#its just getting started this chapter with a little setup but I can’t wait to get into her motivation and stuff | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bratphilia · 1 year ago

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note ✧.*‎ welcome to my descent into madness aka my first attempt at actually writing something with plot (there will be porn i promise you sickos). anyways this started out as a total daydream bla bla bla yall heard me say this many times before. anyways this chapter is just lore, setup, and foreshadowing for the rest of the story. no mike or william in this chapter bc its really just a flashback.

pairing ✧.*‎ steve raglan / william afton x reader, mike schmidt x reader

cw ✧.*‎ kidnapping, drug use, basically child abandonment, paralysis, manic episode

taglist ✧.*‎ @dilfity @iikyutee @kissingrhi @jen-parker @kathxstuff @papyrus-the-poet @lowballbread @cecelovesbooks @bluebearieally @cybunii @van-van @iamunabletothinkofablogname @1ncidentdropout @ice-echo26 @officially-a-simp13 @all4kura @el-sol-sale-de-nuevo @littlexstarlightx @samlow23 @iikyutee

chapter synopsis ✧.*‎ you're fourteen when fate pushes you over the edge, and fifteen when it gets even worse.

lovelace by hoshikoe ⟶ prologue

you're fourteen when fate pushes you over the edge. freddy fazbear’s pizza, a rinky-dink restaurant geared towards kids, is where you’re forced to occupy one day in july. you’re not here for yourself — far from it — you’re here for your little sister, emmy. she isn’t the type of kid to run up to the creepy, uncanny looking animatronics while they robotically sing and dance, only to be apprehended by a tired employee, but she does love them. she loves them to the point where at least one day, maybe two, is spent at freddy’s over the summer. and guess who has to babysit her since mom and dad can’t make it everyday? that’s right, you!

anyways, back to the present. your eyes burn to stay open. the lack of air conditioning in the restaurant provides for a makeshift blanket. “em,” you say to your sister. her eyes are glued on the stage, humming along to the song the animatronics are “singing” while kicking her feet. she ignores you. “em, if i fall asleep, you need to stay right here.”

“mhm,” she murmurs back, continuing her humming. you roll your eyes. there was a part of you that knew you shouldn’t have trusted her. it was screaming at you internally as loud as it could, but the gripes of tiredness overpowered it with ease.

your eyes open for a second, in complete haze. as they open in the direction of where emmy sat, the chair is vacant. it doesn't immediately raise alarm — you're still halfway asleep — but another glance towards the hallway, the one where the employees seem to be coming from, there's the familiar back of a head walking next to a bright, golden colored character. when you finally wake up, you realize you weren't dreaming. your sister is gone. panicking, you rise up from the table and head off the only direction you can think of: down the hall. you aggressively brush pass other employees, ignoring their remarks, telling you that you can't be back there.

finally, a man forcefully stops you by grabbing your shoulders. "you can't be back here. what are you doing?"

"my sister," you say, not noticing how breathless you are until you start speaking. "my sister — she went back here. i have to find her."

the man raises an eyebrow at you. he's wearing a suit and tie, he must be an owner or something. "no one is back here except for employees, but i can help you find her if you say you saw her go back here." you nod, feeling somewhat assured. you know you saw her back here; she has to be somewhere. the man, who introduces himself to you as henry, tells you to wait back at your table. you do as he says, anxiously anticipating him to come out with your sister.

a flurry of things you would say to her flows through your head, each one more scathing the last. how she shouldn't have run off without telling you, going to a place that was obviously closed off to the public. when henry eventually returned, it was just about closing time. the restaurant was empty of patrons. an employee had asked you to leave, but you explained you were waiting for the owner to return something to you. the sunset cast an orange hue that shone through the windows.

"i'm so sorry," henry had said kindly. "i don't know where she is. i couldn't find her."

your face drops and your heart sinks. your lip trembles. "b-but i can't leave without her."

henry looks at you sympathetically. "let's call up your folks, yeah? don't want you to leave here empty handed, and i'm sure i could help alleviate the situation." you nod, tears forming in your eyes at the thought of your parents finding out about your negligence. you give henry your house phone number and lay your head down at the table. you stare at the abandoned bonnie plushie that sits on emmy's chair. you try to focus on it, its purple fur and red bowtie, instead of thinking about your parents' reaction and emmy's disappearance.

it was your dad that came. he didn't spare you a glance at first, just demanded where his daughter was. it wasn't until a sob escaped your lips that he turned to you. you'll never forget the look on his face, that look of disappointment, resentment even. he grabbed you with a tight grip on your arm and dragged you to the car. the car ride home was silent, your dad's jaw was clenched, white knuckles gripping the steering wheel.

"you useless thing," mom had snarled at you when you got home. "you ruined everything. you wanted this to happen, didn't you?"

you slammed the door and flopped onto your bed. on your side, your eyes were trained on the door to your room. you were waiting for emmy to come bursting through your door any minute now, ready to annoy you about anything she could come up with. but she never came. you stared blankly around your room that night, not sleeping, watching the shadows change and light slowly cast and darken over your room.

you started high school that year. freshman year wasn't anything that special. you actually managed to make it into a popular friend group. it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, though. it wasn't like your friends weren't nice, they were, it's just you felt so detached from reality at times that it was hard to enjoy what they were enjoying. you felt like an outsider looking in your own group. always wondering what the hype was about, wondering what other people could find so funny in the moment.

alicia, who seemed to be the head of the group, asked you what was bothering you so much. she didn't demand it out of you, and she didn't put you on the spot. something about it still put you off. "it's some shit with my family," you had told her, "don't worry about it, i'm fine. really." she looked like she didn't quite believe you, but she left it alone anyways. after that, the group treated you a little differently. you had guessed alicia told them what you said. it's not like they were distant, they seemed to be looking out for you more than usual, actually.

it wasn't until another girl in your friend group, kat, had pulled you aside, that you found a coping mechanism. you followed her into the bathroom. "i'm going to help you feel better," she declared. she pulled you into the larger bathroom stall and reached her hand out after searching for something in her bag. she held out a white tablet in the palm of her hand.

you furrowed your brow, unsure. "what is it?"

"vicodin," she told you, and again, "it will make you feel better."

you spared her a glanced and then took it, dry swallowing it. she smiled. "let's go to class, we have first period together."

it didn't kick in until about when class was over. a woozy, unsteady feeling washed over you. your head felt numb, and suddenly all thoughts about your parents and emmy were gone. that day was the most fun you had in years. you sat with your friends at lunch, completely immersed in their presence for once. you did stupid things to make them laugh, such as asking out a shy boy in your class. you wanted to feel like this everyday. you wanted to hold onto this feeling forever.

it didn't last forever, of course, and it wasn't an everyday thing. which is why you stood in the open doorway of your parents bedroom, age fifteen, in the middle of the night. they had a bathroom inside their bedroom that you planned to sneak into. you knew for a fact your mom had a container of vicodin in her medicine cabinet.

the only thing you could hear as you slipped past their bed, their sleeping bodies, is slight ruffle of your feet against the carpet and the beating of your heart. when you successfully made it to the bathroom, you carefully opened the medicine cabinet, disguised as a mirror, and used a mini-flashlight to search the labels until you eventually found a bottle labeled "hydrocodone." you were slow to take it, not wanting the pills inside to rattle and make a noise, then tiptoed back to your room.

you noticed how breathless you were. your mind raced with "what-if" scenarios. what if your parents caught you with the bottle in your hands? what would they do to you? you could only imagine your mother's harsh words, your dad's look of resentment, and suddenly you're thinking about emmy's disappearance again, and—

you freeze — no — you're frozen. you can't move any part of you. your grip on the pill bottle loosens and it tumbles on the ground. you want to reach out to grab it but you just can't seem to move. it's terrifying. your body horribly leans to the side, too. and then it stops.

you're still out of breath and wondering what the fuck had just happened to you. you abandon the pills, hiding them under your bed, you just can't do this right now. you lay down and stare at the ceiling, that moment replaying in your head over and over. you don't get any sleep that night. in fact, it's a night like the past couple nights, where instead of sleeping, you're ruminating in every little thing, every awkward moment, every mistake.

morning comes sooner than later. you're getting ready for school with your mind still racing. not just about the events of the previous night, or your fault in emmy's disappearance, but about every little thing. it's like your brain is on autopilot, though. you're doing things, putting your clothes on, fuck, even putting makeup on — something that was rare for you. reaching under the bed, you felt giddy. you couldn't wait to go to school today.

before you know it, you're at school, heart racing. you gathered your friends in the bathroom, it's cramped with the five of you in there. it was a little hard for you to get them together, you couldn't necessarily get the words out. it wasn't like you were shy or anything, it's like your mouth tumbled out all the wrong words. your friends look at you expectantly and you present them with the bottle of vicodin. only kat seems to be pleased.

"are you... okay?" alicia asked, a look of concern growing on her face.

you frowned. "i thought w-we could do this together. y'know? have some fun."

"i don't really do that sort of thing," was her response. she prompted the rest of your friends, even kat, out of the bathroom, leaving you there alone. you sunk against the wall, sliding to sit down on the floor. what just happened? you felt embarrassed, but like it was against your will, you popped two pills, and moved on.

it was as fun as you hoped it was. you were elated, actually. and you made a very important decision. randomly, you had decided you were going to go to freddy's and look for emmy yourself. she had to be there right? if no one had found her? there were big, obvious holes in your logic, but that didn't seem clear to you then in that moment. what mattered most to you was getting your sister back, getting your family back together.

you impulsively decided to carry out this plan in the middle of english class, asking your teacher if you can go to the bathroom. you catch alicia's eye as you leave. she offers you a strange look. as you walk out to the gate, someone calls your name. you turn and it's the guidance counselor on your trail.

"what are you doing?" she asked. "nevermind, come with me."

she leads you to the main office, close by the gate. she has you sit down in the waiting room while she dials your home number and calls your dad to pick you up. you barely pay attention to what she's saying until the phrase, "needs to go to the hospital, as soon as possible."

and that's how you ended up in the hospital, monitored by either a nurse or a tech. it's hard to tell, but at least two days go by in the blink of an eye. you refuse to eat, chewing desperately only at your finger nails and peeling off the dry skin from your lip; two anxiety habits you've always had, worsened by your current state of mind.

it's not until you wake up from a three hour nap, the most sleep you've gotten in at least a week, to the voices of your parents talking to a psychiatrist in the room. "...we think it's bipolar disorder. she's showing most symptoms of a manic episode."

"oh great, another thing for us to take care of," your mom says sarcastically. your dad is rubbing his eyes, looking pained. they barely even notice the fact that you're awake.

#fnaf #fnaf x reader #five nights at freddy's

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smoments · 10 months ago

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✧ part 14: memories of a stranger // a satosugu reincarnation au

❝ let's meet again, for the first time. ❞

╰┈➤ in which 19-year old gojo satoru happens upon a stranger at a cafe who speaks his name with a kind of softness and familiarity that satoru’s sure he’s heard before.

➽ chapter 14: the transience of summer

“This is pretty smart, if you think about it. They have students make the art, set up the displays alone, and take everything down at the end. And then they get the money from the whole event!”

“Satoru, they do it primarily for your benefit. It’s a good way to expand your horizons and have professionals see your work.”

“Plus, what do you mean, alone? We were there too.”

Satoru hefts the canvas up above his head just to set it back down atop the set of stairs leading outside, exhaling dramatically and shooting them a wide grin. “You’re right! Whatever would I do without you two.” He pulls them into suffocating side-hugs, beaming like a proud parent when neither of them slap him.

After a second, Shoko swats at his shoulder in a request to be released and looks at him sideways when he relents, her gaze curious.

“I told you about that one guy, right? Who was, like, obsessed with your painting?”

“For real? First I’m hearing of this.”

She tilts her head at him apologetically, fighting a smile. “Oops, must’ve slipped my mind. But he owns a gallery somewhere over in Minato, and he wanted to display it there.”

“Oh, wow. Thanks.”

“Think you’ll do it?”

“That’s… Well, wait a second. I forgot to tell you guys, but I’ve been thinking deeply about my future lately,” he starts, looking around at his friends for shocked reactions and realizing he definitely expected too much when they simply meet his gaze with blank faces, “And I don’t think I want to be an artist.”

This part captures their attention; Suguru flinches back as though slapped, and Shoko gasps like he’s just admitted to locking a very artistic body double in his basement and forcing them to make all his paintings for him.

“Excuse me?”

He waves off their concern, speaking lightly and self-assuredly. “Don’t get me wrong, I do love painting and stuff, but do you know what I like even more than that?”

“Being a bad influence on others?” Shoko offers.

“Educating the youth!”

“Half points.” Suguru tells her sagely.

“My life is not a game show.”

He chuckles at this, lifting his shoulders in surrender.

“We never said you wouldn’t be a good teacher. I bet you’d keep things interesting, at the very least.”

“Yeah, and besides, you know we don’t really care what you do. Like, it’s whatever as long as you’re happy with it.”

He gives her an indulgently gratified look as Suguru walks over to the display, checking for any forgotten pieces of the setup. “Is it just me, or was that actually kinda sweet?”

“Yeah, obviously,” she responds, mildly offended.

“Satoru?”

In spite of its softness, Suguru’s voice has a way of attracting attention, and they both look over curiously, searching his face for the same surprise that was so clearly audible in his tone.

“What’s this?”

Satoru’s eyes widen when the cool light overhead catches on a glint of gold in Suguru’s grasp, and he lets out a shriek as Shoko covers her mouth to stifle a delighted laugh.

“Shoko! Get that away from him!”

“Can’t. I’m holding this.” She lifts the basket in her hands, which would have been haphazardly put together except that Suguru turned out to have a knack for arranging gifts. He’d turned pale when Satoru announced that it was finally ready and held it up proudly for him to see, insisting that he’d clean it up a little before giving it to Shoko (Satoru was greatly wounded by this until he laid his eyes on the final product and decided his pride was a worthy sacrifice for such a beautiful result).

“And what’s the issue, anyway? I like your poetry.”

“I told you already, it wasn’t my poetry! And it didn’t rhyme, either!”

“Thank you, Satoru.”

Satoru looks up sharply when Suguru finally speaks, his face aflame, and does his very best to sound unbothered.

“It wasn’t even anything. Really. I didn’t even write it.”

Suguru smiles back at him warmly, and he feels what he’s sure used to be clear, perfectly formed thoughts falling away and melting on the floor of his brain in a pool of mush. This is definitely not healthy. Luckily for him, Shoko sets a prompting hand on his shoulder, startling him back into clarity.

“I’ve gotta get back - an American singing show Utahime accidentally got us both hooked on is airing today. Thanks for all this, though.” She gestures to the basket in her grip. “My skin gets dry sometimes, especially in winter.”

“I knew it!”

“What?… Okay then, bye.”

“Bye, Shoko.”

He loses himself in thought as watches her turn to leave, pausing to whisper something to Suguru on her way to the door. She’s only just made it down the front steps of the gallery when he calls out to her.

“And- uh- sorry I didn’t take the time to say anything to you earlier.”

She slowly spins to face him, surprise written into the curves of her face and the part of her lips, and he meets her gaze with more earnestness than he’d ideally like anybody to associate with him.

“I’m trying to work on being more proactive and stuff. Not that it’s an excuse for being so dense about what you were going through. Anyway, you needed someone to talk to, I think. I should have been that for you. So… I’m sorry.”

Shoko stills, her throat bobbing visibly when she swallows, and she laughs with that casual ease that he’s come to know her for. It’s too high this time, though; almost like she’s nervous. And he didn’t expect his words to mean anything to her, because it wasn’t as though he could actually go back and fix his maddening lack of initiative, but her dark eyebrows are uncharacteristically taut with emotion, and she’s looking at him now with something like gratitude.

“Thanks, Satoru. It means a lot.”

She waves at them quietly, then continues on her way, her other hand coming up to support the weight of the basket in her grip and her fingers tightening ever-so-slightly around the handle. She glances down at the little cat that rests right at the top, a centerpiece among the overflowing snacks and hand-picked gifts packed into the large container, and it smiles complacently back at her with those dark, painted eyes as her own lips curve upward.

“What did Shoko tell you?”

Suguru is staring glassy-eyed into the wall like he’s just witnessed something unspeakable, and Satoru eyes him with concern.

“What…? Nothing. Just to have a good day.”

“Why would she only say that to you?” He asks bemusedly, his brow furrowed. His gaze trails down the collar of Suguru’s uniform to the item in his hand, and his heart skips a beat. He reaches over to pry his fingers off of the placard and tuck it into his own pocket, thanking his luck that Suguru is so out of it he barely notices.

“Let’s head out?”

“Yeah.”

He lets Suguru lead the way, fishing through his pocket and slipping out the smooth, shiny rectangle to get another look at it.

He wasn’t thinking when he wrote it, really; the words came to him in a dream. They didn’t feel like his, and he didn’t remember ever taking the time to put them together, but the raw emotion seemed to pour from them like water, a tidal wave that sent him to his knees with how deeply it resounded in his chest, and so he allowed them to grace the placard that ended up just below his treasured painting on the wall of the gallery. Even now, his breath catches when his eyes skim the small, engraved letters carved into the golden metal, and he picks up his pace to come to Suguru’s side, trying to ignore the incessant pounding of his heart.

to you, who bloomed and fell away like a fruitless flower.

even if these days fade away, they will remain forever colored.

“we’ll meet again, right?”

words spoken in an unheard voice. in the depths of eternity left behind. scattered within a sea of endless blue.

i’m sorry we couldn’t ever reach you.

Suguru shoots him a subdued glance as he rings the doorbell beside the wooden sign that spells out ‘Fushiguro’ in dark, neat letters, trying and failing to sound exasperated.

“We saw him last week, Satoru.”

“Don’t act like you haven’t been missing that kid too. You mentioned him, like, four times yesterday. You were obviously hoping I’d pick up on the subliminal messaging behind your words and come here with you.”

The front door creaks open after a notable amount of time, and a pair of large, sharp eyes peek through the gap in the entrance. Megumi’s wary gaze finds Satoru first, and his expression drops. He moves to shut the door in their faces without appearing the slightest bit remorseful about it, but Satoru sticks his foot through the gap and eases it open before he has the chance.

“We came to hang out with you!” He announces gaily, beaming down at the child through his dark sunglasses.

“Don’t you have any friends your own age?” Megumi grumbles dispassionately, but allows him to push open the door without any voiced complaint. Satoru narrows his eyes, open hands gravitating towards Megumi’s mess of hair threateningly.

“This brat-”

Suguru cuts him off by stepping lightly on his foot, making him roll his eyes and press his lips together. “Yes, of course, Megumi, but we were hoping to take you somewhere if you have time. Would Tsumiki like to come too?”

Megumi looks at Suguru with a bit more tolerance - likely thanks in part to him putting Satoru in his place. Still, he averts his eyes as soon as he’s finished speaking, resignation settling on his features.

“I can’t. I have somewhere to be.”

Satoru crouches down so they’re at eye-level, giving him a suspicious once-over.

“And where’s that?”

“None of your business.” He looks vaguely embarrassed all of a sudden and drops his gaze to the ground. “But… I have to go to a… school meeting.”

“Going to school after school? Did you get in trouble? I knew the nerd act was all a show.”

When Megumi remains silent and fidgets with his hands nervously instead of giving him the scathing look he expected, Satoru’s mouth drops open.

“Wait, for real?”

Suguru speaks up as Satoru sits there gaping, his tone gently coercing.

“What happened?”

“I have to… I did something to this guy, but he deserved it.” When he catches the look of awe on both their faces, he continues with a touch more defensiveness. “Maybe you shouldn’t be a jerk if you don’t want to face the repercussions.”

Satoru knows Suguru has been teaching Megumi new vocabulary words on top of the knowledge he must amass from the books he always has his nose buried into, but he’s still unnervingly well-spoken for a seven year old. He nods slowly, pretending to be deep in thought, and then sighs like he’s just been requested to do something horribly strenuous.

“Okay, okay, sit down and walk us through it.”

Satoru strolls past the elementary schooler and into the house, making himself at home on the small couch in the living room. Megumi gives him a look, but follows him inside silently, leaving the door ajar for Suguru to enter too.

After receiving a slightly more detailed account of the situation that leaves him feeling equal parts proud and disbelieving of the seemingly innocuous child in front of him, Satoru snaps his fingers, beaming.

“Suguru, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“God, I hope not.”

“Megumi… you just need parents, right?”

Suguru immediately understands his intentions and returns his meaningful look with a warning one.

“Satoru.”

“It’s fine! As long as they’re not, like, homophobic. And see? He looks just like us!”

He leans down next to Megumi, who is seated between them, and grins, poking his cheek in an attempt to squish his face into a smile while he struggles to get away.

“They don’t just let you do whatever, you know. I’m sure they’ll check for identification of some sort. And besides, Megumi probably doesn’t want-“

“Okay.”

“What?”

“Really?!”

Megumi rubs his cheek, which is slowly returning to its normal color, and sighs heavily.

“It’s fine. It’s better than nothing, I guess.”

“Woah, don’t get too excited there, kid.”

“And you two are… Megumi’s parents?”

His teacher, a kind-looking young woman with blond hair cut to her chin, looks uncertainly at the odd group before her - and Satoru can’t really blame her, because he and Suguru are quite clearly college students and barely old enough to drive, let alone have a seven-year-old child.

“Yes, but we really do just love him so much, and we only want what’s best for him, so I hardly think this conversation-“

Suguru cuts off his tirade with a picturesque smile, his tone agreeable.

“That’s right. Thank you for having us here. There was something you wanted to discuss?”

She shuffles the pile of test papers on her desk hesitantly, the tips of her fingers brushing the width of the stack, and then sets it down again and dips her head in acknowledgement, bringing her hands together primly. A folded paper name tag rests next to them with Ms. Nitta written in neat print and bordered by colorful, doodle-esque flowers and hearts.

“Right. So, based on what we’ve gathered from his classmates’ accounts, Megumi has been getting into fights on school property.”

Satoru bites back an ‘is he winning’ and instead gasps dramatically, putting an affronted hand to his heart as though the very idea is unthinkable. Anyway, didn’t Megumi say ‘guy’, as in singular? He was definitely not properly prepared for this. Suguru, on the other hand, is playing the role of concerned parent a little too well, especially considering his earlier protests.

“My darling child would never-“

“Was he provoked? Was it well-deserved?” Suguru inquires. “You see, I don’t think he’d go around starting trouble without reason.”

Satoru tilts his head toward him, slightly surprised at how reasonable a question it is, and Ms. Nitta clears her throat awkwardly.

“Well, perhaps, but that’s quite besides the point. You can imagine a parent’s reaction to their kid coming home all beaten up. Still… he does tend to gravitate towards those who are… aggressively inclined.”

“See? Case closed,” Satoru exclaims triumphantly, throwing up his hands. “He’s just beating up losers. He’s basically a superhero.”

She wrinkles her brow, confusion apparent on her face. “Even if we were to gloss over the other things, I’m afraid that’s not it. Megumi is undoubtedly a very smart kid, but he has some trouble getting along with his peers.”

“Aw, yeah, he’s our antisocial little… guy. He takes after this one.”

He jabs a thumb at Suguru, whose eye twitches in annoyance. He directs a tight, closed-eye smile at Ms. Nitta.

“Yes, and he gets all his agreeability from Satoru here.”

“Are you saying my son is disagreeable?! How dare you!”

“He’s fifty percent my son, too.”

“Well, I carried him for nine months, so I think I deserve at least fifty-one percent!”

“You carried him? Nobody decided that!”

“Yeah, ‘cause it was obvious that-“

“If we could keep personal matters out of the discussion…”

“Please.” Megumi agrees, making no effort to mask the disgust on his face.

“You sure this is the right classroom, right, Yuuji? Damn it-“ The sound of a rattling door knob and muffled swearing pulls them from their heated argument regarding the rightful custody of their non-rightful child, and Satoru squints at the door before leaning in to whisper to Suguru.

“Does he have… tattoos on his face?”

“Ah - this is one of Megumi’s classmates. He requested to be here today.” Ms. Nitta explains, moving swiftly to the door and turning the lock on the knob. She holds it open for them to enter, smiling down at Yuuji, who trots in second. The tattooed man gives her a gruff nod of thanks as his eyes travel the room indifferently, double-taking when he notices Megumi sitting between them.

