-

A hologram of your face sprang up out of a handheld projector, the terrible scan they had taken on your first day here, along with your name and the location of your little shack.  “Correct. With you.”

You stood without responding, unable to process the events and hoping maybe they’d just go away if you wished hard enough.

“Follow.  They will not be happy to wait.”  

It sounded like her voice was muffled and distant.  Could you remember how to walk?  You knew how to walk right?

Almost without permission, your feet moved forward, trailing behind the priest in a state of shock.  You wanted to ask why, but even if you could form words you doubted this person would give you a response.  There was no way you’d be able to make a run for it; one alert and you’d be tackled by every zealot in sight.  

You were at the temple much faster than you’d like.  Was the walk here always this short?  At the very least, the lack of a jeering crowd gathered at the stage pushed ‘getting publicly executed’ lower on the possibilities list.  Taking deep, even breaths to calm yourself, you entered the building with the priest, heavy doors shutting behind you both.

           The emotionless minister led you straight through the large atrium where services were held, the stained-glass panel depicting the Calypso twins backlit and radiant as always.  It was never quite as threatening as it was in this moment, the image of the two of them towering over you seeming to hint at your fate as you approached.  You were led into a back hallway, lavishly decorated with symbols and devoid of any outside light sources; the priest entered a that unlocked a sliding door at the end of the hall, and-

           Tyreen and Troy Calypso sat at the top of a raised platform, steep black stairs leading to their matching thrones.  Blue and red lines contoured the edges of the chairs, the otherworldly glow making them even more intimidating than usual.  The room was opulent, well-constructed; unlike anything you had seen firsthand on Pandora.  But the two of them, looking down at you, waiting for you to approach them…

           The sharp noise of the priest moving across the floor brought your soul back to the ground.  Scared as you were, this was absolutely beyond the time to think about making a break for it, or even disobeying in the slightest.  You hurriedly caught up and followed behind, trying not to physically vomit your entire heart onto the nice clean floor.  Please just stop at the foot of the stairs-

           You were climbing the stairs, eyes glued to the red and white robe in front of you, not trusting yourself to look up and risk tripping.  When you reach the top, the worst happens; you’re directed to take more steps and approach them.  Panic tightens your throat, standing in front of the two sirens and feeling very small.  

           “Kneel.” Hissed the priest, pulling you with her to the ground.  “I’ve brought the devoted you requested, my Saviors.”

“You may return to your duties.”  Tyreen called to the high servant, dismissing her with a wave.  The priest stands and bows, and her footsteps fade behind you.  The door closes.

Tyreen and Troy stand seemingly in sync, and you keep your gaze lowered to the floor, wondering why you haven’t been vaporized yet.  The two stride forward until they’re right in front of you, wordlessly looking down at your kneeling form.  

You’re utterly frozen in place as Tyreen reaches out.  You’re braced for something agonizing; the twisting, glowing blue on her opposite arm like the warning colors of a poisonous animal. A jolt runs through you when all she does is cup your jaw with an almost reverent touch, tilting your head up to face them.

“You see Troy?  Can you feel it now?”  

You didn’t dare move as Troy reach out with his human arm to do the same on the other side, calloused fingertips grazing the side of your throat.  

His face splits into a grin, and he laughs. “Ohh, wow. You were right Tyreen.”  

“Say that again.”

“Shut up.”

Troy shifted his hand to hold your chin as Tyreen moved hers away. Your heart was racing and he leaned in, tilting your head from side to side, appraising you and happy with what he was seeing.  It was here you noticed it; his teeth were sharp. Some other kind of body mod to add to the arm and the piercings that dotted his face.  You couldn’t help but tremble.

“Oh now, don’t be scared.”  He purrs.  

“This is an honor, you know.” Tyreen’s voice was behind you, her hands sliding over your shoulders. “So few get the privilege of being chosen like this.”

Troy moved closer, and for one absurd moment you thought he was going to kiss you before he nudged his face under your jaw.

           You tried to jump, finally finding your voice to let out a yelp, but Tyreen’s hands kept you in place as Troy’s looped around your back.  

           “This’ll only take a second, relax…”  Her thumbs rubbed circles into your shoulders, doing little to calm you.

           “Wait- wait- “ Was all you managed to get out before he bit you.

           Troy sank his teeth into the base of your neck and shoulder, slicing through like there was no resistance.   Both of their grips tightened on you as you instinctively tried to scramble away; you were suddenly acutely aware of how easily Troy’s mechanical arm could simply crush you.  You wanted to raise your arms and push against his chest, but they were pressed tight to your sides, leaving you to squirm uselessly in his grip.

           “Shhhhh…” Tyreen soothed from above you.

           A cold feeling crept out from the bite, Troy’s teeth still in your shoulder.  Every thump of your racing heart spread the chill further, a sweeping warmth following its path and beginning to fill your arm and chest with an odd numbness.  Your breathing felt erratic, like your lungs were trying to slow down on their own accord, alternating between hyperventilating gasps and deeper breaths.  The warmth spread its way through your body, leaving slackened muscles in its wake, your shoulders falling and your frightened wriggling going still against your wishes.

