#it's all! so interesting!! and it makes my brain start churning its gears!!

[ostensiblyfunctional]

Sometimes I think about how the only God Slayers seen in Fairy Tail are ones that are direct parallels to Dragon Slayers. How God Slayers have practically the only form of a Dragon Slayer's element that actively hurts them to eat. And it starts making headcanons spawn like bunnies in my brain.

[nelapanela94]

Nela! Congrats on your 1k event! May I start with some fluff?! 3 and 13 combo sound like an interesting duo! One that would leave you with butterflies :)

Elizaaaaa!!!!

Thank you again!!!!

Here’s the dose of fluff we crave.

TW: Fluff, depiction of injuries

WC: 1.5k

1. “I can’t think straight with you!"

2. “I’d build you a palace.”

***

Sluggishly, Levi opens his eyes through the milky veil of sleepiness and weariness, a deep growl wrenching out from his chest, churning his dry throat. All the gears in his body creak back in place, muscles sore and strained, and his left side stabbing with pain. He smiles when the image clears and the first thing he sees is your face.

He winces at the burning sting sinking into the cradle of his elbow, and then comes your tinkling, soothing voice 'Don't move you, ass. You were injured in battle."

And that's when the large room smooths its edges and corners, rattling and agitated with nurses scuttling from beds to trays to the laundry rooms, the smell of alcohol, bleach and blood wafting in the air. So, this is how it feels like to be on the other end.

There's a first time for everything, isn't there?

The dull throb keeps him tethered in bed.

The last he remembers he was riding his horse, smoke signals blasting and swooshing above him, but against the bleak stage tarnished in gray, the colors were indistinguishable. Rain slashed down melted the roads. Sinewy drops hammered against his shoulders and back, holding a shroud through which you could only see death’s expectant eyes. He heard the shouting and cries, two new recruits he knew well. It was their first expedition. He closed his eyes and saw them, and had to make sure it wasn’t their last.

Whatever you put in him is making everything wobbly. The pain falters, and reality skid out of focus. He feels light, floating, adrift. No worries; no agonies.

A weak smile tugs one corner of his lips as he watches you. “You’re beautiful.”

Creases on your forehead pull up your brows in a grimace.

“Shut up!” You blush hard and avert the eyes, scratching an itch under you jaw, the way you do when you’re nervous. You turn to the tray and rummage for a pair of scissors and roll the sheets at his hips. From the hem of the sleeves, you shear his light blue button up, then another cut parallel to the buttons.

“That was my favorite.” He rasps, staring blankly at the ceiling.

“Why do you wear your favorite shirt for an expedition?”

“Admit you just want to see me naked.” He scoffs, and the sting of derisive stares pinch your back. Your peers glance at you, teasing stares and stifled giggles.

“I’m stitching your mouth.”

You remove the torn fabric, dispose it on a bucket standing by your feet, then unbuckle his pants to grant full access to the slash. and damn it, he’s so well built, muscles taut all the way down where the V and a sparse flare of hair dip under the elastic of his briefs. An army of ants march under your cheeks, and you swallow, pouring water to the fire stoked by your rebel hormones. You bite your lips and focus on your job, to clean the wound and make sure this jerk stays alive. Humanity depending on you right now.

“Kiss me instead.” He blurts, rolling his head from side to side on the pillow.

He keeps crossing back and forth the bridge of consciousness.

Through slivered open eyes, he traces the line of your forehead, curving at your nose, your brows knitted in concentration. Your lips juicy in calla Lilly pink.

He feels the needle and thread crawling through, making the two sides of skin re-encounter, the cells in each edge asking the other ‘where were you?’, adding another scar to the record. He wants to reach out and touch you, but his brain cells and nerve endings are on strike under the blurring medication.

Nonsense drips from his mouth, about princes and princesses and fairy-tales he’s never read but heard you babbling about passionately while your nimble hands fix him. Grunting, he closes his eyes and smiles, the cleansing solution running down in rivulets on his skin, washing away blood and sanies, as you gingerly swab him dry with a piece gauze.

He hates this unfamiliar feeling of being vanquished by the inexplicable urge to act on irrational and secret desires. Whatever is coming out of his mouth, he hopes, it's not cringey; he has an image to maintain.

"I'd build you a palace," he spews, and inwardly curses for the crap that wrings out of his mouth. "You and I and our kids... have a date with me."

Your face is charring in bright red, fueled by the tittering of other nurses and winks from the injured soldiers.

"Say yes, Y/N." They cheer.

You wish you could turn into an ostrich and dig your head deep in the ground.

At this point more sedation would be harmful.

You shake your head and exhale a long sigh, apply ointments on the little cuts and bruises and dress the minor injuries in bandages.

He sees you dancing in the low light, coming closer, smiling at him and pushing your devilish grin against his mouth, his hands lacing with yours; you making him bold and naive in a single kiss. You dismantle his defenses, consume him and calm him all at once.

Eventually, he falls asleep, his features relaxed to the slumber, like a little boy's after an evening consuming his energy at the playground.

*

"Uh?" He blinks twice when he opens the door, flicking his eyes over you with disdain. That dress suits you, your hair falling over your shoulders wildly, not gathered in a bun under a bonnet. "What do you want? I'm busy now."

"On what?" You raise a brow, your hands clasped behind your back, sheepishly. "I've heard you're off duty for two weeks."

"tch."

"You asked me on a date."

"Cut the crap."

You chuckle and push past him, invading his office. "Don't tell me you forgot the scene you pull out at the infirmary."

"What the fuck you talking about?" He gulps, and rubs his sweaty hands on his shirt as he follows.

"You and I having kids, living in a palace, something like that."

"I never said that," he growls and sinks into the couch, pouting, his arms folded over his chest as you pour tea for two.

"There were plenty of witnesses, Levi. The whole ward heard your groggy pathetic confession."

The winks, the beer-clanks, the shoulder pats, it all twines into realization.

Irritation coils in his guts. His fists are clenched like iron balls, plunging into the smooth cushions.

"What about you?" he barks, and drops of chai tea smear tadpoles on the coffee table. "Those clumsy fingers of you,” he snaps.

"This clumsy fingers patched you up." You scowl, and thump the mugs on the refurbished wood. Leather screeches under you. "Asshole. Are you feeling well?"

He looks away, like a grounded boy, and mutters, "thanks. And yes, I heal fast."

You scratch your neck and clear your throat, a bead of cold sweat running down behind your ears. You tear off the death skin of your lips and bring your hands down to your lap. "Do you really... like me?" Tugging at the hem of your dress, you coyly ask, and immediately regret it. You stand at the verge of crying, rub your nose, turn your face away.

Levi frowns, and his tongue twists, delving into for the right words, or at least not destructive ones.

“It’s just…” his teeth rake over his bottom lip, his cheeks incandescent with chagrin. Fuck. He’d rather be fighting titans right now.

“If you want me to, I’ll leave you alone.” You stand and smooth down the skirt of your dress.

“Wait!” His hand grasps yours pleadingly, and he looks up, lips parted. Your gazes intertwine.

“Whatever it is just say it.” You purr serenely. Your head tilts to the side by a fraction, and your eyes slip to your locked hands. He squeezes harder.

“It’s you.”

“Me?” Your perplexed eyes crash with his trembling ones.

“Yes. You.” He lowers his head, and tucks his free hand, set into a fist, against his forehead, clenching his eyes tight in a miserable attempt to get his words right. And he explodes, making the mugs rattle as he smacks his fist onto the table. “I can’t think straight with you!”

It wasn’t the downers.

They just knocked down his walls.

Bewildered, you stare at him, and your grimace becomes a giddy smile that evolves to a blast of laugh. And it’s too late for him to pick up the pieces scattered all over the place. Shameful. It just happened, and it’s too late to draw his hand out of the fire unscathed.

Embarrassed, he ducks his head and sighs, fighting the urge to slap his face and kill the obnoxious tingling in his cheeks.

“You silly.” You extricate from him and rush to the door, giggling, before his eyes catch you.

“Stay.” He groans to his feet and shoves his hands into his pockets, defeated.

With your hand on the knob, you look over your shoulder. “You want me to stay?”

He smiles and nudges his chin to the coffee table. “It’d be a waste of good tea.”

[weird-writes]

Five Runs: Run 1 - Doors (The Mandalorian, E)

Title: Five Runs: Run 1 - Doors

Series: Part three of Creed, a non-linear series about Din Djarin and his favorite... distraction. 

Description: A series of drabbles all sharing one theme: you've decided to run away from your Mandalorian. On purpose. For his birthday. Listen, everyone's got their kinks, and his is bounty hunting (sort of. Mostly, it's you.)

Pairing: Din Djarin x Female Reader

It's his brash attitude that makes you decide to push your luck just a little more. You love it when Din gets like this; it feels like an invitation to misbehave in ways only the two of you know how. "You liked the idea--" you make a show of checking the timer on your wrist, "-- thirty four hours ago."

Warnings: Explicit sexual content, canon-typical violence, object insertion but probably not in the way you think, oral sex, manual sex, implied penetrative sex, brief mention of somnophilia, canon what canon, no betas we die like men [warnings are for all drabbles.]

Tropes: established relationship, the helmet comes off, hurt/comfort, fluff, adventure

Author's note: Tumblr for some reason really hates this series - I don't mean y'all, I mean the website itself lmao. Let's see if this one actually shows up!

***

RUN 1: DOORS

The first time it's a surprise:

“When I said run, I didn’t mean from me!"

You slam awake with a start, your adrenaline catapulting you out of bed and halfway toward your blaster before you realize the exasperated voice is familiar. You'd know that intimidating shadow anywhere, and one pale finger of moonlight reaches through the patchy roof to run itself along his armor. Your heart rate drops immediately, soothed by the silvery shine of beskar: no threat here.

You collapse back on the narrow cot you'd rented for the night, brain churning into gear. Din had found you, as you'd known he would. The only question now is if he’s really as annoyed as he sounds.

"In my defense, you were non-specific," you retort. You take a moment to scan the door and windows of your dingy little room. All closed - and not just closed, but locked. How the kriff did he get in here so quietly? Trust your Mandalorian not to leave you an easy exit; he clearly checked the escape routes before waking you. Next time you'll have to rig some sort of alarm.

"Yes, because when someone says run they obviously mean run away, change all your clothes, and hide in the back room of a scrapyard." The helmet renders his tone unreadable but you can't see any sign of anger in Din's broad shoulders. It's hard to tell in the dark but his body language seems relaxed, halfway to cocky even, like when he’s dragging a particularly tough bounty through an admiring cantina crowd. Your pulse picks up again, thrumming with interest, but for a very different reason than when you'd thought there was a stranger in the room.

"I sent a message," you shoot back. "I didn't have to. I could have just vanished instead." You would never just vanish on Din, and you both know it, but you also know exactly how to bait his ego.

He scoffs outright at that. "No you couldn't. No one can just vanish. Not from me, and especially not you." You were right, he's wearing his presumed victory over you the same way he wears the prospect of a tricky blaster shot or a fight against improbable odds. His confidence goes straight to your head like spice, and you feel the slumbering heat between your legs sit up and take notice.

It's his brash attitude that makes you decide to push your luck just a little more. You love it when Din gets like this; it feels like an invitation to misbehave in ways only the two of you know how. "You liked the idea--" you make a show of checking the timer on your wrist, "-- thirty four hours ago." He'd found you with a full day and more to spare, of course, but the timer is still nestled in its strap and if you play this right maybe you can -

One big gloved hand clamps over your arm. You can feel the heat of him even through the leather. "Time's up."

***

You'd been waiting for the perfect opportunity, the right alignment of distraction and circumstance to take off without Din noticing. It needed to be on a job, his awareness of you too great at other times, whether you were doing something as civilized as drinking spotchka or as crude as wading through a swamp, Din hoisting the Child's carry sack overhead to keep him out of the mud. Din's right about that much: when you run with a bounty hunter there's no such thing as slipping away.

There had been a few times when you'd thought you might try for it, credits already tucked in your bag, blaster on your hip. But each time you'd found a reason not to leave him: the situation was too chaotic and he'd worry you'd been hurt; you didn't like the town, too many inquisitive strangers; you didn't want him to hunt you with the kiddo in tow. The excuses were reasonable but eventually you were forced to admit to yourself that your delay was simply because you didn't want to leave him. You'd been traveling together for so long you weren't sure you remembered how the galaxy felt without his solid bulk at your back or his dry, modulated humor in your ear.

Today, though, was too good to pass up, the slap of blaster fire from around the corner announcing that Din had found his quarry at the same time his quarry's hired muscle had found him. You had planned this part out in advance together, leaning conspiratorially over schematics in the cargo bay, his helmet bumping affectionately against the crown of your head as you showed him how to use what you'd made. You may not share his Creed but you speak the same reverential language when it comes to certain things... like explosives.

You know your own role too, which is why you pop up from the stack of crates you've been waiting behind and shove your fingers in your mouth to give a piercing whistle. Your other hand drops to your holster. You draw and fire in quick succession, sending a bolt ricocheting over the heads of the contract guards. Two of them whip around, surprised by the noise and incoming fire from another direction, which buys Din enough time to slap the little ball against the blast door blocking his way. He must have hit the primer button at the same time because you hear his shout even through the helmet: "Got it - run!"

You take off down the alley, jinking around one corner and then another, putting as many walls between yourself and your latest experiment as you can. Din will be fine, the Rising Phoenix on his back doubtless already taking him out of harm's way, but lesser mortals like you have to rely on brick and steel and meters and meters of distance. You're lucky this district is mostly abandoned, full of empty warehouses and docking bays. It's the perfect testing ground for your latest experiment.

You're halfway down the next street when there's a sound from behind you that makes your eardrums pop like you've been plunged into deep water. It's less a noise than a sudden sharp pull against the air, jolting you as the ground lurches sickeningly. It's followed by another sound, this one like a shuttle crashing into a brass band. You can't help your grin as you slow your steps toward the intersection to avoid attracting attention and join the stream of traffic headed toward the market. It worked. That blast door won't be giving your Mandalorian any more trouble, and if you're lucky the shock wave will have cleared out the security-for-hire too.

There's a tavern ahead with an open space in front of it roofed with leafy vines for shade. You pull over into the pleasant coolness and stop, rummaging in your pack for the comm link you always carry planetside. You'd spend all last night thinking about what to say when this moment came. Your message has to make it clear you're not being kidnapped or under duress. It has to be obvious that it's an invitation that he can say no to if he wants. It has to be intriguing.

Oh, and of course, it can't interrupt him while he's killing people.

You dictate what you want Din to read into the little microphone, using the careful wording you'd finally settled on this morning. The ship is parked only a few klicks away and is well within short-distance meshnet range, so you bounce your message through the navcomp’s HoloNet connection as opposed to direct, flagging the data priority level as low. This means it will show on Din's display as text rather than a missed connection attempt, and he will also know that whatever you’re trying to tell him can wait until he's done with the bounty. When he finally has breathing room to check his comm, you know what will blink out in blocky letters on his screen:

Got away from them, and now I’m getting away from you too. Find me? 72 standard hrs, Motok only, no beacon. Happy birthday.

Your interface beeps a notification. Message successfully relayed. It makes you feel better to know it's waiting for him, your words a thread tethering you together even as you spool its length away from him across the city. It's only three days at most, and you have a suspicion the reunion will be worth it.

You tuck the comm back into your bag and get moving, sliding through the crowd toward one of the larger booths. You’re going to need a cloak or a change of clothes if you don’t want him to catch you immediately. Something that will alter your silhouette and cover your hair. Probably a change of shoes to fool his tracking algorithm. Hell, maybe you should buy a new perfume, too - you still have no idea what the helmet of his is really capable of. You spot a stall selling thick bolts of local fabric; surely the garment district must be this direction. You steer your steps towards it, and it's not until you're halfway there that you realize you're absently and happily humming to yourself.

***

It’s less than an hour later when your comm chimes again. You've already bought your disguise, swathed in the long hooded cloak that is common for locals in this sector. It takes you a moment to reach your bag under the yards of lightweight synthsilk that now shield you from prying eyes. You have a missed message, high priority.

Are you serious?

You send back, Yes.

A few minutes after that there’s an insistent buzz from the inner pocket of your bag. Din isn’t bothering to relay messages through the HoloNet anymore - he’s comming you directly.

You pull it out and thumb the button on the side of the unit. “Mando?”

“What is this?” There’s no sound of blaster fire in the background, so however the situation you’d run out on resolved, it’s clearly over. And Din sounds curious rather than concerned, which is a relief. You'd been almost sure your gambit would play well, but there was no way to be certain - any game like this would run the risk of miscommunication, of hurting rather than delighting him. You couldn't know in advance if he'd like the idea, but you do know that if you'd misjudged, your partnership is now strong enough to withstand it. Coming to that realization, finally acknowledging that your connection with Din is secure enough to gamble a little for both your enjoyment, had filled you with an emotion you couldn't quite describe.

Though whatever it was, it had led to some spectacular sex.

You've waited too long to answer him. "Mesh'la?"

You shrug even though he can’t see you. “When you put my tracking chip in, you said you missed stalking me.”

A chuckle. Another good sign. “That wasn’t a hint.”

“No, but I thought it’d be fun. Like old times. And if we need to find each other in a hurry for some reason you can always use the beacon.”

“Three days.” Din’s tone is even more thoughtful. "I did say I wanted to spend some time in Motok. Although I was hoping it would be with you."

“Three days, and you did,” you confirm. “And it can be with me. If you're as good as they say. There’s a timer unit on a cord on my wrist. Get it before then and you win." He won't be able to resist a challenge like that, not from you.

“And what do I get if I win?” His voice through the modulator has dropped, far too dark and intimate for your public surroundings. He must be able to hear the crowd noise through the comm interface. He just doesn’t care.

You're grateful that the hood you're wearing will cover your expression from anyone passing by. You’re suddenly a little lightheaded, adrenaline from the impending chase mixed with a giddy excitement at what you might be asked to give up if you lose. You do your best to sound innocent when you answer. “What do you win? Why, Mando, anything you want. Anything at all.”

Your meaning is clear despite your casual tone. A growl comes through the comm link, then: “Don’t tire yourself out, cyar'ika. You’ll need your strength. See you in forty-eight hours - maybe sooner.”

And the comm goes dead in your hands.

run 2 | series masterlist

[messymessyml]

Breaking and Entering

I'll be moving this one over to AO3 at some point (done, available here), but I'll start this off on Tumblr. This is a lighthearted, multi-chapter Jasonette story.

Summary:

Marinette is away from home when a curious visitor drops in. The kwami don't see any problem letting the man in; the question is: what will the guardian think when she realizes an intruder was in her house while she was gone?

Chapter 1 is below the cut.

Chapter 1: What did I come back to now?

Marinette felt a wave of relief hit her as her key turned smoothly in the lock. She was more than ready to unload her bags and take a well-deserved night in after a whirlwind week of consulting with clients in Metropolis. She’d decided to take Tikki and Sass with her and rent a hotel for the week as most of her clients were only available for early morning consultations, and while it was the most effective way to make sure she didn’t miss a meeting, she was glad to be back home.

Gotham may not be as glitzy or have as many potential clients as Metropolis, but it more than made up for that with the anonymity that Gotham allowed her. The local mentality of ‘take no shit’ and ‘mind your own damn business and I’ll mind mine’ allowed the kwami and her freedom that they wouldn’t get in Metropolis, a city crawling with news stations and a baffling love of all things mundane. Half the time when she visited Metropolis it felt like she had a target on her back; the paparazzi were worse in Metropolis than they ever were in her Parisian hero days and that held for her professional pseudonym as well as plain Marinette. It was a wonder that with so many news outlets (and Superman to report on for crying out loud) that she was still the topic of a news piece twice in the past week: once as MDC and once as plain old Marinette. In all seriousness was helping with a local tree planting event for Earth Day that newsworthy?

‘Enough of that’, she thought, realizing that although her door was now unlocked, she’d thought so much about arriving home that she hadn’t even fully opened her door. A slight twinge of embarrassment hit her. Carrying her tiny friends everywhere was always a blessing, but sometimes, she mused, it might be nice not to have an audience for every action she took—no matter how embarrassing.

Letting go of that train of thought, Marinette stepped through and closed her door behind her, feeling tension bleed out of her shoulders. The underlying scent of vanilla and blossom honey hit her nose as she strode over to the kitchen island. She set her bags to the side and took a hold of one of her swinging barstools with the intention to sit for a bit before making any attempt at dinner for the kwami and herself. Absently tracking the path Sass and Tikki took as they flew in the direction of the room where she kept the Miracle Box, she hesitated to sit as she noticed a slowly building feeling of unease hit her. Something, she thought, was off.

Sharpening her gaze and gripping the barstool a little tighter, Marinette scanned her apartment. At first glance, the living space looked unchanged from how she left it; the furniture was where it belonged, and her shelves and wall art were unmoved. As she looked closer though, she saw items around the house that were shifted a bit more than they would be if the kwami had decided to explore while she was away: the living room rug was centered, the dishes she had left to dry right before leaving the house a week ago were put away, and the barstool she was currently grasping was a bit more level than it had ever been, thrifted as it were. The kwami were a joy to interact with and an honor to serve as their guardian, but cleaners and tinkers they were not.

Marinette released her grip on the stool, rounding the kitchen island to open the cabinets. Like she thought, the dishes she had washed a week ago were put away and the towers of plates and bowls looked straighter than they were normally. Her gut churned as the beginning stages of worry started to fill her.

A chorus of greetings from behind her met her ears, disrupting her thoughts. Turning, Marinette saw the kwami flying towards her from the hallway.

“Marinette, did you have a nice trip?” Mullo squeaked.

“Guardian, I hope all went well on your trip. It is wonderful to have you back home.” Wayzz said.

The other kwami threw in their own noises and words of agreement, mirroring Wayzz’s welcome.

Marinette couldn’t help her small smile, replying, “My trip went well, and I am happy to be back here with you all.” She paused, hesitating before she asked, “Did anything happen while we were away?”

“Not much, Pigtails.” Plagg swam leisurely into view, tailed closely by Tikki, both twirling as they approached. “Some fighting outside, and a bit of a showdown on rooftops at the end of the block, but no damage to our building.”

Wayzz intercepted Plagg’s path, floating into the center of her vision to say, “That may be true, Plagg; however, one of the combatants took a breather on our balcony by using the garden for cover. He didn’t seem injured, but he was breathing heavier than was wise. Most of us hid in the box while I continued to strengthen the wards on the outer walls and windows.”

Marinette interrupted, “No one entered the apartment?”

Wayzz hesitated, then said “The man stayed hidden as best he could, but he was quite large, and I could feel the shifting balance; if he stayed on the balcony, he would have drawn fire here. I strengthened the barrier outwards then loosened the barrier on the balcony doors, undid the latch for him, and asked Trixx to hide us from view. He had a protector’s spirit and none of us could feel an intent to harm any but the ones he’d been fighting outside. I am sorry, Guardian, for making this decision without your input.”

Marinette took a deep breath to fend off the impending tension headache, unclenching the hand she had used to subconsciously gripped her other wrist. She loosened the muscles around her eyes to soften her gaze. “It’s alright, Wayzz. I wasn’t there, and I trust your intuition. What did he do?”

“He seemed distrustful of the open door at first but ended up entering almost silently and quickly moved to scan the apartment.”

Trixx added, “I made sure he could not see the Miracle Box and that he was not visible from the outside at any point, but he stayed away from the windows for the most part.”

Roarr piped in, “He has a fierce spirit, and I agree with Wayzz that he has a strong protective streak.”

She heard some murmurs of agreement from the other kwami, some of them breaking out into small discussion pertaining to the man’s character. “If so many of you saw him, did you leave the Miracle Box then? What did you see?” Desperately, Marinette wished that the immortal beings she called friends could get to the points.

“Some of us came out to see, but most of us stayed in the box. Trixx’s illusions held; he didn’t see or hear any of us.” Barkk confirmed.

“Yes, he mostly stayed in the living room. He sat right here for a while!” Saying this, Pollen surged towards the end of the couch, landing with their back to the armrest in a bored sprawl. “Like this!”

Plagg, swaying upside down near the ceiling, lazily added, “He wasn’t much fun. All he did was check his guns then started cleaning the place. Boring.”

“Guns?! Cleaning? Why?” Alarmed, Marinette’s heartbeat started to pound at the picture painted by the kwami. They had let a large combatant enter her apartment and all he did was inspect his guns and clean??? ‘This can’t be real’, she thought. ‘Was I caught up in one of Scarecrow’s attacks on the way home?’

“He had good manners at the least.” Kaalki sniffed. “His gear smelled of money and he fixed that stool of yours that never would have entered the premises if you had listened to me from the start. At least now it isn’t horrendously squeaky.”

“Hey!” Mullo protested.

Kaalki just turned away.

“He needed the protection.” Wayzz apologetically said. “He didn’t seem interested in your workroom and he wouldn’t have been able to find the box, so we observed. He cleaned a bit and left after checking that the coast was clear outside.”

Marinette allowed her shoulders to sag. “Alright. If you’re sure.” Glancing around, she gave the kwami a smile, eyes hesitating on the glass doors leading to the balcony, she absently added, “Thank you for keeping an eye on things while I was gone.”

Striding over to the doors leading out to the balcony, she peered out. Nothing seemed out of place out here, but she couldn’t be certain. Checking the door handles, she noticed that one of the kwami or her mystery visitor must have relatched the lock. Unlocking it, she stepped out and went to sit at her patio table. Leaning back in her chair, she let her head tip back to view the sunset, partially obscured by the balcony two floors above her own. Her apartment building had mostly staggered the balconies to allow more light to reach its inhabitants, a must in Gotham’s dreary weather.

After a few moments, she let her head droop forward to land in her hands. As much as she loved them, the kwami’s survival instincts always seemed at odds with hers. She couldn’t tell whether that was due to her anxiety amplifying everything past the point of reason or that the kwami’s inherent existence rendering most danger obsolete, but while some intruder might not be a danger to beings that could turn intangible and invisible at will, she was definitely a bit more breakable (‘Mortal’, her brain whispered) than them. If she had been here? Who knows how that visit might have gone?

