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young-dumb-and-vaccinated · 3 years ago

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A Deafened Bard (Stephen Strange x Female!Reader) pt. 2

Doctor Strange and y/n confide their tragic backstories in one another. Y/n struggles with her feelings for him.

Trigger warnings: abusive parenting, use of firearms, discussion of death and grief, mention of alcoholism

"On the outside, always looking in

Will I ever be more than I've always been?

Cause I'm tap, tap, tapping on the glass-"

You stopped yourself before you could indulgently belt out the titular lyric.

"Ew, why was I singing that?" You muttered to yourself. "I don't even like that song."

You knew, subconsciously, that it was because you were trying to avoid what you really wanted to sing. For the first time ever, you had an audience. Someone was paying attention.

"Love of my life, you've hurt me-"

"Oh, come on, butterfingers." He interrupted. "Love of my Life by Freddie Mercury. Give me something hard."

"I wasn't aware it was classic rock trivia night."

"Then why were you staring straight at me while singing?" He smirked.

"Was I?" You cocked your head, expertly deflecting his implication. "I'm so spaced out I don't even know where I'm looking."

"It's Freddie Mercury." He insisted.

"Uh, yes and no." You corrected, drawing on your encyclopedic knowledge of Queen from one particularly weird summer in high school. "While Freddie Mercury wrote the song, it was recorded on a Night at the Opera. Which was accredited to the whole band."

"That's a nitpick," he shook his head. "I'm still right."

You couldn't wear your heart on your sleeve anymore. You could only distract him with 70s glam rock trivia for so long before he started to notice a pattern. Although a sappy love song was in your heart, you sang the anthem of the depressed theater kid.

You were staring straight at him, though. But who wouldn't? You studied his features only for artistic inspiration. His sharp jaw and high, high cheekbones were… inspiring.

You couldn't lie to yourself. You fell and fell hard.

"Butterfingers!" Master Strange called out from the other side of the sanctum. "I need you!"

You dropped your pencil and pushed yourself out from the chair. "Coming!"

You followed the voice into his chambers. This was a new development, you thought. Out of respect for his privacy, you'd never dared to snoop around in his bedroom. But this was practically a written invitation.

The room was spotless. Not a book or a scrap of paper out of place. Nor was there much to look at at all. A handful of picture frames, some magazines from when he was a surgeon, all featuring himself on the cover.

"Butterfingers!" He called again, as if he knew you were about to snoop.

"I'm here!" You yelled back, eyes wandering around the room. "What do you need?"

"I left my watch somewhere in the library!" He sounded disproportionately panicked for what was just a minor inconvenience. "I need you to go get it for me."

"What does it look like?" You asked.

"It's a $27,000 watch." He snapped impatiently. "It looks like one."

"Jesus." You cursed.

"Don't give me that shit, [F/N]." He ordered, slamming his fist down against the sink. "Just do what you're goddamn told."

"Alright, alright!" You put your hands up. "Fine, I'll get it."

You hurried down the stairs and into the library. On the floor between his favorite chair and a stack of musty old books was a slim, silvery watch with a plain black band.

You picked it up and examined it. Apart from the price tag, was there really any reason for him to be so worried about it? He knew exactly where he left it. Did he have reason to believe it wouldn't be there when he returned?

All you needed to do was flip it over to get your answer. You read the inscription on the back.

Time will tell how much I love you -- Christine

You should have known that his massive ego wouldn’t keep the women away forever. Hell, it certainly didn’t deter you. Much uglier douchebags have gotten far prettier girlfriends than they deserved.

You closed your fingers around the watch and sighed. The fantasy you created for yourself, of slowly, deliberately earning his love was shattered. Christine already beat you to it, it seemed. You tried to smother the part of you that resented this person for her exclusive right to Master Strange's affections. You didn't know her, but you loathed her. And you felt filthy for it.

With a heavy heart, you brought the stupid, criminally expensive little timepiece back to its rightful owner.

"Here's your all-important watch, master." You mumbled, placing it on the bedside table.

"I know I told you I would give you space to question things," He said, swiping it from the table and expertly affixing it around his wrist. "But I'd really appreciate it if you didn't question this."

You tried to sound as non-passive-aggressive as you could. You attempted a more forgiving tone, but you couldn't hide your hurt. "It's fine. I don't care."

"I didn't mean to get short with you, [F/N]." His voice softened. "I'm sorry. But this watch-"

"It's fine." You cut him off, peering at the floor.

"It was a gift." He finished anyway.

You felt the lump in your throat rising. You knew what the watch represented and you wanted to smash it to pieces. Along with the sting of rejection, you felt the sting of tears in your eyes. "I know. I saw the engraving."

"She died two years ago." He lowered his head.

Suddenly, all your ill will towards this woman turned into guilt.

"I'm sorry to hear that." You said. "I can't imagine what it's like to lose someone who loved you so much."

"She had agreed to come to a speaking engagement with me. As a second chance, and-" Pain wrapped his voice. He closed his hand tightly around the watch and held it close to his chest. "Have you ever been in love before, [F/N]?"

From the way your heart ached, and how easily the thought of never being with him made you cry, you knew the answer. You'd been avoiding speaking it into being thus far, but you couldn't lie to yourself anymore.

"Yes." You whispered.

"You'll learn soon enough." He muttered. "It only brings more suffering."

The tears finally breached and you tried to blink them away. You didn't know what emotion was causing them: guilt, shame, contempt, anger, sadness-- they were all present.

"Master Strange, I-" you stuttered, tripping over your breath. "I respect what you've gone through, I really do, but it's not fair to take it out on me."

"You're right." He conceded. "I'm sorry. Please, go get some sleep.”

You nodded. “Right.”

You slept as late as you could get away with the next morning. In apprentice terms, that only meant sleeping until eight thirty. Your dailies could wait an extra hour while you laid in bed, feeling like garbage.

You stumbled down the spiral staircase in your pajamas. No bra, no makeup and no effort. You didn’t even run a brush through your hair. Why try, you thought. Why make an effort for the man who would never see you as anything but the help?

When you saw the piano, though, you did a full 180.

In the living area was a French cherry baby grand piano that definitely was not there before. You certainly would have noticed it before. You placed your phone on the counter and approached the new addition.

As if the memories were woven into the very muscles and ligaments of your fingers, you ran down a few octaves of C Major. The keys were smooth as porcelain and the sound that emanated from the instrument was next to heavenly.

A bright orange post-it note was stuck to the music rack.

“Love of my Life”, Queen, A Night at the Opera. 1975

Was this a request, or an admission of wrong? Whatever the case, it made you smile.

"You weren't being entirely honest with me, Butterfingers." He said, randomly materializing behind you.

You turned around on the piano bench and looked up at him. "What was I not honest about?"

"I'm so glad you asked." He sat down on the bench next to you, phone in hand. "Because when you said you used to play piano, you didn't specify you were actually a student prodigy."

Sure enough, on his phone, he was scrolling through your Instagram. Dozens of videos of a much younger [F/N] playing hundreds of different songs, singing with too many vocal runs and doing so with the entire content of her soul behind the music.

"Student prodigy is a bit strong." You turned your head to hide your blush.

He scrolled up and found a picture of a young, zit-faced teenage [F/N] holding an acceptance letter. "Last I checked, Juilliard doesn't give full-ride scholarships to just anyone."

You covered your face with your hands, smothering an embarrassed smile. "God, please. I'd rather you'd found my OnlyFans."

He raised his eyebrows. "As tempting as that sounds, I'd still rather hear your explanation on this. Why did you give up on something you loved?"

You looked at him in surprise. "You really want to know?"

"Well, I told you mine." He playfully nudged you in the side.

You took a deep breath in. "Well, it was about two years ago, now-”

"Cheers to you, [F/N]!" Your best friend Holly raised her glass of champagne in your direction. "Juilliard ain't gonna know what hit ‘em."

"I'll drink to that." You said, bring your own flute up to your lips and taking a swig. You wretched in disgust as the vile liquid ran down your throat. "Or maybe I won't."

"You're gonna have to get used to it." Holly nudged you with her elbow. "I think most professional musicians are alcoholics."

You narrowed your eyes at her. "I don't think that's right."

"Is too." She smirked. "Conductors are mad strict. Abusive even. Drive musicians to drink all the time."

You laughed. "Is everything you know about the world of music from Whiplash?"

"And The Perfection." She added.

"Thank you, Holly." You said, attempting to take another sip of champagne, purely for dramatic effect. "Very cool."

You felt a pair of hands on your shoulders. "Hi, Holly. Enjoying the party?"

Holly took a step back. "Hey, Mrs. [L/N]. Yeah, it's great."

"I hope you don't mind," Your mom said, her fake nice voice eeking through her clenched teeth. "I need to borrow [F/N] for a few minutes."

Holly's face fell. "Sure. I'll catch up with you later, [F/N]."

Your mother tugged you off to the side. With a stressed huff, she began. "Jason is out in the fields with his ROTC friends."

"And what do you want me to do about that?" You asked, knowing her drunk self couldn't read your sarcastic tone.

"Could you go get him and bring him home?" She said, squeezing your upper arm.

"Are you kidding?" You spat.

"[F/N], he's drunk." She scolded. "Do you want him to get another strike on his record?"

"I don't care." You mumbled under your breath. "Have him call an uber. Hell, let him sleep it off in the field. Not my problem."

"You know what he's like when he's drunk." She rationalized. "He gets rowdy. It had better be you."

You tensed up. "No. Holly and I are going to the French Quarter. I don't have time to babysit Jason."

"Just pick him up on your way there?" She pleaded. "It won't take long."

You knew this wasn't going to stop. "Fine, but this is the last time."

You were both dressed far too well to be trekking through the swampy ass nowhere when you should have been fucking your way through the French Quarter. Luckily for your evening plans, all you needed to do was follow the sound of gunshots.

You slammed the car door shut and Holly followed suit. Finding him was the easy part. The hard part was hauling his drunk ass back home.

"Fun's over, shithead." You announced, heels sinking into the sod as you spoke. You didn't have much trouble projecting over the gunfire and getting their attention.

"Shit, [F/N]?" Jason sputtered, so drunk he could barely keep his head straight.

"Holy shit, I didn't even recognize you in that dress." One of his dumb fuck friends added. He jabbed Jason in the side. "Why didn't you tell me your sister's hot?"

"Buster, I-'' You clenched your teeth. "I don't care if you live or die, but my mom needs me to bring Jason home."

"If you get in the car now, we won't have to use the chloroform." Holly added.

Jason scratched the back of his head with the barrel of his gun, then pointed it at you. "You're gonna have to make me."

"Jesus fucking Christ!" You exclaimed, hitting the deck. "What the fuck, Jason!?"

Jason and his dumbass friends laughed. "You should have seen the look on your face, [F/N]!"

"Put down the fucking gun-" You seethed. "And get in the fucking car."

He lowered the gun and looked like he was going to concede. Just when you thought he would cooperate, he stuck it up again. He keeled over in a fit of laughter when you and Holly panicked again.

"Look at them!" He shouted. "They're so fucking scared!"

You knew out in the middle of the swamp, nobody could hear you scream. So you used it to your advantage.

"Jason, you're going in the car, or under it." You raised your voice. "I will mow your drunk ass down like eight day old roadkill right here in this field and you will be LUCKY if anyone finds your bloated, shit-covered remains before the crocodiles get a whiff of you."

That seemed to get his attention.

"Sorry, boys." He pouted. "You heard her."

He had to 'get you' one final time, though. Only that time, the gun went off. Just centimeters from your ear. You clutched the side of your head, trying to drown out the deafening ringing with your screams.

You vaguely remembered Holly pistol-whipping Jason before loading you into the car to drive you to the hospital, leaving him desolate and drunk in the field.

"It was a one-in-a-million shot." The otolaryngologist tried not to sound impressed at what was clearly some kind of anomaly very few got to witness in a medical career. "When the bullet fired, the gunpowder traveled down your ear canal, burning the cells of your auditory nervous system and... singing your eardrum... clean off."

Your eyes widened. "Off?!"

The doctor lowered her head. "I'm sorry, Miss [L/N]. I'm afraid you'll never return to full hearing again."

You didn't want to kill the messenger. You knew she was only doing her job. "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

"If we could do a tympanoplasty, which, given the condition of the drum, is unlikely-" she began. "There would still be no way to fully repair the hair cells along the ear canal."

You took deep breaths to try and quell your simmering rage. "I'm leaving for Juilliard in three months."

"Hearing aid technology has improved significantly over the last decade." She said, a somewhat hopeful upturn in her voice.

That was when your mother decided to join in on the conversation. "Oh, we can't afford that."

You thought you were going to crush your teeth into bits from how tightly your jaw was clenched in fury. "Take it out of Jason's college fund, then."

"Oh, [F/N]." She said as if you had just told the funniest joke imaginable. "Please. That wouldn't be fair to Jason."

"You can afford to send that blithering idiot to the Citadel." You hissed. "You can afford to buy me a hearing aid so I can play piano."

"Beethoven was entirely deaf." Your mom pointed out. "And he became the greatest composer of all time. It's really just mind over matter, sweetie-"

"Sure, that makes perfect sense!" You plastered on a deranged smile, feeling driven to the brink of madness. "I can repair my destroyed eardrum with the power of positive thinking! Jason gets thirty-five thousand dollars a year to play soldier, but I have to just use my imagination."

She covered her face with her hands as if she was being attacked and went into kicked-puppy mode. "Don't be mad at Jason, [F/N]. He didn't mean to hurt you-"

"Fuck this." You said, releasing all your tension in those two words. "Fuck all of this. I'm tired of you defending that chauvinist asshole. The next time you see me will be when one of us is dead."

"Where are you going?!" She wailed.

You snatched your purse from the table and threw it over your shoulder. "I'm moving out."

“Disgraced at age nineteen?" Master Strange said, leaning back on the piano. "Let me guess, you turned to alcohol to cope?"

"You'd think, but actually no." You shook your head. The tone of the conversation had taken a sharp left turn from sadness to dry, apathetic amusement. "I probably would have if I could have afforded it."

"You missed out." He said. "Drinking a whole bottle of eighty year old scotch was definitely the highlight of my grieving period."

You'd never joined the clauses 'Master Strange' and 'drunk off his ass' in the same sentence before then. It was an odd mental picture for sure. One you needed to see to believe.

"I got desperate." You admitted. "Luckily, New Orleans had a lot to offer someone like me, so I didn't have to go far to find people claiming to have answers. But it was all essential oils, incense, binaural beats-"

"I'm sorry," he cut in. "What kind of dickhead suggests binaural beats to someone with only one functioning ear?"

You threw up your hands. "Right? Doesn't make sense. Anyway, I came across a woman named Mistress Fantina and she pointed me in the right direction. How to heal my body through control of my spirit."

He looked at you with that fascination of the human body characteristic of those in the medical field. "It worked, I assume?"

"I figured it out." You shrugged. "But I got so invested in the Mystic Arts that I forgot all about Juilliard. Became a full-time student. Ever since, I never once thought about returning to my old life."

"I suppose if I'd discovered this world because I had lost, say, my ability to perform surgery, it would be hard to leave it behind and return to the operating room." He thought out loud. Sighing, he closed his hand over his watch. "But no matter how medical science evolves, you can't reverse death."

You let the quiet linger for a moment.

#doctor strange #doctor strange x you #doctor strange x reader #stephen strange x reader #doctor stephen strange #stephen strange #dr stephen strange #stephen strange x you #what if #what if marvel #doctor strange supreme #tw guns #tw abusive parent

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ashintheairlikesnow · 3 years ago

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Misread Details: Robert

CW: Dehumanizing language, BBU blanket warning, serial killer/death talk, descriptions of death/abduction/murder, blood, whumper death, some real vague implied noncon references, creepy whumper, sadistic whumper

Part One: Nanda | Part Two: Brute | Part Three: Robert

The Dark Discovery in Robert Weber’s Basement: Box Boy Killer, Part 3

r/LetsTalkTrueCrime

•Posted by u/oshaycanyousee

3 days ago

After Part One, where we learned about the mysterious, but possibly entirely natural, death of Nathaniel “Nanda” Benson, and Part Two, where we saw Henry “Brute” Hanlon’s double life lead to his untimely gruesome murder, you see the single thread that connects these two men who otherwise never met, interacted, or even shared a single person in common… a nameless Box Boy, present at the death of Nanda even if he isn’t responsible for it, and the proven killer of Brute.

It’s my theory that this Box Boy may have accidentally killed his legal owner, Nanda, and then picked up a taste for the act and moved on to taking shelter with those he turns into his victims.

With Brute, he simply didn’t know the man had a wife and children and entire other life, and may have assumed no one would come looking for him or recognize his death. With our third individual, Robert Weber, it seems like our Box Boy Serial Killer got in over his head.

I give you… the Accidental Vigilante death of Robert Weber.

You decide if our unknown killer is simply the unluckiest guy in the world or a killer who even now may be somewhere living with - and earning the trust of - his next victim.

One bright and sunny day in the quaint, old-fashioned California town of Rancher’s Rest, Robert Weber was late for work.

Weber worked in a vehicle repair business owned by lifelong “RR” resident Randy Niles, who had known Weber since his childhood and had been his boss since Weber was eighteen years old and fresh out of high school.

Niles, who is now nearly seventy-five and still spends his days in the shop with an Australian Shepherd named Cody and a blind pit bull named Sue keeping him company everywhere he goes, stated that Weber had no living family he knew of beyond his sister in Vermont, and he was just about the closest thing Weber had to a relative just from having known him so long.

“He didn’t have too much to do with his sister,” Randy said in an interview with Unsolved Mysteries. (You can see the interview on the new Netflix reboot of the show! It’s a really good episode, definitely recommend. It’s how I got into this case in the first place.) “Or nobody, really. Just us at work, the guys at the bar, that kinda thing. He was quiet, kept to himself really. You’d never just strike up a chat around town or anything. But he got on just fine with the boys here in the shop. He was a bit of an egghead, too, always going on about this thing or that he’d seen on the news. Little… odd. Little bit off, you might say. But really, who isn’t? In any case, you know, I’d known him since he was a little boy, so he was just Bobby Weber to me.”

Then, of course, one day Robert Weber didn’t show up to work. Randy Niles immediately felt that something was very wrong.

“When nine, nine-thirty came and went and he wasn’t there,” Niles said, “I knew someone needed to go check on him. Bobby showed up for work right on time or ten minutes early, rain or shine, for twenty years. My first thought was maybe he’d had an accident at home, or some kind of, you know, health thing. Almost never called in sick, took one vacation a year, that kinda thing. So I drove right on over there. This would’ve been, oh, probably ten or ten-fifteen when I got to the house. Had my dogs with me, and they never did like Bobby much, but as soon as I opened my door and got out of my truck they just lost their damn minds. Barking, growling, Cody’s hackles were up like you wouldn’t believe. I know it sounds damn crazy, but I’m sure those dogs could smell that evil had been done in that house.”

On camera, Niles goes quiet, here, his gaze slipping away from the interviewer as he scratches at the side of his nose. When he looks back, the hint of good humor that seems to be an eternal part of his expression is gone.

“I didn’t know what Bobby had been up to all this time. None of us knew. I’ve known Bobby Weber his whole life, and I… I had no idea.”

Randy Niles was unable to convince his two dogs to exit the truck, and eventually rolled down the windows to give them some air and a way out if they chose (he is insistent on this point in the Unsolved Mysteries episode - “don’t you dare say I left my dogs locked up in a truck on a sunny day, I sure didn’t - Cody even knows how to pull a door handle if it’s the right kind”) and got out to knock on Robert Weber’s front door.

No one answered.

Niles knocked again. Still no response.

The front door was locked, but Niles was able to locate an unlocked back door into the garage, where he found Weber’s car neatly parked and nothing out of place. However, once he used an interior door in the garage to enter Weber’s home, what he found was so shocking he still struggles to describe it today.

“The, uh. The first thing I saw,” Niles says in the Unsolved Mysteries episode, wiping at his mouth with a handkerchief, “was a cage. Big old cage in the living room. Like a kennel for a big dog, Great Dane or something, except… except, you know, kennels’re usually mostly wire, not that heavy. You can fold ‘em up, put ‘em away. This was… geez. This was pure metal. Bunch of blankets all piled at the bottom, too. Here’s the-... you know, my mind just didn’t want to even make the thought, but I just, I looked at it and-”

In the episode, Niles has to take another moment, here. His eyes grow wet, and his voice is hoarse when he speaks again. “People cage. Bobby had a damn man-sized cage in his living room. That’s when my stomach just fell out. Even then, though, I couldn’t-... I just thought, oh, well, what people get up to in their own homes is their business. But still, I just. I just decided, find Bobby, figure the rest out later. So I kept walking around looking for him.”

Randy Niles continued to call out, hoping to hear Weber’s response, but received none… at first. The radio in the kitchen was playing a local public radio station (“Bobby always hated the country western and classic rock we played at work, he was a big news man, big into classical, jazz, you know.”)

Niles noticed, he says, that the cage next to the couch had a wooden top, as though it were meant to act as a side table, and on that table was a small woven basket. Inside the basket appeared to be several State IDs and Driver’s licenses. Niles took note of this but his first assumption was maybe that Robert Weber had stolen some IDs or something.

Which was technically true, just… not quite the way he thought.