           By the time Troy pulled his head away from your throat, you felt like if he let you go you’d collapse onto the floor.  You were barely able to hold your head up to see him looking you over; he was pleased.  Stark red blood stained his bottom lip, quickly erased as he ran his tongue over it.

“How do you feel, faithful?”  You could feel his voice rumble in his chest, held so close to him. His grip loosened, letting you slump slightly in his arms.

“I’m...”  Your voice was soft.  Words were lost.  You were warm.  It was nice to be held like this.

“Mmh, good.” It was almost a growl.

“Give it a few more minutes, Troy.”  Tyreen’s voice sounded like it was underwater.  She brushed your hair from your face, tucking it behind your ear.  “You don’t want to make a mess of this one if they panic.”

            “Wha…” You mumble.  

           “We ask all our followers to give their flesh to us in the form of the mark.”  Tyreen cooed, Troy gently mouthing at your branded palm as she spoke, holding your arm by the wrist. “But there is more you can do to serve us.”  Her fingertips caressed your jaw from behind, and you found yourself leaning into her hand, grateful for her touch, tilting your head up to look at her.  “Your sacrifice becomes our strength.”  The blue markings on her arm were glowing, and you felt…floaty, tired…weaker.

           “Hey, that’s mine.”  Troy rumbled.  You felt teeth baring against your wrist.

           Tyreen rolled her eyes, her hands slipping away from you and she stepped back.  

           You didn’t have the energy to shift forward and look at Troy, his mechanical hand splayed out over your back, supporting your limp body and warm from your own body heat.  He leaned in, breath hot over the still bleeding bite wound.  Troy dragged his tongue over the mark he’d made, continuing the motion up the side of your throat, a low growl of approval building in his chest.  

           “Where were you hiding?”   His lips moved against your pulse, teeth grazing the fragile skin; you’d shiver if you could manage it.  Troy nipped at your jaw a bit before he pulled away just a little.

           A dull pop sounded from him.  A content sigh.  Curiosity spurred you to tip your head forward just enough to look at him.  

           His lower jaw had split at the chin, the seams along his cheekbones opening to reveal a mouthful of too many viciously sharp teeth.  His tongue hung between the divide in his jaw, significantly longer than a human’s should be.

           You should probably be alarmed.  Scared, even.  You lean your head back again, letting your eyes drift closed.

           “There you go…”  Tyreen’s voice came from nowhere, everywhere.

           Your shoulder was cold for a moment; something had torn through your shirt.  The chill was quickly replaced by Troy’s mouth, and you felt your head gently tugged to the side to give him more room.    

           The grip around you tightened when he bit down, the siren exhaling, crushing you to him like you were going to get away.  You could feel the distinct sides of his jaw move to dig into the soft muscle, catching a little on your collarbone and raking it with a strange buzzing feeling.  Maybe this should hurt.

           You felt a groan vibrate in his chest, in your own muscle and bone.  He pulled blood from the wound for a few slow heartbeats, before removing his teeth to lick at the bite, huffing for breath.  

           “Fuck…” He panted.  At least that’s what you think he said.  A jaw like that wasn’t good for forming words.

           He lunged back in, snapping his teeth around your shoulder again with enough force to jerk you around.  He was leaning forward, holding you, bent over you, surrounding you from all sides.  Something of yours cracked, and that just seemed to encourage him.  That same draining, weak feeling that Tyreen had given you a preview of was seeping in, much more intensely this time.  You felt like you could just fall asleep, just let him take care of everything.  

           Troy chased the blood pulsing lazily from the punctures and tears he had made, dragging his tongue over the lines before they reached your clothing and soaked in.  He adjusted you, holding you easily as a doll with his prosthetic arm, moving so he could more easily reach the hem of your shirt and push it upwards.  

           He paused, nosing over your soft middle like he was savoring the moment.  His breath was hot, your own blood dripping from his mouth onto your stomach tickling. Cracking your eyes open for the first time in a while, you could see his siren markings glowing intensely, his own piercing gaze flicking up to meet yours.  With his mouth split, face so soaked in blood and monstrous, he unmistakably smiled at you, giving you a wink before sinking his head down and tearing into your middle.  It was here you passed out, only coming around to briefly to feel a rib crack and the vibrating sensation of a ravenous snarl against your insides before going under again.  

Based on all that, you were truly surprised to wake up.  

You were lying on something soft and cushiony, twisted up in a sheet.  Before your eyes had even opened, your hands darted to feel your shoulder, your torso; there a scratch to be found.  Disorientation hit you in waves the second you tried to sit up; maybe lying down for a minute was a better plan.

A laugh nearly made you jump out of your skin “Ha! are you still coming off the sedative?  Goddamn Troy how much did you give them?”

“Ehhh, might’ve gotten a little carried away.”  Okay- okay so none of that was a dream so what the fuck was-

Tyreen approached you, kneeling down to your level and trying to hold back a grin.  “You’re lucky, I really didn’t think Troy was gonna stop.  Well if you’re still out of it, that’ll make this next part a lot easier.”  

The world was still coming into focus, and none of this was helping.  You heard Troy getting up and coming closer, mismatched hands grabbing you and propping you up from behind, bringing a paralyzing shock of dizziness.  