Taking a few more minutes to calm her body’s response, a few deep breaths, and a moment or two of gratitude that nothing bad had happened, she straightened a bit as the evening wind started to pick up and a splash of white started to flutter at the edge of her vision. Glancing up, her eye caught on a piece of paper at the other end of the table that was weighted down with a rock she had decorated a while back with paintings of ladybugs and cats playfully chasing each other across a meadow. That particular rock usually spent time in the catnip bed Plagg had insisted on and Tikki had seconded as a nod to both kwami. Curious, she reached out and grabbed the sheet of paper underneath. Opening it, she read:

Dear Stranger,

I was in a bit of a tight spot and hanging around your balcony when your door swung open. Haunted house, much? Hope you don’t mind, but I ended up using your house as a temporary safe house while you were gone. Don’t worry, I made sure no one saw me entering or exiting, so you shouldn’t have any problems from the type of shit that follows me.

On the topic of haunted houses, are you sure yours isn’t haunted? Your house is unnervingly the calmest- and safest-feeling place I’ve been in a while, but I kept seeing blurs out of the corner of my eye and I was NOT concussed. Might want to talk to someone about that.

I ended up tidying a bit while you were gone, hope you don’t mind. Fairs fair, you (unknowingly, I know) lent me a place to stay, I tidied up a bit. Stay out of trouble, alright?

Cheers,

- Red Hood

The Red Hood? The RED HOOD is who they let into the house? For kwami’s sake, what were they thinking?!?

[isuspectyouhavefantheories]

The Crossroads to the Sun 🌞

Takemura/Female V

Rated: M for mature themes and explicit content NSFW 18s only

Trigger Warnings: Themes of death, suicide, gallows humour

Part 1 of ???? “The Sun Series”

Link to part two :

https://isuspectyouhavefantheories.tumblr.com/post/641314624666468353/search-for-the-sun

Will eventually be posted on my AO3 account when I get this beta’d. 🤟

———

She had decided she wanted to be away from night city when she pulled the plug. If anything, she wanted it to end under the blanket of the starry skies, part of her hoping they would guide her into the next world safely. Driving through the neon jungle felt like a technicolor funeral procession. Or perhaps a walk to the gallows? She was thankful she still had most of her senses as she pulled herself from her morbid reverie just in time to avoid a badly placed bollard on a sharp turn straight down the road heading towards the city limits. She swore under her breath but continued. The pain was dull, but festering in her mind, less so than before, but enough to keep reminding her of the internal ticking clock that was getting louder with each passing hour as it neared to zero. She breathed deeply though her nose and steeled herself. But more doubts began to drift through her, like a slick fog encircling her mind she thought of all the people she would be leaving behind and hoped they wouldn’t hate her after tonight.

Goro’s name flashed up on her biomon and it took her a minute to register. She nearly rear ended a truck at a traffic light before finally answering.

“Yes?”

“Where are you?” His voice was gruff, demanding and her eyebrow crinkled in irritation.

“What’s it to you?”

“Let me help you V. Just take the deal with Hanako, we make this right and you get back your life. If I were you, I would not waste the chance.”

“You mean you get back your life.” She spat, Takemura went quiet on the other end for a moment, his eyes flinching at her tone. “Don’t try and pretend this is concern for my well-being and as far as making this right goes... You really still think you and Arasaka can fix this? Goro I know when I’m beat. Nobody can fix this. I’m done for and it’s time I just fucking faced facts and made my peace. I’m done. I’m calling it.” She hadn’t realised how hard she was gripping the steering wheel until she felt the alloy begin to crunch lightly under her guerrilla cybernetics.

There was a long pause and she thought for a moment he had hung up until she heard the shuffling of erratic, hurried movement on the other end.

“Where are you V?” He demanded, his voice was direct, to the point, no room for nonsense, no room for anything but answers.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve left a data chip with Misty. It contains all the relevant evidence, via brain dance, you need to get the vindication you so desperately require.”

“V, tell me where you are right now. ” It was sharp this time.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help more. Goodbye, Goro. It was a pleasure to have known you.” She hung up and looked down at her phone, closing her eyes a moment only to be jolted by Takemura calling again. She took a deep breath before turning it off and throwing it in the passenger seat and popping into third gear as she trolled though the gates past the city limits to security. She was quickly flagged through with little bother from security. They seemed more interested in what was coming into the city that what was going out.

It took her an hour to get to where she needed to go. The edge of the badlands. The final touch stone before she headed further in, back to all she ever knew. Just another busted down prewar gas station covered in sand, nature already claiming back its land. She parked her car outside and managed to pry open the front door after digging some accumulated sand from the way.

—————

She woke to the whistling of the desert storm on the shutters, the dilapidated old outpost rocked shakily. She almost felt as if she was in the belly of a ship at sea being pulverised, to and fro, by an onslaught or roaring waves.

She sat up, listening to them a while, until eventually the weather died down to a gentle lulling breeze. She stepped outside for a moment and thanked whatever powers that were out there that the sky was clear enough to see the moon and a dim scattering of stars. She climbed from her make shift cot and stepped outside.

“Still think you made the right call? Those Saka assholes might have fixed you up all nice.” Johnny flashed back into her peripheral vision, sitting on a bench under a busted canopy with his guitar slung across his lap.

“I dunno. I guess we’ll see.”

“Val.”

She looked up at him with narrowed eyes.

“They were just going to extract you and dump me the moment it suited them. What, you think I was just gonna put my head in a hungry lions mouth and just hope everything would just sort itself out? For all I know they would have just cut me open the minute they got me up there. I’d rather die out here, on some dusty ass terra firma in the wastes than lose my mind up in some space prison.” She flipped out Evelyn’s cigarette case, only three left in place making her sigh before pulling out one and lighting it up.

Johnny groaned at the sensation of the nicotine flooding her system from her first drag. It had been a while since she’d allowed herself such little pleasures, but for the first time in months she wasn’t on deaths door, bringing death so someone else’s door or trying to kidnap an heiress, so exceptions can be made.

“Weather out here huh? Never notice it in the city but, fuck. Mother nature sure is a feisty broad.”

“You have no idea.” She chuckled.

“Pretty good we got here before the worst of of the storm hit earlier. I would not want to be the sorry sack of shit that had to drive through that.” Johnny chuckled.

—————————

It was about 5am, sun already shining and blistering the ground, she had scavenged a few things from the outpost to keep her and Johnny going long enough to get to the Aldecaldos

Or just long enough. The thought of kicking it just before saying goodbye to Panam and Saul and the others churned uncomfortably down into the pit of her stomach but she attempted to occupy her mind, busying herself with prep work and repairs on her gear. She was going to try at least.

Before she could think of the next task, Johnny materialised again, already on edge.

“Someone’s coming.”

“Raffen? Cops? Arasaka?”

“Can’t be sure. I’d get ready if I were you.” He was gone again, and all she could think to do was get back to the gas station and ready herself for the visitors.

A Herra Outlaw that looked as if the chemical desert had taken a shit on it, genuinely one of the most out of place thing she had ever seen in the badlands and that was saying something, pulled up with a soft screech as the brakes engaged and the engine shuttered off. The pop of the car door made her grip her baseball bat tighter as she edged closer to the door, so as to be on the hidden side when it opened.

The door flung open, nearly ramming her in the face had she not hugged the wall so closely, she held her breath as a darkened figure entered the room, but the rasping baritone that filled the air made her freeze.

“V?” Takemura’s voice cut through her and all she could do was stare in disbelief.

“What the fuck?”

He whipped around like lightening, his wild searching gaze landed on her and his eyebrows all but flew up into his hairline and his eyes widened in disbelief but seemed to relax after a moment, a wave of relief washing over his features as of up until this moment he had been in a panic.

It was all a blur, he pulled the rusted metal door closed, nearly wrenching the door off its screeching hinges before his arms suddenly reached for her. He pulled her forcefully into his chest into an embrace that should have shattered her spine with the implants this man had. The newly back online ones, she noted.

She scrunched her eyebrows incredulously at him when he pulled away, his fingers tracing down the length of her arms until they still rested on her shoulders as he continued to look at her as if he was afraid the moment he took his eyes off her she would disappear into thin air.

“What are you doing here?” She breathed, still struggling for air after the uncharacteristic ribsplitting hug.

He looked down now, almost sheepish in his manner but he did not waiver when he returned his gaze to her.

“Stopping you from making a foolish choice.”

She sighed deeply.

“And since when do you have any right to tell me what I can and can’t do?”

“I do not. But I can try at least to make you see reason.” He wasn’t budging, she wasn’t budging.

“Goro...” she pinched the bridge of her nose and temple in an attempt to quell the newly forming tension migraine.

“You could have your life back. You would be good as new, Arasaka would ensure it if you testify at the board meeting. Arasaka always rewards loyalty.”

“I know that’s some rhetoric you’ve been spoonfed your whole life but unfortunately I have a very different opinion on the subject of ‘who Arasaka serves’ and it most certainly isn’t people who have a history of stealing from them.” She dead panned, making Goro groan.

“If you would just listen to me you would know that is not the case. Hanako-sama has extended this life like to you V do not waste it.”

“I’ve been listening. And watching. From the very start. I’ve seen them from an angle you have yet to even comprehend and part of me fears even then you wouldn’t see the truth.”

“They are-.”

“Only in this for themselves. I won’t argue with you about this, there is nothing you can say that will change my mind. I’m not selling my souls to the fucking devil, man, I’m sorry but that’s how this situation feels to me. I know there is nothing anyone can do for me, not you, not Arasaka, not Hellman, not even Alt fucking Cunningham’s AI ghost from beyond the Blackwall knows how to undo this so fuck this. I refuse to spend the last days of my life scrambling for answers only to whither away to nothin and die anyway. I’m leaving this hellhole on my own fucking terms. So just let it go. Just forget about me and go back to your cushty little life as Arasaka’s cheerleader or body guard or whatever the fuck it is you do.”

She couldn’t remember how, but during the course of their verbal spat, he had pushed her against the adjacent wall from the door and upon hearing her retorts he snarled in frustration and slammed his hand into the wall beside her head, denting the already disintegrating plaster, sending a cloud of dust in the air around them. The pluming cloud fluttered and caught the small rays of morning light seeping through the crags and cracks in the windows and walls of the abandoned gas station. She managed to push him off with a forceful shove only to have him lunge back to her. His martial arts clashed with her own brand of badlands fist fighting. She was flexible, contorting her body out of his reach before rounding on him with a left hook followed by a hasty jab aimed for his face. Unfortunately, he had reach, countering her wild strikes with a wave of his arm and tugging her to him. She lifted her knee between them to vault herself from his grasp but lost her footing at the end and it took only a single low sweeping kick to her other leg that sent her off kilter, but Goro followed her to the ground where he pinned again, this time on the floor with both her hands above her in each of his. She struggled against his vice grip, twisting and squirming beneath him to roll him off but he refused to be moved barely even flinching as she thrashed beneath him, awaiting her to finally stop. She roared in frustration but refused to give up. If she couldn’t knock him with her strength then she could knock him with her words.

“Hanako knew!” She spat at him, the intensity of her glare ripping though him.

“Knew what?” He asked with narrowed eyes.

“She knew it was Yorinobu who murdered her father. She knew you were telling the truth, that you were being framed and she still let you go down. Then guess what the kicker here is?” She laughed bitterly. “Saburo’s not even dead. He’s being kept as an engram, he’s been planning something with Hanako this whole time and they were going to let you go down regardless!! They were going to discard you, who served them faithfully your whole life, for their own fucking agenda. So tell me, why you think for one fucking second that they will actually help me?” Takemura was quiet, his hold on her waining enough for her to flip them, her hands balled into his shirt begging him to look at her but it was as if something had been shattered in him. They both were panting from their verbal and martial exchange, but they were far from done.

He suddenly reached up, his hand cupping her cheek gently, tracing the cybernetics of her face with the tips of his fingers before pulling her down to him without warning, his lips finally met hers in a heated kiss.

She gasped into his mouth, giving him the chance to shove his tongue in to explore her. He didn’t know when he would get the chance, if he ever would again after this. But she had yet to bite his face off so he took that as a good sign. In fact she had nearly gone limp from the shock of his sudden advance. He pulled away slowly, his face still inches from hers but his eyes bored into hers with a renewed intensity.

She pulled her hand from his now loosened grip and reached down gently and placed a delicate hand on his cheek, only for him to lean into it with closed eyes. He pressed his own hand over hers and took a deep calming breath.

“Goro, look at me.”

His eyes opened again, staring down at her with so much hope yet one word from her could shatter him into a thousand shards. And fate was a cruel mistress.

“I’m going home.” He looked down at that, his brow tugged in an unreadable expression but she chased after his gaze and held his chin so he had no choice but to stare wordlessly at her.

“I’m going home. To the people I love. To say goodbye. And maybe... maybe, for once in my life just try to do some good in this world, not for eddies or cred or some fucking illusion of grandeur, but just to do something worthwhile. I want have something real. Before I... before I can’t anymore.” She stroked his cheekbone with the back of her knuckle. “I don’t expect you to understand. But it isn’t up for debate.” Not what he had wanted to hear, but the finality in her words left him no room to argue. And so he was then left to stare down the inevitable horribleness of a world with no V.

He rested his face in the crook of her neck, her soft sun kissed skin, slick with sweat from the desert heat.

“Then let me have this at least.” He whispered against her, causing her to shiver under the weight of his words.

He returned his lips to hers, an even more energised passion driving his need and to his surprise she returned it, hands cupping his face gently. She then pushed him back down on his back and dove back to his lips. He began unbuttoning and loosening her clothes as fast as his hands could allow him. He pulled off her tank top and stopped a moment to admire her perky little breasts before pulling her back to him and lavishing her chest adoringly with bites and kisses that made her mewl against him.

“You have been taunting me since the day we met. Not wearing anything but that tight blue netrunner suit.” He growled against her chest, biting at the underside of her breast, his eyes primal and burning hers with an unspoken need to be closer.

“I’m a net runner you gonk, ah-!” He bit a little harsher around her nipple at the comment but lapped at it gently afterwards. “I-it was for practicality’s sake.” She shivered against him.

“It was to torture me.” He chuckled.

He lifted them suddenly, his hands under her thighs again as he deposited her on a near by countertop, her legs wrapping around his hips as he ground himself desperately into her while trailing his lips from her ear lobe to her jugular and back before biting then tugging sharply causing her to yelp softly.

“Maybe a little.” She gasped, casting him a delighted grin which elicited a growl from deep within his chest. He leisurely ran his hands along the hem of her jeans, tugging at them slightly before slipping his hand down underneath to grab a handful of her ass, squeezing it appreciatively before moaning at how soft and pliant her skin was under the extra sensitive touch of his cybernetic hands. He allowed himself to become lost in her for a moment. Mapping her every contour in his mind, committing each breathless sound that fell from her lips to memory, savouring her sweet breath on his tongue and wondering if he would ever again taste something so perfect as her. He felt her pull away lightly, a few centimetres from his face to gasp for a breath and still his lips chased hers. It was as if she could read his mind sometimes, she was looking at him with those confounding purple eyes, her smile faltering as if she could see how banefully torn he was.

“This won’t change anything.” She whispered sadly against his lips .

His brow creased under the weight of his anguish, another growl, not so carnal as before but instead a roar of frustration and he attacked her body with a new found, punishing fervour. He pulled her up effortlessly once again and threw her into the cot, her body’s weight caused the springs to groan and he had managed to discard his shirt fully, then turned to her. She was now only in her underwear, her golden skin glistened in the low orange morning haze. Her body was lithe yet athletic, her skin tantalisingly smooth to the touch yet disturbed by stray scars scattered about her person. Her years of fighting for her survival in this hellscape had shaped her and moulded her into this picturesque model of strength and beauty. He kneeled before her, nipping his way down her navel to the hem of her panties that he then quickly slid off in one fluid motion. He dove between her legs, basking in the sweet gasps she made as he drove her wild with his tongue. Her hands twisted and twined themselves into his ebony and silver locks, pulling his bun loose to let his hair cascade down his shoulders, grazing her nails over his scalp delicately. He introduced a single finger to her and pumped deeply inside her yet at a controlled pace, eliciting another quivering gasp that made him smile against her.

“Goro...” the way her breathless lips formed around his name drove something in him. She was able to bring out the strangest and most wonderful of feelings in him.

He was sure from her cries she was nearing her climax and before she could taste the sweet precipice of her release, he rose up to kiss her. Her taste on his lips had a lewd yet arousing effect on her, but her climax, once so tantalisingly close was now receding and the heat biting and curling in her abdomen made her squirm against him. She pulled away after a moment and gasped a quick breath.

“You ass.” He pressed his face into her neck again and she felt the rumble of his chuckling. He continued to kiss her neck and his hands pinched and rolled her nipples in a torturously teasing manner. She writhed under him, a mewling mess.

“Stop teasing me.” She pleaded, her own hands cupping either side of his face to pull him from his ministrations on her neck that she was almost certain would be bruised to absolute fuck in the morning.

He nudged her legs to open and she obliged eagarly.

He teased her entrance lightly running his tip up and down coating himself in her essence before sliding steadily inside of her. He had to stop half way and swallowed a guttural moan. She was so tight. Like a warm vice pulling him further inside her and dragging him impossibly closer to her. Her legs had wrapped around his hips, her thighs quivering around his girth. He took another moment to make some experimental, shallow thrusts and groaned once more at how deliciously slick she was.

“Oh... V...” his forehead pressed against hers and his grip around her hips tightened.

“Don’t.... stop...” she was barely above a whisper, which made Goro want nothing more than for her to be louder.

He took this as his moment to flip her onto her stomach against the cot.

His right hand held both her arms behind her back, folded and solidly trapped there. His left hand was holding her hip, dragging down to guide her over his girth once again. He rather enjoyed the view of her at this angle, he was so lost in the way she bounced against him, the feeling of her walls rubbing so exquisitely against his length, that he was sure he wouldn’t last long. The thought of having their tryst cut so short however did not appeal to him, the feeling of being fully encased by her was so unequivocally amazing he never wanted it to stop, so he forced himself to slow down to a languid yet laborious pace, favouring drawn out leisurely strokes.

“Jesus Christ...” she gasped, arching her back in a way that made him want to go back to pounding her within an inch of her life but he was controlled, no foolish young man driven by a cardinal need, but a mature and tentative lover who wanted to make his partner see the stars before this was over.

He reached around, dragging his hands from the underside of her bellybutton to glide along her ribs, up and over her breast, giving it an appreciative squeeze before cradling her throat gently and turning her head to look back at him as much as she could in the position which granted wasn’t much. He leaned forward, still thrusting inside her at a restrained pace, and ravaged her neck, suckling the flesh at the junction of her shoulder and neck before trailing his bites to the underside of her jaw, then to her ear where he nibbled her lobe gently.

“Tell me what you want.” He breathed against her, the lewd sound of their bodies meeting in their primal dance and the soft gushes of wind rattling the shutters were all she could hear above their own crescendo of panting and haggard moans.

“Don’t... be a dick...” she gasped, earning her a sharp smack on her ass cheek.

“Tell me.” He thrust inside her, harder but not hard enough to satisfy her fully, leaving her trembling for more.

“Ah... fuck! Please...” she breathed, trying to shove her own hips back into his for more friction but his hand migrated back to her hips, a solid anchor, preventing her from getting her way.

“That’s not what I asked you.” She could hear the underlying cockiness in his tone and it pissed her off almost immediately.

How could this man illicit such polarising reactions from her, she thought. One moment she wanted him to bend her over a desk, the next she wanted to snap him in two. But the sentiment remained, she wanted him.

“Please... Goro... fuck me... harder...” he hummed in satisfaction and released her arms from his vice grip.

“Then I suggest you hold onto something.” He had leaned forward his lips against her ear, the vibrations of his bassy timbre tickled her in an irresistibly tantalising way.

But her inward musings came to a hault when he began his unforgiving pace, she could feel him hitting her cervix with every thrust and she cried out, hands barely holding on to the edge of the cot as her body rocked against the force of his hips.

His hand came down to tease her slit, circling her sensitive nub in a maddeningly delicious way that caused more mewls to erupt from her lips.

Goro stared down at her, enraptured by every twist and twitch she made. Her arching back defining her musculature and he’d be lying if he was doing any better than her right now. He was holding on for dear life, dragging this out for as long as he possibly could. But eventually, the warmth and curling in his abdomen could not be ignored and he quickened his circling around her clit to drive her to her end. She screamed softly into her hand as her release rolled over her in wave after wave, his continuing thrusts helping her ride out her climax to its fullest. He followed her soon after, nearly collapsing on her, his forehead resting between her shoulder blades as he struggled to regain his breathing. She recovered before Goro and pulled him further onto the cot where they crumbled into it. He curled around her, his arms pulling her flush against him as he savoured the feeling of her skin on his. He pressed his nose and lips to the top of her head, inhaling her scent deeply, attempting to sear these details into his mind for a later date. He tried his best to keep his eyes open, but she began to stroke his chest in a soothing circle, and before he knew it he was out like a light.

——————

He woke with a jolt, the room now completely darkened by the night and a sudden anxiety disquieted his mind. He reached for where V had been but his hand grabbed nothing but empty space.

“V?” He called, sitting up and listening for anything, then scanning the area. He could see from his thermal scan she had been gone from his side for nearly two hours.

He pulled himself up, dressing quickly and wrenching the front door open to see that her Thorton was gone, whatever tracks that were left had been swallowed by the desert wind and he stood in silence.

“This isn’t going to change anything.” Her words echoed in his mind and he clenched his hands into fists, a slight shake evident from his barely controlled emotions on the cusp of breaking through to the surface.

“They were going to discard you, who served them faithfully your whole life, for their own fucking agenda.”

He tried to quell his anger, his hurt, his inescapable feeling of betrayal. He fought to keep his composure but the memory of her touch was seared into his mind and body yet it did nothing but only make him ache to have her back in his arms. He would never feel that again, never experience that intense, intrinsic connection to another human being. The thought did nothing to disquiet his mind. Eventually he broke and turned to punch his hand nearly completely though the wall of the garage as he breathed in ragged and strangled chokes. Unshed tears burned in his eyes and he wrenched his arm back to completely break through the wall altogether with the force of his strike. He didn’t stop. He pummelled the wall until his cybernetics were scuffed and cracked. Warning signs flashed in his peripheral vision but he ignored them, slumping to the ground he cradled his head in his hands and roared in futility. He stayed there a moment, still, quiet and thoughtful. He raised his head with a thud against the nearly dilapidated wall and he looked off into the distance. On one path, the further reaches of the badlands, down another was the fluorescent and blinding lights of Night City, beaconing him back with a curled finger.

And not just night city, but the ominous red looming glow of Arasaka Headquarters illuminating the night and further banishing the stars. The only life he had ever known was within Arasaka’s ranks. All he had ever been was a vassal, a loyal one at that. Traded his life and limbs for them. Let them carve him into an instrument of their empire from the moment they had deigned to elevate him from the slums, only after he had skinned his fingers to the near bone scrubbing his clothes in the chemical sickened canals. He had given Arasaka his life.

Yet Hanako knew he was innocent. Not only her but Saburo, his lord tono, his idol. He had known. It stung him to his nucleus, like nothing ever had. He was stilled, inaction gripping him to his core. He found his gaze always defecting back to the badlands. To her lands. He didn’t make a choice so much as follow an instinct.

He rose from his seated position and opened the door to his car, looking back at Night City one last time, not saying goodbye to the city, but farewell to all the possibilities it held. They were not meant for him. A defiant grin stretched over his lips before a determination set in his eyes, looking back to the badlands. He dove into the front seat and revved the engine before backing out to the edge of the main road and quickly pivoting into position then tearing out onto the dusty highway, sending a plume of dust in his wake as he made for the badlands, his spirit lightened and rejuvenated. He undid his top shirt buttons, ripping off the front Arasaka logo to his cybernetic neck plates and throwing it with a quick flick out the car window, then looking down at the Arasaka patch logo on his arm which he also tore from his jacket then sent it too flying out the window. With each metre he put between him and the city, the younger he felt.

“I’m coming V.” He whispered under his breath as he pressed harder on the gas.

[marshmallow-phd]

Catching Rain

Part of The Untamed - EXO Wolf Universe

Genre: Wolf!AU

Pairing: Minseok x Reader

Summary: You were more than satisfied with your life. You attended a nice college, had nice friends, a nice boyfriend. That’s what your life was: nice. You weren’t looking for anything more, so what were you to do when this seemingly harmless boy walked into your life and turned your nice little world into one much more dangerous?

Part: 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5 I 6 I 7 I 8 I 9 I 10 I Epilogue

**

The theatre was loud, opposite of its normally hushed nature. People were yelling back and forth, saws and drills screeching as they tore through wood. In the background, sewing machines could be heard, along with the occasional curse as the needle got stuck in the fabric. One person, however, was quiet, focused. The paintbrush in his hand was small. The hairs tightly pressed together in order to create the perfect details on the backdrop. Erik was hunched over, sitting cross-legged on the stage floor as he squinted at the distant forest he was perfecting. Setting your bag down in the second row, you headed up the stage stairs.

“Hey,” you said softly in order not to scare him. 

Blinking, he turned around. His glasses were on the very tip of his nose, having slipped from the slight bit of sweat that had conjured on his face from the glaring stage lights. With a green speckled finger, he pushed the frame back up to its proper position. “Hey! I thought you had a project?”

You shrugged. “I did, but… I kind of hit a wall and needed to give my brain a rest. I’m sorry, I guess I should have gotten lunch with you anyway.”

“That’s alright. If you want, I still have half of my sandwich left.”

Smiling, you ruffled his hair. “Thanks, I’m not really hungry.” Minseok’s dismissive response had ruined the idea of food for you. Later you knew you would be starving, but right now food sounded like a great way to churn your stomach and see what it had been brewing all morning. “I’m just going to go hang out in the seats, if that’s okay?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “No one will bother you or question it. Not that anyone would notice in the first place.”

“It’s pretty crazy around here, isn’t it?”

“You missed the big explosion when Dorothy couldn’t find the armchair for the second act. Turns out, someone just leaned a piece of wood for the set against it and hid it from view. Still took us half an hour to find it.”