The kitchen, hallway, and all three bedrooms were equally empty of life. Every room was clean, everything neatly in place. Empty bottles of Jameson whiskey, Weber’s favorite brand, were lined up like décor along the mantel, and one half-full bottle was next to two clean, empty glasses on the kitchen table.

Even the beds were perfectly made.

The only thing missing was any sign of Robert Weber himself.

The question of Weber’s whereabouts was answered when Randy Niles heard a sound coming from the open door to Weber’s unfinished dirt basement.

“Like a ghost,” Niles said in his interview. “Just this low moaning sound. Hardly even thought of it as human, you know. But I just-... I called out, ‘Bobby? That you?’ and the moaning got a little louder, like whoever it was was tryin’ to answer. I could still hear my girls in the truck just going nuts, probably worried about me knowing what they maybe could smell even out there. I figured… I figured I’d best call the cops and get them out here. Seemed like a plan. So I picked up my phone and dialed, and then I headed down those basement steps.”

What Randy Niles discovered in Robert Weber’s basement was a dying man, battered and stabbed eight times, lying in a half-dug grave.

Robert Weber had been beaten with the very shovel that had done the digging. The shovel lay off to the side, caked in dirt and blood. Police would find some of Robert Weber’s hair on it, too. Then, the individual who had beaten him had gone back upstairs - blood smears were found on the railing to the stairs - and taken a kitchen knife out of the knife block on the countertop. A bloody fingerprint was found on the side of the knife block. They had then returned to the basement where Weber was stabbed, almost entirely through the stomach and chest, twenty-six times, until the cheap knife simply broke from the force.

Randy Niles admitted in his interview that he became very ill at this time. “From the shock,” He elaborated. “I haven’t been able to smell much since I was in a car wreck when I was young, so I didn’t smell what-... what my girls prob’ly smelled from outside, and what the cops smelled. To me, it was just… just a little off, is all. It was the sight of it that got to me, not the smell. The sight of the-... the hand.”

Behind Robert Weber’s body, the hand of another person was sticking up out of the loose dirt, as though someone was trying to dig their way out.

“I remember… I remember her nail polish was pink. That’s when I got sick, actually, was when I saw that hand with the painted nails. That’s when it just hit me all at once what Bobby had done.”

Randy Niles went back up the stairs and waited for the cops to arrive. Rancher’s Rest is a small town where everybody knows just about everybody else, and Niles was on a first-name basis with every single police officer he spoke to that day and in the days after. He would learn alongside the investigation that Robert Weber was not simply the quiet, intellectual car mechanic he had always seemed.

Instead, Robert Weber was a serial killer whose potential final victim had managed a miraculous, deadly escape.

Robert Weber never answered a single question about his own murder - he never fully regained consciousness and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. His injuries were simply too severe. His autopsy showed that the cause of death was a stab wound that went deep into his chest and that he was first stabbed only after the beating with the shovel had taken place. Like Brute, most of his stab wounds were applied post-mortem in a rage rather than as part of the killing itself.

Medical examiners also found scratches on Weber’s face and arms, indicating that he had attempted to defend himself - or someone else had attempted to defend themself from him.

So why was Robert Weber killed, and why was there already a body in his basement? Investigators would piece together the story over the following days and weeks from a crime scene that only seemed to become darker and more baffling as time went on.

Excavating the basement was originally thought to be something that would be brief, but after the first body was removed, another one was found beneath it. Then another off to the side of that. And another, although this was simply bones.

Every time the forensics team thought they’d found the last human bone, they dug a little deeper or in a new spot and found more.

Eventually, the remains of twenty-two individuals would be removed from the basement of Robert Weber’s home, not including Weber himself. The oldest located victim was identified as Melinda Traxson, an Iowa woman reported missing by her family after she ran away in March of 1996… more than two decades before Robert Weber didn’t come to work one day.

Investigators are still working to match up every body with a missing persons’ case. For nearly all of them, the cause of death could not be easily ascertained due to the deterioration of the remains, but some showed signs of skull fractures. Identified individuals so far include:

Melinda Traxson, 19, from Iowa, ran away from home in 1996.

Billie Mortimer, 21, disappeared from a day out with friends at Lake Tahoe one year later in the summer of 1997. Her friends went to get lunch from the car after a swim and when they returned, she was gone.

Matthew Ranger, 22, went missing during a road trip to Yellowstone National Park in 1997 (only five months after Billie). His car was found abandoned by the side of the road with a flat tire.

Karl Janssen, 24, a tourist from the Netherlands who was also visiting Yellowstone, disappeared a month after Matthew. Last seen by an employee of the park who witnessed him speaking with another young man and getting into the man’s car. The employee said that the two seemed to be friendly with one another and did not seem like strangers.

Hannah Pointer, 26. She was reported missing in 1999 by her mother after failing to return home from work in Reno, Nevada. This disappearance occurred more than a year after Karl Janssen’s. Investigators would later discover that during this time period, Robert Weber dated a young woman from his hometown and he may not have wanted to risk her finding out what he was doing.

Isaac Jackson, 26, a Rancher’s Rest resident who disappeared after going out to a local bar to see his friend’s band play in 2000. His car was found submerged in a small pond two years later. This is the first time Weber apparently killed anyone close to home. He was actually briefly suspected in Jackson’s death, as he was the last person noted to see Jackson alive, but was cleared of suspicion at the time.

Dustin Swill, 21, who was driving from Colorado to California to visit his sister who had moved to Berras to work for WRU in 2001. He was last seen in a gas station near Yellowstone, where employees noted he spoke to a man who was smoking outside, who gave him a cigarette. When Swill left, employees saw the man put out his cigarette and leave shortly after. They did not find this unusual or noteworthy at the time.

Maria Vargas, 25, a Rancher’s Rest resident who was reported missing in 2002. Her family is intensely private and have shared few details about her, but it is known that her boyfriend at the time suspected Weber, who had attempted to convince her to leave the boyfriend for him and had apparently threatened her. He remained a suspect but there was never enough evidence to charge him.

Jennifer Striker, 28, from who never arrived for an appointment with a realtor in 2011. The long pause between Maria Vargas’s murder and Jennifer’s appeared to be due to Weber keeping a man named Finn Schneider within his home for more than a year after abducting him, as well as Weber serving five years in prison for a violent assault on a man he believed had sold him a defective vehicle. (Schneider was no longer in the home before the assault and prison time.)

Riley Nievelt, 25, was staying at the Big Meadow Campground with six friends during a weeklong vacation in 2012. She vanished while on a trip to purchase supplies. Her cell phone was found on the ground in the parking lot of the Food Lion in Rancher’s Rest, a short and easy drive away. At this time, with multiple individuals vanishing after being seen in Rancher’s Rest or being residents of the town, police begin to suspect and start hunting for a possible serial killer.

Alexander Peterson, 29, was a long-haul driver who vanished while working. He was last seen at a rest stop in 2014 on the California/Nevada state line, and would likely have passed right through Rancher’s Rest on his journey. He was reported missing by his ex-wife in South Dakota when he did not return as scheduled for a custodial visit.

The most recent victim, and owner of the hand that Randy Niles saw sticking up out of the dirt, was Yolanda Pierce, 26. She was a Rancher’s Rest resident with a troubled relationship with her husband, who had stormed out after an argument and was never seen again. She is believed to have died the same day as Robert Weber.

More remains exist but have not yet been identified. If you or anyone you know has a friend or family member who went missing during this time period in or near Rancher’s Rest, Yellowstone National Park, or Death Valley, it may be worth looking into, as those appear to be Robert Weber’s “hunting grounds”.

Disappearances in Yellowstone and Death Valley almost always matched up with Robert taking one of his rare weeklong vacations from work.

When investigators located three large diaries hidden inside a locked box in Weber’s closet, the first two fully filled up and the third nearly two-thirds finished, they found an exhaustively detailed record of Robert Weber’s crimes.

In these records, they discovered Weber’s first three victims were killed within 24 hours of abduction, with the rest being kept alive for longer and longer time periods. It is believed all of them met their end in Robert Weber’s basement.

Diary entries included records of two victims who were not a part of the bodies buried in Weber’s basement, both of whom may still be alive:

Finn Schneider, 19, a German tourist who disappeared in 2003 during a visit to Death Valley. Until Weber’s journals were found, it was believed he had perished in the park and had simply never been found. Robert Weber also visited Death Valley during this time. No one linked the two together. Evidence found in Weber’s home after his death, including the aforementioned diary entries and photographs, shows that Schneider was alive in Weber’s home for nearly sixteen months. It is believed Weber purchased the “human cage” that Randy Niles noticed around this time. The last diary entry that mentions Schneider states that he was “traded” on June 16th, 2005, to an individual only referred to as “Mouse.” What Weber received in exchange is unclear, but he was seen driving a new, custom-painted truck around this time, which he said he bought “from a personal ad” when asked by Niles about it. Schneider has never been found. However, his mother did receive a phone call in 2013 from an individual she believes to be her son, telling her that “Finn” was okay and to stop looking for him.

Our Box Boy, 334235, purchased by Nathaniel Benson years prior, whose whereabouts had been unknown since he murdered Brute Hanlon. Weber believed the Box Boy to be in his early twenties, according to his diary entries, and mentioned that he had picked the Boxie up hitchhiking and had intended to kill him before seeing the barcode on the inside of his left wrist and changing his mind. His diary suggests the Box Boy remained in his possession for roughly a fourteen months prior to Weber’s murder. Police have not released the details of what the Boxie was subjected to during this time, stating only that it is not the public’s interest for this information to be known, and they would like to locate the missing Boxie and interview him about certain details.

Four murders occurred during the time the Boxie was kept by Robert Weber. Weber noted that “the dog helped” with either murder or burial, suggesting that he may have worked as Weber’s accomplice in his terrible crimes.

Is it possible that they bonded over a shared urge to kill? Did the Boxie start a captive and become a companion?

Weber’s diary contained other disturbing facts, as well:

Weber also noted three failed abduction attempts in detail, in 1998, 2004, and 2017. In each he described with incredible precision of memory the appearances and descriptions of each person he failed to capture. He also appeared to do intensive research using their license plates and other information to find out where they lived and who they were. The names of these individuals have been kept quiet for privacy reasons.

Other failed abductions were noted, about one per year, without much detail. Or at least not enough for police officers to know who they were. Nearly all these failures were in one of three locations: Yellowstone National Park, Stanislaus National Forest and nearby campgrounds, and in or near Death Valley.

The last entry in Robert Weber’s diary was penned the day of his death.

NOTE: Weber referred to the Boxie as “the dog” in nearly all his journal entries. His last entry went:

May 6th, 20XX: The dog is pissed about something again. He’s always pissed about something. I think the thing in the basement probably kept him up all night with her caterwauling. He never gets used to the noises they make. God knows I can’t sleep either, at least not well. I’ll handle her tonight, have a drink with the dog after, see if that shuts up his nonsense for a while. Note: missed NPR interview with Senator Carlotta Grant on new leg. about the bb prohibition act. Find that on website later.

Found in Weber’s home, in boxes under his bed, were a series of restraints made of leather, high-quality items that appear to be custom-ordered to specific measurements. These included “gloves” intended to keep someone from being able to claw or scratch in their own defense, five sets of cuffs, a body harness, a leather half-face-mask that police referred to as a “muzzle”, several gags, some of which were deemed to be “designed to cause injury to the inside of the mouth”, and “other assorted items for use in torture and torment”.

You can find some leaked police docs online that go into more detail, but suffice to say they pretty much match the kinds of “toys” found in Nathaniel Benson and Brute Hanlon’s homes, too. And apparently, if you really know where to look, you can find some blurry low-quality photos Weber took, too.

While the items are a bit salacious, they aren’t entirely uncommon in consensual relationships, too, so it’s really not clear if they’re evidence of the Boxie being held against his will or not.

The investigation of the crime scene suggests that at some point after writing his final diary entry, Robert Weber made himself a pizza, which he ate half of and put the rest away in the fridge. His shaving cream and razor were found out on his sink, and Weber’s body was clean-shaven, suggesting he shaved shortly before his death.

He then watched three episodes of Law & Order: SVU. We know this because he texted during this time with his only living relative, the sister in Vermont. Little is known about Weber’s family and childhood, beyond his sister’s recounting of a quiet, strained home life with an overbearing mother and her mention that Robert endured several head injuries as a child and adolescent, including one that hospitalized him for days.

After he finished watching TV, Weber entered the basement and murdered Yolanda Pierce. It is believed he took the Box Boy downstairs with him, either as accomplice or witness. At some point while he was disposing of Yolanda Pierce’s remains, the Boxie became enraged for one reason or another, beat him with a shovel, got the kitchen knife from upstairs and stabbed him to death, and then left the house.

A neighbor remembers hearing odd noises around 3:30 AM and looking out their window to see a shadowy figure walking quickly down the road, but they weren’t able to see well enough to say whether or not the individual matches the description and WRU-provided photos of the Boxie. It does seem reasonable, though, to assume that the neighbor witnessed the Boxie fleeing the scene of the crime.

The Box Boy has never been seen again.

Police are pretty mum about the active investigation into the Box Boy’s whereabouts. I was able to get ahold of one source closely related to a member of the investigative team who said that there’s just not a lot of urgency. “Weber killed nearly two dozen people, just that we know of,” The source said. “The cops are a little bit ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’ about the situation. Unless the Boxie comes back to RR, they’re just inclined to let sleeping dogs lie.”

The sense of “let it be someone else’s problem” would be understandable… if this Box Boy weren’t responsible for one other direct murder, possibly two.

Police believe the Boxie has not left California, and is likely to be continuing to survive by engaging in prostitution or perhaps panhandling or some other hidden way of making money. Unconfirmed sightings have been located in three cities in central California, but all of these are unverified and should be taken with a grain of salt.

It’s also possible he hooked up with a pet liberation movement group, in which case he may be hiding out in a safehouse, protected from the consequences of his actions by the pet lib movement’s understandable insistence on total secrecy and anonymity for the Boxies they take in.

If he’s an innocent victim of circumstance, that’s fair.

If he’s a burgeoning serial killer with three victims under his belt and a taste for inflicting terrible violence on those who take him in… well… anyone who gives him shelter may be next.

Is our Boxie a purposeful killer or just supremely, almost incomprehensibly unlucky? Will he kill again? Was he Robert Weber’s accomplice or his victim?

Will he strike again?

Should there be an audit of WRU’s psychological testing on potential sign-ups to see if, perhaps, a Box Boy-wannabe with an urge to kill slipped through the cracks?

What do you think?

@astrobly @finder-of-rings @burtlederp @whump-tr0pes @raigash @eatyourdamnpears @orchidscript @doveotions @pretty-face-breaker @boxboysandotherwhump @outofangband @whumptywhumpdump @whumpfigure @thehopelessopus @downriver914 @justabitofwhump @butwhatifyouwrite @newandfiguringitout @yet-another-heathen @nonsensical-whump @oops-its-whump @endless-whump @cubeswhump @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @whumpiary

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parvulous-writings · 3 years ago

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Illness is a Consequence // McCree x F!Reader

Request: Super new and ive read alot of your fics and your writings are so well written. This is my first req for Overwatch and I dunno if you done this yet but. Reader x A sick Mccree perhaps? Like he comes home after a long day and he starts to almost faint by the doorway what would the reader do? I just imagine her being caring, putting him under the blankets and just spoils him haha. She/her afab btw. No rush take your time 👉👈💖

Requested by: @fragolaaaaaaa

Summary: The request!

Warnings: illness (It’s very generic though)

Words: 1.4K

Notes: Can I just say 🥺. This is an amazing request, I loved receiving it! It also fills me with joy to hear you’ve been reading a lot of my fics! I hope this lives up to your expectations! My requests are currently open! My pinned post (found here) contains both a list of characters I write for, and a masterlist!

Not my gif

You had been in the Overwatch complex in some sense alone for the past three days. Of course you weren’t really alone, you had many other members of the entire force also in the building with you, but the man you had the closest connection with wasn’t there. He was off on a mission- assigned to him and a few other select members of the force. Unfortunately you were not one included on that list. So, all you could do was wait for your beloved to return to you, hopefully unscathed. You were currently walking back from the canteen, a few brownies in one hand. You didn’t know what they put in those brownies, but damn were they good. You turned down several corridors, chowing down on your little evening snack, heading towards the quarters that you and Jesse were recently given to share.

It looked mostly like every other sleeping quarters in the complex- shared or otherwise- with monotonous grey walls and grey floors, though the pair of you were lucky enough to have a window that looked out over the training grounds of the complex. The room was also filled with stray belongings of yours and Jesse’s, some of you shoes, a couple of stray ponchos. It wasn’t messy, but at the same time it could be cleaner. Regardless of that, you still thought it was one of the most homely places you could be. You grabbed one of the discarded ponchos, not caring for it’s cleanliness, wrapping it around your shoulders to relax yourself, and to remind yourself of McCree’s embrace. It still smelt like him- slightly of cigar smoke, the whiskey that he always seemed to like and bang on about, and something woodier, which you assumed was the cologne he often wore.

You were quite peaceful sitting there on the bed, your eyes wandering aimlessly over the buildings in the distance. You had just finished your brownies- unfortunately- and were starting to settle down to catch some rest, when you heard the door to your quarters slide open. You sat up again, looking curiously over to the source of the noise, to spot Jesse himself, the man you had missed the whole time of your separation, standing there and resting on the doorframe. He looked up from under the brim of his hat, his eyes coming to rest on you as he gave you a tired smile, so you assumed his assignment had worn him out. “Hey, sugar.” He greeted, and though there was tiredness in his voice, there was something else there too, something that didn’t quite sound right. He seemed to notice your look of concern, and tried to silently wave it away, though when you didn’t look convinced he spoke. “I’m fine, pumpkin, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” He tried to assure you as he stepped inside.

His legs seemed to give out under him, and you immediately leapt from your bed to tend to him. “Jesse!” You exclaimed as you moved, he was already trying to push himself up with a quiet groan. “No, no, sugarcube, you get yourself back into bed,” He told you, trying to refuse your help as you assisted him back to his feet. “You were about t’ get some sleep, I can tell...” He mumbled, though his protests became weaker and weaker as you slowly guided him towards the bed. “That doesn’t matter, Jesse. Not when you’re like this...” You told him quietly, taking off his hat and placing it on the bedside table. He collapsed down onto the covers, another quiet groan escaping his lips as he rubbed a hand over his face.

You gently pushed his hand to the side, pressing the back of your own hand to his forehead- the skin was almost scalding to the touch. “Jesse, you’re burning up..” You tell him, concern lacing your tone. “Get those clothes off, we can get you rested up.” Jesse gave a quiet chuckle at your words. “Oh, I thought you were thinkin’ another route there sugar..” He mused, before coughing a little bit. You shake your head at his slight childishness. “No, Jesse. That’s not what I mean, and I think you know that.” You tell him, starting to help him take his poncho off. “Ah, pity..” He joked, trying to make you smile despite the clear worry in your features. His joking didn’t work very well, though a small part of you did appreciate the effort he was making, despite his rather ill demeanour.

“McCree, what did you even do on that damn mission? You never get sick,” You muttered, using his last name to emphasise to him how seriously you were taking this situation. “Well.. It was nothin’ really... We went to Volskaya to try and-” You cut him off with a look. “You didn’t wrap up properly, did you?” You asked him quite sternly, and he smiled a little sheepishly. “Well, I tried, sugar- but I got a little too hot before we left our outpost, and-” “For god’s sake, Jesse!” You sighed in exasperation. “I tell you every single time we head out there together, how come you never listen?” You asked him, clearly very unimpressed. “Why am I not surprised that you don’t take my advice, and the one time I’m not there to remind you about it you get sick...” “I ain’t sick, pumpkin... Just a little under the weather.” Jesse denied with a shake of his head. “That’s why you collapsed, is it, honey?” You reply sarcastically, carefully pushing him back so that he laid down. McCree sighed softly. “I just don’t want you worryin’-” “I always worry about you, Jesse. That’s my job.” You say to him, pressing a chaste kiss to his forehead. “You stay here for a moment, I’m going to go get you a washcloth in case you get a proper fever, alright? And do you want any food?” Jesse shook his head in response, before giving in to you, knowing full well that you would not give up trying to look after him, so he yielded.

He sunk back into the bed, as you moved through to the bathroom, grabbing his washcloth for him, and a small bowl the pair of you kept there, filling it with cool, crisp water. You then moved through to the bedroom again, to see Jesse just about to fall into the clutches of slumber. He peered at you through half-closed eyes, giving you a tired smile. “You spoil me, sugar...” He whispered, starting to chuckle before it evolved into a round of coughs. You placed the bowl down quickly, helping him sit up a little bit. “Hold on, honey, I’ll get you some water, okay?” You said quietly, and he nodded silently. You quickly move back through to the bathroom again, grabbing the glass you usually used for rinsing your mouth out after brushing your teeth, filling it with cool water from the same tap. When you return Jesse had stopped coughing, but, still looked very tired, and rather pale. You move towards him, offering the drink which he happily took, bringing the water to his lips, having a few mouthfuls.

