#ive never drawn any of them before so. bear with me

[itsdefinitely]

fun prank to play on your friend

[lvlyghost]

In the Midst of War: IV

PAIRINGS: Simon 'Ghost' Riley x F!Shadow!Reader

SUMMARY: Home is no longer where it used to be. Left with no one else you wonder who your friends and foes are.

WORD COUNT: 2.3k

TW: poorly written action lol. Fluff, hurt with so much comfort 🤭. Suggestive but no smut yet🌝. Mind the english!🐸 lmk if i missed any.

A/N: okay so this was supposed to be longer but decided to split the last part for chapter v 🐣 it'll be worth it i promise. next part is coming up sooner! as you know i do a lot of double shifts at work and December is the busiest season for me at work lol, just bear with me💖 comments, likes and reblogs are highly appreciated 🩵

Masterlist✨

"𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚 𝒕𝒐𝒍𝒅 𝒎𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒃𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒅."

It's a cold night by the time you get to the safe house in a secluded street somewhere outside Kaindorf. Ghost grunts standing next to you, one of his arms draped over your shoulders to help him keep steady or at least as much as you can help with someone his size. The mission —your first mission since Las Almas— had been successful until it wasn't. You type the code and wait until the door opens with a mechanic sound revealing a not so bad interior. The whole place is silent when you walk in, mirroring the dead of the night. No sound of cars outside not even the sound of the wind to accompany you.

"How are you doing Ghost?" You turn your face to him, he's already staring down at you, noticing the struggle that comes with trying to hold part of his weight. This is not how things should've played out. Yet there he was. A nasty bullet wound on his left shoulder and another to his leg; the latter being just a graze but still hurt like hell.

"Never been better." He growls. And you know he's trying to act nonchalantly. That's just who he is. Who you've come to know. But his injury, especially the one on his shoulder is no joke. You had tried to stop the bleeding right before digging for the bullet. The amount of pain he must've been in was as bad as yours a few weeks ago "How did we miss them?" He mutters under his breath, no doubt recalling the events.

"I don't know. But we'll find out." You lead him to the nearest couch in the corner of the living room and turning on the lamp next to him. Ghost sits down struggling to find a position where he feels comfortable enough. "Alright..." swallowing down you look him in the eyes. "I need to check your wounds again and clean them up properly, okay?"Ghost closes his eyes for a second before nodding, he's too lightheaded to do anything else or maybe it was the morphine you gave him before, he doesn't know anymore.

Trotting back to the truck you unload the duffel bags where all your weapons and medical supplies lie. Closing the door shut and locking it before returning to where the Lieutenant rests. The lamp is turned off again so you can only make the outline of everything. You stop in your tracks dropping one of the bags and shuffle nervously.

"Umm, Ghost?" He hums in acknowledgment. "I can't see anything, do you mind turning...-"

"No." His response comes fast. "I'm not wearing the bloody mask."

So he had taken it off the moment you walked out.

"Then how am I supposed to look at your wounds?" Rolling your eyes you start approaching.

He growls something unintelligible and then adds:

"Fine just don't bloody look up or...-"

"Don't worry, I've no interest in looking at your face."

But the truth was that you wanted nothing more than to see him. The real him. You had dreamed about his face. What would he look like? The small parts of Ghost that you had taken a glimpse of were not enough to make you any less curious. For all you knew was that he most likely was blond. His eyelashes are so light that you wonder if his hair is the same shade. He has soft pink lips and a strong jaw. All of him was huge. Massive. You would never say it out loud but you felt drawn to him.

"Afraid you might like what you see?"

You snort, walking towards him and kneeling in front of the couch he's sitting on. His eyes follow every move you make, never looking up in the process. You slowly peel off the bandages you had previously wrapped around his right leg.

"Does it hurt?" You ask, taking the disinfectant out as you begin to clean up his wound again.

"Not that one." For a moment you almost forget that you're not supposed to look up, but you do. You were trying to take a quick glance to his shoulder, instead laying eyes on his face.

"Shit." You bow your head down as quickly, apologizing profusely to Ghost and expecting some sort of angry reaction from him but he remains in complete silent. "I- I didn't even really see anything, forgive me Sir."

"Fucking hell." He growled. "It doesn't matter. Just don't do it again."

It was true. You barely even saw the entirety of his face. Just pale skin, light brows and a crooked nose from being broken too many times.

"Okay." You swallow hard, hands slightly shaking when your skin makes contact with his much colder one.

Ghost shifts in his seat seemingly uncomfortable with something you can't put a finger on. "Think it's time to stitch that one up." You gesture to where his shoulder should be not daring to look again. Fumbling with the needle and thread waiting for his permission. There's no verbal answer to your previous statement, only a low hum that's enough for you to stand up and silently sit on the armrest next to him, his face is turned the other way hiding himself from you. "You know you can just put it back on?"

"Where's the fun in that?"

"Yeah, right." brows lifting in surprise. "Want me to get you something for the pain?"

"Get it done, kid."

Breathing deeply you oblige.

Ghost's whole body tenses with the first sting of the needle piercing through his skin. Your eyes are fixated on your work but every now and then they travel to the back of his head. Blond hair. So you were right; and you can't fight back the grin that appears on your lips. You're marveled by something so simple as that; if only he'd let you come closer...

"I think it's my turn to cook something for you. All this time you've taken care of me."

"You don't have to. I was doing what I was told."

Blinking you tap his shoulder lightly to get his attention. Ghost merely turns so a small part of his side face shows, still not enough for you to see.

"I want to." Even if he says it was his job. Even if it didn't mean anything to him. All you needed was a way to thank him for what he had done. That was who you were. How you were taught to be. Grateful amongst adversity. "I'm a good cook I promise."

One last stitch. One more. And then you're done, and his body relaxes as you come to stand gathering the medical supplies while looking down the floor. Before you leave he reaches out, grabbing your wrist in a gentle yet firm grip. Eyes going wide.

"You can look now." His voice is low and when you turn he's put the balaclava back on. Big brown eyes staring with intensity. "Thanks for what you did back there."

You stutter when you speak, something about the way he holds you makes you forget how to form words.

"I had to. It was my job, although I failed..."

"You didn't fail." He growls. You motion at his wounds, embarrassed because you knew you could do better than that. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Your mouth hangs open, lips quivering when his words reach your ears. All this time you've tried to look calm. To appear strong when in reality everything has gone from bad to worse; it began with the loss of your former team and the people you held close and dear. People you thought would be there for you for eternity. And then all of the sudden there were none. Alone in a dirty side road to die, you guess that in the end there were no good people. Just soldiers following orders. But standing in front of a man who was always portrayed as the devil himself maybe... just maybe not all hope was lost. And not all people were bad. Much to your dismay, Ghost stands from his place on the old couch, rising in all his massive glory as he takes one firm step closer to you. Your hands threaten to let everything fall onto the floor, breath getting stuck in your throat. You're lucky. So, so goddamn lucky that he's your ally. Someone who, in these past weeks has become something you don't dare to name.

"At ease soldier." He commands in a hushed voice. And he's close. Too damn close you feel the heat radiate off of him. It makes your skin burn and hands sweat. "I'm just looking at you."

-

Ghost is terrifying when you look at him in full gear. The white skull mask a legend itself among all the military forces in the world. Hushed stories told during late nights back on base. You had never met him nor had the chance to work with him. All you knew was that. Never in a million years would you have thought you'd have to be his eyes from the distance; to be the one who guards him. Your finger caresses the trigger of your sniper rifle, ready to shoot at anyone who you deemed dangerous.

"Should've brought my own mattress." You huff, shifting your body to find a more comfortable position.

"You've been out for a few weeks. It can't be that bad." His deep voice talks right into your ear.

"My stomach was literally reattached, Lt."

A deep chuckle that doesn't last long enough can be heard.

"If you can't do it let me know. I can take you back to your room, yeah?"

"I'm having a hard time deciding if that's a good or bad thing, sir."

"The latter, Vesper."

Laughing you turn your head, maybe it's the paranoia of being back but you feel someone constantly watching you from behind.

"How's that a bad thing? Thought you liked me in my room."

You can practically hear him suck in a breath and then a muttered curse.

"Not when you're injured and nearly comatose." He grunts after a few seconds of silence.

Oh.

Oh.

"Well then's a good thing i'm here."

The mission was rather simple. Break in, gather some intel and get out. Nothing was supposed to go sideways but it did. It had started with the room where the intel was supposed to be.

"Vesper." You hear Ghost calling you. "There's civilians in here." His voice drops an octave.

"What?" A shiver runs down your spine. "They are not supposed to be there." All you hear is the sound of muffled voices. Cries for help. Ghost swearing under his breath. And then shots are fired.

Your heart races when the first couple of hostiles appear through your scope. Not being one to hesitate you aim to their heads and fire.

"Vesper sitrep." Ghost barks, his end way more chaotic than yours.

"Hostiles coming in groups. You need to get out of there asap."

"Bloody hell." It's all he says before another round of shots is fired. "Meet me at the evac point."

"I'm not leaving you behind!"

Shifting your scope to look through one of the windows you watch as a dark figure runs downstairs. Ghost is trying to make his way to the back exit when another group reaches the abandoned building. You effectively take out the first three men that jump out of the black van. Then another ominous creak of crunching leaves in the god forsaken roof of the house across, rolling on your back your turn at the exact moment a bullet is fired your way, and hitting the the ground where you previously laid prone.

Wide-eyed your face pales as recognition hits your features.

You know him. And he knows you too.

-

His big hand lifts slowly as if asking permission to touch you to which you give a small nod. Ghost is looking at a spot on your left cheek his thumb softly caressing the soft skin of your face. You don't know why but you find yourself leaning into his touch.

"How'd you get this?" An unknown look is all you give him. "There's a scratch, right 'ere." Careful not to hurt you or cause you any pain he keeps his motion.

"Must've been when we ran through the woods." You mumble. "I'm sure I didn't let any of them get me."

"Atta girl." A small pause settles when all you hear is the sound of the night outside. Crickets and the now casual passing of cars far in the distance, returning from work, oblivious to the dangers of the world. Some things they'd never heard of before, things they wouldn't witness in their lifetime. "Better me than you."

You melt at his words. Heart nearly beating out of your chest. It's like your body acts out of pure impulse. Hands —your hands— grab the sides of his neck pulling him down just enough that his forehead touches yours, and you rest there with ragged breathing fanning over his face. Closing your eyes you weigh in your options. Break the moment and tell him about the encounter with the man back in the roof, or let yourself feel him? Because truth be told this could only mean one thing. Ghost wanted to be near you in ways that were not professional at all. And hell you wanted that too from the moment you saw him. You just didn't know it.

If the things you heard were true he didn't let just anyone close to him. What was so special about you? You wanted to ask, but you feared that even if you moved, this thing would be broken and the moment would slip through your fingers.

In a quick movement you go from standing in the middle of the living room to sitting on the nearest table, you shriek as Ghost slots himself between your legs. Seemingly unfazed by what he just did you then see the corner of his eyes crinkle. He's smiling under the mask.

"You're hurt. You'll reopen the wound and..."

"I don't care, sweetheart. I've got you where I want you." A sheepish smile forms on your lips and your cheeks grow hot. "One word. Say it and I will stop."

You nod right before he lifted his mask and his lips crash down on you.

Part 5

TAGS:

@fictionallifestuff

[autisticlalna]

okay ive managed to get some sleep, let's try and explain this in a way that makes sense outside of my brain

so Viking and Ruby both have like. extensive multiverse going on. and all of how it functions is established in a different series, but is still relevant to Skyblock Kingdoms because of whatever the beans Cherruby is up to.

the most basic gist is: they have shared lore where Viking is the manifestation of space and Ruby is the manifestation of time, although i guess only when they're in the same world together? there's also an infinite number of Vikings and Rubys throughout the multiverse, and we have this info because of a version of Viking that has space powers and a version of Ruby that has time powers on Twitch SMP. this is also all connected to the clock and compass that Ruby has on Skyblock Kingdoms, so that's why this is getting upgraded to "oh god this is relevant and i need to explain it" rather than me going "HEY THIS IS WHY I CALL THEM SPACETIME SIBLINGS BTW :D"

for the more complicated explanation, I HAVE DRAWN SOME DIAGRAMS.

behold: a basic Rubyco and a basic VikingPilot. they're siblings! they're also universal constants, seeing as you can't have a functioning world without time and space and these two dinguses represent those foundational aspects. we have no idea how this happened, and 99% of them dont know either, or even know what their roles are. they're just hanging out.

also, like, if one or both of them permadies, stuff presumably explodes. so far this hasn't been like, relevant, but it's been brought up so i should probably include that tidbit somewhere.

along with Ruby and Viking, there's also the Clock and Compass-- the Clock belongs to Ruby, and the Compass belongs to Viking. if neither of them are in a universe together, then the Clock and Compass show up as separate entities. (also they're labeled Tempus and Locus in galactic when we saw them in Twitch SMP, but there was also a bit where the fandom was nicknaming a Ruby and a Viking Tempus and Locus so it gets a bit confusing.)

however, if one of them is missing-- like, say, there's only Ruby and there was never a Viking in that universe-- then the other sibling gets demoted from "load-bearing pillar of the universe" to "normal guy" and the job of stabilizing space and time is instead done by the Clock and Compass, just like if they were both gone. i think.

for any situation where it's only Viking or only Ruby you can disregard this chunk of their lore as "not relevant" - they're a pair, do not separate. this was also the part i was confused on before, and to be honest im still not sure if im getting it right because the phrasing was vaguer than i remembered. we'll see what happens when i start transcribing tsmp lore again.

ANYWAY. we know this because of these dorks:

...specifically the bottom two, but tRuby and tViking are also important here.

Sapphire and Navigator are... sort of a matching pair? Navigator's a mess, let's pretend he's paired with Sapphire. (Sapphire's actual counterpart Viking is missing in action.) they're also the only two we know of so far that a) know about their roles and b) have the powers to prove it.

Sapphire can reset the timeline at-will (mainly to bring tRuby back to life, but has also used this to drag Navigator back when he swapped out), and has knowledge of past and future. Navigator can swap himself and other people between universes, and has knowledge of things going on in other universes involving his counterparts. Sapphire can't leave the universe he's trapped in, and Navigator is bad at anything involving time.

however, neither of them are native to the Twitch SMP universe! we don't know where they're from, but Sapphire got put there as gay baby jail and Navigator pops in to check in on her. tRuby and tViking are also not native to that universe; they were originally from TwitchCon SMP, but Nav felt bad that they're from a short-lived world and transplanted them into TSMP. they're also the only other matching set we know of besides Nav and Sapph, which might be why tRuby is able to remember past timelines and why tViking is aware of things other Vikings have done. also removing them from their home universe was probably a bad idea for that universe's continued survival but it was literally about to end anyways, so,

Nav and Sapph also can't manifest a body outside of their home universe (???), so for gay baby jail to work there needed to be a Ruby for him to possess and, uh, there kinda wasn't one in TSMP. before Nav's intervention, there was the Clock and Compass keeping things stable. (probably a good thing, because tRuby dies a lot and tViking exploded. he got better.)

but out of the Vikings and Rubys we've seen so far, Nav and Sapph are kinda the outliers in category of "actually knowing about and being able to do stuff with their powers". god wait shit fuck this raises even more questions about Navigator but im not going to get into that right now. ANYWAY

so now we've got a mismatched pair! Cherruby isn't from SBK, but we don't know how it got here or what the world it left behind was like. there's a possibility that Cherruby has a corresponding Viking back home (bc she did mention missing family), but there's also moments pointing towards her being solo. also somehow they found the Clock and Compass and has been holding onto them, and they're under observation for reasons probably related to that.

Summertime, meanwhile, presumably has No Fucking Idea. without there being a Ruby native to SBK*, he's been demoted to Normal Guy status and therefore doesn't have to deal with any of this. maybe. it's, uh, getting kinda fuzzier now that the whole "had a flashback to Dominion" thing happened. god i have no idea what's going on with him

(* Cloneby got brought up, but i don't think ze qualifies considering ze was created partway through. and also i don't know if Avid can, like, do that. especially with Cloneby being an imperfect replica, and cc!Ruby drawing attention to the fact that Cloneby doesn't have the clock despite it being part of Cherruby's design.)

you can now see why i decided to include drawings bc otherwise this is an absolute brick of text. TWITCH SMP IS A SERIES WHERE SO MUCH HAPPENS IN IT.

[baby-xemnas]

Sorry if this is something you’ve answered before but do you have any thoughts on how lawbepo get together? You draw them as pinning teens or in an established relationship but do you have any opinions on, like, who would confess first or if either of them would even do that? Bepo’s so self conscious, it seems like it would be real difficult for him to confess. So, do you have views on if one of them got up the courage or if some, like, horrific accident exposured one of their feelings?

(On the joking side, entirely possible peng & shachi, upon realizing all this unresolved sexual tension was gonna get moved to an incredibly small enclosed space were like “time to just sit them down and tell them. This can’t continue on the sub”)

i havent drawn confessions exactly because i feel like if i attempt it will end up like a 5+ page ordeal LMAO

honestly i feel like i change the answer every other time and this will be no different

yes i probably talked about it but repeat questions are fine because i dont always remember what ive spoken about and what i only have thought

found an old reply to this from a year ago

i do have a talk tag where i TRY to put my rambles when i dont forget

to answer your question: i dont think penguin and shachi would do something like that as funny as it is - they would be too scared to force law into anything, not knowing how he would take it because bepo is clearly so important to law and maybe he has A PLAN and is waiting for the right time so if they did lock them in a room together they would ruin it and they arent ready to deal with the reaper percussions of that!

realistically its up to chance. you dont spring something like this on somebody casually, it has to be a deep conversations about feelings or relationships and then one has to gather up their courage and VERY OBVIOUSLY HINT at that "i actually only love you"

imagining them as teens during this

now who does it have to be? i think its bepo who says that he couldnt share his time with somebody even if it was the cutest female bear in the world because he wants to spend all that time with law

law getting hopeful but saying smth like: well you havent met the cutest girl bear in the world yet so who knows maybe youll put me aside

bepo is like NO I WOULD NEVER and starts complimenting law a bunch and talk about how important he is to him (law gritting his teeth not to blush)

law is like yeah same

i think law Could take responsibility and be like YEAH ACTUALLY ITS "LIKE THAT" and open his arms for a hug like "guess we are gonna stay together" and he cant take it when he is hugging bepo who looks up at him like "really? will you let me stay with you captain? with those cute eyes of his that law has to kiss him on the forehead. maybe bepo cries at that LOL

its against bepos nature to refuse any affection from law but he shyly says "you cant do things like that captain" because he loves law so much he wants to kiss him on the lips!!!! and law is like huh?? (cuz bepo never tells him NOT TO do something) "i'm not captain's lover so captain cant do this" "but what if you were, bepo, could i kiss you then?" "what??" "i like bepo the most" and leaning down to kiss him ♥ bepo going full HFSKAJFJFAS????? follows

[pey-no-attention-to-me]

Jjba and mp 100 for the ask game? (If you don't wanna do both, then choose from whatever one you want to do more!)

OKAY FINALLY IM DOING IT LETS GO

as you know I like the silly’s known as serizawa and okuyasu ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

women? Uhhhhhhh hmmm 🤨 for mp100 I’d definitely say tome kurata because ALIENS for jojo I have no idea but I’ve drawn yukako before she’s pretty cool

my least favorite character. STEELY DAN. STEELLY DAN FOR SURE HES JUST SO ARGGGHHHHH for mp 100 I never really hated everybody but Mogami keiji is pretty ARGGG too

I LOVE PRETTY PEOPLE GAHHHHHH Ermes Costello . She’s. She’s just so. HANDSOME!! and ohhhhhhhh pretty people in mp100. Men. Specifically teru I- HES just so. So teru.

UH FUNNY CHARACTERS ARE LITERALLY THE ONLY THING KEEPING MY LIFE TOGETHER RN I LOVE TGEMMM would recomend reigen as a silly and same goes to polnareff like. Have you seen their faces. They are silly.

For mp100 I think the second season but that’s kinda only cause the ova and JOJO PART 4 OBVIOUSLY I LVOE IT L LOVE IT MUCH

whewww remember how I like Okuyasu yeah my favorite jojo episode ever is let’s go get Italian food. No need to explain any further. And UHHHH ONE SECOND I’m back mp100 is a hard choice but I guess season 2 episode 5 ‘Discord~Choices~’ because when I first watched it I SOME HOW SKIPPED THE MOST IMPORTANT EPISODE AND WHEN I REWATCHED IT I WAS SCREAMING LIKE WHAT WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN JUH

HAHA IVE BEEN WAITING FOF THIS!! ROMANCE‼️‼️i can say this with all the certainty in my body that MY FAVORITE SHIPS EVER are JOSUYASU AND SERIREI YOU DONT UNDERSTAND I WANT TO RUN THEM OVER I WANT OT PLAY WOTH THEM LIKE DOLLS AND MAKE THEM KISS AND I WANT TO PIT THEM IM THE OVEN FOR THEIR LAST MOMENTS I WANT TO EXPLODE THEM BU WRAPPING THEM IN TINFOIL AND PUT THEM IN A Solwave Stainless-Steel Commercial Microwave AND I WILL THROW THEM IN A HOLE FULL OF TIGERS AND BEARS AND 10 DIFFERENT THINGS AND

family ship??? huh?? uh I guess shou and his father(president suzuki??(idk his name 😭)) cause they end up like.. working together it’s cool ig and LOVE JOSEPH AND GRANNY ERINAS CONCEPT I know they didn’t get much screen time together but I LOVE THEM

My favorite friend ships uhmmhhhhhhhhhhhhhHAHAHHHA WAITWAIT JOSEPH AND SPEEDWAGON because like… the kid saves him right and speedwagon just what is happening what NO JOSEPH DONT POKE HIS NOSE and I rlly like shou and ritsu’s friend ship(even tho I romantically ship them too) because loud extrovert with no friends + constantly annoyed introvert that also has no friends is the best concept ever

JONATHAN X DIO I DONT EVEN WANT TO SAY THE SHIP NAME ITS SO BAD AND DIO IS NOT HIS JOBRO ITS SPEEDWAGON AND YOU CSNT SAY ORHERWISE AND MOB X REIGEN?!! NOOO?? IDC IF THEIR AGED UP REIGEN MET MOB WHEN HE WAS LIKE NEGATIVE YRS OLD PLEASE STOP

like you said before, jotakak is pretty overrated LIKE KAKYOIN ISNT A BIRD AND HE DOES NOT LAY EGGS for mp100 I wouldn’t say there’s a over hyped ship but I guess serirei but.. I love them.. so they’re fine.. right..

Underhyped is definitely koichi and yukako like they’re cute okay they’re happy and then shou and ritsu because.. lost of ppl like them but nobody draws them or writes about them(or I’m just bad at finding stuff 😭)

unpopular opinion? I don’t like part 5. Like I literally like part 1 better. There’s no specific reason all the characters are cool(i love fugo) but it just feel so rushed and you never get to learn anything about the characters ig and mp100- uh I don’t know 😭 let me think OH!!! Onigawara is the most amazing best character he needed more screen time and why did he have to leave to high school whywhyeheyehywhy I miss him(sobs)

[viking-raider]

Southern Generation - Part IV

Summary: Sy wakes up in Lily’s arms and shows his gratitude for her comforting him. The mysterious caller is revealed, causing Sy to get extremely protective.

Pairing: Captain Syverson/OFC

Word Count: 7,178

Rating: M - Language, Protective!Sy, Domestic Kink, Stalking, Harassment, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Angst, Confession, Smut - Nipple stimulation, intercourse, orgasm, cream pie. 

Inspiration: Always wanted to write a Sy fic and this is a re-work on an old fic I wrote several years ago.

Author’s Note: Thank you for all the love and support, @wondersofdreaming​! Your ideas, suggestions and encouragement mean the world to me, and my stories.

Sy woke the next morning wrapped around a warm body and a steady heart beat in his ear, he tipped his head back and was met with Lily's sleeping face, his head pillowed on her breasts. He smiled, hugging his arms snugger around her waist and sighed, comfortable and peaceful, nuzzling his face into her chest.

Lily moaned softly, making Sy smile against the fabric of the night shirt she was wearing, her hand moved against the broad expanse of his back, fingertips sleepily caressing his spine, unconsciously soothing him, before moving between his shoulder blades, tickling the nape of his neck and rubbing the back of his head with her palm.

He vaguely remembered her calling his name and holding him after his nightmare, whispering into his ear that he was safe and at home, with her. Lily made the choice to bring him to her bed, comforting him even more, until he fell asleep, and for the first time in years, Sy actually dreamt about something other than war and endless spaces of bloody sand.

Reaching up, Sy brushed his fingers through her bangs, smiling. “My Angel.” He whispered, not wanting to wake her.

Carefully unwrapping himself from around her, Sy slipped out of bed and gingerly covered Lily up, before tip toeing downstairs to the kitchen. Scratching the back of his head for a moment, Sy moved about the kitchen, setting up the coffee maker, pulled out the skillet and started making breakfast. He figured she had been making him breakfast every morning for the last several months, it was time for him to return the favor.

