#like they were full of grief over their mom and then had to grieve you bc you left them too! just bc you struggled doesn't mean they didn't

[ahxiang]

i feel for this guy and having to get out of the house that reminds him of his dead wife, but telling his children "i didn't leave you" when he v much did is honestly so fucked up

[bamboozledbird]

IGNITE: A Teen Wolf S1 AU (Reader's Version) // Prev. / Chapter 3 / Next

Characters: Stiles Stilinski, fem!reader, omc, ofc Pairing: Eventual Stiles x Reader, but man are we talking slow burn Word Count: 6.2k Warnings: Canon typical gore/violence, parental death (rip to your fake mom), depictions of depression (apathy, dissociation, 'numb little bug' vibes) Tags: Canon has been lovingly scrapped for parts, author is a chaotic bi and it shows, prolific overuse of the em dash, the slowest of burns i fear

Summary: You can always smell ash long after the fire is gone. Perhaps, that’s why you still can’t breathe without choking on the past. It’s been four years since your mom died. Four years since she burned alive. Four years since you didn’t. You survived, but they must have buried your heart with her because most days you feel like a shadow, some horrifically sad creature caught halfway between a ghost and a lamb for slaughter. 

You can’t scrub the bitter smell of hospital from your memories, not even with denial. Maybe, that’s why death and disease follows Stiles wherever he goes now. It’s been eight years since his mom died. Eight years since he didn’t. Eight years since he decided that he wouldn’t let anyone he loved die ever again. He survived, but Scott’s new-found abilities and the murky world they’ve been dragged into is making it pretty damn hard to keep his promise. 

Time never stops turning. The grief never dissipates. Children soldier on—but in a town where all the monsters under the bed are real and old family skeletons rattle in every closet, how long can two fragile, breakable humans survive? 

Maybe, the real question is: How long will they want to? Chapter Summary: More information about the animal attack comes to light. You can’t decide if you're more scared of the monster or becoming friends with someone new. 

A/N: You can also check me out on ao3 (dork_knight) for the full lore version!

You were surprised to see your dad’s car in the garage. He wasn’t supposed to be off work for hours, and he certainly never came home early on weekdays. You would be more nervous if there was anyone left in your life to grieve. It was just the two of you now. Your mom hadn’t ever talked about her family; you weren't even sure if she ever had one, and Grandma and Papa Dickinson died before you even had the chance to remember them. You wished, sometimes, that there was someone else in the house. Someone who could fill the cold silence and closed doors. Someone who might chase away the ghosts lingering in the long halls and photographs on the walls. It was a futile dream. You were going to die in this house, and someday a new family would chase your family’s shadows away with laughter.

You felt a bittersweet sense of déjà vu when you walked into the house and saw your dad sitting at the kitchen table. The kitchen was his spot before everything went wrong. He puttered around the island in the mornings with his thermos of coffee and tablet, somehow knowing exactly when to flip the bubbling pancakes on the griddle without glancing up from whatever NPR article he was reading. He only looked up from the screen to kiss your mom on the cheek and give you a side-squeeze until you whined about your inability to breathe. 

That was a long time ago, you reminded yourself as your dad looked up from his iPad. It’d been four years, but he still hadn’t quite figured out how to hug you and the kitchen never smelled like pancakes and cinnamon syrup anymore. “How was school?” your dad finally said after a long moment of uneasy eye-contact. 

Your brow wrinkled, and your head canted slightly, “You really want to talk about my day?”

“Of course,” your dad paused and rubbed his hands over his face, “but there is something important I wanted to talk to you about.” His stubble had grown out enough that you could see where the brown was starting to gray. He looked so old for a moment, and you weren't quite sure how to feel. You never did around him. 

Frowning, you sat down in the chair across from him, “Did someone die?”

“No,” your dad quickly replied, and then he sighed, “well, yes.” He set his iPad to the side and took his thick reading glasses off, “You know about the animal attacks.” It wasn’t a question. You figured that was how this would go; it was easier to pretend you didn’t exist if he monologued to the spot on the wall just over your shoulder. “Sheriff Stilinski and I agree that a curfew is the best course of action, considering the situation we’re in.”

Best course of action. You chewed on what was left of your nails and resisted the sigh budding in your chest. So, this was a council meeting too. You just didn’t get a vote. “Okay.” 

“Okay.” Your dad blinked a few times and rubbed at his jaw, like he’d been expecting you to fight him on it. Most of the fight fizzled out in you a long time ago; it was just easier to pretend. You got that from him, you thought. You inherited your dad’s love for mystery novels and his ability to deny reality straight to its face, and that was where the similarity ended. Your face, your skin, your heart—your exhausting curiosity—that was all your mom. It must be why your dad couldn’t keep his gaze on you for long. He ran his fingers through his short crop of dark hair and said, “Anyone under the age of 18 needs to be home by 9:00 every night.” 

“Fine.” It wasn’t like you had much of a social life anyway, and the curio shop you worked for closed long before dark. “So,” you fiddled with the edge of a decorative bamboo placemat that hadn’t seen a plate in years, “do the police have any idea what kind of animal’s going all Pac-Man on people?”

Your dad stared at you for a moment, a deep divot developing above the crooked bridge of his nose. You looked down at your hands and mumbled, “The vampire Pomeranian, not the wimpyass circle.”

His mouth tugged a little, and you would’ve sworn he was fighting a smile if everything else in the world didn’t directly contradict the theory. “Not exactly.”

“Which means…” you shook your head a little and tugged your fingers through your unruly hair, grimacing a bit as they snagged on a few knots where your hair had frizzed together, “they’ve ruled out tiny bloodsucking dogs, or they’ve narrowed it down to a few probable options?” 

He paused for a long moment, and you pulled your shins to your chest, focusing on the tips of your sneakers hanging off the edge of the wooden seat. You turned your cheek into your kneecaps and waited for your dad to make an excuse and leave. You’d pushed. You always had to push. 

“There were wolf fibers on the girl.”

You whipped your head up from your knees, eyes wide and mouth slightly parted. You were a little embarrassed that you were more stunned by your dad sharing confidential information with you than a wolf migrating to central California for the first time in over a hundred years. “And the bus driver?”

“He’s still…unresponsive. Stilinski is looking into the possibility that he was attacked by the same animal.” 

“Huh,” you said quietly, eyes glazing over as you considered the possibility.

“Regardless, you need to be home before dark until they catch the damn thing,” he leaned back against his chair, tipping his head back with his bottle of Miller High life. The golden liquid sloshed back and forth with the strength of his swallow. It was the first time you’d seen him drink since the funeral, but you knew about the empty bottles he threw away in the trash outside. Over the years, the number varied; you noticed a significant increase around anniversaries, birthdays, and Christmas. You left extra take-out in the fridge during those weeks, always his favorites, and they were gone in the morning. You twisted the pendant on your necklace and made a note to order Little India’s tandoori chicken after your shift.

“I have to work tonight.” You said quietly, nibbling the bed of your thumbnail, “I’m off at 8:00.” 

You both dreaded and longed for your boss’s absurd take on the situation—though boss wasn’t quite the right word for Maggie Sinclair. Despite the fact that she owned Curio Killed the Cat and approved your paychecks, Maggie was the least authoritative person you knew. You’d say Mags was like an older sister, but older sisters generally didn’t require so much supervision around open flames and sangria—and anything else sparkling enough to distract her sporadic focus. Your mom used to look out for her before she died; you supposed Maggie was just another thing you inherited from her. Your favorite thing probably, but that was something you’d most likely take to your grave.

Your dad’s face went blank for a moment, as it always did when he was reminded of anything remotely related to your mom. It was easier for him, you thought, to pretend that she never existed. You couldn’t even be bitter about it; you hadn’t even cried at the funeral. You cried much later, of course, but by then the pity well had run dry. Nobody cared how you coped, so long as you coped quickly. You’d wasted those precious first few months of constant consolations with numbness, with monotonous, 'Thank you,’s and, 'It’s sad, but I’m okay,'s and then, eventually, everyone stopped asking if you were okay. Time passed. You didn’t touch any of the casseroles in the fridge. People moved on. You lived in the wake and pushed people away with an acrid bite that would disappoint the resurrection right out of your mother. Your dad was just coping. You both were. 

“Right,” he cleared his throat, “come straight home after.”

You shouldered your backpack and stood up, “Always do.”

You still didn’t know how Maggie met your mom, given the 15-year age gap and their vastly different…everything, but Maggie had been in your life for as long as you could remember. You spent so much time in Maggie’s store after your mom died that you figured you might as well get paid for shelving spell books and grimoires while you were there—even if you did think that most of Maggie’s customers were totally off their rocker. Of course, in-person customers were a rare oddity in Curio Killed the Cat.

The store was always slow on weekdays, weekends too actually. Most of Maggie’s business was online; she shipped ‘haunted’ and ‘magical’ artifacts all across the globe to e-goths with bad backs and Wicca wannabes. Truthfully, Maggie didn’t really need your help running the storefront, but she claimed she enjoyed the company—even if said company was bitterly sarcastic and hypercritical of the product she was stocking. 

“Hey, Mags,” you called. The bell on the front door tinkled in the background as you shoved it open with your shoulder. You paused to scratch under Maggie’s ancient tabby’s chin until he let out a sawing purr. You weren't exactly sure how old Gizmo was, but he behaved more like the taxidermied animals on the walls than the stray cats that lived in the small alley behind the store. 

“Maggie’s head popped up from the circle of book-stack pillars surrounding her. A few of her black curls frizzed out from her bun like a chaotic springy bow and her sweater swallowed her whole despite the relatively warm evening. “Babe,” Maggie placed her hands on your shoulders and grinned at you with a little too much teeth, “thorn in my side, light of my life.”

You lifted the large pair of acrylic glasses from Maggie’s nest of curls and then slipped them over her rounded nose with a reluctant sigh, “What?”

“Glasses. That was next on the agenda.” Maggie blinked owlishly behind her lenses as her eyes adjusted, and then they lit up with whatever it was she’d miraculously remembered, “I am so delighted to see you.”

“It’s Monday.” Gizmo curled around your leg and meowed pathetically until you bent down and lifted him onto you shoulder, “I work Mondays.”

Maggie rolled her eyes, “I’m aware; I made the schedule. The Concerta isn’t completely defective.”

You grinned a little, and Gizmo kneaded your chest in agreement, “So: You’re delighted to see me.”

Nodding rapidly, Maggie picked up a lavishly bound book from one of the stacks of new inventory. It was so tall that it reached her chin, and there were four more just like it in the back. “I need these stocked for realsies,” Maggie said, blowing off the thin layer of dust that had started to gather on the cover. She dropped the book back on top of the pile with a loud thump and carefully avoided knocking anything over on her way to the front of the store, “And I’m currently in the middle of a bidding war.”

“Haunted or historical?” you grabbed the clunky price gun off of the tarot card display.

“A little of both actually,” Maggie hummed, fiercely focused on the computer screen. Her nose was almost smashed against the monitor.

You set Gizmo down on the floor, patting his head tenderly when he let out a disgruntled whine and clawed at your thin knee socks. Eventually, the effort became too much for his poor paws to bear, and he waddled off towards one of his many nesting spots. “For you or for the store?” you pulled the stepladder away from the wall of stone runes and protection charms and plopped yourself down on the top step.

“For you, actually,” Maggie grinned a little and winked, “don’t say I never gave ya’ nothing.”

“Wonderful,” you dropped your chin into your cupped hands, “a poltergeist bonus.”

Maggie huffed and shoved the sleeves of her hand-knitted cardigan up to her elbows, “It’s not actually haunted. Not really. It’s like…a spirit router, basically. Whatever. It’ll make me feel better about you walking around with a rabid Cujo on the loose.”

“Aw,” you smirked good-naturedly and slapped a price tag on a book entitled ‘Heal the Witch Wound Inside’—$35.99, and for what? You were too amused to point out the redundancy of rabid Cujo. “You got me a guardian angel.”

“Trying to,” Maggie corrected her under her breath, “but MagikMike9917 is a persistent little bitch.”

You laughed and slid ‘Witch Wound’ into the self-help section, “Just get me a mini-taser; they come in some real cute cases now.”

“Mhm.” Maggie briefly glanced over in your direction and then abruptly whirled her head back towards the thick book in your hands, “Not that one.”

You narrowed your gaze as you examined the cover of the book more closely. You had to admit, it was beautiful. The leather was a deep burgundy, and the spine was hand stitched together with gold thread—but it was the carving on the front that really caught your attention. There were two wolves etched into the leather. Their howling snouts pointed towards the full moon above their heads, and their tails entwined around the roots of a large tree sprouting into the sky. Ornate symbols framed the borders of the scene, and a few scattered jewels glinted in the light. It must have taken at least a week to finish. 

You held up the book, your brow curved into a high arch, “This for me too? ‘Cause I’ve already seen The Witcher; pretty sure I got the gist.”

Rolling her eyes, Maggie reached blindly for her soup mug of passionflower and mugwort tea. The smell of it was truly rank, but you had grown accustomed to the musky bitterness over the years. “That one’s already sold. They should be dropping by to pick it up anytime now.” She raised her cup towards you, “I told you bestiaries are essential reading.”

“For dungeon masters, maybe,” you hummed as you studied the cover again. The red and citrine jewels in the wolves’ eyes seemed to be winking at you when the light hit them at the just right angle. 

“Which is an essential contribution to society,” Maggie punctuated her sentence with a loud slurp. 

Your lips gave way to a small grin as you set the book to the side. You’d stocked around half the stacks of books when the front door chimed for the first time since your shift started. You looked towards the door and squinted at the increasingly familiar smattering of freckles and moles, “Are you stalking me now? I will tell your dad; I’m not above snitching or stitches.” 

Stiles blinked a few times and then shook his head, holding up his hands, “I swear on my jeep this time it’s a coincidence. I ordered something here like a week ago.”

You folded your arms over your chest, “And your jeep is sacred, is it?”

Stiles nodded solemnly and rested his hand over his chest, “The sacredest.” 

If the muttered cursing and aggressive sipping was anything to go by, Maggie was too busy with her eBay war to be of any help with inventory. Stocking would have to wait. You stood up and glanced over Stiles’s shoulder, “Where’s your sidekick?”

Stiles squeezed one eye almost completely shut and looked off into the void with the other until realization dawned over his face, “You mean Scott?” He snorted and shot you a grin that was loaded with self-pity, “I’m usually the sidekick reference. Always, actually.” 

You nodded and looked down, searching for the culprit of the little head butting into your shin. Gizmo was probably the most ineffective, geriatric guard dog in the entire animal kingdom, but you appreciated the effort. You scooped him up into your arms so that he could better inspect the strange boy who’d invaded his den and nuzzled your nose against the black stripe on top of his head. “They do tend to never shut up.” 

Stiles looked like he wanted to argue—a frequent expression of you were beginning to realize—and then his shoulders slumped in defeat, “Holy shit, I’ve been type-casted.”

“You could do an arthouse film,” you tilted your head, “show people you’ve got range.”

Stiles nodded, considering the idea, “My charming wit and boyish good looks are really holding me back.” He stooped down to scratch behind Gizmo’s ears. Gizmo bristled for a moment, eyeing his hand suspiciously, but he eventually flopped back in your arms after a few curious sniffs. “No one takes me seriously.”

“Uh huh.” You watched Stiles pet Gizmo and tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear, trying to remember the last man Gizmo hadn’t bit. You couldn’t recall a single one. Warmth enveloped your face when Stiles looked up and met your gaze. He didn’t appear to think much of it, just turned his eyes towards the ground and stroked Gizmo’s little gray toes. 

You set Giz down, despite his pathetic protests, and turned towards the stockpile of inventory, fighting the urge to bite your nails to the quick, “So, what’d you order, boy wonder?” You looked over your shoulder when Stiles didn’t answer. He was smiling a little, mostly to himself, with his hands shoved in his pockets. Your brows quirked, “What?”

“Nothing.” He groaned a little when you kept looking at him, your brows still cocked, and then shrugged with his hands still fisted in his jacket pockets, “It’s just not so bad, the sidekick thing. It’s not so pathetic when you say it like that.”

You swallowed, a little startled by his honesty even though you were the one who’d insisted upon it. “Order?”

“Right,” he nodded a few times and rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s a thickass book, wolves on the front, about yea big,” Stiles held his palms almost six inches apart from each other. “Please don’t make me say the name; I’m pretty sure it’s Latin.”

You grabbed the bestiary you’d set aside earlier and looked at the cover again; there was a small inscription just below the tree roots. “It’s Greek, actually.” You brushed your fingers over the indented letters, “φυσιολόγος.”

Stiles shook his head and took his frustration out on the air with a dramatic jerk of his hands, “In English?”

“The Naturalist,” your lips curled into a shrewd smile, “so sorry we don’t carry it in Japanese.”

Stiles pursed his lips and snatched the book out of your hands. “Hilarious. Truly. I don’t just watch anime, y’know. I also like…” he trailed off and scratched at the nape of his neck, “very cool, normal things.”

“Such as?” 

He pulled a face that was distinctly reminiscent of a little kid sticking their tongue out, “Such as shut your face.”

“Wow.” Shaking your head, you returned to your task of shelving books—this one was about the spiritual properties of mushrooms—and made a popping noise with your tongue against the top of your mouth, “You better hope there’s an English translation in there ‘cause consider my mouth officially shut.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Stiles continued quickly, words almost overlapping with the speed of his tongue, before you could take advantage of such low-hanging fruit, “I made sure I could read it before I bought it—being comprehensible is literally the least it can do for 50 bucks plus shipping.” He shook his head and held up the book, “Can you believe the library wouldn’t order it for me?”

“Imagine that,” you chided, “and with all the demand for vintage bestiaries too.”

He dropped his order on top of a rickety writing desk that supposedly belonged to a Beacon Hills’ heretic who died in the 1800s—at least, according to the tag hanging from one of the drawers and Maggie’s generous interpretation of her family history. “D&D is coming back in a big, big way,” Stiles pointed at you and winked with obnoxious flourish, “just you wait.”

You smirked, pointedly ignoring your recurrent childhood obsession with Egyptian and Roman mythology, and smacked the side of the price gun until the sticker tape unjammed, “My instinct is to make fun of you, but I’m afraid the hypocrisy will catch up with me.”

“What?” Stiles glanced around the store and smirked, “Are you one of those new-agey astrology, crystal nerds? How many fingers is my aura holding up right now?”

You gave him a flat look and reached for another book. “We don’t sell crystals, actually. They aren’t that common in ritualistic spell-casting.”

Stiles blinked slowly, “You’re joking.”

“Wish I was.” You still weren't entirely sure if Maggie actually believed in all this spiritualist-mythical bullshit. She contradicted herself constantly, and often said things just to make your face pinch in disbelief, but at the same time she still insisted that you keep a protection charm bundle under your bed. The smell of the divination tea, at the very least, was great at warding off unwanted chitchat. “Animal blood is the main ingredient in most of ‘em.”

“That’s…repulsive,” Stiles cringed, restless fingers meandering towards the shelves of books next to you. He pulled out a small illuminated grimoire and flipped through the yellowing pages, pulling a face every so often at some of the more unsavory hex materials. 

You pried the book from his fingers and slid it back into its correct slot. Maggie didn’t actually ask you to organize them; her exact words were, ‘Slap a sticker on ‘em and stick ‘em on a shelf,’ but the idea of such a chaotic setup haunted you until you finally reshelved them all with a revised, occult-specific Dewey Decimal System. “It’s actually just corn syrup and—”

“100% authentic dove juice,” Maggie interrupted from behind the front counter without removing her face from her monitor.

Stiles jerked his head to the side, evidently just realizing that there was someone else in the room with you, and then swiveled back to you with his face stretched out in a toothy grin, “That dove juice discount must save you, like, so much money.”

You watched Stiles, warily and wearily, reach for a meditation journal from one of the heaps by your legs, “I have to stock that.”

Stiles turned the journal over in his hands, “Lemme help.”

You huffed deeply and gestured to the diligently organized bookshelves, “I have a system.”

He gave a staunch shake of his head and hunched down so that he could read the small stickers on the spines, “I owe you—for covering for me.”

You took the journal from his hands and squatted down to the bottom shelf. You quickly found the guided meditation section and managed to squeeze the bulky notebook between ‘Walking the Pagan Path’ and ‘Warding Your Mind' with some aggressive wiggling. You looked up briefly and met Stiles’s eyeline. He was especially lanky from this angle. Lanky and soft, with his layers of sleeves and rounded features. You tucked a loose curl behind your ear and looked back at the line of jewel-toned spines, “How is he? Scott?”

“Better.” He tapped his fingers against the top of the bookshelf to a rhythmic beat that felt familiar, “Exposure therapy is a real pain in the ass.”

“I thought it was ‘low blood sugar.’”

“That too.” Stiles leaned over your head and grabbed another book, and you shivered the soft cotton hem of his jacket skimmed over your face. “He’s hemophobic and breakfastphobic,” he said as he handed you the book. You hummed softly in appreciation as he continued, “It’s a vicious cycle, actually. Dude would totally fall apart without me.”

“That’s nice.” You tipped your chin up towards him and grinned, “Totally bogus, but still nice.”

“I told you.” His smile was smug, but somehow still dopey enough to be charming, “I’m a nice guy.”

Your thighs started to ache from squatting in the same position for so long, so you dropped onto your knees, shivering as your bare skin pressed against the cold hardwood floor. “I’m still not sharing my sacrificial blood discount with you.”

“Guess I have to get a job here, then,” Stiles shrugged and leaned against the bookcase, jerking back a bit when he turned his head and came face-to-face with a yellow-eyed taxidermied owl. He turned it around until the glass eyes were safely pointed in the opposite direction and said, “That way I can drive you nuts all day long and become a master wizard.”

You clicked your tongue; the cluck rang with saccharinely sweet pity, “Sucks that you’re only qualified for the first part.”

“Yeah? How’d you get the job, then? You clearly don’t respect the craft.” Stiles ran his spindly fingers along a row of spines, and you wondered if he could play the piano. He certainly had the hands for it. 

“Mags knew my mom, so…” you chewed on your lip until the metallic tang of copper burst on the tip of your tongue. You abruptly returned your attention to shelving the Wicca section and fiddled with the spines until they were all perfectly in line with each other, “It’s more nepotism than anything else, but I do take the history books home sometimes.”

Stiles looked at you, and the prickling sensation of being seen started slithering through your nervous system again. It took you a few tries to get Greek and Roman Necromancy to slip into the small gap on the shelf in front of you. Stiles crouched down next to you. His mouth was twisted around a sly smile, but you could see the earnestness in his eyes, “Witch training?”