“C’mon, you’ve heard stories about sirens healing people, haven’t you?”  He purred, your eyes squeezed shut against the room spinning.  “You’re so faithful and sweet, it would be such a shame to get rid of you.”

Tyreen had moved further away, to the other side of the room.  “You’re quite the little eridium sponge, you know that?  You must be absorbing trace amounts from the environment; it’s a wonder you aren’t falling apart from it.”

Troy was pushing the sheet off your right shoulder, exposing it. “Don’t worry though, we can help you keep it in check.”  He nuzzled under your jaw, and you could feel the grin on his face.

“But before we do anything else, we have to make sure everyone knows who you belong to.”  

You managed to open your eyes just in time to see Tyreen leaning down, holding a metal vault symbol like the one you had been branded with. It was glowing the same pale blue as her siren markings and it was…much bigger than the one on your palm.

Troy held you tight; not that you were able to struggle much yet. All you managed was leaning into him a bit, trying to back away from what was certainly going to hurt.

The siren-energized metal pressed into your skin with a hum, rather than the hiss you were expecting.  In an instant your muscles locked up like you were being electrocuted, raw energy surging through your body and choking the breath from you. Just as you thought your heart would burst, she pulled away, leaving you to slump and gasp for air in Troy’s arms.

Tyreen tilted your chin up, looking into your exhausted eyes with a sweet smile.

“You’ll be a good offering for us, won’t you?”

What choice did you have but to nod?

Tyreen all but giggled at your response, a dangerous grin lighting up her face.

“So obedient.”  Troy laughed.  “I always wanted a willing sacrifice that hasn’t lost their mind.”

Tyreen rubbed her thumb over the aching mark she’d just put on you, speaking with a soft, saccharine voice.  “Go ahead and get some rest, faithful.”  Tyreen looked to Troy.  “We’ll have to get a collar made.”  

Troy set you back down.  You just about melted onto the soft bed, too impossibly tired and sore to worry any more, asleep before they had even left.

[sunken-standard]

16 Sherlolly for the ask meme thing :)

(From this ask meme, I’m assuming, since it’s the last I posted)  Thanks, anon :D

16: do either of them have a specialitem (an article of clothing, a necklace, a book) that they use whenthey miss the other? if so, what is it? what do they do with it(read, wear, look at, smell)?

Short answer: nah.  I don’t really seeeither of them as being that kind of sentimental at all.  They maysee something and be reminded of the other, but that “carrying atoken” trope just doesn’t suit either of them, IMO.  

That being said, I started a wanklockfic a long time ago but never made it to the really good bits; post-TRF,my version of Molly’s Christmas gift.  Slightly sacrilegious, probably.

Unfinished fic behind the cut; I knowI’ve posted at least one sentence of this before, but I don’t think Iposted more than that.  If I have, apologies.  It’s hard to keeptrack sometimes.

*

He was not a religious man.  Molly wasnot a religious woman.  When he opened her Christmas gift two daysafter she’d given it to him (finally working up to it through theguilt, which was hardly a respite from the weight of his sadness), hewas momentarily confused.  

It was a rosary.

Antique, obviously; nothing ornate. Tarnished silver cross and chain, a silver medallion bearing ashrouded skull in three-quarters profile for the centerpiece; carvedivory roses for the Our Fathers and deep red glass beads for the HailMarys.  Nice to look at, he supposed, though it was a bit Goth, evenfor his tastes.

While he was wondering exactly whyshe’d pick such an odd thing, he noticed a mark on one of the ivorybeads.  Habit had him reaching for the magnifying glass, pulling thelamp closer.  There was something odd about it, odd about the grainof the ivory.

Oh.

It was human ivory.  A molar. He examined the rest; all teeth.

Molly Hooper always found ways to beinteresting when he was least expecting it.

*

The rosary lived in the back of hisdresser drawer; he took it out sometimes when he needed to remindhimself that things weren’t always what they appeared at firstglance.  He wondered what kind of person it had belonged to, whoseteeth they were.  Probably the memento mori of a Victorian widow orsomesuch; he found the notion strangely romantic.  He wondered ifMolly had had similar thoughts when she bought it.  He found herather liked that idea, even if he didn’t want to admit it tohimself.

*

He had nothing of himself when he leftLondon; no coat, no wallet, no phone.  He was a ghost, after all. You can’t take it with you, as they say.  

*

He was waiting for a contact a weekinto his new existence in the shadows; Florence was hot and the sunwas bright.  He milled around a street vendor’s table near theCathedral, a hapless tourist.  The sun caught a deep red bead on acheap nickel-and-glass rosary; he bought it without letting himselfexamine why.

It ended up being useful; it gave himsomething to do with his hands while he kept his head bowed in a pewas he waited again the next day for the contact to bring him theflash drive she promised.

He tried not to let his mind drift toMolly like it threatened to do at the worst possible times in thepast week.  He’d been a fool and acted on impulse and fear of his ownmortality, kissing her roughly and asking her to remember him, thereal him; asking her to never reveal his secret, no matterwhat happened—if he died on the roof or if he landed wrong or if henever made it back to London.  Let them all forget, I only need youto remember.