So, Sy went all out, once he had everything made, he brought it upstairs to her.

Lily took a deep breath and moaned, stretching and rolling onto her back, but found Sy was no longer in bed with her. She sat up, panicked that something had happened to him, and was about to get out of bed to look for him, when he appeared in the bedroom door, relieved he was all right.

“Morning.” He smiled, finding her sitting up.

“Did you make breakfast?” She frowned as he approached her side of the bed.

“I did.” He nodded, setting her steaming cup of tea on her bedside table. “I thought, since you always make me breakfast, that I'd make you breakfast this go around.” Sy explained, setting the tray of food over her lap.

“What's better than breakfast in bed?”

“Nothing currently comes to mind.” Lily smiled, a soft blush on her cheeks, actually pleasantly surprised at this change of events, touched at Sy’s sweet gesture.

“I didn't think so.” Sy chuckled, pulling up the chair that was at a small desk in her room and sat down, balancing his own plate of food in his lap.

“So, what's on your agenda today, Captain?” She asked, taking a sip of her tea and was surprised to find it was exactly to her liking.

“I think, it's time I started working on the roof.” He replied, bringing his fork to his mouth. “I want to at least give it some temporary patches, before the weather turns.” He told her, after swallowing. “It'll also give me a chance to find out what all the problems with it are, and if I'll need to re-roof it.”

“I hope not.” Lily frowned, washing down some of her food with a gulp of tea.

“Well, from what I've seen on the ground, it looks to be the original roof that was put on when the house was built.” He chuckled at her, setting his empty plate on her nightstand. “That was nearly a century ago.”

“Unless, you know about it being replaced since then?” He asked her, tilting his head.

“The realtor didn't mention it to me.” Lily replied, searching her mind for any scrap of memory of the day she bought the place.

“That's all right.” Sy assured her, gently touching her hand. “I'll get it done, don't you worry.”

Lily smiled at him, turning her hand to thread her fingers with his. “I'm not worried, since you're the one on the case.” She replied, softly.

Sy grinned at her, bringing her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers, before letting go and collecting their plates. “You know, what would you say, if I managed to install a dishwasher for you?” He asked, pausing in the doorway of her bedroom.

“I have a dishwasher.” Lily giggled, holding up her hands and wiggling her fingers at him.

“You know what I mean, sugar butt.” He laughed, smirking even broader at her.

Lily shrugged, still giggling at him, her cheeks coloring at his nickname. “I don't know, Bear. I've never had one before.”

“Well then, Angel, I'll riddle that one out for you.” He promised in a soft voice.

“I believe you.” She whispered back, giddy, and not for a dishwasher.

“I'm going to check the mail.” Lily said, drying her hands on a dish towel, after washing the dishes from lunch.

“All right.” Sy nodded, still sitting at the table.

Sy had stood to refill his coffee cup, when the phone rang. Biting his lip and glancing out of the kitchen, he saw Lily was too far down the driveway to call her back to answer it, so he picked it up instead; clearing his throat.

“Moore residence.” He spoke into the receiver.

“She's a sweet thing, isn't she?” A sinister voice asked from the other end.

“Excuse you?” Sy barked, a flash of hot anger bursting through his body.

“Oh yes.” The voice chuckled, incredibly delighted. “She is sweet as a Lily, so pure and good.”

“Who is this?” Sy demanded with a deep growl, his teeth gritted and bared as he gripped the handle of the phone even tighter in his hand.

“She's mine, you know.” They growled back at Sy, breathing heavily, their own anger mounting. “She's always been mine and she will always be mine.”

“Not anymore.” Sy hissed back and slammed the phone down in its cradle.

“Sy?” Lily frowned, coming into the kitchen as he hung up the phone. “Who was that?”

“I don't know, you tell me?” He replied, turning towards her, brows drawn together.

“I'm not the one that answered it, Austin.” She countered, shaking her head, confused by his anger.

“It was some guy, said you were his, always had been and would be.” Sy told her, pushing his jaw forward.

Lily's eyes glassed over, letting out a shuddering breath and started trembling. Sy blinked at her, his anger at the caller's words melting away to alarmed concern. He took a step forward, reaching out for her, but Lily stumbled away from him, tears finally spilling free.

“Lily.” He whispered softly, his chest tight. “Easy.” He cooed at her, licking his lips.

“I'm not his, not anymore.” She whimpered, shaking her head. “Why can't he just leave me be.”

Sy blinked at her, frowning harder. “What?”

“Nothing.” Lily mewled, biting her lip.

“No, come on.” He coaxed her, resting his hand on her arm and gently pulled her against him. “Tell me.” He whispered, gently rubbing her back.

“I thought I got away from him.” She sniffled against his shirt. “Thirteen hundred miles away from him. I was so careful—so careful.” She mumbled, hands clinging onto the sides of his shirt. “I don't-I don't know how he found me—unless...”

“Unless?” Sy frowned, still slowly rubbing her back and trying to process what she was telling him. “Sit down.” He said, moving them towards the breakfast table and pulled out a chair for her, before bringing the other one around from the other side to sit beside her.

“Start at the beginning.”

Lily cleared her throat and stared down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I was born and raised in Middleburg, Virginia. You know, that I'm an only child and that my mom died, when I was born. I was raised by my grandparents, because my dad was in and out of my life, before just finally disappearing from it, when I was nineteen.” She explained to him, licking her lips.

“He blamed me for my mom's death.” She added, quietly.

Sy reached out and rested his hand on her thigh, squeezing it gently, and gave her a sweet smile.

“When I was seventeen, I met a boy at church, Jak.” Lily continued to explain to him. “It was the only time I really got to interact with others, my grandparents were strict, homeschooling me and only really letting me out of the house, unless they were with me, which was usually only for church on Sunday.” She fidgeted, shyly. “He was the only boy to show any interest in me, which didn't and did surprise me. The little house on the prairie dresses my grandma made me wear, and the glasses I had back then, you could see the moon through them.” She chuckled, cheeks colored.

Sy smiled back at her, even picturing her as a little girl like that, he still found her beautiful.

“But, Jak didn't care, or at least he didn't say or show he did. I would sneak out at night to meet him in the apple orchard my grandfather grew. It had been in our family since the Revolutionary War, the land was given to my, how many times, great-grandfather as payment for his service in the war.”

“I bet it's beautiful.” Sy commented, warmed at the thought.

“They are, so many of the trees are the original ones that were planted.” She smiled back, picturing the orchard in her mind. “The first one that was ever planted, after he cleared away the land, is still there and yielding, there's a plaque staked by its roots, and people come from all around to see it and the orchard, the Warren Apple.”

Sy rested back in his chair. “Your family owns the Warren Orchard Company? You're one of those Warrens?”

“I am.” She nodded, smiling proudly at that fact, but it vanished.

“Anyway, Jak and I would sneak every moment we could to see each other. He even got a job, during the summer, in the orchard, so we could see each other even more.” She took a deep breath, letting it out softly. “But, a year after we met and started being sweet on each other, my grandparents lodged a missionary for his two year mission in our ward. Jak thought he and I were getting close, that my grandparents had actually brought him to live with us, so he and I could court and marry.”

“He grew jealous and possessive. I was stupid, naive and young, I didn't know what was happening, that he was being abusive, until it was almost far too late.”

“What happened, that caused you to realize it?” Sy asked, tilting his head at her.

“I met Jak in the orchard one night, when I was twenty, the day after the missionary went back home to Michigan, because his two years were up. When I got there, Jak was pacing, already angry. Livid. When he saw me, he started yelling about how he had seen me kissing the missionary, how we practically ate each other's faces on the back porch, while everyone else was in the house, during his farewell party.” She said, glancing out the window behind the breakfast table.

“Of course, I hadn't been. Matt, the Missionary, and I had been on the back porch together, I had gone out there to get away from the press of all the people and he went out there to check on me. We had hugged, only the once, since doing so isn't really acceptable, two not courting, unchaperoned kids. But, we did nothing more, before going back inside. The truth didn't matter to Jak though, he had his version of what he saw and it was unchangeable.” Lily bit her lip and gripped Sy's wrist as his hand still laid on her thigh. “He lost his temper and hit me, but in my love sick stupidity, I didn't break it off there or tell my grandparents about it.”

“Instead, I enrolled in a university for Photography and Web Design, moved out of my grandparents' place and into one with him, like an idiot.”

“You weren't an idiot, Lily.” Sy told her, shaking his head and slipping his hand into hers. “It's more common than you think.”

“I know it is.” She sighed, clinging onto his hand.

“He only got worse and it got harder for me to get my school work done, with him accusing me that I was sleeping with my project partners, even teachers.” She huffed, shaking her head at his allegations, that now sounded so ridiculous. “The straw that broke the camel's back was,” She paused, biting and licking her lips, fighting down a bubble of emotions and memories. “One of my project mates called to ask me about the faux website we were designing for a fake company we had to make up, cause she wanted to know what time was good for us to meet up, and Jak answered the phone, claimed he heard a guy in the background, throwing the phone across the living room and went ballistic, saying I was having her call me to set up a time for me and the guy he heard, to try and fool him.”

“He spent the next hour going to town on me.” She said, glancing up at him, the hint and meaning in her eyes.

“Afterwards, he went to work and I packed a bag. I had some money from the family orchard business, so I took a good portion of it, bought a greyhound bus ticket to a cousin I was close to in New Jersey, Maggie, and stayed with her, knowing he wouldn't find me there, my grandparents wouldn't think I'd go there, and she wouldn't ever rat on me. While I was there, I petitioned for a name change, from Liliana Warren to Lily Ana Moore, and finished my degree, then found this place and moved out here.”

“So, how do you think he found you?” Sy asked, worried about her safety and angry that this asshole had the audacity to hurt her and wanted to try and hurt her again, but he kept a lid on his temper, not wanting to frighten her anymore than she already was.

“I've been keeping tabs on my grandparents, mostly through my cousin.” Lily answered, biting her lip. “She called me a year ago, to tell me that my grandmother had a stroke, a pretty bad stroke at that. She's apparently wheelchair bound now. Maggie went down there to visit them, and my grandfather was talking about how he needed someone to work on the company website, when Maggie let it slip that I have a web design business.”

“Oh.” Sy let out, eyes wide.

“Yeah.” She nodded back. “So, of course, they got upset, understanding that Maggie knew what had happened to me and where I was and all that. She called afterwards, apologizing up and down to me for it. She didn't tell them where I was or anything like that, just that I was safe and fine, and if I wanted to contact them, I would.”

“Did you?”

“I did.” Lily sighed, voice tight. “I figured after four years, I owed them a call.”

“So, do you think they told Jak?”

“I don't know.” She shrugged. “But, a week after I called them, I started getting hang up calls, then calls where no one would say anything for a few minutes, before hanging up. Then, two months ago, I got a call that was different from the others, he said something to me, and a month ago, he said something being soon.”

The wires connected in Sy's brain. “That's what caused you to take all those pills.”

Lily gulped and bit her lip, eyes burning, as she nodded her head. “Ye-ah.” She choked, fear and anxiety starting to mount inside of her again.

“Hey, hey.”

Sy cooed, wrapping his arms around her and pulled her into his lap, hugging her against his chest. “It's all right, Lily. It's going to be all right, I promised to protect you and I will. You are safe with me, you will always be safe with me, whatever the cost.” He whispered in her ear, holding her close and planning ways and means to protect her.

“Sy?” Lily called from the open door of her bedroom, just as Sy stepped out of the hall bathroom, in nothing, but a pair of black boxers.

“Lily?” He replied, rubbing the towel over his head, and looked up at her, lifting a brow, inquisitively.

Lily rested her hand on the handle of her door and stepped sideways, giving a little motion of her head into her room, a soft and offering expression on her face. Sy blinked at her, surprised, then down at Aika, who sat in the doorway of his room, feeling like he was picking what lady to sleep with for the night.

He tilted his head at Aika and gave her a sympathetic expression.

“Sorry, Girl.” He whispered to the Shepherd, turning towards Lily.

Lily chuckled at him, smiling and shaking her head as he passed by her and into her room. “You can come too, Aika.” She called to her, then turned into her room.

“You're cool with this?” Sy asked, eyes motioning to her bed.

“It was my idea, wasn't it?” She smiled at him, then stepped inside her closet for a moment and came back in a t-shirt-like nightie with Mickey Mouse on it, before pulling down the blankets and crawling into bed.

“It was.” He nodded, then laid down with her, covering up.

Lily scooted closer to him and Sy draped his arm over her waist, tucking her against him and she let him lay his head on her chest, stroking his arm. She was comfortable with the warm weight of his body against hers, the clean scent of his skin and hair from his shower. She felt Sy's body slowly melt into hers as he fell asleep, it had been her plan. Lily knew there was a high likelihood of Sy having another episode or nightmare, but figured, if he was there, with her, already safe and comfortable in her arms, he wouldn't have it.

That was her deepest hope, at least.

But, the next thing Lily knew, she was being jerked roughly off the bed and pinned underneath Sy's mountainous weight, his heavy and hot breath puffing against the side of her face as he blanketed her with his body, clearly startled and on high alert. The room lit up with a quick flash of lightning and the furious sound of rain beating on all parts of the house filled the bedroom around them.

“Austin.” She gasped, grasping the back of his arms, nails digging into his sweaty skin, thinking he had been set off by the noise of the sudden storm. “Aust-”

“Ssshhh.” He hushed her, lips brushing her temple, the hairs of his beard tickling her skin. “Stay here.” He whispered into her ear, then moved off of her and out of the room, Aika sitting in the open doorway and growling into the darkness of the hallway after him.

Lily sat up on her elbows, knowing that what was happening couldn't have been from one of Sy's nightmares or the storm, because Aika wouldn't be acting like this, she was angry, like she was daring something Lily couldn't see to try and cross her. But, nothing came, not even Sy, and Lily was starting to get worried. So, getting up, she edged around Aika and tip toed downstairs, jerking at another boom of thunder and crack of lightning, until she found Sy standing in the entryway.

“Austin?” She called out to him, over the sound of the rain, which sounded much louder downstairs.

“I told you to stay upstairs.” He barked, not looking back at her.

“What's wrong?” She asked, knowing there had to be something, by the tone of his voice.

“Nothing, just go back to bed.”

Narrowing her eyes, Lily stepped closer to him and her eyes grew wide, seeing what had caused Sy to wake up and react like he had. The large bay window in the den that faced out onto the porch and the front of the property was smashed, the glitter of the broken glass shined in the lightning strikes and left the outline of the brick amongst them, the cause of the broken window. Lily's eyes snapped out the living room window, expecting to see someone, not just someone, but Jak, to be standing out in the yard, staring back at them. But, there was no one, but her and Sy's cars. Her heart started to race and pound, making her feel dizzy and lightheaded, trembling so hard she almost lost her balance, but caught herself on the back of the couch.

Sy turned and grabbed her, picking her up in his arms and carried her back up to bed. “Stay here.” He ordered her, pointing a stiff finger at her, then went back downstairs.

Going out back, Sy grabbed a large piece of plywood he had bought in preparation for repairing the roof and instead used it to board up the broken window, until the storm passed and morning came, so he could find a piece of glass to replace it, leaving him and the den floor mostly wet. He moped the den floor and laid out nearly every towel Lily had in the house in hopes the old floorboards wouldn't warp under the water damage.

He stepped out onto the porch for a moment, glaring into wet dark. “This is my house now.” He growled, knowing Jak was still out there somewhere nearby. “My girl.” He hissed, before turning back inside, going up to the guest room to change into a dry pair of boxers and joined Lily back in her bed.

“It was him.” She mumbled, hugging her pillow to her chest. “It had to be him.”

Sy sighed softly, locking his arms around her waist and hugged her to his chest, curving his body around hers. He didn't know what to say to her, they both knew it had to be Jak, who else would have thrown a brick through someone's window in the middle of a storm like this one, especially after all the other incidents over the last several months; all the lines drew back to Jak on his unhealthy, possessive rampage to reclaim Lily as his own. Sy was afraid that if he verbalized his agreement with her, it would only inflate her already inflamed fear of the obvious.

So, he just clutched her tighter to him, pressing his lips to her shoulder and squeezing his eyes shut against the bright flashes of lightning.

“Lily, I'm going to go to town, I have something I need to pick up.” He told her, searching the living room for his car keys.

“I thought you already ordered the new windowpane?” Lily called back, appearing out of the kitchen, where she was washing the dishes.

“I did.” He nodded, he had found a shop that he could order a replacement windowpane for the den window that morning, but it wouldn't be ready until the next day. “This is for something else.” He told her, finding his keys under a magazine on the coffee table.

“What are you going for, then, Bear?” She asked, tilting her head at him.

Sy paused and regarded her. “Don't worry about it, Angel. I'll be back in an hour.” He told her, then, went out.

“Okay.” Lily frowned, glancing out the living room window, the thunder and lightning had passed during the early morning, but it was still raining cats and dogs.

Sighing, Lily turned back into the kitchen, taking a bucket and mop out of the utility closet, filled the bucket with warm water and soap, before getting down to mopping the floors, with nothing else to do in the current weather.

Sy rushed out to his truck, but was still almost half soaked by the time he settled himself in the driver's seat. Turning on the car and cranking on the heat, Sy pulled off the property and headed towards Celina. He pulled into the small parking center the small town had, scanning the rain blurred signs, looking for the one he was heading for, before opening the door and rushing towards it, pulling open the door, with an electric ding, announcing his presence.

“How can I help you?” the shop owner asked, coming out of a small room in the back and stopped behind a long glass case.

“Yeah, I'm looking for something specific.” Sy replied, stopping on the other side of the glass case, a look of understanding in both men's eyes.

“What specifics would that be?”

“Taurus, PT111 G2, 9mm.” Sy rattled off with familiar ease.

“Do you have a license and ID?” The store owner asked, eyes scanning the case between them.

“Then, some.” Sy laughed, pulling out his wallet to show the man his qualifications.

“You're a retired Captain.” The man noted, seeing Sy's military ID.

“That I am.” Sy chuckled, grinning with some pride.

The store owner got Sy squared away with the weapon he wanted, a secure case and a couple rounds of ammo, while also chattering about the military, being a retired Staff Sergeant himself. Getting back into his truck, he put the case under the passenger seat, pausing to stare at it for a moment,emotions and thoughts brewing inside of him, then shook them off. Satisfied, Sy went back home to Lily, finding her dusting the living room, when he came in, carrying the case and sat it down on the coffee table.

Lily paused, dust rag poised above the mantelpiece, staring at the case. “Is that what I think it is?” She asked, finally looking up at him.

“If you think it's a gun, then yes.” Sy replied, sitting down on the couch and tugging on the soaked laces of his boots.

“Why,” She gulped, arm dropping to her side. “did you buy a gun and bring it here?”

“Because, I wanted to and as a precaution.” He answered her, yanking his boots off.

“A precaution?”

“There is a fucking asshole out there.” Sy barked, jerking his arm up and finger pointing out the window. “Trying to hurt you.” His finger moved to her, in emphasis. “I am a big man. I'm a strong man. I've killed and subdued more than one man with my bare hands, but a personal cost.” He explained to her, standing and jerking up his shirt, showing her a couple of scars on his sides and chest, some were round and puckered, gunshot wounds, others were stripes, like stab wounds.

“If that prick decides to come into this house, to try and put his hands on you. That,” He pointed down to the gun case. “is going to be the first thing he wants to meet, because if he has to get close enough to me, that I need to put my hands on him, then they will be that last thing he will ever feel.” He told her, chest heaving as he got worked up over the situation.

Lily gulped at him, biting her lip, a flash of fear in her eyes at his passionate words, seeing a vein of rage that Jak had also been capable of.

“I just want to protect you.” He said softly, taking deep breaths, trying to calm himself down; seeing he had scared her.

“I know you do, Austin.” She whimpered back, gulping, eyes shiny. “I know you do.”

Sy moaned, something cold pressing into his neck. “Hm, Lily.” He chuckled, scrunching his head and shoulders together, grinning as the cold and wet touched his bare chest, making him grunt and wiggle away. “Why are you so col-” He started to laugh, opening his eyes, only to meet the soulful and tawny colored eyes of Aika.

“Aika, what are ya doin' here?” He frowned, and sat up, finding it was just him and the German Shepherd in the bed, Lily nowhere in sight. “Lily?” He called out, turning his head towards the master bathroom, but it was empty.

Panic filled Sy as he yanked the blankets back and pounded down the stairs into the living room, then the den. Sy squeezed his eyes shut, taking deep breaths and clenching his hands in and out of fists, trying to keep himself cool and calm, before going into the kitchen, hearing the screen of the back door knocking against the door frame, and found the main back door was ajar.

“What is she doing?” He whispered to himself, biting his lip and looking back, considering the option of going back upstairs and getting the gun, but something in his gut told him he wouldn't need it.

Opening the door, Sy stepped out onto the back porch, a shiver wracking his body as a strong gust of rainy wind rushed by him. He narrowed his eyes, scanning the drenched backyard, the tall, unruly and uncut grass bent from the pelting of the rain and gusts of wind, he caught a quick movement to his left and turned in that direction, stepping off the porch and followed after it, towards the barn, just catching the billowing fabric of Lily's white nightie, vanishing inside.

“Lily, what are you doing in here?” He called out, pushing open the barn door a bit more. “Lily?” He called again, frowning as he crossed the barn and found her huddled in one of the old horse stalls. “What are you doing in here, Angel?” He cooed at her, shaking his head, droplets of rain running down both of their faces, and watched her melt into the corner.

Lily panted, her back pressed against the warped and worn wall behind her, arms pressed to her chest, her nightie so soaked, it was almost see through. Sy bit his lip and gulped, slowly crouching down. He knew what was going on, he had seen and suffered things like this a million times over the last ten plus years. She was having a PTSD episode, running away from the terror that was inside her head, trying to hide and find somewhere safe from it. Everything over the last several months with Jak stalking and harassing her was really starting to affect her, finally breaking her it seemed.

“I'm not going to hurt you, love.” He said softly, keeping his voice soft and low. “Come here.” He gulped, opening his arms to her and biting his lip with apprehension. “It's all right. You know, you can trust me, Sugar.” He whispered, nodding his head as she slowly unfolded herself and crawled over to him.

“Hey, Angel.” Sy cooed, sighing softly, and closed his arms around her, pressing his lips to the top of wet her head. “Ssshh.” He hushed her, rubbing her back and cupping the back of her head, feeling her tears add to the raindrops on his chest.

“I c-can-can't ta-take it an-anymore.” She sobbed, trembling in his arms, overcome with emotions and cold.

“We'll get through this, Angel.” He whispered to her, cupping her chilled cheeks in his hands and tilted her head back to look up at him. “We will get through this. You and I will get through this together. Everything will work out.”

Lily shook her head, her pale lips trembling. “N-no, it wo-won't. He-he always g-gets what h-he wants. All-always.” She mewled, whining. “I don't kn-know why I-I thought I c-could ge-get away.”

Sy's expression was hard for a moment, before he brought their faces together and kissed her, deeply. Lily stiffened against him, taken off guard by his kiss, but she didn't pull away or push him away. Gulping, she shyly returned his kiss, resting her hands on him, feeling the skin of his sides jump and react to her icy touch.

“I've wanted to kiss you.” Sy said, pulling back. “For such a long time.” He admitted, looking into her eyes. “Since that day on the porch, when you woke me up.”

“Since, you gave me your hoodie at the fair.” She whispered back, licking her lips, the warmth of Sy's still lingering on them.

Sy leaned forward, kissing her gently and brushing his fingers through her dripping hair, Lily pushing forward to deepen it for a moment, letting out a breathy whimper. Sy smirked, then looked down at the floor between them, it was still strewn with decades old hay and dirt. He held up a finger and stood, bumping around in the dark barn before a scratching sound sounded among the patter of rain on the metal barn roof. A moment later, a teeny glow filled the space and Sy approached where Lily was still kneeling, holding an old, beat up, oil lantern he knew was in the barn from his many searches of the space, hanging it up on a bent and rusty nail on the stall wall, then disappeared for another moment.

“Stand up.” He said, motioning her out of the stall, holding something in his arms.

Lily frowned at him, but stepping out of the stall and out of his way, catching a glimpse of what it was, it was one of the drop clothes he bought for when he painted the house, keeping the paint off the new porch. Sy unfolded the drop cloth over the dirty hay and stall floor, making sure it was comfortable, then turned back to her.

“How gentlemanly.” Lily complimented him.

“I am a Southern boy.” Sy chuckled, letting his Southern drawl deepen, and wrapping his arm around her waist, pulling her against him. “Who's in love with Southern Lady.”

Lily blushed as Sy kissed her again, hugging her against him and up off her feet, turning around and slowly dropped to his knees, gently laying her back on the situated drop cloth. Lily wrapped her arms around Sy's neck, moaning softly against his lips, feeling the fabric of her nightie rub against her cold hardened nipples as Sy moved to kiss down to her neck, sinking his teeth into her delicate skin and let out a loud moan, pushing up against him.