He carefully put the glass on the bedside cabinet, and you pushed it further on to the surface, so that it didn’t fall off. He started to settle in again, and you got up to go and do a few chores, get a few things done whilst he slept, but a hand on your wrist kept you back. You look back in confusion, and there Jesse lay, giving you the most puppy-like eyes he could muster. “C’mon, sugar... Don’t go so soon.. Ain’t ya missed me?” “Jesse, you are ill. One, I don’t want to get what you’ve clearly got, and two, things need to get done around here.” “You can get ‘em done later.” “Jesse-” “No buts. You wanna look after me, right? Well, I’m asking for ya to stay. That’s how I want ya t’ look after me.” He told you firmly, and you chuckle softly. “You’re as stubborn as a child, you know that, don’t you?” “Yeah, but ya love me.” He chortled, pulling you back to him and onto the bed, his arms wrapping around you like you were some sort of beloved stuffed toy. He snuggled his face into the nape of your neck, a smile slowly slipping onto his face. “Can I have some chocolate when I wake up?” He asks sweetly. “Maybe, but don’t push your luck Jesse.”

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McCree taglist: @rey-is-not-a-skywalker

#jesse mccree #jesse mccree x reader #mccree x reader #mccree #overwatch x reader #mccree overwatch #feminine reader #female reader #afab reader #ourcree

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supersickies · 3 years ago

Link

Summary: "MJ wasn’t a STEM major, but if she were going for her Ph.D. she would bet he had a raging case of bronchitis. Not that the boy would ever admit to it.

“I can’t get sick MJ. It’s probably just some dust in the air.”

“Seriously Em, I just swallowed wrong that’s all.”

“My throat’s dry! I’m not sick!”

MJ had heard it all in the past few days, and she believed none of it."

Peter is basically on his death bed, but MJ has a plan.

A/N: Yay! @sicktember day two! I can't lie this is really the only other sicktember fic that I have complete. Everything else is simply a WIP or merely a figment of my imagination just hoping to be made into an actual work. But who knows! Maybe I'll muster up some motivation between now and when I go see Shang-Chi in a few hours! Either way here's my first (of many) PeterMj fics for Sicktember 2021! Read it here or click the link to read on AO3!

EDIT: LMAO I FORGOT TO POST IT BELOW THE CUT BUT ITS HERE NOW SORRY !!

MJ wasn’t really sure what she was trying to prove when she decided to take a microbiology course. Yes, she graduated from a STEM school (as valedictorian with honors, thank you very much) but college science courses like this were a whole other ballpark. Especially as a journalism major. But hey, she needed the STEM credit. That and her adorable (insufferable) boyfriend practically begged her to take the class with him.

And who was she to say no to Peter?

So that’s how she found herself on the floor of his dorm, notecards of test questions scattered about, trying with all her might to study for their first midterm. But something was keeping her from concentrating.

That something being her boyfriend, hacking up a lung.

Again, MJ wasn’t a STEM major, but if she were going for her PHD she would bet he had a raging case of bronchitis. Not that the boy would ever admit to it.

“I can’t get sick MJ. It’s probably just some dust in the air.”

“Seriously Em, I just swallowed wrong that’s all.”

“My throat’s dry! I’m not sick!”

MJ had heard it all in the past few days, and she believed none of it.

She had seen Peter when he was ill, long before the spider bite. In fact she had seen him sick a bunch of times, because pre-bite Peter was quite the sickly kid. She noted that this current “mystery cough” he had now was eerily similar to the one he had during their 6th grade holiday choir concert, and he sounded a lot like he did in 8th grade when he could barley talk for their group presentation on The Outsiders.

Not that she took note of all the times he was sick. She wasn’t obsessed, just observant.

(She was a little obsessed).

But it doesn’t take an overly observant girlfriend to know that Peter should be in bed and resting right now. Especially when he could barley manage to catch a breath.

MJ tenses as she hears the deep chesty coughs come from where Peter sits studying at his desk. She holds her tongue, not wanting to poke the bear more than she already had. Peter would never and has never in his life gotten angry at Michelle, but the more she had pushed him to admit that he wasn’t feeling well, the more annoyed he was becoming. So she stayed quiet.

But Peter didn’t.

It seemed as time went on, Peter’s coughs became harsher, deeper, wetter even. MJ couldn’t help but grimace at the wheeze that was also now very evident in his breathing.

She glances up at him, his eyes glazed over with fever and his nose burred in micro-bio notes, seemingly unaware of the world around him and the virus raging in his lungs. MJ stifles a sigh, feeling fed up with her decision to keep quiet. She sets aside her flashcards and lays her head in her arms as she weighs her options.

She could continue to push and try to beg Peter to admit that he was unwell. But Michelle knew that would only lead to more defiance, so that was out of the question.

She could also simply force him to rest. She knew she had the capacity to get him into bed with just a look, but the idea of doing so made her feel uncomfortable. This was her boyfriend, not some animal she could just boss around.

Her feet kick in the air behind her as she continues to wrack her brain. She listens despairingly to Peter’s coughs as she thinks, and if she’s being honest, just the sound of his hacking was making her throat feel kinda scratchy too.

Wait. That could be something.

What if it wasn’t just Peter who wasn’t feeling their best.

MJ was known to be prone to migraines, but hadn’t had one in a while thanks to a medication she had started. But what if, hypothetically, maybe she’d accidentally missed a dose?

MJ takes another glance at Peter, who was still zoned in on his own study guide, before making the first move in her grand plan.

She groans.

It’s too loud or overly painful sounding, but hopefully enough to warrant some alarm from her boyfriend.

And it has the desired effect, as out of the corner of her eye she sees Peter stop his studying and glance at her. Now, with his attention, she takes it up a notch. She groans slightly again, this time adding a wince and an eye rub.

She hears Peter make a soft concerned noise. Bingo.

He’s sill looking at her, so she does her best to look just as rundown and sick as she can. It works.

“Em? You okay, babe?” Peter’s voice is gravely and nearly gone, but she can hear the worry in his tone. She’s got him right where she wants him.

She turns her head to answer him, her eyes squinting to make it seem as though the lights were making the headache worse.

“Hm? Oh, no yeah everything’s fine, Pete.” MJ’s voice is usually deeper and raspier than most, but she really cakes it on for this. Again, desired effect achieved.

“You really don’t sound great, Em. You sure?” His sentence is punctuated with a rough coughing fit, ironically enough. But even as the fit dies down his attention stays on MJ, who is now rubbing her temples like her life depended on it, both eyes squeezed together tightly.

When he sees her miserable demeanor he quickly (yet shakily) abandons his own work to sit on the floor beside her.

“Seriously, MJ.”

She looks up at him with pitiful eyes, time to really sell it Michelle. She sighs, “M-My head just kinda hurts…It’s nothing.” She caps her Oscar worthy performance with another wince before burying her head back in her folded arms.

She feels his way too warm hand on her back as he rubs it in an attempt to comfort her.

He’s still buying it.

Maybe she should get a minor in theater performance?

“You sure? This doesn’t look like nothing.” He questions hoarsely. Now that he’s closer to her she can almost hear the crackling in his chest when he breathes. She had to get him to rest now or else this shit was going to get way worse.

“I-I think I may have forgotten my pill this morning. I can’t remember. I think I was just so anxious about the exam that- I don’t know…e-everything’s so fuzzy, Peter.” She says quietly, letting out a shaky breath just like she would if her head were actually pounding.

“Oh, Emmy.” He coos. “Come on, you need to lay down.”

“But the midterm-“

“Hey, the midterm can wait. You’ve been working hard, okay? Take some time to take care of yourself.”

Practice what you preach, Parker.

“Will you lay with me?” She asks, her voice uncharacteristically small as she looks up at him, eyes still scrunched in “pain” but full of emotion. She’s laying it on thick. The things she does for this boy.

“‘Course I will, Em.”

And jackpot. He bought it. What a sucker. At least he’s pretty!

MJ does a victory dance in her head as she lets him help her stand and climb onto his unmade twin bed. She waits for him to climb in and join her, but frowns when he turns and begins to to walk away. She quickly grabs his wrist and once again dons her best pitiful sick person face.

“Stay. Please.” She “begs”, which works again (of course). Peter’s face breaks into a sad smile.

“Just turning off the lights, Emmy. I’ll be right back, I promise.” He leans over and kisses her on the forehand, and she does her best not to think of all the germs he may have actually just passed onto her. She had him in the palm of her hand, she couldn’t break the illusion now.

For the full effect, she lets out a few pained groans here and there as he turns off the ceiling and desk lights in his room, leaving them under the glow of the spidey string lights she’d bought him as a dorm-warming gift.

He’s rather sluggish as he makes his way back and up onto his bed. MJ figures he’ll be out as soon as his feverish head hits the pillow. And she’s basically right, as he lets out a huge yawn as soon as he curls up next to her.

“Get some rest, Em.” He murmurs, already taking his own advice. “‘M right here if you need me.” He snuggles closer to her with a sigh, his arm wrapping around her torso and face pressing into the side of her shoulder. Only moments later soft snores are coming from his mouth.

“You too, dork.” She responds.

Mission accomplished, MJ thinks triumphantly.

#sicktember #sicktember2021 #spideychelle #sick peter parker

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scullydubois · 4 years ago

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Only the Light: Ch. 21

Hello, here is my ‘I didn’t plan for updates to take two weeks, but it always works out to two weeks’ post, right on time. Almost finished with this journey, thank you for sticking around <3

As Mulder helps care for his ill partner and her child, he enlists the Lone Gunmen to investigate the circumstances surrounding Scully's diagnosis. He and Melissa pay a visit to the three men, then Mulder gets an unwanted surprise back at apartment 42.

-------------------

As Scully’s world has shrunk, the amount of love in it has grown. This is small consolation for the hell she’s enduring, but it is the only antidote. She realizes this now that she’s staring down the abyss: all the knowledge in the world won’t save you, and wealth is nothing but a false comfort. What will live on are the parts of herself she’s left with others. Her goal for her remaining time, however long that may be, is to hold tight to those she loves...not to slip away until her heart stops beating.

This is hard when she already feels like less of herself. She’s doing chemo twice a week at Georgetown, and it’s brutal. She knew it would be...her only other choice is to get that gravestone of hers re-engraved.

Meanwhile, Mulder pushed all other work aside to get in contact with the Mufon women. It only took him one day to do so, but Scully doesn’t know that, and for now, she doesn’t need to know. He’s keeping what he’s learned so far to himself...Betsy Hagopian is dead and has been since shortly after Scully saw her. Penny Northern is sick and not responding to treatment. A handful of other women, abductees like Scully, have developed rare cancers too.

It’s not something he knows how to talk about, such despondency. His world has always hinged on hope. That’s what his work on the X-Files is to him, one big leap of faith toward his sister. Or was, before Scully came along. It’s not that she diverted him from Samantha...no, she turned a very personal quest into something larger than him. Or her, or any one person they worked with. She pared it down to its core value, its overarching mission: the truth. Because the truth may hurt at first, but given time, it heals. And it is the only path to healing. This is what he’s learned from her. And now, he’s got to do everything he can to pass the revitalized world she’s shown him onto her.

The arrangement falls into place without any friction: Missy handles the chemo run on Monday mornings, and Mulder leaves work early on Thursdays. Emily spends Mondays with her grandma, and Thursdays too when Missy works the night shift.

Thursdays become something of a spiritual day for Mulder. The hours of approximately 3-10pm are spent doting on his partner--in her apartment, and then his car, then the hospital and his car again, and finally, back to her apartment. Mama Scully brings Emily back around eight, and if Missy’s not home, Mulder gets the honor of the bedtime ritual. The domesticity of it all tethers him to reality, maybe for the first time in his life. He’d give anything to change the circumstances, but it’s humbling to feel--for once--that he belongs on Earth.

It is on one of these Thursday evenings that Mulder could swear he feels his whole life trailing behind him, leading him to the present. The end of the year is creeping up in its usual fashion, which means the outside world is a blanket of darkness before the stoves of countless suburban homes have even been started. Having settled her comfortably into bed with a pile of pillows, Mulder carries his partner a glass of water and pulls the wastebasket to her side; this is their routine now.

“You doing okay?” he asks, lingering as she takes a sip of water. It will soon be time to make himself scarce so she can sleep.

She nods, gurgles a garbled affirmation. Mulder turns to go, and her heart leaps to her throat. “Will you stay?” she spews, embarrassed by her need.

“Of course.” She’s unaware, apparently, that when he leaves it’s for her, not him. He approaches her bedside, lowers himself carefully beside her knees. “Any particular reason?” he murmurs, examining the sunken spaces beneath her eyes.

“I just...wanted to talk to you,” she says, and Mulder thinks there might be a bit more color in her cheeks than there was yesterday.

“Okay.” He leans in and sweeps a strand of hair off her forehead so lightly that Scully doesn’t even feel it. She’s apprehensive about being touched these days, and he has taken this knowledge to heart. She is grateful, and to show the extent of this feeling, she strokes his hand, allows him to take hers in his. He runs his thumb over each finger as they continue.

He wants to ask what she’s thinking about, what it is that has so graciously extended his stay in this room. But he knows that she’ll get to it, that she has nothing to keep from him now.

There’s a sincere serenity on her face that he’s never seen. And after a minute or two, she begins. “I didn’t think it could happen--and it certainly doesn’t make much sense-- but right now, I am happier than I have ever been.”

A string on Mulder’s heart, tightened to its prime, bursts without warning.

She caresses the back of his head. “It’s so trivial, Mulder. So much of what we call life isn’t living at all. Or at least not the important kind.”

He lifts his gaze, eye contact conveying more than he could with words.

“But I’ve thought about the parts of my life that are living, and all of them, in some way, come back to you.”

Mulder shakes his head, feeling too flattered. “That’s not true…”

“You can believe whatever you need to,” she whispers, “but it is the truth, and I am eternally grateful that you happened to me.”

He tries to cough away some tears, which works about a quarter as well as he hoped it would. “Hold on, little lady.” He pats her hand in response to her smile. “I think you happened to me.”

Scully’s chest flutters in laughter. “Did I?” These subtle things have always been so important to them.

“You walked into my office, remember.”

“Well, I guess it would depend on who changed the most due to the other’s influence then,” she reasons.

Mulder just gives her a look.

She smirks. “Okay, so maybe I happened to you, but you…” she chews her lip, and this could be any other day of any other year if she weren’t bedridden. She picks out her words-- “You completed me.”

Mulder spills forward, finding his footing and spinning into the middle of the room. “Holy fuck Scully, are you trying to kill me?”

“We’ve been searching for the truth. That’s the truth, Mulder. I wanted you to know.”

He sets his jaw. He won’t burst into tears in front of her, not when she has all the reason to cry and yet has been so strong.

“You should get some sleep,” he tells her, hoping to expedite his exit from the room.

“I will. And it’s okay to be sad, but not for me. My life is as whole as ever.”

He nods, though he doesn’t agree (what’s new?). He knew Samantha for eight years and has been sad for twenty. He’s known Scully for half that--so he gets at least a decade of mourning.

“Sweet dreams,” he says, resting his hands on the door frame. “I’ll bring Emily in when she gets here.”

“Okay.” She closes her eyes, smiles. “Love you.”

“Love you too, DKS.” He blows a kiss and slips out, heat flooding to his face. This is the first time she’s said that unprompted, and is that what the threat of imminent death does to you? Pries you open?

He wonders. Whose love is saving who?

-------------------------

The primetime line-up is flickering over the television when Mama Scully arrives with Emily, passing her granddaughter to Mulder like the family heirloom she is. They exchange a few words in short breaths, reserving the air supply for their dear Dana. Mama Scully agrees to come see her daughter this weekend rather than interrupt her much-needed rest now, and Mulder is suddenly single parent-slash-babysitter; the specifics elude him.

Perfumed with baby powder from her grandmother’s overly enthusiastic hand, Mulder concludes that Em needs neither bathing nor changing. She doesn’t seem very keen on sleep either, seeing as how her little voice keeps calling out Moldy! and her little fists clobber his shoulders. Still, he will keep his promise. He carries her into the room she shares with her mother, stepping lightly lest the floorboards creak.

As he circles the bed to lay the child beside her sleeping mother, he winces at the mess in the trash can. Good thing he moved it into place though Scully had seemed okay. He hadn’t heard any retching, and it saddens him that he wasn’t there to hold her hair back. He settles Em into place, makes a mental note to rinse the can on his way out.

Her characteristically light sleep lightened further by her illness, Scully stirs from the shift of Emily’s weight against the mattress. She rolls toward the free side and flutters her eyelids open. Her smile is reflexive.

“Hello baby girl,” she purrs. She lays a hand against her daughter’s polka-dotted onesie. “Did you have a good day with Grandma?”

Emily answers with some fluttery babbling and gropes for her mother’s nose.

“I don’t think she’s very tired,” Mulder remarks, hands in his pockets. He smirks. “We should really find out what your mother feeds her.”

Scully pulls her lips into a grin, exhibiting a great deal more effort than she did just moments before. She blinks, rubs her eyes, and seems to go out of the world for a second. Then she sets her gaze on Mulder and speaks dreamily--”Will you tell us a bedtime story?”

“Oh!” Mulder scratches his chin, having expected his dismissal. “Do you think that would help…?”

Scully presses her head into the pillow. “I’m not gonna be able to fall back asleep until she does.”

That is a yes, served with some condescension.

“Okay, well, let me think.” He perches on the side of the bed. “Regrettably, I did not get my degree in bedtime stories.”

“Just say what you know,” Scully mumbles. “We’re the only ones listening, and the goal is to put us to sleep.”

“I hope that’s not a comment on my conversational skills,” he teases, smoothing the sheets.

Again, there’s a look of otherworldliness from his partner. She is somewhere else.

“Go on, tell us a story,” she hums, her surprising lack of impatience attributable to an equal lack of wakefulness.

“Let’s see…” He stretches out, perching on his elbow by Scully’s feet like she did in the first motel they ever stayed in. Emily sits herself up and grasps for him. He laughs, lets her latch onto his fingers.

“There once was a little girl who loved horses and bugging her brother,” he begins. “Now, I’m sure she sounds like just about any little girl out there, but I promise, she was as unique as they come.”

Scully closes her eyes and tilts her head back to listen.

“She always said she wanted to be a butterfly when she grew up so she could spread her wings and fly. And her parents would scoff and tell her that would never be possible, but she believed. She believed it would happen.”

Emily babbles along, adding her own colorful commentary.

“I know, I know right?” Mulder muses to the little girl. “The parents were such jerks.”

He tickles Em’s stomach, then remembers that he’s supposed to be helping her go to sleep. He kisses her temple and begins stroking her knee, hoping to achieve a hypnotic rhythm.

“And so one day, this little girl...well, this little girl got to go on an adventure. She left behind her house and her family, and she got to go up to the sky and see the stars, and it was everything she wished for.”

Scully opens her eyes slowly. Mulder’s focus is centered on Emily, who stares up at him with the awe of a museum-goer seeing the Starry Night. It is as if they are the only two in the room, and this gives Scully great comfort, for she can imagine them having a life after she is gone.

“The girl’s family was sad because they didn’t know where she went. The girl’s brother missed her the most, but it was okay because the girl was happy. She got to fly through the sky like a bird or a plane, and she achieved the dream that her parents thought would never come true.”

Em’s breathing begins to slow into sleep. And thank god, cause he’s running out of story to tell.

“Lay down, little girl.” He guides her onto her back so she can drift off without difficulty, then clears his throat softly.

“Some say that if you see a light in the night sky, that’s this little girl, floating among the stars, living her dream. And her brother, well, he’s pretty fond of that thought. He just wants her to be happy.”

Silence falls over the room like a throbbing sensation of unknown origin. Emily’s eyelids struggle between open and closed, and Mulder knows she will soon be out. Scully’s baby blues, meanwhile, peer at him with such unflinching intensity that he suspects she has fallen asleep like that. It is haunting, but it becomes much less so when she blinks and he realizes that she’s looking at him, that she heard the whole story.

“Is that what you wanted?” he whispers, half expecting her not to answer.

“It was beautiful, Mulder. Samantha lives on.”

He smiles from his eyes...oh, of course it was obvious, his little tribute to his sister. Scully said to work from what he knew, and this myth is something he’s used to keep himself going since his family realized that there would be no happy reunion with Sam. He’s happy to share his fantasy; such escapes are needed now.

----------------------

Melissa’s heart leaps when she opens the apartment door to an empty living room. The TV drones out its slapstick laugh track, contributing to the ominous atmosphere. She’d expect to see Mulder taking up a restless refuge on the couch, or maybe sneaking a late night snack to Em. Her sister should be fast asleep by now, her little world able to slacken its hold on her. Unless she is no longer afforded such luxury…

Missy rushes toward Dana’s bedroom, her purse still on her shoulder. In the doorway she slows as her eyes adjust to the lack of light. And thank goodness because three silhouettes catch her eye; a medium one buried under the covers, a large one strewn diagonally across the bed, and a small bump barely visible on the far side. A snore of unidentifiable origin is the only disturbance. Missy smiles to herself. All the missing persons are accounted for and well. She can continue with the blissfully bland routine of her night.

She washes her face and brews some chamomile before settling on the couch with the week’s issues of Mad Magazine and Vogue. Yes, she contains multitudes. She’s up to the Spy vs. Spy comic when Mulder strolls in, yawning.

“I guess my bedtime story was effective.”

“Mmm.” Missy scoots her mug over so he can prop his feet up. Dana hates feet on furniture, but she’s got a child in the house now, so she’ll have to let go of those judgments. “How is she?”

“Oh shit.” She’s jogged something in his memory. “I meant to grab the trash can on the way out.”

Missy knows what this means. “I’ll get it in a second.”