“Fushiguro?” He nudges Yuuji with his elbow, leaning down to hiss at him in what is quite a poor excuse for a whisper. “You didn’t tell me Fushiguro would be here.”

“I did, ‘kuna,” he protests, indignant. “You were busy playing video games.”

“Huhh? I don’t think so. Anyway, let’s get this over with.”

Ms. Nitta looks to Yuuji questioningly as he and his acquaintance take seats in the tiny plastic chairs usually reserved for her elementary schoolers. Her doubtful eyes flick to the latter, who crosses his legs importantly as the bright yellow plastic squeaks beneath his weight.

“And… are you Yuuji’s father?” She winces at the thought.

“Nah, I’m his brother,” he replies, making a barely perceptible amount of effort to incline his tone towards politeness.

“Big brother,” Yuuji adds unnecessarily. “His real name is Sukuna, but I think he prefers ‘kuna.”

“I absolutely do not, brat.” He glares down at Yuuji, a tinge of red coloring his cheeks, and Ms. Nitta clears her throat.

“So, you had something you wanted to say for Fushiguro?”

“Yes!” Yuuji’s hand shoots into the air enthusiastically. He lets it hover, waiting for stated permission to speak, and she gestures for him to continue. Sukuna rolls his eyes at Yuuji’s behavior, the beginnings of a smile tugging at his lips.

“Fushiguro didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Itadori-” Megumi tries self-consciously, and frowns when Yuuji waves him off.

“No! These annoying brats were bothering Junpei, and Fushiguro took care of them!”

“Whaddya mean, ‘took care of them’? He’s seven.” Sukuna replies disbelievingly. “Not some, like, old war hero-veteran.”

“So am I!”

“Yeah, exactly. You better not be beating people up, either.”

“But you beat people up.”

“Right. Because I’m a grown-up.”

Suguru appears slightly troubled at this particular thread of logic, but thinks better of voicing his concerns. “…Right. Megumi is good to go, then?”

Ms. Nitta lifts her eyes to the ceiling, apparently quantifying the emotional turmoil of having to listen to their side conversations against that of explaining to a livid parent that the child who beat up their own (rightfully, but they wouldn’t hear that) was running free without consequence. Eventually, she settles on the latter of the two evils.

“You all can be free to leave if you promise that this won’t happen again? I’d rather avoid any more trouble, and-“

The unpleasant screech of shoes against linoleum cuts her off, and they all look with interest at the young girl standing resolutely in front of the classroom door, her shoulders heaving with the effort expended on her run over. She blows a bothersome strand of brown, chin-length hair out of her face and opens her mouth to make a resounding declaration to the room that leaves little room for argument.

“Fushiguro didn’t do anything! He’s not even that strong! I bet I could beat him up.”

“If you notice any bullying in the future, just talk to me, okay, Megumi? You can’t cancel out violence with violence, can you?”

Ms. Nitta smiles, patting him gently on the head and confirming Satoru’s suspicions that resisting the gravitational pull of that porcupine hair is next to impossible.

“No, ma’am.” Megumi mutters, embarrassed. Despite his grouchy insistence that his friends didn’t need to show up for him and he would have been fine just dealing with the consequences of his actions all on his own, Satoru can tell from the lingering softness in his gaze that he’s grateful to them for stepping in.

The brief walk back to Megumi’s house passes mostly in silence. They wave him off at the entrance to his house, and he returns the gesture half-heartedly, offering them a rare smile before stepping inside and quietly shutting the door behind himself. Satoru grins to himself, warmth enveloping his body at the small act.

It goes without question that they've grown attached to Megumi in the few months they've known him - it would have been hard not to, really. He's the kind of person whose kind nature melts right through the ice around his words, his occasional moments of naivety made to feel even more precious against the dark, impenetrable backdrop of his mind.

Satoru was never so fond of children, in all honesty; as a teenager, he thought them annoying, a sentiment heightened by the resentment that welled up within him whenever he caught a glimpse of a clearly well-loved child laughing in the arms of a parent, pant knees grass-stained and clothes streaked with dirt. How could their parents still want to hold them when they looked such a mess? What had they done to elicit such affection? And what had he done wrong not to?

Satoru had always wondered if the reason that he remembered his childhood as being so lonely in spite of how many people starred in it was his ungratefulness. Maybe it really wasn't so bad. Maybe he was just a brat. There was always food on the table, after all. He was always taken care of - sometimes to the point of feeling suffocated by it. So why couldn't he stand to speak to his parents, even now?

Children brought up uncomfortable feelings. He preferred to avoid them.

But Megumi was tolerable. Not because of his independence, necessarily, but because of his goodness. It was clear that he didn't have it easy. But it was also clear that his struggles weren't rooted in some misdeed he'd committed.

How could he look at this seven-year-old child and blame him for the situation he was in? How could he even think for a second that it might be his fault?

He couldn't.

And if he couldn't do it to Megumi, he couldn't do it to himself.

So, at his most selfish, he enjoyed being around Megumi because it healed something inside him.

And somewhere along the way, it dissolved into the kind of warm affection he never thought he could feel for what was supposed to be some random kid.

Such emotional vulnerability frightened him, though, especially because theirs was a bond that seemed so precarious; each unpleasant reminder that he wasn't really theirs brought a pang to his chest. They had no real connection to him, no matter how Satoru might have tried to pretend, and no matter that his teacher now believed they were his parents. He had his own life that didn't involve them, and if he decided that he didn't want them to be part of it, that it had been fun while it lasted, but he had better things to do now, then that was it.

He would rather not consider that such an event might come to fruition. And it probably won't.

That's right- Suguru won't be so rash. He won't let his mind be clouded by emotion.

Suguru will tell him he's being ridiculous.

Satoru locks eyes with the only other person who might be able to understand the mess of emotions swirling in his chest, and immediately senses that he’s following an identical train of thought. So when Suguru speaks up, his voice soft, he isn’t particularly surprised.

“You think it’ll always be like this?”

Satoru wants to reply with the kind of incredulity he doesn’t feel; he wants to say that of course it will, that everything will turn out okay, that all of them will stay just like this forever. Instead, he lifts his shoulders in a helpless shrug.

“I don’t know. I hope so.”

They linger on the sidewalk for a second without breaking the silence that now hangs in the air between them, the spring breeze tender against their skin. And then, Suguru clears his throat, straightening up abruptly like he’s just come back to himself.

“We’re loitering.”

Satoru rolls his eyes. “Loitering is dumb. What does that even mean?”

He lets out a breath of laughter, and Satoru’s mouth twitches into a grin at the gentle familiarity of the sound, fondness coursing through his chest. Then, a flash of movement in his peripheral vision directs his attention to the entrance of Megumi’s house, where a crack has now emerged in the doorway, and he blinks, wondering if he’s seeing things until a small head pokes through the gap and calls out to them in that characteristically monotonous tone.

“You said Tsumiki can come next time, right?”

It takes a moment for him to process Megumi’s words, but the second he does, a beam spreads over his face. He elbows Suguru in a way that comes off as more excited than smug like he intended, then looks over at him and finds himself unable to drag his eyes away from the wide-eyed relief on his face- even though it’s an expression that is almost certainly mirrored on his own.

When he remembers that he still has yet to respond, Satoru coughs and turns away, lifting a hand to wave at Megumi, and wonders why he feels so unexpectedly sappy when he wasn’t at all worried in the first place.

“As long as it’s not another one of your behavioral conferences, sure.”

He and Suguru exchange a fond look as Megumi rolls his eyes and shuts the door once more.

#jjk #satosugu #crying screaming throwing up #geto suguru #gojo satoru #ao3 fanfic #coffee shop au #fanfiction #alternate universe #archive of our own #jujutsu kaisen au #jujutsu kaisen

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mlbigbang · 2 years ago

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2022 Ladrien Fic Rec List

It's the end of the year which means it's finally time for the ML Big Bang's yearly fic rec lists! We're really excited to bring you our contributors' favourite fics started this year to supply you with plenty of reading material while you're waiting for the Big Bang fics' publication in January.

you're such a dream to me by @bocadelicate 1,076 words, Teen, 1/1 chapter

there was something so comforting about cuddling with his lady. even though she didn’t know he was her partner, and even if he couldn’t know who she was behind the mask. he was still ever so in love with her, and he wouldn’t change a single thing about it.

"It's simply soft, short and sweet Ladrien fluff."

o, trespass sweetly urged by @apopcornkernel 820 words, Teen, 1/1 chapter

“We can’t,” Ladybug breathed against his mouth, so close Adrien could count her eyelashes. “Your father—” “Isn’t here,” Adrien said, fierce and flushed. Ladybug swallowed, and as she did, her lips grazed his. He couldn’t help the shudder that ran through him. Ladybug is the vigilante protector of the people. Adrien is the crown prince of the kingdom. They should not be doing this.

"It's a Ladrien knight/prince AU. Need I say more. (I will say more though. It has lovely prose, a fabulous setup, and so much potential plot-wise.)"

for all the moon’s beauty (you are far more radiant) by @theladyfae 751 words, General, 1/1 chapter

Oh, the picture they must make: an outlaw, holding onto the hand of a prince, directing him on how to love her.

"this fic takes place in the famed Ladrien knight/prince AU. it depicts a single, simple night of Adrien and Ladybug, with stunning writing and word use where you can feel their yearning oozing off the screen <3"

"Fae's writing is so poetic and beautiful and the entire thing is just so evocative and fitting of Ladrien as a ship."

say something by @coffeebanana 17,963 words, Teen, 4/12 chapters

Whenever Adrien imagined sharing a hotel room with Ladybug...it wasn't like this. It was supposed to be on a desert island somewhere, they were supposed to be happy, and he always figured he'd actually know Ladybug's real name by then. Instead, Adrien's injured and Ladybug's insistent on hiding him away from Hawk Moth. Plus, as if finding out he's been fighting his father for years isn't enough, Adrien's pretty sure Ladybug's been acting differently since she found out who he is. What he is. And Ladybug...has no idea what to say to make things better.

"THIS FIC. It has sentiadrien, which is something sorta controversial in the fandom. However the way it's handled in this is great, the writing is awesome, and every chapter packs this emotional punch that leaves me wanting more. It's also very *realistic*. Adrien and Ladybugs feelings are complicated and messy, and this fic doesn't glide over that- it *embraces* it. Above all, they really care for each other, and this fic allows that aspect of their relationsip to shine."

Probably Not The Best Idea by @coffeebanana 17,827 words, Teen, 5/22 chapters

When Adrien first offered Ladybug his spare room, it was mostly joke. Not once in a million years did he think she'd actually take him up on the offer. After all, he's the only one who's hopelessly in love. Right? For her part, Ladybug never meant to make a habit out of visiting Adrien. But now that she has, well...spending time with him feels safe. It feels right. So why not give this roommates thing a try? Surely it'll be nice, not having to hide her hero identity in her own home for once, even if she has to hide her civilian identity instead. All in all, it might not be the best idea they've ever had, but...can it really be the worst? And if they happen to get a little more than they bargained for in the process? That's just part of the fun.

"personally i love ladrien, and i love domesticity, so when i saw that this fic was a thing i absolutely had to read it. its only a couple chapters in at the moment but their dynamic is written so well and the fic balances humour and fluff really well <3"

Selfish Love by @ck2k18 1,508 words, Teen, 1/1 chapter

Jumping from a nearby bush, the animal changed from lizard to jaguar in midair. She whirled to face it, sword in her hand, but not fast enough. Then she was on the ground, someone else's weight on her as she rolled out of the creature's path. The culprit hovered over her, blonde hair shining in the moonlight. His shirt was torn from the beast's claws, and he panted heavily. He’d flung himself into danger for her. And it looked like he’d do it again. “Adrien, NO!” ... Or: Adrien keeps sacrificing himself for his guard, and she's a little tired of reminding him that it's not his job.

"LADRIEN FIGHTING OVER LADYBUG SACRIFICING HERSELF FOR ADRIEN'S SAFETY. + KNIGHT/PRINCE AU. YOU AGREE."

reinvent love by @peachcitt 36,865 words, General, 30/30 chapters

“And what could a pretty sort of girl like you want with me?” she asks, the corners of her mouth quirking up into a smile. “I wanted to become your right hand man,” Adrien says. “Girl,” he corrects, hurriedly. “Right hand girl. I want to be your right hand… girl.” “Cute,” she says to Adrien as she swings gracefully onto the saddle. “Is that a yes?” or a prince cross-dressing to protect his identity and a famous lady-knight attempting to save the world. for ladrien june 2022

"Fantasy AU! Marinette is a magic knight! Adrien is a runaway prince! ....and is currently known as "Adrienne," self-proclaimed right-hand-girl of the mysterious knight. Has very good parallels to canon, but in a fantasy/medieval setting. And lots of delicious crushes and awkward moments."

Under Oath by @eoscenes 81,446 words, Teen, 30/? chapters

In the aftermath of Hawk Moth's defeat, Ladybug finds her heart torn between her schoolgirl crush and her superhero partner ― who returns, after an unexplained hiatus, more irresistible than ever. ⋆☆⋆ Gabriel Agreste is unmasked, and Paris rises up in the aftermath. Marinette Dupain-Cheng must weather Paris' anxious protesters, ravenous reporters, a scattered team of judiciary investigators, and her conflicting feelings for two different boys. In the eye of this storm is the elusive Adrien Agreste, the primary witness in his own father's trial, who might just hold the secret to finding the Peacock Miraculous. (If only she wasn't in love with him.) Meanwhile, locked away in Le Grand Paris hotel, Adrien grapples with his responsibilities to a city that can't decide if it hates or loves him. Keeping his daytime persona and Chat Noir separate entities becomes even harder when Ladybug, whom he has finally decided to get over, starts visiting him at night, determined to figure his secrets out. (If only he wasn't in love with her.) When an unknown figure returns with the Peacock Miraculous, Ladybug and Chat Noir will have to save their city once more — or lose each other trying.

"An amazing all-sides-of-the-Lovesquare fic (emphasis on Ladrien and Ladynoir), following the defeat of Hawkmoth, dealing with the ramifications of secretly being a superhero who brought down a villain that is also your father; the press, the legal system, and a big team of superheroes trying to solve the rest of the mystery. Plays with both realism and superhero fantasy expertly, gives everyone powerups, and has amazing use of emotion and character relationships. CW for alcohol use. One of my favorite ongoing fics."

#miraculous #miraculous ladybug #ladrien #love square #marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste #ladybug #ml fic recs #fic recs #ml big bang 2022 #ml big bang

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clara02 · 2 years ago

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The Christmas Sugar Cookie War.

(Aegon Targaryen x reader)

Previous Chapter

Chapter three: Last Christmas she pushed her brother off a hill.

It had snowed all night. The streets of King’s Landing were white. It was indeed a perfect day for sliding. And yet Aegon was simply frustrated. His kitchen smelled of spices and the light of the sun that entered through the window was homely. The fireplace kept their house cozy and warm.

It was the ideal setup for a nice winter morning. However, his nephews couldn’t shut up. Even his brother, Daeron, normally a collected child, was almost climbing the walls in anticipation.

-Regretting your choices, brother?! – Helena asked, on a happy teasing tone. Her voice barely heard with all the ruckus around them.

Aegon raised his eyebrow at that.

-I know you’ve agreed to this only to upset our brother. – Helena laughed. – I tried to convince him that it’s nice to step outside and enjoy himself, but… You know how he is. He is going to, probably, sulk the entire time.

-Well… I think it’s going to be lovely. – Aegon said and Helena looked at him suspiciously. – After we control these little demons, that is.

The siblings turned their gaze to the four kids that were screaming at each other.

-C’mon! We’ve gotta go! -Luke said jumping on the sofa, almost squishing Aegon. -We can’t be late! Let’s go! Let’s go!

All the other “kids” started to agree with him. Well, Jace wasn’t supposed to be considered a kid, but… it is what it is.

-We are just waiting on Aemond. -Aegon said with a devilish grin making its way to his face.

So, they started screaming for Aemond. The taller boy making his way out of his bedroom. His eye sharp with murderous intent.

-Stop screaming. Let’s go. – His voice deep and annoyed.

As they were leaving, Aegon was stopped by Aemond’s hand on his elbow.

-If it wasn’t for mother… I would have killed you already.

Aegon gulped but smiled.

-And I believe you brother.

-Hurry up, you two! -Helena called with a beaming expression, holding hands with a, also beaming, Daeron.

____

(Y/N)’s family waited for the Targaryens on the top of a hill. It was a perfect day for sliding and they were excited.

Well. (Y/N) and her younger sister were excited. Her brother and her twin cousins looked like they just bit into lemon. They weren’t super happy about this new “friendship with the enemy”.

But… what’s done is done.

They heard the Targaryens before actually seeing them.

They were obnoxiously loud, which surprised (Y/N). She thought the rich posh boys would be all like Aemond. Quiet with a sense of superiority, but, apparently, they were just as messy as (Y/N)’s own family.

After they were all up the hill (Y/N) smiled and welcomed them, since her brother was obviously not going to do it, and her sister seamed shy in Aegon’s presence.

-I think presentations are overdue. This is my older brother, and this is his fiancé. -She pointed at the couple. The older woman sporting a baby bump. – She is going to act as our referee this year.

They all said their hellos.

-This is my younger sister. – The little girl blushed; her eyes focused on Aegon. -And this are my cousins. – The twin boys snickered and turned their faces away. – Be nice. – (Y/N) whispered but to no avail.

Aegon decided to do a quickly run through of his own family, mentioning his own three siblings, his three nephews and his two cousins, Baela and Rhaena.

-You mentioned a referee?! – Jace piped up. Being the sports addict he was, the prospects of a competition exciting him.

-Oh, yes! –(Y/N) exclaimed. – We are going to race from the top of the hill until that tree. – She motioned a tree very far down. – We are doing this in pairs, but instead of everyone going down at the same time, we put two teams against each other, like matches at a tourney, until only one remains. That way the results are more precise.

-We can start so you guys can get the hang of it. - (Y/N)’s brother suggested. – A demonstration so you guys can see the course.

-Yeah, that’s a good idea. – (Y/N) smiled, relieved her brother seemed to warm up to the other family. Or perhaps he just wanted to scare them of with his aggressive sliding skills. The second option was more likely.

-I’m paring with my sister. – (Y/N)’s older brother reached for his little sister, making (Y/N) frown. They normally competed together, being the undefeated winners for the past years. – No offense sis.

-If you’re not going with (Y/N), who is?! – One of the twins spoke up.

-Well, that’s the sole reason she invited the pretty boy over, isn’t it? – Her brother grinned, pointing at Aegon. – Because no one was going to slide with her this year.

-Why?! – Aemond asked, intrigued.

-She got overly excited with the prospects of winning last year and ended up pushing our brother of the hill and he broke his arm. – (Y/N)’s sister said, spilling the entire gossip without any consideration for her sister’s reputation. – He had to use a plaster cast throughout the entirety of the holidays and the pictures looked horrendous.

(Y/N) was burning red.

-It was a one-time thing. – She said, eyeing her sister. – And it was an accident!

-Right. – her sister smiled. – Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better. Everyone has different coping mechanisms; we won’t judge you. – She said while entering her sled.

The twins cracking a laugh.

She turned to look at Aegon.

-I promise you, I won’t break your arm. – she said. Eyes as big as saucers. Her hands tight together.

-Yeah, don’t make promises you can’t keep. -Her sister started talking once more.

(Y/N) gave her a look.

-That’s our cue. – Her older brother said, and they started sliding down, all by themselves.

While everyone watched, Aegon came closer to (Y/N).

-Well… That was reassuring. – he said, smiling an awkward smile, like he didn’t know if he should find the entire situation funny or if he should be concerned.

-They are exaggerating. – The girl said.

-So, you did not push your brother off the hill? – Aegon questioned, being met by silence. -And his arm did not break?

Silence again. The girl’s cheeks red once more.

-I seem to fail to see where this exaggeration is! – he said in a mocking tone.

- It was an accident. – The girl said exasperated.

-Okay, okay. – he said taking a step back, joking at the girl’s reaction.

-Hey, you two! – one of the twins screamed. – Enough with the small talk. We are up next.

While (Y/N) positioned her sled, she decided to reassure Aegon once more.

-Aegon, I promise, you have nothing to worry about.

-If someone has nothing to worry about it’s us. – the other twin said, already seated at the sled. – Uncle said you won a couple of pounds in college this year, so I’m guessing you’re going for snail-like speed style.

The boys started laughing, and (Y/N)’s eyes got bloodshot. She was mad beyond measure.

-That’s it. Aegon, get ready to push and jump.

-What?! – he said.

-Push! – She screamed. – We are NOT losing this. – she continued to scream while she started descending the hill and Aegon did his best to catch up.

-With that speed you are getting to the tree by next Christmas! – the twins said it together, having a laugh.

-Shut up you brats! – She screamed once more.

Aegon was impressed that they were able to keep a “conversation” at that speed. They were obviously very good at that sliding thing.

-Aegon. When I say go, incline your body to the front, that way we go faster.

-Faster?! – his eyes almost popping out of his skull.

-Go!

The sled almost leaving the ground.

-Eat that, suckers! – she started laughing.

The girl so focused on her rivals she forgot to look when they were heading.

-Look ahead! – she heard her brother scream.

-Oh no! – The people on top of the hill started to scream.

(Y/N) finally looked ahead.

-Aegon… - she started. – Hold on tight, we are about to crash!

-What?! – was all the boy had time to say before they were thrown of the sled.

There was silence. All that could be seen were a few flashes of limbs, the rest of their bodies deep in the fluffy snow.

(Y/N) was the first to peek her head, she looked side to side, looking for Aegon. Her snow-covered hair and big eyes making her look like a cartoon character.

-Are you dead?! – She asked the older boy.

-No… - he grunted, still trying to get his upper body out of the snow.

-Are your arms broken?! – she asked once more.

-I don’t think so… - he said, unsure.

-Good, because we’re still in the competition. Get up. – she said with a smile. – We need to go up the hill.

Aegon gulped.

-How many more times are we going to do this?! -he asked, voice quivering.

-Until we are eliminated, big guy. -she could see his hesitation. – But look at the bright side! We just got ourselves rid of the twins. – she pointed at the two boys sulking in the corner.

When they saw Aegon staring they gave him the middle finger.

So, he started to climb up the hill.

By the end of the “competition”, Aegon had seen his life flash before his eyes at least a dozen times. He was dizzy with the amount of adrenaline.

Jace and Luke were the winners, which made (Y/N)’s entire family whine about their “beginner’s luck”.

The twins were about to suggest a rematch when (Y/N)’s little sister sneezed.

-Oh. Here’s the sign we spent to much time out in the cold. – The girl said, snuggling her small sister.

-Well… - her older brother said, taking in the leading position. – It is lunch time anyways. So…

-I want waffles! – the little girl screamed.

-And I want fries. – one of the twins said.

-Can we have fried chicken? – little Daeron asked.

-Yes! Waffles and fried chicken! – the little girl quickly agreed.

-I was thinking this year we can do something a little different… - the man said. – Eat something healthy, something that can actually be considered a proper meal.

(Y/N) started booing and all her family members, including her brother’s fiancée followed her lead. Soon, the Targaryens decided to join in too. All of them but Aemond.

-Fine! FINE! We’ll do as you want. – The older man started to descend the hill with a pout on his face. – Be responsible, they said. It will be rewarding, they said… - he mumbled loud enough to make the others giggle.

(Y/N), feeling like she had to explain herself, started walking closer to Aegon.

-We always let the kids choose what we are going to eat after a sliding day. It has been like this ever since I was a child.

-It’s nice. -Aegon said. When he was a kid, he was also free to eat whatever he would have liked. But it was normally dinner, after a long day of studying, his afternoons filled with extracurricular activities. His driver, Criston, being the one to take him to Pizza Hut or whatever.

He couldn’t think of one single memory where his mother of father would have taken him and his siblings to a restaurant after a day of fun. Specially on Christmas time, when the Company was more demanding than ever.

After a short walk they were in front of the “Lord Frey’s Diner”.