“Austin!” She cried out, pressing her cheek to his ear as he continued to bite and suck on her neck, his beard tickling and rubbing against the skin underneath her jaw, leaving it red and sensitive.

Sy chuckled, loving the sound of her calling out his name with the metal patter of rain, his hand gliding over the soaked material of her nightie, bunching and hiking it up out of his way, pressing his palm against her side, rubbing his big hands all over her exposed body, grunting and growling into her neck, like a wild grizzly bear, finally getting his claws on his prized catch. His big mitts were on her plump breasts almost instantly, squeezing and kneading them, rubbing the rough pads of his thumbs over the sensitive nubs of her nipples, making her moan and whimper, fidgeting beneath him and rubbing her legs together, adding to the growing slickness between them.

“You sound so sweet.” Sy moaned back, pulling away from her neck, a set of dark teeth marks left behind, dipping his head for a moment to swirl his tongue around one of her nipples.

“Sy.” She whined, gulping down a moan. “Sy, please.”

“Oh.” He smiled, impishly. “You like that?” He asked, flicking her erect nipple with the tip of his tongue and watched her partially melt. “Your sweet, sensitive, little buds.” He cooed, then closed his lips around one of them, suckling gently, rubbing and rolling his tongue against it.

“Ah, shit!” Lily gasped, gripping his shoulders, eyes rolling and fluttering back into her head, heels digging into the fabric of the drop cloth. “God damn it, Austin.” She snapped, pressing her palms to the back of his head, holding his mouth to her breasts, her moans and whimpers filled the barn, pushing against him, egging and begging him to keep going, her breathing growing rugged and labored, moans becoming more urgent and reckless.

“Ah, fuck fuck fuck.” She cried out. “Suck them harder.” She coaxed and demanded. “Oh shit! Please, Austin!!” She gasped suddenly, body going rigid with a soft tremor.

Sy pulled away from her and dripped a hand between her trembling thighs, finding an extremely wet patch there. “So, you come, when you get your pretty breasts sucked.” He grinned, fully turned on and impressed, licking her juices off his fingers and palm.

“I've also never heard you say such naughty words.” He added, teasingly.

Lily chuckled, slowly recovering and smiling shyly up at him.

“Oh, it's too late to get shy now, Angel.” Sy laughed, leaning down and kissed the corner of her mouth. “Your secret is out.” He continued to tease her, playfully bouncing her boobs in his palms.

“And, I'm not letting you off.”

“I'm going to regret this, I can just feel it now.” Lily huffed, shaking her head, but her smile gave away her true feelings.

“Yes, you are.”

Sy chuckled, his hand dipping back between her legs, rubbing her still dripping folds with his calloused fingers, melting her into a puddle of weak and vulnerable whimpers. “You're so sensitive and sound so sweet.” He cooed at her, licking his lips and watching her face. “So, so sweet.” He panted, mouth slightly ajar, slipping his free hand into his damp boxers, curling his fingers around his thick and rock hard shaft, giving it a few shallow strokes.

Lily's eyes drifted down the length of her sweaty body, watching Sy work his cock inside his underwear and felt herself shiver in want and anticipation of it. She licked her lips and looked up at him, their eyes in a silent communication of what they both wanted. Sy shifted, yanking off his boxers to kneel between Lily's legs, wrapping them around his waist, her hips and bottom resting atop his thighs, with the small of her back lifted off the drop cloth beneath her.

“You're sure?” Sy panted, gulping thickly and already breaking out into a sweat, staring at her with wide eyes and blown out pupils.

“Yes.” Lily sighed, nodding her head vigorously at him. “God, yes.” She moaned, squeezing her legs around his waist.

Sy smirked, pressed a hand to her hip, pushing it up her side to palm one of her breasts, squeezing and rubbing it, while taking the base of his cock in his other hand, pumping it a few times, rubbing the fat and cut tip against her still wet pussy, slowly slipping between her folds, brushing her entrance and pushing inside. Lily let out a moaning sigh through her nose, feeling his wide girth stretch her open far more than she had ever been before. Her toes curled and squeezed his hips between her calves and thighs, back arching and hips shifting against the nearly uncomfortable burn of his length being buried ever deeper inside her core. Sy tilted his head at her, bracing a hand on the drop cloth, beside her head, and leaned over her, causing Lily to let out a raspy gasp as his cock changed angles inside of her, and kissed her, slow and passionately, still pushing his hips into her.

“You are so beautiful.” He rasped against her lips, nibbling on her pouty bottom lip.

“Austin.” She whimpered back, breathy, hooking her arms under his arms and pressing her palms flat against tense and sweaty back, nails digging into his cool skin. “Austin.” She chanted, softly, rubbing her nose against his.

“Lily.” Sy moaned back, finally flush inside of her, and rocked into her, taking his time and enjoying her heavenly warmth wrapped around his cock, like a toasty sleeve. “I love you, Lily.” He whispered into her ear, kissing her jaw and cheek.

Lily blushed and let out an airy chuckle, hiding her face in his neck and broad shoulder, hugging her arms and legs tighter around his body, clinging onto him for dear life and squeezed her eyes shut, taking in the sound of Sy's heavy breathing and loud moans and groans, grunting, and sighing out her name, the still steady pitter-patter of the fat raindrops on the old, rusted tin roof and sun-kissed wood walls, all mixed with her own sounds of pleasure.

“Sy?” Lily whispered, after their shared climax, still feeling the euphoric and relaxing pleasure it gave both of them, as she laid on the drop cloth, half tucked underneath Sy's body for warmth in the drafty barn.

“Hm?” He hummed back, nosing her hair and took a deep breath.

Lily smiled, feeling the vibration in his chest, nuzzling back into him. “I love you too, Austin.” She whispered, turned her head to look back at him.

Sy lifted his head and looked down at her, a smile slowly pulling across his lips, an excited and giddy feeling in the pit of his stomach, reaching out to gently brush her hair out of her face, picking out a few bits of straw that happened to get stuck in it from earlier; before oh-so-tenderly kissing her.

“You have no idea how happy that makes me, Angel.” He murmured against her cheek.

“I'm guessing as happy as it makes me, Bear.” She chuckled back, kissing the tip of his nose.

Lily softly stirred just before dawn, cradled in Sy's arms as he carried her out of the barn, the rain finally letting up, and into the house. He carried her upstairs to her room and gently laid her down on her bed, letting him help her out of her still damp nightie and tossed it through the open door of her master bathroom, before crawling into bed with her.

Both of them were out cold before the blankets settled around them, unaware of the audience they had a good deal of the night.

[yandere-dark-cupid]

If you’re requests are open can I get a Yandere Zuko x fem reader where after the war he looks for his darling by making his guards track her down but without anyone knowing bc he doesn’t want ppl to think that he’s back into his old ways again and keeps her in the palace

Ok Angel 💜👌💜. If you want, I could continue this as a mini part to part scenario series if I have the time T.Angel. There is just so many ideas worming around this concept and just think of the crazy things the darling and Zuko is going to go through, while also keeping both of their identities on the veeery low-key. Just let me know Angel 😊☕💜.

Also everyone is going to be aged up to 18+ Btw.

Side note: For the sake of this scenario, the darling will be from the Southern Water tribe. If this Angel decides to let me continue this as a mini scenario series, then the both of us are going to talk about if the darling can be a Waterbender or not.

Warning ⚠!!!: Their is going to be some slight Nsfw in this.

Yandere Zuko: A Dragon's treasure

Five weeks. It has been five weeks since you've went missing. Once the war has ended, Zuko was planning to propose to you. But every since his coronation of being crowned the new FireLord, you just up and vanished. It was like you were never there in the first place. And Zuko has been scattering everywhere in the palace and Fire nation to find you or some type of clue. But nothing. There was nothing there. You really covered your tracks, didn't you?

Right now Zuko was in his thrown room. He was fuming- No steaming with rage. If anyone were to walk in to the room, they'll notice it was boiling in there. He tried to look everywhere in the palace. Even outside the palace. But to no avail. Zuko couldn't find you. You've made it clear that you don't want to be with him or any where near him with this type of stunt you've pulled.

Zuko took a seat on his thrown. His hands was on his head, just about ready to pull his hair out and shout in frustration. But then a knock on the door stop him. " *Frustrated sigh* State your name and your business." Zuko said with spite and a hint of venom in his voice. The person behind the door flinched at his tone of voice. "It's me Sir. The guard you put in charge of the search party for Ms.Y/N". Zuko perked up at the mention of his missing lover's name. " Come in. " said Zuko. With out a second thought, the guard entered the room. She bowed down in respect for her FireLord.

" FireLord Zuko I have an update about Ms.Y/N's whereabouts. " Said the guard. She almost stuttered. The guard noticed how extremely hot it was in the thrown room. It was a clear sign that FireLord Zuko was pissed out of his mind. " Well, " Zuko said in annoyance and anger. Zuko was beyond angry at this point. He was a whole entire cluster fuck of emotions right now. " M-me and m-my crew found some people who could be connected to Ms.Y/N's disappearance , your majesty. " Stuttered the guard in slight fear. Zuko quirked up an eyebrow at what the guard said.

Ah. So the guard managed to find the ones responsible for his darling's vanishment, or at least had some part in it. " Bring them in. " Zuko said. The guard only merely nodded, not wanting to meet the FireLord's intimidating gaze. The guard got off their knees and went to call the other guards, to bring out the people that played some part of the darling going missing. The other guards quickly brought out four other people. Those people was tied up, bounded, and blind folded. The people was visibly quivering in fear. They were very confused and scared on what they did to upset the FireLord.

The four guards forcefully pushed the four people down to the floor. Each guard took off each person's blind fold. In front of the four people, there sat the FireLord in all his glory. FireLord Zuko glared down at the 4 people in a burning gaze. So these disgusting pathetic excuses of human was responsible for his darling going missing. Zuko scoffed at the thought. After a painful intimidating stare down, Zuko finally spoke. " So your the ones held responsible for Y/N's disappearance. " Zuko spat out to them with his voice dipped in poison.

" I-if y-you're talking about a someone that has (h/c), (e/c), and (s/c) then t-they came to m-my store to buy clothes." The woman stuttered in fear. Zuko stayed quite and only listened. " If you're talking about the same person; they came to my food stand and brought some food. " the old man said quickly in fear of what the FireLord would do to him if he took so long to explain himself. Zuko only merely quirks his eyebrow. " Y-yeah, that same person came to my Shop and bought some bags and extra equipment as his they were going on a trip. " The man said while sweating nervously. " The same person came to shack a-and brought some w-weapons. " Said the short lady in fear. Zuko only hmmed at what they said.

" So you're telling me the lady you just described went to all of your stores and shops to buy something. " Zuko said still glaring down the four people. " Y-yes. " the woman squeaked in fear. The old man only nodded quickly. " Mhm. " both the man and woman said. Zuko got up from his thrown and began to walk down to his stand. " What should we do with them you highness? " Said one of the guards. " Bring them to the dungeon. I will decide what to do with them later. " Said Zuko. " I-I don't understand what did we do wrong. " Stuttered the woman in fear and nervousness. Zuko quickly turned to the woman, the woman quickly shuts her mouth. Zuko then begins to slowly walk towards her.

Zuko shot one of his hands out and grasps the woman's face in a painful grip. The woman squeaks in surprise and fear. Zuko just merely just glares down at her. His eyes is filled with a flaming rage. " You all are held responsible for the disappearance of Y/N, " Zuko spat out in anger. Zuko releases his hand from woman's face. Zuko steps away from the woman and is now in front of the four bounded people. " Since you all play a part in my- err Y/N's disappearance, you all will be punished accordingly. " The four people only shook even more at FireLord Zuko's statement. " All of you take them away were they'll never see the light of day again. " Zuko said with venom dripping from his voice.

The four guards only bowed and said a quick " yes sir ". With that they took the four people away. Now Zuko was once again left in his thrown room...... alone.

Zuko let out a sigh of frustration out. He walked towards a window that was in the room. He stared down at his people, he was thinking about something. Based on what the four people said, Zuko can conclude that his darling is no longer in the Fire nation. Zuko dug into his pocket and took out something. It was a necklace. A betrothed necklace to be more specific. You see his darling was not from the fire nation, no no no. You were from a Water tribe, the Southern Water tribe to put it. While Zuko was on his trip to help Aang defeat his father and help him master firebending, Zuko found out from Katara on what her necklace means. He found out that from the Water tribe in order to marry someone, you have to make a betrothed necklace and give it to that special someone. When Zuko found out about this type of information, he instantly got rapped up about it. Ever since he's joined team Avatar he was thinking about what life would be like when he becomes FireLord, then his thoughts were drawn into marriage. He can't help but think, his darling would make the perfect FireLady. His FireLady.

And they'll have children. They'll be lovely children. With his darling swelled up with another one of his heirs all while holding another one of their children. It'll truly be a.. delicious sight to see ~ Zuko hmmed in delight at the thought of his darling bearing his children. But... that's if he witness such a darling sight. Zuko groaned at his mood being dampened and soured. But he knows it's true. Zuko knows if he doesn't act fast, he'll lose his darling. And that lovely little scene that played in his mind, will be nothing but a mere fantasy. Besides, he doesn't want to get himself accidentally sexual frustrated.....

With that aside, Zuko begins to start planning and strategizing. Zuko walks away from the window. He calls a servant, he orders them to get one of his best generals. The servant was slightly hesitant and confused, but never the less terrified. Wasn't the war over? They pushed their question aside, because they know now wouldn't be the best time to question the FireLord. He hasn't been acting himself lately and has been been flaring up at anything these past few weeks. With out much of a second thought, they did as they were told and went to see if someone could get one of the generals FireLord Zuko was talking about.

Zuko on the other hand, went back to sit on his thrown. He knew it will take time for the general to get here, so he decided to sit and be patient for him to get here. All while doing this, Zuko began to plan out in his mind on how he was going to get his darling. He was thinking about getting some of the Fire nation's best spies to help track down his darling. Sending out a whole search team and alerting the public while cause some type of panic. Not only that but he's trying to show that He and the Fire nation has turned over a new leaf, that and he doesn't want people and the other members of team Avatar know he's basically going back to his old ways. Since everybody knows the history on how he went to the ends of the earth to find and Capture the Avatar, and he's basically doing the same for his darling. It'll put a bad name on him and an even worse name on the Fire nation. So he'll lay as low as possible and keep shush shush about it, so he doesn't rise suspicion and ruin all the hard work he's been putting in the past time he's became FireLord.

With all those thoughts in mind, Zuko decides to call the same servant from before. So he can see if his message has been delivered. The Servant said they already sent a messaging hawk out to see if they can reach the general. Zuko only hmmed and dismissed them, and told them to report back to him once the massage has been delivered. With that the servant left, leaving Zuko in his thrown room. Zuko dug into his pocket again. He took out the Betrothed necklace out. He gently creased and rubbed the engraving and creases. He took so many hours and very much effort into making this for his darling. Looking at it always made him feel calmer, it made him happy knowing that his darling will be wearing it soon. But then his darling ran away from him before he can give it to them. Zuko pushed down on the purple garnet at the thought of his darling running away from him ( the rest of the necklace's gems are made up of smaller bits of Rudy and sapphire ). Zuko let out another sigh of frustration. He began to think. Once is darling is back with him he's never letting them go...........

My God, this was a boom ass idea. Not only that, but an idea of Zuko having a bit of a breeding kink has been floating around in my mind for some time now. I had a lot of fun with this. Like I said before T.Angel, If you want me to make a mini scenarios series about this let me know 😆! Well I hope you enjoy it. Until next time my Little Tainted Angels, see you soon ~💜❤💜

[redstainedsocks]

Wrong

I've had this half-written in my docs for a long while, under the heading "doorstep collapse" so I think it was for a prompt or whump event but I don't remember which one...

Normal story this time, not the AU!

Content: sick fic, fainting, delirious whumpee, hospital setting, use of sedatives, reference to noncon drug use, mentioned death threat and manner of death, overwhelmed caretaker

[Masterlist]

One or two of the team had taken to sleeping at the office at a time so that Zach was never there alone. Archer wanted to stay every night, always eager to be nearby in case something happened, but he’d been convinced to go home at least one out of every three nights.

He’d spent last night at home, sleeping guiltily in his own soft bed, miles and miles from where his best friend was holed up in a sparse, grey room that was as far from homely as Archer could imagine. Though he knew for Zach it was probably the most comfort he’d had in years, which made Archer feel even worse.

He’d slept well at home, exhausted from late nights and stress, but he would much rather have been here. The pull out couch in the break room was lumpy and not long enough for his tall frame but he still preferred it these days. Zach was just down the hall and it soothed a tightness in Archer’s chest to be close by. To know he could walk down the corridor and lay eyes on the person he thought he’d lost.

He was still untangling his own mix of grief and disbelief, but he knew it was easier to bear the guilt of having left Zach with his kidnappers if he was at least around to make sure it didn’t happen again; if he could be there to help Zach feel safe now.

It was easier not to have to examine his emotions and thoughts at all, if he was so exhausted that he couldn’t think straight.

Zach had gone to bed a couple of hours ago and he had sat up flicking through paperwork, trying to keep busy even as his eyes itched with tiredness. His ‘bed’ was made up ready for the night but he was sprawled on top of it, putting off the moment of sleep until he could close his eyes and be instantly drawn under.

He was surprised to hear a soft knock at the door, tentative, the sound of someone off balance slumping on the other side. Maybe Zach couldn’t sleep either? Maybe he’d finally had a nightmare and come for company—something none of them had seen him do yet.

“It’s open,” he said, half sitting up.

The door swung inward and Zach teetered on the threshold. His eyes roved across the room, landing on Archer but darting away again.

“Zach?” Archer was up and off the bed in an instant, but paused a meter or so away, as Zach looked flighty and liable to flinch at any contact.

“Ar-cher.”

“Yeah?”

“I think,” Zach spoke and it was slurred and he clung to the doorframe. “I think something is wrong.”

Archer barely had time to react before Zach’s eyes rolled backward and his body crumpled underneath him. Archer caught him just before his head hit the floor.

Time was standing still and moving too fast all at once. The ambulance had taken what felt like hours to arrive, while Archer sat there cradling Zach—delirious, feverish, burning up and shaking like a leaf.

The private hospital they were in now was clean, clinical, and calm. Quiet. Discrete. It was a good place to keep Zach hidden and secure, but being there still set his teeth on edge. He paced the corridor-like waiting room back and forth, glad that no one told him to stop. The team had all been called; Sasha had been the one who turned up and stayed. She was a quiet, steady presence. And though he could tell from the line of her tense muscles that she was as worried as he was, she let him be the one to fall apart while she held it together.

Zach had a fever, something was infected. The doctors just couldn’t find where or what. They hadn’t been allowed to see him. Yet. Archer hoped that would change soon.

He rubbed his face tiredly. “I should get more coffee.”

“I think coffee is the last thing you need,” Sasha replied, calmly. “Come sit down.”

He glanced at her and shook his head. He needed to be moving, doing. “If he—” Archer couldn’t even bring himself to say it. “After everything, if this is too much for his body to handle…”

“Nothing is going to happen, the doctors are gonna fix it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Don’t I?” She levelled him with a look that could surely make a mountain bow down and grovel.

“How didn’t we notice something was wrong?”

“He doesn’t let us near him, not really.”

Finally, he slumped into a seat beside her. “I should’ve watched out for him more carefully, checked he was okay. I should’ve… I owe him. We just… we can’t let him down again, we have to do better.”

“Archer, we’re doing everything we can,” she said gently.

“It’s not enough!” He snapped. “We abandoned him! We just left him there and now we can’t even take care of him? Can’t even tell what he needs?”

“Montgomery Archer, sit. Back. Down,” she hissed.

He hadn’t even realised he was standing. He looked down at her, the unfairness still burning through him, how could she not care? Until he saw her face, eyes glistening, and realised the strength of will it was taking for her to hold it together.

“This is a goddamn hospital and this is not the time,” she said, squeezing her hands between her knees. “We thought he was dead, and there’s shit all we can do about it now. You can have a breakdown about it later, but not now, not like this.”

He took a seat, sheepishly. “Sorry. I… seeing him collapse like that has me all churned up.”

“Don’t apologise, you big oaf. Just breathe, and know they’re doing everything they can, and give yourself some damn slack while you’re at it.” She sniffed and turned away.

He scooted down in his chair and leaned against her shoulder, glad she didn't shrug him off, and relieved not to be alone.

*

They were finally allowed in the room once Zach was stabilised. Allowed in because, in the doctor’s words… Zach was resistant. Archer hadn’t really understood the implications of that, his mind taken up with thoughts of he’s fine, he’s alive, they’ve got it under control.

But now… he could see what they meant. Zach was fighting the sedative, semi-conscious and struggling, suffering. He couldn’t really move, but his eyes were open and he was frightened, terrified, but so obviously not-really-here, either. Whatever had happened these past two years Zach had built up some tolerance to the drugs they’d given him and it was heart-breaking; seeing him foggy but alert, unsure of where he was and unable—but so desperate—for something he couldn't name or do.

“See if you can get him to remain calm, he needs to rest,” the doctor said, arms crossed in concern as his eyes roved over Zach’s prone form. “We can’t try him on anything else until this one is out of his system but even then… He’s been asking for someone, we assumed, well, it might be you?”

Archer nodded, cleared his throat. ‘Right, yeah. He knows me, I can—I’ll do what I can. Anything I should be careful of?”

“Just mind the IV line, and call us in if he gets more agitated or anything changes.”

“Okay, I’ve got this. Thank you, Doctor.”

He did not have this. Not even a little bit. He felt completely out of his depth. He loved Zach like a brother, had loved him and mourned him, and now… felt like he barely knew him. What qualified him to take care of Zach like this? He wrung his hands and stepped closer as Sasha sidled around to the other side of the bed. Zach’s eyes tried to track her, and lost her somewhere along the way. His breathing sped up again, bloodshot eyes wide and aimlessly roving as his fingers twitched on the bed sheets.

“Please, please,” Zach murmured. Whispered, almost. It was slurred but unmistakable.

Sasha gave Archer a look, and nodded to the bed. He shook his head. She raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms and they stared each other down.

I can’t do this. He hoped she understood what his look implied.

Her answering look seemed to say you’re not even trying.

He threw his hands up in defeat and stepped closer. Zach’s eyes landed on Archer’s face and he twitched feebly, shivering in his sparse hospital bed.

“‘M good, I’ll be good, please.”

Archer leaned against the bed, trying to look reassuring, confident. “Yeah, you’re doing really well, okay? We’ve got you, nothing to worry about.”

Zach’s hand jerked and his mouth opened and closed before he whined. “Hurts.”

“I know, buddy, I know.” He looked at Sasha who nodded, so he took Zach’s hand and lightly squeezed. “It’s alright.”

“Please, you promised. Promised.”

That took Archer by surprise and he sucked in a breath, biting his tongue.” I know, I-I said nothing else bad would happen to you, I didn’t know this would happen…”

There was a frustrated look on Zach’s face and his eyes filled with tears, his head flopped a little, side to side. “You promised.”

Archer did the only thing he could think of, he squeezed Zach’s hand tighter and dragged the chair by the bed closer so he could sit and be a calming presence. He wouldn’t abandon Zach, not again, no matter how much Zach yelled and cried at him, broken-hearted though it made him to know he’d let Zach down another time.

“I’ll do whatever--ever you want. Sir, please,” Zach’s voice cracked and he mumbled into incoherence, all in a pleading, painfully placating tone.

Archer’s eyes shot up and he met Sasha’s across the bed, looking as concerned as he did as realisation dawned on them both. Zach wasn’t here.

“Where do you think you are, Zach?” she asked quietly.

Zach--who had flinched at sound of his own name--whimpered. “Can’t--don’t know.”

“You’re safe, we’re here, me and Sasha, and the team has our back. You’re in hospital,” Archer said.

Zach looked at him, clearly, finally. “Promise? Keep your word, like you promised?”

“What did I promise you?” It was a calculated risk to play into whatever Zach thought he was seeing, but he needed to know, didn’t he?

“You said… said you wouldn’t lemme die like this. Not like this. A bullet, you promised, not--not sick, not slowly.”

Archer couldn’t breathe, he blinked furiously to try to keep the tears at bay. “I promise, no-one is dying, not here. Not like this.”

Zach breathed out and tears ran down his cheeks as he closed his eyes and rested his head heavily on the pillows. “Promise. And I’ll be good.”

It seemed to be enough to make Zach settle, and he fell into a fitful doze. Sasha brushed hair back from his forehead and checked the lines in the IV on his right hand. Archer brought Zach’s left hand to his face and kissed the back of his wrist, rubbed his thumb in a circle and then laid it down on the sheets and sat back to bury his face in his own hands.

He jumped when Sasha touched his shoulder and scrubbed hastily at his eyes. “We don’t leave him, one of us stays with him until he’s himself again,” he said, voice thick. “We can’t let him get lost in his own head.”

“I’ll get us something to eat,” she said. “We’ll see him through this.” She left quietly, slipping out the door with graceful ease so they kept their privacy.