You snorted. “Wow. I’m actually kind of sad I missed that.” You kissed his cheek, careful to avoid a smear that you were sure he had no clue about. That stupid guilt knocked once again.

The seat was only slightly comfortable, the cushion long ago worn down from a thousand performances. You stewed there in the second row. Though it wasn’t appropriate during shows, you didn’t think anyone would care if you set your feet on the seat in front of you. Folding nearly in half, you hid your face from those who might look your way as you cranked the handle to get the gears in your head to turn. 

Confusion seemed like too weak a word to describe what was going on in your head. You were angry, frustrated, sad, relieved. There had to be some language in the world that tied those emotions all together. You just didn’t know it. Perhaps that one word could be the pill you needed to no longer feel this way. If you could shove all of that into a single box, you would be fine. But is it ever that simple? When you closed your eyes and tried not to think of anything in particular, Minseok’s face faded into view. You’d shake your head to drive the image away. It came back anyway.

You felt powerless against this unseen pull, this innate desire to see him again, even after what had just happened in the courtyard. Your mind made excuses, told you that if you simply asked him to explain then he would. Looking up at Erik, you sighed. 

There was no comparison because they were two different people. Erik was the sensitive artist, the kind who went to coffee shops on Friday nights to hear a mediocre guitar player sing his “poetry” because he believed everyone deserved an audience. Minseok, on the other hand, was a strange combination of math lab nerd and soccer team captain. He was goofy and dorky, easily amused by corny jokes, but also had the physique of someone who ran five miles in the A.M. for the fun of it. What you couldn’t figure out was what drew you to him in the first place. In any normal, not-already-dating-someone situation, you wouldn’t have been interested in his type. Yet, it was almost… effortless, being around him. Even after all these years, you sometimes had to force yourself into conversation with Erik. Comfortable silences didn’t exactly exist in your relationship, but you always chalked that up to your own personality. Now you wondered if those moments would be better with Minseok. 

Was this a normal thing? You heard stories of college sweethearts all the time and for the last few years, you thought you and Erik would join that club. You hadn’t thought about marriage, per se, but you hadn’t seen an end either. The idea of coming to a fork in the road had never occurred to you. While logic and third party advice you’d casually picked up over your life told you to stick to the left, you were being drawn to the right. One road you could easily see where it led, signs, clear pastures, and everything. The other way wasn’t as clear, disappearing into thick woods that were both inviting and foreboding. You didn’t know if there was another side for the road to come out to. The only way you would ever find out would be to follow it. 

You were able to sit there in that second row seat for a few hours, surprisingly, with your phone and the internet as your companion. Only occasionally would you contemplate that fork again. Left, right, left, right. Easy, hard, easy, hard. In the end, you decided you needed to see Minseok again to really decide. 

The stage manager called it quits late in the afternoon. Erik washed up his brushes and came to meet you. “Hungry yet?” You nodded, more for something else to do before you were alone again. “Good. I’m starving.” Taking your bag like the gentleman that he was, he waited for you to stand up and then walked you out of the theatre.

Dinner ended up being a small burger joint that Erik had been craving all day. You gave no complaints as you started salivating at the thought of their fries. Surely they had to have some sort of secret, addictive ingredient to make fried potato sticks so incredibly delicious. The two of you ended up splitting a large basket of the side. It stayed equally in the middle of the table so no one could say that the other was hogging. Yes. Safe. Easy. Seeable. 

Erik offered a follow up to dinner, but you feigned exhaustion (though there might not have been any faking truthfully, as your mind was tired from constantly running throughout the day). He walked you all the way to the door of your room. As usual, he told you goodnight and leaned in for a kiss. But unlike your normal anticipation, you flinched back to avoid his lips. He stared at you in confusion. Clearing your throat, you made it up to him by kissing his cheek before running for cover in your dorm. From the light of the hallway, you could see that Erik stood on the other side for a few seconds, hesitating to understand what had just happened, before finally walking away. 

Teeth clenched down on your bottom lip, you pulled your phone out of your back pocket. Thankfully, Willa was still out so you were alone. The glare of your phone burned in the darkness. You squinted as you moved your thumb across the screen, unlocking it before opening the contacts. The number you wanted was easy enough to find. The pad of your thumb hovered over the little green phone. It accepted the slightest touch and switched over to calling mode. You placed the speaker to your ear. 

Rrriiinggg. Rrriiinnngggg. 

“Hello?”

You sucked in air. He’d answered. You didn’t have a plan for this. You didn’t have any sort of plan after pressing call. You’d hoped that he was one of those people who didn’t have a voicemail set up. 

“Hello? (y/n)?”

You hung up. 

**

Minseok watched you stalk off in the exact direction he wished you hadn’t. Anywhere else; he would have been fine with you going anywhere besides the theatre where your boyfriend was. His wolf growled and clawed with jealousy. Why was he so stupid? Since when was keeping his mate a secret more important than being with you? Of course he wanted to eat lunch with you, to see how you got along with his brothers. But the idea of Baekhyun figuring it out had caused him to panic. As obnoxious as Baekhyun could be, he wasn’t stupid. At some point during the meal, Minseok would have done something a little overprotective and Baekhyun would have started to connect the dots. Unfortunately, he’d already picked up on something. 

“Oooo, breaking the rules, are we?” The brat even had the audacity to wiggle his eyebrows at the eldest wolf. 

Not holding back, Minseok swung, hitting a good target on the upper arm. 

“Ow!”

“First, it's not a rule,” Minseok grumbled. “Junmyeon simply suggested that we don’t date. Besides, you’re one to talk. How’s Daisy?”

Baekhyun was hardly phased. He sported a cheeky grin. “She’s great.”

Bored, Sehun asked, “Can we just go eat now? Who cares who Minseok was flirting with?”

“I wasn’t flirting with her!” Minseok shouted. He explained in a lower voice, “She’s having trouble in her math class so I’m doing Sungkyu a favor and helping her out so she can pass. That’s it.”

“So why didn’t you want her to eat with us, then?” Jongin asked innocently. 

Minseok flinched. Jongin was more observant than anyone would give him credit for. Not that Minseok was subtle in any sense of the word. “I didn’t say that I didn’t want her to eat with us. Knowing you all, you would have let something slip about what we are.”

“Minseok, we all caught that she was willing to join us,” Chanyeol said. 

Huffing, Minseok grumbled, “Are we going to go eat or should I just go by myself?”

Shrugging off the odd behavior, Baekhyun turned and headed for the parking lot. Minseok was quick to follow, feeling smaller than normal surrounded by his pack members. In his head, he pictured himself running back towards the theatre, bursting through the doors, and - in true dramatic fashion - declaring you his. 

That would be a complete disaster. He should only do that if he wanted you to never talk to him ever again. 

Minseok hardly paid attention as Chanyeol drove them to his favorite pizza place. He was in a trance as the others took control of what to order. Physically, he sat in the booth next to Sehun with Baekhyun on the other side. His shoulder was pressed into the chipped wooden guard rail that ran along the wall but he hardly noticed the uncomfortable poke in his skin. His mind was still back at the campus. He was driving himself crazy trying to figure out how he was going to make this up to you, how he was going to explain his bizarre switch up to you. He hardly ate, which was fine since the others were more than happy to devour the three large pizzas with varying toppings. The others weren’t bothered by his quietness since it was nothing new. Minseok was always more of an observer than a participant. In a time like this, it worked to his advantage.

There was no consulting Minseok when the lunch was through. They all simply piled back into the car and headed out of town towards the woods. Vague mentions of going for a run were tossed around. Minseok didn’t voice any sort of agreement. He wasn’t in the mood. Ha. A wolf not in the mood to run wild among the trees? He really was turned upside down because of you. While the younger ones headed straight for the trees, Minseok headed up the porch and through the front living room until he came to the kitchen. Oh, thank god. There were still beers in the fridge. He grabbed one and immediately opened it, still chugging as he walked over to the breakfast booth. 

“Did you have fun?”

Junmyeon slid into the booth across from him. Minseok put the can down. “Yeah. At first. We had fun with the project. It was when the others showed up that things��  went bad.”

“What do you mean?” Junmyeon asked with a frown. 

“I… panicked. The others invited her to join us and I….” Minseok shrugged. 

“Worried that the others would figure it out?” Junmyeon guessed. The response was a nod. 

“Figure what out?” 

Shit.

Baekhyun stood in the entryway, looking back and forth between the eldest and the alpha. Minseok gulped. He thought that all four of them had gone out on a run and he hadn’t heard anyone else in the house. Stepping further into the kitchen, Baekhyun asked again, “Figure what out?”

Minseok looked to Junmyeon for help. None was to be found. 

“You should probably tell them.”

“I’m not going to tell just Baekhyun so he can go running and tell the others and exaggerate.”

“I can always call a family meeting.”

“I don’t want to make that big of a deal out of it.”

“Too late on that. Besides, that’s the best way to get everyone here. Get it out of the way.”

“Or to get none of them here.”

“I’m still standing here,” Baekhyun scoffed.

Minseok looked at him. “I know.”

Junmyeon sighed. “Baekhyun, will you go get the others? Tell them it's important?”

He nodded. “Sure. Be back in a flash.” He left, already shedding the hoodie over his head. 

Slumping down in the booth, Minseok felt defeated. Junmyeon sensed this immediately. “It really won’t be that bad. And they need to be prepared.”

“Prepared?” 

“Yes. Once a pack member finds the first mate, the others will slowly start to find their own. It won’t be immediate. It could take years, really. But it’s like a domino effect. They should be aware that it's their turn next.”

It made sense. The pack was always connected, both in mind and in instinct. But it had been just them for so long, the idea of bringing in mates to the fold was odd. Minseok wasn’t sure how the others would react. Fists clenched on the table, he leaned his head down. It took almost half an hour before the rest of the pack came back. Yixing had arrived first, coming back from a lab he was making up from earlier in the week. The rest came into the kitchen ten minutes later. They were knocking into each other as they yanked on shirts and pants. 

“Okay, Junmyeon, what’s the emergency?” Jongdae asked, very prepared to be his usual sarcastic, troll self. 

But Junmyeon didn’t reply, letting Minseok take the reins instead. Minseok didn't want to do this. He wanted to run, to keep his secret a little while longer while he figured this whole thing out. But Junmyeon was right. It was time.

“(y/n) - the girl that some of you met today… she’s my mate.”

It was pure silence in the kitchen. It was unnatural in this household. The only time it was ever this quiet was when the house was empty. 

“I’m sorry,” Jongdae said. “You said… mate? Right?” Minseok nodded. He growled.  “Fantastic.”

“You really found your mate, Minseok?” Yixing was more enthusiastic about the news. He looked elated, even. A small smile was creeping up. 

Despite the stunned silence, Minseok found Yixing’s energy infectious. “Yeah. I did.”

“Have you told her yet?” Chanyeol asked. 

“She has a boyfriend,” Jongin reminded him. 

“Oh. Right.”

“I’m working on it,” Minseok said. “I just-” His phone vibrated in his pocket. Pulling it out, his eyes widened at the name popping up on the screen. With sixteen eyes on him, he answered, frantic. “Hello?” A gasp on the other end. “Hello? (y/n)?” You didn’t answer. Two seconds ticked by and you ended the call. He stared at his now black screen in shock. Then his brain started again. “I got to go.”

“Was it her?” Junmyeon asked. 

“Wait, I have more questions!” Baekhyun whined. Minseok was out of the kitchen in a heartbeat, jumping into his car and flying down the road. He didn’t know if you were hurt or in trouble. Why had you called him? Why didn’t you say anything? He was determined to find out. There was only one problem. 

He didn’t know your dorm number. 

You’d briefly mentioned the shared campus housing with your best friend, but that was all the information he had. Looks like he would have to find it the old fashion way. 

Asking. 

As soon as he parked, he headed towards the dorms, thankful at least that the two large housing buildings were close in proximity. He headed for the smaller cafeteria located in the lobby of the first building. The kitchen was closed but there were still students taking advantage of the open seating. Okay. Here it goes. 

The first few groups that Minseok asked had never heard of you. He was starting to berate himself on what a stupid idea this was. He should have called you back and asked you to call him when you were ready because it most certainly would have gone to voicemail. But his luck soon turned around. He approached a group of three girls sitting in a corner. One of them had a camera. 

“Excuse me?” They looked up. Minseok cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but I’m trying to find (y/n) (l/n)’s room. Do you happen to know her?”

One girl narrowed her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

Minseok swallowed. “I… I have her notebook. She’d left it behind earlier at study group. She really needs it for class on Monday but I can’t get a hold of her.” Please believe his stupid lie. 

The girl who’d spoken made eye contact with her two friends. “She’s in room twenty-three-nineteen. If she doesn’t answer, just slide the notebook under the door.”

He could almost jump from elated joy. “Thank you!” 

Taking off, he headed for the stairs. Your dorm room was only on the second floor so it didn’t take long to follow the signs until he was right outside your door. Only now did the possibility that your roommate would be the one to answer cross his mind. What lie would he have to come up with then? He had to take the chance. 

After knocking, he waited, shifting from foot to foot in an attempt to release the nervous energy surging through his body. The door swung open. 

It was you. Thank goodness. 

You were not the same level of relieved. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Crap. He probably should have thought of that. “You called me.”

You looked back over your shoulder before stepping out into the hallway, letting the door shut behind you. “So? That doesn’t mean you can just show up here!”

“I need to talk to you.” 

You licked your lips. No, please don’t do that. It’s too tempting already to grab your face and kiss you against the door. Without speaking, you went back into your room. Well, that was a bust. But before he could walk away with slumped shoulders, you came back, this time with shoes on and your bag. “Let’s go.”

He gave no protest as you led him out of the dorm and into the dark. He had no idea where the two of you were headed, but he planned on embracing whatever came his way. The two of you were going to talk. His heart was thumping hard against his sternum. He was getting more alone time with you. Who knew what would end up flying out of his mouth in these next few hours. Would this be the night of truths and revelations?

[sweetest-honeybee]

To Hell and Back

Chapter 11

Summary: Hels recognizes an all too familiar avian builder and he and Ex start on making dye from flowers after discussing their evident mental issues.

Characters: Helsknight, Evil Xisuma, Xisuma, Grian (briefly)

TW: None that I know of

———————

The night rolled by and soon it was Saturday. Hels had stayed in the same room for the night, wondering on the side where he’d stay when they eventually kicked him out of here. Not through hate, he assumed, just because his stab wound didn’t look more like he barely scratched himself and Stress decided that morning that they’d undress it and let it do its own thing.

All while the lady gave him more candy of course.

He opted to not wear his armor. That could be a mistake if he crossed Wels for any reason, but he knew the admin wouldn’t let him lay a finger on Hels unless the dark knight was the one provoking him. Chivalrous and fair, but Wels stuck by what he stood for and that wasn’t anything in Hel’s taste. To be blunt about it, the knight hated him and for good reason.

Not that it mattered, Hels was supposed to be the villain in the little hero’s book. He couldn’t give more than a mere thought to it.

Anyways, he pushed the thought to the side for later. If he came across Wels during their outing, he would cross that bridge when he got to it. He had an Evil Xisuma to visit if the guy didn’t already plan on dragging Hels out of the clinic himself. He also came to wonder why the Hermits had a clinic. They just respawned if they died.

Not that it didn’t sound unpleasant. His stomach churned at the idea of falling off a cliff and not but a second later waking up in your bed with a cold sweat. He shivered just thinking about it. He’s probably better off without respawning.

He was getting sidetracked again. Damn anxiety, why did Wels have anxiety? He was a knight and while Hels made it evidently clear of the other knight’s various phobias, he still was surprised at the sheer amount of things Wels was likely put off by. But anxiety? That was different, he knew. If he got the chance, he’d probably ask Ex about it. Ex was Xisuma’s clone or something, maybe he was a part of the same general concept.

And again, sidetracked. Was this how Ex’s mind worked? The man had a habit of jumping from topic to topic within a short span of time, Hels soon realized. Before he could think on it further, he threw on the, admittedly quite fancy, outfit he was given- courtesy of Mumbo Jumbo- and left the room.

That was until he quickly realized he had no clue where he was going even with the various signs above his head. After a few wrong turns, he finally found an elevator and sighed a breath of relief. After a short ride, he found himself in what he assumed was a lobby, a quite noticeably excited Evil Xisuma standing with his counterpart.

At the sight of Hels, the two smiled. That was quite odd for him, to have people smile at him when they saw him rather than scampering away in fear. Well, now that he wasn’t the ruler of Hels anymore, he supposed the lack of intimidation wasn’t as bad of a problem as it initially was before. He had nobody to please.

Hels joined the pair and with one short conversation and another spine crushing hug- to which Xisuma laughed at the strangled noises from Hels- the trio left for the garden.

But what he didn’t expect when he got to Ex’s flower shop was an all too familiar read sweater and wheat blond hair. The figure opening some chests for white tulips.

Both Xisuma and Ex must’ve noticed how suddenly the knight stopped in his tracks and turned. Following the rather intense glare Hels was sending him, their eyes landed on one of the other Hermits- Grian. While Ex merely raised a brow at the odd situation, Xisuma seemed to catch on quickly.

“Ah, I think I know. One second.” Xisuma left the trio to approach Grian, a new grin plastered onto his face as he went. Hels and Ex couldn’t hear their conversation with how far away they were, but with the expressions and gestures and Grian’s brief glance at them, he mouthed the word “Oh”.

When both Grian and Xisuma began to return, Hels put a hand to the hilt of his sword, his glare hardening more than ever. They walked up to them.

“Hels,” Xisuma began. “This is Grian. Grian, this is Helsknight, Wels’s evil clone. Hels, Grian wants to know if he in any way was related to the incident the other day.” Xisuma talked slowly and simply, as if Hels was a child. A very tall child.

Yet, his softer tone let the knight’s hand loosen a bit around the sword. He glanced up and down at the builder, as if he was searching for something. Eventually, he huffed.

“You’re not him,” he concluded, shoving the sword back into its sheath.

Grian glanced at Xisuma who simply shrugged. He looked back at Hels. “Not who?”

“The little demon of yours, the NPC.”

Instantly, Grian’s face twisted into deep concern at the all too familiar name. “Oh...What did he do?”

Before Hels could answer, Ex chimed in. “Um, can we talk about that later? We have some stuff to do.” Wordlessly and with a glare from Xisuma, the other 3 nodded, Grian mumbling something along some kind of apology. Within seconds, he flew off and out of the shopping district.

Inevitably, that was going to be brought up later.

Xisuma clapped his hands together. “Well, I’ll leave you both to it then. Ex, don't make him do anything too strenuous and don’t be rude.” With a nod from his counterpart, Xisuma left as well to some other shops nearby.

“Phew, thought you were gonna kill him for a second. I mean he’ll respawn, but that would still cause commotion. Anyways, the garden is another shop or two down. One of the other hermits helped make a greenhouse!”

Abandoning his previous mood, Hels chuckled at the sudden change in Ex’s train of thought. He then became curious.

“Ex, are you...alright…in the head? You tend to jump back and forth between different topics faster than most people I know.” While they walked, Ex skipped in his steps a bit.

“Hm, I’m not sure. Xisuma said there’s definitely something. Something called um….AHDD?”

“You mean ADHD?”

“I think so. He said it means my brain isn’t wired to follow the normal train of thought and I have some trouble with other things of the sort.” Ex spun his fingers around the sides of his head to emphasize his point. They kept walking.

“Problems like what?”

Ex thought for a second, trying to recall what Xisuma had told him. “I’m not sure. He says it’s stuff like transitioning from different tasks or….like starting new tasks or trying to stop doing tasks. It also means I mostly pay attention when it’s a topic I’m interested in.”

“Huh, sounds about right. Well, I thought I’d ask.” Ex perked up.

“What about you? Anything wrong in your head?”

Hels hummed and absentmindedly answered. “Anything Wels struggled with. Usually just anxiety and some phobias, nothing too extreme.”

“What are you anxious about?” The greenhouse was coming up on a small hill.

“Well, I’m high and mighty, but sometimes I start questioning it. And the questioning leads to further thought about it, which usually just spirals into hours of overthinking. Sometimes even an anxiety attack.” The lack of restraint from pouring out that answer surprised the knight briefly.

“What’s that?”

“An anxiety attack?” They approached the greenhouse and stopped at the doors.

“Well, I kind of know. But yeah, that.”

“Just means I get really scared and cry in a corner mostly. But they’re different for others. Some like being touched during consolation, others don’t. Just depends.” They walked inside and the aroma of the fresh plants came at them instantly.

“Do you like being touched during an anxiety attack? What do I do if you have one?”

“We can save that conversation for a later date, okay?” Hels huffed. Ex nodded. With the sight of the flowers, Hels could practically see the counterpart’s mind shifting gears.

“Okay, so I mostly need help with the tulips. Xisuma said nothing too strenuous, so you can pick some and give them to me while I make dye. Good?”

Hels nodded. “Alright, let's start then.”

[biillyhargroves]

If I am able for a request when u have the time. Where the part with Robin and Steve in the bathroom floor. But instead it’s Steve and Billy and at the end when Billy says he likes guys he goes in for Steve I just need fluff Thank u

For the sake of brevity, let’s just say that this is in an AU where Billy worked at Scoops Ahoy with Steve (although I do have an idea for an AU where Billy is freed from the Mind Flayer but is kidnapped by some sneaky Russians before the kids can get to him post-sauna test, so if you want to think of it in that sort of scenario, be my guest! and someone let me know if you’d be interested in reading something like that because…now I’m tempted). 

take this to your grave(fic requests open)

The words leave his mouth before Billy can stop them. He can feel them popping off of his tongue and he cannot tell why, what their purpose is, if he even wants to hear the answer. “Have you ever been in love?” It’s a silly question. The kind that pre-teen girls giggle over at sleepovers, the kind that movie characters ask just before they confess their undying love for one another. Of all the questions that he could ask a drug-addled Steve Harrington, of the dirt that he could dig up, this is what his own hazy brain comes up with: 

Have you ever been in love?

And maybe there’s a reason for it, a reason that Billy is not quite ready to admit - that he won’t admit until he hears Steve’s answer. But maybe it’s there, lying underneath his softly slurred inquiry. Maybe there’s even a little glimmer of hope behind it.

From the next stall over, he hears Steve hum in thought. It a long while before Steve answers, so long that Billy things that he has forgotten the question - he almost hopes that Steve has, but then he hears Steve’s sleepy-sounding voice say, “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Billy nudges.

“Yeah,” Steve repeats. “Uh, Nancy Wheeler. I don’t- I didn’t think I’d ever get over her.”

“No?” Billy asks. He cannot see it, but Steve shakes his head. 

“It, uh, it took a long time,” Steve admits. 

“But you did get over her?” Billy asks, trying to sound teasing but coming off curious. When Steve does not answer, Billy asks, “Are you still in love with her?”

“For a while I was,” Steve says. Again, he falls silent, and that silence stretches the full length of the empty bathroom. It fills it up and rings against the walls and Billy thinks it’ll make him go mad. When Steve says quiet for too long, he clears his throat.

“What happened?” he asks. 

“Uh,” Steve stammers. Billy thinks he sounds a little more sober, but he can’t be sure. “I met someone,” Steve says. “Someone else. And, uh, this…this person…sort of made me feel…not quite how Nancy did, really. I mean, it’s similar, but not the same, you know? It might even be better. I’ve never met someone cooler, you know? Or, like, funnier. Or smarter. I mean, I’ve known some cool people, right? But not like this. I mean, I’ve also never met anyone more stubborn, and for a while I thought…I thought that I’d never met a bigger fucking asshole. I mean, he’s got this wild temper. Fucking insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“He?” Billy asks. His heart catches in his throat and he has to swallow hard to get it to go back down. Even when he does, he can feel it pounding hard and fast in his chest, so severely that he thinks it’ll burst right out. Steve doesn’t seem to hear him. That, or he chooses to ignore him. 

“I guess things changed, though,” he says, though Billy is only half-listening now. He cannot move past that one little syllable that so casually fit itself on Steve’s tongue. He. It came out as easy as a breath. Steve says, “Changed in a a good way, you know? Like…really good, I think. I don’t know. I guess a kidnapping can bring people together.” Billy can hear the smile in Steve’s voice. It makes Billy’s heart- hell, his whole chest -burn. He thinks that he is fitting the pieces together, but he won’t let himself believe it. He won’t let himself think that Steve Harrington is making some grand, film-worthy love confession in an empty movie theater bathroom. Surely, his tongue is still thick with the drugs. Surely, his brain is as fuzzy as Billy’s whole head feels. Billy is so wrapped up in his thoughts that he almost doesn’t Steve falter when he says, “But…I don’t know. I don’t think anything can happen there.”

“Why not?” Billy asks. Steve huffs a small little laugh. 

“I don’t think I’m his type,” he says. 

There it is again, Billy thinks. His, Fitting so easily in Steve’s speech that Billy has to wonder if Steve even knows that he’s saying it. Has it found its way there on purpose? Does Steve hear it, too?

“I mean, how do you know, right?” Steve asks. “If someone swings that way, I mean. If I asked him I think he’d just punch me in the face, and I’ve about taken all I can of that.” 

Billy goes silent- really, really silent. The gears in his brain are churning so hard that Billy thinks he can smell the smoke they’re surely working up. He hugs his knees to his chest and buries his face against them. He breathes in deeply, exhales fully, tries to get his heart to quit skipping every other beat. 

He must be quiet for a long time because eventually Steve says, “Billy?” Billy peeks up over his knees and sees Steve’s shadow moving in the next stall. One sneakered foot pokes into Billy’s, and then another, and then Steve comes crawling his way under the gap. Billy raises a brow as Steve settles his back against the wall. “Thought I lost you,” he says quietly. 

“Still here,” Billy says. He straightens his back. He loosens his hold on his own legs and tries to regain some semblance of composure as the heat of Steve’s eyes- one of them so purple and puffy and bruised that it is nearly swollen shut -lock onto him. He lifts his chin, rolls his shoulders, though each little movement comes across less confident and more fidgety. 

“Did you, uh…” Steve starts, his hands doing some fidgeting of their own, “connect the dots?” Billy does not say anything, not yet, and these seems to touch on Steve’s already frayed nerves. “I mean, I’m not good at the, uh, code talk? And I guess, uh, well…I mean, you haven’t hit me yet, so-”

He is cut off, suddenly.