-It’s presumptuous to call yourself “Lord”, being a Frey above all else, but the old man does make very good chicken. – (Y/N)’s older brother said while they took a seat.

-Damned be him and his chicken empire. – (Y/N)’s little sister made a cheer motion and received a few “cheers to that” and other sounds.

The Targaryens laughed at what seemed like a well-rehearsed attempt of an insult.

Soon the table was a mess. Everyone trying to squeeze their own orders.

After such confusion they ended up ordering more food then needed, which got the children very happy.

There was lots of laughter while the meal occurred. (Y/N) happy the families seemed to bond. Jace and the twins seemed as thick as thieves already, and her own little sister was entranced by Baela’s beauty and Rhaena’s calming voice.

The ruckus only got worse when (Y/N)’s cousins decided to start throwing food at each other’s open mouth, like an improvised game of basketball.

(Y/N)’s little sister turned her attention to Aemond, making silly faces at him. Annoying him to no end.

-What are you doing?! – The older sister asked. When she got no response, she quickly realized what this was about. -Stop it! He’s not a baby! You can’t get him to laugh at silly faces!

-It works with our neighbor! – the little girl pouts.

-That’s because he is two!

That made all Aemond’s siblings laugh, getting him properly red.

But soon it was all forgotten when the deserts started to arrive. Enough ice cream to feed an army.

After a few hours the clan was finally ready to leave. All the children not wanting to stand up, feeling too full to even move. They started saying goodbyes, the Targaryens thanking the invitation.

(Y/N) got closer to Aegon.

-I was thinking we could exchange phone numbers. – she smiled, with pink-tinted cheeks.

-Sure, princess. – Aegon said, finding it curious they hadn’t done it before.

-And I was also thinking… You could… maybe… come by my house tomorrow. – her voice getting lower and lower, while the red on her face got brighter and brighter.

The boy smiled at that, realizing that this time the invitation didn’t extend to his other family members.

-Text me the address and the time, princess. – He said, just as the families started going in opposite directions.

They both smiling to themselves. Smiles bright enough to blind.

After a while, when the Targaryens were already far away, Luke piped up:

-Do you think they will invite us next year?!

-I hope so. – Jace said. – It was the most fun I’ve had in a while.

-It was delightful. – Helena said, smiling, not able to shake the thought of that being the first nice family meal she ever attended, with no drunk fights and venomous remarks.

-It wasn’t that bad, I suppose. -Aemond said under his breath, not wanting to be heard.

But Aegon did hear.

And his heart started beating faster.

He was not sure why. But a warm content felling took over, nonetheless.

And then, his phone buzzed.

“Had fun today”, the text said.

That was indeed a great day.

_____________

Taglist:

@bwormie @fan-goddess

#aegon targaryen x reader #aegon x you #house of the dragon #aegon imagine #aegon targaryen #christmas fanfiction #house of the dragon x reader #modern au #fanfic #hotd x reader #hotd imagine #aegon x reader #house of the dragon fanfiction #house of the dragon imagine #imagine #x fem!reader #the christmas sugar cookie war

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bumblebree1903 · 8 months ago

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Started re-reading The Savior’s Champion (by Jenna Moreci) today and WOW. I haven’t read this since I was like a sophomore in high school (which was like 5-6 years ago) and I knew it was good, but I forgot how good.

There’s so many little drops of foreshadowing and some excellent setup to distract from the truth. Not to mention the opening! WOW!

Today I got through the prologue and the first two chapters so I’m going to give my thoughts on it because it’s fun.

Prologue

Run.

Jenna does such an amazing job setting the tone. I feel the POV character’s panic. There’s a desperation to everything happening. And when it’s finally fulfilled it’s so slow and sad. You wanted Her to succeed. And She didn’t. After that there’s this just startling feeling, trying to piece together what happened and why against this bloody opening (in more ways than one.) It really sets the tone for the entire book.

Chapter One

I love Tobias, and this is where I think you really get to feel Jenna’s skill in delivering information to the reader naturally. You can so clearly picture the setting, the environment, how the buildings look, and its all subtle. There isn’t pages upon pages of details, it’s enough to tell you what things look like and lets you fill in around it. The world building is also natural and not shoved in unnaturally. Blessed Day and the build up to learning about The Savior and what Her deal is feels well executed. I don’t feel like I’m being info-dumped to. It’s well delivered context to flesh out everything the reader can infer up to that point.

You’re also introduced to Tobias’ family and their dynamic…and their struggle. They’re sweet and loving but there’s a tension there. A depression and struggle and hardship from being poor and Naomi’s disability. And underneath it all is the longing for his old life as an artist. This is where we’re introduced to The Plot.

The Savior’s Tournament. The tournament to win the hand of the newly 20-year-old Savior.

His mother discourages him, his sister doesn’t believe he’ll do it, even Tobias says he won’t and insists it’s stupid. And then his best friend, Milo, enters the scene. He takes Tobias away and starts talking about the tournament how they should enter and even if Tobias doesn’t. Tobias continues to insist it’s stupid until Milo brings up his weakness*. His family, wanting to provide for them, how the tournament would let him. And Tobias refuses to think about it, won’t let himself. Because he knows it’s his weakness too, that his want to help his family and to keep the comfortable and healthy could sway him.

When he returns home the temptation is doubled by his return home. Where his finds his sister struggling and in need of care and medicine. And he can do nothing. He goes to bed that night, his sister’s pain temporarily eased, reminding himself he will not enter the tournament.

Chapter Two

We’re back to Tobias’ character and motivation be doubled as he can’t get his sister’s medicine to easy her pain. This is due to the chance to enter the tournament and Milo convinces Tobias to wait with him. So they do and Milo brings Tobias’ want to care for his family. Milo’s dropped off and Tobias is told the chance to enter is open until sunset.

When he returns home his sister is suffering again. And he can do nothing. He repeats over and over and over that he won’t enter. And then he’s out the door.

He makes it just in time and the following scene is a little funny while keeping a sense of tension. He ensures his family will immediately receive money for his entry and waits. And he’s selected.

I absolutely adore this book, and now that I’m older and can better understand it I’m looking forward to continuing to read it. I’ll probably continue to post about it as I read the book, it’s a really good read. And hopefully my mild obsession will encourage more people to read it!!! It’s an excellent book.

#the savior’s champion #the saviors champion #the savior’s series #the saviors series #books #book #books and reading #reading #indie books #fantasy #dark fantasy #fantasy books #dark fantasy books #romantasy #romantasy books #romance #romance books #book thoughts

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iviarellereads · 11 months ago

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System Collapse, Chapter 10

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index and a primer on The Murderbot Diaries, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

In which hey look it wasn't just 2.0 who could do it right.

Tarik catches up with them nearby, and they head down toward the tunnel. Murderbot would ignore the hole in its enviro suit, but Iris has a patch kit, and it's worth letting her use it to see the look on Leonide's face to see someone being nice to a SecUnit. In the de-powered section, they stand a good chance of not being found.

On the way, Iris asks Leonide if this is a rebellion just against her personally, or if this is against all upper management. Leonide admits she doesn't know. Art-drone comments on how perceptive she is, and she tells it to fuck off again. Tarik asks if this schism reached upper management, and reminds her she owes them at least that much. Grudgingly, she admits it's a schism. She didn't realize some of her peers were so serious about meeting their "operational goals." Ratthi asks if that's a euphemism for the slave labour, and Leonide ignores him.

Cutting back to the no-Leonide feed, the team strategizes, wondering if Art-prime could be under attack even now, and if B-E could have intercepted the pathfinders with their reports. Privately, MB and Art-drone agree that their humans are the highest priority, even if the humans hold the colonists' safety higher still.

They reach the little hangar with the broken overhead hatch, and MB wishes they could escape through that again, but landing the shuttle so close to the settlement risks being noticed by B-E. So, back through the tunnel it must be.

MB signs off from AC2 with a request to end the session. AC2 acknowledges the session end, and tells MB to be safe.

I can’t deal with that right now.(1)

As they start exiting, the humans discuss and discard ideas of a landing at the broken hatch area, under the weather conditions. MB backburners their conversation, and realizes the vehicle is gone. Then, ScoutDrone2 goes offline. MB has Tarik kill the one light, and the humans all make contact to stick together.

Somehow, MB knows this is another SecUnit, possibly two, from the new shuttle arrival. It's sure they have the same setup but it has no backdoor to hack through.

Art-drone says it'll be there in a few minutes to pick them up, but MB says it can't risk the shuttle. Art deliberately misunderstands and says the shuttle's purpose is picking up the team. MB has a "procedure module" but its suggestion to shelter in place is garbage, and it knows what it should do.

While Ratthi tries to find solutions in the shuttle's inventory, MB leads the humans nearer to the open gap. It tells them to start climbing for pickup.

Iris said, Right, let’s go. SecUnit, we’ll wait for you up top. I know they will, which is why I’m willing to die to get them up there.(2)

Two minutes out, Art-drone tells MB to "prioritize escape", because it can't take out both the other SecUnits. MB thinks Art is giving it too much credit to believe it could kill a single one in its current condition.(3)

As the humans start climbing, MB hears one of the enemy Units and jumps at it. While the enemy is in armour, MB has the advantage of knowing how to fight in a scuffle like this, and knowing where the weak points in the armour are.

Shortly after, MB gets a surprise: a camera feed view on the humans, as Drone3 is released from the shuttle. Unfortunately, it comes with a bonus surprise: another SecUnit is racing across the paving at them. It sends the feed on to Art-drone, tagged "acck".

An action sequence follows, during which the humans mostly make it to the surface, MB takes out HostileSecUnit1, and Art-drone annihilates HSU2 but takes some heavy damage itself. Then, MB notices a third SecUnit behind it, just standing there. Performance reliability drops to 68%, and MB catalogues everyone's status, before the SecUnit says MB has to go, the others are coming.

Art-drone confirms, this is one of the Units MB gave its package to, and must have disabled its governor module. It sounds a bit different from Three. MB invites it to come with them, but it wants to do what MB did at first, and keep doing its job.(4) It tells MB again to get going.

MB climbs and grabs Art-drone. There's not time to get it and all the humans back into the shuttle, so everyone but Ratthi ends up in a small hopper vehicle off the junk pile that somehow still runs, to meet Ratthi at the terraforming access landing. Art-drone keeps trying to make its goodbyes, but MB keeps telling it to shut up.

Leonide complains about being told to go up to the opening and then not getting on the shuttle, but Tarik says they're taking the tunnel with this vehicle. Leonide calls them all crazy and they "astound" her. Tarik says it's all her fault, then gets to the business of zooming them out that tunnel, to the ringing of weapons fire.

=====

(1) How many times have I missed that these asides are in the present tense, not the past? Were the others in this book? How much is Murderbot editorializing as it retells its story? (2) That trust is the ONLY reason MB wants to save them first, because it knows they'll have its back in turn. It's the most equipped to take a beating and survive it, and it would (and regularly does) try to do what it could for strangers, but the mutual trust of Its Humans, even when they're technically Art's humans, is strong. (3) I can't make this very quippy, but ha ha no you goof your friends have a better evaluation of you than you do because you have a depressive anxiety streak that's been bringing down your opinion of yourself and your capabilities for (checks) 7 books and some change. (4) MB must make a pretty powerful case for "being a quiet rogue element and helping to free the others from their oppressors in secret" in that info package. That, or the organic mix used as the base for SecUnits must impart inherent social orientation in the way of primates even unto defying the programming and learned purpose for existence. Or both. I like both.

#the murderbot diaries #murderbot diaries #system collapse #murderbot #secunit #ratthi #tarik (murderbot)#iris (murderbot)#supervisor leonide (murderbot)#art (murderbot)

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roseandgold137 · 2 years ago

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I’ll wait for the Title poll to be over before I post this to ao3, but here’s Chapter 1 of the Archeology Wives fic (it’s something over 2k, maybe 2500 or thereabouts)

content warnings: pregnancy (and symptoms related to pregnancy including nausea/vomiting), implied childbirth

the first couple chapters of this will be Janet x Jack, and they’re married in the chapter below, just an extra heads up

Chapter 1

————

Janet hadn’t really known how to feel when she found out she was pregnant.

She was excited, of course, delighted at the idea of having her own baby, but it all felt… too soon. She and Jack had only been married less than a year, and had only dated for little more than two years before then. Their relationship was defined by its reckless thrill-seeking, how they didn’t look twice before taking leaps, but for the first time since they met in that café on Sixth Street, Janet hesitated.

She was only twenty-two. Did she really want to have a child before she even finished college? If she kept the baby, she’d be starting next year’s semester with a newborn on her hip. What would Jack think?

Well, Janet knew what Jack would think. He’d be delighted and immediately start looking at nursery setups, figuring out how to build everything himself because “there’s no point paying for something we could do by ourselves”, and get so caught up in his whirlwind of emotion that he’d forget to actually consider what having a kid now would mean. It was one of the reasons Janet loved him, don’t get her wrong, but she couldn’t handle intense right now. She… she needed to sit down.

God, she was a mess right now.

She couldn’t not tell Jack. It was his baby too, and he had a right to know. And, if Janet was being honest with herself, she already knew she’d be keeping this baby. They’d figure out the rest as they went along - just like they always did.

With that, Janet pushed herself up and made her way to the sitting room.

Ever since the MedTech company Jack had invested in last year had taken off, they’d seen an abrupt increase in their monthly income. And while Janet certainly hadn’t been raised in financial instability, she hadn’t had so much disposable income to spare before. Jack wanted to use it to travel to various dig sites after they’d both graduated. Janet wondered how her being pregnant would affect those plans.

“Jack?” she called as she entered the room.

Jack looked over the edge of his newspaper, a joke on his lips, but something must have shown on Janet’s face because his expression quickly morphed into one of concern. “Janny?”

“Can we… talk for a second? Or. I’ll do the talking, please. I have some news.”

Wow, Janet, that doesn’t sound completely ominous and relationship-ending at all.

Janet sunk into the plush chair opposite her husband (because she was not saying this aloud for the first time standing up) and took a deep breath. “Jack… I’m pregnant.”

Honestly, Janet expected a more complicated reaction from Jack. Instead she watched him quickly cycle through worry, surprise, shock, delight and finally settle on excitement.

“Janet! That’s incredible! The way you said it, I thought you were going to elope with my cousin,” Jack said with a grin, newspaper discarded as he rounded the coffee table to kneel beside her.

Janet rolled her eyes. “I had a week-long crush on her when I was thirteen. It wasn’t that deep.”

Jack reached out a tentative hand, hovering above her stomach, before looking up at her. “May I?”

Janet smiled, flushing, and guided his hand down to touch. “There’s nothing to feel yet. I can’t be more than a couple of weeks in. Whoever is in there, they’re probably still smaller than a grape right now.”

“Whoever’s in there,” Jack repeated, almost like a prayer. Abruptly, he sat up straight, eyes alight with determination. “Well, we can’t just sit around and look pretty, Janny. The kid’s going to need a room - maybe the office over the kitchen, there’s lovely light in there-”

Janet smiled as Jack continued his spiel about where to set up the nursery. Yes, the next few months - hell, the next few years would be difficult, but with Jack by her side, Janet knew she could see this through.

——————

Jack never did turn that office into a new nursery. No, instead he bought an entirely new house - a new mansion - right beside the Wayne property. Janet should go over someday, when she was less pregnant. She used to be in the same class as Bruce, and they had shared many social circles.

Until then, she could coo over her new goddaughter.

“Oh Helena, isn’t she just absolutely precious,” Janet said, allowing the little baby to gnaw at her thumb. “She’s going to be a troublemaker just like you, I’m sure.”

Helena snorted. “I was hardly a troublemaker if we’re to compare me to you.”

“Oh, please,” Janet said. “Don’t you remember that time we almost set the PE hall on fire?”

“What about the time we did set the PE hall on fire?”

“It doesn’t really count. We put it out, like, immediately.”

“Tell that to Mr. Shore.”

Janet laughed, which made the little baby in her lap renew her efforts to reduce Janet’s thumb to a stub. Cassandra, Helena had said. Cassie for short.

“Cassandra,” Janet said aloud, just to hear the name again. “She’s absolutely beautiful, Hel.”

“Why, thank you,” Helena replied as she winked. “Grew her myself. How’s your own baby-growing coming along?”

Janet considered it for a moment. “I thought I’d be bigger by now, to be honest.”

Helena laughed, as Janet continued. “No, really! I mean, this kid’s supposed to be the size of what, a pear? I’m not saying I expected to be a balloon, but I thought I’d at least notice a bump.”

“Sometimes people don’t really show,” Helena mused. “Ever heard of those women who don’t realise they’re pregnant until the baby is literally halfway out?”

“Oh my god, Hel, stop-”

——————

Janet did show more in the next few months, though still not as much as either she nor Jack expected.

“All the babies on my side tended towards being pretty big,” Jack said one afternoon. “Wonder what’s taking this little one so long.”

“Some babies are just small, Jack,” Janet said fondly, hand resting on her little bump. “Besides, they’ll have plenty of time to get bigger once they’re not surrounded on all sides by my organs.”

Jack winced, apparently not appreciating the reminder that Janet’s organs were being pushed around to make room for the baby. Janet pounced on the opportunity.

“What? You don’t like to hear about my poor, crushed organs-” Janet draped herself onto Jack’s shoulder, “and all the pressure on my bladder-”

“Okay, okay, you’ve had your fun,” Jack said, laughing despite the green tinge to his skin. “That’s lovely, Janny. But please don’t tell me that again. You know I have a delicate stomach.”

“Can’t forget to look after your wuss of a stomach,” Janet agreed. “Not like there’s a baby crushing mine or anything.”

“Janet.”

—————

Janet had been joking, before, about the baby crushing her stomach. A month later and she wasn’t so sure if it was still a joke. Jack held her hair back as she retched into the toilet bowl.

“I’m going to kill you,” she rasped, before going right back to trying to dispel stomach contents that weren’t there.

“At least wait until I’ve met the baby,” Jack said, as if to lighten the mood. “I’d hate to be an absent dad before they even get here.”

“I’m going to throw you into the river,” Janet gasped upon her next resurfacing.

“Guess I should redouble my efforts in swim class.”

Janet gagged once more, then collapsed back into Jack’s embrace. For several minutes there was nothing but the sound of her breathing.

…. And the stench of her vomit.

Janet blindly raised a hand that would have never found its way to the handle, but as it turned out she didn’t need to, because Jack reached across and did it for her.

“Here, let me.”

Janet slumped further down. “I hate this part.”

“It’ll pass,” Jack reassured her, pulling her up into a slightly more natural sitting position. “Now, let’s get you to bed.”

—————

The nausea did not pass, but it did subside enough for Janet to play blocks with little Cassie. It had only been weeks since Janet had seen her in person last, but already she had an almost full head of wispy golden hair.

“Oh dear,” Janet said, when Cassie’s carefully constructed block tower collapsed. “Wanna try again?”

As it happened, Cassie did not want to try again, and promptly burst into tears.

“Oh dear,” Janet repeated, feeling slightly overwhelmed. Helena had stepped outside to take a call - she wasn’t going to be back to help anytime soon. “Hey, hey, shh, it’s okay. Here - look, Cassie, we can fix it, see?”

Janet tried to remember the order Cassie had put the blocks in - she had been very particular about it during her construction process - and gradually Cassie’s crying quieted down to sniffles. She babbled and reached for the block in Janet’s hand, which Janet handed over easily.

Cassie took the block, turning it around in her hands as though she was considering it. Then, rather abruptly, smashed it into the side of the block tower, sending colourful blocks in all directions. Cassie squeaked in delight, while Janet - well, Janet didn’t really understand what had just happened, but Cassie seemed happy enough, so it must be alright.

“Aren’t you a funny little thing,” Janet mused, as Cassie continued her reign of terror on the other blocks. “I wonder if my little one will be much like you.”

“Ba!” Cassie said, though whether it was in agreement or not was lost on Janet.

————

Janet would honestly rather be anywhere else in the world right now. She really should have declined Bruce’s invitation, but instead she was in Wayne Manor, sitting across from Bruce’s thirteen-year-old kid.

The food looked and smelled amazing, sure, but Janet was beginning to think that the baby inside her didn’t appreciate fancy dinners as much as she’d hoped.

Jack knew what the baby would look like when they were born - Janet wanted to keep it as a little surprise for herself after the labour. It would have been a surprise for Jack too if Janet hadn’t wanted to do some ultrasounds to make sure everything was okay. All that she knew so far was that the baby was “fucking teensy”, as Jack had jokingly described them.

Well, for someone so fucking teensy, they sure did pack a kick.

Janet tried not to wince as her discomfort levels skyrocketed. She only had to make ir through another half-hour of the dinner, after which it would be perfectly acceptable for her to skip dessert and scurry home so she could puke her guts out and wallow in self pity for the rest of the evening.

Unfortunately, the world hated her, and Janet couldn’t quite mask the sharp intake at the next burst of pain.

The burst of pain that definitely did not feel like a kick.

Janet really hoped this was one of those false alarms Helena had mentioned, because not only would her baby be two months early but she wasn’t quite sure how she would go about asking Bruce Wayne to drive her to the hospital so she could deliver her kid.

Dick - Bruce’s kid, though why he preferred to be called that was beyond Janet - made the choice for her.

“Are you okay?” he asked, with a sceptical raise of his eyebrow.

“Perfectly fine,” Janet responded, to little effect, because suddenly everyone’s attention was on her. Janet should just say she was experiencing some cramps - which was technically true, though she was beginning to wonder where the distinction was between a cramp and a contraction.

Dick didn’t seem to be swayed so easily. “Are you going to have your baby?”

Jack put his hand over hers. “Do you think we should call it a night?”

“I think we should call an ambulance,” Dick said matter-of-factly, and Janet knew that violence isn’t the answer, but god she wished it was.

“Dick,” Bruce said warningly, before directing his attention back to Janet. “Is everything alright?”

No. No, everything was not alright, in fact nothing was right at all, and Janet’s dress was ruined.

“I think I might take that ambulance,” she said faintly. “I’m sorry about your chair.”

Dick seemed confused by that, but the butler - Alfred, she remembered, was quick to tell her not to fuss over trivial things as he ushered her towards the foyer. Bruce followed, grabbing his car keys - because it was too far out to wait for the ambulance to get here, and they’d be much faster driving themselves.

Somewhere in the back of her mind Janet thought about their own car parked out front, but it was difficult to think of much when she was suddenly very aware of every slight movement her baby made.

Her baby, an entire two months too early, who had apparently decided that they’d had enough of being confined to a womb and were ready to face the world.

It was a nice thought, as Janet watched the Bristol scenery become Gotham suburbs, but realistically it just meant that her baby would have to be set up in an artificial incubator while they actually finished developing.

The thought made her feel slightly sick, but considering how she had already felt queasy all night, it didn’t really make much of a difference.

“Janet?”

Janet turned to face Jack, taking in his worried brows and his frown that he kept trying to soften, to no avail.

“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered - she promised. No matter how this played out, Janet would make it okay.

“What a way to reunite, huh J?” Bruce asked, in a poorly concealed attempt to lighten the mood. He used to make horrible jokes before baseball matches, too, before inevitably missing all of his swings.

“What a way indeed,” Janet repeated hollowly.

#janet drake #helena sandsmark #jack drake #tim drake #bruce wayne #dick grayson #alfred pennyworth #those three are only in the last scene #cassie sandsmark #archeology wives #wip #fic excerpt #janet drake x jack drake #janet x helena

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see-arcane · 2 years ago

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Lucy, Jonathan, Mina, and the Bastardization of Their Horror Story

I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. I thought it kind of went without saying among all us bitter bookworms when it came to the TV and movie treatments of Dracula and the characters/arcs therein. A lot is a given by now; a running joke. But goddamn if rereading today’s entry didn’t just tick me right off all over again. So here we go.

Lucy Westenra is best known by public osmosis as ‘Mina’s Hot Best Friend’ and/or the ‘Maneater/Heartbreaker,’ what with her small-scale Helen of Troy setup with the suitor trio and Dracula gunning for her first once he hits England. Most people know the Francis Ford Coppola version which not only distills a lot of her and similar damsels’ treatments in Dracula flicks, but also specifically includes…a lot.