He nodded. They would. But really… what could they do in the face of all this?

“What the hell did they do to you?” he whispered to the quiet room.

Zach was too far gone to answer.

@haro-whumps @whumpthisway @hurting-fictional-people @lonesome--hunter @crowned-avery @extrabitterbrain @firewheeesky @outofangband

[madasthesea]

should I tear my heart out now? (everything I feel returns to you somehow)

He’s been reborn many times in his life; forged anew in refiner’s fire. A phoenix in the ashes.

The world that Tony steps into when he exits the Milano is still buried, choking in ash, unsure yet of what it will be when it finally licks its wounds clean.

Tony isn’t sure of what he will be, either.

Or: Tony mourns.

read on AO3

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Tony remembers that first step out of the cave in Afghanistan, holding the car battery and squinting in the sunlight, seeing his guns in the hands of his kidnappers and knowing, then, that his life would never be the same. So, too, does he recall the first wobbly flight in the Mark II armor, bolting from his garage with a thrilled whoop of joy sitting in his throat, racing into a world unlike any he’d ever known.

He’s been reborn many times in his life; forged anew in refiner’s fire. A phoenix in the ashes.

The world that Tony steps into when he exits the Milano is still buried, choking in ash, unsure yet of what it will be when it finally licks its wounds clean.

Tony isn’t sure of what he will be, either.

“I lost the kid,” he confesses, then crumples in the face of this new world: this world without Peter.

“Leave me alone, Rhodes.”

Someone has been with him from the moment he gained consciousness and he’s sick of being watched. He looks like the same person—a little gaunter, a little rougher perhaps, but still like Tony Stark—but he isn’t. He’s a doppelganger, a replica. A ghost.

“No.”

“Go away, James.”

If they stop looking at him, he can stop existing. That’s how it works, right? Quantum physics, Schrodinger’s cat, the “wanted: dead and alive” t-shirt Peter used to wear. He’s only alive because they think he is.

“Nope.”

Tony’s patience is as thin as he is right now.

“I want to be alone,” he snaps. His snarl used to be impressive but now he just feels like a kicked dog, barking as it hides.

Rhodey finally closes the book he was pretending to read, sighs heavily as looks up at Tony.

“You’re on suicide watch, Tony,” Rhodey says. Tony freezes, the heart monitor sluggishly picking up its pace.

Rhodes settles back a little bit in his chair, tilting his chin up defensively. “Suicidal tendencies double in bereaved fathers.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Tony says numbly, shying away from the very thought. Suicide sounds too violent. He doesn’t want to die, he just wants to... fade. Like Peter had. But he doesn’t know how to explain the difference.

“I'm really glad to hear that, Tones, but—”

“I’m not going to because I don’t have to,” Tony interrupts, his vision blurry but not from tears. He thinks he might pass out. He hasn’t said it out loud before but it’s true, and the words tumble out before he can stop them. “I died when he did. This is—I’m just—” Peter’s English homework is still sitting down in the lab, he thinks. They’d read lines together because Peter wanted to impress that girl he was smitten with, in his nerdy, awkward, adorable way. Out, out brief candle. Life’s but— “—a walking shadow.”

Rhodey purses his lips, his eyes suspiciously bright. “Tony. Losing what—You’re still alive. It might not feel like it right now, but life goes on.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t,” Tony whispers. Then he turns onto his side, thinking that he probably hasn’t made the point he meant to.

The constant guard doesn’t stop and Tony knows he doesn’t need it, but he can’t blame them for not believing him.

Bruce falls asleep the third night in. Tony’s mind feels hazy, thinks they might have laced his nutrient saline with a sedative.

He wants out of this bed. He wants to not be looked at but the entire west wall is glass windows.

He knows how to take out his IV without too much mess, unplugs the heart monitor before he takes that off too. The door is propped open.

He spills forward like a puppet on strings, fast and uncoordinated, every limb numb. His head is swimming like he stood up too fast, but the feeling only intensifies the longer he’s up.

He falls a hall and a half away from the Medbay, but he crawls to the wall and hauls himself up before FRIDAY has even finished asking if he wants her to get anyone.

By the time he reaches Peter’s room, he’s running into the walls, tripping over his own feet, but he has to get there. He has to do this because he can’t do anything but this.

Tony’s hand trembles as he turns the knob. He falls inward as the door opens, barely catches his own weight and then his breath as the sight registers: messily made bed, books piled on his desk. There’s a picture of Peter, May, and Ben on the nightstand.

He clambers drunkenly to the far side of the bed and pulls the covers over himself. The sheets smell like Peter.

His breath stutters. His eyes burn.

The sheets smell like Peter but his mouth tastes like ash.

He closes his eyes and imagines what it feels like; burning, tearing, rending. Ignition, combustion, extinction on an atomic scale, on every level of existence. To be so afraid, and so desperate, and in so much pain.

He thinks it probably feels like this.

He turns his face into Peter’s pillow and weeps.

He wakes up to someone crawling into bed with him and he wonders that he doesn’t think it’s Peter, not even for a delirious, half-asleep second. People talk about forgetting, about turning and expecting them to be there, about denial and acceptance and how it takes time, but Tony doesn’t understand that because the knowledge lives in his chest, gnawing and biting and shredding and no amount of denial will take the pain of it away. He wears it like a funeral shroud, breathes it like toxic fumes. It pounds through his veins like poison.

His eyelashes stick together when he opens his eyes. He can’t remember the last time he’d cried himself to sleep, but the pillow under his cheek is still damp with tears.

It’s Pepper, her hair splayed over Peter’s second pillow, the one he never used but Tony did when he came in to comfort him from a nightmare.

“Thought you’d be in here,” she whispers, reaching across the distance and taking his hand. “You scared us.”

Tony blinks at her, his eyes itching and swollen. He knows he should apologize but it seems so pointless. He can’t find it in him to be sorry, not between the emptiness.

Pepper watches him and he watches her back. The light from the hallway paints a stripe of gold in the dark room, the curtains drawn closed.

He wants her to understand that this is all he will be, now. There is no moving on from this—Peter was the gravitational center that was holding him together and now he’s spinning out of control: the world has lost its shape. Everything is trivial and small. Everything is very, very still.

Tony closes his eyes. Pepper puts her hand on his cheek.

“He was—” Tony whispers.

“Your son,” Pepper finishes. “The one thing you can’t live without.”

Tony aches down to his bones. “One of two,” he assures her, because that’s never changed. If he’d lost both of them, he would have had Danvers chuck him back into space. But without Peter—

“I am—I will always be... half alive.”

Pepper nods, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “I can handle that. Half’s better than nothing.”

She pulls him to her, their tears smearing together as she kisses his forehead.

“You deserve better.”

“But I want you.”  

It’s the first time Tony’s ventured to the common areas and he regrets it the second he sees Steve. Natasha’s there, too, and Bruce, in the corner with his headphones on, but it’s Steve he doesn’t want to see, and Steve who sees him before he has a chance to escape.

Rhodey’s guiding him along by the elbow and he’s embarrassed and snappish.

“How are you feeling, Tony?” Steve asks politely as Tony leans against the kitchen island while Rhodey reheats some leftovers for their lunch.

“Spectacular,” Tony bites out. Steve gets the hint and doesn’t say anything else for several long minutes, merely eating his sandwich and watching Nat as she starts making tea. She keeps giving Steve a look, like she’s urging him to do something.

“What,” Tony finally demands. “For a spy, Romanoff, you’re not being very subtle.”

Natasha gives him a dangerous smile. “Maybe that was the point. Steve, do you have something you want to say?”

“I think he would take it better if I wasn’t the—”

“Rogers.”

Steve sighs, then looks at Tony.

“We’re planning the memorial for those that... we lost. We wondered if you wanted Peter to be under Peter Parker or Spider-Man.”

Tony thinks he might throw up his lunch.

When they’d told him that May was gone, he’d felt a traitorous, disgusting, despicable stab of relief that he would never have to see her live in a world without Peter. He thought about how, with her gone, he wouldn’t have anyone he would have to be strong for, no one to question if his level of grief was earned. And then the numbness crept back in because it was too much for one person to bear.

He misses her terribly now because she would understand the visceral abhorrence he feels at the thought of Peter’s name of a memorial to the fallen.  

“Neither.” He tries to make it sound imperious and unquestionable, but his voice cracks. He stands, shakily, leaning heavily on the counter as he does.

Steve clears his throat. “Alright. For the private funeral, I’m assuming Peter would be best.”

He wonders how no one else is losing their balance when the whole world is tilting off its axis at the mention of Peter’s funeral.

“No,” Tony rasps. “No. We’re not having a funeral.”

“Tony,” Steve sighs, in that way that used to make his hackles raise, but now it doesn’t make him feel anything but tired. “Peter’s gone.”

“No, he isn’t!” Tony snaps, his head jerking up. Steve’s eyes widen and he looks impossibly sadder. Natasha steps forward, dread in her eyes and Tony knows what they’re thinking. “He isn’t gone. He isn’t lost. He’s dead. Just say it. He’s dead. Why do you all keep talking like I don’t know? Like it isn’t all I think about?”

He glances around him, at all the people looking at him in pity and shock, and feels the confession build up in his throat like bile, hot and acrid. “I held him. I watched. I didn’t wash his ashes off my hands for three days because that was all I had—”

Tony breaks off, grinds his teeth together to hold back a sob but the sound leaks out anyway.

“Peter’s dead,” he says breathlessly. “He’s dead. If he was gone, I would bring him back. If he was lost, I would find him. But he’s dead and that is the only thing in the universe I can’t fix.”

He holds Steve’s gaze for a moment, takes a shuddering breath, and then crumples forward just as Rhodey rushes toward him, catching his shoulders.

His friend lowers him to the tile floor, leaning him against the island to steady him.

“Rhodey,” he gasps. “Rhodey, do you remember—do you remember when my parents died?” Tony asks, his voice coming in spurts as his lungs spasm in pain at the thought of taking in oxygen when Peter isn’t. “Rhodes, do you—”

“I remember—”

“And you, you found me, drunk on the floor,” Tony hiccups. Someone thumbs a tear off his cheek, but he doesn’t know who, can barely make out the shapes in front of him. He clutches at Rhodey’s t-shirt, his arms shaking.

“Yeah. You were one shot away from alcohol poisoning,” Rhodes sighs, wrapping one hand around the back of Tony’s neck and supporting his head.

“James,” Tony says, his voice broken. “I’d rather relive that night a thousand times than know what it feels like to lose my kid.”

Rhodes’ face crumples and a tear spills over, clings to his eyelashes. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”

Tony’s next sob is muffled against Rhodey’s shoulder as his friend clutches him to his chest, Tony’s tears soaking the fabric of his t-shirt.

It’s only when the cabinet behind him starts shuddering, too, that Tony realizes it isn’t a cabinet at all, but Steve, supporting both of them. Tony turns his head and meets Steve’s red eyes, then glances to his right and sees Natasha, her bottom lip trembling as she once again wipes a tear from his cheek. Bruce is knelt behind Rhodey, his face pinched in concern and pain.

“I can’t bury an empty coffin. I can’t read his eulogy.”

Steve nods, tears shining in his eyes. Tony unclenches one hand from Rhodey’s shirt and holds it out, Steve instantly grabbing it.

“I’m sorry about Sam,” Tony says, and for the first time the loss of everyone else hits him. The whole world is grieving, an entire universe full of fathers who have lost their children and suddenly don’t understand what their purpose is anymore. It aches all the way down to his atoms, to the bits of stardust in his veins that he shared with those people, however many lightyears away. “I’m sorry about Bucky. I’m so sorry.”

Steve bows his head, but it doesn’t hide the tear that falls onto Tony’s arm.

If Thanos had had any mercy, Tony decides as most of what’s left of the Earth’s mightiest heroes sit on the kitchen floor and weep, he would have killed them all.

Tony used to have to fight to escape his own whirling thoughts, but now he lets himself be submerged in them, in the roiling, tumultuous sea that Peter’s absence has created, like a hole punched through the center of the earth.

He lies paralyzed in bed as anxiety tears through him. He isn’t sure what he’s afraid of—he’s already lived his worst nightmare, but not quite because Pepper—

Pepper isn’t in bed next to him.

“Pep?” He asks, too quietly, being yanked back into his own body. He has been so horribly selfish recently—Narcissus staring at his own reflection but not because he loves it; because he loathes it so impossibly much. His own continued existence often seems so detestable, he acts as if he’d died anyway. It is unforgivably cruel to those around him, but he cannot make himself stop.

“Pep?” he asks again, stirring from his resting place.

She appears in the doorway of the bathroom, her jaw set and shoulders squared.

“You ok, honey?”

“Yes,” she says breathlessly. She comes forward, puts a hand around his stomach as she passes and leads him back to the bed. He sits heavily, watching her in dull confusion as she sits cross-legged on the rumpled covers.

“Tony,” she murmurs, curling an arm around her stomach. “I’m pregnant.”

Tony blinks and the bedroom around him disappears, diffusing like a mirage in the desert to show the reality that he lives in.

He has been huddled in the skeletal remains of a once-great forest since Titan. The fire is out but he’s still waiting to burn and here is Pepper, kneeling in front of him with a sprouting seed in her hands, the green of new life nearly foreign in this bone gray world.

One new tree. She is promising one new life, but the atmosphere is still so choked with toxic air the sunlight can barely reach the earth and one tree is not enough to purify it all.

He reaches a trembling hand forward and stops short of brushing his fingers against Pepper’s knuckles.

Surely, it will die if he touches it. Surely he can’t have this.

Pepper’s face falls. Tony forces himself to take a breath of poisonous, burning air.

“I love you,” he says because even the end of the world cannot change that fact. “I love you.”

He kisses the apple of her cheek, the corner of her jaw. He kneels on his bed in his room and does not let himself think about how quiet the forest is now that all the birds are dead; he kisses her stomach over her baggy t-shirt.

“I love you.”

He doesn’t know how to love a child that isn’t Peter.

Growing up, Tony had always wiggled his loose teeth. He’d push on them with his tongue, pleasure-pain shooting through him, until they finally came out.

He sits on the porch in one of the wicker chairs Pepper had picked out and grinds his teeth—it was a habit he’d kicked in his first year of MIT, changed it out for worse ones—and thinks about holding an infant in his arms and being expected to move on.

The screen door swings open and Rhodey walks out, his leg braces whirring softly. He’s got two glass bottles in one hand and he passes one to Tony, who snorts upon seeing the label for root beer rather than anything with alcohol.

“Pepper told you,” Tony asks blankly.

Rhodey settles into a chair with a sigh, pushing it back on two legs until he’s balanced, like he’s a sixteen-year-old instead of a decorated military man on the far side of fifty.

“Yep. Congrats, man.”

Tony hums. “She can tell I’m not as happy as I should be,” he murmurs. “She thinks I don’t want it.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t imagine why she thinks that then.”

Tony shoots him a sideways glare—he’s not in the mood for levity or being congratulated, he wants to brood. He’s always been a very good brooder, an overthinker. Someone that pushes on a bruise.

Rhodey pops his soda open with a fizz, then reaches over and does Tony’s too. Tony takes a sip, just for something to do.

“Know what I think?” Rhodey asks.

“I get the feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“I think you’re a great dad.”

Tony looks down at his hands, twists the bottle around. “I don’t think I’m a dad anymore. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to do it again.”

“You don’t grow out of being a dad, Tones. That baby will come and suddenly every instinct and emotion you felt with Peter is going to come right back.”

Tony can’t answer, unsure how to say that that might be the thing he’s most afraid of.

“Peter would love having a little sibling, you know that, right? He’d be thrilled.”

Talking about Peter hurts, but not talking about Peter for so long has been like slowly suffocating. He can’t stop the way his mouth twitches up.

“Yeah,” Tony sighs, nodding. “They’d be absolute terrors, the two of them together. My DNA and that kid’s talent for trouble? I’d be doomed.”

It’s like pressing on a bruise, picking at a scab. It hurts. It hurts, but he can’t stop.

“He was so freaking smart, you know? Just brilliant, some of the stuff he came up with...”

Rhodey laughs. “The kid drove you half out of your mind, Tones, what are you talking about?”

Tony snorts, takes a swig of his tepid root beer. “Yeah. Oh, do you remember that time he tried to make me a birthday cake?”

Rhodey chokes on his own mouthful of soda. “Geez, how long did it take you to get the batter off your ceiling?”

“It was still there,” Tony cackles, “when—”

Pleasure-pain, from his teeth to his toes.

“Peter climbed up and tried to scrub it off,” Tony continues, hiccupping over the gap. “But it had fused with the building, I swear. Would take a nuke to get that stain out.”

Pleasure-pain. Exquisite, tender. An open wound weeping blood and affection.

Tony clenches his jaw hard, grinding his teeth together.

“She wants me to go to a support group,” Tony suddenly blurts. “In the city. It’s for dads, all their kids—”

“It might be good for you,” Rhodey says, scratching at the label on the root beer bottle with his thumb.

“It won’t be. Not that. I’ll... read whatever, do a blog, some other self-therapy nonsense. I can’t go.”

“Why not? They’re all in your situation, Tony. It’s for dads like you.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s for dads whose kids died. I killed mine.”

Rhodey nearly tips too far backward in his chair, windmills for a second before crashing back to all four legs.

“What? Tony—”

“I killed theirs, too,” Tony says robotically. “How could I possibly go and meet them all and talk like I’m one of them, all the while knowing that I killed their babies?”

Tony grinds his teeth harder, pressing until it hurts, until a muscle in his jaw seizes. Rhodey stares at him in horror for a moment, then shakes his head with a heartbroken expression on his face.

“You didn’t kill them,” he breathes. “Tones, you didn’t.”

“I didn’t save them.”

“Neither did I,” Rhodey says, lifting his chin and accepting his defeat with a dignity Tony could never fathom possessing. “But I tried. And so did you.”

“Yeah,” Tony whispers. “Yeah.”

“Blogging, huh? Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Think I’d be any good?”

“Absolutely not. I can’t wait to read it.”

Tony never sleeps well when it’s hot. The simmering summer air smells like grass and dirt up here, rather than sweat and cigarette smoke, but the heat makes him feel antsy, sick. It makes it hard to breathe.

He wakes up at 4:30 and doesn’t want to go back to sleep. He doesn’t want to get up either; go to the lab until Pepper’s awake, have breakfast with the hot, cloying air only worsened by the heat of the stovetop where Pepper makes scrambled eggs and toasts English muffins.

He wants to be sedated, he thinks. Surely no one would fault him for wanting a little bit of blissful, painless unconsciousness, today of all days.

The air is too hot. Tony kicks off his blankets, pulls off his sweat-soaked shirt.

Cicadas are still chirruping in trees whose leaves are rustling despite no cooling breeze blowing through them. The middle of August has always been—had always been... is Tony’s least favorite time of year.

Tears sting behind his eyes, adding to the heat all around him, the burning inside him.

He can’t stay in bed any longer.

He showers in the guest bathroom, so the sound doesn’t wake Pepper—the water too cold on his skin, so cold it makes his sternum ache, and he’s shivering when he gets out and goes downstairs, not bothering to towel dry his hair.

The light filling the kitchen is gray, already turning white. Early sunrises are another reason he hated summer as a younger man. He didn’t like to be woken up by the light after a long night partying, but he hasn’t slept in for years now. Can’t, most of the time. Didn’t want to, a year ago today. He’d been too excited, as if it had been his own...

It’s Peter’s birthday.

He sits at the kitchen island and stares out the window over the sink and watches the sunrise.

Tony can’t see the lake from where he’s sitting, but he can hear the splashing, the laughter, the shouts of a phantom child running and jumping in, the hot summer sun chasing away any cold that might linger in the water. Peter’s impressive acrobatics make May gasp and his friends cheer. The frosting is melting off the cake as it sits on the porch, half-eaten, the detritus of lunch and presents still at the picnic table.

He can envision it so perfectly. The way Peter glows in the light, in the affection.

The sunlight filters golden and piercing through the trunks of the trees and Tony blinks, and the image is gone.  

Sniffing hard, Tony rubs his face, dispassionately unsurprised to feel the tears there.

He can’t be here. In this house that Peter will never set foot in, in this kitchen where he’ll never spin on the bar stools while he waits for Tony to finish cooking dinner. In this life that Peter wouldn’t even recognize.

He can’t be the expecting father and newlywed husband and retired superhero. Not right now. Not today, it’s not—it doesn’t fit. Right now he does not exist outside his grief.

He can’t go back to being the Tony that Peter knew either. He can’t be the longsuffering mentor, the lab partner, the doting surrogate parent.  

He grabs the keys to Peter’s favorite car from the hook by the door.

The road is empty, stretching on before him, nothing to measure distance but the white lines darting passed him, and he lets himself imagine, for a moment, that he can drive forever, run from his grief and his responsibilities and his guilt for having kept living when Peter couldn’t.

But he knows he can’t and he knows he doesn’t really want to, despite himself. He wants that cabin by the lake, he wants his amazing, wonderful wife, and he wants his baby. He just wants Peter to be there too. He wants to be able to think about the future without his chest aching.

The greenhouse catches his eye and he slams on the brakes, the car stopping in the middle of empty road. There are so many plants hanging in front that the sign is nearly invisible.

Two weeks before the end of the world, he and Peter had helped plant trees for Earth Day. Well, he and Spider-Man. Service was always Peter’s thing, but he’d talked Tony into it, smiling and reciting facts about oxygen and climate change and Tony had agreed.

“Sometimes it feels like all I do is destroy things,” Peter had murmured as he pushed the dirt over the roots to keep them warm, wiped his palms on the Spider-Man suit as if it was a ratty pair of jeans and not a multi-million dollar piece of tech.

“It feels nice to help something grow for a change.”

Tony does nothing so well as he destroys. He doesn’t think anyone has destroyed as much as him—not in all the annals of history, no conqueror, no tyrant has ever burnt the entire universe to ash like Tony has.

The greenhouse is still closed, because it’s 5:30 in the morning. Tony climbs out of the car, checks the hours on the door, then sits in front of it and waits, because here he is neither husband nor grieving almost-father. He can be a novice gardener: he can help something grow.

A half-rusted pick-up truck pulls into the parking lot some time later. Tony lifts his head and watches with dull eyes as a middle-aged man wearing sturdy work boots caked in mud climbs out.

“Can’t say I’ve ever had anyone waiting for me before,” the man greets casually as he comes forward, a big ring of keys jangling in his hand. Tony watches as he finds the right one with practiced ease, inserting it into the padlock on the door.

Tony doesn’t know what to say so he just mutters a soft, “Sorry.”

“No reason to apologize. What can I help you with?” The gardener swings the doors open and a wave of damp, scented air rushes over Tony’s face.

“I need a tree.”

Tony follows the man into the greenhouse, his muscles aching from his long wait.

“Any particular kind?”

“Um, no. I don’t know. I... I live upstate. By a lake.”

The man continues to walk, leading him through a maze of long low benches overflowing with flowers and trellises with vines climbing all the way to the ceiling. Tony turns his head this way and that, finding it easier to concentrate on the flowers than on the conversation.

He tunes back in as the man shows him a little tree in a pot. “—It’s known for its red and gold fall colors.”

“Red and gold, huh?” Tony asks, smiling faintly. He looks at the tag and sees that it’s called the Autumn Blaze Maple.

Peter loved autumn. He was one of those people that was decked out in sweaters and scarves and drinking cider and cocoa from the first day of September, even when it was still eighty degrees out.

“I’ll take it,” he murmurs, rubbing one of the leaves between his thumb and forefinger.

The greenhouse owner helps him get the tree to his car, balking a little at the expensive sports car that Tony carefully puts the tree in, uncaring about any scratches that might get on the leather seats.

“Thank you, sir,” he says as he prepares to climb into the car.

“Thank you, Iron Man,” the man replies earnestly, his voice low.

Tony’s eyes burn. He clenches his jaw and shakes his head, then ducks into the car, slowly backing out of his spot.

He puts on Peter’s favorite playlist on the way back, the summer air already warm enough for him to roll his window down as the early morning sunlight floods the world in gold.

He hums along to the songs he knows well enough, his voice rough and cracking.

Fifteen miles from the lake house, he pulls onto the shoulder of the road, and rests his head on the steering wheel.

The tears come instantly. Tony has never been a big crier, but for the last four months, any time he’s alone he feels like he’s going to break apart, just cry until he dries up, until he resolves into a dew. Niobe reborn. There’s an endless well of grief inside of him and he fights it, all the time, around Pepper, around any of the team that bother to show up, but it builds and builds until he has to cry it out or he’ll burst.

He sits with his forehead against the steering wheel and listens to the tears dripping onto the leather upholstery and the soft guitar music in the background and breathes.

After a long time—three new songs that Peter loved—Tony sits up and looks out. The breeze that comes through the window smells like dry grass as it ruffles Tony’s hair and the leaves of the sapling. He closes his eyes for another long moment, remembers laying on the tower rooftop in the heat of August with Peter next to him, smelling of sweat and grinning in his Spider-Man suit.

He sniffs, wipes away the tears still clinging to his chin, and puts the car into drive, easing back onto the highway.