Mulder nods in silent gratitude, relaxes back into his spot. “She seemed livelier than usual when we got home.”

It hits him that he said home, not back. And well, it is Scully’s home. What about him? He sleeps on the couch and he doesn’t pay rent...that’s how he lived at Oxford, though he gets the feeling that it’s not as evergreen at thirty-three years old.

These days, he only goes to his place on Sunday nights to get (what he considers) a week’s worth of clothing--two work outfits (hey, he never really sees anyone but Scully anyway) and one casual outfit that doubles as pajamas. He bought a bunch of fish feeding tablets so all he has to do is drop a few in on Sunday and the fish are set for the week. As far as he can tell, at least. None of them have floated to the top of the tank yet.

“And Em is all good?” Missy confirms.

Mulder nods. “Your mom takes good care of her.”

“I think I know the answer to this, but do you want some tea?” Missy asks, flashing her mug.

“No, no, save it for yourself.”

“Alright.” She flips a page in her magazine. “Just let me know when you’re ready to kick me out. Since I’m kind of in your bed and all.”

“I should be telling you that,” Mulder counters. “You don’t mind me staying here, do you?”

“Not at all.” Missy lays the magazine on the table. “It’s important that you’re around.”

“Really?...For what?”

“For who,” Missy corrects. “Emily needs you to give her balance, and Dana...she just needs you. You’re the safety net under her tightrope.”

“Oh.” This metaphor grounds Mulder better than gravity ever has.

Missy seems to sense this and takes the opportunity to profit off his vulnerability. “So what’s gone on between you?” she asks, an eyebrow arched.

Mulder squints at her. “Huh?”

“I keep waiting for Dana to kick you out or get irritated about you being around all the time,” Missy says with honest simplicity. “But instead, she lets you take her to chemo and fall asleep in her bed…”

“Well, I think the former is more ideal than the alternative, which is that I watch her child,” Mulder replies. “And I fell asleep on the bed, not in it.”

“Okay.” Missy sips her tea, keeps her eyes on him.

It’s pointless for Mulder to try to keep secrets anymore. He wrings out his hands. “If you must know, when you dropped her off at my apartment after her appointment, we... came to a mutual understanding.”

“Ah.” Missy is not surprised by any of it. Of course it happened. Of course her sister hasn’t mentioned it.

“Why are you just asking about this now?”

“Cause I expected my suspicions to be proven wrong, and that hasn’t happened.”

Mulder nods, taps absentmindedly on his knee. “Actually, I have something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“Oh?” She’s intrigued. The enigmatic Fox Mulder, divulging on his own accord.

“Don’t get excited, it’s not good.”

Damn. Missy reels herself in. “About Dana?”

“About what happened to her or...what is happening to her. It’s about the Mufon women.”

Missy curls her legs beneath herself. “You reached them?”

He nods. “Well, Penny Northern’s hospice nurse picked up when I called. She’s got stage four tumors throughout her body that migrated from her nasopharynx.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Apparently most of the other abductees have cancer too. And Betsy Hagopian--the woman who Scully saw in the hospital last spring--is dead.”

Missy’s gaze drops to the floor. “So the invasive procedures that the abductors did are killing these women.”

“One doctor’s treating them all--he’s supposed to be a specialist--but it doesn’t look like he’s having much success.” Mulder pauses, his mouth partially open.

“What?” Missy presses.

“The Lone Gunmen and I have been looking into him, and we think that he might have been involved in the abductions.”

Missy barrels forward. “You think he did this to them on purpose and now he’s letting them die?”

Mulder nods solemnly.

“Well, we have to stop him. We can’t let any more patients go to him, especially Dana…”

“I know. I’m going down to see the Lone Gunmen tomorrow after work if you want to join me.”

Missy contemplates. “I have the lunch shift tomorrow, so I could. What would we tell Dana?”

“I’ll say that Skinner is keeping me late to go over some paperwork. You could say whatever, she’s not going to question you.”

“I hate to leave her alone for so long, but...yeah, we have to do this.” She leans back, takes another look at Mulder. “You might just save a lot of women, you know.”

------------------------

Missy feels unseen eyes bore into her as she and Mulder approach the basement entrance of a helter-skelter building. She doesn’t recognize the part of town they’re in, and she doesn’t ask.

Mulder hits the button on a call box beside the door. Before he can speak, a voice leaps out at them.

“Howdy Mulderoony.” Mulder recognizes it as Frohike’s voice. “Glad to see you made it safely.”

A variety of locks and chains are undone, the door pulled open.

“Join our ménage a trois,” Frohike says, ushering them in.

“We can’t stay long,” Mulder tells them, squinting as he adjusts to the darkness of their realm. “You guys forget to pay the electric bill or something?”

“We’re conserving electricity,” Byers says, a shadow in the corner of the room. “It’s good for the environment.”

“I didn’t realize the environment was on your list of concerns.”

“It should be on everyone’s list of concerns,” Byers throws back matter-of-factly.

Mulder slides his hands into his pockets. “Touché.”

Ringo comes forward from the darkness, his hair as tressed and greasy as ever. “Well lookie here. Dana Scully in the flesh.”

Frohike inserts himself between them. “You can’t be serious, pool boy. That’s not her, I’d know her anywhere. It is, however, an equally lovely woman.” He takes Missy’s hand and kisses it. “My lady.”

Missy participates with amusement until Mulder brushes Frohike aside.

“Okay boys, lay off. This is Scully’s sister Melissa. And I believe she’s taken.”

Frohike bows. “A lucky man.”

“Woman,” Missy corrects.

“Oh. Excusez-moi."

Tucked in the darkness, Byers scoffs at the childish antics. “Come on, let’s cut to the chase. Lives are at stake.”

“I’m glad to see someone has a brain around here,” Mulder quips.

Ringo pats Mulder’s shoulder. “Not all of us got a full-ride to Oxford, but hey, I’d say we’ve done pretty well for ourselves.”

“Calm down, Ringo. You’d still be the smartest member of the Ramones.”

Like an unleashed dog, Ringo lunges forward, and Byers and Frohike pull him back. They are quite used to this.

“You can insult me, but never speak ill of the Ramones!” Ringo growls.

Mulder puts his hands up, smirks at the permission he’s been given. “Happily.”

Missy clears her throat, her amusement wearing thin. She’s like her sister in this way.

Mulder gets the memo. “Right. Can the trash talk, we’re here to catch a criminal.”

“If he is, in fact, a criminal,” Byers remarks.

Missy frowns. “Haven’t you proved that?”

“We’re connecting the dots, but we haven’t completed the picture yet,” Byers replies.

Mulder circles around to Byers’ monitor. “What have you got?”

“This doctor, Scanlon, isn’t just an oncologist,” Ringo begins, as if Mulder asked him. “His name is associated with the Lombard Research Facility.”

Mulder and Missy both give him a look. More, more!

“A high security medical research center in Allentown,” he clarifies.

“We’ve hacked into some of the security cameras,” Frohike tells them. “We’d have to get in to see for ourselves, but the activity is rather suspicious. The same men, in and out, at odd times. Whatever they’re storing in there, it’s significant.”

“Then let’s get in,” Mulder emphasizes. “You be the eyes and ears, I’ll be the legs.”

Ringo nods. “We’re working on it.”

“We need to observe their weekend patterns before we make any moves,” Byers insists. “We don’t set up our missions to fail.”

“Fine, but as soon as you’ve reached your confidence threshold--”

“We’ll call you,” Ringo promises.

“What are you expecting to find?” Missy asks, frenzied. “Will it help Dana?”

Frohike drums his fingers on the desk. “That’s the plan.”

Byers nods. “We can’t be sure exactly what we’ll find, but the connection is clear: Scanlon was involved with the abductions, and he’s exploiting these women for his own benefit.”

Melissa shivers involuntarily. “It’s amazing that you’ve figured this out.”

Ringo twirls a pencil through his hair. “We have a lot of free time on our hands.”

Mulder takes a shot at the mini-basketball hoop they have, misses. “And you’d better use it all to implicate Dr. Scanlon’s ass.”

Frohike does a two-finger salute. “Aye aye captain.”

Mulder thumbs toward the door. “Now we’ve gotta get out of here before the smell sticks to us. Scully will know exactly where we’ve been,” he smirks.

“Can’t argue with that.” Frohike shows them to the door. “Give the lady my regards.”

“Will do.” He turns back, exchanges a serious glance with each man. “Sort this out, boys.”

Just as quickly as they came, he and Melissa step out of the chambers and ascend back into the sun’s dominion. Entrusting those three with the well-being of a woman they love so much is far from ideal, and yet, they’re throwing all their faith into it.

---------------------------

Mulder slides his key into the door of apartment 42 shortly after seven on Sunday evening. He hasn’t been in for a week, and yet a vivid scent of...smoke sticks about the place. And a wrinkled mess of a man to go with it.

The old man lifts his chin. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Mulder is no longer naïve enough to be taken aback by Cancer Man’s ambush. He shrugs and slides his coat off. “Well, you are in my apartment.”

“I’ve heard that your partner is very sick,” CSM says, his steps so clunky that Mulder wonders whether the downstairs tenants will complain.

“What grapevine did you get that from?...Or are you the one growing the grapes?”

“It saddened me to hear. Agent Scully is a valuable member of the Bureau.”

Mulder nods. “You here to pass on your condolences? Cause I’m pretty sure you could just send a card.”

“I’m here to propose a solution...The doctors say your partner’s sickness is incurable. This is not true.”

“Smarter than the doctors, are you?”

“In this case I am.”

A bitter laugh rises from Mulder. “So I’m supposed to believe that you were involved in sickening Scully, yet you want to save her?”

“We all have our regrets.”

“And I have no reason to trust you.”

“Upon learning about her child, I feel a deep need to intervene.”

“Mmm.” Mulder begins to pace. “And by learning about her child, do you mean when Scully’s ova were removed and fertilized without her knowledge? Because I have a hard time believing that you didn’t know a thing about Emily until Scully got custody.”

“Certainly I did not foresee Emily ending up in her mother’s custody.”

“What was the purpose then, of Emily? To terrorize a woman by taking away her bodily autonomy?”

CSM shrugs. “That’s not my area.”

Mulder scoffs. “Okay you old freak. Tell me how to save Scully’s life or get the hell out of here.”

The wrinkled man folds his hands. “She had a silicone implant removed from her neck. Put it back in.”

Mulder freezes. “Are you serious? That’s your miracle cure?”

CSM nods. “It is the only way to save her life. Removing the implant is what caused the cancer in the first place.”

Mulder steps forward, getting in the old man’s face like a middle-school bully. He’s ready to throw a punch--honestly, ready to kill the man--if need be. He could do it. Easily. He could.

“What does the implant do, Cancer Man?”

“Believe it or not, it is meant as a sort of inoculation. It offsets the negative effects of any tests performed during the...time away.”

“Uh-huh, and what do you get from it?”

“Who says I get anything from it?”

“How else would you know that she had it removed?”

“I am everywhere, Agent Mulder.”

Mulder loses his thinly-veiled calm, wraps his hand around the man’s saggy neck. “You fucking pervert, I’ll kill you! I’ve killed a man before just like this. Tell me the truth.”

“This is the truth,” CSM wheezes, not intimidated by his rapidly deteriorating air flow. His cold, hard eyes stare into Mulder’s. “You wouldn’t kill a man over nothing, would you?”

Mulder squeezes harder, his fingers gripping the man’s pulse. He watches the light drain from his victim’s eyes. All the old bastard does is smirk at him.

Angered by this more than anything, Mulder releases the man so suddenly that his bony body is thrown into the wall. He keeps his footing, stumbles forward.

“Get out,” Mulder growls. When he doesn’t respond, Mulder pokes his finger at the door. “Get out now!”

CSM dusts himself off and walks out, the pompous smirk never leaving his face. Mulder slams the door shut behind him.

There are certain truths he cannot escape. If Scully has made him believe in Heaven, CSM has made him believe in Hell.

#sincerely hope i did the lone gunmen justice lol #also i feel like this chapter is...a normal episode amount of angsty instead of the slow paper cut of the last chapter #the x-files #only the light fic #missy and scully fic #txf #txf fic #fox mulder #dana scully #melissa scully #mine #eww this looks weird w/the tumblr update!!#read it on ao3 lol

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callboxkat · 4 years ago

Text

Infinitesimal (epilogue)

Author’s note: Happy two year anniversary of when I first began posting this fic! Let’s celebrate with its conclusion. I hope you have all enjoyed reading this story. I know I’ve enjoyed writing it. <3

Warnings: food mention, injury mention, illness mention, captivity mention, nightmare mention

Word count: 3058

Infinitesimal Masterpost!

Writing Masterpost!

...

“We’re almost home!” Patton announced as they rounded the final corner. It was a straight shot now, barely any distance at all to the home that Emile and Virgil had built and made their own, and that they had eagerly welcomed Patton to join. A home that they hadn’t seen in weeks, since Emile had first gone missing, not counting Patton’s brief return for Virgil’s birthday gifts. Suffice to say, however friendly they had grown with Roman and Logan, all three of them were happy to be back.

“Home,” Emile hummed. He was clearly exhausted, leaning heavily on Virgil and Patton as they slowly made their way home; but he had insisted after their last break that he could make it the rest of the way in one shot. And now that they were so close, he seemed to gain a new energy. Patton couldn’t blame him—he felt the same way.

Minutes later, Virgil was opening the door and flicking on the lights, and they stepped over the threshold.

Home.

Patton and Virgil had meant to immediately take Emile to the bed in the second room, so that he could recover from the journey; but Emile stopped as soon as he was inside, staring up at the walls.

Oh, right, Patton thought. He’d nearly forgotten.

The drawings that Patton and Virgil had created while Emile was on his ill-fated supply run still hung on the once bare walls, cheerful, colorful banners that coated nearly every bit of available space. Some were detailed—the earliest of these drawings—while others were little more than bright scribbles meant to fill up space like a gigantic patchwork design, adding to the ridiculous cacophony of it all. One in particular, a very goofy looking smiley face, hung at eye level directly across from the door.

A second passed, and then Emile began to laugh.

…

Two weeks had gone by since the littles had departed. Logan had seen no sign of them since, and could only assume—and hope—that this meant that everything had gone as planned, and that they were fine.

He wished he knew this for sure, but it wasn’t as if he could call them and ask.

Logan sighed, tapping the pencil he held in one hand against the book in his lap. It wouldn’t do to be so distracted, he told himself. He was meant to be doing homework.

Deciding that perhaps biology would be easier to focus on than Calculus, Logan stood and went to get his other books.

Soon after, he returned, the textbook, notebook, and calculator held in his arms. He made for the sofa.

“Hello?”

Logan jumped, very nearly dropping the books in his arms. He whirled around towards the voice, and his gaze locked onto the shelf on the wall opposite the window.

Virgil.

“I—” Logan shook his head, composing himself as best he could. “Virgil! Is something wrong? Did something happen? Is everyone okay?”

Virgil held up both arms in a “calm down” gesture, his crutches hanging from his elbows, briefly balancing on one leg.

“They’re fine,” the little said, putting his arms back down. “Is, um. Is Roman around?”

Logan, who had been staring at Virgil with wide eyes as he spoke, deflated slightly. “Ah—yes. My apologies, I shouldn’t assume you are here to speak with me. I’ll fetch him instead.”

Virgil groaned, rolling his eyes so hard that it was a full-body gesture. “No, you moron, you come back too.”

In another circumstance, Logan might have been miffed about being called a moron, but now he just blinked in pleased surprise. “Oh.”

Virgil leaned on one crutch, tilting his head to the side. “So? Are you going to get him?”

“Ah—yes, of course. One moment.” Logan placed his school materials on the coffee table, then strode purposefully from the room.

When he returned, a very excited and curious Roman in tow, Virgil was still on the shelf, shifting awkwardly where he stood.

“Doctor Gloom!” Roman greeted cheerily, his still-exuberant voice softened out of consideration. “What brings you to our homely abode?”

Logan glanced at Roman, a bit surprised at the vocabulary choice, and wondering if perhaps he’d confused the definition of “homely”, before looking back to Virgil for an answer.

Virgil managed to look even more uncomfortable. Logan shifted his gaze slightly away, hoping that that would help. It seemed to do the trick.

Virgil took a deep breath. “So… I wanted to, uh… I wanted to say thanks,” he said. “I know I wasn’t… I wasn’t the nicest, when I came to ask you guys for help, with Em. But you helped me anyway, and you helped him. You saved him. And Patton. So… thanks for that.” He paused. “Um. That’s all.”

He opened his mouth again, shook his head, and turned away, clearly about to dart back into the wall.

“Wait,” Roman begged. “Don’t go yet.”

Virgil paused.

“You came quite a long way just to say that,” Logan observed. “I do appreciate it, as I’m sure Roman does, but….”

Virgil scoffed.

“Would it hurt to have a conversation before you leave?” Logan gently pressed. He hadn’t seen any of the littles in two weeks, which, while not overly long, was certainly more time than he would have preferred.

“Are Pat and Emile okay?” Roman asked. “How are you? What’s been going on the past two weeks?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Virgil muttered.

Logan and Roman waited.

Virgil sighed. “I waited because I wanted to make sure Em was good, okay? And he’s—he’s fine.” Virgil turned away from the wall to look more properly towards them again, but his voice was quieter as he continued, “I just wanted to thank you guys, and he’s better, so I came.”

Logan nodded slightly. “We appreciate it,” he said.

Virgil shifted. “I’m fine,” he continued. “I’m great. Pat and Em, too. We’ve just been, um. Helping Emile. And fixing things up at home.”

Virgil nodded to himself, and started to turn away again.

“Is that all you wanted?” Logan asked. “Do you need food, or supplies? Perhaps you could pass along well-wishes to Patton and Emile.”

“I don’t need charity,” Virgil said, shaking his head.

“It’s not charity,” Roman chimed in. “We want to help. Because we’re friends, right?”

Virgil sighed.

“Is there really nothing you need?”

Virgil tapped one of his crutches on the shelf, thinking. A few seconds later, his shoulders drooped.

“Can I have one of your Christmas lights? A clear one? And some wire, maybe?”

Logan remembered the broken glass in Emile’s bag, the remnants of a light he had attempted to bring home. They must not have been able to replace it yet. Of course, they hadn’t. He should have realized.

Virgil seemed to want to justify his request. “It’s just—we’re not going back to where we used to get them, so. We haven’t found a new spot yet.”

“You won’t have to,” Logan said. “Whenever you need a new light, just ask us. We’d be happy to provide them”

Virgil nodded, still not looking at him. “That’s all, though,” he seemed to need to say. “We can get our own food and everything.”

Logan nodded, allowing a small smile to come to his lips. “Of course.”

“And—and, maybe,” he continued, “Maybe I’ll bring Patton next time. If he wants to come.”

Logan was just happy to hear there would be a next time.

Virgil was persuaded to have a snack while he waited, for hospitality’s sake rather than need; and he and Roman sat down to share a bag of cheese crackers while Logan got the light.

…

Roman sat down on the arm of the chair, watching as Virgil inspected one of the cheese crackers before finally taking a bite.

“So… what’s it like living in the walls?” Roman asked.

Virgil glanced at him warily, then swallowed. “Who says I live in the walls?”

Roman blinked. “Well… where else would you live?” Virgil, Patton, and Emile had all travelled up through the walls towards their home, even if they hadn’t said exactly where that was “…Do you live under someone’s floor? Or in the ceiling?” He paused, reaching for another handful of crackers. “Those are all kind of the same thing, though, right?” He shoved the snacks in his mouth.

Virgil sighed, apparently conceding the point.

“So, what’s it like?”

“What’s it like not living in the walls?”

Roman made a thoughtful noise. “Fair.” Virgil probably didn’t have a great sense of how to compare that aspect of his life to any other. While he had experienced a taste of what living in an apartment was like, but it wasn’t exactly… a normal situation.

They continued snacking in silence for a few moments, until Roman sighed and set his cracker bag to the side.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sounds like you’re going to.”

That wasn’t a refusal, Roman noticed. He decided to go ahead and ask. “Well, it’s just… I’ve been nothing but nice to you, or at least, I know I’ve tried to be, but… sometimes it still seems like you hate me. Why?”

Virgil glanced over. “…I don’t hate you.”

“You don’t like me,” Roman insisted. “Or don’t trust me, anyway, even after everything. Why?”

Virgil shifted, uncomfortable.

Roman waited.

“…It’s because you’re a human,” he admitted. “Yeah, you helped Patton, and yeah, you helped Emile. And I’m very thankful for that—you know I am. But that doesn’t change what you are.” He glanced away. “It’s not your fault, and I’m trying my best to ignore it—I swear I am—and I do… ugh, I do like you, I guess, but… you and Logan are human. And humans hurt people like us. They capture us, they either kill us or keep us as specimens or make us into pets—” he grimaced— “or they make us into playthings. Patton isn’t an outlier. I’ve heard the stories.” He shook his head. “I know you two are nice, but… I can’t just ignore that, even if I want to. So… so I’m probably not ever going to stop being… kind of afraid of you.”

Roman looked down, his heart sinking at Virgil’s words. He felt rather speechless at the sheer certainty in the little’s eyes. The urge to be defensive was still there—if all he and Logan had done wasn’t enough to fully earn his trust, then what was? But he stopped himself. Instead, he took a second, and he thought back, back to when he and Logan had first found Patton, hiding in that conch shell on that fateful day at the beach.