Like this:

It happens for a whole blink, and is never mentioned again or returned to as any kind of meaningful romantic relationship beyond, ‘Lucy hot, Lucy gets around, Lucy makes out with everyone, lol.’ It also includes, and very much highlights, this:

TW: Sexual assault/implied rape/impaired consent

Yeah. That’s Dracula, halfway out of his wolf form. Doing that.

This is followed by her swooning away in bed, becoming more vampy (in both senses) and so forth. Is she still a victim? Yes. But the framework of it has been entirely distorted. She’s the Whore to Mina’s (Marriable! She’s the brainy brunette destined to be with Dracula!) Madonna.

“She was susceptible to Dracula’s seduction because she was already the hot/promiscuous one! It was practically a monsterfucker meet-cute, guys!” –Francis, probably

Then we turn to today’s entry. Hell, the past couple entries in which Dracula’s been zeroing in on Lucy. He abused her sleepwalking, yes, but ultimately resorts to visits, stalking, and—as with today—idly playing with his food by sitting in plain view, watching her watch him, knowing how her mind is struggling between the sleeping trance and the innate dread.

(I know those eyes. I know them. I know him. I fear him. Why?)

This girl, barely nineteen, has been made a target. She has a pliable medical condition being used against her, like pulling a puppet by its strings. She can’t not sleep. She can’t avoid his tugging at her. No more than she can hide from him now that he’s tracked her back to the home she’s sharing with Mina and her mother. And yet, for now, what does Dracula do?

He toys with her. Just a bat at the window. Just a little taste, dear. Back to bed now, I’ll see you tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. Because I can.

There’s no bodice ripping, no overt sexual assault, but the violation remains intact. Along with a far more palpable helplessness. Mina won’t be there to guard her forever or keep the room all shut up against Dracula’s visits. (No spoilers for future chapters, but suffice to say, the Count does not suffer being rebuffed very well or very long. Shit gets intense. Wait and see.)

We saw with the Demeter how Dracula behaves when it’s just a matter of gluttony with victims he has no interest in beyond casual cruelty. Kill, toss, kill, toss. It’s nothing to him.

Willing Lucy to open the window so he can drop the bat form, become himself, and get far more visceral in his playtime would also be nothing. But in Lucy’s case, as with Jonathan’s, when Dracula decides to take a true interest in a victim, he not only likes to savor the game, he prefers psychological torture. Especially with characters established as 24K sweethearts. (Sorry, Lucy. Sorry, Jonathan. Sorry, Mina.)

Right now? Lucy’s just barely at the start of her nightmare. And the most tactile the Count has been with her, period, is a couple nibbles. Everything else is down to the slowly shrinking noose of the situation she’s in. She doesn’t know that yet. Neither does Mina. Mild spoilers, there’s a period coming up where everyone will sigh with relief. They aren’t living in Whitby, after all. They’re on holiday. They’ll leave. Lucy will get better. All is well.

…Until Dracula gets moving too. Back to bloody business. And the volume gets cranked up past 11.

Now let’s swivel to the bizarre (if not unexpected) character flip of Jonathan and Mina’s situations. It’s been gone over a dozen times now just how screwed Jonathan Harker is in every adaptation. He’s either practically nonexistent or transformed beyond recognition into a walking snore. Explicitly ignoring the two months he spent as a captive with Dracula in one-on-one castle time. Canonically, this man spends the most time with Dracula in the entire book. His story could be its own book! Its own movie! And yes, Dracula gives some bullshit excuses about ‘learning how to speak like an Englishman,’ but the core of it was just…he wanted to.

He wanted to keep Mr. Harker in that big stone box with him, just to play mind games, savor that solicitor flavor, then pass him off to the Brides as a present before, presumably, forcing him to turn and join the undead girl gang. And while past directors have loved the idea of a trio of sexy voluptuous vampire babes pawing at a man and each other, that appears to be literally the only purpose Jonathan ever gets within a show/movie. Everything else gets scraped off.

They harvested his devotion to Mina and gave it to Dracula.

They harvested his fucked up Beauty and the Beast-style plush and predatory imprisonment—here, enjoy a cigar, some fine dining, a pretty room, lots of books, nonconsensual touching, being forced to lie to your loved ones, the cannibalization of two children, a woman eaten alive by wolves, knowing your own death date (Which won’t get you out of this castle! You’re here forever! We saved a coffin for you, buddy!), and all the Evil Monster Man Seeks Virtuous Damsel bells and whistles—and gave it to Mina.

Because if they kept to the book that’d look too Ell Gee Bee Tee. And not even in the hot unfulfilled lesbian way! Can’t have that. Nope, we’ll just hand all the creepy-amorous hospitality stuff to Mina.

And oh God. Mina. Poor, poor Mina.

The travesty of what gets done to her character in so many adaptations. She ranges from Classic Bland-Pretty Damsel to Miraculously Sensual-Spiritually Awakened Dracula-Wife (Not a sultry harem Bride, though! That’s for Lucy and the trio of sexy whats-her-faces in Transylvania. Who Dracula always seems to have no matter how romantic and suave he’s being. Can’t drop those standby chicks even for a reincarnation love story, eh, Francis?). We’ll see later how vital she is to the plot and tackling the problem of Dracula.

A problem she will be extremely vehement about destroying, considering the fact that this undead bastard is responsible for tormenting the two most important people in her life, in ways that are intended to terrify, convert, and low-key enslave the victims to a damned eternity. Once she’s clued in to all Dracula has done, our girl’s going to be livid and instrumental to helping the Vampire Hunter Gang in taking him down. But who needs that!?

Just have her go ‘Eek!’ or swoon into Count Fuckula’s manly liberated embrace!

Which really does sum up all of these characters’ crappy deals in media.

Lucy Westenra? Having a nuanced and increasingly horrifying ordeal situated on having a supernatural stalker walking you around like a windup toy in your sleep and preying on you in a fashion meant to ultimately destroy your happiness and humanity so you can join his undead sexdoll collection?

Who needs that!? Make her a redheaded Lilith caricature who barely needs a nudge to give it up to her sexy wolfman-monster-master! She’s the side chick anyway, who cares? :)

Jonathan Harker? Being the character who spends the most time of anyone in close proximity with the Count, the only one to share multiple conversations with him, gets forced into the damsel-in-distress role while Dracula and his Brides make sexually-coded predatory moves on him, gets traumatized by the death and horror he witnessed in the castle he barely escaped, all saturated with the driving force behind his determination being his love for Mina from start to finish?

Who needs that!? Just turn him into a stuffy English scarecrow who gets felt up by the Brides and then we can forget about him. Get that homoerotic shit out of here, we don’t need to see that. Oh, but keep that ‘Loving Mina to the Point of Corruption’ stuff—we can save that for Dracula. :) :)

Mina Murray? One of the earliest examples of intelligent and capable women in all of literature, let alone gothic literature, taking an active role in pursuing Dracula and being exactly as passionately in love with Jonathan Harker as he is with her, said love for him and Lucy being what drives her to participate in a hunt for a monster who wields the threat of not just death, but an infinite horror of existence, a fiend she loathes as much as fears?

Who needs that!? Slap a corset on her, heave up those breasts, and let’s make us a fine Victorian final girl for the Count to woo with his sexy badass vampire charisma. :) :) :)

Fuck :) you, :) Francis. :) And every book-bastardizing director like you :) :) :)

If someone wanted to do a real, fresh and, (yes!) romantic take on Dracula, I think the key would sit with two things.

One: Leaning into the healthy unconventional romantic relationships as much as highlighting the unhealthy/predatory undertones Dracula and the Brides bring to the table. It is possible, even while staying period-accurate.

Lucy can still accept Art’s proposal. But maybe point out that he, out of all the suitors, has the best financial arrangement—and that she and all the suitors basically stealth-conferred with each other. She, Art, and Quincey (Sorry, Seward, you came on too strong, too fast, too weird. Please reapply next year with a new polycule resume, sir.) are a throuple in as close a way as they can manage with Arthur ‘Son of a Lord’ Holmwood basically planning to set up a lifestyle in which they can all still remain together.

Hell, the Suitor Squad should have their own hints and confirmations among each other. Lucy might just be the latest addition to their group, who knows? Play with healthy large-scale LGBT and poly romances! Pool’s open!

Lucy and Mina? Lucy and Mina. In their case, I picture a somewhat past-tense romance, riding in tandem with Mina and Jonathan’s relationship, but open to renewing once all is settled with Mina and Jonathan’s wedding. We’ll say Mina has an open invite, Jonathan too.

Let Jonathan and Mina have the Most Intense Bi4Bi Gothic Romance of All Time the book explicitly lays out for them in coming chapters. They are sweethearts. They have been in love since childhood. They would die and kill for each other. (Yes, that is foreshadowing. Brace yourself, first-time readers.)

Let Jonathan flex his asexual/biromantic horizons. We all read into the ‘thing’ with him and Dracula, and even the hypnosis of the Brides—zero interest in reciprocating/invitation on his part. But if upcoming chapters are any indication, he’ll be firing sparks off with Quincey. Mild spoiler, they have a mutual love of knives! Fun! (Bigger spoiler, Seward, that repressed little bug of a man, is going to start having Thoughts once Jonathan enters the scene. You’ll know when you read it.)

Yes, vampiric and general monster media is often used as a vehicle to explore (or, sadly, demonize/fetishize) the Other. Carmilla did it with lesbians, Dracula does it with—gasp!—a male monster preying on/damselifying another man, the sultry and powerful women being monsters, and with the ‘evils’ of polyamory (No, not just the Bride harem thing. There’s a bit about blood transfusions that takes a unique turn. Again, you’ll know when you read it. Ugh.).

A new adaptation would win a lot of points in depicting all the positive reflections of non-heteronormative relationships and the heart of the last lap of the book, which is a group of good and valiant people taking on a dangerous task for others, and, I cannot overstate this enough, Jonathan and Mina’s love story.*

*Which I’ve mentioned before, could have taken a very spicy and sinister turn in and of itself. If any darkfic-loving directors out there want to take a chance…well. You know what to do with that kukri blade.

Two: Break the story up into three acts!

1. Jonathan—The two months in Castle Dracula.

2. Lucy—The perils of being Dracula’s first ‘special interest’ victim in England.

3. Mina—Everything coming to a big, grisly, race-to-the-finish crescendo.

If you want to add extra salt to the wound, have a prelude and/or interspersed highlights of the fact that, according to the text and its implications, Mina, Jonathan, and Lucy have been friends since they were little kids. Yes, really.

Three friends who have known and loved each other all their lives, all on the verge of their respective happily ever afters, attacked and tormented one after the other by the same immortal sadist. That’s a horror story.

Like it’s supposed to be, FRANCIS.

tl;dr: I respect a good monsterfucker narrative, but Dracula is absolutely NOT THAT STORY. It is horror, and it deserves to be portrayed as such. There’s a whole other essay in how absolutely unrecognizable Dracula himself is in so many media depictions, turning him from a formidable and horrifying entity into ‘Heehee Hoohoo Sultry Vampire Man, give me your love bite~~~.’ They pulled his fangs out and made him into a Ken doll. But that’s a ramble for another time.

#Francis meet me in the pit #lucy westenra #mina murray #mina harker #jonathan harker #dracula #dracula daily #adaptation #bastardization #francis ford coppola #(he is not the only director to do his shit but his is the most well-known/damning/influencing example)#rant rant ramble ramble #dracula spoilers

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cowboycakes · 4 years ago

Text

Loyalty

Chapter One: Memories

Pairing: Levi Ackerman x fem!Reader

Synopsis: You are a Marleyan warrior who holds the Jaw Titan, tasked with infiltrating Paradis and destroying it. But what happens when love causes you to betray your mission?

Themes: NSFW, 18+, action, betrayal, multi-chapter series.

Warnings: Female bodied reader, explicit sex (penetration/riding, gentle and fluffy, Levi is a virgin), violence/severe injury and blood/battle scenes, threats, mentions of death. Profanity. Spoilers seasons 1-4.

Word count: 2.7k (recently edited to make it flow a little better!)

Note: This story contains spoilers for all seasons of aot (not the manga). It is canon divergent (reader has the jaw titan rather than Porco and reader is on the mission with Reiner and Bertholdt.) Some scenes differ/are more rushed than the scenes they line up with in the actual show. This first chapter is set in season 3.

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The most important lesson you'd learned on this journey was that you couldn’t help who you fell in love with. Love would strike you like a viper by surprise, sinking its fangs deep inside of you and injecting you with lethal poison. Your poor soul was so torn.

The viper in question manifested itself as someone quite inconvenient. A raven haired man - the strongest, most cunning, most selfless man you’d ever observed. And all the while, he was still an island devil.

You were supposed to strike back at the viper, sinking your much larger set of jaws into his heart. Your mission - and specifically your mission - was to end him and his kind. The remaining Ackermans were dangerous. They were a threat to your and your comrades’ titan powers. The goal was to get close to him, to find his weaknesses and strengths. To know his ins and outs like the back of your hand. And then you’d have the advantage. Then you would kill him.

That plan had obviously backfired.

You stood on top of the wall now, alongside Reiner and Bertholdt after they’d just exposed the entire mission to Eren and the others. You could feel the static in the air from a few yards away. They were about to transform.

That wasn’t the problem, though. The problem was that the duo was looking right at you, waiting for you to slash your hand and join in. To rush to their side and eat Eren while you had the chance. Then you could all go home and be celebrated as heroes.

Instead, you were staring back at them - a big, sweaty, teary-eyed, nervous mess.

It was time to betray your homeland.

“I’m sorry Reiner, Bertholdt…” you sob, pulling your hand to your mouth, “but my loyalties lie elsewhere, now.” You rip your teeth through your hand.

Three bolts of lightning shake the wall simultaneously. You emerge in your strongest form - the jaw titan. Your titan had a hardened face like a skeleton with an elongated jaw that stuck out like a wolf. Sharp ridges lined your mouth like fangs, and bright red orbs glowed through your eye sockets. A mane with a color that mimicked your hair grew down from your neck.

You were terrifying. Which is why you needed to get the hell away from these scouts before they decided you needed to die.

You had no interest in defeating Reiner and Bertholdt, that was Eren’s problem now. You were more concerned about the captain on the other side of the wall. He could certainly handle himself, but Zeke had quite the throwing arm. Things could go south very quickly.

You launch yourself down the wall, using your giant talons to slow your fall. You scan the field as you descend, trying to find any sign of Levi.

A voice booms your name to the left of you as you reach the ground.

It’s Pieck in her titan form.

Pieck was like a sister to you. It’s been so long since you’d seen her. You feel a tinge of regret now. Pieck was never going to see you the same again.

You narrow your red eyes at her and charge with full force. Your jaws snap at her heels as she whips around and runs full speed across the field. You finally see who she was running to - Levi and Zeke. Zeke was cut out of his titan form and being held by the hair in Levi's hand.

You pick up your pace, grazing Pieck's legs with your sharp teeth. She stumbles when the two of you go over an indent in the ground, only a few yards from your destination. Her mishap allows you to sink your teeth into her legs. She turns around to bite your neck in response, crushing your weakest spot. You jolt your head, flinging her away from you.

She gets up fast after hitting the ground, continuing at full speed toward Zeke and Levi. You are quick to go after her again, but slow down once you see Levi drop Zeke and bolt out of Pieck's way.

Did he really just give up Zeke that easily?

Suddenly, you feel someone cutting through your titan's nape.

Your vision goes dark.

Out of the darkness, you’re thrown into an old memory. Ah yes, you remember now. All of it is so vivid, right in front of you again.

You’d sneak away to the Captain's office at night frequently. You’d tell yourself these visits were for the mission, to aid you in knowing your victim a little better. His weaknesses could certainly reveal themselves in the comfort of his study. But they certainly weren't for your mission anymore. You’d started to simply crave his company.

You’re walking down the dim halls when you hear two sets of footsteps approaching, quite rapidly. You’re met with two giant bodies slamming into you from behind, grabbing your arms to keep you from running.

“You know, Y/N, I’m getting worried about these visits of yours,” Reiner says, tightening his grip on you. You yelp. “There’s only so much you could be talking about in there with him. There’s only so much shit you could be making up about yourself. He’s going to catch on.”

“He isn’t!” you struggle, “And I’m more clever than these sluggish devil bastards! I’m getting all the information I need!”

“Guys, keep it down!” Bertholdt whispers, frantically looking around to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

Reiner let’s go of you as you topple to the ground in front of him, your hands and knees landing on the cold brick floors below.

“Kill him faster,” Reiner whispers. The two of them make their ways back to their rooms in silence.

You finally stand up when you can’t hear their footsteps anymore, dusting your knees off and collecting your nerves.

You were the oldest titan shifter on the mission from Marley, quite a bit older than Reiner and Bertholdt. You were supposed to be bossing these little shits, not the other way around. But it seemed they were always calling the shots. You deserved to carry out your particular mission however you pleased.

Levi's door is cracked open a bit further down the hall, allowing some faint light to spill into the hall. And inside, there he was as usual, sitting at his desk with a tea and reading some boring literature that you could never understand.

“Long day?” he questions without looking up from his book.

“Yeah,” you sigh, plopping your body down onto a leather sofa near his desk. You lean back into it, reaching your arms up to stretch out. “Thanks for always letting me join you in here. It helps me de-stress.”

You had made a routine of coming in here after a fateful night in the dining hall, after you and Levi realized you could click really well in conversation. You two had shared your entire life stories with each other by now - yours obviously contorted to fit a reality that didn't consist of you being raised in Liberio. You'd grown very close to him, way closer than you had with anyone else in the Scouts. Even though he'd never met the real you, you could relate to him - his struggles and his past especially. His cynical personality had a strange and almost addicting way of brightening your day, and you'd always make sure to tease him for it. Not to mention how handsome he was. He'd catch you stealing glances at him sometimes, but you had a feeling he secretly liked the attention.

If you didn't know better, you'd think you were falling for him.

Your favorite stories of Levi's were of the Underground. It was such a peculiar concept to you, even though it faintly reminded you of life in Liberio. You realized that the people living in the Underground were lucky, in a way. They were oblivious to the world above, secluded from wars and titans. If only every other circumstance of theirs wasn't so unfortunate.

You smile at him as he finally looks up from his book.

“Your tea’s over there,” he says as his eyes dart to the coffee table.

You quickly grab the tea and move it to your mouth.

It was way too hot.

You feel titan steam shoot up from your lips. It had really burned you that badly. You slap a hand over your mouth before the steam could escape, the sound echoing off Levi’s office walls.

“What’s the matter? Tea’s gone cold?” Levi questions, his voice dark. His eyes had been on you the whole time.

“Hmmph?” you say through your hand.

Levi gets up and advances across the room, stopping just in front of you. You’re still frozen on the couch.

“I said, what’s the matter?” His hand meets the one still clamped over your steaming lips.

“Is there something you need to hide under there?” Levi’s finger slips under one of yours, forcing it away from your face. Then another.

Oh shit.

This was a setup. He was actually on to you.

Shit! Regenerate! Faster!

Another finger is forced away from your face. You close your eyes tight, focusing all of your energy to your lips.

This may be it. Right here. Reiner and Bertholdt were going to kill you.

The final two fingers are pried away at once. You open your eyes to look up at him innocently, no steam in sight.

“Uh…” you stutter.

He sighs.

“Sorry. Just trying to keep tabs on who my enemies might be.”

“So you… burned my mouth? Dickhead,” you laugh. You needed to come off as clueless as you could.

Levi’s eyes delicately scan your dewey face. Your lips were still throbbing and swollen. You always wondered if that’s what had compelled him.

He leans down, kissing you softly. Your eyes were wide and your face was motionless for a moment. Then you returned it, cupping a hand sweetly around his jaw.

In a flash, you’re transported to another memory.

You're sitting down on a wooden bench on the outskirts of the combat training arena. You remember being so tired on this day.

You lean your head back and close your eyes, letting the sun soak into your sweat-covered skin. Eventually, a shadow blocks the light shining on you.

You open your eyes to see Levi.

“Want to spar?” he taunted.

“Hell no,” you pant, still limp on the bench.

“You sure? Might be fun to have your ass kicked three times in one day.”

You chuckle at him.

Levi sits down next to you, leaning forward to support his elbows on his knees. The two of you sit there quietly, your ears filled with the sound of summer insects and a cool breeze through the trees.

Your eyes eventually wander to Levi again. He looks upset all of the sudden.

“I’m sorry for kissing you,” he states.

You’re shocked he’s actually bringing it up. After the kiss broke, he just went to sit down at his desk. He acted like none of it had ever happened.

“No, don’t be. I kind of liked it,” you confess, leaning forward to be at his level.

“This can’t continue.”

You feel a tight sensation in your chest. You’re hurt.

“Tell me about it,” you sigh, putting your head in your hands and thinking back to your real duties for once. You were only making things more complicated for yourself.

Of course, it did continue. The two of you avoided each other for a couple of lonely weeks until you nearly ended up in a titan’s mouth on a mission. It had you gripped tightly in its hand, completely helpless to it in your human form. You were about to transform when Levi swooped in and sliced its nape.

He helped you to your feet once the titan hit the ground and scolded you for your carelessness. You just stared back at him once he was quiet again. And he stared back at you. For a bit too long.

That night, you ended up in his office again and performed a teary-eyed confession about your feelings for him. It was in those moments that you discovered you didn’t care about the mission anymore.

You’re thrown into another memory.

This one was so intimate. So special. You never wanted to forget it.

“I’ve never,” Levi pants underneath you, “done something like this before.”

You’re straddling his thighs, tracing circles into his abs with your fingers.

“That’s ok, I’ll guide you,” you whisper.

Candlelight glows off of both of your naked bodies in Levi’s dimly lit bedroom. A surprise make out session led to Levi being curious, and the both of you taking all your clothes off in a rush and throwing each other onto the bed in desperation.

You move your hand from his stomach to his erection. Levi lets in a nervous breath once you make contact.

“Hey, you’re gonna do great,” you say sweetly, “you still wanna do this, right?”

“Yes, I do. Just nervous I’m not gonna… do it right.”

It was ironic to see humanity’s strongest so nervous about what was between your legs.

You shush him quietly as you move your lips down to his tip, slowly taking his length into your mouth. You drag your lips up and down as he lets out tiny grunts and bucks his hips up slightly to meet you.

Once he’s warmed up to your touch, you scoot up over his legs until you’re almost straddling his length.

You look up at him to see his eyes wandering over your bare body, lingering in your more intimate spots.

“You’re really beautiful. I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you that,” Levi murmurs as he moves a hand up to glide over the side of your waist.

“You too,” you smile at him. “Are you ready?”

He nods.

You lift yourself up gently before easing him into you. The perfect sensation of him pressuring your walls made your breath hitch. You feel him let out a huff of air once he's fully inside.

You start to rock your hips up and down rhythmically as you lean forward to place your hands on his collarbones. He gently thrusts back to meet your hips. His mouth was parted, his face was flushed and sweaty. He grips the sheets in his hands as you continue riding him.

Everything felt so warm and wet. So gentle and passionate.

Both of you let out little whines as you speed up.

"How can I," he moans, "make you... finish."

You grab his hand from the sheets and move his finger to your clit, pleasuring yourself with it for a moment.

"Just like that," you whisper. "You're doing so good."

The two of you continue rutting against each other on the bed - two wet, tingly, whiney, pleasure-filled messes.

All of it felt so right. It was honest.

The memory gradually crumbles in front of you, plunging you back into the darkness.

It wasn’t the intimacy, the long talks, or the sex. It was none of that.

It was the fact that he was a brave and honest thing in your world full of lies. It made you fall for him.

Levi made you rethink your entire role in this war. What right did you have to come and destroy people’s lives? These people were innocent for all you knew. They were the victims. But they had spirit, guts, and passion that no one on Marley did. You related to them. You loved them.

So whose side did you really belong on?

And why were you being shown these memories?

And what was this bloodcurdling noise suddenly ringing in your ears?

It sounded like… your screams.

You finally enter reality again with a gasp, coughing up leftover fluid in your lungs from your titan form. You look down frantically at your body to see all of your limbs severed. Someone had cut you out of your titan form.