He is cut off by Billy’s lips on his. He is cut off by Billy kissing him. Billy’s heart in his throat and Steve’s jumps up into his own. Billy’s hands fall on Steve’s knees and he smells like disinfectant and sweat and he tastes like salt and copper and Steve’s back is pushed flush against the red wall of the bathroom stall because Billy Hargrove is kissing him. 

When they part, Steve is breathless. He counts to five before opening his eyes and he finds Billy looking at him. He forces himself to exhale and he says, “Um.”

“I connected the dots,” Billy says.

“You- uh, you-” Steve stammers. He clears his throat, then asks, “You…you like guys?”

“Sometimes,” Billy shrugs. “You do?” he asks.

“Uh,” Steve stutters. “Sometimes.” He leans closer, and they kiss again, and Steve feels like there are fireworks exploding inside of him. Billy brings a hand up to tangle in Steve’s hair. He kisses him deeper this time, and Steve lets him, and, God, they both pray that this is not some drug-induced fever dream. Steve even whispers, between the breaths swiped between kisses, “Is this real?”

And Billy answers, “Yes.” It’s real. It’s real.

[lunarsaga]

Me: I'm not gonna write a fanfic, I'll just do this in snippets My "Snippets": *full fanfic chapter length and only getting longer* Me: ......uh.......

This Episode:

The Band Of Seven, Resurrected

Finally catching sight of their friends again was a bit of a relief for both Luna and Ai. It had been a long couple of days, going all the way home and coming back. Part of Luna hoped they’d get just a little bit of rest before whatever shit hit the fan next, but another part knew the odds on that were pretty low. Still, it was nice to be back.

Kagome was the first to spot them as they flew in. “It’s Luna!”

“Luna’s back!” Shippo proclaimed joyfully.

“Hey, y’all,” Luna greeted as Ai touched down. She hopped off the demon’s back as her friends offered their greetings. “What’d I miss?” She asked.

Miroku was the one to answer. “Quite a lot. It seems that we may encounter a new enemy: the local villagers recently informed us of a group of mercenaries called the Band of Seven. The villagers believe these ruthless killers may have been brought back from the dead.”

With a grin on her face, Luna shrugged at the idea. “Undead mercs, huh? Nothin’ we can’t handle.” She held up her fist for her sister to bump it, and as Ai changed back to her human form, Luna noticed their little group was smaller than it should’ve been. “Where’s Sango?”

Kagome bumped fists with her sister, smiling at Luna’s nonchalant comment. “She went off with Kilala. I sensed a Jewel Shard nearby earlier… so I think she may have gone to look for Kohaku.”

Luna didn’t have time to respond. Off in the distance, she heard the distinctive echo of a sound she was all too familiar with.

“What on Earth was that?” Ai asked, her hand on Luna’s arm.

Kagome glanced at her sister nervously. “Was that…?”

“Gunfire. Definitely.” Luna’s eyes were locked on the trees in the direction the sound had come from. Mere seconds after they heard the shots, there was an overwhelming tang of copper in the air.

“And the smell of human blood…” Miroku said, gravely.

Inuyasha hopped up onto a tree limb, hoping to get a look at what was happening. He couldn’t see it, but he sure as hell could smell it. “And it ain’t from just a handful of people, either.”

So much for a second to rest, Luna chuckled to herself as she tightened the straps on her backpack and immediately kicked into gear. “What’re we waiting for, then?”

And off they were, charging headlong into danger as always. Luna could sense something was up; more so than usual. The stench of blood was never a good sign in the first place, but there was something else setting off warning bells. Something she couldn’t put a finger on.

The smell got stronger and stronger, until… they reached its source. Despite the amount of nasty shit she’d seen in her ten years of hunting supernatural monsters, there were some things that still turned her stomach, and seeing a single human being standing in a veritable ring of blood and gore was definitely one of them. His black hair was pulled into a twist; his lips were painted red, he had blue tattoos like tear tracks under each eye, and one side of his kimono was tucked up under his belt. The dude was just squatting in the middle of the carnage, eyeballing the barrel of a matchlock gun like it was his first time seeing one (which, hell, it might be, she thought to herself; in this time, they would’ve only recently been invented). He seemed completely unbothered by the dozen and a half bodies of freshly murdered warriors and their horses surrounding him.

Inuyasha was the one to get to the scene just ahead of the others, calling back over his shoulder: “Stay back! Don’t come over here!”

Instinctively, Luna remained in front of her sister, her arm out to try and block her view. Her stomach was churning, and her hand was poised to pull her gun if needed. No way this guy could be human… right?

“Did… that one person do all this?” Kagome’s voice was a shocked whisper.

It was then that the guy in the middle noticed them. He stood, his sword over his shoulder and his head cocked slightly to the side.

“Are you the one I’ve been looking for?” He asked, a grin on his face as he shielded his eyes from the sun. “Are you Inuyasha?!”

“Got a bad feeling about this.” Luna mumbled, “That guy isn't a demon, is he?”

“I don’t think so,” Kagome uttered back to her, “I don’t sense a demonic aura….”

“How’d you know my name?!” Inuyasha demanded.

He got no answer out of the guy with the sword. Instead, the guy squealed: “You’re adorable!”

A dumbfounded silence fell over the group. Luna glanced around at the others to make sure she didn’t just lose her mind—but no, the general consensus among her friends was along the lines of ‘what the actual fuck?’

“I especially love those fuzzy ears of yours!” The guy continued, licking his lips. “I want them~”

Alright, so this guy was nuts. Luna had had enough of ignoring the bad vibe she was picking up from him. She dropped her bag next to Kagome’s bike and readied herself for a fight: detached the ammo bag and shotgun holster from her pack and slung them over her shoulder, slipped her short sword through one of the belt loops on her jeans, and pulled her shotgun to make sure it was in hand and loaded. She kept her eyes moving back and forth between Inuyasha and the dude with the sword during the next exchange:

“Who are you?” Inuyasha demanded, “What are you after? You don’t smell like a living person, you reek like corpses and graveyard soil!”

No answer.

“Inuyasha,” Miroku said in realization: “Could he be—?”

“Yep,” Inuyasha confirmed, before calling out to the guy with the sword again: “Some villagers were talking! They said some disgusting specter rose up from the grave. That’d be you, I presume!”

Right, zombies, Luna thought to herself; if he really is undead, the Sacred Salt won’t do as much as it would a demon… It’d sting, but what I really need is-… She smirked and holstered her gun again, grabbing a different weapon from the bottom of her bag.

“Are you one of the Band of Seven?!” Miroku asked of the specter as Luna was tuning back in. “Answer me!”

After a long pause as the specter seemed to size the monk up, his response was even worse than before. “Inuyasha really is good looking, but you’re pretty sexy yourself~”

Luna snorted so hard she thought she was gonna eject her brain through her nose. Ai whacked her in the arm as a warning.

“No one minds if I suck him up, do they?” Miroku grumbled.

“No.” Inuyasha said, flatly.

“Hold on!” Kagome said, “He’s got a Sacred Jewel Shard! He must’ve been revived with the power of the Shard!”

“So that was what I was sensing,” Luna mumbled, “but why does it feel off...?”

“Where’d you get the Jewel Shard?!” Inuyasha once again attempted to pose a question to their opponent, only to once again receive a weird, adoring response:

“You know, you’re cute when you’re angry~!”

“Shut up!” Inuyasha shouted, jumping forward and drawing his sword. “Alright, dead man, you’d better start talking to me, and I want real answers!”

The expression on the specter’s face shifted from one of reverence to one more sadistic as he regarded Tetsusaiga. “That’s an interesting sword you have there… let’s see whose is stronger.” He lifted his own sword, making an odd motion around his head and shoulders with it as if he were gearing up for something. “Yours or mine?!”

When he brought his arm down, something that looked almost like a bolt of silver lightning shot from his blade. Inuyasha barely had the chance to block it as it cut an arc through the air toward him.

“Inuyasha!” Kagome called out in surprise.

“Stay back!” Miroku threw his arm out in an attempt to shield the others. “It’s some kind of trick sword!”

“That’s my cue!” Ai shifted into full demon form, jerking her head at the sisters and the little fox. “All aboard!”

Kagome climbed on no issue, but Luna glanced at Miroku, who made no move to follow them. “You coming?”

“I’ll be alright, you keep them safe.” Miroku said, resolute. Not about to argue, Luna climbed on the demon’s back and Ai leapt into the air above the fight.

“You gonna be okay holding all of us after that long flight?” Luna asked her friend.

“I’m fine, it’s the same weight as you with your pack on.” Ai sassed back.

“Yeah well, fuck me for being prepared,” Luna laughed, starting to prep the other weapon she’d brought.

Kagome managed to tear her eyes from the confrontation below to try and see what her sister was doing. “What did you bring, Luna?”

Luna grinned as she clicked the last accessory into place, then turned back to show her sister. “This? This is my baby.” She held up her favorite weapon: it was a fully-customized folding compound crossbow as long as Luna’s arm. She pressed a release on the side, and the arms shot into place, making both Shippo and Kagome jump.

“Whoa!” The fox demon exclaimed, “What kind of a weapon is that?!”

“It’s a crossbow, Shippo,” Kagome explained, “It’s kind of like my bow, but the arrows are smaller and it’s easier to fire.”

“Self-loading, too,” Luna smirked as she strung it up, “The ‘arrows’ are called bolts. This thing can shoot way faster than a longbow, and since we’re dealing with Zombie Harley Quinn down there—” She grabbed a bolt from her ammo bag to show it to them, “—we’re gonna need these. They’re tipped with pure silver. Great for dealing with Vampires, Werewolves, The Undead, and The Unholy.”

Shippo reached out to touch it, but Kagome stopped him, shaking her head rapidly. “It’s safe to assume you shouldn’t touch anything Luna has in her bag, Shippo.”

The kid swallowed nervously. “G-got it...”

Below them, the fight continued. Inuyasha could barely avoid each strike of the snakelike sword, and his opponent only seemed to be having more and more fun.

“What do you think of Jakotsu of the Band of Seven, huh?!” He shouted as he swung the sword once more.

“Not too much!” Inuyasha came back at him with Tetsusaiga, but to no avail.

Kagome gasped. “He needs help!”

“That’s what this baby’s for,” Luna grinned, patting her crossbow. “Ai, can you stay out of reach of the sword but get me close enough to shoot?!”

“It’ll take a miracle!”

“Better start praying, then,” Luna lined up the shot, finger still as stone on the trigger. There was a familiar voice in the back of her head; she could hear her father saying: “Aim for where they’re gonna be, not where they are.”

I know, dad. She tried not to sigh audibly as she managed to get Jakotsu’s head in her crosshairs and pulled the trigger, quick as a viper.

And… almost missed him.

The consecrated silver bolt seemed to burn through the air as it shot just centimeters shy of the specter’s nose and grazing his arm, burning a hole in his kimono. He whipped his attention to the woman who shot it.

“How dare you interfere?!” He snarled, rearing his arm back and whipping his blade toward them.

Luna felt her stomach drop. “Motherf—”

“You idiot!” Ai snapped at her, trying to fly out of range of the sword as Kagome and Shippo both clung, screaming, to Luna’s back. Just as the sword arched toward them, there was a familiar cry of:

“HIRAIKOTSU!”

And Jakotsu’s blade was then tangled around the aforementioned boomerang. All three riding on Ai’s back sighed in relief when they saw Sango swoop in on Kilala. Ai touched down just as Kilala did, transforming into her human form and unceremoniously dumping the sisters on their asses.

“Are you all okay?” Sango called over to them.

“We’re fine!” Shippo answered.

“Perfect timing, Sango!” Kagome said.

“Some weapon, Luna!” Ai huffed in the Hunter’s direction. Luna just stuck her tongue at her.

Jakotsu was practically red in the face, shrieking in frustration: “What is with all you vile women?! Can’t you see I’m trying to battle Inuyasha?!” In the same breath, he whipped his sword again, toward Sango this time. The movement freed the Hiraikotsu, and ended up leaving a small slice on Sango’s arm as Jakotsu pulled it back.

“Stay out of this!” He continued, “None of you will interfere!”

But their “interference” had served Inuyasha well enough: it gave him just the opportunity he needed to rear back and punch the specter in the face.

“Shut up! I’m tired of listening to your pointless babble!” Inuyasha growled.

Jakotsu grunted as he tumbled back, then rubbed his cheek and pouted like a kicked puppy. “That was cruel…”

“Oh, get over it!” Inuyasha snapped, “Now tell me who gave you the Sacred Jewel Shard before I have to seriously hurt you!”

Kagome and Miroku rushed to see if Sango was okay, but she assured them that it was just a graze; she was fine. Her attention was more on the subject at hand.

“I have a feeling that the shard came from Naraku,” She said, somberly. She looked at Kagome. “When you sensed a Jewel Shard earlier… it was Kohaku. I saw the Saimiyosho around him as well.”

“That means that your brother is still under Naraku’s control…” Miroku said. Sango nodded.

Luna had set her weapon down next to her backpack, and came back with a bandage for Sango’s arm. Her mind was going at a million miles an hour, trying to figure out how the hell they were gonna handle this—first an undead band of Ronin, now they have something to do with Naraku. What was Naraku playing at...?

“Gotta wonder what the hell is next…” Luna mumbled sarcastically. Seconds later, she would regret asking. A cloud of black smoke poured over the cliffside, drifting right toward them.

Like he knew what was happening, Jakotsu got up and collected his sword. “Inuyasha! You should get out of here while you can! Bye!” And with that, he was just… gone.

“What the hell—” Inuyasha broke off with a startled yell when the cloud reached him. “Its poison!”

“But where’s it coming from?!” Miroku wondered.

“We need to move.” Luna reassembled her bag in less than thirty seconds—side effect of doing it so often. “We can figure out what the fuck is going on when we’re safely away from here!”

Why do I feel like we stepped into something huge here? Luna thought to herself as the group of friends moved away from the cloud of gas.

[carneaderunt]

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚃𝚄𝚁𝙽𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙿𝙾𝙸𝙽𝚃.

                           ❝      𝚆𝙷𝙾𝙰 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚁𝙴  ,   𝙺𝙴𝙽𝙽.      ❞         he held her by her shoulders   ,   careful not to grip her neck where the blood was pooling near her collar bone   &   soaking into the material of her tank top.   he didn’t stop to question why she was wearing so little clothing in the beginnings of winter.    instead   ,   he pushed some of the hair that had fallen from her ponytail away from her wound   ,   finding a round set of indentions   ———   teeth marks   ———   open   &   still bleeding.

                          𝙺𝙴𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙳𝚈 𝙱𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙺𝙴𝙳   ,   trying to stay focused on him.   she looked like she would drop any minute.   how long had she been wandering the forest alone before he found her   ?   how much blood had she already lost   ?

                          ❝      ———   𝙳𝙰𝙼𝙾𝙽   ...      ❞         she mumbled   ,   hand fumbling for his shoulder.   her chocolate brown eyes searched his face for clarity   ,   answers to what was going on.        ❝      𝚆𝙷𝙰𝚃 𝙰𝚁𝙴 𝚈𝙾𝚄   ———   where did you   ———      ❞         a whimper escaped past her lips.        ❝      ———   𝙸𝚃 𝙷𝚄𝚁𝚃𝚂.      ❞

                         𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝚁𝙳 𝙷𝙸𝙼 𝚂𝙸𝙶𝙷   &   watched his breath form a fog-like vapor as it mingled with the air.        ❝      𝙸 𝙺𝙽𝙾𝚆   ,   𝙺𝙴𝙽𝙽.   𝙸 𝙺𝙽𝙾𝚆   ,   but i’m going to fix you right up   ,   okay   ?      ❞ 

                         ❝         ' 𝙺𝙰𝚈   ,      ❞         she mumbled   ,   slumping a bit in his hold.   her eyes fluttered   ,   but she kept them open.

                         𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝙷𝙸𝙵𝚃𝙴𝙳 𝙷𝙴𝚁 so she was being held up by one arm before pushing up the sleeve of his leather jacket   &   biting into his free wrist.   he held it up to her lips   ,   &   kennedy stared at it dumbfounded.        ❝      𝚆𝙷𝙰𝚃   ———   ?      ❞

                     ❝      𝚈𝙾𝚄'𝚁𝙴 𝙶𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙰 𝙷𝙰𝚅𝙴 𝚃𝙾 𝙳𝚁𝙸𝙽𝙺 𝙸𝚃   ,   𝙺𝙴𝙽𝙽.      ❞        he placed it closer to her.        ❝      𝙸𝚃'𝙻𝙻 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙻 𝚈𝙾𝚄.      ❞

                      𝙷𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝚄𝙻𝙳 𝚂𝙴𝙴 𝙷𝙴𝚁 𝙴𝚈𝙴𝚂 clear up at his words.   he could almost see the gears churn behind the brown orbs.   he could tell that somewhere along the line   ,   even if it had only been right when she was attacked   ,   she had figured it out   ,   &   the rational part of her brain was still in denial.

                      ❝      𝚈𝙾𝚄'𝚁𝙴 𝙲𝚁𝙰𝚉𝚈   ,   𝙳𝙰𝙼𝙾𝙽.      ❞        she tried to straighten in his hold   ,   only to lose her footing and fall onto the ground.   on instinct   ,   she pushed her hands out to catch herself   &   managed only to cut them on the rocky dirt   &   broken twigs.

                       𝙳𝙰𝙼𝙾𝙽 𝙳𝚁𝙾𝙿𝙿𝙴𝙳 𝙳𝙾𝚆𝙽   ,   pulling her against him.        ❝      𝙲𝚁𝙰𝚉𝚈   ?   𝙸𝚂 𝙼𝚈 𝙱𝙻𝙾𝙾𝙳 healing you crazier than you being attacked by   ———      ❞

                       ❝      𝙱𝚈 𝙰 𝚅𝙰𝙼𝙿𝙸𝚁𝙴   ?      ❞        she asked   ,  voice flat.   the fall to the forest floor seemed to have awaken some coherency into kennedy   ,   &   she was suddenly more aware of the blood trickling down her neck.   using her scrapped hand   ,   she held it against the wound   ,   hoping to stop some of the blood flow.   she hissed   ,   cursing under her breath.   the bite seemed to hurt a lot more now that there wasn’t a set of teeth latched to it.        ❝      𝚃𝙷𝙰𝙽 𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙱𝙴𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙰 𝚅𝙰𝙼𝙿𝙸𝚁𝙴   ?      ❞

                      ❝      𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙺𝙽𝙾𝚆   ?   𝙰𝙱𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝙼𝙴   ?      ❞

                      ❝      𝚆𝙴𝙻𝙻   ,   𝙸'𝙳 𝙱𝙴 𝚂𝚃𝚄𝙿𝙸𝙳 to mistake a person attached to my neck as an animal.      ❞        she groaned   ,   pressing her hand harder against her neck.        ❝      𝙰𝚂 𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝚈𝙾𝚄   ,   m’kinda mad it took me this long actually   ———   i mean   ,   it’s so obvious now   ,   &   there you were   ,   day three already dropping hints   ———   oh   ,   can I borrow a copy of 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚟𝚊𝚖𝚙𝚒𝚛𝚎 𝚌𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚕𝚎𝚜   ?   & then you left it in a dumpster at the back of an alley for me to find   ,   which by the way is not the proper way to take care of a library book.      ❞

                       𝙳𝙰𝙼𝙾𝙽 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝚃𝙾 𝚂𝚃𝙾𝙿 𝙷𝙴𝚁   ,   but she persisted on.        ❝      &   𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙰𝙽𝙸𝙼𝙰𝙻 𝙰𝚃𝚃𝙰𝙲𝙺𝚂 with the people drained of blood in both mystic falls   &   the surrounding areas.   those have been going on for the past three months.   &   when did you   &   stefan come to town   ?   three months ago.   now   ,   logan fell being a vampire   …   i wasn’t expecting that.   i’ve been pretty sure for about a week now that you   &   stefan were vampires   ,   so i was a little shocked when it was the guy who can’t take a hint that jenna isn’t interested in him that attacked me.   but   ,   i guess that’s what i get for deciding to take a late night jog in the forest.      ❞

                        𝙸𝚃 𝚆𝙰𝚂 𝙳𝙰𝙼𝙾𝙽'𝚂 𝚃𝚄𝚁𝙽 𝚃𝙾 𝙱𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙺.   he had heard kennedy ramble before   ,   but all the previous times it had been out of nervousness.   it had been her way to fill in the awkward silence that had settled between them anytime he had appeared   ,   but this was different.   it was a comfortable rambling   ,   as if she had been waiting for this moment   ,   had prepared a speech   ,   &   was now rushing through the words in fear she would forget everything she had wanted to say.   she inhaled   ,   breath shallow   ,   &   he took his opportunity to step in.

                       ❝      𝙻𝙾𝙶𝙰𝙽 𝙸𝚂 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙾𝙽𝙴 who attacked you    ?      ❞

                        𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝙽𝙾𝙳𝙳𝙴𝙳.        ❝      𝚈𝙴𝙰𝙷   ,   𝙻𝙾𝙶𝙰𝙽 𝙵𝙴𝙻𝙻   ,   the   ,   uh   ,   douche from the news.      ❞        she let out another whine   ,   moving her hand away to see it covered in blood.        ❝      𝙱𝚄𝚃 𝚂𝙾𝙼𝙴𝙾𝙽𝙴 𝙴𝙻𝚂𝙴 𝚂𝚃𝙾𝙿𝙿𝙴𝙳 𝙷𝙸𝙼.   another vampire   ,   i think   ,   some girl.   i didn’t   ———   i didn’t see her face   ,   but she was   ———   she was fast like him.   threw him off me.      ❞

                        𝙷𝙴 𝙷𝙴𝙻𝙳 𝙱𝙰𝙲𝙺 𝙰 𝙵𝚁𝚄𝚂𝚃𝚁𝙰𝚃𝙴𝙳 𝙶𝚁𝙾𝙰𝙽.   whoever had stopped logan must have been the vampire who had turned the reporter as well   ,   but if this female vampire had been so concerned with saving kennedy from logan   ,   then why hadn’t she bothered to heal her   ?   what had been the point of saving her if they were just going to leave her to bleed out on the forest floor   ?   damon looked down to where his wrist had closed back up.

                        ❝      𝙸 𝙶𝙾𝚃𝚃𝙰 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙻 𝚈𝙾𝚄   ,   𝙺𝙴𝙽𝙽.      ❞        he bit into his wrist again   ,   bringing it up to her lips.   she shook her head.

                        ❝      𝙽𝙾   ———   𝙸 𝙳𝙾𝙽'𝚃   ,   i don’t wanna become a vampire.      ❞

                        𝙰 𝙲𝙷𝚄𝙲𝙺𝙻𝙴 𝙻𝙴𝙵𝚃 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙻𝙸𝙿𝚂 at how pathetic she sounded.        ❝      𝙸𝚃'𝚂 𝙽𝙾𝚃 𝙶𝙾𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚃𝙾 𝚃𝚄𝚁𝙽 𝚈𝙾𝚄 into a vampire.   it’s just going to heal you.      ❞

                         𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝚃𝙰𝚁𝙴𝙳 𝙰𝚃 𝙸𝚃 𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝙰 𝙼𝙾𝙼𝙴𝙽𝚃   ,   &   he was beginning to fear she would pass out before he could convince her to drink the blood voluntarily.        ❝      𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙼𝙸𝚂𝙴  ?      ❞        she asked.   her voice had lost some of its volume   &   sounded scratchy.

                        ❝      𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙼𝙸𝚂𝙴.   𝙽𝙾𝚆 𝙳𝚁𝙸𝙽𝙺.   before i make you.      ❞        he placed his wrist against her mouth   &   watched as she hesitantly wrapped her fingers around his arm to keep it in place as she began to suck at the blood.

                          𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝙷𝙸𝙵𝚃𝙴𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙼 𝚄𝙽𝚃𝙸𝙻 they were sitting more comfortably on the forest floor with kennedy in his lap.   he stroked her hair   ,   letting out a sigh of relief he didn’t realize he had been holding back.

                         ❝      𝙶𝙾𝙾𝙳 𝙶𝙸𝚁𝙻   ,   that’s it.      ❞        he glanced down at the wound on her neck as it started to close up.         ❝      𝙹𝚄𝚂𝚃 𝙰 𝙱𝙸𝚃 𝙼𝙾𝚁𝙴   ,   &   you’ll be good as new.      ❞

                          𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝚃𝙾𝙾𝙺 𝙰 𝙵𝙴𝚆 𝙼𝙾𝙴𝚁 𝚂𝙸𝙿𝚂 before damon pulled his wrist away   ,   wiping the blood off her cheek with his sleeve.   they sat there for a few minutes   ,   listening to the leaves rustle   &   the crickets chirp.   his mind wandered back to 𝟷𝟾𝟼𝟺 when he   &   eliza gilbert had sat like this in a meadow not far from where he   &   kennedy were.   they would sit for hours like this   ,   pointing out constellations   &   just enjoying each other’s company.   it was a friendship he truly missed.

                           𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝙷𝙾𝙾𝙺 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚄𝙶𝙷𝚃𝚂 from his head.   that was then   ,   &   this was now   ,   &   now  ,   he had to think about what to do with Kennedy.   he could compel her   ,   erase her mind of the vampire attack   ,   but that could potentially leave her vulnerable to another attack.   besides   ,   he had a feeling Kennedy knowing about vampires could be a good thing.   for one   ,   she had proven herself rather handy when it came to digging up information.   maybe she could help him find another way to get katherine out of the tomb.   &   maybe he wasn’t opposed to having a friend in this town for once   ,   especially one he could be himself with.

                          ❝      𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙶𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙰 𝙱𝙴 𝙾𝙺𝙰𝚈   ?      ❞         he asked.

[veridium]

dirty little secret

WOAH BOY. I did not expect such a quick turn around, but when you’re writing sweet, sweet friendship, shit happens. thanks to @bitchesofostwick and her fabulous writing that got my gears going.