They’d brought Patton home with them in order to help him; but as much as he hated to think about it, Roman had to admit that Virgil had a point. In those first few seconds after Logan and Roman had found Patton, their first instinct hadn’t been to let him go. It hadn’t been to help. Logan had simply shouted at Roman to catch him, and Roman had jumped in front of the little, cutting off his escape. It was only afterwards that Patton had collapsed, when they had realized the true severity of his condition, that they had changed their approach. Roman remembered clearly the moment the surprise, the wonder, the confusion, the excitement, had drained out of him and been replaced with nothing but fear and concern for the little guy.

Had Patton not been so sick, had he not been hurt, had he not already been so clearly emotionally scarred, Roman honestly couldn’t say what he would have done. Would he and Logan still have brought him home with them? Even against his will?

…Probably, he thought, thinking of Logan’s notebook. Of his own burning curiosity about the small, strange creature. Of the fact that Logan had, despite his good intentions, literally put him in a cage. And of the fact that Roman hadn’t stopped him.

Roman was glad that things had not gone any further down that path. But under different circumstances, while he as much as any other person would want to think they could never do something like that… he could see how things might have gone very differently.

Roman turned his head to look back at the little, who avoided his gaze.

“I get it,” was all Roman said. And he did—as much as any human like him could. Maybe Virgil would always be a little afraid of him, and maybe he’d never be comfortable enough to do something like ride in his palm, like Patton had, but that was okay. Roman would respect his boundaries.

Virgil’s gaze darted back in his direction, and he nodded, looking relieved. “Good. Cool.”

…

By the time Logan returned with the light and the wire, Virgil had finished nearly two of the crackers. Logan sensed a slight change in atmosphere had occurred while he was gone, despite the cheerfulness of the way Roman was asking about the littles’ home—which, it sounded like, was apparently made up of two cozy, narrow rooms within a wall somewhere—but it didn’t seem that anything cataclysmic had gone wrong, so he decided to say nothing about it.

He cleared his throat to announce his presence, and held up the supplies he had put together.

“Do you want to take some of these back with you?” Roman asked once Logan had carefully put the items up on the shelf, holding up the bag of cheese crackers. “I don’t think I can finish them all.”

Virgil squinted, disbelieving. Which was fair, given how few were left.

“I bet Patton would like them,” Roman continued thoughtfully. “He does love cheese.”

Virgil grumbled, but he was already moving to put some of the crackers in his bag. Roman grinned and put a couple more on the shelf.

“So… I know you already said they’re fine, but how are Emile and Patton?” Logan asked, feeling rather left out of their earlier conversation. He’d certainly be asking Roman to share what they had talked about with him, later. “Is Emile getting around okay? Is Pat still having nightmares?”

Virgil finished packing up the crackers. He chewed on his lip, then seemed to take pity on them. “Em’s good. He’s been resting a lot, still, but he’s okay. And Patton’s fine. I think being home helps. He hasn’t really had any nightmares, at least that I know of.”

Logan smiled. “That’s very good news, Virgil.”

“Yeah.” Virgil nodded. “Anyway, um, I’ll bring Patton in… probably another couple weeks?”

Logan felt his smile widen, and he nodded. “That sounds perfect.” He would have liked to see Patton sooner, of course; but he assumed the wait was likely because of the length of the trip (he wasn’t sure exactly how long that was, but he knew it wasn’t short) and because Virgil probably didn’t want to leave Emile home alone yet. It would be a while, he assumed, before Emile was well enough for a visit.

Virgil got to his feet, grabbing his crutches. “So… I guess I should be going.”

Logan’s smile faltered slightly, but he only inclined his head. “Of course. Please give our best to Patton and Emile.”

“Tell them I said hi,” Roman added. “And tell them I quit my job, so no more grocery cart duty! No more asthma attacks!”

“Oh… sure,” Virgil said, looking mystified, most likely about what a grocery cart was. “I’ll tell them.” He put his backpack around his shoulders. “Well… thank you again, for everything.”

“Thank you for coming back,” Logan replied sincerely.

Virgil nodded, offered them a half-smile, and ducked back into the wall.

…

Three more weeks went by before the littles returned to see the humans again; but Virgil and Patton did return, as promised. Patton had wanted to go back sooner, and he knew that Roman and Logan would want them to as well, but he and Virgil had decided to wait one more week.

The reason why they had waited currently stood between Virgil and Patton, his arm still in a sling, and part of his tail still in a splint, but now walking without aid from either of them: Emile.

Patton stepped out from the wall first, bolstered by the sound of quiet voices from the kitchen, confirming that his humans were home.

“Hello!” the little called out cheerfully, as Virgil and Emile carefully followed him out onto the shelf. “Roman! Logan!”

The voices stopped immediately, and there was the sound of two chairs being pushed back before Roman and Logan hurried into the room. Their faces lit up, and Patton beamed at them.

“Hey, guys!”

“Greetings.”

“Sorry we’re late,” Virgil said, walking closer to the edge of the shelf and stopping just shy of Patton. “Em wanted to come.”

Roman looked like he was barely containing his excitement, grinning from ear to ear. “That’s okay!” he said. “I’m just glad you’re here now.”

Logan’s features settled into a calmer smile. “What brings you here tonight?”

Patton shrugged. “We wanted to see you. It’s been a while.”

Logan bit his lip. Patton had a feeling he was trying not to get emotional. His heart went out to the human.

“Well… I’m glad.”

“I want to hear about Roman’s job thing!” Patton added, referring to what Virgil had told them after his previous visit. Hopefully, the story would include what exactly a job was, in the sense that humans talked about them; but Patton was sure he’d enjoy hearing it regardless. “And I bet other stuff has happened. And we can tell you about the new fish in 4B, and about how Virgil drove the rat out of the building!”

Roman glanced at Logan. “Drove the what out of the building?”

“Besides,” Patton continued, still smiling, “we never did get to finish Avatar.”

And so, Roman and Logan moved their dinner into the living room. The littles came down to the very same table where they had once stayed, sitting atop one of the pillows from Roman’s apparently extensive collection. They watched cartoons, and spent the evening talking, laughing, sharing food, and simply enjoying each other’s company.

...

Meanwhile, dozens of miles away, as the title sequence of that first episode played, a young blonde girl with pigtails stubbed her toe.

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ethereal-not-occult · 4 years ago

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patience and the mulberry

"With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown."

Fandom: Good Omens Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) Characters: Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale (Good Omens) Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Established Relationship, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Fluff and Angst, Character(s) of Color, Sericulture, silkworms, past religious trauma, but nothing bad happens in this fic I promise, mixed bookverse w/ TV elements, references to Chinese culture Notes: Originally written for the @goodomensfashionzine !

“I'll only be a minute, dear.” Aziraphale kissed Crowley's cheek as he opened the door of the Bentley. “You don't have to see me to the door if you don't want to.”

Crowley tightened his grip on the wheel. “Sure, angel. Sounds good to me.” The sibilants slid far too quickly past his clenched jaw, and he bit his tongue to stop the instinctive hiss from escaping.

Aziraphale gave him a sympathetic look, but shut the Bentley's door behind him and soon disappeared through the doors of the church. Once he was out of sight, Crowley slumped forward slightly, sliding his sunglasses up and rubbing at his eyes. A few deep breaths later, and he felt composed enough to exit the Bentley himself in blatant disregard for the “NO PARKING” sign on the curb.¹

[¹ Given his new job position (or lack thereof), lawbreaking was no longer a necessity, but old habits die hard.]

The bright afternoon sun made him wince a bit, and two robins in a nearby bush were getting frisky in a way he would never be able to unhear, but they made it easier to forget the distant wail of air sirens. Even standing out on the road, Crowley's skin prickled faintly with the remembered sting of consecrated ground.

He pushed the feeling aside and walked resolutely forward. Aziraphale was bound to take his sweet time as he mooned over the church's dusty old tomes, but Crowley had his own investigations to conduct while he waited. No rest for the wicked and all that.

The concrete pavement under his snakeskin shoes gave way to grass, and the tingling sensation in his soles faded. Soon he found himself at his intended destination—an Edenic grove of mulberry trees, clustered together in a ring in the church's backyard. He'd spotted them on the drive over and couldn't resist the temptation of a closer look.

Crowley wandered into the garden with a scrutinizing eye. They were young, for trees, but growing well despite their callowness. A particularly stocky sapling hardly flinched when Crowley gave it a token glare, much to his disappointment. Then again, outdoor plants were rarely as well-behaved as properly cowed houseplants. It seemed this attitude persisted even in ecclesiastic gardens such as these.

He cast a surreptitious glance over his shoulder, then reached a hand up into the tree's umbrella-like branches and tugged. The season wasn't quite right for fruits, but he still withdrew clutching a handful of dark ripe mulberries. Hardly apples, but his lips twitched upwards nonetheless. He plucked a berry from the pile and raised it to his lips.

“Zaoshang hao!”

Only a hasty miracle saved Crowley from choking as he jumped and swiveled around. Hovering right outside the churchyard was a middle-aged human, well-dressed and smiling pleasantly at him. Judging by her formal clothing and the Bible she carried, she was a part of the congregation, maybe even the priest herself. Crowley swallowed and stepped backwards.

“Ni shi jiaohui de xinshou ma?” the human called again, picking her way across the dewy grass in his direction. Crowley eyed the Bible she held, willing himself not to break out into hives.

“Um. Wo bu—er, no. I'm not new. Not here for church at all, actually.” He fidgeted and clasped his hands, still full of pilfered mulberries, behind his back. “Just waiting for someone.”

The human raised an eyebrow. “You're welcome to wait inside, if you like,” she said, also switching to English. “I reckon we still have biscuits left from the children's morning service—”

“No!” Crowley said too quickly, and perhaps too sharply. He winced. “I mean. That won't be necessary. I'd much rather stay out here, if it isn't too much trouble.”

The human gave him a Look. Crowley's cheeks heated and he averted his eyes, willing his sunglasses a few shades darker.

“Beautiful, aren't they?”

Crowley's head shot back up. The human had turned her back to him and was running a hand through the glossy green leaves of the nearest mulberry tree. Crowley could practically see the branches stretch out in delight beneath her touch, like a purring cat.

“Volunteers from our congregation take care of them,” the human continued, smiling at the young tree. “The kids here like raising silkworms, you see, and we welcome them to pick leaves from the trees each week to feed them.”

Silkworms. Of course. Despite himself, a hazy memory rose to the forefront of his mind: Sichuan, China, several hundreds of years ago. A family farm, weathered and cozy and oozing enough sheer goodness to make the average demon ill with it. Crowley wouldn't normally be caught dead in such a place, but he had owed a favour to the angel. His fingers twitched at the phantom memory of butter-soft silk fibres against his skin; long, winding threads that stretched out thin and fine, tangling so easily around his uncertain fingers. With this memory came the golden, moon-round face of a child he hadn't thought about in centuries, grinning toothily as they held out a box to him, a box filled with small pale larvae that wriggled among the spade-shaped leaves. “Zhe jiao can.”

Crowley forced himself to return to the present. The human was speaking to him.

“—waiting on Mr. Fell?” she asked.

Crowley blinked. Shook himself a little. “Yeah. He's helping out with the restoration of some old manuscript or other.”

The human smiled again. It was an unnervingly piercing expression. “I'm aware. I was the one who requested his help. Such a lovely man. Are you a friend of his?”

Crowley tensed. “His husband, actually.”

He braced himself, but the human only brightened. “Goodness, then you must be Mr. Crowley! Mr. Fell talks ever so much about you. Finally gone and tied the knot then, have you?”

Before Crowley could stammer out a reply, something dinged loudly, making him jump. The human pulled a phone out from her pocket and squinted at the screen.

“Sorry, I have to run back inside. But it was lovely meeting you, Mr. Crowley.” She stuck out a hand—thankfully not the one that had been holding the Bible—and after a brief hesitation, Crowley shook it. As quickly as she had arrived, the human disappeared from the garden, leaving Crowley alone and off-kilter amid a grove of mulberry trees.

---

Aziraphale emerged from the church around an hour later to find Crowley seated on the curb next to the Bentley, basking in the last rays of the afternoon sun as he scrolled through his phone.

“My dear,” the angel sighed. His joints creaked as he eased himself down to sit next to Crowley on the roadside. “Don't tell me you've been sitting here the entire time.”

“Nope,” Crowley said, popping the ‘p’. “I toured the gardens for a bit. Swiped some fruits, too. The mulberries aren’t half-bad, for a bunch of church plants, but they’ll need a good deal more threatening before they're really up to snuff.”

Crowley stopped when he saw Aziraphale chewing his lip, brow furrowed as he studied Crowley's face. Now it was Crowley's turn to sigh.

“Really, angel. It's fine. I was hardly bored.”

The expression didn't leave Aziraphale's face. A soft brown hand reached out and brushed aside stray wisps of hair from Crowley's forehead. The demon hadn't bothered to cut it since the Apocalypse-that-wasn't, and it was growing longer and more unruly by the day.

“I'm fine.” Crowley caught Aziraphale's hand and held it, carefully. He pressed his lips against the well-manicured fingers. “It was years ago, angel, and we both came out of it all right. You don't need to worry about me.”

Aziraphale still looked vaguely distressed as Crowley drew him close. With the sun setting behind him, framing his face and curly dark hair in a golden halo, he was the most beautiful thing Crowley had ever seen.

He kissed him then, right there on the road, in full sight of the church and probably Someone Else, too, if She happened to be watching at that particular moment. Once, he would've been terrified of such a public display, but he hadn't gone through hellfire and holy water to care anymore about what others thought of them.

As he helped Aziraphale into the Bentley, he noticed abruptly that the angel was carrying what appeared to be a shoebox, of all things, along with his usual camelhair coat.

“What on Earth is that?”

“Oh!” Aziraphale carefully pushed the box over to Crowley. “Mrs. Lao gave it to me once I'd finished with those manuscripts. She said it was a gift for you, actually. Have the two of you met before?”

Crowley stared down at the box, baffled. “We talked for a bit in the gardens just now, but I can’t imagine why…”

He trailed off, and his mouth dropped open as Aziraphale eased open the lid and beheld the contents with a raised eyebrow.

“Good heavens. Are those caterpillars?”

“Silkworms,” Crowley corrected automatically, leaning in for a closer look. There were so many of them, somehow both smaller and larger than he remembered, all white and wiggly and chomping away busily at the layers of mulberry leaves filling their box. None of them paid any attention whatsoever to their occult observers hovering above them.

“Why would she give you such a thing? Not that they aren't dear little creatures,” Aziraphale added hastily, glancing into the box, “but I doubt I have the means to keep them in the bookshop.”

“No need,” Crowley said before he could stop himself. “I can raise 'em in my flat.”

Aziraphale gave him a curious look. “You know how to care for these… insects?”

“Yeah.” Crowley gently shut the lid of the inhabited shoebox and curled a hand around the Bentley's stick-shift. “I've done something like this, before. I know what I'm doing.”

“If you say so.” Suddenly Aziraphale chuckled. At Crowley's affronted look, he demurred, “I'm not making fun, my dear. It's only that you still manage to surprise me, even after all these years.”

Aziraphale leaned in and pecked Crowley's cheek, making him blush red and sputter. Much to his disgruntlement, the Bentley chirped a light-hearted rendition of Haydn's Crazy Little Thing Called Love all the way home.

---

Crowley had spent the past eleven years co-parenting the Antichrist with Aziraphale.² They had faced this challenge head-on, and in his opinion, it hadn’t gone too shabbily. Now, without the threat of the Apocalypse hanging over his head, becoming a surrogate parent was far less daunting the second time around.

[² Even if young Warlock hadn't really been the son of Satan, it was the principle of the thing.]

Still, Crowley worried. He had always been something of a worrier, and that hadn't changed even after the First Day of the Rest of Their Lives.

After dropping off Aziraphale at the bookshop, Crowley returned to his flat, where he commenced the preparations for introducing his unexpected twenty-odd guests to their new home. This was accomplished by miracling up a small glass aquarium onto his desk, lining the bottom with paper towels, and carefully (read: nervously) placing the silkworms one by one into the tank. Once this was done, Crowley scattered the half-eaten mulberry leaves from the box around the aquarium. The silkworms set upon their interrupted lunch with all the enthusiasm of Aziraphale devouring a meringue pie at the Ritz.

Crowley slumped into his chair, took off his sunglasses with a wince, and rested his chin on his desk, staring into the glass tank.

“I raised your ancestors once, you know,” Crowley informed the wriggling creatures. “Tiny farm in China several centuries back. We'd weave branches together into a tray and let you loose inside. Bit like how manmade beehives work, or something.”

Crowley paused. Watched one silkworm slowly inch its way across a stem to tackle a new section of leaf. “‘Course, humans use wire mesh nowadays, but the general premise is the same. Always thought it was bloody clever, what humans could come up with. If you gave me a bunch of moth larvae and told me to make a living out of them, I definitely wouldn't think to make clothes.” He snorted. “Whoever came up with that, I'd like a glass of whatever they were drinking.”

The silkworms munched on. They ate much faster than they crawled, that was certain. In the quiet walls of his flat, away from prying human eyes, Crowley loosened the knot of his silk tie and tugged it off, easing the tightness around his neck.

“You're the ones who made this, in a sense,” he said, waving the tie at them. He laid the tie beside one glass wall of the tank at just the right angle for the inhabitants within to see. Several silkworms looked up curiously.

Crowley tossed his suit jacket aside, then unbuttoned his shirt collar. He had always prided himself on his sharp, modern attire over the years, the better to tempt humans with—or so he claimed. Despite repeated scoldings from his superiors, his Lust quotas had never been quite up to par.

Sufficiently dishevelled, and feeling all the freer for it, Crowley sank back into his chair to watch the silkworms.

“The only thing I didn't like about the process was the boiling,” he murmured. “Logically, I can see why it was done. And you would all be in cocoons, so it's not like you'd be in any pain. Not like I was.” He exhaled, the sound becoming a low hiss. “But still. Never liked it. Always felt like an awful lot of trouble just for the sake of some silk threads.”

One particularly adventurous silkworm had nosed its way upwards and was now creeping over the edge of the tank opening. Crowley made a mental note to devise a lid of some kind and stuck his finger against the lip of the tank. The silkworm crawled onto his hand without any hesitation. Tentatively, he drew it closer. Its many feet stuck stubbornly to his skin, and it reared up as he approached, swaying slightly, its mandibles twitching.

Crowley stared at the silkworm. The silkworm stared back, and seemed disappointed when Crowley had nothing else to offer. Just to prove it wrong, Crowley materialized a single large mulberry leaf in his other hand and presented it to the insect, who fell upon it with gluttonous enthusiasm.

Staring at the miracled leaf, an idea formed in Crowley's mind. He smiled, slowly.

“I need a hobby, now that I'm jobless,” he said aloud to the silkworm, letting it creep onto his palm. He ran a careful finger over its smooth back. “I think I'll take up sericulture again, for old time's sake.” He reached back into the tank and gently encouraged the silkworm to crawl back inside.

“Humans have to boil you alive to get those nice unbroken threads off your cocoons,” Crowley mused, withdrawing his hand. “Fortunately, I don't have to do things the human way.” He lowered himself until he was eye-level with the inhabitants of the tank. The silkworm he had carried paused in its perpetual eating and turned its head, almost like it was looking at him.

“How's this?” Crowley asked. “You'll be able to grow into a fuzzy, fully grown silk-moth, and I can take your cocoon after you've finished with it and miracle the threads whole again.” He paused and mulled it over. “I guess I could take it a step further and just miracle the finished silk together, but there's still something to be said about the human way of doing things.”

The silkworm bobbed the front half of its body as though in agreement. Crowley smiled again.

“We can make silk, and no one gets hurt. I'm a few hundred years out of practice, but I'm sure I could make it work, somehow.”

The silkworm turned its attention back to its meal. Crowley didn't notice. He was too busy wondering if Aziraphale had any old texts on silk-weaving that he could borrow, just so he could refresh his memory.

The angel would appreciate having a new silk bowtie to add to his collection.

---

Thank you for reading! Replies and reblogs are always much appreciated. <3

#good omens #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #go fanfiction #good omens fanfiction #go tv #otp: ineffable #li writes #zine fic #insects tw

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deathpuppies12 · 4 years ago

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The perfect Gift

Cloud Strife x Teen! Reader

Sum: (y/n) struggles to find the best gift for Cloud. It’s especially difficult when the keep moving around to different towns. With a little help from some friends it turns out just fine.

(This is post remake, kind of OG game)

Cloud’s birthday was coming and it was coming fast. In fact it’s tomorrow and I still can find him a good enough gift. It’s not my fault Cloud only has like two interests. Buying him a sword seems very out of the question. He has plenty of materia and materia is such a lame gift. That leaves me no ideas. Everyone else already has things for him, all except Red.

We’re stopping in a near town to take a break from walking around so much. I feel very lucky to be traveling with everyone. But even I’ll admit it’s starting to take a toll on me. Everybody else is out right exploring, I opted to stay in our room. I need think up ideas before we leave or I won’t ever find anything.

“Hey (y/n) what are you still doing here”

Tifa’s back.

“Thinking of gift ideas for Cloud”. “what did you get him again”?

“Oh I’m just gonna treat him to breakfast”

Ughh, that doesn’t help me at all!

“Hey what do you say we walk around town and try to find something”. “Cloud and Aerith are out right now so I’m sure we will have plenty of time”.