You grinned a little, grateful for the out, “Hardly. I just like the lore.”

“Yeah,” Stiles’ gaze drifted towards the book he ordered; the wolves’ gleaming eyes were almost hypnotic, “me too.” 

“I’d hope so, for 50 bucks.” you nudged his knee with your elbow, and he swayed precariously on his perched toes and then shot you a glare that lacked any actual malice. “There are cheaper D&D monster manuals, y’know.”

He snickered and elbowed you in the ribs, gently but his bony limbs were sharp and unforgiving, “I knew you were a nerd.”

You were tempted to rebut the accusation, but he already had far too much evidence to the contrary. At least, he didn’t know about your Data/Geordi fanfiction phase—and no one ever would, you thought darkly. You’d have to kill them, probably, or at the very least flee the country.

“At least I’m not a sucker.” You stood up and brushed off your socks, though there was nothing to be done about the red indentations on your kneecaps from kneeling on oak flooring for so long, “Just how easy would it be to convince you to drop another 50 on a replica Byzantine amulet?”

Stiles held out his hand, shaking it in the air incessantly for far too long. You tilted your head and tried not to smirk at his predicament. The longer you watched him struggle, the more pathetic his pleading became. Eventually, Stiles groaned and pushed himself onto his feet with exaggerated effort, “Obviously not very. Evil spirit didn’t even crack the top 20 on my suspect pool.”

“Got it.” You propped your arm on top of an antique guillotine, bent elbow crooked along the wooden pillory. Stiles stared at the rusted blade and then gawked at your arm. He looked like he was a few seconds away from shoving you out of the way, even though the edge was dull with age and safely secured to the iron frame with thick rope. Rolling your eyes, you stepped away from the antique and trailed your fingers over a less forbidding oddity. 

You spun the brass globe a few times and said, “So silver bullets, then? I’m sure there’s some kind of bulk-discount we can work out.”

Stiles’ eyes snapped to your face, “What?”

“You know,” you gestured towards the order he abandoned while buzzing after you like an especially tenacious mosquito, “for all the werewolves running around town. Thought you’d already know that, being a wannabe wizard n’all.” 

“Right.” Stiles’s jaw shut with a click as he ran his hand over his head, “Duh.” He rubbed at his bicep and swallowed a few times before clearing his throat, “Didn’t get to that chapter yet. Clearly, I’ve got a lot of studying to do before I graduate from apprentice to master.” 

You squinted at him, mulling over if you should call him out on his odd behavior or just chalk it up to his usual weirdness. Maggie materialized behind you before you could do either. She placed her hands on your shoulders, squeezing softly, and then shuffled you to the side so that she could join your little circle, “I’m strictly anti-gun violence; the NRA hates me—but we do carry wolfsbane essence.”

“Don’t say essence,” you grimaced.

“We have some wolfsbane goo in the back.” Maggie pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and pivoted back to you, “Happy?”

“Not even remotely.” You turned towards Stiles, finally grateful for his presence. Usually, you were on your own in your never-ending believer versus non-believer disputes, and Maggie was somehow under the impression that she wasn’t massively outnumbered beyond these four spooky walls. Oddly, Stiles looked lost in thought. The one time you needed his dismissive snark, and he just had to actually consider the opposing side.

“Is this like the dove juice thing?” Stiles watched Maggie’s face closely, astute eyes tracking every minute twitch and flicker in her expression. It was easy to make out all the different pieces of Sheriff Stilinski in his face like this. You could see the calculations running behind his eyes, the strings coming together, the chess pieces moving. The effect was startlingly piercing. “Or is this actually the real deal?”

You stared at him, face scrunched in bewilderment, but Maggie was undeterred, “We only sell the real deal in the back, to the honored few.”

Stiles looked towards you, his right brow raised. You sighed, folding your arms over your chest and flicking your hair over your shoulder, “Real useless, but…yeah. The plants are real I guess.”

Maggie winked, “I’ll even give you the friends and family discount.”

You scoffed, “We aren’t friends.”

Stiles frowned, momentarily distracted from his intense investigation of Maggie’s body language, “We aren’t?”

You licked your rapidly drying lips and shook your head slightly, more confused than indignant. Truth be told, you’d expected him to agree with you. You hadn’t known each other for long, and he seemed to be more interested in your connection to Lydia than forming one with you. You hadn’t even considered the possibility that he wanted to talk to you about anything else. It’d been a long time since anyone wanted to, that’s all. The friends who hugged you at the funeral, they stopped coming around a long time ago, and they still avoided you at school—like you were contagious, like you’d leak radiation and your misery would metastasize in their bone marrow. You still woke up crying sometimes, throat claggy with stubborn shadows, choking on the hollow bones of picked-apart memories—too busy shoveling dirt to consider tomorrow. 

You scratched at your arm absently and rolled your eyes, slowly, so that everyone could see how utterly unaffected you were, “It’s a couple hundred bucks for a few millimeters of emulsified weeds. If we were friends, I wouldn’t even let you buy something so stupid.”

Stiles’s frown quickly curved into a crooked grin, boyishly charming and vexingly sure, “Sounds like that’s exactly what you’re trying to do.”

Maggie reappeared through the door to the back room, locking it with one of the many keys dangling from her strawberry lanyard. You didn’t have a clue when she’d disappeared to begin with, but the vial clutched in her hand was far more interesting. It was filled with a thick purple liquid, so dark it was almost black. Maggie held it out to Stiles and laughed at his inquisitive stare, “It’s on the house this time, ‘cause you’re such good friends with my darlingest girl.”

Eventually, Stiles took the vial from her hand. “Yeah, darling,” Stiles smirked and rolled the vial between his long fingers, “‘cause we’re such good friends.” The liquid sloshed slowly, a little like a lava lamp, and you kind of wanted to stuff it down his throat.

“Careful with that,” Maggie blinked at you behind her thick lenses. She wasn’t grinning or winking. It was a little eerie to see her so still, like her body had been snatched by a pod person and it was trying to mimic casual human behavior. “It's potent stuff. Shish-kebab a were with that, and they’ll be dead by sunrise—humans too, obviously, so please don’t stick it in your mouth.”

“If you can even get that close,” Stiles muttered to himself as he held the vial up to his pinched gaze.

“To a werewolf,” you deadpanned, looking between the two of them, searching their faces for any indication of irony. Bat-shit. Your grand total of two friends were both certifiably batty.

Stiles was too busy looking at the back of Maggie’s head to absorb your mockery. Your brow furrowed at the intensity of his stare until your attention was diverted to the dusky orange cast over his skin. You glanced out the window; daylight was rapidly fading. Was it really already almost 8:30? “You should probably head home,” you raised your chin towards the door, “if you don’t want to run into the big bad wolf with a purple goo heavy arsenal.” 

He let out a little laugh, more like a breath really, and muttered, “You have no idea.” Your forehead crinkled as you parsed over whatever the hell that meant, and Stiles shoved the book he ordered into his already overcrowded backpack. “I’ll see you at school.”

Your chin bobbed as you gave him a little nod. You lifted Gizmo from his bed of tasseled meditation cushions, for your own comfort this time, and nosed into his matted fur. Maybe, Stiles was just…really into larping, or maybe he was just…a really dedicated collector of supernatural keepsakes—because there was absolutely no way that you just naturally attracted delusional conspiracy theorists. You’d already met your quota of one the moment you were born. 

“Get home safe.” Stiles’s voice pulled your face from Gizmo’s neck. He lingered against the doorframe, clutching his backpack strap. The corner of his mouth cocked into a tight smile, “No more dead batteries after dark, okay? I’ll kick your ass if you get eaten.”

You took a moment to smile, but once you did, it unfurled over your entire face like sunset coating the store in a golden glow. The corners of your eyes crinkled as you shook your head a little, “I’ll try to restrain myself from killing any more cars.”

“Friends,” Stiles grinned and pointed at you, “we’re totally friends.” He ducked out the door before you had the chance to disagree, but you couldn’t decide if you really wanted to this time. 

You almost dropped Gizmo when Maggie bumped you with your hip. “Who the hell was that?” 

“Stiles. He’s…” you waved your hand in the air and eventually settled on, “a friend.”

Maggie stroked the gray fluff on Gizmo’s cheek, cooed when he rubbed his face against her palm, and then pursed her lips, “Uh huh.”

You shrugged and buried your nose in Gizmo’s neck again, taking solace in the fact that at least half of your face was hidden by silver fur, “So he’s more like a fungus in my life.”

Maggie’s grin was insufferable. Her cheeks dimpled, and her eyes nearly disappeared into happy little crescent moons, “Uh huh.”

You glowered at a stuffed crow perched on top of a water-logged armoire; there was a shine in its beaded eyes that appeared a lot like laughter. “You are the single most irritating person I have ever met.”

It was an admirable trait, never getting upset, never getting offended—but at the moment you wished that Maggie wasn’t so idealistic. She simply gave you a smile that was annoyingly wrought with meaning and took Gizmo from your arms. “Whoever the hell he is, he’s right. Get your ass home before the Wolf Man bites it.”

Maggie wiggled her fingers in the air, and you shoved them away from your face. “I’m going. I’m going.” You paused at the door, gave the store one last look and Gizmo a little good-bye wave, “Seriously, mini-taser, Mags. Prime shipping’s gotta be faster than the spirit realm.” At the very least, a taser might actually have a chance against whatever carnivore was hell-bent on ruining your sophomore year.

[crimsonteaaddict]

imagine ending up the “final girl” to a slasher couple, no matter your gender this slasher couple is just head over heals for you or as a true linguist might say they were both smitten- they’d been struck by pure adoration for you.

Imagine It wasn’t originally apart of their plan. Kian and Lucetta had both planned to come to this camping site and kill everyone before fucking on the carnage they created but you were just too perfect for them to dispose of.

This story goes beyond being an imagine, completely on accident.

Warning: slasher, minors dni, cancer, mostly plot little porn, dubcon, kidnapping, pet play, death of a loved one previously, gore, murder, father mentioned, Yandere, actually written with the darling in mind being more masc but was written to be read by anyone.

You weren’t really the biggest camper in the world, sure this wasn’t your first time camping but you didn’t do it often, in fact you’d only come out here because your dad who loved camping had recently died of cancer and even though you had been to his funeral and you knew this was coming you needed time to grieve.

The man loved camping, sure he wasn’t the best father, he was an asshole fifty percent of the time but in the other fifty percent he was great. You knew he had been trying, then he got sick, he started wanting to travel even more than he had been before and bought an RV.

You went with him and your mom a handful of times but you mostly came over to watch their house while they were gone. So to be here alone in the RV your mom allowed you to take camping for the weekend felt strange, their was this out in your stomach but you were convinced it was just grief or nervousness to be camping.

Once you arrived at the site you went inside the front building to check in, you were pretty far out, or the campsite was at least. In the midst of your nerves you had grabbed your reservation papers… just your reservation papers and your wallet before heading into the building.

Upon opening the front doors you saw a rugged woman behind the front counter conversing with a tall man with a fairly muscular build, long brown hair, a sharp jawline and just enough facial hair to suit him. Next to the way stood a woman who was on his arm. She had long black hair, dark eyes that were almost black, a cute beauty mark just over her upper lip and a beautiful smile.

They were both extremely attractive you immediately noticed. And before you knew it they man was long down at you and the woman up. “You alright there?” The man teased with a seemingly lighthearted smile, they were clearly trying to get through and you were distract.

You snapped out of it quick. “Yeah, yes, sorry, sorry, I zoned out. I’ll just—” You quickly moved in a hurry to be out of the couples way but the pretty woman quickly let go of the man’s arm and gently grabbed yours.

“It’s alright, we’re in no rush.” She said purposely making eye contact with you to get across her sincerity. You felt like she meant something more to her words but you couldn’t figure out what it was. You then wondered if your eyes were still red from the crying that been happening on and off all throughout your three hour drive. She gently dropped your arm and their eyes followed you as you skittered to the front desk quickly handing the lady sitting at your front desk your papers before giving her your full name. The beautiful couple then exited which if you weren’t in such a fluster you might have found odd considering they seemed to have lingered even after you were out of their way.

In a moment you had finished checking in and quickly moved to go back to your RV reaching for your keys in your pocket as you hadn���t really unlocked the doors and went out through the side one… in that moment you realized you’d left your keys in the RV. It takes you not time at all to rush up to the drivers side step up and peer in before stepping down and banging your head once against the RV door. This has happened before. Once. With your dad.

The exact same thing happened but at the time your dog had been itch you when it happened last. That was all it took for you to start sobbing like crazy, forehead first against the RV. Which immediately drew the attention of the couple you’d seen earlier who were about to drive their car into the camping site but were having trouble with the gate.

The second they’d heard the small smack followed by sobbing the gate had opened and while the two of them truly had no cares normally, they were curious. They hadn’t even started yet, why were you so miserable darling. The pretty woman glanced over to her boyfriend and he was quick to shift the car into park before hoping out.

A moment after your misery began you felt a gentle hand on your shoulder, “Having trouble?” You heard looking up to see the man from earlier, you didn’t see empathy in his eyes but you weren’t looking, if you were you would have see curiosity and the smirk he was barely holding back.

In that moment you had no choice but to take a deep breath and come back into the moment. Your breathing slowed and after a minute of crying while looking at the man, you began to speak “I left my keys- l-locked them in.” You sputtered out and the man instantly nodded. He knew that there was more to this but you watched as he looked back to the woman leaning against their car.

“I’ll go ask if the lady at the front desk has a spare for your model.” She said unsettlingly knowing that there were a few RV models including your own that had the same lock on the trailer door. You nodded not second guessing it remembering when your dad had asked you to do the same last time but their hadn’t been one so he’d climb onto the back of the RV and began to pry the bathroom window open, you got up and helped him. It took the two of you an hour and help if you remember correctly before you’d climbed in through the window.

The Woman walked away and was your attention was back on the man she didn’t even bother really going back in rather pull a ring of keys from her purse in an area out of site waiting a few moments.

“Camping alone?” The taller man asked and after a moment you finally felt like something was wrong. You wrote it off though because they were helping you.

“Yeah, I hate camping too,” You let out a sad laugh in your broken voice. “But my Dad loved it and I’ve been having a lot of trouble since he passed and—” you paused before verbally realizing you forgot to introduce yourself you ask for the man or the woman he was with’s name.

“Don’t worry about it, we haven’t exactly had the best opportunity to introduce ourselves to one another. I’m Kian, and the lovely woman I am with is my girlfriend, Lucetta.” Kian says one hand coming down to rub on your arm as he examines you particularly interested. You were a cute griever. Something he wouldn’t mind putting under himself and his just as dominant girlfriend.

He didn’t say anything about your loss at first before saying “Was it recent?” All gentle like just to give you a particular image of him so he could crush it later.

You nod starting to fall back into your own head until Kian’s hand guides your fallen head back up by your chin and you notice Lucetta saunters your way jingling a ring of keys.

“They had spares!” She tells you, the truth was she didn’t even need to check she knew they couldn’t help but you didn’t need to know that and weren’t in the right headspace to question it as Kian let out a sigh and dropped your chin.

Lucetta guided you to the side door and unlocked it letting you in with her boyfriend trailing. “if you have any more troubles come find us. We’re site 80.” Kian told you only for his girlfriend to playfully wink at you and add “You can also come if you want some company or if something scares you.” She teases you in a lower octave leading you to believe the two of them might have found you just as attractive as you found them.

It didn’t take long for you to pull in your RV and start making supper (FIRE BURRITOS). The burritos turned out perfect, and you had some edibles you’d got from a dispensary as you sat and stared at the fire thinking about your dad. In fact everything after getting locked out of your RV went off without a hitch… except you had no cell service and as the sun went down and the clock struck midnight, you couldn’t will yourself to sleep.

You laid in the silence for awhile before you heard the first scream. It was just wrenching and the other noises you heard made you wonder if a bear was tearing into someone. You peered out the window at the trailer next to you to see the windows coated in blood from the inside. Panic ensued.

You had no clue what the fuck you were supposed to do but as you got up, rather than getting out of the RV (horror movie faux paux) you started the engine. You had to go get help, now. It was late so as you thought things through you couldn’t help but wonder if Lucetta and Kian had cell service. Your moment of delay allowed whoever was breaking in and killing people to unlock your RV side door.

“Found you!” A sweet voice sang as the beautiful woman from before appeared in you trailer covered in blood. You could tell without a doubt that she wasn’t here seeking solace. You screamed, it was loud and happened without your own consent. You quickly pulled your keys out of the ignition and went out the drivers side. You made a run for the main road and more importantly the main building, their was a twenty four hour gas station and you knew that they probably hadn’t made it their yet based on the fact your trailer neighbour was dead before you.

Each leap hurt, you’d forgotten your shoes but the adrenaline in the dark night didn’t allow you to stop. You heard loud thumping behind you and another set of feet as well.

“Why’re you running! THERE’S NOWHERE TO GO DARLING!” The once timber and extremely attractive voice yelled as you stopped to rip open the gas station doors. You made eye contact with the man before you got inside pulled the shelve right next to the door down to block it from opening. When you looked in the the dinghy rest stop through the flickering lights you saw a man in his mid forties eyes wide open hanging from the ceiling. His face was bloated and had electrical cord wrapped around his fat neck.

The scream you let out was even louder than the first, a moment passed you you heard it. You forgot their was almost always a back door. You heard the sound of a door slamming and then someone slammed on the glass behind you to your right breaking it. In through the window over the ice cream freezer came Kian while Lucetta prowled in from the sketchy hallway which would hold the smelly washroom.

“Gotcha!” Kian announced his voice sounding somewhat deranged and inhuman as his two large hands lurched onto your shoulders pulling your back into his front. You felt something hard prod at your ass and before you could even begin to fight a pair of soft lips that tasted metallic were on your yours. You could feel her chest pressing against your front as he grinder against your back you couldn’t help but felt confused. Her lips were hungry and she was quick to clip something onto your neck which caused you to stomp on Kians foot. You heard a loud groan before her lips disconnected from your and your head was pulled forward.

When you looked you had a leash attached to your neck which was being held Lucetta, she had collared you. Your eyes scanned the store upon seeing a selection of leash’s and dog collars that were all patterned and clearly just a bad attempt to make more money, they even had a place to dog tags. “Grabbed it earlier when we both realized we’d be keeping you, cute, right?” She asked her face level with yours as a hand came down on your ass for the earlier foot stomping.

“Bad puppy” Kian growled out massaging the place he hit before smacking it even harder. You couldn’t think about anything but how these people came and ruined your grieving process likely traumatizing you beyond repair. You somehow were more focused on the current assault than the fact they were murderers and could easily kill you if you pissed them off.

Your brain didn’t know what to do as it switched between the two your eyes darting only for Lucetta to click. “Ki, be nice, little puppy’s just a little nervous, and we don’t want them running away now so we.” She stated the question as more of an answer still not allowing you to reach full height as she stood at full height tugging the collar to bring you level with her pussy. “I’ll give you a treat, all you’ve got to do is be a good pet and you’ll get exactly what you want.”

Her words were tantalizing and you couldn’t help but feel all reason leaving you head from a mixture of the grief, lack of sleep, weed, and slight lack of air from the tightness of the collar. You mewled being subdued relatively easy. You shook your ass a little as you heard a belt buckle coming undone and a zipper before your own pants and underwear were pulled down by the large man behind you and quickly cut free of you by a knife you didn’t know he had in his hand.

“Let’s move this to the counter, Lucy” Kian breathe the words out in a raspy voice getting a teasing smile for said woman.

“Wanna good view of my handy work?” She teased and you could feel his dick twitch under his boxers. The moan he let out was enough for her to tug you along even as his grip came down to your hips. She was quick to push you on your hands and knees when you went to walk like normal letting the word “Crawl” fall from her lips. You obeyed. Soon enough she was sitting on the counter in front of the body she had butchered, it almost didn’t look real but the smell said otherwise, you wonder at what point she had gotten him. You watch and Kians jean clad legs come over you to hoist his girlfriend onto the counter and grab your leash pulling you to stand.

His back came up to yours once more this time to take down his own girl friends underwear and pants. He pulled you back a few steps with him before pushing your top half into a bed so you were face to face with her pussy. He quickly pulled his own cock through his boxers taking a step back and spitting once on his cock before using his precum and saliva as lubricant and he quickly lined it up and stuck it in.

It hurt like hell and everything after that first moment was a blur. By the end of it you’d passed out and when you woke up again you were in an unfamiliar room on a dog bed chained to metal pole drilled into the floor in what could have been a small house or apartment (likely house as you were almost certain no land lord would allow their tenants to drill into the floor.)

[polina-tvorozhok]

U say we can vent to you, right?

Well...it was quite shocking, and yet I was devastatingly...numb? I was supposed to cry; why am I numb?!

...

Maybe it was because my grandma (dad's mom specifically) also died this year, in July. Maybe it was because despite us trying to nuture her to full health, she still died.

Maybe it was because of just being too familiar with being near some concept of mortality (I...won't elaborate on that.). Maybe it was because of the knowledge that I could die one day and it would be unexpected, even if it was from a disease I could inherit from either side of the family, and even worse—none of you will know because nobody in my place knows about this account, or will ever respect what comes from it if they know of it.

Maybe it was because of the fact I've already contemplated the fear and implications of literal death to a creative person, or anyone in general—even myself: what stories have they not tell, what ideas were never written out, what interests never shared, what secrets never shown—although if it was really meant to be there, it's better for secrets to be six feet under the grave.

I have no idea if this is selfish because...you know...things in my life fucked me up and my perception to myself and every aspect of life like, I dunno, DEATH?!

My religion doesn't believe that the dead become ghosts who either goes to heaven or hell, or anything about ghosts. Being an SDA will make you inevitably know about that part of our beliefs, where instead of such scenarios, the body was in a deep sleep until Jesus Christ comes. But at the same time, we can never tell what happens after—if it was an eternal slumber until the end comes, if we were just left...on Earth...and never wake up or be revived, if we reincarnate into other realities, if our ghosts roam in our own homes and cry over everything, if....anything happens.

Fuck...there goes the tears now...maybe writing does triggee the emotionsof the soul.

I believe that parallel realities and the multiverse can be possible in a separates way, because we live in a timeline where many things could have happen—for the better, for the worse, for everything that may or may not be mournable. But we indeed live in a timeline where misopportunities lead the evil keep on living, and misfortune for the good to fail so. The best thing we can do is to honor the stories and memories we have with Carla Carolina, to respect everything we know about her.