He doesn’t check if Pepper is still asleep when he gets home, but she isn’t out on the porch waiting for him like he’d half-expected. It’s only 6:45 and she’s been so tired lately. Tony makes her tired, even if she doesn’t say it. He’s happy to let her sleep.

He’s ridiculously, anxiously, worryingly cautious as he maneuvers Peter’s tree out of the car, making sure not one twig gets bent, not one leaf falls off. A therapist would have a field day, probably, Tony thinks, scoffing, but he isn’t any less careful as he crouches and lifts the base of the thing into his arms.

He doesn’t make it very far. It’s heavier than he expected, and he’s never bothered working on getting the muscle he lost back. He stops after fifteen yards, gently sets the tree back down, then bends over his knees huffing and puffing. Then he stoops and picks it up again. And walks and stops and pants and picks it up. His arms start shaking embarrassingly fast.

There’s a wheelbarrow in the garage. Some carts in his workshop. He could even call a suit, if he wanted to, just fly the tree to its spot on the lake and blast a hole in the ground and stick it in, but it’s Peter’s tree. It’s Peter’s tree and Tony’s going to carry it. He isn’t going to avoid it or find a shortcut or a cheat and he’s absolutely mental because it’s a tree but it’s Peter’s and he’s going to carry it, shaking arms and all, because he couldn’t carry Peter when it counted.

He’s sweating by the time he finally sets the tree down in the right spot, the sun already beating down on him. He goes and finds a shovel in the garage and gets a bucket of water, which he pours a little of into the pot even though the tree’s probably fine.

The first shovel-full of dirt is hard, baked in the heat of late summer. Tony carefully throws it away and gets another one, stamping down on the blade to get it to sink deeper.

He loses himself in the rhythm and sweat and monotony.

The hole expands until Tony can maneuver the clump of roots into it. He does, carefully, making sure it’s sitting level and deep enough. He fills in the hole with the shovel as much as he can, then kneels on the dry grass and pushes the soil up around the trunk as if he were tucking a child in.

The leaves of the sapling provide meager shade against the sun.

He stares down at his hands, covered in dirt. It’s underneath his fingernails, buried in the creases of his palms.

Tony rubs his hands together, smearing Peter’s ashes as his breath quickens, as the golden sunlight darkens until it’s bleeding orange. Every wheezing gasp makes the wound in his side ache with pain, makes his heart long to collapse in on itself because Peter’s gone. Dead and dusted—

Pepper finds him with his forehead pressed against the tree, tears watering the earth.

“Tony, sweetheart,” she whispers.

“It’s Peter’s—”

Peter’s birthday, Peter’s tree, Peter’s ashes. Tony had insisted on not giving him a funeral but had erected a gravestone anyway: here in his own yard, where he can see it from the kitchen window, the inside looking out of a new life that Peter will never get to have.

“I can’t leave him.”

“It isn’t Peter, Tony. It’s a tree.”

“I-I know that.”

“Then come inside,” Pepper coaxes, bending in a way that makes her sundress show off the little bump of her abdomen. “I made all of Peter’s favorites and they’re going cold.”

“Ok,” Tony says, brushing a kiss to his fingertips and then pressing them to a knot in the bark of the tree.

Later that night, lying in bed in the warm dark, Tony cries.

“I’m the only person left in the world that loves him,” he whispers to Pepper as she holds him. “I’m not enough.”

May, Ned, MJ, they’re all gone. Every person who would feel the hole that Peter left in the world like a gaping wound is gone and it feels like all the hurt they would have felt is his, like he needs to grieve for all of them because Peter deserves that much and more.

“I didn’t even do it right. I didn’t—I didn’t tell him.”

“But you loved him,” she says firmly, running her fingers through his hair. “That’s more than you had to do.”

“I loved him,” Tony agrees. “I couldn’t not.”

“That’s enough.”

He isn’t sure about that, but as much as hates it, it doesn’t matter now. He loved Peter when he was alive and didn’t show it. He loves Peter when he is dead and now all there is to do is show it to the world. To live it and breathe it in and suffer through it and let it change him. He doesn’t know how, yet, just like he still isn’t sure how to live in a world without Peter. He’s stumbling blind, but he’s pretty sure he’s moving forward. It’s all he can do.

Tony wakes up to the sound of retching and shakes his head to rid himself of the dream of Peter laughing.

“Babe?” He calls sleepily, making his way to the bathroom.

He finds Pepper there, sitting on the tile floor and wiping tears and sweat from her forehead.

“Let me find your medicine,” Tony says quickly.

“I already took it,” Pepper whispers pathetically, wiping tears off her chin. “I threw it up.”

Tony kneels in front of her, takes her face in his hands and wipes the tears away. “Are you in pain, honey?”

“No,” she says, but her bottom lip trembles. Her nausea has been terrible, but Tony has never seen her quite this upset.

“What’s wrong?” he whispers, and the tone he uses nearly sends him reeling back to days when Peter would come crawling in the window of his penthouse at 2 AM, crying because he couldn’t save the woman being attacked in time, because the robber shot himself before Peter could stop him, because he couldn’t be everywhere at once.

He swallows, forces himself back to the present.

“I just,” Pepper sobs. “I always thought my mom would be here.”

Tony’s heart sinks, his shoulders slump. Pepper’s mom had been one of the ones Snapped. They’d flown out to Illinois for the memorial and Pepper had born it with grace and decorum and steely strength while Tony had still been drowning under his own loss. He hadn’t been there for her like he should have been and if he had been in her position he might have hated her for it.

She never had. She had always understood.

The weight that Tony carries cannot be shoved aside. It cannot be lessened or lightened or shared. He does not know how to live his life with it constantly bearing down on him, pressing him backward down the hill, the stone getting heavier and heavier as he goes.

But his wife is sitting on the bathroom floor, crying because she misses her mom, because she’d always assumed that when she became a mother herself, she’d have her there to support her.

If Tony can’t bear his grief and support the love of his life when she has done nothing but comfort and strengthen him, what is the point of him?

He wanted to die when Peter did. Part of him did die, but it wasn’t the part that loves Pepper Potts. He’s ashamed it took him so long to realize that.

“What do you need, Pep?” he asks.

She whimpers as she holds out her arms and Tony instantly sweeps her into a hug, into his lap, and holds her while she cries.

He can be Sisyphus, rolling his stone uphill in atonement for his failure, and he can hold his wife. It’s progress.  

There are gummy bears at the check out line.

After the Snap, the survivors had gone insane trying to prepare for the end of the world that had already happened. Store shelves were emptied a mere hour after being stocked, prices of even the cheapest goods skyrocketed. It took nearly four months for production and consumption to start leveling out and even now you can only find non-perishable items with any regularity, unless you’re willing to pay a lot. Meat and vegetables are hit and miss delicacies.

This is the first time Tony has seen gummy bears since before that alien spaceship had appeared in the sky and he’s grabbing them and putting them on the counter before he even registers what he’s doing because he always used to buy them for Peter to eat while he did homework.

“Wait, one more thing,” Tony says, dashing back into the aisles, searching until he finds a familiar jar of JIF peanut butter. Smooth, not chunky. Peter hated chunky peanut butter.

When he gets home, a grocery bag in each hand, Pepper is in the kitchen, sitting at the island.

“Tony, you didn’t have to,” she says, but she’s smiling a little.

“Mm, it was more of a favor for the cashier actually. She looked bored out of her mind, thought seeing Tony Stark might cheer her up,” Tony says flippantly, unloading his purchases for Pepper to inspect.

“Oh, is that right? ... Did you buy gummy bears?”

Tony puts the frozen burritos in the freezer, then rubs the back of his neck. “Uh, yeah, well, you said you didn’t know what you wanted...”

Tony leans against the counter opposite Pepper, idly spins the package with a finger.

“They were the kid’s favorite,” he blurts after a minute. Pepper hums, her chin in her palm as she looks at him.

“He used to eat them with peanut butter ‘cause—teenage boys—freaking... aliens, I swear, just no taste buds at all.”

Pepper raises an eyebrow, then reaches across the counter for the jar of peanut butter. She opens it, then the gummy bear package, and unceremoniously dunks one head first in the thick spread.

She pops it in her mouth, licking the extra peanut butter off her fingers and chewing steadily. Tony feels stupidly nervous watching her, as if her not liking one of Peter’s favorite snacks will be a personal affront. But after a moment, she smiles, laughs.

“That’s actually really good.”

“Is it?” Tony asks, perking up. She nods again, going for another gummy bear.

“Try it.” Pepper offers the next one to him then prepares another for herself. They chew them together, both laughing a little bit because as bizarre as the combination is, it’s surprisingly good.

Pepper looks up at him and smiles, reaching across the island to take his hand. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

Tony smiles back, his own a little dimmer, a little less familiar. He hasn’t smiled without a shadow since coming back from space, but all that matters to her is that he still smiles.

“It was Peter’s idea,” he shrugs.

Pepper nods, stands and rounds the island to the sink. She takes the picture frame off the shelf, the one with Peter and Tony and that stupid certificate that Tony wishes he could find.

“Thanks, Peter,” she says, kissing her fingertips and gently caressing the image of Peter’s face.

Tony exhales a shaky breath, standing behind her and dropping his forehead between her shoulder blades, rubbing his hand along her arm.

Their home is warm and lit and the fire of the world has died down to smoldering ashes. He still chokes on it, sometimes. He still sits by Peter’s tree and hates every breath he takes that isn’t acrid and deadly because his every moment without the boy he loves like a son should be pain.

Peter wouldn’t want him to be in pain: Peter would want him to learn how to love his baby like he learned how to love Peter. He would want Tony to build a swing in the branches of his tree and play with his daughter in its shade. He would want him to eat gummy bears and peanut butter.

“Thanks, Peter.”

[anythingandeverything1d]

Congratulations

“(y/n)” the nurse called out from the door. You stood up and walked over with an anxious smile. She handed you a clip board of medical information that you needed to update and then said she would grab you once it was completed and turned into the desk. You sat back down in the waiting room and flipped through the pages. Ugh I wish my mom was here...am I allergic to anything? I mean I don't think so but maybe Im just unaware of it..I don't remember having surgery-well my tonsils were removed but does that count? You were filling out the page to the best of your ability when your phone buzzed. You looked down and saw his name flash across the screen before immediately ignoring the call. You rushed to finish the paperwork and handed it in as the nurse came back. “Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah.” you followed her down the hall where she took your height and weight before escorting you into the room. You hopped onto the chair and anxiously tapped your foot as she checked your temperature, blood pressure, and oxygen levels. After finishing up she sat on the stool and smiled. 

“So, what are we here for today?”

“Uh...” you looked at your feet and shifted in the chair. “I think I may be pregnant.”

She smiled and nodded, “when was your last period?” 

“My period tends to be irregular but the last one I had recored was around two months ago.”

“Okay, were you on any kind of birth controls, or using any type of contraceptives?”

“I was on a birth control, am on a birth control but I missed a few days while I was on vacation which is when I believe this all happened.”

“Okay. Have you had any symptoms other than your missed period?”

“No, not really.”

“Okay. Have you taken any pregnancy tests at home?”

You nodded, your brain flashing back to that day. 

*Tears were flooding down your cheeks as he grabbed his last hoodie from your closet. All you wanted was for life to stop. You wanted him to say its okay, to make a change in the relationship, to stay. You sat on the bed crying as he walked out the door for the last time, taking with him every once of happiness you had. You ran to the bathroom, physically sick from the situation. It wasnt until you were hunched over the toilet that you realized the box of tampons had gone unopened. Missing periods was normal for you, they had never been regular. There was a slight doubt in your mind though. You had never missed a period more than once, so the fact that you were going on two means something was wrong. You had been under a lot of stress though, the distance, the lying, the excuses, all of it. Wiping the snot running from your nose, you had gotten up, washed your face, and thrown on sweatpants and a sweatshirt. You had mustered the courage to drive all the way to the drug store, purchase three pregnancy tests, and drive home. You had gotten three, you wanted to be sure. You wanted to be positive before making any other decisions. You sat on the bathroom floor after peeing in a cup and dipped each end, turning them over so you couldn't see the lines. You set a timer on your phone and closed your eyes. The only thing that could've possibly made this situation better was having him here. Of course he was gone already but you could still dream right? When the alarm on your phone went off you anxiously flipped them all over. Picking the first up and squinting you saw the dreaded double lines. Picking the second one up: dreaded double lines. And the third: PREGNANT in bold. You dropped them all on the counter and threw your phone. Of course, of course this this happens. He leaves and I end up pregnant with his baby..just like the movies except he won't be coming back. The rest of the day had been a blur. You had kind of just ignored the fact that there were three positive pregnancy tests in the bathroom. When your friend Luke had come over, you had cried into his arms. Cried about him leaving, about the break up, and finally about being pregnant. “(y/n) if you have positive pregnancy tests you need to call him.”

“No. I can't do that. Im not doing that.”

“(y/n)...hes the father, he deserves to know.”

“I may not even be pregnant though..they come up wrong all the time.”

“Not this wrong though.. this seems pretty sure.”

“I mean I've been stressed lately maybe its just a hormone thing.”

“I think you should go to the doctor and check. And if you are then you need to ball up and tell him. Seriously he needs to know”

You had nodded and cried some more before Luke left. Then you had called your doctor and made an appointment.*

Now here you were answering questions about your sex life and body. The nurse handed you a cup and showed you where the bathroom was. She said the test would take only around ten minutes but that she would be coming back to the room to do a blood test as well. Great, what a fun day... You quickly peed in the cup, leaving it on the counter for the nurse and wandered back to the room you had been assigned. Your hands were sweating and you felt dizzy. Having your blood drawn was probably your least favorite thing. In fact, you fainted almost every time. You checked your phone and thought about texting him...instead you texted Luke and told him how terrible the doctor was and that you were going to die while having your blood drawn. His only response was “lol” and you rolled your eyes. Typical guy.. The nurse came back in with a smile and sat down. “Well it does look like you are in fact pregnant so congratulations! We want to do a pelvic exam and ultra sound today just to see where everything is at and then have you come back for a blood draw in the future.” 

“Thanks.” you smiled and relief flooded your face. At least you didnt have to have your blood drawn today. On the other hand, you were pregnant, which was a whole other nightmare in its own. Not that you hadn't wanted and dreamed of having kids. You just thought it would be under different circumstances and that you would be married. 

“Im going to leave this gown here if you just want to change real quick we can do an ultrasound and hopefully see where the little baby is at.” She left for a minute and you quickly changed, your warm body freezing against the chair. When she came back in, she had an ultrasound machine on wheels. She started with the pelvic exam, lightly pressing all around your pelvic region. Satisfied she got out a tube of gel. “This is going to be cold at first.” You had nodded and watched as the clear gel squirted out and the ultrasound machine rubbed against your skin. You watched the screen as she moved it around looking for the baby. After what felt like months, she found a small white dot looking blob and smiled. “There it is...looks like you are measuring around 2 months right now which makes sense to when you thought everything happened.” She looked at you and smiled. “I know it can be a lot to take in..I’m guessing this is your first?”

“Yeah...its just a lot I guess.”

“It is, but it gets easier. Want to hear the baby’s heartbeat?”

You smiled and nodded. She pressed a button and you heard soft thumps. Tears slipped out of the corner of your eye and you wiped them away. “Thats pretty cool.”

She smiled and nodded before handing you a towel. “You are all set to go, we will have the pictures at the desk where you can make your next appointment. It was nice meeting you (y/n) good luck on your pregnancy and congratulations again.” You smiled and thanked her before climbing back into your clothes. 2 months pregnant...theres a living being in there...my baby...mine and Harry’s baby...oh god, what am I going to tell Harry? At the desk you scheduled another appointment and the receptionist handed you a picture saying congratulations. You looked at the little pea shaped blob inside you and grinned. Thats mine...thats inside me. 

Luke surprised you by standing at your car door with an ice cream sundae. “Soo did you faint? did you die? did you live?”

You laughed, “Yeah I lived. I didnt have my blood drawn at all actually.”

“Oh? Why’s that?” You took the sundae from him and smiled taking a bite, the hot fudge melting in your mouth. 

“Because of this.” you waved the picture in your hand and he grabbed it his mouth dropping. 

“Is that what I think it is? Do you have an alien growing inside you?”

“Lukeee seriously”

He laughed and looked into your eyes. “Okay okay but wow, a baby. That’s amazing. How are you feeling about it?”

“I feel like it hasn't sunk in yet....but that I’m really happy. I mean Ive always wanted a baby...why not do it now? I don't need a man in my life. Im a strong and independent woman.”

“That you are, but don't worry you will have me too. Im going to be a great uncle, its the best job anyways. But uh- are you going to tell Harry?” 

You shrugged your shoulders and continued eating. “(y/n)...it is his baby right?”

You rolled your eyes and nodded. “It cant be anyone else's.”

“So then you're going to tell him.”

“Idontknow” you mumbled, your mouth full of ice cream.

“You have to..you know he would want to know.”

“Theres a lot I wanted to know and he didn't tell me so I’m not sure yet. I haven't decided anything.”

“Okay...” he gave in and hugged you. “I’m happy for you I really am.” 

You hugged him back and smiled. “Thanks. I’m glad you're here...I’m glad I have someone to go through this with. And I’m so so glad you brought ice cream.”

“It’s okay. What are friends for right?” You nodded and jumped in the car after saying goodbye. You didn’t quite know who to call yet so you decided to just enjoy some time with yourself. You did the only logical thing you could think of after finding out that there was a baby inside you: you went shopping. You picked a local baby store and walked in, looking at all the onesies, furniture, blankets, binkies, and bears. 

“Hi! Anything I can help you find today?”

“No, thank you I’m just looking.”

“Okay well we are having a two for one deal on onesies and bibs so make sure to check those out.”

“I will thank you.” you smiled at the girl working but she kept looking back at you. 

“Are you (y/n)...the girl dating Harry Styles?” she asked shyly.

“I was dating him, not anymore actually.” She nodded and gave you the look, you know the one of pity and sorrow? You went back to shopping looking at all of the little outfits, there were so many choices. You also had no idea if you were having a boy or a girl..something told you it was a boy but obviously you had no clue whatsoever. You decided on a cute grey onesie with little animals on it...gender neutral. You also grabbed a cute binkie that had a stuffed bear attached to it. 

“These are super cute.” the girl said while checking out. “There's a whole collection that goes with this if youre interested.”

“No, that's okay this is enough for now?”

She nodded and wrapped the stuff in a bag. “So how far along are you?”

“Not very far, only a few months.”

“Well congrats! I hope everything goes smoothly and I hope to see you back here soon for more stuff.”

You smiled and nodded. “I for sure will be back.” 

You drove home, your phone blowing up the entire way with twitter notifications, instagram tags, and more. Inside you scrolled through it, only to find pictures of you shopping for the baby clothes. Your name attached to headlines stating you were expecting but not far along. Great...this is not what I need...how do they even know.... you were scrolling through more twitter notifications. Harry’s name was now being brought into this. Another daddy in One Direction? Harry Styles Expecting? ugh...this literally cannot be happening.. and then everything got worse.. Harry’s name and photo popped up on your screen as he called. “Harry?” you answered anxiously.

---

Part 1 of my new series, hope you all enjoy! Goal is to have another part posted tonight or tomorrow! This is kind of just an intro to the story, I’m hoping to have them be a little longer but let me know what you all would rather: longer and less stories (may take more time to upload) or shorter and more stories (updated a little faster)

Let me know what you think so far and what you think will happen.

xoxo

[hopelikethemoon]

The Truth (Javier x Reader) {MTMF}

Title: The Truth Rating: PG-13 Length: 3300 Warnings: Mild Angst. (Potential Triggers: mentions of period-typical homophobia and child abuse) Notes: You can find the Maybe Today, Maybe Forever Timeline here. Set in March 1997. Part three in the “big angst arc”. Both Javier and Reader’s POVs are reflected in this.  Summary: Monica tells her truth. 

Taglist:  @grapemama​  @seawhisperer​​ @huliabitch​​ @pedropascalito​​ @rogrsnbarnes​​​@thewallpapergoesorido​​ @twomoonstwosuns​​ @gooddaykate​​ @livasaurasrex​​ @ham4arrow​​​@hiscyarika​​ @plexflexico​​ @readsalot73​​ @hdlynn​​ @lokiaddicted​​ @randomness501​​​@fioccodineveautunnale​​​  @roxypeanut​​ @just-add-butter​​ @snivellusim​​​@amarvelousmandalorian​​ @lukesrighthand​​ @historynerd04​​ @mrsparknuts​​​@synystersilenceinblacknwhite​​ @behindmyeyes-insidemyhead​​ @exrebelshocktrooper​​​@awesomefandomsunited​​ @ah-callie​​ @swhiskeys​​ @lady-tano​​ @beskar-droids​​​ @space-floozy @ct-arc-5555​​​ @cable-kenobi​​​

“You gonna talk or am I paying long distance to listen to you breathe, son?”

Javier sighed heavily, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “I don’t fucking know what to say, pops. It’s been a shit show and…”

“And?”

He raked his fingers through his hair, “And I feel like it’s all my fault.”

“How so?”

“How could it not be?” Javier questioned. “We should’ve stopped trying. She wanted to, but I… I wasn’t ready to give up hope. She didn’t want to disappoint me.”

“Who’s idea was it?”

“Who’s idea was what?”

Chucho chuckled, “To have another kid. Since you’re fretting about that.”

“I’m not fretting. She nearly died because of me.”

“Who suggested having another child?”

“She did.” Javier chewed on his bottom lip. “But she wanted to stop trying and I know… she kept trying because of me.” He sank back in the chair, keeping the phone pressed to his ear. “That’s not even half of it. All this bullshit stress is my doing too.”

“Yeah?”

Javier hesitated to tell his father about the stress factors in their lives. Despite how much he had changed over the years — he doubted his father would be as quick to believe him as she was. And he didn’t want to get into it. To explain everything that happened with the DEA. 

“There’s just been a lot going on and…” Javier sighed, rubbing at his eyes. “I never wanna see her like that again.” He shook his head slowly. “They had her hooked up to all these wires and monitors and… I fucking hated it, pops.” 

“Javier, how’s she doing now?” 

“She’s resting. Josie’s curled up with her in bed. I’m glad she didn’t have to see her mother like that.” Javier dragged a hand over his face. “I could’ve lost both of them. Her and the baby.” 

“But you didn’t.” 

“I still could.” Javier pressed. 

“Have you talked to her?”

“Today? No. She needs rest. I’m not stressing her out further about any of this bullshit.” Javier tucked the phone against his ear as he reached for the bottle of beer he’d been nursing, downing the rest of it with a quiet hiss. 

“You should go sleep, Javier.” 

“I’m good, pops.” Javier shrugged his shoulders. His plan was to crash on the sofa. She needed her rest and if he knew Josie — she’d taken over his side of the bed already. He didn’t want to wake either of them up. 

“Talk to her.” Chucho said firmly. “I’m not going to claim to know her as well as you do. I’ve spent all of a month with her over the past few years, but… she’s a good one. Whatever you’re going through, don’t let it fuck this up.” 

“Nothing’s going to fuck this up.” 

His father chuckled, “You don’t do well under pressure.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere. That’s not… It’s not like that.” Javier rubbed at the back of his neck, brows furrowed together. “I thought I could fix something. Something that I was partially complicit in.” 

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. Not really.” Javier clenched his fists. “Colombia still has her hooks in us. I should’ve cut the line, but…” 

“Javi?”

He tensed, glancing back over his shoulder to see her standing in the doorway. “Pops, I’ll call you tomorrow. I’ve gotta go.” 

“Love you son.” 

“Love you too.” Javier hung the phone up, staring at it for a moment as he raked his fingers through his hair and steadied himself. “You should be in bed.” He said softly as he looked back at her. 

“Josie snores like you.” She folded her arms across her chest, smiling at him. “I couldn’t sleep.” 

Javier moved towards her slowly, his heart hammering in his chest. “How long have you been out here?”

She chewed on her bottom lip, her eyes flickering over his face. “Long enough.” 

“I just needed to vent,” He explained, swallowing thickly. “Pops is worried about you.” 

“I’ll call him tomorrow.” She smiled a little sadly, resting her hand against her stomach. He hated seeing the ugly bruising on the top of her hand from where she’d had the IV. “Are we going to talk? Before you worry yourself into an early grave.”

Javier pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek, looking away. “It’s been a long day. A long week.”

She moved towards him, placing her hands on his shoulders. “Look at me, Javi.” She whispered and he complied. “It’s not your fault.” She squeezed his shoulders three times, before she trailed her fingers up his neck and cupped his cheeks. “None of it is and I refuse to let you beat yourself up over it. Okay?”

“Baby—”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.” He sighed heavily. “Fine.”

“I appreciate your willingness to take up my problems, but… it’s not your cross to bear.” She smiled up at him, rubbing her thumbs over his cheekbones. “And I know what you’re thinking… we should back off the DEA article, remove one area of stress—“

“It was them.” Javier admitted. “Monica said someone from the DEA offered to pay her a pretty sizeable chunk of money to start the rumor.”