Well this is the best chance I got.

We head out of the hotel in search of a great gift. Maybe some help finding stuff won’t be so bad. Especially Tifa’s help, their child hood friends. If anyone would know what Cloud likes it would be her. We stop into one of those really basic essentials stores.

“How about we look at cards first”?

“Yeah, ok”.

Stopping by the cards , I look for the birthday ones. Would he like one of the basic ones or a funny one. Or one of the ones that make sound. Nah probably not those. Is Cloud the type to like notes written inside or just a basic ‘happy birthday from’. I feel like I should know these things. I’ve been traveling with him for so long. He would know these things about me.

“How about this one”?

I turn towards Tifa and see her holding a card with a chocobo on it. As soon as I saw the Chocobo I already had great note for the inside.

“This ones perfect”!

“Alright let’s go find an actual gift now”.

Maybe this wasn’t as hard as I was making it out to be. I’m really glad Tifa is here, I don’t know what I would do without her. We stop into a another store, but this one is way bigger.

“Hey y’all what are you doing”?

Barret.

“Hey Barret, I’m trying to help poor (y/n) find a gift for Cloud”.

“SOILDER-boy hard to shop for”?

I can only nod my head this, that’s an under Statement.

“Well don’t worry I’ll help to, Red went back to the hotel, so I got nothing else to do”!

I’ll take all the help I can get. Walking around looking at everything they have. I try to gauge in my mind what Clouds reaction to different things would be.

“How about this”.

In Barrets hand is a charm of a tiny sword. He picks up another one of the charms this one is of Chocobo with a moggle on its back.

“He could put them on the end of his sword”!

“That’s a great gift idea, don’t you think (y/n)”?

“Yeah it is, let’s get em”!

Now I’ve got a gift and a card. It still feels like something is missing. We start to make our way back to the hotel. On our way we run into Aerith. I thought she was with Cloud.

“Hey what are you guys doing”?

“Getting Cloud birthday gifts, speaking of Cloud where is he”?

“Oh, he went back to the hotel to get some rest”.

Good I would hate for him to see the gifts early.

“What did you get”?

I show Aerith the gifts and the card. She thinks there cute. But It still doesn’t feel right though.

“You know, I found out Cloud has a big sweet tooth”, Aerith says.

“That’s it, ill meet you guys back”!

I run off to the nearby bakery. I don’t wanna get anything to big. I looking around, I start to feel hungry myself. No (y/n), remember why your here. I get him a simple cupcake with little frosting. Now all I need to do is make sure I hide these until his actual birthday. Which is thankfully tomorrow.

I reach the hotel room to find everybody sleeping. Good, I hide my bags of stuff in one of the dressers.

Clouds pov

Waking up to sunlight slipping through the blinds. I look around to find nobody else here. Huh where did they all go. I notice (y/n) still sleeping though. Well not everybody is gone. Checking time, it’s 6:30 should I wake her up, It is still pretty early. Before I can decide Tifa walks into the room.

“Morning Cloud, come one I’m treating you to breakfast”.

“Uh, why”?

“Your birthday silly, don’t tell me you forgot”

My birthday, is it really my birthday already.

“You did forget, don’t tell (y/n) that”, she laughs a little saying that.

“Why not”, why would (y/n) care.

“She spent all day yesterday trying to find you the perfect gift”.

She did, she didn’t have to it’s not that big of deal. It’s just me slowly getting closer to my impending death.

“Well come on, we can wake her up when we get back”.

I suppose that would be better. Besides it is super early. We also don’t have to leave anywhere so what’s the harm in letting her sleep in a bit. I take one last look before heading to breakfast with Tifa.

“Do you think we should bring her something back”?

“What do you mean Cloud”?

“Well she spent all yesterday getting a gift for me the least I could do is bring her breakfast”.

“Cloud you silly, she did that cause it’s your birthday and she wanted to. But we can still bring her something back if it puts you at ease”.

Your POV

I wake up to no one in the room with me. Awesome means I can lay in bed in peace. I pull out the book I’ve been reading from bag. I need some entertainment while we travel. I have music player to but reading is more my style. Before I can get to deep in my book some body comes into the room.

“Hey your up, we brought you breakfast”, it’s Tifa and Cloud.

“Awesome thanks”!

I put my book away and sit up. I glance at Cloud, I wonder when I should give him his gifts.

“Well I gotta go meet up with Aerith so you to have fun”.

Tifa heads out leaving just me and Cloud. It’s kinda awkward, we haven’t really talked as much as of late. But that’s only cause of the circumstances. Well I guess now is the best time to give him gifts. I slip out of bed and over to the dresser. Pulling out the bags, I place them in front of him.

He gives me a questioning look before looking inside. Hopefully he likes them. He pulls out the card first and reads the note. It makes him chuckle under his breath a little. Ok it’s good so far.

“Will you relax, your so tense I can feel it in my own shoulders”.

“Ok damn, you don’t have call me out like that”.

He pulls out the charms next, he glances over them. What he does next surprises me. He walks toward his Buster Sword and place them on the handle. I take that as he likes them. He comes back over and final takes out that last gift. The cupcake.

“She told you didn’t she”?

“Yup”.

“Of course she did, she told everybody else to huh”.

“Correct”.

“Great, I’m never gonna live this down”.

I laugh, “so, you like them”?

Cloud doesn’t say anything which is a little worrying. I glance back up at him and notice a very small sliver of a smile. Yes, I’ll have thank Tifa and Barret later.

“We should probably join everybody”.

“Yeah I guess”.

Before I can get up Cloud drops something in front of me. Laying on the bed is one of the charms. A charm of a Carbuncle.

“Thanks, now we match”!

“Yup”.

I think I rewrote this like 3 times. I couldn’t decide in what time and place I wanted to set it at. Not the best thing I have ever written but I wanted to something sweet and cute for Cloud’s birthday.

#cloud x reader #cloud strife #cloud strife x reader #tifa lockhart #aerith gainsborough #barret wallace #red xiii #final fantasy 7 #final fantasy vii remake #final fantasy vii #ff7 #ff7r #ffvii remake #ffvii #ffvii x reader #cloud strife week

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smolbeandrabbles · 4 years ago

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Try It On, Take It Off - Orson Krennic x Reader (Rogue One)

100 Sentence Challenge Request

Orson Krennic + 95 - “Have I mentioned, I fucking hate Halloween.” Requested by @mysticaltimemachinewench

Author’s Note: Roll with the idea of Halloween and October 31st being things in the Star Wars universe just for this fic, please! This boy is so whiny, I spent all week writing for him last week and he’s still like “write more!” so, I thought I’d post one. It’s because he’s all the bottom of my drafts now I’m sure of it. Boots & Boys - Kesha Okay, so I was looking for songs to do with dressing up. And I found a bunch of cute love songs about wearing your SOs clothing, but... This one is fun and I needed fun for the premise-!

Disclaimer: Rogue One Characters/SW Universe not mine. / Requested premise / lyrics & gifs not mine.

Premise: Every Halloween it’s the same thing, and Krennic is sick of people dressing like him. This year he’s determined to get to the bottom of things...

Words: 2010

Warnings: Swearing / Sexual connotations/Pre-Amble

_____

Think it's time that I mention I've got myself an obsession For the smell, for the touch I know I've got myself a habit But I gotta have it now I don't care where, work it out Let me break it down I try it on, I take it off So what you got? Something 'bout boots and boys They bring me so much joy I gotta say I wear 'em both so pretty as I walk in the city Give me boots and boys I'm keeping quite the collection Take nothing less than perfection My men drop beats like a bomb Wind me up, spin me round Oh, lookie what I found (ooh!) I'm crazy for you, crazy for you Hey hey, whatcha looking at? Hey hey, something you can't have They've got me looking rad You feeling that?

---

October 31st was always a date Krennic hated seeing in his calendar. The Death Star had not been a project spanning months by any stretch of the imagination. Orson was many, many years into this – and he was now accustomed to his workers Halloween traditions. He couldn’t say it wasn’t one of the reasons he was glad that it was nearing completion. That, and he might finally get the recognition he deserved. At least for now he had you. Given, you were relatively new to the project when he looked at the timeline as a whole, but you were certainly a necessary piece – and Krennic actually liked you. A lot of the other employees, if he were honest with himself, he actually could have done without. Which is probably why you’d grown close – and then maybe a little too close. But Orson wasn’t going back on that now. This was the day Krennic didn’t want to leave his office – inevitably, it was also the day that everyone would have him chasing all over the structure. Why? Oh, because they all knew how much he hated today too! So as soon as the email pinged in from the other side of the Death Star, Krennic tried everything he could to get them to come to him, or to send him documents, pictures, anything that meant he didn’t have to go on an annoyingly long walk. Orson used practically every persuasive trick in the book, to no avail. Eventually he had to concede rising from his desk, sighing angrily, and gathering his things to head to the problem. Almost immediately he was assaulted with the kind of visuals he’d become accustomed to. It seemed every other person on this damned vessel took today to dress up as him. Now, whilst dressing in the full white Intelligence Bureau tunic would have been against protocol and would have meant he could reprimand them, everyone decided to wear capes of various different colours instead. Some, like his, matched their uniforms – and if it wasn’t also for the fact they copied the way he walked and carried himself, with an unconvincing attempt at his accent and speech patterns, he’d find it quite tasteful. Krennic would almost be flattered, he supposed - perhaps even feel like a trend setter – had the crew not being doing it for any other reason than to mock him. God forbid any of them attempt Lexrulian; one day it was going to make his ears bleed. Others decided to wear their ‘capes’ in the gaudiest colours imaginable, and sometimes Orson felt like he was going to be physically ill just staring at them.

Still, technically all of this was against regulation – and although he probably couldn’t take on the entire staff and win, he took pleasure in chastising those he disliked most. “Isn’t that a little against your uniform regulation?” “Take that off now – before I have you reported.” “Next time I catch you in something like this, you’re off the project.” Annoyingly, he could never keep how irked he was out of his voice – and they took great joy out of that, and never bothered hiding it. When they did take these ridiculous attempts at mocking him off (Though it worked. He supposed.), Krennic knew they’d be pulled back on before he rounded the next corner – but for now at least, Orson could be smug in his little bit of power. The fact he could actually force the crew to remove them. He often pondered how this started. Tarkin, he had no doubt. Krennic wasn’t going to blame himself after all, he knew his uniform looked damn good. He just wasn’t fool enough to think this was respectful admiration. Eventually he reached the person who emailed him and, as predicted, it was an easy fix that Krennic could have done in less than five minutes on his tablet back in his office. The Director almost punished them on the spot for that, but by this time was already too pissed off with the situation to trust himself not to lose complete control. Not that that didn’t happen a lot, especially when everything was stalling – but today that was what everyone wanted. ‘If I see another bad attempt at ridiculing my uniform I’ll scream…’ Orson’s jaw was beginning to ache with the way he was tightening it. Half way back to his office, Krennic took a detour. By now he really was yelling at people – Orson was this close to drawing weapons and kicking them off the station, Project Stardust be damned. Desperately seeking respite, he wandered back to his quarters and as the corridors began to quieten, scuffled along in his boots, sulking. ‘What did I ever do to deserve this-!?’ Reaching the door to his room, Krennic gave a small smile – he would receive relief in here. Well at least she will be sweet... I can tell her my frustrations and she’ll sympathize… As Krennic keyed himself in and the door slid open, he realised just how wrong he could be. You were walking up and down the main room and studying yourself in about every reflective surface you could find. If this wasn’t you, Krennic would have blown it, and immediately all his irritations came flooding back. You were, of course – with access to his wardrobe - pacing around in his uniform. Full Intelligence white, rank bar included. Sure, the sleeves were rolled up – which pained him because it’d take an age to get those creases out - and the cape was a little long for you, but, you had the whole thing on, right down to the boots. Usually Krennic might smirk and call you out on wearing his clothes, after all you did look good in his tailored shirts. Any other day of the week he’d probably be pretty turned on right now. But NOT today. As the door slid closed behind him and beeped locked, you whirled around. The cape moved with you and your eyes fell to it; immediately distracted. Krennic’s uniform was gorgeous on him, but the feeling of power you got when wearing it for yourself was indescribable. You liked running your hands over it – the feeling of the fabric between your fingers very nearly bordering obsessive with your need to do it at every chance you could; it was so perfectly weighted that, in all honesty, the tailoring was a marvel to you. You always made a mental note to thank the designers and sewers for their impeccable work. (On Orson’s entire wardrobe, actually.) “Director.” You presented yourself and looked back to him, “What do you think?” Orson very nearly shivered, and if he wasn’t so pissed he’d probably have let himself. That was Lexrulian – and compared to everything else he’d heard today, was very nearly music to his ears. “What are you doing-!?” There was a snap in the undertone of his voice – agitated, to match the way his jaw tightened. You answered cheerily, nonetheless. “It’s Halloween. So, I’m you! I mean you could be me if you wanted, but I’m not sure the uniform would fit-!” You giggled slightly at the mental image of him in your tight black jacket – no, maybe it wouldn’t fit properly, but it might look really good. If only for a second. Although Krennic was glaring at you by now. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, is all this YOUR idea-!?” For a moment you looked innocent, “No! You mean the fact everyone else does it? I didn’t start it, but I felt I could damn well finish it. Besides, LOOK!, I can do it better than everyone else!” “No! No! Y/N-!” You scrambled up onto the table, and cleared your throat. It was clear to Krennic you’d been practicing, because you had his stance down and his mannerisms almost perfect. He was almost impressed. “The POWER we are dealing with here is immeasurable! Single reactor ignition would be just an inkling of it’s true destructive potential! And I will not fail!” He blinked slowly, thinking you were mixing up at least three of his previous conversations there. There was a long pause before Krennic stepped forward, pointing at you. “GET. DOWN! Do you have any idea how expensive that table was-!?” “Awwww, Orson, c’mon!!” “I’m NOT impressed, GET DOWN!” “Baaabe.” “Don’t whine..!” You backed up just out of his reach, even your best innocent eyes weren’t saving you today – he must have been furious. “But it took me so long, I’ve tried on all the variants, I tried on your dress uniform even-! And it isn’t complete without the cape, and the rain one doesn’t have a patch on the glory of this one!! I thought it wouldn’t drag if I put on my heeled boots, but that didn’t get the look right either! And it’s you – so, it had to be perfect…” Your eyes glittered gently as you tried to plead with him, “I thought if I did it properly, it might make you smile. That it might be more… respectful. I dunno I-” He cut you off, demanding, “OFF. THE. TABLE.” “Well, what are you gonna do-!?!” Krennic was quick on his feet, and even though you’d backed yourself up he still managed to grab your wrist and drag you down. You might have been in his uniform, but you were nowhere near his height; and you might have had his traits down, but you didn’t have his strength either. Meaning within seconds he had you shoved up against a wall – with a squeak – before his lips were on yours, wrists pinned by your sides. He might have been angry, but that only made this kiss hotter, and you practically melted into him. Orson was showing you absolutely no mercy – and you weren’t sure if you really deserved it, but you were at least a little glad of it. Eventually he pulled away from you; leaving you gasping and panting for breath. But you whined, wanting more from him. “Have I mentioned, I fucking hate Halloween.” Krennic had, many a time. Which is one of the reasons you wanted to do this, because he might feel a little better if you were doing it right. Clearly you were in the wrong ballpark. You thought about nodding in admittance, but thought maybe continuing to be playful would get you what you wanted. “Don’t think you did – maybe you did. You should remind me.” “Oh, I think I will.” His smirk was back as you let him run his hands through the fastenings of the tunic and unzip your pants. Oh, yeah, he wanted this uniform off bad. You bit your lip, “It does look sexy on you though, is it surprising everyone wants to copy it? I mean I like trying it on and taking it off.” Orson nipped your neck, eliciting a gasp from you; “Evidently I might too.” Then he chuckled at your sigh, running his hands over your warm skin, “That doesn’t make me hate today any less. I mean it’s hardly tribute, is it?” You tipped your head, “I mean, I tried.” “Oh, don’t think I didn’t hear that mocking tone.” He grazed his lips to yours, and it was hardly rewarding, you pined for more but he held you away from him – still immobilized against the wall, “Still, I’ll admit so much… you do look very pretty in white.” You did very nearly blush, but knew that his mind wouldn’t be going to something as virtuous as weddings or dresses; probably a different kind of white lace altogether. “Can I keep the cape at least?” Maybe he’d enjoy you wearing that and very little else. That would be like a ‘sexy’ Halloween costume, would it not? Even if it was just for him. Maybe that’s what Krennic needed if he detested today so much. He growled, kissing you again before you let him slide the jacket from your shoulders and it fell to the floor; “If you’re good, we’ll see.”

--- Thank you very much for reading! It’s been a while since Krennic has been posted too, I’ll admit! 🙏❤

2/16 down!

#Mysticaltimemachinewench #Orson Krennic #Ben Mendelsohn #Director Krennic #Orson Krennic x Reader #Rogue One #Rogue One A Star Wars Story #Oh my god here we go again...#C'mon Orson don't act like you're not a /little/ proud of her!#Director Krennic x Reader #149 #Linzi Writes #linzi writes requests #Smol Bean Drabbles

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dredreadsdrawing · 4 years ago

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Oc-tober Day 27: Fantasy

A bunch of my isekai ocs with original stories. Oofy. I will make the quickest of beginnings for em. These don’t tell the whole story, just how it starts and maybe some future details. I got carried away with some lol. Also, please don’t mind the absurd names XD I couldnt think of any, and isekais tend to have weird names anyways lol. Looking at you Miss Sidekick.

1. Second Best: Probably the one I have planned out the most and have even written like the entire plot for in a Quickie Summary ill post another time. This started as an isekai, but uh, i found no need for her to be reincarnated after I developed the story more. Still, the original inspiration for this was isekai lol.

Born in a lower noble family with high ambitions, when she was born plain, they planned to push her to be educated, but an accident defaced her at the age of three and that was it for them. They saw her as a lost cause and found it easier to give up on her. They were having another child anyways. So she was kept in the old, secluded wing of the estate, raised by maids and a single ill-kept tutor while her sister, born blessed and pretty, was spoiled. It happens. The protagonist is restless and takes to running away from the estate, going into the neighboring woods to explore. One day she finds a crying boy, hiding from his servants. She helps him and after hearing him out, they create a childish plan. To murder his step mother.

2. The Villlainess's Lackey:

A girl, let's call her Bronze, is reincarnated into an otome game she played nonstop. She was a hardcore fangirl of a particular character. Not the love interests, or the protagonist named Gold, but the hidden villainess that showed up once the characters graduate. Silver, the protagonists's own best friend turned jealous. Our girl is reincarnated as the lackey of the fake villainess, just a cliche bully trying to kick the protagonist out of high society. Bronze isn't too pleased about being stuck with her. She instead gets to working in the shadows, cornering Silver and spilling the beans on the game's entire story. On how Silver would lose. But not to worry! Bronze will meddle and lie and cheat and perhaps even murder for Silver! Silver is confused and refuses, but comes to accept the help with time. So far everything Bronze predicted has come true. But one thing she believed is wrong. Silver didn't rebel because she was jealous Gold got a guy she liked. She was jealous because she loves Gold. Love triangle shennanigans ensue.

3. To Serve (another that started as isekai but isn't anymore lol)

Eclair is a clumsy new maid, forced to take the job when her parents kicked her out. She was hired to a manor the owners never visit only to use her as a scapegoat. Her job: to take care of the young master. To her surprise, the boy of nine years is malnourished and neglected, the staff predicting his death soon. Unable to give up on such a young boy, Eclair uncovers the mystery on why he's kept secret. He's half fae, and part of his sickness is due to lack of magic. So she goes on a quest to get the boy an artifact to keep him alive, and on the way... Her clumsy ass dies. Her spirit pops out, much to her surprise, and she watches her body get up. A new aura around herself. It seems a wanted criminal has recently been caught and killed, but his soul latched on to the nearest body. Now they have to share it. (lol, yaddayadda he agrees to help the kid, they get the artifact, he slips and dies as he tries climbing the manor windows and she returns to her body with him as a spirit now, she nurses the child but as soon as he is better the fsther wants to just outright murder him so they flee the household to travel to the Fae country and along the way they get closer. Also Eclair is a lesbian and the criminal is gay and their attraction to a nonbinary stranger is a mess they need to make a peace treaty with. :'D)

4. Just a Bystander:

A gal is reincarnated as the first love interest of the Hero of the story. She's meant to be kind, passive, a stepping stone for the Hero to later abandon for more beautiful and powerful women. A stupid role in a story. Because she denied her reincarnation so much, the dick god made her mute. Still, she won't be a pawn. Before the Hero even arrives to the orphanage they meet at, she teaches herself how to read and write, a skill most adults in the village don't have. Once he arrives, the encounters start the same, but our protagonist doesn't play along. The Hero is a brat with a complex already and she ignores every bit of it, making him simultaneously dislike her and try harder to get her attention. His attempts end in a terrible clash where he is supposed to save her from a beast, bearing a scar from being hit by it, but the roles are reversed and she gets hit in the face. In the frenzy, the Hero pulls a sacred sword and is revealed to be the one legends speak of. The adults make a big deal out of his newfound glorious fate, but among the chatter comes the concern of the protagonist's face. She's already mute, and now she's been mutilated. She doesn't have much chance at marriage. She's personally not too sad about it, but to her dismay, the Hero takes it too seriously. He proposes to her and they get 'engaged' (these are children, this promise is entirely on his word, she never agreed to this). Before he goes to get trained in the capital, she gives him a letter he can't read. He takes it as a lover's note and for all the time he spends learning in the academy, he finally deciphers the looong note. It's detailed accounts of how he misinterpreted everything she did and how she has no interest in him at all. And by the time he goes back to the village she will be gone. He runs away on a stolen horse to confront her but it proves true. She got a job with a passing merchant in copying script without telling anyone and is long gone. So begins her independent life.