If the ghosts thing is true, maybe she can smile this way. If my religion's belief is true, maybe she would be told of how people reacted to her being lost from us. But whatever other things that could possibly happen...

I so sorry for the lost. Deepest condolences.

...

~✴️ (hope you know who is behind this)

I'm not sure who's behind the message, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is your experience. I'm so sorry for all of your losses.

Don't worry about the crying thing. I woke up to the news and still haven't shed a tear. Maybe it's because I wasn't as close to her as sime of you. Or maybe because I have already experienced a similar kind of grief (when my great grandma died in Ukraine, I won't be able to visit her grave in a good while) but the point is, everyone grieves different. Yet the thought that she a child still breaks my heart.

We both got in the hospital at the same time. Yet for some reason it was her who had two go. For some reason I felt guilty lying in the hospital while knowing that someone out there had it much worse than me. For a moment I believed that her getting hit by a car was some sort of a twisted way God used to send her to hospital and heal her.

Then again, she may not have survived but she hopefully had a painless death. I like to believe that her saying she was better was a swan song, a last boost of happiness the organism produces to comfort itself before passing. I'm sure she had people by her side to hold her hand. I'm sure she was loved till the very end and after it, because she is.

If you, as you say, are a religious or spiritual person, then pray for her and her family. Remember, Carla would want you to be healthy and happy so please take care of yourself.

Stay strong 🤍

[rroaddkill]

Deja vu, a chucky fanfic told through the perspective of Tiffany Valentine, a reflection of how much her child looks like someone she used to really know well.

I wrote this for @stinkysstuff bc of a headcanon they have.

-

"Deja vu? What a strange feeling, I've never felt it before." Words I shouldn't say, because I have. It gives me anxiety every-time I do, wracks my brain with constant stress and pain. I remember too much, I live in the past. I live in a world where my son and his sister didn't exist and it was still us, he looks so much like you now it's almost like looking into a mirror of all my mistakes, it makes me sick. ill. And i hate being sick, I hate it with every fiber of my mind and body.

 I almost feel a sort of grief? It's like God's constant reminder of what I took away from myself years and years ago over something stupid, oh I remember it so vividly too..in full color, every sound made in that moment, every emotion, everything. My life changed forever…but it was for the better wasn't it? Was it not what gave us the life we have now? Even if we're apart, and I'm all alone with my thoughts. Knowing I can never fix it. I want you back so badly, but I'll never get any of that back. 

I grieve a lot about how much I fucked up, I FUCKED UP! I cheated the kids out of a present father, I cheated myself out of the best relationship and only relationship I've ever had..and for what? Because of something that happened and didn't cause me any physical harm at all? Fucking hell, I hate myself. I'm going to vomit everywhere, vomit my guts out, my blood, my tears can flow with it.

"Mom? You alright there?" A sweet and kind voice called out to me, breaking my intrusive thinking.. "yeah..ah..I'm fine, sorry honey." Glen smiled at me, his smile, his laugh, the way he looked and what he wore..everything brings me back. "I was asking if you liked my outfit, mummy?" The only thing that differs you from him is the slight accent, a slight British accent. I always found it cute, adorable that he holds onto it even though he's in a different body than his doll one, but..I digress, 

his outfit reminds me of you, fashionable like you were too, a black trenchcoat with a grey tweed material, I could've swore it was the exact one you had..a white sweater and dark purple plaid pants, his shoes being doc marten boots..oh he looks so much like you.. I miss you.

"Yeah, sweetface..you look great." I smiled lovingly at him, I knew that when him and Glenda left, whenever that'd be..I would end up going upstairs, reminiscing and sobbing my heart out, and god I hope I don't puke.

Come back to me, in a dream, or when I'm dead and decaying.

Come back to me, I won't rest comfortably until you do.

Even if it means death, I'll find my way back to you piece by piece.

Till death do us part, 

Remember?

[novelmonger]

@thesteadfastnarnian expressed interest in hearing more about my clone sister story idea, so here it is! (And it really needs a title :/)

In the near future, cloning of human beings has become possible, though it's still prohibitively expensive. There are also lots of laws and regulations surrounding human cloning, so there won't be any billionaires cloning an army of themselves to take over the world or something :P

The most relevant restriction for our story is that you're only allowed to clone someone after that person has died (and there's a limited window of time after death in which to start the cloning process). When the clone has developed, it will take on the legal identity of the person who died. Basically, cloning is intended to be used to restore people who die prematurely and unexpectedly, like a reset button. For handwavey science reasons, it takes five years for the full cloning process to be completed, and you can choose to implant the clone with the person's memories/personality (may have limited effectiveness unless the brain was mapped while the person was alive), as well as choosing what age to have the clone be at the end of the cloning process.

The story I want to write involves a family with two girls, whose names I think I've decided are Lily and Rose. The sisters are ten years apart; Rose was a surprise, but a welcome one. The two sisters weren't particularly close, though they loved each other; Lily was used to being an only child at that point, and struggled a bit at first with suddenly being a big sister. But Rose was so cute, she won everybody's hearts. While the two sisters were never best friends or anything, since they were so far apart in age and thus had little in common, they still had fun times growing up.

Then came the accident. I haven't decided yet exactly what happened, except that it came out of nowhere and was over before anyone could come to grips with what happened. Something like Rose was walking home from school and got hit by a truck. Maybe Rose clung on for a few hours, just long enough for Lily to rush to the hospital from college, but then she died. She was ten years old.

Everyone was grieving, but her mother took it the hardest. This wasn't supposed to happen. Her baby had her whole life ahead of her, and it was snatched away. She refused to let that happen.

So she insisted that they clone Rose and start over again. Her husband tried to dissuade her, saying they needed to just let Rose go, but the mother would have none of it. They had such a short window of time to make the decision, and they were all hurting, so eventually the father agreed, and made the call.

Now, the family was well off (I'm thinking the dad is like...a dentist or something?), but not super rich or anything. In order to afford this, they had to cut as many corners as they possibly could. Instead of implanting the clone with Rose's memories and personality, which might not have worked anyway, they went with the lowest-cost blank slate option, where they give the clone a basic understanding of language and how to walk and that sort of thing, but beyond that nothing. Also, it's more complicated (and thus more expensive) to choose a specific age for the clone to be, so instead of having the clone be ten years old when they're done with her, they chose the cheapest option, which is to have the clone be five years old when the process is done. Additionally, the dad increased his hours at work and the mom (who had only done volunteer work up until then) got a job she doesn't like to help pay the bills. Lily dropped out of school, moved back home, and started working too.

And so the five-year wait begins. They all begin to process their shock and grief over losing Rose, and come to grips with the decision they made to make a clone. I haven't decided for sure yet, but I'm leaning towards them being a sort of nominally or casually Christian family - they go to church most Sundays, maybe the mom helps out at the church's soup kitchen or something, but otherwise their faith doesn't really affect their day-to-day life.

But maybe in the wake of this tragedy, they start going to church more often. Maybe they start reading the Bible more, searching for some kind of meaning in what's happened, some comfort they can lean on. The mom, at least, has a complete renewal of her faith. She realizes that she's been angry at God for taking away her daughter, and also sees how the whole situation is a wake-up call for all of them to stop just living for their own comfort, but to live for a greater purpose.

And so the mom realizes she was wrong to clone her dead daughter. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. She shouldn't have tried to cheat death. But they're a few years into the process already. They've been getting reports from the organization about how things are progressing smoothly. The mom arranges to go out to the place where they're making the clone, and see it for herself. She timidly asks, "What happens if I decide I don't want the clone after all?" And they explain calmly that, for a small cancellation fee, they can stop the process and inject certain chemicals into the tube where the clone is being made, which will break down the proteins of the developing body.

But when she looks at the half-formed fingers and toes of the barely human shape in the tube, all she can think is, "That's my daughter. It might not be Rose, but that's my daughter." So she has them continue to the end.

And only now are we getting to the beginning of the actual story! XD Exactly five years after Rose died, they finally bring the little clone home. She looks exactly like Rose did at five years old, but she acts and talks kind of like a robot - flat, no emotion, able to talk and understand what they're saying, but without the charming little lisps and kid-talk you'd expect from a five-year-old. Her diction is perfect, by the book. And she doesn't immediately know what things are just by looking at them; she might try to bite into a red ball because she knows that an apple is something round and red that you can eat. So she has a lot to learn about the world.

The mom throws herself whole-heartedly into raising their little girl (though her legal name is Rose, they call her Iris, for the flowers they planted at Rose's grave), and though the dad is a little uncomfortable at first, he warms up to her before long. The one who ends up having the hardest time is Lily.

She's never expressed it, but she realizes now that Iris is home that she feels bitter towards the whole situation - losing Rose, and then having to upend her entire life just to bring into the world someone who looks like Rose but isn't Rose. And at first, she's not even sure Iris is human, because she acts so mechanical and flat. She looks like Rose, but she doesn't act like Rose. That's not her little sister. Maybe she doesn't even have a soul at all.

So the whole story would just be a slow, everyday sort of family drama in which Iris starts learning about the world, discovering her own emotions and humanity, while Lily has to learn how to be a big sister all over again. By its very nature, this is a pro-life story, and I'd want the themes to be about what it means to be human, the value of every life even when the circumstances are not ideal, and what it means to be a sister. There would definitely be some big emotional moment at the end where the sisters are hugging and crying, and maybe Iris whispers, "Tell me about Rose." And Lily gets to tell her all about her other baby sister.

[trueblu3-a]

(   mom   ->   juliette   /   1:04AM   ):   i love you

were juliette anybody else,   she might not have been awake at 1:14 on a thursday morning.   she should have been asleep,   her body was calling for it desperately,   a warning that her days of pushing herself too far were probably coming to an end   (   it may have been grief,   she knew what today was:   september 28th,   25 years ago,   her father had died   /   she didn't like to believe it was grief,   the very thought that she could grieve her father,   still,   made her sick to her stomach   )...   but she was awake.

it's not as though she was doing anything.   in fact,   all she was doing was sitting in the dark at her desk:   her cat her in lap.   she had been sitting in the darkness so long,   &   knew this space so well,   that she could see every little detail with the assistance of the near full moon.   she was staring at nothing,   just looking forward as if anticipating what her night was about to become.

her phone lighting up brought her a sense of confusion.   of course,   on this day,   she always received text messages,   phone calls,   instagram comments,   from people she hardly knew:   i'm so sorry for your loss juliette!   &   she,   being the performer she was,   always obliged   &   thanked them   (   on behalf of her,   her mother,   &   her brother who were truly grieving   ).   but this was early,   only 1 hour into the day that she dreaded all year long,   it couldn't be someone giving her their faux condolences...   &   she was right.

the text left her puzzled,   &   she stared at it with a tilted head   &   parted lips.   in the past decade,   she could not recall a single time in which her mother had sent such a thing over text   (   even worse,   she could not remember a time her mother said such a thing   &   meant it   ).   guilt started to pool in her chest,   building very quickly to a man made lake of emotions that she hadn't felt in a long time.   next came the bile,   &   she swallowed down with pressure to avoid throwing up.

guilt   &   her mother were not friends,   they were not even acquaintances.

it took her at least another fives minutes to decide to get up from her seated position.   at the king family mansion slept mei xing   &   henry,   as he always did on the anniversary of their father's death.   the very act left her wondering,   each year like clockwork,   if maybe she was the problem...   the unloveable offspring rather than the scorned victim she made herself out to be.   for some reason,   the piercing 8 letters that stared through her screen convinced her so...   completely so.

she did not live completely far from her childhood home,   but far enough...   accentuated by the fact that she sat alone in her car for an extra 3 minutes contemplating whether going to see her clearly grieving mother was the best thing to do.   perhaps this was an olive branch...

she swallowed bile once more.

departing her apartment at 1:20AM allowed her to reach king mansion around 1:40.   juliette,   having abandoned her own trust in her gut feelings   (   that was a skill saved only for crossfire   )   felt as though maybe she was overreacting when she pulled up the long   &   curved driveway.   her stomach had twisted in knots   &   her heartbeat reached a pace she hadn't even felt with a gun pressed to her abdomen.   something felt wrong without her even having the smallest piece of evidence to prove it.

the house had a way of communicating with her,   it always had:   perhaps that was why she never felt comfortable in its old walls.   it was always telling her this was going to happen...   what this was,   she didn't know growing up,   but she would:   shortly,   she would.

there was little hesitation once she put the car in park.   logic had won   &   she decided to take the front door   (   illuminated not by the usual extravagant light fixtures that highlighted the old brick walls in a warm glow,   but instead illuminated now by the thick glowing beams of the full moon   )   rather than the garage.   the garage,   while updated,   still creaked loud enough to warn anyone of her presence.

the door was unlocked,   something she was sure henry wouldn't allow on this day,   not on the 25th anniversary,   not while her mother still had nightmares of the day her father died.

it was quickly in this moment she wished she'd have a knife,   or her bow,   or even a gun to protect herself.   well trained in self defense,   whatever was happening   (   &   she knew something was   )   was personal.   so personal she felt trapped in the head of juliette king:   crossfire's intelligence nowhere to be found as she stepped through the dark archway into the pitch black,   cold home.

even with the denial of the importance of her own name,   juliette knew this house.   instinctually she reached to her left,   without even fiddling,   she flipped the light switch.

during holiday parties,   juliette would have been able to expect the staircase before her to be decorated in holly,   with poinsettias accentuating the dark,   nearly cherry,   wood.   during new years eve she would have expected drunk crowds of gotham's most elite to be adorning the stairs with the champagne flutes   &   loud piercing laughs.   during her childhood she would have simply expected the old creaking stairs that led upwards before splitting in two directions.   if she walked them,   she could go to her bedroom.

never could juliette have expected her mother splayed out as she was.   it could have been a gothic painting,   deep crimsons where footsteps once were,   skin peeling back to reveal the deepest insides of the woman she once called...

crossfire had seen a lot,   she was fine with it:   compartmentalization was key in keeping juliette one way   &   crossfire the other.   it worked,   it worked so well that she thought she could get away with it forever.   crossfire could have seen this,   juliette:   could not.   there were no coping skills in her repertoire   (   maybe there could have been,   were her mother's face so not plainly in sight,   white...   nearly purple even in the warm light of the entry way chandelier   ).

juliette king called gcpd at 1:45AM,   completely stoic,   no tears,   breath moving in   &   out of her lungs at such an uneven pace that she felt faint   &   had to lower herself to press her back to the door of her car.

jim g.ordon contacted the b.atman around 2:03AM   &   the two went to king mansion together.   luckily,   it had been an uneventful thursday   (   as if it were a gift from gotham,   saving up the tragedy for the kings,   as they deserved   ),   &   it didn't take long for them to arrive.

she had kept calling her brother,   to no response...   so she prayed to a god she didn't believe in,   prayed he was sleeping,   prayed he stepped out for a walk   &   would be back soon...   because he was supposed to be in the house,   he was in the house every year since their father died,   he comforted their mother every year while juliette moped in self pity.   he,   between the two of them   (   for all his faults   )   had to be alive.

so when the a member gcpd stepped out of the house around 2:10AM,   &   walked up to the ambulance that housed juliette   (   sat in the back wrapped in a blanket   )   &   said the words:   " i'm sorry,   we found your brother. "   it hit her.   there were no words for the loss of someone you weren't sure if you loved,   but you were supposed to.   mei xing was,   by blood,   her mother.   there were even less words for the loss of someone you loved deeply but hadn't spoken to in about a month.   never had juliette experienced such a thing,   never had she pictured that she would be in this state,   shaking as her birth self in the cold of the autumn nights.

crossfire could have done this,   she would have been fine...   but maybe a part of crossfire was in her when she stared at her mother's disfigurement,   because juliette had even calculated who did such a nasty thing. payback,   karma:   what difference did it make to r.oman sionis?

&   what karma it was   (   or maybe karma is just another word for guilt,   for blame,   for the sickening feeling that washed over juliette as she sobbed in the back of an ambulance as she realized her brother had died   ),   juliette king was the last king,   by blood.

the loneliness she had perpetuated in her own double life came to a crescendo so loud that her own screams made her ears ring.   loneliness was now objective,   not subjectively created.   loneliness was this,   loneliness had become juliette king.

[summertimemusician]

So.

Things are gonna be quiet here for a lot longer than anticipated, and I am sorry for that. Well... It's better for me to get it out of the way quickly.

One of my dogs passed away this morning.

At the time I'm writing this it's been at least a couple of hours since I found her. I would have been... Not prepared, per say, if it was my eldest dog, because frankly who the heck is ever prepared for the death of their pet, no one ever is. But I wouldn't have been surprised, she's an old but good girl and I'm terrified every day I'm going to wake up and see her gone, but it wouldn't have been a surprise.

It being one of my youngest to go first was a surprise. And definitely not a good one to wake up to when you are just trying to go to sleep.

...

Her name was Crystal. She was a soft good girl, quiet and with the fur the color of ivory and gold. She was really gentle and affectionate, every time I was home she'd immediately come bounding over, tripping over her own paws to pat at my legs for pets and hugs and kisses. She has an elder sister which has the fur opposite to hers and is incredibly hyperactive but just as sweet, but I've been raising them both since they were pups with my eldest dog as their resigned surrogate mom and a stray I was raising at the time as their brother.

She was such, such a gentle and kind girl. And I... I don't even have any words, she was alright yesterday you know? The rest of this week in fact, running around, barking and playing and cuddling with her sister while my eldest watched on because she has no patience for puppies but Lord willing she'll let fights break out and I had to hold their brother back because he's too big and he'd bowl them both over and I was still trying to teach him how to not accidentally crush them because he's a silly but good boy and I just... Can't process this right now. I just can't. I don't know why or how she passed away and it just... Hurts, I'm numb and I'm empty and I'm so, so, so darn tired I wish I could just tear the pain out of my heart but unfortunately if I tried I'd just find a useless organ that is used to pump blood onto my body so it has oxygen to continue working. Grief is always such a clawing, biting, gritting, cutting thing and it destroys anyone from the inside out and I'm tired of it, I wish I didn't have to mourn again and that she was still here but well, the thing about wishes is that they don't come true.

... But that's not important right now. I'll always, always miss her. I loved you so, so much Crystal, still do. Probably always will though we've barely spent a full year together. I hope you know that, that you're happy wherever you are now and hopefully not in anymore pain, and that you won't worry about your useless owner. I'll make sure to watch over your sister and everyone as best as I can, so just rest in peace okay? Wherever she is, I hope she doesn't worry about me.

(I'd give you guys a picture of her, but she was also my mom's since she helped take care of her and she's... Well, devasted is too soft to put it. Out of respect to her wishes I won't be putting it here.)

... I might go silent here for a while due to this. I know I was going to post a lot more Linktober stuff I didn't yet because I hate to leave stuff incomplete, among other stuff and projects and asks I've been working on. And for those who have read and liked my writing I'm sorry I won't be able to post anything any time soon, and for the unanswered asks in my inbox, I was getting to them in between essays and well. This happened. I... Need to take some time for myself, and to keep an eye on my dogs and on my mom too to make sure they're going to be okay. I'll probably be writing and rewriting a lot in the meantime, writing was and always will be one of the better ways I coped and it's the only way I really can get this out of my system since somehow I doubt I'll have the proper space and time to properly grieve. Hopefully I'll be back soon and until then my apologies, hope you all can be patient with me until then.

Till next time guys. And thank you everyone who liked any of my writing until now.

[stigmvtas]

TALES OF HOLLOWAY — ASTER DAHLIA.

welcome to marina, ASTER HOLLOWAY ( nonbinary, they/them ) ! they are a TWENTY EIGHT year old WITCH (CRADLE) who resides in TOWER HILL. They work as a BOTANIST / MAGIC DEALER and are said to look a lot like LIV HEWSON. People around the island find them to be SAGACIOUS and MAVERICK, but also DOMINEERING and SPLENETIC. what do you think?

CONTENT WARNING FOR WILDFIRES, PARENTAL/FAMILIAL DEATH, GRIEF, ILLNESS, AND (MAGIC) ADDICTION.

profile.

full name — aster dahlia holloway.

nickname(s) — n/a; no nickname required - is anti nickname & will not respond to anything other than their own name.

date of birth & age — april 1st, 1996. twenty8.

gender / pronouns — nonbinary. they/them.

sexuality — gay<3.

typing — witch ( cradle ).

occupation — botanist, potioneer, & underground dealer of plants both of magical and poisonous properties. owner of narcissus' den under pseudonym of same name. opium harvester. girl fucker.

astrology — aries sun, virgo moon, capricorn ascending.

interests — plants of all nature. potion crafting. sudden strokes of genius. finance books and keeping a tight grip over what is theirs. revenge, vengeance, retribution, spite, etc.

aversions — cops. cop - adjacents. "i can fix them" motherfuckers. overfamiliarity in intimate moments. industrialists. fleeting moments of doubt and a guilty conscious.

next in queue — officer that's not mine! by sorry mom; the scratch by 7 year bitch; moaning lisa smile by wolf alice.

notable features — a full - freckled face and a permanently set frown. wiry red hair that's possibly never been brushed. toned arms and skin littered with miscellaneous scars.

general disposition — a held high head that screams insane levels of arrogance, sneers instead of smiles.

last known location — up and personal with a burlesque dancer from pearl's in the alleyway outside their dressing room, mouths red and hands firmly gripped along thigh - aka being a slut.

scrying mirror & kindred — billy butcher ( the boys ), dr. gregory house ( house, md ), steven hyde ( that 70's show ), ruth langmore ( ozark ), april ludgate ( parks & recreation ).

brief history.

born to dahlia verbeck, a local botanist, wildlife conservationist, and volunteer firefighter who was very known in marina's environmentalist scene alongside her twin brother, darius. the two were a team together, witches and scientists who sought to preserve marina's flora and fauna from the destruction of their environment.

aster's father was rarely in the picture - dahlia married at 19 to a man near twice her age, a local cop who never understood dahlia or her passions and left once he realized that there was no controlling her, or their child - who'd grown up to become a splitting image of dahlia.

they never minded maverick, their father, being absent - dahlia was enough of a parent to fill in the "gaps" and aster never wanted anything more except to follow in their mother's footsteps - she'd always been their idol, the one person they could look up to.

wildfire / parental / familial death; when aster was 12, dahlia and darius embarked on a trip into marina's woodlands to observe local flora, collect samples, and conduct a few of their own experiments when seemingly out of nowhere - a wildfire broke out. it took four days and the entire fire department to stop the fire before it spread - and no sign of dahlia or darius except for his wedding ring, and the burnt remnants of their campsite.

maverick took no interest in taking in aster after that - consumed in his own grief despite the abandonment - and darius' wife took aster in instead. she, elaine, convinced she could not grieve under these circumstances - took aster and her daughter, myra, and moved to california. as far away as she could think to take them - away from all the pain of the past.

she tried to occupy their time with the same extracurriculars and hobbies that she had put myra in since early childhood - but aster wasn't graceful like their cousin; and they clashed time after time again.

aster ran away when they were seventeen - after years of tension and arguments, and feeling more isolated and alone than ever. myra could adapt to the situation - could adapt to anything life threw at her, but aster missed home. missed their mother. missed marina.

upon arriving to marina for the first time in years - aster was broke, a high school drop out, and fending for themselves with nowhere to go when they met mother aveira, the coven mother of lune di ecate. she lured aster in with promise of power - of retribution and strength, and aster listened to every word. passed every trial - saddled themselves right besides mother aveira and would've followed her every word.

but it wasn't what it seemed - the coven; and with the more power aster gained, the more energy they felt seeping out of them. the sicker they felt - drained at the expense of the magic flowing through their veins. an argument ensued - and aster broke their contract with hecate - or was it mother aveira? - and left the coven after five years.

now - after years of working under questionable figure to questionable figure and doing anything in their power to find strength of their own - aster's made a career and name for themselves in a few ways. involving a secret "underground" greenhouse, potions and poisons, and their own lucrative drug business. but they're still mad - still angry. still looking for answers.

facts & temperaments.

a cradle witch - aster was born into a long bloodline of witches: the verbecks. like their mother, aster's magic focuses on organic life - mostly plants. mostly.

illness; their father's sick in the hospital, but they've yet to visit him. he has a new family now - and aster can't bring themselves to feel pity. he left them - not the other way around.