“Sons of bastards.” She swore, laughing humorlessly. “Well, fuck them. I’m not backing off this.”

Javier clicked his tongue against his teeth, shaking his head. “You are something else baby.”

“I’m not going to let them win. Do I look like someone who is going to slink back into the shadows and let them win?”

“You need to relax.” Javier curled his arm around her waist and drew her into his chest. “But you have to let me carry some of this weight. Let me handle Monica. We’ll resolve this whole rumor bullshit.”

She clung to him, curling a hand around the back of his neck as she pressed her face against his chest. She pulled back a little, looking up at him. “We’re doing this together.” 

Javier sighed heavily, giving her hip a squeeze. “I don’t want to see you in the hospital again. Not like that.” He shook his head. “I can’t do it.” 

She rose up on her toes and kissed him gently. “I’ll take it easy, Javi. I really don’t want to end up in the hospital again either.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “But I’m not going to lay in bed until I give birth. I will lose my fucking mind.” 

He nodded his head slowly, understandingly. “I’ve never known you to be able to keep still for very long.” 

“Case in point.” She gestured to them and laughed. “A normal person would probably be in bed right now.” She made a face.

Javier pulled her towards him and pressed a kiss to the top of her head, before he swept her off her feet, cradling her in his arms. “If Josie’s taken over our bed, I guess we’ll just have to move to the sofa.” He remarked as he carried her out of the kitchen and into the family room. 

He settled back onto the sofa and she rearranged herself more comfortably in his lap. She rested her face against his shoulder, brushing her nose against his neck. “Don’t be angry with her.”

“Who?”

“Monica.” She pressed a kiss to the underside of his jaw, before pulling back. “She’s just a kid and…” She chewed on the inside of her bottom lip, shaking her head slowly. “I wanna hear her side of the story.” 

Javier gave her hip a gentle pat, before he slid his hand over her leg reassuringly. “What do you wanna do, then?”

“Let’s invite her over.” She said with a small smile. “That way it’s low stress for me… and we can figure out what’s going on.” She reached out and played with the hair that fell against his forehead. “And how we’re going to stop it. I’m not… I’m not ready to let go of this thing with the DEA. If they think they can play dirty, well…”

“You are an unstoppable force.” He grinned at her. “But you have to take care of you first, baby. I should’ve never started this whole mess while you were pregnant.”

“When did you submit the FOIA requests?”

“Before.” His shoulders sagged. “But I should’ve realized they’d retaliate.”

She shook her head. “No blaming yourself.” she leaned forward and rested her forehead against his. “We’re going to get through this.”

 ——

 “Is this the part where you guys kill me?” Monica questioned, rocking nervously from the balls of her feet to her heels as she looked between them. 

You shook your head slowly. “We really just want answers, Monica. The claims you made—“

“They were just rumors! I told a few people and just let it get around. I didn’t…” Monica raked her fingers through her hair. “I didn’t mean for all of this to happen.”

“But it did happen.” Javier said sharply as he steepled his fingers and he leaned his elbows against the table. “If you have plans to work in law enforcement, you should realize this. The choices you make — even ones that seem minor — cause reactions.” He shook his head. “But you took a bribe.”

“Ten thousand dollars. Really?” You questioned, lips drawn into a thin line. “That’s all it took to turn against us?”

“You have no idea how much I needed the money.” Monica whispered, staring at the table. “I don’t know how they knew.” She dragged her fingers through her hair and pressed her hands against her forehead. 

“What did they know?” You looked towards Javier, brows furrowed. “Is there more to this story, Monica?”

She sniffled quietly, before looking up at you, tears in her eyes. “I’m in a really bad situation right now.” Her eyes flickered briefly towards Javier, but his unreadable expression turned her gaze back to you. “And I don’t say this for sympathy. I don’t deserve any sympathy right now, but…” 

You reached across the table and took her hand, squeezing it gently. “You’re a good kid, Monica. If you’re in trouble, you can tell us.” You kicked Javier under the table, encouraging him to say something as well. 

Javier cleared his throat, rocking his jaw slowly as he stared at her. “I know something’s been going on… the missed classes, the late work… What is it?”

Monica rubbed the sleeve of her sweatshirt under her nose, before wiping away a stray tear. “At the end of last semester, my parents cut financial ties with me.” She admitted. “I… wasn’t in a good situation with them, but…” She shook her head slowly and looked away. “It’s complicated.” 

“Is that why you needed the money?”

“The irony of the rumor.” Monica started, her voice wavering. “I’m just going to say this… I’m just…” She nervously rubbed at her lips before she sank back in her seat, somehow managing to make herself seem smaller. “I’m gay.”

“Is that why your parents kicked you out?” You questioned, your heart aching for this poor kid. You couldn’t even imagine that situation. 

“Oh, Monica…” Javier said quietly, shaking his head. 

Monica nodded her head slowly. “I told them over the holidays and…” She wrung her hands. “It had been years since they hurt me. But I couldn’t keep living a lie.” She wiped at her eyes again, looking at you then. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize.” Javier said quickly. “I should’ve realized something was going on with you. You’ve been off all semester.” He dragged his fingers through his hair and exhaled heavily. “Are you in a safe place now?”

She shook her head. “I’m in a hostel right now. I’m trying to find somewhere to live. The money… I’ll give it back.” 

You shook your head. “No. You’re not giving the money back.You did what they told you to do. That money’s yours.” You looked towards Javier then, trying to read his pensive expression. “What is it?”

“I’m trying to think how to help her.” He gestured towards Monica. “Look, first thing Monday morning we’re talking to the dean. We’ll get the rumor brushed aside and explain it’s the fucking DEA playing games.” Javier looked at you then, brows furrowed. “You think Connie might know someone?”

You shrugged, “Yeah. I mean... Connie knows everyone.” You looked towards Monica then, a small smile playing over your lips. “We’ll help you.”

“Why?”

Javier rubbed at the back of his neck, stretching his back as he readjusted in his seat. “Because we’re good people, Monica. And you’ve gotten caught up in our shit.” 

Monica looked between the two of you, her bottom lip trembling before a flood of tears overwhelmed her. She sobbed into her hands, making absolutely no coherent sense with her words. 

“Go get her some tissues,” You told Javier as you got up from your seat and moved around the table to pull a chair up close to her. “Monica, look… I know this situation really sucks, but you’re going to get through it okay?”

“I shouldn’t have taken the money.” 

“No. You shouldn’t have.” You weren’t going to sugar coat it. “But people make mistakes. Especially when they’re going through things.” You looked up at Javier as he held out the box of tissues. “Here.” You passed her the box.

Javier rested his hand on your shoulder, squeezing it gently and you reached up to squeeze it. “Monica you’re a smart kid. I’ve read your papers, you know your shit. But you can’t… taking money from the DEA…” You shook your head. 

She wiped at her nose, looking up at you. Her shoulders shook as she tried to control another sob of emotion. “I regretted it the second I did it. The moment I opened my mouth and started the rumor…” She looked towards Javier then. “You’ve been so good to me Professor Peña. Both of you. I just needed the money so I can have somewhere to live… somewhere safe from my parents.” She wiped at her eyes furiously. “I wanted… I wanted to help kids like me, but I… I’m going to lose everything.”

You shook your head, “No. No. Monica. You’re not.” You reached out and stroked the back of her shoulders gently. “I’m not a bitch, contrary to whatever Javier might say.”

“He’s never said that.” Monica said quickly with a short laugh.

You smiled a little, glad that it made her laugh. “Your internship isn’t going anywhere, kid.”

“Really?”

“But you are going to have to help me.” You told her, arching a brow. “This shit with the DEA just proves they need to have a come to Jesus meeting.” You looked back at Javier then, your heart fluttering a little at the look in his eyes as he stared at you. “I’m not stopping.” Your gaze fell back on Monica. “I can’t do a lot right now, but you can.”

“How?”

“I need someone to help do some research for this article.” Your head canted to the side. “Think you can do that for me?”

“I’ll do anything.” Monica sniffed. 

Javier leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of your head, before he moved back around the table to sit down. “Monday morning we go to the dean’s office. We clear this up.” He looked to you then.

“How much do you make at your jobs?”

“Like five and a half dollars an hour.” Monica answered, her brows furrowing together. 

“Josie can be a handful and I’m probably going to need help. We usually pay the sitter eight an hour.” You looked towards Javier, smiling when he nodded his head in agreement with your plan. “I could use the help.” 

“Are you serious?”

“Yep.” Javier said with a shrug. “And I’ll see what Connie can do about finding you a safe place to live. I’d offer you a room here, but… We already have it set up for the baby.” 

Monica shook her head, “No. I wouldn’t want to impose. I have enough saved for like three hundred and fifty a month…”

“We’ll figure it out.” Javier said with an understanding nod. “Now, you mentioned your parents… hurting you?” He leaned against the table, staring at her. “Are you in danger?”

She shook her head. “I’m not. I didn’t… they don’t know where I am.” Monica hugged her arms around herself. “They know where I go to school, but they don’t… They wouldn’t come here.” 

You rubbed her back reassuringly. “If you need anything.” 

You couldn’t wrap your head around how someone could hurt their child. You knew it happened. You had seen the results of it, but… it just made you think of Josie. The thought of making that little girl even cry by saying ‘no’ made your heart ache. “You’re going to be okay, Monica.” 

“Thank you.” She wiped at her eyes with the sleeves of her hoodie again. 

“Do you want to stay for dinner?”

Monica shook her head, “I have work tonight.”

“Any time.” You told her, offering her a kind smile. 

“How are you doing?” Monica asked, sniffling a little. 

You shrugged, rubbing at your stomach. “I’m pregnant, I have high blood pressure, and my partner would be happy to see me never leave bed.” You looked towards Javier with a grin. “And not even in the fun way.” 

Monica laughed, looking between the two of you. “I wish my parents had been like you guys. Your daughters are lucky.”

“It’s not always sunshine and puppy dogs.” You rolled your eyes. “Speaking of puppy dogs…” You shot Javier a look. “I’m dropping hints.” 

“I think I’m going to go…” Monica said quietly. “I need to decompress before work.” 

“I know the feeling.” You squeezed her arm, before you got up from your seat. “If you need anything you have my number.”

“Thank you. Thank you both.” Monica stepped towards you and hugged you tightly. You wrapped your arms around her and held her. “I’m proud of you, kid.” 

Monica’s smile was thanks enough. 

You headed down the hallway to Josie’s room, while Javier walked Monica out. 

Josie was sound asleep, clutching at her stuffed animal. Her curly hair peeking out from above the edge of her blanket. She loved burrowing under the blankets. You just couldn’t understand it… how could someone hurt their own flesh and blood.

Javier wrapped his arms around you as he came up behind you. “That was… an interesting conversation.” He remarked, kissing your neck. “That poor kid.”

“I knew there had to be more to her story.” You chewed on your bottom lip. “She knew a lot about the emergency room. It seemed like a nervous habit, the way she told me about every little thing in the room.”

“You’re too damn observant.” 

You laughed and leaned back against him. “I am good at what I do, Javi.” You tensed a little, rubbing at your stomach. “Your daughter has an incredibly strong kick.”

Javier rested his hand over your stomach just below where your hand was, “Where?”

You curled your hand around the back of his, sliding it up to where the baby was kicking. It was a faint flutter at first, but then a swift movement followed. 

“Damn.” Javier whispered, keeping his hand pressed there. Hoping to feel it again. “You know… I never fucking expected someone to sit in front of me and say they wished I was their parent.” 

You tilted your head to look at him at him with a grin. “I think we just gained a third daughter.” 

“Oh, did we?” He snorted. “I didn’t sign any papers.” 

“It was a silent thing.” You teased, reaching back to stroke his cheek. “She needs a support system.”

“Steve and Connie like adopting.” 

“Javi.” 

“She’s also nineteen.” 

“Minor detail.” You laughed softly, pulling Josie’s room closed. “What do you think they’ll do next?”

“The DEA?” He questioned and you nodded. “Fuck if I know, but… we’re taking them down.” 

A chill ran down your spine. “It’s not going to be easy.”

“Nothing good ever is.” Javier reminded you. 

[angelruel]

vintage pt.2

      summary: the reader gets into an accident which causes her to lose her memory. as Ruel begins to rebuild their relationship and recall the good memories between them, some bad ones are restored as well and might threaten their future. 

masterlist

Word Count: 4.4 k (kind of long, oops)

       “Soooo what’s my favorite color?”

       “Easy. Blue,” he retorted while reaching over to fill in a space on the tic tac toe board that Y/N had drawn on her empty lap desk. He was the x’s and she played the o’s. It was a bit difficult for Ruel to pretend to not know all of her tricks she played in this game, but he was a very convincing loser. She had also taken the opportunity of his return to test him on some trivia of her personal likes and dislikes. 

       “Okay, here’s a good one,” she said as she filled the left hand corner on the board with a perfect circle. Ruel learned a long time ago that her strategy was to fill two corners and the center spot of the board in order to have an upper hand on winning. He watched her play the same way over again. Ruel admired her predictability and he almost felt confident enough that her tic tac toe skills returning would somehow correlate to her feelings for him to return as well.

       “Well finally a good one. Lay it on me.” He gave her his signature soft smile that he always grants her when he’s being his sweetest version of a boyfriend.

       “What’s my favorite song? Or, at least one of my favorite songs.”

       Ruel scrunches up his nose in thought, “hmmm. I’m gonna need a little more context, bub.”

       “Okay so maybe my favorite song I like to hear on a road trip. Something that gets me energized.” Ruel found it funny that she was reaching for more and more clues to jog her memory. They both knew that couldn’t she remember the last road trip she’d been on, or any of them for that matter. He was proud that she was at least in a more positive mood about not remembering things. 

       “Wait a Minute! by Willow Smith. There’s one.”

       Y/N’s happy expression dropped to a confused one. 

       “Huh? I don’t listen to Willow Smith.”

       They both just sat there for a while. There was still an apparent wall that Y/N had built up to secure herself from being hurt by Ruel since she barely knew him. 

       But the truth was that she barely knew herself.

       “Well, I guess I did listen to her music,” she dropped her head down. “I guess I just can’t remember it.” 

       Ruel used the sleeve of his sweater to wipe off the marker drawings on Y/N’s desk tray so that he could lean over it to hold her hands.

       “Hey, how about we do something else? I brought back some stuff like you asked me for.” She looked up and gave him a soft smile when he let go of her hands to grab a blue shoebox from the floor.

       “Oh, you brought gifts! Yay!” she exclaimed while clapping her dainty hands over and over. He sat the box in front of her lap on the hospital tray and she stared at it for a minute. One of the things she did remember was that blue was her favorite color. And after having a few conversations with Ruel, she discovered that his was brown. So, she assumed that the color of the box was a little nod to her. She thought that was really sweet.

       “You can go ahead,” he encouraged her. “If you have any questions, just ask.”

       She hesitated to lift the flimsy lid from the top. Partly because she was afraid that seeing the contents wouldn’t help jog her memories at all, and also because she was still pretty weak from the constant dosage of pain meds she’d grown accustomed to. 

       The first things to come out of the box were some polaroids and a bunch of little papers she grabbed that were grouped together. One of the polaroids showed a group photo in front of a campfire with little writing at the bottom that said ‘new years 2020.’ There were some post-it notes with little messages written on them in pencil. They were fading but Y/N could still make out what they said. It was a girl’s handwriting, and there was a little drawing of a pond? Or maybe a lake. 

i drew you a pond since you wanna act like a silly goose all the time. bitch.

               -y/n

       There was another one filled with words instead of a cute drawing, and she assumed this one was a serious matter.

hi, love. i left to go watch the sunrise with coco around 4 am-ish. you probably would’ve wanted to join us, but you look so peaceful when you’re sleeping. and coco said that you’ve been smothering me lately and encouraged me to sneak out. anyways, i’ll probably be back before you see this, but just in case i’m not, don’t call the cops. okay that’s all. in case i never return, i love you. 

                -y/n (under the heavy influence of stella)

       Ruel chimed in to explain. “Yeah, you used to leave me little notes like that sometimes instead of texting like a normal person.” 

       “And you kept them?”

       “Of course I did. I’m not a monster.” He joked and she playfully hit his chest with the stack of notes. Ruel scooted his chair closer to the side of Y/N’s bed and leaned in. “Lets see what else we got in here.”

       There were movie tickets, receipts from restaurants, and even old wristbands from festivals. 

       “Is this what you meant when you said I grow attached to material things?” She laughed on the outside but in reality, Y/N was so infatuated in the idea that a boy would keep a box of things that reminded him of her and their relationship. 

       “Ha yeah, I guess it kind of rubbed off on me after a while.” Ruel reached his hand into the box as well and pulled out a little beaded bracelet. It had a simple pattern of ocean blue and brown wooden beads. He played with it in between his fingers.

       “I remember this. Your cousin made it for us when you brought me to Thanksgiving. She kept running back and forth asking us what our favorite colors were. It was so cute. And she said we had to share it,” he reminisced. 

       He gave her the bracelet which she carefully placed on the wrist that wasn’t connected to an IV. There were mostly pictures in the box. Pictures of Y/N and Ruel in different settings: kissing, posing next to venue signs with his name on it, cooking, etc. She picked up one of the pictures and examined it carefully. 

       “I remember this,” she said in a nonchalant matter. Ruel looked up at her, then back at the picture in her hand.

       “You do?” 

       “Yeah, I remember that whole trip. That was a fun trip. Hmm.” She hummed to herself in bliss with a grin on her face. 

       “Tell me about it,” he grinned back at her. “What do you remember?” She looked down for a while. It was almost like the times they spent together were in secret, and too precious to share with anyone else. She felt a deep connection to someone-whoever it was to make her feel such strong emotions in just the echos of the times they spent together. Y/N began longing for the person who made her experience this type of fondness. The person she was looking for was right in front of her. Why was she holding back?

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

       “Okay, how do I say this,” Y/N’s hand snaked up to her head to rake through her hair as she paced in deep thought. She took in a deep breath and turned around to look at him sitting in the hospital chair across the room.

       “I-I want this to be special. I mean, you’ve been so patient and considerate with me. You haven’t tried to rush me into anything at all. But I see the way you look when you think I’m not paying attention. You’re hurting, and I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to finally give in. Well not, finally give in, but. You know, you know what I’m trying to say right?” She used every ounce of energy she had to walk across the room to face him. She picked him up and brought his face close to hers. 

       “I’m trying to tell you that I love you,” she whispered and smiled softly. Before she could say anything else, Y/N heard the doorknob rattle in desperation to open it. 

       She quickly threw the teddy bear back into the chair and tried to pretend that she was doing anything else. 

       Ruel leaned into the door frame and struggled to keep his balance as he carried a Taco Bell bag and two drinks in his hands. 

       “Oh, let me help you with that,” Y/N rushed over to him to grab the drinks and his eyes grew in shock.

       “Well, it’s nice to see you up and moving so much. The doctor was right, you really have been getting stronger every day.” Y/N smiled up at him with pride as they both settled the food onto her desk. “So, have you heard anything yet?” 

       “Anything about what,” Y/N mumbled in between taking bites of her soft taco. She knew exactly what he was referring to, though.

       “Oh, you know. Like when are you gonna get out of this place? I mean, with the way you’re up and walking now,” he brought his free hand up to rest on the back of her neck as he examined her face with concerned eyes. “It’s been, what, four weeks now? They said four to six weeks, but by the looks of it, you’re healing up really well. You’ve done so good lately.”

       She mouthed ‘thank you’ and gave him another wide smile. Y/N was happy that he was proud of her progress. He played a big part of her growth, though. Through the discomfort and the multiple procedures she had to undergo, Ruel was always there at the side of her bed to rely on. Whether she was up at 4 am crying because she couldn’t remember the names of her dogs or freaking out in excitement after being able to stand up on her own, he was there for it all.

       And as her strength developed each day, so did her trust and love for him. She assumed that it wasn’t the same as their previous relationship, but it was more than enough to keep them happy. He would always tell her that he loved her, but she didn’t say it back. He told her it was fine, that he knew she didn’t really know who he was and he wouldn’t hold it against her. But in return, he needed for her to accept that he still loved her as much as he did before the accident and to be okay with him loving her even if it meant that she couldn’t love him equally back for a while. 

       But after spending so much time with him, Ruel was hardly a stranger to Y/N anymore. He was a friend, a very understanding and attractive friend. She couldn’t ignore the burning sensation she felt deep in her stomach when he would cuddle up close to her on the bed during their movie nights. She couldn’t ignore the desire or the comfort she felt for him any time that he was around (which was very often because Ruel was always around). He told her that he would wait for her, that she should take her time to decide if she wanted to continue their relationship whenever she was ready. He told her that she’d just gone through a major trauma and that she needed to focus on getting better. He said he would wait for her, but a part of her feared that he was only saying this to make her feel better. She feared that he had already accepted that they were just friends, that maybe he’d already began a new romance with some skinny long-haired girl in Sydney and he was just waiting for Y/N to get her strength back so that he could go home to her. 

       “Okay, well I have to tell you something,” she finally came out with. Ruel sat up straight in his chair to give her his full attention. His eyes were fixated on her face and his hands rested in his lap. She found herself lost in thought trying to remember what she wanted to tell him but she couldn’t focus on anything but his beauty. 

       “Did they already tell you whether you’re going home or not?” he laughed a little as he went to grab his drink off of the desk. “Did I miss it when I went to get lunch?” He used the side of his jeans to wipe the water that got on his hand from the cup. His huge hand. The same huge hand that he then used to move the long strands of hair out of his face. He’d previously told her that she did not like the long hair look on him and always encouraged him to get haircuts and shave. In the moment, Y/N couldn’t figure out why the hell anyone would ever encourage him to change his appearance when he looked like that. The long hair and mustache gave him a much more mature look in comparison to the old pictures and videos she would look at of him. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to cut the hair that she so desperately wanted to run her fingers through. She quickly snapped out of it and shut her eyes so she couldn’t look at the beautiful boy in front of her.

       “I really do have to tell you something,” she started and stopped because she was nervous. With her eyes still closed, she felt Ruel’s hand grab hers.

       “What’s going on, why are you acting so weird?” he let out a nervous laugh and Y/N realized that he was probably feeling the same anxiety as her in the moment. She knew that someone had to be the confident one in this scenario, and she decided that it would be her. She took one last deep breath and let go of it.

       “Do you remember what I told you when I first told you I loved you?”

       “Yes,” he laughed again, “Do you want me to tell you the story again?” She nodded quickly in a child-like manner and looked at him in adoration.

       “It was a little after a month of us dating and I’d just taken you home after we went out driving and just hanging out. I was almost back in the car when I saw you run out of the house, barefoot, yelling at me to wait.” Y/N laughed a little and felt the tension between the two of them begin to melt away. 

       “And then what did I do?”

       “You went into this whole speech about how you felt and how you were very scared to be vulnerable because you were afraid of being hurt. And then you said something that I’d never forget,” he looked up at the ceiling as if the answers were written on the tiles, “you told me that the fear you felt only grew as you fell more in love with me. You said you thought that it would never go away, but you didn’t want it to stop you from embracing the happiness you felt when you were with me. And then you told me you loved me, and that you were scared of me. You said that I made you wanna jump into the fear rather than run away from it. You said you knew that you loved me as soon as you felt scared. Because you knew you had found something worth cherishing. And if it ever went away, you didn’t think you’d survive it.” He looked down. After saying all of that, it still seemed like there was something he was missing. He looked as if he didn’t manage to not break her heart. He was scared too.

       “Ruel?” Y/N let her hands relax and gripped onto his tighter. 

       “Yeah?”

       “I’m scared.” She began to fiddle with his long digits and almost felt hesitation to do anything next.

       “What are you afraid of-” he began, but was interrupted by the connection of her lips onto his. He freed his hand and rose it up to the back of her neck so he could deepen the kiss. They kissed again, and again. They kissed until their faces were red and she broke away for a moment to catch her breath. She smiled at him and he looked back at her in disbelief. 

       “I love you. I really do, Ruel. And I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long but I don’t want to be just friends. I want you in my life like you used to be,” her eyes dropped to her lap and her expression changed, “before everything got so fucked up.”

       He grabbed her face again and began to pepper it with kisses. At this point, Ruel was halfway onto her bed. She brought up her dainty hands to cup his face and she gently pulled away again. Ruel hitched a rushed breath out as he pouted in confusion as to why she pulled away. 

       “Oh yeah, I’m going home today.” She smiled with her teeth and he laughed in pure bliss before grabbing her face again.

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

       The boxes piled in the middle of the living room all started to disappear one by one. Y/N watched in awe as Ruel picked up every box and placed it in its proper area. Her legs swung back and forth in boredom while she waited on top of the kitchen counter where Ruel had placed her since she refused to wear shoes on the trip to her apartment.

       “You’re such a good slave,” she told him in a sweet tone as her eyes followed him across the area. He shook his head, barely giving her an ounce of the attention she practically begged for, and continued moving things around. 