5. The B-Plot:

Cedar is reincarnated into a game where she is the Villainess, the one to bully the Heroine for seducing her fiancee the prince. In the story, after she is confronted, she is incarcerated and later killed in a fight with the evil forces. Cedar does not want this. So since an early age, she looks for ways out, and surprisingly comes to find she can use magic. Since this was never mentioned in the game, and magic is so rare, she hides this. With research, she realizes her engagement with the prince will mean she gives up over half her magic capabilities to him. That explains it. She will fix this. Once the time comes for her to be engaged to the Prince, she requests to add amendment to the contract, to the surprise of the adults, but they allow it. Her only addition; if three hidden words are spoken that all clauses from the engagement nullify. She would keep her magic. The adults don't realize the extent of this addition, but she holds it dear. As years go by, she trains with what little she has. She makes plans. She realizes the neighboring country is the same as a shounen novel's own isekai series and she seeks to explore it after her ban. She is ready. But.... She has also come to befriend the prince. He's an earnest kid that looks up to her. It's hard to believe his innocent voice would be the death of her. But her resolve is tight and she knows what will come. After he goes on a mission to retrieve the Transmigated Heroine, his attitude shift is clear. And he pubicly shames her at their graduation party, as foretold. Instead of crying, she asks him to repeat his words. He does. "I hate you." The air crackles as her magic comes back with force, draining him of it. She's back to full power, and it's more than she remembered. Everyone looks on with fear as she laughs. She's free. She's sad but she's free. She bids then farewell as she snaps her fingers. She teleports to her room where everything is packed. Then she teleports to the hidden shack outside school campus. She's drained after those big moves, but she has one last thing to do. A potion she brewed that just needed a little magic. She drinks it. And transforms. She won't be Cedar anymore. He will be Oak. And he's going to find the Hero of the neighboring country and join his party.

6. The Selfish Route

A kid is reincarnated as Felicia, the protagonist of a novel where both princes of the land dote on her and she marries into Queendom. Felicia lives without her parents in a manor. The staff mostly takes care of her, as her parents are diplomats and move from country to country. While she has been shown love, she’s always been a nervous wreck, pushing herself hard to get everything right as to not be seen as uneducated by her circumstances. Instead, she is seen as perfect, as she makes a big splash at the first party she attends. She regained her memory at the same age she died, now ten years old and already having met both princes at said party were they were stunned by her. If she remembers the story correctly, the first prince will visit first, named Nicole, then the second prince, named Arthur. She’s back to being nervous and decides to play things as they were written in the story. Going off track feels dangerous! Nicole is written as intelligent and kind. It should be simple enough... But her first visit... completely fails. She stumbles over herself too much, her posture and manners lack, and her gaze never meets the prince’s. He might have been written as kind, but seeing the nervous Felicia, he’s disappointed. He leaves early, and Felicia’s fear solidifies. She’s not as good as the real protagonist was. She can’t sleep that night, and come morning, her staff notices. They crowd her with love and affection, telling her they know her true worth, and that no matter what, they will always be on her side. This comforts her somewhat, and she decides for today’s visit to think outside the box. The second prince is adventurous and daring. She’s still nervous, but when he arrives, she’s already put on clothes for the outside and has a picnic ready. She tells him they’re spending the day outside. He’s confused, but agrees. Their time is spent playing games, eating snacks, and having fun. It ends with them watching the sun begin to set while under a big tree. Then they get to talking. She asks him what he likes to do, and his response is long and convoluted. But it’s essentially this. His brother is better than him at everything. She shakes her head and gets an attitude. She didn’t ask him about his brother. She asked what ARTHUR likes to do. When he doesn’t respond, she makes fun of him. He’s so worried about not being the same as his brother, but he doesn’t have anything he likes. He’s boring. This gets him to respond, and in defending himself, he realizes he does enjoy certain things more than others. Horses and riding them, weapons, learning about the forest and terrain. So she asks him why he isn’t trying to do more of that, instead of barging in on all of his brother’s lessons. Arthur takes this thought to heart, and as he gets up to leave he laughs. He tells her she’s weird, and she starts getting visibly offended. He defends himself, it’s a good weird. He was scared when he learned his brother visited her first, because he’s terrible at formal meetings, but she made this fun. She takes this compliment to heart as well, and as he leaves, she resolves to live the rest of the story not trying to follow the protagonist. But herself. And part of that change, as the year goes by, is her realizing she’s trans. He’d much rather live as a boy. His household is concerned at first, but they slowly become more supportive. It’s the same child, just named Felix now. His parents come to prepare for his coming-of-age ceremony and he’s nervous but he tells them. To his surprise, they accept him. They’ve learned a lot in their many travels, and have broadened their views. In their eyes, this country should do the same, and it’s a pleasure to have their son be the one to start it. They’ll always support him. Nice family moment. Ever since the prince visit, he hasn’t gone to more parties, having been too nervous. But he’s been the talk of nobles his age due to the second prince starting rumors. After he tried rubbing his good day in Nicole’s face, the first prince called him out for liking such a brutish girl. He said they suited eachother. From this little comment, Arthur spiraled. With Felix’s advice, he focused on his training instead of his studies, made friends and became better. But when asked about the interest he showed in the young Felicia at that tea party, he resorted to talking shit. She’s not a well-mannered little lady, she’s a weird girl. Everyone knew now, and waited eagerly for her to make a fool of herself in her coming-of-age ceremony. When the invitations were sent, to Felix’s surprise, one was rejected. The first prince’s. He saw it as a waste of time since he already judged he didn’t like him. Felix becomes scared again, but not over himself. Over the villainess, Lily, who is supposed to be comforted by the prince after being mocked at by other noble children. The day of his ceremony, Felix resolves himself to escape his staff and go watch. He hopes someone else can help her. But as he waits and hears her crying, he realizes no one will. So he steps in. She’s startled, but he calms her down. He’s clumsy in his approach, but sincere. He asks what’s made her sad, and she can’t help to be honest. She tells him that her family makes powerful enemies, and their children always target her. They pick at all her flaws, but the biggest is that she is abnormally tall. Felix comforts her and reassures her that her height adds to her uniqueness. She’s beautiful, and they’re just jealous she can easily be the center of attention. She doesn’t agree. Being the center of attention has been bad in her book. Felix laughs nervously. On that, he can agree. So he gets up instead, and promises her she won’t have people’s eyes on her for the rest of the night. When she asks why, he tells her to go look at the host reveal. He leaves and she gets up. Just as she reaches the rest of the party, the music stops and Felicia’s name is announced. Everyone waits in anticipation to see if Arthur’s rumors were true. Then the speaker changes the name to Felix instead, and out walks the boy that talked to Lily, his mother holding his arm. They dance and the room stares, some laughter hidden poorly behind hands. When the dance is over, it’s customary to wait for volunteers to start a second dance. Only then can everyone join in. Felix waits. And waits. Seconds keep flying by. No one is coming. He expected this, and resolved his heart for it, but still, he’s panicking. Just as he’s about to call it quits, he hears footsteps and looks up at Lily. She asks if she can have the honor of his second dance. He agrees. As they go through the motions, he asks her, didn’t she hate being the center of attention. She told him she does, but if she’s going to have people staring at her anyways. She smiles as they pause. She might as well have a friend by her side with the same problem. He can’t help his own smile from forming, and for the rest of the night they stick close. So starts their beautiful friendship <w< and mayhaps something more.

#traditional art #oc-tober #oc tober #sketches #Fantasy #Isekai #Oof #Isekais #Pencil sketches #trans #transman #trans boy #lgbtq #gay #lesbian

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winchester-reload · 6 years ago

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I accidentally drunk-posted this to ao3 last night, so I might as well post it here too since it’s episode-related. There’s a second half I’m not done with yet, but this bit stands on its own as a coda, or whatever.

Pairing: Dean/Cas

WC: 1400

tags: first, kiss, angst, episode 14x12 pre-coda

also on ao3

Cas came into the bunker like a thunderstorm, expression cloudy and eyes hot enough to start brush fires. He dropped the big book that’d been tucked close to his chest onto the library table in front of Dean, and it coughed dust as the water-warped pages accordioned together, fluffed up again. Kicked the old, thread-bound cover back, revealing the yellow vellum page; Possessionem, atque tutelam &, Vatican Ed. 1723, it said.

Dean uncurled from his book, hands slipping to the edge of the mahogany as he pulled in tight. Cas wasn’t supposed to be back yet. Last text Dean got said maybe Tuesday would see him in Kansas, and that meant Dean wasn’t supposed to have to deal with this. He should have already been gone.

Wonderful.

He cleared his throat. “Who’s your friend?” he asked, trying to keep it light.

“Oh, that?” Cas puffed, carelessly spilling into the chair opposite Dean. The airiness of his response was drowned out by the vinegar he had pickling his words. “It’s a book, Dean.”

“Well, shit, Cas. You don’t say—?”

“Yes. It’s a book that Jack and I managed to track to— and retrieve from—a catacomb in New York. Now, ask me why we went to all that trouble.”

Dean hesitated. Then, “Why?” because he was nothing if not a glutton for punishment.

“Well, because we heard it had some particularly potent protection sigils, which, might— ” He pecked an elbow onto the tabletop, twisted his hand in an overly-animated open shrug “—hypothetically—be beneficial to someone harboring an unwanted invader. Why? What did you do this last week?”

It was baited. Dean didn’t need the all caps, period-after-each-word, version of it to see that. He chewed his cheeks, slid his copy of Vonnegut away. Dog-eared pages flat against the table now until someone else bothered to pick it up. “Okay,” he said scratching his neck. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you talked to Sam.”

“What would give you that impression?”

“Cas, it’s a ma’lik box—”

“Yes—” Cas said, mocking, “I’m familiar with them.”

It triggered that little muscle twitch at the back of Dean’s jaw. “Okay, here we go—” and Cas shot back out of his chair.

“Jack and I were out trying to find literally anything that might help you, and all the while you were out building some stupid, secret box to go bury yourself in— And you weren’t even going to tell me—? So, yes, Dean. Let’s “go”,” he spat, throwing the quotes. “Why are you so impossible?”

“Alright, back off—” Dean bristled. He wanted to keep it civil—fuck, he needed to. The last thing he wanted was to have to ruminate on a fight with Cas for the next forever-billion-years, but the asshole was a button-pusher. Always had been. “I get it, okay? You’re pissed. You wanna be pissed, be pissed, but it ain’t gonna change anything. Billie said what she said.”

Cas rounded on him surprisingly quick, leveled a look so dark, it practically bred its own shadows. “No,” he said, flat, “you’re right, of course, it doesn’t change anything. But do you know what does, Dean? The fact that you’re lying!”

A fingernail of shame suddenly surprised Dean, twisted into his chest. “No—” he stumbled. This was getting away from him quick. Too quick. He scoffed, smiled, tried to brush it away. “Uh, no. You’re wrong—”

“Uh, yes. I’m right—” Cas contested. “See, because if Billie’s answer was to bury you with Michael at the bottom of the Pacific, there would have been no death note to hand you— because, in that scenario, Dean, you’d never die! And maybe Sam doesn’t know that, but I do!” He plucked his chest, tie swinging as he leaned in. It dredged up all those old, angelic chills Dean had filed in the archives of his memory; the weight Cas carried with him like churning ozone when he was all keyed up. “So, why don’t you tell me what the book really said?” he suggested with a low growl. “What you’re actually running from.”

Dean swallowed, tried to hold Cas’ eye, failed. They were close enough now that Dean was all but boxed in his chair, and butterflies played his pulse in response, kicked his heart up into his throat. “Okay, you’re—” he started. Then, “But, that’s totally—” and he stopped, watched Cas’ balled fists turn white at the knuckles. Fuck. “Did you tell Sam?”

“No, but I will tell him. I’ll tell him right now.”

“Don’t—”

“Then what did it say?”

“It said I die old,” Dean muttered, and it was like prying nails from his ribs just to get it out. “ It said I die happy. Natural causes. No Michael. No monsters.”

Cas blinked, caught off guard. The anger in his face diffused then fused again into something so much more knotted up. “I don’t understand—”

“There’s nothing to understand because it doesn’t matter! All the rest of ‘em said I die bad, Cas. All of ‘em! Michael burnin’ me out while he destroys the world—!”

“How does ignoring this one spot of hope fix that?”

“That ain’t hope! I don’t know what to do with that— I don’t even know where to begin to try to make something like that happen! The box is what fixes it! The box, I know how to do!”

Cas’ fingers spread, hands coming up like he wanted to strangle Dean, but couldn’t bring himself to get close enough. “Did it ever occur to you—?” he said slowly. Eyes rolling closed before peeling open again. “—that, maybe, your first step in accomplishing a happy ending, is to stop running? To stop this— suicidal ideation? To just... love, and let people love you?”

Dean shook his head, Cas’ words pooling at the hinge of his jaw and making it hurt. “It wouldn’t matter,” he said, looking at the bookshelves, the corners. Anywhere but Cas.

“Why—?”

“Because no one's gonna love me—” Dean spilled. “Who’s gonna love me like this? An archangel stuffed up in my attic and the rest of me so fucking screwed to hell, I can’t even sleep on a good night!”

Cas balled hands into his own chest, shoulders high and body tight like they were both about to go over some invisible cliff if he didn’t stop the vehicle soon. “I love you!” he pleaded. “Sam loves you! Your family— You are not unloved, Dean!” He had tears in his eyes, but it was easier to ignore them.

Dean shut his eyes, heat washing him. The image of Cas dying on an old couch at the back of the barn flared fresh in his brain— I love you, I love all of you— He tried to swallow it, but it was too sour. Tried to rub it away with the heel of his hand, but it only spread, made speckles. He shook his head, instead, pulled his already loose collar looser. “No, I… Not that kinda love,” he said quietly.

Cas suddenly deflated, arms falling to his sides, weight shifting between his feet. He sunk to the floor at Dean’s knees, looked up, face raw and open and done. “Sam loves you,” he said again quietly. “Jack loves you. Your mother—”

“Cas—”

“—loves you…” He suddenly touched Dean’s knee, stretched up onto his own, wedged between Dean’s legs, quiet and hot, cheeks wet with tears as he pulled all that electric energy in. “But, I—” He grabbed Dean’s face, cradled it between his hands as Dean’s fingers clawed into the fabric at Cas’ sleeve— holding him there, holding him back, he wasn’t sure which. “I love you,” Cas whispered. Something in Dean cracked, split open. He let their foreheads brush. Their noses.

Let Cas kiss him, soft and slow.

Cas kissed like he’d imagined it a thousand times, mapped it. Studied it over and over and over again, until every jump of his lips timed with the thrum of Dean’s heartbeat. The curl of his fingers at Dean’s jaw.

Then it broke, quick as it started, but Cas and all his hasty energy didn’t move back. Neither did Dean. “I don’t know another way to say it,” Cas admitted to the small space between them. His voice finally wavered, broke. His hands uncurled, flat palms drying the tears Dean didn’t know he’d lost. “You have to tell me because I don’t know.”

Dean suddenly remembered to breathe and it came in sharp and unsure. It came in with the smell of Cas and a hit of his blue eyes close enough to taste. Dean swallowed the salt building in the back of his throat and dug his voice out of Cas’ rubble. “That was it,” he whispered back. “You just said it.”

And it seemed utterly ridiculous how everything suddenly felt so simple.

#destiel #destiel fic #first kiss #season 14 #canon divergent #episode coda #idk what this is #i have destiel anxiety okay #I need something canon tonight #14x12 #14x11 #its been a minute since I posted some fic #so take this i guess

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inkskinned · 6 years ago

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literally just a dumb unorganized list of school tips

source: im a grad student. i’ve had a lot of school. also i’m adhd & mentally ill and require +8 organization. this is mostly directed @ college students, but maybe high school students can use it too, fuck, idk, it’s been forever since i was stuck in that hell hole

just say “professor” either ur using the correct title for a person (will make them feel good) or you’re giving them a bigger title on the assumption they deserve it (which will make them feel good) and also prevents having to ever i mean ever use their names

talk at least 1 time a week in each class, aim for 1 time a day. even lecture classes. i fucking hate talking in front of more than 5 people, so what i would do is prepare a question about the hw/etc (even if i didn’t need it answered) to ask the professor after class so they saw me and got used to me and saw i was invested in their class. about 89% of teachers - if they see you try, they will pass you. i mean it’s literally that easy. i know people who went from like a c- but because they legit tried, their grade got bumped up to a b-.

if u have to bring a laptop, pre-download the required material/screenshot it, and then turn off your wifi. it’s too easy to not listen.

physical writing will always give you more information recall over typing.

nobody cares about stupid shit anymore trust me they don’t remember that you were accidentally locked in a towel out of your room bc they have their own dumb shit that happened.... in college all the “cringe culture” turns into “god i wish that were me” culture ... wear ur onesie to a party trust me you make +800 friends and 799 of them will be girls telling you you’re adorable and they’d die for you

about locking urself out.... if ur like me and can breeze past post-it notes placed in obvious areas, don’t be a dumb bitch and rely on post-it-notes. while most schools offer 1 free lockout, dont rely on it - it once took 2 hours before someone could get to me. i was in a towel, which meant no phone. so like. anyway, what i do now is i put something on the handle of the door i have to open/unlock. i can’t just open the door w/out the thing falling down and making a loud “you dumb bitch unlock the door before u shower” sound.

this works for all important don’t-forget it things. other obstacles i’ve used to remind myself to do something include: putting a chair with my wholeass posterboard in front of the door, an entire printer with a single piece of paper that just read “for the love of god check to be sure you have that essay”, and a recycling bin i kept forgetting to empty. guess what bitch finally emptied the bin once it was between me and a swift exit!

no offense and like the whole “it’s the best years of your life!” thing is great but in reality everything goes better scholastically when you treat it as “i came here to win, not to make friends.” i still did make friends, went to parties every weekend, was popular enough i’d be invited to several on one night - but i came there to win. when i put my scholastic life and my mental health first, i went from a 2.0 to a 3.98. yes you can, bitch.

you’re spending the money. don’t squander it. trust me when i say i know plenty of people who breeze through, bc you often can. but like. don’t. challenge yourself bc like. talk about an investment.

if you hate your major, change it. don’t make your life something you can’t stand. on that note, do NOT agree 100% to a track until you have at least some experience in the field. i cannot tell u how many ppl i know who got their whole masters/phd program done, walked into their new profession, and were like, Oh Fuck, I Can’t Live Like This.

college literally offers so many free things and if you’re not taking advantage of them whenever possible i get it but like. try to take advantage of them. this is everything from your gym (which probably has free classes dude) to clubs to like. sober events. these sober events are so ... fuckin good dude i’ve made mason jars with little plants in em... bee aviaries... candles.... go to the free stuff

oh ps on free stuff i wanna say about 4 of 5 days there’s free food on campus just look for things like job fairs, presentations, or discussion groups. also while you’re there at the job fair like. u know, go to the job fair in earnest

i took off 2 years to work and also to just. recover from my bullshit. and it took me 6 years and 3 schools to get my bachelor’s. it wasn’t easy but bitch i lived. there’s no such thing as “too long” to graduate if that’s truly what you want to do.

if on the meal plan, eat as clean as you can the first week. then introduce each part of the cafeteria’s possibly-food-poisoning-creating foods one at a time. give @ least 2 days between each experiment so you know for sure if you get sick what caused it. i literally never eat meat at school but you can still get sick off of unwashed lettuce/salad dressing that hasn’t been refrigerated properly/weirdass things you won’t even think of. this prevents like. dying in a public bathroom.

white loaf bread can be gross & boring. discount bakery section for your slightly chewy artisianal bread needs. if overstale, either toast it or dunk it into water and microwave it (unless u got an oven. use the oven if u can)

steal as many apples from the dining hall/events/etc as physically possible just do it they keep FOREVER and @ some point you’ll be like. fUCK i need a nutrition. ps if you’re keeping them in ur backpack (i wouldn’t keep more than 2) make sure to wrap w/a few paper towels so if you drop your bag you don’t get apple mush

write it all down bitch. “i’ll remember it” no you won’t. unless you are capable of remembering every idea on this list and in order, you won’t remember it. in general, if you write something 3 times, you will recall it correctly at least 80% of the time. i also read it out loud to myself, bc, you know, auditory recall

DO NOT just put your assignment at the top of your notes, unless you’re 100% sure that will work for you. in most cases, it’s much better to have a planner/agenda/place you expect to look for assignments. +7 points if you lie to yourself about deadlines and move them all up.

like not to sound too much like a DARE ad but like. if you don’t like it/don’t want it, don’t fuckin do it. the idea that “there’s nothing to do if you don’t party” is such bullshit. like i promise if you’re like “i am a grouch and want to stay in and binge netflix” about 45 ppl will show up in pjs like “bitch fullscreen it, im a grouch too.” there’s also like. the chance to just.... not overindulge. on wednesdays i have “wine wednesdays” where we sit around and drink a glass of wine while we do our hw. it’s chill and friendly instead of like. drink until u vomit. don’t feel like you either gotta slam the breaks or the gas pedal, is what i mean.