The culprit was crouched right in front of you.

Levi.

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Hi guys! I've been sitting on this fic for awhile, unsure if I wanted to post it or not - I sort of wasn't confident abt it. But I hope some of you like it! I will be coming out with another chapter soon. Also, if you left a request, I promise it will be up soon! Lots of love - Shep

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#levi x reader #levi ackerman x reader #levi x you #levi ackerman x you #levi ackerman smut #levi smut #aot x reader #aot smut #snk smut #levi imagine #levi ackerman fluff #levi fluff #levi aot #levi x y/n #snk levi #levi ackerman #aot fanfiction #levi fanfiction #attack on titan

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meltwonu · 4 years ago

Text

| 🍒 CH-CH-CHERRY BOMB! 🍒 | [CHAPTER 19]

pairing; dom!seungcheol x camgirl!reader

this chapter’s notes; camshow, powerbottom!seungcheol, brat!seungcheol, dom!reader, restraints(handcuffs), sex toys, dirty talk, degradation, dumbificiation, spitplay, yall the way i be using DDD like i’m guy fieri in this bitch ☠️ dkjfhdskh Also, merry christmas if you celebrate it!! Happy holidays!! Be safe, enjoy your day~💕 I’d say this is my gift to yall but I update every friday, I just so happen to be uploading on christmas LOL Although, Cherry Bomb has been a gift to write 🥺!! One more chapter after this, I can’t believe it... But also first chapter of DD next week 😳 Hehe~ as always, inbox roundup this weekend! Enjoy ch 19 and have a great weekend everyone!! ❤️🍒💕

chapters; 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - x

“Hyung… Are you… Okay?”

Seungcheol drops the set of skates in his hold; eye twitching when he turns to face both Seokmin and Jeongguk who stare back at him with a concerned gaze. “You haven’t moved from this spot in the last 15 minutes, Jeongguk was starting to get worried… And honestly, me too. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Or three.”

“I, uh, yeah, I’m good.” Seungcheol laughs it off, shaking his head and letting out a deep breath he didn’t realize he was holding in. “It’s just… Well, I don’t wanna spoil anything but I’m just nervous for tonight.” He bites his bottom lip, remembering when you’d posted the notice to your homepage that basically sealed in the plans you had for him and really, what he had in store for you too.

The two younger males share a look, eyebrows raised. “Whatever’s got you this nervous must be good ‘cause you literally just zoned out and turned into a mannequin for 15 minutes. It was weird!” Jeongguk laughs; half in nervousness for Seungcheol and half in amusement. “Me and Seokmin snapped a few pics too. For posterity.”

Seungcheol rolls his eyes before he picks up the pair of skates again, “Okay, okay, enough with the teasing. Get back to work before Namjoon-hyung sees us all over here!”

“We could say the same to you!”

“Interesting setup…” Seungcheol mutters, eyes glossing over the vibrator, pink fuzzy handcuffs, and cockring that are neatly lined up on the bed. “Should I be concerned that this looks a little too normal?”

You laugh under your breath as you readjust your bra strap one last time before easing onto the bed yourself; patting the spot next to you. “Nah, trust me, it’s not gonna be that crazy. Now c’mere, we only have 10 minutes ‘til we need to start and you’re just standing there fidgeting like we’re about to fuck for the first time ever.”

“Damn, we should’ve done a show with a corruption kink or something.”

“Hey, it’s never too late!”

artist8hao: this looks relatively normal considering the notice

kitty_junjun has donated $75

gc__koo: yea… and considering how i found hyung earlier

alphagyu97: ???

alphagyu97: wdym

gc__koo: mans was a statue

xcaliburDK: yea it was weird, it was like he was possessed

sleepy_wonu: wait u work with him too??

therealchan99: wait is that why u almost quit?

xcaliburDK: can we not talk about me right now thank u

universe_WZ has donated $75

angelhan has donated $100

artist8hao has donated $50

“Well! Aren’t you all a lively bunch tonight!” You giggle softly, wrapping an arm around one of Seungcheol’s as he tenses up under your touch. “Seungcheol’s so tense tonight! Can we get some words of encouragement for him before we start~”

gc__koo: ayyyy my man its gonna be ok

hoshi_tiger_xx: think of it this way, any of us would pay to be in your position rn

tangerine_kwan: l i t e r a l l y

chwenon: its not like ur getting pegged

chwenon: right

Seungcheol’s cheeks bloom a bright pink, wide eyes meeting yours as you laugh loudly. “Wait, is that what the vibrator is for ‘cause I--”

“No, no, no! Seungcheol’s not getting pegged tonight, okay?” Grinning, you ease off the bed and make your way towards the nightstand as Seungcheol watches you from behind.

You grab the item, smiling as you hide it from Seungcheol’s view for a little while longer.

“See, when we, really just I, decided to do this back to back camshow for the last time, I really wanted to try something new, y’know? But nothing too far out there ‘cause I didn’t wanna push our boundaries too much.” You move your hand, flashing the object in front of Seungcheol’s face as he raises an eyebrow.

“A gopro?”

Nodding, you show it to the camera, “Mmhmm~ The quality is gonna go down a bit but I think it’ll be okay! It’ll be worth it~” You set it down next to the array of toys, winking at the camera before settling in next to Seungcheol again.

You lean into his side, grabbing his arm and putting it on your inner thigh as you moan. “Thought that they’d like a new view of us, y’know? Instead of just the static view that we usually have. Now you can film me riding your cock and get a good view of it for the camera~” Seungcheol smirks as he drags his hand up your thigh; fingertips grazing against your panties as you mewl.

“So that’s the game you wanna play tonight, huh, baby? You wanna film each other up close and personal for everyone to see?”

He can feel his cock twitch in his sweats, already eager to see where this went.

“Well…” You bite the inside of your cheek, face hot as you pry his hand off of you. “Actually, I want you up by the headboard while I set up this gopro. Think you can shimmy up there, ‘Cheol?”

The male nods slowly, shuffling towards the headboard as you turn to the camera. “The stream’s probably gonna cut out for a sec while I set this up but please be patient with me, okay?” Winking, you quickly set up the gopro before cutting out the stream to fiddle with the settings and changing it so that the stream was coming from the gopro instead.

“Ah, good! It works!” You make sure everyone can see you from the smaller device before you’re rejoining Seungcheol on the bed; eyes twinkling with mischief as you hand the gopro to him before reaching for the toys you’d laid out.

chwenon: im rly curious about this

universe_WZ: i know, same

alphagyu97: fuck the angles we’re about to get with this for future shows tho

hoshi_tiger_xx: oh hell yeah

Seungcheol holds onto the gopro, making sure to film you as you hold the vibrator in your hand. “Let’s start with this first, huh?” You don’t waste a second before you’re turning the toy on and pressing it against his clothed cock.

“Oh, s-shit!” He almost loses his grip on the small camera when his body threatens to double over at the vibrations that quickly have shivers running up his spine. “Oh fuck, that’s---that’s so s-strong!” Seungcheol’s hips cant up, grinding against the vibrations when he realizes how good it actually feels.

“Strong? It’s only the lowest setting, baby. Is your cock that sensitive?” You smile; voice laced with a teasing lilt and the pieces start to fall for Seungcheol when you seem to spit his own words back at him.

“That’s h-how it’s gonna be, huh?” He grits out, jaw clenched when you raise the setting to the second highest. “F-fuck, you---”

“What? We’re playing like I wanna tonight, right, ‘Cheollie?” Licking your lips, you lean in close to the camera before your lust filled eyes meet his.

“And tonight, you’re just my dumb little fucktoy that I get to play with, aren’t you?”

Seungcheol tugs against the fuzzy pink handcuffs that keep him bound to the headboard; gritting his teeth when you turn off the toy for the third time.

“Ah, ah, ah, don’t move around too much, Seungcheol. Dumb little fucktoys should be good and stay still, right?”

“Right.” Muttering, he watches as you bring the camera closer to his cock again, filming the vibrator that you tap against the cock head; both covered in precum.

“Your cock is already so hard~ God you’re so fuckin’ easy~” You squirm a little from where you straddle his thighs; already wanting to sit on his cock but also knowing you still wanted to play with him a little longer while you had him underneath you.

angelhan: goddamn she’s so fucking hot when shes the dom???

therealchan99: the way i would pay her to choke me and spit in my mouth

alphagyu97: she could put me on a leash and i’d bark without question

You turn on the toy again, pressing it against his cock as he groans and thrusts his hips up. “Ah! We should use the last toy, before you end up cumming without my permission.” Seungcheol lets out a choked sob at the way you sound so cheery, eyes looking up towards the ceiling while you set the vibrator down in favor of the cockring.

Wrapping a hand around his cock, you work you hand up and down as you smear the precum down his shaft. “Hmm~ Bet you’d cum right now if I just sucked you off, huh?”

“Dunno, why don’t you sink your pretty ‘lil mouth down on me and find out?” He snarkily replies.

You shoot him an angelic smile; one that makes him realize he really shouldn’t have said anything when you hurriedly ease the cockring down until it sits at the base of his cock. Grabbing the vibrator again, you turn it onto its highest setting before bringing it back to his cock and holding it parallel to his shaft. “You’re so mouthy~ You should really be careful with that~”

Seungcheol lets out a sharp, shaky breath; eyes wider than saucers when he feels his abdomen tightening and the pleasure rapidly building up in his body. “W-wait, but---but, ah, h-hold on, it--it feels like I’m g-gonna cum!” He tugs against his restraints as his entire body squirms and thrashes against the bed at the sensations that flood his body.

“Ah, you really are so fuckin’ easy for me, Seungcheol~”

A weird feeling washes over Seungcheol when he feels his cock twitching; mouth open in stuttered breaths as his eyebrows furrow. It felt like an orgasm, but at this point, he can’t even tell. “Wh--what?” He lets out a drawn out groan, throwing his head back against the pillows just as you shut the toy off and toss it to the side.

“I think you just experienced your first dry orgasm, huh? Not so fun being on the other side, is it? Being played with~” You laugh teasingly, readjusting yourself until you’re grinding down onto his cock. instead. “Mmh, I’m gonna use your cock and I’m gonna make myself cum and you can’t do anything about it~ Just my own personal fucktoy watching me get off~”

You take the gopro and set it down right on Seungcheol’s chest, “Don’t move, or else.” He nods once shakily, watching as you lift yourself up and position his cock right at your soaking entrance.

The two of you share a moan once you finally start to sink down onto his cock but Seungcheol knows he won’t actually be able to cum anytime soon.

chwenon: they rly said VIEWS on this one

gc__koo: honestly, i aint even tryna get off i just like watching knowing hyung is lowkey suffering

gc__koo has donated $100

gc__koo: its like a reward

kitty_junjun: he’ll be lucky if he even gets to cum again lbr

sleepy_wonu: oh how the tables have turned huh?

sleepy_wonu has donated $100

tangerine_kwan: wait but…

tangerine_kwan: if today was her idea and tomorrow is his…

chwenon: uh oh

artist8hao: oh i didnt even think about that

artist8hao has donated $100

artist8hao: for the aftercare funds

kitty_junjun: dont be too hard on her!!

kitty_junjun: also breakfast on me when ur not too tired

You start bouncing in his lap, loud moans on your lips when his cock curves perfectly into your g-spot.

“Oh, fuh--fuck, your cock is so g-good! Fuckin’ hits me so, hah, d-deep!”

Seungcheol can’t do anything but grit his teeth and let you alternate between bouncing on his lap and swiveling your hips atop his own; jaw clenched tight. “Y-yeah? Your so-called sex toy fucks you g-good? I don’t even have to, ah, do anything, all I have to do is lay here and you’d cum, huh?” He smirks up at you, convincing himself he’s one-upped you when you pout and halt your movements.

He lets out a soft groan when you clench around him and you’re quick to grab the gopro still sitting on his chest before turning the camera towards him.

“Such a bold mouth you’ve got. But don’t forget, you’re the one handcuffed to the bed and you’ve got a cockring on, baby~ I can give you more dry orgasms if you’d like?” You lick your lips, “Be a good little fucktoy and open your mouth for me.”

Seungcheol narrows his eyes before obeying, lips parting hesitantly. “Now, stick your tongue out.” You turn the camera and hold it from the side; filming yourself as you let a glob of spit fall from your lips, directly onto Seungcheol’s waiting tongue.

A shiver runs up his spine when he draws his tongue back in to swallow the saliva, hazy eyes staring back up at you when he parts his lips to show you that he’s swallowed it all down.

“See? You can be so obedient. You just choose to be a brat.”

“Where’s the fun if I make it easy for you? And it’s cute watching you trying to dom me when we both know how much you like being under me.”

You resume your movements, swiveling your hips as you set the gopro back down onto his chest. “Ah, all the things I could do to you right now, ‘Cheol~ We should do this again so I can try some wax play on you… Or, hah, m-maybe even ice play? Since your body is so fuckin’ sensitive. Bet you’d be so fuckin’ cute cumming over and over and whining when the overstimulation starts to bite~”

It only takes a second for Seungcheol to mentally say ‘screw it’ before he uses all his strength to plant his feet down onto the bed and start thrusting up into you. Your body jerks on top of him, surprised noises spilling from your lips at the strength he exerts in his frustration.

“My body’s sensitive? You take one look at me and your panties are fuckin’ soaked.” Seungcheol scoffs, watching as you grab the gopro and set it to the side before it topples off of him. “I might be your dumb little fucktoy today but you’re mine too. My dumb ‘lil cocksleeve that only knows how to beg me for cock. Your pussy was made for me, baby. Don’t forget that.”

The pleasure builds inside your body as you meet his thrusts and for a second, you contemplate taking off the handcuffs and the cockring, but instead deciding to keep them on. Unless he begged.

“Fuck, S--Seungcheol, ‘m g-gonna cum~” You reach down, fingertips on your clit as you hurry to throw yourself over the edge of an orgasm. “That’s right, cum on my cock like the desperate ‘lil cock hungry girl you are.” He growls in frustration; wanting to cum but knowing he wouldn’t be able to unless you took the cockring off.

“Oh god, Seungcheol!”

Your walls flutter around his cock and he lets out a garbled moan at how good you feel when you cum; exhaling harshly at the frustration of not being able to cum with you. “That’s right, bet it feels good with my cock inside your tight ‘lil cunt, huh?”

He halts his movements just as you opt to grind down on him, fingertips still rubbing and pinching at your clit as you ride out your high. “Mmh, bet you wanna cum too, don’t you, ‘Cheol? Wanna, ngh, fill my p-pussy up with your cum like you always do~ But do you even deserve it? Or should I leave you here and let you cool down?”

alphagyu97: the energy we’ve created in the studio tonight

xcaliburDK: i know, holy shit

angelhan: i feel like i'm actually scared for this man im ngl

alphagyu97: if she lets u cum ur a lucky man

You let out a sultry moan; body filled with warmth as the last bits of your orgasm wash over you. “You’ve been so mouthy and bratty but I wanna feel you cum too, so I’ll be nice tonight~”

Smart move, he thinks.

Raising yourself off of his cock, you let out a whimper at the emptiness you feel; pussy clenching around emptiness as you settle back down onto his thighs that are slick with your wetness. “Mmh… On second thought… Why don’t you beg a little? Lemme hear how much you wanna cum~”

He feels his cock twitch and realizes you won’t make this any easier. “Fuck, okay, p-please.... Please take the cockring off so I can cum… I--I wanna cum inside your pretty ‘lil cunt, fuck, I don’t even care if you just jerk me off just---just please take it off! I’ll t-take it easy on you tomorrow, I s-swear!” Seungcheol almost accidentally spoils his ideas for his planned camshow and he quickly bites his bottom lip before he accidentally says too much.

“That was weak but it’s okay. Dumb fucktoys don’t need to think much, do they? Only good for being used like a toy~” You pout mockingly at him before you’re easing the cockring off of him and Seungcheol lets out a guttural moan when you immediately wrap a hand around his cock and start jerking him off.

“You weren’t very nice with your words tonight so you’ll cum with just my hand.”

“Fu--fuck, that’s fine, just let m-me cum, please!” You work your hand up and down his shaft, giggling when you already feel his cock throbbing in your hand when you run your hand from the base to the tip.

“Cum for me, Seungcheol~”

He lets out a small whine, eyes clamped shut when he finally cums and for the first time in his life, he feels himself momentarily black out with how hard his orgasm hits him. Ropes of cum hit his chest as you work him through it, alternating the tightness of your grip on his cock as he whines and moans in return.

“Ah, you’re cumming so much this time~ You’re making such a mess!” You tease.

Seungcheol can barely hear a word you say through the ringing in his ears once his orgasm starts to ebb away and he feels himself slump against the bed as he catches his breath.

His chest rises and falls in deep breaths and he feels you leaning over him to undo the handcuffs; tired sighs on his lips as he tries to focus on you through bleary eyes. He can feel his entire body twitching and he swears his arms have. gone numb from being handcuffed to the headboard. “You’re gonna get it tomorrow, I swear…” He mutters, no real threat to his tired words.

“Hey, you said you were gonna take it easy on me tomorrow!”

“Yeah, well...”

tangerine_kwan: yo im excited to see the sequel to this

gc__koo: i have some… ideas

gc__koo: things r falling into place

gc__koo: my brain is expanding

hoshi_tiger_xx: i feel like its gonna be intense lol

xcaliburDK: knowing hyung…

xcaliburDK has donated $100

xcaliburDK: if u call into work on monday i wont even question it

“Here, you need to drink this, ‘Cheol!”

The said male groans as he tugs a pillow into his arms, already on the brink of sleeping when you finally end your camshow. “But ‘m tired…” He whines. “Can’t we just go to bed and clean up in the morning? The cum on my chest is already dried, it won’t get on the sheets.” You roll your eyes in return, sitting next to him on the bed.

“Oh, so now you’re being a big baby? I’m just trying to get you to drink some water and we need to get you at least a little cleaned up for bed. You can’t go to bed like this, y’know. And anyway, we need to be in top condition for tomorrow show too. We gotta get cleaned up and eat a little something.” You laugh under your breath, shaking your head as he only whines harder.

“C’mon, I always do it for you, right?”

He nods only once before he’s sitting up tiredly; a shaky hand reaching for the glass of water you hold out to him. You immediately take notice of the slight redness around his wrists, pouting as you help him finish the glass before setting it down onto the nightstand.

“Your wrists got so red from the handcuffs, ‘Cheol… You should’ve said something if it hurt, I would’ve taken them off…”

Seungcheol grins at you, eyes unfocused with sleepiness. “Who said it hurt? I didn’t even feel that in comparison to that horrible dry orgasm you made me experience. God, it was like… Like when you have a dream but it feels real until you try to grab for something and realize you can’t?”

The two of you share a laugh as you help Seungcheol off of the bed so that the two of you could properly get cleaned up before he flopped back down onto the sheets.

“Yeah? Trust me, that wasn't even the worst I could’ve done! You’re lucky I took it easy for my first time!”

#cherrybomb!cheol #seungcheol smut #scoups smut #seventeen smut #svt smut #scoups scenarios #scoups imagines #seungcheol imagines #seungcheol scenarios #scoups fic #seungcheol fic #seventeen imagines #svt imagines #seventeen scenarios #svt scenarios #svt fic #seventeen fic #scoups #seungcheol

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taiblogcomics · 4 years ago

Text

I Can’t Pet Force You To Read This One, But...

Hey there, high school crushes. Well, it's finally here. Can you believe it? Yes, counting from the original Xanga site (which, yes, still counts. It's like our own Golden Age publication or apocryphia), this is our 10th anniversary of reviewing comics. That's fantastic. I'm excited, can't you tell? I can tell, since I'm writing this preamble a good two months before the actual anniverary~

So, last year we reviewed the absolute pile of dreck that is Heroes in Crisis. And while that was worth ripping into, I'd rather not spend the 10th anniversary hating on something. I'd like to do something actually meaningful to me. I've teased about this one for many years, probably for as long as I've been doing this blog, and I think it's time we stopped pussyfooting around and reviewed some Garfield. But not just any Garfield. It's finally time, my friends. This... is Garfield's Pet Force.

I dunno how many people will remember this one. Maybe you recall the direct-to-DVD movie adaptation from 2009, or at least advertising for it. I never saw it, but apparently it differs a bit. They also appeared a few times in those Garfield comics from back in the day. We even reviewed a couple (some were on the Xanga blog). But what we're looking at here are the original novellas published between 1997 and 1999. So yeah, these really are from my childhood. And since I've long espoused that Garfield was always funnier 20 years ago, this must be actual premium Garfield content, yeah? By golly, I hope so, because we got five whole books here today. So we should probably get into them~

Book 1: The Outrageous Origin

This is a classic sort of superhero cover. Standard team shot of poses, and that's fine for a first volume. In fact, that's great. Later editions of this would replace the lightning-filled gradient background with a pure white one, but I have this original version. We'll get to specifics about these characters in the meat of the story, but let's talk about the costumes for a bit. Very classic early-'90s sort of look, before the Dark Age kicked in. Reminds me a lot of Jim Lee's X-Men designs, actually. Making all your characters visually distinct is important in a team book. The heavy lean into secondary colours is unusual for heroic characters, but not unwelcome.

So we actually start with a cold open in the superhero universe. This is pretty much to introduce us to the characters as soon as possible, and thus I'll do the same for you here.

*Garzooka, team leader, super strong, has a razor-sharp claw, and can shoot radioactive hairballs from his mouth. That's... at least a unique power, I don't think anyone on the Justice League can do that~ *Odious, the dumb muscle with the accent on the "dumb". Possibly even stronger than Garzooka, and possessing a "super-stretchy stun tongue", an elastic tongue that can scramble the minds of whoever it adheres to. *Starlena, the team girl. She can fly, and she has a siren song that can put those who hear it into a hypnotic trance. Garzooka is the only one immune to its effects, for reasons that are never explained. *Abnermal, the kid-appeal character. He has ice powers, forcefields, and an ill-defined "pester power" that means he can annoy people on a greater scale than normal folks. It's pretty much only used for comic relief, but that could be a brilliant power in the right hands. *Compooky, the brains of the operation. Other than flight, his powers are limited to super intelligence, which means he's usually the exposition guy. There's probably a reason they left him out of the movie adaptation~

You got all that? Don't worry, we'll introduce you again later in the book. What actually happens in the intro chapter isn't really important, it's just setting up the universe. In fact, it's all taking place within Pet Force #99, a comic just enjoyed by Nermal. Yes, we quickly cut over to the main Garfield universe ("our universe", the narrator calls it), where Pet Force is just a comic book. The Garfield gang is all outside, enjoying a cookout prepared by Jon Arbuckle. Nermal is extremely enthused by his comic book, and brags about how he has all 98 previous issues sealed and polybagged, and this one will soon join them. Sorry, Nermal, this came out in 1997, the speculator boom already went bust~

Garfield dismisses comic books as stupid because you can't eat them or use them as a blanket, and declares that none of the stuff that happens in the comic could possibly happen in real life. Uh oh, irony! Because these things can happen, and do! It's a parallel universe, baby! This might be one of my earliest introductions to a "parallel worlds" concept. Much like Earths 1 and 2 in pre-Crisis DC, the events of the comic are essentially the real life adventures of their super-powered counterparts in another dimension. Most of the action in these stories will take place there~

So here's the setup: Vetvix (the parallel equivalent to Liz the veternarian) is an evil sorceress and scientist, who essentially wants to experiment on animals in peace, and possibly subjugate the universe while she's at it. You could argue that Liz is an odd choice for villain, since our universe's Liz isn't particularly evil. But then, our universe's Garfield isn't particularly heroic either. She operates out of a deadly space station called the Orbiting Clinic of Chaos, and at present she's waiting for the arrival of her henchman, Space Pie-Rat, who is a six-foot-tall anthropomorphic rat dressed in stereotypical pirate getup. Vetvix has just finished inventing a levitation ray, and she'd like Pie-Rat to go out and use it to steal all the food in the universe. Vetvix doesn't think small, is what I'm saying.

