#it’s an artificial wall! if you can’t see past or through it then it will feel like that

[chewwytwee]

If you have the space in your room, hiiiiiiighly recommend getting a little clothes rack. It’s great for breaking up space and showing off clothes so it doubles as a decoration

[notsohornytoad]

Poolvertober Prompt | Autumn

Canon-typical language, fluff, light angst, domestic.

——————

“It’s here! It’s here!”

Logan cracked open his eyes, irritated. It had taken him so long to get to sleep the night prior, and here was Wade, jumping up and down on the mattress, not even worried in the slightest that the Wolverine might wake up pissed and stabby.

He pulled the covers back over his head.

“Oh no you don’t.” Said Wade, pulling at the blanket.

Logan pulled back. Wade yanked harder. When he heard the telltale sign of threads ripping, Logan let go, which sent Wade flying into the drywall.

“You two morons are fixing that!!” Al screamed from another room.

With a groan, Logan pushed himself up into a sitting position. His hair was pressed flat on the side he had slept on.

“What the fuck are you going on about?”

Wade pulled himself out of the Deadpool-shaped hole in the wall and brushed the dust off his arms.

“Uh, only the best, most awesome month of the year?” He said as if the other man should have known instinctively. “October? Breathtaking foliage? Crisp Autumn air? Delicious apple cider?”

Logan gave him a blank look, until Wade added “spiked cider, in your case?”

“Now that I can get behind.”

“Yeah, I wish you’d get behind,” Wade mumbled.

“What was that?” Logan said, as if he didn’t hear everything in a twelve mile radius.

“Nothing!” Wade ran over and threw open the closet. “Which sweater do you want to wear pookie? Let’s see theres this one that says ‘I never skip leg day’ with a picture of a turkey dinner on it… this one of George Costanza saying ‘I’m shifting into Soup Mode,’ haha, classic… oh this one that says ‘DILF: Damn I love Fall,’ and who could forget the one that says ‘It’s Autumn baby, let’s bone in the Waffle House bathroom!’”

“… you’re fucking with me you do not have that on a sweater.” Logan said, still sitting on the bed.

“Ok the last one I made up but the other ones are real,” Wade said with a grin.

“Can’t I just wear my flannel?” Logan was already resigned to whatever the hell Wade had planned.

“Well you do make a sexy Lumberjack, all the tumblr reblog girlies know,” he looked in a certain direction and winked.

Logan sighed.

———

As Logan, Wade and Mary Puppins walked through the North Woods of Central Park, Logan had to admit that Wade’s excitement may have been well placed.

The trees were mid transition from their brilliant greens into the deep shades of red and orange that Autumn always promised. The red maples and scarlet oaks looked old and wizened, despite the fact that they were probably younger than he was.

Logan had an inkling that he had been here at its creation but the gaps in his memories were too great to know for sure. The artificial woods almost reminded him of a time he lived with someone, an attempt at a normal life, the splitting of wood… he shook the thoughts from his head. It was no use dwelling on those foggy thoughts. They never stayed with him.

As Wade rambled on about some movie he saw recently about a clown or something, Logan found himself staring. He watched the movement of Wade’s lips as he spoke, the way his brow moved with emphasis, how the daylight shone through his eyelashes almost illuminating them. He suddenly felt like he never wanted to forget this moment, never wanted it taken from him like so many memories of the past.

He reached out and held Wade’s hand.

Wade smiled as they continued to walk, and a single maple leaf drifted down from above.

[ceridescent]

sweet reconciliation — m., wanda.

wanda maximoff x female!reader

summary: “what? you came here thinking i would make you feel better?”

she plasters a sinister smirk on her enthralling face, condescending. 

you stutter, “y-yes,” meekly answering her question, never as humiliated as tonight, along with a delicious throb nesting in between your thighs. 

warnings: dom/sub dynamics, humiliation, degradation, mommy kink, hair pulling, slapping, dirty talk, praise kink, & double-ended strap-on. 

word count: 7,079

18+ only. men and minors DNI.

masterlist | navigation

you reluctantly press your fingers onto the buzzer for the fifth time, nibbling into your lower lip in hopes your pride won’t eat you alive. 

it is past 10 in a tuesday evening, and you are weary — your blouse unbuttoned to the third, your handkerchief wrinkled securely inside your rosewood slacks, gripping onto it to halt yourself from collapsing against her door — two hours after your shift ended. 

the artificial golden light streaming in the hallways outside of her apartment has nothing to do with calming your anxiety down. in fact, it paints a bolder stroke of panic coursing through your system, these very walls a pathway to memory lane, laced with midnights and knaveries. 

howbeit you stay put, your feet numb from standing up for the first thirty minutes, observing the gleam in the slit of her door. and the next thirty minutes, including now, waiting for her to notice you. 

you opt of surrendering, not the one that makes you leave her home defeated and unscathed, but to introduce yourself back into her space like you didn’t beg her to leave you in the first place. 

“…” starting something, you barely try, and you do not have to because you hear the thud of footsteps, and the familiar presence you yearn for inching closer as she opens the door. 

a sigh escapes your lips before you could stop it — your body seems to lose its control whenever she is around. 

you have rehearsed this inside your head multiple times. along the lines of 

“what are you doing here?”

“i wanted to see you,” 

“do you know how late it is? i don’t have time for this”

“i’m sorry, but i want to let you know i can’t stop thinking about you,” 

“for f–“

and then you kiss her fiercely, just as much as you miss her.

yet none of those scenarios came to life. 

wanda stands still behind the midnight-colored door, shielding half her body away from you. 

you’ve become an exile.

you think so — no, you are. the clear disinterest drawn all over her gorgeous, jaded face. the condescending look in her green eyes as if she knew you’d come back to her. 

frozen in your spot, you can’t decide if her body language — blocked by the door with her right hand against the jamb whilst the other clutched tightly around the knob, twisting it — wants you to stay or go away. 

wanda is exasperated at your behavior. unknowingly checking her out as she stands by the door, ready for bed, biding your reason for visit. 

“w-wanda,” this the first time you stutter in front of her, after a long time, excluding the moments she is in you. “i-i, i…” you start, try to, again, execute the lines memorized inside your dwindling brain.

wanda keeps her smirk contained, amused at most. she nags at herself so she won’t be saying anything that would make you beg for her. because it is too soon. that is for later. 

you take your lip in between your teeth in hopes it will draw blood, your fight or flight response aiding you to never pursue her again. your lip does not bleed. the blood seems to stream its way into your cheeks, circulating there with mocking bubbles, feeling how heated they are the longer she stares at you with those viridescent eyes. 

ravished by them, you pokily release your lower lip with your teeth, busily fishing out a thought in your brain to throw something at the woman before you to notice the way her body shudders at the movement. 

wanda begins to latch the door after that, exhausted at the lack of response from an uninvited visitor. as she does, you scream, stopping her. 

“i miss you!” you confess, panicked and distorted. wanda tilts her head to the side and stares at you, her pupils dilating. 

“you do?” she smiles sluggishly and you know what a hoax it is. 

staring at your tapping red kitten heels, you mumble, “i do.”

“what was that?” she asks again, and when you look up you can fully see her. the door is wide, revealing a cream nightgown hugging the dips and curves of her figure. openly you stare with wide doe-eyes, uninnocent, especially at the hardened nubs on her chest. a sly grin pokes out of her mouth as a dimple sinks into her skin. she tilts her head motioning you to come in. 

“i miss you, wanda.” she says nothing, pulling you in her apartment complex with a loose grip on your right wrist. 

“how long have you been standing there?” she knows. 

“for a w-while,” you reply in a weak voice as you trudge towards the living room. 

excruciating it is to stand in the side of the room, in an awfully quiet space, with no hospitable owner to welcome you; unwelcome and uninvited. you are, truly. it’s a shame you’re making it obvious for yourself. 

“what, you’re gonna stand there like you don’t have a mind of your own?”

you jump, appalled, shaking your head in embarrassment, the brunette peeking through the kitchen. 

you mutter an apology and sit by the closest couch to you, like an obedient girl. you knew wanda wants you like this, yet it was your own reflex that had you thinking for yourself, right when she only tells you to. 

it’s a painful five minutes of quietness. in that duration the sounds of the humming water boiler and the glide of the spoon inside a ceramic cup full of matcha green tea was only heard by the both of you. 

and then wanda comes back into the living room with one cup of tea, staring at you patronizingly. cozying herself across the cabriole sofa from you, perfectly encapsulating the owner of the house. she absolutely is. 

“you look like a mess.” she says before sipping her tea, not breaking the sight of you. she lets you stutter a response before she hushes you, “came here all the way from work?” filling the overbearing silence she simply adores. she likes you quiet, a reminder. 

you nod your head, mute. wanda repeats the same question and you nod your head again, disappointing her. 

“mmm”

you’re not sure if she’s relishing the taste of the hot liquid in her cup, or filling the silence of your response, embarrassed that you did come to her all the way from work, an hour drive, desperate and disheveled. 

you fidget with your fingers, head cast down, not knowing where to go from here. 

wanda is so mesmerizing, she’s here in front of you. blinding, her presence. a fiery look you feel yourself melt as if icarus. 

you crave for her. 

“what exactly did you miss about me?”

you cuss, a heavy sigh loading out of your lips. she leaves you speechless yet again, having your brain cloud over thoughts, torn between keeping them to yourself or handing over the hazing thoughts to her for crushing or soothing. 

your mind, particularly, stuck with one question: not even a pet name?

wanda still has control over you, that’s utterly obvious by now. you weren’t aware, you had forgotten, because you could never measure up to your own desires (caused by her), and it has been so god damn long since you’ve felt her. you think you possess the upper hand

as she almost begged you to stay. 

“you’re mine, please?” were the last words you heard from wanda before you pushed her away, mocking how needy she has become over you, and other mimicking related to that. 

was it really that serious?

jokingly, you say, “your colorful set of ceramic mugs,” and you wish to bury yourself alive, having it come out seriously. 

“you can have them.”

you try to retort, say it was a joke, yet you catch sight of her swaying hips and you fall silent yet again. 

catching your lower lip in between your teeth, your focused eyes glued to her backside, backless, the dip of her spine painstakingly thorough. the bounce of her ass, graceful. and when wanda reaches for the drawer beneath her height, her silk clothing climbs up her thighs, milky and broad, her feet on tippy toes. 

you gulp down your saliva at the memory of coming apart with her thigh in between your legs — your lips, circled around her nipples. 

a smile suddenly lights up from you, her shriek from reaching the boxes and wrappers she hoards in the cabinet finally in contact with her hold. wanda entertains the possibility that she would need it someday. you’re not sure if you subconsciously applied that to the circumstance you put yourself in right now. 

shamelessly you rake your eyes all over her body as she comes back into the living room and to you. fuck, you think, she looks so stunning looking you down like that. wanda is not happy, and she is barely keeping her snark together. that must mean you really hurt her. and you’d do anything to make it up for it. 

you take the set, reluctant, your lie attached to it prolonging the reason for your visit. you think wanda knows, but what doesn’t wanda know?

“be careful with them. make sure your teammates handle it with care.” 

you touch her fingers in the process, “i will, w-“ until she pulls her hand away, as if stung by a snake. 

okay, you decided. you’ll say it. you should. that’s part of the reason why you came here in the first place. 

“i’m sor-“

“zip it.”

“wan-“

“that’s not my name.”

“please-“

“what are you really here for, huh?” that completely shuts you up. 

you avoid her gaze looking around the living room, noticing how it was five months ago. wanda’s stare is a killer, your face burnt thoroughly with lasers. you bite your lip at that, unable to let it go, afraid of what sounds might come out of them. 

it’s awkward. 

wanda sighs, “go. since you’re just wasting my night away. i have better things to do than spell out the words for you.”

she tugs at your blazer, taking the ceramic set in her grasp to make your bearings lighter. 

“no, wanda, don’t.” you pull yourself into the seat.

the brunette stops, looking at you like that again. like she would swallow you whole after another wasted second in her life, and you wouldn’t oppose. in fact, you’d push her buttons to get her to do so. 

but you don’t, the slick in between your thighs becoming unbearable. 

“i need you,” you mumble almost incoherently, not intending to frustrate her even more with the lack of noise. 

wanda shakes her head and tosses her ceramic set onto the empty couch next to you, releasing your blazer from her hold. she combs her hair with her fingers having them fall like curtains, her brown hair tangling in a disheveled mess. a snigger bubbles out of her throat. a chuckle. and then a laugh. 

“what? you came here thinking i would make you feel better?”

wanda plasters a sinister smirk on her enthralling face, condescending. 

you stutter, “y-yes,” meekly answering her question, never as humiliated as tonight, along with a delicious throb nesting in between your thighs. 

“who says you can?”

“i’m sor-“

“you come back here ‘cause he couldn’t please you, isn’t it? he probably doesn’t know how much of a whore you can be.” wanda pulls away, walking farther distance from you. 

“or maybe he knows, that’s why you came back to me. he finds you dirty, i bet. a dirty, good girl pretend bitch.”

wanda’s words sting, hitting the bullseye, and god she is always right. her precision inducing you to throb harder after all the months your sex life was spent apart from her. 

you seem to ignore a question, as wanda’s stare is more stern, sitting back down on the same couch across from you. “you’ve lost your manners too, i see.”

“i’m sorry, what did you say?” the brunette only waves you off, her viridescent eyes intent, deciding what to do with you. 

you wish for her command to kneel in front of her paramount position — head held high with the detrimental glint in her eyes, her upper limbs resting above the joints of the cabriole sofa, digits clapped around the edge, legs casually spread apart against the wool, her creamy flesh laid out, inviting you in. 

wanda’s body is sculpted by the gods, and you’re one lucky girl to be this close. 

“crawl up to me.”

a suppressed moan bubbles out of your throat, wide-eyed, jaw slacked. 

“go on,” wanda encourages, “don’t be shy.” she licks her lips and parted them. “crawl up to me like a bitch in heat that you are right now.”

you let loose a bit, moaning softly, closing your lips. it’s been so long since you’ve been commanded to do something this humiliating; you feel convulsed. 

“or else?” you taunt, not willing to briskly give up your submission. you wish to push wanda’s buttons first, missing her wrath and the sting of her touch. 

“don’t get me started with that, bitch.” wanda’s growl rattled something within you. “whoring around doesn’t give you permission to talk back to mommy that way. remember, you’re the one who knocked at my door to get fucked.

“yes, make it up to me.” wanda moans, “what a needy bitch.” she licks her lips in approval as she watches your body crawl, eyes up on her, not breaking the contact. your legs hurt at this position from your shift at work, but that’s to be forgotten for pleasing her pleases you. you’d do anything to get that praise. 

wanda halts your movement with her foot pressed against your right shoulder, and god damn, the pressure jolted you. 

“mmm,” you hum. fuck, that felt good. the pad of her foot, a reward you didn’t know you needed. you’re thirsty, pushing yourself against her restraint. your heat pooled at that, the slight ache she’s bearing down on you. 

“eyes up,” wanda orders snarkily, her husk riling you up in shivers. you obey her almost immediately, your orbs stuck at her breasts spilling out from her nightgown. 

“eyes up.” she growls with a push of her foot against your shoulder before tugging your hair by the scalp, the stinging pain causing you to face her with an angered expression. taken aback by the enraged dilation of her pupils, you back down, gulping. since you couldn’t drop your head low, you squirmed and sat more properly, an apology. aghast. 

when wanda was satisfied with your tamed behavior, she took a sharp intake of breath, then tossed your head like some useless thing no longer serviceable. you squeak and reflexively grind your core against the floor, thrilled being treated this way. no ounce of neglect occurred to your dwindling, little brain. not once that man gave you what you wanted; a loverboy he was. 

he couldn’t even spank your back for goodness’ sake. but with wanda, the goddess above you, you know she’s doing this because you love it. you both love it. you both love it very much. 

which leaves you wondering why you chose him over her, when she was so good to you all the time. you weren’t serious with wanda but him, and even then, after leaving you unsatisfied, you still had faith it would work out. 

leading to the point where you vocalized your preferences, which he only responded with a bewildered look and a shake of his head, rather aggressively. (the most violent act he had made.) he touched your arm and said he couldn’t do that—couldn’t hurt you. made it up to you by making love, and that was the last straw. thus left him alone with his favor of missionary and unattended blue balls. 

it was the least of your concern, the heartbreak. you think back further and realize you have lost your feelings for him the third time he came and you haven’t, laying under him like a corpse, unmoving. although you praised yourself for the acting skills, it was torture. 

and wanda, fuck, fuck, fuck, she’s otherworldly you can do nothing but breath.

wanda knows how to treat you best. 

she has ruined you for everyone. 

wanda dirtied you like a rag doll, molded you into a satyric bitch, and reduced you to a brainless whore. 

she could tell you to jump into a lake in the peak of winter and you would. 

“stop flaunting how naughty you are. don’t remind me. instead, i suggest, use that stuttering tongue of yours and fuck me with it.” wanda tightens her grip in your hair before releasing them, at the same time pulling her feet away from your shoulder. she pats your cheek with her hand and you wish she’s impatient enough to slap it just because. 

you mewl in excitement and content, smiling cheekily at her until she reprimands you to take it down. whores don’t get to smile until they’ve satisfied their mommies. 

you get to working then. 

you begin by gliding your hands through her overflowing thighs, the smoothness of her flesh against your skin causing you to let out a loud moan, loud enough to mask her own. she notes of your neediness and you bite your lip, keeping quiet. as much as you love being humiliated it pains you that it’s the only thing she could do for now. 

“we don’t have the time in the world, you brat. stop savoring it.” she tugs your hair, a deadly look in her viridescent eyes, “get to work.”

you nod with a whimper and push the lace aside, just how wanda likes it. 

she’s dripping, fuck. you miss this. 

“already wet, mommy?”