It was quite possibly the cruelestthing he’d ever done.

*

He kept the rosary in his pocket.  Hewasn’t a person who believed in talismans or good luck charms or anysuch nonsense, but he found the simple act of going over the beadsone-by-one to be calming.  Strings of beads were used the world overfor meditation of one kind or another, it was hardly revolutionary.  

Some days he was too busy to thinkabout her.  Those were the good days, when he was actively gettingcloser to his end goal; closer to dismantling the entire network.

On the slow days and the bad days, shewas constantly in his thoughts.  She’d taken up residence in his MindPalace long ago, he couldn’t even pinpoint when.  She was mostly justthere, quiet and close, giving him the right things he needed when heput his hand out for something.  He was afraid to interact with hertoo much, afraid he might start building her into something shewasn’t.  He’d already done that with one Woman, much to his greatdisgust with himself.

*

The weeks turned into months.  In earlyDecember, he found himself in Prague.  He liked to meet hisinformants in churches; it had a certain old-fashioned Cold Warcharm.  In St. Vitus Cathedral, he read a pamphlet about the life ofJan Nepomucký(or, Anglicized, John of Nepomuk); the patron saint of secrets.  Hewasn’t really thinking when, two days later, he found himself in ashop tucked away on a side street that sold religious paraphanelia;he bought a pair of saint’s medals.  

Heattached one to the rosary in place of the cross (still in his pocketwherever he went); the other he folded up into a square of shiny redpaper and stuffed into an envelope.  He sent it before good senseprevailed; he only wanted her to think of him.  She was clever, shewould understand it.  He was leaving Prague the next day, anyway; aspirit slipping back into the underworld.

*

It wasChristmas Eve and he’d never felt so alone in his life.  He’d alwaysbeen able to plaster on a smile and make a friend for long enough tofeel like part of the human race when he needed to, no matter howhigh or low or disconnected he was at the time; that night wasdifferent.  He lay on his cold sleeping mat and stared at thechipping plaster of the walls of his cell; he wasn’t pretending to bea monk, but he was living like one anyway.

Kama-tanha,he thought, fingering the rosary as he pictured Molly in the dressfrom last year.

Whathe wouldn’t give to go back and live that night over.  No making anarse out of himself, no faked deaths or any of it.

Hewould open his damn present in the quietest corner of the flat, onthe sofa, away from everyone else; Molly would point out the tinyspot of decalcification on the rose that had first caught his eye andhe would give in to the impulse to kiss her, finally taste thelipstick she’d put on just for him.

He made everyone else vanish; he resteda hand on her hip, the satin of the dress clinging like a secondskin.

If only he hadn’t been such a coward. If only he’d said yes, I would like coffee with you sometimeinstead of being wary of an attractive, intelligent woman showing aninterest in him.  How different would it have been?  

If he’d become involved with her then,she would be the primary target now.  Or he really would be dead,because he might have had to go that far to save her, even with hisbrother’s help.

The thought made him feel cold down tohis bones, dissipated the first stirrings of arousal curling throughhis gut.

He pressed the medal to his lips, themetal still warm from being next to his body, in his hands; she washis patron saint.  When he got back, if he got back, he would tellher.  Show her.  Until then, she would have his daily devotions; HailMolly, full of awkward grace.

[literallyusuk]

Cowboy Casanova (USUK) Chapter 1

Summary: A well-bred Englishman finds himself in the American Wild West, surrounded by larger-than-life characters and a backdrop of blue skies and red earth. However, it seems everyone has something to hide, and dark rumours cling particularly tightly to one bright-eyed cowboy. 

This thing is literally like 5 and a half years old, but I’ve finally finished it! Since it is so old the writing style is a bit different to my latest works, but I’m excited to finally let it out into the world. It was initially inspired by the song ‘Cowboy Casanova’ by Carrie Underwood. Updates will be every few days, perhaps two or three a week. I don’t have a particular schedule.

Can also be found on my AO3! It will have additional notes there.

Arthur watched the train speed away into the distance. It glinted silver and copper beneath the wide blue sky, to the point that he had to hold a hand in front of his face to stave off the worst of the glare. Once it was gone from sight he sighed and hefted his duffel bag over his shoulder, turning to focus on his more immediate surroundings.

The train station was one of the only two buildings in sight, the other being quarters for the station master. Arthur adjusted the straw hat on his head before stepping into the shade of the building. The station was bigger than he’d expected and quite airy, with wide windows and double doors opening onto both the platform and out into the desert on the other side. It looked elegant despite being made solely of dusty wood.

“Hello?” he called.

“In ‘ere!” came a shout from inside.

Arthur followed it to find a burly man behind the counter. The man’s clothes were dusty and worn as well, but his eyes watched Arthur sharply. A steaming tin cup sat before him, next to a pile of wood shavings. He held the knife and piece of wood he was whittling in his hands.

“You’re new around here.” It wasn’t a question. “Stayin’ or movin’ on?”

“Staying. How far to the nearest town?”

“Ten miles. S’called Willow Springs. Where you from?”