(magic) addiction; after years of overusing their magic as a means of survival - aster's now heavily reliant on it. the less they use their magic, the more severe the effects of it seems to be, leading to constant use and constant exhaustion. their magic - once strong - is slowly waning and losing its potency, and aster feels sicker by the day.

they inherited dahlia's estate after her passing - but they reside in tower hill and still haven't been able to go back to their childhood home. it's been untouched ever since - except for the greenhouse, the only place aster dares to escape to and the secluded place where they grow their plants and supply.

strong environmentalist - cares more about the state of marina's flora and fauna than actual people and it's obvious in the way aster regards others.

a naturally harsh, brutish person who doesn't bother with formalities or beating around the bush. painfully honest and doesn't care much about the problems of others unless there's a chance of something benefitting them.

passionate about what they love - sometimes to the point of possessiveness but overcritical towards those they don't have a high regard for. thinks mundane problems are above them and tends to look down on other people.

has a pet tarantula named stevie nicks. <3

they opened narcissus' den only a few years ago because they needed a way to both fund their work and gain intel about the important people of marina. it's essentially their very own gossip hub. blackmail auto farm<3

aster's just kind of mean without prompt. doesn't care much for others and is rarely in a committed relationship - likes to keep things casual and at arms length.

but they're smart<3 always thinking ahead. constantly drawing maps out in their brain, always has an idea of what to do next. doesn't do well with idleness and is extremely arrogant.

has gotten top surgery, doesn't bother to hide the scars and thinks they're sexy ngl.

[ro275805]

(Holly crap i still can't believe my favorite tumblr replied to my answer)

I kinda have a lot of headcanons for joker.

Another one i have is that joker has cousins, it felt weird that we never seen any family member besides his parents, so that's where i got it from. They're like besties so when joker was declared missing as a kid of course it's heat shattering to his entire family. Until they're like older (maybe around his age but one of them is adult and have a family?) They started to speculate that joker is jack, their cousin.

Also, i realized i once headcanon that his grandpa has a rough relationship to all his family, especially joker's. Cus he doesn't approve his dad's marriage with his mom.

I still want them to reunite, so maybe captain blue (if you remember that guy) started a conversation with joker and akai (don't ask why i put him there, i don't know either) about his grandpa and stuff

Blue: that's basically about him, how about you? Is he still around?

Joker: i don't know, i didn't get to meet him for years, not even the rest of my... Family.

Blue: ... Meet them now.

So that's basically why he decides to reunite with them... Well not really but uhm.

Hello! If you mean my blog, I'm incredibly flattered, wow... thank you! It's just me posting some drawings and simple thoughts from time to time. I wasn't sure if anyone would really appreciate my KJ scenarios, but I'm very thankful that at least a few people do. My ideas are not for everyone as the things I explore tend to veer more towards dark and offputting premises and exploration of morally grey character psychology (I especially love to explore this in 'good' characters). Still, I have many more things to share, and I hope you might enjoy those scenarios eventually, too. ^^ (My creation process is just extremely slow unfortunately) As for your idea... I've explored Joker potentially having more family, too! This is one of those anime protagonist things that I've otherwise shrugged off, you know how families outside of mother and father don't usually get talked about... one time I explored the idea that Joker had actually been adopted at a very young age, or that there was some kind of secret in the family that Jack would really never know about, maybe in relation to the time-telling goddess, where their family was very secretive and disconnected.

I really, really like the idea that Lupin is Joker's ancestor too, so their entire family is just full of all sorts of secrets. If you're curious about this, I've gone more in-depth here.

I wonder what Joker thinks about all of these secrets and odd little things that he only identifies in retrospect once he gets older? Time naturally fades his memory, but certain things that went right over his head suddenly don't seem as simple as they once were... Did Joker actually ever know his family? If his mom and dad hadn't been taken from him at such a young age, would they have told him more about themselves later on?

I think once he reaches an age where he begins to have these realizations, he would go through a more subtle second wave of grief.

---

But if Joker found out that he had living family, especially if he finds this out when he's older and already a well established phantom thief... What does he think about in such a circumstance? I think his initial reaction is disbelief, because of how many people there are who would want to deceive him. But beyond this, I feel like his reaction wouldn't be as simple as just him being overjoyed once he's convinced it isn't trickery.

Of course Joker is happy.

...But another part of him, the part who thought that he had 'moved on' from that chapter of his past, is terribly conflicted. He went through the steps already. He grieved and moved on and came out stronger.

But now he has family again?

With family comes emotional obligation and also the stress of protecting that family, of the potential grief of losing that family... of connecting with that family being dangerous with his way of life, where hundreds of people would be incredibly happy to hear that 'Phantom Thief Joker' has something that can be used as blackmail. He puts that family at risk.

It's never as simple as being 'overjoyed'.

Not when you're also a boy who's grown up with complicated feelings on emotional vulnerability, where being too vulnerable or too personal is far too uncomfortable, and being too emotional risks him developing weaknesses that will get him killed on heists. (I've talked about this before but I mention it a lot because of how much I think this impacts so much of Joker's actions and his personality, especially with how thoughtless he can be with people around him).

I think that Joker might find his own conflicted emotions offensive to even himself... where he wonders what's wrong with him to some extent, not being totally happy that he has surviving biological family.

What kind of person would he have to be to think that that's a pain, in any way?

Joker isn't the type to dwell on things but he'd stew in it ever so slightly.

For him, family is a more sensitive topic than any other.

[bearsinpotatosacks]

It Must Be Difficult (Dealing with the Concequences of Your Own Actions) - Whumptober2023

People don't change, time does

Summer was nice in Hawkins, she thought, staring at the blue sky. Not California nice, sandy beaches, surfboards and ice cream. It was vibrant green trees against the cloudless sky, hiking in the woods and barbecues in backyards. Also Steve had a pool, which helped. 

Black suited a blue sky and emerald trees. So did the church, brown brick with a full garden of flowers out front. Picturesque and manicured. It was a shame it was for a funeral, and not even for anyone good or pretty. Billy didn’t like flowers, or anything that wasn’t his car, himself or heavy metal. Although now she was wondering if he’d even loved himself.

The ceremony had been insufferable. Stuffy air filled the room and not from the heat. There was an arbitrary picture of Billy next to an open casket, they’d cleaned up his body enough that with a suit, his prom suit, it almost wasn’t like he’d been killed by a monster from another dimension that he’d helped to create. 

For day 20 of @whumptober . Also on AO3

Words: 3768

She didn’t know why she was doing this at night, it wasn’t like she’d get in trouble, Neil hadn’t involved her in any of the funeral arrangements, even when he made all the wrong decisions. Billy was going to hate it. It wasn’t exactly all to boost Neil’s ego but it mostly was, make him out to be a loving father who’d lost his only son. Not a dad who regularly beat up his own kid for stepping a toe out of line. 

“Are you sure about this?” Lucas asked behind her. 

The party were on their bikes, they’d been out all day, trying to forget the horrors they’d seen over the past week. She’d have to go home soon, not that she wanted to. Neil was crying, honest to god crying, like she’d never seen. Her mum was frozen in place working automatically as if nothing had changed, but she could see in the way she moved that she was frozen in shock too. 

Max felt sick a lot. Guilt, trauma. The idea that she couldn’t tell anyone how he actually died, Neil just had to live with ‘he saved me and my friends from a mall fire’ and how he went on and on about how he’d been stupid to go in there, they all had. He hadn’t quite stepped over to ‘if you hadn’t gone in there, he wouldn’t be dead’ but she could sense it coming. If she thought the house was tense before, then it definitely was now. 

“It’s worth a try, right?” She said, posting the invitation into the letter box and getting back on her bike.

Lucas just shrugged, “My mom says you can stay around again if it helps.”

“So did my mom.” Added Will, El was on the back of his bike, staying with Joyce until further notice.

If there was anyone who was sharing her grief right now, it was her. Although her relationship with Hopper had been much better and less complicated, they still lost people to the same fight, still wondered if they could’ve done better, fought better to save them. She tried to tell herself that she would’ve died but that didn’t seem too bad at the moment, with how much her mum and Neil were arguing. 

“And mine.” said Mike.

Dustin nodded. It was great to have such supportive friends, sometimes that house felt claustrophobic, but others it was comforting. It was the only place she really had to feel connected to Billy. His things were there, his camaro had been sold off to someone and they were miles away from California, so it was the only place to go if she wanted to remember and grieve without shame. Sometimes she woke up in his bed of all places.

“Thanks guys but I think I’ll go home,”

“As long as you’re sure,” Lucas added.

She nodded. She’d gotten most of Billy’s things after he’d died, all his music and books and random shit filling up the spaces. They weren’t sure what to do with his clothes. That had made her break down, because she could always keep the music, she actually liked some of the heavier stuff he played, and he didn’t have many books. But his clothes were so uniquely him that didn’t know how she could get rid of them, even if they were of no use to her otherwise. 

She just nodded and began to cycle away. She couldn’t look back, she knew she couldn’t because they all looked so worried. Worried about her, worried about the fact that she just sent off that invitation, worried about her going home. They didn’t need to worry, she told herself, she could handle herself. 

Summer was nice in Hawkins, she thought, staring at the blue sky. Not California nice, sandy beaches, surfboards and ice cream. It was vibrant green trees against the cloudless sky, hiking in the woods and barbecues in backyards. Also Steve had a pool, which helped. 

Black suited a blue sky and emerald trees. So did the church, brown brick with a full garden of flowers out front. Picturesque and manicured. It was a shame it was for a funeral, and not even for anyone good or pretty. Billy didn’t like flowers, or anything that wasn’t his car, himself or heavy metal. Although now she was wondering if he’d even loved himself.

The ceremony had been insufferable. Stuffy air filled the room and not from the heat. There was an arbitrary picture of Billy next to an open casket, they’d cleaned up his body enough that with a suit, his prom suit, it almost wasn’t like he’d been killed by a monster from another dimension that he’d helped to create. 

Neil had cried more. Maybe all of those tears he’d saved up and put out as anger had finally come out in waterfalls. Her mum had stayed still, as per usual when it came to Billy, she wasn’t sure if it was some kind of guilt or relief that he was dead that made her so statue-like but something was making her more and more absent recently, even to her. 

They’d sang some hymns that Billy would’ve hated. The Priest talked about forgiveness in the kingdom of heaven and how sometimes god worked in mysterious ways. Yeah, he did, psychic powers, other universes and Lovecraftian monsters were a weird way to work. It was something else that Billy would’ve hated. 

Half the people in here barely knew him. There was some of Neil’s family that Billy never talked about, his Nana, his Uncle and some cousins. Some of his ‘friends’ that survived Independence day, Tommy and Carol sat at the back looking uncomfortable. Then there was Max and the Party, Steve, Nancy, Jonathan, Joyce, even Robin. She didn’t expect them to come with how Billy treated all of them but they’d all insisted on coming for her. She tried to hide how that almost made her cry, she knew that didn’t matter. 

They’d buried the body, threw dirt in and watched him get covered up. Any chance she had to try again and connect were gone. Even though she hated him, there was always a chance they could try again and get closer. Now he was dead, there never would be.

The rest of the crowd had either dispersed or were hanging around their cars. There was a small gathering happening at their house, Max would have to go even if it was all fake and the memories of Neil screaming at Billy and throwing him against walls were everywhere.

Steve came up behind her and sat down on the grass. Billy’s headstone, void of any personal notes, was behind them. The party sat scattered around, keeping their distance but close enough that she knew they were there.

“I didn’t know Billy was Catholic.” He said.

She looked up from where she was pulling up pieces of grass and sprinkling them back down again. “Yeah, I think Neil is, or was, and his mom.”

Her dress was getting scratchy now. The humid summer was making everything awful. It wasn’t just the humidity making her uncomfortable, of course, but it was nice to blame something else for once. Nothing supernatural, just annoying. 

“I don’t think she showed, though,” she said. “Either that or I got the wrong address.”

“Who’s that then?” Dustin pointed to the lone woman standing near a tree behind them all.

The party followed his point and stared at the woman with long, fluffy blonde hair and a black pantsuit. They knew who it was by the way she stood, the tense way she held her body. Sunglasses covered her eyes, she wondered if she was crying behind them or just felt ashamed. 

She knew they’d noticed her. Her body jolted upwards and she turned to go. But Max wasn’t satisfied with that. If she’d walked out on Billy, left him to become a piece of shit with Neil then she could at least give him some closure, or was it her getting closure?

“Hey, are you Billy’s mom?!” She shouted across the graveyard. 

She stopped and nodded, turning around to them. After a moment of hesitation, she came closer and took off her sunglasses. That’s when they could really tell who Billy looked like out of her and Neil. It was the eyes, the clear blue piercing through you, going steely with that gaze. Her nose too, that was the same, the way her skin wrinkled around her eyes, her facial structure. Billy was kind of a spit image of her.

“I was a bit surprised when I got the invitation,” she said, she didn’t talk like Billy though, it was too gentle, too sure of herself. “I mean, Indiana? I bet Billy hated it.”

Max huffed and nodded. She’d hated it too before she met her friends. She didn’t think Billy got that far.

“I was a little scared that Neil knew my address, or I guess I should be comforted that he knew and didn’t do anything.”

“I sent the invitation.” Max spat out. “Neil doesn’t know you’re here, I don’t think.”

She stepped back a bit, gulped and collected herself. Was that a wash of relief or a touch of hurt? If it hadn’t have been for Max seeing her name on Billy's birth certificate, and finding her in the yellow pages, then she wouldn’t have even known her own son died. 

“And you are?”

“Max, Max Mayfield, Billy’s-” she looked back at the grave. “Step-sister.”

“Oh, you must have really cared about him, to try and find me for his-” She didn’t say the word. It must be difficult dealing with the consequences of your own actions 

“That’s debatable.” Was all she said. 

Flashes of when he almost drove into her friends, when he grabbed her arm and left her at the arcade. All the times he gave Lucas shit just because of the colour of his skin. When he barrelled in and hit Steve so hard he almost passed out.

Then the time when he showed her how to drive. When he said ‘fuck this’ at a family reunion and took her to get milkshakes instead, when he let her play that mixed tape labelled ‘M’. She’d never been sure if that had been a mixtape for her or someone else, but she did like it. 

“Debatable? How?” She stood in the middle of the group now and seemed to shrink under their watchful eyes. “What was he like, now?”

“A piece of shit.” Steve said, not looking at her. 

“What?”

“He almost killed me once when we fought, just kept punching-”

“-he targeted me because of who I am-” Came Lucas.

“-he almost ran us over with his car-” That was Mike.

“-he took his anger out on me for a while,” Max added as a final statement to their bundle of explanations. 

Again, Billy’s mum seemed taken aback. This time something broke through her steely gaze and reddened the white’s of her eyes. Was this guilt?

“That doesn’t seem anything like the Billy I knew,” she said.

The one you left behind, Max corrected mentally. Instead she opted for, “Well that’s what happens when a kid’s left with an abusive father and no one else, you get angry and take it out on the closest thing to you, so in his case, literally everyone.”

Her hand covered her mouth. “I thought-”

“That he stopped? No, he definitely didn’t.”

She looked down. Away from them and at her hands. Max did feel sorry for her, she’d wanted to run too, run away from Billy’s abuse and Neil’s manipulation, but she knew that without her for Neil to use as a pawn to hurt Billy, her mum would be next. And she knew that her mum could turn a blind eye far too easily than she thought she should, but she was still her mum, she was still someone stuck underneath an asshole’s thumb and she couldn’t abandon her. She’d seen what that had done to Billy, and she didn’t want her mum chewed up and spat out, angry in a world that didn’t have a clue.

That’s what Billy’s mum had done, though. So while she could understand, it didn’t mean she liked what she’d done. 

“Neil didn’t just hate you,” Max said. “He was angry and turned to the next thing he could hurt, Billy, and he got hurt and confused and must have guessed that this is how the Hargroves dealt with their emotions, that this is what love was and this is how the world worked, so when I came into his life, I was the next thing he could hurt.”

She didn’t go any further. Everything about Billy was this confusing, conflicted mess deep inside. She wanted him back because of how bad everything was now, because everything seemed peachy in comparison, she wanted to see if he really meant that sorry and if he would change, get out from under Neil and just be himself away from their shitty home. 

But there was that other voice that reminded her of what Billy was like the entire time she’d known him. She didn’t entirely believe that if he’d lived, he would’ve changed. What if he’d only apologised because he’d been dying with a dirty conscience? If he’d have lived, all the evidence suggested that he’d be the same, now even more traumatised by being possessed by some monster he didn’t know anything about. They’d had good moments but they’d been few and far between.

“He hurt you?” Billy’s mum was just looking more and more horrified by the second.

“Not for most of the time we knew each other, for most of it he was a super dickish older brother, distant, cold, uncaring, but that was it, you know? It wasn’t until we moved here, in ‘84, that he really turned on me.”

With a deep breath, she asked, “What happened? It must have been something big for him to turn on you and for you to move to California, right?”

She was smart for connecting the two. It wasn’t exactly hard to figure out. She just hadn’t told anyone the truth, the full truth anyway, of why the Hargrove-Mayfields had moved to Indiana in the first place. 

“It was because of your dad, right?” Lucas said. He was the person she’d been the closest to telling, he was a good listener, I guess you had to be when this was your reality, fighting demons. 

“Kind of.” 

“What do you mean, kind of? That’s what you told us!” Mike added.

“Well people can not tell you things, you know, omit stuff!” She turned to say to him.

Billy’s mum cleared her throat, “Why did you then? Really?”

Max thought back to that night. Her last summer in California. Rays of sunshine, waves crashing on the beach, meeting her friends at the skatepark and occasionally seeing her dad. She would’ve appreciated it more if she’d known it would be her last. Maybe she would’ve done something differently.

“It was the middle of the summer,” She started, everyone now looking at her. Even Billy, she could just tell. “Billy had been more distant than ever, would always be in a rush to get somewhere, anywhere out of the house but never with me. I didn’t care. Any time away from Billy was time well spent in my book, so what if he barely told me when he’d pick me up before speeding off with a wheel spin and speeding fine? It didn’t bother me.”

“Until one day, it was July 11th and I wanted to go to the skatepark, Neil and my mom were at work and he usually got told to do something with me or take me somewhere in the morning but I guessed that that day he just couldn’t be bothered, because he told me to walk and slammed his bedroom door, turned up his music. I was tempted to just steal his car or some of his money as revenge but I ended up calling my dad, we went for milkshakes and he took me to the skatepark instead.”

It was one of the last meaningful times they spent together. All the rest was arguments with her mum, not Neil, never Neil, and letters that got more and more distant.

“And when I got back, Billy wasn’t alone, I didn’t think much of it because it made sense, he wanted to be alone with a girl, big deal, he always wanted to be alone with girls.” She remembered it exactly. While most of her memories of California were terrifyingly fading after the dramatic events of the past year, this one was like a movie seared into her brain. “But he wasn’t with a girl. When I looked through the crack in his door, he was kissing a guy.”

Mumbles of ‘whats’ from her friends rippled. Billy’s mum didn’t budge. She was his mum and probably knew him before he shielded everything below ten plus layers of emotion. 

“I was shocked, but didn’t think about what it would mean, I just knew I had ammunition now. So at the dinner table that night, I told Neil that Billy left me on my own to go kissing boys and I spent time with my dad, two things he hated.” She said. “And I expected him to blow up but he didn’t, he told Billy to be a respecting brother and to not do that again.”

“I was disappointed but Billy, he was nothing like I’d seen him before. Still, quiet, wide eyed and terrified. And he was like that for days. Did everything asked of him and more, didn’t make a sound, almost like he was trying to make it so he wouldn’t exist or something. The tension was horrible.”

Tears pricked in her eyes at this part. Like a lot of things lately, all she could think was all the ways she could’ve done things differently, better. Guilt making her throat stick, eyes sting and hands go clammy. She hated it yet was getting used to it all at the same time. 

“On that Saturday, though, all the tension came crashing down.”

She wiped her eyes and felt Steve’s hand on her shoulder. Lucas was sitting next to her when she looked to her right. And Billy’s mum’s red stained eyes bore into her back.

“Neil told me and my mom to go to the movies while he and Billy ‘had a talk’. We saw the Karate Kid and got pizza afterwards, I just thought that they were having another fight, they had them all the time, almost every night they were screaming at each other.” She said. “When we got home there was an ambulance outside the house. Billy was being loaded into it and Neil was talking about him getting into a fight with some other kids on a Saturday night.”

She could see the flashing lights now. Hear Neil’s structured panic and the deathly calm underneath. It fooled the paramedics, and the cops, and her too, for a while at least. 

“I believed it, Billy got into an argument and got into a fight because he was mad, he did it all the time. But I realised afterwards, seeing his injuries, the fact that they had to glue his skull back together and the bruising on his chest for a few weeks after, that it wasn’t a fight, he and Neil didn’t just have talks. Neil put him in the hospital, Neil decided that there were too many distractions in San Diego and moved us to Hawkins. And Billy blamed me for all of it, so he turned on me.”