“i get wet thinking of ways to tame you, slut.” she barks, bucking her hips in the process. 

“always so vulgar,” you mutter in a chirpy tone, her clutch in your hair tensing as you swipe your tongue against her pussy. you groan at the sweetness of her cum, flattening your muscle in the roof of your mouth. 

“fuck, baby,” wanda moans, her orbs shutting momentarily before she opens them again, unable to tear her gaze from you. you grin as you flick the tip against her clitoris, acknowledging your success in teasing her. 

you look back muttering a curse, watching the sight of her wet parted lips, the column of her neck, and heaving, spilling breasts. you drool, accidentally biting her. wanda hisses, a slap echoing throughout the quiet room. 

groaning as you relish the sting on your cheek, the hands that were once resting upon wanda’s thigh slithering, circling her sides, making their way onto the swell of her breasts to deal with her puckered nipples. wanda swats them away, pushing your head further in her pussy before you could breathe through your nose. “focus on fucking my pussy, greedy bitch. you’re not that smart to deal with two at the same time.” she starts pinching the nipples of her own. 

“mommy,” you mewl, muffled, betrayal clouding your thoughts. but with her thrusting, hungry for more, her panting, and “just like that,” with how you’re going up and down her slit, pulls you back in your space. you belong here, under wanda. you’re just a greedy slut pleasing her mommy, giving her what she wants. 

watching her play with her tits drenched your panties. you’re soaking through your slacks, you can feel it every time you move. you’re fidgety, more and more as seconds pass by, grinding your lower body against the heel of your foot to lessen the ache. 

wanda’s own slender fingers pull at her own nipples, her palms attached to her breasts, gripping and playing with them, cries leaving her mouth as she throws her head back. “good girl,” she praises, your moans vibrating through her pussy as she screams, stimulating her further into her apex. she screams once again when you moan at the pleasure of her praising, finally acknowledging that you are starting to be good enough to be hers. wanda clamps her mouth shut with her lower lip in between her teeth, patting your head. “good girl, keep going. you’re doing so good for mommy.”

“yes, mommy,” you respond on purpose to keep stimulating her bundle of nerves, tongue flicking in and out of her dripping walls, eyes set on the massage of her breasts. 

you want wanda to ruin your tits. god, you want her saliva coating your nubs, your mouth drooling from crying out from the pleasure. you want to be fucked so rough that when you sit you are reminded of how well she stretched your hole. 

“you want me deep inside you baby?” you cry and nod your head, moving your tongue faster, the squelch of her cum making it easier to curl against her spot. “f-fuck! want your pussy clenching around my cock, slut? want it stretching you open like a dirty bitch?”

“please mommy please!” you purred, mouth full of her pussy, wet and squelching. 

“yes, my good girl–fuck! fuck me!” wanda screams, her hips rising above the cushion, chasing your mouth whilst you suck her whole, your thrusting tongue meeting her high as she yelps, her legs shaking. gripping the mane of your hair  to steady herself, your wet eyes watching her figure blur from the sting. 

whilst you focus on catching your breath, a smug grin slithers onto wanda’s lips as she stares at you. she licks her lips then, bitten red and swelling, brushing the loose strands of your hair away from your face. 

“you look so pretty with my mess on your face.” wanda pats your blushing cheek with her slender hand. 

it is a compliment. one you haven’t received in five months. your heart flutters in validation as well as the throb in between your thighs. wanda just called you pretty. 

“all for y-you, wanda.”

“now stand up.” wanda commands, her smile no longer present, back to its stricken countenance. she notes the small pout protruding on your lips and pulls you towards her, inspecting your body. you feel so small even though you’re the one standing. 

lusciously sitting on the couch below you, wanda’s nightgown bunched up revealing her thick thighs, her soft flesh, her puffed up pussy. it looks like it wants more of you. 

“you wet your slacks,” she chuckles after calling you out nonchalantly. “take them off. all of them.” she adds, pulling back the fallen straps of her nightgown. she leaves her lower body exposed, knowing it’d get you more pliable than normal. 

taking off your suit leaves you whining from the stimulation the fabric rubbing against your skin gives you. the plan of touching yourself as you do so gets noticed by wanda, receiving a spank in your ass, her gaze reprimanding. “did i tell you to touch?”

“n-no mo-mommy-“

she slaps your face. a resounding thwack flies through the living room. fuck, you think, my cheek is probably red right now. 

“stop talking.”

“just because you’ve been whoring yourself away from me for months doesn’t give you the excuse to forget my simple rules that your whorish pussy agreed with.”

you fall down to your knees, not to beg for an apology, but because what she said was too much. you’re so wet, your knees are wobbling, unable to hold yourself upright. you bow your head down in shame. 

she strokes your crown, light and soothing. it must be false to hear her coo at you, “oh my baby.”

“how pathetic,” she pats your head, like a pet, “i haven’t even touched you yet.”

“i’m sorry for disappointing you, wanda,” you cry, your fists held together. she clicks her tongue and disagrees. 

“oh no, baby. you shouldn’t be sorry for disappointing me. you should be happy, because i’m giving you one more chance. my girl did a good job pleasing her mommy that i’m feeling generous.”

“one more slip,” she calls you by your name and you shudder, fearful of what’s going to happen if you’re below her expectations again. “and you’ll walk out my door.”

nodding your head vigorously with your lips clamp together, wanda glues her stare at your cowering frame, rising from the cabriole sofa. “come with me to the bedroom.”

you follow like a dog desperate for a bone, clambering onto your hands and feet, catching up to her steps, rather shakily. wanda looks back at you and stops, her incredulous glance providing you news that you’re doing something wrong. 

you get the answer as soon as she rolls her eyes. “on all fours. walk on all fours until you’re laid down on our bed. i want you crawling below me.” wanda’s back is turned, confident you are doing as you are told. after all, you need her this much to walk willfully like a dog, desperate to please her master. 

letting out a silent exhale, getting down on your hands and feet, you crawl behind her. she looks back with satisfaction, saying “next time, i’m giving you a collar and a leash.”

“so that you won’t leave me again.” she whispers the last part to herself.

wanda tells you to stay put in the middle of the bedroom, her king-sized bed just in front of you. patiently waiting to finally lay on her mattress, you remain bent over against the marble floor, waiting for her command. 

wanda circles around you like a predator, you turn shy, almost crumbling down from your stance. you keep your head bent down to avoid wanda’s laser eyes, running all over your body like a hawk ready to strike. 

“crawl up the bed.”

and you do, padding the soft crimson sheets with your scorching flesh, still on all fours for wanda to decide if you could lay down or linger into a different position. 

you shudder as wanda hums, not used to her approval. “sit on your knees for me, princess, and face mommy.” her tone turns gentle and saccharine that your body loosens, turning around to face her beautiful smile. you squirm until you think you’re sitting the way she admires you for: legs bent with your bum on your calves, hands on top of your thighs, spine erect, and head held high. 

wanda approaches you with her smile intact, reaching for your face to fit the loose strand of hair in your ear, caressing your cheek, and leaving a kiss on your jaw. that’s the closest to your lips. 

the brunette holds your shoulders and smoothly lays you down, her kisses peppering lower, giving her whole attention to your neck. she sucks on it. you hiss and thrash when she gropes your chest, humming with a light chuckle. 

a chesire smile unfolds from her lips, her frame on top of you. “your body is so responsive, it is just towards me?” she hums as she waits for an answer, massaging your breast whilst leaving your nipple untouched. 

“yes, mommy.” wanda relishes the title, so turned on to you have you wrapped around her finger again. “yeah?”

“he couldn’t treat you right, could he? poor baby, replacing me with a boy toy who couldn’t please her slutty pussy. that’s why you’re begging for me, isn’t it?”

you refuse to speak, humiliated to the bone. 

wanda stops her ministrations and slaps your face. you gasp, opening your eyes to see her jaw clenched, unimpressed. but you selfishly delight yourself in it. “please mommy, hurt me. i miss how you handle me.” 

the brunette growls and bites your lip, leaving spots of blood on both your mouths. she slaps you again on your cheeks, each echo following a moan from your bruised lips. hungry for more of her treatment, wanda smacks your breasts, watching it bounce by the impact before suckling them. 

“w-wanda!” you yelp, getting your nipples dealt with, her sucking pleasuring you through. she hums in her own pleasure for filling her mouth with your breasts, fitting her hands and kneading them. 

“what do you miss about me?”

it takes you a few seconds to register her attention for answer, blinking, your eyes focused on her face. curious, yet still very much domineering and unstirred. 

“the way you feel,” you gulp, avoiding her gaze, hot all over enough. the knot of her brown hair you stare, the desire of running your fingers over taking in thus you blink, looking back at her maintained eye contact. 

“how do i make you feel?” wanda doesn’t move, her viridescent eyes glued to you. if you weren’t so horny you would’ve noticed the softened gaze she gave you.

“alive.” 

that was enough response, you assume, as she lets an exhale you didn’t know she had been keeping. 

“he can’t do it for you?” 

you shake your head, guiding her hand to your chest — not necessarily for her to knead your breast — but to feel your heart hammering for escape from your ribcage. for a moment she falters, surrendering — missing how you feel too.

you lower her hand down to where she (you and both) wants it, in your thighs, bringing back her role for control. anything wanda wants to do with you she could.

a smirk curls into her pink lips then, “here?” you nod. “tell me, what else do you miss about me?”

“i miss-“ you gasp when wanda squeezes your inner thigh, an inch away from your sopping core, massaging the muscle. “go on,” wanda acknowledges, “keep making those little noises for mommy.”

“mommy, thank you.” you shiver and squeeze her wrist gingerly for a second before pulling away. “i miss you inside me, mommy. i miss that it’s the only thing i want to feel whenever i’m empty.”

“yeah?” wanda chuckles, pulling your thighs closer to hers before slapping it once, engrossed with your dripping clit, licking her lips as if licking yours. her eyesight trails from your throbbing clitoris upwards to your abdomen and your hard pebbled nipples, raking until your parted lips, sighing in content and in agitation. 

the brunette ghosts her fingers against your clitoris, her piercing gaze set to yours — “don’t blink” — watering at the tortured sight. 

“this one, you miss, malyshka?” wanda gives you a gentle smile as she thrusts two fingers into your opening, quick and direct, deep and punctuating. you scream at the sudden intrusion, instinctively reaching for wanda’s body to anchor on. she knows you well, because she pulls away, chuckling at you with your face contorted and crying. she starts moving her digits in and out of your hole, the loud squelching causing shame to breed onto your cheeks. at that, you cover your face. 

“is this what you like mommy to do, princess? fucking your sopping cunt, enjoying how dirty the sounds it makes?

“but you love that, don’t you? hearing yourself sucking me in, making mommy’s fingers dirty as well,” wanda presses her thumb against your clit, resuming her thrusting. “what a fucking whore.”

she pries your arms apart to unshield your face from your hands. a keen yelp comes out of you as your juices flow past your pussy. wanda shakes her head, “for someone embarrassed, your pussy seems to have a liking for what i’m doing to it,” giving another slap to your core yet again. you arch your back at the impact, so fucking turned on. 

“i miss being treated like a toy by you, mommy. use me, please.” 

you thought wanda would resume her fucking yet a cry leaves past your reddening lips, watching her shove your limbs away, leaving you alone in the bed. 

“stay still, detka. mommy will be right back.”

you take your time collecting your sanity there on her king-sized bed, regulating your breathing, and internalizing the ache in your abdomen. 

you wouldn’t oppose whatever wanda had said, and although you had the bravery to disobey her sometimes, you can’t do so because you could barely move. 

it was another five torturous minutes before wanda appeared in the bedroom, face slicken with wicked intent. 

raking your eyes downwards to her nude frame, you’re moaning again by the sight of her. 

her breasts are luscious and heavy with her nipples hard as rock, her flat stomach sinking in and out as she inhales, and mmm fuck, her protruding cock standing proud and thick for the taking. another moan tumbles out from your lips when you realize she has the other end tucked already inside her. 

you squirm in your position, thrilled that you have earned this reward from her. 

wanda agonizingly walked towards the bed, standing at the edge, her eyes glued onto yours. she makes a little show of pumping her cock as the tip faces you, silent groans coming out of her mouth, feeling the shaft shifting inside her walls. 

what a fucking tease. 

you watch her breasts bounce whilst she gets on the bed in front of you, holding her cock. she hovers forward, using your knee for support as she guides the dildo onto your dripping pussy. a moan ripples out of wanda’s throat when she slides her cock against your clit squelching at the contact.

“oh, my baby.” was all she said before gripping your sides and flipping you over. 

“wanda!” you scream, dizzy at the sudden movement. a ragged cry echoes through the room when she forcefully thrusts herself inside you, her hands tight around your hips. 

multiple curses alongside moans tumble out of your mouth, gripping the sheets tight, your back arched to the touch. 

wanda spanks the side of your ass, “stay still,” hard and quick with her pounding. she purrs when you squirm even more, uncomfortable at the sudden intrusion and the intensity of it all. 

“stay still!” she yells and goes harder with her rutting, jackhammering into your pussy, leaving no mercy. 

“wanda! wanda! it hurts!” you yell back and try to wiggle out of her hold; you could barely remain in your position, your legs shaking and sensitive from the previous edging and foreplay. 

the brunette lets out a frustrated grunt when you fall onto the mattress, the shaft sliding out of you but not entirely, the tip snugged in your soaking wall. a muffled scream comes out of you, feeling sensitive and empty. 

wanda takes care of it, grabbing your chest and shoulder and hoists you against her front. you shudder, mewling at her hardened nipples against the swell of your back, a tingling sensation entertaining your slit caused by her wrist around your neck, pinning you against her. 

“i thought you wanted this?” wanda starts snapping her hips again, driving your body forward with each hit. “do you not want this, detka?”

you shake your head as you bounce off at her filling, your pussy splitting open at the stretch by how wanda drives her cock inside you. 

“i love it, mommy!” you choke out a response with fervor and desperation, clamping your eyes shut at the avalanche of pleasure being given to you. 

“mommy, please don’t stop!” you stutter as she jerks your body forward, keeping you locked in her hold as her other hand is palmed against the mattress, holding you both in a slope. 

she chuckles, breathless. “of course you love this, i’m treating you like a slut.” wanda proceeds on nipping your shoulder, sucking on the skin, leaving marks. 

your back arches with a shrill cry, your body molding into a pliable yet fragile form. you wail and thrash as wanda sputters at the same time, her thrusts getting sloppy. 

“fuck,” she mumbles and lets you go, the sudden action causing you to fall face flat onto the mattress. you yell wanda’s name and before you can even nag at her she flips you over, facing her. 

silly noises erupt from you at the sight of wanda, your needy clitoris pulsing yet again. 

red and perspiring, wanda’s chest heaves up and down with the veins in her neck and forehead popping out. not a moment was spent looking away from you. 

“god, princess, mommy’s close.” she grips your ankles gently and bends your knees towards your sides, “you’re such a good girl for mommy, malyskha,” whispering in your ear, her hot breath causing your body to stutter. you mumble “thank you, mommy” and whimper when she nips and cooes at the lobe, giggling at your begging. 

“you can take it, yes?” she lines her shaft in front of your slit and looks at you for approval. “you’ll make mommy come with you, right, my baby?”

nodding your head, you hold your legs apart, waiting for her. wanda licks her lips, “that’s an obedient pet, keeping her legs open for mommy,” burying herself in you. 

she immediately starts at a merciless rhythm, desperately rutting herself inside your tightness. 

“take it. take it all. this is what you wanted. being filled by me, being used like a toy, being a slut for me!” wanda grunts and spasms her hips into drive, penetrating your pussy into oblivion. 

“wanda, ah!” you whine when she slaps your face, pinching and groping your breasts roughly, alternating between that and scratching your stomach and waist with her nails. wanda’s solely using you for her own pleasure now, unconcerned of how you feel. 

“you’re nothing but a hole mommy uses, aren’t you? nothing but a dumb whore, taking anything mommy gives her. 

say yes and i’ll make you come.”

“yes yes yes yes!” you keen as you reach out for your mommy. 

wanda complies and leans her body forward, her hips stuttering uncontrollably, her coil finally stopping. she whines and buries her face into your neck, her moans filling your hearing. you’re almost there, wanda can feel it. 

“oh detka. you’re getting so tight around me. are you gonna come for mommy?”

with palms on either side of you, wanda pulls herself up, thrilled to watch you come apart for her. it’s like a reward, doing this all for you, and getting to see your pleasure-struck face, knowing she could kiss and smack it for her liking. and that she would feel your cum sliding out of this pussy of yours, her pussy, having the power to just push it back in you and make you carry it until you’re begging to be empty.  

whimpering in desperation, you meet wanda’s pounding, your muscles tightening, reaching your orgasm. you sob whilst your legs tremor aggressively, coming apart with wanda inside of you. 

her thrusts slows down gradually to ride out your high, making sure she milked everything inside you. 

“my good girl came so much,” she smiles cheekily and pulls away, slowly and steadily out of you. 

“mmm, mommy,” you whine and pull her close, gasping at the slap of her faux cock against your pussy. wanda mutters an apology and nudges her cock away from your sensitive flesh, kissing your neck and collarbone to soothe you. 

keeping her hand above your abdomen, she takes off the strap-on, groaning when the glossing dildo clamped around her pussy the whole time slides out. 

“baby,” wanda purrs and rests beside you, taking your upper limbs and hugging them. her viridescent eyes soften as the hoods of her eyes droop, exhaustion creeping through. “are you okay?” she asks and you sigh in contentment, a subtle smile on your lips. 

“‘m fee’ing very be’er, mommy,” you respond incoherently and kiss her shoulder, the closest to her lips you could reach. 