        “Honey are you sure you’re gonna be okay on your own like this? You can stay back home a little longer if you’d like,” Y/N’s mother remarked. She looked at her daughter with concern.

        “I’m not alone, I have Ruel. And besides, I’ve already left the nest once before. I should be fine.”

        “Well I guess I’ll be on my way home now. Call me if you need anything. Anything.” Y/N pecked a kiss on her cheek and guided her mom outside.

        By the time she got back into the apartment, the living room was clear of boxes and she moved down the hall in search of her boyfriend. She found Ruel in her bedroom on the edge of the bed hunched over his phone. 

        “What’s so interesting?” She sat down beside him and rested her chin on his shoulder. Once she realized what he was watching, she pulled out one of his airpods so she could listen in. It was from her Youtube channel she started a few months ago. She had faint memories of vlogging herself doing normal things like grocery shopping or going to her brother’s football games. She’d only looked at a few of her storytime videos, including the one where she details how she met Ruel. This was a video she hadn’t seen before, though. It was of her and Ruel together in some resort. It looked like they were on vacation and he explained to her that they were in Amsterdam for some music festival and had decided to make an entire trip out of it since it was so close to their anniversary. They’d coordinated matching outfits for the first weekend and were posing in front of the bathroom mirror together like lovesick idiots.

        “Damn, I’m so jealous of us.”

        Ruel let out a low chuckle at her and skipped through the parts she’d recorded of his performance.

        “Yeah, most people are.” He fast forwarded to a portion of the video after they returned to the hotel. Ruel was in the shower and Y/N was laying on the bed, recently showered, detailing all of the ways she was proud of her boyfriend. He laughed when she poked fun of how he forgot his own lyrics on stage.

        “Well that was almost cute,” he added and locked the phone.

        “Hey, it’s still pretty cute,” she laughed, “You can’t be mad at me for telling the truth, babe.”

        “Babe, huh?” he questioned as he turned to face her.

        “What, is that weird? Or too soon? I mean, you call me ‘bubs’ and ‘love’ all the time,” she looked down and played with the details of her jeans.

        “It’s adorable. I love it. And I love you,” he reassured her as he cupped her face and pulled it in for a puffy kiss. She kissed him back, this time with more dominance. Y/N kissed Ruel like there was a pot of gold hidden somewhere in his mouth that she was determined to get.

        Ruel matched her energy right away. He kissed her back and gripped the back of her neck to guide her face closer into his. They adorned each other with open mouths and full hearts. As they continued, Y/N felt the urge to go further and further with him, exploring his body and getting to know him on a more intimate level. They were so good at making out, it seemed like they’d done it a thousand times before. It felt like she was kissing a lover from a different lifetime, like she’d replayed scenarios over and over which all ended with her loving him. She couldn’t remember ever doing this with him before, but her body remembered. Everything with Ruel came with such ease. Every time he touched her body, she was overcome with euphoria and only craved more. She craved being closer to him, kissing him deeper.

        “Mmm, take this off please,” she tugged on his shirt and he quickly pulled it off before resuming his actions. Y/N felt herself falling into an intoxicated state as she moaned against his mouth. He responded to her by wrapping his hand around her thigh and pulling it closer against him. They both began to move in sync with each other, both giving and taking as their bodies danced a routine they knew too well. Y/N was so distracted by Ruel that she didn’t even hear her mother walk back in through the front door. She only whined when he pulled his face away from hers.

        “Why’dyoustop,” she breathed out. She was out of breath and watched him with puppy dog eyes as he stood up.

        “Your mom is back,” he stated flatly. He was clearly out of breath too and he was trying to calm himself down so he could see what was going on in the front.

       “...so?” she gave him a blank stare and patted on his side of the bed to join her again, “she can let herself out.”

       “Don’t worry, bubs. We’ve got time,” he chuckled to himself and pulled his shirt back on over his head. Y/N sighed and jumped from her side of the bed to join Ruel in the living room.

       “I’m sorry, hun. I forgot the most important box: your things from the hospital.” Y/N’s mother placed a small box on the counter and tapped the top of it lightly, “This is what you had on you when the crash happened. There’s not much in there, just the clothes you were wearing, your wallet, your phone,”

       “My phone?” Her eyes perked up. So did Ruel’s. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. I bet there’s a bunch of clues in there to help jog my memory,” she picked up the box and skipped down the hallway to drop it off. 

       “I’m pretty sure it’s dead, so you’ll have to find a charger for it. You probably have the same kind.” Her mom gestured towards Ruel, who looked like he’d just seen a ghost. His eyes were fixated in thought, emotionless and dazed in a trance.

        “Huh? Oh yeah, probably. Sure.” He snapped out of his guilty state quickly and turned to see Y/N coming back from her bedroom.       

        “Was that it, Mom? Cause we were just about to go out and get some food before it gets dark.” They both said goodbye and hugged Y/N’s mother. Once the door was shut behind her, Y/N grabbed Ruel’s hand with a quickness. His worries were suddenly gone as she led him down the hall. 

        It wasn’t long before they’d continued right where they left off. Y/N was still indulging herself in him and embracing the comfort she felt in his arms. She gripped the fabric of his shirt into her fists to deepen the kiss and felt the vibration from his mouth into hers as he let out muffled moans. With each kiss, she found herself thinking about all of the things she couldn’t wait to do with him before another thought popped into her mind and snapped her out of the daydream. She pulled away from him and turned her head towards the box.

        “I’ve been wondering what was left on my phone,” she gestured to the dresser. “I need to plug it up so I can see what was going on before I lost my memory. It would be cool to see who I last talked to right before my life was ruined, right?” She laughed and began to sit up. Ruel grabbed her hand and lightly pulled it so she could come back down to him.

        “I thought you wanted to do this, yeah? I mean hey, this is our first official night together alone. We can look into the phone later, right?”

        Y/N nodded and laid back down next to him. “Hmmm, you’re right. This first, phone later,” she declared before connecting their lips once more. As Ruel rolled his lanky body on top of hers, Y/N couldn’t help but wonder why Ruel was so against her looking at her phone. Was there a dirty secret in there that he didn’t want her to find? She dismissed her paranoid thoughts and continued.

a/n: okay, so that’s that on that. ugh what is on that phone that he doesn’t want her to see???? i hope this makes sense, i’ve reread it so many times and it seems like crap but i’m still going to post it. thank you for the support of my page, and please send me asks with what fics you would like to see next ;)

[ficsandcatsandficsandcats]

I know this won't all fit in one ask so here goes! Haha! Okay so plus size reader x jaskier. With some jealous jaskier. And he's jealous because reader and geralt are pretty good friends, but thats not why he's jealous, he's jealous because he keeps walking in on them at the worst times and they keep finding themselves in like really odd situations that can be read as sexual when they are NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THAT AT ALL and jaskier just keeps walking in at THEE worst time. Reader has been in 1/?

Love with jaskier for years, they’re close, she’s shy so now he’s like how come Geralt gets to have all this closeness & not me. So he kind of pulls away & maybe starts mumbling to himself when they’re all together & so finally she asks him whats wrong & he’s like very short with her & meaner than he means to be about her & geralt. & she is accidentally like “i’m not in love with him. fucks sake Jaskier ive been in love YOU for years!” & storms off & then reconciliation? THANK YOU!

Fandom: The WitcherPairing: Jaskier x ReaderWord Count: 1,470Rating: TTaglist: @heroics-and-heartbreak @whatevermonkey @mynamesoundslikesherlock @magic-multicolored-miracle @writingstudent @mlleecrivaine @coffee-and-stories @ultracolorfulnerdcollection @astouract @your-not-invisible-to-me @kemmastan a/n: I hope you enjoy it! Thank you for the prompt!

One of the greatest mysteries in Jaskier’s many-storied life was how Geralt consistently surrounded himself with gorgeous women.

Despite how frustrating and downright scary he found her, Jaskier would never deny Yennefer’s beauty. From the stories he’d heard Renfri was also lovely, as was the sorceress Triss Merigold. The warriors who had accompanied them up the mountain were gorgeous with their long necks and strong physiques. Yet all of them had eyes for Geralt and Geralt alone. This continued when it came to you. Geralt had introduced you to Jaskier as a long-time friend but Jaskier knew better. Geralt would be a fool to resist a woman of your charms and you were clearly smitten with him. Jaskier was ecstatic when you joined them on their travels but as his feelings for you deepened, so did his agony.

He would write songs about your beauty only to throw them away when he found you snuggled up on Geralt’s lap before the fire. One time he had walked in on you bent over a table, Geralt right behind you, and you’d tried to say that it ‘wasn’t what it looked like’ and Geralt was ‘just massaging a pulled muscle’ but Jaskier was the first to know those mistakes were all nonsense. He’d “massaged” plenty of “pulled muscles” in his day, thank you very much. There was one night where he thought, perhaps, he had a chance. It was bitterly cold and you’d suggested that you and him share a bedroll, cuddling together for warmth. He’d wrapped you up tight and he could’ve sworn he felt your heart skip a beat as he surreptitiously planted a kiss on your head. But when he woke up, Geralt had joined and you were draped across him. That was when he knew there was no point in trying anymore.

Sure, there were other things along the way that should have made this less devastating. You always gave Geralt long, tight hugs and with Jaskier you were brief and always seemed a bit reluctant or uncertain about touching. You’d casually make bawdy jokes with Geralt but whenever Jaskier made one you blushed or looked askance. Yes, it was clear what was going on here, it didn’t take a genius to see, but it still hurt Jaskier deeply and that hurt turned into outward dickishness.

You noticed that Jaskier grew colder. He didn’t sing songs to you anymore, not even to get your opinion as he wrote songs about the new muse he had, some woman whose beauty was as ample as her body and just as tempting. You envied this woman more than you could bear but you tried to appease yourself with his friendship. True, you were closer with Geralt, having met him long ago, but the real impediment between a close friendship with Jaskier was the feelings you held for him. You kept them tucked away in secret as you watched Jaskier flirt with everyone.

The mumbling was new, though. The coldness and the mumbling started one morning after you had gone to bed with him. Tragically not in a euphemistic way but genuinely curled up for warmth, nestled in his arms. You’d woken in the middle of the night with your teeth chattering, Jaskier even colder than you though fast asleep, and you had woken Geralt to come help you warm him and by the three of you combined you were able to provide enough warmth to sleep through the night. Sleeping next to Geralt was something you’d done a thousand times, you thought nothing of it. But the next morning Jaskier had begun to act strange. He hardly talked and he looked at you even less. When Geralt passed you a piece of bread you thought you heard Jaskier mumble something about ‘getting a piece’ but when you asked him he looked at you in confusion and you moved on. For a week now he’d been making little side comments, though, and you were just about at your limit. You hoped that staying at an inn may help his mood, that perhaps the hard travel was just weighing on him, and he did seem to perk up a bit at getting a warm meal but once Geralt excused himself to leave the mumbling started again.

“What are you doing?” you asked. Jaskier looked up and tried to give you an innocent expression but you were unimpressed.

“What are you talking about?” he countered.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Every time Geralt talks to me you mutter something to yourself,” you insisted.

“Maybe I have to talk to myself because the only one you ever talk to is Geralt,” Jaskier grumbled.

“That’s just not true,” you said, crossing your arms over your chest.

“Right, sorry, my mistake,” Jaskier said, voice hard and sarcastic, “You don’t just talk to him. You also sleep on him and gods know what else when I’m not there. Hell, probably when I’m there too, not like you’d give a damn.”

Your eyes pricked with hot, angry tears and you rose from the table.

“Geralt is my friend. Unlike you. No friend would be so… mean,” you cried.

“I thought you liked mean guys after all, there’s Geralt and you can’t keep your hands off of him,” Jaskier snapped.

“Where the hell is this coming from? I’m not in love with Geralt. I haven’t been in love with anyone but you since we met but you’re so damned pigheaded and stuck in the clouds with your muse that you can’t see anything. Gods, Jaskier, I’ve always defended you when people said you were just some dumb bard but you’re not only daft, you’re cruel,” your voice cracked at the end of your words and you ran from the table towards the stables as swiftly as you could. Jaskier’s head spun as he took in everything that had just happened. He’d never intended to be so harsh, even if you were in love with Geralt it would give him no right to judge or hate you for it. But then you’d said that you loved him? Could such a miracle be true? And even if it was, had be cocked it all up beyond reason now?

Jaskier found you in the stables petting Roach and was grateful not to find you pouring your heart out to Geralt who would likely have murdered him on the spot for making his friend cry, as would be his right. When you saw him you glowered and turned your face back to the horse. Roach looked over at Jaskier and he would’ve sworn he saw disdain in her large, brown eyes.

“Y/N I’ve been an ass,” Jaskier said.

“Yes, you have,” you replied without turning around.

“Everything you said was right. I was mean and cruel and you didn’t deserve any of that,” he continued.

“Too right,” you said with a sniff, wiping your nose with the back of your hand.

“And I hope what I say now doesn’t make it worse,” he said. He saw you stiffen and then turn to face him. Your wet, red-rimmed eyes wrenched his heart. He’d fantasized about how he may confess his love to you countless times and in none of them had he made you cry. Not like this.

“I love you. I’m in love with you. I have been for years and I never told you because… not just because you seemed to close to Geralt – and I know! I know you’re friends!” he said quickly as you frowned and opened your mouth to protest, “But there was such a clear different between how you treated us. You didn’t joke with me as you did him and you seemed reluctant or uncomfortable touching me and I assumed it was because you… well that you didn’t like me. Much less love.”

Realization dawned on your face, as well as a little regret.

“Oh Jaskier… Of course I like you. That’s why I was so distant. I assumed you’d never feel for me the way I did for you and I think I was just trying to keep a safe distance to try and protect my heart. Which means I am also sort of stupid because obviously that ship had sailed,” you said with a rueful laugh.

“You’re not stupid,” Jaskier insisted, moving closer to you and daring to try and take your hand, encouraged when you let him, “Emotions are hard. Well, they’re not, but we make them hard. We humans are a ghastly species.”

“We are,” you agreed, nodding and moving a little closer.

“So,” Jaskier said, pale blue eyes gazing down into yours as you both crept ever so slowly closer, drawn like two magnets that have been held apart for too long, “What happens now?”

You answered him with a kiss.

[welcometophu]

Not Your Guardian Angel: Chapter 22

Marked Book 3: Not Your Guardian Angel

Chapter 22

[ Previous | First | Next ]

Pels blinks several times as she wakes. She’s lying on her side, her free arm curled under her pillow, the other hand lying against her hip. She aches from head to toe in ways that definitely remind her that she’s alive, but the floating sensation seems to be gone.

The room is still somewhat dark, the overhead light off, but there’s more noise and light from outside the curtains.

Dad sits in a chair facing her, but as soon as he meets her eyes, he stands and walks out. The curtain lifts and falls in his wake, and there’s a scrape of a chair behind her.

“I am never going to get used to that,” Jess mutters. Shuffling sounds, and Pels rolls onto her back to find Jess’s hand over her shoulder. Jess pulls back quickly. “You’re awake.”

“I’m awake.” Pels is completely aware of the way Jess hovers as if she wants to lean in and knows she needs to lean back. Pels licks her lips—she feels like she’s been dried out to a husk. “I think Dad left us alone. It’s a surprising offer of privacy.”

“What does he think we’re going to do?” Jess huffs softly. “Shane’s picking up some breakfast. I think your mom and sister will be back a little later. We told them to take their time since you were sleeping.”

Pels nods. She tries to push herself to sitting, and Jess quickly moves to raise the back of the bed for her. “I hurt more,” Pels says. “But I feel less like I’m underwater.”

“I think that’s a good thing.” Jess sits back in the chair, her hands tightly clasped together. “They said they were going to back off on your pain meds. The Healers stopped by and said that in order to be able to start actually healing, your body needs to not be sedated. So. They recommend against prescription painkillers.”

“Mm.” Pels looks at the trash, still full from last night, and the small rolling table she hadn’t noticed that sits off to one side. “I don’t suppose anyone brought me breakfast, did they?”

“I can go ask.” Jess pushes to her feet, but she hesitates. There’s something going on, but Pels can’t read her expression other than that it looks tight and drawn as Jess bites her lip.

“What?” Pels asks.

“I was so scared,” Jess whispers. “I was just so scared, and I’m still kind of scared because I know you’re real and okay and you’re here and Shane told me you’re solid and not some kind of ghost like your dad, but I still just want—” She hesitates. “I wish I could hug you.”

Oh.

Pels touches her wrist, fingers drifting over the mountain’s craggy lines. “I—”

“I get it,” Jess says quickly. “I don’t want you to do anything you—”

“Okay.” Pels interrupts her, needing to get the word out before she changes her mind.

Jess stops. “Wait. Really?”

“Please don’t keep asking or I might say different,” Pels tells her. She opens her arms as best she can with the IV line dragging against her. “Just—let’s do this.”

Jess’s expression lights up, the corners of her eyes crinkling as she leans in. She moves slowly, and Pels thinks she could say no even now, but she doesn’t.

The second Jess’s hand touches her shoulder, Pels feels the zing straight through, like an electrical shock running all the way to her other arm. Then searing warmth as Jess carefully gathers her in, enveloping her in a rolling heat that pushes in through her skin, then wells up inside of her.

“Oh,” Pels whispers. She closes her eyes, her head tilted against Jess’s shoulder as Jess cradles her carefully. Tightly. Pels catches at Jess’s shirt with her good hand, fingers holding on to the fabric against her back.

Under her hand, Jess’s muscles slowly relax. Breath is soft and warm against Pels’s cheek when Jess exhales. “God,” Jess replies. “Just… I was so fucking scared. You flew, Pels. I thought—I thought you were going to be dead. And I didn’t know what I’d do.”

“I’m okay.” It should be obvious, now that they’re like this, but maybe she needs to hear it. Maybe Pels needs to say it. She’s okay. Not just after the accident, but also after touching Jess. She felt it ripple through her body; she knows her mark must have changed. And right now she is absolutely and completely aware of the way lava bubbles through her, as if she could burn up from the inside.

But she’s okay.

Jess pulls back, brushing her lips against Pels’s forehead. She frames her face with her hands and stays there, staring into her eyes. “You are seriously okay?”

“I am maybe a little shaky right this very second, but that has nothing to do with being thrown out of a car,” Pels says with a small smile. She loves the way Jess laughs at that, her eyes crinkling in the corners.

“Can I—” Jess stops herself, making a face. “Too soon.”

“What?”

“You kissed Shane.”

There are semantics to this. Shane kissed her. She kissed Shane. Shane apparently transferred a kiss from Pels to Jess.

But yes, that’s mostly it.

They’ve already touched. It’s not like kissing makes the magic worse.

“If you really want our first kiss to be in a hospital while I’m—” Pels cuts off as Jess leans in, mouth slotting over hers, because oh, she has no breath left to speak. Her heart pounds and there aren’t any bees, just that lava boiling up from her belly, magma ready to spill over and consume her in flames.

A machine in the background gives a startled high-pitched beep and whine.

Jess pulls back, her pale skin flushed a dusky rose. “Maybe making out while you’re hooked up to a heart monitor isn’t the best idea, but I have to admit, the feedback is good for my ego.”

Pels is not going to look at the machinery. She knows her heart is racing, and her skin is heated and warm. She tries for nonchalant. “It was okay.”

Jess laughs; the sound is as rich and warm as the lava flowing through Pels’s veins.

The curtain pulls back with a rattle. “You two look cozy,” Shane says.

Jess steps away, her hands falling from Pels’s face. Pels tries to look innocent, but she feels as if her skin must be blazing red, and the monitor still raises the alarm from her elevated heart rate.

A nurse comes in behind Shane, bearing a tray that she sets on the table. “Breakfast,” she says, taking the lid off and setting it aside. The scents of eggs and warm maple syrup fill the air. Pels’s stomach growls, and she reaches her hands out, grinning when the nurse wheels the table next to her, so it goes in front of where she sits up. She reaches for the mug, but it’s empty; Pels makes a small whining sound.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want coffee or tea,” the nurse says.

Pels looks up, another small, hopeful noise slipping free. “Coffee. As much as I’m allowed to have.”

The pot that’s delivered shortly thereafter seems far too small, but at least she has something.

Shane hands a wrapped egg sandwich to Jess, and they all eat in silence for a little while. Breakfast is far better than last night’s post-midnight snack, and Pels devours it quickly. She’s still hungry when it’s gone, and she wonders if that’s a side-effect of the Healing that’s been done and her body’s attempts to catch up to normal.

Jess refills her glass of water when Pels asks, and she sips at it, trying to get the cotton feeling out of her mouth.

“So,” Shane says, lifting his hand in the air. “I almost dropped everything when you two started making out.”

His mark looks exactly the same. Maybe larger, but Pels can’t really tell and it’s not like she measured the cloud when this whole mess started. “Nothing happened,” she says, frowning at his mark.

“I’m pretty sure something happened.” Shane’s dry tone has a hint of humor, and a moment after he says it, he’s grinning.

Jess reaches out, sliding her fingers over Pels’s hand, curling around hers. “I hugged her. Then she said I could kiss her, and I wasn’t giving up that chance.”

“Bees and lava,” Pels says. They both give her a strange look, and she flushes but doesn’t try to explain. She’s sure she’d sound like a fool if she did.

“So.” Shane gestures to the two of them as he says it again. “I’m not asking for details on the kissing—the monitors made it clear that was a good thing.” He smirks a little, and Pels tries to sink back into the pillows. “Your wrists?”

Oh. Right. That.

Jess holds hers up first, and instead of a mark that indicates either Pels or Shane, she has a clouded inky spot that shifts and moves as she does, just as indistinct as Shane’s.

Pels knows her mark must have changed. She felt the impact of Jess’s touch, felt that singing electrical spark through her blood, down into her arm. But she’s half afraid that if she looks, it’ll still be somehow inconclusive.

Jess reaches for her at the same time as Shane does. They both stop just shy of touching her, and she meets their gazes as she turns her hand over to show the inside of her wrist.

The mountain is still there, but the scene has expanded with a cloud above, and a pool of water below. Both are patterned, filled in with a jumbled chaos of lines that make Pels think of being able to see the air and water in movement on her skin.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “I don’t know why...?”

“Maybe we’re each soulmates with you, but not each other,” Jess says.

“That doesn’t make sense magically,” Shane disagrees. He sits back down in the chair further from Pels, leaving Jess to tangle her fingers with Pels as Shane continues to speak. “It’s my mark, and if I’d bonded with Pels originally, we would’ve had each others’ marks. Instead she got yours. And now she’s got mine, and you’ve got… something in waiting. It’s not done yet.” He puts up a hand before Jess can start speaking. “And yes, it makes more sense if it’s a V—I’ve been researching how triads work.”

“I get the idea, mathematically speaking,” Jess agrees.

“But you and her, plus me and her—that’d be stable, and it does make sense since we’ve known each other forever. And we already know that you and I touching each other doesn’t make a difference, because we’ve done that a hundred times since the Ritual.” Shane shrugs, slumping further back. “We’re still missing something.”

“One step at a time is fine with me.” Pels watches as Jess lightly traces the tiny lines that swirl inside the lake. “I’m adjusting. And I haven’t panicked—” She glares when Jess snorts. “Much,” Pels amends. “I haven’t panicked much. But we’ve touched, and I’ve kissed you both, and that’s all—it’s good. It’s very good. It’s different, too. I feel like I’m different now.”

She blinks, because Dad’s standing behind Shane, just suddenly there. “So much for privacy,” she huffs.

Shane and Jess look at each other. “Your dad is here?”

“He is now.”

“Go on, this was getting interesting,” Dad says. “You feel different how?”

Pels tugs her hand free from Jess, crossing her arms. “Like I want to talk about how kissing feels in front of you,” she mutters. “I just feel—connected. Like I’m aware of them. Bees and lava under my skin, pulling me towards them. You,” she says, pointing to both Jess and Shane. “I know how you feel and it’s different, but I’m aware of it all the time right now. I want to touch you. Be touched by you. Kiss you. And I don’t know if that’s me liking you or the mark saying that I need you.”

“The mark can’t force anything,” Shane reminds her. “It’s a suggestion, not an order.”

“I am perfectly okay if you want to tell me how attracted you are to me.” Jess grins, her thumb sliding over Pels’s skin. “If you want to get some more data, I’m all for more kissing, too.”

“Hey.” Shane protests, but he’s smiling and doesn’t look entirely upset by being left out.

Dad raises an eyebrow. “So. You’re all set then?”

“I think I’m okay without more kissing. For now. I think I just—I know you’ll figure out what’s going on eventually, or we will, but right now… I’m tired,” Pels admits.

Jess moves her hand to Pels’s forehead, smoothing her curls back from her face. She smiles gently as she touches her, fingers just drifting over her skin, like she can’t stop now that she’s allowed. Pels feels every glide and slip of that touch, leaving trails of warmth along her body. “The Healers said that would happen, and if you do rest, it’ll help a lot. The more sleep you get, the more your body gets to heal. They think you’ll be able to go home tomorrow, actually. Your mom and Cheyenne should come by later. They’re staying until you get settled back on campus.”