This was too much. Seeing her face, being forced to tell her biggest secret because she too felt like this was her fault. Her hands clenched again as she squeezed her eyes shut to fight back tears.

"But if you'd have stayed or taken him with you then Neil wouldn't have treated him like this, so he wouldn't treat me the same, but he did and we never got close and he died protecting me in a-" she took a breath, she couldn’t tell her about the upside down now. "Mall fire before I got the chance to properly talk to him."

She stood up, brushing of Steve and Lucas' comfort. Firey, just like her hair, as she stopped trying to be careful with this woman she'd never known and tell her how it actually was - to an extent.

"So this is all your fault!"

Billy's mum looked taken aback again. She squinted her eyes and tightened her jaw again. 

"Why did you invite me, then? If you seem to hate me so much?" She said.

Max looked at Billy's grave. If he was watching this, she'd love to hear what he thought. Although, saying that would probably cause the upside down to make her see ghosts which she didn't want, so she stopped that chain of thought there.

"Because I thought he might like it."

Max turned around. The tears couldn’t be held back now. They flooded her face as she clenched her hands and walked over to Steve's car at the bottom of the bank. Lucas slipped his hand into her’s, stopping her nails from piercing her palms, and smiled.

The rest of the party joined in,  all going into their cars but not pulling away as Max found herself alone with Billy’s mum. She didn’t exactly want to leave her alone, she didn’t hate her with her entire heart and soul. It was just the knowledge that if one little thing had gone differently then most of her life would be different. Well, you could say that about anything to be honest, so it didn’t hold much weight.

“There were good times, you know?” She said, not turning around. “When he taught me to drive his car, or took me to the movies instead of making me study.”

“If things were different, he could’ve been the Billy you knew, again, at least a little bit.”

She was silent behind her. Max went to get into Steve’s car, she could see everyone looking through the windows.

“Thank you for sending me that invite.” Was all she said as Max got into the car.

She watched her turn back to Billy’s grave and kneel down, her hand on her mouth. It was weird, this woman who’d missed so much, was grieving more than anyone. Perhaps you could mourn the living after all?

----

If there's one thing that I really appreciated in Stranger Things 4, it was that it showed Max's comflicted feelings, and part of me does know that Vol 2 was solely written by the Duffer Brothers who probably wanted to just make Max hate Billy, but I like to think that she holds both feelings in her heart. Billy was horrible when he was alive but he died before they could've been close, what if he'd gotten a chance to change? And her time before he died seems so much better compared to her life in Season 4 but it's all nostalgia so was it really better? I love it! Also Billy's mum, I basically put all my thoughts on her in here too, she was hurt and ran but she also left her kid behind to become horrible. I tried to foreshadow something for a future Stranger Things fic I've been planning for a while here with Max talking about seeing ghosts because I would love for her to be able to see them as she's died and also is blind so what if she can only see ghosts?

Thanks for reading! @whumptober-archive

[roryjackson]

⋆ Rory Collins Jackson ⋆ The Baby ⋆ 18 ⋆

Full Name: Lorelai Juliet Collins Jackson Nickname(s): Ror, Baby Jackson DOB: August 2, 1967 Gender: Cis woman Sexuality: Bisexual Job: Primarily a student, but also working part time at the Cherry Museum (and perpetually picking up shifts at Maraschino Music) Major: Undecided Living Arrangements: Currently living with her uncle and cousin, but she & Zahra are trying to save up to move out together + : Trusting, kind, enthusiastic, brave, supportive, - : Naïve, over-sensitive, stubborn, anxious, clumsy, 

& more! stats! here!

Bio: 

(tw for child abuse, domestic violence, & *literal* murder)

It’s somewhat difficult to reach “townie” status in a town as small as Cherry if you weren’t born there. You’d think it would be even harder, when your arrival was somewhat of a shock to everyone involved. Thankfully even the nosiest old bats ladies in town couldn’t bring themselves to ask questions when they saw the grieving ten year old: deathly pale, save the only semi-visible splotches of purple and blue—bruises refusing to fade—that littered her body. It became an assumed tragedy, with most people believing both her parents died in some terrible accident. The truth was so much worse. 

Rory was ushered into the Jacksons’ spare room (their town, their lives) in the predawn hours of an unusually cold May morning because after years of abusing her and her mother, her father had snapped, and done the unthinkable. he stabbed his wife to death, and had attempted to kill his daughter too, stopped only by the emergency personal arriving on the scene. Dan Collins was arrested, Eliza (Jackson) Collins was declared dead at the scene, and Rory? Rory was left effectively an orphan. 

Luckily for her, Rocky Jackson was having none of that. He’d dropped everything when the police called—drove a few hours down the coast to identify his sister’s body, and to collect his traumatized niece. Only once he arrived, and quietly introduced himself as her mom’s brother, did Rory finally allow herself to be led into a bathroom so the dried blood could be scrubbed off of her skin. 

The following months were brutal. She existed in a constant limbo between her new home in Cherry and her old town, where her father’s crime was the case of the decade. Reporters gathered outside the courthouse. She had to testify—had to sit on the witness stand just a few yards away from him. Rory was terrified of him. Terrified he would get off somehow, or escape prison, and come after her to finish what he’d started. 

Even after the trial was over, she struggled to adjust. To grieve. Rory didn’t have a smile to give to her uncle, or a single word to say, except when she was getting into shouting matches with her cousin, or waking up in the night screaming from a night terror. Rocky could barely coax one word answers out of her, and the therapists he brought her to fared even worse. She sat through sessions the same way she sat through her classes: silently, staring at the floor. Until... Something changed. After months of tension and biting remarks, a switch seemed to flip between her and Zahra, and suddenly they were inseparable. And a quiet boy in Rory’s class started talking to her. It took time, but slowly, she started to uncurl from her tight coil of grief and anger. She recognized her mother’s smile in the mirror. Realized she wanted to see it more. She spent weekends on Zev’s floor, talking about movies, until it all hurt less and less. With support from her uncle, Zahra, and her new best friend, she began to blossom in Cherry. 

But everything wasn’t magically fixed. Far from it. For all that Rory started to move on from the pain of losing her mom, she didn’t deal with it. She buried it. Tried to be the best niece she could possibly be to her uncle, the happiest, smiliest, easiest version of herself. Because that smile looked just like her mom’s, and if she couldn’t 

That said, the chaos of high school wore heavily on Rory. Especially the “prank” of the box. And she hated to see someone messing with the people she cared about. Maybe that was why she threw herself into figuring out who was behind it all. With all of the LBD and Lux drama behind them, she’s really enjoying her first year of college. She can finally stress about normal things like her new classes, and dances, and parties. But her real biggest worry these days is her uncle—and money. He puts up a good front, but she knows Maraschino Music is struggling. That’s why she’s always picking up shifts there, and why she was so grateful to Donny for giving her an in at the museum. Rory owes her uncle everything. She’ll do whatever she can to help him. 

Headcanons: 

Rory’s very affectionate in most of her relationships, both platonic and romantic. She gives hugs away like spare change and lets “love you”s roll off her tongue without a second thought. 

When she was little, Rory got stuck in the undertow in the ocean and almost drowned. Her father pulled her from the water physically pretty unscathed- but she’s still scared of drowning all these years later. It made the incident with the box all the worse.

Moving to Cherry didn’t cure her anxiety. That was a hard learned survival skill, growing up in her house, it wouldn’t be easy to let go. She’s still fairly shy in group situations outside of the gang. She certainly wasn’t popular at Cherry High, other than for being Zahra’s cousin, and then senior year after Zahra graduated, for being Bambi’s friend. 

She likes to draw, mostly sketches in pencil or pen. She’s actually pretty good at it, but it’s just a hobby. 

[coreyjensen]

Full thread with: Eleanor Sorensen Date: 18 November 2024 Location: Corey's home Content Warnings: Mentions of death

It was funny how the house had felt small when it had been the two of them, Corey and their mom. Now that they were alone here, the building of just a few rooms had become vast in its emptiness. Not that anyone but Corey would have felt that, given how cluttered the place was with half-packed boxes, old clothes strewn around in piles, and dishes piled in the sink. It’d only been a few days since the funeral. Corey hadn’t even really let themselves feel it, in a strange way. They oscillated around numb and withdrawn, and that dull ache in their chest that threatened to devour them at any moment, but never really broke through. 

Declan had given them a few nights off from the casino, telling them to take some time and get through this, but Corey almost wished they had work that night. They slept way too long, schedule still firmly stuck in gig mode, get-drunk-and-do-something-stupid-at-night mode.When the knock came at the door, insistent little taps, they dragged themselves from bed, walking to answer it with unkempt, unwashed hair, tank top and grey sweats. “Hey,” they nodded, letting out a low mumble of the greeting as they laid eyes on the person at the door. She meant well, they knew, but Corey wasn’t sure if they were ready for this yet. Their eyes dropped to settle on the tupperware container in Elle’s hands, giving a small, half-hearted smile. “You said no more cold Chinese food for me, huh? C’mon. Come in.” 

-

Eleanor wasn’t one to put a lot of stock in the idea that worrying led to anything worthwhile. She was the first to brush it away the second it emerged, her brain switching immediately into methodical steps that led to the intended resolution. If there was a problem, she would find an answer, swallow the cold, hard facts of the resolution, and let the rest go. The black-and-white thinking led her to where she was, allowed her to work with precision, and with an outcome in mind. Yet, that wasn’t always the case when it came to people she cared about, people like Corey. Despite the amount of energy she had dedicated to trying to solve the issue at hand, at the end of the day, grief couldn’t be bartered with or shoved into a box. It wasn’t something that could be solved no matter the steps she tried to work through to do so. No matter what she did, she knew in her heart that it wouldn’t take away from the insurmountable pain that Corey was enduring. No matter what she did, she knew that the worrying feeling for someone she cared deeply about would continue to tug at her heart, yearning to be heard, not wanting to be fixed. 

Still, she was determined to make it better in the best way she knew how. This wasn’t something she could stitch with her steady hands in an OR but she could meticulously put together the ingredients in a casserole. She could ensure everything was cooked perfectly, that it was all temperature tested, and that it was delivered piping hot. She could show up, even if it didn’t take away the pain. Even if Corey hadn’t wanted her to. The shame of their split gnawed under her skin, wanting to be addressed even as she shoved it down further. Now was not the time. Upon pulling up to Corey’s house, she hesitated for a moment, wondering if this was the best call. She didn’t want to give them a sense of false hope. She didn’t want to make it worse by breaking their heart all over again. But knowing that they were grieving, that they were completely alone after everything, was enough to propel her further. 

She was just going to drop the food off and leave, to tiptoe across the floor boards outside and deliver the food but stopped when the door swung open. Eleanor froze, wondering if she should book it out of there or confront the person who was hurting. But she couldn’t get herself to leave, couldn’t take a step back towards the car. “They called and said you were cut off with the amount of food you have been ordering,” Elle responded with a meek smile, hoping to alleviate the tension. “I just was worried that you weren’t eating enough at home.”

-

Corey was no stranger to heartbreak. Pathetic as it made them sound in that brain of theirs, the one that still struggled sometimes with remnants of gender roles and toxic masculinity of their surroundings, part of that nagging pain felt like home to them, a little nest to burrow into. Shit, they told themselves… at least it made for good art, gave ‘em something to croon about when they sang their little shows to patrons who often cared more about hitting it big on a game of blackjack than whatever girl Corey was singing about. 

They wanted to be pissed, cold, rude. Should’ve probably turned down the casserole, and the woman who carried it. Elle had practically ghosted them overnight once Corey had expressed interest in more than a friends with benefits situation. Their romantic little heart had got the better of them. A moment of weakness. A few months of weakness, actually. Between Elle, Beth, and the string of lovers between, maybe a whole lifetime of it. But they couldn’t. They couldn’t be pissed at Elle. At least not now. 

“Hey, Pablo loves me. He always slips extra chicken in my chow mein,” Corey teased, extending a hand to lightly usher Eleanor inside and close the door behind them, taking the food container and carrying it to the kitchen. “Sorry ‘bout the mess,” they sighed, hurriedly gathering some of the empty containers to move to the trash can. “I’m, uh, organizing.” Getting rid of their mom’s things. Yeah. That was the excuse for not having bathed or done dishes this week. “How’s shit? How’re you?” Fuck, Corey silently cursed themselves. How could they be so effortlessly smooth sometimes and so cringingly awkward at others? 

_

What Corey and Elle had had together, if Elle was allowing herself to truly explore it, had been deeper than flirting conversations and whiskey kisses. It was deeper than most things she had allowed herself to experience, often spoken in the heavy silence outside of the hospital under an awning in the back, the taste of cigarette smoke infiltrating Elle’s lungs as it left Corey’s lips. Elle couldn’t ever allow herself to explore that, though. She never let her guard down enough even if she had wanted to. To allow someone in means allowing them to be taken from her. She had already lost enough when her mother moved away, when she left her siblings behind. She was slowly losing her dad to age, slowly losing their childhood home as the cost to run a small ranch only grew year over year as the harvest dwindled. Then, she also had to factor in the deal she made, the people she worked with daily, to know that they could kill anyone she loved without the blink of an eye and hide the evidence. 

When Corey expressed their feelings for her, it was as though armor came over her body, knowing then and there that she would experience loss but that she could stop it from hemorrhaging. It would sting now, would nag at her senses, would appear in the breaks she would take that would not longer have Corey in them. The pain would come in the brief moments she allowed herself to feel, to digest the pain, only to be blocked out altogether. She could handle the pain of this loss if it kept Corey safe. So she did what she had to do. It was hard, here at Corey’s place, to not think of the moment she wrapped her hands around Corey’s and told them that she felt nothing. It was harder still to stand before them now, knowing she had added to the loss they were experiencing about their mother, but knowing it was for the best. Still, the emotions pulled at her, wanting to be felt, wanting to run away at the familiar smell of corey wafting towards them. 

At Corey’s apology, she merely shook her head, not wanting to fully absorb the situation but not wanting to make Corey feel badly for it. Grief was a fickle thing, often hidden in the crooks and crannies. It wasn’t until you were invited into it that it becomes clear how it impacts a person. “Don’t be sorry. I don’t organise even on a good day.” Her eyes scanned the room as she walked through, headed towards the kitchen to set the food in the refrigerator for later. At Corey’s words, Elle cocked her head slightly, clearly feeling the distance between the two of them but not hesitating to play along, to allow them to lead this interaction. “Shit’s alright. Busy. Just getting things in order for my dad and catching up on charts at work. How’s shit for you?” 

-

Sometimes, Corey felt like the hottest motherfuckin' person in the room; six feet tall, fit and androgynous, gorgeous locks of hair and a smile that could melt the polar ice caps. Other times, they felt like a disgusting little gremlin, a weirdo with too many burdens to carry, both internal and external, a mess that people could see even behind their allure of charm and a nonchalant attitude. Somehow, Elle made them feel like both. 

No, that wasn't fair. They couldn't really assign blame to Elle. Truth be told, they'd felt this contradiction all their life, the weird in-betweenness, being rewarded for something they didn't feel was truly part of them, handed trophies for being beautiful in ways that felt unnatural to them. What they felt most of all around Elle these days was confused. They knew things had been good. Things had been amazing. And then, in the blink of an eye, their house of cards had come crashing down around them. 

"You just ask me that?" Corey chuckled humorlessly, but not unkindly. Their chuckle was almost ironic in nature. "They never tell you how much fuckin' admin and paperwork you have to do when someone dies, y'know? And I'm not good at that shit at the best of times." The power of attorney they'd had for their mom's affairs didn't apply anymore. There were bills,  the task of applying for probate, figuring out a mortgage and a dozen other factors that made Corey's head spin. "I'll figure it out. Just gotta figure out what to do next, I guess. Not sure I have anything tying me here once this is all settled."  

-

Elle's heart pang at the tone of their voice, fully letting her emotions grasp the situation for a fleeting moment. It was enough for the emotion of what happened to concave her chest, to feel the utter devastation of the loss. It wasn’t even her own mother, but she could see what it had done to the person she had truly adored. To the person she let in after years of not letting herself feel anything. Corey had seen her at her lowest, on the days when the world had felt so fucked up, when no matter what she did, and the degree of skill she had done it to, it wasn’t enough. When families were ripped apart. When she could have done more and failed to do so.

Likewise, she had seen Corey in an array of colors, had seen their compassion and love for their mom. Had seen how they showed up time and time again, how they hadn’t hesitated to advocate for her, how they loved so deeply. How, when they asked previously how her day was, they didn’t want a bullshit answer. They wanted to know. And on the days where she couldn’t or wouldn’t put it into words, they allowed themselves to be the quiet space for her to retreat to, even if it was brushed off with dark humour or a lack of acknowledgement. She had seen them at their most confident, blowing away a dive bar even if they weren’t given the acknowledgement they deserved.

When they flirted with her at the bar, making her crave their skin, their lips. When they showed up in the smaller ways, with food or caffeine in hand, knowing she had a long shift or presentation. She had seen them on the hard days, on the days that their mother struggled, on the days that the weight of watching someone’s light dim truly sat on Corey’s chest. She had seen them through it all but she had never seen them like this. 

She didn’t want to see them like this. She didn’t want to be in a house that was festering with heavy emotions. She didn’t want to acknowledge that Corey was slowly dying with it. Everything inside of her wanted to leave, to pretend she had never come. She almost wished she hadn’t brought over the food, hadn’t gone to the funeral. In the same breath, she wanted to be here, wanted to check in, wanted an excuse to know how Corey was doing, even if they wouldn’t put into words the grief. 

In a way, she felt a kinship to their pain, had felt the loss of a mother even if it was in a different way. She didn’t know if her mom was even alive, didn’t know where they were or if they even cared. The one time they had reached out to try and see her, she had told them to fuck off and never call back. It had been years. What Corey yearned for, Elle had. The opportunity to see her mom again. But Elle knew she wouldn’t go back, wouldn’t reconnect, wouldn’t let her guard down enough to be hurt again. And that’s where they were different. That was why her and Corey would have never worked. Because Corey loved despite the pain, and Elle couldn’t allow herself to feel love enough to experience it. 

Corey’s words chilled her skin, leaving goosebumps in their wake as she set down the dish. She wanted to offer to help, wanted to bury the ghosts that were so tangible in this space, but she knew it wasn’t her place. “I suppose it’s a pretty shitty question to ask,” Elle admitted, her fingers intertwining now that the dish was down, not sure what to do. “I could help…if you wanted.” The words slipped out before she could even think to consider what she was offering and how Corey would take it. But if she could take even just one thing off of their plate, she would. “You’re leaving?” The words sank into her stomach, gnawing at her. “Where would you go?” 

_

Corey could hurt feelings when they wanted. They could be callous and cold, had a sharp wit that could cut like a cowboy’s knife when they wielded it with intent to kill rather than with their casual, playful charm. They could be cruel, petty and quick to anger, or at least annoyance at times, but Elle had been so patient and understanding with Corey over the time they’d known each other that Corey could barely ever bring themselves to lose their cool with her. Elle, a beautiful little soul, was someone Corey felt the urge to protect. Even if she hadn’t been the cute, five-two little pipsqueak before them, Corey would’ve still wanted to cradle Elle like a baby bird. 

“You didn’t mean nothing by it. It’s okay,” Corey reassured her, busying themself with brewing some coffee, rooting around in the cabinet for an almost empty box of protein bars so they would have something to eat for breakfast (even if it was after noon already). They were starving, and God knew Corey wasn’t gonna be cooking anything, not now. Even scrambled eggs felt too much like hard work, and they were pretty sure they were out of bread and milk. Shit, they were a mess. No wonder Elle didn’t want any part of it. They were surprised she’d even showed up right now. 

“Don’t know if you can help with this, babe,” they answered, the last word casual and neutral, so unlike the ways they’d said it so many times before, when it had been whispered in Elle’s ear with a flirtatious little grin and a large hand draped across her shoulder or around her hip. They didn’t mean to be dismissive. It was just the legal stuff, the financial stuff. That side of things, they were too embarrassed or maybe too stubborn to let Elle see. “Maeve’ll probably help. She knows more about this stuff than I do. Not that that’s hard.” But they had to offer something, some kind of openness, or else they risked not hearing from Elle again, maybe for months, after she walked out that door. It was selfish, but Corey wanted her to stay. “You could help me with her things? Figure out what gets donated, what goes in the trash, that kinda thing?” 

At Elle’s question, Corey stiffened. Leaving. It had never been an option before, not with their mom. Not since they were still young and about as carefree as they could’ve been given the circumstances. Before their mom’s diagnosis had tied them to this place like an anchor tied around their waist. Every instinct in them wanted to say yeah, I wanna leave, and I’m gonna take you with me. But it might’ve been too late for that. What were they gonna do? Leave with no money, no prospects? “Who knows? I got too much shit to think about here before I can even consider it.” 

-

Elle tried not to pry, to not take in the state of the home, the bareness of the cupboards. It’s a sight she had known well from her own upbringing, but for different reasons. And on the hard nights, the one where she would feel crushed by the weight of everything, a home cooked meal was the difference between despair and the drive to work harder. The cupboards may not have been bare because of a lack of financial resources, but they said enough. They reflected exactly where Corey was at. Instead of allowing them to settle for coffee and a bar, she brushed past. “Is it okay if I warm some of this up and have a bite? If you’re not busy?” She didn’t want to push them to eat alone, didn’t want to put them in even more discomfort by having them eat alone. She knew it was probably rude to bring someone food and then eat part of it but she could make them more. She just needed them to eat now, to not be left hungry before she could drag herself out of the home. At least, that’s what she told herself. 

Without waiting for an answer, she removed the aluminium foil, moving to the sink to clean two plates before scooping out helpings onto it. She tossed one into the microwave before turning back to them. Nodding at their words, she allowed the information to sink in. “Maeve is a much better option unless you want someone to completely fuck it up. The offer stands, though, if you don’t end up wanting to make contact with them.” The offer to help took Elle by surprise, then, as she scanned Corey’s eyes, thinking of the next step, of where to teeter on the line. She knew this was messy, dangerous even, allowing herself to be a place for Corey to lean on. Leaning on someone meant getting attached and she had already hurt them once. Still, she reasoned with herself, it was better to help Corey and potentially hurt them down the road, than to leave them alone in one of the hardest moments of their life. “Well, alright then,” Eleanor responded after a moment, a small smile emerging on her lips. “You just tell me where to get started and we will take it step-by-step alright?”