“i’ll let you rest for a bit and then we’ll take a hot bath, okay? mommy won’t let you sleep so sticky; you’re going to complain how icky it feels tomorrow.”

you nod your head, unopposed to anything wanda had said. “mommy knows best,” you whisper and bring her closer to you, the last strength in your body pulling her flush against your body. 

wanda grins, “that’s right, my smart girl,” kissing your forehead. she hums a tune you know so well, a favorite. the one she plays on her vinyl record player on days she turns into a beam of sunlights. 

“i’m sorry for what i did, wanda.”

you refuse to mention you left her, nevertheless remind her that you did. however, coming all the way here for an apology without apologizing was never your intention, so you’re coming clean while you’re still conscious, although drowsy. 

wanda’s hands momentarily stop from caressing your crown before she rests them below your neck, tracing the trajectory of your locks. 

“i know, malyshka. i know you are regretful,” wanda pauses when you wince, “and i know it took you long enough to realize that i will always cater to you, no matter what.

i love taking care of you. and you love being cared for. as long as i am still useful-“

“wanda-“

“i will always be here.” 

she keeps you hushed with another kiss on your forehead, this time longer. she presses her lips against the skin of your temple, bearing her devotion to you. fluttering your eyes close, you savor the tender contact with wanda maximoff.

“i won’t leave you again, i promise.” you take wanda’s hand and stick her pinkie finger out with yours, intertwining them together. 

wanda stares at your eyes intently before kissing the back of your hand. 

“i won’t let you go without putting up a fight, detka. that is something i am capable of vowing for now.” wanda promises, her touch sending shivers down your spine. one which you have not felt before.

she pushes your hand lightly against the mattress and soon her weight follows, straddling your lap and grinning down at you. wanda tilts her head to the left, her curtains of hair falling like dominoes on the side, freeing her face. she then leans forward to claim your lips, peppering pecks to tease you until you whine. she locks her lips with yours, using her tongue to widen your mouth.

“the only thing i regret was not fucking you against the door before you left, darling. i thought that would have made you stay.”

you realize you let a wanton whimper, and that was even before wanda slides a digit against your clitoris. she slaps your left thigh once she pulls away on top of you, giggling like a little kid. 

“rest up! i’ll get us some snacks while we wait for the bath to fill. don’t sleep on me, detka! we have a long way to go with this one.”

wanda doesn’t leave the room without winking at you, beaming.

[elliewiltarwyn]

FFXIV Write 2024 | #9: Lend an Ear

Word Count: 867

Third Umbral Moon, 22nd Sun

So much has happened, yet there’s only one little touch that has overtaken my mind.

Zenos lies dead by his own hand, even after channeling the might of Ilberd’s primal, Shinryu. The Empire has been driven from Gyr Abania by the combined forces of the Resistance and the Alliance. Ala Mhigo, at last, is a free nation once more.

But there are multiple things that haunt me even as the dust settles. First… Zenos. Even as we came face-to-face and crossed swords, the look in his eyes was hungry in a way I have never seen in my enemies before, continuing this strange yearning sensation that I had begun to pick up on when he defeated me in Yanxia. He spoke of the connection he and I shared even as he held Shinryu’s yoke…and he even invited me to join him. To partake in our shared interests together.

I rejected him, of course. But even so…at the end, as he held his own sword to his throat, he met my eyes…and he bade me, “my first friend. My enemy,” farewell.

I can’t untangle what that means - how his definition of friend somehow became so entwined with that of enemy. What sorts of horrors within me that he saw and empathized with.

Because it’s not quite the horror displayed by Aulus mal Asina, whom we confronted mere minutes before Zenos himself. The engineer who kidnapped and tortured Lily and Krile, who put both Fordola and Zenos under the knife to experiment with an artificial Echo.

Mia’s father.

She showed no hesitation, only grim determination and…maybe even a bit of the darkness that Zenos purported to see in me. She brutally, efficiently dismantled him, saving us from his soul-jacking maneuver and completely wrecking his mobile weapons platform. She bore down upon him as he scrambled back against the wall with a hardness in her face I’ve never seen before. And when he tried to lash out, when he blasted Lyse with some secret gadget as she tried to cuff him…

Mia stabbed him through the heart without even flinching.

None of us asked her to - but she still took it upon herself to bear the burden of patricide.

For all my messy feelings about Zenos, can they even begin to compare to what she must have felt as she looked upon the horrified face of her own father, impaled on her own blade?

I didn’t think she’d want to speak with anyone, disquieted by those feelings as much as I am with Zenos. But at the celebration that night, in the shadow of Rhalgr’s frame carved into the cliffside of his Reach, she sought me out, more soused than I’ve ever seen her and grumbling about how she definitely didn’t want to think about it, that she specifically looked for me to spend the party with because I am, to quote, “a good nonthinking buddy - I know you won’t ask me a bunch of annoying questions. Nothing about my absolute… fucker of a dad…”

So, knowing full well how much we’re both wrestling with ignominious, complex thoughts, I told her “I won’t ask, but if you need to talk… I can lend an ear.”

…and she did. I learned a lot about her past. About how little she saw her parents, how she sort of filled the void with the next-door neighbor Jullus and his family. How she didn’t realize what she was missing until she escaped Garlemald. How she had never known how starved for touch and affection and care she was until right now, right here - when she’s nestling herself into my embrace.

If you had told me when I first joined the Scions that I’d ever end up holding Mia Longhart in a caring embrace as she drunkenly unburdened her troubles, I would’ve laughed you out of the room or accused you of spinning wild faerie tales. Fuck, you can see in this very journal, in my entries from years ago, how annoyed I had been at her self-righteousness, her weird moral superiority. Yet here she was in my arms tonight, now one of my closest friends, breaking into a flood of tears as she cursed the monstrous father she had, lamenting that he couldn’t have been like mine, or Lyse’s…

And when she had worn herself out… she thanked me for being here, for listening… for showing her what she was missing. And then she kissed my cheek. And then passed out on my shoulder.

It’s been, I don’t know, maybe two hours since then; I carried her to bed and left her there to write this while watching people celebrate outside. And even with all this tumult inside me, over Zenos’s words and Lyse’s departure from the Scions and everything else… I can still feel the touch of her lips on my cheek, and I am very conscious of how tightly I’m holding on to that sensation like a port in a storm.

…Funny that I did get to comfort her about her father after all. That flame of jealousy isn’t nearly as strong anymore, at least.

Like that’s really the important issue here. Ugh.

[ink-sinner]

pressed sunlight

— cinnabar x chief

genre : hurt/comfort

warnings : none

wordcount : 2,037

summary : trapped in frozen time, there's no beginning nor end, no distinction between her and your trembling body; she holds you tightly, and listens to your muffled cries until the rain has washed away your pain and everything else.

Your room sits on the far edge of the east wing, just far enough from everything else that rarely anyone comes here except you. It’s perfect for privacy, a little something for when you’d like to take some time for yourself alone, but, walking to your room, Cinnabar can’t help but feel like this place is too lonely for someone like you.

Outside, grey clouds gather ominously. She stops in front of your door, and knocks. “Chief? It’s me, Cinnabar.”

A beat passes, too long delayed, and then a quiet, “come in” rings out. Cinnabar pushes the door open.

Your room . . . is surprisingly dark.

When she thinks of you, Cinnabar inevitably thinks of bright things. The golden fairy lights hung over the walls of your office, miss Hecate’s crayon drawings framed tenderly at the center; your office was messy and homely, filled with random souvenirs and memories and the sound of laughter spilling carelessly through your open door. It was rare to not see you hanging out with Sinners even as you worked, and though passing, the sight of your smile as you talked with your inmates is enough to pull a fond smile from Cinnabar’s lips as she walks past.

But your room is dark, thrown in the shades, and despite being your private quarters, there is a sense of being untouched, brand new. There are barely any decorations here, just the bare necessities – Cinnabar could take you out of the room, and it would feel as if no one had been living here all this time.

But you’re there, slumped by your closet door. Your clothes lay in a mess around you, and the plastic surfaces of the hangers catch the lightning flashes that tear up the sky outside. Thunder rumbles lowly, and the clouds are heavy with rain like an overfilled dam, just barely enough that it doesn’t fall. Not yet. The sounds of impending rain scratch the quiet.

“Chief?” she asks. You tilt your head. “Are you . . . okay?”

Your eyes are set to the distance. It is blocked by the cramped, empty walls, but you look as if staring past it all. Cinnabar traces your gaze, but she can’t see past the grey wall and your lonely shadow.

“Did something happen?” you ask instead.

She shakes her head. “No, nothing unusual happened. But Adjutant Nightingale was worried because you were running late, so she sent me to check up on you . . .”

You hum. The thunder drowns it out. “Tell her I’ll be there in a bit.”

And that was it. “Okay,” she says. “I will.”

But her feet are rooted on the ground, unwilling to leave despite the clear dismissal. Maybe it’s because the weather is so gloomy, and the faint nightlight in the corner can barely stave away the shadows, or maybe it’s because she is too used to the golden fairy lights and the picture of you smiling. There is obviously something wrong, and it doesn’t feel right to just leave you alone.

So she steps in hesitantly, and holds her breath, waiting for you to snap at her to leave. But you don’t – you barely seem to notice her there, and Cinnabar can’t decide if it would be better if you had asked her to leave instead.

“Chief,” she says again, and in the dreary room, her voice feels as if echoing for miles beyond. The wind whistles in and draws the windows wide open until they are rattling in their hinges, moments away from breaking apart and crumbling to dust. “Is there anything I could help you with?”

You hum thoughtfully, and go to shake your head. And then, as if changing your mind, you sigh, and tilt your head to the side. “Come in. Close the door behind you.”

She obliges, and the closing door steals the artificial light from the fluorescent lights in the hallway. Like this, she can barely see the outlines of your furniture, and she stumbles on her way to your side.

It’s quiet. She settles beside you, and waits.

“Cinnabar.” She looks up, but you are still staring at that invisible, unreachable distance. Your chin against your arms, your knees tucked tightly to your chest, you look so small. You sigh. “You ever just . . . feel tired, all of a sudden?”

Her gaze rolls to the side, following the grain of the wooden floorboard with her fingers. “Of course. It happens to everyone.”

“Really? Even you?”

“Even me,” she confirms.

You laugh shortly, a soft little thing that gets blown by the wind. You shiver, and Cinnabar takes off her jacket and lays it on your shoulders. “You always seem so energetic, though. I rarely see you take breaks even though you work so hard.”

She bows her head, embarrassed. “I do take breaks, chief. Everyone needs one every now and then.”

“Really,” you hum, and trail it off there. In the ensuing silence, your fingers tickle an idle beat against the floor.

Cinnabar tips her head back, and watches the lightning reflection play on your ceiling.

“I'm tired,” you say, and the weight in your voice draws Cinnabar’s gaze back to you. Set against the pale light, your visage is wrapped in shadow, and the hollow of your cheeks looked as if carved out into a skeleton’s cheek. You sighed, and smiled faintly. “It's silly, though, isn’t it? I haven’t really done anything, but I'm still tired, for some reason.”

“If you're tired, please rest.” Her hands ache to reach out. But even nearby, you somehow feel far away. “You've been working so hard, you deserve it. And . . . please don’t shoulder all the burden on your own. Plenty of people would gladly help you if you asked, chief.”

You continue, as if unhearing. “Lately, all I've been doing is processing documents. I haven’t really done anything to warrant feeling tired. So why . . .?”

Like thunder rumbling, your words spill out, stumbling on one another, shaking with each passing second. You bury yourself in your arms and grief, and Cinnabar wants to sit closer, share her warmth, hold your hand and tell you to please go rest, let everyone take care of it, you will be okay, but it was clear you needed someone who would listen first, so she bites her lips, and listens.

“Isn’t it unfair?” You ask, but you may as well be talking to thin air.  You laugh. “I've done nothing but sit on my ass all day for the past months, and I have the gall to complain to you about being tired. I’ve sent you on what, four dispatch missions this week? You’re probably annoyed at me already.”

“I'm not annoyed!” She says, and breathes out slowly. “I'm not annoyed,” she says again, softer, and tilts her head to try and catch your gaze. “Never. Not with you.”

Your lips tilt in a half smile, crooked and jagged at the edges. “I know. I’m saying you should be.”

You hold your tears with the rain.

Thunder rumbles along your stifled veins, lightning flashes with your fluttering lashes. You could be a painting of the gloomy sky, smudged in between the rolling clouds, where precipitation gathers but never falls. Cinnabar has never seen you so fragile before, but she has also never seen the sky so torn before.

“Chief . . .” She says, and stops helplessly. You dangle on a precipice, and she wants to reach out, but she's never really been good at things like this. At snake eye, if you were upset, you would just drown it all in alcohol. Drown it all in work.

But it's different here. Everything's so different here, and Cinnabar has never felt more out of her depth than right here, right now.

You heave a deep sigh, and finally turn your head to smile at her. You pat her head. “It's okay. Thanks for your concern. Just tell Nightingale I'll be there in a few, okay?”

“Okay,” she says again, but it still doesn't feel right to leave.

You smile to yourself, watching her bluster and hesitate before you. Even now, it rings hollow, like something not quite right. There's something missing. Your image in your office, surrounded by golden halo; your image in your room, rain overfilled and ready to spill.

“You're a good person, Cinnabar,” you say. “Thank you.”

“It's no problem at all,” but that's not what she wants to say, but the words she wants to say won't form into a shape she can understand at all. She still stays, and your eyes are still on her. That worn out smile has already faded.

No, she can't go.

Lightning crackles in the distance. The open window rattles. Cinnabar takes a deep breath, and bites her lip anxiously.

“Chief,” she says cautiously. “Can I . . . May I hug you?”

It isn't what she wants to say either, but it's close enough. Close enough. Your eyes look up at her, and fall back down to stare at the floor, and your silence stretches on between two horizons that Cinnabar starts to wonder if she had crossed a line with her request.

Then,

“Okay,” and you say it on a shaky breath, barely loud enough to be heard over the rattling windows. The wind has already stolen every bit of warmth from the room, and now, it nips at your skin, biting off what little heat has gathered under Cinnabar's jacket on your shoulders. You huddle closer. “Please.”

So she holds you, wraps her arms around your frail shoulders. You have always been smaller than her muscled frame, but you seem even more breakable now, like if she held you tight, you would shatter like glass in her hands. So she holds you like expecting you to run away.

But it's not enough, not nearly enough, and you throw your arms around her neck tightly, pressing your weight against hers. The sudden force pushes her back, and Cinnabar gasps, trapped between the cold floor and your warm body.

“Chief?” Her hand rests on the back of your head, and she tips her head to look down at you, but you hide your face on the crook of her shoulder. “Are you okay? I'm sorry, let me get up . . .”

But you only tighten your arms around her neck, refusing to move. Cinnabar breathes out.

“Chief?” She can feel your hum vibrate against her skin. “are you all right like this?”

A weak nod. Cinnabar sighs, and holds you tighter.

“Then, let's stay like this for a while.” Her voice mellows into a slight whisper, trailing off and beckoning the silence to descend in between distant wails of thunder. Your breath gradually falls into disorder as she brushes your hair back, but Cinnabar only stares at the ceiling, helpless, and presses her cheek against the top of your head.

Rain falls, like ticking seconds.

It drowns out your weak sobs, knocking on the glass pane, pit-pattering like singing out a discordant rhythm along with the wind. The world outside fogs up, ceases to exist among the mist and vague flashes in between raindrops, and all Cinnabar can do is hold you tight and hide you from the chilling cold.

She doesn't really know if she's helping you or not. If she's just intruding on what was supposed to be your private time. But,

It was like this back then, too, except the roles were reversed, and Cinnabar was the one crying while you held her in your arms. You were warm and steady, patiently humming a wordless lullaby that soothed her until all that remained of her pain were muffled sniffles and her swollen eyes.

Even if she can't do much. Even if it's just a little bit. At the very least, Cinnabar hopes she can return some of that warmth back to your cold skin.

It's unbearably cold here. But it will warm, in time.

But for now, the pit-pattering sound of the rain is hypnotic, and she loses track of time, tangled with you like this. Trapped in frozen time, there's no beginning nor end, no distinction between her and your trembling body; she holds you tightly, and listens to your muffled cries until the rain has washed away your pain and everything else.

[spicyicymeloncat]

I don’t remember if I ever rlly elaborated on my potential Ninjago s12 but I’m listening to GRRRLS and it reminded me of it, so briefly here’s all the ideas I had for it (and are currently having for it because I am now coming up with stuff on the fly):

The focus on Jay would be forshadowed by the fact that Jay doesn’t get a resolution to what he does in s11. He seemingly feels bad about ignoring Zane’s dream and in general feels more of a disconnect to the group. This is subtle and he tries not to let it bother him. This is highlighted more at the start of the season, as they are investigating the mechanics hideout.

We would see that Jay gets transported as player 2. He arrives at the very core of prime empire, the tower, which also serves as menu screen. He’s greeted by Unagami, who offers to play games with him, an offer he takes due to being excited

I think on the ninja’s end it would mostly be the same. BUT Whilst Zane and Pixal can’t enter the game due to risk of their data getting scrambled (how that works I’ve decided is that, Prime Empire works by translating bio matter to digital but it can only do bio matter bc it knows how it works, and it doesn’t know how nindroids are made and therefore can’t translate them without risk of error), zane and pixal can set up some sort of communication system that allows them to contact the ninja. Essentially zane and pixal are video calling the ninja from their minds and over the course of the season they chip in with gaming tips (canonically zane and pixal are both gamers so)

The ninja end up meeting superstar rockin Jay, and it goes on as normal, although Okino is a little weirded out by him

In the just dance episode, Nya finds out on the dance floor that Jay is the sussus amogus imposter. Shock horror on the dance floor

It turns out that superstar rockin Jay was just an artificial construct being controlled by the real Jay who is still in the tower with Unagami. But recently Jay and Unagami had a real fight and that’s lead to Unagami taking control of superstar rockin Jay in an attempts to stop his friends’ progress

Not entirely sure how the superstar rockin Jay thing ends tho, all Ik is that I want Nya to have an “oh my god what happened to my boyfriend”/“wait a minute Jay would never say that”

There would be an episode detailing Jay’s pov, showing how he and Unagami became friends and started playing the games together after feeling similarly lonely, exploring Jay’s tendency to ignore his problems and how it’s resulting in him growing distant, before Jay realises he doesn’t want to give up on himself and he’s gonna try to reunite with his friends (probably after seeing how hard the ninja are trying to find him). Then Unagami reacts badly to the idea of being abandoned by Jay and they fight, ending with Jay falling through the walls and into the core of prime empire, in like this weird void of pure code.