I have been wanting to use an all-american-rejects ref as a title since we started and now, here I am!

on this episode...Olivia awakens to find Ellinor wearing a strange fleece (HM??). BUT, that is not the only incident that surprises her, as a message left on her door gives her cause for concern. 

part 1 // part 2 // part 3 // part 4 // part 5 // part 6 // part 7 // part 8 // part 9 // part 10 // part 11 

--

Her cell phone alarm goes off as it always does on wednesday: 7:30, just enough time to get her shit together before her 10am lecture. However, as she revisits the text she got the night before from Ellinor, it also becomes a beautiful morning for hearing all about her “group project meeting.” Luckily she doesn’t have to travel far, or bother with pants. Wearing an over-sized, old All-American Rejects tour shirt she thrifted a year ago, she fits the bill when lastly she slips on her pink fuzzy slippers -- the only items of her wardrobe she would accept in such a color. She then wanders a few doors down to Ellinor’s and Sera’s room. Sera is gone for a few days on some road trip to one of her many hair-brained destinations, so Olivia has no minced feelings about knocking loudly.

Knock, knock, knock. Nothing.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. Nothing again.

“Knock, knock, bitch, get up! We need coffee!”

The door rips open, and a face with slight drool on the corner of her mouth and hair tousled over her eyes appears. But, it’s not her expression that Olivia’s eyes fixate on like a moth to a fleece flame.

A Knight athletic fleece, the expensive one.

“Good morning sunsh--shit, is that…”

Ellinor jerks her chin down, suddenly coherent. Her brow furrows and she whirls around to retreat back into her lair, mumbling things while she lazily swings the door shut. Olivia, of course, slaps her hand on it and waves it open with gusto.

“Ellinor Trev--”

“NO.”

“Is he in here?!” she skips in, looking around in all corners and nooks as if Cullen is compactible like a lawn chair or something. “Oh, God dammit, I never catch your lovers! No fair!”

Ellinor crawls back under her covers and pulls them up over her head. Interestingly, she does not forsake the fleece sweatshirt that has seemed to magically exist out of nowhere.

“Is that his…”

“Mmph.”

“So it IS. You’re a filthy liar! You said you didn’t do anything in your text, I got receipts!” Olivia promptly hops onto the lower side of the twin mattress, curling her legs up under her sideways.

“I didn’t do anything. I meant it. I just...this...it was cold, okay! Why does everyone think I am magically not cold susceptible? I have questionable circulation…” she half-whines the last part, before squirming into her pillow some more like a burrowing naked mole rat.

Olivia hums, not convinced. “You got some explaining to do, and this calls for extra strong coffee. And scones. I want every detail. I’m gonna throw on some sweats or something, I won’t be long.” The casual mood she has yesterday with Cassandra has carried over through a full night’s sleep, and Olivia feels all the pomp and makeup of her typical routine to be unnecessary for once. She swats on the bump in the comforter she suspects is Ellinor’s ass before hopping back onto her feet and out into the hallway. She’ll be back to wrangle her soon enough out of the depths of her ironic despair.

Scooting her poof-slippered feet out into the hall she spots her door half-shut. Only, it’s not her door -- not the way she remembers it, anyhow. There’s...papers? Taped on it just above the doorknob. Posted notes and event reminders aren’t exactly unheard of in dorm halls, but as she walks she scans the other shut and locked doors -- nothing. Just hers has stuff on it.

When she arrives she yanks off the posted paper and notices some hastily copy/pasted clipart of some crosses mounted on a hillside. Her stomach churns as she reads the message. It’s a pamphlet-esque flyer asking the reader if their soul has been saved, and if not, resources in order to accomplish that. On the back there’s a scripture excerpt as the header, and then a list of every Church in the city limits with their contact information and addresses. It has the design skills of a 4th grader who’s project is due the morning after and all they have to use is Microsoft Word 2003.

And on the very bottom, handwritten for that special touch: “For the Slut in 21C.”

She looks both ways down the end of the hall and sees no one lurking, though the hair on the back of her neck stands up. The faces of those Church preps that pouted at her when she was on Cassandra’s bike pop into her head. Oh, it would be an interesting coffee sesh indeed.

--

What had originally been intentions to come outside casual and no muss, no fuss, turned into a black knit oversized sweater dress, thigh-high black velvet boot stilettos, and loose curls with a full face of sharp makeup. She looks like an insta model out in the light of day instead of in her cardboard box, but it is better this way: people don’t fuck with her.

They get their coffee downtown and walk out onto the sidewalk. She has class in 30 minutes, anyway. Ellinor is holding the flyer in her hand, though it’s bent outta shape from Olivia’s wrath.

“I don’t know, Liv. It is kind of concerning that they know where your dorm is. Isn’t that a hate crime if it’s targeting a member of a targeted group?”

“Biphobia getting treated as biphobia instead of ‘free speech’ discussing sexual behavior that both straights and gays sneer at? In this economy?” Olivia slips her own shades on and shoves the forsaken paper into her bag. “And besides, my dorm is easy to find out. All they’d need is one person to see me walking in, or one person who lives in the same hall as me.”

Ellinor slurps her hot matcha latte and hands it over to her, before pulling her aviator shades down from atop her head of a loose braid crown. She slides her arm through the second shoulder strap of her backpack.

Olivia is steeping. On the surface she looks straight up pissed, which is intentional. But deep down she’s nervous. This was more than she signed up for.

“What are you going to do then? It’s obvious this has to do with you hanging out with her. This is bullshit. if I was there when those punks came into the dorm, I would have shoved my timbs so far up their pastey Jesus mayo asses that….that...gah! Just really far, okay?” Ellinor grumbles and sips as they near the corner. She hasn’t had enough caffeine yet. 

Olivia veers to the left and punches the crosswalk button. She reaches into her back searching for her keys as she spots her black mini cooper parked on the curb a block from them.

“I don’t know what the fuck to do! I feel like I’ve become this Scarlet Letter for something I haven’t even done. It’d be different if we had actually, like...did stuff. But she is so prim and…” the crosswalk signals walk, and they push onward. “She goes from this super interested and focused person to hands-off and out the door faster than I can get my eyeliner wings to match.”

Olivia walks faster as Ellinor hones in on the passenger door facing the curb. “Woah that’s...that’s pretty fast.”

“You think?” Olivia faces her over the car hood as she hits the car alarm button, making the headlights flash. She unlocks fast and eyes both ends of the street for surveilling gazes before sliding in.

“At least with Cullen...” Olivia tries to keep her conversation going while settling in, tossing her bag over her head. She slides her key into the ignition and checks her mirror. Ellinor slides her drink into the center console and pulls her seat belt. She’ll need it -- Olivia has a love of driving, and that love translates into speed and mastery of a stick shift.

“At least with Cullen, what?” Ellinor replies, dreading it already.

Olivia bites her lip and eyes her. “You know...at least…” she slumps forward against her steering wheel. “At least you know what his intentions are...I mean, were, for you. He was pursuing you. He wanted to do...to do things with you.” Her tone has gotten less spirited and more melancholy. Enough for Ellinor’s initial defensive pouty face to melt into sympathy. Though, Olivia worries if it’s less sympathy and more soreness at being reminded of what she tossed up.

Dammit, Liv, she thinks to herself. Ellinor isn’t as tough as she plays.

“Well...I think she really does like you,” Ellinor comforts after a pause, her gregarious personality trying its best to rally.

Olivia twists the key to start. The engine grinds and then starts with ease, and she clutches the stick shift with her manicured hand covered in black, dramatic rings on almost every finger.

“I know she likes me. What I meant was, like...you know.”

“You said she asked if she had another...didn’t she call it a ‘shot’ or something?”

“Yeah, but, I don’t--”

“Liv, I don’t know anyone who would ask if they could be friends with someone by asking if they had another shot. Remember how we met?”

Olivia looks at her windshield and snorts. “Yeah. You asked if I had time to talk about our Lord and Savior Gerard Way at a freshman ice cream social of all fucking places. Then I sat on my retainer.”

“Hah,” Ellinor sits back, elbow on the door. “Exactly. Not ‘Do I have a shot?’”

Ellinor, in her particular brand of eloquence, has a point. Cassandra is one of the most intentional people Olivia has ever met. She doesn’t even sneeze out of line. And she doesn’t strike Olivia as the kind of person to sit idle while the things and the people she wants float on by. But, there’s something still hanging her up on it all. An unspeakable hesitancy that comes from having one foot in and one foot out the door.

“I just wish she like...did the thing.”

“Thing? What thing?”

Olivia pulls the car into gear and puts her hands on the wheel, staring out her side mirror for oncoming traffic. “You know, like, there’s a thing queer people do when they want to drop their queerness on the radar. Say you loved the new Hayley Kiyoko single, or...shit, like, you went to Pride last summer and had a blast. Something.”

“Cassandra Pentaghast at Pride? Even if she’s 1/24th lady-lover, dude, I doubt she’d be down.”

“Yeah because that’s how it works, Ellinor,” Olivia chuckles and pulls into the lane, clutches and shifts into gear again as she accelerates. “It’s just like...okay, you know what I mean. Something. Just a little tidbit. Like...letting me go home with a fleece sweatshirt.”

She only has to side-eye her once to see Ellinor’s cheeks go deep with blush, her lips rolling shut.

Olivia raises a brow and adjusts her large, round black sunglasses. “Mhm.”

“Look, I said what I said. It was cold.”

“Fine, fine. I’m only holding off on hounding you ‘cause I know you have to see him again. I can almost see his face watching you leave with it. Ugh, good shit.”

Ellinor slaps her on the arm before grabbing her drink. “It wasn’t like that, dammit.”

“Not when you were looking it wasn’t,” Olivia continues to tease in that sultry tone. “But…’as she walked off, her figure becoming shapeless in the dark and only traceable by lamp light, I knew that she took a piece of my with her...a piece, of fleece…’”

“GOD you are HORRIBLE!” Ellinor’s laugh gets louder the longer Olivia does her act. The ‘poetry recitation’ voice Olivia does is too good, too pure even in its mortification. She laughs, too, as they turn onto the boulevard which will take them directly to campus.

“You talk a good story for a cynic,” Ellinor settles down, resting her knee against the door. The woman can’t sit right in any chair to save her life.

Olivia smirks as she turns her signal on, the car arriving at the light before the campus entrance. “My Mom had those movies on all day when I was a kid, okay. I internalized that trash in between Blue’s Clues episodes.”

“Ugh, I forgot, my bad.”

They pull in and drive past all the pretty red brick building tops, and people walking with backpacks on the sidewalks or running with shorts and tanks on. Olivia notices a jogger weaving through the pairings of people walking to class and she remembers the way Cassandra looked on the soccer fields, back when she was just a tall, dark, and beautiful stranger she could pretend was all these things. Never could she have foreseen this all unfolding, but a part of her misses when it was all a mystery. When it was a mystery, she could believe that Cassandra was for sure into girls. Now, she is attached to finding out the truth, and the truth might not be so kind.

They pull up into one of the Blue parking lots and by some miracle, someone is pulling out in time for her to snag the spot. She turns in and puts it into park.

“Tits up, girl,” Ellinor sighs, grabbing for her things as Olivia turns the key back, the engine going quiet. They both adjust their bras on cue at her word.

“You’re hiding that fleece in your backpack, aren’t you?” Olivia eyes the bag, a little swollen in shape.

Ellinor glares at her. “No.”

“Ellinor,” Olivia giggles, as she pulls her drink up out of the cupholder. “You don’t want to give it back. Admit it.”

“I admit…!” she looks away for a moment and composes herself. “I...am not the owner of this garment, and I will not be keeping it. It was borrowed. I said I would give it to him during class.”

“Mhmm,” Olivia hums again, reaching for the door. Before she does, though, Ellinor is not done with her side of questioning.

“You gonna tell her what happened?”

“Why should I? What is she gonna do, challenge all the preps to a duel on quad? It’s not gonna change anything. Don’t tell Cullen, either. I’m gonna...handle it. It’ll be fine.”

Ellinor rolls her eyes. “Look, I’m not any of your horoscope apps, but the Cassandra I saw last night staring down a guy stick up for someone she barely knows, seems like the kind of person who’d like to know if people are messing with her girl.”

The phrase ‘her girl’ makes Olivia’s stomach erupt into butterflies, and she blushes and looks away towards her window. Thank goodness for giant sunglasses.

“This isn’t High School. I’m not ‘her girl,’ I’m her friend. And a friend who could quickly turn out to be more work than she wanted to deal with when she realizes all her peers want to burn her at the stake.”

“Over my dead body,” Ellinor says, before grabbing Olivia on her forearm as she tries to get out for the car. “Hey, I mean it. If it’s not Cass, it’s me grabbing a crowbar, alright? Just say when and where to aim.”

Olivia looks back at her and her lower lip curdles. “Aw, Ellinor…” she tilts her head, “you do have affectionate emotions….?”

Ellinor quickly scoffs and pushes her. Back to normal in an instant. They get out, and Olivia locks the door. Slinging her bag on her shoulder she looks around again, slightly paranoid despite her cool exterior. No pastel polo shirts and no french braid pigtails. No woman in a black long-sleeve with pants and a pixie cut. For once, she’s relieved on both fronts, and walks with Ellinor down the way towards their respective lecture halls.

On the way, OIivia elbows her in the shoulder, a sly smile on her black lips. “Thanks, babe.”

--

Later that day --

-- Hey, you didn’t say whether you’d come with to the gala next weekend. I need confirmation!!

-- Ellinor: I can, but I’m not going to! You already have someone who can go!

-- That is the opposite of what I have! I’m not inviting her. Ughhh don’t do this to me I’ll cry.

-- Ellinor: [Kim Kardashian Tragic GIF]

-- You’re the worst. How did Cullen act when you gave back the sweater?

✓ READ AT 4:12PM

If she weren’t in the library, she would have screeched like a harpie. As it was, she was not in the place or the time to do so, so her catharsis would have to wait. She shoved her phone in her bra and goes back to collecting her arms worth of books. They aren’t for her this time -- a Professor she’s TA-ing for wanted to scan and make copies of chapters for students, and asked her to do it while they...well, do Professor things.

Such as TA’s did, and Liv being a TA as a third year undergrad was an esteemed vote of confidence she did not shirk.

She comes around the aisle she’s in and decides to cut through to the stairwell. She’s down two floors from the ground level where the checkout desk is, a level that separates the boys from the men in terms of archival dedication. She balances the six or so books of varying densities, wondering how close they are to weighing the same as her.

Around another corner and she comes upon a cluster of single-seat study desks -- you know, the kind that only libraries have, with soft wood and worn out, grey-blue upholstery. A couple heads bob up from their stationed spots at them and she pays them no mind. That is, until she sees a blonde head. Blonde, wavy head.

“C...Cullen?” she says, and is promptly shh’d by someone else. Cullen himself looks up from his desk and laptop, and grins.

“Oliv--” another shh, and he gives them a pointed stare of come on man, before pushing his chair back. “How you been?”

She bobs from foot to foot carrying the stack in both her hands. “Uh, good! Good, just, doing some TA work.”

“Oh, nice. Cassandra mentioned you TA for Professor...uh, their name esca--”

“Erickson. Professor Erickson,” she smiles. “Just for the intro to political and economic theory classes. It’s not a big thing.”  It was and is a big deal. The Political Science department has a huge group of grad students who could TA or assist courses, and they often do. Taking in an undergrad for a TA position meant that undergrad could do the work they did with Bachelor’s degrees, and sometimes even Master’s degrees, under their belt. Her parents didn’t stop talking about it like that for a month after she was invited by Erickson to fill the position. Though, they made it more pompous-sounding than she would have liked.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know. Cassandra is the only other undergrad I know who TA’s.”

“She...she TA’s?”

He looks at her and his brows go together. In a sort of, ‘yeah, of course’ kind of way. Like she was supposed to know that.

“Uh, yeah! In Philosophy, I think.” Figures. The woman breathes and spews philosophy and english lit fervor like Shakespeare has used her for a horcrux. It’s...annoying. And...wonderful.

“Ah, yeah, I think she mentioned that,” she lies, and tucks hair behind her ear while balancing the stack nervously in the other arm.

“You uh, you need help with that?” he gestures to get up, but she shakes her head vehemently.

“No, no,” she replies, smiling again. “It’s fine. I need the conditioning for dance, anyways. How is your group project going?”

He grins and looks back to his desk, blinking fast. He shouldn’t have to say, she already knows. But, it’s the kindness that counts. “Oh, yeah, it’s going good. Group projects, you know. They...they are what they are.”

“Yeah, but, at least it’s with Ellinor right? It’s always better with…” she catches herself, bits her smiling lip, and looks away too. Damn, didn’t think that one through.

“It’s better with people you know, right, I gotcha,” he finishes and puts her out of her misery. He’s a good guy -- he doesn’t let anyone hang out on a limb by themselves, even if he’s a bit awkward in his solidarity. It’s easy being in his presence despite the underlying melancholy.

“Yeah, right! Sorry, my head is fried from today. Look, don’t be a stranger. Come by anytime.” she sounds like she has a house with a picket fence and not a hole-in-the-wall dorm room. The olive branch didn’t fit the ecosystem.

He smiles crookedly and nods. “For sure. Yeah. You have a safe walk back with those books.”

“Oh you know, what’s a fall down some stairs?”

He chuckles and waves his hand casually. “Whatever you say.”

She waves back and sees herself off. A couple yards away from him and she spots the staircase, she reaches in her shoulder bag while keeping her eyes on the sign that says “TO LEVEL B,” feeling for her phone and attached headphones. The papers and pack of gum get shoved in and out, and the smooth plastic of her case finally turns up. She yanks it out before the stack of books in her hand fall apart. The sound and sensation of something falling behind her to the ground pries at the back of her head, but she ignores it -- the books are heavy, and the stairs are gonna be a pain in the ass, and that pain will pale in comparison to copying individual chapters 40 copies each.

She reaches the checkout desk after a grueling journey up two flights and through another plethora of shelf rows. While catching her breath against the desk, she checks her phone. A new message sent 15 minutes prior.

Cassandra: Hey. I’m going to be grading practice midterms Friday afternoon at my TA office in Henderson Hall. I thought maybe you would have a similar workload? Want to keep each other company?

Keep each other company. How sexy. Had she said she TA’d, and Olivia just never caught that detail? That would have been something she’d remember. Oh, wait, they were talking about course-loads at one point during a walk to classes...oh, shit, that was the day Cassandra wore a blazer and took it off as she was walking and was so smooth while doing so and...and...oh. God, Olivia is too bisexual to function.

She looks up and scans the room, her gaze out of focus while she thinks. No, she has no reason to! She can deny her this once, what, does she come at her beck and call now? She has no work to do anyw--

Her email ding goes off. It’s Professor Erickson:

Hi Olivia,

My mother is in the hospital and we are heading out of town to see her. I know it’s short notice, but could you grade the stack of bibliographies in my inbox before Monday and hand them out on that day’s class? I promised the students. Just markup for Chicago style and make sure they have the 3 required sources and 2 outside, and nothing looks iffy. I’m going to cancel Friday’s class.

I might be out until middle of next week. Monday is just a hand-back day, so don’t worry about keeping them entertained after they get their work. Play a movie, maybe. Nothing too radically bootlegged, please.

Don’t worry about the chapter copies. Those aren’t needed until next Wednesday, and if you can’t get to them I will finish what you don’t. Good job today by the way explaining to that one student the difference between socialism and democratic-socialism. You are getting more concise!

Thanks!

E

Sent from my Iphone

Professors. The nerve. They emailed on phones even when it was a long-ass message, and yet threw fits when students didn’t title their emails with anything less than an oath to name their firstborn child after them. Erickson wasn’t that bad, though. A fun guy -- a bit too into loafers -- but a fun guy, and amazing Professor. And she was getting paid, which helped.

She rolls her eyes closed and groans so deep the poor library work study student flinches. She looks at them apologetically before turning her attention back to her phone.

-- Hey. Sure, but I can’t stay very long. What time?

Cassandra: Cool, no worries. Say around 6?

-- Yeah, that works. Henderson is that long building by bio sciences, right?

Cassandra: Actually, it’s the one to the left of quad. Big archway entrance. I’ll be at my desk in 10E.

Olivia sighs. Great, a big building on quad. In front of everyone. Open season continues for her. 6:00pm on a Friday? Why that time? Surely if they were exams they were not going to be handed back over the weekend. Did Cassandra have a life that wasn’t work, sport, and more work?

-- Right, I forgot. Whoops. Okay, see you then!

Cassandra: Awesome. See you. 

Cassandra: Oh, also -- this song came up on my shuffle. It’s an old one, but it’s Adele. I would appreciate if you listened to it. I think you’d like it.

Another chance for a ‘sign’ thwarted. As promised, she sends the link to a song and it is, in fact, Adele. Adele. Olivia pouts to herself. Adele is a beautiful singer, but her songs tend to sound the same to her sometimes. One of those ‘you listen to one, you listen to them all,’ kinda deals. The song is entitled “Water Under The Bridge.” Olivia had hoped it would at least be one of the romantic ones, but it hardly sounds like a profession of love or crushing. Her frustration continues to grow in her mind, and she clicks her phone to lock. 

“Alright, Ma’am, that’s it! They’re due back October 7th!” The woman on the other side of the table shoves the plastic bag of books. What a blessing to have them in a bag. She smiles, says thanks, and heads out the door into the open air of dusk. As she walks back to Jefferson Hall a few minutes away, she can’t help but look over her shoulder ever so often, hand clutching her keys in her bag. But, no one approaches or even appears, and as she gets in the door to her own academic building, it feels like it’s all in her head.

It’ll blow over. No big deal. Just have to pretend it doesn’t bother me.

She gets into the elevator and hits the #3. Thankfully, she, too, has an office to hull up in.

[sherlywrites]

Float

I am floating between the clouds and the sky. Beneath me is Venus, my spiritual home, a planet I’ve never set foot on but am always approaching. Above me, the sun, pricking at my skin with its fiery lashes. I feel it, on my stomach, my thighs, my breasts, my cheeks, my neck, the lids of my eyes. I can see the clouds swirling around me, spirits in a cauldron, coming together and pulling apart in the primordial heat like lovers in the notes of heaven. Below me, starting from my back, comes my shadow. It shrinks the farther it gets from me, until it reaches the planet’s surface, where it can hardly be said to exist at all.

Part One- The Unique

Back then, my job was to monitor drones and droids, to make sure that if they broke and caused some catastrophic error, some human being would be there to text everyone

“The world is ending.” I fantasized.

“Darn.” they’d send back.

It’s not a popular job, but I loved it. The pay was mediocre, but easily worth it to avoid talking to anyone. To be able to stand, more or less alone, on the rails of the dome, taking a break from the artificial sunlight and fake blue sky, turn off my augmented reality glasses, and watch the universe born anew as swirling orange clouds combined and eliminated in the Venus atmosphere, each time sewing a new thread in a rich living tapestry. I thanked the stars I would be dead before terraforming was completed.

It wouldn’t have stopped without me, but nonetheless I played some part in that slow moving murder, as well as in that ornate blindfold over the eyes of the city’s citizens. I, in some bulky protection suit sporting a large bug eyed helmet, crawled like a cockroach across my colony, despising the terraformers even as I dutifully made sure they continued sucking in gas, burning it, and dropping sludge to the ground below.

Despite how much I loved the job, nothing can stop routine from its slow march into monotony, and so in the moments before I witnessed a person I would later describe as the most beautiful woman who ever lived with half her body stuck in a terraformer, I wasn’t really on my toes. I think I may have looked at her without even registering what was happening, actually, and just looked away-- only for my adrenal gland to save the day and send panic screaming up into my head as I quickly processed the sure fate of a soft biological life form if it the terraformer sucked her in-- my muscles responded to some deep apeish instinct and propelled me forward across the walkway as if they belonged to someone else-- grabbed her by the straps on her protective suit-- cranked my magnetic boots up to their highest setting-- and struggled with a terraformer. It would have sucked us both in if I did not succeed in frantically inputting the emergency shutoff command through my AR glasses.

I helped her out of the chute with shaking hands. I told myself to breathe. She still had her helmet on. Good. As she emerged, I noticed she was holding something in her hands.

A little droid, no bigger than a bread box, half burned but repairable.

I started yelling about how foolish it was to risk her life for such a thing. I won’t make excuses for myself, but I couldn’t have in that moment understood why anyone would stare directly into the face of death in the name of protecting a small robot. Why didn’t she issue the cut off command? Why was this particular droid so important to her? Why did she seem so unnervingly calm even after skirting the veil between life and cold dark oblivion? Why did she just stare at me quietly as I yelled at her and flailed my arms? When I later broached the topic again, she stated she did not want to discuss it. Needless to say, though, I’m sure she had her reasons, I’m sure she had good ones, and so I’ll say I’m embarrassed by, and ashamed of, how I acted in the aftermath and leave it at that.

After I was through yelling, she just looked at me in silence, hugged the half baked toaster close to her chest, and said “Thank you.” before walking away.

When one walks the streets of Atlas, even when one looks up at the glimmering statue of that muscular greek myth, the old obsolete earth dumped like so much human garbage beside him, that adorns the spectacular city center, one is bombarded with a series of advertisements for various products and the associated promises of happiness packaged with them. I have neither seen nor been in a swamp, but if advertisements be sludge and slime, then I am a magpie, treading water and trying not to get my feet stuck. At some point, you learn to just ignore it.

Yet suddenly, after that encounter, I took notice once again of how much of my net time being alive was spent having people try to sell me stuff, like a tax on my lifespan.

Was it the moment itself? Usually, death is such a far away, impossible thing. Our lifespans are so long now, it seems like the oldest members of our society-- some in excess of 200 years old-- will never die. Certainly I, a mere infant of twenty-eight, felt as though my time was infinite, and that nothing of worth would be lost by watching it drip down the drain.

Or was it her?

Her simple action, insane, but deprived of personal gain, a glistening gem of selfless self sacrifice, distracted me from swamp treading and bid me dip my beak down to grab it. No facsimile was this, only something very real, human, of the heart, could ever prompt some mad urge to brave the ever churning gears of the terraforming machine.

Two weeks later, I was on my way out of work when I noticed her. She was sitting on a bench, her eyes performing the telltale motion of someone reading off their AR lenses. In the spectacular sunlight, surrounded by people with flawless faces, I felt it had to be her. She had blonde hair. It came down to her chin, and framed a face with features unheard of in the era of body modification. She had a scar, and a broken, non functional eye.