It was hard to digest the idea of them leaving, even after cutting things off. Even if she couldn’t be with them, it didn’t mean she didn’t want them in her life. Maybe it was selfish and only self-serving, but they’d become someone she relied on. Someone she didn’t have to hold her guard up with. Someone she didn’t have to be tough around the edges for. “Just don’t go without telling me, alright?” It was a big ask, she knew that, but she needed to know Corey wouldn’t disappear like her mom did.

-

Corey watched with a tiny, almost nonexistent smile as Elle started heating up the food. They knew what she was doing. She was being a caretaker, making sure Corey ate something warm without flat out telling them to. “You’re sweet,” they said, stepping in to pick up the plate of food once Elle was done heating it up. They didn’t bother with making a show of eating slowly and politely, even in front of the lady. They were starving, and the food barely touched the sides as they shovelled it into their mouth. “See? I can eat. Real, non-processed people food and everything,” they teased. 

The last words hit Corey with the power of a freight train. Don’t leave without telling me. A plea of sincerity, perhaps even desperation. It almost killed Corey that Elle would even consider that an option, but they knew it wasn’t about them. It was a pain they had both endured before. The remnants of it were a scar that even so many years later, never fully healed, wounds that might bleed again at the slightest of touches. “No,” Corey said gently. “I’d never do that.” It was what Beth had done, just up and vanished one day, no goodbye hug, no note, not even a damn text message. If they did leave, it was more likely they’d make an idiot of themselves asking Elle to come to than to just dip without saying anything, but they knew Elle couldn’t do that, couldn’t leave her family, just like Corey hadn’t been able to leave their mom. Goodbye would really mean goodbye, so they pushed that thought aside, dismissing it like an unwanted house guest. 

Instead, they focused on the task at hand, touching Elle’s shoulder with a subtle pressure, one that might’ve meant an entirely different thing at another time. They were just grateful Elle was here, that she was going to stay for a bit. They were too damn stubborn, too damn prideful to flat out ask for company, at least right now. They could disguise their need for a companion with a simple task for them to accomplish as a team. “Well, as you can see, I’ve done an amazing job so far,” they said, gesturing with their arm to the half-packed boxes strewn around the place. “Three piles. Keep. Donate. Toss.” They grabbed a sharpie from the countertop to scribble the words on the side of some of the boxes. “And if you’re real lucky, I’ll promise not to draw little kitty whiskers on your face with this.” 

-

Elle knew that Corey’s teasing, the way it almost felt normal but wasn’t quite, was probably fueled by avoidance. That they didn’t necessarily feel safe with her like they used to, that teasing wouldn’t always roll so naturally off of their tongue. Still, she clung onto it for the moment, wanting to bring some light into Corey’s world even if it came at the cost of avoiding the harder shit. They both had had enough bad memories to fill a lifetime, they deserved a reprieve. “If you weren’t doing it right in front of me, I wouldn’t believe you for a second,” Eleanor replied with a roll of her eyes, though it warmed her to see that they could eat. That they were hungry for more. While she would be leaving behind still several days worth of food, she knew she would bring more back if it meant that it was one less thing for them to care about. 

The room felt so light for the moment, probably more than it had been in weeks, but quickly punched her in the gut at Corey’s gentleness. At the way Corey seemed to know exactly what she was saying when she asked them not to disappear. It was uncomfortable, uneasy to be known so deeply that you couldn’t escape it. She was an ant under a magnifying glass, suddenly more naked than she had been so many times before. All of the walls wanted to go back up at the feeling, wanted to shove Corey away. She didn’t deserve their sympathy anyway; they owed her nothing after the mess she had made. And, in the same breath, it was all she wanted to hear. To know they wouldn’t just leave. To trust that she wouldn’t experience more loss without a goodbye. 

It wasn’t until Corey’s fingers made contact with her back that she came back into her body, a moment that felt so eternal but was actually quite brief. She looked up, straining slightly at their stature so close to her, before allowing them to take the lead. She wouldn’t allow herself to feel anything while she was with Corey. It was better to hide it under the mask of teasing comments and sarcasm, a default of hers ingrained so many years before. “Yes, yes, an absolute masterpiece.” Elle squeezed Corey’s arm then, wanting them to know she wasn’t actually judging, just going along, before scrunching her nose playfully. “How about,” she proposed, “you go take a shower while I start working on this.”

-

Corey was still figuring out how to act around Elle. How to not drive her away. How to not be too much and yet not freeze her out. It was a delicate tightrope to walk, but fuck it. Corey figured that they were better off if they didn’t think too hard. Not that thinking was usually their problem. Usually, it was the opposite. They were led by a heart on their sleeve and a mouth that barely engaged their brain. If Corey got in their head too much, they’d run themselves into the ground, even more than they already were. 

Just having Elle around, having someone take care of them even a little, it made them want to cry, but they weren’t going to make that mistake again. That was how they’d got into this mess. It’d been a chance meeting on a bench outside the clinic while they cried about their mom. Elle had noticed them, too freaking compassionate and gentle to not go check on them in spite of having a rough day herself. A hand quickly wiping away their tears and their tough exterior back on, Corey had tried to play it cool, but even then, Corey and Eleanor had just underwood one another. They couldn’t hide from one another, so it was really no surprise that Elle was the one bringing Corey out of their shell again. 

“Don’t worry. I’ll make you extra cute. I’m a cat person,” they joked, their angular features lighting up with a half-hearted grin, which was more than they’d managed for the last two weeks. At the suggestion they shower, Corey scrunched up their face. “Ugh.” They lifted a toned arm, a tuft of armpit hair visible in their tank top, and made a display of sniffing themselves. “Are you saying I stink? You don’t wanna wallow in my musk?” They goofily leaned into her with their armpit, full teen boy mode, but only for a second. “Fine.” They gave her a light nudge on the elbow, stupid little grin on their face, even if it didn’t fully reach their eyes. They mumbled way too close to her ear. “Don’t think about me naked.” Corey left the comment hanging in the air, finally pulling away again head down the hall to grab a towel and a change of clothes. “You’re lucky I’m closing the door!”  

-

Elle leaned back instinctually, a finger raising as she raised her eyebrows. “You better not take a step closer with that marker or you will have more than a grin painted on your face, C.” Elle threatened this with a serious tone, though the undertone was playful as she began to get to work, picking up what was obviously trash and throwing it into a bag. It caught her by surprise, even as they bantered that Corey would come so close. That they would approach. It was quickly overshadowed by the obvious display of teenage impulses as Elle pulled away, her nose scrunching as they pushed them away from her.

“Now you’re pushing it,” Eleanor warned, a sigh slipping her lips as she shook her head at them. “Go shower, you weirdo.” Elle couldn’t help but adore them, even in all of their idiocities. Still, she was glad to see them a little lighter, a little more in their skin than they had been when she arrived. If it took an armpit in her face to make the other feel better, she’d do it, even if she would deny it and pretend to hate every minute of it.

“I think your arm pit was enough,” she retorted rolling her eyes before slipping back into a rhythm. She couldn't stay long, couldn't allow herself too much time in this place or with Corey, but she would do what she could until her time to stay had passed.

-

"Yeah, yeah," they answered from the bathroom with a smirk. This was fun, the playful banter. It was the best distraction they'd had since their mom had passed. But maybe that was the problem. How easy things were with Elle. How simple. Because they wouldn't stay that way. For now, though, Corey would just enjoy the company, the brief reprieve from their grief. Any opportunity to make it hurt less, even for just a little.

[midorismorningsessions]

before proceeding, listen to the full episode here:

it has been over a week since her funeral, and the void left by her passing is truly indescribable.

although our finals have taken over for the most part of our daily workarounds, i still feel like there is a mountain of grief to climb for all of us—from us to our professors to her friends to her family. my seminar adviser said it best: we can't grieve, because we have people that count on us. and that, unfortunately, is true for everyone that somehow was graced by her presence, but most especially, on her little quaint journalism community.

however, i look back, thinking that we do grieve about it in our own little ways. i think about how she helped forge my thesis into something i am very much proud of even though i haven't begun my data gathering process yet. i think about the atmosphere in her house during the wake, how melancholic and abrupt it is. i think about the assignments that she still had with her, the laptop that she had to frequently check to ensure the presentation was projected correctly. the most mundane things somebody does end up being part of that reminiscence path we walk on each and every day.

our car passed by the alley leading to their house for the first time since her funeral the week before as of writing while we were on our way to a dinner thanks to my brother. i pointed it out to my mom and dad who were beside me as i mumbled to myself, "i miss you, iori." as with the rest of the department's professors, i called them by their respective idolmaster characters. hers was iori minase.

her loss is very much profound, and abrupt, and indescribable. just as our whole academic community were rocked with losses one after another over the past year alone, she was the one that drives the rest of who i call the unnies along to many of these wakes, as she was the one with a license and her own car. and last week was the first time i saw these same people so heartbroken, so emotional, so weary that they had to drive one of their friends to her final resting place. i had never seen them waver up until that point. i had never seen utter heartbreak before my very eyes until i saw them, especially my seminar adviser, completely break down when talking about her. i felt compelled to just stay with her for the better part of our walk to her resting place. if i could only hug her so tight that she wouldn't be able to let go, i would.

in journalism, there is always that rule to never be the story. you're only supposed to deliver the story. when she died, we became the story. they were the story. sure, there weren't cameras during the wake or the funeral, and student journalists were the ones that covered this story, but it was just heartbreaking to see it front and center.

in 2019, i wrote a song called wintercearig, after the old english word meaning a deep sadness comparable to the melancholy brought by winter. that feeling reverberates throughout the entire song, but is most especially prevalent in the bridge:

was leaving you behind a part

of the fate we're forced to face

as tears fall down my eyes

let the sadness rain and shout your name

and i think that would be the best ending theme song for this particular post.

⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠—⁠

today's ending theme is my very own wintercearig from my sophomore outing all these songs were written just for you. enjoy listening!

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

At the risk of oversharing in the wrong place with a thing that's not quite the same, I think I get it. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago this fall. Right from the beginning, it was really aggressive and fast-moving. After almost two years of treatments (one of which we thought we could hope was working for a minute), she went on hospice about a month and a half ago. In the middle of all that, my kid sister had stomach cancer that she had to undergo treatment for twice (she's doing well at the moment).

Well-meaning, friendly people are just chuck full of dumbass things to say about hope and progress and overcoming and things getting better and about how "you can't talk like that! you don't know what'll happen yet! just stay positive!" I always hope for the best. I rarely cross bridges before I come to them. But when you live through something with yourself or an immediate family member and you've seen every little detail and you have a realistic picture of exactly how bad it is, you can't just do that. You HAVE to start grieving and getting comfortable with things sucking so that you aren't blindsided with a wall of the worst thing imaginable all at once.

And even if you know that, the waiting game is insanely hard. I think "it will get better" is true in the sense that you'll start getting used to anything eventually if you have to, but the grief doesn't always go away completely, and The Situation absolutely does NOT always "get better." Nothing makes me want to kick someone's teeth in faster even if I know they mean well. I've only been at this two years (it sounds like you've been at it much longer), and as awful as it sounds, there's almost something more comforting about now knowing that it definitely won't get better as opposed to a few months ago when there was still a tiny chance that it might. I can't imagine how that must wear on someone every year it goes on.

I'm really lucky that I got to grieve with my mom a bit. But there's a lot of things besides just her that I'm grieving, too. I'm grieving taking her to brunch when we're both old as dirt. I'm grieving the stuff in our relationship that we were only just starting to work through now that my other sister and I are adults, and we'll never be able to work through because we're out of time and she's too loopy from the pain meds to have a long, coherent conversation. I'm grieving missing out on my dream job opportunity at the perfect time in my life. I'm grieving the post-college freedom to travel and get an apartment and stuff because I need/want to help with my mom's medical care and help my dad finish raising my two youngest siblings. I feel like there's an alternate reality where I get to keep everyone that's important to me forever and do everything I want, and I was so close to it. It's like I missed the exit on the highway and I can't turn the car around. I know that's not how time works, but sometimes it still feels so close I could just roll over and wake up there, and I feel so bitter about it.

I know we're not going through the same thing at all, so I don't want to try and equate our situations in any way. I relate to the way you worded things, though. I think I do understand the feeling of not being able to stop grieving for something because so much of it is about things that could have happened and things that still may or may not happen. Things won't get better with my mom, and my little sister's medical issues have always had a clock on them with an unspecified number of years ever since she was born. It's exhausting. It's so exhausting, and we'll keep living in spite of it, but boy does it suck sometimes.

Man, it's like, how am I supposed to spend the rest of my time grieving the life I could have lived if I hadn't become disabled. Even after eight years it keeps hitting me how much I've lost and how much more I will lose. I can't ever imagine it lessening over time like normal grief does.

[sleepyrouge]

strange what desire will make foolish people do

word count: 12.8 k

pairing: aizawa shouta x reader

description: your dad dies suddenly and you've never gotten along with your mother. when she announces that she's marrying shouta aizawa, you come up with a plan to ruin their marriage and fall for him in the process.

content warnings: stepdad!aizawa, adult stepdaughter!reader, cheating/infidelity, age gap, jealousy, emotional manipulation, parental loss, grief, descriptions of anxiety attack, mentions of vomit/bile (non-sexual), unprotected sex, spit, oral sex (f!receiving), use of petnames (baby girl), alcohol consumption, recreational drug use, "pranks" that a health department definitely wouldn't approve of, nobody in this is a morally good person. dark content. 18+ mdni (and no blank blogs) or you will get blocked.

authors note: i ended up going balls to the wall and this was 30 pages in google docs :) anyways this is like a series of stepdad!aizawa and angst and it's not the best but it's my favorite thing that i've posted so far

title is from wicked game by chris isaak

songs important for the plot/vibes: wicked game by chris isaak, i don't wanna be an asshole anymore by the menzingers, derailed by the menzingers, karma police by radiohead, you've got to hide your love away by eddie vedder (this is a beatles anti account no i will not be engaging in discourse about it at this time)

You had never experienced a fall from grace. You had always been the pretty little girl-smart, sweet, happy-go-lucky, and the apple of her daddy’s eye. You were convinced you were an angel right here on earth. To your dear dad, there was nothing wrong that you could ever do. Any time you broke one of his loosely defined rules like “no staying out past nine” or “no bickering with your mother while I'm gone on this work trip,” all it took was batting your eyelashes and a noncommittal apology before you were back in his good graces. You were your daddy’s girl, through and through. It didn’t matter to either of you that you were spoiled rotten.

It was probably why your own mother never liked you much.

It started like any other growing pains-your mother and you would squabble over little things, like not wanting to hold her hand when she took you grocery shopping or preferring your dad giving you piggyback rides over her. Then, as you grew up, it morphed into crying in fitting rooms while your mom found new things about you to criticize which eventually led you to shutting her out as much as you could both physically and emotionally.

It was, and you entertained this thought quite frequently, why your darling father died. For three days straight, he complained of chest pains that wouldn’t let up and all your mother would offer to him was over-the-counter painkillers and only cursory words of comfort. She was too busy, or spiteful, to encourage him to go to the hospital. On the fourth morning of that fateful week, you woke up to your mother screaming and your dad not waking up no matter how you shook him. You barely remembered that day-it passed in a blur of paramedics and flowers and tears.

You could remember feeling anger. Anger that would probably last the rest of your life. Anger that would be known across the centuries. There was nothing else quite like it.

You losing your father so suddenly was the beginning of you having to learn how to fall from grace and clip your wings back. You had to learn how to be alone. You had done your research on the grieving process and no matter how long it had been, there came a point where you were bitter and angry and just stagnated there. In a moment of pure hopelessness, you rejected your offer of admission from the university your father had dreamed of you attending since you were a baby. Your mother blanched when you told her, no doubt angered by the fact that you’d be hanging around the house like a black cloud full time now instead of halfway across the country and out of her hair. So she gave you an ultimatum. Either attend classes at the local college or get a job. If you were going to stay at home, the least you could do was be productive. It was how she reasoned with you. You had half expected her to kick you out when she called you into the kitchen to talk but then you remembered-she had an image to uphold. How would it look to the other executives of her firm if she kicked her only daughter out onto the streets so soon after her father died?

Begrudgingly, you enrolled in classes at the local college. You only took just enough credit hours to be considered a full-time student and even then, you never put much effort into your work. It was a rarity if you ever turned any assignments in on time and even rarer still was your actually showing up to your classes. It was a joke to you when you would proudly display your essays with failing grades on the refrigerator. What was the point in trying anymore? Your hero-your real hero was dead and buried. There was no one around to appreciate your efforts anymore.

Halfway into your first semester of your laughable college career, your mother met Mr. Aizawa. Part-time teacher and hero. You didn’t really know how they had met and you didn’t care to know. You had scrunched up your nose in disgust when your mom waltzed into the living room on a Friday afternoon and announced that he would be coming over for dinner that same night. The thought of some man intruding in your father’s house and sitting where he had sat made your blood boil with rage but you kept a calm demeanor for the time being if only for your own sake.

It was a short time later that night that the doorbell rang and you resentfully went to answer it. For some reason, you expected the spitting image of your father to be standing there. Instead, you found a tall, slight man with black hair and a scar underneath his eye. From the way your mother described him, you expected someone more exceptional. You huffed and leaned against the front door, not moving to let him in. You both stood and appraised each other like two gunfighters getting ready for a duel. He broke first and shifted slightly and that was when you noticed the flowers in his hand.

“If you’re at the point where you’re coming over for dinner, you should know that my mom hates that type of flower.” You were nonchalant as you crossed your arms over your chest.

“They’re for you, actually.” Mr. Aizawa extended his arm out towards you and you regarded the small bouquet of daisies with disinterest. You didn’t want him to know that they were your favorite. Still, you took it. There was something strangely endearing about him already-but he didn’t have to know that.

“Wasting money on flowers for me isn’t gonna make me forget that you’re fucking my mom.” You were just trying to get a rise out of him. All you succeeded in making him do was quirk an eyebrow up at you and shove his hands deep in the pockets of his slacks. Mr. Aizawa was so…un-heroic. It almost made you laugh.

Your mother’s voice calling you from the kitchen interrupted your appraisal of the man before you. You opened the door wider and silently invited him in. You led him to the dining room where your mother was making up three plates for dinner. Something about seeing three plates at the table again made bile rise in your throat. You watched as your mother greeted Mr. Aizawa with a kiss on the cheek and a light hug. “Shouta,” she had called him warmly. The bile still swam in your throat.

You barely made it through dinner and the small talk without vomiting. You pushed your food around your plate without committing to eating a single bite. There was anxious energy in the air and you couldn’t quite put your finger on why until both your mother and Shouta stopped eating and kept glancing back and forth at each other. You tried to gauge what was going on from the corner of your eye, but it was your mother calling your name that finally pulled you into the fray.

“We have some news to share with you,” Your mother and Shouta were holding hands lightly across the table and you could tell that whatever was next to come out of your mother’s mouth would be far from good. “We’re getting married!” 

The world fell out from underneath you. You had the edge of the chair that you sat on in a vice grip. Surely you hadn’t heard her correctly.

“What did you just say?” You couldn’t recognize your own voice and Shouta simply watched the scene unfold from his place at the table. He toyed with the handle of his fork.

“I said that we’re getting married! Isn’t that great news, angel?” Your mother was using the voice that she reserved for when strangers were around but she really wanted to scream at you. You grit your back molars together so hard that you could practically hear them squeaking.

“Don’t you ever, ever, call me that again. You know that dad was the only one that could use that name with me. Speaking of dad, couldn’t you wait until he was dead and buried for at least a few months longer before bringing another man into his house?” Shouta held his composure like a statue as you growled across the table at your mother. Something in you was satisfied that he wasn’t running to her aid. Still, static churned loudly in your ears as you waited for her response.

“Don’t I deserve to be happy?” She was embarrassed by the way you were acting.

“No.” The admission damned you.

You got up from where you sat and your mother followed suit. Shouta was the last to rise. You looked between the two of them and barked out a laugh to hide the sweltering tears that wanted to fall. 

“You’re pathetic,” You whispered coolly into your mother’s ear as you pushed your way in between the couple on your way to the front door. You had to get out before the walls closed in on you, and they were closing in fast. 

You were in such a rush to escape the scene that it wasn’t until you were outside stumbling down the sidewalk and sucking in air that you didn’t know you had been deprived of that you realized you weren’t wearing any shoes. You stopped and rubbed the bare skin of your feet against the cement and shivered at the way it tickled. At least it was something to focus on other than the betrayal. You weren’t really surprised that your mom pulled something like this, but it still stung. You didn’t buy into the whole “your dad would want your mom to be happy” sentiment that family friends poured into your ears in the weeks after your father’s death. What your father deserved was happiness. Not your mother and the stray cat she probably found at the train station. You chuckled out loud as you thought of Mr. Aizawa like that. 

In all honesty, he didn’t look like he belonged anywhere and it was hard for you to believe that he split his time between being a teacher and a hero. Still, throughout dinner, there was something about his eyes that kept entrancing you. Maybe your mother was onto something with him.

“You’re gonna get a splinter in your foot if you keep it up.” The monotone voice came from behind you and you slowly turned to see your mother’s suitor situated against the darkness of the night. You glared at him.

“What do you care?” You had to remember that while Shouta wasn’t the enemy, he was still on the opposing team.

“I don’t care, but it seems kind of silly to go and get hurt just for the hell of it.” You lifted an eyebrow at his statement.

“That’s funny coming from a hero,” You stop to look him up and down. “Especially one with as many scars as you have.”

“With my work, at least there’s usually some kind of outcome at the end.” He steps over to perch on a bench underneath a short tree. You cross your arms over your chest and try not to shiver in the cool night air.

“Who’s to say I wasn’t headed towards my own outcome?” Shouta just stares at you. You can tell he’s willing to let you talk yourself in circles and you take the bait. “What outcome do you think you’re gonna have with my mother?”

“I think I’m gonna marry your mom and get a stepdaughter with a horrible attitude problem out of the deal.” Shouta smirks over at you after a second and it’s the first time in a while that you feel yourself crack a genuine smile. 

“You think you’re funny.” You say, trying to fight the edges of your lips back down into a frown.

“Not funny, just observant.” His smile is wider now and it’s almost enough to make the weight on your heart not so heavy.

“Why did you ask my mom to marry you in the first place?”

“I didn’t ask her.” His eyes shift down to the ground and then back up to you.

“What do you mean?”

“She asked me on one of our dates. I thought it was respectable. I think your mother would be good to settle down with before I get too old.” You snort at his answer.