The counter to Vetvix is Emperor Jon, ruler of the planet Polyester. He's kind and benevolent, even if he's a little dippy and his fashion sense atrocious. Having gotten wind of Vetvix's latest plan, he contacts Pet Force in their ship, the Lightspeed Lasagna. Upon learning the problem, Pet Force gives chase to Pie-Rat. They eventually corner him on some desolate planet, landing and entering an abandoned factory. Unfortunately, they're not safe amongst the dangerous machinery, because this turns out to be a trap. Vetvix has been busy as hell, because she's also invented a metal that's impervious to their powers. And that's not all, because she's also basically invented the Phantom Zone, where she traps Pet Force forever. It specifically mentions it doesn’t kill them, because it wouldn't be kosher to murder the heroes in a Garfield book~

The Lightspeed Lasagna has both onboard cameras connected to the heroes' belts as well as automatic return protocols, so within two days, Emperor Jon knows exactly what's happened to Pet Force. He needs help, so he calls upon his most trusted and powerful advisor: Binky the Sorceror. Binky's just as loud and obnoxious as in the main universe, but he's also a powerful magician. He conjures up a spell for Emperor Jon that lets him pierce the veil between universes. It's basically Equestria Girls rules: parallel universes have similar characters between them. So to replace Pet Force, they need the nearest genetic equivalents from another universe. And that's the versions of Garfield, Odie, Arlene, Nermal, and Pooky that we know and love~

Back in the main universe, it's another day entirely. Another cookout is taking place, and Nermal has received his special anniversary issue of Pet Force #100. The cover's really special, dripping with '90s cover gimmicks like glow-in-the-dark and embossing. A rarely used one, though, was "portal to another universe". That was pretty expensive to print, so you won't find many comics like Nermal's. Maybe he had something there with the collecting after all. The cover glows, and while Jon is distracted by the grill, Garfield and Friends disappear~

They reappear in Emperor Jon's wood-paneled throne room, now transformed into Pet Force. Emperor Jon and Sorceror Binky try to explain the situation, but Garfield--now Garzooka--is disbelieving of the whole thing. In fact, even the idea that Jon can now hear him talk absolutely floors him. Since he's about to deliver the exposition for everyone, can we talk about Compooky for a minute? This spell has just granted sapience to Garfield's teddy bear. I don't expect deep philosophy from a children's novella, but the ramifications of this are really under-explored. Like, never mind the whole idea of a teddy bear having the same genetic makeup as an alternate universe equivalent. He goes from inanimate object to fully conscious being, and he just rolls with it.

Anyways, once everybody gets caught up on what's going on and accepts the new reality, a training montage ensues so the group can all learn to use their powers without killing each other. Once at least reasonably trained, the reborn Pet Force is sent out to stop Pie-Rat. He's gotten sloppy in the times with Pet Force dead, so they track him down easily. After a brief scuffle where Garzooka takes his eyepatch, Pie-Rat flees in his ship. They follow Pie-Rat back to the Orbital Clinic of Chaos, but they can't go in the front. That led the original Pet Force into a trap. Finding an unguarded maintenance hatch--standard on any big space station--they enter Vetvix's lair for a final confrontation!

After dealing with the Waiting Room of Doom, which slowly fills with outdated magazines, they enter Vetvix's inner sanctum. Frustrated with Pie-Rat's failure, she uses her magic to turn him into an ordinary mouse. Vetvix then attempts to use her same weapon on this new Pet Force, but thanks to story contrivance, it only works on beings born in this universe. As other dimensional visitors already, they can't be banished to another dimension. She then pulls a Dr. Claw and runs off cursing Pet Force's name while her base self-destructs. Vetvix is a very "discard and draw" sort of villain, it seems. Pet Force, of course, makes a harrowing escape just in the nick of time.

Returning to Emperor Jon, they vow to be ready to return whenever they're called on, since evil never stays dormant for long. Odious even gifts Emperor Jon with the mouse-ified Pie-Rat as proof of their victory. Well, I'm glad they remember that, so they didn't accidentally murder a major villain in their first superhero outing. They're returned to their own universe, and the time differential between them places them back with Jon having not had time to even look up from the grill. Garfield begins to doubt the adventure even happened--until that night, when he finds Pie-Rat's eyepatch still on his person. Ah, definitive proof of... eyepatches, I guess~

Book 2: Pie-Rat's Revenge!

You have to wonder where, in a space-faring superhero setting, Pie-Rat got the inspiration for his classic pirate motif. It's a little incongruous is all I'm saying. And hey, remember when I said earlier that Garzooka's purple-and-green colour scheme was odd for a hero? Well, here he is as a villain! That'll catch your eye. This would be a terrific comic cover, which is what you want in a series like this.

The book opens with a brief recap of the previous story's events, then moves into the new plot. See, Emperor Jon has opted to keep the polymorphed Pie-Rat as his pet. How very Ron Weasley of him. That's pretty apt, actually, because similarly Pie-Rat has maintained his intelligence in his new mousey form. Pie-Rat gets sick of being Emperor Jon's pet and plans a daring escape, exploiting the emperor's dimwitted and loving personality against him. Pie-Rat jams the lock with a food pellet and makes his escape that night.

Once free from his cage, he encounters Binky's cauldron, still left in the throne room from when the sorceror summoned Pet Force from Garfield's universe. Figuring he has nothing to lose, Pie-Rat jumps in the leftover brew. Suddenly he finds himself growing. He returns to his original anthropomorphic state--but with a twist. He's now twice his original height, a staggering twelve feet tall. He scoops up the rest of the remaining potion for later, and sneaks out of the palace as best as a 12-foot rat can sneak. Desiring revenge on both his former employer and his longtime foes, he steals Pet Force's ship and makes his escape from the planet, headed for Vetvix's newest base.

After his guards help Emperor Jon put the pieces of the problem together, they decide they must once again call upon the powers of Pet Force to recover their missing vehicle and stop the newly embiggened Pie-Rat. Fortunately, Garfield and friends have been watching movies all weekend, so Jon doesn't notice when his pets disappear from the living room in a bright flash. Of course, once returned to the alternate universe and the situation explained, they still have a problem: how do they give chase to Pie-Rat when he's got their ship?

And speaking of Pie-Rat in their ship, he's followed the trail of a mysterious energy output, and it's led him right to Vetvix's new base, the Menacing Moon of Mayhem. See, this is why you don't blow up your base: the backup base is never as good. if it was, it wouldn't be the backup. Given that it's such a shoddy base, Pie-Rat is easily able to get inside and get close to Vetvix. She's expecting a technological attack, so she's unprepared when he pulls out that vial of magic potion and sprinkles her with it. And naturally, the potion that made him grow 12 feet tall makes Vetvix shrink to 5 inches. It's magic, we don't have to explain it!

Pie-Rat takes the magic crystal that Vetvix uses to fuel her powers, which of course didn't shrink because magic is just bullshit. See previous paragraph's last sentence. And while Pie-Rat takes over the base and begins plotting a further revenge against Pet Force, we cut over to them. They're at Sorceror Binky's own castle, and it's clear he's a bit of a hoarder. This is to their advantage, though, as they eventually piece together a working spaceship out of old car parts and other things, all patched together between Compooky's know-how and Binky's magic. This seems like the sort of book where I could use that "it's magic" quote every other paragraph. But craft a new--if small--ship they do, and speed off in the newly christened Planetary Pizza.

The rickety little ship does eventually find its way to Pie-Rat's base, saving him the trouble of being proactive as a villain. The magic thing keeps happening, and Pie-Rat basically becomes Discord for a bit while he fights them, doing things like turning Starlena's siren song into actual living music notes. One by one, the members of Pet Force are taken out, with only Garzooka is left. He and Pie-Rat struggle, while Pie-Rat tries to aim the magic crystal at Garzooka. Garzooka uses his claw to rip the crystal from Pie-Rat and defeat him.

Unfortunately, here's where the cover comes in. It seems the moments Pie-Rat was focusing the crystal during the struggle affected Garzooka's mind. He puts the crystal around his own neck. which turns him evil. He helps Pie-Rat to his feet, and the pair escape in the Lightspeed Lasagna. While Pet Force pursues them in their ramshackle ship, the new criminal duo strikes the storage planet of Deli to steal their food. Pet Force manages to catch up as the villains celebrate their spoils, and use a magic blast from the systems Binky installed to short out the Lightspeed Lasagna. This enables them to dock with the ship and climb aboard for a contfrontation.

The group fights, and once again the bearer of a bullshit magic crystal subdues the heroes easily. Annoyed now, Garzooka takes hold of Starlena and prepares to kill her or something. She taps into the one thing she has left: she's not fighting just Garzooka, but Garfield in his body. She drops some heavy put-downs, which resonate with Garfield, and he hesitates long enough for her to cut the crystal off him. The crystal hits the floor and shatters, undoing its evil magics on Garzooka's mind as well as on all his teammates. With Pet Force reunited, Pie-Rat is easily subdued and locked up.

The group waits for the ship to power back up, then speed off to apologise to the planet Deli. Following that, they head back towards Vetvix's moonbase. That night, though, the magic that was making Pie-Rat 12 feet tall wears off, and he escapes from his cell. He steals the remaining shards of the crystal, climbs into the Planetary Pizza, and makes a getaway. As a bonus, he also repeats the power-down spell against the bigger ship, giving him ample time to escape. And he's not the only one. Over on the Menacing Moon of Mayhem, Vetvix also returns to her proper size, and abandons this base as well. And when Pet Force fails to find her, they simply return to their own universe, ready to be called on once again in the future~

Book 3: K-Niner: Dog of Doom!

Another very basic comic book-style cover. K-Niner is a much more typical villain in style. This one's actually a wrap-around, and features the rest of Pet Force reacting to K-Niner on the back cover. Which is good because, other than the first cover, the covers all have a heavy Garzooka focus. Which makes sense for a book series, I suppose, you wanna assure the kiddos that Garfield's gonna be in the book. But as a comic book series, this would be a bad look for a team book~

So after our standard introduction and recap, we start off with Vetvix in yet another new base, the Floating Fortress of Fear. I'm sure it's very intimidating, if she can keep hold of it for more than a single book. She's picking up from the epilogue and putting the last touches on K-Niner, mostly enhancing his intelligence. Now, you look at the cover and tell me what kind of voice you'd expect. Some sort of German or Austrian accent, like the doberman on Road Rovers? Does anyone remember Road Rovers~? Anyways, but no: he speaks with a posh British accent. You know, the "I say, good chaps, looks like we're in a bit of a sticky wicket, eh wot?" type. Trust me, you can tell. But just because he sounds refined doesn't mean he's not evil.

I also love that after the initial "trapped them in the Phantom Zone" bit, the villains just go whole ham. K-Niner here demonstrates that he is indeed evil by threatening to rip out Vetvix's throat. Let your villains be villainous is all I'm saying. She's pleased he's so vicious, but feels he needs to learn his place as well. She force-chokes him until he complies. She then gives him his assignment: she thinks dogs should be liberated. The Boy Mayor of Second Life would approve, and so does K-Niner. Turning pets on their masters is just his style.

K-Niner takes a portable evolution gun, and immediately sets off. He begins on the planet Kennel. Isn't it neat how every planet is named after an English word that describes its function? K-Niner quickly takes over the dog population and turns them against their masters, because boosting their intelligence also makes them evil, of course. They use enslavement collars on their former owners, and within a few days, the dogs now run the planet. We cut over to Emperor Jon on Polyester, where a man has crash-landed a ship. He's an escapee from Kennel, and he's here to report the events so we can get the plot moving and once more summon Pet Force!

And summoned once more they are, Garfield and Friends once more conveniently disappearing in a split second while Jon's back is turned (this time they're outside playing volleyball). And once back in the parallel universe, Emperor Jon fills them all in on K-Niner's dastardly doings. Garzooka, naturally, takes great offense to dogs being in charge, and takes his duties as a hero completely seriously for once. Pet Force takes off for a confrontation with K-Niner in the Lightspeed Lasagna. And speaking of Pet Force's ships...

The Planetary Pizza, piloted by Pie-Rat, plants its pads down on polar planet Glacia. Pie-Rat is here seeking a way to restore his magic crystal and regain his mighty magic powers. He's sought out the home of a legendary evil wizard, who's known by the name of... Barfo. I see why Barfo keeps his location a secret. But anyway, Barfo is the one who made the crystal, so naturally Pie-Rat reasons he can restore it as well. Suprisingly once on Glacia, Barfo's evil lair is pretty easy to find. His manservant, Hobart the Gnome, brings Pie-Rat before the wizard, and within moments the crystal is restored! Pie-Rat turns to thank Hobart, but Hobart suddenly turns into Vetvix!

Yes, Vetvix knew all along that Pie-Rat's quest would lead him here. And as she was once Barfo's student in the ways of evil magic, she knew she could get the old coot to go along with her plan. Barfo returns the crystal to Vetvix, restoring her powers. And so Pie-Rat, a recurring villain in three whole books, is unceremoniously done away with, as Vetvix teleports him inside an asteroid, trapping him in solid rock. Even if the asteroid were hollow or he displaced the interior when he teleported in, no doubt he'll suffocate within moments. That's pretty harsh.

With that over, we rejoin Pet Force as they approach Kennel. K-Niner's battle cruiser spots them incoming, and shoots the ship down, even in spite of Abnermal's forcefields. Pet Force bail out of the ship, and Abnermal uses his powers to make snow to cushion their fall. Upon landing, a contingent of mutant animals attack. The mooks aren't much, but K-Niner himself puts up an impressive fight. However, one of the mooks pulls a gun and points it at Compooky. This is why Compooky usually stays aboard the ship, but that wasn't an option. Rather than let their friend get hurt, Pet Force surrenders.

Pet Force is held prisoner separately from Compooky, with both the cell's technology making it freeze-proof and threats of "don't break out, or we'll shoot your compatriot". Their imprisonment is not long, though, as suddenly the power goes out. Pet Force takes advantage of the situation and make their escape, quickly running into Compooky. K-Niner didn't think the hyper-intelligent teddy bear needed a high security cell, and just locked him in the basement. It was easy for him to then break out and shut down the local power grid. This also has the side effect of turning off the control collars the humans were wearing. How convenient!

With control of the planet now tilted in their favour, Pet Force now has time to both fix their ship and reverse the polarity of the brain-boosting weapons, turning the dog population of Kennel back to their normal selves. Though the experience did change the pet owners of Kennel. Having experienced life in their pets' shoes (so to speak) for a bit, they've resolved to treat their canine companions a bit more equally. More being allowed on the furniture, less stupid tricks for treats. Still, Pet Force can't stay long, and they head off in pursuit of K-Niner's battle cruiser. This is why most superheroes don't have spaceships (Jedis don't count): if your enemy also has one, they can flee way more easily than on foot.

Not willing to let another place go to the dogs, as it were, Pet Force catches up with K-Niner. With his previous success, Vetvix has stepped up the timetable and sent him after Polyester right away. Emperor Jon is in danger! They enter the planet's atmosphere, and are attacked by fighter craft. They fend them off, but their weapons system is damaged in the fight, so they can't simply use the reverse brain-rays and solve it quickly. The team splits up instead: Garzooka and Abnermal will go after K-Niner, while the other three will find the planet's power source and knock out the collars, since that worked so well the last time.

The two heroes quickly make short work of K-Niner's guards, and then turn the battle to deal with the Dog of Doom himself. While the struggle goes on, the rest of Pet Force reach the planet's power grid. Using a clever tactic, Compooky overloads the power and causes and electrical storm that simultaneously undoes the brain-boosting effect and shorts out the enslavement collars. There's only a few pages left, after all, and we have to wrap this up. K-Niner is reverted back into an ordinary dog, and the emperor is reverted to an ordinary non-enslaved person. The day is saved!

And now once again, Pet Force prepares to return to their own universe. However... when the spell clears, the five heroes are still standing there. Something is blocking the passage between dimensions, and Pet Force is trapped. And while Pet Force's adventures have taken place between mere moments in their own universe, they have always returned quickly enough that Jon didn't notice a thing. But this time, as Jon retrieves the volleyball and turns around to his pets, he's surprised to find they've all vanished into thin air...

Book 4: Menace of the Mutanator

This one's very striking because of its more painted look compared to the heavy black outlines the rest of the covers have. Does this one count as having the whole team on the cover? Because, spoilers, that's what the Mutanator is: the rest of Pet Force mashed up into a villain. Again, though, that's definitely a striking image that'd draw in readers to a comic cover. In fact, while Garzooka may be over-used as a cover focus, several of these also show him imperiled in some way, and that's nice for character stuff. That helps balace it a bit~

I wanna say, before we start, that I'm impressed by the continuity for the series as a whole. They could've just written each story as a standalone, but for a series of 100-page children's novellas starring Garfield characters as superheroes, things happen in these books. Like, maybe not sweeping status quo changes, but events affect the plot of each next book down the line. And that's where we pick up! Right where the last book left off, with Pet Force now stuck in the alternate universe, unable to return home to Jon. But if they can't go home to Jon, well, maybe then events will conspire to bring Jon to them~

Yep, because Jon happens to wander into the room where they keep the copy of Pet Force #100 that acts as a portal to their universe, he gets transported into the Pet Force universe. And since Emperor Jon is still an extant entity, there's just two Jons now. Jon, of course, is a bit freaked out, and it takes several pages to explain the whole deal to him, and also have a showcase of all their powers to pad out the book some more. Eventually, they decide to call in Sorceror Binky to examine the problem. When he has a go of it, a sudden tornado emerges from the cauldron and whisks away Pet Force--save for Garzooka, whose prodigious strength keeps him anchored.

Garzooka heads out in the Lightspeed Lasagna to track Pet Force's signature, glad to get away from a double trouble Jon. And while he's searching, the scene cuts to Vetvix's Floating Fortress of Fear. Hey, one of her bases actually lasted more than one book! This is where Pet Force has been transported to, once more in a power-proof cell. Vetvix monologues to the heroes, as she is wont to do, explaining that she's the one who cast the spell to keep them from returning home. And further, she's brought them here to mutate them into her servants.

While Emperor Jon exposits about his backstory (turns out he is not of royal blood, and has about as much legitimate claim to the throne as you or I do), the search continues. Sorceror Binky detects Pet Force, giving them all a view of what happens next. The trapped members of Pet Force are literally broken apart and reassembled: Odious' body, Compooky's brain inserted into the chest, Abnermal's hands, and Starlena's head. She christens this beast "Mutanator", and it is soullessly obedient. I also wanna say, Mutanator's kind of a non-binary icon, aren't they? (The comic uses "it", but it was 1998 and alternative pronouns weren't really a thing yet.) Muscular, masculine body, but confident enough to still wear lipstick. It's a look, is all I'm saying~

Mutanator continues to possess the combined powers of Pet Force as well. Vetvix sends them to attack the planet Armory to gear up before attempting to conquer Polyester. And meanwhile, thanks to the convenience of being able to scan all of Compooky's memories now that his brain is part of Mutanator, Vetvix has the perfect trap to spring on Garzooka--or should she say Garfield. Yes, she really knows the whole origin for Pet Force now, and now she knows all Garfield's weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and probably blood type and other dating profile stats~

Thus, when Garzooka receives the coordinates from Emperor Jon and arrives at the Floating Fortress, he finds himself menaced by giant spiders. Vetvix couldn't think of a way to get Mondays to attack him, so the Giant Spider Invasion will do. Spiders are apparently very formiddable foes, Garzooka's personal fears aside. They can swat gamma hairballs out of the air, they can construct webs as quickly as certain Marvel heroes, and their hairy exoskeletons are resistant to both claw and strength. But despite his fear and Abnermal's running commentary, Garzooka manages to trounce the spiders with a carefully applied flame--taking Vetvix's blueprints with them.

Garzooka heads out once again to track down the Mutanator, leaving his less-than-all-together friends in the safety of their forcefield prison. While he's off, we return to the perspective of his target. Using their combined powers, the Mutanator swiftly conquers the planet Armory and sets their sights on Polyester next. It's not a bad plan, honestly. With the stockpile from Armory, not only will the Mutanator be more powerful, Polyester won't be able to use the planet for backup. Fortunately for the two Jons, though, Garzooka intercepts the Mutanator before they can leave Armory.

The fight's actually pretty good. Very back and forth. But even despite Garzooka's great strength, the Mutanator wins in the end. Thankfully, Vetvix puts her conquest of Polyester on hold to take the time to retrieve Garzooka and add his power to the Mutanator. This, of course will be her undoing--in a completely ridiculous way, of course. For back in the palace, our universe's Jon is watching Pet Force's struggles with the scrying cauldron. And he leans in a bit too close. Sowhile Vetvix is prepping the machine to divide Garzooka's body like she did the rest of Pet Force, Jon suddenly tumbles through the dimensional warp caused by the cauldron and lands on Vetvix, which causes her to put the machine in reverse. A real Jonnus ex cauldrona there, eh?

The Mutanator disappears, their existance as a unique being wiped out as their pieces return to their proper Pet Force owners. With Pet Force reassembled, Garzooka takes out Vetvix with one of his gamma-radiated hairballs while she's distracted by Jon. Pet Force decides that the vile veternarian should have a taste of her own medicine, and stick her in the body-splicing machine with some of her guards. This divides them all up and mixes them into bizarre combinations. It also has the side effect of disabling Vetvix's magic, so they can return to their own universe now.

The book wraps up here. Pet Force first returns to Armory to both return the stolen weapons and also make repairs on the buildings that were damaged in Garzooka's fight with the Mutanator. That's the sort of thing I'd like to see in more superhero stories in general. The two Jons part ways, with the Emperor believing the other Jon's heroism to have been deliberate. And thus are Garfield and friends returned home. And just like the end of their first adventure, where Garfield couldn't be sure if it really happened, so too is Jon's memory fading. Had he really witnessed all that? Only his pets know for sure--and in this universe, they can't talk~

Book 5: Attack of the Lethal Lizards

This one's another wrap-around, showing the rest of Pet Force engaging the remaining Lethal Lizards on the back cover. This is one advantage books have over comics: a front and back cover you can use for your story-telling. The Lizard designs are pretty good for a villain group too. Like Pet Force, they don't adhere to a particular theme, but they do look good individually. Garzooka roasting a hot dog on a stick might be a bit too comedic for a superhero story, though. It sets the tone wrong. How "lethal" can they possibly be if Garzooka is out here roasting hot dogs in the middle of battle?

So here we go, last book. After the usual recap, we open with Jon explaining to Garfield and friends his latest plans: they're going to WackyWorld, a theme park dedicated to Jon's favourite cartoon, The Wackies. Both Garfield and Nermal think the show is lame, and if those two agree on something, you know it must be so. In less lame universes, however, trouble is once more a-brewing. So it turns out Vetvix's Floating Fortress of Fear has been orbiting the swamp planet Reptilius this whole time. And her various experiments in the last two books have been radiating the planet in magical energy...

From that magical power, three reptiles find themselves uplifted in intelligence and granted fantastic powers. Please say hello to our three main villains for this book: Snake, an enormous snake (the only one without an anthro design) with stretching powers; Chameleon, who can shapeshift; and Dragon, a komodo dragon with fire breath and the bad attitude to match. While Snake and Chameleon figure out their powers, Dragon declares himself the leader as he's clearly the smartest, strongest, and most powerful. They name themselves the Lethal Lizards and start plotting how to rule the planet.

After that exciting intro, though, the book kind of slows down. First we get a whole chapter of Emperor Jon also deciding to go on vacation, to planet Funlandia. With Vetvix out of commission for a while, there's no better time. In short, he's out of the castle and Sorceror Binky is in charge. This is followed by a chapter of Jon and his pets at WackyWorld. It's certainly an accommodating amusement park to allow pets on its grounds. Garfield at least gets along with the food, but if you know anything about amusement park food prices, the amount Garfield eats will make your wallet weep. Jon takes his mind off it by dragging the pets along to a ride. Surely they have to be under the height restriction~

Fortunately, we get back to the actual stars of this book, and we see a bit more of their dynamic. Snake is the sort who sucks up to whoever's calling themselves "Boss" at the moment. Dragon is power-hungry, and it's clear he'll sell out his allies at the drop of a hat. Chameleon is Starscream. Anyway, they trek through the jungles of Reptilius until they find a downed spaceship. Reviewing the logs reveals it was a scout ship from Vetvix, and they also learn of Vetvix and her mission. However, they don't know where Emperor Jon lives, so they crowd into the the newly christened Rapacious Reptile and set course for the stars.