I saw the steel in her eyes, in her face, and I thought it must be her. Each step I took towards her represented increased anxiety, but I knew in my gut that I was already past the chains of doubt. I walked up at her, stopped,

She looked up at me without moving her head, “I don’t feel like talking.” she stated without qualification, her eyes returning to reading instantly. I recognized the voice, but still felt the biting chains of doubt begging me to run.

“Were you the woman I pulled out of the terraformer?”

She paused. Her head gradually raised, tilted, her bright eye sharp with scrutiny.

“You.” she stated. In that moment she stared at me, atomized me, picked me apart string by string. I knew, then, she would not be the type to mistake gratitude for obligation.

“Yea, I just wanted to apologize for how I acted, I have no excuse. I am Cheyenne.”

Her eye searched for my hand as she tentatively replied “Sophia.”

On Venus, apologizing is something you do for superiors because you screwed up at work. When you offended a friend, you bought them something nice like a necklace, or alcohol. If she had asked for something I probably would have bought it for her, but I was overcome with the immediate impression that she did not want to be bought at all.

“No gift,” I lied, “just me.”

How do I describe the process of falling in love? I wracked my brain for a long time over that, for several days, with Sophia always reading what I wrote and insisting it was good, before I felt ultimately compelled to delete it and begin all over again.

I could tell you about her eyes, would that make it seem authentic? To me, they are gleaming jewels, they see into me and through me. They see into the future, past the market, past the companies, past Atlas. Her personality? Formidable, she enjoys her athleticism and practices it with grace and power. When she finally gets so frustrated with the constant bombardment of advertisements, takes her glasses off, and says “They task me” my heart soars. I could tell you her hair is like shining waves, gold sheets of clouds ill fitted with the artificial sun of Atlas, and that when I bury my face in it I finally know what the real sun feels like.

It’s frustrating, because as many words as I gift to her, whether to see her smile or to prompt a new kiss, none of them feel like they truly grasp the depth of my love. Staring into my love is like staring into the void, just as infinite, just as terrifying, but warm, and certainly impossible to actually describe. It’s like an eldritch monster inside you giving you a hug.

There have, of course, been moments. When we were eating at a restaurant on our first week together, and I asked her about her wooden rosary, she smiled in her elusive way and told me it reminds her that God and wealth are two separate things, no matter what they tell you. Another time, when we were being served dinner by a droid, and she thanked it. When we were walking through the streets of Atlas one day, she glared up at the statue of the man himself as if she would, and could, impale him on a spike and chuck him into the clouds. She stood there for at least a full minute before shaking her head and walking on.

By then, I would have followed her anywhere, even through the burning atmosphere.

What I never understood was why she liked me. I am not very attractive,  nor am I particularly tough. But sometimes when I’m doing something, like I’m trying on a dress and laughing at how I look in it, or when I’m swaying my hips to some rhythm, I find her looking at me, looking content to watch what I figured was nothing interesting at all.

“I’m not alone, either.” she told me, one morning, when we were outside the dome together, taking our time to watch the new patterns weaving and forming before they were consumed by the terraformers. “Many women in this city are just as sick of this shit as I am.”

“I wouldn’t know.” I said, my fingers deftly typing in codes and reports, “I don’t really participate in the network forums.”

“That’s a good thing,” she sighed, “But I don’t think there’s been this much powerful female energy in the entire history of humankind. They say they abolished sexism for good in 2114, but, you know, we still have way more expectations placed on us. They turn our bodies into commodities, and sell them to a presumed male audience, because of course most women do not feel particularly compelled to consume pornography.”

“Yea, even the stuff with only women in them are clearly made for men.”

“Right, the market assumes everything is for them, or for women to aid themselves in becoming their ornaments.”

“That’s pretty true to what it’s like to date one, too.”

I saw her helmet turn toward me suddenly, silent for a moment. “You dated a man?”

“Once.”

She laughed “Well, no one’s perfect.”

I laughed too, because I thought it was a joke.

My first and only man had been an ambitious one, although it seems to me nearly all men have ambition on Atlas, named Mark. I found him through a dating service, shortly after I underwent my massive body modification. I had thought, and been told, that I would walk into the clinic a man and walk out a woman, simple as that, but of course when I walked out I had no idea what I was doing, and the only instruction manual I had was the market.

And the market always advertised men, and so I thought that came with the role.

He made his expectations pretty clear the moment we sat down, and I was attracted to him at the time so even though I was uncomfortable with the seemingly personal act of being fucked by a man, I allowed him to fuck me anyway. I had been told by the market that sex was free, pleasurable, and fun. I had watched some videos as well, in my curious moments, and it seemed the act was very controlled, and clean.

In reality, it was nothing like this, and nothing prepared me for what to do or how. It was a very bodily, manual act, and if I were in a position he found inconvenient, he simply repositioned me, kicked my legs apart, pushed my back down with his hand. If he felt like trying something new, he tried it. At first, if I gagged, he choked me, or hurt me, he’d ask if I was okay, but eventually he became comfortable enough that he stopped asking.

He fucked me four times before he stopped bothering to talk to me beforehand, and then three times after that. The last time, I learned how truly professional those actresses were, as I spent the next hour washing his climax out of my eye before it stopped burning. I looked at myself in the mirror, at my smeared makeup and eyes I couldn’t even open all the way, and this is what it took before I finally realized something was wrong and never saw a man again.

So when Sophia told me this was because men still felt women were objects to be consumed, like any other commodity, it lit my mind ablaze. It made so much sense; it was an earth shattering revelation with continuous aftershocks each time I saw more and more evidence she was right. I wanted to scream, a lot.

“So in that way, being a lesbian is a kind of boycott of men. It’s an act of rebellion.” she told me. We were sitting on her couch, my head in her lap, as she fed me soy puffs.

“Good, I don’t find men attractive anymore anyway.” I laughed.

She nodded, “I’m glad to have escaped that, I’m still completely pure.”

“Yes if you have any flaw it’s that you’re too perfect.”

With a shrug, she said “It’s a challenge to maintain, so I understand. Our culture is constantly telling you that you are for men.”

I reached up and cupped the side of her face “Now I’m a lesbian, too, in love with a lesbian.”

She smiled down at me and kissed me. Then she paused, looking thoughtfully. “There is one thing of which you must be careful. Sometimes, men will modify their bodies to look like women, to trick us into sleeping with them.”

I made a face “Really? That’s pretty fucked up.”

With a nod, she continued “It is. There are ways you can always tell, of course, by how they act, how they look, how their hair grows--”

My arms curled around her, I pulled her in tight.

“Well, I’m safe, because I only have eyes for you.”

It occured to me only on the lowest level she might have been talking about me, at first. With time, however, the infiltrators took up more and more of our conversation time. I went about my days largely oblivious, but looking back she had painted a black streak on my heart that boiled my blood into self doubt. I hadn’t asked myself if I was a woman or not, but I did find myself checking to make sure I was one. I checked my body, my personality, my behavior, I scanned myself to make sure all my female parts were working, and that my chromosomes were still modified to support my full anatomy.

I was assured, but sometimes I’d say something and wonder if it was too mannish. Some mornings, I’d look in the mirror, and poke at my bones, my breasts. I’d look at myself, and at that altar I’d ask myself what a woman is, and how I know if I really am one.

Then I’d remember that I am loved by Sophia, and got myself out of that room.

When she was undressing me for the first time, I was shaking. I felt her soft lips kissing me in her usual places, her skin white as light along my brown cheek, down the crook of my neck to the crest of my chest. When my shirt was off, her hands worked her way around to my bare back.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered suddenly.

“I am ugly.” I responded, sinking down to the bed.

“No.” she repeated, as she had many times before.

“Do I even look like a woman?

She comforted me with kisses on the cheek. “You are the most womanly looking person I have ever met.”

That threw me. “Huh?”

She pulled back, her face flushed, but her eyes that same steely blue. “Most women, myself included, have come to think of being women as a burden. Some become complacent, try to get by with pleasing men, and others rebel. But you, it seems like you truly think of womanhood as a gift. I’d never met someone who actually liked being one, before you.”

I stared into her eyes for a quiet moment.

I kissed her, she crawled onto the bed with me.

The trouble with gestures of love, even simple pure words like “You’re beautiful” and “I love you,” is that in our culture we hear them so much as a matter of marketing, that they seem like practiced lies coming from the mouth of the city. “I love you” says the man selling you a cup of coffee, “You’re beautiful” says the man to the woman who buys our moisturizer.

Sophia found a way through those barriers. She repeated her words, over and over, looking into my eyes, until they lost their previous meaning and built new ones in my heart, until I could finally walk outside the dome, float between the clouds, and feel her-- the sun-- kissing my skin. Until at last, the sun is my body, and my body the sun, and the sun is love.

It became the happiest month of my life, so happy I ignored the growing undertow of darkness beneath. I was in her room, the artificial sun low enough in the dome to elongate the apartment’s shadows across its length, when she walked in with a look in her eyes I did not recognize. Her face was as cold as the dark side of Venus, her gaze as implacable and consuming as the terraformers, her voice a razor thin wire around my throat.

“Sophia?”

Silence.

My hands started shaking.

“Put on your glasses.” she ordered me. I did.

Our AR glasses between us, now I see what she brought me. My medical report, from the transitory modification. How did she get this?

“Is it real?” she asked, as if she knew.

“Y-yes, but”

She ran to the bathroom, and I shortly heard the sound of vomiting coming from within. I quickly assembled myself into a passable state of dress, and crept around to see what was happening in the bathroom. It felt like the city itself was tilting underneath me, and my soul was outside the dome-- eyes pressed to the glass-- watching, unable to act.

“Soph…” and I saw her, bent over the waste tube, her fingers down her throat as if she needed to get the poison out. She was hurting herself.

“Sophia!” I cried, trying to pull her away from her altar of viscera.

“Get away!” she screamed, swatting at me “Get away from me.” she glared at me, pure hatred in her eyes, hatred for me. I still didn’t understand, I backed away from her.

“You did this to me.” she stepped toward me, I stepped back. “You tricked me, you raped me. How? How could you? You soulless bastard. You fucking filth.”

I could hear her anger rising, but I wasn’t prepared for any kind of scenario in which I had to flee from her apartment, so I cowered, I cowered until she towered over me.

“I don’t-- I don’t understand Sophie, I don--”

She grabbed me by my shoulders and shoved me, shoved me out, towards the door, I scrambled to grab for the handle, to pull it, to get an opening, and she shoved me out, screaming at me until she could no longer see me, and I had gone.

What no one tells you about trauma is the horrendously painful adjustment period your mind takes to accept its new reality. For the next few days, I still expected Sophia to message me, to knock on my apartment door, and I looked for her. I never saw her, not there, not on the streets, not at work, not at restaurants, not in the city square, at the statue of Atlas. I sat down in the city square, still numb, still failing to understand, and I looked at that statue.

Had I become him? Had I become an object of marketing myself, deluded by my desire to occupy a role in society to which I did not belong, and enabled by the ever eager engines of consumption to chew my own body and spit it out in the form of a woman, for the sole purpose of an attack on womanhood itself? I had done everything to my body I thought I needed to do, I had the breasts, the vagina, the skin, the face, the hair, the womb and the chromosomes. But they were all the result of body modification, the product, the market, Atlas itself, shifting and breaking down my body into its idea of a woman, for no reason other than that I paid it to.

If that was all true, then how should I become a woman, then? What did I need to do, where did I need to go, who did I need to talk to. I needed to be a woman, to be back with the person who loved me as a woman loves another. But there is no one, no one to tell me the path, no one but Sophia.

Cheyenne:

So, even though I should have left her alone, I messaged her.

Sophie?

Sophie? Please talk to me.

Sophie…

Please. Sophie, I’m sorry.

I should have told you.

But I didn’t mean to take something away from you.

You know I’d never do that.

Sophie?

Sophie, just tell me, what… what do I need to do? How can I be a woman, then?

I just want to be a girl, I just want to see you again.

Sophie.

I saved your life, Sophia.

I saved your life. The terraformer.

The terraformer.

You owe me an answer. Please.

Sophia:

Nothing

Cheyenne:

What?

Sophia:

There is nothing you can do. You will always be a man. You were born that way, you will die that way. Good bye.

I spent the next few days sobbing into the mirror, my body and face now the mutilated corpse of a delusional man. It had become apart from me, something I controlled like a twisted puppet on the strings of a pervert’s sick joke. I punched my mirror, I shattered its glass, I let it fall about my bathroom, I watched it sit on my floor, specked with my blood.

When I first stepped outside the dome, in my suit, I looked over the edge, and I was afraid of falling, falling to my death. I was worried Venus would swallow me whole, but I should have been afraid it would spit me back out, out into the vacuum, into the darkness, the abyss.

If those old gods wanted my blood, they could have it. I dragged that broken glass across my wrist, and the sting-- the pain-- gave me a rush, filled me with adrenaline. It was like an old friend, one I hadn’t seen since the days of my boyhood, since Mark. His shadow welcomed me back, with open arms, he caressed me, he fondled me. I gave him more blood, I squeezed my hand and watched it slowly drip down onto the sink like the sands of time, forming stalagmites, pointing up at me out of my twisted altar. Did it want my heart, then? It could have it, I could rip it out of my chest and throw it down to those old gods, they could drag it screaming before the squirming waves of viscera and vile sludge, and I would just look down at it, watch it sink and beg me to save it until I was free of it, and could see it no longer.

I looked down at my arm. It would be that easy, I had already done it twice. I needed only do it down my vein instead of across, a longer cut, but the last one I would need to do.

I put the glass back down. I turned around and walked into my kitchen, squirting some healing sealant on my cuts.

I guess I am stuck being alive.

God damn it.

Part 2- Sophia of the Spectacle

I am Sophia.

What is intelligence? How does one define self awareness? It is the year 2321 and still artists have had much more luck defining this than scientists.

It’s okay, because scientists have yet to even make any more significant progress on technology since 2200, when a high efficiency fusion drive was invented to take us to Jupiter. We started a colony there, but turns out Jupiter’s resources didn’t justify the cost of shipping, and it was shuttered, with a hundred thousand souls still aboard to attempt to solve the problem of keeping themselves alive without inner planet support, and failing. Ah, progress.

The earth, meanwhile, has been recovering. They constructed great big nuclear powered hydroponic carbon dioxide scrubbers, which is to say massive amounts of algae. It’s the biggest construction project humanity has ever taken besides Atlas itself, and it was prompted by the leavings of the very people who live on this planet with me right now. Conveniently, they forgot to take a headcount of the people who died during the climate collapse of the 22nd century, so no one knows how many died during the ensuing refugee crises and desertification.

Puts our problems into perspective, doesn’t it? Atlas values empathy as much as it values obstinate women. Simple feminine compassion, the compassion of the life giver, is not just useless feelings we abandoned when we became enlightened. It is revolutionary.

That’s why I dived into the terraformer after that droid. It’s the closest thing to an animal we’ve got here, it’s the other, and they are programmed to want to live. Don’t they have the right, then? And if we can’t even define our own self awareness, what right do we have to assume it is lacking in the intelligences we’ve created. It’s doing okay now, by the way. I fixed it.

I never told Cheyenne I acquired my facial scars the same way.

I guess I am brave, but really I mostly did not care if I lived or died. I’m not depressed, necessarily, but life is such a burden. Atlas is so large, so strong, and it seems like nothing I do can even free me from his influence, let alone kill him.

I once told Cheyenne that God and wealth are two separate things. I said this because on Atlas, religion is not all that uncommon, but what they preach is that wealth is a sign of how blessed God has made you. Ancillary is the assumption that if you do not have wealth, you are not blessed, with the unspoken conclusion being that Atlas is the most holy city of God ever built. A utopia, a paradise.

They don’t enforce our standards of wealth through taxes, however. That would be oppressive government overreach. Rather, everyone pays rent to the company which built Atlas, the company in which my father is the Chief Technology Officer, and those who can’t afford their rent are shipped off world. This is different from taxes, somehow. Naturally, this isn’t true of top corporate officials of companies throughout Atlas. They own shares in the company, and those shares represent their private property, so far as one can own slices of air on a slowly falling city of garbage. It makes as much sense as them owning the ground we’ll be landing on.

When I was a little girl, I told my father I couldn’t wait to see the world outside the dome. He patted my head, smiled, and said me neither. The first terraforming project ever completed, and certainly the most impressive. Who else but the geniuses of Atlas could achieve such a thing? Could they have with the burden of Earth on their shoulders?

As I got older, I discovered that I am not attracted to men. Never have been, never will be, ever. Men do not disgust me, but the thought of fucking one did. I thought of it as an inherently undignified act, where your body yields and is spread by some force, to feed the pleasure of a man who sweats and labors over you. I found it unappealing.

This never deterred men, though, they always tried to fuck me regardless. If I said no, it took some time for them to respond and stop trying. Somehow, even though homophobia was abolished, men still have trouble accepting that a woman may not be attracted to them, and they act with accorded offense and entitlement if you try to tell them.

My first partner and I bonded over this. We were together until we started working. Then she was shipped off world for refusing to sleep with her employer.

I responded with a deep and terrible rage. I responded with lies, and slander, and manipulation, and I got that employer fired and shipped off world too. It didn’t mean my partner could come back, no one evicted from Atlas can ever find a job here again. I turned my eyes to the patriarchy instead, I fought sexist employers wherever I could find them, I joined with like minded women, I communicated with them constantly. My father seemed perfectly willing to help, but then I learned he was getting them new jobs in other parts of Atlas, so I started to hate him too, and I was thrust from power, working outside the dome as an engineer.

People like me have existed throughout history, I realized, and never succeeded in destroying the patriarchy. Why? I searched for answers, and Atlas happily obliged.

They gave me transsexuals.

Infiltrators, who degenerate feminism by entering into it and replacing women with men. Atlas was pumping out women in the image of men’s imaginations, perfectly servile, willing, baby making sluts, and the women who weren’t keeping up had a few options.

Become feminine and submissive, become men, or die.

Everything made sense, then. The patriarchy was inside feminism, and that is where it needed to be hunted first, and so I did, I tracked them down where I could and exposed them, I attempted to insight rage against the clinics, and I once again found the ears of my father listening and nodding. He said he didn’t like it either, but they were reliable consumers of body modification, and so we would need to wait for the company to go under before we could do anything about the degeneracy on Atlas.

So I spread my message, and waited, and hoped.

Then I met Cheyenne.

I had spent so much time hating people like her, I hadn’t really met one, which is how I became convinced with time of her authenticity. That attracted me to her in the first place; sure I dived in after a droid, but she dived in after a person, and I came to saw her ensuing rage as a concern for the safety of others, not as concern for herself. Most people would have let me get sucked in, after all.

I later learned that she is a massive dork, and that she truly loves Venus. No one loves Venus, people “love” Atlas, but Cheyenne loves Venus. The planet as it is now, with all its inhabitability and dangerous temperature shifts. She loves it. She also loves being a woman, which should have given me a clue because most women definitely do not love it-- it comes with so many burdens to bear-- but it seemed like she could shrug those off.

After I threw her out of my home, I cried for the lost idea of my virginity, and I tried to go to bed, but sleep eluded me. What I had done haunted me, not because I thought it was wrong, but because I felt pity for the pain and fear I had seen on her face. No one had ever been personally, physically afraid of me before, but I saw it in her eyes.

She was afraid I might beat her.

I steeled myself. My identity was under attack, after all, and I might need to do some unfortunate things to protect it. I was not going to let her erase me.

She had seemed like a woman to me, though. I was well and truly convinced. What the fuck? But that didn’t matter. I told myself of course the patriarchy would send its greatest trickster after its most dangerous foe.

Then she messaged me, asking what she needed to do in order to become a woman. I just stared at that message for a few minutes. This creature was seriously deluded. Again I felt the sting of pity, and if I had thought there was some way, in that moment, then I would have told her, but I knew there wasn’t. So I told myself I would help her by mercifully rescuing her from her own delusions.

The question stuck in my mind. What is a woman, anyway? How does one become female? Was I a woman when I was born, or did I become one by being born a female baby? The sensible answer is that I was just an infant, unless I had some female soul in my body which made me a woman even when I had none of the traits. But if I had a female soul, then couldn’t Cheyenne have one? I rejected this explanation, I had tread too far into nonsense. Why would God make a male baby and put a female soul inside it?

Then was her need to be a woman some kind of disease? An illness, which needed to be cured but which Atlas had turned into a consumer category for its commodities?

I wracked my brain, I researched, I found so many people offering explanations but none of them agreed, none of them had all the answers. I learned one man suggested they had some sort of sexual fetish which drove the transition. I found this compelling, and then learned that after the transition this fetish nearly disappeared, and that the way they think about their own body nearly precisely mirrors the way I think about mine. Some people suggested that human genes become broken and useless when mixed with the blood of different races. What the fuck?

I needed answers, I chomped through volumes, I chewed them up, I spit them out like sludge onto the floor. In my hatred, I burned through the knowledge of mankind, all its garbage science, and found nothing. I stood at my window, pounding my hand against the glass in frustration, when I realized something. I looked out at the dome and realized what I had lost.

My ability to accept the unexplained. Yes, my ability to dwell in and appreciate inhospitable knowledge was gone, I had lost it, and in its wake I had left a great deal of absolute junk, and the more I burned through the more junk I would accumulate.

I had become Atlas, I had become the city, consuming womanhood, consuming the very mother of women, in my ever expanding need to dominate the universe, to be the captain and steer the ship. When I reach the surface, finding nothing, finding no explanation, no meaning, no God, I will move on, I will go to a different planet and consume it instead, just like I consumed Mother Earth, for I am Atlas, eater of worlds, and breaker of women.

Part 3: Why Eve Ate the Apple

I woke out of my stupor one morning to see Sophia had messaged me.

Let’s talk.

I rolled out of bed and into the shower. As the warm water cascaded down my body, I looked down at scabs and scars on my wrists. I wore long sleeves to cover them. I had put in the code to buy a new mirror by then, and a droid had come in and installed it. I thanked it on its way out without thinking, and stood there at the mirror staring at myself. I didn’t feel as in touch with my body as I did before, but sheer inertia had left self loathing too boring of an exercise, so our relationship could be strictly professional.

I looked fine. I shrugged, and walked out the door.

As I tread down the streets, I started thinking. You know, I’ve attempted to describe these streets in as much poetic language as I could in this work, but the truth is most of the time they aren’t oppressive, or like a swamp, or even like so much garbage. The truth is, most of the time they’re boring. Because I grew up here, I really am used to them, and the insidious thing about alienation is you just get used to it. You get accustomed to feeling you don’t belong, because you forget what belonging feels like, if you ever even knew.

And as I walked to the bench to meet her, I thought of all of these supposedly faceless people, with their perfectly constructed faces. Previously, on some level, in my mind, I had sorted them into some hierarchy beneath me. I thought of them as robots, all the same, with Sophia and I the unique, the special among them. I thought we were better than them.

We weren’t. And I looked at them then, on these streets, and realized they must feel the same thing I did, but in a different way. Or maybe they have different ways of coping, maybe their manufactured faces are necessary for their survival. Maybe to not feel alienated from the spectacle, they must allow it to enter into their minds, and change their bodies.

Maybe that’s what I did, to an extent. My change was the expression of an inner truth, something that came from inside, but the reason the inside and the outside are so difficult to separate is because they aren’t so different. The people around us shape who we are, and we shape them in return. People could have perceived me as a woman when I had my male body, but they weren’t going to do that, so I responded to the situation I was in.

I walked into the restaurant, with my epiphany less like a light and more like sobriety.

I navigated the tables toward Sophia, feeling weird. She had a look on her face, mostly confusion. But maybe it’s a good thing to be confused.

I sat down the table beside her, letting the ambiance of the restaurant drift between us.

Each tick of the clock meets the air like lithium; it combusts and turns to smoke, slipping through your fingers, irretrievable. If I could catch one, I could have done something differently, and repair this distance between us, between me and a woman I used to love.

Instead, she slowly extended her hand across the table.

And I took it.

[moodybunnyxd]

Twisted Mind || Yandere!Taehyung x Reader ||

[ Taehyung x Reader ] || One-shot ||

Yandere AU!

Description: No one could be as heinous as him. He was the replica of Satan himself. He sees violence as his weapon, enemies as his barrier and you as his prize. Things work differently from his perspective, for he has a twisted mind.

A/N: Helloooo! This is my first time to write here on Tumblr! And as you can see, I picked a yandere theme for a start! ^^ Yandere themes are one of my favorite genre of story xD And ooooh, look who I chose for the role~ Interested? I see. Then what are you waiting for? You can read the story now! Oh, and, thank you for reading in advance! I hope you’ll like it!

Word Count: 7,299 words.

    "I am Kim Taehyung."

     Wha--...What...?

     Your heart strated beating faster as panic swirls in you. Hands turning cold the moment those four words reached your ears, you loosen your tight grip on the gun; making it fall to the ground. Your breathing became uneven as your brain processed everything.

     "I don't--...I don't understand everything..."

     His footsteps started getting near while you on the other hand, backed away in fear. You were shaking and that thought alone made you sick inside. It made you furious that he can visibly see you fearing his presence.

     "Oh darling, you don't have to understand anything..."

     Sharp intake of breaths and his footsteps were the only sound that resonated through the dark alley; in which the place where he dragged you against your will. As he came closer with only few feet away from you, tears brimmed in your eyes and fear was eating you up. You were hyperventilating, hands shaking terribly as they made their way to cover your ears. You want to hear nothing but complete silence, not even the steps of the monster that was after you. Your eyes were closed tightly, tears spilling from them, then came streaming down your cheek.

     It was him. It was him all along! The one that caused nightmares, the one that sent terrors to the deaths of each and every innocent person that he laid his eyes on; mistaking them for being his prey, for being his rival that has connections with his possession --as he claims it-- for at least 3 months. 3 freaking months! And sadly, it was your reality. It was your turn to feel the horror that was brought upon his previous late love interests. Yes, late.

     Your eyes shot open as you felt the touch on your head that belonged to the twisted man in front of you. His deep and resonant voice ringed in your ears as the next words rolled off his tongue.