“You think it’s respectable to marry a widow whose husband has been dead less than a year with a maladjusted daughter thrown in the mix?”

“I could do without the maladjusted daughter.” There’s that mischievous grin again and you can feel something inside of you start to crack that you hadn’t felt at all since your father died. It makes you woozy.

“I could do without her too.”

The wedding is planned relatively quickly. It’s a small enough affair to be held in a backyard garden and the day is sunny despite the turmoil you feel raging inside of you. You had been awake since the early hours of the morning, switching between fuming that your mother was actually going through with getting married to someone you both hardly knew and twirling around in front of your bathroom mirror in the dress that you had picked out for the ceremony. 

With your hair and makeup done for the first time in an eternity, you felt quite stunning. It was your vanity that led you to being more cruel than usual to your mom.

It wasn’t like she didn’t deserve it, but even the words slipping off of your tongue felt like they sliced right through the muscle. Your mother called your name harshly as you held her gaze in the big mirror in her bathroom but still, Shouta failed to truly come to her defense. You were satisfied with that. You thought momentarily that maybe he might have agreed with your statement that, “Oh mom, you look beautiful. It’s just a shame that you’re a cunt on the inside.”

You left your mother’s room to the sound of Shouta offering warm words of consolation, could have sworn you heard him offer, “It makes sense that she’s still angry.” You bit your tongue to hide your grin when you heard him fail to refute what you had said. 

You made your way out into the garden covered in lavender and honeysuckle to mingle among the few guests who had shown up. You kept a crystal champagne glass in your hand as you greeted your cousins and extended family. You relished in introducing yourself as “Shouta’s stepdaughter” to the few of his work colleagues that were in attendance. The fleeting appreciative glances that they gave weren’t lost on you and slowly, the cogs of your mind started to mingle with the champagne you drank and as the ceremony started, you started to formulate a plan to ruin your mother’s new marriage. Set it on fire and watch it burn to ash. All it would take was breaking Shouta down and stealing him from her and if there was one thing you knew how to do, it was how to get your way.

After the ceremony came the reception and chairs were cleared away and tables were moved around to allow guests to dance and mingle with each other. You sat by yourself with a sour feeling hanging over your heart. Your mother had actually been cruel enough to get remarried. Their vows and the kiss they shared played over and over again as you sipped on your champagne. The anger was exhausting. Nothing would have been better in that moment than being able to run into the arms of your father and cry to him about everything that was going wrong.

There came a light tap on your shoulder. Slowly, you angled your head to see who was intruding on your bubble of misery. Shouta. He was well put-together, all slicked back hair and an uncharacteristic happy grin. You remembered your own vow from earlier and painted a matching toothy grin on your face. Your eyes flicked down to the hand that he held out towards you.

“Would you like to dance?” You looked at him in confusion.

“What, you know how to dance?”

“There are lots of things you don’t know about me.” Oh, you hoped there were. Still, he smiled pleasantly at you.

“Okay, one dance and you can list off all the things I don’t know about you. For vetting purposes.” Being sweet to him was all part of the plan.

“I think it’s a little too late for vetting now.” He replied as you placed your hand in his and stood up. His hand was large and warm compared to your own. You toyed with the urge to fully lace your fingers through his as he led you to the impromptu dance floor. The song playing was nice and mid-tempo and the lyrics were saying something schmaltzy about love. Shouta held you at a respectable arms distance as the two of you swayed to the music. You could hear little coos of adoration from the couples dancing around the two of you. It fuelled you as you looked up, wide-eyed, at Shouta. He opened his mouth for a second too long before closing it quickly and you cocked your head to the side before running a hand up his bicep. His forehead creased almost imperceptibly.

“What were you gonna say?” You used your most innocent voice, the one that always worked on your dad.

“I know you don’t like when it gets brought up, but uh, I feel really fortunate that your mom came into my life and I’m gonna try my best to be a good role model for you.” The soft smile on your face stuttered as you thought of him trying to replace your father. You managed to stay strong and fight through the feeling. You weren’t mad at Shouta, not really. Just cautious. You needed him on your side to get back at your mom. However, there was something saccharine and sugary and enthralling about the man that stood in front of you. He seemed like someone who could take all of your troubles away if you would let him. As Shouta spun you around to hide his own bashfulness, you decided that he was something you had to have regardless of the ruination of your mother’s relationship.

It was okay if you had a little crush on him as you went about your plan.

You had seven days to yourself; one hundred and sixty-eight hours to be exact. Time seemed to eke by as you split your time between decaying on the couch and finding inconsequential things around the house to make your mom’s life just a bit harder when she returned from her honeymoon. Hair removal cream found its way into her shampoo. Gently used mouthwash found its way back into the bottle. Files in her home office subtly found their way to new homes. All of your pranks were plausibly deniable, of course, and something told you that Shouta would come to your defense.

You were angry after all and you planned to play into that as much as you could with him. He wouldn’t want to rock the boat and get on your bad side so soon after getting married, would he? He didn’t seem like the type of person to want to stick his nose somewhere that it didn’t belong.

As you milled about the empty house on your vacation from your mother, you did more research on your new stepfather. Eraserhead. There wasn’t much to be found on him aside from some news clips with him in the background, long hair floating wildly around his head. At first, you couldn’t believe that the same man holding off hordes of villains was the same man who asked you to dance and vowed to be a good man only days prior. He didn’t seem all that remarkable in his everyday life, but perhaps that was how he wanted it. You kept thinking back to the way he bashfully smiled at you and even though you were alone, you felt blood rush to your cheeks.

Last night as you laid in bed, your mind drifted to what it might be like if he laid on top of you, in between your legs-taking care of you in a different way than what he had meant when you danced together. Your mind had raced as you imagined what his kisses must be like, what it might be like for him to hold you down and make you squirm. It was enough for you to get off, lips parted in a delicious whine as your own fingers pushed in and out of you. You didn’t feel any kind of shame. Shouta deserved better than your mother and even if he might not ever fully grasp that, the least that you could do was sow the seeds of discontent in his mind.

Your musings were interrupted by the sound of the front door unlocking and suitcases scraping past the threshold. You finished gathering a spoonful of peanut butter from the jar and turned to lean against the counter. So, your time alone has finally come to a close. Your mother would ascertain that there would be no more walking around half-naked in front of her new husband, but there was time for one last performance at least.

You brushed one edge of your oversized sweater off of your shoulder, leaving you clad in only your underwear and the cardigan that hung from your frame. You patiently listened to the scuffle of luggage being moved around as you popped the spoon of peanut butter into your mouth. Shouta appeared around the corner and threw his jacket over one of the dining room chairs. He took notice of you immediately.

“We made it back safely!” His words sounded incredibly lame and he never broke his gaze from your eyes. You batted your eyelashes prettily at him as you pulled the spoon from your mouth.

“I can see that.” You were amused at him attempting to make small talk as you deadpanned back at him.

“Our trip was actually really neat. I think your mom took some pictures if you wanna look at them sometime.” Shouta had barely gotten the sentence out of his mouth before your mother was entering the kitchen and her eyes had gone just about the size of Pluto. Your full name sprung from her lips in a shriek.

“You know better than that! Go put some clothes on!” Her words echoed in the now abject silence of the kitchen before you broke out in spiteful laughter and put your dirty spoon in the sink. As you went to leave, still laughing ruefully, you could see an embarrassed blush rising up Shouta’s neck and that had made it all worth it. Your laughter wound down to breathless chuckles as you made it to the hallway and as you paused for a minute to catch your breath, you listened as Shouta once again came to your defense to the tune of, “Honey, it’s okay. She just has to get used to a man being in the house again.”

It’s a relatively easy decision for you to start working out to have more in common with Shouta, even though you’re not very good at it. It made sense that he’d work out. He was a hero and surely the job would be made all the harder if he didn’t have the physique to back it up. At the very least, Shouta seemed like he worked out just enough to be strong for the job. 

His morning schedule is still a mystery to you, so you start to wake up early religiously each morning to work out in the living room within full view of the kitchen. It just so happens that you’re there on your little yoga mat in your sports bra and athletic shorts struggling your way through your second set of squats, when you hear someone moving around in the kitchen. You move your head to the side just enough to see Aizawa appraising you from the counter. You keep up with your routine and try to fight the smirk on your face. You really give an earnest effort to your workout now but you stop when you hear his gruff morning voice. 

“Your form is wrong.” You look over to where he stands, shirtless, pouring a cup of coffee. You’re out of breath and the sight doesn’t help. You stand up to your full height and face him.

“How is it wrong?” You try to hide your breathlessness and the way your tongue wants to stick to the roof of your mouth. He sets his mug on the edge of the counter and crosses over to you. His fingertips airily trace over your spine first. You almost jolt forward at the unexpected touch.

“Your back is too curved. Keep your shoulders back like this,” He tugs your shoulders back until you can feel your spine straighten out. “and your feet are too far apart.” He nudges your feet closer together by a few inches. You let him move you around like a ragdoll for a few moments more. Finally, he steps in front of you and considers your new form. 

“Try it now and see how it feels.” He instructs and you feel incredibly goofy as you go through the motions, his measured gaze never leaving you. You have to admit, the squats feel better now and less like you’re fighting your own body. When you rise to your full height again, you stand with your legs together and cross your arms across your chest.

“That was better.” You confirm, trying to catch your breath. Shouta smiles gently at you and you want to scratch at your skin for the way it makes you feel.

“I’m going on a run in a little bit, you should come with me.” He invites and all you want to do is glug down a gallon of water and collapse onto the floor, but then you remember your solemn vow to yourself and you accept his invitation. It’s all in the name of ruining your mother’s happiness after all.

There wasn’t a lot you knew about heroes. When you were younger, you had a passionate interest in All Might, but so did every other kid in the country. There wasn’t anything special about that.

You were content enough to leave the life-saving to the specially trained heroes. You knew you didn’t have the resolve or compassion to make it as a hero yourself. Still, it was an occupation that you respected from afar. Now, it was something that you got to observe up close every time Shouta came wandering home. Most of his shifts were at night, after everyone was in bed. It was when the real villains could play. Regardless of everything, you admired his ability to train a new generation of heroes during the day and still go out to patrol the streets and rooftops most nights.

You wouldn’t admit it cognizantly to yourself, but you found yourself adapting to wake up whenever you would hear the front door click shut in the small hours of the morning. You would peel yourself out of bed and wrap a blanket around your shoulders as you crept to the end of your hallway to watch Shouta. His goggles would always be pushed up around his forehead. His stubble would always be more prominent than usual. The dim light from the stove in the kitchen always made his eyes look more exhausted than they probably were. From your hiding spot, you would watch him pour a glass of water and sip on it at the kitchen table until his head got too heavy for him to hold up. You would wait until you could hear his gentle snores wafting over to your ears and then you would tiptoe over like you were in church and wrap your blanket around his shoulders. You would work his goggles off of the crown of his head and sit them gently on the table next to him before running your fingers through his silky hair. Your stomach always tingled. You always wanted to duck your head down and place warm kisses on his hairline.

You never noticed his eyes, very much awake, on you as you retreated back to your room.

The thing with time is that it was supposed to heal wounds. Except for you it didn’t. You kept hoping every day that you would wake up and find that you would care a little bit less about the loss of your dad. Maybe even be able to compartmentalize it and get on with your life, get your grades up and transfer schools and move out on your own. Still, you woke up every morning with a deep seated hole in your chest. It was assuaged in little pieces by the family portraits hung around the house. A family picture of your first birthday here. A picture of you and your dad at an awards ceremony there. The little remnants of your dad around the house helped to serve as a reminder that you were still human, as hard as it was some days.

Until one day the pictures weren’t there anymore.

You tore into a blind rage, your mom and Shouta watching from the kitchen as you threw the television remote at the wall. A novel was flung all the way against the refrigerator in the kitchen. You screamed like your head was being torn off. It went on and on until you tired yourself out and sat on the couch to sob embarrassedly, face hidden in your hands. 

You tuned into the whispers emanating from the kitchen. You caught onto your mother telling Shouta that it was time for you to move on, that you were an adult and needed to stop relying on your emotions to guide you. Your hands balled into fists. What did she know? Your head cleared only by a fraction when you heard Shouta answer that maybe taking down the pictures wasn’t the right way to go about things.

You sat on the couch crying for so long that you didn’t realize when the two of them left. You stood, as if on autopilot, and gathered your materials for the classes that you had that day and departed, not caring how you looked, but just needing to get out of the house. 

When you returned that afternoon, the pictures of you and your dad sat in brand new frames on your bed.

It was no secret that you had more friends in high school. You were near the top of your class and always managed to stay on top of gossip and the happenings around school. You missed hanging out with your girlfriends when you were happy, before they all went off to the schools they had been dreaming of for years. You were jealous of them and felt spiteful anytime they would post pictures of the great times they were having on their social media. It didn’t matter that you self-imposed your own exile to wallow in your bitterness. You were envious that your friends were able to fool around with frat boys when all you seemed to attract were the bottom-of-the-barrell burnouts from your college. Not that you were much better than them these days. 

You spent too many weekends holed up in the apartments of your new friends, smoking weed and watching them play video games just for something interesting to do. It almost made you want to turn your life back around and get back on track. Almost, but not quite.

So when you heard of a party happening one weekend, you jumped at the chance to go and rallied your friend group to go with you so you wouldn’t look like so much of a loser.

When you are ready to leave, Shouta and your mother are having an intimate date night in the dimly lit kitchen, sharing wine and giggling at each other over things you can’t make sense of. You wonder what they have in common. Your mother makes you sick to your stomach but a green claw of unbridled jealousy seizes at your chest when you hear the subtle bedroom lilt to Shouta’s voice and when you see how his hand reaches up to push a lock of hair off your mother’s shoulder. You shake off the feeling and enter the kitchen in earnest, dressed in a skimpy outfit that makes your mother’s eyes pop out of her head. You can tell without even looking at her from years of professionally annoying her. You completely ignore Shouta-don’t even give him a spare glance as you walk by the two on your way to the front door.

“Where are you going?” You hear your mother call as you reach for the door handle.

“Out with my friends,” Is all you offer up before you’re gone.

And the party isn’t bad, the music is loud and there’s enough alcohol to placate you for the evening. Even your friends seem like they’re having a good time as they mill about in the crowd. There are just enough people that you don’t know there for you to get comfortably drunk. It’s a good way for you to finally unwind, you think, as you step unsteadily into the messy kitchen. You’re trying to pour yourself another drink when a spindly hand comes out of nowhere and takes your cup from you and finishes preparing your drink.

“I was doing just fine pouring my own drink.” You pout at your friend that you arrived with from the opposite side of the counter and he circles around to stand next to you, too close for what you were comfortable with.

“Nice girls shouldn’t be pouring their own drinks.” He drawls and it was smooth, but you clench your teeth and take the cup from his hand.

“‘m not a nice girl.”

“Sure you are. You just spend a lot of time pretending that you aren’t.” His cool breath is ghosting next to your ear and you’re just the perfect amount out of your right mind to let your eyes close and let your head lean into the feeling. Your mind is a television screen and it’s flickering through what it would feel like to have Aizawa in the same position, doing the exact same thing. 

“If I was such a nice girl, I wouldn’t be hanging out with you, huh?” You lower your voice just enough for only him to hear and then he’s laughing in your ear and his slight torso is pressing against your back and it’s all too easy for you to envision Shouta in his place. Your heart is thumping in your chest, probably so heavily that he can feel it clear through to his chest. Then his nose is pressing against the smooth skin of your neck and his lips are ghosting against you and you can’t help but grip the edge of the counter with your hand that isn’t holding your drink. “Fuck, do that again,” you whisper and press more into his hold, grinding back against the man as his tongue licks a stripe up your neck, hand cradling the opposite side of your head to give him more room. His teeth bite against your skin roughly and you can’t stop the sound that escapes your mouth. It only serves to egg him on, encouraging him to bite and suck at your neck more fervently. Your eyes are shut tight with images of Shouta absolutely ruining you running through your head. It’s not fair to your friend, not in the least, but you warned him that you weren’t a nice girl in the first place. You can feel him hard against your back and that’s enough to startle you out of your reverie. You push him off of you and you can’t turn to look him in the eye. 

“I gotta go…find something else to do,” You parse out and walk on unsteady legs out of the kitchen and back into the music-filled living room. The dancing and drinking is still going heavy but your mood is somber now. You want to be home and you don’t care what it takes to get there as you finish your final drink in only a few sips and set it on the porch steps as you leave the house. 

You weren’t very far from home and despite your level of intoxication, you knew you could get home without forgetting the way. You pulled off the heels that you wore and dangled them from your fingers as you trekked home in the dark. It was hard to keep your mind from your stepfather-the gentle way he cradled your mother’s face in his large palm while he smiled at her and the way he poured more wine for her without her having to ask. You clenched your jaw. That should have been you. Your mother didn’t deserve such a good thing-such a handsome thing. If you had any say in the matter, and by heaven, you would weasel your way in any way you could, Aizawa would be yours and her heart would be broken. It was only fair, he seemed to be the only thing capable of mending the shattered and torn pieces of your angry little heart. You were so fucked.

You were so fucked and lovesick thinking about him as you walked back into your house that you didn’t even register all the noise you were making as you bumped from wall to wall trying to get back to your bedroom. Maybe you were more drunk than you originally thought. You heard Shouta’s voice calling your name from just outside of your cracked bedroom door what felt like seconds after you entered. All you could do was stand there and sway as he watched you from the doorway.

He was clad in flannel pajama pants and nothing else and his hair was messier than usual and you frowned at the sight. It was obvious. He was too relaxed. He had fucked your mother at some point after you left and that made dread settle into your stomach. You wanted to vomit. Shouta was your territory, didn’t she know? Still, you grinned at him like a child trying to get out of trouble. He appraised you, looking you up and down, and you wanted there to be more to his gaze than there was.

“You’re drunk.” It was a statement of fact and it rolled off his tongue weightlessly. You weren’t in trouble.

“I don’t think I am,” You licked your lips and over pronounced every syllable. Your tongue was liquid in your mouth. He barked out an amiable laugh and stepped into your room proper. You were glued to the spot as your heart started to race not for the first time that night.

“Sit down, I’ll get your pajamas.” Aizawa’s warm hand was on your upper arm and guided you to sit down on the edge of your bed. Your skin prickled in his grasp as you let him guide you. Your entire body felt like you were a past-done spaghetti noodle.

“They’re in the top drawer,” You offered up as he looked, a little lost, around your room. You bit the tip of your tongue in between your front teeth to stop from grinning too hard. You liked him taking care of you.

You watched as he dug through your dresser and grabbed a big t-shirt and pair of shorts. He folded the articles neatly in his hands and crossed the room back to your bedside where he placed the pajamas in your lap. You were about to open your mouth to thank him when he took your chin into two of his fingers and pulled your head to the side gently. Your skin buzzed underneath his touch as he ran the tip of his rough pointer finger over the bruise on your neck that you had pretended Shouta had left there in the first place. 

“You’ve been lettin’ boys kiss on you?” He questions teasingly and your stomach clenches so hard you almost can’t reply. 

“Uh, not here,” you swipe your thumb across your bottom lip, “just there.” The reply made sense in your head. You nod your head against the finger on your neck. 

“Well, at least you’re having fun.” Aizawa laughs in earnest, if a little awkwardly, and then his touch is gone from your skin. 

“Not really,” You admit and start to take note of how the room is spinning but you take pains to keep from slurring your words. Shouta raises up an eyebrow at you. 

“Would rather be kissing boys properly, y’know?” There’s a nervous titter between the two of you. 

“Okay,” he chuckles out, hand rubbing awkwardly at the back of his neck. “Just don’t let your mom see.” You feel compelled by some force of nature to keep talking despite the voice in the back of your head screaming at you to just shut up and go to sleep. 

“Would you kiss me?” The words slither out of your mouth as if they were lava and the room isn’t spinning anymore, but upending itself over and over again in the corner of your vision as you watch a stricken look cross over Aizawa’s face. 

“I’m your stepdad and I think you need to remember that, baby girl.” He instructs and you hate the way that he sounds like he’s talking to a wounded animal that’s been stuck in a trap. 

“But if you weren’t? What if I was just…somebody that you knew?” 

“I think you need to put on your pajamas and go to sleep before you talk yourself into hurting your own feelings.” Your eyes felt watery and weak. You felt bile rising in your throat and started to panic.

“Fuck, you’re gonna throw up, aren’t you?” Aizawa registered the seasick look on your face and was hoisting you up by your arms and hauling you into the bathroom before you could even nod your head in confirmation. It was a good thing, at least, that he was in his right mind, because you unleashed the contents of your stomach into the toilet not even a second after your knees connected sharply with the tile of the floor. For once, you were thankful for throwing up, because then you could blame the tears welling out of the corners of your eyes on that.

The shit-faced debacle passed blessedly without much mention. You and Shouta went about your daily lives without bringing up how he held your hair back for you and sat next to you while you cried about missing your dad into the toilet seat. Somehow, even through you blubbering mindlessly about how much your dead dad meant to you, you didn’t let anything slip about your plan to ruin your mother’s marriage or your stupid infatuation with the man himself. 

For the past week, you had regarded each other cordially from opposite sides of whatever room you were in together. You would nod in acknowledgement of each other when you poured coffee at the same time in the morning or when you were coming back from studying and he was headed out on some hero’s errand that you really didn’t care about enough to understand. But now, it was the weekend and you were holed up in your room with a joint and a half-done essay to prevent a repeat of last Friday night. 

Loud music and smoke filled your room as you sat on the floor with your laptop and tried to make sense of the argument you were making on paper. For the first time in your college career, you were trying to apply yourself. Secretly, you enjoyed the warm smile that Shouta had given you earlier in the week when you had hung a paper with a passing grade scribbled at the top on the refrigerator. You wanted a repeat performance.

The steady clacking of your nails against laptop keys was interrupted by a knock at your door. You turned your music down slightly and tapped the ash off of your joint as you called for whoever was knocking to come in. Your door swung open quickly and Shouta propped himself against the door frame. You turned your music down lower.

“What are you doing at home on a Saturday night listening to “Karma Police” all by yourself?” He questioned and you rubbed your dry eyes.

“I have a dead dad. I’m entitled to my sadness.” You deadpanned and laughed after a second. The melodrama hadn’t started to get old yet.

“I mean…that’ll do it.” You raised your eyebrows up at him, wondering why he had come to your room in the first place. Shouta cleared his throat and stepped into your room before sitting down on the floor like you were. “You sure you don’t wanna go out and hang out with people your own age?” He crosses his legs as you take one last pull off of your joint before squishing it out on the ashtray next to your knee.