The first planet they come across is a world called Klod. Quickly the Lethal Lizards beat up the populace and find the local government. Chameleon shapeshifts into a dignitary, pretending to be an advance entourage for Emperor Jon, schmoozing with the governor until he learns both what Jon looks like and the name of his planet. With this information secure, Chameleon nips out suddenly, and the trio sets forth towards Polyester. Governer Klutz calls up the palace as soon as the reptiles depart, and reports the incident to Sorceror Binky.

Binky wastes no time, and he dials up Pet Force. Since all five are in one place, he's able to pull them through even without them being near the gateway through issue #100's cover. Convenient! Pet Force, however, does waste time, as a lengthy comedy scene eats up several pages before we just get on with it. Eventually, the situation is conveyed, and they figure it's safer to keep Emperor Jon on Funlandia for the time being. Compooky stays behind to help plan some strategies, while the rest of Pet Force boards the Lightspeed Lasagna to intercept the Lethal Lizards before they even arrive.

Pet Force spends the next few minutes both scanning for incoming ships and bickering with each other, so I'm very glad when the Rapacious Reptile appears on their detectors before too long. Dragon threatens the ship, telling them to move or he'll knock them aside. It's a spaceship, dude, you can move in three dimensions. The ships trade shots, and while Chameleon's piloting is actually pretty good due to his independently-rotating eyeballs, eventually both ships crash land on whatever planet is nearby.

Both ships crash right next to each other, which is improbable but less ridiculous than some of the contrivances in these books, so I'm okay with it. Now you'd think what with the enemies being reptiles and Abnermal having freezing powers that this battle would be over really easily, but no. In fact, Garzooka and Dragon are pretty evenly matched. Snake turns out to be immune to Starlena's siren song because snakes don't have external ears. See, now there's a contrivance I find a bit weird. Snake swallows Abnermal whole, and Chameleon and Odious get literally tongue-tied. The Lethal Lizards actually live up to their name pretty well.

As the fight continues, half of both sides are laid out when Compooky comes rushing up, saying he has an urgent message from the emperor. And that's when he sucker-punches the team. It was actually Chameleon in disguise, having gotten knocked away when he and Odious separated. So yeah, round one goes to the Lizards, and they make their escape first. Pet Force regroups, and they give chase. The Lizards have enough head start to really lay siege to Polyester before Pet Force arrives, though. They even get access to the palace using Chameleon's shapeshifting, leading to Sorceror Binky letting slip the real location of the emperor just as Pet Force arrives.

Another fight ensues--see, now it's really a superhero story--and the Lizards leave again 2 and 0. This time Snake uses his venomous fangs to attack Starlena. This leads to the weirdest contrivance yet. Maybe not the worst, but definitely the weirdest. They have only minutes to save Starlena. So how do they do it? Well, they notice that Odious drools quite a lot. It's very "fluid output". So they have Binky magically reverse Odious' drooling, so that he has "fluid input" on his tongue instead. It becomes a big suction sponge and sucks the poison out of Starlena. They then restore the drooling, and he just harmlessly drools out the poison. What.

With their teammate saved, Pet Force pursues the Lethal Lizards to Funlandia. They get there just in time to rescue Emperor Jon from their clutches, with Garzooka and Odious combining their strength to literally rip a kiddie ride out of the ground. Starlena corners Chameleon in a hall of mirrors, turning his own trick against him. Snake is undone by Odious' strength. And Garzooka fights Dragon to a standstill, finally trapping all three on a roller coaster still operating. When the ride comes to an end, Abnermal freezes them all until the authorities can retrieve them.

Naturally, Emperor Jon thinks it's all part of the show (because Jon is dimwitted in any universe). The Lizards are sent to a lizard-proof prison (seriously, it specifies this), and Pet Force returns to their own universe. As usual, Jon didn't notice his pets go missing during the dark amusement park ride. The book concludes on an ominous note, however, as the ship carrying the Lethal Lizards makes its jump to lightspeed just as it passes the Floating Fortress of Fear. The shockwave knocks over some debris that reactivates the combining machine, restoring Vetvix to her full evil might once more!

The end!

No, really. Those five books are all there was. I hear it may have continued into the comics, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I didn’t really look into it.

But boy, what a ride, huh? Let’s dissect the books one at a time, since it only seems fair to take them as individual stories.

The Outrageous Origin: It’s a fairly basic origin story, I’d say. It kind of has to be. I guess my main gripe is that, like Rita Repulsa’s entire run on Power Rangers, the heroes never fight the main villain directly. In fact, there’s barely even an evil plot in this one. You have henchmen and some traps, and that’s about it for the menace.

Pie-Rat’s Revenge: A cautionary tale about why you treat your minions with respect. This one’s pretty good, but the events depicted on the cover make up such a small part of the book. Wouldn’t it have been more fun if Garzooka was turned at the beginning of the story? Book 4 would at least do the reverse of that, so it’s not a major complaint~

K-Niner, Dog of Doom: I think this one’s about as middle of the road as you can get. What a coincidence that it’s also the middle of the series! Like I said in the recap portion, it’s a shame that Pie-Rat’s story ended here. This one definitely feels more “villain of the week” than most.

Menace of the Mutanator: This one might be the best book in the series. Garzooka, alone, battling against the best parts of his team? That’s gripping stuff. I guess the main problem is that the Mutanator isn’t really a character in and of themselves. Like, K-Niner, he may have been a generic rent-a-villain type, but he had a personality. Mutanator is little more than an extention of Vetvix’s will.

Attack of the Lethal Lizards: I’m a bit split on this one. The bits with the titular Lizards are great. They steal the show! But the parts where it focuses on either Jon kind of drag, and Pet Force is a bit too jokey here. Like, I get the point is that they’ve relaxed into their roles now, and there’s not much point of doing it as a Garfield story if they don’t actually use the character personalities, but... I dunno. It’s good, but it could have been better~

And that’s it! Like, I dunno how to wrap this up. Pet Force was neither my first exposure to superheroes nor my first introduction to the Garfield brand (you can thank Saturday morning cartoons for both of those). But for some reason, maybe just the absurdly goofy premise, it always kinda stuck with me. And I think that’s a good enough reason to make it my 10th anniversary review, don’t you~?

#books #reviews #Garfield #Pet Force #Garfield's Pet Force #Taiblog

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chicgeekgirl89 · 3 years ago

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The Way Our Horizons Meet: Chapter 4

Fandom: 911 Lone Star

Characters: T.K. Strand, Carlos Reyes

Summary: Carlos' perspective through the aftermath of T.K.'s shooting. Follows the events of episodes 1x08-1x10.

A/N: I had a few requests to write T.K. and Carlos’ conversation about what happened in New York. Hopefully I did it justice!

CW: Mentions of past drug use, overdosing, suicide (just mentioned, not attempted)

Read Chapters 1-3 on AO3

Carlos woke slowly in the morning. Sunlight streamed in through the curtains and he frowned trying to get his bearings; usually he was up before the sun, even on his days off. He liked to get a workout in early, before the day had really started. He shifted in the bed, wincing when he realized his left arm was full of pins and needles.

Blinking his eyes open fully he came face to face with T.K.’s sleeping form. Carlos’ mouth slowly curved into a smile. It had been a long time since he’d woken up to someone else in his bed. Even longer since it had been someone he really cared about.

Carlos watched him for a moment, just taking it all in. T.K. was lying on his back, mouth slightly open, chest rising and falling slowly. Last night had been…perfect, was the word that came to mind. There had been nothing between them anymore, nothing standing in the way of their feelings for one another, and they had spent many hours making that clear.

His arm was trapped underneath T.K.’s pillow, hence the numbness running all the way up to his shoulder. He didn’t want to wake his sleeping boyfriend (wow it felt good to call him that), but his arm was starting to tingle painfully. Slowly he attempted to ease it out from under T.K.’s head. Despited his best efforts, T.K. immediately began to stir, inhaling sharply and opening his eyes. “Hey,” he said, voice rough with sleep as he rolled onto his side to face Carlos, allowing him to free his arm completely.

“Hey,” Carlos said fondly, flexing his fingers as feeling began to return. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“That’s okay.” T.K. smiled sleepily.

“Did you sleep all right?”

“Mhmm,” T.K. said as he leaned forward and pressed his lips to Carlos’. “Did you?”

“It was…the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a while,” Carlos said honestly.

“Well,” T.K. grinned lazily at him, “we were pretty enthusiastic when we got back here last night. You were probably exhausted.”

Carlos grinned back, running a hand down T.K.’s side, resting it on his hip as memories of the night before flitted through his brain. They’d had to get a little creative considering T.K.’s stitches situation. He didn’t seem any worse for the wear though. “I think I was.”

T.K. looked a little more awake now, his eyes glinting with that look he got when he wanted something. Carlos liked that he knew what so many of T.K.’s different looks meant now. “Are you still exhausted?” he asked, voice low.

His fingers trailed slowly down Carlos’ spine, causing him to shiver. “Not in the least.”

“Good.” T.K.’s mouth was on his in an instant, hungry, searching, and Carlos lost himself in the kiss as they picked up where they’d left off the night before.

It was an hour later that they both lay in the bed, T.K.’s head pillowed on Carlos’ chest. “I like waking up with you,” he said quietly.

T.K. didn’t say anything for a long moment and Carlos felt the certainty and bliss of the last few hours stutter in his chest. He thought they’d finally been on the same page, but maybe…

His hand fell back to the bed as T.K. abruptly sat up, determination on his face. The sheets twisted around his waist as he crossed his legs and looked seriously at Carlos. “I want you to know what happened in New York.”

Carlos pushed himself up on his elbow, reaching his free hand out to touch T.K.’s knee. “You don’t have to. There’s no pressure. You can tell me now or never, it doesn’t matter to me.”

“I know,” T.K. cupped Carlos’ face in his hand and stroked his thumb across his cheek, his gaze fierce. “And that’s why you deserve to know. If we’re going to give this a shot, you should know everything.”

“Okay,” Carlos said softly, mentally bracing himself. Based on what little he did know, he didn’t think this would be easy to hear.

T.K.’s eyes fell to the bed as he collected his thoughts. “I had only been clean again for about six months when I met Alex. I was at a friend’s birthday party, testing my sobriety in a way I probably shouldn’t have been. Someone introduced us, and we hit it off right away. I realized later the whole thing was a setup. But I was okay with it because Alex was charming and fun and I was so desperate to get my life back on track. He was stable, had a good job, knew where he was going in life; he was everything I wasn’t.

“We were together a little over two years and it was good. We didn’t fight or have problems. I just…didn’t see who he really was until it was too late.” T.K. swallowed hard and twisted his fingers into the sheets. “I loved him. I really did. I wanted to marry him. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him.”

He laughed ruefully and shook his head. “My dad never liked him. My mom did, but my mom likes anyone I like. My dad…he didn’t say anything outright but I could tell. And even if he had said something I probably wouldn’t have listened. I’m uh, I’m kind of stubborn.”

“I’ve noticed,” Carlos said with a smile.

T.K. smiled sheepishly. “Yeah well, sometimes it’s for the better and sometimes not so much.” His face fell a little. “I had it all set up. Dinner at this fancy place, I was going to propose right before dessert. So cliché, but that’s what I was going to do.” T.K. gave a humorless laugh. “And when he got there I got so excited and I just couldn’t wait. I pulled out the ring and started to get down on one knee and he stopped me. Grabbed my arm and told me to sit down.”

T.K.’s jaw worked and Carlos could tell tears were near the surface. “Hey,” he said, sitting up so they were eye to eye. “Take your time.”

T.K. nodded gratefully and blew out a shaky breath. “He’d been cheating on me. With his spin instructor. They were in love. Now I wonder if the spin instructor was even the first. There were times he seemed distant, and then a couple months would go by and he would be all attentive and sweet again. I think there might have been others, I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

“I had never felt so stupid. Like it was my fault. If I had just been better, done more then he wouldn’t have had to cheat. And I should have seen it. I just wanted so desperately to tick all the boxes that proved I was doing the right thing in my life that I didn’t see any of the warning signs until after the fact.”

T.K. rubbed his hands up and down his thighs, no longer able to meet Carlos’ gaze. “I knew where to get pills fast. So I left the restaurant and I picked up some Oxy and went home. I didn’t even try to stop myself. I just did what I do best in a personal crisis: completely self destruct.”

Carlos’ heart picked up its pace. He knew where this was going, knew that this story ended with them here, together in bed right now, but that didn’t make it easier to hear.

T.K. cleared his throat. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just…wanted it all to go away. The thought of being left, of not being enough…it eats away at you until it’s all you can think about.”

He shook his head. “I took a few and when that wasn’t enough I took a few more and then a few more. And the next thing I knew I was on the floor, puking my guts out, with my dad and his crew picking up my pieces. It wasn’t my first overdose, but it was the closest I’ve ever come to…if they’d been even a minute later…”

Carlos felt his throat growing tight. He’d come so close to losing T.K. before he’d ever even known him. The thought made him oddly protective. He wished he could somehow reach into the past and keep T.K. from ever knowing such incredible hurt.

“My dad didn’t report it, not the way he should have. If he had I would have been fired,” T.K. said, his voice breaking a little as he spoke. “He basically took control of everything and told me to pack my stuff. Because of me he uprooted his whole life and dragged us here.”

He looked up nervously, trying to judge Carlos’ reaction. “You know the rest.”

“You were right,” Carlos said softly. “That is messy.”

“It’s a lot, I know,” T.K. said quickly. “I just…I want you to understand why some things might be hard for me. I fell so hard and so fast last time and I can’t take risks like that again. My dad, he needs me, now more than ever. I can’t do anything to put my sobriety in jeopardy. And I realize this,” he gestured to the disheveled bedding and their naked bodies, “doesn’t exactly look like going slow, but as far as feelings and stuff like that go…”

“Hey,” Carlos put a hand on his knee, “I will never pressure you into anything you don’t want. We’re in this together.” He looked T.K. directly in the eye. “And I want to be really clear here; you can trust me. Always. It’s going to take time for you to see that, for us to build that trust together, but you can. And any mistakes I make along the way are mine and mine only, not a reflection of you.”

T.K. looked at him for a long moment, a hand coming up to softly touch Carlos’ face. “You’re so ridiculously perfect.”

Carlos shifted, clearing his throat uncomfortably. “That’s the second time you’ve said that.”

“Well it must be true then,” T.K. said with a smile.

“That is…incredibly sweet,” Carlos said. “But if this is going to work, you can’t put me on a pedestal like that. The only place for me to go is down.” He slid his fingers between T.K.’s. “You and I are the same; flawed, human. I am not some…god among men, now matter how much I might want to be. I have my stuff too. Which I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough.”

“You can’t possibly have baggage like I do,” T.K. said, leaning back against the pillows.

Carlos shrugged. “Yours might be more obvious, but mine could be worse. You have to watch out for the quiet ones, isn’t that what they say?”

T.K. raised his eyebrows and smirked. “You certainly weren’t quiet last night.”

Carlos threw a pillow at him, which T.K. easily deflected. Carlos shook his head, but he smiled. “That is not what we’re talking about.” His face grew serious. “If this is going to work you have to love me for who I am, not some idealized version of me.”

T.K. blinked at him for a moment. “Love you?”

Carlos’ cheeks flamed and he rushed to take back the word that had slipped off of his stupid, besotted tongue. “I didn’t mean—I—“

T.K. laughed. “It’s okay, Carlos.”

“No, I’m sorry. You just poured your heart out and I can’t keep my damn mouth shut—”

“Carlos,” T.K. leaned forward and kissed him, effectively cutting off his apology. “It’s okay.” He traced his fingers down Carlos’ cheek. “I may not be ready to say that word yet. But I am ready to be with you.” He brushed a kiss over Carlos’ nose. “And I like you,” he kissed his cheek. “Very,” his ear. “Very,” his neck. “Much.”

They were falling back into the bed again, limbs tangling, lips finding bare skin. They clearly had so much more to talk about, but for now, what they’d said was enough. If this was love, it would find them the time to take care of the rest.

#911 Lone Star #Tarlos #Tarlos Fic #T.K. Strand #Carlos Reyes #1x08 #1x10 #The boys are having some feelings #And sexy times #As per usual #The Way Our Horizons Meet #Chapter 4

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ieattaperecorders · 4 years ago

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Something's Different About You Lately - Chapter 14: After the Fire

Jon has some visitors.

Note: This chapter contains a few small instances of well-meaning people touching a blind person without warning in a way that startles them.

Read on Ao3

---

He knew that he was in a hospital before he was fully awake. The texture of the stiff sheets and gown, the antiseptic smell, some indistinctly medical quality to the air filled him with the memory of wandering through distant dreams, of emerging into a cold and brightly-lit room. He came to himself gradually, slowly growing aware of an uncomfortable heaviness, of something wrapped around his face and something else restricting movement on his right side. He shifted experimentally and felt a twinge. Quietly, he groaned.

"Hey," came a voice from nearby. "You actually awake, boss? Or is this another false alarm?"

I'm not your boss anymore, Tim, he thought. Then he thought, wait a minute.

"Tim . . . ?" his voice came out hoarse and thick with grogginess. "Where – augh . . . ."

Pain shot through Jon's body as he tried to lift himself into a sitting position. He heard Tim get up and felt a careful hand on his left shoulder, guiding him back down.

"Oooh, don't do that. They've got you on the good stuff, but you're still a mess on that side. Don't be such an impatient patient."

"Where's Martin? Is he –"

"Relax, Martin's fine. Well, not fine, he's been shot, but he's doing a lot better than you. Bullet glanced off your shoulder before hitting him, tore up some muscle and fat but didn't get anything vital. He was awake before you were even out of surgery."

The hand stayed on Jon until it was clear he was going to remain still, then came away. There was an audible scrape as a chair was pulled closer, and Tim sat down again.

"We're all fine too, by the way," he added, as if offended he hadn't asked. "Just so you know."

"And . . . Jonah?"

Tim was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was subdued.

"Didn't check if he was breathing when we left him, but he wasn't getting up," he said. "And I can't see anything coming out of that fire."

Jon lay still and tried to process it all. He wasn't sure what he should feel. What he did feel was a distant sort of unsteadiness, whether it was shock or whatever painkillers were coursing through his system, he didn't know.

"Have you been sitting up with me?" he asked.

"Don't get too big a head about it," Tim smirked. "I've only been here a bit. Sasha's come by to peek in as well, and we've visited Martin too. I was just lucky enough to be the one to see your grumpy little face when you woke up."

"Huh." Surprise and a strange melancholy rose in Jon at the thought. He smiled wryly, "and for my part, the first thing I hear on regaining consciousness is Tim Stoker's terrible puns."

"Excuse you, I am a delight to be around and my puns are charming."

Jon laughed softly, lapsing back into silence. The quiet stretched on for a while, solemnity beginning to creep in at the edges again. Then Tim spoke.

". . . You think he's actually dead?"

"Jonah? I think so. Avatars can be hard to kill, but he was very afraid of death." Jon tapped his less encumbered hand against the mattress, considering. "I think . . . if he had reached to the Eye in his last moments, it would have simply watched as his life faded away, doing what it does. Drinking in his fear."

"Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy," Tim muttered, something unsettled in his tone. "What about the circus?"

". . . Depends what you mean, I suppose." Jon tried to choose his words carefully. "I'm not the Archivist anymore, so I don't think they'd have any interest in me now. We're not protected from them, but I don't think they'd have reason to come after any of us. Unless, of course," he added pointedly. "Someone draws their interest by going after them."

"Even if we get away, they're still out there," Tim pushed, something limping in his voice, "Doing what they do to people. Am I supposed to just be okay with that?"

Jon was quiet for a while.

"If you could destroy the circus," he said softly, "which is a big ‘if', but if you could, the Stranger would continue manifesting in other forms. Possibly even as a circus again. You can't keep fear from the world, you'd only be changing details. In the end I don't know if it would save anyone."

"It would hurt those things, though. Wouldn't it?"

"Maybe," Jon said. "Maybe not. Certainly not as much as it would hurt anyone who cared about you."

It was Tim's turn to be quiet. He let out a long, frustrated sigh. "Not sure I like this new, future-memories version of you Jon," he said. "He's kind of a know-it-all."

"You should have seen me when I was literally all-knowing."

"Nightmare. Don't know how Martin put up with you."

"Neither do I." Jon smiled, warmth running through him at the thought. He took a long, slow breath. ". . . You died hating me, you know. In that other life."

"Yeah?" Tim didn't sound very surprised. "What'd you do?"

"Plenty," Jon laughed mirthlessly. "Though by the end I'm not even sure how much it had to do with me. We were lost, hurt, broken people, lashing out in fear and pain."

"Yeah. Starting to think that the Magnus Institute didn't exactly facilitate a healthy work environment."

"No . . . ."

He heard a soft, electronic tapping in the pause that followed. Maybe Tim was texting the others, letting them know Jon was awake? He couldn't tell. A gentle shove hit his uninjured shoulder, making him flinch.

"Well. Let's try not to fuck it up this time around, huh?" Tim said. "I'm gonna go get a nurse and tell them you're up, they'll probably want to check your vitals or rotate your tires or something."

"Right. Uh, right . . ." Jon stammered, "thank you."

The footsteps faded, and Jon let his head sink back onto the pillow. He felt . . . adrift. More so than he had in a while.

He'd been confused and frightened through all of this, half the time he hadn't even known what he was looking for, but at least he'd known he was looking. Even in the long, terrible walk across the nightmare domains, the constant pull of their destination had given him purpose. He'd known what he was hoping for.

And there had been Martin there. Of course.

For better or worse now, Jonah was dead and he was alive. He was severed from the Eye, the others were freed, and dark and terrible powers still lurked beyond the edge of human perception, waiting to Become.

Jon wasn't sure what he was hoping for now. He lay back and waited for the nurse to arrive.

* * *

Time passed in a haze. He had little sense of how much he slept, and the divide between sleep and waking blurred together.

Sometimes he had visitors. Georgie came in not long after Tim, having gotten a very incomplete version of events through Melanie. He hadn't exactly intended to tell her anything when she sat down, but somehow after a few confused inquiries, and a gentle "try me" or two, he found himself spilling everything. It was far more disjointed and emotional than his recounting in the tunnels, but the bulk of it seemed to get across.

When it was over, she just said, "sounds like you've had a hell of a time."

It was the calmness as much as the sympathy that affected Jon. As if he'd just told her about a bad relationship he'd gotten out of, rather than his place in the universe's nightmare cosmology and the end of the world.

He didn't know what to say to it, really, and frankly saying anything at all risked letting the tightness inside his chest come spilling out - the pressure bandage would hide any tears, but Georgie would be able to tell. She saved him by breaking the silence, asking if he had any stock tips or winning lottery numbers from the future to share.

Melanie's visits were less steadying, twice devolving into arguments. It seemed to be a constant between them, that no matter what happened or what forces were acting on either of them, their ability to rile each other was inevitable. She was also insistent that he explain every detail he remembered about what she'd begun calling the "dark timeline." When he complained that framing it as an alternate timeline was likely inaccurate and, frankly, horrifying in its implications, she threw a pen at him.

Still, she came back again afterwards. And still, he was glad that she did.

Sasha reported that her hand was healing, though when pressed admitted he'd been right about her range of motion not returning. She also helped him set the voice assistant up on his phone, which was a great relief. Though it was a bit embarrassing to reveal how little he knew about his own device's functions.

"Honestly Jon, you're only thirty-one," she said, going through some final setup that he'd already forgotten her explanation of. "You've got no excuse at all to be so tech-illiterate."

"Yes, yes. I've had other priorities lately."

"I don't mind you asking for help, understand. But what are you going to do if I get eaten by another evil table someday?"

He felt a stab of shock at the blazingly conversational reference to it. Something must have shown on his face because he heard her pause..

"Sorry. Too soon?"

"Ah. . . depends on your perspective of time, I suppose," Jon said, trying and failing to make it sound like a joke.

"Right. You know, it's all a little distant for me. Unsettling, sure, but on my end it's really just a story. . . ." she trailed off. "Hey, what were you doing in Hainault?"