Pels wants to ask what happens next. Whether she just goes back to class and pretends she wasn’t thrown from a car. Whether she gets to relax in her room—if being in a room with Jennifer and Nikita could be considered relaxing at all. That life seems very separate from this one, lying in a hospital bed, trying to keep her eyes open.

“Maybe we should let you rest,” Jess murmurs.

Pels wonders how long it’s been since she said something, and when exactly she closed her eyes. “Mm,” she agrees. “I could sleep.” Which is kind of funny, since she literally just ate breakfast and drank her coffee, but it feels like no amount of caffeine would be enough.

There’s a brush of lips against her forehead, warm and rumbling. Then movement, and another light press that sets her skin buzzing. She smiles at that. “I can tell the difference between you,” she murmurs.

“We’ll come back tonight,” Shane assures her as he moves away. The curtain rattles and falls, then a chair scrapes.

Why Dad would bother to move a chair to sit closer to her Pels doesn’t know, but when she forces her eyes open, he’s done exactly that.

“Hey,” he says quietly, slipping his hand over hers. “I’ve got you. Go ahead and rest.”

“I’m so confused,” she whispers. “I think I like them. But emotions are hard, and then I can feel them getting under my skin, and the physical just makes it all harder to understand. It’s like my body doesn’t want to wait for my mind and heart to catch up.”

“You’ve just described love,” Dad says quietly. “Maybe you should be a writer, Pels. I think you understand more about people than you think you do.”

She feels like she should; she’s spent enough time trying to figure them out, after all.

She floats in a haze that feels like sleep, but she’s still aware of the machines beeping, and the feel of Dad’s hand on hers. When the curtain rattles again, she’s not sure how long has passed, but it’s easier to open her eyes again. She fully expects to see Mom and Cheyenne, or maybe Shane and Jess, or a nurse or a doctor or well… she doesn’t expect to see Pat standing there, the curtain held back, watching her wake.

“Hey,” she says quietly. “I didn’t expect—”

“I heard about your accident, so I took a bus over. Jackson says get better soon. TJ’s… doing something. I don’t know what.” As Pat moves into the room, Dad vacates the chair.

It’s really funny how sometimes he doesn’t mind people walking through him, and other times he seems to loathe the idea of sharing space.

Pat sits down and looks at her. “You look….”

“I haven’t seen a mirror,” Pels admits. “I’m probably bruised. Scraped. I suspect I broke some things—no one’s talking about exactly what happened, just that I spent some time with Healers.”

“Priya said they called her in. She’s a freshman, like us,” Pat explains when Pels gives him a confused look. “She’s from a Healer family, so they have her on call at the area hospitals. Just in case. She didn’t say anything that would break privacy, just that they needed extra support, and it wasn’t easy. But she thinks you’ll be fine, if you just take a break and get some rest now.”

“No one wants to say I almost died?” Pels quips. She’s half afraid she’s right, and doesn’t want to think about it too closely. “I don’t really want to talk about my accident. Tell me you’ve been kicking ass in that game of yours or something. Or new stuff that you and Sera are doing on your skateboards. Or well… anything. Take my mind off of all this.”

She sees Pat’s gaze drop to her arm, which lies wrist down against the bed. Pels doesn’t offer a view of the changed mark; she’s not ready to talk about that, either.

“I’m still pining,” Pat says lightly. “After TJ. I think he’s clueless, actually. He’s either head over heels for Sera, or well, he’s definitely in lust with her. And she’s one of my best friends, so I don’t begrudge her that if she wants him. But Jackson’s watching him, too, and I don’t know what’s harder—me wishing he were ours for me, or for Jackson. Does that make sense? I feel like I’m being greedy.”

“Because you’re dating one person and have a crush on another one?” Pels huffs a soft laugh. “Remember, I have two soulmates. If you can talk to anyone about this, it’s probably me. Apparently Shane’s been doing research on triads and how they work. Because this is a thing that people other than just us do? I didn’t even realize… on the other hand, I had enough trouble with the idea of one-on-one relationships before.”

“So did I, but this… it’s different with each of them,” Pat admits. He’s smiling when he leans forward, tapping at the side of Pels’s bed. “Jackson’s comfortable. He’s like finding that perfect t-shirt that you’ve had for ten years and didn’t realize still fit, and you get the feeling it’s just going to fit forever and will never wear out. It’s like I found another piece of myself I didn’t know I was missing. And TJ—he’s like light shining down on us, lifting us up. I can’t stop watching him, and Jackson can’t either. He’s the north star, and we’re trying to navigate. Y’know? I’m also not even sure if he’s bi or not.”

“You haven’t talked about it?”

“He likes Sera and he never talks about guys,” Pat says. “I think—he’s said some things about how his father felt about guys in dance. It complicates things.”

Pels is pretty sure there’s a part of the story she’s missing there, but she doesn’t actually know TJ all that well other than as an RA, or gaming in Pat’s room. “Oh,” she says.

“Maybe it’s just a daydream,” Pat says, leaning back, hands behind his head as he slouches down in the chair. “But it’s a nice one. It’s not like watching hurts, right?”

“As long as you and Jackson are both okay, then, sure?” Pels says uncertainly. “I mean, don’t lose what you have because you’re both pining for something else.”

“Oh, definitely not,” Pat agrees. “The thing with TJ, it’s just dreaming. It’s nice that my boyfriend has the same crush, and that we’re united on that front. But we’re still us, too, and nothing’s going to change that. I never thought I’d find someone like Jackson, honestly. I wake up every day kind of amazed about it.”

“I never thought I’d be where I am either,” Pels admits. Because relationships are confusing and hard, and here she is sitting squarely between two people who both are interested in her. And don’t hate each other over it. “The universe has a lot of surprises in it, doesn’t it?”

Pat laughs, a short surprised sound. “I guess you’re right. It’s pretty amazing that way, isn’t it? Magic isn’t just about creating things out of nothing, I guess. It’s about everything.”

That’s one way to put it. “Magic lives in the spaces between everything else,” Pels murmurs. “It binds us together, and pushes us apart, and it gives us the things we don’t even know we need, while protecting us from the things we don’t see coming.” Her gaze drifts to where her dad sits quietly in one of the other chairs. “Magic isn’t just about Talent,” she whispers. “Maybe it’s about life.”

[ Previous | First | Next ]

Want to support me? – Patreon | Ko-Fi | Reblog & Comment

[an-upset-librarian]

A Storm of Ice & Wind -- Part VI

As Nesta and Cassian travel North, they talk about the path that brought them together. 

At long last, I humbly bring before you all an update to this little Nessian story of mine. Nothing like a quarantine to get things started, huh? I hope you enjoy this little chapter! 

As always, if you want to be added/removed from the update tag list, let me know! I just copy/paste and I know it has been a while since I updated so...

AO3

I    II    III    IV    V

PART VI

             Thankfully, Nesta held back her surprised scream when Cassian quickly thrust up into the sky with his powerful wings. The drum beat of his wings drowned out the panicked pounding of her heart, but as soon as they cleared the canopy and reached open air, Nesta’s fear was replaced with childlike wonder.

            She’d never paid any attention when she flew before. Never really wanted to open her eyes and look at the world from the new perspective. How stupid she’d been.

            Her breath misted in the chilled air, the early rays of the sun catching it and casting a golden light upon her every exhale. She blinked against the glaring sun as it slowly peeked out from behind the wall of mountains spanning in nearly every direction. She looked down and the forest was only a dark blur beneath them. Washes of greens and browns and snow mixed together until she couldn’t distinguish one tree from another.

            The sky was a brilliant canvas around them. The dawn blushed into life around them, highlighting the clouds and emphasizing the creeping darkness of night as it faded away. Oranges and pinks streaked the sky and clouds. Nesta was in complete and utter awe. They were high enough that she felt as though she could reach out and touch the fluffy clouds around them. A gentle breeze washed through her plaited hair and pinched at her cheeks. She felt as though she was living inside one of Feyre’s paintings.

            The thought of her sister dampened her mood, but not as much as she would have expected. Flying above the canopy, enveloped in the painted sunrise filled her with tranquility, something she had not felt in quite a while.

            A smile lit her face and she nearly forgot who was carrying her when she tightened her grip around Cassian’s neck. The overwhelming sense of smugness exuding from her companion’s pores quickly reminded her of who she was with. He was watching her with mirth in his dark gaze, an all too self-satisfied smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

            The itching of her power under her skin faded to the back of her mind as she took in the great landscape beneath her and the skies around her. Nesta saw why Cassian loved to fly, why all Illyrians loved to fly. And what a punishment it was to clip female’s wings to keep them from experiencing such freedom.

            They were silent for the first half hour or so. Cassian focused on his flying and the trials they would face ahead, and Nesta relishing in the calmness flying brought her and the clarity she could almost reach. Before she knew it, she was relaxing in Cassian’s arms, the stress she’d felt about her magic and her overwhelming emotions fading with each wingbeat.

            While the air was frigid, it was a blessing against her hot, irritated skin. The brisk bite of the cold wind on her cheeks and her hands distracted her from the waves of power boiling inside of her. She knew she had to talk to Cassian about it, see if he could help, but her damned pride was still intact even after months of living as a shell of the person she used to be. Though, the person she used to be was stubborn and prideful as well.

            Maybe that person was still inside her, a foundation for the pieces she was trying to put together again.

            She lost track of time, lost in the beauty that surrounded her and the comfort of the arms around her and the body against her. It wasn’t until Cassian spoke, jolting her from her peaceful reverie, that she remembered their goals and what brought them to flying further North.

            “I needed this,” he said, his eyes filled with rare softness. Nesta nodded. She could see the stress leave his shoulders, like a weight was lifted, and the ease in his movements. His arms tightened around her as he breathed in the cold air. “After Hybern, when that bastard shredded my wings-” Nesta tensed in his arms, memories rising to the surface.

            “A part of me thought I’d never be able to do this again, to fly above Illyria with the winter winds against my wings and the sun on my skin.” His brow furrowed. Nesta wondered if it was the bubble that surrounded them, high above the ground with nothing but the clouds for company, that brought up such vulnerability. She felt it too, a tender and fragile part of her heart seemed to light up at his words.

            “I remember,” she started, “seeing you bandaged. I could see it, the determination to be fully healed but behind that I saw your fear too. And I felt it within me. I was in a body I couldn’t recognize with abilities I never thought possible, Elain was-well, she was Elain. Feyre was gone and so was my home.” That piece of her heart swelled with emotion and she felt the tether tying her to the male that held her grow taut. His thumb stroked her shoulder and he stared into her eyes with no hesitation or fear, only understanding. “I remember seeing you relearning how to fly. I wanted you to win that fight.” She met his gaze head on.

            “I wanted revenge, justice, whichever. I wanted one of us to come out of that cursed castle stronger and unchanged.” She clenched her jaw and exhaled a hard breath of air. “But that revenge came at a price. One I don’t know if I can pay.” The memories of the Cauldron and the King that wielded it came rushing back.

            The feeling of that cold water against her skin, the image of Cassian, broken and unconscious, crawling towards her as she fought and screamed. And what came after-when she was inside that ancient thing. The darkness that surrounded her and what she saw inside of it, what she stole. That darkness lived in her now.

            “Some burdens stay with us, like scars that don’t heal right, or broken bones that don’t set. There are wounds of the mind that can’t be healed, only patched over. I know, I have a couple. Knowing that I wasn’t strong enough, despite what these damned Siphons grant me, that I wasn’t enough to save your or your sister, it is the greatest wound I shall ever bear. Deeper than all the shit I did during the war so many centuries ago, or even the war we just survived.” Cassian’s voice was thick with emotion. His arms tightened to the point of pain, but she didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything. She could only listen, as he did for her.

            “I saw what happened to you, what you went through and I stayed away because I thought it would be best, Nesta.” Her name was honey on his lips, and she leaned in like a honeybee drawn to a flower’s nectar. His face was mere inches from hers and she could feel the heat of his breath fan across her face. She could see the golden flecks in his eyes shining in the sunlight.

            “I wish things could have been different for you, but they weren’t. You were dealt a shit hand and you’re trying your best; I can see that now. I know it isn’t easy. I know.” For once, Nesta actually believed he did know, that he did understand. That he could understand, somehow, the pain she felt. Their scars were different, but if she could recognize those marks on his soul then he could see hers. Another piece of herself fell into place as she stared into his eyes, as she felt his pain and saw his empathy. She took a shaky breath and cupped her hands around his face. They were hovering, almost, in the sky together. Locked in their bubble together.

            “I see you too, Cassian.” She pressed her forehead against his and felt him shudder. A sense of ease and comfort overcame her. It was so easy to be close to him, to be vulnerable with him. In the bubble, she didn’t care about her pride or her wounds that refused to heal. Cassian murmured her name, as if saying a prayer and for once she wanted to answer that call of devotion, without thinking about what it could mean.

            “I-” she stuttered, too afraid to finish.

            “I know,” he answered.

            She thought about the first time they met, when she was still human, and the war seemed like something impossible happening in an impossible place. How she judged those that accompanied her sister. So much has changed, but now it felt right. The thread that connected her to Cassian was singing. It wrapped around her chest and brought warmth and something she never thought she could feel. Its melody was familiar and welcoming, and she was being drawn into its dance. Nesta felt Cassian’s breath against her lips. She thumbed the slight stubble on his jaw and took a deep breath.

            She felt his lips brush against hers and was instantly reminded of the last time she felt his lips on hers, when they faced certain death together as that King walked towards them. Nesta jerked back.

            She heard it again, the snap of her father’s bones. She saw it, his crumpled form. Saw Cassian’s broken wings and body against the earth, looking at her with such grief and loss. All at once, those feelings that dwelled inside her that had been calm since they took off into the skies returned. Her heartbeat sped up and the power inside of her stretched and bared its teeth.

            Nesta pushed against Cassian as the panic set into her bones, nestling besides her pieced together heart. She could hear his voice, a few curses and some attempt at calming words but she couldn’t hear his words. Couldn’t focus. All she could hear was that Cauldron damned snap. All she could feel was the memory of his lips against hers, the salty taste of his tears and the desperation they both shared.

            She couldn’t be here, in his arms and thinking of kissing him. Not when her father was dead, her life forever changed and destroyed, her family lost to her. She couldn’t think, couldn’t focus. There was only the panicked sense of danger that filled every fiber of her being.

            That ancient power inside her relished in her roiling emotions. It took advantage of the brief loss of control she had and lashed out. Her skin was crawling and cold. Nesta’s muscles trembled and despite knowing she was hundreds of feet in the air, the power inside of her wrought havoc. It filled her blood and danced across her skin. She wanted to cling to Cassian, to pull him close and have him tell her everything would be okay, but that power was all consuming. Before she even knew what was happening, her body was finally free of his warm but confining arms.

            And Nesta fell.

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

Tag list:

@maastrash @rhagfyre @blackfyrres @bellsqueen @jordan-hennessy @readthelastpaage @booksaremymate @my-fan-side @luna-colorata @araiajr @ekaterinakostrova @tog-trash @justlikethecheshirecat @i-am-no-bird @a-trifling-matter @thebluemartini @angelina-figjam @beautifulmarigold @darling-god @wolffrising @writergash @booksaholiclife @inardour @book-of-blue004 @rairrai @queenofillea1 @katoto @archeron-queens @mybiglittleplanet @refreshtoexpress @aedionashryver-wolfofthenorth @jxstenminyxrd @jemma-nessian-and-elriel @nuclearplanets @hizqueen4life

[bittysvalentines]

Everyday

From: @ackermom

To: @doggernaut

Summary: Five times Jack and Bitty woke up next to each other, and one time they didn't sleep at all. 

Rating: T, tags: 5+1 things, fluff, domestic fluff

Happy Valentine's Day! I hope you enjoy your gift.

i

Bitty wakes to the hum of the bus. He cracks his eyes slowly, and at first, he's met with just darkness, the black streets of New England melting into each other as the bus speeds down the highway. He blinks and stretches. He pushes his arms over his head, squeezing his eyes shut, and lets out a big yawn, then shifts upright in his seat and rubs the sore spot where his forehead was pressed up against the window. It's late, and the passenger lights have been dimmed. The bus slumbers in a faint blue glow.

He glances around, stifling another yawn. The seat next to him is empty. He shuffles into it and sees that Lardo's gone back to her seat in the front. She's asleep, legs curled up in front of her, one arm hanging into the aisle. It looks like everyone else is asleep as well, exhausted from the game, the loss, or both.

He looks across the aisle. Sitting with his back to the window, Jack's face is lit up by his phone screen. At first, Bitty can't tell if he's awake or not. He's motionless, his gaze turned down, and his head seems to bob with the running hum of the bus down the highway. Then after a moment, his eyes turn up and meet Bitty's from across the aisle. He blinks, maybe waking up, before he retracts his legs from the seat next to him and lets Bitty come over.

"I thought you were going to finish your homework on the ride back," Bitty says as he settles into the seat.

Jack shuffles around until he's front-facing, and he pulls one earbud out, smiling gently at Bitty. "You're not one to talk about procrastination."

"Oh, hush," Bitty says. He's nearly whispering, but his voice seems to echo in the quiet. "What are you listening to?"

"History podcast," Jack says.

Bitty wrinkles his nose. "So even when you're not studying, you're still studying."

"Haha," Jack says. He holds out an earbud. "Want to listen. I just started an episode about Joan D'Arc."

Bitty takes it, smirking. "Of course you did."

"Hold on, let me restart it."

The bus hums on, carrying into the night, and Bitty slips down into the seat, his shoulder brushing against Jack's as he closes his eyes and dozes off again. 

  ii

He really tries not to take a nap. It's a bad habit he has to break if he ever wants to beat himself at his own procrastination game. But Jack's asleep on the couch within minutes of coming home from practice, and the cookies are cooling on the countertop. There's bags to be packed, dinner to be cooked, things to be done. Something about this lazy August day draws Bitty onto the couch instead, into Jack's arms and down into a deep sleep. 

He blinks into Jack's chest when he wakes up. "Honey?"

Jack's arm are loosely laid over him, and his answer vibrates in his chest. "Mmhmm?"

"What time is it?"

Clearly, it's a great effort for Jack to untangle himself from Bitty and check his phone, because it takes several minutes and involves the both of them stretching and yawning in the unlit apartment as the sun sets over the neighborhoods of Providence. The curtains aren't drawn, and Bitty dawdles on the couch, staring into the orange summer sky as Jack stumbles around the kitchen, ordering take-out over the phone.

He rolls over, flat onto his back, and he throws an arm over his forehead, letting the over fall to the floor and scrape against the rug. He tries not to be sad for the hours they just lost. Their last night together before Bitty has to be back at Samwell tomorrow, and his elaborate farewell dinner plans have been dashed by a nap on the couch. 

"Jack," Bitty says when Jack returns from the kitchen, covering a yawn his hand. He curls up on the couch, tugging a fuzzy blanket over himself, and peers up at Jack with sleep in his eyes. "I'm going to miss this."

Jack stops for a second before he continues to the couch. He drops down next to Bitty, stretching his legs out under the coffee table. Then he leans over and kisses Bitty's forehead. "I will too, Bits."

"You're a better cuddler than Señor Bun," Bitty murmurs as Jack strokes his hair. He furrows his brow when Jack smirks. "Don't tell him I said that."

"Never." 

  iii

"Morning, Bits," Jack murmurs sleepily when Bitty pushes a hand through his hair.

He smiles down at Jack, his back against the wall. There's something special and sad about this moment and the unknowns of the future. "Hi, honey."

He doesn't remember falling asleep again, not after he clutched a soaking wet Jack and dragged him upstairs to cry in the darkness of his bedroom. But he must've slept a little, even if his night was mostly spent staring at the ceiling and trying to catch his own thoughts. He woke ten minutes before his usual alarm, blinking at the pink silhouette of his window, the sun rising somewhere over the horizon. Jack slept heavily in his arms, his suit draped across the back of Bitty's desk. Bitty, though tired, though listless, though scared, couldn't bear to stir him.

Jack's eyes flutter before he glances up at Bitty, pursing his lips to hold back a yawn. "Mm. Did you sleep at all?"

Of course he knows, Bitty thinks. This boy.

"Not much," he murmurs. He'd turned his alarm off before it rang and tried to go back to sleep, but it just wouldn't come to him. "Do you want any coffee or something?"

"Bittle," Jack says, reaching up with his arm. He winds it around Bitty's waist and pulls on him, asking him to lie down again, to snuggle back into the warmth and forget about everything for a little while longer. "Come back to sleep."

It's morning, but early. He'll fidget if he just sits here, waiting for the day to begin, for the acceptable hour to text their friends and request a brunch meeting. Quietly, Bitty slips back under the covers and lies down to face Jack, their noses just an inch apart. He hums when Jack draws a thumb across his cheek, smiling at him

"I'll be okay," Jack whispers. His whisper echoes in the small bedroom. "Let's just sleep in a little." 

Bitty curls up, tucking his head under Jack's chin. It'll only be for an hour or so, but he thinks he can manage to sleep like this, safe and warm and comforted, despite anything else that will happen today or tomorrow. 

  iv

The sun is barely up before Bitty can feel someone watching him. He cracks one eye open. As expected, Jack is sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at him. His face remains blank until he sees Bitty waking, and then he grins, leaning back on his palm. Bitty stretches under the covers, pointing his toes straight as he yawns into his hand. He straightens out, pulls the blanket up to his shoulders, and squints up at Jack.

"Good morning, sir," he mutters. "Can I help you?"

He's on his way out for a run, his shoes in one hand. He says, "I'm thinking about steps."

Bitty furrows his brow. "Okay. Stop bothering me and go get some."

"Next steps," Jack clarifies. "Far away steps."

Bitty glares at him. "They're called far away steps for a reason. I have to graduate first! Or at least wake up at a normal hour."

Jack makes a mmhmm noise, then adds, "I know. I just wanted to let you know, I'm thinking about those steps."

With a huff, Bitty pulls the covers up to his chin. He purses his lips, trying not to smile. "I don't know why you're acting like you're cute. Get out of here."

"I'll be thinking about them each step of the way."

Bitty pulls the covers over his face. "Jack. Oh my god, that was bad."

He hears a laugh, feels the mattress dip as Jack moves towards him, and he squawks a little when Jack presses a kiss to his ruffled bedhead, still laughing as he touches Bitty. It reverberates through him, and Bitty's heart does a few little spins.

"Go back to sleep," Jack murmurs when he pulls away. Bitty peeks out from under the covers. He blinks softly into the dawn as Jack slips into his shoes and stands, still smiling down at him. "I'll be back when you wake up."

  v

Morning comes too soon. As he wakes, Bitty can still taste the red wine on his lips from the rehearsal dinner. He tries to ignore it, but the room grows light too fast, the world around them coming to life as they are still finding their ways back from the deepest parts of dreams. Something in him begs to go back to sleep, but this day has been far too long in the making. When Bitty opens his eyes, he can't believe it's finally here.

From the other side of the bed, Jack is gazing back at him. 

"Morning," he says softly, his head pressed deeply into the pillow. He glows in the sunlight that's streaming into the hotel room, casting warm squares of light across his bare skin. He's like a dream, and so will waking up with him be from this day forward.

"G'morning," Bitty mutters. He pushes hand back through his mussed hair and shuffles against his pillow so he can see Jack better. He can't help but smile a little. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"

Jack smiles back.

"Bits," he murmurs, his eyes softening, "I've been ready to marry you since the first time we kissed."

"Stop it," Bitty exclaims. He grins, flushing. "You can't chirp me like that on our wedding day."

"I'm not chirping you," Jack says. He stretches an arm out, his fingers brushing across Bitty's wrist where he's holding onto the covers; Bitty lets go, and Jack twines their fingers together. He smirks. "Unless you want me to."

Bitty laughs. "Only for the rest of my life." 

  +

At some point, Jack gets up. 

Bitty's head jerks up when he feels the mattress dip. He blinks into the low light, and it's just his husband, stepping gingerly onto the floor and moving around the front of the bed with his hands covering a yawn. He sees Bitty watching him from the corner of his eye, and he mouths coffee before tiptoeing in the hallway.

"It's almost five," Jack murmurs when he returns. The bedroom is still and quiet, the off-white walls nearly purple in the darkness. He hands one mug to Bitty; he's taken the liberty of adding a sweet creamer, which Bitty gladly accepts. "That's a good two hours."

Bitty holds the steaming mug close to his lips. "It's a miracle, is what it is."

The bassinet lies quietly at the foot of the bed. Jack moves around it carefully, his socks soft on the floor, and when he slips back into the bed next to Bitty, they both let out a deep breath, coffee mugs clutched in their hands.

"Well," Bitty murmurs as Jack sips his coffee. "This is it, I guess. This is the rest of our lives."

He feels Jack smile at him. "What? Loving and caring for our family?"

"Not sleeping is what I meant," Bitty says. He glances sideways at Jack, smirking. "But yeah, I guess that counts too."

The baby stirs. He holds his breath, but the for the first time all night, she remains quiet; instead, she peers up at them with her hand in her mouth, blinking slowly.

"Hmm," he hears Jack murmur. "Well, we've had enough sleep."