PLEASE know the signs of alcohol poisoning/overdose. most schools have a “Safety Always Matters Most” policy, which means that you can call for help w/out getting into trouble. if you think someone is in danger, act. this also goes for making sure ppl get home safe even if they’re just incapacitated, not poisoned. step in, dudes.

also just. notice when ur starting to rely on stuff too much. i’m super easily addicted to things, so i keep a healthy distance from liquor. i don’t let myself “drink to feel better” bc that’s a scary, scary thing to link to feeling better. if you or somebody u know starts drinking all the time/gets anxious if they don’t drink/drinks in the daytime .... get help. schools have counselling services for a reason.

you’re gonna get a cold/flu of some sort in the first 2 months just brace for it. in the meantime, drink vitamin c, try not to touch too many handles, and when people say “there’s something going around” believe them.

watch kaplan nike just do it

if you can teach it, you know the material. a super good way of knowing if you studied the right way is to try and teach the material to a stuffed animal/imaginary class.

“i don’t know how to study” bitch me too the fuck. this is usually bc we’ve been taught that studying is just sitting down and staring @ ur notes. it’s not. it’s different for everyone, and you need to understand it’s 99% preventative care. if you don’t go to the class or do the homework, studying is going to fucking suck, bc you’re learning the material all at once for the first time. the place you should consider “studying” is “i’m confident in 70-90% of the material, but need to review.” do not let yourself fall behind .... just go to office hours and ask questions if ur not getting something. studying should feel like you’re remembering what you already knew but kinda forgot, not like you’ve been blindsided.

the whole “writing it down in ur own words” while u have been told this 700 times it really helps bc it means u gotta translate it through your own understanding. if you can’t, and it’s not bc the material seems too obvious to you to state in another way - ask yourself if you don’t understand the material. chances are u are missing a bit of info.

i know it’s like A Thing that Some People do but i never had the mental health points for it but i know some people just take 15 minutes after every class to review their notes. since i’m 100% early to every class ever, obnoxiously so, i try to do it before class. having the last class’s notes up in my head super helps. like. put down the phone i know you’re socially anxious me too but review those notes. chances are if u start flipping through pages other ppl will too. this is also fun bc as soon as you start this whole thing, at least one person will be like “is there a test?” no bitch there’s no test but im gonna be ready when there is!

literally so much of success is fucking posturing i could link about 800 peer-edited studies that show that when a student is expected to do well (and knows they are), they do well. like i literally didn’t change my appearance at all, never bothered to look nice (once winter hits i wear 67 layers all the time), but when i showed up after my 2 years off from school, i presented myself with the whole “i came here to win” vibe and people... really respected me? i mean in hs i remember ppl saying shit like “yeah, well, you aren’t gonna have the homework”. by the time i was in college i had an honest-to-god conversation which included someone being like “so tell me what you’re overachieving at right now” like they just expected it from me. wild.

i live by “bite off more than you can chew, and then CHEW IT” but it’s probably unhealthy. the truth is that i have a lot of energy all the time (lmao adhd!!!) and i used to get told i was “trying too hard” and for a long time (still???) i didn’t (i don’t?) know what that was, you know, bc i had a D average, clearly i wasn’t trying. it turns out i was just. putting all my energy into stuff that wasn’t making me happy like toxic friendships etc. when i decided “nope, all this energy is for me and my schoolwork”..... uhhhhh suddenly i was a golden child and everyone praised my try-hardness ... it’s a fuckt up system tbh

take at least 1 class just for fun. i try to do that every semester. it helps break up all the requirements. if you’re like an engineer and got no time or credits left to spend, try to audit your fun course.

make ur advisor love you i don’t care what it takes make them cupcakes show up to thank them i dONT CARE just do it

the library isn’t always the best place. if i start getting anxious bc i pavlovian train myself that library=work, i find a new place to go to do hw. try to go outside if you can!!! not like where i live bc like it’s snow all the time but try. a little green really really really helps depression.

if you’ve been in the same “Studying” place for 1 hour and haven’t done anything the chances are Something Isn’t Right. first, look @ ur body. are you not focusing bc of some pressing physical need? sometimes just taking a shower and coming back helps. are you uncomfy? are you too comfy and going to sleep? if body okay, look @ the material. do you not understand it? do you just need to switch to a new topic for a little bit? can you find a youtube video that will help you better understand it? make notes on what you don’t get so you can ask in the next class. if it’s not the material, it’s not ur bod, check the Actual Space. sometimes just getting up, going for a short walk to a new place, and trying it there actually? really works? if none of this is working.... try ur brain next. hardest to reset bc like, what, turn it on and off again? i use things like caffeine, a short workout, a nap, or a podcast all to just... give me a little boost.

don’t be afraid to leave. i mean this about class, friend groups, and the college ur at. just get up on outta there if ur not feelin it. i cannot recommend “drop the class” enough. even if it’s a required course see if u can switch the times if u hate the professor day 3 it’s not gonna get better just get the fuCK out

don’t nap in the same position u go to sleep in, nap upside down w/ur head away from ur pillow. don’t ask me why but it works to 1. fall asleep faster 2. make sure u sleep okay at night and 3. wake up less annoyed

on that note don’t ever do anything in ur bed in a sleeping position unless it’s genuinely sleeping in it. body will get confused. just sit up, lazybones.

when/if the library has those therapy dogs during finals week.... just go pet them make the time for it

ask before hugging people, but don’t expect a “yes”

get a backpack that fits and doesn’t hurt ur back u fuckin hippie idc how cool it is to wear ur backpack super low just don’t do it it’s not worth it

the tutoring center is a fucking goldmine.... free essay edits my dudes

bring a fan dorms are always hotter than u expect

switch dorms if u can if u realize ur in the wrong room/wrong roomate like just don’t bother with nonsense

when in doubt, follow preschool rules. tell ppl when they did something cool, just ask when u need help, and be confident even in your mistakes, because at least u tried

#anyway

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chuffyfan87 · 5 years ago

Text

Hiding. Part 76a

Cowritten with @disastrousintention.

-x-

It had been two weeks since Peter had confessed to his mum, he’d been struggling with his thoughts and memories of the traumatic birth of Oliver. It seemed the nearer his mum’s due date got, the more his behaviour gave cause for concern. He was sat in his bedroom, on his bed, rolling a cigarette. He had his headphones in, listening to music.

The fact that his mum had told him that the doctors had booked her in for a planned section in three weeks time didn't seem to have helped calm him.

It just made him more anxious that the baby would come before then. He finished rolling his cigarette and placed it in the packet, cleaning up after himself.

He contemplated the scrap of paper that was inside the packet. On it was written the number of a guy from college who had said he could get Peter something to "chill out" with.

He didn’t want to go down that route. He knew it wasn’t a good route to go down. But he was also exhausted from the lack of sleep and trying to study.

That is what had led to him keeping hold of the number rather than just throwing it away without a second thought. He sighed softly. He ended up ignoring the number this time, again.

He picked up his textbook. Why the hell had he decided to take chemistry alongside IT? He was really clever and academic when he didn’t have other things on his mind. He thumbed the edges of his textbook as he lay down on his bed.

The only people who hadn't seemed surprised when he picked chemistry rather than biology were his parents. They seemed to be the only ones who didn't seem to want him to follow them into a career in medicine. They wanted him to be his own person. Chase his passions rather than following his parents ambitions and passion.

His gaze was caught by a bright pink post it note stuck to the side of his desk. He hadn't left that there! Peeling it off he instantly recognised his mum's handwriting reminding him that he had a session booked with his therapist for 6.30pm.

He sighed sadly. He didn’t want to go. He glanced at the clock. Maybe it would help?

Clearly the therapist hadn't mentioned that he'd missed the last session when his mum had called to book this session, something he was grateful for.

He decided to go to the session. Peter remembered what his dad had said about asking for help sometimes.

As Peter headed down the stairs a little later he heard raised voices coming from the kitchen.

His parents were arguing. They didn’t argue often, thankfully but Peter always got scared when they did. He slowly made his way to the kitchen, listening carefully.

"I am perfectly capable of continuing to work!" He heard his mother yell.

“Not at 33 weeks you’re not. I want you to start maternity leave.�� His dad replied back. Peter sighed. His mum was always so stubborn!

"What do you expect me to do for the next three weeks? Sit on my fat arse going stir crazy?"

“Your arse isn’t fat.” He replied, “It’s a sexy arse, along with that attitude of yours.”

Peter rolled his eyes. That sounded like his cue to leave! He was just grabbing his coat when the kitchen door opened and his mum walked into the hallway, looking back over her shoulder as she giggled. "You're not getting around me that way Charlie!"

Charlie groaned. Peter was putting his coat on and looked sheepishly at his parents.

"Is it that time already?" Duffy remarked, trying to change the subject, unsure as to just how much Peter had overheard.

“Yeah.”

"I hope it goes well sweetheart." She smiled softly, squeezing his shoulder gently. "If you let me know when you're on your way back I'll make some food ready for you."

Peter nodded again.

"Shall I make your favourite?" She smiled.

“I’m not really hungry.”

"Peter..." She sighed.

“Ok.” He sighed.

"You better get going. You don't want to be late!"

“Can I talk to you afterwards? In private?” He asked quietly.

"Of course." She glanced at Charlie. "Just me or both of us?"

“Just you.” He mumbled.

"OK. Do you want me to come pick you up after your session and we can go for a drive?" She suggested.

He nodded, “Yeah. Please.”

"OK. Give me a call and I'll come get you." She promised.

“Thank you.” He kissed her cheek and left.

Peter made it to the therapist's office just as his name was called. He gave a small smile at the therapist as he entered the room.

She allowed him to get settled before she spoke. "You didn't contact me to cancel our last session."

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

"Was there a reason?"

He shrugged. “Got drunk.”

"Our appointment was at four in the afternoon..." She replied, concern in her tone.

He shrugged again.

"So what led you to decide to come today instead of going out and getting drunk again?"

“Because I need to talk about a few things.”

"OK. Where would you like to start?"

“I have a friend at college...” He began, “He’s offered me something to help chill me out.”

"What would that something be?"

“I think it’s weed. Could be anything though, I don’t know.”

"He didn't specify?"

“No. Just said if I ever needed 'out', to give him a bell.”

"Why would you need out?"

“To chill out. To stop...” He stopped suddenly.

The therapist waiting silently to see if he'd continue.

“You know, things.”

"What things? What's making you feel stressed?"

“You know... things.” He didn’t say anything, instead he picked up one of the small pebbles out of the pot on the therapist's table. “My mum. The baby...”

"Are you unhappy that your mum is having another baby?"

“Yes and no.”

"Do you wish to expand on that?"

“It’s gonna kill her.”

"You know that for certain?"

“She nearly did last time. And the time before that. And the time before that. Why would this time be any different?”

"I'm sensing something of a pattern emerging..."

“Do you know what happened to my mum last time she gave birth?”

"Nothing more than the bits you've alluded to in previous sessions."

“I’ll tell you, shall I?” He was getting agitated.

"If you want to."

“Mum went into labour at home. Bled out in her bedroom on her bed and covered me. She was in surgery for hours, spent time in ICU. I overheard the doctors talking one day and they said she’d be retarded when she woke. She woke up and could barely speak. Then developed an infection and required more hospital treatment. Despite all that, she survived. But this time, she won’t be as lucky.”

"Were you the only one with her at the time?"

“Auntie Megan was there. And then my dad came soon after.”

"But you saw it all? That must have been very traumatic for you. Have you spoken to your mum about it?"

“Bits and pieces. Don’t like to worry her.” He sighed, “The baby was stuck too. At some point...”

"I would presume that the doctors looking after your mum this time would be well aware of everything that happened last time..."

“And they knew about the twins and how she was after Em and it still happened.”

"What still happened?"

“Bad things!”

"Your mum getting ill?"

He nodded.

"Maybe they don't know why it happens." She suggested.

“Dad wouldn’t cope with us all on his own. He struggles without mum. Mum struggles without dad.”

"Which makes you question why they've decided to have another baby?"

“Yes.” He sighed.

"How many siblings do you have?"

“There’s Jake, Louis, Em, Tilly, Lottie, Oliver and the baby so that’s... Seven.”

"So including you that's eight children?"

He nodded, “Yeah. Louis has a different mum and Jake a different dad but they’re still my siblings. No half about it.”

"That's a good way to look at it." She smiled. "Why do you think your parents decided to have another baby?"

“Because they don’t think with their brains but with their... you know...”

She chuckled. "Have you mentioned this to them?"

“That I think my parents need a lesson on using condoms?”

"I swear you've mentioned before that your parents work in a hospital..."

“They’re nurses, band eight and seven. Nursing manager and Sister.”

"And yet you don't think they understand the concept of safe sex?"

“They really don’t. If you understood safe sex, would you have eight kids?” Peter asked.

"Maybe they wanted a large family? Did you consider that?"

“No, but my parents don’t practice safe sex. I know that for a fact.”

"I don't understand..."

“They don’t use contraception. If they did, they’d realise there was no condoms.” Peter smirked.

"I see... Their stash has been raided I take it?"

“Every now and again, if I run out and haven’t got time to buy some.” Peter smiled, “I love Sarah but I’m not ready for a baby. Neither of us are. Not after the scare we had...”

"When was that?"

“Well... We had one quite recently but please don’t tell my mum.”

"You're over sixteen, I'm not obliged to tell your parents anything." She reminded him.

He nodded. “Last week. Sarah and I had a scare.”

"Is that why you went out and got drunk?"

“Kinda.”

"Was that before or after you found out it was a false alarm?"

“After.”

"Celebrating then?"

“Not like that.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.

"So why then?"

“I don’t know. I just found things really difficult.”

"If you told your parents about it, how do you think they'd react?"

“About what? The pregnancy scare?” He laughed slightly, “Mum and dad would string me up by my balls.”

"If they're as lax as you seem to think wouldn't that be a tad hypocritical of them?"

“Yeah it is I suppose.”

"So maybe try talking to them about it?" She suggested.

“It won’t happen again. We’re looking at different means of contraception.”

"That sounds like a good idea." She paused for a few moments, gathering her thoughts. "Is there anything else that's bothering you?"

“A few things.”

"Would you like to talk about any of them?"

“Yeah.” He smiled slightly. “I’m worried about a lot of things, not just my mum.”

"What's worrying you most, other than your mum?"

#chuffy #charlie and duffy #charlie fairhead #lisa duffin

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rogsclogs · 5 years ago

Text

Some Day One Day (Brian May x Reader); part 12

I’m sorry this took a while to post, I was unhappy with how it originally turned out and had to rewrite it a couple of times. Hope you enjoy it, next part will be up very soon, hopefully by tomorrow. The series is almost over :,)

tag list: @brighter-thanthe-sky @im-a-sheerheartattack @fruityfreddie @discodeakygotmorerhythm @killer-queen-xo @destiel-stucky4ever-loki-queen @alfinaldelarcoiriss @warren-lauren @kazzish @7-seas-of-fat-bottomed-girls @avengerraven1023 @imgonnabeyourslave

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They lived happily ever after since then.

At least, that's what I’d like to tell you, but we both know that’s not how it’s going to go, don't we?

However, things did go perfectly right for quite some time and everything in Brian and Y/N’s lives was amazing, especially their relationship. As soon as Y/N started her master course she got right into it, arriving at every lecture on time and with all her work done and ready to hand in, much to Brian’s happiness. All he wanted was to see her succeed, after all. At first he had offered to help her do her school work, but she obviously refused to let him do so, her pride taking over her rational side which told her that getting help wouldn't be such a big deal after all. Even when she did have classes with him she always rejected any help Brian offered, which kind of frustrated him, but he was even more proud of her when she got things right knowing she did everything by herself.

Then, right after school, he would drive her back to their apartment and they would spend the afternoon together, sometimes baking cookies for Emily and sometimes having sex for hours on end, depending on their mood.

Mostly the ladder, though.

Y/N was in the second trimester of her course when something started feeling off.

She started waking up feeling something within her bugging her and she went to sleep feeling the same way.

She had been vocal about it with Brian, but even though he was keen on having a doctor visit her, she kept pushing her visit back, not wanting to cause any trouble to anyone and figuring whatever it was that made her sick would soon disappear.

knowing how easily she was affected by stress, she also figured that that could be the reason behind her sickness, after all she was still going through a hard time with her family and such, none of her relatives were particularly happy to find she was living with a man who was twice her age and had a daughter with another woman, but she couldn't be bothered to hide it either although she’d never told anyone that he was in fact her university professor, that was way too risky for anyone to be aware of. Still, most of her family were totally against it and a huge part of them had stopped talking to Y/N altogether, not that she was too sad about the loss, it was mostly just disappointment making her upset.

It could be the stress of knowing everything in your life is going great, cause that is in itself a reason to be stressed out, especially when you're used to dealing with constant chaos and people trying to mess you up.

It could be the immense love she felt for Brian moving around in her body everyday, which she often though would make her sick because she truly loved that man more than anything and anyone else.

It could be some of the things that little Emily offered her to eat when she played cook, they could absolutely be toxic for all she knew (she immediately felt silly for thinking something like that, knowing damn well how obsessed Brian was with double checking anything that came close to his daughter’s mouth to make sure it was safe).

It could be anything in the world and it was probably temporary anyway, so why would she worry the people around her? There was no need for it.

And maybe Y/N could have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for her body giving up on her, quite literally.

It all started on a foggy winter morning, Y/N woke up feeling rather ill and couldn't bring herself to have anything for breakfast. Brian had tried to convince her over and over again, but there was no point in forcing her to get food in her system if she felt like she couldn't keep it down anyway.

She felt extremely nauseous and lightheaded, and Brian was worried knowing she was most likely not telling him just how sick she was really feeling, so he tried to convince her to stay home from school, even promising to collect all the worksheets she would need to catch up on her homework, but to no avail. Y/N was very stubborn and sometimes Brian wished she could just give into his requests when they came from a place of worry and care, but he knew it would be pointless to argue so he just forced her to take whatever medicine he had at home and got in the car with her and Emily.

The whole ride he kept an eye on the two girls in the backseat (Emily didn't like sitting by herself back there, so whenever Y/N was around she would always offer to keep her company) and soon realized Y/N seemed to be moving in slow motion, like she was too tired to react to what Em was talking to her about. Not that the little girl would notice anyway, she was rambling about something that had happened at daycare the day before and she had her usual bright smile taking over the features of her face. She was way too young to realize how pale Y/N looked and how distracted she was, especially because she tried her best to keep up with the conversation, mostly so she wouldn't worry Brian.

She even offered to walk Emily into the building where her daycare was, which Brian begged her not to do as a lot of people there knew who Emily’s mom was and he knew they wouldn't keep their stupid mouths shut.

He tried once more to convince his girl to get back home right before they got into the school parking lot.

“I can tell you're not feeling great, why do you do this to yourself? Just take a goddamn day off Y/N, you're not gonna miss that much anyway”

“Brian, you know how I feel about days off when they're not necessary”

“But right now it IS necessary! It’s basically written all over your face that you're sick, I've never seen you look this pale before and you haven't even had anything for breakfast, which is not only unhealthy but very unlike you. Please, I am begging you, just let me drive you back home, I don't care if I'm ten minutes late to my lecture, I'm sure everyone will understand”

“I’m not having this conversation with you again, Bri. I’m fine. I’ll see you in third period” was all she said before angrily stepping out of the car and slamming the door behind her, leaving Brian in his car to curse himself for pushing her too far. He should have just listened to her, if she needed something she would tell him without being forced to.

He pushed himself to get out of his vehicle and to stop thinking about Y/N, he had more important things to focus on: papers to grade, lessons to go over and his students’ questions to answer. He couldn't afford to let her distract him, no matter how much he cared for her wellbeing, after all she was a responsible adult.

They both went on with their day as normal, even though Y/N kept feeling worse by the minute. All the people who had seen her that morning could sense that something was going on, but only a few of them pointed it out to her, not wanting to seem rude. She had sighed deeply and ignored everyone’s questions, wondering if she really looked so bad that everyone in school seemed to be so interested in knowing how she was doing.

She almost got into an argument with Joe because he too tried to convince her to go back home. After their ‘date’ at the cinema, Y/N had tried her best to distance herself from him, not only because she knew Brian didn't love the idea of them hanging out, but also because she was almost positive Joe was crushing hard on her, and she didn't want to lead him on or have to deal with any jealousy issues. Still, he tried to talk to her almost on a daily basis and didn’t seem to get the memo that she just wasn't interested, so Y/N dealt with it and stopped complaining, knowing there was not much he could do once school was over. On that day, however, he had gotten so much on her nerves that she couldn't help but slightly lash out at him, it was none of his business how she was feeling and she didn't want to admit how seriously worried she was starting to become for her own health.

So, she just isolated herself until third period eventually came, and she made a mental note to herself to apply some makeup before entering the lecture hall so that maybe Brian wouldn't be too worried about her if she didn't look sick.

However, she never actually made it to the bathroom as she felt herself slowly slip out of consciousness right as she was getting there and her body fell limp on the hard floor.

#Some Day One Day #Brian May #brian may imagine #Brian May x reader #Queen #queen fandom #queen fic #queen x reader #writer #writeblr #fan fiction

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