"Gertrude's storage locker was there -- are you going through my location history?"

"Just the more recent stuff," she made it sound as if he was the strange one for asking, and he grunted with annoyed resignation.

"You should be careful about that."

"About what?"

"Prying into other people. Invading their privacy," he lay his head back against the pillow. "Don't forget that you were part of a temple to the Eye until very recently. You're free of the Institute now, but the power behind it might not be through with you."

She was quiet for a while. Whether it meant she was contemplating what he said or ignoring him so that she could continue digging through his phone, he couldn't say.

"All I'm saying is that it can be addicting," he continued. "That urge to push past the boundaries that people raise against you. Trust me when I say that I know."

"I'd imagine you would." She paused. ". . . What was it like?"

"What was what like?"

"Being all knowing?"

". . . Hard to describe."

There was a pause, and when it became clear he wasn't going to continue, Sasha pushed out an annoyed breath and said "well you could give it more of a shot than that."

"I don't know. Overwhelming," Jon said. "In the most complete sense of the word. Sometimes I had answers, but so few of them were helpful in the end. And the things I saw, the nightmares, the pain of everyone trapped in them. Having to watch that sort of thing, all the time . . . either it destroys you, or you learn to distance yourself. At least a little. If only to keep from breaking down. Neither is very good, but one lets you survive."

Sasha made a thoughtful humming noise.

"It isn't anything you want. Believe me," he said softly. "Even if the world hadn't ended, if I'd just been another avatar . . . any rewards aren't worth the price that others have to pay."

"Yeah," she sighed heavily. "Sounds about right."

Jon relaxed, some tension he'd been carrying in him slowly unlocking. Sasha continued.

"Well. Talking about privacy, while I'm here let me at least show you how to stop broadcasting your location to anyone and everyone," she tsked and scooted her chair closer. "Honestly. No wonder you got kidnapped all the time."

"I don't really think supernatural manifestations of fears needed GPS to find me."

"Couldn't have helped though, could it?"

"Probably not," Jon smiled sadly. "Should've had you around."

"Yeah. Can't imagine how any of you managed."

* * *

Even with his visitors, there were long stretches of time Jon spent entirely alone. Laying in the dark and the quiet, his thoughts shifting like a tide. Sometimes he'd drift back to those first years at the Institute, or the time-beyond-time after the change. Other days he'd lay contemplating the past few months, all the things that he'd re-written and the worries he still had.

Mostly he thought of very little, the twin sophorics of boredom and pain medication fogging his mind into an uncomfortable stasis.

When the knock came, he'd been listening to the soft, white noise of the air conditioning and thinking of how much it resembled distant waves, putting him in mind of a cold and empty shore. Then he heard two soft taps against the door, along with a familiar voice.

"Knock, knock," Martin said.

It was the first time he'd heard his voice since the fire, since the two of them were falling to the ground together. Without really thinking he asked, "who's there?"

"Oh! Right –" he sounded embarrassed. "Sorry, it's Martin."

"Yes, I -- ah, yes." Jon sounded pitifully eager, he knew, but he couldn't bring himself to care. "C-come in. Please."

* * *

If Jon was asleep, Martin decided, then he'd come back later. He probably needed the rest -- had needed it a good long while before they'd both been shot. Really, Martin ought to be at home resting as well. But when he knocked softly on the half open door, Jon turned in his direction, wide awake.

"Who's there?" he asked.

"Oh! Right –" stupid, he can't see you. Going to have to remember that. "Sorry, it's Martin."

Jon nodded, inviting him in and slowly shifting into a seated position as Martin pulled a chair up to his bedside.

He could see the edge of a dressing covering the bullet's exit wound, just peeking up from under Jon's collar. The bandages had been removed from his eyes, and the area around them was still a little bruised and swollen. He looked wrung out, small and tired. But then, Martin supposed, everyone looks small and tired in a hospital bed.

"How are you doing?" Jon asked, "they told me you've been recovering as well . . . ."

"Yeah, just got released this morning." He stretched, rubbing over the bandage that was hidden below his shirt and jacket. "Went home, had a shower, then came right back to the hospital."

"Sounds like an exciting day."

"What about you?"

"Mmm, still looking forward to a few days here, at least. They don't think I'll be needing more surgery, fortunately, and they're weaning me onto less intense painkillers. It's a little exhausting, but apparently I'm recovering well."

"Considering you took a bullet for me," Martin muttered.

A startled-sounding laugh came from Jon. "I'm not really sure that's what happened. More like we both got shot at the same time?"

"Suppose so," Martin said. Didn't quite feel that way, though. "Honestly, I don't even know if he was trying to shoot us at the end, or if the gun just went off when they tackled him."

"Neither would surprise me."

"But then I didn't even think he had a gun, let alone murdered people with it."

"I suspect he was desperate. He probably only resorts -- resorted to things like that when some disaster crept up on him. Like us, or like Gertrude. He wasn't the hands-on type. Which came back to bite him with the ritual. In a way it's the reason I'm here -- or, the memories are, I suppose."

"Right . . . ."

Martin had plenty of time to think about it all, laid up in his own bed on another floor of the same building. About all that happened, about the things Jon told them in the tunnels. More than anything else, it just made him feel foolish. Like he'd been left out of a conversation that had been going on behind his back, and now everyone was looking at him and expecting him to catch up.

Which was pretty foolish itself, of course. Jon hadn't told anyone the whole story -- there'd been no conversation, no loop he was kept out of. It wasn't as if ‘post apocalyptic time-traveling memories' was a conclusion he could have somehow come to if he'd just paid closer attention. It was a ridiculous way to feel.

Sasha had told him, between games of dominoes, that she was glad he'd been there that night because she didn't think anyone else could have talked Jon out of his plan. Which was a lot to unpack, but didn't help with the sense of being out of the loop. Not if it was that obvious. Of course, she might have just been trying to make him feel useful. The way he saw it, he hadn't done much that evening except quietly panic, shout a bit and get held at gunpoint. And get shot. And get Jon shot with him, because he'd stood in front of him.

"I'm sorry . . . ." Martin said, softly.

". . . For what?"

"I saw what was happening, just before the gun went off. I could have pulled you away if I was faster, or thrown us to the ground, or done something. Instead I just froze."

"Martin . . ." Jon tilted his head in his direction. "Even assuming you could have been fast enough, most people freeze up when a gun is pointed at them. I did the same the first few times."

". . . First few times." Martin repeated flatly. "Jesus, Jon."

"I know. It's been a difficult few years."

"I didn't even know . . . ."

"I didn't want you to know," Jon said. "I couldn't tell any of you, Martin, not until everything was ready. You saw how close things came as it was, if he'd gotten wind of things sooner . . . ."

"Right . . . of course."

The two of them fell into an uncertain silence. Jon's hand worried at a thread on the edge of the bedsheet, twisting and twirling it between his fingers. Martin thought about that hand moving slowly and smoothly over his own, about the sorrow on Jon's face when he'd pulled away. Doubt anyone else could've talked him out of it, Sasha's voice repeated in his mind.

"About what you said. In the tunnels . . . ."

Jon visibly tensed, the edge of the sheet twisting in his fingers. "Er . . . which part?"

"The part about me," Martin said, praying that would be enough, that Jon wasn't going to make him actually repeat the words. "About us?"

"Ah. Right," he smiled weakly. "Funny how much easier it is to say these things when you think you're not going to be alive much longer."

"You were really going to tell me that and then go off to die a minute later, weren't you?" There was something quiet in Martin's voice as he spoke. Calm. Like the eye of a hurricane.

"I . . ." Jon hesitated, then nodded. "Yes."

"Bit rude."

". . . Suppose it was."

Martin went quiet. What could he say to that, to any of it? It wasn't as if he didn't get it, insecurity only goes so far when there's a declaration that explicit. He knew what I love you meant, he just . . . felt like he'd only now joined the conversation.

Before the silence could grow too powerful, Jon spoke again.

"We were together. In that other life. By the end of it, at least. I --" he laughed softly. "It took me too damned long to even realize my own feelings, let alone imagine that -- but we were together."

I can't watch that happen again, he'd said. Martin had more or less guessed that was the situation, but it was still strange to hear it confirmed. Surreal to think that Jon had a history with him, or a version of him, that he wasn't a part of.

"Were we happy?"

Jon was quiet for a while before answering. "I -- I'd like to say we were. I don't know if happy is a word I can use. At first we were in hiding, and then after the Change it was . . . well, it was a nightmare. But we had each other, and that made all the difference. And --"

He took an unsteady breath. "I think I was happier in those desperate weeks we had before the world ended than I'd honestly been in years? And there were times I'd see you in that cabin, and you'd be complaining about something, or humming while we cleaned and laughing to yourself. And you'd look different somehow, and it felt like -- there was a part of you that had been tucked away in all the time I'd known you, that was letting itself breathe again, and I was so lucky to be allowed to see it," he laughed lowly. "Or maybe all that was me projecting. Maybe I was the fool who should have paid better attention before. I don't know."

Martin tried to picture himself tucked into some remote hideaway, hiding from sinister supernatural monsters but relaxed enough to be humming and laughing while they tidied up. Tried to imagine what Jon could be referring to, how he'd been different and whether that was a good or bad thing, even. He found that he couldn't do either.

"What was he like?" he asked. "That other me."

A soft smile spread through Jon. "He was like you, Martin. A little older . . . a great deal more tired. More short-tempered, or maybe just more vocal about it," he added with fondness. "He was brave, and frustrating, and . . . and wonderful. Just wonderful."

". . . Sounds like quite a guy." Martin managed.

Jon nodded. Then the smile slipped from him, and his hands came together in his lap,

"I know that you aren't him. That is -- you are, in a sense you're the same person, but you also aren't?" he gestured outward. "Our experiences, they shape who we are, they change us. I know that."

". . . Right."

A part of him had suspected something like this might be coming, and he shouldn't have gotten his hopes up. It still hurt, and he felt guiltily relieved that Jon couldn't see his face just now.

"I just . . ." Jon continued, "I don't want you to think, ah, that I expect anything--"

"No, I get it." Martin tried to smile, tried to sound like every word wasn't twisting in him. "I probably remind you of him? And -- heat of the moment, you thought you were gonna die. I get it. I don't expect anything either."

Jon frowned, looking momentarily confused.

"I know I'm not him, like, it's not the same," Martin continued, clearing his throat. "It doesn't have to be a thing, you know, if you don't want--"

"Martin." Jon cut him off. "I meant every word I said down there. I still do."

The words dried up in Martin's throat as Jon continued.

“I love you. Just as much as I always have. I still want to have a life with you, and I’m still terrified of that life being torn from us. And I don’t know how you feel about me, but I know -- even if any, ah, feelings are returned, I--” He took a deep breath, “What I feel for you, it’s, well, it’s a lot? There are so many things I’ve been through with you that you haven’t been through with me, and that’s good, I’m glad you haven’t been through them because they were mostly horrible. But I can’t deny that many of them brought us closer --”

“Jon . . . .”

“And -- and I don’t want to scare you off with the -- the intensity of my feelings but I’d understand and I wouldn’t blame you --”

Martin reached out and put a hand on Jon’s arm. The flurry of movement and talk came to a sharp standstill.

“Jon,” he said again.

“Oh. Um,” Jon’s voice was small and quiet. “Oh.”

". . . I don’t know how I’m different from the Martin you remember. And I don’t know how he felt about you, or how what I feel is different,” he said slowly. “All I know is that when you said you were going to go off to find a quiet corner and kill yourself, it felt like the whole world was falling apart.”

Jon was still under his hand, barely breathing.

“Don’t do it again.”

Quietly, Jon nodded. Martin pulled his hand away, settling back into the chair. For a while neither of them said anything,

“I mean, listen . . .” Martin finally broke the silence, shrugging uncertainly. “I’m willing to give it a try if you are?”

An unsteady sound came out of Jon, his hand flew up to cover his mouth and when he pulled it away he was smiling. "I -- I'd like that. Very much," he said.

"Okay." Martin smiled back, feeling airy, lightheaded. "Cool." He laughed. "Getting shot together'll make a hell of a first date."

"Wh-- that was not a first date!" Jon protested, his own laugh coming out sharp and startled, "that was a -- a terrifying escape from our sinister employer."

"Kind of romantic though, right?" Martin teased, "in a bad action movie sort of way."

"Everything else aside, I refuse to entertain the idea that our first date involved Jonah Magnus in any respect," he shuddered, shaking his head. "Though it -- it honestly may be a while before I'm up for anything much better. I'll still be in the hospital a bit, and afterwards . . . well, I know there's a lot I'm going to have to adjust to."

Martin felt a twinge at Jon's voice, at the anxiety creeping back into it. ". . . You won't have to do it alone," he said.

Smiling weakly, Jon reached a hand over the hard plastic rail meant to keep patients from falling out of bed. Martin took it and squeezed. Jon nodded and let go, settling back.

"There's still so much . . ." he said. "So much you don't even know . . . about us, and about other things."

"You could tell me now, you know. If you wanted."

Jon paused, looking uncertain. "Are you sure you want to hear it? I don't know what you're expecting but it's not going to be some sort of --- pleasant office romance. It's just a series of horrible, traumatic experiences, one after another."

It was a fair question, really, and Martin thought about it before answering.

"I want to hear it," he said. "If you're okay talking about it, that is. I want to know what you've been living with all these months. And . . . I want to know more about that other life. Even if it's all just awful."

Slowly, Jon nodded. "All right . . ." he said, "but it really is a very long story. It's going to take a while."

"I don't have anything on today," Martin smiled, standing up. "I'll go and get us some tea."

#tma fanfic #tma #sdayl #man it's almost done wild

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snarwor · 4 years ago

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moon and old stars - chapter 9

holy shit it’s been awhile huh. no warnings for this one <3

Masterlist | Read on AO3

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

Din thought about frost a bit too much.

It made almost no sense. Navarro was a lava planet, sulfuric and burning in dangerous pools less than a klick outside of city limits. His missions took him through the hottest damn planets. One of his only memories of his childhood was whining at the cold, and feeling the heavy weight of his father’s jacket settling around his shoulders. Heat and warmth and weight, that was love.

Of course, the exception to this was the blurrg which had fallen on him on Arvala-7, which was hot and heavy and smelly.

But Grogu, the kid. He weighed barely anything and was no warmer than perhaps a Loth-cat, and yet the weight which had settled over Din the moment he’d shot IG-11, the warmth which had filled his bones when that little hand had reached out for him, it was unlike anything he’d experienced before.

Crash landing on the ice planet with Mrs. Frog and the kid had been an exercise in fear, in hopelessness, in compartmentalization. The Crest was damaged beyond reasonable repair, there was a very odd biological imperative happening, there were karking ice spiders, yet the thing that filled Din with the most dread had been the cold. It seeped in and leached the warmth and hope from his bones, staining his beskar with ice, splintering like cracks in stone. False fissures.

When they'd managed to get to the atmosphere again, he joked about all of them dying in the harsh vacuum of space, and it didn’t even register until they’d hit the balmy surface of Trask. He’d made light of an icy, deadly situation, which was, at its core, supposed to be heavy and blood-hot. He’d been horrified when he realized.

He remembered listening to Omera speak on Sorgan about the history of the valley they lived in, how everything had been ice thousands and thousands of years ago, a massive glacier which melted and froze and melted and froze until an entire mountain had split in two. Din couldn’t believe it, but when he’d gotten back on the holonet, he looked up the phenomenon, and marveled at how cold destruction could bring such an idyllic sanctuary.

He began to see signs of it all over his travels. Ancient canyons with split boulders, once-whole halves laying cleaved by no tool made by man or machine. Din told the kid his findings. “Frost did this. Water gets in everywhere, it settles deep and when the cold hits, that water expands, and breaks things if it’s lucky enough.” Of course, the kid only paid attention when he had dried meat rations in his hand, but he liked to think he was paying attention at least some of the time.

His sanity had sprung a leak on Morak. Boba Fett had taken an ax to that leak and filled every splintered part of him with water until he felt like he was near drowning. His first gasp of air was on the armchair at the safe house, when they had been the only people in the entire galaxy. The shame was his heart’s first winter after the flood. The setup on the Lothal moon was an early spring snowstorm. The safe house had been a mild summer. The water had not left him. But when they boarded the ship, when they fought the Dark troopers, when…

Don’t be afraid.

That had been such a shock to his system that all that latent love and affection in him, feelings left dormant and misunderstood in the abscesses of his heart, froze. It was so cataclysmic he couldn’t even hear himself think over the groaning heave of his every canyon and valley. He was broken. He could not be put back together at all. And when Boba had said those five words, the frost started to melt, sure, but the cracks and chasms remained, evidence of a too-cold climate for anything like love to grow in.

Unless.

The melting sensation Boba had given him, the weight and warmth Din had always associated with love, perhaps it had been as natural as a cleaved boulder, but thaw had been intentional as well. It wasn’t Boba’s fault for the freeze in his heart. It wasn’t Boba’s fault he had existing cracks in his foundation. But he’d cleaned up the aftermath, several times over, taken his broken pieces and patched them together, said “I know you’re not whole, but I love you just the same” with every soft pass of a hand over his hair. With every pleasured moan he drew from Din’s lips. With every suspended second their gazes held, and every gentle press of a kiss, Din realized that the crags in his heart had smoothed over in places, didn’t hurt him as much as they had before. It wasn’t Boba’s fault for this new fissure, and here Din was, cutting the man on his own broken edges.

“Why didn’t you let her just kill me when she had the chance?!”

And still.

“Din—”

And still.

“No. Tell me why.”

And still.

“Because I love you, Din.”

The words sat in the air between them like a physical thing, an old moon in orbit, waiting to see if the shooting star would strike it down or warm it back. The last words his mother had said to him, before she was gone forever. He’d always understood that love wasn’t something to be volleyed back and forth, love wasn’t supposed to be expected or returned, not the true love his mother had given, and not the shy, defeated love Boba was giving him now.

And still.

“I love you, too.”

Boba let out a shuddering breath, half a laugh, and a single tear. “Then you understand why I couldn’t let you go.”

Love could look selfish, but it never felt selfish. At least not to Din. He let go of the bottle, and hung his head in his hands instead. The familiar shame of crying in front of Boba washed over him, and as his shoulders shook, he mourned that freeze a little, because he could at least pretend he was solid when it was there. Not now, though. Not now.

With hesitation, Boba’s arm wrapped around the slumped line of his shoulders. Without hesitation, Din leaned into it. “He’s gone,” Din rasped.

Boba made a noise he probably hadn’t meant to before the other arm came up to pull Din into his lap, curl him up small and safe. With the beskar, he was much heavier, and less kind on his aching body, but Boba bore his weight without complaint. “Not gone, just somewhere else,” Boba said, stroking a hand over Din’s head in a well-practiced motion they’d perfected since Morak. “I’ll...” The promise sat on the tip of his tongue. “If you really want him back, I can help you find him.”

Din shook his head, cried out and drained. “You don’t have to,” he said softly. “Your debt to me is paid, you don’t—”

“I don’t offer this to you out of a sense of obligation. I don’t offer any of myself to you for that. Maybe once, but certainly not now, jat’ika.”

The name hurt Din like a punch to the gut. The objection sat behind his lips like a fathier at the starting gate. He lifted his head so their eyes could meet again. Openness sat in Boba’s expression, and Din realized, all at once, that the two of them had really changed in those soft weeks between Tython and here. Without breaking eye contact, he brought his hand up to cup the back of Boba’s neck, and leaned in to press their foreheads together. A stuttering breath left Boba’s chest, a flash of that softness Din didn’t often see in him.

“I’m sorry,” Din said. “For what I said about your father.”

“You were upset,” Boba hedged. Din shook his head, only a little, as to not break the mirshmure’cya too fast.

“It doesn’t excuse it. I won’t say anything like that again. Forgive me, please.”

“I understand,” Boba said, bringing his own hand up to touch the apple of Din’s cheek. “It’s forgiven. Don’t catastrophize a mistake, Din.”

Din couldn’t help but laugh, a little. “Catastrophize.”

“Exactly,” Boba said, returning the smile. “Do you need to talk some more? Are you injured from the mission?”

This time, Din hedged, “Cuts and bruises, rattled my brain fighting a darktrooper, nothing huge.” Boba leveled him with an unimpressed look. “If it bothered me, I would have taken care of it.”

“Forgive me if I don’t quite believe you can take care of yourself.”

“Hoverskiff daddying, are we?” Din asked, a smirk on his mouth that both endeared and infuriated Boba in equal doses. Boba leaned back to press a smacking kiss to Din’s forehead.

“Show you daddying. C’mon, up. We’ll talk while we get you patched up.”

As Boba removed the armor from Din’s body, the weight which pulled at Din’s conscience followed suit. He felt able to take a full breath of air again, letting Boba smear bacta on his cuts and bruises, like every breath got easier than the last. Boba made him laugh, made him smile and forget he was ever frozen, forget he was ever broken and jagged and rough-edged. And when Boba mentioned the kid, the memories came with an ache, but no sharp pain. He would have permission to grieve, later. He knew that much. But for now, they reveled in the feeling of being alive after another difficult day, a unique sensation to the two that felt more familiar than coming home ever had.

“Your helmet.” Boba finally reached that topic, which predictably pulled a sigh and a downcast expression from Din’s face.

“I broke the Creed on Morak. And again, on the cruiser.” He left out the moments with Boba specifically. You are not of a Creed you can disappoint while in here. The only truth is that you are mine.

“You were saying goodbye to your son. I know men who would raze whole planets to the ground for the chance. It’s an honorable thing, what you did. Not a dishonorable one.” Din can’t make himself believe it in its entirety, not really.

“But the armor—”

“You told me once I’d have to peel your armor off your dead body. Yet I had to, to patch your wounds, give you comfort.”

They looked at the pile in the corner, gleaming beskar and worn padding which had protected Din for years. Clearly, he wasn’t dead, and yet, the armor went. Boba continued.

“And that to hand mine over to me was against the Creed. Until the more honorable realization was proven, you were returning it to me.”

Ret’urcye mhi. How funny that goodbye sounds like return to me.

“Your helmet was in the way of protecting your foundling, until it was not. Ke’juri beskar’gam, but not at the expense of k’ara’novo aliit, nor ke’gaa’tayli aliit bralir, nor ke’ba’juri sa Mando’ade.” Din felt the tears fall, but did not look away. “You are no less Mandalorian for making the decisions you did. In fact, you are perhaps more suited to hold that saber because of it.” He took Din’s hands. “You have protected and cared for your family. One of your aliit is learning what you could not teach. Your son is Mandalorian because he is yours.”

“Then why do I feel so guilty?” Din asked, his chest jumping a little in a hiccup, eyes shining with yet-unshed tears. Boba brought his hands up to kiss at their knuckles.

“It’s not guilt. It’s grief. We carry it differently, but it does not make us. The same as our armor. It is something we wear, something sacred, but it is not the armor who protects a son.”

Din fell into his arms, pressing grateful kisses to Boba’s mouth, his face. Tears of relief, not shame, not guilt, fell across his cheeks and smeared onto Boba’s skin, but he didn’t mind. His soul was still redeemable, he was still an upright man, deserving of salvation and absolution, deserving of the love which patched him together.

He realized he was speaking. “I love, I love—”

“I know, I know,” Boba repeated, not in a volley, but letting Din know his love had somewhere safe and soft to land.

And that it always would.

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

Mando'a - Translation

jat'ika - y'all should know this one by now mirshmure'cya - Keldabe kiss, soft headbutt for emotion, or apply forcefully for stronger emotion ret'urcye mhi - see you again, goodbye aliit - family, clan

Tenets of the Resol'nare (Mandalorian Creed) mentioned in m&os ke'juri beskar'gam - you will wear armor k'ara'novo aliit - you will protect family ke'gaa'tayli aliit bralir - you will help your clan succeed ke'ba'juri sa Mando'ade - you will raise Mandalorians

Other Tenets not mentioned because they don't make me cry as much ke'jorhaa'i Mando'a - you will speak Mando'a ke'shekemi haar Mand'alor - you will rally to the cause of the Mand'alor

#moon and old stars #my writing #mandalorian fanfiction #star wars fanfiction #din djarin/boba fett #bobadin

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