“I was trying to finish this paper, actually.”

“Oh yeah? What’s it on?” You half expected Shouta to say something about the smoke.

“Heroes and ethics or something like that.”

“And you didn’t want my opinion?”

“I like doing things on my own.”

“So you don’t wanna watch a movie with me, then?” There’s that mischievous smile on his face again that makes your heart feel like a galloping horse.

“You could ask my mom.”

“She’s out at a dinner.” You type up one last sentence and hum in acknowledgement of his statement.

“What kind of old man movie do you want me to watch with you?”

“Terminator.”

“Properly retro.” You affirm, closing the lid of your laptop and standing up. “Let’s go, then.” You hold out your hand to Shouta and help him up from the floor. You half expect to hear his knees pop in their sockets as he stands. You lead the way into the living room and sit down on the couch while he pulls up the movie with the television remote. He settles on the couch opposite from you. You’re startled by the overwhelming want to lean your head against his t-shirt clad chest.

“Have you ever thought about getting a cat?” He asks casually as the opening credits roll, remote clinking down onto the coffee table.

“Mom’s not a big cat person.” There’s a quick pause. “I used to have one a long time ago. Dad and I found it behind a trash can. I named it All Might.” Shouta snorted a laugh at your admission. 

“Why’d you name that poor cat All Might?” He pulled a throw blanket down from the back of the couch and fluffed it over his legs. You stared at the simple action. Shouta clocks you from the corner of his eye but you don’t realize.

“I had a crush on All Might when I was little.” You were very serious.

“That’s horrific.”

“Hey, there are lots of things you don’t know about me.” You recalled the conversation the two of you had while you danced at the wedding.

“I know a little bit more about you after peeling you off the bathroom floor last weekend.” Your gaze breaks from his in embarrassment. “You know you can talk to me about missing your dad, right? I can try my best to understand even though I’m not really too good at this whole bonding thing.” He wiggles his eyebrows at you in an attempt to lighten the mood back up. “I want to be a good person for you.” You give him an appreciative glance but can’t figure out how to reply due to the raw emotion seizing your chest. “One good thing did come out of the whole ordeal though.” Shouta continued on and you focused on the deep timbre of his voice to ground yourself.

“What’s that?” It came out in a whisper.

“I don’t have to worry about you getting kidnapped because when you don’t want to move, you don’t. I had the worst time trying to get you into bed.” As you felt your face heat up, you wondered if he caught onto the double meaning as well.

“I’m sorry about all of that.”

“It’s okay, baby girl. It’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” He lifted up the corner of the throw blanket that was closest to you and motioned you over with a tilt of his head. Surely, he just saw you shivering. He had no ulterior motives. You were the only one with those.

You scooted over apprehensively against the material of the couch until your side rested gently against Shouta’s and he let the blanket float down over the two of you. “It’s cold in here, isn’t it?” You could only nod your head in agreement as the right side of your body felt like it was being engulfed in blue flames. 

Your favorite times lately were spent getting to know Shouta better. Getting to know the person he was away from the house, when he was Aizawa-sensei or Eraserhead. You were realizing that he had many different faces, but at the heart of it all, Shouta was really just a person who tried hard to do the right thing. If you were a person that tried to do the right thing like he did, you wouldn’t still be trying to ruin your mother’s marriage. If you were smart, you would have realized that your plan would hurt Shouta as well.

But you weren’t really a common sense girl. Or a nice girl. You just wanted revenge for your devastated heart.

And certainly, Shouta falling in love with you the way you were starting to fall for him wouldn’t hurt either.

He offered to take you to dinner and show you some of his patrol routes since you had been peppering your interest about his job into conversation more fervently lately. He called it important bonding. Your mother was out on work business again and you thought Shouta might have just been lonely. 

You had a fantastic time walking through the brightly lit streets with him. He was still dressed in all black and his back was hunched forward like he was unimpressed, but something told you Shouta was having a good time. Every now and then, he would point out an alleyway or a building where he apprehended a villain. It filled you with a weird sort of pride to know that he did his job so well. He seemed so fucking…morally upstanding that it made you want to scream.

“You gettin’ hungry?” His measured tone broke you out of your thoughts. You nodded up at him and hoped that the smile you gave him was pretty enough, better than your mother’s at least. “I’ll show you this cool place I eat at sometimes.” Shouta grins. You dig your fingernails into your palm.

You follow him to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. It’s run by an older couple that seem to know him well. You end up ordering the same thing he does and you watch as Shouta plays with his wedding ring absent-mindedly while he takes in his surroundings. You can’t figure out how to start a conversation. You tap the bottoms of your shoes against the linoleum floor and he looks at you like he’s about to say something but is interrupted by the little old lady bringing over your food. 

“Is this your new wife, Eraser?” The lady asks as she places his plate in front of him. Her question is innocent but you choke on your spit and watch as vermillion creeps up Shouta’s neck.

“This is my stepdaughter,” he corrects, recovering easily enough and you smile politely at the lady. She smiles back warmly, ducking her head a little bit in consolation for her mistake.

“Forgive me. She’s absolutely beautiful though.”

“Thank you, I know.” It’s your turn for blood to rush to your head. You have to tell yourself over and over again not to read anything into it as the old lady walks away. There’s a charged silence over the table as the two of you focus too hard on your food. You’re the first to break the awkward air.

“I’m thinking about moving out.” It’s abrupt and you don’t realize at first what you’ve really said. Shouta’s eyes widened.

“What do you mean?” He takes a bite of his food.

“I mean, if I keep my grades up, I can still transfer into the university I was originally supposed to go to. I’m planning on summer classes too.” You watch him chew his food as you move your own around the plate.

“I think that’s a great goal to have if you can keep your grades up. I can help you study for your exams if you’d like.” He smiles warmly at you and you feel okay again.

“I’d really like that, Shouta.” You feel the urge to stuff your mouth with food so you aren’t encumbered by the emotions that you’re feeling. Silence settles again over the table. You’re taking a sip of water as you notice his mouth open and close a few times, like he can’t figure out what it is that he wants to say.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, it’s just…adult stuff.” He fiddles with his wedding ring again.

“I’m an adult.”

“I know but I…I shouldn’t talk to you about it.” Shouta looks down at his plate. You nudge his foot with your own underneath the table.

“Come on…we’re bonding, right?” You’re being too sweet, too calculated, but you really do want to know what’s bothering him.

“Your mom is just really difficult sometimes.” He blurts out and you almost laugh out loud but keep up your supportive front for his sake.

“She can definitely be a handful. I was just lucky to have my dad around to help soften the edges for a while.” Your food stands all but forgotten now. You watch as Shouta’s fingers drum on the table just centimeters away from your own. Gently, you slide your hand closer so that your fingertips are touching but you play it off like you don’t notice.

“I think maybe I’m just not used to relationships like this one. Or maybe I just need to finish adjusting. I don’t know.”

“Do you still love my mom?” Your senses are heightened as you speak, but you’re interrupted by the old woman bringing over the bill. Shouta hands over his card and pretends like he never heard your question. He puts his card back in his wallet and slides out of the booth. You still look at him expectantly but he maintains his innocence.

“C’mon, there’s an old record store on this side of town that I want to show you.” He smiles, tight-lipped, and you scoot out of the booth. You wonder why he ignores the question. You want a solid answer why he always runs to your defense (aside from the answer you’ve deluded yourself into thinking is the truth) but you don’t think you’ll be privy to that information tonight. You follow him out onto the sidewalk. You like how you and Shouta are absorbed into the nighttime crowd like any other couple. You don’t talk to each other for fear that your conversation will be lost among the bustle of the people.

Shouta walks with purpose, but never so quickly that you can’t keep up with him. In any case, it would be hard for you to lose him due to his stature. Sometimes you forget how tall he is with the way he hunches over and the way he carries himself. You like the way the neon of the street signs illuminates the sharp edge of his nose. You find yourself staring at the wisps of long, inky hair that frame his face. He was so, so beautiful in a meek way and it’s extremely easy for you to get lost in it. It’s what leads you to almost bumping into his shoulder as he comes to a stop. A giggle, a real giggle bubbles out of his mouth and you feel the final nail being driven into your coffin. You needed him. Like air, like water. He was more necessary to you than he was to your mother. All it would take was a single move. A single move. You could persuade him easily enough that you were a better answer to his question.

“You ready to check it out?” He nods toward the door and starts to push inside without truly waiting for your answer. You try to shake off the millions of emotions that are running through your body.

Inside the record store is warm and smells like old books. You break away from Shouta for the moment and start to paw through the racks of records by yourself. You pick up some of the titles and flip them around to the back, trying to read the writing on the back. It’s hard to concentrate. Your mind keeps stagnating on Shouta’s words and his proximity to you. He’s flipping through the old records the same as you are and you wonder if he can feel your eyes flicking over to him every so often.

He holds one record in his hand but you can’t quite make out what it is. You watch as he looks through one more rack of records before going to the cashier and making his purchase. It gets slid into a brown paper bag with the name of the store stamped on the front. You make your way over to Shouta.

“I’m ready if you are,” He smiles warmly at you and you nod your head, in so very deep. You follow him back out onto the street. He turns to face you quickly. “Here. It’s something to keep you entitled to your sadness.” There’s a barely concealed twinkle in his eye. You take what he holds out with a grin. You pull the record out of the bag.

“You’re so corny.” You laugh, but are touched that he remembered that you listen to Radiohead as he places OK Computer in your hands.

“It comes with the territory.” He speaks easily but nothing gets said on the walk back home. 

Your heart is in danger of pounding out of your chest by the time that you reach the front door. You want to kiss him, to make a move so badly that it’s the only thing that you can think about. Everything that he’s done has to mean something, right? Desperately, you hoped that it did as your fingers fiddled anxiously in front of you. You follow Shouta inside and he walks you to your room like a gentleman.

“Don’t forget this.” Shouta places the record he bought for you into your hands as you moved to open the door to your bedroom. There’s harsh electricity running through your veins that’s bordering on catastrophic. You smile at him as gratefully as you can, nodding your head in thanks as you turn back towards your door. This time, you’re able to get the door completely open and take a few steps before you hear him call your name and apologize in a stage whisper. You fight the desperate feeling in your chest as you feel him tug on your arm roughly and pull you into his hard chest. OK Computer clatters to the floor. It doesn’t matter.

Calloused hands are on the side of your face and then his lips are melting against yours needily. Shouta pulls back just as quickly as he leaned forward but his palms are still on your cheeks. He’s looking at you levelly, letting you make the next decision like it’s a game of chess. Your head feels like it’s full of helium. You watch your hands move from outside of your body as they come to tangle around his neck. You make your play and kiss him back on your tiptoes. The surprise he feels is tangible. The new kiss holds the same probing energy but then expands into something wetter and needier-yet still remains sickeningly sweet. You suck his lower lip into your mouth and sigh in the back of your throat when his hands wander down the curves of your torso to your hips. Shouta breaks the kiss, a string of saliva briefly connecting you for a moment longer and he exhales hard as he lays his forehead against yours. You can’t help but get lost in his permanently bloodshot eyes.

“I-i crossed a line. I’m going to cross a line.” Despite his words, he tugs you closer to him until your bodies are flush with each other. Shame clouds his features and you can’t stand that. Not when you created the perfect storm for this to happen. You play with the shorter hairs at the base of his neck.

“You’re not alone, okay? We’ll cross the line together.” You whisper so reverently that at first you think Shouta might not have heard you, but then you hear a strangled groan come out of his mouth and he’s pushing you backwards until you’re sitting on your bed, surrounded by soft blankets and engulfed in the scent of his mellow cologne. He starts to lean over you and you crane your neck to look over his shoulder dubiously at the door that’s standing almost wide open. It’s the only thing stopping your room from being a sanctuary. He follows your line of sight and turns back around with fiery eyes as if to say, “just be quiet.” You swallow thickly and lean back on your elbows. Shouta crawls up your body, blanketing you nimbly, and then he’s kissing you breathlessly again. You do your best to keep up with him but there isn’t a sense of yours that he isn’t absolutely steamrolling right over. His overwhelmingly hot hands travel up between your soft thighs and push your skirt up around your hips. You can’t stop the pleased sound that escapes from your mouth.

“Fuck, you sound even prettier than I imagined.” He starts kissing down your jaw and sucking at your neck. You hold his head against you and bite on your tongue to stop the salacious moans that are fighting hard to make their way into the heavy air.

“You imagined me?” You whispered, shocked, into his ear. He grins up at you devilishly.

“What the hell did you think I was gonna do, baby girl?” He’s quiet, oh so quiet, but you want to scream so loud that it breaks glass. He kisses you again and you rub your thighs together. His kisses feel better than anything you’ve ever had before. You’re drunk on it. Shouta’s long index finger pulls your bottom lip down. You follow his lead and your mouth hangs open. You watch through hazy eyes as his face hovers over yours and his lips purse. A thick glob of spit falls from between his lips and lands on yours. You feel slick gathering between your legs. His spit is licked off of your lips slowly and you open your mouth again. More. You’ve never seen his eyes so dark as he repeats the action and grinds his rock-hard cock against you.

Your legs wrap around his waist and with your free hand, you guide one of his hands down between your legs. His fingers run over the cotton that covers your slit and you can feel it starting to stick to you uncomfortably. At this point, you don’t care that this is something that neither of you should be encouraging. You’ve already got the feeling that you’ve won, you’re finally getting the vengeance you seek against your mother.

Shouta starts to pull your panties down and doesn’t stop until you’re completely free of them. He kneels on the floor and pulls you closer to his face by your thighs. His fingers knead into the skin there and you can feel his breath against your wet core. An obscene moan gets lost in the air and Shouta shoots a stern glance at you. Sorry, you mouth from where you watch perched on your elbows but you don’t really mean it.

He rubs two of his fingers against your core and you keen against the touch, not expecting it to feel as good as it did. Your mouth lolls open and you try not to squirm underneath the intensity of Shouta’s gaze. He focuses against your clit, slowly rubbing circles around it. You grind your hips down into the feeling and he bites gently into the soft skin of your thighs as you fall apart too quickly on his fingers. Your arms turn to jelly and you slide down until your back is against the comforter. Eyes flutter shut as you get lost in ecstasy.

You jolt back up again when you feel Shouta’s fingers get replaced with his mouth. He laps at your wet cunt like he’s not good for anything else and you feel him pull away just long enough to let another glob of spit fall onto your already soaked entrance. Heat rises through your body when you feel him push a finger inside of you with ease because of how worked up he has you. He curls his finger and watches with a silent chuckle how you have to slap your hand over your mouth to keep your sounds inside.

“Cute,” he mumbles against your thigh and then you’re tugging at the roots of his hair, beckoning him on top of you again. You’re so blindsided by pleasure that you don’t care how you look as you paw his shirt off and rake your fingers through the dark hair on his chest. You babble mindlessly against his ear. It makes no matter to you how you sound.

You start trying to undo the button of his pants.

“So fuckin’ needy for me, huh? My needy girl.” He whispers hotly against the side of your neck and all you can do is nod your head at him and kiss him timidly. The tip of his cock rubbed through your folds and there really was no chance of ever going back. 

“Please,” the request rolls off of your tongue and knocks against Shouta’s lips. He covers your lips with his own again and slowly presses into you. You squeeze your eyes shut at the uncomfortable feeling to begin with. He’s so big and all-encompassing that it’s almost hard to breathe. Shouta pants into the saliva-soaked kiss and bites at your bottom lip as his hips rock slowly against yours. Your fingernails dig into his shoulders at the sensation and you tighten your legs around his waist. 

He grinds his hips against yours until he’s fully seated inside of you. He breaks away from the kiss momentarily to look at you, the tiny little tears pooling at the corners of your eyes from the overwhelming emotion. He runs his thumb through the tears and you bury your nose into the crook of his neck.

“Please,” you mutter again, embarrassed, into the fine sheen of sweat that coats his neck. Shouta rocks into you again and again slowly and deeply and you swear you can see galaxies forming in your field of vision. The heavy feeling of his cock inside of you is enough to have you arching your back into his chest and he fucks your harder and rougher until your grip on him is just at the point of leaving marks. You feel the muscles in your stomach turn to jelly and Shouta focuses his thrusts upward, right into your tummy. You whine against his neck. Your pussy clenches hard around him. He pulls your head away from his neck and you flop back against the mattress.

“Are you gonna cum for me?” He whispers lowly and through hazy eyes, you see a look in his eyes that you’ve seen mirrored in your own. It tips you closer to the edge. You nod your head. “Look at me, baby girl.” He requests and then he’s slapping his hand quickly over your mouth to stop you from being too loud as you reach ecstasy. You don’t know how many more times he rocks his hips into yours before he’s spilling inside of you and you can’t stop your eyes from rolling back into your head. His forehead slumps against your own and there’s a drunken grin on both of your faces as he pulls his softening cock out of you.

He maneuvers the both of you around until you’re both laying on your sides, his chest pressed against your back. You drift off to sleep with Shouta’s fingers running through your hair and feeling like you have just won a long battle.

It had been two weeks since you slept with Shouta. The next morning, in the wee hours, you had woken up in your bed alone but snuck around to give him a quick kiss before he left. He had held you by the waist and cradled your head against his when you kissed him by the front door. He had smiled at you and kissed your forehead, too.

It had been a full week since when he pushed you away in the kitchen and had hissed about how what the two of you had done was wrong. Your mother came in the kitchen while you were speechless and attempting to wipe the stricken look off of your face. You glared at Shouta from across the room while she announced a long work trip that she would be taking at the end of the week.

The night before her trip came and your mother organized an elaborate “family” dinner. You invited the boy that had left hickies on your neck over and after dinner, fucked him loud enough in your bedroom for Shouta and your mother to hear on their end of the house. Being a nuisance and vengeance were what you were good at.

The morning after, your mother left wordlessly on her week-and-a-half work trip. When you did leave your room, you and Shouta avoided each other like two black clouds caught up in a windstorm. You couldn’t focus on anything. Not homework, not shows, not the music coming through your headphones. Silently, you had resolved to curl up in a ball on your bed and let tears run from your eyes freely over the predicament you were in. At this point, even if your dad were still alive, you weren’t sure if he would have good enough advice to help you through this.

It hurt.

It hurt listening through the thin walls to Shouta cluttering around the house like nothing was wrong. It hurt how he only looked at you in passing as he put the leftovers from dinner away as you walked your hookup to the door the previous night. Didn’t he know that he was the reason you were tearing yourself apart? No, that wasn’t exactly fair. 

A violent sob leapt out of your throat and you slapped your hand over your mouth to cover up your residual noises. You were the reason things had gotten so out of hand. You were almost completely blinded by your need to ruin your mother’s relationship that you hadn’t realized that you were sliding down a slippery slope for Shouta. Maybe you were as bad as your mother thought you were.

Your head was clogging up with the frequency of your tears now and it was hard for you to breathe. You couldn’t slow your mind down enough to regulate your breathing and your breaths kept coming out in ragged little pants. You sat up in a frenzy, unable to catch your breath. The disappointed look on Shouta’s face the previous night kept flashing though your head. You were lightheaded as you stood and stumbled on wobbly knees through your bedroom door and out into the living room. Tears coated your eyelashes together but through the blurriness, you could see Shouta sitting on the couch. He sat up slowly, on guard, unsure of where the line was anymore.

“What’s wrong?” His tone was neutral and that was enough to send you into a fresh wave of sobs and panic as your nose was so stuffy now that you couldn’t get a proper breath. You wanted to yell but it came out strangled. You wiped brashly at your face with the sleeve of your shirt and started to wring your hands together anxiously.

“C’mon, what’s wrong?” Shouta had stood and was standing a polite distance away from you now. There was no arm held out to you in consolation but his voice had taken on a tone that was more suited for talking to a dying animal. You felt like one just then.

“I’m-I’m sorry,” You managed to get out through hiccups. Pitifully, you watched the way that Shouta’s shoulders slumped. Still, you sobbed as he stayed quiet. Your knees wobbled perilously and before you could unceremoniously fall to the ground, you lowered yourself to the hardwood in a heap of limbs with your face buried in your hands. For a fleeting second, you wondered if you could die from crying too hard. 

You felt a warm hand on your shoulder. Shouta’s hand. You couldn’t bring yourself to look at him.

“You’re gonna make yourself throw up if you keep crying this hard.” It was nothing but the obvious. His hand squeezed down soothingly on your skin.

“Don’t care,” You muttered stuffily against your palms and curled tighter against yourself. “‘I think I’m gonna die.” Shouta’s fingers worked their way under your chin and yanked your head up more roughly than he had intended and through your puffy eyes, you saw the face of a man wracking his brain to try and remember if there was ever a time in his thirty-odd years where he had successfully used his Erasure to stop a panic-induced crying fit.

“You’re not gonna die.” There’s an annoyed edge to his voice. It makes you cry harder. He heaves out a world-weary sigh and pulls you into his chest. You don’t want his scent to be comforting but it’s exactly what you need at that moment.

“‘m sorry. ‘m just so sorry, Shouta. I didn’t wan-wanna fuck him. Just wanted to make you mad.” Getting the words out feels like running a marathon.

“I know, baby girl. I know.” There’s a pause before he speaks and he warms a little, melting into the sad jumble of your body. You close your eyes and try to focus on that, as if there was any way to repair this.

“Do you know how miserable it is being in love with you?” You look at him with puffy eyes. If your words affect him, he gives nothing away. But your words are the truth. There was only one thing in your life that hurt more than his rejection. His arms around you tighten and then fall away. You wipe your eyes again but it still does no good.

“It doesn’t make sense for you to be in love with me.” He picks at his nails.

“I don’t care. I am.”

“I treated you badly.”

“If everyone stopped loving the people that mistreated them, then the world would be an awfully loveless place.” It’s almost comical how your voice sounds with your nose stopped up.

“That’s not a logical…that’s a childish way of looking at things.” 

“Tell me you don’t love me back.” Your fingers drum on the floor and Shouta’s eyes narrow at you.

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Why can’t you do that?”

“Because you know I fell for the wrong woman. You know I married the wrong one.” Your heart stops.

“I don’t know that,” there’s a pause. “You’re saying that you love me too.”

“I’m saying that I married your mom and fell for you and it’s the most illogical thing I’ve ever done.”

“Tell me that you love me and that I’m better than her and I’ll be okay.” You know you’re pushing him and you should just be grateful that he’s speaking to you again. He sighs deeply, guiltily.

“I love you too. More than your mother. I’ll have a talk with her when she gets back from her trip.”

You grin pitifully at him. You always, always, got what you wanted.