I kinda also wanted to idk make more lava moments but that’s just me

I never really worked out what I wanted Libber (Jay’s mum) to do in this but she’s gonna be relevant

Like something something she’s been here, there’s an echo of her buried in the code. Maybe the game was based on her travels somehow. I kinda wanted Jay to be guided out of the code void by some sort of depiction of her

I kinda want Milton Dyer and Scott to have both somehow known Libber

Maybe libber really did abandon Jay. Maybe like Jay she also had issues that made her feel like she had to distance herself. Maybe there was a genuine reason and she was taken from him. Maybe the point of the season is that it’s hard to tell what happened in the past but that doesn’t stop you from carrying on in the future

Idk I just need there to be a more conscious parallel between jay and Unagami and themes of abandonment

There’s also some kind of theme of giving up not giving up seen with Scott, Okino and Blazey (racer 7), where they’re all encouraged to keep trying. I gotta do sometime with that idk…

Also the mechanic deserves to be cooler. Like can we make him more badass I want his villain resume to look so good that he actually qualifies as a Crystal council member

That’s all I had/have got for now but yeah! I do like most of the season I just think it has a lot more potential yknow

[inkneverdies]

A World of Polished Masks

I am tired of the shallow smiles, the grins carved wide, like mannequins painted by hollow hands. The “How are you?”s that ask nothing, that wait for nothing, an exchange of air, not worth the breath it took.

I am done with the 9-to-5 shuffle, marching in line, another suit, another tie, another day traded for scraps to keep us just hungry enough to come back.

Sick of seeing hands that pull back when asked, eyes that turn away from the ugly, from the broken, from the quiet call of need. What happened to kindness? Or was it all just another line we swallowed like medicine that never worked?

Friends? They’re shadows with names, passing through when the sun’s just right, disappearing with the clouds when darkness falls. “Call me if you need anything,” they say, and when I do, it’s an empty dial tone, the sound of their silence thicker than blood.

Why can't we drop the act? Why can’t we see past the walls we build, the artificial smiles and scripted words? All I ask is for honesty, for the courage to break this cycle of hollow gestures, to give more than we take, to care without condition.

But here we are— a world of polished masks, a stage of hollow actors too scared to look in the mirror.

[canariie]

morning routine

Rating: T

Synopsis: Toushiro builds it into his routine to stop by Hinamori’s room before he begins his day. Sleep eludes him so much so that by the time he sees her, it is still early and dark with the streetlights still twinkling. While the world is still with blue muted tones and the infirmary night shift staff are exchanging guard, he has this moment of solitude with her.

But right as the soft light of dawn breaks, he departs immediately. 

...

Toushiro’s morning routine in the aftermath of the defection where he learns the healing power of proximity and trust.

Word Count: 2680 words

Setting: time in between the Save Rukia Arc & Arrancar Arc (around the time of the Bleach novel Honey Dish Rhapsody) 

Prompt: @hitsuhina-week‘s Hitsuhina 2023 Weekend Day 2 - Morning

Authour’s Note: This was an idea I had for a long time to expand on the few lines that Toushiro is mentioned in the first light novel, and Hinamori by proxmity. (I linked the novel up above if anyone wants to read a translation.) It really excited me to go super super deep into that one bit of him biting his nails as a nervous tick--which ended up being a whole story about hands haha

I didn’t spend too much time on final editing, in trying to keep with the unfiltered emotions and state of shock at coping with a loved one that is unreachable. I think I could have spent more time on this but also wanted to keep it quite raw.

Shout out to Chanhyuk’s songs Goodbye, stay well & If I can’t see you right now for being the songs that helped in the final push!

—

Toushiro never liked the healing barracks. The sterile whiteness of the walls, the artificial lights, the ticking of the clock. Everything felt bare and magnified like it was under a microscope.

He has been called to the intensive care treatment centers—when the shinigami that have almost slipped off the edge towards death have been hastily pulled up—and made to stand tall again for the Gotei 13. Currently, the center has seen its highest volume of patients and it makes his stomach drop as he passes by the doors of soldiers incapacitated by severed limbs and ailments that can only be treated with precedent prognoses.

But he endures it all as he watches the fourth captain check the vitals of her latest patient. He observes from the doorway; on the threshold of being involved, but far enough to be removed.

“Hinamori-fukutaicho’s treatment is complete. The damage to her body will heal sooner or later,” she says softly, her hands flipping through the paper charts; it’s careful in a way that makes Toushiro wonder if she is curating her words.

“The damage to her body…” Toushiro parrots as he bites his nails, a nervous habit he wished he had left outside of Seireitei.

He forces himself to stop.

Toushiro thinks of the times Hinamori chided him in the past. She would take his hands in hers and pull them towards herself, her brown eyes looking at him in admonishment before she would wrap his hands in her much warmer ones; they were always warmer, like she had just carried sunshine.

Shiro-chan, you shouldn’t do that! You’ll ruin your nails. She would tilt her head and smile, the pig tails drifting to the side, making him stop and stare.

If you’re ever worried about something, you can tell me, you know?

Now he has failed her and left her in a dreamless sleep.

It has only been a few days since the defection of the three captains, including Hinamori’s former captain; only a few days since she had been mercilessly stabbed through the chest, and left to die. His blood still runs cold as the sight of her lifeless eyes.

Admiration is the emotion furthest from understanding.

Toushiro gnaws at his thumb.

Unohana-taicho continues undeterred.

“I can only treat the wounds that we can see…Beyond that, we must rely on the patient’s own ‘will to live.’” She looks down at the sleeping girl who looks paler than ever before, as if the walls had sucked away the color of her life. Toushiro grimaces and quickly schools his face, before curtly bowing.

“Thank you Unohana-taicho,” he turns to leave.

“She is waiting for someone to call out to her,” Unohana-taicho calls out with something of an admonishment and plea.

Toushiro stops in his tracks. He knows the older captain knew the guilt he was drowning himself in. Without her intervention, he knew he would have bled out to death in that cold court and Hinamori would have surely not survived. And for that, he owes her an unpayable debt.

His throat tightens and his back remains rigid as he barely looks to the side.

“The way I am now, I can’t be the one to call out to her,” Toushiro says solemnly, before departing the room.

--

Toushiro builds it into his routine to stop by Hinamori’s room before he begins his day. Sleep eludes him so much so that by the time he sees her, it is still early and dark with the streetlights still twinkling. While the world is still with blue muted tones and the infirmary night shift staff are exchanging guard, he has this moment of solitude with her. But right as the soft light of dawn breaks, he departs immediately.

It surprises him one morning to see his lieutenant there before him as she moves around Hinamori’s room. She doesn’t startle when Toushiro calls out to her, instead turns with a worn look on her face, the soft shadows under her eyes looking deeper in the blue light.

“I knew you’ve been holding yourself back from coming in, Taicho,” she says resignedly. “But you shouldn’t punish yourself—we are both equally to blame and self-pity won’t help us.” Her tone is not unkind and she stares at the young girl in the bed with a loaded look that makes Toushiro feel like he’s not the only one carrying demons.

“Unohana-taicho updated me on her condition. She’s not gone but we have to prove her from here that we can bring her back.” She runs her hands through her long blond hair. “I’m proposing that we help with external care that the nurses wouldn’t normally do.”

He raises his eyebrow dubiously. “Like what?”

“Well,” she starts with that knowing tone, “We can do her nails! Who knows when Hinamori has had a manicure last and clearly there has been no time to do so,” she says matter-of-factly lifting up the young girls hands in her own and inspecting it. She tsks in disapproval while Toushiro can only gawk.

“Matsumoto, you cannot be serious.” His lieutenant has had some far-fetched ideas but this certainly tops them all.

“Isane-san said we’re not allowed to change her robes to something more colourful,” Rangiku said with a roll of her eyes. “So—this is the next big thing.” She stares at him, her gray eyes expecting him to retort.

Toushiro cannot say anything. His gut reaction is to do nothing and not move any closer. But he also knows that as much as his vice-captain says Hinamori needs this, Matsumoto equally as much needs this moment—to rid the guilt that is plaguing her.  

“It’s up to you,” he offers quietly.

She lets out a slight smile and exhales a long breath. “I know, I know it seems out there. But I truly believe that if she feels that someone is caring for—it’ll bring her back to us.” Rangiku pulls a seat by the bed and settles herself as she brings up a large hang bag that thunks on the side table.  

“I don’t think her nails will grow that long, but regardless we can still file them.” She pulls out a long nail file and begins on Hinamori’s smallest finger. "You take the file and move it along the nail,"—she demonstrated—"like that."

Toushiro only watches from the doorway, still in partial disbelief of what he was witnessing. Her eyebrows furrow as she concentrates, "Don't pull too fast or it might tear,” Matsumoto murmurs.

Toushiro wasn't enthused by the idea and the older girl could tell when she looks up at him.

She sighs. "Why don't you brush her hair? There's a brush in my bag," she gestured with her shoulder, her long blond hair spilling to the side.

"How much stuff did you bring, Matsumoto?" he asked warily, eyeing the unending volume of items she seemed to bring out of the bottomless bag. He makes no move to step forward from the doorway.

"Just the necessary items." Matsumoto defended as she started pulling out more items from her purse (“a make-up bag,” she had corrected him later). Finally in her hand she holds out the brush, but he still remains where he stands.  

“Why don’t you bring Tobiume closer to her?” the older woman asks, but Toushiro hears the unasked question. You can still carry it, right?

Zanptakou’s are remnants of their owner’s soul. Depending on proximity and the nature of the relationship, any close companion of the wielder is able to hold the sword. It implies trust and honor to carry another’s soul in one’s hands. Otherwise, it remains heavy and immovable to any stranger.

Typically with trust over time, it is common for a vice-captain to be able to carry their captain’s sword in their hand. What is rarer is when individuals outside of one’s division are able to hold the blade. It is a precious secret as it carries confidence—and therefore weakness.

He knew long before that he was able to hold Tobiume; he’s felt the warmth seep into him, like sunshine, like a warm flame, like Hinamori—vibrant and alive.

Toushiro steps forward from the threshold and approaches the sword that has been propped up in the corner.

A flare burns his hands and he drops Tobiume on the floor. The clang of the sword echoes in the room.

He stares down at his hands that are singed with burns, bright red bruises marring his skin.

It is with cold realization that he realizes they are in the same places as Hinamori’s bruises were from when she had accused him of murder.

Rangiku looks at him with great sadness and sighs in defeat. “It’ll take some time, but they’ll both come around.”

--

And so the routine began. Every morning the two would go and tidy up the room, with Rangiku tending to Hinamori and Toushiro just watching from far. After a couple of days, he starts moving closer—replacing the flowers by her bed stand, opening the curtains—but still never touching her.

A week passed and Matsumoto says that she had a lieutenants’ debrief in the morning and wouldn’t be able to come, which left him standing awkwardly in the door way of Hinamori’s room.

Toushiro went about his usual steps of changing the water for the flowers and opening the curtains. He makes a brief survey of her vitals, observing the machines that monitor her heartbeat with a steady steady soft staccato along with making a note to see if her IV bag has been replaced.

Ultimately, he finds himself by her side but cannot bring himself to tend to her hands, so he just opts to lift them. Rangiku has been dedicating a lot of care and besides the soft lines from her bruises, you couldn't tell she was in battle.

As he weighs her hand in his, he grimaced at the cold. He wishes she were warmer like when she was younger and would pull him along. He was never a fan of it, deeming it too childish to be directed by someone else.

Now, he regrets pulling away so quickly.

He studies her hand. There were still scars from when she had held Tobiume so tightly--with all her life to execute a dead man's wish. Which sent her to a dreamless sleep.

Her hands were never meant to carry such pain. They were to protect, take care and bring warmth.

He laments leaving her to face such demons on her own.

Toushiro drops her hand.

“She’ll wake up. I know she will.”

He turns to see the intruder in the doorway, taking up the whole width with his grand presence and bright orange hair.

“I’ve been told I’m not the best at detecting rieatsu but she’s there. I can feel it,” Kurosaki supplies like a hasty defense. "You looked so...sad," he finished lamely. There's a moment of pause as the older boy scratches his head, clearly uncomfortable. "It reminded me of when I lost my mom."

Toushiro regards him slowly. Though he wore the black death robes, his bright shock of hair made him stand out in the door frame, foreign and so alive. In every moment that Ichigo Kurosaki was present in Soul Society, his presence had disrupted their quotidian way of living. And though it was too soon for many captains reflecting on the unknown deceit, there was a begrudging admittance that the boy had wreaked havoc to save a friend and irreparably saved all of Soul Society.

Toushiro himself hadn't spent much time with the ryoka boy; he knew that Matsumoto had acquainted herself with the rest of the group, but he was not keen on making shallow introductions. Toushiro knows that he has been visiting Kuchiki from the Thirteenth but he did not expect to be sought out by the boy—especially to be offered unsolicited sympathy.

A flash of blood passes through his mind. Momo’s eyes pleading and drowning in confusion.

If Ichigo is bothered by Toushiro's silence, he doesn't show it. "My sisters were really young at the time so they couldn't understand the concept of death. Instead, my dad told the story of 'Sleeping Beauty,' and that our mother was far away, asleep and gone,” he speaks softly with the weight of someone who carried grief too prematurely.

"It gave them solace and relief that she'd one day wake up. But after a couple years, they realized it was a fairy tale."

(Toushiro doesn’t know who his father was and felt it was like fool hardy advice—but maybe he knew something more of consoling than Toushiro did).

The ryoka looks past Toushiro to the sleeping girl on the bed.

"But for you, you still have a chance. She's not gone—she's here. Don't give up, Toushiro."

The tenth captain was too stunned to correct the misuse of his title and watched as the human boy left.

Only the hum of the machines buzzed as time ticked by slowly. He looked to Hinamori, who was still asleep but maybe with the boys words and closer inspection, he could start to see a colour on her cheeks, and her chest deeply moving in breaths.

During one of his breaks later, he found himself wandering through a bookstore in the outer rings and found the tale of ‘sleeping beauty.’

He couldn't help himself and bought it.

--

As he reads it, it seemed like the stories that Momo would have liked to read—which made it harder to turn the pages, but he persists. Toushiro ends up bringing it with him in his morning visits and reads portions of it out loud to her.

A beautiful young girl who was tricked unknowingly into a dreamless sleep, caught in between life and death in a castle.

There were descriptions of flowers intricate and delicate as they covered up the walls of her castle. It seems that even in the image of death, there was life. But somehow, Toushiro knows, that when those hundreds of flowers seemed to pile up, then life would eventually fade. It makes him uneasy, knowing that there was this helpless person, left in a state of flux unknowing whether her saviour would come.

After he finishes the story, Toushrio found himself picturing the flowers in his hands. The nervous energy he had stored inside, started manifesting in little shards of ice. And he sculpted them—one by one. Picking at the shards and pulling them long between the prints of his fingers, pinching and piecing them into petals. It felt instinctual to one to bind them all together, until he had a single flower that reflected the light of the early dawn.

Toushiro glances at Momo, whose chest was rising up and down softly—higher than it ever did before.

A sigh of relief escaped his lips.

From then on, Toushiro comes every morning, and sculpts a flower, until he is called away to World of the Living, leaving behind a bouquet of ice by the sleeping girl’s bed.

--

The first thing that Momo could remember when she opened her eyes, was the warmth of sunshine on her face. Lifting herself slowly from the bed she looked down at her nails, painted with a light sheen reflecting the morning light, that she knew she didn't do herself.

She could hear the birds outside and the conversations of passerby. A soft breeze billows the curtain out and she can see the trees outside sway along.

A blinding flash of light catches her attention as she sees ice shimmer—and she is drawn to a beautiful bouquet of ice flowers standing by her bedside table. She drinks it in like water, the varieties of petals and designs and she marvels at the time that has manifested into it.

“Hitsugaya-kun?” Momo moves forward to touch the last remaining petal, but at the prick of her finger, it shatters into a thousand shards.

She wakes up alone, with broken shards of ice by her side of what once was.

—

Authour’s Note: I hope you all enjoyed this one! I really enjoyed taking on a sort of self-deprecating Hitsugaya and thinking about the ones that would get him out of his slump. Ichigo’s conversation was actually the first part that was written down, as part of my Hitsugaya gets life advice from older peers series haha I think Ichigo is the kind of guy that wouldn’t leave a sad kid without imparting something, right?

Also it’s a personal headcanon of mine that zanpaktous change perceived weight depending on the weilder and the holder’s relationship to the weilder! in tie with this, i would love to explore a future fic of Momo and Hyorinmaru post-Winter War.

I also hope that you got the Hyoten Hyakkaso reference! Sleeping beauty worked itself in somehow and then I was like, “oh! i must reference this! it all ties together!”

(but if you didn’t that’s okay! I hope the last paragraph was haunting enough haha)

[mariacallous]

In his polarizing “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were “tech ethics” and “trust and safety,” a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said had been used to subject humanity to “a mass demoralization campaign” against new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Andreessen’s declaration drew both public and quiet criticism from people working in those fields—including at Meta, where Andreessen is a board member. Critics saw his screed as misrepresenting their work to keep internet services safer.