“I came from New York City.”

“That ain’t a New York accent.”

“Ah. Originally I’m from London, England.” Arthur said the words cautiously, unsure where this round of questioning was going.

The man just grunted. “There’s no transportation. You’ll have to walk.”

“That’s fine by me. Which direction is Willow Springs?”

“There’s a signpost outside. Follow it in a straight line.”

“Thank you for your help.” Arthur received another grunt and took that as his cue to leave.

He paused momentarily on the porch before he stepped back out under the sun. Dry desert surrounded him, though he could see scatterings of blue and purple hills in the distance, contrasted against the reddish ground. Clumps of grey-green grasses sprouted every there and then across the earth. They were more concentrated around the train station and tracks. Bushes and cacti dotted the landscape as well. Arthur smiled.

“Watch your footing for snakes!” the station master called.

“Thank you!” Arthur replied, then started forward.

The signpost had only one marker on it, with the faded lettering for Willow Springs engraved into the metal. It pointed westward, so Arthur adjusted his hat further down his forehead and set off. He kept his eyes glued to the ground, watching for snakes as the station master had warned him, though occasionally he would glance upward to check the sun’s position.

He had sweat running down his back within fifteen minutes. He tried to ignore it as best he could and resisted reaching for his water canister more than once every five hundred steps. Counting them helped pass the time and gave him a goal to work towards. As beautiful as the desert around him was, he wanted to find the town as soon as possible. He had to adjust his hat a few more times as the sun sank lower in the horizon, and every now and then he’d take it off entirely to fan at his face. Though his pace had remained slow and steady for most of his walk, it picked up once he saw the faint silhouettes of buildings in the distance.

Arthur stopped briefly about a mile away from the town to drink again as well as splash some water on his face. He also straightened out his clothes and tried to brush his fingers through his hair to smooth it down a bit. It wouldn’t do to present himself so unfavourably in a new area, so he tried his best to make himself look tidier. After two minutes he gave up on the hair and jammed his hat back down over it before starting off again.

He didn’t get very far, though. The outermost buildings of the town were visible in detail when, seemingly out of nowhere, he was surrounded by a group of five men on horseback. A tall, imposing blond man with purple eyes astride a pure white horse seemed to be the leader. An albino, a brunet, and two darker blonds were seated on darker horses a few feet behind him. At the leader’s nod, the four surrounded Arthur on all sides.

Arthur sighed. “And I suppose you expect me to hand over all of my valuables to you now, yes?”

“Yes, that would be nice,” the pale-haired leader said, smiling cheerfully.

Arthur blinked at the light accent in his voice. “Sorry to disappoint you, gentlemen, but I don’t have any valuables on me.” He patted his pockets to emphasize this.

The outlaw’s eyes narrowed. “Is that true? Gilbert, search him.”

The albino snickered as he swung down. “With pleasure.”

“That won’t be necessary.” A clear voice rang out from behind them, stopping Gilbert in his tracks. “Leave him be.”

Arthur turned to see a young blond man sitting on a tricolour pinto horse a few feet away. He was smiling easily, but his bright blue eyes were hard behind his glasses as he toyed with the gun at his hip. He looked like he knew how to use it.

“I do not believe this is your business, Alfred,” the leader said softly.

“‘Course it is, Ivan,” Alfred replied, matching his tone. “You’re tormentin’ an innocent traveller outside the town. As the protector of this town, it’s my duty to stop ya.” His eyes passed over Arthur and then the other outlaws surrounding him. His expression darkened when he saw the brunet. “Toris, what are ya doin’ with these guys?”

“Do not answer, Toris, or you will regret it,” Ivan growled.

Toris looked torn for a moment, before lowering his gaze and staying silent as he played with some loose leather on his saddle horn.

Alfred looked sad. Then, the brief moment passed and his expression brightened again. “Right, let me say it again. Let the nice traveller be, and give yourselves up,” he said cheerfully, but it seemed forced now.

“And what will you do if we don’t?” Ivan challenged.

Alfred drew his gun and cocked it. “It won’t be pretty.”

Gilbert took another step towards Arthur. Alfred caught the movement and urged his horse forward, simultaneously firing. The bullet would have taken Ivan through the shoulder, except his horse spooked. It grazed his arm instead, leaving a long, shallow gash diagonally across his forearm. Alfred stopped the pinto when he was right next to Arthur. The horse reared, and Arthur cursed under his breath as he ducked away from the flying hooves. Gilbert also cursed and scrambled backwards, back to his horse.

Ivan’s forearm was bleeding at this point, but he was still smiling. “That was-” He stopped as his gaze focused on something off to the side, in the direction of the town. “Come on.” He wheeled his horse around, creating a large dust cloud around them. His companions did the same, and the dust cloud grew.

Arthur coughed, covering his mouth with his sleeve. When the dust settled, he was alone with Alfred. “Wh-Where did they go?” he asked, looking around with some awe.

“Damnit!” Alfred cursed, smacking the pommel of his saddle. “I dunno, they’re good at that. But I’ll catch ‘em one day,” he vowed. He looked over his shoulder to see two men approaching him. “Hiya, Ludwig!”