     "...Just know that you're mine, that's all."

    "Come in."

     As your answer was registered through the other side of the door, a familiar face peeped into the room before allowing himself to freely enter your office. As he carefully closed the door, you noticed that he was dressed in casual clothes that consists of plain white shirt, denim jacket, that goes in blend with his knee-cut jeans. In his hands are two paper bags --in which you assumed are food-- as he places it on your table. Your eyes travelled to his face as you were met with his adorable grin that represented those of the rabbit's. His eyes glimmered in joy upon seeing you the moment he stepped in and that alone made you smile at the thought.

     "Mr. Jeon...uh, take a seat." You then gestured to the seat in front of your table. "Uhm, your follow-up appointment is already done. Not to be rude but, what are you still doing here?"

     The male in front of you chuckled as he sat down. Hearing that made you feel pleased. Time really does fly so fast, huh?

     He ran his hand through his soft hair as he let out another smile which seemed to grew wider than before. "C'mon, drop the formality; we're friends! Hmm, I guess you still haven't eaten something, so why not bring you food?"

     A light-hearted laugh escaped your lips. "Thank you, Jungkook-ah." Your eyes then scanned his figure; noticing some few changes physically.

     "Hm, I see you've been doing well just by looking at you."

     "Well, it's because of you who took care of me. I swear those anti-depressants that you gave were really killing me." He let out a snicker as a flashback played in his mind. "Back then, I almost wanted to escape from here."

     "Hey, at least you got better..." As you trailed off, your eyes then flashed a look of pain as memories flooded your brain. "If it wasn't for those...you'd still be here, in that same condition as before."

     A hand rested on your shoulder. It's grip tightened and you can tell how worried he was as he saw your pained expression. "Yah. Don't be like that. I'm fine now due to our sessions, remember?"

     "...Yeah. You're right."

     Silence then took its place. It wasn't a disturbing nor an unsettling one; it was a comforting silence that engulfed you two. The scribbling of your pen and ticking of the clock was the only sound that was heard inside your room. You were quite immersed in your work that you haven't even looked up to Jungkook as he asked you a question.

     "So, what have you been doing these past 7 weeks while I was discharged from here, besides having follow-up appointment with me?"

     By his question, a sudden wave of anxiousness washed over you. You didn't notice it, but as you drew your attention on him, you saw how his expression dropped that caused you to think of how you reacted to his question. You massaged your head as you wanted to ease the throbbing pain away.

     Turning back to him, you smiled faintly as you say the words. "It was hectic here...especially when one of my patients got out of this hospital."

     "How's it going now?"

     "Not so good." You said as you pulled out a newspaper out of the drawer then looked at it's content. Just reading it makes you so stressed. "According to our guards, they saw him going for his escape and tried to get him back, but all of that were in vain. He managed to break his way out; without leaving any traces of himself. He's currently being searched by our search team together with some cops."

     A sigh escaped your lips. "Few weeks ago, he had become a dangerous patient of mine. He's out of control, as if he wants some bloodshed, as if he's having bloodlust." Every word that came out sent shivers down your spine. You feared this kind of situation, especially if it means risking the safety of others.

     "Until one day, he was not seen in his room. He escaped. His room was a mess, scribbling on the walls were there saying about his revenge and all."

     Jungkook felt like he was splashed with cold water upon hearing your words. He knew you weren't joking, not in this kind of matter. Yet what scared him the most was your last words.

     "But what gave us goosebumps are his two assigned nurses...lying on the ground, surrounded by the pool of their own blood."

     You felt like vomiting by just remembering the scene. Their necks are snapped in a different angle and were lacerated by a knife lying near the nurses, with blood pouring badly out of them. Numerous stabs were spotted from their bodies, some are even worse than the others. Some of their flesh are already cut wide open; it's almost like you can see their organs. From the looks of it, they were tortured to death.

     As the stomach churning memory ran through your brain, you didn't notice how your hands were trembling. They became cold in an instant and you felt as if they were numb. Your chest feels heavy as you take deep breaths to calm yourself down. Jungkook noticed this and tried to calm you too. He rubbed your arm repeatedly in hopes of making yourself feel better.

     "Y/N, everything will be alright. Whoever that patient of yours is, I'm sure they'll find that person soon."

     You chewed your bottom lip; the anxious feeling never leaving your chest. Your heart was beating fast, yet you still managed to put up your stoic expression to the best you could. "Thanks for the encouraging words, Kookie."

     In response, Jungkook pouted his lips. "Kookie? New nickname for me?"

     "Well, you just called me by my first name, so might as well give you a nickname."

     "Kookie, what do you mean you're gonna be late?" You tapped your fingers repeatedly on the table as you waited for an answer on the other line on the phone.

     "Well, turns out, there's a heavy traffic here..."

     "Aiish. I knew this would happen." You sighed for what seem to be the millionth time. "Just get here, will you?"

     "Uhh, about that...I think we should just...you know, change place?"

     "What?!" By this time, glances from the other customers at the restaurant were directed to you. As you tried to maintain your composure, you bit the inside of your cheek; not wanting to attract more creeped out gazes from others. "Okay. Tell me where."

     As he told you the location, you immediately walked your way out of the resto, driving to the place where he wants you to meet up.

     Ever since the day he went to your office, you two became closer. Though you still prioritized the thought of being just a psychologist to him, he still managed to crawl his way into your heart, but not in a romantic way, you tell yourself. He keeps on getting you accompanied by himself, he manages to put a smile on your face, and he keeps you entertained by his antics. He was much more different than his depressed self. His dull eyes, stoic expression, pale face and his problems were the reasons that drove you to do your best to cure him, to give him therapies and medicines that will help him through his suffering; just like what you do to your other patients too. And by the results, you were more than satisfied. You were ecstatic to see him back to his normal self, that he was able to see light from the darkness he's been in.

     And so, here you are now, instead of using your free time to get some plenty rest as possible, you were driving your way to the place Jungkook told you to go to. Though tiredness seemed to be eating your system up, you still pushed the feeling away in order to get to your destination on time. You pressed harder on the gas pedal, steering your wheel to your left, shifting gears, then finally parking up in front of a café. Realizing it was the one that you really wanted to go to for a long time now --if it weren't for your packed schedule-- your mouth was slightly hanging open, look of disbelief written on your face. It took you a few seconds before finally having the courage to step out from the car and heading inside the café shop.

     As you walked your way inside, you easily spotted Jungkook occupying a table not far from the entrance door. You quickly approached him, greeting him in the process. "Yah, did I make you wait?"

     "No, not at all. Sit down, I have something to tell you."

     You sat down as you crossed your arms and narrowed your eyes at him. "And what is that supposed to be? I hope it's something good."

     "Unfortunately, it's not." His hand made its way on his nape as he rubbed it sheepishly. "Have you heard the news?"

     Curiosity began to form in your gut as you leaned your elbows on the table. "News? About what?"

     "News about the killings. There has been a lot of killings lately, and according to the news, it seems that one person only did it."

     "How come?"

     "By how the victims were killed." Jungkook's voice faltered as he said the words. Fear is evident from his tone of speaking. "It is said that all of the victims have the same spot for their cuts, there were incisions, and some are...even losing few of their organs." By now, you can see how frightened Jungkook is. His lips were trembling, hands gripping the edge of the table tightly that his knuckles turned white.

     You, on the other hand, weren't getting his point. Though you're fully aware of yourself that you haven't been listening intently --but still trying to understand what he was saying-- you still can't get it. Dang this drowsiness of mine. What does this have to do with you? Where is he going with this? "Don't get mad or anything but...what's exactly your point?"

     He clicked his tongue upon hearing your question. "My point is, I want you to be careful, okay? Especially these days. I don't know if he's targeting for a specific person or, --who knows?-- if he's just starting a random killing spree...It's just that, we don't know if that killer is ready to attack or not." He then sighed deeply as he looked at you with those eyes that are full of worry.

     You sat there completely out of words. Is he really that concerned? Wow. You didn't expect this meeting to go this way. Silence lingered in the air as you tried to think of a response. "I--...I, uh. Okay...?"

     "Yah. Take this seriously."

     "Okay, okaaay. I'll be careful. So, now can we order?"

     "Y/N! Why-- Why are you here...?"

     "You forgot your tupperware at my office the last time you visited, genius. Here, I'm giving it ba--"

     "Aiish!"

     You noticed it. How can you not? It's obvious just by one look at him. Dark circles under his eyes, pale skin, droopy eyes, it's like he didn't get any sleep at all! "Kookie, you look terrible. What happened?"

     "Nothing --I'll take that-- now go home."

     "Kookie, you don't look good. C'mon, is something bother--"

     "I said nothing so go home...!" He whisper-yelled.

     It was unusual of him to act like this. Jungkook was far from that. Were you too pushy? Maybe you disturbed him? Yes, he's a human and it's normal for him to act like that, but it still won't erase the fact that it worries you. He seems anxious about something, which troubles you, but what could it be? He said it last week that everything's stable for him, so what's the acceptable reason for him to be behaving like this?

     "Y/N, please...go home. It's not safe for you here, remember what I said at the café shop?"

     "Jungkook, I don't understand what's happening here. First of all, it's 4:04 pm. What kind of danger that could be lurking around at this kind of hour?"

     He suddenly gripped both of your shoulders, shaking you a bit. "Anything! Now, listen to me. Turn around and go on your way home."

     "No." You refused firmly. A stern and cold look displayed on your features. "You're acting completely different and I wanna know why."

     "That killer is near around here!" That simple whisper became the loudest thing you ever heard.

     Your ears are fooling you, right? Jungkook's just kidding with you. "Are you joking me?"

     "Why would I joke with this, Y/N? I'm telling the truth!" Without wasting any time, he swiftly dragged you inside his house and he closed the door.

     "He's here, Y/N...! He already found his next victim...!"

     You shook your head at him; seeing his words unbelievable. "But, Jungkook...this is a subdivision. A secured one at that. How would someone dangerous like him enter this place?"

     "He has his ways! Y/N, please believe me..."

     As his pleading fell into your ears, something inside you made you doubt. Was Jungkook really okay within these past few days? Come to think of it, he didn't pay any visit at my office a couple of days ago... You looked at him again, uncertainty swims at your [E/C] orbs as you stare at his own chocolate brown ones that reflects a great amount of fear at this moment. You reached out for his arms, rubbing them soothingly as you tried to calm him down. "Kookie, please. Tell me what happened to you on the days you weren't visiting me. I need to know."

     Hesitation and as well as agitation was written on Jungkook's face. His attention was drawn upon you, confused eyes staring at yours. He took a deep breath as he gathered his courage to tell you what perturbed him within the last few days.

     "I saw him last night sitting by my window. He was here."

     "Kookie, open the door!" You shouted as you knocked at his bedroom door; cries could be heard inside. His place was a mess. Everything was trashed with the tables upside down, broken vase, some papers lying around that makes the place barely recognizable.

     As the cries got unbearably intolerable, your face twisted into a painful expression. The thought of not being able to help him disturbs you. The more you hear him cry, the strong the urge to break down the door gets. You twisted the doorknob in a fast manner only to find it locked. As much as you hated it, you resorted to your last option. Stepping back, you gathered enough strength and at a high speed, you lifted up your leg and kicked the door hardly. This went on for a few times before the door went down.

     There he was, sitting on his bed, with his knees pressed near to his body while his hands are gripping his hair tightly. Tears that were streaming down his face seemed endless, each tear came rolling down his chin, then drenching his shirt. His lips were quivering like those of a kid who just got his lollipop stolen. His eyes that are closed tightly, unknown to you, held so much panic that no one would ever think he could have. His eyes that served as his soul's window, always displayed a set of stars, or rather a sea of stars that by this time, turned into an empty, dull orbs that no longer glistens, as his fear clouded his mind and vision. At this, your heart broke into pieces that almost brought tears to your eyes.

     As you approached him by seating on his bed in front of him, you immediately engulfed him by your comfortably tight hug. His cries didn't die down, instead it only got worse as his shoulders tremble with each and every cry of him. You cupped his face in your hands, wiping his tears with your thumbs while he holds your arms. "Kookie, Kookie...shh...don't cry..."

     Your eyes examined his figure. From his tear-stained face to his drenched shirt, your vision travelled lower until your eyes landed on his wrists which has suspiciously red marks. Even his neck has one too; a hand-shaped red mark encircling his neck to be exact.

    Then it clicked.

     Your head snapped up immediately upon the realization; your whole being mortified by what you saw. Was he...

     "Jungkook." You looked into his eyes firmly; demanding for answers. "Who did this to you?"

     Just then, Jungkook flinched as you ran your fingers over his red marks. His eyes showed terror, mouth slightly open as he tried to look for words. "...Y-Y/N...I--"

     "Answer. Me." Your eyes dangerously flashed a look of anger, or maybe it was beyond than that as you saw how Jungkook cowered at your sight. It hurt you to see him like that. But then you concluded that it hurts even more to know that someone had dared to lay a finger on him, your patient; your friend. "Tell me and we'll take a legal action against that. This is more than absurd! No one has the right to choke you and tie your wrists!"

     As you snapped at this revelation of abusive act against him, he felt himself on the verge of crying. The cruelty he had received changed his life bit by bit. And it's because of that guy. Yes, he wants to take a legal action about it too. He was scared for life...but then, if he does that...Y/N will be dragged in this. I can't let it happen!

     "Kookie, tell me who did this..." You held his hand tightly; reassuring him that everything will be alright. "Don't be afraid to speak up."

     ...Sorry, but I can't, Y/N.

     He only shook his head and stared at your eyes. Silence enveloped you two and you were left there shocked. You don't get it quite right. You were dazed by his response. As your eyes were getting clouded by your tears, you somehow saw Jungkook lowered his head and slowly, he leaned his head at your shoulder; much to your surprise. Tears finally spilled down your cheeks as you felt the fabric of your shirt near your neck get drenched by his tears. You took a deep breath as you tried maintaining your composure, only letting Jungkook be the one crying at that moment.

     He took a few deep breaths before finally having the courage to speak up; telling you his thoughts. "Y/N...I'm sorry if as your patient, I can't cooperate with the things you ask right now. Things are confusing and at the same time dangerous..." He bit his lower lip; anxiousness swirling inside him. "I can't risk on letting you be in danger." His soft and mild words reached your ears; indicating he was more than afraid of whatever is happening with him. Yes, you were scared knowing that it was risky, but it's the same case with him. You can't just ditch him and let himself be hurt with your own selfishness. It's just not right.

     "I won't know how dangerous it is if you don't tell me." You reasoned while stroking his hair.

     Suddenly, Jungkook lifted his head hastily; eyes glistening in fear. "You-- You don't understand...! He's quite-- He's quite dangerous! He's too dangerous for you...!"

     He was shaking. Sweat dripping down his forehead, his ragged breaths, his tight grip on your arms; it all revealed his hysteria. It had a great impact on him; you knew it. But little did you know that his last words will cause you to feel the same.

     "He's after you, Y/N...!"

     You woke up to another silent night. Only silence lingered around; almost deafening you. As you looked out of the window, you saw the moon above shining brightly; its calming light illuminating your room you were sleeping in. Your mind wondered how many days it has been since you moved in together with Jungkook, how many days it has been since his nightly screams that would instantly jolt you up, making you scramble on your feet towards his room. It was quite tiring yet, you didn't regret it as it was your job as his psychologist to check up on him and ensure his safety and well-being. Or was it human nature as his friend?

     You sighed and closed your eyes. As you shake off all the negative thoughts that were starting to invade your mind, you stood up and headed to the kitchen to get some glass of water. Silently, you walked down the corridor with your light footsteps, hands fiddling the hem of your shirt, until you passed by Jungkook's bedroom. A sudden thought crossed your mind. He hasn't been screaming for some time now, has he?

     You walked towards his door, slowly reaching for the doorknob. For some reason, you can't get why you're having this kind of bad feeling. Your heart was pounding hard against your chest; cold sweat rolled down your forehead. Your breath hitched in your throat; hands becoming numb in an instant. Still, you brushed it off, thinking that maybe he finally got a peaceful sleep. The little debate inside your head went on for a minute before deciding to see it for yourself. As you came in contact with the cold metal that would open to the other side of the door, you slowly twisted it; gently pushing it open, only to meet an empty bed with disheveled blanket and pillows set aside. With that, you went downstairs in hopes of finding him there; whether it may be in the bathroom or kitchen, anywhere inside the house.

     As you wandered around, you listened carefully in case there are some sounds that would resonate inside. You checked every room; bathroom, living room, dining area, kitchen, patio, but there are still no traces of him. By this, your heart was hammering inside non-stop, faster than it was before. Quick breaths of yours ringed in your ears, worst scenarios playing inside your head. You checked every room again, maybe 3 times more than you remembered, until you broke down in the kitchen; tiring yourself of thinking where he could be. As your eyes scanned your surroundings, something caught your eyes on something stuck on the fridge. You went to read it; peeling off the sticky note.

     Y/N, sorry for going out without telling you. I just can't help to not disturb your peaceful slumber. If ever you're reading this, you can find me in this address.

                                                 [Written address]

     Once you finished reading the note, you immediately changed into your casual clothes and went out; heading towards the address given in it. Cool breeze meets your skin; sending shivers down your spine. It was peculiar, especially for you who liked cool wind. The feeling was off.

     Way off to your liking.

     With that, you walked faster; your mind driving you crazy to the point that you almost ripped your hair off your head due to frustration. Your hands were trembling even though you tried to tell yourself that Jungkook's alright, as proven by the note. Or so you thought.

     Your legs brought you in front of a mini-grocery store; making your brows furrowed. What baffled you is that the store is closed; with no signs of someone working inside as all the lights inside were off. Even the sign read 'Sorry, we're closed'. You looked around searching for the male; eyes frantically scanning everywhere. You walked around the area when a sudden sound reached your ears. From what you could tell, it came from a dark alley. Curiosity got the best of you as you started walking slowly towards the alley. Perhaps you may have not heard of the saying...

                                              'Curiosity killed the cat'

                                        Which led you to your doom.

     A hand suddenly grabbed you by your arm; yanking you to the dark place that became an advantage for him to hide his identity. Yes, you could tell that it was a man that pulled you just by his strength. It was no lie that he was much stronger than you as he covered your mouth to prevent you from screaming; his other hand grabbing both of your wrists from behind. You felt as though the hands of darkness were creeping upon you. Your eyes widen at what's happening. Every touch of him sent chills to the bones which you fought with all your might. You struggled from his grip as he continued to bring you to the deeper place in the alley. As you tried to get out from his hold, you felt something near from his pocket. A gun. You stealthily grabbed it; not making it obvious by moving more to be free from his hands.

     As you were brought in an illuminated area which you assumed is a 'dead end', he let you go far away from the escape route with him blocking the way. You concluded he was an armed man with a gun that you got from his gun holder earlier and a knife from his pocket. A sinister smile crept up from his lips; paralyzing you at the moment.

      "Y/N...I knew you would come."

      Wait...his voice sounded so familiar...could it be?

      "Huh? Weren't you happy to see me? Say something."

      No, no, no! That couldn't be him! Just no!

      "Y/N—"

      "Come in to the light." Your voice sounded so demanding when those words slipped out, though your expression contradicted. It showed fear and terror just by looking into your eyes. So contrasting; much to your displeasure.

     With a little help from the moon above, you could see his figure, but still not enough to identify the face. You saw him tilt his head from your words as if he was mocking you; which really worked to say the least.

      "I said come in to the light. Show yourself." You once again said, this time adding more firmness in each word. Your hands balled into fists as you tried to repress both your anger and fear; not wanting to let the mysterious guy know that you are scared from his presence.

      "If you say so."

      The guy slowly stepped forward; bathing himself from the moonlight. As the moon shone upon him, his eyes glinted in an unidentifiable expression as he looked at you hardly that could pierce right through your soul. His aura locked you in place. It was a menacing one making your blood run cold. You knew something was up and that was proved when he fully stepped out from the dark. His face that barely showed emotion; almost blank, was horrifyingly creepy as it could be. It gave you goosebumps; not to mention it made you feel colder than before. The equal shadow and light that adorned his face greatly added an effect in increasing his menacing presence which made you cower because of him.

     Pathetic. You thought as you gritted your teeth in anger.

     As you glared at him, you slowly realized why he sounded so familiar.

     That face.

     That voice.

     That stare.

     They were all so familiar to you that you trembled in fear. It's him. It's definitely him.

     Your lips quivered in fear as you registered everything. "Wai— Wait...No...It's impossible, it can't be you...!" Tears formed in your eyes; finally slapped by the realization. "You can't be him...You— You can't be Kim Taehyung...!"

     "But I am Kim Taehyung."

     You felt your whole world stop as those words sink in your brain. He was the one that Jungkook was talking about, the killer that everyone feared. His doings spread immediately all over the entire news, each and every day his number of victims killed grew more. This was what you feared for in the first place. You knew he had the ability to kill, to commit murder, to take someone's life like it was just a candy stolen from a baby. But then what you feared for the most was his ability to make someone's death look like a suicide. By that, you knew what you had to do. It's now or never.

     Slowly as you can ever be, you tried to reach your hand out for him; the thought of his skin touching yours plays in your mind that gives chills through your bones. Your lips were trembling as you attempted to speak out, "...Okay...Tae-- Taehyung..." You started, "I guess...we had a ba-- bad start, but hey, it's me, Dr. L/N Y/N..."

     He didn't back away nor moved closer near your touch. He just stood there completely still; observing every movements you made. "You-- You remember me, right...? What do you say if-- if we head back to the hospital and--"

     "What do you think I am, a fool?" His attention went onto your hands and slapped them away harshly. He was digging holes in your head by those burning glare of his. "We're going back to that hospital, and what? Lock me in there again? Like I was your prisoner or something?!"

     You flinched at his outburst. His hands were now gripping your arms tightly making you wince. "Well doctor, not a chance." He shoved you away forcefully as his rage got the best of him. "Do you have any idea how much I've endured staying in there not seeing you? Do you even know how I longed to have your presence beside mine? Do you?!" He ran a hand through his hair out of frustration, quick breaths could be heard from him. "You don't."

     You were scared-- no, terrified of the person in front of you. He's like a complete different guy from the one you've had sessions with. He was aggressive, short-tempered that anytime soon, he could explode out of fury. His dilated eyes, gritting teeth and clenched jaw made it so obvious. "And that's why...I escaped from there. You know, I couldn't quite decipher that I would have the courage to do that; to leave you there alone...with him."

     Him...?

     From being hostile to being unfazed, you watched as he quickly changes his mood. It isn't too surprising for you though as you already encountered lots of patients with the same case. However, you, on the other half, were puzzled by his last words; confusion written on your face, with your brows furrowed. As Taehyung sees this, he mockingly tilts his head to his side for the second time. "Yes, him. I don't really know how...but I do get the feeling that he was somehow...getting quite attached to you."

     He clicked his tongue, annoyed look etched on his features. Eyes glazing dangerously upon your figure, he continued to speak. "I knew I had to make a move, to make a warning for him. He was getting on my nerves...that I couldn't help myself to kill someone." A hellish chuckle escaped his lips, then twitching upwards forming a smirk. "Or should I say...some people?"

     A gasp came out from you, your hands then covering your mouth due to shock, caused by the information you've heard. So it is true...He-- He was the one Jungkook was talking about this whole time!

     Wai-- Wait, where is Jungkook?

     By that thought, you somehow got a bit of courage to ask him the main reason why you came to that place. Is he the one responsible for Jungkook's disappearance? "...Where's Jungkook...?" You breathed out.

     As his name was spoken out, he quickly lifted up a finger in the air to shush you right then and there. "Hey, hey, hey. I was just getting to his part." He closed his eyes and placed his hand on where his heart is, as his face showed a look of fake disappointment; clearly he wasn't even a tad bit entertained at the mention of his name, to be honest. "Aw, you just spoiled the surprise."

     "Sur-- Surprise? What--"

     Boom.

     Your eyes widened; the whole thing was too much for you to handle. It felt like the realization was slammed right onto your face without you even knowing it. The look on your face made Taehyung crack a smile; a wicked smile for his satisfaction. It was like his hunger for your despair filled his empty, once craving stomach. A heinous human being indeed. "You finally got the gist."

     "You-- You were talking about him...? Ju-- Jungkook?"

     "Of course, who else?"

     The once silent and eerie alley was disturbed by your shrill yells and cries. "So you were the one! You-- You were the one who tortured him! The one who mercilessly entered his house and gave him such petrifying nightmares! Ho-- How could you?!"

     Despite your screaming, Taehyung paid no mind about it. Instead, he grabbed his pocket knife and played with it; his finger tracing the sharp edge, light enough not to cut his skin. "It was simple, sweetie. It was hatred...and,

          Hatred is a beautiful thing when you know how to use it right."

     Each words felt like sharp daggers piercing right through your heart and mind. You were losing your sanity, you couldn't control yourself. You were having a mental breakdown; eyes staring apprehensively to the male in front of you. From murdering people to torturing his fellow patient, you barely knew him, even though you're fully aware of what he's capable with. Regardless of those, you're still holding on to the lies that were swimming in your mind; believing that there's still a tinge of good and kindness within him, that he would snap out of it and realize what he has done.

     As you drown yourself in your thoughts, Taehyung's deep voice cut through your own senses; snapping you back to reality. "That hatred is what I used as a weapon against Jungkook. And you were right," A devilish chortle came from his mouth, eyes glinting in mischief. "I was the one who tormented him and his pathetic, little mind. Lucky him, I didn't even give my best shot yet. Maybe next time, what do you say, hm? And I'll gladly let you be his audience when that happens."

     As each word reached your ears, anguish and madness filled you up. "Stop! You're lying...! This isn't happening...Thi-- This isn't real!" You aggressively wiped the newly formed tears in your eyes before they fall down your cheeks. Your mind was overdriven by the events in which you have no control of. "Stop this nonsense! Tell me where Jungkook is and tell me who you really are!" At this point, you don't really care what might happen ahead as you just hastily raised his gun from under your clothes, pointing it at him and at him only. "Taehyung isn't like this! Taehyung isn't like you!"