On Wednesday, Andreessen offered some clarification: When it comes to his 9-year-old son’s online life, he’s in favor of guardrails. “I want him to be able to sign up for internet services, and I want him to have like a Disneyland experience,” the investor said in an onstage conversation at a conference for Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI research institute. “I love the internet free-for-all. Someday, he's also going to love the internet free-for-all, but I want him to have walled gardens.”

Contrary to how his manifesto may have read, Andreessen went on to say he welcomes tech companies—and by extension their trust and safety teams—setting and enforcing rules for the type of content allowed on their services.

“There’s a lot of latitude company by company to be able to decide this,” he said. “Disney imposes different behavioral codes in Disneyland than what happens in the streets of Orlando.” Andreessen alluded to how tech companies can face government penalties for allowing child sexual abuse imagery and certain other types of content, so they can’t be without trust and safety teams altogether.

So what kind of content moderation does Andreessen consider an enemy of progress? He explained that he fears two or three companies dominating cyberspace and becoming “conjoined” with the government in a way that makes certain restrictions universal, causing what he called “potent societal consequences” without specifying what those might be. “If you end up in an environment where there is pervasive censorship, pervasive controls, then you have a real problem,” Andreessen said.

The solution as he described it is ensuring competition in the tech industry and a diversity of approaches to content moderation, with some having greater restrictions on speech and actions than others. “What happens on these platforms really matters,” he said. “What happens in these systems really matters. What happens in these companies really matters.”

Andreessen didn’t bring up X, the social platform run by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter, in which his firm Andreessen Horowitz invested when the Tesla CEO took over in late 2022. Musk soon laid off much of the company’s trust and safety staff, shut down Twitter’s AI ethics team, relaxed content rules, and reinstated users who had previously been permanently banned.

Those changes paired with Andreessen’s investment and manifesto created some perception that the investor wanted few limits on free expression. His clarifying comments were part of a conversation with Fei-Fei Li, codirector of Stanford’s HAI, titled “Removing Impediments to a Robust AI Innovative Ecosystem.”

During the session, Andreessen also repeated arguments he has made over the past year that slowing down development of AI through regulations or other measures recommended by some AI safety advocates would repeat what he sees as the mistaken US retrenchment from investment in nuclear energy several decades ago.

Nuclear power would be a “silver bullet” to many of today’s concerns about carbon emissions from other electricity sources, Andreessen said. Instead the US pulled back, and climate change hasn’t been contained the way it could have been. “It’s an overwhelmingly negative, risk-aversion frame,” he said. “The presumption in the discussion is, if there are potential harms therefore there should be regulations, controls, limitations, pauses, stops, freezes.”

For similar reasons, Andreessen said, he wants to see greater government investment in AI infrastructure and research and a freer rein given to AI experimentation by, for instance, not restricting open-source AI models in the name of security. If he wants his son to have the Disneyland experience of AI, some rules, whether from governments or trust and safety teams, may be necessary too.

[jedimordsith]

I don’t have a Filthy Friday today, but have whatever this is. It was inspired by one of those “the Force dumps Luke in the past” fics... only this time with bb!Mara. 

- -

There were scores of beautiful, peaceful places in the Temple to meditate. Luke liked to rotate between them, joining different groups of Jedi on different days and occasionally seeking out lesser-known rooms and corners just for the novelty.

Today, however, the Force would not let him rest until he followed its guiding to the network of catwalks suspended over the Room of a Thousand Fountains. Made of solid durasteel, the catwalks were intended for maintenance rather than casual use, but Luke found an intersection where four walkways met and settled in curiously. The Force hummed about him in an unusual way, and instead of turning inward when he closed his eyes he reached out. 

The Temple was vibrant with life, as if always was. Lush in a way he could never have imagined before being pulled into the past. Usually he found it soothing, but today he found his heartbeat would not slow. Responding to something he could not see, it raced, resetting to its rapid pace no matter how many times he tried to focus and calm himself. 

The durasteel beneath him vibrated. It was a tiny movement; almost imperceptible. But it rolled through Luke’s bones like the forerunner of a tidal wave. 

Opening his eyes, he stopped breathing. 

Down the catwalk to his right a child stood frozen. She was small, too small for the safety rails to offer her any protection. She hovered close to the edge of the floor-plates. Too close. She wavered on her feet, exhaustion and despair radiating off of her and making her sway perilously close toppling over the edge and into a dizzying free-fall into the waterfall below. 

Green eyes stared at him, sharp despite the crippling fatigue, and disheveled red-gold hair rippled in the artificial breeze. 

Behind its layers of walls and shields, a long-buried connection point deep in Luke’s chest began to burn. 

“Siah!” 

The little girl spun, stumbling, and Luke’s hand shot out, a pull on the Force thickening the air to brace her, keep her on the walkway. 

Three healers appeared at the other end of the walkway. Luke knew them all by sight, knew they were part of the creche ward. 

“Siah.” One of them stepped forward slowly. “Young one, you cannot be up here. It isn’t safe.” 

The child backed away. 

The healer’s expression turned pained. “We aren’t going to hurt you,” they cajoled. “There’s nothing to fear. You just need to rest, little one.”

A ridiculous smile split Luke’s lips as memories cracked open his heart and, with it, all the protective barriers he’d built. The bond reopened with the agony of a thick scab being ripped off a barely-healed wound.

Rising, he stepped forward. “Mara.” 

The child pivoted again, and this time she did fall, landing on her behind on the plating, her eyes enormous and fixed on him. 

The healers saw their chance and started to advance, but Luke held up one hand, halting them. Walking toward her, Luke slipped his cloak off and crouched, putting himself closer to her level. Only then did he catch the bruising that peeked out from beneath her thin traveling clothes, the fine shivers that racked her over-exerted little body. 

Anger and grief surged through him, bitter and hot. Was there no galaxy, no timeline in which Mara was spared suffering? 

“Who hurt you?” He asked softly. 

“She won’t answer you,” the healer called back, their voice low. “She doesn’t talk.” Their look conveyed their dismay. “We’re not sure she can. Her name is Marasiah. We think.”  

The girl’s face screwed up and, across the reignited bond, Luke could feel her hatred of the name. Of everything Siah meant — images of cold and pain and shame flickered across his mind too quickly to grasp. 

His expression contorted and the child went white. 

“You can feel it, can’t you?” He said quietly. “You can feel me.” 

She didn’t answer, but he’d seen the confused terror in her eyes before — in the same eyes, just as tired and wounded but twenty years older. 

Slowly, Luke extended his left hand. “May I show you something?”

She looked at his hand, wary. 

“I won’t get in your head,” he promised. “And I won’t make you sleep.” 

He was sure the healers had tried that. Doubtless it had been what sent her fleeing in the first place. This Mara was too little to explain to the innocent healers the horror of losing control of your own body or the torment of being trapped in sleep with the monsters that hunted you.

But Luke knew. 

She might have seen it in his eyes. Or perhaps she felt the same undeniable pull of the Force that he did. In any case, she cautiously got back to her feet and inched close enough to just barely brush her fingers across two of his. 

Smiling gently, Luke unearthed precious memories he’d never shared with anyone else. Mara during a sparring session, her amethyst blade flashing as she spun across the floor all scorching heat and breathtaking grace. Mara, poised and elegant, backlit by the sparkling lights of a New Republic event hall. A private moment, one that still made his heart ache — the captivating curve of Mara’s lips when she shot him a rare, true smile, her eyes gleaming with triumph as she showed off her new ship. 

The little girl made a broken sound and Luke blinked, coming out of his own head as her fingers curled tight around his. 

“Mara,” she whispered, her voice cracked and papery-thin. She reached hungrily across the bond, her fear and desire clashing stormily. 

“Yes.” Luke’s chest was so tight he could barely get the words out. “That’s you, isn’t it? You’re not Siah at all.” 

Tears welled up and spilled down her cheeks, her tiny chest heaving in silent sobs and her entire body shaking. A torrent of fears and pain and bone-deep fatigue poured over him and Luke let it abrade away what remained of the barriers around his long-dormant Mara-place. It hurt, but he leaned into the pain greedily. Because pain meant that she was there, she was alive and she’d found him. After so many years of not allowing himself to hope, of telling himself that she deserved a beautiful life with her family and that it would be unforgivably selfish to wish for anything else —

With the sweep of a hand and a thought in the Force, Luke had the girl swathed in his cloak and scooped into his arms. She buried her head in his shoulder and burrowed her sense into his as he crooned promises to her — that she was safe, that he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her ever again. 

At the other end of the walkway, the healers gaped. 

“Tell Master Che that I’ll be seeing to my new Padawan myself, please.” Luke pressed a hand to Mara’s back over the enveloping cloak, more for her comfort than out of any real concern they’d object. “I’ll bring her by for the usual assessment once she’s settled. Does she have any things?” 

The healers exchanged glances. “No,” the one in the lead said finally. “But we can send some clothes and bedding for her to your rooms, Master Skywalker.” 

“Thank you.” 

Another memory flickered through — Mara’s face, defensive and uncomfortable as she’d examined one of the twins’ stuffed animals and confessed she’d never had any such thing that she could remember. The Emperor didn’t believe in coddling. 

“Are there any toys?” He asked impulsively. “Something soft. Stuffed?” 

One of the other healers projected warmth at him. “I think the last batch we got in contained a bearsloth. Something fierce for your little wildling, hmm?” 

Luke smiled. “Yes, please.” His smile slipped. “I’ll need bacta gel for her injuries.” 

“Of course, Master Skywalker.” The lead healer drew themselves up. “We’d best see to that so you can get her back to your rooms. If you need anything —”

In his arms, Mara tensed.

“We’ll be fine,” Luke said firmly, pleased when Mara went boneless with relief in response. “Oh,” he added as the healers started to turn away. “And update her records, please. Her name is Mara Jade. I don’t want her referred to as anything else.”

They murmured assent and Luke gave them a few moments head start before he carried his new Padawan back out into the Temple and toward his quarters. She fought sleep the entire way, determined to be awake to explore her new home. 

Luke didn’t chide her. He knew that she wouldn’t have peace until he’d showed her everything and tucked her into his own bed, still wrapped in his robe, behind no less than two locked doors, his body between hers and the rest of the galaxy. Some things, it seemed, were constants in the galaxy. 

For the first time since arriving in the past, he let himself hope that the rare and precious friendship between them might be counted on that list of constants as well.  

[sabineelectricheart]

Distracted, Desperate, Determined [Pt. 2]

Summary: If going about it by underhanded means took him nowhere, Baxter decides to be direct. Jamie is also direct, in response.

Rating: R - Content features heavy themes. Not suitable for most audiences. Consult warnings before proceeding.

Explicit depictions of violence. Reader discretion is highly advised.

Words: 1025

Notes: Leering bosses suck. Even when they’re hot.

Baxter was a man, desperate.

Like a starving dog. Like a traveller who had not seen water in thirty days. Like a distraught, distressed, disturbed prison escapee, wandering through a maze of a library, cursing the existence of every shelf that separated him from her.

He knew where Jamie would be. She is a creature of habit, and he had already had more than enough time to memorize her routine. He had had enough time to memorize everything about her, as ashamed as he was to admit it. It was a testament to his devotion, to how much time he had spent trying and failing to win her favour.

It was evidence of how pathetic he had gotten over the course of his one-sided pursuit, too.

Instead of competing for attention on Beverly Hills or Rodeo Drive, Baxter pontificates out of his office in Downtown, letting his clients go out of their way to meet him, and he has no shortage of those willing to make the trip. It made his commute from his penthouse much more pleasant, he gets more space for the same amount of rent money and it is more convenient for his employees, too.

Jamie, herself, usually takes the metro from her apartment in East Hollywood down to the office. At noon every day, she goes out to a cheap Korean restaurant around the corner, and then walks to the Central Library to rest amongst the volumes housed there.

Baxter went after her. She was hidden in her usual spot , tucked into the far corner of the library, back to the concrete wall, her attention monopolized by the old book spread across her lap. She was still pouring over it by the time he reached her, slumping against the opposite pillar, taking in how brilliantly the muted artificial lighting looked as it danced across her skin.

He does not try to hide the way he stared anymore. He was long past worrying that she would care enough to notice.

Her hair was unkempt, proof that she had run out on the street, probably to make to an appointment with one of her friends at the Korean restaurant, all of them he knows the names of, none of them he was ever introduced to. Her lips were bleeding, too, the lower one chewed raw and split down the middle, but it might have been stranger if they were not.

It must have been a nervous tick, but Baxter found it cute. Baxter found it endearing. Baxter found everything about Jamie endearing, and in the name of a god he does not believe in, he wanted to see those lips wrapped around his…

He hated it. He found everything about her endearing, and he hated it. That was all.

He sighed, the sound airy, exhausted. She does not look up, but that was fine. It would’ve only hurt him further if someone as simple as that drew out her concern.

“I’m in love with you.”

There was a hum, soft and contemplative. A rather generous response, by her standards.

“I’ve noticed.”

“You’re all I think about.” It was an awkward confession, one that he had already used a hundred different times. He did not care. He would use it a hundred more, if he had to. “I’m a wreck. I can barely remember my own name, and some days I can’t even do that. I can’t work, I can’t eat, I can hardly breathe. Every morning, I wonder what it would be like to wake up to your smile, and every night, I stare at my ceiling and loath myself because I’m not holding you in my arms. For fuck’s sake, just yesterday, I almost kissed Xavier because the essences they were working with reminded me of the way your favourite kind of dessert smells, and I’m just so fucking desperate, I convinced myself that was the closest I’d ever come to kissing you.”

He was rambling, by the end, panting, yelling, but she only blinked when he was done, once, then twice. Her dull nails bit into the edges of her book, but she does not seem to mind, nor did she move to close it as she finally turned to face him, the confusion written clearly across her expression.

“Did you kiss Xavier?”

“You don’t get it.” He said, and she nodded in agreement. “You don’t fucking get it.”

“I think I do.” She admitted, more earnestly. Her gaze dropped back to the ground, and instantly, Baxter deflated. “I just… I just don’t think it’d work out, if I’m being honest. I’m still new. New out of college, new to LA, new to the workforce, I’m even too fucking young. I still have too much to prove, I need to give my parents and myself a reason to trust in me, and I don’t think it’s in my best interest to start a relationship with my boss so early on.”

Jamie suddenly paused, laughing to herself. Something in his chest tightened. It was the happiest he had been since he met her, and he still felt like she had pushed a knife through his heart and twisted.

“But you don’t really want a relationship, do you, Mr. Ward? I’ve been told, and I’ve seen for myself, the comes-and-goes of people in your office, and I’m absolutely sure not all of them are engaged to be married.” She chuckled bitterly at her own attempt of a joke. “You’re just bored, and you need something to fixate on. I’m the most available option, so...”

She trailed off, finishing her sentence with a vague, stilted sweeping gesture.

“It’ll be easier for both of us, this way. I like you, Baxter, but I don’t like you enough to put myself through that.” The young woman says, standing up to leave. “Or, perhaps, I like you too much.”

It was the first time she called him by his first name. It was all he could do to remember how to open his mouth.

Once Baxter did, the words came stumbling out on their own, every bit as pathetic as the man uttering them. “Of course.”

*_*_*_*_*

Distracted, Desperate, Determined Masterlist

Our Life Masterlist

[callmekingofthesquirrels]

NAYKT: Season 2 - Update 1

Summary - Several months have passed since they defeated the Author but the victory feels uneasy. Mark is still out there planning who knows what, Silver's soul is still missing, and some of them suddenly find themselves in possession of power they have no clue what to do with.

A new enemy is lurking, and the stakes have never been higher. Everyone is looking for something, but will they be happy with what they ultimately find?

A/N - this is the first part of the main plot of season 2, a sequel to Not As You Know Them: Season One. You don't have to have read s1, but I recommend it if you don't want to wind up completely lost. - This is the second attempt at Season 2, the first having been moved to a non-canon archive on AO3 and removed from canon.

Tag list: @mightnightmooon @thelittleautisticgirl

Like or reblog >>this post<&lt; to be added to the tag list

The bus station is awful.

To one side of the waiting area, King is sitting (and I use that term loosely) upside down on a plastic chair. His legs are going up, leaning against the wall while his head and shoulders are dangling from the chair where a normal person would put their legs. His hands are folded on his chest as he watches the people go past.

“What the hell delays a bus for an hour and a half?”

“You can always go back and wait with the others.” Bim offers.

King snorts at that. Not be here? That’s funny.

Bim is seated beside King, casually flicking through a magazine and wholly unbothered by the dryad’s unusual sitting position. King has never been patient, and being in such an artificial environment can’t be helping.

Green approaches in silence, nervously fidgeting with his fingers as he takes the empty seat on the other side of King. Bim glances over with a chuckle.

“I tried to warn you.”

“What?” King looks between them.

Green shakes his head gently. “Nothing.”

“Seriously what?!”

Bim turns the page of his magazine as he turns his attention back to it, “Bus station bathrooms are not a safe place for data collection.”

“Green!” the dryad grimaces, looking to the droid who very purposefully avoids his look. It’s a good thing the Googles are not equipped to blush in embarrassment.

They fall into an impatient silence that seems to amplify the noise going on around them. A steady murmur of people chatting amongst themselves, figuring out where it is that they need to go, the loud beep from the nearby convenience store, and the distant honking of cars along the pick up tunnel.

The air con blasts cool air but it’s stale and dry and lightly scented. King can feel it crawling all over his skin as only artificial air can. Since he recovered his trees, King finds himself sickened by anything less than pure outdoor freshness, and frankly being in here is making him queasy, though that could be the blood rushing to his head.

The dryad winces as a nearby speaker fritzes into life and a bored-sounding monotone voice murmurs through it. He strains to listen but it’s impossible to make out a single word. All mumbly and garbled with an undercurrent of the electronic whine that accompanies everything in this place.

Bim gently tosses his magazine onto a nearby table, “That’s the one, come on.”