The serious-looking blond in front nodded as he reined in. “What happened? Adam noticed the commotion, and we heard a shot.” A shiny Sheriff’s badge was pinned to his chest.

“It was Ivan. But he’s gone now, the bastard.”

The other man swung down and bounced over to Arthur. “Hello! I’m Feliciano Vargas, but you can call me Feli! You’re new around here, aren’t you? What’s your name?” he had reddish-brown hair and warm amber eyes.

“Yes, I am. My name is Arthur Kirkland. Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Arthur replied, inclining his head slightly.

“Whoa, you’re English! Cool!” Alfred said, grinning more brightly. “My full name is Alfred F. Jones, by the way, though I’m also known as the local hero. Or protector of the town, but hero sounds better.”

“No one calls you that, you know,” Ludwig said. “I’m Ludwig Beilschmidt. Are you coming to our town, or just passing through?”

“No, I was planning on staying here for a while,” Arthur replied, noting their accents as well. “Get some work to support myself.”

“Do you need an escort?” Feliciano asked brightly. “We’ll give you one if you want!”

“I’ll take him!” Alfred called out. “Got nothin’ else to do.” He suddenly nudged his horse closer to Ludwig and leaned in, so that Arthur barely caught the words. “Gilbert was with them. Just thought you’d wanna know.”

Ludwig frowned and nodded tensely, but said nothing. He motioned to Feliciano, who smiled one last time at Arthur and mounted. The two of them rode off, leaving Alfred and Arthur alone again.

“Thank you for your assistance earlier, but I can find my way now. I can see the buildings, after all,” Arthur said, starting to walk after them. He was suddenly blocked off as Alfred brought his horse directly in his way, forcing him to stop.

“Naw, I said I’d take ya, so I will. And ‘sides, what if Ivan comes back? I can’t leave you all defenceless-like.”

“I am not defenceless!” Arthur snapped, looking up at him. He didn’t relish the idea of meeting the group of outlaws again anytime soon, though. After a moment, he sighed. “Well if you absolutely insist, I suppose it would be rude of me to refuse.”

Alfred chuckled and pointed to the duffel bag slung over the Englishman’s shoulder. “That all ya got?”

“Yes. Is there anything wrong with that?” Arthur asked, adjusting the strap over his shoulder.

“No, just wanted to make sure that the load wouldn’t be too much for Star,” Alfred replied, patting the pinto’s neck.

Arthur understood the implication immediately. “No. I am not getting up on that creature’s back,” he said firmly.

“Aww, don’t hurt her feelings! C’mon, I’ll hold ya still and make sure you don’t fall off.” Alfred held out his hand.

Arthur stared at it dubiously before reaching out to take it. The cowboy heaved him up behind himself, and Arthur had to grab him around the waist so he wouldn’t fall off the other side. Colour rose to his cheeks as he felt Alfred’s toned, firm muscles beneath his shirt, and he was happy that he could hide his face in said shirt to keep his blush concealed.

“So are ya really as poor as you told ‘em, or were you just bluffin’?” Alfred asked, pushing Star into an easy-paced walk.

“I-I’ve got about twenty dollars left?” Arthur managed to get out. The sudden movement of the horse startled him, and he ended up clinging to the American even more.

Alfred chuckled as he felt the arms around him tighten and twisted around a bit to look at Arthur. “That’s a little more than ‘nothin’ valuable’. Where do ya wanna go?”

“Just take me to the nearest hotel or someplace I could spend the night.”

“Right. Elizaveta, my Hungarian friend, has a saloon with some rooms above it. You could rent out one of those for a bit.”

Arthur nodded. “Would you happen to also know a place I could find some work?”

“Huh… Do ya know how to handle cattle? Or ride?” Alfred asked, patting one of the arms around his waist.

Arthur immediately loosened his hold. “Of course I know how to ride. I just know how to ride well-trained English horses.”

“And the cattle?”

“No. I’d prefer something inside, if possible.”

Alfred laughed. “Good luck with that.”

They were coming to the town now, and Alfred turned down a small side alley towards a two storey, plain wooden building at the end of the street and at the outskirts of town.

“So you won’t help me?” Arthur asked, disappointment lacing his voice.

“I gave you a ride, didn’t I? But don’t worry, Liz might be able to help you with that. She may be in need of a new barkeep. They’ve been rotatin’ a lot since the original one…left,” Alfred said, hesitating a bit at the end.

“Left?”

“It’s a long story. Liz’ll tell ya, maybe, if you ask her.” Alfred stopped in front of the building and motioned for the other to get off.

Arthur had some difficulties with that due to his duffel bag, and after a few moments of struggling he simply lowered it to the ground before swinging down. “Thank you for the ride. And…for back there,” he said as he slung it over his shoulder again.

“No problem! It’s what heroes do!” Alfred replied cheerfully, dismounting as well and tying Star to a nearby hitching post.

Arthur blinked, surprised that the cowboy was still there. “And I suppose you fancy yourself one?” he asked, recovering quickly. Ludwig’s words rang faintly in his ears.