     His gaze hardened as he stared at your own figure. His eyes flickered dangerously in anger; patience currently running out fast. Drastically fast. But then, he decided to let it slip. A single thing like that isn't really his main priority when he was near in reaching his goal. He just have to make a way out of this little turbulence.

     "But this is what I've become, Y/N. There's no changing that. I was born to be like this. I chose to be like this."

     "I said stop! Don't you dare push me to my limit, or else I won't hesitate to pull the trigger."

     As seconds passed by, Taehyung knew you were at the edge of your fury. Your determined eyes locked with his, with no signs of backing out. "Then go ahead. Pull the trigger." He closed his eyes and opened his arms wide open, as if he was accepting what was about to happen. "If you want Jungkook back, kill me."

     Kill me...

     Kill me...

     Kill me...

     Those words kept ringing inside your head. You couldn't believe the words he just spitted out. You tried to calm your shaking hands, focusing the gun on him. He said it himself, his death would mean you'll get Jungkook safely, but why weren't you pulling the trigger yet? Just why?

     "See? You can't do it. You could never do it. You could never kill your patient."

     And the painful truth struck you like a lightning through your heart. It kept you in your place, the gun in your hands pointed at him shakily. He was right. You could never kill a patient, you could never kill your own patient. You remained silent at the moment, like a muted person, while staring at him blankly with wide eyes.

     "Please...please, bring Jungkook back...return the old Taehyung..." You let out a whimper, your pleads becoming a desperate call. Tears escaped your eyes as you choked on your own cries; words being spoken between sobs were barely recognizable as your own. Yet, he only stood there, like a statue, watching your own figure crumble upon his godly stance and sight; his spitefulness slowly builds up within him.

     As his eyes bore into yours, he saw something. Something that made his hatred towards the missing male burn even more. And so, through his gritted teeth, he hissed in anger, "I am Kim Taehyung."

     "Liar!"

     Bang!

     A loud gun shot resonated in the alley. Each echo sent a heart-pounding feeling through your nerves, giving you goosebumps. Your eyes were closed tightly, hands getting clammy as your breathing started getting a bit faster. There was no sound coming from him. Absolute silence surrounded you.

     Oh-- Oh no...I-- I must've killed him!

     With that thought in your mind, your eyes slowly opened. While you were adjusting your blurry vision caused by your tears, you let out a deep, unsteady breath you seemed to be holding in. As it gets clearer, time seemed to stop as the air got knocked out of your lungs. A heavy feeling in your chest started to spread as your muscles become numb; your whole body was against to what your brain was trying to tell. Your feet was glued to the ground, unable to move them as you were paralyzed at the moment.

     "What an idiotic move."

     Wha— What...?

     A maniac giggle was heard after a minute of silence you fired the gun. As the time ticked by, you didn't know how to react anymore. Were you supposed to be happy that you didn't kill him? Or were you suppose to feel the opposite because you failed to get Jungkook back?

     Your heart started beating faster as panic swirls within you. Hands turning cold the moment those four words reached your ears, you loosen your tight grip on the gun; making it fall to the ground. Your breathing became uneven as your brain processed everything.

     And then it happened.

     Fast like a lightning that tore the sky, you found it hard to breathe the second your eyes landed on his figure. He was suddenly in front of you with his eyes burning in fury. His fingers dug on your neck deeply, his palms suffocating your airway. Tears formed in your eyes as you tried to fight back; your arms were thrashing around him, desperate for freedom from his hands.

     "You think you could get away from this easily?" He was seething with every words he spoke out. "You think you could get rid of me that easily?!"

     As your vision was starting to be hazy, you used all your power that's left in you to push him hardly in order to get away from him. His touch still lingers on your neck as you coughed out from lack of oxygen. You were shaking, all of this were too much. Too much that it only made you mutter out the words. "I don't--...I don't understand everything..."

     His footsteps started getting near while you on the other hand, backed away in fear. You were shaking and that thought alone made you sick inside. It made you furious that he can visibly see you fearing his presence.

     "Oh darling, you don't have to understand anything..."

     Sharp intake of breaths and his footsteps were the only sound that resonated through the dark alley; in which the place where he dragged you against your will. As he came closer with only few feet away from you, tears brimmed in your eyes and fear was eating you up. You were hyperventilating, hands shaking terribly as they made their way to cover your ears. You want to hear nothing but complete silence, not even the steps of the monster that was after you. Your eyes were closed tightly, tears spilling from them, then came streaming down your cheek.

     It was him. It was him all along! The one that caused nightmares, the one that sent terrors to the deaths of each and every innocent person that he laid his eyes on; mistaking them for being his prey, for being his rival that has connections with his possession --as he claims it-- for at least 3 months. 3 freaking months! And sadly, it was your reality. It was your turn to feel the horror that was brought upon his previous late love interests. Yes, late.

     Your eyes shot open as you felt the touch on your head that belonged to the twisted man in front of you. His deep and resonant voice ringed in your ears as the next words rolled off his tongue.

     "...Just know that you're mine, that's all."

                            With his words, you were met with darkness.

A/N: And it’s done! Yes, I did leave an open ending for y’all. I wanna let you guys draw your own conclusions as to what happened to Jungkook, what happened to the reader and whatnot. I think it’s fun to let the reader have that, even for just once in a while xD Sooooo, with that I hope you liked reading this and enjoyed this one-shot! ^^

[littlereyofsunlight]

Goodbye, Dreamland (part 2)

Part 1 was posted earlier today. Catch up before you read the end!

Fic: Goodbye, Dreamland Pairing: Steve/Peggy Rating: T+  Summary:  Steve and Peggy take a trip to Coney Island in an alternate-timeline in which Peggy is brought to the future and Ultron never happened.

“You don’t think the Cyclone will make you queasy this time, do you?”

Steve shook his head. “I haven’t had any problems with my stomach since the serum.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Not that I’ve been on a roller coaster since then, but the way Nat flies the Quinjet has to count as a thrill ride sometimes.”

Peggy had only been up the one time when Natasha was flying, but she really couldn’t fault his logic.

“Well then, let’s go. I never did get to try it out on my last trip.”

Steve felt a familiar churning in his gut as their car rattled its way up the steep incline, but when the brakes released and they shot down the first hill, it unspooled into a pure rush not unlike what he felt when he got to jump from an airlift. It turned out, Peggy really liked roller coasters. It felt dangerous, the way the old wooden car careened over the tracks, slamming them from side to side on the curves. Beside Steve, Peggy screamed her delight and he gave an answering “whoop” when they crested the next hill.

“That was absolutely brilliant.” Peggy’s eyes were bright and her color high when they finally came to a stop.

“You liked it?”

“I’ve never felt anything like it!”

Steve smirked. “You should try jumping out of a plane sometime.”

She rolled her eyes and smacked him on the shoulder. “Yes, but no one was shooting at us here.” She smiled wide. “We’re going again.”

They rode the Cyclone two more times, and then did the Soarin’ Eagle, the Wild River, the Steeplechase, and the Thunderbolt. Peggy suggested the Slingshot next, but Steve steered her towards the Raceway instead. Steve liked to tell the story of how Peggy had been relieved of driving duties after a particularly harrowing escape through the Alps with the Howlies piled into the back of a troop truck. Now when he told it, he’d be able to add she was still hell on wheels even when the car was miniaturized. They did several circuits before Steve was able to pry her out of the driver’s seat, and then he only managed it with a promise of funnel cake.

The funnel cake vendor also sold fried Oreos, so Peggy insisted they sample those, too. Steve tried one Oreo, pronounced it “interesting” and then demolished his own funnel cake—they’d each ordered one, in deference to Steve’s advanced metabolism and Peggy’s legendary sweet tooth. Peggy agreed that the fried cookies were a strange confection, but she wasn’t about to let chocolate, even the inferior American version, go to waste.

Hot, sticky, and lightheaded from the combination of race car exhaust, waning adrenaline and far too much sugar in their systems, they agreed to take a break on the Wonder Wheel so they could take in the view.

When their car reached the full fifteen stories, the Wheel shuddered to a stop. Peggy leaned close to the cage, the better to see out past the boardwalk to the flat expanse of sand, crowded with Saturday beach-goers and all their gear, despite how late it was growing. “We should have brought our bathing suits, the bay looks perfect from up here.”

Steve looked over her head at the same view and felt a sudden swooping in his stomach. “Oh,” he said, quickly looking away.

“Something wrong?” Peggy turned back to him.

In an instant, Steve felt every last one of those one hundred and fifty feet between himself and the solid ground. He grabbed onto the seat divider in front of him as he inexplicably felt like he might lose his balance, though he was sitting down. “Uh, I guess I’m not used to just hanging out in midair.” He tried to laugh it off. “Maybe if I were chasing down Hydra, I wouldn’t notice how high we are.” His stomach gave another worrisome lurch.

Mercifully, they started moving again, and the feeling receded as they got ever closer to the ground. “Are we—” before he could get his question out, it was confirmed. They were going around again. Steve whipped his head around in confusion as the car sailed right past the ride workers and began a second ascent, and with it, his churning gut.

He closed his eyes and tried to control it by inhaling through his nose and exhaling slowly through his mouth.

“Oh darling, I didn’t realize it affected you so much.” Peggy had a little smile on her face as she shifted closer to him and put a hand high up on his thigh. “I’m sure we can think of some way of distracting you until the ride’s over,” she suggested, a sultry note in her voice.

“Oh,” he said, keeping his eyes trained on her hand so he wouldn’t catch sight of the view outside their little cage. “Uh.”

It wouldn’t have been the first time lust had turned him ineloquent, so in the aftermath Steve had to admit Peggy wasn’t exactly in the wrong for leaning in to kiss him at that moment. It was, however, not what Steve was trying to communicate just then.

The ride worker took one look at the mess Steve had made and heaved a sigh so loud Peggy was fairly sure people heard it in Queens. “I’m so sorry,” Steve murmured, actively willing himself to shrink back to his pre-serum size out of sheer mortification. Peggy said nothing at all, and she wasn’t quite sure if it was the shock or anger fueling her silence.

Once she was clear of the ride, Peggy made a beeline for the nearest restroom, holding the hem of her blouse out so the damp portion didn’t stick to her torso. Luckily her reflexes were still as fast as they’d been during the war, or it could have been much worse. Steve followed her, hoping there’d be a nearby spigot. At the time, he hadn’t been thinking about moving his feet out of the splash zone. He supposed he was lucky a day at the beach called for flip-flops.

There was no possible way she’d get her top clean enough using only bathroom soap and a hand dryer on its last legs. Peggy wasn’t about to walk back out into the fray with a giant stain on her shirt. Grinding her molars together, she reached into her bag and pulled out Steve’s souvenir.

Steve tried his best to hold in his laughter as Peggy stalked out of the rest room in the ridiculous shirt he’d never intended for her to wear, but the juxtaposition of her thunderous expression over the artificially inflated body drawn on her torso did him in.

“You seem to be feeling better,” Peggy bit out, shaking her hair out from the neck of the t-shirt. She crossed her arms over the horrible cartoon.

He wiped at his eyes and nodded. “I’m so sorry, Peg. I really didn’t know that would happen.”

Peggy sniffed. “You’ll have to make it up to me, Rogers.”

“Anything.” He looked especially penitent in the light of the setting sun.

She stretched her neck and let out a breath. “I think a very stiff drink is in order so I can deal with the double humiliation you’ve put me through.”

“You don’t want to go home?”

“We haven’t seen the fireworks yet, Steve.” She looked at him as though he’d suddenly lost all higher brain functioning.

Steve made a face. “Really? Even after—”

Peggy laid hands on him and turned him in the direction of Ruby’s Bar and Grill. “We came out here to experience all Coney Island has to offer. That includes fireworks,” she said through grit teeth. “Now, until said fireworks appear, we’re getting me a drink, Captain. You owe me.”

The boardwalk in front of Ruby’s was a crush of people trying to enjoy a beverage or ten that hot summer evening. Even though the sun was setting, the heat of the day lay heavy over the beach, a wan breeze occasionally providing slight relief. Steve waded into the crowd while Peggy hung back at the edge. Some time later he returned with two drinks in hand. She raised her eyebrow. Steve didn’t drink unless he was trying to be sociable, and they’d long passed the point in their relationship where he felt the need to keep up the pretense.

He shrugged. “I’m just holding this one while you finish the first. No way am I going back into that madness.”

“You’re making great strides towards getting back in my good graces,” Peggy smiled.

Steve grinned back at her. The crowd pressed in around them and the air felt stagnant, close, too humid and warm. He tipped his head in the direction of the aquarium, up the boardwalk. “You wanna get out of here?”

“Yes please.” She gulped down her drink so they were only sneaking one adult beverage out of the bounds of the bar, then followed Steve as he cut a path through all the people milling around.

Eventually the crowds thinned out as Peggy and Steve made their way down the wide walkway.

“So this whole neighborhood used to be pretty upscale,” Steve said as they passed the housing project buildings in the distance. “Back when they called the waterfront attractions Dreamland. Then it went up in a fire.”

Peggy quirked her lip. “Much like our day.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, “it was pretty much the opposite of what was advertised.”

There were hardly any people down this end, the revelers sticking close to the bright lights of Luna Park as they awaited the evening’s show. Peggy drew Steve over to a bench, and they relaxed as twilight gave way to nighttime. Though it was steamy, Peggy sat close to him, with Steve’s arm draped across the back of the bench.

“Sticking to the beach might have been a better plan,” Peggy said eventually, watching the water lap against the sand.

“It’s not the cleanest one by far,” Steve said. “And it’s always so crowded.”

Peggy let her head loll back against his shoulder. “That’s all part of the experience, though.”

“Yeah, part of the experience used to be running naked into the surf, so, you know, we won’t be repeating that any time soon.” He scratched at his neck, which was finally beginning to heal now that the sun was down. It was itchy.

“Were you here often?” Peggy asked. “Before the war?”

Steve shrugged. “My health was usually better in the summers, and doctors kept encouraging me to ‘take the sea air,’ which, sure, that helped some. But me and Buck definitely got into more scrapes out here than I care to admit.” He rested his chin against her hair. “We had a lot of fun.”

“Do you think he’ll come in from the cold one of these days?” She’d missed Steve’s run-in with the Winter Soldier, but it not the effects it had on him. Even now, he would rush out if Sam or Nat brought in word of a credible sighting. But Sergeant Barnes didn’t want Steve to find him. Not yet, at least.

“I hope so.”

“Me, too.” She did, though she was afraid of what it could mean for Steve if it happened.

He looked down where their hands were linked in his lap. “Just can’t seem to shake the bad memories out here, huh?”

“They aren’t all bad, though, are they?” Peggy bit her lip.

Steve kissed the the crown of her head, breathing in the scent of sunscreen and Peggy’s shampoo. “It was pretty great seeing you go to town on those milk bottles at the shooting gallery,” he smiled into her hair.

Peggy chuckled. “The look on your face when that boy asked if you were Thor!”

“I was flattered.”

“Naturally.” The breeze finally picked up, and Peggy took the opportunity to snuggle in closer. “So, maybe a good day after all.”

Steve cupped her chin, gently tilting her face up to his. “Not all bad.”

And, as they kissed, the fireworks show began. As far as cliched days at Coney Island went, both Peggy and Steve had to admit this one was pretty great in the end.

[kimdias-blog]

Writing as Self-Care

Over the last year, my writing has gone through the transition from a hobby to a job. It’s been a slight shock to my system with some steep learning curves and the adoption of some really beneficial habits. (Scheduling writing time into my day? The best decision I could possibly have made for my writing career.) It was a solid choice and something I should have done a while ago, when I decided I wanted to take this writing thing seriously.

I have three main ‘projects’ I’m working on. In no particular order: 

my slowly-growing collection of literary short stories. These see me fighting with every single sentence and they have me getting awfully used to rejection letters (somehow, being used to rejection letters doesn’t keep them from hurting). 

short erotica I’m putting up on Amazon and other self-publishing sites. These are actually making money, and the focus isn’t on quality so much as quantity; I’m mostly just trying to churn them out as quickly as possible. (Which sort of kills the reward of creating something, yes, but god, it’s good to see pieces of your work make money.)

a romance novel, which I am currently outlining. It’s been a long process; I’m trying to do as much problem solving at this stage as possible, because last summer, I got 50,000 words into a novel before realising the middle was boring and conflictless and I had no idea how to fix it. I want a solid outline before I start the actual writing. Plot has always been a weak point of mine.

Shifting between these three gears can feel a bit like whiplash at times, and each of them have their own struggles, which are sometimes completely overwhelming. But I can live with all of that. It’s a job. If I want some modicum of success, if I want to stand a chance at supporting myself with my writing, I have to treat it like a job, with all its highs and lows. I’m okay with that. In fact, I welcome the challenges and the structure. 

What I hadn’t anticipated—what I’m currently struggling with—is the way treating my writing like a job has robbed me of my ability to escape.

The last two months have been really hard on me for a variety of reasons. I have not been able to calm my anxiety and my brain has been eating itself. (Something I honestly believe about writers: our tendency to live in our heads is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We create amazing things up there, but gosh, do we have a tendency to let our thoughts collapse under their own weight.) I haven’t been able to get out of my head—which, when you’re overthinking, means never-ending stress. 

Then this morning, after another terrible night’s sleep, I sat on my couch with a cup of tea and read fanfiction for over an hour. Mostly Teen Wolf, with some Check, Please! thrown in there for good measure (because no one does cuddles like Jack and Bitty). All the stories I read were on the short side, most of them under 10k, and they were the most self-indulgent hurt/comfort in the world. (There is no proof a single one of them made me cry, no proof whatsoever.) I could feel myself sinking into these worlds where terrible things happened and people were hurting, but in the end, those people were loved and cared for and looked after and everything was okay. And I—I could breathe again.

And I realised how long it has been since I managed to lose myself in what I was reading.

I’m a reader. Of course I am—I’m a writer. I’m sure there are writers who don’t read, but I’m firmly in camp “if you want to be a decent writer, you have to be a great reader”. In my university’s writing program, my profs talk a lot about reading like a writer—in other words, reading and paying attention to what the author is doing, what choices they’re making, how they’re achieving certain effects. It’s one of the most useful things I’ve learnt how to do. The problem, though, is that it’s hard to turn off. Every time I read now, I’m examining sentence structure and word choice. Even when I read fun and fluffy romance novels, I’m constantly studying the plot structure and working out how to put my own story together. (I repeat: I’m so bad at plot. So bad at it.)

I haven’t managed to read—to just read—in months. And while I was reading about Stiles being bitten by an asshole of an Alpha werewolf and, yes, you’d better believe there are misunderstandings between him and Derek and everything hurts until there are cuddles and, yes, the Hale pack beats the other pack up, why do you ask? (Throw Me to the Wolves, by skoosiepants on AO3, if anyone’s interested) I realised I really really wanted to write.

Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt that way? That I wanted to pick up a pen and lose myself in something? Probably at least as long as it’s been since I last read purely for the sake of reading. 

I didn’t want to write literary short stories, and I didn’t want to write porn, and, god, I really didn’t want to write my novel outline. I wanted to write stories about insecurities being soothed, about misunderstandings turning to hurt turning to conversations and cuddles, about getting lost and being found.

Hurt/comfort, basically. The cup-of-tea-and-a-fluffy-blanket of stories. 

It’s been so long since I wrote for myself. Since I wrote to look after myself. I didn’t even realise that was a thing I did, but I guess it is. I’d never thought of writing as an act of self-care before—but maybe it is and maybe, just maybe, it’s a kind of really really important one.

I’m still feeling crazy. I’m still way too up in my head and I will be for a while. The Real Life things that are bothering me aren’t going to go away just because I’ve discovered this little thing about myself.

But I’m a strong advocate for fiction as escapism. Neil Gaiman puts it quite wonderfully in this 2013 interview with The Guardian: “If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with”.

I hadn’t thought of writing being escapism the same way reading can be. But if I want to go to a world where I’m completely in control… isn’t writing an even better way to do it than reading? I can make everything hurt as much as I need, and then make it better. I can linger in insecurities, and then fix them. I can make a happy ending seem impossible, and then create a happy ending. It’s all the things I can’t currently do in real life—so why not go to a place where I can do it?

So I’m gonna escape for a while. I’m going to burrow into a world where things hurt, but people care and they love you, and the world is awful, but there are good things, and everything’s dark, but there is sunlight outside.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll remember why I fell in love with writing in the first place.

[carneaderuntold]

THE TURNING POINT (1X10).

“Whoa there, Kenn.” He held her by her shoulders, careful not to grip her neck where the blood was pooling near her collar bone and soaking into the material of her tank top. He didn’t stop to question why she was wearing so little clothing in the beginnings of winter. Instead, he pushed some of the hair that had fallen from her ponytail away from her wound, finding a round set of indentions—teeth marks—open and still bleeding.

Kennedy blinked, trying to stay focused on him. She looked like she would drop any minute. How long had she been wandering the forest alone before he found her? How much blood had she already lost?

“—Damon…” she mumbled, hand fumbling for his shoulder. Her chocolate brown eyes searched his face for clarity, answers to what was going on. “What are you—where did you—” A whimper escaped past her lips. “—It hurts.”

She heard him sigh and watched his breath form a fog-like vapor as it mingled with the air. “I know, Kenn. I know, but I’m going to fix you right up, okay?”

“’kay,” she mumbled, slumping a bit in his hold. Her eyes fluttered, but she kept them open.

He shifted her so she was being held up by one arm before pushing up the sleeve of his leather jacket and biting into his free wrist. He held it up to her lips, and Kennedy stared at it dumbfounded. “What—?”

“You’re gonna have to drink it, Kenn.” He placed it closer to her. “It’ll heal you.”

He could see her eyes clear up at his words. He could almost see the gears churn behind the brown orbs. He could tell that somewhere along the line, even if it had only been right when she was attacked, she had figured it out, and the rational part of her brain was still in denial.

“You’re crazy, Damon.” She tried to straighten in his hold, only to lose her footing and fall onto the ground. On instinct, she pushed her hands out to catch herself and managed only to cut them on the rocky dirt and broken twigs.

Damon dropped down, pulling her against him. “Crazy? Is my blood healing you crazier than you being attacked by—”

“By a vampire?” she asked, voice flat. The fall to the forest floor seemed to have awaken some coherency into Kennedy, and she was suddenly more aware of the blood trickling down her neck. Using her scrapped hand, she held it against the wound, hoping to stop some of the blood flow. She hissed, cursing under her breath. The bite seemed to hurt a lot more now that there wasn’t a set of teeth latched to it. “Than you being a vampire?”

“You know? About me?”

“Well, I’d be stupid to mistake a person attached to my neck as an animal.” She groaned, pressing her hand harder against her neck. “As for you, m’kinda mad it took me this long actually—I mean, it’s so obvious now, and there you were, day three already dropping hints—oh, can I borrow a copy of The Vampire Chronicles? And then you left it in a dumpster at the back of an alley for me to find, which by the way is not the proper way to take care of a library book.”

Damon made to stop her, but she persisted on. “—And the animal attacks with the people drained of blood in both Mystic Falls and the surrounding areas. Those have been going on for the past three months. And when did you and Stefan come to town? Three months ago. Now, Logan Fell being a vampire…I wasn’t expecting that. I’ve been pretty sure for about a week now that you and Stefan were vampires, so I was a little shocked when it was the guy who can’t take a hint that Jenna isn’t interested in him that attacked me. But, I guess that’s what I get for deciding to take a late night jog in the forest.”

It was Damon’s turn to blink. He had heard Kennedy ramble before, but all the previous times it had been out of nervousness. It had been her way to fill in the awkward silence that had settled between them anytime he had appeared, but this was different. It was a comfortable rambling, as if she had been waiting for this moment,  had prepared a speech, and was now rushing through the words in fear she would forget everything she had wanted to say. She inhaled, breath shallow, and he took his opportunity to step in.

“Logan is the one who attacked you?”

She nodded. “Yeah, Logan Fell, the, uh, douche from the news.” She let out another whine, moving her hand away to see it covered in blood. “But someone else stopped him. Another vampire, I think, some girl. I didn’t—I didn’t see her face, but she was—she was fast like him. Threw him off me.”

He held back a frustrated groan. Whoever had stopped Logan must have been the vampire who had turned the reporter as well, but if this female vampire had been so concerned with saving Kennedy from Logan, then why hadn’t she bothered to heal her? What had been the point of saving her if they were just going to leave her to bleed out on the forest floor? Damon looked down to where his wrist had closed back up.

“I gotta heal you, Kenn.” He bit into his wrist again, bringing it up to her lips. She shook her head.

“No—I don’t, I don’t wanna become a vampire.”

A chuckle left his lips at how pathetic she sounded. “It’s not going to turn you into a vampire. It’s just going to heal you.”

She stared at it for a moment, and he was beginning to fear she would pass out before he could convince her to drink the blood voluntarily. “Promise?” she asked. Her voice had lost some of its volume and sounded scratchy.

“Promise. Now drink. Before I make you.” He placed his wrist against her mouth and watched as she hesitantly wrapped her fingers around his arm to keep it in place as she began to suck at the blood.

He shifted them until they were sitting more comfortably on the forest floor with Kennedy in his lap. He stroked her hair, letting out a sigh of relief he didn’t realize he had been holding back.

“Good girl, that’s it.” He glanced down at the wound on her neck as it started to close up. “Just a bit more, and you’ll be good as new.”

She took a few more sips before Damon pulled his wrist away, wiping the blood off her cheek with his sleeve. They sat there for a few minutes, listening to the leaves rustle and the crickets chirp. His mind wandered back to 1864 when he and Eliza Gilbert had sat like this in a meadow not far from where he and Kennedy were. They would sit for hours like this, pointing out constellations and just enjoying each other’s company. It was a friendship he truly missed.

He shook the thoughts from his head. That was then, and this was now, and now, he had to think about what to do with Kennedy. He could compel her, erase her mind of the vampire attack, but that could potentially leave her vulnerable to another attack. Besides, he had a feeling Kennedy knowing about vampires could be a good thing. For one, she had proven herself rather handy when it came to digging up information. Maybe she could help him find another way to get Katherine out of the tomb. And maybe he wasn’t opposed to having a friend in this town for once, especially one he could be himself with.

“You gonna be okay?” he asked.