Green nods in agreement and they both stand and move while King looks in utter confusion at them.

“You understood that?!”

King kicks away from the wall, rolling off the chair backwards and somehow landing gracefully in a crouch before straightening up and hurrying to catch up

Around them, several people are rushing past, dragging heaving suitcases along with them, not even stopping to acknowledge when they bump into someone. More than once King gets knocked and he says nothing but he's cursing internally pretty loudly in their general direction.

The large see-through wall of the gate lets the waiting people see every bus as it arrives and leaves, interspersed with built-in automatic doors at each gate. An easy way to control the flow of passengers while making sure no one can run out in front of the buses.

By the time they can see the gate, the bus has already arrived and the doors are already open. It’s a mess of people, some pushing through the doors, some coming through, while several are milling around waiting for their luggage to come free from storage.

“I don’t see him.” King huffs impatiently.

“Be patient.” Bim says calmly.

“I’ve been patient!” he snarks. “I just want-”

“There!” Green interrupts pointing towards the bus.

Sure enough, just this side of the doors stands Bing. Scruffy overgrown hair, sneakers, worn jeans, black t-shirt, and Google’s old royal blue zip hoodie half zipped up. There’s no one else in the world that could be.

Before anyone says anything, King’s running. Bim shouts after him but sod Bim. It’s been months. months, since Bing left to stay at Ed’s ranch. Months of only having the Jims to keep King company. Sure they’ve grown on him after everything that happened but they’re still loud and obnoxious and very extroverted, and very much not Bing.

At just the right moment Bing turns and sees him, beaming that lopsided grin of his and shifting his stance, arms raised, feet shoulder width apart. He knows what’s coming and he’s not going to stop it. The pair collide with force, Bing skidding across the ground from it before King practically lifts him off his feet.

They’re smiling, laughing, holding tight as they stand, not caring if anyone is staring at them.

“I’m guessing you didn’t forget me then.” Bing chuckles.

“Never.” King puts him down.

The others soon catch up, Green giving Bing an equally tight, if somewhat less airborne hug while Bim glances over the heads of the people around them.

“Where’s Ed?”

“He changed his mind.” Bing shrugs over Green’s shoulder. “Something about having had enough of our crazy shenanigans and it being safer at the ranch.”

- beep beep beep beep -

Shrill beeping pierces the air and Bing winces, covering his left ear, “What’s that?”

Bim taps at his watch and the beeping stops, “Don’t worry about it.”

Green takes the handle of Bing’s suitcase, glancing towards the TV host for a moment before turning to Bing, “Let’s get you something to eat.”

Next

[elliewiltarwyn]

FFXIV Write 2023 | Prompt #4: Off the Hook

make-up day! hope you understand why this might have needed some fine-tuning @.@;

-1630 words -Spoilers for Sorrow of Werlyt storyline

----

When Gaius turns away from M’naago and the militia officer, Mia makes sure she has planted herself there in front of him, arms folded, eyes narrowed, her brow furrowing around the third eye in her forehead. “I need to speak with you.” 

To his credit, Gaius does not shy away from her; when he sees the look in her eyes, he nods, the lines in his face creasing and deepening as resolve settles in. “Very well.” He cocks his head towards a nearby alleyway, then gives Severa a brief nod when she looks at them questioningly. She does not follow them into the alleyway.

The moment they’re out of sight, completely hidden behind the wall and its shadow, Mia whirls around and punches Gaius across the cheek, then grabs the front of his coat before he’s even finished shouting in pain and slams him against the wall, pinning him against it—and she brings the tall ex-legatus down to her level, glaring at him with fury blazing in her eyes, her forearms braced across his chest.

“How dare you?” Mia growls, her vision blurring. “How dare you reap these rewards, this lenience, this respect—even though the whole reason we’re in this situation is because your past crimes are catching up with you!”

Gaius’s face is frozen in a wince, and he continues nursing the cheek that she struck. “...My… past…” he murmurs.

“The legacy you left behind, the values you instilled in those children!” Mia slams him against the wall again, eliciting another gasp of pain. “You came unto Werlyt, unto Ala Mhigo, unto Eorzea as a conquerer, to inflict and enforce your ideals unto them— ‘twas terrible enough in its own right, but to learn that you raised orphans from those lands to believe in the same things—!” Mia hauls off and punches him again—tears are forming in her eyes and her throat is beginning to go hoarse. “And now that’s what they’re not just fighting for, but throwing themselves onto the pyre for—it’s all because of you, Baelsar!”

Gaius lowers his hand, apparently resigned to the bruise on his cheek. His grey eyes slide up, meeting Mia’s out of the corners. There isn’t a hint of the anger or imperiousness he displayed on that funicular in the Praetorium’s depths. “...It is,” he says softly. “...They are my sins.”

“And yet you are rewarded—granted command over the militia you conquered, allowed custody over the daughter whose mind you poisoned!” Something burns within Mia’s breast, and she squeezes her eyes shut and grits her teeth, but she can’t prevent it from erupting as a strangled, agonized shout of sheer frustration. Her hand blisters with pain again, this time lasting longer on her knuckles; when she opens her eyes, she realizes it’s because she’s slammed her fist into the wall next to Gaius’s head. The force has left a barely-noticeable impact crater in the stonework.

“...Aye.” Gaius’s voice is so quiet, in comparison. So weathered. So tired. “I have been extended… a shocking amount of grace.”

“...And I was extended none.”

These words bring a strange life back into Gaius’s eyes, and he stares down at Mia. “How do you mean?”

Mia shuts her eyes again and breathes in, deeply. She dredges through her memories, trying to find the traces of beauty within all the sludge. There isn’t a lot. “...You know who I was before.”

“...Aye.” Gaius swallows. “...Maia jen Asina… the daughter of Aulus mal. The chief engineer behind many of the Empire’s most dangerous magitek. The architect of the artificial Echo that Fordola and Zenos wield.”

“And how,” Mia begins, her lungs burning with heavy grief, “do you think it went over when I defected?”

“...I cannot imagine you had an easy time of it.”

“That’s putting it lightly. Dear old dad cast me out, rejected me from my family and friends forevermore. I walked into Ul’dah with nothing but a rusted cuirass and the sword on my back—no home, no rights, nothing to hope for—cast out from your ideal Empire.” She sucked in air through her teeth. “I toiled in the ranks of the Gladiators’ Guild for years, until somehow, the Echo suddenly awoke in me and granted me a chance to fight back.” Her vision flares up again as she sets her gaze on him once more. “Against you, as you may recall.”

“I will never forget it,” Gaius murmurs.

“And yet here we are. You at the head of a revolutionary militia. Your crimes swept under the rug—and then roaring back out from under it to attack us.” She feels her whole body vibrating in fury. “And you’re just… being let off the hook.”

Gaius just looks down at her for a long, long time before he exhales and says, “And you are completely correct; I do not deserve a single onze of the grace I have been extended.”

Mia stops short, freezes over entirely, down to her bones and the blood in her veins and her heart. “Wait, what?” Of all the tacks she had expected him to take, she never once thought he would agree with her.

“It pains me that the Alliance trusts me to lead their efforts against Valens’s ambitions, when I myself am responsible for everything about how those ambitions have taken form.” He keeps his gaze fixated, unwavering, on Mia, but he does rapidly blink as tears begin to roll down his cheeks—right over the bruise Mia had left him. “That they think I am still worth trusting… that Severa and Valdeaulin and Allie still believe me trustworthy… when I may as well have thrown Allie’s siblings upon the pyre myself. ‘Tis beyond the pale.”

Mia wants to keep pushing; she feels she has so much more she has to say—so much shit she’s been through that Gaius needs to know so he can maybe finally grasp some understanding.

…But does he already understand?

“...And you are right. Those ideals… the ones they have been sacrificing themselves for. The ones I upheld, as I marched forth into these territories to conquer them in the name of the Empire.” His shoulders sag, and he hangs limply against the wall, propped up solely by Mia’s grip. “...Madness. Nonsense. And ephemeral—Valens makes mockery of the Empire that I believed in… but that Empire never existed in the first place.” He squeezes his eyes shut in pain. “‘Twas naught but honeyed words, to satisfy the personal ambitions of cruel men.”

Mia tightens her fist in the front of his coat. “...That Empire was also a flawed, terrible, and self-destructive concept at its core.”

“...It was.” He opens his eyes and his gaze flickers elsewhere, nowhere in particular, but Mia has an idea of what he’s thinking about. “...Naught proves that better… than the corpses of Milisandia and Ricon and Rex… and all those in our wakes.” The shadow in his eyes makes it all too clear to Mia; he is deathly, horribly afraid that Alfonse and Allie will be added to that list.

…His children.

Orphans, by his hand… but children that he nevertheless cared for and loved. In the way that my father never did. Never had the capacity to.

…I did not believe the man we fought in the Praetorium had that capacity either. I still don’t, and I doubt he did when he destroyed those children’s families before.

…But what about this man before me?

Mia suddenly releases her grip, and Gaius staggers and nearly falls over before regaining his footing. He rubs his shoulder and grimaces as he straightens back up and meets her gaze once more. “I don’t deserve your trust either, Mia,” he says quietly. “And I will not ask for it. But… there is something I would ask of you.”

She clenches and unclenches her fists, stretching her fingers out, her lips tightly pressed against each other as she breathes. “...What?”

“…Please hold me to account. Even if the Alliance will not.”

“…You’ve asked the same of Valdeaulin and Severa, have you not?”

“I have. And to their judgments, I will also submit.” The look Gaius fixes her with is filled with resolve—and none of the fury she had seen in his grey eyes when she destroyed his eyepiece in the Praetorium. “...But before then… in this moment… I must right the wrongs I have committed. Whether or not the Alliance believes it meet or just for me to do so… whether or not my children believe otherwise. I must face my sins and bear the weight of the consequences inflicted on not just me, but so many innocent peoples.” He does not waver. “And though you may not trust me… I certainly trust that you are capable of putting me back on that hook.”

And mayhaps for the first time ever, Mia sees Gaius Baelsar’s mouth curl into a wry smile. “You have done so once already, after all.”

Mia’s gaze flicks down, then up, scanning him from head to toe. She sighs out a deep exhale and meets his eyes once more. “I didn’t do it alone.” Ellie’s and Lily’s faces, smiling kindly upon her, surge to the forefront of her mind.

“...No, I suppose not.” He lets out a small huff. “I believe that’s proof enough you were right all along.”

For the first time ever, Mia favors him with a wry smile too.

“Gaius—Mia—I hate to interrupt.” She’s shocked from her reverie and turns to see Severa at the head of the alleyway, her brow knit in concern as she looks between them. “But we have to address Allie’s situation.”

“Allie?” Mia’s veins freeze over once more.

Gaius breathes a deep, exhausted sigh and plaintively looks at her. “It seems I must ask you for that favor even sooner than I had hoped.”

[scout-company]

Stellar Acclimation—Chapter 10: Back in the Day

Scout eventually finds Semyon behind the door opposite the storage hallway. Once he peeks his head around the corner.

“There ya are!” she crackles as she scurries over to the door, “Where in tarnation did ya go?”

Semyon just grins and eagerly waves his hand inwards. “C’mon, I want to show you something!”

Scout shakes her head with a fizzing sigh and crackle, but can’t deny her bubbling curiosity. She starts to cross the landing, but then finds the door sliding shut in her face when Semyon walks away from it. 

“Oi! Sem!” she exclaims with a startled pop, tilting her head and ducking a bit just to peek through the window that was probably designed to be easy for people shorter than her and Semyon to see through.

“Whoops! Sorry about that!” Semyon apologizes with an embarrassed laugh as he quickly hurries back to the door, taps something on his side of it, and it opens back up with a whoosh.

“…What is this room, anyhow?” she wonders as she steps past the door.

“This is the medbay,” Semyon says brightly, “Probably one of the most specialized rooms in the ship aside from the control room.”

The medbay is somehow even more perfectly sterile and neat than the rest of the ship. There’s at least two tables, not unlike the work table in Bronzemarch’s hut back home, except they’re made of a sleek white material, possibly painted metal, and they’re decked with even more bottles and indecipherable equipment. Plus a few offline screens. Behind the work tables the floor raises a step, where a large and fancy, if over-complicated, bed—that even has a partial roof of its own for some reason—sits.

“That bed don’t look comfy,” Scout observes.

Semyon laughs with an off-kilter smile that Scout almost guesses is nostalgic somehow as he notes, “It’s comfier than it looks, I’ll tell you that.”

“Even with all them doo-dads and bright lights around?” she pops, gesturing to the bed and its peculiar array of monitors and the odd tube tucked behind its backboard.

“Well the mattress is nice, at least.”

Scout tilts her head at him, the ends of her corona flicking up. “What, you’ve been on it before?”

Again Semyon’s expression squishes to one side as he itches the back of his neck. “Yeah, off and on,” he admits, “I spent quite a while in here a few years ago.”

“For trainin’ with ol’ Bronze-head?”

Semyon’s itching moves to the corner of his jaw while he casts a long glance at the bed. “Partly.”

Curiosity bubbles idly in Scout’s plasma, making her bob float a bit more against the ship’s artificial gravity. She fizzes, “Only partly? What else would ya be doin’ in here?”

“Eh…” Semyon’s itching intensifies, wandering back to his neck for several moments before he steps around the weird bed and gestures for Scout to follow him to another door behind it, all the while repeatedly glancing at her and back at the bed as he stutters, “L-let’s go this way. There’s some stuff over here you might find more interesting.”

Weird. Semyon’s a jumpy guy sometimes, sure. But that wasn’t just jumpy. What’s he beating around the bush about?

Scout tilts her head the other way at him and bubbles confusedly while Semyon again taps something next to the door—a small panel, it looks like—She doesn’t move to follow him until he waves her to come on with one hand, his other lightly placed on another panel on the other side of the door. 

Past the door is a short set of stairs in a smaller room, again lit by those orange lights that Scout outshines. Semyon ascends the stairs in just two steps; Scout takes a couple more hops. But then she finds herself in what she can only assume is a tiny lab. Or it was, at one point.

The steel framing in the walls is more exposed in this room, giving it an industrial feel. An empty white bookcase marks the invisible threshold between the short stairs and the lab area; and on the opposite side of it is another door, flanked by a black and white desk on one side and a small counter with a sink on the other. Both the desk and the sink have cupboards in the same clean colors bolted into the walls above them. But the only thing atop either the desk or counter is a cardboard box that might have been laid perfectly square atop the desk before the ship’s takeoff nudged it askew. 

Semyon stands roughly in the middle of the small room and gestures around, prompting, “What do you think?”

“Kinda…small for a lab, ain’t it?” she fizzes, meandering across the room, running her hand along the cold steel wall as she goes. She can feel the ship thrum beneath her fingers, the warm power from its engines a ghost of a resonance in her brand. It’s a fascinating sensation.

“Yeah, it’s kinda tiny, I guess,” Semyon meanwhile admits. “But it’s really all that Drew needed, back in the day, so…”

Scout is only half listening, but she catches enough to ask, “Back in which day?”

“Back when the Icarus had a full crew. Drew was the chemical engineer.”

That statement catches more of Scout’s attention, and she turns away from her hand still resting on the thrumming wall to look at Semyon. She bubbles, “Wait, ol’ Bronze-head had a crew?”

Semyon laughs a bit, his expression squishing in the way it always does whenever Scout uses Bronzemarch’s nickname out of his earshot, but then he clarifies, “He didn’t have the crew. He was the chief medical officer, not the captain.”

“So that’s why S.A.I.L. keeps callin’ him Officer,” Scout realizes. Then she casts another glance around the small lab, feeling the ship at large continue to thrum, and wonders, “So…where’d the rest of ‘em go?”

Semyon shrugs, expression melting from amused to…indifferent? Scout can’t quite tell; his frown is twisted in a way she doesn’t see on him very often. But it’s not quite sad—or maybe it is; hard to tell—as he says simply, “Retired. Same as Bronzemarch. It’s not like there was much point in sticking around after…uh…everything that happened with Earth and the Protectorate. So…”

“Earth? Protectorate?”

For some reason Scout’s bewildered bubble makes Semyon freeze and stare at her like she’s grown an extra brand. Shock widens his eyes and freezes his expression there until he blinks and glances away, dragging a hand down his mouth and chin while staggeringly muttering, “You don’t…? N-no, of course you wouldn’t…” in a voice so low it rumbles under the ship’s thrumming. “Uh…”

“What?”

Semyon keeps glancing at her and away from her like he’s not sure how to look at her straight without being blinded. His hand freezes on his chin, pulling at the longer curls in his beard. But eventually he takes a breath deep enough to make his shoulders visibly raise, then says haltingly, “The Protectorate was…this big organization for a while. But then Earth got blown apart, like, six years ago and the Protectorate kinda…followed suit. Eventually. I guess.”

Scout just tilts her head, staring at Semyon and only managing to parse some sense out of half of his statement. Earth was a place, clearly. Maybe a headquarters? She asks, “So were y’all part of this Protectorate thingy?”

“Not really. Technically. O-or at least I wasn’t. Technically,” Semyon corrects, “This ship was, though.”

Scout keeps her head tilted at him, doing her best to parse his weirdly dodgy face. “…Yer actin’ mighty strange,” she eventually observes out loud. “You ok?”

Semyon’s face flushes red briefly, his hand finally pulling away from his chin to wave a too-fast dismissal as he claims, “Y-yeah, I’m fine.” He itches the back of his neck again as if that’ll make the red in his face calm down—which it does, but Scout can’t tell if it’s because of his intense itching—and then he walks over to the door between the desk and sink, waving Scout over with his other hand. “A-anyway,” he declares, firmly changing topic, “Come over here. This might be more interesting to you.”

Scout stares at him for a moment longer, bewilderment making her plasma churn idly, but then she shrugs with a pop and walks over.