“‘Course I’m a hero! Don’t pay attention to what Ludwig says. I’m awesome at savin’ people, and the girls all love me,” Alfred replied, winking at the Englishman. “Some guys too.” He gave him a challenging look. “You’ve got no problem with that, do ya?”

“What, that you fancy men occasionally? It’s part of the reason I left England,” Arthur said, shrugging.

“So you’re a queer too?”

“Yes, but I’d appreciate if you refrained from spreading that information around.”

Alfred laughed again. “Quit bein’ so formal, this ain’t the big city or nothin’. But don’t worry, people here are pretty accepting.” He caught the look on Arthur’s face. “Fine, fine. I’ll keep my mouth shut. Now c’mon, you need a room and a job, and I need a nice cold drink.”

Arthur nodded and flushed a bit at the last part, but luckily for him, Alfred had already turned away and was pushing through the doors to get inside. He hurried after him and entered right behind.

“Hiya! Hero’s here!” Alfred announced, drawing everyone’s attention to him, and consequently Arthur.

Luckily for him – again – though, it was just after noon so there weren’t that many people there, most of them being at the local mines. The saloon itself was tidy and well kept. The main drinking and dining room had about fifteen round wooden tables scattered around it, and a piano in the corner. A dark-haired man was playing a slow tune on it. There was a bar in the back, next to a door that presumably led to the kitchen. A short, dirty-blond man stood behind the bar, while a green-eyed woman was coming out of the kitchen with a platter of food in her arms. It smelled delicious.

The woman smiled at Alfred, while the other people went back to what they were doing before, clearly used to the routine. “Hello, Alfred! Did you sort out the trouble? What was it?”

“Oh, hey Liz.” Alfred strode over to her, dragging Arthur behind him. The Englishman received some curious stares, but he tuned them out. “It was Ivan again. He was terrorizin’ Mister Kirkland here, but I saved him!”

Elizaveta’s gaze turned to Arthur, who by now managed to get out of Alfred’s grip. “Hello there, Mr. Kirkland. Are you new here?”

“Please, call me Arthur, miss,” Arthur said, inclining his head to her. “And yes, I am new to the area.”

Alfred burst out laughing at the action, holding his stomach and trying to keep it quiet. Elizaveta promptly whacked him with a ladle she had whipped out of seemingly nowhere. The tray of food was balanced on one arm.

“Don’t you laugh, you great big oaf! There’s nothin’ wrong with being polite!” she scolded him. She then went on to hit Arthur over the head in the same fashion.

“Wha- Ow! M-Miss, what was that for?” Arthur cried, hands going up to gingerly touch his forehead. “Have I offended you in some way?”

Elizaveta brandished the ladle at him, clipping him on the shoulder with it. “Yes, you have. My name is Elizaveta, or Liz, or even Lizzie. Not ‘miss’. Got it?”

“Yes, mi- err, Liz,” Arthur said, quickly backing out of her reach.

Alfred chuckled again. “You’re still good with that thing, Lizzie.”

Elizaveta twirled the ladle expertly before hooking it back onto her belt. “I had a lot of practice,” she said, then abruptly sobered up. “Excuse me. I’ll be right with you, Arthur.” She hurried off to deliver the food.

Arthur glanced at Alfred, but the other man simply smiled. “C’mon, Artie, there are two stools open by the bar,” he said, going to the free seats at the end of the long counter.

Arthur followed him and sat down, ordering some tea. The barkeep gave him a strange look but went off to make it, sliding Alfred a mug of cold beer along the way. When he did get his tea, Arthur sat there quietly, taking small sips. The tea was nowhere near the quality back home, but he had to admit it wasn’t awful. Alfred was telling him some story about how he’d rescued some girl from a group of outlaws – not Ivan – but he tuned the American out.

Elizaveta returned a few minutes later, and Alfred shut up when she got close. “So, Arthur, what are you looking for here?”

“Well, a room would be nice, if you have one, and a job,” Arthur replied immediately. “Preferably inside.”

“I should have a spare room upstairs for fifty cents a night,” Elizaveta said after a moment of thinking. “And you could always work in the mine. It’s inside, and they could always use a new worker. Alfred helps out sometimes, when he’s not off doing who knows what.”

“Hey! You know I help with the cattle over in Ashton when they need it! And I rescue people! Especially pretty lasses in desperate need of a cowboy on a great black stallion…” Alfred trailed off, thinking about all the beautiful girls that would be throwing themselves at him, thanking him profusely for saving them and then going on to kiss him. Oh, and the occasional cute guy, too.

Arthur, who had been frozen in shock since the word ‘mine’, recovered now. “You really are an airhead, aren’t you?” he asked Alfred. Well, that didn’t help his pride at all. It had already been shot by the very fact that he had needed to be rescued, and the realization that Alfred was kind of an idiot killed it off entirely. A noble idiot, it seemed, but an idiot nonetheless.

Said idiot blinked. “Wha?”

“You can’t just go around expecting that pretty ladies will pop up out of the blue in need of saving, give you a kiss, and then vanish. Plus you have a pinto mare, not a black stallion.”

“Why not? It’s worked a few times before,” Alfred said happily, downing the rest of his beer and standing up. He ignored the comment about his horse.