The ship’s thrumming gets louder the closer Scout gets to the door Semyon is standing by. And the resonance of the ship’s power rings stronger in her brand—not quite the same ringing as her dagger; it’s more textured—as she brushes her hand along the wall by the door. There’s another one of those panels by the doorframe, this time on Scout’s side. So she taps it to open the door before Semyon can.

And is instantly bombarded by sound and resonance. The thrumming becomes a roar, the power becomes a storm of discord in the nicks in her brand. Even the orange lights in front of her and behind her grow too bright. She can’t focus. Can’t hardly register anything more than blurs of orange, a pop of blue somewhere, and a smudge of purple darting in front of her. She barely even registers herself sparking with a sharp whistle as she staggers back.

Until the door slides—slams—back closed again. She registers a hand at her back and realizes Semyon is straddled between holding her up and planting a hand on the door’s panel, eyes wide with worry. “Scout! Are you ok?!” he frets.

Scout winces slightly as his voice rumbles a bit too loudly next to her brand, compounding with the echoes of all that other stimuli, but she manages to stumble back a foot and fizzle, “Loud…” 

“I am so sorry,” Semyon apologizes with wide eyes and a deep frown, emphasizing his words yet lowering his voice to a gentler rumble. 

“‘S’ok…” Scout manages. She rubs her face to try and overrule the buzzing echoes in her head, being careful to not touch the aching nicks in her brand, while Semyon ever-so-gently maneuvers away from the door and backs her away from it with him. 

While he backs the both of them away from the door Semyon continues, “I-I thought you’d like the engine room; I didn’t realize it would be—”

Scout cuts him off once the worst of the echoes in her core have calmed down, mimicking the hand-wave gesture he always uses. Everything is still edging on too-bright in the lab—even though most of that light is reflecting from herself—but it’s almost tolerable now. Maybe. So she manages to fizz, “M-maybe we’ll try again when the ship ain’t goin’ FTL.”