Arthur rolled his eyes and took another small sip of tea. “You’re leaving?” he asked once he’d realized Alfred’s position.

Alfred looked down and flashed him a brilliant smile. “Yeah. Liz’ll take care of ya now, and I got some stuff to do. If you’re stayin’ in town, I’ll see you around later!” He slid the mug to the barkeep and walked out, waving to Arthur and Elizaveta as he left.

Elizaveta had gotten a strange glint in her eye, but no one noticed it. “So no mines then, Arthur?” she asked with a chuckle.

“No. You wouldn’t need an extra hand around here, would you? I can cook, and I worked as a bartended in the city for a while,” Arthur suggested.

The woman raised an eyebrow. “You can cook?”

“Yes. My mother taught me a few recipes when I was younger.”

“Alright,” Elizaveta said, clapping her hands together. “I’ll show you to your room so you can get settled in, and then tomorrow you can demonstrate your cooking skills to me.”

Arthur nodded and she led him up the staircase in the back to the upper floor, which had eight small rooms down the one corridor. Elizaveta explained that one of them was the bathroom and that she and her husband Roderich, the piano player, stayed in the first room. The remaining six were rented out to travellers. She gave Arthur the room next to theirs and told him that if he ended up with a job she’d let him permanently rent it out, docking the fee from his salary. The Englishman readily accepted the offer, and she left him to unpack his possessions.

The room was simply furnished, with nothing but a bed, a small dresser, a desk, and a rickety chair. Arthur had a few extra sets of clothes, which he promptly refolded and placed away carefully in the dresser. The only other things he had brought were two small boxes of tea leaves, for emergencies, and a few books including a sketchbook. Those he organized according to thickness and length on the desk. Then he was done. He walked over to the window and was pleased to see a pretty desert view. 

Suddenly, there was a commotion from downstairs. Being used to such arguments from back home, Arthur easily ignored it as he fell back on the bed and closed his eyes. Elizaveta knocked on his door a while later.

“Arthur?” she asked. “Are you done?”

Arthur woke with a start. “Huh-? Yes, yes, I’m finished.” He got up and opened the door, letting her into the room.

She looked tired, but there was a small smile on her face. “You said earlier that you were good at mixing drinks?”

“Yes…why? What happened?”

“Well, we need a new barkeep. If you can mix and serve drinks well enough, the job’s yours,” she replied, a shadow over her eyes.

Arthur deliberated for a moment. He could recall Alfred saying something about the barkeeps changing around a lot lately, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be just another one who left quickly. But then again, a job was a job, and he needed the money.

“When would I start?” he finally asked.

Elizaveta’s smile grew wider. “Perfect! You’d have to start right now. Do you have a white shirt and a vest with you?”

“Yes to the shirt, no to the vest,” Arthur said after taking a quick mental inventory of his clothing.

“Oh that’s no problem, I have something that will fit you perfectly.”

Arthur was slightly worried by the tone her voice had taken on, but he didn’t resist when she dragged him down. A while later, he ended up behind of the bar in his best shirt and a tight, form-fitting dark red vest that showed off his slight curves and muscles, and oddly accentuated his eyes.

A short line of angry cowboys and miners who had come from their work in need of a drink had formed while the new barkeep was getting ready, but Arthur soon got the hand of the drinks and everyone got what they wanted. Some of the names and dialect confused him at first, but he was a quick learner and had some help from the customers themselves, so after about an hour and a half he was working quickly and smoothly. His knowledge of English and eastern American drinks didn’t hurt either.

Elizaveta was just glad she had managed to find a new barkeep so quickly. Things had been difficult since- no. She shook her head to stop her mind from going down that path. What she didn’t know was that, by giving Arthur this job, she had saved the residents of Willow Springs from a great evil- Arthur’s cooking.

When there was a lull in the traffic by the bar – everyone wanted to test out the new barkeep’s skills and luckily Arthur managed to pass all of their criteria – she walked over and explained how their system of pay and rent would work. She set the rent for eight dollars a month, which she would automatically deduct from his pay at the end of the month, right in front of him even, if he didn’t trust her. Since at the moment Arthur didn’t have too much money to spare, she would pay him weekly, with a two dollar deduction. After he’d saved up a bit, the pay check would be monthly. His pay would change and fluctuate a bit every month depending on how much traffic there was, but it generally stayed around the same amount, and she reassured him that if he was smart with it, he would have enough for his needs. Plus, he got to keep whatever small tips he received each night.

Arthur nodded after taking in the information. “That works for me,” he said, and then had to go back to the drinks as a few more people entered.

Elizaveta returned to the kitchen after that, those same people wanting food to go with their alcohol.

Roderich’s playing soothed Arthur into a pleasant rhythm as the evening turned into the later hours of the night. Elizaveta twice brought him food, a hearty meal in the late afternoon just as he started, and then a lighter snack later on to keep his energy up. Arthur was a bit disappointed when he was closing up that Alfred hadn’t come back, but he did his best to banish such thoughts from his mind as he cleaned up the bar, bid Elizaveta and Roderich good night, and went up to his room. Exhausted from the day’s actions, he fell asleep almost immediately.