Semyon huffs a quiet, slightly awkward laugh, “Y-yeah, that might be best.”

~~~~~

<< Previous || Next >>

[unoisveimved-un-proffesional]

From @weiszklee

Hmmm, I think this is because of a natural evolution of conservatism. You remember when Elon Musk supposedly identified as a leftist? Well, what I think it’s all about is the progression of time. As time moves on and society changes, those who once identified as centrists will say “But we liked it how it was lets go back!” And boom, conservatives. Leftists of the past will go “Yeah! This exactly how I want it. I’m fine now. No more change.” Boom, centrist. And conservatives will go “No, no oh god it keeps going forward! Make it stop!” And become more and more extreme.

Time moves them from left to right, unless they’re willing to hold their ground and change with time but relatively stick in place, move forward personally, or be what moves time forward, they’ll end up quite literally falling behind, becoming more and more resistance being begrudgingly pulled their backs pushed right up against the right side wall, until they decide to get together and push back, try to drag the world backwards, no more new things. If you want to maintain your spot on the spectrum, take tiny steps forward, and if you want to go left, keep running, hitch and hike to the end, but if you want to go right, hold still and time will take you there. Some of us don’t gotta worry, we’re far enough left that as long as we make a little leap gradually, we’ll be ahead of time. I don’t really like using the one dimensional left right spectrum, but it’s a very handy metaphor for being able to visualize politics, people, and time. It’s just about moving forward, and dragging the world behind you forward with you, hopefully with the help of others. And until we discover that next frontier that changes our perception, time remains a one dimensional constant movement.

The increasing radicalisation of conservatives has to probably do also with the ease of access to information, community, and the spreading of memes, and yes, I am unironically using memes in its old term definition. In America though, it was kicked off in a way by an abrasive businessman who knew what really sold; outrage, arrogance, and pride, and so that’s what he sold, to a specific kind of outrageous arrogant and prideful person just waiting to hear the Right words, and it’s been becoming the norm of a right winger in the US to believe in those things, spread like wildfire through the ease of access to talkers and con men streaming and social media provide. You don’t have to go to a debate hall, read the newspaper or just talk to a friend about politics, there’s a whole world of faceless and famous people right here easily accessible for you to be influenced by and converse with. It’s contributed to the growth of both sides of the spectrum honestly, for better and worse, how I like it, distilled human chaos compacted into morsels of light and sound.

Personally, I like it more now. I like when things are moving, noticeably, and can’t stand dead things. Dead lands, dead trees, dead wind, dead bodies, it freaks me out. I’m more afraid of things that are supposed to move not moving than things that aren’t supposed to move moving. I just like to see action happening, it feels nice to live in a living world, and long drawn out stalemates are boring. This is more how I feel than how I think, it’s what the heart says.

Anyway, fascists of today are the normal conservatives of the past, who want to artificially move time backwards so they may seem more like normal conservatives, maybe even centrists of their perfect time.

That’s right baby it all comes back to the good ol’ human condition and our relationships with our world and our fellow human beings and how we grapple with ever growing fleeting past, the unyielding march of time, and the uncertain and strange future can I get an aaaaaamen?

Speaking of the march of time it is 4 AM I should be in bed.

“The paradox of conservatism is they want being normal to be punk. They want to rebel against authority while being the ones in power. They want to be rugged individuals and they think everyone should be the same as them. They want to overcome adversity while staying in the majority.” -@innuendostudios on twitter

[envysnest]

Snakeskin (Sephiroth/Reader) (ch. 11/?)

AO3 / Pillowfort

Rating: Explicit

Chapters: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14

Tags: First Time, Reader-Insert, Hurt/Comfort, Bittersweet Ending, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Frank Discussions of Past Rape/Abuse, Everyone is Queer, Canon-Compliant (if you squint), Pre-Crisis-Core Seph, Slow Burn, i continue to disappoint my friends and family, sephiroth is a virgin and in this essay i will, Reader is a Cis Woman, fluffy sex, Praise Kink, Gratuitous Biochemistry

Summary:

You are a young biologist, fresh out of graduate school, working in Shinra's R&D Division under Professor Hojo. You had long since given up on finding a partner and starting a family, preferring instead the company of your cell samples and your scientific instruments.

As the conflict in Wutai worsens, you strike up an unexpected friendship with a First Class SOLDIER.

(Sephiroth/Reader Slow Burn)

TW's for this chapter: Gore and blood (the first section before the page break), nosebleeds (the first two sections).

---

You feel warm. You are outside. Long grass waves in the wind. Midgar does not have long grass. You are sitting in the grass. 

Sephiroth sits cross-legged in front of you. He asks you something. You can’t hear him. 

He smiles and asks again. It’s like he’s speaking through fabric. The birds are singing. They’re very loud. The wind picks up.

You open your mouth to ask, What did you say?

Something warm spills out instead. It is blood. You look into your lap, at your hands. There is so much blood. The birds are singing. No, those aren’t the birds: a live audience is laughing at you. Sephiroth ignores them. 

What? you ask, but you don’t hear your own voice. The audience laughs harder.

Sephiroth sits there and smiles. His teeth are stained with blood. Whose blood?

You touch your fingers to your nose; it is bleeding, too. Your blood?

The sun is bright. You can’t see.

Something is wrong.

Something is wrong, you think. Something is—

---

Your Shinra-co. Sunrise Alarm was on; its lamp shone directly in your face. Gentle, pre-recorded birdsong drifted through your bedroom. You groaned and swatted at the air. After a few tries, your hand found plastic. 

The birdsong stopped; the the alarm clock’s light dimmed to nothing.

The radiator hissed and spat as you sat up. It was unbearably warm in your apartment; your lips were cracked and parched. You rolled back over and stared at the wall. At eye level was Sephiroth’s note, the one you had saved from Saturday morning. 

Be back soon. Had a training thing I couldn’t get out of. Anything in the fridge is yours. Seph.

Had this weekend been real? 

Had you collapsed into bed on Friday night, exhausted from work, and hallucinated your way through a holiday?

Had you begun sleepwalking and writing notes to yourself, lost in a delirious stupor?

You coughed, and the faint, metallic tang of blood crept up the back of your throat. For a second, panic gripped you: metal glinting, gore dripping onto grass, artificially-blue eyes—

You touched your fingers to your nose. They came away red. A few drops of blood stained your pillow. 

---

It was, at last, the end of the holiday season. Shinra employees returned to the office bleary-eyed and unfocused, as if they had walked into work by accident. You tried saying hello; many looked away or scowled back. You couldn’t blame them: you were barely lucid yourself. 

You had spent the previous night obsessively flipping through Shinra’s promotional material. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on Sephiroth: his hair, his voice, his fighting style, the way he held Masamune. Like sticky children, they ripped apart every inch of footage they could find, dissecting every second of Sephiroth’s life. It was exhausting to watch. You crawled into bed at one in the morning, feeling cold and violated yourself.

Eager to hide, you took your morning coffee back to your cubicle. A fresh e-mail from Hojo (c.c. Lazard) blinked on your laptop screen: Presentation Schedule [ μ ] – εуλ 2000, sent at some bizarre weekend hour. Your heart sank: you were scheduled for a department-wide presentation in April. 

Hojo had forwarded you a second copy minutes after the first:

Doctor, This will be an exciting opportunity for us both. I will be submitting my annual performance review shortly after your presentation. Please ensure the data you present are representative of the high standard I hold this laboratory to. Warmly, -H. Senior Biochemist III, Shinra Corporation R&D  Shin-Msg ID no. 9413 “A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”

You folded your arms and rested your forehead against them. Shinra’s fiscal year turned over shortly after your presentation slot. You would already be held to Lazard’s standard (excruciating), and now Hojo could blame you if he didn’t get a promotion (irritating, angering, infuriating, undeserved). Never mind that Hojo’s department had the retention rate of a sieve; never mind that you had to beg around for equipment and samples. A year into your work, and your main job had become repairing Hojo’s tarnished reputation, taking complaints with a smile. You felt your mood sour rapidly. The man himself seemed to be constantly stealing your—

“Professor?” Hammond.

You didn’t pick your head up off the desk. “Samples are gone,” you groaned, “right?” 

“Marce asked me to ask you,” Hammond replied. He shifted his weight on the cubicle wall, folded his own arms and rested his chin on them to mimic you. “She told me not to tell you that, though.”

Did you tell Hammond about Hojo’s casual theft? Shinra— with its labyrinthian clearance levels and endless NDA’s— wasn’t especially forgiving when information got into the wrong hands. You weren’t sure how much Hammond knew: for example, if there were more biochemistry labs beyond this one, or what Shinra might need them for. Truthfully, you weren’t sure, yourself. 

You spoke to him carefully. “QC picks samples randomly. They check purity so that we can back up anything we publish.”

“Oh.” This answer seemed to satisfy him. He scratched the back of his neck. His hair was shorter, you realized; perhaps the barber had nicked him there.

Eager to change the subject, you said, “That cut looks nice on you, Hammond.”

He grinned. “Like it?” He pulled at a stray curl near his forehead. “I wanted something professional. Something that said, Shinra Biochemistry.”

You smiled. “Next time, I’ll get a shave and tell them to dye Shinra Biochemistry across the back.” You drew a line behind your own skull to demonstrate. “In bright red.”

Hammond threw back his head and laughed. “Hell no! Hojo would have a fit.”

“I’ll say it was my idea.” You waved a hand. “Anyway. Can you please check on the mass spec data for that replicate? Let’s see if the glucose receptors hit that polysaccharide a third time.”

Hammond rolled his eyes and gave a playful salute. “Sure thing, boss.”

“Gooooo.” You mimicked pushing Hammond away from you. “Now. Or I’ll walk the three blocks to Morlund’s and buy the hair dye.”

After Hammond had left, you woke up your computer and stared at Hojo’s e-mail. Something nudged you: it had barely been twenty-four hours, but this seemed as good an excuse as any. 

You opened Shinra’s chat messenger and took a photo of Hojo’s signature. For a few tense seconds, you stared at the blinking text indicator. You still hadn’t replied to Sephiroth’s message from the night before. 

Will he be upset if I don’t?

You shoved the thought away and typed:

>>I hate everything about this signature.

You set your phone down next to your keyboard and wrung your hands. Your phone stayed silent. Feeling bile rise in your throat, you tried to draft an e-mail that wasn’t Stop stealing my samples or Please stop e-mailing me forever I quit goodbye also fuck you. 

Halfway into your fifth draft, your phone buzzed.

>>This was before your time, but this one was…special.

There was a picture attached. You cupped your hand around your phone screen and zoomed in. Sephiroth had taken a photo of his own computer screen; when you turned up the brightness, you could see his reflection in his computer. He had pulled up an old e-mail form Hojo that ended with, “My time is precious. Please be brief and straightforward in replies.”

You sighed with relief. If Sephiroth was joking with you, then maybe…this weekend wasn’t a hallucination, after all.

You replied:

>>Shiva’s tits hahaha >> was he always like this??

Sephiroth:

>>Yes. Like a moldy lemon.

You covered your mouth to keep the laugh in.

>>I don’t know what you mean but I know what you mean

He replied:

>>Can explain Fri. Have to go…be good...

Your breath caught. Sephiroth wasn’t a stupid man; surely the Friday reminder was a passive-aggressive way of telling you you hadn’t responded to his text. And what did the punctuation mean? You scrolled up and down through the conversation, but there was no mixed message you could identify. Had you said something wrong? Perhaps you could apologize in-person.

Or…

Or maybe he was teasing you. You could hear— feel— his whisper in your ear: Be good.

You ran your thumb over the message. The messenger app moved: up down up down.

---

You veered away from your usual walk home. You couldn’t stand to look at the defaced poster again. Even thinking about it made you feel hot with shame; as if you, personally, aided the death of thousands for a paycheck.

Aren’t you? you thought. You’re sleeping with a murderer for free.

You took a wrong turn and kept walking. It was usually dark when HQ let out for the evening, but the blackness now felt total, suffocating. Sector 8’s street-cleaning bots enthusiastically salted the sidewalks, leaving patchy white stains on your trouser cuffs.

This guilt wasn’t something to process in therapy. Shinra had birthed Midgar, and it clung to it like a stubborn mother. You couldn’t risk word getting out about your…thing. Most research was either funded by Shinra, or by a company hoping to be bought out by Shinra. 

Most of the High Street stores still had holiday decorations up. A cafe full of people yawned open, spilling onto the sidewalk; it was warm and damp inside. A huddle of musicians smoked cigarettes by the dumpster. You looked down, away from them, as you passed.

Even your advisor had been funded by a Shinra research grant; that alone had gotten your foot in the door. Everyone said it would be a good job, a good company, a great way to start your career. You trusted your therapist, but everyone had a price.

A couple of girls from the Sector 8 Community College walked arm-in-arm, giggling. You squeezed to one side to let them pass you.

And what about what Shinra was doing abroad? You weren’t stupid: you saw the news. It had to be for something. It was no secret Wutai despised its own people. They didn’t have reliable clean water there; they relied on water filter donations. To disguise cities from drones, the government cut the power off at night. Midgar’s refugee and migrant communities went dark at 8 pm out of habit. Wutaian hospitals used smaller generators, powered with natural gas, to run. Mako energy could power thirty ventilators where oil and gas could power one; mako was cheaper, too. 

If your research succeeded, if Shinra succeeded, mako could also deliver life-saving cures. Wutai’s parliament and royal family seemed to value ego over their country’s well-being. If only they didn’t fan the flames of petty nationalism; if only they accepted Shinra’s help.

Shinra was trying to help.

Right?

You cut through a small public square. An older couple ahead of you walked their dog at a glacial pace. You forced yourself to slow down.

Shinra could transition Wutai to cleaner, more reliable mako energy; Shinra could supply mako-derived medical treatments. They’d even build the infrastructure for free. What were a few more power plants, when they already powered the Eastern Continent?

And besides, you couldn’t possibly leave Midgar. Everyone you knew was already here. A new city would mean leaving them all behind. 

It would mean leaving Sephiroth behind, too.

Now outside of the square, you came face-to-face SOLDIER recruitment poster. Its edges were torn. A different Sephiroth was here, reaching out to an awestruck boy. Sephiroth’s blue eyes were benevolent. 

Always looking out for—

Metal, laughter, gore, grass—

Your heart seized in your chest. You turned sharply, nearly running into the couple and their dog. They looked up, the wife’s eyes wide. The husband said something in Japanese: maybe friendly, maybe hostile, but a phrase you didn’t recognize. The dog’s tail wagged slowly.

With a mumbled apology, you escaped into the nearest store. A metal bell jangled above you.

You leaned against the glass and tried to catch your breath. The tile below you was a sunny orange; you stared at it, traced the lines between tiles. Soothing folk radio played over the speakers. 

When you looked up, a row of rainbow objects greeted you. 

For a moment, you couldn’t make sense of what you were looking at— until you looked behind you, at leather harnesses of all shapes and colors hanging on the walls. The rainbow objects in front of you had a familiar shape.

In your distraction, you had run into a sex shop. 

You closed your eyes. Of all the places to end up.  The irony was cruel. You weren’t even sure this shop existed: maybe this, too, was a cruel trick of the light. As far as you could tell, you were the only customer. It would look strange, perhaps even prudish, to run out (though every part of you wanted to run). 

Straightening up and clutching your bag, you began a slow wander through the shop.

The shelves before you boasted dildos, vibrators, plugs: all shapes and sizes and colors. Some were so artfully designed, you couldn’t imagine how to use them. You felt heat flush your cheeks as you scanned the options. The cheaper offerings featured scantily-clad women leering at the viewer; you were sure that some were computer-generated. Out of habit, you looked down at your own body. (Hidden by your coat, and memory liked to lie.) You moved on.

A dark purple bookshelf, packed full, sat next to the harness wall behind you. You squinted at the titles: The Modern Sutra, F*cking With Confidence. There was an entire shelf for queer erotica. Even the usual gil-store fluff (labeled HOLDAY SALE!!!) was here, too.

Seph would like those, you thought. 

You shook your head and looked away. Enough of him, you scolded yourself, you’re obsessed.

The heat inside the shop was stifling. Harsh fluorescent bulbs ran the length of the front counter, illuminating velvet stands of body jewelry. The cashier, pink-haired and pale, smiled at you before returning to their phone. Behind them was a hand-written sign: NO WALK-INS FOR PIERCING!!!!!

A makeshift sex toy museum ran the far wall. An immaculate glass container boasted an old, cracking leather harness. A wooden dildo jutted proudly from its center. 

In the 1800’s, said the plaque, medical doctors believed vaginal penetration could aid with female “hysteria.” 

I need that. You snorted, hoping to appear cool and knowledgable, but you were sure your blush gave you away. Clearly something was wrong with you if you were this flustered and frightened at a fake dick. Stupid girl.

Your palms were sweaty and stifling under your winter gloves. Your eyes traveled the length of the harness. It had clearly been well-loved.

Another thought came to you, uncontrolled, unfiltered: Sephiroth looking up at you from under his lashes, his ears red, his chest bare and glistening under your hands as you—

“Need help finding something?”

You recoiled and looked up. The cashier was watching you over the counter, smiling.

“No,” you said, and you winced at how loud you were. You tried again: “No, I’m fine.”

“Alright, hon,” they said jovially. “You just let me know.”

As they finally turned back to their phone, you deflated with relief. You took off your gloves. You looked past the museum to a small velvet room. Lingerie decorated the walls. Blessed escape: you ducked inside to hide from scrutiny. You shoved the gloves in your pocket.

The tinny music was muted here. A row of headless mannequins sported corsets that looked far too expensive for you. Single pairs of panties lay draped across a shelf: baby-pink, black, cream, robin’s-egg-blue. You felt a pair between your finger and thumb; the silk was weightless against your skin. A photo of a judgemental drag queen was nestled among the offerings. SMILE, GIRL, said the caption, YOU’RE BEING RECORDED!  Her eyes followed you as you turned to the bra shelf. We carry up to 46 GG !!, said a hand-written sign, complete with a clumsy smiley-face. 

There were stockings here, too: crotchless, fishnet, thigh-highs.  Their counterparts, still in their beautiful embossed boxes, sat on a shelf nearby. 

You hesitated over these. Lingerie wasn’t something you normally liked; what was the point? It was expensive, and no one would see it, anyway. You didn’t want to admit the sorry and ragged state of your intimates. Your cotton underwear had become loose and tattered over years of re-use. You wore the same drugstore tights until they snagged, and when they did, you bought an identical pair for less than 1000 gil. Your best bra cups were connected by a few nylon strings and a prayer.  

But—

Cut it out, you thought, but it was too late.

But Sephiroth had touched your drugstore stockings like he had loved them, loved you in them. I wish I could have you through these, he said; at least, wasn’t that what he said? Didn’t he look pleased with you? 

Was he just trying to be nice? 

The memory warped in your head: Sephiroth laughing at you when your back was turned, Sephiroth thinking only about how horrible the tights felt. How ratty; how cheap. They didn’t even fit you anymore, after all. He probably saw how they bit your skin and dug into your waist. You clearly didn’t know what you were doing.

Anger bubbled up inside of you. What did he know? What gave him the right? He’s a man, you thought. He’s never even touched nice ones.

And then, with a jolt: He’s never touched them at all. He wouldn’t know that stockings could look better, feel better, than yours. Surely he had seen better in porn; you know you had. Your thriftiness seemed obvious to you, at least by sight.

But.

You touched the crotchless stockings with your fingertips. They were made of the same silk as the panties. There were even small, embroidered hearts near the waistband. Maybe they didn’t come in your size, and you held your breath. No: a quick glance through the boxes, and your size was there. They were even within your budget. 

Would he even want to sleep with you again? What if you bought these, and he never wanted to see you again? 

You looked into your bag. At the very bottom were your keys, and on the keyring was the FOB to Sephiroth’s apartment.

Buy it for you, urged a small voice in your head. Just buy it for you.

You found your size in black; at the very least, these could be worn under a work skirt. The packaging was heavy, sturdy. You took it to the counter, resisting the urge to hide it between your hands as you did.

“Find everything okay?” chirped the cashier.

You nodded, not meeting their eyes. You stared at the buttons decorating their shirt instead. THE PLANET IS FOR EVERYONE, said one. #STANDWITHWUTAI said another. You could recognize the A for Avalanche. 

“I like your pins,” you said quietly.

The cashier grinned and looked down at them. “Thanks!” They gestured idly at their lapel. “There’s a craft fair in Sector 5 once a month. I usually get some there.”

“Oh,” you said. You fished around in your wallet. “That’s, um, that’s cool.”

They nodded. “Cash or card? We take ShinPay now, too.” 

You hadn’t set up your phone for ShinPay. You sheepishly handed over your card. If the cashier thought any less of you for your corporate attire, they didn’t say so. They bounced on their heels as you both waited for the transaction to resolve.

You took your card and the plastic bag with a thankssomuch and shoved both deep into your work bag, not even bothering to return your card to your wallet. You barely registered the cashier saying, “Enjoy!” as you scurried out of the shop. The cold winter air felt like a blessing against your skin.

As you wrestled the gloves back on, you locked eyes with the poster Sephiroth. That stupid, benevolent smile: he knew what you had just purchased. 

You scowled at him.

---

J - 180 - L - 9177 hadn’t grown after your last split. You tilted the plate; a few lonely cells slid to the bottom, sloshing helplessly around in their media. The cells seemed to have gone dormant again.

You didn’t have an excuse to dose these cells with mako tonight, but you suspected that mako had made them grow. It was hard to tell if they were consuming a normal food source in its absence. Did they need the liquid media for anything more than electrolytes? Could it even be hurting them?

You chewed the inside of your cheek and set the plate down. 

What if the cells had a steady supply of mako, rather than fresh liquid media? 

You tapped one gloved finger against the fume hood bench in a nervous staccato. The chemists weren’t even close to characterizing all of mako’s components. Did it even have the ingredients to support life? Was there more to mako than what it did to SOLDIERs?

Would J - 180 - L - 9177  continue to grow until the cells starved each other out? 

Or would they fight for resources, like frightened rats in a cage?

Would they—

“Still here?”

You looked up. Sephiroth had just poked his head around the corner. His gloved hand lingered on the doorframe, as if you had caught him mid-movement. 

You blinked. Your head felt fuzzy, like an old car trying to shift gears. You were still stuck on  J - 180 - L - 9177. As you continued to stare at him, he turned his head just so, as if silently asking again: Still here?

You stammered.“You…you came back? Here?”

His eyes flashed like he was about to laugh, but he cleared his throat instead. He slunk into the doorframe. The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. “I live here,” he said.

“Oh.” You waved one hand around inside the hood.  “No, what I…what I meant was that you’re, um. Not…don’t you have, like, a mission?”

He stepped closer to you. He wore the standard SOLDIER turtleneck under his uniform coat. “I’ll be out of HQ in ten hours. Or...” He fished around in his pocket for his phone and glanced at the screen. “Nine hours now.”

You looked up at him, tapping the edge of the hood. “And you’re visiting me?”

Sephiroth pocketed his phone with a guilty smile. “Is now not a good time?”

How you hated that effect he had on you; how you hated his soft voice. How you wanted to fall into his arms. “It’s a fine time,” you breathed.

“Should I wait here for you?”

“Yeah, you…you can sit?” You nodded towards the spare chair: the one that was a little too small for him. “Like. Only if you want.”

You turned back to the cells, but you were focused on Sephiroth’s breathing, the shift of his clothing, his footsteps on the tile. It was as if he had grabbed your attention out of the air, like it was some tangible thing. He didn’t reach for the other chair; instead, his footsteps stopped somewhere to your right. 

You had just ejected fresh media onto the plate when something brushed the back of your neck. 

You gasped, hand flying to your skin, but there was nothing there. 

You looked up at Sephiroth, who had now withdrawn his hand. The two of you stared at each other for a heavy moment. Your cheeks burned.

He tilted his head. “Did I startle you?”

“There are cameras in this lab,” you said. You turned away from him and sprayed your hands with isopropyl alcohol again.

“Not here,” he replied. He was right: the cell culture room was a blind spot in Hojo’s kingdom. Had it not been, your secret cultures might have been found weeks ago.

“I…don’t know why I said that.” You stuck your hands back in the fume hood. You looked up at his confused face, his bemused smile. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to jump.”

His brow smoothed over with obvious relief. “You can tell me if you don’t want me to touch you.”

Your mouth twisted; you felt admonished. “Yeah, I know.”

“Was it bad?” That gentle, conspiratorial tone again, the very same one that you pictured Be good in. He didn’t have to put a finger on you, and you felt like he was touching you again. 

You smiled, then tried to stop smiling, then smiled anyway. “Just didn’t expect it.” You loaded a fresh glass pipette, set to mixing the fresh media. You tried to angle the plate away from him, so he wouldn’t see those strange gray cells. 

He didn’t seem to notice. “But did you enjoy it?”

You sheathed the used pipette in its plastic wrapping and threw it into the sharps. It felt good to feel him on you, albeit through his gloves. If you had been able to see him coming, you would’ve welcomed the touch. 

But no: if you had seen him reach for you, you would’ve shied away, too. 

Worry bubbled up in your mind. What did it mean when you wanted something— wanted something small, tender, even less than what you two had already shared— and still felt afraid of it? What were you supposed to do now? 

Metal, grass—

You capped the plate and updated the label.

He asked, “Is that a no?”

“I, um, actually don’t…don’t know?”

“Then I’ll ask an easier question.” He leaned against the bench to your right and crossed his arms. “Would you like me to do it again?”

Yes, you thought, with not a little guilt. Again.

“I…” 

You stared at the cell plate. You twiddled the marker between your index and thumb: a leftover tic from undergrad. Sephiroth said nothing. You could feel his eyes on you. 

Was there a right answer? Was the right answer yes?

When you looked up to meet his eye, he tilted his head. He didn’t seem at all upset with you.

You slowly capped the pen and nodded. You were rewarded when the corner of Sephiroth’s mouth quirked upwards, just so.

You tossed the marker into the hood. “Let me just…let me clean up. Please?”

“You don’t have to ask,” he replied, and your breath hitched at the memory that dug up. He gave no indication that he noticed the connection, unless— and maybe this was just your imagination— his eyes really had darted to the floor for a half-second. He backed away and stood in the doorframe again.

Your hands trembled as you tidied up after yourself; you avoided his eyes. The plates were sealed and labeled; you emptied the sharps bin into the larger, sturdier box below the fume hood. The plastic around the glass pipettes waved gently in the hood, and heaven help you, you thought of the stupid stockings. You thought of them, still in their stupid box on your stupid kitchen counter in your stupid home, and you had the wild, stupid urge to talk about them. Hey, I remembered you liked my tights for some reason, I was desperate enough to buy fetish tights for you, please fuck me again?

You put the plates in the incubator, careful to sandwich J - 180 - L - 9177 between your human cell plates until they were out of Sephiroth’s view.

You removed your gloves and threw them into the biohazard bin. Sephiroth took a step forward, but you said, “Wait,” and you draped your lab coat over the back of the chair. He put his hands behind his back as you approached him, looking like a patient student waiting his turn to speak. He looked like he was trying not to laugh. Desire flared in you.

You stopped in front of him, wringing your hands.

What now?

“Um,” you said. His chest was in front of you. You didn’t want to touch: didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, force your desire on him. “What…?”

He leaned forward. You could see his long hair spilling over his shoulder out of the corner of your eye. “Yes?”

“Can I hold you?” you whispered.

“Oh,” he sighed. “You—“

Just as you were about to back away and apologize, he reached to you. Ever-so-tenderly, he gathered you into his arms. You buried your face in his chest and found yourself impeded by the leather straps there; you rested your head to the side of them. His uniform smelled of fresh leather and sweat. You brushed your cheek against his pectoral muscle. He felt just as good as you remembered. The turtleneck was scratchy under your skin.

Still hesitant, still feeling desperate and wanting, you snaked your hands around his waist and squeezed. You felt him press his nose to the top of your head.

Everything in your mind went silent.

You held each other like this for several minutes, not speaking. You searched the cell chart on the wall in front of you, traced its familiar diagrams of Best Sterile Practice and Parts of the Cell and Media Handling. Sephiroth’s body felt surreal under you, as if you had never touched him before this. His breathing was so steady, his heartbeat thundering under your cheek.

This is real, you thought. This is real.

Was this the same man you had seen on your screen? How could it be? You remembered Sephiroth’s lost expression on the talk show, the way the audience laughed at him. You turned your head towards his coat lapel, ran your fingers over its outside until— yes— you felt the outline of the honeybee over the leather. It was still hiding there, flush against the turtleneck.

“Your heart is racing,” he said into your hair.

You shoved the sorry down into the pit of your belly, right there with the horrible nightmare and the defaced poster and the guilt. “Nervous.”

“About?”

You remembered Hojo’s e-mail from earlier in the week: the perfect excuse. You rolled your eyes against his chest. “I’m presenting to the department early this year,” you groaned. 

“Mm?” You could hear the smile in his voice. He seemed happy to just hold you and feel you talk against him. You weren’t even sure if he was listening; you continued anyway.

“Hojo told me he’s getting his yearly review after. Remember the e-mail? Apparently I should make him look good.”

“Are you not excited to do so?” He released you, hands lingering on your shoulders. His tone dripped with sarcasm as he simpered: “Doesn’t that simply delight you?”

“Ugh!” You looked up at the ceiling in mock offense. Sephiroth laughed. “No!” you said. “I’d rather die.”

“Professor, I am simply so disappointed in your work this quarter.”

You jumped and looked beyond Sephiroth’s shoulder. The doorway behind you two was empty. The lab doors hadn’t opened. Wasn’t Hojo home by now? 

You met Sephiroth’s eyes with alarm, but he was still smiling. He opened his mouth:

“I truly believed I could use you to make a nice bonus for myself.”

Sephiroth was speaking, but it was Hojo’s voice leaving his lips. 

You widened your eyes at him. “Huh?”

“I needed that for my second home in Costa del Sol.” The impression was flawless; you couldn’t hear his voice through it. He must have noticed your shock, because he smirked down at you. “And now you’ve RUINED IT.”

You stared at him.

And then you started to laugh.

“I don’t find the matter of my finances amusing,” Sephiroth snapped in Hojo’s voice.

“Oh. My god.” You couldn’t stop laughing. “Stop.”

“What ever will I do?” Sephiroth cried, gently shaking your shoulders. You snorted as you tried to catch your breath from laughing. “I’ll have to vacation in Junon!”

“Stop, stop!” 

“Like some commoner!”

You giggled and pushed against his chest. “Seph! That’s horrible!”

“What a shame,” Sephiroth purred. Hearing his voice again was a sharp relief. “I practiced just for you.”

“Please never ever do that again.” you gasped, swiping at the tears in your eyes. “It was. So scary.”

“I told you,” he said, “A force to be reckoned with.” He ran a thumb over your lips. “Finally,” he  mock-whispered. “She respects me.”

“Shush.” You stood on your tiptoes to peck him on the mouth. He hummed with pleasure underneath you. The sound made you shiver.

You waited until he opened his eyes again. “I’ve always respected you.”

The corner of his mouth quirked. He was looking at you so gently. “I know,” he breathed.

You tried to kiss him again, but he leaned away. Fear and disappointment surged through you until you saw his expression: still gentle, still focused on you. 

His voice was rough: “Save it for this weekend.”

You blinked. What if he didn’t want you to kiss him? 

Your stomach dropped. Had you done something wrong? You reviewed the way you had kissed him: too messy, perhaps? Too needy? You had a habit of being too much, after all. A mistake, then.

What you said was, “Okay.”

He chuckled. “Don’t sound so disappointed.” He rested a hand on your shoulder as he turned away. “I just don’t want to lead you on.”

“What does that mean?” you said to his back.

“What I said,” he said over his shoulder. He was still smiling at you as he disappeared around the corner. “Friday night. When we’re alone.”

“Wait!”

His voice carried across the lab. “Be good.”

“What—“

The lab doors opened and closed: thundering, final. Your arms still hung in midair, wrapped around nothing. 

Your voice echoed in the cell culture room. “What does that mean?” 

It was hard not to see malice in his smile. He was probably making fun of you after all. 

You gathered your lab coat. Your name was embroidered in mako blue under the Shinra logo; you ran your fingers over the stitching. 

With your luck, you’d come back to his apartment and find him standing there with all of SOLDIER and Shinra Biochemistry laughing at you. “Surprise!” he’d say. The banner above his head would say, You fell for it! You winced as you put your coat back on. Everyone would jeer at you in your outfit, in your crotchless tights, and you’d cry and run home barefoot and they’d laugh harder. 

Something in you hardened. You balled your fists at your side. “The tights are for you,” you said to yourself. He didn’t have a clue.

He also didn’t know that you were terrified.

---

Friday was overcast. On your way back from the office kitchenette, you heard a commotion near the elevators. The excited shouting was loud enough to cut through the glass between your cubicles and the 64th floor.

You craned your neck to look through the glass. A few scientists leaned over to join you.

Nothing happened at first: the 64th floor bustled as usual. A few people sat in the lounge near the escalators, staring at their tablets or talking over coffee or hunched over their phones.

Their heads turned in unison to the elevators. Confusion showed on their faces: they were looking at something specific.

One-by-one, their expressions turned to horror.

Genesis stormed past, holding his nose with a bitter expression. The fans trailing behind him seemed oblivious to his foul mood. The lounge employees stood.

You could make out bandaging under his fingers. The scientists near you murmured.

His nose had been broken, and he was trying to hide it.

He turned his head and glared at you through the glass. There was bruising under his left eye.

Your blood ran cold. A few steps later, and he was gone.

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